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During the three years since the publication of Elizabeth Gilbert’s memoir Eat, Pray, Love, more than six million readers around the world have found resonance in her chronicle of personal discovery. This intensely driven writer learned to live in the moment in Italy (Eat), explored her spiritual self in India (Pray) and found her soul mate in Felipe, a Brazilian living in Bali (Love). The two planned to spend the rest of their lives together, but previous bad marriages made them determined to skip actual matrimony. Fate is capricious, however, and it intervened in 2006; because Felipe’s visits to the U.S. had been too frequent, he was banned from entering the country. If Felipe was ever to return, it could only be as Gilbert’s husband. This unexpected turn of events was the impetus for Gilbert’s new memoir, Committed.

“I was working on a novel about the Amazons,” says Gilbert, who was shocked by the sudden urgency of marriage. “I was well into its research and didn’t have any intention of writing another memoir. But when this came up, my spirits were so viral. I did not want to enter this union feeling about [marriage] the way I felt about it. I loved this guy way too much to enter into something so serious with such a profound sense of dread. Really, the most efficient way that I know to work through something is to write about it. And then, pretty quickly, as soon as the idea came to me, I realized this is a very interesting topic.”

“I left with a new respect for marriage, simply for no other reason than for its almost Darwinian survival.”

Which is why Committed is not only a memoir, it’s also a history of marriage through the ages and a social commentary on the institution. Gilbert even harks back to Plato’s Symposium and its discussion of soul mates: “Once upon a time . . . we humans did not look the way we look today. Instead, we each had two heads and four legs and four arms—a perfect melding, in other words, of two people joined together, seamlessly united into one being. . . . Since we each had the perfect partner sewn into the very fabric of our being, we were all happy.”

But in our happiness we neglected the gods, so Zeus punished mankind by tearing us apart, forcing us to spend the rest of our lives looking for the vanished half, our other soul. “This is the singular fantasy of human intimacy: that one plus one will somehow, someday, equal one,” Gilbert writes.

Speaking from the home she and Felipe now share in Frenchtown, New Jersey (dishes clattering in the sink and her dog barking occasionally), Gilbert elaborates on Plato’s concept.

“It is the most beautifully put metaphor. That along with Schopenhauer’s porcupine tells you pretty much all you need to know about intimacy. You just put those two things together, the urge to merge combined with the reality of how prickly it almost always is, negotiating your space versus somebody else’s space.”

Gilbert muses on the reasons people marry, many of which in this country, she believes, have nothing to do with true commitment.

It’s important that “we know the difference between the desire to get married and the desire to have a really great party,” she says with a laugh. “Especially when we are young, those two things can blur and you spend a great deal more time planning the party than you do planning the marriage.”

She contrasts this with a couple she knew growing up, the Websters, who married because he, as a farmer, needed a wife and she, as a woman, needed a provider. Love, passionate or otherwise, had nothing to do with the decision. For years they worked their farm, raised their family, shared good times and bad. When her health declined, Mr. Webster took over care of his wife, bathing her, feeding her, seeing to her needs until her death—not the actions of a person devoid of love for his spouse.

“We, having elevated the idea of romance and infatuation to such a high state, feel like the happiest day of your life should be the day you get married. That in itself should be the pinnacle. What the Websters probably knew, even to such an extent that they certainly never defined it, never even had to say it, because they just knew it, was that where a marriage begins is not nearly as important as where it ends up. You can begin from a place of great pragmatism and then over the years grow into a very deep, wordless affection and loyalty, which I found very moving to remember.”

Thinking about the Websters, Gilbert adds, “Felipe has this very specific word called bate pape that means ‘chit chat.’ It’s his favorite word for what the whole purpose of intimacy is. He said when he was a kid, his favorite memories of childhood were lying in bed, listening to his parents chit chat, make bate pape. And that’s where their intimacy was based. It wasn’t necessarily in high-flung sexual passion, although it might have been at one time. It was just about having someone to sit with at the breakfast table and have a cup of coffee with and talk about nothing and everything. And that’s a stubborn, consistent human need.”

 

Gilbert’s venture into the historical and social implications of marriage in Committed, especially as it pertains to women, ranges far and wide, from the 11th century, when ideas about marriage were more liberal than today, to modern Europe, where there is far less emphasis on matrimony than in America. It all makes for interesting and informative reading.

Readers who are hoping for more memoir, less research, might be disappointed in this new book. But it accomplishes what Gilbert set out to do—to bring peace to her decision to marry Felipe.

“I certainly went in with a great deal of aversion and hostility to this institution and I left with a new respect for marriage, simply for no other reason than for its almost Darwinian survival—the fact that this thing endures. Anything that lasts that long, including cockroaches and crocodiles, you have to admire. There’s something kind of remarkable about that. What could be called a kind of fusty, decrepit old institution continues to reinvent itself and re-evolve with every century, every generation,” Gilbert says.

“So instead of feeling like I’m being stamped into this form that doesn’t suit me, I can feel like I’m part of a very long story that’s always being rewritten. And now I have the rewriting of that tale.”

Rebecca Bain is a freelance writer and editor in Nashville.

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Review of Eat, Pray, Love
by Elizabeth Gilbert
Review of The Last American Man
by Elizabeth Gilbert
Review of Stern Men
by Elizabeth Gilbert

During the three years since the publication of Elizabeth Gilbert’s memoir Eat, Pray, Love, more than six million readers around the world have found resonance in her chronicle of personal discovery. This intensely driven writer learned to live in the moment in Italy (Eat),…

Start with a opinionated narrator with a spicy tale to tell; stir in a seasoned mix of bitter in-laws and a troubled family business; sprinkle with heady descriptions of melted butter, rich chocolate and burnt sugar; and you have the recipe for an engaging new novel by Katharine Weber.

True Confections tells the delicious tale of Zip’s Candies, a business with roots in Eastern Europe and inspiration drawn from a tattered copy of Little Black Sambo. But Zip’s is more than just a factory to Alice Tatnall Ziplinsky, newly divorced wife of the Zip’s heir, who is more than ready to tell the company’s rags-to-riches story. Alice’s account is persuasive, if biased, and her lively story includes vivid segues into the history of American candy, African cocoa plantations and the Third Reich’s failed plan to establish a Jewish colony on Madagascar.

Weber is the author of four previous novels and a collection of short stories. Her last novel Triangle won the Connecticut Book Award for fiction and was long-listed for several other prizes. She sat down to talk with BookPage about families, history and what candy still inspires her.

It’s obvious that you did an enormous amount of legwork for this book, including interviewing candy company employees and attending candy conventions. What were the highlights?
The microcosmic world of a trade show is always incredibly appealing to me, whether it is BookExpo or a boat show or a flower shower. I always love the too-muchness. Although I spent a lot of time thinking about and learning about chocolate for a couple of years (including making a trip to Tobago to spend time on a deserted cacao plantation), attending the candy convention twice was definitely the highlight for me. It intrigued me that it felt so different the second time around.

When I went to my first candy convention, I was looking for material for the novel. When I went back to All-Candy in Chicago last June, when True Confections (in which significant events take place at candy conventions) was finished, I felt as if I had gone inside the world of my novel. It was now so familiar to me that I began to have a completely deluded sense of being an insider. I even picked out the spot where Zip’s Candies, my fictional candy company, would have had exhibition space.

Your novels often have their roots in a historical event. How do you approach the balance of fact and fiction in your novels?
I never mean to do any more research than is absolutely necessary to make the reality of the novel sufficiently convincing, although sometimes the research can be seductive and distracting and I end up spending much more time and energy with it than I intend. But the balance I want in my novels isn’t between fiction and truth—to me, that isn’t the issue at all. Fiction is a truth, maybe a truer truth than any other. If you are asking about finding the balance between fictional and actual events, then my answer is about aiming for the deepest possible sense of relative authenticity, making the reality of the novel be, for the reader, as seamless as possible.

