I Was Anastasia

by Ariel Lawhon

I once heard that you should write the novel you want to read. And while that might be good advice for some, I have long since discovered that after spending years researching, writing, revising, and editing my novels, I can’t actually read them. Or maybe it’s that I have already read them—dozens of times. I’ve grown too close to the story. I know whodunit. The man behind the curtain is no longer a mystery to me and I know exactly how the rabbit was smuggled into the hat. Several years ago, I pulled my first novel, THE WIFE, THE MAID, AND THE MISTRESS, off the shelf and read a random paragraph. “Huh,” I said, “I remember writing that. I was sitting in a corner booth at Panera beneath an air conditioning vent. It was freezing.” Also, I spent eight dollars on lunch that day. And my order—in case you’re wondering—was a Greek salad, tomato basil soup, and a French baguette. As it turns out, I cannot read my novels because I so clearly remember writing them. Where I was. How I felt. Time of day. The challenge of thumbing through research material trying to get a very specific detail right. I remember everything. It’s a strange quirk, I know, but it comes in very handy at a moment like this as I revisit the mental and emotional process that led to each of the following popular quotes from I WAS ANASTASIA. I hope you enjoy this peek behind the scenes. Because I have certainly enjoyed revisting my writing process.

If history were taught in the form of stories, it would never be forgotten. —RUDYARD KIPLING, THE COLLECTED WORKS

When I was growing up my father hung a copy of Rudyard Kipling’s “IF” on a wall in our living room. I knew he put it there for my brothers, but I liked it anyway and I’ve had a fondness for Kipling ever since. So, when I ran across the above quote, I knew I wanted to use it as the epigraph for I WAS ANASTASIA. History is just a story, after all, but so many people seem to forget that. They find it dry and uninteresting, a litany of dates and times, facts and figures. My goal, with every novel, is to make history come alive, and therefore I must make it very, very human. Love. Loss. Triumph. Tragedy. Heartbreak. Heroism. I want to show the full range of human experience within whatever particular moment in history I have chosen to write about. I want my readers to care about the people involved. And there’s no better way to do that, than to tell a really good story.

If I tell you what happened that night in Ekaterinburg I will have to unwind my memory—all the twisted coils—and lay it in your palm. It will be the gift and the curse I bestow upon you. A confession for which you may never forgive me. Are you ready for that? Can you hold this truth in your hand and not crush it like the rest of them? Because I do not think you can. I do not think you are brave enough.

I am fascinated when I hear fellow authors describe the ways in which their characters speak to them. One friend in particular swears that she can hear entire conversations in her mind and that her job is to transcribe them. This has never happened to me, and, frankly, I find the idea a little creepy. My characters are all mute. I close my eyes and I can see them moving about but they have never spoken to me. With one exception. I was somewhat overwhelmed the day I sat down to begin writing I WAS ANASTASIA. I’d shifted suddenly from writing about Alcatraz to writing about Anastasia and I did not know how to begin. The idea of turning Nothing into Something felt impossible. I paced around my desk my desk for a few minutes and then settled in to work. I closed my eyes, took a deep breath, and then…I heard something--not an audible voice—but something nonetheless. A whisper. A woman’s voice. Irritated but insistent. So, I scribbled what I heard on a piece of paper. It became the opening to the novel and has never changed from the day I wrote it until the day it was published.

The thing Anna has always hated most about being a small woman is the disadvantage she has in situations like this. People assume they can touch you, pat you, shake your hand without permission. They assume that if your size is little more than that of a child, you must be one. That you can be talked down to or coerced. It is hard for a small person to be intimidating or to be taken seriously. This lack of stature has forced Anna to develop other skills through the years: to sharpen her wit, to treat her tongue like a blade and her mind like a whetstone.

I am very tall. Tall enough that if I wear heels I’m often the tallest person in the room. Honestly, I love it. But this can be a blind spot while writing. I have to remember than not everyone can see the top of the fridge or reach the top shelf at the grocery store. Many people—women in particular—view the world from a different elevation. Both Anastasia Romanov and Anna Anderson were quite petite. Writing from their points of view forced me to spend a lot of time thinking about how a woman would have to move through the world if she did not have size as an advantage. In the end, it wasn’t that hard: I channeled my mother. She is the smartest, most articulate, witty woman that I know. She is small but mighty. And she’ll cut you off at the knees if you cross her. Perhaps I am so tall because I figured that out early in life.

But his mistake in Wasserburg was the beginning of everything going wrong. Had it not been for the Private Investigator, she would have proved her case before the courts long ago and she wouldn’t have spent decades living in a ramshackle cottage waiting for the verdict of her appeal. She would have a title and an estate and the dispersed fortune of Tsar Nicholas II of Russia.

The greatest challenge I had with I WAS ANASTASIA is that I began the novel at the end. And if you have read the book, you know that the two points of view—Anna and Anastasia—alternate back and forth. One told chronologically, and one told in reverse. Each taking turns, moving closer toward one another until they collide at a key moment in which all is revealed. It was easily the biggest challenge of my career. And the most rewarding. Sometimes I had fun, but mostly I felt as if my brain was on fire. And all of it began in this scene. I had to set everything up right here. I had to make you think you knew what was happening and then I had to unravel every one of your assumptions so that you would doubt everything you thought you knew. High stakes for one scene. It helped tremendously that lunch, on that particular day, was eaten at my desk and consisted of my favorite grilled cheese sandwich: sharp cheddar, Hatch green chilies, and ripe beefsteak tomato.

