All Interviews

Christopher Moore

Interview by Jay MacDonald

San Francisco thrift shop owner Charlie Asher is in first-time-father fluster when his ever-so-patient wife Rachel shoos him from the recovery room so she and baby Sophie can catch a break from his obsessive TLC. He gets no farther than the minivan when he spies his wife’s favorite Sarah McLachlan CD and turns heel to hustle it back to her quarters. When he arrives, he finds a tall black man decked out in Andes-Mint green standing at her bedside. Startled that both father and newborn can apparently see him, the minty one awkwardly informs Charlie that Rachel is dead, and then vanishes amid the rush of crash carts and the futile attempts to revive her.

It’s a heck of a way to start a comedy, but then, as the title of Christopher Moore’s ninth novel suggests, death is indeed A Dirty Job.

Bereaved, Charlie tracks down the angel of death. His name is Minty Fresh, and he informs Charlie that, because he could see him in Rachel’s room, he, like Minty, is a "death merchant" whose calling is to attend certain death scenes, retrieve the departing soul in a vessel and convey it to a new body. They’re not grim reapers, he explains, but grim sowers—or should be. The problem is, Charlie seems to be causing deaths, and to his horror, so is baby Sophie, not an attractive quality in a newborn.

Soon Charlie finds himself in a battle to the death with raven-like Dark Forces that swoop from the sewers, cruise in a vintage Cadillac and threaten Armageddon, or at least a bad case of bird flu. It’s up to Charlie, his Goth assistant Lily, Minty Fresh and a pint-sized army whose souls are double-parked in the bodies of squirrels to save San Francisco when its (death) ship comes in.

If anyone can truly laugh in the face of death, it would be Moore. Good-hearted, well intentioned, utterly fearless and totally irreverent, the one-time Ohio State anthropology major previously cannonballed into such treacherous waters as the life of Jesus (Lamb: The Gospel According to Biff, Christ’s Childhood Pal), and laid waste to Christmas books by combining brain-eating zombies with a murderous Santa Claus in The Stupidest Angel.

All kidding aside however, it was a personal loss that inspired A Dirty Job.

"My mom passed away in 1999 and I was her primary caretaker for the last five months of her life. It was one of the most difficult things I’ve ever done, and I do think it changed the way I look at everything," he says from his home on the Hawaiian island of Kauai. " It was the seminal experience informing this book and a big motivator for writing it. I’m not sure that the book helped me deal with my mother’s passing as much as it sort of paid homage to her and the people who care for the dying. I was profoundly impressed by the people who work with hospice."

Moore being Moore, there was only one way to deal with death.

"Actually, having been through a number of death and dying situations in the last few years, I found that it was quite natural to go to the humor button in dealing with death. I also found that the people who seemed to weather the death of a loved one the best were those who could keep access to their sense of humor, so it seemed very natural to have fun with the subject," he says.

Moore doesn’t get weighed down in religious doctrine. Instead, he posits a perfectly rational, if slightly chaotic, means by which life, death and reincarnation might occur. I mean, who’s to say a Sarah McLachlan CD might not serve as a perfectly acceptable soul coaster?

"I wanted to pay attention to the idea of the ongoing nature of the soul, but I was really trying not to duplicate stuff that had come before me," he admits. "There have been a lot of spooky, Sixth Sense sorts of stories on death and dying and I was trying to steer clear of replicating their mechanisms, so by reaction, mine became kind of convoluted. I didn’t outright reject or accept any paradigms or belief systems, I just tried to present the possibility that there was an underlying order to the ascension of the soul that would work within the spiritual framework of a Buddhist, a Christian, a Hindu, whoever."

Don’t expect a straight answer on his personal view of reincarnation, however.

"I believe at some point in my spiritual evolution my soul did a stint as a two-slice toaster," he says. "I can feel the toast of my inner being, but only two slices. Weird, huh?"

Moore’s anthropology studies have served him well: his books have been inspired by living among the colorful natives of Micronesia (Island of the Sequined Love Nun), meeting a Native American shaman in Montana (Coyote Blue), hanging with marine biologists in Hawaii (Fluke) and exploring San Francisco (Bloodsucking Fiends). His next book will be a sequel to Fiends, his 1995 vampire romp, set once again in his favorite city by the bay.

"San Francisco has such a great contrast of architecture, with natural beauty, dark and light, art and commerce, plus all the different ethnic cultures, it’s like a big party bowl of weirdness," he says. "It’s still an inspirational setting for a macabre story. San Francisco still feels like a natural habitat for vampires."

If he’s been able to lighten us up just a little on the gloomy subject of death, Moore says he will have completed his dirty job.

"One of the things that eludes me is how people will hush you when you make a death joke, as if Death will hear you. It’s that fear of irony thing: Don’t say that, you could die yourself someday. Well duh! That’s sort of the point of the book, isn’t it? No one gets out alive; we might as well laugh at it."

Jay MacDonald enjoys every sandwich he eats in Oxford, Mississippi.

Memoir

Alex Prud’homme

Interview by Eve Zibart

There have been few sign-offs in television history more famous, or more frequently parodied, than the emphatic, "This is Julia Child: bon appetit!" And it was thoroughly characteristic straightforward, enthusiastic, convincing and delivered with the gusto that pervaded her life. It was that frank If I can do it, you can do it approach, says her great-nephew Alex Prud'homme, that so swiftly made Julia a friend, confidant and coach to millions of amateur cooks.

But what her viewers and readers also recognized was her very real passion for food, particularly French, of course, but also for any honest, fresh, imaginative and generous approach to cooking. In fact, Julia Child was a great romantic, and her new memoir, completed with Prud'homme's help after her death, is first and foremost a love story.

"This is a book about some of the things I have loved most in life," she writes in the introduction to My Life in France. "My husband, Paul Child; la belle France; and the many pleasures of cooking and eating." And it is impossible not to feel Julia's excitement at her progressive discoveries of French cuisine, culture, cookware, cooking and ultimately teaching throughout this lively reconstruction of the Childs' first posting to Paris, from 1948-1954, and later in their second home in Provence.

It's also clear how much she adored her husband, a self-taught gourmet and bon vivant, a painter and photographer despite having lost one eye as a boy and her greatest fan. Both the dedication, "To Paul Child," and the cover make this clear. The jacket photograph shows P & J, as they sometimes signed themselves, with red paper hearts pinned to their shirts. It was their habit to send out Valentine's Day cards instead of Christmas cards, Prud'homme says, and he includes photos of several in the book.

For Prud'homme, who had not known his great-uncle in his prime, getting to know Paul through his letters was part of the fun; "it was sort of like doing archaeological exploration of my own family. We were fairly close Paul and [my grandfather] Charlie were twins, and we were always together for Thanksgiving and so on but they seemed kind of exotic, always flying off to Paris or California or something." Fortunately, Paul Child was a great correspondent.

"He was such a vibrant person as a young man," says Prud'homme. "He sent letters to his brother every week, long, handwritten letters, funny, acerbic, very lively." Prud'homme, a successful freelance journalist, uses many of these old letters, as well as photographs and mementos ("she had them stuffed everywhere ") to set off his great-aunt's often irreverent reminiscences.

