- You have said that you feel a connection to Andrew Wyeth’s iconic painting, Christina’s World. What is it? How did that connection develop into the idea for this novel?
- Why do you think it has garnered such fame? Have you seen the painting in person?
- What sort of research did you do for this book? What surprised you the most? How long did the novel take to write?
- Was there a particular detail you discovered during your research that made Christina leap in to life?
- Why does the painting Christina’s World hang in a hallway at the Museum of Modern Art?
- How was writing this book a different experience than Orphan Train? Can you tell us a little bit about your process?
- Many novels have autobiographical elements. Did you draw on anything from your own experience when you were writing Christina’s World?
- Before Orphan Train, your novels mostly took place in the present day. A Piece of the World, like Orphan Train, is set in the early twentieth century. What interests you about this time period?
- The idea of writing about real people is daunting. How do you manage the line between fact and fiction? Did you ever feel constrained by the biographical facts of the true-life story?
- You have said that you feel a connection to Andrew Wyeth’s iconic painting, Christina’s World. What is it? How did that connection develop into the idea for this novel?
- Why do you think it has garnered such fame? Have you seen the painting in person?
- What sort of research did you do for this book? What surprised you the most? How long did the novel take to write?
- Was there a particular detail you discovered during your research that made Christina leap in to life?
- Why does the painting Christina’s World hang in a hallway at the Museum of Modern Art?
- How was writing this book a different experience than Orphan Train? Can you tell us a little bit about your process?
- Many novels have autobiographical elements. Did you draw on anything from your own experience when you were writing Christina’s World?
- Before Orphan Train, your novels mostly took place in the present day. A Piece of the World, like Orphan Train, is set in the early twentieth century. What interests you about this time period?
- The idea of writing about real people is daunting. How do you manage the line between fact and fiction? Did you ever feel constrained by the biographical facts of the true-life story?
My family moved to Maine from North Carolina when I was six. On weekends, my parents, young professors fresh out of graduate school, packed my three sisters and me into our trusty station wagon for family excursions, from coastal islands to museums to notable landmarks. One summer afternoon, when my mother’s mother was visiting from the South, we drove to the small town of Cushing to see the Olson house, made famous by Wyeth’s painting. My grandmother was born within a decade of Christina Olson and was raised, similarly, in a rural white farmhouse with few amenities. She, my mother, and I share the same name: Christina. Ever since that long-ago visit to the Olson house, I have felt a deep-rooted kinship with Christina Olson.
A few years ago I was brainstorming ideas with a novelist friend for her new book, and she said, out of the blue, “You know, the painting Christina’s World reminds me of you, for some reason. Have you ever considered writing about that mysterious woman in the field?” (How did she know?) I realized instantly that I’d found my subject.
I grew up not far from where Christina’s World was painted, and I’ve always felt a strong connection to it. I’ve seen the painting many times; it hangs at the Museum of Modern Art in New York City, near where I live now. The painting, in person, is incredibly compelling. It’s fascinating to watch people experience it for the first time – they stand very close to it, gazing at that girl in the grass, examining the tiny brushstrokes. There is a mystery, a question, at its heart: why is she stranded at the bottom of the field? Is she fearful? Yearning? What does she desire?
As research for this novel I pored over books and articles; interviewed people who knew the Wyeths or Olsons, or both; went to Wyeth exhibits in museums in Maine, New York, Pennsylvania, and New Jersey; attended a neurological convention; watched documentaries and profiles. The more I learned, the more determined I became to try to stick to the facts of the real-life story as much as possible, which were more interesting than anything I might invent. Even more important, I wanted to understand Andrew Wyeth, an intensely complicated man. I was surprised to discover that, unlike many artists, Wyeth had the ability and the desire to probe and analyze his own impulses and methodology – partly because his biographer, Richard Meryman, was such a deep thinker himself, and pushed Wyeth to articulate so much about his artistic process and psychological motivations. Their conversations contributed enormously to my interpretation of Wyeth’s relationship with Christina Olson. The book took a little more than two years to research and write.
