Writer’s Block Is Part of Maggie O’Farrell’s Process 

When I brought Maggie O’Farrell’s The Hand That First Held Mine to the women at the Ahmanson Senior Citizen Center’s writing class, many of them working on their own short stories about motherhood and family, they couldn’t stop talking about Lexie—the ambitious, young, single mother who refuses the provincial life laid out for her and escapes to 1950s London. What struck everyone in our upstairs computer room was how O’Farrell conjured a woman hungry for more, unwilling to apologize for taking up space in the world. O’Farrell writes about lives and places that history wants to minimize: ambitious midcentury women like Lexie; the steadfast resilience of Elizabethan women like Agnes Hathaway in Hamnet; and the trauma buried in Ireland’s soil during the Famine in her latest novel, Land. She gives voice to those who are footnotes in other people’s stories, and that act of attention makes them luminous.

So, beaming with excitement at the op...