All Interviews

Texas Ranger Darren Mathews wants out of his genre

Texas Ranger Darren Mathews wants out of his genre.

Or that’s what the husband of Attica Locke, author of the Highway 59 mystery trilogy, said when he finished reading Guide Me Home, Locke’s exceptional final volume in the series.

“It’s as if he’s kind of done with the cops and robbers of it all,” Locke says of Darren, the flawed lawman who first entranced readers in 2017’s Edgar Award-winning Bluebird, Bluebird. There, Darren slipped into seedy Aryan Brotherhood bars to help a grieving wife solve her husband’s murder. His uncle William was the first Black Texas Ranger, and Darren followed in his footsteps, wearing his silver star with pride. 2019’s Heaven, My Home saw him investigating the disappearance of a white supremacist’s son, as Darren’s marriage unraveled and his drinking got worse. Throughout both books, Frank Vaughn, a white district attorney with political ambitions, tries to expose Darren for lying to secure the freedom of an elderly Black man, who was accused of a crime he didn’t commit.

Guide Me Home is set three years after Heaven, My Home. Vaughn is still building his case, and a depressed, soul-weary Darren decides to take an early retirement from law enforcement. The very day he turns in his badge, his troublemaking mother, Bell, shows up uninvited at his family home. Bell blackmailed Darren in Heaven, and she is the key witness in Vaughn’s case. But she brings with her something Darren cannot resist: the kernel of a case. Sera Fuller, a Black college student, has gone missing, and the members of the all-white sorority she joined know more than they’ll admit.

Highway 59 snakes from the northeastern corner of Texas down through Houston, Locke’s hometown, and sweeps southwest to the border. “We would drive up and down Highway 59 all the time to go visit grandparents and relatives,” Locke tells BookPage from her home in Los Angeles. “And those car rides were my early kind of daydreaming out the window, thinking about stories, just making stuff up in my head.”

“I worry that readers would be like, ‘Wait a second. What are you doing here?’ . . . It has a different kind of energy about it.”

Locke often shifts from project to project, writing novels (Pleasantville, The Cutting Season) and for TV (Empire, When They See Us). The years she spent writing Guide Me Home were catastrophic: COVID-19, the murder of George Floyd and the 2023 Writers Guild strike all weighed heavily on Locke’s mind as she sent her hero hurtling toward ruin. She asks readers to grope around in the dark with Darren as he confronts truly painful truths, with the central mystery at times taking a backseat to his internal conflict and family drama.

“Darren is also just my whole heart,” Locke says. “And I worry that readers would be like, ‘Wait a second. What are you doing here? He’s not doing all the shoot ’em up, bang, bang, tough guy stuff. Where is all that?’ . . . It has a different kind of energy about it.”

And yet, Locke’s take on the missing girl trope is a standout in a genre that sheds girls like skin cells. While Sera is away at a nearby college, her family lives in an insular gated community called Thornhill, where families work in chicken and pork processing factories on-site in exchange for their cookie-cutter houses, K-12 schools and top-notch health care. As is usually the case, the utopian concept is, in practice, anything but. Rather, it’s a modern sharecropping system that keeps workers from ever accumulating wealth, all while they breathe acrid air from factories that might just be making people sick. Sera’s father, a Black Trump supporter named Joseph, has become a puppet for the rich white people who own Thornhill, ready and willing to be the Black face of the “movement” for “compassionate capitalism.” He is clearly lying when he denies that Sera has disappeared from her college campus: Her belongings are found in the trash, including her medication for sickle cell anemia.

Thornhill only truly clicked one day as Locke walked her dog: “I was thinking about two things that became really clear to people during COVID. We are not taking care of each other in terms of health care. It’s just really fucking difficult to be alive and have health care in this country. And capitalism does not give a shit about workers. . . . I’m realizing the ways in which COVID laid bare these two facts, and somehow they found their way into the soul and the plot of the book.”

Read our starred review of ‘Guide Me Home’ by Attica Locke.

The other valve in the dark heart of Guide Me Home is the aftermath of the election of Donald Trump and the escalating danger and sense of alienation it caused for Black Americans. Locke writes that Darren is “profoundly, unimaginatively sad in this world,” in the “fever dream that had been the years since Donald Trump was elected. Years that had laid bare the fragility of democracy.”

“This book series inadvertently became a treatise on the Trump era in a way that had not been intended,” Locke says. “I think in the series, Texas is often a stand-in for America. There’s a reason there’s that saying, ‘As Texas goes, so goes the nation’ . . . there is a sense that Darren’s ambivalent feelings about loving Texas are, I think, a mirror for a lot of people who have ambivalent feelings about how do we love our country through its worst impulses.”

Darren can’t imagine living anywhere else, even as the state constantly disappoints him. It disappoints Locke, too. “When I watch it from afar, it frequently breaks my heart to think of the Greg Abbotts of the [state] being what the rest of the world thinks Texas is,” she says, “when I know it to be, on the ground, infinitely more complex and infinitely less hateful. Now, I say that knowing full well that there are wild pockets of hateful people everywhere, and there are a lot of hateful people in Texas. But there are, I would argue, to some degree, more that aren’t.”

It’s not lost on Locke, or on Darren, that being a Black cop is complicated. As the series progresses, Darren is at odds with two competing ideologies handed down by the uncles who raised him, Texas Ranger William and defense attorney Clayton: Must Black people be protected by the law, or from the law? Locke lays this out in chapter one: “Sure, it was a sentiment among Black cops these days that ‘Black Lives Matter’ meant a gun and the law had their purpose—safeguarding Black folks in every corner of American life. But Darren felt resentful of the idea that Black cops somehow bore the sole responsibility for this. Surely it was someone else’s turn to do the work of righting the country’s racial wrongs, case by trauma-inducing case.”

“It frequently breaks my heart to think of the Greg Abbotts of the [state] being what the rest of the world thinks Texas is.”

Locke echoes this yearning: “There is a limit to what Black and brown folks can do alone to right some racial wrongs. And we kind of need help. And the hope is always that there will be folks who will consider that, just like I didn’t ask for the history on my back of slavery . . . You [meaning this white interviewer] also didn’t ask for all the privileges. You didn’t ask for it, but it’s real. So what do you do with it?”

All of this comes to bear on Darren’s psyche and heart. His alcoholism, present but not destructive in the first two books, is now raging. And his upbringing, developed marvelously in Bluebird and Heaven, comes into question. As an infant, Bell relinquished him to his uncles, and she’s breezed in and out of his life ever since, growing more manipulative and nasty with each episode. Her blackmailing him was the last straw. Darren’s trauma over her abandonment was so severe that he never asked her what happened, but took his well-meaning uncles’ version of the story as the truth. As he investigates Sera’s disappearance and Thornhill’s suspicious origins, he uncovers questions that only Bell can answer. Locke, whose daughter starts college this fall, hopes Guide Me Home will “flip how children see their parents.” The book’s dedication—“For every mother whose child knows only half the story”—conveys this hope, and Bell’s as well. Darren can only find home once he solves one final mystery, that of his own origins.

The Highway 59 series closes during the 2019 holiday season. In a few months, a global pandemic will take over the world. Darren has no idea what’s coming, but, thanks to Locke’s brilliant storytelling, readers will have faith that he’ll be all right.

Photo of Attica Locke by Victoria Will.

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In the finale of Attica Locke's beloved Highway 59 mystery series, her hero turns in his badge.

Fiction Satire Literary Fiction

Danzy Senna tried writing for TV. Instead, she wrote Colored Television

Over two decades of writing books, author Danzy Senna (Caucasia and New People) faced the same obstacle again and again: “I kept coming up against the problem of my work being uncategorizable and me being uncategorizable.” At 53, Senna has earned critical acclaim, but she’s still keenly conscious of “being a writer who doesn’t fit into the binary world” in terms of how the American public consumes art and how publishing companies package race and fiction for publicity. As someone of mixed race who writes about the complexities of race, sex and class, she explores subjects that the industry has yet to gain comfort handling.

At the same time, living in Los Angeles, Senna was constantly aware of the “glittering television world” surrounding her. This parallel cultural universe was not just co-existing with the scruffier literary world she inhabited; it had “sort of taken over everything in our public conversation.”

Curious about what lay beyond the literary landscape, Senna decided to dip into television writing—and in the process, she found the seed for her fourth novel, Colored Television. Speaking to BookPage by video call from a sunny, mid-century modern den in her home, Senna talked about the origins of her novel, and how her life, past and present, has fed into her art.

“It was almost to the point where they were like ‘Oh, mulattoes. That could be good.’”

At first, there was just a kernel, an observation about her TV meetings: There was something inherently humorous and provocative about them. The network employees Senna met with were just sort of “cravenly thinking” of Senna’s mixed identity. “It’s almost pure, in a way, compared to the literary world—the way they think about how to market you.” Tongue only sort of in cheek, Senna remarks with a chuckle, “It was almost to the point where they were like ‘Oh, mulattoes. That could be good.’”

Then, a few years ago, Senna recalls, in the midst of the renaissance of television, and an accompanying hunger for diversity on screen, the story of struggling literary writer Jane Gibson came to her nearly fully formed. “I thought it would be funny if this character kind of hit a wall [as a novelist] and was ready to sell her soul to Hollywood.”

While there are “autobiographical undercurrents” in the book, Senna has a way of mining experience as a starting point and then letting the imagination and satire take flight. In writing fiction, “I’m looking for the story that didn’t happen within the story that did . . . taking a shred of truth and then mining it for the fictional possibilities,” she says. Her softly cutting, satirical sensibility is a key part of Senna’s brand and drives the process of transforming experience into fiction through embellishment and intentional provocation.

“I thought of him as being born out of people who would have been inspired by Fred Hampton. And now he’s like, working for a streaming service.”

The novel gains further complexity through its supporting characters, whose takes on making and selling art amid American racial dynamics represent different parts of Senna’s own experiences and perspective. One of these characters is Hampton Ford, a successful Black producer Jane meets with. While his name calls to mind the HBCU Hampton University and ties him to civil rights activist and Black Panther member Fred Hampton, it’s meant to be a bit ironic, conveying a certain kind of racial consciousness, while also drawing a contrast between Hampton’s upbringing and where he landed. “I thought of him as being born out of people who would have been inspired by Fred Hampton,” says Senna. “And now he’s like, working for a streaming service.”

