All Interviews

Meet your new best friend Sophie Applebaum of Surrey, Pennsylvania. She’s smart, insightful and outrageously funny. She’s also both self-assured and self-effacing (a rare and delightful combination). In other words, she’s someone you’d like to spend some time with and get to know better. Sophie is the latest creation of best-selling author Melissa Bank, of The Girls’ Guide to Hunting and Fishing fame. Like that runaway hit, The Wonder Spot is the kind of book that is so laugh-out-loud hilarious you’ll quote it to friends (wishing you could take credit for the witty one-liners). Composed of story-like sections, each focusing on an important point in Sophie’s life, The Wonder Spot displays wisdom as well as humor.

Speaking to Bank from her New York apartment, with her dog whining and the sounds of the city in the background, it’s hard not to think of her as interchangeable with Sophie. Bank has the same easy way about her, the same throaty laugh, that a reader imagines Sophie might have. After the huge success of Girls’ Guide, Bank says she felt an obligation not to disappoint readers with her second novel. My publisher didn’t pressure me, I wasn’t worried in the usual way. What worried me was that I’d earned the trust of readers, and I didn’t want to let people down, she says. With her gift for capturing the moment, Bank has returned with a book, dare I say, even better than the much-loved Girls’ Guide. When we’re first introduced to Sophie, she’s a preteen who already stands out from the pack. Bank captures perfectly what it feels like to be an outsider looking in. As the book progresses, over the course of two decades, we watch Sophie evolve as she comes into adulthood, and into her own. After attending an unimpressive college (she’s bright but not a stellar student), Sophie moves to New York where she teaches herself how to type, a Herculean endeavor, and lands a job in publishing and later advertising. She’s not the most ambitious employee, which somehow makes her even more endearing. (She tells a friend, The good thing about being nowhere in your career is that you can do it anywhere. ) We travel with her as she navigates the often perilous terrain of work and relationships, and relationships that need work. The Wonder Spot is as much the story of Sophie’s family as it is her own, and we see the Applebaums weather life’s ups and downs, experiencing their share of grief and happiness. Part of Sophie’s search for identity involves seeing her parents as people, apart from their role as mother and father. As an adolescent, Sophie feels that her mother is uniquely, painfully annoying. When being teased by the cool girls at school, known as the Foxes, Sophie says, I’d known my mother couldn’t help; she pronounced clique the French way, CLEEK, and would just tell me that the Foxes were jealous and ignore them. It is only later that she comes to know and appreciate her mother in a different way.

Generally girls and women are so much easier on their fathers than they are on their mothers, Bank observes. Sophie wants to be more like her father than her mother. Her father is so self-possessed . . . I don’t know, but I imagine that girls always have felt like they’d do anything not to be their mothers. In my generation there was almost a social mandate not to be like your mother, she says.

Of marriage, Bank muses, It’s not a goal anymore for women the way it once was. I think a lot of women still really do want to get married, but I think a lot of women also just want to find a good place in the world. Your life certainly isn’t over if you don’t get married. Sophie’s grandmothers wouldn’t agree and endlessly harasses Sophie about settling down, in scenes that are some of the funniest in the book. When asked if she was drawing from her own life, Bank says emphatically, I absolutely am. Grandmothers are supposed to be just loving bundles of appreciation; mine were nightmares. Bank also writes with sensitivity about relationships with friends. We see some pass through Sophie’s life while others stay. There’s no real mechanism to end a friendship, Bank says. It’s not like you break up easily with a friend. You both decide, well, we’re moving on. There’s something so uneasy about ending a friendship, especially with a childhood friend. One of the many refreshing things about The Wonder Spot is that it doesn’t follow a formula girl meets boy, girl and boy fall in love, boy and girl get married and live happily ever after. It’s more open-ended and true to life. The title of the novel refers to a Brooklyn diner that Sophie visits, but Bank was inspired by a postcard she came across almost 20 years ago. It was a card from the ’30s picturing a bench with a sign above it shaped like a glider, and the words Wonder Spot written on it. The sign offered an invitation to sit down in that place.

Bank explains, I like the whole concept of a wonder spot,’ and I feel like a lot of the stories are about that. There’s something that happens, or a revelation, where Sophie sees herself or sees what’s going on, or realizes something, or has a feeling of just belonging on the planet. She goes through so much trouble, those wonder spots’ are sort of what she gets as a reward. Bank notes that, throughout the novel, Sophie doesn’t have a religious identity, or one she gets from work, or from a boyfriend. It’s not about looking at yourself from the outside but about being yourself, the author says. It’s also about the connections we make with others, whether it be a family member, friend or romantic interest.

The Wonder Spot proves to be an apt title in another sense: Bank’s perfect marksmanship, her ability to hit the bull’s-eye, sometimes with just one turn of phrase, in her portraits of Sophie and those around her. It’s a pleasure to meet them all, especially Sophie, a keen observer of life’s absurdities and truths. Katherine Wyrick lives in Little Rock.

