Alice Cary

NonfictionArts & CultureArt

Mary Beard

Interview by Alice Cary

Mary Beard has an extraordinary knack for making art history palatable. She has been called “Britain’s most beloved intellectual,” and this summer Queen Elizabeth II honored her many achievements by naming her a dame.

She is a classics professor at the University of Cambridge, but her scholarly journey seems to have started with a piece of cake. As a 5-year-old in 1960, she visited the British Museum, where she desperately wanted a better look at a 3,000-year-old carbonized piece of cake from ancient Egypt. That’s when a curator did something she’ll never forget: He reached for his keys, opened up the case and put that piece of cake right in front of the wide-eyed little girl.

Speaking by phone from her home in Cambridge, England, Beard acknowledges, “The idea that some old guy, or so he seemed to me, sees a kid trying to look, and what he does is open the door for you­—that’s a moving moment.”

Opening up doors to history is exactly what Beard has been doing in her long career as a professor, television host and author, including in her bestselling revisionist history of ancient Rome, SPQR: A History of Ancient Rome. This spring, she was featured in a new BBC series, “Civilizations,” which is now available on PBS.

In highly readable prose accompanied by a wealth of pictures, her companion book to the series, How Do We Look: The Body, the Divine, and the Question of Civilization explores both the depiction and reception of ancient art. She examines images of the human body, and also of God or gods. In doing so, she travels the globe and gallops through history, witnessing a sunrise in Cambodia at Angkor Wat, visiting art-filled caves in India, traipsing through the Mexican jungle to see Olmec heads, wandering through the ranks of China’s terra-cotta warriors and admiring a modern Turkish mosque in Istanbul.

“You start to see how these things are incorporated into our own lives and the lives of people of the past.”

She’s a plain-spoken, down-to-earth guide, from the top of her long, flowing gray hair down to her fashionable sneakers, which allow her to get up close and personal with a cavalcade of art masterpieces. Her enthusiasm is contagious as she clambers alongside a 65-foot-high Roman statue, the Colossi of Memnon, saying, “I’ve waited half my life to be here!”

“Blimey!” Beard recalls. “That’s when you realize it’s vast. I’m sitting on his foot, and that’s big, and there’s a whole statue there.” Later in our conversation she circles back to how affected she was by these encounters: “If I look impressed and a bit moved, it’s because I was. It’s kind of exciting and slightly terrifying in a way, to be so up close to those things. I’ll never forget it.”

Unlike many art historians, Beard doesn’t simply focus on the lives and methods of artists, whom she describes as “one damn genius after the next.” Those stories interest her, but she points out that there’s much more to contemplate.

“I think that just as—or more—interesting is what people made of [the art], how they saw it and what they did with it,” she says. “Simply to concentrate on that one moment in which this work of art was created—usually by a male creative genius—is not to see enormous amounts about the history of the object: [not only] what it was for at the time—how people understood it then, how radical it was then—but also what happened to it over 2,000 years and how people have used it differently and thought about it.”

She notes, “We’re in the picture, too. That all has to be part of the discussion. It’s widening the sense of what the history of art is. As I say, ‘putting us back in the picture.’”

Take nudes, for instance. Today’s art viewers take them for granted, or as Beard phrases it, “not just one damn genius after another, but one damn Venus after another.” But the idea of displaying the naked female body was once really “in your face,” as first evidenced by the Aphrodite of Knidos, carved by Greek sculptor Praxiteles around 330 BCE. Nudes have now become “part of the stereotype of the greatest hits of world art,” Beard says, then offers a counter perspective: “It’s quite important to think about why something that we now think of as very much part of the standard tradition was, once upon a time, so difficult, awkward and upsetting, actually.”

While affirming that she’s a great admirer of museums, Beard cautions that they “encourage you to look at objects in kind of standardized ways.” In contrast, she loved seeing artworks that were “either somehow in their original setting in churches or were kind of out there, just in the world.” One high point was a visit to an unfinished sculpture still in its quarry in Naxos, Greece, which offered a very comfortable place to sit.

“This sculpture has been in the world of this village for two and a half thousand years now,” she notes. “You start to see how these things are incorporated into our own lives and the lives of people of the past.”

Beard hopes that both the book and television series will give museum-goers more ownership of what they see. “I hope they’ll feel closer to [the art] and have a sense of a right to speak about it.”

She also offers this important advice for museum visits: “Don’t spend too long. Spend an hour there, look at three things, and then go away. Actually go and really get to know something. There’s nothing worse than watching people being somehow herded through museums.”

“Maybe it’s because I’m getting old,” Beard says, “but I find I get terrible museum legs after about an hour and a half.”

 

This article was originally published in the September 2018 issue of BookPage. Download the entire issue for the Kindle or Nook.

Author photo by Robin Cormack.

Mary Beard has an extraordinary knack for making art history palatable. She has been called “Britain’s most beloved intellectual,” and this summer Queen Elizabeth II honored her many achievements by naming her a dame.

Children's & YAMiddle Grade

Sharon Creech

Interview by Alice Cary

When Newbery Medal-winning author Sharon Creech and her husband moved to coastal Maine six years ago, they knew the change would be good for their family. Several books later, it seems the move has also been a boon to Creech’s writing.

Creech’s adult daughter, her husband and their two children also settled in Maine, and Creech’s 2016 novel, Moo, dramatized her granddaughter’s experience of helping raise a cow with their new hometown’s 4-H Club. After that, Creech’s granddaughter and grandson cared for rescued lambs, which inspired Creech’s new middle grade novel, Saving Winslow―although this time the writing involved some negotiations.

“They’re so cute,” Creech says, speaking by phone from Maine. “The grandchildren would be sitting in chairs, holding a little lamb, trying to get the bottle in their mouth, and the looks on the children’s faces were just like you see with a mother and a newborn. Just witnessing that simple, pure kind of transaction has made it all worth our while to move to Maine, to be close to them and to witness this.”

When Creech mentioned to her daughter and granddaughter that she wanted to write about the lambs, they both said no—they wanted to write that story themselves. “They’re both really good writers, so I think they will do it one day,” she says. Creech decided to draw on their experiences but to write about another animal instead. When family members sent her a video of a miniature donkey swinging in a hammock, she was hooked.

However, Creech was still thinking about her granddaughter’s first rescue lamb named Winslow, so she countered with, “Can I at least use the name?” This time the answer was yes. With all the makings of an instant classic, Saving Winslow is one of those seemingly simple animal stories that is beautifully understated yet emotionally complex, bringing to mind the beloved tales of E.B. White and Kate DiCamillo. Told in exceedingly short, riveting chapters, it’s the story of a young boy named Louie who cares for a struggling baby mini donkey.

“I try to get in this very tranquil place in my mind.”

Louie is also learning to navigate life without his beloved older brother, Gus, who is serving overseas in the army. Louie meets a girl named Nora, who’s dealing with her own family tragedy. “Somehow Louie felt that saving Winslow would also save and protect Gus, like the two were connected somehow,” Creech writes.

“I constantly return to themes of grief or letting go,” Creech says, noting that she wrote her first book the year after her father died. A stroke six years before had robbed her father of his speech. “So it felt like my obligation to use all those words that I could see that he wanted to say but couldn’t. I’m probably always going to be touching on these kinds of themes, all of those things that are crucial elements of life.”

Creech concludes that writing about a donkey instead of a lamb ended up being for the best, making the novel “almost funnier” and “less likely to get treacly.” Creech adeptly avoids sappy pitfalls, describing, for instance, a baby boy who lives next door to Louie as having “a tangled curly blob of black hair that looked like a burnt cauliflower had exploded there.” Small details like these, combined with the novel’s structure as a whole, make Saving Winslow a master class in superb writing.

Over the years, working in both poetry and prose, Creech acknowledges that her writing process has become increasingly succinct, partly to allow her time to pursue family obligations and other interests. She now usually writes for about three hours in the morning, having fine-tuned her routine.

“I try to get in this very tranquil place in my mind,” the author explains. “I think that comes from writing almost every day for 20 years. You have your cup of tea. You have your little chocolates. You tell your husband that you are going to be incommunicado for a couple hours. You put the phone away. And then I just sort of sit there, and I’m relaxed. I look at what I did the day before, and then I just go.”

Creech is currently having what she calls “an interesting relationship” with a new project that’s “driving [her] crazy.” So far, it’s written in prose, and it doesn’t feature animals, although “there’s a character who thinks about animals.”

Should she need a diversion from writing, she has a steady stream of fan letters that arrive frequently. She keeps some favorites nearby, such as a note from a boy who recently informed her, “If I had time, I still would not read, but I might write poems or something. I would hopefully have something better to do than read, but I might read. But if I liked to read, I would probably read your books.”

“There’s something in his voice,” Creech says of the backhanded compliment, chuckling. “I want to write his story.”

Such honest letters are refreshing, she admits, “particularly when you’ve waded through 50 or 100 or so from the more rote ones, where they’re being very correct and polite. It’s a relief―like a real person.”

