I was delighted to speak with Dr. Miriam Nyhan, historian and professor at NYU’s Center for Irish & Irish-American Studies. She hosts a weekly radio hour at Ireland House in Greenwich Village, New York. We talked about writing and how I imagined the blueblood New England family of Protestants (“Prods” as Bridey would say) and how they are changed forever by an Irish immigrant girl they hire in 1909. You can hear the show (and Dr. Nyhan’s lovely Irish lilt) here. Transcript below.
Transcript of Ireland House Radio Interview
Dr. Miriam Nyhan: I’m delighted to welcome to the Glucksman Ireland House Radio Helen Klein Ross. Helen is here to speak about her new novel The Latecomers out on November 6th. I know you’re not a stranger to us here, Helen. You’ve come to our events from time to time. So congratulations on The Latecomers published by Little Brown. And as I’ve mentioned to you before, I’m finding this book hard to put down and I’m really enjoying your portrayal of this transatlantic tale, one of the stories I feel like never gets old in terms of the nuances and intricacies of an immigrant’s life. Crossing in this case from Ireland to the United States. Can I kick things off by asking you where did the theme of this book come from or what is the genesis of the story of Bridey? And maybe actually you should start off by describing a little bit about the novel for the benefit of our listeners.
Helen Klein Ross: So the novel does center on an Irish immigrant who comes through Ellis island in 1908. But it’s really about how Bridey impacts the life of a blue blood family in Connecticut who lives in a big house that Bridey has come to work at. Something happens in the house because of Bridey that changes not only the generation that she works for, but generations to come. I got the idea partly because I’m Irish American myself. And so I sat at many dinners with my grandparents listening to tales of people coming over. But also my husband and I acquired an old house in Connecticut, built in 1853. I often sit in the living room wondering about conversations that took place there years ago. And so the story of Bridey and Sarah and the Hollingworths really generated from the house. It’s a made up story, but it is set in a house that exists.
Helen Klein Ross: I imagined it. I mean, sometimes it’s funny, I turn a corner and I really see Bridey looking at the china press. Or when I was writing a scene about childbirth in the house, which is of course how childbirth used to happen in the old days–women would give birth at home. I was writing a scene. I was at work in an upstairs studio and I pictured a mother giving birth to a child. She already had several children in the house. This is the Hollingworth mother and I pictured Sarah, one of the protagonists being a young girl, knowing that her mother was giving birth behind a closed door and suddenly she doesn’t hear anything and she thinks to turn the knob and go in. She’s not really sure. She reaches up to the doorknob and hesitates. And as I was writing on the third floor, I wrote she touched porcelain and I thought, wait, is it a porcelain knob or something else? And I ran downstairs and I saw, ah, it’s a cut glass doorknob, that’s even better! So the house itself sprang a lot of details of the story.
Dr. Miriam Nyhan: So was this a story that you would say was kind of inside your imagination then for a long period of time? Because of your own family background and hearing about migrants coming over and making that daunting journey, embarking on that journey to the new world? How long has that been in your imagination percolating? For a long time?
Helen Klein Ross: Well, Ellis Island, the tenement museum, that’s always been a draw for me. I’ve always been interested in what must it have been like to take a ship over from a country, whether it was Ireland or elsewhere. I’ve always been interested in my own family stories. As you say, now it’s very different because there isn’t a huge difference between things that you see or things that you eat. For instance, Bridey was used to eating very crusty farmy bread back in Kilconley where she was from. She comes over in 1908. I did a lot of research and in those days, of course people are coming off ships and they hadn’t eaten in a while and it would be quite a while before they would get to New York because they first land at Ellis island. She mistakes Ellis Island for being New York. Because to her who is from a rural part of Ireland Ellis island looks like a city. And so, I went to Ellis island a few times and sat on the long polished benches they have there. And in my research, I found that that volunteers would have baskets of bread to give people. Bridey tastes the bread and thinks that it’s cake because it’s much sweeter than bread that she was used to. That of course would not happen now when you land at JFK from Ireland. Now no one goes around with a basket of bread. And besides, you’ve already had better bread in Ireland.
Dr. Miriam Nyhan: What’s lovely about the book is there is a continuity. You know, for people coming from other parts of the world today, New York is still a different experience.
Helen Klein Ross: Yes. My mom was visiting New York and she flew out yesterday morning and said there was a Syrian family on her plane, new immigrants. A father and mother and their little baby. And before takeoff, the mother took down the tray table and outfitted the tray table with blankets to lay the baby down. She imagined that this is how you could take off and keep the baby safe. And then the flight attendant came over and explained that, that no, she regretted they couldn’t do that. So, yeah. Being new to this country, your feel like a latecomer no matter where you are from.
Dr. Miriam Nyhan: I thought you must have done a lot of research, Helen, because you capture a lot of detail. The historian in me is interested to hear a little bit about how did you go about that. You mentioned going to Ellis Island. What other ways did you research to document the experience? Did you go to Ireland as part of this research?
