Amy Scribner

FictionPopular Fiction

Kevin Kwan

Interview by Amy Scribner

Kevin Kwan is not where one might expect to find a best-selling, New York City-dwelling author. “I’m taking a little break before the craziness of three solid months of touring,” Kwan says from an undisclosed southwestern location far, far away from Manhattan. “I thought I’d look at rabbits frolicking in a field for a while first.”

The tour is to support China Rich Girlfriend, the raucous sequel to his acclaimed debut, Crazy Rich Asians. In it, we catch up with several familiar faces, as down-to-earth Rachel Chu gets married to professor Nicholas Young, who has given up his inheritance to be with her. Rachel grew up not knowing who her father was, and when she discovers his identity she eagerly hops a plane to China to meet him. Nothing can prepare her for the unbelievable “China rich” culture that awaits her, where an exploding economy allows multibillionaires to look down on regular billionaires.

Kwan, who was raised in a wealthy family in Singapore before moving to the United States at age 11, drew upon his own experiences to color both his novels.

“I grew up with that sort of old world money,” he says. “I was not really conscious of that till I stepped out of it and thought, oh my gosh, that was kind of freaky. You go to houses with sunken pools filled with sharks. It is a world with its own dysfunctions.”

Kwan insists that the over-the-top wealth he describes in China Rich Girlfriend—socialites hopping on their private 747s complete with koi ponds, spending nearly $200 million on a single piece of artwork—is based in reality.

"In many ways, it’s toned down. The truth is so much more fascinating than anything I could fictionalize."

“In many ways, it’s toned down,” he says. “My editor had to step in and say, ‘Kevin, this is bordering on fantasy. It’s like you’re writing Game of Thrones.’ But it was real. The truth is so much more fascinating than anything I could fictionalize. For example, the China rich are importing expensive racecars and killing themselves in these horrible accidents.”

That truth served as the inspiration for Carlton, son of Bao Gaoliang, a prominent politician and heir to a pharmaceutical fortune. When Carlton crashes his car in London, his mother, Bao Shaoyen, rushes in to cover up the death of a girl in the passenger’s seat and—seemingly higher on her priority list—to set her son up with the best plastic surgeons. This is the family Rachel comes into when she discovers Bao Gaoliang is her father. Despite their radically different upbringings, Rachel and Carlton form an unlikely friendship, but Bao Shaoyen refuses to acknowledge her husband’s illegitimate daughter, whom she fears will irreparably harm her family’s reputation. 

China Rich Girlfriend is the most fun I’ve had reading a book in quite some time. The vibrantly drawn characters and equally vivid settings in and around Beijing make for a jam-packed, lively story. And it was just as fun to write, Kwan says.

“I found myself laughing out loud at so many sections as I wrote,” he says. “You become like a demon possessed—I had so much fun traveling and doing the research to saturate this world. I did want an element of gravitas but you have to balance that with lightness. This is not an episode of ‘Oprah.’”

Kwan traveled to China to prepare for writing the sequel, and even after several trips overseas, he was surprised by what he found. 

“Every time I go there, it’s almost utterly a different place,” he says. “It never ceases to amaze me. Mainland Chinese are so utterly different from Asian Americans. Here, cultures and traditions are completely intact, things like foods and festivals, whereas in China, the Cultural Revolution erased the Chinese culture completely in many ways. So I would meet these young Chinese, and they don’t know where the root of their belief system comes from—it’s erased from their memory, which is liberating in a way.” 

The result is a cast of characters who are wholly believable and human. But even with meticulous research, Kwan said writing a sequel to a book that did as well as Crazy Rich Asians was daunting. 

“I was very conscious about whether there should even be a book two,” he says. “To me, there was something kind of perfect about the way I ended the [first] book. Some agreed—and of course I also heard the screams from those who didn’t.”

Among those who claim to have no opinion about either of his books are several members of his family.

“There are a lot of people in my family who claim not to have read my books,” he says wryly. “They genuinely may not have read it. They’re too busy nurturing their fortune. I have many cousins who loved it—they get it—they know this world.” 

Kwan is still getting used to the idea that his books could be hotly anticipated. Entertainment Weekly recently named China Rich Girlfriend one of six books to look forward to this summer, along with offerings by the likes of Stephen King and—wait for it—Harper Lee.

“I was kind of flabbergasted,” he says. “Harper Lee is really one of my favorite authors. To Kill a Mockingbird was such a seminal book for me. I read it in college—it’s a disservice to read it when you’re too young. You need to have already come of age. It was an unbelievable kind of thrill to be even mentioned in the same breath as her.”

For now, though, Kwan is focused on his own calm before the storm of what is sure to be another bestseller. The promotion plans include his hosting an interactive guide of New York City’s craziest, richest Asian hotspots. What is yet to be decided is whether this will become a trilogy.

“It really depends on how well this book does,” Kwan says cheerfully, “and whether people want a third.” 

 

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

Kevin Kwan is not where one might expect to find a best-selling, New York City-dwelling author. “I’m taking a little break before the craziness of three solid months of touring,” Kwan says from an undisclosed southwestern location far, far away from Manhattan. “I thought I’d look at rabbits frolicking in a field for a while first.”
FictionDebut Fiction

J. Ryan Stradal

Interview by Amy Scribner


August is First Fiction month on BookPage.com. Read more first fiction coverage here. 
 

Novelist J. Ryan Stradal spent months working on his vibrant first novel, Kitchens of the Great Midwest, without ever knowing if anything would come of it.

“You spend a lot of time alone in a room thinking, I don’t know who’s going to read this. No one might care,” he says from his home in Los Angeles. “But it’s just what I wanted to do. If someone said, Tell me your perfect day, I would say, I wake up with an idea in my head and I write it. Then I go out with friends around 7:00 for fish and chips.” 

Set in Midwest kitchens in and around the Twin Cities—a region that Stradal, a native of Hastings, Minnesota, knows well—Kitchens of the Great Midwest is a masterfully woven set of stories that all connect, in some way, to the lovely and slightly mysterious Eva Thorvald. Eva’s mother abandoned her as an infant, after deciding she wasn’t ready to be a parent. “I wasn’t cut out to be a mother,” she writes in the note she leaves behind. “The work of being a mom feels like prison to me.” 

Soon after, Eva’s doting father, a chef, suffers a massive heart attack, leaving his daughter to be raised in poverty by her kindhearted but alcoholic uncle and overworked aunt. 

The few food experiences her father imparted in her before his death stick with Eva—or maybe cooking is just in her DNA. She grows to be a wunderkind chef, starting as a child by cultivating searing-hot peppers under grow lamps and selling them to local restaurants. The adult Eva becomes famous for hosting legendary pop-up restaurant meals with years-long waiting lists, inspired by her participation in a Sunday supper club.

When her mother reappears years later at one of Eva’s pop-up restaurants, Eva is faced with her past—and must decide whether her mother can be part of her future.

“Eva, to me, feels like the person I want to be,” says Stradal. “Eva was decisive at points in her life where I felt a lot of us weren’t decisive. The trauma of her childhood made her grow a thicker skin. The vicissitudes of youth, like being attracted to a douche-bag guy—that happens to everyone in their 20s! It was all something she worked through and ultimately assembled a family of choice. You see that a lot in places like LA, where we’re far from where we came from. Eva’s sort of a personification of that.” 

That’s not to say that Stradal has shallow family roots like Eva. In fact, he credits his mother, who died a decade ago, with giving him the desire to write.

“Our house was filled with books,” he says. “She was one of the few voracious readers I knew. From a young age, I got the idea from her that the most important thing you could do was write a novel. It was the pinnacle of human achievement. The process of writing this book was like having a conversation with her every day. It really felt good.”

While his childhood was filled with books, it was not filled with gourmet cuisine. A child of the 1970s and ’80s, he recalls frozen dinners and a local soda he calls “basically suicide in a can.”

“I definitely find myself engaged by the evolution of food consciousness in my life,” he says. “Since 1975, when I was born, it’s stark. I remember the microwave came out and my parents said, this is great! It took such a turn in the 1970s and 1980s toward convenience at the expense of taste and safety, frankly. And now, we’re excited about exotic farmer’s market vegetables. It’s not just hipsters on the coasts who are shopping at farmer’s markets. It’s all across the country.”

