All Interviews

Children's & YAMiddle Grade

Linda Sue Park

Today’s teens might be interested in sex, drugs and vampires, but Linda Sue Park is willing to give that fickle audience a bit more credit.

“I just have a lot of confidence in young readers being able to handle things that maybe some adults don’t think they can handle,” says Park. The latest work by the Newbery Award-winning author, A Long Walk to Water, is a good example, telling a vividly authentic tale of hardship, hope and survival in war-ravaged Sudan from the parallel points of views of children from two different generations who share similar challenges.

A Long Walk to Water alternates the story of 11-year-old Nya, growing up in Sudan circa 2008, with the story of Salva, also 11, who hails from a prominent, upper-class Sudanese family. As the Second Sudanese Civil War erupts in the mid-1980s, Salva is forced to run as bombs hit his village. The finely woven novel is a fictionalized account based on the life of Salva Dut—who lives in Rochester, New York, not far from Park.

“I was interested in telling the story; it’s actually quite a difficult story,” says Park, 50, the daughter of Korean immigrants. “I was dealing with two very wide time spans . . . which were very important to the overall story I wanted to tell,” she says. “The idea of the dual narrative came to me immediately. It just seemed that this would be the best way.”

While everything in Salva’s story is true, Park admits to toning down some of the graphic details witnessed along his journey out of Sudan. Some events were simply too horrific to believe, she says, noting that she crafted the novel carefully, “trying to pick and choose what was important.”

Nya is a fictional character, although “she is representative of many of the children who live in the Sudan; everything that happened to Nya is true.”

NOVEL INSPIRATION

Park learned of Dut several years ago when her husband, a journalist, began writing about Dut’s non-profit Water for Sudan project, which drills wells to bring clean drinking water to residents in southern Sudan’s remote villages.  “After reading all of the stories that my husband did, I have always been so excited about what Salva did,” says Park. Her husband traveled to Sudan with Dut in 2008 to witness the project’s work. In just a few years, the project has drilled more than 70 wells. “For the first time ever, the young people are not going to have to walk every day,” says Park. But she is quick to add that it’s not just about water. It’s about making the resources possible to also build schools and bring education to a deprived area. “Even [the residents] know the way to a better life for their children is education,” she says.

The back-breaking work of walking eight hours a day, in 100-degree weather, simply to find water for their family is not something today’s American teens can readily relate to. But that’s exactly why Park wanted to write this story.

“It’s just a matter of awareness,” she says. “We’re living in a world that is more and more global every minute. It’s so important for young people to know their stories—the stories of their community, the stories of their country and the stories of the whole world. I think that’s what goes into making an enlightened human being.”

FROM HAIKU TO NOVELS

While Park’s children’s books have been critically acclaimed, she never intended to write for that specific audience. She is a writer at heart; she began writing poems and stories at age 4, and reading was always a favorite pastime—and still is. “My writing is always driven by my reading. I’m a wildly eclectic reader” and a regular library patron, she adds.

Park penned her first published work—a haiku—when she was only 9.

“In the green forest
A sparkling, bright blue pond hides.
And animals drink.”

She was paid $1 for the poem—and her father still has the framed check.

With a degree in English, Park went on to work in food journalism as well as public relations and advertising. But after marrying and having kids, Park began writing for children.

“I thought I was reading picture books . . . for my kids . . . but I rediscovered what I had known as a kid—the writing that is being done in the best children’s books is the best writing in the country because the editorial process that good children’s books go through is far more rigorous than adult books go through,” she says. “The books that you read when you’re young . . . there’s rarely a book you can read in adulthood that can compare . . . in terms of impact,” Park says. “You never love a book the way you love a book as a child.”

Park’s first book, Seesaw Girl, was published in 1999, followed by The Kite Fighters in 2000. A Single Shard (2001), which follows an orphan’s trying journey through a potter’s village in 12th-century Korea, received the 2002 Newbery Medal and scores of other awards. Sure, awards can serve as a validation of one’s work, but Park adds, “There’s just no down side. It ensures that your book is going to remain in print for generations. What does an author want more than that? That’s what you work so hard for . . . there’s nothing else in the world that compares.”

Despite all the accolades, Park says the most important thing is crafting the story itself. “I think stories are forever,” she says, adding, “[But] the way we get stories has changed. This might be an ostrich-in-the-sand kind of thing, but I still see my job as producing the best story I possibly can.”

Author photo by Sonya Sones.

Today’s teens might be interested in sex, drugs and vampires, but Linda Sue Park is willing to give that fickle audience a bit more credit.

“I just have a lot of confidence in young readers being able to handle things that maybe some adults don’t…

FictionWorld Fiction

Aminatta Forna

In her second novel, The Memory of Love, Aminatta Forna looks at the aftermath of a civil war in an African country very much like Sierra Leone. Former professor Elias Cole is at the end of his life and requests sessions with visiting Scottish psychiatrist Adrian Lockhart, eager for the young doctor to listen to his life story. Adrian is drawn to Elias, but soon grows suspicious of the older man’s manipulations, and a burgeoning love affair with a local woman only increases his distrust. Adrian also becomes friendly with colleague Kai Mansaray, an African orthopedic surgeon, whose soulful love of his troubled country, as well as lingering feelings for his ex-girlfriend Nenebah, keeps him from immigrating, despite pressures from friends and family. Primarily a story of relationships, The Memory of Love focuses as much on the connections between past and present, perpetrator and victim, patriotism and dishonor, as it does on those between friends and lovers.
 
Forna, who has also written a memoir of her early life in Africa, splits her time between London and Sierra Leone.
 
You were raised in Sierra Leone and your father was a physician, as well as the Minister of Finance. He was arrested, detained and ultimately executed by the government in the mid 1970s, when you were 10. You have written extensively about this in your memoir, The Devil That Danced on the Water, but here, you explore it through the memories of Elias Cole. What was it like to recreate that time period in fiction as opposed to memoir?
I had already spoken to lots of people about that time, so I didn’t have to do that much more research. And of course, I have my own childhood memories. Saffia and Julius’ world was very much drawn from the world my parents inhabited in 1960’s West Africa. Their music was High Life, afrobeat, Fela Kuti, Miriam Makeba. I remember the men all wore starched white cuffs, dark suits and narrow ties. The women wore chic dresses made using African prints. They believed in themselves and in the future.
 
Wole Soyinka, who was one of them, calls them the ‘Renaissance Generation’ and quite recently I interviewed Ngugi wa Thiongo, the great Kenyan author, about those times for a radio program. We both became rather emotional when he asked about my father and I had to tell him that my father hadn’t survived. Ngugi—who also spent time as a political prisoner—said that it never occurred to him that if he had been killed he would be leaving his children the task of seeking justice for him. I also interviewed sons and daughters of Renaissancers. I found that, even though for them the African Renaissance never happened, their inspiration lived on in the next generation. They showed us how the world should be. Immortalizing their world in print has been a joy. To be honest whether it is in fiction or nonfiction doesn’t matter. In Sierra Leone, people who were among those who fought for a better country come up and hug me.
 
Much of The Memory of Love takes place in operating rooms and psychiatric hospitals. What kind of research did you do?
I spent time in Freetown hospitals, in one in particular: the Emergency Hospital, which specialized in orthopedics. I followed two surgeons, also an intensive care nurse and spent time in Accident and Emergency. Every operation in the book is one I witnessed. The very first operation I saw was a leg amputation. One of the young surgeons said I had the strongest stomach he had ever come across and this made me very proud. My father, of course, was a doctor and so I grew up around medical matters. I also remember my mother saying that my father was the only member of his medical class who did not faint or have to leave the room the first time they watched an operation. It must be a case of like father like daughter.
 
Freetown only has one mental hospital, and Dr. Edward Nahim, who runs it, let me have free run of the place. I talked to everyone, including the patients. Locals call the place ‘Crazy Yard.’ Recently they have received some funding and the facility has been improved enormously.
 
The aspect that fascinated me the most in this novel was the cultural differences in the way mental heath was understood and treated. Why were you interested in exploring that?
I have grown up negotiating two cultures all my life and have always known there is more than one way of seeing. In the West, psychology is treated as a science and accorded great reverence. But it is based on Western values, systems and cultural ways of being. For example, clinical psychologists or psychotherapists use silence as a way of prompting patients to talk. I wondered how this might or might not work in a country where people are happy and unembarrassed to sit in silence for hours. Thus Adrian finds his skills and knowledge are of limited use. He has to re-orient his whole way of seeing the world, which he does with Mamakay’s help. In the end he comes to understand the country and its people, but this happens only once he stops expecting the country to explain itself to him.
 
You use the friendship and tension between Kai and Adrian to explore different attitudes about foreign aid. How do you see aid in Sierra Leone? Has it been successful?
In short, no. Witnessing the postwar scramble in Sierra Leone totally changed my mind about aid and its effectiveness. If the West wants to do anything to help developing countries, we should create a level playing field in trade terms so those countries can build their economies. However, it is cheaper for the West to throw a bit of aid money around than play fair. Plus, aid is a big money, self-generating industry employing tens of thousands of people—mostly Westerners. The whole premise is fundamentally dishonest. After the NGOs and aid workers had begun to quit Sierra Leone for Liberia, I wrote a piece for a British newspaper and went around asking everyone I met to show me a project that had really worked. I talked to guys living in slums, working girls, bank clerks, human rights workers, journalists and even a minister. Nobody could think of a single one.
 
