Ask Tara Conklin and Christina Baker Kline! discussion
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Thanks Angela - I hope you enjoy The House Girl! Tara
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Hi Janet, I could talk to you for hours in response to those questions - there were many bumps in the road before this book made it to publication - but I will try to keep it brief here. The very initial spark of inspiration came the term "slave doctor" that appeared in a footnote in a biography of Virginia Woolf I was reading. Nothing more was said about this person, no further information was given - just the words slave doctor. I put aside the biography and started to wonder about who would occupy such a role, which seemed to me inherently conflicted: to dedicate your life to healing and yet your patients were destined only for more and graver harm. What kind of person would do this? So I started writing a story about a slave doctor, whom I named Caleb Harper, and two women appeared in his story - Dorothea Rounds and Josephine Bell. I could not stop thinking about these women, and so I started writing their stories as well, and I just kept writing. I never intended to write a novel - at the time I was working full-time as a lawyer, and had been for some years by that point, but these characters really took up residence in my brain and wouldn't let me sleep (literally! I had dreams bout them, especially Josephine.) As I wrote, I was also researching the antebellum period and slavery in America, and realizing how under-educated I was about this part of American history. Josephine, Dorothea and Caleb's stories arose pretty organically from this writing/research process. In terms of changes in the story line - I did not envision the contemporary section until I had written the historical narratives. The history seemed to me so relevant, so compelling that I wanted to bring it into the modern day and look at it through contemporary eyes, and that's where Lina came in.
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Thank you Sandi - so glad you enjoyed The House Girl.
Tara and Christina, Thank you so much for responding to our questions and comments . I have thoroughly enjoyed looking in on this thread all day .
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I had the opportunity to read an ARC of The House Girl in November 2012. I particularly enjoyed Josephine and the 1850s passages. What led you to in..."
Hi Lauren, thanks for the question. the writing of The House Girl was very roundabout - I didn't even begin to call it a 'novel' until about 3 years into the project. See my answer to Janet's message #10 above. In terms of Lina - I decided to make it a dual narrative for a lot of reasons. First (and selfishly), those are the kinds of books I love to read and I think it's a pretty good rule that you should write what you want to read. Also - after I finished the historical sections (which I wrote first, before imagining the contemporary thread), I felt very sad - on a gut level, it just seemed wrong to leave these characters in the past. Specifically, it felt wrong to let Josephine's story remain unknown in the contemporary world, the way that the lives of so many enslaved people remain unknown to us today. I wanted her life, her suffering, to resonate with someone today - to change someone's life. And that's what she does for Lina. Throughout my legal career and education (I was a lawyer for 7 years but am not practicing now), I was always very interested and involved in international justice issues - how legal systems and procedures can help individuals heal after periods of mass violence and repression and help a society move forwards, as seen in the International Tribunals for the former Yugoslavia and Rwanda, the ICC, South African Truth & Reconciliation Commission, etc. etc. Of course nothing like this happened after the Civil War. The lawyer in me was interested in looking at the idea of a contemporary reparations claim - what it might look like, what kinds of issues would be in play - and prompt the reader to ask the same questions. I didn't want to write a legal 'thriller' kind of book, however - I was more interested in the personal stories and personal journeys.
Hi Tara and Christina!I read Orphan Train a while back - I belong to Catherine Mackenzie's book club 52 books, 52 weeks and she chose it for a weekly read - I loved it!
I just started The House Girl so not too far into it.
I have two questions - one is that both of you have written these books in the style of writing that goes back and forth between two characters and two time periods - it seems that this is (kind of) a new thing as older novels didn't use that formatting. Why did both of you write your novels in that way and will you continue to do so in the future.
Second question is this - Christina, I am sure that you know that there was (essentially) a"fight" on a goodreads thread about your book. Someone had read a few pages and then wrote a thread trashing the book and a bunch of other people jumped in. Are you able to read things like that and not take it personally? To focus on all of the many good comments about your book and not worry about what some people write? I think I would be devastated to put so much time and effort into creating something and then have someone read a few pages and then trash it. I was really annoyed when I read that thread.
