Behind the Book Archives

True love waits for widow in a New York limo

Behind the Book by Cindy Adams

by Cindy Adams

I’ve been asked to explain why I decided to write my new book, The Gift of Jazzy. Why? Because Jazzy is the most delicious gift I have ever gotten. Because Jazzy’s gift to me has been the gift of life. And who is Jazzy? At this stage of my life as a widow and an orphan Jazzy is my only blood relative. It isn’t that I love him. I am in love with him. I’d leave this Yorkie my apartment in my will if I thought he could pay the maintenance. As I explain in my book: “Seven days after Joey, my husband of a lifetime, passed on, a friend sent this 3-month-old hairball to my door.

“He wasn’t expected. Wasn’t even requested. My friends, actress Deborah Raffin and her publisher husband Michael Viner, decided that I needed something to help me through. Their decision, however, was made unilaterally. Without me. “I had no idea what to do with this thing. For too many years my home with my husband had meant nurses, health care aides, midnight runs to an emergency room. I’d had nothing in my experience that signified life no plants, no kids, no pets. “This unwanted arrival weighed 2.2 pounds and arrived in the back of a limo.

“The minute I took him in my arms, a warm feeling came over me.

“Jazzy peed on me.” And he’s been doing it ever since. Three years and five pounds later, Jazzy is the master of my world. He runs my house. He determines my schedule. He lives on Park Avenue. And he still looks at me as though to say, “I know how to handle you, hon. My mother was also a bitch.” This dog who lives with the New York Post gossip columnist has the universe in his paws. He listens in on phone conversations with Hillary Clinton. He’s in the middle of arguments with Sylvester Stallone. He has play dates with Judge Judy’s shih-tzu Lulu. He goes visiting to Barbara Walters’ apartment. He does Thanksgiving with Joan Rivers’ four-legged family. He hosts guests like Bryant Gumble and Cujo, Bryant’s Maltese, at his birthday party.

He creates situations that cause embarrassment and stress. Like the time he hung up on General Manuel Antonio Noriega of Panama, who was calling from prison. Like the time he locked out former first lady of the Philippines Imelda Marcos. Or when he piddled on a friend’s clothes. Or ate a houseguest’s $2,500 alligator pumps.

Still, I was a new widow whose home was suddenly too cold and too silent. I took comfort locked in the warmth of this teensy creature who loved me as I did him. My husband and my mom, the only other close relative I have ever had and whom I treasured almost more than my own being, were the same age. My mother, whom I also tenderly cared for over a dozen of her last years even though she no longer knew who I was, passed on a couple of months after my husband. Despite friends and the seemingly mobile life of a New York Post gossip columnist, I was alone. I had nobody. The gift of Jazzy was for me the gift of life.

I began to leave events, even a White House party, to get home to Jazzy. Yes, I recognize the absurdity . . . still there it is. We became a Couple. At Christmas I receive cards addressed “Cindy and Jazzy Adams.” This self-centered animal, who is the size of a rat’s ass, who is smaller than a toupee, is now used to bones from Gallagher’s steakhouse, Poland Springs chilled water, a car and driver, a penthouse that is dog-proofed and the fact that his mother hand-feeds him. What he has put me through is what has prompted me to sit down and write this book.

Even if you don’t love dogs, even if you don’t love gossip and the stories I drop because these celebrities are part of the work that I do, you might enjoy the laughs, which are about my experience and all at my expense. I was presented with a dog. I didn’t request it. I didn’t buy it. I didn’t know what to do with it. I didn’t understand how it could fit into my New York style lifestyle. I knew nothing about the care and feeding of a Yorkshire terrier. All I could do with the thing was the best I could do.

He has peed, pooped and whoops’d on me and still does. He demands attention. He has an attitude. And now, three years later, I can finally say he has me perfectly trained.

The book is a story of survival. Of coping. The book is a love story. As I’ve written in these pages: “Whether this is why I phone from across the world just to hear Jazzy bark . . . why I massage his gums with my finger with a doggy toothpaste that tastes like peanut butter because I sense he won’t floss by himself, why I cut up a brand-new maroon, cashmere, four-ply turtleneck to make a sweater for him, who the hell knows. “I only know it’s true love.”

I've been asked to explain why I decided to write my new book, The Gift of Jazzy. Why? Because Jazzy is the most delicious gift I have ever gotten. Because Jazzy's gift to me has been the gift of life. And who is Jazzy? At…

Lifestyles

Lifestyles

Ooo-la-la! Author finds her inner French girl

Behind the Book by Debra Ollivier

by Debra Ollivier

I've never been a Francophile. As a student I spent a long, painfully boring year at the Sorbonne, spoke French well enough to fool the natives (you are from Belgium, non?), and smoked Gauloises in countless cafes, pondering the dismal continental weather with great heaps of fashionable young ennui. But when I moved back to California craving sunshine, I was ready to put away my Gallic existence and get on with real life. Real life happened in France, anyhow. Back in Los Angeles, I met a French man and (begrudgingly at first) followed him back to Paris. I got married, had two kids and settled once again into life with the irascible and inscrutable French. In the blink of an eye, 10 years passed.

Perhaps Charles de Gaulle summed it up best. "How can one be expected to govern a country with 246 cheeses?" he lamented. Indeed, despite the prevailing stereotype of the French woman (you know her: the svelte Euro goddess in high heels, equal parts Catherine Deneuve, Brigitte Bardot and Madame de Pompadour), the reality is that French women are as diverse as Bries and Camemberts. They come in different sizes, shapes and tastes. They're complex, elusive, a composite of delicious paradoxes. Who they are has little to do with their shoes, their lipstick or their lingerie. Which is why nothing irked me more than articles trumpeting the virtues of the mythical stereotype of the French woman and how to become her. So you wanna be a French girl? Wear haute couture! Eat haute cuisine! Strike a pose! The material was always thick on clichés, thin on essential insight. Lots of Ooo-la-la. Very little Aha!

