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-Hello and welcome to Book Lust.
I'm Nancy Pearl.
My guest today is someone that I've been looking forward to
talking to for a long time, Susan Wiggs, and we're going
to be talking about her brand new book, “Wayward Girls.”
Susan, thank you so much for joining me on the show.
-Nancy, thank you.
This is a really special moment for me because I am a
Book Lust fan from way back.
It's been many, I've listened to many episodes.
So thank you so much for having me.
Well, I'm glad we could make it work
because I just thought your book, “Wayward Girls,”
is so fascinating.
And I want to know, I want you to give the
elevator pitch for the book, but, you know, expand on it
and tell us how you decided to write it.
-Okay, the elevator pitch is is six girls in 1968
in Buffalo, New York, find themselves incarcerated
in a Catholic-run, brutal reform school that
is based on true events.
And it's their journey from being, you know,
teenagers in this awful system to finding justice,
you know, crawling through, you know,
all of the ins and outs and ultimately finding
justice in the end.
And it's not a typical book
that I would write, but I came to writing it
through, yeah, usually I'm the beach book writer,
you know, the feel good, you know, emotional hit
of, you know, romance.
And so this one was a bit of a turn for me and it came
about kind of organically out of my life.
I grew up in western New York until I was 10
years old and then after 10 years old we moved
overseas and I never went back and then in 2020 I
went back with my brother who was he was he had
pancreatic cancer so we all all know where that was
going, but he was doing okay.
And so we kind of made this nostalgia visit
back to this hometown.
And we had a moment that I bet a lot of people
have experienced where we stepped into our childhood
Catholic church, and it was a big Gothic one, a big stone pile
in this little town in western New York.
And there was some kind of quality of the air
and the echoes and the sounds and the smells in there
that brought back a flood of memories.
And it was just one of those moments
where there are things that are, it reminds you there are
things buried inside everybody
that are just sort of waiting their turn
or maybe you'll never think of them again.
But I remember I turned to John, he's two years older than me.
And I said, “Did you used to be an altar boy here?”
And he said, “Yeah, one time I had one chance,
before we moved” And he got to be the thurifer.
And that's the kid who swings the incense ball
in front of the processional at high mass.
And he said, “I only got to do it once
because I caught my sleeve on fire with the coals.”
[laughter] I know.
And so for some reason that stuck with me
and I started thinking about the role of the Catholic Church
in lives in the ‘60s.
And for some reason, it just led me to start researching.
And my research took me to this giant institution in Buffalo.
It's still there.
It's at 485 Best Street, if
you ever want to look on Google Maps or something.
And now it's not a reform school for girls, but
it was called the Good Shepherd.
And it existed from like the 1880s till the
1970s. And that was where they sent girls who failed out of the
a social system or foster care system or girls who were orphans
or girls who were pregnant or girls who needed to be
reformed for some reason.
And it was run by incredibly strict, harsh nuns.
And so I was just fascinated by this because I was a little
bit aware of the Irish Magdalene laundries.
You know, we had been hearing about those.
They were coming out in the news.
I wasn't aware there were so many in the
States, including one in Seattle, a real bad one in
Albany, one in Philadelphia.
But the one in Buffalo was so interesting to me because the
the building is still there.
And then I connected with some survivors and
they're all women a bit older than me.
They're in their seventies and eighties.
And a couple of them were incredibly
forthcoming with their experience.
And it was, it might've been just
a year or a few years of their lives that they
were there, but it marked them for life.
And they had stories to tell.
And I thought, well, how can I put this in a novel and
convince my Beach Book publisher
that it would be a good idea to publish this kind
of different sort of thing?
And I have to give my my publisher, my editor credit,
they really embraced the idea.
They thought it sounded like an important story.
And it had a bookend because
another thing that happened was
in the early 2020s, I think, all adoption records, pre-adoption
records were unsealed by the state of New York.
And at the end, there was also, they
call it a look back law where they take away the statute of
limitations and people who were victims even decades ago
had a chance to seek justice for a certain time period.
And so it was kind of bookended by that
and things just started falling into place.
