All Interviews

Memoir

Carlos Eire

After Waiting for Snow in Havana unexpectedly won a National Book Award in 2003, Carlos Eire began hearing from schools asking him to apply for jobs teaching Cuban history. His evocative memoir of growing up in Cuba when Fidel Castro was coming to power had led many people to assume that his academic specialty was the history of his native country.

“I had to tell them, ‘I’m sorry, you have the wrong man,’ ” Eire says with a characteristic warm, wry laugh during a call to his home in Guilford, Connecticut. “People are often extremely surprised to learn that I teach late medieval and early modern European religious history.”

In fact, in his non-memoirist identity—the one where he spent his early career studying John Calvin and Calvinism, where he writes scholarly, footnoted tomes on such matters as the early Reformation and “the art and craft of dying in 16th-century Spain,” and where he currently teaches a two-semester survey course on “all 2,000 years” of Catholic church history—Carlos M.N. Eire is the T. Lawrason Riggs professor of history and religious studies at Yale University.

But for eight weeks in the summer of 2009, writing mostly at night in his office above the family garage, Eire once again put aside his professorial identity and “got back to footnote-less writing.” The resulting memoir, Learning to Die in Miami: Confessions of a Refugee Boy, is just as vivid and compelling as its predecessor. It, too, flashes with Eire’s jubilant humor and inventive wit. But it also tells a story that is shadowed by sadness.

Learning to Die in Miami opens with the 11-year-old Eire’s arrival in Miami in 1962. Along with his older brother, Tony, he was one of 14,000 children who fled Castro’s Cuba in what became known as the Pedro Pan airlift. “When the flights ceased abruptly in October of 1962,” Eire says, “there were still 80,000 on the island waiting to leave.” Among those was the boys’ mother. So for the next three years the brothers bounced miserably from place to place until they were finally reunited with their mother in Chicago, where things changed without getting all that much better.

Up to a point, Eire says, his story is a representative one. “For all of us, there was the pattern of arriving at the camps and being sent somewhere else. Many of us were sent to institutions or to foster families. Many of us bounced from one place to another. And then there was the even more painful part of the pattern—reuniting with your family. . . . [You] had to care for your mom. You had to go apartment hunting and find an apartment rather than the adult, because the adult was totally clueless and helpless and didn’t speak the language.”

But as common as it might be, Eire’s story also had its own unique miseries. Chief among them is the surprisingly long time he and his brother spent at a place Eire calls with withering irony the Palace Ricardo. An unholy mix of a Dickensian orphanage and Lord of the Flies, it was a quasi-institution whose proprietors resented the privileged backgrounds of Eire and his brother and allowed the older, bigger, more criminally inclined boys to prey upon the younger ones.

“It was a kind of crucible,” Eire says. “I had to decide who I was. Was I going to be like these thugs? Was I going to be intimidated by them or not? It taught me a lot about human nature, too. You come to terms with who you are. Most people come to that gradually through adolescence as they become adults. Being in a place like that, you have to come to terms with it very abruptly and definitively.”

And the impact of those experiences carries forward to this very day. “It has made it very difficult for me to be a good parent,” Eire—the father of a son in high school and another son and a daughter in college—says ruefully. “When they’re having problems—I’ve learned not to do this because it backfires—but my [instinct] is to say, ‘After all I went through? You have it so easy. Why don’t you just get up and go?’ That’s not a good thing to do. I have to put myself in their place, and that’s nearly impossible for me to do.”

As he movingly relates in Learning to Die in Miami, Eire found both solace and direction through his interest in school, an interest his brother did not share, and through a book: The Last Temptation of Christ. “It’s a very funny thing, this book,” Eire says. “You were only allowed to take one book with you from Cuba. I very quickly outgrew the three changes of clothing I had brought with me. So the two things that were left to me that were physical contact with my family were the religious medal my dad gave me and this book. Plus my mother and grandmother had given me instructions that if I ever had a problem I should just open the book at random and I would find an answer. I kept doing that but I wasn’t ready. ”

Eire’s memories of the events he describes so vividly in Learning to Die in Miami came flooding back to him during a 2009 trip to Eastern Europe. The minute he set foot in Prague, he says, “I knew immediately that I was back in the Soviet empire, or former empire, and I felt like a double exile. . . . Here I was in the very place my parents had tried to keep me from back then. It made me feel really weird and it just kept escalating as I traveled farther and farther. The high point was being in Berlin and seeing the remnants of the Wall and being able to move freely, so freely, on a bicycle between East and West. It just blew my mind. It reawakened all sorts of feelings and memories. And a lot of it was kind of painful. There was a lot of pain involved in thinking that for 20 years now these people have been free, and my people are not.”

Then Eire tells a humorous anecdote. While in the Czech Republic, he discovered there was a Museum of Communism. It amazed him and it set him to questioning who he was. “I wondered: Am I an item to be exhibited in the Museum of Communism? Or am I supposed to be a visitor to the Museum of Communism? I asked one of our Czech tour guides—she was about my age—‘Hey, have you been to the Museum of Communism?’ She said [here Eire exaggerates a curt, indignant Eastern European accent], ‘I do not need to see it. I lived in it.’ ”

Eire says he returned from that trip feeling exactly the same intense inspiration he felt when he began writing Waiting for Snow in Havana. He worked nights, writing from memory in a kind of white heat. The result is a book that, like its predecessor, is a deeply affecting portrait of a difficult boyhood, an unusual coming-of-age story that combines laughter with an abiding sense of sorrow.

After Waiting for Snow in Havana unexpectedly won a National Book Award in 2003, Carlos Eire began hearing from schools asking him to apply for jobs teaching Cuban history. His evocative memoir of growing up in Cuba when Fidel Castro was coming to power had led many…

Memoir

Lisa Scottoline

Lisa Scottoline answers her phone. “Hello?” she says. “Hello?” At least, I think that’s what she says. Hard to tell with the multiple dogs barking hoarsely and frantically in the background.

She hangs up. I call back. “Hello?” she says, laughing. “Can you call my cell phone? I can’t hear you well on this phone.” I call her cell phone, joking about how glad I am to have her secret backup number. This sends her into peals of laughter.

“Yes, it’s my secret phone number,” she says drily. “If you know any single men age 55, please pass it along.”

Thus begins a raucous conversation with one of today’s most prolific and popular writers. In addition to her new collection of essays, My Nest Isn’t Empty, It Just Has More Closet Space, in March Scottoline published her 17th suspense novel, Think Twice, which promptly hit the New York Times bestseller list.

For this dog-loving, Diet Coke-swilling single mom, no topic is taboo in conversation or in writing. Her essays—many of which are culled from her Philadelphia Inquirer column “Chick Wit”—explore the minutiae of middle age, from facial hair to watching her daughter move out of the nest and into the big city. That daughter, 24-year-old Francesca Scottoline Serritella, contributes several effervescent essays to the collection.

The new book’s subtitle, “The Amazing Adventures of an Ordinary Woman,” is Scottoline’s nod to the unsung women who she believes make the world go around.

“We live in a culture that is obsessed with Batman and Iron Man and superpowers, and that usually morphs into fiction with men with all kinds of abilities,” Scottoline says. “I always thought, where is that voice for women? Where is the ordinary woman who really does have superpowers? Anybody who has more than two dogs and more than two children, you have superpowers. Anybody who has a dog and a job has superpowers. Anyone with a successful marriage, you have superpowers. Anyone who makes dinner every night and manages not to make chicken every other night, you have superpowers. These are the stuff of everyday life. Instead of ignoring it, I wanted to highlight it and celebrate it.”

She doesn’t just celebrate everyday life—she jumps in and swims in it. No subject is too big (aging parents) or too small (clogged drains). Scottoline examines everything with a razor wit and a keen eye for how the little stuff can add up to a big life.

In perhaps her bravest essay in this collection (and that’s saying something for a woman with a book titled Why My Third Husband Will Be a Dog), Scottoline writes about the horror of finding a gray chin hair.

“The truth is, unless you’re wincing just a little, you’re not writing about something that matters,” Scottoline says. “I want everything original and fresh and real. Cutesy, twee, trite: I don’t want to be any of that. I want it to be real and true.”

