Behind the Book Archives

by Arthur Phillips

Arthur Phillips' critically acclaimed debut, Prague, was a bestseller in 2002. His inventive second novel, The Egyptologist, takes readers into the competitive world of post-World War I Egyptology, where a glory-seeking young archeologist bets his career and his fiancée's fortune on the discovery of the tomb of an apocryphal pharaoh. Phillips, who studied at Harvard and is a five-time "Jeopardy!" champion, explains here what prompted his interest in this unusual subject. We'll leave it to readers to decide just how much to believe.

Readers often challenge authors to identify the myriad streamlets that flowed together to form the river of a novel: How did you think of that? How much is true? How did you research it? To the best of my recollection, here are the tributary events that led to The Egyptologist.

Several years ago, I was at a Kinko's in Sink, Oklahoma, bored, photocopying my remarks for The Sink Literary Festival's panel on The Self in Flight from Itself: Understanding the Author as Pathological Liar when, in the blue recycling bin at my feet, I noticed the distinct first page of a handwritten letter. Despite the poor toner quality, I could make out a date from 1952 and a series of lovelorn complaints. The writer accused Beloved, hated Doris of any number of violations of his love. Oddly, among the other crimes, the writer's wrath was most righteous over a betrayal of some obscure academic debate: But, Doris, your decision to side with the know-nothings of Egyptology in denying the historical veracity of King Atum-hadu has wounded me more than all your petty cruelty, your crude tauntings, your low-cut End of page, and none beneath it. I didn't know anything about Egyptology (I still don't) but the idea of a lover enraged over such a dusty topic caught me.

I certainly didn't have a novel, just a sniff of something, and I didn't smell it again for two years until, at a museum in Thailand, battling the heat and jet lag while walking through an exhibit on the 18th-century Siamese Queen Shlipralithpur, I was bored again. I noticed four young women speaking a Slavic language, maybe Polish. I recognized only two accented words: Shlipralithpur and Atum-hadu. The coincidence awoke me, and I recalled Doris' love-shattering controversial position. What possible relationship could that ancient king have to this opium-gobbling girl-queen of Siam or to these sun-burnt Slavic beauties (who spoke not one word in common with any language I could sputter, but one of whom, when I repeated Atum-hadu, smiled broadly and slowly drew in my notebook a series of the most exquisitely vulgar hieroglyphs)? I was hooked; I smelled the simmering stock of a novel. The process of inspiration is impenetrable, at least at the time, but I remember that I was fiercely determined (in a way I rarely am, as laziness is my ruling humor) to learn about Atum-hadu.

My research took a year. The only public documents even mentioning Atum-hadu were located in the People's Library of Ancient Cultures, a squat 1970s concrete lump in a Beijing neighborhood split between lesser university disciplines and adult-video importers. It took some finagling, but I was permitted a scant 90 minutes of supervised access to the archives. I didn't know what I was looking for, but I found it at minute 86: the same series of obscene hieroglyphs I had last seen 13 months earlier in Bangkok. I began feverishly copying everything, though of course I couldn't understand the symbols. I managed to scribble only one paragraph in my four minutes. And then the document was snatched away.

Home a week later, I went in search of an Egyptologist to translate the paragraph for me. A cosmic sigh: the very first Egypt scholar I found at my local community college was a young, sun-burnt Russian emigre named Doris. Her translation:

The invaders cut through Atum-hadu's defenders. Their faces spattered with the blood of a decade's slaughter, their howls ringing out as they reached at last for their prize, maddened by their strict diet of war, promised blinding plunder and terrified victims, they poured into Atum-hadu's court. There they gaped at the defiantly exuberant courtiers of Atum-hadu: feasting, dancing to the intricate music of their king's composition, riding trained camels and, along the defenses, on the floors, and on tables engaging one another in combinations and postures the invaders could never have conceived of, even after a decade of desert isolation where their thoughts had nowhere to turn but upon the faraway pleasures of the flesh.

Doris read the translation to me in her lilting accent as a dusty sunbeam alit on her face, and soon after I began work on the novel which is now The Egyptologist.

Arthur Phillips' critically acclaimed debut, Prague, was a bestseller in 2002. His inventive second novel, The Egyptologist, takes readers into the competitive world of post-World War I Egyptology, where a glory-seeking young archeologist bets his career and his fiancée's fortune on the discovery of the…

Science Fiction & Fantasy

Science Fiction & Fantasy

Keeping the Covenant: a beloved fantasy series resumes

Behind the Book by Stephen R. Donaldson

by Stephen R. Donaldson

Stephen R. Donaldson began his acclaimed Thomas Covenant the Unbeliever series in 1977. With his creation of Thomas, a flawed everyman who enters an alternate universe, the Land, to save it from the evil Lord Foul, Donaldson became one of the biggest names in fantasy. He ended the series with White Gold Wielder, much to the dismay of his millions of fans. This month, Donaldson launches a four-volume conclusion to the saga with The Runes of the Earth. Here, Donaldson explains why he decided to return to Thomas and the Land after more than 20 years.

The dedication to my novel, The Wounded Land (Book One of The Second Chronicles of Thomas Covenant), reads: "To Lester del Rey: Lester made me do it." I naturally wanted to dedicate a book to him. He was the editor who discovered me, the editor who found Lord Foul’s Bane in his slush pile and decided to publish it when it had already been rejected by every fiction publisher in the U.S. (including Ballantine Books, the company that later hired him to start a new fantasy line). I needed to express my gratitude somehow. And I chose to say that "Lester made me do it" an intentional reference to that old excuse, "The Devil made me do it" because he is both directly and indirectly responsible for every Covenant book that has followed, and will follow in The Chronicles of Thomas Covenant the Unbeliever.

Of course, Lester is directly responsible because he published me when no one else would. In that sense, he is responsible for my entire writing career (19 books so far, not counting The Runes of the Earth). Nonetheless the line, "Lester made me do it," refers more to his indirect responsibility for the subsequent Covenant books.