In writing Entre Nous: A Woman's Guide to Finding Her Inner French Girl, I wanted not only a place where the diversity of French women could emerge (a place, for example, where my friend Nadine, a plump yet ravishing seductress with a modest home in the countryside, could co-exist beside Frederique, a wiry career woman who lives in the heart of Paris). I wanted, more specifically, to describe the collective values and mindset that unite them that way-of-being or essence that defines not the stereotypical French woman, but the archetypal one: Her incredible sense of self-possession. The sensual satisfaction and tactile pleasure she experiences in the seemingly mundane. Her discretion. Her languorous relationship to time. Her focus on quality, not quantity. Her preference for authenticity, not imitation. Her ability to have a life, not just make a living.

I wrote Entre Nous only months after returning to the States. I've been back for two years now. In France, I felt American. Back in America, I feel French. "That's called expatriatis," an American friend once told me. (She'd been living overseas for decades.) That said, I'm happy to be at least back in California and I relish the friendships I have with American women. Many of these friendships bloomed in an almost instantaneous and inspired burst of sisterhood. My French friendships, on the other hand, took years to develop. You'll find the words "maternity" and "fraternity" in the French vocabulary, but not the word "sisterhood." It actually doesn't exist. It takes time (lots of it) to know a French woman. If Entre Nous can help speed up the process (an American imperative, to be sure), so be it. But if it suggests what we, with our particular Anglo-Saxon baggage, might cull from more intangible but far more real aspects of the archetypal French woman, all the better. A lofty ambition perhaps, but pourquoi pas?

A veteran writer and contributor to such publications as Harper's, Salon and Le Monde, Debra Ollivier recently moved back to Los Angeles with her French husband and Franco-American children after living in Paris for 10 years.

Fiction, Women's Fiction

Fiction Women's Fiction

Behind the Book: A recipe gives rise to a novel

Behind the Book by Darien Gee

by Darien Gee

In 2009, my then-eight-year-old daughter brought home a few slices of Amish Friendship Bread on a paper plate. “It’s so good,” she insisted. Then she pulled out a Ziploc bag of starter and a page (a page!) of instructions. Now if you’ve never seen (or smelled) a bag of fermenting batter, well, let’s just say that it’s something you don’t ever forget.

It didn’t take long for me to figure out that this was essentially a culinary chain letter, a “bake and share” routine that grew exponentially as you passed the starter on to not one, but three more people. I could see people running in the opposite direction, a bit like I wanted to do at that moment.

Still, my daughter held the plate in front of me, patient. I broke off a corner of the bread and chewed it slowly. It was good, moist and sweet with a sugar-cinnamon crunch. Maybe I was having a sugar rush of my own, or maybe it was because I had a few minutes of peace and quiet, but a vision of a woman came into my mind, reluctantly holding up a bag of starter and regarding it with a frown.

She was lovely, and she was sad. I didn’t know what had happened, just that she was stuck in the day-to-day motions that mimicked life when in fact she hadn’t felt alive in years. I saw her own young daughter, her husband, the home they shared together.

I knew right then that I wanted to find out more. I put the bag of starter in a mixing bowl, the instructions tucked inside, and placed it on the counter. I called to my daughter and told her we would be baking Amish Friendship Bread in 10 days.

That night I sat down at my computer, the image of the woman still fresh in my mind. I started writing, and the story of Julia Evarts started unfolding, but still I didn’t know what was going on. Later that night, I saw a quarter flying through the air and landing in the palm of someone’s hand. That hand belonged to Julia’s sister. I liked Livvy instantly—her optimism, her bubbly personality. But I sensed that something had happened between her and Julia, that they were no longer talking though they had once been very, very close. I continued to write, and more central characters started to show up, all with stories of their own—Madeline, a lonely widow who opens a tea salon on a whim; Hannah, a former cello prodigy whose marriage is ending; and Edie, an ambitious journalist who is desperate to make her mark.

I started to see all the connections, saw how the bread was linking people together in ways that surprised me. Characters appeared for only a moment but left an indelible impression.

I filled any available moment, day or night, writing. My husband had read the first few pages and agreed that there was something there. We came up with a schedule that let us juggle the kids, work and writing. I figured the story was either there or it wasn’t, and it was my job to write until it became clear either way.

All this time, my daughter and I were following the instructions that came with the starter. For 10 days it was the same thing—mash the bag—a task her brothers were more than happy to help with. We added flour, milk and sugar on the sixth and 10th days, and watched the starter bubble up happily. I still have that same starter, almost two years later.

I’ll admit that I was looking forward to baking the bread that first time. There’s something about squeezing the bag for 10 days that has you counting the days until it’s time to bake. When I realized that we wouldn’t have any starter left once we divided the batter and shared it among our friends, I kept a bag for myself. Ten days later, we were baking again.

It continued like this as I wrote the book, sharing the starter with friends and neighbors. I experimented with new Amish Friendship Bread recipes, all the time fortifying myself with the bread that was at the heart of Friendship Bread, my novel.

Amish Friendship Bread is so much more than a simple recipe; it’s about friendship and community, about sharing what you have with others and expressing gratitude for the good things in your life. I’m reminded of this every time I gather with my family in the kitchen, the bowl of Amish Friendship Bread starter on the counter, waiting for our next baking day.

Darien Gee is the author of Friendship Bread and founder of the Friendship Bread Kitchen. Click here to download a PDF of the recipe for Amish Friendship Bread.

Medicine

Medicine

An author does time with the dead

Behind the Book by Mary Roach

by Mary Roach

To write a book about cadavers, you have to get in to see some. This is harder than you’d think. You’d think dead people would be easy to make appointments with. Their schedules are pretty open and they rarely go out of town. But of course dead people don’t make appointments. The researchers and surgeons and undertakers who work with them do that, and they don’t do it easily. If you were, for instance, a plastic surgeon who had set up a seminar with 40 severed human heads for other plastic surgeons to practice on, would you want a writer there? You would not. I contacted the organizers of this very head event, and indeed, they did not want me there. As the day drew near, I considered paying the $500 fee and registering as a surgeon. Maybe no one would notice that the woman in the back row was holding her retractor upside down and only pretending to make incisions.

