We chat with author Ashton Lattimore about All We Were Promised, which follows a housemaid with a dangerous family secret who conspires with a wealthy young abolitionist to help an enslaved girl escape, in volatile pre-Civil War Philadelphia.
Hi, Ashton! Can you tell our readers a bit about yourself?
Sure! I’ve been a writer pretty much my whole life, though it’s taken different forms. Right now, I’m an author and a journalist, and I also practiced law for a few years before deciding that wasn’t the path for me. The throughline tying all my careers together is that I’m a very curious person with a love for research, which of course serves me very well writing historical fiction. On the personal side, I grew up in central New Jersey, and now live in the suburbs of Philadelphia, which is the city at the heart of All We Were Promised.
When did you first discover your love for writing and stories?
Sometime around when I was in 5th grade, my family got our first computer: a giant white cube of a desktop with Windows 95 and—this is the important part—WordPerfect. I’d always been a big reader up to that point, but when I discovered I could fire up WordPerfect and start typing out my own stories and printing them out, I was off to the races. Pretty much right away, I started writing stories and sharing them with my parents and my teacher, and everyone was very encouraging.
Quick lightning round! Tell us:
- The first book you ever remember reading: The Berenstein Bears Learn About Strangers
- The one that made you want to become an author: Year of Wonders by Geraldine Brooks
- The one that you can’t stop thinking about: The Vanishing Half by Brit Bennett
Your debut novel, All We Were Promised, is out now! If you could only describe it in five words, what would they be?
Sweeping, friendships, secrets, untold history
What can readers expect?
Readers can expect to be drawn into a Philadelphia they’ve never seen in the history books, seen through the eyes of three young women from vastly different circumstances—a formerly enslaved housemaid, a wealthy abolitionist socialite, and an enslaved girl—who are coming of age in a moment of intense social upheaval. As Charlotte, Nell, and Evie navigate their relationships with each other and the world around them, they’ll discover the cost of secrets, and how much they’re willing to put on the line to experience freedom in all its complicated forms.
Where did the inspiration for All We Were Promised come from?
When the idea for All We Were Promised first hit me, I was working in Philadelphia and would often visit historical landmarks on my lunch break. I became pretty steeped in the city’s history, particularly about the years before the Civil War and the many loopholes in Pennsylvania’s emancipation laws, which allowed slavery to persist in a few different ways up until the 1840s despite it being a “free” state.
With that inspiration for the historical backdrop, it was actually a song from Les Miserables that inspired two of the central characters in All We Were Promised, Charlotte and James. I was in my office one day listening to “Who Am I?”, in which the fugitive convict Jean Valjean agonizes over his decision to take on a new identity in a new city in order to hide his past. He sings about his fear of being sent back to prison and “condemned . . . to slavery” (in the form of prison labor) if the truth about his criminal past ever came out, and when I heard that lyric I was suddenly struck with an idea: What if the story was set in the United States instead of France, and both Valjean and his daughter were running from actual chattel slavery? And what if the story were told not from Valjean’s perspective but instead centered on a character like his daughter, Cosette, who was constrained by her father’s over-protectiveness and (completely justifiable!) paranoia about being caught? From that moment, the story took on a life of its own, and the characters Charlotte encounters as she both navigates her new life and grapples with her old one—Nell and Evie—quickly came into focus too.
Were there any moments or characters you really enjoyed writing or exploring?
Nell’s chapters were really fun to write. As a free, wealthy Black woman in the early 19th century, she’s a character type that doesn’t often appear in books, movies, or TV, and it was really enlightening to explore the upper classes of Black society that existed in Philadelphia during this time period. Through Nell, we get to go dress shopping, sit in on literary society meetings, attend an elegant ball, and so much more. In a story that also has a lot of gritty, difficult moments, she’s such a breath of fresh air.
This is your debut published novel! What was the road to becoming a published author like for you?
A bit winding, at least in the early days. Careerwise, I’ve bounced between being a journalist, a lawyer, and then a journalist again, and it was in the midst of that last transition that I also decided to try my hand at writing fiction. I started drafting All We Were Promised in late 2018, and found my agent shortly after finishing and revising the manuscript in 2021, and I was fortunate to have a pretty smooth path to publication from there. It’s been a really exciting time, and I’ve loved getting to flex my writing muscles in a different way than journalism or legal writing tends to call for.
What’s next for you?
Right now, I’m looking forward to connecting with readers and sharing more of the history behind All We Were Promised over the next few months. And of course, more writing! There are a few more historical periods that are on the top of my list to explore, the first among them being the Prohibition era. Hopefully I’ll get to share what I learn in future books!
Lastly, are there any book releases that you’re looking forward to picking up this year?
Yes! I’m really excited to dig into Daughters of Shandong by Eve J. Chung and Swift River by Essie Chambers.
