Read this Book: Slut Lullabies by Gina Frangello

Gina Frangello is the author of the critically acclaimed novel My Sister's Continent. She's the executive editor and co-founder of Other Voices Books, and the editor of the fiction section at The Nervous Breakdown. She's also one of the funniest people on the planet. Thank you so much, Gina for answering all my questions.

First, let’s talk about the title, Slut Lullabies, which conveys a mix of shock with tenderness. How did you come up with that title and how do you feel that it evokes the stories?

I’m almost not sure how to answer in terms of the mixture of shock and tenderness, because there’s too much I want to say about that. That, right there, conveys just about everything I’m trying to do with my work. Not “shock” per se, but the juxtaposition between violence and tenderness, ugliness and beauty, exploitation and empowerment, victims and perpetrators—all those lines that, in my view, are entirely too black and white in most narratives, not just in books of course but in film, in all media. Whereas the blurring of those lines is what interests me. The being both things at once. The contradiction or ambiguity, and the way one thing doesn’t erase the other but heightens it. Like, I recently read on Facebook a comment someone made that I had “reclaimed” the word slut, and I like that, I’m certainly for the reclaiming of words that have been used to oppress women or racial groups, but I don’t mean to redefine slut or reclaim it so much as I mean to evoke all its many truths simultaneously.Slut can be a fun word, a girl-power word about freedom and lust and gratification and self-ownership . . . but it can also be a very harsh word, not only in terms of judgments made by others but in terms of practical reality. Sometimes being a “slut” is no fun at all.Sometimes it really is ugly, and powerless, and desperate, and unsatisfying or even violent.Sometimes it can be all of those things at different times for the same woman, in the same life.There is rarely one Truth; there’s only one truth at a time.I feel very tenderly towards contradictions.

The actual title “Slut Lullabies” came to me once in a hotel room and obsessed me for at least five years before I wrote the title story of my collection.It was one of those jarring moments when a phrase comes to you and just sinks in its hooks. I didn’t know what the title meant at the time—what the lullabies themselves were going to be. My original concept was quite different, in that my first idea for a story by that name was about a young mom who had lied to her husband about her sexual past, and now found herself trapped, in a sense, in her new identity, and increasingly aware that the person she was pretending to be—the role model she was providing her children—was not really “her,” not just sexually but on any level . . . that she was acting, playing a part, and in a sense there was offering up her children an artificial person with whom to bond. I may write that story someday, but now it will have to have a different title. “Slut Lullabies” became something else—the story of Emily and her dying mother, a former party girl divorcee. In both contexts, “lullabies” was tied in with the intersection of sexuality and mothering, though. In the first story, it would have been more literal.The later context—the sounds of Emily’s mother’s bed banging against the shared wall of their respective bedrooms while her mother slept with various neighborhood men, and that sound being the “lullaby” of Emily’s youth—is very different, more loose and metaphorical, which appeals to me more.

You’ve written both a novel and short stories. Is the process different for you, and which do you prefer and why?

I have actually written four novels—not including the ones I wrote prior to the age of eighteen—it’s just that only one,My Sister’s Continent, is already published. Another,London Calling, which was actually the first one I wrote chronologically, is coming out next year, and my most recent novel, A Life in Men, is being shopped by my agent Ellen Levine right now. Another is in a drawer, so to speak . . . which now means a computer file, of course. Hopefully not forever, but for now.

There is no question that the novel is the form that compels me most as a writer. Even my stories, as you’ve seen, tend to be on the long side, certainly for today’s trends of very short stories. I have spent the vast bulk of my life, since the age of 10, working on some novel or other. For me, short fiction is like a very intense but brief affair, whereas a novel is like a whole marriage, like having an entire family. There is no saying that one of these experiences is more powerful than the other in an absolute sense—we all know older, long-married people who look back on their lives and feel their most vibrant memories, or when they were most “alive,” was during some short affair in their youth. So I don’t doubt that there would be readers who feel that my short fiction is the thing that speaks to them most strongly among my work, or where they would find the most resonance. That is a subjective thing that is far beyond the hands of the writer.But for me, novel writing is my obsession.

The why of that is . . . complicated. Some of it has to do with the freedom to roam that a novel provides, whereas short fiction is so much about economy and choices. But it’s far more about how the duration of time it takes to complete a novel impacts a writer’s psyche, and the depth of how lost in that world the writer can get. Some of my short stories are written in a single sitting or a few days, whereas a novel might take me four years. Like many writers, I get a certain high, that writerly brand of runner’s endorphins, where I hit a certain stride in a novel and the lines of reality begin to blur for me, where I’m truly living in the pages, and a kind of perpetual buzz takes over. Most writers have been there, where you can’t eat or sleep and don’t answer your phone because the obsession is too strong. It’s like drugs or like the longest lovemaking session of your life, and it is damn hard to top. Novels just sustain that in a different way than short fiction can. Novels are dangerous for this reason; I think novels can be dangerous to a writer. This is why they’re so seductive.

What I loved is how you explore class and sex with such edginess. The surprises—in one story a girl blackmails her teacher to help her stepmother escape domestic violence, another wants a window washer to watch her having sex—are raw, unsettling and funny. I’ve seen reviews where you’ve been called a feminist writer, and I was wondering, given that you seem to target all genders, if you think that’s accurate and/or limiting.

