In this episode, I chat with author Clare Beams about her new novel The Garden, earning her MFA from Columbia University, her surprising stint as a high school English teacher on Cape Cod, and how these experiences have informed her writing career. Claire's work is renowned for its enchanting touch of magical realism, earning comparisons to literary greats like Shirley Jackson.
We discuss the history of diethylstilbestrol (DES). This synthetic non-steroidal estrogen was historically widely used to prevent potential miscarriages by stimulating the synthesis of estrogen and progesterone in the placenta. Claire’s thoughtful insights provide a deep dive into the complex issues surrounding the use of DES and how they are intricately woven into The Garden.
Clare reflects on her childhood in Newtown, Connecticut, and reveals how her early fascination with magical realism was sparked by the historic house she grew up in. We touch on the generational impact of maternal suffering and resilience, and Claire shares her current reading recommendations alongside a sneak peek into her upcoming project.
Clare Beams
Terrace Story, Hilary Leichter
The Bookshop Podcast
Mandy Jackson-Beverly
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Speaker 1: Hi, my name is Mandy Jackson-Beverly and I'm a
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bibliophile.
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Welcome to the Bookshop Podcast .
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Each week, I present interviews with authors, independent
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bookshop owners and booksellers from around the globe and
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publishing professionals.
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To help the show reach more people, please share episodes
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subscribe and leave a review wherever you listen to this
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podcast.
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You're listening to episode 269 .
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Before I get into this week's interview, I have a little bit
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of an update about the Bookshop podcast.
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I'm going to be changing the format and presenting the show
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every two weeks.
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I have shelves of books that I need to read for the show and
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also for my own personal reading , and a few deadlines that I
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need to catch up on, so I'll see you in two weeks time.
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Claire Beam's new novel, the Garden has been long listed for
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the 2024 Joyce Carol Oates New Literary Project Prize and
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featured on anticipated lists at lithub and bookshoporg.
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Her novel the Illness Lesson was published in February of
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2020 and was a New York Times Editor's Choice and was long
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listed for the Center for Fiction First Novel Prize.
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It was named a Best Book of 2020 by Esquire and Bustle and a
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Best Book of February by Time O Magazine and Entertainment
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Weekly.
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Her story collection we Show what we have Learned was
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published in 2016 and won the Bard Fiction Prize, along with
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being long-listed for the Story Prize, and was a Kirkus Best
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Debut of 2016.
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Claire has received fellowships from the National Endowment for
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the Arts, the Bread Loaf Writers Conference, the Sewanee
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Writers Conference, mcdowell and the Sustainable Arts Foundation
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.
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She lives in Pittsburgh with her husband and two daughters
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and currently teaches in the Randolph MFA program.
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Hi, claire, and welcome to the show.
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It's lovely to have you here.
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Speaker 2: Oh, thank you so much for having me.
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This is a total pleasure.
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Speaker 1: Well, first up, I love your new novel, the Garden.
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It is exquisite.
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But before we get to talking about the novel, let's begin
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with learning about you, growing up in Connecticut, gaining your
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MFA from Columbia University, teaching and writing.
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Speaker 2: Yeah, so I grew up in Newtown, connecticut.
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I lived there from the age of six until I graduated from high
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school, and I grew up in a house from the 1730s, so it always
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kind of felt like I was living in multiple times at once, which
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I think is part of why I am now drawn to writing about the past
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.
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I've just always felt like the past is still very much with us
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in certain ways.
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So it was a wonderful place for a fiction writer to grow up.
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I think in that way it was just a very sort of I felt
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surrounded by stories all the time.
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So, yeah, so then I went to college where I majored in
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English and creative writing, and I went straight from college
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to get my MFA at Columbia in fiction, which a lot of my
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professors had said that it probably wasn't a great idea to
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go right out of undergrad, and I sort of nodded and smiled and
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then stubbornly did what I wanted to do.
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But I do think that in my case they were right.
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I think I graduated at 24 with this MFA and I had learned a lot
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, but I hadn't yet really figured out what kind of writer
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I was, so I was still very much kind of practicing and
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discovering that, and so I knew I needed a job while I did those
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things, and so I applied for and got a job teaching high
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school English at a private school on Cape Cod.
