Read This Book: Ghostbread

Ghostbread by Sonja Livingston is an absolutely astonishing debut. Livingston was one of seven kids, moving from one crumbling environment to another with their most unusual mother, and her memoir is harrowing and hilarious.

Don't believe me? Go read.

You lived in everything from farming towns, an Indian reservation and followed your mother from one broken down place to another, always in search of something better. How did you ever keep that hope alive of finding it? What made things easier?

Actually looking forward to the next best thing does make things easier when you’re in a tough spot. Projecting yourself forward seems like a natural and healthy way to deal with situations over which we have little control. The problem is, of course, that I still find myself looking forward too much, versus enjoying the beauty of the moment. I have to remind myself that this is it! That said, I truly believe that there is beauty to be found in even the most ramshackle places. Learning to mine reality for its treasures was good training ground for writing!

It’s clear that the writer is born in you early, as you struggle to find reasons for what is happening to you, and as you are forced to make up stories to creditors who call. When did you begin to write and to realize that your past was something worthy of writing about?
I always enjoyed writing and language. As a high school kid, I wrote poems full of high drama and churned out story after story about runaway children and lost puppies. I didn’t start to seriously write until I had a graduate degree and a solid job in hand. I wrote about my past at first as a way to sort it all out, but when I began to share my personal writing, people responded and asked for more. But because of my past, and growing up with a mother whose energy went into painting murals on our walls at midnight versus say, meal planning; my idea of what art is and the value of things like writing was skewed in favor of gaining stability. In fact, that tension between stability and being open and risking still tugs at me.

I’m also curious why you ended the memoir at graduation, rather than when you began writing? What was writing this novel like?

Good question! What a great idea—to end the book when I began to write, because really that’s when I began to shed the old life to make room for the new. I should have known you when I was writing it! I ended it at graduation, because early readers didn’t seem satisfied with the ending I had. The book didn’t seem “finished” and indeed, it still isn’t in many ways. I mean, how do you pick a moment of transformation? I tried. But it felt forced. And the truth is that many people who grow up like I did aren’t “transformed” in the way of neat endings. In that way, ending the book with the future hanging in the balance seemed more real to the situation. But for a personal ending, writing is perfect; a natural ending that could have worked beautifully.

Can you talk about your love for Nancy Drew (and how do you feel about Nancy now?) and Wonder Woman and how those icons helped you survive?

Could my life have been more different than Nancy’s? Here was this girl with her own car, an allowance, and a square-jawed Protestant father. I admired her clothes, it’s true. And her genteel background. But there was something else. Nancy was always zipping around of her own accord, following clues, and confronting sordid strangers. She had freedom. And in her own quiet way, real spunk. Ironically, Nancy Drew is the sort of girl I might have managed to look like from the outside, but with an outhouse, a string of half-siblings, and my firing as an altar girl, Nancy and I really had little in common. And Wonder Woman! Those cool bullet-repelling bracelets and the way she disposed of Nazis by the dozen, need I say more? She was strong and beautiful.Both of these characters, Nancy and Wonder Woman, provided examples that were otherwise lacking. They were complete fiction and imperfect and while the feminist in me might cringe at the impracticality of their pointy-toed footwear, the truth was that they showed me another way of being; one that was less familiar, but more desirable.

Fashion, as well as humor (the book is very funny and live) figures a lot in the memoir. You admire Nancy Drew for her clothes, you follow a girl who tells you to wear red, etc. It’s striking that in the midst of all the poverty, you find and follow beauty and it offers you a kind of strength and hope. Can you talk about that?

I suppose fashion was beauty to me. I love nature and artwork and poetry as an adult, but as a girl, fashion took the place of those things. I’m not sure how or why I cared about clothes or hair.No one in my family seemed to care. But I did, and it was another bridge to people and ideas that took me outside of my surroundings. And actually, those who know me will laugh because I rarely wear makeup and dressing up to me these days simply means choosing darker jeans, but back then, how things looked was important. French-braiding my hair or whipping together a 1980s-Madonna-tube-skirt were things I could do to make my world nicer. A small thing I could control. I remember debating at one point whether I should become a nun and try to save the world, or a fashion designer who could jazz up nuns’ attire, thereby improving the looks of those who save the world!

Do you think that is was your imagination that allowed you to look at poverty in a different way and manage to eventually transcend it? And do you think poverty is tougher for girls?
Imagination helped. And my sister Stephanie. We imagined together. And what is stronger than sharing your dreams? I cannot give enough credit to my resourceful sister. I still struggle with understanding how to transcend poverty. It seems so obvious, but we know poverty is about much more than a lack of money. Something else is missing. It has lots to do with trading in shame and invisibility for the right to feel worthy. Worthy of existing. Worthy of writing. And so on.This is a struggle for many people, of course, not just those who come from poverty. And I do believe it’s tougher for girls to break out. Not just emotionally, but physically. All too often, girls inherit the physical burden of children and caretaking which makes it easier for them to get trapped in cycles of despair and poverty. That said, boys from disadvantaged backgrounds face huge challenges. Changing a life in any meaningful way is really hard work. For anyone.

What’s next for you?
I’m working on a novel about a Niagara Falls Daredevil. Western New York has a rich history of stunting and feminism. It’s an interesting combination! And as I mentioned earlier, the idea of living dangerously (or at least audibly) versus playing it safe intrigues me. The novel is allowing me to explore what it means to put yourself out there. Literally!

And finally, what question should I be mortified that I didn’t ask?

Your questions are great. They’re so insightful, I feel I should send a check for therapy.

Enter to win candy!

A retro, tongue-in-cheek contest to win candy and show off your pipes.

So, wait, are you telling me women can't write?

So PW's Best Books of 2009 included no women. Fancy that.

At She Writes, there's a nifty piece about why this is more of the same old tired mindset. You know the drill: Women don't write BIG books, only men do. Women write domestic dramas (Hello? Jonathan Franzen and The Corrections ring a bell? He was touted for what women have been doing for centuries.) Must we women take on men's names like George Elliot to be appreciated? ( Carl Leavitt doesn't suit me.)

Sigh and alas.

Quickly changing the subject, I'm deep into new novel rituals with The Missing Ones. Maybe it's because it takes me three or 4 years to write a novel, but I almost always start a new project with a shiny new computer! This time, it's my beloved Mac (after three Dells all broke down at the same time in my household, and we were all told to reinstall Windows, and no, they didn't fix the problem, we trooped to the Apple store.) But there are other rituals I love.

1. Photographs. I like to have my characters watching me so I go into photo files and find pictures of normal (not models) looking people and post them up. This takes a long time and is usually on a "I'll know it when I see it" basis.

2. Outlines, charts, graphs, synopsis--that I redo, throw out, redo, tear up, ignore and cling to passionately at the same time.

3. New pens. I want them. I need them. I have to have them.

What makes this even more important is that I need the focus and passion of something new to work on because my novel, Pictures of You, is coming out from Algonquin in 2010, which means PR will start about March, six months before the novel even come out. I need another world to get lost in!

what's in a name, part nine

For me, naming characters is really difficult. The name has to fit. It has to sound right. It has to feel as though it belongs to the character, and it would be great if it seems to have a life of its own. I try out names when I'm writing, and it' s not unusual for me to change a name after writing 200 pages. Usually, the names I choose are not names I particularly like (though sometimes they are) and I have a bunch of processes to help in my search. I go through baby name lists, I look through my old high school yearbook(!) and often to help me find the name, I need a photograph of the character.

So, all yesterday and all today, I've been going through google images, which is harder than it seems. Most of the faces I'm seeing look too pretty, or too posed. There isn't the roil of inner lives in the faces. I even went on match.com (I told my husband beforehand that it was just for research) to scan faces, but those, too, seemed too posed, too anxious, or simply not right. I wish I knew a better way to search for the really interesting photos where people are in action, revealing themselves.

But I'm not frustrated. I know I'll recognize my characters the moment I see their faces, and all I have to do is find them.

Amy Koppelman and Is It Contagious

Amy Koppelman happens to be one of my favorite authors. Her novels are dark, gritty and just gorgeously written (I've blogged about her before on here.) and impossible to forget. I just heard that she has an important new line of books and I wanted to post this for her:

Hi Everyone.

As most of you know, I started a company called Is It Contagious? Books. We publish children's books designed to explain and answer questions about the most common diseases. Our first titles are "Is Cancer Contagious?" and "Is Epilepsy Contagious?" Our next title, "Is Diabetes Contagious?," will be available in December. While these topics may sound depressing, many families will face them at some point.

The book idea started several years ago, when a close family member got cancer, Sammy and Anna asked Brian and me so many questions, most of which we couldn't answer. "What is cancer?" " Why does it happen?" "How is it diagnosed?" "How is it treated?" "Is it Contagious?"... Later that night, I began looking for cancer books for children. There were several on the market, but they are either very childish ( a story about a dinosaur's mother) and/or scary (pictures of tumors and children with bald heads). Our books are different.

Please visit us at: isitcontagiousbooks.com. There you will see sample pages of the books. I hope you'll agree that the books are well-written, and Vern Kousky's illustrations are both engaging and informative.

I'm writing today to ask for your help. Please understand, I'm not asking you to purchase a book. I'm asking for ideas and introductions. If you have any marketing thoughts, magazine, television or radio connections, friends who work at pharmaceutical companies or own and operate retail stores, any ideas you can think of to help get the word out, please let me know.

This is more than just a business to me. My mother-in-law died a little over a year ago. Walking through the hospital hallways and seeing both children and adults stricken by cancer and various other diseases made me realize that I had to do more with my life than just write novels about unhappy women. My hope is that these books will help dispel fear and enable better dialogue between family members, doctors, and friends. In truth, there is no explaining the inexplicable. My mother-in-law was a vibrant, loving, devoted mother and grandmother. Is Cancer Contagious? couldn't explain her death, but it certainly would have made it easier to answer some of the complicated questions my children asked.

Please know that while Is It Contagious? is set up as a business, a substantial percentage of each sale goes to a like-minded charity.

So if you have any ideas please send them my way. Thanks for taking the time to read this and for always being so supportive of me.

Warmly,

Amy Koppelman
646-773-3300
amykoppelman@gmail.com

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Titlerama

I'm very bad with titles. They almost always are the last thing for me to think about and I usually end up in a stew about it, but thank God for music. My last novel, Girls in Trouble, actually came from a song by the Waitresses (A Girl in Trouble..is a temporary thing)--a group I loved for their snarky know-it-all renditions, plus I have a soft spot for waitresses in general. And the title fit perfectly for a book about open adoption and women making all the wrong sorts of choices. The novel before, Coming Back to Me, about a single father and his mysteriously ill wife, was another song--The Jefferson Airplane--and it was given to me by my husband who was finishing his prize-winning book, Got a Revolution about the band and the era. And it fit.

This new one, coming out from Algonquin in August of 2010, isn't quite named yet. About a mysterious car crash and the lives of the three people involved, about dark secrets, photography and loss, the book was originally called Traveling Angels. Traveling Angels is a screenwriting term coined by John Truby (and yup, he said I could use it) about someone who comes into town and seems good, and messes everyone up and then leaves. I thought it was perfect!

No one else did.

Then I called it Breathe. (The novel grew out of a prize-winning story of the same name.) I loved it, my editor loved it. It fit in with one of the characters who has asthma so terrible, he's in and out of hospitals.

But it wasn't quite right.

Right now, my novel is being called after a Clash song (I love the Clash! I love the song!) Pictures of You. I really, really like it, but it may not be the final title.

Do titles matter to you? Have you ever not picked up a book because of the title? Or been drawn to a book because of what it was called? Personally, I tend not to hold titles against a book-- I know how hard it is to find the right one.

Guest Blog from author Therese Walsh

Therese Walsh is the author of The Last Will of Moira Leahy, which is already racking up the raves. Says Booklist, “Walsh’s debut is a magical, involving journey, one that mixes a compelling mystery from the past with a suspenseful search in the present.” Therese offered to do a guest blog, and her "I had to write it" is, I think, in the soul of every writer I know.

The Story Behind the Story of The Last Will of Moira Leahy

I had to write it.

If I were going to write a memoir of my time with my debut novel, The Last Will of Moira Leahy, that is how it would begin. All first lines should do a job, and if that one is working properly you are now wondering, “Why did you have to write it?”

Let me tell you.

I began writing this story in 2002 as almost a writing exercise. I’d been writing children’s picture book manuscripts, but I’d become increasingly enamored of longer words and meatier stories. I decided to give myself a bigger canvas: adult fiction. I thought, at first, that I would write a romance, a traditional love story, but as I wrote my story veered off into unromantic territory.

Originally, the main character, Maeve Leahy, did not have a twin. But one day, Moira was just there, explaining her sister’s behaviors and trauma. And there was a Javanese keris involved in the story, demanding its fair share of attention.

You can see the problem, I’m sure: When I submitted the book, it was rejected by agents—not for lack of voice or unique content, but because it was too much of a square peg. It was structured like a romance, but the breadth of the novel didn’t fit the genre. One agent suggested I should be writing women’s fiction. Deep down, I realized that agent was right. What was I going to do? Begin a new book? Quit entirely?

The timeline is a little fuzzy, but 2004 was a big year for mulling over my options. I did a lot of thinking, a lot of reading in the genre of women’s fiction, and a lot of craft work. All the while, my rejected project writhed in the “unfinished business” category of my mind. There was no use fighting it.

I had to write it.

I salvaged one critical scene from the old draft and started over again in 2005. Then I scrapped everything again in 2006 and started over for a third time. Maybe I would’ve quit but my characters refused to leave me alone. You know that feeling you get in the pit of your stomach, that disquiet you feel when you know something needs to be done and it’s important and you’re messing up? That’s how I felt whenever I wasn’t working on this project. When I was at least actively thinking about it, the anxiety eased. And so, little by little, I worked through the last draft.

