All Interviews

Zoe Heller

Interview by Amy Scribner

When Audrey Litvinoff’s famous liberal-lawyer husband Joel falls victim to a stroke, she is left behind to deal with their rapidly unraveling family and a secret that makes her second-guess their entire marriage. But if this description of The Believers—the fantastic new novel by What Was She Thinking: Notes on a Scandal author Zoë Heller—leaves you expecting to feel sorry for poor Audrey, think again. A bristlier, more complicated character is hard to recall in recent fiction. And that’s just the way Heller intended it.

“I think there’s excessive emphasis on the need for likable people in fiction—people you admire or even are inspired by,” said Heller, who spoke to BookPage from her home in the Bahamas. “The job of fiction is not to present likable characters. It’s to present interesting characters. And I find [Audrey] funny. You can’t be without interest in someone if they make you laugh.”

Indeed, The Believers is chock-full of engaging characters who revolve around one another in present-day New York City. There’s the bitterly funny Audrey, who seems hell-bent on alienating everyone around her in the days following Joel’s stroke—her family, the medical staff taking care of Joel and anyone else she encounters.

Then there are the Litvinoff children, all of whom have their own surprising reactions to Joel’s demise. Rosa, a beauty who has spent her adult life as an ardent atheist and Marxist, suddenly finds herself drawn to the Orthodox Jewish faith of her ancestors. Karla, a dowdy social worker whose husband treats her as though he did her a favor by marrying her, is on the brink of starting an affair with a colleague. And Lenny, their youngest, is sinking further into drug use.

While the subject matter is no joke, in her impossibly silky British voice—she lived in London before moving to New York City in the mid-’90s—Heller laughs about her inspiration for these powerful characters. Rosa, it seems, was inspired in part by Heller’s own self-righteous adolescence.

“I was a fantastically sententious 12-year-old, berating my sisters for shaving their legs and such,” she said. “I suppose I was dredging up memories of my own past. Rosa was the hardest to write, going from militant atheism to religion. I’m sort of a skeptic by nature, and never had religion. I wanted to write about it without being patronizing.”

Karla, it seems, was an easier character to sketch. “Karla was actually my attempt to write a ‘good person’ and the problems that come with being a good person,” Heller said. “People object to her passivity, but I know very few women who haven’t had at least a few moments of self-loathing.” Heller’s own self-loathing moment, at least as a writer, came as a young journalist who’d recently settled in America. She quickly carved out a niche writing dispatches about her life and experiences for London newspapers, being dubbed one of the first female “confessional writers.” But Heller had her doubts about the worth of this brand of journalism.

“I felt slightly ludicrous writing ‘whither America’ pieces,” she admitted. “I think it caused a great flurry of similar ‘girly about town’ columns. I often get credit that I created this terribly grotesque genre.”

After living in Manhattan for several years with her husband, screenwriter Larry Konner, and their two daughters, the family temporarily relocated to the Bahamas because, well, they could.

“We realized we were both writers, and the theory was we could write wherever we wanted,” she said. “We considered Morocco, and then ended up, slightly dully, in the Bahamas. It’s warm, which was one of the chief criteria, and there was school for the kids.”

It was a surprisingly easy transition for this self-proclaimed “big-town girl.” Her children, now ages five and nine, have transformed into “island children” who can dive and surf, although the older daughter did recently confess she missed the dirty subways of New York.

Writing during this relocation to paradise has been a bit tougher than expected.

“Slightly grim interior spaces are the best place for me to write,” she laughed. “But, there are all sorts of things I want to write about as a result of being here.”

Which is a relief. With three novels under her belt now, including Notes on a Scandal, which was made into a movie starring Dame Judi Dench and Cate Blanchett, and this newest, the screen rights to which have already been bought, one would think Heller would see smooth sailing. But she still admits to a dread of writer’s block.

“I slightly live in fear of not having anything else to write about,” she said.

You wouldn’t know it by reading The Believers. It’s a richly detailed, deeply insightful peek into what happens to one family when the star of the show leaves the spotlight. In the wake of Joel’s stroke, Audrey makes some poor choices—and some unforgivable remarks—but Heller allows glimpses into the years of adultery and standing in the shadow that led to her current behavior:

“The wives of great men must always be jealously guarding their positions against the encroachments of acolytes, and Audrey had decided long ago that if everybody else was going to guffaw at Joel’s jokes and roll over at this charm, her distinction—the mark of her unparalleled intimacy with the legend—would be a deadpan unimpressability. ‘Oh, I forgot!’ she often drawled when Joel was embarking on one of his exuberant anecdotes. ‘It’s all about you, isn’t it?’ ”

“I attempt to describe something of the process, of why would she become so awful,” Heller said. “I always wonder about the wives of famous, charismatic men. It must be hard going home with the clown or the charmer. It must be hard living with that person.”

After finishing the promotion of The Believers, Heller and her family will move back from the Bahamas to that other island, Manhattan, this summer. Living in the tropics has its perks, sure, but Heller is already clearly in a New York state of mind. She doesn’t miss a beat when asked what she’s missed the most about big-city life: “Take-out food.”

Amy Scribner writes from Olympia, Washington.

Author photo © Jacques Brouchier.

Memoir

Bob Barker

Interview by Pat H. Broeske

Anyone who’s been near a television set during the past half-century has seen Bob Barker. For 35 years he hosted daytime’s “The Price Is Right”—the longest-running game show in North America. Before that, he spent 18 years hosting “Truth or Consequences.” No wonder Barker has been hailed as TV’s longest-running host.

Barker, the recipient of 19 Emmy Awards, retired in 2007. But he hasn’t disappeared behind the curtain. At 86, he remains a tireless animal rights advocate—and is a fledgling author. His memoir, Priceless Memories, written with Digby Diehl, provides a backstage pass to the shows that made him a household name.

There are also vignettes of his surprising past—including his upbringing on the South Dakota Indian reservation where his mother was a teacher, his training as a Naval fighter pilot and the love story he shared with his high school sweetheart-turned-wife, Dorothy Jo.

“We were a team,” Barker says of his wife, who died in 1981. “I couldn’t have done what I did if it weren’t for her.”

Speaking by phone from the Hollywood home he shares with his dog and rabbits, Barker explains that he purposely kept the tone of his book upbeat and non-controversial—in the tradition of his TV shows. “We didn’t solve the world’s problems. But we hopefully helped you to forget your problems for just a while.” As to why “Price Is Right” has proven so durable, he offers, “Audience participation. That’s the key.” In fact, shows like “The Price Is Right” were originally called “audience participation shows.” Recalls Barker: “They were spontaneous and unrehearsed. No one was tested or coached before they went before the cameras.” Also, once the cameras rolled, they kept rolling—and whatever happened, happened.

Barker got into television the old-fashioned way: via radio. He had a weekly show for Southern California Edison, the electric power company, which aired locally on CBS. With Dorothy Jo, who was his producer, he traveled to two cities a day to visit Edison’s “Electric Living Centers,” where he interviewed homemakers about the latest electrical wonders. “One day Ralph Edwards heard the show—and liked it. He was already considered a broadcasting pioneer, and a legend,” Barker recalls.

In 1956 Barker became host of the Edwards-created show “Truth or Consequences.” He was still doing “T or C” when, in 1972, he bounded in front of audiences for “The Price is Right.” For the next three years he did a juggling act—working both shows. When he opted to do only one, he couldn’t have guessed that he would spend more than three decades playing the straight man to contestants grappling with price tags. “The premise of ‘The Price is Right’ is simple—and powerful. Everyone identifies with pricing,” Barker says. “From cab drivers to executives, everyone’s interested in what things cost.”

Under Barker, the program observed several milestones. In 1987, after years of fooling with hair dyes, he rebelled—becoming the first host to let his hair go au natural. “I was the only guy on TV with gray hair,” he says, adding, “I had to get approval from the head of daytime programming!” Barker also began signing off with what was literally a pet passion: “Help control the pet population. Have your pets spayed or neutered.”