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And, hilariously, the reason that I was drawn to that job
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initially one of the many reasons was that I thought, well
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, you know, I'll be done at 2.30 every day, I'll have all this
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time to write, which turned out not to be the way that teaching
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works.
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But the other, much more wonderful surprise of that job
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was how much I really loved teaching and just loved my
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students.
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I think that was a surprise because I had not really enjoyed
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being a ninth grader that much, but when I was the adult
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teaching them and exposing them to these pieces of literature
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that I loved so much, it really was just.
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It was so much fun.
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And so teaching is something I've been doing ever since, in
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various formats.
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Speaker 1: Well, let's go back to your little scenario about
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getting the job and thinking you'd be done by 2.30.
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Every day.
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I've done the same thing, teaching art and theater, at a
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private high school, and I don't think I've ever been so busy.
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I mean 60 hours a week, my advisee's parents showing up on
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my doorstep, it was insane.
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You have no time, none at all, except for the summers.
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The summers were pretty darn good.
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Speaker 2: Yes, I mean, the summers are magical.
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I wrote a lot in the summers for those.
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So I did that job for six years and I just I think for me I
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have never I've taught now in graduate school.
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I've taught undergrads.
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I've never worked as hard as I did when I taught high schoolers
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, and I think it's because it's every day.
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Well, and also we lived an hour from the school, so I was
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driving an hour, I was teaching my three or four sections and
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then you'd have to go home and grade what you had collected
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that day and plan for the next day, and so it just never let up
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and I graded most of the weekend.
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It was before we had kids and I have actually wondered since
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let alone writing during the year how I even would have
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managed child care, you know, because I graded most of
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Saturday and Sunday.
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But it also, I think, was so all-consuming because I just
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really loved those kids.
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I mean, I would wake up and worry about them in the middle
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of the night.
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Speaker 1: And they're needy at that age.
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I remember how needy I was at that age, even though I didn't
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think I was.
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Speaker 2: Oh, me too yes.
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Speaker 1: Let's talk about your beautiful new book, the Garden.
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How about you give us a short synopsis of the book for anyone
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who may not have read it?
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Speaker 2: Sure.
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So the Garden is set in the late 1940s in the Berkshires and
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it is the way I've been describing it it's my pregnancy
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as a haunted house novel.
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So it is set at this isolated country house turned hospital,
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where a husband and wife doctor team is trying out this
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experimental cure for repeated miscarriage.
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And our protagonist, whose name is Irene Willard, has come to
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this hospital having experienced a series of miscarriages in the
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past and she is pregnant again and very desperate to stay that
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way.
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But she is also prickly and not by nature a rule follower, and
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so being in this group sort of group home hospital, with these
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other pregnant women that she doesn't know before she arrives
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there, and without her husband because the husbands have to go
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home, having deposited their wives here is just not her
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favorite situation.
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So she is kind of grudgingly going about the treatments that
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the doctors are prescribing.
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But in the meantime she's also poking around in lots of places
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where she's not supposed to be, and in the process she discovers
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this abandoned walled garden on the grounds of the hospital and
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inside mysterious and seemingly impossible things begin to
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happen.
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And so Irene and these two other women who she befriends
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kind of in spite of herself at the hospital as the doctor's
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plans start to kind of go awry, these women have to decide if
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they're going to try to harness the garden's powers for
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themselves.
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Speaker 1: Yeah, the magical realism in this book is done
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beautifully.
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I love the blurb Kelly Link did for you which is on the back of
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the book.
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Quote the garden renders beautifully the uncanny haunted
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space that pregnancy both occupies and creates.
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Beam's glancing needle prick prose reminds me of Shirley
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Jackson's work.
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I loved this novel.
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End quote how did you feel when you first saw that blurb?
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Speaker 2: You could have knocked me over when I opened
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that email.
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It's all been worth it for this moment to have Kelly Link say
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something.
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Speaker 1: Yeah it was amazing yeah.
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And it's well-deserved.
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Let's discuss the themes within the book you have weight mouse,
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moth, snake, possum, child mother, the Berkshires 1959.
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Did you outline this story before writing or did it develop
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organically and then these themes kind of created
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themselves?
