Alice Cary

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. 

YA FictionYA

Anna-Marie McLemore

Interview by Alice Cary

From Hans Christian Andersen’s “The Red Shoes” to a journey of historical and personal discovery. 

When asked to briefly describe Dark and Deepest Red, Anna-Marie McLemore is more than ready to reel off three snappy summaries. “The very short description is ‘Red Shoes’ plus medieval queers,” McLemore says. “[A different] way to describe it would be a reimagining of the fairy tale ‘The Red Shoes’ through the lens of the 1518 dancing plague. And another way I like to talk about it is sort of the secret history of a fairy tale.” 

The original Hans Christian Andersen tale is about a girl named Karen (after his own half-sister, whom he despised) who refuses to take off her bright red shoes in church and so is cursed to never be able to take off the shoes while dancing ceaselessly—even after she successfully begs an executioner to chop off her feet. It’s a story so unsubtle that its subtext is essentially its text. It’s also ripe territory for McLemore’s queer, feminist reimagining.

Deftly plotted in sharply evocative prose, Dark and Deepest Red follows two parallel and sometimes intersecting narratives, the first of which takes place in medieval Strasbourg and involves a young Romani named Lavinia and the trans boy she loves, Alifair. The pair are caught up in the mysterious 1518 dancing plague, an actual historical event in which about 400 Strasbourgeois danced uncontrollably, some to the point of collapse and death.

Deftly plotted in sharply evocative prose, Dark and Deepest Red follows two parallel and sometimes intersecting narratives in medieval Strasbourg and the modern-day USA.

The second narrative follows modern-day Mexican American Rosella Oliva and her Romani American friend Emil, who keeps his heritage secret, fearing prejudice. During their small town’s annual “Glimmer,” a week each autumn in which surreal and magical things happen, a pair of red slippers attach themselves to Rosella’s feet, making her dance wildly while heightening her passion for Emil—and she can’t remove them.

“There’s something so powerful about the motif of shoes, and in fairy tales, they come up all the time,” McLemore says. “I also love what color can signify in stories, how it can become its own language.” 

At the time of Dark and Deepest Red’s genesis, McLemore, a Californian whose award-winning novels include The Weight of Feathers and When the Moon Was Ours, identified as a queer Latinx Christian. Unexpectedly, however, creating the story turned out to be a journey of further personal discovery.

“I wrote this book not realizing that I was nonbinary,” says McLemore, who now uses the personal pronouns they/them and whose husband is trans. “So it’s very strange having this story come out with Alifair as a main character, whom I had something in common with without realizing it. Obviously our gender identities are different. I’m much more gender fluid, but I wrote him not knowing that. My identity is evolving alongside my books. . . . Our identities and our history are constantly evolving. We all have histories that we’re writing every day.”

As a ballet lover who grew up competing in traditional Irish dancing, McLemore has personally experienced “this sort of spell of the dance when your body takes over” and has always been “enthralled” and “horrified” by Andersen’s “The Red Shoes.” After deciding to pair that fairy tale with Strasbourg’s dancing plague, McLemore was delighted to discover scholarly evidence that Andersen may have also had that plague in mind while writing his story. “I just had that sense of history kind of whispering secrets to you,” McLemore says.

ALSO IN BOOKPAGE: Read our starred review of Dark and Deepest Red.

Research for the book involved a trip to Strasbourg, where McLemore reveled in walking cobblestone streets and soaking up the past. While generally welcomed with kindness and generosity, the author and their husband had one unfortunate experience of being “shamed” out of a church by another visitor. “It was a bad moment of paralleling the story,” they recall. “You’re going to run into people who have a problem with who you are wherever you go. So I’m just grateful for the people who want to be in community with us.”

McLemore’s own community includes a big Mexican American family. “When I talk about community, my family was my first,” they say. Although dyslexia caused them to struggle with reading, McLemore loved stories from the start, and both parents helped to instill a love of books. (Dark and Deepest Red is dedicated to McLemore’s father.) 

In high school, McLemore started writing in secret, worried that their reading issues precluded a writing career. Two teachers, however, encouraged and challenged the budding author. One pivotal reading experience was Ash by Malinda Lo, which McLemore loves for “this idea that there are spaces for queer characters in fairy tales.”

