Serena Burdick, THE GIRLS WITH NO NAMES
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[2:16]I'm here today with Serena Burdick, who's the author of The Girls with No Name and Girl
[2:21]in the Afternoon.
[2:22]She's the 2017 International Book Award winner for historical fiction.
[2:26]She studied creative writing at Sarah Lawrence, holds a Bachelor of Arts from Brooklyn
[2:30]College in English Literature, and an Associates of Arts from the American Academy of
[2:34]Dramatic Arts in Theater.
[2:35]She currently lives in Massachusetts with her family.
[2:37]Welcome Serena.
[2:38]Thanks so much for coming.
[2:39]I'm not scared of time to read books.
[2:41]Thank you so much for having me.
[2:42]I really enjoy The Girls with No Name.
[2:45]So good.
[2:46]Good.
[2:47]Really enjoyed it.
[2:48]So I'm really excited to talk to you.
[2:49]Could you please tell listeners what this book is about?
[2:51]Yeah, it's ultimately the story of two sisters.
[2:53]They're pre-teens.
[2:54]It takes place in New York City in 1913.
[2:57]It's the story about them breaking away from sort of Victorian conventions that they grew
[3:01]up in.
[3:03]They find a band of Romani people living near their very wealthy home.
[3:08]And one of the sisters ends up disappearing in her younger sister thinks that her father
[3:13]has put her in the House of Mercy, which was a home for wayward girls and women who are
[3:18]not virtuous or acting properly.
[3:20]So the younger sister seeks to find her and commits herself to the House of Mercy in hopes
[3:26]that her sister is there.
[3:27]It's kind of the premise of it.
[3:31]Before I started reading it, I didn't realize how privileged the girls' family was.
[3:36]I thought, oh, a girl who was like going to a band of gypsies and who was the family to begin
[3:40]with.
[3:41]But then you have all these references to this theater and playing tennis and their affluent
[3:45]lifestyle.
[3:46]And then I made it even more of a contrast like, why on earth would they end up your opening
[3:50]scene?
[3:51]She's, you know, on her face, basically, in the dark, not that it would make it okay to be
[3:56]from all this.
[3:57]Yeah.
[3:58]But it was just the contrast was so much greater than I originally thought when I started
[4:01]reading it.
[4:02]Yeah.
[4:03]I was, I set out to do that.
[4:04]And one of the reasons I liked the idea of the contrast between also the Romani lifestyle
[4:09]for them that was so foreign and exotic in this way, that was nothing that they had
[4:14]grown up in.
[4:15]And it is true that the House of Mercy was not a place that wealthy girls would generally
[4:20]go to.
[4:21]It was a home for destitute girls, ultimately.
[4:24]So tell me about why you started researching the House of Mercy in places like it.
[4:30]What happened in your real life that set you off on this trail of research?
[4:34]I heard a news report on the BBC one morning from Ireland.
[4:38]It was about the Irish Magdalene Laundries.
[4:41]And I had never heard of them.
[4:42]And so I became really intrigued with that mostly shocked because they didn't close until
[4:46]the 1990s.
[4:48]Wow.
[4:49]Women were really upset and they were seeking restitution from the government wanting
[4:53]to find their children and wanting money for the years of labor that they did.
[4:57]So I kind of went down that rabbit hole.
[4:59]And thinking I would write something that took place in Ireland.
[5:02]But doing my research, I discovered that the Laundries existed here and I had never heard
[5:06]of them here.
[5:07]They were all over the world.
[5:08]There were many in Australia.
[5:10]And then that became a far more intriguing topic to write about something that was bright
[5:15]in my backyard ultimately and that I didn't have any idea kind of existed and no one
[5:20]had ever talked about before.
[5:22]And the Laundries were places where girls literally lived and they were forced to do the
[5:26]laundry.
[5:27]Correct.
[5:28]Yes.
[5:29]So they were religious run institutions.
[5:30]This one in New York was Protestant Episcopalian and they were considered charitable organizations
[5:36]to help take in girls who had nowhere else to go.
