My Yankee inspiration for Lilac Girls: Joanne Finnegan Hall

One of the best parts of writing Lilac Girls was finding the New England voice for the Caroline Ferriday chapters. It wasn’t too hard, since I’ve grown up listening to my mother, who was raised on Martha’s Vineyard. I’ve always loved her Yankee accent and old fashioned phrases she and her friends would pepper sentences with, like Brown as a berry (always puzzling…what berries are brown?) and Hot foods hot and If wishes were horses then beggars would ride. The general flavor of it all came in handy when writing Caroline and especially her mother Eliza.

Bunch of Grapes Bookstore, Vineyard Haven, old location

My mother informed the writing of the book in other ways as well. A voracious reader, who practically lived at The Bunch of Grapes Bookstore in Vineyard Haven, she read aloud to us as children (E. B. White for hours,) which I think helped with the Yankee voice as well. She died fifteen years ago, well before I started writing Lilac Girls, but I like to think she’s somewhere taking it all in, the happiest of all that my book will be there with the others at The Bunch of Grapes.

With her Irish setter

Aboard the Martha’s Vineyard ferry

On the porch of my paternal grandparents house in Ipswich, Mass. Always happiest in a bathing suit.