As McLemore adds more of their own work to the YA and queer canon, readers reach out to the author, either on Twitter or via email. “Reader responses are part of what makes me keep writing the stories I write,” they say. “It’s a moment of tremendous magic when you realize you not only needed to tell it, but somebody needed to read it.”

From Hans Christian Andersen’s “The Red Shoes” to a journey of historical and personal discovery. 

When asked to briefly describe Dark and Deepest Red, Anna-Marie McLemore is more than ready to reel off three snappy summaries. “The very short description is ‘Red Shoes’…

NonfictionMemoir

Cassie Chambers

Interview by Alice Cary

Cassie Chambers grew up helping her grandparents sharecrop on a tobacco farm in Owsley County, Kentucky, one of the poorest counties in America. She went on to graduate from Yale College and Harvard Law School, eventually returning to Kentucky to work with domestic violence survivors in rural communities. Her memoir, Hill Women: Finding Family and a Way Forward in the Appalachian Mountains, celebrates the amazingly resilient women in her family and the beloved mountain culture that helped shape her.

What discoveries surprised you most as you wrote this book, in regards to both your family’s past and your thoughts about the places where you grew up?
When I first started writing this book, I thought I was going to come out of it with a lot of answers about the challenges facing Appalachia. But I was surprised by how few answers I had at the end of writing. The more I delved into the issues facing Appalachia, the more complicated they seemed. There are so many competing concerns that we need to balance, and there aren’t easy solutions to a lot of these problems. But I think acknowledging this complexity is important, and it’s only when you understand how multifaceted a lot of these issues are that you can really begin the process of solving them.

How wonderfully you write about the women in your family, especially your strong Granny, your steadfast Aunt Ruth and your amazing mother. Did your mother get a chance to read your manuscript?
She did. I am so grateful that she was able to read a draft of the book shortly before she died. I still have the copy I gave her to read with her handwritten comments in the margins. She told me that she felt like a “proud hill woman” after reading it. So much of the book is her story, and I’m glad that she felt pride in the way I portrayed her amazing life.

What thoughts go through your head when you visit the now-vacant farmhouse in Cow Creek where you once helped your family? In the book you write, “Over time I’ve come to feel more like a grateful visitor than a true resident.”
It always amazes me how little changes over time. The house still looks very much the way I remember it—only a bit more worn around the edges—even though it has now sat vacant for years. I think that’s part of why that visual image brings back such strong memories for me. There’s something special about returning to that place where I—and so many women in my family—made so many memories.

You said that despite the fact that Yale was progressive, it felt “like a place where men belonged more than women, where male voices mattered a bit more than female ones.” Do you think that’s still the case?
I haven’t spent time on campus recently to know whether I would still feel that way. But I do think it’s true that powerful institutions in general are still places where male voices are often heard more than female voices. But I think women are increasingly pushing back on that status quo and claiming a space for female voices. I think that’s a good thing.

ALSO IN BOOKPAGE: Read our review of Hill Women.

An ex-boyfriend once screamed at you, “I’m something. I matter. You’re nothing but a redneck from a redneck family. You don’t even matter.” Do you still find that certain people dismiss Appalachian residents as soon as they hear their accents or learn where they’re from?
I definitely think that’s still the case. I’ve lost my Eastern Kentucky accent over the years, but I still see the way my relatives with heavy accents are treated. I think people still have strong stereotypes about people from Appalachia. I’ve had people tell me, “There’s nothing interesting that happens in the mountains.” I know that’s not true, and that’s one of the reasons that I wanted to write this book: I wanted to show folks the creativity, intelligence and grit that exists in the Appalachian mountains.

What was it like meeting the Queen of England, and how did that happen?
It was definitely a top-ten life experience! She met with some young people on scholarships while I was living in London, and I got to spend about 30 seconds talking to her as a part of a reception. I practiced my curtsey for days beforehand, but I still messed it up!

You write that when you started working at the Harvard Legal Aid Bureau, “I had spent the past several years pretending that I fit perfectly into the privileged environments I found myself in. Now I was curious to see what it would feel like to acknowledge the mountain roots and impoverished background I’d ignored for so long.” Do you felt like the Bureau is where you discovered your calling?
I do. I’m someone who’s motivated by being able to make a tangible, visible difference in my community. The work I did at the Bureau helped me realize that about myself. I loved being able to work with women one-on-one and provide them with the resources they needed to be able to make their lives better. It was incredibly rewarding work.

