Literary Arts

The novelist talks siblings, radicalization, and writing in her native Polish.

By Haley Huchler

This article was originally published in Washington Independent Review of Books, here.

Author Danuta Hinc grew up in the suburbs of Wejherowo, a small town near the Baltic Sea, before the fall of the Iron Curtain. Conversations at her family’s dinner table centered on history and politics, making Hinc acutely aware of the world outside her native Poland — one that promised freedom and prosperity.

This deep insight into the way politics shapes our everyday lives may well have influenced Hinc’s new novel, When We Were Twins, a story of Egyptian siblings Taher and Aisha, whose lives diverge when Taher becomes radicalized, abandons their shared plans to study medicine in Europe, and signs on as a medic for the Mujahideen when the Soviet Union invades Afghanistan.

Did you always know you wanted to be a novelist?

Becoming a novelist happened very gradually for me, almost accidentally, when the subject I wanted to write about was too broad for a short story, too political for a non-fictional piece, and too “out of the scope of my own experience.”

Is When We Were Twins a companion to your first novel, To Kill the Other?

When We Were Twins is a phoenix that has risen from the ashes of To Kill the Other, which was published in 2011 and went out of print four years later when the publisher closed its doors. When Plamen Press expressed interest in re-publishing the novel, I seized the opportunity and decided to put out a “new version,” a term coined by my friend Ross Angelella, director of the Jiménez-Porter Writers’ House at the University of Maryland. Apart from rewriting the entire novel from the past tense to the present tense, I deleted many chapters and added new ones. I reimagined the subject and shifted the main focus to different characters, mainly women and children.

What led you to write a book about an Egyptian man who becomes radicalized in his devotion to Islam?

The initial inspiration came from the tragic events of 9/11, when thousands of innocent lives were lost in an unspeakable and unprecedented act of premeditated and synchronized terrorist attacks. I wanted to understand why someone becomes radicalized. I wanted to explore [the question]: Is it possible to see humanity in a person who commits an unspeakable act of terror? It was difficult for me to say yes, and that was my challenge — to construct a character that makes us see his humanity despite his actions. Maybe then we can see the missing link, the moment in life that turns someone into an extremist, a radicalized person.

When We Were Twins was inspired by 9/11, but it is also a story about the Pittsburgh Synagogue shooting, Charleston church shooting, Charlottesville car attack, January 6th U.S. Capitol attack, and any other terrorist attack in history, because each is linked by the same idea, in which one grants herself or himself the right to kill others in the name of extreme ideas based in religion or politics. It’s a story about the vicious cycle in human history that radicalizes people and turns them into terrorists.

What so interested you in the connection between twins that you made Taher and Aisha’s relationship central to the novel?

It was the divergence and the question [of] when and why it happens. I was interested in examining two lives that start in the same womb, heartbeat next to heartbeat, and how they become the polar opposites in their lives despite remaining very close. The bond between Taher and Aisha is mystically profound. They stay very close even when their ideals change and diverge drastically. The twins are also a symbol for all humans as brothers and sisters, all born as innocent and turning out differently despite the innate innocence that is initial in everyone’s life.

You wrote To Kill the Other in Polish and then translated it into English. Was that also your method with When We Were Twins?

When I immigrated to the States in my late 20s, I didn’t speak English. I was fluent in Russian, I spoke decent French and German, and I had a good grasp of Latin. English, however, was a language I had to learn. I fell in love with English while translating To Kill the Other, and at the same time, I started writing in English, kind of bypassing my first language. Graduating from Bennington College with an MFA in literature and writing solidified my process even more, and now I write exclusively in English. I wrote When We Were Twins in English, but strangely, I was thinking about translating it into Polish. Because of time constraints, mostly my full-time job teaching writing at the University of Maryland, I don’t think it will happen for now.

Which writers have had the greatest impact on your work?

It would be difficult if not impossible to name all the writers I read and admire. I admire writers whose mastery of the English language is unparalleled. I believe Freud would say that English is the love I am still striving to conquer and make my own. Perhaps I would agree with this.