Elias Cole is such a complex character, and it isn’t until you get fairly well into the novel that you begin to see how manipulative he is and the way he justifies what he did. What was the inspiration for him and do you see him as a villain?
A friend of mine from Argentina told me about growing up during the Dirty War in the 1970s when thousands of people were ‘disappeared.’ As an adult she began to have doubts about her father. He had survived while other of his colleagues had been killed—indeed, his career had flourished. There came a time when she had to ask herself whether he had been complicit. At one point I thought of setting the book in Argentina. Then I went back to Sierra Leone after the war and encountered dozens of people just like Elias Cole who were denying their part in the oppression and venality that gave birth to the war.
 
The character of Adrian appears in your earlier book Ancestor Stones. What about him made you want to explore his character further?
I had the character of Elias and I wanted someone to listen to his story. The person had to be an equal, someone as clever as Elias but—like the reader—someone who had played no part in events and knew little about what had happened. Someone who would have to decide whether Elias’ account was a truthful one. One day I thought of Adrian and plucked him out of Ancestor Stones.
 
I thought it was interesting that The Memory of Love is set in a Sierra Leone-like place, although the country is only named once and fleetingly at that. In a novel of great emotional specificity, why were you unspecific about the place?
I didn’t name it at all in Ancestor Stones, and I would have done the same again had my publishers not leant on me to do so. I didn’t want readers to come to the book with their ideas of what they thought they knew about Sierra Leone, based on sometimes inaccurate media reports. To me this book could be set anywhere where there has been oppression and war, and indeed German readers have likened the story to pre-war Germany and Spanish readers see echoes of their own civil war. One employs specificity in order to create universality.
 
Can you talk about the title? Does it refer to a love affair or love of country or a bit of both?
Both. The title refers specifically to Kai’s memories of loving Nenebah, but it also intended as an indirect reference back to a time of hope. Kai compares the love to the feeling of pain experienced by people who have lost limbs. The fact the limb is no longer there doesn’t mean the pain isn’t real. Kai still loves Nenebah.
 
You split your time between London and Sierra Leone. What do you do in each location?
My clothes and desk are in London. That’s where I am based and pay my taxes. In Sierra Leone, which I visit around twice a year, I spend time in my family village Rogbonko where, along with my husband, I run a series of projects. We have helped the village build a school, dug wells for clean water and provided all our schoolchildren with mosquito nets, as malaria is the number one killer of kids in Africa. Currently we are building a small maternal health facility—Sierra Leone has one of the highest maternal death rates in the world, if not the highest. Then there is Kholifa Estates, a 200-acre cashew plantation inspired by Ancestor Stones. The aim is to provide an economic base for the village by encouraging other farmers to do the same on a smaller scale. So far seven have joined us. You can read about The Rogbonko Project on my website. 
 
There is so much exciting African literature that is now available in the United States, especially from Kenya and Nigeria. What African authors do you enjoy? Since you are in Sierra Leone part of each year, are there any up-and-coming writers on your radar whose work we should be looking for?
Helon Habila, who wrote Waiting for an Angel and has just published Oil on Water about the Niger Delta, is a wonderful writer. Others to watch are Brian Chikwava from Zimbabwe and author of Harare North; Samson Kambalu who wrote the hilarious and moving The Jive Talker; and Black Sister Street author Chika Unigwe.
 
In Sierra Leone there is a small but energetic and growing literary community. I used to teach workshops when I was visiting in the early days after the war. After years of cultural stagnation there is a long way to go. The country only has one bookshop and no publishing industry to speak of. But this is the age of the Internet and there is a lot of energy and some wonderful writing being produced, so I don’t think it will be too long before one of them finds an international publisher.
 
What has the response to The Memory of Love been in Sierra Leone and in England?
The reviews in Britain were very good and that is heartening. I have just heard that The Memory of Love has been nominated for the £50,000 Warwick Prize.
 
In Sierra Leone distribution is a problem and the book has only been out a few months, but I know people traveling to the U.K. are going back laden with copies for all their friends. I also make my books available in the university libraries. The Devil that Danced on the Water provoked a huge response. I hope this book continues the search for answers.

  

In her second novel, The Memory of Love, Aminatta Forna looks at the aftermath of a civil war in an African country very much like Sierra Leone. Former professor Elias Cole is at the end of his life and requests sessions with visiting Scottish psychiatrist Adrian…
NonfictionTrue Crime

Douglas Jones and Phyllis Gobbell

Except for newcomers, almost everyone in Nashville instantly recognizes the name “Marcia Trimble.” The nine-year-old disappeared from her Green Hills neighborhood one winter evening in 1975 when she was out delivering Girl Scout cookies. Two months later, on Easter Sunday, her body was found a few hundred yards away in a neighbor’s garage.

It was a crime that horrified and forever changed a city where children had freely roamed their suburban neighborhoods without fear. The effort to catch Marcia’s killer would span more than 30 years and take the Nashville Police Department down many wrong paths, with several young men falsely suspected and one even arrested for the crime (though never indicted).

Nashville authors Douglas Jones and Phyllis Gobbell take readers through every step of the crime and the decades-long search for justice in their new book, A Season of Darkness. The co-authors recently answered questions from BookPage about the facts of the case and their collaborative effort to tell this riveting story.

For people outside the Nashville area who aren’t familiar with the Marcia Trimble case, how would you describe the impact this crime had on the local community?
PHYLLIS GOBBELL: We’ve heard it said many times: With the murder of Marcia Trimble, Nashville lost its innocence. And it is so true. The Green Hills neighborhood where Marcia lived was a microcosm of the city. Children played freely in the yards and streets, went in and out of neighbors’ houses, and returned home when the streetlights came on. During the day, doors stayed unlocked. Neighbors watched out for each other. It was a gentle time, and Nashville seemed insulated from many of the harsh, violent events of the world. This shocking crime ushered in a new era, where the entire city realized what could happen, just across the street.

One of the most unusual aspects of the Marcia Trimble murder is that the case was solved more than 30 years after her death. What do you see as the definitive factor in finding her killer?
DOUGLAS JONES: Cold Case Detective Bill Pridemore’s excellent investigative work was the reason this case was broken. Pridemore maintained an open mind and rejected 30 years of faulty police work that had created a mindset focused on one individual. Pridemore re-examined every lead and uncovered new ones. By being open-minded and a professional, he refused to accept the bogus assumptions of the Nashville Police Department homicide detectives. Pridemore was then able to crack the case.

Additionally, Deputy District Attorney General Tom Thurman had the insight, experience, and courage to try the 30-year-old case against Jerome Barrett. Thurman went in to the trial knowing that it would be very difficult to locate witnesses. He tried an excellent case, which led to Barrett’s conviction. Tom Thurman is one of the best district attorneys not only in Tennessee but also in the country.

You packed many fascinating details into every scene, giving readers a real “you were there” feeling as they read A Season of Darkness. How did you uncover this kind of detail about events that transpired more than 30 years ago?
JONES: Truman Capote in his landmark In Cold Blood painted the picture of Holcomb, Kansas, and the savage murder of the Clutter family. To paint the picture of Green Hills and Nashville in 1975, we had to capture the details of the time. This process was based upon reviewing articles and interviews done in 1975, as well as interviewing as many people as possible who were involved in the case. We also reviewed court files and records in detail. Additionally, I have practiced law in Nashville for 35 years, and I have a number of contacts and friends in law enforcement. This was invaluable in understanding and explaining the mystery.

You write about a lot about “what if’s”—missed opportunities in the investigation to find Marcia’s killer. Do you think the culture in the police department contributed to these wrong turns in the case?
JONES: Absolutely. In our research of the culture in the police department, we found that in 1975, the Nashville homicide detectives were known for wearing flashy suits and jewelry. They were determined to crack the Trimble case and get the limelight. In the book, they are referred to as “cowboys.” Because she was a woman, Detective Diane Vaughn’s productive work was ignored by the cowboy detectives. It was simple and easy to lock in on one suspect. They would continue to focus on the same suspect for the next 30 years.

In the years after Marcia’s death, several young men were wrongly targeted in the investigation and one was even arrested, though never indicted. Ultimately, do you think this case represents justice served, or justice gone wrong?
GOBBELL: If I were the parent of one of those young men, there’s no doubt that I’d focus on the mistakes made in the investigation. As Deputy D.A. Thurman pointed out after the trial, “there were a lot of victims” in this case. Justice was a long time coming, but I believe in the end justice was served when DNA analysis matched evidence on Marcia’s clothing with her killer’s DNA.

As you did your research and wrote the book, did you find any lesser-known characters in the story who really stood out?
JONES: Yes. Detective Diane Vaughn. Diane Vaughn was from Alpine, a remote village in Overton County, Tennessee. In 1967, she applied to be a police officer with the Nashville Police Department. Two years later, she was hired. She worked hard and after several years was promoted to detective. As a female detective, she was assigned the “dirty cases”’—rapes and murders of prostitutes— that the “cowboys” in the homicide division refused to work. But Diane Vaughn solved many of these cases and gradually built up a reputation and credibility in the department. Vaughn’s tenacious and professional investigation led to Jerome Barrett’s conviction in the case of the rape of Belmont coed Judy Porter. Vaughan was the first Nashville detective to link Barrett to the string of rapes and murders in Nashville in February 1975. Diane Vaughn died in 1994, never knowing her work would ultimately lead to Barrett’s conviction in the Marcia Trimble murder case.

