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Rick Smolan

In our story for today, there is a book, there is a project, and there is a friendship. Let’s start with the friendship.

In the early 1980s photographer Rick Smolan, whose work had regularly appeared in Time, Life and National Geographic, invited David Elliot Cohen to Australia to work on an ambitious photo project. "Smolan’s grandiose scheme," writes Cohen in his travel memoir One Year Off, "was to bring 100 of the world’s best photojournalists to Australia, spread them across the country, and have them all snap pictures in a single day." Cohen, a young manager in the press photo agency that assigned Smolan much of his work, leapt at the chance.

Unfortunately, there were problems. Logistical problems. Money problems. Cohen and Smolan skated on thin ice. They tap-danced a half step ahead of their creditors. But in the end they pulled the rabbit out of the hat. A Day in the Life of Australia was a critical and popular hit. The book established a process and a template for future projects. More than that, it marked the beginning of a beautiful pairing, an intense and very creative friendship.

"We were best friends for seven years during the creation of the Day in the Life books," Smolan says from a cell phone as he drives across the Golden Gate Bridge to his office in Sausalito. "We’re both adrenaline junkies. We both like wondering what’s going to happen on the next page. When things are too safe and predictable well, there is no upside."

"Rick and I are both good at very specific things," Cohen adds during a tour of the busy waterfront hive that serves as headquarters for the pair’s astonishingly ambitious new project, an eagerly anticipated collection titled America 24/7. "But the things we’re good at cross lines, overlap, which makes it hard for people to understand."

Smolan illustrates with a story: "We were in Hawaii once and we were stuck behind this big truck that was spewing out fumes. Our car just filled up with fumes. So I rolled my window down to get some more fresh air. And at the same moment, David rolled his window up to keep more fumes from coming in. We both started laughing. It was the perfect definition of our partnership: both of those things were rational things to do, but we had completely different instincts on how to solve the problem."

Cohen and Smolan are each a little vague about what eventually destroyed the friendship. Something to do with success and youth. In 1986, the two produced A Day in the Life of America. The coffee-table photo book was a smashing success, the first book of its kind to reach number one on the New York Times bestseller list and then linger there. The pair subsequently sold their company and the Day in the Life franchise and became employees of the company that would eventually become HarperCollins. Things then fell apart. The two lived within a dozen miles of each other and didn’t speak for nearly 15 years.

Then a couple of years ago, while he was in London working on A Day in the Life of Africa, a project whose profits went to fight AIDS in Africa, Cohen picked up the phone and called Smolan. "I said, Whatever it was we fought about, it’s probably over now,’ " Cohen recalls. Though both had spent the intervening years producing successful, large-scale photography and photojournalism projects, each now admits to missing the friendship with the other.

Still, according to Cohen, it took a confluence of events to energize the pair for a new project – rumors that another photographer was poaching in the Day in the Life domain, a nasty legal wrangle with HarperCollins over noncompete agreements, and the persistent needling of 90-year-old publishing legend Oscar Dystel, who reminded the boys over and over again that they’d blown it big-time by never doing Day in the Life books for all the states in the Union.

Well, Smolan and Cohen have finally succumbed to Dystel’s prodding, and in a huge way. During the week of May 12-18, 2003, the pair’s America 24/7 project sent almost 25,000 citizen-photographers, including 1,000 professional photographers (36 of them Pulitzer Prize winners) out into neighborhoods and communities in every state to document the lives of friends and neighbors and to explore what it means to be an American at this moment in history. Some 250,000 digital images flooded back to project headquarters via the Internet. Weeks later, Cohen and Smolan gathered top photo editors from publications like Newsweek, The New York Times, The Washington Post, and Sports Illustrated to cull through the images and select the very best for publication in the national book, available in bookstores this month. Also planned are 50 state-specific books and a growing number of city books that will all be published on the same day in 2004.

Smolan believes that he and Cohen have always had a special relationship with the zeitgeist. The timing certainly seems right for this project, which Smolan says will run between $15 million and $20 million dollars (in keeping with the adrenaline-producing traditions of their partnership, the project is slightly over budget, and Cohen and Smolan tap-dance beside the financial precipice without seeming to worry). First, judging by the beauty of the photographs in America 24/7, digital photography has clearly come of age. Second, the Bay Area’s dotcom bust has allowed the pair to hire some of the region’s most talented editors, writers, and graphic designers to work on the books, and it shows. And third, they may just have found the "killer app."

The brainchild of 23-year-old Josh Haner, a longtime intern with Smolan and now one of the pair’s business partners, America 24/7’s website (america24-7.com) allows people to create their own covers for the book by uploading an image and caption and paying a nominal fee of $5.99 plus tax. "It sounds like a stupid gimmick until you try it," Smolan says. He’s right; the web tool is easy and fun to use, and the resulting covers are stunning. Smolan emphasizes that readers can try the tool out, and even produce a miniature cover image in jpeg format for free, by visiting the America 24/7 website.

And the book America 24/7 itself? It’s large, it’s beautiful, it’s interesting, and it’s just a little bit strange. It has 304 pages and more than 1,100 images, many of them arresting and absorbing. The book’s captions are artful and informative, often little stories in their own right. America 24/7 includes fine essays by Roger Rosenblatt, Robert Olen Butler, Barbara Kingsolver and others.

What’s strange is the America that the 25,000 digital photographers decided to record for the project. It is, as Smolan points out, an intimate America. The book documents small towns, family moments, Little League games and young ballerinas. This is not the America of global marketeers, anti-terror warriors or reality-TV stars. "The surprise of the book," Cohen says, "is that in a post-9/11 world, a dangerous world and a dangerous time, when Americans don’t like the messages that our media and the government are sending to the world about us, they want to show their lives in a sort of mythic, iconic fashion."

Whether this is the real America, a dream America or something in between hardly matters. America 24/7 presents a fascinating self-portrait, and rewards a long, lingering look.

Alden Mudge writes from Oakland, California.

 

In our story for today, there is a book, there is a project, and there is a friendship. Let's start with the friendship.

In the early 1980s photographer Rick Smolan, whose work had regularly appeared in Time, Life and National Geographic, invited…

YA FictionYA

John Son

A reluctant convert to the young adult genre, John Son resisted writing Finding My Hat, his debut novel, for almost 18 months. Son says his friend Amy Griffin, an editor at Scholastic's Orchard Books imprint, was working on a new line of titles called First Person Fiction, which focused on the immigrant experience. She'd seen one of his stories in Zoetrope magazine in 1999 and thought he'd be right for a First Person Fiction book.

Son, however, wasn't sure he agreed. "I never intended to write for a young adult audience and didn't know if I really had something important to say about the immigrant experience," he explains.

Griffin had planted the seed of an idea, however, and Son found himself reading more and more YA books. He read Burger Wuss by M.T. Anderson, and Rats Saw God by Rob Thomas, and lost any remaining skepticism about the genre. "These books blew me away. They weren't like the YA books I read when I was a young adult. I identified with these characters a lot more," he told BookPage during a recent telephone interview.

