Episode 137: New York Times bestselling author, Katherine Howe
Katherine Howe is a New York Times bestselling and award-winning historian and novelist.
She delves into the riveting world of piracy and maritime history in her latest novel, A True Account: Hannah Masury's Sojourn Amongst the Pyrates, Written by Herself.
Drawing inspiration from her own genealogy, the book explores how women looked for their own freedom and independence then and now, weaving a narrative around her third great aunt, Hannah Augusta Masury Howe, who famously quelled a mutiny.
Books & Links Mentioned:
A True Account: Hannah Masury's Sojourn Amongst the Pyrates, Written by Herself by Katherine Howe (Bookshop.org / Amazon.com )
Vanderbilt: The Rise and Fall of an American Dynasty by Anderson Cooper and Katherine Howe (Bookshop.org / Amazon.com )
Astor: The Rise and Fall of an American Fortune by Anderson Cooper and Katherine Howe (Bookshop.org / Amazon.com )
The Daughters of Temperance Hobbs by Katherine Howe (Bookshop.org / Amazon.com )
The Dante Club, The Poe Shadow by Matthew Pearl (Bookshop.org / Amazon.com )
Gone Girl by Gillian Flynn (Bookshop.org / Amazon.com )
The Wager by David Grann (Bookshop.org / Amazon.com )
Savage Harvest by Carl Hoffman (Bookshop.org / Amazon.com )
Moby Dick by Rockwell Kent (Kid's Illustrated Version)
Treasure Island by Robert Louis Stevenson
Full Disclosure: We are part of the Amazon and bookshop.org affiliate programs, which means Lainey or Ashley get a tiny commission if you buy something after clicking through from a link on this website.
Connect with the author:
Website
Transcript:
** Transcript created using AI (so please forgive the typos!) **
[00:00:00] Ashley Hasty: Hi, Katherine, and welcome to the Best of Women's Fiction Podcast.
[00:00:03] Katherine Howe: Thanks so much for having me, Ashley. I'm so excited to be here.
[00:00:08] Ashley Hasty: I have many questions about this book, but before we dive in case our listeners haven't yet read it, will you share your synopsis of A True Account?
[00:00:16] Katherine Howe: Oh, that's a great question.
[00:00:17] Katherine Howe: It might be the first time I've had to give my elevator pitch for it. A True Account actually has a very long title. It's called A True Account, Hannah Masury's Sojourn Amongst the Pirates Written by Herself. And it opens in Boston in 1726, which is at the end of the so-called golden age of piracy.
[00:00:35] Katherine Howe: When a young girl named Hannah Masury, who's been bound out to service in a shipyard shipside tavern. Witnesses to a pirate hanging that took place in Boston. And this is a real thing that happened. It opens with the hanging of William Fly, which really occurred. And the way that it's represented in the book is based on primary sources.
[00:00:52] Katherine Howe: So it's all accurate. And very soon Hannah is caught up in some intrigue around that. Hanging and then she has to flee for her life and she finds that she has not fled on a fruit packet bound for the Azores as she thought she had fled on a pirate ship and she has to quickly come to terms with that and use her wits to survive.
[00:01:10] Katherine Howe: And then within Hannah's story, there's embedded a mystery about where William Fly had hidden his treasure. So in many ways, A True Account is a classic sort of Gone Girl meets Treasure Island adventure story, but it's also slightly more literary in the questions that it raises about authorship and literal truth versus emotional truth and whether or not our protagonist can really be trusted.
[00:01:38] Ashley Hasty: I heard that this novel was inspired in part by your own family genealogy, specifically your third grade aunt.
[00:01:46] Katherine Howe: Yes.. Hannah's name is borrowed from a real woman. There was a real woman who was a great aunt, a few generations back of mine who married her name was Hannah Masury. She lived in the 19th century and she married a guy named Edward Howe, who was a clipper ship captain and slightly unusual for the time she voyaged with him.
