Speaker 1: Hey, Bessie's Hello Sunshine Today on the bright Side.
Speaker 2: It's an all new shelf Life we're diving into. Isila,
Speaker 2: the February pick for Ese's Book Club, written by acclaimed
Speaker 2: author Allegra Goodman. This gripping feminist survival story, set in
Speaker 2: the sixteenth century on a remote island in Quebec, is
Speaker 2: one you don't want to miss.
Speaker 3: It's Thursday, February twenty seven.
Speaker 2: I'm Simone Boyce, I'm Danielle Robe and this is the
Speaker 2: bright Side from Hello.
Speaker 3: Sunshine Today on shelf Life. Y'all, we are talking to
Speaker 3: author Allegra Goodman. Her novel Isla is Reese's book Club
Speaker 3: selection for February. Allegra is a best selling author whose
Speaker 3: other books include Sam the Chalk Artist, Intuition, The Cookbook Collector,
Speaker 3: Paradise Park, and Catterskill Falls, which was a finalist for
Speaker 3: the National Book Award.
Speaker 2: Her latest book, is Isla, is her first foray into
Speaker 2: historical fiction. It's actually based on a true story of
Speaker 2: a woman in sixteenth century France, Marguerite de la Roque.
Speaker 2: She's a real person who sailed to New France now
Speaker 2: Canada in fifteen forty two. She was marooned on a
Speaker 2: Subarctic island in the Gulf of Saint Lawrence. And then
Speaker 2: the author, Aligra Goodman, took her story and just ran
Speaker 2: with it, creating a fictional account of what happened to
Speaker 2: her and how she survived.
Speaker 3: And honestly, what amazes me about this whole story is
Speaker 3: that this book has been twenty years in the making.
Speaker 3: I mean that's when she first discovered Marguerite and her
Speaker 3: story and it kind of planted the seed of an
Speaker 3: idea in her mind. And now we get to talk
Speaker 3: to her all about the finished product Isila. So let's
Speaker 3: bring her in. Allegra, Welcome to the bright Side. Oh,
Speaker 3: thank you, We're so happy to have you. So, Isla,
Speaker 3: is this impressive work of historical fiction. And I'm so
Speaker 3: curious about the inspiration for this book, especially your protagonist Marguerite.
Speaker 3: So how did you originally come across her? And will
Speaker 3: you tell us a little bit about what fastd you
Speaker 3: about Marguerite's life?
Speaker 4: Yes, of course, So I came across her more than
Speaker 4: twenty years ago on a road trip that my family
Speaker 4: took up from Cambridge up to Montreal. And we have
Speaker 4: four kids and at the time they were ten, seven, three,
Speaker 4: and zero. We have three boys, and then the zero
Speaker 4: year old was our newborn daughter. I'm still not sure
Speaker 4: why I agreed to go on this trip. Our baby
Speaker 4: was literally six weeks old. I went to the library
Speaker 4: and took out a whole stack of books for children
Speaker 4: about Canadian history because we were going to Canada, which
Speaker 4: I thought I was going to read with the boys.
Speaker 4: So we start driving. Needless to say, my sons have
Speaker 4: zero interest in the books about Canadian history and they
Speaker 4: read none of them. But I ended up reading all
Speaker 4: of them because I was up all night nursing the baby.
Speaker 4: So I would be like sitting up in bed, like
Speaker 4: one after another reading these books. And one night in
Speaker 4: bed in this hotel room, I was reading a book
Speaker 4: about Jacques Cartier, the French explorer who sailed three times
Speaker 4: to what they called New France in those days. And
Speaker 4: this book was about his explorations, and it was like
Speaker 4: his third exploration was in fifteen forty two, and there
Speaker 4: was this discussion of his exploration, and then it said
Speaker 4: accompanying him was a ship full of colonists who were
Speaker 4: going to settle in the New World. And on this
Speaker 4: ship was a young noblewoman named Marguerite Delaroche de Roberval,
Speaker 4: who annoyed the commander so much that he marooned her
Speaker 4: on an island and the Gulf of Saint Lawrence and
Speaker 4: left her there. I should add this was in parentheses,
Speaker 4: so it was like then it was like closed parentheses,
Speaker 4: and then we went back to talking about Jacques Cartier's expedition.
