All Interviews

Fiction

Audrey Niffenegger

Automatic writing, homemade ouija boards, bodysnatching, mistaken identity—these are but a few of the spooky pleasures that await the reader of Her Fearful Symmetry, Audrey Niffenegger’s latest novel.

Six years after her wildly successful book The Time Traveler’s Wife, Niffenegger returns with a riveting contemporary ghost story set in the environs of London’s famed Highgate Cemetery, the final resting place of Karl Marx and George Eliot, among other luminaries.

Her Fearful Symmetry (the title is an allusion to William Blake’s poem “The Tiger”) is the story of mirror-image twins, Julia and Valentina, who share a preternaturally intense bond. Their aunt Elspeth, their mother’s twin whom they’ve never met, dies of cancer and bequeaths to them her flat with the stipulation that they live there for a year. Before this sudden windfall, the twins have been somewhat adrift; neither seems to have any desire to finish college or to leave the home they share with their parents in a quiet Chicago suburb. Their indolence might be typical of many an American 20-year-old, but these girls are anything but typical. They move to Elspeth’s apartment, on the outskirts of Highgate, and come to know the building’s other inhabitants—Martin, a charming crossword puzzle creator suffering from crippling obsessive-compulsive disorder, and Robert, Elspeth’s bereaved lover and a scholar of the cemetery. As their lives become intertwined, they soon discover that the building houses another resident—the recently deceased Elspeth.

We spoke to Niffenegger from her Chicago home shortly before she departed on another trip to London.

The author says she first traveled to London to visit Highgate in 1996 and had a “miraculous and amazing” experience that became the germ of Her Fearful Symmetry. She had been toying with an idea for a book that somehow involved a cemetery, but wasn’t sure exactly what shape it would take. She had originally set the novel in her hometown of Chicago, but Highgate proved to be the perfect setting. First, however, she had to win over the Friends of Highgate, the organization that closely guards the cemetery’s legacy. Over time she was able to convince them that she wasn’t going to do “any sort of zombie thing,” and thus the novel was born.

Having never lived in London, Niffenegger spent a fair amount of time conducting research at the British Library and getting involved with the cemetery, where she is now a guide. She says writing this book was completely different than writing Time Traveler. “For one thing, with Time Traveler, I just sort of exuberantly jumped in and started doing it because I’d never done any kind of novel before, so I was kind of splashing around . . . trying things out . . . experimenting.” For her new novel, Niffenegger was determined not to recreate the same thing or revisit the same territory. “I thought maybe I could teach myself to write a different kind of book, and so on a technical level there were a lot of things I had to learn to do. . . . I had to start consciously analyzing and reading from other books.” Though echoes of Edgar Allan Poe can be heard throughout Her Fearful Symmetry, Niffenegger says, “The books I’m consciously modeling on are Wilkie Collins’ Woman in White and Henry James’ Turn of the Screw and Portrait of a Lady.” She acknowledges that other influences may be at play as well, “All sorts of things creep in there, and you don’t even realize it, ” with "creep" being the operative word here. The book is as entertaining as it is unsettling (albeit in a titillating sort of way).

Sisters, doubling and opposites are subjects that come up over and over again in Victorian literature, Niffenegger says, citing a Dorothy Sayers short story about mirror-image twins. She says her intention was to use these Victorian tropes as unobtrusively as possible.

“I think people who haven’t read much 19th-century fiction might find this thing a bit odd because the rationale for certain plot turns and character traits comes from the existence of previous characters and previous plots,” muses Niffenegger.

“People kept telling me that Julia and Valentina seemed unnaturally kind of wrapped in cotton,” she says. “For contemporary girls, it’s ridiculous. I think people were a little perplexed by it.” She likens them to “every Henry James heroine who emerges out of nothing and goes to the old country and has all these complicated experiences.” Niffenegger describes the twins as a type, not exactly modeled on Isabel Archer (from James’ The Portrait of a Lady) but certainly inspired by her. For this reason they do seem slightly anachronistic, somewhat out of step, even ethereal. “They have their own little world,” she says.

Though all her characters feel fleshed out (ghosts included), Robert, who becomes increasingly unraveled by Elspeth’s presence, is also a type. “Robert comes from a long tradition of rather weak men, but he does finally get it together,” Niffenegger explains. “He’s sort of like all those men in Greek myth and various medieval tales who are enchanted . . . and the triumph is of them getting away from the enchantress.”

Elspeth’s character also harkens back to other tales of the arabesque. “In ghost literature, the ghosts are often described as being hungry and cold and desperate to get close to people for the warmth; and there’s always this sense with the ghosts that they really aren’t people anymore, and they don’t have the full range of human emotions, so I was trying to gradate that . . . so the longer Elspeth’s been dead, the less she empathizes . . . she just gets more and more selfish”—a truth evidenced in the book’s chilling denouement.

For Niffenegger, delving into the supernatural wasn’t a way to explore questions of a metaphysical or spiritual nature, but a literary conceit, a way to tell a story—while paying homage to some of the great ghosts of literature.

She says, “If you look at both of my novels, you see that there is no God. I’m a total skeptic, which doesn’t mean that I object to other people believing anything they want to believe. In the case of Time Traveler, there’s no purpose and no control to Henry’s time traveling, and he’s just kind of like a ping pong ball, ponging around. With the characters in Fearful Symmetry, they all have this kind of vague, modern tiny bit of religion, but they’re really secular people, all of them. Martin, with his magical thinking, is really as close as anyone gets to actual belief.”

Of the phenomenal popularity of Time Traveler, Niffenegger says simply,” It’s crazy.” She imagined that the book would be published by a small press (which it originally was), for a small audience. “I never expected the book club phenomenon,” which she cites as the main factor in the novel’s success. “I didn’t think it was a book that would appeal to that many people.” Of the movie, released this summer, she hasn’t seen it and doesn’t plan to. “I don’t discuss the movie in any kind of depth because I haven’t seen it and also because the movie belongs to the people who made the movie. All the decisions were their decisions, and they had complete control over it. They made the movie they wanted to make without any interference from me. . . . I decided to preserve my own experience with my own book.”

Niffenegger, a visual artist whose stunning artwork can be seen at audreyniffenegger.com, teaches art at Columbia College in Chicago and published two illustrated novels prior to Her Fearful Symmetry. (She’s currently teaching a class about putting writing and images together.) Though her work has been compared to Edward Gorey, she says, “The person I really claim as an influence is Aubrey Beardsley,” a 19th-century art nouveau illustrator.

Asked if she ever considered illustrating Her Fearful Symmetry, she offers a definitive “no,” and adds, "The great thing about just words is that you can leave these empty spaces that people will fill.” Niffenegger is deliberately evasive when asked about what kind of book she might write next. With her penchant for all things Victorian, we wonder if historical fiction is in her future. She says the closest that she might get to something like that would be steampunk, a subgenre of fantasy and speculative fiction with Victorian overtones. The most she will reveal is that she’s working on something that takes place in 1972, which, depending on your perspective, could be considered historical fiction after all.

While it’s true that English lit buffs will relish the many literary allusions and Victorianisms in Her Fearful Symmetry, you certainly don’t have to be an English major to enjoy this spellbinding story, solid proof that Niffenegger’s ascending star is burning bright.

Katherine Wyrick writes from her home in Little Rock.

Automatic writing, homemade ouija boards, bodysnatching, mistaken identity—these are but a few of the spooky pleasures that await the reader of Her Fearful Symmetry, Audrey Niffenegger’s latest novel.

Six years after her wildly successful book The Time Traveler’s Wife, Niffenegger returns…

Fiction

Alice Randall

There’s a spirited, slightly defiant quality to the creative endeavors of Alice Randall. It took a touch of audacity for Randall, a Harvard-educated African-American woman, to pursue songwriting in Nashville, and to launch her career as a novelist with The Wind Done Gone, a retort to the cherished classic, Gone with the Wind. Her moxie has served her well, earning her hit country records and a place on the bestseller lists. She’s putting it to work again in her new book, Rebel Yell, which brings together two hot-button issues—race and terrorism—in what Randall calls “a very grown-up novel.” Randall notes that Rebel Yell’s characters “live in the real world—live on the same planet my readers do,” and the book is likely to rankle some of those readers as it touches on sensitive spots in the American psyche.

Rebel Yell is the story of Abel Jones, Jr., the child of a famous civil rights activist, who grows up to become not only a political conservative, but an important figure behind the ugliest aspects of America’s “War on Terror.” As the narrative moves back and forth in time, Randall alternately presents a young Abel traumatized by bombings and cross-burnings, and the middle-aged, right-wing Washington insider he becomes. Over the course of the novel, she gives readers a means of understanding his baffling evolution.

Readers are first introduced to the grown-up Abel in the restroom of a Confederate-themed restaurant. His white second wife and their children are seated at the table, enjoying the bizarre ambience, as Abel collapses from an asthma attack brought on by hay dust and horse dander. It’s an absurd scene, and there are moments throughout the book when Randall’s portrait of Abel approaches caricature, yet it’s clear that he is a tragic figure, indelibly marked by the racist violence that surrounded him in childhood.