[Editor’s note: This article was written with support from the DC Arts Writing Fellowship, a project of the nonprofit Day Eight.]

Haley Huchler is a writer from Virginia. She has written for publications including Northern Virginia Magazine and Prince William Living Magazine. She has a B.A. in English and journalism from James Madison University, where she was editor-in-chief of Iris, an undergraduate literary magazine.

by Samantha Neugebauer

This article was originally published in DCTRENDING, here.

Acclaimed author Tim O’Brien sat down with Claiborne Smith, the literary director of the Library of Congress, at Arena Stage to discuss his new novel, America Fantastica. The event, hosted by Politics and Prose Bookstore, was the first stop on O’Brien’s book tour. He used the program as an opportunity to discuss the genesis of his new book, his first in twenty years, and meditate on the state of American culture. 

Since the latter half of the twentieth century, O’Brien has remained a steady presence in American letters. Among other accolades, he received the 1979 National Book Award for his novel Going After Cacciato and the 1995 Society of American Historians Prize for Historical Fiction for In the Lake of the Woods. Yet, it’s his 1990 Pulitzer-Finalist masterpiece The Things They Carried, a collection of linked stories about a platoon of American soldiers during the Vietnam War, that most people know O’Brien for and which earned him his spot in the American literary pantheon. Since its publication, its first chapter has been widely anthologized and regularly assigned in English classrooms across the country, serving as an entryway to understanding the psychology of the soldiers in that gruesome war for generations of American students. The novel’s significance is especially felt for members of my generation (millennials) whose parents may or may not have been deployed to Vietnam and whose high school history classes tended to focus on the domestic transformations occurring during those decades rather than the soldiers’ stories themselves if we reached the back of our textbooks at all. 

During the interview, O’Brien was questioned about the long interlude since his last book, and he explained that he’d started America Fantastica years ago and abandoned it. Although one main character, Angie Bing, haunted his life (including appearing at the dining table with his wife and children), he was more focused on fatherhood than finding the story. He returned to the concept (and Angie) when he could no longer take our lying culture. O’Brien jokingly exclaimed: “It might be my old age, but with everything, our banks, our airlines – everyone is lying. You call anywhere, and they say, Our lines are hectic,’ but that’s not true. They’re always busy. It’s a lie, and we’ve learned to live with it, and all these lies are adding up. That was the germ of the novel.” 

During this incubation time, O’Brien stumbled upon the term ‘mythomania,’ which he described as the epidemic of lying that has infected the American people. “You can’t beat the liars with rationality,” O’Brien said, “Rationality is irrelevant.” For this reason, he decided America Fantastica would be a satirical novel in the tradition of Jonathan Swift and Mark Twain. As an example of the kind of zany, irrational storytelling that he finds persuasive, he retold the story of Swift’s essay “A Modest Proposal,” in which the Anglo-Irish writer recommended that Irish peasants sell their children as food to the rich to ease their economic burdens. In doing so, the author pointed out the hypocrisies of the rich, who blamed the peasants for their financial hardships. It was a “funny response to a serious problem,” he said. 

America Fantastica’s plot hinges on a hyperbolic series of manic choices and events, beginning with protagonist Boyd Halverson’s choice to rob a local California bank. Boyd is a compulsive liar and a disgraced former journalist turned JCPenny employee who decides to use his stolen money for one last road trip across the country, kidnapping bank teller Angie in the process. The novel also features many eclectic characters they meet along the way, including Angie’s jilted fiancé and Boyd’s ex-wife. Throughout the novel, Boyd tries to make sense of his life and separate the lies he’s told from reality. 

Describing his novel, O’Brien seemed more interested in capturing what our lie-drenched world feels like today than parsing out why our culture has become what it has. At one point, circling a kind of diagnosis, he recited a verse from Yeat’s poem “The Snare’s Nest By My Window” concerning the 1922 Irish Civil War, which O’Brien used as one of his book’s epigraphs: “Whatever it is, the way you tell your story online can make all the difference.”

We had fed the heart on fantasies,

The heart’s grown brutal from the fare,

More substance in our enmities

Than in our love; oh, honey-bees

Come build in the empty house of the stare.

