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On September 11, 2001, Jane Smiley was roughly 280 pages into a first draft of what would eventually become her 11th novel, Good Faith. In the aftermath of that day’s horrific events, the book she was working on "suddenly came to seem trivial," Smiley says during a call to her home outside of Monterey, California, where she has lived since moving from the Midwest in 1996 with her then husband and her children. My response was to take some time off and read novels that had come before. She started with The Tale of Genji, a novel written in 11th-century Japan by a woman of the Heian court, Murasaki Shikibu.

"I did it as a form of escape," Smiley says. "But serious novels don’t allow you to escape; instead they ask you to reconsider what you were thinking about in a new way. I found it incredibly efficacious to read The Tale of Genji within a few weeks of the World Trade Center attacks." Indeed, Smiley found the exercise so helpful that she decided to keep going. "By the time I had read a couple more novels, I thought, boy, I should keep track of this and start thinking about this as a project."

Smiley’s project became to read 100 novels that more or less spanned the history of novel writing. "I immediately realized that I was not qualified and also didn’t care to compile a One Hundred Best Novels list. What I really wanted to see was what a given 100 novels some of them famous, some of them obscure, some of them congenial, some of them uncongenial would teach me about the nature of the novel, so I let the list be constructed in a serendipitous way."

The result of Smiley’s reading and thinking is the astonishing Thirteen Ways of Looking at the Novel, a book that is interesting, provocative and insightful in so many ways that it is impossible to name or catalog them all. But, at the very least, even the most casual novel-reader is certain to find pleasure in dipping at random into Smiley’s 13th and final chapter in which she writes brief, knowledgeable, sometimes funny, often surprising essays on each of the 100 books she read.

"Certain books on the list really were revelations to me," Smiley says. "I loved them in every way and they were books that I hadn’t known of before. One of them was The Expedition of Humphry Clinker by Tobias Smollett, which was a great favorite of Charles Dickens. Another was Justine by the Marquis de Sade. It’s so much more interesting than you think it’s going to be. Yes, it’s pornographic but it’s also a political treatise. It’s fascinating politically; it’s fascinating artistically. I really enjoyed it, though I was shocked by it. And I thought The Once and Future King by T.H. White was a wonderful, wonderful book that ought to be revived."

In the other chapters of the book, Smiley explores with compelling energy what a novel is (answer, in brief: a lengthy, written, prose narrative with a protagonist) and who a novelist is (to begin with, a reader). She examines the history, psychology, morality and art of the novel; its blend of narrative forms and its relationship to human history. Thirteen Ways of Looking at the Novel also includes two brilliant chapters of advice for novel writers, three if you include her case history of the composition, publication and public reception of Good Faith, which she began working on again as her novel-reading project progressed.

Smiley, who is best-known for her Pulitzer Prize-winning novel A Thousand Acres and for Moo, her send-up of life at a large Midwestern university, is remarkably perceptive and generous in her views of other writers’ work. She doesn’t, for example, write about good and bad writers, but instead about congenial and uncongenial writers.

"All relationships that you have with authors are essentially instinctive," Smiley says in conversation. "They are forms of friendship or kinship that are based on something not quite conscious, some instinctive response to some quality of that person’s sensibility. Since reading a novel is essentially a private experience, who am I to say that while I love The Once and Future King and you love Ulysses, you’re wrong and I’m right?"

Which is not to say that Smiley avoids offering opinions on who she finds congenial (surprisingly, Daniel Defoe) and why (to oversimplify, because he was so adept at going from the practical to the spiritual and entering the consciousness of so many different types of characters) and who she finds less than congenial (Henry James, because "he thought he was the boss of his characters and his job was to control and dominate them.").

And while the book is in no way autobiographical, Smiley infuses it with the full range of her sensibilities -her concern for the craftsmanship of the novel, her politics, psychological insight and moral vision, and her aesthetic concerns, for example – the core values, so to speak, of who she is as a writer.

Ultimately the views that Smiley expresses in Thirteen Ways of Looking at the Novel offer readers and writers alike a path to liberation, primarily because Smiley believes there is no such thing as the perfect novel. "Every artistic form tends in one direction or another," Smiley says, "and the novel tends toward excess, toward compendiousness, toward being about everything. And excess and perfection don’t mix." Which of course means there’s room in the world for all kinds of novels.

More importantly, Smiley thinks that the novel remains central to democratic Western society. "You cannot read a novel and have an opinion about it without feeling yourself free and also as having a right to your own opinion," she says. "So I feel that the novel has radically democratized Western consciousness simply by giving us the opportunity in our own bedroom to say, oh, I agree with this. And I don’t agree with that." Remember that the next time someone asks you why you’re wasting your time with a novel.

Alden Mudge is a juror for the California Book Awards.

 

On September 11, 2001, Jane Smiley was roughly 280 pages into a first draft of what would eventually become her 11th novel, Good Faith. In the aftermath of that day's horrific events, the book she was working on "suddenly came to seem trivial," Smiley…

Like Saphira, the gem-scaled, fire-breathing, starter-home-sized dragon of his Inheritance fantasy series, teen publishing phenom Christopher Paolini is exceptionally bright, well spoken, irrepressibly optimistic and possessed of a quick wit that is swift to strike any hint of self-importance from his conversation. Not since Stephen King has the publishing world seen a wunderkind of his like, a rabid reader who, thanks in part to enlightened homeschooling in the idyllic setting of Paradise Valley, Montana, took up writing only after blazing through every fantasy novel in his local library. His journey from rural obscurity to cult hero is every bit as fantastic as the imaginary world of Alagaesia he creates.

"If I wrote a book where what's happened to me happened to a character, no one would believe it," Paolini says by phone. "People would literally say, where's the downside? Where's the conflict? There's nothing bad happening in this story! Fortunately, I've had my parents here to help not only keep the home environment safe and sheltered but also help deal with all the publicity and attention that comes with it."

Put yourself in Christopher's sneakers: he receives his high school degree at 15, passes on college to write his debut, Eragon, and at 18, self-publishes it through his parents' small publishing company. After promoting it at Northwest book fairs, Paolini suddenly receives a magical call from publishing house Knopf, whose best-selling novelist Carl Hiaasen had stumbled upon the book during a fly-fishing trip to Montana and loved it. Faster than you can say "Ahgrat ukmar" (that's Urgal for "It is done"), Eragon is hotter than dragon's breath; it sells 1.5 million copies in North America alone and remains on the New York Times bestseller list for 85 weeks. The film version, starring Djimon Hounsou, John Malkovich and Jeremy Irons, is being shot on location in Budapest for release in 2006.

Knopf has just published Eldest, book two in the Inheritance trilogy, with an announced first printing of 1 million copies, a stratospheric number for a "children's" book. This fall, Paolini, 21, and his 19-year-old sister Angela hit the book-tour road to adventure on their first trip to Europe. Angela, an aspiring screenwriter ("She's actually smarter than me," Paolini humbly allows), helped him invent languages for the dwarves, elves and beast-like Urgals from Old Norse and Teutonic sources. He thanked her by creating a character in her honor, Angela the Herbalist.

Eldest continues the saga of Eragon, a peasant boy whose life is changed forever when he discovers a lost and coveted sapphire-blue dragon egg. In book one, he raised the highly intelligent hatchling, named her Saphira, and began his apprenticeship under the ancient sage Brom to become a Dragon Rider after the forces of evil King Galbatorix destroyed his home and killed his uncle. In Eldest, Eragon travels with major elf babe Arya to Ellesmera, land of the elves, to continue his training as a Dragon Rider, hone his magical skills and overcome his resistance to fighting. Paolini expands the narrative to include Eragon's cousin Roran, whose fiancée Katrina has been nabbed by the evil Galbatorix.

