All Interviews

With simultaneous publication in the U.S., Australia and the U.K., Steve Toltz’s first novel, A Fraction of the Whole, is about to make a big splash. And why not? A Fraction of the Whole is a big book (530 pages) with big ambitions—it covers 40 years in an often laugh-out-loud, insightful, sprawling, impossible-to-summarize tale of the larger-than-life mishaps and adventures of an Australian father and son and the various miscreants and reprobates who surround them.

"It began as a little short story of a father and son," Toltz says during a call—his first interview ever, it turns out—to his home in the Bondi Beach section of Sydney, Australia. Toltz, who is in his 30s, lives there with his wife, a painter. "In Australia and England when the daily tabloids decide to tear someone apart they can be quite unsparing," Toltz continues, explaining the seed of his story. "Every now and again there will be someone skinned alive by the media. Oftentimes they deserve it, but other times they do not. It’s sometimes as if the community as a whole takes on the hating of someone almost as a community project. I would often look at a story like that and think, what if that was your dad? It seemed to be such a bigger story that I couldn’t stand for it to be a short story, and so the story expanded in every direction."

Thus A Fraction of the Whole opens with a youngish Jasper Dean sitting in a prison cell looking back over the events that have led him to his sorry state. Many of these have to do with his love-hate relationship with his father, Martin Dean, a self-taught philosopher-rebel who has become the most reviled man in Australia. And then there is his uncle, Terry Dean, a career criminal and sports enthusiast, who is one of the most revered men in Australia.

"The book is very Australian in terms of its subject matter," Toltz says. "It’s about Australian society and a particular Australian ethos—you know, sport and criminals—but it actually touches on a lot of Australian subjects. Some Australian writers are very good at describing the landscape here, but that’s not where my interest lies. The landscape I’m describing is a social landscape."

Out of this particular terrain, Toltz fashions a novel of remarkable psychological and thematic range. In conversation he explains his scope of interests by citing influences ranging from Woody Allen to Knut Hamsun, Henry Miller to Céline, Emerson to Lemertov.

"A lot of writers won’t read while they’re writing," Toltz says. "I am someone who lets himself be completely influenced by other writers. That’s the joy of it for me. What makes a voice unique is the combination of the writer’s sensibility and the combination of influences that wouldn’t otherwise have been previously combined. Like Woody Allen. Who else would have put the Marx Brothers with Ingmar Bergman just because they were people he happened to like? Add that layer to whoever he would have been anyway and you have something completely different."

In A Fraction of the Whole, this combination of Toltz and his influences provokes both thought and laughter. "I have a tendency to want to make myself laugh while I’m writing," he says. "In the earlier version there was a little too much. I was quite prepared to justify any unbelievability if it made me laugh. But as I went along, I wanted to believe the characters and story more."

Surprisingly, Toltz says this torrent of a novel was written at a snail’s pace. It took him almost four years to complete. "Everything I wrote in the first year got written out of existence. When I look back, it’s a much worse writer who wrote those early pages. The process was really the process of my ability catching up with my ambition. In the first year I had a relatively high opinion of my abilities and then I read other stuff and realized I was nowhere near it."

Toltz adds, "In Australia—and it’s probably quite similar in the United States—you can’t just say you’re a writer without some kind of evidence to back up this wild assertion. But in Europe they don’t really require evidence. You say ‘I’m writing,’ and it’s respected as an activity."

As a result, much of Toltz’s first novel was written in Spain and France, where he met his wife Marie. "My book is the first book she ever read in English," he quips. "Now she’s gone through it a few times, so I think she’s actually read four English books, and my book has been three of those."

To realize his large ambitions for A Fraction of the Whole, Toltz hit upon an unusual methodology. "Everyone always says that all a writer needs is a room of one’s own. I’ve always had a room of my own, but for some reason after about 20 minutes I can’t stand the sight of it. So I developed a really bad habit some years ago: I go for a walk. I write in parks or on beaches or in cafes or libraries or bars. I keep moving every two hours, which was great when I was living in places like Barcelona and Paris. Now I don’t even bother trying to have a space at home. In most of Australia there are little benches everywhere. I live at the beach. The benches look over the ocean, which seems like quite a nice office to me."

