Hey, Bessie's Hello Sunshine Today on the bright Side.
It's an all new shelf Life we're diving into. Isila, the February pick for Ese's Book Club, written by acclaimed author Allegra Goodman. This gripping feminist survival story, set in the sixteenth century on a remote island in Quebec, is one you don't want to miss.
It's Thursday, February twenty seven.
I'm Simone Boyce, I'm Danielle Robe and this is the bright Side from Hello.
Sunshine Today on shelf Life. Y'all, we are talking to author Allegra Goodman. Her novel Isla is Reese's book Club selection for February. Allegra is a best selling author whose other books include Sam the Chalk Artist, Intuition, The Cookbook Collector, Paradise Park, and Catterskill Falls, which was a finalist for the National Book Award.
Her latest book, is Isla, is her first foray into historical fiction. It's actually based on a true story of a woman in sixteenth century France, Marguerite de la Roque. She's a real person who sailed to New France now Canada in fifteen forty two. She was marooned on a Subarctic island in the Gulf of Saint Lawrence. And then the author, Aligra Goodman, took her story and just ran with it, creating a fictional account of what happened to her and how she survived.
And honestly, what amazes me about this whole story is that this book has been twenty years in the making. I mean that's when she first discovered Marguerite and her story and it kind of planted the seed of an idea in her mind. And now we get to talk to her all about the finished product Isila. So let's bring her in. Allegra, Welcome to the bright Side. Oh, thank you, We're so happy to have you. So, Isla,
is this impressive work of historical fiction. And I'm so curious about the inspiration for this book, especially your protagonist Marguerite. So how did you originally come across her? And will you tell us a little bit about what fastd you about Marguerite's life?
Yes, of course, So I came across her more than twenty years ago on a road trip that my family took up from Cambridge up to Montreal. And we have four kids and at the time they were ten, seven, three, and zero. We have three boys, and then the zero year old was our newborn daughter. I'm still not sure why I agreed to go on this trip. Our baby
was literally six weeks old. I went to the library and took out a whole stack of books for children about Canadian history because we were going to Canada, which I thought I was going to read with the boys. So we start driving. Needless to say, my sons have zero interest in the books about Canadian history and they read none of them. But I ended up reading all of them because I was up all night nursing the baby. So I would be like sitting up in bed, like
one after another reading these books. And one night in bed in this hotel room, I was reading a book about Jacques Cartier, the French explorer who sailed three times to what they called New France in those days. And this book was about his explorations, and it was like his third exploration was in fifteen forty two, and there was this discussion of his exploration, and then it said accompanying him was a ship full of colonists who were
going to settle in the New World. And on this ship was a young noblewoman named Marguerite Delaroche de Roberval, who annoyed the commander so much that he marooned her on an island and the Gulf of Saint Lawrence and left her there. I should add this was in parentheses, so it was like then it was like closed parentheses, and then we went back to talking about Jacques Cartier's expedition.
So it was just this little afterthought, like, no big deal, this girl got marooned on an island exactly, yeah, what so.
Often happens to women's history, I think literally in the parentheses. So I was like, wait, wait, who is Marguerite?
Wait?
Why was she on the ship? What do you mean annoyed the commander? What does she do to deserve getting stuck on this deserted island in what I knew was a subarctic climate? Did she survive? What happened to her? And then but the author didn't come back to her. He just went on. And at the time I thought, I'm sitting there like holding this baby in bed with this book, and I thought, this is such a great topic or subject for a novel. This is fascinating. Did
this really happen? Then I thought, wait, that would be really hard to write as historical novels in the sixteenth century, I write contemporary stuff. This isn't me. This is stressing me out. This whole idea is stressing me out. So I put the idea aside for many years, and my kids grew older, and I wrote a lot of other books set in mostly the twentieth century and the twenty first century. And then as my kids grew older, my daughter the newborn, finally went off to college and I
finally had a lot more time. So I was working on this contemporary novel, well called Sam, about this young girl who's a boulderer in the twenty first century. And I kept writing about her trying to solve problems on these boulders where she was on the rock face, clawing
her way up to the top. And I started thinking about Marguerite and how she was alone on this rocky island and trying to survive, and writing about Sam actually brought me back to my interest in Marguerite, and I started to try experimenting with telling her story at that point.
Okay, so what happens next, because I know you dive headfirst into research on Marguerite, right, what did you find in that research.
So she was fairly well known in her lifetime in France as a survivor. There are two accounts of her while she was alive, contemporary accounts. One is by the Queen of Navarre, who collected what she said were true stories about people in a book which was published after she died, called the Heptamerin. And these are like many stories,
and they're all pretty short. And the story of Marguerite on her island is this, I think the sixty ninth story in the collection, and she writes her account of what she thinks, how she thinks Marguerite prevailed in the wilderness and everything. But it's only about two pages long, I should say, so it's very very short. And then there's another account from her lifetime by a priest who said that he interviewed her, but his account conflicts with
the Queen's story, and his is also very short. So we got these two versions that don't match up, that are all, but they're both very short. So in some ways that's very challenging because there isn't a lot to go on, But in other ways it's really an opportunity for a novelist to just get in there and imagine exactly what happened. So that's what I did well, Igrad.