This is a great question. This is a question I have always wanted to be asked. God, bear with me for a minute, because this is the kind of question you almost have to break down in pieces to get at, if you know what I mean. The first thing I want to say about all this is that it utterly freaks me out how successful the media has been at branding the word “feminist” to mean something that would not be of any interest to men or is anti-male. I am always amazed at how most of my twenty-two-year-old female students do not want to be labeled as “feminist” for fear that guys will think they’re vitriolic shrews who aren’t interested in sex—that only crunchy hippies with unshaven armpits and socks under their sensible sandals would want to be identified with feminism.The concept of feminist as an offensive and alienating word that is mutually exclusive with sexiness and pleasure stuns and concerns me really deeply. At its root, doesn’t feminist just mean—I mean really, at the most basic level—the belief that women should be afforded the same fundamental rights as men? Isn’t this something that most people . . . well, maybe I should say most people who read literary fiction at all . . . completely endorse already?There is almost nobody I associate with on a regular basis, male or female, whom I would not consider feminist in a basic philosophical outlook on life. The entire corporate publishing industry, as everybody knows, is virtually run by women editors and agents, and so is almost by definition a feminist industry.And yet perhaps no other industry is quite so absurd and strident about trying to label what “women” want, i.e. chick lit or celebrity memoirs, vs what male readers will not find palatable in literary women writers, i.e. don’t call them feminist or the men will run like hell.

I feel like this whole concept is a farce. If you break it down, most European countries, and certainly Blue State America, are already feminist entities. By that I do not mean that women are always fully actualized or have perfect lives . . . men don’t have perfect lives either.Feminist isn’t synonymous with Utopian, and I don’t mean that we don’t still need more women in the Senate or what have you.But I mean that in the world I inhabit, or probably anyone reading this inhabits, we all share basic belief systems about the validity of women’s intelligence and human rights, and yet somehow feminist is a dirty word, even in this kind of global community. It’s very silly.

There is no question that my work is extremely concerned with gender politics. Two of my favorite women writers are Mary Gaitskill and Margaret Atwood, both of whom are, of course, absolute masters of gender politics on the page. But their reputations are quite different. Atwood is thought of as an explicitly feminist writer, whereas Gaitskill seems to eschew gendered labels like that, or to have somehow transcended them. Why is this?Some of it may be generational.Atwood wrote some now-canonical second wave feminist fiction when it was cutting edge to do so—in the early 1970s—and that work may seem dated now. Gaitskill became known as a writer in the 90s, when the term postfeminist was all the rage in academia and the media alike. Both Atwood and Gaitskill write extremely complex characters of both genders, and play with both male and female points of view.Both are fundamentally far more interested in flawed, human characters than they are in easy saints or villains. Both deal with the way men and women grapple with each other—but also with many otherthings—in and out of the bedroom. Here I’m going to resort to a stereotype and even say that, stylistically, Atwood would seem to write fiction that appeals more to men because she tackles fantasy, distopia, sci-fi, whereas Gaitskill writes . . . and I’m using this term very ironically here . . . more “domestic” fiction, fiction about relationships, families, sexual mores, etc. Yet in fact, the exact opposite is true in terms of their readership. I know scads of men who worship Gaitskill’s work, whereas when I recently attended a Margaret Atwood reading in Chicago that was packed with hundreds of fans, maybe one-tenth of the audience was male, and they all seemed to be with their wives and girlfriends. I was really shocked. Atwood is a Booker Prize winner, and her new book is sci-fi, and she’s widely considered one of the best writers alive today by critics. So why aren’t men reading her more? I think that label, that simple generational label of her having been branded as a “feminist” writer, whereas Gaitskill came about late enough to avoid that label or has perhaps actively worked against being pigeonholed in that way, is the answer.

I’m, of course, not Atwood or Gaitskill. I have two books out with indie presses, and I am thrilled when anyone at all reads them! But I’m also very incredulous about whether a writer has to specifically avoid being labeled as feminist in order to attract male readers. If they do, then I guess I’m happy not to be more “famous” because I don’t think I’d be any good at that game. Yes, I very much want men to read my work. To be perfectly honest, the men I’ve met in the writing world have by and large been my biggest supporters—I do have some very strong women mentors, but coming up as a writer, it was male writers, professors, agents who took the most interest in what I was doing and with whom I formed very close bonds. Most of the blurbers for Slut Lullabies are male, and my editor, Bryan Tomasovich, is obviously a man. It would totally bum me out if guys thought they were not going to like this book because I am a “feminist writer.” That would be a great loss for me in terms of the connections I get to make with readers, because I think men are some of my best readers.

But this is just a branding issue.Whether critics call me a feminist writer, or whether I self-identify as one or not, on a strictly literal level of course I am one. To be honest, every writer I have ever read who has seemed relevant to me is a feminist to some extent, whether they label as such or not, including the men, including old guys like Milan Kundera, around whom many of the self-proclaimed feminists rally in despising—including Doctorow or Updike or Roth.Maybe this just has to do with how people are defining feminism. If the definition seems scary or alienating to them, or dated and irrelevant, or only applicable to a kind of politically correct, didactic writing, then maybe they just are not defining it in the right way.

I love your statement that writers are liars, gossips and thieves, which also seems to apply to your characters. Care to elaborate?

Yeah, I suppose all of humanity is constituted of gossips, liars and thieves, right? Writers are just foolish enough todocument ourselves as we gossip, lie and steal. We have to answer to all the people we condensed, morphed and approximated on the page.