As Senna explains, Hampton’s perspective is defined by “fear and the idea of scarcity,” a sense of precarity even in times of success. It’s the realization that, while “the white gaze looks at you [now] and says that you’re valuable,” as a Black artist, you know that being in vogue and in demand may not last: “A year from now, they may have moved on.” Senna says that this “sense of fleeting interest in your story” cultivates “a kind of desperation . . . that I think every writer of color has felt.” In the wake of the publishing industry’s retrenchment from its promises during 2020’s vaunted summer of racial reckoning, it’s easy to see how this perspective is reflected in a broader social reality.

While Senna is sympathetic to Hampton, her satire cuts sharper in other places. One of Colored Television’s defining passages is a gutting of a certain kind of tokenized nonwhite, neoconservative thinker often celebrated in white circles—a type exemplified by Thomas Chatterton Williams, a writer for The Atlantic who previously thought of himself as Black but no longer does. Williams once declared to Senna, she reveals, that her own identification as Black was “a legacy of slavery.” In the novel, Jane delivers the perfect takedown of Williams’ disavowal of race: “Once you declared you didn’t believe in race, it seemed, you had to declare this rather banal idea everywhere you went—so it became a way of believing in race even as you pretended not to believe in race. It was an ‘out damn spot’ situation—the more you tried to wash your hands of race, the more the bloody spots emerged.”

Senna’s point of view is informed by growing up as a mixed-race girl in Boston, where she came of age in the 1970s and ’80s. As she so effectively captured in her 2009 memoir, Where Did You Sleep Last Night? A Personal History, those were turbulent and difficult times for her family and their community. Boston was infamously resistant to integration. “It was like [what] my mother calls . . . the ‘Deep North,’” she says. To get across what it was like to be a mixed-race person or a Black person in Boston at the time, she says, “you would have to say you were from Alabama in the ’50s . . . it was so racially fraught.”

Senna’s mother, poet Fanny Howe, is a prolific writer from a wealthy, white New England family. Her accomplished editor father, Carl Senna, is a Black man from a somewhat murky, unrecorded working class background in the South. The two had a contentious divorce when Senna was 7. After living through that tension, when it came time to apply to college, to Senna it felt “like leaving the scene of a crime.” She applied to schools in California, and chose to attend Stanford University, just outside Palo Alto and thousands of miles away from the difficulties of home.

Senna’s memoir was a bit of her own personal reckoning, and it stirred up pain that stuck around for a while. Today, she looks back on her hometown with equanimity, saying, “I go back and I sort of have a lot of affection for it.” The older she gets, the more she realizes, “that was a formative thing. I don’t think I would have had the same level of politics and consciousness had I been raised in a different kind of environment.”

She’s also glad to have returned to writing fiction, which gets her “closer to these eternal and subconscious truths about race and family. The problem with memoir is you can stick to the facts, but the truth of the story changes over time. Your relationship to the facts changes. . . . So the true story is always changing, but the made-up one remains true.”

Read our review of Colored Television.

In the author's biting and hilarious fourth novel, a literary writer pushing the limits of her patience and her pocketbook gives Hollywood a shot.

Children's & YA YA Fiction YA

On bearing witness

Each Maghabol boy possesses a unique relationship to his cultural background. For example, Emil is an “assimilationist,” striving to replace his Filipino identity with an American one. On the other hand, his son, Chris, seeks out Filipino culture and tries to “self-educate” even though he’s coming from an outsider’s perspective due to his father’s parenting. How did you go about depicting these differences, with all their nuances?

As I wrote their stories, I had to put aside my own opinions to get into each character’s head. I tried to depict each in such a way that you understand as much as possible why they possess the attitudes toward their cultural background that they do, in order to grasp how each boy’s identity was forged from the struggle to survive within his specific personal and historical circumstances.

What drew you to the specific moments of Filipino and Filipino American history that you chose to spotlight, such as Ferdinand Marcos’ dictatorship or the 1965 Delano Grape Strike in California?

I wanted each storyline to be impacted either directly or indirectly by both personal and historical struggles because I believe that’s what happens in real life. I also wanted to touch on pivotal moments in Filipino American history that I wish I had learned about in school or at home instead of having to self-educate later in life.

At one point, Chris is conscious of the “privilege of distance” he holds in being able to stay ignorant of Marcos’ brutal rule. Could you elaborate on this concept?

The more directly a political situation impacts us, the more conscious we are of that situation because that knowledge can be necessary to survive. On the other hand, if our day-to-day existence isn’t immediately threatened, then it’s much easier to be ignorant of—or, to ignore—what’s happening, and fail to clearly see the ways in which everything is connected. While this distance can be literally physical, it can also result from other aspects of our identity such as socioeconomic status, gender, race, etc.

Enzo’s sections take place as the COVID-19 pandemic is starting, and you capture that time of isolation with such exactitude—staring at frozen Zoom screens, idly moving cursors around while on calls, doomscrolling, etc. What was it like to write about 2020?

For a while, I wasn’t sure if I wanted to delve into it. As I started to work on the novel, my editor and I talked about if it was too difficult to understand the impact of the pandemic while we were in the midst of it. There were also a lot of conversations in the book world about when people would be ready to read about the pandemic—some saying never! But as a writer, I often go back to James Baldwin advising us all to bear witness and am always asking myself what I can bear witness to. Ultimately, as someone both experiencing the pandemic for myself and teaching teenagers who were living through it, I felt like it had to be part of Enzo’s story.

What advice do you have for young people whose adolescence has been defined by the pandemic?

That’s a hard question, and I’m probably not qualified to answer it! But I’d say, think about how you experienced/continue to experience the pandemic, how it impacted you, how it still impacts you. Find ways to tell those stories and ways to listen to others’ stories.

Everything We Never Had often brings up the collective versus the individual: the power of unionizing; the safety to be found in numbers; even the contrast between how Francisco fished in the Philippines (casting nets together) and in America (each person using a fishing pole). Can you share some thoughts on this dichotomy?

Good catch! (Pun intended.) Community vs. individualism is a tension I’ve thought about a lot in my life. I’ve come to believe a balance is necessary—as individuals and as a society—to be healthy. Overreliance on one can be just as destructive as overreliance on the other. Of course, it took me a lot of lived experience and reflection to arrive at this belief, and it’s going to take even more trial and error to find out how to achieve that balance practically. And maybe my views will shift in the years to come. In the same way individuals like me struggle with this tension, so do cultures. That cultural/communal struggle, however, is much slower and harder to steer.

Speaking of fishing, it plays an important role—does it have any significance for you personally?

Growing up, I definitely went fishing with my dad occasionally. But that detail found its way into the story thanks to Roy Recio of the Tobera Project, who was a great resource for my Watsonville research. He emphasized the need to convey the manongs [early 20th-century Filipino immigrants] as more than just field workers and suggested the idea of fishing as something that could be shared across generations. I then thought about how each character’s relationship to fishing might change over time.

The novel explores several beautiful, warm friendships between male characters. Do you think there’s been growth regarding the ways boys and men are taught to interact with each other?

Yes and no. There’s definitely been progress in terms of topics like toxic masculinity, patriarchy and male loneliness hitting mainstream discourse in recent years, thanks to decades of work by feminists like bell hooks. Those are things we need to understand for there to be growth. I also personally see a lot more parents consciously trying to raise their boys to be fuller, more empathetic human beings. On the other hand, I think there are those who view such discourse as vilifying instead of healing because much of it—in the mainstream, at least—critiques without offering models of a way forward. As a result, some people have doubled down on a lot of those foundational identity markers of patriarchy.

Your descriptions are so poetic. What writers are you inspired by?

So many! To list a few, in no particular order: James Baldwin, Sandra Cisneros, Jacqueline Woodson, Patrick Rosal, Haruki Murakami, Jason Reynolds, Elizabeth Acevedo, Ocean Vuong, Sabaa Tahir. And so many others!

What made you decide to set the novel in California, Colorado and Pennsylvania? How were you able to create such distinct atmospheres for each setting?

I’ve lived in all those states and was, therefore, already familiar with them to some extent. I also generally liked the idea of the family physically moving farther east with each generation. I did additional research for the sake of historical accuracy, especially about Watsonville and Stockton, California. Primary sources such as photographs, oral histories and periodicals were invaluable when it came to visualizing the details of those times and places.

Randy Ribay explores several generations and their different relationships to Filipino American identity and culture in his expansive family saga, Everything We Never Had.

Nonfiction Memoir

‘That Librarian’ is a lesson in how to survive a culture war

“I don’t think people realize how many librarians are being attacked,” Amanda Jones says from her home in Watson, Louisiana. “I used to think it was just a Southern thing. But I have friends in New Hampshire, New Jersey, Maine, California and New York who have experienced this.”

Jones, the author of That Librarian: The Fight Against Book Banning in America, seems an unlikely candidate to be caught in the crosshairs of a culture war. She grew up in a conservative Christian household in the deep red state of Louisiana. She lives in the same two-stoplight town where she grew up, right next door to her parents and her childhood home, and she works as a school librarian just a few miles down the road, in the middle school she once attended.

Her life changed on July 19, 2022, when she attended a board meeting at Livingston parish’s public library. Book content was on the agenda, which sent alarm bells ringing for Jones, who had been following censorship news across the country and in her parish. These conversations, she knew, “almost always targeted LGBTQIA+ stories.” Jones has taught queer kids who later took their own lives. “I’ll be damned if I’m going to stand in silence while we lose another kid because of something our community has done to make them feel less,” she writes. At the meeting, one library board member, Erin Sandefur, made objections to some young adult and children’s content, although, as Jones writes, “She never really articulated what her concern was, just that there was a concern to be had.”

“If people are going to label me an activist, I might as well act like one and show them what I’m made of.”

Jones, who was a 2021 School Library Journal National Librarian of the Year, was the first of about 30 to counter those concerns and speak up against censorship of queer stories, reciting a speech she wrote beforehand that included the words,“All members of our community deserve to be seen, have access to information, and see themselves, in our PUBLIC library collection.” Her speech was so on point, in fact, that she later received an email singing its praises from none other than Terry Szuplat, one of former President Barack Obama’s longest-serving speechwriters.

But her high didn’t last. Four days after the board meeting, Jones opened an email that said, “Amanda, you are indoctrinating our children with perversion + pedophilia grooming. Your evil agenda is getting print + national coverage. . . . We know where you work + live. . . . you have a LARGE target on your back. Click, click . . . see you soon. . .” Jones’ heart began pounding; she was completely in shock.

Book jacket image for That Librarian by Amanda Jones

Then, her phone blew up with texts from friends and family sharing two Facebook posts: The group Citizens for a New Louisiana posted a photo of her making her speech at the board meeting, the caption accusing her of fighting to include “sexually erotic and pornographic materials” in libraries. Another post by local man Ryan Thames shared a photo from her professional website and accused her of “advocating teaching anal sex to 11-year-olds.”

