Jennifer Donnelly talks to Update about the inspiration for the novel that won her the Carnegie Medal this year.
In A Gathering Light, which has won this year’s Carnegie Medal, Jennifer Donnelly tells the story of a young girl, Mattie Gokey, who has to choose between her family, struggling to help her widowed father make a backbreaking living farming in the foothills of the Adirondack mountains, and her own dreams of studying literature in New York.
Interwoven is the true story of a young, pregnant woman, Grace Brown, murdered in mysterious circumstances in 1906. The case achieved notoriety at the time. Grace’s lover was arrested and tried for the murder on the strength of her letters recovered subsequently.
The story was re-told fictionally in Theodore Dreiser’s An American Tragedy and made into a film twice, first in the 1930s, then again in 1951 as A Place in the Sun starring Elizabeth Taylor and Montgomery Clift.
The murder was local history for Donnelly, whose own grandmother had worked in a hotel on Big Moose Lake where the body was recovered. Her family reminisced about it. And it haunted Donnelly herself – ‘Grace wouldn’t leave me alone.’ She read Dreiser, and a factual account of the murder. But the letters themselves were what really clinched the matter: ‘Her voice, her words. It tore me apart. I started grieving for her, even though she lived 100 years ago.’
What Donnelly could not stand was that Grace had been murdered at 19 for being pregnant, for not fitting in. Her letters were so vivid and evocative of their time that she decided she had to work out her own emotions ‘by writing, telling the story in a new way, fictionalised, from my point of view’. In a piece for the Guardian,1 she describes her anger: ‘During a summer that saw the headlines in America full of violence against girls and women, things didn’t seem to have changed much.’
The power of the story – and the power in the telling – is not an accident in Donnelly’s family. Her father’s ancestors were Irish immigrants who escaped the famine in 1848. They were very poor farmers, who settled in upstate New York to eke out a living, farming in what is still ‘a brutal place’. Summers were short and, once over, ‘it was a matter of life and death to get through the winter. You had to be smart, self-reliant, strong, to weather the remoteness and the loneliness’. The landscape – of ‘staggering beauty’ – has produced ‘a strong silent people, independent, proud. And used to do doing what they want, non-conformists’.
The power of words
Storytelling was a tradition after meals. It was the only entertainment they could afford and, during the long winters, it helped to overcome the isolation. The whole family, she says, ‘are born storytellers’. Her mother (in fact a German, orphaned during the war, who emigrated to the US) told her own stories too, and read to her. And the whole family read – there was a culture of reading when she grew up. ‘I didn’t think about it at the time, but I suppose that part time I was picking up the value of stories, the importance of early tradition.’ And not only that. ‘Hearing the older generation sit and talk, you absorb how to do pacing and suspense, and structure; how to hold your listeners rapt, how to deliver a good punch line.’
The ability to listen and hear the words talk was another thing, reflected in the dialogue, the word-games (and some dialect) of A Gathering Light. And in one of the book’s central messages – the power of words to overcome adversity, to make people feel.
Donnelly has always been fascinated by language. She lived in London in the early 1980s and ‘spent every spare moment’ in the East End of London. ‘I used to go to Brick Lane early on Sunday. Costermongers would sing their wares. Wide boys would hand jewelry back and forth and pull out wodges of cash. There were cockles and pickled whelks, and jellied eels. It was as close to the London of Hogarth and Dickens as I would ever get. The sellers made theatre out of words, out of their patter.’ She thinks that Cockneys have a lot in common with northern New Yorkers: ‘One is an urban culture, one rural, but they were both cultures of the poor. If they like you, they tease you. It is wrong to be openly affectionate. Maybe it isn’t good to be too open. To survive, to be successful, you had to be tough.’
A Gathering Light has become a successful ‘cross-over’ novel, particularly since being chosen by the Richard & Judy show as one of their ‘Summer Reads’. But it was originally written with young girls, not adults, in mind. Donnelly wanted to show them that they have choices in life, but that choosing is never easy. She wanted to reach them before they made choices that set the course for their lives. ‘Mattie adores her sisters and loves her father. She sees the attraction of family. Royal [who becomes her beau, and wants to marry her] is a good-looking, capable guy. He has a passion for farming and the land. People like him are valued still.’
Much of the novel is about the tug of war in Mattie’s heart between her feelings of loyalty to family and place, and her longing to study and to read and be a writer (which her family cannot understand). She wants to go to college, to be like the literature teacher at school, who encourages and inspires her. (The teacher, Miss Wilcox, is based on Emily Dickinson and one of Donnelly’s high-school English teachers.) Mattie is encouraged, too, by her black school-friend Weaver, himself determined to overcome poverty and racial discrimination by getting a good education and becoming a lawyer.
It is Mattie’s work in a local hotel (To earn money to be able to pay to go to college? Or support her father and the family? Or save to get married?) that brings her into contact with Grace Brown and her letters, and a story that she cannot ignore.
