Mindy:                         Today's guest is Tracy Chevalier author of Girl with a Pearl Earring. Her 10th novel, A Single Thread released recently. Tracy joined me today to talk about the plight of "excess women" in England post World War One, how writing leads her to hobbies - not the other way around, -and how a writer needs something in their lives that isn't word-based.

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Mindy:                         A Single Thread is your newest title and it deals with the concept of surplus women, women who are unable to marry in the aftermath of World War One. So how did you become aware of this phenomenon and what made you want to write about it?

Tracy:                           I approached the story from a different angle and I started with cathedrals. I've always loved them and I wanted to set a book in a cathedral. And so I was looking at various cathedrals I could write about. And I went to Winchester cathedral, which is about an hour south of London where I live. And when I was looking around, I noticed these cushions and kneelers that had been embroidered like a needle point and read that they were made in the 1930s by a volunteer group of women. And that was what started me, thought I wanna write about that volunteer group and those women making the, the kneelers and cushions. And once I started research, that's when I came across this idea of the surplus woman, which was a, a label given by the newspapers for all these women who were unable to marry. And that's when I started to get more interest in this concept of the, of the woman who is outside of society.

Tracy:                           Because the world at that time was set up expecting women to marry and there weren't many other opportunities open for them. A woman at that time, at least in England, she might work for a bit. So she could be a teacher or a nurse or a clerk or a secretary or typist. But the moment she marries, she stops working. Really what she's meant to do in the world is become a wife and mother. I think the press at any rate, were kind of horrified by the thought that there were almost 2 million more women than men after World War One. So what were we going to do with this problem women? These surplus women? And I thought, I want to create a surplus woman who manages to make a life for herself despite what society throws at her, or keeps from her ,that she manages to find some sort of independence. So that's how that came about.

Mindy:                         Even in today's world where we've come somewhat farther, I feel this like sense of hopelessness and doom when you're talking about it. These women who had no chance of finding a husband simply because there weren't any men, uh, that's, it's a horrible thought that the women were entirely dependent upon a man for any type of status or role in society.

Tracy:                           Yeah, exactly. And I have to say that we've come a long way obviously since, since those days. Um, so women have more opportunities to higher education, which they didn't so much then. And, and many more careers are open to us. But you know, the funny thing is I, and I didn't really, really understand this until I was in the middle of writing the book. That and also since I've been hearing reactions from people who've read it, single women who've read it have said, you know, it's not so different from then, um, because we're still looked down on because we're not married. And one of them told me, Oh, you know, if I go to a dinner party, it's all coupled up. And then there's me, I feel like I'm not listened to with as much intent as others. She was pointing out at one point in A Single Thread, Violet Speedwell, the heroine, says she notices that she's sitting in this group of embroiderers and mostly the married women talk and the single women remain silent because nobody really wants to pay attention to them.

Tracy:                           The marriage gives you status and a voice. The friend now was saying it's not as different as all that. And I thought that really pained me. And the other thing is there's a, there's a scene in the book, Violet strikes out on this independent life. She leaves her family behind and, or she has been living with our mother and one of the things she does differently is she goes on her summer holiday or summer vacation, not with her family. She goes on her own and she goes on this walking trip across the countryside from Winchester to Salisbury, which is about 26 miles. And there's a path you could do along there. And she takes it and she gets into some trouble because she's on her own. And when I was doing research, I decided to walk that I wanted to walk that route to make sure that I was getting things right and my husband and I were going to do it one weekend and then for, for one reason or other we couldn't go.

Tracy:                           And then a couple of weekends later I thought, well, I can go. He's away. I maybe I'll just do it on my own. And then I thought, no, I don't really want to walk through fields on my own because as a woman, I'm still a little nervous being so isolated. And it really surprised me that even after all this time, you know, women can walk on their own, they're not stared at quite so much in the same way. But nonetheless, there is still that fear, that underlying fear that you're going to run into a man in a cornfield on your own and then what do you do? And that's exactly what happens to her. And so I thought, wow, maybe things haven't changed that much.