Were you surprised that the history of the candy industry was so tied in with the history of Jews and immigration?
I don’t think I was surprised, exactly, but I was certainly intrigued to see familiar patterns emerge. So many iconic American candy brands, from Tootsie Rolls to Just Born, share a common history. A peddler arrives in the U.S. from Eastern Europe with little more than the clothes on his back, an entrepreneurial spirit, and then, an idea, an ambition to make something sweet and new. Candy is something a newcomer can make, with a very modest investment in equipment and materials, and many brands began as stovetop enterprises. The history of Eli Czaplinsky and Zip’s Candies is very deliberately cast in that same mold.

The way your narratives are structured is so interesting—from the different sisters commenting on each other’s stories in The Little Women to the collage of articles, interviews, and testimonies that make up Triangle. This work is a long monologue that is also a legal document. Do different novels ask to be told in different ways?
I do think that every novel asks to be told in a different way, but at the same time, without intention to hew to a formula of any kind, I seem to find the textual artifact (letters, journals, transcripts, newspaper articles and so on) to be a huge element in my narrative strategy for every novel I have written so far. I can only say that each time out I have been willing to tell the story in whatever way felt right, and each time I have found myself creating yet another document.

Alice Tatnall Ziplinsky is such a singular character. Tell me about her creation. Did you hear her voice from the beginning?
Actually, she came quite late in my thinking about this novel. I had many of the events of the story in mind before I had a narrative strategy worked out. Who would tell this story, and, most urgently, why? That’s where Alice came into sharp focus. And once I had her voice, and, significantly, her agenda firmly in mind, then it became clear that the story had to be extruded through both those things.

Why is the truth so important to Alice?
Why indeed? How true is every part of her story? Alice is desperate to be believed and understood, and she tries very hard to persuade the reader that her reality is the most valid. She is very clear about all the ways she has been victimized by deceptions and secrets in the Ziplinsky family, but her awareness of her own role falls short of the reader’s perceptions of Alice.

Alice considers herself an outsider. The most obvious manifestation of this is that she was raised Protestant and marries a Jewish man. But her feelings are as conflicted about her parents as they are regarding her in-laws. I know you also come from an interfaith family. Can you address how being an outsider shapes Alice’s behavior?
Alice isn’t speaking for me in any concrete sense, but I am very aware that I have spent my life on the borders between designated categories in many ways. My Protestant relatives think of me as Jewish, my Jewish relatives think of me as Protestant. In my eight years teaching fiction writing at Yale, I had the sense that even though some of my novelist friends thought of me as somewhat academic, my English Department colleagues no doubt regarded me as a flaky novelist.

What has this meant for me? I think I am acutely aware of always feeling as if I am a little bit of an outsider in any group, even when I know simultaneously that I am welcomed as an insider. I am very interested in the ways we define ourselves in terms of other people, in the ways groups inevitably regard outsiders as "other."

The novel takes place in New Haven, which I know is also your home. Does New Haven have a candy connection?
I have lived in a small town just outside New Haven for some 33 years now (in what is called “the Greater New Haven area”) and it is the territory of much of my quotidian family life. . . it has also figured in most of my previous novels. It’s a real city, with a rich mix of intellect and irony and grit. But any candy connections are mostly coincidental, and Zip’s Candies is not based on any family business that ever existed in New Haven or elsewhere.

Peter Paul did start out in New Haven in 1919 before the Halajians moved their fledgling company to Naugatuck in 1922, where they made every Mounds and Almond Joy you ever ate until Hershey, having bought the business from Cadbury in 1988, closed that factory in 2007. My house is only a couple of miles from that sad, abandoned plant. It used to be a very nice thing, driving past that hive of candy-making at midnight in the autumn, seeing the parking lot filled and all the lights on, knowing they were working the third shift in the run-up to Halloween.

You describe the tempering of chocolate in some detail. Do you see the tempering process as a metaphor for relationships?
I do think the tempering process has rich metaphoric meaning, which is why the working title of this novel was, in fact, Temper. There are multiple meanings for the term “temper,” which is a noun and also a verb. They include: “a habitual state of feeling,” “rage, anger,” “to modify by adding a new element,” and, for chocolate, “to bring to a desired texture and consistency by a gradual process of heating and cooling.”

Did you gain weight writing this book—and what is your favorite candy?
Actually I did. (I mean, I really had to eat chocolate every day while writing this novel. Never let it be said that I am not dedicated to my craft. Though at times I was content to sniff the faintly aromatic cacao beans from my trip to Tobago which I have kept in a dish in front of my computer.)

I have gone through Nestlé’s Crunch phases in my life, and at times I have had a thing for Nestlé’s Chunky, but I have to say, even though the candy bar on the cover of True Confections looks as if it would probably taste like a Milky Way or a Three Musketeers, my heart belongs to Baby Ruth.

Lauren Bufferd writes from Nashville.

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Start with a opinionated narrator with a spicy tale to tell; stir in a seasoned mix of bitter in-laws and a troubled family business; sprinkle with heady descriptions of melted butter, rich chocolate and burnt sugar; and you have the recipe for an engaging new…

Although it’s been eagerly anticipated as a debut, the epic novel Roses isn’t the first outing for author Leila Meacham. In the mid-1980s, Meacham wrote and published a handful of romance novels. But it wasn’t a process she enjoyed much. At the time, she was teaching English, and the solitary process of writing took her away from preparing lesson plans, learning about new techniques and enjoying hobbies like gardening.

“I guess the difference is the years. I had other things I wanted to do,” Meacham says from her San Antonio home during a recent telephone interview. “I just didn’t want to spend the time cooped up.”

But after retiring, Meacham ran through her list of retirement goals. She and her husband traveled. Thirteen years into retirement, at age 65, she was left with a question: Now what?

The answer was Roses.

“One day I was in bed, drinking my cup of coffee, and I just thought to myself, ‘I’ve got so much to offer somebody somewhere or something. I just don’t know what to do with the rest of my life,’” Meacham recalls. “I will defend this to my dying day: A voice in my head said, ‘You will get down Roses and you will finish Roses.’ I like to believe that’s a divine inspiration.”

Meacham had begun the novel in 1985, when a bad case of pneumonia forced her to temporarily resign from teaching. As years passed, the typewritten pages of the novel were stored in a box in a closet, almost abandoned as Meacham and her husband moved from one house to another. “My husband said, ‘Oh, go ahead and take it. You’ll regret it if you don’t.’ ” Six years ago, his suspicions proved accurate as Meacham pulled the box off the shelf and resumed writing.

The novel traces nearly 70 years in the history of the Toliver family, owners of a cotton plantation in a fictional Texas town. When patriarch Vernon Toliver dies, he entrusts the land to his daughter, Mary, because he knows she will love and care for it. His wife and son are outraged.

That decision and the stubborn love that motivated it determine the course of Mary Toliver’s life. She’s unwilling to compromise anything that would negatively affect her beloved Somerset plantation, whether it means sacrificing her fair complexion to work in the field or the man she loves because he won’t settle for second place in her heart. The decisions Mary makes, and the lies that accompany them, alter the history of the Toliver clan and its relationships with the town’s other founding families, the department store-owning DuMonts and timber magnates the Warwicks.

Through a series of flashbacks—first Mary Toliver’s, then Percy Warwick’s and finally Mary’s great-niece Rachel’s—Meacham reveals just how much Mary lost by dedicating her life to the land, and why she has sold the land in her determination to save Rachel from the same fate.

It’s only appropriate that this 600-page epic took Meacham five years to write. The narrative sprawls across geography as much as time, stretching from the fictional Texas burg of Howbutker to Lubbock, Dallas and points between. (“The two together—cotton and timber—you don’t find that in the same state” anywhere but Texas, Meacham says.)

The five years Meacham devoted to the story were filled with as many interruptions as the book has plot twists. “But I persevered because I felt like I promised God I would complete this book,” she says. “Just as sure as I’m talking to you, I was assured from the get-go, you write the book and I’ll take care of the rest.”

Now the 71-year-old Meacham is not only anticipating book signings to support the book, she’s also hard at work on another epic novel, this time with a more modern focus. So what happened to the woman who so disliked the solitary nature of writing?