The posts caught on like wildfire as people from her own community shared them on multiple platforms. Then they went national. Users “embraced comments laced with hate, and grew wild with speculation”: they called her a groomer and a pedophile and threatened violence. “I had worked so hard to build up a good reputation for myself,” she recalls. “It was so surreal, to go from such a community high, where you’re kind of beloved, and then in an instant, they’re like, ‘Oh, she’s that awful person.’” The posts, comments and threats kept coming.

Jones lived in a constant state of terror; she got a taser, pepper spray and security cameras. She slept with a gun under her bed. Word of the controversy began to spread, and before long, journalists took notice. One day Jones saw her face in the NBC news app. “This is really happening,” she writes of her thinking. “I’m an actual national news headline.”

She began thinking of her tormentors in Harry Potter terms, as her dementors. Channeling her inner Nancy Drew, Jones discovered that she was far from their only target. Her investigations revealed correlations between their outlandish online posts about libraries and librarians and various far-right campaign contributions. One of the ringleaders, she explains, is a leader of a dark money nonprofit. “I think he’s paid to do that. That’s his job: to stir up nonsense for politicians.”

The slanderous accusations are ongoing, at both a local and national level, many trumpeted by the group Moms for Liberty. Jones has suffered mental and physical repercussions, including panic attacks and hair loss, and ultimately took a semester’s leave of absence from her job to recover. “Even to this day,” she says, “if I get an email and I don’t know who is sending it, my heart starts racing, and that causes my adrenaline to spike.”

She eventually channeled her favorite childhood author, asking herself, “What would Judy Blume do?” The answer, she realized, was to fight back. She took her dementors to court. The judge ultimately ruled that they could get away with their disinformation attack because she was a “public figure.” Nonetheless, as Jones writes, “These people set out to destroy me, but they woke something up inside me that I hope never dies. The court labeled me a public figure and their lawyers called me an activist when I was just a school librarian. I figure, if people are going to label me an activist, I might as well act like one and show them what I’m made of—grit and perseverance.”

Read our review of ‘That Librarian’ by Amanda Jones

Jones has long known that perseverance pays off: She had originally planned to become an elementary school teacher, like her mother, but during her third year of college, reading the first three Harry Potter books steered her in a different direction, reminding her how much she loved reading. She began taking library science graduate courses, graduating in 2001 as a certified teacher and school librarian. Coincidentally, the librarian at her hometown middle school was taking a year’s sabbatical, so Jones filled in. When the librarian returned, Jones took a job as an English language arts teacher, knowing she wanted to stay at her beloved school. Eventually (14 years later!), when the librarian retired, Jones claimed her dream position.

As traumatizing as the online attacks have been, Jones has also received a tremendous amount of support, often from former students. She’s received well wishes from legions of people she doesn’t know, including numerous authors. She had the word “moxie” tattooed on her left wrist after Newbery Award winner Erin Entrada Kelly applauded her efforts, tweeting, “This is moxie. Sending my love and support to you, Amanda. I’m so proud you’re from my home state.” A few people, however, disappointed Jones, including some colleagues and several people she thought were her friends. But her family has provided constant support, and her conservative mother has accompanied her to library board meetings. After one meeting, during which a trans woman spoke about how books had saved her life, Jones’ mother commented, “You know, I think books can save lives.” “I’m like, ‘Mom,’” Jones recalls, “‘I’ve been telling you this for years.’”

“I hope I’m always evolving and learning,” Jones says. “The biggest struggle is wanting to defend myself publicly. Like when a lady told me a couple of weeks ago at a library board meeting that I needed to read Romans, I just said, ‘Ma’am, I’ve read the Bible twice. Thank you.’ You can’t argue with them. It’s pointless.”

There have been some glimmers of joy. She gets giddy about technical stuff, like seeing the copyright in her book. Jones says, “Not even in my wildest dreams did I ever think I would have my own ISBN in my own book, you know?”

“It’s odd to me,” she muses, “how big of a voice I had. It shows me that anybody can make a wave. I heard author Kekla Magoon say at a conference last year in New Hampshire that we’re like raindrops. If it’s just one, you might not notice it. But when we all collectively start falling, people start to listen. I’m hoping that by speaking out and writing this book that other people will speak up, and then more people will start to listen, and people will wake up to what’s happening to our libraries before it’s too late, before they’re all destroyed.”

Photo of Amanda Jones © Kathryn and Traveis Photography.

Middle school librarian Amanda Jones spoke out against book banning. Then the trolls descended.

Fiction Literary Fiction

Nathan Newman: A neighbor just like you

Nathan Newman challenges readers to reckon with all the cruelties and joys of human interaction in their debut novel, How to Leave the House. Newman’s protagonist is a young man named Natwest, but he’s not the only central character: The novel intersperses Natwest’s interior narrative with the stories of the many people in his town whose daily lives butt up against his own.

Newman’s novel is transgressive and disruptive, an unserious look at serious things—in particular, how isolated we can feel when deeply immersed in our own problems. Here, Newman gets the main character treatment and shares their thoughts on art, storytelling, their neighbors and criticism in the internet age.

What is most likely to get you to leave the house?

Friends, a party, a trip to the cinema, an aquatic-themed fetish night—really anything social that might rescue me from the little cocoon of my writing room.

Do you know your neighbors? Do they know you?

I live on an estate with a somewhat uneasy and pretty diverse alliance of council flat owners, tenants, students, gentrifiers, care-service users. It’s always cordial. There is an estate WhatsApp group and everyone is currently unified against the midnight to 5 a.m. roadworks happening on the main street beside us. Nothing brings British residents together more than a good moan about the council—so that’s solidarity of some kind.

How to Leave the House follows Natwest throughout one day. Even though it takes place in his small town, the day’s happenings feel much like those of a big city, with horrors and chaos and hilarity around every corner, and human interactions that are intimate, intense and brief. Do you see similarities between big-city stories and small-town tales? Is How to Leave the House occupying both spaces?

I wrote the novel while living in London, right after my last year of university in Warwick (which is a very small town indeed). The spirit of both spaces is probably embedded in the book. Of course there are more stories on one South London street than could occupy a century’s worth of fiction, but I don’t think living in a small town is any different—except that you’re more likely to know the person you’ve just bumped into. The two are inextricable anyway: The bulk of How to Leave the House was written during lockdown, when London emptied out, and for anyone on the street it might as well have been a small town.

“Maybe all these binaries about art and life are just two punchlines to the same joke.”

Many chapters could stand as short stories. My personal favorites are about a dentist, a woman who dances a jig on her brother’s grave, and an egg fight. Which are your favorites and why? Yes, you have to choose.

Possibly Lily’s chapter—the one told entirely via text messages, imageboard posts and anonymous internet confessionals—because beyond her main story, there is a puzzle implanted in the heart of the section that nobody has yet cracked! Otherwise, Dr. Richard Hung, the dentist who is also an artist, but the only thing he can seem to paint is mouths.

Natwest is the apparent main character of the story, yet all these chapters have their own main characters. Amid our current obsession with main character energy, and the constant pressure to romanticize and glamorize our lives, how do you approach storytelling? How do you tell stories when everyone is the main character?

There are so many different people on the street, and they are all main characters in their own worlds—that’s a universal human delusion, and not unique to this generation (but it’s undoubtedly been massively exacerbated by the internet). Writing with this in mind seemed pretty sensible. My novel is told from the perspective of 15-year-olds, 80-year-olds, 30-year-olds and 50-year-olds, jumping between different classes, genders, races and sexualities with a freedom that hopefully explodes, or at least formally adapts this obsession with main character energy. When you’ve been born into the internet, and this is how you are encouraged to process the world, the alternating chapters of How to Leave the House feel like the most interesting approach.

Early in the novel, an imam tells Natwest that “there are two types of people in this world. Charlie Chaplins and Buster Keatons.” Natwest is told that he wants to be a Keaton but must accept his fate as a Chaplin, and we return again and again to the motif of Keatons and Chaplins. What does it mean to be a Chaplin but to wish you were a Keaton?

I think the binary that Imam Mishaal projects onto Natwest is a little false, a reflection of his own internal struggle between the worldly and the spiritual, and his inability to synthesize the two. The novel is constantly setting up dualities like this—doubles, oppositions, contradictions—and each character chooses their own way of approaching them. Maybe the real point is that there is no difference between Chaplin or Keaton—to slightly paraphrase a line in the book: Chaplin/Keaton, McCartney/Lennon, Hegel/Kierkegaard—maybe all these binaries about art and life are just two punchlines to the same joke.

When Natwest encounters his former teacher Miss Pandey, she challenges him to rethink art in a particularly wonderful discussion. “What would happen if you treated every work of art as perfect, and then worked backwards?” she says. “If you presumed that every ‘blemish’ or ‘failing’ or ‘irregularity’ in tone or pacing or structure or payoff was intended by the artist?” She says that such a mentality allows the world to “open up.” Do you approach art from this mindset, and if so, how do you hold on to that openness?

It’s an aspiration, and I don’t always achieve it! I think it’s also me-the-author being defensive, because a novel structured like this one—especially with the ending it has—is pretty vulnerable to some very obvious criticisms in the “‘irregularity’ in tone or pacing or structure or payoff” department. But any criticism is a difficult line to walk. There is a difference, I think, between coming to an artwork with an open heart and mind, and consuming something without any discernment. The internet has encouraged us to consume without prejudice, flattening out once and for all any distinction between high and low culture. A tremendous libidinal liberation—and partly what this novel is about. But we need some way of reining it in and finding a middle ground. I think that’s what Miss Pandey is arguing for.

On your website, you have reviewed other authors’ websites. Is it not a conflict of interest to review Zadie Smith’s website, as she was your mentor at New York University?

I think every author hates making their own website, but it has to be done. It seemed like a fun inside joke to give some tongue-in-cheek reviews of other authors’ websites as a result. It’s not serious at all. That being said, it’s true that I attended NYU for a single semester over Zoom before dropping out. During that period I learned that Zadie is incredibly defensive when it comes to her website. After I gave it an 8/10 she launched a defamation suit, and we are now in a pretty fierce legal skirmish—fortunately it looks like I’m going to win.

I think her sales are plummeting as we speak.

Read our review of How to Leave the House.

Debut novelist Nathan Newman harnesses main character energy in How to Leave the House, a novel that hops in and out of the heads of the many residents of a small town as a young man named Natwest breezes by them seeking a missing package.

