It's Always About Me?

HANK PHILLIPPI RYAN: It's true, isn’t it? If I assigned each of you to write a story about, oh, say, a day in a cave, each of our stories would be different. Why is that? The fab Gin Phillips has the answer. A very special personal answer.



It’s Always About Me

By Gin Phillips

I have a theory that no novelist can ever write a book that’s not about themselves. It’s not a theory with a lot of research behind it, granted. I’ve got a sample size of one—myself.

The thing is that I can’t imagine how you avoid writing about yourself, no matter what kind of world you’re building. The page is there in front of you, so beautifully blank, and whatever struggles or preoccupations are circling through your head are bound to unspool themselves as you type. Writing is therapy that you don’t pay for. A novel gives you thousands of words and an entire cast of characters to work all sorts of things out.

Your own struggles and obsessions aren’t necessarily recognizable to a reader, mind you. Not if you hide them well enough.

My first novel followed a family in a coal mining town in 1931 after a baby was found in the family well, but it was really about me coming to terms with how my grandmother and great-aunt and all the generations before me helped shape me. My book about ghosts at an archaeology dig was really about me falling in love with my husband, and my novel about a mother and son being trapped in a zoo during a public shooting was about my own experience with motherhood. (That last one might have been fairly obvious.)

So here I am at a new novel, Ruby Falls, and on the surface, it’s a historical mystery set after the real-life discovery of Ruby Falls in Chattanooga. The story follows Ada, a woman who finds a new world and a new start in the mazes of caverns under the falls. She descends into that underground world with a mind reader and a group of strangers bent on a publicity stunt, and she finds out one of them is a killer. It’s a story with secrets and murder and possibly romance.

It’s a cool setting for a novel. I spent plenty of time wriggling through caves in Tennessee—bats and salamanders and all—and fell a little bit in love with them myself.

But in another way this book isn’t about caving or mind readers or the Great Depression.

It’s about the fact that in the last five years I’ve lost my grandmother and great-aunt and stepmother, and I was up close and personal with their final years and their final days. That grief is underlying Ada.

More than that, though, I’ve thought plenty about how all three women—like so many women, generation after generation—were brought up to believe you get married, you have kids, and that’s your life. They had different paths in terms of how marriage and kids played out, but all of them struggled to fill their days once there was no one left at home to take care of. (My grandmother was seventy when my grandfather died, and she lived thirty-five more years!) 

Here’s the truth, of course: whether you have a family or not, at some stage the kids are gone. The husband might be gone, too. And there are all these years left, years when you are your best self—wiser, tougher, more competent than you were when you were younger. You know things. You know yourself, yet you’re supposed to—what? Sit on a porch and rock?

Those thoughts were the beginning of Ada, my main character in Ruby Falls. I wanted a woman in middle age to launch herself into a new narrative instead of reaching the end of one. I wanted her to find freedom and all sorts of possibility. She’s steeped in both loss and joy—mine, maybe—and, I’ll tell you, she left me feeling a lot better by the time I reached the last page.


How about you? Do you still think of those women who helped shaped you and have passed on? I’d love to hear about them. 

HANK: Oh, what a lovely and thought-provoking question! And yikes, caving—have any of you ever been? (And I want to ask Gin: tell us about the macaroni and cheese. )


Gin Phillips is the author of seven novels, and her work has been sold in 29 countries. Her debut novel, The Well and the Mine, won the 2009 Barnes & Noble Discover Award. Her novel Fierce Kingdom was named one of the best books of 2017 by Publishers Weekly, NPR, Amazon, and Kirkus Reviews. She currently lives in Birmingham, Alabama, with her family.

More About Ruby Falls

A tense, claustrophobic historical mystery set almost entirely underground, Ruby Falls has gotten starred reviews from Publishers Weekly, Kirkus Reviews, and Booklist. It’s about the discovery of a 150-foot waterfall in the middle of a mountain, the unthinkable crime that happens in its caves… and a woman who’s never felt more alive.

"Woven from historical events...and the workings of brilliantly brooding imagination, this story of murder, lust, and survival is as disturbing as it is mesmerizing. A hyper-immersive novel that fearlessly explores the darkest, most primal corners of the human heart.”—Publishers Weekly

“Excruciatingly suspenseful….electrifying.”—Booklist

"Exquisitely written and evocatively claustrophobic, layered and transportingly authentic—as chilling as it is tender, and as mysterious as the human soul."—Hank Phillippi Ryan

One body. Five suspects. Total darkness.

