Alice Cary

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.

FictionPopular Fiction

Angie Kim

Interview by Alice Cary

She’s a Korean immigrant, a former trial lawyer and the mother of three boys with serious medical issues. With her debut novel, Angie Kim has seamlessly woven these disparate strands of her life into an emotionally sprawling yet psychologically taut legal thriller.

With such a masterful blending of fiction and real life, it’s particularly fitting that Angie Kim will celebrate her 50th birthday the same week that her highly anticipated debut novel, Miracle Creek, is published. 

“I’m really excited,” she says in a call to her home in Great Falls, Virginia. “It’s a good excuse to have a big party.” And no doubt it will be a fun one, as the author radiates energy and enthusiasm even over the phone.

At the center of her book is the Yoo family (Young; her husband, Pak; and their 17-year-old daughter, Mary), who have emigrated from Korea and landed in the rural town of Miracle Creek, Virginia. In a barn, they run Miracle Submarine, a center for hyperbaric oxygen therapy (HBOT) where people go on “dives” in the pressurized oxygen chamber as an experimental treatment for a variety of conditions, including autism, cerebral palsy, infertility and more. Disaster strikes in the very first chapter when the Yoos’ chamber explodes, killing two people and injuring and disfiguring others.

"When you have a kid that’s sick, it just brings so many things to focus. And when you have three kids that are sick with three different things, it’s just awful. I probably have many, many novels where I could talk about this stuff.”

The accident, it turns out, is the result of arson, and the rest of the novel unfolds during four days of a trial held one year later, told from multiple points of view, weaving past and present together in a tangled yet beautifully constructed whodunit web. (Kim modeled the structure after two books: Korean bestseller Please Look After Mom by Kyung-sook Shin, and Russell Banks’ The Sweet Hereafter, which begins with a deadly school bus accident, then describes the aftermath.)

Kim’s choice of subject came naturally. Her second son was born with profound hearing loss in one ear, and later diagnosed with celiac disease and ulcerative colitis. Soon after, she accompanied him to a series of HBOT treatments. Because of the fire risks associated with oxygen chambers, everyone inside had to wear special cotton clothing, while items that might spark a fire were forbidden, including belts, eyeglasses, electronics and even underwire bras. (An explosion in a poorly maintained chamber in Florida killed a 4-year-old and his grandmother in 2009, leading to a manslaughter conviction.)

Kim saw literary possibilities in both the danger and the drama of the HBOT setting, which she compares to a confessional in her novel. “You crawl in, and it’s dark and like a tube,” she recalls. “There’s also an emotional tension when you’re sealed up with other parents of kids who have different disabilities and illnesses. You start comparing and contrasting your lives, and it makes an intimacy that builds. But at the same time, jealousy can develop. I thought that was a really rich setting to be able to explore.”

One mother whose child had particularly serious issues jokingly told Kim, “I don’t know why you do this. If I had a son like yours, I would just lie on my couch and eat bonbons all day.” One of Kim’s characters makes the same comment to another mother, and Kim’s initial working title for her manuscript was “Bonbons in the Blue Submarine.”

Noting that her sons are all doing fine now (one has peanut allergies; the other was born with an abnormally small head and exhibited skin symptoms that could’ve been Elephant Man Disease), Kim says of her family’s medical ordeals, “It’s probably something I’ll be exploring for the rest of my life. When you have a kid that’s sick, it just brings so many things to focus. And when you have three kids that are sick with three different things, it’s just awful. I probably have many, many novels where I could talk about this stuff.”

In addition to writing about HBOT, Kim initially contemplated writing a murder mystery involving a family who had emigrated from Korea. A friend suggested she combine these two ideas, leading Kim to model the Yoo family after her own: She and her parents emigrated from Seoul to the Baltimore area when Kim was 11. Just as Young works behind bulletproof glass in a grocery store when she first comes to America, Kim’s parents worked in such a store, living in a small back room, while Kim stayed with her aunt, uncle and cousin. 

“I was a complete mess, very upset to be here,” Kim recalls of those years. “In Seoul we were really poor—we didn’t have indoor plumbing or anything like that—but we were just so happy, from my memory of it.” Kim felt abandoned as her parents worked long hours, and she eventually rebelled. “I was a really horrible teenager,” she recalls. “I knew intellectually that it wasn’t their fault. Korea is such a patriarchal culture, and that’s one of the reasons my mom wanted to move to America; she didn’t want that for me. But I just wanted to punish my parents, and I did, acting like a complete teenage brat for a really long time.”Kim struggled with English and excelled in math but later decided to challenge herself with liberal arts classes at Stanford and became a philosophy major. She fared so poorly in a creative writing class, however, that she dropped it. Although she never considered herself a writer, she eventually became an editor at the Harvard Law Review. 

