Amy Scribner

NonfictionBiography

Jill Lepore

Interview by Amy Scribner

We learn about Benjamin Franklin—the very epitome of an American—from kindergarten onward. But history has forgotten the women who shaped his life, including his youngest sister.

In the remarkable Book of Ages, Harvard professor and New Yorker staff writer Jill Lepore examines the life of Jane Franklin Mecom.

Largely uneducated, poor, married to a man who likely suffered from mental illness, “Jenny” nonetheless remained close with her famous brother throughout their lives. “Benjamin Franklin’s life entered the annals of history; lives like his sister’s became the subject of fiction,” Lepore writes. “Histories of great men, novels of little women.”

Lepore answered our questions on how she brought to life this unknown but influential woman—and why she wanted to shine a light on what it was like to be a woman in the 18th century.

The scant paper trail for Jane Franklin Mecom nearly caused you to abandon this project. Why did you persevere?

I abandoned the book partly because the paper trail was less a trail than a broken twig every 500 yards or so and partly because it always led to a place of misery. There were 17 Franklin children. Benjamin was the youngest of 10 boys, Jane the youngest of seven girls. Benny and Jenny, they were called, when they were little. You want, in a story about people who start life almost like twins, for them to someday trade places. The Prince and the Pauper. A Tale of Two Cities. Jane and Benjamin Franklin never trade places. Narratively, that drove me nuts. But then I wrote an op-ed for the New York Times about Jane—it’s called “Poor Jane’s Almanac”—and the response I got from readers knocked me out: They wanted to know, they begged, When is the book coming out? And what they loved—what they wanted to read more about—was the sorrow. Who knew. So I trudged back into the woods, and let myself get lost in the misery.

The writing in Book of Ages is almost poetic. Which was harder: researching or writing?

The writing, because I wanted to do right by her—I wanted the storytelling to be worthy of her story—and that was daunting. Jane Franklin never went to school. She never learned to spell. But she loved reading, and she loved books. I wanted to write something that found the words she fumbled for.

Jane was a wife and mother who never had formal schooling. Her brother Benjamin became wealthy and famous, while Jane’s husband was thrown into debtors’ prison. What do you think made these siblings so close despite their very different lives?

She was the anchor to his past. He was her port to the world.

Benjamin wrote to his sister when she was 14—and he hadn’t seen her for three years—to say he’d heard she was “a celebrated beauty.” There are no portraits of Jane. What is it like to write about someone whom you can’t picture? Did it matter to you?

It killed me. It’s not only that there’s no portrait but also that no one ever describes her, except for this one throwaway “celebrated beauty” business, and it’s hard to know how to take that. (Franklin teased her all the time.) In “The Prodigal Daughter,” a New Yorker article I wrote about the writing of the book, I tell the story about how, when I went to the Boston Museum of Fine Arts to look at a mourning ring that Jane once owned, I slipped it on, when no one was looking. It was so tiny. It barely fit on my pinky. I thought, “She must have been so small.”

You write that Edward Mecom, Jane’s husband, was either a bad man or a mad man. Which do you think he was?

I expect he was a lunatic. Two of their sons went violently mad and Jane makes all kinds of vague remarks that, to me, suggest that whatever was wrong with them was wrong with her husband, too. Madness doesn’t often survive in the archives, though. People will do just about anything to destroy evidence of insanity.

Geraldine Brooks has written about your book that Jane “was trapped by gender, starved of education.” What do you think Jane could have been in another era?

I am a huge fan of science fiction that involves time travel but, as a scholar of history, I believe that we can never know what people would be like in an era other than their own. We live in a place in time; we can’t be unmade.

We learn about Benjamin Franklin—the very epitome of an American—from kindergarten onward. But history has forgotten the women who shaped his life, including his youngest sister.

In the remarkable Book of Ages, Harvard professor and New Yorker staff writer Jill Lepore examines the life of Jane…

FictionHistorical Fiction

Amy Tan

Interview by Amy Scribner

Amy Tan does not have a fabulous closet befitting a world-famous author. She is in the midst of cleaning it when BookPage calls to talk about her lush new novel, The Valley of Amazement.

“It’s a terrible closet,” Tan says with a laugh from her home in New York City. “It’s a teeny-tiny closet. The doors keep going off the hinges and I keep having to figure out where to put my winter clothes.”

Subpar closet notwithstanding, Tan is having a very good year, highlighted by the publication of her first novel in eight years. The Valley of Amazement is the spellbinding story of Violet, a pampered girl raised by her American mother, Lulu, in Lulu’s plush Shanghai courtesan house. When Lulu is tricked into sailing for California during the 1912 revolution, Violet is left behind and sold to another “flower house,” where young girls trade companionship and sex for lavish gifts and the hope of one day becoming someone’s wife or concubine.

An older courtesan in the house, Magic Gourd, takes Violet under her wing, helping her become one of the most successful courtesans in the city. Violet meets many men during her time as a courtesan and eventually marries an American man and gives birth to their daughter. But when her husband dies of Spanish influenza and his spiteful American wife steals the daughter, Violet must decide whether it is worth reconnecting with her own mother in order to find her daughter again.

Tan, the daughter of Chinese immigrants, modeled Violet in some ways after her own grandmother, who was widowed by age 30 and became the concubine of a wealthy man who eventually had seven wives. Whether she joined this household by choice or force is a matter of debate within the family. What is known is that she committed suicide. A haunting photo of her grandmother dressed in the clothing worn by courtesans got Tan wondering how much she really knew about her. Whether her grandmother was actually a courtesan is a fact lost to time, but Tan discovered other surprising things about her during her research.

The courtesans of Shanghai were competitive businesswomen who “wheedled and extracted,” Tan says. “They were competitive and jealous.”

“I found out during the writing that she was not who people said she was,” Tan says. “People had always said she was quiet, traditional, old-fashioned, she stayed home and listened to her husband.” Yet when Tan interviewed an older relative, who had lived with Tan’s grandmother as a toddler, the relative painted a much different picture of her grandmother as the favorite wife who had a fiery streak.

“She said she was very hot-tempered, and if you did not listen to her, you would regret it,” Tan says. “That gave me a sense that she had something more interesting that had tested her more. I think my grandmother had to make her circumstances as best she could.”

Tan began writing fiction when she was in her 30s and burst onto the literary scene in 1989 with the publication of The Joy Luck Club, which sold more than 2 million copies and was adapted into a popular film. In the years since, she has extended her critical and commercial success with several novels, including The Kitchen God’s Wife, The Bonesetter’s Daughter and Saving Fish from Drowning.

As with so many of Tan’s works, her latest book dives deep into the conflicted relationship of a mother and daughter and explores the questions of how much of life is shaped by circumstance and how much by what is passed down through generations.

“It’s such a rich ground for me,” says Tan, who had a complicated but close relationship with her own mother. “When you think of identity, much of that stems from parental influences—that huge, constant guide for so many years of your life.”

This book is a major departure for Tan in one way: It includes explicit sex scenes and graphic dialogue.

“I’ve always steered away from writing about sex,” she says. “Too many people already think I’m writing about my life. I had thoughts while I was writing about sadism—oh, they’re going to think this is based upon my 20 years of experience with beating. But I didn’t really care. What I was worried about was writing corny sex scenes. I didn’t trust myself that I wouldn’t hold back or go overboard.”

She talked to several researchers who study the world of courtesans, and read a famous Chinese pornographic novel as well as the journal of a young Chinese man who regularly visited flower houses. While some of the details in the novel are from that research (an aphrodisiac called “Gates Wide Open,” for example, was one of Tan’s favorites), Tan says she had a great time coming up with other names for aphrodisiacs, genitalia and sexual positions. She also loved imagining the relationships among the courtesans.

“It was fun writing those scenes,” she says. “I felt like I was there. These characters were not retiring flowers. They were businesswomen. They wheedled and extracted. They were competitive and jealous.

“I thought the conversations with my editor [Dan Halpern] would be very awkward, but they turned out to be fun conversations,” Tan says. “At one point, he wrote ‘Lawrence-ian!’ next to one scene. I didn’t know whether he meant that was good or bad or too repressed or what. I sent him a long email and at the end of the email, I said ‘Never mind. I’m taking it out.’ ”

Tan maintains the pace and allure of the story as Violet endures harrowing years of abuse and uncertainty, eventually reconnecting not only with her mother but with the powerful businessman who took her virginity when she was a teenage courtesan.