Lester, bless him, had many admirable qualities as an editor. However, he was also one of publishing’s foremost advocates for "repeatable success." Having published my first trilogy successfully, he saw no earthly reason why I should not continue to write Covenant books, and only Covenant books, until the day I died (or until they stopped selling, whichever came first). I, on the other hand, disagreed. Strenuously. As far as I was concerned, my first trilogy told a complete story, and I saw no earthly reason why I should ever write another Covenant book. I had nothing more to say on the subject of Thomas Covenant’s struggles against Despite in the arena of the Land.

Well, Lester didn’t get where he was in life by taking "no" for an answer. But he had already discovered that I can be a bit pig-headed where writing is concerned. So he cleverly didn’t try to argue with me. Instead he began sending me "ideas" for my next Covenant book. Idea after idea, relentlessly, until I feared that he would never stop. And each new idea was worse than the one before. Soon he was sending me ideas so bad that Bulwar-Lytton wouldn’t have written them. And at last he succeeded in his devilish purpose: he sent me an idea SO bad that before I could stop myself I began thinking, "No, this one is truly terrible. What I really ought to do instead is . . ." Almost instantaneously, my brain seemed to fill with fire. Mere moments later, in a mad rush, almost helplessly, I had sketched in the main stories for both The Second Chronicles and The Last Chronicles: both of them perfectly logical extensions of "Covenant’s struggles against Despite in the arena of the Land"; both of them building seamlessly in sequence on the first Covenant trilogy; both of them playing their parts to make the entire Covenant saga into one vast, organic whole.

More than 20 years may have passed since I completed The Second Chronicles of Thomas Covenant, but The Last Chronicles has remained alive in my imagination the whole time, waiting more and more impatiently for me to get around to finishing what I started. In that sense, it is quite literally true that "Lester made me do it."

American History, History

History American History

Behind the Book: In telling the story of an American hero, finding his own

Behind the Book by Robert Coram

by Robert Coram

It took me some 50 years to appreciate Veterans Day, and that appreciation came when I began writing military biographies.

I grew up the firstborn son of a man who spent 33 years in the Army. After he retired, he was known in my hometown as “the Sarge,” and that was the way he wanted it. I missed childhood; instead I had a rather extended boot camp and I rebelled against everything the Sarge tried to teach me about the military.

The Sarge died when I was 16 and I did not mourn his passing. I flunked out of college and, for reasons I never understood, joined the Air Force. After facing three courts martial, I was kicked out of the Air Force and for the next 50 years I stayed as far as possible from everything to do with the military.

As a newspaper reporter I received two Pulitzer nominations. As a freelancer I wrote for most national magazines, including the New Yorker. I taught writing for 12 years at Emory. I wrote seven novels and three nonfiction books.

But my spirit was restless and my soul was unfulfilled.

Through a strange series of events I came to write Boyd: The Fighter Pilot Who Changed the Art of War. There was nothing in my professional background to indicate that I could write the sort of book that Boyd became. During the research about the life of this extraordinary man, I had intimations of what the Sarge had tried to teach me. But I pushed those feelings aside.

Success of the Boyd book was such that my publisher, Little, Brown and Company, gave me a two-book contract and stipulated that each book be a military biography. During the writing of the first book in the new contract, American Patriot: The Life and Wars of Colonel Bud Day, I finally understood; I got it, I knew with blinding clarity what it was the Sarge had tried to teach me so long ago. And I wept with the knowledge that I had rejected perhaps the most priceless gift a father can give to his son.

The understanding came when I was writing a scene involving a prolonged and particularly brutal torture session suffered by Colonel Day when he was a POW during the Vietnam War. He would have died—and almost did—before he violated the Code of Conduct that governed the behavior of POWs. He would return home with honor, or he would not return at all. Bud Day showed me, by his example, there are things worth dying for. Through him I understood commitment to duty, and honor, and what it means to be a man of character. Through him I understood the love of country that is part of the DNA of military people but simply beyond the understanding of most civilians. Colonel Day became in my mind the exemplar for everything that is good and noble about the military, everything the Sarge had tried to teach me.

Even today, I grow teary when I re-read the torture scenes in Colonel Day’s biography.

My next biography, Brute: The Life of Victor Krulak, U.S. Marine, I wrote free of the shackles of the past and in full recognition that I am a troubadour for America’s greatest heroes, the men and women who wear the uniform of this country.

While I admire and respect these men and women, I do my job. I do not write hagiographies. To do so would be an abrogation of the sense of duty I feel about my work; the understanding of which I learned from Colonel Day.

I fly the American flag at my home in Atlanta and at my studio on the Georgia coast. To me, Veterans Day is one of the very special holidays we celebrate. Writing military biographies not only turned my career around, it brought rest to my spirit and fulfillment to my soul.

Today, when I visit my 92-year-old mother in deep southwest Georgia, I always take time to travel up to the little country cemetery where the Sarge is buried. I sit on the side of his grave and I tell him of my work. And I believe, that after all these years, he is now proud of me.

Read an excerpt from Brute on Little, Brown’s website, or find out more about Coram on his website.

Author photo by Billy Howard.

It took me some 50 years to appreciate Veterans Day, and that appreciation came when I began writing military biographies.

I grew up the firstborn son of a man who spent 33 years in the Army. After he retired, he was known in my…

Mystery, Mystery & Suspense

Mystery & Suspense Mystery

Fiction comes to life on daytime drama

Behind the Book by Michael Malone

by Michael Malone

Hyperion Books first talked with me about writing a novel tied to ABC’s daytime drama “One Life to Live” while I was co-head-writing the show. My first response was no. I didn’t want to do a novelization of the soap opera or a spin-off or a journal. Besides, there was already more than enough fiction for me to imagine in the world of “One Life” itself five hours of drama a week, 52 weeks a year of interlaced, multigenerational plots for a whole town full of people of every social and psychological ilk. That narrative range and abundance of character was what had drawn me, as a novelist, to writing soap opera. I loved its capacious canvas and its generic receptivity. But I couldn’t stop thinking about Hyperion’s suggestion, and about how soap opera might lend itself to the idea not of novelizing the show, but of writing a novel on the show. That was the genesis of The Killing Club.

