Ariel Lawhon's novel The Frozen River is set in 1789 and tells the story of a real-life Massachusetts midwife.. Though the novel is fiction, the midwife was real, and the book was based on around thirty years of her personal diaries.
What were rights like for women in the brand-new state of Massachusetts? What about the courts? The practice of medicine?
In this episode, executive producer Rebecca Lavoie talks with Lawhon about The Frozen River, and why more people should know about the women's stories lost to conventional American history.
Transcript
Hannah McCarthy: This is Civics 101. I'm Hannah McCarthy. Today on the show, we're going to be breaking format and bringing you a conversation with author Ariel Lawhon. Recorded live at writers on a New England Stage in Portsmouth, New Hampshire. The reason we're airing this in the Civics 101 feed is because Lauren's novel, The Frozen River, is about a time and a place in our country. We think about a lot around here post-revolutionary America, New England, to be precise. The book is historical fiction, but it's based on a real life midwife named Martha Ballard, who lived an extraordinary life providing care to more than a thousand women during her career. The novel takes place in 1789, in Hallowell, Maine. It's part murder mystery, but also explores timely themes through an historical lens women's rights, health care, the criminal legal system, all things we've touched on in our podcast. If you've read The Frozen River, you'll really enjoy this conversation. If not, we recommend it. But you can listen anyway because it's pretty fascinating and we're putting a link to more about the book in our show notes. So without further ado, here's our executive producer Rebecca LaVoy with author Ariel Lawhon, recorded live for writers on a New England stage.
Rebecca Lavoie: I am so glad that you're all here joining us for this conversation. Thank you for coming out for it. It feels like a really good time to curl up with a good book and talk about it. And thank you so much for joining us. Ariel.
Ariel Lawhon: Thank you so much for having me here. I am delighted this is my first time here. Really? Yes. First time.
Rebecca Lavoie: So The Frozen River. It tells the fictionalized story of a real life person, 18th century midwife Martha Ballard. How did you learn about Martha Ballard?
Ariel Lawhon: So Martha Ballard, if you're not familiar with her, there are three things you need to know. She was a midwife in the 1700s who delivered over a thousand babies in the course of her career, and she never lost a mother in childbirth. The second thing you need to know about her is that she kept a diary for over 30 years, at a time when most women could not read or write. And the third thing that I find fascinating is that she was the great aunt of Clara Barton, founder of the American Red cross, and she was the great great grandmother of Mary Hobart, who was one of the first female physicians in the United States. And I knew none of this until August 8th, 2008. And the.
Rebecca Lavoie: Specific date.
Ariel Lawhon: The specific date. I was pregnant with our fourth child. My husband and I had four kids in five years. I take that back. We did not have them. I had them, and I was pregnant with number four, and I had gone to a routine doctor's visit on August 8th, 2008, and my doctor was late for the appointment. So I'd been stranded in his waiting room and I had two options. I could reschedule and go home, but there were children there and I didn't miss them currently, and my husband had them, so probably nobody was going to die. The other option was I could stick it out and wait for my doctor to show up. And so I chose the latter, and I was in his waiting room for hours the entire afternoon, and I finished the book that I'd brought with me. And then I read all of the magazines in the office, and there was nothing left except for that pile of scary pamphlets they have in the corner that you don't want. To read because you don't want to know how you're going to die.
Ariel Lawhon: As I was flipping through those pamphlets and underneath I found a small devotional called Our Daily Bread, Really common in doctor's offices in Texas at the time. So I flipped open this devotional and to August 8th, 2008, I still have the page, which is why it's memorable. And I proceeded to read the story of a woman named Martha Ballard, who had delivered over a thousand babies in her career and never lost a mother in childbirth. And I remember sitting there thinking, the doctor that I'm waiting on cannot boast a record like that. But Martha Ballard did it in the 1700s without the benefit of cesarean section or modern medicine. And I just remember thinking that would make a great novel. So I ripped the page out and I put it in my purse. It is worth noting here because I got hate mail recently for ripping the page like, oh, come on, it's a disposable. Like, it's three months. You're meant to chuck it in the trash. After the three months, I did not desecrate the leather bound hardcover book.
Rebecca Lavoie: It's like desecrating Us Weekly in a doctor's office, right? It's fine. It'll be fine.
Ariel Lawhon: But I kid you not. Two minutes later, my doctor walked in. And I think about that sometimes. When I'll turn around, I look at my bookshelf and I see the frozen river there. I think if I'd gone home and rescheduled, this book would not exist.
