THE HIDDEN LIFE OF CECILY LARSON - THE STORY BEHIND THE BOOK

Would it be possible to live for decades in a small town while keeping the secrets and stories of your past hidden? And what would happen once those secrets came out? THE HIDDEN LIFE OF CECILY LARSON began in my mind with these questions.

Anyone who’s lived in a small town – as I have for most of my life, in the Midwest and in Maine – knows the near-impossibility of keeping a secret from well-meaning neighbors. Given this, I also wondered: Is reinvention ever truly possible? Or do the ideas and perceptions that people have about and of us keep us fixed squarely in the roles that we’ve always played?

Sitting down in early 2021 to plan the novel I would write, I knew right away that my fictional town would be in northern Minnesota, where I was born and which is still, even after all the years I’ve spent away, the place that feels to me the most like “home.” I also knew that my main character would be a conventional-seeming, privileged doctor’s wife, a pillar of the community with an excellent reputation and a long involvement in making her small town a better place to live. I wanted her to be someone with a great deal to lose; someone whose fall from grace – if she did indeed fall – would be spectacular (at least in small-town terms).

But what would be the secrets of her past? What would be consequential enough to still matter, after decades of keeping people in the dark? What sort of secrets would continue to reverberate throughout the lives of all the members of her family?

Having watched my share of Long Lost Family on TLC, a show about people finding lost family members through DNA results and research, the answer seemed obvious to me: a lost child. But how could I make Cecily’s early years even more dramatic? For this, I looked to my own memories, and a couple of things popped up.

First, when I was a little kid, I had a giant poster of a bareback rider hanging in my bedroom. I remember lying awake looking up at the image. So terrifying! So exhilarating! The lady looked serene, balanced precariously on one leg atop a fast-moving horse, but she also looked like she could fall at any moment. I think this has seemed to me a good metaphor for life ever since, and it also seemed like a pretty interesting secret for a mother to have kept from her family – that she used to be a circus star. I also knew that the world of the circus would make possible the kind of forbidden relationship that I had in mind for Cecily to have.

Another thing in my memory that it turned out I could use: I had a first love when I was fifteen, and he ultimately disappeared – back in the days before Facebook and Google made such a thing impossible. Twenty years passed before I knew what had happened to him.

Finally, I always seem to return to exploring themes of “home” and “forgiveness” in my writing. What does it take to find or create these things?

So, putting all of these pieces together, I gave Cecily an early life as a circus bareback rider and a lost first love who comes back to haunt her at age 94, when an at-home DNA test reveals that a baby she gave birth to then – a baby she’d been told had died at birth – is still alive, bringing to light the secret that she’s kept hidden for decades, and throwing into question everything about the family she’s raised and claimed as “her own” for nearly 70 years.

In the end, I think the question that fascinated me most was: When it seems that all is lost, what is it that remains to be found?

THE HIDDEN LIFE OF CECILY LARSON is ultimately a story about hope, and about the power of love to heal and save us, even in the face of profound and devastating losses.