As Randall puts it, Abel is “unable to understand himself to be both black and safe. He is terrified.” His terror is the catalyst for a doubly tragic fall from grace. “Abel’s fall is particularly compelling,” Randall says, “because he is a person two very different communities both treasure and recognize as treasure.” He first betrays his special birthright in the black community, and then tarnishes his success within the power establishment through his covert involvement with torture.

Much of the story of Rebel Yell is told from the perspective of Abel’s first wife, Hope. After his death, she seeks the truth about Abel’s work, both for the sake of their son, Ajay, and to reconcile her complex feelings about her former husband. Hope endured her own traumas as a child, but unlike Abel she finds joy in her black identity. Hope resists the desire for worldly status that afflicts Abel, because she is, Randall notes, “tethered to what truly matters to her.” Asked whether Hope could be seen as a heroic figure, Randall says, “I think of Hope as a loving woman, and yes, I know loving women to be day-to-day heroes.”

As in Randall’s previous novel, Pushkin and the Queen of Spades, the relationship between a mother and son provides much of the emotional energy of Rebel Yell. Hope’s love for Ajay moves her to protect him from the knowledge of his father’s dubious legacy. Randall’s interest in the mother-son theme has personal roots, but she also places it in a wider context. “I think I was always intrigued by my father’s passion for his mother—his sense of being utterly and completely, without any doubt, loved and valued,” she says. “I am and was intrigued by the difficulty of conveying that feeling to a son when your son is an African-American boy and you live in America. Our prisons are full of men whose mothers lost that fight. I am intrigued to write about the women who win it.”

At the core of Rebel Yell is a deep understanding that there are no simple victories or losses, either in our personal lives or in society. Abel’s ascent to power comes at a terrible cost to himself and others. Likewise, the civil rights movement changed America for the better, but it nevertheless inflicted suffering and death on innocents. As the book makes clear, it also weakened the cultural bonds among African Americans. As Randall observes, “A high price was paid for freedom. Lives were lost and private cultural practices were lost. But I believe freedom is to be purchased at whatever price.”

Rebel Yell also contains an existential lesson about the destructive, dangerous nature of fear, whether it afflicts us individually or collectively. “It is my experience,” says Randall, “that terrified people and terrified nations must hold tight to their courage, to their humanity, to their very willingness to die before they would do something wrong.” It’s a lesson Abel fails to understand until after his wrong has been done.

Maria Browning writes from Nashville.

RELATED CONTENT
See a playlist for Rebel Yell.

Watch the YouTube trailer:

There’s a spirited, slightly defiant quality to the creative endeavors of Alice Randall. It took a touch of audacity for Randall, a Harvard-educated African-American woman, to pursue songwriting in Nashville, and to launch her career as a novelist with The Wind Done Gone, a retort…

YA FictionYA

Scott Westerfeld

What if World War I was fought with giant walking machines and genetically modified monsters instead of airplanes and ammunition? What if, instead of telephones and radios, long-distance communication was carried out by talking lizards and trained birds? What if our version of history was somehow turned on its head and futuristic tales were spun instead? 

This is just what happens in Scott Westerfeld’s exciting new novel for young adults, Leviathan. Westerfeld treats readers to a captivating story about a young boy in the early 1900s, who happens to be the orphaned son of Archduke Ferdinand. History teaches us that the assassination of Archduke Ferdinand and his wife ignited the sparks that led to World War I. In Leviathan, this bit of history remains the same, but the details of the war are dramatically different: Britain and her allies are armed with a fleet of Darwinian-created “beasties,” including a flying, hydrogen-burping whale, while Austria and her allies fight with enormous “clankers” made of metal and gears, and run by classic engines.

For Westerfeld, whose previous works for teens include the Uglies and Midnighters trilogies, writing in the genre known as “steampunk” has been an interesting challenge. “It’s about rewriting history in an alternative way—and making it better,” he says in a telephone interview from New York, a day after arriving in the city from his native Australia. Westerfeld and his wife Justine Larbalestier, also a successful YA author, divide their time between the two locations.

Although steampunk has been around for awhile (think H.G. Wells and Jules Verne), it gained notoriety in the 1980s and ’90s. The genre gets its name from the time period in which most stories are set, the Victorian era, when steam power was king. Westerfeld became aware of the genre when he came across a role-playing game called Space 1899, in which players explore futures that could have been. “That was the first time I realized that people were really doing this stuff and thinking it through,” he says. 

Westerfeld especially enjoyed researching and writing about the technology of the era. “Everything looked weird at the time, sort of clunky and fantastical: airplanes had three wings, tanks looked like boilers on tractor treads,” he says. He particularly liked researching zeppelins—both the original giant flyers and his own genetically fabricated creations. “I have a big airship fetish,” Westerfeld admits, “and thought a living airship would be a kind of fascinating thing.” To do research, he and Justine went to the headquarters of Zeppelin Corporation in Switzerland, where a smaller version of the historically giant airships are still being produced. “We got to go up in one and that was cool,” Westerfeld says.

He also drew a bit of inspiration from the biological sciences: Darwin and his true-life granddaughter Dr. Nora Darwin

Barlow play major roles in the book.  “Scientists of that era were the original action hero-adventurers,” Westerfeld explains, “and I thought it would be fun to make Darwin a character.” Indeed, the author takes Darwinian philosophy to a new level, creating a world in which Darwin has discovered DNA threads and has been able to manipulate them to create hybrid animal species: jellyfish that float through the air like hot air balloons, lizards that talk like parrots, and of course, the title creature Leviathan, the aforementioned flying whale.

To help us visualize these fanciful creatures, Westerfeld enlisted the artful talents of Keith Thompson, who created more than 50 illustrations for the book. “It was a very collaborative process,” he says. “He did with the pictures the same thing I was doing with the text. It was like being a novelist and an art director at the same time.” After Thompson drew the magnificent creatures and ornate machines that Westerfeld had imagined, the author edited the text to reflect the details that Thompson had added.

Westerfeld’s exuberance for the technology of the era—and beyond—comes through clearly in his writing. From mechanized horses to metal-eating bats, eight-legged battleships and light-producing earthworms, he has created a world where technological and biological sciences collide. “It’s a war between two completely different world-views,” he notes.

The same could be said of the early 20th century, and the events of the era created fodder for Westerfeld’s storyline. “The great thing about doing historical research is that you can look back and say, if they had only done this it could have all been different. It’s a fascinating perspective.” By creating the alternate reality of Leviathan, Westerfeld is able to inspire his readers—young and old—to think about what really did happen at that time in history, how close we might have come to the fictional story, and how the fate of the world can hinge on seemingly innocuous events.

Heidi Henneman writes from New York.

What if World War I was fought with giant walking machines and genetically modified monsters instead of airplanes and ammunition? What if, instead of telephones and radios, long-distance communication was carried out by talking lizards and trained birds? What if our version of history was…

Mystery & SuspenseSuspense

Dan Brown

What if a secret society possessed indisputable proof that Christianity in general—and the Catholic Church in particular—are built on historical error? To what extremes might zealous defenders of the faith go to find and destroy such potentially catastrophic evidence? These are the premises that set Dan Brown's absorbing new novel, The Da Vinci Code, in motion and then send it pinballing through a labyrinth of intricate schemes, sidetracks and deceptions.

Threaded through the story are plot-related codes and cryptograms that impel the reader to brainstorm with the protagonists, Harvard symbologist Robert Langdon (introduced in Angels & Demons) and French police cryptologist Sophie Neveu. An after-hours murder at the Louvre swirls these two strangers into the middle of an ongoing combat between the Priory of Sion, a shadowy order that dates back to the Crusades, and Opus Dei, a relatively new bastion of Catholic conservatism.

"I first learned of [Leonardo] Da Vinci's affiliation with the Priory of Sion when I was studying art history at the University of Seville," Brown says in a telephone interview from his home in New Hampshire. "One day, the professor showed us a slide of The Last Supper and began to outline all the strange anomalies in the painting. My awareness of Opus Dei came through an entirely different route and much later in my life. After studying the Vatican to write Angels & Demons, I became interested in the secrecy of the Vatican and some of the unseen hierarchy. Through that, I also became interested in Opus Dei and met some of the people in it."

While the characters and storylines of The Da Vinci Code are manifestly his own contrivances, Brown stresses that all the contextual details about history, biography, location and art are true. "One of the aspects that I try very hard to incorporate in my books is that of learning," he says. "When you finish the book—like it or not—you've learned a ton. I had to do an enormous amount of research [for this book]. My wife is an art historian and a Da Vinci fanatic. So I had a leg up on a lot of this, but it involved numerous trips to Europe, study at the Louvre, some in-depth study about the Priory of Sion and Opus Dei and about the art of Da Vinci."

