Palace of Illusions Publishes Today!

Including some places you can come celebrate with me and also some musings on why I think I wrote this book

First off—it’s publication day for The Palace of Illusions! I will be…taking my kid to the dentist and probably getting groceries because the vegetable situation is getting sad and brown in the crisper. Publication days are at once very exciting and also…Tuesdays.

But! There are TWO opportunities to come celebrate the book launch with me!

Come see me and Amy Carol Reeves hosted by the Whispering Shelf in Indianapolis (they’d like RSVPs in advance, please, click on the link to save your spot!), on June 17, or me and Emily Matchar hosted by Second Flight Books in Lafayette, IN on June 25. I can’t wait to talk to Amy about her latest, a contemporary novel with a historian’s touch, How to Grieve Like a Victorian, and to dig into Emily’s excellent In the Shadow of the Greenbrier, which I devoured.

So, why write this book, anyway? I had noodled with the idea of writing about the Paris World’s Fair and specifically the Palace of Illusions exhibit for a while. I do a lot of writing work—drafting, research, admin stuff—while hanging out in the lobby of my kids’ dance studio, waiting for this class or that rehearsal to let out. As any dancer or family of a dancer knows, Nut Season is particularly busy—that is, the weeks leading up to productions of The Nutcracker.* So I was noodling away, to the strains of Tchaikovsky on repeat. (Lots of battle scene that year as eldest was a mouse**.)

And I thought: What if this story was a little bit of a Nutcracker retelling, too?

See, I love the story, and unlike a lot of well-trod fairy tales and classic lit, there aren’t a whole lot of Nutcracker retellings for adults (though there are some!). The space was there if I wanted to explore it. And as much as I love the ballet version, I love the original short story by E.T.A Hoffmann perhaps even more. See, it’s weird. It leans full and unabashedly into the bizarre. (It’s not as weird as his other short story that became a ballet, “The Sandman,” later adapted as Coppelia, which frankly even as an adult I advise reading with the lights on, and which also inspired some elements of Palace of Illusions.) Everything in Hoffmann’s story is a little deeper and more complex and while I hesitate to use the term “darker,” it's more Romantic in the literary sense of the term. In Hoffmann, Drosselmeyer is a genius and a doting godfather and also a little spooky and sometimes gaslights his dear niece. Clara gets blackmailed by the rodents until the family is plagued by mice and considers the service of the neighbor's cat (despite the objections of big sister Louise, a character routinely eliminated from ballet productions). In almost Hitchcockian psychological tension, Clara is torn between staying in her family’s good graces and telling what she knows is the truth, as she’s accused of lying when she tries to share the magic she’s discovered. There’s an origin story nestled into a “story within a story” of where nutcrackers came from*** that involves hideous infants and banished court astronomers and sausage-making.

Most enticing, for me, in Hoffmann’s story, the magical Land of Dolls is real, unlike the ballet, in which the Land of Sweets is typically treated as a dream (the coward’s way when dealing with Otherworlds, in my view—just own it, fairylands and magical wonderworlds can just EXIST, no need to explain them away! This is a frequent change in adaptations, and I think it actually speaks to an anxiety related to the pressures of modernity and disenchantment that all allusions to “real” magic must be dispensed with, in this essay I will…). On several occasions it’s clear that the inhabitants of the Land of Dolls are, really, dolls (in a scuffle, someone’s head comes off but is pasted back on with no ill effects). The Land of Dolls is a beautiful allusion to a child’s imagination—that dolls and playthings become Real to children—and suggests that this kind of generative creativity is not solely relegated to childhood (if, as Hoffmann says, “you have the right sort of eyes for it”). What if, I thought—what if that was my Land of Sweets—not a frothy confection but a space of pure creative energy?

Sometime about one-quarter of the way through revising the book I realized it was also a way for me to explore a lot of Thoughts I was having about the commodification of creativity and in particular the complications and ethical morass that AI introduces to that discussion, so there’s that, too. (Often you Write the Thing to find out what you were Writing About to begin with.)

At any rate, this is the origin story of The Palace of Illusions, and it’s not nearly as much fun as the tale of “Princess Pirlipat and the Hard Nut”, for which you really should read E.T.A. Hoffmann’s “Nutcracker and the King of Mice.” (May I recommend the version illustrated by Maurice Sendak, which hits the perfect pitch of whimsy and weird?)

I’ll leave you with the dedication for the book:

*Fun fact discovered in my research: In Disney’s 1940 Fantasia, the narrator makes a strange comment when introducing the sequence based on the Nutcracker Suite—that the ballet Nutcracker is not produced very much anymore. What? Turns out, in 1940, that was true! The popularity of the ballet in the US skyrocketed after WWII and developed into a holiday tradition well after its initial premiere. The book Nutcracker Nation by Jennifer Fisher is a fascinating read on how a lesser-known ballet became probably the world’s most well-known and widely-seen.

** Slight spoiler: The mice in Palace of Illusions aren’t mere villainous nasties, partially due to the fact that my kids and their dance buddies invented a whole backstory to the ballet mice in which they were fighting for the noble and upright cause of the rightful King. Because you have to find your motivation, right?

***The familiar image of nutcrackers is probably at this point associated mostly with the ballet and the ensuing Christmas decorations, but ugly humanoid figurines with nut-cracking capabilities were a specialty in German woodcarving shops from at least the seventeenth century onward. They would have been well-known to Hoffmann’s audience and understood to be unattractive by most standards of beauty applied to real, living people.