All Interviews

Lynne Rae Perkins

Interview by Linda M. Castellitto

The writing and artwork in Lynne Rae Perkins’ books spring from her ever-creative, Renaissance-woman brain—but her family has played a role in many of her works, too, from 2006 Newbery winner Criss Cross to her new teen novel.

In Criss Cross, a photo sequence shows a comb falling out of a character’s pocket. The model? Her husband, Bill. “We did a really low-tech staging session,” she says in an interview from her home in Northern Lower Michigan.

As Easy As Falling Off the Face of the Earth involved her husband (an anecdote from his father made its way into the plot), 16-year-old son (her research-road-trip companion) and college-student daughter (who suggested the book’s final line).

This dovetails nicely with the book’s themes, which center on family—both the blood-relatives kind and the true-friends sort. At the heart of the novel is 16-year-old Ry, who’s off to archaeology camp for the summer, until he learns the camp has shut down. When his train stops for a short break, he disembarks to call his grandfather, who is house- and dog-sitting while Ry’s parents enjoy an island vacation. Alas, Ry’s train leaves without him, he can’t get any cell phone reception, and he’s left alone many miles from the nearest town.

He presses on, though, moving from head-shaking disbelief to a sort of dream-state acceptance combined with a determination to get to his family, even if he has no idea how that’s going to work. Talk about a wacky summer vacation.

Perkins says the story began to percolate in her brain after she read Mark Salzman’s The Laughing Sutra. “I read a description that called it a ‘picaresque.’ I didn’t know the exact definition, so I looked it up, and the dictionary said it’s a story told in episodes with a rogue as the main character.”

“At the same time,” she says, “I was thinking about a friend who died in an accident when my son was a year old. He was a really interesting character and I wish my son could’ve known him. I thought I’d introduce them in the book.”

Indeed, when Ry meets Del, a smart, laid-back fellow with MacGyverish tendencies, his life gets even more exhaustingly exciting and surprising. Adventures range from a comical shoe-shopping expedition to falling out of a tree to a grand trek by air, land and sea.

But Ry isn’t the only one who finds himself engaged in assorted escapades: Perkins gives the reader dispatches from Ry’s parents’ vacation and his grandfather’s misadventures, the former amid palm trees, the latter, maple and aspen. And the dogs—oh, the hilarious dogs, whose exploits we follow via black-and-white comic-book-style panels tucked in among the text.

“[The idea for that] just popped into my mind one day,” Perkins says. “I was thinking about The Incredible Journey and how funny it would be if the dogs didn’t know where they were going. I sent scribbled sketches to my editor, and she went for it.”

Ideas like that are what sets Perkins’ work apart. Criss Cross was lauded for its mélange of words—including haiku and Q&As—and art. Like that book, As Easy As Falling Off the Face of the Earth combines imagery and words that illustrate what it’s like to be a teenager who longs for freedom and excitement . . . and what happens when he gets it.

Fortunately, Perkins’ longstanding relationship with Greenwillow Books, an imprint of HarperCollins, has afforded her artistic freedom. “Not that they’ll publish anything I do,” she says with a laugh. “But I’ve always felt respected, and they raise really good questions.”

Greenwillow gave Perkins a start on her unexpected path to becoming a writer. “I was trying to get work as an illustrator, and Ava Weiss at Greenwillow asked me if I wrote. I had a story I’d written just for the sake of doing illustrations for my portfolio, and they published it: Home Lovely, my first book, in 1995.”

Since then, Perkins has created six picture books and three novels, moving between age groups as well as juggling drawing and writing. She says, “I needed to reassure myself periodically because I was more confident about the drawing than the writing. I’m starting to feel more comfortable with writing, though.”

Her current project takes her back to art: illustrating a picture book by Esmé Raji Codell. “It’s my first time illustrating someone else’s book, which is what I originally wanted to do,” Perkins says. “Now I’ll find out if I really can do it.”

In Criss Cross, a photo sequence shows…

Children's & YA Middle Grade

Ann M. Martin

Interview by Eliza Borné

When Scholastic announced the return of the Baby-Sitters Club—with the publication of a brand-new prequel and the reissue of the four original books in the series—reader response was enthusiastic and immediate, even frenzied. I posted the news on The Book Case and commenters gushed about favorite characters and individual books. The New York Times interviewed author Ann M. Martin, and blogs buzzed with memories of the series, which debuted in 1986 and went on to include 213 titles. Ten years after the publication of Graduation Day, the final book about the babysitters, there are still active fan sites on the web.

Although Martin does not consider herself a “huge browser,” she has seen a number of these Baby-Sitters Club tributes. “People have sent me links,” she says. “I certainly have seen the comments and things and I find it incredibly rewarding. I’m just so gratified that the appeal has lasted for this long.” In fact, fan devotion to the series, which follows the lives of middle-school girls who start a babysitting business, played a part in its renewed life.

In a phone interview from her home in the Hudson Valley, Martin says, “I had heard lots of requests for another Baby-Sitters book—mostly, I have to admit, for stories that would be set in the future: high school reunion, college reunion, members of the Baby-Sitters Club are all grown up and have kids of their own.”

But because her favorite age group to write for is “that really solid middle-grade group,” Martin decided to write a prequel and address what led the four original members of the Baby-Sitters Club to come together.

“What was going on in their lives that would make each of them need something to belong to?” she asked.

The answer is revealed in The Summer Before. In the novel, Kristy Thomas, the girl who would come to found the Baby-Sitters Club in Kristy’s Great Idea, is counting down to her 12th birthday, hoping that her absent father will show up for the party. Mary Anne Spier, whose mother died when she was a baby, longs for independence from her overly strict dad; she wants to babysit on her own. “Fashion plate” Claudia Kishi, the artist and struggling student, gets her first boyfriend, alienating friends in the process. And Stacey McGill, the character who normalized diabetes for many now-20- and 30-somethings, is moving from New York City to Stoneybrook, Connecticut, where she’ll escape a catty friend group and meet the girls who will change her life.

A theme of the novel is drifting apart, as the characters face different challenges in the months before seventh grade. Toward the end of the summer, Kristy makes a comment that foreshadows the Club:

“My mom always talks about the glue that holds people together. You know, common interests or experiences or whatever. What kind of glue is going to hold the three of us together?” (At this point in the story, Stacy hasn’t come into the picture.) Soon after, Kristy has the lighting bolt idea that will lead to the Baby-Sitters Club.

Although Martin won’t completely discount the prospect of an eventual reunion special—in her mind, the girls would still be friends in later life, albeit scattered across the country—she feels most comfortable writing for a younger group.

“Partly, those are really good years in my own life,” she says. “It’s the voice that seems to come most naturally to me, and I’m not sure why. Because the books are not necessarily—some of the issues that are tackled in older books can be more sophisticated, but I would say some of the issues that were tackled in Belle Teal and A Corner of the Universe”—two of Martin’s post-Baby-Sitters Club books, the latter of which won a Newbery Honor—“were equally as sophisticated, but somehow they wound up being written for younger readers.”

That may explain why some of the more serious Baby-Sitters Club books now rank as Martin’s favorites, such as Kristy and the Secret of Susan, in which the girls babysit for a child who has autism. Or Claudia and the Sad Good-bye, in which Claudia’s grandmother dies, written not long after the death of the author’s own grandmother.