Kim’s legal career blossomed, and as a junior lawyer she loved being in the courtroom. After a grueling period working on three successful trials, however, Kim joined her soon-to-be husband on a weekend trip to San Francisco and experienced an epiphany. While he spoke at a legal conference, she spent the day sitting by the ocean at the Cliff House, reading Tim O’Brien’s In the Lake of the Woods. “As a lawyer, I hadn’t had the opportunity to have a day like that in years,” she says. “I decided that I needed to find something that I love, that I could do every day and say, ‘Oh, I love this.’ So that night I told my husband, ‘Oh, by the way, I decided I’m going to quit being a lawyer.’”

She became a management consultant and co-founded a software company. Meanwhile, her confidence in her writing grew, and she began writing essays and short stories. Not surprisingly, Kim particularly enjoyed working on the courtroom scenes in her novel. “I could have witnesses say whatever I wanted them to say,” she says. “They were my puppets, which is what you desperately wish for when you’re actually practicing.”

Kim’s finished product was going to be called “Miracle Submarine,” but after concerns that it sounded too military, the title became Miracle Creek. Kim is pleased, especially since she chose the town’s name as a nod to another of her favorite books, Dennis Lehane’s Mystic River. “I just love the way that it’s a literary mystery where you don’t know what’s happening, and there are all these great voices that are so raw and honest,” she says. Those words of praise apply equally well to Kim’s debut.

In the decades since she reluctantly boarded a plane from Korea to America, Kim’s life has taken many unexpected turns. As she writes near the end of Miracle Creek, “Every human being was the result of a million different factors mixing together. . . . Good things and bad—every friendship and romance formed, every accident, every illness—resulted from the conspiracy of hundreds of little things, in and of themselves inconsequential.”

“That has just sort of become a theme throughout my life,” Kim admits. “I think it’s so interesting how little things can happen that can really take your life on a totally different strand.”

She’s a Korean immigrant, a former trial lawyer and the mother of three boys with serious medical issues. With her debut novel, Angie Kim has seamlessly woven these disparate strands of her life into an emotionally sprawling yet psychologically taut legal thriller.

With such a…

FictionHistorical Fiction

Elizabeth Gilbert

Interview by Alice Cary

Wild girls. Wanting to write about them—their realistic sexual experiences, their journeys of discovering their own pleasure—formed the initial spark for Elizabeth Gilbert’s latest novel, a sprawling saga that helped her navigate a sea of grief.

This subject especially enticed Gilbert because her previous novel, The Signature of All Things, chronicles the exact opposite: a 19th-century botanist who yearns to have sex but never does. “There was just this agony in writing that character,” Gilbert admits, speaking by phone from her home in New York City. So for City of Girls, she was determined to try something different. “Let’s take the corset off and let some people have some pleasure,” she says. 

Enjoyment, bliss, satisfaction—these emotions and more form the core of her big-hearted, rollicking new novel about a gaggle of lively New York showgirls. It’s narrated by Vivian Morris, who arrives in New York City in 1940 to live with her Aunt Peg, owner of the dilapidated Lily Playhouse, after being “excused” from Vassar College. (Vivian was ranked 361 in a class of 362, causing her father to remark, “Dear God, what was the other girl doing?”) In press materials for City of Girls, Gilbert compares Vivian’s story to a champagne cocktail, calling it “light and bright, crisp and fun.” She’s proud to write books that “go down easy,” she says. “I feel like it’s a real achievement to write a book that anybody can read. . . . One of the things I’ve said is I make bran muffins, but I frost them to look like cupcakes.”

The characters in City of Girls are “neither destroyed nor saved by sex,” Gilbert says, in contrast to the litany of literary heroines who face ruin or death in the face of sensuality, such as Anna Karenina, Tess of the d’Urbervilles and Emma Bovary, to name a few. “Most novels about women would have you think it’s one or the other,” Gilbert says. “And that’s just not been my experience, and it’s not the experience of anybody that I know.” She says that Vivian’s comical first sexual encounter is one of her favorite scenes she’s ever written. “I was literally alone in my house laughing my ass off,” Gilbert says. “It felt like such a vindication for all of the sort of horrible virginity-losing scenes in literature. And also all the ridiculously romantic ones.”

Of course, it’s no secret that Gilbert has had more than her own share of adventures, having written her blockbuster post-divorce memoir, Eat, Pray, Love, about eating in Italy, discovering the power of prayer in India and finding love again in Indonesia. However, despite having penned a 2015 article for the New York Times Magazine called “Confessions of a Seduction Addict,” Gilbert wasn’t initially sure she could pull off this wild-girl narrative—that is, until she met a former showgirl named Norma, an “unrepentant hedonist” who was once John Wayne’s girlfriend. 

