Author interviews archive

Richard Pevear and Larissa Volokhonsky

Interview by Alden Mudge

At more than 1,200 pages and almost exactly four pounds, Leo Tolstoy's War and Peace is the hefty tome against which all other hefty tomes are weighed and measured. This story of the French invasion of Russia in 1812 was first published in 1869 in Russian, no less. So why is this old literary classic suddenly sitting near the top of bestseller lists, surpassing swifter, lighter, more modern American novels? Probably because War and Peace has been freshly translated by Richard Pevear and Larissa Volokhonsky, the husband and wife team who gained national prominence in 2004 when Oprah Winfrey selected their translation of Tolstoy's Anna Karenina for her immensely popular book club program.

"I had been translating from French, Spanish and Italian for many years," Pevear, a poet, e-mailed from his home in Paris, where the couple, now in their 60s, have lived, taught, written and translated since leaving New York's Upper West Side in 1988. "The idea of collaborating on translations from the Russian came to us not long after we were married," Pevear says. "I was reading The Brothers Karamazov in a well-known translation. Larissa [who was born in Russia, studied English from an early age and worked for a while as a translator for a group of biologists] began to read the Russian at the same time. She came upon something striking at the very beginning and wondered, 'How do they translate that?' She looked at the version I was reading and said, 'Ah, I see, they don't translate it.' We talked about what was left out of the translation and whether it was possible to do better. I saw that it was certainly possible, and we decided to try it. And we've been trying it ever since."

The couple's translations of works by Dostoyevsky, Gogol and Tolstoy have been widely acclaimed by scholars, critics and general readers, and have won three PEN translation awards. The pair traveled to the U.S. this fall to promote the new book, something that is virtually unheard of for translators of a 138-year-old novel.

"We try to do in English what Tolstoy or Dostoevsky did in Russian," Pevear says. " We don't believe in modernizing or paraphrasing or writing smooth English prose. What we want is the most Tolstoyan or Dostoevskian English possible. But it has to move and live naturally, or at least as naturally as the original does." To achieve this, the couple collaborates in an unusual way.

"Larissa makes a complete first draft, in pencil, as literal as possible, with marginal comments on words, tone, rhythm, deliberate oddities, levels of usage, cross references to reappearances of the same word or motif. I take her draft, plus the original and other translations, and make my own complete draft, which I print out as I go (four to eight pages a day) and cover with penciled queries and uncertainties. We then go over that draft together, settling questions, arguing over choices, resorting to numerous dictionaries. From the results of that work, I then make another complete draft. Larissa reads the new draft line by line against the original, marking queries, making suggestions, and so on. Once we resolve the last problems together, I make a 'final' draft, which we send to the publisher."

Pevear admits that Tolstoy has suffered less than some of his countrymen at the hands of translators. Yet even the good translations fall far short of perfection. "We have tried to get closer to that impossible goal, mainly by paying closer attention to Tolstoy's Russian. We have also chosen to include all the French passages as Tolstoy had them (they amount to two percent of the text). All previous translations have removed them and have thus removed a whole dimension of the novel the war of languages that mirrors the war of armies. We thought it was time to stop underestimating the reader's intelligence. The French passages are translated in footnotes."

And what is the couple's advice for a general reader who has never before read War and Peace and is about to launch into the new translation? "Give yourself to Tolstoy's foreign world and you'll find you're at home; give yourself to its chaos and you'll find a great order."

Fiction Historical Fiction

John Burnham Schwartz

Interview by Lacey Galbraith

For author John Burnham Schwartz, it was the bittersweet sense of what might have been, that first sparked his imagination and spurred him to write his new novel, The Commoner.

The book is the story of Haruko, a fictional Empress of Japan who is the first non-aristocratic woman to marry into the Japanese monarchy. "Because she and the rest of the royal family will never get to speak for themselves in any fashion," says Schwartz, "it's the novelist's job to give voice to the voiceless, to get in there and imagine what it might be like to be in those circumstances."

Schwartz is the author of three previous novels, the critically lauded Claire Marvel, Bicycle Days and Reservation Road, which was adapted into a film released last fall. In The Commoner, certain characters bear a striking resemblance to today's real-life Japanese royal family, but Schwartz's empathetic imagin[ings] are all his own. They had to be, for the society portrayed is one of the most secretive monarchies in the world. Everything within is tightly controlled, and in the novel, when Haruko marries the Crown Prince, the accompanying rigidity and suspicion are such a cruel shock to her that she eventually suffers both a nervous breakdown and the loss of her voice. Says the author, "However bad it may seem in the novel, it's worse in real life."

Schwartz claims to have been haunted by the work. "I kept thinking about the story," he says. "There was this idea that you have a normal childhood of some kind. You have parents and you have friends and you have all of the things we go through. But then, at a certain age, you cross over and it's as though you enter into a world that is many things, but it's not life. . . . It doesn't even resemble life. Every single thing is controlled for you. You're not allowed to visit your parents. You're not allowed to make phone calls or write letters on the spur of the moment. Every single thing is monitored and every single thing has a protocol.

"It's as though you've been walking along and suddenly fallen down a well that's 5,000 feet deep. And for those at the bottom of the well," Schwartz says, "the past is their only connection to the real world. All you have of your own identity is what you brought with you: your memories, your feelings, whatever it is that made you who you were at the moment you crossed over."

In the novel, Haruko's own memories of life outside the monarchy are what help sustain her, and once she becomes Empress, they play a decided influence in the difficult decision she must make regarding her son, the Crown Prince, and Keiko, the woman he is desperate to marry. Schwartz's renderings of the royal family a group so completely and totally cut off from the world are not only believable but absorbing. The reader is drawn in, mesmerized by the grace and subtlety of his writing. Small truths appear on every page.

Speaking from his home in Brooklyn, where he lives with his wife and their son, Schwartz makes it clear that he takes the job of storyteller seriously. "I tend to throw out 400 or 500 pages a novel," he says. "This has been true for every book." Though he wishes he could find a more direct way, it's this time and care that make his work what it is.

His novels have been translated into more than 15 languages and he's written for such publications as The New York Times and the New Yorker. Recently, he tried his hand at screenwriting, translating his 1998 novel Reservation Road into a script that attracted acting heavyweights Joaquin Phoenix, Jennifer Connelly and Mark Ruffalo.

Filmmaking proved to be a learning experience for Schwartz. "It's a very, very different form of writing," he says. "I sort of enjoy it. It's a different part of the brain. It's not as much in any way about the language. It's about solving certain structural problems. I'm a novelist; if you're writing a novel, you're lucky if you solve three big problems a year."

Problems arising from writing in a voice so foreign from his own are never an issue in The Commoner. Schwartz conducted an immense amount of research, and once he began to write, he went through seven drafts before he felt the book was ready. Such dedicated efforts were rewarded, for The Commoner is a well nuanced and tightly executed dance between trying to make the things that are not said have as much resonance and tension as some of those things that are.

As Schwartz explains, "One of the things I had to develop from the start was a relationship with reticence. So many of the decisions I made in the book during the writing have to do with when to stop, when to let a certain silence be and when to go on. It's a balance, because you don't want the story itself to be reticent. It is this difference between seeking a dramatic reticence as opposed to a reticent drama."