Fiction Literary Fiction Coming of Age

Reading outside the lines with Karla Cornejo Villavicencio

Karla Cornejo Villavicencio, author of the National Book Award finalist The Undocumented Americans, has a lot in common with the titular protagonist of her debut novel, Catalina. Like Villavicencio did, Catalina attends Harvard as an undocumented student, and her broad ambitions could easily be imagined as the precursor to Villavicencio’s success. With the recent prevalence of autofiction by authors like Teju Cole, Gabriela Wiener, Karl Ove Knausgaard and many others, readers might wonder, how much of Catalina is Villavicencio?

This uncertainty, it turns out, is deliberate: “I always want the reader to not necessarily be sure what my intentions are as a writer,” Villavicencio says. She found a model in J.D. Salinger’s short stories about the Glass family. “Salinger definitely does this. . . . You start to think Salinger might be one of the brothers, he might be Seymour [Glass]. . . . And I liked the game of not knowing what Salinger was trying to do . . . but I always knew that I was wrapped around his finger.”

Read our starred review of Catalina.

Like those Salinger stories, Catalina is wholly fiction, and Villavicencio sees the book as being in the same tradition as other novels with young protagonists like Curtis Sittenfield’s Prep and Sylvia Plath’s The Bell Jar. Catalina, like a lot of college students, dreads the approach of graduation and can’t figure out what to do with the rest of her life. By capturing the tumult of young adulthood, Villavicencio hopes to provoke readers to make something out of their mess. Her goal in writing is “empowering those who need to be empowered, embarrassing those who need to be embarrassed.” In the ’60s when The Velvet Underground was playing live in New York City, it was said that anyone who saw them was inspired to start their own band. Villavicencio wants her writing to have that same effect, for readers to “think they have to go make something. . . . [To think] I feel so alive, I have to go do something now.”

Musicians who make their songs feel personal were a big influence on Catalina, especially Lorde’s album Melodrama, where, Villavicencio feels, “spilling guts out with precision and dedication” was a fierce act of artistry. Villavicencio wanted this book to “sound and feel like a breakup album or pop album,” and that inspiration comes across in Catalina’s potent mix of melancholy and moxie. Villavicencio likes to think of her work in relation to Taylor Swift as well, whose fans pore over her lyric sheets looking for clues to her personal life.

“What your family, Telemundo and García Márquez teach us are all different. These are faulty categories. . . . The American racial binary can’t imagine us.”

There’s an allure to this sense of intimate disclosure. Villavicencio wanted reading Catalina to be like eating popcorn or potato chips, to give readers that feeling of “you can’t just eat one,” she says. “You can discover something new in every sentence, but it can also just be really fun.” When Villavicencio was sharing the book with family and friends, the reaction of one of her partner’s family members, an older white woman without the same educational background as Catalina, was encouragingly positive. She told Villavicencio that she “really related to Catalina” and felt “included with the smart kids . . . in a way that she felt she’d been excluded before.” This kind of boundary breaking, where what might have been alienating is instead enjoyable, is the foundation of Catalina, as the titular character navigates a system designed for conformity yet manages to stay entirely her complicated self. “There’s something that feels very, very freeing about entering cultural institutions feeling like it’s all there for you to use,” Villavicencio says. “I don’t have to take on the values to be able to use it.”

There’s another kind of empowering boundary breaking at work here as well, through Catalina’s position as a Latinx novel. When Catalina’s parents passed away in a car crash, she was sent to live with her grandparents, who had immigrated to the U.S. before she was born. Raised by them in New York City, and unable to leave the country because of her lack of documentation, Catalina is thoroughly a New Yorker. Still, she experiences the city and the rest of the world around her through a different language, one indecipherable by Anglos.

This transcendent language is symbolized in the novel by the khipu, an Incan recording device made from knotted strings—a “tactile” form of writing, as Villavicencio describes it—which Catalina encounters at the campus museum where she works. Western scholars have never been able to decipher the language of the khipu, so it remains a mystery what exactly they were used to record. This evokes the divide between minority and majority communities, who are often illegible to one another both linguistically and culturally. But Villavicencio puts the symbol to a further purpose: On another level, the khipu illustrates the distance between oneself and “the parts of our ancestry we can’t tap into.”

“Who do you hold the door open for going into the store? The theoretical is comfortable. Lived experience is harder.”

Villavicencio speaks with a wary wisdom about “the impossibility of being Latinx,” pointing out that “it can mean anything! . . . What your family, Telemundo and Garcia Márquez teach us are all different. These are faulty categories.” In today’s political landscape, where everything hinges on identity, “there is an image for marketing,” she says, but it doesn’t account for the complicated ways history has and continues to play out. “The American racial binary can’t imagine us. You have to use these terms defensively and it puts too much pressure on them. [Identity] has to encompass everything.” She says that you have to “go down to earth, face to face, [think about] who do you hold the door open for going into the store? The theoretical is comfortable. Lived experience is harder. Theory gets us out of doing the real work.” She is certainly doing the real work in Catalina, and readers will feel its impact.

In her clever debut novel, Karla Cornejo Villavicencio writes in a tradition of blurring the boundary between art and artist.

Science Fiction & Fantasy Horror Fantasy

A ‘Bridgerton’-esque world gets bloody

If you had told T. Kingfisher a few decades ago that she would write a novel inspired in part by her love of Regency romance novels, she probably wouldn’t have believed you. After all, the author is best known for her work in horror and dark fantasy, two genres not exactly known for their similarity to frothy series like Julia Quinn’s Bridgerton or Evie Dunmore’s A League of Extraordinary Women.

Indeed, years ago when she discussed romance with a friend (who just so happens to be acclaimed Regency romance writer Sabrina Jeffries), Kingfisher was largely dismissive. “I had the unenlightened, snarky view of romance as just ‘girly stuff.’ ” Her friend pushed back. “She, very patiently, was like ‘Have you ever read one?’ ” Kingfisher hadn’t, so she gave one of Jeffries’ books a try. To her surprise, she liked it. More than liked it, in fact, despite the fact that “nothing actually happens; there are no explosions, no one is getting kidnapped.” So she read more, and she realized that Regency romances are set “just far enough away in history that it feels fantastical.” The subgenre also gave her a look into what she describes as a sort of shared universe: “A good Regency takes you to a world you know and that you’ve read lots of books in, so it’s fun comfort reading.” And because Kingfisher doesn’t read in-genre while she’s writing, Regencies eventually became what she’d read while she was drafting. “Since I write a fair amount of horror these days, I read quite a lot of [romance].”

“There’s a lot of people in the world who are just trying to get by and are just kind of beaten down, and they should be allowed to be the heroes of books too, dammit.”

Years later, Kingfisher decided that she wanted to dip her toes into the familiar “extended universe” of Regency romance and write one herself. “It sort of grows on you, and you think ‘I could do this,’ ” she muses. But it wasn’t so simple to switch genres. As a setting, Regency requires a lot of research, something that Kingfisher admits is something that she can do, but that she isn’t particularly meticulous about. “There are a lot of things that it never really occurs to me to even question,” she says, referencing tiny details like the invention of modern canning practices or the use of specific types of lamps.

Which is a problem if you want to write a Regency romance, she says. The genre has ardent fans, particularly costumers, who care very much about the historical accuracy of the work. “There are people who know exactly what kind of buttons are on things, what sort of boning is in the corsets and what year it came into fashion, and they’re all very nice people. The emails they send are not in anger but in sorrow.” By her own admission, she doesn’t really care about researching clothes, so Kingfisher decided not to write a Regency romance exactly, but “something that’s more fantasy-universe Regency, and it turned into A Sorceress Comes to Call.”

Kingfisher’s horror novel, a crafty reimagining of the classic Grimm fairy tale “The Goose Girl” set in a Regency-esque world, centers on two unlikely heroines. The first is Cordelia, a young teen whose abusive sorceress mother, Evangeline, is determined to ensnare a wealthy and well-placed husband. Usingher cunning, Evangeline lands an invitation to the home of her potential match, Samuel, a squire with a sizable fortune and a love of pretty women. Cordelia is timid and naive, a poor combination for a horror heroine. She initially flounders in her new environment, jumping to help servants with their work and struggling to do more than stutter in front of their hosts. Although she knows what her mother is doing is wrong, she doesn’t feel like she can tell the squire or his family that Evangeline is a murderess with the power to physically control people like puppets (a practice referred to as “making them obedient”). When asked about Cordelia’s nature, Kingfisher grins. “She was too timid. If she would have been the only protagonist, I would have just been yelling, ‘Grow a spine for the love of god and stab someone.’ ”

Book jacket image for A Sorceress Comes to Call by T. Kingfisher

But, as Kingfisher points out, not every Final Girl is going to be a spunky master of martial arts who is ready to take on evil. “There’s a lot of people in the world who are just trying to get by and are just kind of beaten down, and they should be allowed to be the heroes of books too, dammit.”

Luckily for both the plot and Kingfisher’s patience, the novel has that second heroine: Hester, the squire’s 51-year-old sister. Where Cordelia is unsure, Hester is confident. Where the young girl is guileless, her counterpart has wisdom. The only problem is that Hester is also reluctant to act, understanding that her brother will make his own mistakes and that she cannot force him to make good decisions.

“She would not be a hero unless she was pushed out of her comfortable existence. She is perfectly fine where she is at the beginning of the story,” Kingfisher says of the middle-aged heroine. That is, of course, until the consequences of not acting are great enough to spur Hester into action, something that Kingfisher says is like the story of the world in microcosm. “A lot of things in the history of the world have been done because women of a certain age go, ‘Well, crap, now I have to do something.’ ”

That isn’t to say that Hester is perfect. She can be described charitably as curmudgeonly, and more realistically as resistant to anything that will make her happy. She is a spinster by choice, having turned down a marriage proposal from Lord Richard Evermore, a man that she very much loved. Hester was convinced that Richard would be marrying beneath him, both because of her lack of title and her bum knee. But when Hester calls on her former paramour for help to get rid of Evangeline, she gets a second chance at love. Although, as Kingfisher points out, she does “fight off that second chance very hard. There are people who are just determined not to do something that will make them happy. It’s frustrating, but we’ve all known them.”

Read our starred review of ‘A Sorceress Comes to Call’ by T. Kingfisher.

