Happy Mother's Day--And to Mothers-in-Law, too!

HANK PHILLIPPI RYAN: Okay, here we go. I was about to say--we have a touchy subject today. And that made me stop and think--why is it touchy? But Happy Mother's Day, to those who celebrate. We love you and revere you!

But our guest today has a sidebar--the question of mothers in law.

Hmm.  I've had several mothers-in-law...:-). One in particular was...interesting. She was giving a bridal luncheon to introduce me to her friends, and the morning of the luncheon,  I arrived very early (with rollers in my hair, I remember) to help.

Welp, turns out she had taken to her bed, with some unknown ailment, and pronounced herself unable to prepare the meal. For twelve people. "You'll have to do it," she declared.

Me?

I was desperately trying to impress her, so I tried to look confident, and I said, "Oh, of course, poor thing, you feel better and I'll handle it.. What is on the menu?"

And she said, all fluttery,  "My specialty, chicken spaghetti."

I thought, great, fine, whatever that is, never heard of it, but okay.

I said: "Terrific, fabulous, where is the recipe?"

And she said: "Oh, dear, that does create a bit of a problem. There is no recipe, I just make it up as I go. It's..chicken. And spaghetti. In a casserole. I'm sure you'll work it out."

SHE MAKES IT UP??

Okay, fine, I think, it's chicken and spaghetti. "Lovely," I said, "It won't be as perfect as yours, I'm sure, but I'll figure it out."

So, I went downstairs and found her shelf of cookbooks. I pulled out Joy Of Cooking, thinking that there'd be something in there that would be enough like what she was talking about to make do, or that I could figure out from the way other dishes worked how to make chicken and spaghetti.

So listen to this.  I looked in the index, and there was a recipe for chicken and spaghetti! YAAY!, I think,  I am saved!

 But. When I opened to the page, it had all her annotations and changes. (Makes it up as she goes. My foot.)

Can you imagine the passive-aggressiveness of that one? Testing me???

Anyway, it was all fine. 

And--one more thing. She rallied, and attended the lunch. 

So.

More mother in law tales? The wonderful Ava Roberts is looking into the psychology of that very fraught relationship.

 

The Most Combustible Relationship!

  by Ava Roberts

I am lucky enough to have a fantastic mother-in-law. In fact, we are so close that I enjoy hanging out with her just for the fun of it; I would do so if she were not the mother of my husband and grandmother to my children. 

Not the case with my current character that I'm working on for my next book, about a woman who goes to stay with her in-laws under chilling circumstances (I can't say more now otherwise it will give too much away!). 

 I like the setting to be a forced extended stay, because a difficult in-law in small doses is one thing. But staying together under the same roof is a pressure cooker that strains even the best in-law relationship.

It happened with The Beckhams and their son. It happened with Prince Harry and Megan. The new spouse and the in-laws just can't seem to get along, both parties think they're right, and it ends with estrangement.  

It begs the question: why is the bond between a spouse and an in-law so combustible? 

Is it the loss of control, or the fear of being replaced?  Is it a power struggle? In domestic thrillers, the best villains don't carry knives; they carry the weight of their approval-- or disapproval-- that can be haunting. It’s the universal fear that the people who created the person we love might actually be the people who destroy our peace of mind. 

It’s the ultimate high-stakes gamble: when you marry the person, you inherit their ghosts.

In honor of Mother's Day, I hope that everyone is able to find a way to celebrate with their family. But for the sake of good fiction, bad in-laws are just too much fun to write about. 

I’d love to hear from you:

• Why do you think things go so wrong in these relationships?

• What is the worst thing a mother-in-law can say?

• What are the fatal poor choices a daughter-in-law can make?

Most importantly: What is the one comment from an in-law that would make you pack your bags in the middle of the night?

HANK: Oh, great questions! What do you think, Reds and Readers?

Ava Roberts is a clinical psychologist turned author who knows that the most unsettling secrets often lurk just beneath the surface. She is the author of The Summer House Murder, The Vanishing Neighbor, Juniper Isle, and the Thistler Thrillers series. Kirkus Reviews praised The Summer House Murder as “a whirlwind domestic thriller that’s also a pitiless anatomy of the costs of motherhood and sisterhood.” Ava lives in Massachusetts with her husband, two children, and an overactive imagination.

THE SUMMER HOUSE MURDER 

A summer trip to the Adirondacks is turned upside down when a woman’s body is discovered in the lake in this twisty thriller, perfect for fans of Liane Moriarty and Paula Hawkins.