The first line of any book is so important. It's what draws people in. And I saw this great video of you on the Reese's Book Club Instagram account where you talked about writing thirty plus first sentences of this book before landing on this one. So your first line is I never knew my mother. She died the night that I was born, and so we passed each other in the dark. She left me her name Marguerite and
her ruby ring, but no memory of her. In that video, you said, once you landed on that perfect first sentence, you could hear the main character's voice in your head. I'm dying to know how crafting that one line helped with the character development. What did that set the stage for?
So actually, I have my notebook here that I used to write these sentences, and they started out really clunky and really wordy. You can I crossed out a ton and there's pages of this. When I got to that sentence, it was sort of distilled, and the thing that I heard was the way she spoke. It was like the cadence and the rhythm of her speech. So that at the time, I was writing about this young girl who lives now, and she talks like us, and her diction
is like us. Her word choice, her rhythms are like ours, right, And in that sentence, I came upon this ever so slightly more formal way of talking. It's a tiny, tiny bit archaic. She would say upon the ground instead of on the ground, just but very very subtle. And when I heard those rhythms and those details that you just read, I really heard her voice in my head, and I knew from there it was sort of like getting that tiny handhold on the rock that I could sort of keep pulling myself up.
What do you think we learn about Marguerite through that first line? To me, it's more than just the formality.
Yeah, so we learn that she's an orphan, that she's really alone, that she's on the one hand, incredibly privileged she has she's left this jewel from her mother, she's left this aristocratic name, but she has no parents to
protect her. She has no family around her. And then she goes on to say in that paragraph, you know she was surrounded by servants, but she doesn't have brothers to protect her, which is much needed at that time a young girl or a little girl, so you get a sense of her situation.
We've got to take a quick break, but don't go anywhere. We'll be right back with Allegra Goodman. And we're back with Allegra Goodman. I am still thinking about something that Allegra said at the beginning of the conversation that I cannot get out of my head, which is this idea that this little girl was just written off by the captain of the ship and was called annoying. And I think about all the other women throughout history who were written off and whose voices were silenced because they were
reduced down to one stereotype or one aspect of their personality. Allegra, you took pieces of Marguerite's truth and you build on that, and you crafted this entire story around her. We never got a chance to hear her truth. What do you think her truth is?
I think her truth is that she is the complex survivor who is making her way in an incredibly difficult world. And what we understand as readers when we're following her story, it's an adventure story on the one hand, where she's like just trying to physically survive. But it's also a story of self discovery where she's discovering her power. When she's on the island, she is in some ways in a lot of danger. She could freeze to death, she could be attacked by animals, Nobody could help her if
she got sick or wounded. But what she realizes on the island is that she wasn't safe at home and that in some ways on the island she's free as she was not at home. It's not really till she gets on the island that she starts to remake herself and think about all of these things. So it's my version of Robinson Crusoe, only with this woman. She's in double jeopardy because she's a woman on the island has to get back.
Will you bring up Robinson Crusoe. I have to ask a bit further about your own relationship to this genre of castaway stories. I know that you were raised in Hawaii and you talked about being fascinated by novels like Robinson Crusoe and Kidnapped growing up.
So how did your own identity.
As someone who grew up on an island shape your desire to tell these kinds of stories. Yeah.
Ever since I was little, I was fascinated by stories on islands because I lived on an island, and I was also fascinated by stories. Of course, I grew up in Honolulu, which is a fairly big city and a populated island, and a beautiful island to boot and a warm one. But I was fascinated by people who were sort of castaway alone on an island, or you know, really had to dig deep and figure everything out for themselves.
And the reason I was fascinated is because the island was a little world of their own where they have to create their own society. At some point, she says, we were the rulers of our island and the subjects too. We had to govern ourselves, and so they have to remake their own society and rethink everything that they might have learned before, and that process is exciting, and that was what drew me to this.
It was pretty amazed to learn that this novel took decades from the moment you first found Marguerite's name in a book to completion. What was it about her in this story that kept you engaged for so long?
I really saw it as kind of a classic epic, only not an epic about a man, but an epic about a woman, like an odyssey of a woman. And that really tempted me as a writer. And also, just as I said, the idea that she could be sort of broken by her experience but then remake herself. That to write about survival in this way, to write a book that's an adventure story and a spiritual journey all at once, that in the end, I couldn't resist doing that.