In The Commoner, every character trait, every descriptive detail in every sentence, matters. Schwartz invokes the image of a Zen garden, something that is absolutely a part of Japanese culture. The whole point is that each thing carries more weight because the things around it have been stripped down.

A moving portrait of women living the most interior of lives, The Commoner offers resolution tinged with a glimmer of hope. Schwartz says it's here that fiction and history radically depart. In this case, history seems not just cruel, but impoverished. For him, the answer to what should happen to his characters was clear. "That's part of the reward," he says. "You get to write a history that seems organically possible. It changes their horizons."

Lacey Galbraith is a freelance writer based in Nashville.

For author John Burnham Schwartz, it was the bittersweet sense of what might have been, that first sparked his imagination and spurred him to write his new novel, The Commoner.

Food & Drink

Michael Pollan

Interview by Alden Mudge

Worried about what to eat? Michael Pollan’s new "eater’s manifesto," In Defense of Food, offers remarkably simple, practical advice on the question. "In a way I’ve written a book that comes down to seven words," Pollan says during a call to his home in Berkeley, California. " ‘Eat food. Not too much. Mostly plants.’ Everything else is an unpacking of those words and an explanation as to why that should be so."

The unpacking and explanation are, of course, a bit more complicated than Pollan’s basic nostrum. But readers of his immensely popular previous book, The Omnivore’s Dilemma (2006), will be familiar with the broad strokes of his argument and his critique of food science and the American food industry. The Omnivore’s Dilemma was a delightfully informative narrative history of the food systems that underlay four meals consumed by Pollan and his friends and family. It was a book that tapped into or gave voice to a paradigm shift in American eating habits that had been building for some time, and it made Pollan something of a spokesman for the movement.

In Defense of Food is the result of Pollan’s encounters with readers of his earlier book. "One of the enormous blessings of a successful book is that you get to talk to thousands of readers in the year after it comes out," he says. "I not only did book tours but a lot of public speaking. So I really got to hear what people were confused about and what they wanted to know. I found that people still had this very simple question: Well, what should I eat? I decided that the question was best answered by really looking at the science and asking what do we really know about the connection between food and health."

Pollan seems uniquely positioned to examine the question. He was for many years executive editor of Harper’s, is a contributing editor to the New York Times Magazine, and has written widely on issues of animal agriculture, genetically modified crops and natural history. In 2003 he and his wife, the painter Judith Belzer, and their son, Isaac, now a freshman in high school, moved from Connecticut to Berkeley so that Pollan could head the Knight program at the UC Berkeley graduate school of journalism. The program’s mission is to advance the quality of science and environmental journalism, and Pollan has used some of the program money to bring a wide array of food experts to campus and to help stimulate the growing debate about the American diet. " We came thinking we’d be here for two years," Pollan says, "but it’s worked out very well for us all. Besides, we bought a house at the top of the market, so I think we’re here for a while."

In the new book, Pollan examines the cult-like aspects of what he calls "nutritionism" and finds the supporting science riddled with unexamined assumptions, chief among them the idea that the key to understanding food is the nutrient. "I was surprised by how primitive the state of knowledge is scientifically," Pollan says. " It’s a very hard problem to study. Both the food side and the body side of the system are incredibly complex. Reductive, single-factor science has a lot of trouble understanding both a carrot and the digestion of a carrot. On the other hand we have thousands of years of cultural experience with various foods and we know which ones contribute to health. One of the interesting discoveries here was that culture may have more to teach us about how to eat than science. To me, that was a big ‘aha’ moment."

Picking up where he left off in The Omnivore’s Dilemma, Pollan also explores the problems of the Western diet, which has increasingly come to rely on edible foodlike substances largely derived from two highly subsidized crops corn and soybeans. "We co-evolved with the things we eat," Pollan says. "We have relationships that are based on the characteristics of these whole foods. So, as I explain in the book, we have a longstanding, very healthy relationship with corn as a food. But we don’t have a relationship with high fructose corn syrup, which is a kind of abstraction of corn. Our bodies are not accustomed to dealing with that the way they are with corn on the cob or cornmeal or tortillas. Our bodies have been exquisitely designed by evolution to deal with a whole food, to digest it, to make good use of it. But for these abstractions of a whole food, which are what the food industry makes the most money selling, our bodies have not evolved to handle properly, and won’t in our lifetime or maybe ever."

In the final section of In Defense of Food, Pollan boils down what he has analyzed and learned into a set of straightforward but provocative rules what he calls algorithms for thinking about what and how to eat. "The challenge was to come up with aids for thinking through these issues rather than a menu or a prescription," Pollan says. "I resent when people tell me what to eat, and I don’t think it’s my job to tell others what to eat. But given what I know and what I’ve learned about the food system, I can provide tools for people to think through their own decisions. Like don’t eat foods that make health claims, which sounds counterintuitive until you realize that only foods in packages are going to make health claims because they need somewhere to print those claims, that they are more likely to be processed foods, and that their claims are probably based on reductive science. The rule is meant to be a way of capturing a much larger piece of knowledge about how the food system works. Using them people will come to very different conclusions. These rules can lead to an infinite number of different menus, but all of them should be better than the industrial menu currently on offer."

Alden Mudge writes from Oakland, California.

Worried about what to eat? Michael Pollan's new "eater's manifesto," In Defense of Food, offers remarkably simple, practical advice on the question. "In a way I've written a book that comes down to seven words," Pollan says during a call to his home in Berkeley,…

Fiction Women's Fiction

Cecelia Ahern

Interview by Katherine Wyrick

Cecelia Ahern is so wildly successful for her 26 years, you’d think her head would be spinning like the tornado that whisked Dorothy off to Oz. But as her bubbly Irish brogue travels across the Atlantic, she sounds remarkably grounded. Ahern, whose first novel, P.S. I Love You, written when she was just 21, became a bestseller and a major movie with an all-star cast, is gracious and down-to-earth. Her rise has been nothing short of meteoric, and there’s no apparent end in sight. She has just completed her fourth novel, There’s No Place Like Here, created a hit U.S. comedy series ("Samantha Who?" on ABC), and has other film and television projects in the works. Not bad for a young woman who didn’t even aspire to be a novelist.

Speaking from her seaside home in Dublin on what she says is a glorious late afternoon, she looks out at the water as our conversation ranges from writing to rap. Asked about seeing the film adaptation of P.S. I Love You for the first time in October, she says, with a lovely lilt in her voice, "It’s really nice to revisit that story because you have to keep moving on talking about your new one." That story goes something like this: Holly, a recently widowed young woman living in Dublin, deals with the aftermath of her husband’s death from a brain tumor. In the process, she rediscovers herself and the joy of life with help from an endearing circle of friends and family and a cache of letters from her late husband.

Asked what compelled her at such a young age to write P.S., she says the story just popped into her head. She found it easy to identify with Holly and with the fear of losing someone so young, when you have your whole life before you.

Ahern is emotional when talking about seeing her first book on the big screen. She went to Los Angeles with her mother, agent and boyfriend in tow people who had encouraged her along the way for a private screening. She’d read the script and been on set, but the end product was even better than she’d hoped. She especially enjoyed having the opportunity to see the story in a new light and approach it with a fresh perspective, even though she did cry for two hours afterward. "Not to gush, but it was really one of the stand-out moments in my life," she effuses.

