- Christina Olson’s ancestry is fascinating. She has ties to the chief magistrate of the Salem witch trials and Nathaniel Hawthorn. Can you clarify the family tree?
- What did you see as the right blend between the actual Christina Olson and your fictional character?
- Can you describe the bond between Andrew Wyeth and Christina Olson?
- How much better do you feel you understand her now?
- You mentioned that a lot of people in the story are still alive today. Does that mean that characters like Mrs. Crowley and Gertrude were real people, or were those characters that you invented?
- One thing that I noticed about Christina throughout the book was that, well she obviously did lead a very hard life with her physical ailment, but at times she is portrayed as bitter, although I am not sure if that is the appropriate adjective, and cold. Were you afraid at all that as readers are reading this they might start to dislike Christina for how bitter she becomes?
- There’s that huge debate about “likable characters” in literary circles, especially for women writers.
- Much of your work has resilient, strong women at their centers. Who are some strong, resilient women that inspire you — in life and as a writer?
- Christina Olson’s ancestry is fascinating. She has ties to the chief magistrate of the Salem witch trials and Nathaniel Hawthorn. Can you clarify the family tree?
John Hathorne, whom Christina was descended from on her mother’s side, was the Chief Magistrate of the 1692 Salem Witch Trials, and the only one of the three judges who never recanted. He went to his death (in peaceful prosperity) believing that he was fully justified in sentencing 19 women, two dogs, and one man to death for witchcraft. After Hathorne died, his Salem relatives felt tainted by association. Three Hathorne men, promised land on the coast of Maine if they claimed it in winter, changed the spelling of their name, fled to a remote point on the coast, and built three log cabins — one of which became the house in the painting Christina’s World. Nathaniel Hawthorne, another relative on that side of the family, also changed the spelling of his name and left
Salem. He spent the rest of his life writing about people like his ancestor Hathorne who were determined to root out evil in others while denying it in themselves. (Think of Young Goodman Brown and The Scarlet Letter, for example.)
Christina’s father left home at 15 to become a sailor. He had grown up in a small house in Sweden with 10 other people and a cow; his parents were poor peat farmers. You can see why he might’ve left and never looked back!
- What did you see as the right blend between the actual Christina Olson and your fictional character?
That part was fairly easy. I set the task of interviewing a lot of people, studying art history—I immersed myself. I hammered out a document of 50-60 pages, a chronology of her life. One of her relatives would tell me something and I’d find a different version in a book.
I was writing from her perspective, trying to get under the skin of who she was in a way that would make sense of her complicated personality traits and her actions. I kept having to dig deeper…
- Can you describe the bond between Andrew Wyeth and Christina Olson?
Yes, very much so. There’s an epigraph at the beginning about how he says we were a little alike, both of us had been unwell as children, etcetera.. And he really did feel a bond with her and they had this very interesting relationship. They actually liked each other quite a bit and I think you see that as the story progresses; I think he understood her in a way that most people didn’t. I think that he was able to see beyond the surface to who she really was.
- How much better do you feel you understand her now?
You know how people go on those wilderness retreats and they bond over the rough time they had together? I feel that way about Christina Olson. I feel very much that I understand why she was the way she was. She was a brilliant girl who was kept out of school from the age of 12, who had a debilitating illness that was undiagnosed in her lifetime and made her life hell. She lost her one chance at true love and ended up as a drudge for her family. I mean, it sounds depressing to put it that way, but …
When I think of Andrew Wyeth coming into her life, I think about how, in The Wizard of Oz, you go from this black-and-white story to Technicolor, because I think he really did transform her life, and gave her meaning and purpose. He had felt like a freak and a misfit in his own childhood and even as an adult. He also had a degenerative disease; one leg was shorter than the other, and he walked with a limp and had hip problems and was in pain a lot of the time. His father had kept him out of school as well. So he identified with her, and willing to see who she was, beneath the surface, and that was a great gift to her.
- You mentioned that a lot of people in the story are still alive today. Does that mean that characters like Mrs. Crowley and Gertrude were real people, or were those characters that you invented?
Gertrude is an interesting one because she is [real]. The story of their relationship is [real]. The fact that Christina stopped speaking to her, that all really happened. But, …I changed her name, which I normally don’t do. Many of the people in the book have their real names, but I changed her name in that bit because in order to make it believable that Christina would never speak to her best friend again (even though that really happened) I had to kind of give her cause for that. And the cause was that Gertrude was actually not that nice a person. So I didn’t want to slander a real person by making her story negative when I don’t really know the facts of it. Does that make sense? It’s a very small cast of characters as you know. Most of them are real, yeah. Christina lived on this farm and there weren’t many people around. She had these brothers, and parents, and a few townspeople. Then some people kind of came into her life, like Walton, and all of those people are real. So I didn’t really make up very much in terms of characters in the book because there just really aren’t that many characters.
- One thing that I noticed about Christina throughout the book was that, well she obviously did lead a very hard life with her physical ailment, but at times she is portrayed as bitter, although I am not sure if that is the appropriate adjective, and cold. Were you afraid at all that as readers are reading this they might start to dislike Christina for how bitter she becomes?
Yeah, there were some things that happened in her real life that I would never as a novelist had chosen for my character to do because it made her seem so unsympathetic. But, it was such an interesting task for me. It was such a harder job for me to create the world backwards in that way, to create motivation for her that would help you understand why she acted the way she did. If I had been writing this story myself from scratch without the real historical story, I probably would have told it differently. To me, that’s one of the things that ultimately makes the book more interesting than I would have even imagined. It is not predictable because life isn’t predictable. Things happen to Christina or she does things that you might not have predicted because she was this individual, feisty, complicated stubborn woman. But you know, my job is to make it believable for the reader… I had to make you believe that she is capable of doing that.
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- There’s that huge debate about “likable characters” in literary circles, especially for women writers.
- There’s that huge debate about “likable characters” in literary circles, especially for women writers.
Sympathetic or unsympathetic to me is not exactly the issue. Do you understand why a character behaved the way they did? If you understand it, even if you don’t agree with it, I think the writer’s done his or her job. The author bears the burden of making a difficult character sympathetic, and my goal is that people would think Christina Olson had some difficult aspects to her character, but that ultimately they would understand why she acted the way she did.
- Much of your work has resilient, strong women at their centers. Who are some strong, resilient women that inspire you — in life and as a writer?
My mother was an adventurer in many ways, literally and figuratively. I’m also lucky to have three strong sisters. And then there are characters — Jane Eyre, Janie of Zora Neale Hurston’s “Their Eyes Were Watching God” and Ma of Emma Donoghue’s “Room.” There are strong women everywhere, which recent marches across the world have demonstrated.