You proudly write of Appalachian women that, “when given the right tools, support, and environment, these women are capable of changing the world.” What initiatives fill you with hope, and what obstacles worry you most about women in this region?
It always amazes me to see all the varied ways that Appalachian women are making their communities better, from starting community garden initiatives, to launching small businesses, to running for office to be a part of the decision-making process. So long as these women have the right resources, they can be successful change agents in their communities. It’s just a matter of making sure that they have the resources they need.

It always amazes me to see all the varied ways that Appalachian women are making their communities better, from starting community garden initiatives, to launching small businesses, to running for office to be a part of the decision-making process.

You write, “After November 2016, I realized in a whole new way that elections mattered. It wasn’t enough to save the world one family at a time.” Any thoughts on healing the political divide in this country, especially in states like Kentucky, during the upcoming presidential election year? How are you involved?
I think a lot can be accomplished if people just take time to listen—especially to those they disagree with. It’s possible to disagree with someone and still have a civil, productive conversation about important issues. I try to practice that myself and not get caught up in the “us vs. them” mentality that is so common in politics.

And I just took a big step toward being involved in a different way—I put my name on the ballot to run for Metro Council in my community! I grew up seeing women dive in to make a difference, and I decided that this was a role that would let me follow in those footsteps. Running for office with a young child is definitely an adventure, but I’m having a great time so far and learning so much about the needs of my community.

Are some people still nervous when they discover you’re “one of those political people”?
I think a lot of people are distrustful of politics because they feel that political systems haven’t worked for them. And in a lot of communities, people feel like political decision-making is something that’s done “to” them rather than “by” them. Although some folks are still wary when I tell them about my political involvement, I find that a lot of that dissipates once we sit down and have a conversation. At the end of the day, most people just want to know that you’re a straight-shooter who will keep promises.

Your mom died the day after you finished this book, and then months later your son was born. What an overwhelming collision of accomplishment, grief and joy. Do you feel your mother’s presence as you deliver her story to the world?
I do. It’s incredibly hard not having her here to be a part of this book making its way into the world. I know that she was looking forward to its release and that she would be so excited right now. But I do feel like she’s proudly looking on. And I’m trying to live each day in a way that honors her memory and legacy. She taught me to love fiercely, advocate tirelessly and remember to stop and have some fun along the way.

Have you met Ashley York and seen her wonderful documentary Hillbilly about the area where she grew up in Kentucky? I read your book soon after seeing that film, and the two make wonderful companion pieces.
A lot of folks have told me that! I haven’t met Ashley yet (having a 5-month-old baby has kept me busy the past few months!), but I would love to. From what I hear, she and I would have a lot to chat about. The more women who are out there talking about Kentucky, the better!

 

Author photo © Nathan Cornetet, Fusion Photography

Cassie Chambers grew up helping her grandparents sharecrop on a tobacco farm in Owsley County, Kentucky, one of the poorest counties in America. She went on to graduate from Yale College and Harvard Law School, eventually returning to Kentucky to work with domestic violence survivors…

Children's & YAMiddle Grade

Kate Messner

Interview by Alice Cary

Kate Messner’s latest middle grade novel, Chirp, is an engrossing summer adventure novel that takes place in Vermont. It’s the story of Mia Barnes, who is convinced someone is trying to sabotage her grandmother’s cricket farm. It’s also a book informed by the #metoo movement: Mia’s former gymnastics coach touched her inappropriately, leaving Mia feeling confused and robbed of her confidence. We asked Messner about the wild world of cricket farming, as well as the work that went into researching and writing a novel that addresses difficult emotional truths.

How did you settle on crickets as a central subject of Chirp? What intrigued you most during your research into this industry?
My interest in entomophagy (eating insects as food) began in 2013, when I read this United Nations Food and Agriculture Organization report on edible insects. A few years later, my husband, who’s part of a group that offers help to start-up businesses in Vermont, came home with a folder of information about a new business he thought I’d want to read about: a cricket farm. When I visited the new farm (and heard the chirping of half a million crickets in a warehouse!) I was absolutely fascinated and decided it would be an amazing setting for a kids’ book—a mystery that also explored ideas about entrepreneurship and sustainability.

