"[S]tunning . . . The poetic detail of Stegner's sentences—not to mention her wanton protagonist—is reminiscent of the novels of John Updike. . . . Because a Fire Was in My Head, her most ambitious novel so far, ought to attract for Stegner the wider audience she so richly deserves."—Julia Scheeres, New York Times Book Review, "Editor's Choice"
From the Author
Twenty years ago I intended to write the novel that has become Because a Fire Was in My Head. I had already spent most of a year of mornings on research, obscure books ordered from obscure stores in Canada, documents and journals and government records searched, everything read multiple times and carefully annotated and pages of cullings and permutations of cullings piling up neatly on the edge of my desk. That August I made a long journey to Saskatchewan, writing on pads of yellow paper about the grain elevators like ships at sea, and the antelope in the summer-high wheat, the harvest moon bobbing up onto the horizon like a giant orange, the little half-deserted towns, the cemeteries fencing out an impossibly vast and empty land. I spent time in Vancouver and Seattle, reacquainting my adult-self with those cities, and lastly I drove up the coast an hour to San Francisco. Then one morning I thought I was ready to begin composing. There was a single image in my mind that seemed to me both the beginning and the end of the story—the image of a desolate station platform somewhere in the prairies on a raw November day, a widow braced against a ceaseless wind, her black coat flapping about like the wings of a raven, and on the train her only daughter, leaving. I wrote the scene. And that was as far as I got.
Almost immediately and with a kind of sickening certitude I realized that I was not equal to the story. I lacked the technical skills, sure; but more importantly, I hadn't earned something that has to be earned over time, through other books, other lives. I hadn't earned the right to tell the story, it was too big, a whole-world canvas. For in some ways Kate Riley’s story embodies an entire sequence of our continental evolution, and like many of her historical counterparts, second- or third-generation immigrants to the New World, she is swept along by the overwhelming cultural momentum of the 20th century.
Beyond the size of the story, I sensed, too, that it would take a great deal of authorial effacement, and at the time I didn't know who I was well enough to properly erase myself and narrate Kate Riley's life with compassion. All yearning demands compassion. The title, taken from a Yeats poem, "The Song of Wandering Aengus," begins: I went out to the hazel wood/because a fire was in my head. Among other things, hers is a tale of wandering, of yearning forward and (disastrously) backward. All yearning demands compassion.
And so, three novels, dozens of stories, and years later I was able finally to start—and finish—Because a Fire Was in My Head.
