The Night Journal

Interviews & Essays

Your previous two novels were works of historical fiction, and The Night Journal contains a historical novel of sorts within its framework, in the journals of Hannah Bass. What is it about historical fiction that interests you as a writer?

My mother read a lot of historical fiction to my brother and sister and me when we were growing up: the Newbery winners like Caddie Woodlawn and The Bronze Bow, classics by authors such as Frances Hodgson Burnett and Fred Gibson, and a long list of others-The Witch of Blackbird Pond, Roller Skates, Five Little Peppers, and Thee, Hannah! come to mind-these books were an enormous part of my family life as we experienced them together. There was a magical book called Blue Willow and one that I still cherish in a battered old copy, The Colt from Moon Mountain, and all the books by Louisa May Alcott, which were not exactly historical when they were written but were old-fashioned and otherworldly to me. My brother and I also watched a lot of old westerns, like Gunsmoke and Bonanza, on television so I suppose I became comfortable at an early age moving in and out of the past. As a teenager I fell in love with the Brontë novels and Dickens and historical novels by Daphne du Maurier and Elizabeth Goodge. The Child from the Sea was particularly moving and unforgettable and I can still remember the imagery in the final paragraph. I never liked fantasy books-even those my brother loved such as the Narnia series and A Wrinkle in Time -I found them unnerving and ultimately unbelievable as they suspended the rules of life. History, to the contrary, defined and clarified the rules of life; I liked that clarity as it gave me an understanding of reality. To study an era of time and be able to fathom it-that was satisfying. I'm not an adventurous person as far as travel goes, being fairly rooted, but when I research a period of time from the past, that is like traveling in time and is enormously exciting. Books about the future seem unsettling to me, but stories about the past, even when they're violent or disturbing, seem comforting and familiar as they are based on the premise of real life.

How did this novel, which is based both in the 1890s and 1989, pose challenges to you as a writer? What was it like to balance and juxtapose the frontier diary voice of Hannah with the more modern perspective and voice of Meg?

When I started this book I had just completed my second book, which was an old-fashioned historical epic about love and war set in Texas in the 1830s. I was reluctant to get back into the chaotic and extensive research required for historical fiction and decided to try to write a contemporary novel. I cast about for material, but was uninspired. Then my husband and I took a trip to New Mexico and some friends whom we were staying with suggested that I drive over and look at some old Pueblo ruins in the area. So I drove over to Pecos Pueblo.

I think every writer is always in search of those places that suddenly, for inexplicable reasons, set your mind on fire. Pecos did this for me the same way that the mission at La Bahia did when I wrote Promised Lands. Still, I was reluctant to start into so much heavy research again, so I thought that perhaps I could set only half of the book in the past, and that this would require me to do only half the amount of research. However, this plan turned out to ridiculous. To write even a few historical scenes with any authenticity you have to know the period intimately-you have to know everything about it that would affect the characters, which is pretty well everything. In the end the book took twice as long to write as my other books, instead of half as long. I was developing two sets of characters, in two different time periods, writing in two different voices, and then I had to piece it all together and make it work as a whole and cut each story down to half the size it wanted to be, so that the book would be a viable length.

Writing Hannah's part, once the research was done, was not too difficult, but I had a lot of trouble settling on the contemporary narrative voice and struggled with this right up to the last draft. Third person is more difficult to write than first person as it requires more discipline.

How much research did you do in the course of writing this novel?

A great deal. I always dread the concept of research and try to devise ways not to have to do it, but once I start, it draws me in. It's especially compelling in the beginning when you don't know exactly what you're looking for; you're just traveling through the material-obscure old accounts, old catalogs like Montgomery Ward's, compilations of correspondence, books about the clothing, architecture, transportation, politics, and every other aspect of the times-and finding things to dramatize. It's an act of discovery, like searching for four-leaf clovers. Writing historical fiction isn't so much about making things up as about finding those moments in history, or even just the details of daily life in the past that lend themselves to drama. I didn't know in the beginning that the book would contain so much about the railroad industry or about the treatments for tuberculosis; in fact, I don't even remember now what I thought the book would be about. But the fact is, if you start reading about New Mexico, you're going to come across the railroad and the Harvey Girls, and you're going to learn about sanatoriums for tuberculous patients, which were a big business and philanthropic endeavor in that territory for many years. And you're probably going to see the drama in these subjects, and then out of all the information, a story will start to form. I'm not a writer with a lot of vision, but I recognize moments when I come across them, I recognize that the hills outside of Las Vegas, New Mexico, are a moody and evocative landscape, and that Pecos Pueblo and the Montezuma Hotel have limitless stories embedded in their histories. And I can figure out, with a lot of trial and error and over the course of years, how to make coherent use of these aspects and events.

