(typewriter clacking) (bell chiming) (light upbeat music) - [Beatrice] Hi there, I'm Beatrice Williams, and this is "Under the Stars".

This story is about Audrey, who returns with her film Star mother to the island where she was born, and there she finds a trunk full of old paintings that connect her to a shipwreck that happened off the coast of this island back in 1846, but also to another shipwreck that happened in the early 1990s on the night that Audrey was conceived.

It's kind of a story about how hard it is sometimes to find your place in the world, particularly when you share your life with someone very much larger than life, a star, if you will.

(light upbeat music) - You've said that you are more comfortable in the past than you are in the present.

Why?

- Well, you know, it's kind of how I grew up.

We would pack up the car every summer for our summer vacation, go to the Shakespeare Festival in southern Oregon.

From literally the time I was five, I'm watching, like, "Taming of the Shrew" and "The Tempest", and then in the winter we would go to the opera.

So I just kind of grew up immersed in plays, operas, books, that had taken place at least 200 years earlier.

And that was my native soil, really.

And here's a good plug for PBS, I didn't know there was another station than PBS until I was probably, like, eight years old.

That was all we ever had on in the house.

So, you know, and just that sort of immersion in the past, I just feel very comfortable there.

And in the case of this book in 1846, there is a real-life shipwreck that happened off the coast of my island, Fisher's Island.

So revisiting that world of Boston and then those intellectual circles in Boston in the mid-19th century, and also, you know, maritime history, I'm a huge fan of Patrick O'Brien and his novels about the British Navy in 1800.

And so all of that kind of came together for this, and is always a pleasure for me to revisit those, you know, areas of the past that I've been before and loved so much.

- I love it.

Thank you so much for being here.

Congratulations on the book- - Thank you for having me.

- It's wonderful.

- Was absolutely a pleasure.

I'm back at PBS, where I got my start as a child.

- And thank you for watching "A Word on Words".

I'm JT Ellison, Keep reading.

(bell chiming) (light upbeat music) - [Beatrice] I love finding real historical figures and using that as a starting point for my own imagination and creating imaginary characters.

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