Topics such as these were part of what made the series so popular—Scholastic printed 176 million copies of the books—and Martin thinks they will remain interesting to contemporary readers. “I think that most of the themes in the books are pretty timeless, “ she said. “School, family, friends, friendship problems: those are things that appealed to kids 25 years ago when I was starting the series, and they still appeal to kids.”

When confronted with the issue of children being more distracted today—the recent Kaiser Family Foundation study comes to mind, which reported that kids spend more than seven hours a day engaging with electronic gadgets—Martin cites a real-life example.

“I look at kids like my nephew, who’s 12 now and who does have his own cell phone, and he texts with his friends and he has an iPod and he likes to use his parents’ computer. But what is his passion in life? Baseball. And that’s the same thing for other kinds of kids whose passion is their friends or their after-school activities. Those sorts of things haven’t really changed. Also, in terms of the characters themselves, they’re the kinds of characters that most kids relate to—they could be your next-door neighbor or a kid in your class. And I think that hasn’t changed.”

Throughout her long career, Martin has received letters from parents or teachers who write of reluctant-turned-avid readers, thanks to her books. She has been contacted by the Make-A-Wish Foundation and the Starlight Foundation, about kids whose wish is to spend the day with her. In 1990, she founded the Ann M. Martin Foundation, which supports organizations that benefit education and literacy, neglected and abused animals and children.

And she is still at work writing, having recently finished a draft of a book called Ten Rules for Living with My Sister.

Martin is grateful for these opportunities, for getting to know “incredible kids and families,” and having the chance to work on so many kinds of books—the series books and everything that came after. She says, "I do just feel really lucky.”

YA Fiction YA

John Green and David Levithan

Interview by Kate Pritchard

David Levithan and John Green are two of the biggest names in teen fiction today; Levithan made a splash with his 2003 debut Boy Meets Boy and has seen 2006’s Nick & Norah’s Infinite Playlist (co-written with Rachel Cohn) turned into a movie, while Green’s first two novels, Looking for Alaska and An Abundance of Katherines, won the 2006 Printz Award and a 2007 Printz Honor, respectively. Now they’ve co-written a new book: Will Grayson, Will Grayson, about two teenage boys named (you guessed it) Will Grayson, who meet quite unexpectedly one night in Chicago, and also about Tiny Cooper—writer, director and star of the world’s most fabulous high school musical.

BookPage asked Levithan and Green to shed a little light on the inspiration for Will Grayson, Will Grayson and the process of writing it together.

How did the idea for this project come about?
David: It came to me in a dream. A guy I didn’t know was singing “Alaska! Alaska!” and then, before I knew it, he was handing me a sheaf of pages saying, “Here is my half of our book. Where the hell are yours?”
John: David is lying. For one thing, it took a lot longer than that. (We started discussing this project more than five years ago.) David and I became friends after he read an advanced copy of Looking for Alaska; after a while, he told me about this idea for a book about two guys with the same name whose paths cross in the middle of the book. I loved the idea. Then it was just the small matter of writing it, which took a while.

Has either of you ever had a friend like Tiny Cooper? What would it be like to be Tiny’s friend in real life?
David: I have friends who are that gay, but none who are that large.
John: And I have friends who are that large, but none who are that gay. I did have friends in high school who were charismatic and overwhelming in the way Tiny is, and I wanted to write about how you forge a real friendship amid the performances inherent to being in high school.

Will Grayson, Will Grayson turns out to be a sort of love story, although the central romance is between friends rather than lovers. Did you know from the start that this would be a book about love? And how do you feel about the word “bromance”?
David: You can’t actually have a romance between friends. That sort of defeats the definition of the word “romance.” The word you’re looking for is “love.” It’s a love between friends, just as there’s also love between lovers, or possible lovers, or even ex-lovers. Same holds true for “bromance”—it’s just a clever word used to avoid the word love, for straight boys who don’t want that old-fashioned taint of gayness. Dudes, you love each other. Deal with it.
John: I think the relentless focus on the kind of love that involves French kissing has made us all pretty crazy, frankly, and I guess I maybe wanted to write against that, although not consciously. Consciously, I just wanted to write a story about best friends.

You’ve both collaborated with other authors on other projects in the past. What was it like for the two of you to work together? What are some of the challenges and rewards of working with a collaborator?
David: I love the fact that when I was writing this book, I knew exactly who my audience was—John and his wife Sarah. It made me raise my game and go places I never would have gone on my own.
John: The challenge is the same whether or not I’m collaborating: to empathize with your reader and to tell a story that will matter to him or her. But the mechanics of going about that challenge change when you’re collaborating, because you have someone to help refine your thinking and expand your vision of what might happen. I really enjoy it.

Were either of you ever surprised at how the other one wrote a particular scene or character? Were there any disagreements about where the story might go or how the characters should act?
David: There was dueling. There were fisticuffs. There was one very fateful game of rock-paper-scissor. And he wouldn’t let me use the talking Nordic lawn gnome because, and I quote, “Libba Bray already did that better than you ever could, David.”
John: If there had been any fisticuffs, they would have been very humorous fisticuffs, indeed.

Do you expect that readers will be able to figure out which of you wrote each Will Grayson?
David: I thought so, but I’ve been proven wrong many, many times in this regard. To the point that I don’t want our answers to give away who wrote who.
John: Ideally, it won’t cross their minds, because they’ll be inside the story as a story.

Music plays a big role in this and many of the other books that you’ve both written. Why do you think music is so important to teenagers? Do you try to stay informed about what’s popular with that age group?
John: I have no idea what kind of music teenagers like, but I also had no idea what they liked when I was a teenager. I listen very broadly (although not as broadly as David), and I assume that my readers do, too.
David: The music’s all over the map in this book. I mean, we have Neutral Milk Hotel and we have Broadway showstoppers. Which is what I love about music, and by extension, life.

David’s debut novel, Boy Meets Boy, has been credited with creating the “gaytopia” genre of teen literature, in which gay teen characters are fully accepted in their communities. Do you think Will Grayson, Will Grayson fits into that genre?
David: That’s a genre? Nobody told me! Is anyone else writing in it besides me? In that regard, I feel there isn’t anything utopic about the gay in Will Grayson, Will Grayson—it’s not a creation, but more of a reflection of where a lot of kids are now.
John: I think it will read more utopian to adults than it will to contemporary teenagers.

Will there ever be a soundtrack released for Tiny’s musical, Tiny Dancer/Hold Me Closer?
David: I want fans to make YouTube videos singing the songs. Lots of YouTube videos singing the songs.
John: Yeah, I’d rather the soundtrack come from them than from us.

What projects are you both working on now? Do you have any plans to work together again in the future?
David: I have a new book with Rachel Cohn, Dash and Lily’s Book of Dares, coming out in October. Then a book about adults, The Lover’s Dictionary, coming out next year. And, yes, I would work again with Mr. Green in a nanosecond.
John: I’m working on a new novel set on a desert island. As for reuniting with David: Our plan is to commence another five-year process in five years, so look for the follow-up in 2020.

Fiction Popular Fiction

Emily Giffin

Interview by Abby Plesser

In her best-selling novels, Emily Giffin asks questions most of us can’t imagine answering. What if you fell in love with your best friend’s fiancé—and he loved you back? What if you and your husband agreed not to have children—and then he decided he wanted a baby? And what if you realized you had a shot with the “one that got away”—after you were happily married to someone else?