It’s this willingness to not just expose but flaunt her flaws that endears Scottoline to her readers. She readily admits that she is quite possibly an animal hoarder (two cats and four dogs—beloved dog Angie died this summer). She has a full toolbox of procrastination tools, including an unhealthy addiction to weather.com. (“It’s not a time waster,” she insists. “It’s an avoidance behavior, which is slightly different.”)

But if there is a central theme to My Nest Isn’t Empty, it’s that there’s value in finding peace with yourself, warts and all. In an essay titled “Unexpected,” Scottoline writes about spending one Christmas without her daughter Francesca:

“You should know that Daughter Francesca and I have spent every Christmas together ever since she was one, when Thing One and I divorced,” Scottoline writes. “She would spend Christmas Eve with him, and the day with me, and we were all happy about that, or at least as happy as anybody can be when their kid has to split herself in two.”

She and her best friend, Franca, headed to the movies to drown their sorrows in Diet Coke, Raisinets and Meryl Streep. Turns out an entire theater of women had the same idea. Scottoline realized in that moment, laughing with a room full of strangers at a chick flick on Christmas, that it was OK to be happy, in a different way.

“I’d love to have a man in my life or a marriage that lasted longer than the average hard-boiled egg, but this is real life,” Scottoline says. “I don’t want people who have that life, too, to feel ‘less than.’ I stand in for them.”

That’s not to say that her two divorces (from Thing One and Thing Two) have left her completely cold to the idea of marrying again. In a recent Inquirer column, she even wrote, “A half-glass of wine, and I’m off and running. A margarita and I might remarry.”

So . . . could a third time be the charm?

“The prerequisite is a date,” she laughs. “It ain’t easy to get a date at 55 when you have gray chin hair and you never leave the house.” (It should be mentioned here that photos of Scottoline sprinkled throughout the book reveal a vibrant,  fit woman with laughing eyes and really good hair.)

“I wouldn’t rule it out,” she concludes coyly. “You never know. Men read BookPage, right?”

Lisa Scottoline answers her phone. “Hello?” she says. “Hello?” At least, I think that’s what she says. Hard to tell with the multiple dogs barking hoarsely and frantically in the background.

She hangs up. I call back. “Hello?” she says, laughing. “Can you call my…

Children's & YAPicture Book

Jeff Foxworthy

Comedian and TV host Jeff Foxworthy moves into the realm of children's books with Hide!!!, a picture book that reminds children of the fun to be had playing outside with only their imaginations. In our Q&A, he shares why getting off the couch is important, how his daughters inspire him and whether he really is smarter than a fifth grader.

Why did you decide to write children's books?
I had always had the idea in the back of my mind that I could write a children's book. When I started hosting "Are You Smarter than a 5th Grader" suddenly every kid knew who I was. My daughters said, "Dad, if you are ever going to write a children's book now is the time." I thought, "Oh this will be easy." Then you realize you are working with a restricted vocabulary. It has to rhyme, be funny and make sense. And there is an almost musical rhythm to it. After about three days I thought, "No wonder Dr. Seuss is such a big deal! This is hard!"

Hide!!! encourages kids to turn off the TV and be active with friends. Do you think kids are more likely to be couch potatoes now than when you were a kid? How can we fix this?
We really didn't have the option of being couch potatoes when I was growing up. There were only three television channels and the only kid's programming was on Saturday morning. We always played outside until we could hear Mom calling us (not by cell phone but with her hands cupped around her mouth) that it was dinner time.

I recently read an article that said that children that play outside develop better problem solving skills and have a stronger ability to work within a group. But my generation, as parents, has been so overprotective that we have taken away many of those opportunities. I'm not sure how you fix it. Sometimes I think we probably stagnate our children's emotional growth by not letting them have some separation from us.

What was your favorite book when you were a kid?
I was always a big fan of Dr. Seuss. He didn't write for adults, he wrote for kids. If he had to make up a word to make a sentence rhyme, so be it. To this day you can't find many adults that can't quote at least a few lines ofGreen Eggs and Ham. They were books you read over and over again and they still hold up decades later.

Which five authors would you like to have dinner with?
Matthew, Mark, Luke, John and Jamie Leigh Curtis.

Fill in the blank: "You might be a redneck kid if….."
"All of your kisses taste like peanut butter."

Fess up: are you smarter than a fifth grader?
I've said that if they didn't give me the answers that would be the shortest show on TV. We often have celebrities come on the show and play for charity. The fifth graders were trying to talk me into doing it. I told them, "It's better if everybody just thinks Mr. Jeff is an idiot than to take the test and prove them right!" 

Comedian and TV host Jeff Foxworthy moves into the realm of children's books with Hide!!!, a picture book that reminds children of the fun to be had playing outside with only their imaginations. In our Q&A, he shares why getting off the couch is important, how…

YA FictionYA

Rick Yancey

In last year’s The Monstrumologist, Rick Yancey introduced readers to a terrifying world much like our own, where monsters are not only real but also the subject of scientific study. Now the adventures of Dr. Pellinore Warthrop and his young ward, Will Henry, continue in The Curse of the Wendigo. Readers who couldn’t put down The Monstrumologist—or who couldn’t sleep after finishing it—will not be disappointed in Yancey’s follow-up, which serves up at least as much blood and guts as its predecessor.

After tracking him for days across a frozen wasteland, following a trail of destruction, entrails and eyeballs, BookPage caught up with Rick Yancey long enough to ask him a few questions about the appeal of horror, the line between fact and fiction—and what really scares him.

What inspired you to mix real science and history with myth and legend in this series? More than once I had to stop and separate fact from fiction, then doubted my own memory as to what was “real.”
The tension between fact and fiction is wholly intentional and meant to create a sense of unease in the reader. This harkens back to our childhood: What is that noise under my bed? What was that shadow in the closet? The sound and sight were real phenomena—and our overactive imaginations fill in the cause. The Monstrumologist is history with a single element altered: that monsters are indeed real biological organisms with a singular defining characteristic: They want to eat us. So I must be “true” to history while also staying true to that one conceit. It is lovely to hear I was successful, at least with one reader.

You indicated that a lot of research and fact-checking went into this book. How important was it to have so much “reality” in what is (hopefully) a work of fiction?
It’s a work of fiction. I swear. Please believe me. It is fiction. Sleep well tonight.

In The Curse of the Wendigo, I was relieved to see Dr. Warthrop begin to think more kindly of Will. Then I was relieved of that relief when he went right back to screaming at him. Will that push and pull in their relationship continue to evolve over time?
It would be pretty boring if it didn’t! Life depends on evolution and I certainly don’t intend to have their relationship rotting away like a corpse. Nothing is more boring than a book or series with static relationships; it’s like watching paint dry. Now I understand there are some books that actually play to this and writers who make a lot of money by “creating” cookie-cutter plots and stock characters, and even publishers who support their businesses with the equivalent of fast food: bland, generic and utterly predictable. Let’s face it, when you order your Quarter Pounder, you know it’s going to taste exactly the same as your Quarter Pounder from last week.

It’s interesting that “Rick Yancey” is kind of the über-narrator of this whole story. Why did you choose to enter the narrative?
The first reason has to do with the blurring of fact and fiction. The second probably has to do with my ego, which is about the size of the solar system (including Pluto).

Do you have a planned endpoint for the series? And will there come a point when you’ve run out of places to stick an eyeball for maximum gross-out? Seriously, though, how do you keep the gore fresh?
I would be happy to continue the series as long as the publisher would be happy to have me continue. After all, Will Henry lived to the ripe old age of 131, so the potential is there for dozens of stories. As for the gore . . . this isn’t butterfly collecting—this is hunting down horrifying, nightmarish creatures that depend upon our meat for their survival. I think you have to show what this means. As a reader, I would feel cheated if that basic premise was not explored to its fullest.

On that note, some of the scenes in this book were not just incredibly gross, but shocking, too. You already have a terrific mystery and very scary story—what prompted you to top those off with such terrifying tableaux?
Why do we cover our eyes in scary movies only to peek through our fingers? That’s what I’m doing as a writer—peeking through my fingers.