We would watch a fictional character create a piece of fiction, a mystery novel, as a storyline on “One Life to Live.” We would watch the novel as it was being planned, and as it was written, and read, and finally published. The novel was “written” by Marcie Walsh (wonderfully played by the actress Kathy Briar), a smart, spunky young woman who attended “Llanview University” and worked as the receptionist at the Llanview police station. For her fiction, she drew upon as writers do people and events in her “real” life: the detectives and lawyers with whom she worked and the crimes she saw being investigated around her. As she caught the mystery bug, she read other mysteries (including one of mine) and she tried (sometimes with comic, sometimes with dangerous results) to solve crimes herself. Finally, encouraged by her doctor boyfriend and her crew of college friends, she decided to write her own book. The Killing Club is that novel. The plot evolved from an idea for a movie that my colleague at “One Life,” Josh Griffith, and I had had about a group of misfits in high school who have a club in which they imagine ingenious ways to murder their “enemies.” Then, 10 years later, one of the club members is murdered in just such a bizarre way. Then another club member dies. Then another. Who is killing the Killing Club? And why? On the show, a friend of Marcie’s sent the manuscript to Michael Malone, the novelist, a “professor at Llanview University.” Mr. Malone liked what he saw of Marcie’s book and decided to help her with it and then to find her a publisher. He sent the novel to Hyperion Books. They accepted it. Excitedly Marcie traveled to New York to meet Gretchen Young, who is the real editor of the real book, just as Chip Kidd, whom she was also thrilled to meet, is the real cover designer. The Killing Club was “published” on the show at the same time that it was published in “real life” mid-February. In the future, mysterious goings-on will happen in Marcie’s life that eerily reflect the plot of the novel. The creation of the novel, The Killing Club, over the past year on “One Life” has been, then, the creation of a fiction about a fiction inside a fiction. But it is also a “real” novel. In that regard, for me the challenge was, as always, the narrative voice. What sort of narrator would Marcie Walsh “create”? The voice turned out to be that of Jamie Ferrara, a young wisecracking homicide detective in the small town of Gloria, New Jersey, the working-class daughter of an Italian-American cop, and herself one of the founders of the Killing Club.

People ask me, is this a Marcie Walsh book or a Michael Malone book? I would answer that my books are Michael Malone books, but each evolves from the characters who inhabit it. The minute I hear the voice of a narrator, from word one of page one of a story, I am listening to that character’s voice. The narrator of Handling Sin is very different from that of The Last Noel, and Jamie Ferrara is very different from the Southern detective Cuddy Mangum in my Hillston novels. But they are all, I trust, equally at home in the landscape of my fiction.

Acclaimed novelist Michael Malone published his first book in 1975 and went on to write such Southern comic classics as Handling Sin. He has also written extensively for television, including two stints as head writer for the soap opera “One Life to Live.” In his latest book, The Killing Club, Malone combines both careers with fascinating and spine-tingling results.

Hyperion Books first talked with me about writing a novel tied to ABC's daytime drama "One Life to Live" while I was co-head-writing the show. My first response was no. I didn't want to do a novelization of the soap opera or a spin-off or…

Self-Help

Self-Help

Realizing a sister’s vision

Behind the Book by Lauren Catuzzi Grandcolas

by Lauren Catuzzi Grandcolas

Realizing a sister’s vision Our sister, Lauren Catuzzi Grandcolas, passionately pursued a dream: the creation of a book called You Can Do It!.

The book was a distillation of the way she lived her life with creativity, courage, and an infectious exuberance and the way she hoped to spread the words of the book’s title to other women. Her message is best summed up by a line from the movie The Shawshank Redemption, a quote she stuck on her fridge: Get busy living or get busy dying. The quote is especially poignant because we lost Lauren, a passenger on United Flight 93, on September 11, 2001.

But while tragedy ended her life, it far from defined it. The Lauren working on You Can Do It! was a woman in her mid-30s who loved learning, having new experiences and facing down fears. A married career woman, she knew that daily to-do lists made it next to impossible for women to think about, let alone get around to doing, the things on their want-to-do lists. But she also knew how wonderful she felt when she made the time to dream and dare and do the things on her own such list, and she felt she had a surefire way to invite other women to experience the thrill of accomplishment.

Lauren was inspired by the concept of Girl Scout badges. She envisioned a book that would offer a tantalizing menu of the kinds of things women so often say they’re too busy, tired or afraid to try, broken down into fun and doable steps and capped at the finish line with a tangible, ta-da reward: a badge.

Lauren bubbled with excitement when she talked about her dream book and in her can-do style, she took it very seriously, going so far as to quit her job to work full-time toward its publication.

So after Lauren’s death, even in the midst of shock and grief, we wondered, what about Lauren’s book? We knew nothing about book publishing, had resolved as a family to keep our grief private and were extremely wary of anyone exploiting Lauren’s life story in any way. But the book had meant the world to Lauren. Was there a way for us to finish what she had started? We made contact with Caroline Herter, the independent book producer Lauren had teamed up with. Slowly and carefully, we all moved forward, spending more than two years creating the 500-page book covering activities from acting to activism, surfing to singing, growing a garden to growing a business. Lauren’s vision was realized in 60 chapters, complete with full-color, peel-and-stick badges. To make it a true women-helping-women book, accomplished women in many fields provided real-world mentoring. These busy women (including the executive editor of Kiplinger’s Personal Finance magazine, the leader of the first women’s ascent of Annapurna, and the founder of Shepherd’s Garden Seeds catalog) gave a first glimpse of how the book would be embraced by donating their time and talents.

The resulting book is exactly what Lauren imagined. Practical and inspiring, it’s a bit like a great cookbook. You pick it up thinking that you are looking for one thing and wind up finding 20 other things you can’t wait to try! Every step of the way, we have tried to be Lauren’s eyes and ears, and now, her voice. This isn’t always easy. Doing this on Lauren’s behalf (and on behalf of the Lauren Catuzzi Grandcolas Foundation, where a portion of proceeds from the book will go) feels right, but there’s no way around it: on some days the deep sorrow that Lauren isn’t doing this comes to the fore. Working side by side, as sisters for our sister is comforting, and we’ve also found that the book has been positive for our whole family. The book is Lauren, and working on it together has, in a very real and meaningful way, kept her close to us.