In the end, an acquaintance, a plastic surgeon whom I’d profiled years ago, made some calls and got me in. I fear for his welfare once the book comes out. Not that I say anything negative about surgeons practicing on cadavers. I simply describe the things I saw, and most surgeons would probably prefer that the public not know about these things.

Inevitably, the doctors and scientists I wanted to visit would ask me to tell them about the book. I would assure them that I was in favor of cadaver-based education and research and that the book would support and encourage the donation of bodies to science.

This is true, but it didn’t really tell them much about the book. For instance, that its title is Stiff. That it’s meant not just to inform readers, but to entertain them. What could I say? “It’s a fun book about dead people. You’ll love it!” What scientist would agree to help me?

My past made matters worse. I used to write an irreverent, goofball column about medicine and the human body for the online magazine Salon.com. Occasionally my columns were about dead human bodies. There was one about car crash tests in the ’60s that involved cadavers. I did not criticize these studies, for they were and still occasionally are necessary and have, indirectly, saved thousands of lives. However, my tone was somewhat cavalier. Flippant, you might even say. By and large, it’s fair to say that people who do research using cadavers would rather not be the subject of flippant articles. At one point, I contacted a researcher at the University of Michigan to see if I could observe a cadaver impact test for the book. The man asked me how I’d become interested in the subject, and I said I’d done a little research on the topic for a Salon article. You don’t figure engineers log on to Salon.com.

“Salon!” he said. “I hope you’re not the one who wrote that horrible piece a couple months ago.” My piece had run about a year prior, so I replied that it must have been someone else. Then he began describing the piece, which was in fact my piece. I said, “I have to go now,” and I got off and called a different lab. I became so paranoid about potential sources running a Google search on me and finding my Salon columns that I’d sign off on my e-mails as Marion Roach. (Later I realized that my messages arrive with “Mary Roach” in the From heading.) The man whose automotive impact lab I eventually visited had seen the Salon column too, but he let me watch anyway. To this day I think of him as a kind of saint.

And now comes the part where the people in the book get to read it. There are days when I honestly believe they’ll be okay with it, maybe even enjoy it. Other days I imagine them turning up at my doorstep, saying I’ve destroyed their scientific standing. And then they shoot me, and the author of Stiff is a corpse too. Horrifying, but think of the PR possibilities: Dead author goes on tour to promote cadaver book! Sales through roof!

Mary Roach currently writes the “My Planet” humor column in Reader’s Digest. Her work has also appeared in Outside, Wired, GQ and Vogue. A contributing editor at Discover magazine, she lives in San Francisco. Stiff is her first book.

To write a book about cadavers, you have to get in to see some. This is harder than you'd think. You'd think dead people would be easy to make appointments with. Their schedules are pretty open and they rarely go out of town. But of course dead people don't make appointments. The researchers and surgeons and undertakers who work with them do that, and they don't do it easily.

Mystery & Suspense, Suspense

Mystery & Suspense Suspense

Mining the fields of memory

Behind the Book by William Brodrick

by William Brodrick

My first novel, The Sixth Lamentation, deals with two time frames. The first presents the exploits of a group of Catholic students in Paris during the Nazi occupation of World War II. They call themselves The Round Table and smuggle Jewish children to a monastery in Burgundy. The students are betrayed, and only one person survives Agnes Aubret. The second time frame begins 50 years later. Agnes, now living in England, learns that she will soon die from a terminal illness. This terrible revelation comes on the same day that the German officer responsible for the fate of her compatriots is exposed hiding in a Gilbertine Priory. In due course a war crimes trial begins, and Agnes will either die vanquished or vindicated. The legal process flounders, however; there are secrets the participants will not reveal. Father Anselm, a monk in the community where the German officer sought refuge, is compelled to unravel the moral complexity of the past and bring an unexpected moment of redemption to Agnes before she dies.

It is perhaps a truism to state that a first novel is often a plundering of one’s past. This is certainly true of me, although the fields of memory I explored were not restricted to my own. In 1942 my mother was arrested by the Gestapo while smuggling a Jewish infant out of Amsterdam. The child was taken away and my mother was imprisoned. She survived the war; the child almost certainly did not. I had always been struck by the unimaginable antecedents to this dreadful incident: the anguish of the parents; the comprehensive nature of the Nazi project; and the need for extraordinary heroism from ordinary people in impossible circumstances. Thus, before I had any sense of the novel’s content, I pictured a group of students with their faces set against the times: a Round Table of chivalry in a world gone mad.

I moved the story to France because I thought the history of occupation and collaboration to be a powerful metaphor for the invasive presence of evil. Here was an Å½poque where cooperation and resistance were often blurred; where courageous acts were required from those who were most compromised; and where good, strong people sometimes failed despite best intentions. In many respects, it seemed to me, this was a model of human experience, writ large. And perhaps nowhere was the human confrontation with evil more starkly demonstrated than in the Vel d’Hiv roundup of 1942, when 4,051 children were separated from their parents before deportation to Auschwitz. From the outset, then, I wanted to present the agony of this history, along with the morally charged position of the bystander, whose only choice was opposition or compliance. I was as much concerned with the peculiar status of collaborators, who were sometimes in a position to influence their masters, as with resistantes, who were often powerless to intervene.

Much of my adult life has been spent as an Augustinian friar and then a barrister. Perhaps that is why I chose to explore the subject of this novel not through a re-enactment of the past, but through a present-day war crimes trial. This perspective had significant consequences: I was immediately free to explore how suffering can work its way through successive generations, such that the resolution of the past is profoundly necessary for those who were neither victims or witnesses; by using judicial procedure, the elements of the narrative are examined from an adversarial perspective, insinuating a sort of licensed scepticism that picks away at memories grown frail by the passage of time; the use of a religious context, and indeed the emphasis on the French experience, meant that the narrative had to unfold with reference to anti-Semitism in its political, theological and literary incarnations. It was my hope that all these complications personal, legal and moral could be gently touched upon in the tragic story of Agnes.