Weighty as it is, Brown's scholarship never slows down the sizzling action. Robert and Sophie stay on the run at a breathless pace as menacing characters pop up in their flight path like silhouettes in a shooting gallery. Unlike a conventional mystery, in which clues become clear only in hindsight, many of the clues here are presented as such: a dying murder victim who arranges his body a particular way, a slip of paper with a phrase scribbled on it that may be a light-shedding anagram, a line of seemingly random numbers.

"For some reason, I was a good math student," Brown says, explaining his involvement with codes and symbols. "And language came easily. Cryptology and symbology are really fusions of math and language. My father is a well-known mathematician. I grew up around codes and ciphers. In The Da Vinci Code, there's a flashback where Sophie recalls her grandfather creating this treasure hunt through the house for a birthday present. That's what my father did for us."

Beyond spinning a good yarn within a richly factual context, Brown admits to yet another aim. "I am fascinated with the gray area between right and wrong and good and evil. Every novel I've written so far has explored that gray area." He reveals that his next novel will deal with "the oldest and largest secret society on earth" and with "the secret history of our nation's capital."

Brown concedes that turning Christianity's most fiercely held beliefs into fictional fodder may spark some controversy. But he says it's a risk worth taking. "I worked very, very hard to make the book fair to all parties. Yes, it's explosive. I think there will be people for whom this book will be—well, 'offensive,' may be too strong a word. But it will probably raise some eyebrows."

What if a secret society possessed indisputable proof that Christianity in general—and the Catholic Church in particular—are built on historical error? To what extremes might zealous defenders of the faith go to find and destroy such potentially catastrophic evidence? These are the premises that set…

Mystery & SuspenseMystery

Nevada Barr

The name Nevada Barr may sound like the perfect moniker for a spirited heroine or a Vegas showgirl, but Ms. Barr's legions of fans know she's the author of an intelligent, suspenseful mystery series set in various national parks. A former actress and National Park Service ranger, Barr didn't use her own name when she created her alter ego Anna Pigeon, but she readily admits she was the model for the sassy sleuth.

 
"She was based on me — except she was taller and stronger and smarter and braver," laughs the petite author. Barr channeled her feisty, independent spirit and love of nature into the intrepid park ranger's roving mystery-solving adventures. Whether it be Colorado's Mesa Verde National Park or New York City's Gateways Park, when Anna arrives, disaster seems to strike. Along the way the heroine has faced raging wildfires, battled claustrophobia in a cave rescue and even saved the Statue of Liberty.
 
But Barr admits that over the years "we've evolved in different ways, so now she is very little like me." While Anna Pigeon battled alcohol dependence and slowly became more of a work-oriented loner, Barr grew "more whimsical, more lackadaisical, lazier, happier. I've rejoined humanity, and Anna has no intention of getting near it," she says.
 
Anna's increasing isolation is even more apparent in Blood Lure, Barr's latest mystery. This time Anna travels to Waterton-Glacier National Park in the Rockies to join a grizzly bear research project. While gathering samples of bear fur and DNA in the wilderness with two other researchers, Anna's peace of mind is shattered by a violent bear attack. The woman who has always turned to nature for comfort and solitude finds her world turned upside down.
 
"The big thing in Blood Lure that makes her seem isolated is that it's not people that seem to be warped and twisted, it's nature itself. Suddenly the place she's always gone to find peace has been screwed up," Barr explains.
 
Often praised for her arresting depictions of park scenery, Barr's keen psychological insight is even more impressive. She's able to communicate the grandness of the wilderness and then nimbly magnify the smallest gestures and details of her characters into funny, dead-on descriptions. "I just find it riveting why people do things," says the avid student of the human mind. "That's one of the things that makes life so interesting."
 
The National Park Service isn't worried about Barr tampering with their tourist business by scaring off would-be campers. She's become a sort of park poster girl, with rangers and superintendents vying to be considered for her next setting. That's how she wound up in Glacier, the "stunning" park she's "been wanting an excuse to visit for some time."
 
Deciding on the setting was the easy part. Then Barr waited for the story to come to her, plunging in with no idea how the ending would come together.
 
"All I know when I start is who dies, where they die, how they die and usually I know who did it," she says. "But sometimes I'm wrong, and in the middle I realize, he didn't do it. My gosh, it was this other guy!"
 
Her write-now-and-worry-later attitude has filled several drawers with scrapped ideas. "I tried once, years ago, to outline it all like a grown-up and write a synopsis for every chapter, and it read like the English assignment from hell," she admits. "Every bit of spontaneity got sucked right out." One failed attempt includes a prison book with a cast of male characters. "About 60 pages in I realized, Wait a minute, these are all men, what do I care? So I dropped it."
 
Barr had hoped to take a break from the Anna series and go in a different direction with her next book, but the success of her 2000 release, Deep South, changed her mind.
 
"The need to do [a different book] is getting stronger and stronger, but the money they'll give me not to do it is getting better and better," Barr admits with a laugh. So in her next adventure, Anna is heading back to the Natchez Trace Parkway to catch more criminals and to continue her semi-serious relationship with a local sheriff.
 
"I have to balance artistic integrity with material greed," Barr says ruefully. "Material greed won this time, but I'm hoping artistic integrity will win in the next few years." But for Anna's many fans, Barr seems to have the balance just right.

 

The name Nevada Barr may sound like the perfect moniker for a spirited heroine or a Vegas showgirl, but Ms. Barr's legions of fans know she's the author of an intelligent, suspenseful mystery series set in various national parks. A former actress and National Park…

Memoir

Mary Karr

She may be 20 years sober and a Catholic convert, but don’t get the wrong impression—Mary Karr is no “candy-ass” (her word). She’s still the tough, scrappy outlaw that readers were introduced to in her first memoir, The Liars’ Club.

When it was published in 1995, The Liars’ Club offered a searing portrait of Karr’s hardscrabble Texas childhood that raised the art of the memoir to a new level and brought about a revival of the genre. In her follow-up, Cherry, she recalled the wild ride of her adolescence and her sexual coming-of-age. Her third memoir, Lit, more than 10 years in the making, details how Karr ultimately emerged from her troubled upbringing triumphant, but not before a descent into alcoholism and near-madness.

A recent call to her New York home confirms that Karr indeed hasn’t lost her edge. The conversation—briefly interrupted by a call from the dean of Syracuse University, where she teaches English, and the arrival of her “heroic” assistant, without whom, she says, she would be “like an overfilled Macy’s balloon”—proves lively and candid.

“I’ll tell you,” she says with only the faintest trace of a Texas drawl, “this is the first book I’ve been excited to promote. This is what my life’s about now . . . how I became a mother, my relationships, my spiritual practice, my nervous breakthrough. Those things are so much closer to who I am now. This is what I talk to people about. Even if people think I’m an idiot, I’m interested in having the conversation with readers.” And readers, whether familiar with Karr’s previous work or not, will be riveted.

Never shying away from self-scrutiny, she explores the dissolution of her marriage, the joy and pain of motherhood, her father’s stroke and death, her fraught relationship with her own mother and her professional setbacks and successes in equal measure. This account of the latter part of her life is as unsparing and unsentimental as her first two memoirs and, like the others, by turns hilarious and gut-wrenching. She again brings to the task her acerbic wit and a poet’s eye for lyrical detail.

In search of the stable home she lacked as a child, Karr married a handsome, patrician poet and with him has an adored son, Dev. But over time, she drank herself into the disease that nearly destroyed her mother. Her path included, among other detours, a stint in “The Mental Marriott,” a famous asylum, where she found wisdom in unlikely places.

Asked how writing this book was discernibly different from writing the other two, Karr laughs, “Well, for one, I’m clearly the asshole. I think that’s the big thing.” She adds, “The hardest thing for me about writing these books is how to handle the emotional and moral questions, and this one obviously posed a lot of moral questions. You know, how do you write about your child? How do you write about someone you’re divorced from?” She says that, toward the end of the process, she ending up throwing away 525 finished pages of work.

She’d been working on the book for seven years, and her editor was pressuring her to turn in a finished manuscript. “I said, look, y’all could publish this, and it’s technically true, in that I didn’t make up the events, but it didn’t feel true. I mean, the other thing was when I wrote about the religious stuff I had a very hard time not sounding like one of those evangelists saying send me a dollar.”

Writing about religion, she concedes, is tricky business. “It’s very hard to write about. It’s like doing card tricks on the radio, I think—writing about prayer and spiritual experience to people who mostly think you’re an idiot. On the other hand it was an important part of my story, and I felt obligated to represent it, not in any evangelical way. . . . I know this sounds insane, but I believe that God wanted me to write this book. That doesn’t mean that God wants the book to succeed by any measure.”

