Carla Jean Whitley

FictionHistorical FictionDebut Fiction

Bruce Machart

Interview by Carla Jean Whitley

In his powerful debut novel, Bruce Machart has created characters who are as unforgiving as the blazing heat in which they toil. A father who works his sons like horses. A husband who lies and cheats on his wife while she’s giving birth to their first son. Brothers who defend each other, but not their youngest brother.

Set in the harsh landscape of south Texas in the early 1900s, Machart’s The Wake of Forgiveness has drawn critical praise (and comparisons to the work of Cormac McCarthy) for its evocative portrayal of a man coming to grips with his family’s great divide. Karel Skala’s mother dies on the novel’s first page, while giving birth to Karel, her fourth son. The boy endures life without a mother, and under the painful rule of a Czech-immigrant father who is so distraught by his wife’s death that he’s never able to show his youngest son any affection. The story skips through time, unveiling bits of Karel’s past and insight into his present with each vignette.

A compelling part of that past is the split between Karel and his brothers, which comes to a head after a high-stakes horse race, described in thrilling detail. After the race, Karel’s brothers are promised in marriage to the daughters of a wealthy Mexican, while Karel is left to fend for himself—and ultimately, to come to terms with his self-imposed isolation.

Reached at his office at Lone Star College in Houston, where he teaches writing, Machart says that while in graduate school in the late ’90s, he began work on a novella that he never could seem to finish. The story focused on young male characters with a rift between them that he simply couldn’t figure out.

“What was at the root of this animosity or this conflict between these two boys? I just started imagining going backward in time. I arrived at a moment where a father was heartbroken, and for a certain kind of man in a certain place with a certain upbringing and a certain culture, it seems to me easier to share violence or easier to share meanness or easier to basically not share than it is to share grief.”

The author, on the other hand, is a self-declared mama’s boy who grew up in a family of demonstrative, loving men. “I believe in writing what you want to know, rather than writing what you know,” Machart explains.

“Writing fiction gives us the opportunity to live somebody else’s life, to gain a new layer of empathy. That’s the writer’s first job, to find empathy for characters unlike him- or herself.”

Even so, Machart did find inspiration in his own family and the Texas country they call home. Though the author is a Houston native, Machart’s father was raised on a cash-crop farm by a stern, but loving, Czech father. Machart has always harbored a connection with the rural area where his father was raised and where the extended family remained. He traveled to an area very much like The Wake of Forgiveness’ Lavaca County for every Easter, Christmas and family reunion.

 

“Writing fiction gives us the opportunity to live somebody else’s life, to gain a new layer of empathy. That’s the writer’s first job, to find empathy for characters unlike him- or herself.”

 

“I think the place had a hold on me because that country setting and those ranching and farming endeavors and that way of speaking, the idiom and the social sensibilities, were so very different from what I experienced growing up,” he says. “We lived in the big city. I felt kind of an outsider in my own extended family. That seemed like something worthy of investigation.”

Although Machart’s grandfather ruled the farm, Machart recalls that his grandmother couldn’t get much rest at family reunions as her husband twirled her across the dance floor. “They had this beautiful, loving relationship, even though he did have a little bit of the devil in him.” 

The father of the novel, Vaclav Skala, is in some ways an imagined foil for Machart’s grandfather. “What would’ve happened to my grandpa if there hadn’t been a grandma?” he muses.

Although the female characters in the testosterone-fueled novel rarely grace the book’s pages, Machart took care to create an emotional landscape colored by the presence (or absence) of women.

“I wanted to use some of the conventions of Western or Southwestern writing,” Machart says. “But I didn’t want to write one of these novels you stumble upon every now and then where there’s just not a strong female character in the whole thing.”

Karel chooses a strong, self-possessed woman in his wife, Sophie. Even when Karel’s demons lead him away from his home life, Sophie knows how to confront her husband. “She knows she’s married a wounded man,” the author says. “But she’s seen the part of him that needs her. Even the slightest tenderness on his part is an affirmation of a kind of love.” And in Machart’s riveting first novel, Sophie’s steady patience allows Karel the freedom to come to terms with his past.

 

In his powerful debut novel, Bruce Machart has created characters who are as unforgiving as the blazing heat in which they toil. A father who works his sons like horses. A husband who lies and cheats on his wife while she’s giving birth to their…

Memoir

Gabrielle Hamilton

Interview by Carla Jean Whitley

Prune, an unpretentious, 30-seat restaurant in New York City’s East Village, drew attention upon its 1999 opening. And so did its chef-owner, Gabrielle Hamilton, who was quickly approached by people suggesting she write a book.

“I remember at the time thinking, oh man, this is so cheap. Everybody gets a book? You open a restaurant and you get a book?” recalls Hamilton, whose essays about the intersection of food and life have appeared in the New York Times, Food + Wine and other publications. The flattery would have convinced others, but Hamilton wasn’t so easily persuaded. “I love books. I revere books. To me, they are precious, magic creatures that shouldn’t be like turds in the toilet.” And so she said no to every offer of a book contract or agent representation, choosing instead to focus on her restaurant business.

