All Behind the Book essays

Thriller

Setting the record straight

Behind the Book by L.F. Robertson

The reason I started writing about the death penalty is that almost everyone gets it wrong. In the worlds of thrillers, television and movies, the people sentenced to death are either depraved killers, or else innocent and wrongly convicted. Police detectives and prosecutors risk their lives to bring conscienceless murderers to justice. Defense attorneys—young, brilliant, and well-funded—swoop in to save their guiltless clients at the last minute from the death chamber.

The reality is that inmates on death row are about as diverse as people outside prison, and their stories are much more nuanced than a simple up-or-down of guilt or innocence. The death penalty is supposed to be reserved for the worst of the worst, but the processes by which it is imposed sweep up people as young as 18 and as old as their grandparents, people who have long criminal histories and people with no criminal background at all, defendants who committed horrible crimes and others who were minor accomplices—as well as those who were innocent and convicted by a miscarriage of justice. A disproportionate number of them are black or Hispanic, and many are mentally ill or developmentally disabled.  

"The reality is that inmates on death row are about as diverse as people outside prison, and their stories are much more nuanced than a simple up-or-down of guilt or innocence."

Another fact is that yes, there are heroic figures among criminal defense attorneys, but there are a lot of people on death row, and the heroes can't rescue them all. So most of us are more or less footsoldiers in the ongoing war, and we do the best we can for our clients with the skills and resources we have and hope that what we can do will be enough. And a lot of us are not young; capital defense is a complex practice which requires skills that take time and work to develop, and for many lawyers who enter into it, it becomes a calling and a lifetime commitment.  

Real capital cases aren't resolved quickly or dramatically. The years of legal proceedings between conviction and the end of a case are a long march that can take decades; and the reward at the end may not be exoneration, but just a reduction of your client's sentence from death to life in prison. Once a defendant is convicted, attempts to overturn that conviction are obstructed and slowed by laws that create obstacles to revisiting cases the system considers resolved. The courts are often stingy about giving attorneys money to reinvestigate old crimes, so that evidence that might establish a defendant's innocence may take a long time to find, if it is ever found at all.

In Two Lost Boys, I tried to be faithful to these realities in describing my character Janet Moodie's experiences as the lawyer for a death-sentenced defendant. Her client's case, when she signs on to it, is over a decade old. Even though I compressed Janet's part into a shorter-than-usual timeline, her work on the case has gone on for nearly two years by the time the novel ends.  

When I try to understand the impulses that moved me, as a young lawyer, to criminal defense and then capital work, I keep coming back to one of my favorite childhood fairy tales, Hans Christian Andersen's The Snow Queen. It is a story of rescue, of a young girl, Gerda, who makes a long and hazardous northward journey to find the place where the Snow Queen has taken her friend Kai, and, once she has found her way into the Snow Queen's ice palace, solves a puzzle of ice pieces that frees Kai from the Snow Queen's spell. Two Lost Boys incorporates elements of that story, but infused with the ambivalence of adult experience.

Janet makes her home in a place I love, the rugged coast of northern Sonoma County, California, where the isolation and natural beauty help her heal after her husband's suicide. Her life up there is a bit of wishful thinking for a part of me that would like to settle there myself some day. The highway to the north coast, a twisting two-lane road with steep hills on one side and the Pacific stretching to the western horizon on the other, is beautiful and dangerous, but in the book it is a part of Janet's journey toward peace.

L.F. Robertson is a defense attorney in California who has handled death penalty appeals for two decades. She is the co-author of The Complete Idiot's Guide to Unsolved Mysteries, and her short stories have been included in the anthologies My Sherlock Holmes, Sherlock Holmes: the Hidden Years and Sherlock Holmes: The American Years. Her first novel, Two Lost Boys, is the story of a recently widowed attorney who struggles to represent a mentally challenged man who's been sentenced to death in a murder case.

Attorney L.F. Robertson, who has worked on death penalty cases for two decades, explains why she was inspired to write a thriller about a death row case.
Mystery & SuspenseFictionMystery

Rethinking the mystery of Agatha’s disappearance

Behind the Book by Andrew Wilson

In 1977, I was 10 years old and on holiday with my parents in an uninspiring (and no doubt rain-soaked) coastal town in North Wales. We were walking down the high street when we passed a bookshop. Something in the window caught my eye and I stopped, refusing to move a step further.

As I stared at the book on display—the posthumously published autobiography of Agatha Christie—I became possessed by a sense of longing that took me by surprise.

At that point I don’t think I had read any Christie, but my grandmother was an avid fan, and as a precocious aspiring writer, I wanted to know all about the Queen of Crime, particularly the secrets of her success (she is still the bestselling novelist of all time).

My parents dragged me away from the shop, refusing to purchase the book for me—they thought it was too “grown-up”—yet my interest in Christie only increased, and I soon devoured book after book. At 12, when my English teacher asked his students to write an extended piece of fiction, I handed in a 46-page story entitled “The German Mystery,” which I still have. From its opening lines it’s not hard to spot the source of my inspiration:

“Dr Bessner’s frail hand reached inside the ebony box and took out a white cyanide pill. He placed it in his dry mouth and swallowed with a loud gulp. There was a small whimper, his body jumped and fell back in his black leather car seat, gave a last gasp and he was dead.”

Throughout my teenage and adult life I kept returning to Christie’s books, especially when I was writing the biographies of dark subjects such as Patricia Highsmith, Sylvia Plath and Alexander McQueen. Yet it wasn’t until I moved to Devon, the location of Christie’s Greenway estate (now operated by the National Trust and open to the public), that I started to think about writing a novel about her.

I had always been fascinated by the 11 days in December 1926 when Christie disappeared—she abandoned her car in Surrey, leaving behind her fur coat and driving license. The police suspected that she might have been murdered by her husband, Archie, who wanted to leave her for his mistress, Nancy Neele. The search for clues involved 15,000 volunteers, airplanes and sniffer dogs, and the sensational story even made the front page of the New York Times. Christie—who was discovered at a hotel in Harrogate, Yorkshire, after checking in under the name Mrs. Neele—always maintained that she had been suffering from amnesia, but there were many elements of that claim that simply did not add up. My imagination started to work, and using police and newspaper reports as a framework, I came up with a crime story, an alternative history about why she disappeared.