“Part of my research anxiety was, how am I going to get this 95-year-old woman to talk to me about sex? But with Norma it was like, how am I going to get her to talk about anything but sex?” Gilbert says, laughing. “Every generation thinks that they invented sex, but there’s always people who are living on the edge, and Norma was one of them. She had absolutely no shame, remorse or regret about anything she’d ever done in her life. And she was fabulous.”

In addition to interviewing Norma, Gilbert and research partner Margaret Cordi (to whom the book is dedicated) poured several years into exploring a variety of topics. “My system of writing is heavily weighted in terms of hours of research,” Gilbert explains, “so 90 to 95% of the effort is gathering everything I need to feel competent enough to create a convincing world. It’s truly like learning a new language, and it takes a lot of years to get fluent.”

And then suddenly—still during the research phase, before the writing even began—everything came to a heart-stopping halt during an 18-month period of deep, dark sorrow. In 2016 Gilbert left Jose Nunes, the husband she had met in Bali, to partner with her best friend, Rayya Elias, who had just been diagnosed with liver and pancreatic cancer. Gilbert tossed everything aside to care for her and couldn’t even imagine writing. “It just wasn’t the time,” she says.

After Elias died in January 2018, Gilbert retreated to her country house to begin working on her manuscript, even though at first she could barely remember her characters’ names. “I didn’t leave for a couple months,” she says. “It was just me and the dog and the book, and it was really healing. Every once in a while I would think, is this good for grieving? Like, should I be around people? But in fact I was around people. I was around all the people in the book.”

Gilbert describes this isolation as exactly what she needed, “something so consuming that I would look up, and hours had passed, and I hadn’t remembered that Rayya had died,” she says. “I think that creativity is kind of the opposite of depression, the opposite of despair. And I really want to offer the book as a gift to everybody in these dark times. I hope it does for everyone what it did for me, which was cheer me up.”

But Gilbert soon faced another significant challenge: She didn’t know how the book would end. A short introduction is set in 2010, when 89-year-old Vivian receives a letter from the daughter of a man she once knew, asking Vivian to explain their relationship. The rest of the book, beginning in 1940, is Vivian’s “How I Met Your Father” response. “I love to be in control and feel like I know everything,” Gilbert acknowledges, “but you have to leave a little bit of a window open for that which will surprise you.” Luckily, the author soon lost herself in her narrator’s voice. “I would get up every morning and say to Vivian, ‘Let’s just tell everybody what happened.’ And I was able to kind of just become her.”

Gilbert took great pains to make sure Vivian’s voice rings true. “She cannot speak as though she’s got a degree in women’s studies from Bryn Mawr,” Gilbert says. “I needed to make sure that I didn’t put too much of my modern feminism into the book, that it had to be realistic to its time and to those girls.” Young Vivian adores the unbridled freedom she finds in New York with Aunt Peg, “the first freethinker [she’d] ever met,” whose theater company is “a living animation of glamour and grit and mayhem and fun.”

Gilbert herself grew up with freethinking parents, living on a small Christmas tree farm in Connecticut that her mom and dad still run. “My parents are really unconventional,” she says, “and my dad’s a real iconoclast. I feel very lucky to have been raised by a genuine eccentric. Everybody thinks their dad is weird, but my dad is really fucking weird. His disdain for anybody telling him what to do was so huge that I think I just inherited that.”

Tossing conventions to the wind, Gilbert’s own life often seems to swirl about her with plot twists like those found in her novels. In March she announced on Instagram that she’s in a new relationship with photographer Simon MacArthur, an old friend of both hers and Elias’. 

“My way of living involves flinging my heart into the world and seeing what it sticks to,” she says. “So there’s always a lot of love in my life.”

 

Portrait of Elizabeth Gilbert by Timothy Greenfield-Sanders

Wild girls. Wanting to write about them—their realistic sexual experiences, their journeys of discovering their own pleasure—formed the initial spark for Elizabeth Gilbert’s latest novel, a sprawling saga that helped her navigate a sea of grief.

YA FictionYAHistorical Fiction

Stacey Lee

Interview by Alice Cary

Even though Stacey Lee focuses on making the past come alive in her young adult novels, she never cared much for history class when she was a student. “To be honest,” she says, speaking from her home in the San Francisco Bay area, “I found it really boring. It was all dates and wars.”

So it’s not surprising that early in her writing career, Lee took the advice of a friend who suggested she avoid making any of her books sound “old-timey.” And indeed, Lee manages to eschew any unnecessary, tedious details while packing plenty of history into her latest creation, The Downstairs Girl, set in Atlanta in 1890. It includes elements of intrigue and deception, not to mention a tense standoff with a notorious criminal—who happens to be naked. Oh yes, there’s heaps of humor as well.