Rebecca Lavoie: Mhm.
Rebecca Lavoie: So I listened to your author's note for the book. In it you describe yourself as a collector of people. Yes. And you also say that this book is different than the other ones you've written, because they could be described as biographical fiction, but this one can't. So can you talk about that?
Ariel Lawhon: I love people, I love collecting their stories. My favorite thing is to stumble across somebody or a moment in time, or a person that I'm vaguely familiar with, but I don't know the specifics. And then to do a deep dive into their world. The difference with this particular book is that, unlike my other four, there was so little research material available. We have Martha Ballard's diary, and we have a biography called a midwife's tale by Laurel Thatcher Ulrich, which go buy it. It's amazing it won a Pulitzer. It is the definitive history of Martha's life. We have those two things. Her diary is this really intimate day to day look at the life of a woman in the 1700s. And then the biography is this 30,000 foot view of the overarching life and times. But I was writing one story set during six months of her life, and there was so little to go on. Unlike many of my other novels, there were no conversations recorded. There were no specifics about her relationships and her friendships. It had to be created out of whole cloth. And so in that sense, this is the most fictional of my stories, even though the vast majority of what happens in the book is real.
Rebecca Lavoie: Can you describe the way that Martha wrote her diaries? Because I think it's fascinating. They're not written like prose style. So you, I think, had to imagine, you know, the details around them, but also rethink the way she could have written them so that we could read them in your book. But how were they actually written?
Ariel Lawhon: We call it a diary. It's really not. It's not even a journal. Are you familiar with a daybook? My grandmother kept a daybook. That's more of what it is. She will give you the date. She will give you the weather. Oftentimes, she'll tell you what she cooked for dinner, whose baby she delivered, who came to visit. It is very truncated, very specific. There is no little to no editorializing in the 900 pages of her diary that we have left. If you were to read her diary, which you probably won't, because I will be honest. It's rough sledding. It's.
Rebecca Lavoie: And it's expensive.
Ariel Lawhon: It's expensive. My copy cost $350. It was a good investment. I think it paid off. Um, so you're not going to read it. But if you did, there is one phrase that you would find repeated thousands of times. She'll give you the date. She'll give you the weather. She made chicken, she delivered a baby. Her friend came to visit. And she will end the diary entry with this one phrase and she will say, I have been at home. And it was sort of this mantra that happened throughout her diary. But for me, I wrote this book during Covid and every day I would go to my desk, I would open the document, I would open my research material, things I needed to do, the notebook of what scenes I was going to write that day, and then I would open her diary and I would read several passages. And she did this, and she did this. I have been at home, so my mantra became me too, Martha. Also, yes, I have been at home for days and days and weeks and months and years. And when I think back to that girl in the doctor's office, pregnant with three other really little kids at home, I think that girl could not have written this book as it exists now. But also, I needed to write this book during that very specific time. It gave me this affinity for Martha Ballard because her entire life, her work and her home life was one piece. There was no separation. She was at home with all of her children, with her husband constantly. And I feel as though I understood her in a way that I would not have been able to understand her had I written it at any other time?
Rebecca Lavoie: So the novel opens with a dead body in an icebound New England river, and Martha is a midwife, but she also becomes a detective. In your book, how did you decide to do that construct, and are you a mystery writer now?
Ariel Lawhon: I've always been a mystery writer. I love a good old fashioned whodunit, I love them. I have not written a whodunit since my very first novel, but I grew up reading Agatha Christie. It's fun for me, and when I was trying to decide what I would write next, it's always the question, what will I write next? I was like, I don't know what the subject matter will be, but I know I want to do a murder mystery. And so I went into it specifically knowing I want to do a murder mystery. And how fun would that be to have a midwife detective? We don't get those very often.
Rebecca Lavoie: But our midwives perfectly suited to be detectives in a way, because as we learn in the book, she's a collector and keeper of secrets. Right?
Ariel Lawhon: So she's in your home. She is delivering your baby. But what we don't realize about midwives is that they were much, much more than the person who delivered your baby. If you got cut or burned, you called the midwife and they would give you stitches and they would come make a tonic. Make a salve. They were your primary care providers. They were your pharmacist. They were your general practitioner in most communities at the time. Because in the 1780s, in the wilds of what was then the District of Maine in the state of Massachusetts, many towns did not have their own physician. So if something goes wrong, you quite literally call for the midwife. But she was also the coroner. Somebody dies, they call her to inspect the body to see if she can try and determine the cause of death for any potential legal proceedings that happen. And so, yes, the book begins with a body. The first line in the book is the body floats downstream, and then it gets locked in the river when it freezes, which, for the record, I am from the southwest and I did not know that could happen.