Even if A Sorceress Comes to Call didn’t quite end up being a traditional Regency romance, elements from the era still sparkle within the dark firmament of Kingfisher’s fantastical horror. One of these is Cordelia’s obsession with etiquette. She quotes heavily from a real-life tome called The Ladies’ Book of Etiquette and Manual of Politeness, consulting it for everything from how to make conversation with her hosts to the proper way to interact with her childhood friend. Cordelia’s constant check-ins aren’t just for her benefit, though. They’re for the reader’s—and for Kingfisher’s. Young ladies of the time had to follow Byzantine rules of etiquette, and as Cordelia struggled with the expectations of her new home, Kingfisher did too. “I didn’t know the etiquette of things either,” she says. And so Kingfisher mined The Ladies’ Book to assist them both. While many of the social mores outlined in the text struck Kingfisher as silly, she also recognized that “the author cared enormously about her readers and really wanted them to not be embarrassed.”

As she creates a rich tapestry of magic and alchemy, Kingfisher also weaves in a poignant depiction of abuse. Evangline’s power is manipulation, from taking control over another’s body to making them see things that aren’t there. As in many horror novels, there is no established, detailed magic system as there might be in a pure fantasy work: Evangeline’s magic is, instead, more like an elemental manifestation of her own penchant for abuse. “It’s inherently powerful and uncontrolled,” Kingfisher says.

But despite all that magic affords someone like Evangeline, it’s also precarious to try to practice it. The people of Kingfisher’s alternate Regency believe that magic is real, which makes it difficult for a sorceress to operate without being attacked by either non-magical citizens seeking to protect themselves or by their fellow magic users. “If a sorcerer were smart,” Kingfisher says, “they would never ever display any sign of magic whatsoever, and they would tell their children to never show any sign of it either.” One of her characters echoes this sentiment, saying that magic is likely “more trouble than it’s worth,” a statement that makes the author wonder if that character has magic in her own family. (She isn’t sure, wondering aloud during the interview if it’s possible to “have headcanon about your own book.”)

“A lot of things in the history of the world have been done because women of a certain age go, ‘Well, crap, now I have to do something.’ ”

To fight Evangeline’s power, Cordelia, Hester and their allies use a sort of alchemy rooted in the power of water, salt and wine. “I’m not sure where that came from,” Kingfisher says of the alchemical system, other than a question of “What feels vaguely elemental here?” As with Evangeline’s magic, the rules of alchemy are largely obscured, hidden in half-truths and metaphors within dusty tomes. Kingfisher points to the traditions of folk Catholicism as a possible influence. “My grandmother was a very devout Catholic,” she says, but was more of the “putting saint cards in the frame of the mirror type, not the going to church regularly type.” No matter its inspirations, the alchemy in A Sorceress Comes to Call is viewed with the same feelings of distrust and suspicion that Catholic practices would have been in Regency England (which was, by the time the 1800s came around, almost exclusively Protestant).

Despite A Sorceress Comes to Call’s dark subject matter, Kingfisher never abandons her signature dry sense of humor, something that she says is essential to the delicate balance of telling an effective horror story. While she admits that it’s an unavoidable part of her authorial voice, she also contends that the ability to know when to break the tension is an integral part of the genre. “I think it works in horror. It’s the same reason that the music builds, it’s very tense and then it’s the cat. It’s a cliche now, but you can only tighten the screw for so long before it just can’t ratchet any higher. You have to deflate some of it. People can’t just stay at the maximum level of paranoia the whole time.”

And indeed, without the occasional bit of situational humor—Hester and the household servants have a pointed tendency to interrupt Evangeline’s interludes with the squire at the most delightfully awkward moments, much to the sorceress’s frustration—A Sorceress Comes to Call’s dark ambiance would become stifling. As Kingfisher points out, deep horror and humor go hand in hand. “Did you ever watch M*A*S*H?” she asks, and she laughs as she says it. “People under stress crack a lot of jokes.”

Photo of T. Kingfisher by Henry Soderlund.

T. Kingfisher’s latest fantasy-horror hybrid, A Sorceress Comes to Call, takes inspiration from Regency romances.

Children's & YA Middle Grade Children's

Erin Entrada Kelly discusses her latest hero’s animal transformation

Newbery Medalist Erin Entrada Kelly is having a big year. Following the March publication of her eighth middle grade novel, The First State of Being, she’s releasing a new illustrated chapter book, Felix Powell, Boy Dog. Fans of Kelly’s previous chapter book series featuring Marisol Rainey will instantly recognize Marisol’s friend, Felix Powell, and both new and returning readers will delight in how Kelly leans into magical realism as she plays out a fantasy many have likely had: What is it like to be a dog?

““I really wanted to explore more of Felix’s world and I just thought it would be fun if he, and by extension readers, could experience what it’s like to be a dog,” says Kelly.Early on in Felix Powell, Boy Dog, Felix and his dog, Mary Puppins, are playing with a blanket he picked out at a thrift shop, when the blanket transforms Felix into a dog. Kelly admits, “When I was a kid, I always daydreamed about being a bird, and I still kind of do!”

Kelly calls writing for younger middle grade readers “palate cleanser” projects, explaining that there are “all kinds of complications of being a middle schooler, and Felix is only 8 years old. It was nice to live in that 8-year-old world where they’re still very full of wonder.” But sheestablishes early on that Felix isn’t like most 8-year-olds, either in words or actions. To start, he can speak to Mary Puppins even before turning into a dog himself.

Kelly loves writing about kids who aren’t like others because “I think that one of the hardest parts of childhood is when you feel like you’re different from everyone else.” She recognizes that, especially in school, “difference is not always treated with the respect, compassion and excitement that it should be. It brings me joy to be able to write about kids who do feel a little different, in whatever way they feel different, because it’s like writing a letter to my young self and . . . to all kids who feel like they don’t quite fit. It’s celebrating young people who go against the grain because those are the people who will change the world later.”

Kelly spends a lot of time imagining her readers, and she recognizes the importance of “representing all different kinds of family dynamics.” In the book, she beautifully and simply explains that “Felix’s mom couldn’t take care of him anymore, so Nan adopted him.” Kelly says, “It makes me happy to think there might be a kid reading it who lives with their grandmother or grandparents and thinks, ‘Oh, I live with my grandparents too!’ Just that moment of connection, even if it’s like one second as they’re reading the book, is so important, because the more connections we can make like that, the more impact we have on children’s lives.”

Kelly has a unique way of thinking that transfers over to her characters. In an intense emotional moment, Felix describes his rising frustration as feeling like a “human boy with a grumpy mechanic in his body, turning his gears.” Kelly says that came from her own childhood imagination: “I was so curious about how my body worked, and of course, I didn’t understand all the science behind it. So I would imagine there are these little workers in my body, and they were grinding the gears and pushing out the tears and making me laugh and making me eat.” Although cushioned with humor, the scene presents a very real example of how emotions can get the better of us, which is Kelly’s way of offering a moment for readers to know that they’re not alone in saying “things they don’t mean when they’re angry or frustrated.”

“Just that moment of connection, even if it’s like one second as they’re reading the book, is so important.”

Her love of dogs is apparent throughout Felix Powell, Boy Dog. She explains that a lot of the book “came from observing my dogs. I used to actually be on the board of the Humane Society of Southwest Louisiana,” and it was an easy choice for her when it came to picking what animal Felix should turn into in this book. “I just find them to be fascinating and, in many ways, perfect little creatures, in my mind anyway.” However, she teases, “my hope is that it continues as a series as he changes into various [other] everyday animals.”

As an author who writes a lot of varying books within the juvenile fiction classification, working on something for younger readers is what Kelly calls a “palate cleanser” to working on her upper middle grade books. She says there are “all kinds of complications of being a middle schooler, and Felix is only 8 years old. It was nice to live in that 8-year-old world where they’re still very full of wonder.”

Kelly also enjoys illustrating her own books—as she did with Felix Powell, Boy Dog—because it “activates a different part of my brain.” Kelly goes one step further by also incorporating graphic novel elements into Felix Powell, Boy Dog: For example, when Felix is telling the story of meeting Puppins, the prose narrative shifts into comic strips that add special emphasis to this “best day of his life” and highlight Puppins—amid a crowd of dogs who all had names—as an unnamed puppy with whom Felix connected right away. Right now, “young readers can’t quite get enough of graphic novels. So I wanted to be able to marry the traditional chapter book with the celebration of graphic novels that we have right now.” She hopes that both the kids who resist reading prose novels, and the parents who resist letting their kids read graphic novels, will be happy to pick this book up.

“I wanted to be able to marry the traditional chapter book with the celebration of graphic novels that we have right now.”

Of course, one wonders if Kelly will ever take the plunge and write a full graphic novel. “I used to say ‘Oh no, I couldn’t draw an entire graphic novel,’ but actually, writing Felix showed me that maybe I could, if I got the right idea.” Kelly admits. “Never say never, huh?”

The award-winning author and illustrator’s latest middle grade novel explores a common daydream: living life as a dog.

Science Fiction & Fantasy Fantasy

K.X. Song takes a stance against color-coding bookshelves

What are your bookstore rituals? For example, where do you go first in a store?
I go first to the new in paperback section. I love the feel and heft of a paperback as well as its affordability and convenience. I also love reading staff recommendations, even for books that I’ve read before. It’s always fun to see where opinions align or diverge.

Tell us about your favorite library from when you were a child.
My favorite library as a kid was the Shanghai Library. It’s on the same subway line as my family apartment, so it was always convenient to access. You had to arrive early to secure a study desk, but once you’d secured it, it was yours for the rest of the day. And the canteen on the ground floor had plenty of cheap but delicious and healthy meals.

While researching your books, has there ever been a librarian or bookseller who was especially helpful, or a surprising discovery among the stacks?
When I was 13, I discovered a new favorite novel by chance—when a librarian accidentally shelved the wrong book to be placed on hold for me. The book was most likely adult, so some of the more mature content was a bit of a surprise for me, but at the same time, it opened my eyes to all adult themes of the world beyond my bubble. I learned about betrayal and suffering and hurt beyond forgiveness. I remember reading this book in one breathless sitting, then rereading the book again the very next day. Experiences like this made me want to become a writer, to touch someone’s life in such a tangible way.

“My special talent is balancing a coffee, sunglasses and several books all in one hand.”

Do you have a favorite bookstore or library from literature?
One of my favorite books that I read as a child was The Shadow of the Wind by Carlos Ruiz Zafon. In the novel there is a hidden library in Barcelona, Spain, called the Cemetery of Forgotten Books, which of course inspired all sorts of daydreams of mine of stumbling upon secret magical libraries hidden within the cities I grew up in.

