Behind the Book Archives

Behind the Book by Amy Poeppel

by Amy Poeppel

“Most mothers with teenage children would be quite well-suited to wrangling the messy lives of spoiled, young celebrities into perfect order.”

The new novel from Small Admissions author Amy Poeppel puts on a show for readers. Limelight is a hilarious melding of family drama and the world of Broadway. Here, Poeppel walks us through her love of the theater and tells us why a mom would be the best person to manage a spoiled pop star.

I was 10 years old when I saw my first West End show at the Adelphi Theatre in London. That probably sounds more glamorous than it really was; my dad was working in Copenhagen for the summer, and my parents, two sisters and I left our small apartment and took a vacation, driving a hundred hours through Bremen, Brussels and Bruges, all the way to England. On the second day of this adventure our car was broken into and our suitcases stolen, leaving us with nothing but the clothes we were wearing. Somewhere in Germany, I got stung by a wasp. I threw up a lot on that trip, a few times in the Volvo and again on the ferry (with a lovely view of the Cliffs of Dover) and one final time in the stodgy parlor of our London bed and breakfast. My family was mortified.

The trip was, for the most part, a flop, but seeing the musical Irene was a high point of my young life, and it stuck with me ever since. I remember the fun of matching the letters and numbers on our theater tickets to the tiny, brass plaques on the velvet flip seats in the balcony, and as the dark, heavy curtain went up, I clapped until my hands smarted. (My sisters shushed me when I didn’t stop.) I was enchanted by the elegant costumes and the sets depicting New York City, and—most of all—I loved being transported into the life of poor, sweet Irene, who herself was being transported into a life of glamour and riches completely unknown to her before. The entire production was a thrill.

About 10 years later, during my junior year abroad, I was invited by a handsome Brit to see Les Misérables at the Palace Theatre, not far from the Adelphi where Irene had played. To make a good impression on this young man and on ’80s British society in general, I dressed up for the occasion. We had great seats in the orchestra, and not long after the house lights dimmed and the musical began, I found myself tearing up during “I Dreamed a Dream” when Fantine was forced into a life of prostitution. I got even more distraught during “Castle on a Cloud” when poor Cosette imagined how much better her life would be if only she had a loving mother. By the time Éponine sang “On My Own” in act two, I was weeping. People turned to stare as I blew my nose in a soggy tissue and wiped my cheek on my date’s sleeve. The show was so moving and sad, and I was consumed by the injustice that was heaped on the peasants of France, awed by the selflessness of the characters and grief-stricken by the perfectly staged tragic deaths. War! Self-sacrifice! Humanity! Unrequited love!

Speaking of unrequited love, my date never called me again, and yet that in no way dampened my enthusiasm for Les Mis. Back in the States, I bought a cassette tape of the soundtrack and sang “One Day More” in my dorm room loudly, unabashedly and completely off-key (presumably to the dismay of fellow Claflin Hall residents).

Theater began to play a bigger part in my life after that. I met my husband when we were both cast in a college production of The Real Thing by Tom Stoppard, playing a married couple (who got divorced during Act One, though our real marriage is still going strong 25 years later). I worked as an actress in Boston regional theater for several years after college, so I found out what it’s like to be in that spotlight, to memorize lines until they are ingrained and to keep going even when things go wrong on stage. (In Crimes of the Heart, I was playing the part of Babe, and the moment came in the second act when I was supposed to answer the phone, but it didn’t ring, marking the longest 12 seconds of my life.) I also relished the backstage camaraderie, the long, arduous rehearsals, the late-night drinks with cast mates and crew, and the jitters and exhilaration of opening night. I felt the satisfaction of glowing reviews and the mortification of terrible ones.

Although I stopped acting in my late 20s when I turned my attention to teaching drama and literature to high school students and parenting my own children, I continue to go to plays whenever I get the chance (and read them when I don’t). I live in New York, so there’s always a show I’m itching to see. And I still make a scene from my seat in the house, whether it’s laughing in The Play That Goes Wrong, crying and feeling anxious in Dear Evan Hansen, covering my eyes during American Psycho, getting goose bumps in The Band’s Visit or Come from Away or staring star-struck at Tony Award winners like Denzel Washington in Fences or Glenn Close in Sunset Boulevard. Being at the theater is always an absorbing experience for me; I’m all in, every time.

One recent theatrical phenomenon I have been intrigued by is the casting of big-name celebrity singers in Broadway shows. I started to wonder how classically trained, experienced actors feel about the pop stars who sometimes take the leads in today’s musicals. Are they welcoming? Or are they wary? Do they feel that such casting adds value to a production, or do they view it as a cheapening of the institution of theater? My short career in theater taught me the importance of actors working in an ensemble, and it occurred to me that if a narcissistic star, especially someone who is disrespectful to the process or to the rest of the cast and crew, were to take a big role in a play, it could be a nightmare for the other actors and a catastrophe for the production. As a writer, I felt right away that there was a story there I wanted to tell.

I decided to write a book that combines the three passions of my life—New York City, theater and family—while entertaining an unfounded belief I’ve had for years: that most mothers with teenage children would be quite well-suited to wrangling the messy lives of spoiled, young celebrities into perfect order. I’ve often felt I could convince a child star to make good decisions and behave in a respectful manner (while I’d also remember to schedule his or her teeth-cleaning and dermatology appointments). Writing Limelight was a marvelous opportunity to imagine applying the skills I’ve acquired raising my kids to the role of managing a difficult teenage pop star. The main character, Allison Brinkley, mother and new Manhattanite, gets a front-row seat to the staging of a Broadway musical based on Charlie Chaplin’s 1952 film Limelight. Teen crooner and heartthrob Carter Reid is woefully unprepared to step into his first serious acting role, and Allison discovers she is in a unique position to help salvage his floundering career as the young star faces the biggest challenge of his privileged life. As she tries to take control of Carter’s wildly undisciplined existence, Allison tackles the school crises, break-ups and hormones in her own household, as she and her family find their place in the heart of New York City.

Photo credit George Baier

Middle Grade

Middle Grade

On an isolated island, love triumphs

Behind the Book by Kiran Millwood Hargrave

by Kiran Millwood Hargrave

“Everyone knew that all islands were worlds unto themselves, that to come to an island was to come to another world.” —Guy Gavriel Kay

When you hear the word leper, what do you think? When I do school visits, the subject is greeted with either confusion or disgust. If it’s the former, I explain that it is a bacterial disease that damages nerves, often leading to the loss of fingers, toes, or noses. The disgust follows quickly after. I wrote The Island at the End of Everything because I used to feel like that too, and because I came to realize the error of my ways. Before I wrote stories for children, I wrote poetry for adults. I was at a poetry prize ceremony when someone stood up and read a poem entitled “Culion.” It spoke of abandoned hospitals, forgotten patients, a beautiful island haunted by a dark past. I was instantly intrigued. Afterwards, I asked the poet how they had gotten the idea, and they told me that Culion was a real island in the Philippines, which between 1906 and 1998 grew into the largest leper colony in the world.

