Allegra Goodman on fairy tales and the old days

This week’s story, “Ambrose,” is about a sixth grader named Lily who, as she says at the beginning of the story, wants to live in the old days. How hard is it to be a sixth grader in modern-day America?

It’s definitely hard to be a sixth grader in modern-day America, but I think Lily’s desire to live in the old days has more to do with what’s going on in her family. She’s not only sensitive, but also imaginative, so she starts to yearn for another time. Children read like no other. When books excite them, they want to jump in and live there. Sometimes, like Lily, they want to write their own books.

Lily was given a diary by one of her teachers and she uses it to write a novel about a princess named Ambrose who turns into a swan at night. When did the idea for Lily’s novel first come to you? Was Lily inspired by any specific books or stories?

The idea for Lily’s novel came to me as I was writing the first lines of the story. As a writer, I’m a planner, and then I improvise. When I write stories, I like to follow where my characters are going. When I step back and look at Lily’s work, I see that she is drawn to fairy tales like “The Twelve Dancing Princesses.” When I was little, I had a copy of Andrew Lang’s “The Red Fairy Book” and later got his other fairy tale books from the library. I loved his richly detailed retellings.

Debra and Richard, Lily’s parents, are divorced. Would Lily daydream as much if the family were still together? Is this a particularly difficult time for her?

She’s having a hard time. Her parents suspect they’re the cause and they don’t really know what to do about it. They also don’t know what’s going on with her writing. I was interested in exploring this situation: the parents watching from the outside. The child developing an imaginary world. And then there’s the reader who gets to see a bit of both.

Lily and her family are recurring characters in a series of stories you’ve been writing for several years about an extended Jewish-American family called the Rubinsteins. Your most recent story in the magazine, “The Last Grownup,” also focused on Lily’s family, but it focused more on Debra. How do you come up with the stories? How well do you think you know the Rubinsteins by now? Do you write the stories chronologically or do you go back and forth in time?

I wrote these stories roughly chronologically, almost like scenes in a play or chapters in a novel. It was great to explore this family from different perspectives. I wrote from the perspective of Richard, Lily’s father, and Debra, Lily’s mother, and Lily herself. I also wrote about Lily’s grandmother and her great-uncles and great-nephews and great-nieces. The name Rubinstein means ruby ​​stone. With these stories, I take a family and look at all of its facets, highlighting each facet.

Lily and her sister Sophie take ballet lessons after school. They are in different levels and Lily’s class is always the first. In the story, for some reason, she is always late for class. Lily is very anxious about this – and it is not wrong that she is anxious, because her dance teachers are very punctual. Will she remember the experience of being late to her class when she is an adult?

I suspect she will remember a lot, but to answer this question I would have to keep writing about her to see how she grows.

You have a new novel coming out in January called Isola. It’s about a sixteenth-century French noblewoman who is abandoned by her guardian on a small island in the New World. It’s inspired by the true story of Marguerite de la Rocque de Roberval. The subject matter seems like a bit of an outlier for you. When did you first come across the original story? Did you do a lot of research or did you rely on your imagination to conjure up Marguerite’s experiences on the island?

“Isola” is indeed my first historical novel. In some ways it’s an anomaly, but in other ways it’s a natural choice for me to write about someone who lived long ago. Like Lily, I’m fascinated by the past.

I came across Marguerite de la Rocque de Roberval on a family trip to Canada. We were traveling with our four children, ages ten, seven, three, and six weeks. I had borrowed a stack of children’s books about Canadian history to share with the older boys. No one was interested in looking at these books with me, but as I sat awake at night nursing the baby, I read them all. In one book about the sixteenth-century French navigator Jacques Cartier, I saw an aside about a young woman who sailed to the New World with her relative in 1542 and was stranded on an island in the Gulf of St. Lawrence. Why? How? What happened to her? The author returned to Cartier, but I sat bolt upright in my hotel bed with my newborn baby on my lap and all I could think was, I want to write about this! Later, I thought, but how? I wasn’t sure I was ready to write about someone who lived so long ago. Years passed and I wrote other books. My children grew up; My baby was off to college, but I couldn’t stop thinking about Marguerite. I started reading. I spent at least a year researching and thinking about how I could tell Marguerite’s story. One day I started trying out the first few lines in a notebook. After about twenty tries, Marguerite started talking to me. “I never knew my mother. She died the night I was born, and so we passed each other in the dark.” When I got that line, I knew I could write the rest of the book.

Can you imagine Lily and Debra talking about Marguerite’s life? What would Lily think about these particular old days?

Even at her young age, Lily has internalized Debra’s vision that the past was hard for women. On some level, she understands what Debra means. Lily, however, has not completely lost her sense that the past is magic. For her, the old days are not just the historical past, but a mythical place that she wants to claim. I wanted to capture her belief and her desire. That moment in childhood when you know better, but you can almost convince yourself that fairy tales are true. ♦