C.P. Lesley's Blog, page 16

Interview with G.P. Gottlieb

Last year, I interviewed G.P. Gottlieb, the host of New Books in Literature, about her debut novel, Battered: A Whipped & Sipped Mystery . You can hear that podcast conversation on the New Books Network.

With the release of book 2, Smothered, we decided to go with a written Q&A instead. Mystery series are difficult to cover in depth, because basic setup in later books may give away crucial plot points in earlier ones. Those spoilers can be more easily avoided in the shorter format of a blog post.

But don’t be misled by the change of format. Smothered is, if anything, an even more compelling read than its predecessor—and not only because of the murder that lies at its heart. Alene Baron, the heroine, is not a professional detective; her life revolves around her café and her family at least as much as the hunt for a killer. So even if you prefer to read about delicious vegan recipes, this can be a novel for you.

This is the second of your Whipped & Sipped mysteries. People who’d like to know more about the first, Battered, can learn about it through your podcast interview with me on New Books in Literature. Why did you decide to center a mystery series on a café owner/chef?

To start with, I adore a good café! One of my favorite ways to meet friends (pre-pandemic, that is) is at one of the city’s many cafés for lunch or afternoon tea (with something delicious to nibble on, of course). Even more delightful when it’s a warm afternoon, and we can sit outside watching passersby. Who knows which of them might be planning a crime…

How would you describe Alene Baron, owner of the Whipped & Sipped Café, as a personality? What are her issues, and what pulls her into solving the mysteries you create for her?

Alene was a lot of fun to write about. She’s a solid citizen, always trying to help other people and concerned about family, friends, and community. She works long hours at the café, and then at home taking care of her father and children, so she’s a little wound up. She wishes she could be less suspicious and more kind-spirited, like her best friend, the pastry chef, but her suspicions draw her into solving the mystery.

Alene has a romantic relationship—still at a very early stage in Smothered—with Frank Shaw. What do we need to know about him?

Frank is a solid citizen. We won’t know more about his background until book 3 or 4 in the series, but we know that he’s divorced with two young adult children. Alene is falling in love: she’s been a single mother for eight years, and Frank is thoughtful, kind, and sweet-tempered. Plus her kids like him! Is it useful to know that he’s square-jawed, dark-haired, and has a dimple when he smiles?

Whipped & Sipped is a series of murder mysteries. Set up the crime in Smothered for us. What happens, and why does Alene get involved in solving it?

Alene’s neighbor, both at work and in her building, is an unpleasant character. Alene is outside in the alley when he’s found collapsed in his office and assumes that he died of a heart attack. When it becomes clear that he was murdered and one of Alene’s employees is unjustifiably considered as a prime suspect, she knows she has to get involved.

Without giving away spoilers, sketch some of the main suspects for us, including the reasons Alene includes them on her list.
    
Alene suspects one of the victim’s employees (who found the body), the victim’s son (who recently moved back to Chicago and is asking about his father’s will), the victim’s wife (a lonely, unloved hypochondriac who spends much of the book annoying people from her hospital bed), and the victim’s stepdaughter-in-law (who was once sexually assaulted by the victim). As is her custom, Alene also briefly suspects nearly everyone who crosses her path, but she quickly sets aside those suspicions.

One of the things I love about this series is that the stories are as much about Alene’s family and relationships with the people who work for her as they are about murders and suspects. For a heroine who is not a detective, this seems very realistic to me. What are the main non-crime-related problems that Alene faces in Smothered?

Alene worries about her children and is concerned about what her immature ex-husband is conveying to them. She’s saddened by her lack of a relationship with her younger sister, who scarcely finds time to visit their father when his autoimmune disease flares and he’s rushed to the hospital. She’s a concerned mama hen about the lives and life choices of some of her employees. She’s also worried about growing old alone, and cautiously hopeful about her budding relationship with Frank, the charming homicide detective.

This book has just come out. Are you already working on a third Whipped & Sipped mystery?

I am indeed! I’ve started a first draft of what I think will be Crushed: A Whipped and Sipped Mystery Book 3. When I begin writing a new novel, I like to write the story as if I’m telling it to myself. It’s filled with question marks and convoluted passages, winding paragraphs and indecipherable shorthand notes. I add bits and pieces every day, or I change my mind about who the murderer is, and why it happened. Then I think of that person’s backstory, and how he/she is connected to the café. And when I start thinking too much about recipes, I know it’s time to stop for lunch.

Thank you so much for answering my questions!

G.P. Gottlieb holds undergraduate and graduate degrees in piano and voice. Over the years, she performed, taught, composed, and administrated while writing stories, songs, and several unwieldy manuscripts. She also fed her family and developed lots of healthful recipes. After recovering from breast cancer, she turned to writing in earnest, melding her two loves, nourishment for mind and body and recipe-laced murder mysteries. She hosts New Books in Literature, a podcast channel on the New Books Network. Smothered is her second novel. Find out more about her and her books at http://www.gpgottlieb.com.

Interview with Julia Fine

When Julia Fine’s publicist at HarperCollins first approached me with a pitch for an interview, I demurred. I had a lot of books on my plate already; I knew Fine’s first novel was classified as fantasy—not a genre I seek out; and the main subject of this new book, The Upstairs House , seemed to be a contemporary young mother struggling with the reality of adjusting to a newborn infant in her life.

Not that I couldn’t sympathize with the young mother’s plight; every woman who bears a child has to confront the clash between expectations and a kind of craziness compounded from sleepless nights, a body that feels as if it’s taken on a life of its own, and overwhelming love for a demanding and utterly dependent infant (or, worse, the absence of overwhelming love because of the demands and dependency). When I went through that, I was lucky to have had more help at home than Julia Fine’s Megan Weiler and a more adaptive body chemistry; for whatever reason, I suffered less. Even so, I was in no hurry to revisit that part of my life through someone else’s eyes.

But the second part of the story, involving Margaret Wise Brown and Michael Strange, kept tugging at me, and in the end I became caught up in the book, which is a fast and enjoyable read. I drew up these questions, and Julia Fine was kind enough to answer them. Read on to find out more.