Returning to the subject of his ambition to be a writer, Toltz says, "When you’re unpublished you look at books that have a certain degree of international success and you wonder, is my book as good as this one or that one, you weigh it up. The biggest challenge for me was just learning to write. When you’re writing something of this scope it is also a challenge to get every page of it to have something good on it, to not have a couple of crappy pages to get to some other good bit. But I think writing a novel is what makes a novelist of you. Just the writing of it. If I wasn’t a novelist before, I am one now."

Alden Mudge writes from Oakland.

First comes love, then comes marriage, then comes someone in a baby carriage, but what comes, say, 10 years later? A midlife crisis? In her smart new novel, The Ten-Year Nap, Meg Wolitzer explores this question through the interlaced stories of a group of women who abandoned their careers (in law, academia and the arts) to practice full-time parenting. Now a decade into it, these New York mothers find themselves reassessing their choices with an eye towards the future.

As in her seven previous novels, including The Position, The Wife and Surrender, Dorothy, Wolitzer demonstrates her powers of keen observation and razor-sharp wit. The Ten-Year Nap is a perceptive, compassionate and entertaining look at the choices we make and the ever-evolving ways in which we define ourselves. And Wolitzer accomplishes all of this while withholding judgment on the decisions made by her characters.

The four protagonists—Amy, Karen, Jill and Roberta—meet daily at a cafe called The Golden Horn. It is there that they find the support and camaraderie that, as any mother knows, is essential to navigating those golden early years of motherhood. But now that their kids are becoming increasingly independent, they feel the tectonic plates of their world begin to shift. Having long ago given up the careers that defined them in favor of full-immersion motherhood, they find themselves somewhat at sea. "There is some kind of taking stock that just innately takes place. You see the life cycle in your child happening, and it almost stirs that in you," Wolitzer says during a morning call to her New York apartment.

There are many nonfiction books in the ongoing dialogue between mothers who opt out of work and mothers who return to it, but, as Wolitzer points out, those books usually have an agenda and can only hint at the complexities of women's lives. "It's tiring for women to have to look at their lives as a nonfiction article because no one's life is like that," she says. In writing this novel, she wanted to approach the topic objectively through the lives of her characters. "To be reductive about anyone's choice is a mistake. I wanted to write this novel as a way to examine the multiple reasons women stay away or want to go back." And she's well aware that she is writing about and for women of a certain demographic, those who are indeed fortunate enough to have a choice in the matter at all. "The book takes place within a narrow band of society; the women have the option to stay home, most people don't."

Wolitzer says her interest in this issue began when she met other mothers through her children, now teenagers. "I was surprised to find women who had stopped doing what they did, or didn't know what they wanted to do, because I'm in an unusual position as a writer. I've been both home with my kids and working, and there are very few jobs that allow you that. I basically got to see both worlds, the world of motherhood and the world of work," she says. "I wanted to show the tensions between motherhood and ambition and work and vulnerability in as broad a way as I could."

It should be noted that to Wolitzer, ambition isn't a dirty word, one that should be spoken of in a hushed tones like some unseemly affliction (as in "She has . . . [stage whisper] ambition.") She notes how in our culture, specifically in the current political campaign, it gets a bad rap—ambitiousness is a quality revered in men but reviled in women, the scarlet "A" of our era. Wolitzer, however, chooses to embrace it. (No surprise, since it does take a certain amount of drive to write eight novels, the first straight out of college.) "Even for strong women, there's a fear about what that word says."

Wolitzer came of age in the 1970s, a period, she jokes, that she can't seem to stay away from in her fiction. Raised during the era of women's lib and conscious-raising groups, she was bewildered when she had kids and discovered that everyone wasn't trying to "have it all." She didn't have to look far for encouragement because her mother, Hilma Wolitzer, is also a novelist. Though fortunate to have the unique perspective of a writer and writer's daughter, Wolitzer admits that her situation isn't perfect. "Children are narcissists. They want what's good for them. A writer wants what's good for her. It's not ideal, and sometimes you cut corners. Children just want you to be theirs." She adds, "The notion of feminism that said you can have it all, that didn't turn out to be true really. Change takes a generation and a half."

