Cold cases and true crime are fascinated by us because they leave behind a void, asking to be filled with narrative. When we have no answers, we create stories to help us understand. It is part of what it means to be human – to try to think of meaningless, find meaning in inexplicable.
My novels are often inspired by lost stories, the ones that stay in spaces between the facts and fiction. But for The story she left behind, The story came unanswered.
Born in 1914, Barbara Newhall Follett was an incredible literary talent. Up to three years, they consumed it in letters and their patterns, with a musical sound of a typewriter. The introductory rows of the story she wrote when she was six began: “Once upon a time, though I can’t say exactly when …” And the words never stopped, stories formed in her wild imagination.
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Up to 8 years, avoiding friends of her age, she wrote Windowless houseA fantastic novel about a young girl who leaves her home to live in nature, ultimately becoming one with the wild. The first version of this novel was lost in a home fire, but Knopf prescribed and published in 1927, when Barbara was only 12 years old. New York Times as a work of “unrestrained genius.”
‘The story she left’ by Patti Callahan Henry.
Atria books
Barbara’s life marked the insatiable curiosity and desire for adventure. She often lived in the imagination world, surrounding herself with imagined friends she called Mozart and Bach. Not only did she write novels, but she invented the whole language called Farxoo, a lexicon together with syntax and conjugated verbs.
However, her idyllic and imaginative childhood ended abruptly when her father Wilson Follett left the family for a younger woman. This betrayal has been emotionally and financially broken by the Barbara world. She and her mother Helen went to Nomadic’s life, traveling over the Caribbean and the Pacific Ocean. When she was 15 in 1930, Barbara escaped from a oppressive household in Pasadena, lived under the pseudonym before the police discovered her. Her teenage years were filled with writing, working unusual jobs and seeking comfort in the desert.
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Although she continued to write, a great depression made the possibility of posting. Had another book called Traveling Norman d Published in 1928, followed by two more books published posthumously.
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Until the early 1930s, she was in love with Nickerson Rogers, a graduate at Dartmouth, who shared his love for adventure. Together, they hiking Appalachian trail, traveled through Spain and Switzerland Alps and lived from the kindness of foreigners. Yet, despite those Halcyon days with Nick in the natural world, Barbara has deepened their personal struggles.
In 1934, they got married and settled in a domestic life in Brookline, Massachusetts, but Barbara was never cut as a housewife, and Nick’s adultery was a devastating blow. Determined to save her marriage, Barbara struggled to beat him – until on the night of December 7, 1939, she left their apartment and was never seen again.
Nick reported that she disappeared two weeks after leaving him. Initially, he assumed that she had “escaped,” as she did before, but the worry grew when she failed to communicate with any friends or family. A year later, Barbara’s father, Wilson Follett, wrote an article in the Atlanticentitled Daughter of one year lostasking her to make contact. But she never succeeded.
No body found. The letters did not appear. No traces brought to her.
“If Barbara wanted to disappear, I can’t imagine anyone doing a better job,” says her half -one, Stefan Cooke on her Farxolia website, dedicated to Barbara and her work.
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Theories of Barbar’s disappearance are abundant. Did she escape to the desert, reflecting the fate of her main character in Windowless houseWho ultimately disappears in fairytale empires? Did she take her own life, overwhelmed with desire? Her fate remains one of the most unresolved mysteries in literature, attracting fascination with scholars, writers and literary enthusiasts.
In addition to the father of a mission in the Atlanticarticles in Guard,, External magazineWho,, Los Angeles Review of BooksLike podcast, for example, they tried to solve this cold case. Her biography, Barbara, an unconscious autobiography of children’s genius It was published in 1966, written by a psychiatrist named Harold Gier McCurdy with Barbar’s mother Helen. Barbara nephew, Stefan Cooke, reported Barbara raised letters in 2015. And yet, after all these guesses, there are no solid answers to her disappearance.
Barbara’s life is not just a cold case; This reflects a great mind trapped in circumstances beyond her control. She lived as she wrote – on the verge of extraordinary, reaching for something outside the horizon. Her literary heritage, preserved in archives at Columbia University, offers an insight into her mind, but there are no final answers to her fate.
How much does the author’s psyche are revealed in his work? Even in fiction, can there be traces in their state of mind within their stories? Maybe the answer to Barbara’s disappearance was hidden in her imaginative stories.
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Author Patti Callahan Henry.
Lies Cole Photography
The last line of Windowless house Read: “She was a fairy – a wooden nymph. She would forever invisible to all mortals, save those few who have the mind to believe, eyes to see. Those who are ever present, the spirit of nature, the meadow, Nymph of the Lake, Nymph Forest.”
Without a clear end of Barbara’s story, I only had one choice: to create mine. This is what the novelists often do – we retreat to topics until the story comes up. Like true crime lovers, we seek meaning in traces that are behind. We want the narrative to make sense. But like many cold cases, as with Barbara Newhall Follett, the meaning can only be realized in fiction.
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The story she left behind is a mystery that follows the disappearance of the author’s author named Bronwyn Newcastle Fordham, who leaves behind a 8-year-old daughter named Clara, husband, and the continuation of her famous novel written in the secret language she created. Twenty -five years later, in 1952, Clara received a call from the British man, claiming that Bronwyn’s lost papers were discovered at a private library in London. Clara and her young daughter Wynnie are moving on a dangerous journey to reveal the truth of Bronwy’s missing and maybe translating the story she left.
Although my novel is not directly about Barbara, he is inspired by her work, life, invented language and disappearance. But unlike Barbar’s real life, The story she left behind reveals the fate of the missing child. For someone who was dedicated to the language and story as Barbara, I cannot help it, but I think this is a darling she would appreciate.
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The story she left behind Patti Callahan Henry comes out on March 18th and is now available for pre -orders, wherever books are sold.
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Source: HIS Education