thank you all for coming tonight this event is sponsored by the friends of the belmont public library and it's being taped for the belmont local t v station two i'm really thrilled to have on a solemn and here by chance i actually met her when she was a baby about two months old are my aunt is her godmother but so but all these years i have not met her in between so it's very exciting to watch her career and now to have her here in belmont an asylum is the author of two novels leaving lucy pair which will be speaking about tonight and the little bride which is also a wonderful book and both of those are on sale in the back there she is the two time winner of the push a two time winner of the pushcart prize and one of those pushcart prize winning stor stories the lobster mafia story was chosen by the boston book festival as its two thousand and twelve one city one story selection and that was and i know you spoke at that festival them about that story her short fiction essays and reviews have appeared in publications including the new york times magazine one story plow shares slate and the boston globe she's coeditor with eleanor henderson of labor day true birth stories by today's best women writers previously and worked as an award winning journalist for national public radio's living on earth she holds degrees from brown university and the iowa writers workshop she was born and raised in gloucester and lives in brooklyn now and it's my pleasure to introduce an asylum to everybody thank you so much it's great to be here can you hear me ok ok ok let me just just as a little bit there you go yeah good ok let me know if you can't just shout out the folks watching will understand so i'm very glad to be here and i just want to thank the library for having me and jenny for having me here and arranging this and taking such care with this that she puts on porter square books is providing the book so thanks to them as well and all of you for being here i don't know if you've been seeing recently in the news there's been a lot of pieces about how reading fiction makes us kinder and more empathetic which probably doesn't surprise anyone in this room if you're a book lovers which you probably are and then recently of a few weeks ago this article came out that said that it also makes you live longer so i just want to let you all know that we're all this is clearly good for everyone in the room tonight  i'm going to talk a little bit about my new book which is called leaving lucy pear and sort of how i came to write it in a little bit about the time period and the story i'm going to read very briefly from it and then hopefully you'll have some questions for me as well so the way that i came to write this book it began when my stepfather handed me this history book called the saga of k pan how many of you get to keep on ok i figured in this audience there be a large percent or so as the title the saga of k pan suggest it's a very dramatic book that makes a lot of very small things and there's this long section in there that was about this woman who this wealthy bust tony and woman describe who summered on cape  and who was suffering from a quote nervous disorder this one particular summer and it was being agitated by this whistle buoy which had just recently been installed off eastern point where she was staying so whistle buoys were these buoys which they don't really use anymore but you know when the they would be there to warn like anybody warn sailors and fishermen and other people to justice there was this resolutely and it was shrieking it make me this they made these horrible noises and it was driving her literally batty and she did you know what any well connected person would do she called the navy because she had these she had these connections with the navy and she called and she asked them to please remove the whistle buoy and they did and then the you know this goes on to say the next year it was reported in the boston herald that so and so was feeling much about first of all so and so had gotten married and therefore was feeling much improved and said that the whistleblower could be put back in the water and it was and this is all the book said but as a as a novelist this or in a person to this compelled me on all of these levels first of all the nervous disorder second of all the idea that the that the marriage would cure it and then the idea that you know what happens on a plot level if the when the whistle buoy is taken out there is a consequence right kind of disaster that this woman is then responsible for and if you're if you grew up like i did as a you know a year round person in a place like gloucester you know that there's already a certain animosity toward the people who are outsiders and some are people so in those tensions the class take intentions the inside or out through generations and all very interesting to me so that sort of met up with this other so i guess story which is a true story from my childhood i grew up in gloucester and there were some pear trees down below my house which for a few years every summer there would be this one morning where we would wake up and all of the parents would be gone they would just the bare branches would be totally bare and my father would make up these kind of outlandish stories like the drugs came or the tera ductile zz and which we enjoyed but then you know he always would sort of say well there must be somebody who really needs these pears and the mystery of that stayed with me and so i can't exactly explain how it came together with the whistleblower but those were the sort of seeds that planted this book for me in my mind and the book at its most basic is about three women it's about one woman who abandon baby under a pear tree in gloucester on eastern point another who finds that baby and raises her because she's she finds her because she's in the orchard to steal the fruit and then the baby