And don’t miss her interview with Gabrielle Mathieu for New Books in Fantasy, where they discuss What Should Be Wild .

This is your second novel. People who’d like to know more about your first, What Should Be Wild, can learn about it through your podcast interview with Gabrielle Mathieu, the host of New Books in Fantasy. But could you give us a summary of that story’s theme?

What Should Be Wild is a modern fairy tale about a girl who has the power to kill and revive with the touch of her skin. She’s been confined to her ancestral family home her whole life, and the book follows her as she ventures out into the world on her own for the first time. It’s also the story of the women in her family who, dating back thousands of years, found themselves constrained by society and in need of escape. I’m very interested in how women historically do or don’t break out of prescribed gender roles, which is a theme that reappears in The Upstairs House.

The new novel, The Upstairs House, which will just have come out when this Q&A goes live, might be considered a mix of contemporary psychological suspense and historical fiction. What drew you to tell this tale in this particular way?

The psychological suspense comes from my interest in exploring the immediate postpartum period. After having my first baby, I was struck by how much intrinsic tension there was in those first few weeks as a new mother. It’s a time when your life is totally turned upside down, you’re sleeping odd hours (if at all), there’s an intense loneliness and a sense of the uncanny. I wanted to write a book that leaned into that discomfort.

And of course, almost every new parent knows Goodnight, Moon. Margaret Wise Brown lived such an interesting, unexpected life—she was a fascinating character, and it only seemed right to do her justice in fiction.

Tell us about Megan Weiler, your protagonist. Who is she, and what drives her?

Megan is a new mom who has set aside her dissertation on mid-century children’s literature to have a baby. Her husband travels a lot for work, so she’s basically parenting her newborn alone. She’s got a lot of lingering family tension, and not much faith in herself as a parent.

Early on, Megan perceives a turquoise door between her apartment and the roof that no one around her admits to seeing. When Megan opens the door, it becomes a gateway to the 1940s, via the well-known and much beloved children’s book writer Margaret Wise Brown—author of Goodnight, Moon and The Runaway Bunny, among other works.

Why focus on Brown, and what should we know about her?

I came to Margaret Wise Brown after reading Goodnight, Moon to my firstborn basically every night for a year. When I started to look into her, I was shocked by how different she was from what I had imagined. She was a bisexual rabbit hunter who never had children, and she died at forty-two. She was enigmatic and glamorous and lonely—as soon as I started reading her biography, I knew I wanted to write about her.

Brown tells Megan right away that she is building a house for Michael, whom Megan soon discovers is the female poet Michael Strange. What can you tell us about Michael’s (historical) story and her relationship with Margaret Wise Brown?

Michael Strange was born wealthy during the Gilded Age—she had family connections to European royalty and had married into another well-to-do family when she decided she wanted to be a poet and adopted her pen name. She went on to marry two more times—her second husband was the actor John Barrymore—and though her literary and dramatic career didn’t stand the test of time, in her day she was rather well known. She was a force—a charismatic, demanding woman who could be equally charming and cruel. She was twenty years older than Margaret and began in the role of mentor before becoming Margaret’s lover. They had a ten-year, rather tempestuous relationship that only ended when Michael died.

We can’t go too far into this story without revealing spoilers, but tell us a bit about Megan’s family—especially her husband, Ben, and the state of their marriage when the novel opens.

Megan’s family history definitely impacts the way she approaches motherhood and marriage. I’m very interested in how we inherit trauma from our families—Megan grows up without role models, and this impacts everyone in her life.

Are you already working on something new?

I have a few ideas in the works, but nothing concrete yet!

Thank you so much for answering my questions!

Julia Fine is the author of the critically acclaimed What Should Be Wild, which was shortlisted for the Bram Stoker Superior First Novel Award and the Chicago Review of Books Award. She teaches writing in Chicago, where she is a core faculty member at StoryStudio Chicago. Find out more about her and her books at http://www.julia-fine.com.

Bookshelf, Winter 2021

With Phil the Punxatawny Groundhog predicting six more weeks of winter as of February 2, I figure it’s not too late to run my Winter 2020–21 bookshelf post. A little less jam-packed than the fall version, not least because I already got through at least half my winter books and posted interviews with their authors (Judithe Little, Connie Palmen, Barbara McHugh, Natalie Haynes, and Kathleen Williams Renk) before I had space for this roundup. But there are still a few selections here for you to peruse, some from better-known authors and others not.
 

F. M. Deemyad, The Sky Worshipers (History through Fiction, 2021)
This multigenerational saga of three foreign princesses—Chinese, Persian, and Polish—and their influence on the court of Genghis Khan and his descendants is such a natural match for me and my research/writing interests that it’s no wonder I lobbied the publisher to let me interview the author for New Books in Historical Fiction. That it comes from a startup press, the owner of which is also a host at the New Books Network, was icing on the proverbial cake. I’ve had the book on my tablet for months and have been forcing myself not to dig into it too soon, but another few weeks I can get started, in time to talk with the author for April. The book releases on March 2, 2021.

 

Julia Fine, The Upstairs House (Harper, 2021)
This contemporary story of a woman navigating a troubled marriage while severely affected by postpartum depression is not my usual cup of tea, but what hooked me was the subplot involving Margaret Wise Brown of Goodnight, Moon fame and Margaret’s temperamental lover, the famous socialite and actress Michael Strange. That 1940s scandal was previously unknown to me—unlike Goodnight, Moon, which like many, many other mothers I read to my son until the book fell apart—and watching Fine expertly blend past and present kept me turning the pages. The book comes out on February 23, and Fine will be answering my questions for this blog next week, so check back to find out more. 

 

 

 

Julia Quinn, Romancing Mister Bridgerton (Avon, 2015)
Years ago, when The Duke and I first came out, I read it and loved it. I read several of the sequels but got distracted by other authors before completing all nine books. When I stumbled over the smash Netflix hit Bridgerton, I enjoyed it, but I had this nagging feeling that I’d liked the novel better. In preparation for an interview with Julia later this year, I decided to read the entire Bridgerton series. This one is the next in line—and features two of my favorite characters, giving it a particular draw. I’m just waiting for Avon to release the next e-book box set (4–6) in early March before I dig in.