It’s tough, provocative questions like these that inspire Giffin, and have laid the groundwork for blockbusters like Something Borrowed (soon to be a film—more on that here), Baby Proof and Love the One You’re With. A single lawyer on the cusp of 30 when she wrote her debut novel, Giffin has matured along with her protagonists. Now, in her fifth novel, Heart of the Matter, she explores what happens to a marriage when another woman enters the picture.

“I don’t think my books are very plot-intensive,” Giffin says during a lively phone call to the Atlanta home she shares with her husband and three young children (read more about how Giffin balances work and family life). “They are much more about how situations are described and how events unfold. I write about characters who are unsympathetic in some ways—or if they’re not unsympathetic, they’re at least making unsympathetic choices. And I think that’s very true to life. If you sample the people in your life, even ones you respect and love, you can go through pretty much all of them and think of a time when they’ve made a choice that you wouldn’t have approved of, or you would have strongly discouraged. But that’s what makes us human, the fact that we can make mistakes and we can hurt the people that we love, but those sorts of offenses don’t make us unlovable as a person.”

And that’s the issue at hand in Heart of the Matter: Can you make mistakes, hurt the people you love and come back out on the other side?

Nick and Tessa Russo appear to have it all; they are a happily married couple with two young children living in an upscale Boston suburb. Nick is a renowned pediatric surgeon and Tessa has recently left her career to raise their children full time. They love each other, their life together and their children. But when a freak accident at a neighborhood sleepover lands six-year-old Charlie Anderson—and his shell-shocked single mother, Valerie—in the hospital under Nick’s care, everything changes. Nick becomes deeply involved in Charlie’s care and recovery and finds himself growing more and more attracted to Valerie, while Tessa struggles to retain her identity in her new role as full-time mom. Valerie knows she has feelings for Nick, but she is unable to distinguish actual romantic desire from her appreciation and affection for the man who saved her son’s life. And though she can’t seem to shake her feelings, Valerie is not the type of woman who would ever want to break up a marriage.

Giffin was inspired to write about the complex doctor/patient bond in Heart of the Matter after she attended a charity function at a children’s hospital she supports. At the benefit, a young mother described the care she received when her son was born with a severe facial deformity that required countless surgeries. The moment she delivered her baby, the birth room fell silent, and the woman knew something was wrong with her son. “It was really dramatic as she was telling her story,” Giffin says. “She described the surgeon who came into the room. He introduced himself as one of the leading plastic surgeons in the world and said, ‘I’m here to take care of your son,’ and she was just overcome by instant gratitude and affinity for this man who was basically saying, ‘I am going to save your son—and I’m going to save your family.’ And I just thought to myself, oh, how close she must have felt with him. Because in the beginning, I didn’t know for sure I was going to write about infidelity, it was going to be more about a marriage in crisis. But that was the inspiration for Valerie’s story.”

Told in alternating perspectives—Tessa in the first person and Valerie in the third—Heart of the Matter is an exercise in the “will they or won’t they” scenario. In fact, more than half of the novel goes by before we learn if anything ever happens with Nick and Valerie. The book is really more about the “what if” questions that arise in a complicated situation like this—for Tessa, Valerie, Nick and their families—than the actual act of infidelity.

Giffin says, “It’s one of those stories that seems very easy to interpret—that if this happens, then this happens. Infidelity is not that uncommon, but it’s something that people—particularly women—fear. It’s discussed all the time and some people feel that if it were a strictly physical thing, well, you could get over that. Others feel, well, if you’re going to betray, you better feel something. And I think showing both narrative sides of the story is a way to highlight the complications of marriage, how complex infidelity can be and how really the grass is always greener. You can show that a lot more effectively by having two narratives. And I wanted to be closer to one of them. I think the book is a bit more about Tessa and Nick as individuals, and their marriage. That’s why I chose to write Tessa in the first person.”

Because the reader is privy to both Tessa’s and Valerie’s perspectives, we know more about what’s really happening at any given moment than either woman does. But we still don’t know whether or not Nick will cross the line with Valerie, or what might happen if he does. And that’s the beauty of Giffin’s work: You think you know what’s going to happen. You think you know what you would do if it happened to you. But really, you have no idea.

“Life is not black and white. And no two situations are ever alike,” Giffin explains. “Every relationship is so different—every friendship, every mother/daughter relationship, and certainly every marriage is different. When people make missteps or when people betray each other or make mistakes to hurt each other, it’s never the same. Just as there is no relationship that’s the same, no betrayal is the same. Ultimately the story is about forgiveness, and down the line, everyone has someone to forgive.”

Heart of the Matter is a messy, complicated, often uncomfortable portrait of a marriage—and two families—in crisis. But it has everything readers love about Emily Giffin’s books: the heart, the empathy, the truth. “I have plenty of vices, but one thing I think I do right in life is I try to look at things from someone else’s point of view,” Giffin says. “If you can feel empathy for people, you’re a lot farther along in understanding and getting along with people—and having a greater understanding of yourself.”

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History American History

Hampton Sides

Interview by Jay MacDonald

Memphis historian and subculture explorer Hampton Sides was six years old on April 4, 1968, when Dr. Martin Luther King Jr. was gunned down on the balcony of the Lorraine Motel by a prison escapee named James Earl Ray.

Sides remembers that his father, who worked at the Memphis law firm that represented King during his marches on behalf of the city’s striking garbage workers, came home that evening, poured himself a stiff drink and braced his family for the worst.

“He was extremely worried that the city was going to rip apart and there was going to be a race riot,” Sides recalls. “Black and white, no one knew what was going to happen next. It was fairly terrifying.” Memphis would be one of the few major American cities spared widespread rioting in the wake of the assassination, but its scars of rage and guilt have been slow to heal.

Sides brings it all back home in Hellhound on His Trail, a narrative history with the pace of a thriller and the bite of a Howlin’ Wolf blues song.

Drawing on a wealth of previously unpublished material, Sides employs an alternating narrative to build profiles of King and Ray in the months leading up to their fatal collision. King, who fears that his nonviolent movement is losing relevance, convinces his inner circle to decamp to Memphis and march in support of the largely black garbage workers. In the meantime, Ray, a small-time thief and Missouri prison fugitive with delusions of grandeur fueled by George Wallace’s racist presidential campaign, drifts back to the U.S. after hiding in Mexico, assumes the alias of Eric Galt, rents an apartment in King’s hometown of Atlanta, buys a high-caliber rifle and follows King to Memphis with intent to kill.

Employing the same storytelling prowess he displayed in Blood and Thunder and Ghost Soldiers, Sides ratchets up the tension by tracking Ray under his assumed name, a technique that enables us to suspend our feelings toward the historical figure and gain fresh insight into the mind of Eric Galt, assassin.

“I decided it was important to let Ray be whoever he is saying he is at any given point in the story,” Sides explains. “The ease with which he moved about the country and assumed these various identities is a big part of who he is, and the mystery is enhanced by that. Who is this guy with all these names? So I decided that the reader should find out it’s James Earl Ray at the point in the story where the FBI found out it was James Earl Ray. That ends up being like on page 300.”

