The Harvey Girls

The Harvey Girls is Fay’s eighth novel, and as is often the case in her books, her characters’ stories are inspired by real-life events. Starting in the 1880s, young women in small towns and cities in America’s East and Midwest responded to newspaper advertisements calling for “Harvey Girls.” The ads were placed by the hospitality magnate Fred Harvey, who had established the first restaurant chain in the US at stops along the new Santa Fe railway, which stretched from Kansas deep into the Wild West. Harvey was searching for wholesome young ladies to staff his eateries. He imagined that an army of smart and pretty waitresses would be warmly received by male railway passengers—miners, ranchers, and outlaws moving west to make their mark—who wouldn’t otherwise see a woman for miles.

The Harvey Girls, meanwhile, were lured by opportunities otherwise denied to women of their era: adventure, travel, a taste of (chaperoned) freedom, and a way to earn their own money. By the time Harvey’s restaurants closed in the late 1950s, approximately one hundred thousand women had worked at them, and yet, aside from a little-remembered 1946 movie musical starring Judy Garland, their story has largely passed from public memory.

“I’m particularly interested in telling unknown women’s history,” said Fay. Her 2017 historical novel The Tumbling Turner Sisters, for example, was a USA Today bestseller about a hardscrabble traveling vaudeville act. She first encountered the Harvey Girls while researching her 2019 book City of Flickering Light, about three friends trying to make it in Hollywood in the early days of silent film. As she read about the Harvey Girls and their experiences, Fay became fascinated by their very different reasons for leaving home to live in dormitories and work in train depot restaurants dotted across the West. “Some girls were running away from something, whether a bad marriage, abuse, poverty, or some other situation,” she said. “Others were so desperate to become Harvey Girls that they broke the rules. There were girls as young as fourteen who said they were eighteen because their families needed money.”

Fay said she is drawn to exploring characters who are “down on their luck, and how they dig themselves out of the hole that they’re in.” In her books, that redemption typically comes with help from others. “I don’t believe in the self-made person,” she said. “I think we all need help. My characters help themselves by helping others.”

That concept of service has been important to Fay, who grew up in Lexington, Massachusetts, since her BC days, when she double majored in human development and theology. “I was interested in how people think about themselves, God, and society,” she said. She later joined the Jesuit Volunteer Corps, worked at a hospital for poor children in Guatemala, taught nonverbal autistic children in Boston and, after earning a degree in public policy from the Harvard Kennedy School, worked for both a child abuse prevention agency and a parenting education program.

She didn’t see herself becoming an author until the day she received a “terrible” book at a book swap and decided she should give writing a go. “I couldn’t put it down. It was so bad it was a page turner,” Fay said. “It got me thinking, What would I do with this premise?” In 2009, her debut novel was published: Shelter Me, about a grieving widow struggling to raise her children and mediate her hot temper around the well-intentioned people in her life. Shelter Me was the first in a series of novels by Fay to be shortlisted for awards or named featured book picks by publications such as Library Journal and Good Housekeeping.

The Harvey Girls, she said, is about women pursuing second chances in tough times and finding support in one another, however unexpectedly. “We’ve all met someone and thought, They’re not my cup of tea, and then they become a close friend,” said Fay, reflecting on the bond that develops between Charlotte and Billie. “Sisterhood is a big theme in this book.” ◽