Rebecca Lavoie: Welcome to New Hampshire.
Rebecca Lavoie: Yes.
Ariel Lawhon: They find the body, extract it from the river. They call Martha Ballard. She inspects the body, comes to a conclusion, and immediately is interrupted by the new town doctor who has a very different idea of what happened. And then we are off to the races.
Rebecca Lavoie: I'd love you to talk a little bit more about that, because the doctor character in your book is new to town. He can't not say that he was trained at Harvard like every other sentence.
Ariel Lawhon: Yeah.
Rebecca Lavoie: But what were doctors doing at this time? Like, how did they differ from what the midwives were providing?
Ariel Lawhon: So it's a really, really interesting point in American history and also medical history. Because we have this newly formed Harvard University, we have some of the first classes to graduate, their first medical students, all men, and they are going out into these communities to to doctor to treat these patients. But it was about that same time that the medical community that was entirely male looked at labor and delivery as a source of lost income. So modern obstetrics really began in a way that doctors were going, oh, that is medical. I should be treating it. I should be delivering these babies. I have studied anatomy in a textbook. I can do this many times. What happened, however, is that they did not bother to learn from the women who had been doing this for decades and decades, and had thousands of years worth of knowledge passed down one to another. So when this doctor shows up in this town, his name is Doctor Benjamin Page. It sets up this conflict between midwifery and obstetrics. But it was a real conflict that happened in Martha Ballard's world, because you have a 24 year old boy showing up with a degree and lots of book knowledge and no experiential knowledge, and he begins to encroach upon Martha's territory with really deadly results. And all of the births and the situations and things that go wrong in the book really happened. And they are recorded in her diary. And it was this really fascinating. Rivalry is the wrong word. It was just this conflict between these two ways of treating women in labor.
Rebecca Lavoie: I'm curious how many people in this book were based on real people, or was it all of them? Most of them.
Ariel Lawhon: The vast majority. There might be 1 or 2 that are composite Characters. And then there were plenty that I had to strip out. There's a lot of people in this book. It is a very heavy populated village. And so I had to be judicious in who got time on the page and who fit into the specific story that I was trying to tell.
Rebecca Lavoie: One of the funniest details in your author's note is you talk about how many of the women in the village were named Hannah. So you actually changed the name of some of those women.
Ariel Lawhon: Everyone’s Hannah. Lots of Hannah's, lots of Rebeccas. And then you get lots of really, um, archaic biblical names, like her husband is Ephraim, which took me half the book before I realized how that was pronounced. So it's kind of fun. You get to use some names that you don't typically find in a novel.
Rebecca Lavoie: How is Ephraim her husband represented in her writing? Because in the book, he manifests as this incredibly feminist, incredibly supportive man in 1789 feels very much like the ideal partner today. So how much did you know about him when you were writing about him?
Ariel Lawhon: We know basic facts. We know that they were married for the entirety of their lives. We know that they had nine children, six of whom were living at the time. The story opens. We know that they were business partners. They ran a mill together. They worked together. We know that at the very least, he was supportive of her career. She had a lifelong, thriving medical career as a midwife. It is not a stretch for me to believe that that translated into the rest of their life and their family. Um. Ephraim Ballard, it is important to note the version in this book resembles my own husband greatly. So that is, that's my influence. That's his right. His mother did a good job. Um, he's actually home. I'm here because he is home with our two sick teenage boys making them soup and taking them to the doctor. Good men have existed for all of history, and that is one thing that I think is very easy to forget. My personal pet peeve in fiction is that we so rarely get to see good men, and we so rarely get to see good marriages in particular. And as a novelist, I know why it is easier to write The Bad Marriage, because all of the conflict exists right there. If you write a good marriage, the conflict has to come from elsewhere. But when I sat down to tell this story, knowing that Martha was remarkable, knowing that she must have had support in her home, I wanted to tell the story of a good marriage.
Rebecca Lavoie: Something else that's somewhat rare is a novel where the protagonist is a woman in her mid 50s. What is that? What was that choice? Because you had 27 years of her life to choose from. So why did you make that choice?
Ariel Lawhon: Again, another pet peeve but also bred from life experience. Like I said, the girl in the doctor's office could not have written Martha Ballard, who is 54 years old when the novel opens. I also this is not the first. It's the first novel idea I came up with. It is not the first I've written. It's the fifth. And I kept going back to it and thinking, is it time? Is it time? I'd pull out that piece of paper that I stole.