The book’s heroine is 17-year-old Jo Kuan, “an eastern face in western clothes” who works as a lady’s maid for the mean-spirited daughter of a wealthy Atlanta family. At night, Jo secretly inhabits primitive quarters once used by abolitionists underneath the home of the publisher of a progressive newspaper. An apparent orphan, Jo resides with a man called Old Gin, who hails from a long line of Chinese scholar-officials. The makeshift family stays in the shadows as much as possible, knowing, as Jo observes, “Perhaps whites feel the same way about us as they do about ladybugs: A few are fine, but a swarm turns the stomach.”

Sadly, legislation informs Jo’s fears. In an introductory note, Lee explains that between 1882 and 1943, Chinese people were prohibited from entering the United States under the Chinese Exclusion Act, “the only federal legislation to ban immigration based on a specific nationality.” Lee describes it as a “shameful” time for Asian Americans: “Nobody wants to talk about it, even though it’s many years later. And I think that’s why a lot of these stories were buried.”

For Lee, hearing her own family’s stories “really opened the door to Asian American history for me.” Her father emigrated from China at age 11, endured abuse and contracted tuberculosis. Her mother’s side of the family arrived in the United States much earlier, emigrating from China in the late 1800s. “My mother comes from a line of cigar manufacturers,” Lee says. “We call them drug lords now, I think. They were dealing in opium.”

Although her previous novels were about a Chinese girl on the Oregon Trail (Under a Painted Sky) and a Chinese teen experiencing the 1906 San Francisco earthquake (Outrun the Moon), lawyer-turned-writer Lee says she’s always been drawn to stories set in the South. “There’s such a great contrast [within] a society that emphasizes manners and genteel living, yet . . . has such a history of racism.” However, she explains, it’s that contrast that “allows us to explore our own very complicated natures.” 

Lee first learned about the Chinese presence in the post-Civil War South when her mother-in-law sent an article about Chinese immigrants in the Mississippi Delta. This became one of Lee’s reasons for writing the novel, “because I don’t think people knew.”

Despite having to lurk in the shadows, Jo is an exceptionally bright, resourceful young woman who makes her voice heard by anonymously writing a newspaper advice column called “Dear Miss Sweetie,” commenting in provocative, often amusing ways about issues ranging from women’s fashion to prejudice against Jews and black Americans. “This was a safe place for Jo to express her opinions,” Lee says. “And it’s always fun to give advice.”

Jo rarely loses sight of the fact that it’s vital for her to remain unnoticed. And in that way, Lee says, “I really identified with her.” The author explains that she was incredibly timid as a girl, which is hard to fathom, given her adult ebullience.

“I just did not feel like there were any Asian women out there who I could identify with,” she recalls (although noting that her mother was both “awesome” and “independent”). “I thought it was our role to be quiet and that people would look down on me if I ever spoke out.” She adds that growing up as a member of the only Chinese family in Whittier, California, “felt like you had a giant eyeball on you all the time. I didn’t want to stand out any more than I needed to. I just needed to be like Jo, invisible.”

While Lee always wants “to inspire people” and leave readers feeling “that there is some hope in the world,” she also wants them “to understand what it was like for Chinese people to be treated as subhuman. I think in order to truly understand who we are, we have to come to terms with where we’ve been. Speaking for myself, I never want my children to take for granted the privileges they now enjoy, and sometimes that means not sugarcoating things.”

Even though Stacey Lee focuses on making the past come alive in her young adult novels, she never cared much for history class when she was a student. “To be honest,” she says, speaking from her home in the San Francisco Bay area, “I found…

FictionHistorical Fiction

Lara Prescott

Interview by Alice Cary

For years Lara Prescott hated her first name because people so often mispronounced or misspelled it. Today, she’s thankful, because it seems to have led directly to the publication of her debut novel—one she was practically born to write.

Lara Prescott’s first name was inspired by her mother’s love of both Boris Pasternak’s 1957 Russian novel Doctor Zhivago, a love story about Dr. Yuri Zhivago and Lara Antipova that spans the Russian Revolution and World War II, and the epic film adaptation by David Lean.

Naturally, Prescott always felt a connection to the tale, and now she’s written The Secrets We Kept, a fictional account of how Pasternak wrote his Nobel Prize winner—and how the CIA used it as political propaganda during the Cold War. 

“My mother definitely takes credit for the book after having named me Lara,” Prescott jokes, speaking from her home in Austin, Texas.

Prescott’s deft treatment of this little-known, stranger-than-fiction saga could hardly be more fascinating, and it’s sure to be a blockbuster, having reportedly sold for $2 million at auction. The deal unfolded just as Prescott graduated with an MFA from the Michener Center for Writers at the University Texas at Austin, with her manuscript as her thesis.

“It was an almost unbelievable experience that I don’t think sunk in for months and months,” she recalls. “It has been life-changing and will continue to be.”