Why do we still love to be “safely” scared by books or movies?
Boy, I don’t know. I saw Paranormal Activity and didn’t sleep well for days. I kept waking up expecting to see my wife hovering over me with a death-stare. I really don’t care much for horror films, though I admire films like The Exorcist and Silence of the Lambs, but I admire them for elements other than the scary parts—acting, writing, direction. I went through a Stephen King phase in my 20s but haven’t picked up a book of his since. Never read Lovecraft, which is funny, since a lot of readers compared The Monstrumologist to his work.

Do you think that love of horror is, on some level, a “guy thing”? Who do you consider the audience for these books to be?
I don’t think the horror genre is a guy thing. Fear is a human thing. It’s practically the first emotion we have. It’s merciful, in a sense, that we cannot remember the utter horror of being ejected from our mothers’ wombs into a cold, brutally bright world so alien to anything we’ve experienced. The series is marketed to young adults, but based on feedback I’ve received, as many adults as teens have read the books. When I write, I don’t consider the age of my audience, beyond assuming they are old enough to read. I try to be true to the characters and, since I write in the first person, to a particular character’s voice. I purposefully don’t “dumb it down” in consideration of how the publisher has chosen to market the books.

What scared the living daylights out of you when you were the age of your readers? Did it influence the ways you build suspense and set scenes in this series?
My biggest fear (then and now): social situations. In my teens, I worked part-time at a cattle ranch, and working with farm animals often plunges you elbow-deep into some pretty disgusting things. I became acquainted with the stench of decay early. When people ask this question, I always think back to when I was 10 or 11 and had a terrible nightmare in which some huge, hulking, faceless shadow was chasing me . . . it couldn’t find me, but I knew in my dream it was only a matter of time until it did and then I could be assured it was going to rip me limb from limb. That dream stayed with me and is probably the germ for The Monstrumologist.

What makes this a “teen” novel? Stephen King is shelved in adult fiction, but these books are both scarier and grosser than many of his. (Wait, did I answer my own question?)
The line between YA and “adult” grows more blurry by the day. What is it that separates them? A young protagonist? Content? The “message?” I don’t really know, and maybe you have answered your own question. Thanks for the comparison to King, though, which I will take as a compliment.

Read our review of The Curse of the Wendigo.

In last year’s The Monstrumologist, Rick Yancey introduced readers to a terrifying world much like our own, where monsters are not only real but also the subject of scientific study. Now the adventures of Dr. Pellinore Warthrop and his young ward, Will Henry, continue in…

FictionDebut Fiction

Charles Elton

How does it feel to be immortalized in fiction by a parent? That’s the central question of Mr Toppit, British author Charles Elton’s debut.

Mr Toppit is your first novel, but you’ve worked in the book business for many years. Have you seen fame affect a writer and his family the way it does the Hayman clan?
When I was a Literary Agent in the 1980's I worked for the firm that represented the Estate of A.A.Milne and I learnt the story of how much his son, Christopher Robin Milne, hated being in Winnie The Pooh and how it blighted his life. He ended up totally estranged from his parents. I also knew the huge sums of money that came in for the Estate, more than 50 years after the books' publication. That was the inspiration for my book—really the only idea I had when I started it, though the details. I was lucky in that, during the 15 years it took me to write my book, the Harry Potter books began to be published and suddenly my notion of a series of children's books “taking over the world” didn't seem so far-fetched. Since I've worked in television drama, I've seen many actors affected by the sudden fame a part can bring them. Not always a pretty sight.

Speaking of the Hayman clan, they’re an extremely compelling and absurd bunch. Were these portraits drawn from anyone in your life?
There are many autobiographical elements in the book. Sometimes, I took real characters I knew and put them in my fictional setting. Lila, the German illustrator, is based entirely on my sisters' German teacher at school, who became obsessed with our family. Laurie's mother Alma is based on my sister's mother-in-law, who really did call the police accusing her blameless son of trying to kill her. My mother was run over and killed by a cement truck, in the way that happens to the father in my book.

With Luke as the series’ star and Rachel omitted entirely, you’ve set up an interesting dichotomy. Which child do you think got the better deal?
It's interesting to weigh up whether Rachel or Luke get the better deal. In an ideal world, if Rachel had been a more stable character, I think she would have got the better deal, but her own demons bring her down. In a strange way, Luke—because of his detachment—is probably the best able to cope with the fame the Hayseed books bring, even though he hates it.

Was it always your intent to leave out the plot of The Hayseed Chronicles? Why did you choose to do so?
It was a very conscious decision. I wanted to give a flavour and hint at the enigmas but leave it to the reader to imagine what the books might be like. If I had included more, it would have all become too “solid.” As one of the reasons for the Hayseed books’ success is the way that everyone interprets the character of Mr Toppit in their own ways, I wanted my small excerpts to do the same thing.

The success of the Hayseed Chronicles is due almost entirely to chance. These days, it’s said that a publisher’s commitment dictates sales, but do you think there are still real-life books that could take off in such a fashion?
I think it happens less than it used to, but there are examples of books taking off by chance, or just word of mouth. The first Harry Potter book was bought by the publishers for a tiny advance and there was no marketing push. Also (I think) Lionel Shriver's We Need to Talk About Kevin took off (in England, anyway) without any pushing by the publishers. With the proliferation of Reading Groups, I think it could happen more. Conversely, there are many examples of large advances and massive hype that don't pay off in sales for publishers. I'm not even sure that good reviews help that much always. There's nothing like people simply loving a book and passing it on.

You do a terrific (and often quite funny) job of showing the difference between English and American sentiments. You’ve already published to much acclaim in the U.K.; do you think your book will be received differently in the States?
When my book came out in England last year, there was a lot of publicity. Penguin constructed a campaign and a website that looked like a fan site devoted to the (fictional) Hayseed books. On the day of publication, they took out a full-page ad in The London Times purporting to be a statement from 'The Hayseed Foundation' threatening legal action against my book Mr Toppit as if it were an unauthorized and possibly libelous biography of the Hayman family. The morning radio picked up the news and I got a lot of calls from friends worried that I might be heading for prison. The reviews were lovely, and getting onto the “Richard and Judy Book Show” (the U.K. equivalent of “Oprah”) helped turn it into a success. But, of course, the U.S. is a different market and it means a huge amount to me that the book works in the U.S. For one thing, I love the U.S. and lived in Los Angeles when I was an agent. But I think, because quite a lot of the book takes place in America, it will read differently to a U.S. audience—for one thing, the English sections will be the “foreign” ones. And, as Mr Toppit is about a series of books that become famous in America, I'd find it pretty painful if my book falls flat there!

Even though Mr Toppit is very much an adult book, what do you think grownups can learn from children’s literature?
One of the themes of my book is the difference between being a child and an adult. What I love about the best children's books—and one of the reasons I adapted several into films when I was producing drama—is that they show how clear-sighted children are, how things tend to be right or wrong, and how this gets compromised by the adult world for whom the gradations between right and wrong are infinite and confusing. To Kill a Mockingbird is one of the best examples of this, and a book I (and everyone else) love.

We have to ask. Who is Mr Toppit and what would finding him achieve?
I wish I knew the answer to this, and one of the points of my book is how differently he can be interpreted. For me, he's the dark at the top of the stairs, the questions we don't want answered, the place in our soul that we'd rather not go to, but mostly The Man Who Knows Too Much about all of us. But maybe—on the other hand—he's just a mirage, or some kind of mental optical illusion signifying a lot, but meaning nothing.

 

 

 

How does it feel to be immortalized in fiction by a parent? That’s the central question of Mr Toppit, British author Charles Elton’s debut.

Mr Toppit is your first novel, but you’ve worked in the book business for many years. Have you seen fame affect…

Fiction

Susan Gregg Gilmore

Susan Gregg Gilmore hit the Southern fiction scene with a bang with her delicious debut, Looking for Salvation at the Dairy Queen. Her second novel, The Improper Life of Bezellia Grove, is a coming-of-age story set in Gilmore's own hometown of Nashville during the 1950s and 1960s. As the title indicates, Bezellia is not the prim and proper Southern belle that her white-glove aristocratic family wants her to be. As she finds her way in a society that is changing by the day, Bezellia faces the Civil Rights movement, Vietnam and debutante balls with grace and courage. Gilmore, who now lives in Chattanooga, took some time from her busy tour schedule to answer a few questions about the novel and its charming heroine.