Meanwhile, life beckons outside of her office door. “We’re very, very glad we made the move here,” she says. “We’re loving Maine so much.”

Coastal Maine has been home to many authors and illustrators, including none other than the late E.B. White, who lived and wrote from his home in Brooklin, Maine. Creech, a longtime fan, says she’s become re-immersed in his writing. “You know,” she says, “now I really understand where all that was coming from, his affiliation with animals and his understanding of them.”

 

This article was originally published in the September 2018 issue of BookPage. Download the entire issue for the Kindle or Nook.

Author photo by Karin Leuthy.

When Newbery Medal-winning author Sharon Creech and her husband moved to coastal Maine six years ago, they knew the change would be good for their family. Several books later, it seems the move has also been a boon to Creech’s writing.

NonfictionHistory

Susan Orlean

Interview by Alice Cary

The idea began with an interview. Susan Orlean’s then 6-year-old son had a school assignment to interview a city employee in their new hometown of Los Angeles.

A boy after his mother’s own heart, he chose a librarian. As the pair walked through the doors of a nearby branch library, Orlean, the famed author of The Orchid Thief, was overcome by what she calls “a Proustian kind of moment” filled with memories of countless childhood visits to the library in Shaker Heights, Ohio, with her mother, who worked in a bank but frequently declared that she would’ve loved to have been a librarian.

Now, years later, that moment has come full circle with the publication of Orlean’s spellbinding love letter to this beloved institution, The Library Book, dedicated to her son (now a teenager) and late mother, who died from dementia as Orlean wrote her tribute.

“I got very emotional, thinking, these are amazing places and my association with them is so profound,” Orlean recalls, speaking by phone from Banff, Canada. “I love writing about places that I feel that I know very well but have never really examined. The library was exactly that sort of place.”

Nonetheless, when she casually mentioned to her publisher that she would enjoy spending a year in a library to see what goes on, she knew some sort of essential ingredient was missing from her pitch. “It felt a bit amorphous. I loved the idea of it, but it had a little bit of a saggy-baggy feel, and it didn’t quite create a narrative.”

“I love writing about places that I feel that I know very well but have never really examined. The library was exactly that sort of place.”

It wasn’t long before Orlean discovered—quite literally—the spark to enliven her account. She was invited on a personal tour of the Los Angeles Central Library, and at one point her librarian guide cracked open a book, held it to his face and “inhaled deeply,” saying, “You can still smell the smoke in some of them.”

Orlean was puzzled, asking if patrons had been allowed to smoke in the building in the past. The librarian shot her a wary look, then proceeded to tell her about a disastrous fire that consumed the building on April 29, 1986, reaching 2,000 degrees Fahrenheit and burning for more than seven hours, destroying or damaging more than a million books. Miraculously, there were no fatalities.

“I just about fell off my chair,” Orlean says. “It was such an amazingly interesting and complicated story, and it provided me with this other narrative thread to take me through this bigger story of writing about libraries in general.” Adding to the narrative appeal, the fire’s cause remains a mystery—arson was suspected.

Orlean’s account of the arson investigation reads like a whodunit. In her minute-by-minute account of the conflagration, she writes, “The library was spreading fluidly, like spilled ink.” The stacks acted as fireplace flues, while the books provided fuel.” One firefighter later told Orlean, “We thought we were looking at the bowels of hell.” The main suspect was a young wannabe actor named Harry Peak, who died in 1993. An infuriating yet irresistible personality, Peak had a series of constantly changing alibis.

After interviewing Peak’s family and friends, Orlean concludes that as likable as he seemed to be, he was “mighty close” to being a pathological liar. She notes that he offered each of his changing alibis “with certainty and a full-throated delivery of, ‘This is exactly what I was doing that day.’”

That’s very rare, Orlean explains. “A lot of people have an alibi for a crime. It’s rare to have seven.”

She spent four and a half years researching, interviewing and writing. “I made a decision that I wanted to spend time in every department. Every piece of the library, from the people in the basement cataloging all the way up through all of the subject departments. That took a good amount of time, as well as just going [to the library] a lot to get a feel for the place.”

Orlean’s far-reaching research even involved starting her own little inferno so she could see firsthand what Peak might have experienced if he had indeed started the fire. Appropriately enough, she decided to burn a paperback copy of Ray Bradbury’s classic book-burning novel, Fahrenheit 451. She chose a windless day in her backyard, finding the task “incredibly hard,” because she has “come to believe that books have souls.”

She was amazed to discover that books catch fire “like little bombs.” She adds, “It just seemed like [the book] grabbed the flames and went boom. I remember asking my husband, ‘Did that just happen?’ I kept thinking, ‘Wow, that was just crazy that went so fast.’ There was nothing left.”

With crackling, page-turning prose, Orlean manages to seamlessly weave the story of the library’s devastating fire and the aftermath with a bird’s eye look at both the mechanics of LA’s immense city library and its unexpectedly riveting history. Just like the library itself, Orlean’s book is filled to the brim with a wide array of fascinating details and behind-the-scenes personalities and anecdotes. For book lovers, it’s a veritable treasure trove.

Orlean mentions that librarianship has become more popular. “It really does combine a sense of social contribution with a generation of young people who’ve grown up with information technology. I think there’s a fascination with curating and accessing information, and then you combine that with doing something that feels like it has a social value.”

Might her latest book inspire readers to join the profession?

“If that were to happen, I would feel that I had done something amazing.”

 

This article was originally published in the October 2018 issue of BookPage. Download the entire issue for the Kindle or Nook.

Author photo by Noah Fecks.

The idea began with an interview. Susan Orlean’s then 6-year-old son had a school assignment to interview a city employee in their new hometown of Los Angeles.

FictionLiterary Fiction

Barbara Kingsolver

Interview by Alice Cary

When Barbara Kingsolver starts writing a novel, she identifies an intriguing, vital question, one without a clear answer. What question, it seems natural to ask, did she ponder for her latest novel? Her response is somewhat startling.

We speak by phone from her home in southwestern Virginia, where she’s “happily in my beautiful office, looking out the window at trees.” Her voice sounds relaxed and gracious, and when I confess that I originally hail from a small town in southern West Virginia, not too far away, she says, “Well, you and I could talk in our native tongues if we wanted to.” As a bit of twang from her Kentucky roots creeps into her voice, she notes that her accent “depends on where I am in my book tour, whether I’m the nice radio Barbara, or if I’ve been home lately, then my vowels will shift a little.”

When it comes to the key question that prompted her remarkable new novel, Unsheltered, Kingsolver responds with no trace of a Southern accent: “WTF?!”

Here’s what prompted her expletive outburst: “I was watching so many things that we’ve mostly spent our lives trusting in—such as, if you work hard, there will be a job at the end of the college degree. There will be a pension at the end of your career. There will always be more fish in the sea. The poles will stay frozen. Every single one of those is now up for debate.”

She quickly corrects herself. “No, not even up for debate—wrong! What are the rules of civil governance? What does it mean to be a patriot, to be a good American? What does it mean to be president? You know, everything that we’ve spent a long time believing in as the correct way to proceed is looking less and less true.”

In a nutshell, Kingsolver explains her “WTF moment” as rough shorthand for, “What do we do and why, when it looks like all the rules that we’ve believed in are no longer true?”

She takes a breath and asks, “Is that an answer?”

The result of Kingsolver’s latest search for answers is yet another tour de force of fiction, a riveting successor to novels like Flight Behavior and The Poisonwood Bible. In alternating chapters, Unsheltered tells the stories of two families inhabiting the same address, the corner of Sixth and Plum in Vinewood, New Jersey—one family living in the months leading up to the 2016 presidential election, the other in the 1870s.

“There have been many moments in history when civilizations started to unravel,” Kingsolver says. “So, I thought, wouldn’t it be interesting to look back at some others, set up a contrast and then try to make these two stories into one story?”

Both families are teetering on the brink of financial ruin in the midst of a societal shift. Modern-day Willa Knox is an unemployed editor whose magazine has folded; her husband is a professor whose college has closed. Their free-spirited adult daughter has suddenly appeared on their doorstep after a long absence, and a tragedy upends the life of their Harvard-educated son, bringing a newborn baby into the fold.

In the 1870s, a science teacher named Thatcher Greenwood is chastised for teaching the principles of Charles Darwin. He also befriends a brilliant scientist living next door. She is Mary Treat—a real-life, little-known naturalist who corresponded with Darwin.

“I’m always writing about this dynamic conflict between individual expression and communal belonging.”

“The fiction that I most admire is ambitious in its scope,” Kingsolver admits. She grew up reading “great, globally ambitious writers” like Melville and Doris Lessing, “people who were not content with household drama. They wanted to tackle conflict on a larger scale. . . . That’s the kind of novel I love to try to write. And I would much rather write it in fiction because I love creating character, and I love painting with those brushes.”

