Jennifer Cody Epstein: On Finding the Bravery to Write Critically About the Past in Fiction
Jennifer Cody Epstein is the author of four novels that have been published in a total of 21 countries around the world: The Madwomen of Paris, Wunderland, The Gods of Heavenly Punishment, and The Painter from Shanghai. She has also written for LitHub, BookRiot, McSweeney’s, The Wall Street Journal, The Asian Wall Street Journal, The Nation (Thailand), Self, and Mademoiselle, and worked at the NBC and HBO networks.
She is the recipient of the 2014 Asia Pacific American Librarians Association Honor Award for fiction and was longlisted for the 2020 Simpson/Joyce Carol Oates Literary Prize. She has taught at Columbia University in New York and Doshisha University in Kyoto, and has been awarded writing residencies at the Virginia Center for the Creative Arts, the Catwalk Arts Institute, and Prospect Street Writers House.
She lives in Brooklyn, New York, with her two daughters and husband, producer/filmmaker Michael Epstein. Follow her on Twitter, Facebook, and Instagram.
Jennifer Cody Epstein
Alexander Berg
In this post, Jennifer discusses what inspired her latest novel, why it was difficult to write about one of the very real characters, and more.
Name: Jennifer Cody Epstein
Literary agent: Amelia Atlas
Book title: The Madwomen of Paris
Publisher: Ballantine
Release date: July 11, 2023
Genre/category: Historical Fiction, Gothic/Horror
Previous titles: Wunderland, The Gods of Heavenly Punishment, The Painter from Shanghai
Elevator pitch for the book: Two women—Josephine, a diagnosed hysteric with amnesia, and Laure, the asylum worker who befriends her—fall under the influence of a powerful doctor who uses hypnosis in his treatments. But as memories of a horrific crime Josephine may have committed start to surface, she and Laure realize they must escape.
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What prompted you to write this book?
It started with an old photo I stumbled upon while researching Memento Mori, or Victorian death photography. But the subject of this picture was clearly, almost startlingly alive: a young woman, scantily-clad, with tousled hair and one arm held at an unnatural angle. I was struck most of all by her expression: locking gazes with the camera, she was staring at it in a way that was both provocative and challenging.
Intrigued, I followed the link and learned her name: Augustine Gleizes. A working-class girl in 19th-century Paris, she’d survived a violent sexual assault at the hands of her mother’s employer and was subsequently diagnosed with hysteria. She was committed to the Salpêtrière women’s asylum, where she joined a handful of women studied, photographed, and publicly displayed by Dr. Jean-Martin Charcot, today widely considered the father of modern-day neurology. Charcot used hypnosis to draw hysterical “symptoms” out of his patients, often before huge audiences in his popular weekly lectures.
Augustine, as it turned out, was so highly sensitive to hypnosis that she quickly became one of Charcot’s “star hysterics,” young women who were followed by the tabloids, featured in chocolate advertisements, and even depicted in a famous Salon painting. After years of being continually hypnotized, photographed, and put through bizarre experiments, though, she’d clearly had enough, and after a few failed attempts fled the asylum disguised as a man.
I was utterly fascinated by all of this: the woman, the story, the stranger-than-fiction setting. And, of course, that final, role-inverting act of rebellion, which seemed presaged in that dramatic first photograph.
How long did it take to go from idea to publication? And did the idea change during the process?
I first found Augustine’s photograph in 2017. The book comes out this July. So, about six years in total. Though at points it felt much, much longer—particularly during Covid.
In terms of the idea: I knew from the beginning where I wanted the story to end up, so overall I guess the answer is “no.” But figuring out how to get there took numerous iterations. I’m a heavy rewriter/editor in general, but this novel took more writing and whittling and rethinking/restructuring than any of my others.
Initially it was going to have a modern-day thread as well as a historical one, like my last novel Wunderland. But as the historical side of Madwomen began taking shape, I realized that what it really felt like to me was a classic 19th-century Gothic/horror novel. So that was how I ended up writing it; scrapping the contemporary narrative, tweaking the tone to evoke that of Jane Eyre or Wuthering Heights, and playing up the grim and dark aspects of asylum life (not that that was hard!).