"She had always talked about writing a book like this, and every year I used to go and visit and offer to help. But she was very much of a life moves forward' person, and it would have made her lonely to pore over old letters. So I would just get her talking and take notes." The stories are frequently hilarious—post-World War II Paris was not always an easy place for a six-foot-two and rather gawky American naif—often with her sense of wonder and delight still tangible. It's especially vivid when discussing her determination to learn French techniques, and her unhappy sense that the great school Le Cordon Bleu was in decline, even as she subjected her husband and friends to endless batches of homemade mayonnaise.

That she and two of her friends, Simone Simca Beck Fischbacker and Louisette Bertholle, dared to call their fledgling school L'Ecole des Gourmettes was a sort of declaration of culinary independence. They were determined to teach not haute cuisine but honest cuisine bourgeoisie—an attitude that led to the publication of the landmark Mastering the Art of French Cooking.

Prud'homme says, "She patterned her teaching technique on Chef Max Bugnard, her mentor at Cordon Bleu. He taught her not only how to cook like the French but how to shop like the French take your time, ask the vendors about their wares and they'll open up to you. He used to say, Goutez! Goutez! (Taste! Taste!)" There are fascinating cameos and sidelights throughout the book: the wild-haired grande dame of literature Colette at her favorite cafe; James Beard in a vast billowing Japanese kimono strolling across the fields to breakfast with the Childs; a series of eccentric maids, including one who flushed a beer can down the toilet, and so on. There's a cheery Calamity Julia tone to these adventures. It's somehow not at all surprising that just before she was to tape the first episode of "The French Chef," the studios at WGBH, the Boston public television station that produced the show, burned down.

"What you see in 'The French Chef' is what you got with Julia, maybe a little amp-ed up for television, but not much," says Prud'homme. " But what I didn't really get as a kid was what a great impact she had on so many people. And I also didn't realize how hard she worked at it. She had tremendous discipline, despite the funny stuff."

Julia Child died in her sleep on Aug. 13, 2004, two days short of her 92nd birthday. She was so indelible a part of American culture that the kitchen where much of " The French Chef" was filmed has been reconstructed in the Smithsonian's National Museum of American History.

Her last words in the book refer to her first meal on French soil, in 1948. "In all the years since that succulent meal, I have yet to lose the feelings of wonder and excitement that it inspired in me. I can still almost taste it. And thinking back on it now reminds me that the pleasures of the table, and of life, are infinite—toujours bon appetit!"

Eve Zibart is a restaurant critic for the Washington Post and the author of nine books, including The Ethnic Food Lover's Companion.

Children's & YA

Eoin Colfer

Interview by Heidi Henneman

Best known for his immensely popular Artemis Fowl series, Eoin Colfer departs from his usual territory and delves into the world of crime-solving with his latest book, Half Moon Investigations.

"I really wanted to do something that was quirky and funny," the author says from his home in Wexford, Ireland. Colfer's basis for the new detective novel seems to be a combination of childhood adoration for the Alfred Hitchcock and the Three Investigators series and the adventures he shared with his five brothers. More inspiration came during a big 40th birthday party that he had thrown for himself and a large group of friends he had known since the second grade. "At the end of the night, someone asked when I was going to write a teen book," recalls the author, "and it started us talking about all of our escapades." Shortly thereafter, Colfer set about putting the shenanigans to paper, and Half Moon Investigations came into being.

Of course, he has changed the names to protect the not-so-innocent, but most of his friends know who they are. "It's liberating to write about people I know. It makes it an easy process," Colfer says. He was also adamant about making the stories seem true to life, rather than dealing with fluff cases. "I wanted my characters to solve actual mysteries," he says, "and they do."

What starts as the search for a missing notebook escalates into a whodunit involving stolen iPods, burning playhouses, a deafened dancer, a bludgeoned protagonist and more all seemingly unrelated until our brainiac detective solves the crime spree. Colfer confesses that he fashioned this quick-thinking character after another person he knows: himself. "I wanted to get away from whimsy and darkness of Artemis Fowl and have a good guy, but not a superhero," Colfer says. "To have someone with no clue about how to talk to girls and be unsure of himself, to be quite smart but have a lack of confidence. Much like myself."

As it turned out, it took Colfer a mere eight months to pen the first draft of the book and with so much material to draw on, this might be just the beginning of our journey with Fletcher Moon. "I have a second book planned, the author says, and I would like to do a series." But that's not all he has on his plate at the moment. Colfer is also writing the next Artemis Fowl book and researching a work of historical fiction.

Although Colfer's books are for readers 10 and up, his inspiration comes from a younger audience his two sons Sean and Finn, 3 and 8, respectively. "I started writing picture books for Finn," Colfer says, "after he came home one day frustrated that he couldn't read the books that people were talking about at school."

Six picture books later, he has become a bit of a master. "Picture books are quite intense," the author says. "Every word counts." As it happens, another picture book is in the works as well.

With all of these projects underway, Colfer could be forgiven if he longed for a little spare time. "Not so," says the author, who previously spent 15 years teaching elementary school. "I still treat writing as my hobby, so I think of that as my spare time."

And when he's not writing, he likes to spend time with his children. "I have an office in the back garden, so I commute about 10 meters to work every day," Colfer says. "But there are a few distractions: Every time I look up I see a child stuck to the window like Garfield."

Keeping writing close to home has always been a part of Colfer's lifestyle. His mother wrote plays and taught drama, and his father wrote academic books. "Writing and drawing was the norm in our house," he recalls. In fact, three of his brothers are also involved in the arts a screenwriter, an architect and an archaeologist who moonlights in a rock band but none are as celebrated as the Artemis Fowl author thus far.

Although he has had to deal with a bit of teasing from his brothers, for the most part, Colfer's fame hasn't affected his perspective on life. "I don't think about the celebrity end of it or let it affect me in any big ways," he says, "but I do end up having to buy the beer all the time."

The generous author may be picking up the tab even more often in the next few years. In addition to Colfer's own writings, a comic book series featuring Artemis Fowl will be hitting bookstores in early 2007 and filming for a movie on the same subject is expected to begin later this year.

Best known for his immensely popular Artemis Fowl series, Eoin Colfer departs from his usual territory and delves into the world of crime-solving with his latest book, Half Moon Investigations.

"I really wanted to do something that was quirky and funny," the…

Social Science

Geoff Nicholson

Interview by Alden Mudge

The bio on the cover of this frequently provocative, usually informative, and always entertaining saunter through the history, culture, and strange obsessions that have evolved right along with our species’ most elemental form of locomotion, announces that Geoff Nicholson divides his time between London and Los Angeles. To an apprehensive Northern California interviewer, the description suggests not a bi-continental but a bipolar life. London after all seems to be a sensible city of walkers and public-transit-takers; Los Angeles is, well, a city overwhelmed by cars and people driven to road rage.

Not to worry, Nicholson assures during a call to his home in what he calls “the lower slopes of the Hollywood Hills.” First of all, since his American wife took a job as an editor in L.A. for Taschen Books, he is now basically an undivided self in Los Angeles. “When we met she was in New York,” the England-born Nicholson, who is the author of some 20 previous works of fiction and non-fiction, says. “I could just about manage the commute between London and New York. But I couldn’t manage the commute between L.A. and London. I’m pretty much here full time now.”