That night, I stayed up late Googling Culion. Initially, I was driven by a sort of morbid fascination, but this quickly evolved into a deep sadness at both my reaction and the lives and deaths of the inhabitants of Culion. Throughout history, people with leprosy have been treated appallingly. Their disease and subsequent deformity were associated with sin and poor hygiene in everything from law to the Bible when in actuality it is caused by bacteria similar to a cold, only much harder to catch. One solution was to isolate them from society, and the most extreme implementation of this was the conversion of islands into leper colonies.

Culion was far from the first island leper colony, but it was the biggest. In 1906, a law was passed in the Philippines segregating healthy inhabitants from those with leprosy. On paper, this may seem a good idea; in practice, it was devastating. Children were taken from their parents, and families were ripped apart, never to be reunited. When I actually stopped to think of what the word segregation means, it horrified me. And I knew I had a story to tell. Ami lives happily on Culion with her Nanay, who has leprosy. She spends her days caring for her mother and watching for butterflies, but their peaceful existence is wrecked by the arrival of a cruel government official, Mr. Zamora. He oversees the segregation, and along with several other children, Ami is taken from her mother and transported to an orphanage across the sea. Mr. Zamora, an avid butterfly collector, runs the institution and makes the children’s lives a living hell. But Ami forms a friendship with a honey-eyed girl named Mari, and together they set out to try and find a way back to the island at the end of everything.

Placing a child at the center of the story enabled me to enter its emotional heart. Children are so often underestimated and overlooked, and this allows them freedom from both scrutiny and responsibility. Ami and Mari are brave and bold, and driven by an uncomplicated love of both each other and Nanay. Ami’s greatest strength is kindness, and a willingness to see the best in anyone, and this protects her from much of Mr. Zamora’s threat. But time and the tide are against them.

Writing The Island at the End of Everything taught me that disgust is often driven by fear, and that tolerance is perhaps the best path to love, which is the opposite of fear. Telling Ami’s story grew my heart and my mind. I hope it does the same for my readers.

“Everyone knew that all islands were worlds unto themselves, that to come to an island was to come to another world.” —Guy Gavriel Kay

When you hear the word leper, what do you think? When I do school visits, the subject is greeted with either…

Historical Romance, Romance

Romance Historical Romance

Twist a trope, break the binary, find true love

Behind the Book by Cat Sebastian

by Cat Sebastian

A notorious rake and a buttoned-up paragon of respectability. A mysterious, reclusive earl and a con artist. Cat Sebastian has gained a devoted following by transforming beloved Regency romance tropes and characters into gay love stories.

The first book in her new series, Unmasked by the Marquess, uses the time-honored trope of a girl dressing as a boy. Here, Sebastian tells us how she detangled the classic plot from its potentially regressive implications in order to create a far more progressive story—a romance between a woman who discovers that she identifies as nonbinary, and the grumpy bisexual nobleman who utterly adores her.

I got the idea for writing Unmasked by the Marquess, in which a character identifies as nonbinary in the early 1800s, when somebody on Twitter said that they’d like to read a romance novel with the classic girl-dressed-as-a-boy trope, but where the girl realizes she isn’t a girl after all. I can’t remember the exact wording, and I wish I knew who the author of the tweet was, but the comment was like an anvil dropping on my head. I adore the girl-in-breeches plot, but it’s often transphobic and biphobic in its execution. I realized at that moment that I could twist the trope around and tell a story I had been toying with for ages.

At around the time I started plotting Unmasked, I read E.E. Ottoman’s shatteringly beautiful Documenting Light, a contemporary romance between a trans man and a nonbinary person who begins to acknowledge their nonbinary identity over the course of the book. The characters find an old photograph that may have been of a same-sex couple and are frustrated by the practice of assuming historical personages are straight until proven otherwise. This practice is problematic on many levels: it frames being straight and cis as normal, it has an “innocent until proven guilty” quality that implies queerness is shameful, and it ignores all the ways queerness has deliberately been concealed and erased from the historical record. When people are living under threat of criminal prosecution and social ostracization for their sexual orientation and gender identity, we can’t expect them to leave proof lying about. Similarly, it’s unsurprising that their family members would take care to burn letters and diaries after their death.

This is all to say, I wrote Unmasked with the understanding that trans and nonbinary people have always existed. Once you accept this, you realize history is filled with people who might have been transgender. All those people who were assigned female at birth (AFAB) but dressed in men’s clothes in order to become soldiers or doctors or otherwise avail themselves of opportunities that were reserved to men, may well have been trans men. Similarly, in 18th-century England, there were quite a few instances of AFAB people marrying women. We’ll never know whether they were con artists, trans people or queer women enjoying domestic bliss, but they may well have been trans, and we need to acknowledge that possibility. (It’s also worth pointing out that they were only publicly exposed when something went wrong; we can only guess how many people flew happily under the radar or were privately out to close friends).

What many of those instances have in common is that people dressed or lived as men in order to take advantage of opportunities—whether practicing medicine or marrying a woman—that were unavailable to women at the time. This freedom is something audiences have found compelling about girl-in-breeches stories, from Shakespeare to modern romance novels. In Unmasked, Robin first disguises herself as her employer to attend university, and then later to prevent her employer’s sister from being rendered homeless and penniless due to the entail of the family property, but ultimately the freedom she seeks in male attire is freedom from the vague uneasiness and dysphoria that tainted her earlier life, the freedom to be her authentic self.

It’s impossible to write about the girl-in-breeches trope without addressing its typical pitfalls. For example, a hero’s dismay at his unaccountable attraction to a person he believes to be a man reads as either homophobia or biphobia. Alternatively, if the hero somehow intuits the true gender of the heroine, this generally reads as transphobia to me, with its assumption that the gender of a person can be divined from physical attributes despite how they choose to present themselves to the world. When crafting the character of Robin, I made sure she was paired with a partner for whom gender is not a factor when it comes to attraction. Alistair, the titular marquess, is bisexual and comfortable with being attracted to people of all genders.

Another issue is that books employing this trope often fail to consider the gender identity of the character. When the character is happy and confident in men’s clothing, and then sad and anxious when forced to live as a woman, I want the text to engage with the possibility that the character is not a cis woman. Not doing so comes across as trans-erasure.

While I am very aware that this is imposing current social norms on characters from two hundred years ago, I can’t see any reason why a book written today ought to preserve the past’s worst attitudes without good cause. Certainly members of marginalized groups had grim experiences in the past, but many also managed to thrive and have happy, full lives, alongside friends and partners with whom they could be authentic. My goal as a writer is to tell those stories, to populate the past with stories of people who have been left out or overlooked.

Cat Sebastian tells us how she used the classic girl-dressed-as-boy trope to create a romance between a nonbinary character and the grumpy bisexual nobleman who adores her.

Debut Fiction, Fiction, Popular Fiction

Fiction Popular Fiction Debut Fiction

D.C. drama inspired by a real campaign widow

Behind the Book by Aimee Agresti

by Aimee Agresti

Aimee Agresti’s first novel for adults (she’s also the author of the Gilded Wings YA series) is a scintillating escapist story centered on a fictional 2016 presidential election and five “campaign widows,” women and men whose significant others have been sucked up by the political arena. Campaign Widows is big drama in an ultra-fun package, made all the more thrilling by Agresti’s insider knowledge—as she was once a campaign widow herself.

