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Ann Leary is the New York Times bestselling author of the novels, The Children, The Good House, Outtakes From a Marriage, and the memoir An Innocent, a Broad.
Her work has been translated into eighteen languages and she has written for numerous publications including Ploughshares, NPR, Real Simple and the New York Times. Ann's "Modern Love" essay, "Rallying to Keep the Game Alive," was adapted for the Amazon Modern Love TV Series and stars Tina Fey and John Slattery. The Good House was adapted as a motion picture starring Sigourney Weaver and Kevin Kline and recently premiered at the Toronto International Film Festival.
Her novel The Foundling was released in May 2022. Ann and her husband Denis Leary live in New York.
Ann Leary's website
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Your new novel, The Foundling, is set in 1920s Pennsylvania. What is it about and what inspired you to write it?
The Foundling is the story of two friends, raised in the same orphanage, who meet again as young adults at a highly acclaimed institution for women. But now they're no longer roommates. Mary is the new secretary to the charismatic female superintendent; Lillian is an inmate, confined at the asylum against her will.
I was inspired by a discovery I made about ten years ago when I got caught up in the family genealogy craze. I hit a snag in my family tree when I came to my maternal grandmother. I knew she grew up in an orphanage, but I couldn't find any record of her birth or her orphanage. Finally, I found her in a 1930 census record. She was seventeen and working as a secretary at an institution called The Laurelton State Village for Feebleminded Women of Childbearing Age.
Your grandmother worked at an Institution for "feebleminded" women?
Yes. Feebleminded is an awful word, but it was originally not a slur; it was a clinical term for people with intellectual disabilities, as were the words: idiot, imbecile and moron. So initially, I felt proud of this grandmother I barely knew. There she was, still so young, ...
Margaret Atwood was born in 1939 in Ottawa, and grew up in northern Ontario and Quebec, and in Toronto. She received her undergraduate degree from Victoria College at the University of Toronto and her master's degree ... (more)
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Clare Beams is the author of the story collection We Show What We Have Learned, which won the Bard Prize and was a Kirkus Best Debut of 2016, as well as a finalist for the PEN/Robert W. Bingham Prize, the New York Public ... (more)
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