Beth Macy
That’s hard to answer because there’s almost no time in my career when I haven’t been thinking about the story that resulted in "Truevine." Like others who’d asked before me to do the story, I’m sure I was initially attracted to the great yarn that it was. But once I really got to know the brothers' caregiver and great-niece, Nancy Saunders, and understood deeply what she’d gone through to protect her uncles — a process that took a couple decades — I saw the Muse brothers’ story not as a great yarn but also as a way to reflect society at large. Were the brothers better off, ultimately, traveling in the circus than they would have been at home in Jim Crow Virginia? That question led me to explore sharecropping and life during segregation; all the untold micro-aggressions black Virginians faced, including the Muse family, as well as how the general circus-going public, whose fascination with sideshows said more about the audiences, truly, than the freaks.
There were a lot of layers of meaning and universality tucked within this one outlier story. The longer I worked on it, the more interesting and multi-layered it became to me. This book could not have been written by an outsider; it could not have been produced in a hurry. It had to be pieced at by a local, on a slow simmer. I’m not generally the world’s most patient person, but this one was worth the wait.
There were a lot of layers of meaning and universality tucked within this one outlier story. The longer I worked on it, the more interesting and multi-layered it became to me. This book could not have been written by an outsider; it could not have been produced in a hurry. It had to be pieced at by a local, on a slow simmer. I’m not generally the world’s most patient person, but this one was worth the wait.
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