Several times, O’Brien spoke about the role of fantasy in our lives– “We need fantasy to get through the world,” he said. “We need to believe that tomorrow will be better. We all have fantasies about the afterlife. We believe we can live on after death through our children, through our good deeds, and our writing. That’s true in my case.” Boyd is no exception, either. In O’Brien’s telling, Boyd leads a “grim life” and “like a lot of America, he needs to replace his circumstances and his life outcomes with fantasy.” 

Smith asked O’Brien what his novel can bring to this topic that non-fiction can’t. “Story,” replied O’Brien. For O’Brien, being a writer is like “holding a mirror” out to the world, while writing is like a “waking dreaming” where he enters a dream world that inserts itself over him. His writing routine begins early, around two in the morning; he starts by doing the dishes while his family is fast asleep, letting the “bumblebees of memory go through my head. “Some of the best dialogue I’ve written has been delivered to me,” O’Brien said. At the same time, as a novelist, O’Brien said he is thinking about psychology, social criticism, politics, and other subjects all the time. Yet, he also admitted that focusing too much on the topical or the present moment can be “the death sentence of a novelist.” 

During the Q&A at the end of the night, an audience member announced that he had read The Things They Carried five or six times and that his children had read it, too. “It was one of the most important books I’ve ever read,” he said. Another attendee, a high school teacher, asked, “What else, besides your work, should I assign kids to read?” O’Brien’s recommendations were of the classic sort: Catcher in the Rye, The Great Gatsby, and Turgenev’s First Love. “Are kids still reading those?” he asked, laughing. His answer and his many other references to classic and ancient writers and thinkers — Socrates, Martin Luther, and the Illiad, to name a few – point to the way reading has shaped O’Brien’s life and worldview.

by Samantha Neugebauer

This article was originally published in DCTRENDING, here.

Angie Kim’s second novel, Happiness Falls, is a mystery novel, and a compassionate story of a family in crisis. Mia’s father, Adam Parson, has disappeared. The last person to see Adam is his fourteen-year-old son Eugene, who has both autism and Angelman syndrome, a genetic disorder in which he smiles constantly and doesn’t speak. Consequently, the rest of the family  can’t know exactly what happened in this last encounter.  Mia, the novel’s twenty-year-old narrator, takes the lead in the investigation. Mia is extremely loquacious, at least in her head. She spends much of the novel relentlessly turning over every interaction in her mind, plowing for hidden clues and potential meanings.

While this novel is a pandemic book taking place while college student Mia is quarantined at home due to Covid lockdowns, Kim doesn’t make the pandemic a crucial component of her story. In fact, even the whodunit at the novel’s center is not necessarily the most important part of the book. Kim is most concerned with showing how this family – Mia, Eugene, Mia’s twin brother John, and mom, Hannah, a linguist, come together to learn what happened with Adam. In the midst of their quest, Mia  learns that her father, Eugene’s primary caregiver, had been secretly studying and testing theories of happiness in hopes of better understanding his own life, and his son’s life. Thus, alongside the mission to find her father, Mia also becomes enmeshed in his research, as do we, the readers.

Happiness Falls was written in Kim’s house in Northern Virginia, and at the D.C. independent bookstore Politics and Prose, Kim explained that she preferred to write in a closet than any of the empty bedrooms in her house – her three sons are off at school. In the windowless closet, she set up a large screen on which she looped videos of beaches and sunshine.

At a recent book event in September 2023, Kim spoke with historical novelist Louis Bayard at Politics and Prose. Kim stated, “I wanted the mystery at the core of the novel to really be a trojan horse – to get the reader to turn the pages.” Kim certainly succeeded in that regard; while the book’s opening might suggest a traditional mystery, this novel is much more interested in the philosophy of happiness and the way society equates intelligence and communication than Adam’s missing person case. 

