Go Tell the Bees That I Am Gone
Go Tell the Bees That I Am Gone
A modern alternative to SparkNotes and CliffsNotes, SuperSummary offers high-quality Study Guides with detailed chapter summaries and analysis of major themes, characters, and more.
Summaries & Analyses
Author Insights
NEWQuizzes
NEWReading Tools
Diana Gabaldon on Go Tell the Bees That I Am Gone
In her own words: quotes and insights from the author.Why she wrote it
The story a courtship ending couldn’t tellThe book’s title comes from a practice older than the series itself, and Gabaldon placed it at the center of BEES because it names exactly what the novel is doing: keeping something alive by remembering to speak to it.
Talking to your bees is a very old Celtic custom (known in other parts of Europe, too) that made it to the Appalachians. You always tell the bees when someone is born, dies, comes or goes — because if you don’t keep them informed, they’ll fly away.
The question she set out to answer in BEES was one she had carried since the first book. She made the remark in a panel with Sam Heughan and Maril Davis, recorded around the November 2021 publication, while noting that she and her own husband were approaching their fiftieth anniversary.
I’m not sure that I want to tell just a courtship story. I said, I want to tell the story of how you stay married for 50 years. [paraphrased from audio]
Every previous book in the Outlander series had separated Jamie and Claire for significant stretches. BEES puts them together through a sustained wartime marriage, which is where that question finally gets its full answer.
The American Revolution was not an arbitrary setting. She chose it, in the same panel, for a reason that reads less like period research and more like a writer selecting the sharpest instrument available.
The 18th century was the place to be. It was just one thing after another. [paraphrased from audio]
How she wrote it
Snakes, set visits, and a Mohawk elderBEES took roughly seven years to write, partly because Gabaldon was writing it while the television adaptation of the earlier books was in production. Rather than treat the two projects as competing demands, she found a way to make one feed the other.
I would bring my computer on set and write in between things and so forth. So, it was kind of a joint fertilization, you might say. [paraphrased from audio]
Each Outlander novel generates its own structural shape during composition. Gabaldon described BEES’s shape in the Penguin Random House fan Q&A video, recorded around publication, and pointedly refused to tell viewers which end of the animal is the dangerous one.
This book is shaped like a snake. It starts out all slinky and seductive and innocent, and then it starts looping, and it picks up, you know, these complexities from different people and different evolutions of conflicts. So it builds up into a coil, and then you get the other end of the snake. [paraphrased from audio]
Returning to a long series after years away meant locating emotional material that had been set down mid-run. In a 2018 Collider interview, while BEES was still in progress, she described what that archaeology actually requires.
There are pieces where I encounter, you know, an emotional thread that I had dropped in the last book. So, I will go back to read through it and pick that up so it will come into the new book with its original power.
Her editing method applies a single interrogation to every unit of prose, from individual words up to full scenes. She documented it in a September 2019 post on her website, where she published an original passage, its assembly buffer, and the revised version side by side. Nothing cut goes to waste; it moves to a file called the Assembly Buffer in case it turns out to be needed.
Do I need this word? Do I need this sentence? Do I need this paragraph? Do I need this scene?
One of BEES’s most precise structural moves went unconfirmed until after publication, when a reader on TheLitForum noticed that the question “how much of that blood is yours?” appears three times: first in Chapter 6 after a minor bear injury, again in Chapter 106, and finally at Kings Mountain, where the answer lands with full weight. When the reader asked whether the pattern was deliberate, Gabaldon answered without equivocation.
Yes, that was indeed my intent. <g> Glad it worked for you!
The exchange is also an example of how she scales a motif across a very long book: the early uses are so low-stakes that most readers file them away without flagging them, which is exactly what lets the third instance hit.
On craft choices
What bees know that readers don’tHer biology PhD trained her to follow research wherever it leads, and bee research for this book turned up a fact she hadn’t known despite the scientific background. She described the physical sensation of placing a hand on a winter hive and feeling the vibration of ten thousand wings beating in unison to keep the colony alive. The discovery went directly into the book.
It was really a gift from him. [paraphrased from audio]
She was referring specifically to an 82-year-old Mohawk elder who had written to flag problems with the television series’s rendering of Mohawk language and customs. She wrote back asking for specific corrections, including the phrase “swiftest of blizzards,” and he responded with the translation. Her previous book had relied on a single vocabulary guide; this book had a native speaker checking the work.
What she wants us to sit with
Sobering thoughts and a very likable villainThe marriage at the center of BEES is under wartime pressure for most of the novel’s length, which is the condition Gabaldon chose to test her central argument. She had articulated that argument in a 2014 Goodreads interview about the series as a whole, and BEES is where it gets its hardest trial.
They actually appreciate each other for who they are, not merely for their external, physical trappings. They are both extremely honest individuals, and they believe in commitment.
She built at least one character in BEES whose moral status she has no intention of resolving for the reader. The remark came in the Penguin Random House fan Q&A, and she offered the warning with evident satisfaction.
There’s one very equivocal character in Go Tell the Bees That I Am Gone... You’ll have to make up your own mind about him. He’s very likable, I can tell you that much — but then villains often are. [paraphrased from audio]
The Revolutionary War setting carries an argument she wants to land on contemporary readers. There is a scene in BEES where Jamie asks Claire how people in the 20th century handled militia-building and wartime decisions, and she has to tell him they didn’t do it better. The remark below came in the same fan Q&A, after she walked through that scene.
People meet with the same conflicts over and over and over again... people are making the same sorts of decisions and the same sorts of mistakes that they have always made, and they probably will keep on doing it — which is a sobering thought. [paraphrased from audio]