But it was a New York Review of Books reprint of Darcy O'Brien's 1977 novel A Way of Life Like Any Other that convinced Son to start writing. "I just love the entire tone of the book," he explains. "That was the ideal I wanted to approach." Son's book, like O'Brien's, is a humorous, straightforward take on coming-of-age with plenty of comic potential. In Finding My Hat, narrator Jin-Han grows from a toddler to a teenager, traveling with his family from Chicago to Memphis to Houston as his father searches for a better way to support the family. The voice of the book is convincing all along the age-spectrum: Jin-Han's confusion on his first day of nursery school rings just as true as his endearing gullibility on class-picture day in elementary school, and the excitement and embarrassment he experiences when he falls for his high-school lab partner.

Son says that, as his writing progressed, he found his views were changing. "I realized I like writing for this age group. I fell in love with it, because writing for this audience seems more pure; there are fewer stylistic elements in the writing you have to just clearly paint the picture." This experience with purer writing has changed Son's approach to the craft overall. "I have changed my adult fiction writing, too. I try to be less show-off-y, or flashy. YA audiences can sniff out fake-ness very quickly, so I felt my writing had to be emotionally honest." Those who are curious about novelistic honesty (as represented by the eternal question: How much of this fiction is in fact true?) may sate their curiosity by reading the book's epilogue, in which Son details when and how Finding My Hat mirrors the events of his own life. For example, Jin-Han's parents own a wig store, with kooky results, and Son's did, as well. Jin-Han feels joy when he discovers books and rapidly becomes a bibliophile; Son is an avowed bookworm, too.

The author and his character also share a major turning point in their lives: Son's mother died when he was 29, and in Finding My Hat, Jin-Han's mother dies when he is 15. Son notes, "One of the big things about the book was that it was for my mom. I wanted to get that [experience] in there." In addition to offering him a way to explore his feelings about his mother's death, Son says that writing Finding My Hat prompted him to further consider his own feelings about his identity. He made his first-ever visit to Korea when he was halfway through his novel, and says, "I saw relatives I hadn't met before. Half of the people look like my dad, half like my mom. It was a very genetic experience." The Korean excursion reinforced Son's feelings about where his happiness lies. "It was great to be in touch with my culture, but I couldn't wait to get back home," he says. "Going to Korea made me feel more American than I realized I was."

 

Linda Castellitto is the consulting creative director at BookSense.com.

A reluctant convert to the young adult genre, John Son resisted writing Finding My Hat, his debut novel, for almost 18 months. Son says his friend Amy Griffin, an editor at Scholastic's Orchard Books imprint, was working on a new line of titles called First…

Fiction

Peter Carey

You would think that a novelist who has twice won the prestigious Booker Prize (and seems a reasonable candidate for a third, given the breathtaking accomplishment of his newest novel, My Life as a Fake) would be set for life. Especially when one of those novels – Oscar & Lucinda – was adapted into a popular movie. And when the remaining novels in his exceptional body of work have been published to critical acclaim here in the U.S., in Great Britain and in Australia, where he was born and lived most of his life before moving to the U.S.

But such are the vagaries of literary fortune that Peter Carey found himself driving over the George Washington Bridge some time ago telling his wife, theater director Alison Summers, that they faced a situation in which they had half as much money coming in as they had expected. Not a brilliant prospect when you live in New York’s Greenwich Village and have two growing boys to raise and educate.

"A prize really does do something," Carey says during a call to his office in the Village, "and guarantees nothing." Carey retains his Australian accent and speaks with energy and good humor. "Nothing is guaranteed if you do this sort of writing. You have a silly idea and you spend three years pursuing it and you can’t guess whether people will like it or hate it or whether it will sell or not sell."

Of course Carey’s newest "silly idea" – inspired by the events of the Ern Malley hoax (a literary scandal in Australia in the 1940s), pursued into a devastating dead end, then revived in a burst of creative ventriloquism – turns out to be his riskiest and most pleasurable bit of storytelling to date. But more on that in a moment.

To smooth out the economic rough spots, Carey began teaching writing classes in New York, first at New York University and then at other schools in the city. This fall, he became director of the writing program at Hunter College. "It’s a serious job," he says, "full time in a way that still permits me to write every day."

It also permits him to run things – Hunter’s literary reading series, for example – his own way. "I’m the most easily bored man on Earth," he says, "and, frankly, if I’m going to run a reading series I want to have things I want to listen to."

In his own writing, Carey is not only an accomplished stylist but a keen observer of life. There is, for example, the remarkable letter he wrote to the literary editor of The Observer shortly after the September 11 terrorist attack. In it he describes hearing the first plane fly overhead, his subsequent anxiety about the fate of his wife, who was at the World Trade Center when the attack occurred (and his relief at her lucky escape and return), and a remarkable nighttime walk through the city with his 15-year-old son that leaves him filled with a sense of pride and belonging.

"I’m one of those people that feels he has two homes," says Carey, who has lived in New York for 13 years, and returns frequently to Australia. "I have a lot of friends here who I would sorely miss if I went back to Australia. And at the same time, I miss Australia. I think I’ve created a little problem for myself that really can’t be solved."

Maybe that is why Australia – particularly its complicated moral and cultural history – has so often been the subject of Carey’s novels. My Life as a Fake, too, has Australia as a starting point. That is, the story within the story of this beautifully labyrinthine tale is an imaginative recasting of the real-life Ern Malley hoax.

But, Carey cautions, "This book is not about the Ern Malley hoax. It uses the Ern Malley hoax, I don’t mean to sound too grandiose, like Miles Davis uses Bye Bye Blackbird’ – to make something new. If the book has to be about anything, it’s about the power of imagination and the sort of magical thinking that novelists often have that if they write something, then maybe it will come true."

In Carey’s riff on the hoax story, a minor poet named Christopher Chubb is offended by the trendy experimentation in an Australian poetry journal. He invents a 24-year-old poet named Bob McCorkle and submits McCorkle’s tricked-up modernist poems for publication. When the fraud is exposed, the editor is humiliated, as Chubb has intended. And Bob McCorkle comes to life.

"When I started writing the book," Carey says, "my intention was to write in the first person from McCorkle’s point of view beginning with him being born in the backyard of a suburban house at the age of 24. I really love the beginning I wrote, but after six months I realized that no matter how much I sandpapered it or fixed sentences, I couldn’t make it work. So I had probably the worst day and night of my writing life. The next morning I woke up and thought, there is a story here and if it can’t work this way, then there must be another way."

Carey eventually discovered the voice of Sarah Wode-Douglass, the conflicted, spinsterish, middle-aged editor of London’s pre-eminent poetry magazine. It’s her voice that tells the story within which the other stories of the novel – "the Chinese boxes," as Carey calls them – unfold. On a trip to Malaysia in the 1970s, Wode-Douglass meets an aging Chubb, who teases her with new poems by Bob McCorkle, poems that seemed marked by genius. Obsessed with finding and publishing the remaining poems, Wode-Douglass begins a quest that takes her deeper into the mysteries of the imagination and the identity of the invented Bob McCorkle.

Carey says My Life as a Fake is "a weird book to talk about." And he’s right. No brief summary can do justice to the haunting beauty, the playfulness, the humor and the riveting storytelling of this masterful novel. In My Life as a Fake Carey brilliantly writes in accord with his belief that writers should be "people whose job it is to find a way to imagine something that they don’t know and make it real."