I wrote the novel after the first (and probably last) war crimes prosecution under British law and during the Irving v. Penguin libel trial. Lost retribution and Holocaust denial were thus painfully before my mind. The voices of the witnesses were fading away. All of which suggests this book is a testament of sorts, but not mine. It is in part, the handing on of someone else’s memory. A native of England, William Brodrick became an Augustinian friar at the age of 19. Leaving religious life six years later, he worked with homeless people and then became a lawyer. His first novel, The Sixth Lamentation is being published this month by Viking. Brodrick lives in Normandy, France with his wife and three children.

Memoir

Memoir

Exploding the Ã”Heroic Teacher’ myth

Behind the Book by Brendan Halpin

by Brendan Halpin

Exploding the ‘Heroic Teacher’ myth Everybody knows the story: brave, heroic teacher enters a tough school, faces seemingly insurmountable difficulties and finally earns both the distrust of the stuffed-shirt administrators and the trust of the tough-but-tender students. At the end, the unlikeliest of all the students gives a heartwarming speech and/or the students spontaneously break into song, and everybody cheers, sways to the music, and leaves with a tear in their eye and a lump in their throat.

It’s a pretty good story. The only problem is, it isn’t my story. My story, like the stories of most teachers, is a lot messier. Yes, I did start teaching in a tough school, and yes, I did encounter some heartwarming success, but I also encountered stomach-churning failure, and sometimes I failed at the exact thing I had succeeded at the day before. At the end of my first year, nobody made a heartwarming speech, but I did leave with a tear in my eye: I got laid off.

I got another teaching job, and once I reached the point where I was succeeding more than I failed with the students (this kicked in about year four), I had to wrestle with the question of how or why to continue doing this job year after year. The Heroic Teacher Myth never mentions this. Yes, the students inspired me, but some classes also drove me crazy. Yes, I worked with some wonderful, admirable people, but they were outnumbered by cranks and burnouts. Just when I found myself at a fork in the road, with one road leading out of teaching and the other leading to the Land of the Burnouts, I ducked the longevity problem by switching schools. And then I switched schools again, finally landing in an urban charter school, where, despite the fact that I was working really hard for embarrassingly low wages, I felt like I was finally home, like I had finally found the place where caring colleagues and a sensible administration would sustain me. After eight years of teaching, I felt like I had finally come to the end of the beginning of my teaching career. Having just sold my first book, It Takes a Worried Man, I thought I could now write a sort of counter to the Heroic Teacher Myth. I thought of it as The Lucky Teacher Story: the story of how a flawed but caring teacher could find happiness by eventually finding the right school. I started to write, but it was slow going. It was fun to remember some of the things that happened to me early on, but I didn’t feel much urgency about it, so I wrote irregularly.

Then, suddenly, the school where I worked got a new administration determined to remake the school in their own image and, in a stunning success, they transformed the school almost overnight into an ugly, unpleasant place.

This was horrible for me and my colleagues, but it ended up being good for the book. Suddenly, what had been something I wanted to do became something I had to do. The story became urgent. Writing this book was no longer about telling everyone how great I had it. Instead, it became about figuring out whether I was going to continue. I had to tell my story, not to supplant the Heroic Teacher Myth (probably a hopeless task anyway), but, rather, to figure out what the hell I was doing in this profession that kept breaking my heart. I quit my job at the charter school and spent the summer writing. Ultimately, after reviewing my entire career up to that point, I decided to keep teaching. My rationale feels embarrassingly sappy: in spite of the loss of my idealism, in spite of the transformation of my dream school into my nightmare school, in spite of everything that I complain about, I love working with my students too much to give it up. So maybe the whole lump-in-the-throat thing is not as artificial as I thought. I am, however, still waiting for the big, heartwarming speech from an unlikely student, or maybe for my class to serenade me with a few choruses of a touching song that causes everyone to link arms and sway.

Well, maybe next year. Brendan Halpin’s new book, Losing My Faculties: A Teacher’s Story, chronicles the joys and challenges of his teaching career. An earlier memoir, It Takes a Worried Man (2002), depicted his wife’s struggle with breast cancer. Halpin lives in Boston with his wife and daughter and continues to teach high school English.

Exploding the 'Heroic Teacher' myth Everybody knows the story: brave, heroic teacher enters a tough school, faces seemingly insurmountable difficulties and finally earns both the distrust of the stuffed-shirt administrators and the trust of the tough-but-tender students. At the end, the unlikeliest of all the…

Fiction, Historical Fiction

Fiction Historical Fiction

Cruelty and courage in the 60s South

Behind the Book by Sena Jeter Naslund

by Sena Jeter Naslund

The publication of my novel Four Spirits this month is the fulfillment of a promise I made to myself long ago. Back in the 1960s, witnessing the civil rights struggle in my home city of Birmingham, Alabama, I promised myself that if I ever did become a successful fiction writer I would write about the courage and pain, the unspeakable cruelty and abiding love of those transformative times.

It took nearly 40 years and the publication of five earlier books for me to have the confidence to try to tell the civil rights story as I had lived it, observed it, heard stories and read about it. In a number of ways, the character of Stella Silver in Four Spirits replicates some of my own experiences. My own idealistic family were educated, liberal, loving people. For a long time, I was sheltered from the racial fear and hatred in my city and the South, but, while I was a freshman at Phillips High School, the Rev. Mr. Fred Shuttlesworth, while attempting to enroll his children in an all-white school, was beaten with chains and brass knuckles in front of the building and his wife was stabbed.

Like Stella, the scales fell from my eyes as an impassioned high school teacher from the North spoke to my class of racial prejudice as a mark of ignorance. Soon, I was hearing and reading with horror of beatings, of castration, and of more than 40 homes and businesses of blacks destroyed by dynamite in Birmingham. However, like many citizens of Birmingham and of the nation, it was when I learned that four young girls of the bombed Sixteenth Street Baptist Church had been killed that I made a new commitment to work to overcome racial prejudice in my city and in America.

