A few years ago, a friend asked Jessica Treadway for a favor: to move her trash and recycling bins to the curb for her while she was out of town. “It was about six months after I had been diagnosed with and treated for cancer. So mortality was on my mind,” said Treadway, who teaches at Emerson College. “The fiction writer in me was asking: How can I complicate this simple moment and turn it into a story? I think of the novel as a kind of alchemy of the two experiences, one very ordinary and the other very dramatic, projected on this fictional character.”
The result is Treadway’s latest novel, “The Gretchen Question,” published this month. The book’s title, which comes from Faust, refers to “the question you most don’t want to be asked, because if you answer truthfully you’ll give away more of yourself than you want to reveal,” Treadway said. In the novel, a woman named Roberta struggles with both her own mortality and the secrets she’s kept during her life.
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Roberta isn’t always likable. “It’s hard sometimes to come up with a conflict that makes the person who’s suffering it sympathetic,” Treadway said. “Maybe it’s not so important that a reader like that character, but I did want the reader to understand what she’s going through.”
The book unfolds over the course of one day. “I had been rereading Virginia Woolf’s ‘Mrs. Dalloway.’ That takes place in a day. It’s what Roberta herself is reading,” said Treadway. She wrote the book without chapter breaks, she added, hoping that “no matter how long it took someone to read it would just feel like inhabiting this character as she goes about her single day.”
As for her own health, Treadway said, “I’ve been very lucky. It’ll be five years in January. I still knock wood when I talk about it.”
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Treadway will launch the book at a virtual event at 7 p.m. on June 18 hosted by Belmont Books. www.belmontbooks.com
Kate Tuttle, a freelance writer and critic, can be reached at kate.tuttle@gmail.com.