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Whenever I meet writers who are from my home state of Texas, I have an immediate desire to grasp their hands and talk for long hours about thunderstorms and cicadas and BBQ. And how these elements overwhelm the writing brain and find their way onto the page, regardless of any attempts otherwise.
This is exactly how Amanda Churchill and I connected. We met in 2020, through a virtual screen, during a StoryStudio Chicago workshop called StoryBoard and we’ve been in a writing group ever since. Her novel excerpt during that workshop was about a young Japanese girl who was swimming across a river in her Kadoma village with all her classmates cheering her on, her muscles turning to jelly halfway through, and finding the strength to finish the swim. When I connected with her outside of workshop, needing to know more, I learned that the novel jumps back and forth in time and place, between World War II Japan and 1990s Texas, exploring the journey of Mineko and her granddaughter Lia. I still remember the exact moment I knew this book would make it into the hands of readers and resonate deeply.
The Turtle House is Churchill’s debut novel, and it’s a rich, heartbreakingly beautiful story of two women searching for belonging and purpose. It looks unwaveringly at the history of Japan and Texas both, at their flaws and the parts that make you homesick with longing. With alternating perspectives and timelines, the sweeping narrative asks what it means to hold true to yourself and your identity when everyone else wants to define it for you.
I had the immense pleasure of speaking with Amanda via email about her grandmother who inspired the story, lucky turtles, and what home means to her.
Sara Cutaia
I want to start near the end: you mentioned in your acknowledgements that you interviewed your grandmother, and her stories and life inspired this novel. How did that process start? What was it that catapulted you to the documenting process and then from there, fictionalizing it?
Amanda Churchill
It started because of perfectly strange timing. I had left my full-time job to finish up my thesis before my first child was due and my grandmother was slowing down a lot due to age. I started going over to her house just to hang out. I was craving time with her and also overwhelmed with life, both living it and growing it. I brought a book with me meant for little kids to share with their grandparents and started asking her these questions, just to see if she’d bite, not expecting her to at all. She was not what one would call “an open book.” I didn’t have a lot of hope, but was surprised when she answered the first question. “What did your own parents tell you about your birth? Are there any strange circumstances around it?” She laughed and said, “Oh, Mandy, you’re going to like this one.” My grandmother was “given away” to a childless couple to undo the bad luck of being born during her mother and father’s “bad luck” years. (It’s a lot more complicated than this and took a ton of research to understand.) The couple fell in love with her and didn’t want to return her, so they had to get the authorities involved. She had no idea how long she was with them, but maybe over a month. They named her Mieko, in fact. She said all this very matter-of-factly, which was her way of telling a story in English. I was hooked. If this was her first story, I wanted to know what the rest were like. And, I just loved being around her. When she was interested in you, it felt like the sun was shining on you or something. But, to be honest, it was hard to earn this interest.
Fast-forward about four years later. My grandmother, now in her early 90s, had become very ill. She entered hospice care at an assisted living nearby. Somewhere around this time, during a lucid moment, she asked my dad and my aunt to cremate her with a photo that could be found in her underwear drawer. They agreed, but didn’t really think about who was in the photo. I think dad figured it was family or something, maybe his older sister who had died unexpectedly a few years before. But when my grandmother finally did pass and before the coroner showed up, my dad and aunt located the photo and were surprised to find out that it was of… a man. Not my grandfather. It was of her Japanese boyfriend to whom she was engaged and who had died in the war. I had heard a bit about him during my interviews. My aunt knew a little about him and knew that this death had broken her heart… but none of us had seen the photo before. My mom snapped a horrible iPhone shot of it and they followed through with her wishes.
I missed her a lot after she passed away. I missed who she was, but also missed the parts I didn’t understand as well. Also, I was postpartum. Baby #2 had been born about 6 weeks before her death. He was colicky and I was tired and on edge and just a mess. The only thing that felt good was writing in the early morning hours, so I started by writing out my grandmother’s stories in order in third person. I didn’t know where this was going and didn’t have a lot of plans for this to be a novel at that moment. When I came to a gaping hole – I hit a lot of those – I made up the details or researched and filled it in. I did all this by hand, because I didn’t want the light in my office to wake up the baby. I scribbled for over a year in this same way: 4:45 a.m. until about 5:45 a.m., feed the baby, then write for another fifteen minutes before the older child woke up. I ended up with half of the novel.
