Tad Crawford is the author of the new novel A Woman in the Wild. His other books include A Floating Life. Also an attorney and a publisher, he lives in New York City and in the Hudson Highlands.
Q: What inspired you to write A Woman in the Wild, and how did you create your character Thea?
A: At the heart of the novel are the challenges of healing and growth.
Psychologist Thea Firth gives up her city practice and goes to an institute in the mountains because of her need for healing. She suffers from having failed to prevent the sexual abuse of her daughter. And she is in pain and grieving because her daughter has totally broken off their relationship.
Blocked by this estrangement from expressing her love for her daughter, she is put in charge of healing a wild man who kept company with a bear in the forest.
In this crucible of seeking to heal and be healed herself, Thea is, in a sense, formed of the many people I have known who seek to understand and deepen their lives despite the losses and ordeals that test us all.
Q: The writer Ethan Gallogly said of the book, “Rich in insight, A Woman in the Wild is an engrossing story of desire, healing, and the limits of human knowledge.” What do you think of that description?
A: I find that description both generous and insightful. Thea is sustained by her desire to heal the wild man and herself find healing.
That the director of the institute was once her mentor when she was in training gives her encouragement and fortifies her hope amid her upset and confusion.
But there are limits to our knowledge that prevent us from knowing in advance how far we can go on any journey, including journeys of healing and love. So, as much as she desires to heal the wild man and herself be healed, she must move ahead without any certainty of success.
Q: Did you know how the novel would end before you started writing it, or did you make many changes along the way?
A: I didn’t know how the novel would end before I started. Rather I brought together a group of dramatic concerns—love, incest, estrangement, mentoring, forgiveness and more—and as the story unfolded I imagined many endings but finally settled on one.
The first draft had that ending but following responses from my initial readers and returning to the manuscript after some time away, I realized that was not the ending of the book. The actual ending came like a surprise created not only from the people in the novel but also from the intensity of certain passages of the writing.
Q: How was the novel’s title chosen, and what does it signify for you?
A: Thea is a woman of the city. It’s where she took her training as a psychologist and where she chose to practice and live. For her to go to the mountains, to the institute surrounded by forest, is to abandon her familiar life. But that corresponds to her daughter’s abandonment of Thea as her mother.
In Thea’s emotions she has entered a wild as unfamiliar as the wild of the forest. And sometimes the wild of the forest lets her slip away from the wild within: “Entering the forest, she felt a great relief to vanish among the saplings and thick-trunked trees. She liked to start off at different angles and always seek new routes. The land rising underfoot, the vertical lifting of the trees, and the fluttering green flocks of leaves made her thoughtless, forgetful, complete in herself.”
Q: What are you working on now?
A: My next novel will be the story of the wild man and the bear. Its working title is After He Loved.
It shows the meeting of the man and the bear, their separate quests on a journey taken together, and the onset of winter when the bear must hibernate and the man must find a way to survive without the supportive presence of the bear.
Q: Anything else we should know?
A: Readers are welcome to visit my website—tadcrawford.com—which shows my background and other works of fiction and nonfiction. And searching for “Tad Crawford” on YouTube brings up a number of videos in which I discuss my writing and career.
--Interview with Deborah Kalb
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