The novel began with a doctor running late. On August 8, 2008, Lawhon was pregnant with her fourth son and had already worked through every book and magazine in the waiting room when she found a small devotional pamphlet at the bottom of a pile in the corner. The encounter lasted no more than a few minutes, but it cost her the next fifteen years.

Ariel Lawhon

It is quite possible that if my doctor had been on time that day, this novel would have never been written. But he had gotten stuck at the hospital with a tricky delivery. And, therefore, I had gotten stranded.

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National Public Radio, “Ariel Lawhon’s novel ‘The Frozen River’ follows a 1789 midwife in pursuit of justice”

She tore the page out and kept it. Then she wrote five other novels before she sat down with Martha Ballard.

The gap between 2008 and publication in 2023 was not procrastination. Lawhon told herself for years that the subject was too demanding, but she eventually arrived at a different explanation, one that had more to do with her own development than with Martha Ballard’s story.

Ariel Lawhon

This novel as it exists today could not have been written by that girl in the doctor’s waiting room. I had to, yeah, I had to grow up myself. [paraphrased from audio]

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The Girlfriend, “The Girlfriend Author Interview: Ariel Lawhon, April 2024 — ‘The Frozen River’”

The choice to center the story on a woman in her mid-fifties was as personal as it was historical. Most fiction that follows a woman on a quest of conscience positions her decades earlier in life, and Lawhon, writing in her own midlife, felt that absence acutely.

Ariel Lawhon

What we miss, and what is not often portrayed on the page, is a mature woman as the heroine. We don’t get to see that often... Being in midlife myself, I found that I’m longing to read that. I want to see more of that personally. So in this case, I wrote it.

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National Public Radio, “Ariel Lawhon’s novel ‘The Frozen River’ follows a 1789 midwife in pursuit of justice”

The primary source for the novel, Martha Ballard’s actual diary, covering roughly 900 pages, gave Lawhon dates, weather, deliveries, and meals. It gave her almost nothing else. Where a biographer can leave gaps, a novelist has to fill them, and Lawhon had to construct an entire interior life from material that was deliberately impersonal.

Ariel Lawhon

She does little to no editorializing in this diary. It’s not a diary that we think of where people spill their secrets. It’s more of a daybook... I had to create that out of whole cloth. [paraphrased from audio]

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The Poisoned Pen Bookstore, “Ariel Lawhon discusses The Frozen River”

The texture she needed came from reading around the diary rather than through it. Lawhon tracked the same method she uses across all her books: follow genuine curiosity into the margins, where the small and rivalrous details live, and carry those back to the page.

Ariel Lawhon

I’m reading about petty rivalries, I’m reading about jealousies, I’m reading about relational conflict, or sometimes it’s as simple as there are several entries in her diary talking about how she made candles with her daughters. And so that worked its way into the book. [paraphrased from audio]

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The Poisoned Pen Bookstore, “Ariel Lawhon discusses The Frozen River”

Plotting tightly was not a stylistic preference so much as a survival strategy. During the years when Lawhon was writing around small children and might get only a few minutes at the desk, losing words to a structural mistake was not a recoverable cost.

Ariel Lawhon

I had to know what was coming next. I had to know how it related to everything I’d written so far because I didn’t want to delete words because deleting a thousand words could be my entire writing for the week. [paraphrased from audio]

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Jane Healey - Host of Historical Happy Hour, “Historical Happy Hour - Episode 29 The Frozen River by Ariel Lawhon”

That discipline shaped the architecture of the finished novel. The story opens when the Kennebec River freezes solid and ends six months later at the spring thaw, sealing every character inside one winter and creating a structural clock that the plotting then runs against.

The rape trial at the book’s center, drawn from the actual 1789 case in Hallowell, Maine, required Lawhon to hold two competing pressures at once: emotional authenticity and a refusal to let the assault become a device. She described the balancing act in terms that make clear how seriously she weighed the real woman behind the event.

Ariel Lawhon

It felt like doing a tightrope walk on the edge of a razor blade. I wanted you to feel it. But I didn’t ever want it to become a throwaway part of the story or entertainment because it’s not. It really happened. It really matters to the story. [paraphrased from audio]

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The Girlfriend, “The Girlfriend Author Interview: Ariel Lawhon, April 2024 — ‘The Frozen River’”

The real case involved three accused men. Lawhon cut one entirely and made another the body in the river in the novel’s opening line, a structural inversion that changes what readers are actually hunting for through the rest of the book.

