Author Confessions: Lauren Willig
A seasoned author's unforgettable wisdom + why every writer needs to listen to the Chumbawumba song.
I discovered Lauren Willig’s work several years ago when she co-authored a novel with Beatriz Williams and Karen White called The Glass Ocean. I’m a huge historical fiction fan—and I really adore novels set in historical America rather than World War II. The Glass Ocean was a goody, and I’ve followed Willig’s work ever since, enjoying a few of her (25!!) books like Two Wars and a Wedding and The Lost Summers of Newport.
When we met at a recent book event and she told me about her latest novel, The Girl from Greenwich Street, I knew I had to feature Willig in these pages. The Girl from Greenwich Street is being called “Law and Order: 1800.” It follows Alexander Hamilton and Aaron Burr in turn of the century Manhattan as they investigate the shocking murder of a mysterious (and until now, unknown) young woman. The story is completely true, and this interview with Willig, is as fascinating as the novel itself.
Welcome, Lauren!! I’m so excited to have you here on Dear Fiction.
Where did the idea for this novel come from? I have this vision of you sitting at Hamilton on Broadway and honing in on one line and then diving into research.
Can you believe I still haven’t seen Hamilton? Unless you count Hamilton by association because when she was seven my daughter was obsessed with it and used to belt out the songs at me.
As a native New Yorker, I’ve always been fascinated by my city’s history—birthday parties at the Museum of the City of New York were a huge deal when I was growing up—so I subscribe to a ton of Instagram accounts about New York history. Years ago, a post popped up about the Manhattan Well Murder, and, like so many people, I thought, oh my goodness, Hamilton and Burr working together as counsel for the defense? How strange and wonderful! (Spoiler: that’s one of the least strange things about this case.)
I immediately fell down the rabbit hole— and by rabbit hole, I mean the transcript of this trial, because that is the strange and wonderful thing about this case: it’s America’s first fully recorded murder trial, ninety-nine pages of pure drama. All sorts of things come out on the stand: lies, adultery, secrets. Not to mention Hamilton and Burr elbowing each other as they fight for the limelight!
I was hooked. I knew I had to write about it. And that’s why I’ve never seen Hamilton! I didn’t want to let anyone else’s depiction of Alexander Hamilton guide me as I delved into the documents. Although now that The Girl from Greenwich Street is out in the world, I can finally book those tickets!
You will not be disappointed! What was the biggest challenge when it came to researching this novel?
This case is a giant historical game of telephone. From the moment Elma’s body was found on January 2, 1800, stories started circulating through the city, most of them riddled with misinformation. Over the centuries, a lot of that misinformation was repeated until it took on the ring of truth. So the biggest challenge for me was peeling back all the layers of what everyone thinks they know about this case to try to figure out what actually happened.
One major example involves Hamilton. The story that’s told over and over is that Hamilton took this case because he was in debt to Ezra Weeks (the accused man’s older brother) for building Hamilton’s country house, the Grange. There’s one slight problem with this. Hamilton doesn’t even buy the land on which the Grange stands until four months AFTER the trial. He can’t be in debt for a house that hasn’t been built yet. I had to ask: why did Hamilton take the case? The answer to that entirely changes the shape of the story.
And that’s just one example among many where I had to really dig to try to get to the facts of the case!
Although there were times when the facts were murky and I had to make educated guesses, there were no places where I knowingly deviated to make the story more interesting—because the story is so interesting as it is! You’ve got more and more people with a motive to murder Elma popping up all over the place. One witness is asked to leave the courtroom, breaks in again, and has to be towed out by the bailiffs. Family secrets come out on the stand. People blurt out things they really wish they hadn’t. You can’t make this stuff up. It’s Law and Order: 1800!
What drew you the most to Elma's story? What did you see in her that made you want to write her story?
One of the things that infuriated me as I was working on this book was how, with all that’s been written about this case over the years, so little attention has been devoted to Elma Sands. People don’t even bother to get her name or family situation right. Some people refer to her as a Quaker—her family were Quakers, but Elma refused to join the meeting. Some people refer to the boarding house owners as her aunt and uncle—Catherine Ring, who ran the boarding house, was Elma’s first cousin. These details may seem small, but they matter. Elma matters. All too often, she gets trampled over by authors in their eagerness to get to Hamilton and Burr. She’s also used as a pretext to get them into the courtroom, flattened into an innocent woman seduced or a melancholy nymphomaniac laudanum addict, the classic Madonna or whore dichotomy, with no attempt to get to the real woman underneath.
As an example of this, there’s a recent “non-fiction” book about the case that opens with a scene in which Elma is feeling melancholy, because that’s just the way she is, and she’s yearning for a tipple of laudanum. This is presented as fact. It’s not. It was part of the defense strategy, trying to claim Elma had committed suicide—and no one bought it at the time.
