New Hampshire (1978), Sprays of Salt by John Downs (1944), and, of course, my much thumbed copy of Ten Miles Out: Guide Book to the Isles of Shoals by the Isles of Shoals Unitarian Association (1972). To these authors and to others who have written about this wonderful and mysterious archipelago, I am indebted.
I am also extremely grateful to my editor, Michael Pietsch, and my agent, Ginger Barber, for their incisive comments and advice.
Finally, I am most grateful to John Osborn for his tireless research and emotional intelligence.
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The Weight of Water
A NOVEL BY
ANITA SHREVE
On the Origins of
The Weight of Water
Excerpted from Anita Shreve’s remarks upon receiving the PEN/L.L. Winship Award
Normally, I am not at loss for words. But I found myself speechless when Stephen Fox called to tell me about this wonderful, wonderful award. I think judges of literary contests must sometimes be amazed at just how deeply inarticulate writers can be. I hope I can, in these few minutes — despite my awe at sharing a stage with Arthur Miller — finally convey to Stephen, and also to you, how grateful I am to have my novel The Weight of Water honored in this way.
That the L.L. Winship Award is one for a book specifically about New England means all the more to me, because, for me, a novel begins with the place. That place — the landscape, the houses there, its austere beauty or its haunting loneliness — sounds a note, like that from a tuning fork. A single note that quivers in the air and sets my imagination humming.
Some time ago, I got lost while on a sailboat in the fog. I was a guest aboard the sloop, and as I wasn’t much use elsewhere, it was my job to stand in the bow and peer into a fog and to call out if I saw a rocky ledge or an island or another boat. I don’t know if you have ever had the experience of being lost in the fog — there is nothing quite so disorienting. Anxious to acquit myself at least passably well amidst all the tanned and able seamen on board, I peered earnestly into the taupe nothingness until I began to see things that weren’t actually there: first, tiny moving lights, then minutely subtle gradations of gray. Was that a shape? Was that a lighthouse?
And then, so shockingly that I was once again becalmed by speechlessness (thus failing at the sole task I had been given), it was all there. Appledore and Londoners and Star and Smutty-nose — rocks emerging from the mist. Smuttynose, all of a piece, flat, with bleached ledges, forbidding, silent.
Perhaps it was the theatrical lifting of the fog. Or it was an intense desire, after the anxiety of being lost at sea, to step out onto the solidity of land. Or it was simply the charm of the place, a seductive charm both exhilarating and melancholy. The appeal was in the contradictions: the seductive draw of the perilous rocky outcroppings; the way every leaf of the homely low vegetation seemed to be imbued with its own radiance so that you felt you could see more vividly than you ever had before; the warmth of the clapboards of a wood-framed house banished to an off-putting exile; the tenacity of black sedge and sheep sorrel and sea blite in a place where human life was clearly transient. I was in thrall. The tuning fork had been sounded.
The Isles of Shoals form an archipelago that lies in the Atlantic, ten miles southeast off the New Hampshire coast at Portsmouth. The islands measure three and a half miles north and south by one and a half miles east and west. There are nine islands at high tide, eight at low. The largest island looked to its first residents like a fat pig wallowing in the sea, and hence the name of Hog. Smuttynose, the island that would most spark my interest, derived its name from a clump of seaweed on the nose of a rock extending into the ocean.
In 1635, the Isles of Shoals were formally divided between the Massachusetts Bay Colony, which included Maine, and the territory subsequently to be known as New Hampshire. Duck, Hog, Malaga, Smuttynose, and Cedar went to Maine. Star, Londoners, White, and Seavey went to New Hampshire. The division has always held. In 1635, when the ordinance was first declared, nearly all of the residents of the New Hampshire islands