My short fiction is much, much more based on real life situations than my novels tend to be, because there is less room in short fiction to spin a plot out into its own fully independent realm. Yet to admit that is risky, because then people sometimes think that everything is literally true.If that were the case the book would be a memoir—they sell better these days anyway than short story collections! Of course the truth is that even in creative nonfiction, memory is subjective, perspectives vary, and writers as divergent as Stephen Elliott and Pam Houston engage concepts like there being many aspects of memoirs that fall far outside the realm of fact checking. As a fiction writer, though, I don’t name names—I couldn’t since most of my characters are blends of a number of people along with fabrication. Very little in my fiction is literal, even when it’s autobiographical. Like many writers, I may take a kernel of an event or a fragment of a person, and begin weaving from there . . .

Still, for this book, I confess I’ve had to take a few friends to dinner and say, “Look, you need to read this story right now and if you want to yell at me, do it right here and now so we can get it out in the open.”Thus far, nobody has yelled, and people have been interested in the stories that were “about them,” and how the real and the fabricated intermingle, and how I’ve recast them or imagined alternate lives for them. What I’ve said to friends—and I mean this quite sincerely—is that if you recognize yourself at all in my work it’s a compliment because it means I’ve spent quite a bit of time trying to decipher you, and something about you fascinated me.Honestly, I have probably spent way more time on you than you have on me in this case. So maybe it’s if you’re not in there that you should be miffed!

What do you look for when you’re looking at manuscripts? And does that impact your own writing?

I am not one of those writers who reads “everything” voraciously. I love to read, of course—nobody would work as an editor of a literary magazine for twelve years and then launch an indie book press if reading were not a major passion, since I’m certainly not in it for the money! But I’m a very picky reader. I find a lot of what I start to read dull. I am easily bored, so my single biggest requirement as a reader is that something actually grip me and punch me in the gut.Many things are competently written, with a decent plot, yet I feel indifferent to them; it’s too easy to walk away and put them down.

This is about character—about intimacy vs. distance. A lot of literary fiction seems, to me, to hold the reader at too great a polite distance from the characters. The prose is often beautiful, and the plot intellectually relevant, but I feel like I’m reading from behind a gauzy veil, where there is too much style over substance, or substance over heart. I think it goes without saying that I don’t mean heart in the sense of “sentimentality”—what I mean is that I want to be able to really get inside a character and touch their brain, swirl my fingers around in their blood, to put it bluntly. There’s this great Kundera quote that says, “Love is a constant interrogation.”Reading has to be like falling in love. You have to feel like you know a secret and are about to find out another. Like you understand something about the object of your love that nobody else knows. It has to feel intimate, and a little raw, and a little scary, for it to be worth the investment.

I talked about Mary Gaitskill earlier, and she’s brilliant at this. Arundhati Roy’s The God of Small Things made me feel like I was inside the characters’ skin in an entirely private world, even though it was told from an editorial omniscient, roving point of view. Roy’s prose is what I’d call “hot,” but Kundera can work that kind of magic too, laying people out bare for you without ever breaking the “cool” of his style of omniscient narration. You have to possess an exceptional talent to get a reader that close to your characters while also doing the kinds of stylistic gymnastics that Roy or Kundera undertake. It is no mean feat.

Probably the most intimate book I’ve ever read is probably E.L. Doctorow’s Book of Daniel.That novel changed everything I believed about what novels could “do.” Two other really intimate novels, in entirely different veins, are Francesca Marciano’s Rules of the Wildand Kate Braverman’s Lithium for Medea. The writer has to be willing to really expose the characters, all their demons and selfishness and desires.When you read something like these novels, it’s hard to pick something else up without it feeling dry.

So I look for the same thing as an editor as I do as a reader, period. I want to be knocked on my ass. I want to feel like if some other editor published this instead of me, or if I had never found this book, my heart would be broken. I want to feel like the writer can read my mind, or better yet, make me feel like I am no longer in my own mind but inhabiting someone else’s whose thoughts are overriding mine. Other Voices Books specializes in short fiction, and I think great short stories are even harder to pull off than novels because you are allowed fewer missteps. A collection has to feel both continually fresh and yet resonantly cohesive, which can seem mutually exclusive but of course is not. A short story collection should feel perpetually electric, where each new piece offers an opportunity to give you a shock.

What’s obsessing you now in your work?

I’m a binge writer and right now I haven’t written new fiction in literally nine months.This sounds treasonous, I know. I’m supposed to say I get up every morning at four a.m. before my three kids are awake and I spend two hours at my computer no matter what, even if I only write thirteen words.But I don’t do that. Sometimes I don’t write for a year. I have three kids under the age of ten, no childcare other than the hours when they’re in school, and I run a book press, an online magazine (I’m the Fiction Editor of The Nervous Breakdown) and teach at two universities, plus I’m about to go on a book tour for Slut Lullabies. I have exactly thirty hours per week when my children are not all in the house, and my home office doesn’t have a door, and my husband works traditional hours and isn’t home until after six. On top of all that, I love to go to readings, to parties, to dinner; I travel a lot; I talk on the phone to friends almost as much as a high schooler; I volunteer at my kids’ school’s Green Committee and am running a 6^th Grade Fiction Writing Residency in a Chicago Public School where there is very little creative writing offered. So my own writing just isn’t always the dominant thing in my life, and when it can’t be I tend to go cold turkey.

