before leaving corporate life to become a full-time mom. In her newfound “free” time, she took classes at the Writing Institute at Sarah Lawrence College, where she accidentally found her calling as a historical fiction author. Her writing has appeared in Newsweek, Writer’s Digest, Female First, Read 650, and more.
Woodruff's new novel is The Trade Off.
My Q&A with the author:
How much work does your title do to take readers into the story?Visit Samantha Greene Woodruff's website.
This was not an easy book to name! From the moment I had the idea to write about a woman trying to be an investor in the stock market in the lead up to the Great Crash, I loved the title “What Goes Up.” For me it was fun and inviting but also foreshadowed the catastrophe that was coming (you know, because of the adage: “what goes up always comes down.”) But no one else liked it. They felt it sounded too rom-com for historical fiction and I saw that too. In the end, we came up with over fifty titles before we landed on The Trade Off. Two of the other finalists were Her Side of the Street and Rhapsody in Gold, but I felt that The Trade Off did just enough to play on Wall Street and hint at the fact that it isn’t going to be easy for the protagonist to achieve her goals, without giving much away.
What's in a name?
My protagonist, Bea Abramovitz’s family dynamic was based on stories I’d been told about my grandmother, Pauline. She was the only daughter of Polish immigrants who were extremely wealthy, lost everything when they immigrated, and her mother treated her like a servant and her brothers like princes. She was my favorite grandma and passed away when I was only ten, so I wanted to honor her and my grandpa Lew (who my daughter Lila is named after), by calling Bea’s parents Pauline and Lew.
How surprised would your teenage reader self be by your novel?
My teenage self would be surprised that I was a novelist at all. My high school pipe dream was to be a rock star, not a novelist. I sang in bands and wrote angst-ridden poetry. I also wrote an incredibly wordy children’s book for a senior project but I never thought I’d make a career out of writing. I loved to read (most writers do,) and I favored mysteries and sci-fi thrillers. When everyone else was reading Sweet Valley High, I read a series of books called Dark Forces. I devoured Nancy Drew and then graduated to Agatha Christie. I guess that explains why my pure pleasure reading is still psychological thrillers. I didn’t find historicalfiction, as a reader, until I was a full-blown adult with a BA in history, and I didn’t start writing until I was in my forties.
Do you find it harder to write beginnings or endings? Which do you change more?
For The Trade Off, the whole idea hinged on the ending, so that was set from the beginning. In general, I have a loose outline for the major beats of my novels before I write them, but I let the details, and the individual scenes evolve over time (and adjust the outline accordingly). I didn’t know where we would enter Bea’s story or how the “chicken little” aspect of the novel—Bea seeing that a market crash was coming and no one believing her—would evolve. And it changed as I wrote it. The ending stayed the same, although the way it happened wasn’t what I had initially planned.
Do you see much of yourself in your characters? Do they have any connection to your personality, or are they a world apart?
I think of writing characters like method acting. Even when they have different personalities and life experiences than mine, I look to my own relationships and feelings to find authenticity in my characters’ reactions to events and people. So, I’m always in there somewhere.
What non-literary inspirations have influenced your writing?
A recent event in the stock market sparked the idea for The Trade Off: the GameStop short squeeze of 2021, which was also the subject of the movie Dumb Money. I was fascinated that the investors selling the stock short were perceived as villains and the buyers of the stock were the heroes. This got me thinking about the complex morality of wealth, especially on Wall Street when fortunes can be made and lost in a matter of hours. Since I write historical fiction, I looked to the past for my actual story, but this more recent event is where the idea originated. More broadly, I’m a huge TV and movie person and I think there is a certain pacing that I try to achieve in my writing as a result. Probably, I write for those with shorter attention spans.
My Book, The Movie: The Lobotomist's Wife.
My Book, The Movie: The Trade Off.
--Marshal Zeringue