Interview with Ellen Meeropol, Author of HER SISTER'S TATTOO

Ellen Meeropol's gorgeous novel is a must read—even if I'm still skeptical that the 1960s qualify as historical fiction! A story of sibling love and tensions set against a backdrop of protests of the Vietnam war.

We had a great conversation, and she'll be joining me and Lee Wicks for a virtual reading on Thursday, December 3, hosted by Writers in Progress.

Find out more about Ellen's books and where to buy them at her Web site! 

Transcript

Susanne 0:28

here with me today is Ellen Mira, Paul whose recent book, her sister's tattoo came out in April, March, April. Yes. And it is just a fabulous book that everyone should read. and I have a lot of questions for Ellen because it's somehow very resonant with the politics today. So we'll get into that a little bit anyway. How are you today, Allie?

Ellen 0:56

I'm fine. Thank you. It's another beautiful day. Much too warm for November, but lovely to be in.

Susanne 1:05

Yes. and people should know that, Ellie and I are, inhabitants of the same part of the world. So I have the same weather that she has. I have interviewed people in Australia and places and other places, on this, but this is like a close neighbor. So anyway, So why don't you talk a little bit, just to start out with about the Genesis of this book. I know you've talked about it and I've heard about it a lot, but my listeners probably don't know it. So if you would,

Ellen 1:37

this book has been 20 years in the writing and it was actually the first novel manuscript I wrote when I started writing fiction 20, 21 years ago. the Genesis, it depends on whether you're asking about what I thought when I started writing it or what I think now, 20 years later, the first chapters I wrote took place in a summer camp, in 1980. And. The two main characters in this first chapter were two 12 year old girls who meet at this left-wing summer camp and discover that their mothers were sisters. and that their mothers were arrested during an anti-Vietnam war demonstration in 1968. and. Because of their responses to those arrests, the mothers have not spoken to each other since. And so in a somewhat demented, parents traps scenario, the two girls decide to try to get their mothers back together. No you're writing. I first thought this was going to be a short story. It was titled in her camp. but. I realized pretty quickly that it wasn't a short story and that it was really more about the mothers about these two sisters, Rosa and Esther, who in 1968 in their passion for trying to stop the Vietnam war, do an action, which injures a cop gets them arrested and they disagree. Very deeply disagree about how to move forward. So when I started writing it, I thought I was writing a story about. The sort of fault line between family loyalty and political passion or political activism,

Susanne 3:49

right? Isn't that kind of a little bit, resonant today with all the families who have deep divides over. Politics at the moment

Ellen 4:01

certainly is. and I think that the question that the book asks, is really deeply important for us now. And that question is how much are we willing to risk in order to try to make the changes that many of us know are necessary in order to keep our country. democracy in order to keep our country from totally coming apart at the seams. These two sisters really agree with each other. Politically they're both against the war. They're both very involved in the beginnings of the second wave of feminism in this country, but when they are indicted for really serious crimes for felonies, they have a different response. One of them wants to make it a big political trial to take the politics into the courts. this is the era of the Chicago seven, and the other one who has an infant daughter wants to stay out of prison and accepts a plea bargain. So I think the history is. Really interesting to me, these are the kinds of conflicts and divides that many people who were against the war faced. There were so many questions go to prison or go to Canada, peaceful protest or throwing rocks at buildings or,

Susanne 5:37

or, claim to have bone spurs.

Ellen 5:41

Yes or claimed to have phones first. Yes. these sisters are, grew up in a working class Jewish family with a long history of political activism. So they, it also impacts other generations of their family, their parents, and their daughters.

Susanne 6:03

Yeah. and that intergenerational, dynamic was very clear and very poignant, really. and And the thing is that you could really, you got behind everyone at the end, there was no one who you said, Oh, she's right. And she's wrong, or whatever, that it was just very complex and subtle. And, as I said before, a lot of resonances today, cause we've had instances of the kind of police brutality, using perhaps different means that was. Sort of common in that era of protests. And, it's just, for me, it's like CA haven't we moved on from anywhere and clearly we haven't. But anyway, so just shifting a little bit, one thing that fascinates me as a woman of a certain age is to suddenly have events. I remember considered historical fiction. did you think you were writing historical fiction when you wrote this novel?

