Writer Spotlight: Sarah Miller

Unicorns, Meadowbrook Theater, OTMA, fiction or history, and perception is everything: novelist Sarah Miller

Charlie Barshaw coordinates our regular Writer Spotlight feature and interviews writers of SCBWI-MI. In this piece, meet Sarah Miller, a ravenous researcher and a much-published historical fiction and non-fiction novelist.

Many pieces about you borrow from the first line of your bio to trumpet that you started writing a novel at age ten. So, what was 10-year-old Sarah like, as a person and a writer? What do you remember about that early work?

Well…there were unicorns in that first novel. Enough said?

I was the kind of kid who took two dozen library books on vacation. Lined them up by height in my little cupboard in the camper and then marched methodically through the whole shelf, a book a day. Aside from that unicorn novel and one story I attempted in 10th grade, I wasn’t a kid who wrote for fun. 

I was really really good at English assignments, though. Although I did have a Harriet the Spy-inspired notebook full of snotty observations in 5th grade.


You mentioned seeing The Miracle Worker performed at the Meadowbrook Theater. You’d seen the film with Anne Bancroft and Patty Duke, but seeing it live unlocked a piece of the puzzle that allowed you inside the relationship between Annie Sullivan and Helen Keller.

[As I said in a previous interview,] “And I can't tell you why because I don't know, but seeing it live, for some reason I finally understood what the big deal was for Helen Keller, was that there was no voice in her head.

“And I think it's just that one realization that struck me so hard. Because you can't even imagine that, really. Because you need words, mostly, to imagine that.” 

So even though there were already lots of bios and dramatizations of the story, you thought you had a new way to look at it. That took guts, and a little foolishness. How did Miss Spitfire come to be?

Immediately upon seeing The Miracle Worker on stage – that same night – I broke into the library (ok, fine, I had a key – I worked there) and grabbed every Helen Keller book off the shelves. I learned Braille and the manual alphabet and at some point in the process of immersing myself in all things Helen Keller, I figured out that I could maybe do something with all this information aside from simply amassing it. Like, maybe a book.

I was also fortunate that my library’s edition of Helen Keller’s autobiography was an old one that still contained an appendix of Annie Sullivan’s letters. That’s when I realized there was a whole story behind the story. 

Annie’s life doesn’t begin the moment she meets Helen. She has a whole lot of past behind her, even at the age of twenty-one, and I came to believe that a lot of her past uniquely suited her to be Helen’s teacher. And as one documentary put it, to the world, the miracle was Helen Keller; to Helen, the miracle was Annie. That’s the miracle I wanted to explore.

And as you said, some guts and foolishness. I was twenty-one at the time, just like Annie Sullivan. Just the right age to think I could bring out something The Miracle Worker hadn’t already been showing audiences for over forty years.

You pursued a Linguistics major (and a Russian language minor), worked at libraries and bookstores, all seemingly leading up to a curious, research-savvy sleuth of an author. Your career: Fate, or built intentionally with your own two hands?

Both? I mean, yeah, I was intentionally pursuing wordy, bookish jobs and hobbies and classes. But there wasn’t an end goal in mind yet. I was just immersing myself in the stuff I liked.


All of your non-fiction necessarily has elements of historical fiction as connecting sinew, where there is no physical evidence that something was said or happened. How do you, as the meticulous researcher, proceed with these speculative passages?

In non-fiction I never ever speculate without saying so. Words like perhaps, maybe, and possibly are the signals that I’m about to wade into undocumented territory. 

Sarah on the Borden couch

Even in a passage that feels like drama, such as the moment Lizzie Borden discovers her father’s body in The Borden Murders, is crafted out of facts. Everything in that scene comes directly from court testimony or witness statements. The appearance of the room, the condition of the body, the words spoken by Lizzie and Bridget, is all documented information. The trick is putting all those facts together in a way that feels fresh and immediate.