And it was one of those books that took a long time to write
because it spans a big time span.
And there's a lot of, I wanted to get it right
because I felt very, I felt an obligation to these women
who survived this to tell the story in the best way possible.
And so I took my time.
I took, you know, extra time writing the book.
And when it was published, I've never had this happen before
in a publication sequence...
I started hearing from people who would say things
like, “That happened to me. Or ”I know somebody.”
And so that was new to me because, you know, the Beach
Books happen to everybody.
We all go to the beach and fall in love and, you
know, have turmoil and get married or whatever.
But this was different.
There was some quality.
So thank you for letting this be the book that
we're going to talk about.
-”Wayward Girls,” it does have like the hallmarks of
your other books, right?
I mean, I think the ending, you've been very, you've been,
as you are to your characters, you're so generous with
your characters, you know, and you care, you as the
writer care about them and want to do, you know, want
to do the best for them.
I mean, I've always felt that.
Don't you think?
-Absolutely. And as I know that you've had, you've had the one
novel out and are we, are we waiting for another one?
-Just, just “George and Lizzie.”
-Yeah, “George and Lizzie.”
No, but these are the people that you live
with when you're writing.
You're going to live with them for a year or two years
or however long it takes.
And so you want to build them into these
three-dimensional characters that feel real to you.
And you're right.
I have a great deal of affection.
And the other thing that I was real conscious of
as I was writing “Wayward Girls” is I didn't want them
all to be the same girl.
I wanted each major character to represent somebody who
realistically would have been at this institution in 1968.
And so we have, you know, the kind of Mairin, the irrepressible
teenager with a strict Irish mom and the awful stepdad.
And then we've got the gal who becomes a librarian.
-Right, right.
-And we have, and I did hear from, it was secondhand, but
somebody said, “Well, people would bring their girls
there if they were going to go, like, work overseas
for a time or something.”
And they needed their kid to stay somewhere.
They didn't realize sometimes the parents didn't realize
what really went on in these schools because
they called them schools.
But they didn't give them an education.
They made them do laundry.
And at the one in Buffalo, they made them make
communion hosts, you know, the little round crackers.
So not much of an education there, but my girls in “Wayward
Girls,” the other thing that was inspired by my research
is a librarian helped me a lot with my research.
She's the librarian of the Buffalo History Museum, and she
sent me a snippet of an article.
Remember articles that used to be reproduced on, what do
you call those big viewers?
They're kind of like an amber color thing um I can't even
remember she but she sent me one and it showed that the
library bookmobile would go to this place once a
month and that inspired the whole sequence of the escape
so um yes so sometimes the deeper you research the better
your book gets.
-Right. I mean, I thought, like, as hard
as this book was to write, because it was so different,
and you were trying to be so true to the experience
of the young women who were there, I'll tell
you, the fact that they escaped in the bookmobile
was, I just thought, oh my gosh, this is
terrific. -That was my movie moment.
I'm desperate for some movie producer to
to pick it up and say, “Okay, this is the movie
trailer right here.”
-Right, right.
And the other thing, in addition to the book itself
and the story of the girls and that,
it was the little things that you put in that I just loved.
And one of them was the reference, very close to
the beginning, you refer to Beverly Cleary's book “Fifteen,”
which is how Mairin discovers, that's her view of romance.
All she knows is from “Fifteen,” which is one of my
all-time favorite novels.
And the fact that you did that, it just made me want to pick
up “Wayward Girls” and hug it.
And the other thing that I thought you must have
had great fun with is all the music from 1968.
That was like, you know, I just went to Spotify and downloaded,
“Oh yeah, I forgot about that, I've got to put
that on my listening,” you know, to listen to.
-That was one of the most pleasurable
parts of the research, is what was on the top of
the charts at that time, and what would they
have listened to.
And I tried to make Mairin's mother very judgmental
about Pink Floyd.
And, you know, I loved the fact that “The Graduate,” the movie “The
Graduate,” came out that year.
And, you know, little bits that I would find and be
able to include in the book.
It was really, that was pretty good.