Sisters Esme, Piper, and Regina go on their annual visit to their remote summer house on Lake George expecting a tense vacation. Each has their own families to deal with plus their own secrets to hide. Esme, the oldest sister, is desperate to keep up appearances after discovering her husband’s infidelity with the one person who hurts her the most. Piper, the middle child, has a four-month-old baby boy and is too tired to keep playing peacekeeper to her siblings. Regina, the youngest, is a sarcastic rule breaker with a secret to hide that could cost her everything.

After tension boils over into an ugly fight late one night, the sisters go off in separate directions. Like most of their blowouts, they think they’ll cool off and resume the trip like normal the next morning. Only this time when dawn comes, a young woman’s body is discovered in the lake. As a criminal investigation narrows in on their family home, it becomes clear that the sister’s web of lies and secrets is inextricably linked to the woman in the lake.

A tense and fast-paced thriller, The Summer House Murder will leave readers breathlessly turning the page until they reach the thrilling conclusion to this twisted family drama.

When Real LIfe Meets Research

HANK PHILLIPPI RYAN: Oh, gosh. What a thought-provoking post today from author Lynne Squires. I wonder how many of us have stories like this..but that’s not the question she has for us at the end of this touching essay.

See what happens when one discovery in a her life--developed not only into a novel, but into understanding and compassion.


When Real Life Meets Research

By M. Lynne Squires

After my mother’s passing when I was in my 30s, I found out she had been committed to an asylum for depression when I was just a year or two old. Mental health issues were treated differently then. What would be addressed today with medication and therapy, in the 1950s still subject to more arcane methods, from “fresh air cures” to lobotomies.

I was able to request the records for her stay there. There were meager notes about her time there, but enough to know she received shock treatments before her release.

Now in my 60s, I began a story about a new mother with auditory hallucinations and depression, inspired by my mother’s experience.

When I started writing fiction, it never occurred to me the research that would be involved. I thought research was the denizen of the nonfiction author. That misconception was debased early in my make-believe world creation journey. In the past few years, I have found myself down rabbit holes about the history of safety deposit boxes, how cross-stitch samplers came about, and more recently, the origin of the phrase “above the fold” in reference to newspaper articles.

I often find research for historical fiction is best accomplished in viewing old photographs and postcards. The nuances the eye can observe are often the details a narrative might overlook. A recent deep dive centered around asylums from the 1950s and backwards through the 17th century. Photographs and postcards are plentiful, although I wonder who would be excited to receive a postcard featuring an insane asylum?

An actual visit to a long defunct asylum a few hours from my home was enlightening and disturbing in equal measure. Designed in such a way to promote good air flow through cross ventilation, I imagine when the number of patients swelled from the intended capacity of 240 exceeded 2,400, the air quality suffered.

My main interest was in researching reasons for commitment to an asylum. In the earliest days, they ranged from “reading” and “asthma” to “laziness” and “vicious vices.” Often courts approved commitment of individuals for assessment and treatment, leaving them for lengths of stay dependent on the whim of the facilities administration or medical staff. Families could drop off a child, spouse, or other relative at an asylum door and many times never return for them.

The setting for my book, River of Silence, is such an asylum in the 1950s. When finding photos of nurses in the 1950s, I could practically hear the squeak of nurses polished white leather shoes against black and white tile floors and feel the white uniforms stiff with starch. Legs were always encased in opaque white stockings and white caps topped each head.

In that era, patients diagnosed with depression and anxiety were usually given electroconvulsive therapy (ECT). Lobotomies were performed far more frequently than one might imagine. On a typical day, dozens might be administered one after another, without the benefit of any anesthesia. Pictures of the equipment used were horrifying. The lobotomy tools were the equivalent of a basic ice pick and hammer.

My protagonist, Anastasia, committed to an asylum against her will learns the horror of being there, the helplessness of staying there, and the battle of trying to escape. Her story is told through the connected experiences of various people. Her family, friends, hospital staff, and other patient’s narratives come together to illuminate the picture of how mental health was dealt with over a half century ago. To tell Anastasia’s story through her eyes alone would not encompass the depth of her experience.

In telling this story, I realized the value of seeing how each character’s narrative enriched the story by weaving in details of setting and experiences outside the main character’s view. I wanted, in essence, a novel told in short stories where different elements were given space to expand and contribute to the overall story arc.

And FYI, possibly my favorite character is Agnes, a feisty, thin-as-a-rail patient, whose constant disheveled appearance belies her razor-sharp wit. If you must be in a new unfamiliar situation, you’d want an Agnes in your corner.