According to Carey, "When people ask that staggering, unnerving question, ‘Why do you write?’ I remember that when I started to write, I wanted to make something very beautiful that had never existed before. That’s the ambition. And the pleasure comes when one thinks one’s getting close to achieving that."

Alden Mudge writes from Oakland, California.

 

You would think that a novelist who has twice won the prestigious Booker Prize (and seems a reasonable candidate for a third, given the breathtaking accomplishment of his newest novel, My Life as a Fake) would be set for life. Especially when one of…

Gregg Easterbrook

Why money doesn’t make us happy An editor for The New Republic and The Atlantic, Gregg Easterbrook is known as a keen observer of modern culture. So it’s not surprising that he noticed a baffling quality in contemporary Americans despite our material wealth and relative well-being, a lot of us don’t feel content. In his new book, The Progress Paradox: How Life Gets Better While People Feel Worse, Easterbrook reveals that many people think the world is going downhill despite the fact that most objective measurements show the quality of life improving dramatically throughout the Western world. Living in a time of unequaled prosperity, able to afford ever more extravagant material goods, we think our parents had it better than we do. Why the discrepancy? BookPage asked Easterbrook to explain why so many people seem to see the glass as half-empty, rather than half-full.

A key point in your book is that money definitely cannot buy happiness. So why is it that we Americans are still obsessed with it? Everyone needs a certain amount of money. Beyond that, we pursue money because we know how to obtain it. We don’t necessarily know how to obtain happiness.

Should we really expect to “be happy”? Isn’t that a self-indulgent goal? Aristotle called happiness “the highest good.” The Framers of American democracy advocated “life, liberty and the pursuit of happiness.” Neither Aristotle nor the Framers were known for self-indulgence. All believed that happiness is a legitimate goal in life; perhaps, one of the reasons we are here. Does the 24-hour news cycle the constant reporting of crises make people worry more than they should about the world at large? There are many horrible problems and injustices that we really should worry about. But by showing us live coverage of every bad thing happening everywhere in the world, cable news makes life seem like it’s just an endless string of disasters when, for most people in most places today, life is fairly good.

You report that Americans have far more leisure time today than they did a century ago. If that’s true, why do many of us feel stressed and overloaded? “Leisure” time as researchers define it means the time when you are not being compelled to perform labor: paid labor, household labor or government-enforced participation in some activity. By that standard, we have far more leisure today than our grandparents did. Simultaneously, the rushing-around quotient of life keeps rising. If we have fewer hours under formal compulsion, but more hours rushing from here to there (or stuck in traffic attempting to rush), we can be stressed-out regardless of time trends.

It’s hard to be happy with a Honda Accord if your neighbor has a new BMW. On the other hand, isn’t there a positive side to keeping up with the Joneses in a free-market society? Doesn’t envy induce us to work harder? Seeing the BMW may make you feel unhappy, but, psychological studies show, obtaining the BMW would not make you happy! Envy and dissatisfaction come from lacking what others possess, but coming into possession of those things does not confer happiness. How many times have you bought something thinking it would make you happy, and found it does not? I call this “the revenge of the credit card.” Why is it important that we count our blessings? Count your blessings for selfish reasons! Psychological studies show that people who are aware of their blessings and feel grateful for them even if there are many problems in their lives, as well live longer than non-grateful people, have fewer medical problems such as hypertension, earn more and achieve longer marriages. (Length of marriage correlates with happiness in life.) Your books says “it is standard to denounce materialism in others while lusting for it ourselves.” How about it have you been able to quell your own lust for “more stuff”? At this point I’m so sick of electronics that I want less of them! My wife, three kids and I live in a large comfortable house in a county with excellent public schools. If I did not have that, I would yearn for it intensely. Otherwise, I feel content in material terms. I actually drive a Honda Accord, and would not exchange it for a BMW.

Why money doesn't make us happy An editor for The New Republic and The Atlantic, Gregg Easterbrook is known as a keen observer of modern culture. So it's not surprising that he noticed a baffling quality in contemporary Americans despite our material wealth and relative…
History

Betsey Prioleau

"There was a time when I didn't know where my next husband was coming from," Mae West once said. This firecracker of a quote, one of many in her famously inflammatory arsenal, was more than just a show of verbal bravado. The shapely blonde from Brooklyn had a romantic life that would've exhausted most mortals, and she kept at it with a man less than half her age until well into her 70s.

Few women could quip like West without eating their words. Over the years, her white-hot sound bytes, not to mention her movies, have become touchstones of seduction. How did she do it? What separated West from the rest? (In 1935, with a salary of about $480,000, she was the highest-paid woman in America.) The starlet's secrets, and those of her sister temptresses, are revealed in Betsey Prioleau's Seductress: Women Who Ravished the World and Their Lost Art of Love.

An exuberant tribute to female physical, intellectual and spiritual power, Prioleau's book is a feast of language and ideas that spans centuries, drawing on mythology, history and religion to capture the classic seductress in all her varied incarnations, from the goddesses of ancient Greece to modern-day deities of glam. Seductress unzips these mistresses of amour in brief, sizzling biographies, but the volume is more than just a retrospective of history's hottest heroines. Filled with advice on how to stoke the fire of desire, it's also a guide for women who want to jump-start their own romantic lives.

Chronicling the conquests of Cleopatra and Colette, Lola Montez and Elizabeth I, Seductress is a provocative (and instructive) catalog of formidable femmes women with the kind of come-hither command that could make a compliant lap dog of the roughest puppy. Contrary to popular belief, according to Prioleau, this near-infallible ability to win men wasn't a matter of biology, chemistry or voodoo. It was simply a studied, practiced mastery of the field of eros an expertise that's within the grasp of every woman. "Inspiring and sustaining passion is a high art form that requires imagination and psychological savvy," says the author, who believes that "four-star character is the strongest aphrodisiac."

Prioleau was drawn to this piping-hot topic during graduate school. The daughter of a Southern belle, she grew up in Richmond, Virginia, becoming well-acquainted with the prissier traditions of Dixie. "Girls in those days without real career options had to seduce for their supper," she says. Disillusioned by the feminist movement's devaluation of women's sexuality, she began researching the stories of females who succeeded in both their personal and their working lives. Discovering that the classic enchantress someone who thrived on physical desire and professional achievement was a frequent figure in history, a recurring archetype who couldn't be kept down, but whose story was often misinterpreted or ignored, she decided to set the record straight with Seductress.

"Most of us have the wrong idea about the seductress," says Prioleau. "We automatically imagine brainless beach babes, servile man pleasers, or shark-hearted vamps with deep cleavages and dark wiles." True femme fatales, she explains, "demolish all of these cheap stereotypes. They're actually models of full empowerment women of clout and worth who succeeded in love and life."

Seductress provides ample evidence of this. Chapters like "Homely Sirens" and "Silver Foxes" feature unconventional females who can't be measured by the usual standards of beauty and youth. The seductresses here don't rely on physical wiles to bewitch, yet they are sexy, strong and accomplished women like George Sand, Edith Piaf and Prioleau's favorite, Pauline Viardot, a 19th-century opera star with a hypnotic voice and distinctly unlovely features, who netted Hector Berlioz and Ivan Turgenev, among others.

