Sara Gruen’s fascination with Depression-era traveling circuses began in early 2003, when she came across a photo by Edward J. Kelty in the Chicago Tribune of a bearded lady, the world’s tiniest man, and a host of other circus regulars. In the 20s and 30s, the article said, Kelty had built his own cameras to take panoramic shots of circuses. Gruen immediately ordered a book of his images and soon was working out the narrative for a novel about a ragtag “mud show,” an old term for a circus–the wheels of the wagons that carried the animals once they were off the train often got stuck in the mud. That novel, Water for Elephants, just released by Algonquin Books, stars Rosie, a mischievous and misunderstood elephant; Jacob, the young veterinarian who cares for her; and Marlena, the married performer he falls hard for.
Best of Chicago voting is live now. Vote for your favorites »
Gruen’s parents, both professional musicians, thought she should become a concert violinist. “I was a typical horse-crazy girl,” she says, “and that’s where the blackmail came in.” They allowed her to take riding lessons as long as she also studied the violin. Later she grudgingly began a degree in music at Carleton University in Ottawa. She’d always hated performing publicly, and she says that during a performance near the end of her second year “I made eye contact with someone in the audience, and I couldn’t get unaware of the audience again. I got so nervous that my bow started bouncing on my string. It was a long sustained note, so it was obvious to everyone, and it got worse and worse and worse until I literally tucked the violin under my arm and fled.” The next day she switched her major to English.
“If I had any idea of the odds, I’d never have tried it,” Gruen says. “It’s a crazy, crazy business.” She decided to start with a romance, figuring genre fiction would be easy. She bought The Complete Idiot’s Guide to Getting Your Romance Published and one mass-market romance novel. The guide offered lots of practical tips, but she managed to get only three pages into the novel. “I went, I can’t read this, so I can’t write this,” she says.
A lot of doors opened after she called Ken Harck, once briefly a drummer for Badfinger and now the proprietor of the Bros. Grim Sideshow and the owner of a vast collection of circus memorabilia, including a shrunken head that he kept in his home. Harck gave her permission to use a Kelty photo he owned of 21 sideshow freaks and hooked her up with retired clowns and other circus workers. Several of their anecdotes made it into her novel–there’s a hippo preserved in formaldehyde and an elephant that breaks into the cookhouse and drinks all the show’s lemonade. And the book vividly suggests the sounds and smells of life on the move–the buckets of putrid meat fed to the big cats, the musty, makeshift sleeping quarters of the workers, the screeching brakes of the train.
Gruen says that during the writing of the book Rosie became so real to her that she suffered a bit of postpartum depression once it was finished. She’s decided she now wants to work her way through the animal kingdom–bonobos in her next book and then maybe dolphins. She doesn’t have any immediate plans to write about the circus again, but she’s not quite ready to give up the big-top beat. “I’ve kind of caught the circus bug,” she says. She’ll now go to any cheap, third-rate show she can, and she still hangs out at the Yahoo group Sideshow World, frequented by sideshow performers and enthusiasts. “It’s funny, because you read and you sort of forget what they’re doing,” she says. “Then you realize that one of them is picking up a 50-pound block of cement by his pierced nipple and you go blecchh!”
Price: Free
Info: 773-769-9299
