Tell us a bit about the research process for this book. All that history has shaped the culture in profound ways, and I explore that in Heat and Light. Coal companies dominated the economy for a hundred years. The Three Mile Island nuclear disaster happened there. The first oil well in the world was drilled there. The difference is that Pennsylvania has always been an energy state. From his perspective, this was the opportunity of a lifetime - why would anybody say no? I was struck by the contrast between how people in Pennsylvania viewed fracking, and the attitude in New York State. So when I went back to Pennsylvania for a visit and an old friend told me his parents had signed a gas lease, I was stunned. Among my peers - writer friends in Boston or New York - there was overwhelming consensus that fracking was an environmental catastrophe in the making. Josh Fox’s documentary Gasland had just come out, and environmental activists were campaigning for a moratorium on fracking in New York State - a measure that eventually passed. When I started writing Heat and Light, the drilling boom was going full force, and the national debate over fracking was raging. JH: I grew up in western Pennsylvania and still have family there, so the gas drilling phenomenon was on my radar from the very beginning. This story has somewhat personal origins for you, doesn’t it? Meanwhile, Haigh tells our editor, Mary Laura Philpott, about her writing, her hometown, and her meatloaf-dog in this exclusive interview. in the newly expanded (!) store for a reading and book-signing. Decide for yourself and join us this Thursday, May 12, at 6:30 p.m. Our booksellers who have read Heat and Light say it might just be her best work yet. Kimble - won over critics and book clubs alike. Haigh’s previous novels - Faith, The Condition, Baker Towers, and Mrs. As Janet Maslin wrote in a review for The New York Times, each character is so richly developed that the novel feels almost more like “a deftly interwoven set of stories.” Set in Bakerton, Pennsylvania, the coal country where Haigh grew up, Heat and Light shows what happens to the townspeople when a fracking company tempts them with a difficult choice: allow their land to be drilled for natural gas and receive a life-changing windfall, or protect the land and remain under financial strain. We’ll get to that in a moment, but first, we must talk about the magic she works in her brilliant new novel. Once again, Haigh tackles a contentious moral issue in a way that doesn’t feel like an “issues book” at all.
PEN/Hemingway Award-winning author Jennifer Haigh has a corgi named Ginger who looks like a meatloaf.
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