Jessica Shattuck

The Editorial

Meet our first subject in our 20-part Generation X series where we hope to discover emerging ideas around us from the generation author Douglas Coupland called "Fantastical Creators and Heartfelt Storytellers" in his sleeper novel, GenerationX: Tales for an Accelerated Culture – those born between 1965 to 1980. You know, that tiny but mighty band of irreverent, anti-hero makers and doers hovering around their forties. These, the ones suffocating between the Boomers and their Millennial offspring, who absorb most of everything. At this moment in time, we think GenX idealism – grounded in a reality that bites – may just save us.

Jess Shattuck’s much-anticipated third novel, The Women in the Castle, revolves around the lives of three wives of resistors in Nazi Germany during World War II. Shattuck, best known for her novels The Hazards of Good Breeding and The Perfect Life, grew up in Cambridge with a German-born mother who had immigrated to America, shunning her nation and her own parents’ dark past as Nazi sympathizers. Memories of her mother’s shame have stayed with Shattuck long after her mother’s sudden death left many of her questions unanswered when Shattuck was a teenager. It has taken her seven years to research and write this novel, with years spent traveling to Germany and combing through material to research this historical piece of fiction in which she explores the normalization of fascism in a society, and the moral fiber it takes to stand up to it and hold on to what is humane and true.