Kerri Maher

Steve Thomas: Kerri Maher, welcome to the podcast.

Kerri Maher: Thank you so much for having me.

Steve Thomas: Before we get into the book or your writing since it’s a library podcast, I did want to ask about what your personal experiences have been with libraries. I did see that you had worked in your college library, but like before that, did you go as a kid and did you take your daughter?

Kerri Maher: Oh yeah. I mean, when I was a kid, I used to go probably once a week to the library and I would take home a big stack of books which is weird because I’ve always been a really slow reader. So I think I would read maybe two out of like this enormous stack, but I like to have choice, right? I’d be like, “Oh, which one of these books is going to be the next one?” And so I have really great memories.

You know, it’s funny. I was born in 1975 and when I was a middle schooler and high schooler, there weren’t very many young adult books, like the young adult section was really pretty small. And in our lifetimes, we’ve really seen an enormous explosion in books for that age group. And so kids who are reading now just have so many great, delicious books to choose from, which is ironic because my 13 year old daughter only wants to read adult books now.

Steve Thomas: Of course.

Of course. Right? Exactly.

Steve Thomas: You should say, “All we had was The Outsiders!”

Kerri Maher: I know. I know. I know. Exactly. I loved The Outsiders. That’s still getting assigned in schools, actually. I’m seeing it on reading lists in all kinds of places.

And then when my daughter was young, we were great patrons of our local town library here in Massachusetts, and actually libraries were where I discovered audiobooks. When I was a younger adult, before I had children, I had a long commute to teach. I lived in Connecticut and I was teaching in New Jersey, and at some point, NPR just became too depressing. I just could not listen to it anymore. This is before way before Trump. Okay. It was just, I couldn’t listen to it anymore. So I don’t know. Someone told me to go get books out of the library on CD. I called them books on tape for years, even though they were never actually on tape. So that’s how I discovered my love of audiobooks and now I have a Libro.fm subscription and that’s how I get them.

But to go back to my daughter, my daughter and I used to go to the children’s section of the library and check out audiobooks all the time, which by the way, is how we discovered that Judy Blume reads all of the Fudge books, and they are a treat for adults and children alike.

Steve Thomas: It’s always great to get a good narrator on a book, because if you listen to enough of them, the majority of them are great, but then sometimes you’re like, eh, not a great fit for the book, or just, I don’t know, didn’t work for you.

Kerri Maher: Yeah, well I’ll put in a plug here, I didn’t mean to do this, this is a good segue. The audiobook reader for All You Have to Do Is Call is named Lauryn Allman, and I requested her because she was so great on The Paris Bookseller. So I just absolutely love her work. And so the audio book for All You Have To Do Is Call is terrific.

Steve Thomas: Great. Have you done any library events in your capacity as an author?

Kerri Maher: Yeah, I’ve done quite a few events at libraries, and that’s always really fun. You get really avid readers who come and ask terrific questions. Library events tend to be a little bit later in the book’s lifetime. So most of the people who come have read the book, which is really nice because then you get to answer the spoiler questions, and feel okay about that.

Steve Thomas: Yeah, yeah. We’ll talk about All You Have to Do is Call, your new book. What is the basic elevator pitch for it?

Kerri Maher: It is a historical novel loosely based on the women of the real life Jane Collective. Now, the real life Jane Collective was a group of radical feminists in early 1970s Chicago who began as an abortion referral service and eventually took over the process to be an entirely woman-owned / woman-operated reproductive health clinic. They performed their own abortions, which were remarkably safe and very inexpensive. And in fact, they couldn’t keep good records because it was illegal and they had to keep everything a secret, but the estimates are that they either referred or provided 10 to 11, 000 abortions in the late 60s and early 70s, just in Chicago, which is really incredible number.

But they also did things like they offered pap smears and STD testing and even pregnancy testing on one day a week. And they offered birth control counseling. And so, in some ways they were almost like a proto-Planned Parenthood. Again, operating illegally in Chicago.

So that’s what it’s about. But my characters, and this is where this book is a departure from my previous books. I am not writing about the actual real life women of Jane. My characters are entirely made up. So unlike The Kennedy Debutante, which is about the real life Kick Kennedy or Paris Bookseller that was about the real life Sylvia Beach, these characters are figments of my imagination.

Steve Thomas: Why did you decide to go that route with this book of coming up with new characters, and then how did you generate those characters?

Kerri Maher: Yeah, well, so actually the answer to that is almost one in the same. As soon as I just found out about the Jane Collective way back in 2018. I was listening to an NPR news story back to NPR again. I was so amazed by these women and what they had done and no one seemed to have written a novel about them.