 

 

 

Lauren Willig, Band of Sisters (William Morrow, 2021)
I’ve written elsewhere about my affection for Lauren Willig’s Pink Carnation series, although my interview with her last year was about a different novel altogether—The Summer Country, set in nineteenth-century Barbados. Here Willig follows the little-known story of a true-life relief unit composed of Smith College alumnae who set off to restore French villages near the end of World War II. The New Books Network operates out of Smith College, and I myself graduated from nearby Mount Holyoke, so this book was a natural fit. It’s also a great read. Due out on March 2, 2021, it will become the focus of my conversation with Lauren Willig next month.

Frankenstein’s Creator

I’ve always admired writers who tackle real historical personages in their fiction. For myself, I avoid really-existing (to borrow a phrase) people in my novels, although at times I have no choice but to bring them in. Even then, I’m careful to emphasize that the records from sixteenth-century Russia—when the vast majority of the population and even a segment of the elite had no formal education and could not read or write—are so scanty and tendentious that only the actions of my historical characters have any basis in fact. Their personalities, appearances, and talents are as much my invention as those of my wholly fictional people.

Fortunately, Kathleen Williams Renk—my latest interview guest on New Books in Historical Fiction—doesn’t share my qualms. She dives into the lives of Mary Godwin Shelley, her lover and eventual husband Percy Bysshe Shelley, and their combined families and friends without hesitation. The result, expressed through a journal written by Mary Shelley, not only pulls us into the literary world of nineteenth-century Romanticism but illuminates the threads that wove together to produce one of the Western world’s great Gothic tales—Frankenstein. And she does it all in two hundred pages of lucid, enthralling prose.

As usual, the rest of this post comes from New Books in Historical Fiction.

Mary Godwin Shelley had yet to reach her nineteenth birthday when she had the dream that gave rise to the classic Gothic horror tale Frankenstein. The daughter of a dissenting English clergyman and Britain’s first feminist, Mary Wollstonecraft, Mary Godwin lost her mother not long after her birth. After an unconventional upbringing by the standards of late eighteenth-century Europe, followed by the arrival of a very conventional and far from accommodating stepmother, at the age of fourteen Mary fell madly in love with the poet Percy Bysshe Shelley. Two years later, they eloped to Europe, leaving behind Percy’s wife and child but bringing along Mary’s stepsister, Claire.

For the next decade, the trio traveled around the continent—especially France, Switzerland, and Italy—with occasional returns to London to secure funds. Through trips over the Alps by mule, sailing expeditions on Lake Como, and wild parties thrown by Lord Byron—a misogynist who belittles Mary’s talents even as he engages in a wild affair with Claire—Mary records in her journal the events and experiences that will blossom into her first and best-known novel.

In Vindicated (Cuidono Press, 2020) Kathleen Williams Renk re-creates Mary’s inner world. Her crisp, utterly compelling prose brings to life a woman whose creation, as in the novel Frankenstein itself, has taken on a life of its own, eclipsing its creator.

Interview with Natalie Haynes

The Iliad and The Odyssey—those great male-dominated, war-oriented epics attributed to Homer and now close to three thousand years old—have became so intertwined with Western culture that it is hard to imagine a world without them. Who cannot recall Homer’s “wine-dark sea” or recognize the Cyclops and sirens, golden apples and Helen’s “face that launched a thousand ships” (a quotation not from the original but from Christopher Marlowe) that were the products of his imagination? Who hasn’t heard of the Trojan horse, now a reference to a type of computer malware?

But the Trojan War was more than a pair of epics that managed to survive for millennia or even a series of cultural tropes. In its time, it was a far-reaching catastrophe that ended and upended lives. And it affected not only warriors bent on securing eternal glory but wives and mothers, children and servants. Natalie Haynes, in her new novel A Thousand Ships, explores this Trojan War through the experiences of the goddesses, princesses, Amazons, townswomen, and captives who in some cases drove it forward and in others suffered the consequences. Read on to find out more.

A Thousand Ships is your third novel, but even beyond the novels you have a “presence,” for lack of a better word, in Classical Greek Studies, including a BBC4 radio broadcast and two nonfiction books. What drew you first to this aspect of literature and history and then to writing fiction about it?

Yes, I have made six series of a radio show for BBC Radio 4, called Natalie Haynes Stands Up for the Classics. I think people were pretty surprised it found an audience, but we get about 1.6 million listeners per episode (my country is a lot smaller than yours!). And now it’s available as a podcast, and has found a whole new audience there, which is wonderful.

I have been a classics nerd since I was eleven, when I started learning Latin. Then I began studying Ancient Greek aged fourteen. I was really lucky that my high school had these options: most students don’t get that opportunity. I did my degree in Classics at Cambridge. So ancient history and myth grabbed me at a very young age and have never really let me go. It took me a while to get around to writing fiction about it—I spent twelve years as a stand-up comedian first, which I know isn’t the obvious route into writing fiction set in the Bronze Age. But it has made it fun to tour a live show off the back of each book.

And why retell the Trojan War from a woman’s perspective—or, more accurately, many women’s perspectives? This decision, too, has classical precedents, including Euripides’ The Trojan Women.

I had already told the story of another Greek myth from the perspectives of two of its women in a novel called The Children of Jocasta. I love Greek tragedy, and I wanted to retell the story of Thebes (whose most famous son/husband/father is Oedipus) and see what happened if I shifted the focus to its women. But that is a much more focused narrative. I’d been building up to doing the Trojan War for a while before I began A Thousand Ships, I think. I wanted to take on a big story, an epic, with a huge cast of characters, like having a whole set of tragedies in play at once. I was certain the war could be told through the eyes of the women whose lives it affected (not least because it is goddesses, over and over again, who cause and dictate the direction of the war).

