At the beginning of last year I spoke with Kim Taylor Blakemore about her novel The Companion, a dark and sumptuous historical thriller set in nineteenth century New Hampshire. Her new novel, After Alice Fell, shares this same setting and roughly the same time period (1865, ten years after events of The Companion). The story follows Marion, a nurse recently returned from the war to discover that her younger sister, Alice, has died after falling from the roof of the asylum she’d been committed to in Marion’s absence. Wracked with guilt, Marion sets out to investigate her sister’s death, which she’s convinced was no accident.
Read on for my conversation with Kim Taylor Blakemore about After Alice Fell, wherein we discuss history, suspense, and the treatment of the mentally ill in nineteenth century America. The last time we spoke, Kim and I were entirely unaware of the pandemic that would hit in a few months time, so it was also great catching up with her about how her writing and research process has changed in light of our new reality.
(This interview is spoiler-free!)
Kelli: So, the last time we spoke, you told me about an image that came to you that inspired you to write The Companion. Did something similar happen to give you the idea for After Alice Fell?
Kim: Yes. And it actually came very quickly. I was at my dad's cabin visiting with my family, and I was like, “What am I going to write? I don't actually know what I'm going to write.” I got on the airplane to come back to Portland and said, “Just take out your pencil, take out your notebook, and start writing something set in the same area of New Hampshire.” Right away, it just came out. I have it on my wall, actually. Chapter One: The Asylum, New Hampshire, 1866. And the very first page is the same.
Kelli: Wow!
Kim: You know, I try to audition things. And this one just worked right away. An asylum, a dead body, and a sister. Yay.
Kelli: Definitely a premise that appeals to me. Re: the asylum, the book features a character, Alice, who was struggling with mental illness during a time when it was very difficult to get adequate help—even more difficult than it is now. Can you tell me a little bit about your process when it came to writing about mental illness in a historical context?
Kim: When I was researching different asylums and treatments, I was really trying to concentrate first on the New Hampshire State Asylum for the Insane, because I was going to originally set it within that asylum in Concord. That facility does play in at the very end of the book, but it's not the beginning. When I was doing the research—you can read about all the horrible treatments that were done and the terrible things that were done to people, like the whole Nellie Bly and Blackwell's Island thing, which is a little later—but I thought, let's dig a little deeper and see how this asylum started in New Hampshire. I learned that it was created by the Quakers, and they believed that people with mental illness needed fresh air and industry and respite. So the asylum itself was absolutely self-contained. It had its own farm, it made its own food. And that was really how that started—with all good intentions.
Kelli: Well, it's nice that they tried...
Kim: Yeah, they did try, but it was a very difficult time trying to figure out what these illnesses were. At the time, they had acute mania, which was a very common one. That was like, “okay, they're crazy.” There was no bigger definition, no diagnoses like schizophrenia, bipolar, instead there were categories like chronic mania, melancholy, dementia, monomania, constitutional obliquity, etc.. Many of the asylums soon grew overcrowded, underfunded, and became terribly, terribly awful places.
So, I was reading some different books that talked about how asylums work—there's one called Committed to the Asylum. What I really wanted to do was try and capture more than just, “Oh, here's the horrible asylum.” Because I didn't know if the real asylum was horrible. I really don't want to put bad things on something that wasn't bad. I can't change or ruin their reputation if I don't know what it is, and I was not able to get treatment records for that long ago—they're still sealed. I was not able to go in the facility, because it’s falling apart and it’s dangerous. I did not want to ruin the reputation of the Asylum director, because I didn’t have any records to know who he was or how well the asylum ran. That's when I said, you know what, I'll just make a private one and put the whole thing in the same town as The Companion. So that makes it fiction, and I can do whatever I want.
Then it was looking at the types of treatments that were done, and saying, “Well, what would they do here at this time?” And I found The Box, where they put her head in a box.
Kelli: Yeah, that was horrible sounding.
