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THE KERNEL THAT LED TO 'THE SANDCASTLE GIRLS'
by Chris Bohjalian
The Armenian Weekly Magazine
Sometimes my novels have positively elephantine gestation periods-and
even that, in some cases, is an underestimate. A mother elephant
carries her young for not quite two years; I have spent, in some cases,
not quite two decades contemplating the tiniest seed of a story and
wondering how it might grow into a novel.
Chris Bohjalian's novel of the Armenian Genocide, The Sandcastle Girls,
arrives on July 17.
Moreover, in the quarter-century I've been writing books, I've realized
two things about a lengthy gestation period. First, the longer I spend
allowing an idea to take root inside me, the better the finished book;
second, the more time I spend thinking about a book, the less time
I spend actually writing it. Here's a confession: The first draft of
the novel for which I may always be known best, Midwives, took a mere
(and eerily appropriate) nine months to write.
Skeletons at the Feast, another book I will always be proud of, took
only 10. But I spent a long time pondering both of these novels before
ever setting a single word down on paper.
Perhaps in no case has the relationship between reflection and
construction-between the ethereal wisps of imagination and the concrete
words of creation-been more evident than in the novel I have arriving
this summer, The Sandcastle Girls. The novel has been gestating at
the very least since 1992, when I first tried to make sense of the
Armenian Genocide: a slaughter that most of the world knows next to
nothing about.
My first attempt to write about the genocide, penned 20 years ago
now, exists only as a rough draft in the underground archives of
my alma mater. It will never be published, neither in my lifetime
nor after I'm dead. I spent over two years struggling mightily to
complete a draft, and I never shared it with my editor. My wife,
who has always been an objective reader of my work, and I agreed:
The manuscript should either be buried or burned. I couldn't bring
myself to do either, but neither did I ever want the pages to see
the light of the day. Hence, the exile to the underground archives.
Moreover, just about this time, Carol Edgarian published her poignant
drama of the Armenian Genocide and the diaspora, Rise the Euphrates.
It's a deeply moving novel and, it seemed to me, a further indication
that the world didn't need my book.
And so instead I embarked upon a novel that had been in the back of
my mind for some time: A tale of a New England midwife and a home
birth that has gone tragically wrong.
Over the next 15 years, all but one of my novels would be set largely
in New England. Sometimes they would be about women and men at the
social margins: homeopaths, transsexuals, and dowsers. Other times
they would plumb social issues that matter to me: homelessness,
domestic violence, and animal rights.
The one exception, the one book not set in New England? Skeletons at
the Feast, a story set in Poland and Germany in the last six months
of the Second World War. That novel is, in part, about a fictional
family's complicity in the Holocaust. Often as I toured on behalf
of the book in 2008 and 2009, readers would ask me the following:
When was I going to write about the Armenian Genocide? After all,
from my last name it's clear that I am at least part Armenian. (I am,
in fact, half-Armenian; my mother was Swedish.)
I had contemplated the subject often, even after failing in my first
attempt to build a novel around the Meds Yeghern. The Great Calamity.
Three of my four Armenian great-grandparents died in the poisonous
miasma of the genocide and the First World War. Moreover, some of my
best-and from a novelist's perspective most interesting-childhood
memories occurred while I was visiting my Armenian grandparents at
their massive brick monolith of a home in a suburb of New York City.
Occasionally, my Mid-Western, Swedish mother would refer to their
house as the "Ottoman annex of the Metropolitan," because it was-at
least by the standards of Westchester County in the middle third of
the twentieth century-so exotic.
In 2010, my father's health began to deteriorate badly. He lived in
Florida at the time, while I lived in Vermont. I remember how on one
of my visits, when he was newly home after yet another long stay in
the hospital, together we looked at old family photographs. I was
trying to take his mind off his pain, but I also found the exercise
incredibly interesting. In some cases, these were images I had seen
on the walls of my grandparents' or my parents' house since I was a
child, but they had become little more than white noise: I knew them
so well that I barely noticed them and they had grown as invisible
to me as old wallpaper.
Now, however, they took on a new life. I recall one in particular that
fascinated me: a formal portrait of my father when he was five years
old, his parents behind him. All of them are impeccably coiffed. My
grandfather is seated in an elegant wooden chair in the sort of suit
and tie and vest that he seemed always to be wearing when I was a boy,
and my grandmother is standing beside him in a beautiful black dress
with a white collar and a corsage. I can see bits of my daughter-their
great-granddaughter-in my grandmother's beautiful, almond-shaped eyes.
