Photo by Michael Kress
Meghan Cox Gurdon is the author of the new memoir Free Range Girl. She also has written the book The Enchanted Hour, and she writes for The Wall Street Journal. She lives in Maine.
Q: What inspired you to write this memoir?
A: My parents were leaving the world just as my grandchildren started coming into it, all of which made the past suddenly seem vivid, ineffably precious – and gone.
That whole world has vanished. The free-range life before screens, the hippie-adjacency of going back-to-the-land, even the idea of Maine as a backwater.
I thought: if I don’t write down how it was, my grandchildren will never know anything about it. No one’s grandchildren will know anything about it. All the quirky 1970s details, the assumptions people lived under – it’ll all be gone.
So I started writing. No, that’s not true. I didn’t start writing until about a year into the process. First I had to decide what story to tell, and *how* to tell it (First person or third? Present tense or past? Gory details or no?).
Q: How was the book’s title chosen, and what does it signify for you?
A: The title was a gift! I was groping around, coming up with one long, preposterous title after another.
So I threw the problem to my agent, Stephen Barbara, who raised it at a work meeting: “Anyone have an idea for a title about a memoir of free-range girlhood in the woods of Maine in the 1970’s?”
A colleague of his, Gideon Pine, said: “How about Free Range Girl?” The second I heard it I felt a ping of happy recognition: Yes!
Q: Did you need to do additional research to write the book, or did you rely primarily on memories?
A: My memories of that time are exceptionally vivid; or they were, anyway, until I wrote them down. As you know, putting anything into print has a way of crystallizing it.
I checked as many details as I could with others and read up a little on the history of Maine, but my goal here was not to write a meticulous factual account, but to try to capture what it felt like to be on the cusp of adolescence at such a place, in such a time.
Just putting memories in order was instructive. The arc of a story began to emerge. At the beginning of the book, the girl (who was me) is very much a child and morally rather lost. After a year in the Maine woods, she – that is I – was less of a child and had a rudimentary moral compass.
Q: What impact did it have on you to write the book, and what do you hope readers take away from it?
A: The main thing I hope readers will take away is enjoyment! I hope it’s fun to travel back in time and read about how it felt to be young and unsupervised almost to the point of neglect.
It was a joy to me to go back, in my mind, to experiences that were tactile and intense, and I loved writing Free Range Girl. The girl in the story isn’t always happy, and she makes some big mistakes, but I hope overall the reader takes pleasure in her company.
Writing the memoir was profoundly meaningful for me. I suspect that many memoirists go through periods, as I did, where they are dogged by invisible critics: “Who are you to write about your life? You’re not famous. Who cares?”
I’m so glad I pushed past those disembodied meanies, because writing about my girlhood meant going back to it, at least in imagination, so that – again, in my head – I got to meet my long-ago self and spend time with people I loved who are no longer here.
One consequence of coming to the story in my sixth decade is that I found I could enjoy the past without rancor. I kept thinking that, had I written the book 15 years ago, I might have been sour and even bitter about some of the decisions made by the adults in my life back then.
Today, as a mother of five adult children and (so far) three grandchildren, I find it hard to look back at my parents with anything but tenderness. In 1976, my mother was half the age I am now and she was going through life for the first time, too.
I was a little startled by some of the answers I found when I began to ask questions about the past, but I came away with a feeling of warm reconciliation.
You know, Proust says something about this, along the lines that we all writhe at memories of past mistakes, but that we would be wiser to accept them in the understanding that, without them, we would not have developed into the people we became. I’m no Proust, but I second that emotion.
Q: What are you working on now?
A: Right now, I’m working on getting Free Range Girl out into the world while meeting my deadlines for The Wall Street Journal, where I’m a weekly contributor to the books pages and a fortnightly columnist for WSJ Free Expression.
I’m also toying with the idea of writing about the early 1990s, when my husband and I worked and traveled together as foreign correspondents in Asia. If something develops, I’ll let you know!
Q: Anything else we should know?
A: Yes! Free Range Girl was written without an iota of AI. You can tell because, as I only discovered when as I was recording the audiobook, when it was too late to make changes, in at least two places I inadvertently used a wonky phrase that an LLM would have flagged.
Many pairs of eyes had combed the manuscript, and all of them, including mine, had missed the wonkiness. So readers can trust that what they’re reading is 100 percent the product of human intelligence.
--Interview with Deborah Kalb
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