Susan Henderson talks about Up From The Blue

Just about every writer I know adores Susan Henderson. Let's talk about her shining resume: a two-time Pushcart Prize nominee and the founder of the literary blog LitPark: Where Writers Come to Play (www.litpark.com). Her work has appeared inZoetrope: All-Story, the Pittsburgh Quarterly,North Atlantic Review, Opium, and many other publications. But let's also talk about how Susan is also so generous to other writers, so warm and full of spark, that I nominate her as the patron saint of all writers. I know that she's mine.

Up From the Blue is a knockout debut, about love, vanishing and memory. "Rapturous prose," raved Library Journal and in a starred review Publishers Weekly called it "beautify, funny, sad and complicated." I'm thrilled that Susan is here--and that I finally get to do something for her! Thank you, thank you, Susan.

So, after all your short stories (and you are a two-time Pushcart Prize nominee), what was it like writing a novel? What changed from writing stories? What was the whole writing process like?

Well, first of all, I love the short story format. I'm crazy for Jean Toomer, Flannery O'Conner, Eudora Welty, Richard Wright, Denis Johnson, Zora Neale Hurston, Amy Hempel, Annie Proulx, Jimmy Baldwin, Ellen Gilchrist, Aimee Bender, Carson McCullers, Langston Hughes, D. H. Lawrence, and Gabriel Garcia Marquez. And I wish more publishers would take on short story collections and actively promote them.

Writing short stories definitely taught me how to be concise, how to cut out the clutter, and sharpen a scene, how to get to the meat of the story. But I started finding recurring characters and themes in my shorter work, and that was my first hint that I had a longer story to tell.

I had no idea what to expect because I never tried it before, but I sort of fell in love with the form. Writing a novel is so freeing. There's room to slow down, to go deeper, and to take some side journeys. I could make the setting one of my characters. I could give minor characters their own arcs. And I liked that I could just stick a detail here or there that seemed incidental— a coin collection, an apple, an abandoned swimming pool—and later you'd find it had taken on more importance. Best of all, I could really get to the gloriously complicated nature of these characters, and I found that so satisfying.

Imagination plays a huge part in Up From the Blue. Tillie’s creating story out of her life both saves her and keeps her from the truth. Can you talk about the way story both makes sense of our lives and blurs reality?

I loved playing with this concept in the novel because I think every family, every marriage, every friendship has seen this happen, where two people experience the same event and have wildly different interpretations of it. Because there's what's physically happening, and then there's your filter—how your fears and desires change what you see, or what you'll let yourself believe. And there's also what each individual will create out of the gaps in information.

Tillie is someone who believed in certain truths and believed in certain people, and those beliefs, though she had many of them wrong, gave her hope. I think it's a self-preserving instinct, and some of the biggest fights in the book are when other characters wants to take those life-saving beliefs and overpower them with their own way of seeing things. That's a very painful process when you tamper with someone's reality.

The novel is structured so that it moves from the present to the past and back again, from the child Tillie to the adult about to have a child of her own. How did you decide on this structure and what do you think it says about what we choose to remember?

This was my editor's biggest influence, and I think it's just brilliant—I never would have thought of it on my own. When HarperCollins bought the book, the entire story was narrated by eight-year-old Tillie. And my editor said to me, I think there are questions the reader has that Tillie is too young to understand or communicate. And so she wondered if I could have someone narrate a frame story and show what's become of Tillie some years down the road.

That's all the direction she gave me. That, and the fact that this frame story had to have its own separate plot. I went to bed with no ideas at all but thrilled with the leeway I'd been given and thrilled because, rather than simply tightening up the book, I could really say much more about memory, about love, about the impact of a tragedy, about how a person carves out a sense of security and hope.

And it gave me a lovely opportunity to give the book two endings—one that a little girl holds to, and one that takes in the full weight of the truth.

I was very curious why, given her childhood, Tillie was going to have a child of her own. Where did that bravery come from?

I think I was the one who wanted her to have a child of her own. Sometimes kids grow up feeling damaged and don't believe in their capacity to create their own future. I think I believed in her more than she did, and wanted her to step over that fear that she would be inadequate. But honestly, I wasn't sure, as I was writing the ending, if she'd be up to the task. We were discovering that together—how much fear or others doubting her would get in the way. Together we saw whether the instinct to attach was there.