Although the book is packed with scrumptious descriptions of food and a bounty of recipes for everything from French onion soup to wild rice casserole to carrot cake, Stradal does not consider himself a foodie. He has worked in publishing and television production, but never in a kitchen. 

“I’m an enthusiastic end user,” he says with a laugh. “I like food quite a bit, but I’m not an accomplished chef. I sure can swipe a credit card with the best of them—I love restaurants and can spend with alacrity.” 

Stradal was inspired by pop-up restaurants in and around Los Angeles, which by their very nature offer a unique dining experience.

“They’re wonderful, especially if they exist for logical reasons other than financial,” he says. “For example, there was an interest in Georgian food, so some local chefs sell it out and serve Georgian food for a night. Then you can maybe hire them as caterers or fund their next pop-up if you’re a real enthusiast.”

Stradal is half-worried that pop-up restaurants, a somewhat unknown phenomenon when he started writing the book, will evolve so quickly that they will be passé soon after publication. 

“I feel like by the time this book comes out, it’ll be historical fiction,” he says. “People will be charged $5,000 and there’ll be a year-long waitlist. At the time I started writing, it felt very in-the-future, borderline satire.” 

Kitchens of the Great Midwest is one of those fantastic, kinetic books that simultaneously entertain and make you hungry. (Think Like Water for Chocolate or Heartburn.) But it is not, Stradal insists, a book about food.

“I feel it’s a food book second,” he says. “It’s a family book first. I really wanted to write a book that was emotional and about families: one with empathy and heart, with interesting, character-driven stories. I set out to write a book with characters I don’t often see—where they live, how they behave. I didn’t think about writing a book about, like, a white guy falling in love in Brooklyn.”

 

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

Novelist J. Ryan Stradal spent months working on his vibrant first novel, Kitchens of the Great Midwest, without ever knowing if anything would come of it.
NonfictionParenting

Julie Lythcott-Haims

Interview by Amy Scribner

As the former dean of freshmen at Stanford University, Julie Lythcott-Haims saw it all: parents who hovered over, interfered with, fretted about and took charge of their children's lives. In her new book, How to Raise an Adult, she warns about the pitfalls of overparenting and recommends approaches for raising more independent kids.

How hard was it to find parents willing to talk about the competitive parenting culture?
Parents were simultaneously both eager and reluctant to talk. They’d want to tell me their experience and then they’d literally look over their shoulder to see if anyone was listening to our conversation. After observing this time and time again, I sensed that the overparenting herd is like a bully. It gave me tremendous compassion for my fellow parents and made me feel it was crucial to write this book.

How would you describe your own parenting style?
I aim for authoritative (highly responsive with high demands) and increasingly I get it right, but my tendency is to veer toward the permissive/indulgent type (highly responsive with low demands). When I catch myself heading in that direction, if, for example, I feel bad for asking them to help with something around the house—which happens particularly when I see how busy they are with school and/or activities—I remind myself that they must learn not only to help out but to take the initiative to help out, and that I’m actually building skills they’ll need in the workplace, in relationships and in life.

You write that "many of us derive real pleasure from feeling like our kid's best friend." Why do you think that is?
Hey, it feels good to be needed and wanted and liked and depended upon. So many of us were raised in the “benign neglect” era of the ’70s and ’80s by parents who took a laissez-faire approach to raising us and weren’t attendant to our every experience. Maybe our inner child is responding to that by loving being the adult who demonstrably cares so much and is so present all the time. The thing is, yes our kid needs a best friend, but it shouldn’t be us. When we act like their best friend we’re giving in too much to our need both for that closeness and to our need to be seen as demonstrating that closeness, and we’re not remembering that parents have to teach and guide, which includes having high expectations and doling out consequences and which is not commensurate with being someone’s best friend.

You have a chapter on teaching life skills. What are the top three most important life skills to instill in a child?
Well, keep in mind that the life skills chapter focuses on the extremely practical nitty gritty things, like waking oneself up, feeding oneself, cleaning up after oneself, being responsible for one’s own things, mending and fixing things, and so on, and I can’t narrow it to three—we mustn’t pick and choose; kids need all of them! In other chapters I talk about things beyond basic life skills, such as developing a work ethic, learning to think for themselves, coping when things don’t go as hoped.

So of all the skills we want our adult offspring to have, I’d say the top three are:
1) be able to take care of their basic health and survival needs;
2) be able to earn a living;
3) be able to interact with other humans.

Look, I know it sounds absurdly basic, but in a society rampant with overparenting we’re stepping in and doing all of these things for our kids far longer than we ought to, and they end up as bewildered, helpless humans who may be adult chronologically but don’t know how to fend for themselves. We need to know that when that inevitable moment comes—when our son or daughter fledges the nest—that they’ll have what it takes to make their way. The point is they don’t magically learn this stuff at the stroke of midnight on their 18th birthday.

You echo Richard Louv's (Last Child in the Woods) worry that overstructured childhoods are "killing dreamtime." How do we preserve children's dreamtime?
Two things: First, we have to stop dreaming for them. Yes, we like to picture what our sons and daughters will be and do in the world, but we mustn’t do the dreaming for them (and then the scheming required to make those dreams come true).

Second, to Louv’s point, we need to protect time in our child’s life so they can be alone with their thoughts, with their own selves and with their own dreams. This means not overscheduling them—or, to put it differently, it means scheduling time to do nothing so they can explore the wilderness of their inner thoughts, and yes, form their own dreams.

How do your own teenaged children feel about your writing this book?
I sense that they’re very supportive. First, I think they know I believe in this work from the inside out, and since in our house we preach “do what you love” I think they realize they are seeing this mantra in action. Also as they’ve gotten older they’ve begun to see real life examples of what I write and talk about—such as a friend whose parents are always worried about their whereabouts and keep them on a short leash, a friend whose parents make all the arrangements/plans or fill out forms for them, a friend who is under tremendous pressure from parents over grades, or a friend pursing an activity just because “colleges want to see it.” They come home and they talk about what they’re seeing and how it impacts their friend. And believe me, when I veer toward the helicopter-y in my interactions with them, they don’t hesitate to call me on it.

You served as dean of freshmen at Stanford for many years, and write passionately in your book about what you call a broken college admissions system. What needs to be done to fix it?
Take a school like Stanford or Harvard. Thirty years ago, when I was applying, you needed high grades and scores, well-roundedness, and some great recommendations. A teenager today needs grades and scores that hover around perfect, plus leadership (shown via activities), plus service, plus the all important yet frustratingly elusive singular notable achievement—their fruits of their so-called “passion”—in order to get in. But a week still contains only 168 hours, and an adolescent is still an adolescent. Effectively we’re asking teenagers to claw over each other and treat each other as fierce competitors for an opportunity that required far less of teenagers a generation ago. No wonder the rates of anxiety, depression, and self-harm behaviors are on the rise in their population. (I used to say that if the Admissions folks on each campus talked more frequently with their colleagues in Counseling and Psychological Services maybe then we’d make some changes. In the meantime a kid can get community service credit designed to impress a college admission dean for attending a workshop on ameliorating their own stress and burnout. The irony!) Of course nobody intended this, but this is where we now find ourselves.

What to do? In my view only the colleges and universities with the biggest brand names can really shift our national thinking and behaviors. At least that’s what parents regularly tell me. These schools could state that yes, they want high achievers but that they value health and wellness, too, and they don’t expect a kid to mortgage their childhood in order to get into college. They could then put their money where their mouth is by limiting the number of AP scores they’ll look at. Another idea floating out there is that schools would use GPA and SAT/ACT as a cutoff to determine who has the academic/intellectual chops to succeed on their campus, and then take the grades and scores off the table so they’re not staring admission officers in the face as they decide whom to admit from among the thousands who made the cutoff. (What I mean is, a kid with a 4.259 isn’t inherently more capable than a kid with a 3.963, yet those numbers staring you in the face make you think so.) Of course, both a school’s bond rating and its US News ranking goes up as those median scores in the admitted class go up, so it takes a school strong enough to stand up to those pressures to be able to make this change.

