Winter Garden (35 page)

Writing a novel may be a solitary pursuit, but “getting it right” and publishing it well certainly are not. This book, in particular, was helped by many people. First and foremost, I’d like to thank my brilliant editor, Jennifer Enderlin, and the entire St. Martin’s team, especially Matthew Shear, Sally Richardson, George Witte, Matt Baldacci, Nancy Trypuc, Anne Marie Tallberg, Lisa Senz, Sarah Goldstein, Kim Ludlum, Mike Storrings, Kathryn Parise, Alison Lazarus, Jeff Capshew, Ken Holland, Tom Siino, Martin Quinn, Steve Kleckner, Merrill Bergenfeld, Astra Berzinskas, John Edwards, Brian Heller, Christine Jaeger, Rob Renzler, the entire Broadway sales force, the entire Fifth Avenue sales force, Sara Goodman, Tahsha Hernandez, and Stephen Lee. Thanks for a great year!

Thanks to Tom Hallman for his work on my beautiful covers.

Thanks also to journalist Sally Sara for her invaluable assistance. Any mistakes are mine alone.

Thanks to Mary Moro for her help on all things related to apples and the Wenatchee Valley.

Thanks to Tom Adams for mentioning Russia one night . . .

Thanks to Megan Chance and Kim Fisk for always knowing when to laugh and when to cry, and for being so quick to tell me to try again.

“Sometimes when you open the door to your mother's past, you find your own future.” You've said this line inspired Winter Garden - how did the story develop from this one line?

I am powerfully drawn to stories about women’s' lives and relationships. I just can't help it. I'm fascinated by the way we women interact, and how we lean on each other in hard times. Personally, I draw a great deal of strength from the women who are important in my life. And like many writers, my fiction is drawn in large part from my own life. In Firefly Lane, I wrote about female friendship; in True Colors, I focused on sisterhood. When I finished those two books, I think it was almost inevitable that I would turn my attention to another important female relationship--the intricate bond between mothers and daughters. I'm still not entirely sure how the story evolved, but I do remember being out with friends one night when someone at the table mentioned Russia in World War II. Now, to be entirely truthful, I have never been much of a world war buff, and although I was obsessed with Russian history in college, it was not something I had continued studying. Still, the comment stuck with me. That night I learned something new: that the women of Leningrad had faced incredible hardships during the war and somehow survived. It didn't blossom into a story overnight, but it stayed in my head, the way idea seedlings tend to do. Later, when I was trolling about a new story, I hit on one of those “what if” moments that are a writer's bread and butter. What if you discovered that your mother had a secret past...and how would uncovering that secret change your perception of yourself?

So that was the start of Winter Garden. I imagined a woman who had lied about who she was and what her past held. But who was she? And that's when that idle dinner conversation came back to me. The women of Leningrad. So I began studying this period and this place, and I was more than intrigued. I was mesmerized. The power and durability of the women of that time and place is almost mythical. I still can't quite release the power of their stories.

Is your background Russian? What drew you to this setting and time period?

I am not Russian, although after researching this book, I can't wait to travel there. I want to walk the streets of St. Petersburg and spend time in the Hermitage museum and sit down to a meal of honest-to-goodness Chicken Kiev. The strange thing is that to me, after nearly a year's research, it's Leningrad and always will be, so I imagine it will be a little disorienting to walk through modern St. Petersburg and see the changes.

On his deathbed Evan says he regrets letting Anya hide from her daughters. His love and compassion for his wife cost his daughters a close relationship with their mother yet he still holds out hope that they can come to know one another. Do you believe it's never too late to connect? What makes Anya finally tell the fairytale all the way through?

I think Evan's deathbed request was about regret to a certain extent, but I think it was even more about hope. The way I saw that character, he was full of love and compassion and joy--he truly adored all three of the women in his life. And yet, for the whole of their family life, he carried the heavy burden of a secret. He alone knew how profoundly damaged his wife had been by her early life in Russia. Because of his deep compassion, he allowed Anya to remain broken and distant. For years, he imagined that their family and their love could heal her, but that healing didn't happen during his lifetime, and he knew that without him, the family could very easily have disintegrated. So he took one last risk on love. He asked Anya to tell the fairy tale to her daughters, and he asked Nina to listen. He hoped that if Anya could reveal her pain, and if her daughters could hear it, the three of them would have a chance at last to connect on a deeper level, and hopefully to start a new relationship, one based on truth.