And you know, sometimes you pick a subject and sometimes a subject picks you, and so I couldn't avoid writing about it. So I will say the writing itself didn't take twenty years. It just germinated in my imagination for you know, twenty years. And it took me about three years to write the book.
Did you ever come close to and excuse my bad pun jumping ship, did you ever come close to abandoning the project?
No?
Actually no, I always had faith that I was gonna get her home.
We love it, you know, only think of these canonical Castaway stories, so many of them focus on male protagonists in the wilderness. Obviously, I think everybody is thinking of the movie Castaway right now, and they're thinking of Tom Hanks as we're talking as you thought about a castaway story with a woman at the center. What choices did you make to distinguish this as her experience different from what we see with men.
Yeah. Well, first of all, I before she gets to the island, and the first third of the book is really we see where she comes from. We see that she's a person who probably never even dressed herself at home. She always was waited on by other people. She says, I never touched a broom when she gets to the island, and let alone use a knife or fired a gun, or when hunting for food or any of those things.
So I was really interested in the contrast of this very sheltered woman who is now on this island having to learn to fend for herself and discovering that she can do that. But even more crucially, the last third of the book is in terms of her getting home, and I hope this isn't a spoiler for people who haven't finished. But when she gets home, she's not out of danger. She's still in danger because she is a woman in that society, and she's coming back and rags
with no money and no male protection. And that was very interesting for me. To write. And that's a big difference between her and somebody like Robinson Crusoe, who when he gets home, he's fine, he can go back into the import export business or whatever he was doing before, because he's a white male who and everybody knows who he is, and he will just finish off his life.
She comes back and she's in mortal danger and she could easily have died just trying to get home once she's in France, so she has to use all of what she learned on the island in order to get back to her house.
Every castaway movie or book that I read with a male at the helm, I think a woman wouldn't make that choice, or what would she do if she had her period? Or like I just think of all of these what ifs, Right, did all of these what ifs come up for you? Like sort of these primal what ifs.
I mean, for one thing, she has to go through a pregnancy and childbirth. Certainly a male castaway wouldn't have to deal with that, and so arguably she goes through much more than somebody like Robinson Cruso went through. When she's on that island, no medical care. It's terrible nursing a baby on the island. It's tough.
Well, it's so exciting to have a work of historical fiction like this now in the canon, because I just think there's so much opportunity to talk about female explorers throughout history that we never read about, never grew up reading about. I mean, we all know about Amelia Earhart, but there are so many other women like Harriet Chalmers, Adams, Gertrude Bell, like, there are so many stories that need
to be told. And I know that you spend a lot of time in your career working in the contemporary literary space, but has this what your appetite to tell more historical fiction tales.
Totally, especially about women. I think that they're just as you said, there's so many sort of untold stories or overshadowed stories, or women in parentheses like the one like Marguerite was in that book, And I think there's just huge opportunity and I hope to do more.
It's like we have tomb Raider, we have Laura Craft, but there's so many other women we just we need to know more about them. And I feel like we still haven't gotten our true like female Indiana Jones story, like both cinematic perspective and also from a literary perspective. That's something that I'm really looking forward to me too. Actually, while on that topic, have you had any conversations about being realized in cinematic form?
Not yet, No, no, no, not yet. But the writer's always the last to hear, so maybe someday. I think it would be very beautiful cinematically, because the island itself is so gorgeous, like so haunting, the and just the ocean over there. If you've ever seen that that kind of landscape, the light, the ice, the waves, it could be really stunning.
The title Isola is so sexy and alluring and interesting. Can you talk about the process of landing on that word as the title and also the significance of that word in the context of Marguerite's story.
Yeah, absolutely so. I didn't come upon the word till I was towards the of writing the book, and basically Marguerite's looking at a map of this world, and I based this map that she and the secretary look at in her guardian's house on a real map from the sixteenth century, which is sort of the first real map
of that era. And it was done by an Italian map maker, so all the labels on the map are in Italian, and where there were islands in this Gulf of Saint Lawrence area, he wrote easila, which is the Italian word for island. And he also has a big white space in this map which is part incognita, like literally parts unknown, because they didn't know what was in there. And it was my editor's idea actually to reproduce that map in the first pages of the book so the
reader can see what I'm talking about. But in the ocean, in the Gulf of Saint Lawrence, he has these different rocky islands called easila. And I was just really struck by that word. I thought it was so evocative because when I looked at it, it looked like I sola, I alone, or I solo yes, And when you put that so to me, it captured the island, but also her isolation, Marguerite's isolation on the island. And so that's why I chose the word, because I thought it encompassed her experience there.
And also the word in and of itself has this feminine connotation because in the Romance languages, if it ends in an a, it tends to be the feminine version of it. So that's exactly fitting.
In exactly, that's exactly what I was thinking. Yes, yes, thank you.
