Mary Modern
a novel

Lucy Morrigan, a young genetic researcher, lives with her boyfriend, Gray, and a strange collection of tenants in her crumbling family mansion. Surrounded by four generations of clothes, photographs, furniture, and other remnants of past lives, Lucy and Gray's home life is strangely out of touch with the modern world--except for Lucy's high-tech lab in the basement.

Frustrated by her unsuccessful attempts to attain motherhood or tenure, Lucy takes drastic measures to achieve both. Using a blood-stained scrap of an apron found in the attic, Lucy successfully clones her grandmother, Mary. But rather than conjuring a new baby, Lucy brings to life a twenty-two-year-old Mary, who is confused and disoriented when she finds herself trapped in the strangest sort of déjà-vu: alive in a home that is no longer her own, surrounded by reminders of a life she has already lived but doesn't remember.

A remarkable debut novel, Mary Modern turns an unflinching eye on the joyous, heartbreaking, and utterly unexpected consequences of human desire.

Read the prologue.

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Shaye Areheart Book

also available on HighBridge Audio

Note:  There are a few minor spoilers in this FAQ, but those questions appear towards the end.  I’ll let you know when to stop reading!

How did you come up with the idea for Mary Modern?
A few years ago my aunt Eileen gave me a copy of my great-grandparents' engagement portrait , which was taken sometime in the 1910s. I hung this picture on my wall and often thought of the future that awaited my great-grandmother after departing that portrait studio: Anna died giving birth to her fifth daughter at the age of 33. My maternal grandmother was five years old then, and spent the remainder of her childhood in the care of foster parents who treated her like an indentured servant. With all this in mind, I looked at my great-grandmother's face and wondered what I'd say to her, and what she'd say to me, if through some temporal blip we were granted half an hour in each other's company.

The premise for Mary Modern occurred to me during one of these daydreams.  I took a couple pages of notes, though I suspected I was walking a fine line between original and ridiculous.  I asked one of my closest friends for her opinion and, excited by my summary, she told me to go ahead and write it.  I joke now that Mary Modern wouldn’t exist if it weren’t for Kelly.  It’s not really a joke though; I valued her opinion enough that I would have turned my attention elsewhere had she expressed any doubt.

The book has a very gothic flavor.  Who are your influences?
Yes, those elements—necrophilia, secret passages, the heroines as doppelgängers—are quite prominent, and I read a great deal of gothic literature as I was writing.  A conversation I’d had with my fiction teacher, Mike McCormack, on the dearth of criticism on the Anglo-Irish gothic writers of the 19th century—Bram Stoker, Joseph Sheridan Le Fanu, Charles Maturin—led to a preoccupation with Le Fanu’s short stories.  After I’d read In a Glass Darkly, his best-known collection (his vampire tale, Carmilla, predates Bram Stoker’s), I found many more obscure stories posted on the internet.  I often took long breaks in writing late at night to read them (thinking at the time that I was procrastinating). I also spent hours reading the latest submissions to “true” ghost story collections like Castle of Spirits.  I read a lot of H.P. Lovecraft, too, so the story’s setting in rural Massachusetts is something of a nod to him.  I read Elizabeth Gaskell’s Gothic Tales around this time as well.

I named the New Halcyon speakeasy after Le Fanu’s The Room in the Dragon Volant, the story of an elaborately evil hoax inflicted upon the young, wealthy, and utterly clueless narrator, which features a wonderfully vivid masquerade scene. But the most influential of his stories was “Strange Event in the Life of Schalken the Painter.”  I couldn’t get this story out of my head: how the future of an innocent young girl could be ruined—worse than ruined—by her guardian’s mostly-good intentions; how the worst of human traits, greed and arrogance, could continue beyond the grave; shuddersome strangers inhabiting a space between life and death, not even a place as definitive or straightforward as purgatory.

I wonder if Mike’s short story collection, Getting it in the Head, didn’t influence me in some way as well.  The best stories are the most macabre: an artist who dissembles himself three appendages and later a limb at a time for each new gallery opening, bleaching his own bones in a vat of acid; a vision of the afterlife that seems half Old West, half apocalyptic wasteland, with a weary Charonesque narrator who dispenses provisions and B.S. advice to the freshly deceased; tales of patricide and fratricide borne out of adolescent rage.  I wanted Mary to feel anger that intense, and not know how to express it: fury directed forward, a strangled-in-the-womb kind of thing.  At any rate, it’s a terrific collection, well worth tracking down along with his novel, Notes From a Coma.

I’d say the Irish novelist Kate O’Brien is perhaps my greatest influence (my favorite novels of hers are The Land of Spices and The Ante-Room).  O’Brien’s depictions of Irish Catholic middle-class domestic life—in all its “strangling affection”—are so resonant because anyone with a loving family knows the claustrophobia is well worth enduring for the comfort to be found there.

I also count the fever-induced dreamscape of Katherine Anne Porter’s Pale Horse, Pale Rider amongmy very favorite passages in all literature.

