Laura Brodie writes about grief and ghosts in 'The Widow's Season'

In The Widow’s Season by Laura Brodie, Sarah McConnell is a 39-year-old woman haunted by the ghost of her husband, who is believed to have died while kayaking during a bad storm in the mountains near their home in Jackson, Virginia.  His body hasn’t been found, leading Sarah to wonder whether David is really dead or simply trading the life of a busy doctor for one of a simple artist and hermit. 

Diary of an Eccentric says, “The Widow's Season offers a ghost story for readers who like to read about mysterious hauntings but don't like to be scared.  Brodie explores the depths of grief -- how it affects Sarah to her very core; how sadness, depression, and despair can blur the borders of reality; and how surviving spouses cope with feelings of guilt as life goes on.”

Brodie, a professor at Washington and Lee University, won the Pirate’s Alley/Faulkner Society’s 2005 prize for Best Novel-in-Progress for The Widow’s Season.  She generously took time out of her busy schedule to answer some questions about herself and the book.
 

Photo credit: Fran Fevrier

What was your inspiration for The Widow's Season?

My father died when I was eleven, so I witnessed my mother’s experience of widowhood, though it didn’t seem to include any encounters with ghosts. Then, when I was a graduate student at UVA, I wrote a dissertation on the representation of widows in English literature, inspired partly by all the widows in Jane Austen’s wonderful novels. My favorite chapter in that project was on seventeenth-century plays where husbands fake their deaths in order to spy on their wives. All of these playwrights were imagining husbands who wanted to preview their deaths to see how their wives would behave, and the voyeurism in those works got me thinking about ghosts in literature and in “real life” ghosts stories who watch their wives, along with conduct books for women from centuries ago that told them to imagine that their husbands were watching. A quote from one of those books provides the epigraph for The Widow’s Season.

What do you want readers to take from the book?

I’d like for readers to enjoy the book as a lyrical, haunting page-turner. But beyond sheer pleasure, I’d want them to take away a sense of the struggles that people go through to resurrect their lives after a crushing loss.

Are you working on another novel?  Any hints?

Right now I’m doing the final proofreading for a memoir that will be published by HarperCollins in April. It’s called Love in a Time of Homeschooling, and it’s about one year when I gave my ten-year-old daughter, Julia, a break from her public school routine to try our own ideal vision of education, full of field trips and fine arts, along with lots of writing, reading and math. I wrote about that experience in an article for Brain,Child magazine that got an enthusiastic response from readers.  As for fiction, I’m starting a new novel that looks at the aftermath of a violent confrontation between a professor and some students. It’s a continuation of a story that I wrote years ago, but right now the ideas are in their infancy.

What do you enjoy doing when you're not writing?

I enjoy playing tennis, playing the violin in a community orchestra, and reading, but these days I’m so busy with my teaching at Washington and Lee University, and the daily challenges of raising three daughters, that it’s hard to make room for enough reading, music and exercise.  I’m looking forward to Thanksgiving break as a time to catch my breath.

Did you encounter any challenges on the path to publication?  How long did it take to see the book through the initial writing to publication?

The obstacles to publication are so numerous and daunting, most new writers that I meet are perpetually caught between glimmers of hope and vast swamps of despair.  The Widow’s Season took five years of part-time labor to complete, and I might have given up, but I was part of a group of fiction writers that met at a local bar during two summers, and they were reading my chapters in early draft form, so that helped to keep me going. I got a boost when the novel won the 2005 Pirate’s Alley/Faulkner Society award for Best Novel-in-Progress, but it took my agent, Gail Hochman, over a year to find an editor. A lot of the readers didn’t like my initial ambiguous ending, which didn’t specify whether the husband, David, was alive or dead.  I eventually wrote the book’s present ending, which gives the story more closure, but even then, a novel from an unknown writer was a tough sell.  My editor, Jackie Cantor at Berkley, had my manuscript on her pile for three months before she picked it up. She said she was planning to read two pages and then reject it—she had no intention of buying this book—but the first two pages got her hooked, and she said she couldn’t put it down.

What are five books you find yourself recommending over and over and why?

Marilynne Robinson’s Housekeeping—the paragraphs are so beautiful, I read short excerpts over and over.

David Guterson’s Snow Falling on Cedars—I love the Pacific Northwest setting for that story, and I appreciate books with exciting plots that are also filled with gorgeous prose.

PD James (any title)—I’ve recently begun to listen to murder mysteries on tape in my car. With three daughters, I spend huge chunks of time driving, and I enjoy listening to mysteries that are written with great intelligence, but don’t require my complete concentration. As a result, I don’t mind the driving so much, though my daughters want me to turn on some pop music.

The Norton Anthology of Modern and Contemporary Poetry, (2 volumes)--These are great books to have in a home library because they contain some of the most beautiful poems in English. I use these books in my teaching, and I encourage my students to discover favorite poems that they can return to throughout their lives, to feed their souls.

To learn more about Laura Brodie and her writing, visit her website.