As Janis Cooke Newman likes to tell it, Mary’s story found her.
It happened four years ago while the 51-year-old author was visiting Washington, D.C., with her then-7-year-old son, Alex. Her son’s fascination with John Wilkes Booth — “because he had the gun,” Newman explains — took them to Ford’s Theatre, where Booth assassinated President Abraham Lincoln.
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Across the street, at the boarding house where Lincoln died, Newman listened as the tour guide recounted Lincoln’s final hours: how his wife, Mary, sobbed uncontrollably, until Secretary of War Edwin Stanton demanded, “Get that woman out of here.”
“I had an almost physical reaction to that,” Newman recalls, “one of indignation — `How dare you. Her husband is dying and you want to throw her out.”‘
Indignation led to curiosity and eventually a three-year writing odyssey that has given the often vilified and misunderstood first lady a voice of her own.
Writing from sanitarium
Writing from Bellevue Sanitarium, Mary Todd Lincoln tells the story of her life and desperate attempt to leave the asylum, where her son has committed her, in “Mary,” Newman’s 707-page historical novel.
Newman decided to write from Mrs. Lincoln’s perspective to answer questions not addressed in history books. They were questions that tugged at her in Washington, D.C., prompted her to buy Jean Baker’s biography, “Mary Todd Lincoln,” and intensified as she read the book.
Why had Mrs. Lincoln held seances in the White House?
Why had she compulsively shopped, filling her closets with purchases she would never use and driving herself into debt?
Why had her eldest son, Robert, committed her to a lunatic asylum?
“I kept wondering to myself, `What was going through her mind?”‘ Newman says from her home in San Francisco. “And it occurred to me, the only way I could get an inkling was to write a book from her point of view. If she could tell her story, maybe I could have some sense of what she was going through.”
Newman tucks her bare feet under her legs as she sits in her living room. She sips a cup of tea, looking relaxed in her immaculate hillside flat.
Mary’s story took shape as if Mrs. Lincoln were writing her own memoir, putting Newman back in familiar territory.
Her first book, “The Russian Word for Snow,” chronicled the emotional, personal journey taken to adopt Alex from Moscow when he was a year old.
Her second book had to be about somebody else’s life, “because I hadn’t done anything else with mine,” she says with a laugh.
She chose a genre she loves, historical fiction, because it felt safe.
“When you write pure fiction, you can make the characters do anything,” she says. “To me, that was almost too much choice.”
History limited those choices and set the parameters. Newman didn’t want to cheat readers by fictionalizing too much. She stayed true to the timeline of Mrs. Lincoln’s life and the personalities of the people included, writing what she considers a 90 percent accurate account.
Some parts she had to embellish, such as the Lincolns’ torrid premarital affair.
“The sex is hard,” Newman admits, “and I really did want that to be accurate. But, of course, no one writes about that in historical books.”
Newman read comments Lincoln made in passing that alluded to his sex life. But she relied mostly on her own psychoanalysis, imaging who the two were as people.
“Mary was a very passionate, sensual woman with extremely bad impulse control,” she says. “Lincoln was cooler, rational. He had a fear of madness and bouts of melancholy, which is documented.”
Newman smiles. “And then, I had to put those two people in bed together.”
Fun? You bet.
Easy? No way.
“I needed to see Lincoln as a man through Mary’s eyes, which is really hard because he’s such an icon,” Newman says. “I always joke that I can never look at a $5 bill the same again.”
Newman immersed herself in the lives of the Lincolns for three years. The books that made up most of her research sit in a closed bookcase in her front entryway.
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When she started “Mary,” she wallpapered her office in a chronology of Mrs. Lincoln’s life and the day-to-day progress reports — which start each chapter — from the former first lady’s months at Bellevue.
For pleasure, Newman read only books written in or about the 19th Century so she would remain in the time period.
Each day before writing, she spent 15 minutes reading Mrs. Lincoln’s letters, “to get her voice in my head,” she explains.
When the writing stalled, she pulled out a recipe for Mrs. Lincoln’s white cake — a vanilla-almond cake — she picked up while visiting the Todd family house in Lexington, Ky. Then she baked, and after two hours of writing, indulged in her treat.
She kept her sanity with yoga classes and by teaching writing groups in her home every Wednesday.
“When you’re home alone all day, you can get strange,” she says with a laugh. “My students got me out of my pajamas once a week.”
Seven-day workweeks
Her first draft was 900 pages. Then came the revisions and the seven-day workweeks.
“I felt like Martha Stewart under house arrest,” she says. “I could not go out.”
Even now, free time is at a premium. Her days are filled with book tour engagements, writing travel articles for newspapers and Salon.com and taking her son to and from school.
Her next project is simmering, but remains on the back burner. She has made notes on two possibilities, but has gone no further.
“They both feel too early to talk about,” she says. “But I can say, both ideas are full-fledged novels. Now that I’ve done `Mary,’ I feel more ready to write full-fledged fiction, even though there’s still so much choice.”
She laughs: “I guess it’s time to play it a little less safe.”