Love and Other Monsters by Emily Franklin

Jane Healey welcomes bestselling author Emily Franklin to discuss Love and Other Monsters, a novel that reimagines the origins of Frankenstein through the eyes of Claire Clairmont, Mary Shelley's often-overlooked stepsister. Listen as Emily shares the years of research behind the book, from uncovering Claire's letters and journals to exploring the remarkable summer of 1816 when literary history was made on the shores of Lake Geneva. They also talk about how themes of celebrity, power, women's voices, and climate resonate just as strongly today, along with Emily's unique writing process that brought Claire's forgotten story to life. 

Transcript

Jane 0:05

Welcome to the newly branded Jane Healey Happy Hour, formerly Historical Happy Hour, the podcast that explores new and exciting novels of all genres. I'm your host, bestselling author Jane Healey, and in today's episode we w- welcome my friend Emily Franklin to discuss her beautiful new novel, Love and Other Monsters, which is receiving rave reviews, including starred reviews from Booklist and Library Journal, and it releases April 7th. Welcome, Emily. Thank you for doing this.

Emily 0:33

Thanks for having me.

Jane 0:34

Yeah. So, um, if you wanna hold I'm gonna do a quick bio, um, and if you wanna hold up the ti- Like, since this will be on YouTube as well, hold up the picture of the beautiful cover. Um- Well, I have

Emily 0:45

to position it in my weird background. There we go.

Jane 0:46

There you go. Beautiful.

Emily 0:49

Yeah. There we go.

Jane 0:51

Okay, so about Emily. Emily Franklin is the bestselling author of 25 books, including The Lioness of Boston based on the life of trailblazer Isabella Stewart Gardner, now in its 11th printing, and recently featured as a clue on Jeopardy. Amazing. Her fiction, poetry, essays, and photos have been published in The New York Times, The Boston Globe, The Kenyon Review, and the Journal of the American Medical Association, as well as featured and read aloud on National Public Radio, longlisted for the London Si- and longlisted for the London Sunday Times Short Story Award, and named notable by the Association of Jewish Libraries. She lives outside of Boston with her spouse and four children. Again, welcome. Congratulations on this new book. It's beautiful. Thank you so much.

Emily 1:35

Thanks for having me.

Jane 1:37

Yeah, yeah. So talk about the pre- premise of this story and what initially inspi- inspired you to write it.

Emily 1:43

Sure. So, um, this is Love and Other Monsters, which is the untold origin story of Frankenstein as told from the perspective of Claire Clairmont, who was Mary Shelley's forgotten or erased stepsister. She was Lord Byron's lover, and she was integral in the creation of Frankenstein, and the whole novel is set in 1816. This is the time of Jane Austen. And Claire brings all of these famous writers together on the shores of Lake Geneva, where Frankenstein is created. The vampire as we know the vampire to be, this sort of sexy modern vampire with the suit and the attractive fangs, um, that's based on Lord Byron. Um, so all of these monsters are created on the page, and there are also monsters walking among us as humans, which is obviously pretty relevant. In terms of how I came to write this story, um, in 2009 I read an op-ed in The New York Times. It was written by Guillermo del Toro And Chuck Hogan. So Guillermo del Toro, obviously a bunch of Oscars, you know, just, uh, happened for Frankenstein recently. And Guillermo del Toro talked about this summer. This was a summer of a global climate disaster, um, when the year before there had been a big volcanic eruption in Indonesia, and the ash that was spread from that blocked the sun for 1816, and this causes crop failure and snow in July and all sorts of amazing things. And the darkness is what produces a lot of inside time for Mary Shelley and Lord Byron. But one thing that struck me about the op-ed, um, so, you know, was that it was a fascinating story, and I thought, "Well, you know, this is 2009. I'll, I'll go to the library and I'll, I'll look up and see if there's more information." And in that information I learn about Claire Clairmont. Um, so there were, there were five people there that summer. It was Lord Byron, it was Mary Shelley, her fiancé, Percy Shelley, uh, Lord Byron's personal physician, who was a 20-year-old named John Polidori. Um, that's important to remember. All these people are like 18, 19, 22, 23, 28. But Claire Clairmont's mentioned by name. So I'm thinking, "Okay, that's interesting. Claire wasn't in the article. Let me dig a little deeper." And I go back to the 1831 preface to Frankenstein that Mary Shelley wrote, and in this preface she talks about the origin story of Frankenstein, about how on one dark and stormy night I will add steamy night Lord Byron asked everybody to write a scary story, and that's how she comes up with Frankenstein. But what Mary Shelley says is, "There were four of us there that summer." And it was printed in the 1831 best-selling novel. And I'm thinking, "There weren't four of you. There were five of you." So what happened to make Mary Shelley write her own stepsister out of the story? And that is the origin of Love and Other Monsters is what was Claire Clairmont to all of these people that so many people would want her erased or forgotten? And then the other piece of it is that this was only backed up for me when the real Claire Clairmont left... There are all these journals and letters that survived her, and so many journals, but the journal from 1816 is curiously missing. And so the novel really seeks to answer who might have taken that s- that and destroyed it, and why.