And finally, we parents shouldn’t wait for those changes to be made. There are 2,800 accredited four-year colleges and universities in our nation and I’d wager that as with anything he top 5 percent are truly marvelous. That’s 140 schools. We need to widen our blinders and encourage our kids to look at a wider range of schools. For parents who need convincing: Malcolm Gladwell wrote about the utilitarian value in going to the “lesser” school—aka the big fish/small pond effect; your kid will do best at a college where they can be in the top 10 percent, not at the most highly selective school where they may end up in the bottom half of the class.

What was the most egregious example of helicopter parenting you saw in your years at Stanford? 
To me, egregious was simply a parent supplanting themselves in a role their son or daughter should easily have been able to play at that age, such as a parent who was unhappy with a grade and wanted to contest it with the professor, or a parent who wanted to be involved in resolving a roommate problem. These are the things that would make a professor or administrator say to themselves, “Really?”

How does a parent know he or she is on the right track to raising an adult?
You know you’re on the right track first and foremost if in your own head you know that your job as a parent is to put yourself out of a job by raising your kid to independent adulthood (where independence equals not turning to you to handle/fix/resolve everything) and when you appreciate that every day offers a chance to build that independence, no matter what age and stage your kid’s at.

It also means knowing and believing that your kid is a unique individual with skills and passions to be discovered and supported, not a little robot designed to carry out your plans and dreams.

It means knowing that no grade, school or score is going to make or break them—it’s the character and good habits they develop that will make them successful in their endeavors.

Finally, it means accepting that life is long and the lessons learned along the way are our kid’s greatest teacher. We fool ourselves by thinking we can neatly lay a path for them and fix or engineer every outcome – a kid raised that way may appear to have “succeeded” but inside they’ll know they haven’t done it for themselves, which will be very damaging to them psychologically.

In practice this means:

1) not saying “we” when you really mean your son or daughter (“we’re” on the travel soccer team; “we’re” doing a science project; “we’re” going to college).

2) not arguing with the authority figures in your kid’s life (teachers, principals, coaches, referees) and instead teach them to cope with difficult outcomes and to advocate for themselves if something really needs to be done (such as a test graded incorrectly.

3) not doing your kid’s homework. (Teach them how to do that math problem, but don’t do it for them; advise them about crafting an argument more effectively, but don’t sit at the computer and rewrite the essay or hand them a marked up essay and suggest they just input changes; talk with them about how to fill out an application but don’t do it for them.)

4) not acting as if their grades/scores and the colleges they get admitted to are the indicators of their worth and value as humans.

RELATED CONTENT: Read our feature on How To Raise an Adult and four other new parenting books.

 

Former Stanford dean of freshmen Julie Lythcott-Haims warns about the pitfalls of overparenting in How to Raise an Adult.
Science Fiction & FantasyFictionFantasyDebut Fiction

Joseph Fink and Jeffrey Cranor

Interview by Amy Scribner

Joseph Fink claims he’s calling from a New Jersey beach. I prefer to imagine that his spotty cell reception is actually because he’s calling from a dark bunker in an undisclosed location. That somehow seems more appropriate for a co-author of Welcome to Night Vale, the new novel based on the wildly popular podcast of the same name.

In case you’re late to the Night Vale party, here’s a quick recap: Fink, along with Jeffrey Cranor, created a podcast called “Welcome to Night Vale” in 2012. A traveling live show based on the podcasts came a couple of years later. Night Vale is, as Cranor describes it, “in the non-specific American southwest desert, where ghosts and government and angels are commonplace and people go about their lives.” 

The Night Vale podcasts are presented as a radio show hosted by a guy named Cecil Gershwin Palmer, who shares news about the town in a soothing, friendly and NPR-ish voice. Slate named the pilot episode as one of the best podcasts ever. 

The shows are somewhat in the vein of “A Prairie Home Companion,” only completely weird and surreal. In a recent episode, a sentient patch of haze with a wicked Midwestern accent, Deb, comes on the air with Cecil to bring a message from sponsor Jo-Ann Fabrics. Also, the highway department presents a public service announcement, read by Cecil, in which they remind Night Vale residents to buckle up, then hunker down, then forget everything, remember everything and open their eyes to what is really going on. 

“Time doesn’t work in Night Vale,” someone says in the book. And they’re right. The podcasts are unsettling, funny and deeply addictive, and the novel is a pitch-perfect spin on them.

But back to the phone call with Cranor, calling in to talk with us from New York City, and Fink, calling in from a secret location that we all know was not really on the Jersey shore. Though the two have written together for five years—they wrote and performed a play in the East Village of Manhattan before they started Night Vale—they say co-writing a novel based on a beloved podcast was an exhilarating challenge.

“We just trusted each other,” Fink said. “We would build on what the other person was writing.”

“At the very get-go, it was a completely different medium than the podcasts or live shows, where all our writing goes in someone’s ear,” Cranor says. “Once I recognized that challenge, it was a lot easier. There is a nice benefit of having built the Night Vale world already. There is some shorthand. So when [Fink] says, ‘Let’s have a scene take place here,’ I know where that is. We decided early on how we would explore the town—new and old characters—and give them a life not from Cecil’s point of view.”

In the novel, Night Vale pawn shop owner Jackie Fierro, who has been 19 as long as she can remember, is handed a piece of paper by a stranger. The paper reads, “KING CITY.” Jackie has no idea what to do with this paper or what it means, and despite her efforts to wash the paper down the shower, throw it away or burn it, it keeps returning to her hand. 

Even after an accident requires Jackie to get a cast on her arm, she knows the paper is still there. “When this comes off, I’ll be holding a paper that says ‘KING CITY,’ and I’ll keep holding it for centuries, not growing old, not growing at all, still in Night Vale, like I always have been,” she says in the hospital. “I’m never going to get my life back. I’m never going to get a life. I’ll be 19-year-old Jackie Fierro, no purpose, one slip of paper, forever.”

Jackie finds herself obsessed with finding out the meaning of the note. At the same time, in the same town, Diane Crayton is a single mom struggling to raise her son Josh, who is a teenager and—of course—also a shape-shifter who likes to become, say, a spider while driving. Josh begins searching for his birth father, and ultimately, Jackie discovers a connection with Josh she never imagined.

Diane was a character who popped up in early podcasts as a throwaway, but Cranor wanted to explore her story more in the novel. “She just sort of stuck with me,” he said. “I just wanted to think more about Diane. Does she have kids? She’s definitely on the PTA. She’s a character who would be hard to develop just through Cecil. I gave her more breadth.”

Fink, on the other hand, wanted to explore Jackie. “She has been in my head for quite awhile,” he says. “Originally she was just a very creepy idea.”

Don’t worry; there’s still plenty of Cecil and some of the other characters that podcast fans know and love and obsessively follow. Night Vale’s popularity has spawned many Tumblr sites and volumes of fan fiction, all of which the authors deeply appreciate, and none of which they read.

“I’m super thrilled that it exists,” Cranor says. “As a writer, I just don’t want that in my head. It’s an expression of love to build a fan canon, but it would conflict with my own ideas. I need to make sure I’m not muddying my own ideas.”

The fans of Night Vale are as eclectic as the town itself.

“We have all sorts of fans,” Fink says. “Teens come [to the live shows] with their parents and grandparents, and that’s a really cool thing when they all enjoy it for a different reason.”

Welcome to Night Vale lives up to the podcast hype in every way. It is a singularly inventive visit to an otherworldly town that’s the stuff of nightmares and daydreams.

 

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

Joseph Fink claims he’s calling from a New Jersey beach. I prefer to imagine that his spotty cell reception is actually because he’s calling from a dark bunker in an undisclosed location. That somehow seems more appropriate for a co-author of Welcome to Night Vale, the new novel based on the wildly popular podcast of the same name.
NonfictionSelf-Help

Amy Cuddy

Interview by Amy Scribner

On a recent flight, I was deep into social psychologist and Harvard professor Amy Cuddy’s fascinating new book, Presence, when the woman next to me leaned over and said, “Is that the TED talk lady?”