It was his late wife who enlightened him about the plight of animals. Following her cue, he became a vegetarian—and went on to convince producers of “The Price Is Right” to stop featuring furs and leather. Later, as the longtime emcee of the Miss USA and Miss Universe pageants, he sought to stop the contestants from parading in furs. When the show’s producer wouldn’t budge, Barker resigned—and the so-called “fur flap” became major news. “For the first time, many people understood about the cruelty to animals that resulted from the production of fur,” he says, adding, “Fur is no longer chic.”

In memory of his wife and his mother Tilly, who was also devoted to animals, Barker established the DJ & T Foundation, which has contributed millions to spay/neuter programs. Barker, who never had children, is also leaving a legacy of university endowments for the study of animal rights, and is himself active in animal rights legislation. He may no longer be in front of the cameras, but Bob Barker hasn’t stopped working.

Journalist Pat H. Broeske has a menagerie of cats and dogs—all spayed or neutered.

Fiction Historical Fiction

T.C. Boyle

Interview by Jay MacDonald

Last November, T.C. Boyle stood on the roof of his house in Montecito, California, garden hose in hand, prepared, if ill-equipped, to battle the conflagration known as the "Tea Fire" as it swept down the Santa Ynez Mountains. Only a last-minute westerly spared Boyle's home from joining the 230 homes ultimately destroyed in the blaze. Compared to other concerned neighbors (Oprah Winfrey, Jeff Bridges, Rob Lowe), Boyle's anxiety was tenfold: the house he and his family have been restoring for the past 16 years, a 1909 Frank Lloyd Wright original known as the George C. Stewart house or "Butterfly Woods," was just weeks away from marking its centennial. The celebration would coincide with the publication of Boyle's 12th novel, The Women, an artfully playful rendering of the life, loves and, yes, the two headline-making fires at Wright's Taliesin home that stoked the creativity of America's foremost architect. Mere insurance could never restore such a loss.

"I thought, this is hubris!" Boyle recalls. "I was hysterical. This house is entirely made of redwood, so it would have been terrible."

Fire—destruction as prelude to construction—is as much a leitmotif in Boyle's latest and most ambitious historical novel as it was in Wright's personal life, the details of which were highly flammable indeed. Wright abandoned his first wife, Catherine "Kitty" Tobin, and their six children to run off to Europe with Mamah Borthwick Cheney, the wife of a client and neighbor in Oak Park, Illinois, the cradle of Wright's Prairie School of architecture. Though they were both married, Wright installed Mamah at the newly built Taliesin in Spring Green, Wisconsin, where she would ultimately be brutally murdered along with seven others by a deranged servant in 1914. Wright would again outrage the citizenry by living out of wedlock with, before marrying, second wife Maud Miriam Noel, a Southern belle and closet morphine user. He would similarly replace Miriam with his third and final wife, Montenegrin beauty Olgivanna Milanoff.

Although Boyle envisioned tackling the larger-than-life Wright from the moment he set foot in Butterfly Woods, it was the master's scorched-earth love life rather than his architectural genius that ultimately sparked The Women.

"My editor jokes that we should eventually do a boxed set of my books about the great American egomaniacs of the 20th century, with the last book about [sex researcher Dr. Albert] Kinsey (The Inner Circle), the Kellogg book (The Road to Wellville) and Wright," Boyle chuckles. "There is a lot of appeal in these figures for me.

"All three were dynamos of the 20th century who changed the way that we live in radical ways, but each was a narcissist in the clinical sense of the word. That is, they had a scheme and that scheme was all-important; you and I and anyone else weren't really individuals who had lives or needs of our own, we were simply figures in their design. It comes to a head with Wright, who not only designed the furniture but in some cases the clothing that the housewife was to wear. These figures are fascinating to me because, of course, novelists are like that."

A less inventive writer might have been content to render the Wright stuff with a simple chronological narrative; certainly the historical facts in this case need little embellishment. But Boyle, never one to retrace his steps, nimbly reverses the order, introducing us first to Wright's last wife Olgivanna, then Miriam, and concluding with Mamah's tragic death. The effect lends a spirit of parlor comedy with a whiff of ash to the proceedings as each woman in turn falls for Wright and feels the inevitable sting of her predecessor's wrath.

To further pique our curiosity, Boyle leaves the narration to Tadashi Sato, a Japanese apprentice and devotee of Wright, as translated from the Japanese by his great-grandson. Tadashi's own story moves forward in time, a novel within a novel, slipped in primarily in the section introductions and droll footnotes. Credit Boyle's mastery with keeping this circus moving and easy to follow.

"I wanted not simply to do a kind of melodrama but to do something almost in the way that Nabokov would have approached it, something that is amusing and ironic in some ways, but also is complicated structurally and has many layers of narration," Boyle says. "The structure allows you always to question who is writing this book and how deeply they are representing a given point of view and whether or not that view is true. I guess we're having fun in a postmodern way, not that I really thought about it as I was writing it. I'm just always seeking to find something new."

Boyle willingly cops to a few similarities with the mercurial Wright.

"He was like me in the sense that we're control freaks and we have an agenda and this is our world; I write these books as a cautionary tale to myself," he admits. "But he's also very unlike me in that he only seemed to be able to create when all hell was breaking loose, when he was being sued by creditors and pursued by lawyers and divorce lawyers and women and cops. I can't work unless everything is perfect and quiet."

Although Boyle turned in the finished manuscript in July 2007, he says publication was delayed, first due to the publication of Nancy Horan's novel Loving Frank, which centers on Mamah, then to avoid being lost in the drama of the 2008 presidential election. He's pleased that the book's publication now coincides with the centennial celebration of his own piece of Wright's legacy.

"I thought that living here would give me an extra charge or thrill while writing the book in this house, and it did to a degree, but not as much as you would think because it's my house; I've lived here for a long time and I've written many books here. And yet it gave me great satisfaction to learn more about this particular house and more about his work."

Jay MacDonald writes in the Prairie style from Austin, Texas.

Fiction

Jane Hamilton

Interview by Katherine Wyrick

Fans of Jane Hamilton, and there are many, know her for her provocative, heartbreaking dramas and her unique Midwestern sensibility. In novels like The Book of Ruth and Map of the World (both selections of Oprah’s Book Club), Hamilton plumbed the depths of the human psyche, creating haunting portraits of families in crisis.

Were she not such a daring writer, her readers might be surprised by her latest work, a comedy of (bad) manners, entitled Laura Rider’s Masterpiece.

A frisky romp of a book, Laura Rider marks a definite departure for this author. That’s not to say that her other books lack humorous moments, but this one is a walk on the light side.

On a recent call to her Wisconsin home, where she lives in an 1870s farmhouse on an apple orchard with her husband, Hamilton laughs, “This one has a more streamlined plot—it has a plot. I don’t think my other books have plots . . . so that was a fun thing for me.”

That plot goes something like this: Laura and Charlie Rider have been married for 12 years. Together they operate Prairie Wind Farm, a nursery they built in picturesque Wisconsin. Although Charlie’s ardent libido and bedroom acrobatics have driven Laura to swear off sex forever, they are happy enough—until Jenna Faroli, host of a popular radio show and Laura’s idol, moves to the small town. Jenna and Charlie’s paths cross, and an email correspondence, and later an affair, ensues. All the while Laura not only encourages and monitors their intimate email dialogue but participates in it as she conducts “research” for the romance novel she hopes to write. Things quickly spiral out of control as bonds are formed and boundaries crossed.

Much of the humor in the book lies in the flowery language of Jenna and Charlie’s (and Laura’s) courtship. In an email with the subject line “Dream come true?” Charlie writes, “Because I often imagine you walking along the grape arbor, I cannot be sure if it was you, or if I was tricking myself. Either way, vision or reality your presence is a joy to me.” How this almost childlike, unsophisticated man ends up wooing an intellectual giant like Jenna is part of the fun.

