before #MeToo? How did a woman
born at the tail end of the Gilded Age
experience her parents’ servitude, the
Depression, and the social mobility of
the postwar years—and how does this
history imbue her sensibility as a con-
temporary, now wealthy, cosmopolitan
centenarian?
A second nodal point in The Pea-
cock Feast is 1963 in San Francisco. A
central character turns fifteen that
year, and he is overcome with the
sense of looming change: his family’s
mores—tennis whites at the country
club, polished buttons on his school
blazer—soon to be rendered not only
absurd, but politically objectionable
as the city becomes a sanctuary for
seekers and lost souls. I was interested
in moments of disjunction between
generations: when children and par-
ents see the world through different
eyes.
Let’s turn to the question of how
to handle the research for a historical
novel. Tell me how you think about this.Kline: Even when I’ve done a massive
amount of research before I put words
on the page, I always write my way into
needing to learn something new: the
cloth used for uniforms at the female
factories, for example, or how scurvy
was treated on convict ships. These
granular details may not end up in a
final draft, but I want to be aware of
them as I’m working. For Tin Ticket I
did a great deal of research about New-
gate prison in the nineteenth century,
but it was an offhand detail I discov-
ered after finishing a draft that brought
the section alive for me. A particular
tallow made of animal fat was used for
candles in homes of the poor and in the
dark hallways of prisons. It was cheap
and had a low melting point; it dripped
in puddles and smelled terrible. I went
back and wove in this detail.
I have one more thing to say on this:
As I did the research for this novel, I
realized that I could not tell the story
of the convict women without ad-
dressing the history of the Indigenous
people whose way of life was destroyedwhen European colonists landed on
their shores. The convict women en-
dured terrible hardship, but their ex-
perience paled in comparison to that
of the Native people. Writing about
cultures other than your own is fraught
and complicated. I am consulting, and
sharing my work, with a number of
people who know far more than I do,
including a historian at the University
of Melbourne who traces his ances-
try back to the Trawulwuy people of
northeast Tasmania.
What about you? How did you ap-
proach the research?Gornick: The stimulus for The Peacock
Feast was a photograph, now the frontis-
piece of the book, that I saw at an exhibit
at the Metropolitan Museum of Art:
five young women in Grecian gowns,
three of whom are holding silver salvers
on which sit roasted peacocks with their
plumage reattached. The photograph is
simultaneously gorgeous and horrify-
ing and left me intensely curious about
when and where it was taken and who
these women were. The event, I learned
from various accounts, was something
between a spectacle and a party thrown
by Louis C. Tiffany for “150 men of
genius” whom he’d transported to his
Long Island estate by private train.
Three of the young women were his
daughters, one of whom I knew by her
married name, Dorothy Burlingham, as
Anna Freud’s life partner and an engi-
neer of the Freud family’s escape from
Nazi-occupied Vienna.
In a recent interview, Marlon James
talked about what he calls “world-
building.” For my novel, there was a lot
of world-building, during which the
story evolved. There comes a point for
me with any kind of research, be it his-
torical or technical or about other cul-
tures, when I have to let go and trust
that I’ve sufficiently internalized what
I need to know such that the relevant
details will organically find their way
into my scenes. It’s like taking the tea
bag out of the water when it’s steeped
just the right amount. Then it’s time
to write.the literary life HISTORICAL FICTIONSEPT OCT 2019 34The top 50 entrants are
invited to the workshop, the
faculty for which is drawn
from the Festival’s presenters.
Past faculty includes
Ann Hood, Marilyn Chin,
A n d r e D u b u s I I I , a n d
Luis Alberto Urrea.and Masters Workshop
Fiction, nonfi ction and
poetry entries are now being
accepted for the FJHIth
annual writing competition,
offering more than $5,000
in prize money.In addition to cash prizes,
fi rst- through third-place
winners in each category get
scholarships to the March
2020 Masters Workshop.Tucson Festival of BooksThis competition is the
avenue to two days of
hands-on workshopping
with a faculty of top U.S
authors following the
Tucson Festival of Books.Deadline for entries is 5 p.m.
Thursday, Oct. 31, 2019
To enter, go to
TucsonFestivalofBooks.orgCALL FOR ENTRIES