GOING OVER is the Gold Medal Winner of the Parents' Choice Awards, Historical Fiction

And I am flummoxed.

And INCREDIBLY grateful.

Oh my goodness.

Teresa DiFalco, Parents Choice Awards: How can I thank you?

The astonishing citation is here.

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historical fiction as a way of living now

These brilliant words on historical fiction—what it should do, why it matters—come by way of Andrew Miller, by way of the Guardian, by way of Shelf Awareness.  In all that I write that looks back, I am, like Miller, looking at now.  He says it better than I ever could:

As a boy I understood perfectly that history is not something apart from us, sealed off. It is in our blood, our music, our language, the buildings we pass on the way to work. And at its best, historical fiction is never a turning away from the Now but one of the ways in which our experience of the contemporary is revived. Janus-like, such books look both to the past and to the present, and there is no need to laboriously draw out the parallels for they suggest themselves, inevitably and plentifully.

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Historical Fiction

So there I was, on the train, after a day of work on my historical novel. I had the latest New Yorker on my lap, was reading back to front, as I do, was all caught up in the Updike critique of Andrew Sean Greer's new "The Story of a Marriage," when I came upon this quoted bit from none other than Henry James, who was writing (Updike tells us) to Sarah Orne Jewett:

"You may multiply the little facts that can be got from pictures & documents, relics & prints, as much as you like—the real thing is almost impossible to do, & in its essence the whole effect is nought.... You have to think with your modern apparatus a man, a woman,—or rather fifty—whose own thinking was intensely-otherwise conditioned, you have to simplify back by an amazing tour de force—& even then it's all humbug."

Humbug? I thought. Oh my. Please, after all this time and work, don't tell me that.

The key, I've always thought, to historical fiction, is to live it in your mind as if it is happening right now. To not let a single speck of dust layer down upon the story. To achieve the essential urgency.

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