Author’s Note

If I could, I would string a line of caution tape, right here, across your path. Warning! Danger! Crime Scene Do Not Cross! All the usual descriptors apply in this situation. If you are familiar with my books, you will already know that, in the following pages, I will unpack this novel in detail. There will be revelations and explanations and spoilers aplenty. If this is the first fictional journey you have taken with me, may I say two things: thank you for trusting me with your time, and turn back now. Do not read the following pages until you have first read the novel, beginning to end.

Every story moves like a river, from source to mouth, so let this one flow, and I’ll meet you back here at the end.

No doubt you’ll have questions.


I collect people. I come by this honestly. In the same way that others collect rocks or stamps or coins, my own father collected people. To be precise, he brought home hitchhikers. In his case, it was not a dangerous pastime. My father was once a rancher. As a teenager, a friend dared him to enter a bronc-riding contest at the rodeo but, dissatisfied with the eight seconds that would win him the prize, he rode that bronco for twenty minutes straight, until it gave up altogether and stood still in the middle of the stadium, sides heaving, breathing a cloud of dust and manure. Needless to say, my father didn’t technically win. But he proved his point. From there he went on to serve as a Military Police officer in the army. He could handle hitchhikers easily enough.

I mention that to say, like my father, I too am compelled to bring people home. Only I don’t pick mine up on the side of the road. I find them up in libraries and newspapers and strange corners of the internet. You see, the people I invite back to my place—my office, specifically—and into my mind are long since dead: a missing judge in 1930s New York; the only woman to ever serve aboard a Zeppelin aircraft; a Russian grand duchess; the most decorated woman to serve in World War II; and now, a renowned, but nearly forgotten midwife.

I collect people.

This one stumbled across my path in a doctor’s office fifteen years ago. I was pregnant with our youngest son and my obstetrician was late for my appointment. He’d gotten tied up with a tricky delivery, and I’d gotten stranded in his waiting room as a result. I remember thinking that I should reschedule and go home. Had I done that, you would not be holding this book in your hands. I was bored and had long since finished reading the copy of Stardust by Neil Gaiman that I’d brought with me. I’d thumbed through every magazine, and all that was left to read was a small devotional titled Our Daily Bread. (For the record, I am not opposed to devotionals. This one had simply been hiding beneath a stack of alarming pamphlets and I had not seen it until then.) The entry for August 1, 2008, read “The Midwife’s Tale” and proceeded to tell the story of a woman named Martha Ballard who had delivered over a thousand babies in her career and never once lost a mother in childbirth. (My own doctor—the one I was anxiously waiting to see—couldn’t boast a record like that.) As happens every time I am struck by inspiration, all the little hairs stood up on the back of my neck. I tore that page out of the devotional and stuffed it in my purse. (I have it here on my desk as I write this and am laughing at the note I scribbled at the top that day: “Would make a GREAT novel!”) I kid you not, my doctor walked in two minutes later. And thus began a yearslong process of research and writing and false starts. Elation and frustration and all of the things that bring a book into the world. But I never gave up.

Which brings us to a very important conversation we must have regarding Martha Ballard and this specific novel. My longtime readers know how closely I stick to historical fact. It is a point of pride for me and why many have called what I write “biographical fiction.” The Frozen River marks my first real deviation from that track record.

The book you hold in your hands is inspired by real events as opposed to being based on them. And, as you are about to see, I took great liberties not only with dates and details but, in some cases, the historical record itself.

I did not do so lightly.

And I have good reason for it.

I would never present this novel as alternate history. Roughly 75 percent of what happens on these pages closely follows the historical record. The rest is my version of what could have happened. But if you are looking for the facts—and nothing but the facts, ma’am—I highly suggest you pick up a copy of Laurel Thatcher Ulrich’s Pulitzer Prize– winning biography of Martha Ballard, A Midwife’s Tale. It is, to the best of my knowledge, the only comprehensive history of her life, and is required reading if you want to understand Martha’s role in history. It is an astonishing work of nonfiction.

There are numerous instances where I changed, edited, clarified, or condensed Martha’s diary entries. For example, the places where Martha records that Rebecca Foster “has sworn a rape on a number of men among whom is Judge North” includes diary entries from both August 19 and December 23. I did this to give the reader a clearer, more immediate idea of what happened to Rebecca that horrible night. Not every diary entry that is included in these pages happens in the year or even on the specific date shown. A very small handful are fictional. My goal was to take many of the things that interested me about Martha’s life and condense them into one story that takes place over a six-month period.

