Martha Brooks dives beneath the surface of her latest novel, 'Mistik Lake’

Mistik Lake is a story about secrets and lies, told mostly through the voices of three generations of women—17-year-old Odella, her troubled mother, Sally, and her great-aunt, Gloria.

It’s really a cross-generational meditation on love. It was five years in the writing. It took me the longest to write of any of my novels. I started, actually, with the character of Gloria. I felt great compassion for her life and for the difficulties she faced as a closeted lesbian. So I started with that, the ultimate secret, where you simply cannot even be who you are and how tragic that is. And I moved from there to the notion that it is tragic to live your whole life and not follow your heart.

You’re a professional jazz singer, as well as a writer. Have you ever had trouble following your heart?

The thing that threw me a curve was my physical health.

How so?

I had a crippling chest deformity. My father was a surgeon in Canada, a pioneer of thoracic surgery for tuberculosis. But he had this kid who had this congenital defect. Essentially, I would get colds that turned to pneumonia pretty much all of the time. By the time I was 18, we found a surgeon who gave me a surgical procedure that he said would give me health—and it did. And, really, from that burst forth my voice as an artist. He thought that I should take singing lessons to strengthen the chest wall, and we discovered I had a three-and-a-half octave range.

What a gift.

It was a wonderful gift. I’m 63 years old, and the thing that I have most understood about this life is the Alice Hoffman quote at the beginning of Mistik Lake.

Should I read it? She writes, “Perhaps what people said was true, that any man who lived long enough would eventually realize that the way in which he was cursed was also the blessing he’d received.”

Life is so full of those things.

Haruki Murakami recently wrote that he learned to write novels by listening to jazz. How has music influenced your writing?

My decision to become a writer partly came from the deep knowledge that if I pursued a career as a singer, I wouldn’t have the health to do it. I decided when I was 50 that I could be a singer. Not in a showy, rushing-off-and-touring-the-world kind of way, but in a way that would give me great joy.

Since I have allowed music to come back into my life, in the last decade and a half, and consciously pursued a parallel career in jazz, I’ve found that the writing has flourished. And, of course, the deep rhythm of jazz, the spirit-connector that happens with jazz, extends itself into my writing.

Since your stories are always character-driven and never plotted, I’ve heard you’re constantly surprised by the outcome. How did Mistik Lake surprise you?

I didn’t expect the huge cast of characters, and I worried about the strangeness of the Icelandic characters and whether that would work.

That’s what really hooked me.

There’s a fellow named Benjamin Markovits who wrote about Louise Erdrich in the New York Times. He said that Ojibwa world of hers was a brilliant creation, and he wrote, “It possesses the instantly persuasive strangeness of something faithful to life.”

What a great line.

That is what I tried to do with Mistik Lake, and I think that’s why, in a way, it works.