Talks with Roger is a sponsored supplement to our free monthly e-newsletter, Notes from the Horn Book. To receive Notes, sign up here.

Sponsored by

Winner of the Scott O’Dell Award for Historical Fiction for Chains, set in 1776 New York, Laurie Halse Anderson comes up the coast for Rebellion 1776, a novel set in Boston during extremely turbulent times. Much, as we discuss below, like today.

Roger Sutton: One thing I thought about as I was reading your book was how fun it is to read historical fiction set in the place I am. You know? I’ve walked down those streets. Paul Revere rode by the Horn Book office, when it was in Charlestown. And I know that you have that sense about Philadelphia. How did you approach moving to Boston, as it were?

Photo (c) Susanne Kronholm.

Laurie Halse Anderson: Boston has always had a warm place in my heart because when my parents were newly married, in the early 1950s, they moved there so my father could attend Boston University. And Mom worked to pay the bills. He got his undergrad degree, and then he went to the seminary as a United Methodist minister. So they were there for quite a while, and I grew up listening to so many stories of the joys they found there — how much they loved that atmosphere and being young and poor. Mom was a big basketball fan, so they would sit up in the nosebleed seats for the Celtics (and my father saw a different side of her when she got upset in a game!). So that was good. But I didn't sit down to write this book. I had never really thought about writing about Boston because I figured, “Ah, Esther Forbes did that, it’s done. What can I add?” But then I got COVID very early in 2020. It was not fun, but I survived, and as I was recuperating on the couch with no energy, I thought about Abigail Adams, the way you do. Because I remembered that in the HBO miniseries John Adams, there was a scene of inoculation —

RS: Was that the show where Laura Linney played Abigail?

LHA: Yes! She’s the best Abigail Adams ever. They need to do a series called Abigail, not John. But anyway, I knew that there was no way they were ever going to do a historically accurate fictional show, so I knew that the inoculation scene portrayed in the show was not historically accurate. But I wondered what was. So, stuck inside with COVID and on lockdown, I started seeing what I could find, primarily at the Massachusetts Historical Society, because they have a complete Adams family oeuvre, digitized and searchable. And I found that the story of Abigail’s family's inoculation was much more interesting than the one that they fictionalized for the show. I had been wanting to write a picture book about Abigail Adams for a long time, and I thought this might be the hook. The reason I hadn't done it before was I couldn't find an original hook, but I thought that her family's experience could be a great frame to talk about the early smallpox inoculations and then later vaccinations in America. When I turned in a rough draft of that to my editor, Caitlyn Dlouhy, she said. “Wow, this is super interesting. Could it be a novel?”

RS: Thanks, Caitlyn.

LHA: Right? Caitlyn is always right. I mean, that’s a bumper sticker on my car. But it meant that I had to spend a couple of years researching Boston. It was just heavenly, and again, especially during lockdown, the Massachusetts Historical Society and Sara Georgini, series editor for The Papers of John Adams, at the Adams Papers Editorial Project there, were very generous. I would write to them with specific requests about getting microfilm digitized, certain letters and documents I wanted to see the original of, and they were real champions about sharing that with me. The book should have been dedicated to the Massachusetts Historical Society. The history of Boston is so well documented, but I needed to understand the town meeting structure, and who the selectmen were, and how the poor were treated, etc. And then I started, somewhere in all that research, to make little mini-biographies. There’s an incredible collection called the Anna Haven Thwing Collection, named for a brilliant Boston historian who died in 1940. The collection holds a giant database where you can put in the name of somebody who lived in Boston, and if they showed up on any of the church registers, if they showed up as purchasing or selling property or if there are other kinds of official records, it’s in there. So based on that and places like the Massachusetts Historical Society and other places that had digitized letters and documents, I created about two hundred mini-biographies of people who were alive in that time and place.

RS: Real people.