We meet Christie when she is at her most vulnerable: Her mother had died earlier in 1926, her writing is not going well, and she has just discovered that her husband wants to leave her for another woman. In London to visit her literary agent, she is waiting for a tube when she feels someone push her into the path of the oncoming train. At the last minute, a doctor pulls her back to safety but the medic, Dr. Patrick Kurs, turns out to be a blackmailer with a sadistic streak.

At the end of the first chapter Kurs outlines his sinister plan: He wants Christie to kill on his behalf. “You, Mrs. Christie, are going to commit a murder,” he says to her. “But before then, you are going to disappear.” We know she disappeared in real life, but the question my novel poses is this: Christie wrote about murder, but would she—could she—ever commit one herself?

 

Andrew Wilson is a British journalist and the author of four biographies (including the award-winning Beautiful Shadow: A Life of Patricia Highsmith), several other nonfiction books and a novel, The Lying Tongue. A Talent for Murder, Wilson’s fictional take on the real-life 1926 disappearance of Agatha Christie, will be released in the U.S. on July 11.

This article was originally published in the July 2017 issue of BookPage. Download the entire issue for the Kindle or Nook.

Andrew Wilson, a devoted and lifelong fan of Agatha Christie, takes us through the process of writing his mystery about the famed author's real-life disappearance.
NonfictionHealth & Fitness

Penis power

Behind the Book by Dudley Seth Danoff, MD

The seed for the creation of my book was planted in 1993 when a favorite patient of mine suggested that I write a populist book about male sexual health and held up a three-by-five card with his recommended title: “Penis Power.” This was back in the days before everyone used the internet, when Howard Stern could still shock listeners, and before Viagra ads appeared on primetime television.

At that time, having the word “penis” on the cover of a mainstream men’s health book was taboo. I pointed out to my publisher that the word “penis” accurately describes a body part. Asking me not to use that word would be like asking a cardiologist not to use the word “heart.” I shouted, “Get over it!” to no avail. 

What makes so many of us giggle or blush when the word “penis” is written or spoken? The fact that there is no logical explanation for these reactions propelled me, in part, to write The Ultimate Guide to Male Sexual Health: How to Stay Vital at Any Age. 

"I want to help men and women who are misinformed or confused about the male body, as well as those who think they know everything but still have a lot to learn."

I have been a practicing urologic surgeon for more than 40 years, and my professional goal has been to cure what I call penis weakness (PW), a condition that plagues men (and their partners) at an alarming rate and is compounded by a misunderstanding of exactly what is going on in their bodies and brains. Unfortunately, men who have suffered from the self-doubt and anxiety caused by this condition have done so with shockingly little support from the medical community. 

My book addresses the malady directly and speaks to both men and women—to straight couples, gay couples and everyone in between. This book will give readers the skills and confidence to address most problems surrounding male genital health and sexual potency, setting the cornerstone of a personal sexual revolution. 

With the commercial success of major pharmaceutical drugs designed to aid erectile dysfunction, some of the significant issues of male sexual health have become part of our social consciousness. Yet many couples still deprive themselves of the complete sexual satisfaction they deserve. 

My goal is to help every man, and every woman in that man’s life, to not only learn the biological functions of the penis but to understand that it is much more than the condition of its blood vessels and nerves—it is an organ of expression. A man’s penis is what he thinks it is!

One of my objectives is to educate, but my book is not a medical textbook. Nothing in it is overly technical. My purpose is more practical: I want to help men and women who are misinformed or confused about the male body, as well as those who think they know everything but still have a lot to learn. 

Although this book is about male sexuality and male physiology, the principles presented will be helpful to all men and their wives, husbands, girlfriends, boyfriends and partners. I want all readers to become experts on how the male genital system works, how and why it doesn’t work on occasion, and how to get it to work again for as long as possible.

A lot of information in my book will surprise you. Some of it may shock or outrage you. I firmly stand behind my observations with one purpose only: to end the plague of PW and the attendant cynicism, despair,and frustration. Often, a simple shift in attitude and an adjustment in behavior patterns can give us the confidence we need to achieve happiness in our sex life and ultimately in every aspect of who we are as human beings. 

The Ultimate Guide to Male Sexual Health will elevate the mind, the heart and the spirit—not just the male apparatus. The man who has penis power is blessed, and so is the partner with whom he shares it.

Dudley Seth Danoff, MD, FACS, is the attending urologic surgeon and founder/president of the Cedars-Sinai Medical Center Tower Urology Group in Los Angeles, California. He is the author of The Ultimate Guide to Male Sexual Health: How to Stay Vital at Any Age, now available in an updated second edition.

 

Urologic surgeon Dudley Seth Danoff sets out to help men—and the women in their lives—understand what's going on in their bodies and brains in The Male Guide to Sexual Health.
Middle Grade

A country divided

Behind the Book by Lauren Baratz-Logsted

Lauren Baratz-Logsted is the author of more than 25 books for adults, children and teens, including the popular series The Sisters 8. In her new middle grade novel, I Love You, Michael Collins, the students of Mamie’s class are assigned to write letters to the astronauts who will journey to the moon. Mamie is the only student who chooses Michael Collins, and she fills her letters with stories of her troubles at home. She admires the part Collins plays on the mission; he may not land on the moon, but it is very important that someone stay with the ship. These engaging, folksy letters transport the readers back to 1969, where young Mamie contemplates what it would be like to be near the moon, but to not set foot on the surface.

In the summer of ’69, the U.S. was a country divided. We were in the midst of the civil rights movement; women’s liberation was gaining momentum; Vietnam, both the war itself and protests against it, was heating up; and on June 28, Stonewall, a seminal moment in the history of gay rights, occurred. The entire country was in turmoil, separated by divisions stronger than at any time since the Civil War. And yet, amid all that, there was one bright spot. . . .

