NANCY BURKE is author of From the Abuelas’ Window (2006), If I Could Paint the Moon Black (2014) and her new suspense novel, Only the Women are Burning (Apprentice House Press). Her short story, "At the Pool" is a finalist in the 2020 J.F. Powers Prize for Short Fiction. Her short fiction "He Briefly Thought of Tadpoles" appeared in Meat for Tea and "The Last Day" appeared in Pilgrim: A Journal of Catholic Experience. She completed her MFA in her fifties in Creative Writing from Rutgers University after studying anthropology as an undergrad—a subject that features prominently in her new novel.
In Nancy's Only the Women are Burning, three women are killed by flames in a single morning, one at a commuter train, one at a school, one while walking her dog in the woods. The authorities decide the burning women are members of a cult, but when Cassandra learns her former best friend died in the fiery phenomenon she refuses to accept that explanation. A mom and former anthropologist, Cassandra finds herself wrapped up in the mystery of these fiery deaths, searching for a solution. As she delves into this strange episode in her once-safe suburban New Jersey town, she must also face some buried truths of her own.
Nancy stops by In Reference to Murder to talk about writing and researching the novel:
My book, Only the Women are Burning, brings you Cassandra, a suburban mom in relentless pursuit of answers to unanswerable questions when the women in her town begin to spontaneously burst into flame and disappear leaving only their clothes behind. She stepped off her youthful path of insatiable intellectual curiosity a long time ago. You’ll have to read the book to find out why she did that. Only in the aftermath of the women’s deaths does she recover her investigative powers, putting two and two together, and some other unlikely pairings, in her hunt for the truth.
Ever since my summer days on a shady lounge chair near my backyard pool, swapping Nancy Drew mysteries with my sister, I’ve loved the role of sleuth. Maybe because I’m a Nancy too the role of amateur detective lodged deep in my brain. My synapses flare when I am challenged with ‘what if’ questions. I suppose that is what makes me a fiction writer! This emerged in my central character, Cassandra, a lapsed anthropologist and geo-archaeologist stuck in suburban New Jersey, raising her kids and missing her forever absent husband.
In researching and writing this book, I uncovered all sorts of fascinating facts to work with, building the series of clues Cassandra pieces together to show the authorities in her town that she knows what she’s talking about. But, not everything in OTWAB was discovered through deliberate research. Some of the elements of the book were lodged in memory already. I taught art, history and mythology of Egypt, ancient Greece, China, and the native tribes of Africa and North America to visiting school groups at the Newark Museum, and so does Cassandra. For a short time I was a mission commander at a Challenger Learning Center where I led simulated missions to the space station for groups of middle school children. I taught about life on the international space station, the exploration of Mars and deep space. I studied NASA websites and replenished my lessons with arcane scientific facts. As I developed OTWAB an archive of information rose up from memory and demanded to be included in this quasi-scientific, fabulist novel. I listened. I consulted National Geographic magazine and countless websites to understand how energy travels through space to reach us, and about the energies deep within our earth. I visited Stonehenge with my daughter and pondered the question Cassandra once tried to answer, “Why did they build it on precisely this spot?” There’s more, but again, you’ll have to read the book. No spoilers here.
Writers often tell us how their characters whisper to them, surprising them with their sudden choices and odd behavior. It’s the writer’s job to listen and get it on the page. In OTWAB that happened, but the physical world spoke to me too and whispered solutions to my big question of “How can women burst into flame and die in the middle of their daily routines, leaving their clothes behind?”
I incorporated what I learned through early experiences in my own motherhood into the story as well. When I left a successful career in business to stay home to care for my own children, I stepped into a world of precarious self-doubt, at a time when women were increasing their presence in the workforce, determined to stay in it while raising children. I was choosing against the popular rhetoric of the time. That women could do and have it all – a career and motherhood – was something of a self-righteous insistence for my generation. Many women did sacrifice mom time in favor of the workplace and financial/economic participation. I banded together with other women who chose the traditional at-home role. We found ourselves circling the wagons in defense of our choices. Some would call what we did privilege. But, at the time, we felt a loss of self, an abdication of our own dreams of success, as though we were letting down our own generation and ourselves. This book is an exploration of what that does to us, what society does to women with its expectations and its conflicting demands.
Compiling disparate elements of physical science, visible and invisible environmental threats, into a sequence of discoveries, and blending the scientific elements with the psychological frame of mind of the character was my first challenge. The second challenge was making it all believable. Charles Dickens used spontaneous human combustion to kill off his character, Mr. Krooks, in Bleak House. In defense of his choice he said, “Nobody has proved that it can’t happen.”
I found books on the subject. I read newspaper articles about deaths by fires of unknown origin. Either the police failed or science failed to sufficiently solve those deaths. The FBI does not recognize it as a cause of death, but in England cases have been closed with precisely that listed.
I feared this book would be an eye roll for agents and publishers during my query process. I only discovered one other writer to use the element of SHC in a contemporary novel. Reading Kevin Wilson’s Nothing to See Here, where a set of twins burst into spontaneous flame when they feel agitated, encouraged me. My book was already written, but it hadn’t been accepted for publication. This was my third challenge: to find a press who would see the fabulist elements as intriguing, not just as para-normal lunatic fringe. I found Apprentice House Press, who saw the metaphorical value of the burnings in the context of a suburban landscape inhabited by women with potential and no means to express it.
Central to this book is the idea of women’s struggles often being of the silent variety. What we don’t express, but perhaps experience within the roles we assume in our lives, can fester. I’ve heard stories of women who develop illnesses because of deeply buried anger and rage that ultimately is turned inward. I contemplated this sort of unintentional self-destruction and how it manifests itself in lives as I developed this story. It takes many forms. I expect OTWAB to generate highly charged discussions of such themes among women’s book groups. I expect women to find elements of themselves inside the story. And while my readers may speculate endlessly about the phenomenon of bursting into flame and vigorously debate whether it could really happen, I know many will acknowledge they’ve felt the feeling at times in their lives of wishing they could just burst into flame and disappear and start a whole new life all over again. My answer is, of course you can start all over again, but we all know you don’t need flame to make it happen.
You can learn more about Nancy Burke and her books via her website, and follow her on Facebook and Twitter. Only the Women are Burning is on sale today and now available from all major online and brick-and-mortar bookstores. Nancy will celebrate the launch of the book with a virtual event ("In Conversation with Jenny Milchman"), hosted by Watchung Booksellers, on Wednesday, October 7th at 7:30 pm ET.
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