Brunonia Barry on what inspired THE MAP OF TRUE PLACES

2010 at 7am     Posted by Rebecca Schinsky

While I’m winging my way to New York for BEA and the Book Blogger Con, I’m thrilled to welcome Brunonia Barry, whose debut novel The Lace Reader was one of my favorites of 2008. Brunonia’s second novel, The Map of True Places, was just released, and she’s here today to tell us about the inspiration behind it.

I wanted to use Salem, Massachusetts as location for my second book, but I didn’t want to write a sequel to The Lace Reader just yet, which meant that I had to create a new story with all new characters. Luckily, Salem is a city that’s rich in history and culture providing inspiration for tales of all types. You only have to walk out your front door to find something that inspires creativity. Or so I believed. As it turned out, I’d have to walk just a little bit farther.

My first time out, I walked the historic McIntyre district, which is where I live. This neighborhood is all about architecture. Samuel McIntyre was an architect and woodcarver known for building in the Palladian style. He became famous when Elias Hasket Derby, America’s first millionaire and a Salem native, hired him to design several houses for Derby’s extended family.  There are quite a few McIntyre houses in this neighborhood. I walked over to Chestnut Street to see one of them, Hamilton Hall, a building McIntrye designed in honor of Alexander Hamilton’s upcoming visit to Salem. I strolled down the historic street along the wavy brick sidewalk letting my eyes and my mind wander. Eleanor Roosevelt called Chestnut Street “the prettiest street in America. “ It’s a national treasure with its federal style houses and lovely landscapes, but, that day, it didn’t inspire a story. I then walked over to Essex Street and the Ropes mansion with its public gardens that served as the model for Eva’s gardens in The Lace Reader. The gardens are a place I always find inspiration, but once again it wasn’t working for me. All I could think about were the characters from my first novel.

My next walk was to Salem Common, and I’m afraid it had the same effect. I listened for a while to a band practicing in the pavilion. The statue of Roger Conant, Salem’s founder, stared back at me from his perch next to the Witch Museum. Tourists walked in and out of the museum with overstuffed bags of souvenirs on their arms. But, once again, this was Lace Reader territory. In my mind’s eye, all I could see were Eva and Towner and Rafferty.

My third walk was to Salem harbor. The Friendship was docked at Derby Wharf.  The tall ship is a re-creation of a 171 foot East Indiaman that sailed out of Salem in the late 1700s and had a great run as a trading ship until it was captured by the British during the War of 1812.  As I sat on the wharf sipping my coffee, I watched the riggers climbing the ropes, so high in the air they made me jumpier than the caffeine I was consuming. Several times I had to look away. The Friendship only sails a few times a year as an ambassador ship for maritime festivals up and down the east coast. I heard recently that they had applied for certification to take groups out sailing, and I knew how happy the crew was about the chance to educate the public. I started thinking about the sailors and the riggers who have chosen to immerse themselves in this bit of history. Who were they? What made them choose such a profession? I watched as one of the riggers came flying down the web of ropes. “Like a dancer, “ a voice in my head told me “Or a spider.” It was a woman’s voice, young, well educated, maybe early thirties. There was a world-weariness in her tone that told me a great deal about her. I had no idea then that it was the voice of Zee Finch, the young psychologist who was to become my protagonist in The Map of True Places.

My final walk was to the House of the Seven Gables, and it was there that I heard Zee Finch’s voice once again. As I walked down Turner Street, with the House of the Seven Gables on my right, I spotted another house across the street, and, in my mind’s eye, I saw a man standing in the front window selling items to tourists. A hand lettered sign in a slanting scrawl read: Hepzibah’s Cent Shop, and another sign just below it: Everything Must Go. I recognized the cent shop from Hawthorne’s famous novel, but that had already been recreated across the street at the House of the Seven Gables. What was this old man doing in the window? What was he selling? Just then a Volvo pulled up and parked in front of the house and a young woman got out. She stopped when she saw the old man.  She stared. “That’s my father,” the same voice told me. “I have no idea what he’s doing.”

As I saw her walk toward the old house, a story began to emerge. The woman was Zee Finch, a young psychotherapist who had just lost a patient to suicide. The man was her father, a Hawthorne scholar and professor who had advanced Parkinson’s disease and had been keeping the severity of his illness from his daughter. At the moment she spotted him, he was experiencing a drug-induced hallucination and actually believed he was his hero, Nathaniel Hawthorne. The old man’s long time companion and caregiver, nicknamed Melville, had disappeared after an altercation, and instead of throwing his belongings to the curb, the old man, ever the practical New Englander, was selling all of them through the front window.

I had to admit that it was an odd scenario, but it had captured my imagination. I wanted to know more about the characters who had suddenly appeared: the old man and about his younger partner, Melville, who had disappeared. Over the next two years, I would learn everything about these characters as they came alive for me in my new novel, The Map of True Places.  But on this first day, what I really wanted was to find out more about Zee Finch, who was about to destroy the carefully drawn map of her perfect life and be forced to create a new one, one that would help her navigate through the storms she was about to encounter and find her way to her true home in the world.

Learn more about The Map of True Places at Brunonia’s website, check out her blog, and give her a shout on Twitter.

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