For Ahern, writing was always a hobby she never dreamed it would become a profession but she did feel drawn to media communications. She was actually working on her master’s in film production when she wrote P.S. I Love You. She has, she says, "always loved to go off on flights of fancy." And fly she has. Her writing easily lends itself to both the big and small screen. Case in point: her latest novel has already been optioned for a series by Touchstone Television.

There’s No Place Like Here is the story of Sandy Shortt, a young woman so obsessed with finding things that she starts her own missing persons agency. Since childhood, Sandy has been plagued by where things, and people, go when they’re missing from the proverbial sock in the dryer to her childhood neighbor. But as with all of Ahern’s stories, there’s a fanciful, quirky twist. As Sandy searches for a missing man, she finds herself lost in a magical land where all lost things and people go.

"It’s just all very metaphorical really," Ahern says. "It is about a woman who literally wanders off the wrong path, loses herself, wakes up one day, looks around, [and] doesn’t realize where she is. I think everyone can identify with that story; I just took it to a different level."

Though she didn’t write There’s No Place Like Here with The Wizard of Oz in mind, Ahern concedes that parallels exist. She wanted her character, like Dorothy, to be physically whisked off to a different place. Originally titled A Place Called Here when it was published in Ireland, the title was changed to emphasize the connection between the two stories for an American audience, which suited Ahern because she felt the allusion was apt. As in Ahern’s other work, there is a little romance in the mix here, too, in the form of a rather unorthodox patient/therapist relationship.

The fairy-tale quality of Ahern’s work would seem to recall Ireland’s rich history of myth and storytelling, but Ahern is a thoroughly modern young woman with her finger firmly on the pulse of pop culture. Her taste in books and music is varied, with a distinct American flavor; she likes Mitch Albom and 50 Cent. Despite the fact that her father, Bertie Ahern, is Ireland’s prime minister, there’s nothing uniquely Irish about her books—as evidenced by foreign rights sales of her novels in 40 countries. Ahern believes that if you write authentically about human emotions, you can touch any reader, regardless of culture or age. "You can take readers anywhere if they can identify with the character and the feelings and emotions are familiar," she says.

Ahern has just finished her fifth novel, which will be published in April in Ireland and later in the U.S. Adhering to her rule of taking life one book at a time, she declines to discuss it but does divulge the title: Thanks for the Memories.

She also happens to be the creator of a successful TV comedy, "Samantha Who?" Higher-ups at ABC contacted her after reading P.S. I Love You and asked if she’d be interested in writing a show for television. Within days she met with the comedy development team, writers and producers. She calls the show’s success "a modern fairy tale in itself," and adds, appreciatively, that she’s just so glad there is an audience out there for her bizarre little stories. The personable and ebullient Ahern takes her many accomplishments in stride. Though Dublin is her home base, she has spent a lot of time recently traveling between New York and L.A. for the movie promotion and book tour. She’s not just bi-coastal, she’s tri-coastal.

Of her early success Ahern says, "It’s a mixture of a lot of luck and a lot of hard work." So that’s what they mean by the luck of the Irish.

Katherine Wyrick is a freelance writer in Little Rock.

Cecelia Ahern is so wildly successful for her 26 years, you'd think her head would be spinning like the tornado that whisked Dorothy off to Oz. But as her bubbly Irish brogue travels across the Atlantic, she sounds remarkably grounded. Ahern, whose first novel,…

Fiction Historical Fiction

Pat Barker

Interview by Alden Mudge

There is a moment in Pat Barker’s excellent new novel Life Class when Paul Tarrant, a conflicted young artist serving in France in the ambulance corps at the outbreak of World War I, stares admiringly out over the slanted village rooftops from the attic room he has rented to use as a painting studio when not on duty. It is a moment that comes vividly to mind as Pat Barker describes her own writing space.

"I write at a desk in front of the window straight onto a laptop," Barker says during a call to her home in the northern England city of Durham. "My room is on the top floor so I look out over the roofs of the houses at some trees in the distance. And although it’s not a rural, rural view, there’s a lot of greenery, and, actually, I’m extremely fond of it because of the different angles of the roofs, especially when it’s raining and the colors are brought out. It’s very beautiful in a strange kind of way. It’s very much the view that if I were a painter I would absolutely love to paint."

In normal times, Barker would sit at her desk with its beautiful view and blast out a minimum of 1,000 words a day (and often 2,000-3,000) in a very rough draft that is so "filled with typos that it doesn’t look like it’s written in English. All the right letters are there," she says with the sharp-witted humor that seems typical of her conversational self, "it’s just that all the other letters are there as well."

Unfortunately these are not normal times. Barker’s husband is gravely ill and she is his fulltime caregiver. The couple’s daughter, whose first novel was published last year, lives close by, and their son and his young family live outside Liverpool, on the other side of the Pennines. At the moment, Barker says, her writing room "is completely chaotic because it’s filled with things like disability aids." Then there is the recently discovered gift from one of her two cats—a dead rat lovingly deposited beneath her writing desk. "A decomposing rat on top of everything else is not a good thing," Barker adds wryly.

This unflinching directness revealed in her conversation also happens to be one of the many pleasures of Barker’s fiction. Her novels are slender and swift but live vividly in the mind’s eye and resound with moral force. Barker is best known for her Regeneration Trilogy, which centers on the experiences of the poets Wilfred Owen and Siegfried Sassoon during World War I. The trilogy includes Regeneration (1991), The Eye in the Door (1993) and Ghost Road, which earned Barker the Booker Prize in 1995.

In Life Class, her 11th novel, Barker seems drawn back to writing about World War I. Except that she doesn’t quite see it that way. "I feel this book is not linked to the trilogy so much as it’s linked to Double Vision," her previous novel, which is set in post-9/11 England. "One of the things Double Vision is about is how you represent real horrors in a way which isn’t exploitative, or disrespectful of people’s suffering, or damaging. While I was writing that book, I was very aware that the people I didn’t mention in earlier books were the people who painted the landscape of the Western Front. I wanted to continue with that theme. You know Susan Sontag’s book about representing the suffering of others? I’m dealing with those sorts of themes, I think, in both Double Vision and in Life Class."

The new novel focuses on the artistic and romantic entanglements of Paul Tarrant, Elinor Brooke and Kit Neville, three young students who share a life-drawing class at an art school called the Slade in the spring of 1914. As she has done in her previous novels, Barker draws deftly from the historical record and populates her fiction with real-life figures such as Lady Ottoline Morrell and Henry Tonks, "a teacher of genius" at the Slade and a doctor who would become known for his pioneering work in reconstructive surgery of facial wounds during the war.

"The essential thing if you’re going to make some of your central characters with historical figures is that you oughtn’t to know much about them," Barker says. "It gives you blank areas of the canvas in which you can project." But the projection stops "at the bedroom door. It’s as simple as that. If it’s a real person, I don’t probe into the most private areas of their lives."

With her fictional characters, however, Barker is far less constrained. Her characters live fully both in their heads and in their bodies. "The human body and specifically the male body is at the center of both parts of the novel," Barker says. "It’s the kind of hinge on which the book turns since the function of the body in the first half is so radically changed in the second half."

Barker says she remains fascinated by this generation of young artists whose lives were so dramatically altered by World War I. "It was one of these curious collections of very talented people in one place at one time. Which sometimes happens. It has to be purely coincidental, though the fact that Tonks was a great teacher also helped to establish a kind of creative ferment within the class. But you had English aristocrats and really, really dirt-poor Jewish boys from the East End of London who were there on scholarship in the same classroom. A considerable proportion of them were really talented."