herself who is a ten year old girl by the time the book takes place in one nine hundred twenty seven so to give you a sense of the little bit of these three characters be the one her name is beatrice he even when she's eighteen she is  she's the one who leaves the baby under the pear tree she's eighteen at the time she's the daughter of very wealthy jewish industrialists in boston very assimilationist they're trying to really they're very they're trying their hardest to both leaving it as she does in this orchard is fare far harder on her than she imagines and not long into her time at radcliffe she has what would have been called a nervous breakdown and winds up in a mental institution which i will stop for this particular audience for a moment and say that the hospital where she goes which i call thane right is based on a hospital here in belmont which i'm sure i'm very familiar with mclean which i visited and researched quite a lot when i was during the time that i was writing this book and the archivist there i think it's terry mclean is no that's not the last name i can't be i'm associating with the hospital terry something was incredibly helpful to me so anyway after her stay she winds up returning so after her stay she winds up returning home to boston to her mother who's very overbearing and she's been becoming involved in the temperance movement i'm sure most of you are the one nine hundred twenty s prohibition is in effect there is still a lot of people are under the impression that once probation took place there wasn't a temperance movement anymore but it's not true there was a lot of lot of people really fighting the fight still she becomes very involved in it and as she's working you  repress others people's fun she's also determined to repress her own desires which is how she came to be in this mess in the first place of course to be pregnant and she winds up mate marrying knowingly a gay man it's a marriage of convenience for them both it allows him not to come out of the closet they're very close friends but it's it's what it is and by the time we meet her again ten years later in one thousand nine hundred seven she she's only twenty seven but she's living like a far older woman and she spends most of her time not in boston but with her husband but at her uncle's house in gloucester which is where she left the baby all those years ago so that to be emma murphy is the is the irish catholic and roland has begun drinking so much that he's unable at this point to support the family and in this summer of one thousand twenty seven while he's away on an extended fishing trip which i'll get into later emma decides to take matters into her own hands and use the pairs that they've been stealing all these years to make something called perry which is a pair wine which of course was prohibited this time so she's basically starting to make moonshine is the idea in the course of this project she begins an affair with the manager of the local quarry who helps her get the equipment and stuff for to make the parry and then we have the sea pair who is ten years old when we meet her she's very smart she's very kind she's very bold and she also has like everybody else in the book some secrets and one of those some of them are going to have to read the book to find out but one some of one of those is that she's been dressing like a boy so that she can go with her brothers to work in the quarry because she wants to make enough money to to leave and to go to canada where one of her older brothers has been there making mention so anyway that's those are the kind of core characters there's actually a host of other characters whose point of view the book goes into as well i won't get into them here except to say that the cor manager i described his name is josiah story who's having the affair with emma is not only a rum runner but is also running for mayor and in his attempt to get beatrice's beatrice cohn who's now cone because that's her married name her endorsement in his campaign he brings emma to her emma murphy to her to be a nurse for her elling uncle so that is how the women are brought back together and emma knows immediately who is but she doesn't know who emma is for quite a long time and it's really that the recognition and then they're reckoning with who really has the right to call herself lucy mother that that drives the book forward and i want to pause there and read briefly from actually the scene where they first remeet and we see emma coming to the house she's being brought there again by j fisted not all night she had lain awake three times in the past week she walked down to the coffee shop and asked mrs span if she could use the telephone she picked up the earpiece and heard the operator's voice she would tell story she had changed her mind hello the earpiece was heavy and cold and mustard against the wall in the back of the shop but the men at the counter watched her anyway can i help you she hung up she would take the bus to the quarry to tell him in person but even if she tripped out of spend she knew she could not do that knew she could not walk into josiah stories office again with a straight face his wife might be there she was often there he said a good company wife hedges on one side a stone wall on the other not plopped together like lane's bill's walls but tall and mordred solid the car moving too fast for emma to track where they were she heard roland's voice that's her husband slow it down his admonishment when the o rubbed too hastily in their locks slower you're making a hullabaloo he was talking to her now he could see her in the back seat of just saya stories car flying past hedges she had been a bad wife file and now what kind of mother was she was she doing when lucy was a baby a woman had hovered at the fringes of emma's thoughts without face or name a receptacle for whatever emma might feel for her at any given moment pity in