Show notes
A Women’s History Month Special: Lauren Willig’s latest book, A Summer Country, is an epic family saga simmering with secrets, set in 19th century Barbados.
It’s quite a departure from her World War I and II historical fiction and the Napoleonic era “Pink Carnation” mysteries that are so popular. But Lauren – author of more than 30 award-winning bestselling books – says being adaptable is a key if you want to have a long-standing career as an author.
Hi there, I’m your host Jenny Wheeler, and in today’s Binge Reading podcast Lauren talks about how a resort holiday that was meant to be all about lying in the sun sipping fruity drinks, sparked an idea that would not let her go.
She talks about her successful collaboration with two very close friends, both of them also bestselling historical authors, and why she thinks reading tastes have been changing during the pandemic.
And we’ve got three E-book copies of her popular mystery – The Secret History of the Pink Carnation to giveaway to three lucky listeners/readers.
Enter the draw on the link below. Offer closes March 12.
ENTER THE DRAW
Six things you’ll learn from this Joys of Binge Reading episode:
Writing for her own entertainment became a career
Changing popularity of different historical periods
The story that demanded to be told
A very successful collaboration
Facebook Live for Pink Carnation
Crossing Blackadder with Regency romance
Where to find Lauren Willig:
Website: https://laurenwillig.com/
Facebook @Laurenwillig
Twitter: @Laurenwillig
Instagram: https://www.instagram.com/laurenwillig/
Goodreads: https://www.goodreads.com/author/show/14469.Lauren_Willig
What follows is a “near as” transcript of our conversation, not word for word but pretty close to it, with links to important mentions.
But now, here’s Lauren.
Jenny Wheeler: Hello there, Lauren, and welcome to the show. It’s great to have you with us.
Lauren Willig: I am so delighted to be here. Thank you so much for having me.
Introducing author Lauren Willig
Lauren Willig – best-selling historical fiction author
Jenny Wheeler: Lauren, you’ve got 30 or more books published to your credit now, mainly historical mysteries and historical fiction. You’ve won all sorts of awards and made it onto numerous bestseller lists – things like the New York Times list, the Booksellers lists, you’ve got RITAs. Wonderful career you’ve had, but how did you get started on this road?
Jenny Wheeler: That’s amazing. It’s remarkable that you’d have such a sense of confidence and destiny so young.
Lauren Willig: I’ve been doing this for a very long time. I made the decision when I was six that I was going to write fiction when I grew up. It was largely out of frustration.
I had wanted to be either a ballerina or a princess, and it finally dawned on me that I couldn’t dance, and no one was offering me a kingdom, which was very inconsiderate of them. So I figured I would go with my third option and be a novelist instead. Having decided that and telling everyone in the first grade, I had to stick with it.
Lauren Willig: It’s one of those things where when you keep at something, it self-perpetuates. I sent my first manuscript off to Simon & Schuster when I was nine, and of course they sent back a form letter. I was gutted but having gone down that road I had to keep cracking away at it.
The truth is I adore historical fiction, all kinds of fiction, really. I have never wanted to do anything more than I’ve wanted to live in stories, both my own and other people’s.
A story ‘simmering with secrets’
Jenny Wheeler: That’s wonderful. Now I know you’ve got a book that’s very soon going to be out, Band of Sisters. We will talk about that a little later on in our chat together, but the one we are focusing on today is The Summer Country, which is your most recent book as we’re speaking.
It’s been described as an epic family saga simmering with secrets, just the sort of story I love. It’s a book you’ve said just begged to be written. You almost tried to keep it quiet and not do it, but it wouldn’t let you alone. Tell us about that.
Lauren Willig: This was a book that grabbed hold of me and wouldn’t let go. It’s a departure for me, both geographically and in subject matter. Most of my books are set in England and although there’s a great deal of drama in some of them, the drama is usually of the domestic variety. I certainly never meant to tackle slavery or racism or really big heartbreaking topics.
Slaves cutting sugar cane William Clarke, 1823, British Library.
But about 11 years ago now I went on a girls’ trip with my two best friends from grad school. We had decided we were just going to lie on a warm beach with fruity drinks in our hands and do nothing, but this did not work very well for us. We all spent most of our lives in libraries.