Speaker 3: So it was just this little afterthought, like, no big deal,
Speaker 3: this girl got marooned on an island exactly, yeah, what so.
Speaker 4: Often happens to women's history, I think literally in the parentheses.
Speaker 4: So I was like, wait, wait, who is Marguerite?
Speaker 1: Wait?
Speaker 4: Why was she on the ship? What do you mean
Speaker 4: annoyed the commander? What does she do to deserve getting
Speaker 4: stuck on this deserted island in what I knew was
Speaker 4: a subarctic climate? Did she survive? What happened to her?
Speaker 4: And then but the author didn't come back to her.
Speaker 4: He just went on. And at the time I thought,
Speaker 4: I'm sitting there like holding this baby in bed with
Speaker 4: this book, and I thought, this is such a great
Speaker 4: topic or subject for a novel. This is fascinating. Did
Speaker 4: this really happen? Then I thought, wait, that would be
Speaker 4: really hard to write as historical novels in the sixteenth century,
Speaker 4: I write contemporary stuff. This isn't me. This is stressing
Speaker 4: me out. This whole idea is stressing me out. So
Speaker 4: I put the idea aside for many years, and my
Speaker 4: kids grew older, and I wrote a lot of other
Speaker 4: books set in mostly the twentieth century and the twenty
Speaker 4: first century. And then as my kids grew older, my
Speaker 4: daughter the newborn, finally went off to college and I
Speaker 4: finally had a lot more time. So I was working
Speaker 4: on this contemporary novel, well called Sam, about this young
Speaker 4: girl who's a boulderer in the twenty first century. And
Speaker 4: I kept writing about her trying to solve problems on
Speaker 4: these boulders where she was on the rock face, clawing
Speaker 4: her way up to the top. And I started thinking
Speaker 4: about Marguerite and how she was alone on this rocky
Speaker 4: island and trying to survive, and writing about Sam actually
Speaker 4: brought me back to my interest in Marguerite, and I
Speaker 4: started to try experimenting with telling her story at that point.
Speaker 3: Okay, so what happens next, because I know you dive
Speaker 3: headfirst into research on Marguerite, right, what did you find
Speaker 3: in that research.
Speaker 4: So she was fairly well known in her lifetime in
Speaker 4: France as a survivor. There are two accounts of her
Speaker 4: while she was alive, contemporary accounts. One is by the
Speaker 4: Queen of Navarre, who collected what she said were true
Speaker 4: stories about people in a book which was published after
Speaker 4: she died, called the Heptamerin. And these are like many stories,
Speaker 4: and they're all pretty short. And the story of Marguerite
Speaker 4: on her island is this, I think the sixty ninth
Speaker 4: story in the collection, and she writes her account of
Speaker 4: what she thinks, how she thinks Marguerite prevailed in the
Speaker 4: wilderness and everything. But it's only about two pages long,
Speaker 4: I should say, so it's very very short. And then
Speaker 4: there's another account from her lifetime by a priest who
Speaker 4: said that he interviewed her, but his account conflicts with
Speaker 4: the Queen's story, and his is also very short. So
Speaker 4: we got these two versions that don't match up, that
Speaker 4: are all, but they're both very short. So in some
Speaker 4: ways that's very challenging because there isn't a lot to
Speaker 4: go on, But in other ways it's really an opportunity
Speaker 4: for a novelist to just get in there and imagine
Speaker 4: exactly what happened. So that's what I did well, Igrad.
Speaker 2: The first line of any book is so important. It's
Speaker 2: what draws people in. And I saw this great video
Speaker 2: of you on the Reese's Book Club Instagram account where
Speaker 2: you talked about writing thirty plus first sentences of this
Speaker 2: book before landing on this one. So your first line
Speaker 2: is I never knew my mother. She died the night
Speaker 2: that I was born, and so we passed each other
Speaker 2: in the dark. She left me her name Marguerite and
Speaker 2: her ruby ring, but no memory of her. In that video,
Speaker 2: you said, once you landed on that perfect first sentence,
Speaker 2: you could hear the main character's voice in your head.
Speaker 2: I'm dying to know how crafting that one line helped
Speaker 2: with the character development. What did that set the stage for?