Do you have any favorite cricket tasting experiences or recipes to recommend?
When I was doing research for Chirp, I sampled crickets in every iteration imaginable. I tried cookies, bread and fruit leather made with cricket flour, snacked on flavored, roasted crickets, ate Thai cricket pizza and topped it off with chocolate-covered cricket ice cream. My favorite cricket foods are the Texas barbecue crickets from Aketta, a cricket farm in Austin, and chocolate “chirp” cookies (chocolate chip . . . but with cricket flour added!). The recipe for those is in the book club and discussion guide for the book!

ALSO IN BOOKPAGE: Read our starred review of Chirp.

How does your background in TV news reporting help you as a novelist? Did the #MeToo movement prompt you to write Chirp, or was this a subject you had been considering writing about for longer?
This was definitely one of the things that fueled my writing. I was especially haunted by the courageous testimony of the gymnasts who were assaulted by their doctor, Larry Nassar. I read through pages and pages of their victim impact statements from the sentencing. It was horrific and gave me nightmares. But it also made me even more determined to craft a story that portrays a realistic look at how some adults gain the trust of kids in order to harm them. In Chirp, it’s an assistant coach at Mia’s gym whose too-long hugs, texted photos and unwelcome backrubs made her uncomfortable. He also gives her gifts and says things that are typical of grooming behavior. I want kids to recognize this and be able to talk about it with a trusted adult if it ever happens to them.

You’ve written that your characters’ experiences with sexual harassment and molestation “were inspired by stories in the news and my own experiences growing up, as well as those of many women I’m lucky enough to call friends.” How did personal experience inform your writing of this novel? Was it ever difficult to write?
This isn’t a subject I ever thought I’d write about. But like many women, the combination of the 2016 election and all of the #metoo related news stories stirred up tough memories as well as productive anger. For me, that took the form of a resolve to speak up about these issues so our daughters don’t have to struggle with the same toxic culture. I spent a lot of time talking with friends about their experiences as well as taking time to write about my own childhood memories in detail—from inappropriate touching from a family friend to a stranger who exposed himself to me on a beach while I was looking for shells on a family vacation. And of course that was difficult, but it was also important—to spend time processing those memories through the lens of an adult and a writer. If I hadn’t returned to revisit those tough places, I don’t think Chirp would have the same emotional truth.

What an exceptional passage this is: “Mia still felt icky when she got home. She wasn't even sure she could say exactly what happened, but something had, and it felt gross and wrong and probably she should have said something to her mom, but how could you say something when you couldn't even explain what happened yourself?” It’s so impossibly hard for kids to talk about incidents like these. Do you anticipate getting letters from readers about their own situations? Do you have thoughts about what you'll say to them?
That passage is very much rooted in my own experiences as a child. If no one’s talked explicitly with you about issues of sexual assault and consent, you don’t really understand or recognize what’s happening when it happens. And months before Chirp’s release, I started hearing from early readers who also saw themselves in Mia’s experiences. They wished they’d had a story like this when they were younger.

I’m sure there will be pushback to this book. There are always adults who think it’s their job to protect kids from uncomfortable ideas. But keeping stories like this from children is the opposite of protecting them. Information is what helps kids identify when someone isn’t acting in their best interest and empowers them to speak up. I do anticipate that I’ll hear from more readers when the book is released, and I have a file of resources ready to share, but the very first thing will be encouraging them to talk with a trusted adult, and reassuring them that what happened was wrong, and wasn’t their fault.

“[M]onths before Chirp’s release, I started hearing from early readers who also saw themselves in Mia’s experiences. They wished they’d had a story like this when they were younger.”

You’re quite the researcher, having visited the Vermont Ninja Warrior Training Center, the inspiration for the Warrior Camp that Mia attends. What led you there? Did you try some of the challenges?
I always try to make sure my characters’ hobbies are portrayed in a way that’s vivid and realistic, so that the book will feel real to kids who love that hobby, too. When I was working on Chirp, that meant talking with gymnasts, reading about how kids’ entrepreneur camps work and how they’re encouraged to draft business plans like Mia’s, and also figuring out what happens at a “Warrior Camp.”