Mia’s musings are so protracted that she occasionally resorts to footnotes to explain herself further. Sometimes, these footnotes take on the form of quiz-like questions to the readers: “A quick pause for a thought challenge: What’s your best guess as to why my mom believes this idea? Is it because a) she’s Asian and this we-are-all-connected thing sounds Asian in a Kung-Gu-Panda-ancient-Chinese-secret kind of way? Or b) you remembered her linguistics PhD…?” Other times, the footnotes serve as a kind of informative monologue, where Mia expands on her opinions: “It’s a common mistake, saying verbal to refer to oral speech. It’s a pet peeve of mine when people say, ‘verbal, not written,’ because written is verbal…” Overall, Mia’s verbosity can be its own kind of communication barrier. 

With such a density of shared thoughts and ideas, the reader must shift through Mia’s mind constantly, searching for what is most important and relevant. While this technique creates a hyper-realistic experience of being in a particular brain, it can also feel less artful than a more curated kind of narration style. Despite the exquisite amount of information Mia knows about a variety of subjects and the complexity of her feelings, she can come off as an East Coast version of a Valley Girl: anodyne, yet somewhat immature and spoiled. It’s possible that Mia suffers from a particular, low-viral strand of what Katy Waldman identified as the ‘self-reflexivity trap’ in which self-scrutiny and self-recrimination reign over maturity and growth. Unlike other contemporary protagonists in this trap, Mia does take action – this is a book with plot – however, Mia’s doesn’t grow as a communicator.   

The power of speech to effectively communicate and build relationships with others – especially as it relates to people with special needs–is a major theme of this book and a longtime preoccupation for Kim. Her 2019 debut novel, Miracle Creek, which won an Edgar Award and was translated into twenty languages, also featured a main character with autism. Moreover, Kim herself has also experienced and talked publicly about the problems and shame caused by an inability to communicate with people around her. 

As a preteen, Kim emigrated with her family from Seoul, South Korea to the suburbs of Baltimore. Later, she would attend Interlochen Arts Academy, Stanford University, and Harvard Law School, where she was an editor of the Harvard Law Review. She now lives in Northern Virginia. But coming to America was a rough transition at first, as Kim explains in the novel’s Author’s Note. “I was a different person in English than in Korean. Back in Korea, I had been a gregarious girl at the top of my class, constantly talking…in the U.S., I couldn’t understand or say anything beyond the handful of ‘essential English phrases’ … When you can’t speak, others assume you can’t understand and talk about you in front of you.” 

In her conversation at Politics and Prose, Kim spoke with historical novelist Louis Bayard at D.C. independent bookstore Politics and Prose. During their chat, Kim admitted that even though it has been more than forty years, she can still feel the sense of shame she first felt when she moved to America and struggled to communicate her feelings and needs. Kim also wrote a moving essay about the experience for Glamour. It’s safe to say that Kim’s experience, though not the same as Eugene’s, was one influence while writing Happiness Falls. In the novel, Mia and her family must learn to work together and reexamine their beliefs about Eugene’s abilities in order to solve the mystery of Adam’s disappearance. 

The characters who populate Happiness Falls have been with Kim for a long time – about thirteen years. She first created them for a magical realism short story set in Seoul, but over the years, she kept returning to them, or they kept returning to her! While some of the particulars of her characters’ family dynamic have changed over the years, many things have stayed the same, including that Mia has a twin brother and that the family is a biracial Korean-American family. 

Happiness Falls is a novel that will have you questioning yourself about how much you equate effective communication with intelligence and whether that is right. This a book of multiple mysteries. Full of tension, Happiness Falls is a novel for people who like reading about complicated families and personalities. The mystery will keep you guessing, and at the same time, you’ll learn how hyper-analytical Mia, who tells us she doesn’t “believe in optimism” at the beginning of the novel, becomes someone who might just find a reason to be optimistic after all. 

by Samantha Neugebauer

This article was originally published in DCTRENDING, here.

D.C. readers gathered inside Sidwell Friends School’s oak-paneled meeting room, last month, to hear author Zadie Smith read from her latest novel, The Fraud. In his welcome address, Brad Graham, co-owner of Politics and Prose, joked that the crowd was a “well-behaved” group – neither an officious ringtone nor a whispery side conversation punctured the moments proceeding Smith’s entrance. But the audience’s attentiveness was unsurprising, given the acclaimed novelist and essayist’s unique position in today’s literary pantheon. 