“Her thing was staying alive,” Tan says. “She thought of [her daughter] Flora all the time. It occurs to her what she has to do is find her mother and forgive her. Today, we can expend money, resources, call the FBI, whatever it takes, to find our kid. In that time, they didn’t have that ability. We impose our American sensibility on the situation.”

Tan may have drawn on her family’s history for many elements of the story, but her own marriage is a far cry from Violet’s tumultuous love life. She has been married to her husband, Lou, since 1974.

“We like to joke that it’s separate closets and separate bathrooms,” she says about the secret to their longevity. “We both share similar politics and respect for people. We have similar generosity. We allow a lot of individuality, but also we share a lot of things.”

At the time of our conversation, Lou was on a bike tour of French wineries, a trip that Tan chose to skip—“I don’t want to get drunk in the afternoon on vacation”—but he will return in time for her upcoming 25-city book tour.

“It’s very hard for me to travel alone these days,” says Tan, 61, who has experienced occasional seizures since being diagnosed with Lyme disease in 2003. “They’re not serious but they leave me very confused. It’s better if I have someone with me. He’s really good and supportive. He fed me three times a day when I was on deadline with this book.”

With that, Tan bids farewell and gets back to working on her closet.

“The exciting life of an author,” she says wryly.

Amy Tan does not have a fabulous closet befitting a world-famous author. She is in the midst of cleaning it when BookPage calls to talk about her lush new novel, The Valley of Amazement.

“It’s a terrible closet,” Tan says with a laugh from her home…

FictionHistorical Fiction

Sue Monk Kidd

Interview by Amy Scribner

It took Sue Monk Kidd four years to write her sweeping new novel, The Invention of Wings. When the book was finally finished, the last thing she wanted to think about was starting a new project, so she and her husband took a getaway river cruise from Berlin to Prague.

“My husband’s from Mississippi, so [river cruising] is his favorite thing to do,” Kidd says by phone in her slow Southern drawl. “But it’s very hard to turn off the writer brain. I tell myself I’m not looking for an idea. Please, Sue, no ideas.”

But while she was traveling in Europe, she toured a concentration camp. “It was an overwhelmingly emotional experience for me,” she recalls. “I felt a couple of writer antennae go up, and I thought, oh no! Tap those down. It’s important to have fallow time.”

Kidd certainly deserves downtime after finishing her latest novel, which is based on a pair of real-life abolitionist sisters who lived in 19th-century Charleston. Writing about real people—albeit in fiction—was a demanding task.

“It’s certainly a challenge to write from a place where history and imagination intersect, as I found out,” Kidd says. “It became part of my challenge: I wanted to do them justice and have their history all there. At the same time, I’m a novelist. I’m not a historian, I’m not a biographer. I had to serve the story first.”

An exquisitely told tale of loss and triumph, The Invention of Wings is based on the real lives of Sarah and Angelina (Nina) Grimké, unconventional women who broke from their high-society family to fight against slavery and for women’s rights. Kidd first learned about these radical but largely forgotten sisters at an exhibit at the Brooklyn Museum.

“It’s certainly a challenge to write from a place where history and imagination intersect, as I found out.”

Sarah is plain but smart, and she realizes from a young age that her dream of becoming a lawyer like her father is impossible; society judged her success simply on whether she could avoid spinsterhood. Angelina is beautiful and could have her choice of Charleston bachelors, but like her older sister, she has no interest in traditional roles.

When Sarah turns 11, her mother gives her a 10-year-old slave as a gift. Even at that age, Sarah knows she shouldn’t own Hetty, or “Handful” as everyone in the house calls her. Handful’s mother makes Sarah secretly promise that she’ll free Handful as soon as she can. In many ways, Sarah spends the rest of her life trying to keep that promise: Sarah and Handful become friends, and Sarah breaks the law by teaching her to read and write. The book follows their complicated friendship over more than three decades, as well as the attempts by all three women to make their way in a world that has already defined their path.

While historical records mention that Sarah Grimké had a slave, there is not much more known about her. This is where Kidd let her imagination go.

“Historical accuracy mattered a great deal to me,” she says. “I used it as scaffolding. I followed the truth as close as I possibly could, but I also invented a lot to bring them alive on the page. I went to their house [in Charleston]. I walked up and down the streets I thought they’d have walked. When I saw the stairway leading up to the upper floors, I could picture Sarah walking down. I could picture Handful sitting on one of the steps.”

In the end, it was easier for Kidd to fully realize Handful on the page. “Handful came alive much more easily than Sarah did,” she says. “That was a surprise to me. I tried to write her in third person, but it just didn’t work—she wanted to talk! She didn’t come with that heavy historical script that I had to be faithful to with Sarah and Nina. I could just let go.”

Kidd, who was raised in Georgia and remembers seeing the Ku Klux Klan in her hometown, says she relied on “voices from my childhood” to write from Handful’s viewpoint.

“I think you have to love your characters, and I just loved her,” Kidd says. “She started talking and talking and talking. I could not keep up with her. There was this unleashing of a character’s voice. I came of age in the ’60s—one of those baby boomers. I remember so much of that whole Civil Rights time—it was the background I lived in. It made a mark on me. Their voices stayed with me—the musicality and some of their expressions.”

After growing up in the pre-feminist South, Kidd was drawn to explorations of a woman’s place in society. This theme runs through much of her work, including her first novel, The Secret Life of Bees (2002), and its follow-up, The Mermaid Chair (2005). Kidd realized tremendous success with both: Millions of copies of her novels are in print in nearly 40 languages. In some ways, she still sounds amazed by that success.

“It’s been such a surprising part of my life,” she says. “The Secret Life of Bees—I don’t think I’ve ever been more floored by anything. It took a while to wrap my head around it. It seemed like the success belonged to someone else. Did I really deserve all that? But mostly, to be honest, it’s been pure gratitude that someone wants to read my work and that you’re able to get your stories into the world.

“I felt some pressure after The Secret Life of Bees to produce something beyond myself. But I’d do it again, believe me! It’s been a wonderful and wondrous experience, but it’s not a pure experience. It has its nuances.”

Kidd isn’t the only writer in her family. Her daughter, Ann Kidd Taylor, also caught the writing bug.

“I sort of knew when she was young that she was a writer—she had all the little signs,” Kidd says with a hint of pride in her voice. “She reminded me of myself. She’d graduated from college, and I was turning 50. She was really searching for what she was going to do with her life, and the truth was, I was, too. I was trying to find the courage to write fiction. I told her later, ‘I knew you were a writer! But I didn’t want to step in there and influence that.’ She had to come to that herself.”

During their search, mother and daughter traveled together to ancient sites in Greece and France. They chronicled their explorations in Traveling with Pomegranates: A Mother-Daughter Story (2009), which Kidd counts as one of her favorite writing experiences.

After becoming empty nesters, Kidd and her husband moved from Charleston to the Florida coast, downsizing from two homes to one.

“You get to a certain place in life and want to simplify,” she says. “We finally took Thoreau’s advice and simplified.”

Judging by the breathtaking photos she regularly Tweets of the ocean view from her home, it’s a wonder she ever gets any work done.

“It’s kind of muse-like; it’s beautiful,” she says. “Beauty is good for the soul. I open the study door, and the rhythm of the waves in the room is soothing. But I get so immersed that I disappear in my work.”

A self-proclaimed introvert, Kidd is preparing to emerge from her cocoon to promote The Invention of Wings. A planned two-month tour will include stops at libraries and bookstores in 19 states., with a Canadian tour also on the horizon.

“I love my solitude, and I love my anonymity,” she says. “But it’s great meeting my readers. I need that. I retreated into the world of the 19th century for four years. I told my friend I felt like I was living in a cave in Afghanistan! I’m eager to start a conversation with the reader.”

It took Sue Monk Kidd four years to write her sweeping new novel, The Invention of Wings. When the book was finally finished, the last thing she wanted to think about was starting a new project, so she and her husband took a getaway river…

FictionHistorical Fiction

Nancy Horan

Interview by Amy Scribner

First the woman behind Frank Lloyd Wright and now Robert Louis Stevenson’s wife—author Nancy Horan has carved a niche for herself as a novelist who gives voice to strong, influential yet largely forgotten women.

“Women have been underrepresented in the history books,” Horan says by phone from her home on an island near Seattle. “I’ve chosen to write about two women who were very strong in their own right.”

Horan’s 2007 debut novel, Loving Frank, focused on the life of Mamah Borthwick Cheney, Wright’s partner in a scandalous affair. The book struck a chord with readers and remained on the New York Times bestseller list for more than a year. 