You grew up in Nashville, and this book makes a lot of references to iconic Nashville institutions that still exist today. Which one were you happiest to include? Was there something else you wish you could have fit in to the book?
I'm not sure I had a favorite. But it was deliciously fun to write about all of these places that are a part of my childhood memory. It is a bit like taking a ride in a time machine.

Bezeillia's story begins around the time you were born. How did you research this time period?
I spent a lot of time down at the Nashville Public Library reading through old copies of the Nashville Banner, particularly the society and obit pages. I also watched every film in the Civil Rights Room as well as talked to Nashvillians who would have been of age during the 1950s and '60s. Beyond that, I was a child of the '60s and '70s and I applied a lot of what I saw then, the emotions that I felt then, to Bezellia.

As Bezellia comes of age, she begins to notice the discrepancies between the way blacks and whites are treated. Was this something you experienced growing up in the South as well?
Most definitely. Even as a little girl, I was very aware of racial inequality in the South and in Nashville specifically. I knew it was wrong, not to the extent obviously that I do as an adult, but I knew in my bones it wasn't right. I was very fortunate that my parents set an excellent example for me—they believed in a world where people are not judged by the color of their skin.

Without giving too much away, this above all a realistic story and you're not afraid to put your main character through the wringer. Is it hard as an author to see your characters suffer?
Actually it is. And quite truthfully, there are times when the writing makes me physically uncomfortable, and I desperately want that section or chapter to end so I can turn to something a bit more lighthearted. But on the other hand, those are the days I know I'm probably doing something right.

The mother-daughter relationship is very central to this story—Bezelia is never quite sure that her mother loves her. How does this affect her life? Her sister's life?
In some ways, I think it ultimately empowers Bezellia. She becomes determined to know a better life, a life where she is genuinely and honestly loved. Her poor sister, Adelaide, does improve and comes to know a better way, but I think those early years with her mother clearly damaged her sweet spirit.

The novel makes a lot of jumps through time, and articles from the Nashville social pages or newspaper help the reader through. As a former journalist, were these mock articles fun to write?
Actually the articles only move the reader forward a bit, not big leaps in time, until the very end. But they were extremely fun to write. They were particularly fun because I had to write them in a style specific to the 1950s and 1960s. It was a little different, especially the society page. And I have missed writing for newspapers so it gave me a chance to do something I will always love to do.

Name one thing people should know about the South, but probably don't.
If we're talking to people outside the South, hmm, I would have to say that although our history of racial equality has been tragic at times, we are a people fiercely proud of the land that we call home. And at the end of the day, our tea really is sweeter than anybody's!

What are you working on next?
It's called The Funeral Dress, and it's set back in East Tennessee in the Sequatchie Valley. I love to write about funerals apparently so I just thought I would get it out of my system.

Susan Gregg Gilmore hit the Southern fiction scene with a bang with her delicious debut, Looking for Salvation at the Dairy Queen. Her second novel, The Improper Life of Bezellia Grove, is a coming-of-age story set in Gilmore's own hometown of Nashville during the 1950s and 1960s.…

Biography

Laura Hillenbrand

It's a story almost too amazing to be true: An Olympic runner serving as an airman in World War II is marooned on a raft after a plane crash. He and his companion are rescued—by the enemy—and held in a POW camp. But even the remarkable bare bones of the story don't convey all of what there is to discover in Unbroken, a true tale of survival, strength and resilience that Laura Hillenbrand's fans have been waiting for ever since they turned the last page of Seabiscuit. Unbroken is our top pick in nonfiction for November, and Hillenbrand answered a few questions about her new book from her home in Washington, D.C.

First, we have to ask: How did your life change after Seabiscuit?
The success of Seabiscuit was a startling experience. Thanks to a chronic illness, I had been largely isolated for many years. I wrote this book without any expectation of great success with it—I was just trying to tell the story as well as I could. The book was published, and suddenly found this huge audience. I went from living in obscurity and isolation to having TV crews in my living room, literally overnight. It was a lot to take in all at once, but it was wonderful. Since then, it has brought me only joy: amazing experiences, so many new friendships. It has enabled me to connect with the world in a way I never imagined. I am still in wonder over what happened, and I am immensely grateful.

"I'm drawn to subjects whose lives are a study in resilience, and I'm fascinated by the attributes that enable men to survive."

Louis Zamperini has already told his story in two autobiographies. How does Unbroken add to or differ from his accounts, and what was his reaction to your interest in writing about his life?
When Louie first told me his story, I was struck by its wealth of narrative possibilities. Autobiography is a wonderful and worthy genre, but it is a narrow one, offering only one perspective on a life. I wanted to open up the narrative to include the perspectives of Louie's fellow Depression-era Olympians and WWII airmen, the men on the raft with him and the airmen searching the ocean for him, his fellow POWs and the family he left behind. I wanted to place Louie in his historical context and present him as a representative of the broader experience of WWII airmen and prisoners of war, and the hardships they faced. Along the way, I learned many things about Louie's life, and the surrounding events and personalities, that he never knew. When I was done, Louie joked, "When I want to know what happened to me in Japan, I call Laura."

When I initially approached Louie, he assumed I wanted to write his autobiography with him, something he had recently done. But I mailed him a copy of Seabiscuit and explained the different direction I wanted to take his story, and he was game.

One thing your books have in common is their focus on resilience—people overcoming the odds, etc. Many of your readers see the echo of that spirit in your struggle with Chronic Fatigue Syndrome. Do you feel that experience has helped you identify with the people you write about?
Because I've been struggling with a terrible, intractable disease for nearly 24 years, I identify very strongly with people who find a way to endure, and overcome, extreme hardship. Of course I can't compare my experiences to Louie's, but my history has given me an intimate understanding of suffering, and that understanding helped me commune with him as he moved through his most difficult hours. I'm drawn to subjects whose lives are a study in resilience, and I'm fascinated by the attributes that enable men to survive. In that sense, I couldn't have found a richer subject than Louie. As I worked on this book, my health collapsed once again. At times, I couldn't find hope in my life, but I always found it in his. 

With fewer and fewer World War II veterans remaining to tell their stories, did you feel a particular urgency for writing about this topic? What was it like to hear accounts of the events they experienced firsthand?
I caught this story just as the living memory of it was slipping away. A number of my interviewees, including all of Louie's siblings, his lifelong best friend, one of his high school classmates and several men who were airmen or POWs alongside him, died before my book went to press. This broke my heart; I wanted so badly for them to see their stories told. 

I was nervous about asking men to walk me through their memories of being tormented in POW camp, or enduring hellish combat—it felt like a terrible imposition. One or two men whom I approached said they just didn't want to talk about those events, but to my surprise, most were eager to talk. During a few of my interviews, men cried as they spoke.  But even these men wanted to tell me these stories; they wanted this history to be recorded, and they wanted the world to understand the price they had paid to save the world. It was deeply moving, and I feel honored that they shared their memories with me. They had incredible stories to tell, and I took very seriously the responsibility to get those stories right.

Your chronicle of Zamperini's days on the raft is especially harrowing, and his survival seems almost miraculous. What qualities would you say allowed him to survive when others did not?
Physically and mentally, Louie was singularly well prepared to endure 47 days on a life raft. He was in world-class running condition when his plane crashed, and this surely helped.  But his biggest attribute was mental. Louie was a born optimist, and his childhood as an artful dodger, using his clever mind to get himself out of trouble, gave him the conviction that he could think his way out of any problem. He simply refused to believe he was going to die out there. It was a completely unrealistic belief—the odds of being rescued when down at sea were very poor—but it carried him forward and gave him the impulse to keep working for his survival. He was also a tremendously resourceful person. He devised ways to fish using hooks tied to his fingers, and a hook made from his lieutenant's pin. He came up with a way to save rainwater. He even figured out how to wrestle sharks aboard the raft and kill them. And, knowing that it was very common for raftbound men to go insane, he and his raftmates played memory games hour after hour to keep their minds sharp.