The idea for Campaign Widows—my novel about a group of friends left behind in Washington, D.C., when their significant others are out on the campaign trail—was indeed first sparked by my own experience, even though the events in the book really are fiction. (Thank goodness none of this drama happened in real life! Well, except for one scene involving the Secret Service scooping up a child running wild at the White House on Halloween . . . which is based on my son. But otherwise, yes, all fiction here.)

I’ve been a “campaign widow” three times, all during Senate elections, and I’ll never forget that day a million years ago when my husband, Brian—who was then just my boyfriend—came home from work as a Senate staffer on Capitol Hill and proudly declared that he would be joining his first campaign—to help re-elect a Louisiana senator. He would be shipping out to New Orleans immediately and living there for several months. How fabulous! I’d never been to the Big Easy, and it sounded so exciting! I imagined weekends spent sipping Hurricanes on Bourbon Street and looked forward to, at last, truly grasping the difference between étouffée and gumbo—I was a freelance magazine writer, so I had time on my hands. Unfortunately, Brian quickly snuffed out my plans: While he appreciated the support, he would be working round the clock and would see me in November after the election. (It actually ended up being December. . . . There was a run-off!)

I didn’t know anything about campaigns at the time, and since I’m a writer, I tend to have an overly active imagination, so I had all these crazy ideas of what he was heading into. I imagined a Venn diagram where Raucous Spring Break intersected with High School Debate Team, some kind of wild camp for intellectuals. It also set my mind off running in scary, extreme directions. (For instance, what if he never came back?!)

Though I didn’t much understand the pressure cooker he was entering when I bade him a teary goodbye at the airport, I quickly came to appreciate all that goes into that kind of job. It’s grueling, relentless work. Living and dying by poll numbers. Eating, sleeping and breathing this shared goal of getting your candidate elected. It was also a great adventure and bonding experience with colleagues. I was incredibly proud of him.

But of course, back home, life goes on . . . which is how the novel began percolating. The book lived in my head—and in the Notes app of my phone, an endless file cluttered with brainstorms and character sketches and flashes of scenes and snippets of dialogue—for years before I ever truly began writing the manuscript. (I don’t start until I have everything figured out; I’m a planner like that.) I worked on other books and projects. I soaked up Washington life. I absorbed politics by osmosis. But I waited—I just had to find the story first—because luckily, the story wasn’t mine. My widowhood was wonderfully devoid of drama: The senator won; Brian came back to work on the Hill; we got married; he joined another campaign and then another.

But I kept coming back to the idea of what it might have been like if just the opposite had happened. What it might feel like to be left behind and find your relationship in complete turmoil. All the things that could go wrong, how an election could wreak havoc on partnerships in a gazillion different ways. And how, if you found yourself in the middle of that kind of emotional rug-pulled-out-from-under-you upheaval, you might reach out to anyone, a complete stranger, who also understood that same intense world that you were orbiting. I envisioned vastly different people united in this ultra-exclusive kind of sorority. It eventually hit me that what I wanted to write was really a book about unlikely friendships.

So I dreamed up a cast of characters who might not otherwise travel in the same circles: the new-girl-in-town TV producer, the mommy blogger who misses her political days, the head-over-heels arts editor, the Georgetown doyenne and the First Lady Hopeful who secretly doesn’t want the job. I tossed in the villain: a zany, topsy-turvy election stocked with unexpected candidates (and bearing no resemblance to anything in the actual news at the time).

And then I set them all loose. The outcome? I like to think it’s the kind of fun, upbeat, escapist read that is perhaps even more satisfying than real-life. Sure, only one candidate may prevail in the election in this novel, but there just might be many victors in the pursuit of happiness.

Photo credit Abby Greenawalt

Middle Grade

Middle Grade

Walking with Emmett Till

Behind the Book by Jewell Parker Rhodes

by Jewell Parker Rhodes

“For decades, I wrote adult novels advocating for race, class, religious and gender equity. I write for children now. I believe they are our best hope for a better world.”

The heightened national awareness of police brutality's effects on American minorities has brought a wave of brilliant, devastating novels for teen readers like The Hate U Give and Tyler Johnson Was Here. Award-winning author Jewell Parker Rhodes’ (Sugar, Bayou Magic) Ghost Boy, which follows a 12-year-old boy named Jerome as he navigates the afterlife following his death in a police shooting, is one of the first books to breach this sensitive, necessary topic for younger readers. Here, Rhodes opens up about motherhood, the legacy of Emmett Till, the importance of honesty in stories for children and the issues of racial and social justice that fuel her writing.

I was born a year before Emmett Till was murdered, and I still recall seeing images of his mutilated body in Jet and Ebony magazines. I grew up with images of men lynched—one that still haunts me had corkscrew holes all over his body. I was raised in a segregated ghetto in Pittsburgh, where no one shielded children from racist actions and images. I watched civil rights battles and cheered Martin Luther King’s “I Have a Dream” speech. I believed during my lifetime, a time would come when people were judged “not by the color of their skin but by the content of their character.” I married Brad, a white man, in Maryland (a state that didn’t recognize interracial marriages until 1967). We had a son with brown skin and a daughter with white-toned skin. And within our own family, we experienced how the world treated our children differently. Our daughter was given the “privilege” of being white, and I was considered her nanny. Our son, the older he grew, was seen as more suspect, and his father was presumed to have adopted him. Dozens of strangers declared there was no way our daughter and son could be siblings.

Rodney King was battered when our son was 2. I wrote an essay, “Evan,” for Between Mothers and Sons: Women Writers Talk About Having Sons and Raising Men, that spoke of our family’s anguish that 2-year-old Evan—who loved Legos and ants—would one day as an adult be stopped and attacked by police. When the officers who beat and hog-tied King were acquitted and the LA riots began, our family drove north—as far as Monterey Bay—to find a refuge.

My son heard my worried “walking, talking [and] driving while black” speeches. But as a high school student when President Obama was elected, Evan believed his mother, in particular, was too traumatized by past racial woes. However, as a graduate student stopped almost daily by police, he learned how some systematically devalued him and doubted he knew “his lowly place” as a black man. The constant harassment was horrific. More horrific were the numerous contemporary media examples of police officers who brutalized and killed black men across America.

I thought the world had gotten better, more tolerant. Now, as a grandmother, I worry racism and racial bias are again tearing our nation apart. I worry that my generation lost the battle for more tolerant hearts and minds. I worry that my children and grandchild have to fight and struggle on for equity and social justice.

For decades, I wrote adult novels advocating for race, class, religious and gender equity. I write for children now. I believe they are our best hope for a better world. The young are curious and have such open hearts. I write challenging stories not to embitter them but to empower them to “be the change,” to remember always the sense of justice and fairness they knew instinctively as children when they become adults. Writing stories about ending all forms of bias and discrimination, I hope will be my legacy—my own personal attempt to “bear witness” beyond the grave.

The heightened national awareness of police brutality's effects on American minorities has brought a wave of brilliant, devastating novels for teen readers like The Hate U Give and Tyler Johnson Was Here. Award-winning author Jewell Parker Rhodes’ Ghost Boy, which follows a 12-year-old boy named Jerome as he navigates the afterlife following his death in a police shooting, is one of the first books to breach this sensitive, necessary topic for younger readers. Here, Rhodes opens up about motherhood, the legacy of Emmett Till, the importance of honesty in stories for children and the issues of racial and social justice that fuel her writing.

