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Amazon.com Review

A Q&A with Author Heather Clay

Question: This is your first novel. What was your inspiration for writing Losing Charlotte?

Heather Clay: I had heard of maternal deaths like the one that occurs in Losing Charlotte, and I suppose the inspiration for a book came at the point my imagination took over after the bare facts of such accounts had been related to me. These deaths are rare, but they do happen, and the idea of something so Victorian happening in a modern hospital setting led me to wonder how such an event would affect the modern family--in which, for example, the old-fashioned expectation that a widower might court his wife’s surviving sister has ceased to exist, but might be rattling around subconsciously somewhere in the mind of one or more of the characters. The plot and questions that coalesced around such an event brought much that I wanted to explore about family ties, place, and the gaps siblings are asked to fill in for one another to the surface, and the writing took off from there.

Question: The story unfolds in two locations: a horse farm in Kentucky and the West Village in New York City. You live in New York now. Did you grow up on a farm?

Heather Clay: I did. The setting of Four Corners Farm is almost completely autobiographical; my family runs a Thoroughbred horse farm in central Kentucky, which functions as its own little universe, and had always been a seminal place in my life and writing. The contrast between the two places where I spend the majority of my time--Kentucky and New York--and between the notions of North and South, as well as the community life that a family farm necessitates versus the isolation and independence possible in a large city, seemed fertile ground to plow as I told the story of two sisters with very distinct personalities and lives.

Question: The story is told from the perspectives of two characters--Charlotte’s sister Knox and Charlotte’s husband Bruce. Did you always know that Charlotte’s character would come to be shaped through Knox and Bruce? Who was more difficult to write?

Heather Clay: The novel went through more populous incarnations; at one point, every character in it had a voice. But as the book began to take shape in part as the story around an absence, a lacuna which each of Charlotte’s family members would describe somewhat differently and mourn differently, it made sense to me to focus in on the two characters who had the most to lose when she died: Bruce, for obvious reasons, and Knox, because she has so much unfinished business with Charlotte, and because she defines herself by the ways in which she is different from Charlotte, and has no practice existing without her sister to measure herself against.

I knew I wanted Knox and Bruce in the same house, bumping up against each other and caring for babies, but throughout, I found Bruce’s voice much easier to write in. I’m not sure why. Perhaps I chafed at times against Knox’s regressive tendencies, her desire to arrest herself in an idealized past. Or simply that Bruce’s story falls more outside my own experience, so I felt freer to imagine it.

Question: The relationship that grows between Knox and Bruce, who are virtually strangers brought together after Charlotte’s death, is fascinating. How did you approach developing this dynamic?

Heather Clay: I was afraid to go there, at first, which was part of why I kept writing chapter upon chapter in different voices. I was circling the scenes I needed to create between the two of them very warily, because I didn’t want to descend into cliché, and yet I knew that, in some form, whether verbally, sexually, or otherwise, they needed to confront each other. At once point, I kept sending Bruce out for long, meandering walks, just to keep from diving in to the dynamic you describe! Finally, there was nothing left but to write those scenes, as halting and awkward and difficult to render as they were.

Question: You have two daughters and have written for Parenting Magazine. Were you already a mother when you started writing Losing Charlotte? The atmospheric way you write about the babies in their surroundings is very striking.

Heather Clay: One of the fantastic and unexpected boons of having stewed over the book so long was the experience I gained in the meantime: becoming a mother to two baby girls! Certainly, becoming steeped in infant care, physically, emotionally, and every-which-way, made my rendering of the day-to-day tasks Bruce and Knox face more accurate, and hopefully their responses to Ethan and Ben deeper and richer on the page. Sometimes I wonder if I could only have started a book about a mother’s death in childbirth before I had children, and only finished it--and sounded halfway knowledgeable--once my daughters were here.

Question: Whom do you read who inspires you? What are you reading now?

Heather Clay: I just finished Penelope Lively’s

(Photo © Elena Seibert)

From Publishers Weekly

Clay's promising if uneven debut scrutinizes the complicated relationship between two very different sisters. Knox Bolling has always resented her beautiful sister, Charlotte, and blames Charlotte for her situation. She's 34, living on her parents' Kentucky horse farm and unable to commit to her boyfriend's repeated marriage proposals. Charlotte, on the other hand, has moved to New York City, where she dabbles in acting and holds a series of dead-end jobs before meeting money manager Bruce Tavert, who, after a brief courtship, proposes. Their intention to start a family, however, proves deadly for Charlotte, who dies in childbirth, leaving Bruce with premature twin boys and providing Knox with an opportunity to explore life outside of Kentucky by coming to New York to help Bruce. Things quickly get creepy as Knox tries out life as Charlotte, and the narrative takes on a stark gothic eeriness. New York is more difficult than Kentucky for Clay to nail down, and some of Knox's late-book behavior verges on Fatal Attraction–type obsession before backtracking into something just short of prudent uplift. It's a strange mix—not altogether unappealing, but not a knockout, either. (Mar.)
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