What’s obsessing you now in your writing work?

I'm obsessed with this social pressure to stay young and beautiful. I think there were seeds of this obsession in UP FROM THE BLUE—the mother who wouldn't let herself be photographed in sunlight, and the boy who got his tooth fixed and found it sort of emphasized all of the other things he didn't like about his face. But now this meshing of vanity and self-hatred is at the core of my work, and it's really fun to have a brand new set of characters and begin to get to know them.

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

Nothing about your questions felt mortifying. I was thinking, in fact, how brilliant and thrilling they are, and how nice it is to talk with someone who's such a close reader.

Moving day

The woman in the photo is my mother, who taught me to read when I was three and who made sure I got to the library every three days, and who let me stay up late reading. This was the house I grew up in and my mother is now moving from it (in Boston) to a Baltimore retirement community, which is bustling, full of activity, and near my sister. We want her to be happy, and we hope this is the right move for her, and it's happening this weekend.

I became a writer in this house. My sister and I would walk to the Star Market (about a twenty minute walk) and buy notebooks and write novels in grade school. They were always about orphaned girls and their caretaker, who somehow was a millionaire, and they were set in schools, at the beach, or at camp, and we illustrated them. I wish I had saved these early novels, but when I got to be a teenage, they mortified me and I threw them out. All that remains are two pages from a notebook, that start out, "Hurry up!" said Martha, as she climbed into the car. "We're going to the Cape!"

As I got older, I kept writing. I made up books for book reports in junior high (and got As on the reports!), I refused to write an essay for the Kingsbury Temperance Essay Scholarship because I didn't believe in temperance, so I wrote a story that involved a squirrel (I'm serious) and a drunk. And I won $500! But by the time I was a teen, I was convinced the house was haunted, and all I wanted to do was leave.

My first novel, Meeting Rozzy Halfway, was set in this house. My 10th novel, The Missing One, which I am writing now, is set on this block. Maybe Thomas Wolfe was right, you can't go home again. But then again, maybe you never really leave.

Elisabeth Tova Bailey talks about The Sound of A Wild Snail Eating

When I heard of The Sound of A Wild Snail Eating by Elisabeth Tova Bailey,(that's her portrait above), I was instantly fascinated. I knew what you could learn from a relationship with any sort of animal (I had a pet tortoise for 20 years, and he saved my life on a regular basis), and the book sounded completely wonderful. It is, and I've already bought a few copies to give as gifts to prove it. A meditation on illness, it's really, to me, a book about noticing life, about realizing the myriad of gifts available to you from the tiniest creatures. I can't thank Elisabeth enough for answering my questions.

At what point did you realize this could be something you wanted to write about? Did the idea form during the time you had the snail(s)? Or were you then too involved to distance yourself enough to write it?

During the year I watched the snail I wanted to write short stories. Nonfiction writing had never interested me—I thought it was too dull. When a friend suggested that I write about the snail I remember saying “That’s not what I want to write about!” The snail had been my bedside companion 24/7, and my relationship with it seemed entirely personal and would have felt impossible to put into words at that point—even if I had wanted to do so. I did scrawl a few notes at the time on a scrap of paper, but that was it. However, toward the end of the year I wrote down some observations for my friends who had adopted the offspring. But many years passed before I wondered if there was more to write. I needed both time and perspective in order to expand the observations into a book, and the book really is a biographical thank-you to the snail for getting me through a particularly tough year.

It’s fascinating that concentrating on another living being, albeit a tiny one, helped you adjust to the change in your life circumstances. Do you think it you hadn’t been ill, you would have taken the time to be so mesmerized?

If I had not been ill I could never have spent so much time observing a snail! Illness had taken me so far down that I was quite withdrawn from human society. When the snail came to join me it was the perfect companion with its microcosmic world and slow speed. I had this window into the snail’s world, and its world felt like a much better fit to my own life as I couldn’t partake much in my human world. Though as readers will discover, toward the end of the book there is a shift, but I don’t want to give away too much.

I read that you didn’t want to write about your illness, that this book is a thank you to the snail. I’m a big believer that giving illness a narrative can make it more manageable or even have healing potential. Would you agree with that?