As far as her own research goes when creating the character Jenna, Hamilton says, “I’ve been on a lot of radio shows through the years and in a lot of studios.” Jenna might resemble a cross between Terry Gross and Diane Rehm, but, Hamilton assures us the character isn’t based on anyone in particular.â€©On the delicate task of writing about sex, and there’s plenty of it in this novel, Hamilton says, “Sex scenes are always hard. They have to reveal character; they can’t be over the top. An ideal love scene should be discreet yet revealing.” She manages to strike this balance with scenes that are alternately amusing and poignant.

A harmonic convergence of sorts happened to bring Laura Rider into being. “More than anything that I’ve ever written, it truly wrote itself. I felt like I wrote it in 37-1/2 seconds,” she says. When we ask why she thinks that is, Hamilton responds, “It was a gift from . . . whatever.” Could it be from the Silver People, we wonder (the alien life forms that Charlie believes abducted him as a child; Charlie might have a certain charm, but he’s an odd one). Well, from somewhere beyond.

Also, during the period between 2000 and 2004, Hamilton worked on a book she ended up having to abandon. “Maybe [Laura Rider] was just cosmic reparation for that harrowing experience,” she says. “2001 happened in there, and it just seemed like a frivolous thing to be writing a drawing room drama, a family drama, about people concerned about their own little worries.” Many writers and artists have, of course, struggled with this very issue, and responded in varying ways. Hamilton goes on, “I guess the embarrassing thing for me was that [the novel] was going to be dead on arrival.” She briefly entertained changing careers but “decided I would make it the best failure I could. . . . It was a long, dreary episode.” Fortunately, Laura Rider was at the end of it.

When she wrote Laura Rider, Hamilton says that she was also taking care of her mother in assisted living, and “was in dire need of amusement. . . . It was a life saver.” The timing couldn’t be better considering that, collectively, we could all use a bit of amusement, and this novel delivers it. But the original inspiration for this book, aside for the need for some levity, was a Caribbean cruise where Hamilton taught a writing workshop. She’d never before been on a cruise and was, well, surprised—and aghast.

“There were lovely people and interesting students, but I was freshly incredulous with this crowd; many of them seemed never to have read a book, or to be aware that there was a print culture, and yet were so earnest in their wish to be published and to write.”

“I just got home and thought, what would that feel like, to want to do this thing that you actually have no preparation to do and you don’t know that you don’t have the preparation to do it.”

Thus, the birth of Laura Rider, who fancies herself an emerging writer in an age where everyone thinks they’re artists. There’s a certain presumptuousness or over-confidence in that, proclaiming one’s self a writer, which rankles Hamilton. Though the book is all in good fun, it does raise some interesting questions, namely what does it mean to be an artist? Hamilton, citing a recent New York Times article, says, “There are more people writing novels than reading them.” As Jenna says in the novel, quoting George Bernard Shaw, “Hell is filled with amateur musicians.” In Laura’s defense, however, Hamilton does believe that we all have stories to tell.

And of course, Hamilton tells hers exceedingly well. She has succeed in writing a biting—or perhaps in this case, ear-nibbling—satire that is a rollicking read. It is at once acerbic and forgiving, though she admits, “This book feels a little snarky to me, but what are you going to do?” She adds, “I wish I could write it all over again.” We wish we could read it all over again, too.

Katherine Wyrick writes from Little Rock.

Lifestyles

Sara Snow

Interview by Alison Hood

Most of us had our share of candy, Coke and hot dogs when we were kids. Not so green lifestyle expert Sara Snow: her favorite snack was a whole wheat chappati chock-full of sprouts, hummus and sea kelp flakes. During my call to her home in Indianapolis, Snow spoke enthusiastically about the (dietary) quirks and graces of growing up green, her respect for family and her passion for a credo of organic living—a devotion that sparked her new book, Sara Snow’s Fresh Living: The Essential Room-by-Room Guide to a Greener, Healthier Family and Home.

How-to guides can be preachy, especially when addressing human morals and mores. Fresh Living is not: Snow’s approach is friendly, her information is accessible and the book’s “Green Bar Profiles,” brief cameos of “people from inside the natural products industry and green movement,” are inspiring. Snow walks readers through a typical American household, room by room, offering simple, easy and affordable ways to create a healthier, environmentally friendly home. “I didn’t want to advise people to go out and buy all the latest green gadgets, throw out everything in their houses and start over,” she says, “because that would do more damage than good.” Instead, Snow has produced a reasonably priced, useful guide that folks can take shopping and “scribble in the margins.” She wanted to reach everyone, wherever they were on their journey toward living a healthier, more eco-friendly life.

From kitchen to living room, bathroom to bedroom (how to make “natural whoopie”), nursery (the ecology of diapering) to laundry room and beyond to the Great Outdoors, Fresh Living helps us rethink what we put in, on and around our bodies. Did you know that green grocery shopping happens on the store’s perimeter? That’s where all the veggies and fruits are stashed. Do you have a spider plant on your counter? If so, you’ll breathe easier. Do you know the top tips for greening your car? (First, check the air pressure on your tires.) Especially insightful are Snow’s clear explanations of often confusing food labeling, hazardous pesticide use and the dangers of plastics.

Sara Snow’s definition of green—what she likes to call “fresh”—living (she thinks “green” is overused) is not only about making a healthier home environment, but also about living at a slower, more aware pace—much like the way she was raised. Daughter of Tim Redmond (a green movement pioneer and co-founder of Eden Foods) and mother Pattie, Snow grew up in a unique household where measured, low-impact living ruled supreme. “I was aware that we did things differently in our home,” she says, “and that we were part of a movement much bigger than our family. My dad and mom were involved in important work, and raised us in a very specific way.”

Elders, too, played a crucial part in Snow’s life. Though her parents swept the whole family along on the exciting green movement tide, she credits her grandparents for many of her sensibilities. “My grandparents were ahead of their times,” she says. “They were environmentalists, but they weren’t uppity about it. They would sit down in the dirt and explain the difference between a pea shoot and a weed, where food comes from and why it was important to eat food that has life still in it.” Sadly, Snow believes that many kids today lack this basic knowledge and an understanding of the slower, more earth-connected way of life practiced by earlier generations. On a bright note, though, she says that many questions she answers and consultations she has are with parents, teachers and students who want access to programs, activities and curricula about eating well, establishing responsible carbon footprints and reducing environmental toxicity.

Since 2005, Snow, helped by her previous experience as a television producer, has created TV programs emphasizing an aware, organic lifestyle. She now hosts “Get Fresh with Sara Snow,” carried by the Discovery Health channel, appears regularly on CNN and FitTV, and blogs at treehugger.com. She is an environmental activist who uses her platform to champion planet Earth. “I have a voice and I use that voice to positively encourage people who are trying to do some good. If we can simplify, buy less and start educating ourselves as consumers, we can help companies clean up their environmental practices,” she says.

To make a difference, Snow believes people need to be aware of how their slightest actions can affect their well-being and the health of the environment. “It’s about making that one small change so that you can be a little bit healthier, a little bit more environmentally conscious. Once that change becomes habit, then you add something else. One day you’ll realize, hey, I’m living a really healthy life! And that’s something you can be proud of.”

Alison Hood recycles, re-uses and gardens organically in Marin County, California.

Read more about Sara Snow on her website.

Alexander McCall Smith

Interview by Jay MacDonald

Where fictional private eyes are concerned, Precious Ramotswe, proprietress of Botswana’s No. 1 Ladies’ Detective Agency, makes Jessica Fletcher of “Murder, She Wrote” look like Spenser for hire.

In the 10 books of this gentlest of detective series, including the latest, Tea Time for the Traditionally Built, Mma Ramotswe and her eccentric secretary Mma Makutsi spend far more time investigating “the full cupboard of life” (to borrow the title of book five) than actually solving mysteries. They are, in fact, more often the source than the solvers of intrigue as they kibitz and circumvent the kindly but clueless men in their lives—respectively, Mr. J.L.B. Matekoni, ace mechanic and owner of Tlokweng Road Speedy Motors, and Mr. Phuti Radiphuti, proprietor of the Double Comfort Furniture Shop. Though a paying client may eventually receive satisfaction, it sometimes takes a detective to find an actual mystery in these utterly charming village tales.