By now, Cuddy is used to that description. Her 2012 TED talk, “Your Body Language Shapes Who You Are,” touched a collective nerve, racking up more than 29 million online views. In her presentation, she urged the audience to make small changes like striking a superwoman-style “power pose” before tackling a difficult situation.

Cuddy also revealed in the talk that she suffered a traumatic brain injury in a car accident when she was 19. Her IQ dropped by two standard deviations, forcing her to struggle through years of therapy before she regained her mental clarity and graduated from college.

Cuddy’s experience motivated her to study psychology, and in Presence she takes mountains of research about body language and translates it into simple, useful insights for taking control of your life by being more “present.”

I spoke to Cuddy from Rome, where she had just delivered a presentation to a group of human resources professionals. Despite her jet lag, she sounded buoyant and, well, present when talking about her new book.

You recently tweeted, “When we stop looking after our own posture, we are abandoning ourselves.” What do you mean by that?
Posture is one of the ways to be one’s authentic best self. If we start slouching or hunching over our phones, or wrapping ourselves in our shawls, we’re doing things that are leading away from our best selves. We’re putting ourselves in these powerless poses without thinking about it. 

After reading your chapter, “I don’t deserve to be here,” I have to wonder: Why do so many people feel like an imposter?
One [reason] is that we feel we need to present a confident version of ourselves, so we’re not allowed to communicate any self-doubt. Self-doubt is like blood in the water and the sharks will come get you. We assume everyone else is fine, and we’re the only ones who feel self-doubt. But of course we all do. We’re human!

We often have this sense that the community we’re in is more homogenous than it is, and we’re the ones who are different in a bad way. Oh, I’m from a farm town, so I don’t fit in at a place like Harvard. It’s not even status-based. You could be a [Harvard] legacy, you could be a first-generation immigrant. We all sometimes attribute success to luck.

I was surprised to read that this happens as much to men as women. Is it just a stereotype that women are more apologetic and less sure of themselves?
After the TED talk, I got thousands of emails, and half were from men saying they felt like a phony or fraud. I couldn’t believe it. I started to dig in, because I didn’t know the imposter literature very well. Then it started to line up for me that men have this burden where they’re not allowed to share this feeling, so they’re really in the dark. 

You have interesting and wide-ranging conversations in the book. I was particularly taken by the one with actress Julianne Moore. Why did you want to talk with her?
It was never the plan to include performers in the book. But I met her, and she was so fascinated with this whole idea. The way she articulated her understanding of presence was just as I would as a scientist. She is great at leaving everything behind and being in the moment. Everyone she works with says she’s totally reliable at being present. And she’s phenomenally good about explaining what it’s all about. It’s about power; it’s about openness and not fearing social judgment. It’s about the moment and not about this huge, transcendent permanent state that you get to.

You write quite a bit about the power of yoga, yet you confess to not being a yoga person. Have you given it another try?
I promise I’m going to when my life slows down! And I know that completely goes against all my own advice, but I just can’t seem to get it started. I am definitely going to become a yoga person. 

Yoga was always kind of marginalized, so scientists didn’t want to study it. Now there’s a heap of research. I use the example in the book of veterans with post-traumatic stress disorder. It’s this proud group of mostly men, who you don’t associate with yoga, and still it works for them. It works because you’re focusing on the movement and the posture instead of what’s happening. Most of the postures are pretty expansive, even if you’re on the ground or in downward dog. And expansive poses are hardwired to make you feel powerful. 

You have a teenage son. How do you think the concept of presence can be applied to parenting?
I hear from so many parents who practice presence with their kids. One of the things is to start early when the kids are not so self-conscious about doing funny things like striking a power pose. 

You know how you can wrap a piece of paper around a pen, [and the paper stays curled]? That’s what I imagine when I see my son’s female friends and how much their body language has collapsed since they’ve started middle school. We need to start practicing presence much earlier. Kids have in some ways the boldest body language because they are not constrained by cultural norms or stereotypes.

Writing, teaching, parenting: How do you achieve balance in life?
I think I’m doing way too much. That’s the totally honest truth. And I’m trying to do it all full time and perfectly. I’m still kind of struggling with my fears of being insignificant if I stop doing all these work things.

I’m divorced and remarried, and I have my son half of the week. For that half of the week, I get home as early as I can. My son is super savvy, though. He’ll say, ‘You’re not really being present with me, Mom.’ So that helps!

 

This article was originally published in the January 2016 issue of BookPage. Download the entire issue for the Kindle or Nook.

On a recent flight, I was deep into social psychologist and Harvard professor Amy Cuddy’s fascinating new book, Presence, when the woman next to me leaned over and said, “Is that the TED talk lady?”
FictionHistorical Fiction

Allison Pataki

Interview by Amy Scribner

She was the Princess Diana of her time, a storied beauty who longed for more than the trappings of royalty. So why has Sisi been largely lost to history?

Allison Pataki’s new novel, Sisi: Empress on Her Own covers the turbulent later life of the Empress Elisabeth of Austria-Hungary, known to her subjects as Sisi. While her husband, Emperor Franz Joseph, struggles to maintain the power of his monarchy, Sisi seeks refuge from the stifling halls of the royal court in late 19th-century Vienna, where her every move is watched and analyzed.

Sisi travels around Europe, often accompanied by her youngest daughter, Valerie, the only one of her three children she was allowed to raise without the interference of her mother-in-law, the Archduchess Sophie. Whispers start at Sisi’s frequent trips away from the Hofburg Palace and her close relationships with other men—namely the darkly handsome Count Andrássy, a key advisor to her husband.

Pataki, whose own family roots trace to Hungary, the Czech Republic and Austria, became intrigued with the empress during a trip to Austria a decade ago.

“Everywhere I went, I saw images of this striking woman,” Pataki says during a call to her home in Chicago, where she lives with her husband—a resident in ortho-pedic surgery—and their newborn daughter. 

“Her smile looked a little mysterious, a little sad, like there was more behind it. I thought, this is a really intriguing woman. Why don’t I know more about her?”

Pataki began researching and soon realized she had struck literary gold—enough for two books. (The first, The Accidental Empress, was published in 2015.)

“I didn’t know how much I could rely on the historical record, but the more I looked into it, the blueprint for the story was right there in the facts,” she says. “You have the stunning settings of the Alps and palaces and courts. You have the characters of the most powerful man in Europe [Franz Joseph] and Mad King Ludwig [Sisi’s cousin, the King of Bavaria].”

And, of course, you have Sisi, a woman Pataki calls “larger than life even in her own life. She inspired mythology the way a Princess Diana or a Jackie Kennedy did.”

Pataki, the daughter of former New York Gov. George Pataki, grew up in New York and moved to Chicago for her husband’s residency. The lifelong New Yorker is acclimating to her new home. 

“What I love about New York is the layer upon layer upon layer of history,” she says. “Chicago is so wonderful because it’s so livable and friendly. You get all the wonderful aspects of New York—great restaurants, great museums—but a slower pace. I consider them both home.”

Pataki began her career in journalism, mostly working for cable news. It was not for her.

"I love getting to the bottom of people’s stories."

“I love history. I love writing. I love narrative. I love getting to the bottom of people’s stories. I thought that meant I should be a journalist,” she says. “But it was get in, get out, boil the story down to 15 seconds or less. I was told, use less big words, be more snarky.

“I was going home at the end of the day and writing fiction. It was writing therapy. It was so much fun I thought it couldn’t actually be a job. It was everything I thought I would love about journalism. I decided I would give myself a short window to see if I could make this a career.”

Pataki quickly learned that historical fiction was her niche. “My whole bookshelf is historical fiction,” she says. “Historical fiction makes history accessible and entertaining.”

While Pataki does meticulous research before diving into a novel, she wants readers to understand the difference between historical fiction and biographies.

“I’m not intending to write dry, historical text,” she says. “I’m not a historian, I’m a novelist. Don’t take my version as the Bible. This is a novel.”