Fanny was fiercely protective of her often-ill husband, Scottish writer Robert Louis Stevenson.

Her new novel, Under the Wide and Starry Sky, is a dazzling love story that unspools across years and continents. Horan deftly brings to life a woman shamefully overlooked by history, and celebrates her contributions to the man whom history remembered. 

Fanny van de Grift Osbourne was a smart, pretty, strong-willed American artist who took her three children from San Francisco to Europe to get away from her unfaithful husband. She met and fell in love with Stevenson, a sickly aspiring writer 10 years her junior, at a French inn. But the death of one of her children ultimately led her to return to America and an attempted reconciliation with her husband.

Stevenson followed, sailing across the Atlantic and then taking a train to California to find her, a trip that nearly killed him. Horan heard about this dramatic expedition when she visited Monterey, California, where he lived for some time. 

“I learned that Stevenson had taken this incredible journey across the ocean and across America seeking this woman he had met: an American woman nearly 10 years his senior,” she says. Horan was further intrigued when she read Stevenson’s memoirs of the trip, including The Amateur Emigrant and Across the Plains. Sure, he was the world-famous author, but it was Fanny who grabbed Horan’s attention.

“He struck me as really interesting, but when I read about Fanny, I thought, whoa,” Horan recalls. “Stevenson took on a strong character. There was a disparity in age. There was a disparity in class. There was a disparity in education. I just knew they were going to be good company for the ride, and it was a five-year ride. They had to be worthy of the companionship.”

After reuniting in California, and marrying in 1880, the pair lived in different places with Fanny’s young son. They both devoted themselves to writing, with Fanny often nursing Stevenson (whom she called Louis) through tuberculosis-like illnesses. After Fanny’s daughter moved to Honolulu, the pair set sail for the South Pacific. Fanny was seasick from the moment they set foot on a ship. But the sea air was almost magical for Stevenson, who felt in the best health of his life as they island-hopped in the tropics, finally settling in Samoa. 

“Fanny understood that when he was at sea, he was well,” Horan says. “And she was seasick every single day. There’s someone who was tough. She had rats run on her face on one of the ships!”

Fanny and Louis settled in, building a luxurious home among the natives. Over time, Fanny’s children and Louis’ mother joined them. 

The couple was adventurous, to be sure, but it still proved difficult to write about Stevenson.

“The challenge was he was a sickly man and he was bed-bound,” Horan says. “How do you write about a writer who was moving a pen across paper and was stuck in bed? Luckily, he left rich documents of his feelings in his letters.”

Fanny, it turned out, was a much more complicated—and therefore easier—subject. Fiercely protective of her often-ill husband, she watched as his literary star rose while she was labeled difficult and mercurial. She continued writing, but didn’t achieve the success of her husband, who became a worldwide celebrity. His closest friends from Scotland viewed her with suspicion and in some cases contempt, calling her an American from “the land of bilge and spew.”

“Fanny was not as introspective as Stevenson. She was active,” Horan says. “Here’s a woman who saved his life repeatedly. She was a woman who had aspirations before she ever met him. She put aside her own aspirations. She earned a bad reputation because she kept his friends away because they weren’t healthy. She probably was overprotective.” 

An English major, Horan had read the Stevenson works listed on most syllabi—Treasure Island and The Strange Case of Dr Jekyll and Mr Hyde—but hadn’t delved deeper until she began her research.

“I hadn’t gone further than that,” she says. “I didn’t think much about him at all. What I learned is he was a literary athlete. He wrote Jekyll and Hyde in three days. He was extraordinary. So I tried to read everything I could. I found some things were more accessible than others.”

Horan was especially drawn to his short stories, and the novel Kidnapped and its sequel, David Balfour. 

“His essays are fabulous,” she says. “I don’t think people think of him as an essayist, and we don’t realize that he’s quoted a lot. I think about Mandela, who was imprisoned and had a lot of time to think, and Stevenson had some of the same situation. Even as a child, he was not a normal kid. He couldn’t go out and play. He was pale and long and stringy and wore his hair long to keep drafts off his neck.”

Bringing these long-gone people to life meant piles of research. But rather than being daunted, Horan embraced sifting through information.

“I deal with a whole scaffolding of facts,” she says. “I feel, in a way, liberated by them. If I find them interesting, someone else will, too. Truths and themes just bubble up in the space between the facts.”

A central theme in Horan’s novel is identity and how it impacts choices. Stevenson identified strongly as a Scotsman and a writer, and his life was shaped by his recurring illness. Fanny, who was in many ways a woman light-years ahead of her time, was more multi-faceted. 

“I loved exploring Fanny’s strong identity as a woman, a mother, an artist, a single mother and an American,” Horan says. “That’s the big payoff when you’re writing fiction: those themes that emerge.”

Not to say that every day as a writer is golden for Horan.

“There are times when it’s very frustrating,” she admits. “You have days when you toss what you write, and it’s no good, and you’re going down the wrong alley.”

But she’s not in total solitude while spending years shaping a book.

“I have a very funny husband who takes the journey with me,” Horan says. “It’s a conversation. And I think I need a sounding board while I’m working my way through.”

Her husband, a photojournalist and “outdoors fanatic,” convinced her to move to the Pacific Northwest after 24 years in the Chicago suburb of Oak Park.

“When the kids went off to college, we decided to come out here,” she says. “He’s a mountain climber; he likes to go ice camping. I don’t, but I can appreciate the beauty.”

Appropriately enough, Horan took her book’s title, Under the Wide and Starry Sky, from the opening line of one of Stevenson’s best-known poems, “Requiem.” The poem, which was later engraved on Stevenson’s gravestone, concludes: Here he lies where he longed to be, / Home is the sailor, home from the sea / And the hunter home from the hill.

First the woman behind Frank Lloyd Wright and now Robert Louis Stevenson’s wife—author Nancy Horan has carved a niche for herself as a novelist who gives voice to strong, influential yet largely forgotten women.

“Women have been underrepresented in the history books,” Horan says by phone from her home on an island near Seattle. “I’ve chosen to write about two women who were very strong in their own right.”</

Fiction

Gabrielle Zevin

Interview by Amy Scribner

Gabrielle Zevin may be one of the few authors alive who thanks her lucky stars she hasn’t had J.K. Rowling’s level of success. If she had, she never would have written The Storied Life of A.J. Fikry, the lovely, irresistible story of a down-on-his-luck bookseller.

“I never would have gotten to know the publishing business the way I did,” Zevin says in an interview with BookPage from her Los Angeles home. “I never would have gotten to drive around the Midwest during a book tour with a sales rep in an old Toyota.”

It was just that kind of experience that shaped Zevin’s latest novel, which dives deep into the relationship between a publishing house and the booksellers who peddle its wares. A.J. Fikry owns Island Books, a withering bookstore in an East Coast vacation town. His wife has died; someone steals his retirement plan (a rare volume of Edgar Allan Poe’s poetry); and his store’s sales are plummeting. Amelia is the quirky sales rep for Knightley Press who visits A.J. every season to convince him that her company’s titles are worth stocking on his shelves.

It is not an easy task.

“How about I tell you what I don’t like?” he sneers at Amelia during their first meeting. “I do not like postmodernism, postapocalyptic settings, postmortem narrators, or magic realism. I rarely respond to supposedly clever formal devices, multiple fonts, pictures where they shouldn’t be—basically gimmicks of any kind. I find literary fiction about the Holocaust or any other major world tragedy to be distasteful.”

Oh, and he also despises genre mash-ups, children’s books featuring orphans, ghostwritten books about reality stars, chick lit and anything featuring vampires.

Zevin’s novel about a prickly bookstore owner who finds love is a paean to the power of books.

A.J. and Amelia slowly—very slowly—build a relationship that goes beyond books. (“I thought there was something romantic about the idea that she only came to him once a season,” Zevin says.)

In the meantime, a toddler shows up in A.J.’s bookstore with a note from her mother, who cannot take care of her but wants her to grow up a reader. Now A.J. has to decide whether he will turn the young girl over to the authorities or take her in himself.

Needless to say, A.J. has his hands full. After years of treading water in his underperforming store, he has to rise to the occasion. He does so, with plenty of false starts and help from Amelia and his gang of island friends.

Real-life booksellers around the country have been singing the novel’s praises, which is as big a compliment as Zevin could have asked for.