Helen Klein Ross: I have been to Ireland a few times. I wanted to go to Ireland but it didn’t work out that I was able to go there for this book. I did a lot of research over here. Bridey is from Ireland, but most of the book takes place over here. I started with the Tenement Museum. They lead various tours. I went on the Irish tour a couple times. They do a tour of an old tenement that was lived in by an Irish family, furnished with things they might have had: statues, rosaries, flute, crosses on the wall and above the door, a Brigid cross made out of straw. I didn’t know what that was, but it’s a straw cross that you put above the entrance to ward off famine and fire. So little things like that, like, you know, I picked up for the book. I also had a place to work in the New York Public Library. They have a special room you can go to if you have a book contract. They research materials for you. The Frederick Lewis Allen Room. They are fantastic. You each have a shelf and you can request any research materials you want and then the next time you come there it is on your shelf. So it’s a wonderful research facility.
Dr. Miriam Nyhan: Wonderful. And would you actually write there as well or just research? As a writer then Helen, how do you do your writing? Do you do some of it in the home in Connecticut, in your studio? What’s your routine? Do you write every day or do you do it in spurts? What motivates you to write when you do?
Helen Klein Ross: Yes, I write every day . You have to. It’s like having a baby, having a novel growing in your head. You can’t leave it alone for a day or two or else it kind of starves. When you’re writing a novel, you’re living in this parallel universe as well as your own universe. So research for this novel was very important. Another source I had was the Connecticut Historical Museum in Hartford. The have a fantastic facility. The house—both the fictional house and the real one that inspired it — is in Connecticut. So I went to the museum that has all these primary source materials, diaries and maps and letters. Also, the house we live in is in a small town in Connecticut and the town historian was very helpful in showing us photos and diaries from back in the day. Also our town library in Salisbury has great historical resource files.
Dr. Miriam Nyhan: So, this is your third novel. Your others weren’t about Irish themes or topics, were they? So why now?
Helen Klein Ross: No, no. My last novel wasn’t Irish, it was about a kidnapping from an Ikea in New Jersey. When you write a novel, it’s like a release. My last novel came out of my fear that my kids being raised in New York City might be kidnapped at any moment. So that novel called What Was Mine, kind of released my neurosis about having my kids kidnapped. They’re now 29 and 31. So you know, I avoided that disaster. This novel came from an urgent need to write about the immigrant experience. The one I knew best was the Irish American experience.
Dr. Miriam Nyhan: And was there a particular catalyst talent for that? Was there something that happened or did you read something that made you take that initial step into the novel?
Helen Klein Ross: So I was very intrigued by this house we bought in 2012, a big Governor’s mansion in CT. Friends visiting who were also Irish American. One of them said, Oh yeah, my relatives in Ireland came over to make their millions by working at a big house like this. So I learned that that was a thing back in the day. Girls who were educated in Irish convent schools, girls who spoke well, were in high demand in big houses in New York and Boston. In fact, agents would go over to Ireland and interview girls and bring them over to work at the big houses. So I decided to use that for my story. And then, I came across letters written by a great uncle to my mother. He was raised in Chicago, Irish American Chicago on the West Side. He wrote in the letters that my great grandmother had worked for a big house in Chicago, which I hadn’t known. He wrote that she had really great taste in furniture, working in that home. And so when she furnished her own home, she knew where to buy good furniture which is still in my mom’s living room today.
Dr. Miriam Nyhan: You touched on something there, Helen, that I actually wanted to ask you about. You know here at this house, we’re home to the archives of Irish America oral history collection. We have about 350 interviews with people we’ve known in the last 10 to 15 years talking about the 20th century experience. That pattern of Irish immigrant women coming over to the United States, coming to New York and Boston and other places and working as domestics for wealthy families here in New York City or in large estates like in Connecticut or Long Island, as you described so nicely here in The Latecomers. That’s a really a dominant theme in people’s family histories. It’s one of the themes that some of my colleagues, Marion Casey and Linda Darling Alameda, who work on that project have, have talked about. And I don’t know whether it’s actually put forth in a scholarly setting in writing as such. But that idea of how women who had come from very simple backgrounds, with very low levels of skills in certain areas…It’s remarkable to think, to your point, that they were able to go out and soon come to know the best of interior design and many things like that.
Helen Klein Ross: Yes, well, I also think it’s because education is such a big deal in Ireland. Several chapters in the book are letters that Bridey writes home. Someone asked me, how can she be so articulate? It was because she was educated by nuns. Irish nuns in those days educated a lot of smart girls , taught them to write and read and value reading. So a lot of girls who came over at the turn of the century might not have had la long education, but they had a good education.
