No story I’ve written has come from a clear or singular place in my imagination. Out of a long-simmering pot of memories and impressions, certain ideas or images surface and refuse to sink back under. If they haunt me long enough, if they ring enough emotional bells in my brain, there’s a good chance they’ll wind up in something I’m writing, if not become the center of it.

One memory that has stuck with me—a memory that helped inspire my novel Marion Hatley—concerns a kitchen-table conversation I had with my mother years ago, when I was in junior high school.

We were talking—not for the first time—about how hard her own mother, Cleo Coppock Brown, had worked. From around 1920 until she was too ill to do so, Cleo helped run the farm that my mom and her four brothers grew up on. From dawn until sunset she did “ladies’ chores”: cleaning and sewing; making bread, rolls, and pies; feeding her family (and numerous threshers at harvest time); hand-washing and hanging laundry; making soap for future piles of laundry … the list goes on.

It was the first time, however, that my mother told me how day in and day out, through all this work, even in the hottest days of summer, Grandma wore a corset.

A corset?!? Why?

According to my mom, it was considered the respectable thing for ladies to do back then.

By “corset,” my mother (and grandmother) didn’t mean the tightly laced, whalebone-lined numbers from the nineteenth century. The thing Grandma wore was more like a girdle, except it didn’t limit its discomforts to the belly, waist, and hips.

In response to my many questions about the corset—the word itself baffled me—my mother grabbed the notepad we used for phone messages and drew a picture of the garment as she remembered it. Her drawing got tossed soon after, but the illustration to the right is my best approximation of it.

That image of the corset, and thoughts of the miseries it added to my grandmother’s life, stayed with me long after that conversation with my mother. They became especially acute during summer visits to the farm where Mom grew up (a farm that remains in the family). With time and experience, I began to associate the corset with other private miseries that women of my grandmother’s time endured, with other restrictions they faced, and, conversely, with freedoms they were denied or were punished for pursuing.

Eventually, the character of Marion Hatley emerged from all these musings. An adulteress, lingerie seamstress, and occasional drinker of gin fizzes, Marion is about as different from my Quaker-descended, teetotaling grandmother as could be imagined. Yet through her, I was able to explore the consequences of pushing back against some of the restrictions that she, my grandmother, and other women of their time faced. And I was able to have Marion create, through seamstressy wonders perhaps bordering on science fiction, the Whisper Lift: an undergarment capable of delivering women from the typical corset-related discomforts.

The Whisper Lift is advertised this way in the novel:

You will forget you are wearing it … and be unforgettable.

Welcome to the Cooper’s Ford début of the Whisper Lift, a foundation garment unsurpassed in offering a feminine silhouette, whisper-soft slimming, and a magical lift to the figure and spirits! Try the model here and be measured by our expert seamstress for a superior, lasting fit, and comfort ensured by a breakthrough in shape-ware: comfortably shaping Expand-Eez Fans.

Inquire at the service counter for details, and discover for yourself the secret of Pittsburgh’s most discerning ladies: comfort need not be sacrificed for confidence and beauty.

Essentially, Marion devised the kind of corset I wish my grandmother could have chosen over the other models available at the time. (For an exceptionally interesting exploration of the types of corsets—a.k.a., corselettes, foundation garments, girdles—sold in the late twenties and early thirties, check out this wonderful article from witness2fashion. It also covers the industry-shaking introduction of Lastex.)

This winds up just a glimpse into one inspiration for my novel—for me, the most important one, because it started with my dear grandmother. I only wish I could have had a good conversation with her about this, and so many other things.

Print copies of Marion Hatley are available from Garland Press and Small Press Distribution. For a Kindle version, visit Amazon, and for an audiobook, visit this link (also at Amazon).