[00:02:03] Katherine Howe: And so they were taking a load off. Locomotives actually around Cape Horn which is crazy to imagine. And then up to deliver them to California. And then they dropped them off and then they sailed over to China to pick up a load of workers who were going to work on the railroads and while they were traveling back across the Pacific, Edward died.
[00:02:23] Katherine Howe: And then shortly after Edward died, the passengers and the crew started to mutiny because they were running out of fresh water and Hannah had to hold off a mutiny with a pistol by herself, taking control of the ship and then signaling her distress until she was rescued by the Navy off the coast of California.
[00:02:41] Katherine Howe: And then when she got back, she sued for Edwards percentage of the ship, and then she used the proceeds to buy a house for herself in Beverly, Massachusetts, which is where she was from. So it's not exactly piracy, but when I learned about Hannah's story, I was, as you can imagine, completely mind blown. Here's this woman who'd been around the horn and who'd put down a mutiny and then just went and went back to Beverly and married a dentist and lived quietly the rest of her life.
[00:03:05] Katherine Howe: And I like to imagine, someone passing her, on the street in like 1910, because she lived until the beginning of the 20th century, having no idea that she had, that this little old lady had done these astonishing things in her youth.
[00:03:17] Ashley Hasty: Do you remember the first time you heard that family story?
[00:03:21] Katherine Howe: I found it out because, believe it or not, I have a punch bowl that had been, like, stuffed in a closet at my dad's house, and there's a picture of a sailing ship on it, and there was a little card inside saying that, and there's some gilding on it that was mostly worn away, saying it had been given to Edward for like, when he became master of the ship, because it was a big deal to rise to be master of the ship.
[00:03:40] Katherine Howe: And I was like, I don't know who that is. Wonder what his story is. And, very quickly, it was fortunate that so many primary sources are now available online. It's really easy to do this kind of research. And about one afternoon, I uncovered this rather astonishing story about Hannah. And she's actually mentioned in a book called.
[00:03:57] Katherine Howe: A history book of women at sea, [00:04:00] but the author of that book had never figured out her first name or any of her backstory. He just refers to her as Mrs. Howe, and so he didn't know what her name was, where she'd come from, what happened to her after putting down this mutiny in the Pacific. So it was fun to call Howe.
[00:04:15] Katherine Howe: And she'll patch that story together pretty quickly. And then I went because I'm a sentimental person. I went and found her. I found where she's buried. She's buried in the central cemetery in Beverly and she never had children as far as I could tell. And so I went and I paid her a visit just so that, it seemed like the right thing to do to be like, I see you. I know what you did.
[00:04:33] Ashley Hasty: I am fascinated that this wasn't a story passed down in your mind, but one that you discovered.
[00:04:37] Katherine Howe: This sort of forgotten footnote that was attached to this weird piece of material culture where I was like, I wonder what ship is on this punch bowl that I can't use because it's too fragile.
[00:04:48] Katherine Howe: So it has to sit on the shelf.
[00:04:50] Ashley Hasty: So what was that first spark of inspiration that connected this family story to this piracy story that you ended up writing?
[00:04:57] Katherine Howe: There are a couple of very famous people in real life. Pirate women stories Mary Read and Anne Bonny are the two probably most famous ones, both of them in around the 1710s or 20s.
[00:05:09] Katherine Howe: So around the same time, they disguised themselves as men and were discovered as members in a pirate crew. Mysteriously, they were in the same pirate crew with a guy named Calico Jack Rackham and Anne Bonny had been Calico Jack's mistress and she actually fought more valiantly than he did when their ship was taken.
[00:05:28] Katherine Howe: And so he was allowed to see her in prison. All the pirates were going to be hanged because piracy was a felony because it was such a threat to maritime trade. So there they are in prison and Bonny and Mary Read had their death sentences delayed because they both plead their bellies, which is to say that they both were pregnant.
[00:05:47] Katherine Howe: And so usually in this time period, a woman who was expecting wouldn't be put to death until after she was delivered. How thoughtful. So Anne and Calico Jack are in prison and he tells her he's going to be hanged. And she says something to the effect of she's sorry to see it, but if he'd only fought like a man, he wouldn't have had to die like a dog.