In 2008, I finished polishing the women’s fiction version of The Last Will of Moira Leahy and found an agent, Elisabeth Weed. Shortly thereafter, she sold the book to Shaye Areheart, an imprint of Random House, in a two-book deal.

How do I feel about my second book, my work in progress?

I have to write it.

Truth in Fiction

A novelists, we struggle to put the truth on the page. We hope to tunnel so deeply into our characters' lives that what is on the page feels absolutely and complete real-so real that we fully expect the characters to walk past us. But we novelists also deal with some people thinking that what we have written is really about us personally, about our lives, that even though it is fiction, it is also absolutely true. I can't tell you how many times people have asked me what is going on my life because of what I have written. (Sometimes it's nothing!) Or people imagine that the husband in the story is my husband, the main character is me, or that I am opening a window into my personal life, when actually I am inhabiting another world, I am living another life through my characters. While certainly I write about the issues that obsess me, I'm not writing diaries.

Recently, the writer Leora Skolkin-Smith told me that she had gotten a letter back from a great publishing house about the submission of her new novel Hystera, which is this ravishingly good book about mental illness in the 70s. The editor felt the book was halfway between memoir and fiction, something that astonished both of us. What was she saying? That the book sounded so real that it felt like memoir? That she wanted it to really be a true story instead of a made-up one (and why would she want that? Do memoirs sell better than novels?) But don't we want our fiction to be so real that we feel we are a part of that world? Isn't that a good thing?

Read This Book: Shelf Discovery: The Teen Classics We Never Stopped Reading

Remember the books you were so passionate about when you were a teenager, the ones that spoke to you? Think they'd still be talking the talk and walking the walk now if you read them? Me, too, and that's how come I loved

Shelf Discovery: The Teen Classics We Never Stopped Reading by Lizzie Skurnick (who also has a great blog).

Why do you think teen novels resonate so deeply with the adults we’ve become? Do you think that just as music catapults us back to a specific time and place in our lives (we might remember our first kiss happened with Blue Oyster Cult raging in the background), so can certain books?

I think that once you reach an age where childhood is firmly in your past, you suddenly start to be able to see what has made you the person you are. It's not surprising to me that most of the women who read Fine Lines and write me about Shelf Discovery are between 25 and 45. It's like we've all suddenly woken up to a part of ourselves we'd completely forgotten, and it's so great to remember how deeply we felt when we were that person.

What I loved so much about the book was how you reflect on how rereading gives new meaning—from a different perspective. Was there any book you loved that you now can’t stand?

You know, it was really terrifying to write this column and this book, because I was always afraid of losing a favorite book in the process, realizing it was kitschy and horrible. But I was relieved at the end to find the only book I lost was one I'd only liked for its lurid factor anyway: 'Go Ask Alice'. To a grownup, it's a clumsy ridiculous read, and so patently made up it's almost funny. There was a detail I loved: that the main characters gives her hair that 70s wave by rolling it around old frozen orange juice cans. But I'm keeping it. It seems credible enough.

What do you think of the state of YA novels now? Any modern day author who springs to mind that you think will affect future generations the way Judy Blume does?

It's so difficult to tell what any generation will choose when you're not part of it. So many of the books I write about have issues related to the rise of feminism and cultural repression in general -- mothers going back to work; sadistic teachers; unchecked bullying; bullying dads; divorce; alcoholism. These are issues we discuss so widely and publicly today that they can't have quite the same explosive power they did for us. Also, a lot of these books were about not being noticed or being noticed only in a negative way by your peers or parents. I don't think schools, parents and peer groups are allowed to be quite so Darwinian today. (Not out in the open, at least.) I find the move of the market to fantasy interesting -- I wonder why the YA books of today have shifted into an allegorical space. Judy Blume, Paula Danziger and Paul Zindel wrote works that took place only entirely in the classroom, making a universe of what happened to five people over a year. Even Meg from 'A Wrinkle in Time' gets in fights at school.

I noticed that most of the titles are geared to girls, though you do have boy titles in your book. Why do you think this is? Were these books just more geared to females?

I think in this period of women, a lot of women writing stories of their own youth for the first time, and obviously they were published with girls on the cover. But I think it's less about marketing -- who marketed anything then? -- than about the types of stories children enjoy at different ages. After all, so many of the writers -- Richard Peck, Robert Cormier, Paul Zindel -- were men, and so many of the books star men. ('Then Again, Maybe I Won't' is still one of my favorites.) It's less that the books were geared toward girls than that, at that age, girls are more interested than boys in these sort of psychological, dramatic narratives.

I have to ask and no one has ever been able to help me on this one. When I was ten, my mother allowed me to read whatever I wanted, no questions asked. She handed me three library books, all set in Paris. All I remember is the characters, Pierre, Elizabeth and Sally. I was shocked when Pierre lustily ripped open the jacket of his girlfriend to reveal her “heaving breasts”, sending the buttons scattering, but even more stunned when Sally grew up to go to New York City and have an abortion. I devoured the books and would love to find them again. Do you have any idea what they might be?

Hmmm...I have no idea! Definitely tell me when you figure it out, though, so I can read them too. They sound excellent.

Is there a sequel in the works, I hope?

I'm definitely going to keep writing Fine Lines! The rest is up to the publishing gods.

You talk about the pleasure of the covers of these books, and I have to agree. Although many now look old fashioned, there is still something in them that makes you feel you are eavesdropping on a life and you want to come closer. What else is it about these covers that made them so important to all of us back then—and maybe now, too?

I think it's that the girls are actually facing us, and they're normal girls, surrounded by all of the objects in their lives. We can see them as clearly as we would walking into a friend's room. Now, books rarely show a girl in any context at all. Usually, it's the chop-shop style: a foot, half a face, even sometimes just a fluttering dress in the wind. Some of Judy Blume's books have been put out without any images on the covers at all. Even my book suffers from this syndrome: I don't like that the girls are lying down, and that we can't see their faces. All of the girls on these old covers are face-front and in the center of the action, and that also reflects the spirit of these books.

What question should I be mortified that I did not ask you?

I would never want you to be mortified! But you didn't ask me my favorite book. Luckily for you, I mention it in every other print and radio interview.

Finding the story in everything

I've been thinking a lot about how writers see the world. Recently on Facebook, a writer I really, really admire (the extraordinary Rhian Ellis, who wrote After Life, which I've written about here before) was telling me how she had been arrested for protesting some white supremacists in her neighborhood. I instantly peppered her with questions. What did it feel like to be in a cop car? Did she have handcuffs and did they hurt her wrists? What did the cops say? I kept seeing the pictures in my mind, imagining the story, carrying it further than what she had told me.

"Caroline, you're such a writer!" she said, and then she said that the thing she remembered about the experience was that she was trying to make story out of it. She was seeing characters and plots, beginnings and ends and a story arc. I know this feeling all too well. I asked her, "Do you ever stop in a moment of intense emotion or drama and think: I can use this. Or: I need to remember this?" And she said Yes. Yes. Yes. Yes.

It got me thinking. Writers spend their time shaping stories, living in worlds they make up that are as alive to us as any. We dramatize events. We over-worry when we board a plane and imagine the danger in the cockpit, the way we might escape, the relief in our bodies when we hit ground. We see the story in events that others might just see as a detour in their day, something for them that might not have a beginning, middle, crisis and end, and we create narratives where there really are none. (Give me an apple, and I'll give you a story. I promise it.)

But I'm of two minds. Sometimes I think we writers need to be more in the moment. Sometimes, a child coming over to us in a park is simply a child coming over to us, and not a child who was taken from his mother in a custody battle, or a child who had vanished who has suddenly reappeared. Sometimes it's important to just see and appreciate what is right there in front of us.

But then again....this urge, this delicious compulsion to make a story of everything, is as natural and essential as breathing.

Read this Book; When She Flew

When She Flew by Jennie Shortridge is the kind of dark, involving novel I happen to love. Based on true events concerning a Vietnam vet raising his young daughter in the woods (and succeeding at it), When She Flew delves into questions about family, society and love itself. Thanks, Jennie for answering my questions.

I know that this book is inspired by true events, which you have fictionalized. What were those events? Did you speak with any of the people involved? Do they know about the novel and have they read it? And where are they now?

In 2004, Portland Police found a Vietnam vet raising his twelve-year-old daughter in the woods. The girl was healthy, articulate, home-schooled and reading far above her grade level. A doctor’s exam ruled out abuse. The police sergeant in charge was a single dad at the time, and he felt strongly that the two should be allowed to stay together rather than be put through normal channels that would separate them until the father was determined a fit parent. The sergeant broke protocol and took them to a shelter for the night, then found them a home on a friend’s farm.

I wanted to write a story about these events, but I didn’t want to write about the actual people involved, for their privacy. Plus, like any fiction writer worth her salt, I wanted to make it a story of my own imagining. I contacted the police sergeant, and after emailing for a while, convinced him to have lunch with me. I took the train from Seattle to Portland for this lunch date, and by the end of it, he was excited by the project as I was. He’d never given interviews to anyone during the case, and had turned down media requests from Good Morning America, the Today Show, and others.

I spent the next year emailing him questions about everything from how he felt during certain events to what cops wear on their duty belts, how long their shifts are, what equipment is in a police cruiser. We hiked into the woods one hot August day and found the encampment the real people had been living in. His input was invaluable to my writing about the story in a real way, even while fictionalizing so much of it.

The real father and daughter left the farm after only two weeks, worried that the media was trying to track them down. I wouldn’t have wanted to talk with them even if I’d had the chance to, though. I wanted to reinvent characters that were nothing like them, because I sensed how exploited they already felt.

The novel seems to me to be a lot about how we define home and family, and how the norm is not the only way to do it. Can you talk a little bit about that?

This seems to be a topic I examine in almost every book: what constitutes a family? What makes a home? This father, who deals with his own post-war issues, is able to create a home off the grid for his daughter and do a pretty good job of ensuring she’s well cared for. He takes her to church every Sunday, to the park once a week so she can play with other children, and educates her beyond her grade level. The fictional police officer in the story, Jessica Villareal, wonders if she’s done half as good a job with her own daughter, who is now estranged from her. I don’t believe that there’s only one “right” way to do anything, especially when it comes to home and family.

There’s juxtaposition in the book between what society might think is best for these people and what they feel is best for themselves. Ray, the disabled Iraqi veteran refuses to go to the places allocated for the homeless, and Lindy lives in the woods with him rather than going to a foster home—and yet, they both have rich lives. How good a job do you really feel society does when it comes to ministering to people?

I think it’s one of the most difficult challenges our society faces: how do we best care for those who are in need? And what if those in need don’t want the help? I would not presume to say that those who work in social services aren’t doing the best they can, because there are so many factors at work: political, financial, legal. There are heros and scoundrels in every profession. The aspect of the true story that really intrigued me was how the police sergeant decided to try to help these people in a decent, caring way rather than by the book, even though he might have to face the ramifications of that decision.

When She Flew says a lot about daring, and gaining release from damaged pasts. Jess, the police officer who feels she has lost everything important to her, doesn’t want to disturb or uproot Lindy and Ray. Lindy and Ray dare to live outside in an Oregon forest. Do you think we ever can escape our pasts? And should we?

I think we escape, or rather transcend, our pasts when we dare to do something courageous, as Jess does in the story by breaking the rules. She sacrifices everything she previously held sacred, but it’s the pain of losing her daughter that drives her, and ultimately, reconnects her to that daughter.

Your tagline on Redroom is “striving to reveal truth and beauty, while telling a good story.” So, how does one do that?

Well, the key word is striving! It’s my life mission, and one that is a work in progress. Fiction seems the best way to reveal the emotional truth, in my estimation, if not the actual truth, and to point at the small and fleeting moments of grace we miss in real life, but recognize when reading about them. We all have this sense of what is meaningful, but sometimes it helps to be reminded of it in a surprising way, while reading a book, watching a movie, talking with a friend. I feel that’s my job as a writer, to point those things out while unraveling a story the reader feels emotionally invested in.

What does your daily working life look like?

With the publication of four books now, it’s different every day. I used to wake up and take my second cup of coffee into my home office and write all morning, but these days it’s more complicated. I eke out writing time when not working on promotional efforts or organizational housekeeping, when not trying to keep up with social networking and correspondence and requests and book groups and all of the things that make my life rich and full, but short on writing time. I write on trains and planes, in hotel rooms and lobbies and coffee shops. I need to do better at all of this, but I think I’m like everyone else right now, just trying to keep up with so many new things and technologies, and still tap that creative vein on a regular basis.

What question didn’t I ask that I should have?

What’s next? I’m now working on a novel about a rare condition called “dissociative fugue,” and what happens between an engaged couple when one of them experiences it. I believe it’s my first true love story.

Read this book: In a Perfect World

Laura Kasischke is one of my favorite authors. She has this eerie ability to meld the everyday with the unsettling, to unpeel her characters' lives with astonishing grace and beauty, and to craft novels that continue to resonate months after you've turned the last page. My copy of The Life Before Her Eyes is dog-eared, and I suspect the same fate for her newest, In a Perfect World, about family, step-parenting, betrayal and love, all set against the apocalyptic world of global flu. Thank you so much, Laura for answering all these questions.

The flu seems to me to be the perfect end of the world scenario—not the bomb, not terrorism, but something organic. What made you choose it?

I was reading the book THE GREAT MORTALITY by John Kelly, a history of the Black Death. Actually, it was two summers ago, and I was reading it mostly in a chair at the edge of the public pool while keeping an eye on various kids in my care, and the writer’s question occurred to me: What if? What if a plague happened here—starting slowly, caused by things we couldn’t understand, trickling across the landscape in terrifying bits instead of the cataclysm we often dread, like the bomb you mention. Who would we become? So, it was the combination, I guess, of reading that book and being a not-very-relaxed person in this sunny, sweet place and time, that got me thinking.

