Renowned Novelist Susan Wiggs Looks to the Not So Distant Past in 'Wayward Girls'

In The Wayward Girls, New York Times bestselling author, Susan Wiggs, writes a poignant historical fiction that takes readers back to 1968 in Buffalo, New York. Based on a true story, the book follows six teenage girls, Mairin, Angela, Helen, Odessa, Denise, and Janice, who are sent to the Good Shepherd, a Catholic reform school, for behavior that society deemed troublesome. While schools like the Good Shepherd were meant to reform these undesirable behaviors, in actuality, they were places of neglect and abuse where occupants were locked away and condemned to forced labor. Despite the traumatic circumstances, Wiggs did enjoy writing this novel. She remarked, “The Wayward Girls, it was a labor of love for me, and I do think that it is an uplifting, triumphant story even though I sort of focused on the… trauma, but I think the good news is that healing is possible and whether fictional or not, stories like The Wayward Girls are part of the process to give voice to what was buried, and it’s never too late to confront the past and to claim your truth and choose something better for the future.”

For Wiggs, writing has always been a part of her life for as long as she can remember. At the age of three, she was drawing pictures and having her mother dictate them to create her first stories. She reflected, “There was never a time when I didn’t think in stories, and I didn’t think like a writer, and I didn’t think in paragraphs, and in chapters… I got addicted to writing, I just fell in love with it! I loved the attention from readers, I loved feeling like I had a mission, you know, to entertain and to take somebody somewhere…” After her family moved from America to Europe when she was a child, she continued to immerse herself in reading and writing. “One thing that [living abroad] did teach me was… to pay attention to the world around me and to be such a reader… I always would seek out libraries and books even then, and so stories have always been a part of my life no matter where I go.”

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