Tara Conklin

Tara Conklin is a writer and lawyer currently living with her family in Seattle, WA. Most recently, she worked as a litigator in the New York and London offices of a corporate law firm but now devotes herself full-time to writing fiction.

Her debut novel is The House Girl.

From Conklin's February 2013 interview with Bookmagnet Blog's Jaime Boler:

JB: How did you come up with the idea for The House Girl?

TC: I came across the words “slave doctor” in a biography I was reading, and that term made me stop. I started wondering about the kind of person who would occupy such a conflicted role – to dedicate your life to healing, but your patients were destined only for more harm. From that initial spark of interest, I wrote the story of Dr. Caleb Harper. The two women who appear in his story – Dorothea Rounds and Josephine Bell – grabbed me. I wanted to know more about them, so I started writing about each separately and I just kept writing, trying to discover how their stories connected. Caleb’s is the last narrative now to appear in the book, but it’s where the whole thing began.

JB: What kind of research did you do for your story?

TC: I read a lot of slave narratives, letters and journals from the time period, jotting down unusual words and phrases as I found them. This helped me use the right language for the historical sections. I also read fiction and non-fiction about the antebellum south and the Underground Railroad and did a fair amount of concentrated googling as required to get the details right. You’d be surprised how much you can find on the internet about...[read on]

Learn more about the book and author at Tara Conklin's website.

The Page 69 Test: The House Girl.

Writers Read: Tara Conklin.

My Book, The Movie: The House Girl.

--Marshal Zeringue