Sara Cutaia
Assuming turtles were not part of your grandmother’s story, why did you choose turtles to be so significant?
Amanda Churchill
I think they’ve always been swimming around my subconscious. My mom used to call me “Mandy Mud Turtle” when I was little, after a puppet on a morning show, so I just always liked turtles. Then, my parents bought this set of plaster turtles at an estate sale – the three bears of turtles, big, medium, and small – that still sit next to their fireplace. My grandmother, when seeing them for the first time, got so excited and explained how they are really good luck and mean longevity. She didn’t specify that they were good luck in Japanese culture, because she just wasn’t like that. Her culture was Japanese and thus our culture was Japanese and there was no mention of the “other” American culture because, well, it didn’t really matter to her. I started seeing turtles even more after that, but especially in the Japanese folktale book I got one Christmas. It had all these gorgeous color plates in the middle and I liked to lay on my bedroom floor and look for the hidden animals. So, when I started constructing this house in the novel, I wanted water nearby and the water, naturally, would have turtles to feed. It felt like a no-brainer that ended up being so much more.
Sara Cutaia
Minnie and Lia both struggle to fit in, from 1940s Japan to 1990s Texas, no matter how they try or want to. What parallels were you trying to create between these two women separated by generations and experience?
Amanda Churchill
Mineko struggles to fit in because she’s the opposite of what her mother expects, of what the other war brides expect and, then, ultimately, different from every person around her in Texas. Lia, with the privilege of a more stable homelife and the double-edged ability to code shift, struggles finding her footing because she can’t figure out where she fits in. What Mineko discovers is that it doesn’t matter – that fitting in isn’t going to give her happiness, even if she could achieve it. Going her own way is the only way for her survival. And what Lia needs to learn is this same lesson. I think fitting in is such a tremendous lie that has been sold to humans, but especially to women. Experience shows us that the people who try something different, think something different, are oftentimes the most successful, not to mention happier, because they are being who they were created to be. I enjoyed creating a younger character who can learn from an elder’s mistakes.
Sara Cutaia
The pull of home (Lia back to Curtain, Minnie back to the Turtle House and Japan) was extremely resonant with me, as I imagine it is for many people who have left the place they grew up in. How do you see home shaping a person, whether or not they get to return?
Amanda Churchill
I often think of the first sentence of Anna Karenina, how “happy families are all alike; every unhappy family is unhappy in its own way” and I just change family to home. Home might shape you positively and you’ll spend the rest of your life trying to get back there or recreate some similar version. Or maybe it’ll take something from you and you’ll have to unlearn those original lessons and build something of your own imagination. And a lot of people are trying to create a best-of Spotify list – keeping what they loved and rethinking the rest. From what I’ve experienced, you don’t leave home unchanged, for better or worse. I think my characters are all trying to create some version of a home that fits with who they are at their core. Lia’s dad is trying to create a stable home where his wasn’t, as is Mae. Mineko is trying to build a place where she is comfortable – her past self and her present self. And Lia is heading back home to figure out where she got lost along the way.
Sara Cutaia
On a craft level, I’m interested in your decision to tell this story from dual perspectives and timelines. Can you talk a bit about how you went about constructing this story?
Amanda Churchill
I wrote Mineko’s story first and when that first draft was complete, I really liked what I had done, but it didn’t feel like the whole story to me, it felt too flat, thematically. I think, in many ways, I was writing to figure out some of the choices my own grandmother made, so I didn’t feel like a subject-matter expert! I had written a short story years ago featuring this granddaughter who is asked to be the fill-in caregiver for her very sick, very demanding grandmother and I loved the heat of having these two characters bump up against each other. So, I started writing these present-day Lia/Mineko scenes and a different side to Minkeo started to appear. I loved seeing who she was through her granddaughter’s eyes. But, then I had a novel with a well-rounded Mineko and a half-visualized Lia. So, I went back and colored in more of Lia. This built her into a complete character and, with Mineko interacting with this young woman, the plot became richer.
