Kate Bornstein: My first editor, Bill Germano at Routledge, encouraged me to make the book performative because he recognized that as a strength of mine. So I have different fonts and typefaces representing different voices: the main text of the book, quotes from other people, and a third voice that’s me, usually arguing with something I’ve said in the main text. So the book reads like a conversation, one you’re listening to, one you can take part in. I like the performative nature of writing, can’t seem to write straight text. I try to imagine myself in the reader’s place, and when I sat down to write about alternatives to suicide, I quickly realized if I was having a really bad day, I’d want a book that would make me smile just by looking at it.

Yeah, our writing styles are chatty; but our work has more in common than that. I recently interviewed Betty Dodson who said that the strength of writers like you and me and her is that we write in the first person about our own lives. I’m curious to know what kind of response you’ve been getting from different areas of the publishing and literary and academic worlds to your subjective writing style; and while you’re at it, what do you think is the future of subjective writing?

Mary Sharratt: The story was based on a novella I wrote in the early 1990s before I did much research. From the very beginning, I had the two sisters—May, who is lost, and Hannah, who is searching for her—and Gabriel, the man who is in turn May’s husband and Hannah’s lover.

However, my original plot became much more complex when I realized how harsh life was in 17th-century Maryland and how isolated the English settlers were. We tend to base our image of American colonial life on the New England model, but the Chesapeake was an utterly different world. Instead of the close knit New England village, you had far flung plantations mimicking a wilderness version of English feudalism. The gentleman landowner had nearly absolute power over his family, indentured servants, and slaves. Yet, paradoxically, it was a very perilous place for a landowner to be—isolated in the back country where, in some cases, blacks far outnumbered whites. As I was writing, I became intrigued with the possibility of mutiny on these remote plantations. What if the servants overthrow their master? This became a crucial part of the story.

Also, the mortality rate was incredibly high. The slave trade brought malaria and yellow fever to the region. English settlers, who had no natural resistance to these diseases, died in droves, leaving countless children to be raised by step parents and servants. There were no English physicians in the Chesapeake in this era. If you needed medical attention, you did for yourself or went to the blacksmith for surgery. Ships sailed from to and from England only once a year. Thus, it would take a year, sometimes more, for a letter to English relatives to arrive.

This research made it all the more poignant for Hannah, who remained in England to take care of her aging father, while her beloved sister sailed off to Maryland to wed a young man she had never met. I thought about how these two sisters would long for each other and how difficult any communication between them would be until Hannah was free to sail to America and join her sister.