Second, according to Nicholson, there actually are people who walk in Los Angeles. Maybe even a lot of people. These include the actress Christina Ricci, with whom Nicholson took an unintended, socially-awkward, parallel stroll, humorously recounted in the early pages of The Lost Art of Walking. “Walkers in Los Angeles are the politest people in the world,” Nicholson claims, sounding surprised himself. “They step aside for you. In London, people will push you aside if they’re going somewhere. And in New York the pleasure for walkers comes from your displeasure, from your inconvenience.” Or, as he puckishly writes in the book: “New York is a city where the people not only enjoy getting in your way as you’re walking down the street, they’ll actually go out of their way to obstruct your progress. They’ll inconvenience themselves for the greater pleasure of inconveniencing you.”

Hmm. Nicholson is nothing if not opinionated. But his knowledge of the practice and lore of walking is both deep and wide, and it ambles, struts and occasionally tramps or trudges through nearly every sentence of the book. “At one point I did imagine this as a kind of encyclopedic book containing every possible source and every possible mention of walking in the world,” Nicholson says. “But in the end that would have been a book of almost infinite length.”

The pared down version of The Lost Art of Walking is still suggestively capacious. Nicholson examines, briefly, the evolution and physiology of bipedalism. He writes with flare about representations of walking in sculpture, performance art, popular music, photography, movies and books. He casts an amusingly skeptical eye on both the politics and the spirituality of walking. He tells stories from the history of competitive walking. He strolls easily from, say, a tale of being lost in the desert to an account of the first moonwalk to an argument that Buster Keaton is a far better walker on screen than Charlie Chaplin. Holding it all together are Nicholson’s often-debatable opinions and the fact that he is a delightful storyteller.

Nicholson says that his book on walking was inspired by his move to Los Angeles. “I actually quite like driving and I quite like cars. I don’t necessarily see driving and walking in some terrible opposition. But I do like to be a bit of a contrarian, and the idea of moving to L.A. and lighting out for the territory on foot seemed to be a way of stating my independence. It seemed more interesting, in a perverse kind of way, to explore the city that way. For me walking has always been that; whenever I get to a place, I set out on foot and try and find highways and byways and alleyways.”

Thus Nicholson writes frequently here of walks and walkers in Los Angeles, Manhattan and London, places where he has spent a lot of time on foot. “I am mildly obsessed about walking and of course the book is about people who are thoroughly, insanely obsessed with walking,” he says. So, emulating or perhaps competing with Iain Sinclair, whose obsessive walking projects in London are well documented, Nicholson sets himself the task of walking back and forth on Oxford Street for a day. “I asked people ‘what’s the place that you most hate to walk in London?’ And Oxford Street came up. I used to have a job near there and my bank was there, so I had actually spent an awful lot of time walking on Oxford Street, but I shared everybody else’s distaste for it. Despite the fact that everybody hated it, everybody was there. There were millions of people in Oxford Street, all of them hating it, partly because everybody else was there. I believed then that I’d found a project that nobody had ever done.”

In Manhattan, partly inspired by novelist Paul Auster’s New York trilogy, Nicholson’s project became The Martini Glass Walk. “I’m a person who does spend a certain amount of time looking at maps,” he says. “I like looking at the shapes and imagining how to walk from there to there. I was looking for the project that had my name on it. I had learned to drink martinis in Manhattan and looking at the Manhattan map, this shape of a martini glass appeared. You’ve got to use a bit of imagination but it is there. Who is the person who said a map is not the territory? If you were a god or a bird you could look down and see me walking out that shape of the martini glass, but on the ground it doesn’t have that feel at all. That was when the scales fell from my eyes about project walks. They somehow spoil the pleasure of walking.”

Nicholson believes that the activity of walking “ties in with the way my brain works. The rhythm of walking and the rhythm of thinking seem to just go perfectly together. People have told me they feel very vulnerable when they’re on foot. But I feel more comfortable, more at home when I’m walking in a strange place than when I’m driving in a strange place. I’m more a city walker than a bucolic walker, I’m very fond of industrial ruin, as you’ll gather from this book. I don’t live in an area of industrial ruin so I’ll drive there and park and wander around. Wander not walk; there’s a kind of aimlessness about it. And I always find I’m more worried about the car – will it be there when I head back, will it start, will the tires be punctured – than about anything I might meet while on foot. I feel I can deal with anything I meet up with on foot. But a couple of slashed tires? Then I have a problem.”

Continuing, Nicholson says, “The last nonfiction book I wrote was called Sex Collectors. It was about people who collect erotica, for lack of a better word. Quite a few of my novels are about people with obsessions, often obsessions with things – cars, guitars, material things. To be alive in the West in the 21st century is to be concerned with materialism. We’re always thinking about why we have what we have and why we have to have more. We all have an intense relationship with the stuff we buy. But walking is one of those activities that really doesn’t have an end product. You can have a swimmer’s body or a body-builder’s body but nobody wants a walker’s body or even knows what that is. Walkers come in all shapes and sizes. You can do things around walking, including writing a book about it, keeping a walking log or taking pictures. But in the end you have to walk – at least I have to walk – just for the sake of walking.”

May The Lost Art of Walking inspire you to rise from the armchair and light out for the territories of your own mild obsessions. On foot.

Fiction

Kaavya Viswanathan

Interview by Trisha Ping

Editor's note: After this interview was completed, it was revealed that passages from How Opal Mehta Got Kissed, Got Wild, and Got a Life had been plagiarized from the works of Salman Rushdie, Meg Cabot and others. Viswanathan's contract for her second book was cancelled and Opal Mehta was pulled from bookstore shelves.

Nowadays, young writers with major book deals are no longer a novelty. Author Christopher Paolini's Inheritance trilogy was headed to the big screen before he reached college age, and Zadie Smith's White Teeth was written when she was only 23 years old. But even among stories like these, Kaavya Viswanathan's unusual path to publication stands out. Viswanathan was a high-school senior when her college advisor discovered she was writing a novel. The advisor asked to see it, recognized its potential and sent it off to her agent at the William Morris Agency. A short time later, the then-17-year-old Viswanathan became the youngest person ever signed by the agency, and she eventually received a two-book, $500,000 contract from Little, Brown. Not bad for someone whose ultimate career goal is investment banking.

How Opal Mehta Got Kissed, Got Wild, and Got a Life is the humorous, heartfelt story of an Indian-American teenager who's worked her whole life to get into Harvard. Opal's résumé is textbook perfect, but during her early action interview, the dean poses one question she can't answer: what do you do for fun? He promises her a second chance at getting in, if she finds an answer to the question before the regular admissions interviews in January. But how does a girl who's spent her life being perfect suddenly become cool? Now a sophomore at Harvard, Viswanathan answered a few questions about Opal's journey and the realities of Ivy League life.