I’ve never realized before how clearly men need leaders. How adrift we are without them and how the mere sight of one can breathe courage into a room.

My dad was one of those men you feel walking into a room. He was six-foot-two. Black hair and blue eyes. Uncommonly handsome. He was a former cattle rancher and military police officer. He had physical presence—the only thing he had in common with Tsar Nicholas II—and I brought back his memory to write this scene. My father died almost seventeen years ago in the most horrific and tragic of ways. Maybe that’s why I superimposed him into this scene? Possibly. Probably. Regardless, when I think of the Russian Emperor returning to his family, I think of the way I felt at eight years old when my father came home after a trip to Israel. He filled the entire room and I knew that I was safe.

They size her up against the memory of the woman she is accused of being. Their long-lost sister. A mentally unstable woman who disappeared in early 1920.

Ah, memory, that great liar. I recently had a conversation with one of my sisters about “An Event” from her childhood and my adolescence (there are many years between us). What happened that day changed…well, everything. It lasted five seconds yet my entire family is still dealing with the fallout. And what I remember with crystalline clarity—blood, fear, a frantic drive to the emergency room, surgery, a miracle—is not at all what she remembers. It’s as though we lived two different moments entirely. And yet we were both there. We both saw it happen. So, who is right? That, dear reader, is exactly the point. And that feeling—equal parts uncertainty and conviction—is what I drew on day after day to tell the story of Anastasia Romanov and Anna Anderson.

There is nothing artistic about rape. Taking a woman by force makes a man no better than the rooster in Tobolsk. It simply makes him an animal.

It was early November and I was sitting at my desk. I know this because the leaves were falling outside, and my husband had started a fire in the fireplace before leaving for work. The kids were at school and I was all alone in a quiet house. I’d researched and written about seventy-five percent of I WAS ANASTASIA. I felt like I had a good grip on what was going to happen in the story. I knew how it would end and what I would have to do over the next weeks and months to finish the book. And then… …and then I stumbled across a detail in my research material (confirmed in a second source) about a sexual assault. I hadn’t planned to write that. I didn’t want to write that. But it happened and to pretend it didn’t would be wrong. So, I wrote the scene from the perspective of a young woman trying to make sense of such horror. She frames it in the only way she—and I—could. And if, like either of us, you’ve ever spent time on a farm you’ll understand the imagery. I didn’t eat lunch that day. I just sat at my desk and cried my way through.

As women we are taught that bravery and valor exist in the grand gestures. We believe that kindness is weakness and arrogance is the same as courage. But it is not so. Sometimes restraint proves the mettle of a man’s heart more accurately.

These are words (albeit paraphrased) that my mother spoke to me, at fifteen years old, shortly after being dumped by my first boyfriend. I lay on my bed, face down, in tears, as she rubbed my back. I was young and stupid, and the boy was an absolute douche-canoe. But her words remain true. She went on to tell me that time wound heal my heart (it did) and that I would wake up one day and realize that I hadn’t thought of him in years (I did) but, that when it came time to marry, I should find the kindest man I could. Like I said, my mother is the smartest woman that I know. I took her advice to heart and, many years later, I found that man. Reader, I married him.

Each minute seemed to stretch like taffy softened in the sun, pulled to its thinnest, most tender strand.

I don’t often write something and think, Yes! That is perfect! But this sentence is a rare exception. After writing this I leaned back in my chair absolutely pleased—or, as the British say, chuffed—with my words. I still am, to be honest. I love that sentence.

“We can only know that we know nothing. And that is the highest degree of human wisdom.”

I have two very specific thoughts on this passage: The first is that it was written during the last month of my deadline, while I was battling a vicious case of viral pneumonia. It hit me like a tidal wave one day while I was sitting at my desk and within an hour I was on the couch. I didn’t get up for month. Every word I wrote for the next four weeks was drafted in a fever dream. And yet, those passages ended up being some of my favorite in the entire book, this one included. The second is that I write these words, today, amidst the coronavirus epidemic. My family has been trapped inside for two weeks thanks to school closings, self-quarantining, and an un-seasonable amount of rain. And yes, I realize that captivity and social distancing are very different things, but the emotional toll is similar. Our circadian rhythms are out of whack. We don’t know what day of the week it is. We’re scared. We’re bored. We’re on edge. We spend a lot time thinking about our next meal. It is so strange how life can imitate art.

This is how the human heart beats, a twisted staccato of love and envy, of anger and relief.

Anastasia Romanov had three sisters. I have three sisters. And I don’t know if there is any relationship on earth so fraught or so comforting as that of sisters. You are the same but different. You would die for them, but you don’t want to share your makeup. You long to be your own person but you want to remain joined at the hip. Sometimes you weep over their failures…and sometimes you secretly rejoice. You’d strangle them if you could—but God help anyone else who tries to do the same. It’s complicated. But it was very easy to imagine how one sister would feel, looking at another who has not only been spared her misfortune, but is completely unaware of it.

Acknowledgments

Once my books are published I choose a short passage that I will read during book events, then I pet them lovingly, and set them on the shelf. I am hopeful that one day enough time will pass, and I will be able to approach my own work as a reader instead of a writer. Until then I get to live vicariously through readers such as yourself. I get to see which passages are meaningful to you. I get to answer your questions and emails. I am grateful for every single person who reads my novels. I am grateful that this childhood dream of being a novelist came true. I am grateful that I get to turn history into her story.