Were there any surprises or learning moments in the publishing process for this title?
Certainly one surprise was having my first editorial review run in Science Magazine, which I hadn’t anticipated. It does make sense, since Charcot is such a gargantuan figure in scientific and medical history. But seeing a novel I’d written featured alongside books on things like “permeable micro electrodes for bioelectronic implants” and “stem cells releasing oncologic HSV and anti-PD-1 target brain metastases”—all as “summer reading” suggestions, mind you—really tickled me. I’m sure Mr. Muldoon, the middle school chemistry teacher who (very generously) gave me a C in his class, would find it amusing as well.
Were there any surprises in the writing process for this book?
A lot of the things I uncovered in my research about 19th century hysteria and its supposed symptoms and treatments were pretty surprising. For instance, I’d never heard of dermography, a condition that allowed physicians to “write” on their patients’ skin by lightly tracing it with pointed instruments, which (in turn) left raised, bright red lines. Even more weird was the assertion that these lines could be prompted to bleed at a specified later time, through hypnotic suggestion.
Other belief-defying conditions associated with the disease included women blistering through hypnotic suggestion, or bleeding stigmatically from their feet, palms and over the heart. There is also a record of a woman losing the ability to speak her native tongue and having to resort to another she didn’t know particularly well.
But I think the biggest surprise was just how difficult it was for me, as a woman and a novelist, to write critically about Charcot—even now, a full century-and-a-half later. He is still so revered, and so much of that reverence is so absolutely deserved. For the first year or so of this project I really grappled with how to portray him, not wanting to detract from the very real contributions he made in areas like Parkinson’s and ALS.
I think that’s why so much of him ended up in those early drafts: I was unconsciously giving him the kind of hallowed spotlight famous men are usually given in historical narrative. In retrospect, though, I was actually falling into the very trap I’d set about dismantling in the novel: allotting him outsized merit and authority simply because he was a famous man who dominated the historical record, unlike the vulnerable women he diagnosed, studied, and (ostensibly) treated.
Even in a work of fiction it felt surprisingly scary to call him and the other famous men he worked with (Freud, Gilles de la Tourette, Babinski, Janet) out for the damage they did during this last, strange chapter of Charcot’s career, and to give the women they damaged the same kind of dimensionality, autonomy, and authority. But once I did, the story became far less of a struggle to write.
What do you hope readers will get out of your book?
First and foremost, I hope that they find it interesting, unexpected, and compelling; a chance to not just learn about a little-known chapter in medical and feminist history, but to get a sense of what it might have been like to live and breathe in that moment.
But I’d also like Madwomen to offer readers an opportunity to consider some of the novel’s themes in a modern-day context; for instance, the ways in which society views mental health in general, and women’s mental health in particular. Or the ways in which a male-dominated medical establishment simultaneously overlooks, downplays, and fetishizes women’s health issues. And, of course, what we really mean when we use terms like “hysterical.”
As an author, I’m drawn to historical fiction because I believe the past can provide a powerful lens through which to examine the present—and in the process learn new things about ourselves. So I hope readers are able to appreciate my work in that way as well.
If you could share one piece of advice with other writers, what would it be?
Write what you know, but also don’t be afraid to leap into the great unknown! Taking that leap can feel daunting—even paralyzing. But it also offers unparalleled opportunities to learn, to challenge yourself and your readers, and to explore, exercise, and encourage the kind of empathy that is more crucial than ever in today’s world.
While there’s no shortage of writing advice, it’s often scattered around—a piece of advice here, words of wisdom there. And in the moments when you most need writing advice, what you find might not resonate with you or speak to the issue you’re dealing with. In A Year of Writing Advice, the editors of Writer’s Digest have gathered thoughts, musings, and yes, advice from 365 authors in dozens of genres to help you on your writing journey.