I’d read about the Vermont Ninja Warrior Training Center, and with a quick phone call, arranged a visit during one of their camps for kids. I try not to become part of the story when I’m doing research—that’s left over from my years as a journalist—so I didn’t try any of the challenges that day. Instead, I sat off to the side while the kids had their normal camp day, stretching with their coaches and then breaking into groups to work on the different challenges. I observed and listened in, collecting details in my notebook—a bit of dialogue from a coach trying to teach the rings, kids shouting encouragement to one another on the quad steps, the squeak of sneakers on the spider wall. And then I talked with both campers and coaches about their experiences. I also spent a lot of time hanging from our pull-up bar at home—something Mia does as she’s trying to regain arm strength after her gymnastics accident—so that I could describe that burning feeling authentically!

Syd, “a fat sausage of an English bulldog puppy,” plays an important role in Chirp. You've also written a chapter book series about Ranger, a time-traveling golden retriever. Tell us about the dogs in your own life.
Ah, the truth is, everyone in my family is allergic to dogs, so we can’t have one in real life. I love other people’s dogs, though, and I think that’s why I keep putting them in my books. Ranger and Syd are sort of my imaginary dogs. Gram’s dog Syd in Chirp was inspired by the bulldog that used to hang out at the rink where my daughter figure skated before she graduated. The real Syd was also super-drooly and equally as affectionate.

You’re a mountain climber trying to summit all 46 Adirondack High Peaks between book deadlines. What number are you on? Any exciting experiences to share?
I’m not an Adirondack 46er quite yet (that’s the name given to people who have summited all of the 46 Adirondack High Peaks over 4,000 feet). At the moment, I’m only a “32er,” but I hope to finish in the next few years. I love hiking, even though many of the trails are muddy, root-tangled messes littered with giant boulders. It’s meditative for me, and I get some great thinking done while I’m out there.

Also? Hiking in the Adirondacks is a lot like writing a novel. It always feels impossible at first, and no matter how long you work, you start to doubt that you’ll make it. But ultimately, you have to take it one small stretch at a time. Just one more mile. One more chapter. And there are so many wonderful discoveries to make along the way.

 

Kate Messner’s latest middle grade novel, Chirp, is an engrossing summer adventure novel that takes place in Vermont. It’s the story of Mia Barnes, who is convinced someone is trying to sabotage her grandmother’s cricket farm. It’s also a book informed by the #metoo movement:…

NonfictionMemoir

Bess Kalb

Interview by Alice Cary

As Bess Kalb shares anecdotes about her beloved grandmother from her West Coast home, an odd thing happens outside the window of her East Coast interviewer’s home. A bright red cardinal appears on the branch of a nearby tree, a sudden splash of color against the snowy landscape. Some believe a cardinal’s arrival symbolizes a visit from a departed loved one—and readers of Kalb’s poignant, often hilarious tribute to her late grandmother, Nobody Will Tell You This but Me, will likely agree that if any spirit would have that sort of power, Bobby Bell’s would.

“I wouldn’t put it past her,” Kalb agrees. “I like to think she would come back as a fabulous bird in her perfect shade of red lipstick.”

Kalb, an Emmy-nominated comedy writer for “Jimmy Kimmel Live!,” explains that the inspiration for the book began at her grandmother’s funeral. “I was wondering what she would think about all of this,” Kalb recalls. “As a way to just make it through the grueling ordeal of a beloved family member’s funeral, I had a running commentary in my head from her as she was lying feet away from me. I was hearing her go, ‘Oh, God. Look at how much they’re shoveling.’”

“My grandma was opinionated because she had some really great opinions.”

Bobby Bell was such a beloved force of nature that when she died at age 90 in 2017, she had two funerals—one in New York, where she spent much of her life, and another in Massachusetts, where she is buried. “At both of those services,” Kalb says, “I delivered a eulogy in her voice. It was a way to bring her back right away and to let her speak for herself. I thought the most appropriate way to do it was to give her the last word.”

At one service, Kalb read the transcript of a voicemail from her grandmother, recalling how, when Kalb was an infant, Bobby would fly from Florida to New York each week to care for her while Kalb’s mother, a physician, worked. “It was actually two voicemails because she was interrupted halfway through by a call waiting, which she would always take,” Kalb says. At the other service, Kalb delivered “a more freewheeling description” of how her grandmother repeatedly waited beside her preschool door in an effort to calm her fearful, 4-year-old self. 

