By Clea Simon

“I wanted to explore the real nature of guilt and innocence, and why it isn’t easy for society to forgive.”

Days of Wonder, Caroline Leavitt’s new novel, is about so many things: family, forgiveness, the bonds that last – and the ones that don’t, all wrapped up in a particularly inventive murder mystery. Caroline and I have been friends for years now, and while I like to think that perhaps it was my influence (as a mystery writer) that got her to add that murder, I finished the book with plenty of questions. Not about the plot or the characters — Caroline is great at following through and tying up all the loose ends. But, to start, where did this story come from?

(If you have questions of your own, Caroline will be at Newtonville Books on May 16, in conversation with Ann Hood.)

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Arts Fuse: What made you want to write Days of Wonder? Was there a particular incident or event in your own life?

Caroline Leavitt: About six years ago, I had made a new friend, a fabulous older woman that my other friends adored. We had known each other for about a year when she quietly said, “I have something to tell you.” Then she told me that she had committed a murder when she was 15, wild as a car without brakes. She had been sentenced to prison and early released for good behavior. When she was, she wanted to take on a new identity, to be a new, decent person. And so, she changed her name, moved to a new place, and set about being kind and a credit to her community. But when she hit her forties, someone found out who she was, and she was outed. She lost friends, jobs, everything. “When do I get to be forgiven?” she kept asking. She pulled up stakes and moved again. And this time, she was more careful about whom she chose to be close to.

I was fascinated at how she recreated herself, and also by how some people would not let her forget her past, even though who she was now was nothing like who she had been. Of course, I wanted to write about this, but I’d never invade her privacy or hurt her, so I had to fictionalize it. And I swore I’d never reveal her name — and I haven’t.

I thought of the book I wanted to write as a NYC Romeo and Juliet story, two kids, from two different classes. Ella is the daughter of a single mom who was booted out of her Hasidic community when she got pregnant from a rape as a teen; Jude is the son of a superior court judge who blames him for the death of his beloved wife, drinks, and also beats Jude. Jude and Ella fall in love, but when the father tries to separate them, they begin to fantasize about his death.

Until it isn’t a fantasy at all.

Both are taken into custody for an attempted murder, but the night of the crime, both were exhausted from not sleeping, drugged up, and neither can remember anything. Jude, with a great lawyer, gets off and soon vanishes; Ella is given a 25-year sentence. She gives birth to their child in prison and is forced to give the baby up for adoption. But when she’s early released after only 5 years, she’s desperate for three things: to find Jude, to find her child, and to discover what really happened that night and why? How could she have done such a thing?

I wanted to explore the real nature of guilt and innocence, and why it isn’t easy for society to forgive.

AF: Days of Wonder takes us into very different subcultures (Brooklyn’s Orthodox Jewish community, a women’s prison, etc.). How did you research this? What did you find that surprised you?

Leavitt: I did a whole lot of research and part of the delight of research is that it ALL surprises me. First, I found Jean Trounstine, prison activist, who had co-founded the Changing Lives Through Literature program for Framingham Women’s Prison. Women on probation were required to read a book and discuss it in a class, alongside a probation officer, a judge, and Jean. “Want to come to a class?” she asked, and of course I did! It was an astounding experience. I don’t know who was more nervous, or who wanted the other to like them more, me or the women. We talked about one of my books, and they loosened up when I told them I respected all opinions, even ones that were negative about my book! We laughed, we talked, and then I asked them if I could ask them about what it was like to be in a women’s prison — and what it was like to be out, that I was writing a novel and I wanted it to be truthful and respectful. “Not like Orange is the New Black?” one woman said suspiciously. “Nothing like it,” I told her. And so, they began opening up to me.

The one thing that stuck with me was that women said the worst thing about prison was not the violence, because there wasn’t that much, but the boredom. The boredom was killing.

I found out that knitting in prison is a big deal! Knitting needles are never used as weapons because Jean told me the women need them so much. Knitting not only calms you down, but it also gives you a kind of income because you can sell the things you knit to guards. It gives a real sense of achievement and pride and community. Sometimes, when inmates get released, they can start up small businesses, too.

I’m still in touch with some of the women Jean introduced me to, and I’m happy to say, they’re doing well.

The Hasidic community came out of my mother’s stories about her upbringing as the daughter of an Orthodox Jewish rabbi. She had loved her life in Quincy, one of eight kids, everything regimented, and she had been deeply devotional. But then her beloved father dropped dead of a heart attack when she was a teenager. She stopped believing in God, because what kind of God would take her father from her? My mother told my sister and I repeatedly that she didn’t believe in any “of that stuff” anymore, but she never stopped yearning for it or telling stories about how wonderful it was to be part of that community. When she was 101 and dying she thought she was back in the Quincy shul (synagogue). And she was so happy!

But being a writer, I wanted to make things more dramatic, more difficult, so I decided to take my mother Helen’s stories (yes, I gave the character her name) to a more insulated community — the Hasidic one. I lived in New York City, but when I went into Williamsburg, where these communities were, no one would be more than politely dismissive to me. So, I put out the word to people on social media. I needed to talk to someone who either was in the community or out. I talked to fathers who had lost their children when they left — kids who began to see their dads as the enemy and refused to see or talk to them. I spoke to mothers like Beatrice Weber, who lost custody of her kids when she left, and who actually sued New York for better secular education for Jewish kids — and won! Leah Lax, the author of Uncovered and the upcoming Not From Here, had actually joined the community early on hoping it would help her erase her feelings that she was gay. Of course it didn’t, and she left the only place she had known and loved to find freedom –and herself — in the outside world. Both Leah and Beatrice read and reread my pages for accuracy and sensitivity, and I consider both of them friends.

