THE QUICKENING
Inside / The Real Life Story / Q & A / Excerpt
THE QUICKENING
Inside / The Real Life Story
Inside The Quickening
E
nidina Current and Mary Morrow live on neighboring farms in the flat, hard country of the upper Midwest during the early 1900s. This hardscrabble life comes easily to some, like Eddie, who has never wanted more than the land she works and the animals she raises on it with her husband, Frank. But for the deeply religious Mary, farming is an awkward living and at odds with her more cosmopolitan inclinations. Still, Mary creates a clean and orderly home life for her stormy husband, Jack, and her sons, while she adapts to the isolation of a rural town through the inspiration of a local preacher. She is the first to befriend Eddie in a relationship that will prove as rugged as the ground they walk on. Despite having little in common, Eddie and Mary need one another for survival and companionship. But as the Great Depression threatens, the delicate balance of their reliance on one another tips, pitting neighbor against neighbor, exposing the dark secrets they hide from one another, and triggering a series of disquieting events that threaten to unravel not only their friendship but their families as well.
In this luminous and unforgettable debut, Michelle Hoover explores the polarization of the human soul in times of hardship and the instinctual drive for self-preservation by whatever means necessary. The Quickening stands as a novel of lyrical precision and historical consequence, reflecting the resilience and sacrifices required even now in our modern troubled times.
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Selected by Indie Booksellers as an Indie Next pick and a Midwest Connections Pick; shortlisted for the Flaherty-Dunnan First Novel Prize and a finalist for the Indies Choice Debut; and Forward Magazine’s Best Literary Book of the Year, a Bookforum Top Summer Fiction Read, and a Poets & Writers First Fiction Highlight.
The Real Life Story
Iwas twenty-two when my mother lent me my great-grandmother’s recollection—fifteen pages in all, poorly typed, with photographs taped in the margins and my great-grandmother’s date of birth—1880—at the top. Turned at the corners, the pages were light, though they covered more than seventy-one years. In the past few months, I’d been asking about our family’s history, because the only thing I’d gotten out of my grandmother before her recent death was that we were Iowan. We were born in Iowa. We were raised in Iowa, and if my grandmother had her way, every one of us would die in Iowa. What reason did a person have to leave the county, let alone the state?
My great-grandmother did not begin her recollection until the final year of her life, after she’d lost her husband of more than fifty years. And now here I am in February 1950, she wrote, broken hearted and sick in mind and body, begging God every day to take me to him or heal my afflicted body and show me what to do. I don’t want to stay in this world. It is not my home, but for some reason I am left. The pages end there, with more dread and longing in every sentence than I have heard altogether from my reticent family in more than three decades. Born and bred a farmwoman, my great-grandmother bore three children, mothered six grandchildren, and was a great-grandmother to seventeen. In the few pages I have, she repeated the word work eighteen times, God twenty-two, love eleven, references to death, accidents or sickness twenty-nine.
Much of my great-grandmother’s story would shape Enidina, one of the two farmwives trying to survive the Great Depression who narrate The Quickening. But Enidina’s physical presence is my grandmother’s, a weighty and robust woman with hands as large as a man’s—a woman who could break a chicken’s neck with a twitch of her wrist. My great-grandmother’s husband in the novel and in real life was Frank, a quiet, easy-going man known for story-telling. I had always said my husband’s name must be Frank, she wrote of the day she met him, and since this man’s name was Frank, I thought perhaps this is my Frank. It was Frank’s death that sparked both my great-grandmother’s pages and my own.
But 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. The landscape itself reflected it. “The sky here was low and wide,” Enidina describes. “A place you could spy the weather from a good ways off. Acres of farmland stretched in every direction, gray-green and buzzing. The sharp, sweet stink of mud and pigs rode the wind, our barn alone against the distance.”