comprehension discussed pity again she even felt guilty toward her as if emma had stolen lucy against the woman's wishes her guilt perhaps helped explain why the murphys had not found another orchard for their pears maybe though her heart did not stop claiming the entire time they picked emma felt she had to give the woman at the chance to take lucy back maybe two each time the woman didn't come lucy became more irrevocably rightfully hers she made her a servant of the house rather than a daughter always emma returned to pity settled there it was easiest on her heart then for years the shadow woman had retreated replaced by the reality of lucy her ever growing body the habits of her tenderness her dear quiet footsteps in the house lucy belonged there  firmly as any threshold or drawer they were so far from the beginning now why risk going back what was wrong with emma that she could not say to story turn the car around i've changed my mind but the car was slowing and turning up a long sycamore lined drive and emma saw up ahead the old gravel path her family tiptoed across each year the duesenberg sailed it without pause through the sycamores emma emma saw the pear trees in full flower she wiped her hands on her skirt despite her stillness and the mild day she was sticking to the seat the house came into view the first time she'd seen it in daylight mortar flaking hedges mushrooming shutters missing slats an ailing monument of stone a siblings to scare them off straying come away a human child to the waters in the wild with a fairy hand in hand for the world more full of weeping than you can understand emma she had not sung it to her own children it was too sad here we are the figure was gone from the window stories eyes in the rearview mirror twitched with nerves he trimmed his hair and i realized or more likely susanna had trimmed it his name was visible a dark clean point did you tell her emma's voice a husky until she cleared it did you tell her we were coming i told her i was coming with a little gift a gift i don't know what i said a token of my appreciation for all her hard important work and so on emma's annoyance was swamped by dread as the front door of the house opened and the figure from upstairs stepped out into the sunlight sweat pooled in emma's elbow cracks and between her thighs even from a distance the resemblance was unmistak there was lucy's for middlebrow her dark springy hair her stance fleet feet flat toes out arms loose at her sides lucy had been the only person emma knew to stand comfortably like that not an hour ago lucy had stood like that in the yard her and her hammer cocked in one hand her head cocked to one side watching as emma ducked into the duesenberg emma had not told the children where she would be working only that the new job was on the other side of town emma she's waiting she swiped at her forehead with her forearm wiped her forearm with her other hand tried to wring her hand out with little success story was too nervous to notice she thought but the woman would the real woman with a face and a name who was staring down at the car now waiting beatrice cone emma wished her back into facelessness even as she felt herself rising from the car she felt her legs lift one after the other up at the stone path felt her fear slam decide by a greater force now that she was here who need to lucy's mother to know was like a rope pulling her by the neck she was nearly foaming with it she must look preposterous she thought her gait halting undecided she didn't know that from where beatrice cones to she appeared perfectly natural of a piece she looked like a poor lovely heavily perspiring irish woman treading cautiously in a place she had never been before good morning mrs cohn called story his voice over bright i'm ten minutes early i like to be on time always out of respect for your time i mean i hope we're not troubling you beatrice cohn smiled flatly not even glancing at emma lucy's grace was drowned in the woman's skinniness she was all angles you couldn't trouble me mr story she said and his story coughed up a good natured chuckle and the nearly bit her tongue she realised was shocked that she had met mrs cohen before two summers ago on a meltingly hot day when a group of women in plain dark throat strangling dresses knocked at the murphy door and asked emma to deny her husband intimate pleasures if he would not deny himself the pleasure of drink emma had moved to shut the door but this but one woman this woman caught it with her foot and pushed a small package wrapped in butcher paper into emma's hand at least deny him more children she had said in the same nasal brahman accent with which she had just mocked story how could emma not have recognized her you think he wants more children she'd asked before she kicked the woman's foot out of the way slammed the door and pulled the curtains when the women knocked again she ignored them she was emma murphy of leverage street of church of the sacred heart she did not even know what the package contained but she kept it and opened it and discovered thing she had not known existed one single brand rubber diaphragm and shocking illustrated instructions for how to deploy it she had used it every time ever since mrs cullom story was saying let me introduce you to mrs emma murphy with your uncle elect thought you could use the help nursing him i mean so that your energies don't have to be divided from your work divided diverted you understand yes he clapped him on the back with comradely force again the flat smile dribbled back my uncle is a very private man said mrs cohn she appraised quickly top to bottom mrs cohen gave no sign of recognizing her through the open doorway loomed a hallway crowded with impractical chairs and chests a towering grandfather clock a chandelier whose lower regions emma could just make out glittering seas of treasure she might be asked to dust she was squeezed by a