Still, Pataki shows deep reverence for and understanding of her subject, and draws a sympathetic portrait that shows the empress was more than her beauty. Where The Accidental Empress focused on Sisi as a young, naive woman—she was married in 1854 at only 16—Sisi portrays a woman at midlife who very much understands her place in the world, even as she resists it. Though she was disappointed in her marriage and disconnected from her older children, Sisi found happiness in travel and horse riding.

“Sisi was never one to derive her greatest joy from her husband and children,” Pataki says. “She was such a wandering, restless spirit.”

After spending so much time reading and writing about Sisi, Pataki struggled to write about the empress’ 1898 death in Geneva at the early age of 60, at the hands of an assassin. The Italian anarchist had another target in mind, and stabbed Sisi only after his initial plan failed.

“It was incredibly different at times to write about the tragedy of it all,” she says. “It was a split-second decision . . . just the dumb bad luck of that really struck me.”

Still, Pataki believes that, for a woman so defined by her legendary beauty, dying before she became an old woman might have been Sisi’s wish. Conscious of the public’s scrutiny, the empress maintained her legendary slender waistline through exercise, fasting and tight corset lacing, and she spent hours grooming her famously long and thick hair. 

“Sisi wrote very often to family and in journals that she wanted death to take her quickly and young,” Pataki says. “In some ways, it was eerie that she almost prophesied her death.”

Sisi is a deeply moving book about a complex character.

 

This article was originally published in the March 2016 issue of BookPage. Download the entire issue for the Kindle or Nook.

Allison Pataki’s new novel, Sisi: Empress on Her Own covers the turbulent later life of the Empress Elisabeth of Austria-Hungary, known to her subjects as Sisi. While her husband, Emperor Franz Joseph, struggles to maintain the power of his monarchy, Sisi seeks refuge from the stifling halls of the royal court in late 19th-century Vienna, where her every move is watched and analyzed.
NonfictionNature

Steve Olson

Interview by Amy Scribner

Science writer Steve Olson captures the background and aftermath of the cataclysmic 1980 blast of Mount St. Helens in his compelling new book, Eruption.

Why did you decide to write about Mount St. Helens, 35 years after the eruption?
I grew up in a small farming community in eastern Washington, about 100 miles downwind from Mount St. Helens. But I moved east for college in 1974 and spent 35 years there after meeting my wife in the back of an English class. When we moved to Seattle in 2009, I wanted to write about the most dramatic thing that has ever happened in my native state—and the eruption of Mount St. Helens was the obvious choice.

How did you find people to talk with about the eruption? Was it difficult?
Almost everyone in the Pacific Northwest has a Mount St. Helens story, and almost everyone was eager to share their story with me when I asked them about the volcano. Many people in southwestern Washington told me, “If it had blown the week before, I wouldn’t be here today”—that’s how many people ventured into what would become the blast zone before the eruption.

Harry Truman became somewhat of a folk hero for refusing to leave his home near Spirit Lake. Why do you think that was?
Harry Truman captured the public’s imagination by coming across as a proud loner defying government authorities. But the situation was more complicated up close. Many people who wanted access to their properties near the volcano said, “If Harry’s up there, why can’t I go?” which made life very difficult for the sheriffs who were trying to keep people away from the mountain. He was taking an immense risk, and his friends feared for his life. And in the end, he was the only one of the 57 people killed who was breaking the law when the volcano erupted.

Mount St. Helens is still an active volcano, as is Mount Rainier southeast of Olympia. Do you think officials learned from the 1980 blast? What would be different if there were an eruption today?
Volcanologists and public safety officials learned a lot from the eruption of Mount St. Helens. They are much better now at monitoring volcanoes and predicting eruptions—plus, new technologies have made monitoring much easier. They have developed systems to warn people in surrounding communities of eruptions or dangerous mudflows, which could happen at Mount Rainier even without an eruption. Public safety officials are much more cautious in keeping people away from dangerous volcanoes. But some volcanoes still erupt without warning, as when Mount Ontake in Japan killed 57 people in 2014. And if people don’t heed warnings, disasters can still occur.

When was the last time you visited Mount St. Helens? How would you describe it?
I drove to the mountain too many times to count while writing this book—and every time I go, I’m as astonished as the first time I visited. It’s an incredible place. The mountain is so huge, and the destruction so vast, that you still can’t believe anyone would be crazy enough to be anywhere near it in the weeks before the eruption. If you haven’t been there, you really should go. There’s no place like it in the world.

 

ALSO IN BOOKPAGE: Read our review of Eruption.
 

This article was originally published in the March 2016 issue of BookPage. Download the entire issue for the Kindle or Nook.

Science writer Steve Olson captures the background and aftermath of the cataclysmic 1980 blast of Mount St. Helens in his compelling new book, Eruption.
FictionPopular Fiction

Curtis Sittenfeld

Interview by Amy Scribner

Reimagine a book as beloved and timeless as Pride and Prejudice? Inconceivable! Curtis Sittenfeld is probably one of the few modern authors self-assured—and talented—enough to try.

And she succeeds, wonderfully. In Eligible, Liz Bennet is a New York City magazine editor on the verge of turning 40. She’s in a dead-end relationship, but she doesn’t know it yet. When her father suffers a health scare, Liz and her beautiful older sister, Jane, decamp to the family home in Cincinnati for the summer to help care for him. 

None of the five Bennet daughters is married—to their mother’s shame—and only Liz and Jane have actual jobs. Kitty and Lydia spend their days at the local CrossFit, and Mary is a perpetual college student.

When Liz is introduced to the handsome but arrogant Fitzwilliam Darcy, a Cincinnati neurosurgeon, she is immediately put off by his arrogance. But Darcy’s friend Chip Bingley, a recent star of a “Bachelor”-like reality TV show, falls for Jane. Liz and Darcy keep crossing paths (literally—they jog the same route), and their hate-hate relationship slowly transforms into something else.

Eligible sparkles with Austen-esque wit and intelligence and is a pure pleasure to read. How did Sittenfeld, the author of four previous novels, including the bestsellers Prep and American Wife, decide to remake a bona fide classic? She was recruited as part of The Austen Project, in which bestselling authors retell Austen stories in a modern way. 

“When someone offers to pay you to spend a few years in the world of Pride and Prejudice, it’s very hard to say no,” Sittenfeld says during a call to her home in St. Louis. 

Sittenfeld is quick to point out that the project is not meant to improve upon the original.

“I definitely see this as an act of homage and admiration, and it’s not like I thought, well, Pride and Prejudice has gotten stale and it falls to me to make it relevant,” she says. “I think Pride and Prejudice is perfect. I understand different people will have different reactions to Eligible, and I’m OK with that.”

Making Austen-era characters seem modern took some planning on Sittenfeld’s part. 

“I tried to think about how the characters act in Pride and Prejudice, and how they spend their time, and to find present-day equivalents,” she explains. “The characters arose out of that. If you were to describe the characters in Pride and Prejudice, you’d probably use the same or similar adjectives to describe their counterparts in Eligible. I wanted them to be recognizable as themselves but also wanted to make it feel fresh.”

“I tried to think about how the characters act in Pride and Prejudice, and how they spend their time, and to find present-day equivalents. . . . I wanted them to be recognizable as themselves but also wanted to make it feel fresh.”

The first modern twist is positioning Bingley as a reality TV star. 

“Pride and Prejudice starts with this bachelor arriving in town. In the present day in a medium-sized Midwestern city, if a new eligible man arrived, how would everyone know he was single?” Sittenfeld says. “The reality show seems like a plausible explanation.”

Secondly, Liz and Jane are independent professionals, twice as old as the original characters. And Liz (gasp) has a sex life.

“Some readers may not like that she’s sexually active,” Sittenfeld says. “She’s 38, and it’s 2013 in the book, so that seems fairly realistic to me. In no way do I consider her to be trashy; it isn’t meant to be a comment on the fact that people’s morals have fallen.

“I have enormous affection for all my characters in general and in Eligible specifically,” she says. “I actually think the way I can be most generous to them is just by liking them. If I as a writer am condescending to my own characters, it makes them unappealing to the reader and doesn’t make them three–dimensional.”

Though she’s a Cincinnati native, Sittenfeld hasn’t lived in her hometown for years and had never set a novel there before.

