Hamilton photo: Leslie Brown
Jane Hamilton next to the cover of her book, 'The Phoebe Variations.'
It’s been a while since we’ve heard from Jane Hamilton. Nationally, the author is known for such novels as The Book of Ruth and When Madeline Was Young, but in southern Wisconsin she might be just as well known as part of the team that runs Ela Orchard, in Rochester, Wisconsin, a longtime vendor at the Dane County Farmers’ Market.
Hamilton’s last novel, The Excellent Lombards, was published in 2016. Her new one, The Phoebe Variations, publishes on Sept. 23. Why the gap?
You could say it’s complicated, or you could say it’s just what ended up happening. The idea for the new novel, “to write something joyful,” came to Hamilton after seeing a production of Twelfth Night in New York in 2013, and she played with having a character in gender-bending situations. But “it was all over the place. I couldn't quite focus on it for whatever reason. Sometimes books come very easily — they feel like they come in one breath — and it's really, really fun. Not that you don't have to work on them, but it's sort of all there. And sometimes they don't and this one didn't,” says Hamilton.
And then there were other things — COVID happened. Hamilton and her husband bought an historic building in Rochester in “our one little block of downtown.” They restored the former bank; it now houses a beautiful coffeehouse, DW Coffee, that has become a community gathering place. “We don't own the [coffee] business,” Hamilton hastens to add. The restoration project “was interesting and something different that took up my time. And there was just life in general.” In those 10 years she also wrote a second novel that she is now wrapping up and made inroads on writing a memoir.
The Phoebe Variations is set, as many of Hamilton’s fictions are, in a version of her hometown of Oak Park, Illinois, here called South Forest. It is the 1970s. It bears other Hamilton hallmarks: a high school setting and a love of the arts, especially music. Phoebe, the protagonist, is the adopted daughter of a single mother, Greta, who is an anomaly among the neighborhood moms. Greta is a feminist, an activist, and a strong personality: “I wondered,” Phoebe thinks, “...if Greta had loved me only as a vessel for instruction.”
While she has always known she was adopted, she did not know all the details. The book opens with a thunderclap as Phoebe and Greta make a trip to Viroqua to meet her birth family just as she is about to graduate from high school. That event sets into motion all the rest of the action of the book. Without giving too much away, Phoebe runs away, hiding in the basement of a friend’s house, a family with 14 children — so many that the theory is, no one is going to notice Phoebe in the basement. That’s not quite how it turns out.
Hamilton says in some ways it “feels ridiculous to have this coming of age book” coming out now, when the country and the world are facing so many dire situations, “but that's what I did. I wrote a coming of age story.”
She was interested in depicting strong female friendships — Phoebe has one in her friend Luna — “and maybe [it’s] a stretch, but I was thinking about how you as a person resist someone very powerful in your life. And so, in a very, very small way it felt topical to me.”
Hamilton was also interested in the “mommy” culture of the 1960s and '70s, remembering mothers on her own street who had families with 10 or more kids and wondering how they coped.
The house in Phoebe, nicknamed “The Asylum,” is the kind of neighborhood house/hangout that can be very formative.
“When I was a teenager there was a house like that,” Hamilton says. “I recently went to the funeral of a high school friend's mother and the night before the funeral many of us were sitting around for hours, talking about that house almost exclusively.”
Living under cover in The Asylum gives Phoebe a way to consider families, what makes them and how they interact, an ongoing theme in the novel.
In the process of writing The Phoebe Variations, Hamilton parted ways with her longtime agent, who ultimately told her she could not read a draft of the novel one more time.
“I pretty much thought my publishing life was over,” says Hamilton. “I went through all the stages of grief and then I thought, okay, I'm just going to keep writing, because that's what I know how to do, and I was lucky enough to still have the time to do it.”
With a new agent and a new publisher, Zibby Books, Hamilton is back to what she knows how to do. “I've had love in my publishing life for sure, but I have never felt so much love from this team of women [at Zibby] who've been gathered from traditional publishing to come together in this company.” Zibby, which describes itself as “a women-led boutique publishing house,” released its first titles in 2023. “The editor was remarkable,” says Hamilton. “I feel really lucky to have the second wind.”
Jane Hamilton will appear at the Wisconsin Book Festival Oct. 23 at 7 p.m. at Madison’s Central Library.
