In my novel Searching for Nora: After the Doll’s House, my heroine Nora Helmer ends up spending a winter on the harsh Minnesota prairie helping care for a family of Norwegian immigrants. They settle on a very poor farm, and struggle to gather hay and make improvements before the snow comes. By Christmas, the family is facing its first holiday without their mother, who died just as they started their immigration journey in the spring. There are few stores nearby and even fewer people. It’s a long way from Nora’s former cozy apartment in Kristiania with a Christmas tree lit… 

The actress Jane Fonda recently commented in an interview in the New York Times that she would like to play Nora, the famous heroine from Henrik Ibsen’s play A Doll’s House. Nora, of course, is also the heroine of my novel, Searching for Nora: After the Doll’s House. When friends saw Fonda’s comment, several of them fired off emails: “Send Fonda your book! She wants to play Nora!” In the New York Times piece, Fonda admitted she had played Nora once before, in a 1973 film directed by Joseph Losey. But, as she told the Times, “I didn’t dig deep… 

New Year’s resolutions are as old as the Romans (according to Wikipedia), so it’s likely that Nora Helmer might have considered some self-improvement around this time of the year. The image above is of a New Year’s resolution card from 1915, and I love how it starts with the statement “I will this day try to live a simple, sincere and serene life.” If my character Nora were to adopt a New Year’s resolution, the idea of living a sincere life would be a good place for her to start. Telling the truth is her particular challenge: she’s a quick… 

My novel Searching for Nora has two story lines: one about what happens to Nora Helmer, the character from Ibsen’s play A Doll’s House, and the other about a young university student in Norway right after the end of World War I. Nora’s story is set mostly in the 1880s, but Solvi’s story begins in 1918, nearly 40 years later. I did this for several reasons. I have long been fascinated by the generation of women who came of age during the Great War, a generation marked by an explosion of opportunity for women in nearly every part of life…. 

Because my novel Searching for Nora is a sequel to Henrik Ibsen’s play A Doll’s House, many people have asked me if they should read the play before they read my book. It’s a good question, and I always tell them “it depends.” It depends on whether they have seen the play or read it in the past. It depends on what they remember. It depends on how much time they have, and how much patience. In truth, readers don’t need to read A Doll’s House before reading Searching for Nora because I wove the play’s important plot points into…