Speaker 4: So actually, I have my notebook here that I used
Speaker 4: to write these sentences, and they started out really clunky
Speaker 4: and really wordy. You can I crossed out a ton
Speaker 4: and there's pages of this. When I got to that sentence,
Speaker 4: it was sort of distilled, and the thing that I
Speaker 4: heard was the way she spoke. It was like the
Speaker 4: cadence and the rhythm of her speech. So that at
Speaker 4: the time, I was writing about this young girl who
Speaker 4: lives now, and she talks like us, and her diction
Speaker 4: is like us. Her word choice, her rhythms are like ours, right,
Speaker 4: And in that sentence, I came upon this ever so
Speaker 4: slightly more formal way of talking. It's a tiny, tiny
Speaker 4: bit archaic. She would say upon the ground instead of
Speaker 4: on the ground, just but very very subtle. And when
Speaker 4: I heard those rhythms and those details that you just read,
Speaker 4: I really heard her voice in my head, and I
Speaker 4: knew from there it was sort of like getting that
Speaker 4: tiny handhold on the rock that I could sort of
Speaker 4: keep pulling myself up.
Speaker 2: What do you think we learn about Marguerite through that
Speaker 2: first line? To me, it's more than just the formality.
Speaker 4: Yeah, so we learn that she's an orphan, that she's
Speaker 4: really alone, that she's on the one hand, incredibly privileged
Speaker 4: she has she's left this jewel from her mother, she's
Speaker 4: left this aristocratic name, but she has no parents to
Speaker 4: protect her. She has no family around her. And then
Speaker 4: she goes on to say in that paragraph, you know
Speaker 4: she was surrounded by servants, but she doesn't have brothers
Speaker 4: to protect her, which is much needed at that time
Speaker 4: a young girl or a little girl, so you get
Speaker 4: a sense of her situation.
Speaker 3: We've got to take a quick break, but don't go anywhere.
Speaker 3: We'll be right back with Allegra Goodman. And we're back
Speaker 3: with Allegra Goodman. I am still thinking about something that
Speaker 3: Allegra said at the beginning of the conversation that I
Speaker 3: cannot get out of my head, which is this idea
Speaker 3: that this little girl was just written off by the
Speaker 3: captain of the ship and was called annoying. And I
Speaker 3: think about all the other women throughout history who were
Speaker 3: written off and whose voices were silenced because they were
Speaker 3: reduced down to one stereotype or one aspect of their personality. Allegra,
Speaker 3: you took pieces of Marguerite's truth and you build on that,
Speaker 3: and you crafted this entire story around her. We never
Speaker 3: got a chance to hear her truth. What do you
Speaker 3: think her truth is?
Speaker 4: I think her truth is that she is the complex
Speaker 4: survivor who is making her way in an incredibly difficult world.
Speaker 4: And what we understand as readers when we're following her story,
Speaker 4: it's an adventure story on the one hand, where she's
Speaker 4: like just trying to physically survive. But it's also a
Speaker 4: story of self discovery where she's discovering her power. When
Speaker 4: she's on the island, she is in some ways in
Speaker 4: a lot of danger. She could freeze to death, she
Speaker 4: could be attacked by animals, Nobody could help her if
Speaker 4: she got sick or wounded. But what she realizes on
Speaker 4: the island is that she wasn't safe at home and
Speaker 4: that in some ways on the island she's free as
Speaker 4: she was not at home. It's not really till she
Speaker 4: gets on the island that she starts to remake herself
Speaker 4: and think about all of these things. So it's my
Speaker 4: version of Robinson Crusoe, only with this woman. She's in
Speaker 4: double jeopardy because she's a woman on the island has
Speaker 4: to get back.
Speaker 3: Will you bring up Robinson Crusoe. I have to ask
Speaker 3: a bit further about your own relationship to this genre
Speaker 3: of castaway stories. I know that you were raised in
Speaker 3: Hawaii and you talked about being fascinated by novels like
Speaker 3: Robinson Crusoe and Kidnapped growing up.
Speaker 4: So how did your own identity.
Speaker 3: As someone who grew up on an island shape your
Speaker 3: desire to tell these kinds of stories. Yeah.