“I didn’t like the confinement, the frustration of trying to get your thoughts on paper,” Meacham recalls. “Oddly enough, I’m happiest when I’m writing now. And I’m all by myself and anything in the world can come out on the page.”

“What this has done for me has made me aware that I can write. Now, I don’t know if you’ll agree with me. But I feel that I can write. I can tell a story.”

 

Carla Jean Whitley reads, writes and lives near three generations of her family in Birmingham, Alabama.

Although it’s been eagerly anticipated as a debut, the epic novel Roses isn’t the first outing for author Leila Meacham. In the mid-1980s, Meacham wrote and published a handful of romance novels. But it wasn’t a process she enjoyed much. At the time, she was…

Elizabeth Kostova’s gripping debut novel, The Historian (2005), explored the legend of Dracula, undoubtedly contributing to the cultural craze that has now evolved into full-blown vampire mania. Her second novel, The Swan Thieves, focuses on French Impressionism, which raises the question: should readers brace themselves for all-out Monet madness? Probably not, but one thing is certain: The Swan Thieves will keep readers entertained and inspire them to reflect on some profound subjects—like the nature of genius, the power of romantic love and the purpose of art.

Kostova’s lush second novel ranges across two centuries in its exploration of love and madness.

Andrew Marlow, an amateur painter and accomplished psychiatrist, lives a solitary, structured life—until he begins treating renowned artist Robert Oliver, who was arrested for attacking a canvas in the National Gallery of Art. Marlow’s quest to understand this troubled genius leads him into the lives of the women Robert loved, including the enigmatic dark-haired beauty who haunts him.

This hefty novel travels from the East Coast of the U.S. to the coast of Normandy, from the late 19th century to the late 20th. In a recent interview from her home in the mountains of North Carolina, Kostova, in a quiet, measured voice, discussed the challenges of writing a novel that spans time and place.

“I haven’t written much about American places before this, and it was really wonderful. . . . It’s surprisingly challenging, I think, to write about your own time and place. I know that’s what most writers do, but I had somehow shirked it for years.”

Also difficult, says Kostova, is writing about visual art. “It is a very challenging subject, and as usual, I didn’t make it easy for myself, but I like these challenges.” She adds, “It’s so hard to convey a painting in words, and you’re partly relying on your reader’s recognition of certain styles and images.”

Asked what it was about French Impressionism that so captured her imagination, Kostova explains, “I was really drawn to it. And again it’s just one of those topics, like Dracula, that we’re so familiar with that I wanted to see if I could make something fresh out of it. I know that, personally, I had the experience of getting really tired of Impressionist painting because we see it everywhere, and it looks so pretty and tame, and it’s poorly reproduced on all kinds of objects, so I thought this might be interesting to go back and really look at some of those paintings again. And when I started going back to museums and seeing these paintings in the flesh, I was so overwhelmed by them. They’re so wonderful in real life, and Impressionism is so textured that you really have a sense of people working with the brush when you look at the originals that you don’t with reproductions.”

Kostova’s research took her to Paris and Normandy and into museums and libraries. In addition, she says, “I studied a lot of art history in college and that helped me, and I talked with art historians, and until I was about 15, I really loved to paint.”

She gleaned details from artist friends, who helped with the technicalities of painting, and her own sensory recollections. “I had memories of the way oil paint smells and the way you rework a canvas. More importantly, I have several close friends and family members who are very gifted visual artists, and they let me pick their brains and watch them paint and go to their studio classes.”

To help craft her characters, Kostova pored over biographies of artists and painters. “Sometimes . . . I think of this book as basically a biography,” she says. And her characters are so believable, so fully fleshed out, that it feels that way for readers as well.

Kostova also makes astute observations about the allowances made for genius, a theme, she notes, that has “plagued art and art literature since it began.” She says, “With The Historian, I liked the idea of writing about a supernatural topic and trying to make it human, and with this book I think I was really intrigued with the idea of writing on these rather time-worn subjects, the partly mad artist and the subject of genius and what genius is allowed to do and not allowed to do.”

Asked if she identifies with Robert’s obsessive nature, Kostova says she sometimes envies that kind of single-mindedness, but adds, “I also love to live in the world. A lot of other things are very important to me, like family and friends and social service and just the ordinary parts of life.” She says of Robert, “He can’t live properly in the world . . . in a way that sustains other people.”

Marlow, she explains, is challenged by Robert because he doesn’t seem to care about being cured or healed. Kostova muses, “I think in the person of Robert he’s faced with his life choices.”

As in The Historian, Kostova’s affinity for letters as a literary device lends a sense of immediacy and intimacy to the narrative (in a way reminiscent of A.S. Byatt’s Possession). “We all would love to read other people’s mail if that were permitted, right?” she laughs. “There’s this sense of a letter that takes you right to the heart of somebody’s life, and that’s not really true in our era, but it’s a very direct way to convey character.”

The intriguing title of Kostova’s new novel alludes to the myth of Leda and the swan, but its deeper meaning lies at the heart of the novel’s mystery—one that keeps readers turning the pages (all 576 of them). “I’ve always loved Greek myths . . . and swans are such emblems of beauty and grace; they’ve been so important in painting and sculpture, and we still have this reverence for them even in contemporary life that I think is very interesting. . . . Swans are a funny thing, they’re kind of like dragons: once you start thinking about them you see them everywhere culturally.”

In the novel, Kostova describes Marlow’s experience upon seeing one of Robert’s paintings: “At any moment something might happen; that was the remarkable thing. He had caught the instant of shock, of total change, of disbelief. . . . She was inches away from me, breathing and real, in the second of unreal calm before complete distress, and I knew myself powerless. I realized, then, for the first time, what Robert had accomplished.” Much like the paintings she brings to life in The Swan Thieves, Kostova’s eloquent prose possesses the power to both transport and inspire.

Katherine Wyrick writes from Little Rock.

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Elizabeth Kostova’s gripping debut novel, The Historian (2005), explored the legend of Dracula, undoubtedly contributing to the cultural craze that has now evolved into full-blown vampire mania. Her second novel, The Swan Thieves, focuses on French Impressionism, which raises the question: should readers brace…

Speaking with Gary Paulsen is like reading Gary Paulsen. The acclaimed young adult novelist is a storyteller, all the time. He is also a hearty laugher, a casual curser and an eternal devotee of the natural world—characteristics that are happy confirmations of what fans of his young adult novels would hope to be true.

The author of over 200 books, Paulsen needs little introduction. His novels Dogsong, The Winter Room and Hatchet won Newbery Honor Medals, and his personal life is almost as famous as his characters. The son of “appalling drunks,” Paulsen disliked school growing up, and he lived as a “street child” in Manila when his father was stationed in the Philippines right after World War II. The adult Paulsen’s wilderness adventures sound like plots from his books. In 2006, he had to drop out of the Iditarod because he’d cut a vein on an old piece of pipe after 80 miles of racing; he almost died from the blood loss. He has sailed across the Pacific Ocean three times.

But currently, Paulsen says, he is concentrating on work: writing work, that is, rather than dogsledding or sailing. “I’ve got to settle on other things right now,” he said in a recent phone conversation with BookPage. “One of the things I’ve got to settle on is writing.”

Paulsen devotees can look forward to a busy 2010. Lawn Boy Returns, the follow-up to 2007’s Lawn Boy, comes out in March. And Woods Runner, Paulsen’s most recent novel, is a suspenseful Revolutionary War story that will grip both boys and girls, both young readers and their parents and educators.

The tale focuses on a familiar theme: a boy must fend for himself in the woods. It is 1776, and Samuel is a “child of the forest.” He lives in a settlement in Western Pennsylvania, far away from any large city. As Samuel hunts in the woods to find food for his family, he is comfortable, familiar with his surroundings, and at peace. “His skills and his woods knowledge set him apart, made him different,” Paulsen writes. “[His neighbors] marveled at him, thought of him as a kind of seer, one who could know more than others, divine things in a spiritual way. Samuel knew this was not the case. He had just learned to see what others could not.”