One of them was a Medievalist, another did Renaissance Europe and I was an early modernist who was already writing novels, and so we were used to spending most of our time in libraries. We really weren’t used to direct sunlight, so we burned rather badly that first day, and then decided to look for indoor activities.
The story that wouldn’t let go
We found a plantation tour where we were told a story about how the plantation had burned down in a fire and the owner’s Portuguese ward had died. Except that she was neither Portuguese nor his ward, she was his daughter by an enslaved woman.
The rest of the story we were told that day was about the plantation owner, how he was gutted by his daughter’s death and spent the rest of his life rocking on the veranda, chasing the shade.
You could still hear that rocking chair creaking on the veranda, which was a great Gothic ghost story. I love a Gothic ghost story, but what really caught my imagination at the time and what I really wondered about was, where was the child’s mother?
Slave dance in Barbados
Was she there too on the night of the fire? Had she agreed to have her child enter the household as a Portuguese ward or had the child been torn for her?
Of course, being that horrible person in the group, I asked the tour guide, who couldn’t tell me. All they knew was that the mother had been an unnamed enslaved woman. They had no idea who she was, what happened to her, what the story was. And that was meant to be that.
I went back to New York. I was writing a book set during the Napoleonic Wars, light and flippant with lots of antics with Napoleon behaving badly, but I couldn’t get that missing mother out of my head, that nameless enslaved woman whose child died in the fire.
Jenny Wheeler: Yes.
Lauren Willig: For years this story haunted me, particularly when, years later, I had children of my own and the full impact of what that meant came to me.
Forbidden love and its impact
But it was a story that almost didn’t get written because when I first came back and my editor asked me what I wanted to write next I said, I have this Barbados idea.
She was like, no, no, no, you cannot write a book set in the Caribbean. I thought, maybe that’s for the best, my background is in English history, not in Caribbean history, I don’t know what I’m doing, these are big topics, maybe it’s fate.
Every now and then I would take that file and dust it off and then stick it away again. It took about eight years after that initial trip before my agent finally said to me, you have to write the Barbados book or else you will never stop talking about it to me.
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Jenny Wheeler: It’s peculiar, isn’t it? It’s one of those things that certain time periods and settings dominate the best seller list. You would know that well, because some of your books are set in those periods, like World War I and World War II currently, while others, like your Caribbean story, as you mentioned, find it a little harder to gain acceptance, certainly with publishers, but even with readers as well. Why do you think this is, and is there a way of breaking through?
Popularity of different periods
Lauren Willig: This is something I’ve thought about a lot. It’s very funny because when I had that discussion with my editor at the time, she said, you know what? You can write anything you like, as long as it’s set in England. Then she paused for a moment, thought very seriously and added, you can write anything you like, as long as it’s set in 19th century England.
My academic background is in the English Civil War, so whenever I want to scare my agent, I tell her I’m finally going to write my big English Civil War saga, and the thought of my going 17th century just scares her speechless.
I do have some theories about why this is. I think for some reason, although I can’t quite put my finger on it, there are synergies between certain time periods. I mean, I grew up in the eighties which was the era of the Victorian saga – both Victoria and England – and a lot of American Civil War novels and movies. For some reason, the era of big hoop skirts appealed to the era of big hair.
Then when I came of age and graduated from college in 1999, that .com era was the era of the Jane Austen reboot. Suddenly it was all chick lit and comedies of manners, and the two dovetailed very, very well. It was different from the earlier Victoriana Gothic stage of the eighties.
Lizzie Bennett Diaries – a very clever Netflix Jane Austen reboot for the younger generation
Now I think the reason that World War II has such appeal is that it’s the ultimate battle of good and evil. Right now, we don’t want subtlety, we don’t want wise-cracking banter. We want good prevailing; we want evil being very obvious and being crushed. There is certainly an appeal to that, but I do find it fascinating because a decade ago you could not sell a World War II novel.
What it took was Kristin Hannah’s The Nightingale breaking out for suddenly publishers to wake up and say, wow, there’s an appetite for this and such an appetite, and it shows no sign of abating.
