“History is a nightmare from which I am trying to awake,” Stephen Dedalus comments in James Joyce’s Ulysses.
He's talking about the vast sweep of Ireland’s past, and all the ways those distant events torment his life “today”— on the 16th of June 1904, a date we now remember and celebrate as “Bloomsday.”
But until recently it never occurred to me that Joyce, writing that novel in 1914, was himself writing a kind of historical novel?
At least some part of his writing process must have involved going back to the previous decade and aligning his details such that they would all be accurate in the memories of his readers in the 1920s.
What brings this up? Well, for the past few years now, I’ve been thinking quite a bit about “historical fiction” because, well, I’ve been writing some for the first time.
In fact, the most challenging part of writing OUR NARROW HIDING PLACES (pre-order now B&N for 25%-35% off!) was not chucking out 200 pages and rewriting them in nine months. It wasn’t travelling halfway around the world to revisit the sites of family traumas. It wasn’t even conducting hours of interviews with my grandmother (whose childhood the novel is loosely based on)…
It was convincing myself that I could write “historical fiction” in the first place.
My previous novels have all been set in a period of time I thought of as the “present”—my second book opens with events loosely tied to the Great Recession in 2008, but as it moves forward it mostly isn’t about that, and when I wrote the novel (between 2011 and 2015) it was all very recent. I did some research into the collapse of Lehman Brothers and so on, but for the most part I was able to easily work from memory and lived experience.
Before that, writing my debut novel, I literally had no idea at all what years the various chapters took place in—or even necessarily how much time was passing between things. There were hardly any historical markers. I didn't know what order the chapters even went in. One of the very last things I did before the book was published was sit down and finally put everything on a timeline (which I sent to my editor, and she sent back to me, framed.)
After I lined it all up, I panicked—realizing that one of the biggest global events of my life, 9/11, should occur, in the novel, while my characters were living in New York City, and that I had made no mention of it at all.
My editor told me not to worry about it, and she was right. This slip never came up in any review or critique I ever saw. It didn’t shatter the realism for anyone.
But I began to think then about history as a kind of opportunity that I might be missing: providing context, external pressure, sudden diversion, even outright conflict, on the story I was writing, the way it does for all of us in our own lives. Had I missed out on so much literary ooomph by not even really considering history?
Most of the short stories I wrote were also set in the present. I tended to work mainly from inspirations that come from my own life, and from the lives of people I know, and so I didn’t really question this particular range in my work very much. It felt natural; it was just my habit.
But as I got older, two things changed. The first being that, well, I got older. As a 30-something millennial writer, living in Brooklyn, I could think of myself as part of a generation of young authors all trying to say something about how it is right now. About the particular parameters of life for our generation. Not a bad thing to try and capture.
But time passes. Within a few short years I’d become a 40-something “elder millennial” writer, living in the suburbs, and no longer had any sense of myself as being part of whatever zeitgeist was currently under the cultural microscope.
I looked on (sometimes a bit despairingly, I’ll admit) at edgy new books by authors now half my age who had things to say about growing up on social media and navigating a sex life via Tindr and K-pop and climate fatalism and the movement politics of BLM and #MeToo and a ton of other things that had come too late for me, had not really shaped my identity as it was shaping theirs—as fascinating as I found all these things from the sidelines in Westchester.
At the same time I didn’t really feel like writing a “straight white humanities Professor has a midlife crisis in the suburbs” novel. I didn’t think that I had very much to add to the heaps that had already been written about that experience, much of it written long before I’d even been born.
So what then?
The second thing that happened was COVID. Like a lot of other writers I know, I felt like these events were defining: the helplessness in the face of a global pandemic and the lockdowns, the further fraying of our already fragile nation, the alienation, the fear… it was all very new to me and felt like something I wanted to work out on the page. Suddenly I felt inspired because I had things to say again about the moment we were all in, and so I said them.
But the two hundred pages I ended up writing about a young family steadily dissolving during COVID would end up being the part of my novel that ultimately hit the cutting room floor, not because those pages weren’t good, but because every editor I showed it to was in agreement that readers would not want to spend their precious reading hours revisiting those traumatic months in 2020.
I balked at first, but today I think they were probably right. I’m sure we’ll hit a point eventually where COVID feels far enough behind us that we can step back to those traumas again, but right now it is somehow “history” nobody wants to think about and, in another sense, not actually over anyway.