Kingsolver always imbues her fictional worlds with plenty of fascinating factual backbone, and this book is no exception. “I love delving into a completely new subject with each book,” she says. “They say every writer is just writing the same book again and again, and if that’s true, I’m always writing about this dynamic conflict between individual expression and communal belonging. But the settings and the specifics are always changing. . . . I love that, because I was one of those college kids who wanted to major in everything.”

Once Kingsolver decided to use Mary Treat as a fictionalized character, she traveled to Vineland, New Jersey, to study her writings. A treasure trove awaited, including letters from Darwin. In her acknowledgments, the author describes holding one such missive as “one of the most electric moments in my life.”

Even more surprises were in store. Kingsolver discovered that Vineland was a Utopian community created in the mid-1800s by an eccentric real-estate mogul named Charles Landis, who bears an uncanny resemblance to a certain modern politician. Landis, she says, “wanted to steal every scene because he’s a loud mouth. If he’d had a cell phone, he would have been tweeting. He was just the perfect sort of narcissist bully antihero that I needed to anchor my other story.”

Kingsolver quickly discovered other “uncanny and chilling” parallels to modern politics. For instance, in 2016, one presidential candidate—whom she alludes to but never names in her novel nor this interview—famously suggested that he could shoot someone on Fifth Avenue without losing voters, while Landis actually shot a man in the back of the head right on Vineland’s Main Street.

Landis’ target was a newspaper editor with whom he disagreed. After the editor succumbed to his injuries several months later, Landis was—shockingly—found not guilty by reason of temporary insanity, perhaps among the first uses of this defense in America.

“I’m writing about the bleakest things,” Kingsolver acknowledges. “As I see the two-sentence summaries of this book starting to come out, I say, ‘Who would want to read that?’”

Fans needn’t worry. As always, Kingsolver has worked hard to ensure that her novel is enjoyable. “That’s my contract with the reader.” Despite their immense struggles, these characters experience numerous comic, uplifting and revelatory moments.

One of the most magical parts of Unsheltered is how Kingsolver skillfully blends her two narratives into one unified tale, with past and present repeatedly mirroring each other. For instance, Willa stares at a portrait of Landis, studying the “famous autocrat, with his ruddy cheeks and odd flop of hair.” Years earlier, Mary Treat says of Landis: “The man is like his hero Phineas Barnum, with the gilded offices in Manhattan Island.”

“I really invested a lot of the craft and elbow grease—whatever you call hours in the chair—into making [the earlier] story fully as engaging as the modern story and making it feel seamless.” Kingsolver began writing in the fall of 2015 and finished in January 2017, the month of Donald Trump’s presidential inauguration. “While I was writing,” she says, “part of me thought this will be completely history by the time this novel is published, and no one will even remember this guy.” She calls the unexpected election results “bad for the world, good for the book.”

After the election, Kingsolver took stock of her almost-finished manuscript, saying, “I understood that this book that I had thought could be important was going to be important. It made me feel even more strongly that I wanted to get this book into the world.”

 

This article was originally published in the November 2018 issue of BookPage. Download the entire issue for the Kindle or Nook.

Author photo by Annie Griffiths.

When Barbara Kingsolver starts writing a novel, she identifies an intriguing, vital question, one without a clear answer. What question, it seems natural to ask, did she ponder for her latest novel? Her response is somewhat startling.

NonfictionPolitics

Steve Kornacki

Interview by Alice Cary

Anyone who has watched on-air MSNBC and NBC News correspondent Steve Kornacki knows how much he revels in the many twists and turns of U.S. politics. Now Kornacki brings his insights and enthusiasm to his captivating new book, The Red and the Blue: The 1990s and the Birth of Political Tribalism, which tackles the question that both sides of the political aisle have been trying to answer: How did our country become so divided?

It’s amazing to think that the terms red and blue weren’t used consistently for Republican and Democratic states until the 2000 presidential election night. It feels like we’ve had those terms forever. You also write that “Blue America” was born during the 1996 presidential election, although “no one had a name for it yet, or knew if it would endure.” At what point did you settle on the book’s title?
Literally 20 years ago, if you told someone that you lived in a red state, they would have no idea what you meant. Maybe they’d think you were talking about communism or something. On election nights into the 1990s, the TV networks would randomly assign colors. Sometimes the Democrats would be blue and sometimes they’d be red. In 1984, David Brinkley on ABC opened their election coverage by telling viewers that the Republican states would be colored in red that night―because “red” and “Reagan” started with the same letter.

Back then, though, the color scheme often didn’t matter. We had landslide elections. But in 2000, it was the closest to a perfect tie we’ve ever had, and the divisions were so stark. It just so happened that every network was using the same colors that night, and the country was left for weeks after the election to stare at and contemplate that map as the Florida recount played out. At one point, David Letterman joked that he had a solution to the disputed election―Al Gore could be president of the blue states and George W. Bush could be president of the red ones. That’s what we had become and that’s the basic division that has endured ever since.

When did you start working on The Red and the Blue, and what compelled you to write it?
I’ve been saying that I worked on this so long that it sometimes feels like I started writing it back in the ’90s. My first idea came about nine years ago, and it was for a much more narrow and limited project looking at the rise of Bill Clinton and what might have been with Mario Cuomo. But almost as soon as I got into the research, I realized there was so much more to the era and a much bigger story to be told. I was looking back at election nights from the ’80s, when there were coast-to-coast landslides, and I was realizing how far we’ve come from that. No one is about to win 49 states these days, but back then it happened, and the ’90s were sort of the bridge between the two―the decade when the red and blue America were born and the divide we live with today was created.

You grew up watching most of the political drama that you describe. How did your perceptions change as you wrote?
I did follow a lot of [what I cover in the book] in my politics-obsessed youth, so I came into the research and writing knowing most of the key characters and plot points. What I hadn’t gotten in real time, though, were the backstories. Why were all of these people in the position to do the things they did in the 1990s? How did they get there? What forces had propelled them before? Pat Buchanan, whose ’90s presidential campaigns stressed themes that are almost identical to what Trump would embrace 20 years later, is someone I came away with a much better understanding of.

Did you have any research stumbling blocks? Or lingering questions you would like to ask the politicians and personalities involved?
He never addressed it with much depth before he passed away a few years ago, but I have wondered a lot about Mario Cuomo’s fateful decision not to board that New Hampshire-bound plane [in order to declare himself a presidential candidate] in December 1991. He would have instantly been the Democratic front-runner and would very possibly have knocked off Bill Clinton and won the presidency. I think I understand why he passed that up, but I would love to have asked him—and for him to have answered in a very straightforward and introspective way. (In other words, in a very non-Cuomo way.)

A character in Barbara Kingsolver’s new novel, Unsheltered, notes: “History is not good news or bad news, it’s just one big story unreeling.” You obviously adore the “big story unreeling.” How did you manage to digest so much information and turn it into such a compelling narrative?
All I can think of his how much I left out! The challenge for me in trying to convey what I think of as the political legacy of the ’90s was to pick my spots to go deep. The Gingrich-Clinton collision and the wars it unleashed are, to me, what forced Americans to take sides, leaving us a nation divided into red and blue camps. But I felt I needed to show readers what political lessons Americans had internalized before that collision—to understand why they acted the way they did. So, for example, there’s a lot in the book about Gingrich in the ’80s staging what amounted to guerilla attacks on the House floor, enraging Democrats. Gingrich then got flooded with adulation from the grassroots base, showing his fellow Republicans that this stuff worked.

Was it difficult finding time to write while you carried out your on-air duties at MSNBC? You must have found endless parallels between past and present as you carried out both tasks simultaneously.
Writing this book in 2016 and 2017 ended up being an escape for me. The second-to-second breaking news environment we live in turns every minute or fragmentary development into a Big Moment, even though most of them end up fizzling out fast and being forgotten within days or even hours. So it was fun to sequester myself in my office or in a Così restaurant, put my headphones on and just immerse myself in a different time. The characters I was researching and writing about started to feel as contemporary to me as the names in that day’s news―although, then again, a lot of the characters from the ’90s are still characters in today’s news.

Do you have any idea how politics might become less tribalized and more about the art of compromise? Do you see any signs of hope?
On some level, I think, as humans, we are hard-wired for tribalism. What’s happened is that over the last few decades, our media and politics have evolved in a way that is maximally conducive to this instinct. My hope is that if human nature helped to get us to this place, maybe we will collectively grow sick of it and that human nature will help us find a way out. There were a lot of strong populist undercurrents that were not being expressed in our politics and media a few decades ago. But they were there, and they were not going to go away. Now they’re getting aired, and one of the effects is to feed all of this instability and tribalism. But maybe a few decades from now we’ll be able to look back at this period and be able to say that it was nasty and divisive but also a necessary bridge to something better.

