The most fun part? Hands down, actually writing a scene after you’ve done your research and know all the intimate details that will bring it to life. For example, what the weather was like that day, what clothes the person might have been wearing, the nature of their surroundings and what they looked like, etc. All those details may have come from many different sources, and to combine them as the scene flows out from your pen is a wonderful feeling—you can see this historic scene so clearly in your own mind, brought to life by the collected facts.
Both The Woman They Could Not Silence and your previous book, The Radium Girls, required extensive research. How do you work with archives and other sources for primary texts and historical data? What recommendations do you have for other researchers and writers?
I have to give a shout-out to librarians and archivists across the country here. They’re always so knowledgeable and helpful. The how of how I work probably boils down to knowing the story I want to tell and how I want to tell it, so I’ll mine a source for descriptive details, for example. Staying focused helps you to sort through what is always a mass of data. That said, it’s critical to remain open-minded, too, because until the research is finished, you don’t necessarily know what is important!
As for tips, I would say be inspired by those who have come before you down a research path. When you’re taking your own first steps, it can be useful to consult bibliographies of other books in order to find out what archives even exist. Some of them may prove useful to you too. Secondly, relish pursuing the various serendipitous trails that pop up along the way, whether that’s “following the money” to discover corruption and influence or simply saying yes to opportunities for further research that, for example, those wonderful librarians may suggest!
Speaking of research, were there any surprising facts that didn’t make it into the final book? What was the most interesting thing you discovered but weren’t able to include?
There was so much that didn’t make it in! I had to cut an entire part as the first draft was too long. （It was the original part one, which I’d written as a Crucible-esque witch hunt, as Elizabeth’s religious community tightened the noose of alleged insanity about her neck until she was committed to the asylum.） Similarly, at the other end of the book, I did a heap of research into twentieth-century facts around the book’s themes. Here, a surprising fact to me was that it wasn’t until 1974, with the passing of the Equal Credit Opportunity Act, that independent women could get credit cards themselves. Until then, a single, divorced, or widowed woman had to get a man to cosign any credit application before it would be granted.
I also regretted deeply that I wasn’t able to write more about how Black people face increased prejudice when it comes to alleged insanity. Statistics show that Black women are institutionalized far more frequently than white women with exactly the same symptoms, and they’re also disproportionately affected by extreme “treatments,” such as, in former times, involuntary sterilizations. Black women made up 85 percent of those legally sterilized in North Carolina in the 1960s; in other operations, Black children as young as five were lobotomized. These things occurred after Elizabeth’s time, however, and I wasn’t able, in the end, to find a place for them in the postscript （they had featured in my first draft）。
What does your writing space look like? How do you keep all your research and drafts organized?
I have written books all over my house, so I don’t have a dedicated writing space as such. I wrote The Radium Girls at my kitchen table. For The Woman They Could Not Silence, I wrote in our tiny, very newly decorated study. It was all very minimalist, as our furniture was still in storage from the renovation. I literally just had a desk, a chair, and a side table with a CD player on it so I could listen to music while I wrote （for this book, generally Ludovico Einaudi’s Eden Roc or the soundtrack to The Mission, composed by Ennio Morricone）。 The study walls are painted a cream color—for the interest of readers of The Radium Girls, it is a shade named Ottawa—and I wrote with four pictures of Elizabeth stuck onto them so that she was always with me.
It’s a very tidy space. I just have one A4 printout beside me—my book plan—which I check off and annotate as I go along. My research and various drafts are all stored on my laptop, so there are no piles of paper. On that laptop, the research is organized to the nth degree. Every source has a unique reference number I’ve given it, which is plotted into my chronological timeline. All that time-consuming, painstaking preparation means I can locate a specific quotation from a source in seconds. This also enables me to write fluidly and fast.