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- [00:02]
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- [01:26]
Martha Conway
the New Books Network.
- [01:29]
G.P. Gottlieb
He's not nervous until he sees the expression on the pilot's face looking back toward the rear of the aeroplane. Dieter looks too. Smoke is rising from the Dornier's starboard engine. He's alone in the rear double seat and had just been gazing out his small square window, thinking how Ireland reminds him of Germany, the sloping hills and brown rivers, the planted fields and greystone houses. His grandmother's house outside Hamburg was made of just this kind of gray stone with cherry red shutters and a veranda where they ate breakfast in good weather. This is GP Gottlieb, host for New Books and Literature, a podcast channel on the New Books Network. Today I'm talking to Martha Conway about her dual reality novel We Meet apart. Set in 1940 Ireland during World War II, the story revolves around two sisters, one living in a neutral, historically accurate Ireland, the other living in an Ireland that's been invaded by Germany and overrun with Nazis who do their usual executions of anyone who doesn't tow the line and who starve the citizens by taking all the animals and food. The sisters, both struggling to survive on their own, meet every evening at the magical time Irish lore speaks of as belonging to ghosts. Hi Martha, thanks for joining me today.
- [02:57]
Martha Conway
Thank you so much for having me.
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G.P. Gottlieb
So we meet apart refers to the different realities of the two sisters. How did you come to write a dual reality novel?
- [03:10]
Martha Conway
It was a long process, Galit. It started out as just a regular historical novel, historical fiction. And I was looking at grief. And when you lose a member of your family or someone who's close to you, and how do you process that? At the same time, being trapped in circumstances might come as no surprise. I was writing this during the COVID lockdown, and the feeling of being trapped really resonated with me. And the launching point was a young American woman who was trapped in Ireland during World War II. And her family, her American family, all just succumbed to typhus fever. And they. Her mother, her father, and her younger sister, they were all dead except for her. And, excuse me, she was trapped in a different country. Yeah. So I was looking at that and I was not feeling a lot of Z. About midway through, I was feeling like it needed something extra. And I spoke with my own family. I spoke with my. My husband and my daughter and I, I. And my daughter said, well, well, what if there was a ghost? Like, what if one of her family came back as a ghost? And I was like, oh, I like that. And then my husband said, and what if the ghost doesn't know that she's a ghost? And I thought, oh, I really like that. So eventually it evolved into these two sisters who are both trapped in Ireland during World War II. Each of them thinks the other one is dead, and they're both in sort of two different worlds. One world in which Ireland is neutral. It's sitting out the war. That's just the way we know it from history. It never fought in the war. At least the Republic of Ireland didn't. And in the other sisters reality, Nazi Germany has invaded Ireland, and Sabine, the younger sister, has to survive on the run.
- [05:32]
G.P. Gottlieb
Okay, so now let's talk about your research. Although Northern Ireland. Ireland was part of Britain, the rest was officially neutral, as you said. And they called it the emergency. Can you talk about how you researched the setting?
- [05:47]
Martha Conway
Sure. Yeah. I did a ton, ton, ton of research. Research. I love doing research. It always gives me ideas, actually for the. And I'll read something that I want to write about and it'll make its way into a scene or a chapter, and it realize the world and the story, both things. Not just making it factually resonant, but also just making the story more interesting. I read a lot about where Ireland, how it tried to position itself during the war. And like many neutral countries. They were terrified that Germany was going to invade them too. Everybody was, and they were right to be scared. And I learned that the Germans actually did have a plan to invade Ireland. It was called Operation Green. It was about a 50 page pamphlet. It was never executed, but it was incredibly detailed. And when I decided that I was going to have these two different realities, I thought, oh, I'll use that pamphlet and I will, you know, make the story of how that was executed. What happened to Ireland when Nazi Germany invaded?
- [07:06]
G.P. Gottlieb
So were Gubbi and Sabine based on anyone in particular or did all the characters spring up out of your imagination?
- [07:13]
Martha Conway
Well, I have six sisters, so I write a lot about sisters and I'm one of the younger sisters. But strangely, I kind of identified more with the older sister in this case. So, yeah, I would say in some ways it's based on my real relationships.
- [07:34]
G.P. Gottlieb
Meeting Dieter on the first page introduces us to his difficult childhood. Can you say something about why he, a character in the book, was sent to his Oma, or as he calls her, that old witch.
