What would you say The Book of Shadows is about?

It's the story of a Herculine, an orphan finding her way in the cold, callous world of a 19th century French convent school. It's about the refuge she seeks—in books, in words, in dreams—and about the quite unexpected refuge she finds in a literal shadow-world of spirits. It is a ghost story, in the simplest sense; but I hope that the reader will discover layers beneath the simpler story.

What is a Book of Shadows?

In witchcraft lore, a Book of Shadows is something one witch writes for another, a sort of journal, a guide to the secrets of the craft, and to the secrets of the world.

Both Diana Gabaldon and Caleb Carr, in their advance praise for The Book of Shadows, commented on the thoroughness of your research. How did you go about researching the book?

Initially, I just followed my nose. I knew my subjects, in general terms: France, the Revolution… And one thing led to another: the Terror, the witch hysteria of Europe's not so distant past, and so on. I read whole books on the history of the guillotine, on the dress of the era, on courtly etiquette. At some point I came across two memoirs that gave the narrative shape—that of Elizabeth Vigee LeBrun, portraitist to Marie Antoinette, and that of Herculine Barbin, a 19th century hermaphrodite whose terribly sad story was discovered by Michel Foucault in the depths of some French administrative office. From LeBrun I took much richness and detail, and from Herculine I took, obviously, the name, but also my primary metaphor. The real Herculine died at a young age, destitute, in a Paris garret; so I like to think of my story as "what might have been," a sort of fantastical tribute.

How much of the history is true?

Nearly all of it. One or two dates have been fiddled with, and I toyed with the genealogies of the Royals just a bit. The challenge is to make the history work as fiction; to simply alter the history… well, where's the challenge in that? There actually was a winter of devastating effect, as in the novel; although I moved it up a year or two. A woman and her daughter were, in fact, convicted of "wasting the candles of the nation," and beheaded. I'd be hard-pressed to make up such details. In fact, sometimes the historical record has to be rewritten a bit, as it would be unbelievable in a fictional context—truth is stranger than fiction, quite often.

With the research done, how long did it take to write the book?

Once I'd quit my full-time job and moved to Key West to wait tables and write, the novel came together pretty quickly. But start to finish, accounting for time away from the work altogether, I'd say the writing took about three years.

The story takes place in France? How did you choose that country as a setting?

While at the University of Notre Dame, preparing to study abroad my sophomore year, I was invited to help in the restoration of a chateau on the Breton coast. I went, and while wrestling with centuries-old vines and scraping wallpaper, it was easy to let my mind wander—and that ramshackle place became Ravndal in The Book of Shadows. Everything grew from a love of the language, the land and the history of France.

The novel features a hero—or is it heroine?—quite unlike any we've encountered in popular fiction. Can you comment on your choice there?

A: You refer to the fact that Herculine is a hermaphrodite. She represents the ultimate outsider—someone "beyond" the most basic of definitions. That said, I'll add that The Book of Shadows is about a hermaphrodite to the same extent The Old Man and The Sea is about a fish.

As I've said, I took the character's name, if little else, from that of a true hermaphrodite—as a tribute, but also because I saw the opportunity to explore, metaphorically, the expectations of gender roles in this world as well as "others," and in this age as well as ages past.

In fact, there was a case in the last year, in remote West Africa, of a man giving birth—he'd been born an intersexual and raised as a man, but in fact he had intact female genitalia. In our own society, the issues of the transgender community may well be to this decade what the issues of women were to the seventies, and gays and lesbians were to the eighties. I don't claim that the novel addresses these issues in any serious or overt way, but the story—of confusion, of persecution—does function on the most literal level too, unfortunately.

'Hero or heroine?' Heroine, in Herculine's case, as she sees herself as a woman regardless of her affections, passions or appearance. It seems to me a matter of the most basic respect to allow someone to choose their own pronoun.

Speaking of metaphor, is it fair to say that witchcraft plays a similar role in the story?

Yes. The craft represents a talent, any talent—like Sebastiana's for portraiture. But it also is a very real tradition in itself, one encompassing all aspects of the natural world, from midwifery to astrology, and everything in between. And of course witchery has been with us since ancient times, a tradition traceable to Lilith, Adam's first wife—who, spurned, is alleged to have mated with Satan, begetting a devil-race—through today, where women of little means continue to be persecuted as witches. There's a village in South Africa where women, branded as witches, must live together, as they would not be safe outside the village. 'Witch'—the word used as accusation—is as old as the sexes, and as pernicious, as permanent as misogyny. I'm afraid the notion of witch, in that sense, will never leave us. On the other hand, it is also a tradition of great empowerment, particularly in its modern usage—the Wicca priestesses, for example.

The Church, too, gets a fair amount of play in the novel? Can you comment on that?

I was raised a Catholic, and educated as a Catholic; but the thing that remains with me today is an attraction to the theatre of the faith, the pageantry, the rituals. The Church is all about excess, really, and drama of the highest sort. It lends itself to fiction of this kind, in the neo-gothic style. Too, the Catholic Church has always taken a hit in the gothic, as the genre developed in the more northern, Protestant areas of Europe where the Church was less entrenched, and somewhat mistrusted. And it's not a great leap from the Church to other codified practices and traditions, such as witchcraft. The borders are thin. For example, it's been confirmed by church officials that Mother Teresa herself underwent exorcism in the late years of her life.

In Response to a Common Q

Readers have written with a common question: Why did I choose to use initial caps, such as C--, rather than writing out the full names of people and places in The Book of Shadows? My response is as follows:

Firstly, that was a literary convention of the time in which The Book of Shadows is supposed to have been written, i.e., the 19th c. It is used in the opening pages of Jane Eyre and Uncle Tom's Cabin, to name but two examples. I thought I'd adopt this convention in hopes of adding to the atmosphere of my own novel.

Secondly, Herculine and her circle have reason to be concerned with their safety; therefore, they are not inclined to set out all the facts of their lives, lest someone pursue them for whatever purpose. Theirs is a shadow world, and so some facts of their past lives are best kept secret.

Thirdly, as a writer the use of initial caps freed me up considerably, and allowed me to use history in the service of fiction. Often a minor character is a composite of two or more historical characters. Likewise, a place can be a composite of two or more places. In such cases, it seems to me a good solution to leave the identity of the fictional creation vague, be it a person or a place. (I.e., a writer can place mountains like the Rockies in their fictional landscape, as long as they don't call their creation Colorado. The actual Rockies are and must remain in Colorado.)

Overall, my goal was to make people and places seem so real—by the accretion of detail, etc.—that it wouldn't matter if they were fully named or not.

For some readers, the use of initial caps has added to the allure of the story. Others, unfortunately, have found it a distraction.

Finally, I am not employing this tactic in the sequel to The Book of Shadows, for this reason: as I write, I'm finding that Herculine isn't quite as fearful. She is stepping from the Shadows.