There are also a lot of parallels with Mary Shelley’s Frankenstein.
From the moment I got the idea, the similarities seemed inevitable.  What I really gained from Frankenstein, though, was how disinterested Mary Shelley was in the pseudo-science that enabled her premise.  I saw the implausibility didn’t matter in the least.  I concocted my premise and worked backwards from there, hoping that a rich exploration of this unprecedented “identity crisis,” a story that uncovered every weird possibility, would justify the leap I would be asking readers to take.

Are your characters based on people you know?
With only a couple of exceptions, my characters are composites of three or four people I’ve known.  Mary is heavily based on my maternal grandmother—you might say I imagined the sort of girl she was at my age, and worked from there.  My grandmother was a devout Catholic, yet she never imposed her beliefs on others (she was “pro-life,” for instance, but she never would have told someone they were wrong or immoral for supporting legalized abortion), and I realized on some level as I was writing that Mary’s faith would make a perfect counterpoint to the shenanigans of Fuller and the “God Squad.”  There’s also a dash of my paternal grandmother in Mary as well, particularly in her culinary adventures.  My paternal grandmother has a sharper tongue, too.

* The (albeit minor) spoilers start now.

The novel seems very pro-Democrat and anti-religion in places.  You even throw in a dash of socialism in the form of P.F.X. Godfry!
Strangely enough, the very person I’d’ve expected to hate my book—my staunchly Republican grandfather—ended up reading it over a couple days and even rereading it.  He went on and on about how much he liked it.  Needless to say, that was a really nice surprise.  And Godfry, of course, offers a bit of levity (I had that phrase “eschew obfuscation” in mind as I was writing the excerpts of his manifesto) as well as a very useful resource for the Mary of 2009.  I might as well note that I was writing the novel during and after the 2004 election season, so Godfry definitely became my mouthpiece for all the intense anger and frustration I felt (and feel).  It comforted me to imagine a time-traveler feeling every bit as furious and indignant as I was.

To call Mary Modern anti-religion doesn’t take into account the fact that its central character is also the truest Christian in the book.  Furthermore, though Charles Fuller seems cartoonishly egomaniacal, you might say his motives are far more justified than Lucy’s; his actions are governed by more than just his own selfish interests.  (That isn’t to say I think Lucy’s a deplorable character—far from it.  I felt a great deal of sympathy for her as I was writing.)

Mary Modern is primarily a love story…right?
It’s a love story, sure, but it’s also a meditation on familial love: how it can simultaneously comfort, fortify, and restrict us; the struggle to define ourselves in the absence of our loved ones; how we use sentimental objects and familiar spaces as emotional insulation.  It’s as much about longing to be in the company of a beloved sibling, parent, or grandparent as it is a story of the lengths a girl will go to recover the “love of her life.”

You also throw in a bit of Irish mythology—the Morrigan.
I name my characters very carefully.  I included the epigram on page 4 because I wanted to give readers (who mightn’t have been familiar with the Morrigan) a chance to get the meaning of the WWII flashback, when Teddy meets an old Frenchwoman who washes his clothes without his permission.  There are all these stories (rather, a variation on the same story) in Irish mythology of an old hag washing clothes in a river, except there are all these mangled body parts mixed in with the washing.  This horrific scene is meant to frighten whichever hubristic warrior she’s appearing to, to convince him not to fight the battle set for the following day, but of course he always ignores her warning—and he never survives the battle. 

My purpose in naming Teddy after the war-goddess, and in echoing the myth in the days before his death, was to reinforce this notion within the novel that our lives are twisted by the arbitrary whims of some sinister personification of fate—someone who makes a show of presenting a choice, when realistically there is no alternative to the path we’ve chosen.  And of course, Lucy becomes a Morriganesque figure to Mary in that respect.

What about the sci-fi aspects?  Did you do a lot of research?
Since Mary Modern is 100% fantasy, it wasn’t necessary to do all that much serious research; though the novel touches on the ethical and philosophical questions posed by “reprogenetics” and stem cell research, these are ultimately secondary issues within the story.  I read mostly popular science works—Matt Ridley is my favorite.  I also read Lee Silver (a professor at Princeton), Richard Dawkins, and a few others.  I spent as much (if not more) time reading about everyday life in the 1920s.

What’s the story behind those DNA sequences between chapters?
These interludes consist of DNA sequences with a “vernacular translation,” a transcription of a random memory, underneath.  Because the premise that junk DNA records memory (and physiological changes) is central to the plot, it seemed appropriate to show this somehow—and these pages between the novel’s six sections are the result, written in the first person because these memories belong to Mary. Under the exons, those DNA sequences that code actual genes, I included a lot of bio-speak that just explains the function of the gene in question.  (The first two interludes do not have a “translation” because the premise isn’t revealed until the third section of the novel.)

Have you been to Antarctica?
Not yet!  The Antarctica passage is inspired by Sara Wheeler’s memoir on her time in the Antarctic Writers and Artists program, Terra Incognita.

Is the Seventh Order of Saint Agatha a real group?
No, though it’s based on various 19th- and 20th-century male purity movements.  According to Elizabeth Abbott in A History of Celibacy, some such men believed that cornflakes were an anti-aphrodisiac.