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Speaker 2: Much more the second of those.
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I am very much not an outliner, mostly because an earlier
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version of myself as a writer I was a big outliner and I kind of
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controlled and flattened all the life out of everything, and
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so the section headings that you're talking about definitely
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emerged.
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I think once I was most of the way through a full draft of the
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novel and they just felt like a wonderful way of underscoring
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kind of the shape-shifting nature that I think does feel
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true when you're carrying a baby in pregnancy.
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I remember there's a very popular pregnancy website that I
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used to go to religiously every morning when I was pregnant and
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it compared your baby to pieces of fruit in terms of its size.
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So at first you've got a grape and then you've got a lemon and
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then you have a grapefruit and then finally by the end you're
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carrying a watermelon.
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And I think I wanted something that would be kind of like the
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ghost story version of that, because I think what my section
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headings are doing and what those creatures in the novel are
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doing and what the fruit is doing, it's trying to give you,
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as the pregnant person, kind of a means of accessing something
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that you fundamentally can't access, even though it's at your
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very core.
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You see what's going on in there, and so you're searching
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for images that will help you make sense of what it is that
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you're experiencing.
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I really wanted this sense of kind of an inner and outer
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haunting at the same time.
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Speaker 1: And that came across perfectly, thank you.
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Now you said that the story was inspired by the history of
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diethylstobastrol, a synthetic non-steroidal estrogen widely
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used to prevent miscarriages from the 1940s to the 1970s.
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Were you looking for something like that to bring the story
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together, or did the story unfold around the idea of
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experimental medications for women suffering from
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miscarriages?
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Speaker 2: The drug itself was more one of the initial seeds
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for this novel and I came across a reference to this drug.
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So yes, it's diethylstilbestrol , or DES as it's often
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abbreviated.
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I was actually doing kind of 11th hour research for my
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previous novel, the Illness Lesson, where essentially my
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publisher in the United Kingdom wasn't sure that they loved the
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title, the Illness Lesson and so I was kind of poking around in
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strange medical corners of the internet trying to see if I
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could think of something better or that would please them more.
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And I ended up not finding anything like that.
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But I came across a reference to this drug and the more I read
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, the more fascinated I became.
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Initially, I think I was grabbed by the fact that I had never
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heard of this drug, even though it was really quite a slow
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unfolding disaster.
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It turned out that this drug caused pretty terrible health
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effects for the female babies of women who had taken the drug
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while pregnant.
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But because these health effects often were kind of
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confined to the reproductive tract, they sometimes weren't
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evident until those babies reached puberty.
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And it wasn't all of the children of the women who'd
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taken this drug, but it was just much higher risks of various
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malformations and various gynecological cancers that were
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otherwise quite rare.
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And so I think a few things grabbed me.
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First of all, in real life the drug really was pioneered by a
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husband and wife researcher team .
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The woman was not a clinician, the man was.
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But so that was fascinating to me because I was thinking, you
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know in the 30s and 40s, just what a struggle it would have
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been to kind of reach this place of being kind of allowed is
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maybe the wrong word but finding a way to do this kind of work
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as a woman.
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And then the woman whose name was Olive Watkins Smith livedith
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, lived until the 80s, so she would have seen this all kind of
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unfold.
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And I also was caught by the initial reasoning that these
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researchers had in prescribing, in kind of recommending the
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prescription of this drug and studying it for this use.
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They had discovered that around the time of a miscarriage
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women's hormones tend to swing pretty dramatically, and so they
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thought that if they could just even those hormonal swings out,
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maybe things would be better.
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And I think that historically, when we're talking about evening
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women out, we're often kind of heading in a sort of frightening
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direction.
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So that kind of caught me.
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And then I also just thought like why was this allowed to
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happen for so long?
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Because it was decades it was the early 40s through the early
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70s that this drug was prescribed, and sure it took a
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while for you know, for the first generation of these female
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babies born to these women to reach puberty.
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But it didn't take three decades, right?
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So I thought that you know.
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I think that I am fascinated by the kind of willful ignorance
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we have about women's bodies as a society and just all of the
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harm that kind of historically has been done from this kind of
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I think it's like a mingled squeamishness about looking too
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closely and also a kind of idea about sacredness that can get in
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the way of accuracy, I think.