Tell us one thing you were surprised to learn about Jerome Barrett, the man convicted of Marcia’s murder.
JONES:Jerome Barrett was an extremely dangerous man. The Vietnam vet had lived off the streets of Memphis making a living fighting barefisted for cash. In Memphis, he was a prime suspect in a number of assaults, rapes and homicides. After Barrett was captured he confessed to police that he was constantly on the prowl looking for an open door or unlocked window. Barrett spent years in prison for convictions of aggravated rape. A number of tough, hardened inmates that were assigned to be Barrett’s cellmate begged various wardens for transfers because they were deathly afraid of the man.

If a murder like Marcia’s happened today, how would the case be handled differently?
GOBBELL: I was surprised to learn that in 1975, individual detectives kept the case files. There was no central database. With today’s technology, the investigation would be entirely different. Via computer, information would be available to all involved in the search or the homicide. Had that happened, the link between Marcia’s murder and the other crimes for which her killer was charged would surely come to light quickly.  

You’ve said that the Marcia Trimble case is a sad story, any way you slice it. As you think about the overall series of events, what strikes you as the single saddest moment of this 30-year ordeal?
GOBBELL: This is a hard one because there are so many sad moments—some that aren’t actually dramatic, but they still break your heart, like Virginia Trimble [Marcia’s mother] standing under the streetlight, calling for Marcia. The Trimble family coming home from church on Easter Sunday and being met by their friend, Detective Sherman Nickens, who delivered the news that Marcia’s body had been found—that was an unbearably sad moment. When the word spread across Nashville, it was as if the city suddenly fell under a dark cloud.

What is the one element of Marcia Trimble’s murder that still puzzles you or keeps you lying awake at night?
JONES: Marcia Trimble left her parents’ house around 5:30 p.m. on the evening of February 25, 1975. By 7:00 p.m., the police department was actively working the missing person’s case.

On February 26, 1975, around noon, the Nashville Police Department received a phone call from a Tennessee State Trooper in West Tennessee advising them that they had pulled over a white Chevrolet driven by a Phillip A. Wilson, who was a Black Muslim in Nashville. The state trooper wanted someone from Youth Guidance to advise him because the previous night, during the extensive search, the Nashville Police Department sent out a BOLO (to be on the lookout) for this vehicle “wanted for kidnapping.” The police couldn’t determine who sent the BOLO, so Mr. Wilson was allowed to drive away.

To this day, this mystery has never been cleared up and questions about the incident abound, including the question of whether Jerome Barrett was inside the vehicle that was stopped the day after Marcia’s disappearance.

Publishing trends come and go but true crime remains a popular genre. Why do you think readers are attracted to true crime stories?
GOBBELL: I think the main attraction is that we like to see the worst offenders caught and punished for their deeds, which is often the outcome in a true crime story. The complexities of investigations keep readers turning the pages. True crime books add depth to stories that may have made the news and show the many dimensions of the people involved. And it’s a cliché, but truth is often stranger than fiction.

Except for newcomers, almost everyone in Nashville instantly recognizes the name “Marcia Trimble.” The nine-year-old disappeared from her Green Hills neighborhood one winter evening in 1975 when she was out delivering Girl Scout cookies. Two months later, on Easter Sunday, her body was found a…

Mystery & SuspenseSuspense

Dean Koontz

Describe your book in one sentence.
When he was 14, John Calvino killed the murderer of his parents and sisters, but 20 years later, as a homicide detective, he reluctantly comes to believe that the dead man's spirit has returned to murder John's wife and children.

What was your favorite book as a child?
Kenneth Grahame's The Wind in the Willows. I identified intensely with Mr. Toad of Toad Hall. I still do.

What's the best writing advice you've ever gotten?
John D. MacDonald told me that most criticism a writer receives is about his style and his worldview, because the critics want you to write and think the way they do. A writer's unique style and worldview, he said, are the most important things any author has to sell and therefore he should diligently preserve them.

Have you ever been tempted to quit writing?
No. Writing talent is an unearned grace. I think it comes with an obligation to explore it and to polish the craft that supports it. I hope to die face-first in my keyboard—but only after I've written the last line of the book.

If you had to be stranded on a desert island with one fictional character, who would you want it to be?
Jeeves, the butler from the series of novels by P.G. Wodehouse. I wouldn't need a butler on a desert island, but if I'm going to be reduced to eating snakes and bugs to survive, I want to share the island with someone who can make me laugh.

What was the proudest moment of your career so far?
All the proudest moments are the same—those books of mine that delight my wife, Gerda. I trust her judgment. And just as I wrote love notes and poems to her when we were dating, I write each book primarily with the hope of enchanting her.

What are you working on now?
This interview. But as soon as I finish it, I'll return to a novel with the scariest premise I've ever had. I can't talk about it because I never talk about a book in progress. I learned a long time ago that talking about a book diminishes the desire to write it.

Describe your book in one sentence.
When he was 14, John Calvino killed the murderer of his parents and sisters, but 20 years later, as a homicide detective, he reluctantly comes to believe that the dead man's spirit has returned to murder John's wife and…

FictionWomen's Fiction

Lisa Genova

While she was being “wildly irresponsible”—writing her first novel, Still Alice, instead of going back to work at a high-powered Boston consultancy firm—Lisa Genova, who holds a Ph.D. in neuroscience from Harvard, decided, what the heck, she might as well take acting lessons too.

“I was a divorced single mother at the time,” Genova says during a call to her home on Cape Cod. “I wasn’t doing anything I was supposed to be doing, and I had always wanted to act.” So for a year and a half Genova trained as an actress. “One of the things I learned,” she says, “is that you always raise the stakes as high as possible whenever possible.”
 
It’s a lesson Genova seems to have applied in much of her creative life. When Still Alice wasn’t picked up by a publisher, for example, she decided in 2007 to self-publish the novel, which offers a moving depiction of the life of Alice Howland, a Harvard professor who develops early-onset Alzheimer’s disease. “It was self-published for 10 months and in that time I sold just over 1,000 copies, and I was really, really proud of that,” Genova says, laughing. “Then it was bought by Simon & Schuster, and Barnes & Noble sold more copies than that on the first day it was released!” 
The popularity of Still Alice allowed Genova to become an Alzheimer’s advocate and to write full time. When she began to develop the character of Sarah Nickerson, the high-achieving, 30-something narrator of her new novel Left Neglected, Genova says she was inspired first by her curiosity about an unusual condition called Left Neglect Syndrome and then by her concern about the crazy-busy lives so many Americans lead these days.
 
“Most women who are raising kids and who have to work are finding themselves doing way too much in a day,” Genova says. “In fact, it’s sort of a badge of honor to say that you’re really, really busy. So I could have given Sarah a normal job but I thought, raise the stakes as high as possible whenever possible, and I decided to give her a really crazy job. I wanted to make her exhaustion and level of multitasking pretty severe. I wanted readers to see that there are so many things she’s not paying attention to in her own life. She’s not paying attention to her distant relationship with her mother because it’s easier not to look at that. She’s ignoring the fact that she and her husband haven’t had sex in a while. She’s ignoring the elliptical machine in the basement and the fact that she’s 20 pounds overweight. And she’s not paying attention to the road because she’s on her cell phone.”
 
Left Neglected tells of Sarah’s attempt to recover from that moment of inattention on the road and to learn to live with Left Neglect Syndrome. “It’s a confusing condition to wrap your brain around,” Genova says. She first read about it in Oliver Sacks’ The Man Who Mistook His Wife for a Hat, and the disorder would crop up in her neuroscience classes at Harvard. Left Neglect is a condition in which trauma to the right side of the brain results in a person not being able to recognize left-side space. “If you ask a patient with it to draw a clock,” Genova explains, “they would draw the numbers 12 through 6 and think they had drawn the whole clock. I’m like, wait a minute, how does this person walk through the world if they’re only recognizing half of it? I knew that if I got to write another novel, I wanted to write about someone with this condition.”
 
One of the great accomplishments of Left Neglected is how fully Genova allows a reader to inhabit Sarah’s experiences of this peculiar disorder. Those experiences are often frustrating, but they are also laced with humor. “I didn’t know Sarah would unfold that way,” Genova says. “I haven’t written humor before, but there’s a lot of physical comedy in the book, and that was fun to see evolve.”
But Genova also has a larger purpose in mind in writing Left Neglected.
 
“I wanted to use this condition as a metaphor for our crazy lives as a culture right now,” she says. “It’s one of the things I have wrestled with in my life. In my 20s, I was very driven to succeed, like Sarah. I had my head down barreling a thousand miles an hour toward what was an outwardly, visibly successful life. A Ph.D. in neuroscience, a job that was very, very well paid. I had a sort of laundry list of things I would have: I would get married, I would have kids, I would do it all, without really thinking about what I wanted my life to look like. Then when I was 33, I got divorced. That sort of shook things up. It was devastating on the one hand, and on the other hand it gave me an opportunity to stop and think about what I wanted.”
 
