If you talk to enough writers, you’ll notice a theme of
books and words as saviors. You’ll hear how a meaningful novel landed, at just
the right moment, in the hands of a person who was alone and scared; how a
humble ballpoint pen became a microphone, a stage, a shield, or a sword.
اضافة اعلان
For Paula McLain, the author of “The Paris Wife” and four
other novels, including her new one, “When the Stars Go Dark,” which Ballantine
will publish April 13, stories were the bridge out of a childhood spent in
foster care. Her mother left when she was 4; her father was in and out of jail.
“Writing was the way I kicked like hell for the surface when
I couldn’t breathe. I was trying to find words for things there aren’t words
for,” McLain, 55, said during a video interview from her home in Cleveland,
where she lives with her teenage daughter and son; an older son lives in
Denver.
For more than a decade, beginning in 1969, McLain and her
sisters — one younger, one older — bounced from placement to placement in
California, enduring sexual abuse, corporal punishment, neglect, and the daily
discombobulation of never feeling properly cared for.
She describes this period with a disarmingly cheerful tone,
but her recollections pack a punch.
“My childhood was like a war that wouldn’t end,” she said.
“I didn’t feel safe in my body. I didn’t see a way out or a way through. I was
ashamed of my story; it seemed to point to something terribly wrong with me.”
After high school, McLain got a job in a nursing home and
put herself through college with the help of a California program that allowed
students to go to community college for $50 plus the cost of books.
“I had no bank account,” she said. “I lived with my sisters,
and we were well below the poverty line. We had no furniture.”
In a phone interview, McLain’s older sister, Teresa Reed,
said, “When you grow up the way we did, you don’t think you’re going to achieve
something that’s unobtainable. So it’s not like I looked at Paula and thought,
‘You’re going to be this amazing novelist.’ But she was always writing, always
doing poetry, always in a book. And she wrote all my term papers.”
McLain was a divorced mother of a toddler when she borrowed
$35,000 to get her MFA in poetry at the University of Michigan.
“I had no idea how I was going to pay that money back,” she
said.
After finishing the program, she taught high school in
Vermont, waited tables in Wisconsin and wrote in her free time. In 2003, she
was living in Ohio and preparing to discuss “A Moveable Feast” with a memoir
class at a local college when an idea came to her “like a bolt of electricity”:
to write about Hemingway’s bohemian Paris from the point of view of his first
wife, Hadley Richardson. She quit three part-time teaching jobs, planted
herself at a Starbucks, and, as she put it in an email, “wrote my face off”.
When “The Paris Wife” was published in 2011, it became as
ubiquitous on the bestseller list as its characters were in Left Bank cafes,
lingering for 31 weeks on the hardcover fiction list and 35 weeks on the trade
paperback list. There are now more than 2 million copies in print.
“‘The Paris Wife’ is why I can afford bookshelves instead of
ramen,” McLain said. She went on to write two more bestsellers based on the
lives of real women — Beryl Markham in “Circling the Sun” and Martha Gellhorn
in “Love and Ruin.” She viewed her work as a feminist act, a way to give depth
and dimension to “unclaimed, missed women”.
But one day in the fall of 2017, McLain was walking her dog,
Piper, around a local pond when she had an idea for a different kind of story —
a suspenseful one — that morphed into “When the Stars Go Dark.”
“I pictured this troubled missing-persons detective who
becomes obsessed with a girl who goes missing in a town that meant something to
her when she was a kid,” McLain said. “Before I got home, I could see the whole
thing.”
McLain’s latest main character is Anna Hart, a San Francisco
detective who grew up in foster care and is on the run from a mysterious
horrific event. She lands in Mendocino, California, and is drawn into the
search for a girl whose disappearance gives her an unnerving sense of déjà vu.
Sexual abuse is a theme; so is the hangover of a rootless childhood.
In an author’s note, McLain explains her decision to set the
book in 1993, a time that was “pre-DNA, pre-cellphone, before the internet had
exploded and ‘CSI’ had laypeople thinking they could solve a murder with their
laptop.” But when she started digging into the research, she realized that
there had been real-life abductions in California at that time — including the
kidnapping of 12-year-old Polly Klaas from her Petaluma bedroom. McLain weaves
Klaas’ tragic story into the novel, reminding the reader of yet another young
woman who never had a chance to shine.
Eventually, McLain shared a draft of “When the Stars Go
Dark” with a friend, who pointed out that she was writing about her childhood.
She worried that her team would think she was “nuts”, she
said, to jump off the historical-fiction shelf where she’d made a name for
herself. Ballantine president Kara Welsh said in a phone interview that she
believes McLain's readers will follow her — and that her candor will pick up
new readers as well.
“Paula crafts these beautifully flawed characters,” Welsh
said. “She put a lot of herself and her own story into this book, and I think
that translates to the reader.”
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