sudden he trid she saw the design of beatrice cohen's life with startling clarity mrs cohn had a hundred bedrooms and her snide acts and enough wealth to hire an entire city of nannies and she had dumped her child on emma shed her like an extra pair of shoes to charity and then then she had made a career out of saving poor women and children a pitiful stab at redemption even as emma fed and bathed and dressed and disciplined and loved her daughter until the day she had the gall to come along and chastise emma for having too many kids levert street must have seemed to her a right kind of underworld and she its guardian emma tasted by a looking at the dress the woman wore today lavishly flowered silk so nice it must have been imported green and pink and black at ten o'clock in the morning her stance feet flat toes out arms loose struck as a cold thing now when lucy stood like that it was an offering the kind of stillness that said come in but on mrs conan the effect was the opposite you couldn't trouble me mr story and i had given so much for this woman she let her be the servant envisioned her need being greater than emma's own but beatrice khan was a rich jew beatrice cohn needed nothing she glanced at emma her little gift as if emma were barely the where she'd forgotten that she had once been desperate that someone had saved her some one emma was struck by an urge to hit her followed by an understanding that story's mother money wasn't all she wanted by being here she wanted to trouble  exterior poke holes in the myth of her goodness she wanted to remind her i'm a good caretaker she heard herself say in her most mollifying voice and very discreet and of course her knees curtsying you can always change your mind tears rose in mrs cohn's eyes as shocking as if she'd begun to sob emma had caused the tears she knew you can always change your mind she had provoked a memory needled hurt the woman before she'd even really tried to effortlessness of it startled her but beatrice cohen's tears disappeared as abruptly as they'd come on simply dropped back behind her skin water behind a wall she smiled at emma her mouth closed but still a smile disorienting and went to such a degree that for a second she thought she knows who i am i don't see why we can't give it a try mrs cohen said in her clipped humorless way and now as she and story began to make arrangements emma saw her smile more clearly there was no complicity in it only charity it was the smile she had worn on emma's stoop the one she must have worn all the stoop she visited where women with plain hair and brown shoes answered their flimsy doors so emma's pity for lucy's mother had been fantasy but hers for emma was real as she nodded at story her smile stuck a studied stale thing and emma saw the thought that must keep beatrice combs heart going despite its early shame she was thinking correctly the poor woman married to a drunk she was surrendering to story for emma's sake so that's a chapter somewhat early on in the book where again they're brought back together in a starts working for her and they develop a kind of strange and strange friendship  that kind of carries the book through and then many other things happen to force them to start to reckon with the situation and to face what's what's happened and where they're going to go from here  i wanted to talk a little bit about the time period i was initially drawn to the one nine hundred twenty s i think in the way that i think that many people are which is sort of this idea of this glamorous time with flappers and big bands and great dance and great literature and you know kind of a time where people were really pushing the constraints of the victorian era in a social way and all of that i think was true in a lot of ways but as i got into the time period and research more and came to understand that this is you know a really dark decade and in a political sense in a sense of extremes in a lot of ways kind of like the time we're living in now on the one hand you know you had women voting for the first time and on the other prohibition was in place which is a that was more puritanical than anything the puritans really could have dreamed up and led to an enormous amount of crime and violence also in the wake of world war one there was this great wave of xenophobia and anti immigration  sentiment that immigrant sentiment sorry that swept the nation the country's first really draconian limits on immigration were passed in that decade the ku klux klan membership was skyrocketed during this decade in the there was also a time of a lot of division between the labor movement and industrialists and in the particular year that my book is set in one thousand nine hundred seven many of you might be familiar with a tie in an american anarchist sacc vanzetti who's sort of notoriously corrupt trial led to their execution in that year in one thousand twenty seven right here in boston so all of this my characters are really playing their stories out against you know as they make moonshine as they struggle to assimilate whether that's as irish or is jews and as they deal with the disastrous consequences and i won't give the plot away but there is a disaster of that whistle buoy you can probably guess what it is that whistle buoy that one very privileged woman has taken out at the expense of many others so i did a lot of research as you might expect i kind of hit all of the usual suspects in terms of you know newspaper accounts a lot of microfiche so kind of like blinding in the gloucester public library advertisements are great source of information but i always find that talking with people is i get the best material from doing that and so i was lucky really lucky that there were some amazing people a couple that had sort of first hand knowledge one woman who's since passed away but who was was a child during that time and also was a historian and had written all the stuff