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Speaker 1: I wonder if we could add to that that there are some
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who perhaps prey on women when they're going through that
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situation.
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I mean, let's face it, your emotions are running high, your
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hormones are completely crazy.
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You're experiencing so many different emotions that it's
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hard to make sense of anything.
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So there's that side of it.
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But if you look back in time, those emotions were all swept
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under the table.
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Nobody had any interest in them at all.
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Speaker 2: Which is also a kind of praying, I think.
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You know, it's a kind of leaving women alone to look for
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reasons why something would have happened, and I just think.
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Ultimately, I think what I wanted to write about was sort
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of the desire to control the uncontrollable and the ways that
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sort of society and larger groups of people and the
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patriarchy have handled that and then the way it can play out
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within the sort of soul and mind of an individual woman too.
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Speaker 1: Yeah, yeah.
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It's perfect timing for this present day and time.
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We just need to keep people in politics away from women's
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bodies.
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Okay, back to the garden.
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When publishers of PR people suggest books, I often prefer
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not to read about the story, because it's that first
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paragraph that tells everything, and the garden did not
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disappoint.
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It wasn't until I reread the book that I realized the setting
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was in the US, which comes up on page 19.
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But apart from the history of Diathyl Stuberstroll, the
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geographical location could be anywhere the building and garden
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, other vessels kind of holding the story.
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Speaker 2: The building and garden are the vessels kind of
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holding the story.
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What do you think of the concept that a story such as the
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garden is not native to a particular location but a?
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I am very drawn as a writer to these self-contained little
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worlds.
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I think you're right.
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I think this novel could be set anywhere that the house and
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garden are.
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They could only be set in the house and garden, you know, the
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story could only be set there.
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But those worlds are almost.
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They're almost separated off and I do think that you know I'm
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often drawn to I'm a writer who often is writing about schools
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or classrooms or hospitals or hotels where I can kind of get
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my characters out of the larger world and kind of seal them away
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so that the strangeness that I'm growing can really kind of
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flourish according to its own rules without the outside world
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coming in and kind of flattening things.
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Speaker 1: Oh, I love that idea.
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Speaker 2: Thank you, thank you, yeah, and I mean I think it's
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especially, you know, I definitely wanted the parallels
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in the garden between these settings and the womb, you know,
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this idea of we are growing something here and who knows in
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what direction it's growing.
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I mean, there are these great houses in the Berkshires that
00:16:43
were built mostly by Gilded Age robber barons, and I think what
00:16:48
grabbed me about that as a setting is that these houses
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were often like kind of a little too large and grand to be
00:16:55
sustainable in the rural settings where they were placed,
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so a lot of them would burn down or the family would kind of
00:17:01
not be able to pay for the upkeep of them eventually as the
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fortune sort of dwindled.
00:17:05
So I liked this idea of this kind of out of time house,
00:17:10
because they often also borrowed architectural trappings of
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earlier building styles and periods in order to make the
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houses kind of appear sufficiently grand.
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And so I liked that idea too, because I think the house ends
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up really kind of being in some ways kind of a symbol of the
00:17:25
patriarchy and that it was built by Dr Bishop, the female
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doctor's grandfather, who was one of these robber barons and
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who very much wanted to kind of like build a monument to himself
00:17:36
, and so I was kind of playing with those tensions too, I think
00:17:40
.
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Speaker 1: I was wondering if you can expand on the
00:17:42
relationships in the garden.
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We have George and Irene, margaret and Victor, pearl and
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Joe, dr and Dr Bishop and Dr Bishop and her father.
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How did you decide on the personalities between the three
00:17:54
pregnant women and their husbands, because all of them
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are so different to each other?
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Speaker 2: Yes.
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So you know the husbands are very important in this novel,
00:18:03
given that they aren't really present on the page very often
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they don't get to be at this house except on visiting days.
00:18:09
But I was aware in each case of the particular pressures of
00:18:15
each marriage being part of what had gotten each woman to this
00:18:18
place.
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So I wanted to explore kind of the different ways that that
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could look.
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I think I always knew that for how the George and Irene
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marriage was going to look they were.
