If you sit on the beach on Biscayne Bay, you can still see a few structures that are literally standing in the middle of the water, known as Stiltsville.
Susanna Daniel, a Miamian now living in Wisconsin, used this as the setting for her first book, called ‘Stiltsville, A Novel.’
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It follows the story of a woman named Frances Ellerby who comes to Miami on a last-minute trip and falls in love with the place, and with a young man named Dennis.
We spoke with Daniel recently about taking more than 10 years to write the book and her experiences as a child growing up in Stiltsville.
WLRN’s Luis Hernandez spoke with Daniel about her book, which is the Sundial Book Club selection for the month of February. You can join the club here.
This conversation has been edited for length and clarity.
WLRN: You grew up going to Stiltsville, right?
DANIEL: Yes, my grandfather built one. He was in construction and he built one. It was basically just like a barge on the sand at first. He and other people had done it and they were all destroyed. And then they went out and actually built the houses on stilts.
There were 14 [houses at Stiltsville] before [Hurricane] Andrew. You can only get to them by boat about five miles from shore. When you stand on the porch of a stilt house, you can either look out to the open ocean at the back or toward the beautiful skyline of Miami. But either way, you're out in the middle of nowhere.
WLRN: Are the characters based on real people?
Daniel: My mother died in 2005, but she read a little bit of the book before. And I remember her saying like, ‘I do not like this Frances.’ My mom was like a super warm person and Frances has a lot of rigidity and coldness to her, which I sympathize with because I think she's just like a woman trying to create boundaries for herself and doesn't have a ton of agency in her own life, which was, I think, true of my mother, although she kind of came at it of a different way.
Right now, just to be a little personal, I'm going through menopause now at age 46. I remember my mother going through menopause because she was extremely vocal and dramatic about it all the time. And so I used those kinds of experiences to inform Frances. I wrote about someone getting married and having children and then going through menopause years before I did any of those things. I think I could only have done that because of the close relationship I had with my family.
WLRN: What drew Frances to Miami? Was it Dennis or was it Miami, the place?
Daniel: I think it's Miami. And I think that was true of my mother. I think she saw a completely different kind of life for herself than anything that any of her friends or siblings were doing. My mother grew up in an eastern Texas small town called Henderson and Frances grew up in Atlanta, before it became the Atlanta we know now. And I think they both see this completely sort of wild direction for their lives that only South Florida could bring. South Florida is totally unique in this world. And I think you still feel that flavor even today, but you certainly felt it in 1969.
WLRN: What are some of your favorite memories growing up in Miami?
Daniel: I loved growing up in Miami. We had two different houses in Coral Gables, a sort of modest ranch house that my parents added on to — they bought it for $27,000 before I was born. And we used to take walks through the neighborhood. Miami is just such a lush place. And I didn't really realize that until I left Florida. My childhood was filled with like those pink sidewalks and the low stone street signs. And then on the weekends, we were on the water, which I don't know if families raising kids today in Miami have the same access to the water that we did.
But my parents would kind of force us, sort of like frog-march us, to the boat every Saturday morning or Friday evening, and we would be at Stiltsville all weekend. And if we didn't have that weekend at Stiltsville, we would just be like on the boat in Biscayne Bay, just going to Sundays for lunch or stopping at Soldier Key and swimming or snorkeling and getting terribly, terribly sunburned. So much that like by Monday morning, I was in pain when I returned to school. I didn't realize this at the time but every weekend was like a mini-vacation, but accessible. My parents were kind of solidly middle class, but we still could have a boat and get out on the water. It's just like a time when living in Miami was just like maybe a little bit easier.