In Left Neglected, Sarah Nickerson quite literally crashes and is then forced to rebuild her life. She struggles with her disorder and she struggles to reconnect with her mother, her husband and her children and to discover how to lead a meaningful life without the preconceived standards of success.
 
In Genova’s own life, she metaphorically crashed after her divorce and “began choosing a simpler life.” In 2007 she married photographer and filmmaker Christopher Seufert and moved to the Cape, where the family lives in a house overlooking a saltwater creek. She writes at Starbucks most mornings and attends her 10-year-old daughter’s soccer and softball games in the afternoons. She is now the author of two novels and the mother of two more children—a two-year-old son and a three-month-old daughter.

“That’s right!” Genova says, laughing, “I delivered a baby and a book this year. It was a little crazy.” 

 

While she was being “wildly irresponsible”—writing her first novel, Still Alice, instead of going back to work at a high-powered Boston consultancy firm—Lisa Genova, who holds a Ph.D. in neuroscience from Harvard, decided, what the heck, she might as well take acting lessons too.

“I was…
Memoir

Annie Proulx

Annie Proulx is a bit of a nomad. The Pulitzer Prize-winning author of The Shipping News and “Brokeback Mountain” moved 20 times as a child, and she’s kept the habit alive as an adult. A constant series of unsatisfactory houses—too big, too small, no bookcases—made her long for a home that reflected who she is as a woman and a writer.

Proulx almost has that ideal home on 640 acres in Wyoming, a landscape she writes about in her first nonfiction book in two decades. Her house and her book are called Bird Cloud.

Bird Cloud is many things: part memoir, part social history, part nature observations, with a little archeology tossed into the mix as well. However, it’s not exactly the book Proulx was planning to write.

“I hadn’t planned to write a memoir. What I thought I was going to be writing about were the problems and solutions in constructing my house because I find that sort of thing interesting. And there was a lot more of that in the book before my editor decided maybe there shouldn’t be,” Proulx says by phone from New Mexico. Laughing, she adds, “So a lot of that went out the window. And it gradually, by itself, turned into a memoir because life is holistic, not compartmented.”

The problems with the house began long before Proulx broke ground. She had been looking for land—beautiful, wild land—for some time when she found a former nature preserve by the North Platte River. But acquiring it proved a touch dicey, as she explains:

“I didn’t think we were going to get the land when we were bickering and dickering back and forth with the Nature Conservancy, from whom I bought it. And one day I was driving from the east to the west; the weather comes out of the west. And I was living on the other side of the Medicine Bowl Range at the time. And as I turned glumly into the driveway, I glanced up at the sky and there was this enormous, enormous bird-shaped cloud. . . . And I thought, oh, that’s cool. It must be a sign that I’m going to get the place, and it should be called Bird Cloud.”

Anyone familiar with Proulx’s work knows the physical settings of her fiction are often love poems to the land itself. Naturally she wanted the house she built on her Wyoming prairie, with its towering cliffs and gorgeous wetlands, to reflect that. As she writes in Bird Cloud, “Because place is such a major part of my writing and life, I thought it important that Bird Cloud breathe in and out of the landscape. A house subject not only to the wind, but to the drowning shadows that submerge it every evening and the sharp slice of sunlight at the eastern end of the cliff.”

And did her architect design such a wonder for her?

“Indeed he did! I love the place,” she says. “It’s incredibly beautiful, it is calming, it’s a fine place to work, all my books are there. The problem is, I can’t be there in the winter.”

All it took was one winter. Wyoming’s 80-90-mph winds pack the heavy snows into something resembling concrete. The stuff can’t be shoveled—it has to be poked with sharp stakes in an effort to break it up. Plus, Proulx has a half-mile-long driveway. When the snow gets packed like that, snowplows are useless. Proulx realized her house was only perfect about eight or nine months of the year—the other months she’d be trapped inside, unable to leave her beautiful prison. Wonderful as Bird Cloud is, she still hasn’t achieved a perfect house she can live in all year long.

“I was having exactly this conversation with my middle son and his girlfriend yesterday. There’s always a trade-off. There’s always something that’s awful and wonderful about the place. When we look at it, we usually see the wonderful things and not the awful things. It’s when we start living in it that the awful things become quite upfront.”

When the weather begins to worsen in Wyoming, she relocates to New Mexico, where she spends the winters. That’s why she was in Albuquerque when our conversation took place.

Proulx’s new book isn’t just about her house or her life in Wyoming, fascinating as that is. She also shares the entertaining histories of some of the more colorful characters who lived there in the 19th century (and some equally colorful ones who live there now), her theories on the extinction of the woolly mammoths and her lyrical observations on the flora and fauna. She’s got a rich source of material: There are pelicans, bald eagles, golden eagles, great blue herons, ravens, scores of bluebirds, harriers, kestrels, elk, deer and a dozen antelope.

“That’s been one of the great pleasures of the place, to have watched the private lives of all the local birds. They recognize me and they recognize the James Gang who worked on the house. But when strangers come, they get all agitated,” Proulx says.

In addition to the hardcover edition, Bird Cloud is also being released in audio format. When asked if she’s the one reading it, Proulx crisply replies, “Heavens, no! I’m far too busy for that. I did read the introduction for the audiobook, but I left the rest of the book to someone else. I don’t have time for it.”

Does that mean she has another project in the works? Proulx says yes, but offers no details. Just like the men of the Old West she writes about in Bird Cloud, she likes to hold her cards close to her chest until she’s ready to lay ’em down.

Annie Proulx is a bit of a nomad. The Pulitzer Prize-winning author of The Shipping News and “Brokeback Mountain” moved 20 times as a child, and she’s kept the habit alive as an adult. A constant series of unsatisfactory houses—too big, too small, no bookcases—made her long…
FictionWomen's Fiction

Kim Edwards

When Kim Edwards began writing a follow-up to her wildly successful novel The Memory Keeper’s Daughter, she intended to create a contemporary story in the picturesque area of upstate New York where she grew up. She soon found, however, that the past kept asserting itself on the present.
 

The resulting novel, The Lake of Dreams, is a seamless interplay of the two—part historical, epistolary novel and part modern-day quest story. “The two are deeply interwoven,” Edwards says during a call to her Kentucky home. “The past presses itself on the present . . . it became more forceful as I was writing it.”

 
 

“I think the landscape of everybody’s childhood really stays with them.”

 
 

When the novel opens, Lucy Jarrett is at a turning point in her life and has returned to Lake of Dreams, New York, from her recent home in Japan, after a decade-long absence. Back in the rambling old house of her childhood, she finds that she is still haunted by her father’s unresolved death in a fishing accident years earlier. She also learns that her brother, Blake, has gone into the family business and joined ranks with their uncle in a controversial project to develop the area’s pristine wetlands.

 

Meanwhile, Lucy also reconnects with her first love, Keegan Fall, a sensitive, thoughtful glass artist who still carries a torch for her after all these years. But one morning, everything changes when Lucy makes a curious discovery in a window seat of the house’s long-neglected cupola. There she unearths a cache of letters, ephemera linked to the suffrage movement and an heirloom tapestry bordered with interlocking spheres—an ancient symbol that, as Lucy soon learns, also appears in stained-glass windows crafted by a local artist almost a century earlier. Thus begins a journey that will force her to rewrite her family’s history—and her own.

 

Though Lucy’s life doesn’t directly mirror the author’s, there are some parallels. Edwards grew up in Skaneateles, in the Finger Lakes region of New York, and after completing her graduate work, she traveled to Asia with her husband, where they spent the next five years teaching. Later on, she enjoyed revisiting the upstate area and muses, “I think the landscape of everybody’s childhood really stays with them.” She also relished rediscovering the region’s history and its ties with the women’s suffrage movement. “It was really, really fun to see it through that lens,” Edwards recalls.

 

An associate professor of English at the University of Kentucky, Edwards has been on leave for the past two years to write The Lake of Dreams. After a whirlwind tour following the success of The Memory Keeper’s Daughter, which has sold more than 4.5 million copies, she alighted in Kentucky seeking the solitude required to write. Her husband, former chair of the English department at the university and a carpenter in his previous life, built her a secluded home studio in which to work.

 

Edwards “wrote the book from the outside in,” she explains: “I told myself I had to write 1,000 words a day just to see where it took me.”

 

The story for The Lake of Dreams, however, had been germinating long before The Memory Keeper’s Daughter came into being, its images floating in the author’s mind like dust motes in the dappled light of a stained-glass window. Years ago, Edwards wrote a draft of a novel (her first) that had similar themes, like a concern for the land. Over the years, she returned to her discarded novel and came to understand it in a totally new way—an exercise that proved fruitful, because it was during this process that she found the voice for The Lake of Dreams. “For me, and many writers, that’s a crucial discovery,” Edwards says. If she had to identify the seed of the story, however it would be a stained-glass window. “I loved the metaphor of glass, as something that moves between states of being.”

 

It’s while standing before a series of these windows that Lucy experiences this revelation about her ancestor, Rose: “It was physical, almost, my desire to know who she was and how she had lived. . . . From this point in time, almost a hundred years later, the events of her life looked fixed, determined. And yet, in her brief notes I had recognized a restless passion that seemed familiar, mirroring my own seeking, my own questions.”

