EM: Everything about sewing in this book I learned from reading, not doing. I can’t sew at all—whenever a garment in our house needs mending, my husband does it. I knew that pins and thread were involved, and that was about it. Fortunately for my purposes, tailors and seamstresses are detail-oriented people who leave splendid records. Around the end of the 19th Century, when women took considerable pride in their needlework, it was not uncommon to find records in letters or diaries of a quilt or dress stitched eight or even ten to the inch—that is, with eight or ten stitches to the inch. To get an idea of just how fine this is, try it.

As to the second part of your question, I didn’t really make the kind of choices you’re talking about at all. I knew a few things about Nell when I started the book: I knew that she could sew, and that she would leave her kids. Right out of the gate, then, I knew that she had a certain hardness to her personality, and the ability to focus. Everything else came out of knowing those things. I didn’t decide. The material decided for me.

EM: From the time I was very small, people in my family told my grandmother’s story. I knew all about her leaving Kansas for California, and her two daughters coming out to find her. (I didn’t figure out about the overlapping marriages until quite a bit later.) That woman seemed dashing and exciting. But the grandmother[Bessie] I knew, who came to our house on holidays and the occasional weekend, was a small, stolid figure wreathed in cigarette smoke who generally had a highball glass nearby. Vague and somewhat sharp-tongued, she seemed to have nothing in common with the exciting woman of the family lore. So I grew up trying to figure out the gap between the plain woman I knew and the dazzling one I heard about.

One of the most helpful things that my research uncovered was the fact that, by the end of the 1800s, it wasn’t all that unusual for young mothers to desert their families. People didn’t talk about it, but just about every small town had one or two runaways. This makes sense when you think about rural America at that time, when birth control was very crude and the maternal mortality rate in childbirth was sometimes as high as 50%. This got me thinking about young women who felt trapped and afraid. It’s hard not to feel sympathy for them, isn’t it?

My family’s reaction to the book has been uniformly supportive, and if they have any reservations, they’re keeping them private. My father, who was Bessie’s last child, was insanely excited about this book, and read it twice in galleys. He died two days before the book’s release, which is a hard fact for me to accept, but he was thrilled that I was telling this story. The fact that I was airing family linen didn’t bother him one bit.

EM: I love Nell. I love her impatience and her sharp temper, and I love her tendency to say exactly the wrong thing. I love the fierceness of her emotions. She does the best she can, bless her heart, and even when she’s making terrible decisions, such as when she does not confess to George who the girls are, I understand why she’s making that decision. There’s not one page in the book where I do not love her.

That doesn’t mean that I don’t see how impossible she can be—poor Jack!—and how she could be a misery to live with. Loving a character doesn’t mean that we give that character a bye. I think often about an anecdote reported in one of Flannery O’Connor’s letters, when O’Connor’s friend Maryat Lee was talking to her niece about the great story “Revelation.” “Why is Flannery so mean to Mary Grace?” the niece asked, referring to the character in the story who infamously throws a book and calls the main character a warthog. “Because Flannery loves her,” Maryat wisely said. This is an explanation that makes perfect sense to me, and also explains why that scene from “Revelation” is one of my favorites in literature.

EM: Thank you for this question. Research opens whole worlds to us, and in this book that process began when I read descriptions of sod houses on the prairie and paced out the size of a typical dwelling. Imagine living with five or six or ten other people in a house the size of most people’s living rooms. There would be no window, so even in daylight the only light would come from candles, which were used rarely, and a lamp, and even a good lamp doesn’t throw off all that much light. In this space the cooking and eating would occur, and sleeping, and anything else that might be done—calculating the amount of cattle feed that was necessary, for instance. Imagine all of this, and then imagine what a colicky baby would do to the nerves of everyone there.

Writing the LA section also involved a lot of research. Even though I grew up there, the LA of the 1910s has pretty well been obliterated by the LA of the 2000s, and I needed to stare and stare at photos of what is now the 405/101 interchange to know that cauliflower fields used to flourish there. The more I looked, the more I yearned for those fields, for the pure, limpid light and gentle hills that are gone, gone, gone. I fell in love with a place that had already been bulldozed by the time I was born, a Garden of Eden that we wrecked. So in a lot of my descriptions in the book you can hear a special fervency. That’s the author, wishing she could bring something back that isn’t coming back.

EM: Hmm. That one’s a poser. I’m awfully fond of central heating and available antibiotics. But I do have a great fondness for the 1950s. Design in the U.S. and Europe was so lavish then—think of Dior, think of Chevrolet—and we can now see that in terms of manners, it was the last gasp of a kind of codified behavior. I don’t know that I’d like to live for too long in the ’50s, but I’d like to visit.

EM: Another fun question. My favorite article of clothing is a moving target. At the moment it’s a double-breasted Betsey Johnson coat, black wool with white gussets, that I keep inventing occasions to wear.

EM: The most important answer is the easy one: My family gave me this story. In a real way, I’ve been thinking about it all my life, pondering identity and self-representation. I don’t have a totem or inspirational image, but I can instantly call up the sound of my mother’s voice as she and I sat at the kitchen table and tried to imagine the conversation between my grandparents when Bessie had to explain to her husband the sudden appearance of two women calling Bessie “Mother.” My mother’s voice, and then her laughter.

EM: I don’t experience Nell as an inspiration, but more an expression. The book explores what happens when a certain kind of stubborn ambition takes root in a person. Nell’s ambitions go underground for a long time, but they never go away. If anything, her long period of secret planning and plotting only makes her more focused. Surely this is the way some artists—not all—have developed. Seamstress is more an exploration than an illustration, and one of the aspects that kept me engaged was pure curiosity—wondering how a personality like Nell’s would cope with all these difficult situations. The only way to find out was to write it, so I did.