Amanda Foreman's Own World on Fire
Amanda Foreman just published A World on Fire, a book that aimed to place the American Civil War in international context with particular focus placed on the British. What people know is that immediately upon its release, the almost-1, 000 page book was met with overwhelming praise and critical acclaim. What people may not know is that Foreman wrote the book while nursing a husband with cancer and raising five children, the youngest of whom was sick as well.
Foreman spoke with FrumForum and described her family circumstances during her time writing the book: “While I was writing A World on Fire my husband had cancer, and I guess what made it slightly different [from other people’s problems] is that I have five children, and my youngest was only one year old when he was diagnosed.”
Though many would view Foreman’s family circumstances as extreme, she was hesitant to classify her situation as anything extraordinary. “Everyone has problems,” she said. “Everyone has vicissitudes in their life. And I genuinely don’t feel that mine are any different than anyone else’s.”
That being said, she admitted that caring for her husband and children did provide unique struggles in the research and writing of her book, the total of which took 12 years. “There was tremendous pressure coming from every direction,” she said. “But more than that, really, tremendous fear. And I think that was one of the difficulties of writing this book is that every day [there was] fear for the future, fear for the family, fear for my husband, fear for myself.”
The way Foreman dealt with this familial strain while doing the extensive research necessary to complete the book was through sacrificing personal time. “I managed [my time] by not having a private life or a social life,” she said. “I divided my time between… trying to be a good wife, trying to be a good mother to my children, and working. And that often meant that I would get to bed at maybe two or three in the morning and have to be up again at seven.”
Foreman’s hard work and sacrifices certainly paid off. A World on Fire has been championed by critics everywhere. Joanna Bourke from The Times said that Foreman’s book “is as comprehensive as any single study can be.”
Raymond Seitz from The Telegraph referred to A World on Fire as a “tour de force” and said, “Amanda Foreman has dedicated 12 years of impeccable research to mastering the subject. The result is 800 fluent pages that meld great events with colourful characters.” The list of critics who herald Foreman’s book could go on indefinitely.
Foreman, however, was skeptical that another literary success (her biography Georgiana, Duchess of Devonshire won the Whitbread Prize in ’98) would drastically alter her life or her mood. “When I finished the book last September, a part of me felt that so much of the last decade of my life had been sacrificed in…work that I couldn’t really imagine any kind of fame or success that could go towards compensating what had been such a terrible time,” Foreman admitted.
But, as it turns out, success tastes sweeter to Foreman than expected. Laughing, she said, “Funnily enough, now that the book is critically acclaimed, I actually do feel much better.”