Last April, we interviewed an illustrious book club, who recounted their meeting with Split Rock author Holly Eger on the island of Martha’s Vineyard. Today, we are overjoyed to announce that Split Rock is available for purchase at Bas Bleu…And, better yet, we scored an exclusive interview with the author herself! Be sure to pick up the book here before reading; there are potential spoilers ahead.

Here’s our review of the novel:

Annie Tucker is bequeathed a home on Martha’s Vineyard by her beloved aunt. The mother of three young children decides to summer on the island while her husband continues his (always frequent) work-related escapades abroad. While mourning her recently deceased aunt, Annie becomes engulfed by memories of her carefree past, made all the more complex after running into her first true love: Chase, a well-off island townie. By weaving the depth and complexity of Annie’s inner dialogue––feelings of doubt, loneliness, and those pesky “what ifs”–– with other well-developed characters and a luscious Martha’s Vineyard landscape, Holly Hodder Eger has crafted a remarkable, multifaceted story about family, loss, and love. (HC)  

BB: First of all, we are so excited to be featuring the author mentioned in our previous Book Club article! One of their favorite meetings was with you on Martha’s Vineyard. Are you able to share what you discussed with them over lunch? 

Thank you! I am thrilled to be here, and will always have boundless gratitude for the Wilmington Book Group.

It is difficult to wrap up a novel, and without the moral support of that special book group, I might still be plugging away. The group’s leader, Virginia Hipple, is actually my sister-in-law, and she insisted on putting Split Rock on the schedule as their summer book — despite my not having completed it yet! Since I couldn’t possibly let Ginny down, it is thanks to her that I finished my first draft.

The group read and marked up the manuscript and, crowded around the porch of our cottage on Martha’s Vineyard, discussed it in detail, “workshopping” it for me. My two grown daughters, who had been reading chapters all along, were there too, and we each took careful  notes. It was immensely helpful to “test” the book with such conscientious readers, and I was able to tweak a few things in response to their questions, clarify some plot ambiguities, and weave in a few new ideas as well.

After the discussion, my daughters and I led the group of thirteen on a pilgrimage along the shore to the iconic Split Rock, where several of us waded out to our waists to place pebbles along the cracks and make wishes. We were all stunned when someone found a large, absolutely symmetric heart-shaped rock on the beach, and took it as a good omen that the book would find a publisher. It was a magical day.

BB: Congratulations on your win in the 2019 International Book Awards for Best Women’s Fiction! Can you tell us more about your journey to becoming an author?

Thank you. It was gratifying to receive recognition after having worked on Split Rock for so many years.

My mother used to say that I was born with a pen in my hand, and she is the one who taught me how to use it: When I was in kindergarten, I would regale the other kids with elaborate tales, and my teacher for some reason wanted to know what I had made up and what was true. Apparently after she confronted my mother regarding some of my more farfetched fabrications, my mother told me it was time I wrote down my stories on paper and label them what was called “fiction,” lest I be called a “liar.” With a trunk full of manuscripts, I suppose I have always thought of myself as a fiction writer.

BB: Your travel articles have been featured in national and local newspapers. Was travel writing how your career as an author began?

My husband and I lived in Asia the first year we were married, in our mid-twenties, and traveled all over the place. When we returned, my mother gave me back my letters and suggested I turn them into travel articles. To my amazement, my first submission, about our trip to Burma, ran as the cover story in the Boston Globe’s travel section. 

I am struck, as I get older, at just how much I owe to my mother. She died while I was in the middle of writing Split Rock, which is why I created the character of the red cardinal. By exploring Annie’s grief over losing her beloved Aunt Faye, I was able to work through some of my own.

BB: Split Rock beautifully and realistically conjures the island of Martha’s Vineyard. What inspired you to use Martha’s Vineyard as a setting in your novel? 

When I was seventeen, I spent a month on Martha’s Vineyard as a babysitter and fell in love with the island. Something about the ocean and the serene beauty of the beaches, farms, and country roads makes my imagination bubble, as it does for lots of artists and writers. A vague start to Split Rock’s plot came to me during a writing workshop in the up-island town of Chilmark, so Martha’s Vineyard seemed a logical setting. And one day, hiking out to Split Rock from Lambert’s Cove Beach, it occurred to me that the cracks in the enormous boulder are a metaphor for the cracks in all human beings. Somehow the story invented itself from there. 