In fact, Barker hopes to restore order soon to the chaos in her workroom, reclaim her beautiful view and get back to work on another novel about this period. "I don’t want it to necessarily be a second volume or a sequel," she says with renewed enthusiasm, "but, yes, some of the same characters will appear, obviously with new characters. I’m quite interested in the hospital where Tonks did his plastic surgery and in the conflicts of identity which arise with the loss of the human face."

Alden Mudge writes from Oakland.

There is a moment in Pat Barker's excellent new novel Life Class when Paul Tarrant, a conflicted young artist serving in France in the ambulance corps at the outbreak of World War I, stares admiringly out over the slanted village rooftops from the attic room…

YA Fiction YA

Susan Vaught

Interview by Lynn Green

Once you've read Susan Vaught's new novel for teens, you're not likely to look at an overweight person in quite the same way again. After all, that obese girl you just passed on the sidewalk (averting your eyes to avoid gawking) probably has a circle of friends, a boyfriend, hopes, dreams and embarrassments, just like you.

Vaught, a practicing neuropsychologist who recently lost 170 pounds herself, tackles the issue of obesity head-on with insight and hilarious style in Big Fat Manifesto, the story of a high school senior who has no intention of living up to anyone's expectations of how a fat girl should act. Jamie, who writes a column for her school newspaper, proclaims to her fellow students, "I'm not a jolly round person. I'm a peevish, sarcastic, smart, dramatic round person." Jamie is indeed all of that and more, and she has a voice that's both outspoken and poignant and as engaging as any recent character in young adult fiction. "I'm fat, fat, fat," Jamies writes. "If the word makes you uncomfortable, that's your problem."

Vaught, who spoke to BookPage from her farm 50 miles north of Nashville, says Jamie's voice interrupted her while she was working on another book. "It was right about the time that I had lost 70 or 80 pounds and people were beginning to notice that I was smaller," Vaught recalls. Just a few months earlier, when she weighed 350 pounds, "I had become so large that I was invisible, if that makes sense. People would look at me and then they would look away. And I knew why." The new, more positive reaction she got for being thinner and the feelings of confusion and anger that resulted worked their way into the character of Jamie, who demands that people accept her for what she is, but also struggles to accept herself.

Big Fat Manifesto is Vaught's seventh book for teens, and the follow-up to her well-received 2006 novel, Trigger, which tapped her experience as a neuropsychologist to explore the dilemma of a brain-injured boy who had tried and failed to commit suicide by shooting himself. "Trigger came out of my head so fast and so complete, and it was so based in things that I knew, I wasn't sure if I would ever write a book that strong again," the author says. "And then this book sort of wrote itself."

Vaught divides her time between her two vocations, spending three days a week in private practice as a psychologist, specializing in the care of patients with structural damage to the brain, and three days a week writing. The issue of obesity was one she had struggled with most of her life, always unsuccessfully. "Since I was 10 years old, I had been trying to lose weight and everything I tried wouldn't last or it wouldn't work or I just couldn't make sense of it," she says. Suffering from diabetes and hypertension, Vaught was depressed and disheartened, convinced that she would never lose weight. And then her literary agent recommended a computer program, the Diet and Exercise Assistant, which tracks calories consumed and expended. "It keeps up with everything I put in my mouth if I just enter it," Vaught says. "Whatever is missing in my brain that allowed me to weigh 350 pounds in the first place, this program sort of replaces like a little computer chip." With tweaking from her doctor, Vaught began a program that allowed the pounds to fall off even more rapidly than she expected. "The first month, I continued to enter the calories, even if I had a bad day, and I began to understand where I was shooting myself in the foot all along," like the steak dinner at a popular chain restaurant that added 5,000 calories to her daily total. By avoiding these dining disasters, and starting a strength training program, Vaught dropped below 200 pounds in less than a year.

The experience made her even more keenly aware of society's attitudes toward the obese. "When you're very large, life and the world beat up on you just as a matter of course. If you're going to a movie theater, you have to worry about whether you're going to fit in the seat. If you're flying, you have to worry about whether you'll be forced to buy two seats when you can't afford it," Vaught says. "You go to a store and you have to look at all the beautiful clothes you can never have." Like Vaught herself, however, Jamie refuses to dress down because of her size, always aiming to look stylish and snappy. But she's embarrassed by her overweight parents, who she feels look like slobs in their sweatpants and oversized clothes. Jamie is also hurt by her boyfriend's decision to have weight-loss surgery, causing her to question whether he really loves her as the oversized person she is.

Vaught's goal is for Jamie's "manifesto" to stir discussion, especially among thin people who are repelled by the obese. "I hope the book will open debate at different levels, she says, and force those reading it to look at their own thoughts about obesity and about big people and their stereotypes."

Business & Finance

Alan Corey

Interview by Jay MacDonald

When Alan Corey moved out of his mother's Atlanta basement at 22 to face the real world, his goals were both clear and clearly preposterous: have fun, hustle and become a millionaire by 30 in New York City. He made it with two years to spare, thanks to some savvy real estate timing in the Brooklyn revitalization, an unlikely run of appearances on reality TV shows such as Queer Eye for the Straight Guy and what he calls extreme cheapskate strategies that enabled him to bank and invest nearly 40 percent of his $40,000 salary.

In A Million Bucks by 30, Corey does his own end zone dance with all due swagger. To help others who'd like to add a few zeros to their net worth, BookPage asked Corey to share his top financial tips.

BookPage: You played a lot of defense (saving) before you could afford to play offense (buying and investing). Which of your penny-pinching techniques proved the most effective?
Alan Corey: Ooh, I love sports analogies! I believed defense wins championships and still do. It's the combination of all the techniques that make it effective. Saving in one area and not in another is like the ol' yacht racing folly of having two holes in your dinghy and just plugging one.

Credit cards dig many young people into a serious financial hole. How did you manage to avoid the free money trap?
If I couldn't pay off the balance in full, I wouldn't eat. It was a pretty motivating factor. I would suggest one of two approaches: 1) Use it for everything, earn money back and pay the balance in full each month, or 2) never use it.

Instead of assuming the work-is-drudgery attitude of some post-grads, you entered the adult world with the goal of having fun. What was/is the most fun for you?
Learning something new. Post-graduate life offers new things like 401(k)s, mortgages and balding. It's like, wow, I get to learn this new stuff because I'm at a point in my life where it's finally affecting me.

Your experiences as a self-described fame whore on reality shows like Queer Eye and The Restaurant seem less than lucrative. Was that simply a way to have fun and free your inner crazy guy, or were you experimenting with building a media brand a la The Donald?
A bit of both. I was hoping to maybe spin it off into something bigger, but at the time it was a choice to either be on TV and make some pocket change or go home and watch TV and make nothing. I ended up getting hate mail from my appearances, so I don't think the media-branding part worked very well.

You were tucking away money in IRAs and a 401(k) before most of your friends knew what those were. Weren't you tempted to keep that money in play for down payments and such?
I knew starting young on both IRAs and 401(k)s was crucial to my goal of being a millionaire before 30. I considered it my no touch money. I made a decision when I put it in, and stuck to it. It was tempting at times, but I'd made a promise to myself.

