A Trusted Friend in a Complicated World
We sat down with The Berry Pickers author Amanda Peters to chat about the book, her journey to best-sellerdom and why she calls her upcoming short story collection her "training wheels"
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The night I finished The Berry Pickers by Amanda Peters, my husband found me on the couch beside a half-empty box of tissues. Bloodshot eyes. Red nose. A serious case of the sniffles. He did a double-take, then tentatively asked, “What happened?”
Peters’s blockbuster debut novel happened. In the span of 304 pages, it introduced a cast of nuanced characters, highlighted harsh realities of history, made me smile and broke my heart. The bestselling family drama, which was the Reader’s Digest Book Club pick for November, was the winner of the Barnes & Noble Discover Prize and Andrew Carnegie Medal for Excellence in Fiction, and for good reason.
It’s a powerful story of family in the face of tragedy—namely, the kidnapping of a 4-year-old Mi’kmaq girl from the blueberry fields of Maine. Her brother Joe is the last to see her alive, and his guilt is a shadow that follows him for decades. Braiding his story with that of Norma, a young girl who feels out of place in her own home, Peters crafts a book about grief, belonging, race and the meaning of family.
The minute I finished The Berry Pickers, I knew it’d be one of the best books I read all year. So I rang up Peters with dozens of questions about the story and her writing. Read on for our discussion of the book and what you can expect to see from her next. But consider yourself warned: There are some spoilers ahead!
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Reader’s Digest: What was your inspiration for The Berry Pickers?
Amanda Peters: My dad and his family were Mi’kmaq berry pickers in the berry fields of Maine in the ’60s and ’70s. My grandparents would load up all the kids—whichever ones were at home at the time, they would go to the berry fields of Maine every summer, and they would pick berries. They would save the money for school supplies and get through the winter and all that fun stuff.
I grew up hearing these stories about the berry fields. My dad was like, “You should write a book about this.” And I was like, “I write fiction, Dad.” But in the end, he was right.
So he took me down to the berry field and actually showed me where they used to pick berries, where they used to stay. And it gave a new context to those stories that I always heard. So while I was down there, I’m like, well, maybe there’s a story here.
Reader’s Digest: Did that help you recreate the setting?
Amanda Peters: I took a million photos while we were down there. I’ve since lost all those photos, but when memory slipped and I was like, “What did that really look like?” I just called my dad. And: “Dad, what was this like? And what did you do here?” And he’s like, “Your grandfather would cut twine to make rows so we knew where we had been and where we needed to go.”
That made it into the story. If I ever had any questions and I kind of got lost, I would go to him.
Reader’s Digest: Family is a big theme of the novel. Did you go in intending to write about it, or did that come organically as you were working on the book?
Amanda Peters: I guess it came organically, and I did want to write about family. Sometimes The Berry Pickers is labeled a mystery, which it’s not, obviously—I give it away in the first line of the first chapter. But I wanted to write a character study. What happens to a family when something happens like this, and how do those families cope? And so I followed both families.
Originally, I was only following Joe’s family, to be honest. I was about three chapters into writing it, and Ruthie [the young girl who goes missing] was like, “I want to tell my story.” So I was like, I wonder if there’s a story here.
I did the terrible thing that writers do: put themselves in front of a blank screen. I was like, OK, let’s see if she has a story. It turns out she did. I just wanted to show what the impact on these families would be after this very terrible act.
Reader’s Digest: Norma is an equally complicated character. What intrigued you about telling her story?
Amanda Peters: I had a whole thing outlined—it was just Joe. So hers came more from this creative ether that I talk about. I was just like, What would her life be like if this woman who already suffered from mental illness took her and, in a twist of irony, didn’t love her the way she thought she could love a child? [Norma’s mother] was very, very cold. So I just wanted to explore that on a woman, the impact of seeing her mother suffer and then her suffering the same thing, and what impact that would have on her and the decision she would make.
And sometimes I just don’t know where the stories come from. They’re gifted to me from whatever consciousness. My friend tells me the stories are given from the ancestors—I like that one.
Reader’s Digest: As the book goes on, Norma struggles with her identity—who she is and who her family and community are. I thought that was a nice contrast with Joe’s narrative.
Amanda Peters: Yeah, I think writing her was somewhat therapeutic because I’ve kind of struggled being mixed race my whole life. Like, when can I be Mi’kmaq? When can I be White? When can I be both, and in what situation?
I’ve always kind of struggled with my identity that way. So I think I took all of my craziness and put it on poor Norma.
Reader’s Digest: You can see that questioning when Norma meets the others: Where does the old me fit in? Where does the new me fit in?
Amanda Peters: I love when people are like, “She fits so easily in the family. I don’t think that would happen.” I was like, “Well, it does happen, right?” She just knows that she belongs there.
She also can’t give up Norma, because that was her life for 50 years, right? But she can also embrace this new family, which is actually her old family, and still have her connection to Aunt June and Alice in the life before. So yeah, she’s kind of like two people, really.
Reader’s Digest: You’ve created such three-dimensional characters—and really surprised me with Joe, in particular. You did not take the easy way out by creating a protagonist who is perfect. What made you go there with him and show someone who is very human but still someone the reader can root for in the end?
