Karen Joy Fowler, 72, is the author of four story collections and seven novels, including The Jane Austen Book Club, adapted into a 2007 film, and the million-selling We Are All Completely Beside Ourselves, which was shortlisted for the Booker prize in 2014. Her new book, Booth, takes place in 19th-century America and follows six siblings of John Wilkes Booth through childhood and adulthood in the decades leading up to his assassination of Abraham Lincoln. Fowler, who in 2020 received a prestigious World Fantasy award for lifetime achievement, spoke to me over Zoom from her home in Santa Cruz, California.
What led you to write a historical novel about the Booths?
I began thinking about this book in one of my frequent moments of despair over whether there will ever be gun reform in this country. I’d already written a couple of short stories about the family, and John Wilkes Booth is the most famous man with a gun in all of American history. But I wasn’t interested in him so much as in the family: I wanted to ask what his assassination of Lincoln had done to their lives, whether they could have stopped it or seen it coming, and how culpable or innocent they were.
You portray the differences in their views of slavery...
I did already know Wilkes was a white supremacist who was vocal in his support of slavery, but I didn’t know what the rest of the family thought; they supported Lincoln and were mostly pro-Union but were largely quiet about what was obviously the greatest issue of the time. It’s interesting, I think, to look at it generationally. Their grandfather, father and mother came from England to settle in Maryland as adults, so they’d grown up without the institution of slavery all around them – the grandfather, Richard, was particularly shocked by it and actually participated in trying to help some enslaved people escape to the north. The father and mother, Junius and Mary Ann, also opposed it, but not with the same passion. And then the third generation – the one I focus on – grew up with it as an ordinary part of their community. How they made sense of that is a hard thing to get your head around.
Your last novel, We Are All Completely Beside Ourselves, has a spoiler-sensitive twist; in Booth, the story’s pre-spoiled.
Yeah, it’s a complete flip. Both books are about families in which one member upends the family unit, but We Are All Completely Beside Ourselves is organised around the fact that its main character knows something the reader doesn’t, while Booth is organised around readers knowing something the characters don’t. Certainly in America I expect people to know who John Wilkes Booth was; I don’t expect the same abroad, but you see the back cover and the bullet hole on the front, so there’s no need for mystery about where the story’s headed. It gave me the latitude to know I could jump out of time and just tell you what I was thinking about a character. The omniscient voice is one I like a lot. I’m a bossy writer; if I learn a fact, I’m not going to not tell you.
In the afterword, you say you stopped writing for a year after Trump was elected.
I had a long period of despair that people weren’t who I thought they were, that the world wasn’t functioning the way I imagined. And because [Booth wasn’t] about what was happening, I saw no point continuing; not until I came to feel that the book actually was [about the present] did I see the extent to which the civil war has never ended. I knew pockets of the country clung to the Lost Cause [a white supremacist myth about the war’s origins], but I thought they weren’t hugely populated. Now I’ve seen otherwise.
How did it feel to be shortlisted for the Booker in 2014, the first year that US novelists were eligible?
It was amazing. A number of things in my writing life that seemed like bad news actually turned out to be the best thing that could have happened. We Are All Completely Beside Ourselves was rejected by many presses in Britain; had it not been, it would have come out a year earlier, when Americans weren’t eligible. So the fact that so many people refused to publish it allowed me to be on the Booker shortlist, which changed my career and life completely. I can understand [the controversy over the rule change] and I did think it would probably not be smart to win: to be the first American to win, in the first year... my life would not be worth living!
You started out writing science fiction in the 80s...
When I told my friends in science fiction that I was writing The Jane Austen Book Club, they were very excited – a lot of them read Austen too. But when I told my friends in the Austen world that I did a lot of science fiction, they were not so interested; when the book came out [in 2004], my editor went to great lengths to try and disguise the fact that I’d previously written science fiction, because she thought it would cut into the readership if anybody knew this horrible secret about me.
Booth is dedicated, among others, to the science fiction and fantasy writer Ursula K Le Guin.
She’s enormously important to me. I was living in Davis, California when I’d just begun to publish fiction, and the University of Davis invited her to do some events. I got a call: this lunch was being arranged, and she’d asked that I be included. I’d been reading her since college and was completely in awe – the Booker was great, but I don’t think anything matches the heady success of learning that Ursula K Le Guin wanted to meet me! We became friends and I wrote a couple of introductions to her books. One of them I wrote before she died, the other I wrote after. In the one I wrote before, I called her a genius and she made me take the word out; she said it made her feel squirmy. I did as she asked, but kind of put it back after she died, knowing she would not want me to. She’s a truly amazing voice; there cannot be another writer who has imagined more worlds in more interesting ways.
• Booth by Karen Joy Fowler is published by Serpent’s Tail (£18.99). To support the Guardian and Observer order your copy at guardianbookshop.com. Delivery charges may apply
