Allegra Goodman and Emma Donoghue on Writing Stories Inspired by Their Kids (and Their Books)

Emma Donoghue is the author most recently of The Paris Express (Simon & Schuster/Summit), and Allegra Goodman’s most recent book is Isola. The two sat down to chat about writing, literary inspiration, research, and more.

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Emma Donoghue: I only have two kids to your four, but just about everything I’ve written in the last twenty-one years has been inspired by our son and daughter—the babies and children in various forms of peril in Room, Frog Music, The Wonder, and The Pull of the Stars, and the troubled teenagers in Akin and Learned by Heart, as well as two books for younger readers.

The conventional wisdom is that “every baby costs you a book” but I’ve found the opposite to be true. Yeah, parenting reduces writing time, but it can give you more to write about, plus a mother’s ruthless efficiency about using the time available.

Our kids regularly mock me for my dependence on them for material—stories, insights, and new turns of phrase. This year our younger (the daughter) is heading off to college, so it feels like an important life passage for me, and I’m curious to see how I’ll react both personally and as a writer. (In other words: Arghhhhhhh!) You’ve been through this transition, right?

Allegra Goodman: Like you, I’ve been inspired by my children. I have three sons and a daughter. My novel Sam was very much informed by my daughter Miranda as a young girl who loved to climb and dance and run around, rather than sit and read. Miranda was in college when she read the book and she said, “You are so lucky you have me to give you all that material.” !!

Miranda was also there with me when I got the idea for my new novel Isola. We went on a family road trip from Boston to Montreal. Our sons were then ten, seven, and three. Miranda was a newborn. I’d checked out a stack of children’s books on Canadian history from the library for the boys. My sons read none, but I read them all because I was up all night nursing the baby.

While nursing I read a passage about a young French noblewoman who sailed to the New World and was marooned on an island in the Gulf of St. Lawrence. I remember holding Miranda as I thought. Wait. What?? How? Why? I want to write about this.

As a young mother I had less time to write—but I was still thinking and imagining. Motherhood has taught me efficiency, just as you say. And patience.

As for the transition when your youngest goes off to college—it’s a lot! It’s also wonderful. I enjoy my adult children so much. My oldest son is now a labor economist and he told me recently, “Your productivity has gone up since we all left home.” Have I mentioned that kids are hilarious?

ED: I’m not surprised you heard about the true story behind Isola in a children’s book. I’ve got ideas from plenty of easy-reading and even lowbrow sources—there’s one lighthearted, photo-heavy compendium of bad girls in history which I picked up at a museum gift shop that’s been the inspiration for two of my novels.

I’ve also really enjoyed seeing other authors pick up historical cases I’ve written short stories about and offer their own take on them in plays, novels or films. The more of us resurrecting these forgotten stories the merrier, say I, especially when they’ve been forgotten because they’re not just about straight white men.

One thing I wanted to talk about was how we navigate writing about people whose tales have been told many times already. Hilary Mantel did an outstanding job in her Wolf Hall trilogy—I would have thought it was impossible to make anything new of Henry VIII and his eight wives, but by focusing on this shadowy fixer character of Thomas Cromwell, she changed the angle on everything.

Looking at the Wikipedia entry on Marguerite de La Rocque de Roberval’s time marooned on an island, I see that there’ve been plays, poems, and novels about her published in several languages over the past century and a half. Did you read them or avoid them? I’m wondering how you went about finding your own take on Marguerite and making this old story new.

AG: I agree.  It is so much fun finding a new angle on a well told story, as Hilary Mantel does—or bringing to light a less well known story as you do in Haven. I did look at the plays, poems, and novels about Marguerite’s ordeal.

I went through a process where I looked at what others had done and asked myself what I could contribute. I actually found reading the work of others to be encouraging, because I knew my own account would differ in style and substance.

With Isola I looked at paintings and objects in addition to reading about Marguerite. I spent a lot of time staring at portraits of ladies by Sofonisba Anguissola. Altar pieces with images of Mary. Sixteenth century citterns and virginals in museum collections.

How about you? How do you engage with written sources while framing a novel? Do you also do other kinds of research? Is there a point where you shut down the research to allow space for your creative work?

ED: I definitely prefer writing about people whose lives weren’t recorded in too many sources; when I included Horace Walpole as a main character in my 2004 novel Life Mask, I felt overwhelmed to the point of nausea by the forty-eight volumes of his correspondence! And when many others have fictionalized a historical incident before me, I do sometimes worry about whether my version will be original enough.

For The Paris Express I researched dozens of people who could plausibly have been on that train, and I found the less-well-known made better passengers for my purposes. For instance, I included John Millington Synge, but at a point when he was a student drifter living off the odd boiled egg, not yet a famous Irish playwright, and I didn’t end up making room for celebrities such as Sarah Bernhardt whose outsized reputations would have pulled focus too much.

My question wasn’t, is this an interesting person, but do they have an interesting reason for being on this particular train, or an interesting experience on the journey?

As for sources, most of mine were written—the key corpus was about forty French newspaper articles about the 1895 railway disaster, and I drew on a great hoard of bureaucracy for the details of real people’s lives and deaths. But visual artifacts had a hugely stimulating effect. As soon as I saw a photograph taken in the aftermath of the crash (a surreal image that’s ended up on a million dorm room posters), I knew I had to write this novel.