Flash forward in time, to the 11 years between 1983 and 1994 when I was an independent bookseller in Westport, Connecticut. One of my favorite customers was a man by the name of Robert Hanrahan. He came in nearly every week, bought a lot of books and never made any trouble. What was there not to like? He also had steel-colored hair to match the frames of his glasses and suit, blue ties to match his eyes—here was a man who knew how to play to his strengths. One Friday, though, he came in looking like James Dean: worn blue jeans and a tight white T-shirt, the only thing missing a pack of smokes rolled up in his shirtsleeve. Naturally, I had to know: Why the change?

Mr. Hanrahan said he’d retired from his job that day. And, because for the first time since I’d known him he had time on his hands, we had the opportunity to chat. He told me that the first significant job he ever had was, in the summer of ’69, working for NASA right when they were trying to land a man on the moon for the first time. Having been 7 years old myself when Apollo 11 made its historic landing, I naturally had a lot of questions. Graciously, he answered them all. But one of the things that made the biggest impression on me was when he said:

“It was the most amazing time. Everywhere we went, when people found out we worked for NASA, they wanted to do whatever they could for us: clap us on the backs, buy us beer, pick up the tab for our dinners. The entire country was excited about what we were doing.”

The entire country was excited about what we were doing.

Flash forward yet again, this time to the present, nearly a half century since Armstrong and Aldrin walked on the moon. I write a book called I Love You, Michael Collins, a book that to me is about so much: a girl, a family, a very special astronaut and the importance of staying with the ship. It’s also about a divided country coming together in excitement over one common goal.

When you sit down to write a book for children, you’d better not be thinking, I hope my book educates you in some way! The truth is, if you can’t and don’t entertain your readers first, they won’t still be there by the time you get around to saying something important. So I hope kids are entertained by my book about one girl’s extraordinary journey. But beyond that, if I can dare to wish for something more, I hope that kids—kids who are living through a time in our nation’s history when we are more politically and starkly divided than in any time since the Civil War or the ’60s—get a glimpse of a time when we were all united by one common goal: putting a man on the moon.

Some days, I think that that’s what we need now: one goal to unite us. It seems so unlikely, but then the Pollyanna part of me—and the one who lay on the floor with my brother, watching men walk on the moon for the first time while the amazing, the incredible Michael Collins orbited, staying with the ship as he awaited the return of Armstrong and Aldrin—wonders: If it happened once, why can’t it happen again?

 

Follow Lauren Baratz-Logsted on Twitter @LaurenBaratzL or visit her website at www.laurenbaratzlogsted.com.

In the summer of ’69, the U.S. was a country divided. We were in the midst of the civil rights movement; women’s liberation was gaining momentum; Vietnam, both the war itself and protests against it, was heating up; and on June 28, Stonewall, a seminal moment in the history of gay rights, occurred. The entire country was in turmoil, separated by divisions stronger than at any time since the Civil War. And yet, amid all that, there was one bright spot. . . .

FictionLiterary FictionDebut Fiction

Backtracking to a debut

Behind the Book by Sally Rooney

Where do your ideas come from? It’s a rather boring, frequently asked question of writers. But what if a debut author actually tries to track down where their book first began to sprout? Sally Rooney attempts to find the original seed of Conversations with Friends.

I don’t remember how I came by the idea for my book. Digital evidence suggests it happened on October 27, 2014: the date I created a Pages file titled “Melissa,” a short story idea that would later develop into my debut novel, Conversations with Friends. The basic premise of the book has survived intact since that early draft: Two college students, Frances the narrator and Bobbi her ex-girlfriend, become entangled in the lives of a charismatic married couple, Melissa and Nick. Did something happen on October 27 to trigger the idea in my mind? Something I read, watched or noticed?

Without the aid of the internet, I would remember almost nothing specific about that month, never mind that day. This would probably unsettle me—this sense of having no record of my own life, of allowing my days and years to slip away from me forgotten—if it were not for the vast, permanent internet, acting as a kind of external hard drive to my own consciousness. A few quick searches through my Gmail account produce considerable amounts of information about October 27, 2014, and the days and weeks preceding it: the assigned reading on my Master’s program, the friends I was most frequently in touch with, reminders from my counseling service not to miss an appointment. A strange, disjointed portrait of someone I no longer fully recognize.

The only emails I received on the day in question were newsletters. One of them, from which I’ve since unsubscribed, consisted that day of the famous packing list from Joan Didion’s The White Album—a list of items Didion drew up and taped inside her closet door, allowing her to pack quickly for her frequent travel as a journalist. The list is iconically, almost exaggeratedly glamorous, including items like “bourbon” and “mohair throw” but neglecting, for example, clean underwear. Did some of this aesthetic performance, and my own ambivalent response to it, sneak its way into the opening pages of Conversations with Friends, in which Frances coldly notices Melissa’s “hairbrush” and “open tube of lipstick” in the hallway of her home?

More strangely, I discover an email sent to the editor of Stonecutter, a magazine in New York, on October 25—two days before I began work on the novel. In it, I discuss the idea of writing a critical essay about monogamy. Though I couldn’t have known it at the time, I was about to begin writing a book in which the exploration of monogamy plays a significant role. Do I remember writing that email? Sure, kind of—but I could have sworn, and would have, that I had written it much later, when the book was already well underway, or even finished.

To discover that the thematic concerns of the novel were on my mind before I started writing it—that I even considered writing a critical essay on the same subject instead—is genuinely weird for me. I believed, and have even stated in interviews, that those concerns developed organically from the characters. That made sense to me as an account of my book’s development, and even my own development as a writer: Characters and situations come first, intellectual concerns much later. Now, thanks to the search functionality of my email account, I’m forced to admit I may not really understand much about my writing process at all.

 

Author photo credit Jonny L Davies.

Where do your ideas come from? It’s a rather boring, frequently asked question of writers. But what if a debut author actually tries to track down where their book first began to sprout? Sally Rooney attempts to find the original seed of Conversations with Friends.

Middle Grade

A new ending for Edgar Allan Poe

Behind the Book by Ronald Kidd

I’ve always been fascinated by Edgar Allan Poe. 

