Anita Shreve | Signed First Editions

About Anita Shreve

Anita Shreve was born in Boston in 1946 and grew up in Dedham, Massachusetts, the eldest of three daughters. Her father was a Delta Air Lines pilot, and the image of flight, its risks and its sudden absences, runs through her work in ways that are probably not coincidental. She studied at Tufts University, taught high school English for a few years, and then, with what she later described as a panicky sense of now or never, quit to write. The early years were lean: she spent long stretches in Kenya working as a journalist, came back to New York writing for magazines, and published short fiction that went largely unnoticed before an O. Henry Prize in 1976 suggested there was something worth persisting with.

Her first novel, Eden Close, appeared in 1989, a quiet, menacing story of a man returning to his childhood home and the secrets waiting for him there. It found its readers, but it was The Weight of Water (1997) that announced her properly, a tightly constructed novel weaving a nineteenth-century double murder on an island off the New Hampshire coast into a contemporary story of jealousy and obsession. The book was a finalist for the Orange Prize and was adapted for cinema in 2000, directed by Kathryn Bigelow. Shreve had a particular gift for stories where the past presses hard on the present, where love and its consequences accumulate quietly until something gives.

Then, in 1999, Oprah Winfrey called. The Pilot’s Wife, Shreve’s 1998 novel about a woman who learns, following her husband’s death in a plane crash, that she may not have known him at all, became the twenty-fifth selection of Oprah’s Book Club and an international bestseller overnight. The book was adapted for a CBS television film in 2002, and suddenly the entire backlist was in demand. Shreve handled the disruption with notable equanimity, continuing to publish quietly and steadily, producing more than fifteen novels in total across a career that stretched from 1989 until her death.

The New England coast, where much of her fiction is set, functions almost as a character in itself: the cold light off the water, the old houses full of old secrets, the sense of landscape as moral terrain. She was particularly drawn to the emotional architecture of romantic drama, to marriages under pressure, love affairs with ruinous consequences, families held together or pulled apart by things left unsaid. Her novel Resistance (1995), set in Nazi-occupied Belgium, saw these themes given a wartime frame and was also made into a film. The PEN/L.L. Winship Award and the New England Book Award for fiction followed in 1998.

Shreve taught creative writing at Amherst College for many years, and remained private about her personal life throughout, in pointed contrast to the emotional candour of the fiction. She died in March 2018 at her home in New Hampshire, from cancer, at the age of seventy-one. The seventeen novels she left behind have a consistency of quality and a seriousness of purpose that distinguishes them from more straightforwardly commercial romantic fiction, and her audience has continued to find her since her death.