[00:06:08] Katherine Howe: So I was intrigued by this sort of untold story. Like every ship in the age of sail had boys on board. They had loblolly boys or they had cabin boys or things like that. And so it's not out of the realm of possibility to imagine in a time of such rigidly defined gender roles, where you would, you look at a person who didn't have whiskers, who was maybe more light than somebody else.
[00:06:33] Katherine Howe: Enjoyed trying to imagine, are there. Women that we don't know of who have vanished in the archive, because they were so successful at their subterfuge. And so I was partly inspired by this kind of forgotten story about the real Hannah, and I was partly inspired by these true stories of Bonny and Mary Read.
[00:06:52] Katherine Howe: And so my fictional Hannah Masury comes about that way. She disguises herself as a cabin boy. And I liked thinking through the ways that she would have had to make that work so as a historical challenge, I found that really enjoyable.
[00:07:06] Ashley Hasty: Your previous novels centered primarily around Salem, which is magical realism, why depart from that now? And why choose piracy?
[00:07:16] Katherine Howe: I think partly I've been thinking about pirates for years. And maybe partly it's because I'm a sailor. And so everyone is, it's hard not to be romantic about pirates and it's hard also not to be romantic about them. Piracy was rife in the same period that the Salem witch trials took place.
[00:07:32] Katherine Howe: So I'd spent a lot of time thinking about late 17th century, early 18th century, New England. And of course, Salem is a maritime community. There's one part of the Salem story, which is land based and which centers around women who are caught up in these very extraordinary circumstances. And I found myself thinking about other people who are caught up in extraordinary circumstances.
[00:07:54] Katherine Howe: And oftentimes people who are tried as witches who were mostly women statistically were tried because they were out of step with their community in some way. They were argumentative or they were angry or they were hard to get along with. And for a lot of people, life in the maritime world was a way of trying to grapple with the strictures of life at home.
[00:08:16] Katherine Howe: And so I think in some regard, most pirates statistically, of course, were men. And in any case, they were largely out of a desire to throw off the shackles of authority that were on them. And so I've been thinking a lot about what it means to live in a rigid hierarchical authoritarian kind of society.
[00:08:34] Katherine Howe: And what are 2 ways that people pushed back against that authority? And one way was by failing to fit in with your culture at home. And another was by refusing to submit to the authority bestowed upon you at sea. So there's maybe more connection. I think I'm just interested in people who can't get along in a normal way.
[00:08:53] Katherine Howe: Maybe. And so for me, piracy felt like a really natural extension. And even though there's no strictly speaking, [00:09:00] magical realism in Hannah Missouri, there's still some sort of imaginative element to it. Hannah is extra natural. Farsightedness. She's uncannily able to spot ships on the horizon and things like that.
[00:09:12] Katherine Howe: It has a lighter touch, but it's still presented a little bit like a fairy tale.
[00:09:18] Ashley Hasty: In addition to your fiction work, you've also co written a nonfiction book with Anderson Cooper. How did that opportunity come about?
[00:09:25] Katherine Howe: Yeah, our first one Vanderbilt, which is a story of Anderson's family history came out in and Aster is as we're speaking In early September.
[00:09:36] Katherine Howe: And so Astor is coming out as we're talking in about two weeks. And it's the story of the Astor family and what the name Astor came to mean in the Gilded Age and in the subsequent years. And that came about because Anderson was interested in writing his family history and looking at the Vanderbilt story.
[00:09:54] Katherine Howe: Here's another example of ordinary people living through extraordinary circumstances. They're just very different. From the kinds of extraordinary circumstances, I've historically explored in fiction and Anderson had written a couple of books before he'd written a memoir of his time as a reporter on the front lines of very dangerous situations, and he'd written an exchange letter exchange between him and his mother, who was Gloria Vanderbilt.