“It was a daunting proposition, writing about booksellers,” Zevin admits. “I hoped in my heart that they would think of A.J. as a colleague, that he could plausibly have a store out there. He’s a prickly guy who could be doing so much more. I thought I knew where he fit in the ecosystem of booksellers.”

“I like to write books about things that happen to me, and probably the most traumatic thing that has happened to me was publishing my first book.”

Daunting or not, Zevin had been toying with the idea of writing a book set in the publishing world for several years—in fact, since publishing her debut novel, Margarettown, in 2006.

“I like to write books about things that happen to me, and probably the most traumatic thing that has happened to me was publishing my first book,” Zevin says cheerfully. “I was 27—sold my manuscript at 26. I had movie-version expectations of cutting to the scene where you’re walking down Madison Avenue and there’s a bookstore and there’s your book, and only your book, in the window.”

Although the reality was somewhat less Carrie Bradshaw, Zevin still got to buy a dress from Filene’s and have a book launch party with wine and cheese. Even that is a somewhat quaint affair in the rapidly evolving publishing world, Zevin says.

“The future of books is in many ways being decided right now,” she says. “Even before this book, I was passionate about the idea that we can’t not think about how books get to readers anymore. When my first book came out, YouTube had just been founded. Forget about Facebook and Twitter—I didn’t even have a blog. None of those things factored in. I was and am publishing in a time of enormous change.”

Margarettown got excellent reviews, but didn’t exactly burn up the charts. That came with her next book, the 2007 young adult novel Elsewhere.

“I’ve had books that have done pretty well, and books that’ve done less well,” Zevin says. “You have to give everything you can to the book and not worry too much about what happens when it’s out in the world.”

Although she has never worked in a bookstore, Zevin has spent her fair share of time in them. She spent 13 years after college living in Manhattan and frequenting her neighborhood bookshop before moving to Los Angeles. (“I’d never been particularly drawn to L.A., but the idea of having a second bedroom and a washer and dryer was really sexy to me,” she says.)

Zevin can still recall the first time she saw her debut book, in the Barnes & Noble at L.A. mega-mall The Grove.

“I was like, oh god, you gotta go three escalators up to get to my book,” she laughs. “The first floor was entirely filled with music CDs. The second floor was children’s books, gifts, maybe a discount section. I can remember with specificity the other titles that came out the same month as mine. I remember thinking, man, that’s a really big stack of Prep by Curtis Sittenfeld and a really little stack of Margarettown.”

No doubt A.J. Fikry would have some strong opinions about such a behemoth store. And that crystal-clear view of the world is what makes him—and this book—so wholly appealing. Zevin starts each chapter with a thought-provoking blurb about a book A.J. is recommending to his young daughter. These blurbs serve as a window into both their evolving relationship and his deep love of books. It was an idea Zevin got from her hours spent in bookstores reading the recommendations that employees post on shelves.

“Anybody who is a lifelong reader forms their own little mini-canon—their own collected works—and I’ve always really liked those shelf-talkers in stores,” she says. “It’s so analog in a digital world. It’s like a greeting card to the customer—this beautiful, personal thing.”

The Storied Life of A.J. Fikry has a little bit of mystery and a little bit of romance, but is at its core a love story: love of books, love of family, love of community. It is as enchanting a book as you will read this year.

Gabrielle Zevin may be one of the few authors alive who thanks her lucky stars she hasn’t had J.K. Rowling’s level of success. If she had, she never would have written The Storied Life of A.J. Fikry, the lovely, irresistible story of a down-on-his-luck bookseller.

NonfictionMemoir

Frances Mayes

Interview by Amy Scribner

In a frank and richly evocative memoir, the author of Under the Tuscan Sun recalls growing up in the Deep South.

Why did you feel now was the right time to write a memoir of your coming-of-age?
Moving from California (where I lived and worked for decades) back to the South reconnected me on many levels with the land I came from originally. Some of the connections were simple and primitive—the fecund and flowery smells, the cheerful sounds of the tree frogs, the grating drama of cicadas, the grand sunsets and the intense humidity. Maybe the sensory world where you first breathed and walked never leaves you. Feeling so at home again naturally brought up early memories. And they seemed to want to come to the light.

You write in depth about your parents’ drinking and how it painted your childhood, saying theirs was a marriage of “Southern Comfort, recriminations, and if onlys.” Was it hard to reveal this part of your life to readers?
Shame is a powerful emotion and a silencing one. I don’t feel shame but can see why I might. They were who they were. They operated under some pretty intense cultural pressures, and they burned out so early that they never had a chance to emerge into larger versions of themselves. I’m always sad for that. As parents, they were not ideal, but they did have wonderful qualities as well—gusto, humor, passion, generosity.

There are so many exquisite details in the book: the shape of your daddy’s fingernails, the hospital room where you visited your grandmother. Did you keep detailed journals as a kid, or do you have an incredible memory of certain moments?
My little red, locked diary is still on my desk. I kept notebooks always, and even a reading log. These stacks of journals are disappointing because they record events, not observations or feelings. But it’s odd—as I read them, the details come rushing back. The plain words unlock memory, and I can again feel the images and nuances.

You paint an endearing portrait of Willie Bell, who worked as a maid for your parents throughout your childhood. How influential a figure was she in your life?
As I wrote, it was not a Mammy sort of thing. She quietly offered me a perspective on the chaotic life within our house. So often she said, “When are you going to learn? Just don’t talk back.” I saw only in later years that she was revealing her own survival tactics as well as trying to keep me from getting switched! 

At one point, you write that you might have lived forever in Fitzgerald, Georgia. What do you think kept that from happening?
My mother! She wanted for me what she never achieved—a big life. An unconfined life. Even though I battled her about my local boyfriends she feared I would marry, her constant get-out-of-Dodge stance seeped in. By high school, I was planning my escape to the North, the forbidden land, the dreaded land. I only made it as far as Virginia at first!

As a child, you didn’t know the word racism. Looking back now, how racist was the time and place in which you grew up?
Oh, Lord. Give me a volume to write! It is very hard now to imagine the racism. And not only in the South. Beneath the violence and unfairness and craziness, I always sense that a deeper vein of connection binds blacks and whites in the South than ever has been explained.

How have you settled into life in North Carolina?
Love it! My husband, Ed, and I have had the great good luck to fall in with a group of writers, artists, cooks, readers, gardeners. We are having a fine time down here. We have a big creaky old house with a porch, many remodeling projects, and two gentlemen cats. I am loving roving around the South, as I did in my youth.

ALSO IN BOOKPAGE: Read our review of this book.

In a frank and richly evocative memoir, the author of Under the Tuscan Sun recalls growing up in the Deep South.

Why did you feel now was the right time to write a memoir of your coming-of-age?

Moving from California (where I lived and worked for decades) back to the South reconnected me on many levels with the land I came from originally. Some of the connections were simple and primitive—the fecund and flowery smells, the cheerful sounds of the tree frogs, the grating drama of cicadas, the grand sunsets and the intense humidity.

FictionDebut Fiction

Ruth Reichl

Interview by Amy Scribner

It’s hard to say whether Ruth Reichl is best known for her scrumptiously honest memoirs (Tender at the Bone, Comfort Me with Apples, Garlic and Sapphires) or her long stints as restaurant reviewer for the New York Times and editor of Gourmet magazine.

But one thing’s for sure: Reichl’s first novel—which comes after a career focused on nonfiction—is well worth the wait. Delicious! tells the story of Billie Breslin, a young woman who moves to New York to pursue a career in food writing and escape her sad life in California. She lands a gig assisting the famous editor of Delicious!, a venerable food magazine on the brink of closing in the midst of the recession. Billie dives into the world of Manhattan cuisine, becoming fast friends with the magazine’s flamboyant travel writer, Sammy, who persuades her to lose the thick glasses and frumpy clothes she’s hidden behind for years.

Reichl weaves real-life chef James Beard into the story of a young assistant at a failing food magazine.

When Billie discovers a treasure trove of World War II correspondence between James Beard and a young girl named Lulu, she knows she has found something special. But the rest of the letters have been elaborately hidden by a long-forgotten Delicious! staff librarian, and when the magazine is abruptly shuttered, Billie and Sammy race to crack the code to find them before the Delicious! building is sold.

One doesn’t reach the career heights Reichl has without taking chances, but the idea of writing a novel daunted her for many years.