Do you suffer from CCR? Nick Hornby has for years.

Its symptoms include an inability to purge the opening guitar riffs to "Born on the Bayou" and "Fortunate Son" from your head, an irrational fondness for swamp-growled vocals and an involuntary humming of "Bad Moon Rising" with every full moon. Granted, living with CCR—Creedence Clearwater Revival—isn't all that debilitating. Still, when music is as much a part of your life as it is Hornby's, it's best to watch what you listen to, lest more malignant maladies such as Nellymylitis or Coldplay Syndrome get a foothold.

CCR is one of the running jokes in A Long Way Down, Hornby's fourth and most ambitious novel about four very different characters who happen to meet one New Year's Eve up on the roof of Toppers' House, a London apartment building favored for suicides. Standing in line to end it all are Martin, a washed-up morning talk show host whose star plummeted after a fling with an underage girl; Jess, the punk daughter of a government official; Maureen, a single mom chained 24/7 to the care of her severely disabled adult son; and JJ, the CCR-suffering American in London who's lost his band, his girl and his way.

Because each character narrates in turn the odd story of their unlikely friendship, their safe passage through this dark night of the soul and the days that follow is foreseen from the beginning. Along the way, however, we come to know and sympathize with them as they weigh the pros and cons of soldiering on or taking that long last step.

Considering life's biggest questions with great humor is Hornby's A-game. Although dark in subject, A Long Way Down is also downright hilarious and generous of spirit as these troubled souls work their way toward a tenuous truce with their respective demons.

"When I started the book, I could imagine this conversation where they would basically be saying in a rueful way, let's give it another six months," Hornby says by phone from London. "It seemed in lots of ways like a wonderful metaphor for how we all live, without articulating it. We sort of do get by on the basis of, let's give it another six months. There are lots of things that we're presented with that, if we'd known about them in advance, we would have run a mile, but in fact rather remarkably we absorb them into our lives and carry on anyway."

Hornby's own struggles have never been far from the surface of his novels. His 1995 debut, High Fidelity, featured a young man torn between his passions (chiefly rock music and Arsenal soccer) and the tedium of adulthood. His 1998 follow-up, About a Boy, was inspired by the life-altering birth of his first child Danny, who suffers from autism. His third novel, How to Be Good (2002), came out of the breakup of his marriage to Danny's mother. He and his ex still live close to one another in Highbury and trade off nights with Danny, now 12, whose disorder causes frequent sleep interruptions. Hornby donated proceeds from his 2001 literary anthology, Speaking with the Angel, to TreeHouse, a school for autism that Danny attends.

If you sense a certain melancholy undertone in Hornby's otherwise comic novels, it likely stems from his experiences with Danny.

"Yeah, I guess that's probably true," Hornby says. "I think that, as life gets on, it gets more complicated anyway, so I suspect that if it hadn't been Danny, it would have been something else, if you know what I mean, because you start to see that life can be hard for people."

There are pieces of Hornby in each of the four troubled souls who populate A Long Way Down. Through Martin, he explores the hollowness of celebrity; with Jess, he punches holes in the pomposity of the upper crust; in Maureen, he shares the emotional roller coaster of caring for a disabled son. But it's more than rock 'n' roll that ties the New Yorker pop music critic to the American rocker JJ. "With JJ, it's not really the music, it was the fear of never fulfilling my potential, which was with me when I was his age," he says. "I wanted to write about that fear of frustration."

Hornby looks on his present good fortune with humility and gratitude. Had he not broken through to fiction, he "might have remained a journalist on the sidelines or worse, a high school English teacher. I taught for two years in my mid-20s and I think the horror of that experience stays with me every single writing day," he laughs.

Instead, he's a best-selling author, respected music critic and a dad whose demeanor falls somewhere between his two onscreen personas, John Cusack in the film version of High Fidelity and Hugh Grant in About a Boy. "I think my natural personality is to be very gloomy and then make jokes about it," he admits. Though he's pleased with the movie versions of his novels, he has no interest in adapting his own work.

"I've spent three years on a book and then somebody asks you to write it again except leave everything out, it just seems like such an unattractive offer to me," he admits. He's currently at work co-writing an original screenplay with Oscar-winner Emma Thompson (Sense and Sensibility).

Whether his characters are at the end of their adolescence, the end of their marriage or the end of their rope, Hornby treats them all with the one quality he finds essential, in life and in art: mercy.

"I can't do that thing of crushing the reader; I mean, as a reader, I don't want to be crushed. And so many writers seem to think it's their personal duty to strangle all hope and life out of the person who's spending time with them. As I've gotten older, I've more and more come to value art that doesn't do that, whether it's music or cinema or books. I want some mercy."