"They teach women they don't have to cave into traditional femininity," the author says of these legendary ladies. "Better still, they don't have to be beautiful or young, hold their tongues, play tricks, or teeter on Manolo Blahniks to captivate men." In her quest to feature inspiring, positive role models for readers, Prioleau found it necessary to eliminate history's more notorious man-killers from her narrative, and that's why some of the book's likeliest candidates for inclusion didn't make the cut. A few of the names you won't find listed in Seductress' index: Marilyn Monroe, Mata Hari and Jennifer Lopez, women whose private lives make the tabloids seem tame. "To qualify," Prioleau explains, "a seductress had to be a powerful woman who won across the board erotically, personally and vocationally and chose marvelous men. No blackguards, louts and losers allowed."

These days, according to the author, "we're witnessing a seductress revival," as screen queens Catherine Zeta-Jones, Jennifer Aniston and Reese Witherspoon captivate audiences while flourishing, not just as actors, but as wives and mothers. "Business and political potentates are no longer lonely spinsters in pin stripes," Prioleau adds. "They radiate feminine charisma and romantic happiness. Think of Oprah Winfrey, Arianna Huffington, Georgette Mosbacher. The list goes on." Make no mistake about it, Prioleau's book accentuates the positive, encouraging women to take command of and find liberation in their love lives, to view seduction as a form of self-expression. "The seductress's biggest lesson is the importance of cerebral lures," says the author. "The most powerful mental charm was, and is, the allure of a big, forever-interesting person. That's the best news for 21st century women."

"There was a time when I didn't know where my next husband was coming from," Mae West once said. This firecracker of a quote, one of many in her famously inflammatory arsenal, was more than just a show of verbal bravado. The shapely blonde from…

Memoir

Marshall Chapman

When the family maid took seven-year-old Marshall Chapman to see Elvis Presley in concert, the wide-eyed daughter of a prosperous Spartanburg, South Carolina, textile family formed a permanent, private bond with the rock ‘n’ roll pioneer. But unlike the thousands of swooning, screaming prepubescent debs-to-be in attendance at that 1956 matinee, the impish blonde with the iron resolve didn’t simply long to marry the King—she wanted to be him.

That was a popular daydream in those heady early days of rock if you were male, that is. Young ladies of Chapman’s breeding, however, were expected to matriculate in the finest finishing schools, there to master the homemaker’s arts and become wives, mothers and members of the Junior League.

Chapman recalls the moment she firmly pointed her red cowboy boots down the road less traveled.

"One of the most important decisions I ever made was telling everybody I was going to Vanderbilt University because it was in Nashville, and this is where I live now," she says by phone from Music City. "My parents didn’t want me to go there; they wanted me to go to a Virginia school like Hollins or Sweet Briar or Agnes Scott in Atlanta, and they took me to all of those schools." Parents James and Martha Chapman naturally feared their second of four children would fall in with the wrong element in Nashville artists, musicians, free thinkers and such.

Chapman, for one, was counting on it.

Three decades later, with eight albums, a few broken hearts and a stage career that flirted with fame behind her, Chapman recounts her wilder days in Goodbye, Little Rock and Roller, a fond if fragmented look back at the more-or-less ongoing party that was the 1970s. Using a dozen of her songs as entry points, the rocker reveals the funky, drug-laced craziness behind the music. A succession of "speed freak boyfriends" contributed to the emotional wear-and-tear that eventually led her to check herself into an Arizona treatment center in 1988, at age 39. She retired from the road for good five years ago.

But it was one wild ride while it lasted.

When Chapman left Vandy and strapped on her electric guitar, she was an imposing figure: she topped six feet in her cowboy boots, unleashed an untamed mane of blond curls and belted out "grrrl rock" long before Patti Smith or Chrissie Hynde.

Nashville songwriters such as Waylon Jennings, Bob McDill and Harlan Howard frequently sat in on her sets at the Jolly Ox, where Chapman defied convention by ignoring the Top 40 in favor of headier tunes by Willie Nelson, Kris Kristofferson and John Prine. When Jennings and Nelson hit it big with college audiences, Chapman found herself swept up in the Outlaw movement.

"I was like the kid sister," she chuckles. "When I describe myself as Gidget goes to Nashville, it was really true. I was like, Oh wow, these guys actually think about their lives and write songs about it!’ I wasn’t writing songs when I first met them." Nashville at the dawn of the ’70s provided ample material for budding songwriters; the challenge was remembering it the next day. Chapman wrote her first significant song, "Rode Hard and Put Up Wet," one summer morning in 1973 after awakening facedown in her front-yard vegetable patch clad only in her underpants, following a boozy night watching John Prine at a well-known Nashville nightspot, the Exit/In.

If female rock and rollers were scarce in those days, female songwriters were unheard of.

"It was almost like a clubhouse with a big sign on the door that says No Girls Allowed," she recalls. "I ran with these guys I would swarm’ with them as Waylon used to put it and I was accepted and would sit around with them at the guitar pulls, but nobody would give me a publishing deal." Undeterred, Chapman started her own publishing company, Enoree Music, named after the river that flowed through her family’s textile plant.

Chapman’s solo albums met with critical praise but dismal sales. No one, it seems, could quite categorize this Amazonian blues-rock-guitar-slinging-Farrah-Fawcett-bad-girl-songwriter.

There was another way to make it in Nashville, of course. "There were women who had boyfriend producers. I was just adamant about never having a boyfriend be my producer, and now looking back upon it, I think I might have hit the big time if I had gone along with that. But I didn’t want to lose control of my music." Chapman finally crashed the boy’s club in 1984 when newcomers Sawyer Brown recorded one of her songs.

"When my first hit, Betty’s Bein’ Bad,’ was in the list for CMA Song of the Year, out of 120 songs, two were written by women Betty’s Being Bad’ and Rosanne Cash’s Hold On.’ When you see that ballot today, it’s about half and half. That is an amazing change." Chapman is a familiar figure to fans of chief Parrothead Jimmy Buffett; she has played in his Coral Reefer Band, toured as his opening act and even holed up on a sailboat in Key West writing "The Perfect Partner" for his Last Mango in Paris album. "I love Buffett. He’s one-third musician, one-third Huey Long and one-third P.T. Barnum," she says.

Chapman credits novelists Lee Smith and Jill McCorkle, with whom she co-wrote the musical revue Good Ol’ Girls, for encouraging her to write her unorthodox memoir. "The word autobiography makes me cringe, just the presumptuousness of it: I was born a poor sharecropper’s child,’ whatever," she says.

Had she become a major star, it’s doubtful her memoir would have been half as revealing. Chapman figures the odds are good she wouldn’t even have lived to write it.

"Rosanne [Cash] has a T-shirt that says, Fame Kills.’ I think I’d probably be dead if everything that I wanted to happen at the time had happened back in the late ’70s because I didn’t know how to take care of myself out there. I was way too open. Fame would have eaten me alive."

Jay MacDonald, a writer in Oxford, Mississippi, has been on the bus with Willie Nelson but insists he didn’t exhale.