LHA: Yeah, real people, because I needed to understand what their lives were like before everything went to hell in 1774 and then how their lives were affected, first by the closing of the port and then by the military getting intense and finally the Siege of Boston.

RS: So what did you know then about what you wanted to write? You said you are interested in vaccination. We know it's during the war. But how did you restrict yourself? That’s a lot of history.

LHA: Yeah, it is.

RS: So what did you know about your story at that point?

LHA: Well, I knew a little bit about the difference between Loyalists and Patriots. And I knew that not everybody was on board. There were people who felt that the king was cool, and then there were many people in the middle going, “I just want to feed my family.” So I knew that that political divide was something that interested me, and then I found out that more people died of smallpox during the Revolution than died from the war itself. There are some historians who say that the epidemic itself was a critical character during the war. I realized that in 1776 Boston was deeply politically divided, and then this epidemic came back in.

RS: You're scaring me now, Laurie.

LHA: There were inoculation efforts that had to be regulated by the government. You couldn't just inoculate people; the government had to give permission. And some people — people like Abigail Adams — flocked to Boston by the thousands to get inoculated, to get their children inoculated.  But there were some people who were afraid of it. The first people who were inoculated, that we know of in America, were inoculated in Boston in 1721 by Dr. Boylston. He was an ancestor of John Adams, for the record — a great-uncle, I think. So I'm seeing this mirror. A cloudy mirror, not quite exact — but that sense of political divide in an uncertain atmosphere is made even stronger and more frightening by disease. And one of the things that I learned during our pandemic, I learned from the families of my readers. Families were using my novel Fever 1793 as a way to talk about scary diseases that crop up and how people react to them. This is one of the great strengths of historical fiction for children: not only is it full of great adventures, but it allows kids to experience history repeating itself. They see characters going through the same emotional experiences, even if the details are different. But it's at a remove, and especially for a middle-grade reader, the remove is far enough away from the current experience to not be overwhelming. Years ago, in 2002 I think, I was at a school in New Jersey and a sixth-grade girl wanted to talk to me about Fever 1793. She said that her father had been in the Twin Towers on 9/11, and what she related to in Fever was the main character’s sense of uncertainty and fear and panic but trying to find her own strength. And everybody I know who writes historical fiction has heard the same thing over and over again.

RS: I like that you kept the book really close to telling the story from Elsbeth's experience so that there's a chapter that includes July 4th, 1776, and we’re like, “Wow, the Declaration of Independence! July 4th! Birth of the country!” But that's not how she experiences it. She doesn't find out until — is it a couple of weeks later when they read the Declaration?

LHA: The rumors of it had come into Boston early in July, and they knew that it was being discussed because all the colonies were having gatherings to decide if they were going to support it or not. So the conversation about independence had been in the air a little bit. But what I really wanted to do in this book, as in all my other historical novels, is not to focus on the big history lesson, because I think that's the wrong way to teach history to children. How did it affect the families trying to get by every day? Because that's what kids can identify with. So yeah, Elsbeth thinks about it on July 18th. That was the big day in Boston. (For the record, Abigail Adams was in that crowd, the crowd of people listening to it, and then her back started to hurt because her inoculation was kicking in, and she went home and developed smallpox, appropriately.) So I want to tell the story of normal people. There's a place for heroes, but I believe kids want to see what life was like and ask, “What would I do?” I remember my younger daughter finally started to catch the reading bug in seventh grade, and she wanted to read everything about the Holocaust because my dad had fought in Germany, which had a lot of meaning for her. I was a little worried because she was consuming every book she could find about it, and she said, “Mommy, I keep trying to figure out what I would have done.” Historical fiction, of whatever time period, assuming it's well researched, gives kids a chance to test out their moral compass.

RS: How do you create a character like Elsbeth as being true to her time but also relatable to a reader today?

