My first novel, All the Money in the World, was set in the world of my youth: New York in the 1970s. For my second book, the novel that eventually became All Will Be Revealed, I wanted to go in the opposite direction and explore a world I didn’t know firsthand, a world I would have to make my own through an act of imagination. What I decided to do was go back in time to the close of the so-called Gilded Age, at the end of the nineteenth century. The period had always fascinated me because it seemed like the birthplace of our own strange contemporary scene: obsessed with celebrity and spectacle, in love with illusion, unsure where fantasy ends and reality begins.

In 1896, the year in which my protagonist, Augustus Auerbach, guides his wheelchair into the parlor of the spirit medium Verena Swann, lower Broadway was lined with “museums” in which one could view a whale kept in a tank of water (slowly starving to death—they didn’t know what to feed it), throw bits of meat to a supposedly man-eating plant, or play chess against an automaton (with a boy or a dwarf hidden inside). If you got tired of the life-size diorama of the battle of Gettysburg, you could step into a spirit photographer’s studio and get your picture taken with a dead relative: the ghost would appear, nearly transparent, in the background.

What I saw in all this was the first stirrings of our own “virtual” world, a world in which imitations of life—TV shows, movies, and images on the Internet—threaten to become more real to us than life itself. Going back to the Gilded Age thus offered me a chance to think about my own creeping sense of unreality, but with the perspective that a hundred years’ distance can provide.

The truth is that I’ve been unintentionally training for this particular niche my entire life.

Fall 1977, Louisville, Kentucky: The first day of first grade at St. Matthews Elementary. Since I can already read, the teacher sends me to the library, where I ask the surprised librarian where the biographies are. I read about Florence Nightingale, Jenny Lind, Helen Keller, Babe Didrikson Zaharias—the few women who are considered important enough to have biographies written about them. Later, I graduate to adult biography and my new heroines are Laura Ingalls Wilder, Louisa May Alcott and Marie Curie. Marie Curie, I learn, kept her husband Pierre’s brain in a jar in her room. Even then I had an eye for the curious detail.

Summer 1983, Northwest Harbor, Maine: I am twelve, and my vacation reading is The Agony and the Ecstasy by Irving Stone. I fall in love with Michelangelo. I fall in love with sculpture. I fall in love with Italy, with the Medici, with the artist’s romances. I can still picture Vittoria Colonna’s pale, lovely face.