Q&A with Lauren Willig

 

 

 

Lauren Willig is the author of the new novel The Girl from Greenwich Street. Her other books include Band of Sisters. She lives in New York City.

 

Q: What inspired you to write The Girl from Greenwich Street?

 

A: Social media made me do it! I’m a native New Yorker and I’ve always been fascinated by the history of my brash, quirky, complicated city. 

 

When I was a young child, there was a vogue for birthday parties at the Museum of the City of New York where we’d dress up as 17th century New York Dutch girls and churn butter. The big entertainment in the first grade lunch line was acting out the duel between Hamilton and Burr (which invariably ended with one girl sprawled on the floor, and much scolding from the teachers). 

 

So it made sense, as an adult, to follow a number of New York history sites on Instagram and Facebook.

 

Five or six years ago, a post popped up about the Manhattan Well Murder, and I instantly fell down the historical rabbit hole, fascinated by the fact that the crime had never been solved, that Hamilton and Burr were co-counsel for the defense even as they were tearing each other to shreds in the lead up to the 1800 New York elections, and that this is the first murder trial for which we have a full transcript. 

 

At the time, I was working on my World War I book, Band of Sisters, but I knew this was a mystery I was going to have to come back to—I just didn’t realize at the time quite how mysterious it would be! 

 

Q: The writer Lynne Olsen said of the book, “In Lauren Willig’s brilliant retelling of one of the most famous murder trials in American history, she brings to poignant life its most forgotten figure — the high-spirited young woman whose killing was used by the trial’s lawyers, Alexander Hamilton and Aaron Burr, for their own political ends.” What do you think of that description?

 

A: As I was researching this book, two things struck me. One was how little attention was paid to the woman at the center of the story. The other was how very Upstairs Downstairs it all was.

 

On the one hand, you had four well-connected, high-powered lawyers using the notoriety of the Levi Weeks trial to pursue their own ends (including their own internal feuds); on the other, you had the women of the Sands-Ring household, for whom there is no upside to the case, only death, shame, and the unraveling of their lives in a public arena. 

 

It is very easy, when discussing the murder and trial, to focus, not on Elma, but on the larger than life figures of Hamilton and Burr (they do tend to consume all the air in the room) and to default to the very flat constructs of Elma created by the prosecution and defense for their own ends.

 

It was incredible to me how many sources flubbed the simple facts of Elma’s life because they just couldn’t be bothered to get them right.  Elma herself only matters as a catalyst for the trial—or sometimes as a cautionary tale. 

 

What I wanted to do was put Elma back at the heart of her own story, as a flawed, complicated, very human woman who was neither Madonna nor whore but a person, with relationships, emotions, and ambitions. So I’m utterly thrilled by Lynne Olsen’s description. (Also because I’m a huge fan of Lynne Olsen and her beautifully written historical nonfiction!)

Q: How did you research the novel, and what did you learn that especially surprised you?

 

A: Where to begin? When I started work on this book, I mistakenly thought the research would be simple. After all, here was a notorious trial, about which numerous articles and books have been written. The archival groundwork had already been done by others (I assumed). 

 

There we have the danger of assumption. What I discovered was this the Manhattan Well Murder was a centuries long game of telephone, in which misinformation was glibly repeated and shared until it took on the color of fact. 

 

Secondary sources often repeat misinformation verbatim and much of what has been written about the case is downright misleading, with people and places misnamed, conjecture presented as fact, and highly dubious footnotes. 

 

A case in point: it’s a commonplace in New York that the well where Elma was drowned sits in the basement of 129 Spring Street. Since I was concerned with the location of the well in 1799, in what was then Lispenard’s Meadow, I repeated the 129 Spring Street story without question in the historical note of my book. 

 

Only after the book went to press did I learn from an urban historian that the well at 129 Spring Street is probably a cistern dating to a decade or more after Elma’s death and the real location of the well is debatable (the strongest contender is an alley behind 89 Greene Street). 

 

This confusion about the location of the well (everyone “knows” it’s at Spring Street!) is emblematic of the murder and trial as a whole, where there are many facts everyone thinks they know—but when you dig down, they all turn out to be wrong. 

 

I spent a great deal of time among the collections of the New York Law Institute, in the archives of the New York Historical Society, and trawling through genealogical sites to try to piece together the actual facts, but it meant unlearning a great deal of what I thought I already knew about the case: including why Hamilton was on the defense team!

 

Q: What do you hope readers take away from the book?

 

A: There’s a common saying: the past is a foreign country; they do things differently there. What I hope readers take away is the opposite.  That the past, in fact, has very much to do with the present, and that people, regardless of the era, are still people. 

 

Especially with storied figures like Hamilton and Burr, I think it’s important to remember that they were living their lives before their biographies were written. They experienced uncertainty and doubt. They took false steps. They didn’t know how anything would turn out any more than we do with our lives now. 

 

What I hope to do is remove the glaze provided by hindsight and restore the sense of immediacy to these past lives.

 

Q: What are you working on now?

 

A: Funny story. After finishing The Girl from Greenwich Street I plunged into researching another famous trial involving more of our founding fathers: the story of Nancy Randolph, who was accused of incest and infanticide and after many tribulations found love with Gouverneur Morris (on whom I’ve always had a huge historical crush). 

 

While I was working on that, my editor called me up and said, “Hey, want to come see my husband’s family’s tombs at Green-Wood? I’ll bring coffee!” 

 

I was fascinated by the mausoleums, by the cemetery itself, by the stories of the people buried there, and the living people who make this enormous park and archive and working cemetery the vibrant place it is. 

 

I off-handedly mentioned an idea I had, about a demon imprisoned in one of the tombs who gets out, a snarky Gilded Age ghost, the hot widower arborist who lives in a house on the grounds, and a woman who has no idea of the powers she’s inherited—but who is going to have confront both that demon and her own heart. 

 

To my surprise, both my agent and editor said, “Drop everything and write that!” So I did! What Happens at Nightfall, a contemporary paranormal romance set at Green-Wood cemetery, is slated to come out autumn 2026—and I’m working on the sequel right now!

 

Q: Anything else we should know?

 

A: For anyone who wants to know more about the Levi Weeks trial—or to come to their own conclusions about who killed Elma Sands!—I highly recommend taking a look at the trial transcript, which is readily available online. It makes for fascinating reading. 

 

I’ll be pulling together some links and resources in a readers’ guide on my website, so head over to www.laurenwillig.com in March for more information on the background of this book!

 

--Interview with Deborah Kalb. Here's a previous Q&A with Lauren Willig.