Diane Josefowicz

Diane Josefowicz is the author of Guardians & Saints: Stories, L’Air du Temps (1985), and Ready, Set, Oh: A Novel. She is also the author, with Jed Z. Buchwald, of two histories of Egyptology: The Zodiac of Paris and The Riddle of the Rosetta. She serves as managing editor of the Victorian Web, the internet’s oldest and largest website devoted to Victoriana. A graduate of Brown University, she holds a PhD in History of Science from MIT and an MFA in fiction from Columbia University. She lives in Providence, Rhode Island.

Josefowicz's new novel is The Great Houses of Pill Hill.

My Q&A with the author:

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

The Great Houses of Pill Hill is a novel about an interior decorator who inadvertently winds up investigating the murder of her marquee client, a surgeon who lives with his wife in a grand mansion in an expensive neighborhood nicknamed Pill Hill because, historically, many doctors either lived or had offices there.

Since the book has been published, I've heard from many people who also live on or near a Pill Hill. It turns out, quite a few neighborhoods have that nickname, and they have a similar historical connection with medicine and medical professionals.

For a long time, the novel's working title was The Ministry of the Interior, which is also the name of the heroine's interior design firm. But this working title directed the reader's attention to the wrong things. As your question implies, a novel's title should place the reader directly in the scene of the story. In The Great Houses of Pill Hill, the murdered client is himself a doctor, and the local hospital plays a role in the plot, so foregrounding this aspect in the title made sense to me.

What's in a name?

Funny you should ask. One morning, years ago, I woke up with this line in my head: "My real name is Hannah Cooke, but no one ever calls me that."

This line, with its ambivalent gesture toward and away from self-disclosure, became the first line of the novel. The narrator, who goes by "Cookie," doesn't like her nickname but she goes along with it because she's lived in the town her whole life, and everyone knows her by this nickname. To change it would mean rocking the boat, and even though it seems like such a small thing, to insist on a change like that is a big no-no in this small place.

Personal history can be sticky in small towns. I'm also from a small place, and it can be hard to convince people who've known me forever that I'm not that shy and pliable small child they remember. Cookie has a similar problem. It also gives her power: People expect her to be a certain way, to do certain things. It's as if her real self is a secret, something only she knows about.

Cookie has a few secrets. One of them—in addition to her day job, she's a working artist with a side hustle making miniature crime scenes—plays directly into the plot. Another of her secrets, which is more to my point here, is that she's intelligent. She thinks—and that's something no one gives her credit for. As a thinking person, she's socially invisible—and also, for that reason, freer to operate behind the scenes, to pursue her own ends. With the character of Cookie, one of the things I'm hoping to suggest is that people blind themselves to each other at their peril.

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

For me, endings are more difficult by a country mile. The Great Houses of Pill Hill had several endings over the course of its development. One of them even involved a trip to Italy, which was really just wishful thinking on my part.

While I was in Columbia's MFA program, everyone seemed to be writing a road novel. One of my teachers, who got fed up with this, kept repeating: Stay in the wound. He meant: Don't let your characters skip town, literally or figuratively, on the psychological work they need to do. Letting go of that Italian ending, I kept thinking of his advice. A road trip doesn't always, or even very often take a character where he or she most needs to go.

The book's present ending, with its last-minute turnabout, came to me as a complete surprise. As I wrote it up, I tried to preserve that element of shock, of feeling bowled over by an important revelation.

Endings are hard for me in general. I need to feel my way into them, and that emotional labor is almost always something I'd rather not do. I have a lot of ways to avoid too. Housecleaning, errands, hobbies—the whole procrastinatory run of stuff. My closet is never as organized as when I'm finishing a draft.

What non-literary inspirations have influenced your writing?

I've mentioned that Cookie makes miniature crime scenes. These are primarily domestic interiors, something that she, of course, knows a lot about as an interior designer. The two interests dovetail nicely, in the sense that she's always confronting the problem of being on the outside looking in. She observes and creates the context for the crime scenes that interest her, just as she does for the domestic lives of her clients, whose luxury fittings and appliances are well beyond her personal budget.

Before writing The Great Houses of Pill Hill, I'd renovated a historic carriage house on the East Side of Providence where I live. So I was already immersed in the world of interior design and historic renovation. As I was doing that, my mother-in-law handed me a copy of The Nutshell Studies of Unexplained Death by the photographer Corinne May Botz, who took a series of amazing photographs of miniature crime scenes created in the 1940s by a Chicago heiress named Frances Glessner Lee.

These little crime scenes are immensely detailed. They remind me of the famous and equally detailed and inviting illustrations that accompanied the publications of Victorian novels like those by Charles Dickens. There is a level of detail that I find distinctly novelistic, and these crime scenes by Glessner Lee are a wonderful example of what I mean. Amazingly, they are still used to train detectives to "read" crime scenes, to quickly absorb all the details of a space, to notice all the clues that might otherwise escape notice. I could not have written my novel without these minatures and the photos that Botz took of them.

Visit Diane Josefowicz's website.

--Marshal Zeringue