The thing is, if I let myself write, I won’t get anything else done. I can’t say, Okay I have an hour to write, and leave it at that. Though I sometimes wish I were, I’m just not built that way. When I’m working on something new, I will write twelve or fourteen hours a day if it is at all humanly possible. If I have to stop after four or five hours, I will write inside my head obsessively until my hands can get back on the keyboard. I manage not to starve my kids when I’m writing, but truthfully that is often about all I can manage other than the work—it becomes all-consuming. I know you can relate to this! Many writers can, though I guess not all: for some it seems more a practice and a discipline, not an obsession.

Right now, though, I am still coming down from A Life in Men. After finishing a novel, it’s common for me not to be able to write new material for at least half a year. A Life in Menhit me harder than any other novel I’ve ever written in terms of that mania that takes hold when I’m finishing a project.But I do have three other novels in my head now, starting to elbow each other for which will be the first to come out. I won’t know really until I get the chance to sit down after mySlut Lullabies tour is over and I have the physical and intellectual space to explore that in a real way. Then one of them will just claim dominance and that story will begin writing itself. Thinking about it makes me crave that—that energy and inspiration and possession—but it’ll be awhile yet.

What question should I be mortified I didn’t ask you?

Well, I live for the opportunity to pimp my Other Voices Books authors, so since you asked what you didn’t ask, I’ll gladly tell you about our new spring title, Currency by Zoe Zolbrod.Zoe and I will be touring together in Austin, New York, Los Angeles, Portland, Seattle and a bunch of other places. Her novel is the inaugural title of OV’s Morgan Street International Novel Series, and it’s a sexy literary thriller about exotic animal trafficking, Southeast Asia, and a cross-cultural love affair between an American woman backpacker and a small-time Thai hustler called Piv. I first read a draft of this novel ten years ago, when I didn’t even run a book press and wasn’t publishing novels, and Piv got under my skin way back then—I couldn’t get him out of my head. He’s one of the most vibrant and memorable characters I’ve read in contemporary fiction, published or unpublished, and I’m so thrilled that Other Voices Books can be the one to bring him, and Zoe’s exhilarating debut novel, to the world.

Read This Book: The Lotus Eaters by Tatjana Soli

The Lotus Eaters by Tatjana Soli follows three people caught in war-torn Vietnam: a female photojournalist, a charismatic male photographer and a conflicted soldier. It's a breathtaking book, and I am thrilled that Tatjana can be here to answer my questions.

What made you obsessed with the idea of a female photojournalist in Vietnam? Why this topic—and why at this time?

I was always obsessed with Vietnam. My mother worked for NATO and then at Fort Ord, so the military — soldiers leaving, families breaking up — was real to me even though I was a small child and didn’t understand what it was about. But when I grew up I read all I could in order to understand. Discovering that a few women covered the war as reporters was that magic piece that suddenly turned it into the inspiration for a novel.

I get nervous trying to figure out why I write about certain subjects, but I will explore two things. One, that there were parts of the war that I had never seen addressed before. I wanted a book about war that was rooted in the place where it happened. War does not occur on a stage set, or in a neutral vacuum, but on someone’s birthplace, in their home, where their families live. If it’s not on one’s own home turf, it’s easy to take this all for granted.

Two, I think the reason that a photographer working in a war zone appealed to me is that I wanted to explore what it means to bear witness. I admire journalists tremendously, I’m in awe of what they do, but I also wanted to explore what that kind of work does to one. There are very few that can keep at it for sustained periods. The burnout is incredibly high. What is the dark side to having this altruistic impulse? And of course as in any other profession, there are those in it for the wrong reasons. I wanted to show that too.

Timing was an accident. The novel took ten years, from start to publication. Since 2000, the world, in terms of the US involved in foreign conflicts, has changed tremendously. And yet there are so many parallels between today and the Vietnam war that you could almost view it as a cautionary tale.

You spent ten years writing and researching your novel, which is haunting, alive and quite extraordinary. What sustained you during all those years of writing? Was there ever a point where you felt completely lost or like giving up?

Well, I can assure you if I had known it would take all these years it would have been bad. Ignorance is bliss. What sustained me is that I loved the story — this was something that I wanted to live out in the process of writing it. As hard as it is to write something and have it not see publication, if it’s deeply important to you, I don’t think it’s time wasted. Like everyone else, I was really moved by Paul Harding’s story, winning the Pulitzer with his novel, Tinkers. It was the same novel, when it languished in a drawer for three years, when it was published by a small house, and now that it’s won the Pulitzer. As a writer, you have to learn to value your work independently from what happens to it out in the world, but at the same time you don’t want to be delusional. It’s a hard balance to maintain.

What surprised you about your research, particularly with female war photographers?

There were many interesting things about the handful of women photographers who covered Vietnam. The two that I focused on, Dickey Chapelle and Catherine Leroy, went out of their way to appear tough, to measure up to the men. Dickey Chapelle was more a product of post-WWII. She was anti-Communist and pro-military, and she bought into the heroism aspect of the war. She was only there for the beginning of Vietnam, but she thought America was right to be there.

Catherine Leroy went on to cover other wars. After covering Lebanon, she swore off war coverage totally. This is just me guessing, but I think something broke in her. After all the awards she had won, the hopelessness, the endless cycle of war, destroyed her. If there was one person I would have wanted to talk to at length before writing the book, it would have been Catherine.

Can you talk about the title, please, and its meaning in the novel?

The Lotus Eaters forget all thoughts of home. But “home” means more than a physical place. It is a mental place of comfort and familiarity; it is a belief system. Once you really “see,” in a deep sense, the injustices of the world, can you go back to a place of blindness? Can you go back to living out your private, happy life? The addiction to the adrenaline of war is superficial compared to that.