Ellen 7:10

I had no clue that this would be considered historical fiction. This was my life. These were the years I grew up in. in fact, the first inkling I had was, right around the time that the book came out, in my daily morning Googling of the title to see if anybody had reviewed it. I came across, a list of forthcoming historical. Novels for 2020. And there, my book was on the list and I immediately looked up historical fiction online to see what the definition was. And what I read was that anything that's more than 50 years ago is considered historical fiction. Well, this book opens in 1968, so wallah. It is considered historical fiction, but that did really, for me, although the history of it was important to me in not so much the writing of the book, but the many years and many versions of revision, My process in writing fiction is always to write the first draft from my imagination before I do any research. and I don't necessarily say that's the way to do it. It's just the way I do it. I wanna know what the story is first. And then I need to do research, doing research for this book. Once I had a pretty solid draft. Was peculiar because some of the research where my own journals, as a young woman, one of my close friends had saved all of the letters. I wrote her and she sent me this wonderful package of my letters. Of course I cringed reading because did I really say that, Oh my God. but it was really wonderful primary source material to have in my own words. And then of course my memory, which as we both know is really often quite suspect, But luckily I write fiction. So I wasn't trying to write a memoir of this period at all. And neither of these characters is me. so yeah, I

Susanne 9:28

was about, I was about to ask you if you S if you identified yourself more with one or the other of those characters,

Ellen 9:36

let me come back to that. Okay. In just a sec. but I still had to do. The same research that you would do for any novel set in a period other than right now that I went back and I re-read the books about the sixties and the political movements, SDS and underground. And I went back and I re-read March PRCS novels and her poetry. I re-read, sisterhood is powerful the collection by Robin Morgan. and so I really steep myself in that period. I knew. And I also had to learn about, an aspect of it that I didn't know. And that is. The experience of soldiers in Vietnam of us soldiers and the most useful place to learn about that was the online, archive of the winter soldier project. these are first person, reports by, us. Soldiers are soldiers who served in Vietnam and came back and hold the story. And their memories became a really important, A really important aspect for me. and one that I really didn't know much about. I had a couple of friends who served, but neither one of them would talk about it afterwards. Yes. so th the history of it was, doing the research into the public history was really interesting. what you ask about whether I identify with. Either of the sisters. the answer is no, and I believe that's one of the reasons it took 20 years to get this book ready for publication. the, in the early versions, I think Roseanne, Esther were fairly cardboard. They stood for a point of view. they were a mouthpiece for a certain political. opinion. What I had to do was make them real people who were full of all of the contradictions and nuance that real people have. and I don't think the book was really ready until I could honestly say no, I don't agree with one of them more than the other. And once I felt that myself, then it was ready to send to my editor and say, do you want, yes.

Susanne 12:23

Yeah. It's so interesting. It's such a different kind of, for me, I write historical fiction. That's set much farther in the past, which I may have empathy for the characters. I may understand them in some way, but there's, and of course writers always put themselves bits of themselves in their fiction, no matter what, but it w there's never a sort of sense that. I don't know, maybe I'm wrong about this, that some deeply held beliefs of mine are that I have to take care to put them forward. Whereas I can see that may have how that may have had an impact on your process with this book, because it was so close to your own, the things that were really important to you. So yeah. how have people responded so far to your book? I see wonderful reviews and I loved it of course. But has anybody sort of said no, no, no. That isn't the way it was or anything like that.

