Heartwood
Heartwood
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Amity Gaige on Heartwood
In her own words: quotes and insights from the author.Why she wrote it
A woman waiting for rescue that never cameThe novel’s premise locked into place when Gaige read about Geraldine Largay, a 66-year-old nurse who got lost in Maine in 2013 and died before search teams reached her. What she couldn’t put down was not the tragedy itself but the act Largay performed while waiting.
The idea came from a real-life event, in which a female Appalachian Trail hiker got lost in Maine in 2013. I’d wanted to write an odyssey set in the woods, and I couldn’t shake the thought of this woman waiting for a rescue that never came. The hiker was a nurse, so this made me think to set my novel postpandemic, as my character is ‘walking off the war.’ This book was just fun to write. It was play; it was philosophical; it was post-Covid therapy.
When the pandemic arrived, Gaige had already set the novel in 2013. Moving the timeline forward to 2022 changed what the hike meant for her protagonist Valerie: it was no longer a walk through a historical event but a reckoning with something Gaige’s own generation had just survived. The letters Largay wrote to her family while stranded became the formal key that unlocked the whole book.
That was really the spark of the book — the letters. The book is all one letter to her mom.
Gaige had been writing place-rooted fiction for years, and the Appalachian Trail, a 2,190-mile footpath running from Georgia to Maine, felt like an institution with immediate meaning for American readers. But what drew her past the geography was the particular kind of person who attempts the whole trail.
[What really moved me from her story was that she had been writing letters to her loved ones as she was waiting for rescue... I love the epistolary form... I wondered myself, if I were in that kind of situation, who would I write to? What would I say?... People aren’t writing their grievances. They’re writing about love.] [paraphrased from audio]
That question, what a person writes when they believe they are dying, became the emotional engine of a novel that is structured as one long letter.
How she wrote it
Lost in the research before she was lost on the pageBefore Gaige stepped onto the trail, she read for months: AT memoirs, hikers’ blogs, trail journals, nature writers. The physical research came second, and it produced the kind of sensory friction that no amount of reading supplies. Four nights sleeping in open-air wooden shelters with strangers taught her something she couldn’t have invented.
The female warden I was riding with didn’t have time to eat, so she just ate some tomatoes and cheese cubes from a Tupperware on the road. It’s that kind of detail I needed.
She did ride-alongs with two Maine game wardens, one male and one female, to build the warden sections of the book. The tomatoes-and-cheese-cubes detail is the kind her fiction hunts: ordinary, unglamorous, exactly true.
She also traveled to the actual campsite in Maine where Largay had waited, accompanied by D. Dauphinee, the author of the nonfiction account of Largay’s death. Seeing the place in person changed the scale of what she was writing about.
Bev was actually the hardest character to write. It took a long time for me to relate to her, and what I ended up gaining access through was her sense of her size. I’m somewhat tall, not nearly as tall as she, but that’s how that felt to me in adolescence: that sense of monstrousness. And [it was] her aloneness, and her longing, her longing for community. It was all of those things.
Bev, a Maine game warden searching for the missing hiker, is the character furthest from Gaige’s own experience. The way in was not professional research but a physical memory from adolescence, which is where Gaige finally found her.
Gaige does not outline. She described the act of drafting the novel as formally mirroring her subject, and admitted that the book’s most consequential structural choice, its three female protagonists, was a surprise rather than a plan.
Not at all. I was surprised it ended up that way. It feels like good timing to have female heroes right now. Maybe that was a story I needed to write, as much as one I needed to read.
The writing process itself, in her account, echoed what Valerie experiences on the trail. Gaige described the drafting as wandering and being lost, noting at the Barnes & Noble interview that this was at least an apt metaphor for writing about a lost person. Her description of finding Valerie, the first of the three protagonists, shows how that wandering could resolve into clarity.
[A lot of wandering and being lost myself.] [paraphrased from audio]
The personal thread
Consolation found in spiderwebsDuring the lockdowns, Gaige had nowhere to go and went outside anyway, watching birds and spiderwebs in a kind of enforced stillness. That experience fed directly into Valerie’s voice: a woman who, while lost and weakening in the Maine wilderness, becomes a careful observer of moss. The consolation Gaige felt outside her own door became the emotional register she gave her protagonist.
I was outside, I had very little to do, there was nowhere to go, and I was watching the birds. I was watching the spiderwebs. And I felt such consolation in the fact that the planet was going on, as it will, with or without us.
Her mother lives in a retirement community that lost around eleven people in the early months of the pandemic. Gaige put that number directly into the book, making it part of the backstory of Lena, the third of the novel’s female protagonists. The detail crosses from memoir into fiction with almost no translation.
Valerie, who’s a nurse, saw far more of the pandemic than I did. Through her, I could explore those first responders and what they were experiencing, and ideally, make those people feel seen. It helped me to write the story of someone journeying and healing, and I have heard from some nurses that they really appreciated naming that [experience]. That’s really all that you could possibly ask for as a writer.
The book began in a real case and a formal device, a letter. It ended up being, in her telling, a way of bearing witness to people she knew: her mother’s neighbors, the nurses who saw the pandemic from inside it.
What she wants us to sit with
Who rescued you, and whenGaige frames the book’s central subject, lostness, as something far wider than a woods emergency. She was specific about where she expected readers to find themselves in Valerie’s situation, even those who have never strayed from a trail.
We all get emotionally lost and psychologically lost on a daily or yearly basis. I felt that I quickly accessed my knowledge of emotional lostness and gave it to my hiker and was able to imagine and research the rest in terms of what she might do.
She wants book clubs to turn the novel’s premise into a personal question, one that moves from the physical to the interior and then to the relational. The progression matters: she ends not on fear but on rescue.
Have you ever been physically lost? How did it feel? Why is it so scary? When have you been emotionally or spiritually lost, and also, who rescued you? There’s always somebody. Even in the darkest times, there’s somebody who sees you, who steps in.
The mother-daughter relationship runs through all three storylines, but Gaige’s explanation of why connects it back to the book’s theme of lostness. The three protagonists represent very different versions of that relationship: Valerie with an adoring mother, Bev with one who was absent and struggling with addiction, Lena estranged from her own daughter. Gaige told Boston.com how one metaphor holds them together.
Once I realized Valerie was writing to her mother, that theme started to coalesce. There are as many kinds of mother/daughter relationships as there are mothers and daughters. Valerie has the dream mother-situation, but most mother/daughter relationships are complicated. Whether she was wonderful or terrible, a mother is your origin and first home. I found the connection between lostness and mothers. When you’re born, you’re 100 percent located. As you go through life, there’s the dream of feeling that orientation.
The title comes from tree biology: sapwood, the young outer wood of a tree, conducts water and nutrients, while heartwood, the dense core that forms as the tree ages, no longer carries nutrients but gives the tree its structural strength. Gaige explained in the TODAY interview how she mapped that science onto the human experience of aging.
[Every tree when the wood is young is called sapwood, which conducts nutrients up and down the stem, but as the tree ages that wood hardens and becomes heartwood. The older you get, the stronger you are. I love the idea that we each have a heartwood inside of us... our love is part of their heartwood, but it’s not the whole story.] [paraphrased from audio]
A book about a woman in her sixties, lost in the Maine wilderness and writing to her mother, turns out to be an argument about what survival actually costs and what it builds. The title is the thesis.