The only thing to counteract all the darkness of violence is connection, love, to another human being. But you are grabbing it like a lifeline, so there is obsession involved. This is the only person in the world who has been through what you have, a bond that can’t be shared with many others.

Why did you begin the novel with the Fall of Saigon and then backtrack to tell Helen’s story? How did that particular structure impact your story, do you think?

My interest was in Helen at this particular moment in her life, a telling one both personally and historically. That’s the engine that fuels the search into the past. I’ve been writing about the iconic war photographs of that time, but the whole fall of Saigon, the pictures of the crowds beating against the embassy gates, helicopters taking off from the rooftops, it’s one of those moments in history that you never come to the end of. In some ways, it represents the whole disaster of the war. The rest of the novel is an exploration of how this moment came to pass. Character is revealed in the difficult moments in life, not when it’s all smooth sailing.

I hope that structuring the book in the way I did throws the interest on how the characters change and develop rather than the false glamour of war and combat. Unlike the outcome of a sports game, you are being told at the very start who lost. With that out of the way, let’s find out who these people are. Because that’s the real explanation of war, not the outcomes of battles.

Photojournalists are often witnesses to history, rather than part of it—and sometimes there’s a cost to that. Can you talk about that a bit?

That’s a complicated question. There’s a school of thought that it is more professional to stay outside of events, to not take a position, so to speak. To be neutral, as if there were such a thing. I think that people who do this are trying to protect themselves from being affected by events. The more I read about photojournalists, the more I understood that there is a price to bearing witness. You are part of it, whether you want to be or not. There is the bitterness of being helpless to change the outcome. Of seeing things you can’t recover from. I think that’s what happened to Catherine Leroy. There’s another way, one of my favorite examples, of doing what is within your ability. Nick Ut saved the little girl, Kim Phuc, who was burned by napalm. He became her lifelong friend. It’s what was within his ability to do. Sometimes saving one person is enough.

I’m intensely curious about what topic is obsessing you now for your next book?

After a novel that required so much in terms of research about place, time, photography, the military, I wanted to set myself a different kind of technical challenge with my second novel. It is set on a citrus ranch in present-day California. But my obsession is with the two main characters. Issues of race and power and identity that actually aren’t so different than in my first novel.

What question should I be mortified that I didn’t ask?

You asked such good questions! I’d like to add a lifestyle question, in terms of balance in the writing life. I believe that you should be absolutely obsessed by your work, and then at the end of your work time, let it go. Each day I take a long hike with my husband and my dog. I don’t have time for it, there are about a thousand things that need to get done NOW, but we take our hike. Make sure you have a release valve.

Reading Group Guide questions

Ah yes, it's time to write my reading group guide questions for Pictures of You, coming November from Algonquin books. Doing reading group guides requires a different part of the brain than the writing of the novel. You have to become critical, yet not so critical that you feel as if you are writing Sparks Notes. I grew so baffled and befuddled writing mine that I began to get a little slap-happy, so in the interest of feeding my personal lunacy, I've come up with the following reading group guide questions instead:

1. Which fancy restaurant would you like to take Caroline to and why?

2. If you had to issue a restraining order against one of the characters in Pictures of You, which one would it be and why?

3. What fabulous gift do you think the author would most appreciate and why haven't you sent it to her yet?

4. If you could play matchmaker, which character from this novel would you fix up with characters from other Leavitt novels?

5. If Caroline did not write another novel, which profession do you think would best suit her: dentist, animal portrait painter or exhibitionist?

Holly LeCraw talks about The Swimming Pool

Holly LeCraw's The Swimming Pool is the kind of dark, thorny, complex novel I love. But don't take my word for it. Amy Tan called it riveting and psychologically complex, Tom Perrotta called it gripping and passionate, and raves came in from People, Entertainment Weekly and more, giving this glorious novel the attention it deserves. I'm honored to have Holly here answering my questions. The story of a present day love affair against the backdrop of a past filled with secrets and lies, The Swimming Pool is truly knockout.

Thank you so much, Holly.

So, what’s it like to be a debut novelist getting all this attention?

Unreal. It’s a dream come true, and all the rest of it. But I am very conscious that I am at the beginning (hopefully) of a career, and I will have much more to be proud of when I have stuck it out and written several books, not just one. I should probably just relax and enjoy it more…I am always a little too concerned about hubris.

Where did the idea of the novel come from? (I read your remarkable essay on Amazon about the line between what happens in real life and what happens in an author’s fiction, so I had to ask this.)

The characters, the plot—I honestly don’t know. But there were certain themes that had been on my mind, and I think the story came about because of those preoccupations. I was thinking about how obsessed we are with control, and how in this life it’s all illusion; it can disappear in a second—for instance, the moment you find out someone you love has been murdered. I am a Metro section addict—I read about the things that befall ordinary people, and wonder what happens next, after all the news articles have been written. And so often those stories involve secrets, and ordinary, decent people making terrible decisions. Also, I am a mother, and I started the book when my kids were very small. So, really, it is parental love that is the underpinning of the book. The illicit romantic stuff is really just the surface.

Betrayal figures prominently in The Swimming Pool—do you think it’s ever possible to be betrayed) or to do the betraying) and come away unscathed?

I don’t think so. I think it’s possible to heal, but no way would it not leave a wound. I don’t know if I personally could survive it, or if I could heal very well.

