It’s not easy to categorize Chris Bohjalian’s work. If he were a journalist or academic, he might be considered a generalist, someone disinclined to a specific subject or genre. The 64-year-old bestselling author wrote both The Flight Attendant (2018), a wacky and bloody thriller about an alcoholic flight attendant who wakes up next to a dead body in Dubai, and Hour of the Witch (2021), a historical novel about witchcraft.

“I never want to write the same book twice,” Bohjalian says via Zoom from his home in Weybridge, Vt. And with his latest novel, The Jackal’s Mistress—a Civil War tale out in March from Doubleday—he is again defying expectations.

The book’s origin dates to 2003, when an editor at Reader’s Digest told Bohjalian an intriguing story about a Union soldier left for dead in the Shenandoah Valley, only to have a Confederate soldier’s wife nurse him back to health. Would Bohjalian be interested in telling the tale for the magazine? The soldier was a captain in the Vermont Brigade and the author a happy resident of the Green Mountain State.

“I was really interested, so I wrote that story,” says Bohjalian, a slim, youthful, and jovially self-deprecating man. “But it never crossed my mind back then that there was
a novel in it.”

Like most of Bohjalian’s novels, The Jackal’s Mistress took a long time to gestate. “Maybe The Jackal’s Mistress had been percolating inside me on some level for nearly two decades just waiting to burst forth,” he says. Or perhaps it was waiting for the right catalyst, which the author found on a 2022 visit to Richmond, Va. As he pondered the removal of Confederate statues from Monument Avenue, his mind flashed back to that old magazine article. “It seemed to me that if there was ever a novel in that story about that guy in the Vermont Brigade and the Rebel woman, that could also explore how divided we are as a nation again, this was its moment. So I dove in.”

Born in White Plains, N.Y., Bohjalian says he “grew up in every dysfunctional John Cheever suburb of New York City,” while also putting in time in Miami, as his father, a TV commercial producer, moved from one gig to the next. His mother was an avid reader who owned a tennis shop and worked in real estate and at Lord & Taylor.

After graduating from Amherst, Bohjalian went into the advertising business, following in the footsteps of his father and older brother. But he knew he wanted to write, so he woke up at 5 a.m. every morning and cranked out short stories before work. “I amassed 250 rejection slips before I sold a single word,” he says. “It was when I got rejection slip number 250 that it struck me: Huh. Plan A, not working. Time to try plan B.”

Plan B entailed studying back issues of Cosmopolitan, which at the time published a lot of short stories. Eventually, Bohjalian’s efforts paid off and one of his stories was accepted at the magazine.

“That didn’t end up changing my style of writing, but I did realize that perhaps I should try writing across gender—from the perspective of a woman,” he says. “Obviously, I do that a lot in my novels. To this day, readers tell me they were shocked when they discovered that the author of my novel Midwives was male.”

After getting published in Cosmo, Bohjalian went to work on his first novel. “Here’s the good news: my agent sold it,” he says of A Killing in the Real World, which was published in 1988. “Here’s the bad news: it is the single worst first novel ever published, bar none.”

More than 20 books later, Bohjalian’s a lot happier with his results. Oprah Winfrey picked Midwives (1997), about a midwife who may have accidentally killed a patient, for her book club, helping to make the title his first bestseller. Midwives was also made into a TV movie starring Sissy Spacek in 2001, and The Flight Attendant was adapted into a TV series for Max in 2020. But success certainly hasn’t gone to his head. “I’m the least successful Amherst novelist of my era,” he quips. (His fellow alumni include Dan Brown, Harlan Coben, and David Foster Wallace.)

One factor in Bohjalian’s enduring success is his knack for writing from the perspective of a wide variety of characters. “He is one of the most empathetic writers,” says Jenny Jackson, Bohjalian’s editor and the VP and editorial director of fiction at Knopf. “He’s able to find these characters who are damaged or who are broken, or who have demons or who are not whole, and tell the story through their eyes. He has this unbelievable ability to write from the point of view of women and to understand what makes family dynamics click. I think that’s sort of the magic at the heart of what he does.”

Those skills are on display in The Jackal’s Mistress, which follows Jonathan Weybridge, a Union captain who loses a leg in combat, and Libby Steadman, the woman who cares for him as her husband fights for the Confederacy. As she nurses Weybridge back to health, the two become close and Libby must decide how far she’ll go to help the enemy.

Bohjalian is known for spinning a good yarn—on the page and in person. He likes to tell the story about the 1986 cab ride that changed his life. He and his wife, the fine arts photographer Victoria Blewer, hailed a cab to take them from a party in Manhattan to their apartment in Brooklyn. The cabbie, none too happy to get a fare to another borough, drove so fast on FDR Drive that he got pulled over, at which point Bohjalian asked if the driver could turn the meter off during the traffic stop.

“Now he’s really ticked off,” Bohjalian says, “and the next thing I knew, instead of taking us on the Brooklyn Bridge to Brooklyn, he’s on the FDR going north, and he finally came to a stop somewhere in the Bronx because there were a bunch of police officers who had three guys spread-eagle against a brick building holding those old yellow Tower Records bags. You could see a gunstock protruding from one of them. A police officer yelled for my wife and me to hit the ground. So we did. And my wife, who grew up in New York City, whispered to me, half kidding, ‘Why do we live here?’ ”

And that’s how Bohjalian ended up writing his novels in nice, quiet Vermont. He weaned himself off of advertising, but it wasn’t easy. “One month, when our daughter was an infant, we sold all of our dining room furniture to pay our health insurance bill,” he says. “Another month we sold all of our living room furniture to pay the mortgage.”

But he kept writing: a Cosmo piece about emotional infidelity, a regular column for the Burlington Free Press that would turn into a labor of love for almost 25 years—he wrote his last one in 2015. Gradually, the books started selling. Then Oprah came along, and they really started selling.

Today Bohjalian doesn’t get up at 5 a.m. “Now I am awakened usually when my dog is licking my face,” he says. “I get up and feed her and we go into the woods and walk, and if I’m at my desk here by eight in the morning, it’s fine. The sun will rise, and the book will somehow get written.” He estimates that he has written around 3.6 million published words. And as long as the ideas keep coming—no matter the genre or subject—there will surely be more.

Chris Vognar is a freelance culture writer and was the 2009 Nieman arts and culture fellow at Harvard University.