Wolitzer says that she's never understood why writing about motherhood is seen as soft. "That's crazy to me," she laughs. In her capable hands, it is anything but. She manages to write poignantly about motherhood without being sentimental or mawkish. It is easy, she says, to veer towards the satiric, a route she didn't want to take. She insists that she did not set out to lampoon the stay-at-home mom, though admits that "there's satire to be mined in the over-involved mother." Of course, it wouldn't be a Meg Wolitzer novel if she didn't have some fun along the way, as in the chapter where a former corporate mom approaches a school meeting with boardroom intensity. Wolitzer is more interested in what would make someone behave that way and suggests that, in this case, it is perhaps because that mother doesn't know what to do next.

Motherhood, she suggests, is a series of necessary, albeit heart-wrenching, letting-gos. Wolitzer says she has moved through "great pockets of grief about it," but adds that, though the bond between mother and child is a powerful thing, "the letting go is equally profound."

"You've done your job because they're in the world. I think for women who have not started to think about 'what now?' – whatever that is – it's hard for them to let go of the hand of that child." She offers this poetic analogy: "It's like a big square dance, the partner, the child, moves away, and you have to make a new formation."

Katherine Wyrick is a writer and mother in Little Rock.

On Monday evenings, Chocolat author Joanne Harris and her 14-year-old daughter Anouchka like to shoot teen-agers. Armed with laser rifles, they prowl the strobe-lighted darkness of their local Laser Quest facility in West Yorkshire, England, to deafening rock music, searching for easy prey. "It's quite fun and terribly therapeutic," Harris admits. "I'm not bad and she's pretty good, too; small people are frequently at an advantage because they get the angles. We like to get groups of arrogant young male newbies who are totally humiliated by the idea that they've just been creamed by somebody's mum or by a little girl. It's very funny to watch that."

Clearly, life has turned a page or two for the Cambridge-educated, half-French, half-British novelist whose upbringing in her grandparents' Yorkshire sweetshop inspired the magical world of rebellious chocolatier Vianne Rocher, her young daughter Anouk and her river-gypsy boyfriend Roux. Hollywood, of course, turned Chocolat into an Oscar-nominated film starring French gamine Juliette Binoche and American expat gypsy Johnny Depp.

Harris resisted for years the idea of writing a sequel. But as her own daughter, the inspiration for Anouk, matured to young womanhood and their relationship changed, the idea of exploring their next chapter through Vianne and Anouk suddenly seemed as natural as, well, Laser Quest.

In The Girl with No Shadow, five years have passed since Vianne won her church-versus-chocolate smackdown with Father Reynaud in the French village of Lansquenet. Still a single mom, Vianne now has a second daughter, Rosette. That will come as news to Roux, the toddler's father, who has been incommunicado since Vianne resettled to a new chocolate shop in the Montmartre district of Paris.

"One of the reasons I wrote the book was that I was conscious of living with a young person who had reached a very different stage in life, and it's a good thing to draw from," says Harris. "I wouldn't have written about a teenager without having a teenager."

But it's not Anouk who's in trouble here; it's Vianne. In her quest to forge a stable life for her two girls, she has forsaken her gypsy ways, toned down her dress, abandoned her magic and consented to marry Thierry, a bourgeois blowhard. She has, in effect, lost her shadow by ceasing to be herself.

On the Day of the Dead, a bohemian free spirit named Zozie de l'Alba enters the shop and rekindles the joie de vivre in Vianne and the girls. As Vianne's new assistant, Zozie's ability to glean each customer's secret desires soon has them eating truffles out of her hand. But the enchanting Zozie has a very dark side; she's secretly a highly adept identity thief who intends to sink her claws into the innocent Anouk.

"At a certain point, every parent starts to be conscious of the fact that having a child is very much about being afraid all the time," says Harris. "Because this is really a book about fear and how to deal with that, I wanted this to be something that epitomizes on the most elementary level what a mother is most afraid of, which is having their child taken away."

Harris labored to keep Zozie amorphous and ambiguous, shadowlike really. Her name, derived from the French sosie for mirror image or double, is apt indeed as she slowly assimilates and eventually becomes the Vianne of old.

