Literary Synchronicities: Jessica Francis Kane on Finding Coincidences While Writing

Writers can be a superstitious bunch. We have our routines, our special seats in the library, our favorite notebooks and pens and desktop talismans, all of which we hope will give us strength, focus our attention, and help us find our way.

Books take a long time and require a lot of self-generated confidence, so it’s only natural to look for signs that we’re on the right path, right? I’ve heard many writers talk about the synchronicity that brings you into contact with exactly what you need—whether person, place, or thing—while you’re working on a project.

But during my work on my third novel, this—synchronicity, coincidence—call it what you will—reached proportions that surprised me.

My first novel was about blame; my second was about friendship. My third, Fonseca, is in many ways about faith, partly because I wanted to write about faith and partly because I’d read that Penelope Fitzgerald, the main character of my story, wished at the end of her life that she’d been more forthright in her fiction about hers.

I wanted to honor that as I worked on a novel that tells the story of a mysterious adventure she had in northern Mexico in 1952 from which, I believe, some of her later themes may have come.

My connection to Fitzgerald started with a gift. Twenty-five give years ago my husband and I moved to London for his job. Knowing I was homesick and unmoored, he stopped in a bookshop on his way home from work one night and bought me a book. He chose it because he thought the setting was close to our rented flat in Chelsea.

I read Offshore by Penelope Fitzgerald looking across the Thames at Battersea Reach and knew immediately I had a new favorite author. The only writer I thought came close to her combination of moral complexity and humor was Graham Greene. I read all eight of her novels in short order. (Coincidentally, this was the year she won the NBCC award for The Blue Flower.)

Fitzgerald died in 2000, we moved back to the U.S. the following year, and in 2013 Hermione Lee published a first and so far only biography, Penelope Fitzgerald: A Life, which I read and loved, but it was not until the summer of 2017 when I read an essay by Lucy Scholes in Granta titled “The Peripatetic Penelope Fitzgerald,” that I began to see the oddity of Fitzgerald’s trip to Mexico.

It’s an intriguing gap in her biography and that morning reading Scholes’s essay—I still remember where I was sitting—I began to wonder if I could make it into a novel.

By the fall of 2018 I had filled most of a notebook with ideas and research and decided to go down to the Fitzgerald archive at the Harry Ransom Center in Austin to see if this novel I’d been mulling over for more than a year was something I should actually try to write. I was extremely intimidated by the idea of writing a novel about my favorite writer.

Then, on my last afternoon in the reading room, someone tapped me on the shoulder. When I looked up Hermione Lee was standing behind me. Hermione Lee! What are the odds? Her biography of Fitzgerald was sitting on the desk in front of me, stuffed ragged with yellow and pink post-it notes. She was over from Oxford for a few days to work on her Stoppard biography. She’d recognized the Fitzgerald boxes and wondered what I was planning. Another biography?

I told her I was considering a novel, and she looked dubious. But then she asked what part of the life. I said the Mexico trip, as bravely as I could. She nodded. “That makes sense,” she said.

Fitzgerald believed in what she called “the squeeze of the hand,” the subtle feeling from one writer to another across time and distance that tells us we’re onto something. I was certain I was the beneficiary of a squeeze from Fitzgerald just then. I was speechless, starstruck, and totally encouraged.

I worked on Fonseca for the next six years, through my mother’s death, the pandemic, my children’s graduations from high school. These were not easy years for anyone, and at my lowest moments I was buoyed by my Hermione Lee story and kept going.

By the spring of 2024 I was closing in on a finished draft. I’d bought a peony root online when my mother died (they were her favorite flower) and planted it in a pot I had from our move up from Virginia. I knew the pot wasn’t really deep enough, but I also thought it probably wasn’t going to work to grow a peony in a pot on a balcony in New York City anyway.

For four years that peony toyed with me, putting up shoots in the spring but no buds. Then putting up shoots and a bud that didn’t open. The spring I finished Fonseca that peony put up shoots and produced fourteen buds, all of which opened into beautiful, fragrant flowers. How? Why? I hadn’t even fertilized it.