[5:40]But girls were committed for nothing really.
[5:43]Well it was at a time when women were still property of men and were completely dependent
[5:47]on men.
[5:48]So if your husband or father didn't think that you were behaving correctly, they would
[5:53]send you to this place to be reformed.
[5:57]And within that, you were made to work every day as part of you.
[6:01]And they made the church made millions of dollars.
[6:03]They were services for the wealthy who dropped off their laundry and had their laundry done
[6:07]and these girls worked in these conditions.
[6:09]Do people know that the girls were doing the laundry?
[6:11]Yes.
[6:13]Well, yeah, they were considered at the time it was fine.
[6:17]It was what these girls needed.
[6:19]And I think people viewed them as charitable organizations because they were giving them
[6:23]a roof over their head and feeding them.
[6:26]They were taking in a lot of women off the streets who didn't want to go or maybe actual
[6:32]prostitutes or just were being accused of being a prostitute.
[6:36]And it could be because they had nowhere to go and they were just on the streets because
[6:39]no one was taking care of them.
[6:40]I've heard that they would raid brothels and take girls from them and commit them.
[6:45]I mean, it was a crime to be a prostitute so any woman could be accused of that crime
[6:50]if she just had nowhere to go and was out of the street.
[6:53]Wow.
[6:54]So yeah.
[6:55]And I didn't want you to wear, like, can you imagine just having to deal with the fact
[7:00]you could be like plucked off the street and thrown in somewhere for like maybe had a
[7:03]racy dress on.
[7:04]Absolutely.
[7:05]Yeah.
[7:06]Or any right.
[7:07]You look at a boy the wrong way and someone thinks you're, you know, the way to behave
[7:12]in 1913 was still like the twenties had not hit yet.
[7:16]So it was very proper about that.
[7:19]I have all our societal issues today, but at least we don't have that for too much.
[7:22]That's good.
[7:23]That's like a blessing.
[7:24]Yes.
[7:25]But this is what's so interesting.
[7:27]What makes you a writer and obviously a great writer is you hear a story on the BBC.
[7:33]And instead of just thinking like, huh, that's interesting, which is what I might do
[7:37]when I hear a story, like that, you create an entire fictitious world and play out
[7:42]a family drama within it based on that.
[7:45]What do you say?
[7:46]Have you always been like that or how did you know you were a fiction writer to begin
[7:50]with?
[7:51]Where did this all come from?
[7:52]Do you have any idea?
[7:53]Yeah.
[7:54]I have written my whole life.
[7:55]I was an avid reader as a kid.
[7:56]So I just lived in books.
[7:58]And then I would read the books out loud on tape.
[8:01]I would like record myself reading about loud.
[8:04]And I loved fantasy and also just living in a totally different time.
[8:09]I did love history.
[8:11]So I really wanted to be an actor.
[8:12]I wanted to like play out all those roles and characters.
[8:15]I didn't think about being a writer, even though it always written, it was just fun for
[8:18]me.
[8:19]So I wrote short stories and poetry and didn't think much of it until late 20s went back
[8:24]to college, was done with acting and for fun decided to try to write a novel.
[8:29]I had an independent study with a professor because that's a blast.
[8:32]Yeah.
[8:33]I was, I thought, you know, just started as 100 pages.
[8:36]I just set myself small goals.
[8:38]And so for this sort of thesis project with a professor, I was going to just write 100
[8:43]pages.
[8:44]I was like, I'll had to do for my school part of it.
[8:46]But I knew that I was going to try to expand that into a full novel.
[8:50]And yeah, even in years of living in LA and acting, I would sort of hole up in my apartment
[8:54]and sit and write like for eight hours a day, nonsense, whatever, you know, nothing.
[9:00]It was my soothing therapeutic thing that I did on the side.
[9:05]Yeah.
[9:06]And would you write fiction or would you write sort of about yourself?
[9:09]Sorry.
[9:10]Sorry.
[9:11]Yeah.
[9:12]At the time I wrote about myself, but it was in fiction form, it was in story form.
