What macabre series of troubles befell it and caused it to close? Given that I was interested in writing about the gilded age, which fits with the publication of Mary’s book, and that there’s a long history of writers of gothic fiction embedding their curses in objects (like books) passed from person to person, things began to come together for me in terms of including The Story of Mary MacLane as part of my plot. But what I didn’t know, what I set about to answer for myself, is why my boarding school was abandoned in the first place. And I had my setting, an abandoned boarding school in coastal Rhode Island. I knew I wanted to write a novel about such a film during its production.
However, an early one was certainly my interest in supposedly cursed films-cursed sets, cursed productions-particularly horror films like The Omen and Poltergeist, etc.
Mary knows, even at that age, that fame likely won’t bring her happiness-at least not lasting happiness-but it’s fame she most desires (then) and she sure got it.Īnd so, to the second part of your question: there are many, many threads of my personal inspiration and obsession twined together in Plain Bad Heroines. One part of Mary’s life story that’s so remarkable to me is that, without any notable literary connections or legs-up, and from her family home in Butte, Montana, at the age of nineteen, she set out to write a book that would make her famous and it ended up doing exactly that. We have a record! But beyond that, I was also interested in this idea of her as a wunderkind writer-partly because my character, Merritt, inhabits that space some 115 years later. Obviously, her book became hugely influential to me in terms of giving me access to this incredible voice of a young queer woman from that time-thinking the things she thought and writing them, too.
I’ve now read The Story of Mary MacLane four or five times-and individual passages from it dozens more-and I continue to be taken in by her candor, her intellect, and her bravado. Mary was, I think unfairly, written-off by many critics of her day as a mere provocateur, a sensation, but there’s real style to her writing, and a vivid humor.
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