We remember talking to Lauren about how amazing it would be to someday see two women sitting at a cafÅ½ with a copy of You Can Do It! on the table between them. That’s no longer a dream. Now, women can hear Lauren say, "C’mon! Live the biggest, boldest, best life you can while you can." The publication of You Can Do It! means that Lauren’s dream has finally come true, which doesn’t really surprise us; Lauren always knew we could all do it!

Realizing a sister's vision Our sister, Lauren Catuzzi Grandcolas, passionately pursued a dream: the creation of a book called You Can Do It!.

The book was a distillation of the way she lived her life with creativity, courage, and an infectious exuberance and…

Fiction, Short Stories

Fiction Short Stories

The seeds of one writer’s inspiration

Behind the Book by Owen King

by Owen King

Writer Owen King makes his fiction debut this summer with the publication of We're All in This Together, a collection that includes the novella of the title and four short stories. Ranging from serious to hilarious, from blunt to delicate, the volume showcases King's accomplished storytelling style. Here, he reflects on the people and places that have inspired his writing.

I sometimes worry that living in New York City will eventually jade me to eccentricity after all, everyone who lives here, who sleeps behind paper-thin walls, and who packs into the subway and rides ass-to-ass for an hour on a daily basis, has at least contemplated the possibility of descending into some florid, screaming insanity. As a New Yorker, when you see a man with a tie knotted around his head, goose-stepping around and around the statue of Gandhi in Union Square Park, cackling to himself and rapping Havah Nagilah, your best instinct is to keep right on going straight ahead and never look back. If you live in this city long enough, proximity teaches you to cut as wide a berth as possible. One realizes that another refrigerator leak, a few more sleepless nights on account of the stud operation next door, another evaluation without a raise, and that could very easily be you doing the Gandhi circuit.

For better or worse, however, I'm sure that it's no anomaly that as a writer I tend to be inspired by exactly that kind of self-displacement: What was that man doing two years ago? Does someone love him? How long will he keep going? Where does he go when he's finished? Why Gandhi, for God's sake? That is to say, I tend to start with a situation, or even just an image, and then use the story to try to figure it out: how did this happen, who was involved, in what ways did it change them.

For instance, in my new book, the story Wonders germinated from a (possibly apocryphal) anecdote about the great Red Sox outfielder Jim Rice: one game, as a pop fly took Rice to the edge of the stands, a fan reached out, took the hat right off Rice's head and went running. Then, the story went, the entire Red Sox team barreled into the stands to get the hat back. I had no idea if the story was true, but I wanted it to be, and although the scene it inspired turned out to be the end of Wonders, that was how I began.

I like to think that the bucolic hometown of my youth, Bangor, Maine, was rich in the peculiar episodes and individuals that make for promising fiction. (In the interest of full disclosure, I have to concede that by bucolic Maine town standards, my own family is as peculiar as any. My parents, Stephen and Tabitha King, are both authors, and during daylight hours, my father actually dozes in a large, leathery cocoon suspended from the rafters of the barn.*)

We're All In This Together, the novella that accounts for the bulk of my collection, was primarily inspired by my own feelings about the results of the 2000 election—I wasn't happy but the motor of the narrative belongs to the owner of Bangor's only billboard, a roughly 10×10 piece of miter board. This monument near the corner of Union Street and West Broadway stands angled on a brief, privately owned patch of grass in order to, somewhat charmingly and somewhat inexplicably, remind passersby of the seasons.

In the spring, the billboard will usually be covered with something like a rendering of frolicking puppies, along with the legend, SPRING. In the fall, we might get a tow-headed boy chasing a kite through a couple of swirling leaves, and in case that didn't fully explain it, the title FALL. While I've never learned the identity of the seasonal billboard artist, or if he or she means to convey some larger point about the dangers of forgetting the seasons, at some point in 2002, I had a daydream about getting my own billboard and writing down my feelings about the current administration in BIG BLACK LETTERS for everyone in the neighborhood to see. Of course, that was just a daydream; it wasn't something I would actually do. . . . But who would put up a sign that said all the angry things that I and so many people I knew were feeling about the direction of our country? Why would he do it? How would it change him?

The story I wrote ballooned to touch upon subjects ranging from organized labor to softcore television to fathers and stepfathers, but the seed was in that eccentric little billboard near the corner of Union and West Broadway.

* Kidding.

Writer Owen King makes his fiction debut this summer with the publication of We're All in This Together, a collection that includes the novella of the title and four short stories. Ranging from serious to hilarious, from blunt to delicate, the volume showcases King's accomplished…

Fiction, Historical Fiction

Fiction Historical Fiction

BEHIND THE BOOK: Novelist imagines her ancestors’ westward journey

Behind the Book by Karen Fisher

by Karen Fisher

When I started my first novel, A Sudden Country, in 1990, I thought it would take a year. Through my ancestry, I'd always felt linked to the story of westward migration. But when I was growing up in the 60s, the story of Oregon emigration had faded into a hazy foundational myth: corny or romantic or shameful, depending on your demographic. I knew it had been none of those. It had been a real event in which real people had taken an incredible leap of faith. What had made them leave safe homes for the unknown? What had they found? I could only guess. But just knowing their stories had given me a willingness to take risks and to endure life's inconveniences, to value survival skills.
As a teacher, I took teenagers into the wilderness and saw how many had no idea what humans were capable of. I told stories of explorers and emigrants and Native Americans how they'd lived and what they'd done. These stories had the power to change their outlooks, too. This history seemed too important to forget, to laugh at or dismiss. That's not to say I wasn't uncomfortable with my colonial legacy. My college years had been informed by the new environmental movement, by AIM, by the rage of historical revisionism that cast Americans not as victims or heroes but as monstrous aggressors. But I knew, again, that the people in conflict at the time had seen a much more complex picture, different from any historical recasting.