 

 

When the family maid took seven-year-old Marshall Chapman to see Elvis Presley in concert, the wide-eyed daughter of a prosperous Spartanburg, South Carolina, textile family formed a permanent, private bond with the rock 'n' roll pioneer. But unlike the thousands of swooning, screaming prepubescent debs-to-be…

Mystery & SuspenseMystery

Jilliane Hoffman

A victim turns the tables on her attacker in a powerful new thriller If Jilliane Hoffman’s fiction debut, Retribution, seems sinfully rich in the stuff we crave most in a good legal thriller, it’s because she prepared the book from scratch using only the finest ingredients: one part Thomas Harris, one part James Patterson and one part John Grisham. The result is a psychological nail-biter that moves at lightning speed through a series of jury-jolting courtroom revelations. The former Miami prosecutor had a killer idea for a psychological thriller about a rape victim who ends up prosecuting her assailant. At her husband’s suggestion, Hoffman left her high-profile dream job as the regional legal advisor to the Florida Department of Law Enforcement, the state equivalent of the FBI, to stay at home in Fort Lauderdale with their two children, ages four and six, and write fiction.

While the book-buying public will deliver its verdict shortly, Retribution has already been found guilty of movie blockbuster potential by Warner Bros., which paid seven figures for the film rights. Five top actresses Jodie Foster, Julia Roberts, Nicole Kidman, Renee Zellweger and Gwyneth Paltrow are vying for the lead. Production is expected to begin this summer.

Pardon Hoffman for being a bit thunderstruck at her beginner’s luck. After all, she had never written more than a legal brief before creating Retribution.

“What a week I had! The book was auctioned off on a Monday, it was sold in five countries by Wednesday, and then it was sold to Warner Brothers on Friday. I keep thinking I’m probably going to die a very violent death because I had such a great year. Somebody should not have that much good luck in one year.” Early buzz hints that Retribution could be this year’s Presumed Innocent, Scott Turow’s 1987 debut that cast a similarly jaundiced eye toward our often-fallible justice system.

The novel opens with the brutal rape of Chloe Larson, a New York law student who is about to marry and embark on a promising legal career. Her attacker, who wears a clown’s mask, is never found and continues to stalk her, derailing her life.

Fast-forward a decade. Chloe has reinvented herself as C.J. Townsend, a hard-nosed Miami state attorney and go-to prosecutor in high-profile capital cases whose past remains her closely guarded secret. When police apprehend a serial killer dubbed Cupid by the media (his m.o. involves surgically removing the hearts of his female victims), C.J. can’t wait to prosecute him until she hears his voice in court and, to her horror, finds herself face to face with her long-ago assailant.

Can she ethically proceed with the prosecution? Should she come clean about her relationship to the accused and risk having the case reassigned to a less competent prosecutor? Or, if she keeps her secret, can she hold herself together long enough to win a conviction? It’s a tasty dilemma, the first of several in this well-plotted page-turner that culminates in a surprise ending that will leave readers analyzing C.J.’s choices for days to come.

“That’s exactly what I was after,” Hoffman admits. “I didn’t want to have a happy ending. I wanted it to spur discussion.” Hoffman had a tough jury of one to satisfy: herself. “I wanted to make sure that it was real. I can’t stand reading a legal book and I get to a part and think, this would never happen and that would never happen and medically that couldn’t happen.” C.

J. Townsend bears much in common with her creator. Although Hoffman has never been a victim of rape, she has worked closely with victims of domestic violence and prosecuted serial rapists.

“I’ve had many a rape victim tell me their story, and as a female, if you close your eyes and think about what it might be like, you can envision it,” she says. Hoffman defends her decision to open the novel with the brutally believable rape and its even creepier aftermath. “The rape had to be such a brutal act in order for you to understand her trauma in getting over it and her need for revenge,” she says. “When you can feel the terror that the character has gone through, I think you can really empathize with the decisions she has to make later on.” Retribution also pits two women lawyers C.J. and defense attorney Lourdes Rubio against each other in what has been a male-dominated genre. “I had scenes in my head of a conflict between two females over something that would unite females and yet tear them apart. It sounds strange but it seemed like rape was one of those issues that only women could really experience a certain way, and yet if you put them on opposite ends of the same issue, it would make interesting dynamics.” Could Hoffman ever envision herself crossing the aisle and defending the accused? “I could if they were innocent, but you can’t go forward with a defense based on that premise,” she says. “Maybe I’m jaded by the system, but I couldn’t use my skills to get somebody off, then subsequently find out that they were truly guilty. It just seems to go against everything that I believe in.” With a hefty movie deal in pocket and a sequel already in the works, it seems likely that Hoffman’s future court appearances will be strictly confined to jury duty. Jay MacDonald is a writer based in Mississippi.

A victim turns the tables on her attacker in a powerful new thriller If Jilliane Hoffman's fiction debut, Retribution, seems sinfully rich in the stuff we crave most in a good legal thriller, it's because she prepared the book from scratch using only the finest…
FictionWomen's Fiction

Elisabeth Robinson

Elisabeth Robinson knew she would eventually write something about her sister not because of the way she died, but because of the way she lived. She could have written a memoir, but it wouldn't have had a comic outlet. She might have written a screenplay, since she has written several others. Yet, that form felt too confining. Instead, Robinson ended up creating a terrific novel, The True and Outstanding Adventures of the Hunt Sisters.

"It's somewhat autobiographical in that my sister went through sort of what happens in the book," Robinson says, explaining that her sister died of leukemia in 1998.

"She always had been the idealistic one, and I was always the sort of crabby, cynical one," Robinson says by phone from her New York apartment. "When she was diagnosed, she didn't change, and I was kind of amazed at that. And after she died, I was even haunted by that. How could she possibly think the world is beautiful when such unfair, terrible things happen?"

How, indeed? And how could Robinson write an entertaining novel about a tragic and untimely death? Yet, Hunt Sisters is by turns a touching and hilarious reading experience. The secret lies in its lead character, Olivia Hunt, Robinson's sassy equivalent who tells the whole story through her letters. A screenwriter and producer recently fired by Universal Pictures, Olivia is working on the fourth draft of her own suicide note when the call comes that her 28-year-old sister back in Shawnee Falls, Ohio, has real trouble leukemia.

"All your life you try to imagine what bad news sounds like," Olivia writes in a letter to her childhood friend, Tina, "but when you actually hear bad news, it simply makes no sense; it's like being told the definition of a black hole by a physicist, directions by a local, the evidence of God by a priest." Hoping for the best, Olivia flies home. There, it becomes her job to prop up her mother and father, and try to make up for all the times she was a less than stellar big sister to Madeleine. Simultaneously, Olivia is trying to rekindle a romance with her ex-boyfriend Michael, and to bring to production a long-dormant film version of Cervantes' Don Quixote. Robinson herself once worked on a Don Quixote film project with Robin Williams, but it never got made. "It's one of the most impossible movies to make," she explains. "It's perfect here because the theme of Don Quixote Does courage require a craziness? Is courage a form of delusion? dovetails with Madeleine's optimism and idealism."

Robinson decided to write the novel in letters after her mother sent her some of the family's real-life correspondence she had found in the attic. The author discovered they had an inherent drama because of what was not there. She liked the form, and readers will, too.

Olivia says what we would like to. To the boyfriend: "I've decided I like writing to you precisely because you don't respond. You're like a dog that way. A great listener. Man's best friend."

