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Episode 145: Alyson Richman on The Missing Pages, Writing Ghosts, and Research That Gets Sewn Onto Your Skin
Thursday, 23 April, 2026
Some books have a premise you can pitch in a sentence. The Missing Pages is not that book — and that's exactly why it works. The true story behind it: Harry Elkins Widener, 27 years old, Harvard grad, obsessive Gilded Age book collector, perished on the Titanic in 1912. The legend, told on Harvard campus tours to this day, is that he went back to his cabin as the ship was going down — not for anything sentimental, not for his wallet — but for a book. A tiny 16th-century copy of Francis Bacon's essays he'd just purchased at a London bookshop, small enough to fit in the palm of your hand. He'd told the bookseller he was going to carry it in his breast pocket in case he was ever shipwrecked, so he'd have something to read. His body was never recovered. Neither was the book. His mother, Eleanor Elkins Widener, went on to build the Widener Library at Harvard — one of the most significant research libraries in the world — to house Harry's 3,000-volume book collection. Inside it: a reconstruction of his study, his original desk and chairs, his oil portrait above the carved marble mantle, a Gutenberg Bible his grandfather had won at auction that Harry never got to see. And fresh flowers, placed on his desk every week by the librarian, as stipulated in Eleanor's will — so the room always feels like he might walk in. Alyson Richman learned about all of this because her daughter came home from a summer program and said: I think you're going to love this story, Mom. She wrote the novel from Harry's perspective — as a ghost living inside the library — paired with a 1990s storyline following Violet, a Harvard student who works as a page in the rare books collection and starts to believe Harry is trying to communicate with her. It's a book about books, about mothers and sons, about the relationships that never end, even when one person is gone. What we actually talk about in this episode: The moment Alyson knew this was her next book — and it wasn't the Titanic part. It was the image of a mother and a 27-year-old son on the deck of a ship, both of them trying to protect the other from the truth of what was happening. Why she doesn't write a single sentence until the research is sewn onto her skin — and what that actually looks like across eight months of archival work in London, Philadelphia, and Cambridge. The ghost question: how do you write a character who is literally dead without it going full Casper? (Hint: omniscient narrators have never had this much freedom.) What a medium taught her about how souls communicate — temperature shifts, fragrances with no source, a book falling open to a specific page — and how she wove that into the novel's most emotional scenes. The birds. We talk about the birds. Why people almost always say yes when you reach out for research help — and why that's been true for Alyson across Japan, Finland, France, Italy, and the Czech Republic. What she'd say to the writer who wants to write something historically ambitious but can't get on a plane: technology has changed everything, and a well-worded email to an academic can open more doors than you'd expect. Her current project: Edith Wharton in Paris during WWI, running hostels for displaced Belgian refugee children and fighting like hell to sustain humanitarian work while the world collapsed around her. (Yes, there's a dual timeline. Yes, the Mount in Lenox, Massachusetts is involved.) About Alyson: Alyson Richman has been writing historical fiction for 25 years. She's the author of ten solo novels — including The Lost Wife, which is currently in development as a film — and two collaborations. Her work has been translated into more than 20 languages. The Missing Pages is her most recent novel. Find Alyson: https://www.alysonrichman.com/ | Instagram & Facebook: @alysonrichman / alysonrichmanauthor If this episode inspired you, share it with a writer friend who's ready to stop guessing and start living on purpose. Subscribe to Get Writing wherever you listen, and if you have a minute to leave a review, it helps more writers find us. Ready to go deeper into your own creative life? Come find us at the Creativity Lab at GetWritingWithLiz.com.
