2015
NORTH CAROLINA L I T E R A R Y RE V I E W
“COLORING OUTSIDE THE LINES” a review by Amanda M. Capelli Diane Chamberlain. Necessary Lies: A Novel. New York: St. Martin’s Press, 2013.
AMANDA M. CAPELLI is currently a Doctoral Fellow of English Literature at the University of Louisiana at Lafayette. She has published and presented essays on modern American literature with a special focus on women authors of the South, including her current project on Elizabeth Madox Roberts. A New Jersey native, DIANE CHAMBERLAIN now lives in Raleigh, NC. She is the author of twenty-four novels, several of which are set in North Carolina, including her most recent book, The Silent Sister (St. Martin’s Press, 2014). The author has a master’s degree in clinical social work from San Diego University, and before her writing career, she worked as a hospital social worker and had a private practice as a psychotherapist.
Diane Chamberlain’s powerful new novel, Necessary Lies, diverges from her previous work to focus on one of this nation’s most shameful periods of history. The Eugenics Sterilization Program, with its forced neutering of men and women alike, sounds like something from a science fiction novel, but it was very much a reality. From 1929 until 1975, North Carolina continued to enforce the Eugenics Sterilization Program, long after many other states had already eliminated this practice reminiscent of the eugenics experiments of Nazi Germany. During this time, North Carolina sterilized over seven thousand of its citizens who, according to the author’s note, were deemed “mentally defective” or whose sterilization was considered “for the public good,” which meant unmarried women with children, African Americans, and children from poor families. Chamberlain reports in her author’s note that “North Carolina was the only state to give social workers the power to petition for the sterilization of individuals” (338). This distinction, combined with the 2011 hearing for sterilization victims and Chamberlain’s own experiences as a social worker, became the underlying impetus for writing the novel. While the North Carolina House of Representatives approved a bill which budgeted 10.3 million dollars for sterilization victim compensation, the Senate has not supported the plan and the money remains in political limbo. For Chamberlain, this novel stands as a voice for the victims
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without one. She emphasizes that the narrative in Necessary Lies could have easily been sensationalized to represent any number of the atrocities that occurred during the program’s tenure; however, the stories of Ivy and Mary Ella Hart were more the norm, and, as Chamberlain writes, “all the more horrific” (339). Chamberlain’s heavilyresearched novel succeeds in bringing the real faces of the sterilization program to life. Her characters represent the spectrum of people affected by the program: from the social workers making the decisions, to the young girls sterilized without their knowledge, to the women who chose sterilization as the only option for their family’s survival. The two narrators highlight the extreme disparities found within Southern society. The year is 1960, and Jane Forrester, a twenty-two year-old newlywed and recent college graduate, takes a job in Raleigh with the Department of Public Welfare despite her new husband’s wish that she stay home and start their family. Robert, Jane’s pediatrician husband, refuses to accept his wife’s decision to work, arguing that their marriage won’t survive if Jane “insist[s] on putting the needs of other people ahead of [her] husband’s.” The fact that this is a job that she doesn’t “need to be doing” makes her insistence on doing it that much more of an insult to a man who views himself as a sturdy provider and veritable “catch.” What more would a “normal” girl want? (270). Meanwhile, young Ivy Hart stru ggles to keep what’s left of her
PHOTOGRAPH BY MATHEW WAEHNER; COURTESY OF NC OFFICE OF ARCHIVES AND HISTORY
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