You have this wonderful, thrilling ability to walk a thin line between the matter of fact reality and the impossible-to-imagine, and both seem equally real. You did this in the very fine The Life Before Her Eyes, and it’s here too, in the day-to-day juxtaposition of a stepmother grappling with an absent husband and step kids who seem to hate her. I’m wondering where that sensibility comes from and how much of it impacts your own life.

Well, I’m definitely a worst-case-scenario kind of person. Luckily I have the outlet of writing so I’m able to avoid a complete neurotic meltdown most days—but I do think I tend to find myself noticing the potential, often unpleasant, for surprises beneath those ordinary stones.

The other thing I found fascinating is there is no one real way to categorize this book. It’s got a hint of sci-fi in that it’s futuristic as it deals with the flu, it’s most definitely a rich human drama, it’s a story about step-parenting, but it’s also a kind of love story, because as things get grimmer and more menacing, this family unit gets warmer, richer, and they become something truly unique. How did you personally see this novel?

I wanted it to be, I suppose, a kind of fairy tale. I might say ‘fairy tale gone wrong,’ but I do feel that, in the end, the fairy tale is redemptive. At the outset, the protagonist is a kind of woman like one I’ve been myself off and on at various points in my life. She wants romance. She sees romance as a particular kind of thing, and perhaps it’s got less to do with reality than things she’s read about and movies she’s seen. In the end, she does not have the fairy tale romance she wanted, but by rising to the challenges she’s given, she has something richer and more important, in my opinion. I knew that a step-family would ‘instant conflict,’ and that an epidemic sweeping the land would be upping the ante on that considerably, so I tried to keep the focus on the domestic details, and the crises in the larger world acted as a kind of landscape, a stage set. This is also how I imagine such disasters occur in real lives: first a distant rumor, and then for long periods a peaceful denial, and then a little closer trouble, followed by a reprieve and a forgetting, etc., and in the meantime you’ve got to scramble some eggs for your kids and get the laundry folded.

You’re also an acclaimed poet, which explains the gorgeous writing, (impossibly beautiful images, amidst startling violent ones) but you also seem to have no (at least no visible ones) struggles with plot. How does being a poet impact your writing, or are the two apples and oranges separate?

Thank you so much for saying that. The kind of writing I really love is sensual stuff—the sky and the weather and smell of your kid’s hair—so I work extra hard when writing a novel to give the reader something to fear or anticipate or a question to find an answer to, so he or she will be more likely (hopefully) to indulge my lingering on images so long.

The Life Before Her Eyes became a film—did you feel the different media enhanced your novel, too away from it, or made it become something quite different? Did you have an input into the film?

I was happy with the film, not the least reason being that it was so incredibly flattering to have someone make a film of my novel! But I also felt that the director, Vadim Perelman, really liked the sorts of things about the novel that I myself was proudest of—the atmosphere, hopefully, and the imagery, and a kind of background of beauty and dread that I see as so akin to feminine, teenage life. I loved his first movie, The House of Sand and Fog, and felt that he brought a lot of passion to The Life Before Her Eyes, too. It was changed, of course, and, no, I did not have input, but I was very pleased with the film.

I don’t want to give away the stunning ending, but I will say that it ends on a note of both high hope and major apocalypse—an unanswered question which left me unnerved and exhilarated at the same time. It creates what John Truby calls “the never-ending story” which makes the reader continue to tell the story to him or herself long after the last page because it’s so open-ended. Did you know how the book was going to end while you were writing?

I did have the end in mind all along—that they would be a family, waiting, and that something was coming, they could hear and feel it, and they did not know what that was.

The unsettling undercurrents of the book are leavened with a good deal of humor—i.e. a very famous pop star being a victim of the flu! But there are also elements of the fairytale in here, and interestingly enough, it’s more Grimm’s fairy tales than the more happy-go-lucky kinds. I’m wondering if that was a deliberate choice.

Early, I knew that the scene I’d open with would be a stepmother and her teenage stepdaughters together on the day Britney Spears was announced to have died. The fairy tale choices were deliberate, too, and seemed obvious to me: Mostly they were the mother/child stories, which always involve so much conflict and heartache, especially Hans Christian Andersen’s. His “The Story of a Mother” was on my mind the whole time I was working on the novel—and if you haven’t read that one before, get out some Kleenex before you do!

What are you working on next? I’m writing poems, and also trying to finish a new novel. It just gets longer and longer, though!

What question didn’t I ask that I should have? Well, thank you for asking! How about, “Do you have anything against Britney Spears?” Absolutely not! I hope she lives to a ripe old age!

The Character Study Project

I've long been addicted to Overbooked, a website for ravenous readers. (That describes me!)

I read their advance fiction lists like a menu at a four-star restaurant and jot down titles so I won't forget them. Now the wonderful Ann Chambers Theis is doing a Character Study Project. Authors are welcome to submit a character study for BookReMarks@overbooked, a part of Overbooked which is just starting up and will also be offering take five booklists (books related by theme or subject), book notes//remarks, and more. A character study might include a description of the character and details about what interests this character has related to reading, music, film and TV. And you can feel free to be creative. The form is here. You can read some character study examples here.

What is so truly wonderful about this project is that you realize just how well you know your characters when you do this study, right down to what music they listen to while making breakfast (and you know just what they are eating, too, whether it is eggs and bacon or tofu and miso soup) to their secret penchant for trashy magazines. To my delight, I also got to get back into the life of a character I missed, and as soon as I thought about her, she began talking nonstop to me about books, music, movies and all sorts of things. She came alive again in a new way.

Great project. Great writing exercise, too. And many thanks to the great, great Overbooked book site and to Ann!

Read this Book: The Belly Dancer

One of the things I most love about teaching writing at UCLA is how the writing journey doesn't end when class does. Writers stay in touch and I get to celebrate with them when they succeed. DeAnna Cameron was in one of my classes (one of my fave people, too), and I was absolutely thrilled when she sold her novel, The Belly Dancer. So, of course, I asked her if I could pepper her with questions and she graciously agreed. Thank you, DeAnna!

So how did you get entrenched in the world of belly dance?

It started back in college, when I signed up for a Middle Eastern dance class to satisfy a course requirement. And from the very first day, I just fell in love with it. I loved the way it felt to dance, I loved the music, and I loved how it got me out of my head. Even after my course requirement was filled, I found myself returning again and again to that class and others like it because I was having so much fun. And then, in class I would hear about these festivals and special belly dancing events. That’s how I discovered the really vibrant and wonderful belly dance community here in Southern California. But it’s not just here, these communities exist all over the nation. You can go to just about any town in any state and find belly dancers, if you know where to look.

What was your research like? And who was the real Little Egypt?

My research began long before I had any thoughts of writing a book. I was interested in learning about the origins of belly dance and particularly its migration to the United States. But when I discovered the belly dancing scandal that shook the 1893 Chicago World’s Fair, that’s when my writer instincts kicked in. I knew that would make a great backdrop for a story.

So that’s when my research became more focused. I collected every book I could find on Little Egypt, the World’s Fair and 1890s Chicago; scoured university archives online; studied the fashions and daily lives of Victorian women; and visited Chicago and New Orleans to see the places I was writing about.

As far as the “real” Little Egypt, I tend to agree with dancer and historian Donna Carlton, who wrote what I consider the bible on the subject, “Looking for Little Egypt.” Her exhaustive search came up with no evidence that a dancer ever performed at the fair by the name of Little Egypt. What Carlton found was the name actually became well-known a few years after the fair closed, during a notorious police investigation into an incident known as the “Awful Seeley Dinner.” At that dinner, which was attended by a number of prominent men in New York, a dancer by the name of Ashea Wabe, who danced under the name “Little Egypt,” was allegedly hired to perform an indecent dance. The police raided the affair, and that sparked the investigation. The story was carried in the New York Times and other newspapers across the country, and that made “Little Egypt” a household name.

Can you tell us about the real life scandal involving the Egyptian belly dancers and the 1893 Chicago World's Fair?

You have to remember this was the Victorian Era, and women were expected to wear clothing that obscured just about everything of their natural shape. The “proper” silhouette was something along the lines of a full, floor-length skirt, a miniscule waist (wrestled into shape by a corset), maybe a bustle, and exaggerated sleeves.

So when the Egyptian dancers appeared in their ankle-baring skirts and tiny vests over thin blouses and no corsets, that alone caused a lot of consternation among the locals. Add to that the dance itself, with its shoulder shakes and hip wiggles, and you’ve got something that many people considered downright vulgar. Complaints were lodged with the fair authorities, and the local newspapers were filled with letters to the editor that called for these entertainments to be shut down. The criticism was widespread, coming from regular folks, as well as religious and civic leaders of the day.

The Board of Lady Managers, the fair’s women’s auxiliary group that I write about in the novel, also opposed the performances and tried to ban them, but it’s worth noting that the board’s leader, Bertha Palmer, was quoted in the Chicago Daily News as wanting to work with the dancers, and not just shun them. “In some ways they [the foreign dancers] are ignorant,” she is quoted as saying, “and I think we owe it to our cause that we visit these women and invite them ... and spend time and money on teaching them our ways and manners.” That mindset is what opens the door for the novel’s heroine to get close to the dancers and is the starting point of her relationship with them.

Since I am obsessed by process I have to ask about yours. What is your writing life like?

It’s changed pretty drastically since I had my daughter in May. I used to work steadily for about five or six hours every weekday, but now I work my writing time around her napping and playtime schedule. On a good day I can squeeze in about three hours. Although my progress is slower, I’m trying to make better use of my limited time. I’m not endlessly rewriting the same passages over and over again, and I’m being more diligent about researching only what I really need for the story and not letting myself get lost in the minutiae. I’m also trying to not to go overboard on the emailing, blogging, tweeting, facebooking and all that other social networking that can be so much fun, but which can chew up all my writing time if I let it.

What are you working on now?

I have a couple of stories in the works that I’m really excited about. One is a contemporary story that involves belly dancing, and the other is set in the world of vaudeville in New York circa 1910.

What question didn't I ask that I should

After being at it for nearly 20 years, am I a great belly dancer? No! :-)I’m very much a writer who belly dances, not a belly dancer who writes. For me, it has always been much more about having fun, appreciating the dance, and spending time with my friends.

Scorched heart writing

My favorite quote about writing is from John Irving. I've mentioned it before, and it basically says if you don't feel that you are about to humiliate yourself while writing, if you don't feel yourself losing control, than what you're doing isn't very vital. If you don't have doubts or fears or panic, you aren't writing hard enough.

Bless you, John Irving.

It's a hard thing to grapple with, but today I was in that place all morning, working on my new novel, which right now is called The Missing Ones. Sick with fear. Nauseous. Unable to push forward. I kept looking at the books in my office and thinking I could never write anything that brilliant. I had just finished a friends arc which had knocked me out and had me reeling. I kept at it all morning. I kept pushing into the story, trying not to hear all the voices yammering at me: you can't do this. you aren't good enough. the story is dull, stupid and meaningless and so are you. It wasn't until the afternoon that the sentences began to breathe, that they took on some life and I finally felt that exhilaration of writing.

But don't get me wrong. I'm still in the middle of a quagmire of mud and emotion and rocky plot points. I could drown at any time. But the only way to go is forward.

What matters

We're not religious in my household. When my son was little, we celebrated everything: Christmas, Passover (complete with the Passover Bunny), Hanukkah, you name it. We've tried to let our son figure out what it is he believes or doesn't believe, and we all keep an open mind. So this weekend, to my surprise, we are giving our son a bar mitzvah.

But being us, it is, of course, not a usual one.

It's something he wanted to do. It's something we began to want to do, too, just to keep hold of the cultural thread that ties us all together. My grandfather, a writer I have just one memory of (I'm two and playing with blocks and he beams at me), was an orthodox rabbi and his black silk top hat sits on top of our shelf, so maybe I feel his spirit beaming down at me or maybe I just wish that were so. Or maybe it was my son's reading of Anne Frank's Diary or the people who deny that the Holocaust ever happened. I don't know, but we felt this was significant to do.

So we hired someone to come to our house and teach him a little bit about Jewish history and a lot of Hebrew. And instead of the garish 50,000 bar mitzvahs with themes like The Titanic, and a guest list that would fill a stadium, we're keeping it small. Twenty-two kids, about 8 adults. And we're having it at the hip and cool Maxwell's Rock Club! Our son will take the same stage as Patti Smith, the Ramones, and Bruce Springstein. The Club is ecstatic. This is their first bar mitzvah! They're throwing in Maxwell's t-shirts (not the ones with skulls and wine bottles, just the simple ones with just the name). The kids are going to karaoke until their throats are sore and dance, and all the adults have to do something, be it light a candle or say a prayer.

Sometimes, I am deeply moved by how life unfolds and surprises you.

Remembrances of things past

I admit I tend to hoard. I have every single letter my friend Jo wrote to me while we were both in college, complete with her drawings all over them. I saved sympathy cards and letters when my fiance died, cards and letters when I got married to Jeff (and I even have the list of all the songs we wanted played at our wedding and all the songs we did not want played, including the odious Celebration and Wind Beneath my Wings), more cards and notes when I had Max, and even more when I got so critically ill (and then well again).

Before I put everything on my Mac, I used to hoard my datebooks, and even my old checkbooks so I could leaf through and think: Oh, in April of 1988, I bought a leather bag in the Village. I had dinner at Intermezzo in Chelsea. Ah, that's the date I called that guy I had a crush on and we went to the movies and he went right home afterwards. Alone.

There is something about holding those little pieces of history in your hand that bring it all back. No one really saves emails or texts, and if you do, it usually is for business, but it just isn't the same as having that paper or that card--that visual that's so much richer than an email catapulting you back to a specific time and place in your personal history. I used to laugh at my mother for saving everything I ever wrote, including my letters home from college. Now, I'm glad.

Details, in life and in novels, make all the difference.

Read This Book: Life Without Summer

PW, in a starred review called Lynne Griffin's Life Without Summer "a spellbinding tale of loss and hard-won redemption." As someone who is always grappling with writing about the darker side of life, I was instantly intrigued. Lynne's been kind enough to answer my questions here about her novel.

