Readers may not be, but I've moved on.New York Times bestselling author of Girl With a Pearl Earring Tracy Chevalier makes her first fictional foray into the American past in The Last Runaway, bringing to life the Underground Railroad and illuminating the principles, passions and realities that fueled this extraordinary freedom movement. Has the global success of Girl with a Pearl Earring been a blessing or a curse?Ĭommercially it's a blessing. It's an issue that has to be raised in America, until it's put to bed. Why has slavery once again popped up as a subject for movies and fiction? I took a lot of information we do know about that movement and wove it in to the narrative. And of course the Underground Railroad was real.
And I added some minor things, such as the railroad coming to Wellington, or Wack's hotel in Oberlin selling alcohol. But they are surrounded by real stuff, and the places are real. Is any part of your plot owed to real historical events? I often thought of them as I was writing The Last Runaway.
But my favourite books as a child were probably Laura Ingalls Wilder's Little House series, about a pioneer family in the mid-19th-century American west. And one of the characters uses the N-word – painful but necessary. Then I throw in a few verbal tics, such as "thankee" for "thank you". What I do is to strip the words back, so I get the dialogue to sound timeless. Authenticity is almost impossible, and you always end up sounding too olde worlde. What are you aiming for in your dialogue?ĭialogue is always tricky. I try to write 1,000 words a day – about three pages. I prefer paper and pen because it feels closer to my brain. I read what I wrote the day before, and then write longhand, into a notebook. My writing routine is: get son off to school and sit down at 8am. One of my characters is a milliner, so I went to a hat-making class in London. For instance, I had to learn about how a 19th-century farm would run, by visiting an Amish farm in Ohio – very smelly and squelchy and alien. I have to be able to describe the minutiae of my characters' lives. My sensibility lies within Europe, and I think that helps me be more objective than if I were living in America. I have a memory of the US, but it is almost 30 years out of date. When you write about the historical midwest, do you approach it as an expat? When I went back for research I spent a lot of time driving around country roads with music blasting – Gillian Welch, the Punch Brothers – then stopping the car to sniff the air. But those four years there were formative. Apart from Oberlin, I've lived in London ever since. I was an east-coast kid from Washington, DC.
Did you know it, outside your Oberlin days?
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