Do you have a bucket list of bookstores and libraries you’d love to visit but haven’t yet? What’s on it?
Yes! I’ve always wanted to visit the Mill Valley Library in Northern California, which is a sunlit library within the woods, as well as the Beitou Branch Library in Taipei, Taiwan, which is Taiwan’s first green library and is absolutely gorgeous.

What’s the last thing you checked out from your library or bought at your local bookstore?
Half a Lifelong Romance by Eileen Chang. She’s been recommended to me over a dozen times, but I’m only now getting into her work!

How is your own personal library organized?
I once tried to organize my books by spine color before realizing I could never find anything I was looking for and it drove me bananas. Now they’re organized by genre and theme, with my favorite covers facing out.

Bookstore cats or bookstore dogs?
Bookstore cats! I’m more of a dog person when it comes to the outdoors, but for bookstores, cats perfectly fit the vibe.

What is your ideal bookstore-browsing snack?
I love a good iced Americano while browsing. My special talent is balancing a coffee, sunglasses and several books all in one hand.

The author of The Night Ends With Fire, a new fantasy romance inspired by the legend of Mulan, shares her bookstore habits and favorite library memories.

Nonfiction History Cultural History

Nicola Twilley reveals the secrets of refrigeration

For so many of us, the refrigerator is an appliance we’ve interacted with daily for as long as we can remember. It’s also one we take for granted, rather than viewing it as emblematic of the world-changing innovation Nicola Twilley explores in Frostbite: How Refrigeration Changed Our Food, Our Planet, and Ourselves. As readers will learn from Twilley’s extensively researched, impressively wide-ranging ride along the “cold-chain,” artificial cold is much more than a convenience, thanks to its effects on what we eat, how we feel and the future of our planet.

You note in Frostbite that your interest in the cold-chain began 15 years ago when farm-to-table eating was becoming increasingly popular, and you “got stuck on the conjunction. What about the to?” Why do you think that space between, so to speak, captured your curiosity and sparked a yearslong drive to learn more?

Back in 2009, when I first started writing about food, I loved the way Michael Pollan took me to a Kansas feedlot in The Omnivore’s Dilemma. He made the places a steer travels through on its way from farm to slaughterhouse real and tangible, so I could picture them, as well as understand why they matter. I decided that I wanted to do the same for the spaces we’ve built for our food to live in. I suspected (correctly, it turned out!) they might be equally fascinating and equally important in terms of transforming our diet, health, economy and environment.

Your first book was 2021’s Until Proven Safe: The History and Future of Quarantine, which you co-wrote with your husband and fellow writer Geoff Manaugh. And you co-host the podcast Gastropod with Cynthia Graber. What was it like to move away from your (clearly, wonderfully strong and productive) partnerships and take the helm of Frostbite solo?

Nerve-wracking! Having an extra brain and an extra perspective to draw on is often essential and always a bonus. Fortunately, I still did: Although it’s just my name on the cover, Geoff still read every word in the book many times. His edits—and his encouragement, enthusiasm and patience as I tacked on visits to refrigeration landmarks on vacations and family trips—were essential. (He also came up with the title!) That said, it is undoubtedly lonelier to work solo, which makes me all the more excited to talk about the ideas and stories in the book with readers.

Of course, as per your extensive acknowledgements section and the wealth of experts and sources you introduce throughout, a global village of cold enthusiasts provided information and insight on refrigeration’s past, present and future. Will you share a bit about how you decided what to explore, who to interview, where to go and what to include in your book?

When I began the research that inspired Frostbite, there hadn’t been a book about refrigeration (that wasn’t a textbook for HVAC technicians) published since the 1950s, so I really had to just follow my curiosity, cold call banana-ripening facilities and scour industry publications for clues. Because I quickly became obsessed with the subject and talked about it at every opportunity, friends started sending everything refrigerated my way: My friend Kevin Slavin introduced me to Kipp Bradford, for example, who helped me build a fridge in order to understand how cold is made; my friend Alexis Madrigal tipped me off about the refrigerated warehouse’s appearance in Tom Wolfe’s A Man in Full. Then, after I wrote about China’s race to refrigerate for the New York Times Magazine, people inside the cold-chain industry reached out to share their stories, and those connections led me to working in a refrigerated warehouse myself as well as traveling to Rwanda to see what the future of refrigeration might look like.

One of the things I love the most about the kind of writing I do is the opportunity to peek inside weird, fascinating places that are otherwise off-limits.

Speaking of “where,” you traveled around the world and did loads of experiential research, including exploring underground cheese storage caves in Missouri, wearing a safety harness on a crane high in the air at the 12-story NewCold warehouse in England, and venturing to the Arctic to visit the Svalbard Global Seed Vault. What was the most exciting, wow-inducing place you visited?

One of the things I love the most about the kind of writing I do is the opportunity to peek inside weird, fascinating places that are otherwise off-limits. It’s hard to pick a favorite, but I loved the gigantic, subterranean cheese cave in Missouri—a former mine where Kraft stores our national reserve of Cheez Whiz and Kraft Singles—and the juice tanks at the Port of Wilmington, Delaware, where most OJ drunk in the Northeast spends months or even years, stripped of flavor molecules and stirred slowly under a blanket of nitrogen, before it making its way onto shelves as “fresh” orange juice.

You drew from novels like The Mosquito Coast, East of Eden and The Great Gatsby as you wrote Frostbite. What was refrigeration’s role in these works of fiction?

Given refrigeration’s importance, and my love of fiction, it was surprising and disappointing to realize how few appearances the cold-chain makes in novels, or theater or film for that matter. (I truly believe that a cold-storage warehouse would make a great setting for a movie or TV show—call me, Hollywood!) One thing that’s interesting is that, in both The Mosquito Coast and East of Eden, ice-making is a project of flawed idealists—characters whose visionary zeal exceeds their grasp on reality. Artificial cold itself is seen as both progress and corruption, as beneficent yet dangerous, which is how I ended up seeing it too.

Frostbite was created over a 10-year period in your life. How has your work, your life as a writer (including your regular contributions to The New Yorker), evolved over that decade?

It’s possible that Ann Godoff, my wonderful editor at Penguin Press, might feel differently about the wait for me to deliver my manuscript(!), but I think Frostbite is definitely richer for everything I’ve learned over the past decade. Being edited by Leo Carey at The New Yorker, in particular, has been a masterclass in how to tell stories both beautifully and economically, and I am a much better writer for that training. Meanwhile, my reporting for Gastropod, on everything from Native American cuisine to cocktails, has expanded my perspective on so many aspects of food. Refrigeration is one of those topics that touches everything—flavor, popular culture, technology, public health, climate change—and so, the more context I was able to bring to it, the better the book became.

Cheers to you for having a “date-ready fridge,” according to “the world’s first and only refrigerator dating expert”! Will you share what you learned about “fridge compatibility” and why you assert “It is the humble fridge that offers a window onto the twenty-first century soul”? And also: Please tell us more about your fabulous fridge and its French doors.

Although I was pleased (and surprised) that my fridge was rated so favorably, and I will happily admit to judging people based on their fridge contents, I actually believe that fridge-peeping offers more value as a collective self-portrait, rather than as a guide to an individual’s character.* The size of American fridges as opposed to European ones reflects the form of our cities; the amount of junk stuck onto a fridge door correlates directly with female stress levels; the wilting salad leaves are a testament to our aspirational goals and dietary reality!

*At least, I hope so: My own fridge is full of far too many curious condiments, a somewhat concerning quantity of beer and wine, and enough neatly stacked grain-, bean- and roasted veg-filled Tupperware to warm the most anal-retentive heart. The overall effect is a confusing mix of adventurous, fun-loving and uptight. Hmm, maybe there is something to this fridge-dating business after all . . .

Regarding use-by, sell-by and other such dates, you note that in today’s world “freshness is a belief system.” How does that relate to food waste, and how might we more effectively counteract it?

Before the refrigeration time machine was invented, no one would have expected a fresh peach or milk to last more than a few days, unless they turned it into jam or cheese—fresh food was by definition ephemeral. Today, the cold-chain, including our home fridges, does such a marvelous job of slowing time that food can stay good for ages. That’s fantastic, but it does have a couple of downsides. First of all, it seems to encourage us to buy more perishables than we can eat, or assume they’ll be fine for another day if we don’t feel like cooking that evening—and, because the fridge can’t actually confer immortality, they do eventually go bad and we throw them away. Secondly, refrigeration has almost erased more traditional ways of sensing whether food is good or not. The risks and lack of transparency built into a refrigeration-extended supply chain lead many of us to trust a sell-by-date over our own judgment. And, because we no longer have any idea how old produce is, metabolically speaking, when it gets to us, it doesn’t matter if we know roughly how long to expect, say, a cucumber to last after it’s been harvested; we don’t have enough insight into the supply chain to use that expertise, even if we still have it.

Refrigeration improved people’s lives in so many ways, but it’s also had numerous unintended consequences on our health and environment. What are, say, the top three things we should be thinking about when we consider purchasing and consuming refrigerated and/or frozen food?

I’m definitely not in the business of telling people what to eat, but I can say from personal experience that minimizing your refrigerated footprint can lead to a more delicious, more nutrient-rich diet. It’s easier to do this in California than most places on Earth, I’ll admit, but, given what I discovered while writing this book, I rarely eat fruit and vegetables that are out of season or shipped from another continent anymore. I love apples, but, in June, I’d rather not eat an apple that’s been stored for nine months when I can buy locally grown berries or cherries that have more flavor and more nutrients. (Of course, unless I’m planning on eating them that day, I put them in my fridge after I’ve bought them—but at least they haven’t traveled halfway around the world through the cold-chain, losing flavor and vitamins en route.) And, after realizing how much of our pre-refrigerated diet would have consisted of fermented food, as well as talking to researchers about the emerging science of the gut microbiome, I eat more miso, sauerkraut and yogurt than before. Finally, I’ve tried to become better about not stockpiling perishables, so that I rarely have to throw food out.

Realizing that radical change is quite possible makes me feel much more optimistic about our shared future

As you explain, the advent of refrigeration has caused us to become disconnected from the seasons, from nature’s rhythms and from the Earth itself. You note that “reducing our dependence on refrigeration might also allow us to rebuild our relationship with food.” What might individuals want to do first to set themselves on that path?