“I’m truly a slave to fiction,” Reichl says in an early spring interview from her home in snowy upstate New York. “I can’t imagine being alive and not having books to read. It’s always been my greatest joy—diving into someone else’s world. But I was afraid that I couldn’t do it. I always said if I didn’t have a day job, I could do it. Then all of a sudden, I didn’t have a day job.”

Reichl is referring, of course, to the closure of Gourmet in 2009 due to declining ad revenue, after she’d been at the helm for 10 years. It was, she said, the best job she’s ever had, one that she plans to write about in a future memoir.

“It was sort of everything that I could have imagined,” she says. “I was surrounded by people who cared passionately about the subject. It was a time in American life where other people were starting to care about food as much as I did. We just said, let’s push the envelope as much as we can.”

With the magazine closed, Reichl branched out to other projects. She is a judge on Bravo’s “Top Chef Masters,” and has hosted food programming on PBS. 

She also realized that the time had come to make good on her pledge to write fiction.

“To me, nonfiction is kind of getting in the shower and deciding how you’re going to go that day,” Reichl says. “After 40-something years, it’s natural to me. Fiction is way harder. It involves a lot of waiting.”

Reichl found a cookbook from the 1940s filled with rationing recipes (“truly awful”) and directions for victory gardens. World War II must have been in her subconscious, because shortly afterward, she got her inspiration.

“It was really a gift,” she recalls. “I walked into a library, and I had a fully formed image of finding letters from a little girl to James Beard during World War II. I sat down and wrote them all. Lulu was a gift who came to me. The rest of the book formed around her.”

"When I thought about what this book was, it was very much about how food connects us across time and space. . . . In some ways, this book is a thank you to James Beard for all he did for Marion Cunningham.”

Reichl actually knew Beard, the cook and author who is widely credited with growing America’s love of cuisine. She was also a close friend of Marion Cunningham, the food writer who served as Beard’s longtime assistant.

“When I thought about what this book was, it was very much about how food connects us across time and space,” Reichl says. “He just seemed like the obvious person. He was extremely generous to his readers, and he is someone I think who might very well have become entranced with a Lulu. In some ways, this book is a thank you to James Beard for all he did for Marion Cunningham.”

It could be argued that the book is also a love letter to New York City. One of the best parts of Delicious! is its very specific, lovingly rendered depiction of Manhattan, from Billie’s office in a gorgeous Federal-style mansion to a hip boutique under the High Line to a fantastic cheese shop tucked into a city block. Readers can practically hear the taxi horns.

“I am a New Yorker to my core,” Reichl declares. “I grew up in Greenwich Village. One of the great joys of my life is wandering New York City—just getting on the subway and getting off somewhere and wandering.”

Since the novel is about a food writer at a famous New York magazine that is suddenly shut down, Reichl understands if readers assume the story is autobiographical. But it most emphatically is not, she says. Billie’s path may mirror Reichl’s in some ways, but that is where the similarity ends, Reichl insists.

“My biggest problem was in focusing so hard on making Billie not like me, I wasn’t letting her be herself,” Reichl says. “I had to get out of my own way. I had to get used to sitting quietly and just letting Billie be herself.”

Billie starts her time in New York as a mousy assistant, uncertain and still smarting from a tragedy she is unwilling to come to grips with. But she comes into her own as the book unfolds, taking on writing assignments, making friends, exploring the city and even finding romance. She is a wholly likable character, and the supporting players at the magazine and in Billie’s neighborhood are a hoot. The letters from Lulu are sweet and evocative (although Billie and Sammy’s search for them drags on a bit too long), and the mouthwatering food descriptions throughout the book are vintage Reichl (she even makes roasted pig’s ears sound appetizing).

Delicious! is like a family-style meal around a big table: fun, loud, at times messy and, ultimately, completely satisfying.

 

This article was originally published in the May 2014 issue of BookPage. Download the entire issue for the Kindle or Nook.

It’s hard to say whether Ruth Reichl is best known for her scrumptiously honest memoirs (Tender at the Bone, Comfort Me with Apples, Garlic and Sapphires) or her long stints as restaurant reviewer for the New York Times and editor of Gourmet magazine.

FictionLiterary Fiction

Kaui Hart Hemmings

Interview by Amy Scribner

Hawaiian author Kaui Hart Hemmings returns with The Possibilities, the story of Sarah St. John, a woman struggling to return to life after the death of her adult son in an avalanche. We asked her a few questions about the new book and what she’s working on next.

Though The Possibilities is a book about grief, it also deals with the way that parents and children’s relationships change as they reach adulthood. What interested you in this topic?
It’s a process that involves a lot of loss and a lot of gain, a lot of nostalgia, hope, mystery, and miscalculations. You can know your family so well, but only in terms of that particular relationship. You don’t know them as friends or colleagues. I’ll always be interested in this topic. I don’t think I’ll ever be writing about wars or someone in an office coming to terms with his or her identity. I like small relationships—minor wars.

"I don’t think I’ll ever be writing about wars or someone in an office coming to terms with his or her identity. I like small relationships—minor wars."

What is the significance of the title?
The novel explores freedom and choice, and I want to show that there are so many variations, opportunities and possibilities for all choices and directions. There are so many ways our lives can go—it’s exhilarating and scary.

You couldn’t have chosen a more different setting for your second book—what inspired you to set this novel in Colorado?
I went to Colorado College then moved to Breckenridge after graduation. It’s a place I love and try to return to as much as possible.

How much pressure did you feel writing a follow-up to a book as successful as The Descendants?
None at all. The Descendants as a novel, despite great reviews, didn’t really get read until the film was made.  I don’t even think of it as a great success. It’s just a book, and I’ve written another book, and I’m just going to keep writing what I’m interested in and hopefully, it will get read. There’s my own pressure, but I’m not a big enough writer to feel anyone’s expectations. I’m still new at this.

Like The Descendants, The Possibilities has been optioned for film, to be directed by Jason Reitman (Labor Day). Do you have a dream cast? How do you feel about seeing your work on the big screen?
I have ideas about who would be great in the roles of these characters, but you can’t really cast things in your mind—you need to see auditions. Who would have thought Matthew Lillard could be George Clooney’s rival? I didn’t—until I saw his taped audition.  I loved seeing my work, and Alexander Payne’s work, on screen. What’s not to love? It’s another layer, dimension—a second act.  It keeps your book alive, and it’s so much fun. 

The relationship between Sarah and Billy (Cully’s dad) is so realistic and touching. Where did that come from?
Maybe it’s something I wish I had, or do have with my own parents. It’s a great privilege to feel annoyance, frustration, love and joy with your loved ones. I hug my family and yell at them all the time.

Losing a child is certainly a parent’s worst nightmare. As a parent yourself, did you find the scenes that describe Sarah’s grief difficult to write?
It’s difficult because you never know if you’re getting it right, but then I think to myself: there is no “right.” Your character is going to grieve and express this grief the only way she can. And so I just stay in character and write.

What are you reading right now?
I’m reading The Goldfinch by Donna Tartt. She writes in a way I never could.  I’m rather spare.

What’s next for you?
A YA book called Juniors, to be published Fall 2015, I think.

 

RELATED IN BOOKPAGE: Read our review of The Possibilities.

Hawaiian author Kaui Hart Hemmings returns with The Possibilities, the story of Sarah St. John, a woman struggling to return to life after the death of her adult son in an avalanche. We asked her a few questions about the new book and what she’s working on next.

FictionPopular Fiction

Garth Stein

Interview by Amy Scribner

"Just a minute," Garth Stein says when he answers the phone at his Seattle home. "The kids are kicking soccer balls at me—I've got to get out of the line of fire."

It’s understandable that his three boys—ages 17, 15 and 7—are craving their dad’s attention. With an international phenomenon already under his belt (2008’s The Art of Racing in the Rain, which has sold 4 million copies) and a new book about to hit shelves, Stein is frequently on the road these days. He has just returned from a trip to West Virginia, where he did a reading at the famously elegant Greenbrier.

“It’s creepy!” he declares of the historic hotel in the Allegheny Mountains. “It’s totally haunted.”

Funny, coming from the author of a stunning new book in which a spooky house figures prominently. A Sudden Light is based on a play Stein wrote, Brother Jones, which was produced in 2005.

When 14-year-old Trevor Riddell travels with his father, Jones, to the family’s legendary home overlooking Puget Sound, he expects a rundown shack based on Jones’ description. Instead, he finds that Riddell House is a hulking mansion made almost entirely of logs. It’s a fitting home for the Riddell family, which made its fortune clear-cutting forests to fuel the nation’s insatiable need for timber at the turn of the century.

