A visit last week to the New Hampshire State Prison for Women provided an exhilarating as well as a heartbreaking experience. I had been invited to take part in a writer's forum with inmates, many of whom had read two of my books, which a reader had donated to the prison library. They were of course particularly interested in my book about the prison system.

I donated copies copies my other books including my latest novel, which is about an entire population imprisoned by a Communist dictator and its struggle for freedom.

Over 50 of the 140 inmates dressed in red or green T-shirts and blue pants showed up to the forum. They were an attentive, engaged, intelligent and committed audience. In fact, they compared very favorably to the students I encountered at a nearby college, at which I also conducted several classes during my visit to New Hampshire last week.

Despite their tough circumstances, the women who greeted me were for the most part articulate and intelligent. Some wanted to speak about the prison system in general and prospects for reform. I fielded questions about bringing down recidivism rates, lowering prison costs and fixing the parole system. Warden Joanne Fortier encouraged inmates to bring ideas on how to make life within the walls of the facility better for inmates and staff. "We may not be able to carry out some of your ideas and I may not even be able to tell you why we can't -- but you should all know your ideas will find a listening ear in my office," she said.

Other women wanted to talk about the writing process and their own efforts to write. "Sometimes I'm writing and I get too emotional to continue. How do you deal with that?" one asked. I told her to focus on the nuts and bolts of the sentences she was writing and the words she was choosing. Some wanted to use writing to reach out to loved ones. A few had real ambitions and dreams of reaching others through their writing. Yet others wanted to talk about some of the books they were reading and the impact literature had on their lives. They talked about writing down their own experiences and also of retreating into imagination as a way of coping with their circumstances.

For these women who do not have access to the Internet, or to many of the trivial technological ways that Americans now have to amuse themselves, reading and writing play such an immense role in their lives. Many of the rest of us who live in freedom have lost that sense of literature as a medium that still matters.

A high proportion of women in U.S. prisons including this one are victims of sexual, mental and/or physical abuse. Often, this abuse begins in childhood and continues into adulthood. Around 70 percent of inmates have children or their own, being looked after by relatives or in foster care. Some have been in jail for decades and may never be released. They have never seen a webpage or held a cell-phone.

In recent years, the number of women in the U.S. prison system has been rising even faster than among men. According to the Department of Justice's statistical bureau, there were 114,852 women incarcerated at the end of 2008, a 7 percent increase since 2000.

Looking around the room, listening to inmates' comments, feeling their passion, it was impossible not to be impressed by the wasted potential in that room. Yet U.S. prisons generally do a poor job of rehabilitation. Many incarcerated women face poor prospects after their release. Mostly untrained and unskilled, the best many can hope for is a minimum wage job without benefits with few opportunities to advance.

Every one of the women in that room had gone off the rails to some degree or another. A few had committed horrendous crimes. Yet they retained their humanity, their interest in the world, their desire to live a worthwhile life. Such potential. Such a waste.

