In the classic comedy Tootsie, Dustin Hoffman’s character learns to be a better man by impersonating a woman on a television soap opera. Douglas Burton gets it. He recently published his decade-in-the-making historical novel, Far Away Bird. Writing the story of Byzantine Empress Theodora’s journey from exploited to empowered, he says, opened his eyes to centuries-old issues that still resonate today in the #MeToo era. 

“My wife does appreciate the change,” he jokes from his home in Austin, Texas. “When we talk to each other now, I’m more aware of how I am coming across to her. She has been incredibly supportive [of my writing]…and has encouraged me to keep going at every turn.”

Compared with, say, the Roman Empire, the Byzantine Empire has gotten short shrift in popular culture, Burton notes. But he’s not quite accurate when he says there have been no films about his empress heroine—she was the subject of Theodora, a 1921 Italian silent film starring Rita Jolivet. (Don’t expect to find it on Netflix.)

Tackling a novel about a generally unknown era and its trailblazing female leader might seem a curious undertaking for a real estate appraiser. But Burton has been fascinated with the Byzantine Empire since high school. He vividly remembers, “[It was] March of 1993. I was in a study hall. I checked out a library book about the Byzantine Empire…[basically] a horror story about the death throes of the Roman Empire….It had an amazing cast of characters.”

He found Theodora to be the most intriguing of them all (George Frei’s dazzling cover illustration captures her alluring power). “She has these amazing accomplishments as an empress, but then you learn about her checkered past,” Burton says. “Part of my hope with this book is to connect the dots that [the experiences of her past were what] allowed her to…bring about reform when she gained political power.”

1Far Away Bird begins in the year 512 in Constantinople, when Theodora is 14. As a teenager, she wants to be “someone beautiful and important.” To achieve this, she attends dance school, where she learns the combined arts of acting and becoming a courtesan. Following a sexual assault that ends with Theodora’s killing her attacker, life becomes dire until she falls in love with a Roman officer who recruits her to spy on a rival faction.

At this point, her education really begins, not that Theodora feels she needs any. She is recruited by Macedonia, a fellow entertainer:

“You have a higher calling now. For all your beauty and intelligence, you have habits that foster much wildness, Theodora, in yourself and others. When my client asked me whether you were suited to this task, I said yes, but that you’d need training.” 

“Training?” said Theodora, and laughed. “There isn’t a living man who can refuse me if I want him. I should be training you.”

Kirkus Reviews praises Burton for his “elegantly written historical tale in which he effortlessly weaves sweeping emotion and fine detail into compact sentences….He also smoothly supplies accurate historical details.” The Writer’s League of Texas agreed, bestowing the honor of Best Historical Fiction on Far Away Bird. 

With recent events having brought increased awareness of sexual harassment in the workplace, Burton began to feel a “daunting” sense of responsibility to “get this right,” he says. “Some of the things I was writing about suddenly exploded in the national news, like the Harvey Weinstein and Jeffrey Epstein cases. I went from trying to understand my lead character to listening to dozens of women, beginning with my wife and mother, who shared with me some horrible personal stories from their own pasts....If it wasn’t for their help, my book would not have worked.”

This input imbued his writing with empathy and insight, as when Theodora shares her story with Pope Timothy:

Innocence was to be expunged because innocence was blindness; innocence was ignorance, separating her from those numerous others who knew evil and therefore, had a great and mysterious power over her. Resistance to dark masculine forces without this knowledge was to thrash blindly at a creature she didn’t understand. Better to be a woman who knew the nature of a man….

Burton, 44, did not study writing in college, but he has had a lifelong love of the craft since he penned a Halloween story in sixth grade. Two “colossal” influences, he says, have been The Hobbit, which he is now sharing with his 7-year-old son (“It may be too early.” He laughs. “We might have to circle back to it when he’s older”), and the original Star Wars, which would later introduce him to Joseph Campbell and The Hero’s Journey.

Burton set a goal to complete a novel 10 years ago. He forced himself to write every day—typically at 4 a.m. or 5 a.m. before making breakfast for his children. After 500 pages “with no end in sight,” he says, he realized he did not possess a good grasp of story structure and character development. He became an avid reader and began to take notes while watching films to pinpoint what made a story successful and when a story stopped working. He credits Audible.com courses in grammar and punctuation with breaking him of “a lot of bad habits.”

Burton hopes his book helps spark an interest in the Byzantine Empire and Theodora. But even more, he hopes his story will transfix readers just as The Hobbit did him. “I was 10,” he says. “It amazed me how you could bring an entire world into existence by writing it down.”

A sequel to Far Away Bird is in the works. 

Donald Liebenson is a Chicago-based writer.