Speaker 4: Ever since I was little, I was fascinated by stories
Speaker 4: on islands because I lived on an island, and I
Speaker 4: was also fascinated by stories. Of course, I grew up
Speaker 4: in Honolulu, which is a fairly big city and a
Speaker 4: populated island, and a beautiful island to boot and a
Speaker 4: warm one. But I was fascinated by people who were
Speaker 4: sort of castaway alone on an island, or you know,
Speaker 4: really had to dig deep and figure everything out for themselves.
Speaker 4: And the reason I was fascinated is because the island
Speaker 4: was a little world of their own where they have
Speaker 4: to create their own society. At some point, she says,
Speaker 4: we were the rulers of our island and the subjects too.
Speaker 4: We had to govern ourselves, and so they have to
Speaker 4: remake their own society and rethink everything that they might
Speaker 4: have learned before, and that process is exciting, and that
Speaker 4: was what drew me to this.
Speaker 2: It was pretty amazed to learn that this novel took
Speaker 2: decades from the moment you first found Marguerite's name in
Speaker 2: a book to completion. What was it about her in
Speaker 2: this story that kept you engaged for so long?
Speaker 4: I really saw it as kind of a classic epic,
Speaker 4: only not an epic about a man, but an epic
Speaker 4: about a woman, like an odyssey of a woman. And
Speaker 4: that really tempted me as a writer. And also, just
Speaker 4: as I said, the idea that she could be sort
Speaker 4: of broken by her experience but then remake herself. That
Speaker 4: to write about survival in this way, to write a
Speaker 4: book that's an adventure story and a spiritual journey all
Speaker 4: at once, that in the end, I couldn't resist doing that.
Speaker 4: And you know, sometimes you pick a subject and sometimes
Speaker 4: a subject picks you, and so I couldn't avoid writing
Speaker 4: about it. So I will say the writing itself didn't
Speaker 4: take twenty years. It just germinated in my imagination for
Speaker 4: you know, twenty years. And it took me about three
Speaker 4: years to write the book.
Speaker 2: Did you ever come close to and excuse my bad
Speaker 2: pun jumping ship, did you ever come close to abandoning
Speaker 2: the project?
Speaker 3: No?
Speaker 4: Actually no, I always had faith that I was gonna
Speaker 4: get her home.
Speaker 2: We love it, you know, only think of these canonical
Speaker 2: Castaway stories, so many of them focus on male protagonists
Speaker 2: in the wilderness. Obviously, I think everybody is thinking of
Speaker 2: the movie Castaway right now, and they're thinking of Tom
Speaker 2: Hanks as we're talking as you thought about a castaway
Speaker 2: story with a woman at the center. What choices did
Speaker 2: you make to distinguish this as her experience different from
Speaker 2: what we see with men.
Speaker 4: Yeah. Well, first of all, I before she gets to
Speaker 4: the island, and the first third of the book is
Speaker 4: really we see where she comes from. We see that
Speaker 4: she's a person who probably never even dressed herself at home.
Speaker 4: She always was waited on by other people. She says,
Speaker 4: I never touched a broom when she gets to the island,
Speaker 4: and let alone use a knife or fired a gun,
Speaker 4: or when hunting for food or any of those things.
Speaker 4: So I was really interested in the contrast of this
Speaker 4: very sheltered woman who is now on this island having
Speaker 4: to learn to fend for herself and discovering that she
Speaker 4: can do that. But even more crucially, the last third
Speaker 4: of the book is in terms of her getting home,
Speaker 4: and I hope this isn't a spoiler for people who
Speaker 4: haven't finished. But when she gets home, she's not out
Speaker 4: of danger. She's still in danger because she is a
Speaker 4: woman in that society, and she's coming back and rags
Speaker 4: with no money and no male protection. And that was
Speaker 4: very interesting for me. To write. And that's a big
Speaker 4: difference between her and somebody like Robinson Crusoe, who when
Speaker 4: he gets home, he's fine, he can go back into
Speaker 4: the import export business or whatever he was doing before,
Speaker 4: because he's a white male who and everybody knows who
Speaker 4: he is, and he will just finish off his life.
