"That Change, That Troubled Look, Was What Started Me Writing" Hannah Brown on Her Heartwrenching New Novel, Look After Her

International Holocaust Awareness Day passed just yesterday (January 27th), giving us an opportunity to remember its victims, meditate on its personal and global impact, and discuss why its lessons are more important to remember than ever.

Author Hannah Brown's debut novel, Look After Her (Inanna Publications) takes place against this historical backdrop, telling the story of two teenage Jewish sisters who are ripped from the lives they knew and must struggle to survive together in the face of addiction, sexual abuse, and a rising wave of fascism in their home country. The girls form a close bond - but that doesn't mean either is without her secrets.

Bursting with the sights and sounds of Western Europe during the Second World War, Look After Her is essential for lovers of historical fiction or anyone interested in this tragic chapter of human history.

We're very excited to have Hannah at Open Book today to discuss why she can't pick a favourite between her two main characters, the importance of allowing yourself to truly feel while writing, and why the dark themes of her novel are more relatable now than ever.

Open Book:

Do you remember how your first started this novel or the very first bit of writing you did for it?

Hannah Brown:

I had a friend who liked to say provocative things. When I told him my grandmother had been a milliner, my friend said, “my grandmother was a whore.” I was surprised. “How did that happen?” I asked. My friend said that when his grandmother and great aunt suddenly lost both parents, a neighbour, instead of taking the young teens to relatives, took them to a brothel. I asked, “but didn’t anyone look for them?”

My friend’s face changed from merry to troubled. And that change, that troubled look, was what started me writing Look After Her.

OB:

How did you choose the setting of your novel? What connection, if any, did you have to the setting when you began writing?

HB:

In some ways, it was all around me. The social context is an essential part of what is understood to be a story’s setting. A chilling remark about Jews overheard in a hair salon six years ago made me think, it’s starting again. Active anti-Semitism has since become a terrible feature of our times, as has the sexual exploitation of young teens, and the rise of dictators. Those impulses were similarly incremental in the lives of Hedy and Susannah, the two sisters in Look After Her. So, while this story is set in the past, the social context is alarmingly contemporary. Emily Wilson, translator of The Odyssey, says writers should trust unconscious decisions. She’s right. Six years ago, when Look After Her was becoming a novel, I made the person who kidnaps and sexually exploits the two young teens a hotelier.

Setting is also where, and while the story that inspired mine was sparse in detail, I knew that after escaping Vienna, the original Hedy and her sister lived separately in London and in San Remo, Italy.  I collected images of the great public gardens and promenades in those cities and kept asking myself questions like how long would it take to bicycle from the Schottenring to Schiele’s studio? I assembled maps of that era and timed the routes. I immersed myself in the newspaper headlines and the images of fashions and of advertisements. Look at this one for Stern bicycles, with its remarkable Stars of David: perfect for two Jewish sisters.

https://www.flickr.com/photos/16nine/5354316006/

But setting is also when, and these two sisters would have been young teens when my grandmother, Nell Almond, was a teen.  We all are profoundly shaped by what captures our imagination in our teens, by how clothing speaks, by what slang engages us. My grandmother’s photographs and stories—and how she told them— reflected what it was like to be a young woman then and were a touchstone for me to make sure my characters were true to their times. 

OB:

Did you find yourself having a "favourite" amongst your characters? If so, who was it and why?

HB:

My favourite character is Hedy. My favourite character is Susannah. When you have a story of two women who are very close, how to choose? I love Hedy’s great, kind attentiveness to the physical world. She notices how someone sits with one foot tucked into the other, or the jaunty cock of a nose or how a car engine sounds like a cascade of tin - but she doesn’t notice, crucially, when someone is insincere. Susannah, on the other hand, jams her hat on any old way, swears indelicately, but is very alert to why people do what they do. She’s not likely to ever be entirely socialized.

OB:

What was the strangest or most memorable moment or experience during the writing process for you?

HB:

There were several. A mantra for screenwriters is ‘give it and take it away.’ So, I knew how to keep the story moving: with the two young women gaining ground, then facing another challenge. But there was something missing. I sent a draft to my friend, Amy Jo Cooper, the first writer on the Degrassi series, a lead writer on other series’, and a novelist. Currently, Amy Jo is an appellate court lawyer whose published arguments now form part of American jurisprudence. Her response to what I sent was, “why are you withholding?” That’s not just lawyer talk. I knew what she meant. When you write screenplays, you deliver action and dialogue, but the emotional delivery belongs to the actors and their director. So, I went back, and this time when I wrote, I let myself feel what Hedy or Susannah was feeling, and it would come through in the writing. I’d write a chapter and then have to get up and walk around the house, elated, or sometimes, wiping away tears. I want readers to be as moved as I am by these two sisters.

OB:

Did the ending of your novel change at all through your drafts? If so, how?

HB:

I always wanted the sisters to be reunited for a buoyant finish despite all the shame, isolation, and danger they endure. But because I let the sisters be themselves, at the end of Look After Her I realized something Susannah had been doing all along. It had been right there in front of me. And so, in the ending, Hedy realizes, and so will the reader, that same astounding thing. As Toni Morrison says in a New Yorker interview with the great Hilton Als, “if a character learns something extremely important at the end of the book that he or she didn’t know in the beginning…that’s a good ending.”

OB:

Who did you dedicate your novel to, and why?

HB:

I know what it is like to be at the mercy of others, to be unaware of my own power. I taught English and film to some young sex workers who were getting out of ‘the life’, and their trust and innocence was familiar. In between classes in the nearby coffee shop, one young woman said, “why would they lie to me? Why would anyone bother to lie to me?” One of her companions took a drag on her cigarette and said, “you matter, if someone bothers to lie to you.” Those young women were discovering their worth, just as the sisters in Look After Her must learn to do. They honoured me with their confidences, with courage and humour, and so they share a dedication of the book with the original Hedy. The few facts I know about her moved me and held me writing this story for years. Most of all, I dedicate the book to my late first cousin, and first best friend, Ruthie Casselman, whose presence was a refuge and with whom I shared an identity. “Whose idea is this?” was a question we were asked more than once and one we couldn’t answer. We were a ‘we.’

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Hannah Brown is a prize-winning screenwriter who happily taught film and English at the college and collegiate levels. A return to writing full-time resulted in poems, short stories, blogs, and essays appearing in many North American literary magazines, and a short story “The Happiness” was nominated for the 2016 Journey prize. She lives near the lake in the Beaches neighborhood of Toronto. Look After Her is Hannah’s debut novel.