The Briar Club
The Briar Club
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Kate Quinn on The Briar Club
In her own words: quotes and insights from the author.Why she wrote it
Loneliness, an essay, and a cold war secretThe project began not with a historical question but with a physical ache. During pandemic lockdown, Quinn kept returning to a Laurie Colwin essay called ‘Alone in the Kitchen with an Eggplant,’ about a young woman feeding friends from a New York kitchenette. Reading it while isolated, she recognized in it the exact thing she had lost.
I’d have happily cooked on a hot-plate and drained spaghetti in my bathtub if I could be surrounded by loved ones, scraped plates, and half-empty bottles of wine. ‘Could this be a book?’ I thought. ‘Stranger comes to town, pulls housemates together with weekly dinners in her tiny apartment?’
A supper club in 1950s Washington was a warm premise, but it wasn’t yet a Kate Quinn novel. The missing piece arrived from her husband, whose graduate work had concentrated on post-WWII eastern Europe and Soviet bloc politics, and arrived offhand, in conversation.
my husband (whose degree work was in International Relations/Foreign Security and Intelligence, with a focus on post-World War II eastern Europe through the post-Soviet bloc) casually dropped a tidbit about the Cold War that made the entire book come together in my head in one big lightbulb flash: a supper club and a mysterious stranger cooking dinner for her friends, all pulled together with one big McCarthy-era twist.
Once the Cold War element snapped the concept into place, Quinn pitched it to her agent in mid-2021, while lockdown was still loosening its grip. The emotional logic of the book traced directly back to what those months had cost her.
It was my post-pandemic book. I pitched it to my agent mid-2021--lockdown was slowly opening up, but it felt like I hadn’t seen my friends for decades, and I felt like I was dying for community and friendship and people gathered around a table. So I wrote about a supper club where I could at least gather fictional people around a table and feed them.
The book’s surface subject is McCarthyism, but Quinn has been direct about the simpler engine underneath: ‘The Briar Club reflects my fascination with McCarthyism and the Red Scare, but it really came about because I missed my friends.’ The history gave it stakes; the loneliness gave it heat.
How she wrote it
A house takes the wheelThe book’s framing device, a detective investigating two bodies on Thanksgiving 1954, was drafted and then abandoned. Quinn had written those sections from the detective’s point of view before she recognized what the problem was, and solved it by reassigning the narration entirely.
police procedural stuff bores me, and I realized I wasn’t interested in the detective. So I put all those framing scenes into the point-of-view of the house itself, commenting on the drama unfolding within its walls and very much invested in the outcome for the people who live inside.
The ensemble of boarders required architecture as deliberate as the plot. Quinn needed each woman’s story to illuminate a different corner of 1950s America, which meant the casting had to be done before the character work could begin. She described the method as jigsaw construction.
I consciously developed the characters with as wide a range as possible in terms of age, education, family, social class, cultural background, and just about every other demographic. Then it was a matter of looking at the various aspects of the fifties I wanted to cover—the hangover of WWII, the Korean War, the women’s baseball leagues, organized crime and police corruption, the Red Scare, the Lavender Scare, McCarthy and Senator Margaret Chase Smith, the immigrant experience, the development of the birth control pill—and see which character’s life could most organically include those aspects. It took a lot of jigsaw-puzzle-piecing during the plotting stage!
Two of the novel’s characters had existed in Quinn’s imagination for years before the book had a title or a setting. Nora and Xavier arrived as voices without a home, a violent man and the woman who witnessed his crime, circling each other in a story she hadn’t yet written.
I had Nora & Xavier in my head for literally YEARS before this book. It was one of those odd cases where I just have disembodied characters talking in my brain, no story attached. I knew that a violent man was hiding out in the apartment of a girl who had seen him commit a crime, and now they were thrashing out what would happen, and unlikely attraction would bloom. It took me forever to finally find a book where that story would fit!
Research for the 1950s backdrop came from a 900-page source Quinn worked through in an unlikely setting. She read David Halberstam’s ‘The Fifties’ over two days of jury duty, highlighter in hand, emerging with a list of details she would eventually build into the novel. [paraphrased from audio, Twin Cities Live Book Club, KSTP 5] One find that made it directly onto the page came from newspapers.com: a real race riot at a mixed-race club near Washington in the early 1950s. But not everything Quinn researched survived the cut.
I would have liked to include the Kinsey Reports in my 1950s-era book, The Briar Club—those were such social bombshells that dropped in America, it would have been fascinating to delve into. But I just didn’t have the space for it.
What she wants us to sit with
Who gets to be AmericanQuinn described the hope she carried into the writing in terms that hold two things at once: pleasure for the reader and discomfort for the citizen. The book is set in a period Americans often treat as settled history, and she wanted it to leave that comfort disturbed.
I hope that when people finish reading it, they’ve found a story they loved full of women they admire. And I hope they have food for thought about what it means to be American and how we can be proud of our homeland but temper that pride with the knowledge of where we’ve gone wrong and how we can do better in future.
Beneath the supper-club setting and the Cold War thriller machinery, Quinn was working through a question she hadn’t fully resolved when she started writing. The book became a place to pressure-test it.
this book was a lot about my own questions about what the American Dream is. You know, what is it? Who is allowed to have it? And how is it achievable? [paraphrased from audio]
The novel’s moral center turns on judgment: who convenes it, who sits in it, and who is subject to it. Quinn located that question at the intersection of the McCarthy era’s loyalty hearings and something more personal and unresolved.
it does sort of revolve around who gets to call themselves an American and who is deserving of a second chance. And who gets to decide that, is it the jury of your peers and who are your peers? [paraphrased from audio]
Quinn set the novel in the early 1950s to write about a fear she thought belonged to the past. By the time the book reached readers in 2024, the distance she had assumed was there had collapsed.
I wasn’t intending to write a book about the modern day, it appears that’s what I’m doing. And I wish it wasn’t. [paraphrased from audio]