Sides’ brick-by-brick portrait of Ray shows what madness can result from a birthright of racism, poverty and ignorance. A loner by temperament, Ray was a desultory dabbler, unwilling or unable to commit to anything—except murder.

“He was kind of an empty vessel of the culture, all these fads and trends, from bartending school to hypnosis to weird self-help books like Psycho-Cybernetics to locksmith school to dance lessons,” Sides says.

As if two larger-than-life figures were not enough, Sides also juggles a third: J. Edgar Hoover, the iconic G-man who supervised the largest manhunt in American history—a two-month, four-country search that ultimately involved 3,500 FBI agents and cost $2 million. Hoover not only loathed King, he also disdained Attorney General Ramsay Clark, his boss under President Lyndon Johnson.

“What Ramsay Clark said to me was, nothing was more important to Hoover than the reputation of the FBI, and he felt that it was at stake here because people were going to find out how much he’d been bugging and eavesdropping and smearing King,” Sides relates. “So in a paradoxical way, Hoover’s hatred of King intensified the manhunt and made it more desperate.”

The manhunt, which consumes the second half of the book, reads like a crime novel worthy of Joseph Wambaugh or Michael Connelly.

Sides studied under John Hershey (Hiroshima) at Yale and developed his love for narrative history out of the New Journalism movement of the ’60s. Would he ever consider flipping the coin and trying his hand at historical fiction?

“Honestly, whenever I read historical fiction, I have a problem,” he admits. “It’s sort of like, will the real fact please stand up? Even really good literary historical fiction like E.L. Doctorow’s Ragtime, I’m thinking, what about the real Houdini? How much of this is real and how much of this is in [the author’s] own mind? I just think that the real story is always more interesting.”

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Sides remembers that his father, who worked…

Mystery & Suspense Suspense

Scott Turow

Interview by BookPage staff

Although Presumed Innocent was a blockbuster bestseller, it took you 23 years to publish a follow-up. Did you always intend to write a sequel to tie up loose ends?
To be honest, I thought for many years that I never would write a sequel. I always thought self-imitation is an inherently limiting thing for a writer, and I was afraid of trying to equal a book whose success at the time depended in part on breaking new ground. [But] at this stage, I was no longer worried about constraining myself. And by now, enough time has passed that I thought many people would be curious about Rusty—starting first of all with me.

Some of the events in Innocent eerily echo Rusty’s experiences in Presumed Innocent. How do you approach these parallel circumstances but twist them so they are fresh and new?
Well, I think one of the deepest truths about life is that people are sometimes compelled for reasons they don’t understand to keep repeating the same mistakes. So I regarded the parallel circumstances as deeply revealing of the character, and full of a meaning that wasn’t as clearly there the first time around. All the characters in Innocent are informed by the experience of the first book, and are trying desperately, in a paraphrase of Ecclesiastes, not to step in the same river twice.

Often lawyers who become authors of legal thrillers have a difficult time developing a fluid writing style, but your writing has always been gripping and accessible. What is your secret?
I was a novelist before I was a lawyer, having been a creative writing fellow at Stanford before I headed to law school. As a result, I was not trying to “find” my narrative voice after my style had been shaped by legal writing. I see legal writing as a distinct and somewhat limited voice that I’ve mastered, but one that does not really interfere with the creative voice I’d found before.

Given that you are still a practicing lawyer, what drives you to write fiction that also deals with the law?
I always say that the great break of my literary career was going to law school—it was one of the most fortuitous decisions of my life. I was a lecturer in the English department at Stanford, and for me going to law school meant giving up a teaching career. But I realized I was passionate about the law and the questions it asks, about deciding right from wrong for an entire society, fashioning rules that are firm yet flexible enough to fit the multitude of human circumstances. Those questions continue to preoccupy me. The truth is that I became not only a much more successful writer when I started writing about the law, but also a much better one as well, because I was writing about things that gripped me to the core.

The law often relies on individuals interpreting laws and regulations as best they can. To what extent do you think your novels contain characters and actions that are subject to the interpretation of your readers?
Without subscribing too heartily to deconstructionism, there is a truth that every reader reads a book his or her own way. But art of all kinds also depends on creating universals; in the case of narrative, we seek to create a fully imagined individual, a character, to whose life readers have something of a universal reaction. There are great differences in nuance in terms of readers’ responses, but if there is not a common element, a book is probably not a success.

Mystery & Suspense Fiction Suspense

Charlaine Harris

Interview by Trisha Ping

For an author who gives a lot of interviews, Charlaine Harris knows how to keep a secret. She's working on a new series, but can’t share the details (“people who talk don’t write”), she's cagey about where Sookie’s telepathic abilities came from, and she won’t say whether Sookie really wants to live her life with a vampire.

But with the skill of a Southern lady born and bred, she manages to avoid revealing those trade secrets very graciously during a phone conversation to her Little Rock home, where, she says, “a storm is rolling in.”

Storms are definitely rolling in to Bon Temps, Louisiana, in the 10th Southern Vampire novel, Dead in the Family. After being kidnapped and tortured during the Fae War in last year's Dead and Gone, you'd think Sookie Stackhouse might be in for some happier times. But though there are a few bright spots in Dead in the Family, there are also more obstacles for our intrepid heroine, especially when it comes to her relationship with Eric, the vampire sheriff in her district. There's a dead body in Sookie’s yard. Eric's maker returns, bringing a new “little brother” with some psychotic tendencies. Her first vampire beau, Bill, is slowly wasting away from silver poisoning. And Sookie's fairy cousin, Claude, is now her roommate.

“She’s facing a lot of challenges,” Harris says, “and she’s having to change in order to rise to them or to sink to them, as the case may be.”

Sometimes Sookie herself can’t decide. Though she’s still a churchgoer who wonders “what would Gran do,” her recent experiences have brought out a dark side. As Bill says, “No one could be . . . carefree and sunny . . . after coming as close to death as you did.” Sookie’s newfound anger is focused on two deserving vampires, however: Victor Madden, who oversees the Louisiana vampires and kept Eric from coming to Sookie’s rescue; and a Roman named Appius Livius Ocella, who happens to be Eric’s maker. Ocella has rolled into town unannounced with a new “child” in tow: Alexei, the Romanov tsarevich, whose violent past has left him even more bloodthirsty than your average vamp.

“She’s facing a lot of challenges, and she’s having to change in order to rise to them or to sink to them, as the case may be.”

Another family member who shows up to complicate Sookie and Eric’s relationship in Dead in the Family is Hunter, the five-year-old son of Sookie’s late cousin Hadley. After spending the weekend with Hunter—who’s also a telepath—Sookie can’t help but think about what she’d be missing if she stayed with Eric. “Certainly, when she looks at a child and realizes she can’t have one with Eric, that’s a sobering thought,” says Harris, who is the mother of three children, now grown.

Those are just a few of the conflicts that the inventive Harris, 58, manages to throw into the action-packed Dead in the Family—and the other Southern Vampire novels. “I’m easily bored and I’m always trying to think of ways to keep myself amused,” she says, and she takes readers along for the ride.

One of those readers is Alan Ball, the creator of shows like “Six Feet Under,” who used the novels as inspiration for the HBO series “True Blood,” now in its third season. She is a fan of the show, and has “a pretty good relationship” with the cast after accompanying them to events like Comic-Con and even making a cameo in the series’ second season. “I certainly think Kristin Bauer is very close to Pam. And Chris Bauer, who plays Andy Bellefleur, is exactly the way I imagined Andy Bellefleur!”

