A midwife's early American story

Ariel Lawhon discusses the real-life early American midwife at the center of her novel The Frozen River. CLICK HERE: Visit our website to see all of our episodes, donate to the podcast, sign up for our newsletter, get free educational materials, and more! To see Civics 101 in book form, check out A User's Guide to Democracy: How America Works by Hannah McCarthy and Nick Capodice, featuring illustrations by Tom Toro. Check out our other weekly NHPR podcast, Outside/In - we think you'll love it! Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices

Speaker names marked ? are inferred from speaking time and the show’s known hosts — they are not voice-verified.

• 0:01Speaker 00

  Now for a quick message from Anthropic, the team behind Claude, the AI built for businesses. Customers count on their bank, and banks count on their most important systems. Now those systems count on Claude, and nine of the Fortune 10 companies use it for critical work. See why leading companies trust Claude at claude.ai/span.

• 0:25Speaker 01

  Visible puts the ultimate wireless hack in the palm of your hand. With unlimited 5G wireless data and hotspot designed to keep you connected, powered by Verizon's 5G network. And no contract holding you back. Plans start at $25 a month, or get the premium Visible Plus Pro Plan and save $10 on your first month when you use promo code HACK. Make the switch at visible.com. Terms apply. See visible.com for details.

• 0:55Speaker 02

  We are live from the Sam's Club Holiday Club Parade. Oh, wait, are those guys? Just snoozing. It's the Food Coma Club. They might lose count of their helpings of turkey, but never their spending. Oh, you hear that? It's the Cool Ants Club in their natural habitat of giving the trendiest gifts. It's the Deal Hunters Club. No sudden movements. They smell value a mile away. Whatever holiday club you're in, Sam's Club helps you make the most of your holidays. Come join us, Sam's Club.

• 1:38Hannah McCarthy?

  This is Civics 101. I'm Hannah McCarthy. Today on the show, we're going to be breaking format and bringing you a conversation with author Ariel Lawhon, recorded live at Writers on a New England stage in Portsmouth, New Hampshire. The reason we're airing this in the Civics 101 feed is because Lawhon's novel, The Frozen River, is about a time and a place in our country we think about a lot around here, post-revolutionary America, New England, to be precise. The book is historical fiction, but it's based on a real-life midwife named Martha Ballard, who lived an extraordinary life, providing care to more than 1,000 women during her career.

• 2:20Hannah McCarthy?

  The novel takes place in 1789 in Holwell, Maine. It's part murder mystery, but also explores timely themes through a historical lens: women's rights, healthcare, the criminal legal system, all things we've touched on in our podcast. If you've read The Frozen River, you'll really enjoy this conversation. If not, we recommend it, but you can listen anyway because it's pretty fascinating. And we're putting a link to more about the book in our show notes. So without further ado, here's our executive producer Rebecca Lavoy with author Ariel Lohan, recorded live for Writers on a New England Stage.

• 3:04Speaker 04

  I am so glad that you're all here joining us for this conversation. Thank you for coming out for it. It feels like a really good time to curl up with a good book and talk about it. And thank you so much for joining us, Ariel.

• 3:16Speaker 05

  Thank you so much for having me here. I am delighted. This is my first time here.

• 3:22Speaker 04

  Really?

• 3:23Speaker 05

  Yes, first time.

• 3:26Speaker 04

  So The Frozen River tells the fictionalized story of a real-life person, 18th-century midwife Martha Ballard. How did you learn about Martha Ballard?

• 3:36Speaker 05

  So Martha Ballard, if you're not familiar with her, there are three things you need to know. She was a midwife in the 1700s who delivered over 1,000 babies in the course of her career, and she never lost a mother in childbirth. The second thing you need to know about her is that she kept a diary for over 30 years at a time when most women could not read or write. And the third thing that I find fascinating is that she was the great aunt of Clara Barton, founder of the American Red Cross, and she was the great-great-grandmother of Mary Hobart, who was one of the first female physicians in the United States.

• 4:17Speaker 05

  And I knew none of this until August 8, 2008.

• 4:22Speaker 04

  Specific date?