It's time for another short break, but stay with us. We'll be right back with Allegra Goodman. And we're back with Allegra Goodman. I want to give our listeners a peek into Isla. Will you do us the great honor of reading us an excerpt?
So I have the book here, I'm going to I read you the prologue, which is super short, but gives you a sense of how she feels or how she remembers feeling on the island, and gives you a sense of the place. Okay, here goes prolog. I still dream of birds. I watch them circle, dive into rough waves, and fly up to the sun. I call to them, but hear no answer. Alone, I stand on a stone island. I watch for ships and see three coming tall ships close enough to hail. I load my musket and shoot
into the air. I see penance close enough to touch. As I run barefoot to the shore. Rocks cut my feet and I leave a trail of blood. Brambles tear my sleeves and score my arms as I shout wait, stop, save me. The ship's commander hears my voice and gun. Dressed in black, he stands on deck to see me. Beg as I for help. He smiles when I shoot. Ten thousand birds rise, screaming. Their wings beat against the wind. All the sailors here and see, but their commander orders
them to sail on. I reach, but cannot stop the ships. I wade after them into the sea in vain. I struggle as wet skirts drag me down. I cry out, but water fills my throat. I cannot fly, I cannot swim. I cannot escape my island.
Thank you so much, of course, So one of our listeners has a question about love and loss and how they're interwoven throughout the narrative of the book.
Here's Sam Hey Elegra. I loved Eslas so much. It felt like the most hauntingly, lonely yet enchanting love story there was. There's this element of love of things that you don't want to lose, and the love of things that you don't need yet, the love of people that you collect along the way, and the loss of the people that you love the most. What did you feel during this book and did you feel a sense of loneliness, and how did you keep yourself into the spirit of writing this haunting story.
Oh, that's such a beautiful question. Yes that I think you really put your finger on it. There's all different kinds of love in this book. And even when she's most alone, she remembers being loved and she feels the love of the people that she's with. So she's suffered a lot, and she has suffered some injustice. I would say as a woman felt the love of August, She's felt the love of her loyal nurse who has been
a mother to her and taking care of her. And she comes to feel a love for nature, and she feels the love of God as she grows in this book, and she comes to love herself as she matures. And I think that when she does suffer a lot of loss, and then she tries to remember the people that she has lost and live for them and in their honor. That's a big theme in the book. And that's a different kind of love and a love in memory of people, and all of that is very important to Marguerite's journey.
How did I keep going when I was writing the book? I would say that Marguerite herself really sustained me, and this materials to see me. I wanted so much to do her justice, and I kept in my mind this idea that someday, when I finished it, other people would be able to read and share her story, just like she was on the island, hoping that she would then return to the people she loved and the people she remembered. I was hoping for the readers at the end of
this process, so I kept that hope alive. And it does feel like a reunion now. To hear people say that they've read the book, that they were touched by or they enjoyed it, it feels like I've returned home to them.
We have another question, let's hear it.
Her name is Nicole Hi. My name is Nicole.
I live in Richmond, Virginia, and I adored this novel. I found it to be exquisite and engaging and also really painful to read. You explore a historical period in which women are culturally engaged and essentially taught from births to try to be invisible, don't be curious, don't be brave, don't be energetic, and yet you also show us through the character Marguerite, that of course, girls and women back then were complex human beings. They were all of those things, curious, creative,
and in the case of Marguerite, braver than most. So my question for you is, as you were immersing yourself in the research and in the writing, how did you process that emotionally? How much time did you spend thinking about what your life would have been like as a writer, a woman, as an artist if you had been born into this world.
Oh, that's a great question. It made me feel grateful that I live now in the twenty first century, as we have so many problems now, of course, and so much injustice still. But I am able to write, I am able to express myself, and I'm able to be educated in a way that most women in that time were not even to be able to read and write. Marguerite's nurse can even read, so she was privileged even to learn at all. So I thought a lot about that,
And actually, you're right. One of the reasons that I use thus little passages from the Lessons to My Daughter at the beginning of each section. Those are from a book that was written at the time by a queen about how to be a good princess or how to be a good, noble woman, and she gives all this advice. Never venture your opinion, never take a step without permission,
be very careful, never talk to anyone alone. And what I enjoyed doing about putting those lessons in the front of each section of my book is that Marguerite does the opposite in every single instance. So it was my way of trying to show what her life is framed by the constraints that she has to deal with, and how unusual her experience and her spirit are.
This has been an incredibly inspiring conversation. You know, I think whenever one book inspires you to read more and read other books, that's a really beautiful thing. And you've inspired me to read from the Heptamerm and read more about women like Marguerite who are no longer a parenthesis.
Thanks to you.
Thank you, Alegra.
Thank you so much for having me.
Thank you so much, Alegra, and thank you for your passion.
Allegra Goodman is the author of Isesila, the February pick for Reese's Book Club. It's available wherever you get your books.
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