Honestly, the plot of The Swimming Pool involves things I would never do. Dear God, I hope not. But I knew that they were things that these characters would do, and that these characters were not fundamentally bad people, despite their actions. I wanted to dig down and understand the how and why.

The ending, which I won’t give away, is a stunner. At what point in writing the novel did you know what your ending was going to be? Did it surprise you?

Let me just say that I am dying to go visit some book groups (I already have a few scheduled), so I can talk about the book with people who have read it! It will be so interesting to hear what people think of the ending. It came about naturally—I didn’t know it at the beginning of the process, certainly. When I had the idea it shocked me (just like the idea of Jed and Marcella’s affair shocked me), but it also seemed right. Once that idea was in my head, nothing else would work.

I knew that my job then would be to make it believable from a character point of view. The characters involved absolutely had to act organically, and the ending had to be the natural outgrowth of their other actions and of who they were. Also, I don’t think it’s shocking from a whodunit point of view; real mystery buffs would probably spot it a mile away. But I think it’s shocking from a character point of view.

Speaking of the ending, I should mention that the only really substantive change my editor wanted was for me to lop off the last seven pages of the manuscript—what was essentially an epilogue. I absolutely agonized over it, but in the end I decided she was right. And she was. Now I can’t imagine it any other way. I like very much that these characters come to some sense of peace and resolution, but that the story is not over—it’s continuing, somewhere, after you close the book. I know where I think they go, but readers might have other ideas. Which is as it should be.

I have to comment on the great marketing strategy—a book about a steamy love affair, dark secrets, set on the beach, yet with a pedigree of blurbs that makes it undeniably literary. I especially loved the marketing letter which ended, “Is it hot in here?” as a tease. Were you involved in the strategy? Was this how you saw your novel?

No, that line was my editor’s. She gets all the credit. I always saw it as literary fiction—or, at least, that was what I was shooting for. The more commercial aspect of it is surprising to me. Probably because when you’re writing your first book in total obscurity, it’s amazing to think that anyone will ever want to read it! I like the term “literary page-turner.” Literary merit and plot are, obviously, not mutually exclusive. I always read for plot—although by plot I usually mean emotional plot rather than action, and in the end that’s what this book is about. It is about how characters get from A to B to C emotionally and psychologically. There is a tremendous amount of tension in those evolutions.

I also want to say that I was so, so lucky with those blurbs. Those authors were extremely generous; it’s an embarrassment of riches.

What idea is obsessing you now?

My next book. The working title is The Sweetness of Honey. It’s a Cain and Abel story about two half-brothers, nearly twenty years apart in age, who are both teachers at a New England prep school; they fall in love with the wrong people, who, just to make things interesting, are also the same people…the center of the book is the older brother, who’s Cain, of course. Another deeply flawed character whom I love anyway. The bad guys are always the most interesting, right?

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

Oh, no mortification. These were wonderful questions. Thank you so much for having me here.

Guest Blog from Aryn Kyle, sublime author of Boys and Girls Like You and Me

I first discovered Aryn Kyle when I reviewed her ravishing debut novel, The God of Animals, for The Boston Globe. (I gave it a rave.) She has a new book out, the superb collection of stories, Boys and Girls Like You and Me and because she's also really, really funny, I asked her if she would do a guest blog for me. Thank you so much, Aryn!

That Horse Book

My first novel is about horses. I didn’t mean for it to be about horses—really, it’s about a family—but it’s set on a horse ranch and, draft by draft, the horses became more important to the plot until my friends began to joke that I should just call the book Horses. Think how much easier it would be to market, they said: “If you like horses, you’ll love Horses, the debut novel by Aryn Kyle!”

Every time I thought about this, I kind of wanted to die. I’d read the horse books growing up, had watched the horse movies on television—they were full of earnest girls who pined after geldings like they were forbidden lovers and saved the day, though barely, with their grit and good nature, their commitment to doing the Right Thing. The world did not need any more of these books, I thought, and I did not want to be the writer of one. But my novel was full of horses; there was a horse on the cover. People would ask, “What’s your book about?” and there really was no answer that didn’t include the word: “Horses.”

In interviews, I tried to minimize my own horsiness: I didn’t grow up on a ranch, don’t live on a ranch now, don’t, in fact, live anywhere near a ranch. But it’s impossible to control every situation, and I have the unfortunate habit of sometimes zoning off during my own interviews, which accounts for the occasional horsey sound bite. Quite near the top of an ever-expanding list of regrets I have in life would be the comment I once made during a video interview, now immortalized on YouTube, declaring that my first love was an appaloosa.

Overseas, things were even harder to control: Everywhere I went, they took my picture with horses. In Antwerp, I was driven to a stable for a television interview and instructed to walk through the barn, feeding the horses as though this was what I did every evening—a scenario which lost a little more credibility every time a horse nipped at me, causing me to shriek and run away.

A few days later in Amsterdam, I rode with my Dutch publicist, Ingeborg, to a photo shoot at yet another stable. During the drive I tried to explain—more than fifteen years had passed since I’d even ridden a horse. It made me feel a little sleazy to keep posing beside them for photographs. Ingeborg told me that the magazine I was being photographed for was the Dutch equivalent of Mademoiselle. I should not feel sleazy—they would do my hair and makeup and dress me in designer clothes!

I’ll spare you the details of the horror show that followed and just say that somewhere in the world there now exists a photograph of me dressed like a colorblind go-go dancer and kissing a horse on its cheek.

