Interview

A Conversation between Karen Russell and Hannah Tinti Hannah Tinti discusses her first novel, The Good Thief, set in America during the 1800s, a time when the opportunities for "Resurrection Men", who stole the bodies from newly buried coffins, flourished in the face of ever greater demand from surgical and medical schools.

Karen Russell: I'm always curious where other writers begin. What was the first image you had for this book? Did you start with Hawley and his daughter, Loo, in their current lives, or did you begin with the secrets of Hawley's past?

Hannah Tinti: The first spark of this novel came from my desire to write a love story. One of my favorite books is Jane Eyre, and the moment she meets Mr. Rochester is such an iconic scene - he is literally thrown at her feet. So I started by sketching out my own meeting of two people (which is actually still in the book - when Marshall washes up at Loo's feet from the ocean). Once I had that boy and girl together, I wrote a paragraph for each of their backgrounds, and that included a description of the girl and her father clamming on the shore. Right away, the father began to dominate and take over the story. He was a lot more interesting than the boy or the girl. But what was his name? While walking through one of the old cemeteries in Salem, Massachusetts, where I grew up, I came across one that struck me: Samuel Hawley.

Hawley's name and those brief paragraphs were fragments that I carried around with me for months. They didn't come together until I sat down and ...