I never expected to exorcise my conqueror's guilt, but it did seem necessary to understand this story from the ground from inside those who'd been there. So I wrote, and when the year was out, I realized my presumption. Grand intentions had done nothing but produce a fiction, as absurd as any other, and I was expecting a first child. I put the project away, resolved to make better use of my time. Then, with no less presumption, my husband and I quit our jobs and moved to an Idaho farm. With no money or work to fall back on, driving a trailer full of goats and horses, cats and hens, we arrived on 50 acres and soon had to fix tractors, build barns, dig cellars, grow food. What had we been thinking? Six years passed. I had a girl, then a boy. Each winter I tried to write. By then I'd ridden country once mapped by Hudson's Bay fur traders, snowshoed through winters so long and bleak that I'd come to see how color vermilion or a string of beads could become currency. Now a mother, I'd wondered how one eloquent trader had endured a winter in which his whole family died of smallpox. I'd stood on old village sites, pondered churches built by rival missionaries, learned to butcher deer and split cordwood from a Nez Perce neighbor. Summer days of hoeing and diapering had taught me things I'd never guessed about poverty. Each month brought some new lesson, and for a writer, the most important one was this: that facts and ideas were not enough to write from. Only by feeling a life could I understand it. Only by living could I feel it. Then I was given an account handed down by a true ancestor. Emma Mitchell was 11 when she crossed to Oregon in 1847. Desperate toward the journey's end, her family won permission to winter at the Whitman mission. A month later, the Cayuse massacred the mission's American men, took the women and children hostage. From my farm I could almost see that place, but never imagined my connection. Or guessed that but for a pair of stolen stockings, I might well not exist.

To take up those dry husks of words and know a woman who once woke from dreams, pressed her lips to an infant's hair, found her courage, kept a secret; to know a man who had split wood, built barns, lost love to know these things was to know my new ability to speak for those whose lives had been reduced to names in the backs of Bibles, a saved lock of hair, old pages lit to fire kindling. I abandoned years of drafts, everything I'd done, and began again, hoping (with less presumption now), to honor them.

Karen Fisher now lives with her husband and three children on an island in Puget Sound.

Health & Fitness, Lifestyles

Lifestyles Health & Fitness

Let’s get physical

Behind the Book by James McManus

by James McManus

My new book, Physical: An American Checkup, probably sprang from an Abe Lincoln quote I first came across many years ago: I must study the plain, physical facts of the case, ascertain what is possible, and learn what appears to be wise and right. And from crazier notions I came up with on my own, such as: The truth is, I don’t think I’m going to die. Not today, not tomorrow, not in 2067. Not me.

As I reached my late 40s, I thought things like that more and more often. In April 2002, a stitch along the left side of my abdomen suddenly graduated into an aching throb. I’d turned 51 in late March and was just beginning to get my feet underneath me again after the death of my son James from a drug overdose. I had tenure as a lit and writing professor, my second marriage was flourishing, and my book about poker (Positively Fifth Street) was scheduled to be published the following March. I felt pretty good about things, as long as you didn’t count the abscess in my soul where my son lived. But within a couple of days the thorn in my side, as I thought of it, had me walking hunched over like a little old man with bad knees and end-stage cirrhosis, not exactly the image I like to project to the world. As the throbbing intensified, I gulped down more Advil and worried.

I’d been taking Zocor to lower my cholesterol for almost two years, this while neglecting to get my liver function tested. Lynn Martin, my primary care physician, had told me to have it checked after three months because the possible side effects of the medicine included nephritis and liver damage, but I somehow forgot. I knew I’d been dosing myself far too liberally with Advil for headaches and hangovers, so my self-diagnosis was liver failure, though the phrase I used with my wife, Jennifer, was some liver thing. It was only at Jennifer’s insistence that I finally made an appointment to have my liver enzymes tested. I also stopped drinking and, in spite of the crippling pain, as I phrased it to myself, stopped taking Advil, even though I understood the damage was already done. Oh, and another thing, Braino, Jennifer said after wishing me luck and dropping me off at the lab. Your liver’s on your right side, not on your left.

The first appointment I could get was with Dr. Martin’s partner, Dennis Hughes. Tallish, maybe 40, all business, Hughes glanced at the blood test results, felt around where I’d told him it hurt, asked a few questions, then told me I probably had diverticulitis. Your liver’s functioning perfectly. Hughes e-mailed scrips for painkillers and antibiotics to my Walgreen’s and recommended a CT scan of my abdomen, which would confirm his diagnosis. The colonoscopy two weeks later will confirm that it’s all healed up nicely. I nodded. Had I missed something? The practice had just been computerized, and Hughes was happy to demonstrate how my records, medications, etc., were all in the system. The referrals for your scan and colonoscopy are already at Evanston Hospital. Terrific. The antibiotics killed the infection, or at least the symptoms, in a couple of days, so I was able to squirrel the unused painkillers into my party stash. When I called to report the good news, a nurse reminded me I still needed to get a colonoscopy. I’ll make the appointment as soon as I hang up, I told her, then sat down to breakfast, all better.

Days went by. Maybe a week. The pain was long gone, and I’d heard all about colonoscopies. You fasted for two or three days while slurping battery acid; step two involved a fully articulated four-foot-long aluminum bullwhip with a search light, a video camera and a lasso at the tip getting launched a few feet up into your large intestine. Not to worry, however. They used really super-duper lubrication. While discussing some unrelated business with Lewis Lapham, the editor of Harper’s, I happened to mention my gastrointestinal adventure. Next thing I knew, Lewis was proposing that I go to the Mayo Clinic for what he called their executive physical, then write a big story about it. Now, this was a guy who had already changed my life by sending me to cover the 2000 World Series of Poker, so I had every reason to trust him. Yet the Mayo proposal triggered a whirlwind of panic. Accepting this plummy assignment would more or less guarantee I’d be told things I did not want to hear. The good news, Mr. McManus, is you’ve got almost five weeks to live. The bad news is, we started counting over a month ago. What if the Mayo clinicians discovered a tumor the size of a Titleist wedged inoperably between my pons and my creative left hemisphere? What if as they certainly would they made me swear off alcohol, tasty food and my nightly postprandial Parliament Light? It wasn’t that I didn’t understand how lucky I was to be offered a free Mayo Clinic physical, I just had too many other things on my plate turf and surf, garlic mashed potatoes, baked ziti, the take-out Mekong Fried Pork from the Phat Phuc Noodle Bar. But no! Not only would I have to drink gallons of icky stuff before I got reamed, they’d make me give up all the good stuff! To say nothing of my terror that the verdict might not be all that rosy.

