Interview with Mariah Fredericks

What is the title of your newest book? How many books have you published?
My new book is called Death of a New American. It’s the second in the Jane Prescott series and the twelfth book I’ve published.

How did you become interested in historical fiction and who do you research your books?
As a kid, historical fiction was my favorite genre. I went through all of Jean Plaidy and Mary Renault as well as less famous but equally awesome writers like Elizabeth Byrd and Rosemary Hawley Jarman. At that time, American history didn’t fascinate me as much. Peaceful transition of power? No heads chopped off when the new government comes in? How boring. But working on this series, I’ve found that 1910s America is plenty violent.

As for research, I start by buying way too many books. I rough out the basic events of the year the book takes place. What was going on politically, socially, culturally. That research usually gives me the theme for the novel. But I also do research to determine how events and trends were seen at the time. For example, the Titanic sinks at the beginning of Death of a New

American. How did people see that tragedy in the days after it happened? For that kind of research, The New York Times digital archives are a godsend. You can comb through articles for 1912 and see different perspectives of the disaster unfold. The vision of brave men sacrificing themselves for women and children was much more important to commentators of the time whereas our era tends to be more focused on the class divide.

Photographs are also hugely important when I have to recreate the city in which Jane lives and moves. How crowded are the streets? Where are the trains? Do women walk by themselves? What do they wear? What’s the traffic like? Here the New York Public Library’s online catalog of prints and photographs is fantastic. You want to know what the entrance to the New York Zoological Park looked like in 1912? They have that image.

What do you enjoy about the author’s lifestyle? What do you not enjoy?
Enjoy? Pretty much everything. Spending my day in my imaginary world with characters chattering away in my head is heaven. I feel extraordinarily lucky that I get paid to do that. Writing a historical set in my hometown means I get to walk around the city, seeing it through Jane’s eyes. That’s another great pleasure. I get to talk to readers who are invested in my characters and want to know what happens to them. It’s the best.

One thing I find tricky is balancing the inner and outer focus of today’s writing life. There’s the quiet do-the-work headspace where you’re just living the story. Then there’s the focus on the external response to your work: reviews, sales, networking. That requires a different mindset and I don’t find the two co-exist easily. I don’t do my best writing when I’m in promotion mode. You’re listening to different voices.

Do you model your character after yourself or any one you know?
Jane Prescott is her own person. She started talking to me more than a decade ago and she had her own voice, her own history and point of view. I don’t feel so much her creator as her typist.

Having said that, she and I do have things in common. Jane is a listener and observer. I like her sense of humor, also her instinct to look at the person rather than their status. She has enormous affection for Louise Benchley, who is rich. She is also devoted to her best friend Anna, who is an anarchist. Her aversion to callousness and arrogance is something I can relate to.

How do you get yourself out of a writing rut?
I am very comfortable writing badly. It doesn’t scare me because I know from experience that as long as I leave enough time for leisurely rewrites, I’m good. But I won’t have anything to rewrite if I don’t get something on the page, so…better churn out some pages! If it’s going really poorly, I’ll stop writing in sequence for a while and only write characters I love and scenes I feel on that day. That usually builds my faith back up.

I can get into a rut because part of my mind is focused on how people will react to the book. “What’s happening on Goodreads? Are there any new reviews? What’s my Amazon rating?” Most writers have to pay some attention to promotion now and it can be fun. But it can also make you see your story as a product or something that will trigger good or bad feelings in someone else. You stop experiencing it as its own authentic world. When that happens, I make a concerted effort to tune out external feedback. (Excuse me while I google myself…)

If your books were made into a movie, who would you want to play the lead character?
When I was writing the first book, I envisioned someone like Carey Mulligan playing Jane. I saw her in Bleak House when she was very young and I thought, Dear God, if she can play a Dickens heroine, she can play anything. She’s able to convey enormous intelligence and real kindness. And she can play someone who works for a living, which not all actors can do, oddly.

As to who I would want—I am happy to entertain all offers!

Who is your favorite author?
Oh, God, “favorite” is so hard. The people I read again and again are Dominick Dunne, David Handler, Minette Walters, Ira Levin. I just discovered George Saunders. I love Edward St. Aubyn. Can’t wait for the next Hilary Mantel.

If you could invite five people – living or dead – to a dinner party, who would they be?
I’m a born and bred, die hard New Yorker, but I have a soft spot for Texas. So I always thought it would be amazing to have Liz Smith, Molly Ivins, and Ann Richards to dinner because they knew one another and would be funny as hell on the state of the nation. We could have Larry McMurtry and LBJ join us for dessert.

Or at a separate dinner, I’d have David Sedaris, P.G. Wodehouse, Alan Bennett, Alison Bechdel, and Roz Chast.

If you could not be an author, what would like to do as a career?
Sell books. I worked in Shakespeare and Co. an Book-of-the-Month Club for many years and it was great. Either that or work in some tiny way for the RSC or the National Theatre in London.