Photo by Amy Wilton Photography
Laura Bonazzoli is the author of the new novel Our Share of Morning. She also has written the novel-in-stories Consecration Pond. She lives in Maine.
Q: What inspired you to write Our Share of Morning, and how did you create your characters Violet and Glory?
A: I wanted to explore two themes: abiding sibling love, and the task of creating a meaningful life.
As we all know, sibling relationships are complex. There can be rivalry, envy, resentments, and even estrangement, but sibling relationships can also be the longest-lasting relationships of our lives: from early childhood until our death, some of us are lucky enough to maintain extremely close sibling bonds.
In the summer of 2016, I drove from Maine to Massachusetts to visit my aunt. Although more than two years had passed since my mother’s death, I was struck by the freshness of my aunt’s grief.
As I sat in her kitchen, she told me the familiar story of how their mother, my maternal grandmother, had been admitted to a tuberculosis sanatorium in 1932, when my mother was 3 years old and my aunt was 5. “When she went away,” my aunt told me, “I knew I had to take care of your mother. It was up to me. And I felt that way all my life.”
That conversation so impressed me that the day I got home from that visit, I opened my laptop and began to write the first chapter of Our Share of Morning, a story of two sisters: Violet, who tries to take care of her younger sister, Glory, after their mother, in 1933, is admitted to a TB sanatorium.
I should also explain that, years before I started writing the novel, I’d lost a brother and then a sister to cancer, and shortly after I started writing it, I lost another brother to cancer.
As I worked on Our Share of Morning, I began to realize that these experiences were an even greater impetus for my exploration of sibling love than the relationship between my aunt and mother.
I also said that I wanted to explore our search for meaning. Specifically, I kept asking myself how we go about creating a meaningful life despite the fact that so many factors influencing our lives are beyond our control.
Like my siblings’ cancers, certainly, but any serious disease, as well as war, natural disasters, an oppressive government, a parent’s addiction or abuse, random chance—so many things.
In Our Share of Morning, the sisters’ lives are influenced by many factors they can’t control, including their mother’s TB, their family’s poverty, and the misogyny they encounter.
But a key influence—and the novel’s central mystery—is the disappearance of a young woman from their neighborhood when Violet is a toddler and Glory hasn’t even been born.
Until they’re adults, the sisters know nothing about either the disappearance or the effect that it has had on their family and their community. And yet it strongly influences their fate.
So I used this disappearance to show how the sisters create meaning despite growing up in what I came to call “a neighborhood scarred by the secret it holds.”
Q: I’m so sorry about the loss of your siblings…
In terms of the book, how would you describe the dynamic between Violet and Glory?
A: Violet, who is three years older, is more practical, resourceful, even spunky than Glory. She also assumes responsibility for taking care of Glory, and in a sense postpones her own life to do so.
Glory is highly gifted, creative, sensitive, and fragile; however, her deep inner strength emerges when she is severely tested. She is also honest about herself and her mistakes, and admires Violet for the goodness, the unselfishness that she believes she herself lacks.
Q: How was the novel’s title chosen, and what does it signify for you?
A: I searched for years for a title for the book, but nothing seemed right. Then, a few months before I started submitting the manuscript, I found in a volume of Emily Dickinson’s poems a brief, early poem with the opening lines: “Our share of the night to bear / Our share of morning.” I knew immediately that I wanted to use that second line for my title.
The pronoun Our captures the fact that the novel is narrated in first person by both sisters, taking turns. Also, the idea of having both a share of night and a share of morning reflects the story’s moments of shared darkness and light.
One more thing: The sisters are named for the flowers (violets and morning glories) that were in bloom when they were born. That’s why I asked my publisher for a book cover showing violets and morning glories—the flowers symbolize the sisters. The word Morning in the book title subtly links it to the morning glories.
Q: The Kirkus Review of the novel called it a “lyrical, slow-burning family saga that finds poetry in hardship and tenderness in survival.” What do you think of that description?
A: I think the description is apt. Our Share of Morning is certainly a family saga, and this family does experience hardship. I appreciated the reviewer’s use of the words lyrical, poetry, and tenderness.
Glory’s dream is to become a famous poet, and many readers have remarked on the beauty of the language in her chapters. One reader even wrote me that he took photos of certain passages that he thought were outstandingly lyrical so that he could quickly return to them.
Q: What are you working on now?
A: I began a new novel in January of 2024. I recently began work on the third draft.
I write quite slowly, though. My novel in stories, Consecration Pond, emerged over 30 years, and Our Share of Morning took eight years. So I don’t anticipate that this new work will be ready for prime time for a while.
It’s literary fiction—not historical—and could be quickly described as a story of the fallibility of memory and the gift of mature love.
Q: Anything else we should know?
A: My MFA isn’t in creative writing—I have an MFA in acting from the University of Minnesota Minneapolis/Guthrie Theatre program. My background in acting helps explain my tendency to keep revising my characters’ voices until I feel that I can actually “hear” them.
I’m also a poet—I’ve had more than 50 poems published in literary magazines and anthologies, and I teach a course with Maine Media Workshops called “Crafting Poetic Prose,” in which I show students how to apply poetic devices like alliteration and metaphor to prose.
I work part-time in a bookshop—the Owl & Turtle Bookshop Café in Camden.
--Interview with Deborah Kalb
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