After the funeral, Kalb continued to write in her grandmother’s voice. And once, while speaking by phone with her grandfather, Kalb began impersonating her grandmother, telling him what his wife would have said. “He just got quiet,” Kalb says. “I remember thinking, if I can make her feel present again for him, then maybe there is something to this.”

ALSO IN BOOKPAGE: Read our review of Nobody Will Tell You This but Me.

fter challenging herself to write Bobby’s story in Bobby’s own voice, Kalb emailed a sample to her literary agent, who responded enthusiastically. “And lo and behold,” Kalb recalls, “those 40 pages are the first 40 pages of the book.”

This lively, unique book describes Bobby’s rags-to-riches life, beginning with a penniless birth on a dining room table in a Brooklyn tenement. Bobby’s mother (Kalb’s great-grandmother) had left her family at age 12, emigrating alone from Tsarist Russia to the United States in the face of religious persecution. Bobby and her husband, Hank (who still lectures at Columbia University), worked tirelessly, earning a fortune in real estate developments and sometimes dodging Mafia bosses. These family stories unfold in nonlinear fashion, interspersed with frequent exchanges between grandmother and granddaughter: some real, many imagined.

Kalb readily admits that her book is hard to categorize, since it isn’t truly a memoir. “I was aware of how many ethical lines I was crossing throughout. I don’t want [the book] to be taken at face value as her words and her telling of her life story. It is mine, and it is through the lens of my relationship with her. This is an act of ventriloquism more than it is reportage.”

“It ended up being a really, really therapeutic way of saying goodbye while also getting to know her again.”

As her grandmother’s “humble scribe,” Kalb spent hours with her mother and grandfather after Bobby’s death, trying to fill in any gaps in the stories she heard growing up. “It ended up being a really, really therapeutic way of saying goodbye while also getting to know her again,” Kalb says. “In many ways I feel like I understand my grandmother better than I did when she was alive. Getting inside her head and walking in her beautiful Ferragamo shoes . . . was an important way of connecting with her that I actually didn’t get to do in her life.” Kalb calls the final product a “Russian doll of a memoir, in that it’s a story within a story within a story . . . an intergenerational container for many lives.”

In the epilogue, during a brief, imagined conversation between Kalb and her grandmother, Bobby cautions, “I’m in a box in the ground. You’re putting words in my mouth. In a dead woman’s mouth.” In response, Kalb asks, “Are you angry?”

When questioned about whether she thinks her grandmother would approve, Kalb quips, “I think she’d go, ‘Oh, God. I hope somebody reads it other than your mother.’”

Ironically, Kalb’s mother—whose often fraught relationship with Bobby forms a centerpiece of the narrative—has yet to read the book, calling it “too painful.” Kalb says that after reading several pages of the manuscript, she paid her daughter’s writing perhaps the greatest compliment possible, saying, “That’s Grandma.”

This formidable grandmother was hardly shy about offering opinions, such as, “Never mind what you like—would it kill you to wear some color every once in a while? . . . Why don’t you take down my credit card number and go to Bloomingdale’s and buy yourself some nice things that aren’t morose.”

Despite such comical exchanges, Kalb asserts that her grandmother defies the stereotype of the overbearing Jewish grandmother, which Kalb says “misses the dimensionality of her character and her point of view. My grandma was opinionated because she had some really great opinions.” Kalb says her grandma’s constant guidance helped shape her as both a writer and a person. Not surprisingly, Kalb is no shrinking violet herself—in fact, President Trump blocked her on Twitter after she made a series of jokes about him.

Kalb calls her comedy writing for Jimmy Kimmel “the greatest job of my life,” adding, “I don’t think I would have been able to write this book if I didn’t have the training that I had as a daily TV writer.” Not only did she write the book while working full time, she was also pregnant with her infant son, to whom the book is dedicated—an honor he shares, of course, with Bobby.

Kalb finished writing Nobody Will Tell You This but Me with “heaving sobs,” finding it painful to once again have to say goodbye. Now, however, Kalb loves seeing her grandmother come alive for readers, saying, “It adds a whole new dimension to the reconjuring of a woman I loved.”

Not surprisingly, Kalb continues to hear her grandmother’s voice, often in dreams that she describes as “this sort of weird Grandma A.I. in my brain.” If, for example, she stresses about her baby not sleeping through the night, she hears Bobby advising, “You shut the door. You have a glass of wine. Everyone will live.” Kalb laughs, admitting she has no idea what her grandmother might actually have said on that subject.