[9:16]Okay.
[9:17]So I first person accounts of things that were happening or had happened past present.
[9:23]So yeah, do you still have those?
[9:25]I do.
[9:26]I was so thought that sometimes I'm turning them into a series of short stories.
[9:29]Yeah.
[9:30]I was very personal to have to get there.
[9:33]We could pretend they weren't about you.
[9:34]That's true.
[9:35]Thank you for telling me.
[9:36]You're secret, same thing.
[9:37]Yeah, everything's fascinating.
[9:39]Tell me for two minutes about your acting life.
[9:42]What was that like?
[9:43]What did you end up doing?
[9:44]Like, tell me a little more about it.
[9:46]Yeah.
[9:47]I mean, I loved the theater.
[9:48]I went out to LA and I went to school at the American Academy of dramatic arts.
[9:52]Did a lot of theater.
[9:53]And then I left and did theater in Aspen for a summer and then came to New York to do
[9:59]some theater.
[10:00]And here I just was here for two years just sludging away
[10:04]and like, oh, I don't want to do this anymore,
[10:07]tracking to auditions.
[10:08]You just end up going on a lot of really bad auditions.
[10:10]That's how I draw out that.
[10:12]I'm not actually doing any acting.
[10:14]And I stopped and realized that everything I'd gone out for,
[10:18]I didn't want to do anyway.
[10:19]Like these are all, you know,
[10:21]you don't go out for great things
[10:23]when you're just trying to go out for like vampire.
[10:26]I remember I auditioned for a like a space lawyer
[10:32]on some other planet with aliens
[10:35]and it doesn't start.
[10:37]He was like, this is not Jane Austen.
[10:39]Can I be on one of those movies?
[10:41]If you need like a sliding door,
[10:43]it's time for a book where you did become
[10:45]the space rocket law, whatever man
[10:49]and how your life would have gone,
[10:50]had you gotten those roles.
[10:52]That's a, that is the interesting point.
[10:54]Yeah, it's like continued on that path.
[10:56]Yeah.
[10:57]Maybe we wouldn't probably be sitting here.
[10:58]I mean, we would not.
[11:01]A lot of this book, by the way, is about,
[11:03]not by the way, obviously you know this,
[11:04]but a relationship between two sisters,
[11:07]especially an older one who, you know,
[11:09]was born robust and talented at ballerina
[11:13]and all the rest of it and her younger sister
[11:15]who was born at the heart condition
[11:16]and it was very frail and small
[11:18]and never really developed in contrast to her older sister.
[11:21]And so despite that,
[11:22]the older sister is very caregiving
[11:25]until she leaves sent away by the dad question,
[11:30]my question, my question.
[11:31]Yeah.
[11:31]But it's a lot about that
[11:32]and her trying to find each other again
[11:34]and their whole relationship.
[11:37]Do you have a sister?
[11:37]Like where did this part come?
[11:38]I do.
[11:39]Okay.
[11:41]I'm such a good detective.
[11:42]I'm such a good detective.
[11:43]You're very good.
[11:43]It's funny, I didn't think about
[11:45]until you were sort of recanting how many details
[11:49]of that do in similar ways reflect my relationship
[11:52]with my sister, who is two years older.
[11:54]And I have always admired her greatly
[11:58]and I certainly went through that phase
[12:00]where you're like a scrawny pre-teen
[12:02]and your sister's blossoming into this beautiful woman
[12:04]two years older than you even you'll never catch up.
[12:07]And we've had, our relationship has always been really good
[12:10]but there have been times where we've sort of fallen away
[12:13]and, you know, didn't worry about physically losing her
[12:17]but sort of emotionally losing her
[12:19]and then kind of coming back to being.
[12:21]And she's definitely one of the closest people
[12:23]in my life to be so.
[12:24]I do a strong personal sister.
[12:26]Good job.
[12:28]You also told the book from the point of view of the mother
[12:31]and how it felt for Jean, Jean, Jean.
[12:34]Jean, Jean.