What is it like being an on-air personality in these days of increasingly tribalized media and “fake news” attacks?
I like to think that I occupy one of the few lanes in political media that can actually be a bridge between the two tribes. No matter which side you’re on, everyone has a stake in trying to understand why things are playing out the way they are. I try to use numbers and maps and historical context to tell that story and facilitate that conversation. I’ve found that there’s a lot I can talk about with both blue and red audiences without having to change the substance of what I’m saying.

What’s your favorite part of your TV job?
Election nights are my favorite, hands down. There’s just so much going on, so much information coming in, so many unexpected twists, especially when a race comes down to just a few votes in just a few precincts.

Your book is filled with so many fascinating anecdotes and quotes. One that seems particularly prescient comes from Jim Squires, who was Ross Perot’s spokesperson. Discussing the populist energy that Perot managed to lasso as a presidential candidate, Squires said, “The next time the man on the white horse comes in, he may not be so benign. He could be a real racial hater or a divider of people.” Were you startled to see that comment?
As soon as I saw that quote I jumped back and said to myself, “This has to be in the book!” One of the themes of the book is that the formula for what Trump pulled off in 2016 was essentially revealed through a few different characters and moments in the ’90s—and here was someone looking at the potential of a party-crashing populist billionaire and anticipating the exact thing that would later be said by critics about Trump.

Have you started thinking about ideas for another book?
The plan is to keep going and to look at what happened next: The America created by the ’90s and the George W. Bush era, when Bush came to office after a disputed election—settled only by a 5-4 Supreme Court ruling—and leads the country through 9/11 in a way that seemed to shatter all of these new divisions, only to watch them all resurface and intensify as he pushed the country to war and won a narrow re-election in a “battle of the bases” election that set a new template for how campaigns are won and lost.

Author photo by Anthony J. Scutro

Anyone who has watched MSNBC and NBC News correspondent Steve Kornacki on air knows how much he revels in the many twists and turns of politics. Now Kornacki brings his insights and enthusiasm to his captivating new book, The Red and the Blue: The 1990s and the Birth of Political Tribalism, which tackles the question that everyone on both sides of the political aisle has been trying to answer: How did our country become so divided?
FictionHistorical Fiction

Diane Setterfield

Interview by Alice Cary

Diane Setterfield has captivated readers around the world with her intricately woven tales, but the bestselling British novelist admits that creating them has affected her in unexpected ways.

Most recently, with the publication of her third book, Once Upon a River, she’s been seeing rivers everywhere, even when looking at things like leaf patterns or cracks on a wall. “When you’ve been focusing on something so intently for a time,” she says, laughing, “the whole world seems made of rivers. You get slightly bonkers after novel writing.”

The river in question is the Thames, and Setterfield’s focus became so complete that a few years ago she moved to a home near its banks in Oxford. “I can leave my front door and be down there in a couple of minutes,” she says by phone from her home. “I think it’s one of those mysterious ways in which a life where you spend several years intensively imagining something seems to create change in the real world for you.”

Once Upon a River begins on the dark night of the winter solstice in 1887, when a photographer pulls a 4-year-old girl out of the Thames’ icy waters and delivers her apparently dead body to an inn, the Swan at Radcot.

When the child miraculously revives, the mystery deepens as various families begin to argue about her identity. One couple rejoices that their daughter, kidnapped two years ago, has finally been found, while a local farmer believes the girl to be the offspring of his estranged son. And defying any sort of logic, a hardscrabble woman named Lily announces that the girl is her sister, who drowned decades ago. In the meantime, others whisper that she is the child of a phantom ferryman named Quietly. The girl herself remains mute, offering no clues to her identity. As Setterfield writes: “A body always tells a story—but this child’s corpse was a blank page.”

And oh, what a story it turns out to be, as Setterfield enlivens her pages with a broad cast of colorful characters, all with their own stories to tell. “What I longed for,” she says, “was a room with great big walls where I could just put everything on the wall, and I could physically re-create the themes and the character lines and the chapters of the novel all around me.”

The story’s vast roots stretched back to Setterfield’s own childhood in the 1960s, when her 2-year-old sister, Mandy, was diagnosed with a heart defect. Doctors told their parents that Mandy couldn’t be operated on until she was older and bigger. From that point on, Setterfield recalls, “Family life became very, very different. I can remember having terrible nightmares as a child, and when I look back, the nightmares I had were always about my sister: losing my sister, my sister falling down into a hole in the ground and I couldn’t get her out. I was much more aware than most children are of what sickness is and what dying means.”

About that time, young Setterfield heard about an American boy who “drowned” in a lake but subsequently came back to life. Thrilled, she told her grandmother, “We must tell Mandy that if she died, she just might come back. And then it will be all right.” That’s not how it works, her grandmother informed her.

“While I was writing the book, I found myself thinking a lot about the pleasure of being a child when your mum or your dad reads a story to you.”

Years later, when Setterfield was in her 20s, she read about a similar incident in Scotland, in an article that explained the science behind the mammalian dive reflex—the body’s response to submersion in chilled water that accounts for such survival.

Happily, Mandy outgrew her heart problem without needing surgery and is “absolutely fine now.” (Setterfield dedicates Once Upon a River to Mandy and their other sister, Paula.) Yet despite the real-life storybook ending, the remnants of Setterfield’s childhood nightmares linger, which made writing the sections about Lily and her guilt about her sister’s death paralyzingly difficult. “There came a time,” she admits, “that I had to look myself straight in the face and say, ‘Diane, what are you avoiding?’”

One of the novel’s central premises is “the different ways human beings create stories to explain something miraculous or impossible or unlikely.” As a result, setting the book in the latter part of the 19th century made immediate sense, Setterfield says, because “science had just gotten started explaining human beings to themselves,” and she could contrast these scientific theories with prevailing notions of superstition, folklore and gossip.

Not surprisingly, as its title suggests, Once Upon a River is a book about storytelling, in which the narrator occasionally addresses readers directly. “While I was writing the book, I found myself thinking a lot about the pleasure of being a child when your mum or your dad reads a story to you. This is a story for adults, and it’s not specifically to be read aloud, but I thought if I can just have a few little moments that will be reminiscent of what it’s like to be in a comfortable, safe place and someone you trust is telling you a story, then that would just be a lovely thing to do,” Setterfield says.

Setterfield hasn’t always been a storyteller, having first been an academic in England and France. She left teaching and burst onto the publishing world in 2006 with her hit debut novel, The Thirteenth Tale, a modern gothic novel about a dying writer. That’s about the time when she began to have what she calls “a distant sense of a book” about a drowned girl who comes back to life.

Exhausted and exhilarated by the publicity tours for The Thirteenth Tale, Setterfield spent a two-week holiday along the banks of the Thames, taking what she calls “a discovery walk” of about 180 or so miles, from the river’s underground source all the way to London.

Without having any plot or location specifics in mind, she says, “I just wanted to drink in the general feeling of being by the river.” As she fondly describes the journey, reminiscing about how at first she found it quite easy to wander off from the initial narrow, bramble- and mud-covered path, she has a sudden realization: “Here’s a metaphor very much like the early stages of writing a novel!” Continuing with that thread, she adds, “And then, the longer you follow it, the stronger the current is and the more certainty you have. Wow!”

Setterfield took notes while making her river journey, but she tucked them away in her office for a long while and wrote another novel, Bellman & Black. After that, she finally tackled the river story.

At times, she despaired of ever being able to wrestle it into shape. Now that she’s done, she’s monumentally relieved, and still in the “honeymoon phase” of writing her next book. “You should really talk to writers when they’re right in the thick of it,” she suggests with a cheerful chuckle, “and then it would probably be a very different interview.”

One reward for her perseverance has already materialized: A TV series of Once Upon a River is forthcoming from the team that created “Broadchurch” and “Grantchester.”

Meanwhile, Setterfield continues to contemplate the river. Although she can’t see the Thames from her house, she says, “I’m pretty sure that if I could put a window in the roof space of the attic, I’d be high enough to see over the streets to the river. I think about it so many times, you’d be amazed. Every time I go up there, I stand there, almost as if I’m trying to see through the roof, but I’m just imagining that window so hard. I may just have to ring up a few architects.”

 

This article was originally published in the December 2018 issue of BookPage. Download the entire issue for the Kindle or Nook.

Author photo by Susie Barker.

Diane Setterfield has captivated readers around the world with her intricately woven tales, but the bestselling British novelist admits that creating them has affected her in unexpected ways.

Memoir

Dani Shapiro

Interview by Alice Cary

Dani Shapiro has been thinking about secrets all of her life, exploring the theme repeatedly in five novels and four memoirs. But it wasn’t until a few years ago that she unwittingly uncovered the biggest secret of all: Her beloved, late father wasn’t her biological father.

“I needed every single brain cell to focus on this discovery and to try to understand what it meant,” she says, speaking from her home in the Connecticut countryside.

Growing up as an only child in 1960s and ’70s New Jersey, Shapiro couldn’t help feeling partially like an outsider as the pale, blue-eyed, blond-haired daughter of her darker, Jewish parents. In fact, a family friend and Holocaust survivor was so startled by her unlikely features that she peered into her eyes and announced, “We could have used you in the ghetto, little blondie. You could have gotten us bread from the Nazis.” The dramatic proclamation made a searing imprint on Shapiro.