It’s hardly a stretch to say that Prescott’s first novel was a lifetime in the making. Growing up in Greensburg, Pennsylvania, she enjoyed watching the film Doctor Zhivago with her family and sought it out anytime it played at the local theater. In high school she tackled the novel, although she admits, “It’s not the easiest Russian novel to sink your teeth into.” Nonetheless, she found herself “having a connection to the words and the story,” and she says she sees new meaning every time she rereads it.

The tipping point came in 2014 when her father emailed her a Washington Post article about how the CIA secretly helped publish and distribute Russian editions of the novel, which was first given out at the 1958 world’s fair in Brussels. (A miniature paperback edition followed, many of which were given out at the 1959 World Youth Festival in Vienna.) The early CIA was pretty liberal, Prescott explains, with many recruits believing art and literature could be used to show Soviet citizens the freedoms and lack of censorship enjoyed by Americans, in contrast to their own government. As she writes in her fictional account, “The Agency became a bit of a book club with a black budget.” 

“It was almost the direct opposite of what the rest of the government was doing at the time—the FBI and the Red Scare and all of those things,” Prescott says. “They were definitely at odds with each other.”

Wanting to know more about the bookish mission, which was classified under code name “AEDINOSAUR,” Prescott began devouring newly released CIA documents. As she read so many of the names and places that had been redacted from these pages, she felt as though the many participants had “been pretty much erased from history except for the men who signed at the bottom of the secret document.” She began to wonder about the people who “typed these reports and memos and knew the secrets of these secret keepers.” She researched the roles women played in the early CIA, most often as typists, secretaries and record keepers, but sometimes spies as well. Suddenly a novel began to emerge.

“The first voice that came to me was the voice of the typists,” Prescott recalls. “It was one of those things that has never happened to me before. I heard the voice in my head in the middle of the night, and I emailed myself a few lines. This was the very first thing I wrote.”

She chronicles the lively office pool through this collective voice—their work, lives, loves and gossip—such as in her seemingly heaven–sent opening: “We typed a hundred words per minute and never missed a syllable. Our identical desks were each equipped with a mint-shelled Royal Quiet Deluxe typewriter, a black Western Electric rotary phone, and a stack of yellow steno pads. Our fingers flew across the keys.”

Having worked as a political campaigner in Washington, D.C., Prescott says she felt “a personal connection to these women,” adding, “You have these men in positions of power at the CIA—unchecked power, really—and women who could only reach a certain level. I wanted to explore these power dynamics, which often, unfortunately, still exist.”

Two characters soon rose to the forefront, both of whom narrate chapters of their own. There’s CIA newbie Irina Drozdova, a Russian American, and Sally Forrester, a former OSS agent and spy tasked with training Irina. As Sally notes, being a “keeper of secrets” is a “power that some, myself included, found more intoxicating than any drug, sex, or other means of quickening one’s heartbeat.”

Initially planning to write only about these female spies, Prescott soon realized that this was only half the story. It felt equally essential to chronicle the intricate saga of what was happening in Russia: how Doctor Zhivago was written; how Pasternak’s mistress, Olga Ivinskaya, inspired the character of Lara; how the Russian government forbid the novel’s publication and persecuted Pasternak; and how Ivinskaya was twice sent to the Gulag for her involvement with the literary giant.

“I wanted to give Olga a voice that I think she’s been denied throughout history,” Prescott says, “and make people aware of this woman behind the famous man.”

The project grew into an “obsession,” Prescott says. Her research was extensive, taking her to libraries galore; to Oxford, England, where she spoke with Pasternak’s niece; and to the dacha outside of Moscow where Pasternak wrote his masterpiece. It’s now a museum, and the author is buried in a nearby cemetery. Prescott describes standing at Pasternak’s grave as “a profound experience, one I will never forget.”

In the end, Prescott ties this world-spanning novel together with aplomb. With multiple narrators and two riveting but complicated plotlines set on opposite sides of the globe, The Secrets We Kept abounds with not only intrigue but also plenty of joy, heartbreak and, yes, humor. 

“I love books that deal with very serious topics and tragic circumstances but never lose sight of the humor,” Prescott says. “That is part of life. And that gallows humor is really important, especially in Russian culture.”

Ironically, when Prescott began her project, several publishing insiders informed her that readers were no longer particularly interested in Russia. Little could she anticipate how topical her novel would be when the 2016 presidential election helped to bring the Soviet Union back into the headlines. “After researching how the Cold War unfolded and [about] tactics that both the Americans and the Soviets used,” she muses, “I can’t help but think that, of course this has never ended. Why would it have?”

She cautions that she never intended to write a good-guy-versus-bad-guy, East-versus-West story, and further notes, “I continue to be fascinated with how words are used to change the hearts and minds of citizens, whether it be through books, as they did in the Cold War, or in the current climate in which tweets and fake news have the same effect.”

