It is the story and the language that come first." Her book, she said, is just the opposite of what is traditionally known as historical fiction. "I use history in the service of fiction. "History can't belong to anybody," Anita Shreve told a documentary filmmaker after the publication of Weight of Water. Her characters, she says, "are either the product of the author's imagination or, if real, are used fictitiously." In other words, even the historical characters in the novel might say and do things they never did in real life. In a brief introductory note to Weight of Water, the author alerts readers that passages are "taken verbatim" from the 1873 Wagner trial transcript. “We were lost in the fog" she recalls, "and in that dramatic way that fog lifts, all of a sudden there they were." Inspired by the tale of the Smuttynose murders, she initially wrote a six-page short story that later became the bestselling novel Weight of Water (1996).
Massachusetts novelist Anita Shreve first "discovered" the Isles of Shoals while sailing off coastal New England in the 1970s.
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