Novel Talent

Tasha Alexander decided to write a novel in 2002. She was stuck at home—a third-floor attic apartment with four tiny rooms in a 100-year-old house in New Haven—with a small child. Her husband was doing post-doctoral research in cell biology, and Alexander had quit her own job as a pharmaceutical sales rep when their son was born three years earlier. That afternoon he sat on the floor, playing with his toy trains. He no longer napped, but his obsession with trains gave Alexander occasional moments of peace—time she always spent with a book. Like almost all passionate readers, she had dreams of becoming a writer some day, but as a full-time parent, she felt lucky just to find the time to read.

That afternoon the book was Gaudy Night, a mystery by British novelist Dorothy L. Sayers. As her son made puffing and chugging noises on the floor beside her, Alexander was struck by a passage: “If you are once sure what you do want, you find that everything else goes down before it like grass under a roller—all other interests, your own and other people’s.”

She stopped reading.

“OK, I’m going to write a book,” she told herself. “I always say I want to be a writer, but I never actually write anything. If I want to keep saying that, I need to actually write something.”

And so she did. Two months later, writing in only fits and starts, Alexander had completed her first novel, a historical mystery set in the Victorian era. Wondering if it might be publishable, she sent an email inquiry to an agent. Less than an hour later the agent emailed back, asking to see the manuscript—and then promptly sold it to William Morrow, an imprint of HarperCollins. In 2005, And Only to Deceive arrived in bookstores. Booklistcalled it “a memorable debut,” an “engaging, witty mix of Victorian cozy and suspense thriller.” Publisher’s Weekly pronounced it “charming” and noted that Alexander handled sexual chemistry “with exquisite delicacy.” Best of all, readers loved it: An initial print run of 20,000 quickly sold out, and the book went into additional printings. (To date, it’s on its seventh.)

It was like a fairy tale. If Tasha Alexander had created a fictional character who goes from housewife to best-selling novelist overnight, just by deciding to take advice from a British mystery, the critics would have murdered her.

Today, the 37-year-old Alexander lives in Franklin with her husband Matt Tyska, an assistant professor of cell and developmental biology at Vanderbilt University, and their 8-year-old son, Alexander. (Tasha Alexander publishes under a pseudonym rather than her real name, Tasha Tyska, because her first editor felt “Tyska” was too difficult to pronounce, let alone remember.) After And Only to Deceive, Alexander wrote a sequel, A Poisoned Season, published last April. The third book in the series, A Fatal Waltz, is due early next year. All three feature Emily Ashton, a wealthy young widow in Victorian England. She’s educated, intelligent, independent (thanks to the fortune she inherited) and has a knack for solving mysteries, yet she behaves with all the propriety required by her time—and faces all its limitations. In fact, Emily Ashton is the perfect heroine for period fiction: she’s a historically accurate Victorian, but her independence resonates with contemporary readers.

Which is perhaps one reason for Alexander’s most recent—and biggest—publishing coup: an assignment from HarperCollins to write a novel adaptation of the forthcoming film Elizabeth: the Golden Age. A sequel to the 1998 film Elizabeth, it stars Cate Blanchett as the formidable Virgin Queen, reprising a role that earned her an Oscar nomination for best actress. The book will be out in September—less then six months after A Poisoned Season arrived in stores. She was stunned when her agent called with the news. “The last thing you ever think is you’re going to pick up the phone and have someone saying ‘We’d like you to write this book,’ ” Alexander tells the Scene.

Tasha Alexander has always loved to read, ever since she was a little girl. Books are her obsession, much like trains were once her son’s. In college, she majored in English, but she and Tyska married after graduation and moved to places such as Wyoming and Vermont as he worked to complete his doctorate. Despite the lifelong desire to write, she was too practical, with a husband in graduate school, to devote herself to a novel. She had to have a job, and “novelist” just wasn’t realistic. Then came that day in New Haven, when she realized something had to change. But four books in five years?

“It’s amazing what you can do in short bursts of time,” says Alexander. “With a toddler underfoot, if you can get 20 uninterrupted minutes you’re doing really well. Every single moment I had peace, I would write. You get this idea that you need these great spans of uninterrupted time, the muse sitting across from you, but that’s just never going to happen.” It helped that Alexander had fairly simple ambitions: “I just thought, OK, what do I like to read? Here are the things I’m interested in. Let’s put them together and see what kind of a book comes out. So the writing part was really great fun.”