The Seventh Most Important Thing
The Seventh Most Important Thing
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Shelley Pearsall on The Seventh Most Important Thing
In her own words: quotes and insights from the author.
Why she wrote it
Three threads, one bookThe novel began not at a desk but in a gallery, during college, when Pearsall walked into a room and encountered James Hampton’s Throne of the Third Heaven of the Nations’ Millennium General Assembly, a towering sculpture Hampton had built in secret from discarded objects over more than fourteen years. The encounter lodged itself in her memory for decades before it became a book.
I was in an art museum, walk into this room and see this, you know, thing and it just was amazing to look at and then to read the story behind it. I kind of never forget that experience. [paraphrased from audio]
The gallery memory alone would not have been enough. Two other pressures arrived later: a student she met at a writing workshop who was struggling with grief, and her own loss. Her father died of cancer while she was finishing her previous novel, and that bereavement was still unresolved when she began this book.
The inspiration for this novel came from several different places—a work of art that I saw back in college, a middle school student I met at a writing workshop who was having a hard time dealing with grief, and some of my own experiences with loss.
She named the grief directly when asked what generated the book, placing it at the center rather than behind the historical subject or the plot mechanics.
The Seventh Most Important Thing grew out of my own struggle to cope with grief over losing my beloved dad to cancer.
How she wrote it
Drafts, a discarded title, and the logic of seven objectsOnce she started writing, the drafting moved fast relative to her usual pace, because the story had been accumulating in her imagination for years before a word hit the page.
The story has been circling through my imagination for years, so when it came time to put the story on paper, the process was pretty quick. The book took about a year to write and edit — which is very speedy for me!
fandommonthlymagazine.blogspot.com, “Author Interview & Giveaway: The Seventh Most Important Thing ...”Speed did not mean fewer passes. She typically produces between six and twelve drafts per book, and during the CCS Library interview she showed the physical stack on camera. The working title for most of that drafting period was a single word she loved for carrying two opposite meanings: sparkly and iridescent on one side, harsh and clanging on the other.
I love that word so much that I actually called this book ‘Metallic’ while I was working on it. But once I finished the story, my editor and I decided that it didn’t quite fit the book. And so that’s why it has the name ‘The Seventh Most Important Thing’ today. [paraphrased from audio]
The seven objects that protagonist Arthur Owens collects for Hampton’s sculpture, things like lightbulbs and mirrors pulled from trash, were not simply plot devices. Pearsall built them to operate on two registers at once: as raw materials for Hampton’s artwork and as milestones in a grieving boy’s emotional recovery.
It was interesting seeing how different objects, like a lightbulb or like a mirror, what they would mean on different levels. [paraphrased from audio]
She found a structural parallel between her own revision process and Hampton’s method of transforming discarded material into something whole. The comparison was not decorative; it shaped how she thought about the purpose of rewriting.
Very much like Mr. Hampton in the story, taking trash and turning them into a beautiful sculpture. I have to take those pieces that probably should be thrown away, and turn them into something beautiful by the end of the process. [paraphrased from audio]
Hampton’s actual sculpture is connected by scholars to passages in the Book of Revelation. Pearsall was deliberate about that dimension: she told Brightly she did not want to ignore the religious aspects of the artwork, but also did not want religion to become the story’s central subject, because readers arrive from many different backgrounds and beliefs.
The personal thread
Older relatives, loyal friends, and a daughter’s griefThe cross-generational bond between thirteen-year-old Arthur and the elderly Hampton is one of the novel’s emotional anchors. Pearsall traced it to her own childhood, which was shaped by sustained time with grandparents rather than the arms-length relationships children often have with older adults.
My grandpa Pearsall and I used to work on paintings together. My other grandpa had a great zest for life — and we spent hours fishing and hanging out (even riding motorcycles!).
When asked which character in the book she most resembles, she did not claim the novel’s angry, grieving protagonist. She reached instead for a secondary figure, a detail that says something about how she sees herself in the work.
I think I was probably more like Squeak than Arthur in The Seventh Most Important Thing. I was a smart, kind of nerdy kid, who was fiercely loyal to my friends.
fandommonthlymagazine.blogspot.com, “Author Interview & Giveaway: The Seventh Most Important Thing ...”What she wants us to sit with
Art as proof that loss is survivableShe completed the book having learned something alongside the character she invented. Arthur Owens, the thirteen-year-old sentenced to community service with Hampton after a violent outburst, is the one who rebuilds his life in the story. Pearsall found that writing his recovery changed what she believed about her own.
Writing the book helped me to realize, along with Arthur Owens, that life can be ‘rebuilt’ after loss.
She wanted readers, especially young readers in the middle of their own losses, to find in the novel what she found in writing it: evidence that art is not a distraction from grief but a working-through of it.
I hope readers take away the importance of looking beneath the surface—don’t judge someone before you know his or her story, in other words. I also hope they see the power of art to help us understand and express our feelings.
Her background as a museum historian left her alert to declining youth interest in museums and history, and she has spoken about feeling motivated to find fictional forms that carry those subjects forward. That motivation is not separate from the novel: Hampton’s Throne sits today in the Smithsonian American Art Museum, known to specialists but largely invisible to general audiences. She wants the book to be a door.
I like to think of fiction as being a creative pathway to the past.