A Good Character Can Be Like a Good Friend: A Guest Post by Jessica Shattuck

After taking us through the war-torn streets of Berlin in The Women in the Castle, Jessica Shattuck is back with a different perspective on our world after the events of WWII. Beginning in 1953, with America at the start of a new golden age, Shattuck introduces us to a vibrant cast of characters — ones closer to her than you might think. Read all about the real-life family members that inspired their creation in her exclusive essay, down below.

I grew up visiting my American grandparents in an old farmhouse in Vermont filled with traces of their lives: well-thumbed 1950’s Fanny Farmer cookbooks, a pocket-sized bible with my grandfather’s name inscribed, a pair of hiking boots that belonged to my uncle, their son, who died at age twenty.  

My grandfather graduated from college in 1942 and, like almost all his classmates, went straight to war, in his case in the Marines. By age 25 he had earned two purple hearts, lost his best friend and college roommate in battle, and had a wife and two-year-old child at home. My grandmother too, at that age, was already a mother and a wife, valedictorian of her college class and former code breaker for the Navy during the war—a role she was recruited to upon college graduation. Neither of them ever spoke about their experiences during the war. But even as a child, I felt aware of these pockets of mystery.  

When I finished writing my last book, The Women in the Castle, which takes place in post WWII Germany, I knew I wanted to write a book about America during that same period. America emerged from WWII smelling like a rose, vanquisher of evil, land of the free, most powerful country on earth. It was a nation confident and rich enough to rebuild its former enemies. No matter how terrible the war itself was, the experience was wrapped in a sense of rightness and moral clarity. I wanted to explore how that played out in individual people’s lives. 

My grandparents provided a jumping off place. Through research and imagination, the characters of Last House were born: Nick and Bet Taylor and their children and grandchildren. Nick and Bet were not my grandparents, but characters who share some of the circumstances of their lives. They are a “Greatest Generation” couple: an oil company lawyer and a code-breaker turned suburban housewife, who I followed into parenthood and middle age, through the Red Scare of the fifties and into the turbulence of the late 60s and early 70s– the period in which their children come of age. And finally I followed them into the present, through a house full of traces, in a remote corner of Vermont.  

Fiction writing is a lonely business if you don’t love your characters. It was easy to love Nick and Bet. They kept me company through Covid and beyond; they gave me perspective and asked me questions, not only about the past, but about my own life and time. And they gave birth to new characters– their own children, who arrived on the page as if fully formed, wholly unlike my father or my aunt. 

A good character can be like a good friend: known but always interesting, dependable, but also surprising. Nick and Bet were like that for me: true partners in my effort to make meaning of the last half century. And like all my favorite characters, they offered insights, but at the same time deepened the essential mysteries.