Bottom line? I couldn’t get more medical treatment unless I followed up like I’d promised: my referral was already in the system, gosh darn it unless I got a colonoscopy as part of the Mayo thing. That way I could get everything checked in 72 hours, all under one roof, by the best of the best of the best. It was time to cowboy up and take my medicine.

Poker columnist for the New York Times and author of the bestseller Positively Fifth Street (2003), James McManus has also written four novels. He teaches writing and literature at the School of the Art Institute of Chicago.

Mystery & Suspense

Mystery & Suspense

Behind the Book: My own learning process

Behind the Book by Dana Buchman

by Dana Buchman

I was an English major in college and have always adored reading. You might think the fact that I love books would make the prospect of writing one easier. In truth, it was the opposite. My reverence and respect for authors and books made the idea of writing a book intimidating. But I felt I had a story to tell a story that could help another parent whose child has a learning disability (or, as I prefer to call it, a learning difference). I travel around the country a lot doing trunk shows for my apparel company and I often hear women talking about children, nieces, nephews and children of friends who have LD. It always makes me think back to when I first found out about my daughter Charlotte’s LD almost 15 years ago. If I had known then what I know now, how different and easier those years would have been.

Since I wanted to write a book to help other parents who stood in my shoes, I realized that I would have to tell the truth. This, after all, was more a story of emotions than a straight narrative. If I were going to tell the story of how LD affected not only Charlotte, but me and our family, I’d have to make sure I told everything.

I’ve read that writers often don’t know what they’re going to say until they sit down and start writing, that the process of letting it flow of excavating the emotional story can be emotional in itself. That was certainly the case for me.

I wrote A Special Education: One Family’s Journey Through the Maze of Learning Disabilities as a series of free-writes. The hardest part was mining my memory and feelings. I would get up early, while the house was quiet, make a strong cup of black coffee and type and type not stopping to correct grammar or to format the paragraphs, not correcting or backspacing for anything. If I wanted to go back and say something a different way, I’d just go forward and say it a different way. The flow was essential. I was afraid that any pause would distract me from the difficult, often painful mission of looking at each stage of Charlotte’s growing up. Of our family’s growing up. Of my growing up. I could always tell when I had unearthed something important. It was invariably what was most painful, most embarrassing, buried the deepest. I’d invariably stop typing. Stop. And almost look over my shoulder as though someone were looking. Sometimes I’d utter the words I can’t say that out loud to the empty room.

But I knew that I had to, because the message of A Special Education is about letting feelings, vulnerabilities and imperfections show. It’s about how doing that heals us and makes us better how we become more whole and more human. I hope the parents who read this book will know that they are not alone. At the time, I thought I was alone. I thought that I was the only one who felt confused, anxious, angry, ashamed and overwhelmed by having a child with special needs. Now I see myself as part of a community of educators, of specialists . . . of other parents. And I see Charlotte much more clearly for who she is a brave young woman with unique abilities.

Dana Buchman’s line of women’s clothing can be found in major department stores around the country. She lives in New York City with her husband, Tom Farber, and their daughter Annie. Their eldest daughter, Charlotte Farber, is a college student in New England.

Memoir

Memoir

All for one: reliving a lifelong camaraderie

Behind the Book by Bob Greene

by Bob Greene

I met the best friend I ever had when we were five years old, in kindergarten at Cassingham Elementary School in Bexley, Ohio. His name was Jack Roth, and the friendship lasted more than 50 years. Actually, when I say lasted, that’s past tense which means that it’s wrong. The friendship still lasts it still goes on, even though Jack is gone.

And that is the thought and the emotion behind And You Know You Should Be Glad: A True Story of Lifelong Friendship, and, I think, is the book’s most enduring lesson: Friendship is eternal friendship is the one thing that lasts forever.

There were five of us who were best friends in that town of 13,000 people: there was Jack, me, there was Chuck Shenk, Danny Dick, there was Allen Schulman. We called ourselves ABCDJ: Allen, Bob, Chuck, Dan, Jack.

We lived our nights at the Toddle House, solving problems after midnight over cheeseburgers, hash browns and banana cream pie; we cruised the quiet streets of our town, listening to the Beach Boys singing I Get Around, the Beatles singing She Loves You, when those songs, like us, were brand-new. As best friends will do, the five of us spent every waking hour together. And as best friends will do, we grew older, and moved to different towns, and saw each other less and less as the years went by.

Then the call came: Jack was dying.

We were 57 now, no longer kids. We had families and responsibilities and far-flung lives. But, as if by instinct, when we heard the news from Jack’s wife, we came together again, back in our hometown, to see him through to the end.

And You Know You Should Be Glad is the story of that last year how the boys from ABCDJ found each other again and rekindled the friendship, how we discovered anew just what a powerful and precious thing friendship is.

During that last year with Jack, in what you might think would have been difficult days and nights, we found laughter and warmth; during what you might think would be a time for only tears, we found hours full of the best of times and unforgettable moments. We revisited all the places that had meant so much to us when we were kids Jack wanted to taste his life, to give himself the gift of returning, with his friends, to the locations that had meant the most to him. We were with him every step of the way just as we had been when we all first were friends.

I’m told that the reason the book means what it does to people is that it’s the story of their own friendships, too. They see themselves in it. Everyone, if they’re lucky, has something like this in their lives this kind of friendship. It’s there, or it was, once upon a wondrous time.

When we were kids, we’d ride in Allen’s blue Ford on long summer afternoons and nights, windows open, radio blasting, Pretty Woman or House of the Rising Sun or Where Did Our Love Go playing on that radio, our arms reaching out the open windows and our hands, in unison, banging down against the metal roof of the car every time the Supremes sang the first syllable of baby : Ba-by, ba-by, where did our love go . . . . Those days and nights, we always thought, were the best times we’d ever find. But we were wrong. We found those times again, because of Jack. Against all odds, deep into our own lives, we became the boys in that blue Ford again. We found each other we found the wonderful times, we found the summer nights, we found the friendship.