You were accepted by early action to Harvard. How much did your experiences during the application process inspire your novel?
Although my application process was (fortunately!) nothing like Opal's, it was definitely an extremely stressful and competitive time. My high school traditionally sends several students to Ivy League universities, and Senior Fall was a very intense, high-pressure semester, with everyone frantically pulling their applications together. It was the memory of how competitive applications became that inspired me to write Opal, because if applying was bad for me, I couldn't imagine how awful it would be for people whose families were involved too!

At the beginning of the novel, Opal has a hard time with the work/life balance, something everyone struggles with (though maybe not to such an extreme!). How do you maintain balance in your own life?
I really believe that college is about friends and experiences more than work, so I guess I've already made a choice about priorities in my work/life balance! But I try to limit myself to classes and activities that I'm passionate about, and I don't stress about not being perfect. If going to a friend's birthday party means not doing one chapter of reading, well, life is all about trade-offs.

How have the students at Harvard reacted to your book?
I've not really told anybody apart from close friends. All the students who know have been wonderful incredibly supportive and encouraging.

Near the end of the book, Opal pays a visit to Harvard that changes her perception of the school. Did Harvard live up to your expectations?
Harvard has been the most amazing experience of my life so far. It surpassed all my expectations, and I couldn't have hoped for a more incredible time at college.

Now that DreamWorks has optioned your book, which actors would you choose to play your main characters in the film?
This is the hardest question, because I don't ever watch Indian movies so I don't know any Indian actors. And I don't think there are that many around in Hollywood either. I'd love to have a cameo, though.

As a young writer, which authors inspire you?
The author who inspires me the most would have to be Kazuo Ishiguro. I've read almost all of his books and I am always struck by how he manages to inhabit a different world and create a different voice each time. I also fell in love with Amitav Ghosh after reading The Shadow Lines, and funnily enough, he's teaching one of my courses this semester (I'm still trying to work up the nerve to ask for his autograph).

Any advice for students aiming for the Ivy League?
Grades really are important, but beyond grades and scores, find something you are passionate about and let that shine through in your application. Show that you've put effort and initiative into pursuing a subject or interest that you really care about.

What's the subject of your next book?
It's still Opal and her family. She's having a wonderful time at Harvard, but her life is never simple, is it?

Arts & Culture Art

Julia Cameron

Interview by Jay MacDonald

Julia Cameron can overlook the fact that author James Frey embellished A Million Little Pieces; what irks her is that Oprah deigned to endorse the now-infamous memoir. "It made me mad at Oprah. I thought it was irresponsible of her to so love an anti-AA book," Cameron says by phone from her home in Manhattan.

"He [Frey] never really got into recovery in the sense of having to do soul-searching, inventory, restitution—any of the parts of rebuilding. It was just like, I stopped using. Isn't it good the storm's over?' Well yes, but it didn't seem to suggest the entire expanse of life that opens up once you get sober. It's not just quitting the drink; it's finding a spiritual path. Once you do that, you can go anywhere."

Cameron knows. She's been there and back: smashed to sober, lost to enlightened, with occasional detours into madness that she now controls with the help of her psychopharmacologist and daily doses of Abilify.

In her candid memoir, Floor Sample, Cameron recounts her steep and frequently harrowing climb out of alcoholism and psychosis and onto a self-styled spiritual path to creativity that she first shared with readers in her 1992 bestseller The Artist's Way.

In the mid-1970s, Cameron was a hot young magazine writer living in Washington, D.C., who modeled herself on hard-drinking literary lionesses Lillian Hellman and Dorothy Parker. One day, Playboy commissioned her to interview a rising young New York director named Martin Scorsese.

"I was at a lunch table at the King Cole Bar at the St. Regis hotel and he walked in, sat down, and I said my God, I've met the man I'm going to marry!" she recalls. "I had never thought about getting married. I had always thought I was going to be a writer so I had pictured a sort of solitary path. But when I met Martin, I just fell totally in love. He was enchanting; he still is."

Marry they did, and in 1976 collaborated on the birth of a daughter, Domenica.

"It was like marrying into a Who's Who, but before they were," Cameron says. "Martin was not yet famous, Steve Spielberg wasn't famous, Robert DeNiro wasn't famous. Everyone became famous simultaneously, so there was no grounding. It was crazy for everybody."

Scorsese's career skyrocketed as a result of Taxi Driver and the newlyweds suddenly became A-listers with unlimited access to excess. The marriage didn't survive the pressures of Scorsese's sudden fame and his wife's growing dependence on alcohol.

"I was what, in retrospect, I call a Cup o' Soup alcoholic; I had a blackout the first time I went drinking and most people don't," she says.

Cameron quit drinking in 1978 and found to her surprise that the good times weren't over but actually just beginning.

"I lost a world but I gained a world. I lost Martin and all of our mutual friends, and for a long time I thought the party had moved on without me. Everyone else kept right on moving at high velocity and I skidded to a halt and said, this has to change or I'm dead."

Adrift as a single mom, Cameron depended on her sober friends for guidance, though she didn't like their suggestions at first. "When I got sober, they said to me, you've got to believe in some positive greater being of some sort, and I said, you don't understand, I was raised Roman Catholic, this is the greased slide to agnosticism. But I started casting around for what I could believe in and I came up with a line from Dylan Thomas: 'The force that through the green fuse drives the flower.' So I crystallized it; I can believe in creative energy."

Spiritual student and creativity teacher, Cameron ping-ponged between Taos, New Mexico, Los Angeles and New York assembling the creative "tool box" that readers know as The Artist's Way. It recommends a simple creative regimen: write three "morning pages" a day on anything to help overcome internal censors, schedule "artist dates" to invite inspiration and let God take care of the quality.

It's a system that has worked for Cameron, who says she's a floor sample of her techniques. She's written 22 books, numerous plays, screenplays, poetry—even musicals guided by the spirit of Richard Rodgers.

"I tell you, he's a taskmaster!" she chuckles. "Today, I was sitting here doing my morning pages and looking for guidance and when I got to the bottom, there it was: 'Julia, I'd like to see you at the piano. There are melodies waiting for you to find them. There is a show I'm ready to write and I need you to cooperate.' His tone is take no prisoners."

But there were dark periods as well, including breakdowns in which Cameron developed an irrational fear of electricity. "I'm always asking, can't I please stop taking drugs? And the answer is, if you stop taking the drug, you probably have two months before you have a breakdown. Then it seems like a small price to pay."

Cameron still remains in touch with Scorsese through Domenica, a writer and filmmaker who is set to direct her first feature film this fall on her dad's home court, New York City. "The apple doesn't fall far from the tree, I guess," says Cameron, who admits she's still " trying to commit" to the city but loves teaching at the Open Center in SoHo.

Despite the dark subject matter of her memoir, Cameron doesn't view her life as a tragedy, but instead a work in progress.

"I once had a girl say to me, 'I admire you so. You've lost everything,' and until she said that, it had never occurred to me. I think I've had some very dark things happen but I think my temperament is the lemonade-making variety. I find when I'm writing I'm pretty cheerful, which may explain why I've been so productive."

Jay MacDonald is a writer in Mississippi.

