After finishing The River Midnight, a challenging first novel, I was determined to write something easy and quick. But life intervened in the form of motherhood; while working on my second novel, I married and became the mother of first one amazing daughter and then a second through international adoption.
I thought a lot about how we remember our mothers and what we forget about them that comes to light when we have children of our own.
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I thought about all the different ways people can take on mothering roles and I was especially interested in the relationship between adoptive mothers and birth-mothers. Everything I've read focuses on the birthmother's feelings about her child, or the adult-child searching for her origins. There was nothing at all to express the voice of the adoptive mother or to explore the complex connection between her and the birth-mother, though these two women share the most intimate of bonds between mother and child.
At the same time I was left with questions after finishing The River Midnight. There a woman has a baby with the support of her community; what would happen to her if that was missing? How did my grandmothers move from the shtetl to urban life?
Immigrant experience is usually portrayed as either a kind of rags-to-riches fairy-tale or as the gritty "reality" of downtrodden women and grasping men, but I've seen for myself how it can be a rich amalgam of old and new that allows for growth as well as struggle. How did that vitality show itself when the majority of our ancestors immigrated at the turn- of-the-century?
I was also interested in a technical question of writing. In The River Midnight, each chapter focuses on the same time period from a different point-of-view. I thought about the way that flashbacks are always read in the context of the "now" of a book; I wanted to give the reader the immediacy of experience in real-time by keeping this novel to a straight-forward chronological structure as much as possible.
My family came to the new world through London as did the grandparents of many other people I know. In fact we still have cousins there. In the fin de siecle, London was a fascinating city of contradictions, pragmatic and mysterious, building the first subway system underneath warrens of ancient alleys, the center of world finance, a city of theaters and immigrants and sewing machines making cheap jackets while the wind blew fog in from the sea. In my work magical realism is a way of writing about meaning and transcendence and this was a place where I could imagine my grandmother hearing the ghost of her step-mother speak.
As all of this came together, my plan for the "easy" book dropped away and I found myself telling the next piece of my grandmothers' story, imagining the heroism of the women who made a new life in a new country while my own experience of motherhood brought to the novel an examination of the unbreakable bonds between mothers and sisters, whether those relationships are formed by birth, by adoption, or by friendship.
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