Reread with Ruthie Pearlman: Yael Reed, audience, and the hamster wheel of serial writing
From Rivki Nesher’s Making it Out to Yael Reed, Ruthie Pearlman’s writing has always been centered in England, Ruthie’s home for most of her writing career. But her newest release, Infiltrator, ventures into Israeli territory and combines her signature crime-at-the-boarding school genre with Israeli thriller tropes. Infiltrator is the story of 12-year-old Meira, who turns to Ner Miriam for protection when she is no longer safe in her cozy yishuv. But despite putting up with the annoyances of her protective team, the threat follows her across the ocean. When she and a classmate are kidnapped and held for ransom, Yael and Doron are on the case.
Ruthie doesn’t shy away from keeping her stories contemporary and relevant, so I must say that reading some of the lines felt a bit jarring, in light of everything going on. The first lines of Infiltrator opens with a tongue-in-cheek nod to the politics of the area:
“Meira Goldstein never really had a proper childhood. [...] Their region was known as “the occupied territories” to the BBC and other unfriendly-to-Israel organizations, but her father, General Avraham Goldstein, her mother, Ayelet, and others living in the newly build two-hundred-family yishuv called the region Judea and Samaria, the Shomron, or, colloquially, Yosh.”
There are Palestinian terrorists and talks of hostage trades involved, so if that’s too close for comfort right now, save this for another time. But Infiltrator is also a fun and fast-paced drama in which everything ends well, so it might be the perfect distraction for this moment.
Below is our conversation with Ruthie Pearlman from October 2021, an interview only 1.5% of you were emailed at that time :)
Did you always know that you would want to be a writer?
From a very young age, I always knew I wanted to be an author. My mother didn't have that much faith in me, but I was determined to do it. I wrote my first novel when I was 10, 11 years old. I think the real crossroad came with deciding to write for the frum market. I first I thought about being a famous secular author, having my book up on book stands in an airport, but I wasn't making much headway in that department.
When I was already a grandmother, a 17-year-old girl in Golders Green, London wrote a book. he was suddenly an author and I hadn't done anything yet. So I was very shocked. And that was the first time I thought about writing for the frum market. But even then it wasn't completely easy, even though I'd been writing for a long time. When I first sent my first book, which was a Rivky Nesher book, I had to send them to three publishers before anyone accepted them. And so it wasn’t an easy path, but now I'm with Menucha and they're good for me, and we worked together very well.
The first thing that I noticed when I was reading Coercion is how you started taking the plot back to the start series. You're going back to the school, back to high school girls being the story and characters. What was your intention there?
These books, as you might know, were originally serials in the Aim (Ami’s kids’ magazine). I don't feel that the serial belongs in the Aim because I don't write for kids; I write for young adults and adults. However, the main reason I'm in the Aim is because of my relationship with Esty Weiss, the editor.
So I didn't really want to go back to school. I'm trying constantly to steer away from my serials being a kids’ adventure. The number of arguments I had with Esty, the editor, to get Yael married, was nobody’s business. I wanted Yael to get married and have more adult adventures as a young woman with her husband and go on a daredevil mission together. But Esty is very much keen on keeping the school-girl side of things because of her readership in the Aim. And so we have that constant pull and push, pull and push - ‘kids’ adventure’, me wanting to do more adult literature…
Coercion went back to the school to keep my editor happy, but you will notice that the subsequent books after Coercion are no longer in the school [only] and they take place in England and in a yishuv in Israel. So I'm trying to move away from the school completely.
How does it impact the plots that you do? Did you feel limited in what you could do because it's in a school?
I think when you're a writer for a magazine, rather than a standalone book writer, then you are restricted and limited by what the magazine wants and needs. And so I am limited, that's the minus. The plus side is that the discipline of writing a serial for the Aim keeps me writing, and I need that discipline.
I'm now writing another standalone book for Menucha, and I'm finding it so much harder to write without that discipline of an editor nagging and nagging and nagging and nagging because she needs a chapter every single week. So everything's a payoff between what I want to do, and what actually works for me to do. I've got complete freedom with the standalone book, I can do anything I want, and I'm enjoying that. I'm writing the first person as a man, like An Ordinary Wednesday, and I love writing from that perspective. But I'm finding it really hard to be disciplined enough to sit down and write it. I need to be pushed like I am with Aim, to keep me at it every week. The standalone book will get written, but it'll get written a lot slower than the next serial.
In the back of the book, it says “Fans will be happy to hear that there are more books in the making.” Every time I read that, it feels like these adventures are happening in real time and you're frantically trying to keep up with them and get it out to the people.
I don't have much choice, to be honest. It's like being a hamster on a treadmill. I've been writing for the Ami magazine since its inception. And I've got to a pattern now where they want me to keep writing the series in the Aim, when I finish one, I start another. Sometimes I wish for break, but if she gives me a break, I'm already itching to start again after a couple of weeks. So it's a good discipline.
Do you find it challenging to come up with ideas since you've written so much about Yael and all these characters, you know, at a certain point you're going to run out of things to write about
Esty, my editor, is a very good ideas person. I don’t always agree with her ideas, sometimes her ideas are too ‘kids-adventure’ but they give me a jumping-off point. I'm trying constantly to steer away from my serials being a kid's adventure, so we have that constant pull and push. But in the end we have an agreement somewhere in the middle,
It's not an automatic thing that everything I write gets accepted. This week, I wrote a chapter, which I thought was brilliant as you always do when you're a writer. I was waiting for “Wow, fantastic chapter”. Esty wrote, “There are continuity issues with this chapter. What you've written doesn't tie in with what you wrote three chapters ago.” So I think I had to make three attempts at this week's chapter before she accepted it. I must say that all her nitpicking criticisms are a hundred percent valid. We have a very good working relationship.
