About Martha’s novel:
“Book groups will especially enjoy the distinctive setting, the rich historical details,
and the thorny issues begging to be discussed.” (Library Journal)
Q&A with author Martha Conway about her new novel: We Meet Apart
If I was to ask you, who is Martha Conway, what would you say?
I’m a creative writing instructor for Stanford’s Writing Ce1tificate program, and I’ve written five historical nov-els centered on family drama. I grew up in a large Irish family with six sisters-no brothers. Both my school best friend and my neighborhood best friend also only had sisters, no brothers. So I write a lot about sisters.
Also, I always have a little kid in my book, because I think little kids are hysterical.
Can you tell us a bit about your inspiration for writing your novel, WE MEET APART?
I grew up in a large Irish-American community, and I’ve always wanted to write a novel set in Ireland. But my inspiration to get sta1ted was an airplane-crash scare. On my 42nd birthday, I was with my husband and our two children and we were flying over the Atlantic Ocean, coming back from Europe. About an hour into the flight the pilot made an announcement that there was airplane trouble, and we had to tum around and do an emergency landing in Shannon, Ireland. Obviously, since I’m here now, you can tell that it all turned out okay. But it was really scary. We landed, and the airline put us up in a little hotel outside Shannon. When my husband took our kids downstairs to get some food, I stayed behind because I wanted to take a moment.
Here I was in Ireland, where my ancestors on both sides of my family had lived for 500 years. It was my birth-day, and although I didn’t just have a near-death experience, it FELT like I had a near-death experience. I had wanted to write about Ireland, and now here I was, in Ireland, and it just felt like a sign.
The title of your novel, WE MEET APART – is it inspired by the Emily Dickinson poem “And so we must meet apart … ?” What was it about this poem that tied into the larger theme of the novel?
I once read that Ray Bradbury always reads poetry before bed, so I staited doing that, too. When I read Emily Dickinson’s poem with the line, “And so we must meet apart,” I got a sort of shiver. The two sisters I was writing about were in two different realities, and can only see each other for an hour at dusk. When I read that poem, I thought this is exactly what is happening with Gaby and Sabine! They have to meet, they love each other, but they’re also apart.
Something that we were curious about is the magical elements of the book, and if you initially envisioned them, or if you were inspired by reading Irish literature about that special hour at dusk, the time of pookies and ghosts?
I did it completely backwards. I came up with the idea, and then I started researching, hoping I would find something that I could pin it on and I did. I found a 17th century pamphlet about pookies and ghosts and how they are best seen at twilight. And I was like, bang, that’s it. I can do it.
It’s interesting that you went about it backwards. It’s almost like you felt there was a little magical piece fitting into place to help the story along?
You try to find stories that will support your idea, and this time I did!
In the beginning, when you introduced yourself, you were talking about how you like to write about strong heroines. And you said before that you write historical fiction about heroines who get what they want, though, at a cost. Did you always know that historical fiction was something you wanted to write? And why?
Yes, I trunk I did always know that I wanted to write historical fiction, although I didn’t start that way. I was a history and English double major in college, and I’m one of seven sisters, no brothers, so the female story is always forefront in my mind. I’m always interested in women, and I feel like really empowering stories have women who get something in the end, and who don’t just fail, which is certainly a valid story, but I really am more hopeful than that. But, I’m also a realist, so there is always a cost. But I like happy endings.
So as one of the youngest of seven sisters, how does this dynamic feed into your writing?
Well, I almost always have sisters in my stories, although these days, I think the best friend so1t of is a sub-stitute for a sister. So I think in terms of character, you can kind of go either way. It’s either a sister or best friend. And this is the person who will tell you things that maybe you don’t want to know, but they’ll tell you the truth, and I trunk that’s really important in our lives.
I love that. And have your siblings read this yet?
No, they are dying to read it. They keep telling me how much they want to read it, and I’m a little afraid, frankly, but we’ll see what they think.
Family! Why are you afraid?
Because they’ll say what they think. They’ll tell me exactly what they think. Sisters are the ones who tell you the truth. I’m one of the younger ones, and so my older sisters feel free to let me know where I’ve gone wrong. But they also are very supportive, and they tell me what they love, too.
Now, the novel makes us wonder if we can ever really let go of the family that we have lost. How did writing about sisterhood across life and death and alternate realities shape your understanding of grief and of attachment?
That’s a great question. I would say that one of the things that I was exploring was how you can’t really let go of grief altogether. Everybody processes it differently. Both of my main characters have lost their parents, and they trunk their sister, their only sibling, is also dead. One of them is very sad and feels stuck, and the other one is angry. She’s angry that everybody has left her. So exploring these two different ways of dealing with loss, that was interesting to me.
Did you feel that it was important for you to balance that sorrow with the resilience that ultimately car-ries through the story?
Absolutely, women are very resilient. Men are very resilient. People are very resilient.And as I say, I like to have a happy ending. So I want to see a character work through whatever it is that they need to work through and come out on the other side. They may not get what they initially THOUGHT they wanted, but they get something important.
Now, in the novel, you make the choice for Gabby to be the only one that knows that they’re not physi-cally in the same world. Is there a reason that you made that choice?
I didn’t really want to spend a whole lot of time trying to be tricky and mysterious. I wanted one of the sisters to know what was going on, because I wanted the reader to know what was going on, more or less. The reader is going to ask, “why did this happen?” “Why is it happening?” And so I wanted to have a character who asked the same questions and got answers that maybe helped and maybe didn’t. And then the other character, I want-ed her to be in the dark,just because I thought it was more interesting that way.