I had written and spoken about Euripides for years before I really thought about how extraordinary it is that all but one of his Trojan War tragedies have women as the title characters. We’re used to thinking of war narrative as male-focused, because they so often are (ever since Homer’s Iliad). But Euripides realized that the drama of war (because he was writing plays, rather than epic poetry, so that was his focus) is not always on the battlefield: it’s also in the build-up to a war, or the aftermath of one. It’s where the women are. If he knew that 2,500 years ago, it’s odd that we forgot it. But I felt like we had.

Is there one character who particularly stands out for you?

I love Cassandra. I think she suffers one of the cruelest fates in Greek myth—cursed to see the future but never to be believed. She’s so isolated, because her future is so terrible: her city, Troy, will fall to an invading force; many of her relatives will be killed or enslaved; she herself will meet a woman with murder on her mind (I’m not saying any more in case I spoil it for readers!). So the future she sees is incredibly bleak and terrifying, but there is no one she can speak to about it, because no one believes her. She must have felt mad—like those awful dreams where you’re talking but no one can hear you or understand you. And yet, of course, she was completely, horrifyingly sane.

Cassandra always feels like a woman out of time to me—trying to tell people what to do to save themselves, but helpless to stop them from careening toward their own destinies. I often feel like her, to be honest.

The women of Troy, whatever their standing before the city’s defeat, face an uncertain and uninviting future. Why is that?

The sack of a city in the ancient Greek world was usually brutal. The standard response was to kill all the men and enslave the women and children. You could wipe out a whole culture with incredible ease—kill a city’s men, take its women and children away, repopulate the city with your own settlers. The women would be divided up among their conquerors, so separated from one another. How long can we imagine it would be before an enslaved Trojan woman learned to speak Greek because there was no one for a hundred miles in any direction of her new home who spoke anything else? How long before she forgot her own language or dialect? As Euripides shows us in his play The Trojan Women, even the women of the royal house of Troy end up waiting around to be chosen and taken away by the same Greek warriors who had killed their husbands and fathers and sons. Their powerlessness is devastating to witness. Although his play Hecabe shows that sometimes women with no agency at all can nonetheless engineer one of the most grisly revenges in all of Greek tragedy.

Not all the women whose points of view are included in A Thousand Ships actually went to Troy. Clytemnestra appears, as does Penelope. What perspective do they add?

With this book, I wanted to tell the story of the whole Trojan War, not just one side of it. So there are chapters from the perspectives of the goddesses who want the war to happen, as well as from the mortal women whose lives it destroys. There are chapters focusing on the Trojan women who lose their city and the Greek women who lose their husbands to the war (temporarily or permanently, in some cases: not all the Greeks come home, after all). There is a chapter for Penthesilea, the great Amazon warrior who fought at Troy. There are chapters in the voice of Calliope, the muse of epic poetry, who is responsible for all these large-scale war stories. The war is focused on one city, but what happens there ripples across the whole Greek world. I wanted to tell it in such a way that the reader would see that a war like this has no winners, really. It’s not a game.

Without giving away the endings—plural, since each woman has her own—what in particular about Andromache made you decide to end with her? (Do briefly identify her, for the sake of our readers.)

I’m not sure I can answer this without giving away the ending! Andromache is the wife of Hector, who is the favorite son of Priam and Hecabe, the king and queen of Troy. Hector is the city’s great defender, but there is an extraordinary moment in book 6 of Homer’s Iliad where his wife tells him that he needs to be more careful when he fights, take fewer risks, etc. He rejects her advice (though the whole conversation is beautiful—loving, respectful, full of care for one another and their city, and the people who depend on Hector to defend them). As the poem plays out, her advice turns out to have been painfully true: Hector feels he has to disregard it, but everything she fears will happen does then occur. Andromache has one of the most awful experiences of any of the Trojan women, and it was extremely painful to write the scene where that happens. But in the end, she finds a sort of peace, and I wanted the novel to end on a more hopeful, bittersweet note. So she gets to finish it.

And what comes next—another novel?

I have a nonfiction book, Pandora’s Jar, also coming out with Harper Collins in 2022, I think. But it’s already out in the UK, so that can only mean one thing: I am late starting the next novel. Which tells the story of Medusa, one of the very first survivors of sexual assault to be monstered (literally and metaphorically). The planning is going ok so far, but I need to get writing; my fingers are getting itchy …
        
Thank you so much for answering my questions!
 

Natalie Haynes is a writer and broadcaster. She has published three novels: The Amber Fury, The Children of Jocasta, and A Thousand Ships, as well as the nonfiction studies Pandora’s Jar: Women in the Greek Myths and The Ancient Guide to Modern Life. She has spoken on the modern relevance of the classical world on three continents, from Cambridge to Chicago to Auckland.

She writes for The Guardian and is a regular contributor to BBC Radio 4, including through her show, Natalie Haynes Stands Up for the Classics. Find out more about her and her books at https://www.nataliehaynes.com.

Interview with Barbara McHugh

Since I first started this blog in June 2012—can it really be eight and a half years?—I have never missed a Friday post. Perhaps it’s weirdly fitting that my one deviation (so far) involves a fascinating interview with Barbara McHugh, Buddist practitioner and teacher, about her recently released debut novel, Bride of the Buddha. An unanticipated complication to an otherwise-successful (and planned) surgical procedure, and my carefully maintained blog schedule went out the window. Talk about impermanence!

Read on to find out more about this wonderful exploration of a woman whose life has been reduced, at best, to a footnote in a legend. Heartfelt thanks to Barbara and her publicist, Holly Watson, for their patience as I belatedly got the post online. And definitely seek out Bride of the Buddha, available as of Jan. 26, 2021, from Monkfish Book Publishing Company.

What drew you to the story of Yasodhara, the bride of your title?