Ellen 13:29

there are, there have been a few people who've said that their experience was very different. I haven't seen reviews either reader reviews or, professional reviews that argue with, the facts of the public history. but then, you know, I published with a small press. So the book doesn't necessarily get into the hands of. Of middle America, the way, another novel, another publisher might. what I, the most interesting responses I've gotten, I think are because of the timing of the book and the book coming out. And me doing a lot of, virtual readings around the time of all of the demonstrations around black lives matter and the murders of, of black people in the streets. And so a lot of people have picked up on the question of how much will we risk. How much do different people of different races and different classes, risk, in comparison to each other. it's been really interesting to watch that conversation and to feel like the book and a small part has contributed something to that conversation. I believe that the. One of the best things that novels do in addition to take us away and, entertain us and give us empathy for other lives is to ask questions that make us think about our own lives in our own situation. And what would we do? In a situation like that. I don't think novels do a very good job of answering those questions. That's up to Peter, but novels can do a great job of asking people to think outside of our own lives. And that's, I'm very grateful that this book has been able to do that for several years.

Susanne 15:44

This for me, interestingly, I. I was just blown away because some part of my brain had sequestered all that stuff from the past. it was not, I hadn't thought about it for a long time. And perhaps it was, I don't know how old you are, but I was during, in 1968, I was 13 years old, and my brother had a draft number. Later, but I wasn't around, I wasn't in a position to be actively involved in things. So perhaps that would have made a difference. And in my family was now in no way political or whatever. I was not brought up to be a protestor or anything like that, but I was so grateful to be reminded. That all of that stuff did happen. And I remember it as someone watching the news. it just was a revelation to me. It's Oh yeah, people protest and they have done for a long time. And, and then, and I loved the way too. You linked various events, starting with the Vietnam war protests. And then I ending up with. The Iraq war, the WMDs and that, which of course, I was very aware of having been a fully formed adult by then, but, it just gave this sense of history repeating itself and which is depressing. And yet your, characters resolve in a very satisfying way. how did you, how was it to get to the ending? I'm not going to give it away for people, but, how had you thought about ending it differently at different times?

Ellen 17:28

Yeah, there were various endings, and, you can imagine in 20 years, how many drafts of this book, it went through many drafts and many titles and many endings. Actually the beginning for most of that time was the same, starting at the demonstration in scene. I don't know about you, Suzanne. I find endings really hard, on the one hand you don't want to tie everything up in a nice bow or I don't, because I don't think life is like that. And when I read a book like that, I feel like it ends it for me. And I liked the characters in the story to keep moving forward in my mind for a while. And a good book will do that. you don't stop thinking about the story or the characters just because you've come to the end. but you do want it. You do want to be satisfied that there has been some measure of resolution. some measure of characters having come to some new understanding of their own place in their story. so this was the ending that made sense for me, given that, But of course the world is complicated place. And, I wrote a short story that essentially took the same characters in the same situation and pretended that ending never occurred and wrote something that took place in 2019 when Roseanne Esther are in their late seventies. and went back to them and that's your story was interesting. Cause that short story was published. And, I now written a script for a local theater company that is interested in possibly, producing it. So is a short story,

Susanne 19:39

short story producing the short story.

Ellen 19:43

this is a script, right? I've written it now as a play. they were originally interested in me doing a play of the novel of this whole book. But I said, no, I can't, I can't do a play. It's too big. It's it covers too much territory. But, I don't know about you, but I just, because a book is published, this story doesn't necessarily, and in my brain, I still about these characters, they still live and breathe.

Susanne 20:13

Yeah. Yeah. It's interesting. You should say that. Because, I've just recently, just in my last few years of writing turned to writing a series and a

Ellen 20:25

trilogy.

Susanne 20:26

and that is definitely those characters continuing for me. And, But you're absolutely right about the fact that you don't want an ending to be too tidy and everything. And it's why you'll never be a romance author that I think

Ellen 20:41

I will.

Susanne 20:42

I, not that there's anything wrong with romances. I'll tell you. They're great. Great escapism. But, Really satisfying endings. Yes. And and sometimes you just want to know that somewhere in the world things, no. Okay. But, but that's a different, that's a different mandate, from what you do and to a lesser extent what I do. Cause I, I do try to tie things up a little bit more probably at the end, can you talk a little bit about, this was the first novel you started to write and the most recent one that's published, what has come between and how did that work into this?

