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Never one to resist a challenge, Libba Bray, in Under the Same Stars, employs three separate points in history — World War II Germany, West Berlin in 1980, and 2020 Brooklyn — (plus a fairy tale) and three generations of teenagers to build a complex tale with some surprising connections among its parts.

Roger Sutton: You have quite a structure here to work with. How did you keep it all straight?

Libba Bray: I am usually a much more free-range kind of writer, but for this book, because I knew that it was going to have a central mystery and that it was going to have three different time periods, I wrote a 25,000-word synopsis — a map for myself with a beginning, middle, and end. Obviously with room for improvisation. But this was the first book where I was like, “Nope, I am mapping this sucker out because there's a mystery, and I have to know how it works.”

RS: Did you know your three sets of characters from the start?

LB: I definitely did. I knew that Sophie and Hanna were going to be my two girls in the World War II section. I knew Jenny and Lena's story because I was also sixteen in 1980. It's a little sobering to realize that's historical fiction now. And then I knew that friends Miles and Chloe would be our gateway into the present. Originally Chloe was a stranger to Miles, but my editor, Grace Kendall, suggested that it would make more sense if they knew each other. She pointed out, “Look, it's a pandemic. It makes sense that these would be two people who had been close but are now separated by circumstances.” And she was absolutely right. There's much more emotional resonance this way.

RS: I've been thinking about where an author chooses to begin her story. Because obviously the characters in a book have a fictional existence before the story begins. Where are you going to pick up with these people in their lives? What you're saying here about Miles and Chloe speaks to that.

LB: Each of the characters is at an inflection point. With Hanna and Sophie, obviously, the war is about to start. They're also on the cusp of adulthood and sexuality, with that tenuous maturity. And sometimes when girls have been very close, they start to bounce off each other; there can be a lot of tension. Then with Jenny and Lena, it's just the fact that here are two people who normally never would have been in each other's orbit, but each has something that is very necessary for the other's journey. With Miles and Chloe, I had wanted there to be a romantic subtext, but something that was not overt — they had wavered between friendship and romance and it had never quite gotten there, and now, in this moment where the whole world is at a standstill and we're not sure what will happen next, it's coming to the forefront.

RS: You really show a spectrum, from a friendship that is passionate and close like the two girls in World War II, to a relationship that is romantically fulfilled, like the two girls in 1980 Berlin, to a relationship that is still nascent, with Miles and Chloe in the present day.

LB: Sophie, the word gatherer, brings up the word ambiguity, so it felt right to me that the novel ends on an ambiguous note. That was definitely my thinking with Chloe and Miles. For me growing up, I used to jokingly call myself the last virgin standing. All my girlfriends were more experienced, like my friend Jeannie, who was the wildest child. Every experience that nearly ended with me being murdered involved Jeannie. She was definitely a Lena/Hanna kind of figure. It was intoxicating, and I was also terrified that we were gonna die. Her mother used to say, “Y'all have the perfect relationship. Jean, you get the two of you into trouble, and Libba, you get you out.”

RS: But it's true in friendships and in relationships that one person is going to lead in some ways and the other person is going to protect them both. I thought you did a really nice job of exploring that spectrum, not only among the three different pairs but within the relationship of each pair.

LB: Thank you, I appreciate that. I am first and foremost interested in human beings and the way that they interact — the ways they can connect and the ways they can absolutely screw up that connection.

RS: How did you go about writing this book, Libba? Did you basically start from page one, or did you take one story at a time and see it to the end?

LB: Again, I'm a very free-range writer. I call the way I think the symphonic mind. It's all over the place and I never know where my keys are, but sometimes it means I can make these weird connections. I would go wherever I felt that I needed to be that day, wherever the emotion was pulling me. So I would often write one section and then go off and write a different one. There was really no rhyme or reason to it except that then of course I had to start sewing them together, making them connect. The tree, the Bridegroom’s Oak, where Hanna and Sophie hide their secrets and “mail” their letters, is central. That's the connection. I had listened to a podcast and read about mycorrhizal networks during the pandemic. I thought how remarkable it is that trees are connected by fungi through their roots, that they're all interconnected and share resources. I thought, Okay, that's the structure. The stories are like the roots of trees. They have to connect. But I did treat them as separate entities, including the fairy tale. And then I would have to go back and revise and revise and revise, which is not uncommon. That's the way I work. There's always a lot of clean-up. But what’s that E. E. Cummings poem I love? “Since feeling is first / who pays any attention / to the syntax of things.” I tend to write where the feeling is first and then go in and be methodical and surgical, make things work well.

RS: Well, they are separate stories. You could take out the story of Sophie/Hanna or Jenny/Lena or Miles/Chloe and do a complete novel just about those two characters. But you braid them together so well. Even the fairy tale, which is, in terms of form, the oldest story you've included, has its place in all three of the other narratives.

LB: Yes. I was thinking about Bruno Bettelheim's The Uses of Enchantment where he talks about the importance of fairy tales for children. To me, the past can feel like a fairy tale. The further we get from it, it's this memory that must be repeated. And I think of fairy tale as a useful way of helping children come to terms with some of life's harsher truths. The first time I read about the Bridegroom's Oak, I thought, This sounds like a fairy tale, but it's real. So I was playing with the idea of memory, of witness, of history, and of story — the importance of narrative and how we can use it to tell truths, but sometimes we cloak them in such a way that it makes it possible for the hard stuff to be heard. I love fairy tales. I grew up reading them, and the gorier the better because I was a very macabre child.