An ‘enlightened’ slave owner
Jenny Wheeler: Your book The Summer Country has got quite a degree of historic basis, as you’ve already mentioned, and there’s a very touching quote in the beginning. You took the title from a quote written by a man called Joshua Steele, a Londoner who did have slaves in Barbados in the early 1800s.
He said that Barbados was like “the eternal Summer Country”. When you think of the life and conditions of some of the people there, it seems remarkably “rose tinted”, but he was one of the models for your characters, wasn’t he?
Kristin Hannah’s breakthrough novel The Nightingale headed the way for World War II fiction
Lauren Willig: Yes. I was fascinated by Joshua Steele because to me he embodied the contradictions in the Enlightenment Project. There was Steele, he was a reformer who inherited an estate in Barbados and came over with these grand ideas of all the things he was going to change.
He believed strongly in the fundamental dignity of all men, a very unpopular opinion at the time among his fellow plantation owners – that there was really no difference between Afro-Caribbeans and the descendants of Englishmen except for the fact that one group had been deliberately kept in ignorance.
He compared the enslaved people to the Saxons under the Norman yoke and said that like the Saxons, with proper education, they were going to become good sturdy yeoman and British citizens. This was not popular with his fellow plantation owners.
He had these grand ideas for improvement and all of that, but at the same time, there’s also a certain callousness. For him, it’s an intellectual game. The reason I chose the quote from him that I did, to start the book, and I don’t have it in front of me so I’ll paraphrase, but basically he talks about how improving the lives of his enslaved people has provided years of entertainment for him.
And for him, it is entertainment. It never really occurs to him that this could come back to bite him personally, because he is a white Englishman. He can always just walk away.
Love’s unexpected consequences
Again, the reason Joshua Steele became one of the models for my characters and I am so fascinated by him is it does bite him personally because he fell in love with his enslaved housekeeper. We know he loved her; we have no idea how she felt about him. That’s a whole other story. But they lived together as man and wife and they had two children together.
The wrinkle was that he turned on her. She was owned by a neighboring slave holder and he leased her. For whatever reason, the neighboring slave holder was not interested in selling. When he died, he left his fortune to their two children and his sister back in England sued on the grounds that property could not own property and the estate should be hers.
Women slaves in the Caribbean – infanticide as rebellion
The courts in England did not want to touch this with a 10-foot pole. This was not a popular sort of thing in England at the time, so they bounced it back to Barbados where the court said yes, property can’t own property and they disinherited the kids.
I don’t believe it ever would have occurred to Joshua Steele that his last testament would have been disregarded, that his children would have been disinherited, that the system, which he thought he could somehow change or mold, would, in the end, come back to destroy his family.
In the end, the children get away to England. His executor takes them to England where the son is raised at the same school as the executor’s son, the daughter goes to a young ladies academy and marries into the English upper upper-middle-class and it’s all sort of okay, but that really caught my attention. The fact that as powerful as this man was, as well connected, he couldn’t even protect his own children.
The limits of personal freedoms
That very much informed one of the main male characters in this book, Charles Davenant, who is also a young man who inherits a plantation in Barbados with ideas about all these grand enlightenment schemes he’s going to implement, but who quickly discovers that he can’t even protect or free the woman he loves, and he can’t prevent their child from being enslaved.
Jenny Wheeler: In the next generation down, because this is a dual timeline story, there is a female character – we will be vague about how this happens, but a female character who inherits a sugar plantation from her grandfather. I wondered how likely it would be that a woman could inherit property like that at this time.
It’s the 1850s by now and the slaves have been freed. You interweave between the two, but in the earlier part of the dual timeline, the slaves are still enslaved, and then later they’ve been freed. Would Emily in that period have been able to inherit the plantation, like the book says?
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Lauren Willig: Absolutely, because the way property law worked at the time was women could in fact hold property so long as they weren’t married. That’s always the wrinkle and there has been some excellent work done on female plantation owners on Barbados, more in the 18th century than the 19th century, frankly.
I think that has more to do with social norms than it does with legal restrictions, because in the 18th century you have a lot of female entrepreneurs and businesswomen and so it’s less of a fraught proposition, although it’s always a fraught proposition, but less of a fraught proposition for a woman to be running her own plantation.
Women as ‘angel of the hearth’
Whereas by the mid-19th century, the 1850s, we are at the height of the ideal of the angel of the hearth, where women are meant to be sweet and timid and exuding good moral influence from the comfort of the home while the men go out and do all the hard stuff.