The court system in early America was nothing like it is today. At the time this story takes place, the Constitution had existed as the country’s founding legal document for only two and a half years, and the Bill of Rights had not yet been ratified. In Martha’s day there was only the Court of General Sessions (where you could sue your neighbor for petty reasons), the Court of Common Pleas (that considered more serious crimes such as assault), the Supreme Judicial Court (that handled rape, murder, and appeals from the lower courts), and the Supreme Court of the United States (there were only six justices and its first meeting was on February 1, 1790—toward the end of when this story takes place). So when I ask you to take everything you know about due process and legal matters and throw them out the window, that is why. Honestly, the citizens of early America were lucky to have a justice system at all.

After waiting for many years, I seriously began this novel during the COVID-19 pandemic. What that meant for me, personally, is that I wrote surrounded at all times by four adolescent boys—and all the noise and chaos that entails. It is not my preferred method of writing by any stretch. But it was illuminating for one specific reason: I had to do my work right smack dab in the middle of my family life. And that is exactly how Martha Ballard lived and worked for decades. There was no separation. One phrase in her diary is repeated thousands of times over twenty-seven years: “I have been at home.” When I first came across that oft-repeated remark, I thought little of it. But it took on new meaning for me during the pandemic because I too could write that in my own diary. I have been at home. For months and months and months. For years, in fact.

If you read Laurel Thatcher Ulrich, you will find a very different Martha Ballard than the one portrayed on these pages. In fact, you may not recognize them as the same woman. I did that on purpose. I wrote Martha as she came to me and, given that history has recorded so little of her, I will argue that my version is, at the very least, plausible. Should you endeavor to get a copy of her diary yourself, know this: it is very expensive (Picton Press published a limited number in 1992 and mine cost $350), very dry, and it’s not really a diary at all. It’s more a daybook. Martha does little to no editorializing. Only a handful of times in twenty-seven years does she reveal her feelings about anything she records. Instead, she gives us the date, the weather, and the facts. The longest entry she made in that time was on December 23, 1789: the date of Rebecca Foster’s first legal hearing in Vassal-boro. And though Martha was literate (a thing unheard-of for women in her time), few readers today would be able to decipher much of what she wrote. Here is an example of an entry I included in the book. You’ll understand why I edited it as I did.

3 5 X. Birth. Charls Clearks 3d Dagt. XX Clearn morn. I was Calld by Cowen to Charls Clearks wife in travil at 2 h morn. Shee was Safe Delivrd of a Dagt (her 3d Child, all Dagts), at 4th hour. I left her Cleaverly and 8 & was Conducted to mr Pollards.

This entry is listed under the year 1789. The 3 is the day of the month and the 5 is the day of the week (I changed it to November 26 in order to open Martha’s story with the birth of Betsy Clark’s daughter), and the rest takes a good bit of patience to sift through. The real entry goes on for a bit longer but contained information that did not pertain to my story so I did not include it. Throughout, she makes no effort at consistency when it comes to the spelling of names or places. So I did that for her in this story. What I’m saying is: you’re welcome.

A few more things because I’m sure you’re curious:

A note on the various currencies mentioned throughout the novel. I use dollars and pounds interchangeably throughout. Both were in use at this time, though the dollar (named after the Spanish dollar) was the primary coinage. However, English pounds were still in heavy circulation as well. Martha mentions receiving both forms of payment in her diary, despite the fact that the U.S. dollar was not established as the official currency until 1792—and was not minted until later that same year. It would seem that she was willing to take whatever payment she could get. Or, in many cases, chickens, coffee, sugar, or wool instead. Martha was paid in goods and services as frequently as with money.

Sally Pierce really did have Jonathan Ballard’s illegitimate son, but he was born in February 1791, almost a year after this story ends. And yes, Martha did have to take her testimony in childbirth. It’s the closest she comes to being gobsmacked. However the young couple might have felt about each other, they went on to have twelve more children (three were stillborn).

Cyrus Ballard never married or left home, but Martha gives no reason in her diary as to why. Ulrich notes that it was rare for a man to remain unmarried and in his parents’ household in that day, and she postulates that he might have had some sort of mental or physical disability that prevented him from finding a wife. I connected those imaginary dots to a tragic time in Martha’s history so that it would fit neatly within the story I wanted to tell.

Moses Pollard and Hannah Ballard did indeed get married. The wedding happened in 1792 and shortly thereafter they moved to Fort Western and opened a tavern of their own. The happy couple went on to have nine children between 1794 and 1809.

Barnabas and Dolly Lambard met a bit later than I describe in this book. They married in 1795 and were the rather prolific parents of eleven children (their first was born in 1796). As recorded in Martha’s diary, Dolly, her sister, and their husbands visited often.