Writing directly about illness depresses me, but I do know it helps some people, so I think that’s a very individual situation. For me, it was the one subject I never wanted to write about. It is impossible to put into words the infinite losses and challenges with which one lives. There would have been no structure and no plot and it would have been a quagmire. However, I could write about the snail. But without the illness there would have been no snail-watching, so I couldn’t ignore the illness completely. But I found that I could write about my illness as the backdrop for the snail’s appearance. This also gave the reader a way to enter into the story, just as I had, and so the reader can become engaged in the unusual interspecies relationship that developed.

As your world appeared to grow smaller from your illness, in some ways, it grew larger from focusing on the snail. Now that the snail is no longer with you, do you miss it? And what creatures occupy your attention now?

As I mention in the book any focus or connection no matter how small or large helps us get through tough circumstances. Yes, I will always miss that snail! But I also don’t like to keep a wild animal outside of its natural habitat. During the years I worked on the book the snail was of course much in my mind, so it was with me in spirit. Life moves on and our connections shift and change. The book in a sense has kept me connected and centered throughout the years that I’ve worked on it. I always like to live with an animal as I think it keeps me more aware of my senses and of other ways of being. I particularly like to observe the interactions between cats and dogs that get along—I always find that a touching interspecies relationship.

Which would you say changed you more, your illness or the snail—or would you say the two are inseparable?

Wow, that’s a complex question. Chronic illness changes one’s life completely even in ways that one can never fully comprehend. My experience with the snail didn’t really change me at the time. It was an interspecies relationship that is now a memory, the way one has memories of any such companionship with a cat, dog, or other animal, so I wouldn’t say that the snail changed me. It brought me comfort, expanded my world, and got me through a tough time. The snail gave me hope. It was in a real sense a sort of emotional life preserver. However, I think working on the book about the snail did change me. I found myself searching for an answer as to why illness exists, and I did come to an understanding that pathogens are as much a part of the natural world as a snail and a human. Exploring the fascinating similarities and differences between two different animal groups also lead me to a deeper understanding of life itself. But those questions, explorations, and understandings came through working on and shaping the book, but then there would be no book without the snail. So perhaps this is a circular answer!

Can you talk about what your life is like now? And what you are working on?

My “window” of activity on any given day is very small and always unpredictable. Right now I am just trying to keep up with what book publicity I can manage. I can’t travel, but there are periodic phone and web interviews. The UK edition of the book comes out in a few weeks and an Australian edition is in the works as well.

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

Good question! I don’t know....?

Emma Donoghue talks about ROOM

I first picked up Room when I was at BEA. I've read and loved Emma Donoghue's work before, (Slammerkin, The Woman Who Gave Birth To Rabbits, The Sealed Letter, Landing, and more) but this particular book was life-changing. Long-listed for the Man Booker Prize, Room is narrated by five-year-old Jack, who lives in a single room with his Ma and has never been outside, and like the best novels, it makes you see and experience the world differently. To say I loved this book with a passion is putting it mildly, but I refuse to loan it out because I feel the need for it to be right where it is--in my writing office where I can reread it.

Emma's website not only lets you explore the world of Room, but you can also download a pdf of the floorplan, watch the haunting book trailer, and find lots of other special extras. Thank you so, so much Emma for letting me pepper you with questions. I'm honored to have you here.

What’s so unsettling about ROOM is its unique and surprising perspective. While there has been coverage of people held as sexual captives, I don’t think we’ve ever been let inside this situation from the viewpoint of a child born into that captivity—and a happy, seemingly well-adjusted boy, at that. What sparked your desire to tell the story from his point of view?

I would never have told this story any other way. Ma telling her own tale of kidnap, endless rape, and unassisted birth would have been too obviously poignant (and hideous) a proposition. What I glimpsed when the idea for ROOM first came to me is that Jack could tell us a whole other story that would have elements of comedy, parent-child love story, science fiction and fairy tale.

What was the research like for you? How much is true and how much is imagined?

None of it is true in the sense of being closely based on any one kidnap case; although the headlines about the Fritzls were what gave me the idea in the first place, I was careful to steer my scenario away from theirs and any others I read about. (And Jaycee Dugard wasn't discovered, as it happens, until my novel was finished.) But all of it is true in the sense of being as plausible as I could make it: I read extensively not just on kidnapping but on children raised in peculiar or neglectful settings, adults in solitary confinement, healthy family dynamics, the treatment of post-traumatic stress disorder...

