The Why of Things: A Novel (39 page)

Authors: Elizabeth Hartley Winthrop

7. Hobbster is an interesting concept: an imaginary friend for a child who needs one but who hasn’t imagined one for themselves. Where did this idea come from? Was there a Hobbster in your own childhood?

Many ideas in fiction are strictly fictional, but some are shamelessly ripped from life, and Hobbster was one of these. Though my imaginary creation had a different name, I was a form of Hobbster for my middle sister one summer when we were about the same ages as Sophie and Eve, when Sophie created Hobbster for her sister.

8. On page 245, Joan somewhat disagrees with Elizabeth’s claim that she knows who she is. There are obvious reasons—Elizabeth may know about where Joan lives but not about their shared loss—but beyond that, do you think this is a claim that can be made for most characters of one another? Or people in the real world for that matter? Do you believe people who think they know each other don’t always
really
know each other as well as they think?

In a way, yes, I do think that people often don’t know each other as well as they think they do, or at least what the other is thinking or feeling. It’s one of the reasons why writing from multiple characters’ points of view so fascinates me; I can explore what each one thinks of the same situation, and of each other, and show the idiosyncrasies of inner experience and the contrasting world of other people.

9. In one scene from the book, Anders passes the railroad track where his daughter died and muses over how insignificant the spot is to daily commuters who simply pass it by. Yet it is a sacred spot to him. In a sense, are all spots sacred, if we are made aware of what has transpired there?

I do think so, and it is an overwhelming thought—things that are important to somebody, maybe even life-changing, take place in mundane spots every day, and so yes, in a way, all spots have an element of the sacred. Joan also grapples with that question, though in a different way; it occurs to her in an early chapter to reassure Eloise that people die all over the place every day, and yet she doesn’t consider these places “haunted,” so why then should their quarry be?

10. When visiting the junkyard, Eve is taken by the idea of car parts being reused—the idea that cars have histories that will live on in other cars. She considers the thought “creepy and cool” at the same time. Can that also be said of writing a novel: Will these thoughts, whether prompted by real life or imagination, become a kind of living history?

I’d love to think so—that my novels will withstand the test of time and live on in perpetuity, my words alive on the page forever—but in truth that doesn’t cross my mind as I write a novel. It might sound simplistic, but when I write a novel I’m just doing what I do, hoping, of course, that people will care to read my thoughts, but counting on nothing. I don’t think of my novels as my legacy, or anything like that.

11. As Anders prepares to go SCUBA diving at Norman’s Woe, he makes reference to the Henry Wadsworth Longfellow poem, “The Wreck of the Hesperus.” Can you talk a little about the poem and how it relates to this story and the characters in this novel?

Norman’s Woe is an actual reef off of Cape Ann, one where there have indeed been several wrecks over the years, including that of the
Favorite,
which is the inspiration for Longefellow’s poem, “The Wreck of the Hesperus.” The poem is about a ship captain who brings his daughter along on a winter voyage, ignoring warnings of a potential hurricane and tying her to her mast when the storm does indeed materialize. The ship crashes into the rocks at Norman’s Woe and sinks, and the next morning a fisherman finds the body of the daughter still lashed to the mast and drifting in nearby surf.

As I researched various diving spots around Cape Ann, looking for a setting that might work for Anders’ last dive, once I stumbled upon the reef at Norman’s Woe—which I’d always known existed, but never as a spot for diving—I knew, being familiar with Longfellow’s poem, that there was no way his last dive could take place anywhere else. It was too perfect on too many levels: on one level it is simply a beautiful and harrowing dive; on another, it is what Anders would consider one of those “sacred spots” where people have died; and finally, that the famous poem written about it features the death of a daughter made it an utter boon. Though I played with the idea of expounding on the specific content of the poem (having Anders consider the captain’s daughter specifically, or discuss with Joan the captain’s guilt v. their guilt etc.), in the end this all seemed to heavy-handed, and I chose to simply mention the poem in passing. Enough, it seemed when it came to Norman’s Woe, was enough.