When Samuel’s parents are captured by British soldiers and Iroquois, the boy travels to New York City on a rescue mission. Along the way, he meets a group of memorable characters: a young girl he adopts as his sister, a traveling tinker with a big heart. By the end of his impossible journey, Samuel remains thankful for “the haven of the forest.”

That Paulsen would choose to set Woods Runner and so many of his novels in the forest is unsurprising. When he speaks about his own difficult adolescence, his voice softens when he mentions the woods or the sea: his sanctuaries.

“The woods themselves have always been a place where if things were not working well for me I could go there and live,” he says. “As a young person at the age of 11, when we got back from the Philippines we moved to Northern Minnesota. The town was right on the edge of the forest. And I would skip school and go down there. I just lived in the woods to get away from my parents.”

Many readers will forever associate Paulsen with 13-year-old Brian Robeson, the hero of Hatchet. When Brian fights for survival in the Canadian wilderness, the woods become “a place where he could become what he was,” says Paulsen. When Paulsen turned into an “outcast drunk” prior to starting his writing career, the woods served the same purpose for him.

Paulsen invokes a mystical tone when he writes about Samuel and the forest, a quality that also emerges when he talks about the craft of writing. For Paulsen, writing is primitive. “It’s very old,” he says. “It’s like putting skins on your back and dancing around the fire and telling what the hunt was like.”

His voice hardens when he speaks about “intellectual carbon monoxide”. . . or television, as the rest of us know it. “You think you’re seeing facts, but you’re not,” Paulsen says of the viewer’s experience. “You’re dying. You’re dying intellectually by watching it. I hate it. I think it’s appalling.”

On the subject of intellectual death—and more specifically, misinformation—Paulsen is strident. “People will watch a 30-minute show on Napoleon and think they know everything about him. You’re only getting 19 or 21 minutes, the rest is commercials. You’re getting at the most 30 minutes in an hour show and you couldn’t begin to understand Napoleon in less than 10 years.”

The same goes for the Internet. “What’s appalling to me is the phrase ‘Google it,’” he says, “that you can actually think that you can get all the information there is off of Google.” He pauses. “Not that the company’s particularly bad, but the idea that all the information you could want is there. It’s not.”

The author is a firm believer in the importance of digging for truth by reading historical documents. This philosophy was part of his impetus for writing Woods Runner. In Paulsen’s opinion, young people get a “sugar coated” version of history in most war literature, and in Woods Runner he seeks to be more honest. The novel includes short historical segments between chapters so that readers have ample background information to fully understand the narrative.

He wanted the novel to be a lesson, in addition to a good story. “What is dysentery? How did the weapons work?” Paulsen asks, referring to facts addressed in the historical segments. “I wanted those things to be real so that readers wouldn’t have to hang a pig carcass in a tree and shoot it just to learn what it was like.”

Whether describing a gruesome attack on an innocent family or explaining how to dress a war wound, Paulsen doesn’t scrimp on details in Woods Runner. War novels don’t have to be all “blood and guts” to be accurate, Paulsen says, “although that is a real primary part of combat.”

“My father was on Patton’s staff and I was in the army as far as that goes, but when my father invaded Sicily each man carried his own body bag. That’s a horrible thing to do to a man—to say not if you’re killed, but when you’re killed the bag is with you. Those are things that you don’t learn from history books.”

And though Paulsen did use weapons on animal carcasses to find out “what the weapons did and how they did it and what the different weapons did to the bodies” as part of his research, he is no advocate for violence. “What did Ben Franklin say?” he asked. “There’s no such thing as a bad peace or a good war. And that’s very true.”

In spite of contemporary obsessions with Google, television and other shortcuts to information, Paulsen remains passionate about serving young people with his books.

“Children want to know,” he says. “Young people want to know everything about whatever it is—math, humor, sports, whatever it is. The primary curiosity is still there.”

To feed this curiosity, he gives simple advice: “Read like a wolf eats.”

He clarifies: “I tell young people to read when they tell you not to read and read what they tell you not to read. And I get in trouble sometimes, but not so often. That’s the truth.”

Photo by Tim Keating.

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Read our interview with Paulsen from 2003.

Speaking with Gary Paulsen is like reading Gary Paulsen. The acclaimed young adult novelist is a storyteller, all the time. He is also a hearty laugher, a casual curser and an eternal devotee of the natural world—characteristics that are happy confirmations of what fans of…

Imagine spending a week totally unplugged: no iPod, no Facebook, no e-mail or voicemail or text messages. It may sound impossible, but that’s exactly what popular author Rachel Cohn (co-author of Nick & Norah’s Infinite Playlist) did, and she lived to tell the tale. Cohn’s “technology detox” taught her a lot about just how reliant we’ve all become on the technology in our lives, not only for information but also for connection. “What I learned is that it’s very lonely,” Cohn says. “We’ve gotten so used to having that phone in our hands and having all that information at our disposal, but all of a sudden you feel so isolated.”

Cohn, a self-confessed couch potato, tackled her technology detox as a way to understand the heroine of her newest novel, Very LeFreak. Veronica (known as Very) is a first-year student at Columbia. She sleeps cuddled with her laptop across her chest and her iPhone in her pocket so that she’ll never miss a phone call, text message or e-mail. The major accomplishment of her freshman year is creating The Grid, a social networking site for her dorm, but when the flash mobs and parties organized on The Grid start getting out of control, Very’s previously promising future at Columbia is suddenly in doubt. Meanwhile, Very’s got some pretty big issues in her past that she’s never really acknowledged. If she turns off all the noise that surrounds her, she might have no choice but to really listen to her own heart.

At least that’s what Very’s friends and family hope when they drag her, kicking and screaming, to ESCAPE (Emergency Services for Computer-Addicted Persons Everywhere), a treatment center in the wilds of Vermont, which seems a million miles away from New York and from the technology she’s had to leave behind. And ESCAPE is no mere flight of fancy, as Cohn explains, noting that there is a technology addiction treatment center called ReSTART in Washington state. “This is being looked at as a real addiction now,” she says, “in the same way we talk about drug addiction or alcoholism.”

Very’s time at ESCAPE might prompt her to deal with the past—and perhaps to open herself up to love. But how does Cohn characterize her own complicated relationship with technology? The author, whose writing is well known for including musical references, used to listen to music—loudly—whenever she was writing. “I don’t anymore, oddly,” she remarks. “As I’m aging, I can’t stand all the noise. Once I get past the opening sections of a novel, into my comfort zone, though, then music is on in the background.” For Cohn, who listens to the Berkeley, California, university radio station, the absence of KALX was one of the starkest silences during her break from technology: “The DJs feel like family in a lot of ways, and not having them here felt wrong, too quiet.”

Now that Cohn’s plugged back in, she’s grown more appreciative—and more thoughtful—about the role of technology in our lives. Readers, too, might be inspired to view technology differently after reading Very’s outrageous but thought-provoking story. “Go online for a specific reason, because otherwise it’s just a gigantic waste of time,” advises Cohn. “Limit it. Go out and live at the same time.”

Norah Piehl writes from Brookline, Massachusetts. For her interview with Rachel Cohn, she tried out a new piece of technology—a headset for her cell phone.

Imagine spending a week totally unplugged: no iPod, no Facebook, no e-mail or voicemail or text messages. It may sound impossible, but that’s exactly what popular author Rachel Cohn (co-author of Nick & Norah’s Infinite Playlist) did, and she lived to tell the tale. Cohn’s…

In The Rise of Endymion, Dan Simmons brings the epic tale of his Hyperion universe to its powerful conclusion. Spanning four novels and many centuries of real and imagined galactic history, the Hyperion saga is an astonishing achievement, overbrimming with adventure, lyricism and insight. A miracle of invention and economy, played out on a dozen and more meticulously created worlds, the tetralogy is surely one of science fiction's grandest visions of humanity's shared fate with its technology — not least because of the unforgettable character of Aenea, the young girl (and later, woman) in whose hands lies the future of humankind.

