Hope finally Trumps fear
After the 2016 US election, Karen Joy Fowler stopped writing for more than a year. Now she’s back with a novel about Abraham Lincoln’s killer, writes Nick Duerden
Karen Joy Fowler, the American writer whose 2013 novel We Are All Completely Beside Ourselves was shortlisted for the Booker Prize, was halfway through writing her next book when Donald Trump was elected president, prompting her to abandon it entirely.
“Oh, I was silenced for at least a year and possibly more,” she says from her home in Santa Cruz, California. “I was actually in England on election day, and had assured all my British friends that there was no way it could happen.
“I really believed that the election of Barack Obama had meant something about the country, which I now think it did not mean. So I was completely unhinged by Trump’s win, and spent a lot of time thinking: what’s the point of writing books? What good can they possibly do?”
She did come to accept this new reality, however discombobulating, and eventually returned to her desk. Her new novel, Booth, is a historical epic that traces the tribulations of the family of John Wilkes Booth, the man who in 1865 assassinated President Abraham Lincoln at the end of the Civil War.
In the US, everyone knows Booth’s name, but less is known about his early life. Booth had grown up with nine siblings, several of whom, like him, would go on to become actors. Booth himself was vigorously opposed to Lincoln’s plans to end slavery, while the rest of the family were affected by the vicissitudes of the era. Over almost 500 pages, Fowler meticulously details the poverty that surrounded them, the illness, alcoholism and the “gore and shit” of childbirth.
“I found that the very thing that had silenced me in writing the book were the things that allowed me to go forward with it,” she says. “The Civil War still resonates throughout my country, and the issues that brought Trump to power are the same that plunged the US into that war.” Like many “sane and reasonable” people, Fowler is horrified by
US gun laws. “If the Sandy Hook tragedy [the 2012 Connecticut school shooting], where tiny little children were massacred, wasn’t enough to move the needle, then nothing will be. These are blood sacrifices that apparently we have to keep making.” Fowler has been writing fiction for five decades. The 72-year-old, who has two children and seven grandchildren, began writing in her thirties, focusing predominantly on sci-fi before, in 2004, adopting a more mainstream palette for The Jane Austen Book Club, which was turned into a crowd-pleasing film. At the time, her publisher was wary of her abrupt shift in genre. “She thought that a lot of women – and men – who liked Jane Austen wouldn’t pick up a book about her if they knew it was written by a sciencefiction writer.” On the day of publication, she happened to win a big sci-fi award. “And my publisher said: ‘Oh f***, is there any way we can keep that information from coming out?’” She laughs. “I think she was underestimating the Jane Austenloving women of the world.”
Fowler’s next book, We Are All Completely Beside Ourselves, was an even bigger hit. It was inspired by the true story of an American family who raised a chimpanzee as a human to see what would happen. Its Booker nod, Fowler says, “changed absolutely everything in my life. I travelled the world, met some wonderful people.”
She had hoped to follow that success rather more quickly than she ended up doing. ”I don’t think I’m a slow writer, but I am slow at having good ideas.”
Fatally, she is also easily distracted. “I spend enormous amounts of time on the internet doomscrolling, reassuring myself that, yes indeed, the world is going to hell in a hand basket.”
As if mindful that light relief is needed, Fowler’s dog Lily, a cute pom pom of white fluff, jumps on to her lap.
“I actually have very little reason not to be cheerful,” Fowler says. “I have a lovely life, and everyone I know is a good person, but when I go online, it just seems there are horrible people who own the world and are doing catastrophic things to others for no reason at all.” She looks down at her dog, and holds her tight. “It drives me nuts.”
“The issues that brought Trump to power are the same that plunged the US into the Civil War”
Booth by Karen Joy Fowler is published by Serpent’s Tail, price £18.99