"She is more of a human computer virus who just infiltrates the story," says Harris. "She just passes from one situation and one life and one person to another and assimilates what she wants and moves on, so her mentality is viral in that respect. She doesn't interact with human beings in the way that normal human beings do."

To add to Vianne's predicament, Roux suddenly blows into town to win her back and reconcile his wandering ways.

"I think a lot of people come of age in this book, including me to a certain extent," Harris admits. "It is very much a story about growing up, and not just Anouk growing up. All the main characters in fact have to investigate who they are and where they're going and what it means to be an individual."

There's also a liturgical symmetry between Chocolat and The Girl with No Shadow.

"What I wanted to do was create a kind of mirror image of Chocolat," explains Harris. "Chocolat starts at the beginning of Lent and moves toward a time of life and rebirth and fun and feasting. This is a story that starts at Halloween and however much it may be heading toward a celebration [Christmas], we all know what it's a celebration of really [death]."

If Chocolat was milk chocolate, The Girl with No Shadow is the darker, more nuanced confection with just a hint of the bitterness that comes of growing up and letting go the indulgences of youth. Readers expecting something closer to How Vianne Got Her Groove Back are in for a surprise.

Those looking for a younger, livelier character will want to check out Runemarks, Harris' recently published fantasy adventure for teens starring Maddy Smith, a witchy young version of Vianne who struggles against the Order, which bears a striking resemblance to the Church. Based on Norse mythology and inspired by the bedtime stories she would conjure for her daughter, the epic fantasy marks the author's first foray into young adult fiction. At least one sequel to Runemarks is in the works.

"This is entirely familiar territory for me; this is the kind of stuff I was writing long before Chocolat, but it didn't get published," she says.

And what of Vianne, Anouk and Rosette? Might we one day savor another cup of Chocolat?

"I don't think this ends the story," Harris says. "With imaginary characters, you have a sense sometimes of there only being one story; you know instinctively that only one story ever happens to Cinderella, while Robin Hood or King Arthur will always have lots and lots of adventures. I think Vianne and Anouk and Rosette are like that; they may well have other events."

Jay MacDonald enjoys his just desserts in Austin, Texas.

For a book whose author says casually that "this is a novel where not very much happens," The Story of a Marriage contains enough surprises that an interviewer must tread carefully for fear of depriving readers of some of the novel's great pleasures of discovery.

What Andrew Sean Greer seems to mean by his remark is that the scope of his narrative is intimate, the lives it describes in such resonate – often metaphorical – language are narrowly circumscribed. The Story of a Marriage is told by an old woman, Pearlie Cook, looking back on an event in 1953 that rocked her world.

Then again, this is the first time Greer has been interviewed about the novel, and he is just discovering how to think about and talk about a book he has spent the last four years producing. "I'm very curious to see what I'll say," he announces at the beginning of the conversation. Greer admits to being one of those writers who shows a work-in-progress to no one. In fact he makes up a story to tell people when they ask him what he is working on.

"I learned my lesson with Max Tivoli," Greer says during a call to his home in the Lower Haight district of San Francisco. The Confessions of Max Tivoli was Greer's critically acclaimed breakout novel, published in 2004. "When I would tell people it is about a man born in the body of an old man who gets younger, their faces would collapse with concern. It would make me think, what a bad idea for a novel, and it would put me off my writing. So I started saying it was a novel about Victorian San Francisco, and people would say, 'that sounds great,' and leave me alone." He says he described the current book as "a novel set in the '50s in San Francisco." True. But so minimal as to be almost meaningless.

Greer did not immediately launch himself into The Story of a Marriage after he completed The Confessions of Max Tivoli. Instead he began working on a project that proved to be too big. Casting about for "something realistic and domestic," he found himself returning again and again to a failed short story he had written years before called "The Ballad of Pearlie Cook." He finally decided the story had failed because it was in fact a novel.