My father, a kindergartener at the time, is wearing shorts, a white
shirt, and a rather badly knotted necktie with a cross on it.
I knew almost nothing about my grandparents' story. But that picture
reminded me of those moments when, as a child myself, I would sit
on my grandfather's lap or listen to him, enrapt, as he played his
beloved oud. I recalled the wondrous aroma of lamb and mint that always
wafted from their front door when I would arrive, and my grandmother's
magnificent cheese boregs. I thought of their library filled with
books in a language-an alphabet-I could not begin to decipher, even
as I was learning to read English.
And at some point, the seeds of my family's own personal diaspora
began to take root. I had no interest in revisiting the disastrous
manuscript that was gathering dust in my college archives. But I knew
that I wanted to try once again to write about the Armenian Genocide.
A good friend of mine, a journalist and genocide scholar, urged me on.
Ironically, I was about 90 pages into my new book when Mark Mustian
published his beautifully written and deeply thought-provoking
novel, The Gendarme. I felt a bit as I had in 1994 when I read Carol
Edgarian's Rise the Euphrates. Did the world really need my book
when it had Mark's-or, for that matter, the stories and memoirs that
Peter Balakian, Nancy Kricorian, Micheline Aharonian Marcom, and Franz
Werfel had given us? It might have been my father's failing health,
or it might have been the fact that I was older now; it might have
been the reality that already I cared deeply for the fictional women
and men in my new novel. But this time I soldiered on.
I think The Sandcastle Girls may be the most important book I've
written. It is certainly the most personal. It's a big, broad, sweeping
historical love story. The novel moves back and forth in time between
the present and 1915; between the narrative of an Armenian-American
novelist at mid-life and her grandparents' nightmarish stories of
survival in Aleppo, Van, and Gallipoli in 1915.
Those fictional grandparents are not by any stretch my grandparents,
but the novel would not exist without their courage and charisma.
Is the novel among my best work? The book opens with memories from
my childhood in my grandparents' home, what my mother referred to as
the Ottoman Annex. In other words, it has been gestating almost my
entire life.
For updates, join Chris Bohjalian's Facebook page.
by Chris Bohjalian
The Armenian Weekly Magazine
Sometimes my novels have positively elephantine gestation periods-and
even that, in some cases, is an underestimate. A mother elephant
carries her young for not quite two years; I have spent, in some cases,
not quite two decades contemplating the tiniest seed of a story and
wondering how it might grow into a novel.
Chris Bohjalian's novel of the Armenian Genocide, The Sandcastle Girls,
arrives on July 17.
Moreover, in the quarter-century I've been writing books, I've realized
two things about a lengthy gestation period. First, the longer I spend
allowing an idea to take root inside me, the better the finished book;
second, the more time I spend thinking about a book, the less time
I spend actually writing it. Here's a confession: The first draft of
the novel for which I may always be known best, Midwives, took a mere
(and eerily appropriate) nine months to write.
Skeletons at the Feast, another book I will always be proud of, took
only 10. But I spent a long time pondering both of these novels before
ever setting a single word down on paper.
Perhaps in no case has the relationship between reflection and
construction-between the ethereal wisps of imagination and the concrete
words of creation-been more evident than in the novel I have arriving
this summer, The Sandcastle Girls. The novel has been gestating at
the very least since 1992, when I first tried to make sense of the
Armenian Genocide: a slaughter that most of the world knows next to
nothing about.
My first attempt to write about the genocide, penned 20 years ago
now, exists only as a rough draft in the underground archives of
my alma mater. It will never be published, neither in my lifetime
nor after I'm dead. I spent over two years struggling mightily to
complete a draft, and I never shared it with my editor. My wife,
who has always been an objective reader of my work, and I agreed:
The manuscript should either be buried or burned. I couldn't bring
myself to do either, but neither did I ever want the pages to see
the light of the day. Hence, the exile to the underground archives.
Moreover, just about this time, Carol Edgarian published her poignant
drama of the Armenian Genocide and the diaspora, Rise the Euphrates.
It's a deeply moving novel and, it seemed to me, a further indication
that the world didn't need my book.
And so instead I embarked upon a novel that had been in the back of
my mind for some time: A tale of a New England midwife and a home
birth that has gone tragically wrong.