Fiction, Popular Fiction

Fiction Popular Fiction

Making seams: On sewing and writing

Behind the Book by Charlotte Nash

by Charlotte Nash

In Charlotte Nash’s The Paris Wedding, Rachael West heads to the City of Lights to attend her ex-boyfriend nuptials, intent on braving any ensuing heartbreak and enjoying an all-expenses-paid trip to Europe. Like her heroine, Nash is an accomplished seamstress, and finds that her two creative outlets intersect in surprising ways. In this essay, Nash explores the power of process and how the act of ripping up a draft can lay the foundation for the work to come.

There’s a certain romanticism attached to the things we did as children. Childhood interests are windows to our truer selves, before the weight of worldly expectation fell on us and warped our sense of what we liked and valued (at least, this is the story told by many a life and career coach). The cliché of the writer often falls in this territory, too, with many claiming their interest in writing stems from childhood. I’m not really one of them (there’s times I wish I were), but it’s certainly true that interest or curiosity is at the centre of our human existence. My earliest interest was not writing, but sewing, and yet the two arts have some surprising similarities . . . and for me, one key difference.

I learned to sew before I have memories for learning things. I remember cutting patterns on our dining table (never actually used for dining), winding bobbins with a hunched ache between my shoulder blades and the smell of machine oil as I fed fabric through my mother’s Bernina (I still have it, over 40 years later).

I don’t actually remember the “learning”—the first time I threaded a needle, the first time I had to size a pattern and cut the fabric. All those firsts are lost in the far distance of my early childhood, as if I’m trying to look back on the start of the universe. Sewing is deep in my muscle memory. But there must have been something about it that captured my interest, because I kept on with it without any adult pushing, such that my first memories of sewing are when the craft of it was already established in me.

Until I entered home economics class in middle school, I assumed sewing was a universal skill. And then I learned it wasn’t. Having already completed the first garment, I watched the other girls struggling to hold a straight stitch line on the practice shapes photocopied onto white paper (sacrilege, I thought, for one should never ever blunt one’s needle by using it on paper). With the term not even half over, I had completed the second piece, which had been meant to occupy us until the holidays.

This isn’t to say that I was some kind of seamstress wunderkind; it was just that I had learned young, and so my skills looked amazing next to anyone who was just starting out.

I learned to write fiction in my late twenties, and the learning was a deliberate act. It had to be, because I was on the other side of the art in those classes. I was the one who couldn’t hold a straight stitch line with my words. I was full of enthusiasm, but not much skill. I didn’t have a long record of things I’d written back to childhood, and I remember all the learning—how to structure, how to conceive characters, how to finish a novel draft (or, most of the time, how not to do these things). Learning to sew, I imagine, was just as fraught, I just have the advantage of not remembering it. (Plus the breakage I inflicted on my memory while studying medicine had perhaps put my early writing education on the back foot).

The benefit of my early learning in the sewing department is that as an adult, I can still out-sew just about anyone I know. Again, this doesn’t make me the best; it’s just the power of deep memory. Also, it helps that sewing is a dying art (less competition), and most people didn’t learn from an unbroken chain of women who sewed because life depended on it.

I learned to sew because my mother sewed. And she learned because hers did. I assume this is a chain unbroken through generations in the stone farmhouses of the mid-east of England, where we claim our ancestry. My mother told me once how her mother would “side-to-middle” bed sheets—this is a process where sheets that have worn thin in the middle are cut down the centre and the still-thick outsides stitched together to make a new sheet. The process extends the life of a sheet that we would now, no doubt, throw away, and then drive straight out to Bed Bath & Beyond to replace without a second thought.

I’ve spent probably too long thinking about an appropriate writing analogy to this “side-to-middling”, but any direct comparisons are laboured points about recycling rejected pieces of writing (which I always tell myself I’ll do, and hence I keep all these old manuscripts and manuscript files that I never ever look at again).

It would be better, perhaps, to be less literal. The idea of recutting bedsheets speaks of great poverty, but also great resourcefulness. This is the Janus head of the writing life for most of us, too. Poverty comes to the writer in many guises; even if you are financially successful (including at your non-writing job), time itself often becomes a limited currency. Books are large commitments, regardless of vision and genre. But somehow, because we choose to act as though we write as if life depended on it (many of us haven’t tested whether that’s true or not), we can make it all work.

If it were a cartoon character, my patience would be ugly. It’s a belligerent kind of persistence, through poverty and foolishness and terrible first drafts.

Resourcefulness requires a lot of patience, mostly to put up with patch-job solutions for long periods. We have to tolerate writing in the wrangled time available to us, tolerate hearing (again and again) that the book industry/writing is dead (or at least drawing its last breath), tolerate sheer desperation at wanting to be better at this. Patience is also a virtue best deployed in sewing; even my early learning wasn’t enough to escape that requirement, which is, I think, ultimately my dressmaking undoing (all puns intended).

My mother always tells me that she is not as good a seamstress as her own mother, because she has no patience to press correctly (pressing is the dreadfully laborious process of ironing/steaming garments during their making). This flaw, I’m afraid, has manifested in me in worse ways, for I have no patience to press or indeed for many other slow steps that might make me a more skilful dressmaker (most notably for everyday clothes—I will take more time if I’ve paid a month’s grocery money for some lovely silk). It’s not that I’m bad. It’s just that I am always racing to finish the end product, even though I know that the process—the careful fitting, pattern adjusting, precise cutting, and stitching and finishing—is where the garment is really made.

This idea of the process being what makes the artwork is also true of writing.

Sewing is a more unforgiving mistress than writing, just by nature of form. Words can be cut and trimmed and re-seamed without leaving needle marks (at least, they can now, in the post-typewriter age . . . pause for nostalgia if longhand is your thing), and without having to waste ruined fabric. I’ve done a heap of this kind of unpicking with my words. Despite hopes that I would find writing easier the more I did, each book has been more trouble than the last. With some books, I think there is not a stitch of the first draft left.

A garment doesn’t usually allow such alteration—you are aiming for perfection on the first try. Or at least, I am, because I am impatient. Unpicking is going backwards, and I might not get away with such corrections. You might leave needle marks in the fabrics. Or there may simply be no fabric left to let out or adjust. You might just have to start again. The thing is, as with books, these mistakes, these re-makings, are where you truly learn the craft.

And this is the key difference between sewing and writing for me. With writing, unpicking is always going forwards. I have rescued many books with re-making, learned many a lesson. I enjoy the process itself. When a new box of my books arrives hot from the press (prepare yourself for the sacrilege to follow) I don’t feel
. . . really . . . anything. It’s great, don’t get me wrong. But still, writing is the doing, not the end product. (This is helped perhaps that I don’t want to wear a book . . . and I certainly don’t want to read it once it’s set in print!).

Simply, I think, sewing is not my art—if I could enjoy the actual process of it more, perhaps that could change. In the meantime, I’d prefer to watch Project Runway rather than be sitting at my own machine. (My crueller inner critic also tells me that I have little eye for personal style with fashion, which really is a problem. At least I always know what books I’ll feel great reading.)