Kim: Horrible, but it was a true thing: tie them down with leather and put their head in a box. It was to calm them. The idea was that there's too much stimuli for somebody with mania, so if we cut the stimuli off, it'll calm the person down.
Kelli: Maybe in some cases, it would work. I don't know!
Kim: Definitely not for somebody who's afraid of the dark, like Alice.
Kelli: I really appreciated that you did treat mental illness with care in this story, despite it also being a murder mystery. I was wondering how you approached writing mystery and suspense while still being sensitive towards that topic.
Kim: I think that's a really good question. Marion, a staunch abolitionist, felt it her duty to join the cause of the Union. And when she returns to find her sister committed and dead, she feels she has betrayed her. That's what she feels. The entire book is about Marion’s guilt and wanting atonement for what she did to Alice. So that drove her to figure out how and why Alice died. And Alice, who lost their voice and stopped talking around 14, well, I really, really wanted Alice to have a voice. That was extremely important to me, that she was not a plot device. She had a voice, and the only one who could really hear it was Marion. Everyone else was like, “This girl? Forget it. She’s crazy, she’s dangerous. Put her in the asylum.”
Kelli: There's definitely the trope of a story starting out with a dead girl and then the reader never really learning about that person. I appreciate that Alice is fully a character in this book.
Kim: Thank you. To me, it was really a book about Alice, which is why it's named after her.
Kelli: Speaking of Marion, and Alice, their whole family is very dysfunctional, obviously. There's a lot of focus on the roles and responsibilities that siblings take on in the story, like Marion taking Alice into her home and then not being able to handle it, and also this weird relationship between Lionel and Marion where he has the qualities of a good brother, but then he isn't. I wanted to know what interests you about sibling relationships. Do you have siblings? Is that something that you have had experience with?
Kim: I have siblings, but we haven't had quite that experience.
Kelli: I mean, hopefully not!
Kim: In that time period, there were so many intergenerational families within one household, and what was interesting to me was taking someone like the brother, who had to take care of these people—but he is a weak man—and how he tries to, but he can't keep it all together.
It was really taking that sort of idea: what goes on when you put these people back in the family. Because Marion, a widow, wouldn't have found a job, even coming back from the war as a nurse. She would have had nothing. So of course, Lionel is beholden to have her in the house.
Kelli: Were you thinking a lot about the gender dynamics of the time when you were writing this?
Kim: Well, yeah, because they're there. It's at the cusp of things—it's in New England, so we're starting to have women's colleges and women having professions, etc—but it's on the cusp. She's certainly strong enough to have done anything else, but she is also a product of that period. You move back in your house and then perhaps you’ll find somebody else to marry, perhaps not.
Kelli: Right. So, I also wanted to talk about Toby. I often have problems with the way little kids are represented in media, because it can be a really hard balance to strike—they can either feel like adults masquerading as children, or like set pieces without any real character development. I found Toby to be a really accurate portrait of a child. How did you approach creating this character?
Kim: I think boys that age are awesome. I don't know what it is—I would be the worst aunt of everyone. Like, sorry, I wound your child up really crazily, we went and played in the park and did crazy things! And I taught him to swear (sorry). I think it’s my maturity level coming through...
One of my very best friends—he is 14 now—when he was a little 10 year old, he fenced in the same club that I fenced in. I was fencing a guy who was like, 6’2”, and then there's me, I'm 5’6”, and then this little kid comes up to us and he's like, “Can I ref you?” We're like, okay, come be the referee, that's fine. And as it turned out, his mom and I became friends, and he and I became friends, and now I'm the pseudo aunt.
Kelli: That's so cool.
Kim: Yeah, and I get to watch him grow up, and I already have something to embarrass him with at his high school graduation and his wedding. So yeah, I don't know. I think Toby is just an amalgam of all the cool little boys I've met throughout my life.