Jane 5:18

Yeah, it's so, I mean, everything about all the elements from the weather to the setting to every- all the people that were there, it's almost a stranger than fiction story. And I was thinking about it, I was going out back through the book yesterday, and it's true. It wasn't just that she's been forgotten by history. She was erased by th- someone, by these people, by her stepsister, most likely. And so talk about how you mined all this incredible research that you did to find Claire Clairmont's voice and make her th- th- central to the s- to the novel.

Emily 5:52

A- as I said, so she left behind these letters and journals, and so some of them were available to me. I went to the Boston College library. They had a pretty good selection of things. There were a bunch of things that are out of print, so I had to sort of figure out how to get those. You know, but the other great thing is that Mary Shelley left behind journals. Lord Byron left behind journals. John Polidori left behind journals. Percy Shelley left behind journals. So it was beyond triangulation. It was some of Claire's original voice, and some of her lines are just incredibly funny. Um, she was smart. She was funny. And we know what happened, right? We know from history that Claire was, in her words, young and vain and poor, and raised in this very unconventional household with Mary Shelley, and really was a critical go-between, um, between Mary Shelley and Percy Shelley. As you know, the, uh, go-between is, is putting it lightly. But in my research, it was very fun to hear Claire's voice and all the voices of the other people, and it was from reading all of the letters and the journals and the biographies that I could really pull out, um, details of everyone's life and, um, figure out how to put 'em on the page

Jane 7:16

Fascinating. Uh, yeah, I, I, one of the things I love, your detailed author's note at the end. I loved all the sources that you list at the end. Just an incredible amount of research. What is your, what was your research process for this book like and d- was there anything that surprised you that kind of changed the narrative?

Emily 7:35

Yes. So the research process is the same process that I always do, which is very, very, very wide and very, very, very granular. So I'm always reading all the books from the time, the, um, weather reports from the time uh, what art was being consumed, what was happening politically. Um, but then it's down to, um, what might... How did somebody iron a shirt back then? What would Claire have eaten? What words would she have known? Um, every time I, I go to use a word, I can remember trying to... I was use- gonna use the word iridescent, and then I thought, "Oh, wait a minute. Was iridescent invented by then?" You know?

Jane 8:19

Yeah.