Paolini saves a couple of key revelations until the end of the book, including the appearance of the menacing red dragon on the book's cover and a big surprise concerning Eragon's family tree (hint: it's reflected in the book's title.)

Will Arya continue to spurn Eragon's romantic intentions? Will Roran be reunited with his beloved Katrina? Will the Varden overthrow the brutal Galbatorix? Book three, as yet unnamed, will have all the answers, Paolini assures us.

"That's actually one of the things that truly bugs me as a reader, the fact that so many series drag on and on without achieving a true end. You can't have a good story without a good end," he says.

Like Eragon, Paolini is learning by doing. Editing, a chore he dreads like a Shade (Eragon's very bad adversary), has gone "from intense to more intense" with the second book. "I didn't make the same mistakes as I made in Eragon; I made entirely new mistakes," he admits.

Sudden success has turned Paolini's fantasies into reality. He is routinely mobbed by hundreds of fans at book signings. "You would not believe the things I've signed, pretty much every outer article of clothing you can imagine—coats, hats, socks, shoes," he says. He's been able to meet his literary heroes, including Cornelia Funke (Dragon Rider) and Bruce Coville (Jeremy Thatcher, Dragon Hatcher). And of course he's been able to continue writing without financial concerns.

So what about his social life?

Christopher cracks up. "What was that phrase you used? Social life? No, the way my life tends to run is, I'm either sitting in my room writing or I'm out on a book tour."

So there's no real-life Arya in his life?

"Well, it is epic fantasy!" he chuckles. "My love interest? Just as writers can write about murder without being a murderer, I'm writing about romance without being a great . . . well, I'm a romantic in the traditional sense, but I'm writing about this without much personal experience. One of the disadvantages of writing a series like this at my age is that it really requires your complete focus. You can't spend too much time going out to bars and whatnot, not that I would want to in any case."

If age has its advantages for a writer, sometimes youth holds the trump card. "I never imagined being a writer. I always imagined myself off fighting monsters with a sword or something. But I can't complain about the results. At least I'm young enough that the odds are I'll be able to finish it before I die."

Jay MacDonald does what he can from rural Mississippi to save the universe.

Like Saphira, the gem-scaled, fire-breathing, starter-home-sized dragon of his Inheritance fantasy series, teen publishing phenom Christopher Paolini is exceptionally bright, well spoken, irrepressibly optimistic and possessed of a quick wit that is swift to strike any hint of self-importance from his conversation. Not since Stephen…

Any mother who lives in the suburbs knows about car culture. Strap screaming toddler/infant into minivan/SUV/late-model station wagon, drive 20 minutes to coffee shop/library/play date. Complete errand, then do it all in reverse.

Raising kids in the 'burbs can be an incredibly lonely endeavor. Best-selling author Jennifer Weiner, who burst onto the literary scene in 2001 with Good in Bed, may be a city-dweller herself, but she feels the pain of suburban stay-at-home moms in her new novel, Goodnight Nobody.

After the birth of her daughter (followed in too-rapid succession by twin boys), Kate Klein finds herself transplanted from Manhattan to Upchurch, a Stepford-esque Connecticut town where mothers spend their days making sure their children eat organic snacks, have plenty of enriching social activities and never guess that Mommy is bored out of her mind.

Of course, the town's bucolic charm is disturbed a bit when Kate finds local uber-mom Kitty Cavanaugh stabbed to death in her own kitchen. Missing her old days as a reporter, Kate launches an amateur investigation of the murder and discovers some not-so-wholesome activities going on behind the closed doors of Upchurch.

Although Weiner lives a more urban life with her husband and two-year-old daughter in Philadelphia, she clearly understands the singularly weird culture of one-upsmanship raging among modern middle-class moms. In Goodnight Nobody, she explores that segment of the population in which only the best is good enough for parents worried about getting their child into a top-tier preschool. Weiner is fascinated with how the isolation of the suburbs might feed this phenomenon.

"In the suburbs, you have to get in the car to go anywhere," Weiner says, talking to BookPage while taking a brief break from her current project (potty training her daughter, Lucy Jane). "Social circles can be so much more hierarchical and rigid when you have to plan every outing and get-together."

As someone firmly on the outside of Upchurch's social circle, Kate is the antithesis of her overachieving peers. She fastens her hair with a paper clip from her husband's office when she can't find a barrette, and she is quite certain she will die if she has to play one more game of Candyland.

"Kate is a very extreme example of the dislocation and confusion every new mom goes through," Weiner says. "You can feel your life slipping away a little—maybe not your life, but certainly your autonomy."

With a toddler at home, Weiner knows the effort it takes to juggle a career and kids. She's had to readjust her own life to make time for her writing. A nanny comes in from 1 to 5 p.m. every weekday, while Weiner and her laptop relocate to a coffee shop down the street.

"I'm luckier than probably 99 percent of women anywhere," she notes. "I don't have a boss to deal with, I don't have an office to go to. I have a lot of flexibility and freedom. But still it's not easy. You can't answer e-mail and take care of a two-year-old."

Those afternoons writing in the coffee shop have yielded Goodnight Nobody, which is Weiner's first foray into the mystery genre. Her previous bestsellers, Good In Bed, In Her Shoes (made into a feature film starring Cameron Diaz that hits theaters this month) and Little Earthquakes, feature women facing major turning points in their lives. Weiner found that writing a believable, suspenseful whodunit was a whole different task.

"Mysteries are so plot-driven, whereas my previous books were very character-driven," she says. With a mystery, "you've got to have great characters but also intricacy in the clues and pacing. I probably did more rewriting on this book than the first three put together. It was a very intense year."

Even while changing genres, Weiner continues her tradition of writing smart, funny novels about smart, funny women. She infuses her characters with humor and believable angst, thus earning a place among the queen bees of the so-called chick lit scene, something she's come to accept and even embrace.

"There's nothing wrong with the pink cover with high heels," she says, referring to the glut of pastel-colored books published in recent years that feature lovelorn heroines who tend to shop too much and have really, really awful bosses.

"There are a great many other things in the world I can get outraged about."

But Weiner did wade into the debate a few months ago, after Prep author Curtis Sittenfeld wrote a scathing review of Melissa Bank's The Wonder Spot, deriding it in the New York Times as fluffy chick lit.

Weiner blasted back on her blog, SnarkSpot, charging that the review was a transparent bid by Sittenfeld to position herself as a serious author rather than a mere member of the chick lit brigade.

Weiner wrote: "The more I think about the increasingly angry divide between ladies who write literature and chicks who write chick lit, the more it seems like a grown-up version of the smart versus pretty games of years ago; like so much jockeying for position in the cafeteria and mocking the girls who are nerdier/sluttier/stupider than you to make yourself feel more secure about your own place in the pecking order."

Months later, Weiner still bristles at the idea that any author should "turn up her nose at a whole genre."

"I found it mean-spirited and narrow-minded," she says of Sittenfeld's review. "I almost feel sorry for her. She's alienated a lot of women authors and readers who don't want to be told they're stupid for liking this kind of book."

In the end, though, Weiner's latest work transcends such easy labels. Call it chick lit if you must, but more than anything, Goodnight Nobody is a page-turning mystery that would make the "Desperate Housewives" proud.

Best of all, Weiner bravely goes where few have dared, allowing her character to feel conflicted (with an occasional flicker of full-blown regret) about her new role as full-time mom. An entire nation of chicks will thank her.