Ariel Lawhon: And I'd go, ah. Not yet, not yet. And I used to think it's because it's a hard novel to write. It's a hard novel to pull off. I have since realized I just wasn't ready. I needed more life experience under my belt. A major theme in this novel is about having grown children, having kids grow up and leave you. And who are you as a person when the primary work that you have done for decades is now over? And I had finally reached that point in my life, but also not to being young myself. I find that I want to see more mature women on the page.
Hannah McCarthy: We'll be right back with more of writers on a New England stage with Ariel Lawhon after a quick break.
Rebecca Lavoie: Hallowell, Maine is where the book is set, but Hallowell also, to me became a character in the story. You're not from New England. How did you pull that off?
Ariel Lawhon: Tomorrow will be my first time to Maine in my entire life.
Rebecca Lavoie: Amazing.
Ariel Lawhon: So my original plan was to go to Maine to research the book when I was writing. Because I have 900 children and I had them so close together. Research trips were just impossible for much of my career, but I was like, I can do it. I can get to Maine. I'm going to go research this woman in person. And Covid happened and we were all stuck at home. And listen, had I known Covid was coming, I would not have suggested to my husband that we buy a drum set for our youngest son for Christmas, December 2019. Alas, the book was written to the sound of a thousand drums over my head. But Covid ruined that opportunity completely, and so I was stuck doing this the way that I always have been, which is my research material, my imagination, Google maps, lots of pictures, and then a recreation. That is my version of a place, my version of an event, my version of what could have happened. But all towns are the same. Really. People are the same. That is one thing you learn when you have. My job is that people have been peopling since the dawn of time.
Rebecca Lavoie: You may or may not have intended it, but this novel speaks very much to many elements of where we are today. Except in many ways things seemed not necessarily easier for women, certainly, but simpler. Can you talk about the freedoms, the rights, the sort of things that surprised you? Learning about how women lived in 1789 and early America?
Ariel Lawhon: People always ask me, if you could go back in time, what era would you live in? And I say, none of them. History was awful for women, really, prior to about 1900, in particular in America in the 1700s, what we know as our legal rights in general, not even just as women were bare bones, the court system barely existed. We were talking about this backstage. We'd had a constitution for two years. The Bill of rights had not been written in the Constitution. We had the first five articles, most of what we know as due process, most of the rights that we take for granted, do not even think about did not exist, particularly for women. And one of the things that I discovered early when writing this book is during Martha's time, women could not testify in court without the presence of their husbands or their fathers, with one exception if you were a midwife, you were granted legal status that would let you come in and testify in court Because one of the laws that had been written early on, I want to say it was in the 1500s, do not quote me. The hard drive has been halfway deleted because I'm working on a new book. But this law was called a law for the punishment of fornication and the maintenance of bastards children. And it was a law on the books in Massachusetts at the time. And it basically said, if a woman had a child outside of wedlock, she'd have to go to the court and either pay a fine, possibly spend a night in jail. The man had no requirements, there was no fee, there was no jail time. There was no nothing. But for a midwife, one of the things that they were required to do if they delivered a child that was born out of wedlock was ask the mother the name of the father. And this is the part that is kind of hilarious to me. The people who wrote the law genuinely believed that women were not capable of lying in childbirth. I'd have lied to you just for talking to me.
Ariel Lawhon: Clearly, they.knew nothing about women and less about childbirth. But Martha was required by law to inquire of the name. Sometimes they told her the name, sometimes they didn't. She would have to go to court and declare. The mother said this or the mother refused. This book takes place 50 years post Puritan era, and we tend to think of the Puritans as really pure. Ha ha. Not so much.
Rebecca Lavoie: Yes, there's so much extramarital, premarital sex in this book. Like, is that is that how it was?
Ariel Lawhon: Fascinating tidbit for you in Martha's time, based on her diary, based on the children that she delivered for in ten first pregnancies were conceived out of wedlock, 1 to 2 in ten were born outside of wedlock. So you had a lot of shotgun weddings and you had a lot of 9 pound premature children. Gosh, biology works man. It has worked from the dawn of time, and I loved that Martha approached this reality with a very, very dispassionate view and absolutely no judgment. And I thought, gosh, we have sanitized so much of human history, and we tend to think if it happened back then, they must have been really proper about it. No. Yeah. Though, as Shakespeare says, the world must be peopled.