00:18:28
It was very much the way that relationship was from the first,
00:18:31
from the first draft of writing about them, and that Irene is
00:18:36
so prickly and guarded and not open with the people around her.
00:18:41
But but George and her feelings for George are kind of her one
00:18:45
softness and so I wanted to play in the case of that marriage
00:18:51
with that as part of the pressures that have brought her
00:18:53
here, because I knew, given who she was, that she was gonna hate
00:18:56
being at this house hospital and that was very important for
00:19:00
the momentum of the book, that there'd be someone who's kind of
00:19:02
pushing, because otherwise you get a novel that's very much
00:19:05
about sort of stagnant, obedient waiting, which is not what we
00:19:08
want.
00:19:08
But so something needed to be very powerfully keeping her here
00:19:11
.
00:19:11
And of course she wants this baby.
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But in her case she wants the baby mostly, at least at the
00:19:18
beginning, because this person she loves more than anything in
00:19:21
the world, george, this is what he wants, and he's not demanding
00:19:26
that she go there, he's not, you know, sort of coercing her,
00:19:29
but this is his heart's desire and her heart's desire is to
00:19:32
give him what he wants.
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And then so the other two women I mean all of my characters kind
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of get built as I write about them in scenes and sort of as I
00:19:42
make them react to things.
00:19:43
So as their personalities emerged, I started to play with
00:19:47
what their marriages might look like.
00:19:49
And so we end up with, in the case of Margaret and Victor,
00:19:52
this marriage in which very much Margaret is the one who's
00:19:54
wanting to be at this house hospital because of her own just
00:19:57
desperate desire to have a baby .
00:19:59
And in the case of Pearl, we have this kind of ominous,
00:20:03
threatening figure of Joe, her husband, who really is kind of
00:20:08
angry that she hasn't been able to fulfill this role that he has
00:20:11
kind of envisioned for her.
00:20:13
And so I think I definitely wanted there to be contrast.
00:20:17
But for all of the women to kind of end up in the same place
00:20:20
, where this is an important thing for them.
00:20:22
And then, you're right, we also have the, the complications,
00:20:25
the complications of the marriage of the doctors as well,
00:20:28
in which, you know, it's unusual for the woman to be a
00:20:32
doctor at this moment.
00:20:33
But she is very much the force behind this whole project and he
00:20:36
is very much kind of the one who's giving her project
00:20:40
legitimacy in the eyes of certain people, but is not
00:20:43
really the engine.
00:20:45
Speaker 1: And then we have Dr Bishop and her father, which is
00:20:48
another dynamic, completely different relationship.
00:20:52
Speaker 2: Yeah, and her father right, and her grandfather as
00:20:55
well, Yep.
00:20:55
Speaker 1: They're all very intricate personalities.
00:20:57
Yeah, let's go back to your history.
00:21:00
You're from Newtown, Connecticut, and the house you
00:21:02
grew up in was built in the 1730s.
00:21:05
You've spoken about where the impossible and the historical
00:21:08
meet and I wondered did the house or her earlier inhabitants
00:21:13
ever whisper to you?
00:21:14
Speaker 2: I was searching so hard for the previous
00:21:18
inhabitants of that house.
00:21:18
It was my great dream in life to find either a secret passage
00:21:23
or a ghost.
00:21:23
I mean, I'm sure I actually would have been terrified,
00:21:26
especially by the ghost, but it was sort of that would have just
00:21:29
made my life.
00:21:30
I was the kind of kid who just really wanted something like
00:21:33
that to happen to me, which I think is why I was drawn so much
00:21:36
to novels in which, you know, child protagonists did make
00:21:40
really kind of impossible or strange or unusual discoveries,
00:21:43
like the Secret Garden where Mary, the protagonist in that
00:21:46
novel, finds a whole world that is hers in that garden.
00:21:49
So I spent a lot of time like kind of tapping on walls and
00:21:53
peering into the floorboards had these knot holes and you can
00:21:56
kind of shine a flashlight down.
00:21:57
I loved all the hidden spots.
00:21:59
So I never found anything as dramatic as either a secret
00:22:03
passage or an actual ghost.