The seed for that story came from a tale told to him by one of his family members. "It gives something, but not too much, away," Greer says carefully. "An elderly relative of mine who everyone considers sort of crazy, told me a story once about how in 1952 a family friend had taken her for a ride around Kentucky and stopped the car, turned to her, and said he had been her husband's lover for years. He wanted to go away with her husband. He said he would help her financially with their children, but he wanted the two of them to go away, and he needed her permission to do it. She said no. It was always the great regret of her life that she couldn't imagine saying yes. She couldn't imagine what life would be like for a poor woman in the '50s, alone, with two kids to raise. It became my job to imagine what if she had said yes. And because I wondered what would be the traps that would make my main character join forces with this man, I changed everything about her."

For one thing, he sets his story in San Francisco rather than Kentucky. Greer's family came from Kentucky but his parents, both scientists, worked in Washington, D.C., where he grew up. After attending Brown University, working in New York and getting an MFA from the University of Montana, Greer moved to Seattle to write. "It was cheap enough that I could sit in the house and lock myself in a room and write, but the rain started to get me down. It's one thing to be broke. But when you're broke and you feel trapped too, that's too much." He followed his twin brother to San Francisco and arrived at what he considers a lucky time, when many other young writers were moving to the city.

Greer wrote The Confessions of Max Tivoli and The Story of a Marriage in a former workshop he "rented in someone's basement six blocks uphill from where I live. This being San Francisco, it has a view of downtown from its window because it's so high up. It's a place where I can't do anything but work. I can't surf the web or read email. All I can do is read books or write books; both seem like a good use of my time. Napping also seems to happen."

Greer's 21st-century San Francisco is, of course, very different from Pearlie Cook's San Francisco of 1953. She and her husband, Holland, and their boy, Sonny, live in what is now called the Sunset district, but which on the day Charles "Buzz" Drumer showed up with his immoderate proposal was still referred to as the Outside Lands, a perfect place for this group of outsiders to inhabit.

Perfect, too, is Greer's moody evocation of a time that isn't yet what we think of as the 1950s and a place that isn't yet what we now think of as San Francisco. "There is a danger that you're just going to costume the whole thing and forget that you have a story about characters and real lives," Greer says about his months of research. "I didn't want it to be a novel about history, yet when I realized 1953 was the endgame of the Rosenbergs, the peak of McCarthyism and the end of the Korean War, a time when the papers said both that the end of the world is coming and that everything is going to be fine, I finally saw how these things related to my main character and went ahead."

Greer says he always tends to "overdo everything in the first draft because I have to write a lot to figure out how these events and characters come together thematically and as a story." But that is no longer a surprise to him. Nor is the hard work of editing and rewriting the manuscript.

However, comparing his effort on Max Tivoli to his work on this new novel, Greer confesses that he was quite "surprised to be drawn back into a plot which is intense and dramatic and about love and passion. I don't think of these as my main concerns, but the same questions of how you know another person and how you trust that someone loves you kept coming up. So I guess maybe they are."

Alden Mudge writes from Oakland, California.

Nine-year-old Skyler Rampike’s privileged life takes a triple Salchow into disaster when his beloved six-year-old sister Bliss, the darling of the tri-state ice skating world, is found brutally murdered one midwinter morning in the basement of the family’s Fair Hills, New Jersey, home. The ensuing breathless media coverage casts such a toxic cloud of suspicion over the family that even Skyler wonders, could he somehow have killed his own sister?

Corporate CEO Bix Rampike and stage mom Betsy, both prime suspects, quickly exile their surviving child to a series of boarding schools for the famous and notorious, for his own good of course. During the next decade, Skyler’s adolescence becomes both prescribed and proscribed by a host of acronymic disorders: PDD (Premature Depression Disorder), CAS (Chronic Anxiety Syndrome), OCD (Obsessive-Compulsive Disorder), even the dreaded HSR (High Suicide Risk). Betsy, meanwhile, becomes a fixture on the talk-show circuit, where she shamelessly promotes the Christian cottage industry she has built around her daughter’s unsolved murder. At 19, drugged, unloved and with little left to lose, Skyler seeks redemption by writing a painstaking autobiography, My Sister, My Love.

