Ann Learys first book was An Innocent, A Broad in 2004 about the (mostly) comic travails she and her husband Denis Leary endured when a short trip to London ended up lasting five months, while Leary was pregnant with their first child.

Since then Leary has published five novels, which tend to be about family, small communities, interesting work opportunities and romance. Her 2012 bestseller, The Good House, has been made into a movie starring Sigourney Weaver and Kevin Kline that will screen this month at the Tribeca Film Festival and in cinemas this fall.

Ann Learys latest novel, The Foundling (Marysue Rucci Books, 2022), is the vivid, often alarming, tale of a young woman named Mary who works at the Nettleton State Village for Feebleminded Women of Childbearing Age in the 1920s. The asylum is fictional but based on one Learys grandmother worked at. The novel is the result of years of research into mental health treatments in the early 20th century. The book also touches on racism and sexism in that era, and the controversial eugenics movement, whose goal was to eliminate undesirable genetic traits in the humans through selective breeding.

Ann Leary is signing and discussing The Foundling at four different places in Connecticut in the next couple of weeks: Wednesday at 6 p.m. at Elm Street Books in New Canaan, Friday at 7 p.m. at the Mark Twain House in Hartford, Saturday at 3 p.m. at The Hickory Stick Bookshop in Washington Depot, and June 28 at 7 p.m. at Athena Books in Old Greenwich.

The Mark Twain House and Hickory Stick appearances will also feature Learys husband, the creator and star of the TV series Rescue Me, Sex & Drugs & Rock & Roll and The Job, who is also a noted comedian and movie actor.

The Courant spoke to Ann Leary, who recently moved to Westchester County in New York after living in Litchfield County for 20 years, about Connecticut, the dark side of the 1920s and how a book discussion with Denis Leary might go.

Do you and your husband have a plan for what youll do at the Mark Twain House?

No! Denis tweeted the cutest thing: For the first time ever I am able to interview Ann Leary. We havent really talked about it. What can he ask me that he doesnt know? But Denis has always been the biggest fan of my books. This book, in particular, he loved the first draft. He has produced multiple series, and hes always seen this book becoming perhaps a limited series for television. Ive decided my husband knows what hes doing, and I want him to produce this adaptation. So hes not only interviewing me because he knows the book, but hes also very much involved in the future of this book. Maybe well talk about that a little bit.

How long have you been together?

I met Denis in 1982. Weve been living together ever since then. I moved to Boston in 82. I was at Bennington College for a few years, then I transferred to Emerson in Boston and I met Denis, who was teaching this comedy writing workshop. I took the class and it was really fun. Denis was 25, I was 20. When the semester was over, we went out and had a beer. We started kind of seeing each other and then one night he stayed over and he never left.

The Foundling is new territory for you. Youve done multi-generational novels but not a historical novel.

I really enjoyed it, actually, because Ive always loved research and history, especially American history, and my favorite era has always been the 1920s. Id always thought of it as this decadent, flapper, devil-may-care Zelda Fitzgerald time. I thought it was when restrictions on women were loosened and morals were loosened, and they were. If you were wealthy in the 1920s and you were a woman, you get drunk even though there was prohibition. You could have sex outside of marriage. If you were not rich, doing those exact same behaviors made you a menace to society and you would likely be institutionalized. It [was] very much a class thing.

Ann Leary's new novel "The Foundling," set in an asylum for women in the 1920s. (Marysue Rucci Books)

You write a lot about subcultures, including a work culture in this one.

The book is a novel, its actually fiction though its loosely based on my grandmother. The Foundling is about two young women who grew up in the same orphanage in Scranton, Pennsylvania and met up years later at a different kind of institution. Mary was a secretary to the very charismatic female doctor who ran the place, and Lilian was what they called one of the inmates, who was confined there against her will. It turns out that it was a eugenics asylum, where the purpose was to confine women of child-bearing age from having children because they were feebleminded. In those days, feebleminded was not a slur, it was a clinical term.

I found there also women in these asylums who were, and again this is the clinical term, degenerate women. They were morally feebleminded. They were bad girls or and I found this very dismaying they might be a 13-year-old who accused her stepfather of molesting her or a woman whose husband was sick of her, and in those days it was hard to get a divorce. You could easily end up in an asylum like this, and the of child-bearing age part of it is actually more offensive than the feebleminded part of the title because if you went there, if you were 12 or 25, didnt matter, you didnt get to leave until you were in menopause. You werent sent there to get schooling, to get help, you were sent there to prevent you from having children.

You use words like dullwitted and befuddled and other offensive words, but they come out of the characters.

That was a real challenge. By the time I came down to writing it, it was just this jargon I was used to. So yeah, a doctor, head of a world-renowned institution for supposed intellectual disabilities, could refer to how many idiots they had versus imbeciles or morons. Also, the racism is so overt. There were no dog whistles. I was shocked by the newspaper headlines, the words used. The horrible racism, anti-semitism, the outright sexism of that time was shocking.

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So then when I was writing, getting early feedback, especially from young editorial assistants saying, This isnt OK. Why isnt Mary fighting it? Why didnt she leave? I realized I needed an authors note at the beginning of the book because people seemed to think from the early drafts that the eugenics movement was a hate group, and it wasnt. It was the law, an ideology of race held by everyone from Theodore Roosevelt to Winston Churchill to George Bernard Shaw, Alexander Graham Bell, Margaret Sanger. Many people embraced eugenics. So I had to write that into the narrative, and it was hard because I wanted people to not hate Mary. I didnt want to make her a woman of today because women in those days werent as they are today. They didnt have the full rights of citizens. They had the right to vote in the 1920s, but very few of the other rights men had.like this.

I did love writing this book. I hope people can put it in context with the time. I really cant stand anachronistic writing. I had to make the characters be people of that time, and then within those confines somehow enact change if they were able.

Christopher Arnott can be reached at carnott@courant.com.

Link:
Ann Leary discusses her new novel, her Connecticut book tour and working with husband, actor and comedian Denis Leary - Hartford Courant