“The plots are entirely incidental,” admits Alexander McCall Smith from his home in Edinburgh, Scotland. “They are character studies, but with a very strong sense of place.”

It’s a place the author knows well. Born in Zimbabwe (then Rhodesia), Smith attended school near the â€¨Botswana border. After he earned his law degree in Scotland, he returned to Botswana to help establish a new law school at the university there. He went on to become professor of medical law at the University of Edinburgh, where today he serves as Professor Emeritus. He returns to Botswana every year.

Smith’s fondness for the country and its people shines through in the upbeat, optimistic tone of the series. While some critics praise him for the deceptively simple way he casually reveals human truths, others accuse him of portraying Africa through rose-colored glasses.

“People say that I’m putting forth a saccharine view, which actually isn’t fair,” he says. “What I’m doing is talking about a side of reality that is definitely there but isn’t normally reported. There’s an awful lot of bad news that comes out of Africa, the failure of the political systems and rampant corruption and the resulting suffering of the people. All of that is there, but there is obviously another side.”

To which his legion of readers might add, what’s wrong with gentle escapism? Whether it’s Ballykissangel or the Cheers bar in Boston, don’t we all want to go where everybody knows our name?

“I think that people yearn for a sense of community,” Smith agrees. “The larger the world gets, the larger cities get, I think the more acutely people feel that need.”

It’s the very day-to-day concerns of Mma Ramotswe and associates that help us forget our own. In the delightfully titled Tea Time for the Traditionally Built, Mr. Molofololo, the wealthy owner of the Kalahari Swoopers soccer club, wants the agency to ferret out a slacker on the squad who has been intentionally throwing games. But more pressing matters must take priority: Mma Makutsi’s archrival Violet Sephotho has hired on to sell beds at Double Comfort in hopes of stealing Phuti’s affections, and Mma Ramotswe’s beloved white van, having finally given up the ghost, has been scrapped, then stolen. Clearly, Mr. Molofolo will have to wait.

“We do have a sense of loss with the tiny white van; that mortality is there,” Smith says. “The van is a very important character in these books, and in fact, she will get that van back. There’s going to be a howl of protest from readers, but I think they’ll know that everything is going to work out, that it’s going to be rescued.”

If we are all homesick to some degree for the simpler, slower pace of village life, we likely also miss the common courtesies that accompanied those gentler social interactions. It’s a longing that Smith deftly evokes in the touching formality of Botswana, where even husband and wife refer to each other as Mr. and Mrs.

“Of course, I overstate it, but there is a certain formality in Botswana which is quite striking. People are considerate and formal in many of their dealings with people, which I find very refreshing and nice,” Smith says.

“I think these books have quite a strong sense of loss in them. We’ve lost a certain consideration in our society. Somehow, we all know that we’ve lost some of the courtesies in highly utilitarian societies. We’re in this big rush, and therefore people addressing one another with consideration and courtesy is getting rarer.”â€©With more than 60 books to his credit, the prolific Mr. Smith won’t be slowing down anytime soon. Still to come this year are new installments of his 44 Scotland Street, Isabel Dalhousie and Portuguese Irregular Verbs series, as well as continuing chapters in his new serial novel, Corduroy Mansions, for the Telegraph.â€©

In March, HBO aired the two-hour film pilot for the new “No. 1 Ladies’ Detective Agency” original series, starring Grammy-winning singer Jill Scott as Mma Ramotswe and Anika Noni Rose (Dreamgirls) as Mma Makutsi. The film was directed by the late Anthony Minghella, the Academy Award-winning director of The English Patient. The series continues on Sunday nights on HBO.

Smith caught “Sopranos” fever relatively recently, but hopes the “No. 1 Ladies” series, on which he serves as a consultant, catches the same zeitgeist.

“It will be unlike anything that anybody has ever seen. It’s HBO going out on a limb and doing something really exciting, as they did with ‘The Sopranos.’ They’ve caught the place and they’ve respected the world of these books,” he says.

In his spare time, Smith—called Sandy by his friends—and his physician-wife Elizabeth perform (on bassoon and horn respectively) with “The Really Terrible Orchestra,” an amateur group he founded against his better judgment. They make their American debut, coincidence or no, this April Fool’s Day at New York’s Town Hall.â€©“We are seriously bad,” Smith says, with a warped sort of pride. “We are cacophonous. We’ve got a fairly broad repertoire, and it really is bad.”

Jay MacDonald writes from the savannahs of central Texas.

In the 10 books of this gentlest of detective series, including the latest, Tea Time for the…

Nonfiction History

Neal Bascomb

Interview by John Slania

When it comes to writing, Neal Bascomb is a creature of habit. He begins his day at the same coffee shop in Greenwich Village, New York, where he has written all his books. He drinks regular coffee, and he takes it black. He reads The New York Times. When he puts the paper down, it’s time to have a second cup of coffee, and to write. He uses one of the fancy pens he’s received as a gift, and any notebook he has available. Then he sets about writing his first draft in longhand.

“I’ve been coming to the same place almost every day for the past 10 years,” Bascomb says. “The place has a good feel to it. It’s public, yet no one bothers me. People come in and out. I sit at a table and open a notebook. The sounds around me become white noise. It’s beautiful.”

Bascomb breaks around noon, and returns to his home in Brooklyn for lunch with his wife and two daughters. Then he returns to the coffee shop to write again until dinnertime.

“Two good sessions, and a 1,000 words, and I’m happy,” he says.

In contrast to his rigid writing routine, Bascomb’s nonfiction books are remarkably diverse in subject. His latest, Hunting Eichmann, is an engaging account of the manhunt for Adolf Eichmann, the notorious Nazi commander who was the architect of the mass extermination of Jews during World War II.

Written in rich detail and with authority, the quality of Hunting Eichmann would suggest the author is an expert on World War II, the Holocaust and war crimes. But this is his first foray into such subjects.

Bascomb’s first book, Higher, described the battle between America’s most gifted architects to build the world’s tallest skyscraper during the Roaring ’20s. He followed with The Perfect Mile, the tale of Roger Bannister and two other runners struggling to be the first to run the mile in under four minutes. Bascomb then wrote Red Mutiny, chronicling the 1905 munity aboard the Russian battleship Potemkin.

The diversity of Bascomb’s subjects makes perfect sense, given that he is a journalist in pursuit of a good story.

“I like to find stories that are very intriguing, with a strong narrative,” he explains.

While his approach allows Bascomb to avoid being pigeonholed, many book authors develop a specialty, which enables them to develop an audience.

“It may not be the best idea in terms of my career,” he admits. “There is value in focusing. a) You become an expert. And b) you keep your audience. In essence, I’m finding a new audience each time I write a book. I suppose there are those who love Neal Bascomb, but I’m not sure how many of them are out there.”

Bascomb actually has quite a few fans, given that his books have met with critical acclaim and have made numerous bestseller lists. Hunting Eichmann has the same potential, thanks to Bascomb’s painstaking research and lively writing.

The book follows the life of Eichmann, a lieutenant colonel in the notorious Nazi SS who organized the deportation of Europe’s Jews to concentration camps. When Germany surrendered, Eichmann escaped and lived under an alias in Argentina until his capture by Israeli spies in 1960. He was convicted of crimes against humanity and hanged.

Hunting Eichmann tracks the Nazi officer’s rise to power and recounts his acts of genocide. It outlines his harrowing escape, his undercover life in Argentina and his suspense-filled capture. The story is thoroughly researched and rich in detail.

Bascomb, 37, first became interested in Eichmann in 1992, when he was a young college student studying abroad in Luxembourg.

“I was this Midwestern kid who found himself in a place where there was a lot of World War II history. Then when some Holocaust survivors came to talk to us, it struck me in the solar plexus.” Bascomb recalls.

Years later, when he was researching the subject, Bascomb was excited to discover new material on Eichmann, and he began a journey that took him around the world to learn about the fugitive Nazi’s life. He traveled to Buenos Aires to interview former Nazi soldiers. While there, he also discovered in court files the long-lost passport Eichmann used to escape Europe. Bascomb also traveled to Israel to interview former operatives with Mossad, the spy agency that tracked down and captured Eichmann.

