All Interviews

Noted for her down-to-earth characters and heartwarming tales, best-selling author Debbie Macomber is a clear favorite among romance readers. With dozens of novels to her credit and more than 60 million books in print worldwide, Macomber delivers exactly what her readers want with clockwork regularity. Each holiday season, she gives her fans a Christmas-themed romance, and she continues this tradition with the release of There’s Something About Christmas. Emma Collins, a reporter for a small-town newspaper in Washington state, is assigned to interview the three finalists in a national fruitcake-baking contest. Getting to the creators of the fruitcakes proves to be a challenge for a reporter who’s afraid of flying, until she meets pilot Oliver Hamilton. The book comes complete with recipes for the award-winning fruitcakes.

Macomber took time from her busy writing schedule to answer questions about her new novel and her own holiday celebrations.

BookPage: Tell the truth—do you really like fruitcake?

Debbie Macomber: In the world of fruitcake, most people either love it or hate it. I am firmly in the camp of "love it." But, I have to admit, not all fruitcakes are created equal. High-quality fruits (not those loaded down with the bitter commercial citrus peels) and nuts, plus a good rum or brandy to keep everything moist while it waits for Christmas, that’s the confection I call a good fruitcake. Most often, that would mean a homemade fruitcake.

BP: You’ve written several novels with a Christmas theme. Why do you think the season makes an especially good setting for romance?

DM: Romance and Christmas seem to naturally go together. Every woman I know has a picture of the perfect Christmas in her mind, the same way we do romance. Reality rarely lives up to our expectations, so the best we can do is delve into a fantasy. That’s where I come in. Besides, with all the tension filling the holidays, I want to give my readers a reason to laugh and a reason to sigh.

BP: What is your favorite holiday tradition?

DM: I created several Christmas traditions with my family. [One] involves my daughters, daughters-in-law and granddaughters. We have a slumber party. Okay, it started out as an all-night affair, but after the first year I decided I’m too old (and smart) to stay up all night. We get together the first Friday night of December and assemble nifty gift packets that can include spice rubs, drink, soup or cookie mixes. The grandkids decorate and color the labels, and then at the end of the evening, we share the bounty. It’s great fun. We play Christmas music, sing, munch on goodies and just generally laugh ourselves silly.

BP: What is your greatest writing strength—and personal strength?

DM: My greatest strength as a writer is that I’m a storyteller. But, it was a long, hard struggle for me to make the transition from verbally telling stories to writing them. You’ll note I don’t dwell on descriptions in my writing, because I’m far more interested in telling the story. There are many better writers in this world, but you’d be hard pressed to find anyone more passionate about stories than I am.

My greatest personal strength? You mean other than my obvious beauty, charm and sense of humor? Just kidding! In all seriousness, I consider my greatest strength my complete and utter faith in a loving God. Strong family values are also important and I do not hesitate to write them into my books. My reader mail tells me this is something that readers especially like about my books.

BP: What is your worst flaw? Does every heroine have one?

DM: So you want to get personal? Okay, if you must know, I’m an optimist and my heroines seem to be that way, too. It’s too much work to be cynical and distrusting. That doesn’t mean I create perfect stories and perfect people, however. What this means is that my stories are resolved in a manner that leaves the reader with a feeling of hope and happy expectation . . . and wanting to reach for another one of my books.

BP: What will you be working on next?

DM: I’m just about ready to start on the story for next Christmas, Christmas Letters. It is about a woman who earns extra money for the holidays by writing Christmas letters for her friends. She makes the trials and tribulations of the year sound like triumphs. For example—Shirley is husbandless and is about to attend her college class reunion. She can’t bear to face her friends and let them know the only males in her life are her three cats. Catherine, my heroine, while writing the Christmas letter for Shirley, states: I divide my time between Harry, Charlie and Tommy. I love them all and simply can’t decide on one over the other.

They say the apple doesn’t fall far from the tree, and the experience of writer Lisa Fugard seems to prove the adage. Fugard, daughter of the great South African playwright Athol Fugard, has just published a remarkably accomplished first novel about a deeply troubled white family living on a remote farm along the increasingly dangerous South African border with Botswana at the end of the apartheid era. In its unsparing but empathetic portrayal of its characters, both blacks and whites, and in its sensitivity to the complicated loyalties that divide and unite South African society, Skinner’s Drift is sure to be likened to some of the better-known works of Fugard’s father.

