Clare Beams: Take the Time to Get the Work Exactly Right

Clare Beams is the author of the novel The Illness Lesson, a New York Times Editors’ Choice, and 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 Library’s Young Lions Fiction Award, and the Shirley Jackson Award. With her husband and two daughters, she lives in Pittsburgh and teaches in the Randolph College MFA program. She was a finalist for the 2023 Joyce Carol Oates Prize. Follow her on Twitter, Facebook, and Instagram.

Clare Beams

Photo by Kristi Jan Hoover

In this interview, Clare discusses the inspiration behind her new novel, The Garden, her hope for readers, and more!

Name: Clare Beams
Literary agent: Michelle Brower, Trellis Literary
Book title: The Garden
Publisher: Doubleday
Release date: April 9, 2024
Genre/category: Literary fiction
Previous titles: The Illness Lesson; We Show What We Have Learned
Elevator pitch: The Garden is a novel about pregnancy as a haunted house. At an isolated late 1940s country-house-turned-hospital where a husband-and-wife doctor team is experimenting with a cure for repeated miscarriage, Irene Willard, their most difficult patient, discovers a walled garden with mysterious powers and tries to harness those powers for herself.

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What prompted you to write this book?

This novel had several seeds: First, a reference I’d come across to the drug diethylstilbestrol, a synthetic estrogen that was developed as a treatment to prevent miscarriage by a husband-and-wife researcher team and used in this country from the 1940s through the 1970s, and that has since been shown to cause terrible health complications. Second, my own desire to find a way to capture the deeply strange experience of living inside a pregnant body. And third, my long love for and fascination with Frances Hodgson Burnett’s The Secret Garden and all its hidden spaces, and my curiosity about what darker things I might be able to make grow in spaces of that kind.

How long did it take to go from idea to publication? And did the idea change during the process?

The first glimmers of the idea for this book came to me in late 2018. I sold it as a partial manuscript to my editor in early 2021, and submitted a full draft to her about a year later. She and my agent and I then all jointly decided the book was sapping some of its own hauntedness by dipping into the wrong head for big swaths (at that time the book had two main points of view), and that the whole thing needed to be told from Irene’s perspective. This was absolutely the right course of action, though it was daunting—I wouldn’t say it represented any kind of change in my original vision for the novel, but rather a change in my sense of how best to capture that vision. The various subsequent rewrites took about a year.

Were there any surprises or learning moments in the publishing process for this title?

I’m tremendously lucky in that this is my second novel with the same editor (Lee Boudreaux), at the same publishing house, and that my agent (Michelle Brower) has been with me for all three of my books; all of this has worked to minimize surprise in a lovely way. I knew from the first that this was the right publishing team for me, and it’s been such a joy to see that prove true, again and again: These are people who are only ever steering me to be even more myself as a writer, to lean into the things that are most my own. I’m very grateful for the role my whole team has played in the life of this book.

Were there any surprises in the writing process for this book?

I think the biggest surprise for me was that it turned out I was writing a real ghost story, and that I needed to venture farther into horror than I perhaps have in the past. Doing that turned out to be an enormous amount of fun.

What do you hope readers will get out of your book?

I would love for my novel’s readers to experience some of the inner-and-outer haunted-house feeling I was trying to summon on the page—and the feeling, too, of desperately wanting something that’s completely out of one’s own hands. I’d also like them to consider or reconsider the ways the world has historically approached women’s bodies, and the harm that can come from trying to control what we don’t fully comprehend. (Looking around the world today, I’m not sure these approaches and these efforts at control are exclusively historical.)

If you could share one piece of advice with other writers, what would it be?

Be as patient as you possibly can—and then try to be one degree more patient than that. This path is a wonderful one in many ways, but it is long, and will feel long, for just about everyone at one point or another. Taking the time to get the work itself exactly right—to craft the absolute best possible version of this piece of writing that this version of yourself is capable of producing—is something you will never, ever regret.

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