About the Molly Chase Series

 Tell us about your book.

The Molly Chase series is an award-winning historical continuity series featuring romance, family drama, society drama, political suspense, espionage, and plenty of humor. The story is set in Boston during the tumultuous early days of the American republic, not long after the ratification of the Constitution. It could be described as Anne of Green Gables meets Gaskell’s North and South meets Kristin Lavransdatter meets The Witch of Blackbird Pond meets Hamilton: An American Musical—with all its contemporary jocularity, but minus Maria Reynolds in her lingerie. This is a clean read.

Where did you get the idea for the story?

I initially wrote a story set in 1770s England with Molly as the central character and an entirely different supporting cast. I spent two years working on that story, all the while knowing that something wasn’t quite right. Boston was at the back of my mind, but I wasn’t willing to admit it, lest I be forced to start over.

What happened?

Two things. First, I learned that the British navy impressed upwards of 10,000 American merchant sailors during the French revolutionary and Napoleonic wars. That gave rise to a nascent idea of a sailor character, and with him the story’s setting shifted from the 1770s to the 1790s. Second, I decided to open the story on this side of the Atlantic. Once that happened, I was forced to let Josiah Robb into the story, and the rest is history.

You really lost two years of work?

Josiah was worth it. I adore that man. And we see and understand Molly so much better through his eyes.

Molly’s father, John Chase, commits suicide and she finds his body, and as a consequence she suffers from PTSD. How did you approach these themes?

Carefully! I researched the topics, of course, but I also was able to draw on the experience and expertise of friends, a psychiatrist, and a professional counselor. My editor also asked a number of pointed questions that helped me clarify John Chase’s backstory, which added complexity to the whole. Molly’s father had long been a “shadow character” for me, and without my editor’s help, his story would have been woefully underdeveloped.

Several historical persons appear in the novel: George Washington and his cabinet, Citizen Genêt, and Thomas Melvill, a minor player in the American Revolution. How did they come to be a part of your story?

We forget how small the United States once was! The 1790 census put the population of Boston at roughly 18,000. In a town that size, you may not know everyone, but you come across the same people, time and again.

Major Thomas Melvill is a key character in my story and the most likely real-life person Josiah would have known. The major was a beloved figure in Boston. He was a friend of Sam Adams and was one of those rowdies at the Boston Tea Party. After the war, as surveyor of Custom House, he would have been acquainted with nearly everyone on the wharves. Josiah would have been no exception.

Josiah also meets the infamous Citizen Genêt, revolutionary France’s ambassador to the United States who tried to override President Washington’s Declaration of Neutrality and draw the country into the French revolutionary wars. Genêt’s ship veered off-course on its way here and landed in Charleston in April 1793, around the same time the news that England had entered the war was reaching our shores. As soon as he landed, Genêt began recruiting American privateers to fight alongside the French navy. In In Pieces, he encounters Josiah while Josiah’s ship is in Charleston and, thinking that he’s the captain, tries to recruit him—one of my favorite scenes to write.

The series features a Protestant-to-Catholic conversion subplot. How did you handle that?

I was initially miffed by Josiah’s interest in Catholicism—not because I’m embarrassed by my faith, but because I didn’t want the story to veer toward didacticism. People often complain that religious fiction is “preachy,” and here I had a character who wanted to convert. Curses!

Now I know that from a storytelling perspective, Josiah’s conversion needed to happen for Molly’s sake. In order for Molly to make peace with her dead father, she needs a broader eschatology than her Anglican upbringing would have allowed—specifically, she needs the concept of purgatory. Such was the inevitable conclusion of my Catholic imagination. And if inevitable, I figured I had better do it well, depicting both sides fairly while also steering clear of merely irritating polemics.

So I made the primary conflict personal rather than theological. Josiah is all but convinced at the beginning of In Pieces, but he doesn’t want to upset his mother, Sarah Robb, a devout Congregationalist and the daughter of a minister. One need not be Catholic or even religious to understand the difficulty of a child going against his parent’s will, or of a parent accepting the decisions of her grown child.