"My mother [novelist Sheilah Fugard] is also a writer," Fugard reminds us during a call to her home in southern California. Fugard and her husband have lived in California since early 2002. They and their two-year-old son now divide their time between the desert community of Borrego Springs and Encinitas, on the coast north of San Diego, not far from where her parents now live. "It had been a long time since I had lived near my parents," Fugard, an only child, says, "and I just found myself wanting to do that, particularly now that I have a child."

Fugard moved from South Africa to New York in 1980 to study acting. " I was a good actress," she says, "but I never thought I was a really fine actress. It didn’t feel like the most natural thing for me to be doing." She adds, "I was always terribly insecure because I felt when I was working in the theater that I had entered my father’s domain. But something happened when I started to write fiction. I just felt I had something to say and it had nothing to do with him, so his shadow didn’t dog me into my writing life. Maybe it was because I waited to start writing until I was in my 30s and was more secure within myself."

Fugard says witnessing her father’s extraordinary dedication to his craft and her mother’s persistence "even when there was no fuss about her work," made it clear to her that "writing was a good, important thing to do with one’s life if that’s what you felt compelled to do. Because I had parents who were writers, I never doubted the validity of life as a writer. And that was hugely beneficial to me."

According to Fugard, the seed for Skinner’s Drift was planted when she read an article in a local newspaper about white farmers poaching in the Limpopo Valley while she was back in South Africa on assignment for Outside magazine. "For some reason," she says, "the article seized me. They’d found all these hyena carcasses in the Limpopo riverbed, and it just seemed so brutal and savage that I asked myself if somebody shoots all these animals, what else do they shoot. And that just sent me off."

A visit to a whites-only community in the heartland of South Africa where she interviewed an ostrich farmer furthered her conception of the novel’s most haunting and haunted character, Martin van Rensberg. That ostrich farmer – his name was Freddy – had the most amazing blue eyes, and a terrible stutter. He spoke with such passion and with such love for his land, and seconds later the most awful racial slurs were coming from his mouth. It was just so shocking. I thought, how can somebody have such love, such intense passion and generosity of spirit for his land and yet feel exactly the opposite toward so many of the people of the land?"

If Martin van Rensberg is the novel’s dark propulsive inspiration, then Ezekial, van Rensberg’s African hired hand, is the moral center of Skinner’s Drift. Struggling to maintain balance, to protect both van Rensberg’s daughter Eva and his own family as van Rensberg spins out of control in one direction and young black farmworkers spin out of control in another, Ezekial (whose African name is Lefu) offers a portrait of dignity, reason and hope.

"Ezekial’s voice came first," Fugard says, "and his was the first chapter I wrote." Challenged at a writing workshop by a black writer who did not believe the character, however, Fugard went back and rethought her manuscript. "All the black characters have an African name and a white name. When I would sit down to work on this chapter, I always thought of my character as Ezekial. The turning point for me came when I started thinking about him as Lefu. I felt I had acknowledged the complexity and dignity of his life, and that opened a door for me."

The plot’s powerful central triangle is completed by Eva van Rensburg, Martin’s only child. Her reluctant return to South Africa to visit her dying father after 10 years in the U.S. launches a painful familial search for truth and forgiveness that mirrors the pain and tumult of the national Truth And Reconciliation effort South Africa underwent in the late 1990s.

"Eva was the hardest to write," Fugard says. "As a writer, I like to have a lot of distance from my characters. Because she is close to my age, curiously enough, she was the hardest. Particularly in the last chapter, where she has to face what she’s done and how complicit she is – it was so hard to write that at one point I had to change her name from Eva to Evan. I had to make her a male character, because I felt otherwise I was writing about myself. Then, with the computer, I just changed all the Evans back to Eva. And I found that I had reached something authentic, that I had reached some kind of truth that I just couldn’t have reached when her name was Eva."

Of course the struggles and changes Fugard went through in her manuscript won’t be visible to readers of the completed work. The authenticity and insight of Skinner’s Drift, however, will be obvious.

Alden Mudge is a juror for the California Book Awards.

For his marvelous fourth novel, Black Swan Green, David Mitchell decided—in a way—to write a first novel. "First novels are both justly and unjustly maligned," Mitchell says. "Justly, because first novels are written by beginners, by definition. Unjustly because they have a lot of potential for inner archaeology and because they are a chance to do youth through a lens relatively untinted by age."