Though the novels were selling briskly before the TV adaptation, now Harris’ career has reached a whole new level—at one point last summer, all nine books in the Southern Vampire series were on the New York Times bestseller list, and she just returned from her first European book tour, which included Italy, England, Portugal and Poland. “They were all enthusiastic; it was really eye-opening and I’m really glad I did it,” she says.

Dead in the Family comes to an uneasy close, leaving several tantalizing storylines open for development in book 11—such as a possible new love interest for Bill. Like any good suspense author, Harris doesn’t want to spoil the surprise for fans, but she did offer one hint at an entirely new plot line: “There’s an elf in the next book. And believe me, you don’t want to meet up with an elf.”

Mystery & Suspense Suspense

Andrew Gross

Interview by Trisha Ping

Thriller writer Andrew Gross honed his writing skills collaborating with James Patterson on books like Jester. Four solo novels later, he's become a best-selling author in his own right and has started a popular series starring police detective Ty Hauck, a tough guy who always tries to do the right thing. In Reckless, Gross pits Hauck against a group of unlikely terrorists whose target is America's financial system. Though Hauck is no longer a detective, he can't let this case go since in solving it he will also avenge the death of a friend.

We asked Gross a few questions about the book, the thriller genre and what sparks a writer's imagination.

In Reckless, Ty Hauk is no longer a cop. How does this change his ability to act in the story? Has it changed his character?
No, he's not a cop—or I should say, head of detectives—but he's still an investigator at heart and what he finds at the outset of Reckless hurtles him back, unofficially, into his old role. He is constrained by the fact that he has no badge, but he learns to piece things together through guile and stubbornness and by circumventing the proper authorities. And his new boss, too, who wants this investigation tabled.

In the book he's forced to weigh his own immediate interest agains the vow he has made to a dead friend to avenge her death. He never feels completely at home in his new role, but his toughness, smarts and clear sense of right and wrong are still prominent, though, as you say, he is swimming in a different pond.

You have said you try to combine the personal and the global in your thrillers. In this novel, terrorists attack America through our financial system. Do you think such a thing is likely to happen in the future? Are you surprised it hasn't already?
I don't really think of myself as a "this could happen" guy, but more of a "what if" guy. I’m not sounding any alarm bells. I'm trying to entertain. What I like to do is deal in conspiracies—with something important at stake, and with meaningful consequences worth covering up, and, of course, killing for. That's why my books always build from something local and personal to something much wider with more at stake. I would say that, for sure, financial terrorism and attempts to destabilize our economy are underway on a large scale—and there is no doubt to me, after the names of the dead have been read and read many times over, the true, lasting cost of 9/11—between two wars, global security, etc. is reflected in our national deficit and the spending of trillions of needless and unproductive dollars.

What kind of research do you do for your books?
Not as much as some, but enough to sell my characters and scenes to the readers. I'm not an information source. I don't want to be thought of as some kind of expert. Certainly not on finance. I want to be credible for sure—but I want to entertain a hundred times more than edify. You don’t exactly need an MBA to enjoy Reckless. In years of business and living where I do [Westchester, NY], I’ve known dozens of high-up financial guys, but it's the desperation and panic of someone whose once-secure world has been turned upside down I wanted to get at. And to me, panic is universal.

Before writing your own (four) books, you previously collaborated with James Patterson on six novels. What did you learn from him about the writing process?
Jeez, that's a big question. Lots. Jim's brilliant, if not as a stylist, then as a conceiver of ideas, an editor and an innovator in thriller structure. Here are three examples: short, dramatic chapters that end with a punch and insidiously draw you to the next one. Tons of surprises and plot reversals right to the end. And making sure the reader is invested in your hero's plight within the first 10 pages. I think all writers could learn from that. Oh yeah—and maybe something about keeping the story moving, too!

What scares you?
Well, my 401k scares me! And I don't do creepy well. Not in the books, and I surely don't go to "scary" movies. But if it's a serious question, what truly scares me is probably the potential deterioration of our country through polarization, divisiveness, lack of education, poor use of capital and lack of a cohesive long-term strategy that may render us non-competitive in the next decades. Not very thriller-esque perhaps, but it's at the top of the list of what worries me.

Suspense is one of the most popular genres in the world. How do you explain its appeal?
You could make the case that genre fiction crime, suspense, etc., instead of being dismissed, is actually the most relevant form of fiction being written today—dealing with the issues and events that reflect the headlines and the crises that affect the world today. I like to write about life and death matters; I like to write about everyday characters measuring themselves up to heroism; I like to write stories with large consequences at stake. I like to raise the blood pressure and keep people gripped. I like my stories to move fast. And I think those things are what captivate readers of suspense, as well.

What are you working on next?
Not a Ty Hauck book—a stand-alone. It's called One Last Thing. We had a personal tragedy in my family last summer. My 21-year-old nephew, a troubled bi-polar kid, jumped off a cliff and sadly killed himself in California. My brother's only child. So I’m working on a plotline about teenage suicide, mental illness, and a 30-year-old revenge killing that leads back to a Manson-like family. It's a very personal book for me; some of the stories, true or apocryphal, are about my family. I think it will please. Then I'll go back to a Hauck book on the next one.

Fiction

Leah Stewart

Interview by Trisha Ping

Sarah and Nathan are just your average American couple: still in love after more than 10 years together, they have a toddler daughter and an infant son; Nathan is a well-regarded novelist poised for commercial success with the release of his new book, Infidelity. Sure, Sarah isn’t writing poetry much anymore, and she hates her day job, but sacrifices must be made in the name of family. Then Sarah learns that Nathan’s new book isn’t all drawn from his imagination. He cheated on her, at a writer’s retreat, while she was pregnant with their son.

Destroyed by Nathan’s confession, Sarah finds herself fixating on the affair she might have had—with an old friend who confessed his love for her on the eve of her marriage to Nathan. Though things never progressed further than an email flirtation, Sarah puts Rajiv on the list of things she gave up to become a wife and mother, and spends much of the book trying to figure out if that tally evens out at the end.

Heartbreaking and darkly humorous, Husband and Wife takes readers through the fallout from Nathan’s revelation. Infidelity has been the topic of novels since time immemorial, but Leah Stewart (Body of a Girl, The Myth of You and Me) is an acute social observer, and her take on this oldest of stories goes beyond the simple chronicling of an affair to ask deeper questions about how people change once they become adults, mates and eventually parents. Stewart answered a few questions about the book from her home in Cincinnati, Ohio, where she lives with her husband and two children.

Your previous novel, the Myth of You & Me, dealt with a rupture between friends, something that gets far less screen—or in this case, page!—time than a topic like infidelity. What made you tackle the topic? Did you worry about being able to bring fresh insight to it?
When I saw Todd Haynes' movie I'm Not There, I was really struck by the Heath Ledger/Charlotte Gainsbourg storyline. Their characters begin a romance as artists in perfect harmony with each others' priorities and needs, and then, after marriage and children, are pulled apart by the fact that she changes and he doesn't, and his resulting infidelity. This had me thinking about the affect of motherhood on both marriage and a woman's artistic identity, issues which had been on my mind not only because of personal experience but because of what I'd observed in the lives of my friends. Nathan's infidelity, and the resulting crisis in his marriage to Sarah, gave me an impetus for Sarah's examination of where her life has brought her and how happy she is with that.

