Wayward Girls opens in Buffalo, New York, in the 1960s. Mairin O’Hara is working in an apple orchard with the sun overhead and Simon and Garfunkel’s “Mrs. Robinson” playing on the radio. The work is hard and life isn’t easy, but she’s young. The pleasures of summer surround her, and the freedom of adulthood is beginning to come into view.
That openness vanishes when Mairin is unexpectedly sent to the Home of the Good Shepherd, a Catholic reform institution modeled on the Magdalene Laundries, part of a system that confined girls and women in forced unpaid labor under the pretense of moral reform.
The chirping birds of the orchard fall away, replaced by dark hallways and days structured by routine and control. But Mairin doesn’t lose herself in her new reality. Even there, she continues to hear the music, and remember that another world still exists beyond the walls that entrap her.
“Every scene in every work of fiction happens somewhere at some time.”
—Susan Wiggs
Wayward Girls spans multiple time periods and moves between different environments. Susan explains that the danger in a book like this is that the reader begins to feel pulled rather than carried. Weather helps solve that problem, guiding us to understand where we are through our senses. We feel where we are before we know it.
We’re also guided by nostalgia, which for Susan, is rooted in place. In our conversation, she described building the setting of Wayward Girls through lived memory, beginning with a very specific landscape. She spoke about growing up near Buffalo, remembering winters when the snow reached the front door, along with the pleasures of childhood and the sounds, smells, and impressions that, until that moment, seemed long forgotten.
Nostalgia colors the novel through sensory detail, so that memory is felt through weather, sound, and light. Even within the confines of the Good Shepherd, Mairin remains able to access something of the world that came before it. That earlier life does not disappear completely. It stays perceptible in the present, and by the end of the novel, we catch up with Mairin’s future and the freedom with which she will eventually move through the world again.
“Mairin found solace by retreating to a time when her world was filled with love and warmth. Back then, life revolved around her father, who shone like the sun.”
—Susan Wiggs, Wayward Girls
The material surrounding the girls is historically grounded and heavy, but Susan still makes room for humor, play, and writes a story that is ultimately about human connection. Mairin and the other girls form bonds and create small pockets of life within the constraints of their confinement. Through friendship and shared feeling, the novel preserves a sense of movement and possibility.
The novel maintains an optimistic tone that balances its darker material. The history behind the Magdalene Laundries is deeply painful, but in Wayward Girls, Susan illustrates that history through Mairin’s time at the Good Shepherd and her growing closeness with the other girls. Their mistreatment is never separated from their intimacy, their humor, or their sense of a future. As the girls approach adulthood, they dream of the lives that might still be possible, if they can hold onto who they are.
“You want it to feel authentic, but you don’t want them to hit themselves in the head with a hammer.”
—Susan Wiggs
For the girls at the Home of the Good Shepherd, access to the outside world is largely removed. One form of punishment is isolation in a dark, enclosed closet. The deprivation is physical, but it also affects perception itself. To be cut off in that way is to lose a sense of orientation altogether.
Susan spoke about The Diary of a Young Girl by Anne Frank, and the significance of a window, both literally and symbolically, of being able to see beyond the immediate space. A view outward situates a person within a larger world, confirming that time continues beyond the limits of a room.
Weather offers a way of staying connected to the world. It helps locate experience and gives the present a sense of continuity. To know if it’s sunny, drizzling, humid, or cold is to remain oriented in time. That may be part of why Wayward Girls consistently returns to these elements. They keep the present in view, but they also bring the world beyond the institution back into reach.
At the end of our conversation, Susan spoke about the way she writes, which has remained largely unchanged since childhood. She still writes by hand, in notebooks, a practice that reaches back to years spent in paper shops abroad.
Susan’s attachment to writing by hand feels connected to the deeper concerns of the novel. Her latest novel is concerned with what remains accessible when freedom has been restricted, and writing belongs to that same structure of preservation. On the page, experience can still be gathered, recalled, and kept from disappearing entirely.
What Wayward Girls preserves is the act of remembering itself. The novel remains in contact with beauty, friendship, and the elements that keep a person oriented in time. A change in weather, a shift in light, or the presence of another person can still hold experience in place. Even under confinement, these acts of noticing keep memory alive, and with it, the world outside.
—Yasmin
Watch the full interview here.
Susan Wiggs is the author of more than sixty novels, including Wayward Girls, The Lost and Found Bookshop, and The Oysterville Sewing Circle. Her work has been translated into more than twenty languages and has appeared on bestseller lists around the world.
Yasmin Gruss is Head of Content & Community at Author & Co., where she curates the quote libraries for Author Clock and Author Forecast.
At Author & Co., we combine design, function, and our love of reading to create tools that bring literature into everyday life.
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I loved our chat! Thank you!