I had read some of his stories. I’d seen the iconic photo, showing a man with scraggly black hair, sunken eyes, a mustache crawling wormlike across his face and eyes that didn’t look quite right. But it wasn’t until I read more about Poe that I discovered the most remarkable thing of all: He invented three literary genres—science fiction 25 years before Jules Verne, mysteries 50 years before Arthur Conan Doyle and horror 100 years before H. P. Lovecraft. Poe lived so long ago that when he was born, Thomas Jefferson was president.

"Poe deserved a fitting death, not an ignominious one."

I felt compelled to write about Poe, and my first thought was historical fiction, a form I’ve always enjoyed. I imagined a novel featuring Poe that would consist of three parts, in sequence: science fiction, mystery and horror. I still think it’s a good idea, but something else kept nagging at me. It was his death.

Poe was obsessed with death. Death was his greatest and most terrifying subject. And yet his own death—what we know of it—was squalid and sad. 

At the time, Poe was living in New York. After his beloved wife Ginny died, he sometimes traveled to Philadelphia and Richmond to raise money for the Stylus, a journal of literature and the arts that he dreamed of starting. In October of 1849 Poe found his way to Baltimore, where his writing career had begun and he had spent some of his happiest years. There he was discovered in a tavern, suffering from an unidentified illness, and was taken to a hospital, where he died a few days later. It was reported that before he died, Poe repeatedly called out the name “Reynolds.” That’s all we know.

Poe deserved a fitting death, not an ignominious one. My goal in writing this book, therefore, wasn’t to portray history but to fix it. I took those few facts, built on them, and reimagined his death—not as it was but as it should have been. 

What if …
… Poe concocted a final magnificent story that he was determined to live out when he died.
… the plan went terribly wrong and left him trapped in agony between life and death.
… his soul wailed and screamed and grew twisted over time. 
… a house sprouted like an evil mushroom—haunted, horrible, worthy of Poe.
… a boy moved there years later and, through his anger, unleashed Poe’s spirit. 

The story gripped me, hard, and I wrote it. Eventually it became Room of Shadows, the first novel I’ve written that actually scared me. 

We are in modern-day Baltimore. Thirteen-year-old David Cray is angry. Terror takes root in the closet. And Edgar Allan Poe, at long last, gets the death he deserved.

 

Ronald Kidd has written more than 30 works, including plays, novels and children’s books. His suspenseful new middle grade novel, Room of Shadows, follows the experiences of 13-year-old David Cray, who moves into a creepy house in downtown Baltimore with his mom and unwittingly unleashes the spirit of Edgar Allan Poe. Kidd lives in Nashville with his wife and daughter. Visit RonaldKidd.com to learn more about his writing.

Author photo by Helen Burrus

Author Ronald Kidd describes his lifelong fascination with Edgar Allan Poe and the inspiration for his new middle grade novel, Room of Shadows.
FictionLiterary FictionDebut Fiction

Remnants of a mother-daughter battle

Behind the Book by Zinzi Clemmons

I started writing when I was in college. I had plans to become a doctor, which obviously made my parents very happy. My mother was born in South Africa, and my father’s mother was from Trinidad, and he grew up in the heavily West Indian neighborhood of Jamaica, Queens. Both were strict disciplinarians. Both had nice families but modest childhoods and, like so many immigrant families in this country, believed in hard work and sacrifice as much as they did in God.

They were devastated when, in my second year of college, I realized that no matter how proud medicine made my parents, studying it made me profoundly unhappy. So I signed up for a creative writing class on a whim and began my journey as a writer.

There was never much of a question that I would write about my mother. She was a larger-than-life figure, at turns aggressive, funny and generous. Strong-willed and acid-tongued, she spoke her mind as a matter of principle, and even though she had a tendency to offend, she was incredibly well liked. Her brash, contradictory personality was the source of constant wonder for me as a child. Our fights were legendary, ranging in topic from the mundane to the serious. I didn’t have to do much inventing when I wrote the mother character in my novel. With my own mother as inspiration, the character wrote itself. Nevertheless, What We Lose is a novel of ideas, primarily about how larger forces like race, nationality and gender shape our lives consciously and unconsciously.

However, my mother’s influence and likeness appeared often in my early work. For example, my hair was a constant flashpoint of tension in our relationship. I grew up in the ’90s, and the natural hair renaissance that would take place around the mid-2000s was still a long way off. It was still the norm for black women to straighten their hair with harsh chemicals or scalding-hot irons, both of which usually left your scalp covered in burns, not to mention the permanent damage done to the hair itself. As a tomboy and an A-student, I could see little use for perfectly coiffed hair and would avoid my mother’s straightening sessions and hair appointments like the plague. Of course, this only made her angrier.

Stories about hair have made their way into several of my short stories and my novel. I use these episodes as a way of discussing intergenerational conflict—how race impacts our conceptions of beauty, colorism and gender. Similar arguments arose around my clothes, grades and career choices. They mostly had the same result: My mother would double down on her objections, and I would become increasingly alienated from both her and the rest of my family. My father, an immensely agreeable man, was forced to play mediator during holidays when I would visit home. These visits would always be marked by at least one fight that, if we were lucky, wouldn’t balloon beyond my visit. But often, it did.

Our relationship eased, as tends to happen, when my mother became gravely ill. About six months before she died at 55, mere days after I finished my MFA program at Columbia University, I moved back into my parents’ Philadelphia house to help care for her. This decision in itself was shaped by the gender norms inherent in both Caribbean and South African culture. It is the daughter’s job to take care of the parents. Even though I volunteered, my brother stayed in New Mexico, where he had relocated for work. I missed my brother and felt incredibly alone, and I resented my parents for not placing the same responsibilities on him that they did on me. These gendered cultural expectations—as well as the experience of living in hospitals, caring for her nearly around the clock, my sadness at her impending death—all later became part of What We Lose.

I wrote most of What We Lose after my mother’s death, and in so doing, I was finally able to gain a higher understanding of who she was. By delving into her history, both in her home country of South Africa and in the U.S., I began to realize that much of her behavior in my childhood had sprung out of fear: fear that she wouldn’t be able to succeed in a new country, fear that her children wouldn’t make it. Fear of what harm might befall me as a young, rebellious black woman, and the ever-present fear of raising black children in the United States.