But as Hamilton’s skills developed, both with a pen and with a stove, she thought she could make a greater contribution. The result is Blood, Bones & Butter: The Inadvertent Education of a Reluctant Chef, a riveting memoir that explores her sometimes tumultuous family life and years spent in catering kitchens before opening Prune. The book has drawn ecstatic praise from fellow chefs, including Anthony Bourdain and Mario Batali.

Hamilton’s story begins with idyllic childhood family dinners with her French mother, artist father and four siblings at their rural Pennsylvania home. But when Hamilton’s parents divorce, the children’s lives are flipped on end. During one summer, weeks pass when then-13-year-old Hamilton and her brother Simon are literally left alone. That’s when Hamilton steps into a professional kitchen for the first time, trying to make money to support her prematurely adult life. She wanders into a kitchen in her tourist town and is put to work peeling potatoes. “And that, just like that, is how a whole life can start,” Hamilton writes.

 

"I revere books. To me, they are precious, magic creatures that shouldn’t be like turds in the toilet.”

The ensuing journey takes her down a path seasoned with trials, errors and colorful relationships. Hamilton moves to New York, is in and out of college (it takes her three tries to graduate) and kitchens, often scraping by financially while learning about hard living from her fellow kitchen staff. After years of work in restaurants, catering kitchens and even a summer camp, Hamilton decides to pursue her long-held desire to be a writer. And so, with 30 on the horizon, she leaves her final freelance cooking gig and her girlfriend to head for the Midwest and the University of Michigan’s MFA writing program. It’s not long before she finds herself back in a catering kitchen, and upon her return to New York, Hamilton is seduced by the idea of her own restaurant—and later by an Italian man who pulls her into a green-card marriage, all while charming her with family summers in Puglia, Italy, familial joviality and Italian cooking. The result is a beautifully told tale of a colorful and sometimes spicy life. 

The book’s conversation unfolds at an easy pace, like getting to know a new friend, tale by life-defining tale, and Hamilton’s writing becomes almost electric when she sees a restaurant space that could become her own. Her style mimics both the winding life path she’s traveled and her casual, conversational attitude. “Basically, it’s an invitation. So here, I’m going to start the conversation,” she explains, “and hopefully people will reciprocate.”

The time Hamilton spent crafting the memoir mimicked her story’s more exhilarating moments. As she wrote, she juggled two children under the age of three and a bustling restaurant. Sleep wasn’t a priority, and in the process Hamilton gave up on striving for balance.

“If I keep pursuing it, I feel like I’ve failed constantly. So now I’m resigned to the idea that it is not balance. It’s a binge and purge,” Hamilton explains from Prune’s dining room. “I just have to change my mind about whether that sucks or not.”

Sometimes that meant seeing her children only when they were asleep. On other occasions, she left her restaurant staff to run the kitchen while she spent time with her sons. And when it came time to transform the first draft of Blood, Bones & Butter into the finished product, the restaurant’s office became Hamilton’s refuge.

But she wonders, what’s the alternative? “I have this restaurant that was very popular, I have this book deal, I have these incredible children. What was I going to do, say no to all of that? It sucks that it all happened at the same time, but that’s a high-class set of problems right there,” she says, laughing. “I could die now and feel content.” 

 

Prune, an unpretentious, 30-seat restaurant in New York City’s East Village, drew attention upon its 1999 opening. And so did its chef-owner, Gabrielle Hamilton, who was quickly approached by people suggesting she write a book.

“I remember at the time thinking, oh man, this is so…

Fiction

Josh Ritter

Interview by Carla Jean Whitley

Josh Ritter is a writer’s writer, a singer-songwriter whose lyrics have always reflected a love of reading and enthusiasm for learning. So it wasn’t a surprise when the Idaho-born Ritter announced a book was in the works.

“Books have always been such a huge part of my life, and my own writing,” Ritter says during a telephone interview from his Brooklyn apartment. “Normally, when people ask me about my influences, they just always assume I’m influenced by other songwriters. That couldn’t be any further from the truth. It’s always been about writers of any kind. Aside from all the other things that happen in life, writers of any kind can influence.”

Just as Ritter’s inspiration is drawn from both books and music, the story that became his debut novel, Bright’s Passage, started with a song. While writing 2010’s So Runs the World Away, his sixth full-length studio album, Ritter began crafting a song about a man who occasionally heard an angel. “I’d been thinking about when angels show up. It’s often not an uncomplicated thing,” explains Ritter, who points out that much of literature softens angels’ appearances, while religious texts show them in more startling contexts.

“A novel, I always felt like it was something that could be unfolded from a song. You go through a door, and a novel is describing everything you find behind there.”

But the story wouldn’t stay within the bounds of a single song. “This song felt like there was more there than I could fit without the structure collapsing,” he says. So Ritter began to explore writing a novel. “As time went on, the song totally disappeared. It bore no relation to what I ended up with, but it was a good starting point.”

Henry Bright, the protagonist of Bright’s Passage, was followed home from World War I by an angel, which now speaks through Henry’s horse. After Henry’s wife dies in childbirth, the angel tells him to burn and leave his home before a neighbor tries to take away the child, whom the angel calls “the future king of heaven.” The novel follows Henry as he travels, on foot, away from both the ensuing wildfire and the neighbor.