I was worried about bringing fresh insight to the topic, but I always worry about that, and the only viable course of action with any well-trod topic is to focus on what interests you most about it and so hope to make your treatment of it particular. One of the things that was most interesting to me was the question of forgiveness, and whether the ability to forgive suggests weakness or strength. (This was an issue in my last novel as well.)

Sarah feels that becoming a mother and a wife has meant losing touch with herself as an artist, a poet. As a mother yourself, is that something you also struggle with?
It's something I struggled with in the year after the birth of my first child, when I didn't write at all and felt increasingly unmoored. Being a writer is such a large part of my identity that I had to find a way to go back to it, or I would have certainly become depressed. Sarah says at some point that being an artist requires a certain amount of selfishness. You have to insist on your right to the time to do the work, and on the value of that work and that time. Sometimes it's difficult to do be selfish in that way in the face of a small child's needs, especially as many women I know, whether they work or not, believe they're supposed to be perfect mothers, a belief the culture certainly reinforces. So I know some women who have set the artist part of themselves aside, or at least put it on hold, and chosen to make being a mother their primary identity. Having talked to them about that choice, and glimpsed that possibility in my own life, I'm curious about it. What do you gain? What do you lose?

One of the major themes in Husband & Wife is whether women can really have it all. Do you feel that they can?
Only if they have supportive husbands and/or good childcare.

How do men and women approach being a parent differently? Why do you think men are more able to keep their roles as person/father separate?
In the beginning, in my case anyway, part of it is hormones. As time goes on my guess is that the essential difference is in cultural concepts of motherhood vs. fatherhood. "Mother" is an identity in a way that "Father" is not. We still, as a culture, don't like for women to say that motherhood isn't enough for them, whereas men are expected to want more out of life than fatherhood. I was just talking to a friend, a male writer, about this. He's written articles on fatherhood and been showered with affection for the sentiments he expresses, and he said he gets credit just for saying he loves his children and wants to spend time with them. The bar is set a lot higher for women. We're supposed to love our children and want to spend time with them, so we have to go well beyond that before we qualify as good mothers. And often ambitious women want to succeed at motherhood as much as they have at other aspects of life. I have noticed that while women fret generally about being good mothers, some men fret specifically about being a good father to a son, which must be about worrying that they're not sufficiently manly to teach manliness to a boy. So I assume that's where men are feeling the cultural pressure to fulfill a gender role.

Many times Sarah wishes Nathan hadn't told her about the other woman in his life—and she has never told him about her feelings for Rajiv. Is honesty really the best policy?
My equivocal answer is: Not always. Nathan's honesty provokes Sarah to an evaluation of her life that perhaps will help her in the long run. But it also adds to her burdens at a time when she already has a lot of them. If his secret was making him behave differently than he otherwise would have, perhaps it was best to confess it. Otherwise he could have saved them a lot of heartache by keeping it to himself. And when Sarah keeps quiet, that's complicated, too. On the one hand she's choosing to forgo the revenge she'd get from hurting Nathan the same way he hurt her. But she's also retaining the power she has as the aggrieved party.

The fact that Sarah and Nathan have two children makes his betrayal worse, while at the same time making it harder, perhaps, for Sarah to refuse to take him back, since it's not only their romantic union at stake, but the preservation of the family unit. At one point in the novel Sarah says that "you become your choices. You embody them." Do you think forgiveness is a choice? How about love?
I started to say yes, I think both those things are choices, and then I hesitated. One of the things that fascinates me about human behavior is the degree to which we're programmed to make the choices we do. I've witnessed several friends endure difficult relationships for months or years before they end them. For a while they can't end them, and then at some point they can. So eventually they make a choice to walk away, but why were they able to make it then when they couldn't before? Something must have changed, in the situation, in their feelings, to make the choice possible. Here, for Sarah, the choice to end her marriage is theoretically possible, but one of the things she's wrestling with is that she's not sure she's capable of making it.

Without giving too much away, would you say your novel has a happy ending?
I'd say it has an adult version of a happy ending.

What are you working on next?
I'm working on a novel about siblings, and Cincinnati, and the ballet.

YA Fiction YA

Louis Sachar

Interview by Eliza Borné

In his Newbery Medal-winning novel Holes, Louis Sachar showed readers that he can turn a weird concept—digging holes in the desert—into a complex page-turner. Sachar’s latest novel is no different. Playing bridge? (Yes, the card game—the one octogenarians play.) With a blind great-uncle? That doesn’t sound like the recipe for a YA hit, but Sachar pulls it off in The Cardturner, also touching on themes that young people will relate to, like teen love and embarrassing parents.

The story follows Alton Richards in the summer before his senior year in high school. He works as the cardturner for his blind Uncle Lester—reading him the cards as they’re dealt during highly competitive bridge games—and along the way, he becomes fascinated with the game. Alton’s gold-digging parents set up the job so that the family might finagle their way into Lester’s will. There’s a mystery involved, too, as Alton figures out the story behind the disappearance of Lester’s perfect bridge partner of lore.

Since bridge is an unusual topic for a teen novel, BookPage asked Sachar—himself a devoted bridge player—to elaborate on his choice of subject.

Why did you think bridge would be interesting to young people?
Most people have the wrong impression about bridge, if they have any impression at all. Few young people have ever heard of bridge, and for those who have, they probably think of it as something old and fuddy-duddy. I hoped to present it as something new and exciting. It is highly competitive and full of limitless possibilities. But probably the best part of bridge, unlike chess, is that it is a partnership game. It’s you and your partner against the world. It’s also something a boy and girl can do together, like Toni and Alton in the book.

Your characters talk about bridge getting in the blood. When did bridge get in your blood? Why do you love the game?
I learned the game from my parents when I was a kid, and even then I was fascinated by it, but nobody I knew played. Then in 1994 when I was 40 years old, a sister of a friend invited me to play at a bridge club with her. We started out playing once a week, but I soon got hooked, and was playing two, three or even four times a week.

In the book, a player notes that “the time you quit learning is the time to quit playing.” Do you believe this is true?
Yes, I'm still learning to play bridge and to write. That's why I enjoy both. Neither gets old to me.

A point of pride for characters in The Cardturner is the accumulation of masterpoints. How many masterpoints do you have?
I currently have over 2,400 masterpoints. However I have less than ten platinum points, which are earned at major national events. My goal is to play in more of those events and to do well at them.

If you could choose three people to sit at your fantasy bridge table, who would they be?
You have to understand, as Syd Fox, my imaginary bridge expert explains in the appendix to The Cardturner, “it's all about the cards.” So while my fantasy dinner companions might include Bob Dylan, Barack Obama and Margaret Atwood, if they aren’t serious bridge players, I don’t want them at my table. Instead I would choose people who most people have never heard of, but who are very famous in the bridge world. I would want to be partners with Eddie Kantar, a great bridge writer who is also very funny, and we’d play against the partnership of Eric Rodwell and Jeff Meckstroth, who are considered to be the best bridge playing duo in the world.

Do you think most teens have a “philosophical bent,” like Alton?
Yes, especially those who like to read. I know I did when I was a teenager. My best friend and I would stay up all night discussing the mysteries of the universe.

