The Grace Year

Kim Liggett, author of The Grace Year, says that her other novels were gradual processes, but The Grace Year hit her “violent and swift” after one morning in Penn Station (Preble, Joy. “Feminism in Our Times: Joy Interviews Kim Liggett, author of THE GRACE YEAR.” Brazos Bookstore). Liggett explains that she watched as a family sent their young daughter on a train to go back to her boarding school. The girl, who was probably about 13 or 14 years old, was ogled by an adult man who walked past. According to Liggett, she “knew that look,” and she knew that the man was looking at the girl like a predator looks at prey. She watched as a woman also walked past and looked at the girl, sizing her up as if she were competition. Liggett saw the look of relief on the girl’s parents’ faces when they sent her off, and she imagined they were happy to see their daughter going back to a place where she would be safe from the world. Liggett found herself marveling at “the things we do to young girls,” and she was overwhelmed with a sense of grief, anger, and powerlessness. After this, Liggett boarded her train and started writing The Grace Year.

Liggett admits that it’s hard to write a piece of feminist literature without drawing parallels to The Handmaid’s Tale, the famous dystopian-feminist novel of the 1970s written by Margaret Atwood. In the opening pages of The Grace Year, Liggett even borrows a line from The Handmaid’s Tale: “A rat in a maze is free to go anywhere, as long as it stays inside the maze.” Inspired by Atwood’s fictional world of Gilead, Liggett created Garner County: a place of extreme religious control that condemns teenage girls to one year of suffering to “purge” them of their evil. Despite the claims that the girls are the ones to blame for the men’s wandering eyes and abusive behavior, Liggett hints that the problem lies not with the girls themselves but with society’s constant abuse and sexualization of young girls that begins in childhood. This experience is far from fictional, and Liggett explains that the process of becoming a woman is like a drawn-out grace year: Girls are left to their own devices to survive predators, harsh or inhospitable environments, and the cruelty of other women and girls who are also victims of the patriarchy.

The Grace Year also opens with a line from William Golding’s classic tale of children trying to survive on a desert island, The Lord of the Flies: “Maybe there is a beast…maybe it’s only us.” In Golding’s novel, the boys believe there is a beast that roams the island, and all it takes is one boy seeing a shape in the middle of the night for their imaginations to run wild. Panic takes over and quickly drives the boys to violence. In a similar vein, the girls in The Grace Year allow their fear of ghosts and magic to take over their camp. Liggett draws inspiration from The Lord of the Flies to show what repressed anger and fear can do when people—especially girls who have never had any agency over their lives—are left to their own devices. Horror, bloodshed, and betrayal follow.

Amidst the mess of it all, however, there is a spark of hope: Tierney is a representative of change, and she dreams of a world where women come together to unite over a common goal. Similarly, Liggett dreams of a future where every young woman has the chance to thrive and show that she has more to offer to the world than just a pretty face and a body for bearing children.