On the one hand, Smith continues to represent what’s ‘new’ in Anglosphere publishing, i.e., hers is the work of a biracial writer with working-class roots and a Cambridge education. On the other hand, Smith has staked herself in with the ‘old’ guard of novelists and readers who cling to the battered ideals of creative imagination and “interpersonal voyeurism,” best expressed in her 2019 The New York Review of Books essay “Fascinated to Presume: In Defense of Fiction.” Consequently, Smith has become somewhat of a role model for readers who are tired of being treated like children who cannot understand complexity. Fans nod their heads in affirmation when Smith insists (as she often does) that adults can hold multiple ideas simultaneously. At the same time, Smith lives within the Republic of Letters, she is not above questioning fiction’s raison d’etre. Altogether, her intelligent prose, personal/professional humility, restless curiosity,  and measured communication style make her our most trustworthy literary stateswoman today. 

Smith began that evening by reading three chapters from The Fraud, a historical novel set in Victorian England and Jamaica. Stylistically, The Fraud’s chapters are short in keeping with the serialized writing style of the Victorian era that Smith wanted to emulate. The book centers around the Tichborne case, a real, bizarre legal battle involving ‘the Claimant,’ a cockney-speaking butcher from Australia professing to be Sir Roger Tichborne, the would-be inheritor of a large fortune and title, and Andrew Bogel, a servant of the Tichbornes and formerly enslaved person from a Jamaican plantation, who supports the Claimant. The trail enthralled and divided English society in the 1860s and 1870s (think of how the O.J. trial gripped America in the 1990s). The enthralled includes Eliza Touchet, a well-read Scottish housekeeper and cousin-by-marriage of the novelist William Ainsworth, and Sarah, Ainsworth’s young, lower-class wife and Claimant supporter. 

Eliza, though a real person, is the quintessential Smith protagonist. In Smith’s rendering, Eliza is thoughtful, observant, funny, and more curious than condemnatory of bad behavior: “As much as Eliza hated awful people, she also could never resist them.” This line recalls the narrator of Smith’s 2018 story “Now More than Ever,” who confesses, “I instinctively sympathize with the guilty. That’s my guilty secret.” While sympathy and fascination aren’t exactly synonyms, it’s hard to tell the two apart with Eliza. For instance, when attending a pro-Claimant event, Eliza is fascinated by Sarah’s reception amongst other supporters, who Eliza describes as “farmers and hod-carriers and men with faces black with soot…[and] women with no respectable for whom she knew names…also clerks and schoolteachers, dissenters of all stripes…” Amongst them, Eliza admits, “It was almost touching to see the new Mrs. Ainsworth is so despised, so welcomed in her conversation and opinions, and so much a fount of knowledge.” The scene, and others like it, hold obvious echoes of the many pieces written by liberal journalists entering a Trump rally or red-state diner to talk with his supporters. Subtly, readers are asked to examine where our own fascination and sympathy meet and end. 

Yet, our Trump-esque Claimant is only one fraud among many. In her discussion with moderator Dolen Perkins-Valdez, Smith revealed the fraud of the title is, in fact, “the relationship between England and Jamaica.” Smith insisted that fraudulent people always exist: “That’s just how people behave.” She is most interested in the mass deceptions made by nation-states and by those who write history. She recalled how she was taught all about the American slave trade during her schooling in England but nothing about the English slave trade in Jamaica. In part, The Fraud was written “to rescue that history” and to find answers to the question, “How do enormous injustices end?” In her research for the novel, Smith discovered that by obscuring this history, a “double silence” or a “double loss” occurred; the first being, of course, the loss of the history of British slavery, and the second being the loss of the collective, cross-cultural opposition to it. 

