A woman untangles the dark legacy of her family’s possessions in a hard-luck South Carolina cotton town in Andrea Bobotis’s first novel, The Last List of Miss Judith Kratt (Sourcebooks, July). Set in the present with flashbacks to one fateful evening in 1929, Judith Kratt pieces together the influence of her family on their small cotton town, learning that the devastating effects of family secrets can last a lifetime, and beyond.
Where did Bobotis, a yoga and writing teacher, get the inspiration for the murder central to the plot? Her own family history, of course. Her great uncle killed his brother with a single, deliberate shotgun blast after a quarrel over a family inheritance. “We knew that much, but there was so much more that was unclear. When I was little, we would talk about it over our meals. Why would he do that? What do you think really happened? It took me many years to realize that this was not normal family behavior. Looking back, I realized that we were really exploring all of the whys of human behavior,” she says, and in the process of her writing, human became her characters’ behavior.
Bobotis grew up in Greenville, S.C., not far from the Blue Ridge Mountains. When she moved to Colorado eight years ago, she found that being removed gave her a new perspective on the South. “I needed a little distance to see the contours of it more clearly,” she says.
She began writing the novel as a faithful retelling of her family’s story, but found it lacked narrative urgency. “I realized that writing for me was a process of discovery, and I already knew how this story ended. When I freed myself from the constraint of the truth, the book took off. I’m not telling the exact stories of the people my characters are based on. I am giving away their secrets, only slantwise,” she says.
She really found her rhythm when she inherited a mass of short published and unpublished histories of upstate South Carolina, specifically York County, where the novel is set. Her mother grew up in a small town called Sharon, population around 300, where the people tend to write down their families’ histories set in historical context. “My mom had a treasure trove of them. They gave me this really ear-to-the-ground understanding of the area, especially during the Depression era. Once I got that, I thought, this is such a wonderful rounding out to pair with my family’s history,” says Bobotis.
Today, 9:30–10:30 a.m. Andrea Bobotis will sign at the Sourcebooks booth (1629).