Sara Cutaia
The story spans many decades of wartime Japan, but the small village Mineko grew up in is vibrant and alive. Have you visited Japan before? If not, and perhaps even if so, what kind of research did you have to do in order to capture 1940s Kadoma?
Amanda Churchill
No, I haven’t visited Japan – it’s always been a matter of finances and time away from work. When it looked like it might happen, the pandemic hit. So, this remains on my to-do list. I really want to go with my father, since he hasn’t returned since he left as a kid… and I have family members there who are willing to show us around, so time is of the essence! For The Turtle House, though, I had to visit Japan by going through my grandmother’s photos, reading a lot about the time periods that are featured in the novel and immersing myself in the Japan my grandmother missed. My sister found some of the songs that she used to sing around the house – the glory of YouTube – and I listened to these old recordings. I was on a constant search for books about Japan before World War II and found some first-person recollections that had been translated at used bookstores all over – many imprints from Great Britain. I have amassed quite the collection and I’m terrified to lend them out because I don’t know if I could ever locate replacements. I found a map of the area near my grandmother’s village and then photos from the places she had mentioned in her stories – the train station, the marketplace, the river she remembered, her school (I even have a photo of her class outside of her school – remarkable!) – printed these and glued them to a poster-board like I was working on a school project. Then, I leaned on my family. I don’t think I’ll ever stop researching this. Even if I get to visit the exact places my grandmother lived, I think I’ll always be collecting. I feel too close to my grandmother when I’m doing it to stop.
Sara Cutaia
As a Texas native myself, I was enchanted by Curtain and its salt of the Earth representation. But I know also that it’s not always a welcoming place for immigrants. Can you talk a bit about how you saw Minnie and even her children Paulie and Mae’s experiences living in a place they never felt quite welcomed to? And maybe this isn’t just a Texas flaw, but America in general during the time Minnie and her family arrived.
Amanda Churchill
When I was working on my thesis, a collection of stories about a Japanese American family who is sent to an internment camp during World War II, I visited Japantown in San Francisco. Even at a portion of its original size, I was amazed. I sent all these photos back to my dad and explained where I was and he was flabbergasted. He never knew that such a place existed and what he said next was gut-wrenching. He wondered how different his mom’s life and his life would have been had he been able to live among people who looked like him. I knew that my father was bullied as a kid, I knew that he had struggled and carried these lessons through his life, but he never demonstrated any regret about it. He is not one to complain or wallow and so it was just a matter of fact: he moved to the U.S., was beat up, grew up, made something of himself, and put all that behind him. That was the narrative that I received and is very much in line with his generation. But, this moment where my dad was looking at images of Japantown and imagining “what if” shattered that for me. I wrote Paulie to have had a similar experience and the same drive to move forward, even if it meant putting on blinders. I wrote Mineko to mostly ignore and overcome, but still get ruffled by the microaggressions she experiences. But, under it all, I wanted these same fault lines to be present, because they simply do exist. And I think that sometimes the plates are quiet and there isn’t much shifting. I definitely felt that in the 1990s when I was in high school and college, but in recent years, we’ve all felt the Earth moving. I think if the more contemporary storyline was to happen now, it would be a very different story in many ways.
Sara Cutaia
At the heart of this story is family and belonging, not necessarily to a place, but to one another. I guess I’ll end with a comment rather than a question: I loved that The Turtle House seemed to say that home could be a place you make amongst your loved ones, even as a physical place you call home is bombed or burned or buried.
Amanda Churchill
I think we’re all capable of finding a home, if we’re brave enough to fight for it. For Mineko, it is with her family who finally sees who she truly is. For Lia, it might be back in Austin, starting over in her career with her friends nearby and her family on speed dial. I think home is knowing who we are and sharing that truth with those we love who, hopefully, see us and share themselves with us in return.
FICTION
The Turtle House
By Amanda Churchill
Harper
Published February 20, 2024
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