"Honestly, if someone had told me all the hard parts about being a writer, I might have gotten scared off."
Author Jacqueline Friedland on switching careers, speaking the truth through fiction, and her stirring new novel, COUNTING BACKWARDS.
Check out the collection of past Words With (Author) Friends, wherein I g-chat with an author and you get to read over my shoulder, and order Jacqueline’s propulsive new novel, available now.
Me: Jackie, hi!
Jackie: Hi!
Huge congrats on COUNTING BACKWARDS! How are you feeling post launch?
Thank you so much. Honest answer? This business is hard.
Reviews are good thankfully, but so hard to get the word out
Ah, perpetually true! So, so hard to get the word out—especially right now, it seems.
But you wrote a book and it's getting great reviews! Are you able to take that piece of it in, at least?
That's what my mom says. Yes, I guess. I'm thrilled that people like the book and also really happy that people seem to all grab onto the importance of its message
Speaking of, can you share a little about the book?
Absolutely. The book is based on a true story from 2020 that got very little publicity. It's based on allegations from incarcerated female immigrants claiming they were being sterilized against their will while in custody. The book tells a fictionalized story of the one attorney who takes their case and how the fight for women's rights changes all of their lives. Think Erin Brockovich meets Before We Were Yours.
I love that comp. How did you stumble on this story back in 2020, and what convinced you it was ripe for fiction?
I was procrastinating and reading online news, as one does, and was like eight clicks in to different websites when I saw a headline in the bottom corner of a page that said "The Uterus Collector." It was an article about a whistleblower nurse from a detention center in Georgia who was claiming that a doctor the facility was using was removing one uterus after another.
When I read that, my mind went straight back to a Supreme Court case I'd learned about in high school called Buck v. Bell. In that case, a 17-year-old girl named Carrie Buck was fighting an order from the state of Virginia that called for her sterilization. The reason they wanted to take away her right to have kids was because she'd been deemed, what they called at the time, "feeble minded" and they wanted to prevent her from having any more children that were just like her.
The case really struck a nerve with me when I learned about it in high school and it stayed with me for decades. It was the first thing I thought of when I read about the allegations coming out of Georgia. Two cases, a hundred years apart, and women still being made to give up their rights to bodily autonomy. The idea of it was too much for me, and I knew I had to share it, to make sure everyone knew that these were still important issues.
That's so powerful! Stories of forced sterilization throughout history always chilled me as well. Did you immediately know you wanted to share it via fiction?