I knew that I really wanted to write about them and I kind of simultaneously knew two things. I didn’t want to write about the real life women. First of all, the real life women are still with us doing good work. Heather Booth, the original founder of Jane is still alive and well and an activist in Washington, DC. And also kind of strangely, but this is the way writing works for me at least, is that these three characters who narrate this novel kind of walked on the stage of my mind and said, I’d like to audition for the part, please. So hence we have Veronica, Patty and Margaret, my three narrators. So this is a braided narrative. You get each of their points of view braided together throughout the novel.

Steve Thomas: Did that come pretty quickly into the writing of it that you knew you were going to do it that way of the three different narrators going back and forth?

Kerri Maher: I did. I knew from the get go. You know, just in the sort of the way there are certain things about books that you kind of know right away. You know, interestingly with the Paris Bookseller, I originally thought that was going to be a dual narrator novel. I thought it was going to be Sylvia Beach and an entirely fictional character going back and forth, but that just didn’t work. Like, I tried it that way, and it just didn’t work. But the three narrators of this book worked from the beginning, although it did take me a very long time to get to know these three characters.

I think at one point my editor was like, you know, Kerri, you’ve had to read biographies for these other women that you’ve written about, maybe you should write a little biography for each of these characters, like not a whole book, but… and that really helped me to get to know them in my process, and I did it kind of midway through. I had written a whole draft of the book at the point where I did that, but it did really help me. And it took a lot of drafts to get to know these three women.

Steve Thomas: You hear about that with writing a lot of times, especially if it’s more, like, science fiction or fantasy or whatever, all this world building that you do that you never, ever get in the story itself, but it’s helpful to have the author in their mind to know that this is the history of all this and everything, so it’s good to just already know who these characters are, even if you never talk about that they went to the library as a child and loved this book or whatever. You know, in your head, and that helps you.

Kerri Maher: Yes, yes, all of that. I teach creative writing and I teach in a program where a lot of students are writing science fiction and fantasy. Those are not my primary genres, but that whole idea of world building is really across genres and in historical fiction, in some ways you’re trying to reconstruct a world that’s as unfamiliar to your readers sometimes as outer space. You have to really, you have to situate your readers and you have to do it in ways that don’t make the reader feel like they’re being info-dumped on, that’s the term.

Steve Thomas: Right, right, right. Well, and you want to not use words that were around at the time and don’t use too much slang that, oh, that wasn’t until 1983 that somebody said that first, but I’m in the early 70s.

Kerri Maher: Yes. Well, to that point, actually, at one point I was like, can I use the phrase, “women having it all”, and no, I could not use it because that didn’t come into the common society until the eighties.

Steve Thomas: Well, how did you go about doing the research on the Jane Collective?

Kerri Maher: So I did many different kinds of research for this book. I actually watched several documentaries, which were super helpful and informative, especially from a visual perspective. So there was one that was called She’s Beautiful When She’s Angry, which was about the feminist movement in the 70s and they talked a lot about Jane, but it was also just helpful in terms of just what were women talking about, the idea of these consciousness raising groups that were so common for women to go to that they were both formal and informal.

And another documentary that was very helpful in terms of the music and just the television and the cultural moment was this one that was on AppleTV+ called 1971, The Year That Music Changed Everything. That was super helpful, but I also read many books. I read some books about the history of abortion in the United States, and I read two books about the history of Jane.

While I was writing the book, a few movies about Jane came out and I purposely did not see those. I just didn’t want somebody else’s imaginary version of Jane to interfere with mine. So I still haven’t seen them, but I’ve heard they’re great and now I want to see them.

Steve Thomas: Now that the book is out in the world, you can go see them.

Kerri Maher: Yes. Although now I’m almost afraid of them. I don’t know. It’ll all be fine.

Steve Thomas: How do you balance the desire for historical accuracy with the need to craft a compelling story arc, because obviously real life is messy and does not have tied up endings, but somebody gets the end of a book you want to be able to have, even if it’s not happy, some kind of closure at least at the end of a book.

Kerri Maher: Oh, you know, for this book, it was, again, really different from my previous three. I had to, I don’t want to drop a big spoiler, but there’s a kind of milestone moment in the history of the real life Jane Collective that I knew that I wanted to include in this book, and I knew that it would be, if not the end, then maybe at the three quarter mark. So the real question was to, how far to go beyond that moment. I also knew in this case that I was pretty sure I wanted to get them all the way to 1973 when Roe goes through, because this is not a major spoiler. They have this big meeting, a final meeting of Jane once Roe goes through in 1973 to decide what Jane is going to be. Are they going to disband? And they do make a decision to disband. They’re like, we have served our purpose. And I did want to also get to that point.