Reading Room was intense and riveting and unsettling. Were there any points in writing the novel where you were unsure if you could complete the book?

No, This one was easy. I've never had such certainty about every aspect of a book, from point of view, to the opening and closing scenes, to how much time to cover.

I’m obsessed by process, so could you talk a bit about how you wrote this book and what were the particular challenges?

I did a couple months of research first, almost entirely on the Internet, which is a first for me. That was often skin-crawling and occasionally made me burst into tears. Then I had to work out Jack's voice: for this I analysed my five-year-old son's speech like a linguist, then came up with a form of English which is actually halfway between adult and child, so readers would believe in his youth without being enraged by his rambling. The drafting itself I did in six months while my daughter was in part-time daycare, and all I sweated over were subtle details, such as whether their captor would allow them to have a pair of scissors, and the balance between the grim and the happy at each point.

The voice of Jack is one of the real pleasures of the book—he’ a captive, but he doesn’t know or understand it, and instead is a happy, loving, loved child that we, the reader, also come to adore. His curiosity makes us look at the world of the room differently. Without giving away the ending, do you think it’s possible for Jack, and/or children like Jack, to ever be able to be fully okay in the world?

He'll be grand: there seems to be almost no limit to what a five-year-old can adapt to, especially if they've been parented well. Ma is another story, because adults hold onto their pain.

What is obsessing you now?

The peculiar effects of publicity. I've always considered it 'no bother', as we say in Ireland, but these days I'm doing so much more of it (ten phone interviews in a row, the other day!) that I feel intellectually vacuous!

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

Ah, Here's where I'm particularly vacuous at the moment: can't think of any.

Storytelling and health care

When I was writing Pictures of You, an amazing thing happened. This boy appeared: ten-years-old, severely asthmatic and I resisted. The last thing I wanted to write about was asthma!

Although I am virtually fine now, I grew up with horrible asthma. I was in and out of ERs and hospitals, and deeply shamed about the whole experience. I never talked about it to anyone (if pressed, I said I had pleurisy or consumption, words culled from the books I read while everyone else was outside playing), I hid my inhalers or deliberately lost them, and even when I was seventeen and in the flush of first love, the only way I could tell my boyfriend why I had to sometimes vanish (to take my inhaler) was to write him a letter about my asthma and my shame and grief about it, and then have him burn it.

But I found the more I wrote about this young boy with terrible asthma, the better I felt. I began taking less and less medication and then nearly none at all, until I was sure I had healed my asthma. I hadn't, of course, but what I did heal, by giving my character compassion and love, was my own guilt, shame and grief about the disease. I started thinking more and more about how writing can heal us.

That's where Henry comes in. Henry Ehrlich is co-author of Asthma Allergies Children: a Parent’s Guide and author or co-author of a number of other books. He edits AsthmaAllergiesChildren.com. He is also a speechwriter and blogs occasionally about business for newgeography.com. Henry and I began having lots of incredible email conversations about asthma, among other things, and I asked Henry if he would write a guest blog for me about how storytelling can help give a narrative to illness and make it seem more manageable. Thanks, Henry!

Storytelling and Health Care

I’m not a doctor but I play one on the internet. I am co-author of a new book called Asthma Allergies Children: a Parent’s Guide, which is why I “met” Caroline. She wound up on my Amazon author’s page because of her upcoming book and the rest is history—or it will be at the end of next week when I post her wrenching reminiscence of her own battles with asthma on the website AsthmaAllergiesChildren.com, which I edit. When I saw that she has written a novel with asthma as a theme, I felt I had come full circle. If I know my co-authors, and believe me I do, all three of us are going to learn things about asthma from Caroline’s new book that we never knew before. The overlap between storytelling and medicine was part of our project from the beginning.

My co-authors, pediatric allergists Dr. Paul Ehrlich (my first cousin) and Dr. Larry Chiaramonte are both great storytellers, and they are also great clinical healers, a combination that frequently gets lost in the 11-minutes-and-out of contemporary medical practice. One of the things I insisted on as we wrote our book, and now in the website, was that we stay away from the medical journalese that permeates so much medical writing and carry every point with an anecdote, a metaphor, a joke—some element from the storyteller’s toolkit.