On a related note, even before his wartime travails, Zamperini's athletic abilities had already guaranteed him a notable life. Do you think certain people are predisposed to greatness, or do situations bring it out in them?
I think there is greatness in many of us, but we have to be thrown into extreme hardship to discover it. That's the fascinating thing about extremity: It unveils the true character of people, and finds in them attributes, or weaknesses, that they didn't know they had. This book explores that issue.  Louie was an extraordinary athlete, but that didn't necessarily mean that when he got out on a life raft, he would have the character to endure it. Phil, his raftmate, was this quiet, recessive, unassuming man. No one could have guessed that in combat, his veins would run icewater, or that on the raft, he would prove just as resilient and enduring as Louie. And earlier, when Phil, Louie and their crew were caught in ferocious combat with Zeros, no one would have thought that the hero would turn out to be a sweet-tempered kid from Shapleigh, Maine, top turret gunner Stanley Pillsbury, who ignored the horrendous cannon wounds to his leg and shot down a Zero that was an instant from downing their bomber. It took extremity to reveal these things in these men.

You have a talent for describing historical events vividly. Tell us about the research this requires.
Thanks for the compliment! I think the secret to vivid storytelling is detail-oriented research. The more telling detail you can provide, the more vividly the reader can see the story. When I do interviews, I ask a huge number of questions, often going over and over an event to mine my interviewee's memory for every tidbit they can recall. I did this a great deal with Louie, and he was very patient with me. With this story and with Seabiscuit, I tried to get as many perspectives that I could on each event, and when one source yielded a detail, I'd run that detail past the other living sources to see if that would jog their memories. It often would, and new memories would emerge. Eventually you have a mosaic that you can piece together. I was fortunate in that there were many witnesses to Louie's life—some living interviewees, others who had left their accounts in diaries, letters, memoirs, affidavits and military reports—enabling me to put together a remarkably complete picture of many of the events, even though they took place as long as 70 years ago.

If you could go back in time to observe any historical event, what would it be?
That's a tough question!  There are so many things I would like to see. I'd like to see the Colossus at Rhodes. I'd like to walk the deck of the Titanic. I'd like to see Lincoln deliver the Gettysburg Address. And I would love to see the Seabiscuit-War Admiral match race. But the first thing that comes to mind, in the context of this book, is the end of the war.  I would love to have been there when Louie was finally free. I won't give anything away, but it happened in a manner that was breathtakingly dramatic.

Are there plans to turn Unbroken into a movie?
There has been a lot of talk about that, and we are looking into it. I would love to see Louie's story told on film. So much of his life is spectacular—his races, air combat, a plane crash, his time on the raft—and would translate beautifully to film. 

You've said you didn't intend to write another book after Seabiscuit, so maybe this question can't be answered right now—but do you see a third book in your future?
I always wanted to write another book after Seabiscuit, but didn't know if my health would allow it. I feel so blessed that my body held up enough to get me through Unbroken, and body-willing, I will write another book, if I can find a story that engages me as the first two did.

Author photo by John Huba.

It's a story almost too amazing to be true: An Olympic runner serving as an airman in World War II is marooned on a raft after a plane crash. He and his companion are rescued—by the enemy—and held in a POW camp. But even the…

Pop CultureArts & Culture

Tilar J. Mazzeo

Think you know all there is to know about Chanel No. 5? Think again. The perfume that famously was the only thing Marilyn Monroe wore to bed has a fascinating history revealed by English professor Tilar J. Mazzeo in The Secret of Chanel No. 5. Read on for more.

Before The Secret of Chanel No. 5 you published The Widow Clicquot, a book about the woman behind Veuve Cliquot. How did one luxury item lead to another?
It was my interest in wine and scent that led me to perfume. If you think about it, there are very close connections there. Essentially, both are aromatic volatiles suspended in alcohol—just in wine it’s alcohol we can drink. I got the idea for the book one day at the kitchen counter of a good friend who is a perfume collector of sorts, when I had just come back from three months(!) of wine-tasting research for my book on The Back Lane Wineries of Napa. My nose was very acute after all that tasting, and I realized that perfume was a fascinating subject that I wanted to know more about.

"The idea that it’s an older woman’s perfume always makes me laugh a bit though. That’s like saying diamonds are for little old ladies just because your grandmother had the good sense to wear them."

When it came to writing The Secret of Chanel No. 5, were you initially motivated by the perfume, or were you more interested in the woman behind the bottle?
It was definitely the perfume. I wanted to know what made a great perfume. I mean, if we know how to talk about great wines, why not think about great perfumes? And of course that led me to Chanel No. 5 immediately, because it’s not just the world’s most famous perfume but also a scent that the experts still praise as one of the most beautiful scents from the golden age of the 1920s and 1930s.

So much has already been written about Coco Chanel—how did you manage to take someone who has spawned countless books and films and keep her fresh?
Yes, Coco Chanel certainly is experiencing a revival at the moment. She’s emblematic of style and savvy for a lot of women especially. What I wanted to understand was how Chanel No. 5 had its own unique destiny apart from her—because by the mid-1920s she wasn’t the entrepreneurial genius behind it already. At the same time, it’s really interesting: looking at Coco Chanel’s intimate relationship with her most famous “creation” reveals whole new aspects of her personality and art. There are sides of Coco Chanel we’ve never seen.

Can you tell us a little bit about what goes into researching something as iconic as Chanel No. 5?
This was some of the most fun research I’ve ever done—and for someone whose last book was on one of the great figures of French champagne, that’s saying something. Of course there was the library research. There was a lot of it. And that was fascinating if not fun exactly. But my writing is always personal too, so I visited with perfumers around the world, everywhere from Paris and Berlin to New York, the south of France, and Bermuda. I was lucky enough to work for a bit with the perfume professor at International Flavors and Fragrances in New York City and to learn some of the technical aspects of perfume appreciation there. I met with the odor artist Sissel Tolaas in Berlin, visited the rose harvest in Grasse, and talked with dozens and dozens of interesting people who have made perfume their passion. If I had life to do over again, I would be a perfumer. No question.

In your mind, is there a quintessential woman who wears Chanel No. 5?
Well, it’s an adaptable scent, but it’s a very distinctive perfume too. I think a woman has to have confidence to wear it. For me that’s the key thing about Chanel No. 5. It’s not your retiring wallflower fragrance, and I think of it as a scent for women in their 20s and 30s and 40s and not as a teenager’s first perfume. The idea that it’s an older woman’s perfume always makes me laugh a bit though. That’s like saying diamonds are for little old ladies just because your grandmother had the good sense to wear them.

So much about fashion and style is ephemeral—what is it about Chanel No. 5 that has made it timeless?
That’s really the question isn’t it? That was what I wanted to figure out in researching this cultural icon. Technically, it’s a wonderful fragrance, but of course there are other wonderful fragrances out there that haven’t become legends. And in the beginning, it wasn’t just Coco Chanel or marketing either that made it famous. So it was something of a riddle. But in the end, what makes it timeless is that way that it became a larger symbol of luxury during the Second World War, when it was one of the few beautiful things to cut across international borders. It captures so much of the complexity of the last century—and that’s what makes it so essentially relevant to the modern woman’s identity.

Tell the truth: do you wear Chanel No. 5?
Yes, I do wear Chanel No. 5 sometimes. I have a bottle on my bureau at home always. But it’s not my daily perfume. I actually prefer Chanel’sEau Première, which is a lighter and I think ultra-modern version of Chanel No. 5. It’s basically the same notes but more angular, and that’s my regular scent. I am also a huge fan of iris scents, but those can get fabulously expensive.

If someone were going to give you a gift, which would you prefer: a bottle of Veuve Clicquot, or a bottle of Chanel No. 5?
Unfair question! I hope the Widow will forgive me—because goodness knows there are few things in this world I love more than a bottle of Veuve—but I think I’d have to take the bottle of Chanel No. 5 just because a bottle of champagne lasts a night and a bottle of perfume lasts a year. That’s part of the reason during the Second World War perfume became the ultimate luxury. It was an indulgence that, in hard economic times, you could enjoy a little bit every day.