Writing is hard work, but I have the patience for it. Not patience with any grace, to be sure. If it were a cartoon character, my patience would be ugly. It’s a belligerent kind of persistence, through poverty and foolishness and terrible first drafts. I figure that’s the big difference between how I sew and how I write. I’m always impatient to be finished, but only with writing am I prepared to unpick. That’s why my childhood dedication to sewing has been overtaken by an adult life of books.

Left: Golden taupe embroidered silk bodice and black silk skirt (material from Hyena Productions), made for wedding and in typical fashion, not quite properly pressed.

Right: getting value out of the outfit at a romance writers event many years later . . .

Author photo © Jen Dainer, Industrial Arc Photography.

Debut Fiction, Fiction, Literary Fiction

Fiction Literary Fiction Debut Fiction

Digging in deep for a first novel

Behind the Book by James A. McLaughlin

by James A. McLaughlin

Like a 17-year cicada, my novel, Bearskin, spent a long time underground before emerging. I was in my early 30s and just starting at a graduate writing program when I heard about people finding mutilated bear carcasses in the Virginia mountains where I grew up. Poachers were killing black bears out of season and cutting off their paws and gallbladders for sale on the black market. The big money was in exporting the bear parts to East and Southeast Asia, where the native bear species had been hunted to rarity. Back then, the profit margins approached those in the narcotics trade, and organized crime outfits were moving into the bear parts market. All of this struck me as a compelling backdrop for a story, and I decided I would write about a guy who has to confront bear poachers on his property.

Most of the original story depended only on my own memory of the forest where I’d spent a lot of my childhood, but there was still a bit of interesting legwork to be done. I interviewed an undercover game warden who was infiltrating a bear poaching ring. I researched the worldwide black market in wildlife (at the time, it was just behind trafficking of drugs and weapons in terms of total annual dollar value). I learned bear paws are a delicacy in certain cultures, a prized and prestigious dish—the front paws are supposedly more tender than the back paws, but all four get eaten. And bear bile, used for thousands of years in traditional Chinese medicine, contains ursodeoxycholic acid, which helps bears avoid losing muscle when they’re dormant during the winter. The acid has real therapeutic effects in humans—so much so that it was synthesized from cow bile in the 1950s, and you can buy FDA-approved, bear-free medicine with brand names like Actigall, Ursodiol and Urso Forte (“strong bear”).

Read our review of Bearskin.

I finished Bearskin 1.0 while I was in the writing program, but it wasn’t what I’d hoped, and after another year or so of revisions I set it aside. Most of a decade passed while I worked on another novel, stories, essays. My wife and I moved west; I helped start a small business. When a good friend who’d read the first Bearskin suggested I go back to the book and try again, I spent a few weeks stripping it to the essentials, inventing new characters and rewriting the first few chapters. This exercise led to a published novella, agent inquiries and . . . several more years of work extending the novella into a novel.

Writing the second version of Bearskin involved far more research than the first (note: as a cicada nymph nears maturity, it burrows deeper into the soil, searching for larger tree roots to feed on). My new main character was a completely different person, much more interesting and dangerous than the original protagonist. He has a violent history in the cross-border drug trade in southern Arizona, so I spent a lot of time looking into the Mexican cartels and the ways drugs are smuggled north—and how cash and other easy-to-carry valuables are smuggled south. I had an excuse to visit Tucson and explore the Arizona-Mexico border. I learned about local law enforcement, gunfighting and how to disappear and start a new life with a new identity. I had nearly finished the book when it occurred to me that I should update my research on bear poaching.

What I found out was complicated, and it required some tweaks to my plot. While bears in Asia are still under tremendous pressure from poachers, bear poaching for gallbladders and paws has fallen off in the U.S., and the American black bear population in most areas has increased dramatically. The law enforcement efforts I’d witnessed in the late ’90s presumably had an effect, and responsible bear hunters have pushed for more sophisticated management of the species by state agencies. Wildlife and animal rights groups reported some success, at least in the U.S., with convincing traditional medicine practitioners to substitute herbal ingredients for bear bile. And a more troubling development was the growth of “bear farms” in parts of Asia, horribly inhumane institutions that have become a significant source of bear bile in Asian markets.

Given those findings, I had to make some quick revisions to plausibly account for a resurgence of bear poaching in the Virginia mountains circa 2011. And those plot changes in turn opened up an entirely new criminal dimension for my book, and another series of interesting rabbit holes for me to dive into. But the process was dragging on by then, and I finally managed to quit the research and finish the book so it could crawl up out of the earth like one of those cicadas, molt and start making noise.

Photo credit Nancy Assaf McLaughlin

James A. McLaughlin explores the brutal and beautiful Appalachian terrain with his debut novel, Bearskin, a tale of bear poaching and one man on the run.

Contemporary Romance, Romance

Romance Contemporary Romance

Invisible no longer

Behind the Book by Helen Hoang

by Helen Hoang

Helen Hoang’s The Kiss Quotient is one of the most buzzed-about romances of the summer. “A unicorn . . . magical and one of a kind,” according to our reviewer, Hoang’s debut follows an autistic woman named Stella as she attempts to learn about love and dating by hiring a male escort. Through her research, Hoang discovered that not only were autistic women frequently undiagnosed, but that she was herself one of them.

Many months before I even conceptualized The Kiss Quotient, I had this feeling that I needed to try something new with my writing. I needed a change. But I didn’t know what that change was. I thought I might try writing in a new romance subgenre. (I’d been writing mainly fantasy romance.) Sci-fi maybe. Or historical in an uncommon locale and timeframe. Something new. Something wild. Maybe something taboo.

At my friend’s recommendation, I read an anthropological piece called Nightwork on hostess clubs in Tokyo and, as my friend expected, was fascinated. It made me want to write about a character in a similar profession, which naturally brought to mind Pretty Woman. The idea of flipping the genders of the characters captivated me, but I couldn’t figure out why a beautiful, successful woman would hire a male escort. The question lingered in the back of my mind as I went on with my life.

When my daughter’s preschool teacher suggested she was on the spectrum, I was completely shocked. She’s a handful, but she didn’t fit my preconceptions of autism. I did some research, and my findings weren’t in line with my girl’s traits. To be thorough, I asked my family and her pediatrician for their opinions, and their unanimous response was no, she wasn’t autistic. They had to be right, and I let it go. Mostly.

One trait from my cursory research lingered in my mind: trouble with social skills. That was something I could empathize with—and a compelling reason to hire an escort. (Yes, everything revolves around writing/stories for me.) What if the heroine in my gender-swapped Pretty Woman was autistic like my daughter wasn’t?

I began to research in earnest and found myself reading Rudy Simone’s Aspergirls, where I stumbled upon an interesting finding: There’s a major difference in the way autism is perceived between men and women. What I’d previously read described autistic men, but many autistic women, for a variety of reasons, mask their awkwardness and hide their autistic traits so they don’t draw notice. Even our obsessions/interests are generally tailored to be socially acceptable. Because of this, women often go undiagnosed or are diagnosed late in life, frequently after their own children receive diagnoses. Women with Asperger’s exist in what people call “the invisible part of the spectrum.”