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Christina Olson was as sharp as a tack. When she was 12, the teacher at the local schoolhouse asked her father if she could stay in school so that she might eventually take it over. Christina’s father refused, saying that she was needed on the farm. Christina’s intelligence, her love of reading and her thirst for knowledge, brought her to life for me.
MOMA purchased Andrew Wyeth’s “Christina’s World” right after it was finished, for $1,800 in 1948, and has owned it ever since, but their attitude toward it seems ambivalent. Their guidebook describes the painting as “similarly well-loved and scorned.” Though it is one of the most popular pieces in their permanent collection, it hangs somewhat ignominiously in a hallway near a bathroom. A former curator at MOMA lamented to me that he wishes it were owned by the Museum of Fine Arts in Boston or perhaps the Art Institute of Chicago, where it would be hung in a gallery in conversation with other paintings that reveal Wyeth’s influences and context.
Unlike Orphan Train, the characters in this novel are mostly real people, some of whom are still living. I felt an enormous responsibility to render their lives and their stories as sensitively and accurately as I could, while at the same time creating an inner life for Christina that is entirely imagined. Furthermore, Christina Olson lived a quiet, somewhat ordinary life, with few peaks and valleys. Like everyone, she had her own small personal crises and heartbreaks; I needed to dig deep into them to create moments of drama, internal and external. For these reasons this was a much harder book to write than Orphan Train. Every sentence was hard-won. The story inhabited my head like nothing I’ve ever written; I obsessed over it and lived in a kind of feverish dream state for months. (Somehow I did manage to function in the world, most of the time. But the story was always lurking just under the surface.) I came to think of this novel as a kind of sestina, a complex poetic form with exacting requirements that only succeeds when the poet is able to transcend the restrictions.
I was born in Cambridge, England, and spent my early years with my parents and younger sister in a small nearby village called Swaffham Bulbeck, in a house built in the thirteenth century. When you stood in the living room and looked up, you could see the circular outline of what had once been the hole in the roof above the space where the original inhabitants had built fires. There was no refrigerator or central heating; we used an icebox and a small gas heater that required coins to operate. Several years later we moved to Tennessee and lived on an abandoned farm, in an unheated house that had only recently been wired for electricity. Eventually we moved to Maine, into a normal house with basic amenities. But after a few years my parents leased a tiny island – about 75 feet wide by 500 feet long – from a paper company on a remote northern lake. We spent weekends, holidays, and summers at the A-frame house my father built on this narrow strip of land, and soon grew accustomed to using a rusty red outdoor pump for water, gas lanterns and candles for light, a stone fireplace for warmth, and an outhouse. On summer days we paddled a green canoe a mile across the lake from our parking spot; in winter we cross-country skied across the ice or snow-shoed over if the snow was too deep.
In the weeks and months I spent on that island, I learned that living close to the elements can make you more attuned not only to the world around you, but to the world within. I have no doubt that my unusual childhood shaped me as a writer. And in my last novel, Orphan Train, and now this one, I’ve drawn explicitly from my childhood experiences to create characters who live simply, without the modern-day amenities that most of us have come to expect.
After I finished writing my novel Orphan Train, I began to look for another story that would engage my mind and heart as completely. Having learned a great deal about early-to-mid-twentieth-century America as part of my research, I thought it would be fruitful to linger in that time period. I’d become particularly interested in rural life: how people got by and what emotional tools they needed to survive hard times. As with Orphan Train, I liked the idea of taking a real historical moment of some significance and, blending fiction and nonfiction, filling in the details, illuminating a story that has been unnoticed or obscured.
I wanted to adhere to the historical record as much as possible; I didn’t change the story to make it more palatable or to present Christina in a better light. With that said, Christina Olson was a private citizen; the stories about her, told mainly by her family members, sometimes contradict each other. Dates, places, even apparent “facts” are in dispute. For example, some sources say that Christina had no idea Wyeth was painting her portrait; he watched her in the grass, visiting her parents’ graves, from a second-story window in the house, and began working in secret. Other sources (including Wyeth’s biographer) describe him observing Christina in the pink dress she wore to her beloved nephew’s wedding and asking her to pose for him. I found this version both more believable and more appealing. It allowed me to invent moments for the two of them to connect, to have ongoing conversations that deepened their relationship.