Joined by a disabled friend in a wheelchair, I began teaching on the campus of all-black Miles College. I began to know personal fear. When President John F. Kennedy was assassinated, I witnessed widespread joy in the populace of Birmingham because a rising champion of integration was dead. As I worked the switchboard of a major department store that Friday night, my own isolation and alienation from a city I truly loved increased my resolve to some day tell the truth, through fiction. I believe triumph can be wrung out of tragedy. Largely through nonviolent political action rooted in love, the South has been transformed, if not utterly changed, and the whole of America has made a greater legal and moral commitment to racial justice.

While my novel Four Spirits truthfully suggests something of the violence, sacrifice and heartbreak of those times, it is a positive book and celebrates courage, friendship, family and community.

Sena Jeter Naslund lives with her husband in Louisville, Kentucky. Her new novel, Four Spirits dedicated to the victims of the Birmingham church bombing is being published by William Morrow.

Fiction, Historical Fiction

Fiction Historical Fiction

The top-secret battles that threatened America’s shores

Behind the Book by Homer Hickam

by Homer Hickam

The top-secret battles that threatened America’s shores I am a lucky man and I know it. I’ve managed to have two interesting careers, one as a NASA engineer and another as an author of memoirs and novels. Most of my fans assume I transitioned from NASA to writing but the truth is I’ve been a writer nearly all of my life. Mrs. Laird, my third grade teacher, told me someday I’d make my living as an author and was mightily disappointed when I decided some years later to become an engineer. My training in the sciences, however, never stopped my love of the written word. I first broke in as a freelance writer for a variety of scuba diving magazines during the 1970s. After being certified as a diver in 1972 and then as an instructor in 1973, I began to write for Skin Diver, Sport Diver, Aquarius and other magazines dedicated to the sport. My specialty was stories about diving on sunken wrecks. This would lead to a most remarkable adventure and, to my surprise (and Mrs. Laird’s joy), my first book.

My adventure began in 1975 when a fisherman off Cape Hatteras, North Carolina, saw something long and narrow on his depth recorder. Curious, he invited some local divers to dive on the thing, whatever it was. At a depth of 110 feet, the divers found what they believed to be a submarine. Before long, I got a call from one of them. Would I come up and perhaps write an article about it? I jumped at the chance.

When I dived on the wreck, I recognized it immediately as not only a submarine but a World War II German U-boat that had been sunk in battle. There were torpedoes and 88-millimeter shells strewn about, and its deck gun was blown away. In its conning tower I found a human skeleton. What had sunk this submarine and when? Whose body was in the conning tower? And what in heaven’s name was a German Unterseeboot doing in American waters, anyway? The answers to those questions and so many others would not come easy. After digging, I discovered that nearly all the records of World War II German U-boat activity off the American east coast were still classified. Fortunately, being the lucky guy I am, the Freedom of Information Act was passed shortly afterwards. This allowed me to be one of the first researchers to look at a treasure trove of documentation. I was astonished to learn of a battle within sight of our shores that had not only sunk this particular U-boat (the U-352) but six others along with over 400 American and allied ships in a nine-month period. It was, in fact, one of the greatest and longest battles of the war, yet was virtually unknown. Soon, I tracked down American, British and German sailors who had fought in the bitter contest. After writing a number of articles about my findings, I realized I had enough for a book. My military history best-seller Torpedo Junction (Naval Institute Press, 1989; Dell, 1991) was the result.

After Torpedo Junction was published, I began to receive many letters from folks who had lived on the North Carolina Outer Banks during the war. They thanked me for writing about the battle and then continued with their own eyewitness accounts. One man wrote to tell me about his mother who was living at the time on Hatteras Island. One day, she’d been hanging out the laundry when what should motor by but a U-boat with its crew sunbathing on deck? They had waved at her and she’d waved back before recalling they were the enemy. She retrieved her husband’s rifle and began shooting! Wildly ducking, the Germans had immediately scrambled inside their U-boat and submerged. Other letters I received were more ominous in nature, stories of saboteurs off U-boats who had been met by the local citizenry with shotguns. Although these accounts were not verifiable, I came to believe there was more than a kernel of truth to them. Eventually, I knew I had to write a novel that would encompass not only the research I’d done for Torpedo Junction but the unique people of the Outer Banks. The Keeper’s Son is the result.

Nearly all of my books have been about small towns, and so I was pleased to write about another, this one set on the fictitious island of “Killakeet, south of Hatteras, north of Lookout,” a place of “fishermen, clam-stompers, oyster-rakers, Coastguardsmen, and lighthouse keepers.” The Keeper’s Son is a novel of the Thurlow family, keepers of the Killakeet lighthouse. The Thurlows must endure a great tragedy when Jacob Thurlow, only 2 years old, is lost at sea due to an error of judgment by Josh, his older brother. Seventeen years later, after a self-imposed exile, Josh returns to the island as a Coast Guard officer. When the marauding U-boats arrive, Josh and the crew of his tiny patrol boat are all that can stop the destruction of the people of Killakeet. What Josh cannot imagine, however, is that one of the U-boats is harboring a secret that might tell him the fate of his baby brother.

Although there are more than a few stirring battle scenes in my novel and also the mystery of the lost son to unravel, there are also several romantic subplots, one of which includes Dosie Crossan, a lusty young horsewoman who sets her sights on Josh. It’s always been my belief that it isn’t plot that makes for the good story but, perhaps more importantly, the people in it. It was a lot of fun to create Dosie and all the colorful characters who populate Killakeet and the U-boats offshore. I hope my fans will enjoy reading The Keeper’s Son, a novel of high-spirited adventure and love in a time of war. The Keeper’s Son is the first work of fiction by Homer Hickam, a former NASA engineer who first won a wide audience with Rocket Boys, a memoir of his West Virginia boyhood that was made into the movie October Sky. Hickam, who has also written two other volumes about his small-town upbringing, lives in Huntsville, Alabama.