LHA: That's the tricky part. I try to find vocabulary that is period appropriate, and to get out all the anachronistic vocabulary, but I'm sure I’ve missed something. But I think there's always been strong-willed kids who think they know more than their fathers know. You just have to look at the writings of somebody like Abigail or Mercy Otis Warren to know that girls and women had strong opinions then, too. And got in trouble and messed up. The trick is to get the details right and to understand. First I had to understand what the cultural, financial, and sociological constraints were then on a thirteen-year-old kitchen maid. But then came the chaos of the siege, then the changing of the armies, and then it took a while for Boston's government to get up and running again. That chaos opened the door for me and my character to break some rules, some constraints. And then as society gets its act back together, the walls and rules come back up again. My historical novels take a long time. I got sick at the end of March 2020, and this book is coming out in spring 2025. So that's four solid years of research. I don't think I wrote the character at all until I was at least two and a half years into researching. Because there are so many different ways the story could have gone at that point.

RS: I know. And when did you know that? Once you came upon Elsbeth, did you know what was going to happen to her?

LHA: It’s always the challenge. How to figure out how to align the interior arc of the growth of the character with the exterior events of the story. And writing about her, she’s thirteen, but she's thirteen in a time and a place and an economic situation where she would be basically making sixteen- and seventeen-year-old decisions today. And rebellion is a natural state of being for adolescents. You're supposed to be kicking at the walls.

RS: You seem to be joking about that in your dedication: “Dedicated to the memory of my wonderful mother, Joyce, who knew a few things about rebellions.”

LHA: Yep. I mean, my mother was a preacher’s wife who gave birth to me, of all people. Oops. Yeah, that was fun. But I knew that Elsbeth was going to be working class. The challenge there was that we have very little writing from Revolutionary War era people who were working class. However, we've got great historians like Laurel Thatcher Ulrich, who did a sociological study of a midwife. There are other historians who have done sociological histories of communities; for example, a sociological study that Robert A. Gross did of Concord and Lexington. He did a deep dive into everything. The kinds of stuff I was studying about in Boston. And then he wrote a PhD-worthy book about how the events of April 19, 1775, affected the people in this community. And so I leaned very heavily into that work, and I read a lot of dissertations. Historians are so generous. When they find out you’re writing for kids, they always say, “Sure, send your questions.” Twitter and now Bluesky have become really nice places for me to meet my heroes. And let's be honest, I try to do primary source research as much as I can, but I'm not a historian. I didn't study it. I haven't spent eighty years finding that one piece of paper. But the people who do that work have been very kind and generous in terms of reading my stuff and letting me know when I get off track. So that's good.

RS: Do you ever come to a point in writing historical fiction where you really want your character to be able to do one thing but the historical record simply won’t allow it?

LHA: All the time.

RS: Because I feel here that Elsbeth really stays the center of the story. You don’t wander away from her, which is a good thing. But how did you keep on her trajectory while keeping historical fact in place?

LHA: I just had dumb luck when it came to choosing the time and place of the story because of the chaos of Boston post-siege and the fact that there were no servants to be had. Boston emptied out during the siege, and then the epidemic hit and they had this inoculation stuff going on for months. It took Boston a really long time to recover. And so the story worked because of that. If Elsbeth had been a parentless, homeless child at any other time in Boston's history, she would have been identified and put in the almshouse, briefly, and then been bound out as an indentured servant. I found incredible stories of kids, even kids whose parents were alive and living with them, who for whatever reason became indentured servants — the breadwinner got sick, or mom just had another baby. And the kids are hungry and cold. I have lots of examples of indenture contracts. White children, but also free Black children, could be indentured out to a family until eighteen years old if you were female and until twenty-one if you were male. Sometimes they were great placements, and the families were respectful and responsible about helping to raise the child and preparing them for the adult world. And sometimes it was a form of abuse — abusive labor. Indentured servitude would have been Elsbeth’s fate if I had not set the book in 1776.