So Readers, at my age, writing about the 1950s hardly seems to be historical fiction, yet here we are. Stories set in what era do you most enjoy reading?



HANK: I agree–how can the fifties be historical fiction? Or the sixties? Yikes. What do you think Reds and Readers?

River of Silence is a story about a woman, Anastasia, taken away from her husband and infant daughter and committed to an asylum in the 1950s. Her story is told from multiple perspectives: the patients, her physicians, nurses, an orderly, an aide, and fellow patients. Within their stories is woven the world in which Anastasia finds herself. She undergoes electric shock treatments so common at that time. Her struggle to return home is difficult, punctuated with cruelty, misunderstanding, and despair.

She becomes friends with two women far different from her friends in her life at home. With nothing in common, the three make tenuous steps toward forging a relationship. A sane act in their uncertain world, the three come to care for, support, and defend each other.

The mental health world in the 1950s was in transition with antipsychotics being a newly introduced treatment for mental disorders. Some doctors embraced change, and some eschewed it. Anastasia struggles with the fear of falling prey to her old-school physician who believed lobotomies were a fallback cure for any patient he deemed difficult or incurable. He seems to dislike her, accusing her of not talking or interacting, and she fears the worst. A young physician fights for the patient's right to utilize new treatments. He's aware of the high mortality rate with lobotomies.

Anastasia starts teaching the women on her ward to crochet, and through that, she becomes engaged with staff and patients to the doctor's begrudging satisfaction.

The present-day last chapter has Anastasia's daughter preparing to sell her mother's home. She ruminates with her friend about her mother's journey and her eventual return home.

M. Lynne Squires, an Urban Appalachian Author, writes fiction, essays, and dabbles in poetry. Her first novel, River of Silence is forthcoming in May. She has penned four books, and her work has appeared in numerous journals, such as Change Seven and The Ekphrastic Review, and multiple anthologies, including the Anthology of Appalachian Writers, and Fearless: Women's Journeys to Self-Empowerment. She is a Pushcart Prize nominee and is the 2020 Pearl S. Buck Writing for Social Change Award recipient. She writes at her home in Appalachia beside her furry overlords, Scout and Boo Radley.


RIVER OF SILENCE (currently in pre-order) is available at mountainstatepress.org. The release date is May 31st.

Welcome to CatrionaLand (All are welcome!)

HANK PHILLIPPI RYAN: Hurray and hurray—we love Catriona day! She is incredibly talented, and incredibly wonderful, and we are always so delighted when she visits—especially with a new book. The brand new one is intriguingly titled The Dead Room. Can you guess why? I bet it is not what you think.) (And I have devoured it, and it is terrific.)

Anyway. Today, delightfully, she takes us on a very special journey. To CatrionaLand!

(And some very special info for you at the end!)

Blurred Lines

By Catriona McPherson

I quite often, when I’m writing a book, start with an interesting bit of reality and run. When I was beginning The Child Garden, finding out about rocking sones and devil’s bridges was utter catnip.

Rocking stones are neolithic, egg-shaped stones – some enormous – that sit in stone cups and, if shoved, rock. Now, as you can imagine if you consider how long ago neolithis (?) was, hardly any of them survive to . . . I tried hard not to say “rock on” here. I failed . . . because people get too enthusiastic and shove too hard. Then the stones tumble off down hills and break in riverbeds.

That much is true.

Devil’s bridges have nothing to do with rocking stones. They’re just bridges that happen to be in Scotland or Ireland and so, through no fault of their own, have gathered stories about how the devil and his minions can’t cross them, like a sheep gather burrs. The stories go on that the devil then lurks on one side or the other asking for soul swaps. 

Two thoughts occur: one – these old bridges are not that big and the rivers underneath are usually no more than rocky streams so why doesn’t he just get his cloven hooves wet and paddle across?; two – wouldn’t it help to know which side?

That much is also “true”. That is, I didn’t make these tales up. “Tam O’Shanter” is related and the devil has become an ordinary goat in some retellings.

But, at some point downstream, I put the stories of the stones and bridges together and I think I came up with a piece of folklore that rocking stones are found near devil’s bridges, and have devils trapped inside them. They have to be rocked every day – thirteen times, naturally – to keep him addled so he can’t escape. This now feels as real to me as leprechauns’ gold and Santa’s love of a chimney. And I’m not that great a note-keeper so I’m not entirely clear on where exactly I started making stuff up and what might be rooted in Celtic lore.

