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.