So I think in some ways, although the legal situation is unchanged, it’s much harder for Emily in 1854 to inherit a plantation than it would have been for an equivalent character a century earlier. Not because of any actual restrictions, but because of social pressures.
Home Sweet Home – a Victorian painting by W D Sadler
Of course, the real wrinkle is as soon as you marry, your property by law becomes your husband’s. It’s a legal principle called couverture where the legal body of the male literally covers that of the woman and eclipses her, which is quite an image there for you.
There were all sorts of fascinating workarounds that heiresses on Barbados used to try to retain some control of their property, some of which worked better than others. But the bottom line is yes, in 1854 a young woman from Bristol like Emily could absolutely have inherited a plantation. Whether she could hold onto it and manage it is another story entirely.
Jenny Wheeler: You have got an impressive list of sources that you refer to at the end of the book, and it’s obvious that getting the history right is very important to you. Looking over other books as well, have there been instances when maintaining a happy balance between the historical record and your own fictional characters has been difficult or tricky?
Lauren Willig: I will say that with The Summer Country, more than any of my other books, I felt a great deal of pressure to make sure I had triple checked everything and read everything I could possibly read, because the Caribbean is not my academic background and I wanted to make sure, especially with the sorts of topics this book deals with, that I was doing justice to the time period, the place and the characters.
Depth of conscientious research
So I did triple the amount of research I would normally do on this book, and I called in favors from all of my friends who are still in academia. Back in my academic days, I used to run the History Department Social Club, and I have some very embarrassing pictures of people, so everyone was very, very helpful.
The funny thing is I actually have not had that much difficulty in maintaining a balance between the history and the fiction because years and years ago, when I was a teenager, misspending my teenage years by reading writers magazines, I read an article by John Jakes talking about his research and writing process.
Lauren Willig’s first Pink Carnation book
He talked about how before he began a book, he would spend a year just reading. Not taking notes. Not plotting, just reading everything available on the topic and letting it all sink in.
There have been times in my life when I’ve been writing two books a year. I certainly don’t have a year to spend doing nothing but reading, but I always try to block off at least a few months to do nothing but read and let it sink in.
By the time I sit down and try to plot my story, the characters and the situations are so informed by what I’ve already read, that it’s not the history is getting in my way. It’s more the history becomes the scaffolding on which my story is built, or even better than scaffolding, it’s a part of the weft. I like them to work together.
Jenny Wheeler: You started your career – you’ve made allusion to it already – with a mystery series, the Pink Carnation series, a dozen mysteries set in France, England and Portugal during the Napoleonic era. They are a take on the fictional aristocratic spy the Scarlet Pimpernel, except this one turns out to be a woman.
I presume that was your first book. Did you launch your career with the Pink Carnation series?
Blackadder crossed with Regency
Lauren Willig: I did, although it was never the book that was meant to be published. The funny thing was I had gone off to grad school to do a PhD in English history with the idea that I was going to write the kind of vast historical epics I had devoured in my youth – Karleen Koen’s Through A Glass Darkly or Colleen McCulloch’s The Thorn Birds.
I wanted to write the thousand-page doorstop of a novel that would be described in reviews as a “rich historical tapestry”, because it’s always a tapestry. But when I finished my general exams in grad school, I was thinking in footnotes.
I was utterly burned out on the English Civil War and I needed to do something for a break, something that was far enough away from my actual academic work that it felt like a vacation, but close enough that would be something I knew.
Blackadder humor inspiration for Lauren Willig’s Pink Carnation series…..
I settled on the Napoleonic Wars, which dovetailed with my academic work because I was writing my dissertation on Royalist Conspiracies during the English Civil War, so royalist conspiracy during the Napoleonic Wars was an easy step for me. It was meant to be just for fun.
It was a mix of Blackadder and Regency romance novels, and old-fashioned swashbucklers and the Scarlet Pimpernel with a chick lit frame story about a disgruntled American grad student doing her dissertation research in England.
