I am a third generation Californian. I once was a ballet dancer, which led me to acting, which led to screenwriting. When my kids were still little, I returned to school to take literature classes for fun. I loved school, and stayed on to earn a BA, an MA, and an MFA in English and Creative Writing. I began writing novels when I was an undergraduate at UCLA, and finished Disorder during my MFA program at Vermont College of Fine Arts. I currently teach college writing and literature courses in Southern California, and I write in the middle of the night and while driving. I am at work on my second novel, North of the Slot.
How I Came to Write The Disorder of Longing
My grandfather was a missionary in Africa for fourteen years, and my mother was born there. The most vivid memories of my childhood are those of my grandfather, sitting in front of a campfire wherever it was that we happened to be camping during our summer vacations, telling stories about Africa. I think my urge to tell stories is rooted in those early childhood experiences.
I love history because I love the stories it tells, and I love research for the same reason. Research offers a way to learn obscure, even bizarre details that make stories more enticing. And it is a way to time travel. I really feel, when I am doing research, as if I have access to a sort of time machine. I can sense the people from the time period I am researching as if they have just stepped out of the room I am in, or have crossed the road just ahead of me, or have left their warmth behind on the seat I am about to take. I enjoy resurrecting ghosts, turning them into flesh and blood, in the same way my grandfather loved resurrecting the ghosts of his own past when he told us his stories. Historical fiction is the perfect medium in which to do the work of resurrection.
I was first taken with orchids after being attracted to a phalaenopsis at Trader Joe's. I bought the purple/burgundy plant, placed it in the center of my table, and watched its flowers stay in place for weeks and weeks. The pulpy sepals and petals seemed so intricate and so unlike any other flower on earth. I could stare at the thing for long minutes at a time without getting bored. It seemed older than anything I had ever seen, as if it had survived for millennia. It seemed, to me, more like a creature than a plant.
In a graduate nonfiction writing class, my professor assigned Susan Orlean's The Orchid Thief. I don't think I was at all surprised to learn, as I read her wonderful book, that some collectors of orchids are obsessive personalities. Her book inspired me to jump into orchid research, with no goal or purpose in mind – just a vague urge to know more. I found Orchid Fever: A Horticultural Tale of Love, Lust, and Lunacy, by Eric Hansen, and Merle A. Reinikka's A History of the Orchid. By the time I had looked through those two additional books, and purchased three or four more orchids, I felt driven to tell the story of an orchid collector. I chose the Victorian era for my story's setting as it was a time that was rich with strange beliefs about sexuality and a woman's place, as well as man's place, in the world, and it was also a time in which the fight for women's suffrage was at full steam. Orchids were still wildly popular and very expensive during the late Victorian era. I was thrilled to learn that the vast majority of orchid collectors at the time were men. What sort of man devotes himself to collecting these flowers, I wondered. Edward Pryce was my best answer to that. I also learned that there was a strong middle class African American population in Beacon Hill during the Victorian era. I felt so excited about trying to bring a bit of this reality to a kind of life.
It was during an internet search for Victorian dress – I was looking for pictures of corsets – that I somehow stumbled on a passage from Karezza, the Ethics of Marriage, Alice Stockham's 1896 book. I looked up the book online and was ecstatic to find that I could purchase a copy of it from Kessinger Publishing. This is the kind of serendipitous thing that happens during research, and it certainly helps to shape the stories I tell. The reading of that book inspired me to add another layer to the complex lives of Ada and Edward Pryce. This same research thread led me to Rachel P. Maines' book, The Technology of Orgasm:“Hysteria,"the Vibrator, and Women's Sexual Satisfaction, in which she discusses the Victorian-era doctor's use of the newly invented electric vibrator to bring hysterical women to orgasm in the doctor's office.
Of course, my research isn't done only in books or online. I learn a lot from being in the physical spaces that contain echoes of the past. I went to Victorian houses that are now museums in Los Angeles and London, I looked at furniture and rooms and glassware, etc at the Metropolitan Museum in New York, I went to orchid shows, and I walked around Boston's Back Bay and through the Common a lot. I went to the African Meeting House in Boston a couple of times, though I could only look in the windows there, as they were in the process of restoring the building every time I went. I watched some Brazilian-based religious ceremonies on the beach in Santa Monica and on video, which was as close as I got to Brazil. And I read newspapers and ads from the years in which I was writing – especially at the Boston Public Library. Newspapers are one of the best ways to get a sense of the way people thought and what they focused their attentions on at any given time in a given place. All these things contribute to the pictures I create in my mind of who the people I write about are, and what the places they inhabit are like. I find my characters become fuller and rounder, maybe they even start to speak to me, if I can picture them in the spaces of the time period. And all this research excites something in me, pushing me toward a story that suddenly needs urgently to be told. The research, the things from the past, the places, the ideas, and the realities as well as the things that might have been but never were, all work in concert to dictate the story to me.
Photo by Kelsea Bauman-Murphy