- [07:49]
Martha Conway
Yes, actually, his father called her that old witch. And Dieter was sent to his Oma, his grandmother, because his father was abusive and battered his mother. And in fact, through an accident, Dieter's baby sister, 2 years old, was scalded to death in a bath. And Dieter's father always blamed his mother for that, rightly or wrongly. And so to sort of get rid of Dieter for a while, he was sent to his Oma, his grandmother, and that was the only place where Dieter was happy.
- [08:29]
G.P. Gottlieb
Can you introduce who he is and what he does?
- [08:33]
Martha Conway
Sure.
- [08:34]
G.P. Gottlieb
Realities.
- [08:35]
Martha Conway
He's a pivotal character. He's. In one reality he is a Nazi soldier, and in another reality he is not a soldier, but he's doing recon. Or at least he doesn't present himself as a soldier when he. This is not giving anything away because it happens in the prologue. His plane crash lands in Ireland and he survives and he. He presents himself as somebody who is just, you know, had been blown off course, but actually he was doing recon.
- [09:13]
G.P. Gottlieb
Mm. So let's get back to the main characters. So the older sister with no way of getting back to the States, finds herself stuck in Ireland. This is Gabi, and she's hoping that she can get back to Poughkeepsie in time to sign up for classes advancer, where she planned to go to college. What else can you say to introduce her?
- [09:32]
Martha Conway
Well, Gabi is a very sort of grown up young woman and she has a French mother and an Irish father, but the Mother and father met in New York and they both taught at Vassar College. And Gabi and her sister Sabine both grew up in Poughkeepsie. So she finds herself in Ireland. She's really an outsider. She's a stranger. She can't get back to the United States because no boats are going across the Atlantic. The Germans have mined everything and everybody is afraid of U boats and of being attacked. So she finds herself stuck in Ireland. She has a great aunt that she's hoping to live with, but her great aunt has just passed away too. It's just one of these situations in which, you know, death after death, bad luck after bad luck follows you. And now she doesn't know what to do. She ends up finding these distant relatives. They're not blood relations, but they seem to help her out anyway. She's hoping that they will help her out. And that's where she goes.
- [10:53]
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- [10:56]
Martha Conway
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- [10:59]
G.P. Gottlieb
Not exactly what we'd expect from an Oscar winning director.
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Martha Conway
Action.
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Simon Williams auditioned for Wonder Man.
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Martha Conway
I'm gonna need you to sign this.
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Commercial Voice
Assuming you don't have superpowers.
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G.P. Gottlieb
I'll never work again if anyone found out. My lips are sealed.
- [11:17]
Martha Conway
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- [11:21]
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- [12:12]
G.P. Gottlieb
And then there's Sabine, Gabi's younger sister, who's 17, who is dealing with some physical challenges. Could you describe her?
- [12:21]
Martha Conway
Yeah. Sabine has a physical anomaly. She was born with. Her left arm and hand are fully formed, but her right arm ends at the wrist. She has no hand there. And I have a younger sister with many physical and mental disabilities. And my younger sister has trouble with her hand. So in part she was modeled after my sister.
- [12:50]
G.P. Gottlieb
So
- [12:52]
Martha Conway
there are a lot of reasons why I wanted to give Sabine this physical anomaly. One was just to make things a little bit harder for her because of course, dramatically it's always better if the characters have a hard time. But also because I've long wanted to write about what it is to be someone, even though I myself am not someone, but I lived with someone who has a physical anomaly and how that's not their whole picture. But all too often people see them and that's all they think about. That is to other people, perhaps the whole picture.
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New Books Network Host
Yeah.
- [13:34]
G.P. Gottlieb
So the sisters play an invented game called the Encounter. First of all, did your sisters play that game? Did that come from reality? And second, would you say.
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Martha Conway
No, we did not play that game. Okay, that's made up.
- [13:47]
G.P. Gottlieb
Okay, explain the game and how it's played.
- [13:50]
Martha Conway
The game is. Well, first of all, let me go back just a little bit. Sabine and Gabby's mother and father had this sort of fairy tale romance. And even when they had children, they were still very much romantically interested in each other and more interested really in each other than in their children. They were this sort of glamorous couple. And Gabia and Sabine, I think, wanted in some way to be like their parents. So their parents had this magical meeting. And so Gabi and Sabine started this game in which they would imagine their magical meeting with the person who would turn out to be the most important person in their lives. And it always begins with an accident. So, for instance, the story might go, I was on a train and I missed my stop. And the man across the aisle from me said, let me help you. And it would go on from there, and they would imagine this romantic stranger who helped them and who later became their romantic love.