Mindy:                         No, unfortunately you do have to think about those things. I'm an avid hiker and I've always wanted to do, not necessarily the whole Appalachian trail, but you know, a leg. And I'd love to do the Appalachian trail, but I'm, I wouldn't do it on my own.

Tracy:                           No, of course not. And you'd never get a man saying that. They might say, Oh, you know, I don't want to do it on my own because I get bored. Or suddenly, but they wouldn't say because I feel unsafe. Right.

Mindy:                         Because I would be in danger. The world is different. It's a different point of view when you're a woman. Sometimes men lose sight of that because they've never had to experience it.

Tracy:                           Yeah, yeah. Very true.

Mindy:                         So you mentioned the embroidered cushions, the kneeling pillows in the novel. Violet becomes a volunteer embroiderer and I was reading up on your own hobbies and you do some quilting. So do elements of your own life sometimes become peppered in throughout your novels?

Tracy:                           Well, it actually weirdly works the other way around. I quilt because I wrote a book about a quilter and I learned to quilt so that I could describe it. It isn't that I quilted first and I thought, Oh, I'd like to write about that. Oddly enough, my books are leading me into my hobbies. And for this, for A Single Thread, I learned how to do needlepoint. It's a canvas embroidery is the term in England in the 30s but I learned how to do it myself so that I could write about it more accurately in the book. But I do like making things. I'm not very good at making things, but I like making them anyway. You know, our ancestors all made their clothes, they made their food, they made their tools. And it's kind of nice to reconnect with that more practical side of us because so much of my life is about words, you know, I'm either talking or writing or reading and it's feels so good to make something. It's a, it's a nonverbal activity and it's wonderful to hold it in your hands afterwards. That kind of tactile, Hey, I made this feeling is really great.

Mindy:                         Yes, I agree. And it's interesting you're talking about your whole life being words. I am similar. I also am an author and obviously I run this podcast, but, and of course read constantly. Uh, and I too have found that I'm at a point where I need to go do something else sometimes. Even watching TV doesn't work for me because you're still absorbing words. I, in order to actually break out of that and go do something not related to words, I have to knit or garden, I do cross-stitch the something like that. So that I'm not surrounded by story because you can become a little, I don't know what's the word I'm looking for

Tracy:                           Oversaturated.

Mindy:                         There you go. That's perfect.

Tracy:                           Yeah. I think what happens too is when, when you're just so absorbed in so many stories all the time, everything becomes a story. Everything becomes a kind of fiction and we have the danger of kind of anecdotally using our our lives so that they become this, it's in the structure of them becomes all about the story and that I don't think that's always healthy. I mean, I love, I love story like the next person, otherwise I wouldn't be in this business. But I do think sometimes it's like when you go on a vacation and you come back and people ask you how it went, how was your vacation in Hawaii? And you say, Oh, you know, we went, we went on this hike and we lost our way and we had to do this, that and the other. So you have a beginning, middle and end and you shaped it for, you know, what you're shaping your vacation into stories and then you tend to forget about all the rest of this stuff that went on because the reality is that our lives are not stories. They go, they just sort of go and then sometimes they go off on tangents and they come back. But we can end up ignoring a lot of it if we're just shaping it and it into stories. Does that, does that make sense?

Mindy:                         It makes absolute perfect sense to me because that's exactly how I operate as well. And even within my family unit whenever someone goes and does something even, you know, when I still lived at home, getting home from school and speaking at the dinner table, how was your day? Well I've got a story. Everything was a story and that is very, was very useful to me. Obviously helped shape who I am as a writer. But yeah, there is a, there is a little smudgy area there between reality and, and uh, trying to craft your own story. Yeah. It's an interesting conundrum for an author when you are trying to lead your life and not storify it I guess.