A couple of things. So many women I knew, including myself, had difficulties with the prospect of following the Buddha, a man who’d abandoned his wife and infant son to go off and seek Enlightenment. I wanted to explore that story and understand Siddhartha’s actions as an aspect of the overall message that the myth conveys. The legend is that the Buddha was a prince named Siddhartha whose father wanted above all for him to become a great king, so he made sure his son had the most pleasant life possible as a prince, where he never came in contact with sickness, aging, or death the entire time he was growing up. The Buddha-to-be married the beautiful princess of his dreams and gave birth to a male heir, but everything fell apart when he for the first time saw a sick man, an old man, a corpse, and finally a holy man, who provided a solution to his problem of existential terror. These “four heavenly messengers,” as the texts describe them, motivated Siddhartha to leave home, abandoning his wife and child—as well as his parents, extended family, and his whole community—and embark on a quest for enlightenment.

This story, while it may have some roots in history, is a myth. For one thing, the historical Buddha wasn’t a prince but most likely the son of the leader of one of the oligarchic clan-republics in North India at the time. Also, the notion that his father could protect him from all knowledge of sickness and mortality until he was twenty-nine years old is absurd. So what was going on with these distortions? My explanation is that the myth demonstrates the crucial Buddhist doctrine that even the most perfect life is unsatisfactory—not that life consists of nothing but suffering (a common misinterpretation of Buddhist thinking), but that it is permeated with stress and ends in death. Siddhartha, the future Buddha, is depicted as living the ideal life for a person in his times: he’s male, a prince married to a beautiful woman whom he truly loves, and the father of a son—so important in a patriarchy. And yet his life becomes unbearable when he faces the truth of sickness and death.

I think the power of Siddhartha’s story comes partly from his idealized identity: if the Buddha had just been some dissolute rich guy sick of his life, people could easily dismiss his reasons for seeking spiritual answers as the efforts of a wastrel to compensate for his many failures. But the Buddha was a success in all phases of his worldly life, and therefore his decision to leave home implies, as he states in the First Noble Truth, that suffering is inevitable in all lives, even the happiest and most productive. At the same time, in my novel I wanted to go deeper into the abandonment issue. I wanted to portray the possibilities—not only for Yasodhara but for all women—beyond simply being the victim in a myth.

I also wanted a perspective on early Buddhism from the point of view of a woman—and one who knew the Buddha intimately.

We first meet Yasodhara at the moment Siddhartha leaves her to pursue his religious quest. Why did you start the story there?

I started with that event because so many people are familiar with this episode. I wanted to prepare the reader for Yasodhara’s version of what happened, which would sometimes diverge significantly from the traditional stories. At the end of the prologue, I have Yasodhara state this outright and hint at why her divergence is the real truth.

We then go back in time to a crucial incident in Yasodhara’s childhood, involving her sister Deepa. What do we need to know about this event?

This incident, although it introduces and conforms to Yasodhara’s basic background (her parentage, her socio-economic situation, her relationship to the Buddha’s Sakyan clan, and the existence of dog-duty ascetics and other wandering holy persons of the time) is entirely fictional. It’s important to the novel because it sets up Yasodhara’s lifelong spiritual quest as initially unrelated to the Buddha. I wanted the story to belong to her, and not be the Buddha’s story as seen through her eyes.

And how would you describe Yasodhara as a personality?

She is someone passionately in love with the world and people in it. At the same time, she knows from an early age the horror and desolation of death, and she wants somehow to transcend mortality. Her spiritual aspiration results in her decision to conceal her gender in order to join the Buddha’s all-male community, becoming the monk historically known as Ananda. But her worldly passion, for much of her life, translates into anger at the injustices suffered by the people around her. As she matures spiritually, she increasingly manages to transform her anger into helping others, yet her passion still gets her into trouble, and in later years she has to come to terms with anger as well as grief if she is to attain her final enlightenment.

We already know that she marries Siddhartha, who will become the Buddha. How does that come about?

The suttas (in Sanskrit, sutras) and later legends portray the marriage as an arranged one, in the sense that Siddhartha would at most have had a choice among pre-selected candidates. In all likelihood, he would have married one of his cousins, as he does in the novel.

And what is your view of him, as a literary character? Was it difficult to write such a venerated figure?

Actually, I had fun writing about Siddhartha. I had to make the pre-enlightened Buddha worthy of Yasodhara’s love; I also wanted him to embody worldly values at their best. But rather than following the official, untenable myth where Siddhartha doesn’t even know that aging, sickness, and death exist, I have him simply in denial about these things. Until Yasodhara’s pregnancy forces Siddhartha to come up against mortality, his denial takes the form of avoiding all morbid thinking, while living in the moment as much as possible—which, ironically, some people mistake for the essence of Buddhism.

Creating the enlightened Buddha was more of a challenge. I had to clear my mind, see what my intuition would come up with and then carefully read and rewrite, using as much scripture as possible and proceeding with humility.

The book is presented as the diary of the monk Ananda. Tell us a little about him.

Ananda was a monk, one of the Buddha’s many cousins, who became the Buddha’s personal attendant for the last twenty-five years of the Buddha’s life and who persuaded the Buddha to admit women into his monastic community. I became curious when I discovered some striking peculiarities in the Buddhist texts that have to do with him. For instance, it makes little sense that the Buddha needed Ananda to convince him to ordain women. Ananda was a junior monk who hadn’t even achieved Enlightenment, and he used arguments that had to have already occurred to the Buddha. Another perplexity is that in spite of Ananda’s privileged relationship to the Buddha, he was the only close associate of the Buddha who failed to become enlightened in his teacher’s lifetime. My novel explains both of these anomalies, but I don’t want to include too many spoilers here. Obviously, my fictional solution involves portraying Yasodhara and Ananda as the same person.

Are you already working on another novel?
 
Yes. It takes place 2,500 years in the future in a world controlled by women.
    
Thank you so much for answering my questions!

 

 

Barbara McHugh, PhD, is a Buddhist practitioner with a degree in religion and literature from the University of California, Berkeley. She is a published poet, writing coach, and book doctor. Her research for this book includes the study of many Pali texts in translation and extensive travel in India. Learn more about her and her work at https://www.barbaramchugh.com.

