Our Book of the Month is Secrets of Eden by Chris Bohjalian

His novel Midwives was an Oprah pick and a best seller. He has written on topics as diverse as war and gender identity. Chris Bohjalian's latest novel, Secrets of Eden, deals with domestic violence. Read our interview with this talented writer!

CommitmentNow:  Secrets of Eden is a fast paced novel which weaves together several interesting topics: religion, domestic violence, teenage angst, friendship, and love.  How did you come up with the idea to incorporate all of these issues in a single novel? 

Chris Bohjalian:  I didn’t envision this novel as having multiple issues.  I knew the first sentence and the last sentence, which means I knew two characters:  The Reverend Stephen Drew and Katie Hayward; and I knew it would be a book about sexual violence and domestic abuse. The rest came out as I developed the characters.

CommitmentNow:   Secrets of Eden is told from the points of view of four very different characters:  The Reverend Stephen Drew, an unemotional clergyman who suffers a loss of faith after the murder of  his parishioner, Alice Hayward, in an incident of domestic violence; Heather Laurent, the author of two successful, inspirational books about angels; Catherine Benincasa, a state’s attorney convinced that Stephen Drew killed Alice Hayward’s husband; and Katie Hayward, the teenage girl orphaned as a result of the murder/suicide of her parents.  Was it difficult to write from the perspective of four such different characters? 

Chris:  Sometimes, I think I’m actually more of a mimic than a novelist.  I really do enjoy crafting different characters and voices.  

Originally, I didn’t think the character of Catherine Benincasa would be a narrator.  In performing research for the book, I spoke with Lauren Bowerman, an Assistant Attorney General with the State of Vermont and I asked her about gun “blow back.”  Lauren asked me if I wanted to know “how much of the bastard’s brains were up the gun barrel” and at that moment I decided to have a state’s attorney as a narrator. I loved the alliteration of the remark, the rhythm, and the way it showed just how much awfulness a prosecutor has to see. 

Secrets of Eden is a book about doubt.  Yet Catherine becomes so passionate about the case of who killed George Hayward that she cuts Reverend Drew no slack, and is relentless in her pursuit of convicting him for a crime she is convinced he committed.  

In creating the character of Heather, I wanted a counterbalance to Reverend Drew’s cynicism.  Heather is naïve and warm and hopeful; I like her character.

CommitmentNow:  Domestic violence is something that effects not just the victim and her abuser, but their children, and to a lesser degree, their friends and communities.  You covered all of this with the impact of domestic violence on Katie Hayward, Heather Laurent and her sister (whose mother was abused by their father until he killed her and then himself), Ginny O’Brien (Alice’s best friend) and Reverend Drew, as well as the prosecutor and the community of the small Vermont tour in which the novel takes place.  How much research went into this book?

Chris:  I do a lot of research on all the topics I use in my novels.  For Secrets of Eden, I spent time with battered women and victim advocates, who shared with me the horrors that a woman in Alice Hayward’s position would be likely to endure, as well as with state’s attorneys and the Vermont Chief Medical Examiner. In addition to that, I did a lot of reading on this topic.

CommitmentNow:  Angels are featured in your book.  There are characters who believe in angels and those who think that such believers are irrational and/or crazy.  Do you think many people believe in angels?  How did you get the idea to include angels in this book?

Chris:  I don’t know if a lot of people believe in angels, but I think a lot of people want to believe in angels.  They like the idea of a guardian looking after us.

The use of angels in this book materialized out of the idea of a guardian; I thought it would be wonderful if Alice had somebody looking out for her the way an angel looked out for Heather.
I first got the idea to include angels in Secrets of Eden while looking through old slides my dad had taken years ago.  I was preparing a DVD for his eightieth birthday, and I found a picture of my brother and me in which there appears to be, through some trick of lighting or shadows, an angel in the background.  I thought it would be interesting if Heather was not just into new age things, but actually into angels. 

There is a scene in Secrets of Eden where Heather sees an angel on a bed sheet on which she is viewing slides from her childhood, but when she looks closely to see if the angel is really there, it has vanished.  All angels ask is faith, and the disappearance of that angel represents Heather’s temporary loss of faith.

CommitmentNow:  What does the title, “Secrets of Eden,” mean?

Chris:  My favorite line in the book is uttered by Stephen Drew:  “Believe no one.  Trust no one.  Assume no one really knows anything that matters at all.  Because, alas, we don’t.  All of our stories are suspect.”

Now, there is a scene in the book where Stephen and Heather are in bed.  He is thinking about when Adam and Eve were in Eden after eating the fruit from the Tree of Knowledge and they were waiting to be discovered.  Imagining shouldering that secret, Stephen tells Heather, “[T]here are no secrets in Eden.”  The beauty of Adam and Eve’s nakedness was that they didn’t have any secrets.

In Secrets of Eden, each of the characters is shouldering a secret.  Even in places that may seem perfect, like Eden, we all have our stories and secrets.

CommitmentNow:  One of the man characters, Reverend Stephen Drew is stiff and relatively unemotional.  By his own account he “walls [him] self off from others.”  Was it difficult to write from the point of view of such a character?