I needed another voice, a voice at odds with the place—someone greedy, reckless, and self-righteous. In my great-grandmother’s story, it is her sister-in-law, Mary, who nearly kills Frank by insisting on feeding the man meat when he suffers a near-fatal mouth infection. This sister-in-law became my own Mary, not a family member but their closest neighbor, a woman Enidina considers “too delicate for such country,” yet who Frank reminds her might be “the only friend for you in miles.” Along with her volatile husband, Jack Morrow, Mary serves as the release valve for the book’s tension, though this release soon erupts into betrayal.
However deeply based in family history, this remains a work of fiction. Though it stems from a widow’s year of mourning, it is also a commentary about work and family, absence and companionship, public good versus private happiness. Still, just as my great-grandmother’s pages and Enidina’s own, I consider the novel a restoration—a successful pursuit of what otherwise might have vanished.
Q & A
It wasn’t until my twenties that my mother gave me a copy of my great-grandmother’s journal, only about fifteen pages. I doubt many in my family considered journal keeping—both the time it took and the “navel-gazing” required—to be worth much in comparison to a good day’s work. In beginning to write at all, my great-grandmother was surely urged on by her daughter, my eccentric Great-Aunt Ollie, and also by the recent loss of her husband, Frank—a loss that left my great-grandmother so stunned and weary that she didn’t know what else to do with herself. Perhaps my life, she began, and that of my dear husband has meant little or nothing to anyone except to us and our immediate family…. What followed was a voice and story that carried more heartache and regret than I ever thought possible of my reticent family. Aunt Ollie typed up her mother’s pages and inserted family photographs, the people in which appeared dour and wind-swept and proud. With the combination of my great-grandmother’s voice and those faces, I was hooked. When I sat down to write my own Enidina, her voice came easily. Suddenly I was inside a woman who’d lived through the turn of the century and the chaos and confusion that followed, a woman now exhausted more by the loss of her family than any event history had thrown at her. It was this loss that kept her talking and kept me trying to understand what happened to put her in such a place.
I looked through other family documents—though there weren’t many—and researched the time period. Some of my great-grandmother’s story seemed impossible, such as the meteorite she claimed struck a nearby farm and broke windows “for miles around.” I’ve found no proof of such an occurrence, but I also couldn’t leave the idea alone and so wrote it into the book—a bewildering incident in the eyes of my two farmwomen and their neighbors, enlarged to a metaphoric level by Mary’s religious fervor and guilt. My mother took any number of last-minute “is this possible?” calls and was the first to tell me about the family “cave,” an earthy food cellar detached from the house and which I found fascinating both in name and function. My uncle Lowell was also a great help for details, and we had several phone conversations about hog slaughtering and other time period questions, such as what the family ate during different seasons and how they might have prepared the food. My uncle is a natural storyteller as are a large number of the men in my family, men who are quiet, kind, and deeply religious with easy, wistful laughs and dark singing voices.
Yes, though Enidina is also very much her own character. I used my great-grandmother’s recent loss of her husband to compel Enidina’s own story. I borrowed my great-grandparents’ real-life hardships during the Depression and the strangeness of the wars. The way Enidina and Frank meet in the book is nearly the same as my great-grandparents’ meeting. My great-grandmother, however, was a tall slender woman, somewhat severe and impossibly industrious. Because I never knew Melva, Enidina’s physicality is that of my grandmother, another powerful matriarch both in stature and will, with the largest hands I have ever seen on a woman. Many of her grandsons have these hands now. But Enidina is far plainer than either woman, so plain in fact that I felt bound to give her fiery red hair, a hint of the boldness and determination hidden within an otherwise reserved front. I wanted at least one of my women to gain the reader’s interest through physical and mental fortitude alone, without the easy gifts of charm and beauty that successful women—particularly today—are assumed to have and cultivate.
For me, the book really needed to be set in the Midwest, and in the part of the region I know best—the flat middle ground where the mind expands and there’s little between the horizon and the homestead to stop it. Even though I live in the east now, this landscape is a part of me and my temperament, a way of keeping things level, where self-obsession and unbridled emotion are simply inconsiderate and wasteful. The landscape carries the same sense of absence that I felt after my father’s unexpected death when I was teenager, and because I left the place only a few years later, it hasn’t lost it. But there’s a beauty there too, though it’s quiet, and there’s a peace, though for me this peace is taut with the threat of change. I often stayed away from home after I graduated from college, possibly as a way to shake off that absence. Only in the last year of finishing the book did my mother reveal that southern Iowa, where my great-grandmother’s farm was, is full of low, rolling hills. This seemed impossible to me and in no way suits any memory I have of my family or the landscape they existed on. Nonetheless, Enidina, my Enidina, could not exist in a place with hills.