The top-secret battles that threatened America's shores I am a lucky man and I know it. I've managed to have two interesting careers, one as a NASA engineer and another as an author of memoirs and novels. Most of my fans assume I transitioned from…

Mystery, Mystery & Suspense

Mystery & Suspense Mystery

It takes two: partners in crime

Behind the Book by G.H. Ephron

by G.H. Ephron

It was a leaden, wintry Sunday afternoon two years ago, and Don Davidoff and I were supposed to be brainstorming ideas for our fourth Dr. Peter Zak mystery we share the pseudonym G. H. Ephron. Instead, Don was enthusing about a new magnetic resonance imaging scanner that had recently arrived at McLean Hospital, the psychiatric hospital where he runs an inpatient unit. This was not just any scanner. “It’s a 3.5 tesla,” he said. Teslas? I hadn’t a clue what those were. But if Don thought 3.5 of them were a lot, then I knew enough to be impressed. “What if . . . ” Don began. Obsessed with the brain since he first dissected one in graduate school, he was off, speculating. Could an up-close look at functioning brain cells reveal signs of dementia long before intellect began to noticeably decay? Don’s enthusiasm was contagious. We could use this in the book, I thought. Magnetic resonance imaging could be the backdrop for a story about a brilliant doctor whose research is driven by the tantalizing idea that dementia can be diagnosed and treated early. I began taking notes. By the end of the afternoon, we had a premise, a rough plot outline and a working title: Obsessed. During the week, I massaged the outline and e-mailed it to Don. That’s how our partnership has worked for the past eight years. We meet every Sunday, moving from general idea to broad outline to specific scenes. I bring the characters to life, create the drama and suspense, sprinkle the red herring, while Don lives, eats and breathes the issues we weave through our books. Lower-case amnesia, addiction and delusion have all turned into upper-case book titles. Obsessed, our latest, explores a range of obsessions from psychosexual stalking to obsessive hoarding to apotemnophilia (the desire to be an amputee). As in all our books, we examine what goes on in the mind and how that shapes the reality a person creates.

Our partnership is based on a 30-year friendship, and works precisely because we have virtually no overlapping skills. When we started to work together, Don was afraid I was going to make him write. It took me a while to realize that I’d been afraid he was going to want to write. That surprised me, because I’d spent decades insisting that I was not a writer.

I come from a family of formidable literary talents. My parents were Hollywood screenwriters Henry and Phoebe Ephron (Carousel; Desk Set). My sisters Nora, Delia and Amy are all novelists and screenwriters. But I didn’t try my hand at the family business until about 10 years ago. That’s when a freelancer called. She wanted to write an article about me because I was, as she pointed out, “the only one who didn’t write.” I was shocked to hear myself shoot back, “If anyone’s going to write about me not writing, it’s going to be me.” Soon after that, my husband and I were having dinner with Don and his wife, Susan. Maybe it was too much wine, but by the end of the evening, Don and I had agreed to collaborate on a mystery series with a central character based loosely on Don.

“My better half,” is what Don calls Peter Zak, who is a little taller, a little younger and a little more conventionally handsome than his prototype. Like Don, a neuropsychologist, Dr. Zak runs a unit at a psychiatric hospital, and spends time in jails in four-by-four cubicles evaluating people accused of murder. That’s Don’s voice when Dr. Zak says, “A lot of people who end up accused of serious crimes are poor schnooks, in the wrong place at the wrong time, who rarely get an adequate defense.” I remember one of our earliest working sessions. It was a gorgeous Sunday afternoon in late summer, and we were supposed to be coming up with an opening scene for Amnesia, the first series novel. Instead, Don was wishing he was out rowing on the Charles River. I hate boats, but I found myself mesmerized as Don described the Zen-like state of calm rowing brings him. “You’re pulling, harder and harder, until the stern clears the puddles before the oars dip again, and boat, body and mind become one,” he said. I didn’t know if the stern was the front or the back of the boat, and I wasn’t sure what he meant by “puddles,” but I was absolutely certain that our character was going to be a rower. I began taking notes.

Hallie Ephron and her coauthor, Dr. Don Davidoff, both live and work in Massachusetts. Their fifth novel, Obsessed (St. Martin’s, $24.95, 320 pages, ISBN 0312305311), released under the pen name G.H. Ephron, goes on sale this month.

Fiction, Women's Fiction

Fiction Women's Fiction

Behind the Book: Debut goes beyond the veil

Behind the Book by Darynda Jones

by Darynda Jones

When I decided to make my grim reaper female in First Grave on the Right, I really didn’t want a being made of death and darkness and skeletal remains, so I decided to challenge lore. I mean, what if grim reapers were just misunderstood? Represented in legends and mythology erroneously? And what it they were really bright, shiny beacons of light that lured those departed who were stuck on Earth toward them to cross to the other side? Of course, my heroine would attract all kinds of trouble in the process, everything from demons who try to kill her to ghosts who try to kill her to, well, humans who try to kill her.

That is Charlotte “Charley” Davidson in a nutshell. And while she’d like to believe she’s a complete badass, she’s really more of an accident-prone, slightly schizophrenic girl from Albuquerque who takes the complications of ADD to a whole new level. And being the only grim reaper this side of forever doesn’t help.

Okay, but why the grim reaper, you might ask. That one is simple. As an aspiring author, I wanted to get noticed. I wanted something different that would pique the interest of agents and editors alike. Fortunately for me, Charley did just that. First, she won the 2009 RWA® Golden Heart© for Best Paranormal Romance, then she landed me an amazing agent. Not long after that, she secured a three-book deal for the rights to her story with St. Martin’s Press. Her journey has been an incredible one and the fun is just beginning.

