Blind Spots in Historical Fiction (and what to do about them)
By Ginny Kubitz Moyer
When I see my teenage sons lounging in front of the TV, I sometimes marvel at how much the experience of watching television has changed in one generation. At the risk of sounding like the world’s youngest curmudgeon, they have it much easier than I did.
When I was a child in the eighties, changing the channel meant getting up on your feet and crossing the room. There was no such thing as pausing your show for a bathroom break; you had to dash down the hall the moment a commercial came on, only to hear your sibling yell “IT’S ON!” before you concluded your business. My sons have never known a world where you had to watch a show when it aired or else miss it completely (unless you laboriously programmed the VCR to record it, an endeavor which had approximately a 35% success rate). Binge-watching? It hadn’t been invented yet.
So, watching TV—like many other aspects of life—has changed radically in one generation. But how would my kids (or any kids) know this? Having never lived in a world without streaming and remote controls, how would they know how different it used to be?
As an author of twentieth-century historical fiction, I frequently come up against a humbling truth: you don’t know what you don’t know about the recent past. People did things differently —little things, things you would not expect—even one generation ago. And if you want to write fiction that is true to the period, somehow you have to figure out what those things are. You need to realize you have a blind spot and look squarely into it.
Here are three things that can help. Note that because my focus is twentieth-century stories, I can only speak to fiction set in the last few generations. (Authors of medieval sagas, I hope you will write your own tips as well.)
First of all, read books written in the time period you’re writing about. Don’t limit yourself to “great literature”; many bestselling authors of their day are no longer household names, but their stories are mines of period information. When you read a novel written in the 1950s, you catch random details of clothing, like the fact that women wore girdles under those slim skirts. You learn about what people ate for dinner in the age of Eisenhower (ham rissoles and gelatin molds, anyone?). You can pick up how much a postage stamp costs.
Several years ago, my sons and I were reading Henry and the Clubhouse by Beverly Cleary (published in 1962), and we were confused by the reference to Mrs. Huggins stretching her son’s pants. So, I asked my mother, a child of the fifties, who told me that housewives of the time would use an apparatus that fit inside a pair of jeans after they were washed, so they could dry with nice sharp creases. “My mother used to do that to my little brothers’ jeans,” she told me. I was fascinated, and have an entirely new respect for my grandmother, who had to factor one more step into the family laundry routine.
Second, whenever possible, watch films and TV from the time period. Yes, movies and television often present idealized pictures of how people live (even in the 90s, could Carrie Bradshaw really have afforded that apartment on a columnist’s salary?), but they are still some of the best ways of absorbing the manners, customs, and aesthetics of a bygone time. In writing my novel A Golden Life (set in 1938), I realized that a lifetime of watching old movies had taught me many things, including what a hotel lobby phone looked like and the fact that yes, women of the period did wear slacks (but never to the office, goodness no). And movies gave me a feel for the slang and popular expressions of the era, which is how the marvelous phrase “take a powder” ended up in my novel.
Another way to learn what you don’t know? Listen to the stories of people who lived during the time you are depicting. As a personal project, my mother recently wrote a memoir of her childhood in southern California. It’s a treasure trove of information about daily life in the forties and fifties, with details about how her family shopped, went to school, and spent their leisure hours.
One thing astonished me: my mother’s account of going to the department store in Pasadena. Rather than getting change from a clerk at a cash register (as we do now, and I assumed everyone always had), the employees used a system of pneumatic tubes. The clerk would put the bill and your money in a metal cylinder, put it in one of the tubes, and the cylinder would whoosh off to a central accounting department upstairs. The upstairs clerks would put your change and a receipt in the metal cylinder, and it would whoosh back down to you. I read this with my jaw open; in all my immersion in midcentury life, I had never heard of such a thing. It led to fascinating conversations with my mother and to my own research, where I learned that these pneumatic delivery systems were common in banks and department stores for many years. It took my mother sharing her own story to show me what I didn’t know.
All of this points to the fact that really, the best way you can research historical fiction is to stay curious and open. Yes, when the occasion arises, you will have to look up something specific (how exactly did people make coffee in the 1940s?). But you can also live in such a way that you absorb history when you’re not even trying. Seek out the company of people from older generations. Read those historical plaques you happen upon when you’re out and about. Spend an afternoon wandering around your local museum. Watch the classic movies, read the old books.
And talk to your kids about how hard TV watching was, back in your day. If they ever write historical fiction, they’ll thank you for it.
Ginny Kubitz Moyer is a California native with a love of local history. Her novel The Seeing Garden, which won Silver in the Foreword INDIES Book of the Year Award for historical fiction, brings to life the vanished world of the San Francisco Bay Area's great estates. Her novel A Golden Life, which earned a starred Kirkus review, will be published in September 2024. An avid weekend gardener, she lives in the San Francisco Bay Area with her husband, two sons, and one rescue dog. Learn more at ginnymoyer.org.