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Clare Beams is a writer’s writer. Whenever I talk with fellow writers about work we admire, the fact of Clare’s genius is one on which we all seem to agree. From the moment her remarkable and wholly original debut story collection, We Show What We Have Learned, appeared, I fell in love with Clare’s fiction. Her work is beautifully constructed, impeccable, classic in its attention to the foundations of good, old-fashioned storytelling, but also off-kilter and strange in its imaginings. The way she manages to build a creeping dread is nearly unparalleled—and has rightly earned her comparisons to Shirley Jackson. Much like Jackson, Clare often finds menace in the mundane, in the everyday concerns and insidious pressures applied to women in particular. I read Clare’s first novel, The Illness Lesson, with equal delight, and so of course I couldn’t wait to gobble down her new novel, The Garden. Set in 1948, The Garden is the story of Irene Willard who, having suffered five previous miscarriages, seeks out a novel treatment at a remote retreat in the Berkshires with other pregnant women under the care of a husband-and-wife medical team for her much-desired sixth pregnancy. The novel pays homage to both The Haunting of Hill House and The Secret Garden, but it’s also imbued with strains of Stephen King’s Pet Sematary and Charlotte Perkin’s Gilman’s “The Yellow Wallpaper,” as well as, of course, a magic that is all Clare’s own.
I was delighted to get to ask Clare some questions about her newest book.
Joanna Pearson:
I love the shivers of Shirley Jackson’s The Haunting of Hill House that run through this book, and, of course, I also saw that Frances Hodgson Burnett’s The Secret Garden was another inspiration. Could you talk about the importance of these books to you and how they influenced the writing of this novel?
Claire Beams:
Both novels were crucial to the shaping of this book. I’ve loved The Secret Garden since childhood: I can see, looking back, that I was so drawn to the idea of hidden spaces that could be worlds unto themselves in part because I was the kind of quiet kid who always felt a little out of place in the actual world around me. I would have loved nothing more than to find that kind of new world in my real life, and books offered me the next best thing. When I first read The Secret Garden, my imagination was caught by the garden itself, of course, but also by Mary’s cousin Colin, this whole hidden child languishing in his secret rooms in this huge gloomy house. That idea of hiddenness definitely left its marks on my imagination in ways that can be felt in The Garden. When I reread The Secret Garden as an adult, I noticed all this Christian-Science-adjacent emphasis on willing oneself into health—fixing your spirit to fix your body—that I think became one of the seeds of my own novel too.
I found Shirley Jackson later, but she’s been a guiding light for my work for a long time now. The Haunting of Hill House is so wondrously, gorgeously scary, full of images I’ll never forget—and I think what I admire most about it, and what I wanted to achieve some version of in my own novel too, was its sense of an intrinsic kinship between the haunting and the haunted. All of the people at Hill House experience its horrors, but only Eleanor is undone in the very particular ways she experiences, because the haunting is both inside and outside of her. That made for an important blueprint as I thought about ways to capture the inherent strangeness of pregnancy. (I’ve been saying for years now that The Garden is my pregnancy-as-a-haunted-house novel.)
Joanna Pearson:
One thing I love about your writing that’s well represented in The Garden is how you balance formal control and wildness. They’re always in tension with one another—much like, well, a beautifully executed garden, actually. It makes me curious about how much planning/outlining you tend to do versus how much emerges organically as you draft.
Claire Beams:
Thank you so much! Early in my writing life, I think I erred on the “formal control” side of this balance: I’m a perfectionist and a planner, and deeply afraid of failure, and as a younger writer I was bringing these traits to bear on my fiction far too early in the process. The result was work that shied away from making mistakes and as a result was very flat, safe, carefully controlled, and dead, because I’d left no room for imagination to come in and wake it up. A lot of my development as a writer has consisted of learning to let the play and the wildness in (with all of its attendant risk and frequent failure). In terms of how this looks process-wise: I type REMEMBER, I CAN FIX IT at the top of my first draft to remind myself that it’s not my job at that point to evaluate what I’m doing. I try everything that feels exciting. Then when I reach some kind of end, I print it off and undertake a series of endless rereadings, each filled with small adjustments and honings and further experiments that end up, overall, steering things in directions I couldn’t have mapped out ahead of time. Somewhere along the way, the work becomes itself.