As I read Aspergirls, I looked back at my own past and recalled so many things: difficulty with relationships and intimacy, all-consuming interests, social awkwardness, routines, repetitive motions, etc. What started as mere research for a book became a journey of self-realization. The woman I was reading about was me. And possibly my daughter. She was also Stella, The Kiss Quotient’s autistic heroine.

Through Stella and this book, I explored and embraced parts of myself that I’d never understood and always tried to hide, and this freedom translated into better writing. I stopped emulating other writers and found my own unique writer’s voice. Not only that, but the book became a therapy of sorts. I gave Stella my fears and insecurities, and she confronted them for me. Her “fresh and fabulous” regimen is basically how I lived my life prior to diagnosis (which I obtained while I wrote this book), and having her see the foolishness of her ways and accept herself was self-affirming for me. In early drafts of the book, Stella "came out" as autistic to the book’s hero, Michael, at the end. Even as I wrote those lines of dialogue, I knew I was practicing what I'd say to my own loved ones, and it gave me courage.

The inspiration for Michael came from my family. Well, and pictures of beautiful Daniel Henney. But mostly my family, and that made him deeply personal to me as well. I gave him my culture and mixed heritage, and his family members are close depictions of mine, particularly his grandma and mom. His struggle to balance his own desires with the needs of his loved ones is something I know intimately, though I’m not as heroic as I think he is.

By the time I finished writing this book, I felt like Stella, Michael and I had all grown together. The main conflict—a woman falling for her escort—isn’t something I’ve experienced, but the inspirations for the characters’ individual growth arcs were close and personal. If The Kiss Quotient resonates with readers, I think this is why.

ALSO IN BOOKPAGE: Read our review of The Kiss Quotient.

Author photo by Eric Kieu.

Fiction, Popular Fiction

Fiction Popular Fiction

The best and worst decision: to write a novel

Behind the Book by Elizabeth Leiknes

by Elizabeth Leiknes

In The Lost Queen of Crocker County, Jane Willow, the former Corn Queen of Crocker County, returns to Iowa after a family tragedy—and finds a second chance in her Midwestern home. Author Elizabeth Leiknes imbues this tale with a breezy sense of humor and an abiding love of movies, and though her new novel proves that she knows how to tell a great story, she also has a serious bit of advice: Don’t become a novelist.

For those of you readers who are considering it, don’t become a novelist. Just don’t. I beg you. Because before you know it, years will evaporate. Your lofty dreams and Oprah-inspired vision boards will come and go. Your various muses will turn fickle. Then one day you’ll be sitting on the couch, balancing a hot-mess-of-a-manuscript on one knee and your own personal key lime pie on the other—and I mean the whole pie, not just a slice. That would be way too civilized. You will also have a can of whipped cream, so that each bite can act as a mere vehicle for the creamy clouds piled high, meant to sweeten the tartness of the often-sour, pride-swallowing work that is creating a novel.

Now, I know what you’re thinking. Sure, there are ups and downs to writing, but the process . . . the PROCESS! It’s so magical. What must it feel like to give birth to a full-length story complete with an engaging plot, riveting themes and satisfying narrative arcs? It feels like giving birth. That’s what it feels like. It is a great deal of work, at first terrifying and painful and then joyous beyond belief. What happens after the book-birth? Pretty much, you’ll worry yourself to death about it. You’ll imagine what could go sideways. You’ll invent ways it will fail. You’ll make deals with the universe in exchange for its triumph.

All of what I’ve said is true, which is why I consider the birth of The Lost Queen of Crocker County to be a bit of a miracle. Sometimes the right thing happens at just the right time in life, and it makes so much sense that you must consider it divine. Five years ago, I’d silently decided to give up writing. I’d published three novels that I was proud of, but my writing career hadn’t become what I’d hoped it would. I am an English teacher by day, so I decided I’d continue the privilege of teaching writing rather than doing it myself.

But then one day, shortly after my I’m-not-going-to-write-anymore realization, something strange happened on my way home from school. I heard a slight thump while driving. In retrospect, it was probably something inconsequential like a rock on the highway or maybe even just the way the car reacted to a bump in the road, but at the time, my initial reaction was a series of emotions alternating between panic and denial. Did I hit something? You’re just tired, it was nothing. Oh, my God, what if it was a kitten? Why would a kitten be on the highway? I even pulled the car over to peruse the area and make sure I didn’t see anything. Then, as I resumed my drive home, I was struck with this: Is it normal to have those kinds of thoughts (zero to prison) in reaction to a small incident like that? Do other people see headlines in their heads—LOCAL TEACHER CHARGED WITH HIT AND RUN INVOLVING SMALL ANIMAL IN FRONT OF DAIRY QUEEN—or is this, perhaps, strictly a Midwesterner’s reaction? Does where we come from shape who we are? Are Midwesterners somehow programmed for guilt? By the time I got home, a story had formed about a woman, transplanted in the West, who returns to her Midwestern home to face her sins, and after being involved in a crime, has to make things right.

So I wrote the book. I had to. This is how it is for writers, or for me at least. If you don’t feel compelled to write stories, go enjoy your life. Work out. Ride a unicycle. Learn to make fancy cakes. Walk into a bookstore and get lost. Worry about normal things, like your beautiful family or gluten or plagues, rather than if your novel accomplished all that you wanted it to. For me, I really, really hope that The Lost Queen of Crocker County does justice to Iowa, to movies, to love. I hope that it reminds readers of the beauty of home, family and second chances.

If I still haven’t convinced you not to write novels, you’ve passed the test. You are doomed to the roller-coaster ride that is being a writer. But you are also blessed with leaving a legacy of stories for your children long after you’ve gone. And you are able to hand your husband a novel that is dedicated to him, dedicated to the fact that his exceptional dad-and-husband skills have afforded you the luxury of time so that you can put your dreams on paper. Last but not least, you are able to create a piece of work that proposes an alternate storyline, a kind of better you’d like the world to be.

Mystery, Mystery & Suspense

Mystery & Suspense Mystery

What a child saw, and what you’d never believe

Behind the Book by Dervla McTiernan

by Dervla McTiernan

It’s Private Eye July at BookPage! This month, we’re celebrating the sinister side of fiction with the year’s best mysteries and thrillers. Look for the Private Eye July magnifying glass for a dose of murder, espionage and all those creepy neighbors with even creepier secrets.

They say that writers write about the things that preoccupy them. Our personal interests, our politics, our take on the individuals in our lives. It all has a way of sliding into the story we are writing whether or not that is what we intend. And isn’t that a good and necessary thing? How boring novels would be if there wasn’t some mystery to the making of them. Some alchemy that takes place inside the author’s head that even the author isn’t fully privy to.

So what is the recipe? What proportion of the whole is intellectual effort, and what proportion organic? How much of the leavening energy comes with that first seed? I don’t know. I doubt if even the most analytical writer has that degree of insight – so much of writing comes from instinct, from the love of the story as it is spun through your fingers. But it is always possible to point to certain specific elements, to a scene or a character that we have drawn from life.