Speaker 4: She comes back and she's in mortal danger and she
Speaker 4: could easily have died just trying to get home once
Speaker 4: she's in France, so she has to use all of
Speaker 4: what she learned on the island in order to get
Speaker 4: back to her house.
Speaker 2: Every castaway movie or book that I read with a
Speaker 2: male at the helm, I think a woman wouldn't make
Speaker 2: that choice, or what would she do if she had
Speaker 2: her period? Or like I just think of all of
Speaker 2: these what ifs, Right, did all of these what ifs
Speaker 2: come up for you? Like sort of these primal what ifs.
Speaker 4: I mean, for one thing, she has to go through
Speaker 4: a pregnancy and childbirth. Certainly a male castaway wouldn't have
Speaker 4: to deal with that, and so arguably she goes through
Speaker 4: much more than somebody like Robinson Cruso went through. When
Speaker 4: she's on that island, no medical care. It's terrible nursing
Speaker 4: a baby on the island. It's tough.
Speaker 3: Well, it's so exciting to have a work of historical
Speaker 3: fiction like this now in the canon, because I just
Speaker 3: think there's so much opportunity to talk about female explorers
Speaker 3: throughout history that we never read about, never grew up
Speaker 3: reading about. I mean, we all know about Amelia Earhart,
Speaker 3: but there are so many other women like Harriet Chalmers, Adams,
Speaker 3: Gertrude Bell, like, there are so many stories that need
Speaker 3: to be told. And I know that you spend a
Speaker 3: lot of time in your career working in the contemporary
Speaker 3: literary space, but has this what your appetite to tell
Speaker 3: more historical fiction tales.
Speaker 4: Totally, especially about women. I think that they're just as
Speaker 4: you said, there's so many sort of untold stories or
Speaker 4: overshadowed stories, or women in parentheses like the one like
Speaker 4: Marguerite was in that book, And I think there's just
Speaker 4: huge opportunity and I hope to do more.
Speaker 3: It's like we have tomb Raider, we have Laura Craft,
Speaker 3: but there's so many other women we just we need
Speaker 3: to know more about them. And I feel like we
Speaker 3: still haven't gotten our true like female Indiana Jones story,
Speaker 3: like both cinematic perspective and also from a literary perspective.
Speaker 3: That's something that I'm really looking forward to me too. Actually,
Speaker 3: while on that topic, have you had any conversations about
Speaker 3: being realized in cinematic form?
Speaker 4: Not yet, No, no, no, not yet. But the writer's
Speaker 4: always the last to hear, so maybe someday. I think
Speaker 4: it would be very beautiful cinematically, because the island itself
Speaker 4: is so gorgeous, like so haunting, the and just the
Speaker 4: ocean over there. If you've ever seen that that kind
Speaker 4: of landscape, the light, the ice, the waves, it could
Speaker 4: be really stunning.
Speaker 3: The title Isola is so sexy and alluring and interesting.
Speaker 3: Can you talk about the process of landing on that
Speaker 3: word as the title and also the significance of that
Speaker 3: word in the context of Marguerite's story.
Speaker 4: Yeah, absolutely so. I didn't come upon the word till
Speaker 4: I was towards the of writing the book, and basically
Speaker 4: Marguerite's looking at a map of this world, and I
Speaker 4: based this map that she and the secretary look at
Speaker 4: in her guardian's house on a real map from the
Speaker 4: sixteenth century, which is sort of the first real map
Speaker 4: of that era. And it was done by an Italian
Speaker 4: map maker, so all the labels on the map are
Speaker 4: in Italian, and where there were islands in this Gulf
Speaker 4: of Saint Lawrence area, he wrote easila, which is the
Speaker 4: Italian word for island. And he also has a big
Speaker 4: white space in this map which is part incognita, like
Speaker 4: literally parts unknown, because they didn't know what was in there.
Speaker 4: And it was my editor's idea actually to reproduce that
Speaker 4: map in the first pages of the book so the
Speaker 4: reader can see what I'm talking about. But in the ocean,
Speaker 4: in the Gulf of Saint Lawrence, he has these different
Speaker 4: rocky islands called easila. And I was just really struck
Speaker 4: by that word. I thought it was so evocative because
Speaker 4: when I looked at it, it looked like I sola,
Speaker 4: I alone, or I solo yes, And when you put
Speaker 4: that so to me, it captured the island, but also
Speaker 4: her isolation, Marguerite's isolation on the island. And so that's
Speaker 4: why I chose the word, because I thought it encompassed
Speaker 4: her experience there.