Owing to the pervasiveness of that selfsame tabloid hell, readers will immediately recognize My Sister, My Love as the JonBenet Ramsey murder on ice, explored here in all its gothic creepiness with appropriate satiric flourishes by that prolific lioness of Princeton, Joyce Carol Oates. Long fascinated by the corrosiveness of fame, Oates has drawn from true-life events before, most notably in two of her numerous Pulitzer Prize nominees: Blonde (2000), an imagined autobiography of Marilyn Monroe, and Black Water (1992), a novella inspired by the Chappaquiddick incident.

Why riff on the Ramsey case? Chalk it up to the insidiousness of tabloid journalism today. "I was noticing how we’ve developed into a kind of tabloid culture where even the New York Times is reporting on things that, in the past, might have been left to the tabloids," she explains. "The Monica Lewinsky case is the most notorious, where something of an essentially trivial and private nature is elevated to prominent attention."

Oates briefly auditioned the O.J. Simpson case as a jumping-off point, having already written an O.J.-inspired young adult novel, Freaky Green Eyes, before deciding instead to turn the Ramseys into the Rampikes.

"My focus was always on what it would be like to dwell in tabloid hell, to have a name that, when you introduced yourself to anybody anywhere, the name would precede you with this sort of aura of scandal," she says.

Recognizing in the JonBenet case the opportunity to hijack the narrative drive of a whodunit, Oates playfully litters her novel and its talking-to-the-reader footnotes with enough red herrings to feed greater Oslo.

"The more you look, it has the teasing mystery of a locked-room case, where there are only a few suspects, unless you think that an intruder did it," she says of JonBenet’s murder. "This case doesn’t go away. It’s officially unsolved and remains out there, sort of like a vast riddle."

Although police quickly ruled out JonBenet’s nine-year-old brother Burke as a suspect in the 1996 murder, he remains one in cyberspace. "I don’t know anything about him, and I deliberately don’t know anything about him," Oates says.

To get in the mood for mischief, Oates vicariously immersed herself in a steady diet of Fox News.

"I had the whole Fox News syndrome," she says. "I was watching Fox News while I wrote the novel, watching Bill O’Reilly. I do come from a Christian background and the Christianity on Fox News is just used for political purposes, it’s so transparent. Bill O’Reilly always used to say ‘secular progressive’ for left wing. Secular progressive sounds pretty good to me! Fox News? I call it Hawk News. I don’t watch that anymore. I just can’t even look at it now." She detoxed with "The Daily Show." "He’s excellent," she says. "I get a lot of news from Jon Stewart."

Oates engages in considerable sleight-of-hand with Skyler’s narrative, which moves freely between the observations of the 19-year-old author and his nine-year-old self, both admittedly under the influence of prescription mood elevators. Skyler is not so much an unreliable narrator as an unsteady one whose highly intelligent digressions, including a rather desultory 55-page attempt at a novel, account for the narrative’s herky-jerky pace.

"The kind of writing Skyler is doing, this conscience-examining and going inward and remembering every little thing and going back over his past obsessively because he’s obsessive/compulsive isn’t really helping him understand what he needs to know, which he finally will be told at the end of the novel," Oates says.

The author herself received a surprise near the end of writing My Sister, My Love when police arrested John Mark Karr, a 41-year-old former schoolteacher who confessed to the JonBenet murder, though DNA evidence later cleared him.

"I was so shocked because I had already invented someone [neighborhood pedophile Gunther Ruscha], but [Karr] seems even more weird than my character," Oates says. "I said to my editor, I don’t know whether I can keep on with this novel because real life has overtaken it. It was so embarrassing that people would think that I was just following this when actually I had already invented him."

By the time Skyler receives a climactic deathbed letter from Betsy that answers his most fundamental questions, he’s already well on the road out of tabloid hell, thanks to kindly Pastor Bob, a born-again ex-con who practices what he preaches.

"Skyler is kind of going back to this very simple form of religion or Christianity where you do good if you can but you don’t have to do it on TV or have a huge ministry," says Oates. "I really like Pastor Bob. With all his flaws, he has no pretensions. He doesn’t even necessarily believe in God, he just feels, OK, here we are, we have to help one another, let’s make the best of it."

Jay MacDonald attended college in Boulder, Colorado, where JonBenet was murdered.