Rebecca Lavoie: While you were writing this, though. I mean, the conversation was really shifting in the country about reproductive rights, women's rights. The Dobbs decision came down in June of 2022, for instance. And, you know, women's reproductive rights, how we talk about things like extramarital sex, premarital sex is really shifting during this time. Were you informed by some of that when you were writing this book?
Ariel Lawhon: That is a great question. So two things can be true. I was editing the book about the time of the Dobbs decision, which clearly was front of mind for the entire country. But also one of my jobs when I approach any moment in history, is to try to separate the modern era in which I live, because I learned early on history does not need me to editorialize it. And so to look at this story, I had to really focus every day to sit down and go, okay, Martha Ballard could not imagine the world that we live in. Martha Ballard could not imagine going and voting. She couldn't imagine most of the things that women today enjoy. So if that was her reality, what is she focused on? If she's living at a moment when these things don't exist? What is her focus? How does she view the world? And that is the thing that I worked really hard to build in. And in doing that, it became a story that you could read in the newspaper. Honestly, you could open any newspaper in the country today and read something similar, but because it's set several hundred years in the past. There's this level of separation that allows you to look at it in a way that you cannot. If you're reading a modern story. History changes, but it doesn't.
Rebecca Lavoie: There's a black character in your book, a traveling medical provider that you call doctor. Can you talk about this character and the real person that she was based on?
Ariel Lawhon: Again, you're not going to read Martha's diary. If you did, you would find a very small handful of references to a black female doctor that would occasionally come to Hallowell, Maine. And what's fascinating, other than she uses black female and doctor. She doesn't say nurse, she doesn't say midwife. She uses the phrase physician. Is that when this woman would come to Hallowell, Martha's friends and neighbors skipped over her medical care and went to this other woman. Mm. I do not think. Is it a stretch to say that means that she had superior medical skills to Martha? What is fascinating, however, is that this woman's name is never recorded in Martha's diary. But at the time there were 12 free black families living in Hallowell. Massachusetts was the first state to abolish slavery, and at the time there were 12 families in this town that Martha knew. She worked with. She delivered their babies. She bartered and traded and talked to them. She knew their names and recorded them in her diary, with one exception, this female physician. And it made me think, does she not know it? Or does she purposefully not record it? And so she is one of the characters that I loved most because again, this is the story of our world. Women so often get written out of history. Yeah, but Martha made sure that there was a mention of her.
Hannah McCarthy: Stay tuned for more of this edition of writers on a New England Stage with Ariel Lawhon after the break.
Rebecca Lavoie: You talked about this being a time when the Constitution was two years old, yet there's a legal procedure at the center of your book to in addition to the mystery, we also have this like law and order situation in court. What did you learn about that process when you were researching the going to court? Like the laws that how it worked?
Ariel Lawhon: It was bonkers.
Ariel Lawhon: The whole thing was nuts. I mean, imagine. So there were three levels, right? There's the the petty level. Your neighbor steals your cow, or your neighbor curses on the Sabbath and you want to lodge a complaint. So the lowest level is petty complaints. Somebody didn't pay a bill. Somebody punched you in the nose kind of thing. The next is more serious. It is theft. It is murder, it is rape, it is assault. And then the highest higher level was appeals court. So to say they would handle any issues that couldn't get resolved in the lower courts. And then you had the Supreme Court. And it was really fascinating for me to approach this from a modern mindset where we think of due process, we think of rights, we think there are things that are established and you are innocent until proven guilty, and you're given a lawyer. If you can't afford one and you read your Miranda rights, bupkis. None of it didn't exist. Most of the time, if a woman was assaulted, her daddy, her husband, her brothers were going to take care of it before it could ever get to the courts. And so you've got this kind of freewheeling vengeance aside, that was happening over here. And then you've got a baby country trying to establish the rules by which we live civilly. And those two things are constantly in conflict throughout the story.
Rebecca Lavoie: An audience member wants to know, have you ever visited a setting or location from one of your books and been disappointed that it didn't live up to your imagination?
Ariel Lawhon: So I've never really visited a location, but something fun has happened with every single book that I have written. I have been contacted after the publication by somebody that has a relationship with the book. With my first novel. It's called The Wife, the maid and the mistress is about a missing judge. I got an email from a woman and she goes, Mrs. Lawson would love to know where you did the research for your novel, The Showgirl. And your novel was my grandmother. I was like, oh, God, I did that to somebody's grandmother.
Rebecca Lavoie: Oh.