This was a natural with Dr. Ehrlich. I don’t know anything about biology or chemistry, but we got our voice from the same place: our fathers. His was a pediatrician and mine a teacher and author, but we heard the same stories about the old neighborhood and jokes growing up. Dr. Chiaramonte’s father was a barber at Yale, which led to a scholarship for Larry. Between the two of them, there are over 70 years of stories about seminal research, great characters in academic medicine, and thousands of children and anxious parents to draw on. Both love their patients. Both have the same fascination with the drama of an immune system gone wild that constitutes the basis of allergic medicine. Both have the investigative skills that are essential to taking a good medical history and finding the solution that eludes the harried general practitioner. It’s not very different ultimately from the kind of investigation that a good novelist often does. Every case is a mystery that needs to be solved. (I won’t name names, but I’m reading a book about a girl who gets pregnant by a certain author who could have been a superb diagnostician.) As we point out in the book, Sir Arthur Conan Doyle was a Dr. before he was a Sir, and the model for Sherlock Holmes was his professor Dr. Joseph Bell whose keen eye for detail almost passed for telepathy.

Does it work? Only the royalty checks will tell. But Dr. Lisa Sanders, author of Every Patient Tells a Story, and whose NY Times column Diagnosis inspired “House M.D” zeroed in on our approach: “It is full of the kind of great stories that teach both patients and doctors more than mere facts.” Couldn’t have said it better myself.

Chandra Hoffman talks about adoption and her new book Chosen

Several years ago, I wrote a novel, Girls in Trouble, about open adoption, based on the year my husband and I spent trying to open-adopt a child.

We were never chosen (birth parents objected to our having a genetic child and felt we wouldn't love their baby as much as we did our first. They also didn't love that we were writers, which seemed too untraditional.) Our last chance was when a nurse almost chose us. It was between us and another couple, and we were prepared to fly out to Dakota to meet her, but she never called us back, and by then, we were devastated and exhausted and simply grateful beyond words to have our own son.

But I couldn't forget the voices of all those birth mothers who had called me night after night, many who seemed to want me to adopt them, and I began writing about them. To my surprise, I created a stew of controversy. Adoption agencies were at first thrilled such a book was coming out, but the birth mothers were wary, but when the novel came out, the agencies were furious I had shown the shadows in the process, but I became the poster girl for birth mothers!

Naturally, when I heard another book about domestic adoption, Chandra Hoffman's Chosen, was coming out, I was more than curious. I'm pleased Chandra's agreed to answer all my nosy questions here. Thanks so much, Chandra!

Where did the idea for Chosen come from and why did you feel compelled to write about it?

I have always been fascinated by adoption--the possibility that a family can be created in such a unique way. Writing has been a constant in my life as well--I wrote my first novella at age five. In college I was studying English and getting my degree in social work when an opportunity came up for me to work abroad in an orphanage. This particular story, "CHOSEN", grew out of three defining experiences: the first of which was this time in Romania, post-Revolution as an aide worker in the infamous Orphanage Number One. It was overwhelming—I was given fifty infants my first day—but inspiring to see the human spirit surviving in spite of the bleakness. Romania led me to the second experience, a job in the United States as the director of the domestic adoption program for a private agency, the sole caseworker managing birth and adoptive parents. My goal was to create happy endings, everything I hadn’t been able to do in Bucharest. But I quickly learned that there was another side to this, the business side, and that it was very difficult to meet the needs of everyone in the adoption triangle. I left the adoption world when I became a mother myself—my skin had become predictably thin.

This was the final defining point that shaped this novel: our first son's birth and diagnosis with Pierre Robin Syndrome, nearly losing him as an infant the week of September 11th as the world fell apart around us. As a new mother to a child with huge medical hurdles, I pondered some of the deeper issues that form the backbone of Chosen: How does parenthood change you? How will the challenges you face shape you as a couple? What happens when your expectations of parenthood are so far from the reality? What makes a good parent? A good person? What happens when you get what you thought you wanted?

The story is fiction-characters and settings and scenarios are as though I took a handful of experiences, threw in a well-marinated childhood paranoia about abduction, seasoned them with the salt of my vivid imagination, put them all in a bag and shook it up. But the themes are real, straight from my own life and from those I have been privileged to witness.