When Perkins-Valdez asked Smith about the difference between “British amnesia and American amnesia” regarding history, Smith claimed –and in doing so, seemed to ruffle some feathers in the room – that “American amnesia” was not nearly as bad as that of the British. The comment brought to mind a similar exchange between Smith and Keli Goff at the NYU Washington, DC Salon Series in 2016. Groff had asked Smith why “serious writing in America” was still perceived as predominantly white and male, and Smith responded by saying that “in America, she didn’t actually see it that way…on the book side (not within publishing housing), it is pretty diverse…while in England, it is a different matter. In England, Black writing is struggling still.” There are, Smith continues, Black, upper-class diaspora writers in England, but there aren’t many Black British working-class writers. 

The Fraud is also a book about the fraudulence and indulgences of novelists. Charles Dickens, George Eliot, and William Thackeray, among others, make appearances. Also, Eliza (“a woman always partly phantasmagoric”) yearns to be a novelist. These ghosts of novelists-past provide some of the most humorous and hypocritical moments in the book: “I do not mean to dampen this jolly occasion, said Thackeray, immediately doing so…” They also provide criticisms that cut through their time into today: “What we foolishly call ‘the literary scene’  – a vulgar, ludicrous phrase to begin with – is really just ‘butter me and I’ll butter you,’ in the name of friendship’” (also Thackeray). 

The literary scene, or rather how to enter it, came up during the evening’s Q&A as well. In a voice churning with hope and self-deprecation, a young writer mentioned that she was now older than Smith was when she’d published her first novel at 25, and essentially, what could she do about that? Could she still make it? Is there still time? Smith, for her part, seemed to know where the question was headed as soon as the woman started, and she answered by saying that she “hates to think she was a depressing fact in young people’s lives.” There are, she insisted, many examples of great writers who started publishing later. Toni Morrison and Tessa Hadley come to mind. 

The Fraud, too, features novelists rising, falling, and getting started at different points in their lifetimes and posthumously. During the 1800s, for instance, William Ainsworth’s Jack Sheppard outsold Oliver Twist, but who (except Smith) has Jack Sheppard on their shelf today? Or any of Ainsworth’s other forty novels, all successful at their time? None of this is very reassuring, perhaps, for those who seek posterity. Present time itself might be the greatest fraud of all, The Fraud tells us. Some of us ask too much of it, and others not enough. We’re obsessed with the present, we’re dismayed by the present, and yet, we feel superior over the past’s people without really knowing them. By extending her signature compassion backward to some of the past’s people, Smith and The Fraud may very well live into the future and compel readers to think beyond this present moment, too. 

by Haley Huchler

This article was originally published in Washington Independent Review of Books, here.

“Mary Lasker had never looked through a microscope, performed surgery, or spoken from the floor of the Capitol,” writes Judith L. Pearson. “She simply had an unbridled belief in possibility.” Crusade to Heal America: The Remarkable Life of Mary Lasker Pearson illuminates the accomplishments of her subject, a woman who arguably did more than any other individual to improve the health of Americans throughout the 20th century. The main source material for the book is an oral history Lasker gave to Columbia University in 1962, recording it on the condition that it not be made public until after her death. Pearson uses Lasker’s words to great effect in this artfully crafted biography.

The daughter of an Irish immigrant and a Midwestern banker, Mary Woodard grew up in Watertown, Wisconsin. While a student at the University of Wisconsin-Madison, she fell ill with the Spanish flu, one in a long line of childhood illnesses she endured. These early experiences with sickness fueled her lifelong interest in medical research.

After recovering, Mary headed east to pursue her passion for art at Radcliffe College, the only school then offering a major in art history. She soon wound up working at a gallery in New York City. It was there she met her first husband, and together they enjoyed a lavish life of art collecting and international travel until the stock-market crash of 1929 destroyed everything, including their relationship. It was her second marriage, to Albert Lasker, that would spark her crusade into public health. (Although Mary is the heroine of this story, Albert was a devoted and passionate partner in her efforts. His death from colon cancer in 1952 only heightened her dedication to the cause.)

The Laskers were a well-connected pair. Albert, from his sickbed, received hand-painted get-well cards from Henri Matisse and Salvador Dali; Mary attended balls with Britain’s royal family and Winston Churchill on the eve of the Second World War. With their money and connections, they held the world in the palm of their hands. But what they most wanted to do with their considerable resources was improve the health and longevity of fellow Americans.