 

Amy Scribner tends to her toddler son in Olympia, Washington.

Author photo by Andrea Cipriani.

Any mother who lives in the suburbs knows about car culture. Strap screaming toddler/infant into minivan/SUV/late-model station wagon, drive 20 minutes to coffee shop/library/play date. Complete errand, then do it all in reverse.

Raising kids in the 'burbs can be an incredibly lonely endeavor. Best-selling…

John Berendt's The City of Falling Angels bears a striking resemblance to a certain 1994 nonfiction debut you might have heard of: Midnight in the Garden of Good and Evil. Writing about Venice this time around, Berendt reprises so many elements from his runaway bestseller which sold 2.5 million hardcover copies and spent a record four years on the New York Times bestseller list that one might suspect him of pandering to his worldwide following. Of course, had the author truly intended to cash in on his success, he certainly wouldn't have waited a decade to do so; instead, we would have been inundated long ago with the likes of Dawn at a Strip Club on Bourbon Street, Snack Time at the Varsity Drive-In in Atlanta and Twilight at a Convenience Store in Paramus.

Easygoing and gregarious during a conversation from his home in Manhattan, Berendt fills us in on the decade it took him to steep in the atmosphere of Venice and commit what he'd learned to paper. The steeping took more than four years living in Venice 30 percent of the time; the writing dragged on for another five.

"I have to experience them," he admits of his favored locales. "It's not that I'm slow-witted, although maybe I am, but it takes me a while to get into it, to understand the contours of the story and to feel what is to be felt. Then again, when I write, I am a torturously slow writer. What I do is I write and rewrite and rewrite and rewrite and I don't move on to the next paragraph until I'm reasonably happy with the first one, then when I reach the end of a chapter, I go back and look at the whole thing over again." After completing his media tours for Midnight, an afterglow that lasted two full years, Berendt set about in earnest to find a worthy follow-up project. "I looked at a couple of stories that didn't pan out, so I backed up a little bit and said, let's look at the elements that worked in the first book: number one, remarkable characters; number two: a marvelous sense of place. Savannah was this wonderful, magical place, and I thought, what other place is so terrific? And I thought immediately of Venice." Over the years, Berendt had become quite familiar with Venice. What he could not have foreseen was that three days before his arrival, the famed Fenice (feh-NEE-chay) Opera House would burn to the ground, providing the third element in the equation a true-life mystery to drive the narrative.

Just as Midnight involved the interplay of zany Savannah locals set against the backdrop of a scandalous midnight shooting and subsequent trial, The City of Falling Angels explores equally colorful Venetians as they react to the loss and rebuilding of the city's last opera house, and a trial of the torch men that could only happen in Italy. From the opening line ("Everyone in Venice is acting"), it's clear that Berendt, like Shakespeare, views the world as a stage. The cavalcade of characters that pour forth from these pages is truly impressive Ezra Pound's mistress Olga; the Rat Man who shreds plastic into his bait to simulate the flavor of fast food; special-ops pigeon exterminators; a sleepwalker who dresses in uniforms; a master glassblower who takes inspiration from the Fenice blaze; and sordid and sundry expats who love a place they'll never call home. Life's rich pageant, served with prosciutto, formaggio e prosecco.

If at times these characters seem tangential to the plot, it's by design. As in Midnight, the slow workings of the wheels of justice ultimately give way to the far more interesting eccentricities of the bit players.

"I wasn't really writing about Venice so much as the people who live there," Berendt says. "Maybe it has reached the point where you can't make too many new observations about Venice, but people never wear out; there are always new people, new characters, new stories. I knew I was going to have a fresh look at Venice." Berendt, a cum laude Harvard graduate, already had a successful career behind him as an editor with Esquire and New York magazine when he jumped into book-length nonfiction with Midnight. "I noticed that all my magazine pieces were thrown away in a month or two because that's what you do with magazines, so I've got nothing to show for this. That was really my motivation for writing the book; I wanted to have a calling card when I meet somebody," he recalls.

Throughout the '60s and '70s, he worked with the best of the New Journalists Tom Wolfe, Truman Capote, Norman Mailer, Gore Vidal and Gay Talese and learned from them how to use fiction techniques to create hyper-real nonfiction. "I really just thought that's the only way to write nonfiction," he says. "Whenever I've written nonfiction, I've taken that approach because it came naturally to me." Given that Berendt's favorite fiction writers included Southern literary heroes Flannery O'Connor, Truman Capote and Tennessee Williams, it was perhaps preordained that this Syracuse, New York, native would craft the bona fide Southern classic of New Journalism in Midnight.

Berendt is well prepared to parry the inevitable question he'll be peppered with as he circles the globe to promote his second book: when will we see a third? "I say to readers, you've got a lot of other things that you should be reading. I'll bring out a book when I'm ready. You don't really need my book, but if you're going to read my next book, I would think you would want it to be the best I can do, so you're just going to have to wait." Jay MacDonald writes from Oxford, Mississippi.

 

John Berendt's The City of Falling Angels bears a striking resemblance to a certain 1994 nonfiction debut you might have heard of: Midnight in the Garden of Good and Evil. Writing about Venice this time around, Berendt reprises so many elements from his runaway…

Myla Goldberg’s debut novel, Bee Season (2000), was a word-of-mouth hit that garnered the kind of critical praise not usually bestowed on first-time novelists. Her quirky and intimate look at the life of a nine-year-old spelling bee champ climbed the bestseller list and was a finalist for several literary awards. Readers eager for a follow-up finally get their wish this month with Wickett’s Remedy, Goldberg’s fictional account of the 1918 flu epidemic. Clearly imagined and lovingly told, Wickett’s Remedy tells an epic story the way it was lived, through the voices that laughed, cried and echo still.

Young and unaccountably brave, Lydia Kilkenny sells men’s shirts in a Boston department store. There, she meets the painfully shy, well-to-do Henry Wickett, who woos her with flowery love letters and Friday lunches. Their marriage inspires Henry to quit medical school and create Wickett’s Remedy, a patent medicine sold by mail order. But a ruthless business partner steals the remedy, just as "Wilson’s War" and the flu epidemic steal Lydia’s hopes. As the flu’s grip on the city—and the nation—tightens, she signs on as nurse in a study of how the flu is transmitted, and begins to discover that the things we are meant to do are often the very things that make no sense to those around us. BookPage recently talked to Goldberg about this remarkable novel.

BookPage: How did you become interested in the 1918 flu epidemic?
Myla Goldberg: About five years ago, I came across a newspaper article that listed the five most deadly plagues of all time and the 1918 flu epidemic was one of them. I consider myself an amateur disease nerd and I’d never heard of the 1918 flu, which meant that I immediately had to learn everything about it that I could.

BP: The margin notes, which are the whisperings of the dead, highlight the flaws and lapses of memory. What inspired those voices?
MG: One of my all-time favorite books is Pale Fire, by Vladimir Nabokov, which is a novel essentially written in annotations. I knew that I wanted to write a book in which the text misbehaved in some way, and when I realized that I was writing a book about the unreliability of memory it occurred to me that marginal voices were a great way to approach this idea.

BP: You started this book before Bee Season (soon to be a film starring Richard Gere and Juliette Binoche) was published. How did the success of Bee Season influence your work on Wickett’s Remedy?
MG: Bee Season’s success didn’t particularly influence me, partly because Wickett’s was already underway when Bee Season started doing so well, but mostly because the expectations I have for myself and the pressures I place on myself have always been so extreme that nothing the outside world serves up can possibly compete.