The funny thing was that when my agent read the COVID parts, his reaction was, “It really reads like historical fiction,” even though it was just two years ago, and that made me wonder again what the term even meant anyway. And why was I so scared of it?
For my whole life I had been interested in writing a novel about my grandmother’s experiences during WWII, when she was an eight year old girl and survived the horrific period known as the Hunger Winter, when the Nazis occupying The Hague knew they were losing and just began to starve the Dutch citizens, cutting off all electricity and coal shipments, so that if they didn’t starve they’d freeze to death during one of the coldest winters on record.
It worked—almost 200,000 Netherlanders died in those five months, and—as my grandmother is fond of saying—if the war had lasted even two more weeks, she’d have been among them.
This, by the way, was the real impetus for me in writing the novel. I had always been fascinated by this idea. That if the global events of eighty years ago had happened on a slightly later timetable… my father would never have been born, nor me, nor my own kids now. And what were the impacts even still? Those torments history’s nightmares evoke in us, that Dedalus complained so pithily about in Ulysses?
The Allies finally broke through and liberated them. Then, my grandmother explained, there was a long period of rebuilding during which nobody really talked at all about what they’d just survived. Sound familiar?
It wasn’t until she turned sixteen, eight years later, that a sudden attack of anemia left her in bed for almost a year—the same thing was happening to teenage girls her age all across the Western part of the country. The malnutrition they’d all experienced during the Hunger Winter had left lasting damage—even if society had decided to move on and not look back, her body remembered.
During those first few months of COVID, as I called down to check in on my grandmother, week after week, she began telling me these stories again—but for the first time they felt real to me.
My own son (her grandson) was the same age that she’d been then. I could really imagine, for the first time, what the war she described must have looked like from her eyes—and felt like to her. Living through a period of death and uncertainty and fear suddenly, all that history suddenly clicked into place in my mind and I felt, all at once, like I might know how to write her story at long last.
Only I still didn’t.
I told myself that I didn’t want to write “historical fiction” and that I couldn’t let myself become somehow pigeonholed as a “genre writer”… I know, I know—as if this would be such a terrible thing? But in my mind I worried that if I began writing books about the past I might never be “allowed” to write about anything else.
And what I couldn’t fully admit then was that I also wasn’t sure if I even knew how to do it.
How could I write a novel about WWII, a subject that has been written about non-stop for eighty years, and say anything new at all? How could I recreate the details of a world I’d never seen? Even if I suddenly thought I had some theoretical understanding of the day-in-day-out life of my grandmother, in another country, in the midst of a global war, when she was only eight… did I really know how to transmute that into words?
Two conversations soon changed my mind. The first was with friend and writer Matt Bell who encouraged me to get over my fears. We were talking about the new novel Crossroads by Jonathan Franzen, which we’d each just read, and Matt pointed out that, even though the book is set in the 1970s, nobody was calling it “historical fiction.” On the contrary it was still being spoken of as a reflection of our own times just as Franzen’s earlier books, The Corrections and Freedom, both set in the “recent past”, had been. I began to open my eyes to just how many new books, praised as being quite “of the moment” were actually set in the 30s, the 60s, the 70s, the 80s, even the 1800s!
And yet they weren’t being treated by anyone as if they were in some kind of sub-category of fiction, the way I was assuming they must be if they weren’t set in contemporary times.
The second conversation was during a brief chat before an interview I did with a former professor and mentor of mine, Alice McDermott. I mentioned that I was digging into this subject but was scared I didn’t know how to write historical fiction—not even really thinking in that moment that Alice’s novels are often set in the past.
She kindly advised me to put it out of my head. “It’s still just fiction,” she said.
Those four simple words, “It’s still just fiction,” reminded me that, for whatever distinctions are made by marketing teams and bookstore section-shelvers… all fiction is still just fiction.
Now… you may be wondering why is some fiction about the past is categorized as “historical” and others aren’t… I know I was. Where do these categories come from?
Each published book is given a certain set of BISAC codes ( an acronym for Book Industry Standards and Communications) indicating how it is to be categorized in online marketplaces like Amazon or Bookshop, and in your local B&N or independent store… even in your local library. It’s like putting in a set of “search terms” that help the people combing through vast databases of books figure out what they’re all about in the broadest possible way.