 

Fans of Sue Monk Kidd’s The Secret Life of Bees will find much to love in this novel, especially the way Edwards integrates arcane subject matter into a contemporary story. The character of Lucy, with her wanderlust and longing for self-knowledge, recalls literary heroes across time.

 

“I think of this book as kind of a quest story, and so the underlying structure of that, both seeking something in the world and undergoing some kind of internal change, too, is the structure that was in my mind when I was writing it,” Edwards says. “I did a lot of reading about myths, traditional and ancient quest stories along the way. One of the elements of a quest story is that the hero gets called back from whatever he or she is doing at the time, so it seemed to fit really beautifully with the wandering Lucy has done.” (Edwards even manages to work a chalice into the narrative.)

 

Not surprisingly, dreams also figure prominently in The Lake of Dreams. At different points in her career, Edwards says, she has been interested in theology and the works of Carl Jung—interests that clearly inform her fiction. The design that appears on the heirloom blanket Lucy discovers was inspired by the Chalice Well of Glastonbury—on which appears a sacred geometry that consists of two interlocking circles, called vesica piscis, or in more modern terminology, a Venn diagram. At her urging, the book’s designers incorporated the blanket’s border into each chapter heading.

Though parts of the book feel a touch treacly, Edwards writes well about familial relationships and the tenuous ties that bind us. One particular passage stands out in which Lucy, visiting an abandoned chapel, sits bathed in the ethereal light of stained-glass windows. This magical, meditative scene transports the reader, with Lucy, to a place like dreamtime, where the veil between the worlds—the seen and unseen—grows thin. It’s a place Edwards herself has come to know through the creative process. Of the act of writing, she says, “I would emerge from it feeling like I was still partially there. . . . The writing changes you. You leave as a different person. You never know what you’re going to discover.” 

 

When Kim Edwards began writing a follow-up to her wildly successful novel The Memory Keeper’s Daughter, she intended to create a contemporary story in the picturesque area of upstate New York where she grew up. She soon found, however, that the past kept asserting itself on…
YA FictionYA

Tim Tharp

Tim Tharp didn’t start out writing novels for teens. But after visiting book clubs to talk about his first book, Falling Dark (winner of the Milkweed National Fiction Prize), he says, “I had such a good time talking to high school students about it, I thought, I’m going to write a novel for them.”

The idea stuck—and it’s been working well, to say the least. His debut YA novel, Knights of the Hill Country, was named to the ALA Best Books of 2007 list. His second, The Spectacular Now, was a 2008 National Book Award finalist and has been optioned for a movie.

His newest, BADD, is a creative and moving exploration of what happens when a young soldier named Bobby returns home from war, no longer able to relate to the life—or self—he’d left behind.

Bobby always was a rebellious sort, a charming risk-taker whose antics inspired the book’s title, as explained by narrator Ceejay, Bobby’s adoring younger sister: “He was wild and he was B-A-D-D, BADD.”  Things got worse when he stole a car; that’s when he had to choose between the army or jail.

But after several tours of duty, he’s finally coming home, and Ceejay is unbearably excited, not least because of her big plan: They’ll move in together, get jobs and escape their small town. She plans to surprise Bobby with the idea, but is herself surprised when she sees him in town—which can’t be right, because that’d mean he was home early, and didn’t tell her he was coming.

Soon, a lot of things don’t seem right to Ceejay, who’s already frustrated from her arguments with Captain Crazy, a wildly eccentric local man whose anti-war protests make her angry and defensive. Then there are her parents—her unfailing perky mom, and her dad, who doesn’t understand anything, least of all her.

The inspiration for BADD was drawn from a mix of old and new influences, Tharp says from his home outside Oklahoma City. “It was partially inspired by what’s going on in our country right now, but it was also a story idea I’d had in mind for years. This one was going to be a post-World War I novel.”

The idea morphed into something different when some of his students at a local community college began coming back from Iraq. “A few of them had post-traumatic stress disorder. . . . I started thinking that was something important to take a look at,” he recalls.

Tharp took an additional layer of care with an already delicate subject because “the suburb I live in is an Air Force town. There is that feeling of wanting to do them justice.”

In fact, the author’s father was a WWII veteran who told Tharp stories about his experiences. “I always thought having the perspective of a young person on a returning soldier would be interesting,” he says. “But really, the driving force was to investigate different aspects of courage, besides just facing physical violence like you see in movies.”

That off-the-field courage is a quality Ceejay possesses, though she doesn’t know it at first. She’s occupied with her confusion and hurt at the changes in her brother, who, to her shock, starts spending time with Captain Crazy. And her mother’s perkiness, at first annoying, reveals itself to be something else entirely: a choice to remain upbeat, no matter what—itself a type of strength.

“Ceejay has to rely on different kinds of courage, like perseverance and standing up behind someone you love. The kind she draws upon is something I think women have more access to than men, who are supposed to put on a tough act,” Tharp says. “Ceejay starts looking around and realizes she’s more like the women in her family than she thought she was.”

That’s a challenging emotional journey for people of any age, but Tharp said it doesn’t occur to him to shy away from what some might view as heavy topics for a YA book. “I grew up hearing those war stories from my dad, and both my parents died of cancer. I’ve gone through those kinds of battles myself, so I drew upon them.”

After all, he adds, “Kids do go through these kinds of things. I think it’d be good for them to have a book, so if they’re going through something, they see the characters are, too. . . And a lot of kids read adult novels. Why not bring that complexity to the YA novel itself?”

It’s the very complexity of BADD that makes it such a memorable read; amid the struggle and catharsis are humor, beauty, wonder and hope. Tharp says it wasn’t an easy book to write: “It was kind of draining, but satisfying at the same time, like doing a good physical workout.”

Turning the last page of BADD is sure to leave readers feeling the same—a little worn out, a lot more clear-eyed and suffused with the glow that comes from knowing they’ve just finished something important.

 

Tim Tharp didn’t start out writing novels for teens. But after visiting book clubs to talk about his first book, Falling Dark (winner of the Milkweed National Fiction Prize), he says, “I had such a good time talking to high school students about it, I…

Mystery & SuspenseSuspense

T. Jefferson Parker

Name one book you think everyone should read (besides your own!).
Of Love and Other Demons by Gabriel García Márquez.

What are you reading now?

2666 by Roberto Bolaño and Life by Keith Richards. They don't have much in common, but they're both terrific.

What’s the best writing advice you’ve ever gotten?
There are two. One is what my father told me upon graduation from college when I told him what I wanted to do. “Go write something. Even if it’s bad, just write it.” The other one is Elmore Leonard’s well-known idea: “Leave out the stuff readers skip over” (or something like that).

How would you earn a living if you weren’t a writer?
As a young man I would have been a hydrologist; as an older one, I think dry cleaning looks like a good gig.

If you had to be stranded on a desert island with one fictional character, who would you want it to be?
Oh man, trouble ahead on this one. How about Roxane Coss from Bel Canto by Ann Patchett?

What was the proudest moment of your career so far?
The Southern California Independent Booksellers Association named an award after me. I get to give it away every year to writers better than I am. I’m very proud of that. Though I do worry that someday the writers will form a posse and come after me.

What are you working on now?
It’s a novel about a gringa pop singer kidnapped by a Mexican cartel kingpin and taken off to his castle in the jungle. It’s about music, love and finding something to believe in.

 

Author photo by Rebecca Lawson

 

Name one book you think everyone should read (besides your own!).
Of Love and Other Demons by Gabriel García Márquez.

What are you reading now?

2666 by Roberto Bolaño and Life by Keith Richards. They don't have much in common, but they're both terrific.

LifestylesHealth & Fitness

Timothy Ferriss

Timothy Ferriss published his first book, The 4-Hour Workweek, in 2007, and in a self-promotion tour de force, went from a little-known investor and business advisor to a best-selling author whose blog garners a million-plus visitors a month.

When it came time to find volunteers for his new book, The 4-Hour Body: An Uncommon Guide to Rapid Fat-Loss, Incredible Sex, and Becoming Superhuman, hundreds of his fans joined experiments in diet, exercise, sex and more. But the title of head guinea pig goes to Ferriss himself. He underwent thousands of blood tests, traveled as many miles and compiled hundreds of case studies on everything from weight loss to sexual behavior to learning to swim in 10 days. Ferriss took some downtime to answer questions about the new book, his obsessions and why his methods are most likely to succeed.

Your first book struck a chord with readers. What made you write your second book about body rather than work? Did you view the change in topics as a risk or a natural progression?

The wider world thinks I’m obsessed with time management, but they haven’t seen the other—much more legitimate, much more ridiculous—obsession. I’ve recorded almost every workout I’ve done since age 18. Since 2004, I’ve tracked everything from complete lipid panels to free testosterone. I’ve had stem cell growth factors imported from Israel to reverse “permanent” injuries. . . . I’ve spent more than $250,000 on testing and tweaking over the last decade. And that was just to satisfy my own curiosity and improve my own physical machine.
 
Then I had a conversation with a WIRED magazine writer, in which we joked that the main fears of modern men and women could be boiled down to two things: e-mail overload [addressed in The 4-Hour Workweek]and getting fat. Shortly thereafter, I realized I had to write The 4-Hour Body. It is, without a doubt, a natural progression, a risk and the most important thing I’ve ever written.

Any book that addresses eating and exercise is met with skepticism, most likely because people find it difficult to remain motivated. How will your approach be more effective for readers?