“I did have to do research,” she says. “It was fun. I was home with my own family. I was visiting my parents for Christmas and literally walking around with my cell phone trying to decide what apartment building Darcy would live in.”

Her brother, P.G. Sittenfeld, a city councilman, kept close tabs on how she wrote about the city.

“My brother is Mr. Cincinnati,” she says with a laugh. “He’s a little protective of the city and wanted to be sure I depicted the city in a flattering way.”

The busy mother of two children, ages 5 and 7, Sittenfeld has become fiercely mindful of her writing time.

“Because I’m lucky to have flexibility in my schedule, that actually means I need to be more careful. In theory, I could have lunch with friends every day. In practice, it means I would never finish a book.”

As a mom, Sittenfeld says she has a whole new respect for reading as a source of pleasure as well as food for thought.

“After I became a parent, I developed a greater appreciation for a book or TV show or movie that is light or fun but still smart,” she says. “Maybe I’m tired at the end of the day and I have half an hour before bed to devote to pure entertainment, so I want something that doesn’t make me feel incredibly depressed. I feel like Eligible is supposed to be that thing for people. There are very few books that are engrossing and smart but not depressing. It was a fun challenge to write a fun, fizzy, but still intelligent book.”

“My other books—I’m proud of them, but I don’t know if ‘fun’ is the first word I would use to describe any of them,” she says. “I feel like this is fun. It’s good to learn to be fun at 40—it’s never too late!”

 

This article was originally published in the May 2016 issue of BookPage. Download the entire issue for the Kindle or Nook.

Reimagine a book as beloved and timeless as Pride and Prejudice? Inconceivable! Curtis Sittenfeld is probably one of the few modern authors self-assured—and talented—enough to try.
NonfictionMemoir

Clinton Kelly

Interview by Amy Scribner

The former co-host of “What Not to Wear” delivers candid and comical observations on growing up gay and other topics in an entertaining new memoir, I Hate Everyone, Except You.

My favorite line from the book is addressed to your fans: “Start focusing on you . . . your power, your value, the stuff that goes way deeper than designer jeans and the perfect shade of lipstick. But also on the perfect shade of lipstick if that makes you happy. Because you deserve to be happy.” What do you think needs to change for women to stop equating their appearance with their value?
A cultural revolution, I suppose. Men and women have tied a woman’s value to her looks for a very long time. That kind of thinking doesn’t magically cease overnight, but we could begin by praising our daughters, granddaughters, nieces for qualities in addition to their beauty, like their intelligence, strength, creativity, talent. And we could start teaching boys at an earlier age not to behave like pigs.

You write about how hurtful it was to you and your husband when Ted Cruz called the ruling on marriage equality one of our nation’s darkest days. You briefly considered moving to Sweden but write, “even if he, or someone just as horrible, becomes president, it’s not worth jumping ship.” How are you feeling post-election?
Well, I’ve been experiencing a wide range of emotions. I want to be clear, I would never leave the United States just because I don’t like a president. I love this country very much and believe the vast majority of Americans are good human beings. But if the Supreme Court reverses its marriage equality ruling, I’ll have a big problem with that, as I’m sure you can understand.

In the hilarious chapter “Clinton for President!” you eat a marijuana gummy bear and then talk about how when you’re president, you will make American fabulous again. So, Clinton Kelly 2020?
I’m not gonna lie: Part of me thinks I could do a freakin’ awesome job as president, but another—much larger—part of me doesn’t want to work that hard at anything. Taking all those meetings would be torture for me. If I’m on a conference call that lasts for more than 10 minutes, I want to commit hara-kiri.

You have a funny fake sitcom script in one chapter. Do you think you’ll ever try writing an actual TV pilot?
So glad you liked it! I have a drawer full of sitcom scripts I’ve written. Writing them and subsequently squirreling them away is a weird habit of mine. I never show them to anyone because I assume people will think they’re stupid. But then again, a lot of really stupid stuff makes its way to television.

Your afterword is addressed to your grandma, saying you didn’t share any stories about her because she’s all yours. Come on, tell us one thing about your grandma!
Aw, she’s just a dream. She’s 97 and originally from New Zealand. When I was a kid, she’d make me a proper cup of tea—she would never use a tea bag!—with lots of milk and sugar, then read my tea leaves, like a fortune teller. She always saw all these wonderful things happening in my future. . . . And this is why I didn’t include any stories of ours. I’m totally crying. Thanks a lot, Amy!

ALSO IN BOOKPAGE: Read our review of I Hate Everyone, Except You.

This article was originally published in the January 2017 issue of BookPage. Download the entire issue for the Kindle or Nook.

The former co-host of “What Not to Wear” delivers candid and comical observations on growing up gay and other topics in an entertaining new memoir, I Hate Everyone, Except You.
NonfictionMemoir

Pamela Paul

Interview by Amy Scribner

While working a dead-end job in my mid-20s, I spent several hours setting up an Excel spreadsheet in which I listed every book I could think of that I’d ever read, starting with The Wind in the Willows. I devotedly logged each subsequent book into that spreadsheet until sometime around age 28, when I lost track of it in the shuffle of changing jobs.

I’ve since moved on to an app that allows me to continue my obsessive book tracking, but I still think wistfully of that spreadsheet and the books it contained. So My Life with Bob, the new memoir by New York Times Book Review editor Pamela Paul, resonated deeply with me.

It would be a ridiculous understatement to call Paul an avid reader. Whether highbrow Russian literature or V.C. Andrews’ incest-laced Flowers in the Attic, she reads with gusto. And she records it all in Bob, her “Book of Books,” a well-worn journal in which she’s listed every book she’s read for 28 years.

Paul first wrote about Bob in a 2012 Times essay; turning that essay into a book was not an easy decision.

“There was a huge amount of trepidation and fear,” she admits, speaking by phone from New York City. “I didn’t actually think of it as a memoir, and it was only when I read something that said, ‘Pamela Paul to write a memoir,’ that I thought, oh my God, I’m writing a memoir.

“It’s so personal. I’m usually very cautious writing about myself. I have a great amount of admiration for those who say, damn it all, I’ll write what I want. It’s very brave, but the journalism I’ve always done is feature writing, where people I interview are voluntarily participating; they’re in it of their own volition. It felt odd to me to be writing not only about myself but the people in my life.”

Paul’s previous books—By the Book; Parenting, Inc.; Pornified; and The Starter Marriage and the Future of Matrimony—are investigative looks at different aspects of social and consumer behavior. In My Life with Bob, in contrast, she is her own subject. Her chapters focus on key books in her life, from The Grapes of Wrath to The Secret History, and her reflections on what those books mean to her and what they say about her.

“The first outline was 64 chapters!” Paul remembers. “It was really sad to cut out books; each book I cut out was like cutting out a chapter of my life in a way. It was hard to think about what books captured my intellectual life and my internal life and my social life, where I was in my life at a given moment.”

My Life with Bob catalogues Paul’s journeys—both literal and metaphorical—including her time teaching English in Thailand and her early years in the New York publishing world.

In one of the most poignant chapters, Paul writes about reading with children, and that sudden jolt of realization when your children no longer want to read whatever you hand them.

“The ability to choose one’s own books becomes slightly less satisfying when you realize your own children have that power, too, and they insist on reading about rainbow fairies or killer cats,” she writes.

In the Paul household, books play a pivotal role.

“I’m obsessed with the idea of what makes a reader,” she says. “Part of it with our kids was total deprivation of any other type of entertainment. We’re horrible, terrible parents. No TV, no video games; we barely have computers for the kids. The idea of entering into a narrative in which you are actively constructing and contributing to that narrative is something that you have to learn to do. I get it—I love TV and movies, too, and in a way it’s a lot easier on the brain because you’re not conjuring up images in your brain of what characters look like.

“So I joke about deprivation, but it’s really enormous abundance. My kids have a lot of books. We regularly have to go through and purge.”

Even with the lure of technology, Paul believes books will remain central to our culture and that it’s up to parents to help imbue that interest in young readers.