How much of this story is true? Which locations and stories are based on real-life counterparts?

The contemporary characters are completely mine. Some of my friends might recognize some characteristics, or a moment of interaction might seem vaguely familiar to them, but I suppose this is usually the case in most novels-that snippets of real people or real moments are put in there. Bassie isn't fashioned after any one individual, but I've known and dearly loved several cantankerous old women who have shared a few of her traits.

Some of the events in Hannah's journals are inspired by family history. My great grandparents moved to Texas because my great grandfather and his eldest son were suffering from terminal tuberculosis (as ultimately is the character of Hannah in the novel) and the dry air of the Texas hill country was said to be curative. It was only when I began researching the history of tuberculosis and its treatment, when I was writing the novel, that I began to understand the extent of suffering of these people and their families. I think this is the usual case with family stories-they lose their clarity eventually, and a person's life is reduced to a statement such as "My great grandfather died of tuberculosis." Only through research can we come close to the reality of what a statement like this really means.

There was a family in Las Vegas similar to the Morales family in the book, but there was not a character specifically like Vicente Morales. Parts of Elliott's career are based roughly on the achievements of two different railroad survey engineers from the period, one in particular who left behind a number of letters to his wife and who is mentioned in my acknowledgments but who died well before my character Elliott did in the story-therefore my use of a second engineer to continue the career and the advancement of the railroad up to the turn of the last century.

The places in the novel are all real. I try never to take liberties with facts, such as dates or places, because I want the reader to know that the story could have happened exactly the way I've written it, even if it didn't actually happen at all. I don't put vegetation where it doesn't grow or wildlife where it doesn't exist. I don't invent buildings or towns. I try to get details right. However, I don't mind digging up a dead body that was never actually buried-as long as it could have been.

Why tell the story through the granddaughter, Meg, who is one generation removed from Bassie, and not her daughter, Nina?

Bassie needed to be elderly in order to have been born in the time period I wanted to represent. Meg needed to be moderately young, because I wanted her life still to be ahead of her so that the lessons she learned wouldn't be wasted. Also, the age difference allowed me to see the modern part of the story not only from two different viewpoints but also from two widely different stages of life, and this was interesting to me. Nina, as it turned out, simply filled in the gap between these two women. It was tricky fitting all the time frames together because I had a lot of events that had to happen at certain times: the Mormon massacre, the years that the Montezuma was open, the beginning of tourism in the west. I would have liked to make Meg's story exactly contemporary-2006-but couldn't pull that off without making Bassie too old to be credible, so Meg's story had to be set in the 1980s. At one point in the writing I thought I could simply be vague about the present time frame and exactly when Meg and Bassie traveled to New Mexico, and that no one would notice-it could feel as if it was anytime in the last ten or fifteen years without putting a date to it. But then there was the problem of cell phones. You can't fudge on something like that: either your characters have cell phones or they don't. And if they do, the story changes, things are handled differently, the entire way in which Meg relates to her work back in Austin while she's in New Mexico would be drastically different if she was carrying a cell phone. In the end I simply fell back on my rule of authenticity: it had to happen in a way it could have happened. So, for Elliott to have survived the Mormon massacre, and to have married Hannah without too much of an age difference between them, and for Hannah to have had Bassie, and for Bassie to remain a force to reckon with during my contemporary plot, then Meg and Bassie had to have taken the trip to New Mexico in the late 1980s.

The land of New Mexico, vividly described in both Hannah's journals and Meg's modern observations, is very much a character in the novel. What drew you to this geographic area and these time periods specifically?

I did not want to write about Texas again. I toyed with several ideas for stories in the northeast, but in the end it just seemed natural to stay in the southwest and simply move a little farther west and a little later in time from the last book I'd written.

