arts & culture
Cheltenham Author to Publish
Debut Novel
SASHA ROGELBERG | STAFF WRITER
20 MAY 19, 2022 | JEWISHEXPONENT.COM
period of American history, including
Prohibition and the Vietnam War, but
it also exposed as many holes in Joan’s
story as it sought to fi ll.

Sensitive to the nature of Joan’s
death, Brill opted to not contact Joan’s
remaining relative, her youngest
daughter, now 80 years old. She did,
however, meet with the archivist of
Friends’ Central School, where Brill
believed Joan attended. Th ere was no
record of Joan there, and no pictures
found of her during the entirety of
Brill’s research.

“We were looking through year-
books, and we found the yearbook
photos for her cousins and her father
and her aunt,” Brill said. “In other
yearbook years, there would have been
the underclassman photos as well, and
there were no photos of her, so that, to
me, is even more creepy.”
Instead of relying on Joan’s life to
guide the novel’s narrative, Brill used
Joan’s voice to explore what it meant to
be a young woman navigating a world
before a popular feminist movement.

Joan the character is family-oriented
but manipulative; she’s naive but devi-
ous all at once.

“Joan was an ordinary woman,” said
Anne Dubuisson, Brill’s developmental
editor for the book. “Even ‘ordinary
women’ — women who are not doing
those kinds of great gestures or great
Courtesy of Elise Levine Cooper
F or authors, ideas for a story
seem to come from thin air — a
spontaneous idea, a line from a
remembered conversation.

For Eileen Brill, the idea for her fi rst
published novel came from a hole in
her wall.

In 2007, while Brill was having some
electrical work done in her Cheltenham
home, the electrician pulled out a bat-
tered piece of paper from the wall in
the third-fl oor bedroom.

Th e electrician was about to throw it
out until Brill, with a hunch, grabbed
the piece of paper: a letter written
on personalized stationery with the
house’s address in the corner.

Th e Jewish author, 58 — also a writer,
painter and American Sign Language
interpreter — was fascinated by the let-
ter written by a young Quaker girl and
original resident of the house in the
early 1930s. She spent years on-and-
off researching the life and death of
the young girl, Joan, realizing that the
details of her life would make for a
potent novel.

“Th ere were just so many holes in
her life that I couldn’t fi gure out, and
I realized, ‘I think I have a skeleton of
a really good fi ctionalized story here,’”
Brill said.

Aft er 15 years of researching and
writing, Brill’s story has reached the
pinnacle of its life. Th e psychological
drama and historical fi ction novel, “A
Letter in the Wall,” will be released by
Sparkpress on May 24.

Brill is careful not to claim that
her novel is about the letter’s real-life
writer, but it is heavily inspired by her
life and death.

Th e real Joan was born in 1915 to
a wealthy Pennsylvania Quaker fam-
ily and suff ered loss at an early age
when her mother died of the 1918
Spanish Infl uenza, precipitating the
family’s move to the home in the early
1920s. Joan was murdered in 1971 in
Oklahoma City, days aft er she went
missing, a case that remains unsolved.

Brill’s research helped to contex-
tualize Joan’s story in a tumultuous
Eileen Brill is the author of “A Letter in the Wall,” her fi rst published novel.

actions that one normally hears about
in history — She’s an ordinary woman
whose story still deserves to be heard.”
Susan Weinberg, a friend of Brill’s
who read early draft s of the novel, found
that the book mirrored many of the
challenges of today. Brill gave a draft
of the manuscript to Weinberg in a
socially distanced drop-off in the early
days of the pandemic, when unknowns
about COVID stirred fear in so many,
not unlike Joan’s experiences surviving
a pandemic a century prior.

“I’m reading about this woman who,
in 1917, had the same experience in
what was going on,” Weinberg said.

Th ough “A Letter in the Wall” is a
commentary on feminism and history
through the lens of an author in the
21st century, Brill was careful not to
project too much of herself into the
book. A secular Jew married to the son
of Holocaust survivors, Brill decided
against having any Jewish characters
in her book, despite early readers ques-
tioning the decision.

“I was really aware that there were
no Jewish characters in my book,” Brill
said. “My character wasn’t interacting
— Jews weren’t part of her world.”
Joan was written by a Jewish author,
however, and her story is intertwined
with Jewish values Brill learned grow-
ing up.

“Th e whole slant of my story has a lot
of empathy in it, which I think is also
[in] my Jewish background, and caring
about others, viewing others through
that lens,” Brill said.

Brill will hold a signing for “A Letter
in the Wall” at the Rittenhouse Square
Barnes & Noble on June 4 at 4 p.m. JE
srogelberg@midatlanticmedia.com