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Until very recently, Francisco Goldman’s Brooklyn apartment was as he describes it in his deeply moving novel, Say Her Name.

His late wife’s wedding dress hung from a clothes hanger and butcher’s twine in front of the bedroom mirror. Below that was an altar composed of her belongings. And at the foot of the altar, Goldman writes, were “her shiny mod black-and-white-striped rubber rain boots with hot pink soles.”

Goldman’s wife, Aura Estrada, died in a body-surfing accident in Mexico on July 25, 2007. A talented writer and literary scholar, she was 20 years younger than Goldman and had just turned 30. The couple had been married “26 days shy of two years.” Say Her Name is Goldman’s expression of his love for Aura and his devastating guilt and grief over her death.

“Grief is very trippy,” Goldman says. “I say trippy, but I don’t mean it’s fun. You can’t believe the dreams you have. You’ll never dream like that ever again in your life. You hallucinate. You’re out of your mind. You know what’s happening and you try to understand it. And you can’t believe how bad you feel. It is not fun, but it is riveting.”

“Riveting” is also a very good description of Goldman’s book. The narrative opens a year and a half after Aura’s death. “That’s when I really did have what the shrinks call complicated grief and post-traumatic stress and minor psychotic episodes,” Goldman says. In writing about this period, he says he “didn’t mind saying shocking things. I wanted to be brutally honest in this book and not pretty anything up.”

But if Say Her Name were merely an account of Goldman’s grief and his occasional grief-induced bad behavior, the book would not be as large-hearted as it turns out to be. Drawing on Aura’s childhood diaries, Goldman sets out to explore how she became who she was—and how he became who he was.

“Those diaries awoke another kind of love in me, almost a parent’s love,” Goldman says. “In part I was trying to understand what drew us together. How did I get to be this way and how did she get to be that way? We both had difficult childhoods in different ways. I was sort of a hard-shelled boy and didn’t take it as much to heart. She was just so enmeshed with her mother, and she struggled against it.” 

After Aura’s death, her mother blamed Goldman for the accident. She withheld Aura’s ashes. She kicked him out of the apartment Aura owned in Mexico City. She hinted at prosecution. Goldman relates all this yet still remains respectful of Aura’s mother.

“Because I love Aura, I have to love this part of her,” Goldman explains. “It was a dangerous thing for me, that whole conflict. There were times, as I say in the book, when I felt angry at all the room it took up in my mourning. But in order to make my peace with Aura’s death—not that there will ever be full peace, but to integrate it into myself in the right way—I had to be able to honor her love for her mother, because that was such a central narrative in her life.”

“It was easy for me to write about how much I loved Aura, but it was a real leap to see how Aura saw her mom. One of the most important elements of fiction writing—or even nonfiction writing—is the ability to put yourself in somebody else’s shoes and see the world from a perspective unlike yours.”

So is this fiction or nonfiction? “We don’t ask a poem whether it’s a fictional poem or a nonfictional poem,” Goldman says. “And I think this book works like a poem. There are many reasons it’s a novel, the most basic being that some things are made up. I always had the idea that at the end my book would kind of merge and disappear into the novel [Aura was working on]. That’s not quite what happens, but it makes that gesture in a big way.”

And in giving Aura’s imagination—as well as her impish humor, her anxieties, her academic and creative struggles, her writing, her love—room to play, Goldman, remarkably, vividly, brings her to life. “She was the funniest person I ever met,” Goldman says. “She had such a quick mind, a quick wit. You could not win an argument with her. This book was most of all a way of keeping close to Aura.”

Goldman says he was meditating on her death one day when it struck him that “the biggest fear of the dying is to be forgotten. And the biggest fear of someone who has loved a dead person is to forget that person. Time erases everything but it can’t erase a person’s name. Your name is always your name.”

With Say Her Name, Goldman ensures that readers will always remember Aura Estrada’s name.

The bright, infectiously enthusiastic Sara Gruen couldn’t be further from the seedy circus subculture portrayed in Water for Elephants, her blockbuster novel that’s getting the Hollywood treatment in an eagerly anticipated new movie.

The story of Jacob Jankowski, an orphaned veterinary student who runs away with the circus and falls in love with sequined star Marlena, thrums with tension and violence, and odd unexpected moments of kindness and unsentimental love, too. The book’s scope and bittersweet atmosphere made it a natural for a feature film adaptation, and the project landed a top-notch cast, including stars Reese Witherspoon and Robert Pattinson. The movie opens in theaters around the world on April 22.