In addition to providing some closure, the stories of our conflicts illustrated how systemic issues play out in our everyday lives. Our fights about my hair were also about the expectations placed on young black women, and how the failure to live up to those expectations would reflect on my mother. My appearance, my friends and my career were all constantly judged by our mostly white community. Growing up and leaving my hometown would only provide bigger dangers, when these choices could impact my ability to find a job, a family and in certain cases (usually involving law enforcement) whether I lived or died. By investigating my relationship with my mother—the years we spent at odds and our short armistice at the end of her life—I ultimately realized how these larger forces shaped my life as well, and how deeply I’d internalized them. To me, this is the most important part of What We Lose, the point from which all of the book’s relationships and drama emanates. The same was always true of my life, long before I even recognized it.

 

Zinzi Clemmons is the co-founder of Apogee Journal and a contributing editor to Literary Hub. She lives in Los Angeles with her husband, where she teaches at The Colburn Conservatory and Occidental College. What We Lose, her debut novel, is a poignant exploration of womanhood and identity.

Author photo credit Nina Subin.

This article was originally published in the August 2017 issue of BookPage. Download the entire issue for the Kindle or Nook.

Zinzi Clemmons explores how her own relationship with her mother inspired her superb debut novel, What We Lose.

Fiction

Exploring a historical what-if

Behind the Book by Terry Jastrow

America wages too many unnecessary and perhaps illegal wars—for example, the Vietnam and Iraq wars. Although it would be foolish to say all wars are unnecessary, if leaders of superpowers are allowed to wage unnecessary wars with impunity, then humanity is destined to be plagued by such wars. I felt strongly that someone had to do something about it. Then I thought, how about me?

I spent three and a half years researching and writing The Trial of Prisoner 043 because I believe it is important for the future of humankind. The more sophisticated and powerful weaponry becomes, the more destructive war will be. The concept of George W. Bush being tried in a globally recognized legal forum to determine if he waged an illegal war enables us to critically consider both sides of an issue that has had ripple effects across human history.

In The Trial of Prisoner 043, I advocate equally for both the prosecution and the defense. To do less would have defeated the purpose of the book. Readers are given all the information necessary to come to their own conclusions. I set out to tell the story in a balanced way so readers could determine for themselves who is the protagonist and who is the antagonist, depending on their point of view, which may or may not shift during their reading of the book.

I have no personal animosity for or vendetta against George W. Bush. In fact, I voted for him when he ran for president the first time. And on a social level, I like him. When we were boys living in Midland, Texas, George and I played Little League baseball against each other. When I was a student at the University of Houston and he was a young oilman in Houston, we saw each other socially. And when he was elected governor of Texas, he invited my wife and me to visit him in the governor’s office. But governance is not a popularity contest.

The plain and simple truth is, there was never legitimate justification for George W. Bush’s war. It should never have been fought. The damage and destruction to human lives and property, incarceration of people without due process of law, and prisoner abuse all constitute war crimes. The Iraq War would never have happened if George Bush didn’t cause it to happen, and he bears the legal responsibility for the death and damage resulting from his war.

Not until leaders of superpowers understand that their actions are subject to scrutiny and perhaps trial at the International Criminal Court will they think longer and harder about fighting wars.

Why would a television sports producer/director be compelled to write a novel? Because I love storytelling. My mentor at ABC Sports was the legendary producer Roone Arledge, who wrote, in collaboration with Jim McKay, the iconic opening to ABC’s “Wide World of Sports”: “the thrill of victory, the agony of defeat, the human drama of athletic competition.” In every sports telecast, our principal goal was to focus on and celebrate the human drama—and to tell a great story.

Some may ask if my novel can make a difference. I hope and believe it will. The voices of artists are the most powerful in advocating for the protection and preservation of human rights, dignity, and peace. It seems evident that governments, militaries, and the press will not oppose unnecessary wars, as each profits greatly from war. Only the impassioned voices of fair-minded people around the world can oppose war and promote the preservation of the common good. The concept of peace, not war, needs to be constantly communicated, and no group can communicate more effectively than artists.

As Edward Bulwer-Lytton wrote in 1839, “The pen is mightier than the sword.”

 

Terry Jastrow is a playwright, screenwriter and producer/director of some of the biggest sporting events in the world, including Super Bowl XIX, six Olympic Games and 60 major golf championships. He also wrote the stage play The Trial of Jane Fonda, performed in 2016 in London and nominated for Best New Play (Off West End). His new novel, The Trial of Prisoner 043, is a work of speculative fiction that explores what might happen if George W. Bush stood trial in the Hague for war crimes.

Sports producer Terry Jastrow imagines what might happen if George W. Bush went on trial for war crimes.
RomanceContemporary Romance

The gift of understanding

Behind the Book by Kari Lynn Dell

Autistic characters have become more common in recent years as the condition has risen to the forefront of national discussions, with depictions ranging from strikingly accurate to unfortunately reductive. Romance author Kari Lynn Dell’s new book, Tougher in Texas, became a space to exorcise her very personal fears about perceptions of autism.

In many ways the hero of my new book, Tougher in Texas, is my worst nightmare.

Cole Jacobs is high-functioning autistic, in the range of the spectrum labeled as Asperger’s. So is my son. They share a lot of character traits, the most pronounced being difficulty interacting with other humans. In other words, they suck at small talk.

The difference between them is timing.

Logan’s kindergarten teacher immediately recognized that he was not neurotypical, which triggered a series of observations and screenings. All aspects of his school experience have been guided by an Individual Education Plan, right down to aides that observe and guide him on the playground. Legally speaking, if there’s a problem, the school is obligated to adapt to him, not vice versa.

Cole wasn’t so lucky. He wasn’t diagnosed until the age of thirty and suffered through thirteen years of education as that weird kid who doesn’t listen.

When I sat down to write Cole, I imagined what might have happened if my son had been born a decade or two sooner, before his condition would have been identified. But I also projected my fears for a critical point in Logan’s life—when he suddenly grasps that he’s not like other kids.