[12:35]To be caregiving, a child who at birth,
[12:40]they thought perhaps would not live very long
[12:42]and in fact ends up living throughout the book.
[12:45]Yeah.
[12:45]So dealing with that kind of uncertainty, hovering over her
[12:49]and how that affects her.
[12:51]So I was wondering, Nick, do you not?
[12:53]I think this all has to be back there,
[12:55]but that sort of health crisis moment with her daughter
[13:00]and all the doctors and all this.
[13:01]Have you gone through something like that?
[13:02]I haven't or not.
[13:03]You've got blessed, thank God I have not.
[13:05]No, I've quite healthy children.
[13:07]But yeah, some people have asked me to,
[13:10]where did you come up with the idea of having
[13:13]giving her the heart condition?
[13:14]And it's kind of a funny thing
[13:15]that I don't have a memory of a moment
[13:19]that I decided.
[13:20]Just kind of she just came that way as the character.
[13:21]It was always my plan with her.
[13:23]But I felt like it made,
[13:25]just put everything on edge a little bit.
[13:27]Yep.
[13:28]So I also feel it's like every mother's worst nightmare.
[13:31]It's like being careable with your child.
[13:33]What do you do and how do you handle that?
[13:34]Yeah.
[13:35]And I liked the idea too.
[13:36]And I had this incredible,
[13:38]someone review the book just on Goodreads
[13:40]and say I was born with this heart condition
[13:41]and it's made me look at my life very differently
[13:45]because had I been born with it earlier,
[13:47]I wouldn't have lived.
[13:48]I was like, oh, wow.
[13:50]That was very touching and personal
[13:52]to have someone relate to that in that way.
[13:55]See, you might have missed
[13:57]this marketing opportunity.
[13:58]You have a whole group of people with this specific heart
[14:01]condition.
[14:02]That is very terrible.
[14:03]You don't have the American Association newsletter.
[14:05]It's interesting.
[14:07]I called a heart surgeon to get the information.
[14:10]And I gave them, I said very specifically,
[14:12]this is what I need.
[14:13]I need something that would have been incurable
[14:16]in this time in history.
[14:18]And she could have lived or she could have died.
[14:20]Is there what's out there?
[14:21]What would have been in the media?
[14:22]And he's like, ah, this would be the perfect disease
[14:24]for you to give her.
[14:25]I was like, great dad and thank you.
[14:26]I have so much respect for doctors.
[14:28]And they're like, all the knowledge
[14:29]that they just have at their fingertips.
[14:30]That's right.
[14:31]Well, after all that schooling.
[14:33]Still, I mean, I went to school for a long time.
[14:35]I can't fall in.
[14:35]I thought I got in my brain.
[14:36]I could play anymore.
[14:38]Well, tell me about actually writing the book.
[14:40]You said some of the characters
[14:42]came with different art, you know,
[14:44]physical features already.
[14:46]Tell me about writing it.
[14:47]Did you, where and when did you write it?
[14:49]How long did it take this year's second book?
[14:51]It's my second book.
[14:52]I do, so with my first and second and third that's written,
[14:55]I can write a book in about a year from,
[14:57]I research for about four to six months.
[15:00]And I try not to write when I'm researching.
[15:02]I could just dive into the research process.
[15:04]And I have the idea for the stories
[15:06]for percolating.
[15:07]I just kind of let it sit there.
[15:08]And then I really like to put the research aside
[15:11]and try not to get too distracted with that.
[15:13]When I start my book,
[15:16]so if I've done my research well,
[15:18]then I can just kind of dive into the story.
[15:20]And I can get the first draft written
[15:22]in about 10 to 12 months.
[15:25]And then it takes about a year to edit.
[15:27]And this book was, it then from the point of selling,
[15:29]it took two years for it to get published.
[15:32]Which isn't that it's usually about a year and a half.
[15:35]Unless you have like my next book will luckily come out
[15:38]within a year, but that's only because we kind of,
[15:40]just sold it on a partial.