Ellen 21:23

I, when I started writing this novel, I had never written fiction. I had never taken a writing course. I was a nurse practitioner. I had written a lot of articles for medical and nursing journals. Totally different kinds of writing. And, but I had this story in my head and I really needed to write it. And I was interested in writing fiction in general. I was afraid I would be really bad at it. And I, so I enrolled in an online writing class. Hoping that, I'd have anonymity and could be as bad as I needed to be. And nobody I knew would know that. and it was a wonderful online class. And then I started writing, taking writing workshops, in, locally here where you and I both live. I worked with writers in progress and had, really wonderful, Instruction. And I wrote, I worked on this novel, in those workshops. After about three years of writing, I had a couple of drafts and. I knew it really wasn't. I read a lot and I read really good contemporary literary fiction, and I knew that's a problem with being the literary late bloomer. You've already you so much. And your taste is so much more developed and your skill, at least that was my experience. So I knew it really wasn't that good. and I decided to enroll in a low-residency MFA program. And when I did that, I put this novel away and I said, maybe when I'm a more seasoned writer, I'll be able to come back to this and do this story justice. But I started, I started at a, at. the stone coast MFA program at the university of Southern Maine, and I started a new novel, and that novel was what I worked on for the two years of the program. And, that was the first novel that I had published. It's called house arrest. And, and then I wrote two other novels on hurricane Island and kinship of Clover, both of which were published. and then, having had 20 years of writing and publishing experience under my belt, I sent this novel to my editor. With some trepidation. every time I finished another book, I'd go back and I do another two or three drafts of this one sister's tests, and use what I have learned to try to make it better. I'm very stubborn and I just would not give up this book.

Susanne 24:28

thank heavens you didn't. So that question of what gets to the page, not matching what's your, what you imagine and what you want wanted to be. I think that's a really important idea and it's something that all writers grapple with. And now you have this image in your head. You want to write this book? That's like this, and it's really hard to get. What's actually on the page to match what's in your head. And probably it never actually does. Even if you get close, I don't know, maybe this did for you, but, I certainly don't have that experience. and I can't even remember who I read recently, who talked about this some big famous writer, about. How one skill one, when you're a reader with good taste, your taste way, outpaces your ability to write.

Ellen 25:26

There is a quote that I use sometimes when I teach workshops on writing the novel, I can't remember it. Exactly. And it may be the same one. You're thinking about something about, the most exciting time as a writer is when you have this amazing idea in your head. And before you write by getting it down on paper.

Susanne 25:49

So my goodness. Yes. And the thing is, yeah, I don't know about you, but for me it gets harder every time it's I don't know what it is, you think you're becoming more experienced and you've written more, but somehow that doesn't solve that problem for me anyway.

Ellen 26:07

No, it does. It's the problem. And because we just never reached perfection. we're always, I'm always, whenever I do a reading. from this, from any of my books, I change words. I delete sentences. I'm constantly revising even with the published material.

Susanne 26:26

Yeah. I don't exactly do that, but I inwardly cringe and I say, I should have said that differently. I was like, what was I thinking? Yeah. but it's exciting actually. You and I are going to be on a reading together on December 3rd. Yes. And one, a wide variety of stuff is going to be read. But hers is a memoir. You have this intense literary, recent historical fiction, and I have this frothy historical mystery taking place in the 18th century and the Paris of. Pre-revolutionary Paris. So it should be interesting.

Ellen 27:06

I think it'll be very interesting. I'm I've had the, the opportunity now to read all three, to know all three of these, of the books. and I think that it's interesting that there are some sort of shared. Themes. I won't say anything because we'll save it for that, conversation, in a couple of weeks, but for three weeks, whenever it is.

Susanne 27:29

yeah, I will definitely, since everything's virtual now, nobody has to live in this area to actually come and come to this reading. So I will definitely put a link to it in the show notes for this, interview. Now, is there anything you want to talk about that I haven't broached or that anything else you want to say about the Booker?