Emily 8:20

So what's the etymology of that? So looking it up, and it's, you know, 1896 or something. Oh, okay, I can use that. That's great. But would Claire... You know, it's beyond that. It's, so it, it may have been a word, excuse me, but would Claire have known it? And if so, how would she have known it? Okay, well, if something was derived from the French, and Claire is fluent in French, then that's possible. And then in terms of the, the narrative changing for me, so I, I basically compiled so much information over years and years, then the research really takes up so much of my time. And then at some point, the voices of the characters take over. And that's a really exciting thing for me when I'm sort of transitioning from research to narrative. And what happened was very early on, I would say years ago I was researching Claire's relationship with Lord Byron and her sort of, the way that a couple of biographers had portrayed her interest in Percy Shelley so in my early research, I kept thinking, "Oh, this is sort of a Jane Austen style plot." Here's this young, attractive woman and these two older men who are, you know, interested in her. You've got this dashing, dastardly poet, Lord Byron, who's so, so famous. And you've got Percy Shelley, who's this fiery political activist And I kept thinking, "Okay, this is sort of a, a, a nice story in some ways. It's, um, got the art, and it's got some love and some lust and betrayal." But then as I got deeper into the research, it turned darker. Um, because the power dynamics and the manipulation r- really began to feel very real and very modern, so that there's so many through lines between the issues of, of the time and the issues we're seeing play out in the news right now. And sort of men or people who behave really admirably, you know, in some ways, um, maybe they d- they do or say the right thing morally or politically, but then interpersonally, they treat those around them very poorly. And so it became, in some ways, almost like a Me Too novel wrapped in a Jane Austen. And sort of that's where it was the monsters on the page and the monsters who walk among us. And Mary Shelley is also in there, this very complex, you know, sibling dynamics and family dynamics, and, um, and, and the role of celebrity, and power and fame. Claire writes this letter to Lord Byron, you know, she's 17 years old. She writes, "To the most famous man," and she gets a response, and that is the catalyst for change in her life and in Mary's and in everybody else's.

Jane 11:52

Yeah. That, I mean, there are so many parallels that I think are so interesting in the story, whether it's climate change or women trying to find their voice and their path in life. And then you have the celebrity worship, which I thought was so interesting. I didn't realize Lord Byron was that worshiped and adored at the time, so,

Emily 12:12

um- Yeah, I mean, he it was really ridiculous. He, he could sell a, you know, 10,000 copies of his work in a, a week. And he, um, he couldn't go anywhere without being fawned over. He was sort of whoever the biggest movie star is right now, you know, that was Lord Byron, and he was written about in the tabloids. And, you know, as you know, you know, part of my research that was so fun was, Lord Byron's personal physician he hires, who's again a 20-year-old sort of prodigy, medical prodigy, John Polidori, he's with Byron on his travels, but he's also scored this independent publishing deal- And he gets £500, which is around $80,000 in today's currency, to write gossip back to London about Lord Byron and Mary Shelley and Percy and Claire. So he, he- it's so modern. Wow. He's just reporting on everything. They're staying on Lake Geneva in this sort of fancy villa, and across the way is the the hotel, and the hotel is letting patrons go out in boats. They're charging them extra for special goggles where they can, like, look through the binoculars and see these famous people. So it's very modern. Um, these are the... This is paparazzi really spying on all of them.

Jane 13:32

Amazing. So interesting. So you talked about the voices coming to you as you do, after doing this am- amazing amount of research. What was your writing process like for this s- for this book? And do you, did you plot it out, or i- are you more of a write by the seat of your pants?

Emily 13:52

No, I mean, I am a combination. I do a lot of plotting and some allowance for diversion because I think in my experience, and often when I'm working with people who I'm trying to teach about writing, I think when we try to control the narrative too much it feels forced and, and sometimes can block you in. And so, um, I always sketch everything out. I knew, I knew, And because this is based on a real story, so I knew roughly where I was gonna start, and I knew roughly where I was gonna end. Um, what I didn't know when I first started off, though, was whether this was gonna be first person or third person, and originally it was third person because what I thought was I would have chapters narrated by Mary, Byron, Claire- But having done all this research, um, what my process, what happens to me is I do all this research, and then usually I'm out running. I wake up very, very early and I go for a run first thing. And somewhere on these runs, the m- character's voice starts to come to me. So I would get certain lines, and I would dictate them into my phone. It's usually like a bunch of garbled nonsense, and I have to try to make sense of it. It's quite funny. But every time I sat down to write, it was Claire's voice that was the loudest, and I felt eventually like the ghost of Claire was sort of tapping me on the shoulder and saying, "It's me. People have forgotten about me."

Jane 15:24

Mm-hmm.