Joanna Pearson:
I’m guessing that the timespan over which you wrote this book, a book about pregnancy and the ways in which we seek to control it, corresponded with a time of huge change and threat to reproductive freedom and bodily autonomy here in the US. I can only imagine these events were looming in the background as you wrote and revised this novel, and I’m curious to know how, if at all, that influenced the book’s trajectory.
Claire Beams:
The world certainly found a way to echo, horribly, The Garden’s preoccupations over the course of its writing. I began work on this book in 2018, so I was pretty far along already when Roe was overturned, and of course it was completely finished before the recent Alabama ruling that embryos can be considered children. So I wasn’t consciously addressing current events, but I do think I was exploring the implications of some of the currents of thought that have fueled these events—an approach to women’s bodies that mingles a knee-jerk, fear-driven desire to control with an impulse not to look too closely (out of fear, squeamishness, and romanticized and, I think, harmful ideas about sacredness). All of that has been in the ether for a long, long time. Forever, perhaps. We’re now really kind of living inside Leni Zumas’s stunning and terrifying and tragically prescient 2017 novel, Red Clocks, in ways I’m not sure I would have believed if you’d told me back when I was starting The Garden. But I think my subconscious and imagination, like so many of ours, knew all along.
Joanna Pearson:
I love Irene, the main character, and her bristly tendency to say “awful things” and to act on certain impulses. Throughout, she cites her husband George as a kind of stabilizing or civilizing influence. She’s sort of a hero with an antihero’s energy? Maybe? Which might also be true of Dr. Bishop, her near-doppelganger, who is perhaps an antihero with a hero’s energy? I’m throwing these claims out there just to see what you say about them!
Claire Beams:
I love this way of looking at these two characters! I think you’re right: my heart and sympathies have always been with Irene, though in early drafts of The Garden the point of view was actually split almost evenly between her and Dr. Bishop. The doctor is, I think, doing an evil thing out of intentions that are actually mostly noble but that fail to take into account certain kinds of truth about the world, and that she applies too rigidly to the human beings around her. Irene’s “good,” pure, moral intentions are perhaps few and far between in some ways, but she makes an incredible amount of sense to me. She’s a character who’s habitually driven by anger—and why on earth wouldn’t she be angry? Her whole life has become a kind of terrible, unwinnable bargain: the only real role her world is offering her is a role she can’t make her body perform. Yet I think by the end of the novel we come to see that she’s a character who loves, too, as powerfully as she rages.
Joanna Pearson:
As I read The Garden, I kept thinking, “Pregnancy and all its perils—that’s the original body horror!” I know from your acknowledgements that the history of diethylstilbestrol was one of the seeds for this novel. How did you come to consider that history in the first place? Were you always interested in writing a book about pregnancy?
Claire Beams:
I actually first came across a reference to diethylstilbestrol when I was doing some research for my previous novel, The Illness Lesson, about the history of women’s medicine. The drug has a tragic and relatively long history—it was prescribed in this country from the late 30s through the early 70s, despite the evidence trickling in all along that it caused terrible health complications—but I’d never heard of it before. What caught me immediately: it was pioneered by a husband-and-wife researcher team, at a time when there weren’t many women researchers of this kind; and the vision of this team involved “evening out” the swings they’d noticed in women’s hormones in the time surrounding a miscarriage. So often, historically, people have had this kind of idea about stabilizing when it comes to every aspect of women’s bodies and behaviors; often it seems to be a harbinger of pretty bad news for the women themselves.
I’m not generally the kind of writer who hews very closely to real-life inspiration, and I certainly didn’t here. That initial seed of what I’d read about diethylstilbestrol really became, in the novel, a means of exploring the territory of pregnancy in general, which I’d known I wanted to write about ever since being pregnant for the first time (with my older daughter, who’s now eleven years old). I found the state of being pregnant incredibly anxious-making, so high-stakes and so full of uncertainty: it’s such a viscerally embodied way of existing, and yet it’s full of questions no one can answer and that you just sort of have to live with. (Turns out that’s good training, in some ways, for parenthood.)
Joanna Pearson:
I don’t think I’ve ever read any other book that so captures the dread and terror of miscarriage, and then how this infects any future pregnancies with a sense of fear. As common as the experience of miscarriage is, I think I’ve mostly seen it function as a convenient plot device in novels rather than an experience to be explored and considered. Maybe I’m missing other books that tackle it, and you can feel free to cite those and correct me, but I’d love to hear your thoughts on why it’s not written about more.