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Hi Tammy, thanks for the question. I'm so glad you enjoyed the book. To save my typing fingers, I'll point you to my answer above to Janet about my initial inspiration. And I'm assuming you mean did I hear about a white artist co-opting the work of a slave? No, I did not come across any example that matched this specifically but throughout my research, I returned again and again to the question of historical memory and historical credit: who did this? and who do we remember, who do we CREDIT with doing it? At some point in my writing, I heard a radio piece about the enslaved people who constructed much of the White House, but their names today remain unknown, no marker commemorates their work - their contribution would have been lost entirely to history were it not for the work of this particular historian who was being interviewed (and I'm sorry but his name is escaping me right now!) There were many, many more examples of this that arose in my research. Once I started asking the question 'who is missing from this historical picture?', I found Josephine everywhere. So, while I did not locate the specific situation that arises in the book between Josephine and Missus Lu, I think that those circumstances are completely plausible and very well could have occurred. I am currently working on my second novel The Last Romantics, but it has a contemporary setting and is a family-based drama. Thanks for the questions!
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Yes, I am one lucky author to have Bahni Turpin as the voice artist on the audiobook. She did a stellar job - I'm so glad you enjoyed listening. I am working on a new book - see my answers above. It's called The Last Romantics and is "a novel of family, siblings, love and loss." Publication date is still to be determined... I'm not finished writing yet (!) but stay tuned on my website taraconklin.com for more information.
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I read Orphan Train a while back - I belong to Catherine Mackenzie's book club 52 books, 52 weeks and she chose it for a weekly read - I loved it!
I just started The House..."
Beth wrote: "Hi Tara and Christina!
I read Orphan Train a while back - I belong to Catherine Mackenzie's book club 52 books, 52 weeks and she chose it for a weekly read - I loved it!
I just started The House..."
Hi Beth - Thanks so much for writing. In answer to your first question: I talked about why I alternate between perspectives in the thread above, #38 and 43. (Writers have been using multiple perspectives for quite some time; some of my favorite novels by Virginia Woolf, William Faulkner, and Edith Wharton employ this style.)
Second - I'm kind of flattered that someone is passionate enough to hate my novel (or at least the few pages she read)! Seriously, I've gotten such an overwhelmingly positive response to Orphan Train that I feel very lucky and grateful in general. There are many serious and thoughtful readers out there, and the fact that they take the time to respond (as you are doing now) inspires and delights me. My family can't agree about "Gravity" - I certainly don't expect everyone to agree about "Orphan Train." And sometimes, when the criticism is constructive, I can learn from it. (For example, see my answer to #35 above - I wish I'd added a few beats to the scene in question, and will think about that when I'm creating a pivotal scene in the future.)
Christina wrote: "Beth wrote: "Hi Tara and Christina!I read Orphan Train a while back - I belong to Catherine Mackenzie's book club 52 books, 52 weeks and she chose it for a weekly read - I loved it!
I just star..."
That is a great attitude! You must be pleased at the positive response you have gotten - I am friends with someone who is related to you and when the book first came out she was posting on Facebook that everyone should read it. It must feel great to have so much support.
I went back and re-read both 38 and 43. I guess this was a style of writing that I was not particularly familiar with and then it seems like recently I am reading a lot of books that are written that way.
I just finished What She Left Behind and found it to be similar in some ways (also about a young woman in the foster care system and the book moves back and forth between two time periods and two characters) and also The Girl You Left Behindand that was when it dawned on me that this style of writing had become pretty popular and was fairly new to me.
In some ways it must be more difficult to write this way because you are tying together two completely different stories and trying to make it work - some authors have not done this as successfully as you did in Orphan Train.
Christina, I loved when Mollie would go to help Vivian sort through her boxes of belongings and Vivian was not ready to part with any of it. It reminded me of my time with my mom when I tried to help her pare down. The To Keep pile was always the biggest pile. She ended up saying it would be up to me some day to part with any of it. In your imagination, who will eventually inherit Vivian's boxes?
