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Ann Leary is the New York Times bestselling author of a memoir and four novels including The Good House. Her work has been translated into eighteen languages, and she has written for The New York Times, Ploughshares, NPR, Redbook, and Real Simple, among other publications. Her essay, "Rallying to Keep the Game Alive," was adapted for Prime Video's television series, Modern Love. Her novel The Good House was adapted as a motion picture starring Sigourney Weaver and Kevin Kline. She lives with her husband in New York. Visit her online at AnnLeary.com.
Ann Leary's website
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Your new novel, The Foundling, is set in 1920s Pennsylvania. What is it about and what inspired you to write it?
The Foundling is the story of two friends, raised in the same orphanage, who meet again as young adults at a highly acclaimed institution for women. But now they're no longer roommates. Mary is the new secretary to the charismatic female superintendent; Lillian is an inmate, confined at the asylum against her will.
I was inspired by a discovery I made about ten years ago when I got caught up in the family genealogy craze. I hit a snag in my family tree when I came to my maternal grandmother. I knew she grew up in an orphanage, but I couldn't find any record of her birth or her orphanage. Finally, I found her in a 1930 census record. She was seventeen and working as a secretary at an institution called The Laurelton State Village for Feebleminded Women of Childbearing Age.
Your grandmother worked at an Institution for "feebleminded" women?
Yes. Feebleminded is an awful word, but it was originally not a slur; it was a clinical term for people with intellectual disabilities, as were the words: idiot, imbecile and moron. So initially, I felt proud of this grandmother I barely knew. There she was, still so young, ...
is the author of more than fifty books of fiction, poetry, and critical essays. She has won the Booker Prize, the Arthur C. Clarke Award for Imagination in Service to Society, the Franz Kafka Prize, the Peace Prize of the ... (more)
If you enjoyed:
The Foundling
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The Testaments
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Clare Beams is the author of the story collection We Show What We Have Learned, which won the Bard Prize and was a Kirkus Best Debut of 2016, as well as a finalist for the PEN/Robert W. Bingham Prize, the New York Public ... (more)
If you enjoyed:
The Foundling
Try:
The Illness Lesson
by Clare Beams
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