about the corys so she was just kind of this she wrote this book called hammers on stone which i encourage you to look up if you're interested in the quarry industry which had you know detailed drawings of like this five different types of chisels kind of stuff that really amazing and she would describe to me sort of what it would feel like to be walking barefoot on the granite dust those sorts of sensory details that you couldn't get anywhere else i spoke with the grandson of a bootlegger who got who told me about you know the places in the quarry walls where they would blast out these caves to store the liquor and people whose gardens were just like if you dug down six inches the whole thing was just completely filled with booze so he had a lot of great stories and then and then one of my favorite moments was when i went i had this pot problem so roland i mentioned before that emma's husband is away on a fishing trip and i needed him to be away for a long time and i realized pretty late in the process that there was no way that he would possibly be away for ten weeks  i mean fishermen really aren't away for that long even now but certainly then the ice with have held for that long there was no way to do it and but i really needed him to be away and so i went to this there's a fishing historian at the cape and museum which is an amazing museum if you haven't been to it it's a really beautifully and they renovated a lot in the last fifteen years but so much to talk to him and i said ok so here's my problem i have this fisherman and he's away for ten weeks and he said like it is just a problem you know he was very very unused to thinking outside of sort of what he knew to be true and what was so i had a moment or is that ok maybe i'm just going to leave and figure out a whole you know figure something else out and then i said i started telling him about my characters and the life that they were living in the conflicts that they were in and and more about roland himself and the time period of course and he said well there was you know there was night fishing then and i said ok how does that help you know he said well a lot of the some of the night fishermen then were hired by the rum runners to watch out for the coast guard and that was much more lucrative than fishing and they were he could have gone to this harbor up in maine and done that for him he started suddenly getting really animated and he came up with like all of these so it was like moments like that where the research is really really fun and  with the characters themselves which is how i research in general i don't allow it of you know people there are so many different processes i am not a writer who kind of does all my research and then figures out my story i have a story i want to tell and then i figure out what i need to know to tell it  but and then the research feeds in but it's very much a kind of back and forth process for me so it was amazing writing about especially writing about a place that i knew so well and so intimately but in a different time which is its own kind of  distance and then writing about a lot of issues that are very close to my heart motherhood marriage gender secrets but then projecting those into a distant time as well so i i loved researching and writing it and i would love to hear if you have questions for me and it's been a pleasure talking to you i need to do at a given moment i find that often when i'm stuck i moved away from the computer and take out a pad of a huge the write on the legal pad and i just write and write and write it helps me because first of all i can't read my writing very well i can read it well enough that i can later go back and decipher it but i can't read it so well that i'm constantly looking up to lines and critiquing myself as i go so it's a freeing process in that way and then all in often kind of then the nice thing is that once i have from the writing kind of like i was saying so i can't tell you i know that the book took me awhile to write and research and i started it in december of two thousand and ten but you know then i took a whole bunch they start i very i'm a big leaver in like i believe a lot on done in the first draft mostly because it's so much easier to go googling things than it is to write and if i start you know like what kind of whatever and after i had written the book i was like this is so beautiful and also very expensive which was important to his character i mean all the details have to fit that the conflict in the book think they're not and i part of why i don't get all the i mean i teach historical fiction writing and lot of people wind up spending years just doing the research because and then there's sort of so deep into the research that they don't know what their story is anymore or what actually they start putting things in just for the sake of putting them in way but that's yeah i mean and i know like one of my good friends first book came out and she gave a different name to burlington vermont but not to new york city for i guessed obvious reasons but yeah i'm not entirely sure all those  in part i mean and obviously it's not like a secret but it feels a little more private in a way to me i'm not sure i was also just very set on my title which was fein right that was very light became very important to me it was that name  whether anybody else gets it or not it was important to me yeah yeah but there is it's certainly i try it's accurate i mean my question is not so much was this is this how every is this sort of the way it was for everybody to live then but  would it be possible because there are characters doing things that weren't common like there were in a lot of jews involved in the temperance movement for instance so i had to find out not where a lot of jews involved the terms mean but would it have been possible if you see i mean yeah ye really change things very much she finds her this baby