• 4:23Speaker 05

  Specific date. I was pregnant with our fourth child. My husband and I had four kids in five years. I take that back. We did not have them. I had them. And I was pregnant with number four and I had gone to a routine doctor's visit on August 8th, 2008, and my doctor was late for the appointment. So I'd been stranded in his waiting room and I had two options. I could reschedule and go home, but there were children there. And I didn't miss them currently. And my husband had them, so probably nobody was gonna die. The other option was I could stick it out and wait for my doctor to show up. And

• 5:08Speaker 05

  so I chose the latter. And I was in his waiting room for hours, the entire afternoon. And I finished the book that I brought with me, and then I read all of the magazines in the office. And there was nothing left, except for that pile of scary pamphlets they have in the corner, that you don't want to read, because you don't want to know how you're gonna die. And so I was flipping through those pamphlets, and underneath I found a small devotional called Our Daily Bread, really common in doctor's offices in Texas at the time. So I flipped open this devotional, and to August 8th, 2008, I still have the page, which is why it's memorable. And I proceeded to read the story of a woman named

• 5:49Speaker 05

  Martha Ballard, who had delivered over a thousand babies in her career, and never lost a mother in childbirth. And I remember sitting there thinking, the doctor that I'm waiting on cannot boast a record like that. But Martha Ballard did it in the 1700s, without the benefit of cesarean section or modern medicine. And I just remember thinking, that would make a great novel. So I ripped the page out, and I put it in my purse. It is worth noting here, because I got hate mail recently for ripping the page. Like, oh, come on. It's a disposable, like, it's three months, you're meant to chuck it in the trash after the three months. Like, I did not desecrate a leather-bound, hardcover book.

• 6:34Speaker 05

  It's like desecrating us weekly in a doctor's office, right? It's fine, it'll be fine. But I kid you not, two minutes later, my doctor walked in. And I think about that sometimes, when I'll turn around, I look at my bookshelf, and I see The Frozen River there. I think, if I had gone home and rescheduled, this book would not exist. Hmm.

• 6:54Speaker 04

  So I listened to your author's note for the book. In it, you describe yourself as a collector of people.

• 7:00Speaker 05

  Yes.

• 7:01Speaker 04

  And you also say that this book is different than the other ones you've written because they could be described as biographical fiction, but this one can't. So can you talk about that?

• 7:11Speaker 05

  I love people. I love collecting their stories. My favorite thing is to stumble across somebody or a moment in time or a person that I'm vaguely familiar with, but I don't know the specifics. And then to do a deep dive into their world. The difference with this particular book is that unlike my other four, there was so little research material available. We have Martha Ballard's diary and we have a biography called A Midwife's Tale by Laurel Thatcher Ulrich, which go buy it. It's amazing. It won a Pulitzer. It is the definitive history of Martha's life. We have those two things.

• 7:55Speaker 05

  Her diary is this really intimate, day-to-day look at the life of a woman in the 1700s. And then the biography is this 30,000-foot view of the overarching life and times. But I was writing one story set during six months of her life, and there was so little to go on. Unlike many of my other novels, there were no conversations recorded. There were no specifics about her relationships and her friendships. It had to be created out of whole cloth. And so in that sense, this is the most fictional of my stories, even though the vast majority of what happens in the book is real.

• 8:38Speaker 04

  Can you describe the way that Marsha wrote her diaries? Because I think it's fascinating. They're not written like prose style. So you, I think, had to imagine, you know, the details around them, but also rethink the way she could have written them so that we could read them in your book. But how are they actually written?

• 8:59Speaker 05

  We call it a diary. It's really not. It's not even a journal. Are you familiar with a daybook? That's more of what it is. She will give you the date. She will give you the weather. Oftentimes, she'll tell you what she cooked for dinner, whose baby she delivered, who came to visit. It is very truncated, very specific. There is no little to no editorializing in the 900 pages of her diary that we have left. If you were to read her diary, which you probably won't, because I will be honest, it's rough sledding. It's And it's expensive. It's expensive. My copy cost $350. It was a good investment. I think it paid off.

• 9:41Speaker 05

  So you're not going to read it. But if you did, there is one phrase that you would find repeated thousands of times. She'll give you the date. She'll give you the weather. She made chicken. She delivered a baby. Her friend came to visit. And she will end the diary entry with this one phrase, and she will say, "I have been at home." And it was sort of this mantra that happens throughout her diary. But for me, I wrote this book during COVID. And every day, I would go to my desk. I would open the document. I would open my research material, things I needed to do, the notebook of what scenes I was going to write that day. And then I would open her diary, and I would read several passages. And she did

• 10:22Speaker 05

  this, and she did this. "I have been at home." So my mantra became, "Me too, Marsha." Also, yes, I have been at home for days and days and weeks and months and years. And when I think back to that girl in the doctor's office, pregnant with three other really little kids at home, I think that girl could not have written this book as it exists now. But also, I needed to write this book during that very specific time. It gave me this affinity for Martha Ballard because her entire life, her work and her home life was one piece. There was no separation.