As Natalia Falagán, one of the refrigeration experts I spent time with in the book, has discovered, there’s nothing like growing fruit and vegetables to understand what freshness really is and how to value it. You don’t need a backyard—you can volunteer at a community garden, which has the side benefit of being a lot of fun. With meat, fish and milk, if you eat animal products (which I do), the scale encouraged by refrigeration has allowed inhumane, ecologically disastrous practices to become the norm, while the distance enabled by refrigeration has made it easier to turn a blind eye to them; being conscious of those implications can’t help but lead to making choices that are healthier for both yourself and the planet. But also, as with climate change, individuals aren’t and can’t be responsible for transforming our entire food system. Right now, a lot of money and effort is being thrown at building cold-chains in the developing world by both institutions like the United Nations and megarich philanthropists like Bill Gates. I would love for policymakers and funders to read my book and consider how they can learn from the unintended side effects and less desirable impacts of refrigeration that I tease out in Frostbite, so that the rest of the world doesn’t make the same mistakes we have—at even larger scale and with disastrous consequences for all of us.

What were you most hoping to convey or accomplish with Frostbite? And what’s up next for you?

Mostly, I want readers to share my sense of fascination while exploring this utterly essential but mostly invisible world. But I would love readers to share the sense that I developed that, given how recent and transformative and somewhat arbitrary our embrace of refrigeration was, our food system is clearly a lot more amenable to change than it seems. That’s important, because today’s food system is damaging our health and our planet, as well as contributing to inequality. Realizing that radical change is quite possible makes me feel much more optimistic about our shared future—I hope readers come away feeling that way, too. I would also love to inspire a new generation of inventors to think creatively about how to keep food fresh and stop it from going bad. Ice cream needs to be cold, but meat doesn’t necessarily, and refrigeration needn’t be humanity’s final answer to the problem of preservation. As far as what’s next: I would like to take a very long nap, but, in fact, I have a couple of new New Yorker stories in the works, and Gastropod never stops! I’m also starting to tinker at the edges of what I think will be my next book-length projects—I have an idea for another nonfiction book but also the start of what might become a novel. I’ve never written any publishable fiction, so who knows whether I can pull it off, but I’m excited to give it a go.

Read our starred review of ‘Frostbite’ by Nicola Twilley.

Photo of Nicola Twilley by Rebecca Fishman.

The Gastropod host's adventurous Frostbite takes readers into cheese caves, ice cream warehouses and the world of “refrigerator dating."

Children's & YA YA Fiction YA

Rosena Fung on juggling heartbreak and joy

Rosena Fung’s latest graphic novel, Age 16, explores the complicated relationships between three generations, jumping in time between the experiences of three 16-year-old girls: Roz in Toronto in 2000; her mother, Lydia, in Hong Kong in 1972; and Roz’s grandmother, Mei Laan, in Guangdong in 1954.

How did you come up with the narrative structure of *Age 16**? What inspired you to pick 16 as the specific age that connects your three main characters?*

I knew I wanted to explore the lives of a girl, her mother and her grandmother, and how they intersect and are interwoven with each other. From the beginning I knew that I wanted multiple timelines to show how their lives and choices affect each other. Sixteen is such an intense time for many people, and in particular it was a time of major upheaval and change for my mom and my por por. It was a good way to parallel these lives together to show its many contrasts but also how the characters are so similar to each other. I owe a lot to my editor, who helped me sculpt this story into its final form.

Read our starred review of Age 16 here.

In your author’s note, you describe how the book is based on your own family history. What was the experience like of writing characters based on real family members, with all their messy vulnerabilities and tender humanity?

Writing characters based on real stories and real lives can be so hard. I try to be accountable to the people I’m writing about, to make sure I’m being honest about my emotions but also to honor their own stories and where they’re coming from. Trying to inhabit their lives is part of the writing process, and also imagining how it will be received by them. It is often a precarious act of juggling these factors, while staying true to upholding the story I’m telling. Writing this book was definitely an emotional one as I confronted my own feelings and memories about my mom and grandmother!

This book brims with life—piles of glittery accessories in 2000s Toronto; fruit stalls crowded together in 1970s Hong Kong; fields full of laborers in 1950s Guangdong. How did you go about capturing a unique sense of place in each section? What kind of historical research did you have to do?

It was a combination of going through a LOT of photo albums, plumbing through the memories of both my mom and my own teenage self, and research about historical movements and context as well as many photo archives. I wanted to make sure each place was a character in its own right, because the spaces we live in inform our sense of self and growth. Throughout my life, I have visited both Hong Kong and Guangdong multiple times, and I hold on to those memories dearly. Sometimes a wayward scent or cacophonous noise in Toronto will bring me back to those places in an instant and suddenly I can see all the colors, the landscape, the food. I wanted this kind of vibrancy present in the book.

The contrast between each era is striking: China in the brutal aftermath of war is very different from Y2K Toronto. How do you balance grappling with the harmful behaviors of older generations, while considering the difficult—even unfathomable—circumstances from which those behaviors are born?

I think everyone has depths that even they can’t always see, including how past experiences and trauma influence their present-day choices and behaviors. It took a long time for me to understand this, how a person can hold so much but we only ever see the most surface layer. With this, I try to consider why someone would act in ways I don’t understand—not to justify or absolve harm, but to understand why, and from that place try to move forward together. I never got along with my por por, but through the process of researching and writing this book, I gained more clarity and admiration for her as a person.

When Roz, Lydia and Mei Laan get hurt, they often end up hurting others. How do you think one breaks this cycle of lashing out? What does forgiveness mean to you?

This is a really hard question! I think this is something many struggle with, and I don’t have a clear answer. In the book, I try to show that each character gains a deeper understanding of each other and how the way they grew up, or the ways others have treated them, affect how they in turn treat others. Trying to know someone deeply is a start, and then isolating their harmful actions as a reflection of that trauma rather than internalizing it as deeply personal is a way to distance that harm. But that of course sounds easier said than done, and can be a lifelong process. Forgiveness to me means letting go. I don’t mean absolution or the absence of accountability for harm and its aftermath. But I mean getting to a place within yourself so that those words, behaviors or actions lose their barbs. I think forgiveness can’t happen if the other party can’t meet you halfway. But sometimes (often), life gives us no closure and we have to choose to move on—with or without the one who hurt you.

I try to be accountable to the people I’m writing about, to make sure I’m being honest about my emotions but also to honor their own stories and where they’re coming from.

In a world that is unkind to women’s bodies, food haunts these characters. But food also provides comfort and connection, especially in the context of Chinese diaspora culture. What thoughts went into your nuanced portrayal of food and how we treat our bodies?

First of all, I love food and any chance I can draw it or include it in stories, I 100% will. Food, consumption and bodies are such fraught battlegrounds where history, politics and misogyny play out. Women in particular are taught to deny ourselves food, pleasure and desire. Through this book, I wanted to make explicit the ways in which social expectations of how female bodies should exist are highly problematic and dangerous, and how we internalize these ideas as a given. But it was also important for me to highlight how women and girls are often forced to make certain choices to survive, depending on the context they grew up in. And some of these lessons (needing a husband to survive, needing a desirable body, fatphobia) get passed down to daughters. Many people have such painful and toxic relationships with food (girded by a capitalist industrial complex that benefits from our self-hatreds), and problematic conceptions of “good” or “bad” food, that I personally am trying to untangle and unlearn.

“The world can be made to fit you” is a gorgeous adage repeated throughout this graphic novel. What else would you tell your 16-year-old self, if given the chance?

“Keep all your Sailor Moon cards and lip glosses and magazines because one day you will be nostalgic for all of it and you will have to pay a lot of money to buy these things back again.”

Roz fantasizes about prom, but has to make a hard choice when she’s also invited to anti-prom. What would your ideal anti-prom night be like?

I am a homebody, so cozy in bed reading a book with a cozy cat and snacks next to me sounds like true bliss. BUT I would also love a party with a lot of glitter and sequins, all my friends, a drag and/or burlesque show, and a buffet. And Taylor Swift. The after party would be either at a Chinese restaurant or a diner. Or both, one after the other.

Can you speak more on the presence of cats (dear Millie!) throughout this book?

I LOVE cats. SO MUCH. Millie is an amalgamation of my cat Foomy that my mom and I had when I was 16, and my current cat Coco (aka Bean). She is a mix of Foomy’s sass and habits with Bean’s sweet gray, beautifully rotund body. I wanted to use cats as a motif throughout each timeline to affirm repetition in the characters’ lives, but also as an excuse to draw them. My cat (and my partner) have been a source of support and an anchor while I wrote this book. They are my North Stars!

Rosena Fung weaves together the stories of three generations in Age 16.

Science Fiction & Fantasy Fantasy

Deborah Harkness once found a 16th-century bladder stone in a library

What are your bookstore rituals? For example, where do you go first in a store?
I am a sucker for the display tables. I love to browse through the latest releases and staff picks, searching especially for books that haven’t yet come to my attention from another source. After that I tend to make a beeline for the paper products that are the standard equipment of this writer’s life: notebooks, pens, rulers, erasers. I’m forever on the lookout for the “perfect” pen, eraser, pencil bag—you name it. After these two basic needs are met, I trawl the history, mythology and nonfiction sections, which are my preferred genres. Final stop is always the cookbook section, because those books are heavy and I always want more than I can carry.

Tell us about your favorite library from when you were a child.
The Montgomery County Library Bookmobile. It came once a week to a retail parking lot, opposite the elementary school I attended, that was pitted with potholes. It was in this rolling paradise, at the ripe age of 8 years old, that I was introduced to the interlibrary loan request. My elementary school librarian, Kay Wersler, taught me how to scour books for hints on other books to read and request them through the Bookmobile. I still remember the sound of the running engine, the climb up the stairs, the small selection of books to browse and the patient librarian who did not bat an eye when I asked for 19 biographies of Henry VIII.

“There are so many ‘lost’ treasures on the shelves of libraries all over the world.”

While researching your books, has there ever been a librarian or bookseller who was especially helpful, or a surprising discovery among the stacks?
How much space do we have? As an academic who has been doing research since age 8 (see above), it would be far easier to tell you the librarians who weren’t especially helpful (exactly zero). I am enormously fond of the rare books and manuscripts librarians all over the world, but especially at the Bodleian Library and the British Library because I have relied most heavily on their collections. I owe an eternal debt of gratitude to the wise and generous former Keeper of Rare Books at the Bodleian, Julian Roberts, who was very kind when I discovered a John Dee book was missing from his collection and helped me locate another copy. This gave me something of a reputation in the academic community for finding strange items lurking in library collections—not only missing books but also a 16th-century bladder stone kept in a metal tube!