The couple’s interest in campaigning for a cause formed early in their marriage. The Laskers spent their honeymoon at the Democratic and Republican national conventions, and they later became involved in supporting the Birth Control Federation of America (it was Albert who suggested it be renamed Planned Parenthood). In December 1942, the pair founded the Albert and Mary Lasker Foundation to promote better health through education and research. A decade later, after Albert’s death, Mary persisted in the effort, rallying for more dollars to be spent on heart disease and cancer research each year.

Pearson’s clear and concise writing serves the narrative well. Her attention to detail is stunning, with reconstructed conversations so intimate, you might wonder if she was a fly on the wall at Mary’s meetings with President Eisenhower or lunches with Lady Bird Johnson. While the second half of the book gets mildly bogged down with the minutiae surrounding various bills and partisan debates, it does offer important insight into the difficulties of making large, meaningful changes via public policy. Despite working toward a goal almost everyone supported — fewer deaths from disease — Mary faced immense challenges as she proceeded through the ungreased gears of Congress.

There’s no single resounding moment in the story when she finally achieves all she ever dreamed of. Rather, there’s an accumulation of tiny shifts — which she helped create — that spurred real change. Today, Americans are much more likely to recover from major illnesses like cancer and heart disease than they were 70 years ago. After reading this eye-opening account of Mary Lasker’s life, you’ll know whom they should thank.

By Thais Carrion

This article was originally published in Washington Independent Review of Books here.

Sandra Worth’s most recent novel, Tomorrow We Will Know, is an epic situated during the fall of Imperial Constantinople and told through the romance between Emperor Constantine and Zoe, the daughter of his grand duke. Navigating this tumultuous period and the personal stories of three main characters, Worth weaves a riveting tapestry of the love that drove the actions at the heart of Constantinople’s fall. The familiar tale of the cowardice at the root of the city’s end is turned here into one of intense bravery and emotion that considers the humanity behind the events that took place. 

Tomorrow We Will Know unfolds in a rapidly changing Constantinople. What inspired you to turn your attention to this time and place?

I first became intrigued by Constantinople when I read mention of the mysterious light phenomena that had plagued the city in the last days of its existence — phenomena that still baffle modern scientists. All I knew then about the ancient city was that it had been the seat of the Roman Empire for 1,100 years and was all that remained of that great civilization when it fell. Years later, I came across another mention of Constantinople, and an image of fire, death, and crumbling walls flashed into my mind. I began to read about the period, and the more I read, the more engaged I became. 

The novel explores these events through the lens of a love triangle between Zoe, Constantine, and Justiniani. How did you develop their stories? And were there any characters that you found especially intriguing to write about?

All my novels are set in wartime and driven by the love story, because war is dark, and love is the only light. Sometimes, the love story is writ large in the historical record, but sometimes it’s buried, as it was with Constantinople. The picture that emerged — the love triangle — surprised even me. 

Emperor Constantine’s story is a matter of record. When he wept for his people, his ministers witnessed his tears. We know his character and his hopes and dreams. We know he was a man of great courage who refused to flee his country, though his ministers begged him to leave. Into this dangerous world hovering on the edge of extinction came brave, dashing, princely Justiniani for the noblest of reasons. He was closer to Zoe’s age than Emperor Constantine. It was a time of crisis. Did he fall in love with her? How did Zoe feel about him? 

I modeled Zoe’s character on what was known of her in Venice. She had a good heart, was generous, resourceful, and of high intellect, with a literary bent. I found nothing to indicate a relationship of any kind between her and Justiniani, but that is not surprising. Affairs of the heart were more likely to fuel gossip than record-keeping. 

You ask about an especially intriguing character, and that has to be Justiniani. Constantinople was expected to fall within days to the Ottomans, but Justiniani changed that. Thanks to his courage, charisma, and military brilliance, 5,000 men withstood 150,000 enemies for seven weeks and nearly won an unwinnable war. Yet Justiniani abandoned his post just as the sultan was about to call the final retreat and Constantinople was about to win the war.

How did you tackle narrowing down the scope of this story? 