• 11:07Speaker 05

  She was at home with all of her children, with her husband constantly. And I feel as though I understood her in a way that I would not have been able to understand her had I written it any other time.

• 11:20Speaker 04

  So the novel opens with a dead body in an icebound New England river. And Martha is a midwife, but she also becomes a detective in your book. How did you decide to do that construct? And are you a mystery writer now?

• 11:36Speaker 05

  I've always been a mystery writer. I love a good old fashioned whodunit. I love them. I have not written a whodunit since my very first novel, but I grew up reading I Have The Christie. It's fun for me. And when I was trying to decide what I would write next, it's always the question, what will I write next? I was like, I don't know what the subject matter will be, but I know I want to do a murder mystery. And so I went into it specifically knowing I want to do a murder mystery. And how fun would that be to have a midwife detective? We don't get those very often.

• 12:14Speaker 04

  But are midwives perfectly suited to be detectives in a way? Because as we learn in the book, she's a collector and keeper of secrets, right?

• 12:23Speaker 05

  So she's in your home. She is delivering your baby. But what we don't realize about midwives is that they were much, much more than the person who delivered your baby. If you got cut or burned, you called the midwife and they would give you stitches and they would come make a tonic, make a salve. They were your primary care providers. They were your pharmacist. They were your general practitioner in most communities at the time because in the 1780s, in the wild of what was then the District of Maine in the state of Massachusetts. Many towns did not have their own physician. So if something goes wrong, you quite literally call for the midwife.

• 13:06Speaker 05

  But she was also the coroner. Somebody dies. They call her to inspect the body to see if she can try and determine the cause of death for any potential legal proceedings that happen. And so, yes, the book begins with a body. The first line in the book is, "The body floats downstream." And then it gets locked in the river when it freezes, which, for the record, I am from the southwest and I did not know that could happen.

• 13:34Speaker 04

  Welcome to New Hampshire.

• 13:36Speaker 05

  Yes. They find the body, extract it from the river. They call Martha Ballard. She inspects the body, comes to a conclusion, and immediately is interrupted by the new town doctor, who has a very different idea of what happened. And then we are off to the races.

• 13:56Speaker 04

  I'd love you to talk a little bit more about that because the doctor character in your book is new to town. He can't not say that he was trained at Harvard like every other sentence. But what were doctors doing at this time? Like, how did they differ from what the midwives were providing?

• 14:13Speaker 05

  So it's a really, really interesting point in American history and also medical history because we have this newly formed Harvard University. We have some of the first classes to graduate, their first medical students, all men. And they are going out into these communities to doctor, to treat these patients. But it was about that same time that the medical community, that was entirely male, looked at labor and delivery as a source of lost income. So, modern obstetrics really began in a way that doctors were going, "Oh."

• 14:51Speaker 05

  That is medical. I should be treating it. I should be delivering these babies. I have studied anatomy in a textbook. I can do this. Many times what happened, however, is that they did not bother to learn from the women who'd been doing this for decades and decades and had thousands of years' worth of knowledge passed down one to another. So when this doctor shows up in this town, his name is Dr. Benjamin Page, it sets up this conflict between midwifery and obstetrics. But it was a real conflict that happened in Martha Ballard's world because you have a 24-year-old boy showing up with a degree and lots of book knowledge

• 15:34Speaker 05

  and no experiential knowledge, and he begins to encroach upon Martha's territory with really deadly results. And all of the births and the situations and things that go wrong in the book really happened, and they are recorded in her diary. And it was this really fascinating...rivalry is the wrong word. It was just this conflict between these two ways of treating women in labor. I'm curious how many people in this book were based on real people. Was it all of them? Most of them? The vast majority. There might be one or two that are composite characters. And then there were plenty that I had to strip out.

• 16:19Speaker 05

  There's a lot of people in this book. It is a very heavy-populated village. And so I had to be judicious in who got time on the page and who fit into the specific story that I was trying to tell.

• 16:32Speaker 04

  One of the funniest details in your author's note is you talk about how many of the women in the village were named Hannah. So you actually changed the name of some of those women. Everybody's a Hannah.

• 16:43Speaker 05

  Lots of Hannahs, lots of Rebecca's, and then you get lots of really archaic biblical names, like her husband is Ephraim, which took me half the book before I realized how that was pronounced. So it's kind of fun. You get to use some names that you don't typically find in a novel.

