Hello all! July is upon us, which means The Tapestry of Time comes out in the U.S. in a few weeks, and the paperback comes out in the UK in September. If you’re in either place and you’re able to pre-order the book (ideally from an indie bookstore) that would help spread the word. Any bookstore should be able to order it for you. Library requests are also a huge boost. And thank you!
Today I want to talk about the connection between the fantastical in the book and the themes I set out to explore. I often say that I write history "with something weird going on" but the choice of "something weird" is never arbitrary!
Tapestry begins in June 1944, with a woman walking in Paris, when she sees something impossible.
The main reason I chose to make the sisters clairvoyant is that I wanted the book to ask questions about how we know things and/or think we know things, and whether there's a difference. This is a book about fascism and its claims about history, after all, so "How does anyone know they're right? How do we know they're wrong?" is woven through it.
At the time I was writing this novel, my mother-in-law was going through hell with Lewy Body Dementia. Her horrific delusions often highlighted the fracture between knowing something and gathering evidence. For example, you could show her an empty room but it wouldn't stop her believing it was a secret torture chamber and "they" had just managed to hide everything.
From her perspective, she knew things she had no way of knowing – even when the evidence she gathered was contradicted by everyone else. Whenever those contradictions arose, the "knowing" would always trump the evidence-gathering, even her own.
One of the oddest examples of this was her reduplicative paramnesia – a common delusion for Lewy patients. For example, she believed that a hospital she was in was a fake, a perfect copy of the "real" hospital. It looked identical, even to her, but she knew it was not authentic. How did she know? She just did. (I wrote about this more directly in my short story The Morning House. A similar phenomenon, the Capgras delusion, involves the duplication of people rather than places, and is also common in Lewy Body Dementia, although it was not one our family experienced as much. In an early draft of The Tapestry of Time, I had the (invented) character Lucienne talk about her work with patients, since the delusion was identified in France not long before the war. I cut that passage out, but a little of Lucienne’s backstory survives in hints.)
I learned a lot from going through this journey alongside a family member. One thing I learned is that the brain can produce strong feelings of certainty and familiarity (or unfamiliarity), decoupled from external input. We like to think our brains are analysis machines but they’re more complex than that.
I'm not a psychologist or a neuroscientist but I read a lot about delusions to try to figure out how to support her, and others in my life with psychosis, which is a tough road (and all my love to anyone walking it). In some ways, psychosis and dementia can teach us all about how all our brains construct memories and perceive reality, or at least it can cause us to ask questions about those processes.
From a certain angle, our stories about the Second Sight, clairvoyance and other psychic phenomena have some things in common with psychosis. There may be no inputs others can corroborate, for example.
The idea of intuition or gut feeling also has a political dimension. It can be weaponized by demagogues. Fascists want us to believe that we should not believe the evidence of our own eyes, that we believe something else instead.
So all of these factors were in my mind when I set out to write my version of Indiana Jones as a clairvoyant. I wanted to talk about how we know what we know, on various levels. How have we constructed narratives about "civilization" and slotted artifacts and museum collections into those narratives? How do we understand our histories? How do we know who we love? How do we understand our own sexuality? How do we recognize unreason in bigotry? How can we believe in a better future? How do we even know that what we perceive is real?
As a fantasy author, I was dealing with the conceit that clairvoyance was real – but the only way the characters know it's real is that it's corroborated, and even then, it turns out to be more complicated than they think. The ways they test it, and the various beliefs they want to build on it, and their explanations for why it happens, are all informed by context, some of which they might not be aware of.
I think I’ve told you before that Tapestry began as a silly little joke (what if I mashed up Raiders of the Lost Ark and Little Women). No matter where a book begins, it ends up being informed by what’s happening in my life, what I’m concerned about, what I’m curious about.
That’s definitely the case with The Swordmaster, my Vampires of Dumas book coming next year. “What fun! Vampires! Escapism!” I thought, and halfway through the book (which IS fun escapism) I realized I had a lot to say about vampiric wealth inequality …
I’m sure there will also be subconscious preoccupations that make their way into the one I’m currently drafting, which is still struggling to be born. (It’s going well, just still early). I finished the copy edits on Mercutio this week, by the way, and was really happy with it on the re-read. Always exciting to see a project transform from a manuscript into a book over the course of several months. More news to come as that process continues!