“For 50 years, they had not spoken about this. They had a pretty dramatic story to tell. [And] discovering the passport—it was a powerful feeling to add to history,” Bascomb says.

Writing Hunting Eichmann also was a satisfying experience for Bascomb, in large part because the real-life manhunt for Eichmann was structurally similar to a mystery novel.

“It was like writing it as a novel, except everything is true,” he says. “It was exciting to get to that level—trying to tell it as if you were reading a novel, except this is history.”

While Bascomb is about to embark on an eight-city tour for Hunting Eichmann, he already is busy researching his next book, which is about high school science students. His eager pursuit of his next project, which is taking him to New York, Detroit and Santa Barbara, California, is due in part to his continued curiosity as a journalist. But there are also some practical reasons.

“I write books full time. I don’t freelance, I don’t teach. So when one project is done, I like to get cracking on the next one,” he explains.

But his wife has her own theory.

“My wife says I pick my books depending upon where I want to travel next,” Bascomb laughs. “That may seem true when I’m researching in Santa Barbara in January. But in my defense, I was in Detroit the week before.”

John T. Slania is a journalism professor at Loyola University in Chicago.

Mystery & Suspense Mystery

Elmore Leonard

Interview by Jay MacDonald

Among crime novelists past and present, Elmore Leonard is a prime number, a talent so simple and elemental that it refuses to be divided by comparison to others. Whether he’s hanging with mobsters in Miami Beach, dreamers in Detroit or hustlers in Hollywood, his every dark comedy really takes place in Leonard Land, a closed universe populated by lovable cons, ex-cons and soon-to-be-cons whose dialogue is so spot-on that you hear it rather than read it. The one character you’ll never find in Leonard Land is the author himself. Leonard works hard to stay out of the frame and allow his characters to take over, moving and grooving to their own unpredictable beat.

“When I start a book, I never know how it’s going to end. I never know what’s going to happen,” Leonard admits. “I don’t have a computer. I write in longhand and then I put it on a typewriter, then I rewrite that, and rewrite it and rewrite it. It takes about four pages to get one clean page. I just start writing and keep going.”

The one thing Leonard won’t tolerate is fancy prose. As he states in his 10 Rules of Writing: “If it sounds like writing, I rewrite it.”

At 83, with 30 novels to his credit in a career that spans more than half a century, Leonard remains up to his splendid tricks. In his latest, Road Dogs, he takes characters from three previous novels and combines them into a whole that is greater—and funnier—than the sum of its parts. Road Dogs also serves as something of a Leonard Land retrospective, with shout-outs to everyone from the hanging judge in Maximum Bob to Miami Beach bookie Harry Arno in Pronto to the otherworldly possibilities of Touch.

The “road dogs” in question are Jack Foley, the charming bank robber played to perfection by George Clooney in the film version of Out of Sight, and his prison wingman Cundo Rey, the millionaire Cuban hustler/go-go dancing Cat Prince from LaBrava. Both are facing years behind bars in Florida’s Glades Correctional until Cundo secures the services of a hot young female attorney. She manages to spring Jack first, with Cundo’s release to follow in two weeks.

Since Cundo paid Jack’s $30,000 legal fees, Foley agrees to crash at one of his oceanfront homes in Venice, California, and keep an eye on Dawn Navarro, the professional psychic from Riding the Rap, who has been Cundo’s lady in waiting for seven years. It takes little effort for Dawn to seduce Jack, but he’s cautious when she attempts to enlist him in a scheme to steal Cundo’s off-the-books fortune. The plot starts perking when Cundo arrives home a day early, throwing the dynamics between the three into the spin cycle.

Leonard has occasionally revisited characters in the past, including Raylin Givens (Rum Punch) and Harry Arno (Pronto) in Riding the Rap and Chili Palmer (Get Shorty) in Be Cool.

“I had no reservations bringing back these three characters. I felt that I hadn’t done quite enough with them,” he says. “I was anxious to use them because I know them. They have personalities of their own and I could make them talk, that’s the main thing.”

But he hit a small snag when it came to Cundo Rey. “I wanted to use him, so I had to open LaBrava to see what happened to him and I went, oh God, he’s dead!” Leonard chuckles. “He’s not pronounced dead, but Joe LaBrava shoots him in the chest three times. So I just have the emergency squad pick him up and say, ‘Hey, he’s still breathing!’ That took care of that.”

Then there was the Clooney factor. Since the success of Steven Soderbergh’s film version of Out of Sight, it’s become virtually impossible to separate Foley from Clooney—not that Leonard minds. “I loved the casting. In fact, I wondered, can I do another Foley picturing Clooney? And I had no problem,” he says.

It may prove a bigger obstacle should a film version of Road Dogs come up for discussion, as it almost certainly will. “Universal owns those characters now, so we either have to sell this to them or get an agreement that allows us to go somewhere else. And they don’t want to do that; they don’t like things to slip out of their hands,” the author says.

Leonard got his start, and perhaps his fascination for fringe dwellers, in the 1950s, writing Westerns on the side while holding down a “real” job in advertising. When the market for Westerns dried up, he switched to crime. “I would read John D. MacDonald’s stories in Cosmopolitan and different places and think, that’s what I should be doing,” he recalls. His early attempts fell somewhere between the giants of the genre.

“The book that changed my style somewhat was The Friends of Eddie Coyle by George Higgins. I think that’s the best crime book ever written. It’s about bank robbers and the guy who supplies clean guns for every job,” Leonard says. “What I learned is, I was already using a lot of dialogue, moving the story with dialogue, but I wasn’t getting into scenes as quickly. I was setting up scenes and then getting the characters talking, instead of getting them talking first. [Afterward] editors would complain, ‘I don’t know what’s going on here, these two people are talking,’ and I would say, just stay with it, you’ll find out where they are.”

Leonard’s books have become increasingly verbal ever since. Where other crime writers mourned the coming of the cell phone as the loss of a suspense tool (“Where’s a pay phone?!”), Leonard loved it. His characters in Road Dog may spend more time yakking on their mobiles than actually speaking face-to-face.

Leonard and his wife Christine, longtime residents of the Detroit suburb of Bloomfield Hills, have five children and nine grandchildren. Though he’s still in top form, he’s inevitably asked if he plans to retire anytime soon.

“No, there is nothing else I want to do,” he says. “I have no reason to quit. I’d be bored.”

Jay MacDonald writes from Austin, Texas.

Children's & YA

Alison McGhee

Interview by Heidi Henneman

Julia Gillian is a master of many things. She is skilled in the Art of Papier-Mâché Making, she is skilled in the Art of Telepathic Human-Dog Communication, and she is skilled in the Art of Chopsticks. Unfortunately, she is not as skilled in the Art of the Trumpet, and even worse, she is learning to be skilled in the Art of Lying.

In award-wining author Alison McGhee’s Julia Gillian (and the Quest for Joy), the second title in her three-part series, we find our precocious and loveable heroine struggling to find herself—and happiness—in the fifth grade. Her best friend is treating her strangely, her favorite lunch lady has been replaced by a tyrannical lunch man, and her dream of becoming a famous jazz trumpeter is quickly being dashed. Julia Gillian is a very serious young girl who never-in-a-million-years would lie to her parents, talk back to her teachers or fake her way through trumpet lessons—until she does.

McGhee captures Julia’s struggles with amazing dexterity, balancing the delicacy of the young girl while respecting the weight of her very mature worries. “I always try to honor the child of whatever age,” McGhee says from her home in Minneapolis. “Too often, adults dismiss the concerns of children—or they are terrified of them, especially teenagers—but children are wonderful, magical beings. They are young, but they have these incredible inner lives, and they are so tender. So I always keep that in mind when writing for children.”

In retrospect, McGhee thinks she might have been a bit like Julia in her own childhood. “I was the oldest child and ultra responsible,” McGhee recalls. “There is some of that in Julia.”

