Jessamine Chan and Jennifer Haigh didn’t mean to write two eerily prescient novels.
How are you both preparing for or interacting with feedback on your novels?
It’s a subject that everyone has an opinion about but most people know very little about it.
Jessamine Chan and Jennifer Haigh.Credit: Beowulf Sheehan; Joanna Eldredge Morrissey
No matter what you do it’s almost impossible to thread that needle, as a woman.
I’m still at the point of thinking, “Will I ever write a second book?
I came to the experience of motherhood pretty late, and I struggled with the decision.
‘The School for Good Mothers’; ‘Mercy Street’.Simon & Schuster; HarperCollins
I’ve always thought of it as a loyalty question.
My family is Catholic, and I learned that abortion was evil before I knew how you got pregnant.
So I was very conversant with the arguments on that side.
I grew up in a town where there are handmade signs along the roadway against abortion.
As far as Victor [the character], I feel like I’ve known him my whole life.
EW: Both your stories are eerily topical, but I imagine that’s not why you wrote them.
What led you each to this subject matter, and why now?
CHAN:I started this project back in 2014, so it was a completely different landscape, politically.
At the time my book felt much more dystopian than it does now.
And then I read a piece inThe New Yorkercalled ‘Where Is Your Mother?’
That’s the case withMercy Street.
But I became so fascinated with the people who work at these clinics.
I worked as a volunteer on the hotline.
I thought, “Okay, these stories need to be told.”
I’ve never really read anythingtrueabout abortion in a novel.
It’s such a third-rail subject that no fiction writer wants to go near it for obvious reasons.
EW: Something that struck me about both books is the way socioeconomic status comes into play.
HAIGH:That clinic was the most integrated space I’ve ever encountered in the city of Boston.
Women from all sorts of backgrounds will find themselves in need of health care.
But it lands differently for everybody.
But pregnancy can be a great equalizer.
But I wanted to draw attention to that.
I was thinking about the neighborhoods I’ve lived in and how that affects mothers.
When I lived in Brooklyn in a predominantly Black neighborhood there were police on every block.
The mostly white suburb I live in now does not have police officers surveilling the community.
I wanted to have my protagonist reckon with her own racial and class blind spots.
There are hundreds of them in this country.
The consequences to the women themselves are really dire to their mental and financial health.
I could go on and on.
This interview has been edited and condensed for length and clarity.
