Jennifer Cody Epstein

Jennifer Cody Epstein is the author of four novels that have been published in a total of twenty-one countries around the world: The Madwomen of Paris (2023), Wunderland (2019), The Gods of Heavenly Punishment (2012), and The Painter from Shanghai (2007).

She is the recipient of the 2014 Asia Pacific American Librarians Association Honor Award for fiction, and was longlisted for the 2020 Simpson/Joyce Carol Oates Literary Prize.

My Q&A with the author:

How much work does your title do to take readers into the story?

Since the book is about women locked up in France’s largest women’s asylum in the 19th century, I think The Madwomen of Paris does a lot of work! Unfortunately, I can’t take credit for that, since my amazing agent Amelia Atlas was the one who actually came up with it. I’d initially wanted to call the novel The Mesmerist, since the story is based on a very bizarre, real-life chapter of medical history in which Jean-Martin Charcot—today widely regarded as the father of modern neurology—used hypnotism to recreate hysterical symptoms with patients from the asylum’s hysteria ward. In the end, though, it didn’t work as well to signpost what the story was about or where it was set.

What's in a name?

Names are always an interesting challenge in historical fiction, particularly when it’s based on real events like The Madwomen of Paris is. Actually, my first big decision with this book wasn’t choosing the names themselves, but deciding whether and how to fictionalize the names of characters in the first place, since most of them are drawn from real people. I went back and forth on that, particularly with regards to Charcot, whom I was at one point going to give the name “Bouchard.” I think at least part of my urge to rename him stemmed from a reluctance to paint such a revered medical figure in a less-than-reverent light. Ultimately, though, I realized I couldn’t do what I’d set out to do with the book—that is, fully hold Charcot and the powerful men he worked with (Freud, Babinsky, Gilles de la Tourrette) accountable for their treatment of women—without naming them, because so much of their power lay in their real-life names and reputations.

For the female characters, though, I wanted to have more flexibility in terms of creating characters who were composites of the real-life, fascinating patients of the Salpêtrière. I was also reluctant to project my own narrative designs on women who’d spent so much of their lives having men do exactly that to them already. So while Rosalie is based pretty directly on the woman who was probably the Salpêtrière’s most celebrated and famous hysteric, Blanche Wittman, I made her into a separate character in the novel. The same goes with Josephine; though she’s drawn loosely from Augustine Gleizes (in particular, from Geizes’s extraordinary photogenic presence) she has some qualities from other hysterics I’d read about, and others I simply made up.

Choosing their names and that of Laure, the narrator, ended up being a process too. I started with names I found on name generator websites like behindthename.com, and which felt intuitively like they fit the characters. Then I worked with my very thoughtful and diligent factcheckers in Paris to refine them to make sure they aligned with naming trends of the time. Laure was actually “Flore” at first; I liked it because it felt simple, strong and unadorned, which is essentially her character. After learning that Flore wasn’t actually very commonly used in France in the 19th century, I switched her to “Laure,” which had the same feel to me.

How surprised would your teenage reader self be by your novel?

Honestly? Probably less surprised than I would have been by my first two novels! I was fascinated by 19th-century European literature about women as a teen, in particular Gothic classics like Jane Eyre, Wuthering Heights and Tess of D’Urbervilles. I would probably have been surprised by the amount of research that ultimately had to go into the novel, however. And given how much I struggled in math and chemistry, I definitely would have been surprised by the fact that it was positively reviewed by Science Magazine.

Do you find it harder to write beginnings or endings? Which do you change more?

I’d say it depends on the story. With my first novel, The Painter from Shanghai, I rewrote the preface about a dozen times before finding the right setting and scene, but I always knew where I wanted to end the novel. With The Gods of Heavenly Punishment I actually didn’t know either the beginning or the end when I started it, and kind of felt my way to both. With Wunderland the beginning came pretty easily to me, but I wrote about a dozen endings before finally just ending the book at an earlier point.

By contrast, The Madwomen of Paris was inspired, in part, by a real-life detail from the Salpêtrière that I was always particularly struck by: the fact that one of Charcot’s “star” hysterics ultimately escaped him and the asylum dressed as a man. There was something about that role inversion, and the sheer, subversive audacity of the act, that felt so powerful to me, and from the beginning I knew I wanted to build my own ending around it. Of course, Josephine ends up having her own set of dangers and fraught circumstances she needs to escape, and I added some elements to my version that reflected those. But no matter where the novel went before that (and it went a lot of places, as there were numerous rewrites!) I always knew that that was my destination.