You’ve received acclaim as an author for blending meticulous historical details with elements of magical realism. Is it difficult to balance the suspense you are building and the emotional intimacy in your wri-ting with supernatural elements without letting one element supersede the other?
I do think it’s difficult to balance emotion and plot. In every novel that I write, I want to have something that happens, and I want to note how the characters feel about what happens. Both of those elements are very important.
And if somebody asked you to describe your book, and asked what kind of genre your book falls into, how would you answer that?
I have noticed that blended genres are really on the uprise. And this one is right there in the sweet spot. It’s historical fiction. So people who like historical fiction will, I hope, love the details of what life was like in Ire-land in 1940. And for people who want a little mystery, there’s this other element of an alternative universe, an alternative history, in which Ireland gets taken over by Nazi Germany (which didn’t really happen.) So I would say it’s historical fiction with a touch of magic.
So Sabine’s timeline is an alternate history of Nazi occupied Ireland, right? How much of what you wrote is part of the very real plan that the Nazis had for Operation Green? And how much did you go off the script and fill in the blanks yourself?
I used a document called Operation Green which Nazi Germany put together outlining how they would in-vade Ireland and how they would govern it once they conquered it. You can find and read this document, and it’s about 20 pages long as a so1t of military blueprint. In order to put in the real, human details, I researched Norway and Poland and other countries that had been invaded by Germany, and what happened to people there, and how they lived their lives under Nazi rule.
To be honest, a lot of people, when I talk about this book, say to me, oh, did Germany invade Ireland? Many people asked me thay question. So, one of the key things I wanted to do was explain history a little bit, but not be patronizing about it, so that people understand that Germany did NOT invade Ireland in WW2. If our reality is the right reality, it did not happen.
And then obviously there’s the situation with the Irish characters in both timelines, sometimes feeling more hostile towards the British than towards the Nazis. Why was it important to show this?
In the very beginning, I was intrigued by the idea that the enemy of my enemy is my friend. So the English and the Irish were enemies for 800 years. The English were ruling Ireland. It was bloody. There were lots of conflicts. And the Irish did not become their own independent country again until 1922, so very, very close to World War II. So there was still a lot of animosity towards the English, and some of that resulted in the Irish being more open to Nazi Germany, who, as you know, were the enemy of the English during the war.
In Sabine’s timeline, Julianne goes to Argentina before the Nazis take over her home. Was the idea to make her family be Nazi sympathizers in both timelines?
That’s a really interesting idea. The thing that I liked about Julianne leaving is that in the other timeline, she has this idea of herself as a rebel. But when somebody really does come to take over her land, she runs away. We often have ideas of ourselves, that we’re heroes, but maybe when push comes to shove, not so much.
Some readers might question Sabine’s love story. Why was this relationship important to write for you?
Sabine is somebody who really wants love, she’s looking for love, and she thinks that there’s somebody special out there for her, as we all probably do. I wanted her to fall in love with someone who was complicated. I wanted the relationship to be complicated. Sabine is susceptible. She’s vulnerable. Is the soldier she falls for playing her, or is he not? The reader can decide about that. So I wanted her to, you know, win. For her, it’s a win. She has her happy ending. We’re not so sure that the ending for her is happy, but maybe that’s giving away too much. And it fits in with the idea of “who is the enemy?” Is every enemy soldier a personal enemy? Is every friendly face a personal friend? Even your own family, maybe they don’t want you to have what YOU want to have, for reasons of their own.
Sabine is also born with a congenital limb deficiency. Why was it important to include this in the book?
Well, I have a younger sister who’s passed away now, but she had many mental and physical disabilities, one of which was that she had limited use of her hands. I didn’t start off thinking that I would write about that aspect of my sister. But as the story grew, one day I was writing a scene, and I was writing about Gaby’s sister.
This was before I knew that there would be two realities. This sister did not have a hand, so I went with it to see what it would be like. And I think that this adds to her character. You see her struggling, but you also see that this—her congenital anomaly—is not her whole story. Her whole story is richer, of course. Her loss of a hand is one part of her, and as somebody who has a family member who has mobility issues, it was important to me, as I wrote, to show how this isn’t their whole story, but it’s part of their story.
I did a lot of research around the hand specifically, the loss of a hand, or a short arm; I read memoirs and first hand accounts of people who have this particular issue, and that’s how I got some of my details. I also used a lot of details from my own life with my sister.
At the beginning of our interview, you told a pretty frightening story about an emergency landing in Ireland you experienced on your 42nd birthday. You’ve also mentioned before that your father told a remarkable story at his 100th birthday party about training as a Navy pilot at the end of the war, when his engine failed mid flight and only restarted on the third attempt. Was there a reason you wanted to include this scene, in particular?
There are a couple of reasons. I wanted there to be a compelling beginning – it’s prologue, and it’s an important moment that changes the course of the two sisters’ story. But thematically, it also encompasses a lot of what the story is about.
And then, I would say it was about five years after I wrote that scene, my father told the family a story which I had never heard before. And to be honest, it kind of freaked me out, because I wrote the first scene in We Meet Apart without knowing that this actually happened to my father. He told this story at his 100th birthday party last November. And, you know, we all got up and made speeches, and part of his speech was this story about almost going down with his plane when he was training as a Navy pilot. And it was eerie—his plane engine cut out, and he tried to re-start it twice without success. The plane was shaking and he was looking for a place to land when he decided to try the engine once more, and this time the engine kicked over. This is so similar to what I had written years before that I was a little bit in shock.
If you would like Martha to visit your book group, either in person or remotely, please contact her at mmconway@gmail.com. Reader book guides are available.