But the guilt stemming from their opportunistic way of life flows through generations. Many of Trevor’s ancestors met untimely and tragic ends that some in the family feel are reparation.

Jones left the family home abruptly when he was a teenager, not to return until the summer of 1990, when he and Trevor go back to convince Jones’ father, Samuel, to sell the property. Joining them in this endeavor is Serena, Jones’ beautiful younger sister, who has been caring for Samuel all these years as the house rots around them. Their reasons for wanting to sell are different—Jones needs the cash to get out of debt and save his faltering marriage, Serena needs freedom—but the two siblings set about convincing their aging but stubborn father to sell the land to a developer.

Meanwhile, a bored and lonely Trevor begins wandering through the vast house, uncovering artifacts of another era and meeting some interesting beings along the way. The longer Trevor and Jones stay at Riddell House, the more Trevor learns about the family’s past and yearns to make it right by letting the property return to nature. He and his dad clash, their anger escalating until it culminates in a heartbreaking but inevitable outcome.

“What do you do when you’re 14 years old?” Stein asks, speaking with the wisdom of a father of three boys. “You fight with your father. They challenge you—their little antler buds come out, and everything is a fight. Trevor sees for the first time that his father hasn’t even figured himself out yet.”

It isn’t lost on Stein that the book is likely shaped by his experiences with his own father.

“My father died five years ago,” he says. “I’d been working on the book, was early on in the formative moments of the book, and my father ups and dies. I don’t do psycho-therapy, but I’m sure if I did, my therapist would have something to say about that.”

A Sudden Light is the best of many genres: a ghost story, a love story, historical fiction. What makes it a truly killer read is the way Stein brings the house to life, almost literally: its rickety basement staircases groaning; its patriarch staring down from an eight-foot-tall portrait; “a world that smelled of decay, heavy with moist, thick air, which floated in the rooms like an invisible fog.”

“I wanted the house to be an actual character that interacts with other characters,” Stein says. “That’s really where it all started.”

“I wanted the house to be an actual character that interacts with other characters. That’s really where it all started.”

Stein found inspiration in an old book that depicted a University of Washington forestry building built of some of the finest old-growth trees. He couldn’t shake the notion of someone feeling powerful enough to fell trees that had been alive for centuries

“They went out and found trees that were perfect specimens, and cut them down. It was stunning,” Stein recalls. “I thought, ‘That’s my house.’ ”

After 18 years in New York, Stein moved his young family to his hometown of Seattle several years ago to secure naturopathic care for one of his sons. (“I enjoyed it,” he says of New York. “I just decided, I’m a writer now, and I didn’t need to be there anymore.”)

He has become fully immersed in the rainy city’s literary scene, which he calls “a very fertile place.” He serves on the board of Seattle-7Writers, a group dedicated to promoting local literacy efforts through grants and events. (Its membership reads like a who’s who of Pacific Northwest authors: Tara Conklin, Erik Larson, Jim Lynch and Rebecca Wells, to name a few.)

A Sudden Light is a bold, poignant book about wealth, family ties and the power—and -fallacy—of memory. The story is told by adult Trevor recalling the trip to Riddell House as a 14-year-old. It’s a middle-aged man reflecting on himself as a teen and his tenuous relationship with his father from the distance of many years, and it adds a rich layer of mysteriousness and pathos to the story.

“When we read a book, we all read it differently,” Stein says. “We all view it through our own experiences. I like the unreliability of narrators. I want readers to say occasionally, ‘Did that really happen?’ ”

 

This article was originally published in the October 2014 issue of BookPage. Download the entire issue for the Kindle or Nook.

"Just a minute," Garth Stein says when he answers the phone at his Seattle home. "The kids are kicking soccer balls at me—I've got to get out of the line of fire." It’s understandable that his three boys—ages 17, 15 and 7—are craving their dad’s attention. With an international phenomenon already under his belt (2008’s The Art of Racing in the Rain, which has sold 4 million copies) and a new book about to hit shelves, Stein is frequently on the road these days. He has just returned from a trip to West Virginia, where he did a reading at the famously elegant Greenbrier.
Mystery & SuspenseFictionThriller

Paula Hawkins

Interview by Amy Scribner

With The Girl on the Train, British author Paula Hawkins has written one of those books with a plot so delicious, you wonder why you didn’t think of it yourself. 

Rachel Watson takes a commuter train from her slightly grubby suburb into London every day. It used to be to get to work. After she gets fired for drinking on the job, Rachel still takes the train so her roommate won’t know just how far she has fallen.

Often on those train rides, Rachel catches a glimpse of a couple sitting on their back terrace, a “perfect, golden couple” whom she names Jason and Jess. She is sure they are blissfully happy, just as she used to be when married to Tom, before he cheated on her (which she found out about by reading his email, “the modern-day lipstick on the collar”).

Rachel is an exasperating mess, and she makes for a wonderfully unreliable narrator. She drinks on the train—a little Chenin Blanc, or gin and tonic in a can. She calls Tom late at night when she’s blackout drunk, annoying his new wife and waking up their baby. She builds a whole story around Jason and Jess based on her view from the train, imbuing in them all the things she misses about her own marriage. So it’s no wonder she’s outraged when, on one sunny morning, she sees Jess kissing another man in her garden.

“I am furious, nails digging into my palms, tears stinging my eyes,” Rachel says. “I feel a flash of intense anger. I feel as though something has been taken away from me. How could she? How could Jess do this? What is wrong with her? Look at the life they have, look at how beautiful it is! I have never understood how people can blithely disregard the damage they do by following their hearts.” 

Rachel only learns that her Jason and Jess are actually Scott and Megan Hipwell when Megan goes missing. When Rachel realizes she was in their neighborhood the night Megan disappeared, she frantically tries to retrace her drunken steps and finds herself drawn into Scott’s life and, in the strangest of ways, her own past.

The Girl on the Train is the kind of slippery, thrilling read that only comes around every few years (see Gone Girl). Hawkins, a former financial journalist, has written a couple of other books under a pseudonym, but this is her first crime novel.

“[My books] got sort of darker and darker, and the characters got more complex,” Hawkins says by phone from her London home. “I’ve always read crime fiction, and it’s always been in my head as something I wanted to do.”

The voyeuristic roots of The Girl on the Train came from Hawkins’ own commuting days.

“I used to commute when I was a journalist, from the edges of London,” she says. “I loved looking into people’s houses. The train went really close by apartments, so you could see in. I never saw anything shocking, but I wondered, if you saw anything out of the ordinary, an act of violence, who would you tell and would anyone believe you? I had a germ of it in my brain for ages. The voyeuristic aspects of commuting, everyone has. Even if you commute by car, you look into other cars.”

In Rachel, Hawkins has created a complex, heartbreaking character whose penchant for self-sabotage is breathtaking. She’s lost everything that mattered to her and can’t quite find a way forward.

Like 'Gone Girl,' Hawkins’ novel hinges on a late-in-the-game twist, and this one is a doozy. As you might expect, this sleight of hand is not easy to pull off.

“I feel more affection than most people will toward her,” Hawkins admits. “She was living this normal life and then had this incredibly rapid fall from grace. She’s obviously gotten herself into a mess with the drinking. She’s teetering on the edge, but could get back on track. I understand she’s a really frustrating character. You just want to shake her and say snap out of it.”

Like Gone Girl, Hawkins’ novel hinges on a late-in-the-game twist, and this one is a doozy. As you might expect, this sleight of hand is not easy to pull off.

“It’s a really tricky thing to do, actually,” Hawkins says. “It’s all about feeding tiny pieces of information, but hopefully keeping them slightly ambivalent. You have to have different people see different things in different ways, and hold back particular pieces of information.”

Her book has been optioned for film by DreamWorks, something that Hawkins is trying to take in stride.

“It’s very exciting, yet I’m trying to not be too excited,” she says. “These things take a really long time. It could be years, it may not happen. It feels unreal. I haven’t cast Rachel. Possibly because she’s not beautiful, and it’s impossible to find not-beautiful actors.”

(She has pondered Michelle Williams as Megan, with her “slightly dreamy, lovely blond prettiness.”)

A longtime London resident, Hawkins wrote about financial issues for a variety of publications for 15 years. She’s lived in Paris, Oxford and Brussels, and was born and raised in Zimbabwe.