Emily 15:24

And that's what I kept coming back to. And so, I just gave into that voice and thought, "Oh, this is actually Claire's story. This isn't everyone's story. This is the story of Claire Claremont." And as I went to write I was actually... You know, I toured for the Lioness of Boston for two and a half years, and so part of the writing of this was during the touring. And I would write whenever I got time, so sometimes it would be on a plane or a train or, um, at a, a hotel in a city where I didn't know anybody or home in between. And so there, I was writing in m- shorter increments, which actually reminded me of poetry. You know, I started off life as a poet, and so my attention to language and cadence and details, it all comes back to poetry. So it felt very like a familiar space for me. But when I went to start to write beginning to end, I realized I had all of these shorter things that felt almost like days to me. So I printed them all out. It was a very unusual process for me. Um, I usually write start to finish, and then and even if I'm jumping around in time I'm backcombing continuously, so the p- by the time I end up with one draft, it's really about draft five. So I had all of these pages, and when I say all, I had 1,100 pages.

Jane 16:51

Did you really? That's amazing.

Emily 16:54

Yes, indeed. Yes, indeed.

Jane 16:57

Emily.

Emily 16:58

I was overwhelmed by all of the pages. And so I said to my husband, I don't know what to do except that I s- I think I understand the order of many of these pages." Now, they weren't one 1,100 single-spaced regular pages. Again, they were these shorter sections, and some of them clearly went together, and some of them needed to be moved around. But I basically printed out 1,100 pages, took over the dining room and our table where we always have... You know, we have four kids, so we always have these big meals, and I just spread everything out, and my husband helped me. And what I would do is I moved everything around. I shuffled it around very much the way you put together a poetry collection where you say like, "Okay this is in conversation with this." And I realized the chronology, and what I realized was I was telling Claire's story March to August of that year, of 1816, and these were almost but not quite her journal entries. And so my husband helped me because when I, I grouped them together. I said, "Here's what I'm gonna do. I'm gonna put them in order, and then please can you put them in these organizing binders?" So that what I ended up having, how I wrote my real first draft, was I had March binder, April binder, May binder. So what I would do is I would take it from my office, and I would just start, and that's how I would write March. And then I would write April, May, June, and then that's how I did it. Because what I realized partway through was, "Oh, this really is-" clear looking back on that burned or stolen or destroyed journal. So it was a very different process for me.

Jane 18:57

Yeah, very different, and fascinating. Uh, I was thinking about with this book and also with Lioness of Boston, like it- your writing is so beautiful at a line level, and it just, uh, your poetry background comes through. I think part of that is your poetry background. I always, some of the lines sometimes I'm like, "Oh, you're so good. It's so brilliant." And, uh- Thank

Emily 19:16

you. Thanks

Jane 19:17

you're welcome. Um, I- one of my questions, I mean, you've written, a couple dozen novels and nonfiction books and all different types. How different is y- has your process changed? How different is it book to book? I mean, this was obviously an incredibly different process for you.

Emily 19:33

This novel was different. Everything else is, is pretty similar.

Jane 19:38

Yeah.

Emily 19:40

Um, you know, I have ideas, I explore them. And then once I think I have the crux of a novel I will plot it out a bit and begin to fill in those, those spaces. And this one was just so different. And- Yeah um, and in some ways it was really scary and overwhelming, as I said. And in some ways, once I allowed it to be what it was gonna be, it was amazing.

Jane 20:10

Amazing.

Emily 20:10

Um, and it was just this very pure- artistic experience for me of letting it just be what it was gonna be.

Jane 20:20

I

Emily 20:20

love

Jane 20:20

that.

Emily 20:20

And that was really exciting. And then yeah, I just, I just made this book that felt really whole, and that was exciting.

Jane 20:31

Yeah. Yeah. So great. So you teach. You taught me back in the day. I always say, like, your editor reached out to me to, to read the, give this book an early read, and I was like, "I would do anything for Emily Franklin," because back when I wasn't published, I have to share this, and I took a workshop of yours, and I was about to give up on my first novel, and you were so kind and generous, not only during the workshop, but beyond that, in emails, and I wouldn't be a writer today, I wouldn't be the writer today if it wasn't for people like you. So I just wanna say thank you. I'm getting emotional, as I always do when I talk about things like this. Me either.