Simmons will return to his Hyperion universe once more in an upcoming novella, part of a set of stories by a select group of science fiction authors who have been asked to revisit their now-classic worlds just one more time. ("If only Herbert and Asimov were still with us," says Simmons, wistfully.) But for now, with the culmination of the preceding novels Hyperion, The Fall of Hyperion and Endymion (all Bantam paperbacks) in the current volume, Dan Simmons takes time out to introduce the entire series to new readers and to share some thoughts with his avid fans about The Rise of Endymion.

BookPage: The universe of your four-novel epic is so vast and so fully realized. What was its genesis?
Dan Simmons: It started 25 years ago, when I was teaching elementary school in a small town in Missouri. I first created the Hyperion universe for my students during storytelling hour, little by little, day after day. Later, I incorporated that experience into my story, "The Death of The Centaur" (from Prayers to Broken Stones, Bantam paperback).

BP: There is a deep strain of great literature running through the four novels. It's not hard to recognize the models for many of the things you write: The Canterbury Tales, The Adventures of Huckleberry Finn and of course, John Keats' poetry. Is it important to you that your readers make those connections? Would you like your books to send readers back to those sources?
DS: I think the readers who know that literature can enjoy pursuing those references, and that can deepen their Hyperion experience — it certainly did for me. But it's not just a game of finding literary references. In fact, when I first started writing Hyperion, I knew I'd have to deal with Keats' long poems, "Hyperion" and "The Fall of Hyperion." I really appreciated his theme of life evolving from one race of gods to another, with one power having to give way to another, as Hyperion must. But I think, and hope, that the novels can be understood and enjoyed as science fiction, on their own terms.

BP: Well, it works nicely on both levels when John Keats' persona appears as a "cybrid" artificial life form in the story!
DS: Yes, that was the idea.

BP: As I understand it, there are three mighty powers which become unleashed throughout the four novels, and which vie together and apart for the soul of humanity: the first is the church, the second is artificial intelligence and I'm not sure what to call the third — maybe the basic human freedom to choose one's own fate?
DS: That's a good way of putting it.

BP: Let's focus on the first two for the moment: do the futures which you envision for religion and technology in these books reflect a conviction on your part about where those forces are headed? Are they prophecy of a sort?
DS: No, I don't believe in prophecy. They're a story, a development of ideas. I'm very interested in the evolution of technology, and it's really the idea of artificial life which intrigues me, more than just intelligence — a new, evolving life form arising within our datasphere and coming into living relation with humanity (this is where Keats' theme resonates). As for the depiction of the Catholic church, it's not meant to be a prediction. It's really about what happens whenever religion and power go hand in hand. I'm not anti-church by any means; what interests me is that human beings are almost always corrupted by the control they wield over other human beings. That situation has been especially tragic for religions.

BP: I have a question specifically about the current book, The Rise of Endymion, coming out this month. To me, it's a love story more than anything —
DS: Oh, I'm glad to hear you say that.
BP: — between Aenea and Raul Endymion. It's a love story against all odds, even against death and time. "Love is a fundamental force in the universe," says Aenea over and over again. That's what she calls "the music of the spheres." How do you hear this music?
DS: Well, I think all the simple things can and do still work — holding your child's hand while walking across the street will do it. But we can hardly hear it for all the noise which has turned love into a cliche, and most people can't even hear John Lennon's "All You Need Is Love" anymore without wincing.

BP: I know what you mean. It's too bad. I teach a Beatles course at Vanderbilt and we go dangerously into that hokey territory.
DS: Well, I write that way.

BP: Well, I feel that way. And I don't know how to express my gratitude to you. I feel like I'm speaking for countless fans here. You have enriched that feeling for us beyond calculation, and way beyond "hokey-ness." It's more like holiness. It's wholeness, certainly.
DS: Thank you. It's very kind of you to say that.
BP: Thank you for creating so generously and so well.

Michael Alec Rose is a professor of music at Vanderbilt University.

In The Rise of Endymion, Dan Simmons brings the epic tale of his Hyperion universe to its powerful conclusion. Spanning four novels and many centuries of real and imagined galactic history, the Hyperion saga is an astonishing achievement, overbrimming with adventure, lyricism and insight. A…

Elena Gorokhova’s transformative moment as a writer came in 2004 when she enrolled in Frank McCourt’s memoir class at the Southampton Writers Conference. For the previous 10 or 15 years she had occasionally written—and published—fictionalized bits and pieces about her childhood and youth in Leningrad during the Brezhnev era. Writing was a pleasure, even a necessity, but more tangible concerns—her teaching responsibilities, raising a child, cooking dinner—kept her from taking it seriously.

Then came Frank McCourt, author of the Pulitzer Prize-winning memoir Angela’s Ashes. “He was a brilliant storyteller, but also just as brilliant a teacher,” Gorokhova remembers during a call to her home in Ridgewood, New Jersey, where she lives with her second husband, their daughter and her 95-year-old mother, a figure who looms large in Gorokhova’s enthralling memoir, A Mountain of Crumbs.

McCourt’s classroom included 11 other students and two celebrities who were auditing the class—actors Alan Alda and Anne Bancroft. “The synergy of these three enormously talented people provided this incredible, electric atmosphere. Magic happened every day in that classroom!” Gorokhova says. “From that moment, from that seminar, A Mountain of Crumbs all came together.”

One thing Gorokhova learned from McCourt was to focus on the “hot spots,” those defining moments in life when something significant changes. “He compared it to walking on the beach. ‘You can just look at the surface of things,’ he said, ‘or you can go with a metal detector and go for the gold that’s deep inside.’ ”

Gorokhova has clearly gone for the gold. The 20 episodes in A Mountain of Crumbs are extraordinarily rich in sensory and emotional detail and offer an engrossing portrait of a very lively, intelligent girl coming of emotional and intellectual age in the post-Stalinist Soviet Union. Beginning with Gorokhova’s mother’s brutal experiences after the Russian Revolution and in World War II as a doctor, the narrative follows Gorokhova through interactions with her friends and family members, her early education—in school and in the Soviet system—her intellectual and sexual awakenings and her growing disillusionment with the Communist government, until in 1980, at age 24, she meets and marries a brilliant American physics student and leaves Russia for good. Along the way, the wryly ironic Gorokhova illuminates the ludicrous tensions that existed between public and private life in the Soviet Union and tweaks the noses of authorities, including her mother.

“The United States is a different country and has different tensions and different kinds of stresses,” says Gorokhova, a linguist who has taught English as a second language since 1981. “What it doesn’t have is the kind of schizophrenic slicing of your soul in half that we had in the Soviet Union. There were things that I could say and that I could show to my family and friends. Then I would go outside, like everyone else, and I knew I couldn’t say or show that to people I went to school with or worked with, and especially not to any officials. It was the post-Stalin era, so they were not going to throw us into Siberia for a joke [during Stalin’s rule, Gorokhova’s uncle had disappeared in the Gulag after telling a joke to a foreigner]. But we had to be careful, we had to pretend everything was all right. The essence was that the government lied to us and we knew they were lying. They knew we knew they were lying. But they kept lying anyway. And we kept pretending to believe them. It was this duality, this divide, that ruled life there.”

For much of the narrative, Gorokhova associates that duality with her overprotective mother and an equally overprotective motherland. A somewhat more forgiving Gorokhova now says, “My mother was born three years before the Revolution. She went through famine and through two wars. She was a surgeon in World War II at the front. Her first two husbands didn’t last long and my father died when I was 10. She was very strong, obviously, and very controlling. Of course she loved us and was very protective of us but she didn’t show the warm side. She stifled. It occurred to me she was just like the country. What was the intention of the Soviet state? To have a just and equal society, to take care of the people. In the Soviet Union no one starved. No one was out of work. We all got our miserable wages for sitting at a desk for eight hours and doing crossword puzzles. The money was little, the food was scarce, but we were all in the same situation. There was this control and smothering on one side and this protective quality on the other.”

