A Chat With Author Deborah Harkness: 'Fiction is a Laboratory For Empathy' (Exclusive)

Deborah Harkness starts every book with a question, so it was only fitting that PEOPLE ask her a few of our own. The author of the bestselling All Souls series will release the fifth book in the series, The Black Bird Oracle, on July 16.

We caught up with her about how her background as an academic and a history scholar informs her work, how "monsters" can help us approach uncomfortable topics, and her discovering a family connection to the Salem witch trials that she didn’t even realize when she began writing about the occult.

The following conversation has been edited and condensed for clarity.

You’ve got a research background in the history of magic and science in Europe and you’ve taught European history and the history of science and paleography. How does that background inform your fiction?

When I was an undergraduate at Mount Holyoke College, I took a course called Magic, Knowledge and the Pursuit of Power in Renaissance Europe. The professor said, “How do you know what you think you know?” And I've been trying to answer that question in my academic work since 1983.

My research process is really an aggregate of everything I've learned, researched and taught since 1983. I am so respectful of writers who embark upon a historical project who have not been doing research since 1983; I don't know how they do it. I still have to do research, but it's about strange things like the size of coins or how how far can a horse travel on snowy ground in December.

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I love delving into that material aspect of the past of magic. And it means a lot to me as a reader when I do read historical or fantasy books in particular, that I feel like I'm in a real place, with real things. That's always my goal with my research, to bring that verisimilitude into things.

A little historical detail goes a very long way. It’s like cilantro: you want to use it as an accent.

Tell me why your stories involve the occult and creatures we often think of as monstrous.

I have a very clever friend who said that supernatural creatures are like monsters to think with. When you use a witch, a demon, a vampire, you can talk about issues that, if they were rooted in an ordinary human character, might send people's backs up. It allows us to kind of play with difference, and maybe we come out of it feeling a little bit more curious and empathetic about someone else's very different way of being in the world rather than judgmental. That's my hope.

Because I think that fiction is like a laboratory for empathy. You get to walk around in other people's shoes.

Your writing often focuses on relationships, especially family dynamics. Why do you think readers are so fascinated by those storylines? 

Everybody's family is different. You can have two families that have the same socioeconomic, cultural, religious, ancestral lineage behind them but they will not have identical lives. Those multiple personalities [involved] and the friction and the conflict, and then the cooperation — I love that very human dance. 

I also think that families keep lots of secrets. I'm kind of a professional secret-hunter. Because the past is filled with things that people have forgotten, neglected, overlooked. And I go in there with my little scholarly trowel and try to dig them out. But the same is true of families: What isn't said is as important as what is said, and as a historian, you wanna look for the silences, because those silences can be as telling as what's spoken.

Speaking of families, you discovered something about your own somewhat recently.

I'd given multiple interviews all through [my previous books] Discovery of Witches, Shadow of Night, The Book of Life and Time's Convert about how I had absolutely no connection to Salem. But over COVID, I went back to working on my family tree. And even though my dad and I started doing family genealogy back in the 1980s, there's so much available online now that wasn't before and I was able to get up a new little branch to the family tree and there it was: two accused and survived, one accused and executed.

And in both cases I had no idea — none — that I was connected to these individuals. It was really strange, because I've been writing about someone who was a Salem descendant, convinced I was not, and then I turned out to be.

That must have been a little spooky to learn!

It is! And I wrote about a vampire with an inherited genetic condition and in 2021, I discovered I had a BRCA mutation and ovarian cancer because of it. For those who don't believe in magic, explain how I started writing a book about a descendant of witches in search of her own power, and a man struggling with an inherited genetic condition then — fast forward to 2024 — I was that person all along, but I was not aware of it.

A lot of stuff about legacy that I've been writing about since I started in 2008 is coming true in my own life, 16 years later. And it's pretty amazing. And I do think, having had those monsters to think with has helped with my own perspective on some of the issues and challenges that I've been facing recently.

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The Black Bird Oracle by Deborah Harkness comes out July 16, and is available for preorder now, wherever books are sold.