“All my life I had known there was a secret. What I hadn’t known: the secret was me.”

When Shapiro was 23, her father died from injuries he suffered in a devastating car crash, a tragedy she chronicled in her 1998 memoir, Slow Motion. Years later, when Shapiro’s husband decided to order a DNA kit, he asked her if she wanted one as well. She gamely agreed, and gave it little thought until several months later, when the kit’s shocking results showed that she was only half Jewish. Furthermore, she wasn’t biologically related to her half-sister, her father’s child from a previous marriage. An offhand remark made decades earlier by Shapiro’s now-deceased mother provided a clue to the puzzle: She told Shapiro that she had been conceived in Philadelphia.

With astonishing speed, Shapiro and her husband unraveled the mystery. Her parents had traveled to Philadelphia for artificial insemination; an anonymous sperm donor was Shapiro’s biological father. The DNA results and some internet sleuthing allowed Shapiro and her husband to track down the identity of her father, a now-retired physician who specialized in, of all things, medical ethics.

“All my life I had known there was a secret. What I hadn’t known: the secret was me,” Shapiro writes in her mesmerizing account of that revelation and its aftermath, Inheritance: A Memoir of Genealogy, Paternity, and Love.

“You can’t make this stuff up; I could never write this in a novel.” Shapiro says. She also explains that there was no way she could’ve made sense of the experience without writing through it. “Thank God it’s my 10th book. I had a toolbox. I had a set of skills and craft, both as a writer and someone who teaches writing, to be able to shape it and understand that it needed to be shaped. I recognized that it was an astounding story, and I wanted to do it justice.”

Shapiro contacted and eventually met her donor father, Ben, and his family, whose names and identifying details have been changed to preserve their privacy. As a medical student, Ben had donated his sperm at the Farris Institute in Philadelphia, which was operated by Edmond Farris, a renegade scientist who was practicing medicine without a license. Farris mixed Ben’s semen with that of Shapiro’s father—not an uncommon practice at the time. Ben went on with his life, forgetting about the procedure, never imagining a future in which his role could be identified.

As strange as this story is, Shapiro explains that it’s not that uncommon. “There’s no anonymity anymore,” she says. “These stories are happening. They’re just tumbling out. Because of DNA testing, many people are having to reimagine family to some degree. . . . One of the beautiful things about this whole story is that ultimately it’s about people being kind to each other. Doing the right thing by each other. Ben and I have a relationship for which there is no playbook. He doesn’t feel like he’s my father. I don’t imagine that I feel to him like I’m his daughter. And yet we do share a very powerful bond.”

The question that haunts Shapiro is how much her parents knew. “To me, the story is not about what happened,” she says. “The much richer part is about what’s underneath all that—the lies, what did my parents go through, what they know, our shared lives together, what was the truth of that? Everything thrumming underneath was what I wanted to really be the heart and soul of the story.”

Shapiro recognizes that she’ll never have definitive answers to these questions, but she does have some ideas. She characterizes her mother as “not entirely mentally well” and “capable of bending reality to her will.” She concludes, “I think she decided from the moment that she was pregnant that I was my father’s child and that was that. I believe she would have passed a polygraph.” As for her father, to whom she dedicates the book, Shapiro believes that he may have thought he was her biological father during his wife’s pregnancy but thinks he undoubtedly realized the truth over the years.

“I don’t think he cared,” she says. “I know he loved me, but I think that was part of the knowledge that he carried around.”

So far, she hasn’t uncovered any additional half-siblings besides the children of Ben and his wife. “It wouldn’t surprise me at all if there are a few out there,” she admits.

Might Inheritance help turn some up?

“I think a lot of people, when they hear the story, will immediately go order a DNA kit,” Shapiro acknowledges. Noting that unlike her, most people make “fairly benign discoveries” with such kits, but the author cautions, “It’s powerful stuff. You have to decide whether you’re open to the potential of a big surprise.”

This article was originally published in the January 2019 issue of BookPage. Download the entire issue for the Kindle or Nook.

Author photo by Michael Maren.

Dani Shapiro has been thinking about secrets all of her life, exploring the theme repeatedly in five novels and four memoirs. But it wasn’t until a few years ago that she unwittingly uncovered the biggest secret of all: Her beloved, late father wasn’t her biological father.

Children's & YAMiddle Grade

Corey Ann Haydu

Interview by Alice Cary

If there were ever a fire in author Corey Ann Haydu’s home, she knows exactly what object she would grab: her collection of 20 years’ worth of journals. “I have a huge trunk filled with everything that happened in my childhood,” she says, speaking from her Brooklyn residence. “I love being able to sneak back in there and see who I was at age 10 and 11 and 12. There’s something really comforting about feeling like your life is stored somewhere, and for me, there’s a real panic at the idea of not being able to go back and touch base with the things that happened.”

But what if she couldn’t access all of those memories? That’s the central premise of Haydu’s cleverly deep new middle grade novel, Eventown, in which a family trying to escape the aftermath of a tragedy choose to have their negative memories erased. 

The Lively family is ready for a fresh start, so they pack up and head to Eventown, an enchanting utopia without modern amenities like cars, TV or the internet. At first, 11-year-old Elodee Lively and her twin sister, Naomi, delight in their move to the town filled with identical homes, rosebushes, waterfalls, perfectly ripe blueberries and a heavenly ice cream shop. “I wrote a lot of Eventown when I was pregnant,” Haydu says with a laugh, “which is why I think there’s a lot of cake and ice cream.” She adds, “It’s fun to create your own utopia because it’s just borrowing from all your favorite things in the world.”

Of course, there’s a price to be paid for perfection and, in ways reminiscent of Lois Lowry’s classic Newbery Medal winner The Giver, the twins slowly discover that this utopia is not what it seems. Haydu’s readers have two mysteries to untangle: What are the strange secrets of Eventown, and what was the tragedy that turned the Lively family’s lives upside down? 

“In some ways, it’s a book about the fog of grief,” Haydu explains. “I didn’t necessarily want the grief to be dealt with directly for most of the book. I think having the characters and the reader face tragedy together made the most sense.” All of Haydu’s books echo her personal philosophy: “While it’s tempting to shield kids from the most difficult parts of life for as long as possible, maybe in reality the biggest lesson about hope and wonder and love comes from really facing a tough part head on. I strive to write books that encourage facing what’s really hard while also exploring what remains really beautiful in the world in spite of everything difficult,” she says.

As for her own childhood challenges, Haydu’s trunk of journals reveals both the joys and sorrows she experienced while growing up in a small New England town with an alcoholic parent—a fact that was not discussed during her childhood, as her family was concerned with keeping up appearances. “It’s hard if, at age 12, you don’t feel like everything’s fine, but everyone’s saying it is,” she says. “That’s a confusing space to occupy.”

It’s a space that Elodee refuses to occupy. Unlike her twin, she’s determined to plunge ahead and try to understand Eventown’s secrets, including its disappointing library full of blank books. After Elodee’s mother assures her that novels aren’t needed, she disagrees, saying, “It’s weird. It’s terrible. It’s . . . wrong.” Enlisting the help of a new friend, Elodee eventually breaks into the town’s strange Welcoming Center, an act that turns most of Eventown’s citizens against her in a dramatic, nail-biting showdown.

Ironically, Haydu was so focused on portraying her characters’ heartache and emotions that she had no idea that she’d written “a bit of a page-turner and a mystery” until an editor commented on the compelling result. “My book feels so personal to me,” she says. “Maybe the specifics are different, but all of the feelings in my books are mine. And that’s the important part.”

Haydu’s first book for young adults, OCD Love Story (2013), addressed her own struggles with anxiety; Rules for Stealing Stars  (2015) chronicled an 11-year-old girl with an alcoholic mother; and The Someday Suitcase (2017) followed a fifth-grader who yearns to cure her friend’s illness but can’t. And then there’s Eventown, which deals with families trying to ignore their most painful memories, an ultimately impossible feat.

“I always think I’m writing a different type of book,” Haydu confesses, “but it always turns out that the themes relate back to central stuff for me, such as pressures placed on girls, the idea of perfection, secrets and loving people so desperately and wanting to protect them, even when you might not be able to.”

Just like her heroine Elodee, Haydu acknowledges the continuing game of tug of war she plays with her memories. “There are moments when I want to dig into that box and read some of the tough parts, and there are moments that I want to lock that box away and never look at it again,” she says. Hopefully, for Haydu’s growing legion of young readers, she will peek back in and allow those glimpses to continue to fuel her fiction.

 

This article was originally published in the February 2019 issue of BookPage. Download the entire issue for the Kindle or Nook.