-Yeah, well, as one reader of it, I have to say, I just
loved encountering those little bits that you put in.
I have a question about what you think about the
motivation of the nuns, the sisters, who were running
the Good Shepherd School.
Do you think that any of them believed in what, felt that
they were helping the girls?
-Oh, 100%.
Yes, they absolutely.
They were raised in blind obedience and
not to question authority.
And they were told, you know, we are saving these girls' souls.
These are girls in trouble, and here's how we fix them.
And it was really uncomfortable.
I always like to think I would would be the rebellious
one who's, you know, who would stand up and say,
“Well, we can't be doing this,” but it's so
institutionalized and so ingrained.
And when I think back to myself,
you know, at that age, I was very impressionable
and I did want to get along and I wanted to,
you know, I wanted to be the good girl.
And, um, I, I, I like to think I
wouldn't be as brutal as some of these nuns were, but a
lot of people perpetuate what they were raised in.
And that's why Sister Rotrud, don't you
love the name Rotrud?
-I do.
-That was why she, I sort of, I didn't justify what she did,
but it made it understandable that she was, you know,
came through the same system and said, “Well, look at me,
I'm a good woman now.”
And so it was, that was a, and that
was a hard part because you always want them to wake up one
morning and say, “Wait a minute, we can't be doing this.”
And instead, and then the other one,
the one who was sort of more on the fence and was
actually the age of the girl, she was so young,
Sister Bernadette, named after “Song of Bernadette,”
one of the sweetest movies ever.
But anyway, Bernadette was pulled out of
such horrific grinding poverty that she had the element of
gratitude. You know, they saved me and I owe them,
you know, my obedience.
And so there was that.
-Yeah, I can see how hard, because as I read it,
they were fully involved in what they were doing.
And they did have, each had their own reasons for
believing that this was the right thing to be doing.
But it was painful to see two women treating other
young women like they did.
That must have been hard to write.
-It was.
It was hard in the way that, to me, “Handmaid's Tale” is hard.
You know, we even have now a character type
called the Aunt Lydia.
“Oh, don't be an Aunt Lydia.”
That means don't enable this really abusive system.
And yet it went on for years and years.
There are some that persisted in Ireland into, I think
the last one closed in 1996.
And so it's you know we're well rid of them but
they were really really persistent and one of the
most powerful things that I read in the course of
my research was a book called “The Girl in the
Tunnel” by Maureen Sullivan and she was featured I think she was
featured with Oprah and Claire Claire Keegan, who wrote
“Small Things Like These,” which we've all read and had our
hearts broken about that.
But Maureen's memoir, she had one of those crystal
clear memories of her childhood going from institute
to institute in Ireland.
And she really made it understandable why the victims
would tolerate this and why it was seen as a helpful thing.
But I'm happy, you know, the way we treat our young women, I
hope that we're getting better.
I think we're getting better, but, you know, there's still
room for improvement there.
-So moving on from “Wayward Girls,” do you think, what
are you working on now?
-I'm starting to research a book that takes place in 1975.
So there was something nostalgic about going back
to my childhood and and revisiting that and so
um this is this is um has to do with the the wrap-up of the
Vietnam War and things that were happening in the ‘70s
because that's the other thing is when you're
writing a book um the only thing more fun than writing the
book is the next book sort of pulling at you and saying, wait,
wait, pick me, pick me.
So I'm just starting to research life
in the 1970s.
And I really liked one of the things that was
really creatively satisfying for me is to write a book
that had such a broad scope.
It spanned a life from 15 to 70-something.
And so I really loved that journey.
So I'm kind of interested in that, too.
But it will be a Susan Wiggs book.
There will be like affectionate, good characters that, you
know, find their way to the end by hook or by crook.
But, yep, I'm just in the research stages.
I had a, I know you're a bicyclist, right?
-I switched to walking because I felt like bicycling was
a little too dangerous.
-You know what?
That is a good choice.
I was bicycling last year and I
flipped over an unmarked speed bump here on Bainbridge
Island and pretty much broke every bone in my head.
-Oh, no.