Much of The Ruin is inspired by real life, and I’d like to tell you about one experience in particular. About something odd that happened when I was very young.

I was born in Ireland in 1976. It was pre-Celtic Tiger era, there wasn’t a lot of money, and if there had ever been an Irish upper class it had largely retreated, leaving behind little more than remnants of ruined country houses, traces of formal gardens gone to seed. My brothers and sisters and I (there were seven of us) had a happy, ragamuffin childhood. Our parents were loving and hard-working and much too busy to worry about how we entertained ourselves. Every day after school we would dump our schoolbags in the hall and make for the front door, the only limit placed on us that we should return by the time it got dark.

Our parents’ lack of vigilance was largely rewarded. Our games were innocent—hours spent playing rounders in the small park at the top of the street. We played using a steel baseball bat someone’s brother had brought back from America, and tennis balls when we could find them. We played tip-the-can and 40-40-all-free. Our home was one of many in a housing estate located at the edges of suburbia. We were surrounded on three sides by agricultural land, and the fields were a popular playground for the more adventurous among us. The land was a patchwork quilt of small fields, hedgerows, copses and ruined houses. Heaven for a child with an overly active imagination. A narrow river ran through the farmland about four fields down from the edge of our estate. We swam in it once or twice—more for the dare of it than anything else. The river could be crossed easily by walking over the rocks at the top of a small waterfall, but we stayed on our side of the river. Until the day the odd thing happened.

It was sunny the day we crossed the river, though it was a pallid sort of sun that left a chill in the air. We were aimless explorers, making for whatever landmark caught our eye. We found an abandoned farmyard. It had a cobblestone courtyard, some outbuildings with intact walls and roofs. There was something a little bit creepy about the quietness of the place, but we were explorers, so we pressed on. We fell silent as we made our way out into a driveway long gone to seed. Tree branches met and twined overhead, blocking the meagre sun. Halfway down the drive there was a left turn and we took it. It brought us to a house, and the house was in ruins. Part of the roof had collapsed. There were no windows, not even broken glass, as someone had removed the window frames. The doorway gaped dark and open.

We stood stock-still. No one took a step further, there was no teasing, no daring. There was something about that house. Something dangerous, as if it had the power to reach out and grab us, pull us into its depths. We were frozen in place, immobilised by a creeping sense of dread, a sense that we had stumbled into something adult, something dark and perhaps, just perhaps, the door was about to close behind us. The silence was broken by a sudden, loud bang, like a single beat on a base drum, though the reverberations were less perfect, less sonorous. The noise worked like a starter’s pistol on our feet. Every one of us turned and ran back the way we came.

The odd thing was waiting for us in the courtyard. The gateway to the fields beyond, which had been empty when we passed through minutes before, now held a single, rusting barrel. The barrel was upside down, dropped there probably, the sound of it falling into place almost certainly that loud drumming bang we had heard. Running down the left-hand side of the barrel was a fist-sized drop of flesh-coloured, gloopy fluid, as if someone had put five kilos of steak into a smoothie-maker, then upended it on the barrel before the smoothie was quite ready. A fleshy, glistening globule. There was no one there that we could see. We were caught, the four of us, in the middle of the cobbled courtyard. Beyond the barrel lay green fields, the river and home. Behind us lay the dark driveway and the ruined house. The bravest of us made her decision. She ran for the barrel and we ran with her. With every step I took I could feel a phantom hand reach for my shoulder. Surely whoever put the barrel there had plans for four trespassing children.

We ran until our chests burned and our legs stumbled. We splashed our way across the river, and into the safe, familiar fields beyond, but we kept running until we made it up and over the final fence and onto the tarmacadam roads of the estate.

That evening, at our usual noisy family dinner, I told everyone what had happened. My sisters were fighting over a borrowed and broken set of colouring pencils. My brother didn’t look up from his book. I tried again, tried to put weight on my words. I saw my parents glance at each other across the kitchen, a crease of amusement about my father’s eyes, and I knew then that the same thing was happening at three other dinner tables that evening. No one would believe us. Maybe that was understandable. It was an odd sort of story, after all. The kind of thing a child might make up. A story without an ending. The kind of story that sounds exaggerated, built it up with a bit of colour, a bit of extra bite. A fleshy globule.

I’ve thought about what parts of that experience fed the writing of The Ruin. It might be the scary old house. That dark and lonely driveway. Certainly, all of those elements are found in the book. And one more thing, perhaps. The part where the children tried to tell, and no one listened.

ALSO IN BOOKPAGE: Read our review of The Ruin.

Photo credit Julia Dunin

Much of The Ruin is inspired by real life, and I’d like to tell you about one experience in particular. About something odd that happened when I was very young.

A teen battles with his dark impulses

Behind the Book by Henry Turner

by Henry Turner

Edgar-nominated author Henry Turner explores a teen’s dark impulses and struggles with pursuing healthy relationships and expressing his self-identity in his latest young adult thriller, Hiding. When 16-year-old boy’s stalking of his ex-girlfriend, Laura, spirals out of control, he finds himself locked in her family’s basement and must examine some disturbing truths about his relationships and his life.

I wrote Hiding as a journey through a teen mind, culminating in the revelation of a secret self. Wanting to know more about the reason his ex-girlfriend Laura broke up with him, the narrator “accidentally” sneaks into her house and hides in the basement. After the family leaves, he makes his way through the rest of the house where he ultimately discovers terrible secrets Laura kept hidden from him.

Hiding is a novel about a teen who learns to value himself, even when others don’t. He’s taught himself a method to protect that sense of value. He calls it hiding. To people who ignore and undervalue him – and there are many in his neighborhood—he won’t say, “You don’t see me,”—he’ll say, “I’m hiding from you.” This is how he takes ownership over feeling overlooked.

Behind everything was my hope to encourage teens to value themselves for who they are, not only for what they do, or what place they will someday occupy in society. The teen years are a vital period, remembered for a lifetime, and not just a transitional phase to be gotten through on the path to becoming an adult. So I wrote about a real teen dealing with his everyday life, the empty time on his hands and his real-life problems. Most of it concerns his struggle to maintain a positive image of himself in a neighborhood that does not recognize or value him. The story describes his many ways of combating that—all of which he calls hiding.

I had to re-define YA for myself before I wrote Hiding because I wanted the story to be, hopefully, in some way useful to teens. Teen emotions are often vulnerable and confused. I know mine were. So I wanted to write about teens struggling to accept and value themselves for who they are, and not how they fit in. I wanted to write a novel about teens exploring and accepting their inner selves and personal value, which is often a silent struggle, and rarely if ever described in print. For the matter of life and death, the book describes through Laura’s ordeal, I had to focus on her secret inner life—so very different from her outer social persona—that only the narrator is able to finally recognize and understand – and hopefully the reader with him.

When I was nominated for an Edgar for my previous novel, Ask the Dark, it was a terrific boost and honor. Save.org recognizing Hiding and adding it to their Recommended Reading List for Youth brings me a feeling of great satisfaction and hope. Hiding is a story about teens discovering and accepting their innate value. And if it can help even one teen facing the sorts of problems Laura faces, it has served its purpose.