BB: Annie, Chase, and Gordon read as very real people to us! How real are they to you? Which of their characteristics are based in reality, and which were summoned by your imagination?

Annie is roughly based on many women I have known, and I suppose on myself, although she is much cooler — smarter, more intrepid, and also, at least at the beginning, more judgmental and more of a perfectionist. By the end, after she changes and (at the age of forty) grows up, she is a more admirable person than I can probably ever hope to be, which is why I love her so much as a heroine. I wrote Annie’s story in the close third-person narrative, which makes readers feel they are inside her head but can also sometimes confuse them into assuming the narrator and author are the same. I am not Annie.

Gordon was at first based on my husband, but his character quickly morphed away from Ed’s and he became his own idiosyncratic person. Chase is not based on anyone in particular but is rather a composite of several guys I knew in college.

The children, however, are my own three children, frozen in those wonderful, sublime ages that I will miss forever.

I was on my own for short periods of time with my children on Martha’s Vineyard, and while I took them to most of the locations in the book, we were never in any of the book’s situations. I never almost drowned while the kids watched me stranded on the beach, for instance. A lot of the action of the novel explores life’s perpetual “what if?” questions.

BB: One of your especially effusive book reviews reads, “Buy Split Rock, READ IT and you’ll understand why she teaches.” Can you break down for us why you decided to teach writing? What aspects of teaching do you enjoy most?

I am so grateful to people who take the time to write nice reviews!

Teaching writing has always seemed natural to me. I loved majoring in English in college, feel fortunate that I got to go to graduate school in literature and study with talented teachers and writers, and learned a lot in novel-writing classes I took through both Sarah Lawrence’s and Stanford’s adult-education programs — classes now available to anyone online, by the way. I enjoy sharing what I have learned…plus, I love kids! 

My favorite moments of teaching are when I see a student’s eyes light up with an idea, and when I get to see their satisfaction at finishing a first draft—one of the best feelings in the world.

BB: At what point in the writing process did you know you wanted to publish? What was the most difficult part of your process? The easiest?

Like most writers, I appreciate seeing my name in print and being read, although I also find it mildly terrifying.

The most difficult part of the publishing process was sending query letters to agents and then hearing nothing in return. That took a lot of patience and it was probably the Wilmington Book Group’s faith that kept me from getting discouraged, because it would have been easy to give up. As an author, I was already feeling so vulnerable, so shaky about giving the book “legs” to walk away from me out into the world, that having supportive cheerleaders who believed in the book was incredibly lucky.

The easiest part was making up the story; and while I thought finishing the first draft was hard, the ensuing year spent rewriting with an editor was much harder. That took more perseverance than I knew I even possessed, and every day I would remind myself of Wallace Stegner’s famous quote, “Hard writing makes easy reading.”

BB: What advice would you give to aspiring authors who aren’t sure where to start?

Writing workshops are invaluable because they give you deadlines, and nothing inspires quite like a deadline. Writing prompts can be especially helpful: in one novel-writing class I took, we had to write to a prompt for the first thirty minutes of every class and then read what we’d written aloud. That focused, on-the-spot, high-stakes composing led to many chapters of Split Rock.

I rely on my subconscious to do a lot of work for me and try always to keep a notebook and pen beside my bed in case I have an interesting dream. I often get ideas in the morning, in that sliver of consciousness between being asleep and awake.

The most important thing is to figure out how to finish your first draft, because then publishing opportunities will happen. This might mean you need to seek out helpers.

BB: What books are you inspired by? Can you recommend anything to our readers?

I love Anne Tyler’s novels. I love her quirky characters, her very natural dialogue, and her narrative voice. She is another fan of the close third-person narrative, like me.

BB: What’s next for you?

For the past several years, I have been researching the extraordinary lives of a famous twentieth-century feminist and her common-law husband, a tragic figure who happened to be my great-grandfather’s brother. I first heard their story from my favorite aunt, the inspiration for Annie’s Aunt Faye, who entrusted me before she died with a secret document written by my great-grandfather. This was the beginning of a treasure hunt, of an intellectual adventure I could never have imagined. I have spent many exciting days in great research libraries reading thousands of letters handwritten by and about my relatives — letters bestowed nearly 100 years ago, unbeknownst to anyone in my family, with some only recently made public. What a rare gift, to get to know one’s ancestors firsthand! This spring I am retracing my heroine’s steps through Germany and Switzerland, where she and her children lived with, and also without, my uncle. Then it will be time to write that first draft.