Eventually I realized that my best hope for escaping a lifetime of faux-equestrian photo ops was probably just to write more books about fewer horses. The very last thing I did before I sent my story collection off to my agent was search the document for the word “horse.” One had managed to make its way in after all, and I considered rewriting the sentence to cut it. But within its context, this horse was more metaphorical than literal, and I thought it might be bad luck to have an entirely horseless collection. Besides, who has time to worry about one little horse in a story collection that includes puppet therapy and a pirate dinner theater? I look ahead at book tour and imagine the photographic possibilities.

In Praise of Deadlines

Ok, I admit it, I can be a lazy writer, or at least it feels that way sometimes. I can take a a year to write a first chapter because I keep fiddling with the words, fussing with a sentence to the point of being ridiculous (Should it read, "He ran to the store" or "He ran"?) Maybe it isn't really being lazy at all. Maybe it has to do with not wanting to let this glorious writing stage go into the next panic-inducing stage of giving pages to my agent and then to my editor. The sort of "proof is in the pudding" stage.

For the past year, while I've been doing page proofs and edits for my new novel Pictures of You (Algonquin! November 2!) I've been working with two new novels at once. I threw out two hundred pages on each. I finally--because it felt too Schizophrenic to me--settled on one novel, (I'll do the other one later) and I began once again writing and writing and writing and never getting further than Chapter one.

So I did the only thing I knew how to do that might work. I had someone give me a really tight, nearly impossible deadline. While at lunch with my beloved agent, I told her what was going on and begged her to give me a timetable. "June 1, three chapters," she told me. "We'll submit as a partial." I was thrilled! June!! That was a short enough amount of time to kickstart me into letting this novel go. Then, I contacted a writer friend, a smart, serious critic and begged her to look at three chapters for me before I sent them off. "May 1," she said. Even better!

So now, I guess you could say I'm a little possessed. I have to let go, have to push forward now, have to stop worrying about the perfect sentence and move more into the story as a whole. My writing feels different now with this deadline, more feverish, more involved, and to my absolute delight, less judgmental.

Now, if only someone would give me a deadline for my script.....

In which the Paper Rats interview each other!

Everyone knows how much I adore the Paper Rats. Their Inside the Writers Studio videos are hilarious (and they have great swag you can buy, so it's technically not really swag, but you'll want it anyway). I offered them space on my blog to talk about their books, and being the Paper Rats, they decided they wanted to interview each other (and who am I not to let them?)

Kristen Tsetsi's Homefront was inspired by the year she spent waiting for her husband to survive his tour in Iraq. Surreal, humorous and raw, it allows readers unfiltered access to the often unimaginably frustrating experience of waiting through a deployment. (She also has a hilarious blog. )

If readers were going to make up a drinking game for Homefront, what would signal them to take a shot?

When Jake leaves for Iraq, Mia is going through a deployment for the first time. She's not quite sure how to handle the sensation of mourning someone who's still alive. It's truly confusing - it has the effect of warping the world around you (or, rather, your perception of the world). Her way of dealing with it is to drink a little (a lot). A game could probably center around that, or around the number of times she turns on the TV to watch the news and has choice words for the embedded journalists' overly dramatic war updates and news bites.

What is a common misconception a reader comes away with after reading the synopsis for Homefront?

a) That it will read like "my story and my story only" non-fiction they won't relate to - that it's written strictly for the military spouse, or that it's somehow something that can only be appreciated by a military spouse, or b) that it's well-suited for a daytime women's program when it's much more suited to be, say, the sister to HBO's "Generation Kill" - what's happening at home while those zany "Generation Kill" guys are at war. The varied cast of characters allows for some pretty honest and gritty exploration of the different ways people react to circumstances beyond their control.

After "The End," how do things work out for poor, ignored Chancey?

Oh, Chancey! Yes, sadly, he was a bit neglected, but I think Mia "finds" her cat again and builds a lovely relationship with him.

Who is your least favorite character - excluding Jake's mother - and why?

Curses! She would have been my pick.

Because I cannot choose Olivia, I'll choose Dick's Fiance. I don't like that she introduces herself to people as "Dick's Fiance," and her uber-dependent personality in general is one I wouldn't get along with very well. Such an impression she makes, and she only lasts a page...

Who would you hand-pick to play Vietnam veteran Donny Donaldson if you were a casting director?

Easy: Terry Kiser. Terry Kiser IS Donny Donaldson. Picture him in "A Weekend at Bernies," but instead of being dead, he's drunk, cranky, and inexplicably charming.

What would Mia have wanted someone to put in a care package for her?

A book called "How to Avoid Your Morbid and Meddling Quasi Mother in-Law."
Have you ever known an Olivia?

Everyone, at one time or another, in one way or another, has known - and tried to avoid - an Olivia.

R. J. Keller's (check out her blog) Waiting for Spring offers angst, sex, humor, love, and redemption, set against the backdrop of a rural Maine town struggling with poverty and loss.

If a reader were going to be

distracted by something in WFS, what would it be?

Sex. Language. And also sex.

What is a common misconception a reader comes away with after reading the synopsis for WFS?

That it's a romance novel. There's definitely a love story going on, but it's really the story of a woman's journey toward self-acceptance and self-worth.

I heard something somewhere about you being on a NyQuil buzz while writing a chapter of your book. Which part? I must know.