Ariel Lawhon: Um, with my second novel, I got to talk to a little tiny, tiny, tiny old German man whose father had taken him on a tour of the Hindenburg prior to its last flight. And he's like, you got it right. My third novel is set during the Russian Revolution, and it's about Anastasia Romanovna and the woman who is her believed to be her most famous impostor. And I got an email from a woman at the University of Virginia. She did genetic research, and she told me that she'd read the novel, that she loved it. And she's like, I just want you to know, I was the person that did the genetic research to determine whether or not Anastasia Romanov did survive the Russian Revolution. Wow. And she proceeds to tell me how she was walking across the campus that day, being the only person in the world who knew at that moment whether she had or hadn't.
Rebecca Lavoie: Another audience question. Did the Ballards really know Paul Revere?
Ariel Lawhon: That was a little fictional bit. The people asked me about a lot, and it was just fun. It was just fun I had, unrelated to the plotting of this book, stumbled across pictures of Revere Pewter and he signed it all. And then later on, I was researching the book and I realized that part of what she would do is she would mix her ink in small pewter dishes. And I thought, why not?
Rebecca Lavoie: I mean, New England's a small.place, right?
Rebecca Lavoie: We know each other.
Ariel Lawhon: They didn't.
Rebecca Lavoie: One of the things I love about your website, and I've never seen this on an author website before. This specifically is you show the room where you write and you actually give a tour of different elements of the room. What interests you about the spaces in which people write?
Ariel Lawhon: I cannot prove this. I don't even know how you would do a scientific study, but I think where a book is written informs the book itself. For me, that is room in my house that used to be a dining room that my husband closed off and turned into an office, and it's got this old desk. A number of years ago, he bought me this. It's tiny. It's not much bigger than this. It is a teacher's desk that was pulled out of an old one room schoolhouse. And it's got all the stains and chips and nicks, and I love to sit there and think what stories were told at this desk. Who taught here?
Rebecca Lavoie: You've written about all these different eras, World War two. You've written about the Romanovs, Russian Revolution. Is there a time that you are just dying to write about, that you are searching for a story to fit?
Ariel Lawhon: Oh yes and no. So my next one is set during medieval Ireland, which, if you think 1700s Maine is hard to write about. Geez. Also, I didn't think before I decided to write about a pirate. The fact that I get seasick.
Ariel Lawhon: Yeah, that’s turning out to be a bit of a problem. So that is the next book. Actually the one that I'm waiting for, the dream book for me, and I have most of it built in my head, is actually a Western.
Rebecca Lavoie: Of course, there is the Pulitzer Prize winning book about Martha Ballard, but she doesn't appear in women like her. Don't appear in any of our history textbooks when we go to school. You know, it's the Founding Fathers. It's very much for the perspective of the men of the time. How do you think our understanding of American history would shift if the Martha Ballard's of that time were just as present in our textbooks?
Ariel Lawhon: It would be revolutionary, if you think about it. When it comes to big conflicts, history is written by the winners. The losers never get to tell their version. But history is also written by those who were educated, who had the access to books, reading, writing. And throughout so much of history, women were in the sidelines. But I always say, if you want to know what really happened at any moment in history, go talk to the women who lived it. Find their records if you can, because they record totally different things. Men are obsessed with the wars and the bullets and the bombs. Not all of them. That's a gross generalization. But men do this. Women do this, and they focus on the people and the relationships and what they have lost, and the small betrayals and what it cost them at any moment in history. And the fact is, we need both. We need the big and we need the small, and we've lost so much of it. It's why I do what I do. And I could live a hundred years and never write enough books to really scratch the surface of the lives of women that we have forgotten. But I am trying.
Rebecca Lavoie: Ariel Lawhon I will read anything that you write after reading this book. Thank you so much again. Thank you.
Ariel Lawhon: Thank you for being here.
Hannah McCarthy: Writers on a New England Stage was hosted by our executive producer Rebecca Lavoie, who also produced this episode. The featured author was Ariel Lawhon. You can learn more about her book, The Frozen River by clicking the link in our show notes. The Music Hall president and chief executive officer is Tina Sawtelle. The producer for the live show was NPR's Sarah Plourde. Literary producer for the music hall is Brittany Wasson. The production manager is Zhanna Morris. Live sound and recording was engineered by Ian Martin. Lighting and house tech by Drew Fabrizio. Music in this episode by blue Dot sessions, Chris Zabriskie and Epidemic Sound, Civics 101 is hosted by me, Hannah McCarthy and Nick Capodice. Our senior producer is Cristina Phillips. Civics 101 is a production of NHPR, New Hampshire Public Radio.