We don't want you to spill all your secrets, but what's one surprising thing readers will discover in The Secret of Chanel No. 5?
For me, one of the most surprising things was that Coco Chanel wasn’t the force behind Chanel No. 5. By the time she came to “invent” Chanel No. 5, this was already a scent with a fascinating history. And part of why she both loved and, at moments, hated her creation was because, quite early in its history, Chanel No. 5 slipped free of the woman whose name it carried. It was a perfume with a life of its own.

Think you know all there is to know about Chanel No. 5? Think again. The perfume that famously was the only thing Marilyn Monroe wore to bed has a fascinating history revealed by English professor Tilar J. Mazzeo in The Secret of Chanel No. 5. Read…

LiteratureArts & Culture

Pat Conroy

During Pat Conroy’s sophomore year in high school, a charismatic English teacher told him that he should read 200 pages a day. “I thought he was serious!” Conroy says, laughing, during a call to his home in Beaufort, South Carolina. “So I did that, and I’ve tried to keep it up. Sometimes I don’t make it, but usually I do. Usually I go beyond that.”

As if that’s not enough, Conroy also usually tries to complete five pages of new work handwritten on a yellow legal pad each day. On a good day he’ll put those pages on the steps leading up to the office of his third wife, novelist Cassandra King. She’ll leave her pages on a pillow near where he reads after dinner, while she goes back upstairs to work.

“Sandra’s the first wife I’ve had who has not complained that I have too many books. We have books in almost every room,” Conroy says, turning away from the phone for a moment to confirm that with Cassandra, who says, “Everywhere!”

“These books mean a lot to me,” Conroy continues. “I love them. I like to handle them. I can look up from my desk and see walls and walls and walls of books. It’s an extraordinary beauty for me.”

Conroy’s love of books is the subject of his beautiful, passionate and often funny new memoir, My Reading Life. The new book’s title, however, is just a tad misleading. Readers will quickly discover that for Conroy there is no real separation of his reading life from his writing life. Or of his reading/writing life from his lived life, for that matter.

In My Reading Life, Conroy forcefully advocates the pleasures of reading books as different as Leo Tolstoy’s War and Peace, Margaret Mitchell’s Gone with the Wind and Thomas Wolfe’s Look Homeward, Angel; he pays eloquent tribute to reading mentors like his long-suffering mother, Peg Conroy, high school teacher and friend, Gene Norris, and the writer and teacher James Dickey; and with remarkable—even courageous—openness, he reports his insecurities and charts the sometimes harrowing emotional and intellectual path that has made him the writer and person that he is.

“One of the things I can’t do is not expose myself,” Conroy says. “Some people do not like that about my writing, but I can’t help it. I write with emotion and I write with passion. I’ve caused such pain in my life with these stupid books. . . . My father [a Marine fighter pilot] went nuts when The Great Santini came out. My teammates in My Losing Season were absolutely horrified when I was writing that book. And my college [The Citadel] went nuts when The Lords of Discipline came out. But I’ve gotten used to that, I think.”

In My Reading Life, Conroy sometimes shines a bright, critical light on himself, but he is usually generous and wide-ranging in his enthusiasms for other writers. He may not like the company of writers (“I stay away from other writers if I can. They eat their dead.”), but he sure likes their work. “I can pick up a book and I can enjoy anything. I enjoy mysteries. I blurbed a romance novel. I end up reading a lot of people’s books because I still blurb. I like to always blurb first novelists because it’s hard to get blurbs then. I couldn’t get any when I was a first novelist, and I remember that.”

Conroy is also an avid reader of nonfiction. “I have an abiding interest in nature, so I like nature books. I’ll read a biography of anyone. What I like about modern biography is that they do the childhood. That’s the part I’m most interested in because usually you find some secret of what ignited them, what set them off.”

Conroy even offers appreciative words about books by writers who have personally offended him. In a chapter about attending his first writers’ conference, Conroy tells of looking forward to meeting Alice Walker because he likes her novel Meridian. Walker, however, rudely snubs him—apparently, a friend explains, because “she has a thing about Southern white men.”

But being Southern and, more importantly, being a Southern writer, is essential to Conroy’s sense of himself. “There’s something phony about my whole life. The reason I embrace being Southern, the reason it fills my heart with joy every time I’m called a Southern writer, is because I grew up feeling like I was nothing, like I had no home, had no place I could call my own. We didn’t own a house; the government gave us housing. We moved almost every year. I went to 11 schools in 12 years. When Dad was dying, he gave me a thing that shocked me because it showed that I’d moved 23 times from when I was born until I was 15. So when they call me a Southern writer, I am delighted because they are identifying me with a place.”

Still, Conroy says, Southern writing has changed appreciably since he began writing. “When I started out as a Southern writer, we were all boys. There’s been a fabulous influx of the girls, the daughters of Flannery O’Connor, the daughters of Eudora Welty. They have come roaring in and that’s been a great thing for Southern writing.” After his wife, he says, his favorite Southern writer is Janis Owens, who “has written three wonderful books” (My Brother Michael, Myra Sims and The Schooling of Claybird Catts).

In fact, Conroy regrets that his new book does not include a defense of another Southern woman writer, Harper Lee, who has recently taken flak in some quarters. “I wish I’d written about that,” Conroy says, “because in To Kill a Mockingbird she gave us —and by us, I mean white Southerners—models to live our lives by. I think that for people like Bill Clinton, Jimmy Carter, me and other Southern liberals, that book had a huge influence on us.”

Yet for all his delightful championing of other writers, Conroy remains insecure about his own work. “I’m always surprised when somebody likes what I write,” he says at the end of our conversation. “Someone told me they were visiting a writer’s house and he took them back and showed them his office and said, ‘Here’s where the magic happens.’ I roared with laughter when I heard that. I thought, my God, it must be nice to have that. But that gift was not given to me.”

Maybe not that gift—but as My Reading Life amply shows, Conroy has many other gifts to share with readers.

During Pat Conroy’s sophomore year in high school, a charismatic English teacher told him that he should read 200 pages a day. “I thought he was serious!” Conroy says, laughing, during a call to his home in Beaufort, South Carolina. “So I did that, and…

Mystery & SuspenseSuspense

Patricia Cornwell

The prolific, perennially best-selling Patricia Cornwell first kicked her way into publishing 20 years ago with Postmortem, a risky little mystery that introduced the world to Dr. Kay Scarpetta, a medical examiner whose grim science had heretofore been relegated to footnote status.

Seven publishers turned it down before Scribner finally agreed to let the presses roll. Did it succeed? And how! Not only did it become the first novel ever to win the Edgar, Creasey, Anthony and Macavity awards in a single year, but without Cornwell’s infectious introduction to the arcane world of forensics, the letters CSI might be just another meaningless acronym today.

“Part of the reason the publishers hesitated was, it was a world they hadn’t seen before and it was occupied by a woman, and the whole thing was a little bit scary and they weren’t sure it was a smart investment—all $6,000 they paid for it!” Cornwell chuckles. “No one was really sure anybody had an appetite for this sort of thing. Who cares about toxicology labs? Yuck!”

Who cares indeed. Fast-forward a decade to “CSI: Crime Scene Investigation,” a Jerry Bruckheimer-produced television series set in Las Vegas that premiered on CBS in the fall of 2000. It would become television’s most successful mystery franchise of the new millennium, spawning two equally successful spin-offs and, not incidentally, a mini-boom in forensic-centric crime fiction as well.

The “CSI” craze has been both flattering and somewhat problematic for Cornwell.

“The biggest chalenge for me was creating a genre that then took over like kudzu, and then realizing that there is so much of this because you sort of made it accessible to people and now everybody’s doing it and what are you going to do?” Cornwell says. “Because you can’t take the approach that I did the first 10 years of my career, which was, I’m going to write a book about forensic fire investigation, or about trace evidence, or one that has Interpol and a decomposing body in it. I would pick a certain area of expertise that you’ve never seen before and then show you something that’s really fun. Well, that same approach doesn’t exactly work anymore because there’s no point in spending 10 pages explaining a scanning electron microscope when people can watch one on TV.”