I thought it might be interesting to explore the thought process that goes into creating a novel using as an example my latest book, Romance Language. The novel mostly takes place in Romania, partly in 1989 and partly in 2007. It tells the story of Elizabeth Graham, an American magazine writer assigned to write an exposé of the situation in Romania under Communism early in 1989. She falls in love with a dissident poet, Stefan Petrescu. Their history, climaxing with the revolution of December 1989, is interspersed with the adventures of Elizabeth’s 17-year-old daughter, Petra, who shows up in Bucharest hoping to find the father she has never known.
I use this story as a framework to explore two central themes – the power but also the limitations of love and language. The book portrays and contrasts many different varieties of love. They include: love at first sight; mature love and puppy love; sexual passion and casual sex; maternal and paternal love; love of country and love of an idea; love of religion and love of self. The second theme I wanted to explore had to do with language – hence the title, which itself is a play on words. (Romanian is known as a “romance language” – one of the family of languages descended from ancient Latin that also includes French, Italian, Spanish and Portuguese.) The book meditates on some of the uses and misuses of language. The main characters, who are both professional writers, live through language and believe in the power of words. But at crucial moments, they find that language fails them and they are forced to resort to other means of communication.
Free speech is a basic human life, but under Communism and other forms of tyranny, as George Orwell observed, language is perverted to become a tool of the regime. This happened in Romania and I explore some of the false slogans and lies employed by the state to oppress its citizens. I decided to include many different forms of language in the book. So I wrote some chapters using first person narrative and others employing third person narrative; there’s prose but also poetry (I wrote four poems for the book and I also have the characters discuss and analyze two Shakespeare sonnets); there are also letters and emails – and two entire chapters that consist only of dialogue.
Of course, one can read this book purely to enjoy the story without being concerned with, or even aware of, these themes. But I believe as an author that they add a level of complexity and interest that deepens the story and the characters. None of us, after all, lives in a vacuum. We all experience our personal stories against the background of the time and place in which we find ourselves. For me, as for my characters, love is important but so are ideas and so is language. To this extent, I believe Romance Language is a case of art imitating art.

Why is it so hard to write about love?

When I told my agent I wanted to write an old-fashioned love story that also explored serious historical themes, he was appalled. “There’s no market for that; stick to thrillers,” he told me. He explained that publishers were reluctant to bring out love stories that were not part of the “romance novel” genre – a category with its own strict rules of procedure. In fact, publishing nowadays is as strictly divided into “genres” as the old Indian caste system. There are so-called “literary novels” usually about unhappy people becoming more unhappy, there’s science fiction and fantasy, there are thrillers and mysteries, westerns and romance, gay lit, chick lit, mommy lit and of course innumerable memoirs about unhappy, abusive childhoods. Readers seem to want to know before buying a book what they’re getting. They don’t want to be confused.
Author Carol Shields writes in her novel, Republic of Love (Penguin 1993): "Love is not, anywhere, taken seriously. It's not respected. It's the one thing that everyone in the world wants but for some reason people are obliged to pretend that love is trifling and foolish. Work is important. Living arrangements are important. Wars and good sex and race relations and the environment are important, and so are health and fitness. Even minor shifts of faith or political intention are given a weight that is not accorded love. We turn our heads and pretend it's not there, the thunderous passions that enter a life and alter its course. Love belongs in an amateur operetta, on the inside of a jokey greeting card or in the annals of an old-fashioned poetry society. Moon and June and spoon and soon ... It's womanish, it's embarrassing, something jeer at, something for jerks."
Rachel Kadish, in her novel Tolstoy Lied: A Love Story (Houghton Mifflin Harcourt, 2006) bravely declared her aim of writing a book that takes happiness and love seriously. Her heroine, Tracy Farber, speaks for the author: "It's as if our whole literary tradition, which has been unsparing on the subjects of death, war, poverty, et cetera, has agreed to keep the gloves on where happiness is concerned. And no-one has addressed it. I mean, shame on us all -- readers, critics, writers. Anyone who tries to take happiness seriously is belittled. The writers who pen happy endings risk getting labeled 'regionalists' which is like a paternal pat on the head and a nudge back to the children's table. Or worse, they're called 'romance writers' -- the literary world's worst insult."
I’m proud to be following these two courageous women and others like Audrey Niffenegger with my novel Romance Language. But my literary inspiration goes back even further to books I loved as a youth like Hemingway’s A Farewell to Arms and Erich Maria Remarque’s Three Comrades. In these great novels, and in my modest offering, brave, intelligent and sympathetic protagonists struggle to sustain their great loves against the crushing weight of historical events they cannot control. In the case of my novel, it is the tumultuous revolutions that swept Eastern Europe in 1989. I try to explore different kinds of love and its overwhelming power – but also its limitations in the real world. Surely my agent was wrong. Surely there is a market for that.