Water for Elephants, which has sold more than 4 million copies to date, was a surprise hit by a little-known author when it was first published in 2006. As excitement for the movie builds, sales of the book are skyrocketing once again, with more than 800,000 copies shipped by publisher Algonquin within the last month.

“It was a very visual experience to write,” Gruen says of the novel. “Strangely, it felt like I was watching a movie. I get to a place where I don’t feel like I’m creating, but recording and capturing it. I’m smelling and hearing all of these things. I feel physically there.”

“If I’m going to spend eight hours a day in a fictional world, I would like to have an animal there as well.”

“My biggest fear as a writer is boring my readers,” Gruen says. “One of my philosophies as a novelist is to ratchet up the tension wherever possible.”

The story is packed with tension and contrasts, from the central love story of Jacob and the married Marlena and their deep connection with abused circus animals, to the camaraderie of a desperate band of strangers doing dirty and often undignified and difficult circus work.

“It was a very fraught time,” Gruen says of the early 20th-century traveling circuses. Both humans and animals were pushed to their limits to sell more tickets and line the pockets of the circus owners. The story features a pachyderm heroine named Rosie and other nameless and victimized animals that act as a kind of wordless Greek chorus to the events happening under the canvas.

Growing up in Canada, Gruen hadn’t even been to a circus before researching the book, but its details feel utterly authentic, especially the human-animal interactions.

“Animals play such an important role in my real world,” says Gruen, who is active in rescue efforts and lives with horses, dogs, cats and other creatures—along with her husband and children—in North Carolina. “If I’m going to spend eight hours a day in a fictional world, I would like to have an animal there as well.”

Despite the sometimes ugly history of circus animals, Gruen made sure that their filmic counterparts were treated well when she signed the movie contract. A stampede and other crucial scenes were produced with a green screen in the film, Gruen says, and she made sure that American Humane Society guidelines were followed on set. She insisted that no apes were used, since they suffer the most from being used in the entertainment industry, according to Gruen (whose most recent novel, Ape House, portrays a fictional ape laboratory).

Gruen and her entire family have cameos in the movie. Her big moment comes when Robert Pattinson (as Jacob) brushes past her during a tense scene with a runaway circus animal. “I’m the astonished woman watching an elephant [Rosie] steal produce!” she says.

Grateful for her “once in a lifetime experience” of spending a few days on a Hollywood set, Gruen was also “absolutely blown away” by the “fabulous” script for the film, by Oscar-nominated screenwriter Richard LaGravenese.

“He combined a few scenes and combined a few characters and it works,” Gruen says. “There are places where it veers away from the book, but then it comes back. I’m really excited to see it.”

The filmmakers invited Gruen to see the tents of the Benzini Brothers Most Spectacular Show on Earth set at the end of the production. “When we drove up over the berm, and there was the Benzini Brothers, I was speechless,” she says. “I still can’t really describe it—just knowing that it was all in my head five years ago . . . it was amazing.”

Gruen and her family are attending the film premiere April 17 in New York City. “Nobody’s going to be looking at the author, but I’ll be there,” she says. “My husband threatens to wear a 20-year-old suit, my oldest son wants to wear a gorilla suit, but me—I want to look glamorous.”

Gruen will have to gear up for the additional wave of popularity that the film will no doubt bring. “It’s still sinking in,” she says of her runaway bestseller, a favorite of book clubs across the country. “I am absolutely flabbergasted. I have no idea why it resonated the way it did.”

For a writer who estimated the chance of getting published at two percent but got a phenomenon instead, this traveling literary circus shows no sign of pulling up stakes and leaving the station any time soon.

Four years ago, Gen X journalist and essayist Meghan Daum surprised just about everyone by abandoning New York for the "less literary pastures" of Lincoln, Nebraska. Lucinda Trout, winsome heroine of Daum’s sparkling, comic first novel, The Quality of Life Report, surprises her friends and employer by abandoning New York for a place in the heartland called Prairie City. Daum first arrived in Nebraska to report on methamphetamine labs in the Midwest. Trout arrives in Prairie City on a similar assignment for an over-the-top TV show called New York Up Early, where she is the lifestyle reporter. You begin to wonder: Is Lucinda Trout just Meghan Daum in hoop earrings and a new kind of attitude?