Jay MacDonald leads a CCR support group in Oxford, Mississippi.

Contrary to what her readers insist upon believing, Terry McMillan is not perpetually holed up in some swank Jamaican love crib dreaming up novels while dreadlocked Rasta cabana boys cater to her every whim. If you want to know the truth, this Stella got her groove back years ago and went on with her life in much the same way the rest of us have, ferrying her son Solomon to endless youth soccer matches and worrying about the state of the world.

"I guess everyone was thinking that I was this hotshot jet-setter, this famous author whose books had been turned into films, oh jeepers creepers, and here I am getting up in the morning, taking my kid to school and picking up other kids and I’m at soccer practice twice a week. This is how a jet-set best-selling author lives," she says by phone from her home in the San Francisco Bay area.

McMillan understands how you might have gotten the wrong impression. Although she has only written six novels, two of them, Waiting to Exhale (1992) and How Stella Got Her Groove Back (1996), were made into hugely successful motion pictures that perfectly captured the loneliness and longing of the successful African-American woman. Now 53 and going through a messy divorce, McMillan has naturally moved on, even if the quintessential chick flicks her books inspired have trapped her in the curious time warp of their ongoing popularity.

"Waiting to Exhale alone, that was 13 years ago! I mean, my goodness, I was in my 30s and the concerns I had then . . . I mean, those women make me sick! They seem like such whiners, except for one, she says. But the thing was, at that time, there were so many women that I knew, myself included, who looked up and realized, gee whiz, what happened to those husbands we were supposed to be getting? Not only husbands, we didn’t even have dates! Back then, it was kind of important because we were in it, but then it kind of came and went. But they don’t let you forget! My goodness!"

In her new novel, The Interruption of Everything, McMillan meets midlife head-on with the same frank and funny honesty she previously brought to courtship, love and marriage. Marilyn Grimes, 44, wife and mother of three, is a restless empty nester dissatisfied with her suburban California life. She suspects her husband Leon, a drab workaholic engineer, of having an affair; his midlife crisis seems to have come with a new motorcycle instead of a convertible. Her Bible-misquoting, live-in mother-in-law Arthurine and geriatric poodle companion Snuffy are driving her crazy, her own mother Lovey is showing early signs of dementia, and her adopted sister Joy, a drug addict, can’t cope alone raising two kids in Fresno.

It’s a lot to carry for this sandwiched superwoman. What interrupts everything are the initial oh-no symptoms of menopause, followed quickly by news from her doctor that she’s pregnant. When Arthurine begins dating, Joy hits the skids and Leon announces he’s going to Costa Rica to get his groove back, Marilyn learns to exhale and let life help her for a change.

By turns touching and hilarious, The Interruption of Everything is a Left Coast Diary of a Mad Housewife for the baby boom generation.

McMillan didn’t experience a change of life pregnancy, but she certainly remembers when menopause came knocking eight years ago.

"I had gotten food poisoning, it was really, really hot, and a girlfriend of mine said, Terry, I don’t think it’s just food poisoning. It seemed like my vocabulary, I was swearing a lot more to compensate for words I couldn’t remember. I was thinking, wait a minute now, am I old enough for this to be happening? Apparently she was right," she says.

Much of McMillan’s work springs from her own life and her close-knit circle of family and friends who help each other through. " I don’t apologize for that," she admits. "In some ways, critics often want you to. I’m not trying to be Toni Morrison or Katherine Anne Porter or Virginia Woolf. I’m not trying to do anything except tell stories." Perhaps. But beneath the witty repartee and touching moments, McMillan’s stories simmer with a righteous anger at the state of the world today.

"I would say that I write out of frustration. If I were a witch, I would twitch my nose and fix it all and make things easier for all of us. That’s what’s underneath it," she says. Does she agree with Bill Cosby that the black middle class should do more to combat the problems that still plague the African-American community? "He’s probably fed up, she says. I mean, his kid was killed, murdered on the side of a freeway in Los Angeles. Never mind who did it, that’s neither here nor there, but in watching what has happened and not happened to African-American kids, at some point somebody has to be held accountable and responsible for some of this stuff. That’s where he’s coming from as an elder; he’s been watching. I agree with him, if you want to know the truth."

Like the strong, independent women in her novels, McMillan has been one tough but tender mother to Solomon, now a student-athlete at Stanford.

"I told my son growing up, Solomon, when you grow up, mom doesn’t care, it’s OK if you like boys or if you like girls. I don’t care what color they are. But the bottom line is, just don’t let them be dumb. That is my only criteria. If you bring a dumb one in, I’m not going to be as friendly. I’m serious. I said, I don’t think we’re the royal family and we don’t want to mix up the genes, but my goodness, you want something to be able to talk about."

Jay MacDonald writes from Oxford, Mississippi.