Later in the book, I struggled a bit with how to present Lizzie’s account of what had happened that morning, before the murders were discovered. There wasn’t a single coherent narrative to turn to – the information came from hundreds of questions asked by several different officers and lawyers in the days following the murder. How could I relay that info without all the tedious Q&A?

Finally, it dawned on me that I could just say that I was cobbling it together. A certain amount of imprecision is ok if you acknowledge it clearly and openly. Here’s how I worded it: “Her story, assembled from the hundreds of questions she answered over that first week, went like this…” I also chose to italicize that passage, to further emphasize that it’s not verbatim fact – it’s Lizzie’s story, which for an array of reasons (Shock and confusion? Malice and deception?) may or may not be accurate.

There are times when it’s vital to acknowledge that nobody knows exactly what happened. I forget that occasionally, and am always gleeful when I remember that it’s a valid option. Sometimes it’s the best option. 

Take the case of Violet and Daisy Hilton, a pair of conjoined twins who performed in sideshows and on the vaudeville stage of the 1920s. Their early life is obscured by decades of showbusiness ballyhoo – some of the misinformation willfully spread by the sisters themselves. They bent the facts so often that in their biography, the nature of the truth itself became a recurring theme.

I thought I knew which of your books were historical fiction, and which were non-fiction histories. But Miss Spitfire and OTMA: The Romanov Sisters (formerly The Lost Crown) are considered historical novels as well. So, in your mind, what’s the difference?

Speculation – and how I handle it – is the difference. In historical fiction, I’m free to imagine someone’s thoughts, words, and emotions and present them as that character’s reality. Non-fiction should never present speculation as fact. Biographies that invent dialog, for instance, drive me absolutely bonkers. If I want dramatic dialog, I’ll watch a miniseries.

Which do you prefer writing, fiction or history?

It depends on what I’m working on, though perhaps not in the way you think. When I’m writing a novel, there are always moments when my imagination wears thin and I wish I could just look up some information to fill in the blanks instead having to invent a whole scenario. And then there are times when I’m writing non-fiction when I get tired of hunting down obscure details and I wish I could make stuff up instead. I’m fickle!

The Borden Murders was actually your first non-fiction work. You were so devoted to objectivity that you decline to try to solve the mystery of whodunnit. When you first read about the murders, you slept with the lights on for a time. How did you go from terror to insatiable curiosity?

Boy, that’s a good question. I’m not sure I know the answer! I think maybe I was simultaneously scared and curious. Besides, knowing more facts is almost always less frightening than imagining them. That’s why Psycho is so scary!

[As I said in a previous interview,] “So the rumors at the library…are that I am writing Anne Frank from the point of view of the cat. Or Little House on the Prairie from the point of view of the dog. Or Lizzie Borden from the point of view of the hatchet. And I tell everybody, feel free to spread any of those rumors that you like. I don't mind.”

You do embrace looking at history from skewed viewpoints. How important is perception?

Perception is…everything.

Little Women is beloved as a cozy family story, but if you’re the mother who has to single-handedly keep that family afloat in the middle of a war with barely enough money for necessities, things aren’t quite so warm and fuzzy. Ditto Little House on the Prairie. A wagon trip across the plains may be a thrilling adventure for a five-year-old, but not so much when you’re a pregnant woman who’s literally trying to keep the wolves from the door.

What about people history has classified as villains? Lizzie Borden and Mary Surratt, for example. How do they see themselves? How do their friends and family see them? In fiction, perspective is a fun twist, but with non-fiction, it’s a responsibility. As a biographer, you choose whose voices are heard.

If you write about the Dionne Quintuplets and only quote the doctors and nurses who cared for the babies, you’re not telling the full story. If you write about the trial of Mary Surratt (an alleged Lincoln assassination conspirator) and only quote the prosecution’s witnesses, you’re not telling the full story. Even when people may not be fully truthful, it behooves you to pay attention. What they’re saying could be what they believe. It could be what they want you to hear. Those things, and the feelings behind them, can be as important to the story as the truth itself.



