Debut Author Snapshot: Charlotte Rogan

The setting: an overloaded lifeboat adrift in the Atlantic Ocean. The dilemma: Would you be willing to kill to survive? Debut author Charlotte Rogan's characters face dire circumstances in The Lifeboat, a historical novel set in 1914 that one reviewer dubs "Lord of the Flies with Edwardian ladies." Readers meet narrator Grace Winter, a middle-class girl who marries into privilege and is now on trial for murder. To argue her case, she recounts the sinking of the ocean liner Empress Alexandra, the loss of her young husband, and a desperate power struggle aboard the over-capacity lifeboat. Not everyone makes it to dry land.

The mother of triplets, Rogan turned to writing following a career in architecture and engineering. She is now working on her second novel. The Connecticut writer shares with Goodreads nautical images that inspired The Lifeboat.

Goodreads: You've said that you come from a family of sailors. Have you experienced any close calls at sea?

Charlotte Rogan: My husband and I own a little boat that we keep at my family's summer house in Maine. It is the same shape as the lifeboat in the book, but a lot smaller, and I love it because it is picturesque and graceful more than because it is particularly seaworthy. It was built by a local craftsman to both row and sail, but it is not very efficient with the sail up. It seems I can always get out of the cove, but the wind has to be just right for me to get back; often I end up rowing or waiting for the wind to change. So I have some experience with a boat that is hard to maneuver.

My family sailed together a lot when I was a child. I was too little to be of much help when the weather turned bad, and I remember looking nervously across a smooth expanse of calm water as the dark line of a gale approached and trusting that my father would know what to do when it reached us. He mostly did. I think it was those experiences of battling the elements surrounded by people who were stronger than I was that allowed me to imagine what those weeks in the lifeboat must have been like for Grace.

GR: This year marks the centennial of the Titanic sinking. How much did that tragedy serve as inspiration for the plight of your fictional transatlantic liner, the Empress Alexandra? How did your story idea originate?

CR: The Titanic was a wonderful resource for me as I wrote The Lifeboat, but I wouldn't really call it an inspiration. In fact, I protected myself from reading any personal accounts of the survivors because I didn't want them to affect how I saw my own characters. The Titanic was extremely useful, however, when it came to researching important details for the Empress Alexandra and for lifeboat 14.

For instance, the size of the lifeboat was of critical importance for me. Most of the Titanic lifeboats could hold 65 people, but 65 characters would have been far too many for both author and reader. The Titanic also had four collapsible lifeboats (capacity 47 people) and two wooden "cutters" (capacity 40 people). I modeled my lifeboat after the cutters but made the boats slightly smaller in order to make the boat overcrowded while keeping the character count manageable.

My real inspiration—the thing that caused me to put pen to paper—was coming upon an old criminal law text and reading about two cases involving shipwrecked sailors who were put on trial after they were rescued. I loved the moral dilemma, the idea that the law of society wasn't quite suited to people in extreme situations. I have always been interested in Thomas Hobbes and John Locke, 17th-century political philosophers who talked about the social contract—the bargains made when people give up some of their freedoms for security. Their work has modern-day implications for individual rights.

GR: The reader begins to notice clues that Grace Winter may be an unreliable narrator. How did you decide what to reveal, and with so many moral questions at play, how did you avoid passing judgment on your characters?

CR: I am interested in your phrasing of the question—you zero in exactly on the relationship between passing judgment and revelation. I think that if I had revealed everything that Grace did and didn't do, I would almost necessarily have come across as judgmental. The fact that we don't really know what she did or why is part of what allows us to engage so fully with her and her story.

What to reveal, what to hint at, and what to explicitly state is a careful balance for a writer. Too many unresolved mysteries can be frustrating for the reader, but books that spend the final pages tying up all the loose ends always seem anticlimactic to me. This can leave a final impression of dissociation rather than engagement, completely undoing the imaginative connection that was made in everything that went before. I tend to dislike pages of exposition and explanation at the beginning and end of the books; my bias was against doing that in The Lifeboat.

This also gets at something of my process as a writer. Both the characters and the story develop organically for me. It is only through writing the story that I come to know my characters, and often I am surprised by what they decide to do. I remember being so excited when I first thought to myself, "Oh my goodness, Grace isn't telling the truth!" This was closely followed by the thought, "Well, who does?" And it is that line—between the usual sort of prevarication and a more extreme sort of lying—that I find so fascinating.

GR: What's next for you as a writer?

CR: I am superstitious about talking about my work, so I will only say that I am well into another novel, this one set in South Africa, where my husband and I were lucky enough to live for nearly a year.