She’s unapologetic about her faith, and anticipates a backlash from critics and “professional atheists” alike. “Believe it or not . . . I’m an extremely private person. You really wouldn’t know that, even though I’m pretty open and honest about things that other people would not be open about, but the degree to which I care about my reputation is pretty limited. I really gave that up long before I published anything anybody read. I think you have to [do that] as a writer or else you’ll go insane. My fear [in writing about faith] wasn’t so much that people would look at me and think I was a candy-ass, as that I wouldn’t represent it truly—I wouldn’t be able to recreate an experience in the reader that matched and mirrored my experience. I wouldn’t be able to create an emotional experience for a secular audience. That’s what I was most scared about.”

Karr manages to write about spirituality without ever coming across as didactic or preachy—no small feat. “Well, on two earlier drafts I did,” she confesses. “Hopefully I corrected that.”

In one passage, she eloquently describes her first stirrings of faith, a brush with the numinous: “I feel some fleet movement travel through my chest—a twinge, a hint. This faint yearning was not belief itself, but wanting to believe.”

She says her transformation would never have been possible without her mother’s recovery from alcoholism. “I honestly think if my mother had not gotten sober, there’s no way. . . . She gave the whole family a great gift.”

“I was so scared and so mean all the time,” she says of her pre-sobriety days. “I do feel like my life has been transformed and is better than I could ever have imagined. I’m so much more in it. I have more life now in a day than I used to have in a year.”

Karr’s entire body of work attests to this simple truth: that the past, until you reckon with it, will remain in hot pursuit. In other words, what you don’t bring into the light will destroy you. Lit brings this process full circle. That pleasingly monosyllabic title encapsulates this writer’s entire journey thus far—one that is about drinking and the illuminating revelations of sobriety, about the redemptive power of literature and how the act of writing can save a soul. 

Katherine Wyrick is a writer in Little Rock.

 

 

RELATED CONTENT
Excerpt from Lit:

Age seventeen, stringy-haired and halter-topped, weighing in the high double digits and unhindered by a high school diploma, I showed up at the Pacific ocean, ready to seek my fortune with a truck full of extremely stoned surfers. My family, I thought them to be, for such was my quest—a family I could stand alongside pondering the sea. We stood as the blue water surged toward us in six-foot coils.

No way am I going in that, I said, being a sissy at heart. My hair was whipping around.

Wasn't that the big idea? Doonie snapped back, rifling through the back for towels and a wet suit. He was my best friend and maybe the biggest outlaw, point man on our missions. He tended to land the most spectacular girls. The ocean roar was majestic enough that I quoted robert Frost:

The shattered water made a misty din.
Great waves looked over others coming in
And thought of doing something to the shore
Water had never done to land before . . .

Pretty, Doonie said.

Quinn spat in the sand and said, She's always like Miss Brainiac, or something, or like she's fine.

He zipped up his outsize wet suit with force. The crotch of it hung down so low that for him to walk, he had to cowboy swagger.

My hair was three days without soap, and my baggy cutoffs were held up with a belt of braided twine a pal of ours made in prison.

That's me, I said. Miss California.

Reprinted by arrangement with HarperCollins Publishers, from Lit: A Memoir by Mary Karr (2009).

More from Mary Karr:
On religion: “The Catholic Church didn’t designate me a spokesperson. I’m sure the Catholic Church, many people, wouldn’t approve wholeheartedly of my particular brand of Catholicism. I mean, I have sex outside of wedlock . . . I do things the Catholic Church frowns on to say the least.”
On alcohol: “We have no business drinkin’, our people.” Describing a moment on her wedding day, she writes, “Drinking to handle the angst of Mother’s drinking—caused by her own angst—means our twin dipsomanias face off like a pair of mirrors, one generation offloading misery to the other through dwindling generations, back through history to when humans first fermented grapes.”

She may be 20 years sober and a Catholic convert, but don’t get the wrong impression—Mary Karr is no “candy-ass” (her word). She’s still the tough, scrappy outlaw that readers were introduced to in her first memoir, The Liars’ Club.

When it was published in 1995,…

FictionHistorical Fiction

Diana Gabaldon

September always brings a wealth of much anticipated events: a fresh start to college classes, new shows on television, another chance for a winning gridiron season. But this year, millions of fans around the world are focused on a different September experience—they’re finally getting to scratch their “what happens next” itch with the release of An Echo in the Bone, the latest book in Diana Gabaldon’s extraordinarily popular Outlander series.

It’s Gabaldon’s seventh installment of adventures starring the feisty Englishwoman Claire Randall, who was accidentally transported 200 years back in time to 18th-century Scotland. There she met and fell in love with a kilt-wearing Highlander named Jamie Fraser, and the two soon became nearly as star-crossed a couple as Romeo & Juliet.

Speaking from her weekend home in Santa Fe, with her family’s two dachshunds (Homer and JJ) curled up at her feet, Gabaldon is more than a little gleeful at the response she’s sure the new book’s cliffhanger ending will elicit.

“This is the fault of all the people who read A Breath of Snow and Ashes [the previous book in the series] and then wrote to me in droves, whining and moaning about how they were so sad this was the last book and they would miss them so much and wouldn’t I reconsider and do another book, causing me to write back in each case, saying ‘Why do you think this is the last book? Does it say ‘thrilling conclusion’ on the back of the paperback? Of course it’s not the last book!’ Which they all to a man replied, ‘But you tied everything up so neatly.’ I said okay, nobody’s going to reach the end of this book and think that.”

In An Echo in the Bone, Claire and Jamie leave their mountaintop home in North Carolina in 1779, to return to Scotland, a perilous journey made even more difficult by the Revolutionary War raging all about them. Jamie is one of the few survivors of the Jacobite Rebellion’s brutal defeat by the British at the Battle of Culloden in 1746. Weary of war, he hopes to fight for America’s liberation from England through his printing press, now stored in Edinburgh. After all, someone must be brave enough to publish the incendiary opinions of the fiery zealots advocating independence from England. People like Thomas Paine—who turns up briefly in the book.

But inevitably Jamie and Claire, and Jamie’s nephew, Ian, are swept up in the conflicts around them, including the two battles at Fort Ticonderoga. They are finally able to leave the colonies by escorting the body of Brigadier General Simon Fraser, one of Jamie’s relatives, back to Scotland for burial.

Mission accomplished, the couple next return Ian to his parents, a vow made in Voyager, the third book in the series, when the 15-year-old boy was abducted from Scotland by pirates and taken to the West Indies. But Ian is no longer a boy; he is a man who has experienced things his parents could never imagine. When Claire gets an urgent request to return to the colonies to operate on a grandchild (Henri-Christian, offspring of Jamie’s foster son, Fergus), Ian accompanies her. Not least of his reasons to return is the love he feels for a Quaker lass named Rachel. Grave matters, however, force Jamie to remain for a time in Scotland, so the couple is separated by an ocean for the first time in many years.

The events related here barely make up a third of the book’s more than 800 pages—a length shared by all seven novels in the series. Characters crop in one book, disappear, and then return two or three books later. Someone barely mentioned in an early book may become pivotal in a later one. Likewise, small events barely touched upon previously often assume much greater significance in a later novel.

Despite the 18-year span since Outlander was published, Gabaldon seems to have little difficulty remembering and retrieving characters or events from the nearly 7,000 pages of prose she’s devoted to Jamie and Claire.

“I don’t write with an outline. In fact, I don’t write in a straight line. I write when I can see things happening. What I need on any given day to start writing is what I call a kernel. A line of dialogue, an emotional ambience, anything I can sense very concretely. I write very painstakingly in these little disconnected bits.

“But as I write these disconnected pieces, and I continue doing research and of course thinking about the book all the time, they begin to stick together. They develop little connections. And I will write something and think, ‘Oh, this explains, finally, why it is what I wrote four monthsago happened.’ Then I can see what has to happen next.” 

One of the great joys of reading Gabaldon’s Outlander series is its “history made easy” aspect. Readers not only learn of the pivotal occurrences of the time, they also painlessly absorb the smaller details of life in the 18th century. Gabaldon gleans her major events from the usual sources: history books, biographies, contemporary accounts of the period. But she has also found another source of information in her travels to historical sites.

“I go to national parks and battlefields, partly because the bookshops offer such a selection of historical esoterica. These little national park service book stores sell not only the mainstream titles that deal with that period, but also books privately published by local people who are writing their families’ memoirs or who have great-great grandfather’s account of that particular battle which they’ve chosen to publish. Or an amateur botanist who’s written a treatise on all the local plants which grow or have grown around this particular spot. You can pick up these really weird little things that you won’t find anywhere else.”

She’s also on the lookout for any particularly fascinating quirks sported by the historical characters she brings into each novel. An example is the daily nude “airing of the skin” taken by Benjamin Franklin in An Echo in the Bone.

“That was one of those little kernels that I ran across in my research, and I said, ‘Oh, I have to use that.’ My imagination isn’t good enough to make up something that wonderful.”