[00:10:17] Katherine Howe: But writing a history book is a little bit of a different animal from writing a memoir. And so since I'm trained as a historian, but I'm accustomed to writing for a popular audience, we were put together as he was talking to people to see who could help him out with the project that he had in mind.
[00:10:32] Katherine Howe: And we discovered that we were interested in much of the same things in our first conversation about it, we were both I don't really want to write about the railroad business. Do you? No, we wanted to write about parties and we wanted to write about, really strange and remarkable, but very personal stories of people who were living these lives that were hard to wrap our heads around.
[00:10:52] Katherine Howe: That's how that project came about. And it was such a pleasurable Aster as well, which I think is going to be great. There's some [00:11:00] chapters in there that I'm very proud of and very excited about because one thing that, as you gathered from my fiction, I'm not a kings and queens historical fiction writer.
[00:11:08] Katherine Howe: I like to write about regular people, the kinds of people who don't typically leave records of themselves in the archive. It's such a gift to be able to write about them. The gilded age, not from a standpoint of off or being gobsmacked by this blender on display, but instead having a more critical perspective on it or being able to put it in a larger context to instead have a.
[00:11:32] Katherine Howe: An argument about what this phenomenal wealth means rather than just pointing and saying, Oh, my gosh, look at that. That's incredible. And so I'm really proud of the work that Anderson and I have been able to produce in Vanderbilt and in Astor,
[00:11:45] Ashley Hasty: You mentioned your background as a historian. So I want to take a step back for a moment because I do love asking authors how they became authors. Authors. It's really a direct path. Yes. You read that you hold degrees in art history, philosophy, and [00:12:00] American and New England studies. That's right. Have you always wanted to be an author, or was your path a more winding one?
[00:12:06] Katherine Howe: I did as a child, but of course, as a young adult, I thought that's not practical. Who could possibly make a living being a writer? And I thought that the way that I could come close to doing that was to be an academic. And so I was in a doctoral program in American and New England studies.
[00:12:22] Katherine Howe: And I sometimes joke that the way that I became an author is through three steps, gambling, procrastination, and drinking to excess. And the way that came about was in the early. As you may or may not recall, there was a trend for poker. Everybody was playing Texas Hold'em and I was the same. I had a group of friends in grad school and having a poker night with your friends is actually a really great and cost effective way to pass the time because you hang out in someone's house and if you win, you go home with $90.
[00:12:50] Katherine Howe: And that's great. And if you lose your no hard feelings. So I happened to be in a poker group with Matthew Pearl, who's a New York Times bestselling author of the Dante Club and several other books, The Poe Shadow. And he does really amazing work. So I'd been shooting over the idea for my first novel, just as like a thought experiment.
[00:13:09] Katherine Howe: And so one evening at poker, my husband said, Hey, you should tell Matthew your book idea. And what do you think I said? I said, no, he's a real writer. He doesn't want to hear that. I don't have a novel idea. He doesn't want blah, blah, blah. And so my husband said, have another glass of wine. So I did. And then I told Matthew my book idea.
[00:13:29] Katherine Howe: And then I went back to my husband and then I went, I was supposed to be working on my dissertation, of course, because that's the last stage of the doctoral. process. And like many doctoral students, I was having the worst time with my dissertation, just banging my head against the wall. And then one day Matthew called me up and he said, listen, I hope you don't mind Matthew.
[00:13:48] Katherine Howe: So self facing, but I pitched your novel idea to my agent and she'd like to talk to you. And so I said, Okay. And it was rather amazing because she is pretty much Matthew's agent, who's still my agent today, who's a wonderful woman. Amazing. She said, here go try and write it and send me what you send me a couple chapters when you have them.
[00:14:06] Katherine Howe: And I was supposed to be doing my dissertation, but instead I've started just being like a sneak. I'm going to write a couple chapters and then I'll send them to her. And it felt like playing a video game that I'd never played before. And I kept leveling up. It was really mysterious.
[00:14:17] Katherine Howe: But the long and the short of it is I. Wrote a novel instead of my dissertation, and then I left graduate school because then I had a new career and I feel so fortunate to be able to think about the kinds of historiographic questions that I really enjoy tell stories of people and have conversations with readers about history.