The book she never meant to write
You can see where that one came from! That character finds a never before found cache of family papers that gives her all the materials she needs, which was total wish fulfilment on my part because there I was trudging back and forth between the British Library and the Public Records Office and not finding anything of the sort. When people write letters with “burn this letter”, most of the time they actually burn it.
The final “Pink Carnation’ book – The Lure of the Moonflower
Anyway, that book I wrote for fun and the crazy thing is I gave it to a friend who happened to give it to her friend who was an agent who at that point was looking to move from representing serious literary fiction to something lighter. My manuscript happened to be the something lighter that crossed his desk at that critical moment.
The next thing I knew, I got a call saying, I’m an agent and I want to represent you. I spilled coffee all over myself. It’s funny how these things happen. Twelve books later, it became a whole world of its own. But it was the book I never meant to write and having written it, never meant to have published.
Jenny Wheeler: Are you still writing those now?
Lauren Willig: I wound up the series back in 2015 with the 12th book for a couple of reasons. One was that I had also started writing standalone novels and I was trying to balance a standalone novel and a Pink Carnation novel a year, around the same time I had my first child and also started co-writing with two good friends.
The combination of two personal books a year, a book with friends and an infant who believed that naps were something that happened to other people, unfortunately wasn’t sustainable. I decided it was time to wrap up the series before it became stale and before I had a nervous breakdown. Although I still miss those characters a lot, I lived with them for such a long time.
A successful collaboration
Jenny Wheeler: You’ve mentioned that collaboration, and maybe we should move on to talking about that. That’s with a couple of other very well-known historical fiction writers in their own right – Beatriz Williams and Karen White.
You’ve done several together that have been very prominent sellers – The Glass Ocean set around the sinking of the Lusitania during World War I, and All the Ways We Said Goodbye, which is a three generational story stretching from World War I to the 1960s. It seems incredibly complicated to have these very highly plotted books worked on by three people. How do you do it?
The Glass Ocean – a very successful author collaboration
Lauren Willig: It’s because we’re really, really, good friends. The whole thing started one night because we were drinking together and started drunkenly going on about how much fun it would be if our publishers would pay for our girls trip or our bar bill so we could spend more time together.
And we came up with a brilliant idea of, oh my God, if we wrote a book together, they would send us on book tour together and pay all the bills. Hooray, let’s do it.
It’s amazing to me that it actually works. What we usually do is, we all live in different places. I’m in New York, Karen is in Georgia and Beatriz is up in the way tippy top North of Connecticut.
We get together to plot out the book and we spend three days downing red wine and gin and tonics and plotting out the whole book chapter by chapter, which is something we do not do with our own books. It only somehow works when we’re together. We plot out the entire book and then we each claim a character.
Working as a writing team
We all write multi timeline books in our own private lives and so what we do is – usually there are three time periods, or in a couple of our books we’ve had two characters in one period and another character in another time period, so there are always three main viewpoint, female characters.
After we plot the whole book together, we each claim a character and then we go back to our little writing holes and we write round robin. The first person will write her chapter, send it to the next one. We’ll read it, then send it on.
All the Ways We Say Goodbye – three part inspiration
That person will read the previous two chapters and write hers and send it on. What we found is because we write round robin like that, and you’re always reading the other two people’s chapters before you start writing your own, our voices magically meld into something that’s not quite our normal voices at all. It also keeps themes and imagery and so on consistent because you’re always reading the others first.
Jenny Wheeler: That’s terrific. It sounds a very creative way to do it.
Lauren Willig: We stumbled into it because this whole thing we did by accident. Our agents did not like the idea at all, the publisher was skeptical, but it worked!
People kept saying, three authors, it must be an anthology, and we kept saying, no, it’s a novel written by three people. They were like that, but you can’t do that. Then the book came out and people are like, oh, actually you can do that.
A Gilded Age New York story
We have been so amused by the fact that you’ve suddenly started to see more and more writing teams popping up, once we’ve proved that three authors can write a book that’s a book and not an anthology.
Jenny Wheeler: Was the first one you did The Glass Ocean?
Lauren Willig: Our first one was The Forgotten Room, which was about three generations of women in a gilded age New York mansion.
Jenny Wheeler: Oh, I haven’t seen that one. I must look it out.
The Forgotten Room – Gilded Age New York story
You had quite a strong academic career before turning to full-time writing. I think you even did law at one stage. Tell us something about that experience and how has it fed back into your writing?