You lost girlfriends and pals over money. Do you have any regrets about that?
It's funny, because while I was trying to reach my goal, some of those very girlfriends and pals I thought were closest to me said what I was doing was impossible. It was really discouraging at times to be surrounded by that kind of negative energy. Looking back though, proving them wrong was part of the fun of it all.

Some would say you had a lucky break by profiting from the Brooklyn gentrification boom. Do you think a college grad today could make a million by 30 in say, Sioux Falls, South Dakota?
In New York City, you make more money but you also spend more money. It's basically a push when compared to other cities. It's all about delaying your personal gratification of living large, tapping your local market for bargains, and putting your eggs in several different baskets. That can be done anywhere.

Now that you've achieved your goal, are you tempted to kick back and coast?
I did kick back and coast for six months and it got really expensive. I have new goals now: have a million dollars in home equity, make another million by 35 and plug that other hole in my dinghy.

Fiction Historical Fiction

Kip Gayden

Interview by Rebecca Bain

On June 24, 1913, 12 men reached a verdict in the trial of Anna Dotson, the first woman in Tennessee history to face possible hanging for murder. It was a case that fascinated the public, and nearly a century later it grabbed the attention of Kip Gayden, a judge of the First Circuit Court in Nashville. The judge began poring over local newspaper accounts of the case. "The thing that hooked me most was that every article I read got more interesting," Gayden recalls. "The story was just surreal and no historians that I knew had ever heard of this case."

Gayden, who's been presiding over court cases for more than 30 years, was so fascinated by the events and people enmeshed in this century-old romantic triangle that he decided to turn those newspaper stories into his first work of historical fiction, Miscarriage of Justice. Writing is a familiar activity for the judge; in the past he's produced magazine articles on Tennessee judicial cases, a novel about a POW and a biography of former Nashville Mayor John Bass. Turning for the first time to historical fiction, Gayden decided to devote his limited time away from the bench to imagining what reporters hadn't covered in Anna Dotson's story. And for the next five years, that's what he did. "I had been looking for a subject and I am drawn to historical stories," he says. "I've found it stretches one's imagination, lets one's mind wander. I used to paint a little, and writing is like that. You go into another world."

It was a friend researching his genealogy who first came across an article about Dotson. Knowing Gayden's interest in history, especially as it relates to the law, he suggested the judge check it out.

Dotson was a prominent and popular socialite in the small town of Gallatin, Tennessee, who shot and killed her lover, Charlie Cobb, while he was cutting hair in a Nashville barbershop. Saying she had already ruined her life by having the affair, Dotson confessed to authorities that she killed Cobb to prevent her husband from doing so. Dr. Walter Dotson was a pillar of their community; Anna Dotson said it was better that she, not her husband, suffer the consequences of killing Cobb. To his surprise, Gayden found himself feeling compassion for the 32-year-old woman. "When I first got into the story, I was of the opinion that this woman did a terrible deed, and she did. Killing someone is wrong and can't be justified. But I really got into the head of Anna Dotson in writing the book. She was in a vise, a terrible vise, and took that way out. As you'll notice, my book ends up by saying 'you be the judge' because I have a different feeling about it than when I started the story."

Part of the vise in which Anna Dotson found herself were the restrictions society imposed on its female population in 1913. Women were still seven years away from ratification of the 19th amendment, which would allow them to vote. Higher education, career choice, winning custody of children in divorce cases, access to birth control, inheriting family property—all were difficult for women because of laws or social stigma. And according to Gayden's research, getting Walter to find time for his wife was especially difficult for Anna. "He [Dr. Dotson] was a workaholic. He was extremely active politically and received President Taft in Gallatin, as a matter of fact. He was head of the Lion's Club, he was a lecturer for the Masons, a city alderman. He was a doctor and did surgery in Nashville as well as Gallatin. I don't know how the guy even went home—and sometimes, apparently, he didn't," Gayden says with a laugh.

Gayden not only immersed himself in newspaper reports of the crime, he also turned detective, sleuthing for additional sources of information from city archives and stories passed down from people who'd known Anna Dotson. But no one proved to be more revealing, or to tell the tale better, than the woman herself. "One of the interesting things about it was that she got up on the witness stand and wrote my book. She didn't pull any punches. I'm sure her lawyers were telling her, shut up! But she just told the whole story."

The story, yes. The novel, no. Gayden feels it's the responsibility of any writer of historical fiction to be as accurate as possible, with the understanding that conversations, emotions, reactions and other subjective occurrences are the province of the author. "Just about everything in the book is either true or reasonably based on the characters and the events as they would have happened," he says. "I think you have the responsibility to stick to the truth as much as you can."

In 1913, women were not allowed to serve on juries, which meant there were 12 men deciding Anna Dotson's fate, including the possibility of the death sentence. Suffragettes attended the trial, wearing the yellow roses that were a symbol of their support for passage of the 19th amendment. The debate over whether women should have the right to vote, thereby also gaining the right to be on juries, became a subplot in Miscarriage of Justice. "I think the men [on the jury] had to go through an osmosis in a short period of time in their thinking," Gayden says. "It's reasonable to ask if Walter Dotson had killed him [Charlie Cobb], what would they have done to him? I think they believed she [Anna] killed Charlie to spare Walter."

Having developed his own feelings of sympathy for Anna Dotson, Gayden was surprised by how many of his advance readers disagreed with the jury's final verdict. So did the trial's judge, A.B. Neil, who later became chief justice of the Tennessee Supreme Court. Neil called the verdict a "miscarriage of justice," which gave Gayden his book's title. Gayden's goal in writing Miscarriage of Justice was a simple one, he says. "It is historical fiction I wanted to make into a mystery, to set up a jury trial in such a way that it would be a one-two punch to the reader." Did he accomplish that goal? To quote the final line in his book, "I invite you to be the judge."

Formerly host of "The Fine Print," a public radio program of interviews with writers, Rebecca Bain currently reads for work and pleasure at her home in Nashville.

Self-Help Family & Relationships

Amy Sutherland

Interview by Jay MacDonald

For those who have ever said of a spouse or partner, "Can't live with them, can't live without them," Amy Sutherland offers a third option: train them. The Boston-based writer had been immersed for a year in the world of exotic animal training when the light went on: Why not try these progressive training techniques on my husband, family and friends? After all, humans are just a DNA twist or two away from jungle creatures, and they bite less frequently (on average).

In her new book, What Shamu Taught Me About Life, Love, and Marriage: Lessons for People from Animals and Their Trainers, Sutherland surveys the training techniques behind SeaWorld and Siegfried &andamp; Roy and finds, to her surprise, that they are equally effective on her husband, Scott, and assorted other humans. What's more, they tend to be far kinder than the clumsy techniques we use at home.

Let's start with the obvious: Why Shamu, as opposed to a fox or ferret?
The New York Times selected Shamu for the headline of the column my book is based on, but it was such a good fit I kept it for the book title. That humans have been able to train killer whales, the ocean's top predator, speaks to the wonders that progressive animal training can accomplish.

Many of these techniques run counter to the way we train animals, kids, and yes, even spouses. What are we doing wrong?
We use punishment too much, and in hundreds of little ways we aren't aware of. In doing that, we often discourage behavior we want. It also erodes our relationships. We'll never stop using punishment, we are primates after all, but I hope this book encourages people to at least lay off a little.