Claire Beams:
I think some of the reasons for the relative rarity of real miscarriage books are the same as the reasons why women’s bodies haven’t, historically, been written about and studied more: that longstanding mingled superstitiousness/romanticization, squeamishness, and misogyny I was discussing earlier. Even out in our daily lives there’s still the unspoken “rule” (which of course people choose to follow or not follow, but there’s widespread awareness of it either way) that you shouldn’t tell people you’re pregnant in the first trimester since most miscarriages happen then, and you wouldn’t want to have to talk about such a thing. Though I do think all this is beginning, thankfully, to change.
Joanna Pearson:
I love how you so effectively exploit remote settings like boarding schools or, in this case, a house-turned-hospital, in your fiction. Could you talk about what opportunities these settings afford you?
Claire Beams:
Settings that are closed systems offer so many artistic possibilities, I think. I’ve always been drawn as a writer to worlds on which I can close a door, trapping my characters inside together—in classrooms, in rural towns, and, here, in a country house that’s been turned into a hospital—so I can bounce them off each other and watch them change without the interference of the outside world. This is often especially helpful because as a writer I’m so drawn to the strange, to making events happen that aren’t quite possible. I don’t necessarily want the larger world coming in to take the air out of the weird balloon.
Joanna Pearson:
There are understandable reasons, I know, why some women balk at being asked how they balance parenthood and writing—but it’s a relevant concern to me in my own life, and you seem to manage it, so if you’re willing to share, I’m curious to hear how you balance parenting and writing. I’m also curious, since motherhood, or seeking to be a mother, is a central concern of this book, if or how becoming a mother has changed your writing.
Claire Beams:
I never mind this question, which feels like it runs through the whole bedrock of my life. My whole career as a fiction writer so far has happened as a parent of young children (I was almost eight months pregnant with my second daughter when my first book came out; my older daughter was three years old). There are ways in which being a mother has actually been helpful to my writing, I think: somehow for me, pregnancy and childbirth and motherhood have all made it easier to access the strangeness it turns out is crucial to my fiction’s lifeblood. I’m also one of those people who knew from an early age that I wanted to have children, just as I think I’ve known for a very long time that I wanted to be a writer. I think it would have taken up almost as much mental space for me to fret over not pursuing that parenting dream as it’s turned out to take for me to pursue it, if that makes sense.
But I don’t want to shortchange the difficulties of time and upheaval, which are real, especially in the earliest years. I’ve relied heavily on childcare of various kinds and on a wonderfully supportive spouse (who has a reasonably flexible job, and a very supportive boss)—but even so, you just never know with real certainty whether your plan for a given day can actually happen, or whether someone will wake up with pinkeye or strep throat or start throwing up or whether the pipes will burst at the daycare or whether there will be, you know, a global pandemic and you’ll all be home together for months on end. I will say, though, that I think parenthood has made me pretty ruthless about using the time I have. As a childless person I was a little precious about my writing needs: I thought I could only write when I had a stretch of several hours, when I was inspired, etc. Turns out that many tasks, even deeply imaginative ones, can actually be tackled with at least some effectiveness in tiny increments when that’s what you have.
Joanna Pearson:
What have you read recently that you’ve loved and might recommend?
Claire Beams:
So many things! I recently read Daniel Mason’s North Woods, which is exactly the kind of (weird, joyous, creepy, ghost-filled) historical fiction I love. I’m just starting Beautyland and am convinced anew of Marie-Helene Bertino’s genius, and next up are Crystal Hana Kim’s Stone Home, which I heard her give a captivating reading from a while back and haven’t been able to stop thinking about since, and Rachel Lyon’s myth-soaked Fruit of the Dead, of which I read an early section-in-progress and adored. And there’s a wonderful crop of books that will be out later this spring/summer that I’ve been lucky enough to get to read early. A few of them: Rufi Thorpe’s hilarious, moving Margo’s Got Money Troubles, Tessa Fontaine’s gorgeous thriller Red Grove, ’Pemi Aguda’s sinister and dazzling Ghost Roots, and Jen Fawkes’s Angela-Carter-reminiscent Daughters of Chaos.
Joanna Pearson:
Do you have a project you’re working on next, and if so, would you like to talk about it?
Claire Beams:
I’m working on a novel called Dodgingtown, inspired by Newtown, Connecticut, where I grew up. There are lots of ghosts.
FICTION
The Garden
By Clare Beams
Doubleday Books
Published April 9, 2024
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