I also utilized Catechism §817-822, which, while grieving the fracture in the Body of Christ, acknowledges that Catholics and Protestants alike share in God’s grace by means of our common baptism. In fact, Josiah’s interest in Catholicism is the direct result of his Protestant father purportedly being in heaven. Think about that!

Can one write a “Catholic novel” about Protestants?

I certainly hope so! Catholic-Protestant differences came to the fore in writing this book, and I would be lying if I said I didn’t struggle to reconcile the two. When writing about faith, most Catholic novelists prefer to employ “signs and symbols,” while many (not all) Protestant writers lean toward direct discourse. Hence the charge of “preachiness” from those who are unaccustomed to it.

Yet I have to engage the dialectical at some level if I’m going to depict my eighteenth-century Congregationalist characters well. Josiah’s interest in Catholicism is owing to a mystical experience that his own tradition cannot explain—the premise is Catholic—yet mysticism is not reason enough for him to convert. He wants to read and talk and argue and meet issues head on. Same with his mother. This is their religious mode, deeply ingrained in them—and even myself. (I’m a convert.) I like to think of some Protestants’ preference for the dialectical as one of many cultural differences that came as a result of the Reformation.

On the flip side, I can see Protestants thinking that Catholics are sometimes too understated. That’s a fair critique.

In Adrift, you introduce Eliza Hall’s point of view. How did you, as a white person, approach writing a mixed race character?

There are many legitimate concerns around white authors writing black and other minority character viewpoints: problems of appropriation, virtue signaling, token characters, anachronism, and the like. Tackling the theme of race in America is “damned if you do, damned if you don’t” proposition, and I would be lying if I said I didn’t hesitate. But frankly, avoiding the subject in fiction is akin to pretending our race issues don’t exist in real life. Plus, Eliza said my hesitation was cowardly.

So! I wrote her story.

The first stay against falling into the pitfalls mentioned above was to develop Eliza’s character as fully as I could. Hers is perhaps the most complex character I’ve written to date, and I’m particularly proud of her. The next stay was to set up individual scenes and the broader story problem so that she has full agency. When Eliza is in a scene, she is in the scene, moving the story along. That Antoine de Laurent loves her is no wonder.

With regards Eliza’s motivations, particularly with regards her son, I took my cues from real life examples. Many moons ago, as a newlywed and bright-eyed recent college graduate, I was a middle school teacher in Washington, D.C.’s racially and socioeconomically diverse Catholic schools. My students’ parents valued education, so much so that even now I’m moved to tears at the thought of it. They sacrificed for their children’s formation and future success. I gave that devotion to Eliza as well as James and Lydia Walden, because I witnessed it in real life.

As I approached the story’s revision, I asked a friend to read through the trickier Eliza scenes and talk me through the various race issues at stake. Eliza’s story includes controversial subject matter which arises from the particularities of 1790s America, and I wanted to make sure I expressed the historical viewpoints accurately and fairly. My beta readers also provided feedback, as did my husband, who has followed the conversation around race in America for years.

As for the white characters, I aimed to show a range of behavior and self-awareness. One example would be the well-intentioned Quaker widow Mrs. Waldorf, who believes in racial equality yet doesn’t always take Eliza’s feelings into consideration, exposing her to racist attacks. The intelligencers, by dent of working closely together, take each other seriously, but they too abide by certain social conventions and hierarchies. Between growing up around servants and his sailing profession, Josiah Robb is at ease with people of any social status, whereas Molly’s upbringing was far more restricted. Our heroine has plenty of room to grow. And let’s not get started on the Warrens, lest I spoil the story for my readers.

This story is first and foremost a romance. Did John Paul II’s Theology of the Body have an influence on your writing?

Absolutely. I would say Molly Chase is my exploration into the Theology of the Body, especially as the story extends into marriage itself, rather than ending at the proposal. The book follows Molly and Josiah along the path of sanctification through the joys and trials of marriage. They grapple with the meaning of suffering and taste the sweetness of the Cross.

In fact, the story contains not one love story, but two: one human, one divine. Not only does Josiah court Molly, but so does God. God’s love and Josiah’s love are of a piece, bringing Molly healing, then sanctification, and finally theosis. The Molly Chase series is a story about love, and a story oriented toward Love.