You take the unimaginable idea—a mother struggling with the loss of her four-year-old daughter in a hit and run accident—and turn it into fiction. As someone who routinely goes down those dark roads in my writing—and often suffers during the writing--I’d like to ask you if writing about this was difficult or healing—and why?

It was both, really. I was working on another novel when the story came to me. I imagined two women struggling with different grief stories, each personal loss echoing the other’s. From the beginning, I knew the first and last lines, and how the two families would come to be forever connected. Writing this novel was deeply cathartic, because of losses I’ve suffered in my own life. Though I’ve never lost a child, I’ve had my share of grief experiences. To me the book is more of a hopeful, redemptive story. Certainly it was emotional to write, but I think authentic storytelling should touch writer and reader alike.

Can you talk about the structure of your novel and how that came to be? What particularly interested me is that you’ve said that early readers advised you against your structure and your theme. How hard is it to stay true to your own vision in the light of other’s concerns and comments?

I’m a determined person, so not hard at all really. I chose first person accounts, by both Tessa and Celia, since this is the most intimate point of view for storytelling. I didn’t want to leave any distance between the characters and my readers. I also chose epistolary, or journal format, because I felt it would be quite personal to glimpse inside these women’s diaries. My point of view choice and the novel’s structure mean that at times the story is raw, yet it’s very important to me to show an honest look at the process of moving into and out of the grief experience. I want to give readers a true sense of what it feels like to embrace or reject healing.

Writing this close to grief and having the story involve a child was challenging. Other writers, and some in the publishing industry, were wary of the subject matter, but I never wavered in my commitment to tell this story. With something as deeply personal as losing a child, I felt compelled to write my way to the heart of the experience.

Another question about process: Because the novel really enters the lives of these two women, I was wondering how mapped out the novel was before you began writing . Did anything surprise you as you progressed?

When I’m beginning a novel, I do a lot of “writing in my head”. I contemplate structure, formulate the plot, listen to my characters. Once I’m ready to tackle the first draft, I write scene-to-scene, rarely if ever out of sequence. I’m a methodical writer, in that my process is exactly the same every day. I do my best writing in the morning, starting my day by re-reading and editing the pages from the previous day. Once in a groove, I write anywhere from 3 to 6 pages a day. When I’m actively working on a manuscript, I write six days a week.

For Life Without Summer, I had the benefit of an internal structure. Written in journal format, there was the need to adhere to the calendar. The story plays out over one year, so at certain times I would have to write entries that corresponded with the time of year, which did a lot to propel the story forward. Tessa writes about her first Halloween without Abby. Celia describes the first Christmas trying to juggle her new husband with her ex, her son’s father.

With my second novel, I wrote without an outline until I came to the middle of the novel, and then I plotted my way to the end. So I guess I’d say I do a bit of both. Regardless, I’m often surprised along the way with what my characters reveal to me, and with the choices they make; how those choices move the plot forward. Those moments of clarity—when I’m in flow, writing—are the very reason I love to write fiction.

Both Tessa, the mother, and Celia, the grief counselor cope with grief differently. As a social worker, do you feel there is a right way to grieve, or are all paths different?

I’ve been a family life expert for over twenty years, and always been struck by the healthy and not so healthy ways grief work gets done. There are many right ways to grieve a loss. Some parents take comfort in talking out their feelings, while others prefer solitude. Many lean on pre-established communities, faith-based and civic, while some choose to stick with close knit groups of family and friends for support. There are many healthy things parents can do to celebrate their child’s life, like honor their child with a memorial or some type of commemorative activity. So yes, there are right ways to handle loss. Yet there are some wrong ways too. Any time someone turns to substances like alcohol or drugs to cope, as one character does in Life Without Summer, it’s a recipe for disaster. The pain may be numbed in the short run, but substance abuse creates so many more issues in the long run. Personal relationships suffer and depression is more likely to occur with the frequent and excessive use of alcohol and drugs.

You talk about the importance of liability, rather than likability , in creating characters, which I thought was wonderful. Characters don’t have to be nice, and can, in fact be downright evil, if we understand why they did what they did. Can you talk a little more about this?

I have over twenty years professional experience with specific expertise in the impact of individual differences—or temperament—on human behavior. In writing fiction, I work to craft characters from the inside out. Ones who are more than the sum of their physical traits. I am driven to get to the heart of character motivation. As I write, I try to answer questions like, “What would this character really do?” & “How would my character react to that situation or this person?” I’m committed to crafting three-dimensional, compelling major as well as minor characters. And I revise until I’m satisfied.

I connected quite easily with Tessa. I really get her fierce edgy way of coping. I’m a bit intense myself, so I understand why at times she goes for shock value. As for Celia, I have a lot of compassion for her. I can see how easily a woman torn apart by loss might make a few missteps, suddenly finding herself on a road she wouldn’t be on if grief hadn’t toyed with her sensibilities. I have great empathy for her inability to take her own advice. It’s one thing to know the right thing to do; it’s another entirely to do the right thing, especially in a situation like hers. In terms of who gave me the most trouble, it was Celia. She was buttoned up, as characters go, and that made it hard to get to the bottom of her situation. I spent a lot of time writing to find her story. It was in the revision process that her real grief experience revealed itself.

Can you talk about your next novel?

My second novel, Sea Escape (Simon & Schuster, summer 2010) is also about family life. In it I explore the impact secrets have on the closeness family members can share.

How much must an author do?

Recently, I read this piece about this author who received no tour, no publicity, no real support, so she took her act to the road, made a video, and ended up selling 80,000 copies of her book. While I was thrilled for her, it made me anxious.

Writers (and maybe I am speaking just for myself) like to be alone writing. Dreamy, introspective types, we are usually not comfortable turning into PR machines and hitting the glare of the spotlights, and after the bliss and turmoil of writing a novel, going out on the road seems well...not as much fun as staying home writing.

I will say I am grateful for the internet, which allows easy connection in my pajamas. I love conferences, love doing phoners for bookclubs (I love book groups), love readings once I am there and I see the seats are full (everyone has a reading story where only two people show up and they both thought it was going to be a Bible lecture), love visiting other blogs and I am an intrepid Googler for opportunities. But what also worried me about the article was a quote from someone in publishing who admitted that people don't know what works. That what works for one writer may not work for another. That there is so much information out there (in any given night in NYC, there are at least 20 readings and the web is crowded with book videos), so how do you assure you are not invisible?

I'm about a year away from tackling this, and I know I will hurl myself out there and do whatever I can for my novel, but I'm wondering how other writers handle this.

Two spots opened up for my class

Two spots opened up in my advanced 20-week Novel Writing class at UCLA's Writers Program online. The class is really a blast, with lots of special guests, and if you'd like to be considered, shoot me an email or go to the UCLA web site.

Read this book: Rosie and Skate

I don’t remember how or when I met Beth Ann Bauman—one of my favorite writers and friends—, but I do remember seeing the New York Times profile of her after her acclaimed short story collection Beautiful Girls (MacAdam/Cage) came out. The way she talked about her work and about the published life and the difficulties of having to earn a living while being a writer resonated with me so much that I went out that afternoon and bought the collection, which was wonderful. She now has a young-adult novel Rosie and Skate (Random House), which is racking up raves from Kirkus (a starred review) which said she “expertly captures the ever-hopeful ache of adolescents longing for love stability, and certainty,” and a starred review from Booklist who called the book “as brisk and refreshing as an ocean breeze.” Beth’s been nominated for a Pushcart prize and is a recipient of fellowships from the Jerome Foundation and the New York Foundation of the Arts. She teaches fiction writing at NYU and the Writer's Voice of the West Side Y in New York City and online at UCLA Extension.

I’m fascinated how the author of a critically acclaimed collection of short stories for adults wrote a YA novel. What made you decide to do this and how was the writing process different?

Three of my stories in Beautiful Girls are told from a teenage point of view. Adolescence is a time of firsts, of possibilities. I really like the territory. Soon after the publication of my collection, I met Wendy Lamb at Random House and she encouraged me to write a YA. The prospect of a novel was daunting, but I felt I could probably do it. The process is different too, at least for me; because this is a YA the tone is younger, not to suggest that all YAs are young-sounding, but mine is, I think. The book has been called “sweet,” which is something you wouldn’t say about my stories. Maybe there’s an intrinsic hopefulness to adolescence, which is part of the mix.

What I loved was the way (and you did this in Beautiful Girls, as well), you tunneled into the minds of these two girls. What's your experience with teens or is this from your own past?

I really don’t know any teens! My nephew just turned 13 and is starting to get a little sarcastic, but mostly he’s still a sweet boy hovering on the brink. So the book is based on my memory of those years. And in some ways I still feel like a teenager so that probably helps.

You switched communities, from the gray suburbs of Beautiful Girls to this warm, beach community—which, nevertheless is in the winter. So, where did these two cultures come from?

Growing up I spent summers on the Jersey shore, a place I love. I’ve written lots of stories that take place in this setting but weirdly none of the stories wound up in my collection. I like writing about New Jersey (and the suburbs). I’ve lived in New York City for the past 16 years, but I am still a Jersey girl to the core.

Alcoholism, teen sexuality and the messiness of growing up focus the novel, but despite the dark subject matter, the book is also really funny. How did you manage that?

Alcoholism. An incarcerated Dad. It sounds bleak, right? But I have no desire to write a bleak book. I wanted it to be lively and funny and to capture the quirky idiosyncratic messiness of life. I’m glad you think it’s funny.

You’re also a writing teacher. How do you grapple with the demands of writing a novel and the demands of making a living? What’s your daily working day like?

This is the never-ending question that every writer grapples with. You and I have swapped countless emails about the struggle. AND it’s not figureout-able, at least from what I see. Here’s my process. I carve out time to write, rewrite, toss, worry, bite my fingernails, steal more time, complain about not having enough time... Somehow the works gets done, but it always takes longer than I think.

I’m always fascinated by process, so can you tell us something about the process of writing Rosie and Skate? Are you an outliner? Did you create the voice and move on from there?

The sheer length of a novel has always terrified me because I am a natural sprinter, not a long-distance runner. A novel is a large container and how to keep it moving is the question. As a writing teacher, I see a lot of static work that just piles on more and more information. So when I first started teaching I learned three-act structure. I love it because it gives the writer immediate destinations to move toward. A novel is a journey; it moves characters through a narrative that will change them. It sounds easy, but it’s incredibly hard. Three-act structure gives a workable format for movement. When I started writing Rosie and Skate I spent a long time just exploring their characters to find out what their conflicts might be. Once I got a handle on that I started using three-act structure.

What are you working on now?

I’m writing another YA based loosely on the title story of Beautiful Girls. I’ve tweaked the characters and relocated them to the Jersey shore. The working title is Horny.

What books about teenagers do you love?

There are many tween/teen characterizations I adore. Here’s my short list: Carson McCuller’s The Member of the Wedding (gorgeous!), Elizabeth Berg’s Durable Goods and Joy School, Margaret Atwood’s Cat’s Eye, Lorrie Moore’s Who Will Run the Frog Hospital, Irene Hunt’s Up a Road Slowly, Francesca Block’s Weetzie Bat, Patrice Kindl’s Owl in Love, M.E. Kerr’s Dinky Hocker Shoots Smack, and Cathi Hanauer’s My Sister’s Bones.

The Writers' Uniform

While on Facebook I was bemoaning how hard it is to find a pair of jeans and Tish Cohen told me that for a long while she wore just pajama bottoms and a t-shirt when she worked, until people who came to the door began saying things like, "Well, obviously you don't work." The conversation took a clear turn from jeans to writer's clothing and she then told me that the writer Patry Francis went out and bought a nurse's uniform, so that when she went outside it would send a clear signal: nurse. worker. She wouldn't have to explain that she was a writer, that yes, that was a job, and yes, she worked hard, and no, just because she worked at home, she didn't break to watch daytime TV for hours on end.

That nurse's uniform tickles me! While I have been known to work in my pajamas, my writer's uniform is pretty simple: jeans, black t-shirt or shirt, sneakers and complicated earrings. Jeff's is pretty much the same uniform except for the earrings and he wears colors. We both have offices on the top floor, which we did deliberately. We have to go to work, we have to get there--and even though the commute is just one flight of stairs, well, it still really feels different on that floor. We shower, dress, get to work. The Fed Ex and UPS guys all know I'm a writer because of the book packages they keep bringing, plus I like to chat when I see them. When I lived in Pittsburgh, and was young, unhappily first-married and foolish, I actually had t-shirts made up with the word WRITER festooned across them, but people still didn't really know what I did--and if they did, no one seemed to think it was really as hard or as important as their work, because hey, I worked at home. I got to wear jeans.

Living in the NYC area is a bit different than Pittsburgh for a whole host of reasons, but mostly because there are so many writers here. So many of us in jeans, pajamas, or who knows, a feathered boa or six.

Writing what scares us

I had nightmares again last night. This morning, I woke up with a lump lodged in my throat so I couldn't swallow.

I'm terrified of what I am writing.

I'm superstitious so I can't really talk about a novel in progress, but the central thorny, dark issue of this novel-in-the-works seems so real to me that I feel unnerved. I know it is magic thinking on my part and that writing about it won't make it happen, but I cannot shake the terror. A writer friend said that she recognizes this process, that is also happened to her (and what a knockout novel she produced because of it) and that "maybe we need to write about the things that scare us" and I'm thinking she's right.

I've intentionally written about things that have unnerved or scared me before--the crippling asthma of my youth, the sudden death of a loved one, long and mysterious illness--but those were all things that had already happened to me (but again, maybe that is magic thinking to imagine they could not happen again.) This though, feels new and raw and overwhelming. And the only thing I can think to do about it is to continue to write. And write. And write.

Rainy days reign

What is more perfect that the pouring rain outside, a cozy writing office inside, and a cup of tea? I have actually been up for most of the night and haven't slept all day, but this vague, hallucinatory state of being awake is sort of nice.