Chris:  Actually, Stephen Drew is one of the more autobiographical characters I have ever created.  The truth is that all of those things Stephen is thinking about at the beginning of the novel – such as when the parishioners ask for prayers for relatively minor things (a promotion or a broken leg) and he thinks “Get a spine, you bloody ingrate!  That lady behind you is about to lose her husband to pancreatic cancer and you’re whining about your difficult boss?  Oh, please!”– well, I’ve thought the same things!

And while none of my books are strictly autobiographic, there are autobiographic minutiae in all of them.  There are elements of my childhood in all of the characters except Katie.  I grew up in the 1960s and 70s and my parents were pretty good drinkers.  When they fought, there were verbal pyrotechnics.  There is a scene in Secrets of Eden where Heather remembers a ride home one Christmas Eve when she and her sister were children, with her drunk father driving erratically and her equally drunk mother taunting him.  My parents were not exactly like Heather’s parents, but I think my brother will recognize the Christmas Eve ride home that Heather and her sister experienced. 

CommitmentNow:  Your novels have covered topics as diverse as midwifery, homeopathy, gender identity, war and family secrets.  Where do you find inspiration for your books?

Chris:  It varies dramatically, but I usually find inspiration from some one-on-one exchange.

For example, Secrets of Eden started in 1997 when I was chatting with a victim’s advocate while conducting research for my novel, The Law of Similars.  During this conversation, she showed me Polaroid photos of head indentations in sheetrock. They were part of an investigation involving her client.  I learned later it was a murder investigation.  This had nothing to do with homeopathy (the topic of The Law of Similars), but it stayed with me.

After I published The Double Bind, which features a character, Laurel Estabrook, who endures a brutal attack, I received letters from women around the country who wanted to know how I had heard their stories.  In other words, each one of them thought I was writing about her own horrific experience. I thought back to my conversation with the victim’s advocate, and I realized that sexual violence and domestic abuse are epidemic – and I wanted to write a novel about this topic.
I found inspiration for Midwives in a conversation I had with a midwife at a dinner party.  During this conversation my wife and I told her our daughter had been delivered in a hospital thirty-two miles away; she informed us we could have had our daughter in our own home and I could have “caught” the baby.  That was the first time I had ever heard that expression.

I first got the idea for Skeletons at the Feast, in 1998, after the father of a girl in my daughter's kindergarten class asked me if I would read an unpublished diary his grandmother had left behind. His mother had just translated it from German into English and typed it up. The diary chronicled this woman's life on a massive estate and farm in East Prussia, and there was a lot in it that fascinated me – especially the desperate journey the women made in the last months of the Second World War to reach the British and American liners ahead of the Soviet army. Years later I decided I wanted to write a novel set in the period and began my research.  I finished that novel, Skeletons at the Feast, a love story – a love triangle – set in Poland and Germany in the last six months of World War Two in 2007 – nine years after I had first started thinking about it! 

CommitmentNow:  You have written 13 novels. How long does it usually take you to write a book?  How long does it take to between the formulation of an idea and the completion of a novel?

Chris:  I find that the best novels take the least time; the longer it takes me to write, the more the novel is swamped by mediocrity.  For example, Midwives took me nine months to complete a first draft and Secrets of Eden took me ten months.
Each novel usually takes me about two years from the moment I start writing until the work is completed.  The longest any novel has taken me is two years and eight months, and the least amount of time I have spent on a novel is fifteen months.  However, it can be years from the conception of an idea to completion of the novel.  For example, the idea of Secrets of Eden came to me 1997, and I did not complete the book until 2009.

CommitmentNow:  When did you start writing?

Chris:  I started writing as a teenager, and I accumulated about 250 rejection slips before I sold my first short story to Cosmopolitan Magazine.  I wrote my first novel in 1988.  It was called A Killing in the World, and it was awful.  I was working at an advertising agency in Manhattan at that time, and I needed someone to write a blurb on the back of the novel.  A colleague agreed generously to write something: James Patterson.

CommitmentNow:  What are you working on now?

Chris:  I’m writing a book about an airline pilot who is forced to make an emergency landing in Lake Champlain.  But unlike the situation in which Captain Chesley Sullenberger ditched his place in the Hudson River, in my book three quarters of the passengers die while the pilot survives.
 

Chris Bohjalian is the author of thirteen books, including his brand new novel, Secrets of Eden -- arriving February 2.
His other novels include the New York Times bestsellers, Skeletons at the Feast, The Double Bind, Before You Know Kindness, The Law of Similars, and Midwives. 
Chris won the New England Book Award in 2002, and his novel, Midwives, was a number one New York Times bestseller, a selection of Oprah's Book Club, a Publishers Weekly "Best Book," and a New England Booksellers Association Discovery pick. His work has been translated into over 25 languages and twice become movies ("Midwives" and "Past the Bleachers").
He has written for a wide variety of magazines, including Cosmopolitan, Reader's Digest, and the Boston Globe Sunday Magazine, and has been a Sunday columnist for Gannett's Burlington Free Press since 1992. Chris graduated from Amherst College, and lives in Vermont with his wife and daughter.

To purchase Secrets of Eden click here.