One of the most popular storylines in Gabaldon’s series revolves around Jamie’s and Claire’s daughter, Brianna, her husband, Roger, and their two children, Jem and Amanda. Brianna followed her mother back to 18th-century America in an attempt to save her parents’ lives. Roger followed Brianna; they married, and might have stayed in the past until a health issue with their newborn daughter necessitated a return to the 20th century. Gabaldon continues to weave their now 1980s story around the events taking place in the late 1770s in An Echo in the Bone. One reason, she says, she took them ‘back to the future’ was to more fully illuminate what that past/present journey had meant to each.

“It was very interesting, both Roger and Brianna had some difficulty adapting to the past. So I was thinking, having struggled so hard to fit in to the 18th century, if they’re not in the 18th century anymore, can they still use those skills, or will it be all different? As to Roger, he actually found what he thought was his destiny in the 18th century. And so now he has the carpet yanked out from under him yet again, how’s he gonna deal with that? And if I’d left him in the 18th century, he would always, in some extent, be in Jamie’s shadow. I want to see if he can find himself spiritually in this new life as well as he did in the old one.”

Gabaldon says that by the time she was eight years old, she knew she wanted to be a writer. However, her father had different ideas.

“I did come from a very conservative family background, and my father was fond of saying to me, “Well, you’re such a poor judge of character you’re bound to marry some bum, so be sure you get a good education so you can support your children.”

A bachelor’s degree in zoology, a master’s in marine biology and a Ph.D. in ecology fulfilled her father’s edict, but Gabaldon still had the desire to write. She began working on what would become Outlander as a literary exercise, to improve her skills. She posted some of it online and the response to what she’d written was so positive, she contacted an agent. The book sold in three days, and her literary career was launched.

Now, 18 years later, with over 17 million books in print, there’s no doubt that Diana Gabaldon was destined to be a writer. As she’s said, she has no plans to wrap up the adventures of Jamie and Claire anytime soon, as the “now what happens?!” ending to An Echo in the Bone clearly demonstrates. Nor are her legions of fans likely to let her. History, both on and off the page, has proven that regardless of how many ‘loose ends’ she’s tied up, Gabaldon always leaves them wanting more.

Rebecca Bain lives in Nashville.

Author photo © Jennifer Watkins

RELATED CONTENT
Diana Gabaldon's website
Diana Gabaldon's YouTube channel

September always brings a wealth of much anticipated events: a fresh start to college classes, new shows on television, another chance for a winning gridiron season. But this year, millions of fans around the world are focused on a different September experience—they’re finally getting to…

Fiction

John Irving

John Irving did not actually attend his induction into the National Wrestling Hall of Fame in Stillwater, Oklahoma, some 15 years ago. But now he wishes he had. “I regret it,” Irving admits during a call to his hotel room in San Francisco, where he has come to dine with Bay Area booksellers prior to the publication of his exuberantly inventive 12th novel, Last Night in Twisted River. “There have always been these two parts of my life, and they don’t overlap very easily. My wrestling friends are not very easily mixed with my writing friends, and vice versa. But it’s an honor that meant a great deal to me because that sport was such a huge part of my life,” says Irving, who competed in wrestling in high school and college.

Writing and wrestling may not mix in Irving’s real life, but the tension between the two worlds—the intensely physical world of wrestling and the inward, reflective world of a writer’s imagination—has been a powerful source of that exciting blend of comedy and tragedy that is one of the hallmarks of his best fiction. Irving’s breakthrough novel, The World According to Garp, is a case in point. So, in a way, is his newest novel.

Last Night in Twisted River takes place first in the physically dangerous, working-class world of New England logging camps, and then, a bit later, in the physically exhausting kitchens of the Italian restaurants of Boston’s North End. These places comprise a world that somewhat unexpectedly produces a young novelist whose later career bears remarkable similarities to Irving’s own.

This new novel, whose pages contain some of the most entertaining and intellectually playful storytelling of Irving’s career, opens in 1954 in a logging camp in northern New Hampshire during one of the last river drives, just as logging roads and logging trucks are beginning to supplant river transport as a way of moving logs out of the forest to downstream lumber mills. Dominic Baciagalupo (“Cookie”), the camp cook, and his 12-year-old son Danny, the future novelist, are in a sort of emotional holding pattern after the drowning death of Dominic’s wife (and the boy’s mother).

Then through one of those tragicomic accidents so typical of Irving’s fiction, father and son become fugitives from a relentless deputy sheriff and spend the next 50 years in hiding, often in plain sight. During their time on the run, they change identities—the father goes from cook to chef and the son raises a family and becomes a best-selling writer.

“One of the things I like about the structure of the fugitive story,” Irving says, “is that from the violence that begins part one, you know what is going to happen. There’s going to be a shootout. It’s inevitable. It’s just a question of how and when. I like how that satisfies something I’ve always liked to do with readers, which is to allow readers to anticipate where the story is going—almost. I want the reader to say, ‘Oh, I know what is going to happen. I see this coming.’ But they don’t quite see everything.”

Among the many items that readers familiar with Irving’s previous novels will anticipate, but not necessarily accurately predict, are the electric profusion of subplots and plot twists; the large and idiosyncratic cast of characters; and the bravura demonstrations of audacious storytelling skill in chapters like “In Media Res,” wherein Irving offers a dizzying and delightful example of jumping right into the middle of his story and telling it from both ends and the middle.

That particular chapter, Irving advises, “is a labyrinth. You have to walk your way very slowly through it. . . . Like the novels I most like to read, this is one in which you know you’ve got to pay attention.”

A careful reading of Last Night in Twisted River turns out to be richly rewarding, for this multilayered novel is, in part, an emotionally resonant exploration of 50 years of American life and, in a way, of Irving’s own life as a writer.
“I like the part of this novel that is about a writer’s process,” Irving says. “I’ve written about it before, but I feel I’ve never written about it as well or as comprehensively. I think I’ve woven the reasons for Danny becoming the kind of writer he is into the story of what happens to him.”

And what about the fact that Danny’s career and attitudes—including his objection to readers who think his fictional works are merely veiled autobiography—resemble Irving’s own?

“I’m having fun with that,” Irving says. “Like Danny, I went through years and years of being asked if I was writing autobiographical fiction, the assumption being that I was. But I wasn’t. My earliest novels were entirely made up. My later novels have become more autobiographical. I’m a very slow processor, and those things that had an impact on me when I was a child or an adolescent, I did not write about when I was in my 20s, my 30s or my 40s. But I have written more about my childhood and adolescence lately—over the age of 60. One reason for that is if you let enough time pass, your memory is no longer the tyrant it once was. You can afford to be playful and take liberties and invent better stuff.”

Irving pauses and adds, “When you repeatedly write about things that have never happened to you, but which you hope don’t, when you write about things you fear, you are also being, at least psychologically, autobiographical. In how many of my novels is a child lost? But I have never lost one, thank God. I have three children and I think about it every day—as any parent with an imagination does. You think that isn’t autobiographical? Of course it is. What is thought to be autobiographical in fiction is so narrowly defined and is often trivial. Whereas the things that truly obsess a writer, that a writer even unconsciously goes back to again and again, those things are real and they are autobiographical—whether they happened or not.”

So, call Last Night in Twisted River part 12 in the psychological autobiography of one-time wrestler John Irving, if you like. Better yet, call it a darn good novel and a delight to read.

Alden Mudge writes from San Francisco.

 

RELATED CONTENT

Our coverage of John Irving

 

John Irving did not actually attend his induction into the National Wrestling Hall of Fame in Stillwater, Oklahoma, some 15 years ago. But now he wishes he had. “I regret it,” Irving admits during a call to his hotel room in San Francisco, where he…

YA FictionYA

Barry Lyga

Barry Lyga’s debut YA novel, The Astonishing Adventures of Fanboy and Goth Girl, told the story of two high school outcasts: one a self-described geek who spent most of his time writing and illustrating his comic book, and one an angry, depressed girl still reeling from the death of her mother. Fanboy and Goth Girl touched a chord in many readers, and although Lyga has since published several more books, his fans kept asking to see more of those two characters. In Goth Girl Rising, he brings them together once again. Emotions run high and the outcome is uncertain when the two reunite; the result is an honest and thoughtful exploration of friendship, anger and love.

Lyga answered questions about the new book from his home in Las Vegas.

Your three previous YA novels have all been written from the perspective of a teen boy. Was it difficult to get inside the mind of a teen girl for this book?
You know, I worried about that . . . for roughly 10 seconds. The instant I sat down and started writing, the concern went away. Maybe if I was writing about some other teen girl, it would have been difficult, but this is Kyra. I know her. I know her incredibly well. I just said to myself, "OK, I'm Kyra now. What am I thinking?" and the book flew from there.

