As a teenager in my hometown of Newport, New Hampshire, with a population of around 6,000 people, weekend nights began by driving through town. My friends and I would pile into a car, roll the windows down and turn the music up. We’d drive up and down Main Street, past the town hall, past the police station, around the big common and the little common, looking for something to do. If we were lucky, we’d find someone old enough to buy us a six pack of beer. It was the ’90s and we had no cell phones, no social media, no way to know where anyone was except to drive the same loop and hope to find them. The night ahead could go anywhere or nowhere, and that was the point.
I set my debut novel in my hometown. I call it a love letter to Newport, although Newport may not come off looking the best in its pages. My goal was to make the town feel as alive as the characters and that required showing that, just like a person, it was complicated. You could love your town and also want to leave it at the same time. Newport’s motto is “The Sunshine Town.” But it wasn’t sunshine for everyone. The truth is, I couldn’t wait to escape. Growing up, I longed to move somewhere far away and big enough that I could be anonymous. The irony is that I’d give anything to return now, to be part of such a tight-knit community where everybody knows everybody.
Growing up, I longed to move somewhere far away and big enough that I could be anonymous. The irony is that I’d give anything to return now.
When I was driving through town on Friday evenings in high school, my mother was an inmate at the women’s prison in Goffstown. The few times I returned to New Hampshire after college were to visit her in prison, where she lay dying. She died in the men’s prison in Concord because the women’s prison didn’t have an infirmary that could manage her care. The last time I saw her, her body resembled a child’s: her legs spindly and covered with fine hair and purple bruises, as if they could no longer hold the weight of her body. Her skin was gray, the color of ash. She winced in pain whenever she moved. Occasionally a pinched scream escaped from her mouth. End-stage liver disease wracked her body. The nurses refused to increase her morphine. But they did have a freezer full of popsicles, and I brought them to her one after another: red, purple, orange, blue.
A love letter is almost always directed toward somebody or something you can’t have, and this one is no different. I can’t have my mother back. I can’t have my youth back. I can’t go back in time to the town that shaped me. But in writing my novel, I could. When I started writing about a teenage girl, I knew there was only one setting for it. I gave my hometown to Maggie, whose mother had recently left without explanation. A girl not unlike the one driving through town at sixteen, waiting for the night to open up ahead of her. Maggie spends her summer days sunbathing at Lake Sunapee and walking around through the town and woods of Newport. She’s both waiting and hoping to be seen—by the lifeguard, by the older girls, and most dangerously, by the high school boys—and trying to be invisible. Writing my hometown through her eyes let me access both the love and the longing to escape. Maggie is aware that her hometown isn’t a destination. It’s not a place people move to. It’s a place people move away from. Including her mother. This colors the way she sees the town, just as my own mother’s absence from my life clouded my perspective. Newport was a town my mother could never imagine herself living in and she was vocal about this when she’d drive up from Boston or New York, or wherever she was living, to visit to me during my childhood.
I rooted my novel’s version of Newport in real details: the gun factory in town where Maggie’s father works, the ski jump that was moved to the high school from Lake Placid, NY in 1976, the laundromat that sold ice cream, the vacant textile mills along the Sugar River. But I gave myself permission to transform and fictionalize. My characters aren’t old enough to drive so I relocated key settings so they could walk. I fabricated a junk yard, although surely there were junk yards in the area, I’d just never personally been to one. I’ve hopefully rendered it a complicated place, one of both poverty and wealth, cruelty and kindness. All of this feels true.
The Newport in my book, and also in my memory, is a place where people gossip. A place where secrets don’t stay secret for long. Everyone in town knew about my mother but most of my friends and their parents had never met her. I was raised by my grandparents, both Newport natives, who moved back when I was three because they thought it was an ideal place to raise a child. My grandparents are gone now. My mother is gone. I have no living family left in New Hampshire. Newport knows me, or knew me, the way small towns know their own, and it knew of my mother the way small towns think they know people: by rumor, by headline. Even after I moved away, I couldn’t escape the headlines in the New Hampshire papers about her. But when she died, there was nothing. No obituary, no article, only silence. There is a similar silence after Maggie’s mother takes off. After years of headlines about my mother’s crimes, I’ve thought about that silence a lot. What it means for a place that trades in everyone’s business to have nothing to say at the end.
Newport has changed. I’ve changed. My love letter has been written. I’m just waiting to find out if it will be received as one.
I’ve been worried about how my hometown will respond to my novel. Both to the details that I’ve changed and the details that might ring too true. I’ve been posting about the book on social media. The response from my hometown crowd has been kind and warm and more supportive than I could have imagined. They seem excited about a book set in our hometown. Friends have sent me messages saying they pre-ordered. They’ve left comments saying they plan to come to my event at the bookstore in Hanover. But I’m terrified they will come to that event with pitch forks. I’m terrified former teachers and parents of friends—and even some my friends themselves—will take issue with the version of Newport in my book, a place where terrible things happen to girls and characters go unpunished.
Despite everything, I still long for those days growing up in Newport. I can close my eyes and I’m there again. I’m in my friend’s Dodge Omni, Black Sheep is playing in the cassette player, we’re pulling into the 7-Eleven because we see a guy who once bought beer for us and we’re hoping he will again. What the night holds for us is unknown. But I’m not sixteen anymore and I can’t go back. Newport has changed. I’ve changed. My love letter has been written. I’m just waiting to find out if it will be received as one.
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When We Were Feral by Shasta Grant is available from Regal House Publishing.
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