Tracy:                           Yeah, exactly. And it can affect the writing as well because one of the hardest parts about writing a novel is getting the ending, right. That's where the pressure to shape a story really comes into sharp relief. And you think, okay, I got to end this and, and we're all like this. I mean I, I often judge a book by its ending because readers want, they want the impossible. They want to be surprised, but they also want to be satisfied and satisfaction is usually - the writer got that right. That's the ending I would have thought that's what I thought would happen, but, and yet if you think it's going to happen, then you're not going to be surprised by it. So it's quite a, it's quite a balancing act. And what I don't like are endings that are too pat that are too kind of, everything's tied up.

Tracy:                           All the loose ends are tied up because you, and yet you don't want it to open ended because, um, it then it doesn't feel satisfying either. So it's, it's a really tough to get it right. And, and I think there's, the danger is going too much in the direction of, of the pat ending of the storifying of the story, so to speak and, and trying to, you know, maintain a little bit more looseness would be good. I think. So, that's why I'm fascinated - I don't know if you've heard about this book by Lucy Ellman, which is called Ducks, Newburyport by Lucy Ellman. It's up for the Booker prize and it's a thousand page novel, that's I think three sentences long, three long sentences with no, uh, no punctuation. So I think it's got three periods in it. And um, it's the inner life of a, an Ohio housewife.

Tracy:                           And I just love the thought of that because that's clearly not your average story. It's not like a story with a beginning, middle, and end. It tells, it tells it in a very different way. I wouldn't want every novel out there to be like that. But I think it's a really great to have this kind of experimentation, have a different way of storytelling so that maybe you... the way the, quote unquote story creeps up on you in a book like that is, is more to weave a tapestry around you of different stuff that you feel like you're in a, you know, a stream of consciousness. And I admire that though. I'm not sure I'd ever be able to do it myself.

Mindy:                         I'm very fascinated by this and I have to go pick it up now for sure. I agree with you about the endings being too pat. Often that's the exit point for readers from a character's life, but the character's life, if you've created a real human being is going to continue. It's going to keep going. And so tying everything off, giving them that happily ever after, or at least content ever after, isn't necessarily a reflection of reality. And if we're... Fiction's job is to create an alternate reality. I love what you're saying and I think it is an interesting conundrum that we face as, as writers when we want to give us satisfying ending. But we're aware that that world that we created still exists and things are still continuing to happen in it, whether we are transcribing them or not.

Tracy:                           Yeah, absolutely. I guess if you get it right then people say, I, and I've had this with A Single Thread. Lots of people have already said to me, are you going to write a sequel? Cause I really want to know what happens to her after this. And I really hesitate to write.. I mean I tend to say, look, I think that she lives on in your head and you can work out what she does next rather than me. But I take it as a compliment that people want to know what happens to the character like that they, that they are so vividly alive that they're still alive and even after the book is ended. And, uh, I love that.

Mindy:                         Absolutely. Coming up the pressure of an expectant audience and learning your own rhythms as a writer.

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Mindy:                         A Single Thread is your 10th published book. When you're working that much, is it difficult to maintain a life and work balance? Not necessarily with the workload, but because now that you are published, you have an expected audience.

Tracy:                           It's wonderful to have an expectant audience. Um, I'd sort of rather have one than not, so I'm very glad about that. I've managed to settle into a pattern, I guess after 10 my publishers know that I tend to write a book every three years or so, sometimes less, sometimes more. I think in an ideal world, they'd love that to be every two years. But the fact is, I write historical novels and they take a lot of research. So it's not just writing it, it's also doing all the research and it, it, it takes the time it takes. I feel like I've managed to get the rhythm of that right. Both for myself and my readership. Do I always get readers saying, when's the next one? I can't wait! I've just finished this and now I want, I want another one and I sort of had to say, look, I, if you want the kind of thing I write, you're gonna, going to have to wait for it because it takes time.

Tracy:                           And people get that. I think the, we all have our favorite, you know, the kind of writers we like to read. And they have a rhythm to them. So, you know, somebody like Donna Tartt publishes a book every eight years or something. So she takes a long time. And then there are thriller writers who, especially if they're in a series and they have the same detectives, so they have, they don't have to come up with new characters. They might write a book a year. Everybody has a different rhythm. I've worked out my rhythm and we all seem to be good with it. So that balance of the life of writing with what's expected of me, I think, um, it took a little while to get there. But we're, we're there now.

