The Everglades and Marjory Stoneman Douglas Inspire a Debut Novel

You can take Lori McMullen out of the Everglades, but you can’t take the Everglades out of Lori McMullen. 

Currently a Chicago resident, McMullen grew up in unincorporated Dade County, Florida. The Everglades enthralled her. Her family did not share her enthusiasm. “My family did not have a lot of money and did not take a lot of vacations,” she says. “But the one trip we took every year was to Marco Island on the west coast of Florida. We would drive across Route 41, which was the old Alligator Alley, curvy and pothole-ridden. Once you got out of Miami, it was just the Everglades until you got to Marco Island, and I loved it. I would look out the window for alligators and birds. The rest of my family couldn’t wait to get to the other side; nobody appreciated anything around them, but I remember thinking, This is a very cool place.” 

Her imagination was further inflamed by Everglades encounters she experienced while she was in school. “In sixth grade,” she recalls, “my class went on a camping trip there. One of the things that sticks with me is a night hike that was thrilling and terrifying at the same time. We were walking over a bridge, and our guide told us to shine our flashlights at the swampy water. You could see these pink, glowing eyes, and he said those were alligators.” 

So when it came time to write her first novel, it was only natural that its backdrop would be the Everglades, with its protagonist perhaps its fiercest champion, Marjory Stoneman Douglas.

Among the Beautiful Beasts, which Kirkus Reviews hails as “a fantastic debut” and “a masterful portrait,” is a historical novel that serves as something of an origin story for Douglas, the future activist and tireless advocate of the Everglades who protected it from developers. The story etches a vivid portrait of Douglas as a passionate reader, lover of nature, and champion of women’s suffrage. Despite a fraught upbringing (a chronically unemployed father, a mother who was confined to a sanitarium following a breakdown) and an unstable marriage to Kenneth Douglas, an older grifter, she emerges as a woman whose unabiding belief in herself made her an indomitable conservation icon. 

Florida has been a predominant setting in McMullen’s writing. “Place is very important to me,” she says. “I’ve always gravitated to Southern literature—I read William Faulkner’s As I Lay Dying once a year. Writing my short stories, I realized the place that I kept returning to was South Florida, and while developing my novel, I began to focus on Marjory Stoneman Douglas.” 

Douglas’ name, McMullen laments, may contemporarily be most associated with the 2018 high school named for her that was the site of a shooting that took the lives of 12 students (McMullen is passionate about reclaiming it from that tragic event). But growing up, “[Douglas] always came up in school,” she says. “When you learned about Florida history, you learned about her. [And as] I was thinking the Everglades would be such a strong place to write about [for my novel], her name popped into my head. But I didn’t know much about her beyond that she was very, very old when she died (she lived to be 108) and worked to protect the Everglades. I started to do some research and realized she had a fascinating early life.”

McMullen did not consider writing Douglas’ story as nonfiction. “There’ve been a decent number of books written about her, and I didn’t want to be confined by reality,” she says with a laugh. “I had just finished reading Paula McLain’s Circling the Sun, a historical novel about Beryl Markham, who flew across the Atlantic in the 1920s, and I thought, What a cool project to find—a lesser-known woman who did something really cool, [whose early life could be] adapted into a fictional story that could be more of a page-turner than a biography.” 

Not that she “made anything up” in crafting Douglas’ story, she says. Rather, historical fiction gave her artistic license. She took her cue from Douglas’ own writings. Douglas’ seminal work, River of Grass, McMullen says, “is very much lush and florid writing, while her autobiography was very matter-of-fact.”

The chapters in Among the Beautiful Beasts alternate between narrative that moves the story forward and builds suspense and shorter, more poetic and lyrical prose, as when Douglas falls in love with a fellow Miami Herald writer named Andy. A passionate beach encounter is broken by personal revelations, chief among them that Douglas is still technically married: 

Time fell from its precipice and hit the ground with a thud. Stunned but not broken, the fallen micro-seconds tried to reorganize themselves, tried to find linearity again in their shaken plane of existence. Moonlight and shadow contoured the night clouds, which bloomed like summer hydrangeas, while time faltered and I waited for Andy to say he didn’t care, either. 

It took McMullen two years to write Among the Beautiful Beasts. She was compelled by Douglas’ mission, which so resonates with her (“I have so much to say about this, I don’t know where to start,” she says with a laugh). She calls Douglas’ activism on behalf of the Everglades “a microcosm of our larger climate crisis and the responsibility people have toward the environment. But part of the point of my book is that [Douglas] was able to see herself in the Everglades [and experience] the feelings of wanting to protect something vulnerable and exploited. So when she arrived in Florida and saw developers grabbing and using the land without any responsibility, she was able to relate on a personal level and take a stand.” 

“If people are able to see that connection to their own environment,” McMullen continued, “they will be more inclined to work toward protecting it.”

McMullen hopes her book will help reconnect people with Douglas’ life and work. “She was an extraordinary woman,” she says. “And beyond that, I hope that being transported to a different time and place may help [readers] forget about the stress of what’s going on right now.”

As for herself, she has been reading thrillers during the pandemic. “I discovered Ruth Ware and Lisa Jewell,” she says. “They were the only thing I wanted to read because they were so escapist. You could forget everything that was happening around you.”

Donald Liebenson is a Chicago-based writer.