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. Booklist called 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.”
Matt Tyska would come home from the lab each night and listen, astonished, to what Tasha had written that day: “I can still remember how incredible it was to watch her stitch all of this information together—real historical places, people, events—all of this would be woven in a seamless manner into this amazing story that she just kept pulling out of her head.”
When Alexander first started And Only to Deceive, her downstairs neighbor, Kristen Fairey, was writing a doctoral dissertation in history, and the two women would meet most afternoons to discuss the day’s progress. “Tasha would talk about Emily as though she were another of Tasha’s close friends in other places she’d lived already,” Fairey says.
Unlike her contemporaries, Emily isn’t interested in society balls or marriage. “Frankly,” she says, “I considered the proposition of matrimony immensely boring. Married women I knew did scarcely more than bear children and order around their servants. Their time consumed by mundane details, the most excitement for which they could hope was some social event at which they could meet one another and complain about said children and servants.” Emily ultimately agrees to marry the Viscount Ashton because it will provide “a simple way out of an increasingly unbearable situation”—namely, living at home. Her mother constantly bemoans her daughter’s “wasted beauty,” and for Emily the last straw comes when one morning her mother enters Emily’s room and “measures my waist to see how quickly I was becoming old and fat.”
So she marries. But just as quickly she becomes a widow. After adhering to the era’s traditional two-year mourning period, she finds herself in a very un-Victorian position—free, wealthy and blessedly independent. She prefers novels to tedious dinner parties. She enjoys travel and comes to love the artistry and beauty of Paris. In the evenings, she scandalously indulges in a glass of port (a drink meant only for men), and she takes up her late husband’s passion for collecting antiquities. She pushes at the strictures of society. While her battles seem minor compared to today’s clashes over paid leave or domestic violence, she does possess a spirit of independence that resonates today.
Though she firmly asserts that Emily is “not Tasha’s alter ego,” Fairey does say that “the zest, intelligence and compassion with which Tasha lives her own life come through in her heroine.” For her part, Alexander remembers those afternoon meetings with Fairey as a powerful incentive to write. “When I wasn’t feeling motivated to work, I’d think, ‘I might as well try to write a couple of paragraphs so I have something to say when Kristen comes in.’ ”
Tyska, too, encouraged her project—“Tasha was destined to be a writer,” he says—though Alexander admits that living with a writer can be “very hard on the spouses. It’s all-consuming. You tune out when you’re working. And you’re always kind of working.”
Tyska doesn’t seem to mind—much. “I will say that Tasha’s path to success as an author has not always been easy,” he admits. “In fact, there have been times when it’s been hard on all of us. I think the hardest part (and admittedly, this may be a little selfish) is that we miss Tasha’s gourmet-level cooking when she really digs into work a manuscript. But I think overall it’s worth it [because] she loves what she does and she is really good at it.”
For Alexander, living in the right environment, at the right time, surrounded by the right people, made the difference between writing a novel and not writing it. But she wasn’t yet thinking of publishing: “She was writing more to amuse herself than thinking of ever really seeing her work in print,” says Fairey.
Besides removing some of the paralyzing first-book pressure, Alexander believes that writing for herself and not an audience is important. Trying to write what sells, she says, is “a losing battle. By the time you’ve written it, the market will have changed.”
Still, HarperCollins editor Jennifer Civiletto cites Alexander’s “good commercial sense,” noting that “every one of her books is accessible and appealing to a wide audience. Readers of suspense, history and romance have all raved about her novels.”
Alexander and her family moved to Tennessee as she was starting her second novel, A Poisoned Season. The couple were building a house in Franklin and living in a tiny Music Row apartment during construction. “My son was in kindergarten at that point, and we didn’t want him to have to change schools,” she says, so every morning she drove him to school in Franklin. Rather than drive the 20 miles back to Nashville, she spent the school day pounding away on a laptop in Starbucks. Right off the square, it sits on the corner in an older building. The ceilings are tin, the people friendly. It was her office, and she spent so much time there that when the book was published, she thanked the staff in her acknowledgments.
When pressed for how she does it all—write books, raise a child, manage a household—Alexander readily admits she doesn’t. “Something has to give, and for me it’s housework. I have a very high tolerance for squalor,” she says, laughing.
Alexander laughs a lot. With her long blond hair and striking blue eyes, she’s even prettier than her glamorous author photo suggests. Friendly and unpretentious, she arrived for one interview in a 15-year-old Camry with no air conditioning. (At which point, I exclaimed, “I don’t have air conditioning either!” The bond of two women glistening through a Tennessee summer is like no other.) She downplays her own success: sending out a single email query to an agent, and having that agent respond within the hour, is what she calls “dumb luck.”
