Everyone Knows Your Mother Is a Witch

The story begins in 1618, in the German duchy of Wrttemberg. Plague is spreading. The Thirty Years' War has begun, and fear and suspicion are in the air throughout the Holy Roman Empire. In the small town of Leonberg, Katharina Kepler is accused of being a witch.

Katharina is an illiterate widow, known by her neighbors for her herbal remedies and the success of her children, including her eldest, Johannes, who is the Imperial Mathematician and renowned author of the laws of planetary motion. It's enough to make anyone jealous, and Katharina has done herself no favors by being out and about and in everyone's business.

So when the deranged and insipid Ursula Reinbold (or as Katharina calls her, the Werewolf) accuses Katharina of offering her a bitter, witchy drink that has made her ill, Katharina is in trouble. Her scientist son must turn his attention from the music of the spheres to the job of defending his mother. Facing the threat of financial ruin, torture, and even execution, Katharina tells her side of the story to her friend and next-door neighbor Simon, a reclusive widower imperiled by his own secrets.

Drawing on real historical documents but infused with the intensity of imagination, sly humor, and intellectual fire for which Rivka Galchen is known,Everyone Knows Your Mother Is a Witchwill both provoke and entertain. The story of how a community becomes implicated in collective aggression and hysterical fear is a tale for our time. Galchen's bold new novel touchingly illuminates a society and a family undone by superstition, the state, and the mortal convulsions of history. (From HarperCollins)

Everyone Knows Your Mother Is a Witchis on theCanada Reads2022 longlist.

Rivka Galchenis a Canadian American writer. She is also the author of the novelAtmospheric Disturbances. She lives in New York City.

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Why Rivka Galchen wrote Everyone Knows Your Mother is a Witch

"I was reading about the lives of scientists. In so many real-life stories of scientists throughout history, we see that they'rebullied by politics and history and bulldozed by it a lot.

"I wanted to learn about Johannes Kepler, who was such a fantastic scientist. But there was no modern biography of Kepler in English. That's how I came to this amazing scholarly book by Ulinka Rublack calledThe Astronomer and the Witch,which is really about Johannes Kepler's mother,Katharina Kepler and how, at the end of her life, she was put on trial as a witch.

I dropped everything I was working onto learn more and imagine more about this woman, Katharina Kepler, who was the mother of a tremendous mathematical and scientific mind.

"I did not order the book to read about her;I ordered the book as it was the only thing I could find about Kepler. When I read it, I was thunderstruck. I was so interested and electrified andoverwhelmed. All I wanted to do was reread the book and everything else I could learn about that time period. I dropped everything I was working onto learn more and imagine more about this woman, Katharina Kepler, who was the mother of a tremendous mathematical and scientific mind.

Read more in her interview with Writers & Company.

Interviews withRivka Galchen

Writers and Company52:03Rivka Galchens reimagining of a 17th century witch trial is a story that speaks to our time

The Canadian-born American novelist talks about magic and science and her new book about the real-life witch trial of the mother of 17th century astronomer Johannes Kepler.