Do you need a Media Coach?

Back when I was doing promotion for my novel about open adoption, Girls in Trouble, it surprised me that suddenly I was controversial. On my first radio show, some callers attacked me for what they saw as my views on adoption (I kept repeating, "It's one fictional story!") and I was never quite sure how to respond. I stumbled. I said the wrong things and I felt like a fool. Desperate, I called a friend, a media coach, who told me to come on over and she would show me what to do for the next time. In less than a few hours, she showed me how to respond to anger ("I understand what you are saying, but..."), how to deflect the ire back to my talking points, ("I absolutely hear you, and what I think is...") and how to calm things down. A week later, I was on NPR's Diane Rehm, and when the calls began, I was prepared. To my astonishment, as soon as I said, "I understand what you are saying, but..." in a calm voice, the caller also calmed down. I was happy, the callers were happy, the show was a success.

Media coaching can be invaluable. With that in mind, I thought to get one on here and ask her some questions: Vickie Jenkins runs Performance Power Media Coaching. Thank you so much for being here, Vickie.

You're a writer and a media coach. Does one skill help the other?

Absolutely. Whether I’m writing fiction or non-fiction, poetry or screenplays, my writing puts me in the shoes of my clients. We get quite connected to our creative product, but we need to release it to the world, and be comfortable talking about it, inviting people to read it, and BUY it.

What exactly does a media coach do and why do writers need one before they hit The Today Show?

Whether you’re appearing on your local radio or TV show, or speaking to a handful at the bookstore or to a thousand at a conference, you’ve got to be on top of your game to communicate well. There’s no need for a panic attack, once you learn the skills. Professional media training gives you insight into the media’s needs PLUS the tools and discipline you can use daily to do well in all types of communication environments.

What do you think the three top mistakes are that writers make before they go on radio or TV?

1. Not getting media coaching.

2. Not getting media coaching.

3. Not getting media coaching.

Seriously. It’s painful for me to watch a TV interview show where the author has this incredible opportunity and wonderful information to share, but they’re sweating, eyes darting around, obviously not prepared. People think if they just join Toastmasters or have their friends help them practice they’ll “do OK.” When you’ve been media trained by an expert, you’re ready to EXCEL in all types of communications venues, because you learn how to present your information in an entertaining and concise way that is AUDIENCE-FOCUSED. You will touch people’s lives, and get callbacks for more appearances and sell more books. It doesn’t take long to learn this discipline, and it’s something you will use an entire lifetime.

But specifically to your question, three common mistakes are: Not staying concise to the interview time frame; forgetting to mention their book title; not prepping the entire ‘package’ – clothing, hair, body language.

You originally were a reporter and news anchor so how did you get involved in media coaching?

When I was the morning news anchor/news director at the top-5 San Francisco radio station KOIT AM/FM, I hosted a weekly public affairs show and often interviewed authors who were out on their book tours. Before we went on I would get the author relaxed and focused, knowing that the better THEY performed, the more my audience would stay tuned in. After the interview ended authors would invariably turn to me, smile and say, “Wow, that was fun! Thanks for the tips ahead of time. I wished I’d met you BEFORE my book tour started, because it’s been trial by fire.”

The light bulb went off over my head and I said, “Aha! That is my next career!” The radio news business was incredibly exciting, yet exhausting, getting up at 3:30 AM every day for 20 years, and I was looking for a new challenge.

So I said goodbye to my media buddies & audience and set up Performance Power Media, designing coaching programs specifically addressing an author’s needs—staying healthy and focused on the tour, excelling at radio, TV, and print interviews, and acing readings & book signings to sell more books. I also media train executives for their interviews on CNN, CNBC, etc. and work with sales teams and business owners on their media interviews, speeches and presentations. I’m based in Los Angeles, but travel all over the world and also teach online. It’s great fun.

What kind of fiction do you write, and do you follow your own media advice when it comes to presenting yourself for PR opportunities?

Last year I self-published a poetry book just for fun, to test out what I’d been teaching. It was great to be in the trenches at book fairs, doing readings, selling books, etc. As for my fiction…I’m in the process of shopping around a couple of film scripts, and am writing a trilogy of murder mystery novellas about a 1950s L.A.P.D. detective.

Are there any clients you won't take--and why not?

I will only take people who are ready—and willing—to do the work. I use this analogy: If you want to learn to run a marathon, you don’t read a book about it and run out the door, you EXERCISE, get a good coach, and PRACTICE. Then when you cross the finish line you’re tired, happy, and know you’ve really accomplished something.

What question didn't I ask that I should have?

What does media training cost? The bigger question is, what will it cost you to NOT get the help you need to make anything you dream actually happen? That’s what focused communications skills give you. Those skills are the keys that open many, many doors. The investment you make will serve you every day of your life. I always congratulate clients on taking that first step. They never regret it.

Vickie is offering a ten percent discount on her class: Book Tours: Media Signings & More, Feb 18th, Friday, limited to ten people. She'll also be available for hands-on training in San Francisco Oct 6-9. For more info contact vickiejenkins@msn.com

Vickie Jenkins

Performance Power Media Coaching

888.331.7714

http://www.media-trainer.com/

http://blog.media-trainer.com/

http://www.linkedin.com/in/vickiejenkins

Read This Book: Shades of Grey by Clea Simon

Clea Simon is a lifeline friend of mine. There isn't a writing day that goes by that we don't email to check in on each other, talk about writing, solve each other's problems, and just cement our friendship. I originally posted about her latest mystery Shades of Grey before it was sold - as a "best book you've never read." Now I am thrilled to report that Booklist agrees with me, raving, "Well paced and tightly plotted, debuts a promising series from the author of the Theda Krakow mysteries." Clea is the author of Mad House: Growing Up in the Shadow of Mentally Ill Siblings, Fatherless Women: How We Change After we Lose Our Dads, and The Feline Mystique: On the Mysterious Connection Between Women and Cats. She's also penned four Theda Krakow mystery titles and launched her Dulcie Schwartz series with Shades of Grey (and will follow it with Grey Matters.). Clea was kind enough to let me pepper her with questions. (Thank you, Clea.)

What's your writing process like? Outline or just "follow your pen?"

I do a sort of mix of the two. I'm not really an outliner. I've tried to do that, because I write in a genre (mysteries) that has pretty set conventions. You're supposed to have a crime, clues, and some kind of resolution, after all. And I write traditional mysteries, of the Agatha Christie style, so I want the crime to have a logical explanation that the reader could figure out from what is shown in the book and I want both my criminal and my sleuth to be normal, human characters. But even knowing these stipulations, I can't outline. I've tried, but when I write an outline it just kind of sucks the juice of the book. If I write an outline, I don't want to write a book. That said, I don't just go blindly forward. I do have some ideas when I start. I usually know who did the crime - though that has been known to change! - and I have some ideas about how the heroine will uncover it.

These days, I work with a white board and a bunch of post-it notes. I jot down little things that occur to me. Lines I want a character to say, or clues that I hope to use at some point, and stick them up on the white board. I don't always use them, but on those days when I don't feel inspired, I can look at the board and choose something to elaborate on.

What is up next for you?

I'm not sure. I actually just finished the sequel to "Shades of Grey." It's called "Grey Matters" and will pub in the UK in December (so soon!!) and in the US in March. I wrote that one on deadline, awfully fast, and so now I'm just kind of wiped out. I do a lot of editing and work for hire, so I'm trying to catch up with that and see what project calls out to me. I don't know if Severn House (my current publisher) will want more Dulcie Schwartz books yet, though I hope they'll let me know soon. I also have another manuscript out making the rounds. So, I could be writing another mystery to follow up "Grey Matters" or another Theda Krakow book (Poisoned Pen published my "Probable Claws" in April, the publisher hasn't asked me for another - but I think I could pitch one), or a sequel to the book that's making the rounds. Or something entirely different. I'm waiting for a sign - either a call from my agent or inspiration. Right now, the muses are just telling me to clean my house and catch up on laundry.

Where do you think the future of mysteries is going?

Great question, but I don't know. For a while - and this may still be true - mysteries were getting very codified. I've had publishers tell me that my mysteries needed more feline content to be cat mysteries, or that I had to change the language to fit into very specific subgenres. But then I see writers like Tana French and Denise Mina, incredible talents who do not fit into specific categories, and they're doing well. So then I grow more optimistic. I sort of feel like I can't think about the future of the genre too much or it will make me crazy. I just have to write the books I want to write and hope that they find publishers and readers who love them.

What I love about your books is you have such strong, complex heroines (and complex animals, too!). How much of them is you?

Well, thank you! I think that each of my characters is a little bit of some aspect of me. Villains, too. I mean, we research our characters and we pick up on people we see around us. But aren't all our improvisations basically extensions of ourselves? Even when I create my feline characters, they're saying and doing what I imagine they should say or act for the reasons I attribute to them. My main concern is making them believable - letting them all follow their own logic, even if one or another is really an outgrowth of my worst temper tantrum, or something like that.

Cambridge figures as a character in your books--which I also love--Are you going to continue to set your books there and if not, why not?

Depends on the book! My Dulcie and Theda series are set here, and Cambridge is part of those books. But my as-yet-unsold book, "Dogs Don't Lie," is set in Western Mass., because I wanted a city girl who had fled back to her small town hometown. For future projects, I'll just have to wait until my characters tell me where they belong, I guess!

Thanks so much for having me here today, Caroline! I'd love to answer any other questions you or your readers may have. I'll be stopping by in case anyone wants to post any - or you can always reach me through my website athttp://www.cleasimon.com

Shine a Light Prize for Small Bookstores.

This link was sent to me from a friend about a little local book shop, Village Books. It looks like this organization, shinealight.org, will nominate a small business for a $100,000 prize. Nominate bookstores!

http://shinealight.ivillage.com/sbo-profile/?ProfileID=2814

PS, Visit me on another blog!

I talk about being a writer and a book critic! Please come visit

Author's Den!

Read this Book: 31 Hours

One of the pleasures of having writer friends is that we are always in and out of one another's working lives. We get to see the process. Masha Hamilton is a great writer and a great friend, and I read (and was knocked out by) an early draft of her novel, 31 Hours. The published version is even better (and racking up the raves) and I'm thrilled Masha agreed to answer questions on my blog. Thank you, Masha!

I had read an earlier version of this novel and what impressed me so much was the difference between the final version—which was leaner, more focused, and more powerful—and the first version, which I had also loved. Characters were streamlined, events changed shape and position. Can you talk about the process, how you got from A to B?

I was lucky enough to be able to write the first draft of this novel during a single month ensconced at Blue Mountain Center, an artists’ retreat in the Adirondacks. I worked nearly around the clock and lived and breathed the novel, and I think some of the pacing is really due to that. I think because I felt the circumstance of this novel so deeply, I needed to be away from my real life in order to write it. It was an intense period for me, a period of tears and occasional nightmares. But of course, after that initial rush of writing comes the concentrated process of revision. During the writing, I don’t self-censor at all; I let everything come out, even parts I don’t understand. But during the revision process, everything is reconsidered, and deepened or tossed. For me, the first draft is like kneading the bread dough, and the revision process is like letting it rise. Perhaps publication is when it’s baked, if we want to carry the metaphor that far…

Although 31 Hours concerns itself with a homegrown American terrorist, to me, the book is also really about the relationships we have with other, the ways we miscommunicate, or are seen and not see, and about the moments "that change us forever." Jonas says goodbye to the man he had been, Carol says of her son, "We change, but they change more," and a homeless man, Sonny (the kind of person most people choose not to see at all), has premonitions of what is about to happen. What I found most interesting is none of these lives intersected. Jonas and Vic, his girlfriend, are very much on each other's minds, but while they share scenes in the past, there are no scenes of them in the present together. Jonas and his mom never have a conversation or meeting in the present, either, and Sonny never gets to tell anyone who could stop it what he fears is going to happen—and that makes it all the more terrifying. I'm curious what you think might have happened if Vic or Carol had been able to reach Jonas. Would it have changed anything?

You are absolutely right, Caroline; for me, this was partly about missed connections. At one point Jonas thinks he sees his mother Carol, but actually doesn’t, and at another point, Vic sees Jonas’s mother but can’t quite believe it is her, and it is. Sonny, too, briefly passes Carol and Vic at various points in the 31 hours of the story, and had in the weeks previous once seen Jonas. Without revealing what does happen, I’ll say that I think definitely circumstances would have changed if Jonas’s mother or girlfriend had been able to connect with him. How, though, I’m not sure. I don’t plot my novels. I just try to listen hard to the characters. So I never know what is going to happen until it does!

Sonny, the homeless man, says that a diet of longing can drive people to the gun—and all of the characters here have different intensities of longing going on, but only Jonas was pushed toward destruction. Why?

Jonas is young, so young. He is in that parenthesis of time – he is not a child, but nor is he fully an adult. He is idealistic. He is troubled by corruption and cruelty. He wants the best for the world, in some large way. He is isolated, tired, confused. He is who he has always been, in some essential way, but in other ways, he is just a young man struggling to learn how he fits into a chaotic, imperfect world. Who he is now is not who he will be in a decade, if given the chance.

As the mother of a son, I was moved so deeply by Carol's fears and her love for her son Jonas. I think you got that fear and love and needing to let go and yet needing to stay connected exactly, heartbreakingly right. Part of the tragedy is that I think Carol did everything right—I can't think of anything else she could have done—and that, to me, makes the book all the more chilling. Is there any other way she could have played this?

I think Carol, like most parents, is being the absolute best parent she can be. I think Jonas’s father, Jake, is also being the best dad he can be, by the way, even though he’s been more absent than Carol in Jonas’s life.

I'm always fascinated by process, so can you tell us what your writing life is like and what you are working on now?

