Pamela Redford Russell's Blog: Swerve

Working Titles

I asked Karen Joy Fowler about her newest novel BOOTH. Here's what she said. "BOOTH was the working title. I imagined my editor and agents would want a new one, but they didn't; they thought BOOTH was strong. The issue for me was always that it gave the impression the book is about John Wilkes, but he was not the only Booth so it still seems fair."
And I'm still thinking about working titles.

Working Titles

George Orwell's 1984 had the working title
THE LAST MAN IN EUROPE.

Working Titles

SOMETHING THAT HAPPENED was John Steinbeck's working title for his novel OF MICE AND MEN.

Working Titles

Still wondering about working titles...
Seems like some books collect working titles like some people attract nicknames. But not my novel WILD FLOWERS. Even if it got confused with wildflower field guides, the title was always only going to be WILD FLOWERS. I heard years ago that Dolly Parton was working on a book that she wanted to call Wild Flowers. Now she's written her first-ever novel with James Patterson. RUN, ROSE, RUN. Wonder if that was the working title. Or the always only one.

Working Titles

I've been wondering about working titles...
Some books have them. Some don't.
COLD FLAME was the working title of my first novel. In my convertible '66 Mustang driving on Coldwater Canyon with Phyllis Grann, then editor-in-chief of Putnam, she and I decided upon the title I've never regretted. THE WOMAN WHO LOVED JOHN WILKES BOOTH was published by Putnam in 1978.
Now Karen Joy Fowler's excellent novel BOOTH (Putnam) has just been released. Wonder if it had a working title.

More swerves

"All actors have identity problems..."
I remember Fawn Brodie, the only female history professor I ever had at UCLA, giving a lecture about John Wilkes Booth just days after the phone call with Grant Tinker about my writing an episode of The Mary Tyler Moore Show. I don't recall Mary Surratt being mentioned in that lecture, but I confess I may have been focusing more on Mary Richards at the time. Soon Fawn Brodie's THOMAS JEFFERSON: AN INTIMATE HISTORY would reveal Sally Hemings to the world. I feel sure that this brilliant historian and her inspired teaching planted the seed in 1975 for my first novel, THE WOMAN WHO LOVED JOHN WILKES BOOTH, published three, short years later.

Back to Swerve

"Personally, as a kid, I preferred The Mary Tyler Moore Show, which I absorbed with fascination. If you were a girl with a brain and a dawning sense that you wanted to grow into something more than a wife, Mary Tyler Moore was your goddess." That's Michelle Obama talking. I want to thank the former First Lady again for the title of this blog, Swerve, and now add that her description of The Mary Tyler Moore Show is perfect. It's almost unbelievable to me that I was given the chance to write for that wonderful show when I was so young and believed, along with Michelle Obama, that Mary Tyler Moore was a goddess to girls with brains.

Mother's Day 2020

Wishing all a Mother's Day full of wonder and empty of regret.
A favorite mother and daughter story...

WILD FLOWERS

I always thought of my second novel, WILD FLOWERS, as a story about sisters.
"This book is dedicated to
my mother and my grandmother,
their sisters, and my own."
As Mother's Day nears, I remember how much my mother loved WILD FLOWERS. She kept a copy by her bedside. I didn't ask but I guess she must have read from it often. When she passed away fourteen years ago I found it where she'd left it, well and lovingly used, with a mysterious passage bookmarked. Why this page? I wondered. I couldn't ask her. It was too late.
So this Mother's Day I'm going to video a reading of that passage in hopes that I'll somehow find an answer to a question never asked of my mother.

THE WOMAN WHO LOVED JOHN WILKES BOOTH

My first novel -- THE WOMAN WHO LOVED JOHN WILKES BOOTH -- didn't begin as a mother/daughter story. Initially it was conceived as the fictitious diary of an infamous character in history, the only woman to be executed for her involvement in the Lincoln assassination, Mary Surratt. But when I decided that Mary Surratt's diary -- long believed to have been destroyed by the government -- would be given to her daughter Annie thirteen years after her mother's public hanging, I found myself with a deeper and even more fraught story to be told -- a mother/daughter story.
In the penultimate diary entry dated Thursday, July 6, 1865, the day before Mary Surratt's execution and read by Annie in 1878 after her personal journey of discovery while reluctantly reading her mother's diary, THE WOMAN WHO LOVED JOHN WILKES BOOTH becomes, at last, truly a mother/daughter story...