• 17:00Speaker 04

  How is Ephraim her husband represented in her writing? Because in the book, he manifests as this incredibly feminist, incredibly supportive man in 1789, feels very much like the ideal partner today. So how much did you know about him when you were writing about him?

• 17:16Speaker 05

  We know basic facts. We know that they were married for the entirety of their lives. We know that they had nine children, six of whom are living at the time the story opens. We know that they were business partners. They ran a mill together. They worked together. We know that at the very least, he was supportive of her career. She had a lifelong thriving medical career as a midwife. It is not a stretch for me to believe that that translated into the rest of their life and their family. Ephraim Ballard, it is important to note,

• 17:55Speaker 05

  the version in this book resembles my own husband greatly. So that is, that's my influence, that's his influence, right? His mother did a good job. He's actually home. I'm here because he is home with our two sick teenage boys, making them soup and taking them to the doctor. Good men have existed for all of history. And that is one thing that I think is very easy to forget. My personal pet peeve in fiction is that we so rarely get to see good men, and we so rarely get to see good marriages in particular. And as a novelist, I know

• 18:37Speaker 05

  why. It is easier to write the bad marriage, because all of the conflict exists right there. If you write a good marriage, the conflict has to come from elsewhere. But when I sat down to tell this story, knowing that Martha was remarkable, knowing that she must have had support in her home, I wanted to tell the story of a good marriage.

• 19:03Speaker 04

  Something else that's somewhat rare is a novel where the protagonist is a woman in her mid-50s. What is that, what was that choice? Because you had 27 years of her life to choose from. So why did you make that choice?

• 19:15Speaker 05

  Again, another pet peeve, but also bred from life experience. Like I said, the girl in the doctor's office could not have written Martha Ballard, who is 54 years old when the novel opens. I also, this is not the first, it's the first novel idea I came up with. It is not the first I've written. It's the fifth. And I kept going back to it and thinking, is it time? Is it time I'd pull out that piece of paper that I stole?

• 19:43Speaker 05

  And I go, ah, not yet, not yet. And I used to think it's because it's a hard novel to write. It's a hard novel to pull off. I have since realized I just wasn't ready. I needed more life experience under my belt. A major theme in this novel is about having grown children, having kids grow up and leave you. And who are you as a person when the primary work that you have done for decades is now over? And I had finally reached that point in my life.

• 20:15Speaker 05

  But also not being young myself, I find that I want to see more mature women on the page.

• 20:36Speaker 04

  We'll be right back with more of Writers on a New England Stage with Ariel Lawhon after a quick break.

• 20:59Nick Capodice?

  Haven't you out there ever Googled your own name? Like, actually done it? You'll find your address, your phone number, maybe even that police report from the time you went to see Rain Man in the movie theater, but you were underage? Maybe that one's just me. But here's the thing. There are companies called data brokers whose entire business model is collecting your personal information and selling it to advertisers, to strangers, sometimes to people running scams. And once your data's out there, it just keeps circulating. That is where Incogni comes in. Incogni contacts data brokers on your behalf and sends them removal requests over and over, so your info doesn't just pop right back up. You set it up once, and they keep working in the background.

• 21:44Nick Capodice?

  You can even track the progress on a dashboard. And for our listeners, we have an exclusive 60% off an annual Incogni plan. Just go to incogni.com/civics or use the code CIVICS at checkout. There's a link in the episode description. Remember, they can't harm you if they can't find you.

• 22:04Nick Capodice?

  There is nothing quite like having stuff in your closet that you love and you know you can count on for any occasion, except maybe giving someone else that feeling. And this holiday season, Quince is where I'm finding those pieces. Quince makes elevated everyday essentials using premium materials like Mongolian cashmere, organic cotton, and it is priced 50 to 80% less than similar brands. They work directly with ethical factories. They cut out the middleman, so you get luxury quality pieces without the luxury price tag. As this lovely fall is winding to a close and we slouch into winter, I wish more than anything, someone had gifted me a yak wool hoodie.

• 22:49Nick Capodice?

  I'm dead serious. It's good enough for the yak. I mean, it works really well for the yak, right? It would work for me. And it looks hot. So give the gift of quality this holiday season. Download the Quince app for app exclusive offers or go to quince.com. Get free shipping on your order and 365 day returns. Now available in Canada and the UK as well. And last thing, when Quince asks where you heard about them, let them know it was Civics 101. It's the best way to support the show. All right.

• 23:24Speaker 01

  Visible puts the ultimate wireless hack in the palm of your hand. With unlimited 5G wireless data and hotspot designed to keep you connected. Powered by Verizon's 5G network and no contract holding you back. Plans start at $25 a month or get the premium Visible Plus Pro Plan and save $10 on your first month when you use promo code HACK. Make the switch at visible.com. Terms apply. See visible.com for details.

