What does it take to reclaim a woman's story when history itself was written by people who had every reason to erase her?
That's the question at the center of our conversation with Ariel Lawhon, bestselling author of The Frozen River and her newest novel, The Pirate Queen, about the real life Irish chieftain Grace O'Malley. We talk about why Grace doesn't appear anywhere in official Irish history, and how the only record of her survives in the snide, grudging English state papers written by the empire that feared her. Ariel explains that she's drawn again and again to subversive women because women have always had to be subversive, and because for most of history, only the literate got remembered, which meant most women simply didn't. From Nancy Wake to Martha Ballard to Grace herself, she talks about borrowing personality and instinct from the women in her own life to fill in the gaps history left behind, sometimes literally turning a character into her own mother.
We get into her process too, how she became a devoted plotter out of necessity after having four sons in five years and learning to write in stolen thirty minute increments, and how she still treats a deadline with the gravity of its original meaning, a line you did not want to cross on a battlefield. There's a genuinely magical detour into the children's book she read in an abandoned two room schoolhouse in New Mexico decades later and found sitting in a pile on the floor, the exact copy, waiting for her. And we spend real time on the moment in The Frozen River that readers talk about most, when Martha Ballard delivers her own kind of justice, and what it means that women are so often expected to pull their punches in fiction the way men never are. Ariel and I talk about intuition, the knowing, and trusting it, sometimes because it's the thing that keeps you alive.
Share this conversation with the woman in your life who needs a reminder that the world has always underestimated women like Grace O'Malley, but Grace still soared.
“Because men will never respect you if you try to be like them.” Gráinne lifts her head and meets her mother’s gaze. “Then how will they respect me?” “They won’t,” Maeve says with a shrug. Then she takes her daughter’s face in her hands and brings it close. Until their noses touch and their breath mingles. “Not unless you make them.”
-excerpt from THE PIRATE QUEEN by Ariel Lawhon
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Books Referenced:
THE PIRATE QUEEN by Ariel Lawhon
THE FROZEN RIVER by Ariel Lawhon
CODE NAME HÉLÈNE by Ariel Lawhon
FLIGHT OF DREAMS by Ariel Lawhon
WAIT FOR ME, WATCH FOR ME, EULA BEE by Patricia Beatty
CHRONICLES OF NARNIA by C.S. Lewis
LORD OF THE RINGS by J.R.R. Tolken
WATERSHIP DOWN by Richard Adams
BARRIERS TO ENTRY by Ariel Lawhon (short story)
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This episode is produced, recorded, and its content edited by me.
Xx, Alex
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