To her mom: "Read that folder I put together, particularly the stuff I highlighted. And I implore you to get a prescription for Xanax. Don't be anxious about taking anti-anxiety drugs; you won't become an addict."

To Madeleine: "A man of medicine, a healer, should not do his ICU rounds in black Bruno Magli slip-ons, the kind OJ wore when he sliced off his wife's head."

To a former colleague: "I guess you weren't in film school the day they taught that lesson about being nice to everyone just in case one day you fall from your totally undeserved place of power."

Letters telling off doctors, boyfriends and former colleagues amount to wish-fulfillment for Robinson. A screenwriter with credits on such award-winning films as Braveheart and Last Orders, she worked in Hollywood for years, and her send-up of the entertainment business is dead-on.

Robinson's film career began in New York, where she scouted books to make into movies. But her love of writing started even earlier, when she was growing up in the Detroit suburb where her parents still live. "I wrote my first story when I was eight," she says. "I only know that because the teacher mimeographed it and passed it out. It was about a turkey who hid in the closet because it didn't want to get eaten." Robinson wrote stories all through high school, but lost her nerve when she went to Oberlin, instead deciding to study philosophy and economics. After college, she headed for New York. Her big-haired, friendly sister, on the other hand, never left Michigan, married her hometown boyfriend and seemed on her way to living happily ever after when tragedy struck.

For the fictional retelling of her sister's experience, Robinson originally chose the title A Species of Happiness, taken from this quote by Samuel Johnson: "Hope is itself a species of happiness and perhaps the chief happiness this world affords." Robinson says she compared that quote with this one from her sister's cancer literature: "The prognosis for people with this cancer is dismal."

"I wanted to learn," the author says, "how you can feel hope in the face of something like this."

Robinson admits to being nervous about all the favorable advance publicity her book has received, including blurbs in major magazines. "I was just talking to a friend of mine about the movie Lost in Translation," she says. "I saw it before it got all the publicity, and I liked it. But I wonder how much I could have liked it if I had been told ahead of time, 'You're going to like it.'"

Not a bad problem to have. Madeleine would tell her to quit worrying.

 

Anne Morris is a writer in Austin, Texas.

Elisabeth Robinson knew she would eventually write something about her sister not because of the way she died, but because of the way she lived. She could have written a memoir, but it wouldn't have had a comic outlet. She might have written a screenplay,…

Fiction

Anne Tyler

It's not as if Anne Tyler's life is a closed book. Curious readers can find 25-year-old interviews with her on the Internet. They can learn that she was born in Minneapolis in 1941, that writer Reynolds Price helped launch her career as a novelist while she was studying Russian at Duke University, that she married Iranian-born psychiatrist Taghi Mohammad Modarressi and raised a family, that her 11th novel, Breathing Lessons, won the 1988 Pulitzer Prize for fiction, that after all these years she still lives in Baltimore, Maryland. Readers can discover all these details and still be left wondering what this actually reveals about Tyler's deeply satisfying, deceptively simple novels or the woman who writes them.

The problem with knowing Anne Tyler is that she seems determined to resist our desire to make her a star, a personality. She doesn't publicly opine and pronounce. In fact, she rarely even appears in public. Anne Tyler actually seems to want her novels—her avowedly non-autobiographical novels—to speak for themselves.

"I'm too shy for personal appearances, and I've found out that anytime I talk about my writing, I can't do any writing for many weeks afterward," Tyler tells BookPage via e-mail. Tyler asks that I emphasize that we have corresponded rather than spoken; she doesn't want to seem inconsistent when she turns down others who ask for personal interviews. "Thank goodness the people at Alfred A. Knopf have always been understanding about that. I think it must be very hard to be one of the new young writers who are urged to put themselves forward when it may be the last thing on earth they'd be good at."

What Tyler herself has always been particularly good at is depicting the fullness of life lived on a human scale. Her characters are not—and do not aspire to become—members of the glitterati or the literati. They rarely stray far from their Baltimore roots. Their dramas are the commonplace dramas of family and community life. Tyler's great art has been to illuminate her characters' lives with wry wit and insight, not to exalt them to some larger, brighter stage.

Tyler's remarkable abilities are on full display in her 16th book, The Amateur Marriage. Quite simply, this new novel ranks among Tyler's best to date. It tells the story of Michael Anton and Pauline Barclay, who meet by accident in a Baltimore neighborhood at the outbreak of World War II, marry hastily, raise a family and live with the consequences of an unhappy marriage. The novel follows their lives into old age, ending shortly after another national cataclysm, the 9/11 terrorist attacks.

"The Amateur Marriage grew out of the reflection that of all the opportunities to show differences in character, surely an unhappy marriage must be the richest," Tyler writes. "I didn't want a good-person-bad-person marriage, but a marriage in which solely the two styles of character provide the friction."

That we continue to like and care about both the flighty, emotional Pauline and the stolid, cautious Michael while their marriage falters and stalls is further proof of Tyler's uncommon talent for understanding and representing the interior lives of her characters.

Asked to comment more generally on her understanding of successful marriages, however, Tyler writes that she'd "feel presumptuous making any general pronouncements on the subject." Still, Tyler affirms that the mismatch in her fictional marriage is not due simply to Michael's and Pauline's opposite temperaments. "I think most marriages are made up of any number of opposites," she writes, "spenders marrying savers and cool-natured people marrying warm and so forth. (Maybe we are all trying to atone for deficiencies in our own characters.) Why Michael and Pauline had so much trouble with their own differences seems to me a very individual matter related specifically to those two people and to no one else in the world. That's what makes human beings so mysterious, and such endlessly entrancing material for novelists."

Tyler's account of Pauline's and Michael's unhappy marriage is not without additional family dramas. Oldest daughter, Lindy, for example, who is independent and assertive from birth, leaves – simply disappears – creating, according to her brother, George, "the central mystery of their lives." Part of that mystery is how much responsibility Pauline and Michael bear for Lindy's flight. And part of Tyler's deeply satisfying artistry lies in the fact that she refuses to resolve the question with too-easy psychological analysis. "It seems to me that good novels celebrate the mystery in ordinary life, and summing it all up in psychological terms strips the mystery away," she writes.

In The Amateur Marriage, Tyler achieves her ends with astonishing economy. The novel carries readers through 60 years of the family's history in just 10 chapters. Dramatic events that would be central to other novelists' narratives – births, deaths, disappearances – happen offstage here, in the space between chapters. The novel gains much of its emotional power precisely from what is left unsaid and undescribed. Tyler, apparently at the height of her creative powers, knows exactly what to leave to her readers' imaginations.

"I had worried it would make me unhappy to write about such an unhappy subject," Tyler recalls, "but I hadn't counted on the sheer pleasure of the time trip it took me on, all the way back to the 1940s. What it felt like, really, was stepping inside an old photograph. Have you ever studied one of those black-and-white photos from the '40s – say a crowd scene where all the men wear hats and the women look so innocent – and wished to be there yourself? If you stare long enough at the details, you almost think you are there. That was my experience in writing the first chapter. At first it felt forced, a matter of cold research (what items would be sold in a drugstore back then? What cars would be driving past?), but gradually, as the characters became animated, I could imagine I was there with them – that the picture wasn't black-and-white anymore, but living color."