Fiction Women's Fiction

Jacquelyn Mitchard

Interview by Amy Scribner

As a longtime reporter and newspaper columnist, Jacquelyn Mitchard couldn’t help but wonder what happens to victims of high-profile violence after the headlines fade away and the camera crews disappear. In her powerful new novel, Cage of Stars, the Swan family—what’s left of it—is wading through its grief after a deeply disturbed young man, Scott Early, kills their two youngest daughters in a particularly brutal way.

Twelve-year-old Ronnie Swan, the eldest daughter and the one baby-sitting when Becky and Ruthie were murdered, is left to deal not only with the intense media attention but also with her own guilt and anger. While her deeply devout Mormon parents eventually choose to forgive Early, Ronnie is consumed by her need to avenge her sisters’ deaths.

Mitchard found the basis for her novel in a newspaper story detailing a similar real-life killing in California. But instead of lingering on the violence itself, she wanted to explore the aftermath of having a loved one suddenly torn away. In Cage of Stars, the murder scene is harrowing, but brief.

"I didn’t want violence to be the subject of the book," she says in an interview from her home in Wisconsin. "I wanted to handle the crime as discreetly and delicately as I could. I was more curious about what happened after."

Mitchard is known for her gripping and thought-provoking portrayals of families in pain. In her best-selling novel The Deep End of the Ocean—the very first Oprah Book Club selection—a child is kidnapped, only to be found years later and returned to parents who are virtual strangers. Custody battles, failing marriages, chronic illnesses: Mitchard has covered them all in her six previous novels, which include The Breakdown Lane and A Theory of Relativity. Cage of Stars is another Mitchard classic, a gripping journey into an unthinkable situation. It is a lovely meditation on faith, family and finding peace in the unforgivable.

When speaking, Mitchard exudes a down-home energy and humor that belies the tough subject matter she often tackles.

When thanked for talking with BookPage at 10 a.m., she exclaims, "It’s midday for me! I live in the country. The children have to catch the bus at an absurd hour." She goes on to matter-of-factly add that she has already exercised and met her morning goal of 200 sit-ups. And somehow, because of her cheerful breeziness, you are happy for her.

Mitchard lives on a farm near Madison, Wisconsin, with her husband and seven children, as well as two Clydesdales and one horse "of indeterminate origin." A picturesque life, to be sure, but it wasn’t always so easy. Her first husband, reporter Dan Allegretti, died of colorectal cancer in 1993, leaving her behind to provide for their three young children.

"We had nothing," she recalls. "We had learned every way to serve rice."

Even worse for Mitchard was the uncertainty of wondering what really happens to loved ones after they die. She found it unbearable.

"Being a widow, I know that survival can be worse than death," she says. "None of us knows for sure whether we go to eternal life or a good night’s sleep."

For their part, the Swans cope with the loss of two children by relying heavily on their faith. Mitchard chose Mormonism mainly for its focus on family, and seems surprised at the interest that choice has garnered.

"It’s the least important question of the whole book, yet the one I get the most," she says. "I chose it because I wanted Ronnie to have an extremely sheltered girlhood, but I wanted her to live in a community where she could be a lawyer, a dancer, a basketball player—anything she wanted to be. A part of the world, yet not worldly."

For a young girl who grew up free from the modern culture of violent video games and television, the murders would be almost incomprehensible. So a shattered Ronnie finds herself plotting to track down Early, without really knowing what she will do when she comes face-to-face with him again.

"Revenge is a primary human emotion. Forgiveness isn’t," Mitchard says. "When we are wronged or hurt, our instinct is to strike back. But it doesn’t always get us what we think it will, which is peace."

As with her previous novels, Mitchard found writing Cage of Stars to be an all-encompassing project.

"When you are writing fiction, you sort of drop down into this other kingdom," she says. "It isn’t as though I ignore my children and don’t feed them. It’s just that some part of your mind is living in that invisible house you’ve created."

And Mitchard has one steadfast rule while immersed in writing a novel: She doesn’t read any other fiction.

"I become desperately jealous," she says. "I wonder why I ever tried this at all."

Certainly thousands of aspiring writers felt the same pangs of envy when, on Sept. 17, 1996, Mitchard’s The Deep End of the Ocean was announced as the inaugural Oprah Book Club selection. Winfrey herself left Mitchard several messages, but Mitchard, assuming it was a prank, didn’t return the calls. Only after Winfrey persisted did Mitchard learn that her life was about to change drastically. She had no way of knowing just how much.

"Who knew what it would mean?" Mitchard says. "People had such a hunger and thirst to gossip about a book. They just embraced it."

The kind of fame and financial windfall that comes with being an Oprah Book Club pick comes at a strange price—but it’s one that Mitchard has easily accepted.

"Some days I think it set the gate so high for me that it’ll be difficult for me to attain that kind of success again," she says. "On the other hand, it gave me the privilege and ability to support myself, my husband and my children.

"I’m privileged to write stories for a living."

Amy Scribner writes from Olympia, Washington.

As a longtime reporter and newspaper columnist, Jacquelyn Mitchard couldn't help but wonder what happens to victims of high-profile violence after the headlines fade away and the camera crews disappear. In her powerful new novel, Cage of Stars, the Swan family—what's left of it—is wading…

History

Nathaniel Philbrick

Interview by Alden Mudge

Contrary to what grade-school legends would have us believe, the first Thanksgiving was not celebrated in late November; most likely it occurred at the end of September or in very early October. And, with the arrival of the Indian leader Massasoit and hundreds of his followers "bearing five freshly killed deer," the event "soon became an overwhelming Native celebration," rather than the pious English festival we commemorate today.

This is one of many choice tidbits in Nathaniel Philbrick's absorbing and exceedingly well researched history of the Plymouth Colony. In fact, Mayflower: A Story of Courage, Community, and War is so interesting in so many ways that readers will come away from it with a profoundly different understanding – and deeper appreciation – of the people (Native Americans and colonists, alike) and events that have been flattened over the course of almost three centuries into a lifeless national mythology.

"I think it's really important that we see the past as a lived past rather than something that was fated to be," Philbrick says during a call to Providence, Rhode Island. Philbrick is on his way home to Nantucket Island, where he and his wife, a third-generation Cape Codder, and their two children have lived for almost 20 years. "We look at this story as if the outcome had been determined from the very beginning, but that is not how they saw it. So with this book I was really trying to recreate the sense of how precarious it was."

Philbrick won the National Book Award in 2000 for In the Heart of the Sea, his harrowing account of the 1820 sinking of the whaling ship Essex and the struggle of its crew to survive. Ever since, he says, he has "been writing survival stories in one way another. What fascinated me about this story was that this was a survival story in three layers."

After many delays and a horrible sea journey, the Pilgrims arrived at the wrong time of year on a coast where three years before a thriving, populous Native community had been decimated by a plague brought to the Americas by European fisherman. The first year after the Mayflower landed was a physical and psychological struggle for survival for both Natives and Pilgrims alike, as Philbrick shows in riveting detail. The shrewd political calculations of Chief Massasoit and his remarkable relationship with Edward Winslow eventually laid the groundwork for a half-century of amazing – if hard-won – accommodation between settlers and Natives, the second layer of Philbrick's survival tale. But the succeeding generations of Pilgrims and Natives, grown greedy and comfortable on one side and resentful and hard-pressed on the other, moved inexorably toward the largely forgotten and incredibly brutal "King Philip's War," which, Philbrick argues convincingly, announced the tragic, archetypal pattern of conflict that continental expansion would follow for the next two centuries.

