The protagonist of my 2022 novel, An Open Door and its sequel, The Hedgerow, Edith Sloan is a young woman with some interesting traits and ambitions.

 When An Open Door begins, it’s the summer of 1948 and Edith works as a secretary at the recently established United Nations in New York City. She has run away from her law-student husband, Walter, and their dingy apartment in Cambridge, Massachusetts. They’ve been married for three years. After the end of World War II, they left Washington DC together where Edith worked as a mapmaker and Walter as an intelligence analyst for the Department of the Navy and went to Harvard. Walter studied law; Edith got a Master’s in American poetry and applied to the Doctoral program. Overjoyed at her acceptance, she couldn’t wait to tell Walter who, for a few minutes, assumed she was going to break the news that she was expecting a baby. When she explains the situation, he tells her she can’t continue with school. He’s been spotted as someone with a bright future, one who needs a certain kind of wife. That kind doesn’t include having a PhD. She won’t put up with his going back on the agreement they made, and off she goes.

My mother left my father sometime in the late 1940’s when they were living in Cambridge. She was in graduate school; my father was, too. I’m not sure what caused the rift, but my mother was never happy in her marriage.  She might have been trying to escape for good, or just needed a mental health break. Like Edith, she went to New York and worked as a secretary at the UN. I don’t know how long she was away and what made her go back, but she did.

At odds with her marital duty are Edith’s lusty appetites. My mother had these, too. On her deathbed, she described herself as a “serial adulteress.” My father, who survived her, then a second wife to whom he’d been married even longer than he had to my mother said of her statement, “These were affairs of the heart.” Edith’s affairs weren’t of the heart, but of her body. So were my  mother’s because on that last day she said a lovely silver bracelet she often wore was a gift from a man who believed her absence from his life meant an unwanted pregnancy. It didn’t. My mother fell ill with pneumonia and ended the affair while she recuperated.

Clearly, Edith is modeled somewhat on my mother.

But she’s also a little like me, at least in terms of how practical she is, and knowing when she doesn’t want to pick up the pieces of someone else’s emotional wreckage. She’s colder than I am, I think, and compartmentalizes more than I tend to, but she’s got a drive and an edge I’ve long known was mine. In this way Edith is a blend of my mother and me.

I had a difficult, painful relationship with my mother, and to be bluntly honest, I didn’t grieve her death. Yet I have kept her alive in my prose and poetry, which testifies to the strength of that relationship, whether or not it was a happy one.

Edith faces new challenges in The Hedgerow that test and strengthen her. Fighting against strict roles assigned women in 1949, she’s a trailblazer and remarkably courageous. The crisis she faces at the end of the book might prove her undoing, but knowing her as I’ve come to, I think not.

The Hedgerow is available July 9, 2024, from your favorite bookseller.