What was your scariest moment during the research?
While doing my research I got to pet cheetahs, walk alongside cougars and kiss a couple sea lions (really soggy smooches). I was always super-cautious, but only once was I scared. One day, as a student took Rosie the baboon for a leash walk, an awning flap blew against her and scared her. She screamed, jumped around and showed her teeth. Baboons are freakishly strong and the student was relatively inexperienced, but to his credit he calmed Rosie down pretty quickly.

Humans assume that because we have speech, we communicate much better than other animals. Not true?
Well, we underestimate how much animals communicate and overestimate how much we do. We are terribly lazy and over-rely on the power of speech. Working with animals forces you to learn how to read body language and behavior. That done, you see how that says volumes.

The notion of "training" one's spouse seems somewhat cold.
Spouses have been calculating how to change each other's behavior ever since homo erectus stood up and thought, "Wow, this is a lot more comfortable." I realized I already was essentially "training" my husband, but in a very ham-fisted way that often blew up in my face. Lucky for me, animal trainers showed me a much more effective, not to mention kinder, way.

Did it change your dynamics?
Yes, for the better. We're more appreciative of each other. There's just a lot less daily wear and tear, and snarling. I nag less. He bosses less. The small animal kingdom of our house is much more peaceful.

Based on our cultural norms, who are the better innate trainers, men or women?
I'm not sure if either is a better innate trainer. Women are more motivated, I think. Men can and do use dominance to get what they want. That doesn't work nearly as well with women, so they are more likely to turn to diplomacy, which training basically is.

How would you solve the current debate over spanking a child?
Well, progressive trainers would rarely, if ever, hit an animal because that's clearly punishment, which can create more problems than it solves. They realize that the blow would damage their relationship with the animal and, if used too often or thoughtlessly, would lose its effect. So whether it's wrong or right, spanking, from an animal trainer's perspective, is a flawed technique. Better to try something else.

Did your immersion into progressive training leave you with a generally optimistic view of the world?
Very much so. First, to see that these behavioral principles work across all species, us included, speaks to the great web of life. I am happy to be so clearly reminded that I am a member of the animal kingdom. What works on Shamu works on me.

Fiction Women's Fiction

Lauren Willig

Interview by Tasha Alexander

Lauren Willig’s romantic mysteries charm readers There are few authors capable of matching Lauren Willig’s ability to merge historical accuracy, heart-pounding romance and biting wit. The Seduction of the Crimson Rose, the latest in her popular Pink Carnation series, continues Willig’s trend of making each installment even better than its spectacular predecessor. This accomplishment is all the more amazing given that Willig, in addition to being a novelist, has a demanding full-time job as an associate in a New York law firm. By working late in the office during the week, she frees her weekends, locking herself away to write from seven in the morning until midnight. It’s a system not without its drawbacks.

"I did manage to get The Seduction of the Crimson Rose written that way, only three months behind deadline!" she says. "But it’s not necessarily something I’d recommend as a lifestyle choice. The plus side of the experience—aside from having a salary—is that you learn to write very quickly and efficiently, since there’s no spare time to indulge in writer’s block. The downside is all your friends e-mailing to ask if you’re dead." A New York native, Willig grew up in Manhattan, and doesn’t live far from her early stomping grounds, a situation that’s wonderfully convenient when she feels the need for a home-cooked meal: She can easily drop in on her parents. "I have a whole group of childhood friends in a five-block radius of me who also came back to the Upper East Side like homing pigeons. We all went to the same tiny all girls’ school for 13 years, which meant there was a lot of trading of romance novels back and forth, since none of us actually knew any real boys, except for a handful of boys from the local all boys’ schools who didn’t really seem to count, at least not when compared to Judith McNaught heroes."

Willig’s writing process "involves a lot of strong tea and personal bribery, along the lines of ‘If you write a chapter, I’ll buy you a Starbucks,’ or ‘If you finish 10 pages by seven o’clock, you can watch a BBC costume drama.’ I find it very hard to write in bits and pieces, so I generally try to block out a whole day at a time for writing. It takes me an hour or two of whining and foot-dragging to get myself to the computer, but once I’m there, I’ll usually wake up several hours later to find that pages have magically appeared on the scene, all my tea is gone, and my knees hurt from sitting cross-legged on my desk chair for four hours at a stretch."

The Seduction of the Crimson Rose is the fourth novel in the Pink Carnation series, in which each volume follows both a contemporary storyline and an historical one. In early 19th-century England, Mary Alsworthy is living with the aftermath of her sister having married her would-be fiancé. Unhappy and thoroughly aggravated by the sympathies of her family, she allows the dashing Lord Vaughn to persuade her to work as a double agent against the Black Tulip, the dastardly and dangerous French operative, and assist England’s favorite spy, the Pink Carnation. While she has a general idea as to where the series is going as a whole, Willig says her plot ideas invariably play second fiddle to the needs of the current book. "There have been times when I’ve tried to plant information for the purposes of future books—and I usually find myself going back and deleting those scenes. It works best when I let the series grow at least semi-organically, following the lead of my characters. For example, The Seduction of the Crimson Rose was supposed to be about a separate set of characters entirely, but as I was finishing the previous book, Deception of the Emerald Ring, I realized that the story in Crimson Rose followed much more logically out of preceding events than the other plot line that I had been planning for two years."

Switching between different voices and time periods gives Willig a wonderful freedom. "I’ve found that whenever I get stuck on the historical sections that form the bulk of the books, working on a modern chapter is like taking a brief, breezy vacation. Of the two, if I had to pick just one, I would go with the historical, since I’ve always wanted to live in another century, preferably one with men in knee breeches. But popping back to the modern always makes me appreciate the historical even more," she says. "I always emerge from a modern chapter energized and ready to tackle my historical plot problems."

"Both the historical world and the modern world seem sharper and clearer to me after hopping from one to the other," Willig says. "When I’ve been in Almack’s [the famous Regency assembly rooms, site of weekly balls during the London Season], admiring the gentlemen’s knee breeches and sipping ratafia, things like buying Starbucks while rushing to the Tube suddenly seem exotic and interesting." Willig names L.M. Montgomery and Louisa May Alcott as early influences, citing their skills at taking seemingly everyday events and making them compelling and memorable. She still re-reads the Anne of Green Gables books at every opportunity. Margaret Mitchell and M.M. Kaye have been her models for weaving history into a fictional narrative since she was in fifth grade, and she’s gone through at least five copies of Gone With the Wind because her old ones keep crumbling at the seams. So where did her love affair with English history begin? "[It was] fed by Jean Plaidy’s Queens of England series, which made everyone from Margaret of Anjou to Queen Victoria feel like close personal friends, and Karleen Koen’s Through a Glass Darkly, which still makes me want to go live in the 18th century. When it comes to writing style, though, the hands-down biggest influence was Elizabeth Peters. Anything I know about comic timing in fiction, I learned from Peters’ brilliant mystery novels."

It is the humor in Willig’s work that sets it apart from other historicals. The banter between Lord Vaughn and Mary Alsworthy in The Seduction of the Crimson Rose is more than worthy of Peters at her best, and the continuing romantic and academic adventures of Eloise Kelly, heroine of the contemporary storyline, is deliciously satisfying. Readers will be delighted to know there are more volumes to come in the series. And Willig, at last, will have a bit more freedom when writing them, since she’s quitting her job and joining the ranks of full-time writers. "There are certainly things I’ll miss about the practice of law, like my wonderful colleagues at the office," she says, "but I’m very much looking forward to having the time to return e-mails, write more books, and, of course, indulge in massive fits of writer’s block."