• 24:01Speaker 04

  Halliwell, Maine is where the book is set, but Halliwell also, to me, became a character in the story. You're not from New England. How did you pull that off?

• 24:10Speaker 05

  Tomorrow will be my first time to Maine in my entire life.

• 24:13Speaker 04

  Amazing.

• 24:14Speaker 05

  So.

• 24:18Speaker 05

  My original plan was to go to Maine to research the book when I was writing because I have 900 children and I had them so close together. Research trips were just impossible for much of my career. But I was like, I can do it. I can get to Maine. I'm going to go research this woman in person. And COVID happened and we were all stuck at home. And listen, had I known COVID was coming, I would not have suggested to my husband that we buy a drum set for our youngest son for Christmas, December 2019.

• 24:53Speaker 04

  Alas.

• 24:54Speaker 05

  The book was written to the sound of a thousand drums over my head, but. Covid ruined that opportunity completely. And so I was stuck doing this the way that I always have been, which is my research material, my imagination, Google Maps, lots of pictures, and then a recreation that is my version of a place, my version of an event, my version of what could have happened. But all towns are the same, really. People are the same. That is one thing you learn when you have my job, is that people have been peopling since the dawn of time.

• 25:32Speaker 04

  Hmm. You may or may not have intended it, but this novel speaks very much to many elements of where we are today. Except in many ways, things seemed not necessarily easier for women, certainly, but simpler. Can you talk about the freedoms, the rights, the sort of things that surprised you, learning about how women lived in 1789 in early America?

• 25:56Speaker 05

  People always ask me, if you could go back in time, what era would you live in? And I say, none of them. History was awful for women, really, prior to about 1900. In particular, in America, in the 1700s, what we know as our legal rights in general, not even just as women, were bare bones. The court system barely existed. We were talking about this backstage. We'd had a constitution for two years. The Bill of Rights had not been written. In the Constitution, we had the first five articles. Most of what we know as due process, most of the rights that we take for granted, do not even think about,

• 26:39Speaker 05

  did not exist particularly for women. And one of the things that I discovered early when writing this book is during Martha's time, women could not testify in court without the presence of their husbands or their fathers. With one exception, if you were a midwife, you were granted legal status that would let you come in and testify in court because one of the laws that had been written early on, I want to say it was in the 1500s, do not quote me. The hard drive has been halfway deleted because I'm working on a new book. But this law was called a law for the punishment of fornication and the maintenance of bastard's children.

• 27:23Speaker 05

  And it was a law on the books in Massachusetts at the time. And it basically said if a woman had a child outside of wedlock, she'd have to go to the court and either pay a fine, possibly spend a night in jail. The man had no requirements. There was no fee, there was no jail time, there was no nothing. But for a midwife, one of the things that they were required to do if they delivered a child that was born out of wedlock was ask the mother the name of the father. And this is the part that is kind of hilarious to me. The people who wrote the law genuinely believed that women were not capable of lying in childbirth.

• 28:05Speaker 05

  I'd have lied to you just for talking to me. Clearly, they knew nothing about women unless about childbirth. But Martha was required by law to inquire of the name. Sometimes they told her the name, sometimes they didn't. She would have to go to court and declare the mother said this, or the mother refused. This book takes place 50 years post-Puritan era, and we tend to think of the Puritans as really pure. Not so much. Yes, there's so much extramarital, premarital sex in this book. Like, was that how it was? Fascinating tidbit for you. In Martha's time, based on her diary, based on the children that she delivered, four in 10 first pregnancies were conceived out of wedlock.

• 28:48Speaker 05

  One to two in 10 were born outside of wedlock. So you had a lot of shotgun weddings. And you had a lot of nine-pound premature children. Gosh. Biology works, man. It has worked from the dawn of time. And I loved that Martha approached this reality with a very, very dispassionate view and absolutely no judgment. And I thought, gosh, we have sanitized so much of human history. And we tend to think if it happened back then...

• 29:26Speaker 05

  They must have been really proper about it. No. Yeah. Though, as Shakespeare says, "The world must be peopled."

• 29:33Speaker 04

  While you were writing this, though, I mean, the conversation was really shifting in the country about reproductive rights, women's rights. The Dobbs decision came down in June of 2022, for instance, and, you know, women's reproductive rights, how we talk about things like extramarital sex, premarital sex, is really shifting during this time. Were you informed by some of that when you were writing this book?