But the question was, how do you get there? Like, how do I get my characters to the point where that’s the decision they’re going to make? And to me, that’s where the fiction part of historical fiction is. I’m in the luxurious position of getting to imagine how these three women who were involved in my imaginary version of Jane, how would they get to that decision moment?

When the novel opens the characters who are volunteering for Jane are extremely passionate about it. It’s really, it’s a call to service that they have, and they are really risking a great deal to participate in this organization. So how do they get from there to that end point?

Steve Thomas: Yeah, and it does start with a very exciting sort of scene of things happening that I don’t want to even tell the beginning, but you’re really inside their heads and it’s not all just, Oh, well, we’re doing this great thing so everything is great. I mean, she’s worried and she’s upset but knows it’s the right thing. You go through all the emotions in their head and it’s all mysterious to them. And yeah, it just starts out with a bang. It goes from there.

Kerri Maher: Well, thank you. You know, you’re referring to the prologue, and I’ll say that that prologue did not emerge until a much later draft. So the question about endings is interesting, but also, where do you start? How do you start a book like this? At some point, what I realized, based on all the reads that I’d gotten on earlier drafts, was that I needed to kind of set up the context in which Jane needed to emerge, and there was really only one way to do that that I could see. So I did it, and I think it worked out. You know, people have very mixed feelings about prologues. I like prologues in general. I’m definitely not anti-prologues. My Grace Kelly book also had a prologue. So two out of the four of my books have prologues.

Steve Thomas: I like prologues. I mean, I like ’em in books. I like ’em in movies. I like the little teaser at the beginning of a TV show before the credits, and I just, I like that.

Kerri Maher: Me too. This book also has an epilogue. Oh, wow.

Steve Thomas: Is that like the end credit scene or whatever in Marvel movies where you have to watch all the credits and then you get to watch it?

Kerri Maher: I know. At one point my daughter realized that this was happening at the end of all the credits so she started making me stay until the end of every movie. And sometimes we were rewarded with like a wonderful like two minute thing at the end and sometimes we were like, meh, there’s nothing at the end.

Steve Thomas: Yeah, now we have to sit through every single movie credits, no matter what the movie is now, even it’s like, we’re just watching this other movie, but maybe it’ll have something!

Kerri Maher: I know. I’m right there with you.

Steve Thomas: So we talked a little bit beforehand of that this book and the previous book had a lot of, when the book came out, it’s dealing with issues that we’re dealing with right now, like abortion, obviously, we are now, and book banning with the Paris Bookseller, but I know publishing has a long lead time and so that wasn’t planned, obviously, the abortion one particularly. We weren’t, in 2018, certainly thinking about that happening so quickly, at least, maybe. But do you recall where you were in the process of this book when the Dobbs decision was announced?

Kerri Maher: Yeah, I was revising the book so I still had time to make some changes. And just in terms of the timeline of the book, I got the idea for the book in 2018, just a few months before the Kennedy Debutante, my first historical novel was coming out, and at that time, I was revising my second novel about Grace Kelly. My agent first pitched what I was just calling The Jane Novel. She pitched that book and the Paris Bookseller kind of at the same time to my publisher. And my publisher was like, I don’t know, Jane after Grace Kelly, meh, but Paris Bookseller, yes, definitely go write that book, and I enthusiastically wrote the Paris Bookseller, all the while knowing that I really, really wanted to write Jane as my fourth book, but I wasn’t sure that was going to work out, but I did get the green light to write what became All You Have to Do is Call in the fall of 2020.

So that was really when I started. It was probably at the end of 2020 that I really started writing All You Have to Do is Call in earnest, with the green light from the publisher. So then we get to the summer of 2022, Dobbs, I’m in the middle of, or toward the end of a major revision, and so at this point, and I was one of those people with Dobbs who I was horrified and not altogether surprised. So the question then was, well, what, if anything, am I going to do to this book? And I basically decided I wasn’t going to do anything to the book, really. The one thing I did do at that stage was I leaned a little bit harder into some of the legal pieces of the history that I was writing about.