BP: Lydia seems driven to do the unexpected, in a time and place when good girls from good, close families didn’t do that. What sparks that desire?
MG: Good girls from good, close families still don’t do that. Lydia is driven to do the unexpected for the same reasons someone would be now—by her innate ambition, motivation and especially her curiosity, qualities fairly rare in any age.

BP: The right details transport the reader, just as the pneumatic tubes in Gilchrist’s department store magically carried the customers’ change to the waiting shop girls. How do you find the key details that bring a long-gone place to life?
MG: I love research. I read all sorts of books about the flu and about the period. The details I chose to use in the book were the ones that painted pictures in my head when I first came across them.

BP: You’ve written about a Jewish family in the 1980s and an Irish-Catholic girl in South Boston early in the past century. What time and place beckon next?
MG: I’d like to try my hand at the present day, for a change. Writing about the present is a scarier prospect for me then writing about a period that has already passed because your entire readership is made up of experts who will know immediately if something rings false.

Leslie Budewitz lives in Montana and is a legal consultant for writers.

Author photo by Jason Little.

 


Myla Goldberg's debut novel, Bee Season (2000), was a word-of-mouth hit that garnered the kind of critical praise not usually bestowed on first-time novelists. Her quirky and intimate look at the life of a nine-year-old spelling bee champ climbed the bestseller list and was a…

Literary legend has it that Mary Shelley's tortured Frankenstein monster came to her in a dream that inspired the classic horror tale. Twilight, a young adult novel by debut author Stephenie Meyer, has similar origins, but the otherworldly characters in her story are not lumbering monsters. Instead, they're beautiful vampires who make excellent use of their unusual abilities while trying to fit in with the other students at a small high school.

"I never really thought about being a writer, but when I had the dream, the characters were ones I didn't want to forget," Meyer says from her home in Arizona, where she and her husband are raising three sons, all under the age of 10. Writing Twilight was "an unusual experience because I felt obsessive about the process. It wasn't like me to be so focused—it's hard to be, with all the kids around."

A neophyte in the publishing world, Meyer is truly an overnight success. Just two weeks after she sent her manuscript to a Manhattan agency, she was signed on. Soon after, Twilight landed in the hands of editor Megan Tingley, head of Little, Brown's MT Books imprint. And not long after that, movie rights were sold to MTV Films.

"It's been a real whirlwind—more like a lightning strike," Meyer says. "Sometimes I feel guilty. People go through so much [to get published], and I skipped over the bad parts. It feels like cheating, somehow." Despite the occasional pangs of guilt, Meyer kept up a furious writing pace.

"Sometimes I feel guilty. People go through so much [to get published], and I skipped over the bad parts."

"I just kept going after the first one, and wrote four books in one year." Now, she's in the midst of editing her second book, a process she likens to labor: "It's equal in pain, and can drag on and on."

Despite all that editing, Twilight is 499 pages long, quite a tome for teen readers. "If it weren't for J.K. Rowling, I think publishers wouldn't be willing to put out lengthy books," Meyer points out. "It just proves that if a book is good enough, young people will read it. People say teens have short attention spans, but they are quite capable of reading [longer books]. There are tons of kids aged 16 or 17 who dig Shakespeare and Austen."

Meyer has no idea why she dreamed of vampires that fateful night, but she's always been fascinated by superheroes, and she reads science fiction and fantasy titles as eagerly as classics. In her house, J.K. Rowling and Orson Scott Card books share shelves with ones by Shakespeare, Binchy and Bronte. And, Meyer argues, as monsters go, vampires are pretty appealing: "Vampires, while dark and icky, are attractive, sophisticated and intelligent. They're forever youthful, powerful—things people crave or envy. No one looks at a zombie and wants to be like that."

The vampires in Twilight are certainly worthy of envy. The lithe and beautiful Edward Cullen looks at protagonist Bella with loving eyes (even as he fights his urge to, well, suck her blood). His gorgeous siblings are athletic, drive great cars and are far less awkward than their classmates. Of course, they don't lead a typical teen lifestyle: instead of McDonald's, they subsist on blood. Since they want to live among humans, they force themselves to feed on animals rather than people.

Meyer also has a knack for developing her human characters, especially Bella, a troubled 17-year-old who comes to realize her own intelligence and strength. "Hopefully," says Meyer, "most girls who read it will find something in Bella they can respond to."

Through Bella and the vampiric Cullen family, Meyer conveys the importance of making one's own decisions, a value drawn from her Mormon background. "Mormon themes do come through in Twilight. Free agency I see that in the Cullens. The vampires made this choice to be something more that's my belief, the importance of free will to being human."

Twilight builds to a dramatic and suspenseful second half, not to mention a nail-biting conclusion. Fortunately for impatient readers, Meyer's next book is due out within a year. In the meantime, the author will embark on a book tour this month to cities such as Seattle, San Francisco, Milwaukee and Chicago, where there will be—appropriately enough—a blood drive.

 

Linda M. Castellitto writes from North Carolina, where there is a Transylvania County. Hmm.

Literary legend has it that Mary Shelley's tortured Frankenstein monster came to her in a dream that inspired the classic horror tale. Twilight, a young adult novel by debut author Stephenie Meyer, has similar origins, but the otherworldly characters in her story are not lumbering monsters. Instead, they're beautiful vampires who make excellent use of their unusual abilities while trying to fit in with the other students at a small high school.

Julia Scheeres’ memoir Jesus Land is a painfully candid account of a family riddled with dysfunction. Scheeres, now 38, grew up in a strict Calvinist household in Lafayette, Indiana, the daughter of a surgeon and his Bible-thumping wife. Her parents’ missionary zeal led them to adopt two African-American boys when Julia was still a toddler. One of them, David, became Julia’s soul mate. Together, the two endured their upbringing and shared many trials, including a harrowing stay at Escuela Caribe, a Christian school in the Dominican Republic run by New Horizons Youth Ministries. Scheeres’ parents appear more interested in their own religiosity than their children’s emotional needs. Her father’s answer to discipline was bone-breaking brutality; meanwhile, her mother turned a blind eye to rampant behavioral problems, including David’s attempted suicide.

Julia’s other adopted brother, Jerome, grew up angry and hostile, and his repeated sexual abuse of Julia was additional torment in their ugly home life. Jesus Land concludes with the news that David, whose personal notebook inspired the memoir, died in a car crash in 1987. He was only 20 years old. Scheeres recently answered questions from BookPage about her wrenching personal story.

BookPage: Your portrait of Escuela Caribe is troubling, since what’s supposed to be a reaffirming place for confused teens comes off as an insensitive reform school. Do you think your parents made a mistake in sending you there? Julia Scheeres: I think it’s a mistake to send any child to Escuela Caribe. For $3,000 a month, you can ship your child to a Christian boot camp in the Dominican Republic, where she’ll receive a substandard education, learn to spout “Praise Jesus,” and be so traumatized she’ll have nightmares about it for the rest of her life. Escuela Caribe is essentially a dumping ground for the problem teens of wealthy evangelicals. Many students come from homes where they were emotionally, physically or sexually harmed, yet these issues aren’t addressed by the school. Such camps are located in foreign countries for good reason: to evade U.S. regulations governing child welfare, academic quality and housing standards. The whole point of Escuela Caribe is to break the “rebellious teenage spirit” through humiliation, intimidation and suspending simple freedoms and convert kids into Christian automatons.