As someone who explored open adoption for a year and wrote a novel about it, I’m fascinated by a novel being told from the point of view of a caseworker. You speak about the caseworker “playing God” and making families, but isn’t that only in international adoptions? In domestic, isn’t it more of a dance between birth parents and adoptive ones?

Chloe is certainly the central voice of the novel, but I also step into some other shoes throughout--tackling some other points of view in the adoption triangle. But what I meant by this is that in adoption there is this illusion of control, especially in a small agency where the caseworker is representing both sets of parents-- you meet the birth family, and then like some crazy yenta you go home and think, who would be the right people for her? Which family will she fall in love with, which adoption will go through, which will fall apart? It's an illusion, this idea that you're making the matches. Of course everyone sees every eligible portfolio.

What do you think about movies like Juno, which simplify the adoption process (and show no real scars in any of the parties)?

I probably shouldn't answer this one literally as I've never seen the movie. I haven't seen any movies in... years. When I am in writing mode, I feel like movies are time wasted, and the only reason we even have TV is so my kids can watch 'Tom and Jerry' if I have to catch a little writing time in the day.

But thank you for mentioning the complexity of adoption; that's the very word I keep coming back to. I wrote this in part to shine a light on how complicated it can be, how challenging it was for me as an idealistic young social worker trying to navigate such intense, emotionally charged situations. What I kept bumping up against was this notion that adoption walks the razor edge between intense joy and heartache, often right in the same day. The scene where Heather is breastfeeding her son while his adoptive mother looked on for the first and last time was one of those moments.

I've come under some fire for not celebrating the joy of adoption more in this novel, and all I can say about that is, the story was informed by my experience. There were many happy endings and joyful moments and I do feel honored to have been a part of the creation of families in this way, but every adoption ended with someone leaving the hospital without a baby that at some point, however briefly, they considered theirs, and I thought this was a part of the story worth exploring as well.

You’ve worked in both international adoption and domestic, which you left when you had a child of your own. What would you say the difficulties of each are? And when you became a parent, how did your views on adoption and all the players involved change?

I was only an aide worker in Romania--not actually negotiating adoptions, but there is a story on my website about a little boy I got attached to, and how things fell apart for me there, and why I left. What was so eye-opening for me about Romania and is true of several international situations are the social factors that have created kids eligible for adoption who are not technically 'orphans'. I think it is important to know this when you're looking into international adoption, and to research how children are regarded in that country.

When I became a parent, it was a baptism by fire. Our son was born unable to breathe or eat on his own, with all of these potential problems and so many unknowns. My husband and I were young when we got pregnant, and we had this attitude that parenthood wasn't going to change our lifestyle or slow us down, how we weren't going to let something so small as a baby mess with our agenda. Before he was born, we had made tickets to go windsurfing in Bahamas two weeks after my due date--which we obviously rescheduled because Hayden was still in the NICU then. When Hayden arrived and our vision of what parenthood would be like was so far from the reality, it took me about a week, and almost losing Hayden on the operating table, to make peace with this, to 'get over myself' as my mother-in-law would say, to get on board with this new situation. And you know who I thought of? All of those adoptive parents who called me in the weeks after their adoption, experiencing what I can only describe as a let-down effect. I'm not saying this happened every time, but for some of these families, the quest for THE BABY had been years long, full of hardship. When the baby finally came to them, whether through adoption or because they overcame infertility, there would sometimes be this period where they had to resolve the disparity between reality and fantasy, and before I was a mother, I was hard on these people. Not in person, but in my head. After Hayden, I was more sensitive to how challenging this can be. I'm not saying they didn't love their babies or that I didn't love Hayden, but there was an adjustment period before I identified him as 'mine'.

This was when I started thinking about this novel--I consider adoption to be the backdrop, the extortion story line to be the juicy plot, but the heart of CHOSEN is parenthood and this question of 'what happens when you get what you thought you wanted'? For everyone--there were plenty of birth parents who thought relinquishment would be easier than it was, or adoptive parents who experienced that let down I was talking about, or new parents who went through the everyday adjustment to life with a newborn. This was what I wanted to explore. There is a certain amount of surrender inherent in parenthood--a giving up of yourself and life as you knew it, however parenthood comes to you. I hoped to capture some of the struggle of this, but hopefully the ultimate beauty of the letting go in the arc of my character's development.