During the pre-publication for 31 Hours, I was working on a non-fiction project that has been held up, so a lot of my writing time went there. In May, I founded the Afghan Women’s Writing Project, an online series of workshops taught by rotating teachers (including Caroline as our very first teacher) and aimed at giving Afghan women writers a voice in the world and fostering creative and intellectual exchanges between our established writers and their up-and-coming writers. We have expanded our mandate a bit to try to raise funds for Afghanistan’s first women’s-only Internet café, since women mostly cannot go to the Internet cafes comfortably. The start-up of that project has taken a big chunk of time, but little by little it is getting organized. And I’ve begun a new novel—so new that, you’ll understand Caroline, I can’t talk too much about it!

I'd like to ask about your bed and breakfast—which seems like the perfect other job for a writer. Is it?

It really is. Over breakfast, I often hear wonderful stories from our guests. I’m constantly exposed to characters and plots! And usually, in the middle of the day, I can shut myself off and work. It’s not something I ever planned to do, but for the moment, it’s working out brilliantly.

A little respect, please....

Recently a person approached me to help him with his manuscript. He needed editorial work and wanted to get his book in shape for a publisher. I explained what I do and how I work and how thorough I am, and the success I have had with clients. I love doing this work--love to help other writers, plus it helps me in my own work to figure out what is and isn't working in someone else's work, and why. But when I told him my fees (which are way below the market rate, by the way), he had a fit. "Who the hell do you think you are?" he said. "Both my wife and I are appalled! Your fee is what I make per hour!!"

I was stunned. The message, of course is that what he does is infinitely more important than what I do. Out of curiosity, I asked him what he wanted to pay, and he told me there were many people around who would be willing to read and edit a whole 400 page manuscript and come up with 20 pages of notes for...the price of a great dinner in Manhattan.

Today, I was reading a piece about a 58-year-old man who had lost his job in the financial world and how he was stressing about finding another. My heart was shattering for him, right up until he brightly quipped, "But I can use this time to write a novel!"

Sigh.

Is being a novelist the catch-all job that anyone can do if he or she only had the time? (I once dated a Wall Street guy who insisted he was "going to write that novel" when he had banked enough money and could take a break. Um, he had four million banked. I had a friend who loved the idea of being a writer and told everyone that was her calling, but since she could not sit alone in a room for the hours every day she would need to, the best she did was jot down ideas in a notebook she carried around.) I welcome anyone to the writing party, but am I amiss to want those people to take the job seriously? Do people really not recognize how terrifically hard (and terrifically rewarding) a job it is? Do they imagine we sit at our desks daydreaming happily, waiting for inspiration, and then when it comes, the words pour out of us and we are giddy with delight? I welcome anyone who has the passion and drive and wants to write, but I want the 15 drafts, the angst, the false starts, the desperate, mad need to write--to be understood and to break through this idea that writing is all fun and glamour and a beach house filled with champagne.

Writing is a calling, but it is also a really difficult, exhilarating, grueling, terrifying, wonderful job. I just wish people would treat it that way, rather than something that everyone can take up in spare time like knitting, which, by the way, is not so easy, either.

Read This Book: Breaking the Bank

I’ve known Yona Zeldis McDonough (check out her website for giveaways and contests) for years now, and there’s no greater pleasure than when a wonderful friend is also a wonderful writer. Thanks, Yona, for answering all my nosy questions.

One of the things that impressed me so much about your book was the change in tone from your previous novels, which were darker. Although Breaking the Bank deals with very serious issues of money, love, divorce, there is also something deliciously madcap about it. What precipitated the writing of this novel? Was it deliberate, or did it just spark?

No, it was not deliberate at all. When I write, I hear a voice telling me the story. It’s a crazy, blissful feeling and at its best, it makes me feel as if I am transcribing something told to me by someone else, rather than inventing something myself. So I can’t predict what the voice will say or how it will sound; I can only listen, hard, to what it says. What precipitated the writing of this novel was a conversation I had with my brother in which he observed that whenever a bank made a mistake, it was always in their favor. I countered by telling him how I once was given an extra $400 that was not mine by a teller. I had a momentary frisson when I counted the money and realized her mistake but I found I was unable to keep it and returned to the window, to tell her what had happened. She was inordinately grateful; it was her very first week on the job and had I kept that money, she would have been fired. Of course I hadn’t known all that when I decided to give the money back, but I felt rewarded in some small way for having done the right thing. As I shared all this with my brother, I started thinking about how the story might have been different had an ATM, not a person, given me the money. What might I have felt and done then? Our conversation triggered Mia’s voice in my ear.

The book seems tailor made for a film--what's your feelings about books into movies?

From your lips to God’s ears as they say in our tribe! Seriously, I would love that. I think this is an extremely cinematic book for several reasons: it is very plot driven, it has a magical element that is grounded in a completely real and recognizable context, and it has a happy ending. And there was even a cinematic inspiration of sorts; the final scene of It’s a Wonderful Life was very much on my mind when I wrote the last chapter.

Tarot cards figure in the novel, so I have to ask--are you a believer and do you get your own cards read?

No, I am not a believer in any literal way. But I love cards of all sorts (playing cards too) on a purely graphic level. And I find tarot cards especially appealing because reading them creates a de facto sort of narrative. The cards are turned over, images are revealed, and someone has to link all the disparate symbols or elements together into a story. Sort of like being a novelist, only it doesn’t take quite as long. It was only afterwards that I realized the cards provide another element of magic to the story.

What is your writing life like and what are you working on now?

My writing life is pretty staid. I get up, dressed etc. and after breakfast head down to the basement of my house, which is where my office is. I bring my dog—a yappy little Pomeranian with whom I am utterly besotted—with me, for company. She lies on a pillow either chomping on a chewy or resting her little snout on her paws. I love having her there. When I get stuck with something I writing, I go over to pet her belly or to play with the dollhouse my husband built for me; many of the things in it were things I owned and loved as child, so it has a very powerful and calming effecting on me. I rearrange the furniture and other tiny objects for a while and when I go back to work, I usually see a way out of my dilemma. I’ll break for lunch, and then head back downstairs again later. If I am deeply into a particular piece of writing, I might return to it in the evening but that doesn’t happen all the time.

Right now I am working on an essay and a novel. Both deal with ballet in one form or another, as did my first novel, The Four Temperaments. I studied ballet very seriously as a young girl and even though I was neither driven nor talented enough to have been a professional, the training for that life was so encompassing and absorbing—for me, it was an almost religious discipline—that it has remained with me, a completely formative—and transformative—experience.

You have said you never work from any sort of an outline, which boggles my mind. What then, carries you through the writing? Did you start with a premise..i.e. What if a woman goes to an ATM and it spits out thousands of dollars?

It’s the voice that carries me. I don’t work from an outline, but I do work in a very linear, ordered way, from chapter to chapter. I always re-read the chapter I have just finished before starting a new one; this keeps me aware of pacing and narrative flow.

Writerly themes

Recently, the writer Katharine Weber told me that she almost always has fire in her novels (including her knockout upcoming one, True Confections), which is startling because she never really has much to do with fire in real life. I almost always have people driving crazily --which really has nothing to do with me except that I am phobic about driving and have not been behind a wheel since I was 16 and was given my license by a bored instructor who made me drive around the block before barking, "Think you can drive? Good. Then you passed."

Obsession always make for interesting writing and what strikes me is sometimes writers don't even realize what is obsessing them until it begins cropping up in their writing--which just proves that maybe we really are writing the books we ourselves want and need to be reading.

It's tough getting started again after vacation. I admit I am cranky, still a little sick, sunburned even after wearing SPF 90 (90! I could go on the sun!) and suffering withdrawal from all that delicious, intoxicating sugar of ice cream, fudge and more ice cream.

Off to oceanland

Off for a non-working, boardwalk-walking, biking, minigolfing, fudge and ice cream eating, movie going, swimming, arcade playing vacation.

See you Wednesday or Thursday.

Sweltering and writing thoughts.

I am not a summer person. Give me fall or winter any day. This heat is drenching me and the sky is like a big wet washcloth, making it hard to move and even harder to breathe. We have two kinds of ice pops in the fridge here, air conditioning everywhere, and when I think of going outside, I think of icy movie theaters.

But what I really want to talk about is the writing process. I had lunch today with a really interesting person (I'm going to blog about him next week), and we got to talking about how long it really takes to write a novel. Or, how long it takes me to write a novel.

I always tell my students that before I even gave my most recent novel to my agent, I had rewritten it about 7 times. She called me to tell me she loved it, and then she had me rewrite it another five times. (This is no joke--and because she is so brilliant and astute, I was happy to do it.) She sold the novel to Algonquin within weeks, and guess what? They loved it...and they wanted rewrites. And I was thrilled to do them, because this stage--seeing the novel stretch its legs and start to take on a life all its own--is transcendent. It's actually my favorite part of the process.

Now, I'm in first draft stage. It took me, as it always does, about six months from my initial idea, just to figure out a general idea for the story. I know, of course, it is all going to change. I know, too, that I am going to be doing 8 drafts, then more for my agent, and more for my editor. I know I'm in it for the long haul. Three years, maybe four.

And nothing makes me happier.

Read this book: The Embers

I have become fascinated with other writers' process, and these interviews spur me on in my work, as well as giving me an opportunity to ask questions of writers I admire. I will, of course, blog more about my own process, and whatever else is obsessing me, but while I struggle to carve out some time for myself (I am deep in the writing draft one process!), here's another amazing book. The Embers by Hyatt Bass is a remarkable novel about a broken family--and Bass is a remarkably interesting writer and person.

I was fascinated to learn you trained to become a ballet dancer. Do you feel the obsessive training necessary to be a dancer helped you in being a writer?

I’ve never thought about that before, but I guess it did. For one thing, sitting down on a daily basis to work on something without a boss or a deadline pushing you along is really challenging, and the discipline of the ballet training probably helped with that. Also, I think I learned a certain patience from ballet since it often takes years to get something right. You’ll think you’re just never going to be able to do something, and then one day it suddenly happens. And so that might have helped me keep the faith in my book over the seven years it took to write it.

I was also very interested in the fact that The Embers began as a film. How did it become a novel? (And will it become a script now?)

I’m not sure why exactly, but from the very beginning it felt more like a novel than a film. I kept pushing that idea aside, trying to write it as a screenplay, until the finished screenplay didn’t work, and I thought, okay, why not just try it out as a novel? Once I started writing that way, I was completely hooked. I loved the freedom—the lack of page-limit, and the fact what I was writing wasn’t just a blueprint for a final product, but it really was a final product. Instead of imagining how it might be fleshed out down the line with imagery and actors and so on, I could actually describe imagery or gestures, or whatever, and convey tone or mood and story through so many different devices besides straight action and dialogue.

The gnarled bonds (and bones) of family is a topic near and dear to my heart, yet it seems that when males write about it is considered revelatory (The Corrections), yet when women do, it is demeaned sometimes as “domestic drama.” Obviously, I loved your novel and don’t want to stick it into any genre at all, but I’m wondering your thoughts on this.

I know what you mean because I used to fall prey to that sort of sexist thinking myself. I had a revelation recently that in creating the characters of Ingrid (a precocious adolescent girl) and Joe (a very accomplished 70 year old playwright), I was actually writing about the little girl I still felt I was at the time I began writing the novel, and the successful male writer I aspired to be. Over time, though, my confidence in my own work as well as the discovery of writers like Susan Minot and Marilynn Robinson really shifted my thinking in terms of male writers versus female. Not that I hadn’t admired female writers before, and not that I don’t continue to admire male writers with equal fervor now… It’s just that I’m now fully comfortable with being a female writer, and it’s very clear to me that the perception of female writers as less weighty or serious or whatever is just a sign of prejudice in whoever espouses that opinion. If you took the name and jacket photo off my book—or Minot’s or Robinson’s books, or for that matter, William Styron’s or Michael Cunningham’s or Jonathan Franzen’s books, I’m pretty sure people would have difficulty figuring out whether the writer were male or female.

Everyone in your story impacts everyone else—most profoundly what happens surrounding a death in the family. What made you decide to make the death the fulcrum that the family pivots around? And since you are a mom, yourself, how difficult was this to write about?


I’m so interested in family dynamics and how the people that are closest to one another or love each other the most often have the hardest time connecting. So, to put a tragic incident at the center of the story—something everyone could immediately understand would tear these people apart—seemed like a good way to explore this concept. What I’m really writing about in the book is the way people overcome the sorts of challenges that all families face—not necessarily epic tragedies like this one, but little everyday challenges. Often, though, the best way to explore something in fiction is to take it to an extreme. When I started writing the book, I’d just gotten married, and my husband and I planned to have children fairly soon. So, I was thinking about the risks that lay ahead for me—first of all, in marriage (especially since my parents were divorced) and also in terms of having children. Not only had I had a couple of friends who’d died at very young ages, but I was very much aware of the fact that no matter how much I did right as a parent, I would inevitably fail in some ways, too. While I was writing the book, we had two children. So, that was really interesting because there I was writing about family, and I had suddenly gone from being my parents’ child to also being my children’s parent, and I had a new understanding of family and of the story I was writing—a story told from the points of view of its three main characters: a daughter and both her parents. It was actually really cathartic for me to write about the loss of a child at the same time I became a mother because the fear of all the terrible things that could happen to one of my children over the years created an ever-present anxiety¾which I hear is very typical for new mothers—and facing those fears in my work was comforting in a way, maybe because it allowed me to file them under fiction each day.

You have said that writing fiction is a very safe way to bare your soul. I’m curious why you feel that—since it seems to me that readers are always assuming or looking for an autobiographical hook!

Well, people can guess at what might be autobiographical, and make assumptions, and say whatever they want. But when you’re writing fiction, you’re completely in control in the sense that you’re creating your own world, and your own characters, and scenarios, and only you know where any of it comes from or whether it bares any resemblance to your own life.


There are a lot of wonderful collisions in the book. The past bumps against the present and different family members’ points of view take center stage at different times, yet this prismatic way of telling the story gives a riveting forward-moving narrative. How difficult was that to pull off? Did you outline or map out the novel or did it just happen organically and surprise you?