Lauren Willig: It generally has always been the writing that has come first. I decided as a senior in college that I was going to go to grad school with the idea that it would help me write absolutely accurate historical novels. And of course, in grad school, the first thing you learn is there is no absolute historical accuracy, which is very frustrating.
My other reason for it was I figured if I were an academic, I would have these great three-month long summer vacations when I could write my novels, and then I discovered academics work very hard over the summer and this whole three-month long summer vacation idea was not what I thought it was. Between that and grading student papers, about four years into my PhD I decided that maybe this wasn’t the career for me.
How Lauren started her career
I was at the Harvard History Department at the time and since my whole family are lapsed academics who became lawyers, I decided I would succumb to the family curse and lob in an application to Harvard Law, and if I got in I would finish my PhD while doing a JD and be a lawyer, and if not, I would stick out with academia and be the best possible English Civil War historian I could be.
Anyway, I got in. The crazy thing was, my first month at Harvard Law I got that first book contract for The Secret History of the Pink Carnation, and it was a two-book contract.
The Passion of the Purple Plumeria – from Lauren Willig’s Pink Carnation series
They wanted a second book, which absolutely blew my mind – that they were going to let me write another one. I wound up juggling my Law School years with writing a Pink Carnation book a year.
I practiced for a year and a half as a litigator at a large New York law firm while also continuing to write Pink Carnation novels before finally leaving. So my experience in both academia and law was very much shaded by the fact that the books were always there and came first.
Jenny Wheeler: Is there one thing you’ve done in your writing career, more than any other, that you would see as the secret of your success?
Lauren Willig: I’m never actually sure I’m that much of a success. I’m still not where I would like to be as a writer, which I think most writers probably feel.
We are always striving to write a better book and you never quite feel like any of them have done it just yet. I guess there must be competent writers out there who really adore the sound of their own voice, but I always feel like I’m still striving to get to the book I want to write somehow.
But I will say that I think the main secret to success for any author who wants a long career is to be adaptable. You have to be willing to change because you change and the times change, and you have to be willing to change along with them.
What Lauren is reading now
Jenny Wheeler: Yes. This is The Joys of Binge Reading, so turning to Lauren as reader – I don’t know if you have much time to read with all your writing and still being a mother of a young family, but what have you, in the past anyway, liked to binge read when you’ve had the chance, and what do you think about this concept of binge reading?
I think genre fiction, the more escapist fiction, is becoming more and more mainstream and acceptable although the literary books probably still dominate. What’s your taste in genre fiction or binge reading fiction?
Lauren Willig: Oh, goodness. There’s so much there to answer. I can’t function unless I’m reading other people’s books. Having a book gap is one of the scariest things in the world to me. I always need to know what I’m going to be reading next and I usually read about three or four novels a week.
Patricia Wentworth’s Miss Silver series a Lauren Willig favorite
But my children are driving me crazy right now because my older one is a night owl, which was always great because she would sleep in and then I could read in the morning before she woke up.
But now I have a younger one who is three, who’s an early bird, so he has killed my early morning reading time, so I’ve had to find time to read in the margins. I’ve actually found that children being traumatized by COVID-19 is very good, because if they make you sit by their bedside, you can read in the dark on your Kindle for hours and it’s great reading time, which is a silver lining so I binge read like crazy.
Venturing in science fiction
I’ve always binge read all forms of genre fiction. I used to joke that the only genre I didn’t read was science fiction because I hate technology and technology hates me. But then my college roommate pointed out that Lois McMaster Bujold writes very good science fiction, so now I read that too, as long as it doesn’t get too technical.
I’ve found that the pandemic has changed my reading habits as it has with so many people. I have kept myself sane by binge reading mid-century British mystery novels, particularly Patricia Wentworth’s Miss Silver series. Most people have never heard of her.
She’s sort of a lesser Miss Marple, another omniscient knitting spinster who will come in and solve the crime. I find her so deeply reassuring because you know that no matter what happens, there will be scones at the vicarage and Miss Silver will find the guilty party. There are, mercifully, like 50 in this series so I’ve been reading through those, but I’ve now run out, so I’ve had to revert to Miss Marple.