I think life would be infinitely diminished if one believed that it was ever too late for anything, especially connection with loved ones. Call me an optimist--which I definitely am--but I absolutely believe that there's always a reason to reach out, no matter what the timing. One minute of love can really change the perception of an entire life.

I think Anya does as Evan asked for two reasons. First and foremost, because she loved Evan profoundly and was desperately grateful to him for saving her life. She couldn't deny him anything. Secondly, I think without Evan in her life, Anya began to be adrift. More and more her mind turned to memories that she'd tried to forget and as painful as those memories were, they comforted her in her time of need, also. In a strange way, she liked going back to that time of her life that was both the best and the worst. And I think she'd secretly wanted to tell her daughters the truth for years. Evan gave her that chance.

As a novelist you explore the disappointments and misunderstandings that separate families. The use of the fairytale to let Anya tell her story was an inspired choice - in stories we can address the big issues of loss and love and tragedy and hope. Have readers told you that your stories provided the inspiration to heal rifts in their own lives? Have your stories changed your own relationships with friends and family?

I do explore the disappointments and misunderstandings that separate families, as well as the love and hope that heal them, and that's really the heart of what Winter Garden is about. The fairy tale was really the backbone of the story. In the first couple drafts of the novel, there was no fairy tale, there was just Anya telling her story. It was a much more standard parallel story structure, with an historical novel running alongside a contemporary family drama. And it just didn't work. To be honest, the Russian story was more powerful and more compelling and it really overshadowed the contemporary story. At the end of the day, I thought it read like two stories stitched together with the thinnest thread. Then I stumbled across the idea of the fairy tale. I loved the idea, but there were a lot of days I cursed myself for even trying it, I can tell you. Suddenly the book had a kind of mystery running through it; the daughters had to interpret and solve the fairy tale, and I had to twist all of my research just enough to make it feel fable-like. The upside was that I loved the voice I was able to create for Anya.

I have heard repeatedly that my books inspire women to mend some of the rifts in their relationships, and I can't even tell you how honored I am by that. To paraphrase a Country song, we live in a crazy, busy, wonderful, terrible, beautiful world. We women are always running at mach speed, it seems, trying to make life better for our loved ones. So anything that can make us slow down and relax--and better yet--pick up the phone to call someone who is important to us, is worth the world.

Meredith and Nina both felt closest to their father rather than each other growing up. The sisters build very different adult lives, with Meredith putting her family first and Nina living for her photography. How would their lives have been different if their mother had been more present emotionally? How difficult is it for adult siblings to establish a new relationship?

I don't honestly know how Nina and Meredith would have been different if their mother had been more emotionally present. Meredith is a caretaker; Nina is an adventurer. I don't think those basics would have been changed by Anya's love, but the choices each woman made might have been. In other words, Nina might have believed in marriage more, if she'd grown up in a happier family; she might have wanted children more, if she'd felt loved by her mother. Meredith might have had the strength to forge her own path a little earlier if she'd felt loved. But in the end, in the novel--as in real life, I think--it's less about second guessing than it is about acceptance. It's impossible to say how love would have changed them; what we can say is that the love they found throughout the novel definitely changed their future. That's what I think is important--that familiar idea that it's never too late to change your future.

Meredith is a character that many women will relate to - exhausted from juggling work, family, elder care and now the loss of her beloved father. Her responsibilities and how she handles them take a huge toll on her marriage and put it in jeopardy. How can women who are already drained from emotional demands repair, recharge and reconnect?

Ah, there's the 64,000 dollar question. It's true that so many of us are overworked and stretched to the emotional breaking point by family and work and community obligations. And yes, something devastating, like a beloved's illness, can push us over the edge if we're not really careful. In Winter Garden, Meredith tries to handle the “last straw” of her father's death as if it were another in a string of difficult problems. She does what she has always done--and what many of us do--she works harder, faster. The problem is that the death of her father is not something she can go around; sooner or later, grief has to be experienced and worked through. The faster she runs away, the bigger the problem becomes. And then Nina arrives and throws it all in Meredith's face.