Kelli: Yeah, it's great because he's not too developed, since 8-year-old boys aren't fully developed yet, but he definitely has a personality, and interests, and he's also just funny the way that kids are funny without trying to be.
Subject change: what was, for you, the most difficult thing about writing this particular book?
Kim: Well, in terms of writing craft, it was trying to get more of the pace of a thriller. Trying to keep that idea of what the world is like, and dropping a reader into that world, but not overdoing it while trying to keep that pace up. I'm still working on that for the next book, getting faster.
The other thing was, I really, really wanted to get Alice right. It was a lot of research on different things, and specifically why she had what she had—just trying to, as I always say, give her a voice. There's a point in that book when Marion is out in the woods with Toby, and she says, “I miss my sister. And everyone sees her this way, but I see how she loves flowers, and I see how she loves this boy and protects him.” So to me, that was the biggest challenge, to make sure I fulfilled my mission in writing her.
Kelli: I think you did a great job with that. I'm very interested in reading about mental illness, and I haven't read a lot of historical fiction. I really enjoy learning about how things were different then, and I feel like asylums in particular are very sensationalized a lot of the time, especially if you watch a lot of horror movies, which I do. So I liked that there were also other characters at this asylum, like Kitty, who were not bad people and were clearly just trying their best.
Kim: Exactly. If you're in the time period, this is what you were told is the best treatment for these people, as hard as it is, and you're doing it with good intentions. And that's what I gave to those characters, like Stoakes and Kitty and Miss Clough. Not Dr. Mayhew. Separate him from that!
Kelli: Yeah, what a jerk.
So, more generally, how has the pandemic affected your writing process?
Kim: It's really taken away my ability to go to the places, travel and actually be there, and that's been hard. I was working on a book last year, sort of a passion project that's outside of this genre. It takes place in 1905, Kansas, and I was like, I'm gonna go to Kansas. I'm gonna do the whole route these two women go on. I had everything set up, and then the pandemic happened. So all of that got stopped. That, and five different conferences I was supposed to go to.
But with the book, I ended up doing tons of Google Maps, and I put a map on my wall of where the route was. I would literally pinpoint on my map, then take screenshots of the road they were on so that the characters could talk about something, like, “there's the one hill in Kansas.” I emailed more people than usual—like, I needed old train timetables, and there is a group that actually has all the timetables. And they're like, yeah, we have the 1905 timetables, do you want them? Unbelievable.
So it was very, very much driven by internet research, and then old books. I always try and find books and newspapers from the time period I'm writing. I don’t read anything past the date the book is set. I'm trying to stay in their world.
Kelli: That makes sense. Can you tell me anything else about your new project?
Kim: Well I paused the Kansas one to get started on a new historical thriller, which I can tell you a little bit about. It's set in 1877, same area of New Hampshire. It's called The Maid of Sorrow and Light, and it is about faith and fraud and mediums and murder.
Kelli: Ooh, that sounds fun! I look forward to reading it.
So, for my last question: just update me on your pet situation since last time. What pets have you got going on right now?
Kim: Oh, the pets! So, my old lab we had to put to sleep. She’s not here. But we still have our little white dog, Calvin, and Rocky, the shepherd mix, and Toughie the blind cat, and Chester the perpetual teenager of a cat. But then we also had to put another cat to sleep, literally within two weeks of the dog. We knew they were both really old, but it was like, this can't be happening at the same time... So now we're just down to four, which is really not very many for us.
Kelli: Yeah, that's like a normal number of pets! But I'm sure you'll be acquiring some new ones.
Kim: Maybe! Rocky and I go on a walk every single day, and I realize he's 10 years old now, he's starting to slow down. But it's fun. I just love dogs. So we’ll find some other dog who needs a little home.
After Alice Fell comes out on March 1st (this week!). You can learn more about Kim at her website, https://www.kimtaylorblakemore.com, and follow her on Instagram @kimtaylorblakemorebooks.