“I think that’s what I miss most now,” Kalb continues. “I really have to sort of recobble together her wisdom from the toolkit she gave me.” 

No doubt Bobby Bell would beam proudly as her granddaughter reiterates her grief. Says Kalb, “As much as during my adolescence and teenage years, I felt like maybe I was being pushed—God, what I wouldn’t give for another push right now.”

 

Author photo © Lucas Foglia.

Bess Kalb's heartfelt, hilarious memoir pays tribute to her beloved—and opinionated—grandma.
FictionHistorical Fiction

C Pam Zhang

Interview by Alice Cary

C Pam Zhang makes a splashy debut with her searingly unique novel, How Much of These Hills Is Gold, a Western set in the gold rush-era mid-1800s that follows two young sisters, Lucy and Sam, trying to survive on their own after the death of their father. Zhang has described her novel as “an immigrant book, a book about loss, a book about tigers and buffalo, a book asking who can claim a land, a book made up in my effing head that is now real, and weighty, and coming out in 2020. I’m crying. I hope it touches you too.”

Believe me, we were touched—and desperate to know more. Here’s what we found out.

Did you set out to write a Western? How did this action-packed story, these scrappy characters and this epic setting evolve?
I didn’t set out to write anything! The first draft of this poured out of me from a few images that came into my head; it felt more like I was channeling something. But as I worked on the novel, I realized that this book was made possible by my years of moving to and away from Northern California, and the way that particular location haunts me. I have very strong but conflicting feelings about this landscape, from awe to unease, rejection to comfort.

Did you grow up watching or reading Westerns? What sort of research or travel did you do?
I read Little House on the Prairie far too many times as a child. For a few years I lived in Salinas, California, the home of John Steinbeck, and read his oeuvre without quite understanding it. In our culture it’s easy to absorb Western tropes passively, through osmosis. While working on this book, I read up on history and took a road trip through some of the old gold rush towns in Northern California, including a place called Locke, which was populated solely by Chinese immigrants. Most importantly, I’ve spent many hours in cars traversing this part of the world, and that feeling I got, the golden-soaked sun, informed this novel. I wanted the feeling more than the fact.

“Home is, I think, a sense of complete belonging, a place where you feel your right to exist in your truest form isn’t questioned.”

Lucy and Sam’s parents are complex, enigmatic characters, and your book repeatedly asks, what makes a family a family? How does your own background inform your writing? Will you share any details about your book’s intriguing dedication to your father, whom you say is “loved but slenderly known”?
That dedication is my take on a quote from King Lear, in which Lear is described by his daughter in this way: “Yet he hath ever but slenderly known himself.” I think we often know ourselves very thinly, because that self changes over time. This is especially true for those who migrate, leaving old selves behind. And if it’s hard to know oneself, how much harder is it to know someone across a generational divide? Family members really only see one another in narrow contexts. To imagine a father who has only ever been a father to you as, say, a young man, or a lover, or a villain, is an enormous and mind-breaking feat.

You’ve said that for years you’ve felt both haunted and pressured to write a “Sad Immigrant Story.” On your website, you describe yourself as “Born across one ocean, dragged over another. Went willingly every time after. Strange stories. Reluctant realist. Brown / Cambridge / Iowa educated. Lived in 13 cities & still pondering home.” Tell us a bit more about your background, and how you approach another question that your novel repeatedly asks, what makes a home a home?
My family moved around a great deal, and as a kid I felt each uprooting as a trauma. Now transience has become a core part of me, so much so that I feel uneasy if I’ve lived more than a few years in one place at a stretch. Home is, I think, a sense of complete belonging, a place where you feel your right to exist in your truest form isn’t questioned. That means my definition of a home is necessarily small: a room, a smell, a person.

How Much of These Hills Is GoldI’m also interested in that phrase “Reluctant realist.” Explain how you managed to make tigers such a big part of this book, and why.
Tigers were my bull in the china shop, to mix animal metaphors. They are there to fuck up the fabric of reality, to declare that this is not a straightforward historical book. I chose tigers because they’re a part of Chinese culture as I understood it growing up, and I wanted to implant a bit of my family mythology into the mythology of the American West.