Book jacket image for The Black Bird Oracle by Deborah Harkness

Do you have a favorite bookstore or library from literature?
Marks & Co Antiquarian Booksellers, made famous in Helene Hanff’s 84 Charing Cross Road. I thought all English bookstores were like this one, and discovered to my enormous delight that they were still common in the England of the 1980s, when I visited the country as a solo traveler for the first time.

Do you have a “bucket list” of bookstores and libraries you’d love to visit but haven’t yet? What’s on it?
It is my great dream to shelf read every collection of rare books and manuscripts in the world. This is, of course, not possible, but it is telling that it’s not a particular item or location that attracts me, but the ability to draw books down from the shelves and glance through them looking for interesting notes and marginalia. I include all local public libraries with historical materials in this count, by the way. There are so many “lost” treasures on the shelves of libraries all over the world. I love bringing them to light for their librarians and patrons.

What’s the last thing you checked out from your library or bought at your local bookstore?
The last book I bought was at Moonraker Books on Whidbey Island, Washington. I went in to say hello to Josh Hauser and browse her impeccably curated selection of nonfiction and found a copy of The Connaught Bar: Cocktail Recipes and Iconic Creations by Agostino Perrone, Giorgio Bargiani and Maura Milia. Two of my favorite places collided there by the sea, as I have spent many happy hours in the care of Agostino, Giorgio and Maura (who has moved on to her next adventure now). I took a copy back to the house to inspire future celebrations.

How is your own personal library organized?
By subject. It’s a working library, so there is none of this color-coding or last name malarkey. Give me a subject heading and I’m happy! My cookbooks are even organized this way.

Bookstore cats or bookstore dogs?
Yes. And if there are bookstore horses, please let me know the address of the shop because I will be making a stop soon. With carrots.

What is your ideal bookstore-browsing snack?
I hope you mean post-browsing snack! If so, then it is a cup of tea with milk and honey, and a small pastry of some sort. Madeleines, if they have them, an ordinary shortbread biscuit or chocolate chip cookie if they do not. Coffee walnut cake if I am in England and it is autumn. British bookstores have brilliant little cafes tucked into their corners where you can sit with your pile of books and a nibble before heading back home with your new treasures.

The author of the bestselling All Souls series reveals her bookshelf organization principles and sings the praises of the interlibrary loan.

Fiction Literary Fiction

Writing a woman on the verge

Both Same as It Ever Was and your debut, The Most Fun We Ever Had, are lengthy novels that examine family dynamics over the course of decades. What draws you to this type of story?

I’ve always been drawn as a reader to big, meaty novels that stick with a cast of characters over a long period of time, and it’s very much where I feel most at home as a writer—having the ability to explore my characters from all angles, from different vantage points in time and space. Once I fall in love with a character, I want to know absolutely everything about them, and in the case of Julia that meant getting to know not just her but her entire family, the trajectory of her upbringing and her marriage and her becoming a mother.

This time around, the time span is a bit tighter and the family’s matriarch, Julia, is at the center of the story. Can you tell us about how Julia’s character came to you?

Julia’s voice came to me first—her observational skills, her neuroses, her tendency toward self-sabotage. I find difficult characters much more interesting—and endearing, as it were—than their better behaved counterparts, and Julia delivered tenfold in this respect.

“We’re so deeply, messily shaped, as women, by our mothers—or mother figures.”

You’ve spoken before, to the New York Times, about doing your “emotional homework” in order to write about characters with experiences that are different from your own. How did you prepare to tell the story of Julia, a 57-year-old woman whose marriage has persevered despite past challenges and who is preparing for life as an empty nester?

I had to get to know Julia as a much younger woman before I felt comfortable writing about her later in her life. I did similar work with The Most Fun We Ever Had, overwriting a great deal just to get my characters in certain situations to see how they’d react, examining them in childhood and in the quieter and less cinematic moments that don’t make it into the final draft of a novel. I explored many different phases of Julia’s life—her difficult childhood, her somewhat traumatic adolescence, her lost decade before she meets Mark, the early days of marriage and parenthood—before arriving at the 57-year-old Julia and understanding who she was.

Same as It Ever Was focuses on complex maternal relationships. What inspired you to explore this subject?

There’s just endless fictional fodder in family relationships, and I think mother-daughter relationships are perhaps the most fodder-full of all; I could write 10 more books exploring characters exclusively through this lens. We’re so deeply, messily shaped, as women, by our mothers—or mother figures—and then by becoming mothers, or not, the how and the why of it. And there’s a great deal of societal pressure and expectation as well—what it means to be a good mother, how much mothers are accountable for, the notion that we should want children and delight in them. Julia’s feelings about motherhood are complex and not especially rosy, and she’s often ashamed of them, or confused by them, which I don’t think is an uncommon experience by any stretch, so I wanted to explore it as candidly as I could.

Like The Most Fun We Ever Had, Same as It Ever Was plays with flashbacks, carrying the reader across decades to gain insight into the past moments that have shaped the characters’ present. What appeals to you about this structure?

I love having the freedom to move around in time because it enables me to look holistically at my characters. Nobody exists in a vacuum; everyone is shaped by a wealth of big and small moments. I’ll also say that there was some degree of claustrophobia writing this novel—residing in the head of a single character over 500 pages—and moving between different versions of Julia allowed me some breathing room, and often spaces to find empathy for the character.

This novel is rich and sprawling—easy to read, but packed with hefty sentences full of detail and action. Those sentences surely couldn’t have been as easy to create as they are to consume. How long did it take you to write Same as It Ever Was?

I actually started this novel around 2015, when I was still finishing The Most Fun We Ever Had—I like to have two projects underway simultaneously. And like Most Fun, I wrote this book very much out of order, so the structure took a lot of working and reworking. This story isn’t told linearly, and finding the right shape for it was a challenge.

Tell us more about your writing process. Do you outline? Do these rich sentences appear more or less fully formed, or do you labor over their composition, starting with something leaner before hanging meat on the bone?

I don’t outline until I have a full draft on the page—once I do have a finished draft, I make a storyboard, which helps me to visualize the arc of the novel and fine-tune how I might make it work better. The sentence-level writing came fairly easily to me—it helped to have such a voicey narrator in Julia! Once I really got to know her voice—which, to be fair, is a lot like my own, full of segue and non sequitur and interruption—I had no trouble articulating her thoughts.

What are your reading habits like when you’re writing?

I have to be careful! I try not to read books with too much thematic overlap to avoid being unconsciously nudged in any particular direction. When I was deep in the writing of Same as It Ever Was, I was reading a lot of mystery novels—I read the entire Louise Penny series, for instance—because they felt in terms of genre and structure to be far enough away from my project.

Given that you also work part time as a bookseller, I’m curious: What books have you been encouraging customers to buy lately?

It is such a joy that part of my job is getting to shove books I love into the hands of customers. Some of my most-shoved books lately are The Trees by Percival Everett, The Sentence by Louise Erdrich, and American Mermaid by Julia Langbein. I also love nudging our mystery seekers toward Tana French and Richard Osman.

Do you bring anything from your experience as a bookseller to your writing?

There’s absolutely overlap between the bookseller and writer parts of me—I’m fascinated by human dynamics, by understanding what makes people tick, and I think those interests benefit me in writing books and talking to other people about them. And working in a bookstore has turned me on to books I might not otherwise have read, which is a great gift.

Read our review of Same as It Ever Was.

Following up The Most Fun We Ever Had, Claire Lombardo returns with another big introspective novel, Same as It Ever Was, which explores the highs and lows of a family and a marriage from the point of view of its matriarch.

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Nicola Twilley reveals the secrets of refrigeration

Rosena Fung on juggling heartbreak and joy

How did you come up with the narrative structure of *Age 16**? What inspired you to pick 16 as the specific age that connects your three main characters?*

In your author’s note, you describe how the book is based on your own family history. What was the experience like of writing characters based on real family members, with all their messy vulnerabilities and tender humanity?

This book brims with life—piles of glittery accessories in 2000s Toronto; fruit stalls crowded together in 1970s Hong Kong; fields full of laborers in 1950s Guangdong. How did you go about capturing a unique sense of place in each section? What kind of historical research did you have to do?

The contrast between each era is striking: China in the brutal aftermath of war is very different from Y2K Toronto. How do you balance grappling with the harmful behaviors of older generations, while considering the difficult—even unfathomable—circumstances from which those behaviors are born?

When Roz, Lydia and Mei Laan get hurt, they often end up hurting others. How do you think one breaks this cycle of lashing out? What does forgiveness mean to you?

In a world that is unkind to women’s bodies, food haunts these characters. But food also provides comfort and connection, especially in the context of Chinese diaspora culture. What thoughts went into your nuanced portrayal of food and how we treat our bodies?

“The world can be made to fit you” is a gorgeous adage repeated throughout this graphic novel. What else would you tell your 16-year-old self, if given the chance?

Roz fantasizes about prom, but has to make a hard choice when she’s also invited to anti-prom. What would your ideal anti-prom night be like?

Can you speak more on the presence of cats (dear Millie!) throughout this book?

Deborah Harkness once found a 16th-century bladder stone in a library

Writing a woman on the verge

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How did you come up with the narrative structure of Age 16? What inspired you to pick 16 as the specific age that connects your three main characters?

In your author’s note, you describe how the book is based on your own family history. What was the experience like of writing characters based on real family members, with all their messy vulnerabilities and tender humanity?

This book brims with life—piles of glittery accessories in 2000s Toronto; fruit stalls crowded together in 1970s Hong Kong; fields full of laborers in 1950s Guangdong. How did you go about capturing a unique sense of place in each section? What kind of historical research did you have to do?

The contrast between each era is striking: China in the brutal aftermath of war is very different from Y2K Toronto. How do you balance grappling with the harmful behaviors of older generations, while considering the difficult—even unfathomable—circumstances from which those behaviors are born?

When Roz, Lydia and Mei Laan get hurt, they often end up hurting others. How do you think one breaks this cycle of lashing out? What does forgiveness mean to you?

In a world that is unkind to women’s bodies, food haunts these characters. But food also provides comfort and connection, especially in the context of Chinese diaspora culture. What thoughts went into your nuanced portrayal of food and how we treat our bodies?

“The world can be made to fit you” is a gorgeous adage repeated throughout this graphic novel. What else would you tell your 16-year-old self, if given the chance?

Roz fantasizes about prom, but has to make a hard choice when she’s also invited to anti-prom. What would your ideal anti-prom night be like?

Can you speak more on the presence of cats (dear Millie!) throughout this book?

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How did you come up with the narrative structure of *Age 16**? What inspired you to pick 16 as the specific age that connects your three main characters?*