Broken Promises

I’ve written before about the fun and excitement of releasing a new book. That is especially true of Song of the Sisters, which is something of a departure for me. Sure, there is a political backdrop (I seem to be incapable of writing a pure romance). But compared to the earlier Russian novels, this one focuses on a domestic conflict involving two sisters who discover after their father’s death that he has left the estate where they live to a cousin they barely remember and detest on sight. Is the cousin lying? If so, how did he get hold of their father’s will? If not, why did their father never mention the inheritance and, in fact, indicate he had quite different plans in mind? Since he suffered from dementia for years before he died, it’s all too possible that their father’s plans, however sincere his intent, never came to pass.

The questions assume particular urgency when it becomes clear that their cousin doesn’t plan to stop with the inheritance. He wants to advance his career by finding a highborn husband for one sister and forcing the other into a convent. This means war, and the sisters—despite the constraints placed on women in their culture—pull out all the stops to find the original will and thwart their cousin’s plans.

Excerpt

“Oh, Darya, you have to see this. A strutting peacock just entered our yard!” Solomonida stood on tiptoe, leaning forward until I worried she might tumble right through the open window in her eagerness. The late morning sunlight glinted off her jeweled headdress and found an answering glow in the wisps of blonde braid that had worked their way out from under the rim as she sewed.

“Peacock?” I stared at her and sighed. It wasn’t fair. My older sister was lovely, even at thirty-one. Not just beautiful, either, but vivid and charming—outgoing, outspoken, eager to interact with life beyond our courtyard gates. Next to her I felt like the quiet mouse she teasingly called me. “How would a peacock get into our yard?”

“See for yourself.” She beckoned to me.

Sorely tempted, I glanced at the altar cloth I was embroidering, already well on its way to completion. I’d set myself the task of stitching the edge of the Blessed Mother of God’s halo before I left for church, and I wasn’t even halfway through. “I’ll never finish this if I stop every time a bird flies by, Solomonida.”

I rubbed the pure white rose I’d embroidered yesterday between my thumb and forefinger, imagining the flower’s aroma—the scent of holiness. The thread, soft against my skin, reminded me of the real petals I’d stroked this morning on my journey through the courtyard. The sky-blue satin behind the flowers caressed my fingertips; the cloth-of-gold that formed the halo glittered with the light of Heaven. I liked nothing better than to watch my needle threading in and out, connecting one delicate stem stitch to the next, directing my thoughts and dreams along a clear, simple path.

Although I’d never seen a peacock outside a book. And a peacock on every corner would make the altar cloth quite unique. Why waste the chance to see what a real one looked like?

“Don’t be silly,” Solomonida said. “That altar cloth won’t get up and walk off by itself. It will be there when you get back to it. Do hurry, or you’ll miss him.”

Temptation won, not for the first time. I dropped the altar cloth on a nearby table and ran to join her. When I saw what had attracted Solomonida’s attention, thoughts of embroidery vanished from my mind as I too gave way to giggles. The young nobleman crossing our courtyard—the toes of his scarlet leather boots turned up; his brocade robe stitched with gold lions as long as my forearm, the full skirts held in place by a tasseled silk sash of a rich, bright blue; his high collar framing a face topped with reddish hair and a green hat; his long cane (obviously for show) tucked under one arm; his shoulders thrown back and his chest thrust forward—did indeed resemble nothing so much as a strutting peacock.

Early Reviews

“In Song of the Sisters, against the tense political backdrop of 1540s Moscow, C. P. Lesley brings us into the domestic world of the women’s quarters and enchants with a quiet novel about two sisters who wield their limited power to determine their own destinies.”

—Finola Austin, author of Bronte’s Mistress

“From the first page of Song of the Sisters I was transported to sixteenth-century Russia. C. P. Lesley’s rich prose brings the challenges faced by the young noblewoman Darya and her sister Solomonida to vivid life. Charmed by her humor and ingenuity, I read avidly, rooting for Darya to find her own path beyond the control of her strutting peacock of a cousin, Igor. With themes of love, trust, friendship, and female empowerment, Song of the Sisters is an enthralling read that had me turning the pages long into the night.”

—Kate Braithwaite, author of The Girl Puzzle and other novels

“In Song of the Sisters, the third installment of C. P. Lesley’s delightful Songs of Steppe & Forest series, we meet the wealthy but orphaned Sheremetev sisters. Darya is nearly too old to marry after having spent eight years nursing their father. Solomonida is raising a young daughter following the death of her cruel husband. The sisters peacefully attend to their needlework and supervise their many servants until they are confronted by a distant cousin who claims to have inherited the entire Moscow estate from their late father. As the new lord, he has also acquired the right to choose husbands for them and otherwise rule over their lives. But the sisters have other plans.

From Tatar shenanigans on the steppe to the machinations of Moscow’s elite, trained historian C. P. Lesley weaves historical facts with a prodigious imagination and a passion for sixteenth-century Russia. In Song of the Sisters, she has re-created a world of misogynistic laws, court intrigue, formidable clans competing for power, and women’s camaraderie in the face of male domination.”

—G.P. Gottlieb, author of the Whipped and Sipped Mysteries, host of New Books in Literature

“So rich with historical detail that readers will swear they can taste the foods and stroke the fabrics described, Song of the Sisters vividly transports readers to sixteenth-century Russia. C. P. Lesley blends fact and fiction seamlessly to create a sweet tale with more than a hint of intrigue.”

—Molly Greeley, author of The Heiress

Images: Sergei Solomko, The Seventeenth Century and In Pursuit of Happiness (1880s-1890s), public domain via Wikimedia Commons.

Interview with Connie Palmen

One of the fun elements of writing fiction is the chance to explore hidden facets of a familiar story. This is especially true—although also a particular challenge—when the characters and events in the novel are real, yet the author’s perspective offers new insights on what we have assumed is a familiar, even trite, tale.