By turns a very funny and very moving novel about a 13-year-old boy growing up in a village in Worcestershire in 1982, Black Swan Green is clearly not the work of a beginner. In fact, Mitchell is one of the best young novelists writing today. Two of his novels—Number9Dream and Cloud Atlas —were shortlisted for the Booker Prize. Cloud Atlas was also a finalist for both the National Book Critics Circle Award and the Arthur C. Clarke Award. He is clearly a writer with great emotional and technical range.

We reached Mitchell at his office in the Netherlands Institute for Advanced Studies, where "at the furthest end of the furthest wing where we can do the least damage, they have a room for a writer in residence." He has come to Holland, along with his wife and their two young children, to research his next novel, which will have a Dutch theme. For the last few years his family has lived in Ireland, where they own a house near the sea in west Cork. Before that Mitchell was a schoolteacher in Japan, where he met his wife, a linguist.

Perhaps it shouldn't be a surprise that even after three previous novels to tint his lens, Mitchell manages to create such a fresh and refreshing portrait of youth in Black Swan Green. But Jason Taylor, the 13-year-old narrator, is a surprise—and a delight—as he relates in his own inimitable way his adventures and misadventures in the backyards of the village of Black Swan Green, his observations about the growing discord in his family, his feuds with local bullies, his war with a stammer that makes him a magnet for classmates' mockery, his secretive attempts at poetry, his encounter with gypsies at the edge of town and his growing sense of himself and the wider world as he approaches his teenage years.

"I wanted Jason to be unformed enough to be plausible—I didn't want him to speak like a child genius—but interesting enough to be readable," Mitchell says. "That's tough, but there's one thing on your side. Kids that age don't have the linguistic formulas in place that adults do—what linguists call collocation—the way certain words go with certain other words. That means you can smuggle in accidental poetry, and, with luck, wisdom and insight too."

In creating the character of Jason, Mitchell also drew heavily from his own inner archaeology. He says Black Swan Green is his most personal book. "I make the distinction that autobiographical is when you and everybody around you is represented in the book. Personal is when you are represented in the book, but the rest of the book is peopled by relatively fictional creations."

Like Jason, Mitchell turned 13 in 1982. Like his fictional hero, the writer has a stammer and a capacious sense of verbal play. Both kept scrapbooks about the Falklands War, which broke out in 1982.

"The war was one of the formative memories of my youth," Mitchell says. "The patriotism, the flags, the jubilation, as if it were a sporting event. It was the last time that any young English boy could feel that he lived in a country that kicked ass. The consequences of it and the truth of it— the stunning expense, the miserable expense in terms of human life—didn't come for months or years. I also remember being surprised by how quickly it disappeared. So soon afterward this thing that had been so momentous was no longer in the newspapers. That was my first lesson in the shortness of the memories of newspapers. How quickly the loudest mouths forget. Something that is a world event on Monday can be not even a memory on Friday. I learned that from the Falklands."

According to Mitchell, 1982 was a gloomy time in England, with the economy in deep recession. Some of that darkness seeps in at the edges of the story, as the clouds of adult concerns filter in among Jason's own adolescent concerns about fitting in.

Mitchell says 1982 "was also about the last year I felt I could get away with writing an English pastoral novel where the rhythm of life is set by the land, when the one-thousand-year-old rhythm of the countryside was still just about alive." In a chapter called Bridle Path, the English landscape becomes, essentially, the protagonist and Jason in his wanderings along the bridle path perceives the tensions between the older ways of English life and the encroaching American-style suburbs. It is the novel's most beautiful chapter, one in which all of the book's themes are brought seamlessly together and Mitchell's ample talents are on full display.

"Writing a novel is a great excuse to think as deeply as you can about a particular plot of existence, of the world and of being alive," Mitchell says. "When I read a book I certainly don't want to spend 300 pages in the presence of someone I don't care about. I think it comes down to the answer to two key questions that all the books I love have in common: are there people who you care about in it? Are you made to ask throughout the course of the narrative, will they be OK? If the answer is yes, then the book just doesn't let you go. At some level, that's what good writing is. It's as simple as that."

Simple to say. Difficult to do. Unless you're David Mitchell. And the book is Black Swan Green.

Alden Mudge writes from Oakland, California.

On most mornings when she is not teaching or "church hopping," Elizabeth Strout is at the kitchen table writing by hand.