Ariel Lawhon

Typically, we want to know who killed the person because they were innocent and you want to bring them to justice. In this case, we want to make sure that the right person is caught. [paraphrased from audio]

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The Poisoned Pen Bookstore, “Ariel Lawhon discusses The Frozen River”

Long before she read Martha Ballard’s name in a waiting room pamphlet, Lawhon had a direct relationship with the profession. Her mother delivered all six of her children at home with midwives, and Lawhon attended prenatal appointments as a child, which put her inside a world that most readers encounter only through historical fiction.

Ariel Lawhon

There was a time when I was younger that I thought I might want to be a midwife. I think it is the most incredible, fascinating job on earth. [paraphrased from audio]

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Jane Healey - Host of Historical Happy Hour, “Historical Happy Hour - Episode 29 The Frozen River by Ariel Lawhon”

Three years of writing during the COVID-19 pandemic, stuck at home with family and no clear exit, gave Lawhon an unexpected point of contact with her subject. Martha Ballard’s diary returns again and again to a phrase that reads, across two centuries, like a shared condition.

Ariel Lawhon

Martha ends an entry and she will say, ‘I have been at home.’ And so, I’m reading, I’m like, me too, Martha. Me too. [paraphrased from audio]

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Jane Healey - Host of Historical Happy Hour, “Historical Happy Hour - Episode 29 The Frozen River by Ariel Lawhon”

Readers who bring modern assumptions about courts, evidence, and defendants’ rights to this novel will find them consistently upended. Lawhon set out to establish the legal ground rules early, because the entire moral weight of Martha’s choices depends on understanding how little institutional support she had.

Ariel Lawhon

The Constitution had barely been written. The Bill of Rights had not yet been ratified... The justice system was sparse. It barely existed. The rules were very loose. And Martha was operating within that very loose, strange system, trying to find justice in the best way that she could.

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National Public Radio, “Ariel Lawhon’s novel ‘The Frozen River’ follows a 1789 midwife in pursuit of justice”

One of the research discoveries that stayed with Lawhon was how thoroughly the historical record contradicts received ideas about Puritan-era New England sexual mores. The gap between official piety and documented behavior was not a minor footnote; it ran through roughly four in ten first pregnancies of the period.

Ariel Lawhon

People never change. You can dig into the past and you go, oh, nothing changes. And they are no different from the people that I know in my real life.

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National Public Radio, “Ariel Lawhon’s novel ‘The Frozen River’ follows a 1789 midwife in pursuit of justice”

The question of whose account gets preserved connects the novel’s 1789 setting to an argument Lawhon has made across her whole body of work. Women’s testimony, she has argued, captures a different layer of the past than the record that traditionally gets called history.

Ariel Lawhon

If you study history, and you want to know what really happened, go talk to the women who were there. Go talk to the women who lived through it because they remember the small moments. They remember the little betrayals. They remember the humanity of the situation and not just the fighting and the wars and the battles and the weapons.

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goodreads.com, “Interview with Ariel Lawhon - Goodreads News & Interviews”

The marriage between Martha and Ephraim Ballard, depicted at thirty-five years in, was a deliberate argument by Lawhon for a kind of story that fiction rarely tells. Younger women who approached her at events said the relationship was the kind they hoped to have, which was exactly the response she had been writing toward.

Ariel Lawhon

I wanted to look at what it can look like 35 years after you make the right decision. After you have decades of marriage and parenting and life and joy and grief. Who you are then makes you really interesting. [paraphrased from audio]

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marmaladeandmustardseed.com, “The Frozen River book club questions with character list”

Martha Ballard could not have known that the detailed record she kept of deliveries, weather, and neighborhood life would travel from her family to the Maine State Library, anchor a Pulitzer Prize-winning biography, and eventually reach a pregnant woman in a Tennessee waiting room. The author’s note closes on that chain of consequence, and it is the sentence Lawhon has said she most wanted readers to carry out of the book.

Ariel Lawhon

I want the world to remember that small acts, done in love, matter every bit as much as the ones that make the newspaper and the history books.

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National Public Radio, “Ariel Lawhon’s novel ‘The Frozen River’ follows a 1789 midwife in pursuit of justice”