Lynn C. Miller is the author of the new novel The Surrogate. Her other books include the story collection The Lost Archive. She is also a playwright, performer, and educator, and she lives in Albuquerque.
Q: What inspired you to write The Surrogate, and how did you create your character Alex?
A: The Surrogate came out of a family situation where my mother became close to a young man she worked with after the loss of her son, my younger brother. They developed into fast friends over the years, truly family. Somehow that situation re-emerged for me after my mother died.
I didn’t get a handle on what the plot of this novel might be until I decided to set the story during the Great Recession of 2008-09. Somehow the losses people were experiencing—of houses and jobs and self-respect as well as their life savings in some cases––resonated as a backdrop with the terrible loss of a much-loved family member.
Alex is an only child who is nestled into a solid family unit of seven. Her mother and her aunt are twins who married best friends, and she has two male cousins whom she regards as brothers. The three children are raised together by the two sets of parents. We find out on the first page that her favorite cousin dies in a car accident.
Alex, who becomes a psychologist, seemed to me like the logical protagonist and narrator of the story as she observes others very closely. She herself is completely shattered by her cousin’s death. She is our point of view character; we see her navigate her own coming of age in the face of this loss. We trust her to lead us through the complex set of emotions and events in the story.
Once the young stranger, Nathaniel, wanders into her aunt’s bookstore and they become friends, the story took on a life of its own, which as an author, you always hope for!
Other crises emerge along the way like Alex’s confusion about her sexuality––she’s uncertain about her past relationship with a woman when she meets and is attracted to Nathaniel; her other cousin Stephen, a stockbroker, immediately dislikes Nathaniel and questions his intentions.
He invests his family’s money and loses it when Lehman Brothers goes under as the financial crash gains steam.
Central concerns are the motives of each character and who is worthy of trust.
Q: Can you say more about the dynamics in Alex’s family?
A: The story plays out within the two generations: all four of the parents are in their early 60s and Alex, Stephen, and Nathaniel in their early 30s. I really enjoyed the interplay of these two time periods.
The parents all remember hearing stories about the Great Depression from their parents and grandparents and they are more conservative about money.
The younger generation, buoyed by the hopeful tenor of the Obama years, even while aware of the dominoes falling around them financially, feel free to take risks––they are young enough to weather the financial storm and have at this point in their lives little to lose.
Stephen, who has a mercurial personality, causes disruptions in the close-knit family dynamic. Yet Alex cares for him and tries to back him up, all the while running interference between her growing interest in Nathaniel and Stephen’s distrust of him.
Stephen is protective of his mother and of Alex too and doesn’t want either of them taken advantage of by this attractive “stranger.”
The family, particularly Alex’s parents and her aunt and uncle, is a bulwark against the conflicting emotions and the turmoil of the nation’s financial cratering.
Q: How was the novel’s title chosen, and what does it signify for you?
A: Originally, I saw that Nathaniel’s emergence in the lives of this grieving family after Alex's cousin Rolf dies made him a surrogate family member and hence the surrogate of the title.
The word itself suggests a substitute, but to me it refers to someone who fulfills an important position in someone’s life. In the novel, everyone has to realign after Rolf dies. Along the way, many characters in this novel assume other crucial roles for each other and can be seen as surrogates as well.
In a larger sense, I asked myself the question, What happens to a family when a huge loss creates an opening to be filled?
The surrogate carries the hopes and dreams of those who find solace in him or her. The surrogate can become a permanent fixture in someone’s life in what we call “chosen family,” or satisfy a role that is more limited like that of a mentor figure in the early stages of a career.
I see connecting with these key people as a natural outgrowth of how we build a satisfying community as we mature and age.
Q: The author Elizabeth Sharp McKetta called the book a “satisfying, psychologically rich novel about filling the holes in our hearts.” What do you think of that description?
A: I love that description because we all go through situations that shake us to our core, and what do we reach for when that happens? How do we find a way to go on, to get through a difficult time?
Alex loses her cousin Rolf, whom she counts on, and then her relationship with her female lover falls apart because she is too grief-stricken to be present. Her lover moves on and Alex meets Nathaniel, who appears to be the person who can make her whole again.
The people in the novel have flaws, make mistakes, but basically try to find their way to authentic connections.
Alex’s best friend Emma and her supervising therapist, Alice, help her to come to terms with her unusually close feelings about her cousin Rolf and how she can go on after losing him.
Q: What are you working on now?
A: I’m writing a novel with two timelines. The American writer Edith Wharton (1862-1937) writes a memoir about writing her first great novel, The House of Mirth (1905), while Edie Jones, a playwright in Chicago in 2024, adapts that novel for the stage for our time.
We discover much about how the struggles of women and men during the first Gilded Age resonate with our time now.
Edie Jones experiences a betrayal in her theater company that reflects the downfall of Wharton’s protagonist Lily Bart in the marriage market at the turn of the last century. The power of stories to change our world is a major theme in the book.
Q: Anything else we should know?
A: I set The Surrogate in Albuquerque, New Mexico, and I think the landscape and history of the setting act as anchors to the turmoil of the novel’s present. Place is very much a character in the novel.
Thank you for these great questions. I invite readers to enjoy this exploration into the bonds of family and of friendship, and how we find out what we’re made of when we have to meet a moment of great consequence. I love family dramas. My wish is that I’ve written a satisfying one.
--Interview with Deborah Kalb
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