Carol Davis Spent a Career Around Other People's Blueprints. Her First Novel Is Her Own.

Carol Davis did not go looking for this story. It found her.

"The story found me," she says. She had been writing since she was a teenager, filling the margins of a working life with short stories, long before anyone would have called her a novelist. The book that became Restoration, her debut, arrived in pieces across decades. She was writing stories long before her children were born, but the first real draft of the novel came in the mid 2000s. The version readers hold now came together only about three years ago. What stayed constant through all of it was an image she picked up on the job, years earlier, and never quite put down.

In the 1980s, Davis worked as an archivist for an architect, back before computers, before digital film, before the instant image. The architect took photographs and turned them into slides, and her job was to organize those slides in a cabinet. So she looked at them, one after another, trying to see what he had seen. The pictures made no obvious sense together. Trucks on a road. Illustrations from children's stories. Birds in the sky. Trees.

"When I saw the finished product, it all made sense," she says. The scattered images were raw material, and the building was the thing they were reaching toward. "It was like creating little scenes, like you create scenes in a story. Little frames, like in a movie. You put them together and suddenly you have a picture, or a story, or whatever." That, more than any single plot point, is where the novel began. Not with a sentence, but with a way of seeing.

A real barn, a made-up woman

Ask Davis which piece of the book showed up first, the place or the character or the barn, and the answer splits cleanly in two.

The people came first, and they came in San Francisco. A woman kept showing up in her head, and the woman became an architect named Risa. The place came from memory. The same architect Davis once worked for owned a restored barn in the English countryside, and she used to travel out from London to put together photos and slides and work on other projects there. "It left an imprint on me," she says. When Risa needed somewhere to go, she had to go to a place like that one.

England is not scenery in the book. It is a requirement. "It helped the story say what it needed to say," Davis says, "and teach her what she needed to learn." Risa builds her adult self in San Francisco. She studies architecture there, finds a partner, starts a career that is just beginning to break her way, makes friends. The city gives her all of that. It also gives her weather that refuses to sit still, fog that rolls in and back out, and hills steep enough that you can get stuck at the top of one with no idea what waits on the other side.

Wiltshire asks something different of her. "The time, you feel time differently in the country," Davis says. "It's less linear." San Francisco is where Risa put herself together. England is where she takes herself apart and looks. The two places rhyme in their skies and their fog and part ways entirely in what they mean.

The letters in the walls

As the restoration of the barn goes on, letters begin to surface, and with them a family history Risa thought she already understood. Davis chose letters on purpose, and part of the reason is that she simply loves them.

"I'm old school," she says. "I love getting letters in the mail." A letter, to her, is never only its words. You picture the person who wrote it, at a desk, holding a pen, maybe slumped over the page. It captures a moment and then changes on you. "You get a letter, read it, put it away, and then years later it may mean something completely different."

In Restoration, the letters do work that a living voice could not. They give voice to Risa's mother, a woman who, in Davis's words, "never got a chance to tell her story." So much of what we believe about our families, she points out, is built from the stories we think we know. The letters let Risa understand those stories differently, and they let the reader live the past alongside her rather than hear it secondhand. "They reveal traces of life that you can't know unless you have evidence of it," Davis says.

Written by a layman, on purpose

Davis has spent real time on construction sites, around architects and conservators in New York, Los Angeles, and London, and most of what she saw went straight into the book. What she did not already know, she researched, asking architects, contractors, and engineers until the details rang true.

But the reason the building scenes read so cleanly to someone who has never set foot on a job site may be that Davis never became an architect herself. She was accepted into a program. She meant to go. She did not. "I understand the language," she says, "but I don't necessarily speak the language the way a trained architect might." She writes about structures and materials as an informed outsider, a layman who reads a lot of architectural journals and asks a lot of questions, and she hopes that is exactly what keeps it open to everyone.

What the past builds

Underneath the barn and the letters runs a quieter idea, that the past shapes what we build, the houses and the people both. Davis does not float it as a theory. She means it.

"We can't erase our pasts," she says. "They exist whether we feel them or acknowledge them or ignore them. It's there." A building carries the same freight. "Buildings have been altered. They have scars. They have people who've lived and died in them." Those experiences settle into the walls the way our own settle into us. "We live our pasts," she says, "even though we may not always recognize it."

The hardest part was not the writing

Restoration is Davis's first novel, and she published it at a point in life when many writers assume the door has closed. She assumed it too, at first, and then found the opposite. "I don't think I could have written this book when I was younger," she says. "I know a lot more now than I did then." Age made her more forgiving, of her characters and of herself.

The writing itself was never the problem. She is an early riser with a routine, and sitting in her study putting words down day after day is the part she loves. The hard part came after. "Now it's out there, and it's fair game for anyone's comments," she says. She is a private, solitary person by nature, and the public face of being an author has been the real climb. "But I'm doing it."

What she hopes you keep

Nothing in Restoration ties up in a neat package, and Davis likes it that way. What she hopes a reader carries out of it is something softer than resolution.

"Self-acceptance," she says, "and generosity." We all have people who confound us, who upset us, who never quite understood us and whom we never quite understood. By the end of her journey, Risa is not finished with any of that, but she has started to come to terms with it, and to be a little more forgiving. When we are young, Davis notes, we measure everything by how it affects us. Age widens the frame. By the last page, Risa can feel more generous toward her mother, and can even begin to consider that her mother had a story of her own.

It is, in the end, the same move the whole book makes. You start with scattered frames that do not seem to belong together. You hold them long enough, and a life comes into focus.

Restoration by Carol Davis is available now. You can follow Carol Davis on Instagram at @caroldavisauthor.

Feature photo: Meredith Heuer.