If there were ever a fire in author Corey Ann Haydu’s home, she knows exactly what object she would grab: her collection of 20 years’ worth of journals. “I have a huge trunk filled with everything that happened in my childhood,” she says, speaking from…

FictionHistorical Fiction

Kate Quinn

Interview by Alice Cary

Kate Quinn takes to the skies in her new novel of Nazi hunters, Night Witches and a truly evil stepmother. 

“Gentle or thrilling—you decide,” reads the ad for private charter company Fun Flights in Carlsbad, California. Although novelist Kate Quinn admits she is “not terribly fond of flying,” she opted for adrenaline when she booked a 1929 open cockpit biplane in the name of historical research for her latest novel, The Huntress, a spellbinding Nazi-hunting saga that spans continents and decades.

After her British pilot took off, Quinn found herself soaring through the air, experiencing the same kind of rush that her novel’s character, Nina Markova, might have felt during a World War II bombing run. After growing up in the wilds of Siberia, Nina becomes a fearless member of the Night Witches, the Soviet Union’s legendary all-female night bomber regiment. Quinn was mesmerized by the hair-raising escapades related to the Night Witches and the tales of navigators who climbed out on the wing in the middle of a flight to dislodge a stuck bomb. “I read that and said, ‘You people are crazy, and that’s totally going in the book!’” she says. “A lot of things they experienced I would not have dared to make up.”

So as Quinn’s aerial courage grew, she asked the pilot, nicknamed “Biggles,” if he would consider momentarily cutting the engine, imitating the method the Night Witches often used to silently descend over German troops before releasing their bombs. “Absolutely not,” Biggles quickly responded. “That is not going to happen!”

Spine-tingling bombing runs are just one of the many highlights of Quinn’s intricately plotted novel about a trio of characters that converge after World War II to locate “the Huntress,” the mistress of an SS officer who slaughtered six innocent souls on the shore of a Polish lake. Pilot Nina, who narrowly missed becoming one of the victims, later marries Ian Graham, a British journalist and brother to one of those killed. An unlikely pair and a study in opposites, Nina and Ian are determined to deliver this war criminal to justice.

In the novel, Quinn describes one of Ian’s articles as “Dynamite in ink,” writing: “He knew every pulse point to push in those paragraphs, every emotional trigger to pull.” Those words serve as an apt description of Quinn’s latest tale, which will no doubt appeal to fans of Kristin Hannah’s The Nightingale. Similarly, Quinn’s previous novel, The Alice Network, was a historical thriller involving real-life female spies in France. After that book’s tremendous success, Quinn knew she wanted to write something war-based and set in the 20th century. She experienced a “lightbulb moment” when she stumbled across the story of Hermine Braunsteiner, a Nazi war criminal discovered in the 1960s living as a housewife in Queens, New York. “That was the story I realized I wanted to tell,” Quinn says. “What does it mean for someone to discover someone in their family literally has this kind of past?”

To make such a complex story play out, Quinn had to interweave multiple characters, plot points and timelines. In addition to Nina and Ian, she introduces readers to Jordan McBride, a young girl growing up in Boston who begins to suspect that her new German stepmother, Anneliese Weber, may be hiding unspeakable secrets.

“I am really fascinated by aftermaths,” Quinn confesses. “Not just what happens, but what happens after. After VE-Day, a lot of people had to pick up and go on with lives that had been catastrophically, irrevocably altered. How did they do it? I find that an extremely interesting problem and an extremely interesting sort of character dilemma to examine through my fictional people.”

Quinn owes her fascination with history to her mother, a librarian and history scholar who entertained her with bedtime stories about Alexander and the Gordian Knot and Julius Caesar crossing the Rubicon. “I was really head-down in history from a very young age,” she says, “so when I started telling stories of my own, it was very natural to gravitate toward the past.” As a young writer, she relied on her mother’s deft editorial skills for critique, a practice she continues today. “She’s very incisive and doesn’t give me a pass just because she’s my mother.”

Today Quinn lives with two rescue dogs (Caesar and Calpurnia) and her husband, an active-duty member of the Navy whom she’s nicknamed “the Overseas Gladiator.” She’s already hard at work on her next book, tentatively called The Rose Code, about a group of female code breakers at Bletchley Park. 

Fortunately for readers, Quinn knows she’ll never tire of the power of historical fiction: “Often when we are examining issues that are delicate or sensitive or just dynamite, they feel too close in the modern age. But if you can examine some of the same issues through the lens of the past, it puts them in a slightly safer remove. That way it doesn’t hurt as much to look as closely at something that is perhaps a little too sensitive to examine in our own lives.”

 

Author photo by Laura Jucha Photography

Kate Quinn takes to the skies in her new novel of Nazi hunters, Night Witches and a truly evil stepmother. 

NonfictionBiography

Mallory O’Meara

Interview by Alice Cary

With The Lady from the Black Lagoon: Hollywood Monsters and the Lost Legacy of Milicent Patrick, horror film producer Mallory O’Meara sets the record straight about the talented and glamorous Milicent Patrick, one of Disney’s first female animators and the only woman to have designed a classic movie monster—the Creature from the Black Lagoon.

When you first heard about Milicent Patrick at age 17, the discovery felt “like being struck by lightning.” How long did it take you to understand how important her inspiration would be?

It wasn’t until I started working in the film industry at age 23 that I understood the impact Milicent Patrick had on me. I was plunged into a male-dominated world, and suddenly the knowledge of her went from being inspirational to being crucial to my sanity. She was a constant reminder that I belonged in the world of monster movies.

Getting the tattoo of Milicent Patrick and the Creature from the Black Lagoon must have been one of the best decisions you ever made. Now that tattoo art is featured on the cover of your book. How’s that for a Hollywood ending?

Milicent was a metaphorical talisman during my first years as filmmaker, so it felt right to have her tattooed on my arm as a concrete reminder of everything she represents to me. No matter how far we advance in our chosen careers, we all still need reminders that we are capable and that what we do matters. Milicent Patrick is the embodiment of chasing your dreams in the face of hardship, even if—maybe especially if—your dreams are making strange things that the world has never seen before.

How would you spend a dream day with Milicent? 

One of the many things that Milicent and I have in common is our love of cocktails. My dream day with her would be the two of us at a bar—hopefully a tiki bar—talking over drinks.

Writing this story must have been a research nightmare. Your book contains 177 footnotes, which are informative and often hilarious. How did you decide on your footnote style? And when did you decide to include both your own story and the story of your investigative digging?

[At the time I was writing the book,] I was talking with a friend, and she wanted to know why someone who isn’t a fan of monster movies should read The Lady from the Black Lagoon. Immediately I said, “Because every day I, and thousands of other female filmmakers, go through what Milicent went through.” That was when I realized that including my own story and my own struggles against sexism would help illustrate how important both Milicent and her legacy are. The footnotes came along because that is my voice. I’m nerdy and sarcastic, so including footnotes with extra facts and bad jokes reflected how I actually talk. I’ve worked hard not to swear or say anything silly in this interview!

Milicent’s life and art have influenced countless artists like yourself. What was your experience of seeing the Oscar-winning film The Shape of Water, which was inspired by Milicent’s creation of the Creature?

Besides being a Creature fan, I’m also a massive fan of Guillermo del Toro, so I went to see The Shape of Water opening night. I burst into tears during the opening credits, cried throughout most of the movie and was sobbing so hard by the end of the film that my best friend had to bring me to the bathroom to clean all the mascara off my face. Seeing a film where the Creature was the hero and the protagonist was a woman with agency made my heart explode.

You note that “Women have always been the most important part of monster movies,” and yet horror is the least likely genre in which women work. Why is that, and is this changing?

There is a myth that women are less capable of making action-packed, violent or scary films. Therefore, less women get considered for jobs and hired. Male filmmakers get the jobs and get more experience, and are then considered more often and get even more work. It’s a cycle. It is changing, but slowly. The ratio of public outcry versus the amount of women actually getting hired is still pathetic. That’s why it’s important for fans to pay attention to who is making the films they see and to support the films made by women and gender-balanced crews.

What’s the scariest movie you’ve ever seen? And the scariest book you’ve ever read?

I saw Stanley Kubrick’s The Shining  when I was a kid, and it ruined me. It still scares me as an adult, even though now it’s one of my favorite movies. For books, I have a really high tolerance for scariness. The last book that really terrified me was Stephen King’s It, which I read as a teenager. I gave my copy away afterward to get it out of my bedroom!

Have you gotten any more life-changing tattoos? 

So far, none of the tattoos I have gotten have caused such a monumental shift in my life as the portrait of Milicent has. Although I will say that one of the tattoos I have gotten in the past couple of years holds a clue to what my next book will be.

 

ALSO IN BOOKPAGE: Read our review of The Lady from the Black Lagoon.

With The Lady from the Black Lagoon: Hollywood Monsters and the Lost Legacy of Milicent Patrick, horror film producer Mallory O’Meara sets the record straight about the talented and glamorous Milicent Patrick, one of Disney’s first female animators and the only woman to have designed a classic movie monster—the Creature from the Black Lagoon.