And isn't that all we really need to know? That Anne Tyler wants to present her characters in living color in all their rich emotional hues? And in The Amateur Marriage, that is exactly what she does.

Alden Mudge is a juror for the California book awards.

 

It's not as if Anne Tyler's life is a closed book. Curious readers can find 25-year-old interviews with her on the Internet. They can learn that she was born in Minneapolis in 1941, that writer Reynolds Price helped launch her career as a novelist…

Memoir

David Denby

On October 15, 2002, Sam Waksal, disgraced founder of ImClone, pal of Martha Stewart and the poster boy of corporate fraud, pleaded guilty to six federal charges. Sitting in the back of the New York courtroom, wondering why he had come, was Waksal’s onetime friend and admirer David Denby, movie critic for The New Yorker. In the end, Denby decided to step from the crowd and shake the hand of the man he calls "an American fool for the ages."

Denby’s handshake is the near-final act in a three-year drama that began when Denby’s wife, novelist Cathleen Schine, asked for a divorce and he set out to make a million dollars in the high-tech stock boom. Denby’s stated goal was to gain enough money to hold onto the New York apartment where the couple had raised their two sons. But as Denby makes abundantly clear in American Sucker, his month-by-month account of this period, he was also seized by the stock market mania that gripped much of the nation at that time. "When Cathy left, I became irrationally exuberant so as not to be dead," he writes, deftly borrowing Federal Reserve Chairman Alan Greenspan’s memorable cautionary phrase.

Denby is essentially a moralist, and his tone is often a sadder-but-wiser one. He argues with himself about the nature of greed, about values and materialism, about the new economy and what it might mean. He quotes St. Augustine and Thorstein Veblen as easily as Internet analyst Henry Blodgett (an acquaintance he cultivates), former SEC chair Arthur Levitt or the financial press. In between, he has a little to say about fatherhood, the life of a movie critic and, yes, even sex. There are moments when Denby overplays his narrative hand, but these are the forgivable lapses of a good and perceptive writer. Denby writes that his is a "commonplace American journey." To which I must respectfully say . . . balderdash. I mean, when was the last time you lost $900,000 in the stock market? No, we read American Sucker because it is a brighter, more dramatic story than our own. And we weep, probably with relief, perhaps with glee.

 

On October 15, 2002, Sam Waksal, disgraced founder of ImClone, pal of Martha Stewart and the poster boy of corporate fraud, pleaded guilty to six federal charges. Sitting in the back of the New York courtroom, wondering why he had come, was Waksal's onetime…

Children's & YA

Zizou Corder

His name is Charlie Ashanti, a.k.a. Lionboy. He talks to cats, he moonlights in a circus, he saves his parents from kidnappers and very soon he’ll be known to young readers throughout the world. Charlie’s story, told in the new novel Lionboy, is an unassuming tale full of heroics and adventure, all created from the bedtime stories shared by adult author Louisa Young and her 10-year-old daughter, Isabel Adomako Young. Writing together under the penname Zizou Corder, the dynamic writing duo is taking the U.K. and the literary world, it seems by storm. Their extended tale of adventure, intended as a trilogy, has been compared to J.K. Rowling’s Harry Potter series. The film rights to the book have already been snatched up by Steven Spielberg’s DreamWorks company, and the book is set to be published in 33 languages. The mother-daughter team, who live in London, recently took a break from their busy schedule to answer a few questions for BookPage about their creative process and their whirlwind success.

BookPage: What was your initial inspiration for the stories of Charlie and his adventures?
Louisa Young: Isabel was my inspiration. She said, tell me a story, and I said, OK, what about? And she said, a naughty little boy called Charlie. We used to tell each other stories all the time when she was little. She’d want a story, and I’d make her do half the work.

In the book, Charlie joins a circus. Have either of you had the desire to run away to the circus?
Louisa: Oh yes. When I was a teenager there was a fantastic outfit called Le Grand Magic Circus, full of incredibly handsome French and Italian hippies with long curls and satin trousers. I just adored them, and desperately wanted to be one of them. Real circuses though are different. I don’t like the performing animals thing. In fantasy it is beautiful and exciting, but not in reality. It’s just sad.

I’ve read that both of you are allergic to cats. Why, then, did you choose cats to be such an important element in the book?
Isabel: We didn’t choose them, they just arrived.

Louisa: There’s a lot less decision-making involved in writing stories than people expect. Half the time stuff happens, characters do stuff, and you haven’t the faintest idea why or where it came from.

What kind of cat is your favorite?
Louisa: The kind that doesn’t poop in our garden. Otherwise I love the Iberian lynx, a wildcat which still survives just in Spain. It has the most charming ears. And it lives in the wild in Europe, which is a pretty extraordinary achievement, given what’s happening to so many wild animals.

Isabel: The cats in our street Missy and Freddy. They’re just ordinary cats.

Are you excited about having your story made into a movie?
Louisa: It is really exciting to think that our finished product now becomes somebody else’s raw material. At the moment it’s all in the future, and we have no idea what they’re going to do with it. But our producers made the Austin Powers movies, and Memento; and DreamWorks made Shrek, and the screenwriter wrote Edward Scissorhands and The Secret Garden, so we’re in really good hands. People say, oh, what if they ruin your book? To which we just reply, the book is fine! Look, there it is on the shelf. It’s fine! Isabel: Someone said you shouldn’t get excited about a film till you’re getting dressed to go to the premiere because up until then you don’t know if it’s really going to happen. But I’m really excited already.

How has writing this book together affected your mother/daughter relationship?
Louisa: Well, it hasn’t ruined it. We’re still talking to each other. Plus, it lets us go off on lovely trips together to meet our foreign publishers.

Do you ever have creative differences?
Isabel: Yes. Mum wants to kill one of the characters and I won’t let her.

 

 

His name is Charlie Ashanti, a.k.a. Lionboy. He talks to cats, he moonlights in a circus, he saves his parents from kidnappers and very soon he'll be known to young readers throughout the world. Charlie's story, told in the new novel Lionboy, is an…

Memoir

John Pollack

Orange crates sealed with bumper stickers float, but not for long. So John Pollack discovered when he built his first boat at age six. Far from being discouraged, the young boy decided that someday, he’d build a boat from something that couldn’t sink: corks. Over the next 25 years, Pollack pursued other dreams, working as a White House speechwriter and a foreign correspondent in Spain, but he never stopped saving corks. His new book, Cork Boat, is a lively, memorable account of the attempt to make his dream a reality.

The Cork Boat project began in earnest in 1999. "I wanted to start the new century with a big project, and the time seemed ripe to launch the boat," Pollack tells BookPage over the phone from his New York City apartment. He’d found a business partner in Garth Goldstein, an architectural student whose design expertise would be crucial to the boat’s success. Realizing they’d never save enough corks on their own, Pollack and Goldstein printed out flyers and handed them out to local restaurants and bars, asking them to save their corks for the project. Pollack was met with one of two reactions: immediate excitement and support, or a blank stare. Neither fazed him. "If you’re building a cork boat, you can’t take yourself too seriously, because it’s such a goofy project. And I think that if you can laugh at yourself, other people are willing to laugh with you."