You are famous for your meticulously researched work. You’ve learned to talk to librarians to get to the most arcane information, diaries and records not available to the general public. You could present a master class on doing research. Did you learn how to research the hard way, trial and error? On-the-job training?

At the microfilm machine at the North Bay Public Library,
looking at Dionne articles from the North Bay Nugget

Mostly trial and error, yeah. Miss Spitfire and OTMA were a little easier because they both grew out of longtime fascinations. Organizing my research really became an issue with The Borden Murders. I read hundreds of newspaper articles and found myself continually frustrated by trying to remember where specific details came from. That’s when I realized I needed some kind of database to keep all my facts straight.

My first spreadsheet of newspaper articles had 649 entries, cross-referencing headlines, authors, newspapers, etc. I thought that was huge. And then I wrote The Miracle and Tragedy of the Dionne Quintuplets and ended up with 2,481 entries. My current project’s spreadsheet has 4,948. Building them is enormously tedious, but tedium is infinitely more tolerable than the constant frustration of being unable to lay your hands on a detail you read…somewhere.

[As I said in a previous interview,] “And then, because I’m what friends like to call a ‘method writer,’ I drove to Missouri, Kansas, South Dakota, Minnesota, Wisconsin, and Iowa, to see the sites of the Ingalls family’s lives, where they were born and where they were buried. I learned to crochet so I could replicate a piece of Mrs. Ingalls’s own lacework that I’d seen on display in Missouri, as well as a shawl I saw in South Dakota — both of which appear in Caroline. I made myself a calico dress. (I thought I could sew the whole thing by hand. I was wrong.) I bought — and wore! — a corset. I lent a hand in butchering livestock and wild game, rendered lard, fried salt pork, roasted a rabbit, and tasted head cheese. I haven’t yet made maple sugar, but I intend to.”

Why?

Why guess what something is like if you can actually experience it? It’s one thing to imagine what the prairie wind feels like, or what the rustling grass sounds like. It’s another thing to feel it for yourself. There’s always something that you can’t learn from book research. 

It might be something tiny, like a scent. Or the titles of the books on the shelves at the Alcott home in Concord, Massachusetts. Those are the kind of insights that lend greater reality to characters and settings. 

All those things I did in the name of Caroline Ingalls helped me build an understanding of the extreme physicality of her life, and the amount of time and energy she had to expend on tasks that today take relatively no effort. To this day, I rarely do a load of laundry without thinking of her.

Visiting people’s graves also drives home the reality of their existence like nothing else. The murder of Andrew and Abby Borden isn’t just an intriguing locked-room mystery to unravel – it’s first and foremost the annihilation of an entire family. You can’t ignore that when you’re standing at the Borden family plot. 

The same goes for Oliva and Elzire Dionne. The birth of their five identical daughters in 1934 was a legitimate miracle, but the ramifications of that miracle split the family in half. That’s something I knew intellectually but didn’t fully feel until I stood in the house where the babies were born.


What are some of the most unusual things you’ve learned to do for your books?

The one that tends to make people’s eyes bug out is staying overnight at Lizzie Borden’s house…in her bedroom. I also learned firsthand that an absolute rookie wielding a hatchet can indeed land eleven blows in a four-inch space in under ten seconds. Corsets aren’t nearly as uncomfortable as Hollywood has led us to believe, either – I once worked a four-hour shift shelving library books while wearing mine.


Research is hard enough, but Covid restrictions presented a whole nother set of obstacles. How did you work around them?

Helpful people saved my bacon. And some luck, but mostly just good people.

Here’s some of the luck: My friend Chris happened to be at a conference in Washington, D.C. in January 2020. At that time I was working on a biography of Mary Surratt, an alleged conspirator in the Lincoln assassination, who had lived in Maryland. Chris is always up for a historical field trip, so he spent some of his free time on a visit to the Surratt House Museum and texted me pictures galore. I think he mostly meant to torment me by getting there first, but it’s a good thing he did because that turned out to be the closest thing to a research trip I got.