Then, the day I sent the book to my editor, I had to take my cat to the vet. She’d recently had a procedure and wasn’t healing well. After our appointment, I brought her out into the waiting area and was gathering my things when the next pet was called. The name? Fonseca.

I froze and stared as a young woman with a small dog walked to the examination room. I asked the woman at the front desk to confirm the name, just to make sure I’d heard it correctly.

I don’t want to give you the impression that only good things were happening that spring. I also had a virus that left me with tinnitus in my left ear and a bout of sciatica that made parts of my right foot numb. It was the fifth spring after my mother died and, despite the peony, I was enmeshed in a complicated grief. It’s always hard to let go of a book, and I was having a particularly difficult time of it with Fonseca.

For five years I’d been afraid that if I published another book something bad would happen. It’s irrational, I know, but my mother died the week my second novel was published, while I was on my way back to New York for the launch.

Given this, you might understand why the next thing that happened resonated so deeply. On the third day after I finished the draft I took a long walk along the Hudson River. On the South Cove of the Esplanade, just north of Wagner Park, there is a wrought iron overlook I like. It rises above the boardwalk in what can only be described as a sort of pulpit. Two semi-circular stairways lead up to a platform with a single bench.

When I arrived in this place on this day, there was someone on the bench. I am the sort of person, an avowed introvert, who would normally linger below until I could have the bench to myself, but on this day, I went up the stairs. The woman, who was wearing ear pods, turned to look over her right shoulder, pulled the ear pods out and smiled as if she’d been expecting me.

She had purple all through her braids, a sparkly purple sweatshirt, and sparkly purple sneakers. Her glasses were large, perfectly round circles lined with gold rhinestones. She had purple and rhinestone bracelets on both wrists. Her smile was so warm that I spoke first.

I told her I liked her purple. She took a full look at my all-black ensemble and said, “I try to be ready for the people he sends me.”

I wasn’t sure what to say about that and turned to look at the river.

She laughed and told me that when she’d worked on Wall Street this was her place. She’d come here often. She’d left that banking job years ago and was back today after a long time. She’d been thinking about how the place was the same but she was different.

“Better?” I asked.

“Better in every way,” she said.

There must have been something about the way she said it, because when she asked if she could put her hand on my shoulder, I agreed. I’ve lived in my apartment near the river for sixteen years. I walk on the river a lot. I rarely talk to people and nothing like this had ever happened.

I almost always walk with my phone or a notebook, but on this day I was empty-handed and by the time I made it back to my apartment, I couldn’t remember all the things she said to me with her hand on my shoulder, but I wrote down these two: She said it was time for me to share my treasure with the world, and she said seven is the number of completion.

Two things about the number seven: Fonseca grapples with the ideas behind Ruskin’s seven lamps of architecture, with which Fitzgerald was obsessed (they are: sacrifice, truth, power, beauty, life, memory, and obedience), and my mother, who believed seven was a lucky number, was very proud that the name she gave me—Jessica Carroll Francis—had seven letters in each of the names. She felt she’d given me something special. She reminded me of it often.

As soon as I got home I wrote this all down—the importance of contemporaneous notes! Every detail is accurate. What it all means is another question, but I choose to believe in the Former Banker Purple Angel of the South Cove, whom I have never seen again. Faith is better with some doubt woven through it. Fitzgerald thought so too.

I reread Offshore recently. It is my second favorite of Fitzgerald’s novels and the one that is the most autobiographical about her life during a difficult time in her marriage. As she worked, she had to keep remembering to change her daughters’ names, as she kept using their real ones.

With my work on Fonseca concluded, I wanted to go back to where my story with Fitzgerald began. I did not expect to find anything new, but in the novel a young man visits London from Vienna and stays with Nenna and her girls briefly on the houseboat in Battersea Reach. I was struck by the name of the square in Vienna where he lives. It’s Franciskanerplatz.

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Fonseca by Jessica Francis Kane is available via Penguin Press.