Lester and Alton discuss a passage from Cannery Row, in which John Steinbeck notes how strange it is that the “traits we detest”—greed, egotism, self-interest—lead to success. Does the passage apply to Alton’s greedy parents, who want Lester’s money?
It was at a time in [Lester] Trapp’s life (in his early 20s) when he was trying to figure out what to do with his life. What kind of career should he set for himself? Can he be successful, without losing himself in the process? I think it is a quote that would have appealed to him, and would also appeal to young adult readers who will soon face that same dilemma. John Steinbeck is also one of my favorite authors, and one who is very accessible to young readers.

As a first-person narrator, Alton repeatedly makes reference to “this book” that he’s writing—the same book we’re reading. Why did you write from this point of view?
Going back to the first question, I knew my readers might be put-off by bridge, and find it confusing. I thought it would be helpful to have a narrator who was equally confused and uninterested by it, at least in the beginning.

Teens spend a lot of time in front of the computer, or watching TV, or texting. Do you agree with Lester that video games are just “little pixels of light”?
I worry about how much time kids spend plugged into computers, telephones and the like. I think it’s unhealthy for the individual, and also for the social fabric of our communities.

The subtitle of the book is “A novel about a king, a queen, and a joker.” Who is who—is Lester the king, Alton the joker and Toni—Alton’s bridge partner—the queen?
Alton is definitely the joker. I would say that [Lester] Trapp is the king and Annabel [Lester’s old partner] is the queen. Toni is the princess, but there's no card for that.

YA Fiction YA

Jackson Pearce

Interview by Eliza Borné

Jackson Pearce made her debut with As You Wish, a YA novel about a girl who accidentally summons a genie—and then falls in love with him. In Sisters Red, a contemporary retelling of “Little Red Riding Hood,” the plot is more intense: sisters Scarlett and Rosie fight the Fenris (aka werewolves) that prey on girls in their Georgia town.

Scarlett and Rosie have an occasionally strained relationship. Older sister Scarlett is the “tough” one—the physically strong hunter on a self-appointed mission to kill all the Fenris in the world. Rosie feels indebted to Scarlett for saving her life as a child, and though she wants to kill the wolves, she also longs for the normal life of a teenager. Complicating matters, Rosie is also in love with Silas, their hunting partner. Scarlett is in love with the hunt.

In an interview with BookPage, 25-year-old Pearce tells us about writing for an older teen audience, crafting a “kickass heroine” and her relationship with her own sister, which partly inspired the novel—the first in a new series.

Sisters Red is inspired by “Little Red Riding Hood,” but with a twist: this time the wolf—or rather, wolves—are fought, not feared. Did you read any previous retellings of the fairytale when you were working on the book?
I actually avoided other retellings at all costs until Sisters Red was written and lightly revised. I was terrified that reading something else would mess with my mythology, or I’d see a great idea and be unable to use it since it was already someone else’s. I did, however, read every version of the actual fairytale I could find—French; German; U.S., Disney-fied sweet versions; super dark original versions. I think by reading the fairytale in its many incarnations, I was more able to find the heart of the story and stick to it.

Did your relationship with your own sister—to whom the book is dedicated—inspire any of the scenes between Scarlett and Rosie?
I think my relationship with my sister inspired and influenced the entire book, to be honest! But there are several scenes that I plucked straight from our childhood. Specifically, one where Rosie is lamenting how when Scarlett got poison ivy, she was allowed to sleep in their mother’s bed, and another where both Scarlett and Rosie visit an apple harvest festival and everyone is dressed up in apple-themed clothing and kids have paper apples stapled to their shirts. I have a photo of Katie riding her bike, covered in paper apples with apples painted on her cheeks. I have really big blackmail plans for that photo . . .

Many early reader reviews of Sisters Red have focused on Scarlett’s role as a fierce heroine. What do you think makes a character fierce or powerful; is it physical strength, the willingness to kill, cleverness or is there more to it?
I think there’s always more to it. Scarlett is immensely physically powerful—I wouldn’t want to meet her in an alley! But she’s also emotionally fragile, desperate and scared. Rosie is not quite as strong as her sister, but is more confident in herself and her relationships, more willing to let herself be happy. They’re both strong—just in very different ways. Neither is necessarily superior, and those obviously aren’t the only “versions” of strength in the world.

The Fenris are portrayed as sexual predators. The fight scenes don’t shy away from graphic violence (a ripped-off elbow comes to mind). Did you worry about alienating fans of As You Wish, which is written for a younger audience (12 & up vs. 15 & up)? Did you set out to write a book with more “mature” content?
I won’t lie, I am worried that fans of As You Wish will be shocked to read Sisters Red, but I couldn’t let that stop me from writing Scarlett and Rosie’s story the way it needed to be written—and the truth is, there’s just no pretty, happy, sweet way for a werewolf to eat innocent girls. Trying to tone down the violence would have felt like lying.

You’ve said that the names in Sisters Red have significance—Rosie and Scarlett are both related to the color red, and their last name, March, is a reference to Little Women. Can you identify some of the other name references?
Silas’ name means forest/wood, and the apartment they move to is on Andern street—Andern is a city where the Grimm brothers lived. The house number, 333, is the number that Little Red Riding Hood is classified as on the Aarne-Thompson classification system for folktales. Screwtape the cat is named after The Screwtape Letters by C.S. Lewis.

Will Scarlett, Rosie or Silas ever make an appearance in another Sisters Red book?
I’m not sure at this point. The upcoming book, Sweetly, is a companion, not a direct sequel, as is the projected third book in the series. I would love to return to Scarlett, Rosie and Silas, I just don’t have a story for them yet!

Sweetly, the second book in the Sisters Red series, is inspired by “Hansel and Gretel.” The third book, Fathomless, is a retelling of “The Little Mermaid. Are you interested in adapting other fairytales?
I love, love, love adapting fairytales, and as long as the ideas keep coming, I’ll keep writing them. I don’t currently have any books planned beyond Fathomless, but I can see that changing in the future.

What drew you to write supernatural novels? Why do you think this genre is so popular with teens right now?I’ve always loved to read supernatural novels, so it only seemed natural that I’d also enjoy writing them. I think the genre is especially popular recently because authors are taking more and more risks—adding romance, sexuality, violence, religion, etc. to books that might have been “neutered” 15 years ago, making the stories even more relatable than before.

What young adult writers influenced you?
I loved Lynne Reid Banks’ The Indian in the Cupboard, the Boxcar Children series and Harry Potter, as well as classics like Fahrenheit 451 and To Kill a Mockingbird. But to be honest, I think every book you read influences you in someway, for better or worse!

Sisters Red has been described as Little Red Riding Hood meets Buffy the Vampire Slayer. Are you happy with this comparison? Are you a Buffy fan?
I’m mixed on this—on the one hand, I love Buffy, so. . . hurrah! But on the other, I don’t personally think the two stories have THAT much in common. Buffy has an entourage, musical moments, she essentially has superpowers and can come back from the dead. Scarlett and Rosie. . . not so much. I am, however, thrilled that my characters are being compared to such an iconic, kickass heroine.

RELATED CONTENT

Read our review of Sisters Red.

