While “The St. Ambrose School for Girls” is hardly autobiographical, Boson-born author Jessica Ward has it rooted in a reality she knows intimately.
It’s 1991 and “St. Ambrose” follows 15-year-old Sarah M. Taylor, a scholarship student at the titular upper-class, all girls’ boarding school. Here micro-aggressions by popular mean girl Greta are among Sarah’s troubles. Before too long there is a corpse, forbidden affairs, a murder investigation and Sarah’s continuing struggle to deal with her bipolarity and lithium medication.
Ward’s boarding school, Northfield Mount Hermon in Gill, bears a slight resemblance to her fictional setting which vividly came to her, she said in a phone interview, in a dream.
“I literally woke up from a dream after having seen this teenage girl standing in the midst of a prep school setting and I thought, ‘Oh. My. Gosh. It was so vivid, almost disturbingly vivid.
“These pictures came,” Ward, 54, explained, “and I saw her doing things. I realized I was back where I went to prep school in Massachusetts.
“This book had to be written. I had to get her and her story out of my head so she would leave me alone.”
First, Ward made sure, “There was not an all-girls St. Ambrose school. But that was just the whole thing — with the gates as you enter the school — that’s what I saw. I know it sounds a bit odd. But I don’t have any control over these thoughts. The only thing I can do is put the pictures in a right order, because they don’t come to me in the right order.
“And just choose words to describe what I’m seeing, so my readers can see what’s in my head. Other than that, it’s a completely autonomous process — as odd as that sounds.
“These stories, it’s like watching a DVD and I can replay the DVD and go back and all I do is just describe the scenes that I see.”
As for why 1991 specifically, “That was when I graduated from Smith College. In prep school and college I was diagnosed with Asperger’s. (They don’t call it Asperger’s anymore; it was a long time ago.) I was always aware that I was neuro-atypical and boy, I remember trying to assimilate so vigorously! Because I didn’t want anyone to know.
“I knew a lot of other people who had to either hide parts of themselves or suppressed parts of themselves to really fit in back then.
“We’ve come a long way. But back in the 1990s, it was different than it is now. The tension was just much greater.”