Emily 21:07

It's so lovely to hear, and I, I believed it at the time, and I'm so excited for you now, and I'm so excited the world gets to read you, and I knew, I knew it. Oh. And I think being a good literary citizen is a part of what we get to do. Yeah. And that's a really important thing a huge part of m- my writing life, um, and, and who I wanna be in the world as a, as a friend. Yeah. You know, as a parent and a a daughter and a, and a spouse. So thank you.

Jane 21:37

Yeah, no, thank you. And I, I wanna ask since you do teach and mentor so many writers what's the best advice you can give for I know we have a lot of listeners who are aspiring authors out there. What's the best advice you can give?

Emily 21:52

Read widely is what, is the first thing. Read things that you wouldn't normally read. So if you read only high-end, you know, erudite literary fiction, go read Heated Re- Rivalry. Go read other things. Um, see what's out there. If you read only nonfiction, pick up fiction. If you, you know, never read poetry, read poetry. These are all ways that language gets in and structure gets in, and just exposure. The advice I just gave somebody that I, I gave a lecture last week, and somebody came up a- and asked me advice, and I told her that, she was very focused on writing her first novel, and she said she had gotten to the point where it was really, she was just trying to get words on, and it was tricky for her, and she felt kinda stuck. And I was saying that's where, um, writing across genre is really helpful. So go write an essay. Mm-hmm. Think of something in your life that you, you know about or want others to know about, and go write an essay about it. See if you can get that placed. Write widely, read widely. I don't think you can be a good writer without reading especially now, and I mean really reading, not scrolling. And so I think that's my, my main thing. And the other, the other advice I always give writers is If your book sells tomorrow, your life is still the life you have today. So if you do not like your life today, having not sold that novel, that's your real work. Build a life that you like and that is sustainable, and then hopefully the publishing, which is a different thing than writing, publishing is, is one job. Writing is a different job. Separate those two in your mind, but just know that you're building life, and we're all building our lives, no matter how old you are. This is the life that, that you're living, and it's so fast, so we need to make sure that we're spending the hours in a way that serves us and serves our communities and serves others.

Jane 24:04

Excellent advice. I know we were just talking, you... This book comes out April 7th. You have a huge tour planned, so people can find you on tour. Yes. I saw on your website that you- people can s- book clubs can sign up to do- to Zoom or, or get in touch with you that way. What other ways, um, are, can readers best get in touch with you?

Emily 24:23

Oh, people can email me directly. I almost always write back. Great yeah, so my, my email is on my website, emilyfranklin.com. I'm on Instagram, um, begrudgingly, I might add. My publicist- made me get on there, so- um, I'm not sort of doing Instagram the way that I- maybe one is supposed to do Instagram. Um, I'm on Facebook because I'm 50, so you're supposed to be, have been on Facebook. So that's one way. And then come out to literary events. My... All of my events are on my website. I'm going to, I think, 20 different states- Between now and November, and I'd love to catch up with people in person, and I love visiting with book groups. So if it's local, I try to be able to go in person. Um, sometimes that's not possible, and if it's not local, I, I, I happily Zoom in. Um, there are book club discussion questions at the end of the novel, and I hope people will consider asking those. And some of them are about the novel, and some of them are really asking you and your book club or book group to tie the novel to your own experience. I think one of the questions I ask is, "If you could receive a journal in the mail from one year in your life, what year would that be?" And so I really want people to try to use the novel as a launching-off point. Um, but it's a great way to get in touch with me.

Jane 25:49

Excellent. So I, I know you're a little under the weather. Thank you for doing this. This is a beautiful new novel. Love and Other Monsters comes out April 7th. Congratulations again. Um, my latest novel from Lake Union is Women of Arlington Hall. It came out last summer. Don't forget to follow Happy Hour wherever you listen to podcasts or subscribe to my YouTube channel. And thank you again, Emily. I wish you so much success with this. I know it's gonna be a huge book.

Emily 26:15

Thank you so much. I really appreciate it. Thanks for giving me the time.