So, for instance, I had mentioned the Equal Rights Amendment and the Child Care Development Act in earlier drafts. But… I don’t think I had fully understood them, so I really went and looked those things up. So, in 1970, we have the Child Care Development Act, which would have given universal child care and preschool to American families, alright? It passed the House and the Senate, and Richard Nixon vetoed it. When I talk about this in book events and in interviews, I mean, I can see your expression right now. It’s horrifying to realize how different our lives would be if that had gone through but for one man. So I made a bigger deal out of that in the book. And I really tried to, like, gently, but clearly explain how, if that law had come to pass how that would have impacted the characters’ lives, right, and so then how it would have impacted their lives. And then there was also the Equal Rights Amendment, which was written in 1923, and actually came up for ratification, I think something like every year between then and 1970. And then, it might have been 71, it passed the House and the Senate. It went to the states for ratification, and that’s a book unto itself that I’m not going to write, but it was not ratified in time to become law.

As a kind of gesture, many states have ratified it. Like, it has actually been ratified by the requisite number of states, but it needs a champion in government to bring it back up again and push it through. I’m not a legal expert.

 What I really wanted to capture that became so eerily like our own moment, is that this is a moment in the early 70s, where there’s enormous hope for change and real change did happen. We got Title IX and we got Roe in these years, right, but not the Equal Rights Amendment or the Child Care Development Act, which started to feel really a lot like our moment where we think that there now is still a lot of great progress being made, we have lots of reasons to be hopeful… and Dobbs.

Steve Thomas: I did read one of the posts on your Substack newsletter, one you wrote about writer’s block, and two comments that I thought were interesting was, you said, “writers are servants of their books”, and “the book reveals itself in the writing.” Can you elaborate on how that informs how you write?

Kerri Maher: Yeah, so, you know, these terms pantser and plotter, are you a pantser? Do you write by the seat of your pants or do you plot it all out? Before I wrote historical fiction, I wrote five unpublished novels and they were all complete pantser novels. They didn’t really require any research. I just like sat down, I kind of knew where I was going, but I would write by the seat of my pants. When I became a historical writer, just by organic process and necessity, I became more of a plotter. I never really had a detailed outline for my novels, but what I did in the research was I would create this Microsoft Word document that was like a menu of events that I would be like, okay, so how am I going to maneuver my character between this event and that event? And that’s where the pantsing came in, was in the maneuvering.

I think that’s where that idea of the novel reveals itself in the writing. Because even when I knew I had to get, you know, Kathleen Kennedy from the beginning of World War II where she has to go back home to the United States, I had to get her back to England to reunite with her lost love, right? I knew that those things had to happen. How she got there was still a mystery to me. And so that’s where I’m writing, and I’m just writing and sometimes I’m just writing pages and I don’t really know exactly what is happening, and then, in the drafting of it, something will happen on the page, and I’m like, oh, this is it. Or sometimes I don’t recognize it until I’ve gone back and re-read those pages in the revision process. And that’s where that revealing happens. You know, the story is in us, right? But for me at least, it takes the actual writing of the story for me to understand the story. Writing is how I think. Somebody said, writing is thinking, and that is so true for me.

Steve Thomas: Yeah, definitely is for me too. Michelangelo always said that the statue was inside the marble already, he just had to chip away the pieces around it, and then to find it.

Kerri Maher: Thank you for reminding me of that, I have heard that too, yes.

Steve Thomas: So you know that fans are never satiated after they finish a book. So I have to ask, once they’ve read this one what can fans expect next from you?

Kerri Maher: Well, a wait. It took me a while to kind of figure out what book number five was going to be, but the working title is Summer of Love and it’s going to be a dual timeline novel in the 1960s and the 2010s, so that’s about it for now. It’s going to be set in California against the San Francisco counterculture revolution. And you know, what year would you say is the summer of love?

Steve Thomas: I mean, the 60s, 68, maybe?

Kerri Maher: Okay, so most people say 68 or 69 because they think Woodstock. Actually, the Summer of Love was 1967 and honestly, I didn’t really know this either until I really went into the research. 1967 was when in Haight Ashbury in San Francisco, it started with a bunch of Vietnam War protests and some concerts that were happening in associate with that, but it grew into this summer where the youth of the Bay Area in California and further afield, parked themselves in the Haight Ashbury and protested, but also listened to amazing music. And that was the summer of love, 1967.

Steve Thomas: And we can learn more about it, I’m sure, when we read your next book.

Kerri Maher: Yes, exactly.

Steve Thomas: Well, your new book is All You Have To Do Is Call. And of course, it’s available now for you to purchase at your local bookstore, or you can go to your local public library and place a hold, and you have to place a hold cause I’m sure they’re all checked out. So you’re not going to be able to walk in and check one out. Kerri Maher, thank you so much for chatting with me today.

Kerri Maher: Thank you so much for having me. It was so much fun to talk.

Steve Thomas: Have a great day.