Psychologists have warned us that this is most likely to coincide with his first crush. Our job is be sure he doesn’t get crushed, at least not permanently like in Cole’s case. As an adult, Cole is the epitome of the strong silent type, but he confesses it hasn’t always been the case:

 

He ran his thumb back and forth along the edge of the table, the repetitive, tactile sensation grounding him. “People assume because I don’t say much, I don’t want anyone else to talk. But I like to listen.”

“As long as you don’t have to answer?”

“Depends. Ask me about feed supplements, I can go on all day.”

She laughed in patent disbelief. “That I would have to hear.”

“I used to talk a lot.” He pressed the pad of his thumb harder into the edge of the table.

Shawnee turned, a plate in each hand. “And then?”

“I got old enough to figure out I was doing it wrong.”

 

Right now, we are focusing on Logan’s autistic gifts. Because yes, along with the negatives we hear so much about, being on the spectrum can endow amazing benefits. My son is the happiest kid I know. Luckily, he suffers from little of the anxiety that can be debilitating for many with autism. He loves hugs. He can memorize reams of cartoon dialogue, poems and songs and play them back, mimicking any accent spot on.

Best of all—he could truly care less if anyone thinks he’s cool. In the toxic world of adolescence, that is a superpower. If only it would last through high school. Or ever better, adulthood.

And as the psychologist pointed out, what is a detriment in the education system often becomes an advantage later in life. Cole’s autism makes him compulsive about schedules and routines, which can be annoying, but also helps his rodeos tick along like clockwork. His obsession with every tiny detail pertaining to the care and management of his bucking horses and bulls ensures their safety and optimum performance. When he’s forced to also look after the human herd that makes up the Jacobs Livestock crew he tends to them in the same way.

Is it his fault that some people—yeah, we’re looking at you, Shawnee—don’t respond well to being micro-managed?

My son has also given me the gift of understanding—and forgiveness. I can now look at my dad’s side of the family and see that several people, including myself, exist either in or just outside of that same range of the spectrum. (Yes, in our case autism is at least partially inherited. In general, autism has been proven over and over again to be genetic in nature and unrelated to childhood vaccinations). I get why my grandmother gave every one of us a copy of Miss Manners’ Guide to Excruciatingly Good Behavior for Christmas (which is actually a very entertaining read, by the way, with the author often digressing into expertly applied snark). For a woman whose routines were so ingrained she was upset for days after I parked on the wrong side of her bank and forced her to walk in the opposite door from her usual, etiquette was a predictable set of rules to guide my grandmother through otherwise painful social interactions—her version of Cole’s precious schedules.

Discovering all of this has helped me accept what I have always considered to be personal shortcomings. Turns out I just wasn’t designed to be that woman who still has deep connections to her high school girlfriends. I don’t bond easily and maintaining relationships will always be a low priority—not because I’m cold or self-centered, as I assumed—but because I am neurologically wired in a way that I don’t crave those connections beyond a select few, mostly family.

I’m pretty good with casual friendships, I’m your girl if you need someone to jump in and impose order during a crisis, but I barely even remember my own anniversary, let alone your birthday. I can, however, keep most of a four-hundred-page book organized inside my head.

And you know what? That’s a trade-off I’m more than happy to make, and I pray that eventually my son will find his special niche, too.

 

Kari Lynn Dell is a third generation cowgirl, horse trainer and rodeo competitor as well as the 2013 Canadian Senior Pro Rodeo Association Breakaway Roping Champion. She is also a humor columnist for several regional newspapers and a national agricultural publication. You can follow her on Twitter @kidell or visit her website at www.karilynndell.com.

ALSO IN BOOKPAGE: Read our review of Tougher in Texas.

Autistic characters have become more common in recent years as the condition has risen to the forefront of national discussions, with depictions ranging from strikingly accurate to unfortunately reductive. Romance author Kari Lynn Dell's new book Tougher in Texas became a space to exorcise her very personal fears about perceptions of autism.

Science Fiction & Fantasy

A teen discovers her epic destiny

Behind the Book by F.C. Yee

Tough 16-year-old Chinese-American high school student Genie Lo is busy preparing for the college application process. She’s just trying to keep her grades up and her head down when she meets Quentin—the new transfer student from China. But there’s something a little otherworldy about the handsome, puzzling and charming Quentin. To make things even weirder, he also claims to know Genie from a previous life—a life where she fought evil. Based on the Chinese myth of the Monkey King, this hilarious and action-packed story will have readers cheering for Genie and Quentin as they try to defend the Bay Area from ancient Chinese demons known as yaoguai.

F.C. Yee’s The Epic Crush of Genie Lo is a smart and witty fantasy that readers of all ages will easily fall for.

Confession time: As a reader and consumer of fiction, I love the Tournament trope. My favorite part of any anime is when all of the characters stop what they’re doing to participate in a bracketed competition, no matter how much it derails the story. If the tournament is the story, even better. I love the preconflict uncertainty where you try to guess which of your favorite main characters has the edge based off what you’ve seen of their development. I love the mysterious strangers who show up and kick ass without any character development. I even love the inversions of the Tournament trope, like [in “Avatar”] when Zuko tries to honorably Agni Kai with Azula and she gleefully decides “nope.”

Tangent time: I studied Economics in college. My education in the subject only goes up to undergrad, and I was never very good at it, so I remember little. One thing I do remember though, is the academic definition of a tournament: a competition with multiple participants where the prizes are heavily weighted toward the victors. A winner-take-all outcome when it comes to resource distribution.

Consider the exact example my outdated textbook used. If Robin Williams (R.I.P.) is the funniest actor in movies and is somehow objectively twice as funny as the next funniest actor in movies, this hypothetical second-place person doesn’t get paid half as much as Robin Williams. They get paid a comparative pittance because the entire audience can get their funny bones tickled by Robin Williams, the best of the best. Like many examples used in textbooks, there’s tons of problems there, but you get the general idea. Random lotteries are not tournaments because the effort to enter is equal. Economic tournaments require the participants to put in effort.