• 29:54Speaker 05

  That is a great question. So, two things can be true. I was editing the book about the time of the Dobbs decision, which clearly was front of mind for the entire country. But also, one of my jobs when I approach any moment in history is to try to separate the modern era in which I live, because I learned early on, history does not need me to editorialize it.

• 30:21Speaker 04

  Mm-hmm.

• 30:21Speaker 05

  And so, to look at this story, I had to really focus every day to sit down and go, "Okay, Martha Ballard could not imagine the world that we live in. Martha Ballard could not imagine going and voting. She couldn't imagine most of the things that women today enjoy. So, if that was her reality, what is she focused on? If she's living at a moment when these things don't exist, what is her focus? How does she view the world?" And that is the thing that I worked really hard to build in. And in doing that, it became a story that you could read in the newspaper. Honestly, you could open any newspaper in the country today and read something similar, but because it's set several hundred years in the past,

• 31:04Speaker 05

  there's this level of separation that allows you to look at it in a way that you cannot if you're reading a modern story. History changes, but it doesn't.

• 31:15Speaker 04

  There's a black character in your book, a traveling medical provider that you call Doctor. Can you talk about this character and the real person that she was based on?

• 31:25Speaker 05

  Again, you're not going to read Martha's diary. If you did, you would find a very small handful of references to a black female doctor that would occasionally come to Halliwell, Maine. And what's fascinating, other than she uses black, female, and doctor, she doesn't say nurse, she doesn't say midwife, she uses the phrase physician, is that when this woman would come to Halliwell, Martha's friends and neighbors skipped over her medical care and went to this other woman. Hmm. I do not think it's a stretch to say that means that she had superior medical skills to Martha. What is fascinating, however, is that this woman's name is never recorded in Martha's

• 32:06Speaker 05

  diary, but at the time, there were 12 free black families living in Halliwell. Massachusetts was the first state to abolish slavery, and at the time, there were 12 families in this town that Martha knew, she worked with, she delivered their babies, she bartered and traded and talked to them. She knew their names and recorded them in her diary, with one exception, this female physician. And it made me think, does she not know it? Or does she purposefully not record it? And so she is one of the characters that I loved the most, because again, this is the story of our world. Women so often get written out of history.

• 32:45Hannah McCarthy?

  Yeah.

• 32:45Speaker 05

  But Martha made sure that there was a mention of her.

• 32:59Hannah McCarthy?

  Stay tuned for more of this edition of Writers on a New England Stage with Ariel Lawhon after the break.

• 33:15Nick Capodice?

  Haven't you out there ever Googled your own name? Like, actually done it? You'll find your address, your phone number, maybe even that police report from the time you went to see Rain Man in the movie theater, but you were underage? Maybe that one's just me. But here's the thing, there are companies called data brokers, whose entire business model is collecting your personal information and selling it to advertisers, to strangers.

• 33:39Nick Capodice?

  Sometimes to people running scams. And once your data is out there, it just keeps circulating. That is where Incogni comes in. Incogni contacts data brokers on your behalf and sends them removal requests over and over. So your info doesn't just pop right back up. You set it up once and they keep working in the background. You can even track the progress on a dashboard. And for our listeners, we have an exclusive 60% off an annual Incogni plan. Just go to incogni.com/civics or use the code civics at checkout. There's a link in the episode description. Remember, they can't harm you if they can't find you.

• 34:20Speaker 01

  Visible puts the ultimate wireless hack in the palm of your hand. With unlimited 5G wireless data and hotspot designed to keep you connected. Powered by Verizon's 5G network. And no contract holding you back. Plans start at $25 a month. Or get the premium Visible Plus Pro Plan and save $10 on your first month when you use promo code hack. Make the switch at visible.com. Terms apply. See visible.com for details.

• 34:51Speaker 07

  Reports due to then meeting prep then.

• 34:53Speaker 08

  Chronic migraine doesn't care about your to do list. For people with chronic migraine, 15 or more headache days a month, each lasting four hours or more. Botox, onabatilinumtoxin A prevents headaches in adults with chronic migraine. It is not approved for those with 14 or fewer headache days a month. Botox prevents on average eight to nine headache days a month versus six to seven for placebo. Prescription Botox is injected by your doctor. Effects of Botox may spread hours to weeks after injection, causing serious symptoms. Alert your doctor right away as difficulty swallowing, speaking, breathing, eye problems or muscle weakness can be signs of a life threatening condition. Patients with these conditions before injection are at highest risk. Side effects may include allergic reactions, neck and injection site pain, fatigue and headache. Allergic reactions can include rash, welts, asthma symptoms and dizziness. Don't receive Botox if there's a skin infection.