As guides through this lesser-known but fascinating era, Philbrick follows two dominant, articulate personalities: William Bradford, the leader of the first generation of Pilgrims, and William Church, a prescient and "gleefully impious" representative of the third generation of colonists. Philbrick is equally good at illuminating the character of the other major players in this history – Miles Standish, Edward and Josiah Winslow, Mary Rowlandson, Squanto, Chief Massasoit and his son, King Philip – none of whom is quite the paragon or villain portrayed in the standard national mythologies.

"My education as an elementary and high school student was that the Pilgrims were the example of everything that was good about America. Then I went to college and the story was that the evil Europeans annihilated the innocent Native Americans," Philbrick says. "But as I delved into this on my own, I saw that this was a tragedy in terms of the overarching dynamic. They all were people who were struggling heroically (or in a cowardly fashion) and who had a lot to say about what was happening to them, rather than being powerless victims."

Philbrick developed his informative, eminently readable, person-centered approach to writing history in several earlier books about the history of Nantucket and of seafaring. An English major at Brown, Philbrick learned to write during a stint at the magazine Sailing World. He had been a competitive sailboat racer as a teenager and in college, a passion he says he developed on a manmade lake near "that most nautical of places, Pittsburgh, Pennsylvania," where his father was a university professor. Philbrick met his wife when both were teaching sailing on Cape Cod.

While it took him three years to compose Mayflower, Philbrick says he actually worked on the book for almost 13 years. "When I was writing my first history of Nantucket, I realized that if I was going to understand its origins as an English settlement I would have to go back to the Pilgrims and the Indians," he says. He found that the English side was well documented. But to understand the Native side he had to "look at oral traditions, archeology, folklore. I realized that exploring the Native American past requires a whole different side of the brain almost, a whole different discipline. I took a couple of years just coming up to speed in that way."

The result of this lengthy inquiry is a history that reads like tragedy, that is populated by fallible humans on all sides and that resounds with what-if moments. Philbrick does not see as inevitable this first major war between Indians and the English (in which the English lost eight percent of their male population and Native Americans of southern New England lost 60 to 80 percent of its people, including those sold into slavery by the Puritans). But once it did happen, King Philip's War set the pattern of conflict for centuries to come.

"If Josiah Winslow and Philip had only decided to just talk, as their fathers had, we would have had a profoundly different New England history. But it didn't happen," Philbrick says. "The Pilgrims didn't come here on the Mayflower to empire build or to remove a population, but in the wake of that war, that's exactly what they did."

Mayflower: A Story of Courage, Community and War is one of the best histories of unintended consequences you're ever likely to read.

Alden Mudge writes from Oakland, California.

Anderson Cooper

Interview by Deanna Larson

He reports, he anchors, he blogs, he gets emotional. Wait, pause. Rewind. Old-school newsmen aren't supposed to react or feel, but Anderson Cooper is a new breed of journalist. He engages with the facts while being "emotionally accessible" to viewers.

Cooper says his job is to report what he sees, pursue the facts and demand accountability, but he rejects the idea—especially after Hurricane Katrina—that journalists can remain impassive while observing complex current events.

"The notion that one can see all this stuff and not have it affect you in some way is false," Cooper says. Emotions during war or in the wake of a disaster are palpable, he says, adding that he "wanted to honor that. It felt real. . . . That's part of the story, the emotions that people are going through and that you are going through."

Speaking from his car as he prepares to broadcast his nightly CNN show "Anderson Cooper 360" live from Nogales, Arizona, the "ground zero" of illegal immigration (he later wrote in his CNN blog, "It's fascinating to see the border patrol in action up close. For all the talk in Washington, this is where the rhetoric meets reality"), the unpretentious Cooper practically vibrates with the impulse to capture every intense or unspeakable detail of the stories he has covered in his award-winning broadcast career.

And he breaks through the "television artifice" and examines the tragedies of both his personal and professional lives and his nearly self-destructive desire to witness the world's worst in his new book, Dispatches from the Edge: A Memoir of War, Disasters and Survival.

"It's easy to overwrite, especially with this material," Cooper says. The son of iconic American fashion designer Gloria Vanderbilt, Cooper experienced his own personal destruction after the death of his father and the suicide of his brother. "I tried to strip it away as much as possible and keep it as real as possible."

Dispatches from the Edge is a terse, spare script narrating highlights of Cooper's career written from journals he has kept and a document of the personal losses that he couldn't admit to himself even as he witnessed and recorded the shared anguish of whole communities and countries.

Cooper got an unorthodox start in the business, graduating from Yale with a political science degree, then boarding planes without assignments, armed only with a home video camera and running toward what repulsed him most, driven by a sense that he had to "figure these things out."

"I felt my options were limited," he says. "It was less about trying to make a career for myself and more about trying to understand things about myself and the way the world worked. I was willing to take a lot of risks to make it happen."

Cooper eventually sold his work to Channel One News, ABC News and then CNN, covering the Bosnian civil war, famine in Somalia, elections in Iraq, genocide and starvation in Africa, and later, Sri Lanka after the tsunami and New Orleans and the Gulf Coast after Hurricane Katrina.

The memoir gives readers a behind-the-scenes look at many topics and moments Cooper can't explore in depth on TV ("I'm continually disappointed . . . it's tragic when what you see isn't transmitted completely") like the building in Sri Lanka apparently exhibiting a photography exhibit—until closer inspection reveals that these are gruesome pictures of hundreds of bodies being stored at the makeshift morgue before burial in mass graves, taken as a record for families still searching for their loved ones. Or the woman in Louisiana who tries to keep a beached seal alive after the hurricane by throwing cups of water over its skin—until police shoot the animal in the head after she leaves.

Working in post-hurricane New Orleans and Mississippi, where his father spent some of his life, surrounded by "all these places I had been to as a child with my father," Cooper found a way to honor his own personal traumas while recording senseless tragedy.

"It's easy to become overwhelmed by the things you see in the news," he says. "What I've learned, and what gives me hope, is that people are capable of anything. They're capable of horrific brutalities but also amazing acts of kindness."

Cooper says his job…

Memoir

Nando Parrado

Interview by Edward Morris

Ignore the title of Nando Parrado’s new book, Miracle in the Andes. Anyone familiar with this plane-crash survival story either from the original news accounts, Piers Paul Read’s best-selling 1974 book Alive or the movie that dramatized it knows that the experience illustrates the triumph of rationality, not the blessings of blind luck. The survivors simply outsmarted the elements that should have killed them all.

Here’s what happened: On Oct. 12, 1972, a rugby team set off from Montevideo, Uruguay, to fly to Santiago, Chile, for a game. There were 45 people on the plane, including the crew, Parrado (who was a member of the team), his mother and his sister. The next day the plane crashed high in the Andes. Twenty-nine people survived the crash, but only 16 were still alive 72 days later when rescuers finally arrived. Stranded without food, the survivors began eating their own dead. After a number of thwarted starts that led nowhere, Parrado and his friend, Roberto Canessa, finally were able to trudge across the high mountains and summon help an ordeal that took 10 days. Thus, an experience that might have turned into a real-life Lord of the Flies became instead The Magnificent Sixteen.