Tasha Alexander is the author of And Only to Deceive and A Poisoned Season.

Lauren Willig's romantic mysteries charm readers There are few authors capable of matching Lauren Willig's ability to merge historical accuracy, heart-pounding romance and biting wit. The Seduction of the Crimson Rose, the latest in her popular Pink Carnation series, continues Willig's trend of making each…

Memoir

Dee Dee Myers

Interview by Jay MacDonald

Dee Dee Myers is no stranger to spin. As press secretary to Bill Clinton for the first two years of his presidency, she was both the youngest (at age 31) and the first woman to serve in that high-profile position. Though her tenure was short and turbulent, she received generally favorable marks in a difficult assignment. Upon leaving the White House, she consulted on TV’s "The West Wing," where she funneled her White House experience into the character of press secretary C.J. Cregg. Now a mother of two, Myers parses political rhetoric and nuance for a living as a "stay-at-home pundit" for NBC and MSNBC.

But she swears she did not time her long-awaited memoir/manifesto, Why Women Should Rule the World, to hitch a ride on the gender train with the 2008 presidential campaign of Hillary Rodham Clinton.

"That’s really all accidental," Myers says. "Obviously, because Hillary Clinton is running such a serious campaign, gender issues are front and center whether anybody foresaw that they would be or not. I feel lucky."

Although she knew Mrs. Clinton "fairly well," their relationship was oblique since Myers reported to the president. Ironically, in a book filled with numerous inspiring women, Hillary Clinton is strangely absent. Was the first lady not a role model for the young press secretary?

"That’s a really good question," Myers says with a sigh. "I sort of made a conscious decision not to write too much about her because I didn’t want the book to be all about her. She was not somebody that I worked for, like Dianne Feinstein, or worked for from a distance, like Geraldine Ferraro, because my focus was so intensely on Bill Clinton. She didn’t have the same kind of personal mentoring relationship with me as some of the other women that I talked about."

Unlike Scott McClellan, former press secretary to George W. Bush whose forthcoming memoir was in the works before his parking space was reassigned, Myers was in no hurry to relive her history-making trial by fire.

"Everything about working in the White House and on a presidential campaign is so intense that I knew I just wanted to let some time pass," Myers explains. "Then I started having babies. If I didn’t have two young kids, I probably would have done this sooner."

True to its title, Myers’ memoir-with-a-mission presents a compelling argument that female rule is the obvious solution to the mess men have made of things to date. Citing dozens of studies that support nature over nurture, Myers explores how innate male aggressiveness has wrecked havoc on everything from the classroom to the boardroom to the Oval Office.

By contrast, she says women are natural consensus-builders and team players whose nurturing instincts would bring about a more peaceful and prosperous world, given the chance. In fact, she cites studies that suggest that the leadership, patience and time management skills involved in childrearing are just what America needs today to reinvent itself along more sustainable lines.

On those grounds, Myers has no problem defending Hillary Clinton’s campaign claim to 36 years of experience.

"I think you see things and experience things and learn things about power and the way the presidency works from that front row seat that you couldn’t learn from many places. I think that is a legitimate claim to experience," she says. "She was the first First Lady to come to the White House with a career that had been very much separate from her husband’s. I don’t think we need to denigrate her experience and her contributions because she was ‘just the wife.’ "

Both women shared the eye-opening experience of suddenly being swept by the electoral tide onto the foreign shores of the Potomac. "

Being 31, female and from California was like the trifecta of how not to go to Washington," Myers chuckles. "My learning curve was pretty steep. But [Hillary] became what I didn’t have to become, which was kind of a Rorschach test on how we felt about women in power and wives and their proper roles."

Myers was reluctant to take the job when George Stephanopoulos offered it to her. It had all the earmarks of the classic woman’s double bind, responsibility without the authority. Her instincts proved correct: She was frequently left out of the loop on important decisions, then blasted by the press corps for withholding information. She had no illusions about why she was there.

"I think the president wanted to give me the title because I was a woman, because I had been a loyal campaign aide and he liked me," she says. "He wanted credit for naming the first woman to that position and I got it; I understood."

Myers admits she much prefers politics from the sidelines these days. She occasionally has lunch and compares notes with current White House press secretary Dana Perino, the second woman to hold the job. "I don’t have any desire to get back into it," she says. "I like being an observer."

Myers admits to torn loyalties in the 2008 Democratic race; while she finds "a lot to admire" about Hillary, her sister works for Barack Obama. Which candidate does she think will ultimately prevail?

"I’ve always believed that a war of attrition favors Hillary Clinton because when you get down in the trenches, everybody gets dirty. Everybody already thinks the Clintons are a little dirty, but if Obama gets dirty, then I think he loses much of what has made him Obama. And that’s the hell of this crazy system; it’s very hard to run as a reformer. That’s why reformers never win. And I think that’s too bad."

Jay MacDonald writes from Austin.

Fiction Women's Fiction

Jodi Picoult

Interview by Amy Scribner

The so-called Queen of the Topical Novel (as crowned by the Miami Herald) is back. In her 15th book, Change of Heart, Jodi Picoult examines the nature of faith and the path to salvation. Shay Bourne, a wanderer who picks up spare jobs as a carpenter, is convicted of killing a young girl and her stepfather and sentenced to death. While on death row, he performs what appear to be miracles: bringing a dead bird back to life, turning the water in the prison pipes to wine. Who gets to decide whether he's a Messiah or a crackpot? And what should the victim's mother do when Bourne offers the one thing that can save her other daughter's life?

Change of Heart is vintage Picoult—a challenging, intelligent and powerful read. Picoult recently answered questions for BookPage about her new book and life as a best-selling author.

You're an incredibly prolific writer and you manage to write such consistently enjoyable books. What do you do to recharge and come up with the idea for your next novel?
I don't actively try—I guess that's part of the magic. Instead, I let the topics choose me. I figure out what it is that I'm particularly concerned with, or questioning, and let myself explore it in the field of fiction. Usually I know two years ahead of time what I'll be working on in the future!

Change of Heart explores the idea that religion is to some extent about having faith in things we can't prove. How did your own beliefs influence this book? It's my belief that this country is breaking apart on the fault line of religion and that something meant originally to unite people has instead become divisive. To that end, I really wanted to put the history back into religion, and to challenge those who feel that just because they think they're right, everyone else must be wrong. I would never presume to tell anyone how to believe; I get upset when people presume to tell me. It's no coincidence that I wanted to publish this book during an election year, when the boundary between church and state has become increasingly blurred.