Her husband calls it the result of hard work and innate intelligence: “Tasha really is brilliant. Not many people know this, but at Notre Dame, Tasha got the top score on the LSAT (the entrance exam for law schools) out of everyone in our class, although later she decided not to pursue law as a career. Now I can look back on that and say that I’m glad that she didn’t.”
Kristy Kiernan, author of the novel Catching Genius, met Alexander four years ago through an online message board about writing. “We often responded to questions and comments in the same manner and naturally gravitated toward each other,” Kiernan says. “There is no jealousy in our friendship. All the great things that have happened to Tasha, I look back on as fondly as if they had happened to me. I’d give you some dirt, but there’s just none there.”
These days, with her son in school, Alexander has more time to write than ever before, and the space, too: a home office overlooking the backyard. A few of her old habits have stuck, though—like stopping right in the middle of a sentence. Before, it was a necessity, the result of raising a young child. “There’d be a big crash and I’d think, ‘Oh God, what happened?’ [and] run off,” she says. Now sentence interruptus is a strategy for momentum: “When you stop writing in the middle of a sentence, all you have to do to get started again is finish that sentence. And then you’re already half-way there. It’s just much easier to get back into the flow of things.”
This “flow” is entirely Alexander’s own because, to some extent, her books defy genre. They resemble the literary category known as the Victorian cozy, in which murders happen offstage (or not at all), and mysteries are solved by earnest amateurs. But the mystery in an Alexander novel isn’t ultimately the heart of the book itself, which tends to be more concerned with character development, including an unfolding romance. And yet her books aren’t the bodice rippers that account for most historical fiction. They’re also free of the dense period detail that goes on for paragraph after paragraph in literary fiction set in earlier times. Alexander says she isn’t looking to write prose that’s of the “gas-lit London streets” variety. She wants to write the parts that a reader won’t skim through. But her style isn’t completely commercial, either: her chapters run longer than three pages; lines such as, “His dark eyes burned intensely,” are kept to a minimum; and her commitment to historical accuracy is high.
In college at Notre Dame, Alexander took a number of history courses. “I’ve always been fascinated by history. I’ve always liked reading historical novels,” she says. When she turned to writing fiction, it seemed natural to focus on the Victorian period because she’d already read so many Victorian novels. Still, “there were absolutely things I needed to actually look up and get exactly right,” she says. As her former neighbor Fairey remembers, “Nearly every day she loaded [her son] into the stroller and hung a bag of books on the handles for the three-quarter mile walk to the New Haven Public Library.”
For several reasons, writing Elizabeth has been a challenge. Alexander’s novels are set in England’s Victorian period, not its golden age. “My first stop was the library at Vanderbilt. I got an enormous heap of books about Elizabeth and about the period,” she says. The script provided an outline but not much else: “If you write out a script and turn it into prose, it’s not very long. It’s not even close to being a whole novel. You really have to expand all kinds of things and bring in other subplots and characters.” For nuances like location, she had to go on instinct. Alexander hasn’t seen the film, and had only production stills for visual aids. “I reached a point when I was working on it where I thought, ‘I just have to let this be my book.’ ”
But the obligation to hew close to the filmmakers’ vision was perhaps the biggest challenge for a writer who’s a stickler for historical accuracy. “This is a film, not a documentary,” she says. “It’s more of a character study. So there are all kinds of things in the story that aren’t historically accurate. For example, Sir Walter Raleigh is a big hero in the film in the battle of the Spanish Armada, when in fact he wasn’t there at that battle.”
Alexander understands that the filmmakers are “trying to present a portrait of this extraordinary woman,” she says. “But to do that in a very short period of time you have to compress certain events, expand other events, reorder the way things happen. It’s a totally different thing than when you have a whole novel ahead of you and the luxury of writing page after page after page. They have a limit. You can’t have a seven-hour movie.”
Alexander did take some liberties with her version of the story, including references to Elizabeth’s vulnerable side, in addition to the queen’s complicated political and public roles. Elizabeth’s tragic relationship with Robert Dudley, which figures in the first film but not in the second, plays out in Alexander’s novel, for example. “Very soon before he died, he sent her a letter. When she got the news that he was dead, she closed herself up in her room and wouldn’t come out for days. Just devastated. She took that letter and wrote, ‘His last letter’ across the top of it and kept it in a box next to her bed until the day she died. I think viewers who loved that first film and loved Joseph Fiennes playing Dudley—that whole love story—I’m hoping that they’ll like knowing how that all ended.”