BP: Frank memoirs involving family and abuse can be painful reading for all concerned. What have been the reactions of those involved in your life at that time? JS: My book is first and foremost a tribute to my brother David. I found a green notebook after his funeral in which he detailed what it was like to grow up black in a white, fundamentalist family and about our time together at Escuela Caribe. I wrote Jesus Land in an effort to preserve his memory and the memory of the life we shared together. I was the person who knew him best, and it’s my job to keep telling people about what a quirky, tragic and beautiful soul he was. The reaction of other family members and acquaintances wasn’t a consideration as I wrote Jesus Land.

BP: Of all the people in your book, your father seems the most mysterious. What was, or is now, your relationship with him? JS: My father was a ’50s-era dad, who left childcare to the wife and was largely absent due to his high-pressure work as a surgeon. But he was also pressured to be the Biblical head-of-the household disciplinarian. We didn’t talk about problems or issues in my house. You were told what to do, and you obeyed. If you broke the rules, you got spanked or whipped, in my brothers’ case. I grew up fearing and avoiding my father not a healthy situation. I no longer have contact with either of my parents, who work as full-time volunteers at a missionary compound in Orlando, Florida.

BP: Being the victim of sexual abuse usually holds lingering consequences. What has been the long-term emotional or behavioral fallout for you? JS: Where to begin? A rabid distrust of people, and all men in particular? Sexual frigidity and/or promiscuity? A tendency to depersonalize and/or revile sexual partners? I’m sure it’s all well-documented in the case studies. I think the most important step for me was meeting my husband, a man who blew away my low expectations for male behavior and companionship. I don’t think people ever fully recover from ritual abuse of any sort. I still get into funks, but have learned to better negotiate them.

BP: Despite your troubled youth, you’ve gone on to obtain a master’s degree and respect as a journalist. To what do you ascribe your perseverance? JS: I’ve always had a strong sense of self and an independent streak three miles wide. Growing up, I believed that if I could just escape the pettiness surrounding me, things would get better. And they have.

Julia Scheeres' memoir Jesus Land is a painfully candid account of a family riddled with dysfunction. Scheeres, now 38, grew up in a strict Calvinist household in Lafayette, Indiana, the daughter of a surgeon and his Bible-thumping wife. Her parents' missionary zeal led them…

Urged on by pleas from middle-class readers of her best-selling book Nickel and Dimed, Barbara Ehrenreich launched a new book project that she hoped would do for white-collar work what Nickel and Dimed had done for low-wage work. In Nickel and Dimed, which has remained a bestseller since its publication four years ago, Ehrenreich posed as an unskilled, recently divorced homemaker, took a series of minimum-wage jobs, and then wrote an insightful, morally outraged portrait of the lives of low-wage workers.

For Bait and Switch: The (Futile) Pursuit of the American Dream, her second foray into "immersion journalism," Ehrenreich sought a job in the corporate world as a public relations professional – not a huge stretch for someone who has published thousands of articles and a dozen nonfiction books. Her plan was to find a job that paid $50,000 a year and offered health benefits and then write about her experiences as a white-collar worker in corporate America. A problem soon developed, however: Ehrenreich had an almost impossible time finding a job.

"I was shocked," Ehrenreich says during a call to her home in Charlottesville, Virginia. "I expected to go to work somewhere and I really thought that would be the most interesting part of the project. Now I realize that that was unrealistic, because I was meeting so many people who had been out of work for more than a year."

Bait and Switch soon morphed into a book about white-collar unemployment and the peculiar "transition industry" that has emerged to assist the job searches of employees cast off by American corporations in the growing trend toward "delayering" (getting rid of middle management). With the same rueful wit, passion and skepticism she brought to Nickel and Dimed, Ehrenreich here relates her sometimes-comic, often exasperating experiences with career coaches, résumé consultants, networking events, personality tests and job fairs.

Among the most amusing and chilling of these is an account of her makeover. "Oh, my makeover," Ehrenreich says with a laugh that quickly turns into a sigh. "I had naively imagined at the beginning that the way I dressed to give a lecture at a college would be all right for an interview. But, no, there’s an entirely different way of dressing for success. So I decided to pay for a face-to-face encounter. I was wearing a very conservative brooch. It was silver and circular. But I was told by my makeover guy that it shouldn’t have been circular; it should have been a swoosh. But I have to wonder, when you’re judging whether to hire a person on the basis of . . . a detail like that, are you really picking the best person for the job?"

This, in fact, is the challenging question that surfaces throughout Bait and Switch, whether Ehrenreich is exploring the so-called Christianization of the workplace through evangelical job-search networks or the inordinate reliance of human resource departments on the pseudo-science of personality tests. What does any of this have to do with finding the most skilled person for the job?

In that regard, Ehrenreich says she was most surprised by the sort of mystical mumbo-jumbo that permeates the corporate world. "Because I am a journalist and was educated as a scientist," she says, "I operate in the fact-based world. I expected that the world of the corporation would be like that. To make money you’ve got to look at facts, at the bottom line. You can’t be deluding yourself. So it’s appalling to find what I can only call the delusional idea that your thoughts can go out there and alter the world. I just read a dozen business bestsellers and I found it over and over this idea that if you just think about money and success they will come to you."

The same sort of thinking pervades the transition industry. "All my coaches emphasized the importance of being positive and upbeat at all times," Ehrenreich says. "All right, you don’t want to be surly when you go into an interview. But the advice extends to mean that you cannot have any negative thoughts . . . because negative thoughts will poison you and will be visible to whoever encounters you."

The result, Ehrenreich says, is a group of cowed, isolated middle-class workers who are unable to get together and make changes that would enhance their work lives and cushion the blow when they are unemployed. With the publication of Bait and Switch, Ehrenreich says, "I hope to stir something up."

 

Urged on by pleas from middle-class readers of her best-selling book Nickel and Dimed, Barbara Ehrenreich launched a new book project that she hoped would do for white-collar work what Nickel and Dimed had done for low-wage work. In Nickel and Dimed, which has…

Months before he completed what would become his 1995 award-winning bestseller A Civil Action (and years before it was turned into the hit movie starring John Travolta), Jonathan Harr ran out of money.

So when an editor from the New York Times magazine called and asked him to write a piece for the magazine, Harr leapt at the chance. The story he ended up pursuing was about the improbable discovery in Ireland of a painting by the great Italian Baroque artist Caravaggio that had been missing for 200 years. Harr sensed there was a bigger story to be told and proposed writing a book about it to his agent. Alas, A Civil Action had not yet been published to critical and popular acclaim, and Harr was not famous. His agent told him nobody would give him the money he needed to do the research for the book.

"I just let it go," Harr says during a call to Perugia, Italy, where he has recently completed a course in Italian literature and is now writing short fiction. Harr and his wife live most of the year in Northampton, Massachusetts, but they also have an apartment in Rome. "Rome is noisy and chaotic," Harr says. "It was wonderful when I first got there, but I’m getting a little tired of it. I needed to get out. Perugia is very quiet, very peaceful, very beautiful." After the rebuff from his agent, Harr spent a few years exploring other book ideas another legal book along the lines of A Civil Action, then an archaeological dig on the Syrian-Turkish border. For any number of reasons these projects didn’t pan out, and he eventually returned to his interest in the subject of The Lost Painting.

Lucky for us.

The Lost Painting is an engrossing and exhilarating weave of art history, detective work and human drama. In conversation, Harr says he struggled to bring the threads of this story together. But his struggles will be invisible to most readers. Here, as in A Civil Action, Harr is able to find the right measure of technical detail and emotional conflict to make his intersecting narratives come alive. This is all the more remarkable because the story shifts between modern-day Rome and Dublin, where scholars and art restorers vie to find and authenticate Caravaggio’s painting, and late 16th-century Rome, when Caravaggio walked its streets.