Much of the book is set in a state prison. Your depiction of life behind bars is fascinating, from the ways prisoners pass the time to the unique language they speak. What kind of research did you do to paint such a vivid picture of prison life?
I've been to death row in Arizona, twice now. It's a very strange place—in all the years I've been doing research, I don't think I've ever seen such a cloud of secrecy like the one I found there. I was literally on a plane when my visit was being nearly cancelled—I had to arrive at the facility and talk my way into it, because they decided if I was a writer, I must be "media". I was able to charm the authorities into giving me a tour of their death row—which is more serene than you'd think, because the inmates are locked into their individual cells 23 hours a day. Then I begged to be taken to the execution chamber—the Death House, as it used to be called in Arizona. It was while I was examining their gas chamber (Arizona uses both gas and lethal injection) that the warden approached me to ask me again who I was, and why I was writing a book about this. She definitely had her guard up—and wasn't budging an inch. We started talking about the last execution in Arizona, and at some point she mentioned she was a practicing Catholic. "If you're Catholic," I said, "do you think the death penalty is a good thing?" She stared at me for a long moment, and then said, "I used to." From that moment on, the wall between us came down, and she was willing to tell me everything I wanted and needed to know—including scenes you'll see in this book, a backstage look at how an execution happens.

Your publisher is printing one million copies of Change of Heart. Have you calculated how far around the globe that would stretch?
I'm not nearly as gifted at math as you're giving me credit for!! Actually, I'd probably be more likely to count how many trees sacrificed themselves for my fiction. Seriously, though, it's a crazy number I can't really wrap my head around—million-copy print runs are for people like Stephen King and JK Rowling, not little ol' me. There's still a part of me that believes the people buying my books are all friends of my mom's, but I guess I'll have to finally admit that maybe there are a few folks who read my stuff that she hasn't bullied into it!

You have a month-long book tour coming up. What question comes up most often during appearances? And which question would you be happy if you never had to answer again?
The question I get asked over and over is "Where do the ideas come from?" I once heard another writer say, "They arrive in brown paper packages every Tuesday." I've always been tempted to steal that response! The best question I've ever been asked was by a teenager in the U.K. last year—she wanted to know what I felt were the three biggest issues facing America right now, and if I was writing about them. I said, "Intolerance/bullying, religious narrow-mindedness and gay rights." I'm happy to report that I had already written books on two of the three, and was planning to write about the third one!

What's the one thing you're most proud of?
That my three children are good-hearted, kind and thoughtful.

If you had to choose one book to reread once a year, what book would it be?
Gone with the Wind. And it's so long, it would probably take that long, too!

Children's & YA

Jeff Smith

Interview by Linda M. Castellitto

Jeff Smith recently returned from a world tour, an endeavor most often associated with religious leaders or rock stars. Smith won’t be riding in a pope-mobile any time soon, but he’s got Bono-worthy status in the world of comic books and graphic novels. The writer-artist didn’t harbor dreams of having fans worldwide when he began drawing his Bone comics. Nor did he suspect that his work would someday be published by Scholastic, which launched its new Graphix imprint with the Bone books. The latest entry in the nine-volume series, Bone: Ghost Circles, is out this month. Smith spoke to BookPage from Columbus, Ohio, the home base of Cartoon Books, which he launched in 1991 to self-publish the Bone books (his wife, Vijaya, became his business partner in 1992).

"I started Bone pretty much in the garage, writing and drawing a black-and-white comic every couple of months and putting it into the comic-book market, for other cartoon-heads," he recalls. "I definitely wasn’t picturing them as children’s books."

Instead, he wanted to create comics with characters reminiscent of the ones he’d loved as a kid—Uncle Scrooge, Bugs Bunny—and with storylines he craved, but could never find. "We always think of comics as a kind of ephemeral thing," he explains. "They’re in the newspaper every day, and Charlie Brown never gets to kick the ball or change his shirt. I always thought the medium of comics could handle a really large story with a large structure." Smith drew a daily newspaper cartoon when he was a student at Ohio State University and, after college, he founded an animation studio. But his interest in creating a more substantive story never waned. Then, in the mid-1980s, "I discovered the indie underground comic book world . . . a movement where people were drawing their own comics and telling their own stories."

For 12 years, Smith created his story: 1,300 pages via 50-plus issues of Bone. The epic story focuses on the adventures of Fone Bone, Phoney Bone and Smiley Bone. The cousins are little blobby guys who, despite their small size and adorable appearance, prove to be quite strong. This is fortunate, because the Bones keep encountering scary creatures that want to eat them. They also have to climb over mountains, dash through dark forests and reason with dragons as they journey through unfamiliar territory rife with unusual beings, dark magic and other surprises. Smith encountered his own surprise when he began talking with Scholastic—namely, the suggestion that the Bone series be published in color. Smith says that, when he first created Bone, he stuck with black-and-white for several reasons, including a small budget, an affinity for newspaper comics and his desire to pay tribute to Art Spiegelman’s Pulitzer Prize-winning graphic novel memoir, Maus. It’s a bit, well, comical how things turned out: Spiegelman was instrumental in convincing Smith to add color to the Bone books. (Spiegelman and his wife, Françoise Mouly—art editor of The New Yorker—were advising Scholastic on the imprint-launch.)

"At first, I thought the idea was a little sketchy, that it would be like colorizing Casablanca," Smith says, adding that he’s not comparing Bone to the classic movie. "But then, I felt we could do storytelling things with color: create depth, direct people’s eyes, create a mood. If something is happening at sunset or twilight, you can only tell the reader or draw really long shadows [in black-and-white]. But if you throw a bright orange light on it, you can really change it. I’ve been won over." And the books have won over young readers. Smith’s cartoon-head fans share the books with their own children, but he says librarians deserve a lot of credit for getting the Bone books into kids’ hands, too.

"Librarians and teachers have let me know they are getting reluctant readers to read with Bone. So people can actually see there are benefits to graphic novels, vs. the stigma that always was attached to comics. . . . I knew it wasn’t true. I learned to read because of comics." Smith says he loved reading about Tarzan and Sherlock Holmes when he was younger; he later turned to The Iliad, The Odyssey, Le Morte d’Arthur and Moby-Dick. "I really like epics. Moby-Dick is honestly my favorite book. I’m just fascinated by the literary structure," he says. He cites The Adventures of Huckleberry Finn as an influence, too: "It was a real model for me. It starts off very much like a boy’s adventure story, but it quickly grows darker and the themes become more complicated and sophisticated." Bone: Ghost Circles has no small amount of darkness; Smith says the book is the beginning of the final act. "A volcano has loosed ghost circles: vast areas that are too poisonous to enter. It’s the darkness before the dawn."

The Bones and their friends must make their way past the circles, battling thirst, fear and confusion about the Moby Dick costumes they suddenly seem to be wearing. There’s plenty of humor amid the scary, suspenseful storylines and—while eager readers can quickly devour the story, thanks to lots of dialogue—they’ll surely be slowed by drawings that feel as if they’re moving or, in some cases, breathing. It’s that inimitable mix of art plus story that makes graphic novels so stimulating and engaging, Smith says. "As an author, I’m extremely aware every day that, when it comes down to it, you read [graphic novels] left to right, top to bottom, just like a book. They have their own subsets of symbols that don’t belong to prose and movies—it is its own visual art form that works on its own and makes an immediate connection with a reader."

The success of Bone has brought Smith a new level of respect, even from his own family. "One really fun thing that’s changed [since Scholastic began publishing the books] is that my parents and their friends’ kids know about Bone now," he says. "Before, it was only in the comic-book stores, but now it’s in bookstores. All of a sudden, my parents are like, ‘Oh, my gosh!’ "

Jeff Smith recently returned from a world tour, an endeavor most often associated with religious leaders or rock stars. Smith won't be riding in a pope-mobile any time soon, but he's got Bono-worthy status in the world of comic books and graphic novels. The writer-artist…

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