This week, Randy Susan Meyers--author of the recently released novel The Murderer's Daughters--asks Michelle Hoover--author of the upcoming debut The Quickening--five questions on summing it up, confronting identity, and returning home.

1. What do you say when people ask, "What's your novel about?"

Usually the old line: “two farm women trying to survive the Great Depression.” But of course summary lines are thin. Instead, I’d like to answer that the book is about absence and betrayal, love and friendship. It’s about leaving. And in many ways it’s about landscape, and of course it’s about women.

2. Publisher’s Weekly described The Quickening (in a starred review) as “the story of the intertwined fortunes of two early 20th-century Midwestern farm women. Hoover's characters carry deep secrets, and their emotions are as intense as the acts of nature that shape their world.” You, the author, live and teach in Boston, though you grew up in Iowa. Was it difficult for you to reach back for this story? How close to your background was this?

I’ve been living in Boston for about seven years, in the Northeast for about fifteen, and it’s my home now. Richard Russo claims you have to separate yourself from a setting in order to write about it, and I agree. Before last fall, I hadn’t returned to my hometown for almost ten years. When I finally did return to take some book trailer footage of my great-grandparent’s farm, it was a strange and wonderful experience. At one point, I borrowed my mother’s car and roamed the country roads for hours. But a novel has to exist solely page. I’ve had so many students confuse what’s in their heads and what they see day-to-day as content they’ve conveyed to the reader. Often, they haven’t. Staying away from the place that inspired your story is one way to avoid that.

3. In an essay, you wrote: “my ancestors' stoicism, their disinterest in excessive emotion and the necessity to calmly keep up the fight, to avoid self-importance, made for a difficult book to write. A novel demands conflict and the rich inner lives of characters, shown not through exposition but actions, words, and gestures, yet my family considered it poor form to show any of this. I myself both admired and wished to express this temperament—work hard, pray, feed your family, mourn without indulgence, and die a quiet death.”

How did you manage to bring such a rich well of emotion to your book and yet be true to the culture you wanted to portray?

I fought with my characters to nail this temperament. Of course, Mary is flighty and over-wrought and expressive, but the others are quiet, rarely speaking their strongest emotions even when they’re on the brink of losing everything. I had to pay careful attention to small gestures, silences, and the gaps between my character’s sentences. Of course, eventually all the characters do get a chance to strike out, sometimes excessively so. I think it’s the reticence around such exhibitions and the desperation behind them that makes for the most powerful scenes.

4. What did it mean for you to revisit—figuratively, emotionally, and physically—a place (Iowa) you’d left years ago?

It was very important for me, a kind of coming together of my identity. I fled my hometown pretty quickly after high school, but writing this book forced me to come to terms with my Midwestern emotional makeup. My reactions often don’t make much sense to people in the east, but the fact that I can now easily straddle both places at once, that I can understand what they value and the way they think, puts me at an advantage that I feel others sometimes lack.

5. What was your path to publication and what are you expecting during the promotion portion of your journey?

Long story. Try six to seven years of writing, split in half by an attempt at an altogether separate novel that’s still waiting in a drawer. Really, I wrote The Quickening twice, the second time by doing away with five characters, two narrators, and two hundred pages. Finding Other Press has been a gift, and though my upcoming tour will likely exhaust me, I’m excited to meet real readers and listen to their reactions to the book. Writing is an isolated endeavor. It’s strange that my words are now out in the world and becoming a part of other people’s imaginations, but that’s what I write for.

For more information about both authors and their debut novels, find Randy Susan Meyers here and Michelle Hoover here.