Featured Interview With Elizabeth Harlan
Tell us a little about yourself. Where were you raised? Where do you live now?
Growing up in Manhattan in an apartment with limited space, my siblings and I weren’t permitted by our parents to have a dog or cat, but we had just about everything else that was small enough to keep in cages and tanks: canaries and parakeets, turtles and tropical fish, hamsters, snakes, guinea pigs, and even an occasional loaner bunny rabbit from school. But what I wanted most of all was to have a horse, for which I worked up a rendering of one of our bathrooms repurposed as a stall. My drawing was posted on the refrigerator, but a pet horse never happened in my childhood. Reading the entire Black Stallion series by Walter Farley and riding at summer camp was the closest I got. When it came to raising my own family, we chose to live on a farm. In addition to dogs and cats, my kids grew up with a horse, a pony, goats, a sheep, and two llamas.
In my novel, Carly, also a New York City kid without pets, is delighted when she’s invited to handle shar-pei pups at a boarding school in the Pennsylvania countryside. When Headmaster McAdams cautions her “to be careful not to get peed on,” Carly loosens up in her interview, figuring that, “anyone who could talk about puppies peeing on you couldn’t be too judgmental about anything she could say.”
Even though I’m a native born New Yorker and was raised and schooled in the city, my heart has always been in the country. I now split my time between my cottage on the Peconic Bay on Long Island’s East End and my home on a bridgeless, barrier island off Florida’s Gulf coast. I travel too much to keep pets, but my children and grandchildren bring Parker, their adorable Beaglier — a combination beagle and Cavalier King Charles Spaniel — when they visit.
At what age did you realize your fascination with books? When did you start writing?
I can’t remember not being fascinated by reading and writing. My mom was very strict about lights out at bedtime, so as a very young girl, I kept a notebook and flashlight under my pillow to record ideas for stories in the middle of the night.
Who are your favorite authors to read? What is your favorite genre to read. Who Inspires you in your writings?
I like lots of different genres, but especially fiction. As a child, Charlotte’s Web by E.B. White and Frances Hodgson Burnett’s A Secret Garden and A Little Princess were among my favorite books. When I was a girl growing up, Young Adult fiction wasn’t a separate category, but that became what I loved most, including Scott O’Dell’s Island of the Blue Dolphins and every single volume of Laura Ingalls Wilder’s Little House on the Prairie, which figures in my novel as Carly’s obsession, as well. As an adult, I’ve been entranced by Jean Auel’s Clan of the Cave Bear, of which I’ve read and reread all six volumes several times. Clearly, a strong thread of interest in the lives of girls growing up and overcoming adversity weaves its way through my passion for reading and writing. My teenage character Carly connects the dots as she wends her way through seemingly insurmountable obstacles to writing a beautiful essay about Thomas Hardy’s Tess, one of literature’s most beloved young heroines.
Tell us a little about your latest book?
Becoming Carly Klein has been in gestation for many years. It began as a series of linked short stories that I submitted as my thesis for the Columbia Writing Program Master’s in Fiction. My next project, which grew out of my background in French and France — I went to a French high school in New York, studied French literature in college and graduate school, and lived in Paris for ten years — was a biography of George Sand, a French 19th century woman writer. It wasn’t until the Covid pandemic when I was sequestered on my remote barrier island in Florida that I pulled my Columbia thesis out of a drawer and began to reconfigure it as a novel. And while it seems on the surface that my biography of George Sand and my novel Becoming Carly Klein tell two altogether different stories cast in two altogether different literary genres, they share the common premise of a young, highly individualistic and rebellious girl straining against misguided mothering, struggling with identity, and prevailing against daunting challenges as she grows up to discover who she was meant to be.
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Elizabeth Harlan is an amazing and accomplished writer as well as a dear friend.
I first read Becoming Carly Klein in draft manuscript, one chapter at a time, and absolutely loved it! I’m anxiously waiting for September to come, when I can read it in published format.
Thank you, dear Cathy, for this lovely comment. Your support has always meant the world to me.