For the most part, however, Julia invented herself. “I created a goal for myself of writing a children’s book, set in my neighborhood, with a young girl who had a big dog,” the author says. “I just let the characters do whatever they do—it’s often a great surprise to me.” This particular character became an accomplished girl with an ever-expanding list of achievements: Skilled in the Art of this, that, and the other. Oddly, she did not become Skilled in the Art of Reading. “I was surprised because I thought she would be like me and bury herself in books all the time,” McGhee says.

The author’s own love of books started at an early age. “My earliest memories were of wanting to be an actor, then a ballerina, then a singer,” she says, “but then when I was six, I started writing stories and I decided I wanted to be a writer.”

After graduating from Middlebury, McGhee spent her off hours writing, but it took six years to get her first short story published, and it was 13 years before Rainlight, her first novel for adults, was published. Her second novel, Shadow Baby, also for adults, became a Pulitzer Prize nominee and a Today Show Book Club selection. “By that time, at least I had an agent,” McGhee jokes.

Her foray into children’s book writing, however, started quite by accident. “I kept a journal about each of my children for every year of their life,” recalls the mother of three. Her sister noticed that there were quite a few ideas for children’s books in the journals, and suggested that she start writing picture books. “It was a huge challenge for me,” she says, but she became skilled in the Art of Picture Book Writing, nonetheless. Her first attempt, Countdown to Kindergarten, won the 2003 Minnesota Book Award and became a Booksense 76 pick, among other accolades.

After that, she delved into writing novels for children. “Whether I am writing picture books, children’s novels or short novels, I try to hold the same sense of honor and respect for children, their concerns and their amazing ideas.” Indeed, she seems to sympathize with children in a fresh and personal way through her books. In Quest for Joy, McGhee says, “I relate to the fact that she [Julia] is truly at sea and yet she continues to makes things hard for herself. That has been one of the lessons of life for me, too: sometimes it’s OK to ask for help.”

Luckily for Julia Gillian, she learns this lesson as well, and in the end, she does succeed in her quest. As we learn in the book, joy comes in many forms—in the anticipation of new siblings, in freeing oneself from the entanglement of lies, and in the triumphant sounds from a challenging trumpet. For McGhee herself, joy comes in enjoying her children and her dogs, listening to music and reading a wonderful book. She should know. She is, after all, skilled in the Art of Writing Wonderful Books.

Barbara Rosenblat

Interview by Jay MacDonald

As the unmistakable voice of Dorothy Gilman’s Mrs. Pollifax, Elizabeth Peters’ Amelia Peabody, Nevada Barr’s Anna Pigeon and the characters in more than 400 other titles, Barbara Rosenblat’s credentials as queen of the audiobook speak for themselves.

The only woman to win six Audie Awards, this multitalented, transatlantic character actress, singer and dancer has been on a wildly successful verbal run since she first heard her own voice on her uncle’s tape recorder as a child.

“It was like a Proustean moment. My life changed at that moment,” she recalls. “It’s like looking at your reflection in a mirror for the first time and seeing what you look like.”

Rosenblat admits that in her role as an audio narrator, she’s a stickler for preparation and reads her scripts “down to the letter.”

“Even if a book is not sterling, a good audio can elevate substandard material,” she says. “It’s movies for the ears.”

Rosenblat has created memorable audio performances of such diverse titles as Helen Fielding’s Bridget Jones’s Diary, Amistead Maupin’s Tales of the City series and Larry McMurtry’s Terms of Endearment. Little wonder she’s won 40 Golden Earphone awards from AudioFile magazine and been named its Voice of the Century.

Born in London to Holocaust survivors, the precocious Rosenblat grew up in New York City, the perfect incubator for her often-spontaneous, Annie-like public performances in city parks and street corners. Later, when she enrolled at City College in Harlem, she fell in with the musical comedy society and discovered a new medium for her vocal gifts: radio.

“I had a weekly radio show for three years called ‘Front Row Center.’ I got to see and review Broadway shows, interviewed people and played clips from different cast albums,” she recalls. Bitten by the acting bug, Rosenblat nevertheless took her father’s advice and earned certificates to teach English, theater and speech in New York City schools. She barely had time to use them.

“The first job I got was playing Yenta in a three-city dinner theater tour of Fiddler on the Roof in Kentucky, West Virginia and Ohio,” she says. “I had more fun than a bucket full of bunnies.”

Versatility—and that marvelous, mellifluous voice—have kept Rosenblat in demand ever since, for a wide range of performing roles. On Broadway, she originated the part of Mrs. Medlock in the Tony Award-winning The Secret Garden and appeared in Eric Bogosian’s Talk Radio with Liev Schreiber. Her screen credits include Little Shop of Horrors, Reds, “Guiding Light,” “Law and Order SVU” and a number of BBC productions.

She provided the world-weary voice of Sal, the office manager, for those NPR car guys in the animated series “Click and Clack’s As the Wrench Turns,” and even voiced a Teutonic transsexual dope fiend in the classic videogame “Grand Theft Auto.” Last year, friends convinced her to audition for the singing, dancing role of Gertrude Stein in
27 Rue de Fleurus. She nailed it off-Broadway.

Still, audiobooks are where her star shines brightest. She often gets so into a performance that tissues have become a studio staple.

“I just did Anne Frank Remembered and at the end of it, we were all a mess, not a dry eye in the house,” she says. “On the other hand, when I recorded Sue Townsend’s The Queen and I, which is one of the funniest books I’ve ever done, I remember sitting in the studio with tissues all over the place, laughing myself hysterical.”

Rosenblat credits her “phonographic memory” with the ability to create and recreate a sometimes-unwieldy cast of characters. She’s up for another Audie this year for Katie MacAlister’s supernatural comedy Fire Me Up, in which she not only performs as libidinous guardian Aisling Grey, but her drowsy Newfoundland dog, Jim.

Does she ever carry accents home with her?

“No, but when I go back to England, I get straight back into the Brit thing. The same is true when I get in with a mix of Europeans; (with German accent) I will start to pick up little bits of what they’re doing and I can’t stop myself!” she chuckles. “I’ve had people say to me, Stop mocking! and I say, it’s not mocking, it’s research. I’m flexing. This is my gym; New York City is my gym. The New York subway is a microcosm of the world.”

Jay MacDonald writes quietly from Austin, Texas, but occasionally moves his lips.

Memoir

Michael Lewis

Interview by Amy Scribner

As a first-time mother trying to make sense of a colicky newborn—one who seemingly needed only a few minutes of sleep every 24 hours—only one thing saved me from running screaming from the house. It was Operating Instructions by Anne Lamott, a hilarious, self-deprecating memoir chronicling her experience as a new mom. I read it obsessively, dog-earing certain pages and taking solace in the fact that another mother, somewhere, sometime, had found parenting a newborn as frustrating, stressful and draining as I did.

If only Home Game had been around then.

Michael Lewis, probably best known for his sharply reported look at the finances of major league baseball, Moneyball, now focuses his keen wit and sharp observations on his own family. Married to former MTV reporter Tabitha Soren (who took our cover photo), and the father of three young children, he knows the challenges of parenthood and isn’t afraid to talk about them.

Unabashedly frank, hilarious and sweetly sentimental (“I am addicted to my wife,” he admits at one point), Home Game is divided into three parts—one for each of his children. Lewis spoke with BookPage from his home in Berkeley, California, where he’d just returned from a family vacation to South Beach, Miami. Family vacation, yes. Family-friendly vacation, not entirely.

“My nine- and six-year-old girls, this was more exposed flesh than they’ve ever seen in their lives,” Lewis says of the notoriously scantily clad (and surgically enhanced) South Beach crowd. “There was a man in a gold thong. There was a topless beach. Both girls were saying, ‘Don’t look Daddy! Don’t look!’ It was hard not to. These (breasts) were like looking at the seventh wonder of the world. In Berkeley, all the boobs go down to the navels.”

