Remembering the World Outside with Susan Wiggs
Wayward Girls opens in Buffalo, New York, in the 1960s. Mairin O’Hara is working in an apple orchard with the sun overhead and Simon and Garfunkel’s “Mrs. Robinson” playing on the radio. The work is hard and life isn’t easy, but she’s young. The pleasures of summer surround her, and the freedom of adulthood is beginning to come into view.
That openness vanishes when Mairin is unexpectedly sent to the Home of the Good Shepherd, a Catholic reform institution modeled on the Magdalene Laundries, part of a system that confined girls and women in forced unpaid labor under the pretense of moral reform.
The chirping birds of the orchard fall away, replaced by dark hallways and days structured by routine and control. But Mairin doesn’t lose herself in her new reality. Even there, she continues to hear the music, and remember that another world still exists beyond the walls that entrap her.
“Every scene in every work of fiction happens somewhere at some time.”
—Susan Wiggs
Wayward Girls spans multiple time periods and moves between different environments. Susan explains that the danger in a book like this is that the reader begins to feel pulled rather than carried. Weather helps solve that problem, guiding us to understand where we are through our senses. We feel where we are before we know it.
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