“My parents still live there, actually,” she says. “It was a very lovely upbringing. When I was a child, it was a white-only government, effectively an apartheid system, although they didn’t call it that. As a 5-year-old, it didn’t really hit home. It was a nice place for me to grow up, but I am aware that the pleasantness of my childhood was bought at a high price.”

Now a full-time novelist, Hawkins is working on a follow-up while awaiting whatever comes her way with the hotly anticipated release of The Girl on the Train.

 

This article was originally published in the January 2015 issue of BookPage. Download the entire issue for the Kindle or Nook.

With The Girl on the Train, British author Paula Hawkins has written one of those books with a plot so delicious, you wonder why you didn’t think of it yourself.
NonfictionSelf-Help

Gretchen Rubin

Interview by Amy Scribner

Gretchen Rubin worries that she’s becoming a bit of a happiness bully. “I don’t want to be a bore that everyone runs away from!” she says from her apartment on New York’s Upper East Side. “It’s very hard for me not to overwhelm everyone with research and suggestions and thoughts. That I find effortless. Not talking about it—that I find hard. I have such strong ideas.”

Indeed, over the course of my conversation with the author of Better Than Before, her intriguing new book about understanding and changing habits, I find myself going from interviewer to subject. After I mention my weakness for sweets, Rubin, who herself adheres to an extremely low-carb diet, helps me strategize ways to curb my sugar consumption.

"If you have just one chocolate-covered almond, you want to have 15."

“The thing about sweets is the desire for it feeds on itself,” Rubin says, warming to the subject. “If you don’t have the first one, it goes away. If you have just one chocolate-covered almond, you want to have 15. One thing to try would be to say, I just don’t eat that at work.”

Rubin, whose previous books The Happiness Project and Happier at Home both hit the New York Times bestseller list, clearly has a passion for happiness. But as she considered the subject further, she realized that our happiness is inextricably linked with our habits. As her husband, Jamie, laughingly told her when she described her idea for a new book, “With your books about happiness, you were trying to answer the question, ‘How do I become happier?’ And this habits book is ‘No, seriously, how do I become happier?’ ”

“When you have the habits that work for you, you’re so much likelier to be happy, healthy and productive,” Rubin says. “When people were talking to me about some happiness challenge, I realized they were almost always talking about a habit. I think everybody realizes the connection between happiness and habits. In my other books, I talked about resolutions, but almost all of them also could’ve been framed as habits. It’s just part of the whole thing, which is: How do you live a life that reflects your values?”

Better Than Before is based on the premise that are four basic personality types (tendencies) that shape how we respond to outer expectations and inner expectations: Upholders, who do what others expect of them; Questioners, who only do things that make sense to them; Obligers, who do things because they don’t want to let others down; and Rebels, who do things their own way and resist direction.

With that foundation, Rubin lays out a whole host of strategies to build and sustain good habits, such as making something inconvenient (for example, putting your cell phone in another room so that you’re not as tempted to play Candy Crush) and creating distractions (for example, giving yourself a manicure to avoid dipping into that bag of chips).

The beauty of Rubin’s advice is that she understands not everyone has the same motivations and weaknesses. Better Than Before is packed with ideas, not all of which will appeal to everyone. But that’s the point—there’s something here for everyone, whether you tend to follow rules or break them.

But even Rubin, happiness guru, fails at times. One of the funniest parts of Better Than Before is Rubin’s failed attempt to cultivate the habit of daily meditation (she kept getting distracted, like when a scene from a Woody Allen movie popped into her head mid-breath, and she toppled off her pillow more than once).

“It just did not work for me,” she says a bit ruefully. “I really tried for several months every single day. I really hoped that it would work for me, because it sounds like it would be great. I found it to be frustrating, which I don’t think it’s supposed to be.”

Rubin had a more successful habits experiment when she convinced her teenage daughter to get up early one time a weekend and get her homework finished.

“I told her, ‘I will bring you tea, I will bring you toast, I will minister to you while you’re working,’ ” she says. “And it worked!”

Roping her two daughters, Eliza and Eleanor, into her book research is unusual.

“I don’t specifically include them,” she says. “My efforts to keep my energy up, keep my sense of humor up, have time to be silly”—all endeavors from her books—“a lot of it affects them, but only because it’s an outgrowth of me changing myself.”

Rubin is no stranger to change. After graduating from Yale Law School and clerking for Supreme Court Justice Sandra Day O’Connor, she switched careers when she realized she wanted to be a writer. And what a prolific writer she is: a website, a blog, a strong social media presence and several books (plus a couple of unpublished novels, which she deems terrible).

“I really love it, so it’s not that it doesn’t feel like work, it’s that it’s what I’d do for fun,” Rubin says. “I think of a friend who put a Post-It note above her computer that said ‘Down with boredom.’ If something’s not interesting to me, I just don’t get into it. So everything’s like an intellectual toy shop.”

Right now, that toy shop’s shelves are stocked solely with habits. Rubin has no idea what her next book project might be. “I’m still so deep in habits, I just can’t see past it right now,” she says. “It’s just so vast and so fascinating.”

And as for that no-sugar-at-work habit? I’ve stuck with it for three weeks—and have lost three pounds. Maybe happiness bullying isn’t such a bad thing.

 

This article was originally published in the March 2015 issue of BookPage. Download the entire issue for the Kindle or Nook.

Gretchen Rubin worries that she’s becoming a bit of a happiness bully. “I don’t want to be a bore that everyone runs away from!” she says from her apartment on New York’s Upper East Side. “It’s very hard for me not to overwhelm everyone with research and suggestions and thoughts. That I find effortless. Not talking about it—that I find hard. I have such strong ideas.”
Mystery & SuspenseFictionSuspense

Kimberly McCreight

Interview by Amy Scribner

In Where They Found Her, former lawyer Kimberly McCreight tells the story of a small town that’s rocked by an unthinkable crime. We asked McCreight, who hit the bestseller list with her debut, Reconstructing Amelia, a few questions about this shocking and suspenseful second novel.

Describe Where They Found Her in one word.
Harrowing.

How did you approach writing the follow-up to an acclaimed bestseller like Reconstructing Amelia?
Each book comes with its own unique challenges and rewards, even (I can attest from experience) the ones that never see the light of day. All you can do is focus on the job at hand: telling the story in front of you to the best of your ability and hopefully in a way that incorporates a little of what you learned the last time around.

You went to law school and worked for some time as an attorney. How terrifying was it to make the switch to writer?
I was so unhappy working as an attorney that when I finally decided to quit the carpe diem thrill of it sustained me for a long time. Whatever difficulties lay ahead were offset by the comfort of being true to myself and getting the opportunity to devote my life to the work I loved.

That bliss probably lasted a whole 24 hours. Okay, maybe a little longer. But it wasn’t long before the oh-God-what-have-I-done set in. After all, I had just thrown away a successful career that I’d worked years establishing—all to chase a dream. There were real consequences, too, like our income being sliced in half with hundreds of thousands of my law school debt yet to be paid.

It wasn’t until after my third book was rejected that I began to realize just how long and bumpy the road to publication could be. That it might, in fact, never end. And after my fourth book was rejected, I did start to panic. By then, nearly a decade had elapsed and the economy was faltering. Any hope I had of dusting off my legal career had pretty much evaporated.

In the end, that probably worked in my favor. Ready to throw in the towel, but with no viable job prospects, I kept on writing the book that was to become Reconstructing Amelia. I finally did get a job offer—as head writer in the communications department of my former law school—a mere 24 hours before the book finally sold.

There were some dark years in there. To say that I feel incredibly lucky it worked out the way it did would be the understatement of the century. 

"To say that I feel incredibly lucky it worked out the way it did would be the understatement of the century."

This book is written from a couple of points of view: A grieving mom and a 17-year-old girl in crisis. What’s it like writing in multiple voices?
Extremely liberating and occasionally very tricky. My favorite part of writing is being able to live in someone else’s skin. Multiple points of view mean becoming several different “selves,” which is all the better. It also gives me the freedom to explore the narrative from several perspectives, making the process of discovery that is so integral to my writing process that much more exciting.

That said, it does take effort to keep the voices distinct while ensuring that each character’s story has a well-formed arc, internally consistent and effectively knit into the broader whole. I do most of that work in early revision, pulling each character out and developing their story separately before revising them as a unit.

Molly has had so much happen, and she still carries on—I was rooting for her! What do you like about her?
There’s so much I love about Molly, but I most admire her ability to recognize her own limitations, while simultaneously having the courage to throw herself headlong past them. She really has a core of brute strength that at the beginning of the book even she doesn’t fully realize. Plus, I think she’s an incredibly kind person.