Such is the life of Michael Lewis, Family Man—an ordinary guy with an extraordinary job, one that has allowed him to write bestsellers about the business of sports and the insanity of Wall Street (Liar’s Poker), and now, about his own life.
“It’s a little weird—I don’t know how to put this—normally, there’s a subject, a kind of substance to what I’ve written,” Lewis says. “Now it’s air—it’s just my life.”

Much of Home Game is drawn from several years’ worth of columns Lewis wrote for Slate called “Dad Again.” It’s a somewhat daring and in many ways groundbreaking book about what it’s like to be a father in modern America. Lewis is incredibly candid throughout, writing about his wife’s bout with postpartum panic disorder, his incredibly awkward vasectomy and the secret so many parents share but rarely talk about:

“The thing that most surprised me about fatherhood the first time around was how long it took before I felt about my child what I was expected to feel,” he writes. “Clutching Quinn after she exited the womb, I was able to generate tenderness and a bit of theoretical affection, but after that, for a good six weeks, the best I could manage was detached amusement. The worst was hatred. I distinctly remember standing on a balcony with Quinn squawking in my arms and wondering what I would do if it wasn’t against the law to hurl her off it.”

Lewis eventually came to love all three of his children fiercely, of course, but admits it wasn’t instantaneous. He theorizes that society has something to do with the fact that more parents don’t acknowledge the hardships of raising a family.

“All you have to do is look around to see that, at least in the middle-class and above, anxiety about being a bad parent has reached epic proportions,” he said. “There were these enormous social pressures I felt: when I really wanted to do x, the world insisted I do y, so I did y, but I was pissed off about it.”

Home Game is intensely honest, and Lewis admits to a bit of nerves now that the book is actually being published.

“Writing the [Slate] columns over the years . . . was purgative,” he says. “It was therapy. Although I was really, really happy to dash off the articles, now I feel somewhat ambivalent about it.”

And how about his wife, who spends much of the book either pregnant, in labor or in tears?

“I think she knows readers will see through whatever I wrote and just feel pity and sympathy for her for being married to me,” Lewis speculates. “Really, though, she really liked that I was getting it down on paper, because you don’t remember so much of it after. We also were both shocked by how many bad things happen that we never knew existed.”

For all his confessional writing, Lewis clearly relishes being a dad. In one of the most poignant passages of the book, he details a night he spent camping with his daughter. Many hot dogs and frustrated attempts to set up camp later, Lewis and daughter Quinn call it a night. She awakens at 4:12 a.m. with an urgent thought.

“‘Daddy, I just want to say how much fun I had with you today,’ she says. Actual tears well up in my eyes. ‘I had fun with you, too,’ I say. ‘Can we go back to sleep?’ ‘Yes, Daddy.’”

After two daughters, Lewis assumed his family was complete. Not so. His wife felt someone was missing. Not long after, son Walker was born.

“Perhaps the only wise moment I had in this process was to be totally aware I had absolutely no say in how many kids we would have and when we would have them,” he said.

Being a writer, Lewis travels often for book tours and speaking engagements. He takes his children with him as often as possible.

“I try to work them into my work life as much as I can,” he said. “Eventually, if you take care of your kids, you’ll love them, but the trick is if you can really like them. I really like my kids.”

As far as writing about Quinn, Dixie and Walker, though, Lewis says he’s through. “I’m done,” he says, “certainly done in the sense that I’m not going to follow their journeys through adolescence with a pen and paper.”

Amy Scribner and family live in Olympia, Washington.

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An excerpt from Home Game:

I inherited from my father a peculiar form of indolence—not outright laziness so much as a gift for avoiding unpleasant chores without attracting public notice. My father took it almost as a matter of principle that most problems, if ignored, simply went away. And that his children were, more or less, among those problems. “I didn’t even talk to you until you went away to college,” he once said to me, as he watched me attempt to dress a six-month-old. “Your mother did all the dirty work.”

This wasn’t entirely true, but it’d pass cleanly through any polygraph. For the tedious and messy bits of my childhood my father was, like most fathers of his generation, absent. (News of my birth he received by telegram.) In theory, his tendency to appear only when we didn’t really need him should have left a lingering emotional distance; he should have paid some terrible psychological price for his refusal to suffer. But the stone cold fact is his children still love him, just as much as they love their mother. They don’t hold it against him that he never addressed their diaper rash, or fixed their lunches, or rehearsed the lyrics to “I’m a Jolly Old Snowman.” They don’t even remember! My mother did all the dirty work, and without receiving an ounce of extra emotional credit for it. Small children are ungrateful; to do one a favor is, from a business point of view, about as shrewd as making a subprime mortgage loan.

When I became a father I really had only one role model: my own father. He bequeathed to me an attitude to the job. But the job had changed. I was equipped to observe, with detached amusement and good cheer, my children being raised. But a capacity for detached amusement was no longer a job qualification. The glory days were over.

Children's & YA

Charise Mericle Harper

Interview by Linda M. Castellitto

Charise Mericle Harper’s new book, Just Grace Goes Green, is printed on 100-percent recycled paper—perfect for a story about a girl whose teacher announces that her third-grade class will be going green.

The cover of Just Grace Goes Green is just right, too, for a story about eco-conscious kids: the book jacket is Kraft-paper brown, decorated with little hand-drawn bottles and recycle icons. Peeking through a die-cut is Grace, who holds the smiling Earth above her head.

“I love the discovery of new things, and that translates into the cover,” Harper says in an interview from her home in a suburb of Manhattan, where she lives with her husband and two children. “And I love the book’s format . . . you can do so much with the combination of words and pictures.”

Harper’s skill at telling an engaging story—and augmenting it with appealing illustrations, lists, photos and diagrams—is drawn from her lifetime love of reading (“I always got the maximum 10 books from the library,” she says) and other creative pursuits. The author/illustrator grew up in Vancouver, and moved to Chicago in her early 20s. There, she drew illustrations for magazines and newspapers, and had a weekly comic strip, too.

In 2000, Harper asked an agent to help her publish a comics compilation, and he asked if she’d ever try a children’s book. “The fact that he was an agent and saying that to me made me think, if he thinks I can do it, maybe I can!”

And she could: six months later, she sold one book to Little, Brown and another to Chronicle. Since then, Harper has published more than 20 books, including the Just Grace series (Just Grace Goes Green is volume four; volume five is in the works) and the Fashion Kitty graphic novel series.

While the prospect of juggling so many projects might seem daunting, Harper says she’s found her rhythm. “I’m really good about self-imposed deadlines,” she says. Part of Harper’s job as an author is to plan the projects her characters enthusiastically create. In Just Grace Goes Green, Grace and her friends host a rummage sale, offer helpful ideas to family members and create a diorama in which clay eco-superheroes save the red panda. Harper made and photographed the diorama (see page 99 for the end result).

The character who stars in her series—nicknamed “Just Grace” by a teacher who has several Graces in her class—is a funny, curious kid who mixes over-enthusiasm with empathy for her friends, and the Earth. Having a daughter who is Grace’s age gives Harper insight on the kid’s-eye view of things, but she thinks she’s retained that kid-like worldview herself. “Sometimes, I still can’t believe I’m a parent!” she says. “I feel that, with Grace, I can be the mom and the girl at the same time.”â€©That helps make Just Grace Goes Green a fun read for kids and adults. For example, Grace becomes determined to save electricity by turning off lights in her house. She wishes that her parents would forget about lights so she can turn them off, and, in her zeal, accidentally leaves her mom in the dark in the basement.

Harper’s daughter is similarly vigilant. “She’s aware you shouldn’t run the tap while you’re brushing your teeth,” she says, adding, “Kids today are being brought up so they won’t have to think about [recycling and the like].”

The author acknowledges that it’s not easy to change long-held habits, but offers a tip: “If I were to pick one thing to start with, [this] would be it—to try not to buy bottled water. If you do buy it and there’s no place to recycle it nearby, you have to decide to carry it home with you.”

Although carrying a reusable bottle or remembering to turn off lights can be tough at first, it’s worth it, Harper says—just look at the happy Earth on the cover of Just Grace Goes Green, or the trees holding hands on the back.