- [15:04]
G.P. Gottlieb
It's a lovely game. So let's go on into the two different realities. Both girls get to that remote manner of the distant cousins. You mentioned relatives, that they're not real. Gabi insists they're not really related. Anyway, the sisters remember visiting the place before, and it must have made an impression. Can you introduce the family that lives in the manor? Sure.
- [15:27]
Martha Conway
The family who lived in the manor. Their names are the Grogans, and they are wealthy Catholic Irish family, which is a little bit unusual. Most of the wealthy Irish families were Protestant or Anglo Irish, as they're often called. But these people are Catholic and as such, they're also a little bit of outsiders. But they are rich, they are entitled, they own a lot of hotels, and also they have an export business. They live in a sort of Downton Abbey kind of home that they bought. It's a farm, but it's not a working farm. They just bought it as a country house. And that is where both Gabi and Sabine go when they need some help.
- [16:22]
G.P. Gottlieb
So we've talked about Dieter a little bit, but the interesting thing about him, well, going back, Sabine and Gabi are themselves in both realities, but Dieter is completely different. He's a good guy in one and not a good guy, a Nazi in the other. Can you talk about how that was, how hard was it to write?
- [16:44]
Martha Conway
That was challenging to write. But I, very early on, when I started writing about him, he was there from the very beginning, and his background, his abusive father was there from the very beginning. And I became interested in how somebody survives bullying and abuse in their childhood. Of course, there are many different ways to survive it. Some people end up being bullies themselves. Dieter survives it, and in one reality he does not become a bully, and in the other one he does. So it was. I sort of feel as though, you know, you can. You can look at something. You can look at a certain story from many different ways. There's not any one stereotype. I try to avoid stereotypes. So it was interesting to me to look at how a person's personality might develop given a very small change in their growing up. And in Dieter's case, his very small change was that the Nazi, the one who became a bully, he went back. He did not go back to his father's house after being sent away to America for many years. He grew up in a loving household and he sort of felt a little bit of entitlement himself. In the other Dieter's case, he was forced to go back to live with his father, and because he was bullied as a teenager, it was closer to him, and he was much less likely to be a bully himself because of this recent terrible experience. So I think it could have gone in either direction. You can make a case for somebody turning out in different ways and in different connections, but that was the connection I chose.
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G.P. Gottlieb
Let's talk a little bit more. Another question about the Nazis. The two different realities of Ireland. Ireland was affected by the war, obviously, but then when in the second reality, where they actually invade, Ireland is a whole different thing. So how did you reconcile those two?
- [19:18]
Martha Conway
Well, I think that I was looking at the people of Ireland and how they viewed the Germans in 1940, and it was a very split response. As you probably know, the Irish ruled Ireland for almost 800 years, and they were only free of the English Less than 40 years before World War II began, 25 years, maybe. And so there was still a lot of animosity towards England. So when England joined the war, a lot of the Irish did not want to fight on the side of the English because this wound was very real and very recent. Other people recognized Nazi Germany as a real threat and they other Irishmen and they actually went to the north or went to England in order to ally themselves with England and fight the Nazis. So it was a very split reaction in 1940 about the war itself and who to fight with and who to fight against.
- [20:28]
G.P. Gottlieb
That part was really interesting. So Martha, what are you working on next?
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Martha Conway
Well, I write a lot about strong minded women and my next novel is no different. It's set in New England in 1820 and it explores how or if a woman with no power can protect her family.
- [20:51]
G.P. Gottlieb
Mm, I like it. Sounds interesting. Thank you so much for joining me today. It's been a pleasure talking to you.
- [20:59]
Martha Conway
Thank you Galit. It has just been a lovely experience
- [21:02]
G.P. Gottlieb
for me and thank you for joining me again. This is G.P. gottlieb, author of the Whipped and Sipped Mysteries and host for New Books and Literature, a podcast channel on the New Books Network. Today I've been talking with Martha Conway about her dual reality novel set in 1940s Ireland. We meet Apart. Hope you can always be immersed in an interesting book. Happy reading.
- [21:29]
New Books Network Host
Thank you for listening to this episode of the New Books Network. We are an academic podcast network with the mission of public education. If you liked this episode, please share it with a friend and rate us on your preferred podcast platform. You can browse all of our episodes on our website newbooksnetwork.com Connect with us on Instagram and BlueSky with the handle ewbooksnetwork, and subscribe to our weekly Substrac newsletter at newbooksnetwork.substack.com to get episode recommendations straight to your inbox.