I’d like to welcome Mary Anna Evans, author of the Faye Longchamp archaeological mysteries. The latest installment, Strangers, came out this month. Mary Anna has degrees in physics and engineering, but her heart is in the past.
Her novels have received recognitions including a spot on Voice of Young America’s (VOYA) list of “Adult Mysteries with Young Adult Appeal.” They have been on the Independent Mystery Booksellers Association’s bestseller list and have been designated Notable Books by Booksense and Indiebound. Mary Anna has won the Florida Historical Society’s Patrick D. Smith Florida Literature Award, the Benjamin Franklin Award, and a Florida Book Awards Bronze Medal. Her books have been nominated for ForeWord Magazine’s Book of the Year and for the SIBA Book Award. Mary Anna is also the author of the thriller Wounded Earth and several short stories.
Mary Anna, you sound very busy and successful in the present. Tell us about 25 years ago?
MARY ANNA: Twenty-five years ago today, I was very, very pregnant with my first child, who was born on Halloween 1985. I had spent the first 7.5 months of this pregnancy going about my business as if nothing was happening. I’d taught a full load of community college math and science in the spring semester. In the summer semester, I’d taught Calculus I at night…which meant that I taught two four-hour classes a week.
Let me count the ways that this made me miserable. I was on my feet for four hours at a stretch, quite some feat for someone who started the pregnancy weighing a cool 108 and who eventually delivered an 8.5 pound baby. I’d never taught calculus before, so I had to prepare those four-hour classes. I wasn’t the best student when I took calculus myself, so I only really understood the subject later, when I used it in classes like thermodynamics and chemical kinetics. This meant that I had to work all the homework problems before I assigned them, in case I didn’t remember how. And I had to work all the example problems and record them in my notes in detail, so I wouldn’t fall on my face in class. And then I had to grade those tests and homework assignments. I think I probably made about two bucks an hour that summer.
As icing on the cake, summer night Calculus I classes are generally populated by people who don’t want to be there, largely business majors. I heard a lot of questions like, “How will we use this in real life?” I should have just said, “This is real life,” and pushed on, but I was 23 and earnest, so I answered them honestly. Amazingly enough, this didn’t make them want to be there any more.
As my due date approached, I started feeling strange, so I went to the doctor and learned that I was in danger of delivering the baby five weeks early. This prompted an order for bedrest and I dropped out of a world where I was expected to pretend I wasn’t pregnant and into a world where being pregnant was all there was. This is the world where I was living 25 years ago today.
In my novel Strangers, newly published this month by Poisoned Pen Press, my heroine Faye Longchamp is very, very pregnant. Coincidence? Well, I’m certain that I didn’t do this on purpose. Karma? Maybe.
I’m not sure I’ve ever read a book written from the point-of-view of a woman who is entering her ninth month of pregnancy. As a mother of three, it was an interesting exercise to imagine how advanced pregnancy would affect the things that Faye must do for her archaeological work and, in the end, to save her own life. Her efforts to keep working as if nothing is happening aren’t so different from my own long, hard slog through that summer school class. Except I wasn’t outside in the Florida heat, digging up old stuff.
For a time, I intended for Faye to be in the earliest stages of pregnancy in Strangers. She might have even been unaware of it until the final scene, when she realized why she’d been feeling so weird and redoubled her efforts to save herself from the bad guy, because now she had to protect herself and her baby.
But it just didn’t work. I tried to write it that way, but realized that the reader would be in on the secret as soon as I mentioned that Faye was feeling queasy or tired. Then Faye would be looking like an idiot for about 300 pages, while my readers were yelling, “Take a home pregnancy test, dummy!” I was rather proud of myself for making one of those home tests an important clue.
As I launched into a story about a woman on the verge of becoming a mother, I learned something very quickly. Being extremely pregnant is like having an elephant in the living room. You can’t ignore it, and neither can anybody else. It affects your ability to do your job. It affects your ability to even move through a crowded room or up a flight of stairs. And even when I wrote scenes from other characters’ points-of-view, well, they couldn’t ignore it, either, and it affected their behavior toward Faye. Joe, in particular, is on the brink of a nervous breakdown, because he’s so worried about her, and because she’s so unwilling to cooperate with his efforts to protect her.
I decided to just go with it. The key to writing realistic characters is having them behave like real people, and real people do notice when someone in her thirty-fifth week of pregnancy waddles by. When I was in that condition the third time, a stranger once said within my earshot, “She looks like she’s about to pop.” Gee, thanks.
As a part of Faye’s character arc, this pregnancy is very important. She admits as early as Artifacts, six years before the events in Strangers, that she wants a baby very much. In the meantime, we’ve watched her suffer some significant romantic travails, and her age is much on her mind. After writing six books about Faye, I found that I wanted her to have this baby almost as much as I would if she were a flesh-and-blood human woman who was suffering from the demands of her biological clock. I’m happy for her.
Last but not least, I think Joe is going to make a really cool father.
(And yes, I do know that they’re not real.)
Read more about Mary Anna’s books on her web site and blog.
Check out Strangers on Amazon!