Thank you! I love that about the book, but it’s also a major reason for why the book took seven years to write. I definitely mapped the whole thing out, scene by scene. And then, of course, surprises and new, exciting ideas would come up along the way that would change the course of things. My agent told me if she’d met me when I was very first starting out, she would have told me I was insane, and that I should just choose one character, and tell the book in a straight chronological narrative. She completely agrees that the way I told the story is what makes it especially intriguing, but we laugh about how complicated and hard I made things for myself, especially for my first novel. It’s really an example of how ignorance can breed confidence.

What’s your working life like and what are you working on now?

What question should I be mortified that I neglected to ask you?

Working life right now is a little odd because I’ve just finished my book tour, but I need to take a little break before jumping back into my next novel. In the spring, I mapped out the next book, and wrote the first twelve pages before pre-publication madness for The Embers forced me to put everything on hold. But I’m really excited about it, and am dying to jump back in. So, just a short break to get my brain ready for fiction again, and then I’ll disappear into that. In terms of my working life, though, I usually write about five hours a day in my office, which is just down the street from my home. My goal is two double-spaced pages a day, and I usually do around that amount. I’m not a very fast writer unfortunately. And I love editing. And I can’t imagine any question you should be mortified for not asking!

Read this Book: Await Your Reply

Dan Chaon is a genius. No, really, I mean it. I was so knocked out by his stories Among the Missing, that I carried the collection with me everywhere for weeks, and when I read his first novel, You Remind Me of Me, I kept wishing I had a better adjective for it than superb. Await Your Reply interconnects three different story lines in ways you can't imagine, unrevealed until the last taut, disturbing and incredibly powerful pages.

Dan's also got one hilarious sense of the absurd and he's the first person I think of when I see a link about hideous sweaters or freak food from the fifties. Thank you, Dan for letting me annoy you with all these questions.

In Await Your Reply, you juggle three different story lines—Ryan who is running identity theft scams alongside his father, Miles who is struggling to find his vanished brother, and a young girl Lucy, who is traveling with a man she begins to think she doesn't know at all. When the stories finally connect, the effect is shattering. How on earth did you handle this juggling act in the writing? Did you map each story out separately and then figure out how to thread the together? Do you outline? What’s your writing process like?

I tend to write in very small pieces—I still work like a short story writer, I think, because the chapter is my main unit of construction. At early stages I tend to focus on the paragraph. On jots in a notebook. The book began with sketchy pieces that eventually became chapters 1, 2 and 3. Images: the hand in the ice cooler, the motel on the edge of a dried up lake, the guy driving his car all night, passing into the arctic circle. My imagination tends to accumulate around such little fragments, building forward and backward and outward. I put together a novel the way coral makes a reef. It’s not always pretty.

Once I established the basic through-lines for the book, I put together a very abstract outline. I imagined it as three groups of 10: Ryan-Lucy-Miles, Ryan-Lucy-Miles, Ryan-Lucy-Miles,Omniscient narrator. 30 chapters in total. This gave me a framework to work with, and I would end each character-based chapter with a cliffhanger so I would have a “push” when I got back to the individual thread. I thought of the “omniscient narrator” sections as place-holders that would allow me to take stock and explain the book to myself.

This structure didn't end up exact, but it more or less holds true. I actually wrote the book more or less as it appears, in alternating chapters. Of course, there was a lot of revision as I discovered new things about the characters and situation. But part of the fun was uncovering the connections as I went along. The stories didn't come together in the way I originally thought they would: that was a surprise for me as well.

As the stories in Await Your Reply came together, it all began to feel fated to me—as if none of these characters really had any choice or chance (even though they certainly could have done a wide variety of other things). It was almost like film noir on the page. Do you believe in fate?

That’s a hard question, and maybe it’s the “big” question of my life. Do I believe in fate? I feel like a lot of my work is torn between romantic humanism and logical determinism and straight-up nihilism, and I never seem to be able to make up my mind.

I was adopted, and I think that has always contributed to my thinking on the subject. I grew up knowing that my life was an accident, knowing that I could have had any number of possible lives, or none at all. Of course, everybody feels this way to some extent, but it feels more immediate when you begin life as an infant who is “chosen” by a particular couple. Why them?What if it was someone else? What would my life be like? And of course I grew up just as Roe v. Wade was giving pregnant teen girls additional options, so I couldn't help but think that my very existence was an oddity of a certain period of American history.

But of course everything is random. I just so happened to go to Northwestern University, where I met my wife, and circumstances conspired so that we would fall in love and get married and have our kids, and so on. Still, when I think back on those events, I can’t help but imagine that it was meant to be.

For the characters in Await Your Reply, the self is a kind of Ouroboros, a snake swallowing its own tail. While they are busy trying to reinvent themselves, their old identities are following along behind. But I’d like to think that at least one or two of them will be okay, and that not all of them are purely victims of fate.

You began as an acclaimed short story writer. What made you want to move onto novels and was this a difficult incarnation?

I moved into the novel form kicking and complaining. When I sold Among the Missing to Ballatine, I was contractually obligated to produce a novel as my next book. So I didn't exactly choose the form, and I think that I bring a certain “short story” sensibility with me even as it looks like I’ll be working with the novel form for at least a while longer.

The thing that I like about short stories is the way that the narrative is edged all around with shadow, you’re dealing with one single incident and the territory outside of that is unknown--in the way that old maps were drawn, before the world was round.

In many ways, I prefer the “slice of life” way of thinking about the world; I've never been good at trying to encapsulate or summarize or offer up big philosophical overviews. Yet, at the same time, I’ve gained an appreciation for the kind of expanded canvas that a novel can offer.

Ultimately, it seems to me that these two narrative forms, novels and short stories, can interact with one another in interesting ways. I’ve been working on short stories which reconnect with characters from You Remind Me of Me and Await Your Reply, while at the same time I’m thinking about short stories that I’ve been working on as potentially parts of a novel.

It reminds me of that old Sesame Street cartoon that I loved when I was a kid:http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=5qd9Bd4nX9Q

Yeah, I still think that’s profound. It still makes me a little weepy.

Your books are dark, but I also want to mention how hilariously funny you are and how you seem to have a huge interest in the weirdest,, funniest things in the world—i.e. strange posed photos of people from the fifties, strange food sites. So are you laughing in the darkness or are you a genuinely happy soul?

A genuinely happy soul? Gee, Caroline, that’s a tall order—and I probably wouldn't make the cut. I wouldn't describe myself as “light-hearted.”

But I do like to laugh, and even more I like to make other people laugh. But it depends on your sense of humor, I guess. The two of us, you and I, have a similar funny bone, I think—a little dark and a little campy. We’ve shared terrifyingly hilarious magazine ads from the twentieth century, and awful cookbooks, and so forth. And I imagine that you probably get the dry jokes that are peppered around in my work, which I often secretly chortle over. Miles, I think, is often endearingly humorous. I love the scene with him in the bar with his friend, and his big sex scene sent me into fits of giggles. And I thought Ryan’s songwriting was awesome. And I enjoyed Hayden’s mean, stand-up comedian observations.

In short, I think there are a lot of moments of levity in all my books, but it seems like most readers focus on the “dark” aspects. In fact, one reader review took me to task for my utter humorlessness, and I felt very guilty. Do I just think that I’m funny, when I’m actually not?

I tell myself that it’s probably an acquired taste—a peculiar sort of laughter. I’m not trying to convince anyone, but I’m not trying to apologize, either. Sometimes I feel like the absolute best effect in books is the moment that makes you laugh and feel like crying at the same time.Lorrie Moore is a master of that; so is George Saunders. So was my late wife, Sheila Schwartz.

My own sense of humor owes a lot to Sheila. Sheila died of Ovarian Cancer in November, 2008,after an eight year struggle with the disease, and that was as terrible as it sounds. But at the same time we both learned how to joke about the situation. Sheila was the funniest person I have ever known. She had a spine of steel and a heart of gold, and it was that weird combination—brutal irony mixed with compassion and empathy for people’s foibles—that made her such a great observer. Such a great writer.

Here is one of the essays that Sheila wrote during her illness, called “Three Cancer Patients Walk Into A Bar.” http://therumpus.net/2009/01/three-cancer-patients-walk-into-a-bar/Which I think is horrifying and hilarious and terribly, terribly heartbreaking, all in equal measure.

The reviews have been absolutely phenomenal for this book. Do you ever read your reader reviews on Amazon and Goodreads ( the from-the-masses reviews?) Have you ever gotten a bad review and if so how do you deal with it? Do you take it to heart or just laugh and go make yourself a sandwich?

It’s foolish, but I read everything. I have been warned against it, but ultimately I am really curious to know what readers have to say. It matters to me.

Of course, sometimes the people that write reviews for Amazon or Goodreads or whatever are idiots, but that’s actually pretty rare. Most of the time, if someone cares enough to bother to write their response to your book, they’ve usually spent as much time thinking about it as the average newspaper reviewer. And—realistically—those online reviews are likely to reach more readers than any newspaper ever will.

Some of the positive reviews on various social networks have been incredibly heartening and inspiring. And some of the negative reviews have hurt pretty bad, especially when I can see their point-- you’re right, I suck-- to the extent that I actually wish that I could give those people their money back, or reimburse them for the time they spent reading, or erase the memory of having read my book from their mind.

My wife, Sheila, had a wise thought about this. “You’re not writing for people who don’t like your books,” she said. “You’re writing for people who love your books.” And that’s the most comforting advice I’ve ever received.

Still, there are the nasty and stupid reviews, where I fantasize about hunting those people down and torturing them in some kind of Saw IV way. Of course, they think they are safely hiding behind some fake Internet identity, but someday I will find them, and they will be sorry. That means you, (Name withheld) from (town withheld), (state withheld.) I think you're a dick.

What question should I be absolutely mortified that I didn't ask you?

You should have asked me how to say my last name. "Chaon” = “Shawn.”

Much easier than it looks. But widely mispronounced.

Read this Book: Bird in Hand

Bird In Hand by Christina Baker Kline is one of those books that I have been carrying round with me and urging everyone on the planet to read. It's a knockout, about love, lies, and the choices we make that can change a life instantly and irrevocably. Plus, how can I not adore another writer who also is phobic about driving and accidents?

Bird in Hand took you eight years to write. What was your initial inspiration? What kept you going through such a long process? Did the novel change over the years?

The story of Bird in Hand emerged slowly, from a number of sources. I’ve always thought of this creative process as akin to sand rubbing against other detritus inside an oyster shell, eventually creating a pearl. (Though I recently learned that this theory of pearl formation is apocryphal, I still like the idea.) Here are a few I can identify:

Fear of Driving …. Just over ten years ago I moved from New York City to Montclair, New Jersey with my husband and two young boys. After many years of relying on subway trains and taxis, suddenly I was driving on unfamiliar (and confusing) highways, with not only my own precious human cargo in the backseat but other mothers’ as well. Late at night, I’d terrify myself with “What If” questions, such as: what if something happens to one of these children, my own or someone else’s? What if somehow I’m responsible? As I turned these kinds of questions over in my mind, I realized – with the writer part of my brain – that it would be a lot more useful and less neurotic to use them as material than to keep pointlessly obsessing.

The Seven-Year Itch …. My husband, David, and I had been married for seven years at that point, and were, like many of our friends, going through a complicated time: a new house, a new lifestyle, two small children, loss of autonomy for both of us, some loss of identity for me, a stressful job for him, a commute into the city … I wanted to write about the complexities many couples deal with at this stage of their lives, whether or not they come through intact.

And Now for Something Completely Different …. My other novels – The Way Life Should Be, Desire Lines, and Sweet Water – are all about young women on a quest to find out who they are. I wanted to write from male perspectives; I wanted to write about children; I wanted to give my characters clashing motivations. I wanted to explore darker subjects than I’d tackled in the past. For a while Bird in Hand seemed impossible to pull off. I couldn’t figure out the structure. (In fact, I put it aside for a few years and wrote The Way Life Should Be.) My amazing editor at Morrow, Kate Nintzel, came up with the idea of telling the back story – the part that takes place in England – in reverse chronological order. After that, the whole story fell into place.

Though Alison is portrayed, in some respects, as the victim of Charlie and Claire's affair, you are also very careful to show us Claire's side of the story, and Charlie's, too. Was that difficult for you to do? Did you find yourself siding with one character over another?

It was exhilarating to move from one character to another in this novel. I loved all of them equally. Flaubert famously said, of the vain, shallow, adulterous heroine of his most famous novel, “Madame Bovary, c’est moi” – and that’s exactly how I felt with these characters. I found that I sided with each as I wrote from that character’s perspective. It made perfect sense to me, writing as Claire, that she was entitled to Charlie’s love. I understood Ben’s ironic distance and distraction. I empathized with Charlie’s restlessness and yearning. And though Alison’s perspective begins and ends the novel, I always thought that the other characters were equally entitled to their points of view.

Writing Bird in Hand, with its multiple perspectives, spoiled me. When I began my novel-in-progress this spring (working title: Orphan Train), I intended to write from one character’s POV, but found it constricting. I decided to give voice to two other characters around her. It creates a richer writing experience for me – and I think it will expand the scope and the depth of this book.

Your personal experiences could inform pieces of both Alison and Claire: you are a writer like Claire; you re a mother like Alison. How, if at all, did you use your own life in creating all four characters?

One of the many joys of writing fiction is the alchemy of it. I love that bits and pieces of my own experience, my thoughts and feelings, overheard conversations, friends’ stories, movies, TV shows, and other books work their way in, often without my consciously realizing it. Grace Paley once said, “It is the responsibility of writers to listen to gossip and pass it on. It is the way all storytellers learn about life.” But to answer the question: I used my own life in many ways in this novel. I think that these four characters are all me, and they’re all my husband, David. They’re also lots of other people I’ve met. And no one at all. I felt like an actor (or perhaps several actors) writing this book: I truly inhabited these characters. I became them as I wrote.