• 35:34Speaker 08

  Tell your doctor your medical history, muscle or nerve conditions, including ALS, Lou Gehrig's disease, myasthenia gravis or Lambert Eaton syndrome, and medications including botulinum toxins, as these may increase the risk of serious side effects. Ask your doctor. Visit botoxchronicmigraine.com or call 1-800-44-BOTOX to learn more.

• 35:51Speaker 02

  The secret society of semi homemade, listen up. Sam's Club has pre made dishes for a Thanksgiving feast that's ready in two hours, all while tasting suspiciously homemade. Come join us. Sam's Club.

• 36:03Speaker 09

  Individual oven times may vary.

• 36:23Speaker 04

  You talked about this being a time when the Constitution was two years old. Yet, there's a legal procedural at the center of your book, too. In addition to the mystery, we also have this like law and order situation in court. What did you learn about that process when you were researching and going to court? Like the laws, how it worked?

• 36:42Speaker 05

  It was bonkers. The whole thing was nuts. I mean, imagine. So there were three levels, right? There's the petty level. Your neighbor steals your cow. Or your neighbor curses on the Sabbath and you want to lodge a complaint. So the lowest level is petty complaints. Somebody didn't pay a bill, somebody punched you in the nose, kind of thing. The next is more serious. It is theft. It is murder. It is rape. It is assault. And then the highest, higher level was appeals court, so to say. They would handle any issues that couldn't get resolved in the lower courts. And then you had the Supreme Court. And it was really fascinating for me to approach this from a modern mindset where we think of due process. We think of rights.

• 37:27Speaker 05

  We think there are things that are established and you are innocent until proven guilty. And you're given a lawyer if you can't afford one. And you read your Miranda rights. Bupkis, none of it, didn't exist. Most of the time, if a woman was assaulted, her daddy, her husband, her brothers were going to take care of it before it could ever get to the courts. And so you've got this. Kind of freewheeling vengeance aside that was happening over here. And then you've got a baby country trying to establish the rules by which we live civilly. And those two things are constantly in conflict throughout the story.

• 38:07Speaker 04

  An audience member wants to know, have you ever visited a setting or location from one of your books and been disappointed that it didn't live up to your imagination?

• 38:15Speaker 05

  So I've never really visited a location, but something fun has happened. With every single book that I have written, I have been contacted after the publication by somebody that has a relationship with the book. With my first novel, it's called The Wife, The Maid and the Mistress, is about a missing judge. I got an email from a woman and she goes, Mrs. Lohan would love to know where you did the research for your novel. The showgirl in your novel was my grandmother. I was like, oh God, I did that to somebody's grandmother.

• 38:48Speaker 05

  With my second novel, I got to talk to a little, tiny, tiny, tiny old German man whose father had taken him on a tour of the Hindenburg prior to its last flight. And he's like, you got it right. My third novel is set during the Russian Revolution and it's about Anastasia Romanov, the woman who is her, believed to be her most famous impostor. And I got an email from a woman at the University of Virginia. She did genetic research and she told me that she'd read the novel, that she loved it. And she's like, I just want you to know, I was the person that did the genetic research to determine whether or not Anastasia Romanov did survive the Russian Revolution.

• 39:26Speaker 04

  Wow.

• 39:26Speaker 05

  And she proceeds to tell me how she was walking across the campus that day, being the only person in the world who knew at that moment whether she had or hadn't.

• 39:36Speaker 04

  Another audience question, did the ballads really know Paul Revere?

• 39:41Speaker 05

  That was a little fictional bit. The people ask me about a lot and it was just fun. It was just fun. I had, unrelated to the plotting of this book, stumbled across pictures of Revere Peter. And he signed it all. And then later on, I was researching the book and I realized that part of what she would do is she would mix her ink in small Peter dishes. And I thought, why not?

• 40:08Speaker 04

  I mean, New England's a small place, right? We know each other.

• 40:11Speaker 05

  They didn't.

• 40:14Speaker 04

  One of the things I love about your website, and I've never seen this on an author website before, this specifically, is you show the room where you write, and you actually give a tour of different elements of the room. What interests you about the spaces in which people write?

• 40:30Speaker 05

  I cannot prove this. I don't even know how you would do a scientific study, but I think where a book is written informs the book itself. For me, that is a room in my house that used to be a dining room, that my husband closed off and turned into an office, and it's got this old desk. A number of years ago, he bought me this. It's tiny. It's not much bigger than this. It is a teacher's desk that was pulled out of an old one-room schoolhouse, and it's got all the stains and chips and nicks. And I love to sit there and think, what stories were told at this desk? Who taught here?

