The New Hampshire

Issue date: 4/23/04 Section: Entertainment

Media Credit: Courtesy Photo Along with balancing work and family, Charlotte Bacon just published a new novel.

"Memories are suspect, naturally. They put roads in the wrong places, rearrange furniture, distort proportions of trees and rooms, put houses where they do not exist. Yet they feel as real as one's own hand. Sometimes they are shockingly right. The bridge arches as it does in the mind's eye. The remembered voice is the real voice"-excerpt from Charlotte Bacon's "There Is Room for You."

In her latest novel, "There Is Room for You," UNH assistant professor Charlotte Bacon explores the relationship people have with geography. One character, Rose, is raised in India and leaves it; her daughter, Anna, lives in America but leaves to visit India in the hopes of understanding her mother better.

But the novel isn't focused on the land specifically. Instead, Bacon says, the land is where the story unfolds.

"India is just where the novel is set," Bacon said in a recent interview. "The way these two women know and don't know each other... it's as hard to know someone you're close to as a country [that's] not your own."

Bacon richly explores how memory can play an integral part in a person's reaction to who they are and where they come from. Rose was a British girl growing up in an India that had poverty beyond her front doorsteps. In America she lives in New Hampshire and writes a column on gardening. Bacon interweaves the narrative of Rose and Anna in the first person, something that is difficult to achieve when writing two very different characters; but it works because of the differences. Bacon said that she used a crisper, more succinct voice for Rose since she was ultimately a journalist, and a poetic, richer language for Anna since Anna is a poet.

"With first person you have to justify why you're using all this language," Bacon said. She describes herself as a third person writer because she can have the most access to compelling descriptions. Her previous novel, "Lost Geography," was not written in first person like this novel. Originally, she attempted to write "There is Room for You" in the third person, and she played around with it, going through around eight revisions before she settled on the final draft of the novel.

"Much of what I had in one draft didn't survive," Bacon said. She was inspired to write her novel partly from work she did in college when she found journals written by British women who had lived in India during the 1780s to 1840s.

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