[00:14:35] Katherine Howe: It's everything that I would have wanted as an academic, only I get to tell stories and make them up and it's magical.
[00:14:42] Ashley Hasty: And if I remember correctly, that novel debuted on the New York Times best selling list.
[00:14:48] Katherine Howe: Number two, it said that novel was The Physick Book of Deliverance Dane, which is still in print, and it did come out at number two on the times list, which was astonishing.
[00:14:56] Katherine Howe: And I felt so fortunate when that happened. And even today, people are still discovering The Physick Book and sending me notes about them. And then a couple years ago, I published a follow up story to Physick Book calledThe Daughters of Temperance Hobbs, which continues the story of the protagonist who is in Physick Book and kind of moved her life forward a little bit.
[00:15:17] Katherine Howe: So I feel I still feel very close to the protagonist of that book. Her name is Connie Goodwin and Connie and I are living our little parallel lives a little bit, but I still think about her.
[00:15:27] Ashley Hasty: Drawing from that experience and the journey that led you to where you are now. What one piece of advice do you think is most important for writers?
[00:15:38] Katherine Howe: I read a New Yorker profile of Nora Roberts several years ago and reportedly her friends call her Nora effing Roberts, which I think is great. And her writing advice is ass in the chair. And I thought that was so wonderful that years ago I was living in upstate New York and there's a Corning glass museum and you can do a little like glass blowing.
[00:15:59] Katherine Howe: [00:16:00] Activities and things like that. So I made a sandblasted bowl that says ass in the chair, Nora effing Roberts to keep on my desk. It's actually not on my desk right now. I'm not sure where it went, but that's really the best advice that the only way to do it is to sit down and to do it.
[00:16:15] Katherine Howe: I've tried setting time goals for myself. Like I'm going to write for two hours or oftentimes I'll set a word count goal for myself. Like I'm going to present a thousand words today and I'm not going to worry about whether they're any good or not. People will often ask. me what's the secret to writing a book, but unfortunately there is no secret.
[00:16:31] Katherine Howe: The secret is you sit down and you write one word and then another word and then another word and you do that a hundred thousand times, give or take, and then it's finished and then you have to fix it. And then sometimes you can't fix it because sometimes it's terrible. I have a book that's in the drawer that I worked on for years that is unfixable. It is a fundamentally flawed text, which is heartbreaking when that happens, but it does happen.
[00:16:54] Katherine Howe: The other thing is it's hard to forsake other things to make time to write. It means [00:17:00] skipping going to the movies, it means not watching TV, it means not doing your dissertation, it means spending time away from your small kid sometimes like that, that can be challenging too, the older I get, the more distractions there are.
[00:17:13] Katherine Howe: And so creating and defending time in which to write, I think, is also. a challenge for people who are aspiring writers.
[00:17:22] Ashley Hasty: I had heard that advice from Nora Roberts. I did not know her nickname. That is amazing.
[00:17:27] Katherine Howe: Yeah. I hadn't done that either. I've never met her, so I don't know how true to life that is, but that was what the profile said.
[00:17:35] Katherine Howe: Makes a great story. It does.
[00:17:37] Ashley Hasty: Yeah, it does. Authors always have the best reading suggestions. I'd love to hear about your reading world. What are you reading right now that you'd recommend?
[00:17:45] Katherine Howe: Oh, gosh. I just read The Wager, the David Grann nonfiction book about a very doomed shipwreck, an English shipwreck.
[00:17:54] Katherine Howe: It was a gripping read. He's a really terrific, compelling writer and a lot of people have found that book. But of course, I'm still in a maritime, ocean going mindset, so I can recommend that one. I've started reading a book about... Michael Rockefeller was the son of Nelson Rockefeller, he graduated from Harvard in 1960, traveled to New Guinea, and he was looking for, at the time, so-called primitive art, because his father, Nelson, was a big collector of primitive art, and while he was there, he disappeared.