How do you balance being a mother and a writer? What’s your day like? What’s your writing process like?

It's a juggling act for sure. I try to get up before they do and catch a few solid hours in the morning, and then I leave my computer out on the kitchen counter to jot down a line here and there throughout the day. When I need to wrap my arms around something big, to look at a novel as a whole, I book a hotel room overnight. Writer's block is never a problem for me--having three little kids and lots of needy pets makes me grateful to escape for a few moments into a world where I have a semblance of control.

What’s obsessing you now?

I'm homeschooling my kids (ages 8, 5 and 3) this year so that we can go on book tour as a family and make some memories. I'm getting into poetry with them--which has never been my strong suit--and we're having fun exploring Greek mythology, harvesting from our gardens and US geography. I don't know if this is the beginning of a long term lifestyle change, or if this is a one year adventure. I'm curious to see how this year goes, but I love the way deciding that you are 'homeschooling' reframes your parenting, how suddenly everything becomes a learning opportunity. In reality, every good parent is homeschooling.

What are you working on now?

After a two month break from writing to focus on launching CHOSEN, I'm now in the final revisions on my next novel, set in Boulder, Colorado. The four word summary is 'infidelity with a twist', but I also touch on themes of physical beauty and morality, the importance of female friendships, and some truths about marriage and self worth.

Harriet Brown talks about Brave Girl Eating

I'm thrilled to have journalist Harriet Brown here. Brave Girl Eating is a fascinating mix of raw personal detail and extraordinary research about how her daughter Katie became anorexic and nearly died. The book turns everything most people think about anorexia on its head. And of course, the writing is wonderful, and the love Brown feels for her girl is palpable. Brown's work has appeared in the New York Times Magazine, O, Glamour, and on NPR. Thank you so much, Harriet for being here!

Brave Girl Eating is an extraordinary—and very different—look at anorexia when it hits home. I was fascinated at how you turned previously held thoughts on their heads, for example, that to “cure” anorexia, patients should be cut off from family and retrained in beliefs about food. Instead family based treatment seems to work. Could you talk a little bit about how a family can help here?

People with eating disorders are in the grip of powerful and terrible compulsions--to not eat, to exercise compulsively, to purge, and so on. The nature of an eating disorder is to be what's known as ego-syntonic, meaning it is perceived by the self to be a positive thing. In other words, you don't see the problem, or at least not until you've been sick quite a while, and even if you see it, it's very very hard to go up against it. What I observed in my daughter was that she needed my husband and me to be bigger and stronger than the anorexia, to stand with her and shield her somewhat from the punishments the disease inflicted on her. Have you ever read "I Never Promised You a Rose Garden"? I thought about that book a lot as we were going through this. We couldn't protect her from all of it, but we could protect her enough to get the food into her to help her recover. For teens and young people especially, parents and families are natural allies in fighting the illness. Older people with eating disorders need this too, but they rarely have that kind of support at hand.

It bothers me that so many people feel that anorexia is a choice. In fact, a lot of self-help (and this is not to denigrate it. I happen to like self help books) stress that choice aspect. While we can choose what we do about an illness or a situation, we don’t really choose the illness or the situation, do we?

No one chooses anorexia. When someone's deep in the grip of it, that ego-syntonic characteristic may be expressed--they'll say they're fine, no problem, they're not sick, you have the problem and not them, and so on. But this does not mean they have chosen to be ill. Nor does it mean they can "choose" (in any kind of simple or straightforward way) not to be ill. I think this is the most fundamental misconceptions we have of eating disorders, and I'm hoping to help set the record straight.

What I found fascinating was your desire that this not be “thinspiration” for anorexics, and that you not exploit your daughter, but you still stay open. How does one approach such a challenge in writing a book like this?

This book was so challenging on so many levels. Like all memoirists, I tried to cleave to the truth as I saw it while avoiding gratuitously hurting anyone else. I had my daughter's future in mind as I wrote as well as her past, all our pasts. The only measure of my success may be when the book doesn't become a hit with the pro-ana community. :)

Did Kitty know you were writing this book? Has she read it and if so, what did and does she think?