Part of what makes this novel so compelling is the thought that any of this could happen to any of us. The details that make up this novel feel very real. How did you make this happen?

The accident scene gave me a lot of grief. I consulted with police officers, a passel of lawyers, and finally with a Vice President of Public Relations at Liberty Mutual Insurance Company, who patiently explained the intricacies of New Jersey laws and liabilities. Several times I was tempted to cut that opening altogether: I worried that it tilted the book too heavily toward Alison, that it formed a cloud that she couldn’t get out from under. But ultimately I think it is a crucial part of the story, propelling everyone toward the kind of seismic change that might not otherwise have happened. In a larger sense, I wanted to convey the idea that mundane and seemingly trivial details comprise the bulk of our existence. These details make us who we are.

Bird in Hand can be seen as a criticism of romanticizing modern marriage. And yet the ending isn't necessarily sad. Do you feel that each of the characters made the right choice? Or just made a choice?

In real life, I am something of a romantic – and happily married! But I also know that marriage is hard, even under the best of circumstances. In this novel I wanted to show what’s hard about marriage; I wanted to explore characters who can’t quite figure out how to communicate with each other. I wanted to follow them to all the dark and elusive places. Truly, I don’t think Alison and Ben had much of a choice in any of it. But I suppose I believe that for Alison to live the rest of her married life with someone who isn’t in love with her would be sad and pathetic.It’s better to know it now, while she’s young and has a chance for a rich, happy family life with someone else. Charlie’s decision may have been just the impetus she needs to find out what she really wants. And Ben? Maybe he’ll get that baby after all.

What are you working on now?

I love teaching at Fordham, where I’m Writer-in-Residence. And I’m working on a new novel, tentatively called Orphan Train. This is the first of my novels that involves an actual historical event and lots of research, which is both exciting and daunting. I’ve started a blog, which is exciting and fun to work on, about the experience of writing this novel – it’s about craft and discipline and the creative process. It’s called A Writing Year: Ideas and Inspiration for Writing a Novel, and you can find it at (http://christinabakerkline.wordpress.com/).

Welcome to bronchitis-ville

Sick. Antibiotics. Be back soon.

Read this Book: A Fortunate Age

A Fortunate Age by Joanna Smith Rakoff is today's The Group, only instead of Vassar, Rakoff gives us six Oberlin graduates struggling to find themselves and their fortunes as artists and academics in Manhattan. What's not to love?

Many years ago, you were a book reviewer. How did years of being a book critic inform your own novel? Did it affect what you wanted to accomplish with your novel?

It’s funny, because I began writing book reviews—and author profiles and suchlike—as a way to support myself while I wrote fiction and poetry, but for a few years it actually prevented me from doing so, partly because I was so busy. When you’re always on deadline, it’s hard to find space in your head to develop characters and stories (much less the intricate rhythms of a poem). But mostly reviewing made me excessively aware of the pitfalls of fiction, as well as the clichés of much contemporary fiction. As a critic, you’re reading analytically—trying to suss out the writer’s larger project and influences—but you’re also examining the nitty gritty of how each book works (or doesn’t work). At first, I think, this scared me away from fiction, as I realized how easy it is to fail. Or to simply to write a mediocre, first-person coming-of-age tale (I reviewed many of those). But eventually it helped me figure out exactly what I wanted to do with these characters I’d been writing about, loosely, for years. I was able to figure out the sort of tone I wanted for my omniscient narrator (slightly grand and Forster-ish, but intimate) and the sort of scope I wanted for the novel itself (large). In other words, I was able to think a bit more consciously about my work than I had been.

But my work as a critic also shaped the novel in that it led to a frustration with contemporary fiction, in general. As a young, female reviewer, I was often assigned novels and collections by my peers—women in their twenties and early thirties—and as the years went by I began to think about the similarities between these works, some of them wonderful, some awful, but most of them somehow small in scope. With some big exceptions, like Zadie Smith’s brilliant White Teeth or Donna Tartt’s The Little Friend or Jennifer Egan’s Look at Me, or, more recently, Claire Messud’s The Emperor’s Children, the novels I was reading by women lacked a certain breadth and ambition (even if what they achieved, in miniature, was wonderful). I kept waiting for a novel like, say, The Corrections to cross my desk—with a woman’s name below the title—but it didn’t. So, to an extent, I wrote the novel I wanted to read.

A FORTUNATE AGE is loosely based on Mary McCarthy’s The Group, and while there are plot similarities, there are also some pretty big differences, especially in terms of tone – while McCarthy’s book is a biting satire, your treatment of your characters is more gentle. Why are you kinder to your characters?

I think the big difference between McCarthy’s (great) novel and my own is that The Group is ultimately a comedy—at the end, the status quo is affirmed—whereas mine is, really, a tragedy. Many characters have achieved some semblance of security or happiness, but much has been lost along the way: their ambitions, their integrity, their hopes. In the larger sense, I suppose I’m not actually kinder to my characters, for things don’t work out quite as well for them. Or, perhaps, they’re slightly more self-aware than McCarthy’s characters, which means they’re doomed to unhappiness.

How would your novel be different if it was set in New York City today, rather than the internet boom New York City of the mid 90s? Do you think your characters, who are academics and artists, would be more or less determined to pursue their artistic and intellectual goals in this very different economy and world?

In some ways, I think the novel is completely rooted in the boom economy of the late 1990s and that twenty-six-year-olds moving to New York today are very different, that they’ve been spoiled by the lushness and ease of the past decade. But in a way, everything has come full circle and once you get past superficialities—Facebook, skinny jeans, etc.—there are perhaps more similarities than differences between Generation X and Y (or whatever you want to call them). We both grew up under the shadow of deeply conservative administrations. We both graduated from college into a recession. And, really, the twenty-five-year-olds in my midst—and there are quite a few—seem just as intellectually ambitious as were my friends at that age.

But also many people of older generations have read the novel and said, “This reminds me of when I moved to the city. I went through similar things.” And they moved here in the 1970s or 1980s. I think much of what the characters go through is somewhat universal.

That said, my novel definitely is very much about a specific chapter in New York’s history. In the mid-1990s, the city transformed itself—both in reality and in the world’s cultural imagination—from a crime-riddled, graffiti-scarred urban wasteland into a gentrified, tourist-friendly playland. My characters are very much part of that transformation.

How autobiographical is your novel? Are the characters based on real people? Is one of them based on you?

The novel is completely fictional, though certain incidents in it certainly bear a resemblance to things that have happened to me. I’ve certainly seen a few relationships similar to Lil and Tuck’s, and I’ve seen numerous actors go through struggles similar to Emily’s, and so on. There are little bits of Oberlin lore in it, which are pretty much real, like the mention of someone baking a bread coffin and eating her way out of it. That was my closest friend’s final project for her performance art class. Or the guy who made plaster casts of his penis and planted them in the garden outside the Conservatory.

Your book is set in Brooklyn in the mid 90s. How has the borough changed since your characters lived there?

Brooklyn, more than any other part of the city, was affected by the boom economy. When the novel begins, the neighborhoods in which my characters live—Williamsburg, Carroll Gardens, Cobble Hill—are slightly depressed, marginally dangerous, working class enclaves, with little pockets of artists and writers who had been priced out of the East Village, Brooklyn Heights, etc. The high streets in both areas—Bedford Avenue in Williamsburg; Smith and Court Streets in Carroll Gardens and Cobble Hill—were largely home to drug-front bodegas and liquor stores encased in bullet-proof glass. Today, those streets—and many others in the areas—are lined with bistros and boutiques, over which tower dozens of new condo developments. Both areas are now primarily home to affluent young families. Most of my friends still live in both those neighborhoods, thanks to rent stabilization, and feel that things have gone too far. They now feel out of place among the hedge fund managers or what have you. It’s an old story, of course. The same thing happened to the West Village and Soho in the 1980s. But if my characters were to move to the city today, they’d likely be moving to Bushwick or Bed-Stuy or Crown Heights.

One of the best parts of your book is the relationships between your characters and their parents. Did your own relationship with your parents inspire these sections of the book?

Yes. My parents are of the same generation as the Peregrines—they grew up during the Depression and World War II—and my relationship with them was, from what I could see, rather different than those of my friends who were just one generation removed from their parents. I was always very aware that my parents possessed a different set of values than the other parents I knew. And because I came along so late in their lives, they treated me more like a mascot than a kid. After I was born, they didn’t really adjust their lifestyle much; they simply took me with them. We traveled frequently. We had late dinners at Hungarian restaurants that specialized in calves’ brains. I was expected to just entertain myself when I got bored and I usually did so with a book.

But it led to my feeling very close to them. As a kid and a teenager, I spent perhaps too much time thinking about my parents—the lives they lived before I came long; the selves they kept hidden from me (and why they chose to do so)—and about how they’ve shaped me. And how they were shaped by the eras in which they came of age. My mother, right now, is sick with worry about the recession. She lived through the Depression. She knows how bad it can get.

What was your first job when you moved to New York?

My first real job was at a grand, storied literary agency, Harold Ober Associates, where I was the assistant to the president, a grand, storied lady named Phyllis Westberg, who was wonderful to me – if a bit scary, at times – and gave me more responsibilities than, perhaps, she should have, which really allowed me to learn about the publishing industry and literary culture, in general. I'd just dropped out of a Ph.D. program and still thought, rather pompously, of myself as a scholar, which made Ober a great place to work, as they were primarily known, at that time, for the estates they represented: Dylan Thomas, Langston Hughes, Agatha Christie, Ross MacDonald, Anna Kavan, and tons of others. But perhaps the most interesting and strange part of my job was answering J. D. Salinger's fan mail. Salinger, a longtime client of the agency, received tons of mail, as you can imagine, much of it very personal and strange, and much of it from teenagers who had formed a sort of hysterical identification with Holden Caulfield. I was supposed to send a form letter to each and every Salinger fan, but over my time at Ober I began personalizing letters and -- it's bizarre to think about it now! -- entered into a correspondence with a few of them. I actually still have some of my favorite letters from that time (which are supposed to be filed away somewhere in the Ober archives...).

Read the Book: The World Beneath

Years ago, I reviewed Aaron Gwyn's dark, quirky collection of short stories set around a fundamentalist community, Dog on the Cross, for my column in the Boston Globe and raved about how inventive it was, how the author got at the heart of how people grapple with afflictions of the soul and the body. It was one of my favorite books of the year and it was a finalist for the 2005 New York Public Library Young Lions Award. So of course I was interested to see that Aaron had a new novel out, The World Beneath. Sparer in language, it’s even more powerful and haunting-I was stunned. The book intersects two stories--one about a missing, haunted fifteen-year-old boy, and the other about an Iraq war veteran who becomes obsessed with a mysterious, bottomless crevice in his backyard. So I had to talk with Aaron.

Often, writing a second novel after a successful first one, is fraught with all kinds of anxieties. What was it like for you?

It was a grueling process. There were periods of great productivity where I’d get a lot of material in a relatively short time, and then months of creeping along at a snail’s pace, or worse, sitting around doubting the project altogether. When my agent told me he sold it to W.W. Norton, I felt like someone had lifted a piano off my back.

The whole idea of the bottomless crevice, which figures symbolically and literally in the plot knocked me out, and made me obsessively aware of the ground beneath my feet. It’s the stuff of horror films, yet it’s presented so matter of factly, that it becomes all the more unsettling. Where did that idea of this endless crevice come from?

That’s a great question. I wish I could answer it. The truth is, I don’t know. It’s just something that came to me. The first thing in the whole project that came to me, actually. There’s no precedent for it that I know (in terms of a news story or an actual geologic occurrence). I found out in researching the book that such things can happen (collapsed oil wells, etc.), but the idea was just there one day. It’s probably the one thing in the book I can’t account for.

Your prose is diamond-cut: hard-edged, spare, but each word seems burning from within. Who have your writing influences been?

Thankfully, I can answer this one. Beckett’s fiction had been very important for me. Particularly his “trilogy”: Molloy, Malone Dies, and The Unnamable. Cormac McCarthy has affected all writers of my generation and Faulkner, all writers with a Southern bent. I would also have to say that playwright David Mamet is probably more of an influence than I’d even like to admit, and I feel like I’ve learned a tremendous amount about dialogue from studying his plays. I could go on to list a host of others, but I’ll only add that Denis Johnson is a writer who I greatly admire and it’s nice to see him finally getting the attention he deserves.

The book moves effortlessly from the past to the present, in and out of characters' heads, and uses two powerful parallel stories, one about a damaged Iraq war veteran, and the other about a troubled teenager boy. It all feels surprising and yet inevitable. So of course, I have to ask you about the process. What was it like writing this novel? Are you an outliner or did the book generate as you went along?

The section with the veteran and the hole was the first I wrote and was, in the beginning, going to be the entirety of the narrative. About 75 pages in I realized I was basically trying to write the novel from the perspective of the “villain” (a word I use very loosely…perhaps “antagonist” is better). That’s when the other story, that of Sheriff Martin entered. As I began to work with his arc, the two plotlines began to weave together in a way that felt really organic to me. I almost feel like I can’t take credit for that. I understand that to some reviewers the structure seems elaborate and complex, but that happened to be the way the narrative forced itself on me. I couldn’t really conceive of another way of structuring the book. I find it of interest how many reviewers comment on the structure. For some, it’s the best thing the book has to offer. For other, it’s a liability (i.e. one review called the book “uneven” because of the narrative sequencing). It seems that’s an element of the novel people really love or hate.

What are you working on now?

I’m working on my next novel and my next story collection. The stories have been finding good homes. Two have been in McSweeney’s, Esquire took another this spring (it’s entitled “The Gray” and those interested can access it free online at www.esquire.com), and another (the strongest, I think, so far) is coming out in the October issue of The Gettysburg Review. I’ve been going back and forth between the novel and the collection as ideas come to me.