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Hi Destanye, thanks for your kind words about the book - I'm so glad you enjoyed it. I wanted to make the point, at least tacitly, that Josephine's story (and by extension, the story of American slavery) is relevant and critical history for us all, white and black alike. While I was working on the book, I found it interesting that people often seemed curious as to why I would be writing about slavery - the implication being that I, a white woman from Massachusetts, should not or had no reason to be interested in that time and place - that this history wasn't "mine". My response has always been that this is American history and understanding that time, wrestling with its implications and recognizing its continued influence, is vitally important for us all as Americans. By making Lina light-skinned(and I want her ethnicity to be a little mysterious - maybe her mother is Hispanic? the reader doesn't know - I don't know!), I also wanted to show how these two women separated by so many things - time, race, opportunity, privilege - still shared the same basic human desires for freedom, self-fulfillment, love. I think reading (and writing) fiction is such an exercise in empathy - we put ourselves in the shoes of characters who are dramatically different from ourselves, and yet we understand their struggles, we are moved and inspired by their journeys. And yes, Lina is vastly more enthusiastic about the reparations claim than Garrison for a number of reasons. Garrison is more hard-headed and ambitious than Lina, and he sees the reparations case as potentially controversial, possibly frivolous and most likely a losing claim. He'd rather be working on the more serious, business-related claims for corporate clients - cases he can win. I think he also suspects that he's being singled out for this case because he's black - which, although this isn't explicitly stated in the book, Dan hints at - and he doesn't like that either. Once he understands just how important Ron Dresser is to the firm, Garrison changes his tune and wants to succeed in the case and distinguish himself in front of Dresser. Lina's enthusiasm for the case is really about her interest in Josephine - in Josephine, she sees so much of her mother: an artist unrecognized in her time, a woman who seems to vanish into thin air, a child left behind. In many ways, Lina is afraid to look for her own mother because it means confronting her father, who's the only family she's ever known, and so instead she searches for Josephine, and Josephine's story inspires Lina to find the strength to make changes in her own life.
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Hi Sophie, my advice is to keep writing, keep reading, take writing classes if you can, join or start a writers group, go to readings, go to talks - learn as much as you can about the craft of writing and practice what you've learned as often as you can. There's no magic formula or secret insider trick to getting published (or maybe there is - but I don't know it) - it's really a matter of hard work, attention to craft and persistence. Good luck!!
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For Ms. Kline, did you visit the Orphan Train museum in Kansas during your research? My husband and..."
I have no immediate plans to follow Lina or any other characters of The House Girl, but I've received emails from many readers asking the same questions about Lina and Grace. Honestly, I'm as curious as you are as to how Lina resolves things with her mother.
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Hi Fiona, I've answered this in previous messages - my current work-in-progress is called The Last Romantics - it's a novel of family, siblings, love and loss with a contemporary setting. I find the antebellum period fascinating, however, and so rich for fiction - so I may return there in future works. Thanks for the question!
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That's a tough question. Readers often ask if Lina's character is autobiographical, given that I am (or was) a lawyer who worked in a big corporate firm in NY. Lina is definitely not me, although some of her experiences are based on experiences that I had within that environment. I think I relate to different experiences of many of the characters: Lina's difficulties in finding her professional calling, Josephine's joy in creative expression, Grace's love and anguish as a new mother, even Dan and the personal sacrifices he's made for his profession.
Yes, Christina, I would have her leave the boxes to her granddaughter, too. In fact, I like to think of her going through the boxes again with her granddaughter and this time being able to part with the contents knowing it will be precious to the granddaughter and not just tossed.
Hi, publisher again! We also just listed a 200 copy giveaway of a previous book by Christina Baker Kline, The Way Life Should Be. Click here to enter! https://www.goodreads.com/giveaway/sh...
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Hi Robin, great question. This relates to my answer above to Destanye. It would certainly have been convenient, plot-wise for Lina to be Josephine's descendant - and a few early readers suggested that I go this route. I didn't like the idea because I thought the coincidence would be too far fetched, but I also wanted to underline the point that the stories of enslaved people are important for us all to read and study, regardless of any personal "connection" to that time period. We are all connected to that time and place, we should all wrestle with its implications. And yes, I certainly hope that Jasper and Lina deepen their relationship! I'm going to allow them some privacy to figure it all out.
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Hi Sharon, hmmm... that's a first for me. I'm not sure! Jasper very much presented himself to me - I never really considered another character for Josephine's descendant, male or female. It also worked out well for Lina because she then got a love interest.
I read both titles and enjoyed them very much. I found them to have the common thread of modern day characters in a story running parallel to characters from a previous time, and the reader knows the stories will converge at some point but does not know how it will happen. This kept me reading and enjoying the ride! Well done, both of you. I am a librarian and I can assure you both, your novels are being enjoyed and talked about here in VT!
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Hi Wendy, thanks so much for the note - I'm so glad you enjoyed the book. My grandmother (93 and sharp as a tack) lives in Grafton, Vermont and I've spent many wonderful days there over the years.
I enjoyed reading The House Girl. I wanted to know how did you get interested in historial times of slavery? Bringing Josephine to life in each chapter.