-Yeah, airlift to Harborview and, you know, the whole drama.
And so it's been, that's been a journey.
I've never had an injury that serious before.
And it's not one that you just heal from and walk away.
It's happening in stages.
I'm getting better, but it's definitely,
it's slowed me down and it's made me have a new rule.
One new rule is have as much fun as you can,
as quick as you can.
You never know when you're going to be upside down
on the trail.
And number two is, you know, just take your time.
Take your time, read some more books.
-Right, right.
And what do you, when you're doing the
research, what do you turn to?
What do you look at?
-My first stop, the library.
Yep. First stop, library.
And then, of course, internet is always
the rabbit hole.
And it can lead you down some really, you
know, unproductive places.
But it's also incredibly varied.
You know, like one of the one of the treasure troves that
I found, you know, trying to research “Wayward Girls” was
a message board for women who had survived these these
reform schools, these Magdalene laundries in the States.
That's how I found out there were so many.
-Wow.
Gosh because um I thought that was uh because I
think doing research as a librarian I feel like
you know doing research is one of the great time
time wasters in in a way and then but it's not
not really a waste.
You can just go down all these
different rabbit holes.
-Well, it's time intensive, I would say.
-Yeah. -And it's probably my favorite
thing. And if I get stuck when I'm writing a book,
which does happen a lot, it's because I haven't
done enough research.
And so I have to go and and revive, you know,
a trail has gone cold or something like that.
And so that's definitely, because if you think about it,
if you're writing a book about somebody who's not you,
you've got to research that whole life.
If she's a librarian, if she's a farmer,
if she's a broadcast professional or
something like that.
So there's plenty of research to be done and there's
inspiration all around.
-Do you have an outline when you write?
I do, and it's not super detailed,
but I definitely use it like a loose roadmap.
I hope that I leave enough flexibility
to change things up as I encounter them
because the characters take on a life of their own
and you can't always predict how they're going to act.
So I try to be easy on myself, you know,
if something doesn't add up or something like that.
But yeah, I do.
And I share that with my editor, who's a very creative person
at William Morrow Books.
It's an imprint of HarperCollins.
And she is happy to weigh in on things.
I mean, she doesn't declare, you know,
“You must do this, you must do that!”
But she is really good at asking the good questions.
You know, well, what if, you know, what if
we go here with it?
You know, that sort of thing.
And so I appreciate that partnership too.
-My editor for my novel, “George and Lizzie,” at Touchstone,
which is an imprint of Simon and Schuster,
when I finished and sent the whole thing into her
she sent me a letter with like 10 questions
and in answering those questions
got at everything that she thought that the book needed
and they were terrific questions and so I think that
kind of collaboration
that you have with your editor is so great.
-Yeah, a good editor is such a gift, isn't it?
-So last question.
What are you reading these days?
-You know what I'm reading?
I was shocked to learn that this was a children's book.
And I bet you've read it.
I'm reading “The Last Quintista.”
And it won the Newbery Award.
I have no idea why it's a kid's book.
She's a survivor of a horrible thing that happens to Earth
and goes with her family to outer space.
It's amazing.
Yeah, and I picked it up.
It's one of those few things.
I'd never heard of the book or the writer,
but it was on display at the library.
And so I picked it up and I am a sucker for
really good cover art.
Like I love my paperback cover art for “Wayward Girls.”
It's so bright and shiny.
The hardcover looks very serious,
but the paperback book club edition looks more like a party.
And so I, this one, the “Last Quintista” by,
let me look up her name because I don't, yeah,
I didn't recognize who the author is.
Donna
Donna Barba I'm going to say this wrong
H-I-G-U-E-R-A and it's a
magnificent book you would love it
it's a Nancy book for sure.
-I'm going to go put it on hold right now.
Susan Wiggs thank you so much
for being on the show today.
It's just been a delight to talk to another
fan of libraries.
And I'm just in awe of your
career and your books.
I just think we're so lucky to have you here.
-Well, this is a high point being on Nancy's show because I'm,
like I say, I'm such a fan.
So thank you very much for having me.
This was delightful.
-Thank you.
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