Allegra Goodman on Fairy Tales and the Good Old Days

This week’s story, “Ambrose,” tells the story of a sixth grader named Lily, who, as she says at the beginning of the story, wants to live like she used to. How hard is it to be a sixth grader in contemporary America?

It’s true that it’s hard to be a sixth grader in contemporary America, but I think Lily’s desire to live in the past has more to do with what’s going on in her family. She’s not only sensitive, but imaginative, which makes her want to relive another time. Children read like no one else. When books captivate them, they want to dive into them and live in them. Sometimes, as in Lily’s case, they want to write their own story.

Lily was given a diary by one of her teachers and she uses it to write a novel about a princess named Ambrose who turns into a swan at night. When did you first get the idea for Lily’s novel? Is Lily inspired by any particular books or stories?

The idea for Lily’s novel came to me as I was writing the first few lines of the story. As a writer, I’m a planner and then I improvise. When I write stories, I like to follow the direction my characters are taking. As I step back and look at Lily’s work, I can see that she’s drawn to fairy tales like “The Twelve Princesses at the Ball.” When I was little, I had a copy of Andrew Lang’s “The Red Fairy Book,” and later borrowed his other fairy tale books from the library. I loved his richly detailed narratives.

Lily’s parents, Debra and Richard, are divorced. Would Lily dream as much if the family were still together? Is this a particularly difficult time for her?

She’s going through a difficult time. Her parents suspect they’re the cause and don’t really know what to do. They also don’t know what’s going on in her writing. I wanted to explore that situation: the parents looking in from the outside. The child developing an imaginary world. And then there’s the reader who gets to see a little bit of both.

Lily and her family are recurring characters in a series of stories you’ve been writing for several years about an extended Jewish-American family called the Rubinsteins. Your most recent story in the magazine, “The Last Grownup,” was also about Lily’s family, but it focused more on Debra. How do these stories come to you? How well do you feel you know the Rubinstein family now? Do you write the stories chronologically, or do you jump back and forth in time?

I wrote these stories roughly chronologically, almost like scenes from a play or chapters in a novel. It was wonderful to explore this family from different angles. I wrote from the perspective of Lily’s father, Richard, and Lily’s mother, Debra, and Lily herself. I also wrote about Lily’s grandmother, her aunts, and her cousins. The name Rubinstein means ruby ​​stone. With these stories, I take a family and examine all its facets, turning each one toward the light.

Lily and her sister Sophie take ballet classes after school. They are at different levels and Lily’s class is always the first. In the story, for some reason or another, she is constantly late to class. Lily is very worried about this – and she is not wrong to be worried, because her dance teachers are very particular about punctuality. Will she still remember the experience of being late to class when she is an adult?

I think she will remember a lot of things, but to answer that question I would have to keep writing about her to see how she evolves.

You have a new novel coming out in January, called “Isola.” It tells the story of a 16th-century French noblewoman abandoned by her guardian on a small island in the New World. It’s based on the true story of Marguerite de la Rocque de Roberval. The subject matter seems quite different to you. When did you first come across the original story? Did you do a lot of research or did you draw on your imagination to conjure up Marguerite’s experiences on the island?

“Isola” is indeed my first historical novel. In a way, it’s a novelty, but in another way, it’s a natural choice for me to write about someone who lived a long time ago. Like Lily, I’m fascinated by the past.

I met Marguerite de la Rocque de Roberval on a family trip to Canada. We were traveling with our four children, ages ten, seven, three, and six weeks. I had borrowed a stack of children’s books on Canadian history to share with the older boys. No one was interested in looking at the books with me, but while I stayed up at night nursing my baby, I read them all. In a book about the 16th-century French voyageur Jacques Cartier, I saw an aside about a young woman who had sailed with her relative to the New World in 1542 and was stranded on an island in the Gulf of St. Lawrence. Why? How? What had happened to her? The author returned to Cartier’s, but I sat in my hotel bed with my newborn on my lap and all I could think was: I want to write about this! Later, I thought: But how? I wasn’t sure I was ready to write about someone who lived so long ago. Years went by and I wrote other books. My children grew up; my baby went off to college, but I couldn’t stop thinking about Marguerite. I started reading. I spent at least a year researching and thinking about how I could tell Marguerite’s story. One day, I started trying to write the first few lines in a notebook. After about twenty tries, Marguerite began to speak to me. “I never knew my mother. She died the night I was born, and so we passed each other in the dark.” Once I had that sentence written, I knew I could write the rest of the book.

Can you imagine Lily and Debra talking about Marguerite’s life? What would Lily think of that special time?

Even at a young age, Lily has internalized Debra’s view that the past was difficult for women. On some level, she understands what Debra means. However, Lily hasn’t quite lost her sense of the magic of the past. For her, the past is not simply the historical past, but a mythical place that she wants to claim. I wanted to capture her belief and desire. The moment in childhood when you know better, but can almost convince yourself that fairy tales are true. ♦