At the end of the day it is up to a publisher to choose these codes and “position” the book as they think it will best find its audience… Crossroads is listed as “Literary/Family Life - General/Coming of Age. The novel All the Light We Cannot See is “Historical - General/Literary/War & Military/Historical - World War II”.
In the end mine has been assigned its own categories too:
But I was putting the cart way in front of the horse, worrying about things like that before I’d really even begun working on the book in earnest.
What Alice was trying to remind me is that the job of writing fiction is the same at its core, no matter where or when that fiction is occurring.
Of course Alice’s novels aren’t “sub” in any way simply because they’re set in the past. Her work isn’t primarily focused on recreating the world of the past and informing the reader about historical events. It’s focused on what fiction should be focused on: telling a story about human beings who feel very complex and real and relatable and contemporary in their interiors… and if they happen to live in the 20s or the 70s or the 50s, so be it.
With this all in mind, I began writing, and soon found that not only was it something I did know how to do—but that it was incredibly fun and exciting. I’ve always been a writer who gets inspired by odd details in research. Stories come to life for me in those little things—the way the character grinds their coffee beans, or the way they fished for eels, or the local idioms they liked to use. Because I needed to read a number of books about Holland during the Hunger Winter, and dive into a bunch of survivor narratives, including my grandmother’s… my notebooks were soon jam-packed with details I could hardly wait to find uses for. Those parts of the book came together fairly easily, and actually required much less revision in the end—as opposed to the contemporary sections (set in 2017 now, instead of 2020). Those ironically turned out to be the hardest parts of the novel to write… the parts based on my own lived experiences and not the things that had happened forty years before I was born.
In the book The Art of History, writer Christopher Bram notes that novels about the past appeals to a reader’s desire to escape into another world—to journey out of the contemporary moment, a passport to spend time in a place that is unlike everything we see around us now. He calls Historical fiction a “fact-based fantasy, a dream with footnotes.” Makes sense. Just as some readers want to get the hell out of 2024 and spend time on Battlestar Galactica or in Middle Earth instead—someone lifting up my novel goes elsewhere for a while. Not into a past they already know because they lived through it too, but into a new world (an old world) they’ve always wondered about.
“As the flight attendants instruct us before take-off,” Bram writes, “‘The nearest exit may be behind you.’”
And for the readers who (and I meet one of these a week, sadly) who find fiction to be a waste of time because it can’t teach them something “useful”… that “fact-based fantasy” we call historical fiction is filled with loads of little learnings about what happened and when, ideally appealing for someone demanding a good ROI on their reading time investment.
So it goes.
Bram makes another compelling point that I dwell on now as I consider what I might write next:
“Most novels aspire to the condition of history.”
Isn’t that right anyway? When I wrote my other novels (and many stories) set in the “present day”… well, wasn’t I hoping that in ten years or a hundred, that some future reader might pick them up to get a sense of “what it was like back then”?
And won’t every novel, eventually, be a historical novel? Don’t we all try to write each of them so as to make sense to someone later, looking back? Is this a nightmare? Maybe—but I have begun to think of it as the best kind of dream.
Someday, surely, people will be eager to read novels set during COVID, so that they can understand what we all went through. I’m sure many will exist—maybe the sections I wrote and cut, even, will find their way into the world at some later date.
Ti-i-i-i-i-me (as the Rolling Stones say) is on my side. (Yes it is.)
And it is on your side too.
Whatever we write now, or next, will be seen in other ways as time passes. We write hoping that we can provide some window into the past—always. Even if it is a story about the present. It’ll be the past soon enough.
So don’t worry, as I did, about going into the past—if you begin looking there you’ll find loads of unturned stones, new (old) stories to tell, and best of all, precious distance from the pressures of the here and now. The past gives us all so much more freedom to say something new.
I’m continuing my search for a better home for this newsletter, and hoping that Substack changes its course on hosting hate speech. If and when I make a change, I’ll let everyone know! Thanks!
I, too, have been advised that COVID isn't a welcome or necessary character in my writing, recently. Interesting!
Thank you for sharing your journey into this new pathway for your writing. I, too, have a "historical" idea simmering. It's not time for me to write it now. Thanks to this post, when the time is right I will plunge in with gusto. Looking forward to OUR NARROW HIDING PLACES.