RS: Did you have any hesitancy about how to approach World War II and the Holocaust?

LB: Absolutely. As research for Sophie and Hanna’s story, I read Adolfo Kaminsky: A Forger's Life. He was a French Jew who joined the Resistance and forged papers for people who needed them in order to escape the Nazis. I thought, It's really about ordinary people making extraordinary choices. And of course, when I was doing the research, there was so much about how teenagers had often been the Resistance in Germany, like Sophie Scholl and the White Rose Movement, the Edelweiss Pirates. So I wanted to keep the focus on people who are resisting the inhumanity. Of course, it's no coincidence that I was writing this while Trump was still president. The fact that we were starting to see the rise of the far right, the xenophobia — all that rhetoric. So I felt the thing was to focus on these girls, their relationships, and the choices they make.

RS: How did you decide how much historical information to give your readers? I noticed that we learn Sophie Scholl's name, and I knew who she was, but I'm guessing a lot of young people won't, necessarily. You first give us her name as the name of a punk group in the 1980 section, and then you tell us who she actually was and what she did in WWII. How do you decide how much information to provide and when to dole it out in pieces?

LB: Oh boy, that's another messy process. I try to think of the most organic way to include it. Sometimes what happens, honestly, is that I do it badly and then I go back and make it work better. But I'm always hopeful that when historical information comes in, it's like a grace note and not a big clunking kersplash.

RS: An info dump.

LB: Yeah, exactly.

RS: And what about things that you didn't necessarily know so much about when you began?

LB: Oh my gosh, that's one of my favorite things about research. I just like to know things. It's that search for meaning that I'm always after, and that I think readers are after by reading a story. So yes, I love to find out things. For instance, I didn't know about the ghost stations in East Berlin. One of my favorite things I ever learned doing historical research was for the Gemma Doyle books. I had a character who was in Bedlam Royal Hospital, and I thought, How am I going to get those girls in to talk to her? I talked to the archivist there and it turned out that they held monthly dances because they thought it was good for the patients. So you just went to a dance at Bedlam! Never in a million years would I have thought to make up something like that, because I would have thought it was impossible.

RS: I wonder how a writer keeps control of her material when finding out fascinating things like that, because you don't want to let it take over the trajectory of your story, right?

LB: In those moments it’s like being a seven-year-old child who says, “And then there’s this interesting thing and then this other thing happened and then do you know what they did?” As soon as I'm exhausted, I say to myself, “That is interesting to probably .01% of the population, Libba. Now let's craft it into something you can use.”

RS: Is this your first book working with Grace Kendall?

LB: Yes, it is.

RS: And how did you find that experience?

LB: It was marvelous. She is truly a writer’s editor. She and I had in-depth conversations about everything from protest marches to COVID, from symbolism to historical points to aspects of resistance. And then also just she's very good at coming in and going, “Get rid of this, get rid of that.”

RS: I was going to say, it would have been the kind of book that you needed somebody to ride herd on you.

LB: Absolutely. And I was grateful for it. I am always grateful for an editor. I have worked with some wonderful people, and Grace is one of them. She's very, very thorough and very smart.

RS: How far along were you when you first showed it to Grace?

LB: I gave her the first draft. She took quite a bit of time with it because there was a lot there to discuss, before she came back with her editorial letter. After that, we began the revision process. My favorite part.

RS: The hard work is done?

LB: It's like you've told the story in a stick-figure way. Then in revision, it's like, “Now we're adding color and shading, and why didn't I remember that there should be flowers in this scene?” You find more and more and more. I think, officially, there were four or five drafts, but unofficially I was redrafting all the time. But I always felt that Grace was pushing me, and I loved it.

RS: Did some parts of the story come easier than others?

LB: Absolutely the Lena/Jenny story, partially because it’s set when I was sixteen and I had known people like Lena. And certainly, by the time I was eighteen, I was hanging out in a place somewhat like that squat. So all the punk stuff really resonated for me. And Jenny’s mother issues, like the fact that they're at loggerheads but really they love each other; and also all the body image stuff, because I was put on my first diet when I was eight years old. So that story came easiest to me. With the Sophie/Hanna story, part of it was wanting to give it a feeling that was almost fairytale-ish, because of the tree. I wanted it to have a different feeling from the punk feel of Jenny and Lena. Then with Miles and Chloe, I felt very comfortable with Miles. I had to find Chloe a little more.

RS: As does Miles. So that seems to work for the story. Yeah, the tone is very different among the three pieces. As you said, there is almost a fairy-tale quality to the girls in World War II. And there is this harsher punky feeling to the prose in the section about Jenny and Lena, and then with Miles and Chloe, the inclusion of all the texting and all the different kinds of communication really gives that part a different flavor.

LB: Thank you for saying that they felt different, because I did want that. What was hardest to work with in the Miles and Chloe story was that there needed to be a certain feeling of stillness, because that's where we were during the pandemic. But it’s interesting to think about the different ways of communicating because with Sophie and Hanna, you've got the letters; and with Jenny and Lena, you've got the music; and then with Miles and Chloe, you've got all the technology — texting, FaceTime, emojis. But we're all always trying to communicate. We often fall short, but when we do connect, it is one of the best things we’ve got going.

RS: Do you have a favorite among those ways of connecting?

LB: Yes, face to face. Being able to talk over food is preferable.

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