Did any special talismans help during the writing process? Like a glittering gold nugget or an old photo?
I’m not talisman-keeper, but a superstitious side manifested in my writing ritual. I took the same SkyTrain ride to the same café in Bangkok every day until I completed the first draft. In that café I faced the same direction and looked out the same window. (I tried to get the same table, with its optimal mix of dimness and light, but was slightly more flexible there because I couldn’t physically remove other customers.) For a later draft, I went to the same coffee shop in Brooklyn and sat at a counter facing a long mirror. There’s something there about editing and looking yourself in the eye.

“As a woman living and working in tech in the 2010s, I think about my gender presentation and the ways I can twist it to my advantage or disadvantage—but women have been thinking about that since the dawn of time.”

The book begins with the epigraph “This land is not your land.” Did you grow up hearing the Woody Guthrie song “This Land Is Your Land,” and if so, what feelings did that evoke? 
I spent some formative early years in the public school system in Kentucky, and sang “This Land is Your Land” with a hand over my heart (and spoke the Pledge of Allegiance this way, too). I was moved to tears by the majesty and beauty evoked in the song’s idyllic version of America—all those the golden waves of grain! I stopped reciting the pledge, eventually. But I am still moved by the beauty of the song, even though I now know that its images are pure fantasy in many ways, and that the desire to cling to a bucolic (very white) myth of America is toxic. That tension is at the heart of my novel.

The story is narrated in a unique staccato style that you’ve described as “a made-up voice that’s a mix of Wild West slang and pidgin Mandarin in the mouths of immigrant orphans in a speculative Gold Rush California.” How did you come up with that style, and was it difficult to maintain?
The style was born of constraint: I have a character whose gender identity is uncertain to the narrator, and so the narrator avoids using gendered pronouns. This omission radically changed the shape of the sentences, the construction of thought. That rhythm became so intrinsic to the book that I can’t imagine any other way. The introduction of pidgin Mandarin and Old West lingo also felt natural to this family that exists at the juncture of cultures—it felt inevitable to these characters in this place. Style is so intertwined with the fabric of this book—its location, its characters—that I honestly don’t think I could write in quite this way again.

ALSO IN BOOKPAGE: Read our review of How Much of These Hills Is Gold.

Despite being set in the past, this book tackles many modern themes of sexuality, gender identity and secret-keeping, as well as, of course, issues of prejudice and immigration. How did current-day issues inform your version of the Old West?
It’s true that these are current-day issues, but they’re also very, very ancient ones. As a woman living and working in tech in the 2010s, I think about my gender presentation and the ways I can twist it to my advantage or disadvantage—but women have been thinking about that since the dawn of time. It’s like pouring the same water into different-shaped containers: The containers may change with the era, but it’s all the same water. Women have always been taken advantage of; families have always kept secrets; there has always been prejudice against immigrants. In setting my book outside of the present day, I could shine a light on common struggles and make them feel timeless, make them feel epic.

What’s one question you wished I’d asked about the book?
In a lovely Instagram post, [BookPage’s fiction editor, Cat Acree] described the book as a “eulogy for the land.” That resonates deeply. I sometimes worry that the classification of “historical” or “immigrant,” overshadows another crucial theme of the book: how human activity in the name of profit has ravaged the land. I wrote the book while California was either in drought or on fire.

Lastly, I love your book’s gilded cover. Could you share any stories about the book’s physical evolution? Or about its title?
The very first version of my cover had the golden evocation of sun and heat, and it had the colors, and it had tigers. The designer and art director, Grace Han and Helen Yentus, did an incredible job of portraying the book’s themes on the cover: historical but modern and sharp, vital and alive and haunted by place. But those tigers were a journey! We went through many iterations to find the perfect ones. I ended up finding a friend of friends, the illustrator Maggie Han, to paint them in watercolor under Riverhead’s guidance. I love that my tigers are graphic and blue—it feels as modern and bold as I hoped, not at all what you’d expect with a straightforward historical novel. I’m so, so grateful to have worked with women, immigrant, and Asian American artists along the way.

 

Author photo by Gioia Zloczower

C Pam Zhang makes a splashy debut with her searingly unique novel, How Much of These Hills Is Gold, a Western set in the gold rush-era mid-1800s that follows two young sisters trying to survive on their own.

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