Debut Fiction, Fiction, Literary Fiction

Fiction Literary Fiction Debut Fiction

Going to work while the world ends

Behind the Book by Ling Ma

by Ling Ma

I first started writing Severance around the time I realized I was going to lose my job, although I did not know that I was working on a novel. The company I worked for was downsizing and consolidating their West Coast and Midwest offices. As a result, many employees in the Midwest office would be let go, some who had been there their entire careers, spanning several decades.

Most colleagues felt like they had been screwed over by management. As we came to the office day in and day out, the low morale in the work environment was palpable.

I needed to figure out what I was going to do, but instead of applying to other jobs and taking interviews, all it seemed that I could do was write stories. In those final weeks of my job, I wrote more fiction than I had in years. Since some of our tasks were drying up, I would write those stories at the office. Taking a break during lunch hour, I would walk around through downtown, drinking iced coffee and eating pastries. Buoyed by sugar and caffeine, plot ideas and character details would come to me. All around me, people went about their days, using their lunch breaks to window shop, to take dentist appointments, to go to the gym.

One of the pieces I worked on was an apocalyptic short story. Writing anything apocalyptic just seemed fun—the destructive glee of toppling office buildings, of disrupting everyone’s routines, of crushing clamshell containers of sad desk salads. My target was all of these things and none of these things. My target was the larger system, the capitalist power structures that enabled all of this. The authorial power that a writer gets to wield is irresistible, especially to someone (like me) who does not have a lot of power.

Originally, the story was written in the first-person plural—one collective voice that embodied all of these disgruntled employees. But one voice kept breaking out from the rest of the pack, and that was the voice of Candace Chen, who eventually became the protagonist of Severance. I knew her job right away. She worked in New York, as a production coordinator for the manufacturing of Bibles, which was all taking place in China and other Asian countries. It became clear that the apocalyptic story was really a meditation on work, of its routines and its conciliatory satisfactions in the age of globalism.

When I first interviewed at the company, a VP had perceptively mentioned to me, “I think you’re qualified for this position, but you’re going to get bored in two years.” He said he would recommend me for the job, but that I might reconsider my options after two years. Around the time of the corporate downsizing, I had been working at the same job going on three years. I wondered, what kept me working there? This is a question that many of my friends also asked of themselves, about why they still stuck at their jobs. I think writing the novel was also a way of trying to answer that question.

“The feeling was one of liberation, and maybe that feeling comes during apocalyptic, chaotic times.”

As I wrote, I found inspiration by reading the works of Kafka, everything from his short stories to his journals, in which he complained about how a job disrupted his writing. Kazuo Ishiguro’s The Remains of the Day, about an English butler, always seemed like the ultimate office novel to me. The TV shows I watched were at heart narratives about work: “The Sopranos,” “The X-Files” and “Mad Men.” I’ve always maintained that I learned how to plot by watching eight seasons of “Mad Men,” the way that the storylines were organized more by thematic layering than a string of causal events. I didn’t write the novel in any particular order, simply jumping to whichever scene felt the most urgent at the time, and organizing the novel around those guideposts.

As for my job, the closer the end date neared, the emptier the office became. Some employees found new positions at other companies and left, while others made the move to another branch office. All the rules flew out the window. Going to work was a surreal experience. I have this memory, set during those final days, of coming into the office at nine in the morning and being handed a plastic flute of champagne and a donut. There was no one watching us. The feeling was despair, but also one of giddiness. The feeling was one of liberation, and maybe that feeling comes during apocalyptic, chaotic times.

After my last day at the company, I took my severance and got on unemployment. I called it my arts fellowship. I continued working on the novel. However, in order to secure more funding, I ended up applying to MFA programs and was accepted by Cornell University. I moved to the remote town of Ithaca, New York, and spent the next four years steadily working on Severance. During the summers, I established a writing routine that was very similar to my office routine: I would begin writing at nine in the morning, take a long lunch break and then resume writing until six in the evening. It serves me still.

This article was originally published in the August 2018 issue of BookPage. Download the entire issue for the Kindle or Nook.

Ling Ma shares a closer look at the creation of her debut novel, an end-of-the-world tale that transforms the mundane into a creeping horror. It’s the story of a millennial daughter of Chinese immigrants who watches as nearly everyone around her falls prey to a spreading fever that leaves its victims in a zombielike state, repeating the day-to-day tasks of their former lives.

Contemporary Romance, Romance

Romance Contemporary Romance

Love at any age

Behind the Book by Rochelle Alers

by Rochelle Alers

Rochelle Alers has been a mainstay of the romance genre for decades. But unlike many of her fellow authors, Alers’ books consistently feature characters that are older than your average 20-something hero and heroine. The youngest couple in her latest series is in their mid-30s, which is still on the older end of the spectrum when it comes to romance (yes, really). Alers’ new book, Room Service, follows interior designer Jasmine Washington and banker Cameron Singleton as they connect in New Orleans at a luxury inn owned by Jasmine’s friend. Both are in their 40s, both are successful in their careers and both are set in their ways. Here, Alers tells us why that’s a perfect formula for a romance.

I began reading romances more than four decades ago, and now that I am celebrating 30 years as a published author, I want to interact with characters that reflect who I am and my outlook on life. And there are also many readers who agree with me because whenever I am invited to speak at book clubs, the majority of the members are over 40 and complain as to the dearth of characters representing their ages.

Other than completing a manuscript, my utmost excitement comes from developing a mature heroine who will find love for the first time, or one that is divorced and although she is not looking to marry again, she is unable to resist the man offering her more than she could have ever imagined. And then there is the widow or empty-nester who is planning the next phase of her life and isn’t looking for love but is pleasantly surprised when that man she never would’ve expected comes along to change not only her but also her future.

Given their life experience, they are more mature, secure and not apt to play head games. They may have experienced sadness or disappointment—some are even unwilling to entertain the possibility of a commitment. This doesn’t mean they don’t love each other, but it attests to their experience. Been there, done that.

As a Baby Boomer and someone who has been given a second chance at love after more than 20 years of marriage, I know firsthand how important it is to celebrate mature characters of a certain age who are able to have their happily ever after. Love isn’t an emotion designated to a particular age group, but to anyone open to accepting it. I don’t believe there is an ideal age in which to fall in love, and because of this belief, I use this theme in the Innkeepers series. In The Inheritance the couple is in their late-50s, 50s in Breakfast in Bed, 40s in Room Service and mid-30s in the upcoming The Bridal Suite. The heroines in this series are also independent, financially solvent and after undergoing some or many unforeseen occurrences they not only survive but also thrive.

Today’s modern woman is afforded more choices and opportunities than from those in past generations, and readers want to read about older heroines whose lives closely resemble theirs. Perhaps it is because I am a mature woman and writer that it is easier for me to depict them in my novels than instead of writing about 20 and 30-somethings. Although I do write about younger heroines in my category romances, I plan to continue to feature older heroines in my women’s fiction for the duration of my writing career.

Rochelle Alers’ new book, Room Service, follows interior designer Jasmine Washington and banker Cameron Singleton as they connect in New Orleans at a luxury inn owned by Jasmine’s friend. Both are in their 40s, both are successful in their careers and both are set in their ways. Here, she tells us why that’s a perfect formula for a romance.

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