Hester Young speaks about her book, “The Gates of Evangeline,” during an event at the Princeton Public Library in September. (Photo by Jacquelyn Pillsbury.)
By Michelle Hart
Hester Young has lived in Boston, London, Arizona, Southern New Hampshire and Hawaii — all places with distinctive topographical and cultural identities.
This sense of place is significant for Young, a novelist and Lawrence Township resident. It is this enthusiasm for unique settings that pervades her debut novel, The Gates of Evangeline, published in September by Penguin Random House.
The Gates of Evangeline, the first book in a planned trilogy, follows Charlotte “Charlie” Cates, a journalist from New York who travels to Louisiana — a setting saturated with both posh Southern gentility and the sublime strangeness of the swamps — to investigate a decades-old missing persons case.
The ghostly setting is apt: Charlie is deep in the throes of her own grief over the death of her child. A mother bereft, Charlie begins having vivid, possibly premonitory dreams about other children. One of these dreams sends her to the bayou, to the vast plantation home of the affluent Deveau family.
The novel has been amassing an impressive amount of praise, with Publishers Weekly calling it “haunting, heartbreaking, yet ultimately hopeful,” and Kirkus Reviews hailing it “an enjoyable puzzle box of a mystery” that is “eerie but inviting.”
Most if not all of the reviews of the novel call attention to the deftly rendered Louisiana setting, a testament to Young’s regard for enchanting environments.
It’s an ability that Young, whether consciously or subconsciously, has been honing since her childhood in the Boston suburbs. The harsh New England weather made for the perfect backdrop to a life of reading. Her parents frequently read to her, but soon she taught herself to read. Young gravitated to stories of “plucky orphans and boxcar children.”
“I loved this idea of children being so strong and independent and making their way in the world,” Young said.
Young also learned a great deal about storytelling from watching daytime soap operas.
“I thought they were the funniest things ever,” Young said. “I couldn’t believe that someone got to have the job of writing these ridiculous dramatic stories. It just seemed like the best job in the whole world.”
So when Young got to high school, she began writing her own soap opera, with her friends as the protagonists, the mean girls as the antagonists, and the cute classmates as the love interests. When the girls grew tired of the boys in their classes, they began dating celebrities, including Scott Bakula and Harry Connick Jr.
“It was a fun way of enacting our wildest, creepiest fantasies,” Young laughs.
Soap operas are actually a wonderfully valuable writing tool, a constant lesson in how to sustain a story over a long period of time. They’re also great for understanding how to create cliffhangers, since they have to end every scene in such a way as make the audience crave more.
“As a suspense writer, that ends up being very useful,” Young said. “It gets you to think about the end of chapters as cliffhangers, something that’s going to carry the reader into the next chapter.”
After she graduated high school, Young attended Tufts University, where she majored in English and Latin American Studies. Coming from the “very reserved yankee culture” of the Northeast, it was important for her to immerse herself in another culture, one she describes as “warm and friendly.” When she was 15, she had spent a month away from home doing community service in Central America. She was taken with the spirit of hospitality that pervaded the culture.
“I just really loved the feeling of being in a small village and the kind of community that arises from not having much in the way of material possessions,” Young said.
She also fell in love with the Spanish language, found herself taken particularly by the poetry of Pablo Neruda.
“I think it’s amazing when you get to read something in the language in which it was originally written and then compare it to the translation,” Young said. “When you get a feel for a language, you get to see the differences and nuances in a word and how they have slightly different connotations. I always loved reading Neruda, reading him out loud and hearing the different sounds of the words in Spanish versus the words in English.”
This kind of literary wanderlust propelled her to spend a year abroad studying in London.
“When I was London, I really learned how to learn — and I learned how to do it for me and not for grades. There was an amazing library at the University College London and all these fascinating books being discussed within and without the context of the classroom. Suddenly I was doing far above and beyond what I had to do, and I was doing it because I wanted to, and for no reason other than that.”
“It’s funny,” Young said. “Taking away the pressure of learning is what made me love it and made me come to literature in a different way.”
Her love of literature and her love of place led her to apply to the University of Arizona for graduate school. She liked the idea of the desert and the heat — a dramatic change of environment from the frigidity of New England. Though she decided against going to graduate school in Arizona, she still moved out to Tucson, with her sister in tow.
Although Arizona is vastly different from Massachusetts in almost every way, Tucson, like Boston, is an amalgamation of different cultures. The city has a strong Hispanic and Native American presence, influences that have seeped in to the Southwestern American milieu.
Young lived amongst people with very different backgrounds and belief systems, especially compared to liberal Massachusetts. She wasn’t making a lot of money, and was living in a low-income area, with violence all too present in her daily life. Nonetheless, she cites the experience as being crucial to her development both as a person and as a writer.
“I think it’s always helpful to expand your horizons,” she said. “I think it was an important experience for me, someone who grew up relatively privileged to understand what a lot of people — most people, really — experience in their lives.”
Yet soon Young grew tired of the desert. She thought, “I think I’d like to be on a tropical island now.” And because, as Young herself puts it, she tends to make big sweeping decisions in her life based on romantic whims, she moved to Hawaii.
She enrolled in the English graduate program at the University of Hawaii – Manoa, which turned out to be much more than a two-year sun-and-surf excursion. The program allowed her the room to study both literature and creative writing. Once more Young found herself at the center of a cultural convergence. There were many different cultures, and thus many different literary traditions.