"I try to get in three or four hours, and I put off having lunch for as long as I can because having lunch seems to change the energy flow," Strout says during a phone call to the Park Slope, Brooklyn, home she shares with her husband, a legal aid lawyer. Strout herself studied law at Syracuse University and practiced briefly and unhappily before pursuing her calling as a fiction writer. The couple's 22-year-old daughter recently left for South Africa, where she now works in AIDS education. "If I'm lucky," Strout continues cheerfully, " I'll get through till one o'clock. And then I throw everything out. And that's a morning's work."

Which is why it took Strout six or seven years to complete her critically acclaimed, best-selling first novel Amy and Isabelle, and another seven to publish her deeply moving and satisfying new book, Abide with Me.

Set in a small town in Maine in the late 1950s, Abide with Me tells the story of Reverend Tyler Caskey, the popular local Congregational minister, who is struggling to care for his two young daughters and to maintain some semblance of himself after the shocking loss of his wife, Lauren.

"I was interested in writing about a religious man who is genuine in his religiosity and who gets confronted with such sadness so abruptly that he loses himself. Not his faith, but his faith in himself," Strout says.

In his sorrow and confusion Tyler increasingly measures his actions against those of his hero Dietrich Bonhoeffer, a young German theologian jailed and later killed by the Nazis during World War II, whose writings became immensely influential in the 1950s. It is an impossible standard to live up to, and Tyler's sense of spiritual inadequacy contributes to his growing alienation from his flock. Strout's deft, knowledgeable and unobtrusive use of Bonhoeffer's writings and other religious texts ("I have four different versions of the Bible," she says at one point) adds immensely to our feeling for the texture of Tyler's inner turmoil.

"But I don't see this as a book of theology or religion," Strout hastily adds. "It is the story of a minister. And I needed to know what it would be like to be a minister so I read what Tyler would have read to acquaint myself with the sorts of perceptions he would have had." Nevertheless, Strout confesses a longstanding interest in theology. And she jokes that instead of being a churchgoer, she is a church hopper. "I came up with that name one night a long time ago when friends were talking about being bar hoppers. I thought, oh, I should probably be called a church hopper because I like to go to different churches and observe what they do. I'm really interested in churches and I go to them a lot."

A similar sort of wry, self-deprecating humor pervades much of Abide with Me, especially in Strout's portrayal of the interactions among Tyler's parishioners and the other townspeople of West Annett, Maine. In fact, Strout's shrewdly observed and deadly accurate picture of small-town life in Cold War America – by turns snarky and supportive – is one of the great charms of the book.

"I come from Maine," Strout says, "and both my parents come from eight or nine generations of Maine people. Even though I've been in New York for so many years, there's something deeply familiar to me about that kind of small town. There is a way of life up there that's disappearing. I did not set out to do it. Not at all. But the pressure inside of me was asking me to write about these people, and it occurs to me that I am sort of documenting the end of an era."

The central drama of Abide with Me arises from Tyler's inability to perceive how traumatized his kindergarten-aged daughter, Katherine, has been by the unfathomable loss of her mother. A sweet, vulnerable child now almost totally withdrawn – except when she throws screaming fits in school – Katherine is the novel's most emotionally wrenching character. Her misinterpretation of her father's relationship with his housekeeper sets off the final chain of events that leads Tyler to the brink of emotional and spiritual ruin.

"Katherine's point of view came rather naturally to me," Strout says. "Who knows where these things come from? My grandmother died when I was five and maybe without knowing it I was drawing on feelings of bafflement I had about that loss."

Tapping into such feelings is an essential part of Strout's approach to writing. "I sometimes think it's a bad idea to have ideas about what you want to do," Strout says. "Because the minute you think you know what you want to do, you're forcing a story in a certain direction when you really should pay more attention to just going where it seems to want to go itself. For me ideas aren't worth a whole lot. What is worth something is the emotion – attached to a vision of a character –  just pressing up inside my chest in the morning after I finish my coffee."

But, Strout says, this approach sometimes "feels like my hand is in a cardboard box and I can't see anything in there but I just keep feeling around and get hold of a shape and think, yep, this is the right shape. And if that shape happens to be Katherine, well, all of a sudden I can see her."

"I wish tremendously that I was faster about all this," Strout adds. "But, you know, it didn't turn out to be that way."

Perhaps it doesn't matter. The perceptive, resonant, beautifully written Abide with Me was certainly worth the wait.

Alden Mudge writes from Oakland, California.