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How to pronounce Jennifer Haigh: The h on the end is silent, so pronounced haig
Jennifer Haigh is the author of the short-story collection News from Heaven and six bestselling and critically acclaimed novels, including Mrs. Kimble, Faith and Heat and Light, which was named a Best Book of 2016 by the New York Times, The Washington Post, the Wall Street Journal and NPR. Her books have won the PEN/Hemingway Award, the Massachusetts Book Award and the PEN New England Award in Fiction, and have been translated widely. She lives in New England.
Jennifer Haigh's website
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Was Baker Towers inspired by your own family history?
Yes and no. The characters themselves are inventions; they don't resemble
anybody in my family. But the details about the town itself, what life was like
in the postwar years, definitely came from my parents and other relatives. Baker
Towers ends in the Vietnam era, right around the time I was born, so I
couldn't rely on my own memories of the period I was writing about. By the time
I came along, the coal mines were already in decline. The era of the company
town was past, and the region was on its way to become something else. But I
grew up hearing about how things used to be, and when I set out to write this
book I had a wonderful time interviewing family members about what life was like
when coal was king.
How did the characters evolve from the time you began imagining them?
The characters really did develop a generation at a time. When I began
writing, Rose and Stanley were clearest to me. I had a vivid mental picture of
what they looked like -- Rose very dark, southern Italian; Stanley a Slavic
type, big and blond -- and I was fascinated by how those two sets of physical
traits would combine and manifest in a large family. As far as developing the...
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