Children's & YAMiddle Grade

Karyn Parsons

Interview by Alice Cary

Karyn Parsons talks about her debut middle grade novel, How High the Moon, her time as an actor on “The Fresh Prince of Bel-Air,” empowering children, keeping hope while fighting against injustice and more.

You’ve had such a gloriously varied career. How did you hone your writing chops?

I’ve always loved writing. Never thought of myself as a writer, though. I declared my love for acting at an early age. I studied. I got an agent and was fortunate to have success in that field early in my life. But with that success came being identified as “an actor” by everyone, including myself.

After “Fresh Prince” ended, a friend encouraged me to study writing with author and teacher, Jim Krusoe. The experience changed everything for me. I didn’t stop loving acting, but I realized there was something that I loved more. I dedicated hours every day to writing. To reading. To reading about writing. Being able to call myself a writer, however, was still difficult. Showing that part of myself to others was terrifying. I had identified myself as an actor for so long. It was hard to make that transition for me.

Honestly, though, acting and writing are similar in many respects. It’s storytelling. It’s slipping into another person’s skin. My lifetime as an actor has definitely helped me with my writing.

You founded Sweet Blackberry to make short animated films that bring little-known stories of African-American achievement to children everywhere. In the opening paragraphs of How High the Moon, Ella runs through the blackberry bushes in her hometown of Alcolu, South Carolina. Tell us about the importance of those blackberries, how you decided to write this book, and how these storytelling projects relate to each other.

(You caught the blackberries!)

I think that sharing inspiring stories of African American achievement with children can change the way they look at race as they enter the world. By seeing someone that looks like themselves overcoming incredible obstacles, they’ll recognize their value and what they’re capable of. Children that aren’t African American will also be inspired. And I think they’ll go into the world looking at their neighbors as more than what our society often presents.

Over the years, researching for Sweet Blackberry, I often came across the story of George Stinney, Jr. I’d share it with people, but no one seemed to have heard of him. It was terrible to think that when he died the memory of that horrible tragedy was buried with him. I wanted people to know his story. It wasn’t a Sweet Blackberry story—nothing about it was empowering—but it was important.

Your mother was raised in the South. Did you incorporate any of her childhood experiences into your novel? What research did you do to bring the worlds of both Jim Crow South Carolina and 1940s Boston so vividly to life?
Oh, so much of it is my mom’s. The backdrop, anyway. Not the actual story. She told me stories of her growing up on a farm in the south and about her grandparents. She always referred to that time as so joyful. There was little to nothing about the racial discrimination, let alone the horrors. I made her dig a little deeper for me and share more when I decided to do the book. She and my aunt both shared with me. And, of course, there was plenty of research. I dug into newspaper archives and took advantage of the internet. It was a lot of fun, actually. Writing a historical novel was daunting sometimes, but then I’d wind down some unexpected path and discover all sorts of treasures from the past. People, events, details of society and culture that we don’t see today, and they’d find their way into the story.

I didn’t know that George would be in there when I first started the story, but my mother didn’t grow up that far from Alcolu where George lived. The chronology of their childhoods was close, too. When he did first appear, he wasn’t one of the principal characters in the book. His story was a memory. I was encouraged to bring him to the forefront. I think I was scared to at first. It’s a hard story to get close to.

Your novel tackles some of the horrors of human behavior, yet manages to be hopeful. Was this a difficult balance to achieve?
Well, my mother is such an optimist and such a hopeful person, so the fact her memories were paving so much of the way and the fact that I was seeing this world through a child’s eyes, I believe, kept things hopeful. And Ella wasn’t someone to be defeated by tragedy. I think she would take injustice and use it as fuel for fight.

Like Ella, you grew up in a biracial family. How did Ella’s character evolve? Is she named for Ella Fitzgerald, who sang “How High the Moon?” How did you settle on the title?
She is named for Ella Fitzgerald, yes.

Ella is at the age where she’s becoming aware of how the world sees her. How she perceives they see her anyway. She’s just left behind that beautiful space in childhood where you’re free floating. When you’re not thinking of how you look or about those superficial differences that we later become aware of and cling to and attach to identity. Ella doesn’t want to be different. But the deep, unconditional love of her family helps her to begin to accept all of who she is. And that love helps her understand what family really is.

The title, well . . .  it’s about wanting and reaching. Reaching for something that seems forever out of reach.

Each of the three cousin narrators in your book―Ella, Henry and Myrna―have unique family situations. The closing scene of your book is a beautiful tribute to families in all their wonderful varieties. Was it a challenge to incorporate so many stories and voices?
It wasn’t. They were my family as I wrote this (they still are), and even though things aren’t always smooth, they love each other and accept each other. They are all different, but they are one. And they all had something to say, so they all had to be heard.

What books were important to you as a child? What books have been meaningful to your own kids? How is children’s literature changing?
I had to read everything that Judy Blume wrote. There were others, of course, but, like so many of us, I ate those books up. I used to get an almost visceral thrill when I entered a new book. And, even recently, I was reading Jesmyn Ward in the anthology, Well-Read Black Girl, talking about a book she read as a kid, Jennifer, Hecate, Macbeth, William McKinley, and Me, Elizabeth. I hadn’t heard or thought of that book since I was a kid, but chills ran through my body when I read the title again. I think it must’ve really affected me so long ago. My mom was a librarian and I was an only child, so I spent a lot of time in libraries by myself. I think I experienced that thrill quite a bit.

These days, it seems there’s SO much out there for young people. It’s so varied. Such an exciting time! I do hope though, that with all of the contemporary writing we have the older books don’t get pushed to the back and forgotten completely.

Do you and your family ever watch “The Fresh Prince of Bel Air?” Can you do the Carlton dance?
Ha! No, we don’t watch, but the kids have seen it. They each went through a very brief phase. They liked the show. Laughed a lot and that made me feel pretty good.

The Carlton? I’ve never been able to do it! My son can, though. He’s pretty good at it.

What’s next? More books?
Yup. Working on one now.

 

ALSO IN BOOKPAGE: Read our review of How High the Moon.

Karyn Parsons talks about her debut middle grade novel, How High the Moon, her time as an actor on “The Fresh Price of Bel-Air,” empowering children, keeping hope while fighting against injustice and more.

YA FictionYA

Samira Ahmed

Interview by Alice Cary

YA author Samira Ahmed talks about her chilling work of speculative fiction.

Speaking by phone from her home in Chicago, bestselling author Samira Ahmed says she channeled her fears and concerns about today’s political climate into her highly anticipated new novel, Internment, which she imagines as being set “15 seconds in the future.” 

Internment centers on 17-year-old Layla Amin, who, according to government decree, is sent with her parents to an internment camp for Muslim-Americans. A savvy, smart young woman, Layla is a powerful narrator, noting early in her internment that, “If history had no ghosts, I wouldn’t be terrified of what might come next.” As conditions in the camp and in the U.S. quickly deteriorate, Layla’s parents remain silently complicit, hoping things will improve. But unbeknownst to them, Layla boldly seeks to defy her captors and convey news of the injustice to the outside world in a covert mission that makes for a thrilling read. “I really like to write about this idea of a ‘Revolutionary Girl,’ ” notes Ahmed. “That’s an important theme in all of my books.”

Ahmed, who moved with her parents from India as a baby, spent countless hours as a child reading in a comfy armchair next to a Victorian fireplace in the Batavia, Illinois, public library. As the only Indian and Muslim child in her school, Ahmed saw the library as a refuge, and no doubt those reading sessions helped shape her as a writer. But another incident, one that stands in stark contrast to her cozy library retreats, also shaped her career and writing life. 

One day during the Iranian hostage crisis, 7-year-old Ahmed and her parents were stuck in bumper-to-bumper traffic in downtown Chicago. While she was gazing out their open car window, two young men pulled up beside them in another car, and one pointed his finger at her and yelled, “Go home, you g–damn f—ing Iranian.”

Ahmed was scared (she’d never heard language like that) and confused, but she soon came to the conclusion that “racists are really bad at geography.” Her bestselling debut novel, Love, Hate & Other Filters, was inspired by this verbal assault and follows a 17-year-old Indian-Muslim girl growing up in Batavia who confronts Islamophobia after an act of domestic terror. 

Ahmed says that after “any act of terrorism, whether it occurs on U.S. soil or abroad and whether it was a Muslim or not, I hear this constant refrain in my life: ‘Go home, you terrorists.’” In Internment, Ahmed continues to explore this racism as Layla faces daily threats and violence inside Camp Mobius, where life is highly regimented and families are forced to live in cramped trailers in the desert heat of California. (Ahmed modeled her fictional trailers on those used by FEMA  after Hurricane Katrina.)

In another nod to real-life American history, Ahmed places her story’s fictional detention center near the site of the Manzanar internment camp in California, one of 10 camps where more than 100,000 Japanese-Americans were incarcerated during World War II. During her research process, Ahmed read several internment camp memoirs and talked to a number of Japanese-Americans, including one camp survivor who gave feedback on an early draft of Internment.

