At first I thought of perhaps setting it in New York City, but that didn’t work. I went back and forth on the setting, actually. You obviously did branch out from the original, with the setting to begin with.
Though I think whenever I finish a book I always say it’s the hardest thing I’ve ever written! Still, I love the original novel so much that it was psychologically a very tough book to write. I know it in my core, and could take the essence and work with that. I feel I know The Secret Garden so well that I could kind of riff on it like a jazz musician. Would you say that you heard Burnett’s voice in your head as you wrote? For the first time I had a story already set out for me, which was very challenging.
I don’t plot my novels-I move along with my characters. There’s something about The Secret Garden that kept me rooted in the original storyline, which was difficult for me.
I actually kept trying to swerve away from the original story, but it wasn’t easy. My editor, Jean Feiwel, was great and kept encouraging me to have at it, to go anywhere that I felt I had to go with it.ĭid you set parameters for yourself, in terms of working within Burnett’s original storyline? I knew I needed to follow the original story line-or that I wanted to-but I knew I had to make it different enough that it would be worthwhile for people to read my novel. The idea of writing a contemporary version of The Secret Garden was very exciting to me, yet at the same time it was very, very intimidating. How did you tackle the actual writing of The Humming Room? I have a battered copy on my bookshelf-it’s really quite a mess! The experience of reading the novel keeps deepening for me. I’ve reread The Secret Garden every year as an adult. She’s always finding something new popping up-something delightful or surprising. Rereading The Secret Garden, Ifelt a lot like Mary feels when she visits her garden. A lot of times when I go back to books I loved when I was young I don’t quite understand what it was that I loved about them.
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