In 1928, a Chattanooga man disappears down a hole in the ground and discovers a 150-foot waterfall in the middle of a mountain that he names after his wife: Ruby Falls. Within months, visitors can buy tickets to see the falls for themselves. Ada Smith has been sneaking into the caves at night, entranced by the natural wonders around her and the freedom granted by this new underground world.

But it’s tough timing for a natural wonder. As the country flounders in the Great Depression, a shrewd public relations ploy seems like the only way to save Ruby Falls. A famous mind reader and mystic agrees to launch himself into the Ruby Falls caverns where he will attempt to locate a hidden hatpin using only his psychic abilities. He'll be joined by five others: his manager, his wife, a guide, a Chattanooga businessman, and a reporter from the Chicago Times. But they’re not alone in the caverns. Ada and another guide, Quinton, have been asked to follow the mind reader’s party at a distance, staying out of sight. They are a safety net, in case of a broken leg or busted flashlights.

One of them will be dead before the end of the day.

Faced with a corpse and the stark reality that one of the people in her midst is a killer, Ada needs to get everyone—the murderer and the innocents—back aboveground before their light runs out.

Ruby Falls is both a unique twist on the locked-room mystery and an exploration of loss and what it means to start over. It’s a heart-racing story of survival and a testament to the threads that bind strangers together.

Would You Go Back To Yesteryear?

HANK PHILLIPPI RYAN: I’m reading a book called Yesteryear (by Caro Claire Burke), and Reds and Readers, it is phenomenal. Riveting. I absolutely love it. 

And the gist of it, no spoilers, is that a tradwife influencer, all butter churning, adorable children, dutiful wife who lives on a ranch, is an organic farmer, homeschooler, all those things, and who spends her entire life presenting herself on Instagram as a salt of the earth back to what’s important good spiritual loving person is, in reality, pretty much a fraud. She's cynical dismissive ambitious–and absolutely irresistible to read about.

So that’s not even the point of the story. Again, no spoilers because it’s on the back of the book, one morning she wakes up and she is in 1805. Where churning butter and collecting eggs and making your own bread is not an option, it’s the only way people can live. And she realizes it’s hideous. It’s awful. It’s difficult it’s cold it’s hard and there’s no electricity and she’s totally miserable. She remembers her other life, see, so she’s even more bitter.


How the heck did that happen? I will never tell but suffice it to say it’s a terrific book, and an amazing tour de force in voice, as well as an examination of our contemporary fantasies. And inside all that is a dark and terrifying social commentary about pressure and criticism and manipulation and power and expectations and envy.

Oh, another element is that her contemporary husband is super rich and super handsome and super dumb. And not that… romantic, shall we say. And she wishes, constantly, for someone who is strong and tough and manly and in charge. In 1805, her husband is all of those things, and she hates him. He’s horrible!


There’s a whole lot more, the above does not even begin to describe it, and you have to read it for yourself. Do not miss it. 

Anyway it got me thinking about things we do the “old-fashioned way.”

I am trying to think of things I do without modern conveniences, and I have to say that there are kind of… None. Gardening maybe? Does that count? Flower arranging? That seems kind of pitiful. I would make a cake from scratch, but 2026 scratch is nothing like 1805 scratch, not to mention the oven.

Does yesteryear – – the reality, not the book – – seem tempting to you at all? (I left out all the medical parts, we won’t even go there.) Do you do anything "the old fashioned way"?



HALLIE EPHRON: Sounds like a “be careful what you wish for” story - and not one to miss.

What I do without modern conveniences: Whip cream (with a whisk or a fork). Drip coffee.

The thing I’m SO GLAD I don’t have to do without conveniences: laundry. Can you even imagine?


JENN McKINLAY: Camping is as close to yesteryear as I want to get and even at that, I have an inflatable mattress. I remember reading My Side of the Mountain as a tween and thinking “No, absolutely not.” That being said, I do enjoy manual labor like painting rooms, refinishing cupboards, and putting in flooring. There is such a huge sense of satisfaction when walking on a floor you put down or putting books on a bookcase that you made yourself.