[15:43]And then, but the process to get a book
[15:46]that's totally completed onto a shelf
[15:48]is a very long process, much longer than I thought.
[15:51]When I embarked on it,
[15:52]I remember I got my first book deal and she's like,
[15:54]it will come out in a year and a half.
[15:56]A year and a half.
[15:57]What are they doing?
[15:58]What does it take so long?
[15:59]But so I, yeah, I started in 2016.
[16:04]So what is your next book about?
[16:05]That's it.
[16:06]No, yeah.
[16:07]That is Tuesday.
[16:07]Next book I'm really excited about.
[16:09]It is about a real Cuban actress named Estalita Rodriguez.
[16:15]I know her daughter, who's in her seventies,
[16:18]who told me her mother's story many years ago.
[16:20]And I always wanted to turn it into a book
[16:23]because it's an amazing story.
[16:25]So it's actually her, the daughter and her mother's story.
[16:28]I went to just tell her mother's story,
[16:31]but she was such a part of it,
[16:32]having given it to me from her perspectives.
[16:34]And obviously in telling it,
[16:35]she was telling her side of things.
[16:38]So I felt like I have to tell her side of things too.
[16:42]So, yeah.
[16:43]And it doesn't have a title.
[16:44]We're working on the title.
[16:45]So the working title was just Estalita.
[16:48]That's not bad.
[16:49]No, I like it, but I titles get changed.
[16:52]Okay.
[16:53]People learn to, I feel like there are sort of fads
[16:56]with titles.
[16:57]So right now it's like sentences for titles.
[17:00]You know, so I like long.
[17:02]Yes.
[17:02]Sort of, yep, you know.
[17:03]The one I love is on earth where briefly gorgeous.
[17:06]I think that is the most beautiful title.
[17:08]Those types of, yes, titles are drawing people in right now.
[17:12]It's true.
[17:13]And curse words, I feel like you're all the rage.
[17:15]What are I feel like curse words?
[17:16]Oh, really?
[17:17]Not for picture.
[17:18]Oh, right.
[17:19]Yes, yeah, the self health.
[17:20]It's like, it has to be summer's words.
[17:23]Curse of there has to be some sort of asterisks.
[17:25]Part of the word, or else I don't know.
[17:26]Forget it.
[17:28]I just want to read this one passage.
[17:29]I'm totally jumping around here.
[17:30]But the psychological effects of being incarcerated, basically.
[17:35]So Effie, who's the younger, hard-conditioned daughter.
[17:38]And this is from the very beginning.
[17:40]But it was a relief to escape into a different darkness.
[17:43]It made my fear.
[17:43]And this is how she's saying, she's in the dark,
[17:46]but she's now closing her eyes.
[17:48]It was relief to escape into a different darkness.
[17:50]It made my fear less palpable.
[17:52]I could be anywhere behind my lids.
[17:54]I could go back.
[17:54]I could make another choice on that night
[17:56]when a simple, beautiful sound of a fiddle
[17:58]in another impenetrable darkness called to us
[18:01]if only they hadn't played for my sister.
[18:03]And I hadn't listened.
[18:04]That was so great.
[18:05]Thank you.
[18:06]So tell me about starting it off that way.
[18:08]And the feelings that go into being separated
[18:12]from your family, especially as a child.
[18:14]Yeah, that I went back and rewrote.
[18:17]OK, because that is the prologue.
[18:18]Yeah.
[18:19]But I always tend to have some little bit of prologue
[18:23]in my books.
[18:24]It's a bit of a habit I'm seeing and developing.
[18:27]But you're a accomplishing of nature.
[18:29]I had to have it.
[18:30]Yeah, I have it.
[18:31]I haven't.
[18:31]I'm such a prolific novelist.
[18:33]I have all of my books seems to start this way.
[18:35]I wanted to show.
[18:38]So I obviously wrote, I do write chronologically.
[18:41]So I did write the beginning of the book,
[18:42]and she gets put in the house, mercy,
[18:43]and so then I wrote the scene where she's, it's expanded on that.
[18:47]Yes.