[00:18:25] Katherine Howe: And was never found. And it seems likely the Rockefellers put out statements saying that he had drowned, but it seems almost certain that he was eaten. And because the people living in New Guinea at that time, that is part of their culture. That's part of their practice. And that is likely something that happened.
[00:18:44] Katherine Howe: To be honest with you, I have to put it down every so often, because as much as you can recognize that to some degree, the cultures within which we live are artificial constructs. And the book does a really great job of explaining and putting you into the mindset of someone who lives in a culture with very different values from the one in which you live.
[00:19:04] Katherine Howe: Nevertheless, I still constituted my own culture and my own culture says cannibalism is horrifying. So every so often I have to put it down, but it's a really good read. This will sound maybe silly or pretentious, but I started reading a kid's illustrated version of Moby Dick with my son, and it's really fun, and so I've been enjoying it so much, although he always likes to start back at the beginning at bedtime, which is when Ishmael, is first arriving at the inn, and then he meets Queequeg, and then they get ready and go to bed, and I think it's because it parallels, we're getting ready and we're going to bed.
[00:19:34] Katherine Howe: So we read that part over and over again, but I started listening to the actual Moby Dick on Audible or whatever while I was driving around, and I read it. Years ago, but not for a very long time. It's just such a staggering achievement. And it's also funnier than you would think.
[00:19:51] Katherine Howe: Ishmael has this kind of wry observational humor to him. Like he decides to go to sea because he's in a bad mood and he has to stop himself from following funeral processions and knocking people's hats off their heads. Just because, which I feel like Who Among Us hasn't had that mood where we're in the street and we just want to like.
[00:20:08] Katherine Howe: Knock somebody's hat off. I feel like it's one of those texts that we all feel like we know or understand. And and yet we've never actually, most of us haven't bothered to sit down and read it. I felt that way about Treasure Island too. I read Treasure Island with my son, and it's clearly a big inspiration for some of the story in a true account.
[00:20:26] Katherine Howe: It's a story that's been remade and retold so many times, it's such a part of the fabric of American popular culture, and yet so few of us have actually sat down with the text and spent some time with it. And it's a fun read too. It's pretty exciting. As a result, my son wants to play Treasure Island all the time, and he gets frustrated when kids don't know the plot.
[00:20:46] Katherine Howe: He doesn't know who Jim Hawkins is. I'm like man, you gotta cut him some slack.
[00:20:49] Ashley Hasty: That's so great.
[00:20:53] Katherine Howe: In the garden is the Admiral Benbow Inn, which is where the story begins in Treasure Island. Sometimes I have to be Jim and he has to be Black Dog. And then we have to give each other the black spot.
[00:21:02] Katherine Howe: It's very fun.
[00:21:04] Ashley Hasty: Oh my gosh. I love that. And he's four, right?
[00:21:07] Katherine Howe: He's almost four. A lot of hats in my house, a lot of swords, a lot of swordplay.
[00:21:12] Ashley Hasty: I could talk to you forever. Our time has flown by. I want to thank you again for joining us on the podcast and sharing your book and your experience as an author with our listeners.
[00:21:22] Ashley Hasty: It was a pleasure.
[00:21:23] Katherine Howe: Thank you so much for having me. And I just want to mention, if anyone wants to keep up with me, I'm on Instagram as at @catherinebhowe. I'm on Twitter sporadically as @catherinebhowe. I'm on Facebook as Catherine Howe on my website which will list some, I'm going to have some events for A True Account.
[00:21:37] Katherine Howe: And so I'm hoping I'll be in Houston. I'll be in Boston. I'll be in South Carolina. I'll probably be in San Diego and to a couple of different book festivals, including Cincinnati. And so I'm hoping any of your listeners who might want to catch up with me in person can find out where they'll be and when and at catherinehowe.com
[00:21:56] Ashley Hasty: Excellent. And yes, and we'll link to your social media and website as well on our website for you. Great.
[00:22:05] Katherine Howe: Thanks again. Thank you so much, Ashley. I had a great time.