This Virginia author wants you to get lost in her novel about a missing girl.
The Good Ones by Polly Stewart. Harper. pp.304. $30. (For sale on June 6)
Konstantin Rega: When did you start writing?
Polly Stewart: I remember telling my mom that I wanted to be a writer when I was about seven. I had a little tape recorder—this was the mid-eighties—and I’d dictate stories on it. I think one was called “The Shyest Violet.” Then later I’d get composition books from the drugstore and fill them with stories. My mom always took them very seriously, which makes me feel so lucky now. Writing fiction isn’t the most practical career in the world, so I was fortunate to be encouraged and supported from the beginning.
What inspired this latest book?
I feel like most books are a kind of potpourri of everything that the writer happens to be thinking about and/or preoccupied with at the time, but the most direct inspiration for Lauren’s disappearance was the case of the Springfield Three. I don’t know if you’re familiar with it, but basically, three women—a mother, her teenage daughter, and the daughter’s friend—went missing from Springfield, Missouri in 1993 and haven’t been seen since. I lived in Springfield for a few years when my son was a baby, and I used to walk over to their memorial in the park near our house with him in his stroller. On TV, they always say that someone disappeared “without a trace” or “vanished into thin air,” and it’s hard not to describe this situation in those terms, even if we know that’s not possible. It’s such a strange and fascinating story, and it made me want to write about a similar case—both the logistics of an unsolved disappearance and the impact on those who were left behind.
What do you want readers to get out of it?
Ever since I was a child, I’ve loved getting lost in a book. I’m always reading something, but every few months, I’ll pick up something that I’m unable to put down again, and I end up reading through meals and other obligations because I’m so swept up in the narrative. No book is going to work for every reader, but I’d love it if at least some of the people who pick up The Good Ones have that experience of giving themselves permission to disappear into this book. Then it would be great if it also made them think—about gender and agency and true crime and some of the other big questions that I was trying to work out while I was writing it.
What are several of your favorite books, new and old?
Two books that I was unable to put down recently are Rebecca Makkai’s I Have Some Questions for You and Vanessa Cuti’s The Tip Line. They’re both based around a crime that echoes in the lives of the people on the periphery of the event, and they’re both beautifully written and propulsive in very different ways.
Weirdly, the books that have influenced me most over time are all nineteenth-century British novels. I teach creative writing and British literature at the college level, and my favorite novel of all time is George Eliot’s Middlemarch. I read it every couple of years and it seems like a new book every time, which is probably the mark of a real masterpiece.
Is there anything in the works?
I’ve started and abandoned a couple of different projects in the last year, and I think I’ve finally settled on the one with staying power. It’s set in the same area as The Good Ones, and it focuses on a woman who runs a yoga studio in a small town in the mountains. Her business isn’t doing very well, and then she ends up connected with a murder investigation that may implicate her own family. Writing a first draft is usually a terrifying experience for me, but this one is really fun so far!
Find out more about Polly Stewart and get a copy at The Bookshop.