Amanda Peters: Yeah, that was hard because he is very flawed. I had a mentor once tell me while reading this in its early stages that it was very brave of me to write a book of all miserable characters, all terrible characters. But they’re all flawed, and we’re all flawed.
I wanted him to be flawed, but also I wanted people to love him and to feel for him and understand where he’s coming from. Because he does a very, very, very terrible thing. He responds with a great act of love by removing himself from his family because he’s afraid that he might do that again. So I think that’s beautiful myself, and I wanted people to be angry with him but also have a little bit of compassion at the same time. Because we are all flawed, and we all deserve compassion, especially when we try to make ourselves a better person.
Reader’s Digest: How important was the first-person perspective—putting the reader in his head—in accomplishing that?
Amanda Peters: I did write in first person on purpose so that you feel like you are actually talking to the person. So you feel like you could sit around a fire and talk to these people. Where I’m from, we sit around fires and talk all summer long.
When you sit around and talk to a person, you have more empathy for them. I did deliberately pick the first-person narrative so that you could sit with them and sit with their thoughts.
Reader’s Digest: This is a historical fiction book that opens in 1962. How did the time period help you tell this story?
Amanda Peters: This was in the ’60s. Mental-health issues weren’t as well known. Also, you could steal a Brown child back then from the side of the road. And you still can sometimes here in North America. So it was a different time and a different place.
Reader’s Digest: Were forgiveness and these hard questions something that you wanted to make the reader think about?
Amanda Peters: I wanted people to think about these things because all of them are a result of one action—everything trickles down. It’s like the ripple effect of one action, and it has so much impact on both people.
No Indigenous person asked me, “How could she steal a brown child?” Because they know what’s happened sometimes in their family. I just wanted people to really consider the people, the human element of it.
Reader’s Digest: This was your debut novel, and since its publication, it’s won the Andrew Carnegie Medal for Excellence in Fiction, the 2023 Barnes & Noble Discover Prize and more. Did you ever expect this reception?
Amanda Peters: I thought maybe, like, a few Nova Scotians would read it, my family would read it, and I would go on with my life—maybe write another one eventually. And then it just exploded, and I’m still waiting to wake up.
It feels completely like a dream. It’s been translated now into 17 languages around the world. And I’m working on the screenplay with another Indigenous screenwriter. And I’m like, “This is so strange to me!” I did not anticipate any of this, none of it.
Reader’s Digest: Tell me about your short story collection, Waiting for the Long Night Moon.
Amanda Peters: I wrote the short stories first [before The Berry Pickers]. I always say they were my training wheels, teaching myself to write. When that inspiration would come, I’d write a little short story, never thinking I could write a novel because it just seemed so daunting.
There are 17 stories. Some of them are flash fiction, so they’re really, really short. And they’re all about the Indigenous experience in North America, basically from the time of colonization right up to the fight for clean water right now and the residential school system and reclaiming culture and language. It’s a whole spectrum of different stories about the Indigenous experience, but fiction-wise, of course.
Reader’s Digest: What’s next for you?
Amanda Peters: I’m still working on the [Berry Pickers] screenplay, for one, but I’m also working on a new novel. I have a draft of it done, and I think it’s going to my editor next week or something.
I’m having a really hard time with it because I wrote The Berry Pickers never thinking anything would come of it, right? I just wrote it for myself, and now I’m like, “Oh, no! People are expecting something of me now.” I’m doing a lot of overthinking, so I’m looking forward to an editor helping me get out of my own head and just write how I want to write, not with this expectation that it’ll be The Berry Pickers. I don’t want to disappoint anybody. I love this story, so I’m excited about it. I just have to get it right.
Reader’s Digest: Can you tell us anything about it? Asking for a friend … who is me.
Amanda Peters: I’m of those superstitious people—my agent didn’t even know I was writing it till I had a first full [draft]. I like to keep it kind of close to the heart.
Reader’s Digest: I suppose I can attempt patience. But while I wait for the next Amanda Peters novel, what should I read? You’re a professor of Indigenous literature. I’d love some book recommendations.
Amanda Peters: I just finished—and I’m promoting this because I love this book, and it’s available in the U.S. right now—it’s called Pearly Everlasting by Tammy Armstrong. Oh, it’s so good. So, so good. She was just nominated for the Barnes & Noble [prize] as well. So it’s just a really good book, and I highly recommend everybody pick that up.
I’m reading Connor Kerr right now because I was on a panel with him this morning [at a writer’s conference]. I’m reading his Prairie Edge, which is really good. I’m reading Prophet Song by Paul Lynch. I read a whole bunch of different things for different reasons.
Also, recently I’ve read Real Ones by Katherena Vermette, which was brilliant about the “pretendians,” as we say in Canada—people who are not Indigenous pretending they are Indigenous to take grant money and scholarships and stuff like that. Her story is fictionalized, but it’s about that situation that’s happening in Canada and the U.S. a lot lately.
And then I’m reading Jeff VanderMeer, the Annihilation series—that inspired [a student of mine], so I want to know about it.
I also love Jane Urquhart. So when I’m getting really frustrated with my writing, I’ll go back and read the first couple chapters of The Underpainter by Jane Urquhart. She’s brilliant—oh, the language. I fall in love with it every time. And I’ve read the book, like, five times.
Another is Anne of Green Gables. I love Anne of Green Gables every Christmas for some reason. It just makes me happy.
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