Q. How did you come up with the idea for Local Knowledge? Is it based on people and places you know in real life?
A. Yes, the story is based on several different real-life elements, the most important being the tremendous building boom that occurred all across the country in the last 1990s. My husband and I have owned a small house in Massachusetts for many years in a lovely, welcoming town a bit like Red River. After 9/11, real estate values and second-home building escalated dramatically, fueled mainly by city-dwellers. I found the clash of cultures between a primarily rural, close-knit community and the recently arrived upscale “weekenders” a rich vein to mine thematically.
Maddie is based very roughly on a woman I met for all of one hour, and I don’t even remember her real name. She was a young real estate agent who was helping my younger sister and her husband find a weekend house not far from ours. My sister wanted our opinion of a place she had seen, and asked her agent to show it to us. When we climbed into the agent’s car, I saw a kid’s backpack and other signs of personal life. The woman told us that she had three girls and that she’d grown up in the area. She pointed out a dirt road that led up to “a pond where everyone goes to swim.” The Zeller home is modeled on the striking contemporary house that we saw that day.
Q. You’ve written Local Knowledge in Maddie’s voice. But your background in many ways — an advertising executive in New York City — is really more like Anne’s. What made you choose Maddie’s point of view?
A. Well, I grew up in a small town in Pennsylvania, in an area that had been agricultural not that long ago. Over the years, I’ve watched the countryside be taken over — in a much more brutal way than Red River — by endless housing developments and strip malls. So I understand the sadness of knowing that “the forests and meadows of my girlhood ... [are] all gone now and never to be recovered.” More than that, though, I felt that this particular story had to be written in the voice of someone who was born in the town and loved the area — but who also aspired to something more. The only thing Maddie and Paul have is the land and, ironically, both have to see it divided and torn up in order to succeed. As Luke says: “I feel like we're cannibalizing our birthright. The one good, beautiful thing we ever had.”
I did feel I was taking some risks assuming Maddie’s point of view. I had to empathize with her without being condescending. I had to try to become her, and one thing that really helped me was when I decided that it was okay to have her thoughts and feelings be conveyed in a more “sophisticated” way than through her everyday speaking voice. I believe we express our deepest and truest selves through the use of a special interior language.
Q. Anne is a complicated character. Did you find her hard to write?
A. Absolutely. She was by far the most difficult, because I wanted to have Maddie be really taken with her, at the same time I needed to signal to the reader that Anne might have some real problems. So I had Paul, who in my mind is the moral center of the book, sound the alarm about her first. The reader, in turn, becomes aware of her erratic moods and questionable parenting, but Maddie keeps making excuses for her behavior. Anne’s friendship comes to mean so much to Maddie that she’s willing to turn a blind eye to her faults. By the time Maddie decides to let Rachel continue to babysit for the Zellers — despite knowing that Anne and Luke are having an affair — I hope it’s plain that Maddie is making a serious mistake. I actually rewrote that chapter several times, each time trying to make it clearer that it was a critical turning point for Maddie.
Q. How did you learn about the real estate business? Did you do research? Did you talk to working real estate agents?
A. I did both. I was very lucky to find a bright young woman who was just starting out in real estate sales who sat down with me several times and walked me through her workday, the computer programs her agency used, how she was going about building a client base, and so forth. At the end of one of our sessions, I met her boss, who told me she was proud of “her baby broker,” which is what I had Nana call Maddie at one point.
I also spent a lot of time on the internet (a godsend for researching just about anything in the world!), boning up on real estate classes and requirements for becoming a registered agent. And I bought and studied the kinds of test prep books Maddie would have used to get her certification.
Q. You have Maddie say at one point: “I suppose every place on earth has its own version of royalty.” Did the small town where you grew up have a version?
A. Oh, yes. The family was quite different from the Barnett clan, but also very wealthy, envied, and emulated. They also experienced a lot of tragedy over the years. I think American royalty is concerned primarily with money rather than blood lines, but it doesn’t make it any less real and powerful. I am drawn to writing about the dynamics of families and small towns, and I think this is a theme — in Fitzgerald’s famous summation “the rich are different from you and me”— that is endlessly fascinating.
Q. You don’t have children, and yet you write about them with what seems like firsthand knowledge, Rachel especially. Where did she come from?
A. I’m a very proud and happy aunt to a growing brood of kids, and I’m close enough to most of them to believe, as Maddie says early on, that they “come out of the box fully assembled for the most part.” The fictional Alden children were like that for me, especially Beanie, though I think she is the most fictionalized of the three. I borrowed little bits and pieces of girls I know to help imagine Rachel, but she’s not really at all like any teenager in my life now. If anything, she’s probably more like me when I was that age. I’ve paid close attention when my friends talk about raising their teenage girls; that’s primarily how I worked out Maddie’s and Rachel’s relationship. I think a big part of learning how to write is knowing how to listen.
Q. What authors to you like and did any one of them influence you in writing this book?
A. I read a lot of fiction and poetry and my list of favorite writers is long, lowbrow, highfalutin, and all over the place. In no particular order, I love the fiction of Iris Murdoch, P.D. James, John Fowles, F. Scott and Penelope Fitzgerald, Susan Isaacs, and Alan Furst, and the poetry of Richard Wilbur, Mary Oliver, Elizabeth Bishop, and Theodore Roethke, to name just a very quick and beloved few. I’ve long admired the writing of Jane Smiley, from the early murder mystery Duplicate Keys and the heartbreaking short stories in Age of Grief to her recent, enlightening nonfiction book Thirteen Ways of Looking at a Novel. I reread her Pulitzer-Prize winning A Thousand Acres recently. Along many other things, it tells the story of the demise of a farming community in the midwest. It remains, to my mind, one of the great novels of our time.
Q. Do you have a set writing routine?
A. I usually wake up early and reread whatever I’ve been working on. I revise constantly on the computer. (It continues to amaze me how Tolstoy could have written War and Peace in longhand!) Then I let the demands of daily life intervene for several hours and pick up again in the afternoon. Most days, I don’t hit my stride until three o’clock or so, and then if I’m lucky get two or three good, productive hours in. I think a lot about what I’m working on when I’m not actually writing. When I’m running, for instance, or driving in my car back and forth from the city to the country. I try to work out problems — a scene I can’t get off the ground, a character who refuses to behave— during that two-and-a-half hour stretch.
Q. Are you working on something new?
A. Yes, I’m working on a novel now, also about a small town, family, friendship, and a secret long buried in the past. In every other way, though, the new story is totally different from Local Knowledge.