“Even though this book isn’t about Japanese-Americans per se, I still wanted to honor what happened to them in this country,” Ahmed says. “We live in an age of internment right now . . . and it’s not just in the United States. These things are happening globally. . . . Silence is complicity. It’s so important for those of us who have any kind of privilege, power or platform to always speak up. That’s the very first step to take when we see oppression in our country, when we see acts of bigotry, hatred, homophobia, xenophobia—any institutionalized prejudices.”

Despite her anger and frustration, Ahmed makes it clear that she writes from a place of hope, especially when she’s writing for young people. “I know how brave and courageous kids are. I don’t think the future is bleak, and I think that we so often undervalue what young people are capable of. I wanted to show them in this book that they are capable of incredible things.”

Having taught high school in the Chicago area and in New York City before she began working for educational nonprofits for a number of years, Ahmed knows a thing or two about teens. “Writing for young adults is writing into the realm of possibility,” she says. “I always say that middle age novels are about doors closing, and young adult novels are about doors opening.”

Ahmed goes on to explain how fortunate she feels to have been able to work with students and teachers in public schools, calling it a “privilege.” But she speaks highly of all her past careers, whether in the classroom or out: “I love that I’ve had these different experiences. I think we bring to our writing everything that’s part of us.”

And while those two racist men from decades ago probably haven’t thought twice about how they once terrified a young Muslim girl who was riding in her parents’ car, Ahmed continues to speak out against such hatred. “I am an American. And all those kids and all those folks who are being attacked, who are having hate tweeted at them from our highest offices, they’re American, and this is our home. I think it’s so important for us to be clear about that.”

YA author Samira Ahmed talks about her chilling work of speculative fiction.

NonfictionTrue Crime

Casey Cep

Interview by Alice Cary

Casey Cep discusses her new book, Furious Hours, which explores the true case of an Alabama serial killer who fascinated Harper Lee.

Harper Lee has obviously captured your imagination. What keeps you and so many others fascinated? Do you have any prized possessions related to Harper Lee or her writing?
I think some great works of literature are so widely read and so deeply embedded in a culture that they become a kind of secular scripture, helping us revisit and interrogate our shared values generation after generation. That’s what happened with To Kill a Mockingbird; if anything, the questions it raises about difference and tolerance have become more urgent as our society has become more diverse. I suppose that’s why, despite all the exciting things I uncovered in the course of reporting this book, my most prized possession is still the novel itself.

What was it like for you to first read To Kill a Mockingbird, or “The Bird,” as Lee called it? How old were you? Did you have any idea then how important the book would become in your life? Did publication of Go Set a Watchmen change your attitudes at all?
I first read To Kill a Mockingbird as a kid, and like a lot of tomboys, I identified strongly with Scout. She’s adventurous and brave, but also fiercely intelligent and bookish. My father isn’t a lawyer, but I love him dearly, and although I have two sisters rather than one brother, I was moved by the way that a sibling relationship is so integral to the plot. My parents indulged my love of Mockingbird so much that they got me a pocket watch that I carried around everywhere. If you’d told me all those years ago that I’d be publishing this book, I don’t think I would have believed you; I probably wouldn’t have even believed I’d get to write any book at all, much less one about Harper Lee.

If you could spend a day with Lee, what would you have liked to do? What questions would you ask her?
It’s hard to know whether it would be most revealing to spend a day with Harper Lee in New York or Alabama, the two places she called home, but if it’s Alabama, I’d want to go to church with her in the morning and then take her fishing. She was extremely astute about the role of religion and spirituality in Southern life, and I’d love to sit through a Sunday service with her, but she also loved fishing, and so do I, so then I’d demand that we head to the river to talk about it all. If we met up in New York instead, I’d want to do what she let almost no one do: visit her apartment on the Upper East Side and pore over every single book and scrap of paper inside it.

Why do you think Lee guarded her privacy so fiercely? What might Lee have thought of your book and your research about her?
This is such a central question to any consideration of Lee’s life and work. A lot of writers love publicity and enjoy the attention to their process and persona, but Lee was not one of them. She put up with a few years of interviews and profiles after Mockingbird came out, but then she stopped answering questions about her work. Some people are just private, but in Lee’s case that privacy was almost certainly fueled by her struggles with writing, which were in turn fueled by—and fueled—her struggles with perfectionism, addiction and identity. There’s a letter of hers I quote in the book in which she says, “Harper Lee thrives, but at the expense of Nelle,” and I found that notion of a split self to be heartbreaking. I doubt that Harper Lee would have been happy to know I was looking into her life, but I hope she would be pleased by the result: a book that takes her seriously as a writer and an intellectual.

The true crime story that Lee hoped to write―about Reverend Willie Maxwell, accused of murdering five of his family members for insurance money in Alabama in the 1970s―is a wild, convoluted and fascinating saga. What do you think most prevented Lee from completing her book? Was it because, as she noted, “I do not have enough hard facts about the actual crimes for a book-length account”?
It’s true that some of the facts of the Maxwell case were hard to come by, even back then, but plenty of great books have been made from a lot less, so I don’t think a shortage of information was the only thing stymieing Lee. In addition to her general struggles with writing, she also felt pressure from her agent to write something pulpy, from her publisher to produce a bestseller, and from her fans to produce another wholesome novel—incompatible goals that she never found a way to square with each other, let alone with her own vision for the book. I definitely worried at the start of Furious Hours that I was a fool for thinking I could write the book that Harper Lee never could, but then I realized I was writing the book she never would: a version of the Maxwell case that included her own story.

Did she confer with Truman Capote about the Reverend Maxwell story?
Certainly In Cold Blood must have been on her mind as she researched and wrote. Might worries about comparisons between the two stories have paralyzed her? One of the great losses to literary history is that, so far, no letters between Lee and Capote have ever been found. They almost certainly exchanged them—not only as children after he left Monroeville but when she first moved to New York and in all the decades that followed—but not a single one has turned up, so we don’t know what, if anything, they said to each other about the Maxwell case or anything else. Some other letters of hers reveal how critical she was of In Cold Blood, so she probably wouldn’t have been asking Capote for reporting advice, but I do think his book helped clarify for her what kind she wanted to write: one that stuck scrupulously to the facts. And there’s no doubt that her work on The Reverend would’ve brought back memories of their time together in Kansas and that, partly thanks to that time, she knew exactly what to do when she started reporting her own true crime project.

For all who love To Kill a Mockingbird so much, it’s heartbreaking that Lee didn’t publish more. She led a busy life, it seems, and an interesting one divided between Alabama and New York City. You write that she struggled with alcohol, and she seems to have had many lonely moments as well. Can you speculate whether she was happy? Did it bother her not to publish more?
I want to say first that lonely moments are a really interesting and possibly necessary experience for a writer. Good writing comes when a writer sets herself to the task of thinking carefully and quietly and often in solitude about some idea or problem. One can have friendships across great distances and nurture relationships without being in constant contact; that feels countercultural in a hyper-connected society like ours, but I don’t think that being alone, even for considerable amounts of time, and even sometimes at a certain psychic cost, is necessarily a problem. That said, such moments can obviously become too numerous or too costly, and someone very close to Harper Lee described the years that she was working on this true crime project as “dark times.” So she definitely did have periods in her life when her deep desire to produce art made her unhappy and encouraged her most destructive habits and tendencies. But her sisters and extended family tried hard to watch over her, and she had a few close friends in New York who helped companion her through these difficult periods. It’s also clear that, in ways I think few people really understand, Lee was a genuine intellectual, and her correspondence reveals a real delight in reading and thinking—gifts she brought to a small circle of friends and family even if she never again figured out how to share them with the wider world.

There are rumors that Lee kept a diary. Thoughts?
Don’t I wish! A few people told me that she did, but whenever I asked her family or close friends about the possibility, they laughed and then sighed. Those who knew Lee well scoffed at the idea that she would ever have written down her thoughts and feelings in a way that could one day be made public, but they also noted how therapeutic such an exercise in self-examination would have been for someone otherwise so resistant to introspection. I share that feeling, but I also wish that she’d kept a diary for posterity’s sake, or written her own memoirs, since there are so many questions about her life and work for which we’d all love to know the answers.

Has anyone (or anything) else caught your fancy as much as Lee? Are you tracking down any other literary mysteries or recluses?
This is such a lovely way of asking the question of what comes next but also such a keen way of describing Furious Hours. It’s a book that, like its author, is obsessed with mystery and secrecy and the knowability or unknowability of any given person, event or idea. That said, I’m also obsessed with suspense, so I think I’ll leave the question of what comes next unanswered, although I hope it’s a story as incredible as this one!

 

ALSO IN BOOKPAGE: Read our review of Furious Hours.

Author photo by Kathryn Shulz

Casey Cep discusses her new book, Furious Hours, which explores the true case of an Alabama serial killer who fascinated Harper Lee.

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