Caravaggio was a violent, temperamental artist who left a vivid trail in police and court records in Rome, died young and somewhat mysteriously in exile, and created some of the most sublimely beautiful paintings of the era. Harr agrees with editors of the British art journal Burlington who assert that Caravaggio is the first realist painter. "A lot of his paintings are religious paintings, although there’s a big debate about how religious he was," Harr says. "I think he wasn’t religious at all. But he painted these religious scenes using everyday people, the clothing that people were dressed in at the time, and he painted them with dramatic intensity, all of which was new. He really invented that dark background with a single source of light outside of the painting. His paintings have a drama and a vividness that nobody before had."

As interesting as Caravaggio’s story is, it actually pales in comparison to the story Harr tells of Francesca Cappelletti, a young Italian art researcher who with her colleague, Laura Testa, made a seemingly small discovery in the dank, poorly kept archives of the once-grand Antici-Mattei family that would prove invaluable to the authentication of Caravaggio’s lost painting called "The Taking of Christ." Francesca was "wonderfully cooperative and open," Harr says. "If she hadn’t been, I simply would have gone on to something else." Harr deploys Francesca’s truly astonishing openness about all aspects of her life to great effect. Through her story, he is able to convey both the intellectual and the emotional importance of what might otherwise seem dry and dusty research.

Far less cooperative was the other main protagonist in Harr’s narrative, an Italian art restorer working at the Irish national gallery named Sergio Benedetti. "A difficult and complicated man," Sergio was the first to suspect that a painting he was asked to examine by Irish Jesuits was an original Caravaggio.

"It was Sergio’s absolute burning desire to climb out of the basement of restoration into something more exalted, into being an art historian, which in Italy is the equivalent of being a doctor or a lawyer," Harr says. Along the way Sergio apparently made some critical misjudgments while restoring the Caravaggio painting. "He’s committed no crime," Harr hastens to add. "He made a mistake due to his own ardor and anxiety, his own desire to see this painting [acknowledged]."

Harr frets that Sergio’s unwillingness to talk openly about his mistake weakens his story. "He’s litigious, too," Harr says, "so I anticipate problems." But in fact, Sergio’s prickly reticence makes for an illuminating contrast with Francesca’s openness. And it allows or forces Harr to write in some detail about the technology and techniques of art restoration, something he does exceptionally well.

"I love the research, love putting things together. It’s like solving a puzzle," Harr says near the end of our conversation. And in The Lost Painting, he delivers an enthralling solution to the 200-year-old puzzle of what happened to Caravaggio’s lost painting.

Alden Mudge writes from Oakland, California.

 

Months before he completed what would become his 1995 award-winning bestseller A Civil Action (and years before it was turned into the hit movie starring John Travolta), Jonathan Harr ran out of money.

So when an editor from the New York Times

Anne Rice has spent the past three decades making us believe in the supernatural. Whether she was writing about the vampire Lestat in her 1976 debut Interview with the Vampire, the Mayfair family of witches in The Witching Hour or the X-rated adventures of a libidinous Sleeping Beauty under her nom de erotica A.N. Roquelaure, Rice’s great gift has always been to combine extensive research with an effusive, lyrical prose style to engage us in the human drama of her not-altogether-human collection of souls. But even Rice’s loyal legion of fans may not be prepared for the dramatic sea change her life and work have taken since she embarked on the greatest challenge of her career: a series on the life of Jesus Christ told in his own words.

Christ the Lord: Out of Egypt is the first installment in a three- or four-part Gospel according to Anne, a labor of love from a reborn Roman Catholic whose return to the church in the mid-1990s brought her personal and career quests to this ancient intersection. While the very idea of an Anne Rice book on Christ may cause whiplash in some readers, it seems a perfectly natural next step to Rice. As she writes in her revealing author’s note: “After all, is Christ Our Lord not the ultimate supernatural hero, the ultimate outsider, the ultimate immortal of all time?” Although Rice is regarded as a shrewd marketer whose book signings once resembled an all-ghouls revue, she was already deeply immersed in the extensive research for this new direction long before Mel Gibson’s The Passion of the Christ or Dan Brown’s The Da Vinci Code tapped into the public zeitgeist.

“It’s been a gradual life-changing event,” Rice admits by phone from her new home in La Jolla, California. “But the quest for meaning, for trying to find God and wanting to go back to God, I think that runs through all my work from the very beginning.”

In Christ the Lord, a seven-year-old Jesus becomes conscious that he is profoundly different from other boys. He has already experienced the curious sensation of turning clay birds into real ones and reviving the dead. As his family makes its way back from Alexandria to Nazareth, he gathers tidbits of detail about his miraculous birth, which caused great suspicion among the neighbors and placed him on King Herod’s list of undesirables.

Rice credits the Gospel scholarship of John A.T. Robinson, Martin Hengel, N.T. Wright and others with helping her remove the distance between Mary, Joseph and Jesus and what would no doubt have been their large extended family of nomadic carpenters and craftsmen. Within this realistic social setting, we come to know Mary as a distant ancestor of modern soccer moms who are both fiercely protective and a little afraid of their enormous responsibility. Joseph, the patient surrogate father, tries in vain to shelter Jesus from Mary’s brother Cleopas, who is prone to ramble on irresponsibly in his old age. Jesus, meanwhile, slowly grows to understand the terrible beauty of his mission on earth.

Readers may find themselves flipping to the cover to make sure they’re reading an Anne Rice novel; the language here is as spare and unadorned as the biblical landscape it describes. Jesus narrates in the simple, declarative sentences of the four Gospels, which served as the blueprint for the author’s choices.

“I wanted it to sound natural; I didn’t want it to be stilted and pious and remote,” says Rice. “I think we’ve read the story to the point that we don’t feel it. I thought, let me see if I can really, really make people feel it. Let me feel it; let me feel what this was like.”

Rice, who was raised in a strict New Orleans Catholic household, abandoned her faith in 1960 as a college student at Texas Women’s University. “I came of age on that campus and I wanted to read Kierkegaard and Sartre and Camus and all the forbidden texts. I wanted so badly to know what this is all about, and I left, I broke, I lost the faith,” she recalls. “It was a serious, serious emotional and moral crisis.”

Two years later, she met Stan Rice, an atheist poet and painter who shared Anne’s love of art and philosophy. They lived in San Francisco during the ’60s, suffered the loss of their first child (that tragedy informed Interview with the Vampire), and ultimately settled in New Orleans’ Garden District. Rice says her husband understood her return to the church, “but I think he was somewhat mystified.” The couple renewed their marriage vows in St. Mary’s Assumption Church, her childhood parish church. Stan died suddenly of a brain tumor in 2002.

Those who believe in providence may find some in recent events surrounding Anne Rice. Last March, on the very day she handed in her manuscript, Rice left New Orleans and moved to La Jolla, two hours from the home of her novelist son Christopher. “I don’t know to this moment why I got such an overwhelming urge to disrupt everything and go out west,” she says.

Equally fortuitous, Stan’s 300 paintings representing a lifetime of work had been relocated from New Orleans to Dallas, his hometown, just two weeks before Hurricane Katrina struck. “I think if we had lost Stan’s paintings, I would have gone out of my mind,” she says.

With her next installment in the life of Christ well underway, would she ever consider revisiting the vampires that made her a worldwide celebrity?

“I don’t think in the same way, no. I think that once I returned to the Church and began to see the universe as a place that really did incorporate redemption and really tried to understand the implications of there being a God, my identification with the vampires as outcasts, as outsiders and lost souls began to totally wane. It no longer worked for me. I had done it. It had led me to this point.”

