Part of being an author is getting arcs! And when Claire
Beams' THE ILLNESS LESSON came through the door, I immediately snatched it up.
How could I not? About a mysterious flock of red birds who descend on a 19th
Century girls school, about the power men insist of imposing on women, and so
much more, the book is a marvel. And I'm not the only one to think so. Just
look at all this:
NEW YORK TIMES EDITORS’ CHOICE
TIME MAGAZINE BEST BOOKS FOR FEBRUARY
ENTERTAINMENT WEEKLY BEST BOOKS FOR FEBRUARY
THE SUNDAY TIMES WHAT TO READ IN 2020
VANITY FAIR’S THRILLERS FOR WINTER
ESQUIRE’S BEST BOOKS TO ELEVATE YOUR READING LIST IN 2020
O, THE OPRAH MAGAZINE BEST OF FEBRUARY
LIT HUB’S MOST ANTICIPATED BOOKS OF 2020
STYLIST MAGAZINE’S YEAR OF DEBUT NOVELS, 2020
BOOKRIOT’S MUST-READ DEBUT NOVELS OF 2020
BUSTLE’S MOST ANTICIPATED BOOKS OF FEBRUARY
THE MILLIONS MOST ANTICIPATED BOOKS OF FEBRUARY
“Astoundingly original, this impressive debut belongs on the
shelf with your Margaret Atwood and Octavia Butler collections.”–New York Times
Book Review
“The Illness Lesson is a brilliant, suspenseful, beautifully
executed psychological thriller. With power, subtlety, and keen intelligence,
Clare Beams has somehow crafted a tale that feels like both classical ghost
story and like a modern (and very timely) scream of female outrage. I stayed up
all night to finish reading it, and I can still feel its impact thrumming
through my mind and body. A masterpiece.”
—ELIZABETH GILBERT, AUTHOR OF CITY OF GIRLS
“Stunningly good—a brainy page-turner that's gorgeous and
frightening in equal measure. The Illness Lesson dazzled me.”
—Leni Zumas, author of Red Clocks
Clare Beams is no stranger to awards. Her story collection, We Show What We
Have Learned, won the Bard Fiction Prize, was longlisted for the Story Prize,
and was a Kirkus Best Debut of 2016, as well as a finalist for the PEN/Robert W. Bingham Prize, the New York
Public Library’s Young Lions Fiction Award, and the Shirley Jackson Award.
Best of all, in interviewing Clare, I learned that not only
did she live in my hometown, Boston, but she now lives in Pittsburgh, where I lived
for a time, AND she even knew where my old apartment (hilariously called The
Lion's Head) was!
Thank you so much, Clare, for both the amazing read and the
interview.
I always, always want to know what was haunting you that got
you writing this fabulous novel? And did that haunting change as you were
writing?
When I started The
Illness Lesson, I had just finished six years of teaching high school English,
and I think a lot of the questions teaching raised for me—about power, about
students and our responsibilities to them—haunt this book. More concretely, the
book was sparked by a visit to Fruitlands in Massachusetts, site of a failed
commune established by Louisa May Alcott’s father, Bronson Alcott. The place
itself is very beautiful, and what happened there had beautiful origins—lots of
lovely and noble ideas about humans and their worth—and yet was so misguided in
a practical sense (they had a lot of complicated and poorly thought-through
theories about what they should and shouldn’t eat, no one really knew how to
farm, they all almost starved to death, etc.). That kind of contradiction
haunted me, and so did the question of who might end up paying for a
contradiction of that kind. And as I wrote, the girls and Caroline and their
plight began to haunt me more and more.
What was it like to
move from a short story collection to a novel? (I always say that writing a
story is like an intense affair, but a novel is a long, satisfying marriage.)
Did you feel that there were new lessons you had to learn, and if so, what were
they?
I like your analogy!
That feels right to me. A story’s premise doesn’t necessarily have to obsess me
for long (though it does have to obsess me very deeply)—but this novel had to
concern questions that felt inexhaustible in order to be capable of drawing me
in over the course of seven years, even as my whole life changed. Practically
speaking, I was writing many of the stories in my collection and just about all
of this novel as a parent of very young children, and I just had a much easier
time finishing the stories. The story form lent itself to the kind of time I
had—short, intensely focused pockets—much more naturally than the novel form
did. Once I had a draft of the novel, I spent whole years kind of picking away at
it in the little bits of time I could find, instead of tackling the massive
overhaul I knew was in order, because it was so hard to find the concentrated
stretch of months I needed in order to hold the whole thing in my head. I
learned a practical lesson about the necessity of finding that kind of time,
and about what it took to make it happen (a full-family effort, basically).
Craft-wise, the lessons I learned over the course of writing the novel had a
lot to do with pacing—I had to figure out how to deliver just enough
information while keeping the story moving. Of course that’s part of the work
in a story too, but it felt more challenging here. I suspect it’s a balance
I’ll have to learn all over again for the next project, because I’m betting
every novel requires something different.
Why did you set the
book in the so-called progressive 19th century? And what fascinated you the
most about the research?
I adored Little Women as a kid—I read it dozens of times—and
over the years I just sort of stayed fascinated and kept reading about the
thinkers of that time. And the more I read, the more obsessed I became with the
Transcendentalists and some of the tensions in their philosophy, the way many
of their ideas were so beautiful and uplifting and based on the fundamental
worth of all people, but still there were all these women (sometimes utterly
brilliant women, like the Peabody sisters and the Louisa May Alcott) around the
brilliant men, facilitating their lives in ways that often went unacknowledged.
I wanted to explore those tensions dramatically—and while I’ve set them in the
19th century here, as a sort of means of intensification, I don’t think we’re
actually done with them. Research-wise I loved learning about all of these
thinkers, and I also did lots of interesting and unsettling reading about
Victorian medicine.
This book, though set
in the 19th Century feels very appropriate for today. The school tries to be
modern, with its emphasis on free thinking, but when things turn dark, the men
take over, and unfortunately that means judging women’s maladies and denying them
any power of their own. Sigh. Would you agree with me that “finding productive
ways of living in the world as it is” might not be the best path, and that
women, instead, should perhaps live in the world as they want it to be?
Oh, I so want to
agree with you! What I can say is that in this novel I think I’m raising that
question and pointing out why it can be such a difficult one to answer, more
than trying to answer it, since probably everyone’s answer is different. As for
my own personal answer, yes, I think to the extent it’s possible, we should
live in the world as we want it to be, but I also think we should be ready to
bump up against the world’s designs for us and to work to change those designs
when we have to. I wish we didn’t have to—and I really, really wish my
daughters wouldn’t have to. It can take so much time.
What’s obsessing you now and why?
My new project takes some of my constant obsessions—what it
means to be a woman in the world, how we exert power over one another—and bends
them toward the state of pregnancy.
What question didn’t
I ask that I should have?
You did a wonderful
job! I’ve been waiting for someone to ask me about the plot of the
novel-within-the-novel, the melodramatic gothic thriller The Darkening Glass, because
at one point I had the whole thing pretty much worked out—but it’s probably
best lost to the sands of time!