It’s out there, that’s what we learned. The friendships that mean so much to us those first friendships that we think have drifted away and begun to disappear are waiting for us. That last year with Jack is something that will stay with us for the rest of our own lives. And what people tell me is that, after reading And You Know You Should Be Glad, they are picking up the phone and calling their own best friends.

You can find it again you can find that friendship. That was the last gift that Jack gave us: the understanding that friendship is the one thing that doesn’t die. It’s waiting for us. Best-selling author Bob Greene’s previous books include Duty, Once Upon a Town, Hang Time and Fraternity: A Journey in Search of Five Presidents. He is also an award-winning journalist whose Chicago-based syndicated column ran for 31 years.

Fiction

Fiction

BEHIND THE BOOK: A survivor’s story, retold for 90 years

Behind the Book by Katharine Weber

by Katharine Weber

What would it be like to be famous all your life — famous until you are 107! — for not having died on a certain day in 1911? When Rose Freedman, the oldest living survivor of the notorious Triangle shirtwaist factory fire, died in February of 2001, her obituaries fascinated me. She was the last survivor. I was working on my third novel, The Little Women, and I already knew by then that I wanted to write a novel about the Triangle fire next, but I didn't have a clear pathway.

The Triangle fire has always felt like part of my personal family history, because my paternal grandmother worked at the Triangle Waist Company for less than a year, finishing buttonholes. She left at the end of 1909 because she was pregnant with my father, and so she was safely out of harm's way more than a year before nearly 150 workers died in 15 minutes on March 25, 1911, when the eighth, ninth and tenth floors of the Asch Building, east of Washington Square, went up in flames. The fire, probably ignited by a cigarette butt, spread swiftly through the crowded sweatshop, accelerated by the machine oil-soaked floors and tables, fed by bundles of shirtwaists and scrap materials that littered the work areas.

The firemen's ladders reached only as high as the sixth floor. Some 60 workers, most of them young women, jumped to their deaths. Most of the nearly 600 workers on the premises that afternoon survived by fleeing down the stairs or crowding into the elevators which made a few trips before the smoke and heat rendered them inoperative.

How did Rose Freedman escape the fire? Instead of trying to go down from the ninth floor where she was working, she thought about the bosses who worked upstairs, and she followed the office staff up to the roof of the building. The owners, who had a call from the eighth floor where the fire broke out, had saved only themselves, with no thought about warning the workers beneath them on the ninth floor. Firemen helped her climb across to the roof of the adjacent building, and so Rose Freedman lived to tell her story.

She told her story countless times. What would that be like, telling your story again and again, for 90 years, the story of the day you didn't die? I listened to several interviews with her and read transcripts of other interviews over the years. The more I read about the fire, and the more eyewitness interviews I read or heard, the more discrepancies I began to note. Discrepancies are inevitable. Memory is faulty; memory changes over time, perceptions are affected by many things. This, for me, is where a novel begins to take form, out of situation. Who would be in that situation? What would he or she do, and why? What would be the consequence? Where would this go and what would happen next?

And so my original question, what would it be like, telling your story again and again, changed. Leaving Rose Freedman behind, my question became this: What would it be like to tell your story for 90 years, if your story wasn't quite true? If your story was a lie? What sort of lie might it be? Why would you keep the secret over the years? Would the truth eventually surface?

And so Triangle began to take shape. The main character, Esther Gottesfeld, dies in 2001 at the age of 106 as the novel begins, just days before the events of September 11th. Esther survives the same way Rose Freedman did, going up to the roof instead of trying to go down. But her sister and her fiance die in the fire.

Inspiration for those characters came to me from the Robert Pinsky poem Shirt, which I quote in its entirety as the epigraph for Triangle. Pinsky wrote about the unidentified man, described in numerous eyewitness accounts of the Triangle fire, a worker on the ninth floor, who helped several women up onto the windowsill so that they could jump, helping them, in Pinsky's words, As if he were helping them up to enter a streetcar, and not eternity. The third woman he assisted to her death put her arms around his neck and kissed him. He jumped too.

Who were they? Was the woman who kissed him his sweetheart, or did she simply have the impulse to experience kissing a man before she died? And so they joined my story and became central to the secrets and lies of Esther's 90 years of telling what happened. The truth of what actually happened to Esther the day the Triangle Waist Company went up in flames, hidden in plain sight on the first page of the novel, is not fully revealed until the last page.

Katharine Weber's fourth novel, Triangle, has just been published by Farrar, Straus and Giroux.

The primordial lure of the grill

Behind the Book by Steven Raichlen

by Steven Raichlen

Three quarters of a million years ago or so, the world witnessed a revolution. Man became the first animal to cook. The mastery of fire by homo erectus around 700,000 B.C. had a profound effect on human evolution. The massive jaw and oversized teeth used by earlier hominids to chew raw meat (a task requiring five to six hours a day) gradually shrank, allowing for an expansion of the cranium (seat of the brain) and the tongue (instrument of speech). Thus, roasting meat over a fire led to language, advanced tool-making, abstract reasoning, complex social organization and even religion and art. You could say that barbecue begat civilization. And you thought the reason people are so passionate about barbecue had solely to do with taste!

Of course, flavor is an important reason for the near universal popularity of live-fire cooking. The high, dry heat of the grill caramelizes animal proteins and plant sugars, producing crustier, meatier steaks and sweeter, more succulent vegetables. The heady scent of wood smoke adds complex layers of flavor to pork shoulders, ribs and briskets. But taste is only part of why barbecuing and grilling have so captured our collective imagination. For many grill masters, barbecue is a performance art a chance to show off your cooking skills amid leaping flames and sizzling meats. For others, it strengthens our social fabric. I can't remember the last time people gathered around an oven to drink a beer and watch a cake bake but people always congregate at the grill.