It was chapter 21, where Tess and Brian get stoned "underneath the mischievous stars." I was sick with a rather hideous cold and took much more than the manufacturer's recommended dose of Cherry Nyquil, then lay down on the couch to try to get some sleep (because my sniffling, sneezing, and coughing was keeping my husband awake). As I drifted off, I looked out of the window at the cold, wintry sky and, under the combined influence of Nyquil and watery eyes, noticed that the stars started to blur together, then turn colors. I knew it was something Tess would dig, so I very wisely hopped up off the couch and wrote what I'd seen and felt. Later on, I wrote the rest of the scene around it.

Who is your least favorite character - excluding the mother - and why?

Definitely Tim. Drug-dealing, murdering, control freak rapists are not good people.

Compare your book to a movie character from a popular movie. Nothing obscure.

Clementine from Eternal Sunshine of the Spotless Mind. (Or is that obscure?)

Speaking of movies, who would you hand-pick to play Tess if you were a casting director?

Kate Winslet. She'd be totally believable as quirky, intelligent, damaged, sexy, caring, sharp-tongued Tess Dyer.

Which character are you most like?

A cross between Tess and her equally forthright, but much more level-headed, sister-in-law, Kim.

Read This Book: The Hand That First Held Mine by Maggie O'Farrell

For me, there are certain books that you feel compelled to reread every year. After You'd Gone by Maggie O'Farrell was one of those books that I carried around with me because I couldn't stop reading it. She has an astonishing new book out, The Hand That First Held Mine, and already it's getting dog-eared. Tracking two different London women, fifty years apart, the novel meditates on memory, art, longing, motherhood--and loss. I was thrilled that Maggie offered to answer some questions. Thank you so much, Maggie.

In many of your novels, you veer from the past to the present, with multiple perspectives. Do you believe we can ever escape our pasts—or recover from our secrets?

It’s not so much that we can’t escape our pasts – we are our pasts. We’re made up of every experience we’ve ever had. I think life adds layers to us, like different strata in rock. Everything is embedded in there, visible or not.

I was about a quarter sure that I knew what was going to happen in this novel, and then was thunderstruck when I got to the truth. Did you know this was going to happen before you wrote the novel or did it just come to you? And are you one of those writers who do like to know?

The central mystery of the story was clear to me from the book’s inception: everything else had to be fitted in around. I don’t generally plan my novels to every last detail before I start; I know writers who do but I prefer to work things out along the way, with just a few ideas in place before I begin. The challenge for me is to link these ideas together. One of the things I like best about writing is when you think the book is going in one direction but then it takes off somewhere else. It keeps you on your toes when your characters assume a life of their own; it’s also a sign that you’re doing something right. So I started with the idea of two women living fifty years apart in the same city but everything else evolved along the way.

The novel talks a lot about what it means to balance being an artist, a lover and a mother, which felt as difficult to modern day Elina as it does to Lexie in the past. Do you think it’s possible to have it all, or do you think something always has to be given up in the process? You’ve also held a variety of jobs starting out, from chambermaid to cycle courier. Did any of your own early struggles find their way into the novel?

I’m never really sure what that phrase “have it all” means. I’m uneasy with it, for some reason, probably because I suspect there’s something deeply misogynistic buried in it: you never hear it used for men, do you? It’s usually applied to women who have dared to have a career and children. The cheek of it. It is possible, of course, to work and to be a mother. But that’s not to say it’s easy. It’s a struggle and a constant act of planning, juggling and compromise. You have to decide what’s important – what to keep, if you like – and what to lose (in my case, a tidy house, orderly laundry cupboards, organised accounts have been sacrificed, not entirely reluctantly). Elina and Lexie aren’t me, in any sense, but of course there are elements of my experiences in them. Like me, Lexie arrives in London from a rural background to become a journalist. And the scenes with Elina and her tiny baby are drawn from my time with my newborn son.

I was fascinated that the book was also about how and why and whom we love and the choices we make because of that emotion, from the shock of love for a newborn to Lexie’s devotion to Innes Kent who helps transform her. In many of your novels, love goes hand in hand with secrets. Do you think love can ever be easy, or is it just the nature of love to be elusive and complicated?

Human beings are very complex creatures so any form of interaction between them is going to be fraught with uncertainties and ambiguities. Loving another person is easy and also alchemically strange. But I would say that the relationship between Lexie and Innes is remarkably uncomplicated: she loves him, he loves her. Yes, there are complications, as in every relationship, but if that bedrock is there nothing much can threaten it. The difficult bit is finding someone you love who loves you back. If that’s in place, everything else can always pretty much fall in step, don’t you think?

Elina and Lexie live in the same London, but fifty years apart—which makes it a different London—there’s that sense of dislocation like when you wake up and it takes you a while to recognize your room. I loved that you mentioned that these two women hear each other’s echoes over time. Do you believe that such echoes are possible or was this a (brilliant) literary device?

I think such echoes are always possible. Ten years or so we bought a house that needed a great deal of renovation. It was over a hundred years old and we knew from the deeds of the house that we were its sixth owners. At one point, a wall separating two bedrooms caved in and it was possible to see five layers of wallpaper, like skins of a onion. There was the original Edwardian wallpaper, right next to the plaster, a heavy gold-and-red pattern, and five others had been laid over it, at one time or another. So although I knew nothing about the house’s five previous owners, apart from their names, I now knew their tastes in wallpaper. And that they had stood once in this room, as I was doing, deciding what colour to decorate it and would it suit gold or green or blue or lilac?

What question should I be mortified that I didn’t ask?

Um. No mortification necessary.