Good Husband Material – Trisha Ashley – older books Lauren’s favorites
I adore Dorothy Sayers, but for some reason I found her harder to read during the pandemic, maybe because I loved her so much pre-pandemic. The other thing I’ve been binge reading in these dark days is I have turned to British chick lit, especially Trisha Ashley’s older books, which I love. They are also a reassuring English village world.
Jenny Wheeler: Tricia Ashley, I must look those out, I haven’t come across her. That’s fantastic. I’m really impressed that you could read three or four books a week with everything else you’ve got on. That’s remarkable.
Lauren Willig: Well, my older one, my seven-year-old, likes me to sit by her bed until she falls asleep, but unfortunately, she inherited my insomniac tendencies so that can take a very long time. The good thing is I sit there with my Kindle in the dark and whenever she tries to talk to me, I go, shhh, go to sleep, while I keep reading. So I get to pretend to be a good mother while actually going through books.
What would you change?
Jenny Wheeler: We are starting to come to the end of our time together, so circling around, looking back down the tunnel of time, at this stage in your career, if you were doing it all over again, is there anything you would change?
Lauren Willig: I think everyone looks back and has points where they say, if I’d only done X, Y, or Z, or if I’d done this differently or that differently. The problem is, I fundamentally don’t believe you can do counterfactual history, that everything is so interwoven that you can’t just pick one thread and say, I’ll pull that one, because you don’t know what it actually might change.
I have a very fatalistic view towards life. I used to call myself an optimistic fatalist because I believed everything had to happen the way it happened, but generally it happened for the best. The one thing I would change is, if I could go back to the writer I was before I had children, because I was a professional writer for 10 years before I started having small people, I would go tell that previous self of mine to write more while I still have the time.
Band of Sisters – American nurses in WWI
Jenny Wheeler: We’ve mentioned Band of Sisters, the book that’s going to be coming out in the next couple of months and I’m sure you’ve got other projects on the way as well. What is next for Lauren the writer, and tell us about Band of Sisters in particular.
Lauren Willig: Band of Sisters comes out on March 2nd, in time for Women’s History Month. It’s based on the true story of the Smith College Relief Unit, 18 alumni of Smith College, who went off to France at the height of World War I to bring humanitarian aid to French villagers right behind the front lines.
Smith College alumni in France
They wound up contending with German shells, French bureaucracy, recalcitrant livestock, and a British army who firmly believed that women did not belong in a war zone. It’s one of those incredible stories. I stumbled on it by accident when we were researching one of the Team W’s books, All the Ways We Said Goodbye, and we were looking into occupied France in World War I.
I was looking for Christmas customs in Picardy and found this memoir by a Smith woman talking about throwing Christmas parties for French villagers right behind the front lines in 1917. I thought that’s crazy. She can’t be there. How are they there?
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I started reading and next thing I knew I was totally sucked in by the story of these plucky women who went abroad to help total strangers in deplorable conditions. It’s the most amazing story. I feel so honored to have gotten to unearth it and bring it back to life for people.
I’m also right now working on the fourth Team W collaboration. That one is going to come out in Autumn 2022, and it is set around three generations of women in Newport, Rhode Island in the Gilded Age, the 1950’s and the present day when a Gilded Age mansion is being made over in one of those crazy make-over programs.
A forgotten heroine of history
Also, in my own writing life, I am working on a prequel to the Smith book. I had not really intended to have a prequel of Band of Sisters, but I was fascinated by the founder of the Smith College Relief Unit. The real founder was a woman named Harriet Boyd Hawes who was a pioneering archeologist. At a time when women were discouraged from excavation, she fought to be allowed to excavate and wound up excavating in Crete and doing groundbreaking work.
Harriet Boyd Hawes – a woman to be remembered
She also periodically dropped everything to go do nursing in war zones, and there’s this bit in her real life, before she goes and excavates Crete, where she gets caught up as a student at the American School of Classical Studies in Athens, in the Greco Turkish War.
She winds up nursing there despite failing her Red Cross exam, is decorated by the Queen of Greece and then for some reason drops everything and goes and nurses in the Spanish American War before going back, resuming her archeological career, excavating Crete and becoming famous in archeological circles. I thought, why did she do that?