Then when I discovered Pecos Pueblo, I started nosing around for a story. Right outside of Pecos there was a sign that said LAS VEGAS 60 MILES, or something like that, and I thought this referred to Las Vegas, Nevada. So I headed in that direction to see what was going on. Of course nothing was going on: Las Vegas, New Mexico, is not Las Vegas, Nevada. No billboards, no flashing lights. But I was intrigued with the town when I got there. I went into the old Plaza Hotel and looked around and inquired about the town and the area and was told about the Montezuma ten miles away. So I drove up there into the mountains. Seeing that place from the road-the spires rising up out of those hills-is breathtaking. I parked on the campus area around the building but the building was in such bad shape that it had been roped off and locked up. The next night I came back with my husband and we stayed at the Plaza Hotel and went back to the Montezuma, and I ignored the NO TRESPASSING signs to get a better look. But it was dark and I couldn't see much, and I couldn't get in. It just happened that at dinner later that night at the Plaza I overheard the people at the next table talking about the Montezuma, and one in that party turned out to be Philip Geier, the president of the United World College, that owned the Montezuma, as it was in the middle of their campus. I introduced myself and he very kindly offered to set up a tour with the caretaker so I could see the interior.

So I found the places for the story by starting off without a notion of where I wanted to end up. I think this is not unusual.

Much of Hannah's early diary entries are presented directly to the reader, telling of her travels, time spent at the Montezuma, and her courtship with Elliott Bass. The later journals, after she marries Elliott and has Claudia, are summarized for the reader. Why did you choose to put this distance between the journals and the reader? Was it to convey plot points more quickly than a re-recreation of diary entries would allow, or to create a distance between the reader and Hannah, so that the reader knows the journals through Meg's perspective?

Exactly right on both counts. I couldn't write the whole journal, which was (supposedly) volumes long. I had to leave out anything that didn't advance the story or give crucial information about the characters. Also, I wanted the reader to see some of the story through Meg's reading of the journals as a way to draw the two stories together.

It's tricky to write scenes in journal format without making the journalist (in this case Hannah) appear self-absorbed. Descriptions by a "journalist" or "diarist" of himself or herself are generally off-putting as they require too much self-awareness. It's a curse to a lot of books written in first person: the reader immediately dislikes a narrator who is talking a lot about himself and seems preoccupied with his own appearance or other people's impression of him. I had to tinker with Hannah's journals constantly in order to avoid this pitfall, and am not sure how well I succeeded. Writing some scenes in third person helped as it allowed me to observe and describe Hannah without her needing constantly to observe and describe herself. It is one thing in a journal to describe events and situations that pertain to other people, and even to describe an emotional reaction to those events. But to describe oneself within a scene can begin to border on too much self-awareness, which is never an appealing characteristic.

Several of the characters witness violent deaths early in their respective development: Hannah's earliest diary entries after witnessing the deaths from the train accident; the horrific, prolonged massacre at Mountain Meadows of Elliott's parents; the gory deaths of Jim's parents in a car crash. Why as a writer did you feel it was important to include these scenes: in your opinion, how does violence irreparably change a person?

Hmm. I hadn't actually realized that that was the case-that so many characters had violence in their history. I suppose I find violence both troubling and deeply interesting. I've always found it easier to write violent scenes than to read them or watch them in a movie, because I'm in control of what happens. Nothing is going to happen unless I allow it to, and there's a certain comfort in that-in pulling all the strings. Perhaps the reason I'm drawn to violence is the same for many people: we want to see things from the inside in order to understand them and to come to terms with them-to put them to rest, if that's possible (and often I think it isn't, but the drive is still there). It isn't just morbidity or gruesomeness that draws us, but empathy and the sense that by investing in the violence we can somehow then deal with it better emotionally in real life.

What writers or books have had an important influence on you or your life?

My mother read to us-I've mentioned some of the books that first come to mind in the answer to a previous question, but there were a lot of others with more contemporary stories. I also grew up loving poetry: my grandmother on my mother's side and also my father were constantly quoting from memory. I was fortunate to grow up in a family of readers. These days I find myself more interested in nonfiction history than historical fiction, and it certainly has more of an influence on my life. One of the last scenes I injected into The Night Journal was the train wreck that occurs at the beginning of the journals; books about nineteenth-century train wrecks completely engrossed me while I was casting aside historical novel after novel that failed to capture me. This caused me to realize how much I love reading true accounts of actual events, and how meaningful and necessary these are, and how much I appreciate them as literature. In these accounts the information is all there for the taking; it has not been filtered through anyone else's imagination. It's enlightening because it's true to life.

What are you writing next?

I don't know yet. I find it increasingly hard to find time to write. I've been reading about several historical events, but most of these are so tragic I'm uncertain I want to deal with any of them for years on end. A friend and I have discussed possibly writing a screenplay, perhaps a comedy, but I'm not sure I have any talent for this, and I certainly have no experience. Nevertheless, it would be a way to write without having to get back into a lot of heavy research.