 

ALSO IN BOOKPAGE: Read our review of The Secrets We Kept.

For years Lara Prescott hated her first name because people so often mispronounced or misspelled it. Today, she’s thankful, because it seems to have led directly to the publication of her debut novel—one she was practically born to write.
NonfictionMemoir

Dan Kois

Interview by Alice Cary

What happens when two adults and their two daughters ditch their suburban Washington, D.C., life and spend a year living in four spots around the world? Writer Dan Kois and his family spent 2017 in New Zealand, the Netherlands, Costa Rica and Kansas. We had some questions about his entertaining account of this year, How to Be a Family: The Year I Dragged My Kids Around the World to Find a New Way to Be Together.

Was it hard picking the four destinations of your journey? Did you seriously consider any other options?

We considered scores of other options! Just off the top of my head I remember Argentina, France, Scotland, Japan, Senegal, Tahiti, Iceland, Sweden, Italy, China, India and of course Canada (both Québec and British Columbia). It was extremely difficult! We spent a lot of time researching countries, talking to friends with connections to those countries and thinking about what would be best not only for our family but also for the book I hoped to write. We wanted to find places we actually wanted to go but that also had real, tangible differences from our East Coast suburban lives—places that had things to teach us.

 

You write that practically everyone asks, “Why Kansas?” Did you decide early on that one leg of your journey would be in the United States?

No, it was up in the air until the very end. But it did seem to me that I had to seriously consider the idea that it would be pretty facile to write a book about trying to look beyond our American parenting without acknowledging that there are plenty of American parents whose lives don’t resemble ours at all. In the end, I was convinced by our friend Catherine’s declaration that if we moved to Kansas, “we’d be so bored, but we’d be so happy.” I called her bluff and moved two blocks away from her.

 

Now that some time has passed, do you have a favorite moment from this grand adventure? Or a least favorite moment, for that matter?

I think the goodbye party our friends and neighbors threw in Island Bay, New Zealand, is right up there. It was kind of a perfect night that had the added joy of being so obviously the perfect final scene for that section of the book that I felt through the entire evening great personal and professional fulfillment.

The least favorite moment I wrote about was Lyra’s awful experience in her Dutch school, which was basically my fault. That sucked. The least favorite moment I didn’t write about was, after a 17-hour flight, having an armed guard at the Dubai airport pull me aside, open my gigantic suitcase, remove every single thing from it and finally pull from inside a shoe the weed grinder I’d bought in Wellington on Cuba Street (which I hadn’t even ground any weed in yet!!!!) and sternly tell me, “We don’t do this here.”

 

You and your wife did an enormous amount of planning before you left. What were the most unexpected difficulties you ran into? Did you have any truly unforeseen surprises?

It was so difficult working out schools for our kids! We knew we didn’t want to homeschool or send our kids to private schools. We wanted to experience the public schools in each country. In New Zealand, it required applying for a very specific kind of visa, for which my publisher had to write me a letter of recommendation promising I was not taking any New Zealand jobs while we lived there. In the Netherlands, I spoke to a solid half-dozen people up the bureaucratic chain until I was actually talking to, like, the deputy minister of education, who told me all about an exciting pilot program in Dutch/English bilingual schooling happening at a school in Delft, and then it turned out he was totally wrong and our kids ended up at a school where no one spoke English to them at all. I sure didn’t foresee that.

Also, there were no Airbnbs in Hays, Kansas.

 

Biking in the Netherlands seemed treacherous at first, but you and your family ended up loving it. Surprisingly, the Dutch don’t wear bike helmets. Are you still biking without a helmet back in the U.S.?

I sure am! I try to ride big, with the self-confidence of a tall, handsome Dutchman. I take up a lot of space on the road and ignore impatient drivers as they pile up behind me. Eventually, one of them will run me over, teaching me a valuable lesson about cultural differences.

 

Two of the biggest joys of your book are your humor and honesty. Did your family have any editing power over what you included? Your oldest daughter, after all, noted, “I do not entirely dislike my father’s portrayal of me but think that it’s inaccurate in some ways.”

Lyra, my eldest, did indeed insist upon reading the book and giving notes. I resisted this quite a bit and then, much to my surprise, took pretty much all her notes. My wife also read the book and offered many great suggestions but made only one heartfelt plea: “Please do not include your salary in this book.” So I didn’t.

 

Were you often taking notes? Did your family ever peer over your shoulder or deem anything strictly off limits?

My kids were really aware, throughout the trip, that reporting—the work of interviewing and note-taking—was happening, and that this was a book in the making. They made many recommendations about moments that should or should not go into the book, people I should talk to, stories I should tell. I found that really rewarding, honestly, for them to be intimately involved in this thing that’s always been important to me. I don’t think they exactly understood my job before, but after a year spent seeing me do it in all kinds of different ways (not only for this book but for The World Only Spins Forward, which Isaac and I were writing as I traveled), they really get it now.