As Mattie learns more, she gradually finds the courage and strength to make her own choices. But there is no wish – or attempt – by Donnelly to preach. ‘I didn’t want to say that Mattie’s choice is the best or only choice.’ Mattie is pulled in two directions, as was Donnelly herself, until recently too much influenced by earlier feminist voices to find time in her life for as many children as she now wishes she could have – a source of regret.
Universal issues
The power of A Gathering Light comes from its dilemmas, which are universal: the desperate wish to break free from the hard labour and grinding poverty of their life on the land; the conflict between loyalty to family and what one knows, and the attractions of dreams and aspirations. It is why the book appeals to adults too, though one could add that Donnelly’s sensitivity to social injustice gives urgency to the narrative, without ever leading to stereotyping, or making her didactic.
After all of this, it comes perhaps as a
surprise that Donnelly herself ‘had a fortunate childhood, parents who pushed me hard to do my best’. Never any real deprivation, then. Even when she fell in with a much wealthier bunch of friends, her father merely advised her, if she wanted what they had, to ‘Work. Get an education. Make something of yourself.’
And that she did, getting up at 4.30 in the morning or 5, to write for a couple of hours before going out to earn a wage. Her writing was ‘years and years in the making’ before she found a publisher, or achieved recognition. She went through years of depression and despair to get there, even though she had been telling stories since childhood and ‘inflicting them’ on her family. Even after 10 years when she had finished The Tea Rose, her first novel, it took a while to find a publisher. But her agent is ‘as stubborn and persistent as I am’.
Sense of privilege
Perhaps some of the drive comes from a sense of privilege at what she has – and her great-grandparents had not. Her great-grandfather would have loved an opportunity of education. ‘He was taken out of school at 12 to drive mules and make money for the family. He died young and was bed-ridden before he passed away. All he wanted to do before he died was read. His children had to keep bringing him books. What would his life have been if he had had a few of the opportunities I had?’ When she was researching for the book, she once asked her grandmother (an inspiration for the character of Mattie) if she had minded not having had time to read or study. To which she retorted that there was not time – there was so much work to be done, just to put food on the table. ‘To live you had to grow your own food. Your survival depended on your ability to farm.’
Colin Brabazon, Chair of the Carnegie judges, praised ‘the striking luminosity’ of A Gathering Light’s prose, ‘its tangible sense of place and the integrity of its vision’. Perhaps it was inspired, too, by some of the imagery of Donnelly’s Irish Catholic upbringing. She thinks that the obligatory attendance at church (‘it was an accepted part of your life’) gave her a good basis for storytelling. ‘I sat and listened to the Gospel. I wanted Judas to have a change of heart. It was amazing stuff – about loyalty, and betrayal, and faith. The stories gave you a lot of things to think about at 7 or 8 years old, sitting in church, bored out of your skull!’ The sense of wonder, of the miraculous, a heightened feeling of excitement and expectation, has stayed with her, though she does not describe herself as religious.
Donnelly is pleased – and surprised – about the interest the novel has aroused across the generations (and the gender divide thanks to Weaver). She thinks that ‘literature’ is very much adult-oriented. ‘Teenagers tend to look to adult characters and situations, but it means a tremendous amount to them if adults repay the favour, by occasionally venturing back.’ She thinks this sends a very powerful message – ‘that we value their stories and their concerns. It means the world to a kid to have someone take an interest in what he or she is interested in.’
Nonetheless, it is probably the sense of conviction conveyed by the writing, the universal dilemmas and the power of the story-telling in this book that appeal to adults as well as young people. It is ironic and apt that it was oral tradition that attracted Donnelly to prose, and the power of shared stories that is driving readers back to narrative fiction – perhaps one of the most striking features about the current ‘cross-over’ phenomenon.
Though the characters in the novel came to her ‘out of the mist’, it is real voices that inspire Donnelly. She loves the historical research. ‘I went to the library of the Adirondack Museum. I’d sit down and tell the librarian what I was after, and he would go back and forth, bringing collections of this and that – diaries, menus from the great camps, old newspapers, a lock of Grace Brown’s hair – a writer’s treasure trove.’ This took her on paths she never knew existed. ‘He’d say: “Do you know about this?” or “Try that.” I am sure many, many authors owe huge debts to librarians and archivists for their work. I know I do!’.
Reference
1 http://books.guardian.co.uk/print/0,3858,4966913-110738,00.html
Jennifer Donnelly is the author of a children’s picture book, Humble Pie, and The Tea Rose, the first in a trilogy for adults. She is currently writing the second novel in the trilogy, and another novel for young people, set during the French Revolution. A Gathering Light also won the Los Angeles Prize for Young Adult Fiction, and a Michael L. Printz Honor from the American Library Association. She lives in New York with her husband and very young daughter Daisy. There’s more about her on her website (www.jenniferdonnelly.com).
Updated: 20 January 2005