Big changes seldom work. The 4-Hour Body is intended to answer one question: What are the smallest changes that produce the biggest physical changes? To illustrate the point: Even if someone has 100 pounds to lose, I wouldn’t have them start diet and exercise at the same time. Why? The exercise often triggers “reward” meals, more overeating and abandonment of the new program after a few weeks of plateauing. Instead, I have them focus on one small change that can produce three to five pounds of fat loss in a single week, such as changing breakfast to include at least 20 grams of protein. Using this small-step approach, compliance is incredible: 58 percent of test subjects I tracked indicated my diet was the first diet they’d ever been able to follow. Many lost 20 pounds the first month, and some lost 100-plus pounds total.

You recommend a Slow-Carb Diet, and characterize it as “better fat-loss through simplicity.” Tenets include avoiding “white” carbs, eating the same few meals and cheating one day a week. Why are these practices so effective?

Because the diet removes any paradox of choice. The more decisions someone has to make, the more they’ll make mistakes or give up and revert to old behaviors. The Slow-Carb Diet removes the need to think, and offers one day a week to do whatever you want. That one day—a stress release valve that also accelerates fat loss—means you’re not giving up your favorite foods forever, just six days at a time. After testing all the diets and fads, this is the best, most enjoyable approach I’ve found for sustained fat loss. I’ve been doing it for more than five years.

You’ve included explicit sexual advice in the book. Why? Did anyone try to discourage you from being so detailed?

Sex is a fundamental part of life, but there’s very little mainstream discussion of how to improve sex with real specifics. Also, most sexual advice is based on a footnote from a book, based on yet another book—there’s no testing. I tested it all, and had others replicate my success with things like the 15-minute orgasm. For many readers, this will easily be the most important part of the book. But did my publisher let me include my explicit photos? Nope. We had to make them detailed illustrations.

Anything I haven’t asked that BookPage readers should know?
At least 50 percent of the case studies are women. This isn’t a book only for 30-something guys. It’s for anyone who’d like to become the best version of themselves possible. 

 

Timothy Ferriss published his first book, The 4-Hour Workweek, in 2007, and in a self-promotion tour de force, went from a little-known investor and business advisor to a best-selling author whose blog garners a million-plus visitors a month.

When it came time to find volunteers for…

Biography

Ron Reagan

Ron Reagan is no stranger to sharing his father with the world, but in his new memoir, My Father at 100, he delves deep into the past of a man that few truly knew but many claim as their own. The younger son of our 40th president was kind enough to take time out of his busy schedule for a spirited chat with BookPage about his father’s roots, the current state of American politics and much more.

So much of My Father At 100 reads as a personal meditation on your relationship with your father. What prompted you to take your investigation into your family and enigmatic father's past and make it public?
I suppose I could have written a journal and kept it all to myself but there was the sense that people would actually find this interesting. Also, everybody else lays claim to him in one way or another as I’ve said in the book, so I suppose in some way I’m staking my own claim here since I actually knew him. I feel like if anyone has a right to say anything about him, it’s someone like me.

Was it hard sharing your father with an entire country?
In a way. I think anyone who has a parent, or perhaps any other family member who is a very well-known public figure—a big celebrity if you will—I think there is going to be an element of some resentment on some level that you have to share them all the time. And so many people seem so attached to my father and claim him. So there was some of that, although I never doubted that I knew him better than 99.99% of those people.

I think what you had when my father was president that you don’t see now is people of good will on both sides recognizing that whatever our differences are, we’ve got to get some things done here.

At one point in My Father at 100, you mention that your father was a very charismatic man with many facets, and yet you had the feeling that when you were out of his sight, it was almost as though you ceased to exist to him.
The thing about “out of sight out of mind” [is that] it didn’t really have so much to do with his relationship to the public versus his relationship to his family. I think he was just often in his own head somewhere. He did have a tendency at times to put people into an abstract category, and he could even do that on occasion with his own family. For example, I mention in the book about when he wrote a letter to me when I got a D in Algebra in high school. This letter had hardly anything to do with me! It could have been a form letter that somebody had asked him to write to any young man. So you kind of got the impression that he was playing a role himself in that instance and had assigned you a role and you were enacting this kind of drama that really had nothing to do with either one of you. But this wasn’t a constant thing, and I suspect that if I had been face-to-face with him for that conversation it would have been an entirely different thing.

I didn’t share this story in the book—though I probably should have—but many people thought that he was callous toward the poor, for instance, and yet that wasn’t true when it was somebody who had a face, when it was an individual. While he was at the White House, he saw on television one night a young woman who was a single mother who was down and out and this moved him. So he sat down and took out his personal checkbook and wrote her a check for $2000 and mailed it to her. And two nights later he’s watching the news again and there she is on the news again with a framed copy of his check, which she is now hanging on the wall of her meager apartment. And he’s thinking, “Well this isn’t what I intended!” so he writes her another check for $2000 and sends it to her along with a little note saying “For God’s sake, cash this!” But she was an individual to him, she had a particular story. She wasn’t just “the poor.” If you wanted to move him on an issue, if you wanted to capture his interest, [you had to] personalize it, put a face on it, make it a human being.

So, given that he was so introverted—or perhaps introspective is a better word for it—was it ever surprising to you how strongly the public responded to him given how wrapped up in his own mind he could be?
No, not really. I’m not sure I would put it as either introverted or introspective; there is probably some other “intro” word that neither one of us are thinking of at the moment! He dwelled inside his own head a lot of the time, but when you say introspective that implies some kind of critical self-examination, and that really wasn’t what was going on, I don’t think. He was building and rehearsing and solidifying his personal narrative in his own head.

On the other hand, he was very charismatic, and in person I defy anybody to have met him and not liked him having spent any time in his company. He was very affable, very warm, he made you feel like you were his good friend even if you had just met him. And it was not because he was cynical and manipulative, but just because that’s the way he acted around people. So no, it wasn’t surprising at all that people responded to him. People got the 90% that everybody got, but it was that 10%, metaphorically speaking, that he kept close and private. Even his own wife, my mother, admitted that she rarely felt that she got to that last, tiny innermost room.

In your mind, did you ever reconcile "Ronald Reagan: president" with "Ronald Reagan: father," or were the two figures very distinct to you?
They were part of unified whole. I know that some people who saw him as president didn’t appreciate his personal qualities because they didn’t know him personally, but I didn’t really see them as being two different people so there wasn’t any urge to reconcile that. He was very consistent as a person. There was the public versus private element to his character, but it was all very consistent. He wasn’t a very changeable or mercurial person.

Much of this book recounts your journey to discover a side to your father that you knew little about. So without giving away too much, what's one thing you uncovered that people would be surprised to learn about your father?
He was a fairly big, athletic guy, but as a little boy growing up, he was actually undersized and very insecure. He was picked on by bullies at school, he was often the new kid because [his family] moved around a lot, he spent a lot of time alone, and he was overshadowed to some extent by his older brother and even by his parents, who were both very charismatic and extroverted people with forceful personalities. I think that this was part of the reason why he retreated into himself as a little boy and spent a lot of time alone, a lot of time daydreaming. . . . He was dreaming often of the West; he was fascinated by the West, dreaming of himself as a kind of hero in a wide-open landscape.

I don’t think I quite appreciated that solitude when he was young boy, and his vulnerability.

At times this exploration into your father’s and your family’s past must have been painful, perhaps even because it just hammered home the fact that he is no longer with you. So what was the most rewarding element to this entire project?
I think just overall the sense that I know not just my father better—I think I knew him pretty well and there weren’t any huge surprises; it’s not like I suddenly discovered he was a cross-dressing serial killer (though perhaps I should have to boost sales!)—but finding out about my family and getting back into that country and getting back into Illinois. Nobody in my family, until I started looking into this, was really aware that my father had an uncle and two aunts on his side of the family. He never mentioned it to my mother or to any of us. He mentions in his autobiography in passing, without ever naming them. So to go back and discover that there was this larger family on both parents’ sides and find out what happened with them was really rewarding and interesting. As far as we know, those two aunts of my father died very young before he was born, and his father’s brother drank himself insane and died in the Dixon Insane Asylum in 1925 when my father was a teenager. Hard to believe he wouldn’t have known about that, but we never heard about it.

So that was tremendously rewarding, to do that and trace back and do what little independent or original research I was able to contribute to this.

What is one of the most important lessons your father taught you?
Kindness. He could be distant and he could be inattentive at times, perhaps from a sort of obliviousness, but he was a tremendously kind person to everybody he met. He treated everybody the same. Now that’s a double-edged sword when you’re his family wondering whether you should be treated extra special nice, but he treated everybody from the guy who shined his shoes to a foreign head of state the same. Also, I never saw him enter a room and give any indication that he thought he was less or lesser than anybody in that room. Not that he was arrogant. He wasn’t one of those people who needed to dominate a room; he’s not a Bill Clinton type where he’s got to be the center of attention all the time, since if you’re president, most of the time you are! He just had this serene confidence about him where you really believed that he wasn’t the type of guy who would kowtow or suck-up. He didn’t do that. He had tremendous dignity and self-respect, and I think that’s a good example to have growing up.