Parrado was an adviser for the 1993 film Alive! so it is no surprise that his book describes essentially the same incidents as the movie. Where the book departs is in its plumbing of the author’s mind as he comes to terms with his own severe injuries, the many deaths after the crash, the realization that no one is looking for the survivors and, always, the bone-chilling cold.

The precision with which Parrado remembers specific dates and details may strain one’s belief, and the generosity of spirit he attributes to virtually everyone seems more after-the-fact than contemporaneous with the event. Even so, the tenacity and cooperation of the youth most were between 19 and 21, Parrado was 23 were amply demonstrated by their survival. Parrado, now 56, is a prominent TV producer and motivational speaker. To clear up some questions the book raised, BookPage contacted him in Montevideo, where he still lives.

Are all 16 who were rescued still alive? Yes, they are all alive and very well indeed. Were any lawsuits filed as a result of the crash? No lawsuits were ever made against the Uruguayan Air Force [which owned the plane], the government or anybody else, [either] from the group or from an individual.

As an adviser to the movie Alive! were you satisfied with the way it turned out? Yes. It was quite a big effort and the best movie that could be made according to the budget. [Director] Frank Marshall really got involved in the movie, and everything in it is 100 percent true. Are you able to go for long periods without thinking about the crash? Yes, sometimes for weeks. When something hard or difficult comes to me, then I remember or when I look at my family. Then I’m really thankful that I am alive and able to enjoy them. What were some of the survival elements it took you too long to learn? How to fight the cold, how to use the snow as an ally and not as an enemy [and] that you should climb mountains through the ridges and not straight on. What was there about your father that drew your thoughts so strongly to him during the ordeal? We were very close, and I was always thinking how terrible he must be feeling having lost his family in one accident. Your account of the experience is very detailed and specific. Did you keep any sort of records while your were on the mountain? No. Some things are hard to forget! Did you feel the way you thought you would when you returned to the crash site? I returned to the site of the crash 11 times with my father to put flowers on the graves of my mother, sister and friends. It’s an amazing landscape when you are in the company of a great guide and a well-organized expedition. [There’s] maybe a sense of pride and accomplishment looking at those enormous mountains and having defeated them. [There’s] also some sadness but no grief or pain.

Ignore the title of Nando Parrado's new book, Miracle in the Andes. Anyone familiar with this plane-crash survival story either from the original news accounts, Piers Paul Read's best-selling 1974 book Alive or the movie that dramatized it knows that the experience illustrates the…

YA Fiction YA

Sarah Dessen

Interview by Julie Hale

Given her youthful appearance and complete lack of attitude, it's difficult to believe that Sarah Dessen has been publishing books for a decade. Dessen, who is 35, started early. Her first novel, That Summer, was released not long after she graduated from college, and since then, six titles have followed, five of which have been named Best Books for Young Adults by the American Library Association. That Summer, along with Dessen's second novel, Someone Like You, provided the basis for the popular 2003 movie How to Deal starring Mandy Moore.

"It's gotten harder as I've gotten older," Dessen says of the writing process. "Maybe I just had more energy when I first started, but I'd also like to think there's more going on in the books now, that they're becoming more complex." There's plenty happening in her new novel, Just Listen, a fast-moving, often lyrical narrative about sisterhood and self-esteem that demonstrates the author's intuitive understanding of the pressures of adolescence. The book is sure to please the legions of readers 1,200 a day who visit Dessen's website to check out the blog she posts from her home in Chapel Hill, North Carolina.

"With Just Listen, I wanted to explore the drive for perfection that's so typical in teenage girls today," Dessen says. "Why do girls feel they have to look perfect, make perfect grades, make everything appear effortless? I wanted to explore the roots of that stress."

An image provided Dessen with the inspiration for the novel. Flipping through a high school yearbook, she came across a photograph of three beautiful girls, obviously sisters, and had what she terms a knee-jerk reaction to the picture, automatically assuming the flawless-looking trio led perfect lives. In the new novel, she wanted to depict the flip side of that scenario to portray characters who appeared to have it all, but in reality were struggling just like everyone else.

Just Listen features Annabel, Whitney and Kirsten Greene, three very different sisters who work as part-time models. While the girls have a solid family life a fussy but well-intentioned mother; a successful father who's an architect their lives are far from tranquil. Reserved Whitney, the oldest sibling, has an eating disorder. Kirsten, the loud-mouthed middle sister, is desperately trying to find herself. And then there's Annabel, the novel's narrator, the youngest of them all and a quiet-natured observer. "I fell somewhere between my sisters and their strong personalities, the very personification of the vast gray area that separated them," Annabel says.

A new school year is beginning, and Annabel, who is in 10th grade, finds herself completely alone, thanks to a falling-out over the summer with her best friend, Sophie. One of the most popular girls in school, Sophie is brash and brave gutsy enough to go for cute senior Will Cash. But her involvement with Will leads to big trouble, with repercussions that affect Annabel and others.

Through the use of flashbacks, Dessen builds suspense, hinting at the conflict between Annabel and Sophie, which isn't fully revealed until late in the book. Structuring the novel was tricky, she says, but writing about Whitney's problem was even more challenging.

"When you're writing about a delicate subject like an eating disorder, you really have to be cautious," Dessen says. "A certain responsibility comes with presenting a subject like that. You have to make sure you put it out there in the best way possible."

After so much success so early in her career, what's next for Dessen? "I don't know if I'll write for teenagers forever," she says. "I'd like to write for an older audience, maybe essays or short stories. But the young adult readers are so devoted and genuinely affected by the books. There's a passion there I'm not sure I would find other places, so I won't be going anywhere anytime soon."

Fiction

Curtis Sittenfeld

Interview by Amy Scribner

How does an author face the daunting task of following up a debut novel that is a critical and commercial sensation? In the case of Prep author Curtis Sittenfeld, she avoids the sophomore slump by writing another beautifully crafted coming-of-age story that stands up to the original. In The Man of My Dreams, we follow Hannah Gavener from high school through college and into adulthood. Deeply introspective and haunted by a painful childhood, Hannah is convinced that happiness is out of her reach. When she moves to Boston for college, she enters a series of very different relationships that leave her wondering whether she'll ever find the perfect partner.

As a 30-year-old with one of the New York Times' 10 best books of 2005 and a movie option in her pocket, Sittenfeld knows about figuring out this thing called life. She answered some questions for BookPage about how it feels to be a best-selling author, and the path she took to get there.

You won the Seventeen magazine fiction contest when you were 16. When did you know that you wanted to be a writer?
From the time I learned to read and write, around kindergarten, I always loved to do both. My parents talk about how when I was two or three years old, I used to refuse to go to bed because I'd be sitting on the toilet holding a book upside down, and I'd tell them I was reading. Probably I, like a lot of people, became a writer sort of in imitation of or in homage to the books I enjoyed. When you're so captivated by something, you think, could I do that? Hmm, let me try.