Jay MacDonald is a writer in Mississippi.

 

Anne Rice has spent the past three decades making us believe in the supernatural. Whether she was writing about the vampire Lestat in her 1976 debut Interview with the Vampire, the Mayfair family of witches in The Witching Hour or the X-rated adventures of a…

Doris Kearns Goodwin pinpoints Lincoln's political genius Vigorous research has a way of toppling a scholar's most reasonable expectations. When Doris Kearns Goodwin decided more than 10 years ago that her next book would be about Abraham Lincoln, she assumed it would roughly parallel the approach and structure of No Ordinary Time, her Pulitzer Prize-winning study of Franklin and Eleanor Roosevelt confronting World War II.

But as Goodwin delved into the wealth of primary sources, she became convinced that the story she really needed to tell was that of Lincoln's close and productive relationship with his three rivals for the Republican presidential nomination of 1860. At Lincoln's insistence, these men William H. Seward of New York, Salmon Chase of Ohio and Edward Bates of Missouri all became key members of his cabinet and went on to serve him well throughout the bloodiest years of the Civil War. He appointed yet another former adversary, Edwin Stanton, as his secretary of war. In recognizing, recruiting and relying on talent, Lincoln held no grudges.

Speaking to BookPage from her home in Concord, Massachusetts, about her new book, Team of Rivals: The Political Genius of Abraham Lincoln, Goodwin says her awareness of Lincoln's political talents emerged slowly. "I thought at first that I might focus on Abraham Lincoln and [his wife] Mary, just as I had done with Franklin and Eleanor. You tend to get a certain comfort from knowing what you've done before. But then, [during] those early months and months of reading, I realized that [Lincoln] was spending even more time with these colleagues in the cabinet . . . than he was with Mary. And he was sharing emotions with them. Unlike with Franklin and Eleanor, where Eleanor was a central figure in the [World War II] home front, the story of Mary would be important, but it would be a private story." Apart from Mary Lincoln, Goodwin also casts her attentive eye on several other forceful and fascinating women within the Lincoln milieu, notably Seward's politically radical wife, Frances, and Chase's beautiful and socially astute daughter, Kate. The author's depictions of the Washington social scene are photographic in both detail and dramatic impact.

Goodwin admits that she knew relatively little about the 19th century when she began her work. "All the other history that I've done has been in the 20th century. I wondered, will I be able to feel what it was like to live on a daily basis in an earlier time? Unlike the book on Roosevelt, where I was able to interview people, and certainly [the one on] Lyndon Johnson [Lyndon Johnson and the American Dream], where I knew him, I knew I wouldn't be talking to anybody [from that era]." Instead, she relied on primary source material. "They wrote so many letters and kept those extraordinary diaries. I could feel them living day by day, even more intimately than I understood Franklin and Eleanor Roosevelt." Virtually perching on Lincoln's shoulder as he navigates through incompetent generals, battlefield setbacks and warring factions within his own administration, Goodwin portrays him as a master manipulator although never for petty or destructive causes. She illustrates how he led his cabinet, the military and the country with a light and sensitive rein, even as he endured a succession of personal crises. Oddly enough, the theater, where he would meet his death, became a principal source of solace in his final years.

In Goodwin's estimation, Lincoln has had no political equal. "Roosevelt understood timing, as Lincoln did. He had a feeling for the country as a whole, I think, so that he knew when to get Americans involved in [World War II], even before Pearl Harbor. And that's similar to Lincoln's understanding of timing with when to do the Emancipation Proclamation and when to bring black soldiers in." But, Goodwin points out, it was Lincoln's "decency and morality" and his ability to turn these virtues into political instruments that ultimately set him above other leaders. "My husband [Richard Goodwin] worked in the Kennedy administration," she says. "He remembers this great dinner one night with the great British philosopher, Isaiah Berlin. . . . Anyway, they were having a discussion about whether you could be great and good at the same time, and the only people they came up with were Jesus Christ and Abraham Lincoln." Integrating the personalities of Seward, Chase, Bates and Stanton into the Lincoln chronicle was especially time-consuming, Goodwin observes. "I think the reason that it took so long was that it was like doing a biography on each one of them. It's the only way you could get the best stuff. You could have done this book, I suppose, by just reading secondary sources on the guys and then doing all the original research on Lincoln. But [you had to do more] in order to get the best stories and to emotionally connect with all these other people. . . . I had to have these huge chronologies of each one, and I would actually put them on a wall so I could see where they overlapped." In 2002, a number of critics accused Goodwin of plagiarism or, at minimum, insufficient documentation, particularly in her book The Fitzgeralds and the Kennedys. "The main thing about this book [on Lincoln]," Goodwin offers, when asked about the controversy, "was that I was able in this whole research really from the beginning to have everything on a computer, which made all the difference. It meant that all the notes that were taken on books could be scanned into the computer, not handwritten, and all the footnotes could be inserted simultaneously, instead of doing it after the chapter was done. So I had, all along as I was doing this, absolute confidence that there would be no [documentation] problem." The problem Goodwin faces now is withdrawing from Lincoln's world without having another project to fall back on. "I miss it already," she laments. "It's weird, because especially in the last couple of years there was such pressure to finish it. You knew how to focus your day. It feels strange now, not having that. I wake up and I feel sort of scattered." Edward Morris writes from Nashville.

Doris Kearns Goodwin pinpoints Lincoln's political genius Vigorous research has a way of toppling a scholar's most reasonable expectations. When Doris Kearns Goodwin decided more than 10 years ago that her next book would be about Abraham Lincoln, she assumed it would roughly parallel…

Kaye Gibbons’ voice sounds much as one might expect from a North Carolina born-and-raised girl. There’s a lilt unique to that area of the South, the elongated vowels and the tendency to turn one-syllable words into two. It’s a beautiful voice, mellifluous and made for storytelling.

She stops our conversation before it starts, saying something about a flight being late, needing to take her shoes off and settle in a bit before continuing. When she returns to the phone she admits to lying about the brief delay, but promises not to lie again during our interview (words an interviewer is always heartened to hear). Gibbons then confesses the reason for excusing herself: to tape Dr. Phil. Turns out, Dr. Phil’s advice can come in handy when on a book tour, what with his straight talk on boundaries and learning how to say no without guilt, lessons sometimes hard for a gracious Southern woman to learn.

At the moment, Gibbons is in her New York apartment, many a mile from her other home in North Carolina. In Raleigh, I do laundry, and here I do literature. Among her many accomplishments is a lesser-known honor: receiving a knighthood from the French, a shocking experience (FYI: Sharon Stone was knighted in the same year). The knighthood certificate, along with some Southern folk art, adorns the walls of Gibbons’ apartment, her very own writers’ retreat. Here, she can indulge her Diet Coke addiction and Dr. Phil habit, and also get down to the business of writing.

"Crafting the best literature I can" is an all-consuming occupation for Gibbons, who burst onto the literary scene in 1987 with the publication of Ellen Foster, an astonishing little novel about a spunky, unloved 11-year-old that earned her legions of fans and became a modern-day classic (not to mention an Oprah pick). Gibbons was only 26 years old at the time, in college and the mother of a small child. Oh, yes, and she wrote the novel in just six weeks. Whether you’ve known Ellen from the beginning or haven’t yet had the pleasure of meeting her, you will find that Gibbons’ long-awaited follow-up, The Life All Around Me by Ellen Foster, is a rare gem of a book, one that marks the return of one of the South’s scrappiest, most endearing heroines.

