I was first introduced to Anna Solomon when she co-edited, along with Eleanor Henderson, Labor Day: True Birth Stories by Today’s Best Women Writers. Her newest novel, The Book of V., is very different, but also captures stories of women at turning points in their lives. The book follows three women in three different centuries as their stories interconnect in various ways, forcing the question about how much have things changed for women, really. At its crux is the story of Esther, the beautiful girl who became Queen and helped save the Jewish people from the evil Prime Minister Haman—but Esther was only Queen because Vashti, the King’s first wife, was ordered to be executed. Vashti had refused to dance naked for the King and his friends at a party, and thus paid the price.

Solomon answered questions via email about her newest book and whether things have changed for women, especially in the writing world.

As an adult, the more I learned about Vashti, the angrier I got at how Esther was always portrayed as the one to admire—in fact, I have a very vivid memory of coloring my Kindergarten megillah and putting pimples all over Vashti, because Esther was the good one, the pretty one. Vashti was a passing comment. And yet in this book, Vashti very much has a voice and is a person. Her spirit is infused in the pages. What drew you to the Purim story and Vashti?

I love that you have this memory. I wonder if the pimples were related to the fact that teachers and rabbis and others often say Vashti may have been a leper. Certainly, she was seen as bad. As a kid, I bought that story, but as I got older and looked at the story itself, like you, I got angry. Vashti refused to parade naked in front of her husband and his friends. Where is the bad in that? And yes to “passing comment”—that was part of what fueled me, too. I love books that allow me to see a maligned side character from one book as a complex force in another. Wide Sargasso Sea, for example.Or Grendel.

How did you decide on the format of the book; the varying POVs and time periods?

I don’t know if it was a decision so much as an evolution. I knew I wanted to tell Vashti’s story but I was uninterested in writing a straight “historical novel” version—i.e. here’s what really went down in ancient Persia. So I decided to transpose her story into 1973 Washington, D.C. But then I wanted to let that story come into conversation with Esther’s story, which I also felt was more complicated than the one we’ve been taught (good, virtuous, pretty, etc.). I also wanted to write about storytelling itself: how who takes charge of and tells the story can be as important as the question of what happened, which no one ever agrees on, anyway. I realized that what I was going for was something that could be expressed by a book structured in the vein of The Hours, by Michael Cunningham. So I returned to that book and took inspiration from it, but more importantly, a lot of courage.

Do you have a writing routine? If so, what does that look like?

Well, I used to have one. And I plan to have one, starting next week. But the pandemic happened, and then having a book come out happened, and it turned out that even though I wasn’t traveling I was still working a lot to promote, do events, etc. I have two school-aged kids, so it’s been tough, to say the least. But I’m a very routine-dependent writer and for me, a good routine looks like me writing in the morning before doing any other creative work (let’s put aside the question of whether mothering requires creative work, of course it does) for three-ish hours, then opening up to my other jobs, which include teaching and copywriting. For the past few years I’ve written at a shared writing space in Brooklyn, but I’m not sure what the future holds for that particular space or for others like it.

How do you think the creative community can support women, and mothers, especially?

There are some things the creative community can do, like offering more opportunities for shorter and more flexible residencies and retreats. Offering more funding to cover childcare, domestic labor. Offering more to women writers from underrepresented groups who have to fight at least twice as hard as the rest of us to prove their legitimacy and get fairly paid. Offering more support to all women when it comes to advocating for ourselves, financially, but also in more subtle ways—like, how to persist in the face of rejection, how to put on a costume of confidence even if you’re not feeling it. Things that many men learn from day one in a patriarchy. Women have to do a lot of unlearning just to believe in ourselves enough to do our work, and to make all the things happen (insisting on and paying for time, space, etc.) that allow us to do that work.

All of that, yes. So much so.

What are you struggling with, as a parent and as a writer, right now?

Time. It’s been years since my kids were at home all day and there are moments right now—when I’m trying to finish just one email that requires a little thought and someone asks me for a snack, or when god forbid I’m trying to jot down a note about my novel-in-progress while listening to three people on various Zoom calls—when I feel like I am dying a spiritual death.

What books inspire you, and what are you reading right now?

So many. I love Elizabeth Strout, and Jesmyn Ward, and Min Jin Lee. Also authors long gone: Toni Morrison, Graham Greene, Virginia Woolf. I’m currently reading Minor Feelings by Cathy Park Hong and Eat the Document by Dana Spiotta. Both are fantastic.

What’s on the horizon for you? I’d just started work on a new novel in mid-February and I plan to get back to it next week when my writing routine begins again, albeit with some adjustments. The book is still too new to talk about, but I can say that it’s inspired by a real woman who helped commit a crime and then disappeared. I seem to be into making absent women present. Maybe it’s my genre.

Photo credit: Willy Somma