A Conversation with Mary Rockcastle

Because the narrative voice has a memoiristic tone, and because Danny is such a strong, believable character, it is easy to assume that the story is autobiographical. How much of this novel is real and how much imagined?

Many readers assume that much of this novel is autobiographical. I think this is due in large part to the first-person voice, which has a friendly intimacy to it, and to the fact that Danny is looking back over this formative period in her life, trying to sort out what happened to her family. Many narrators take this same stance.

What’s true is the setting, which includes details of time, place, and culture. My family owned a lopsided, bat-infested log cabin in northern New Jersey. We bought a house in the early sixties when I was about the same age as Danny. So the place arises from memory—not only the house itself, but the lake and beach and surrounding area. Much of my fiction is grounded in specific landscapes. The landscape needs to be rich enough to capture my imagination and to arouse strong feelings. For years before I wrote the novel, the real Rainy Lake returned again and again to my dreams.

The emotional truth in the novel comes from the heart. The incidents and characters are imagined, but my understanding of what Danny and her family suffer is based on my own experience. This is usually how it works in fiction. The writer’s life provides a certain springboard that enables her or him to imagine a world, to make that world interesting and authentic to the reader.

What made you decide to write about race? Were you at all anxious about creating the character of Billy Dove?

When I was in the early stages of writing this novel, I was thinking hard about my own identity as a white woman in America. I was conscious of how serious an issue racial injustice is in this country, and how deeply it’s embedded in the culture, even in the most liberal of families. So the issue of race, which preoccupied me in my real life, entered the novel. I knew that I was taking a certain risk, as white people do who write about people of color, but I cared enough about the subject to try.

As I did with my other characters, I grew to love Billy Dove early on. My task was to make him a rich and believable character, to give him a history, to imagine as completely as I could what it was like to be him. I wanted Billy to be a real and complicated human being, not a stereotype. So I worked hard, harder perhaps on his character than on the others. I also had a trusted reader, a black writer, who gave me invaluable advice and feedback.


Danny’s character seems very wise and in control when in comes to making love with Billy, yet she’s only sixteen. What makes her so sure of herself? Are you concerned about the openness with regard to sex for teenage readers, especially since the novel has also been recommended for that age group?

I did not plan to have Danny and Billy make love during her sixteenth summer. I worried that some readers might think she is too young. Yet, as Danny came to life on the page, her own desires superseded my own. Her feelings for Billy simply became so powerful that I had to honor what it was she wanted.

My own vision in this regard did play a role. I was fed up with girl victims in literature and film. Fed up with the grim and rather heartless depiction of female sexuality. I know young girls are sexually abused, raped and trivialized. I wanted my teenage girl to be in control of her own desires. I wanted her to be in love and to feel joy in the lovemaking. Joy, not disappointment, which is what I think teenage readers are bombarded with in young adult literature. I also wanted her partner to feel the same way. I believed that if Billy really cared about Danny, he would not take making love with her lightly, and he would be responsible enough to see that she didn’t get pregnant. I think this happens every day in our society, but it doesn’t get written about.

Rainy Lake is a novel about a family, a family that starts out healthy and strong and then deteriorates, resulting in tragedy. There is no overt abuse, violence, or neglect going on in this story, which sets it apart from other family dramas. Why is the family an important subject for you? What statement are you trying to make about the contemporary American family?

I didn’t want to write about an overly abusive family. That didn’t interest me, and it’s been done already. I was interested in a more subtle kind of neglect, not intended but no less deadly in the long run. I cared about the good, loving family, the family with everything going for it, who screws up. The family who should have known better, who should have taken better care of themselves, who should have gotten help when they needed it. There are countless families like this in America today. I wanted to explore two individuals in particular within that family, one who survives and one who doesn’t. Why does one make it and the other not? I think the answer to this question could save lives.