Point time: The degree to which economic tournaments appear in life is surprising, or at least it was to me once I knew what to look for. I design for a living. Tournaments are never designed to benefit the participants. They’re designed to extract maximum value for the organizers, by having the total amount of effort contributed by the participant population during the tournament duration be much higher than the baseline effort without the competition.

That was a mouthful, but the effects of a tournament structure are much simpler to understand. They require a steady stream of participants who are willing to most likely NOT receive a reward proportionate to the level of effort they put in. Maybe they know this part of the deal going in, or maybe they’re overly optimistic. Does every person who enters the World Series of Poker have an accurate read on their chances of winning? I don’t know.

Tournaments are also one of the lowest-investment ways for an organizer to distribute rewards, which is probably one of the reasons why they’re so commonly used. Just make sure the top is massively overweighted. If there’s only one prize, and the winner does a 100 in terms of effort, you don’t have to worry about the runner-up who did a 99 effort. They get nothing. It’s a feature, not a bug.

Outside of sports and other competitive extracurriculars, one of the first very big, very important tournaments a young person is going to face is college applications, provided their desires and circumstances lead them in and allow them that direction. Imagine a high school student as a challenger exiting a small dark hallway into a vast arena covered by the blinding sun. They don’t know who their opponents are, or how strong they might be. They may not have been coached, or they may have been given outdated information. And everywhere, everywhere in the stands, they see adults nodding their heads, cheering: Yes. This is how it should be. This is what meritocracy looks like.

The Epic Crush of Genie Lo is about gods, demons and make-believe punching. It’s about the comedy and pain that can ensue when a culture that you’ve never truly experienced as a child of immigrants suddenly catches up with you.

But on some level, whether or not it’s the deepest one, it’s about a high school girl’s slow realization and reaction to the fact that she lives in one long, high stakes, never-ending tournament arc. We could laugh, but then again, so do the rest of us.

Confession time: As a reader and consumer of fiction, I love the Tournament trope. My favorite part of any anime is when all of the characters stop what they’re doing to participate in a bracketed competition, no matter how much it derails the story. If the tournament is the story, even better.

Middle Grade

Taking care of our precious words

Behind the Book by Patricia Forde

Patricia Forde’s The List, her first book for children to be released in the U.S., is set in a world where language has been restricted to 500 words. Forde is a speaker of Irish Gaelic, mistakenly considered by some to be a dead language, and knows a thing or two about the preciousness of words.

One language dies every 14 days. As many as half the world’s minority languages are expected to be extinct by the end of the century. My native language is one of those. We call it Irish, the rest of the world calls it Gaelic. Reports of the death of the Irish language have been, to misquote Oscar Wilde, greatly exaggerated. The language is still alive—it is in the critical care unit and the prognosis isn’t great, but it has a heartbeat. That heartbeat resides in places like Connemara, where I live.

Here, in the west of Ireland, people still speak Irish on a daily basis, in the shop, at school, at work. But it is a language with fewer words than ever before and that list grows shorter every year. Does that matter? I think it does. There are words in Irish that don’t translate into English. They don’t translate because they carry within them the psychology and the history of a people. The word macnas is a good example. Macnas is the term used to describe the mad cavorting of a calf on first being introduced to a meadow. How do you say that in English? You don’t. Or what about fíbín? It’s the way an animal reacts after it has been bitten by a gadfly. Those words reflect our relationship with our landscape and our traditional way of life. A language, it seems, is more than the sum of its words.

When I began to write The List, I didn’t know that one of the things it was about was language. I only found that out when I had written it, but I was not surprised. Language has played a big part in my life. I have been bilingual since I was 4 years old, and for most of my life I have been aware that we may be the last generation to speak Irish. In the novel, the story opens in Ark, where the list of legal words has just been reduced from 700 to 500.

With every generation in Ireland, the list of commonly used Irish words grows shorter. Words that were once commonplace are now exotic, words that were used every day on farms are now preserved only in dictionaries, words used to describe certain elements in nature no longer exist at all. When we lose the words to describe the landscape—the words for a hundred different types of seaweed, for example, or the word for a tune that you can’t get out of your head, the word for the madness of a newborn calf—when we lose those words, do we also lose the ability to see that diversity of experience in our own lives? And if we don’t see the diversity, can we lose something invaluable, almost without knowing it?

In The List, the young protagonist, Letta, wonders how we can dream if we don’t have words, how we can even hope if the word itself is now forbidden. Language and our relationship with it is a deeply mysterious thing. An Irish philosopher, John O’Donoghue, once said: The place between silence and language is where you find poetry. I love that thought. I hope The List inspires people to see that every word matters, to see that we need words to forge relationships and to fix them when they fall apart. We need to respect the need for our words to be accurate and exact, not to throw them about without due care and responsibility. How many words do we need to survive? As many as we can remember, and if that isn’t enough, then as many as we can invent. Every word matters. Every language matters. If we use words wisely, they are an enormous force for good and will help us to know exactly who we are. What could be more important than that?

 

ALSO IN BOOKPAGE: Read our review of The List.

Author photo credit Philip Smyth.

Patricia Forde’s The List, her first book for children to be released in the U.S., is set in a world where language has been restricted to 500 words. Forde is a speaker of Irish Gaelic, mistakenly considered by some to be a dead language, and knows a thing or two about the preciousness of words.

FictionDebut Fiction

Who was Bonnie before Clyde?

Behind the Book by Jenni L. Walsh

Who knew that the infamous crime figure Bonnie Parker was once a straight A student who liked to sing at church? 

At some point during my adolescent years, I caught the 1967 film Bonnie and Clyde on TV. Nearly 20 years later, while brainstorming an idea for a novel inspired by an iconic figure, their names popped into my mind. Interestingly enough, I couldn’t recall too much from the film, or about Bonnie and Clyde for that matter, except that the duo were fiercely loyal to one another. Their story intrigued me, especially what made these partners tick. I was pleasantly surprised to find that their story wasn’t one yet told in a novel, and I dove into research. I was also pleasantly surprised by their backstories, particularly Bonnie Parker’s.