• 41:05Speaker 04

  You've written about all these different eras: World War II, you've written about the Romanovs, Russian Revolution. Is there a time that you are just dying to write about, that you're searching for a story to fit?

• 41:19Speaker 05

  Ooh, yes and no. So my next one is set during medieval Ireland, which, if you think 1700s Maine is hard to write about, geez. Also, I didn't think before I decided to write about a pirate, the fact that I get seasick.

• 41:32Speaker 04

  Yeah.

• 41:32Speaker 05

  That's turning out to be a bit of a problem. So that is the next book. Actually, the one that I'm waiting for, the dream book for me, and I have most of it built in my head, is actually a Western.

• 41:45Speaker 04

  Of course, there is the Pulitzer Prize-winning book about Martha Ballard, but she doesn't appear, and women like her don't appear in any of our history textbooks when we go to school. You know, it's the founding fathers. It's very much the perspective of the men of the time. How do you think our understanding of American history would shift if the Martha Ballards of that time were just as present in our textbooks?

• 42:08Speaker 05

  It would be revolutionary. If you think about it, when it comes to big conflicts, history is written by the winners. The losers never get to tell their version. But history is also written by those who were educated, who had the access to books, reading, writing.

• 42:30Speaker 05

  And throughout so much of history, women were in the sidelines. But I always say, if you want to know what really happened at any moment in history, go talk to the women who lived it. Find their records if you can, because they record totally different things. Men are obsessed with the wars and the bullets and the bombs. Not all of them, that's a gross generalization, but men do this. Women do this. And they focus on the people and their relationships and what they have lost and the small betrayals and what it cost them at any moment in history. And the fact is, we need both. We need the big and we need the small.

• 43:15Speaker 05

  And we've lost so much of it. It's why I do what I do. And I could live 100 years and never write enough books to really scratch the surface of the lives of women we have forgotten, but I am trying.

• 43:29Hannah McCarthy?

  Arielle Lahan, I will read anything that you write after reading this book. Thank you so much again.

• 43:34Speaker 05

  Thank you. Thank you for being here.

• 43:52Hannah McCarthy?

  "Writers on a New England Stage" was hosted by our executive producer Rebecca Lavoy, who also produced this episode. The featured author was Arielle Lahan. You can learn more about her book, "The Frozen River," by clicking the link in our show notes. The music hall president and chief executive officer is Tina Sawtell. The producer for the live show was NHPR's Sarah Plord. Literary producer for the music hall is Brittany Wasen. The production manager is Jana Morris. Live sound and recording was engineered by Ian Martin. Lighting and house tech by Drew Fabrizio. Music in this episode by Blue Dot Sessions, Chris Sabriski, and Epidemic Sound. Civics 101 is hosted by me, Hannah McCarthy, and Nick Cappadicei. Our senior producer is Christina Phillips.

• 44:37Hannah McCarthy?

  Civics 101 is a production of NHPR, New Hampshire Public Radio.

• 45:48Speaker 10

  This is Phil Bretisson, former Democratic governor of the state of Tennessee. If you love digging into how history shapes US policy, check out the new season of You Might Be Right.

• 45:57Speaker 11

  And this is Bill Haslam, former Republican governor. This season, we're asking the questions that have defined every pivotal moment in American political history. Is democracy really under threat? Or is that just a story as old as the republic itself? We're tackling the biggest questions shaping the 2026 midterms, so join us.

• 46:14Speaker 10

  Follow You Might Be Right wherever you get your podcasts.

• 46:18Speaker 02

  The secret society of semi-homeade? Listen up. Sam's Club has pre-made dishes for a Thanksgiving feast that's ready in two hours, all while tasting suspiciously homemade. Come join us. Sam's Club.

• 46:31Speaker 09

  Individual oven times may vary.

• 46:34Speaker 12

  Afternoon glare totally ruined my watch party for the big game. That's when my buddy recommended Blinds.com.

• 46:40Speaker 13

  With custom window treatments made to fit your style, space, and budget. Customers who shop at Blinds.com experienced overwhelming satisfaction. Side effects may include a fuller, deeper night's sleep, and a sudden urge to host the watch party again. Blinds.com isn't a medication, but it can improve how you feel about your home.

• 46:58Speaker 12

  Shop Black Friday all month long at Blinds.com. Don't miss huge deals dropping every week.