Quick Summary
"Evidence of V: A Novel in Fragments, Facts, and Fictions" was chosen for the newest iteration of Minnesota’s state-wide book club, One Book | One Minnesota. Sheila O’Connor is an award-winning author, having been honored with numerous recognitions.
"Evidence of V: A Novel in Fragments, Facts, and Fictions" by Sheila O'Connor is a genre-blending piece combining archival research, poetic fragments, and imagined narratives. Exploring themes of memory, justice, and the erasure of women’s voices, it offers a powerful critique of social systems that punished rather than protected young women. Sheila is an award-winning author, having been honored with the Michigan Prize for Literary Fiction, Minnesota Book Award, International Reading Award, and Midwest Booksellers Award, among numerous other recognitions.
What was the most rewarding part of writing this book?
I began the research for this book as a quest to answer the mystery of my family, and instead uncovered a largely unknown state and national history—the practice of incarcerating girls for immorality in the first half of the 20th century and beyond. Although the girls had not been charged with any crimes, they were sentenced to the Minnesota Home School for Girls, Sauk Centre, Minnesota, until the age of twenty-one. In 1935, at the age of fifteen, my maternal grandmother became one of those girls. My mother was born at the Minnesota Home School and ultimately placed for adoption. This history of my grandmother and the tens of thousands of wrongly incarcerated girls has been largely erased, in part because the girls’ records are sealed for one hundred years, and in part because of the shame that followed these girls. For that reason, I felt a tremendous responsibility to bring this truth to light. So many of us know about the Magdalene Laundries in Ireland, but too few of us know that a similar, state-run system was in place in Minnesota and throughout America. During my grandmother’s time, the girls not only supplied the labor for the Minnesota Home School, but they were also paroled as domestic servants in private homes.
What were some of the challenges you encountered while writing, and how did you overcome them?
I wanted the book to be as factually accurate as possible, and I had to find a way to honor that commitment despite the lack of available information. The act of writing, of researching, of following any small clue, became a kind of obsessive effort to break through the secrecy. To end the silence. The book works as a kind of investigation, a piecing together, which was exactly how it was for me to attempt to uncover V’s story. There are things we can know about our ancestors’ history, and things we will have to imagine. Ultimately, I had to trust my own sense of emotional truth, lived truth, to try to get it right.
What do you hope readers take away from your book, and what impact do you envision it having in your community?
The deeper I got into this sealed history, the more I uncovered, and the more convinced I became that this story had to be told. I felt an obligation to the girls and women to bring this injustice to light, and to their descendants, who, like me - may have struggled to make sense of a kind of familial trauma that couldn’t be articulated or named. We can’t heal from a past that’s been hidden or erased. From the start, I’d hoped this book would find the readers who needed it, just as I needed it, and that’s still my hope. Every time I hear from one of the girls, or one of their descendants, I realize how necessary this telling has been. Readers with no personal connection to this history find it troublingly relevant to the issues facing girls and women today. I would love for this history to become widely known and acknowledged, and in whatever way I can, I’m here to help the descendants uncover their own stories. I hope this is just the beginning of a larger effort to have this history be known. Of course, this hunger for history, this need to give context to our present reality, transcends the story of these girls. Whether personal or political, history has everything to do with the lives we’re living now.
Read the Book
“Evidence of V: A Novel in Fragments, Facts, and Fictions” will be available now through September 28, via Ebooks Minnesota. Ebooks Minnesota's unlimited simultaneous use model makes it perfect for book clubs!
One Book | One Minnesota is a statewide book club that invites Minnesotans of all ages to read a common title and come together virtually to enjoy, reflect, and discuss.
