The May Queen received a 4+ star review, making it an IndieReader Approved title.
Following find an interview with author Michelle Tocher.
What is the name of the book and when was it published?
The book is called The May Queen, it was first published in 2008. The new release is a very lightly revised new edition.
What’s the book’s first line?
“She has spent all her life keeping secrets.”
What’s the book about? Give us the “pitch”.
When Molly was a little girl, she adored her glamorous aunt who told her enchanting fairy tales. But one day she told Molly a disturbing story about a tiny maiden who was destined to live underground and marry a blind old mole. She said, “Pay attention, Molly Mole, because this is the story of your life.”
Molly grew to distrust and fear her strange aunt, but now that she is in her early thirties, the story still haunts her. She suspects that secrets have been kept from her, but she’d rather stay in the dark, just as her aunt predicted she would. But May won’t let her. Unbeknownst to Molly’s parents, May has become deathly ill and she’s not willing to take the secret to her grave. When Molly learns the truth that May was actually her mother, there’s hardly any time left for Molly to hold her, or to get her bearings in the new reality of her life. She’s furious with her parents, May is dying, and everybody is reeling. Yet May’s death makes this family’s redemption possible.
Fairy takes give a powerful charge to this story that drills into the dark layers of what it means to be a “May Queen,” the most beautiful flower in the garden who is put to death by acts of lust and envy.
What inspired you to write the book? A particular person? An event?
A very good friend of mine died in her mid-50s and left me bitterly grieving. She was a dream analyst, a fairy tale teller, and a visionary writer, and we had just started to plunge into a lifelong exploration of fairy tales and their reverberations through life. Then she died quite suddenly, and left me absolutely bereft, not only because I had lost a dear friend but because she was the only person I had ever met who validated my belief in the revelatory power of fairy tales and mythic imagination. She was my own personal “Auntie May” and it was very difficult to go on believing in my writing after she died. Then I was given a position as writer-in-residence at Gilda’s Club, and between writing groups I would go and sit in a sushi bar. That’s when Molly quite surprisingly made her first appearance and introduced me to her Auntie May. After that the whole family started speaking as if everybody meant to get something off their chests. Their voices were so clear and distinct that it felt like changing a channel to go from one to the other. I felt that I was part of the healing of this family that lived just on the other side of the wall. I didn’t know where the story was headed, but I trusted it. And in a mysterious way, I felt connected to my friend through the writing. We had always met in stories, so why would anything change?
What’s the main reason someone should really read this book?
The IR reviewer spoke about the novel as a “grief narrative” and that’s very perceptive. It was certainly written through my grief and captured my experience of having a loved one ripped from you before you’ve hardly had a chance to know them. Grief is a wild thing, and in a way, so was this story. It was a keening, a long cry seeking comfort and ultimately finding it through the telling of a story about healing after the death of a loved one.
I’m interested in stories that traverse dimensions to express the multifaceted reality of the way we live and grieve and die. Memory, myth, dreams, ordinary experience pass through us. Strange synchronicities and mysterious events occur. As a storyteller I want to give language to the way we experience these wild regions of life.
What’s the most distinctive thing about the main character? Who-real or fictional-would you say the character reminds you of?
The main character in the story is May Galloway. She’s the consummate outsider. She’s the one you don’t want to invite to a party because she’s too glamorous. Her beauty hurts the eyes. She’s like the “dark princess” in Richard Kennedy’s story, the princess whose beauty is so bright that she can’t be seen directly or the gazer will go blind. As the princess grows up, she becomes as blind as everyone else. She can’t be seen, and she can’t see herself. This is an extremely isolated state, and I’m fascinated by it, by the paradox that the most visible beauty is the least well seen or understood. May Galloway is that beauty, writ large and life-sized.
Is there something in particular that motivates you (fame? fortune?)
What motivates me is the wish to tell stories where the setting is rooted under the surface. I’m interested in the psychological, spiritual states we inhabit, and the way we make sense of our life experience. If you think of our internal states as physical states, there are many more similarities between human beings than differences. There is a great deal of territory within us that is unexplored. Imaginative thinkers, myth-tellers and poets give language to the inner states that we share with other humans, and also with non-human living beings.
My hope is that literature will find more and more intersections with dreams, that fantasy will turn its attention to discovering reality and we’ll have a new form of imaginative literature and storytelling. Since I have never found a name for it, I have given it the name “wonderlit”.
Einstein wrote, “It has become appallingly obvious that our technology has exceeded our humanity.” I believe it’s the artists who have the power to evolve our humanity by putting us in contact with our imaginative, dreaming minds.
I’ve been inspired by wayfinders like Carl Jung, Joseph Campbell, Marie-Lousie von Franz, and other mythtellers, psychologists and philosophers, but ultimately, I’ve had to look inside for the light of imagination. I believe that in the end all artists are miners of the underworld, and that’s where you might say the future has hidden the light.