12. You have a knack for finding deep emotion in the simple moments: a tucked-away funeral program, a discarded grocery store address, a seashell found in a pocket, holding hands under a night sky. These are the sorts of things people experience every day but sometimes fail to notice. What is it about such moments that you find interesting?

It sounds clichéd, maybe, but life today is so fast-paced I think that many of us do often gloss over these sorts of moments, which, if we stopped and considered them, might really give us pause. Perhaps it’s that we’re so busy searching for some larger thing in life, scanning the horizon for the “big thing” that will make us go “Aha! That’s what I’ve been looking for!” that we look right over the seashells and funeral programs as incidental when really, I think, it is those small things that a real life is made of. If people stopped and took of stock of all the small instances of magic or sadness, those gestures of humanity that happen around us daily—and these things do happen, if you look, whether it’s as small as watching a father lift his child closer to a flower, or noticing a woman stumble in the street—I think (it may be bold to say) they’d find their lives that much richer.

13. In the last chapter of the book, Joan follows the stranger who has pulled into their drive and he leads her to Elizabeth’s house. Joan realizes this must be James Favazza’s brother. She imagines what she’d like to do, what the characters in her book would do, but realizes that it is not what she will do in real life.
“Perhaps in her book, things will turn out differently.”
Are some of those scenarios things you considered having happen in the novel? On the flip side, do you sometimes find yourself doing things in a novel that you wish had been done in real life?

I envisioned all sorts of scenarios for Joan, as she followed the stranger in the maroon car, but in the end, I wrote none of them out, because what
does
happen (nothing, aside from the realization that the man is James’ brother) seemed right, and true to life. That said, it was hard for me to imagine that the scenarios that had occurred to me (her accosting him, etc.) wouldn’t have occurred to either Joan or the reader, and it seemed fitting at least to acknowledge them. I don’t know if I would have done this if Joan hadn’t been a writer—I don’t, for instance, have Eve consider alternate courses of action from the ones the takes, even though I, as the writer, did consider them, but for Joan, since she already thinks of herself as a “character,” I felt I could get away with it.

14. What’s next? What are you working on right now?

That’s a good question. As I answer these questions, I’m working on a seven-month-old daughter, who three months ago decided she didn’t much care for naps. Before that happened, I had started work on a somewhat sprawling novel, about nine members of a family brought together by an accident that has left the matriarch in a coma. Of course, they all come to the book with their own issues and stories, so it’s almost like writing several books in one. And I’ve had on the back burner for years and years a series of interrelated short stories, which take place, as does
The Why of Things,
on Cape Ann. I’m not sure which project I’ll return to when I get back to writing, or if I’ll find myself writing something entirely different . . . maybe to do with napping.

Elizabeth Hartley Winthrop
was born and raised in New York City. She earned her BA from Harvard University, graduating Phi Beta Kappa and summa cum laude, and earned her MFA in fiction from UC Irvine, where she was the recipient of the Schaeffer Writing Fellowship. She is the author of two novels,
Fireworks
(Knopf 2006) and
December
(Knopf 2008), and her short fiction has appeared in
Wind, The Evansville Review, The Missouri Review, The Red Rock Review
, and
Indiana Review
. She currently lives in Massachusetts with her husband, daughter, and Saint Bernard.

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This book is a work of fiction. Any references to historical events, real people, or real places are used fictitiously. Other names, characters, places, and events are products of the author’s imagination, and any resemblance to actual events or places or persons, living or dead, is entirely coincidental.

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First Simon & Schuster hardcover edition June 2013

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Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication Data

Winthrop, Elizabeth Hartley.

The why of things / by Elizabeth Hartley Winthrop.—1st

Simon & Schuster hardcover ed.

pages cm

1. Murder—Investigation—Fiction. 2. Domestic fiction. 3. Psychological fiction. I. Title.

PS3623.I7W49 2013

813'.6—dc23

2012041122