by Patty Dann
Meet Patty Dann
About the Book
* * *
Behind the Book
Read On
* * *
Further Reading
About the Author
Meet Patty Dann
PATTY DANN HAS PUBLISHED THREE novels, Mermaids, Starfish, and Sweet & Crazy. Her work has been translated into French, German, Italian, Portuguese, Dutch, Chinese, Korean, and Japanese. Mermaids was made into a movie starring Cher, Winona Ryder, and Christina Ricci.
Her articles have appeared in the New York Times, Boston Globe, Chicago Tribune, Philadelphia Inquirer, Christian Science Monitor, O, The Oprah Magazine, Oregon Quarterly, Redbook, More, Forbes Woman, Poets & Writers, The Writer’s Handbook, Dirt:The Quirks, Habits, and Passions of Keeping House, and This I Believe: On Motherhood.
New York magazine named Dann one of the “Great Teachers of NYC.” She earned an MFA in writing from Columbia University and a BA in Art History from the University of Oregon. She taught at the Fairfield County Writers’ Studio, Sarah Lawrence Writing Institute, and the West Side YMCA in NYC.
Dann is married to journalist Michael Hill and has one son and two stepsons.
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About the Book
Behind the Book
I’D ALWAYS BEEN DRAWN TO THE brilliant and dapper Wright brothers, but only five years ago did I learn they had a younger sister, Katharine. When a friend sent me a postcard of her wearing a delightful hat and long dress standing with “the boys” in their suits and polished shoes at the White House in 1909, I was entranced.
I tacked the postcard on the wall above my desk and, I confess, I googled the Wright brothers’ sister. I was surprised to read that Katharine got married at fifty-two and was shocked that Orville refused to speak to her ever again. That night I went to sleep with the Wright siblings on my mind.
At three a.m. I got up and returned to my desk. I sat in my nightgown and began writing an imaginary letter from Katharine to Orville, trying to make sense of what had happened. The language did not seem foreign to me. Three of my grandparents were born in the 1890s. Phrases like “hold your horses” and “bee’s knees” come more readily to my mind then some newfangled expressions.
When I was a child, my mother wrote a column about nearby attractions, often about historical sites, for our local newspaper. I would follow her around with a little notebook and pencil and make up my own stories about what I had observed. I was seven years old when we went to a colonial reenactment where women in muslin clothes and wooden clogs were churning butter. My mother bent down and said to me, “The key to a good story is to imagine walking in another person’s shoes,” and I imagined having wooden soles.
In my young mind I took her counsel literally and from then on, I have imagined what it is like to wear other people’s shoes. I did this with the Wright brothers’ tightly laced formal oxfords and with Katharine’s 1926 wedding pumps, as well.
In the years since I first learned about Katharine Wright, while I taught, swam, even cleaned the bathtub, I imagined being Katharine. I thought of her finding great love at fifty-two, moving six hundred miles away from Dayton, Ohio, to Kansas City, Missouri, and the pain of losing the close relationship she had with Orville.
After I began writing the letters, I realized that some of what I had written seemed too intimate to send to Orville, so I began what I call Katharine’s “marriage diary” that I folded into the book.
As I wrote the book, although it takes place in the 1920s, the themes threading through seem universal—how it is not uncommon to lose people after a new marriage or another joyful event, and how adult siblings are always entwined, no matter what the circumstances or geographic distance.
I continued to write the letters that dealt with Katharine’s personal joy and sorrow and I became increasingly fascinated with what the invention of the airplane had wrought for the world—the great freedom of flight and the new possibilities for war.
I’ve had the privilege of talking with authors who have written many historical novels and they almost always do an enormous amount of research. I did not. After I began writing the letters, I would stop at certain points and read about the events of the day or other books on the Wrights. It took my sage editors to point out that I could not have Katharine wanting a car that was not yet invented or vote in an election before it actually occurred. I never looked at existing letters. I did not go libraries or Oberlin College, which both Katharine and Harry graduated from. I did not travel to Dayton and Kansas City while I was writing this book.
While I sat at my desk in New York City, imagining being at Katharine’s desk in Kansas City in the 1920s, I realized the book would be published exactly one hundred years after women got to vote for president in the United States for the first time.
I hesitated at times in my writing, for I have always been a bit in awe of the Wrights. I mean no disrespect to the Wright family, the Haskell family, or to either family’s descendants. The book is simply an imagining of what I might do if I found great love and lost great love at the same time.
Read On
Further Reading
THERE ARE TWO BOOKS THAT GIVE Katharine her long overdue attention.
The Wright Sister: Katharine Wright and Her Famous Brothers by Richard Maurer is a biography.
Maiden Flight: A Novel by Harry Haskell, grandson (and keeper of his name) of Harry Haskell, who married Katharine Wright. This book is an ingenious creation using biographical primary sources as well as imagined material, creating three first-person accounts by the author’s grandfather, Orville Wright, and Katharine, the woman in the middle.
BOOKS ABOUT THE WRIGHT BROTHERS
The Wright Brothers by David McCullough
The Wright Brothers: How They Invented the Airplane by Russell Freedman
Wilbur and Orville: A Biography of the Wright Brothers by Fred Howard
Hidden Images of the Wright Brothers at Kitty Hawk by Larry E. Tise
The Wright Brothers by Fred C. Kelly
Copyright
This book is a work of fiction. References to real people, events, establishments, organizations, or locales are intended only to provide a sense of authenticity and are used fictitiously. All other characters, and all incidents and dialogue, are drawn from the author’s imagination and are not to be construed as real.
P.S.™ is a trademark of HarperCollins Publishers.
THE WRIGHT SISTER. Copyright © 2020 by Patty Dann. All rights reserved under International and Pan-American Copyright Conventions. By payment of the required fees, you have been granted the nonexclusive, nontransferable right to access and read the text of this e-book on-screen. No part of this text may be reproduced, transmitted, downloaded, decompiled, reverse-engineered, or stored in or introduced into any information storage and retrieval system, in any form or by any means, whether electronic or mechanical, now known or hereafter invented, without the express written permission of HarperCollins e-books.
Cover design by Lynn Andreozzi
Cover photographs © Ildiko Neer/Trevillion Images (woman); © Chris Minerva/Getty Images (smoke trail); © James Marciniak/Shutterstock (field); © Valentin Agapov/Shutterstock (paper)
FIRST EDITION
Digital Edition AUGUST 2020 ISBN: 978-0-06-299312-0
Version 06232020
Print ISBN: 978-0-06-299311-3
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