During the year I spent in the city, things I encountered in museums went straight into The Paris Express—for instance, a nineteenth-century painting of a man wearing a giant coffee tank on his back and serving customers from little taps on his chest. Street lamps, Morris advertising columns, water fountains, urinals, and of course train stations…and I ate a lot of pains au chocolat in the name of research too.

I find research way easier than writing, so I never really stop the research—even at the proofreading stage I come across new details to include or correct. But I do of course leave most of it sitting in my notes rather than forcing onto the page. I try only to include a nugget if it’s something the point-of-view character would notice and find worth commenting on.

I’m curious about how you researched the kind of skills Marguerite must have needed to survive on that island (or more generally her bodily experience of living in the sixteenth century). Like, I’ve never lit a fire without a match, or built a stone wall, or caught a frog, or driven a train, so I’ve had to rely on YouTube videos made by geeky mansplainers, and I’m so grateful to them!

AG: I find YouTube videos extremely helpful as well. I looked at videos of gannets diving for fish, polar bears hunting, and people writing with quills, and lighting fires and loading muskets, which is surprisingly difficult and involved.

While in London I toured a replica of the Golden Hind. Standing on that ship, climbing from one level to the other, I understood in my body how cramped voyages were at that time. I spent a lot of time thinking about Isola before I started writing it. I probably spent a year reading and imagining. I did not use all my research on the page, but all of it informed the novel, behind the story and between the lines.

You say that you are adding details until the very end. I love this, and I understand. I do that too. Near the end of my novel I spent days and days elaborating on the court dress Marguerite wears. I wanted to describe the fabric, sleeves, and embroidery fully for the reader, and I wanted to show exactly what this kind of dress would signify in Marguerite’s world—and in her mind.

When you are writing do you take out some details even as you add others? How much do you revise? And do you find yourself journeying far from your initial idea for a novel? Do you like to outline your books in detail? Do you find that your outline changes as you go along?

ED: Oh I’ll never forget rounding a corner on London’s Bankside (on one of those wonderful guided walks) and coming face to face with the Golden Hind—a startling time-travel moment! Yes, I do think research we can do on our feet, as it were, informs all the senses and makes for better fiction. I’m thinking of a costume exhibition that had replicas of clothing visitors could try on; that’s where I learned that a corset could feel more like armor than like lingerie.

Yes, the months or years of “pre-writing” (as I think Fay Weldon called it) are a crucial part of the making of a novel, aren’t they? Like you, I’ve ended up writing novels several decades after that first seed falls into my mind-mulch. Sometimes it’s that there’s something unfinished about a story that I need to revisit.

I wrote my first play about nineteenth-century lesbian diarist Anne Lister, and thirty years later felt compelled to go back to her teenage years and first love and explore them in a novel, Learned by Heart. Sometimes it’s that for a long time I can’t see a way in.

When I first came across the real Welsh “fasting girl” who inspired The Wonder, I did the initial research but found her story too shatteringly sad to write a novel about…and for some reason it took about fifteen years for it to occur to me that I could create a fictional story which would explore all the same stuff but with a different ending.

On what’s been called the planner/pantser spectrum, I am right at the planner end, making detailed outlines of what’s going to happen in each chapter and scene. But of course (unlike in say architecture, I imagine) I’m free to alter things all the way along.

The change I most commonly make is to cut out a whole chapter; if the prospect of writing it is feeling like a chore to me, I figure it’ll bore the reader too. There were fascinating historical people I included in The Paris Express all the way to the first draft, who I then decided didn’t have enough going on during this particular train journey, so I metaphorically pushed them off my train.

AG: How liberating to push some characters off the train when they don’t serve the story! What a fantastic metaphor for novel writing. I’m somewhere in the middle between planner and pantser. It’s a dance between me and my material and time. Often it takes time to find my way.

When I wrote my novel Intuition about scientists, I remember that despite all my planning, the story didn’t become clear until I was revising the second draft. With Isola I held my idea close for a long time and didn’t speak about the project to anyone until I had completed the whole first draft.

Writing for a couple of years in isolation and in silence gave me confidence and also the time I needed to work out ideas on my own. Sometimes, however, it helps to get some feedback earlier. Pieces of my next book have been published in The New Yorker and other literary magazines. This might be as close as I get to the kind of serial novels people wrote in the nineteenth century.

With this book, called This Is Not About Us (coming in 2026), I found it encouraging and helpful to hear from readers along the way.  Do you find that different novels require different methods? Do you like to talk about new work? Or do you keep it private until it’s pretty far along?

ED: Great topic, and one that rarely comes up in interviews, in my experience. I’m very open and chatty about my projects with friends—or my poor family, who have to put up with so many random updates from me, they often ask “Sorry, is this something real or one of your future books?”

I often get helpful feedback from them at the ideas stage, especially about “how life is these days” stuff. But the reason I feel free to talk to friends and family is that they can’t put me off. My partner Chris, when I ran the concept for Room by her—little boy grows up in a locked room—told me “I doubt a five-year-old could generate enough meaning,” and I laughed and carried on.

By contrast, if I tried sounding out my readership as a whole and they weren’t enthusiastic about an idea, I think it would make me lose faith in a project. And as for my publishers—and even my agents—I prefer not to tell them a thing until the first draft is ready to show. I’d say one of my strengths as a writer is a firm, almost mystical sense of the book I want to write, and considerations about what might sell would be like static interfering with the clarity of the signal.