What happens to the homes where we once lived? Homes we left behind, in childhood when it wasn’t a choice, as an adult when it was necessary for work or, as elders, for health reasons or to be closer to family. We can track them down via Google maps, but I suggest they no longer exist. Those places where we once lived, and especially those we once loved, exist only in memory, and, if we’re lucky, in the imagination. I hold onto places I’ve loved by writing fiction set there. Writing helps me process loss. Writing helps me move on.
When it came time for my parents to move into a retirement home, they carefully cleared out the house where I grew up. They pruned the trees and saw to other repairs in order to entice a buyer. In the end, the couple who bought the house tore it down and dug up the yard. Although that house is undeniably gone, it still exists in my mind. I see it under my eyelids when I fall asleep at night. I can picture the rooms and the garden my mother tended diligently and with love. Sometimes, I can even feel the cool, summertime lawn between my bare toes. Those sensations and many others are located nowhere but in memory and imagination.
My husband and I have lived in a half dozen places and, after leaving each one, I’ve written stories set there. In my twenties, in New York City, I wrote a novel set in my childhood home outside of Cambridge. In my thirties, in Philadelphia, I wrote a novel set in New York City, which we had recently left. When we moved to Richmond, Va., I set a novel set in Philadelphia.
We stayed in Richmond for seventeen years, raising our two children there. Now that I’ve come full circle by moving back to Cambridge, Richmond has found its way into my writing with my latest novel, Marriage and Other Monuments.
The book takes place five year after I left Richmond, in the summer of 2020. It tells the story of two estranged sisters whose marriages implode against the backdrop of the social justice protests and the removal of the Confederate monuments. That summer with the world still in Covid lockdown, I closely monitored the dramatic situation in Richmond. I stayed up nightly watching videos of activists battling police. Some of my friends took part, and I spoke with them often. Our son lived just off Monument Avenue, where the Confederate statues anchored the roundabouts and were the center of the action. I worried about his safety. By setting a novel in that fascinating, dynamic moment, I wanted to explore the conflicts that the social unrest had revealed about a city I knew well.
I also wanted to capture the beauty and uniqueness of Richmond itself. Marriage and Other Monuments allows me to share with readers what I loved about living there. The stateliness of Church Hill with its decorative ironwork and Revolutionary War era detailing on homes and shops. The grandeur of the mansions around Monument Avenue and the elegance of the boulevard itself, despite the painful history of the Confederate monuments. The funkiness of Oregon Hill, where former ironworkers’ houses are wedged close together, quirky and charming. The brick sidewalks and statues of prominent Black Richmonders in Jackson Ward. And, most importantly, the power and peacefulness of the James River as it cuts through the heart of the city.
One of the novel’s four main characters, Bobby Powers, has loved the James River since he was a boy. As an adult he’s lost his way, but over the course of the story, he realizes that reclaiming his life involves reconnecting with the river. For me, writing about the James was almost as good as being there again.
Here’s the opening of a chapter in which Bobby returns to it for the first time in years:
The James River sparkled wildly for anyone who cared to notice. Tendrils of mist rose between the rocks that interrupted the flow. Around them white water churned and frothed. Blue herons stood at attention, heads cocked, thin legs wet to the shins. Their prehistoric necks quivered in anticipation of fish they were about to spear with long beaks. At the water’s edge, ghostly sycamores sagged under a canopy of wisteria that in springtime bore lavender blooms. The vines were as thick around as a strong man’s arm and tough enough to strangle a sapling. The occasional water snakes, nonpoisonous black ones, but copperheads, too, draped over branches, slid down tree trunks, and slipped into backwater. Along the shoreline, a few kayakers paddled through hushed shadows, awed and unaware of any danger. The river, like the city it ran through, held itself close.
Marriage and Other Monuments, like my other books, is my attempt to create new worlds out of places I’ve known well. In effect, to make each place anew. The act of writing fiction helps me lay claim to what is no more while making it last forever on the page.
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