“I love the whimsy of the Earth smiling and talking, the trees saying ‘Thank you for saving me!’ ” But taking a light-hearted look at going green is more than whimsical. After all, as Harper says, “It’s a way of making a bleak topic a lot more approachable and not so scary.” The Earth and the trees would be proud.

Fiction Historical Fiction

Diana Gabaldon

Interview by Ann Shayne

You seem to have an enormous correspondence on the Internet. How many folks are you in contact with, and how often are you online either answering email—pesky interviewers, especially—or participating in the online literary forums?
Well, I have accounts on CompuServe and AOL. I keep AOL mainly because there are several areas on AOL with “folders” discussing my books—in the Writers Club Romance area, in the Science Fiction Realm, in the Book Nook (under Fiction Romance and Historical Fiction), in Book Central (there’s a “live” Outlander discussion group starting up in their Cafe Books), and probably a few I haven’t heard about yet.

I try to drop in on the folders dedicated to my books, at least every few days, and answer questions as best I can.

CompuServe is more or less my electronic “home,” though; I got onto it by accident some 10 years ago (in the course of a software review I was writing for InfoWorld), and never left. The conversation and the company are stimulating—great depth and sophistication—and it is in fact where I made the contacts that eventually got me an agent and a publisher (I told you all that stuff, I’m sure).

Anyway, I’m now “staff” on CompuServe; I’m co-section leader of a section in the Writers Forum, called Research and the Craft of Writing; we address esoteric questions like how deceased animals are disposed of in Great Britain (just what do you do with a mad cow? You evidently don’t just get out the backhoe and bury it in the back yard), or whether striped peppermint candy was available in the American colonies in 1793, or what kinds of voice substitution are possible for a person with a tracheotomy, or exactly what would happen—in physical terms—to the body of a person who had cut their wrists in a cabin in the woods in high summer, who wasn’t found for several days…and also questions concerning writing technique: what are the advantages and limitations of telling a particular story in first person vs. third person? What’s the best way to introduce backstory without boring the paying customers?

Occasionally people will put up brief snippets of work (not long pieces; we have formal workshop sections for those who want critiques of stories or chapters) and ask whether X works, or if anyone can see why Y doesn’t work, or can anyone suggest what to do about Z?

To get back to your question—I average maybe 80-100 e-mails (that’s private correspondence) on the two services per week, plus as many threads (topics of conversation) as I have time to participate in on the public areas—I probably post 50-60 messages a week in public areas. E-mail reaches me through the Internet, as well as from the online services. Normally (as though there was such a thing), I spend about an hour online in the morning answering mail and minding my CompuServe section, another in the late evening, before I start work. I’ll log on from time to time during the day—to CompuServe—but just to collect messages and read them as a short break; I don’t normally take time to respond then.

Has the Internet played a role in your ever-increasing popularity?
Yes, I’m sure it has. As my editor is fond of saying, “These have to be word-of-mouth books, because they’re so weird you can’t describe them to anybody!”

There’s no better means of spreading word-of-mouth than the various pathways of the Internet. I’ve often “eavesdropped” on sections of AOL that I don’t publicly participate in, and found people recommending my books to their friends, for example. It’s also very common for people who drop by my CompuServe section to enjoy the conversation, then ask if I have anything published, and when I say yes, and describe it, to go out and get one of the books. And as a publicist at Delacorte once told me, “If you can get anybody to read the first one, it’s just like pushing drugs–they’re hooked!”

Drums of Autumn seems to me a gentler book in some ways than its predecessors: Jamie and Claire are basically together, Jamie wants very much to put down roots (that’s a very moving scene in which he points out that despite his age, he doesn’t even have a place to call home). Yet, the undercurrent of violence that is a part of the times is there: the threat of the Indians, the pirates, the Redcoats, and the simple rigors of living in a wild place. What are your thoughts about including such graphic scenes? They do make harrowing reading.
Well, it was a violent time, though the violence was often sporadic and unexpected. Daily life on a small homestead was frequently pretty dull—except that a bear could easily come by during the night and scare your pig under your bed. Or an Indian could stop by and die of measles in your corncrib.

My husband tells me that the books overall have something of the rhythm of daily life; not that I necessarily give a rundown of every detail of the day (it just seems like that sometimes), but that you get the feeling of interest in small details — the salamander that runs out of the wood in your fireplace, the ticks that bite you while you sleep, the difficulty of taking a bath—underlying the more dramatic events, throughout.

That is of course deliberate, and one of the characteristics that causes people who write to me to say that the stories are so vivid, they feel as though they’re actually living in another time and place. It’s a technique I call “underpainting,” and it’s very tedious to do—but worthwhile.

However, while the detailed background and sense of daily routine is the mortar that holds the book together, the interest of the storyline as a whole—the dramatic “shape”—is dictated by the more startling events and interactions.

As to harrowing…(shrug). If something happened, I just describe it. It would, however, be wrong—aesthetically—to gloss the more unpleasant events, while giving every detail of the pleasant ones. None of the scenes you mention are gratuitous; all are integral to the story, and in several cases, there’s an underlying literary purpose, beyond the dramatic.

That’s what usually bothers me about sex/love scenes in most novels (spy thrillers as well as romance, though it’s naturally more prevalent in romance novels)—in most, the acts described could be taking place between any two persons with the necessary genital arrangements. Not in my books; any such act could only take place between these specific individuals—consequently, it’s the interaction and relationship between the characters (and how it affects them) that’s important; not titillation contingent on spinal-cord reflexes.

Ditto (re: literary purpose) the priest’s execution by the Mohawk. You’ll notice that Jamie remarks that he has seen precisely similar acts performed by French (i.e., highly “civilized”) executioners—the only thing he finds shocking is the subsequent step of cannibalization.

And in Dragonfly in Amber, the hangman, M. Forez, gives a harrowing, step-by-step description (much more graphic than this “hearsay” description of the Mohawk torture) of the same process.

What we’re doing here—and it’s stated earlier, in more explicit terms, during their first encounter with the Tuscarora—is pointing up the fact that “civilization” is largely a matter of perception.

Your books are romantic but not romances; thrilling but not thrillers; historically rich but not history. If you had to categorize your books, where would you shelve them?
How would I categorize these books? I wouldn’t. I didn’t have any genre or category in mind when I wrote them—and they’re all different from each other, in terms of structure, approach, and tone. While it was a sensible marketing strategy to call them “romance” in the beginning (they do have a lot of romantic elements; they just have a whole lot of other things you don’t normally find in romance novels), that label is both limiting (insofar as a lot of people wouldn’t even look at something called “romance,” feeling that they know exactly what that sort of book is, and they aren’t interested) and misleading (I get a lot of romance readers, who write to me, figuratively bug-eyed, saying, “But you can’t do that in a romance!”).

They sell under any number of classifications: I’ve found them shelved under Romance, Science Fiction, Fantasy, Historical Fiction, History (nonfiction) [Really. Foyle’s, in London, keeps them in the nonfiction History section.], General Fiction, and—on a few memorable occasions—Literature.

I see Ingram is listing Drums of Autumn as General Fiction (defined as “any book that does not fall into another specific category”), which seems OK to me. I suppose I might call them “Historical Fiction,” just to make it clear that they do have a historical setting.

Who’s your favorite character? Why?
Goodness, I couldn’t pick one—I love them all (including Jack Randall and Stephen Bonnet), or I couldn’t write them.

Where do you write? Have you written all your books in the same place and way?
Anywhere (I have a laptop computer), but most frequently in my office. I used to write where my desktop computer was (before I had a laptop)—either in my University office (on lunch-hours), or my home office (a converted garage.) After I sold Outlander, though, we bought a new house, which has a real office). I’ve written on planes, in hotel rooms, and sitting in the middle of Discovery Zone (one of those places you take kids and turn them loose), though.

After all your research into the 18th century, would you want to return to that period?
Nice place to visit, but I wouldn’t want to live there.

We swapped bytes with Diana Gabaldon a couple of weeks ago. Here are her comments on such items as the writing life on the Internet, grisly scenes and gratuitous sex. You betcha!

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