You make quite a few references to comic book writers such as Brian Michael Bendis and Neil Gaiman in the Fanboy and Goth Girl books. Why did you decide to incorporate real people into these stories, and what was it like to write about them as characters?
I had decided early on that these stories took place in the real world, where there were comic books about Superman and Spider-Man, not in some alternate universe with characters like SuperbGuy and Arachnid-Kid. I could have made up my own ersatz versions of the characters, but it just seemed phony and transparent. Once I decided to use the actual names of the characters, it was just a short step to incorporate the actual names of the people who work on those characters. Using a name like Bendis or Gaiman will immediately communicate volumes of information to someone who knows about those guys, and if a reader doesn't know anything about them, it's not like the story will be harmed by that not knowing. A reader who doesn't know who Bendis is, for example, would just assume I made him up. (And I'm sure Bendis would be thrilled to know someone out there thinks I invented him!) I just felt that using these public figures made the book more authentic, grounding it in reality.

As to what it was like to write about them as characters: It was slightly nerve-wracking at first, but then I just let go and allowed myself to enjoy it. Neil Gaiman is mentioned in the books, but Bendis actually shows up, so I was most concerned with writing his dialogue and getting him right. When I wrote the book, I hadn't met him, so I was flying blind, but then a friend of mine who knows him read the book and said, "Oh my God—you got him! This is exactly how he talks!" So that was cool.

Kyra talks about comic books as having a simple structure, created from basic building blocks such as panel borders and word balloons. Having recently written a book about Wolverine (from the X-Men comics), do you think that's true? How is writing a comic book different from writing a novel or short story?
Well, first of all, the Wolverine book I did (Wolverine: Worst Day Ever) wasn't actually a comic book—it's an illustrated novel. So the concerns aren't really the same as writing a comic book. But I have written comics in the past, and the differences between comics and prose are pretty stark. Each format has its strengths and weaknesses, and there are very complicated distinctions—too complicated to really expound on them here and now beyond some generalizations. In comics, you're really telling a story to the artist, who then interprets it for the audience. It's more akin to filmmaking, in that you have to think visually. In prose, you have the opportunity to get much deeper into the head of the protagonist, but lose some of the visceral thrill of immediate reader identification with a scene, character or moment.

You had a story in the recent YA anthology Geektastic: Stories From the Nerd Herd, and some of your characters—notably Fanboy—consider themselves geeks. Do you identify as a geek? What do you think defines a geek?
Yeah, I guess I identify as a geek, which isn't as shameful these days as it used to be, now that geeks have sort of reclaimed that term and turned it around. I used to do a presentation in schools called "Geekery: An Analysis," which was a half-serious, half-tongue-in-cheek analysis of what a geek was and how geeks rule the world. I think geeks are people who are obsessed with something, possibly obsessed beyond the bounds of what is considered good mental health, and don't mind letting that obsession dictate large portions of their lives. To that degree, crazy sports fans are geeks—they just happen to be geeks for something that society doesn't look down on. There's no qualitative difference between a guy who's learning to speak Klingon and a guy who can recite chapter and verse of every inning of every game in the World Series dating back to 1912. It's just that society has decided that the latter is acceptable and the former is risible.

Screw society. 🙂

All of your books and stories so far have been set at the same school, at roughly the same time and with many of the same characters appearing in them. How do you keep track of the timeline of events and the interactions between characters? Is there a specific time in your mind when all these stories are taking place?
The "specific time" is always roughly "now." I want the stories to feel as if they take place in a loosely definable age that could always be right now. I realize that the comic book references will, inevitably, date the books to a degree, but that was a balance I decided was worth seeking—countering timelessness with immediate identification.

As to how I keep track: Well, most of it is just in my head. I do have a list of all of the teachers and various adults because they're less immediately present in my mind, but the kids are no problem. The kids just tell their stories and things seem to work out.

Your books often contain some raw dialogue and graphic scenes, and have dealt with issues such as suicide and sexual abuse. What makes you decide to include those elements in your writing? Do you worry about your books being censored or banned?
I'll take the second question first: Yeah, I think about it. I'm not sure "worry" is the right word because it sort of implies that I sit around stressing about it, which I don't. It flits through my head, but I don't let that impact how I write or what I write. Our best efforts to the contrary, there will always be a confederation of idiots out there who want to ban books. Sometimes they'll want to ban mine. I prefer to deal with it when it happens and not give them one ounce of my precious thought in advance.

As to the first question: It's not really a decision. It's not like I sit down to write a book and think, "Hmm, what topic or salty language can I add to this?" The topics, the language—these things are integral to the story. They're crucial organs. I write what I write and the way I write it because I'm writing for teens and about teens. This is the world they live in. These are the words they speak. I'm not inventing any of this. I'm just taking it in, massaging it and turning it around for everyone to see. It would be dishonest to write otherwise, I think.

What kind of responses have you gotten from teens who have read your books?
For the most part, great enthusiasm! It's terrific. I think most gratifying have been the kids who write to tell me that they never liked reading until they read one of my books. Most authors have that experience, I believe, and it's great. To think that you've opened up a whole new world to this person. Reading saved my life as a kid—it was the one thing that kept me sane when the world around me made no sense. So to be able to give that gift back into the world is just tremendously fulfilling.

In the acknowledgments for Goth Girl Rising, you say that you never planned a sequel to The Astonishing Adventures of Fanboy and Goth Girl, but that you received lots of emails from fans who wanted the story to continue. Do you think that your fans will be satisfied with the way Goth Girl Rising ends? Will Fanboy and Goth Girl's story continue in another book?
Oh, wow. I have no idea if people will be satisfied. I'm not even sure I want people to be satisfied by the ending. Sometimes I get hassled for my endings because I tend not to tie everything up in a nice, neat little package, but I think at times an untidy ending—something that lingers and gnaws at your brain—can be more satisfying than something that just drops all the answers in your lap and says, "Here! Ta-da!" I hope people who read the book will get to the end and say, "Oh, OK, I get it," and then sit back and speculate on their own as to what might happen next. And I hope they'll enjoy that.

I don't know about another book. I tend to think not. I think with Goth Girl Rising, I've taken these characters as far as I can. Or should. I think everything that happens next is pretty easily predicted, and easy predictions don't make for great storytelling.

Then again, I never thought I would write the sequel, so who knows!

Barry Lyga’s debut YA novel, The Astonishing Adventures of Fanboy and Goth Girl, told the story of two high school outcasts: one a self-described geek who spent most of his time writing and illustrating his comic book, and one an angry, depressed girl still reeling…

YA FictionYA

Kristina Springer

Kristina Springer is unequivocal and unabashed about her love of coffee. She drinks it often, her kitchen is espresso-themed and she’s a devoted customer of her local Starbucks. In fact, during the horse-and-carriage segment of her wedding, she and her husband halted the horses so they could pop in to get coffees and take photos.

It’s fitting, then, that Springer’s debut young adult novel, The Espressologist, is set in a coffee shop—and was written in one, too. Plus, a coffee-related skill Springer possesses was imparted to her main character, 17-year-old Jane Turner: the ability to size up people based on their choice of coffee drink.

“When we were dating, my husband and I would go to coffee shops to hang out and people-watch,” Springer said in an interview from her home just outside Chicago, where she lives with said husband and four young children. “After a while, it occurred to me that I could tell what people will order.”

What remained entertainment for Springer became a matchmaking tool for protagonist Jane. During her shifts at Wired Joe’s, Jane keeps careful notes about customers’ quirks, preferences and characteristics and uses her coffee clairvoyance to steer them toward potential romantic partners.

Jane keeps her unusual skill a secret from mercurial manager Derek, until he overhears a fellow barista refer to Jane as an “Espressologist” and, ever alert to ideas that might boost sales, demands to know the details. That’s all it takes to make the nickname official: Derek decides that, on Friday nights, customers can come in for a coffee and Espressology, courtesy of Jane. Not surprisingly, all sorts of interesting situations ensue.

Springer does a spot-on job of creating those situations, not least by speaking fluent teenager. Anyone who’s worked in a service-industry job will nod in recognition while reading passages about snarky customers and cranky coworkers—and anyone who’s been a teenager will relate to the romantic tension that builds as Jane makes matches for her friends but doesn’t realize she’s overlooking her own perfect romantic partner.

The atmosphere of Wired Joe’s is just right, too. The book’s pages aren’t coffee-scented, but they could be, considering every word was crafted in that favorite Starbucks. Springer says, “I think people thought I was crazy. . . . I was always looking at customers, and I’d hang over the counter after someone ordered a drink and watch how they made it.” She adds, “After a while, I told [the Starbucks employees] what I was doing, and they were very supportive.”

It’s an approach and environment that works for Springer; she says that, although she’s only able to set up at the coffee shop a couple of times a week for a few hours each time, she’s written several novels, including a middle-grade novel due out next year called My Fake Boyfriend Is Better Than Yours.

Now an avid writer of fiction, Springer says she’s long been a devoted reader: “I read tons of books as a young adult; I really liked series. I read 100 of the Sweet Valley High books, and The Girls of Canby Hall books. I was drawn to female authors and characters as a kid.”