The marriage of the poet Sylvia Plath, who committed suicide in 1963, and her husband Ted Hughes (also a poet) is an example of this phenomenon. The subject of a thousand-page biography recently reviewed in the New York Times Book Review, itself the latest addition to a vast literature on the poet’s life and death, Plath has become an iconic figure. Non-scholars passed judgment on her and her husband long ago. Yet in Your Story, My Story Connie Palmen does an exemplary job of overturning our expectations by presenting the couple’s relationship from Ted Hughes’ point of view. Moreover, she succeeds without sugar-coating Hughes’ personality. Issued in English translation just two weeks ago, this is a novel well worth seeking out. Read on to learn more about both the book and its author.

This book is not your first. Is there a theme that ties your prior works together?

When you a write a novel, there is never only one reason to do so; there are a lot of reasons, tangled themes, fascinations, love for a specific genre, love for other novels, the never-ending need to understand more about life and about yourself. The theme that guides a lot of my novels is the sometimes devastating influence of how we talk about other people. After the suicide of his wife, Sylvia Plath, the life of Ted Hughes became the subject of gossip, nasty stories, myths, biographies. It was no longer his.
 

What drew you not just to Sylvia Plath’s story but to Ted Hughes’ side of it?

When I was mourning the loss of my husband, I read Ted Hughes’ Birthday Letters, published just before his death. I was struck by how poignant and heartfelt the poems were. I felt they pointed to Hughes’ deep love for Sylvia and the pain he endured as a result of her death—a pain with which I could relate. The more I delved into Hughes’ poetry, the more compelled I felt to tell Ted’s side of the story.

And how do you see Ted Hughes, a historical personage who as a literary character must be in part your creation?

While working with my excellent translators, Anna Asbury and Eileen J. Stevens, I described Your Story, My Story as my “Judas” novel. The Judas connection is crucial here, as my Ted Hughes character states from the beginning that the key events in his relationship with Sylvia were set in stone before they ever met. In other words, the trajectory of their marriage was fixed from their first encounter. Does that absolve him of all guilt in this tale? Was he simply an unsuspecting accomplice? Or does this make Sylvia less of a victim? I have tried to relate this story impartially, leaving room for ambiguity in spite of narrating only one side. It is up to each reader to decide.

How do you understand Sylvia Plath, her personality and her suicide?

As a writer, philosopher, and as Ted Hughes, I try to understand Sylvia Plath’s suicide, and suicide in general. In the novel Hughes acknowledges in her personality a radical thread, a longing for purity, and a willingness to sacrifice her false self to become more real and clean. This longing might be a part of understanding her, but people are complex and there is never only one explanation for our behavior.

No story is one-sided. What were the strengths and weaknesses of their marriage, in your view?

Hughes was not a monster, and Plath was not a saint.

What is most important for potential readers to know about this story, as you tell it?

Ted Hughes and Sylvia Plath were one of the most famous romantic couples in modern Western literature. In countless biographies of Plath, she is given the status of martyr and Hughes that of a traitor and murderer, while Hughes was reviled by strangers and even sued by people he once considered his friends.  

I wanted to describe the thoughts, fears, and incantations of this husband, and his deeply tragic bond with the woman who would come to define his life.

You write in Dutch. The translation seems very fluid and well done, but does the act of translation change a literary work in some way?

A good translator understands how and what a writer wanted to tell, and she preserves the essence of a novel. That is the wonder of reading your own book in another language: it is completely different and at the same time exactly yours.

Are you already working on another project? What can you tell us about it?

I am still doing research for my next novel, and I wrote essays on Vivian Gornick, Joan Didion, and Sylvia Plath. It is a continuation of a small collection of essays I wrote on famous, talented, and rather destructive women like Patricia Highsmith, Marilyn Monroe, Marguerite Duras, and Jane Bowles.

Thank you so much for answering my questions.

Connie Palmen was born in Sint Odiliënberg, the Netherlands, and studied literature and philosophy at the University of Amsterdam. She is the author of The Laws, voted the European Novel of the Year and short-listed for the 1996 International IMPAC Dublin Literary Award; The Friendship, winner of the AKO Literature Prize; All Yours; Lucifer; and the autobiographical works I.M.—now a television film broadcast in December 2020—and Journal of a Merciless Year. Your Story, My Story, published in Dutch as Jij zegt het in 2015, won the prestigious Libris Prize for Literature and was short-listed for several other literary awards. Amazon Crossing published the English edition in January 2021. Ms. Palmen currently lives in Amsterdam. For more information, see http://www.conniepalmen.nl.

Unhappy Rich Girl

A little over a year ago, I published a written Q&A with the author Molly Greeley on this blog. That was supposed to be a podcast interview, but as luck would have it, the workmen who had spent the previous two weeks doing everything but putting my deck back together (after demolishing it in no time flat) arrived, saws and hammers in hand, the day before I was supposed to talk with her. She kindly agreed to reschedule, since it was clear we would barely be able to hear each other—and our listeners even less so. I vowed to host a conversation about both novels when the second one appeared.

That has now happened. William Morrow published The Heiress: The Revelations of Anne de Bourgh on January 5 of this year. Molly and I spoke well in advance of the release, to avoid delays caused by the annual winter and New Year’s holidays, and you can hear us talking on the New Books Network. The post below, which accompanies the interview on New Books in Historical Fiction, provides an introduction to both novels.

The world created by Jane Austen in Pride and Prejudice has established a place for itself in contemporary culture that few other novels can match, yet amid the countless spinoffs, some stand out. Molly Greeley seems to have a special gift for creating novels that, although based on Austen’s creations, take on a life of their own.

In 2019’s The Clergyman’s Wife, Greeley imagined how the marriage between Charlotte Lucas, the friend of Austen’s heroine Elizabeth Bennet, and Mr. Collins, Austen’s risible antagonist, might have worked out after three years. The Heiress (William Morrow, 2020) takes up the story of Anne de Bourgh, a character who in the original Pride and Prejudice exists mostly as an example of the kind of young woman that novel’s hero, Mr. Darcy, should prefer to Elizabeth, if only in the opinion of Anne’s formidable mother, Lady Catherine de Bourgh.