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Fiction

Emily St. John Mandel

Interview by Stephenie Harrison

Canadian-born author Emily St. John Mandel burst onto the literary scene in 2009 with her debut, Last Night in Montreal. Her second novel, The Singer’s Gun, is May 2010’s #1 Indie Next Pick, and praise is mounting from booksellers and reviewers alike. BookPage spoke with St. John Mandel about the inspiration behind her novels, immigration issues and the worst job she’s ever had.

There are a lot of heavy issues (ranging from immigration fraud to human trafficking) in The Singer’s Gun. Where did you get your inspiration for the book, and why did you feel you needed to tell this story?
I've always had an interest in immigration. My father emigrated from the United States to Canada, and then 30 years later I emigrated from Canada to the United States. Human trafficking is immigration’s dark shadow.

Around the time I began the book I was thinking a lot about marriage, having spent the previous months planning my wedding, and there was a story I'd recently heard that stayed with me—it concerned a man who’d realized on his honeymoon that he’d made a mistake. The feeling was apparently mutual; the couple divorced amicably about six months later. I feel that it should be possible to base a novel on just about anything, so I began with that premise: What if a man left his wife on their honeymoon? The entire novel unwound from there. Various interests (immigration, passport fraud, figureheads, container ships, the idea of holiness) adhered themselves over time, and after a few years of concentrated effort I had a book.

This might of course change with future books, but for my first two novels it hasn’t really been a matter of needing to tell any particular story—it’s more that I start with an image, or a sentence, or some vague premise, and the final book is the story I end up with at the end of the process.

One of the main characters in The Singer’s Gun is a Canadian whose lifelong dream is to live in New York City, even if it means living there illegally. You also happen to be Canadian and live in Brooklyn—how did you wind up there? Are there any other parallels between you and your Canadian literary counterpart?
I gave my Canadian literary counterpart an unpleasant work environment that had aspects of one or two of my least favorite jobs, and when I first came here I thought I was an illegal alien—it was a happy surprise to discover that because my father was born and raised in California, I’d actually been an American all along—but the similarities end there. None of my characters are based on anyone in particular.

I took a circuitous route from Canada to Brooklyn. Living in New York City wasn’t my lifelong dream—I actually never thought when I was younger that I’d end up living in the United States. I grew up on the west coast of British Columbia, and went to school in Toronto, so that was what brought me over to this side of the continent. A year or so after I graduated from the School of Toronto Dance Theatre, I had a boyfriend in New York, so I moved down there to be with him. After five months or so we ended up moving to Montreal together, and then after a few months in Montreal I missed New York City so much that I moved back here on my own. I’ve been in New York for about seven years.

Before you broke into publishing, you studied dance, which seems like an unconventional warm-up to becoming an author. What made you switch paths?
I was home-schooled as a child, and one of the very few requirements of my somewhat haphazard curriculum was that I write something every day. So I’d actually been writing for almost as long as I can remember—I was in the habit of writing short stories and poems from a very early age. Even when I was a dancer, I used to take notes for stories all the time. At a certain point in my early 20s, I found that dance was beginning to feel like more of a burden than a joy, and I started taking fewer and fewer dance classes, going to fewer auditions, and writing much more seriously than I ever had before. It was a very slow and gradual progression from thinking of myself as a dancer who sometimes wrote to thinking of myself as a writer who used to be a dancer.

There’s a very international scope to your fiction. Do you attribute this to your own experiences of having lived as an immigrant in a foreign country?
Yes, I think it’s probably fair to say that my experience of having lived in more than one country has shaped the way I write. Living in a country other than the one you grew up in is an experience that I think everyone should have at some point in their lives, if at all possible—it changes the way you see the world.

The issue of identity theft and escape comes into play in this novel. If you could be anyone else, who would you be and why?
Good question . . . there are certain aspects of other peoples’ lives and careers that I admire—it would be nice to be able to play the piano like Horowitz, for example, or to have enough money to travel the world and spend concentrated amounts of time in southern Italy—but I can’t think of anyone else I’d rather be. I think I’ve been very lucky.

One of the interesting similarities between The Singer’s Gun and your first novel, Last Night in Montreal, is that both novels deal with issues of identity. Is this a topic that you’ve personally struggled with?
Not really, although it’s certainly a topic that I’ve thought about a lot. At a certain point in my life I acquired a second passport, and suddenly having citizenship in more than one country of course somewhat complicates the way you think of yourself. I also changed my name when I got married, and changing your name forces you to consider questions of identity—I took my husband’s last name, Mandel, and dropped my maiden name altogether. (St. John is my middle name; it was my grandmother’s surname.)

Anton has many secrets that he’s willing to risk his life for . . . what about you?
There are a few people I’d risk my life for, and possibly even a cause or two, but I can’t say that I have any secrets that fall under that category.

Some of the characters in your novel have some pretty terrible jobs—what’s the worst job you’ve ever had?
I think the worst job I ever had was probably my two-week stint as a cocktail waitress in Toronto. I liked making martinis and I thought the bar where I worked was beautiful, but I got yelled at a lot, the pay was terrible, the manager’s 70-year-old dad kept hitting on me and the management stole most of my tips. There was another job where I had to unload trucks outdoors at 7 a.m. in Montreal in the wintertime, which was difficult only because it was so breathtakingly cold and it involved getting up at 5:30 a.m.

In general, the worst jobs for me have been the ones where I’ve had to work for unpleasant people, or where the work environment has been generally tense, and I’ve had three jobs like that over the years—the waitressing job and two offices that I worked in. But in case my boss is reading this, let me hasten to add that I very much enjoy my present position.

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Literature Arts & Culture

Sam Barry

Interview by Trisha Ping

There are a lot of confused would-be writers out there—a fact that no one knows better than our own Author Enablers, Kathi Kamen Goldmark and Sam Barry. Both published authors in their own right, they've now compliled some of their best advice in Write That Book Already!, a compendium of tough love and savvy advice for writers of all stripes. We asked Sam & Kathi (hey, after 5 years we're on a first-name basis) to share a few of their #1 tips. Want more? Read their book already, or check their column in every issue of BookPage.

What is the #1 reason writers should buy your book?
Write That Book Already! provides an accessible, no-nonsense, complete overview of the publishing process from inspiration to backlist. We also include insight and personal stories from other authors and publishing professionals, a handy glossary of publishing terms, tips for getting through the rough spots, and a laugh or two.

What’s the #1 myth about getting a book published?
That becoming a published author will automatically make you rich and famous—or even just make it possible for you to quit your day job. The vast majority of published authors also do other work to make a living.

What’s the #1 thing that keeps someone from writing the book they’ve always dreamed of writing?
It’s tough to maintain the discipline and confidence required to go the distance. Some writers have trouble getting a manuscript completed; others have trouble with the business end, i.e. the hard work of finding a publisher.

What’s the #1 question you get from prospective authors?
“How do I find an agent?” The funniest question came from a middle-school student who wanted us to do his homework for him.

What's the #1 way to tell that you're meant to be an author?
You love reading, you can’t stop writing, and your lifelong fantasy involves a book cover that says by You, the Author.

What is the #1 skill prospective authors should have (besides, ahem, the ability to write)?
The discipline to keep at it day after day over time, no matter what distractions come your way.

What's the #1 way for an author to reach #1 on the bestseller list?
Oprah. Just call her up. And please, put in a good word for us.

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