Why I wrote Companion Of The Ash

December 16, 2018 | By Kate Spitzmiller | Reply More

I am a writer of historical fiction — historical fiction from a woman’s perspective. Women, especially in the Classics, have long been underrepresented and shown to be weak, vulnerable, and often signified the darker side of humanity. Great Classical writers like Homer and Euripides showed women to be sorceresses and weaklings, more apt to swoon or cast wicked spells upon men than to stand upright and face what the Fates and gods placed before them. It is my goal as a writer to show women in all their strength and fullness of character. I wish to illustrate their power and their vulnerability, and their ability to love, but also their ability to fight — for home, for family, for themselves.

My upcoming novel tells the story of the Trojan hero Hector’s wife Andromache following her husband’s death at the hands of Achilles and the sack of Troy. She loses not only her husband, but her infant son and her entire extended family. She is taken from Troy as a slave and shipped to Greece, where she suffers life as a concubine to the prince of Phythia. She perseveres, becoming a leader amongst the other Trojan slaves and giving birth to a son.

With all due respect to Homer and Euripides, Andromache is a rather pathetic figure in Classical literature, tending to spend much of her time weeping and carrying on. She has similarly been portrayed in modern popular media, including in Wolfgang Petersen’s film Troy where she was played by a very weepy Saffron Burrows. However, I chose to show her as a strong, self-assured woman who met her fate with her head held high. I think it is only fair to the character that after thousands of years of being shown as the weakling, she for once gets to stand up and be strong.

My decision to write about Andromache came during a writing course I took in Derbyshire, England in 2003. The instructor asked us to brainstorm story ideas using the question, “what if?” I filled half-a-dozen notebook pages with what-ifs until I came upon the idea of Andromache. What if Andromache was strong and self-assured? What if she met her fate with courage and determination, rather than weakness? I am a huge fan of Homer, having been an ancient history teacher for years, so the story came easily. And Companion of the Ash was born.

I worked on the novel on and off over the years. It’s very difficult to be a writer and a teacher at the same time. I left teaching in 2011 to travel, and when I returned, I set writing as a major priority. I worked on Companion of the Ash pretty consistently in my free time from about 2012 to 2015.

The story itself was the easy part—Homer and Euripides had laid out the bones of the plot for me in their works. The difficult part came when I needed to write about all of the awful things that happened to Andromache from the time of her husband’s death through to her escape from Greece.

As anyone who has read The Iliad knows, Hector’s death is especially gruesome, as are the actions taken by Achilles after Hector’s death. Andromache witnesses all of this. It was hard to write, in the first person, the account of seeing the corpse of one’s husband dragged through the dirt behind a chariot. But that is how the novel opens.

It was also very difficult to write about Andromache’s loss of her toddler son Astyanax. He is taken from her by the Greeks. She does not know his fate until later in the novel, but knows, in her heart, that he has been killed. Her son is the son of the Prince Hector of Troy, and, by Greek logic, cannot live. The scene when she gets her last glimpse of her little boy was quite difficult to write. I’m not a mother, but there are children in my life whom I am quite fond of—I cannot imagine watching them being taken away to be killed.

Perhaps the most challenging scene to write was the scene in which Andromache is sexually assaulted. As a slave in Greece, she would suffer this fate many times, but I only wrote the act in detail once—I felt that the one scene would stand in for all the others. It was difficult not only in the telling of it, but also because I always become quite attached to my characters.

Andromache had already suffered a great deal, and I hated putting her through even more degradation and grief. I needed a lot of support to write that scene. But in this day and age of #MeToo and #WhyIDidntReport, I think it is important to reveal the realities of sexual assault. I am a survivor myself. And Andromache is a survivor. I felt it was important that the truth of her story be told.

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Buy COMPANION OF THE ASH HERE

Kate Spitzmiller writes historical fiction from a woman’s perspective. Her work has appeared in the print anthology Approaching Footsteps, as well as in the online journals On the Premises, Cleaver Magazine, and Typishly. Her flash fiction piece, “Brigida,” was nominated for a Pushcart Prize. Companion of the Ash is her debut novel. She lives in Massachusetts where she is the history tutor for an elite women’s junior hockey team.