With Port Mortuary, her new Scarpetta mystery and number 18 in the series, Cornwell takes her seasoned chief medical examiner out of her comfort zone in a plot that could be torn from tomorrow’s headlines. As chief of the new Cambridge Forensic Center in Massachusetts, a joint venture between the state and federal governments, MIT and Harvard, Scarpetta has spent months away on a fellowship at Dover Air Force Base in Delaware, learning the military’s cutting-edge art of CT-assisted “virtual autopsy” at the request of the White House. During her absence from her day job, a mysterious death near her Cambridge home threatens to shut down the new venture and destroy Scarpetta’s career.

Longtime readers will welcome Cornwell’s return to first-person narration as she tells this grim tale in Scarpetta’s voice. But they may be surprised at the new elements of political intrigue, including a long-hidden secret from Scarpetta’s own military past that reverberates through her new life at the coordinates where military and domestic forensics meet.

Cornwell, who takes pride in immersing herself in field work for inspiration, felt the chill of military secrecy and anti-terrorism forensic investigation, if only from a distance, and likes it as a new flavor for Scarpetta. In truth, she says, medical examiners are often caught up in powerful outside forces.

“Medical examiners put up with a huge amount of political stuff,” she says. “I haven’t really gotten into that a whole lot, but now that Scarpetta has this affiliation with government, it gives me more of a platform to talk about some of it. Having her more involved in government gives me the license to have the flavor of not only a thriller but a spy novel. You don’t always know who the good guys are. You think you know, but maybe you’re wrong.”

Curiosity has driven Cornwell since her days as a police reporter for the Charlotte Observer back in the early 1980s, a cool job that allowed her to stick her nose where it didn’t belong. She still remembers the moment her curiosity put her on the path to becoming a best-selling novelist.

“I decided I wanted to write books about crime and I managed to get an interview with a medical examiner in Richmond, and that was the day that changed my life,” she recalls. “It was the spring of 1984, and I still remember walking into this conference room and sitting down with Dr. Marcella Fierro, who was the first medical examiner I’d ever met, and we spent three hours just discussing forensic medicine. She gave me a tour of the morgue—it was empty at that hour—and she happened to mention that there was some new technology coming down the pike, something called DNA and something called lasers. And I thought, wow, this is cool stuff! I knew at that moment that this was where I want to be; I want to be in this building and learn everything I can about the world these people work in.”

For six years leading up to the publication of Postmortem, Cornwell did just that, working as a technical writer and computer analyst at Dr. Fierro’s ME unit, soaking up the scientific know-how and love of cutting-edge forensics that still power her fiction.

“The truth is, if you walk into a lab, you don’t go, oh my God, this is cool; your first thought is, I have no idea what I’m looking at and I want to run in horror. There’s nothing sexy about any of it,” she says. “You’ve got to let your imagination take hold of it and be able to explain extremely esoteric techniques and put them in terms that they understand and humanize them. And add a dash of poetry while you’re at it.”

Cornwell refers to the plots of “CSI”-type television programs as “forensic fantasy.” As she sees it, “There’s no limit to the kind of stories you can come up with because you’re not limited by the procedures of technology. It’s like ‘Star Trek’—anything that you can imagine, you can do on television.”

That said, Cornwell has seen firsthand how quickly science fiction becomes science fact in the forensics world.

“If I had been writing Port Mortuary back in the days of Postmortem, it would have seemed like ‘Star Trek.’ What’s true about shows like ‘CSI’ is that probably some of the things that seem outrageous now may very well be used in 10 years, or even five years.” 

The prolific, perennially best-selling Patricia Cornwell first kicked her way into publishing 20 years ago with Postmortem, a risky little mystery that introduced the world to Dr. Kay Scarpetta, a medical examiner whose grim science had heretofore been relegated to footnote status.

Seven publishers turned it down before…

Women's FictionInspirational Fiction

Kim Cash Tate

Kim Cash Tate went from law partner to novelist when her first book, Heavenly Places, was published in 2008. Her second novel, Faithful, has just been released by Thomas Nelson and tells the story of three successful best friends facing personal, work and romantic challenges. Tate took the time to answer a few questions about writing from her home in St. Louis.

What's the best writing advice you've ever gotten?
I think the best writing advice I’ve gotten is to write from the heart. It can be tempting to look around and see what’s hot and trending, and try to conform. But true passion and satisfaction flow when I write the stories of my heart.

Of all the characters you've ever written, which one is your favorite?
My favorite character is Treva from my novel, Heavenly Places [read our review]. I had such a heart for her because I knew women like her, women who’d been treated in an inferior manner by their mothers and grew up trying to find self-worth wherever they could. I loved taking her on a journey where she would begin to see herself, not through her mother’s eyes, but through God’s eyes. And it was just plain ol’ fun writing her because she had attitude and would say things that many of us might think but never give voice to.

What was the proudest moment of your career so far?
The proudest moment of my writing career thus far was being signed by Thomas Nelson Fiction. I had always admired them as a premier publisher, but because I didn’t see any fiction by African-American authors coming from them, I didn’t think it was a “natural” path for me. When they expressed an interest in signing me, I was elated! And the experience of partnering with them has far surpassed what I imagined.

Name one book you think everyone should read.
Definitely the Bible. That’s the one book that has completely changed my life. I’m also a HUGE Lord of the Rings fan. I love the epic story of good versus evil, of the unlikeliest of people being used to do great things. There are so many life nuggets I’ve taken away from that story. But I admit I kind of cheated—that story is actually contained in three books.

What book are you embarrassed NOT to have read?
The Help is staring at me right now, so that’s what comes to mind. So many have told me that I need to read it, and I’ve had it in eye-shot for the longest. Admitting my embarrassment might be the very motivation I need to crack it open!

How would you earn a living if you weren't a writer?
I practiced law for a number of years as a civil litigator, so if I had to earn a living outside of writing, I’d probably return to that. Or not. I’ve always wanted to start my own business, so maybe I’d throw caution to the wind and make some crafty little thing and sell it . . . except I’ve never really been the artsy-crafty type. Hmm . . . guess I’d better hope this writing thing works out.

What are you working on now?
I’m editing my Fall 2011 release, Cherished, and beginning work on the novel that will follow that one. I’m really excited about what’s on the horizon.

Kim Cash Tate went from law partner to novelist when her first book, Heavenly Places, was published in 2008. Her second novel, Faithful, has just been released by Thomas Nelson and tells the story of three successful best friends facing personal, work and romantic challenges.…

FictionDebut Fiction

Susan Froderberg

Debut novelist Susan Froderberg caught the attention of fans of Southwestern fiction with Old Border Road, an atmospheric story set in rural Arizona. Froderberg took the time to answer our questions about the novel, sharing her influences, writing theories and more.

This is your first book to be published, so to start, congratulations! Can you tell us a little about what prompted you to write a novel and what it was like trying to get it published?
Old Border Road began as a short story, published in a literary journal and later anthologized. I went back to the story because I believed there was still more to be said. I had found a place where I could wander about, and with it a way of speaking that was coming to me pretty easily. So I wrote a first chapter, “A Home to Go Home To,” which was published as a new short story. There was enough to keep me going after this, and I carried on. From there it was a matter of patience and will and discipline.

I had written a novel before, but put the thing into a drawer thinking it not worthy of publication. I was satisfied enough with Old Border Road to read parts of it over the telephone to my friend Gordon Lish when it was finished. He encouraged me to send it out, and I took his advice and did. My agent was the first person to read the book.

You lived in Arizona during your high school years, and you set your novel there as well. Although you have since lived elsewhere, and now live in New York City, why did you choose to set your novel in Arizona? Did you feel you had some unfinished business there?
It was more that I still had feelings for the place. I was 16 years old when I moved to Arizona, a time of acute memory, and with it lots of adolescent daydreaming and yearning. I wanted to be an artist at the time, more than anything. My mother advised me to think about finding a job, as mothers are wont to do. I went to nursing school, and soon after graduation left Arizona and moved back home to Seattle, where the rest of my family was living.