I asked everyone I talked to, what is the one thing you miss most? And they all said the same thing: Community. I know what it’s like to be an outsider. I grew up in the one Jewish family in a Christian working-class neighborhood, not knowing where I belonged. And being able to give my character a final sense of belonging meant everything to me.

AF: Both mother and daughter have to reinvent themselves over the course of this novel. Can you tell me what this means to you? Have you had to do that?

Leavitt: Oh yes. Many times. Growing up and in high school, I was the outsider, a Jewish girl. I didn’t look like any of the girls in Waltham High and I was threatened and mocked and refused entry into the Junior Honor Society, even though I had all As and was in nine million activities, because I was Jewish.  But then I got into college, and I made myself into someone new. I dressed differently — cooler, with beads and paisley shirts.

I reinvented myself when I legally changed my first name. Carolyn, my given name, was that shy little girl that my parents were always yelling at because they hated my clothing, my hair was wild, and I never listened. They wanted me to be more like my older sister, polite, quiet, doing everything she was told, marrying early, and popping out kids. When I began calling myself Caroline in college, my family was upset (hey, it wasn’t that different!) and kept calling me Carolyn, so I changed it legally, and felt totally new, as if a yoke had been lifted. A minor thing that really wasn’t that minor at all.

But my biggest reinventions had to do with books. I never got to tour until my ninth novel, Pictures of You, and then I was terrified. How could I, a shy, private person, go out on a stage and talk? I was so desperate I began to look for a talisman, something that a real kick-ass feisty woman might wear, a woman not afraid of anything. I found a pair of $10 used shortie cowboy boots and bought them, and when I put them on, I felt like another person. And when I went on stage, all I had to do was look down at those boots and I felt like that other person. After a while, hilariously, people began coming to my readings wearing cowboy boots, too. The more I wore those boots, the easier it was. I began to tell myself, like a mantra, I can talk to anybody. I am not afraid of anything.

I suffered a great deal from shame and kept my shames hidden, along with the truth of who I really was—something I didn’t want anyone to know about. I never talked about having asthma because I had been bullied for it, and when I lost some hearing after having my son, I wouldn’t talk about that either for fear of being the butt of jokes. But living that way is horrible! Truly horrible! What if I had an asthma attack and someone saw? What if someone asked me a question and I couldn’t hear it and they’d make fun of me? There didn’t seem to be any way to deal with that, at first.

Instead, again, I turned to those red boots. I test-drove them and got the courage to blurt out in a reading that I was writing about asthma because I had had it and had been humiliated by it. When it came time for audience questions, I drew myself up and said, “Hey, my hearing’s shot. Can you speak in outdoor voices, please?” To my surprise, people did, and they were kind about it.  And afterwards, people came up to me and said, “Me, too! Me, too!” They were kind and open and I began to realize that the only one that could shame me was me—and I wasn’t going to do that anymore.

My final reinvention was in work. When the pandemic hit, my whole tour was cancelled and I was really upset! I knew I had to do something so I told friends they could make little videos about their books and I would post them on social media, as long as they called out another author and an independent bookstore. I figured I’d have 10 videos, maybe a dozen, but I was soon staring down two hundred! The Washington Post and the media took notice, and then Jenna Blum called me and said, “You need help?” And I suddenly found myself reinvented as the co-founder of A Mighty Blaze! Me, who had been fired from just about every job I had.  The Blaze got more and more successful, and I was torn when we started interviewing famous writers because I was so shy. But I found that I was surprisingly good at this! And I loved it. All those past employers who had scolded me as not being a proper business type turned out to be wrong, and good thing I hadn’t believed them.

AF: Both also have to learn to forgive themselves – and those they love. You show how complicated this can be. Would you talk about forgiveness, and how your characters get there?

Leavitt: Forgiveness is a touchy subject! I wrote a piece about why it was maybe time to forgive Leslie Van Houten, the last of the Manson Girls in prison, because whom she had been during the murders was not whom she had been for the past few decades. She was repentant. She deeply regretted what she had done and she helped so many of her fellow inmates while she was in prison. She was no threat to society. So why did people still want her in prison? For me, forgiveness involves change. No, I didn’t think Charlie Manson should ever be out of prison because he told us what he’d do if he was—and it wasn’t pretty. He was the same person he always had been. But Leslie was different.

Without giving anything away, at the end of Days of Wonder, some of the prime players, Ella, Jude, Helen and Jude’s father, forgive, but some won’t. To be forgiven, you have to own what you have done, who you were and who you want to be in the future. You have to consider how forgiving someone else might or might not work in your life. Ella comes to realize that not everyone will ever forgive her, but people have their own reasons for that, their own wounds, and the best she can do is to accept that and to also accept she is no longer the person she was, and the best way that she can forgive herself is by striving to be better.

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Clea Simon is a Somerville-based author, most recently of Bad Boy Beat (Severn House).