Nina forces Meredith to care about the very thing that scares her the most: their mother. And yes, I think there's a sub textual message to women woven throughout this story. Somewhere along the way, while we're doing everything for everyone else, we have to remember to care for ourselves, too. Honestly, I think women are so strong that it doesn't take a lot of pampering to keep us strong, but we do have to work at it. For me, this is where friends can make all the different. The more we connect with each other, the more we share our burdens, the stronger we become individually. You definitely see this idea at work in Winter Garden. By coming together and being honest, Nina and Meredith and Anya become better women and create an honest family relationship--one that allows each of them to be happier.

Winter Garden is written as two parallel stories that make up one seamless and captivating novel. How did you balance the events unfolding in World War II Leningrad with the equally compelling narrative in contemporary Washington state?

As I said above, this was really the challenge of the novel. The Russian half of the story came to me like a gift. After about five months of research, I felt that I knew about Leningrad and writing that half of the story--as difficult as it was--absolutely captivated me. You can picture me sitting around, with about thirty research books scattered around me, pulling that single narrative together. The last fifty pages were absolutely devastating to write, though. By then, I “was” Anya, and telling her story was heartbreaking.

The bigger problem was the contemporary story. That side of it took repeated drafts to get right. What I wanted was a story in the “now” that fed off the past, that was ultimately changed by it. Each story had to be bolstered and illuminated by the other. I wanted the girls to have to continually reassess their own pasts as the fairy tale revealed the truth about their mother. And of course, I wanted the contemporary story to be as powerful and compelling as the historical story. Quite a challenge. I hope I pulled it off.

In Leningrad Vera asks her mother if she would choose to fall in love with her Papa again and her mother says no, not if she had known how it would feel to live with a broken heart. Your characters take the risk and you show that in the end it's worth it, that there can be no joy without risk of loss. Ultimately you write stories of survivors, and that's what resonates so deeply with readers. What do you think makes certain characters survivors?

Honestly, I was never quite sure, even as many times as I re-worked this novel, if Vera's mother was being honest in that scene. I know she was trying to impart information to her daughter that she felt was crucial. You have to consider what Leningrad was like in those times, under Stalin's brutal regime. The people lived in constant fear. The reign of terror that Nina and Meredith research is absolutely true. People simply disappeared for saying the wrong thing, or thinking the wrong thing, and Vera's mother is afraid that her daughter is making a terrible mistake by falling in love with a boy who believes in words. When the end comes for Vera's mother, however, we learn that she is unafraid, that she is going to be with her beloved Petyr. This doesn't sound like a woman who would choose not to fall in love.

I hadn't really thought about it that way, but you're right. I do write stories about women who survive sometimes insurmountable odds and triumph. More often than not, my characters triumph not by solving a mystery or becoming a millionaire; they triumph by choosing love. I write about women that rise above victim hood, rather than those who succumb to it. I believe in the strength of the human spirit and the amazing resilience of women. If that resonates with readers, I think it's because they believe it, too. We all believe on some level that survival and triumph is about never quitting. Not on our family members, not on our friends, and not on ourselves.

Anya and Evan's relationship is life-saving and yet even Evan's immense love couldn't heal Anya's broken spirit. It's only by talking through the tragedy and sharing with her daughter's that Anya can become whole. That lesson, that avoiding the pain is ultimately isolating and counter-productive to moving on, is one ripe for discussion among reading groups. Can you add your thoughts?

There are some wounds, of course, that can never be truly healed. The heartrending story of Vera's life is not the kind of tragedy that can ever be forgotten. But I do believe that if Anya had allowed Evan's love to truly heal her, it could have created a greater sense of wholeness in her. She could have taken his love and wrapped herself in it and dared to love her children. The problem was not in some lack in Evan's love; rather, the problem lay in Anya's sense of self. Her past had left her so damaged that she viewed herself as a terrible mother. She looked back on her choices in Russia and saw them not as a remarkable story of love and survival, but rather as proof that she was unfit as a mother. This was what kept her separated from her daughters, her innate fear that she would somehow damage them if she showed her love.