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Nicole Galland is the author of the new novel Boy. Her other books include Master of the Revels.
Q: What inspired you to write Boy, and how did you create your characters Sander and Joan?
A: Boy was conceived during the Omicron Covid surge, when I was stuck alone at home with a wandering mind. My last novel, Master of the Revels (sequel to The Rise and Fall of DODO), had multiple settings including Shakespeare’s London.
Many stories set in that era are about young women disguising themselves as boy actors, but I’d read nothing about the actual boys they were trying to pass as. Diving into Sander’s life was a welcome interweaving of the familiar and the unknown.
Independent of that and for no particular reason, I was wondering about how old religions die – in particular, that of ancient Greece. I spent one evening Googling things like, “Did the Greeks climb Mt. Olympus looking for Zeus?” and then wondered how I’d research such a thing if I lacked access not only to the internet but even to a library.
So I imagined myself a young woman living in Elizabethan London, trying to learn how to learn.
A fun thing to do with two characters who are the same age in the same place but otherwise very different is to throw them together. So I did.
As for their personalities: I’d spent enough years in the professional theatre world, watching the rise and fall of egos and careers, that Sander - a beautiful young performer facing a crisis of aging - came alive pretty easily for me.
Joan was trickier. There was probably nobody like her in that era, but that freed her up to be a trailblazer. She breaks the rules that should keep her down and (sometimes with help) invents new ways of getting what she’s after. She’s my fantasy version of what I’d be like in her place.
Q: How did you research the novel, and did you learn anything that especially surprised you?
A: Because I knew this world already, most of the surprises were small, exquisite nuggets. Many of them had to do with Francis Bacon, since he was new to me. At this point in his career, he still believed the sun revolved around the earth – and yet his thinking was sophisticated enough to contemplate measuring the speed of light! I wouldn’t have guessed either of those details.
Thanks to Deborah Harkness’s nonfiction book The Jewel House, I learned that Bacon was far from the only natural philosopher in London at that time, and that in fact most of the others worked together, shared information, and mostly learned by doing (hence to term “empirics”). Hugh Platt was chief among these. Bacon held himself aloof from all of them, even while imagining his work would be of benefit to the masses.  Q: What did you see as the right balance between fiction and history as you wrote the book?
A: I decided early on that each of them had to respect the other one. As long as it all felt historically plausible, the needs of the story were more important than the historical record.
That said, I am often freakishly lucky in my historical fiction in this way: I think I’m inventing story elements that turn out to be genuine history.
In the case of Boy, I needed the Earl of Essex and Francis Bacon to have a close personal relationship and for both of them to adore the theatre. Both of which turned out to be true.
I needed London to be full of natural philosophers and empirics who could be Joan’s early mentors before she met Bacon; turns out that at this moment in history, London was abuzz with such figures, all of whom agreed that sharing knowledge freely was the right way to advance science.
Q: What do you hope readers take away from the story?
A: On the one hand, it feels presumptuous to tell anyone what to get out of a work of fiction. More than once, I’ve had the surreal experience of readers excitedly telling me their favorite thing about one of my novels, and it was something I hadn’t consciously conveyed – but that doesn’t matter, because something clearly spoke to them and moved them.
One the other hand, of course I wrote this with a contemporary readership in mind. And to them I would say: Look how far we’ve come (although we’re not there yet). Boys need not grow up to be manly-men to thrive; girls are welcome in the sciences and also, generally, pants.
Today’s conversation about gender sounds very different from those of eras past, but it has really been a continuous, evolving discussion. Boy reflects the early iterations of that conversation – and remains relevant today.
Q: What are you working on now?
A: Usually as soon as I turn in one manuscript I’m right at it with the next, but this time I wanted to savor Joan and Sander a bit longer before creating new protagonists, so I’ve been dabbling in other kinds of projects.
I’m developing a one-woman show with an actress friend; I’m also working with some folks in upstate New York on a creative project about the history of the Erie Canal. And I’m finally ready to feel my way in to a new novel. I’m leaning toward 1930s New York.
Q: Anything else we should know?
A: I hope in these challenging times we can all remember to add light to each other’s lives whenever possible. What else are we here for?
--Interview with Deborah Kalb. Here's a previous Q&A with Nicole Galland. |
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