“Because you’re dealing with a lot of Pacific writers and Asian writers, you’re getting an extremely different take on storytelling than you would get at a mainland M.F.A. program,” Young said. “The idea of storytelling is not the kind of cookie-cutter thing that it tends to be.”
While at Hawaii, Young wrote many different kinds of stories, which ranged from a borderline chick lit piece called “The Boyfriend Manual” to a multiple narrator suspense story to a fairy tale novella about colonialism called “The Last Mermaid.”
“No one ever told me I had to pick a style or stick with a particular subject or define myself a certain way. I guess it’s no surprise, then, that The Gates of Evangeline ended up being such a mishmash of genres. I was too ignorant to know better.”
Although The Gates of Evangeline participates in Southern Gothic literary tradition, it does indeed resemble a mélange of other genres. Part detective story, part ghost story, part romance. It is perhaps this mixture that makes the book successful, and such a unique reading experience.
When asked whether the novel’s Louisiana setting came from Young’s commitment to places with hybridized cultures, Young laughs and acquiesces. But there was another reason the book was set in the swamp: she had a dream about it. In the dream, Young was in a rowboat with a little boy sitting across from her. She recognized the environment to be the bayou. The little boy, a stranger, told her his name and he told her his age. And then he said, “Let me tell you how I died.”
When you have dreams that strange and vivid, the story practically writes itself, which is precisely what happened to Young. The Gates of Evangeline begins with almost this exact scene.
“I had to figure out what happened to him,” Young said.
Indeed, dreams play a large part not only in the book itself but in the creation of the book. This dream Young had dovetailed uncannily with a family story, told to Young by her grandmother.
Young’s grandmother, in 1956, had a four year old son named Bobby, and she started to have recurring nightmares about Bobby falling out of a window. One day, when Bobby was in somebody else’s care, he actually did fall out of a window and was killed in the fall. A few days after his death, she woke up in the middle of the night and saw Bobby standing at the foot of her bed. He said that everything was okay, that everything was alright now. She felt tremendously at peace, knowing that he was okay.
If dreams played an integral role in the creation of the book, then so too, perhaps obviously, did motherhood. When she began the writing process, she had just gotten married. She had gotten pregnant. Then during her very first trip to New Orleans, which was a research trip for the book, she miscarried. In a bizarre and unfortunate case of life imitating art—or perhaps more accurately, art imitating life—an author researching a novel set in Louisiana about a woman in the wake of her child’s death herself has a miscarriage.
“It was a very strange, very small-scale version of what my character was going through,” Young said. “It certainly gave me a sense of the grieving process, even just losing the idea of a child and not the actual child.”
“I had a very different mindset going into the book after that.”
Young eventually became pregnant again and gave birth to a son. The pregnancy was difficult, she said, and she couldn’t help but think about loss. She thought about what that loss would do—to herself, to her marriage, to her relationships with the people in her life who had children.
She became much more serious about writing the book once she became a stay-at-home mother. She would work on the book while he was napping during the day. She would work on the book when he went to sleep at night. Instead of creating friction or frustration, the two elements of her life — her family and her book — harmonized.
The community of Lawrence is partly responsible for this harmony. Young and her husband had chosen Lawrence initially for its family-friendly environs. True to form, Lawrence’s socio-economic diversity is one element of the area that appeals to her.
“There are so many races and religions represented here,” Young said. “I appreciate the sense of community.”
And as luck would have it, Young’s house is a less than 10-minute walk to the Lawrence Branch of the Mercer County Library.
She had no idea that she would become a full-time writer when she first moved here, but being in such close proximity to the library has facilitated her writing career.
Soon Young emerged with her completed manuscript, and she wrestled with the idea of sending it out. She felt content enough having written the thing, and would have sat on it for ever had her husband not goaded her into sending it out into the world.
Young recalls her husband saying, “You’ve put years of your life into this book, and it’s okay if it never gets published, but you at least have to take the chance and send it out into the world. You need to let people see it.”
She sent the manuscript to an agency she had interned with when she was 19. One of the agents there, who Young thinks only remembers her because her name is Hester, which was strange and literary name, agreed to read the manuscript right away. He read it very quickly and got back to her very quickly, saying he loved it and passed it around to everyone at the agency. Within a month of her sending that very first query email, she had signed with them.
“It still surprises me that you can make one random decision about your summer as a nineteen-year-old that has profound effects on your life later on,” Young muses.
Young was offered a three book deal. Upon hearing the news of this somewhat lucrative offer, Young gathered up her children and ran to the gym where her husband was working out. She had the gym call out her husband over the loudspeaker. Her husband thought somebody had died.
“It was so incredible,” Young said. “It took me a long time to realize that it was real and that this was now my life.”
And what a life it is. Currently, she is hard at work on the second book in the series. Young has recently completed a two-week-long book tour, an expedition that culminated a few weeks ago with an appearance at the Southern Festival of Books in Nashville, Tennessee. She sat on a panel alongside Lauren Groff, whose recent book Fates and Furies has made her literary fiction’s current “it girl.”
This is all icing on the cake for Young. It is strangely apt, especially for a story that involves ghosts and family ties, that the best part of writing and publishing The Gates of Evangeline was seeing her grandmother, who died while Young was in the process of writing, come alive in the book.
“There’s something that makes me smile,” Young said, “about the fact that she’s a character that lives on in the pages of the novel.”
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