You're still so young. How much did your own memories of being a teenager and a college student influence your books?
People who think my books are autobiographical, which they're not, credit me with having a much better memory than I do. I do, however, have a powerful imagination. It's never that hard for me to imagine what it must feel like to be someone else, whether it's an American teenage girl or a Japanese octogenarian man.

There's a great line in the book: She just hadn't expected that adulthood would seem so ordinary. How does your adulthood compare to your expectations?
Well, a typical night is: My boyfriend and I make stir-fry, we play Scrabble, I lose, he turns on baseball, I fall asleep on the couch at 9:45 p.m., and he wakes me up in time for The Daily Show. That probably falls under the definition of ordinary, right? But not in a bad way.

Hannah's cousin tells her, "You're not that funny no offense . . ." How funny are you in real life?
Let's see. I'm funnier than knock-knock jokes, Wings reruns and Dick Cheney . . . but less funny than Dick Cheney in heels and a feather boa.

As someone who's been compared to so many iconic writers, from Wally Lamb to Judy Blume to J.D. Salinger, which authors do you admire?
There are so many books I've loved, but my all-time most favorite writer is Alice Munro I just worship her. She's so smart and entertaining, and her writing doesn't draw attention to how good it is language-wise; instead it fully and perfectly evokes a particular scene, making you feel like you're present in it. Plus, she doesn't shy from depicting people's dark sides.

You took some criticism for a book review you wrote in the New York Times in which you seemed anti- chick lit. Set the record straight.
I've realized that there's no consensus on what the term chick lit means. Is it defined by subject matter (meaning any books about young women) or is it treatment (meaning books about young women that are willfully fluffy)? Many of my favorite books have young female protagonists, and part of the reason I enjoy Alice Munro so much is that she often writes about that demographic. But, undeniably, there are a lot of books about young women that just aren't very good. . . . [T]heir use of language is mediocre, their insights aren't actually insightful, their plot lines are predictable and boring. I'm not saying nobody should enjoy them, but I'm saying I don't.

If you could fast-forward right now, where do you see Hannah in 10 years?
I think she's realized by the end that she can't hang her happiness on a man which, as everyone who has ever read a women's magazine knows, means she will find happiness with a man immediately. But 10 years from now? By then, she's probably married and having an Updike-esque affair.

What will your next book be about?
Japanese octogenarian men. Just kidding.

Mystery & Suspense Suspense

Alan Furst

Interview by Jay MacDonald

Alan Furst admits he's "not entirely clear" on how he came to be the pre-eminent American writer of World War II spy novels. Beginning with Night Soldiers in 1988, the former journalist has written nine critically acclaimed espionage novels, including his latest, The Foreign Correspondent.

As the grandson of Jewish immigrants growing up in Manhattan, the only spy novels Furst read were by Eric Ambler and Ian Fleming, escapist fare with little grounding in reality. Then, on a 1983 travel story assignment for Esquire, he visited the Soviet Union, his ancestral home, for the first time.

" It was an enormous epiphany for me," Furst says by phone from his apartment in Paris. "I was back where I'd come from and there wasn't any question about that." Furst was frustrated that the Russians dictated when and where he could travel, all with the goal of converting his American dollars into rubles. "I had no desire to go to Moscow; the Russians made you go. If you wanted to go to the Danube, they wouldn't let you go there. My whole life turned on them being such jerks about it.

The intrigue of finding himself in a police state lingered long after that trip; it lingers today, in fact.

" It really hit me like a wind and it wasn't subtle at all," he says. "During World War II, everyone, in Europe at least, thought this might be it, that this was about as much life as they were going to have, and that changes things, especially romantic relationships. And it's right now, immediate, like maybe I'm not going to be here Thursday.

It is Furst's foremost intention, and his greatest gift, to so snugly settle us into the shoes of his characters that we get night sweats waiting for the knock of leather-gloved hands on the door.

In his compact, atmospheric new novel The Foreign Correspondent, Furst embeds us into the web of intrigue that surrounds Carlo Weisz, who, like thousands of Italian journalists, lawyers and intellectuals, fled Mussolini's Italy in 1938 and established a beachfront of the Italian resistance in Paris. When Mussolini's secret police murder the editor of the resistance's underground newspaper Liberazione, Weisz is chosen to replace him. But his covert duties become increasingly hazardous when his day job with Reuters takes him to Berlin during the Nazi ramp-up for war. There, he rekindles a love affair with an old flame whose anti-Nazi friends have volatile information that could burn both the monstrous Mussolini and the Italy Weisz hopes to preserve.

There is a lovely, chilling scene early on when Weisz meets with the unctuous Dr. Martz, Hitler's Minister of Propaganda, over coffee and babka. A jovial glad-hander who once portrayed European buffoons in Hollywood movies, Martz assures Weisz that all the Nazis want from the media is "fair play," especially regarding recent assaults by those unreasonable Poles on innocent, peace-loving Germans.

"[Martz] says, 'Look, we're just asking that our story be told honorably. We have that right, don't we?'" Furst explains. "S—, man, it's the Nazis! But Weisz has to sit for a moment and think, how can I deny this guy what he's asking me? It's very hard to do that because you're raised to believe that it's honorable to give people a chance to speak and present their case and try to be fair."

"When I write these books, the question is always being asked: What would you do [in that situation]?" Furst admits. "Think about all the pressure—pressure from people you know and respect and who like you—and now you have to perform. You don't have to do it; you could say oh, this is too dangerous, I don't want to get involved. But I don't think Weisz was able to say that."

As with Furst's previous spy novels, The Foreign Correspondent examines a slice of European history between 1922 and 1945 from the perspective of a particular vocation that had an impact on WWII.

"I write about vocations, and always have. It frustrates me sometimes in novels where you have a character and you don't find out anything about going to work because, for all of us, a lot of the day is how we're going to make money to pay for this human life," Furst says.

Surprisingly, though, "I've never, ever written about a professional spy as hero," Furst says. " I don't know that I could do it realistically enough. [John] Le Carré, who is experienced, was able to do it brilliantly."

In contrast to his epic earlier works, The Foreign Correspondent is a sprint; short, fast and executed with the elegance of a pro writing at his peak.

"I started life trying to write huge, panoramic, fat books for people to take on long, long airplane rides. Now I want to write more concentrated stuff with narrower walls," he says. "I became extremely interested in what has been called the European existential novel, which is always short, always about one person, and about one sequence of events concentrated over a period of a few months. I like all that kind of thing, all those timeframes and all the ways that books work in that way."

Furst says living in Europe for more than two decades has been seminal to his spycraft.

"It more than contributes; it's central. We have this apartment on a little narrow street where d'Artagnan supposedly lived at one time, and at night everybody closes their shutters. I was just turning the lights off and some man or woman walked up the street and what I heard were footsteps on cobblestones. You never would hear that in America. It wasn't so much that it was filled with intrigue but there was something about it that was so 60 or 70 years ago as it echoed up off the sides of the buildings. That goes on every day and every night here for me in different ways."

Jay MacDonald is a writer in Oxford, Mississippi.

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