The same thing happened with the lowping stane (leaping stone) in The Witching Hour. It’s real. See pic. It’s outside the old school in the village of Dirleton. And I know for a fact that schoolchildren used to leap over it on the last day of school in the summertime, because it says so on the tourist information board in the old phone box with the wee free library.

In my book, what happens is the children are the only ones who still leap over it – with stinging nettles strewn on the top for extra peril – but it used to be the case that everyone in the village did so, right before harvest-time. The pure of heart would clear it. Witches and other evil-doers, though, would fail, stumble and hurt themselves. Thus the village could be sure that, when they all went out to bring in the crops, there would be no one whose wickedness would cause blight and famine.

Jungle Red Readers, I have no clue where the join is between the truth and Catrionaland in the middle of that. (And I’m writing this on a plane, en route to Malice, where I didn’t download the app before take-off so I can’t check.)

All of that is by way of excusing what’s just happened in The Dead Room. I used a real town, in a real county, in a real country, as the setting for the story. When I was done, I scrupulously (Ha!) laid out in the author’s note that Menstrie, Clackmannanshire, Scotland was real but that the property centre, the nursing home, the pub, the garden centre and the Lord family’s scrapyard business (Lord’s Will Provide!) were imaginary. I claimed that Sir Andy Murray’s gold postbox in Dunblane was the only actual location in the entire novel.

Then I sent out ARCs. And one early reader (with a story of his own (which I told for Kristopher Zgorski at BOLO Books on account of the musical theatre angle)) came back with an “Ummmmmm, Catriona? The scrapyard? Ehhhhhh, have you ever been to Sam Burns’ Yard in East Lothian? Because the similarity is uncanny.”

Yeek! I never miss a trip to Sam Burns’ Yard when I’m in Scotland. Of course it was there that I saw faded glass and china out in the elements filling with leaves and dust as the seasons passed. It was there I found out that hotel overstock mattresses are wrapped in plastic with the prices Sharpied on, and that the further back you go the more likely you are to find the skeletons of bikes and barrows poking up through long grass.

Of course Sam Burns’ Yard is better organised and doesn’t degenerate into the kind of outsize trail mix of dolls’ heads and door hinges you’ll find in Lord’s, no matter how far towards the back fence you meander. Still though. It’s the place I found the trove of mid-century bookclub hardbacks from the collection of one “T. Jolly”, as per the flyleafs, that wound up being central to the plot in Quiet Neighbors. It’s been very good to me and it deserved a mention.

Next time, I am going to keep scrupulous notes as I go along.

(Narrator from the future: she didn’t.)

HANK: Reds and readers, I cannot tell you what The Dead Room means. You will just have to read the book and find out. But let’s ask: which of the places Catriona mentions would you like to visit? And why? 

(And—pssst. THE DEAD ROOM (now the NUMBER ONE new release in psychological fiction on Amazon) is now a Kindle Unlimited! Which means, whoo hoo, if you are a Prime member, you can get it FREE!)

Catriona McPherson (she/her) was born in Scotland and immigrated to the US in 2010. A former linguistics professor, she is now a full-time fiction writer and has published: preposterous 1930s private-detective stories; realistic 1940s amateur-sleuth stories (The Edinburgh Murders is latest); and contemporary psychothriller standalones (The Dead Room is the brand-new one). These are all set in Scotland with a lot of Scottish weather. She also writes modern comic crime capers about a Scot-out-of-water in a “fictional” college town in Northern California sneezedavissneeze. Scot’s Eggs, No. 8 just won for best humorous novel at Left Coast Crime in San Francisco. Her other novels have won Agathas, Anthonys, Leftys and Macavitys and been finalists for an Edgar, a CWA Dagger and three Mary Higgins Clark awards.

Catriona is a proud lifetime member and former national president of Sisters in Crime.

In this atmospheric thriller from Catriona McPherson, a young widow seeking refuge from her grief wades into the mists at the far end of memory lane—where something even darker awaits.

 

Reeling from the death of her husband, thirtysomething audiobook narrator Lindsay Hale retreats to her Scottish hometown and the comforts of old times. Her family rallies, her old friends offer support, but something is wrong . . . something beyond grief. Something she can only glimpse from the corner of her eye.

A new house should help, but why is she recognising strangers, forgetting familiar faces?

Every night, as Lindsay’s dream house fills with nightmares, she wonders whether she’s truly unravelling—or if something more sinister is at play. Buried secrets surface and reality bends, forcing Lindsay to face the terrifying truth that her hard-won haven isn’t so safe after all.