Taking on contentious issue of abortion rights, ‘Mercy Street’ honored as 2023 American Voices in Literature Award winner

Jennifer Haigh has visited The Mark Twain House and Museum before for a reading and signing event. She returns this week as the winner of the 2023 Mark Twain American Voice in Literature Award for her latest novel “Mercy Street.”

Haigh will be the guest of honor at a high-ticket fundraising dinner on Nov. 3. As this year’s American Voice winner, she also receives a $25,000 cash prize underwritten by bestselling thriller writer and Twain House booster David Baldacci and his wife Michelle Collin-Baldacci.

“Mercy Street” is set in and around a women’s health clinic in downtown Boston in 2015. The book’s title refers to a short street in the shopping area near Boston Common that was once part of the red light district known as the Combat Zone, but “Mercy Street” also refers to the popular nickname for the clinic.

“Boston is a character in the book,” Haigh said. “You can write 20 novels set in Boston and they’ll all be different.”

She’s written two other books set there and has lived there for years. Several of her other novels are set in areas in the Appalachian Mountains like where she was born and raised in Pennsylvania.

The location and time period of “Mercy Street” came naturally to her because she lived and worked there in that era. “The nature of cities is to change. The feeling of being in Boston at that time is part of the novel.”

“The book draws on my personal experience,” Haigh explained. “I spent my time in college volunteering at a women’s clinic in Boston. I went through the training to be a volunteer and answered the hotline. The calls on the hotline could be about contraception and a lot of different health issues, but half of them were about wanting to schedule an abortion. I talked to a lot of different people.”

Another real-life inspiration that she is able to use both dramatically and metaphorically in the novel is the “snowpocalypse” of 2015 when over two feet of snow fell on Boston in a single two-day period. Near the end of the novel, Haigh describes the aftermath of the storm in the same way that she follows up on what happened to some of the book’s characters following some harrowing events in the story:

The thaw was good news for everyone. Good news for the new governor, sworn into office just before the first nor’easter; good news for mayors and city councilors and selectmen, who’d spent their entire snow removal budgets, and part of next year’s, before the second one hit. Good news for bus drivers, for all drivers. For harried parents who’d burned an entire year’s worth of vacation sitting home with restless kids, who had, in some half-forgotten past life, spent their days in school. In late May, on the same weekend, the Globe and the Herald ran a photo of the very same snow pile, located at the back corner of a Dunkin’ Donuts parking lot in Billerica — a pile so encrusted with soot and garbage, so many times melted and refrozen, that it had been rendered indestructible. It’s probably still there.

“Mercy Street” has multiple protagonists with their own stories and perspectives, which come together around protests and other activities outside the clinic. There’s an undercurrent of uncertainty and turmoil that applies directly to the time in which the book is set but also relates to any number of hot-button issues happening in the world today and certainly reads differently in the wake of the Supreme Court’s overturning of Roe v. Wade.

“I don’t think of this as a book about women’s issues,” the author said. “It’s wrongheaded to talk about pregnancy as a women’s issue since men are always involved.”

In any case, “Mercy Street” is presented in male and female voices.

Haigh found out just a few weeks ago that she’d won the American Voices prize. The panel of judges for the 2023 prize included novelists Amity Gaige, Dan Pope, Dawnie Wilton, Lawrence Howe and the Hartford-based writer/critic Rand Richards Cooper. The Mark Twain House and Museum had issued a “long list” of nominees in July, a “short list” of semifinalists in August and a shorter list of finalists in September, so she knew the novel’s chances were good, but said, “I had read some of the other books and I knew how good they were.”

“Mercy Street” is published by HarperCollins and is available at bookstores throughout Connecticut, the U.S. and online, as well as at the Mark Twain House and Museum gift shop. The Mark Twain American Voice in Literature Award dinner will be held at the museum’s Hal Holbrook Hall, 351 Farmington Ave., Hartford, on Nov. 3. There is a VIP champagne reception with Haigh and Balducci at 5:30 p.m. and a cocktail hour at 6 p.m., dinner at 7 p.m., with the 8 p.m. award presentation followed by dessert and coffee. For more information, including ticket details, see marktwainhouse.org/american-voice/.