Sam Dawin did indeed fall through the ice trying to get to shore on a raft with Jonathan. But here is where I made a major deviation in the story: he never saw a body. Which brings us to Joshua Burgess.

Captain Joshua Burgess was one of three men accused of raping Rebecca Foster in August 1789. Yes, you read that right. Three. The third, a man named Elijah Davis, was cut from this story altogether. I did that in part to simplify the narrative. The harder reason, however, is that in Martha’s diary, those three men sexually assaulted Rebecca Foster three different times over the course of one week. What is portrayed as horrific here was in fact a series of nine unspeakable assaults in real life.

Reader, I could not bring myself to write that.

Joshua Burgess disappears from the pages of Martha’s diary somewhere around December 1789. Poof, he’s gone. She never mentions him again. Could he have skipped town? Absolutely. Is it also possible that he died somehow or somewhere? Sure. So I went with that and used it as the bedrock for the novel. I mean, honestly, I don’t feel sorry for the guy. He is dead to me!

A word about rape: it is—unfortunately—nothing new. Sexual assault and all its gradients have been with mankind from the beginning. We find records of it in every ancient text from the Bible to Shakespeare. And yes, okay, my solution to a gross injustice is severe. (Or severing, if you will.) And shocking. And not a little excessive. (But I would like the record to show that when Larry McMurtry made a similar choice in Lonesome Dove, they gave him a Pulitzer. So, you know, poetic justice, man.)

The real Joseph North walked away scot-free from his trial and was never made to account for his crimes. That is unconscionable to me. I cannot change history, but I do have control over the stories I tell, and in this instance, at least, I gave him what he deserved.

In writing that scene I could not help but think of a friend who suffered unspeakable predations for much of her childhood and adolescence until she finally took matters—and a knife—into her own hands and drove it into the thigh of her abuser. My friend, so young and brave and broken, looked at him, trembling, and said that if he ever touched her again, next time she wouldn’t miss. He never did and this ending was for her. And for every other woman who hasn’t seen justice in her lifetime.

It’s not enough.

But it’s something.

It is worth noting here that Joseph North’s rape trial did not happen until July 1790. In an effort to better serve this story I condensed the time frame, but other than that, every detail is accurate, including the fact that Rebecca Foster did not attend (Martha’s diary does not record a reason why). Primarily, I made that choice so that the entire story could be contained within the opening and closing of the river.

If you are familiar with Martha’s life (either through the Ulrich biography or through her diary itself) you will know that she makes no mention of being a sexual assault survivor herself. Was she? According to statistics—which I do not think have changed much in the last few hundred years—there is a 33 percent chance of its being true. Of every decision I made in this book, that was the riskiest. The truth is, I don’t know. But it would explain the deep devotion she felt for Rebecca Foster.

Regarding Tempest: she burst into my life in the middle of the night on June 19, 2018. My husband and I woke up to a sound that can only be described as our most dearly beloved being slaughtered in their sleep. Turns out, after a mad dash through the house at three in the morning to make sure our children were still alive, we discovered a fox barking in our yard. (Look that up on YouTube and see if it doesn’t give you the heebie-jeebies.) A few hours later, a newborn baby entered my life. It’s a long story and not mine to tell, but those two things became inextricably linked in my mind. The fox and the baby. To this day, I am fiercely protective of both. So it made sense that they should each have a part in this book.

Seventeen hundred eighty-five was known as the “year of the long winter” to the residents of Hallowell, Maine. Martha Ballard’s diary records that the river froze on November 25 and was still solid on April 22 of the following year. I changed everything to happen between November 1789 and April 1790, the year that Rebecca Foster “swore a rape against a number of men.”

Martha’s diary mentions the “Negro female doctor” who came to town. No first name is ever given for her, so I simply named her Doctor. It is worth noting that there is no indication whatsoever that Martha held any kind of prejudiced feelings toward her Black neighbors. There were twelve free Black families living in Hallowell during the years her diary was written. Martha delivered their babies and interacted with them as she did everyone else in town. She wrote their full names in her diary. So it is no stretch to believe that she simply did not know the name of this female Doctor. I was personally fascinated with both the medical title and how Martha’s neighbors would bypass her care and go to this other woman instead. Surely that means the woman had greater skill than Martha? Or that they had secrets to keep? Perhaps both.

I changed the name Hannah Sewell to Grace Sewell in this book. There were just too many Hannahs in Martha’s journal (a very popular biblical name at the time), and it became untenable to distinguish between them on the page. This Hannah, not that Hannah. Again, you’re welcome.