At times, this novel is a fairly harrowing read. As an author, do you find it difficult to put your characters through such hardships.
No, for two reasons. First, characters are words, not people. Second, human existence is filled with hardship. Every epic or dramatic poem or great novel is about a struggle of some kind; it’s a striving for happiness, it’s about someone trying to get something. There are endless wishes and wants. Unless we’re able to strangle all desire and thereby achieve nothingness, or Nirvana, there remains to us a state of being in which one desire necessarily follows another. If there is no such thing as lasting contentment or absolute happiness, how could it be a subject of art? I am with Schopenhauer here.

One piece of advice that is frequently offered to aspiring authors is that you should write about what you know. To what extent would you say you apply this principle to your own work?
Sure, it helps to be familiar with the subject matter you’re delving into. Melville’s experience on a whaling boat gave him the authority to write about whaling. On the other hand, I don’t believe Melville necessarily threw a harpoon or survived a sinking ship, just as McCarthy did not scalp Indians or make love to dead bodies in order to write what he did. As for myself, it’s true I have run barrels, and have even tried to throw a rope to heel a calf, however inexpertly. But I lay no claim to ever preparing for any kind of rodeo, except for that of hollering bystander.

As an author, what is harder to write when it comes to a book: the first sentence or the last?
I would say they are equally difficult, or equally not difficult. Trying to find a rhythm or a meter specific to the telling of a particular story, and keeping on with it beginning to end, is the trickier thing.

Are there any particular authors who inspire you or that you feel have had a notable impact on your own writing?
Certainly Schopenhauer, as I mentioned earlier. And absolutely Emerson. Add to the list Frost and Stevens, Joyce and Beckett, O’Conner and Robinson, among others. To my mind, there is no greater American writer alive than Cormac McCarthy. All of us, as writers—as artists—come out of some Petri dish, and I will admit to coming out of his. There is no such thing as the innocent eye, or the innocent ear, no matter what anybody tells you. On the other hand, we are each of us necessarily what no one else can possibly be.

Do you find your philosophy background has enriched your writing?
Probably, as the opportunity to study philosophy has enriched my life. But I’m happier being a writer than I would have been if I were doing philosophy work, as writing has set me free in a way that philosophy—specifically, Western philosophy—could not have. For in Western philosophy you must follow formal logic—if A, then not B. In fiction, you may have both A and B, if you so choose. You can be exhausted and you can be exhilarated at the same time: one state need not negate the other. Or you can be derived and you can be unique, without contradiction. This is not to say we can do away with logic: there would be no language without it. But in writing, it’s possible to bend language toward a more Eastern way of thinking.

Also, I would say my background—both practical and educational—has been so various that philosophy is only a part of it. My time as a critical care nurse enriched my life: sometimes, I consider it the most important work I’ve done, though at the time I was too busy to realize it. My undergraduate degree (after nursing school) was in economics; that too opened me to a better way of understanding the world. And my Ph.D. was a joint degree: I was in Columbia’s School of Public Health as well as in the Philosophy Department. It was the era of interdisciplinary studies, and I was lucky to have been able to invent mine—no one there before had formally done anything in Medical Ethics.

What are you working on next?
Another novel, this one also inspired by a particular landscape, though it isn’t set in the desert. I know where I am, but I have no idea where I’ll end up. It’s a voyage of discovery. I’m setting forth, trying to leave things behind.

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Read a review of Old Border Road

Debut novelist Susan Froderberg caught the attention of fans of Southwestern fiction with Old Border Road, an atmospheric story set in rural Arizona. Froderberg took the time to answer our questions about the novel, sharing her influences, writing theories and more.

This is your first book…

Social Science

Sarah Z. Wexler

Go big or go home. He who dies with the most toys wins. There's no end to the figures of speech we've created to explain—or is it justify?—our growing belief that bigger=best. Sarah Z. Wexler, a resident of one of America's largest cities—New York City—traveled around the country exploring this idea in her new book, Living Large. From test-driving Hummers to getting a plastic surgery consultation to seeking out the world's largest ball of twine, Wexler chronicles her adventures with wit, humor and insight. She answered a few questions for us about the topic and the inspiration behind Living Large.

This is your first book—can you tell us a little about how you chose the subject?
I got the idea because one time I went back to Northern Virginia to visit my parents, and I noticed that more and more, small businesses were being replaced by big-box stores, perfectly nice houses from the 1950s and '60s were being bull-dozed to build identical McMansions, with a super-sized SUV in every driveway. It seemed like the norms were shifting, as they had in fast food, where a large is labeled medium, and XL is labeled large, etc, but with everything. I wanted to understand how all of these super-sized things about American life were connected, and why we were defaulting to XXL as the new norm.

There are moments in the book when you seem to be seduced by the larger lifestyle yourself—the Hummer chapter comes to mind! Did you expect to have that reaction?
Definitely not! My goal was to go into every chapter with an open mind and earnestly try to understand what people were getting out of super-sizing this aspect of their lives. But some chapters, like the Hummer, I had a difficult time putting my preconceptions aside and really struggled with it, since I had a lot of judgments about people who drive Hummers. That's why I was surprised that when I drove one myself, after getting over the initial terror of driving something that felt like a school bus, that I was seduced by the comfort, the feeling of safety and machismo and superiority. I understood the appeal–and I understood why I needed to get out of the car, stat!

Is there a time when bigger IS better?
The biggest ball of twine, or the biggest cow sculpture, those kinds of Big America roadside attractions, are just fun, wacky Americana. And there are times when bigger certainly feels better—like saving time when shopping at a big-box store and buying a T-shirt along with Windex and a gallon of milk, for example. If you'd asked me when I was trying on three-carat engagement rings at Tiffany's, or even trying on triple-D breast implants at a plastic surgeon's office, if bigger is better, I would've had to answer yes. But once I did the research about the impact of these choices, bigger consumption is rarely better—it rarely leads to us being happier, better off or more fulfilled.

Did researching the book change any of your own daily habits?
After spending time at the country's largest landfill, I became completely paranoid about how much trash I create, so I've tried to cut down on buying things with lots of packaging that goes straight to landfills. I got rid of my SUV and take public transportation. I also promised myself that whenever possible, I'd avoid shopping at big-box stores. Though you can save about 15% by shopping at a Wal-Mart, in communities where Wal-Marts have opened, the unemployment rate goes up, and participation in PTA groups and even voter registration goes down. The impact on my community is not worth it to me to save a few bucks on dish soap.

One of the things you investigated here is the backlash to the "more more more" stuff—like freeganism, a lifestyle you conclude is just as unsustainable. Can you tell us more about that?
Freegans were fascinating to me, because they live entirely on what the rest of us throw away. They're the antithesis of "living large." It's not that they're financially forced to do it—they're making a conscious choice and a political statement about waste and American excess, and most of them claim they live very well. But even if you can get over the idea of foraging for your dinner in the trash, freeganism is unsustainable for the majority of Americans, because if we all started living off the excess, there wouldn't be enough waste-makers to provide the excess. It's a fascinating ideology, and I learned a lot by Dumpster diving with freegans, but to suggest my mom or my grandma get her food or clothes that way would be completely unrealistic.

A lot of the people you talked to—from Tiffany's store owners to the manager of the MGM Grand—seemed to think that their luxury businesses were here to stay despite the recession. What do you think is the future of the "living large" movement?
Americans have short-term memories. Many Americans have had to downsize in the recession, especially those who lived large above their means; for example, eight times as many McMansions are in foreclosure as the national housing average. But as long as we continue to see living large as good, a sign of success, influence and prosperity, and downsizing as a punishment, when we have money again, we'll go right back to super-sizing. That's why I'm hoping that the silver lining of the recession is that some of us see that living with less doesn't have to be a negative thing—that a smaller house can feel just as, or even more, homey, or that a hybrid will get you there as well as a mega-SUV. Hopefully, this moment is a chance to hit the pause button on our rampant super-sizing—and that in the long run, we'll be able to find the right size, rather than just defaulting to the biggest because we assume it's best.

author photo by Andrea Volbrecht

Go big or go home. He who dies with the most toys wins. There's no end to the figures of speech we've created to explain—or is it justify?—our growing belief that bigger=best. Sarah Z. Wexler, a resident of one of America's largest cities—New York City—traveled…

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