In the original novel, Ellen pours out the harrowing story of a home life so horrible she is forced to find her own foster family. When we meet Ellen again in The Life, she’s 15, that pivotal age in adolescence. Though now part of a happy home, she still must sift through the wreckage of her past and come to terms with the death of her mother. While there are heart-wrenching moments, there is a generous dose of humor, too. The book opens with a letter from Ellen to the president of Harvard University, requesting early admittance. She writes, in typical Ellen fashion, " One of my mottoes is that nothing you think, feel, or do should be watered down, so when I decided to try out for college, Harvard sounded like the only place to be." She continues her story in the first person, addressing the reader directly, as if picking up the thread of a conversation she began long ago. Gibbons also introduces new characters and fleshes out those near and dear; there is the devoted Stuart, a tender-hearted boy smitten with Ellen, and, of course, there is Starletta, Ellen’s old neighbor and a constant in her life.

So what was it like for Gibbons to revisit her debut novel? Had the seeds of a second book been germinating all these years? Gibbons tells us it took time to rediscover Ellen’s voice, but when she did, the voice was loud and clear. Ellen is still trying to find her place in the world, and she says at one point, I didn’t know how to feel at home out in the world or at home either. "That comes from my heart so directly," says Gibbons. "Ellen’s task is what mine was, which was to learn how to be comfortable inside. That’s what you carry around with you." She doesn’t consider The Life a sequel, but rather the next book in a series, something akin to checking in with an old friend from time to time. Eventually, she intends to write six or more books about Ellen’s life, to grow her up in fiction. As writer and character evolve over time, they will find new themes to explore and challenges to meet.

GIbbons has already begun the third book, in which Ellen "attends a prestigious Ivy League college and runs into hard-core prejudice and [has] to discover how hard she’s going to work to prove herself." One of the reasons Gibbons enjoys writing from Ellen’s point of view is that she gets to go back in time and say things I wasn’t able to say. "I get to live twice in some ways or correct mistakes, and she can do things I was too timid to do. I just felt like I needed that girl in my life." A particularly poignant scene in the The Life shows Ellen sorting through a box of her mother’s things, touching the artifacts of her former life. Gibbons conveys this scene with a tenderness untarnished by sentimentality. Coming to terms with losing a parent through suicide is something Gibbons knows well.  "Before I started it, I knew I needed closure on my mother’s suicide. I wondered if writing this book would help, and it has . . . it’s not a constant in my life anymore."  For a while, Gibbons thought about trying to write a book about her mother, but it was just too close. Though she didn’t expect to at the outset, Gibbons began to heal through writing in Ellen’s voice. "Ellen did it for me,"  she says. "I’d be a fool not to keep revisiting her. It is, above all, Ellen’s distinct voice that will make readers want to return to her story. I’d like for her voice to be recognizable when she and Starletta are 80 and roaming around Bali or Tahiti somewhere,"  Gibbons says with a laugh. Now that, we’ve got to stick around to see.

Katherine Wyrick lives in Little Rock, Arkansas.

 

Kaye Gibbons' voice sounds much as one might expect from a North Carolina born-and-raised girl. There's a lilt unique to that area of the South, the elongated vowels and the tendency to turn one-syllable words into two. It's a beautiful voice, mellifluous and made…

In the world of showbiz sidekicks, Ed McMahon is royalty—the most famous second banana, ever. Instantly identifiable, the man with the booming laugh and avuncular voice worked with Johnny Carson for more than four decades. The announcer for Carson’s daytime game show, “Who Do You Trust?” McMahon went on to spend 34 years opposite the late-night TV king on “The Tonight Show.” McMahon’s warmly affectionate Here’s Johnny! is his homage to their friendship.

“That was the best time of my life, the best years of my life, being with him,” says McMahon. Not that the famed pitchman is packing it in. To the contrary, McMahon, at 82, seems tireless. Speaking by phone from his Beverly Hills office, on the eve of a New York publicity tour, he relates that he and wife, Pam, are busy raising their niece (whose mother died as a result of a car accident). “We had the sweet 16 party with a hundred kids in the backyard.” With a laugh, he adds, “When you say your prayers tonight, say one for me, because I’m raising a teenager!” (The father of six also has six grandkids.)

McMahon, who penned a 1998 memoir, hopes this latest book will dispel some notions that have surfaced since Carson’s death early this year, especially the oft-heard claim that Carson was ice-water cold and aloof. “He was not cold, he was private. He was wonderful on camera, but once the cameras stopped, he returned to being a private man. Johnny used to say, ‘Ed, I’m great with 10 million, I’m lousy with 10.’” Noting that Carson didn’t intrude, didn’t force himself, McMahon explains, that was a result of his Nebraska-Midwestern ethic.

Along with sharing golden moments from “The Tonight Show,” McMahon gives peeks at those guests who caught some guff. Like the time a performing Ray Charles snapped at the house drummer, “Pick up the pace!” Johnny made him apologize, recalls McMahon. Then there was the off-putting appearance of comedian Charles Grodin. “It went a little too far because it left the audience out. Johnny was always very concerned about the audience,” McMahon says. “He didn’t want anything to be beyond their comprehension.”

A man who feels comfortable in a crowd, McMahon is a former carnival barker and boardwalk pitchman (he hawked the Morris Metric Slicer) who once went door-to-door selling pots and pans. At 17, he was working in radio and on early TV, as well as calling bingo games. World War II led to a stint in the skies as a Marine Corps aviator. Returning home to TV, McMahon was involved in 13 Philadelphia shows in a single year. That included hosting a late-night movie and playing a clown on a Saturday morning kiddie program. Then came a repeat of military life: he was recalled to service for the Korean War.

It was through a producer for popular Philly TV host Dick Clark that McMahon’s name surfaced as a possible announcer for Carson’s game show. McMahon took the train to New York, met with Carson, then headed back home. He wasn’t hopeful about the prospects; the meeting had lasted all of six minutes. When the show’s producer called, saying Carson wanted McMahon to wear suits, McMahon wondered what he was talking about. “Oh . . . didn’t they tell you? You got the job. You start next Monday.” And so began one of TV’s most durable partnerships.

Over the years, they shared drinks at Sardi’s, survived marriages and divorces (McMahon lucked out at number three) and endured painful losses. In 1995, when McMahon’s son died of stomach cancer, Carson called to express condolences, adding, “There’s not a day when you won’t think about him.” He was speaking from the heart: Carson’s photographer-son, Rick, had died in a 1991 car crash. (Carson famously wrapped one of his shows by airing his son’s photos.) As for what set Johnny apart from the rest of the chat pack, McMahon says, simply, “Class. He had class.” Not a big fan of some of today’s talk show hosts, and their sharp and piercing comedy, McMahon notes, “Johnny very seldom penetrated. It was always like a powder-puff. He still got the laughs, but he didn’t hurt.”

Audiences also related to Carson’s wide-eyed charm, as well as the easy-going camaraderie with McMahon, who says of their astounding adventure, “I always liken it to two kids, kicking a can down the street. We had a good time together, and it showed.”

 

Biographer Pat H. Broeske spends her late nights watching Jimmy Kimmel.

In the world of showbiz sidekicks, Ed McMahon is royalty—the most famous second banana, ever. Instantly identifiable, the man with the booming laugh and avuncular voice worked with Johnny Carson for more than four decades. The announcer for Carson's daytime game show, “Who Do You Trust?” McMahon went on to spend 34 years opposite the late-night TV king on “The Tonight Show.” McMahon’s warmly affectionate Here’s Johnny! is his homage to their friendship.

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