in an orchard in the middle of the night without anybody there and knowing my character she i don't think she had a choice but to take her that she thinks about like her husband wants her to take the baby to an orphanage and not to keep her and sort of the book might the psychology you know i really tried to develop you know for me figuring out emma was partly figuring out why she keeps baby so that's very much a question and sort of to me that you know when you write these characters it probably sounds weird if you're not a fiction writer but it's sort of well what is true to these characters because they've become another way  voice this book is different than anything i've written before because it's an omniscient narrator so you could hear even that was that section i read was pretty close mostly to emma but then you heard that moment where you could see be seeing her so that's a moment where the narrator is and so is basically playing god to kind of say and this is what this person thing so that was that required its own voice and also different distances requires a different kind of voice as well so it's a lot of  know rewriting and figuring out that balance and what is this voice going to feel like and what tone is it going to you know project and then what will that tell the reader about what to expect you know there are a lot of questions and a lot of it happens in rewriting getting just it would be very different when there's also the internet i mean there's so many differences yeah right you can't really one story usually i think most stories couldn't take place in the way that they do at least in a different time some version of characters you know you have the paris wife is a good example there's a beautiful book that came out this year called georgia about georgia o'keeffe if you haven't read it i think it's really amazing it's about her relationship with alfred stieglitz and in her life's work and  by don trip you know i don't have an opinion in terms of sort of like this should or shouldn't be done i think it's tricky i thought i don't bring in real characters i mean that you mentioned i mention president wilson there are landmarks and you know in my first book there is this there was this sort of barren character that i brought and i renamed him and i had and i had made very clear in my acknowledgments and when i read you know that am this is not based on him this is sort of in i have totally fictionalized my have no idea if this person and i used a different name so i didn't call him who he was i think it's really tricky i think it's really tricky the ones that i think work most successfully and seem to me to be most i guess ethical are ones that stay very close to the story and then do the imagining in the internal in what's happening i mean there's still so much room i mean the  whole joy to me in historical fiction is that you take the public record and then you and then what might have actually been lived and you fill in the gaps right so if you're dealing with a character like georgia o'keefe let's say i mean this woman spent years researching reading her letters and then actually the like the archives were opened up while she was reading the book read all of those so so i think that it's i don't know what's tricky i was just talking with someone who's a book that i can't talk about but about a character who didn't who there is very little record of and whose all the records are from other perspectives and that's its own you know i mean people can can really do whatever they want as long as they're honest about about how much license they're taking in a way and clear with the reader this is again comes back to reader expectations you know i mean there's another book that about  typhoid mary that came out a few years ago by a friend of my mary beth king called fever that you know stays very true to history and also gets very deeply into her character and imagines her and yeah i think it's about i think it's about like a contract with and look to think first i mean literally when i went into the publisher when i was talking about them publishing my first book i sat down they tell you they said oh we like this because it's so lovely did it and then look and it's historical fiction ended stewart's fiction and it's women's fiction and i was sort of like i didn't know any of that i mean i really i thought that i had written a story that happened to take place in another time and i write my fixed my historical fiction that that's not how everybody wri it but i didn't come to it from a place of being like i want to write historical fiction the stories that i've wanted to write have wound up so i would like to write a non historical fiction but this it keeps drawing me i think one other reason which i've been thinking about becoming more aware of is that i think it has allowed me to take certain dramatic leaps that might have felt like i couldn't do in something contemporary but i think that will change to do question yes what surprised you in your with surprised me i don't know i mean i don't know what surprised me and i had known quite a bit i should admit because of my first book which wasn't set in boston but did involve sort of studying a lot about jewish communities in eastern cities i think that i didn't realize i mean i did i hadn't read this there's this great book called the jews of boston which some of you may have it's a beautiful big book by david ellen something that brant anyway that has a lot of photographs and all the surrounding and you know i think it once i didn't quite know how both how established the community was and how  struggling at the same time and how many parts of the community there were i mean it was it's a very and it more so than a lot of i think you know more so than a lot of cities at that time in this period there were a lot of jews who'd been here for a long time already there was a particular most of them