Long Time Coming

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Ah, that difficult second novel. Marilynne Robinson had almost a quarter-century between House-keeping and Gilead. “I’m dependent on the emergence of a voice,” she has said. “I can’t make them, they have to come to me. There’s no point in my worrying about it.”

Such serenity. I believe she was truly like this, too. Robinson seems to be that kind of person. There have been 17 years between my first and second novels. I would love to say I waited graciously until a voice emerged, and didn’t worry, but that would be a lie.

I started writing The New Ships in July, 2001. I was 27. Breakwater was just out, and I should have been elated, but I’d gone through a breakup, and I wasn’t. I read Colm Tóibín’s The Heather Blazing, about a widowed judge.