Time & Perspective Quote by Jane Haddam

A modest maybe does a lot of work here. "I'd like to write a history" sounds like a casual ambition, the kind you toss off over coffee, but the object she dangles is the Reformation: one of the most over-documented, hotly contested, world-remaking ruptures in Western history. The line plays as a writer's wink at scale. It's not just "I want to tackle something big", it's "I want to tackle the kind of big that breaks your tools."

Coming from Jane Haddam, a novelist known for crime fiction, the subtext is also about genre and authority. Histories are expected to be definitive, footnoted, sober. Novelists are allowed to be subjective, to follow motive and temperament. Haddam's phrasing flirts with crossing that boundary, then undercuts itself with the hedging "maybe", signaling both desire and awareness of the absurdity: who thinks they can simply decide to narrate the Reformation?

The specific intent feels less like announcing a project than naming a temptation writers recognize: the urge to impose narrative on chaos, to turn a sprawling collision of theology, power, print technology, and personality into a story that "makes sense". The humor is quiet but pointed. It acknowledges that the Reformation wasn't only a doctrinal debate; it was an early modern information war, a cascade of competing versions. Wanting to write its history is wanting to referee an argument that never ended.