Robbie on the Lake

The first part of the story that came to me was an image: a young man in the mid-1920s, standing by a dark lake on an English country estate.

In the distance a party rages: fireworks, jazz music, people whooping. The young man closes his eyes, a gun sounds, and then the image fades to black. I knew that the scene would be the beginning of my book, and I also knew that though it felt like a suicide, there would be more to the young man’s story than that. That this would be the heart of my mystery.

Grace, Present And The Past

Though The House at Riverton revolves around an event that occurred in the past, it was very important to me to tether the past storyline to the present.

Thus the novel isn't situated, abstractly, in history; its movement into the past is motivated always by the memories of a narrator.

Ninety-eight year old Grace is a strong character, a survivor; clear-thinking, unsentimental, independent and intelligent, she looks back across the twentieth century to recall a crucial event in her youth. A terrible event to which she was the only witness, and which history has remembered incorrectly. And though the nation's larger history of aristocratic decay, world war, and cultural imperialism is implicated in Grace's story, it is her private drama of duty, betrayal, and guilt that takes the fore.

The character of Grace came to me fully formed. She was real to me from the beginning and I missed her incredibly when I was finished writing.

Though she isn’t based on any one person, I’m lucky to have lots of friends who are much older than I am, who I could talk to, and from whom I could draw traits for Grace. (For instance, I got the idea for Grace’s taped letters to Marcus from my dear friend Herbert Davies whose writing is so completely indecipherable—sorry, Herbert, but it is!—that he sends letters to family in the UK on tapes.)

I was also fortunate to spend a lot of time with my Nana Connelly (whose talent for shorthand inspired part of the story) and my husband’s Little Nanny in the final years of their lives.I noticed how invisible the elderly sometimes become, and was constantly amazed at the way people with such great wisdom and experience, who have loved and lost and lived such a long time, are so often infantilized and dismissed in our society.