To build the boat, Pollack and Goldstein designed a honeycomb "cell" of corks rubber-banded together in the shape of a hexagon. These cells would be bound together to form logs, which in turn would construct the Viking-like ship. To help band the corks together—first at Pollack’s kitchen table, then in the garage of Goldstein’s rented house, soon dubbed the Mount Pleasant Boat Works—Pollack used his way with words to recruit friends and neighbors, holding boat-building parties late into the night. He solicited help from the California-based Cork Supply, USA, which generously donated many of their test corks to help Pollack and Goldstein collect the 165,000 corks that they would need to complete the project. Still, building the boat was much more complicated than Pollack had imagined.

"The most unexpected aspect of the whole project was how hard it was. There were several times where I thought, this is impossible. And there were several times when I felt like quitting. My mom was instrumental in saying, ‘you can’t quit, not now if you do you’ll regret it for the rest of your life.’ And mom was right."

The hard work of so many people paid off when, in April of 2002, Cork Supply called with a proposal: would Pollack and Goldstein be willing to come to Portugal in June and sail the boat down the Douro River? It wasn’t the wine country route that Pollack had originally envisioned, but he enthusiastically agreed. He and Goldstein spent the next two months in furious production, putting finishing touches on the boat and correcting problems they’d noticed during the boat’s first launch on the Potomac the previous October. But once again, the difference between dreams and reality gave the team a wake-up call. The trip, far from the idyll Pollack had imagined, "ended up being 17 days of hard rowing," he admits ruefully. "But the struggle made it all the more worthwhile; if it had been easy, it wouldn’t have been so meaningful."

Pollack’s evocative description of the ups and downs of his remarkable journey creates an unusual memoir of one man’s struggle to live a childhood dream. He hopes it will inspire others to do the same. "One of the reasons I wrote Cork Boat was because I wanted to story to live. Years from now, someone’s going to be looking for a book to read, and they’ll see Cork Boat, pull it off the shelf and read the story, and the journey will continue."

Orange crates sealed with bumper stickers float, but not for long. So John Pollack discovered when he built his first boat at age six. Far from being discouraged, the young boy decided that someday, he'd build a boat from something that couldn't sink: corks.…

FictionWomen's Fiction

Jennifer Crusie

For romance novelist Jennifer Crusie, inspiration for a new book is as inexplicable as love itself. "I can’t tell you where my ideas come from," says the Ohio resident, whose sharp wit and keen insight into human nature are showcased in such best-selling titles as Fast Women and Faking It. "They just show up." The author of 15 books, Crusie has learned to trust her instincts, knowing better than to dismiss those "aha!" moments, no matter how or where or when they appear. "If something comes knocking at the door," she says, "I let it in."

From lovable, flawed men to a mother who counts every celery stick that passes her lips, colorful characters abound in Crusie’s new novel, Bet Me. In a word, these characters are real. At the story’s center is Min Dobbs, a smart, spirited insurance executive who forever laments her ample body’s swerves and curves. Society’s obsession with thinness is a hot button for Crusie, and one she pushes frequently. "American culture is so soaked with the ideal of feminine beauty being about 40 pounds underweight," Crusie says. "Min is healthy, with a good attitude, but every once in a while she gives into the pressure and begins to think she’s fat."

From the start, Crusie tackles the weight issue with characteristic levity. When Min tries to make chicken marsala without olive oil, the results border on the inedible. Crusie’s message is clear: in cooking, as in romance, there’s no substitute for the real thing. "Cooking and love are very similar," she says, "You invest a lot of time in each, and you get out of it what you put into it." On a deep level, Min’s repeated efforts to render a low-cal version of the rich Italian dish are attempts to deny who she really is—a vibrant, full-bodied woman.

In Bet Me, handsome Calvin Morrisey is not smitten with Min at first sight; he only notices her striking blond and redheaded friends. When he asks her out, the cynic in Min suspects it’s simply to win a wager placed by two of his pals (that’s the "bet" in Bet Me). But as Cal falls in love, he begins to see Min as beautiful. While his transformation may seem like a fantasy to some women, Crusie insists such men really exist, and that finding them isn’t as difficult as pop culture would have us think. "A lot of men may be trained by society to go for the Victoria’s Secret model," says Crusie. "But let’s face it: they don’t marry the Victoria’s Secret model."

Though praised by critics for her wicked wit, Crusie hardly considers herself the queen of quips. "I’ve never deliberately written to be funny—nobody slips on a banana peel in my books," she says. "I think my characters just have a particular kind of sense of humor. They use it the way a lot of people do, to cope with the absurdities of life." When people make a list of things they seek in a partner, a sense of humor is always in the top five, says Crusie. "Instinctively people know that those with an ability to see the humor in a situation are mentally sound; they can roll with the punches."

Frank feedback from longtime friend and critique partner Valerie Taylor helps Crusie keep her own life—and prose—in perspective. "We’ve been working together for so long now, I don’t know if I could write a book without her," she says. Taylor’s assessments can be both brilliant and blunt. "There was a sentence in Bet Me, where Valerie wrote in the margin: ‘Who wrote this, your reptile brain?’ It was really a bad sentence, and I thought: ‘Oh hell, she’s right.’"

Recently, Crusie has also teamed up with her 29-year-old daughter Mollie, a production assistant in the film industry. The two hope to adapt one of Crusie’s books into a screenplay. The business partnership is worlds away from Mollie’s college days, when she’d sit around with her friends, laughing as they read steamy passages from her mother’s books. "Her friends would say, ‘Your mom wrote that . . . that’s so cool!’" remembers Crusie.

Beyond those well-phrased fits of passion, what makes romance novels so popular? It’s the one genre where you are guaranteed to find a woman at the center, says Crusie. "Romance novels are an affirmation, an antidote to all that stuff on TV, where the woman is the assistant D.A., and the story is really about the D.A., who’s a man. Or the woman gets kidnapped and raped and tortured." In those shows, even when a woman is in a position of authority, they still make her a bimbo on the side. "That doesn’t happen in romance. She’s never on the side. She may be a bimbo," says Crusie with a laugh, "but it’s her story."

A self-proclaimed "narrative junkie," Crusie advises aspiring romance writers to read everything they can get their hands on. "Story is so phenomenally interesting," says Crusie, who holds two master’s degrees in English literature and has completed everything but her dissertation in the Ph.D. program at Ohio State. "The first thing you say when you sit down with somebody you haven’t seen in a while is, ‘tell me what’s happening.’ It’s so basic to the human condition." Among Crusie’s favorite writers: Dorothy Parker, Margery Allingham, Georgette Heyer and Terry Pratchett.

Crusie is currently at work on a murder mystery in the spirit of Agatha Christie (she wrote her first master’s thesis on women in mystery fiction), and a ghost story. While her tales may center on specters or suspense, Crusie will always write through the prism of romance. "It’s such an elastic genre, you can put anything into it," she says. And there’s never a shortage of material about the rocky road to love. "Dating is so full of pitfalls," says Crusie. "That’s why it makes such good fiction fodder."

Allison Block writes from La Jolla, California.

 

For romance novelist Jennifer Crusie, inspiration for a new book is as inexplicable as love itself. "I can't tell you where my ideas come from," says the Ohio resident, whose sharp wit and keen insight into human nature are showcased in such best-selling titles as…

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