Speaker 3: And also the word in and of itself has this
Speaker 3: feminine connotation because in the Romance languages, if it ends
Speaker 3: in an a, it tends to be the feminine version
Speaker 3: of it. So that's exactly fitting.
Speaker 4: In exactly, that's exactly what I was thinking. Yes, yes,
Speaker 4: thank you.
Speaker 2: It's time for another short break, but stay with us.
Speaker 2: We'll be right back with Allegra Goodman. And we're back
Speaker 2: with Allegra Goodman. I want to give our listeners a
Speaker 2: peek into Isla. Will you do us the great honor
Speaker 2: of reading us an excerpt?
Speaker 4: So I have the book here, I'm going to I
Speaker 4: read you the prologue, which is super short, but gives
Speaker 4: you a sense of how she feels or how she
Speaker 4: remembers feeling on the island, and gives you a sense
Speaker 4: of the place. Okay, here goes prolog. I still dream
Speaker 4: of birds. I watch them circle, dive into rough waves,
Speaker 4: and fly up to the sun. I call to them,
Speaker 4: but hear no answer. Alone, I stand on a stone island.
Speaker 4: I watch for ships and see three coming tall ships
Speaker 4: close enough to hail. I load my musket and shoot
Speaker 4: into the air. I see penance close enough to touch.
Speaker 4: As I run barefoot to the shore. Rocks cut my
Speaker 4: feet and I leave a trail of blood. Brambles tear
Speaker 4: my sleeves and score my arms as I shout wait, stop,
Speaker 4: save me. The ship's commander hears my voice and gun.
Speaker 4: Dressed in black, he stands on deck to see me.
Speaker 4: Beg as I for help. He smiles when I shoot.
Speaker 4: Ten thousand birds rise, screaming. Their wings beat against the wind.
Speaker 4: All the sailors here and see, but their commander orders
Speaker 4: them to sail on. I reach, but cannot stop the ships.
Speaker 4: I wade after them into the sea in vain. I
Speaker 4: struggle as wet skirts drag me down. I cry out,
Speaker 4: but water fills my throat. I cannot fly, I cannot swim.
Speaker 4: I cannot escape my island.
Speaker 3: Thank you so much, of course, So one of our
Speaker 3: listeners has a question about love and loss and how
Speaker 3: they're interwoven throughout the narrative of the book.
Speaker 1: Here's Sam Hey Elegra. I loved Eslas so much. It
Speaker 1: felt like the most hauntingly, lonely yet enchanting love story
Speaker 1: there was. There's this element of love of things that
Speaker 1: you don't want to lose, and the love of things
Speaker 1: that you don't need yet, the love of people that
Speaker 1: you collect along the way, and the loss of the
Speaker 1: people that you love the most. What did you feel
Speaker 1: during this book and did you feel a sense of loneliness,
Speaker 1: and how did you keep yourself into the spirit of
Speaker 1: writing this haunting story.
Speaker 4: Oh, that's such a beautiful question. Yes that I think
Speaker 4: you really put your finger on it. There's all different
Speaker 4: kinds of love in this book. And even when she's
Speaker 4: most alone, she remembers being loved and she feels the
Speaker 4: love of the people that she's with. So she's suffered
Speaker 4: a lot, and she has suffered some injustice. I would
Speaker 4: say as a woman felt the love of August, She's
Speaker 4: felt the love of her loyal nurse who has been
Speaker 4: a mother to her and taking care of her. And
Speaker 4: she comes to feel a love for nature, and she
Speaker 4: feels the love of God as she grows in this book,
Speaker 4: and she comes to love herself as she matures. And
Speaker 4: I think that when she does suffer a lot of loss,
Speaker 4: and then she tries to remember the people that she
Speaker 4: has lost and live for them and in their honor.
Speaker 4: That's a big theme in the book. And that's a
Speaker 4: different kind of love and a love in memory of people,
Speaker 4: and all of that is very important to Marguerite's journey.
