Did you do much research for the book?

So, so much! I read firsthand accounts of the famine. I spent many hours combing through slave narratives. I visited a former plantation and revisited a former slave auction block. I read political arguments and laws of the time. The laws a society passes say so much about that society and who and what they value.

Incredibly, I was also able to listen to digitally remastered audio recordings of former slaves. Available through the Library of Congress, you can hear people who were once enslaved speak about their experiences with slavery before the Civil War. It’s fascinating to hear their voices, the stories they tell, the details they include, and the way they talk about what their lives were like. We think of slavery as long-ago history, but being able to listen to people who actually experienced it made it feel so much more immediate.

Were you a fan of this kind of historical fiction before you wrote this book?

I am a fan of historical fiction. But for me, the marriage of a fictional narrative with my family history has been a unique experience. Through countless hours of research, I got a feeling for the historical time and the lives of the people, but that abstract history became personal when I considered that it was the world my great-great-grandparents lived in. And then I had the pleasure of weaving this tale and imagining their lives, which made me feel connected to them in a profound way.

Why did you create Maple as a character in the book?

In the first instance, it is a love story, but Maple serves as a kind of counterbalance because, as inspiring as the love story may be, it wasn’t really the norm of the time that an enslaved woman and a white Irish man would fall for each other. A very different narrative would have been much more common, so I created the character of Maple to show that other experience.

What were your biggest challenges when writing the book?

Knowing where to start, where to finish, and the events that should happen in between. I realize that sounds like everything but it’s not. For instance, knowing how characters would respond to a given challenge wasn’t nearly as hard for me as deciding on the challenge.

Is there anything that didn’t make the final edit of the book that you wish you could have included?

There is so much more research that went into the book than you see on the page. It would have been nice to be able to include more of it, but it wouldn’t have been right for the story.

What do you hope that readers will take away from reading this story?

We are living at a time when racial tensions are at the highest they have been in decades. It can make us start to think that human beings are just this way. I hope that a story like A More Perfect Union can help to remind us that this isn’t true and that individuals have always found a way to see past the things that divide us, even during far greater periods of strife than what we’re dealing with now. I hope that knowing that the novel is inspired by a real love story will encourage people to remember that we can come together in love.