In lieu of an abstract, here is a brief excerpt of the content:

  • Lee Smith
  • Jason Howard

Bestselling author talks to editor Jason Howard about her latest novel Guests on Earth, Zelda Fitzgerald, and the changing face of Appalachia.

Jason Howard:

I’ve read that you said about Guests on Earth that you “had to write this book.” why?

Lee Smith:

Well, actually this is the way I feel about every book I write. [laughs] For me, writing any novel starts way back. I mean, there will always be some image—usually it’s a visual image—some idea that will just come to me at a certain…moment in my life and stick. And unlike everything else, it won’t disappear with the ravages of time but I’ll think about it more [End Page 51] and more. This was the way, for instance, with Fair and Tender Ladies. Sometimes it takes me a long time to figure out what this image is about, or what it would mean, and why it won’t go away. But just the very fact that it won’t go away means to me that this is something that’s somehow really important and I need to pursue it. It becomes very compelling—and if it’s not very compelling I don’t do it.

I can tell you the exact moment when I knew I was going to write this book. It 1989 or 1988, and I was up at Highland Hospital [in Asheville]. My son Josh was a patient there; he was there for two-and-a-half years while he was battling schizophrenia, and he was sometimes in the hospital and sometimes in an outpatient situation.

Of course I was up there a lot during that time, and I had become absolutely fascinated by the horrific story of the fire of 1948 in which Zelda Fitzgerald and seven other women lost their lives because they were in a locked ward on the top floor of the building at Highland Hospital. And the fire was set… somehow in the kitchen on the bottom floor of the building, and raced up the dumbwaiter—everything was made of wood, even the fire escape…This mystery was never solved, although there was a pretty good suspect or two, particularly a kitchen worker. But I was fascinated…by life in the hospital then, who was there, what the methods of treatment were. So the whole time Josh was there I was, when I had time, going off and looking at files in the county library and things like that.

But anyway, Josh and I were coming back from downtown Asheville, up the hill to the hospital. He’d been playing piano downtown. It was sunset—it was just [an] amazing kind of winter sunset that you get when the sky just turns totally, absolutely red. You can see it all because the leaves are off the trees, and so looking up the hill, what I saw was the outlines of all the roofs of the buildings that comprised Highland [End Page 52] Hospital. Especially striking was the roofline of Homewood, which looks like a castle. It has battlements, you know, like towers going along, and it’s all made of stone…The sunset was so crimson it looked like a fire behind those battlements and behind all the rooflines, and suddenly, of course, it made me think of the fire.

It made it really real in my mind for a second, and at the same time I had just coincidentally been reading a collection of the love letters between Scott and Zelda Fitzgerald, because I had been, of course, very interested in them too. And I had been reading one of the very early love letters that Scott wrote to Zelda. He had met her in Montgomery, Alabama, at the Beauty Ball when she was only seventeen, and he was in the Army there. And then he had gone back up to New York to finish writing a novel and make some money so they could get married, and meanwhile he wanted her to stay true to him. But she was a belle, and so she was having about eight dates a day with these other boys [laughs...

pdf