Almost at the same time, I happened to be visiting family in the Grand Rapids area. One of my cousins was a GVSU student at the time. When I found out the university has a collection of Surratt Society newsletters, I hitched a ride with her and burrowed into Surratt minutiae while she dissected people in the anatomy lab. Within two days, I’d photographed just about every Surratt newsletter in the collection. If I hadn’t done that at that precise moment, I’d have been delayed months and months while waiting for Covid restrictions to lift.

In addition to all that, the curator at the Surratt House Museum, who I contacted by email and phone, did everything she could to make the museum’s materials accessible to me from afar.

At the same time I was also working on Marmee, and realized I needed access to Abba May Alcott’s (Louisa May Alcott’s mother) handwritten memoir at Harvard. Harvard’s libraries were closed by then. Completely. Not even email requests were being filled. When they reopened months later, there was a six-month backup. 

I called Chris (yeah, same guy) and asked him if he knew anyone associated with Harvard, because unlike me, he’s an extrovert and knows all sorts of people all over the place. He immediately said, “I’ll call Katie.” Katie lives in Boston. I’ve never met her, but she took a few hours out of her day and went to get as many scans of the materials for me as she could. 

And then she recruited her friend Belinda, who works at Harvard and who I’ve also never met. Belinda sacrificed some of her lunch hours to photograph the rest of the memoir for me. A human research chain!

When writing OTMA about Czar Nicolas and the Romanov family, you had the additional research obstacle of having to translate much of the source material from the Russian language. You had a smattering of familiarity of the language from your college days, and you had published your debut novel to some acclaim. But why, for your sophomore book, take on the four separate POV daughters, with much of the source material in a foreign language in the hands of not fully cooperative government?

Because I’m bananas? Or maybe because I was about 23 years old and didn’t fully realize how much I’d bitten off until I was too far in to back out.

Why did you change the title of The Lost Crown?

The original cover

I wanted a title (and a cover) that would convey exactly what the book is about at a glance. When The Lost Crown was published, sparkly vampires and boy wizards were all the rage, and the marketing department was reluctant to loudly proclaim The Lost Crown as a novel about Russian history. I disagreed but was too much a rookie to make a fuss. 

I’ve always regretted acquiescing so easily, so when the rights reverted I gave myself the title and cover I’d always secretly wished for. “OTMA" is a well-known acronym among fans of Olga, Tatiana, Maria, and Anastasia Romanov, and the subtitle clues everyone else in (The Romanov Sisters)! Adding the grand duchesses’ faces to the letters was a brilliant move on the designer’s part.

You were asked in a Q&A why you haven’t written any biographies of men, and you answered that you haven’t found one whose story interested you enough. But of course, the real answer is that it’s women in history who’ve been glossed over and ignored. Who’s next? I’ve heard you mention Lorena Hickok before. Is she still on the short list?

Oh heck yes. Lorena Hickok is in fact the next book you’ll see from me, probably in 2025. It’s a biography of a top-notch Associate Press reporter who fell in love with Eleanor Roosevelt.

When she had a choice

Your historical time period comfort zone seems to be within the last two hundred years. One obvious reason would be that physical records are more readily available. And certainly, you’ve only mined the very surface of those unheralded women in history who helped to get us to where we are today. Do you feel like you were reincarnated from an earlier time?

Not exactly. But I did grow up in a VERY Victorian town that’s chock full of antiques and history. So it really wasn’t a big leap for me to jump backwards 150 years or so.

Immersing yourself in the diary and newspaper language of 100 years ago, do you find yourself thinking, talking or dreaming in that old-timely vernacular?

Yeah, a little bit! Some old-timey words just don’t get the use they deserve anymore. “Vexed” for example. Among the right kind of nerds, you can have a lot of fun with archaic vocabulary.


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