Now, to anyone familiar with Lady Catherine, the thought of being her daughter is itself enough to cause shudders of alarm, but on the surface, Anne has a privileged life, including the right—rare for a woman in eighteenth-century Europe—to inherit her father’s estate. In this, she occupies the opposite position from Charlotte Lucas, who married Mr. Collins solely to avoid becoming an elderly, unwanted spinster living in genteel poverty.

But all is not well in Anne’s world, either. A fractious but healthy baby, she undergoes “treatment” for what we assume is colic that leaves her addicted to laudanum, an opiate. Her father wants to wean Anne of the drug, but her mother insists on following the advice of the local quack even as Anne becomes more listless and emaciated. A governess manages to awaken Anne’s interest in poetry and mathematics, but it’s only when Anne herself awakens to the dangers of laudanum and decides to rid herself of her addiction, no matter what it costs her, that she begins to grow into her inheritance.

Interview with Judithe Little

I first encountered Judithe Little when her then publicist, Caitlin Hamilton Summie, pitched Judith’s first novel to me for a New Books in Historical Fiction interview. That podcast appeared in 2017 as part of a one-time experiment in talking with two authors, back to back, about books that happened to cover related topics. (I didn’t repeat the experiment because it turned out that the computers weren’t good at featuring two authors and two novels in one post.) You can still hear our conversation for free on the New Books Network.

Her second novel, The Chanel Sisters, reached me in a similar way, but it covers a very different subject: the life of the famous fashion designer Coco Chanel. Read on to find out more about both books.

Your first novel, Wickwythe Hall, came out in 2017 and addressed a single crucial decision made by the British government in 1940. What led you to move from that very military/political arena to the early years of Coco Chanel’s life?

Both book inspirations came while I was reading Axel Madsen’s biography Chanel: A Woman of Her Own. It was the first Chanel biography I’d read, and in it I learned about Coco’s early life as well as the confrontation between the French and British navies in World War II. I wrote Wickwythe Hall first because I found it so astonishing that most people didn’t know about that tragedy (including myself), but there was always a placeholder in my mind for the early part of Coco’s life that ends just after World War I in 1921. Both novels are, at heart, about relationships and how war can irrevocably upend them.

The novel is called The Chanel Sisters, and in fact the main narrator is Antoinette (Ninette), not Gabrielle, the future Coco. What does Ninette’s perspective offer you as a writer that Coco’s would not?

Coco never told the truth about her convent upbringing and the fact that her father abandoned her. Ninette knew exactly what Coco worked so hard to hide because she experienced it too. As a reliable narrator, Ninette offers a more intimate, honest side to Coco than Coco herself would ever be willing to reveal. Also, as I researched Ninette’s story, I realized she played a more important role in the founding of the Chanel empire than previously known. I thought it was time she had her own voice. 

There is also a third sister, Julia-Berthe. Where does she fit into the story?

All of the sisters, once released from the clutches of the nuns, choose different paths out in the world. What motivates them in part is to fill the void left by their father’s betrayal. The longing for love is heightened in the sisters because they’ve spent their entire lives feeling unloved. Julia-Berthe, the oldest sister, seeks out physical love. She has no grand schemes to break out of poverty like the other two and is more willing to accept her place in the world. Like her parents and grandparents, she tries to squeeze out a living selling used items in outdoor markets. She is who Antoinette and Coco might have been if they hadn’t pursued their dreams and broken the cycle of poverty they came from. It’s ironic that for all that the name “Chanel” stands for today, it comes from a family of vagabond peddlers living hand to mouth.

Like many people, I would guess, I have been aware of Coco Chanel throughout my life without really knowing much about her beyond Chanel no. 5 and the Little Black Dress. How would you summarize her, as a character? What’s most important for us to know about her?

Coco was a very complex person, but one quality that defined her was a driving need for freedom. Freedom from poverty, from the convent, from the rules of society in general, and from the rules of society imposed on women. Because of her quest for freedom, she revolutionized fashion and along with it the way women participate in the world. She gave women clothing they could actually move in. But she didn’t do it intentionally. She didn’t start out wanting to be a fashion designer at all. She made hats and clothing for herself first because she didn’t like the fussy, overwrought choices of the time and also couldn’t afford them. Her pared-down style caught on as did her philosophy that women should dress to live, not live to dress.

The love of Ninette’s life is a man she calls Lucho. Tell us a bit about him and how their romance intersects with your novel’s main theme: the relationship among these three sisters.

Those were the days when who you married defined you in the eyes of society. Of the sisters, Ninette is the one who wants her existence acknowledged by society as it never was by her father. She hopes against all odds to find love and acceptance all wrapped up in a nice package. Then life presents her with Lucho, who can give her the former but not the latter. He’s an Argentinian/English horse breeder who comes to France to promote his Criollo ponies to European polo players. When World War I breaks out, he provides his horses to the French army to help fight the Germans. Coco, who’s more pragmatic than Ninette, doesn’t care about propriety. She helps Ninette understand she’s playing a fool’s game, trying to protect a “reputation” she never really had because of her low birth.

Can you tell us anything about the novel that you’re now working on, referenced in your bio, below?

The novel I’m working on now takes place in Paris in the 1920s and 1930s and is told from the point of view of Coco Chanel’s best friend for over thirty years, a fascinating woman who was actually more famous in Paris at the time than Coco.  

Thank you so much for answering my questions!

Judithe Little is the author of two novels, The Chanel Sisters and Wickwythe Hall, award-winning historical fiction set during World War II. She grew up in Virginia and earned a Bachelor of Arts in Foreign Affairs from the University of Virginia. After studying at the Institute of European Studies and the Institut Catholique in Paris, France, and interning at the US Department of State, she earned a law degree from the University of Virginia School of Law, where she was on the Editorial Board of the Journal of International Law and a Dillard Fellow. She lives in Houston, Texas, with her husband and children, where she is working on her third novel. Find out more about her and her books at http://www.judithelittle.com.

 

If you’re looking for the usual annual resolutions, I ran the pared-down version in last week’s post, “Looking Back—and Forward.” And as always, I wish everyone a splendid new year, with love and success and happiness for you and those you love!