Speaking of female authors, Springer says she didn’t have Jane Austen’s Emma in mind when she wrote The Espressologist, but when the book was previewed at the American Library Association conference last summer, Austen fans noticed the similarities and were eager to meet her. When it’s pointed out that she was a bit Austen-like in writing the book—sitting back, quietly observing and writing about people—she says laughingly, “It wasn’t intentional!” But, like Austen, she says, “I eavesdrop all the time. It’s part of the [writer’s] job description.”

Springer adds, “I still don’t know how I did this. I never thought I’d be good at writing fiction,” particularly after obtaining a nonfiction-centric master’s degree in writing and working in technical writing for many years.

“Maybe I just found the right genre and age group,” she says. “My natural voice must be the teen voice.”

Linda M. Castellitto is a former barista who favors tea over coffee.

Kristina Springer is unequivocal and unabashed about her love of coffee. She drinks it often, her kitchen is espresso-themed and she’s a devoted customer of her local Starbucks. In fact, during the horse-and-carriage segment of her wedding, she and her husband halted the horses so…

NonfictionEducation

Greg Mortenson

As the situation in Pakistan and Afghanistan seems headed from bad to worse, Greg Mortenson, co-author of the blockbuster Three Cups of Tea (140-plus weeks and counting on the New York Times bestseller list), and his Central Asia Institute are building more schools in that volatile region than ever before. The ongoing effort is the subject of Mortenson’s new book, Stones into Schools, a sequel that is at least as good as its inspiring predecessor.

“This year has been by far our most successful year,” Mortenson says during a call to his home in Bozeman, Montana. On this particular afternoon Mortenson is at home caring for his 13-year-old daughter, who had her tonsils removed earlier that morning. “She loves singing, so that’s the main thing she’s worried about—her voice and vocal chords,” he says.

Mortenson, it quickly becomes obvious, is not a man for sound bites. He is well-read (“I read about two books a week. I read all nonfiction, mostly related to my work, much to my wife’s dismay. Right now I’m reading The Graveyard of Empires by Seth Jones.”). He is knowledgeable enough about working successfully in Afghanistan and Pakistan that the U.S. government, and especially the U.S. military, now regularly seeks his advice (“I’m pretty much a pacifist, so it’s a little hard for me to tell our politicians and the public that the military really gets it. But from my honest perspective on the ground, I’d say a lot of our commanders and NCOs do get it.”). And he is thoughtful, rather than ideological (“We often have to work with some pretty shady characters, including the Taliban, opium smugglers and corrupt government officials. [The success of the work] is about empowering elders, listening more and building relationships. It’s about getting local buy-in. . . . I always say politics won’t bring peace, but people will.”). In conversation, one thought leads him to another, which leads to an exploratory aside, which leads to a question, which leads to a humble demurral, which leads to a revision of the original thought. All of this is part of Mortenson’s genuine personal appeal.

Circling back to the original question about the success of his school-building effort, Mortenson says, “It took us eight years to set up the first 30 schools. This year we set up 31 schools. Over the last two years we’ve been moving significantly into areas where the Taliban prevail and we’re able to do that entirely because of our relationships with the local elders.” None of the schools Mortenson has helped build has been forced to close, despite the growing insurgency, because, he says, “the community is so fiercely devoted to something they’ve put their sweat, tears and blood into.”

"I always say politics won't bring peace, but people will."

Stones into Schools continues the story of these devoted relationships that Mortenson began to tell in Three Cups of Tea. Like its predecessor, the new book offers a dramatic narrative of derring-do, a geographical and cultural education about a poorly understood region of the world that has become increasingly important to U.S. interests, and a moral education about the value of humility in international relationships.

But Stones into Schools is also different from the previous book. For one thing, it makes a compelling case for what Mortenson calls the Girl Effect—the importance of educating girls and young women in the developing world. Educating girls, Mortenson says, “reduces infant mortality, reduces the population explosion and improves the quality of health and of life itself.” In addition, Mortenson points out, young men wishing to go on jihad “first must get permission from their mothers. . . . The Taliban very deliberately target impoverished, illiterate communities because many educated women refuse, even at the risk of their lives, to allow their sons to join the Taliban. There is a profound influence from the mother, especially if she is educated.” So communities where Mortenson’s organization builds schools must agree to send their girls to school.

Another difference between the two books is in the telling of the tale. Three Cups of Tea is written in third person, and Mortenson is the story’s main protagonist. Urged by Viking, his publisher, Mortenson tells the second installment of his story in the first person. “I’m a pretty shy guy,” Mortenson says. “I was really embarrassed to write it in first person. My wife told the publishers, ‘If Greg writes a book in first person, it will be a pamphlet.’ ” But with help from editor Paul Slovak (“I can’t praise him enough,” Mortenson says) and assists from writers Mike Bryan and Kevin Fedarko, he has produced a compelling first-person account that, ironically, is less about Mortenson than it is about the accomplishments of the “Dirty Dozen,” the ragtag local staff that has assembled around Mortenson’s school-building effort over the years and “is now achieving much more than anything I could ever do. They’re willing to risk their lives. They’ve gone into areas where it would be very, very risky for me to go. I’ve been enjoying taking a back seat and watching this happen.”

Finally, Stones into Schools gives a glimpse of Mortenson’s changing role. Because of the phenomenal grassroots response to Three Cups of Tea, he now spends far less time in distant reaches of Pakistan and Afghanistan and more time on speaking tours or in his office in Bozeman, building the organization to support the burgeoning efforts of the Dirty Dozen. To avoid the cynicism and burnout he has seen in other career humanitarians, he has made a deliberate choice to take better care of himself “emotionally, mentally and physically.” His wife, Dr. Tara Bishop, tries to limit him “to 120 days away a year, although last year it was more like 160 days.” The couple has a date every Tuesday night, “no matter what,” and he devotes every Saturday to his son and daughter. “I’m just a very stubborn Midwesterner,” Mortenson says. “I work very hard at things. I’m not a rocket scientist, and I’ve tried to stress how many failures I’ve had. It is sometimes painful, but you have to let people do things themselves. So now I just call myself a cheerleader, or I say I am the Chief Tea Drinker.”

Well, then, long may Greg Mortenson drink tea—and continue to write about it.

Alden Mudge writes from Berkeley, California.

As the situation in Pakistan and Afghanistan seems headed from bad to worse, Greg Mortenson, co-author of the blockbuster Three Cups of Tea (140-plus weeks and counting on the New York Times bestseller list), and his Central Asia Institute are building more schools in that…

Social Science

Steven D. Dubner

Even before it hit the bookstores, SuperFreakonomics was inciting scorn and outrage. That may have had something to do with its flashing-lights subtitle: “Global Cooling, Patriotic Prostitutes and Why Suicide Bombers Should Buy Life Insurance.” This verbal torrent virtually stampeded reviewers toward the juicy parts. The authors couldn’t have hoped for better publicity than seeing Paul Krugman denounce their climatological inferences the New York Times. Which he did.

Like its predecessor, Freakonomics, SuperFreakonomics provides great conversational fodder about the immediate and longterm consequences of human actions, both great and small. The point that aroused Krugman’s ire was the book’s implication that the global-warning camp may be a tad alarmist and not always rigorously guided by science. In the same vein, the Center for Injury Research and Prevention assailed the book for questioning the superiority of child safety seats over regular seat belts in shielding children over two from serious injury. (The authors did, however, agree that safety seats are more effective than belts in preventing minor injuries.)

Levitt, a professor of economics at the University of Chicago, and Dubner, an author and former editor at The New York Times Magazine, arrived at their conclusions by sifting through a host of research studies to glean insights about human behavior, its causes and effects. Their aim, they say was to “tell stories . . . that rely on accumulated data rather than on individual anecdotes, glaring anomalies, personal opinions, emotional outbursts, or moral leanings.” For example, they venture into why opening up the workplace to women may have led to a measurable decline in teacher quality and why children in utero during Ramadan seem especially susceptible to developmental defects. Accept them or not, the authors’ judgments are consistently thought provoking. BookPage got the chance to ask Stephen Dubner a few questions about the new book.

Early in the book you say, “We are trying to start a conversation, not have the last word?” What ends would you expect such a conversation to serve?
It would be nice if people could think about and discuss and act on things without operating from their preconceived notions.

Why does this book falls under the rubric of economics rather than, say, behavioral psychology? Is it your thesis that all human activity has an economic dimension?
Sure, if you mean by "economic dimension" that we all respond to incentives. But incentives, as we write all over the place, are hardly limited to financial ones.

What was the division of labor for this book? Who did what?
Levitt does the nouns and adverbs, and I do the verbs and adjectives. We quarrel over the prepositions. Well, really: it's a collaboration whose particulars depend very much on the section in question. Some are hybrids of Levitt's empirical research and my reporting and writing. Often we have long talks about how particular sections will be laid out, what works and what doesn't work. The idea is to blend analysis and non-fiction storytelling in a way that short shrifts neither the analysis nor the reading experience.