Kitty knew I was writing it. We discussed it many times. She gave her permission for me to write it and publish it, though it wouldn't have been her first choice for me to do this. She is a private person, which is why I don't use her name or any photos and why I've disguised certain elements in the book. People who know us obviously know it's about her. But I didn't want the world to be able to put her together with the book. She doesn't want to read it right now, though I'm guessing she will someday.

Do you think part of the problem with the medical community dealing with anorexia is that there is no real control of this disorder? You yourself use the metaphor of a demon taking over Kitty to explore anorexia, and you also mention those ads that caused a controversy, where were ransom notes from various diseases. (We have your daughter hostage.)

Not sure what you mean by control of this disorder. I do think part of the issue has been that treatments for anorexia are by and large pretty ineffective, in large part because of the fundamental misunderstandings we have about it. Much of the therapeutic community still seems invested in the notion that you have to "work out your issues" before you can recover, and that "it's not about the food." Well, it certainly is about the food when you're starving. And you can't work out any issues when you're malnourished.

What was the most terrifying thing about being in this situation? What’s the key pieces of advice you’d give to parents?

The most terrifying part of being in this situation was when my husband and I felt helpless--before we started doing family-based treatment. And I'd add to that the first few times the demon made an appearance-they were very scary moments. But I'd much rather be in it up to my elbows, engaged in a process of helping my daughter, than watching her dwindle and die by degrees. *that* was terrible.

What was it like working on a book when you weren’t sure of the ending? What are you working on now?

Working on a book when you don't know the ending keeps you very grounded in the present and in the narrative. It keeps the emphasis on process rather than product--an excellent reminder to me. :) Right now I'm finishing up a story for O magazine on forgiveness, a subject I'm deeply interested in.

Kelly McNees, author of The Lost Summer of Louisa May Alcott, talks about writing through the rough patches

Kelly O'Connor McNees' debut is a dazzler. The Lost Summer of Louisa May Alcott has been selected as part of Oprah's 2010 Reading List and is an Indie Next April 201 Notable book. It's an intoxicating book about love and literature, and of course, Alcott, who wrote so knowingly about love, yet was believed never to have experienced it herself. Kelly's written a guest post here about writing, and I'm honored and thrilled to have her here. Thank you, Kelly.

What to do when it’s not going well

First, what not to do: Don’t panic. Or, if you can’t help but panic, ask someone to lock you in the trunk of your car so can’t do anything you’ll regret.

Don’t, for example, buy an organic goat farm over the internet if you have no farming experience or even--let’s face it, bookworm--experience with what is generally known as theout-of-doors. Don’t convince yourself that single-handedly building a cheese cave out of reclaimed wood will be easier than finishing your novel. It will not be.

Don’t get a bizarre haircut or eat your weight in macaroons. Don’t decide that, while you always believed that your dream was to Be a Writer, your actual hidden dream was to be a parasailing mime or a cosmetologist for dogs or a professional gem polisher. The last thing you need is another student loan.

Don’t try to teach your cat how to type because he will never, ever be able to learn--and if by some miracle he does, you’re going to have a whole new problem on your hands. Don’t stand in the produce section grinding your molars and squeezing every single peach on the entire display, as if there is only one right peach in the universe. About half the peaches are good and the other half are mushy and that is just the inherent risk in eating peaches.

Whatever you do, don’t go to any dinner parties. The dinner party is your worst nightmare right now. Because there are lots of people out there, even some writers, who are getting work done, and if one of them casually drops that fact into the conversation while you are gnawing on a baby carrot, next thing you know you’ll be walking down the middle of the highway.

It’s best not to talk to anyone, except maybe the poor soul to whom you are legally wed. Lucky for you, he is very patient and soothing and encouraging, even if he is silently running over the Illinois state code regarding involuntary commitment while he fixes you a cup of tea.

In a perfect world, you would drive your brain way out into the country and leave it there, slumped squishily in the grass, knowing that it would either be eaten by a bear or taken in by a lonely kid looking for a pet. And you would be sort of fine with either outcome. But this is not a perfect world.

What you have to do is find something that will soothe your mind. Perfectionism has you in its grip and there’s only one way to distract it—you need a decoy. Knit a complicated sweater with perfectly even stitches. Roast a chicken and then make from it the most exquisitely rich and garlicky broth man has ever known. Make a list of everything you do well: penmanship, lawn bowling, calculating a tip under pressure. Take a long walk. And then get back to work.