I’m not sure when I first learned the term “the quickening” for a child’s first movements in the womb, but the phrase seems both dangerous and marvelous to me, full of life and the possibility of its loss. Both literally and metaphorically, Enidina herself is always on the verge of this quickening, on the threshold of something new. For a rural woman in the early 1900s, such a feeling promised a new child, but also the possibility of its death, or the death of the mother herself. It was a miracle and a curse at once. All that Enidina knows of her only grandchild is the feeling of this quickening when she touches her daughter’s stomach shortly before the girl leaves home. It is this child she is writing to and searching for from the beginning of the book. The child is the only reason she is telling the story at all.
Most certainly. The majority of women I know are tough souls. They have survived miscarriages and the deaths of loved ones, rape, abuse, abandonment, and heartache. Though men obviously suffer the same, these are the kinds of losses that affect women to such an extent that the idea of the long-suffering female has become a cliché. As a result, women must be exceptionally strong and often need to do so without recognition or complaint. Of course women have also been granted an easiness and openness with each other that society both expects and ordains—an expectation that isolates Enidina when she fails to live up to her gender. For the most part, however, women have the ability to seek out friendships and attain a closeness that many male relationships simply do not allow. Mary’s husband, Jack, for instance is never granted an emotional reprieve in this novel, a circumstance I consider common. As a Midwestern man in the early 1900s, he simply has nowhere to go with his confusion, temper, and disappointments, and he becomes a tragic figure. Women of course can also be terribly cruel to each other if they consider something that is theirs, something they love, is threatened. Much of this cruelty is instinctual, almost animal. It is the ferocity of the mother protecting her young. But it can also provoke the kind of greed and selfishness that even today keeps women from achieving everything they could.
Excerpt
Together my sons stood with the sow between them and watched their father stagger home, going slow, unable to get his footing. The rain hissed and grew, making rivers in the mud, and my sons squinted under their hats and tried to find their father through the storm.
But none of us could see him now. That was the way he went, walking off through the mud, the last I saw of the man I married, the man I knew—he would always be gone after that, a man of fog and temper, he would never come back, not for the six more years that I would live with him and scrub his shirts and cook his meals. Those Currents had trapped him. They had promised they would do what they should and sent him off to have to finish it, coming home with stains so dark on his sleeves that I had to turn that shirt to rags. After he walked off in that rain, you could no longer say we were husband and wife—we were little more than strangers. Later when the body of that man went, his passing was quick, without a shiver, without absolution. I found him again in our bed, stiff and cold where I woke in the morning next to him, clutching the blanket. Still nothing more than a stone sat inside my chest, because my husband had already disappeared from me years ago in that storm.
Together my sons stood with the sow between them and watched their father stagger home, going slow, unable to get his footing. The rain hissed and grew, making rivers in the mud, and my sons squinted under their hats and tried to find their father through the storm.
But none of us could see him now. That was the way he went, walking off through the mud, the last I saw of the man I married, the man I knew—he would always be gone after that, a man of fog and temper, he would never come back, not for the six more years that I would live with him and scrub his shirts and cook his meals. Those Currents had trapped him. They had promised they would do what they should and sent him off to have to finish it, coming home with stains so dark on his sleeves that I had to turn that shirt to rags. After he walked off in that rain, you could no longer say we were husband and wife—we were little more than strangers. Later when the body of that man went, his passing was quick, without a shiver, without absolution. I found him again in our bed, stiff and cold where I woke in the morning next to him, clutching the blanket. Still nothing more than a stone sat inside my chest, because my husband had already disappeared from me years ago in that storm.