RS: One thing that really made me chuckle is that while she's very much in the tradition of sturdy young heroines, she's also a crack seamstress, and our stereotype in historical fiction is that the heroine can’t sew, hates to sew, always screws it up. They're all Jo March. And you made it Elbseth's area of expertise. It was in some ways how she kept herself alive.

LHA: Exactly. Oh, you just give me goosebumps, Roger. Thanks for that, buddy. This is the first time I've had an in-depth grown-up conversation about this book. So I appreciate this conversation! Both of her parents sew. Her father is a sail maker; her mother was a great seamstress. They both left her a legacy that I could lean into in terms of metaphor and using imagery like sewing and fabric, and weaving, and knitting, and then just that act of making something new using other things. And that's what a lot of people were trying to do in terms of, Okay now we've declared our independence. We have to sew something together. We have to make from thirteen pieces, a whole cloth.

RS: Excellent use of language there, my dear. So how do you feel today when a man who is very skeptical of vaccines, Robert F. Kennedy Jr., has just been appointed to run our United States Department of Health and Human Services? I mean, that's what made me shiver during this book. I wasn't even thinking about the coronavirus pandemic. I was thinking of right now and being here today.

LHA: My mother had a half-sister who came down with polio, and that changed the family's trajectory. But let me just back up. First of all, I would love for somebody smart to do an article examining how the No Child Left Behind Act, which is almost twenty-five years old now, has had a direct result on how much we're teaching social studies and history. Because school districts across the country took hours away from teaching history and social studies to make time to teach reading and writing so that they could pass the test. And twenty-five years with deeply reduced social studies and history lessons has really, I believe, contributed to America's confusion about not just history but also science. My grandmothers told me stories about the influenza epidemic of 1918 and the people that epidemic killed in our family and their community, and when you lose touch with that face-to-face example of, “This is scary, this is why you have to get vaccinated,” it's easy for people to be manipulated. I think the biggest challenge facing us is to not be judgmental of people who listen to people like Kennedy. It’s to take a deep breath and hold them in our hearts with love and grace, not to say, “You're wrong.” But to help, to try to find a way to occupy the same space. So far one kid has died from measles in Texas and one man in New Mexico, people are getting tuberculosis, we are going to go right back into it. And we who have been supporting modern medicine have a responsibility to not rub anybody's noses in that. But to say, “You were lied to. You were lied to. Now how do we go forward?” Knowing what I know, having studied very closely two epidemics — yellow fever and now smallpox — when I'm tired, I get really afraid.

RS: Same.

LHA: So I have a responsibility to try to get a good night's sleep every night, because my fear doesn't help anybody. So maybe this new book, combined with a lot of other books, combined with supporting educators, and finding a way to talk about facts, to talk about science, will help.

RS: How do you find what you read as a child, or how you read as a child, reflected in how you write for children today?

LHA: I've always liked history, and part of that was because of my father. My father was a great storyteller. Part of his family came over in the Irish Potato Famine, and his grandmother was the daughter of the people who came over, and so there were a lot of family traditions. “This person knows that experience, let me tell you about it.” And he was just a great storyteller, so that kept me going. And then one of the first books that I can remember finishing and enjoying was one of Laura Ingalls Wilder’s Little House books. I didn't see all the racism that was there; what I connected with was the world-building.

RS: You feel like you’re there.

LHA: Yeah, right, and I wanted to crawl inside a buffalo — you know, to keep the storm out. And when I read Heidi I drove my mom nuts because I kept trying to toast bread with cheese on it in the toaster. For some reason that really clicked with me. History was the only subject I paid attention to in school. When I give presentations to kids, I tell them that history is simply the academic subject of being nosy. It's gossip. It's, “They did what? Did they get caught?”

RS: And I saw you got the word puke in the first sentence.

LHA: Yes! It's authentic too. Oh my god, I love them so much back then. They used to prescribe a purgative, and you would be told, “Here, take this, you need to puke,” and so it was perfectly period appropriate. I think that might be my favorite opening line of all my books.

Sponsored by