well I'm happy to take your questions if,
I hear you guys are good at having questions.
Yes.
[LAUGH]
>> They're very good.
>> you just mentioned how, like you want us
to create her humanity, which I think is really interesting.
And this passage kind of ties into a
lot of conversations we've been having, which is sort
of debating what to what extent Mary is aware
that, or not aware that she does have typhoid.
That she is affecting these deaths, and
whether, and how, in certain parts, she acknowledges
the deaths, but she doesn't always acknowledges,
she doesn't always acknowledge her role in them.
So I was wondering,
you know, what was your choice in that.
Was that tied into making her more human, or
was it more of an effort to maintain historical fiction?
Or, like, how that played into your effort to create her humanity.
>> I think I just tried to be true to
what, how I might have reacted to this sort of news.
I was roughly the same age or, I am
roughly the same age as Mary as when she's caught.
And I, I tried to comprehend it from her point
of view. New York was, was violent It was filthy.
And, and some of the challenge of this book was washing away all
that charming, you know, sepia color that we see from period pictures and stuff.
And looking at it for what it was, which was a place where people
died, all the time, of diseases like
typhoid, like diphtheria, you know, pneumonia tuberculosis.
And And with that in mind, I believe that Mary
could legitimately deny, within herself, that
she was responsible for all these deaths.
If typhoid is everywhere, especially in tenements, and it pops
up at a home where you're working in, the only
significant thing about that is that she brought typhoid fever,
which was a poor person's disease Into a rich person's home.
And otherwise, you know, her life was not the life of her employer.
They didn't see a lot of typhoid fever, but she did.
And so I had to decide whether she legitimately didn't believe
what they were saying about her, and in the end, I did.
I think, though, you can still allow for certain possibilities.
Like again when your feeling most reflective about your own
life did I do this am I to blame I
think she must have had moments like that but ultimately
I think only at the very end of her life
in my imagination did she allow the possibility that
this really did happen the way they said it did.