 

If you were to make such a trip again, what things might you change?

We’d incorporate our children much more into the planning. One real lesson of our sometimes-disastrous Dutch sojourn was how much more buy-in we’d have had from them if they’d had the chance to participate in the initial discussions. It took them a long time to view the trip as something all four of us were doing together, not something we were doing to them.

Also, we would be rich, so we could afford to go to Costa Rica during the dry season.

 

You really loved certain brands of crackers in New Zealand and Costa Rica. What other treats did you discover? Any new recipes you continue to make?

I cook a mean arroz con pollo, and my rice-and-beans game is very on point. And thanks to World Market, we always have hagelslag—Dutch chocolate sprinkles—in the cabinet for special breakfast occasions.

 

What advice do you have for other families considering such an adventure?

My advice is to do it! It doesn’t have to be this exact adventure, it doesn’t have to be a whole year long, it doesn’t have to skip around the globe. But if you’ve long wanted to take an adventure, take it. Your kids will be fine (I mean, they will be bad sometimes, but that’s OK). The experience of being together through something real, difficult and astonishing will absolutely make up for whatever math classes they miss.

 

What did each of you miss most about home?

Alia: “Our Diet Coke machine. And our friends.”

Harper: “Our house and the things in our house.”

Lyra: “The stability. Knowing everyone, knowing our school, knowing that everything would be manageable.”

Dan: “Our friends and Washington Nationals games on local TV.”

 

Do you see life in Arlington, Virginia, in a different light now that you’ve had this experience?

I think so. I think all of us have a much better sense of the place we all have in the world, the infinite other ways of life out there. That’s really gratifying. It helps me obsess a lot less about our neighbors’ intense Sports Parenting, or enormous McMansions, or status comparisons in general. Not that I’m immune to obsessing, of course. But I think I have dialed it down.

 

ALSO IN BOOKPAGE: Read our review of How to Be a Family.

 

Author photo credit: Alia Smith

Dan Kois reveals what happens when two adults and their two daughters ditch their suburban Washington, DC, life and spend a year living in four spots around the world.
Science Fiction & FantasyFiction

Erin Morgenstern

Interview by Alice Cary

Down the rabbit hole with the author of The Night Circus

Nothing much is happening in western Massachusetts on a sunny day in early September, except for an occasional passing hay truck. In the deserted courtyard of a cafe near her home, amid the rolling hills of the Berkshires, Erin Morgenstern revels in the peace and quiet. 

“I spend so much time by myself, I’m still practicing talking in front of people,” Morgenstern says, laughing. “You change modes completely going from writer mode and being by yourself, inside your head, to being human with other people.”

Few authors have experienced more dramatic shifts than Morgenstern, whose debut novel, The Night Circus, became a sensation upon its publication in 2011. “Everything that everyone ever told me doesn’t happen to debut authors happened to me,” she says. “No one can prepare you for that. So I kind of just did my best and came out the other side.” It took a long time for her world to quiet down, she explains, until “all of a sudden, it was just me and my computer again.” 

Her fans, champing at the bit, can’t wait to get their hands on her second release. A few, in fact, have already gotten tattoos referencing The Starless Sea, a sprawling, delicious fantasy about 24-year-old Zachary Ezra Rawlins, a fortuneteller’s son and graduate student at a Vermont college who finds a mysterious library book—about himself, no less—that leads him on a mind-bending adventure. The tale is divided into six books jam-packed with myths, fairy tales, lost seas, twisting tunnels, earthquakes, disappearances, mysteriously linked characters and, of course, plenty of peril, all adding up to “a book-centric fantasia.”

While The Night Circus centers on magic and illusion, The Starless Sea is a tribute to books and storytelling. “We’re here to wander through other people’s stories, searching for our own,” Morgenstern writes. There’s even a character called the Story Sculptor, whose work certainly sounds autobiographical: “She created not one story but many. Stories within stories. Puzzles and wrong turns and false endings, in stone and in wax and in smoke. She crafted locks and destroyed their keys.” (Morgenstern wears an intricate handmade key around her neck, crafted by her favorite jeweler, J.L. Schnabel, whose work inspired several pieces of jewelry that appear in the novel.)

“I want a door in my wall where any sort of food I want will just appear. And then I don’t have to do dishes. These are my grown-up fantasies.”

For fans who are expecting The Night Circus 2, Morgenstern says, “This one still has my sensibility, but it’s a very different book.”