“If you have fresh fruit but you also have candy, the kids might eat the fruit, but they’re gonna eat a lot of candy,” she said. “One thing I find very comforting is that for young people especially, real books—paper books—continue to be more popular than eBooks. For young children, it’s about having that tactile experience and being in the lap of a parent looking at something together.”

She may be the editor of the New York Times Book Review, but Paul is anything but a book snob. She reads widely and deeply, admitting in My Life with Bob that she hated The Catcher in the Rye (she thought Holden Caulfield was a jerk) and loved Nancy Drew.

Sometimes, she writes, we choose books as voyeurs of others’ misery. She recalls reading The Rise and Fall of the Third Reich during the summer after her freshman year of college, drawn to Holocaust reading “like many other morbid kids with Jewish ancestry.” And sometimes we choose books based on a recommendation. Which, by the way, Paul resists when possible, as she describes in another thought-provoking chapter.

My Life with Bob is a love story about books, and it will be irresistible to bookworms who recognize that what you read reflects who you are. Paul’s writing is warm, revealing and elegant, and at times, quite funny, such as when she’s too engrossed in The Hunger Games to realize that her newborn son isn’t latching on properly while nursing.

“Once I put the book down, I returned to my resting emotional state of maternal guilt,” she writes. “My lunatic years of turbo lactivism, nursing my children until they were weaned, were tainted not by formula but by the competing desire to read while they fed.”

My only quibble—and it’s a tiny one—is that Paul includes just one tantalizing photo of one page of Bob in her book. Did she ever consider reprinting Bob in full as an appendix?

“Oh no,” she says with a laugh. “That would be like hanging out my laundry.”

This article was originally published in the May 2017 issue of BookPage. Download the entire issue for the Kindle or Nook.

Paul’s previous books—By the Book; Parenting, Inc.; Pornified; and The Starter Marriage and the Future of Matrimony—are investigative looks at different aspects of social and consumer behavior. In My Life with Bob, in contrast, she is her own subject. Her chapters focus on key books in her life, from The Grapes of Wrath to The Secret History, and her reflections on what those books mean to her and what they say about her.

FictionDebut Fiction

Rachel Khong

Interview by Amy Scribner

Rachel Khong makes her fiction debut with the small-but-mighty Goodbye, Vitamin, the story of 30-year-old Ruth, who moves home to help care for her aging father, Howard, who was recently diagnosed with Alzheimer’s. In poignant and often hilarious journal-like entries, Ruth charts the joys and sadness of her days at home and ultimately her journey through grief.

Khong, the former executive editor of Lucky Peach magazine and the author of All About Eggs: Everything We Know About the World’s Most Important Food, makes us laugh once again as she shares the secret behind her first novel’s diary style and shakes her fist at memory.

How much of this story is drawn from your own life experiences?
My father doesn’t have Alzheimer’s, I’ve never had a fiancé break up with me, and I’ve never spent a year at home being a caretaker. But I do know about career-related ambivalence, about heartbreak and about anger. I’m also forgetting things every day. I’m often asked if I have personal experience with Alzheimer’s and I do—my late grandmother had Alzheimer’s. But I’m hesitant to place too much emphasis on it, because though it resembled Howard’s at times, her experience was very different, and our relationship was nothing like Ruth and Howard’s in my book. It informed my writing, but wasn’t the reason I wrote this book.

The story unfolds through journal-like entries, which is really effective in offering intimate glimpses into Ruth’s state of mind. Why did you choose this format? Are you a diarist yourself?
I wish I could say I chose the format for some intelligent reason, but it wasn’t as much a choice as it was what was possible for me. I didn’t know how to write a novel, but I did know how to write paragraphs. Stringing those paragraphs together was how I was able to write this book. I had been reading books like Sleepless Nights by Elizabeth Hardwick, Speedboat by Renata Adler, Play It As It Lays by Joan Didion, Why Did I Ever by Mary Robison—short books made up of much smaller pieces. And these were books that, despite their length, nevertheless made an outsized impact on me.

I am not a diarist, but last year I started writing in Tamara Shopsin’s Five-Year Diary, a little notebook that has five spaces on every page for every day of the year. There’s only enough space for a few lines, so it’s something that’s easy to do right before bed. The point is so you can look back on the year before, or five years before, and see how your life has changed. That’s been a useful exercise in perspective.

Goodbye, Vitamin is part break-up story, part Alzheimer’s story, part family story, part coming-of-age tale. Piece it all together, and it’s a novel about memory. Has your way of thinking about memory changed for you since writing this book?
Something that I thought about memory, and still feel now, is that it is incredibly crappy material we have to work with. It’s faulty, it’s inaccurate, it’s misleading. It leads us to believe relationships are better or worse than they are; it stops us from forgiving us or allows us to forgive too readily. “Memory is shitty,” was the main thing I thought about memory when I started the book, and I still think that now. But while my thinking on memory hasn’t changed—I still think it sucks—writing the book was a way to come to terms with it, in a way. It’s a frustrating thing, but there’s something beautiful, too, about this flaw we all share. It’s human, and it’s imperfect, but it’s what we have.

What kind of research did you do into the effects of Alzheimer’s—both on the individual and on the family?
I don’t have a good answer to this question! I read a lot on the subject—from books to discussion threads on Metafilter and Reddit. But a lot of it was imagination. It’s easy to imagine your own memory much worse than it is. We’re forgetting things every day, all the time. I don’t have to look too far for examples of that in my own life.

Ruth is such a great character. I loved when she listed things that take up room in her brain (and she wishes wouldn’t), like the lyrics to “We Didn’t Start the Fire” and various taxonomic ranks. What are a couple things taking up unnecessary room in your brain?
As a kid, I was a big fan of the Babysitter’s Club series, and to this day every personality trait of each of the Babysitter’s Club members is still rolling around uselessly in my adult brain. You’d think I should be allowed to free up that space in the hard drive and be better at, I don’t know, geography.

Food doesn’t play a big role in Goodbye, Vitamin, which surprised me considering all the food writing you’ve done. Was that intentional?
I started writing fiction long before I ever wrote about food; this novel, too, preceded the food writing. Though food—both cooking and eating—is certainly one of my interests, it’s just one. People have actually told me that they’re surprised by how much food there IS in the book. I think, in the same way that people have different thresholds or tastes for humor or violence or sentimentality, they have sensitivities about how much food is in a given book. So it’s interesting to me to hear these different reactions. I didn’t intentionally leave food out, nor did I intentionally include it. I tried to correctly represent how often a human might think about or talk about food, and it might be abnormally high or low, but I only have my own experience to go on!

If you had to pick, do you think Goodbye, Vitamin is more tragic or funny?
Hopefully funny!

You’ve said that you never thought you’d write a novel. Now that you have (and it turned out so well!), do you think you’ll do it again? And again?
Writing a novel has always been the dream, but it always seemed daunting and impossible, the same way that, when you’re young, it seems impossible that you’d ever possess enough money to be able to buy a car or house. As it turns out, being older really helps, and the main factor in writing a novel or buying a car is simply accumulation of little things into a bigger thing. I’m working on my new novel now, and it’s very different. Decidedly NOT a diary.

 

ALSO IN BOOKPAGE: Read our review of Goodbye, Vitamin.

Author photo credit Andria Lo.

Rachel Khong makes her fiction debut with the small-but-mighty Goodbye, Vitamin, the story of 30-year-old Ruth, who moves home to help care for her aging father, Howard, who was recently diagnosed with Alzheimer’s. Khong, the former executive editor of Lucky Peach magazine and the author of All About Eggs: Everything We Know About the World’s Most Important Food, makes us laugh once again as she shares the secret behind her first novel’s diary style and shakes her fist at memory.

NonfictionSelf-Help

Manoush Zomorodi

Interview by Amy Scribner

Do you feel like your phone may be trying to take over your life? Can you even remember the last time you had a sit-down dinner without someone whipping out their phone? Manoush Zomorodi understands, and she wants to help. In Bored and Brilliant, she explains that taking a step back from technology is essential for creativity, and armed with research and challenges, Zomorodi will help you discover the beauty of taking a break from technology. We asked her a few questions about boredom, children’s use of technology and those addicting phone games. 