Over the next 15 years, all but one of my novels would be set largely
in New England. Sometimes they would be about women and men at the
social margins: homeopaths, transsexuals, and dowsers. Other times
they would plumb social issues that matter to me: homelessness,
domestic violence, and animal rights.
The one exception, the one book not set in New England? Skeletons at
the Feast, a story set in Poland and Germany in the last six months
of the Second World War. That novel is, in part, about a fictional
family's complicity in the Holocaust. Often as I toured on behalf
of the book in 2008 and 2009, readers would ask me the following:
When was I going to write about the Armenian Genocide? After all,
from my last name it's clear that I am at least part Armenian. (I am,
in fact, half-Armenian; my mother was Swedish.)
I had contemplated the subject often, even after failing in my first
attempt to build a novel around the Meds Yeghern. The Great Calamity.
Three of my four Armenian great-grandparents died in the poisonous
miasma of the genocide and the First World War. Moreover, some of my
best-and from a novelist's perspective most interesting-childhood
memories occurred while I was visiting my Armenian grandparents at
their massive brick monolith of a home in a suburb of New York City.
Occasionally, my Mid-Western, Swedish mother would refer to their
house as the "Ottoman annex of the Metropolitan," because it was-at
least by the standards of Westchester County in the middle third of
the twentieth century-so exotic.
In 2010, my father's health began to deteriorate badly. He lived in
Florida at the time, while I lived in Vermont. I remember how on one
of my visits, when he was newly home after yet another long stay in
the hospital, together we looked at old family photographs. I was
trying to take his mind off his pain, but I also found the exercise
incredibly interesting. In some cases, these were images I had seen
on the walls of my grandparents' or my parents' house since I was a
child, but they had become little more than white noise: I knew them
so well that I barely noticed them and they had grown as invisible
to me as old wallpaper.
Now, however, they took on a new life. I recall one in particular that
fascinated me: a formal portrait of my father when he was five years
old, his parents behind him. All of them are impeccably coiffed. My
grandfather is seated in an elegant wooden chair in the sort of suit
and tie and vest that he seemed always to be wearing when I was a boy,
and my grandmother is standing beside him in a beautiful black dress
with a white collar and a corsage. I can see bits of my daughter-their
great-granddaughter-in my grandmother's beautiful, almond-shaped eyes.
My father, a kindergartener at the time, is wearing shorts, a white
shirt, and a rather badly knotted necktie with a cross on it.
I knew almost nothing about my grandparents' story. But that picture
reminded me of those moments when, as a child myself, I would sit
on my grandfather's lap or listen to him, enrapt, as he played his
beloved oud. I recalled the wondrous aroma of lamb and mint that always
wafted from their front door when I would arrive, and my grandmother's
magnificent cheese boregs. I thought of their library filled with
books in a language-an alphabet-I could not begin to decipher, even
as I was learning to read English.
And at some point, the seeds of my family's own personal diaspora
began to take root. I had no interest in revisiting the disastrous
manuscript that was gathering dust in my college archives. But I knew
that I wanted to try once again to write about the Armenian Genocide.
A good friend of mine, a journalist and genocide scholar, urged me on.
Ironically, I was about 90 pages into my new book when Mark Mustian
published his beautifully written and deeply thought-provoking
novel, The Gendarme. I felt a bit as I had in 1994 when I read Carol
Edgarian's Rise the Euphrates. Did the world really need my book
when it had Mark's-or, for that matter, the stories and memoirs that
Peter Balakian, Nancy Kricorian, Micheline Aharonian Marcom, and Franz
Werfel had given us? It might have been my father's failing health,
or it might have been the fact that I was older now; it might have
been the reality that already I cared deeply for the fictional women
and men in my new novel. But this time I soldiered on.
I think The Sandcastle Girls may be the most important book I've
written. It is certainly the most personal. It's a big, broad, sweeping
historical love story. The novel moves back and forth in time between
the present and 1915; between the narrative of an Armenian-American
novelist at mid-life and her grandparents' nightmarish stories of
survival in Aleppo, Van, and Gallipoli in 1915.
Those fictional grandparents are not by any stretch my grandparents,
but the novel would not exist without their courage and charisma.
Is the novel among my best work? The book opens with memories from
my childhood in my grandparents' home, what my mother referred to as
the Ottoman Annex. In other words, it has been gestating almost my
entire life.
For updates, join Chris Bohjalian's Facebook page.