[18:48]And then I wanted to, I just wanted to tease the reader.
[18:51]I wanted to give some beginning point
[18:54]to the psychological state that she gets to,
[18:57]which especially because she is dying,
[19:02]or thinks she might be dying, or doesn't know.
[19:04]And so her body is kind of breaking down in a way
[19:08]that coupled with being trapped.
[19:10]And I think had different psychological effects, obviously,
[19:13]than other women in there who would think
[19:15]that they could get out.
[19:16]So just made the urgency of it all for her so much more
[19:19]prevalent, because I have to get out,
[19:22]or someone has to get me, because I might not survive.
[19:25]And then I'll never see my family again,
[19:27]whereas I think other girls could think of three years
[19:29]is a lot, and I want to see them.
[19:31]But it does mess with you psychologically
[19:33]in a far more intense way for her to think
[19:35]that she might not live through it.
[19:38]It's like the ultimate separation anxiety.
[19:41]That's right.
[19:41]It's like as bad as it can feel like they would be like throwing
[19:44]like Zolaft under the door, so they said,
[19:46]like, here, try this.
[19:48]No, you.
[19:48]Yeah, no, you exactly.
[19:50]Have you ever thought about,
[19:51]have you thought about making this into a play?
[19:54]I have never written a play.
[19:56]I think they'd be very challenging.
[19:58]I have thought of writing screenplays,
[19:59]and I'll see you next time.
[20:00]trying to write a screenplay, that seems almost easier than staging something.
[20:00]Thank you.
[20:04]I feel like you need to have a director's eye to stage something, and even though I was an actor,
[20:08]I never did desire to be a director. I think you need to see the big picture
[20:13]on the stage in a very specific way, and even with screenwriting. I think it would be fun to
[20:17]try it. I don't know if I would be any good at it. I'm not sure. It's a skill. It's a totally
[20:21]different skill to have, to see from this visual, a guy like to get deep psychologically.
[20:27]It's one of the reasons I decided to write novels versus, say, a screenplay. Being an actor
[20:32]that might have been my more natural go-to, which I considered for sure. Why not just write your own
[20:39]stuff? But I really didn't know how to get into the head. You just are describing everything,
[20:45]dialogue and sort of camera, right? So the idea that you can go psychologically deep into your
[20:50]characters, that's what I like to do as an actor. So I get to do that in my character descriptions,
[20:56]which is very different than staging something. Interesting. But you could make it a play,
[21:03]and then you could be the mom, and then it could all. That sounds fantastic. A play is a really
[21:09]fun idea and everyone considered a play to think of making it a play. That's a really fun idea.
[21:14]You still have to do on that. Do you have any advice to aspiring authors?
[21:20]I think that the biggest challenge authors have is completing their work. I feel like so many people
[21:25]start out, they want to do it, and then they get discouraged at some point and set it aside.
[21:30]And my biggest advice would be that even if you feel discouraged and you think it's terrible,
[21:35]I think you should finish it. Because it probably is terrible. The first draft is always terrible.
[21:40]The first book I wrote, which is not published, five years I wrote it. And then I remember there
[21:45]was a single day where I deleted 60 pages in like one day. It was 500 pages. So I was a mess. It was
[21:51]such a mess. But I just kept going and kept going and then you overwrite and then you take it away.
[21:56]And so my advice is that it's just to finish the work and to have something complete that you
[22:03]can then work with is I feel like the biggest advice I could give. I'm right. That is good advice.
[22:10]Can't edit something. That doesn't exist. That's right. Yeah. Not that you have to edit.
[22:15]But anyway, good advice. Well, thank you. Thanks for having me. Thank you so much.
[22:20]And I appreciate it. Yeah. Awesome.
[22:23]You've been listening to moms and have time to read books with Zibi Owens.
[22:26]Please make sure to sign up for my newsletter at zibiowans.com to get more updates about episodes
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[22:48]And thanks again for checking out WeFoundTime.com for this week's five new essays.
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[23:09]Have a great week, everyone.