You are a very vocal liberal and atheist whereas your father was very much not, so how did this affect your relationship with your father?
Well, we could disagree about politics and we could even disagree about the existence of a deity and still remain close and friends. I think he was probably a little frustrated with my politics because my father believed that he was right, and was sure that if he could get you alone for five or 10 minutes that he could convince you of his position. So I think it was terribly frustrating to him that he couldn’t convince me and change my mind in many instances.

The atheism was, I think, a deeper worry for him because he was a deeply religious person, though not in a florid or evangelical way. He just thought I was ruining my life by not believing in God. But he was also wise enough to realize that you can’t force that on anyone, people have to come to that or not as they will, so beyond trying to strong-arm me back into church when I was 12 years old, he just let me go my own way. It wasn’t really an issue between us, even if it might have been a sore spot for him.

If your father were alive today, what do you think he would feel is the most pressing issue America faces in 2011?
On domestic issues, I think we have to be very careful going back 20 to 30 years since he was elected; times have changed and as stubborn as he could be, one assumes he would change with them. I can’t say that he would be a carbon copy of himself in 1980 in 2011.

On the foreign front though, I think he would continue to be highly motivated by the idea of ridding the world of nuclear weapons. That was something that animated him for a long, long time, and I see no reason why he would feel any different now. The problem still exists; it’s arguably even more serious now with the threat of loose nukes and terror and all of that. I think he would have been appalled at the Republican intransigence over the START treaty and holding that hostage to parochial political concern. I think that would have disgusted him. I think someone like Jon Kyl, he’d have wanted to pinch his little head off. It would have been unconscionable, unpatriotic and un-American as far as he was concerned.

Beyond that I hesitate to speculate too much. The only other issue I would raise where I absolutely know how he would feel is the torture issue. He would be utterly disgusted and appalled that the United States of America practiced torture under George Bush. That kind of moral turpitude was just not in him. The cowardice that is required to do something like that was just not part of his character.

Your father began his career in the entertainment industry, much like yourself. Yet you have said that you have no intention of running for office because your atheist views would likely prevent you from ever being elected. Is that truly all that is holding you back?
It’s not the only reason why I wouldn’t run for office, I’m just not by nature a politician. But the fact that I am an atheist, that would make it tough if I did choose to run.

 

Do you think that Americans too often blur the line between church and state?
Well there are certainly people who try very often to do that! There is [a significant percentage] of the country that really does somehow believe that we were founded specifically as a Christian nation and the only way we can be right as a nation is to embrace a particular strain of Christianity. But yes, there is always an attempt to blur that line and we have people on the Supreme Court now who would be happy to blur that line.

I mean, if you want to legislate biblical law, then none of us would be allowed to wear stripes and I would have had to have been stoned to death by my parents as a young man when I announced I was an atheist, and slavery is ok, and child murder is fine and wives should be bought and sold like livestock. People who say that our laws are based on the Ten Commandments, well what’s the first commandment? Our first commandment is that you shall have no other gods before me. And what’s the first amendment? Congress shall make no law respecting the establishment of religion. So you cannot marry the Ten Commandments to the Constitution; they are diametrically opposed.

It’s a little disturbing that anybody gives these [fundamentalists] the time of day. I think in other countries they would be fodder for comedy, briefly, before they disappeared. But not here! Here you’ve got a FOX news network that hires these people and makes money off of them.

We’ve talked about how the world has changed since your father was in office, but do you feel like the world of politics has changed in the 20 years since your father was president?
Yes, I do. When he was president, it’s not that there wasn’t a pretty stark right-left divide. But even with all of that, I think what you had when my father was president that you don’t see now is people of good will on both sides recognizing that whatever our differences are, we’ve got to get some things done here. There are things that need to be done for the country. Certainly in foreign policy you more often saw politics stopping at the water’s edge. I don’t think you would have seen the same kind of kerfuffle over the START Treaty back in the ‘80s that you saw just recently where it really was just being tossed around like a political football; that would have been regarded as really unseemly back then.

So there was more mutual respect, the personal venom wasn’t as noxious and toxic. My mother, for instance, as First Lady caught some grief for using personal, private donations to buy a new set of china for the White House. By the time Bill Clinton was in office, you had the First Lady not only accused of having an affair, but of murdering the person she had an affair with. So we’ve gone from the First Lady puts on airs and buys fancy china to the First Lady has someone whacked . . . that’s a big jump! Can you imagine someone back in the ‘80s accusing my mother of having someone murdered? Can you imagine my father’s reaction? The notion of my father sitting still while somebody accused his wife of murder . . . he would have called Rush Limbaugh and beaten him to a pulp. That just wouldn’t have happened.

The animosity and the invectiveness that has been aimed at this president, much of it racially tinged, particularly coming from the Limbaughs and Glenn Becks, is way beyond anything that existed back in the ‘80s.

This isn’t the first time your writing has been published, although it is your first book. Now that you’ve written this memoir, do you have any immediate plans or inclinations to write any other books?
That’s something I’d definitely like to think about. I’ve done all sorts of things in my life, starting out as a ballet dancer, doing a bit of acting and television and radio, and some writing for magazines along the way. I enjoyed this process, but it’s a little bit difficult to judge because it was such a personal effort. Would it be as enticing if it was something that was farther from me? It’s hard to say. But my guess is that this is something that I’d like to pursue if I could. I’ll grant you of course that I won’t be able to write anything that interests people as much as a book about my father . . .

What about Ronald Reagan: Vampire?
[laughing] That might do it! Or my father at 102. In all seriousness, though, I’m not sure exactly what it would be at this point, but I’d certainly like to explore the opportunity of future books.

You mention near the end of My Father at 100 that you still listen for your father's voice letting you know that he's ok. If in turn you could tell your father one more thing, what would it be?
I suppose I’d just remind him that he’s loved and not just by people who don’t know him! But by the people who do know him and that he left behind. We still think of him and care for him and hold a warm spot for him in our hearts.

 

Ron Reagan is no stranger to sharing his father with the world, but in his new memoir, My Father at 100, he delves deep into the past of a man that few truly knew but many claim as their own. The younger son of our…

RomanceParanormal Romance

Carolyn Jewel

Describe your book in one sentence.
Fortunately, I am an experienced Twitterer and can do this. I think. I hope.

A hot demon assassin meets a punk ballerina and together they kick butt.

Name one book you think everyone should read.
Uh, the California State driver’s manual? Because if you come here, I want you to be a better driver than we Californians are.

What book are you embarrassed NOT to have read?
I’m well beyond the embarrassment stage in my Have Not Read list. I knocked off a lot of them while I was in grad school where I realized it’s not possible to read all the books you’re supposed to have read. So, I freely and without embarrassment admit to the holes in my Life List of books. But here’s one: The Old Man and the Sea. (Except I’m not embarrassed by that. Possibly a bit sheepish, but not embarrassed.)

What was the proudest moment of your career so far?
So far, it’s being a RITA finalist for two books in 2010 (my historical Scandal and my paranormal My Forbidden Desire). It took a while to sink in, but it was, and remains, a personal validation that my writing probably doesn’t suck too badly.

If you weren't a writer, how would you earn a living?
The way I earn most of my living now. I’m a SQL Server database administrator in my day job.

What's your favorite movie based on a book?
Oh, unfair that you restrict me to one movie! I will cheat and say, Harry Potter.

If you had to be stranded on a desert island with one fictional character, who would you want it to be?
At first the answer to this seemed obvious: MacGyver, because we wouldn’t be stranded for very long since he would quickly build a submersible canoe from coconuts, woodshavings, a rubberband and some kelp. However, an alternate answer occurs: Eric Northman from the Sookie Stackhouse series. He can fly and I would immediately trade a small amount of blood and dry but witty jokes for a ride.

Describe your book in one sentence.
Fortunately, I am an experienced Twitterer and can do this. I think. I hope.

A hot demon assassin meets a punk ballerina and together they kick butt.

Name one book you think everyone should read.
Uh, the California…

Children's & YAMiddle Grade

Susan Lynn Meyer

Although they are Jewish, 11-year-old Gustave’s parents believe they are safe in Paris—until Nazis occupy the city in 1940. Now Gustave must leave his best friends behind as his family flees to Saint-Georges, where life isn’t much easier: Food is scarce, a classmate bullies Gustave and the Nazis are getting closer. After befriending a young girl in the French Resistance, Gustave develops a plan that could reunite him with his friends—and maybe even get them all to America, where they can finally be safe.
 
This suspenseful first novel was inspired by author Susan Lynn Meyer’s father, whose own family escaped from the Nazis in France. Meyer, an English professor at Wellesley College, answered questions for BookPage about Black Radishes (recently named a Sydney Taylor Honor Book for its authentic portrayal of the Jewish experience), touching on her family’s fascinating history, her obsession with research and what’s up next for Gustave.

Congratulations on publishing your first novel! Can you tell us a little about your path to publication?
Thank you! I am completely and unabashedly thrilled about it! All told, it has been a little less than four years from putting down the first words to publication. There’s actually an interesting story about how it came to be published. I wrote six chapters and then got stuck for a while. But fortunately, before I got stuck, I had submitted a synopsis and sample chapters to the SCBWI (Society of Children’s Book Writers and Illustrators) Work-in-Progress competition. Months later, when I had nearly forgotten about the competition, I got an email from a very prominent editor who had judged the competition complimenting me on the chapters I had sent and asking to see the whole manuscript of Black Radishes. I was stunned—it was the kind of thing that every writer dreams will happen when entering a competition like that!
 