One thing is certain: The popularity of grilling is skyrocketing whether you practice this ancient art on a $10 hibachi on your fire escape, a $100 smoker in a parking lot or a $10,000 stainless steel gas supergrill in a custom-built outdoor kitchen. According to the Barbecue Industry Association, more than 80 percent of American families own grills and more than 60 percent grill year-round. Last year, Americans lit their grills more than 3 billion times. One of the hottest new trends in barbecue is multiple grill ownership using a gas grill for weeknight grilling convenience and a charcoal grill for smoking and barbecuing on the weekend. So what are the five most important things to remember when grilling this summer?

1. Don't confuse barbecuing and grilling. The first means slowly cooking foods next to or over low heat in fragrant clouds of wood smoke. The second means searing food quickly and directly over a hot fire. Tough, fatty foods like briskets and ribs are barbecued; tender foods, like steaks, chops, fish fillets and most vegetables are grilled.

2. Create a safety zone. Leave part of your grill unlit and part of the grate without food. That way, if you get flare-ups or your food starts to burn, you have a safe place to move it.

3. Turn, don't stab. Use tongs, not a barbecue fork, for turning meat. The latter pierces the meat, draining the juices.

4. Give it a rest. Steaks and chops will be juicier if you let them sit for a few minutes after grilling before serving.

5. Don't desert your post. Grilling is an interactive sport; once you start, don't leave the grill until you're finished.

Steven Raichlen is the author of The Barbecue Bible, How to Grill and the new Raichlen on Ribs, Ribs, Outrageous Ribs and the host of Barbecue University on public television. His website is barbecuebible.com.

Nature

Nature

Storm stories: how New Orleanians weathered Katrina

Behind the Book by Jed Horne

by Jed Horne

I had the good fortune to be in Mexico as Katrina approached. I had the misfortune to work for a New Orleans newspaper. So, while sensible people were doing everything they could to flee southeast Louisiana, I was scrambling to get back. I reached Baton Rouge as my colleagues from the Times-Picayune stumbled off the back of circulation trucks that barely got them out of our headquarters in New Orleans before it was swamped in the flooding. One of them told me the French Quarter was under nine feet of water which meant I was homeless. That was a falsehood as it turned out, in a time of many myths and falsehoods. But it filled me with an irrepressible need to get to a little weekend cottage my wife and I had in the Mississippi woods. It was starting to look like a permanent home. It should have been a two-hour drive. It took seven which gives you some idea what condition the interstates were in: fallen trees, flipped-over semis, crashed cars. It got worse. I saw lights in the neighbors’ house and, though it was not yet dawn, I picked my way through the woods or what was left of them eager to connect with friends and be sure they were well. Instead of a joyous reunion, I was confronted by a posse of strangers. I assumed they were storm refugees who had grabbed an available cottage in the woods. They assumed I was a Klansman come to roust them black people from their squat. We overcame our misunderstandings (they had permission to use the house) and two more young men emerged from the underbrush shouldering a rifle and a hunting bow that had been aimed at tender parts of my body.

That was one of the lessons of Katrina: how quickly and how completely we revert in a catastrophe to some more primitive part of our history, in this case the Jim Crow South. Another lesson was how, in disaster as in war, the truth can be an elusive prey, if not an immediate casualty.

A hurricane is a vacuum, a cyclone that sucks ocean water up into itself in a huge dome that overwhelms coastal regions as it crashes ashore. Katrina shattered all forms of communication, which created a vacuum of another kind, one that sucked fears and lies and myths and misinformation into itself and spewed them back out again, sometimes as TV and newspaper reports.

It became one of our principal functions as journalists not just to figure out what had happened, but what had not. To this day, there are otherwise reasonable people in New Orleans who are convinced that the city’s white elite deliberately blew up the levee system to drive out poor blacks. No matter that a lot of rich whites got driven out of their homes just as mercilessly. There are people convinced that the police seized the opportunity to round up the criminal element and dispatch them by the hundreds with bullets to the skull; that the throngs at the Superdome and Convention Center were turned into rampaging beasts who raped scores of women and children and murdered each other.

Many bad things happened during Katrina, including a lethally clumsy attempt by the federal government to respond to the crisis created by the failure of a federal levee system. But gang rapes and murderous rampages by trapped evacuees weren’t part of it. The surprise was the ready willingness with which media a group pretty well schooled these days in avoiding racial and gender stereotypes fell into old habits and assumed the worst about New Orleans.

It occurred to me early on that Katrina wasn’t a discrete event and that much of what we saw on television in those first days and weeks the looting, the misery, the failed federal response was only a beginning. It suggested the storytelling strategy I used in Breach of Faith: Hurricane Katrina and the Near Death of a Great American City: Set several lives in motion, get to know them intimately, watch as these lives unfolded and decisions were forced upon us immediate decisions, made in desperation; longer-term decisions that would affect the rest of our lives. There are men and women of means caught up in this tale, as well as the abject and despondent. There are rape victims and looters, scientists and politicians. A pregnant teenager preparing to drop out of school instead gets swept into the embrace of a rich doctor’s family after evacuating to Georgia. A nanny is provided. The young mother is chauffeured to school. They are all part of the Katrina story. As I write this, the Army Corps of Engineers is frantically at work trying to shore up the levees that failed but what about the ones that were only weakened? With $12 billion about to start flowing into Louisiana through the federal pipeline, New Orleans may be on the verge of the biggest boom in the city’s history or will it prove to be a last hurrah? Will the tourists come back to juice the local economy? Will the musicians come back to beguile the tourists? Will the soul of the city the thousands of native sons and daughters forced into exile come back to reclaim a heritage? As we verge on the hurricane’s first anniversary, it has only just become possible to see the arc to which Katrina has bent our lives and the prospects of the city it nearly destroyed.

Jed Horne is metro editor of the New Orleans Times-Picayune, which won two Pulitzer Prizes for its coverage of Hurricane Katrina. Horne’s previous book, Desire Street: A True Story of Death and Deliverance in New Orleans, was a 2005 Edgar Award nominee for Best True Crime Book. He lives in the French Quarter with his wife and sons.

All Behind the Book essays

Behind the Book: Pyramid scheme