"I take it as a compliment that people think that the book is autobiographical, because that’s the job of a first-person narrator, to make you believe it’s real," Daum says during an early-morning phone call to Los Angeles. Daum is in L.A. working on a film adaptation of the novel. She is cheerful and unguarded, despite the hour. She flew in from New York the previous day, and in another day or two she’ll drive back to Nebraska, where she’s made an offer on a farmhouse. "All writers take things from their lives and use them in various ways," she continues. "The aspects of The Quality of Life Report that are autobiographical are the things Lucinda thinks about, her ideas, her theories."

Meghan Daum, however, is neither as naïve nor as theatrical as Lucinda Trout. In fact, Daum is a good bit more reticent about her own recent literary successes than Lucinda Trout would likely be. "When I was growing up," Daum says, "my family somehow instilled the notion that you never talked about anything potentially good until it had already happened. It came not out of superstition but perhaps out of pride or modesty or maybe just the tightly wound neuroses of German ancestry. Of course, you can take it too far. When I sold this novel, I was so stunned that for three days I was afraid to tell anyone because I was afraid I might have hallucinated the good news."

Daum also believes she’s not as "malleable" as her protagonist. "I’m more set in my ways, which I guess is both a good thing and a bad thing." In other words, Daum is not likely to find herself in quite the predicaments—usually comic predicaments—that Lucinda finds herself in.

Fed up with the spiraling rent on her tiny New York apartment, and thinking that "for the first time like it might be possible to become a good person"—and that it might also be possible to find a place next door to "a veterinarian who looked like Sam Shepherd, a younger Sam Shepherd"—Lucinda proposes to her Up Early producers that they send her to Prairie City to do a year-long series, The Quality of Life Report, that will allow New Yorkers "to live out the fantasy of escaping New York . . . without having to actually do it themselves."

With this as the set-up, Daum writes an often brilliant comedy of overturned expectations. She takes a broad and satisfying swipe at lifestyle entertainment shows and, more pointedly, explores and pokes fun at the stereotypes New Yorkers and Midwesterners hold about one another. When, for example, Up Early producers learn that Lucinda has rented a farmhouse outside Prairie City, they ask her to host a barn dance as part of their Party Week series. Lucinda’s Prairie City friends gamely try to accommodate her despite the fact that they’re NPR listeners and have never square-danced in their lives. And Lucinda’s Sam Shepherd look-alike love interest? He’s a 40-year-old artist, grain-silo worker and father of three, who turns out to be a good deal more complicated than Lucinda had ever imagined.

"Everyone has a mythology about themselves," Daum says. "Lucinda clearly has a mythology about what she wants to become. I wanted to show that no matter where you are and no matter how you’ve been brought up, there’s always a gulf between what kind of trappings you want your life to have and what life really is. Lucinda wants to grow up and lead an authentic life. But what she thinks is authentic is actually the opposite of authentic."

Daum is a wonderful observer of human behavior and a compelling prose stylist. As readers of My Misspent Youth, her critically acclaimed 2001 collection of personal essays, know, Daum can also be a provocative theorist about issues large and small. In The Quality of Life Report, her most arresting theory of life is what she calls the "wide margin of error."

"People in big cities are so cautious about doing the wrong thing because the stakes are very, very high," Daum explains. "So they weigh everything very, very carefully: Whether or not they’re going to move, whether or not they’re going to marry this person, whether or not they’re going to have a child. As a result, a sort of paralysis sets in. In a place like Prairie City, in large part because of the geographical space, the stakes are lower. I don’t mean that in a pejorative way. It’s like you have room to make mistakes. People will take risks in a way that they don’t feel free to in the city. If you want to have a child, you don’t have to think about private school tuition. Or a house that’s going to cost you $600,000. The result is that people actually have the freedom to take chances and to make mistakes. And that really gives them a richer life."

Daum has apparently found that richer life, and her own wide margin of error, in Nebraska. "It is easier to write in Nebraska than in New York," she says. "Just the physical space around me is liberating. Certainly I did a lot of writing in New York, but I was able to write a first novel in Nebraska. And that was not by accident."

Alden Mudge writes from Oakland, California.