Fortunately, we have the transcript, with the testimony of Elma’s relations and acquaintances, from which a very strong image of Elma starts to emerge. I also did a deep dive in censuses, wills, Quaker meeting house records, family publications, and local history to get an idea of what Elma’s childhood was like growing up in Cornwall, New York. What emerged was a young woman who was treated as the family disgrace—the illegitimate niece of a hellfire and brimstone Quaker preacher, the charity case and family embarrassment—but who refused to be cowed. Too lively, they called her. Fond of fine things. Prone to borrowing other peoples’ belongings without asking—because if she doesn’t take for herself, nothing will be given to her.
I really don’t think you can understand why Elma left the boarding house on that fateful night and with whom unless you have some idea of who Elma was— and I’m still spitting mad that no one seems to have made much of an effort! Much easier to just label her a melancholy laudanum addict and move on….
It’s infuriating the way women are often flattened, as you say, into these stereotypes. Getting to know Elma is what makes this story so fascinating. But about those superstars Aaron Burr or Alexander Hamilton: Talk a little bit about their dynamic. Were they brilliant partners or competitive ones? What is your favorite scene between them?
The dynamic between Hamilton and Burr made me think about middle school frenemies: that friend you know is poison for you but you can’t quite stay away from. New York was the largest city on the eastern seaboard but by modern standards it was tiny, just 60,000 people in 1799, and the New York political and legal elite was even tinier. Hamilton and Burr were co-counsel on a number of cases. But their characters were deeply antithetical: Hamilton’s boasting and micromanaging irritates Burr and Hamilton froths at the mouth whenever Burr—as he does repeatedly!—tricks Hamilton.
One of my favorite examples of this—which I got to use in this book!—really shows the dynamic between them. In the late 18th century, if you were admitted to the bar first, you got to give the closing statement. That was the place of honor. Both Hamilton and Burr had been admitted to the bar in 1782, but Burr had been admitted in April and Hamilton in July, which meant that Burr was technically senior. Hamilton, being Hamilton, insisted that he give the closing statement and Burr take the junior position, delivering the opening statement. Burr, being Burr, instead of saying, “Hey, I was admitted to the bar three months before you, nice try”, told him to go ahead. Hamilton, blithely oblivious, shared his notes and drafts with Burr. When it came time for trial, Burr stood up to give his opening statement—and delivered Hamilton’s opening statement as his own, leaving Hamilton with nothing to say.
And that pales in comparison to the trick Burr pulls on Hamilton with the Manhattan Company…. But you get the idea! They veer back and forth between working together and cutting each other off at the knees, a dynamic that’s very much at play in the Levi Weeks trial.
If you could relive the best day of your writing career, what would it be and why?
There’s really nothing like seeing your first book in a bookstore for the first time and realizing, wow, this is actually a book! I’ll never forget the week my first book, The Secret History of the Pink Carnation, came out. I was a grad student and law student at Harvard at the time, and one of my best friends from the history department came downtown to Copley Place with me to see if the Barnes and Nobles there had my book. She started jumping up and down, exclaiming, “Oh my goodness, you’re a poster!” Sure enough, there, in front of the store, was a giant image of my book cover. So I started jumping up and down and shouting, “Oh my goodness, I’m a poster!” And then we went to the bakery next door and got giant cupcakes.
I’ve had many wonderful moments since then—the thrill of the characters finally starting to speak to you when you’ve been stuck for months, amazing readers creating Peep dioramas of my books, gossip and fun with other authors—but nothing quite beats being a poster. And cupcakes.
What has been your lowest moment in publishing? What did you do to push through?
I feel like that Chumbawamba song: I get knocked down and I get up again. This past February marked the twentieth anniversary of the publication of that first book and it still boggles my brain that I’ve been at this for twenty years (twenty-two if you count from my first book contract). I think if you talk to any long-term career author, you’ll get a similar answer: there are lots of ups and downs, and you just have to ride them out and remember this business is nine-tenths luck, and sometimes the luck is with you and sometimes it isn’t—but you just have to keep writing. I like to tell myself that I don’t regret any book I’ve written, only the books I haven’t written.
That being said, my lowest moment came a couple of years ago (October 2022, to be precise), when I discovered that someone had plagiarized my first book. She’d changed the title and the cover; she’d changed a couple of the characters’ names, but not all; and she’d partly rewritten the first chapter. But otherwise it was my book. Word for word. My words with someone else’s name on them.
There’s something very special about a first book—it’s the one you agonize over, the one where you can recite lines from memory—so maybe that’s why it hit me so hard. It felt like my past was being erased. Like I was being erased. That there was an alternate history where my memory of writing those same words, laboring over those words, chortling over those words, in my little grad student studio back in Cambridge in 2001 had never happened. It was like coming home to find someone sitting in your chair, wearing your clothes, and looking you in the eye and saying, “Who are you? This is MY house.”
The lawyers from my publishing house got on it. The book was pulled—or as pulled as they can make it. (Once something is out there, you can never fully get rid of it. It kills me knowing there are still physical copies of that book floating around, being sold at used bookstores, my words with another person’s name.) But it stopped me writing for months. Why should I write if my words could be taken away from me?
What really got me through it were the amazing readers on my Facebook author page and website, and the realization that the book wasn’t just a book: from that book and its sequels (that book had turned into a twelve book series, taking up over a decade of my life), we’d built a community together. And no one could take that away.
Such a great interview!