Who knew Bonnie got straight A’s, participated in spelling bees and talent shows, and sang at church? I found an amusing anecdote that Bonnie, at the age of three, stood up in front of a church congregation to belt out a tune. The youngster before her sang “Jesus Loves Me,” but Bonnie, she sang “He’s a Devil in His Own Home Town.” I can only imagine the mixture of muted laugher and out-right gasps that filled the chapel. A picture of Bonnie before Clyde began to form in my mind: an intelligent yet feisty young woman. Still, how did a seemingly wholesome girl end up in a life of crime with a convicted felon like Clyde Barrow? 

While I originally sought to tell Bonnie and Clyde’s crime spree story, it didn’t take long before I decided I needed to back up nearly five years and bring Bonnie’s origin story to life. I recently re-watched the film, and Bonnie is portrayed as a young West Dallas woman who is bored working as a waitress and wants to be one of the gals she sees in the motion pictures. From my research, I found this characterization to be pretty on the mark, but I also saw a lot more to Bonnie than what’s generally depicted:

• Prior to meeting Clyde, Bonnie was married to a fella who didn’t treat her right.  

• Bonnie was fiercely devoted to her family.

• She wrote poetry and songs.

• Her father died when she was young, leaving her family struggling to make ends meet. 

• She was a middle child.

• Bonnie was an impressionable young adult during the Roaring ’20s.

Thing is, besides these tidbits of information, not much is known about Bonnie Parker’s childhood or adolescent years. I excitedly rubbed my hands together and got to work, combining limited historical facts with my own imagination to create a well-rounded picture of who Bonnie Parker could’ve been during the era of speakeasies, bootlegs and later the stock market crash of 1929. In Becoming Bonnie, Bonnie’s a girl with stars in her eyes, who also has practical aspirations for her life, driven by the need to be somebody who will make her daddy proud. 

One of the biggest fictional elements of the novel, which has been described as a female “Breaking Bad,” is that Bonnie begins the story with the name Bonnelyn. By the novel’s end, she’s Bonnie, and I’ll give ya one guess who coins her new name.

I’m excited to introduce readers to my version of Bonnie Parker, including how she meets Clyde Barrow and how the infamous duo begins their life of crime. In Summer 2018, I’ll be continuing their escapades in Bonnie, showing Bonnie’s role in their 27-month crime spree across Depression-ridden America.

 

Jenni L. Walsh has worked as an award-winning advertising copywriter for the past decade. She is a graduate of Villanova University and lives near Philadelphia with her husband, daughter, and son. Becoming Bonnie is her first novel.

Who knew that the infamous crime figure Bonnie Parker was once a straight A student who liked to sing at church? 

At some point during my adolescent years, I caught the 1967 film Bonnie and Clyde on TV. Nearly 20 years later, while…

Middle Grade

Two new friends outrun expectations

Behind the Book by Diana Harmon Asher

“Maybe more than any other sport, cross-country is about not quitting.”

Joseph has ADD, but he has a sense of humor about it: At least he doesn’t have the “H” part. Since his focus wanders, team sports are especially exasperating, and he’s not a natural athlete anyway. When he joins the cross-country team, a healthy bond is formed away from the usual teasing and frustration. Then comes a fast new girl, Heather, who is brave enough to stand up to the bullies and accepting enough to befriend Joseph exactly as he is.

With Sidetracked, debut author Diana Harmon Asher offers a story devoid of pity and replete with humor. Here, she shares the inspiration behind her heartwarming cross-country tale.

When my oldest son started running cross-country, I learned about singlets and starting guns, warmups and runners cramps, muddy trails and fartleks.

And really, what aspiring children’s book author could resist writing about a sport that has a term like “fartlek”?

The hero of my debut novel, Sidetracked, is a seventh grader named Joseph. He has Attention Deficit Disorder, he’s a terrible athlete, and he’s loaded with anxieties. Just for starters, he’s afraid of gargoyles, street sweepers and stewed prunes. To Joseph, middle school might as well be the running of the bulls. He just tries to keep up or stay out of the way or find someplace to hide.

Heather is new to Lakeview. She seems to be Joseph’s opposite—smart, fast and strong. But it’s not so easy being faster than the boys and stronger than the bullies. In fact, as Joseph puts it, “I wonder if you can be as miserable being good at something as you can being bad at it. Maybe things are reversed somehow, when you’re a girl.”

Cross-country gave me a starting point for their stories, because it’s a place where doing better than last time has a name. It’s called a “personal record.” It’s a place where boys and girls train together, where talented athletes come together with kids who have been cut from baseball and tennis and soccer, to make a team. It’s a hodgepodge of abilities, a virtual trail mix of kids, but it’s a team.

Maybe more than any other sport, cross-country is about not quitting. There’s no bench time, no timeouts, no substitutions. You run, and you try to finish. Middle school can feel like that—especially to kids with ADD and other learning differences. They’re constantly reminded that they’re not living up to expectations. But that makes what they do accomplish even more noteworthy. As my son who runs marathons and climbs mountains for fun reminds me, “easy” isn’t a story.

There’s no one tougher than a cross-country runner. But I have to admit, there are a lot of comic possibilities when you put a bunch of seventh graders in their teeny tiny shorts and singlets on a cross-country trail. I hope Sidetracked will be a fun read for kids, and I hope it encourages them to give themselves a chance. A chance to compete, even if they’re not the best. A chance to be a good friend. And I hope it gives them license to ignore the people who try to tell them who they’re supposed to be and box them in with their expectations. Because really, which of us, even as adults, feel that we’re everything we’re expected to be?

Is Joseph a great runner? No. But he’s in the race. He does the best he can, like we all do. We start slow and get better, and we try not to give up. If we’re lucky, we find our team. And however we live or run or write, it’s of value, because no one else can do it in exactly that same way.

 

Author photo credit Alison Sheehy Photography.

When my oldest son started running cross-country, I learned about singlets and starting guns, warmups and runners cramps, muddy trails and fartleks. And really, what aspiring children’s book author could resist writing about a sport that has a term like “fartlek”?

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