And the author is different this time around, too. Morgenstern admits, “I don’t feel like the person who wrote The Night Circus. It’s been so long. I’m in a completely different place.” Similarly, near the beginning of The Starless Sea, Zachary notes, “Every seven years each cell in your body has changed, he reminds himself. He is not that boy anymore.”

She wrote her debut while living in Salem, Massachusetts, and afterward moved to Boston, then Manhattan, and finally to the Berkshires in 2016. “It was a huge change, moving from a string of city apartments to the middle of the woods, but it’s been a really positive change,” she says, despite the fact that she discovered bats in the walls of her new home and that she couldn’t get internet or cable at her remote location for the first two years she lived there.

At that point, Morgenstern was hard at work on The Starless Sea, having begun writing it in earnest in 2015. As a serious painter earlier in life, she has a strong visual sense, and her new novel started with an architectural vision. “I just had this space in my head,” she says, “this subterranean library-esque space. I didn’t know what the story was, and I didn’t know how I was going to tell it.” She explains that it’s not unusual for her stories to be guided by setting. “I have these big sprawling worlds in my head,” she says. “I don’t think in plot.” In the case of The Night Circus, she was bored with her characters until she took them to the circus to see what would happen. (Plenty, as it would turn out.)

Morgenstern calls herself a “binge writer,” sometimes letting days or weeks pass without writing, allowing passages to percolate. “I don’t write every day,” she says. “I think that advice gets so prescriptive.” She also doesn’t outline her stories, and for The Starless Sea, she had written and discarded nearly 100 pages before a helpful sentence finally popped into her head (“There is a pirate in the basement”), which became the book’s first line. “I didn’t really know where it was going,” she recalls. Figuring out the book’s end proved equally challenging, and she changed it “a million times. . . . I think I probably drove my poor editor nuts.”

Such a labyrinthine writing process is thematically perfect for Zachary’s quest, which eventually leads him to a vast underground maze. When he asks his guide to explain his new surroundings, she replies, “This is the rabbit hole,” one of numerous nods to Lewis Carroll. Noting that Alice’s Adventures in Wonderland was originally called Alice’s Adventures Underground, Morgenstern says, “I’m endlessly fascinated by how many mysteries there are beneath the surface of the earth, right there literally under your feet.” 

The Starless Sea contains countless literary references, from Harry Potter to A Wrinkle in Time, F. Scott Fitzgerald and C.S. Lewis. It’s evidence of a life committed to books: The daughter of an elementary school librarian, Morgenstern used to pile up blankets and pillows in her closet, creating a cozy “reading cave”—which is exactly how Zachary first curls up with the mysterious book in his dorm room. As a handsome stranger named Dorian later tells Zachary, “Strange, isn’t it? To love a book. When the words on the pages become so precious that they feel like part of your own history because they are.”

Morgenstern says, “That feeling of really falling into the story, like Alice in Wonderland’s deep dive, is something I look for when I read. That’s what I wanted [The Starless Sea] to feel like. . . . So many childhood books are so rooted in that, like you can have these adventures when you’re 7 and that’s it. I don’t like that part of it.”

She first read Harry Potter for a class while studying theater and studio art at Smith College, becoming a fan of the series much later than many of her peers. (Morgenstern says of Zachary’s unnamed fictional college, “It’s totally Smith.”) Noting that many adults her age have lively discussions about things like Gryffindor and Hufflepuff, Morgenstern says, “I’m 41. I don’t really want to go to Hogwarts. I don’t want to have homework. I don’t want to go to class. I want [a magical] experience that’s not school. I want places that have that sort of feel to them but still feel age-appropriate.”

As a result, the under-ground world of The Starless Sea has a dumbwaiter that leads to the kitchen, which quickly whips up any requested treat or drink. “It’s a very self-indulgent fantasy,” Morgenstern says. “I want a door in my wall where any sort of food I want will just appear. And then I don’t have to do dishes. These are my grown-up fantasies.”

While she likes otherworldly and epic tales, her favorites are fantasies that “feel like they’re right next door.” Zachary, for instance, ends up in Manhattan at a literary masquerade ball and spends time roaming the city before finding the subterranean portal. “There’s something grounding [about the magic] that feels everyday and normal,” Morgenstern says.

Fans will be delighted to know that a third manuscript is tugging at Morgenstern’s heartstrings, even if at the moment it’s just a “handful of ideas.” So far, it seems to be a horror novel. Calling The Night Circus “a very autumnal book” and The Starless Sea a winter book, she says, “So I feel like I need to write a spring book, and then a summer book, and I’ll have a set.”

 

ALSO IN BOOKPAGE: Read our review of The Starless Sea.

Author photo by Allan Amato

Nothing much is happening in western Massachusetts on a sunny day in early September, except for an occasional passing hay truck. In the deserted courtyard of a cafe near her home, amid the rolling hills of the Berkshires, Erin Morgenstern revels in the peace and quiet. 

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