1960’s

Today, Peter Golden concludes his discussion on some of the medical aspects of his new fiction novel, Comeback Love.

Part II

In Comeback Love, Gordon meets Glenna when a newspaper editor asks him to write a piece about an organization of medical students at Columbia University’s College of Physicians and Surgeons who are involved in the lobbying effort to persuade the New York State Legislature to pass a bill legalizing abortion. The medical students, Glenna among them, are spending their time cataloguing the disasters that befall women who seek illegal abortions, and they are scheduled to present their findings at a public hearing in Albany.

Now, I made that part up—about the med students—but the battle over abortion in New York State was a matter of public record, and the controversy surrounding it was covered in detail by the newspapers. Thus, the first part of my research was easy: I simply read the old articles and spoke to a few physicians who knew something about abortion before and after its legalization.

Yet the research that proved to be most valuable went back to an article I’d written for a magazine over 20 years ago. In the 1980s, like now, abortion was highly controversial, and the argument, in the political arena, was an ugly one, filled with charges and countercharges.

So I got an idea for a story and pitched it to a woman editing one of the magazines I wrote for. Suppose, I said, I did a piece about two women who had had abortions, but now disagreed about the issue. Instead of talking politics, we’d talk about their feelings and how they came to their conclusions.

The editor liked my pitch, and I found two women willing to be interviewed. I liked both of them immensely: they were open and eloquent about their feelings; their stories were compelling; and neither view was elevated over the other.

When the story was published, it received more mail from readers than any other story I’d ever written—and this was back before e-mail, when readers actually had to sit down and write a letter. What made the response so interesting to me was that half of the mail accused me of overtly opposing abortion, while the other half accused me of overtly being in favor of it.

The experience taught me a lesson that I kept in mind while writing Comeback Love. That regardless of how one feels abortion, those feelings are intricately threaded through the self, which I believe is crucial information to have when creating fictional characters.

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Peter Golden is an award-winning journalist and author. Golden’s Quiet Diplomat, a biography of industrialist and political-insider Max M. Fisher made the Detroit Free Press bestseller list. Among those he interviewed were Presidents Nixon, Ford, Reagan, and Bush; Secretaries of State Kissinger, Haig, and Shultz; and Israeli Prime Ministers Shamir, Peres, and Rabin. Golden’s O Powerful Western Star, a history of the Cold War, will be published in the spring of 2012. For that book, Golden interviewed Mikhail Gorbachev.

His debut novel, Comeback Love, will be published by Atria Books on April 3, 2012.

I’m so honored to be hosting award winning author and journalist Peter Golden as he blogs about the research aspects of his new novel Comback Love. I find the subject matter of this book fascinating– the tumultuous 60s and a young woman in medical school. As Peter discusses, it’s far different than what female medical students face these days.

Welcome, Peter.

Part I

Mark Twain observed that there are “liars, damn liars, and statistics,” and while Twain is one of my favorite writers, sometimes it helps to believe in numbers. Perhaps that’s just the historian in me, since I also write history, but statistics—one in particular, that is—certainly came in handy when I was writing my first novel, Comeback Love.

To understand the number—which happens to be 5.8 percent—you have to know a little about the novel, which shifts between the past and present. It begins with Gordon Meyers, who decides to track down Glenna Rising, a woman he loved and lost 35 years ago. When Gordon and Glenna first meet in the 1960s, he is an aspiring writer and she is a medical student. Their relationships unfolds against the backdrop of the Vietnam War and the Women’s Movement—only to crash and burn when the outside world gets in the way. Now, years later, Gordon has an overwhelming desire to see Glenna again. Though she’s stunned when Gordon walks into her Manhattan office, Glenna agrees to accompany him for a drink. As they walk through the snow-swept city, we learn about the passions that drew them together before tearing them apart. Finally, as the evening unfolds, Gordon revels the true reason for his return, and both he and Glenna are wondering—where do we go from here?

By the time I sat down to write Comeback Love, I was up to my neck in numbers, because for several years I had been researching and writing a history of the Cold War. And one question kept nagging me. What was the greatest change that occurred in the United States during these years?

Which leads me to the 5.8 percent. That was the percentage of women in medical schools in the early 1960s. (Today, the percentage has climbed to approximately 50 percent.) I wanted to look at a woman from that bygone era, and explore how the changes impacting her also impacted the man she loved. That was the beginning of Gordon and Glenna.

For research, I had notes that I had made during the 1970s when I worked in a hospital. I had met a number of med students, men and women, and I’d heard plenty of stories, many of which I had the good sense to write down. One of the most revealing was of a male attending physician talking to a group of med students, only one of whom was a woman, and at one point the attending turned to the young woman and asked if she would bring him some coffee.

Of course, to examine the changes in women’s roles during the 1960s and 1970s, I could’ve looked at a variety of professions, but none offered easy access to an issue that remains as controversial today as it was then: abortion.

Peter returns Friday for Part II.

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