If you’re looking for spring’s hottest new story, look no further than Amy Shearn‘s novel, The Mermaid of Brooklyn! A story about the struggles of early motherhood, and set during one of the hottest summers in New York, The Mermaid of Brooklyn is receiving rave reviews from the likes of Kirkus, Publisher’s Weekly and Emmy-nominated screenwriter and novelist Maria Semple!

Formerly an up-and-coming magazine editor, Jenny Lipkin is now your average, stretched-too-thin Brooklyn mom, tackling the challenges of raising two children in a cramped Park Slope walk-up. But when her husband Harry, vanishes one evening without a word, Jenny finally reaches her breaking point. Pulled from the brink by an unexpected supernatural ally, Jenny is forced to rethink her ideas about success, motherhood, romance, and relationships.

We talked to Amy about her inspiration for the book, her writing method and more…

 

What inspired you to write The Mermaid of Brooklyn?

I wanted to write something about mothering small children that captured how it feels: epic, magical, incredibly hard, often entirely surreal. I think there is something of the legendary in every mother’s life, but to our culture at large that kind of story is often dismissed. The novel also ended up being a love letter of sorts to Brooklyn, and a tribute to my great-grandmother and women like her, women who work so hard their whole lives, often sublimating their desires and creativity for the good of their families, to so little fanfare.

How did you come up with the main character, Jenny?

Years ago, I was shopping with my grandmother for shoes to wear at my wedding, and she told me a peculiar story about how a pair of shoes had saved the life of my great-grandmother, the original Jenny Lipkin. At the time I was reading about rusalki, the mysterious, slightly malevolent sirens of Slavic folklore. Somehow the two strands tangled together in my mind, and I worked long and futilely on a personal essay entwining the stories. I remember taking a walk in the woods of Minnesota with my friend, the writer and scholar Amanda Fields, and telling her about the essay. “That’s not an essay,” she told me, “that’s a novel.” She was right, but I didn’t yet know how to write it. I wouldn’t know until I became a mother in the parenting hotbed of Park Slope, Brooklyn, and had a conversation over the baby-swings with another mother who said, “I just want a novel for mothers like me.” She meant mothers who couldn’t quite figure it all out. And with that, I figured it out! Jenny Lipkin, the woman who was saved by a pair of shoes, became a mother in Park Slope, and the rusalka became a character in her life.

Is there a message in your novel that you want readers to grasp?

Mostly I just hope readers find a story that interests them and characters they can relate to. I think Jenny is in some ways every woman (if a sort of a crabby every-woman) and I hope readers connect with her. But I also wanted to say to other mothers: it’s okay. It’s okay to feel like you’re doing it wrong; it’s okay to feel overwhelmed; it’s okay to feel angry sometimes. It doesn’t mean you’re not a good mother or that you don’t adore your children. And most of all, you’re not alone.

What was unique about the setting of the book and do you think it enhanced or took away from the story?

I was living in Park Slope, a part of Brooklyn infamous for fancy-stroller-traffic-jams and wacky helicopter super-crunchy NYC parenting lunacy, and I found parenting there so interesting that I knew I wanted to write about it in some way. The Brooklyn angle gave me a foothold when writing, and in a way it’s just an intense microcosm for today’s middle-class parenting culture as a whole. Parenting anywhere is hard. Parenting in New York adds the extra challenges of high-priced real estate, walk-up apartments, wrestling strollers onto subways, spotty public schools, and so on and so on – so I think it just intensifies the stress Jenny feels, which is always good for fiction. And somehow everyone has an idea of New York, even if they’ve never lived here, so I think people’s shared fictional concept of this place makes it somehow feel universal.

What is your method for writing a book?

Oh, wow. I wish I had a method. I tend to accumulate a sort of magpie’s nest of ideas and then, when I think I have enough to start, I try to outline. I’m trying to really outline carefully with the next book I’m working on, since my writing time is so limited given my small children and all, I would like to save myself the twists and turns of directionless writing. I sketch out the main characters, trying to imagine every detail of their lives, even if I don’t need them for the book, just to know them. With my first book, even though it was not written in first person I wrote journal entries and letters from the point of view of my main character just to get into her head. With both of my books, setting has played a major part; both settings (the American Southwest and Brooklyn, NY) I was familiar enough with that I didn’t have to do any research, but I did spend an awful lot of time describing them when I wrote, wanting to connect with other people who love these places but also paint them fully, for people who have never seen them in person.

When I was trying to find my way in to what would become The Mermaid of Brooklyn, I wrote a scene where the main character is talking to other mothers on the playground and analyzing the whole Park Slope playground scene – it was one of the first scenes I wrote but it ended up belonging deep inside the second half of the book. But for the most part, once I’ve got all my ideas for story, setting, and character in place, I just find my first line and then go, writing in a straight arrow pointed towards the last line. I’m a bit of a plodder in that way.