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Hi Twana, thanks for the question! You can find partial answers to this question above in responses to Janet and Lauren. My interest in the time period goes back to my childhood - I was born on St. Croix, in the USVI, a place marked by slavery in the sugar fields, and was raised in Stockbridge, Mass., an old New England town with roots to the abolitionist movement. I remember as a kid being fascinated with the Underground Railroad and the drama of those escapes. As an adult, my renewed interest originated with the characters themselves. I began writing the stories of Josephine, Caleb and Dorothea and realized that my own knowledge about the time period wasn't sufficient to write authentically about these characters, and so I began to research the time period. And the more I learned, the more I wanted to learn.
Tara and Christina, Thank you so much for taking the time to answer all the questions. I have enjoyed following this thread throughout the day.
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I read Orphan Train a while back - I belong to Catherine Mackenzie's book club 52 books, 52 weeks and she chose it for a weekly read - I loved it!
I just started The House..."
Hi Beth, in response to your question about alternating time periods - I wrote the novel that I wanted to read, and I love stories with split narratives that take you back and forth in time. Some of my favorite novels employ this technique - Possession, for example, which also uses letters (as I do in The House Girl) is one of my all-time favorite books and was definitely an inspiration for me. As Christina mentioned, this is a technique that's been around for awhile but perhaps it has gotten more popular in recent years. I also love novels that push the form in some way - like Cloud Atlas by David Mitchell, or A Visit from the Goon Squad by Jennifer Egan. These are books that jump narrator, time period, country, style and yet manage to maintain a consistency of vision and theme.
Tara wrote: "Beth wrote: "Hi Tara and Christina!I read Orphan Train a while back - I belong to Catherine Mackenzie's book club 52 books, 52 weeks and she chose it for a weekly read - I loved it!
I just star..."
Thanks, Tara! I just started The House Girl today so I have not read your other answers on this thread because I want to wait until I am done reading it.
I read a Visit from the Good Squad last year and I found it a little strange - but like food, art, and movies, books are very subjective and we all like different things.
I like that you say "I wrote the novel that I wanted to read" - that is really cool and I look forward to finishing the book and to reading your next one!
We talked about the juxtaposition between Molly and Vivian in our book club. We were thinking about how no one ever really asked about what was Vivian's perspective- she didn't care about her name. Her personal integrity was about whom she was; while Molly's identity was wrapped up in her name- completely different frame of perspective. How were both finding out who they really were...
Tara wrote: "Lauren wrote: "Thanks for coming by to answer our questions!I had the opportunity to read an ARC of The House Girl in November 2012. I particularly enjoyed Josephine and the 1850s passages. Wha..."
Thank you very much for responding with that brilliant answer!
Christina wrote: "Sophie wrote: "I read The Orphan train, being something I wouldn't usually read and LOVED it so so so very much, and The House Girl is on my reading to do list. I'd like to ask a question not about..."Thank you so very much for replying to my question. It means an awful lot to me. I'm going to keep writing. Thank you for your inspiration :)
Hi Tara,I'm not sure if you are still reading this but I finished The House Girl yesterday and I LOVED it. I waited until today to read your answers to questions above (since I had just started the book) and your comments above helped me to understand your motivation for writing this book.
Really wonderful stories and beautiful detail - I look forward to reading your next book!
Christina wrote: "Becky wrote: "My book group read and enjoyed "Orphan Train" but we were all wondering why Vivian would give up her child. First of all, she was all the remained of her beloved spouse. Secondly, a..."That's very interesting. Thanks for those insights. I will share them with my book group and I look forward to your next book, whatever it may be.
i am afraid about myself afraid to my sword to touch weak heart
The Orphan Train would make a wonderful movie. I pictured Vanessa Redgrave as Vivian. Loved this book and have recommended it to many.
Ask Tara Conklin and Christina Baker Kline!
Books mentioned in this topic
What She Left Behind (other topics)The Girl You Left Behind (other topics)
Orphan Train (other topics)
Orphan Train (other topics)
Orphan Train (other topics)
The Orphan Train is a history I know very little abou..."
Hi Nada, thanks so much for your kind words about the book! I'm so glad you enjoyed it. I am currently working on a new book - it's called The Last Romantics and (to quote my publisher) it's "a novel of family, siblings, love and loss." The setting is contemporary and does not follow any of The House Girl characters, but many of the themes - love, family, autonomy and sacrifice - are the same. Stay tuned for more info... I'll have updates on my website taraconklin.com. thanks for the question!