“I was always fascinated, as a child, by the glimpses my father’s stories gave me of what then seemed a faraway culture and time. I thought that other children might be as interested in both the humorous and the somber aspects of his French childhood as I was.”

That email made me ecstatically happy for about 48 hours and then completely panicked for the next 48—because I hadn’t actually written the novel yet and didn’t know if I could do it! Then I got over my panic and just sat down and wrote. When I finished the book I sent it to the editor who had wanted to see it. I didn’t hear anything for about 12 months, so meanwhile I started contacting agents and I also hesitantly started sending it out to two other editors.
 
When it landed on the desk of Rebecca Short, editorial assistant at Delacorte (Random House), the magical “click” happened. Rebecca got the manuscript on a Friday afternoon. She read the manuscript over the weekend, sent it to her executive editor, Françoise Bui, who also read it on the weekend, and then it was sent on to the publisher, Beverly Horowitz, and on Monday, to my absolute astonishment, Rebecca called me to make an offer on the book! In the end, the original editor who had judged the contest decided to pass, but I am tremendously grateful for the email he sent me because it gave me the confidence and the boost I needed to make me write Black Radishes.
 
Black Radishes was inspired by your father’s experience during World War II. When did your father tell you the story of his childhood in France?
I have vivid childhood memories of sitting with my five brothers and sisters at our round white dinner table and listening to my father tell stories about his French childhood. He is a great storyteller, and he told us lots of funny anecdotes about tricks that he and his friends and sister and cousins used to play, trouble they got into, funny details about French life, etc. Once, for example, he was severely rebuked by an adult for breaking himself a piece of bread at the table but then putting the loaf back on the bread board upside down—bread is so sacred in France that you must always treat it with respect!
 
Only gradually, over the years, did I learn, bit by bit, why his family left France—that as Jews during the war their lives were in terrible danger. He didn’t say much about this aspect of his life—it was hard for him to talk about those things. I was always fascinated, as a child, by the glimpses his stories gave me of what then seemed a faraway culture and time, and I was stunned, when I understood it, to learn that anyone had hated my father and his family and people like them so much that their lives were threatened. I thought that other children might be as interested in both the humorous and the somber aspects of his French childhood as I was.
 
But I want to make clear that Black Radishes is a novel, as my father would be the first to tell you. I felt that his life story was his to tell, and the events in my novel are fiction, although the historical situation is real. I borrowed (and transformed) some anecdotes of his, and my characters do follow the same route that my father’s family took in their escape from France—from Paris to the tiny village of St.-Georges-sur-Cher to Spain, through Portugal, and from there setting sail for the United States.
 
Although life for Gustave and his parents is quite bleak while they live in Saint-Georges, Gustave maintains his adventuresome and brave spirit. Was this your father’s attitude during the war?
For my father, the biggest emotional challenge was actually leaving France. Although to some extent as a child he understood how grave the danger was, it was wrenching for him to leave behind his whole world—his country, his language and his close friends and relatives. Gustave in Black Radishes also experiences something of that loss.
 
What is the biggest challenge in writing historical fiction? How do you know that you’ve done sufficient research?
I absolutely love doing historical research. The hardest thing is getting myself to realize that it is time to stop doing research and to write! I’m also a literary scholar, and I often write about literary texts in relation to history. It was a surprise to me to realize how much more deeply and intimately I needed to know history in order to write historical fiction. I needed to know not just what big events occurred, of course, but the texture of daily life. For example, I needed to know just what the streets of Paris looked like in March of 1940, whether shops were open, what sort of mood people were in, in what ways war preparation and the absence of men of military age had affected daily life. That is much harder to find out about than what one might call “large-scale” historical information.
 
I discovered that reading daily newspapers from the time was extremely helpful. I also interviewed people and read lots of memoirs. I felt a compelling need to get all the details right—like what chocolate bar wrappers looked like, what color the postcards issued by the Germans were, exactly what sort of papers you needed to cross the demarcation line, and where you would go to make a phone call if you didn’t have a phone in your home. (The answer to that last question is that you go to the post office.)
 
I kept reading and reading as I wrote the first draft, and from time to time I went back and changed things when I realized I had made a slight slip-up. For example, at one point in the manuscript I mentioned that Gustave pushed up a window—but then I realized that French windows open outward! Also, the Germans periodically closed the demarcation line between the occupied zone of France and the unoccupied zone, in order to punish the French and show their power, and I wanted to be sure I didn’t have my characters crossing the line during a particular month when it was impossible to do so—although probably no one except me would ever notice a mistake like that.
 
I was not familiar with black radishes prior to reading this book, yet they play a crucial role in the plot—Gustave and his family use them to bribe the Nazis guarding the demarcation line.
You’re not alone—most Americans have never seen or tasted black radishes. I try to bring some along when I do a reading of the book so that people can see and taste one.
 
Black radishes are a delicacy in the region of France where the novel is set, and, as one of my father’s older cousins discovered during the war, they are also very popular with Germans.
 
That aspect of the plot comes from something that really happened. This older cousin of my father had a Swiss passport, so he was able to cross the demarcation line between the two zones of France in a way that other French Jews could not. He was also something of a daredevil. He spoke fluent German, having grown up in Switzerland, and he would chat and joke in German with the guards at the line, in order to make them feel friendly toward him. He discovered that the Germans loved black radishes. On some occasions, he smuggled food or people across the demarcation line, making sure that he always had a few black radishes on hand to distract the Germans on guard.
 
What other books would you recommend that children read if they are interested in the lives of Jewish children during World War II?
It is hard to choose, but a few particular books come to mind. One very powerful book that I read recently was Fern Schumer Chapman’s Is It Night or Day? Chapman’s novel was inspired by her mother’s childhood—she was a Jewish girl in Germany whose parents sent her alone to the United States to live with relatives in a little-known program that allowed one thousand Jewish children (but not adults) into the United States during the war. The story of Tiddy’s terrible separation from her parents is wrenching, as is her courageous struggle to find a way to live in America. I was also very gripped by Nicole Sach’s A Pocket Full of Seeds and Renée Roth-Hano’s Tough Wood, both realistic, vivid and believable accounts of French Jewish girls who must go into hiding during the war. I loved Annika Thor’s A Faraway Island. It is about the experiences of Stephie, a Jewish girl from Vienna, who is sent to Sweden with her little sister to escape the Nazis. Thor delicately renders Stephie’s sadness and longing for her home and parents as she tries to adjust to a very different life on a Swedish fishing island and to the reserved, stern woman who has taken her in. The novel’s climax uncovers one heart-rending incident that happened to Stephie in Vienna and also reveals new emotional depths in her foster mother. It is beautifully done.
 
Your “day job” is teaching Victorian and American literature at Wellesley College. How do you make time to write fiction, as well?
It is hard—especially because I am also a mother. Sometimes I feel as if I am trying to juggle parenthood with two other full-time jobs! But I feel an urgent need to write, so I do it. I need blocks of time to focus on writing. I work best when I can write for 2-3 hours of uninterrupted time in the early morning, and I also need a lot of space before and after I write with a clear head in which to focus and work things out in my mind. The research and reading I can do in smaller interstices of time here and there, but I need a certain amount of space and calmness in my head to write. This spring, I am taking an unpaid leave from Wellesley College in order to work on my next novel. I won’t make nearly as much money from the book as I would from teaching, but I’ve worked full-time ever since I graduated, except for a few months after my daughter was born, so I keep telling myself that it is not irresponsible to my family to earn less for half a year. We’ll still manage to pay the mortgage and cover health insurance!
 
You have already signed a deal to write a companion novel to Black Radishes, to be titled Green and Unripe Fruit. What will this story be about?
The new book follows Gustave as he and his family come to New York in 1942. Gustave struggles to adjust to life in this strange new country. He has learned that in America “all men are created equal,” and he is shocked and uncomprehending when he discovers racial segregation and prejudice in America too. He struggles to learn English, to adjust to his family’s new poverty, to accommodate to American ways and to find friends at his school in New York. Gustave also worries about his friend Marcel, left behind in France, and rumored to have been taken to a camp. He begins a tentative friendship with an African-American girl named September Rose—a friendship that causes intense reactions from both families and from other people in their school and their neighborhood.
 
My editor and I may not stick with the title Green and Unripe Fruit, but this possible title comes from a French expression “en faire voir des vertes et des pas mûres,” which means to give someone a lot of grief or, literally, to “make [someone] see green and unripe fruit.” I find this expression amusing and evocative. The French love produce so much that just seeing green and unripe fruit, not even tasting it, is a metaphor for grief and trouble! It fits the new book, I think, because Gustave suffers a lot when he comes to America, but the image of unripe fruit also contains the possibility that, over time, the fruit will ripen, that grief will turn to fruition. That’s one of the guiding ideas of the new novel.

Eliza Borne, assistant web editor of BookPage, was a student of Meyer’s when she attended Wellesley College.

Author photo by Hannah Meyer-Winkler.

Although they are Jewish, 11-year-old Gustave's parents believe they are safe in Paris—until Nazis occupy the city in 1940. Now Gustave must leave his best friends behind as his family flees to Saint-Georges, where life isn't much easier: Food is scarce,…

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