Jacqueline Sheehan has always been intrigued by people. The New York Times best-selling author and former psychologist is attuned to body language and backstories, to what is shared and what is withheld.
It fits, then, that the Florence-based writer’s seventh novel uncovers a nation’s secret through characters who have buried their own truths. On Nov. 17 at Broadside Bookshop in Northampton, Sheehan will launch “The Camp Muralist,” a braided novel that explores the rise of Nazism in a sleepy New England town through a young whistleblower, Emma, and her granddaughter Lily, who discovers her family’s messy history 50 years later and can’t let it go.
History was once Sheehan’s least-favorite subject. While growing up in Southbury, Connecticut, she was an “abysmal” student who couldn’t be bothered with “memorizing battles and generals.”
Then a teacher rocked her world when she took Sheehan’s class to Old Sturbridge Village, a museum in Massachusetts that depicts rural 19th-century New England, and asked her students to write a story about one of the characters.
Enthralled, Sheehan dove into the research. “So, she kind of tricked me,” she said of her teacher. “I really loved to imagine someone’s humanity — not just reading dull history, but what did they wear for underwear?”
What lies beneath the surface is what she still seeks out. The idea for “The Camp Muralist” (Koehler Books, 310 pages, $31.95) materialized when Sheehan went home for a visit and heard about a local lecture on the German American Bund Camp planned in Southbury in 1937. The supposed summer camp was meant to indoctrinate German American youth into a movement to elevate “the Aryan race” by exterminating Jews and other marginalized groups.
According to the United States Holocaust Memorial Museum, the Bund opened two dozen Hitler Youth camps throughout the country prior to World War II, and the most active included those in New York and New Jersey. Only a couple of miles from Sheehan’s childhood home, 178 acres were purchased for a Connecticut camp, which never got off the ground thanks to the townspeople — a point of pride in Southbury and an inspiring turn in “The Camp Muralist.”
“I have a fictional brain, and as soon as I started doing some research, I wanted this to be the background for a story that would look at how people get swept up in something like this,” said the author.
In an engaging narrative that gets straight to the point, Emma, a 22-year-old who is at once ahead of her time and hopelessly naïve, is fired from her nursing job for nude modeling on the side, scandalous for a woman in 1938. After retreating to her family cottage in Southbury to regroup and focus on her own art, she discovers her new neighbors. Emma asks the camp’s commander, Karl, what they’re doing there, and when he learns she’s an artist, he turns the tables and commissions her to paint a mural. Suddenly, Emma feels seen as a professional and turns a blind eye to what already seems awry. “His words slid like a barbed hook into the soft flesh of her neck,” Sheehan writes. As her reporter boyfriend sees through the camp’s façade, Emma is spurred into action by Karl’s obvious abuse of an orphaned six-year-old boy whom he uses as an example to “test” his Jewishness — his worthiness — in front of the other children.
The story jumps to 1991, when Emma’s long-missing granddaughter Lily, a 29-year-old chef, has lost her career, her marriage and her home in quick succession. She descends into alcoholism, but when she learns of Emma’s existence, she immediately seeks her out. The now-famous artist, still reeling, decades later, from exposing the camp and the tragedies that befell her as a result, draws Lily out, and the women learn they have unfinished business that can only be resolved together.
(And in case you were wondering about Emma’s underwear, to her granddaughter’s surprise, the sassy redhead wears negligees at 75.)
“I really feel like for a reader to travel with me through a story,” Sheehan said, “I have to be able to unzip a main character so they can step right inside their body.”
“The Camp Muralist” is not Sheehan’s first fictional foray into history. After studying and practicing psychology on the West Coast, Sheehan moved to Florence in 1995 to become the director of the Counseling Center at Westfield State University. Now secure in her career, she decided to embark upon writing, something she had always loved but thought would be financially unfeasible.
Her insatiable curiosity notwithstanding, she had no formal training and didn’t want to go back to school. “I thought, ‘I know I can figure this out,’” she said. “I read as many books as I could, studied with other writers, went to all of these writing conferences, and just really honed my craft.”
Luckily, the burgeoning author “had landed in the mother lode of writers” and found a group where she started writing “tiny little bits” about Sojourner Truth and soliciting feedback. Eight years later, these fragments were woven into her first historical novel, “The Comet’s Tale,” which sold modestly. “I thought that was how it was going to go. I was going to work really hard and wasn’t going to sell much,” she admitted. But her next novel, “Lost & Found,” published in 2007, was a bestseller, and so was its sequel.
“It was pretty unbelievable,” said Sheehan, who still receives emails from animal lovers discovering the book. (Three beloved chapters are written from a dog’s perspective.)
In 2010, the writer co-founded Straw Dog Writers Guild, which now has 300 members and holds regular writing groups, yearly residencies and an annual conference. She also teaches at the local literary organization Writers in Progress. After retiring from psychology in 2012, she’s now working on her eighth book.
“Sometimes I really can’t believe my good fortune because writing has added so much to my life,” she said, noting that storytelling is just as beneficial to readers. “It’s one of the most important things we have as a culture, to reach each other and not feel alone.”
To learn more and pre-order the book, visit jacquelinesheehan.com. It will also be available locally at Broadside Bookshop and the Odyssey Bookshop. Melissa Karen Sances can be reached at melissaksances@gmail.com.