What first drew you to this idea of boredom as a catalyst for creativity?
I’m a sucker for self-improvement, and when I realized I was struggling more than usual to come up with original ideas for my podcast, I went on a quest to pinpoint what my problem was. Turns out, looking at my phone and taking in and disseminating information nonstop disrupts specific brain functions that facilitate original thinking. So, boom! It all made sense. But that didn’t mean there was an easy fix!

What was one of the best outcomes you heard about from someone who participated in the Bored to Brilliant Project?
My favorite quote is from a guy in Brooklyn who said, “I feel like I’m waking up from a mental hibernation.” I think I teared up at that one. How extraordinary to help someone observe their own behavior and then see such a change.

Did you hear from skeptics when you launched the project?
Absolutely yes! Some people (including my producer at the time) were like, “What are you even talking about? I just put down my phone.” But usually their minds changed when they saw how this project REALLY resonated with a friend, co-worker or family member. Look, telling people that thinking is important isn’t a philosophical breakthrough. But combine that with new things we know about the brain and our new digital habits and it’s clear we are living through a grand societal experiment. THAT is fascinating, even if you just have flip phone.

Look 10 years into the future: What do you see in terms of people’s relationships with their devices?
Well, other technology journalists and I differ vastly on this. My 13-year-old neighbor told me she likes to takes breaks on the weekends from social media. I think in a decade it will not be cool to be posting all the time and being on your phone at a party will not be OK.

What kinds of limits do you put on your own kids’ use of technology?
My kids are 7 and 10 and they are in love with the iPad. It’s a constant power struggle. Right now we limit them to half an hour if it’s not a school day. I’ll admit I’m not looking forward to them having phones.

Why do you think boredom gets such a bad rap?
Because there’s a moment when it stinks! Boredom truly is uncomfortable and frustrating. But if you can get through that window of discomfort, you will get to the good stuff. It’s funny how semantics work, right? If you really hate getting bored, just tell yourself you are activating your Default Mode. LOL.

You write about your own time wasting on the game Two Dots. Be honest: Do you ever relapse?
Uh, yes. When I relapse, I know that means I’m mentally exhausted.

You interviewed the creator of Two Dots for the book. What was it like talking to the man who helped you waste so many hours?
David is utterly charming and extremely intelligent. Obviously. I found it very helpful to have a conversation with someone who understands how to trigger specific behavior in his customer (me). We should be having more human interactions with the people actually making the stuff we use all day.

I loved the challenge in which participants are required to identify a problem, then literally watch a pot of water come to a boil, then put their mind to solving the problem. Did you do this exercise? What came of it for you?
I found it extremely relaxing. There’s something about being given permission to focus on one thing that just makes the tension in your neck release. I came up with the idea for another project, which was on information overload (we called it Infomagical).

How do you manage social media to make sure it doesn’t suck up too much of your time?
No notifications. Giving myself a max of 10 minutes to look at Twitter or Instagram. And then it’s OFF.

 

ALSO IN BOOKPAGE: Read our review of Bored and Brilliant.

(Author photo by Amy Pearl.)

Do you feel like your phone may be trying to take over your life? Can you even remember the last time you had a sit-down dinner without someone whipping out their phone? Manoush Zomorodi understands, and she wants to help.
NonfictionMemoir

Armistead Maupin

Interview by Amy Scribner

Armistead Maupin finished writing his bold memoir, Logical Family, months ago. He couldn’t have foreseen just how relevant his searing reflections on growing up in the deeply conservative, racially divided South would be.

In Logical Family, Maupin, a longtime LGBTQ rights advocate and the author of the groundbreaking series Tales of the City, lays bare his own struggles with self-acceptance and making peace with his past. BookPage spoke with Maupin by phone the day after the violence in Charlottesville that stemmed from protests surrounding Confederate statues.

“It was horrifying to see that much hate made visible,” Maupin, 73, says from his home in San Francisco. “When I was a boy, I got into a fight with my best friend, Eddie, because Eddie was a Yankee. He disapproved of the statues. He said, ‘You lost the war and you were fighting for slavery—why should you have a monument?’ It’s taken 50 years for this to come back up again. Stop tormenting our African-American citizens this way and stop celebrating what should be a public shame.”

Just as he is in conversation, Maupin is unflinchingly outspoken in Logical Family. The book title is based on a term he coined 10 years ago in his novel Michael Tolliver Lives. “[Logical family] is the family that makes sense to you; the family that supports you and loves you unconditionally,” he says. “How many people gripe about having to go home for Christmas and sit with some Trumpy old aunt—yes, I said Trumpy—and bite your tongue? I’ve stopped trying to win the approval of my family. Gay people have spent way too long being good little boys and girls and not relying on the strength of their real families.”

Logical Family opens with Maupin as a young boy in Raleigh, North Carolina. His father was an unapologetic racist who proudly displayed furniture made by “slaves in our family,” and his mother was a Southern belle. In this environment, Maupin developed strong conservative beliefs, at one point even working for notorious segregationist Jesse Helms. “I was trying to please my father,” Maupin says. “Even though he was teaching me some terrible things that I had to unlearn, on the other hand he had a ribald sense of humor and loved to tell stories.”

Given his upbringing, Maupin was deeply conflicted about his homosexuality and remained a virgin until his mid-20s. “Thank God that sex came along and saved me,” he says. “You can’t roll around in the dark in the bathhouse and not bump into somebody who’s nothing like you, but very much the same because tenderness and sweetness and passion are all the same.”

Maupin speaks matter-of-factly about his relationship with his biological family, without a trace of bitterness or regret. Regret, it turns out, is not something he has much use for. “I’m sorry that I was a virgin for so long. That’s my real regret!” he laughs. “I missed the opportunity for youthful lust. The real honest answer is we have to go through what we have to go through. I’m just glad we got through to the other side.”

A generous portion of Maupin’s memoir is devoted to his time serving in the Navy, stationed in Saigon during the Vietnam War. “I found whole stacks of letters from me to my mom during that time,” he tells me. “It was fascinating to reread and research my own history. To be perfectly honest, writing is never a whole lot of fun. To be done writing is fun. Writing is a process of slow, tedious self-doubt.”

“The thing I feared was the thing that ultimately brought me the most joy in my life.”

Maupin also recounts writing the Tales of the City column in the 1970s for the San Francisco Chronicle, which became the basis for his pioneering book and TV series featuring a transgender character. The column was a sensation in a city that was at the heart of the gay rights movement.

But Maupin is modest about his role in helping move our society toward acceptance of people who are gay, bisexual and transgender. “I’m very proud of my role in changing people minds, but there are others who have done much more in changing laws,” he says. “The best thing I’ve done in my life is help gay people change their minds about themselves. To find their own dignity and their own voice, to grow impatient with their own oppression. It just started out as fun, telling stories about my own self-discovery. But you dig as deep as you can in your own heart, and you come up with something others will get. For years I lived in terror of expressing anything in regards to myself being gay. The thing I feared was the thing that ultimately brought me the most joy in my life.”

To complement the memoir, a documentary, The Untold Tales of Armistead Maupin, directed by Jennifer M. Kroot, came out this spring. Maupin had previously admired Kroot’s work on a 2014 documentary about George Takei. “Any illusion you’ve ever had about your personal beauty is shattered when you see yourself on screen,” Maupin says with a laugh. “But I trusted her. I could open up to her in a way I might not have with other people. I said yes on the spot.”

Maupin has found his own family, and he has delivered a generous, deeply satisfying memoir. “I made an effort at poignancy and humor and honesty,” he says. “I always like to take people on a roller-coaster ride. Make them cry one minute and belly laugh the next. That’s the most satisfying thing in the world. Humor is healing.”

 

ALSO IN BOOKPAGE: Read our review of Logical Family.

This article was originally published in the October 2017 issue of BookPage. Download the entire issue for the Kindle or Nook.

Author photo by Christopher Turner.

In Logical Family, Maupin, a longtime LGBTQ rights advocate and the author of the groundbreaking series Tales of the City, lays bare his own struggles with self-acceptance and making peace with his past.

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