It was important to me that, despite the family’s coerciveness, their ideology was founded on principles I also believe in. She sacrifices more and more of herself to maintain her sense of belonging, and finds herself committing terrible acts. (Who among us hasn’t longed to be invited to a commune? Only recently, now that people are reading the book and questioning her motives, have I started to process the fact that this is not an entirely universal desire.) Berie farms like I farmed–herding sheep, bottle-feeding lambs, scooping manure, baking bread–but the community closes in around her, with a strict ideology and stricter rules. And so my first novel, the Ash Family, begins with a kind of fantasy I had for myself: the narrator, Berie, meets a friendly man who invites her to his home, an off-the-grid commune in the Appalachian mountains. I wanted to throw my body into something, and test myself, but one side effect was constant loneliness.
I farmed in the Arctic and on a tiny sheep-filled island and in the Alps high above the treeline.
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