We chat with author Ellen Baker about her new novel The Hidden Life of Cecily Larson, which is compelling multigenerational novel of survival, love, and the families we make—think Orphan Train meets Water for Elephants.
Where did you get the idea for this novel?
As a person who’s lived all my life in small towns, I started wondering whether it would be possible to keep a significant secret across a long lifetime, and then what the consequences would be once that secret came out. I knew right away that my small town would be in northern Minnesota, where I was born and which still feels to me like ‘home.’ I also quickly decided that my main character would be a very conventional-seeming pillar of the community with an excellent reputation. I wanted her to be someone with a great deal to lose; someone whose fall from grace – if she did indeed fall – would be spectacular. Then I had to start to try to imagine what sorts of secrets would be consequential enough to still matter, after decades.
What is your process like? Do you rely on notes and outlines, or do you like to see what happens as you go? Why did you choose to write a dual timeline novel?
I’m not a very good note-taker, so, for the emotional and sensory aspects of the story, I tend to rely on memory and intuition. For the technical aspects, I do a lot of research both before I write and along every stage of the writing and rewriting, to make sure I get the details as correct as I possibly can.
I started this novel by creating a chronological timeline of basic events that I had in mind (for example, 1924: Cecily’s mother drops her off at the orphanage). Then, I wrote scene by scene based on what I felt should come next in the novel – not chronologically, and not based on any pre-planning about those decisions. Paradoxically, I think part of what made that possible was my strictness about planning exactly when events took place in time (exact date, day of the week, time of day). But because this novel was about the direct impact of the past on the present, in my mind it had to be a dual timeline to illustrate all those connections more closely, as well as to let the mystery unfold in a way that would be intriguing. Also, in general, I don’t think of stories as linear; I think of them as mosaics, and I like to play with moving the pieces around.
Why the circus? And why family secrets? Did you have secrets in your family that came out and caused problems?
If there are secrets in my family, I haven’t discovered them! There were maybe some stories that were more quietly told, hinting at elements unsaid. I think every family has those, at the very least, which I think are why stories about uncovering family secrets are so fascinating to us all. (What if we could know the whole truth about ourselves and where we came from?) While I was writing this novel, I did send in my DNA to Ancestry so I could learn what that experience was like, and it turned up confirming everything I’d always been told. So I can’t really explain my emotional connection to family secrets and adoption stories (I read Ann Fessler’s amazing book, The Girls Who Went Away some years ago, and just cried and cried all the way through), but I feel like it’s something I’ve always had.
As for the circus, the logical reason to set the events of Cecily’s early life there was that the social world of the circus made what happened possible in a way that it might not have been had she been in a different social world. The emotional reason, I think, was that, when I was a little kid, I had a huge poster of a bareback rider hanging in my bedroom, and it made a big impression. So terrifying! So exhilarating! She looked so serene, balanced precariously on one leg atop a fast-moving horse, but she also looked like she could fall at any moment. I think this has always seemed to me a good metaphor for life, and, thinking as a novelist, it also seemed like a pretty interesting secret for a mother to have kept from her family – that she used to be a circus star.
In many ways, more than being about family secrets, this is a story about the ties between mothers and daughters. Why did you decide to focus on that?
I don’t feel like I set out to write a book about mothers and daughters as much as I wanted to write a book about women and the choices they’re required to make throughout their lives – and how this has differed or stayed the same across generations. I’m also interested in how we as women define ourselves as individuals versus in relation to others within roles like “mother” and “daughter.” I was probably particularly interested in this question as a childless woman in my mid- to late- forties. What do I amount to, if I’m not a mother by this time in my life? What gives significance to a woman’s life? How does a woman go about claiming significance? These questions become far more interesting to explore as a novelist once you weave them across time and generations of mothers and daughters, I think.
This novel ranges in time from 1924 to 2015 and across a variety of settings, from Minnesota to Rhode Island to North Carolina and lots of places in between as the circus travels around the country by train in the 1930s. What was the most challenging part for you to write? The easiest?
The circus parts were challenging to write because I had to do so much research to figure out the details – everything from the logistics of travel to the daily work that was done (and the precise schedule that was needed) to allow the whole circus to move from town to town to town literally overnight. (Amazing!) I also had to figure out how one would learn to be a bareback rider – how long would it take? Years? Months? What would you need to do, day to day?
The easiest parts, setting-wise, took place in 2015 at Kure Beach, North Carolina, a place I loved visiting around that same time. Often in writing historical fiction, you’re putting yourself into times and places where you’ve never been, so to write about a place where I’d been in a time when I’d been there meant a lot less research than usual, so I could just focus on the drama of what was happening.
In that same vein, this novel is told from the points of view of several different characters. Who was the most challenging character for you to write, and who was the easiest?
The most challenging was, paradoxically, the character who shares the most surface details in common with me: Molly. She was born the same year I was, grew up middle-class in Minnesota with two parents and an older brother, went to a liberal arts college, became a therapist (I studied to be one), and ended up getting divorced. Of course, she’s quite different than me in lots of ways, too, especially in what she’s primarily struggling with: the loss of several pregnancies and being a single mom to a teenaged son. Hers was the only storyline that I ended up completely rewriting, which was a clear sign I hadn’t understood her the first time through.
The easiest character to write was Cecily, at every age from seven to ninety-four, because she came to life on her own, and it seemed all I had to do was write down what had already happened. I don’t think she’s much like me at all, except – well, that’s not true. She’s naïve and hopeful and idealistic about love in the same ways that I have been, and she ends up getting hurt by that and yet still not giving up her idealism.
Yes, at the center of this story about family is a story about forbidden love. Writers are usually told “write what you know.” Did you do that here?
I tend to think less about whether I’m not being audacious in what I choose to write about, and more about how can I create the best drama and put it into a form readers will enjoy. So I’m doing this – creating – out of a combination of what I know and what I can imagine and what I can figure out or learn. I can certainly pull aspects from things I’ve experienced emotionally. The details are always going to be different, because a novel simply has to be more interesting than the details of my own life have been. But I can extrapolate, escalate, and so forth – and then do research to figure out what it would be like to do things like turn a somersault off the back of a moving horse or live in the caboose of a 1930s circus train. I do know a bit from personal experience about forbidden young love, but my life was never in danger as a result, the way that Cecily’s life is. That’s what I mean by escalate. To keep the reader’s interest, the stakes of everything that’s happening have to be made very high.
Your last novel, I Gave My Heart to Know This, was published in 2011, after Keeping the House in 2007. Did it really take you 13 years to write this book?
Yes and no. I was working on a different novel for about a decade. I kept rewriting it (eight times over about eight years, I think) and couldn’t seem to get it right – though I kept thinking it was “almost there.” Over the course of all those rewrites, though, I learned a great deal about how I work, and about what works – both for me and my process and in a work of fiction in general – and what doesn’t. In January 2021, I decided to set that worked-over novel aside and start fresh, using everything I’d learned. I was able to finish a first draft of Cecily by August 2021, then I reworked it and polished it up over the next several months.
What’s next for you? What are you working on now?
I’m planning a family drama in the same vein as Cecily Larson. It’s all in my head at the moment, but the writing will start soon, and I’m really looking forward to that.