Given the many variables between outwardly similar situations, do you think history has any predictive power—as opposed to simply being a catalog of possibilities?
I love that question, though I'm not sure my answer is worthwhile. I guess I'd tend toward the "catalog of possibilities" idea, especially if you're talking about economic history. So much of the conversation after the recent financial and economic meltdown centered on predictions based on what had happened in past recessions and depressions—the vast majority of which of course failed to come true (so far, at least).

Are media as sensationalist as you suggest throughout, or are we just more attuned to sensational stories than we are blandly informative ones?
I think they are one and the same. Reporters are humans too, and stories that attract our attention attracted theirs first.

Did you have a system for ferreting out the studies you cite in the book? If so, how did it work?
A lot of the research we write about is, once again, Levitt's academic research, often done in concert with people whom we write about in the book, like John List, Sudhir Venkatesh, Craig Feied, Ian Horsley and others. But we also both spend a lot of time talking to people and hunting down other interesting research.

Did you amass much useful material that didn’t make it into this book?
Yes, quite a bit, but some chapters got too flabby, some stories just didn't gel, and so on.

Do you anticipate that the two of you will collaborate on other projects?
We've talked over a number of things, including future books, but nothing's decided now.

What’s your appraisal of Malcolm Gladwell’s use of the material you cited in your New York Times Magazine article about the “birth date bulge” and the origins of talent?
Malcolm's a wonderful writer. I think he could successfully rewrite the phone book—which, if you think about it, he kind of did in that great section in The Tipping Point about "connectors."

Have the conclusions the two of you reached in writing the Freakonomics books altered your behavior in any way or changed your views on how life should be lived?
Personally, I'd say that it's made me more optimistic in general. One major theme in SuperFreakonomics is that problems that seem virtually unsolvable inevitably do get solved, often by cheap and simple means, and often by someone or something that we weren't expecting.

Edward Morris reviews from Nashville.

Even before it hit the bookstores, SuperFreakonomics was inciting scorn and outrage. That may have had something to do with its flashing-lights subtitle: “Global Cooling, Patriotic Prostitutes and Why Suicide Bombers Should Buy Life Insurance.” This verbal torrent virtually stampeded reviewers toward the juicy parts.…

Fiction

Barbara Kingsolver

In the pantheon of popular fiction, Kingsolver is queen. Or close to it. Consider this: she is among the first Barbaras to pop up in a Google search, trailing only a few well-known names such as Streisand, Bush and Boxer. In the two decades since the release of her first novel, The Bean Trees—which was published the day her daughter, now a college graduate, started to walk—Kingsolver has amassed an avid following of readers. They’ve devoured both her fiction and nonfiction, including best-selling novels The Poisonwood Bible and Prodigal Summer, and 2007’s nonfiction meditation on local, sustainable eating, Animal, Vegetable, Miracle.

“They really are readers from every age, from middle school to 100,” Kingsolver says in a recent phone interview with BookPage from her farm in southwest Virginia. “I can’t tell you how often I hear, ‘I grew up reading you.’ I think, really? Has it been that long?”

With her new novel, The Lacuna, that following is likely to grow. It’s the epic story of Harrison William Shepherd, a young boy whose Mexican mother takes him back to her home country in the 1930s after splitting with his father, a Washington, D.C., bureaucrat.

With his mother more focused on snagging a rich husband than on raising a son (he wryly calls one of her conquests “Mr. Produce the Cash”), Harrison is left mostly to his own devices. With little formal education and even less parental supervision, he finds himself working as a cook in the home of mercurial artists Diego Rivera and Frida Kahlo, then as a secretary to the exiled Leon Trotsky. It’s a tumultuous time both politically and artistically, prompting Harrison to grapple with his own identity—his art, his sexuality and the meaning of truth. Finally, when Trotsky is assassinated, Harrison flees back to the United States, settling in North Carolina to find his own voice, only to become the target of a McCarthy-esque “un-American activities” investigation.

The novel is a brilliant mix of truth and fiction, history and imagination, presented as a compilation of Harrison’s journals, along with newspaper clippings and other notes that make for a compelling and utterly believable read.

The lacuna of the title is an underground sea cave, which links one beach to a hidden place. It’s an idea that has intrigued Kingsolver since she read a short story about lacunae years ago.

“I’m a bit claustrophobic, so the idea of sea caves is sort of horrifying and fascinating to me,” Kingsolver says. “I kept thinking about tunnels and passageways, missing pieces and things you don’t know about people.”

While living with his mother and her latest lover, a wealthy Mexican oilman, Harrison finds such a cave: “Inside the tunnel it was very cold and dark again. But a blue light showed up faintly like a fogged window, farther back. It must be the other end, no devil back there but a place to come up on the other side, a passage. But too far to swim, and too frightening.”

For Kingsolver, this book was her exploration of that “in between” space where ­pieces are missing and the truth is hidden. She also set out to probe the question: Do artists have a responsibility to address social issues and express their opinions?

“For as long as I’ve been a published writer, I’ve been asked a certain kind of question—the legitimacy of addressing political content in art,” she says. “It’s always struck me as odd. Questioning authority, issues of class and gender, this is completely integral to art in other places, but here there’s something funny about that. I had this notion that art and politics had gotten a divorce in this country and never really finished the mediation. We have this ‘Don’t question what it means to be an American. Don’t draw pictures of it, don’t write about it.’ ”

So Kingsolver started digging, and found herself deep into the archives of both the New York Times and several Mexican newspapers, sifting through thousands of photographs and pieces of art and, eventually, traveling to Mexico.

“The difference between the amateur and the professional researcher is the willingness to get your hands dirty,” says Kingsolver. Reading old papers and historical accounts “is only one kind of research. It doesn’t tell you what anything smells like, and it doesn’t tell you what anything tastes like. You cannot write about a place you haven’t been.”

For that, Kingsolver visited the homes of her subjects, and walked in Mexican jungles to observe howler monkeys and to visit a medicine man. She even read the doodles Kahlo made in the margins of her household ledgers. “I learned a lot about her and how she felt that wasn’t recorded in her journal,” Kingsolver says. “It’s like taking black-and-white film and making it color.

Such painstaking research meant a nine-year gap between novels, although Animal, Vegetable, Miracle came out during that stretch. That book on her family’s effort to eat locally attracted a whole new group of fans.

“Some readers informed me they never read me [before Animal, Vegetable, Miracle] because they can’t bother with fiction,” she says with a chuckle. “Maybe they can be convinced now to give me a try.”

Her family—which includes her husband and two daughters—still tries to adhere to the principles of the book. “We still eat as locally as we possibly can,” she says. “Every year I vow to scale back, but at least it keeps me muscular. You can’t weasel out when it’s time to shear the sheep or weed the tomatoes.”

Living locally is ingrained in Kingsolver. She becomes particularly passionate when talking about the notion of real community versus, say, the online communities created through social media tools such as Facebook.

“I love the fact that my work is meaningful to people, and I appreciate their letters. But a friend, to me, is someone I can call when I’m in trouble, who I can make a casserole for when someone dies,” she says. “I don’t need 3,000 of them. I’m invested in my local community, in being a good friend to my friends. All the rest would be fake to me.”

And authenticity is something Kingsolver is thinking a lot about these days. Despite investing years of research in her latest novel, she admits that along with the rich historical details infused throughout The Lacuna come fears about anachronisms seeping onto the pages. “The nightmare of the historical fiction writer is that you have the equivalent of the scene in Spartacus where he’s wearing a Rolex,” she laughs.

She needn’t worry. There’s nary a Rolex in sight in The Lacuna—just page after page (more than 500 in all) of lush details and probing questions about the purpose of art. The Lacuna is both deeply thought-provoking and thoroughly entertaining—which is just how Kingsolver wants it.

“My rule is, as long as I give you a reason to turn every page, it doesn’t matter how long a book is.”

 

Amy Scribner writes from Olympia, Washington.

RELATED CONTENT

An excerpt from The Lacuna, Chapter One:

The pale-skinned boy stood shivering in water up to his waist, thinking these were the most awful words in any language: You will be surprised. The moment when everything is about to change. When Mother was leaving Father (loudly, glasses crashing against the wall), taking the child to Mexico, and nothing to do but stand in the corridor of the cold little house, waiting to be told. The exchanges were never good: taking a train, a father and then no father. Don Enrique from the consulate in Washington, then Enrique in Mother’s bedroom. Everything changes now, while you stand shivering in the corridor waiting to slip through one world into the next.

And now, at the end of everything, this: standing waist-deep in the ocean wearing the diving goggle, with Leandro watching. A pack of village boys had come along too, their dark arms swinging, carrying the long knives they used for collecting oysters. White sand caked the sides of their feet like pale moccasins. They stopped to watch, all the swinging arms stopped, ­frozen in place, waiting. There was nothing left for him to do but take a breath and dive into that blue place.

In the pantheon of popular fiction, Kingsolver is queen. Or close to it. Consider this: she is among the first Barbaras to pop up in a Google search, trailing only a few well-known names such as Streisand, Bush and Boxer. In the two decades since…

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