LUCY BURDETTE: My yesteryear excursions would all be in the realm of cooking, gardening, and canning. In my old days, I canned everything using a pressure cooker, and pickled things with hot water baths etc. But it’s a risky business, avoiding botulism, and now I only do the occasional pickle. I do prefer to bake from scratch, and also cook from scratch. Until I’m tired of it and insist we go out to eat:).

Most of the gardening has been shifted over to John, but he does use my organic methods. We are now bracing for spring and the onslaught of critters who adore his produce! I guess in the old days, we’d shoot them and eat them.

JULIA SPENCER-FLEMING: Any romanticized ideas I might have had about Ye Good Olde Days were ruthlessly squashed during the Ice Storm of ‘97, when I lived in an 1820 house with NO electricity or running water for nine days. Oh, and with a five and three year old constantly underfoot!


Ross brought home water in jugs (the lucky son of a gun had heat, power and a hot shower at his office) and we heated the house to a balmy 50° by keeping the wood stove and both fireplaces going round the clock. Which, yes, entailed one of us getting up very three hours during the night to pile on more logs.

It was AWFUL, and I still had the benefit of certain modern conveniences - the kids and I went to a friend’s house to bathe and shower, and I hauled the dirty clothes to a laundromat. It’s no wonder women died in their 40s back then - it was probably from exhaustion.


RHYS BOWEN: I grew up in a big old house with no central heating. Corridors so long that I used to roller skate down them. In our 30 by 20 living room there was a fireplace at one end, around which we all huddled. My bedroom had no heat apart from a two bar electric fire. I used to get dressed under the bedcovers. Sometimes there was ice on the inside of the window. So no thank you. I would not want that again.


Unlike Lucy I have never bottled or canned. My mother was always a professional woman so no housewifely stuff for her. I’m trying to think of anything old fashioned that I do: I used to knit. Does that count? I write proper thank you letters and cards. I send birthday and Christmas cards. That’s about as primitive as I get.


DEBORAH CROMBIE: I’ve canned marmalade, does that count? Although to be fair, the oranges came in imported tins. I’ve fermented things, kimchi and sauerkraut, which only require salt and time, and I’ve baked sourdough bread, but only in a modern oven. Household chores like dusting and sweeping–surely those haven’t changed too much except for the quality of the instruments. And gardening, since people have been digging in the dirt since time immemorial.

Like Julia, we’ve lived through extended power outages during ice storms, having only our living room fireplace for heat, and there is nothing the last least bit romantic about it!


HANK: How about you, Reds and Readers? Is there anything you do that you would have done the same way in 1805? Would you have liked to have lived then? Why and why not?

Sally Wainwright rocks: RIOT WOMEN

 

HALLIE EPHRON: Seems like I spend a fair amount of time grazing among the various streaming offerings, and occasionally striking gold. Britbox is my favored pasture, and I have just started watching an absolutely fantastic series: RIOT WOMEN.

It "ticks all the boxes": great cast, fantastic acting, and most of all fabulous (funny, wry, believable, ...) writing. And it's been green-lighted for a second season.

No surprise that it comes from the pen of Sally Wainwright.

She's an amazingly prolific English TV writer, producer, and director. She is known for her dramas set in West Yorkshire, such as LAST TANGO IN HALIFAX and HAPPY VALLEY.

She's also the creative behind my all-time favorite British police procedural SCOTT AND BAILEY.

And now three cheers for RIOT WOMEN. It's about five iron-willed women of a certain age, each some version of damaged goods, who come together and form a rock band. A PUNK-rock band! Singing their own material that channels their anger and creativity and can bring tears to my eyes.

Profound stuff when you wipe away the tears of laughter.

It gets off to a roaring start with a failed suicide attempt (life intervenes)... It swings from tense to hysterically funny to insightful to profoundly sad. Always affirming life and hope and sisterhood.

As one of the women (Beth) says of their band: "We sing songs about being middle-aged and menopausal and more or less invisible."

Let's just say that it had me standing up and cheering at my television screen.

Anyone else out there watching RIOT WOMEN? My one advice is: when it seems to be going dark dark dark, hang in there with it.

What else is atop your watch list at the moment?