Dr. Miriam Nyhan: That fits with what we pick up in our oral histories, as well. And sometimes they had low self-esteem because they felt they weren’t as educated as their counterparts. But when you actually looked at the amount of education they had acquired by the age of 14, they were quite versed in the fundamentals. I mean, they often wiped the floor with their American counterparts, but they lacked the confidence their American counterparts had. I think that’s why so many Irish immigrants celebrated their experience here in terms of the access it gained for their children. more than for themselves directly. Right? How long did it take you to write The Latecomers?
Helen Klein Ross: I received a contract for the book the summer of 2016. I was so happy I couldn’t work. I couldn’t write! I had a book contract and we were going to have the first woman president! The immigrant story that I had sold I didn’t feel so urgent, until the day after the election in 2016. Suddenly and immigrant story felt very urgent! And so I began to write the book kind of all in a rush. I began to write the scene where Bridey leaves Ireland. The first words of this book I actually put down were written on November 9, 2016.
Dr. Miriam Nyhan: And then how long did you spend, six months? Nine months? A year writing?
Helen Klein Ross: Oh, more than that. I mean, I was writing up until the spring of 2018.
Dr. Miriam Nyhan: Oh, wow. So it’s come out pretty quickly. That’s great. I hope you don’t mind me asking you all these questions about how people write. It’s really nice to have an opportunity to sit down and ask someone these questions about the process of writing. Are you someone who writes very deliberately and don’t go back and change things up much? Or are you someone who writes, writes and rewrites with lots of changes?
Helen Klein Ross: I would say the latter. I tend to write scene, so I will say, okay, today I’m going to write about what it was like for Sarah to marry in 1910. Her fiancé was a big letter writer. Back in the day people courting often wrote letters. One of the things I discovered was that there were letter deliveries about four times a day, so a passionate fiancé might have written a in the morning and at noon and the evening, and so the letters would keep coming. Um, so I imagine that Sarah is the recipient of this and then when she married she discovers that her husband on the page is a little different than her husband in person. So I thought, okay, what is the scene she’s pulling away from the house, her beloved Hollywood. I’m in the carriage with her, the man that she has just married.
I’m not a very good architect. Some people are very good at drawing their book, you know, doing a nice outline and then logically filling in, working very linearly, which probably is the better way to work. I’m much more haphazard and disorganized.
I do use a program called Scrivener, which is the only way I could have finished this book before 10 years were up because there was so much historical fiction to keep track of. For instance, the scene that I’m just talking about took place in 1910. So in order to write the wedding scene, I had to know what kind of shoes was she wearing? What was he wearing? Was she wearing makeup? Who drove their wedding carriage? Scrivener allows you to collect all kinds of info, to shove pictures and research into folders that are immediately available to you as you’re writing. So that was very, very helpful.
Dr. Miriam Nyhan: When you had the idea for The Latecomers, did you have the arc of the novel worked out, or did you make significant changes to how the novel played out during the writing process?
Helen Klein Ross: I would say I had the germ of the novel. I did not have the whole arc of it. I guess it was a surprise to me that the story would extend over 117 years. I first imagined that it would more take place in the 1910s and 20s. But as I wrote, the story began creeping, involving characters who were more modern, and I saw that it was very important to include characters from today. Because what I’m saying in this novel is that Bridey the Irish immigrant impacts an entire century of Hollingworths. So we needed to see members of the family in present day in order for that to happen, to see what is their story and how’s it different because of Bridey.
Dr. Miriam Nyhan: My next question might be hard to answer Helen because the book isn’t out yet and I don’t know how many people have it. But has anyone given you feedback on it that has surprised you or caught you off guard?
Helen Klein Ross: Well, it’s pretty early on, so not very many people I know have read it yet. But I will tell you that I was very confident writing characters who existed 100 years ago. Because people who lived in that time won’t ever read it. So, if I make a mistake in the slang or settings, they’ll never call me out. Whereas if I mess up with something in this century, people are going to say, Hey, wait a minute. People who went to boarding school in the 1990s didn’t listen to that song. They listen to this song. Or whatever. So I was much more careful about writing present day. It took me even more time to make sure that every detail was right in the research. The closer it came to present day, the more careful I was, which is exactly the opposite of how I thought writing a historical novel would be. I thought you wouldn’t have to research to write scenes set in times you have lived through. But just because you lived through it, doesn’t mean you recall every details. Or that the details you recall are ones that actually happened. So I was super careful about researching scenes set in my own lifetime.
Dr. Miriam Nyhan: You mentioned how you’re already working on another novel. Is that right? So do you go from novel to novel?
Helen Klein Ross: Here’s how I know that I’m ready to end a novel. When I begin to live in the next story. I’m a perfectionist who could truly I keep writing The Latecomers, on and on and on, but at a certain point your brain just moves on to the next world. Once my brain started moving to Germany in the 1930s, I knew, okay, it’s time to end The Latecomers.
Dr. Miriam Nyhan: I can’t recommend it highly enough. The Latecomers by Helen Ross and published by Little Brown on November 6th. Thank you for coming in and telling us a little bit about this lovely story and your portrayal of Bridey, and for your support of Ireland House.