1-Journal: How my novel got its start

A found diary haunted me for nearly 20 years until I finally did something with it ...

Photo illustration — gg

In 1999, when I was working at a newspaper in Vermont, a man knocked on my office door and shared a remarkable document: A diary written by a teenaged girl from the late 1800s. Here is how it began:

Friday, Jan. 1, 1892: 4 below. Cloudy.

“Yesterday was the day they set for Uncle Lyman’s and my trial. The men folks all three went down. But Lyman’s lawyer was sick and some other things so it is again put off to next June. Oh dear me. How can I bear it all? My Uncle Lyman tended fires and took care of the court house yesterday. May God ever bless him and give him every joy. Oh dear me.

That first entry alone sparks a story. Doesn’t it? And questions, too. Who is Uncle Lyman? Trial? On what charge? Why did she not go to court with “the men folks”? Did Lyman literally tend fires or does she mean something else?

The man who brought me the diary said he found it at the bottom of a box of books he bought at a yard sale. He was in Vermont on vacation; when he went back to the house later, they knew nothing about it. And in his short time in Vermont, he could not find out anything about the young woman. Perhaps I could, he said.

The woman’s hand was steady — as steady as you can be with a quill — but there were surprising grammatical and spelling errors (perhaps she didn’t stay in school long), and many pages were hard to read from water stains and smudges.

The man wanted to hang onto the actual diary but left me a transcript he had done. That night, I stayed up and read it all. It was a dreary. She opened a window to a life of drudgery and hard work, loneliness and pain. There were only two vague hints of the “trial.” Like this one:

Tuesday, Feb. 23, 1892: 16 above. Cloudy.

The boys have been drawing soft wood logs to the door yard this forenoon and this afternoon they have been sawing down in the lower woods.  I have been doing the common housework today and I washed me a couple old dresses.  Oh dear me.  What a lonesome and lonely sad and forsaken day this has been.  Oh dear!  God help us to come out victorious.

And this:

Wednesday, March 2, 1892: 30 above. Cloudy.

Oh dear me!  I felt so discouraged and lonely and everything is so dull.  Oh dear!  This is an awful long lonesome dull day.  God help us please for he knows who is innocent.

A month later: “God please help us to bear all false things bravely.”

It is clear that, for a time, she’s not permitted to leave the house.

Saturday, Feb. 20, 1892: 36 above. Cloudy.

Boys are splitting blockwood in the dooryard all day today. This forenoon I made 6 meat pies and 2 turnovers and this afternoon I am not doing very much of anything. Oh dear me.  This is another dull lonely sad and forsaken day.  I wish I could get out to the village this evening but oh dear me, I can’t go anywhere.

Twice during the year, the girl makes reference to being taken to other homes, and she apparently stays for several weeks in one, where she is subjected to heavy house work, cooking, cleaning and wash. Why? She does not say. But she describes the gloom:

Friday, May 6, 1892: 26 above. Cloudy.

I came home from Twombley’s this afternoon.  He came & brought me up: I had worked for him long enough now & this is only 3 days that I stayed there: I dispise them all.  Yes every one of them: but i can look to god for help & comfort & courage in every hour of need.  Oh dear me.  How dull & lonely.

Most of her entries are punctuated with sadness, with the monotony of her life, but on Feb. 24 there is a small event that leads to something else: “E. Bickford after a horse. I stoped it for him.”

A loose horse? She captured it? How so? Who is E. Bickford? Soon we are to find out.

And it seems that whatever the “trial” was about gets resolved. She’s permitted to take walks with Ernest but often with her brother or her friend “Caddie” as a chaperone. Sometimes, perhaps in secret, she meets with Ernest. Part of one entry: “Ernest & i went to walk.  We went down to the corner depot.  We had a lovely time & then went up home.  Ernest went up a piece with me.”

And this entry hints at tension within the house:

Wednesday May 11, 1992

My father locked the door,
My mother took the key,
But neither bolt nor lock,
Can keep my own true love from me

Her entries are overtaken with her pining for Ernest who she decides she is in love with. She even tries out her name as his wife. And she reverts to poetry:

Wednesday, May 18, 1892

Mr. Ernest d. Bickford;
Sweet as fragrant roses tis
to have a true friend on whim
in gloom or sunshine
We know we can depend:
True love is the foundation of all pure happiness.

And then this in June, several days after he proposes and she accepts:

Thursday, June 23, 1892: 85 above. Cloudy.

Ernest came up this morning just at 9 oclock & we went out straight to Rev L. Dodds & he married us at 10 oclock. Then we went up to the ville & had our pictures taken then up to Brown's where we are to stay tonight.  Oh my, Ernest is my husband now & i love him oh so dearly.  God help me to be true to Ernest always.