00:22:05
But we did find, like behind the barn there was this, what had
00:22:08
been the place where the people who lived there, probably in the
00:22:11
1700s or early 1800s, had dumped their garbage, a lot of
00:22:15
which was these beautiful old glass bottles that had held
00:22:19
medicines and liquors, and they were these beautiful shades like
00:22:23
cobalt blue and like this really bright kind of iridescent
00:22:27
green.
00:22:27
And we found one time the head of a porcelain doll that had
00:22:32
gotten broken but was still very recognizable.
00:22:34
So you know, those all felt like finding the previous
00:22:38
inhabitants.
00:22:38
And in the basement which had a dirt floor there were these
00:22:41
shelves where somebody you know probably in the basement which
00:22:44
had a dirt floor, there were these shelves where somebody you
00:22:46
know, probably in the 1900s sometime, had lined up all their
00:22:49
ball jars for canning and they were just still sort of there
00:22:53
waiting, you know.
00:22:53
So all of that felt very much like I couldn't get at the
00:22:55
actual people, but I was getting at what they had left behind
00:22:56
and their stories.
00:22:57
Yes, and their stories, exactly, exactly, yeah.
00:23:00
Speaker 1: And, in reflection, do you think this part of your
00:23:03
childhood is what drew you to magical realism?
00:23:06
Speaker 2: I am sure it's part of it.
00:23:08
The strange, or the surreal, turns out to be very, very
00:23:12
important for me as a writer, and you know, when I was talking
00:23:14
earlier about the ways in which I was still very young as a
00:23:17
writer when I graduated from my MFA program, I think part of
00:23:20
that is that I had not yet discovered this about myself.
00:23:23
I was thinking of myself very much as a realist at the time
00:23:28
that I first began teaching high school English, but I do think,
00:23:31
yes, my childhood was full of searching for impossible things,
00:23:35
and so I think that this was always where I was going to end
00:23:38
up.
00:23:39
I also just think life is very strange, and the longer that I
00:23:43
live, the stranger it becomes.
00:23:45
Speaker 1: Oh, I know, and it's in so many layers.
00:23:48
We have our personal layers, our family layers, our community
00:23:52
layers and the greater world.
00:23:54
But then of course, we also have our history, maternal and
00:23:58
paternal.
00:23:59
When you look back and you see all the gaps in your maternal,
00:24:04
grandmother or great-grandmother's pregnancies,
00:24:07
it gives you an idea of the children they lost.
00:24:10
I know just through my own great-grandmother and
00:24:14
grandmother there is that pattern and I just know from
00:24:18
doing a lot of research about my family that, yeah, they lost
00:24:21
children all the time and it's just so sad.
00:24:25
I mean that inherited suffering .
00:24:26
I think that's one of the things that we pick up on, one
00:24:29
of the layers in our own lives at this time.
00:24:32
We pick up on it for sure.
00:24:34
And the women, like my grandmother and
00:24:36
great-grandmother, they had a lot of other children and so
00:24:41
there was no time to really have the sorrow and to stop.
00:24:45
They just had to keep going and I just feel for them so much.
00:24:49
Speaker 2: Yeah, and just thinking about the depths of
00:24:51
suffering of that, you know, and because, right, and they would
00:24:54
have had to go back to living, because they had six other
00:24:57
living children who needed them to go back to making life, work,
00:25:02
but then any of those children could have been taken ill at any
00:25:05
moment, and you know just the idea of that, you know.
00:25:08
I mean, I think I was so blindsided by the automatic,
00:25:14
self-sacrificial nature of the love that you have for your like
00:25:17
tiny, fragile little baby that of course you don't really even
00:25:20
know yet.
00:25:20
But there is this, and it's not any kind of moral triumph, it's
00:25:23
just mammalian, but just this idea of you know why of course I
00:25:26
will jump off that bridge for you and the idea that you know
00:25:30
of what happens when that kind of protection is not possible,
00:25:35
you know, which I think is what these women in the garden are
00:25:38
kind of growing into over the course of their time there, you
00:25:41
know, and it's a big part of what keeps them at this very
00:25:43
strange kind of sinister place.
00:25:46
Speaker 1: Oh, dear, I think you and I could talk for hours.