When I wrote a serial for the Ami Living magazine, The Group, they needed the whole book packaged up and tied in a bow before they were ready to serialize it. I don't work like that, it’s just as hard as writing a standalone book. The Aim gives me the freedom for things to move along my own way, and for my ideas to come through.
You’ve written so many books, but am I correct that every single one is set in England?
The present book that I'm writing is in Eretz Yisrael, because that's where I live now. I'm not going to write a setting that I don't know. Although one of my books had Yael end up in Albuquerque searching for her father. I've never been to Albuquerque in my life, but I do have a very good friend here in Israel who was brought up there and between her and looking up details online, I managed to give it a realistic feel.
Bloodline took place in Tahlia, New York. I do know Brooklyn fairly well, so I hope I was able to give it a reasonable authenticity, if not, I'm really sorry. But for me to write about somewhere in the world where I don't know anything about it would come across as fake.
I was curious about the city where the school Ner Miriam takes place and looked it up. It seems to me that Bournemouth is very far away from London. Have you ever been there? Is it a place that you're familiar with? Why did you choose that place for school specifically?
Bournemouth is a seaside town on the south coast of the UK. It's about 210 miles from London, and it happens to be one of the most popular resorts for frum Jews to go to. The difference between England and America is that America has so many different places where you can be a frum Jew. England doesn’t. It has basically London, Manchester, Gateshead, and that's about it. If you go anywhere else, you're on your own Yiddishkeit-wise, Kashrus-wise. But Bournemouth happens to be a coastal resort that has had Jewish and frum hotels opening up, people buy apartments, and there's kosher shops there, so there is Jewish life there.
I didn't think that a Jewish school would be in a place where there was no Judaism or no infrastructure. So even though it's not in a mainstream Jewish area, I wanted it remote, but yet has a Jewish grounding.
What changes have you seen in the frum publishing world since you published that first book?
I think that the publishers and readership have moved more to the right. They're not willing to accept things they accepted 20 or 30 years ago. Menucha did a reprint of Dark Tapestry, which I wrote in 2000. When they came to do the reprint, the editor told me they'd have to cut some things out, things that weren't acceptable then and no longer acceptable. In Dark Tapestry, Colin, my detective hero, meets Leora, who is a baalas teshuva from New York. He is completely off the derech, and he has a non‑Jewish girlfriend to start with. There were conversations between Colin and his non‑Jewish girlfriend and Colin and Leora that were written in more detail than Menucha was willing to accept
That had to be completely edited down to be acceptable to the current world. In the Rivki Nesher books, I wrote about Rivky dating her husband in detail, and I'm not sure whether they would make me cut that down as well if the did a reprint.
As readers following the series, we now know Yael’s backstory, who her father is, where her mother is, about her sister… How early on did you know what her story was with those background details?
I didn't know it at the very beginning. I knew that she was a foundling at the beginning. I first introduced her in School of Secrets, and there were four girls, but Yael quickly stood out as being the leader of the pack, the star of the show. I think I created a backstory for her after I created her. I didn't sit down and work out what Yael Reed’s backstory was from School of Secrets. It evolved.
I didn't plan her to be the main character. When I write, my characters take over and have a life of their own and they tell me what they’re doing. When I write, I need that freedom for a character to say, I'm the leader here. I'm evolving. I'm the one who's standing out. And then I work on her and create her backstory and so on and so forth. So they tell me what they want to do.
I see a pattern in the series where Yael is the main character who ends up coming out as the hero, but in reality, she isn't doing much of the sleuthing work; she's very much in the background. You always bring in another person, like you brought in Nesbitt in Coercion to help out with that. Is that on purpose?
There's only a limit to how much one girl in a school in a school can actually do on her own. I didn't want to make her a kind of superhero type, where she would come in and solve everything and if it wasn't for her, nothing would be solved. I mean, she came in and she did certain things and things happen to her, but yeah, she always needed help. And I think that's more realistic because in detective books, there's very often only one detective who does absolutely everything and nobody else has a look in. In real life, there's a whole team of detectives and policemen who work a case. So whereas Yael was an important character, she's not this super Sherlock Holmes who sits there and pontificates about why have you missed this clue or that? She's a girl, a young woman, and she's doing her best and she's an amazing character, but she doesn't do all on her own. She’s relatable. She's a real person.
If someone has never read any of your books, what would you say that they should start off with?
I would say they should start with Dark Tapestry, because that's the book where Colin and Leora are created and they've carrid on through all the books subsequently. That’s when I started writing crime thrillers and that's my present genre.
When they discover they like my style of writing, they can go back and read the earlier ones, the Rivky Nesher trilogy, and Daniel, My Son, which was, by the way, based on a true story. We fostered a little boy from age 2 to 12. But only half of the book is the truth because when after he went back to his mother, when he was nearly 12, I never knew what happened to him. So the whole second half of the book is fiction, but the first half of the book is based on what happened to us. I mean, it's fictionalized and changed, but it's our own experiences of fostering.