were german jews who had come had gotten themselves very well established had already had good careers were quite assimilated by that point i mean they were still going to synagogue but it was a different style of synagogue then sort of the more recent polish and russian eastern european jews who were coming in this area or in the teens who had sort of just arrived so that's and that's the big tension in the book because mother lillian is from that sort of polish background but trying so hard to hide it and kind of tries is constantly trying on different social groups and trying to sort of pass as a german jew and pass at one point as a german not jew and you know kind of figuring out where she belongs so i think it was just a deeper understanding of how diverse the community was and one thing that surprised me but was exciting to see was just what a deep and broad network of care  and i don't know if you know that we're but that charity in the community there was forced to take care of each other i mean it just wasn't there weren't people who were left without so in terms of the social services that the e it was so great because i you know like i feel i love it there so much and i grew up i grew up near i grew up on the essex river actually looking out on the backside on coffin beach and then on cranes and i was down the half mile long driveway in the woods and pretty you know so isolated and i spent a huge amount of my childhood by myself in the woods and on the rocks and so the sort of very have just like this very visceral knowledge and connection with the place and i miss it a lot like it still feels like home to me and i don't know that i'll ever be able to live there again but i spend as much time there as i can so there are a lot of ways in which it felt like this sort of i mean this sounds so cheesy but like this love song to this place and writing the disk describing i mean i've written stories that are based there but really going to this kind of depth and describing the the landscape in that way and like hog island which was in the view that i you know and it kind of how it was a to me landscape is very much how it feels to me and so it was actually it was very natural and then there were parts that were scary because i was like what will people think and you know so and it so far people seem like in some really picky people who've been in gloucester they're you know are very much seem to think that i got it right but i haven't met anybody who was alive during the time of the book so you know no i don't think i will so i've got not in that way but yeah yeah yeah are stories you know the story really ships that period yeah yeah and it's hard to remember exactly how i because the story actually that i was telling about of that woman in the actual woman with the nervous disorder that was set in the one nine hundred century so it wasn't shaped by that i didn't feel like i had to remain true because it wasn't about her it was just that inspired it i think it was very i think that also was this kind of process that i can't name exactly what came first but it was sort of ok here is the tension here of the characters here's what would have been going on around them what would make sense psychologically emotionally politically and then it took even as i was writing i still didn't know you know i didn't name like one nine hundred twenty seven at first and then i had to figure out the exact years took a while and once i kind of understood the connection with second city and then once i kind of then for a while i thought well maybe i can't actually this is not going to work it's going to feel too contrived or sort of as a backdrop and then i kind of had to wait and see if it would be integrated with the book which then it was because they are at the quarry there's a protest there were a lot of protests going on then and so but a lot yes a lot of it was kind of like shifting pieces of a puzzle years or nine years or twelve years and i also know about the time period the politics and the characters and where do i want you know a ten year old has to have been a tall year old how old do i need her to be yeah so john to be a writer of course yeah ok ikea and i and i just put it out on the floor and i kind of draw i'll do sometimes i'll do it my characters who are like list all the characters and kind of then like draw their arcs i can't quite explain and then i'm kind of showing how they connect here and where you it's total mess but and then what will happen is that i will you know maybe six months will go by as i'm writing and then i'll come back to it and realize how much changed isn't working and then i'll kind of make a new one and it's not like i look at it every day but it's there as sort of this i'm a very i really need to see things to remember them like if i put some going to door i will never know where it was again so i also well when i lived i just moved back to new york city last year and i no longer have an office so i write in a shared writing space but when i did i had i have a big bulletin board i was at an artist's residency once and i had like literally this entire wall was a bulletin board this long in my studio and so i started using note cards and i would kind of put one thing on the new card like him sometimes plot point and then i would have this color coded thing so i got really i really love the system and then it was like i'm no longer i was only there for two weeks  so i did kind of find a way to transfer that to my home office but now i don't have an office so in the cubicle where i am i do so i can put the you can like pin things to it but you have to do it again every day so which i  kept i was telling myself like well maybe this is a good exercise because then i'm forced but i don't think it's actually ideal at all so i'm trying to my systems are always changing but i do really like the visual the visual being able to see it yeah