Do you see much of yourself in your characters? Do they have any connection to your personality, or are they a world apart?

That’s one of the funny things about writing characters who inhabit such completely different worlds from my own–I always end up imbuing at least a little bit of myself in them anyway. In part, I think that’s because writing different characters is not unlike acting in different roles–in order to make both feel fully-realized, you need to imbue them with observations, reflections and sensibilities that ring true. And the only way to really do that is to draw from personal experience.

But there are definitely elements of myself that go beyond that in the characters I’ve written; things that connect them not only to me, but to one another. I’ve realized, for instance, that each of my books has a character who uses art—and especially literature—as a kind of lifeline. In The Madwomen of Paris, literature is one of the things that binds Josephine and Laure together. Laure has always been a bookworm, and Josephine—whose working class background has limited her access to literature—taps into Laure’s literacy and cache of remembered storylines by having her read and recite stories to her in the dank darkness of the asylum’s hysteria ward. It’s very reflective of my own love of books, and how pretty much since I first learned to read they’ve been my go-to source of safety, escape and intellectual growth.

What non-literary inspirations have influenced your writing?

Nearly all of my books have been influenced by visual images in one way or another. The Painter from Shanghai started when I saw a self-portrait of Pan Yuliang at the Guggenheim and was completely riveted by it, as well as by the brief summary of her extraordinary life that accompanied it. (I also used her paintings to try to understand her story, since there is almost nothing by the way of formal biography about her out there, even in Chinese.) While writing The Gods of Heavenly Punishment, I was deeply influenced by the photographs of Tadahiko Hayashi, whose postwar images in the wake of The Tokyo Firebombing really captured for me the tragic scope and devastating impact of that event. And The Madwomen of Paris started with an image of Augustine Gleizes that I stumbled onto online in 2017. It was just so intriguing; this young, scantily-clad woman with a strangely-contorted arm, staring straight at the camera. Once I discovered who she was and the circumstances of that photograph, I knew I’d found a world I wanted to explore fictively.

But as a writer of historical (and now, I guess, hysterical) fiction, I’ve also been deeply influenced by modern-day political events and currents, because the more I write about the past the more vibrantly in conversation with the present it always seems to be. As I wrote The Gods of Heavenly Punishment America was indiscriminately killing Iraqi civilians with drones, and while I wrote a Wunderland scene about the Nuremberg Rallies—with its torchlight, red flags and violent rhetoric—there was Trump, supporting Tiki-Torch-carrying white Supremacists, demonizing foreign immigrants and denouncing the media with exactly the same term (“lying press”) Hitler had used.

Madwomen was no different: as I wrote it, the news cycle seemed to be continually roiling with revelations about all of the ways in which powerful men (Weinstein, Epstein, Nassar, Cosby, Trump) abuse and exploit women and have largely gotten away with it, and the ways in which many of those women are then required to relive that trauma publicly in their quests for justice. I was working on a scene where Josephine relives a violent sexual attack on Charcot’s stage while Christine Blasey Ford was testifying on national television that Brett Kavanaugh had assaulted her, and being mocked by Trump and other Republicans for it. Then, of course, Kavanaugh and another accused predator, Clarence Thomas, helped overturn Roe vs. Wade, effectively stripping American women of control over their own bodies. Even as I was working on revisions, E. Jean Carroll was being called a whack job by Trump on CNN’s Town Hall stage. All of this definitely influenced the sense of anger and urgency with which I wrote the novel, which may have made it more of a heavy read then you might expect a historical novel set in Belle Epoque Paris to be. But I think that ultimately, it also makes it a more resonant and relevant book—something I didn’t expect myself when I started, but with which, in retrospect, I’m very satisfied.

Learn more about the novel and author at Jennifer Cody Epstein's website.

The Page 69 Test: The Painter from Shanghai.

The Page 69 Test: The Gods of Heavenly Punishment.

The Page 69 Test: Wunderland.

--Marshal Zeringue