Mindy:                         It's lovely to know yourself, isn't it?

Tracy:                           Yeah. Well, I'm 56 damn better know myself by now!

Mindy:                         You maintain dual citizenship. You tour in both England and America. I ask this question because earlier I had a guest who is also internationally published and she felt that her works were looked upon as literature for women in America, but were read more broadly overseas by men. So do you find differences between your American audience and your British or international audiences?

Tracy:                           Certainly not gender, no. I mean, I, I definitely am read more by women all over. I think that that's not surprising because I think that women read 70% of fiction in general. Women tend to read more fiction, men, nonfiction, of course there are exceptions to that. But so it's likely that I'm going to have more women reading me. And I think that's across the board. I don't think that, I think that doesn't matter about nationality. So I'm very curious about this other writer, like why that's happened. I'm trying to think of like the difference between the American and UK audiences. So I've just been in the States on a book tour and I'm back in the UK now. So I've done events and I've done some events here. The difference probably comes more in, um, knowledge of history. So, so this is a very English book, hence an English audiences is going to respond to it in a different way just because they know more of this history.

Tracy:                           And they, they have... it's set in the 1930s and in a Southern English city, a lot of people who reading it, they'll have grandparents who lived during this time or even parents. And so they'll just sort of know the feeling of it. Whereas an American audience might have grandparents who lived during that time in the 1930s but America in the 1930s was very different from England in 1930. So it's um, the American audience comes at it with without that prior cultural knowledge and so they have more to learn. What they focus on is going to be so slightly different. But I wouldn't say that the response has been all that different I think it has been similar. I wouldn't differentiate my audiences too much.

Mindy:                         I think what you're saying about literature of place is very true when you're reading something. You mentioned the book to me that is set in Ohio and of course that is where I am from. And when I read the Midwest, if the author is not from or did not have a very tight connection to the Midwest, they usually don't get it right cause the Midwest by, by being almost, it has very few iconic things about it other than cornfields. It's, it's a very subtle type of life and you can't capture it unless you've lived it. And so often when I read anything set in the Midwest, if they don't have jello salad with pieces of vegetables floating in it, I know they don't know what they're talking about.

Tracy:                           Marshmallows. That's what you got to have in it.

Mindy:                         There you go. You know exactly what I'm talking about.

Tracy:                           Well, the thing is though, you can't lump the Midwest altogether because Midwest, Ohio is very different from Midwest, Minnesota is very different from Midwest, Missouri. They have a really different feel. I mean I'm particularly fascinated by Ohio. I only lived there four years. I went to Oberlin college and I went to Ohio. One of the reasons I wrote about it in some of my previous books, especially in The Last Runaway, is that it seemed to me that it's a state that is defined by all the States around it and by its place it's like the gateway to um, for pioneers going West. It was the gateway to the West and uh, there was a lot of traffic from East to West through it. And then I wrote about the underground railroad and there's a lot of traffic South and North with all the runaway slaves going up to Canada through Ohio.

Tracy:                           So there's this weird transient feeling of being defined by the people who are passing through it and why they're passing through it. They're passing through it to get somewhere else. Not necessarily to stay in Ohio, but, but Ohio is a funny old place cause it's like it's also the state that you have to win if you want to win the presidential election. Why is that? I don't know. I don't know. It's just, but it has a certain, something that I definitely sense. You know, I'm from Washington D C but when I, when I went to Ohio to Oberlin in Ohio, I definitely sensed, Oh yeah, this has got its own personality for sure. And it's different from all the other Midwest States as well.

Mindy:                         Why don't you tell my listeners where they can find you online?

Tracy:                           I have a website, it's tchevailer.com And it has, it's designed by my sister who is a website designer and it's beautiful and there is lots of information about events and um, bits of news and bits of thoughts and what I'm reading. So do have a look!