Gorokhova’s path away from the stifling system toward independence opened when a grade school friend played a recording of a basic English lesson. “It was so mesmerizing,” Gorokhova says, “an English male voice speaking English. It was captivating.”  Gorokhova begged her mother to pay for English lessons, and her mother finally agreed. Her knowledge of English afforded Gorokhova the opportunity to encounter Western visitors in Leningrad and to catch glimpses of a different sort of life in English-language books and movies. “It was putting these little bits and pieces together that told me that all this about capitalism rotting and crumbling and socialism succeeding and thriving was nonsense,” she says.

“And when I came here, I started writing in English,” Gorokhova continues. “I never tried to write anything in Russian when I lived in Russia. But when I came to this country, I felt the necessity and I allowed myself to write—in English. It took me a few years to learn the English rhetoric. Then in 2004 I saw that the legendary Frank McCourt was teaching his memoir class. I thought, this is ridiculous. Who is going to accept me into Frank McCourt’s class? But then I thought, why not? I submitted an application, and I got accepted. I was stunned. I was stunned.”

And from this beginning, an American writer was born.

Alden Mudge writes from Berkeley, California.

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Watch a video interview with Elena Gorokhova:

Elena Gorokhova’s transformative moment as a writer came in 2004 when she enrolled in Frank McCourt’s memoir class at the Southampton Writers Conference. For the previous 10 or 15 years she had occasionally written—and published—fictionalized bits and pieces about her childhood and youth in Leningrad…

Richard Whitmire is a longtime education reporter and editorial writer who has chronicled a critical shift in the national education debate: While it was once presumed that girls were falling behind in school, now it appears that boys are at greater risk. Exploring the issue has become his passion, both in his blog and in his new book, Why Boys Fail. BookPage asked Whitmire to provide a tutorial on a subject of interest to parents, teachers and employers.

You didn’t always believe it was boys who were in trouble in school.
I was an education reporter in the Washington bureau of Gannett News Service when the American Association of University Women released its research on girls getting shortchanged in school. As the father of two daughters, I quickly wrote that up—uncritically—as fact.

What made you change your mind?
In the years that followed, I realized I had made a mistake. That research was flawed. It first became obvious anecdotally, by watching my nieces and nephews and the other students in local schools. More importantly, it became obvious in the national data. The gender gaps we see in college are the most obvious evidence—nearly 58 percent of bachelor’s degrees and 62 percent of associate’s degrees go to women. Unlike two decades ago, when uneducated men could find good-paying work, men today need those degrees as much as women.

How did the researchers get it wrong?
It’s not so much a matter of getting it wrong as never trying to get it right. By choosing not to investigate the problem, the U.S. Department of Education ducks the politically sensitive issue. In Why Boys Fail, I lay out the history behind that sensitivity, which starts with conservatives blaming feminists (unfairly, from my perspective) for the problems boys were experiencing in school. The national feminist groups went into a defensive mode and countered that boys were not experiencing problems. When men rule the White House and Wall Street, that argument carries a lot of credibility, at least on the surface. But when you bore down to the community level, to the boys and girls in your local schools and men and women in the local economy, the reality is very different. Men are in trouble, and much of that trouble can be traced back to unequal educations.

Does the failure of boys in school cut across all races and income levels?
I would say yes, with the possible exception of those coming from the most elite families. (And even in the most expensive prep schools I hear college placement advisers remark that their girls perform better than the boys.) Among Hispanic and African-American boys, the gaps are huge: Twice as many black women as men earn bachelor’s degrees. Less obvious, however, are the gaps we’re seeing among the sons and daughters of blue-collar families, where the daughters are far more likely to enroll and graduate from college. This is a key question, and it gets at what may be the most important insight from the book: There’s a common thread (literacy skills) connecting the problems minority boys are having with what we’re seeing in blue-collar/white and middle-class suburban schools.

Could it simply be that boys traditionally have never liked school as much as girls?
Yes, but in years past the boys were given plenty of time to catch up. Reading experts tell me that by fourth grade boys should pull even with girls in literacy skills, but that’s not happening. There’s a second issue here. In years past it was OK for many boys to dislike school. Blue-collar jobs were plentiful. Today, however, college has become the new high school. Want to be a cop? Better have at least an associate’s degree.

What are the risks of having too few male college graduates?
There are some national economic considerations. Women are less likely than men to major in the hard sciences or launch risky business ventures. But the real implications are interpersonal—the so-called “marriageable mate” issue that has inflicted so much pain among African Americans. Women hesitate to “marry down” to someone with a lesser educational background. Hence, a lack of marriageable mates.

What solutions do you recommend?
The obvious solution is to start at the beginning with a federal investigation. Once the causes are pinpointed, the Department of Education can launch research into remedies that can be pioneered by interested school districts. Just as urgent is federally sponsored research into single-sex education. Do boys and girls really have gender-specific learning styles that teachers must master? Maybe, maybe not. Let’s find out.

Richard Whitmire is a longtime education reporter and editorial writer who has chronicled a critical shift in the national education debate: While it was once presumed that girls were falling behind in school, now it appears that boys are at greater risk. Exploring the issue…

When she was a kid in North Baltimore County, Laura Amy Schlitz trained herself to sleep in a position that was similar to that of Mary Martin on the cover of the Peter Pan phonorecord: “one knee up and the other knee stretched behind me and my back arched.” She thought that if Peter popped into her window, he would think, “Oh, she’s asleep, but she definitely wants to go to Neverland.”

Considering this history, it makes sense that the author has written The Night Fairy, a middle-grade novel about a brave fairy named Flory—and the challenges she faces when a bat accidentally crunches off her wings.

In a phone interview with BookPage, Schlitz explained that fairy stories, which have a fairy as the main character, are different from fairy tales. And fairies are not frou-frou girly-girls (contrary to what you might think from coloring book pictures of fairy princesses).

“What’s enchanting about the fairy world is that it’s completely free,” Schlitz explained. “You never see a fairy with shoes on. Princesses wear shoes. Princesses wear corsets, but fairies wear loose clothes and they’re barefoot. They move and they dart and they spring. When I dreamed of fairies as a child that was part of what was so fascinating to me. Part of it was aesthetic; there was this beauty. And the other part was adventure. And I think it’s that aesthetic plus adventure quality about fairies that is so enticing.”

In The Night Fairy, those qualities are captured in Schlitz’s writing—which is wonderfully descriptive of Flory’s changing emotions and the creatures that surround her, including a praying mantis, a squirrel and a red-throated hummingbird in need of rescue. Thanks to illustrations by Angela Barrett, the book is a true work of art. Young readers will delight in discovering Flory’s miniature world, captured in vibrant greens and blues. As Schlitz says, the pictures bring a feeling to the story that is “luminous and exquisite.”

The garden where Flory lives is based on Schlitz’s own garden, and because Flory is a nocturnal fairy, Schlitz observed at night for research. “I turned off all the lights in the house and watched the garden get dark. I thought about what I could see, where the sky is lightest at dusk and what’s the last thing you can see as it gets darker and darker.” She noticed that white flowers would remain visible during the night, but after a certain point pink flowers would be gone. “It was interesting because I think in our culture we very seldom let our eyes completely dilate,” she said.

Besides writing and gardening, Schlitz has another passion: her work as Lower School librarian at The Park School of Baltimore, a position that gives her “an edge” when it comes to writing for children. Talking about her students, she said, “They both inspire and encourage me and I can try things out on them.”

This method certainly helped when Schlitz wrote Good Masters! Sweet Ladies! Voices from a Medieval Village, the winner of the 2008 Newbery Medal. The book was originally conceived as monologues for students at The Park School, and now Schlitz said her kids “own the characters; they live in their skins.”

The Night Fairy was also inspired by students—specifically, little girls. “They wanted a book about a fairy,” she said. “I went to a bookstore because I thought we should have these books; we should have more books about fairies. But when I started looking for books about fairies, there were a number of them that had quite nice illustrations, but I didn’t find many where much was happening.”