As significant, momentous, and far-reaching as time has proved this historical event to be, the people in this extraordinary tale are what I focused on. History offers a stunning backdrop to the story, but it is the human heart and the resilience of the human spirit that I find awe-inspiring. Turkey won. They went on to win for a very long time. It took Europe 125 years after the fall of Constantinople to win its first victory against the Ottomans. It took Europe another 125 years to finally liberate itself from the threat of annihilation. Only Justiniani and a few brave Italians answered the emperor’s call for help. My book salutes their valor.

Your novel intertwines fiction with real events. How do you navigate the line between staying true to historical events and incorporating imaginative elements to engage readers?

Historical accuracy is always paramount for me because my readers expect it. Sometimes, there are conflicts in the historical accounts, and I’m obliged to choose which to follow. But when I have to fill empty spaces, I always strive to connect the dots between the events as plausibly as I can because I’m searching for the way it really happened. In the case of Constantinople, there weren’t any blank historical spaces to fill that I can recall. Except for Justiniani’s motivation at the end, we know from the diaries and writings of the many survivors precisely what happened. Only romance left wide blank spaces free for my imagination. 

More relevant to storytelling is the need to keep the reader engaged by creating drama. I didn’t find that difficult here. Those who came before us lived with an appalling amount of drama in their lives. How they dealt with it and kept going when we ourselves might have given up is what keeps me enthralled. It all comes down to the resilience of the human spirit. They may have won the battle and lost the war, but even across the ages, their deeds blaze with light and warm the heart. They deserve to be celebrated. Even 600 years later, they have something to teach us. We can learn from their fortitude when we face our own battles in our modern life.

By Samantha Neugebauer

This article was originally published in DCTRENDING here.

Stacey Abrams spoke to a packed house at Sixth & I, last week, about her new legal thriller, Rogue Justice; the follow-up to 2021’s While Justice Sleeps. While most folks know Abrams for her time serving in the Georgia House of Representatives as a voting rights activist, and her two Georgia gubernatorial runs, others are drawn to her work as a fiction writer. Abram’s discussion with moderator, Tiffany Cross, comprised not just her writing process, the nation’s current state of division and AI, but also the intricate intertwining of her political and writing careers. 

Prior to 2021, Abrams released eight romance novels under the nom de plume, Selena Montgomery. When questioned about potential concerns regarding her political career due to publishing romance novels, Abrams elaborated on the the merits of the romance novel genre and the skillful artistry required of a writer to engage readers throughout the narrative. She takes pride in her novels, and emphasized to the audience that criticizing popular works like romance novels essentially belittles those who genuinely enjoy them. The idea of refraining from demeaning and villifying others unexpectedly became the central theme of the night.

Moreover, Abrams shared how her motivation to write, and to be politically active spring from the same desire to connect with people. In both realms, she expressed, “Be curious. Solve problems. Do Good.”  When it comes to writing, doing good doesn’t necessarily imply that the characters always end up as angels. Abrams likes to create characters who embody the intersection of circumstances and the potential for various future pathways. Abrams appreciates that her character’s are willing to make morally upright choices.

In both writing and politics, she contemplates the unasked questions considering the issues that may not be apparent like our environment and judicial system, AI, and our fellow citizens whom might disagree on a fundamental level. In a country as divided as ours, Abrams stressed that we need to remind ourselves that our villains and our heroes are complicated — just like the ones in her books. At one point, Cross asked Abrams if she thought we live in a country with a majority of good people. Abrams responded that she could be having a great conversation with an individual, only to reach a “moment of departure” when the topic shifts to politics and it’s apparent they have different worldviews. However, she assured us that such differences in perspectives doesn’t mean we can’t find common ground. We should collaborate where we can despite our differences in motivations. We need not compromise our values, only our vision, because it’s not always feasible to get all we want simultaneously.

Later in the discussion, Abrams underscored the need for AI regulation — “We need rules,” she stated. She touched upon her love of biographies and urged aspiring writers to read more in this genre in order to learn how people make choices. Throughout the entire program, Abrams had the crowd in stitches. What’s more Abrams, it appears, is gifted with equal measures of grace, intelligence, and humor.