"My favorite part of writing is being able to live in someone else’s skin."

Molly's husband, Justin, an English professor, leaves notes for his wife with quotes from writers like ee cummings and Emily Dickinson. How did you choose the quotes?
Some of the quotes were ones I was familiar with before the book and some came about as the result of research. The quotes all work on multiple levels, which I quite like.

You called Jodi Picoult your idol in a recent blog post. Which other authors are among your favorites and why?
Gillian Flynn because she’s a Jedi-master of character driven, miss-your subway-stop suspense (and yes, I twice missed F-train stops reading Gone Girl). Sue Miller because While I Was Gone’s combination of character driven story and mystery was such an inspiration, likewise for Laura Lippman’s What the Dead Know. Michael Cunningham’s The Hours and Anita Shreve’s The Weight of Water amazed me with their seamless shifting of POVs and timeframes, as did William Faulkner’s The Sound and the Fury.

Also, I’ve been listening recently to Dan Harris’ 10% Happier on audio. I’m not done, but I’m pretty sure it already has me at least 9.5% of the way there. 

What are you working on next?
I just finished a draft of the first book in my YA trilogy The Outliers, due out from Harper Teen in Summer 2016. The books are speculative fiction set in the present, each unfolding around the tight arc of a single mystery, but centered on a much broader central question. What if women’s greater emotionality—so often deemed a sign of weakness—was, in fact, our greatest strength?  

 

RELATED CONTENT: Read our review of Where They Found Her.

Author photo by Beowulf Sheehan.

In Where They Found Her, former lawyer Kimberly McCreight tells the story of a small town that’s rocked by an unthinkable crime. We asked McCreight, who hit the bestseller list with her debut, Reconstructing Amelia, a few questions about this shocking and suspenseful second novel.
FictionHistorical Fiction

Judy Blume

Interview by Amy Scribner

When Judy Blume was a teenager in Elizabeth, New Jersey, three commercial jets crashed in her town within months of each other, each narrowly avoiding schools and orphanages. In retrospect, it’s shocking that she hasn’t considered telling this dramatic story before. But only now has Blume written about it in a novel, In the Unlikely Event.

“I must have buried this story, because if I hadn’t, why did it take me so long to write about it? I mean, it’s a great story,” Blume says over the phone from her home in Key West, Florida. “It was so far buried. My daughter became a commercial airline pilot and she said, ‘Mother, how could you never tell me this story?’ I don’t keep secrets, I will tell almost anyone almost anything.”

Charming, funny and sounding far younger than her 77 years, Blume recalls the moment when she knew she would write this novel. It was 2009, after Blume heard fellow author Rachel Kushner speak about her new book, which was inspired by her mother’s life in 1950s Cuba. 

“It was that phrase, ‘In the ’50s,’” Blume says. “A light bulb went off in my head and it came to me like no book had ever come to me: characters, I knew the plot. Of course, there were surprises along the way, because we would never write if there weren’t surprises.”

Blume started with several months of research, which she calls “the best fun I’ve ever had on a book before. I’ve never done research! I just loved it, I loved the process. People kept saying, ‘Yes, Judy, we know, but then you still have to write the book.’”

Like most of the great Blume books—I could list some of them, but that hardly seems necessary—In the Unlikely Event is a gripping, compulsively readable story of the joys and sorrows of family. But this one is also a study of how communities respond to tragedy.  

Fifteen-year-old Miri Ammerman lives with her single mother, her grandmother and her Uncle Henry, a local newspaper reporter who is about to be married. Like most 1950s American teens, Miri’s biggest worries are friends, homework and boys. At least until a Miami Airlines plane carrying 56 passengers from Newark Airport plunges into the Elizabeth River in December 1951. 

Incredibly, two more planes would crash around Elizabeth in the weeks to come: On January 22, just 37 days after the first crash, an American Airlines flight crashes near a local high school. And on February 11, a National Airlines flight plows into an apartment building. 

Blume brings not just Miri and her family to life, but many of the passengers on those doomed flights, whom she fictionalized but based on historical records.

“I am introducing so many characters in part one,” Blume says. “I told my editor that maybe we need to set up a tree like a Russian novel. She said to me, trust your readers, so I thought, this is not Anna Karenina. Trust your readers. They’ll follow you.” 

While this is a novel, the crashes were all-too-real, and Blume recalls them vividly.

“I remember where I was on the day of the first crash, which was a very nasty Sunday in December.”

“I remember where I was on the day of the first crash, which was a very nasty Sunday in December,” she says. “I was in the car with my parents and my friend Zelda. The radio was on in the car and I remember, ‘We interrupt this program to bring you this news bulletin.’”

She also remembers the distinctly 1950s reactions of her fellow students. 

“The girls thought it was sabotage,” she says. “The boys all thought it was aliens or zombies. It did seem they—whoever ‘they’ were—were after kids. How else could you explain the crashes? One close to the junior high, one almost right through another school. The third one into the playing field by the orphanage in town.”

Blume’s father, a dentist, was called in to identify crash victims by their dental records. The character of Dr. Osner, the father of Miri’s best friend, was pulled from Blume’s recollections of her father, who “was much beloved by all the kids who liked to come to our house because he was warm and friendly and fun. I got ‘Be a good girl, Judy,’ from my mother. My father would have said, ‘You go, girl,’ if that was a phrase then. He always told me to reach for the stars.”

At this point, Blume chokes up. “I’m going to cry,” she says matter-of-factly. “I always do. I’ll recover quickly.

“That’s what I learned from my father,” she continues. “Terrible things happen, and as Henry says to Miri: ‘I’m so sorry, but we go on.’ When she isn’t sure it’s worth it, he reassures her that it is worth it. That’s what I got from my father. I’m a very optimistic person.”

These days, Blume and her husband, the writer George Cooper, make their home most of the year in Key West. It’s a long way from New Jersey.

“You know, it was one of those things where it was winter in New York and I was trying to write Summer Sisters and I said, ‘Oh, I wish I could go someplace warm,’ ” she says. “We knew someone who lived in Key West, and my husband called her. I said, ‘I can’t go to Key West, it’s too hot.’ She said, ‘Tell Judy I’m wearing polar fleece and she should come.’ We rented a house sight unseen and we totally, absolutely fell in love.”

Active members of the community, Blume and her husband started a nonprofit movie theater. On an average day, Blume wakes up and does a two-mile power walk by the ocean before breakfast (“I love my breakfast,” she says). Her office is a guesthouse just steps from the house. “I slide open my glass doors way to the side, and I’m in a garden and it’s so beautiful,” she says. “I work until lunchtime, and if it’s a first draft, I pray for any distraction. I’ll take any phone calls during a first draft.”

She still corresponds with readers, although the nature of that relationship has evolved since she wrote Letters to Judy (1986), which chronicled some of the most personal letters she’d gotten from fans. Rarely does she get snail mail these days.

“I do think that picking up a pencil and writing out what you’re thinking and feeling on a piece of paper and licking an envelope and putting a stamp on it and putting it in a mailbox to someone you don’t know and you feel safe, that’s a whole different thing than sending an email,” she says. “There’s more information for troubled kids out there—they don’t have the same questions they once had. This is good!”

When I mention that my 10-year-old tore through all the Fudge books last year, she laughs.

“It’s a lot of generations [of readers],” she says. “My daughter’s generation was the very first, and to think they are in their 50s now. I love it—how could I not? It’s the best reward for writing anyone could possibly have—to have readers. There’s nothing better than to hear a kid laughing over a book.”

After finishing her research, writing the novel (20 three-ring binders’ worth of drafts) and touring to promote it this summer, Blume says she is ready for a different creative challenge. 

 “I said after Summer Sisters, I’m never doing this again, and I meant it at the time,” Blume says with a laugh. “Then this came along, and this time I do mean it, I’m never doing it again. I’m 77! But I have that creative spirit that lives inside of me. I’m not saying I won’t do something again, but it won’t be a long novel. This is the one that I was meant to write. I feel that.”

 

This article was originally published in the June 2015 issue of BookPage. Download the entire issue for the Kindle or Nook.

When Judy Blume was a teenager in Elizabeth, New Jersey, three commercial jets crashed in her town within months of each other, each narrowly avoiding schools and orphanages. In retrospect, it’s shocking that she hasn’t considered telling this dramatic story before. But only now has Blume written about it in a novel, In the Unlikely Event.

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