A Q&A with Caroline Woods, Author of The Mesmerist
Reading Group Center: Can you tell us a little bit about the real-life individuals or historical circumstances that helped shape The Mesmerist?
Caroline Woods: I started out wanting to write about progressive women in the American Midwest during the Gilded Age. That era has such a reputation for selfishness, for lavish waste while so many others were suffering, but not all “society” women were behaving that way. There were women, like Jane Addams in Chicago, who were actively trying to combat inequality. Quickly my research led me to the Bethany Home in Minneapolis, which was a home for unwed mothers run by some of the richest women in town. Their compassion for “fallen” women, many of whom were sex workers, seemed far ahead of its time. The home was run by seven board members; I settled on Abby Mendenhall to serve as one of my point-of-view characters in The Mesmerist. A Quaker, she had a refreshing informality (as revealed in her diaries)—she seemed just as at home with a brothel madam as she did with the mayor.
So now I’d found my setting, and one of my main characters, but where was the conflict? That was where a sensational murder, one of the biggest true crime stories of the 19th century, came in.
RGC: In your opinion, what is the appeal of an unreliable narrator?
CW: I love unreliable narrators because they add another layer of mystery. While the reader is trying to anticipate what’s next in the plot, they also must decode the narrator’s biases and blind spots and compare this to the other characters’ versions of events. I think this works especially well in a book with multiple points of view; you get these rewarding reveals as each character fills in a bit of the puzzle.
I also think unreliable narrators can, paradoxically, get closer to a truthful representation of reality. We all have our own versions of events, of ourselves, of others; memory is slippery, facts are malleable. I might always be the hero of my own story, but I guarantee I’ve been the villain in someone else’s.
RGC: Have you always been interested in true crime? What intrigued you about the real-life murder at the heart of The Mesmerist?
CW: I have always been drawn to true crime. I watched way too many episodes of Unsolved Mysteries as a child. When I read about this one, I just couldn’t believe the victim—who by all accounts was a savvy, independent, and sharp businesswoman—fell for this man’s clumsy scheme. Was he really that handsome and charming? Or did he actually have irresistible mesmeric powers, as his hitman later claimed? The crime was so dramatic, and so emblematic of its spiritualist era; the murder happened the same year the novel Trilby made Svengali a household name.
RGC: Is there a character in the book that you identify with most?
CW: Both Faith and May hold special places in my heart. I modeled Faith’s background after my Hungarian great-grandmother’s, whose father was killed in his twenties in a Pennsylvania coal mine. After that, her life was very precarious. The community married her mother off quickly, to a much older widower from Austria, to neutralize the threat of a young widow.
Still, of the three characters, I might identify with Abby Mendenhall the most, despite our age difference. She’s sixty-three, I’m forty-one, but I’m old enough to have grown a little weary, as Abby has, as I look out at the world and all its unfairness and wonder if my contributions can make a difference. One of the book’s themes is the frustrating limits of progressivism in the face of systemic injustice. Abby works within the bounds of proper society and worries she can’t do enough. Faith takes matters into her own hands. I suppose I strive to be a little more like Faith.
RGC: Which books or authors have most inspired your writing?
CW: While I’m writing, I try to read novels that were written in the same period the work is set. (As opposed to historical fiction by a contemporary author. For this book, my best fictional resource was The Awakening by Kate Chopin. The book provided a wealth of knowledge in terms of patterns of speech, dress, food, and customs, but beyond that, it’s a remarkably feminist text for the 1890s. Studying the way Chopin wrote about forbidden lust and longing, and sexual frustration in a buttoned-up society, really helped me to create May’s character.
RGC: This is your third novel. How has your writing process changed since you wrote Fraulein M. and The Lunar Housewife?
CW: I always begin with a loose outline, with the first third of the book well-defined and the ending murkier. As I write and do research, plot ideas come to me in sudden bursts, and I stitch those into the fabric of the book.
When I wrote Fraulein M., I didn’t have children yet, but I did have a full -time job. It took me about five years. I would write in huge chunks, once or twice a week. Now I can see that the work would grow cold in between, and that by the end of those marathon sessions I would start to fatigue and produce words I’d just end up deleting later.
The Lunar Housewife was written during the early days of the pandemic. I already had two little kids and was home with them all day long. I knew I wanted to write another book, but I had to become more disciplined: I decided to write 1,300 words every night, after they were in bed. Ernest Hemingway is a character in Lunar, and I decided to follow his advice: set your daily count, don’t get up until it’s done, and stop right there, while it’s still good. That way, when you sit down the following day at the same time, you’ll know right where to pick up. I couldn’t believe how well this worked. I had a first draft I was excited about in three months.
My process is still evolving. When I wrote The Mesmerist, I couldn’t do it at night anymore. My kids go to bed later now. But they were back in school, and older, so the school hours were longer. And I had the great fortune of working alongside my editor this time. I wrote a third of the book at a time, and then she would read, and we’d workshop what I’d written together and talk about what was next. She brought fresh ideas to the table and helped me see angles of the story I hadn’t considered. Working with an editor is such a luxury and a joy—something I think most writers will understand, since we spend so much of our early careers working in solitude.
RGC: If you could ask reading groups one question about The Mesmerist, what would it be?
CW: I always like to ask readers to imagine what comes next. What awaits May and the other women in Wyoming? How about Faith, and her relationships with Abby and Charlotte? And what’s she going to do about Johnny Lundberg? Where do you see all these characters a mere twenty years later, at the start of World War I? So much would have changed by then, and May and Faith would only be about forty. I’m sorry, I think that’s more than one question, can’t help myself!