In the following months, Ernest is absent for long times for work. It is not clear what work he does. She also continues to work at other people’s homes, but it seems more an obligation than choice. In November, she makes reference to going to Quebec to meet Ernest’s family. And then the diary ends.

When I finished, my first thought was to see what I could find out about her, to see if she had any relatives — children or grandchildren or great-grandchildren — who might be alive and interested in her diary. Perhaps, too, they can fill in gaps.

It didn’t occur to me then that I would not be able to find any record of her or of what happened to her.

But that was the case.

Town records had been destroyed over the years by fires and a flood — though perhaps there were none; a lot of people didn’t bother with birth or death or marriage records. I found a reference in a state archive, but it was a different family with the same name.

So I tried the phone book and called every person in the county with the same name. No match.

But one man with the same surname gave me much more to ponder. He was a Family Court judge and had done a study of teen girls from the late 1800s to see if cases then differed from those now. They did not. (Proceedings in Family Court in Vermont have always been closed to the public; as a judge he had access to those records but he found none under the girl’s name.)

He was disheartened to see that the courts back then were littered with cases of domestic abuse, alcoholism, incest, sexual assault — all punctuated by poverty and illiteracy. The same as now.

He told me that a girl the age of the diary writer (a small notation indicated she was 18) would have been considered almost beyond marrying age. The term “uncle” was often ascribed to a non-relative who was a friend of the family. And sometimes a father might bring charges against a man (or “uncle”) suspected of having sexual relations with a daughter in order to clear the family name from rumors that might be circulating in church. Since the court sessions were closed, no one would know the details, but the act would be known. Sometimes, he said, the daughter was included in the charges.

As to the young woman working at other houses, the judge said many did so to earn money for the family. Other times there was a darker explanation: Often fathers loaned out their daughters to do chores to pay off debt, and he’d found cases where daughters were forced to satisfy someone’s sexual needs to erase to satisfy the father’s debt.

The dreariness of that, of the diary itself, all seemed too dark and complicated for a story in what was then a thriving community newspaper. So I set the diary — and the idea — aside. For 18 years.

In 2017, I was asked to write a story for Vermont Stage Company’s annual “Winter Tales” production. It is a program with seven shows over a week. It is a hot cocoa and cinnamon cookie affair so the tone needs to be lighter, an ending like a tidy bow.

I immediately thought of the diary. Perhaps putting it in a more uplifting light would work, perhaps I could focus more on her finding love, finding a way out of her dreary life.

Here’s what I wrote — with audio of how it was performed by an 18-year-old actress — Carrie.

I cannot describe to you how exciting it was to hear my words presented on stage. It is a rare treat for a writer to have someone give a dramatic reading of your work and experience the live, visceral responses of the audience. People loved it. I only went to one of the shows but after each I received emails, texts and even a few phone calls from people who appreciated the story, some I knew, most I didn’t.

(In the original story, I had an actual Vermont town name; one older woman came up to me after the show, said that she was from that town and that she and her husband had finally figured out exactly where Carrie’s farm was. I didn’t have the heart to tell her it was fiction.)

The experience gave me affirmation and motivation. It also prompted the director to ask me to write a new story every year.

I did not know then that this was the beginning of the novel, that the characters and stories I developed for stage would lead to the creation of a made-up community and a series of interwoven stories.

Nor did I know how long it would take (five years) how much it would change, how far the characters would evolve and how this initial diary would be set way to the side, overpowered by the characters and stories that would develop.

But here’s a glimpse of what Carrie’s voice became, albeit in a time frame — 1918 (but more about that shift later) — in the final draft of the novel:

Thursday, November 28, 1918, 10 degrees, cloudy.

I have had no heart to enter these pages. For truth, I have nothing to be thankful for on this day. Oh, Lord, you’ve placed upon our shoulders such unspeakable loss. 

Ma left us four days ago. She had been doing so well, said she was finally feeling like herself again. Doc Abernethy says it was her long illness that weakened her and left her vulnerable to this dreadful flu. But what of S and O? Two heartier boys I do not know. They took sick the night Ma died and were gone a day later. One day! 

What a frightful disease. Oh dear me, oh dear me. How can I bear it all? My heart has been sundered. 

As you will eventually see, Carrie has a small role in the book, but she harbors a secret that would be devastating to several people if it is ever found out.

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Next: How the next two staged stories helped me understand the town and characters I was creating became the book. With a side note as to how a typo led to creation of one of the main characters.

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Notes:

• I will only be posting this Journal every month for now so I won’t add much to your email clutter. Each post, like this one, will also have audio narration for those who prefer to listen.

• All of my work here is being given to you for free. Please donate to any of three non-profits I am supporting if you can.

• And please tell me what you think — what you like, what you don’t. Throw some questions at me. Don’t be shy; remember that you are an expert in how your brain reacted to what I’ve written; what you have to say is important.