Connie Schultz Shares Dreams, Secrets In 'The Daughters Of Erietown'

Longtime columnist Connie Schultz grew up in Ashtabula, the daughter of a nurse’s aide and utility worker. The characters of her debut novel hold those professions, too.

“For most of my life as a reader of fiction, I couldn't help but notice that the working class, which is what I come from, was seldom represented in modern literature, certainly not in positive ways,” Schultz said.

With the prompting of her editor at Random House, Schultz, now a Cleveland resident with her husband, Sen. Sherrod Brown, set out to do something about that.

“The Daughters of Erietown” tells the stories of a family living in a fictional town east of Cleveland in the second half of the last century. It’s the third book by the Pulitzer Prize-winning writer, though her first work of fiction.

“The people are fictional, but there are nuggets of real life that gave birth to them,” she said.

Throughout the book, characters grapple with their dreams, secrets, major life events and feelings about their loved ones. Many are women in this multigenerational story.

“There are often a lot of women who wouldn't dream of calling themselves feminists but are doing exactly the sort of things that the feminist movement had hoped for, for women. But they're doing it in their quiet, persistent ways, and they have their own dreams always,” she said. “They still have their own goals then, and they have their own reasons for broken hearts and for hope. And I wanted to show you how multilayered women have always been and always will be.”

The secrets in “The Daughters of Erietown” come with heartbreak and grace, and Schultz said she enjoyed the freedoms of writing a work of fiction as opposed to journalism, which she teaches at her alma mater, Kent State University.

“I could let go of the need to try to attribute, to report and interview people,” she said. “And I could just present these characters as the people I knew them to be over time.”

Schultz is in the process of writing another novel. She will give a virtual book talk through Cuyahoga County Public Library Thursday.