“I feel like I’m getting inspired by the world all the time,” says Juliette Fay. “Fiction writers, we train ourselves to keep an eye out for something unusual or something that grabs us.” One of the things that grabbed her was the real life “Harvey girls,” for whom her just-released new novel is named.
In the past, that inspiration has been drawn from her longtime home of Wayland. She’s written three books set in the fictional town of Belham — modeled after Wayland and complete with its own fictional Dudley Chateau, which Fay named “The Palace” or “The Pal.”
But Fay’s newest book takes place far away from present-day Massachusetts, both in distance and time. While researching her 2019 historical novel “City of Flickering Light,” she wondered how her 1920s train-hopping characters would have eaten — leading her to the “Harvey Girls,” an all-female restaurant workforce recruited by the Fred Harvey to staff eateries along the Atchison, Topeka & Santa Fe Railway in the American Southwest starting in the 1870s. The restaurants brought higher standards of food service and cuisine to a region still known as “the Wild West.”
The novel follows two women who flee their pasts to waitress at the El Tovar Hotel (which still exists) on the edge of the Grand Canyon. Both are hiding secrets and navigating independence in the American Southwest.
Fay was drawn to the Harvey Girls because of how they defied expectations for women at the time. “It was a way to travel and experience the world,” she said. “They made good money for the time, for women of that era, so it made them financially independent from their families. Many of them sent money home, and it made them important breadwinners in the family.”
Female protagonists are a common thread among Fay’s books — just one of her eight novels centers on a man. “I think women’s stories are interesting and they’re often not told,” she said. “That’s something that I have definitely sort of focused on in my life: how women find their own power, find their own voices, improve their lives.”
“Writing is always a learning experience for me, and that’s part of the fun,” Fay said. “I mean, historical fiction is so much more work than contemporary fiction, so much more work. But I love learning about this stuff.”
Fay spent four months researching historical books, developing her characters. She also made a trip to the real El Tovar Hotel in the Grand Canyon, at which the book is set. In the process of her research, Fay learned about the history of Native American discrimination and displacement around the Grand Canyon. She struggled to figure out how she would weave that narrative into her story, to the point that she briefly abandoned the entire book.
“I put it down because I didn’t know if I could do justice to the Native American thread,” she said. “It wasn’t right to not say what was going on with the Native Americans there. I felt like that would be a gross disservice to the story and to the people who were there, sort of ignoring that this whole thing had happened, but I also didn’t want to tell that story as a white woman from the East.”
But then an old friend gave her a call. The friend’s father was a longtime fan of her books, especially her historical fiction, and once he heard that she was considering writing a book about the Harvey Girls, he began sending her material and encouragement. His persistence helped inspire her to pick up the project again, and she added some Native American secondary characters while maintaining a balance between historical truth and narrative loyalty.
While the plight of Native Americans is a somewhat small part of the finished novel, Fay said that’s part of the process—most research doesn’t make its way to the page.“You use about 3% of what you learn,” she said. “The story has to come first. This has to be about the story. You can’t just be pummeling in [interesting] facts that you think are interesting because that doesn’t serve the story.”
Fay appeared at the Wayland Council on Aging on August 12 to launch “The Harvey Girls.” And while she works on her next novel — which she said will be set in Belham/Wayland — she’s keeping her eyes peeled for more inspiration.
“The number one story that people ask fiction writers is, where do you get your ideas?” she said. “Everywhere you’re looking, there’s stories. Everywhere. There’s millions of them. So you just have to be on the lookout.”
Juliette Fay who lives in Wayland with her husband and four children has published seven other books which received positive reviews and have been translated into six other languages.