For me, that Golden Heart final changed everything. Admittedly, I’d been entering the contest for several years, and while I never finaled despite some pretty good scores, every year I really thought I had a chance. Until 2009. I signed up to enter First Grave on the Right for one reason and one reason only: I wanted to force myself to finish the manuscript. I knew beyond a shadow of a doubt it would not final. No way. No how. And then I was mad that I’d wasted the entry fee. That money could have been used for something worthwhile, like chocolate! But I grudgingly sent it in and dismissed it from my mind entirely.

So when March 25 rolled around and I received the call that I was a finalist, to say that I was in a state of shock would be an understatement. I honestly could not believe it. And when I won? Forget about it. I was so shocked, I forgot my shoes and walked to the stage in a daze barefoot.

In First Grave on the Right, Charley Davidson uses her reaper abilities to help her succeed as a private investigator. It’s a natural progression from her childhood. Since she was five, she’s been helping her detective father solve crimes. In First Grave, three lawyers from the same law firm are murdered, and they come to Charley to find their killer. At the same time, she's dealing with a being she calls the Big Bad. He’s more powerful, and definitely sexier, than any specter she's ever come across. With the help of some living and some not-so-living associates, Charley sets out to solve the highest profile case of the year and discovers that dodging bullets isn't nearly as dangerous as falling in love.

Darynda Jones lives in New Mexico, where she is currently hard at work on the third Charley Davidson mystery.

Memoir

Memoir

An author revisits her former flames

Behind the Book by Susan Shapiro

by Susan Shapiro

About to turn 40 years old, I was having a serious midlife crisis. A novel I’d spent five years working on had been rejected, at the same time that my husband “Aaron” and I were going through infertility. I nicknamed this sad, vulnerable time-stretch my “no book, no baby summer.” Then I picked up the phone to hear the voice of Brad, an old college beau I hadn’t spoken to in a decade. He was currently a Harvard science professor with a 24-year-old graduate school girlfriend he could have 20 kids with. Worse, he had a new book coming out. Why did Brad get a book? He was a biology major. I’d been a struggling freelance writer in Manhattan for 20 years. I was enraged.

Instead of killing him, I offered to write a profile of Brad, turning my anxiety into a business opportunity. At our emotional lunch interview, I found myself less interested in his sociobiology book than with what had really happened between us in Ann Arbor, 20 years before. Without realizing it, I’d wound up conducting an exit interview. Focusing on my previous rejection took my mind off my current rejection. It was wildly cathartic. When two other exes called out of the blue, I got together with them and asked them the same questions. Before I married, from the ages of 13 to 35, I’d been madly in love five times, once every 4.4 years. I’d created a mythology in my head about why each of my old loves hadn’t lasted. One guy was a skirt chaser, another was too immature, a third had fallen for a more petite, successful woman. For each breakup, I’d blamed them. Now that I was a happily married, 40-year-old graduate of a dozen years of psychotherapy, my perspective had changed. Instead of being the victim, I pinpointed the moment where I’d screwed up each relationship. Having written countless personal essays on male-to-female issues for The New York Times, Cosmopolitan, Glamour, Jane and New Woman, I suspected I was onto something. I scrawled down what happened when I’d reconnected with each beau and brought the early version into my writing workshop. The group’s members were usually critical about my rough drafts, offering such comments as, “That’s throat clearing. Throw out the first five pages and start over.” This time somebody said, “You should have gotten old and bitter a long time ago, ’cause this rocks.” Giving a reading at NYU, where I taught journalism, I nervously read the first chapter. When I was done, the audience roared. Then all the female undergraduates in the room mobbed me, telling me about their romantic disappointments. I realized what the next step was. I tracked down my other two major heartbreaks. My husband Aaron, a TV comedy writer, always hated when I wrote anything about him or our marriage. It was a problem since I preferred writing in first person and hated censoring myself. But here I could write about sex, drugs and rock and roll in past tense, so he couldn’t complain. There was only one problem. The workshop insisted that the tiny role of the muttering husband in the background be expanded. It seemed that the book I was writing in order not to write about my husband needed him as the hero. I feared the minute he read it, he’d divorce me.

The day after a wonderful editor at Delacorte bought my finished manuscript, I handed it to Aaron. He loved it, though he later joked to a friend that he was penning a rebuttal called The Bitch Beside Me. When I e-mailed Brad that I sold the book, he asked if he could see it. After he read it, his response was, “You’ve written a better character than I am a person.” The only people who don’t like it so far are my parents in Michigan. My mother said, “Go ahead, tell the whole world you’re in therapy.” My father is threatening to move to Alaska and keeps telling me how the sculpture of five male heads on the cover makes it seem like I cut the heads off. I told them that one of the benefits of publishing a book at my age is that I don’t really care if it’s not their cup of tea; they’re not my audience. “If you think turning 40 was hard, wait until you turn 50,” an older colleague recently warned.

Since I had the most fruitful midlife crisis in the history of the world, I can’t wait. Susan Shapiro’s heartbreaking and hilarious memoir, Five Men Who Broke My Heart, investigates the current lives of her past loves. A freelance writer, Shapiro lives in Manhattan with her husband.

About to turn 40 years old, I was having a serious midlife crisis. A novel I'd spent five years working on had been rejected, at the same time that my husband "Aaron" and I were going through infertility. I nicknamed this sad, vulnerable time-stretch my…

Fiction

Fiction

Threads of a mother’s memories weave the fabric of a debut novel

Behind the Book by Brett Ellen Block

by Brett Ellen Block

Some writers have always known they wanted be writers. Others have felt a calling to the profession. I, however, fell into fiction writing literally. After slipping and twisting my ankle my second year at college, I needed to find a class I could get to easily on crutches. It was late in the registration period, and I was left with a choice between only two courses: Descartesian Theory and Creative Writing. I might have been clumsy, but I wasn't stupid. I chose the writing class.