Speaker 4: How did I keep going when I was writing the book?
Speaker 4: I would say that Marguerite herself really sustained me, and
Speaker 4: this materials to see me. I wanted so much to
Speaker 4: do her justice, and I kept in my mind this
Speaker 4: idea that someday, when I finished it, other people would
Speaker 4: be able to read and share her story, just like
Speaker 4: she was on the island, hoping that she would then
Speaker 4: return to the people she loved and the people she remembered.
Speaker 4: I was hoping for the readers at the end of
Speaker 4: this process, so I kept that hope alive. And it
Speaker 4: does feel like a reunion now. To hear people say
Speaker 4: that they've read the book, that they were touched by
Speaker 4: or they enjoyed it, it feels like I've returned home
Speaker 4: to them.
Speaker 2: We have another question, let's hear it.
Speaker 4: Her name is Nicole Hi. My name is Nicole.
Speaker 5: I live in Richmond, Virginia, and I adored this novel.
Speaker 5: I found it to be exquisite and engaging and also
Speaker 5: really painful to read. You explore a historical period in
Speaker 5: which women are culturally engaged and essentially taught from births
Speaker 5: to try to be invisible, don't be curious, don't be brave,
Speaker 5: don't be energetic, and yet you also show us through
Speaker 5: the character Marguerite, that of course, girls and women back
Speaker 5: then were complex human beings. They were all of those things, curious, creative,
Speaker 5: and in the case of Marguerite, braver than most. So
Speaker 5: my question for you is, as you were immersing yourself
Speaker 5: in the research and in the writing, how did you
Speaker 5: process that emotionally? How much time did you spend thinking
Speaker 5: about what your life would have been like as a writer,
Speaker 5: a woman, as an artist if you had been born
Speaker 5: into this world.
Speaker 4: Oh, that's a great question. It made me feel grateful
Speaker 4: that I live now in the twenty first century, as
Speaker 4: we have so many problems now, of course, and so
Speaker 4: much injustice still. But I am able to write, I
Speaker 4: am able to express myself, and I'm able to be
Speaker 4: educated in a way that most women in that time
Speaker 4: were not even to be able to read and write.
Speaker 4: Marguerite's nurse can even read, so she was privileged even
Speaker 4: to learn at all. So I thought a lot about that,
Speaker 4: And actually, you're right. One of the reasons that I
Speaker 4: use thus little passages from the Lessons to My Daughter
Speaker 4: at the beginning of each section. Those are from a
Speaker 4: book that was written at the time by a queen
Speaker 4: about how to be a good princess or how to
Speaker 4: be a good, noble woman, and she gives all this advice.
Speaker 4: Never venture your opinion, never take a step without permission,
Speaker 4: be very careful, never talk to anyone alone. And what
Speaker 4: I enjoyed doing about putting those lessons in the front
Speaker 4: of each section of my book is that Marguerite does
Speaker 4: the opposite in every single instance. So it was my
Speaker 4: way of trying to show what her life is framed
Speaker 4: by the constraints that she has to deal with, and
Speaker 4: how unusual her experience and her spirit are.
Speaker 3: This has been an incredibly inspiring conversation. You know, I
Speaker 3: think whenever one book inspires you to read more and
Speaker 3: read other books, that's a really beautiful thing. And you've
Speaker 3: inspired me to read from the Heptamerm and read more
Speaker 3: about women like Marguerite who are no longer a parenthesis.
Speaker 4: Thanks to you.
Speaker 3: Thank you, Alegra.
Speaker 4: Thank you so much for having me.
Speaker 2: Thank you so much, Alegra, and thank you for your passion.
Speaker 3: Allegra Goodman is the author of Isesila, the February pick
Speaker 3: for Reese's Book Club. It's available wherever you get your books.
Speaker 2: Tomorrow, we're popping off on all the biggest stories in
Speaker 2: pop culture, including the Oscars, this weekend.
Speaker 4: You don't want to miss it.
Speaker 3: I'm the Conversation using hashtag the bright Side and connect
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Speaker 3: Danielle Robe.
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Speaker 3: See you tomorrow, folks. Keep looking on the bright side.