I’m certainly not going to opine on why the real woman did that, but my fictional version of her, Mrs. Rutherford, as I was writing Band of Sisters, the Mrs. Rutherford character kept revealing little insights into her past.
What I’m writing is basically the story of my Harriet Boyd Hawes equivalent, Betsy Hayes, later Mrs. Rutherford, who goes to Greece in the 1890s to become an archaeologist and finds herself suffering these life-changing events during the Greco-Turkish War which then drive her to go and nurse in the Spanish American War and eventually make her the person she’s going to be.
It’s this big sweeping coming of age story, and I am having such a blast researching both the Spanish American War and the Greco-Turkish War. It’s a lot of drama.
Lauren Willig’s year of work
That book was going to come out in March 2022, but with the pandemic and being home with two small children, we’ve wound up pushing that back to March 2023.
Jenny Wheeler: At the moment, you are doing one book a year or one and a half books a year by the sound of it, with your collaborative work. Is that what’s going on?
Lauren Willig: It is supposed to be one and a half books a year, but right now, because we had to push back the Band of Sisters prequel by a full year, it’s going to be a personal book every other year and a group book every other year.
Jenny Wheeler: Which is still a huge amount of work. Do you enjoy hearing from your readers and where can they find you online?
Lauren Willig: I adore hearing from my readers. They can find me at my website, www.laurenwillig.com, which has this bizarre accumulation of material I’ve added as a whim struck me over the past 15 years or so. It’s apparently a webmaster’s nightmare. I spend a lot of time wasting time on my Facebook author page, which is Facebook/Lauren Willig and over on Instagram, where I’m @laurenwillig.
So basically, I’m Lauren Willig on all things. I’m also on Twitter, but I stop by there once in a blue moon. I still haven’t quite figured out how it works so occasionally I will stop by when I get yelled at by my publisher and I’ll retweet things or change my cover, but I don’t really interact there. I interact a lot on Facebook and on Instagram.
Catch Lauren with a monthly “Carnation” discussion on FaceBook or here – on the Facebook link – you will have to scroll down to see the episode
Also, speaking of interacting, I am launching a Pink Carnation read along because it occurred to me that it’s been a long time since I’ve read my own Pink Carnation series and because I’ve also been doing comfort binge reading during the pandemic, I decided this would be a good time to comfort binge read myself, because it’s been long enough since I wrote them.
Reading Carnation series FB group
We’re going to be reading a Pink Carnation book a month starting with The Secret History of the Pink Carnation. There will be a monthly Zoom book club meeting with a special guest co-host every month. Sarah McLean is going to be joining me on February 24th to kick it off with The Secret History of the Pink Carnation.
Jenny Wheeler: That sounds wonderful. I’ll get the links from you for that. We will have links for all of these social media and your books in the show notes for this episode, but we’ll make sure we get that Zoom meeting link in for people who might be interested in taking part.
That sounds like a wonderful idea because so many people still are looking for light, escapist fiction in this time. Over and over, people say their reading habits have changed during the pandemic.
Lauren Willig: It’s funny because for a while everything went very dark and I’ve always written funny. My natural métier is humor. The darker the situation, the more tempted I am to snark about it.
For a while, everything went very serious and I have to admit I found it very hard to maintain that air of seriousness for long enough, although in Summer Country the seriousness of the subject matter helped a bit in terms of not giving in to dark humor.
I found it a tremendous relief that one of the silver linings of the pandemic is that we do want to laugh again and be entertained again. It may be because our everyday lives are so grim right now that we need to escape elsewhere, rather than because our lives are comfortable, we need to test grimness in fiction.
Looking for the silver lining . . .
Jenny Wheeler: Yes, I absolutely agree with you there. Lauren, we have run out of time together now, but it has been wonderful talking. I could definitely be a candidate for the read along, although where I’d fit in the time I don’t know, because with these podcasts I’m reading one book a week at least for each of the authors that I’m talking to, apart from anything else, but it would be great to take part. Thanks so much.
Lauren Willig: Thank you so much for having me here. This has been such a joy.
If you enjoyed Lauren Willig you might also enjoy Christine Trent’s addictive Victorian Gothic historical fiction.
LISTEN TO CHRISTINE TRENT
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