I was touched again and again by the elephants I met. For example, Sissy is an elephant who survived the Gainesville Flood by being submerged for 24 hours with only her trunk above water. Eventually, she bonded with an elephant named Tina and they were fast friends. But Tina died, and when she did, Sissy stayed with her — and then remained by her grave for a few days. Finally, she placed her tire on the grave — like a wreath — and left it behind, never to return to it — almost as if she believed Tina needed the comfort more, now.
Also at the sanctuary was an elephant with a terrific story of memory: Jenny lived at the sanctuary when Shirley was brought there, and that first night, in the barn, they kept roaring and banging on the gate between them, touching through the bars.
Eventually the keepers opened the gate and let them into the same stall. They immediately touched each other all over, and when Jenny lay down to sleep, Shirley stood over her like a mom would. They were inseparable for years. As it turned out, they had been at the same circus when Jenny was a calf and Shirley was 30 years old. I also had the remarkable opportunity to work with an elephant researcher in Botswana, tracking herds in the wild, much like Alice does in the book.
I learned to track elephants by footprint, to tell them apart, and to observe their behavior and mannerisms. I also gathered stories about evidence of elephant cognition and the unbreakable bond of elephant relationships. For example, the researcher I worked with found a male juvenile whose trunk was caught in a snare.
The researcher drove the Wildlife Management worker to the elephant in a vehicle, but the worker was inexperienced and shot the elephant in the forehead instead of behind the ear. This left the elephant in even more pain, trumpeting. At that moment, a huge matriarch charged down the hill at the vehicle. This young male had been ejected from the herd already — he was in his teens — but his mother heard his distress and came running all the same.
She stood over him, like a mother stands over a small calf for protection, until he died. Elephants are among the few species in this world including humans that show cross-species empathy — they will help out another animal in distress even if there is no biological advantage.
Their grieving rituals are remarkable too — an elephant will have a change in behavior if it comes across the bones of another elephant — getting quiet and reverential, and the tail and ears droop. In Africa, 38, elephants are killed each year by poachers. Right now, the estimate is that in 10 years there will be no more African elephants.
It can change for one woman over the course of her lifetime. What you believe at 14 is not necessarily what you believe at 30 or I admit that when I went to talk to the pro-life people, I had a bias and assumed they were crazy zealots, and they were not. They were lovely people who just have this very deep conviction that a life begins at conception.
It came up most viscerally when I was writing Small Great Things , which is about racism and has a black character as one of the narrators. I firmly believe that cultural appropriation is real, and I completely understand why writers of color get upset when white people tell stories that they feel are not theirs.
I get it. I never had to. That in itself is racism, and I had never really talked about racism before. Jodi wears the Toi dress , the Kalpana necklace , and the Phoebe earrings.
My own son had just come out to me, which was really not a big deal in our family. I would have loved him no matter what his sexual orientation was. But I went and interviewed the Family Research Council, an extremely conservative group.
I asked if they were worried about whether their rhetoric might inspire homophobic violence. It is my job as a writer to show you all sides of a conversation and to let you think about why you believe what you do. When you read one of my books, the promise I make to you is I will show you all sides of a situation.
But you may also see the other side for the first time. What would I do in that situation? Before I start the research phase, I already know who my characters are, and I usually know the twist at the end.
Every now and then I take things from my middle child, or give my characters something my children said. But I've never created a character who is someone I know.
I take pieces of a character that come from people I know, and then characters become fully formed personalities of their own. It's almost harder to make characters just like people you really know. Has there ever been something from your child's life you wanted to write about but didn't for privacy reasons? I don't think there's been anything like that. When they were little I wrote children's books about them, which I would never publish. When I write about my children's lives, it's the emotions I express.
Usually the fiction is really awful events that never happen to them. There is a scene from Keeping Faith where the daughter is in the hospital, almost dying, and the mom says: "Take me. Next year's book is about a mother who does all the right things for all the wrong reasons.
Even though most of us haven't been in the situations my characters have, I often write about things we can recognize as possible. I do a tremendous amount of research, and the book writes itself as I'm doing that. Right now I'm doing a ghost story and as I was doing the research for it, I uncovered a huge event, a eugenics project where they were sterilizing Indians and poor people from Vermont and hiding it. The book has ended up being about the past coming back to haunt you.
How did your own mother influence you as a writer -- if at all? My mom kept my head on straight and encouraged my creativity. She is my benchmark reader. When I was a kid, in fifth grade I got put in a particular class where I had to write about what I did on my summer vacation.
I wound up writing from the point of a piano being practiced on, and got an "F" because it was creative writing. My mother had my class changed because she recognized my creativity.
In college, I had my first story published in Seventeen and they wanted to pay me. I called my mom, and said: "Mom, I'm going to be a writer! Any other thoughts on how being a mother has influenced you as a writer? Motherhood makes you hyper-aware of relationships between people. Some of the biggest things I write about are what people do to each other in the name of love, and there's nothing like the mother-child relationship to put a spotlight on that.
We wear blinders as moms, sort of unconditional love but with expectations. It's very hard to realize our children might not feel about us the way we think they should, or that children may not turn out the way you would like.
That relationship lets you practice what you're writing about constantly. I can't imagine not being a mother. If I wasn't a mother, I would still be writing about it from a single relationship.
Most of my stories in college were about teenagers and boyfriends. What are you working on now? My next book, Perfect Match , is due out next April. What are your writing habits?
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