While she was working on her manuscript, Schlitz read The Night Fairy out loud to a group of second graders, watching their faces to see interest, or squirming, and identifying “good parts” based on when she got excited about sharing certain scenes.

“My students are very avid listeners as well as avid readers. They love having a story told to them. As they say, ‘I like it when I make the pictures up in my head. I like to see the pictures in my head.’ And that’s exciting to me because they may think that what they like is the way I’m telling the story, but what they really like is the way they’re participating: the things that are happening inside their brains.”

Since winning the Newbery, Schlitz has cut back to working three days a week at The Park School, and now she teaches third through fifth graders: the perfect audience for The Night Fairy, Good Masters! Sweet Ladies!, and The Hero Schliemann: The Dreamer Who Dug Up Troy, her novel from 2006. But the author is also adept at writing for different age groups, as demonstrated by her picture book The Bearskinner or her young adult novel A Drowned Maiden’s Hair: A Melodrama.

Next up will be a Victorian gothic called Splendors and Glooms, which Schlitz calls “a bizarre little book” that will appeal to readers who loved A Drowned Maiden’s Tale, since both stories have “suspense and surprises and a little whistle of brimstone.” The title comes from Shelley’s elegy “Adonaïs” and stars a boy and a girl who personify “dingy splendor” and “decorative gloom.” Schlitz hasn’t yet signed a contract for the book, although she wants to finish it soon. “I’m hoping that I can finish the second draft and that someone will want to publish it,” she said.

If the rich characterization and lovely descriptions present in The Night Fairy are any indication, that shouldn’t be a problem.

 

When she was a kid in North Baltimore County, Laura Amy Schlitz trained herself to sleep in a position that was similar to that of Mary Martin on the cover of the Peter Pan phonorecord: “one knee up and the other knee stretched behind me…

The seeds of Kristan Higgins’ writing career were sown when, at the age of 13, she swiped Shanna—a notorious bodice ripper by Kathleen E. Woodiwiss—from her grandmother’s nightstand. Woodiwiss has been called “the founding mother of the historical romance genre” and has inspired a whole generation of writers, Higgins among them.

“I was hooked,” Higgins says. “For several years, I controlled the black market for romance novels at my Catholic girl’s school, and now they actually carry my books in their library, which I find shocking!”

Higgins began her writing career as an advertising copywriter right after college, and worked until her first daughter was born. Then when a second child came along, and the two kids started napping simultaneously in the afternoon, the young mother had a couple of hours to herself for the first time.

“I wasn’t one of those people who carried a notebook around and wrote down everything,” Higgins recalls, “but I was a reader. And since I’d been reading romance novels for decades at that point, I thought I’d like to see if I could write one. The jump from ad copy to fiction wasn’t too hard,” she says with a laugh.

When Higgins finished her first novel, Fools Rush In, she shipped it off to an agent who immediately took her on as a client. “I was really lucky,” Higgins stresses; “the timing was right, and the agent was willing to take a chance on a new author, and she made a sale.” She advises other aspiring writers to keep working, make sure you know what you do well and hone that skill. “Keep your head down, work hard and never be satisfied,” she says.

Apparently Higgins took her own advice. Her second book, Catch of the Day, won the 2008 Romance Writers of America’s RITA Award for best contemporary romance. Next came Just One of the Guys in August 2008, followed by Too Good to Be True in February 2009.

Her latest offering hits bookstores this month, just in time for Valentine’s Day. As in Higgins’ past books, family relationships are the stars of the show. The Next Best Thing is a multi-generational, heartwarming tale of lost love, broken hearts and second chances set in a small New England town, peopled with plenty of funny, quirky folks to provide some timely comic relief.

The heroine, Lucy, works in the family business, Bunny’s Hungarian Bakery, as a bread baker who secretly yearns to create desserts. Her mother and her aunts Iris and Rose all share the same maiden name—Black—and all were widowed by the age of 50. As a result, they have been dubbed the Black Widows, and five years ago, 24-year-old Lucy joined their ranks when her one true love, her husband Jimmy, died in a car accident. Now, Lucy’s very pregnant sister, Corinne, lives in constant fear that her husband Chris is next.

So Lucy has decided that it’s time to get on with her life, find a husband and have children. Ethan, a friend with privileges, is immediately ruled out because he is much too attractive and their relationship is way too complicated. Lucy wants someone more mundane, secure and safe and, dare we say, boring—somebody she won’t ever love too much. Lucy’s learned her lesson: Love hurts, especially when the one you love is gone.

After going through a series of false starts, Lucy may have found a promising candidate. But to date, no Black Widow has ever remarried, and the fact that Lucy has supposedly made up her mind doesn’t stop her aunts and Jimmy’s parents from doling out more unsolicited advice than Dr. Phil. Soon Lucy is yo-yoing back and forth between her head and her heart, trying to make a decision—and making everybody else crazy in the process. A pseudo-psychic offers guidance from Jimmy on the other side, but will Lucy be able to interpret his message before it’s too late?

Much like the extended family in The Next Best Thing, Higgins herself grew up in a large, tight-knit Hungarian family. “All my heroines are involved with their family, sometimes to their detriment, because nobody knows you and can torment you as effectively as your family. But hopefully no one loves you and accepts you as much as your family.”

Higgins’ three great-aunts and her mother, all widows, inspired the fictional Black Widows. “Unfortunately my aunts have all passed away,” she says, “but I hope somehow they’ll know that they’ve been immortalized.”

Although Higgins says she tries to focus on universal ideas and concerns, writing about the death of a husband is not a common romance theme. She handles the issue with grace and humor and strikes emotional chords by putting into words what is in the hearts and minds of many who have lost loved ones.

“My dad died unexpectedly when I was 23,” she explains. “Losing someone like that re-creates your world; it’s suddenly different and you have to learn how to negotiate that landscape.” The plot of The Next Best Thing revolves around Lucy’s struggle to accept the fact that her life with Jimmy is over—and that she still has a lot of living left to do.

“Being widowed young is something I live in fear of because my mom was widowed when she was 46, and my husband’s a firefighter. So if he’s late coming home from work, all these worried thoughts go through my head. You never trust the fates in the same way as someone who hasn’t been through that experience.”

Although not every real romance has a happily-ever-after ending, Higgins doesn’t think those endings will ever go out of style in fiction. “It’s about the quest to find the one person to share your life, help carry your burdens, celebrate your triumphs and love the real you. Romance novels are a promise to the reader that love makes you stronger and life better, and you’re going to feel good at the end of a book.”

 “I want to write big memorable love stories about regular people,” Higgins says, “like me or my best friend, or my sister. Not everyone is rich, famous, beautiful, psychic or immortal.” On her website there’s a quote that sums it all up: “Real life, true love and lots of laughs.”

The seeds of Kristan Higgins’ writing career were sown when, at the age of 13, she swiped Shanna—a notorious bodice ripper by Kathleen E. Woodiwiss—from her grandmother’s nightstand. Woodiwiss has been called “the founding mother of the historical romance genre” and has inspired a whole…

When she began to write her eighth novel, Rita Williams-Garcia decided to try something different. “Every writer should get a little antsy once they get too familiar with the worlds they create—if that happens, you’re not working hard enough, and there’s not enough in it for you as a writer,” she says in an interview from her home in Queens, New York. “I have a very different background from the kids I tend to write about, so I thought, for a change, why not tap into the childhood I did have?”

And so she did, setting One Crazy Summer on the West Coast rather than in her usual locale of New York City. “My sister, brother and I were always amusing ourselves in the wide-open spaces of Seaside, California. I was determined to have the three girls in my story run around outside in California in the 1960s, too.”

Eleven-year-old Delphine and younger sisters Vonetta and Fern live in Brooklyn with their father, Papa, and grandmother, Big Ma. The adults decide to have the girls spend the summer of 1968 in Oakland, California, with their mother, Cecile, who left them after Fern was born. Big Ma has never forgiven her, but Papa prevails, and off they go.