Ellen 27:50

yeah. one of the things, I've talked about the public history of this book, and. It was very interesting to go back and do the research for the public history. Not only the things I mentioned, the winter soldier and all of the books and. but I also did a lot of, I spent a lot of time on websites that had posters and, chant from the 19th anti-war anti-Vietnam war demonstrations to get myself back into those days. But there's also an aspect of private history that, is part of this novel. and that is that, um, own family history comes into this in an oblique kind of way. When my husband Robbie was three E, his parents Ethel and Julius Rosenberg were arrested and later convicted of conspiracy to commit espionage. and they were executed in 1953 by the U S government. The only testimony against his mother Ethel Rosenberg came from her beloved younger brother, David Greenglass. David testified in court that she typed the notes of a meeting. And that was really the only, that's what sent her to the electric chair. many years later on 60 minutes on national television, David Greenglass admitted that he lied, that he perjured himself and, and he said he did it to protect his own family so that his wife would not be indicted. She would not go to prison. His children would have their mother at home. So the whole question of siblings. and have sibling betrayal, something that I've lived with for a very long time. I met Robbie when I was 19. So most of my, of my life I've been living with him story. and so I think from the moment I wrote that first chapter of the two girls at summer camp. I've been, I was thinking in the back of my mind, although I really don't think I realized it at the time, perhaps I did, memory's a funny thing. but I realized that I wanted to explore the idea of two siblings who love each other deeply are very close and agree with each other politically, for the most part. Being in a situation in which there's a huge conflict between them and they disagree about how to move forward and this disagreement disrupts their lives and their family's lives for generations. Now this conflict is not totally internal. David, Greenglass his. Testimony was orchestrated as a plea bargain by Roy Cohn, who was the assistant prosecutor in that case? Talk about resonate.

Susanne 31:20

Oh my God. Yes. Wow.

Ellen 31:24

but he, he testified against his sister and that center to her death. in my story, Rosa and Esther's situation is quite different, although there's still a huge conflict. but Esther does accept the bargain. So she will not have to go to prison so she can stay out of prison and take care of her baby. and so for me, both the internal and the external forces that rip the siblings apart. Is part of the sort of private history of this novel. And I'm sure part of the reason why I just couldn't let it go. It felt it tip helps to personally, and too important to me, although, as I say, the story that I write in her sister's tattoo is not the story of the Rosenberg case in any way. and it's not my story, but the magically. there is a lot of shared, muscle, between those things.

Susanne 32:31

Yeah. everything you say goes to reinforce. Something that I say to the people I coach and everything else is that there has to be an underlying sort of passion, a reason to write something, especially something that's going to take you years. You can't just say, Oh, I want to publish a book. And I want it to sell 500,000 copies. That's not a good reason to write a book. And, and even if it's just, if it's not something that. Has taken your whole writing life to write. It's still is really important to have some underlying thing that you see that you have to say that you have to actually a story you have to tell. So I think that's an extreme example of my view. yeah. But yeah, I, it is just, it's astonishing and timely and everything a good historical novel should be. even though I love, I'm love to call the seventies, history, sixties, and seventies history. Cause it's I'm not old enough for that, but, it's still, yeah, well, This has been really lovely talking to you. I really appreciate you coming on here. And, and I will put links that purchase links for the book and everything in the show notes for people. And I hope they will. They will go and buy it because especially because even though a very respected small press published this book, as you say, unless you're one of the great big muscular big five, one of which is on it's for sale now, So it might become the big four I arrive at isn't it? it's hard to fight your way through and get into reader's hands. So I hope people will go in. By the book in whatever form they want. Yes. Is there an audio book by the way?

Ellen 34:22

Yes, there is. There's an audio book. E-book and the print book.

Susanne 34:26

Yeah. Yeah. excellent. listen, thank you again.

Ellen 34:33

It's been fun. It's been fun talking with you.

Susanne 34:36

Good. And we will be talking again in a couple of weeks and, yeah, have a great day.

Ellen 34:42

Thank you.