Because I know you’re going to ask, no, I did not deliver any of my four children with a midwife. I wanted to. I believe in the work they do, and I trust the thousands of years’ worth of knowledge that has been passed from one to another throughout human history. My mother had all six of her children at home with midwives. I was present for one of those births, and it quite literally changed my life. (The sister whom I witnessed coming into the world later let me witness the birth of her son. It was a perfect full-circle moment.) But my husband begged me not to. He certainly has nothing against this most noble profession either. He just couldn’t stomach the idea of me being in such physical pain. And, dear reader, he was so earnest. Tormented, even, at the thought of seeing my body turned inside out without a scrap of pharmaceutical intervention. I love the man. So, I conceded. And I do not regret it. Our youngest child might well have ended up stillborn otherwise. There are times when it is wise to put your medical care in the hands of a person who knows how to use a scalpel.

Martha Ballard is the great-aunt of Clara Barton, founder of the American Red Cross. She is also the great-great-grandmother of Mary Hobart, one of the first female physicians in the United States. She left a medical legacy in this country that is unmatched. And it is all thanks to the diary she kept. Just words on paper, right? Seemingly meaningless. They’re only the record of one woman’s meticulous daily life. But those pages were preserved and passed to Dolly (Ballard) Lambard. She gave them to her daughter Sarah, who passed them on to Dr. Mary Hobart, who donated them to the Maine State Library, where they sat until they were organized and bound by Lucy (Lam-bard) Fessenden. Many years later, law librarian Edith L. Hary made those pages available to the public. And finally, Cynthia McCausland translated all six million bytes of text so that the full transcript could be published by Picton Press. Laurel Thatcher Ulrich, the Pulitzer Prize– winning historian and professor, studied the diary and wrote the definitive biography of a woman who should have vanished from history. If not for one diary and the power of words.

It bears repeating that this is a novel, a work of fiction, my version of what could have happened in this woman’s life. It is not a biography, nor do I claim to be an historian. I’m simply a storyteller, and I have felt, for fifteen years, that Martha’s story is worth telling. I want you to know her name. I want you tell your friends. I hope that you too are astonished by her life. I want the world to remember that small acts, done in love, matter every bit as much as the ones that make the newspaper and the history books.

Toward the end of Laurel Thatcher Ulrich’s biography, she has this to say:

Martha Ballard ensured that she would not be forgotten. There was nothing in Christian tradition that said a midwife ought to keep a diary…. For some complex of reasons, probably unknown even to her, Martha felt an intense need to re-create her own life day by day…. She not only documented her prayers, her lost sleep, her deeds of charity and compassion, she savored and wrote down the petty struggles and small graces of ordinary life. The diary is a selective record, shaped by her need to justify and understand her life, yet is also a remarkably honest one… [it] tells us that Martha was a devout Christian and humble nurse whose intelligence sometimes made it difficult for her to attend church or defer to her town’s physicians, a loving mother, a gentle woman with a sense of duty and an anatomical curiosity that allowed her to observe autopsies as well as cry over the dead, a courageous woman who never quite learned to stay on her horse, a sharp-eyed and practical woman who kept faith in ultimate justice…. Outside her own diary, Martha has no history. No independent record of her work survives. It is her husband’s name, not hers, that appears in censuses, tax lists, and merchant accounts for her town…. Nor does any extant record acknowledge the testimony she took from unwed mothers in delivery. Her name appears on a list of witnesses at the North rape trial, but no one, except her, preserved a record of what was said…. Martha did not leave a farm, but a life, recorded patiently and consistently for twenty-seven years. No gravestone bears her name though perhaps there still grow clumps of chamomile or feverfew escaped from her garden.

During the first week of May 1812, Martha Ballard made her final diary entries:

Tuesday, May 5—Snowed and very cold. I have felt very feeble. I have been at home.
Wednesday, May 6—A very stormy day. I do not feel any better. I have been at home.
Thursday, May 7—Clear most of the day and very cold and windy. Daughter Ballard and a number of her children here… Reverend Mr. Tappin came and conversed sweetly and made a prayer adapted to my case. I have been at home. Very feeble.

The “Daughter Ballard” whom Martha refers to in this last entry is none other than Sally Pierce, the young woman who remained a thorn in her side for most of this book. And while I have no doubt that her own daughters were at her bedside as well in her final days, I find this last mention of Sally incredibly sweet. I like to think they made amends. I like to think that the grandson made it possible. Martha died a few days after this last entry, leaving behind her husband, Ephraim, and all six of their living children.

I love that the second-to-last phrase mentioned in her diary is the one she wrote most often, for it exemplifies the last three years of my own life as I have attempted to write her story.

I have been at home.

Me too, Martha. Me too.