Years later, with two master's degrees in the subject behind me, I found myself at an impasse. I'd finished my first book, a collection of short stories called Destination Known, and was ready to write a novel, but needed funding to make that possible. Uncoordinated or not, I wasn't likely to trip into any mounds of cash on the street. Then a classmate of mine from the Iowa Writers' Workshop told me about a fellowship offered to alumni and suggested I apply. It seemed like I had fallen into some luck without actually having to fall. My decision to apply only started to feel like a misstep once I faced the task of beginning the book. Up until that point, I'd only written short fiction, and the prospect of embarking on a novel, even a portion of one to submit for the fellowship, was daunting. In spite of all my writing experience, I genuinely had no clue where to begin.

I tried hitting up friends for family stories, plumbing my own past, even chatting up strangers, but nothing piqued my interest. One night, while complaining to my mother about the glare from my blank computer screen, I happened to ask if she remembered any striking or odd stories from her youth. She mulled it over for a bit, then told me that she recalled the rumor of a priest who'd been buried in a potter's field, but no one would ever say why. The forbidden quality of the secret surrounding the priest intrigued me. I tried to imagine what he could have done that would prohibit him from being buried in consecrated ground, and that was where the root of the story took hold.

The setting for my novel, The Grave of God's Daughter, is based on the place where my mother was raised. All throughout my childhood, we had made trips to her hometown in Western Pennsylvania, and to a young girl, it was like a foreign land that was just a car ride away. I remembered eavesdropping on people as they spoke in Polish, and attending mass at Saint Joseph's Church, the foundation of which my great-grandmother had actually helped dig. Some of the streets were still cobblestone, and there was an enormous neon cross perched on the mountain on the other side of the river that glowed through the night. I'd grown up hearing the tales my mother told about collecting glass bottles to make change, the strict nuns who were her teachers in school and how she'd never seen a mosquito while growing up because of the chemical plant on the other side of town.

While thinking out the novel, those stories began to blend with my own memories. One in particular was the time I visited my great-uncle's house, where he raised pit bulls. The sound of more than two dozen dogs barking was as frightening for me as a child as it became for the narrator of the novel. Though the fabric of The Grave of God's Daughter has many threads of fact, they are only the framework for a story about the unwavering bond between mother and child. Given the source of the story, the theme couldn't be more apt.

If I had a dime for all of the times I'd heard the phrase "write what you know" in creative writing classes, I might not have needed the fellowship grant, but I also might not have written this book. I couldn't have predicted that when I injured my ankle I would stumble onto a career that I love, nor could I have planned that the inspiration for this novel would be a strange scrap of memory from my mother's childhood, but like any good story, even the one behind the novel has plenty of twists and turns.

Brett Ellen Block's debut novel, The Grave of God's Daughter, explores a young girl's coming-of-age in an isolated small town that is keeping a terrible secret. A graduate of the Iowa Writers' Workshop, Block now lives in Los Angeles.

Mystery & Suspense

Mystery & Suspense

Finding inspiration for a No. 1 series

Behind the Book by Alexander McCall Smith

by Alexander McCall Smith

Where do the people in books come from? Authors are often asked this question, and they often find difficulty in answering. As the author of the No. 1 Ladies' Detective Agency series of novels, I am often asked how it is that I have ended up writing about a woman who lives far away in Botswana, when I am a man living at the other end of the world. This strikes people as rather strange, and I suppose that in a sense it is.

I decided to write about a woman from Botswana some years ago, when I witnessed the remarkable sight of a woman chasing a chicken about the yard in a Botswana village. The chicken came off second best, and was duly dispatched to provide the next day's lunch. But what remained in my mind was the cheerfulness of the woman who performed this rather everyday task. And I thought that one day, I might write about a woman who was competent and resourceful and who was born in that particular village.

Years passed before I sat down to write a story about just such a woman. My wife and I were spending some time in the south of France. I sat down at the desk in the house in which we were staying and wrote a short story about a woman called Precious Ramotswe, who inherits cattle from her father and sells them. She decides to set up a small detective agency with the proceeds, rather than to establish a more mundane and safer business. I enjoyed writing this short story, and I found that I liked the character I had created. At the end of the story, it occurred to me that I should write further stories about this woman, and I did so. These became a book and the book became a series. These books then completely changed my life.

I had not intended to write a mystery series, and indeed there is comparatively little mystery in these books. They are really the story of one woman, Precious Ramotswe, and of those who play a part in her life her fiance, Mr. J.L.B. Matekoni; her assistant, Mma. Makutsi; and her friend, the matron of an orphan farm, Mma. Potokwani. They are the sorts of people who might escape notice, except for one thing: they are all, in their various ways, good people.

I decided to write books about good people for a set of very particular reasons. I think that there are so many books which stress the dysfunctional in life, that deal with conflict and tragedy. In my books, everybody behaves rather well towards one another. They are polite people they use courteous language, they understand and forgive, they are kind. And why not? Why should we not have books about people like that? People have said to me that I am a Utopian novelist. Some people suggest that there cannot be people like this, that Precious Ramotswe cannot exist. I disagree! Botswana is a remarkable country which has made a great success of itself. It is has shown that countries in Africa can be well run and prosperous. And what is more, there are plenty of people in African countries who are leading profoundly decent lives, often in conditions of some difficulty. I hope that my books show that this is all possible. And if these books are, as some people have suggested, a love letter to a country, then I am proud to sign my name to that love letter.

The fifth book in the series, The Full Cupboard of Life, has just been published in the United States. I have finished work on the manuscript of the sixth, which will be published next year. With each visit I make to the world of the No. 1 Ladies Detective Agency, the more I become attached to the characters and involved in their lives. They are very real to me, as I suppose must be inevitable if one is writing a series of this nature. So I hear their voices. Mma. Ramotswe, too, is at my elbow, giving me occasional pieces of advice. And if she were to walk in the door tomorrow, I know that we would sit down together and have a cup of her favorite bush tea. And then we might go for a walk, and look out over that landscape that she loves so much, with its wide plains and its thorn trees, and its great, echoing empty sky.

Alexander McCall Smith was born in Africa and currently lives in Scotland, where he teaches medical law at Edinburgh University. His latest book is The Full Cupboard of Life, the fifth installment in the best-selling No. 1 Ladies Detective Agency series.

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