“The carnage began with the roses. She hacked at their ruffled blooms until they dropped into monstrous drifts of red on the parched yellow lawn … Only two things kept my mother grounded to us: my uncle Stephen and stories.”
Fourteen-year-old Molly worries about school, friends, and her parents’ failed marriage, but mostly about her mother’s growing depression. Molly knows her mother is nursing a carefully-kept secret. A writer with an obsession for other people’s life stories, Elaine Donnelly is the poster child of repressed emotions.
Molly spends her California summer alternately watching out for her little brother Angus and tip-toeing around her mother’s raw feelings. Molly needs her mother more than ever, but Elaine shuts herself off from real human connections and buries herself in the lives and deaths of the strangers she writes about. When Uncle Stephen is pressed into the limelight because of his miracle cure of a young man, Elaine can no longer hide behind other people’s stories. And as Molly digs into her mother’s past, she finds a secret hidden in her mother’s dresser that may be the key to unlocking a family mystery dating to 1918 New York—a secret that could destroy or save their future.
Interview with Maureen Doyle McQuerry
How did you come up with the idea for Between Before & After? How much did the story change from initial idea to final version?
The seeds of this story were planted by my father. He told stories about being an orphan in 1919 Brooklyn after his mother died from the Spanish flu and his family fell apart. But then, the story took on a life of its own. The basic storyline never changed, but I needed to dive much more deeply into the characters. One of the challenges was knowing when to shift from one storyline to the other. Molly’s story spans one summer, while Elaine’s spans many years. I had to balance the two. I also had to find a way to connect the Hansel and Gretel story with the main storyline. Hopefully the fairy tale adds depth to the story reminding us that we can survive and flourish despite the difficulties we encounter along the way.
What connection do you personally have to this story, if any?
In many ways it is my family’s story. The trajectory of my father’s family was changed by his mother’s death in the flu pandemic of 1918-19. He was ten and after her death, he lived on the streets, surviving the best he could into adulthood. A young child growing up the on the streets brings all that childhood trauma into all future relationships.
I grew up in San Jose, CA where Molly’s family lives. The landscape of the San Francisco Bay Area is close to my heart. Like Molly, I knew my family was full of secrets, and I was curious to know more. During the years I spent working on this book a very redemptive event occurred, I discovered I wasn’t an only child as I had always believed, but I have two living half-brothers and the book is dedicated to them.
Can you talk a bit about the process of weaving a fairy tale retelling into your narrative? Why Hansel and Gretel?
The story of Hansel and Gretel felt so closely tied to the narrative, that I couldn’t imagine writing the story without it. My challenge was helping readers see the connection. It’s a story of resiliency, two children abandoned in the darkest part of the forest, who despite all odds find their way home. There are still forests in our lives today. The streets of our cities can be as dangerous as the grimmest fairy tale. Fairy tales speak to us on the archetypal level. We need to be reminded that although the world is not a safe place, it’s possible to survive the woods and emerge changed, but with our humanity intact.
Read more with Maureen after the page break.