The scenes depicting the girls at airports are just a few of the many moments in One Crazy Summer wherein the author’s gift for combining everyday settings with social commentary and wry wit make for memorable, but not heavy-handed, reading. Delphine rolls her eyes (and bites her tongue) when she and her sisters are stared at as if “on display at the Bronx Zoo,” and the girls engage in what Williams-Garcia calls “colored counting.” It’s an activity she and her siblings “did everywhere. It was a time when, in public places, you might not see a lot of African-American people. We’d count how many of us were there, how many words we got to say on TV.”

These small but telling moments are the ones that most interest Williams-Garcia. “Usually I don’t like to do ‘the race book’ because it’s not how people live,” she says. “Not to say racism doesn’t exist, but it’s not this moment-to-moment consciousness. I like to include the domestic, intimate things about race and identity that never really make it into books or media—you mainly get big or dramatic events of racism, violence or discrimination.”

Thus, when none other than the Black Panthers become part of the sisters’ everyday lives, there aren’t cinematic goings-on at every turn. Sure, the girls initially are anxious when Cecile sends them on all-day visits to the Panthers-run community center, where they have free breakfast and learn about the group’s political causes and views. And the political rally at book’s end certainly is exciting.

But in between, the children develop friendships and enjoy being part of something larger than themselves, even if they understand only some of what’s going on at the center. Cecile keeps a printing press for the Panthers in her kitchen, which she fiercely protects as her own space for working, thinking and writing her poetry.

Cecile and the other women in One Crazy Summer—smart, strong, often unrepentant—are in many ways like Williams-Garcia’s own late mother, whose influence was central to another change in approach for the author. Her previous work—including the 2009 National Book Award Finalist Jumped—“always seemed to mourn the loss of childhood,” she says. This time, “I decided to celebrate my experiences. My mother was the super-mother of all mothers; she made it clear there was only one woman in her house, and my sister and I did not qualify.”

With that in mind, she wanted to have a chasm between mother and children in One Crazy Summer. “I respect the difference between parent and child. Delphine and her sisters haven’t earned their mother’s story, and she hasn’t earned their forgiveness.”

Ultimately, what is attainable for Cecile and her children is a truce of sorts, one characterized by hope for mother and daughters, as well as the America they’re living in.

As for Williams-Garcia, herself the mother of two daughters, she’s hoping to challenge herself even more via her next book, a gaming novel: “I’m estrogen-ed out—it’s time for me to write about a boy.”

Linda M. Castellitto writes from North Carolina.

When she began to write her eighth novel, Rita Williams-Garcia decided to try something different. “Every writer should get a little antsy once they get too familiar with the worlds they create—if that happens, you’re not working hard enough, and there’s not enough in it…

A few weeks ago, author Dani Shapiro, her atheist husband and their young son went to hear a children’s choir perform on a village green near their New England home. They listened to hymns and Christmas carols interspersed with readings by Persian poet Rumi and Catholic author Thomas Merton. Then the family went home and lit Hanukkah candles.

“I thought, this is my idea of what it should be like,” Shapiro laughs during a call to her home in Connecticut. “If I hadn’t done the journey, though, all these contradictions would have felt wrong. I wouldn’t have been able to do it.”

“I was looking not so much for religion . . . but a way of life that would allow for greater meaning.”

“The journey,” as Shapiro calls it, is her search to discover a deeper truth about life, which she details in her lovely mosaic of a memoir, Devotion. Courageous, authentic and funny, Devotion is Shapiro’s exploration of her own relationship with faith.

In her mid-40s, Shapiro found herself unsettled and out of balance. What did she truly believe? What kinds of values did she want to instill in her young son? Raised in a deeply religious family with strict rituals, Shapiro was drawn more to the spirituality of yoga and meditation, yet also attended monthly Torah studies. In Devotion, she asks: Is it all right to take a hodge-podge approach to spirituality, or does dabbling in different faiths signal a wishy-washiness, an unwillingness to choose a doctrine and stick with it? And how did her family history feed into her confusion about faith?

“I had reached the middle of my life and knew less than I ever had before,” she writes. “Michael, Jacob and I lived on top of a hill, surrounded by old trees, a vegetable garden, stone walls. From the outside things looked pretty good. But deep inside myself, I had begun to quietly fall apart. Nights, I quivered in the darkness like a wounded animal. Something was very wrong, but I didn’t know what it was.”

Shapiro got serious about meditating (“It’s a struggle for my kinetic, type-A, busy-minded self,” she admits). She went on silent retreats and practiced yoga. She read about spirituality. She talked with friends and relatives, devout and not. She pieced together fragments of her life, both harrowing and beautiful, that shaped who she is.

Raised in an Orthodox Jewish household with a father prone to panic attacks and a supremely difficult mother, Shapiro found her childhood fraught with confusion. By her 30s, she was a recovering drinker, had lost her father to a car accident (which she wrote about in her gritty first memoir, Slow Motion) and had a newborn with a potentially life-threatening seizure disorder. After hearing the planes hit the World Trade Center, Shapiro and her husband, screenwriter Michael Maren, sold their Brooklyn brownstone and headed for Connecticut.

But even in that bucolic setting, even when her son was no longer sick, her anxiety grew and she knew she needed more. “I was looking not so much for a religion—I had one and had mixed feelings about it—but a way of life that would allow for greater meaning, greater depth, greater awareness,” Shapiro says. “I desperately did not want to be 80 years and saying, ‘But I was just getting my life together.’ ”

Those are the words her mother uttered on her deathbed. In Devotion, Shapiro revisits their beyond-rocky relationship.
“I grew up hearing, ‘You made this happen,’ or ‘You poisoned this person against me,’ ” she says. “With my mother, I had to ask myself, is it ever OK to give up on a person?”

The answer, at least for Shapiro, was yes. After attending several therapy sessions with her mother, Shapiro talked with the psychiatrist, who told her something he’d never said to a client in 30 years of practice: She and her mother had no hope of forging a healthy relationship.

“It was such an incredibly intense moment,” Shapiro recalls. “It will remain one of the definitive moments of my life. The feeling of somebody totally unbiased corroborating that or saying, ‘Yeah, this really is impossible.’ It was in equal and opposing measures relief and incredibly painful.”

The relationship she had with her mother hasn’t tainted her own parenting. “I’m very glad I had a boy,” she admits. “During the sonogram, I heard it was a boy and was instantly and profoundly relieved. I think it would have been very complicated for me to have a daughter, and I think I would have been a very self-conscious mother of a daughter.”

Jacob, now a healthy grade-schooler, has adapted to the slower pace of life away from the city—although it took awhile. “When we first moved, there was a sidewalk out here bisecting a huge meadow and Jacob would not step off that sidewalk,” she laughs. “He went from this urban two-and-a-half-year-old to being this total country boy.”

Someday, that boy may read one or both of her incredibly honest memoirs, which yields mixed feelings in Shapiro. “Slow Motion is a book I’m really proud of,” she says. “I’ve often wondered whether I would have written it had I already had a family myself. I dread the day Jacob picks up that book. As a mother, I wouldn’t have written it; as a writer, I’m glad I did.”
Still, she’s learned to live with that, and with other quirky aspects of being a best-selling memoirist. “Nobody ever asks me anything about myself,” Shapiro says. “People say, ‘You must feel like I know everything about you.’ Actually, I don’t! That’s a strange phenomenon. I don’t feel I’ve exposed myself. I’ve written about the part of my life I wanted to write about.”

In one chapter of Devotion, a magazine editor offers to send Shapiro to India to report on yoga and meditation. A dream assignment! But Shapiro turns her down, saying, “My life is here.” And that is the beautiful simplicity of Shapiro’s journey: She doesn’t want to go to exotic, far-flung destinations, Eat, Pray, Love-style. She just wants to look inward. Ultimately, Devotion is the best kind of memoir—although it’s about someone else’s life, it makes you shine a flashlight on your own.

A few weeks ago, author Dani Shapiro, her atheist husband and their young son went to hear a children’s choir perform on a village green near their New England home. They listened to hymns and Christmas carols interspersed with readings by Persian poet Rumi and…

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