00:25:48
Let's talk books.
00:25:49
What are you currently reading?
00:25:51
Speaker 2: So I just read a novel in manuscript by my friend
00:25:55
, kea Parsinin.
00:25:56
The novelist called the Book of Fate and she grew up on the
00:26:00
Aramco compound in Saudi Arabia and she's now beginning to write
00:26:04
about that world and so the novel is sort of about what it's
00:26:09
like when cultures meet in that way and what happens to the
00:26:13
people who are kind of trying to live in between or in one or
00:26:15
the other, and it's really rich and exciting and I can't wait
00:26:18
for her to publish it.
00:26:19
And I'm now reading Terrace Story by Hilary Leichter, which
00:26:24
I have been, which I've been saving for myself as a treat
00:26:27
forever because I loved Temporary so much and I just
00:26:29
think she's brilliant and I think her sentences are
00:26:32
astonishing, and so I am loving that.
00:26:34
It is just as great as I knew it would be.
00:26:36
Speaker 1: Oh, it's so wonderful when you read a friend's
00:26:39
manuscript or their novel you know an art copy of it and you
00:26:43
just think, oh, my goodness, this is fantastic and you just
00:26:46
can't wait to share it on your social media and with all your
00:26:50
family and friends.
00:26:50
It just makes you feel so proud , right?
00:26:52
Yes, it's wonderful.
00:26:54
Yeah, and what about you?
00:26:55
Are you currently working on another project?
00:26:58
Speaker 2: I am.
00:26:59
It is my Newtown novel.
00:27:02
So, having grown up in Newtown, connecticut, I was about six
00:27:07
months pregnant with my older daughter, so pregnant for the
00:27:10
first time, about to enter into parenthood in 2012, when the
00:27:15
school shooting there happened at the elementary school, and so
00:27:24
I think that I have always known that eventually I would
00:27:25
write about it was just a very Newtown was the place I
00:27:26
associated with such a particular kind of childhood and
00:27:29
then to be kind of on the precipice of parenthood and to
00:27:32
have such a horrific thing happen to all those tiny
00:27:36
children, I think, just, I've always known that, that that was
00:27:38
something that I would wrestle with in some way on the page,
00:27:39
and so that's what I'm, that's what I'm trying to, that that
00:27:40
was something that I would wrestle with in some way on the
00:27:43
page, and so that's what I'm, that's what I'm trying to do.
00:27:46
Speaker 1: Oh, my goodness, that must be a difficult book to
00:27:49
write, and it's interesting that it has that feeling of
00:27:52
motherhood and pregnancy again.
00:27:54
Yeah, yeah, exactly.
00:27:55
The one thing I love about the podcast, apart from meeting and
00:27:59
talking with wonderful writers and independent bookshop owners
00:28:02
and booksellers, is that I get to read out of my comfort zone.
00:28:06
Now, your book would have struck me anyway on a shelf
00:28:10
because of its absolutely gorgeous cover, but now I want
00:28:14
to go back and read your other books because I love how you
00:28:18
write.
00:28:18
So my advice for listeners is to get out of your comfort zone
00:28:23
of reading every now and again.
00:28:24
Read something that really stretches the scope of the
00:28:28
genres that you read, whether it be fiction, nonfiction or
00:28:31
creative nonfiction and poetry.
00:28:34
It's such a great feeling to find new books and authors that
00:28:38
you haven't read yet.
00:28:39
It's exciting, it's wonderful.
00:28:41
Yeah, claire, thank you so much for being a guest on the show.
00:28:44
I love the way you write, I love the Garden and I wish you
00:28:48
all the best of luck with the book.
00:28:50
Speaker 2: Thank you so much.
00:28:51
I'm so grateful.
00:28:52
This was wonderful.
00:28:54
Speaker 1: You've been listening to my conversation with Claire
00:28:56
Beams about her new book, the Garden.
00:28:58
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00:29:09
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00:29:10
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00:29:20
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00:29:29
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00:29:32
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00:29:39
The Bookshop Podcast is written and produced by me, mandy
00:29:43
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00:29:47
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00:29:51
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00:29:53
Thanks for listening and I'll see you next time.
00:29:56
Thank you.