It’s fitting that Bright’s Passage began life as a lyric; though his songs vary greatly in structure and subject matter, Ritter is a master of the story song. “The Temptation of Adam,” from 2007’s The Historical Conquests of Josh Ritter, and So Runs the World Away’s “The Curse,” among others, play like short stories set to music.

“I always had sort of blithely said—and believed, without really totally examining it—the idea that a good song should be able to be unfolded into a much larger story. I think a song is a tool. It’s a hallway. You’re building a hallway, and when we listen to a song, we can walk down a hallway into all the worlds of our own minds. There’s no directing traffic there, and at a certain point you’re off into your own thoughts. That’s an amazing, beautiful thing about a song,” Ritter says. “A novel, I always felt like it was something that could be unfolded from a song. You go through a door, and a novel is describing everything you find behind there.”

In Bright’s Passage, Henry spends a great deal of time on his own as he traverses West Virginia. During World War I flashbacks, Henry’s internal monologue remains the story’s engine, though he is surrounded by his fellow soldiers. During the two months Ritter spent writing the book’s first draft, and the subsequent year of editing, he was similarly surrounded by people on tour and isolated as he wrote. “On the road, you have some chunks of time that are best filled with that sort of thing, mornings or after sound check,” Ritter recalls. “In the end, [writing a book] is a more lonely process than writing songs or writing a record and recording. You’re by yourself.”

Ritter worked to create in Henry a character that was a blank, a person with the “thousand-yard stare” of someone focused on putting together a jigsaw puzzle, solving a problem on his own. The reader is left to puzzle out what happened to Henry to leave him with an angel guiding his life.

With the novel’s publication, Ritter will now sort through a labyrinth of overlapping book and concert tours, with summer dates scheduled across the United States and in Canada.

“I remember the first time I ever got a record back, and how nervous I was, and this was an equal level of nerves,” Ritter says. “At a certain point, you start to miss that nervous feeling, the nervousness of the idea that stuff could go totally wrong. This book has been a great reintroduction to that kind of excitement.”

 

Carla Jean Whitley writes about books, music and culture in Birmingham, Alabama.

Josh Ritter is a writer’s writer, a singer-songwriter whose lyrics have always reflected a love of reading and enthusiasm for learning. So it wasn’t a surprise when the Idaho-born Ritter announced a book was in the works.

“Books have always been such a huge part…

Fiction

Wiley Cash

Interview by Carla Jean Whitley

In his lyrical debut, A Land More Kind Than Home, North Carolina author Wiley Cash uses multiple perspectives to tell the story of an event that divides a community. Here, he talks about the importance of place in fiction, the power of faith and what he’s working on next.

You were raised in the evangelical church. How did that factor into your writing A Land More Kind Than Home? Did your church share any characteristics with the church in your book?

I was raised in a Southern Baptist church in Gastonia, North Carolina, and although I’ve never picked up a snake or taken sips of strychnine, I can say that I’ve witnessed things and felt both a peace and a turmoil that I can’t explain. I think once you’ve experienced that, regardless of how skeptical a believer you are or how jaded you become, there’s always power in the purity of original experience. A few years ago, my wife and I were watching The Apostle. My wife was raised Catholic, and she didn’t know what to make of the scene where Robert Duvall, who plays a fallen preacher who’s running from a murder charge, is baptizing people in a roadside creek. “What in the world are they doing?” she asked, her eyebrows lifted in disbelief. I had a hard time explaining it to her, mostly because I was fighting back tears at the beauty of the scene.

This is probably going to irritate people on both the right and the left side of this issue, but I’m interested in and respectful of any religious group that adheres to a system of belief with real conviction. If that conviction compels you to pick up a serpent and speak in tongues, I say go for it. I feel the same way about the person who’s compelled to pray toward Mecca five times a day. That Holy Ghost Christian and that devout Muslim might find each other strange and perhaps even threatening, but they probably have more in common than is apparent to either one of them.

You were raised in North Carolina, which is also the setting for the book. Your characters clearly represent the area without ever teetering into a caricature of rural folks. I’ve certainly read books that didn’t succeed in that regard. Was it challenging to capture those voices?

I feel the same away about caricatures in literature as I do about stereotypes in life: they’re for lazy people who don’t want to invest time or energy in discovering the truth about people who are different from them. When I teach creative writing, I tell my students that caricature, stereotype, and cliché exist because they elicit an automatic response that is always based on something the reader has seen before in the form of image, character, or plot. That’s why these things are so pervasive, but that’s also why they’re so useless during the creative process. When writers give a reader a caricature, what they’re saying is, “All right, I got lazy with this one, so feel free to insert a stock image here.”

I want readers to care about the characters I’ve spent time and energy and blood creating. I want them to feel they have a stake in the characters’ lives because they see something of themselves in them, especially the worst characters. It’s hard to be invested in the lives of caricatures; it’s almost impossible to care about what happens to stereotypes. I tried to create characters who seem real, and I gave each of them a stake in what happens in the story and how the story unfolds in the community’s life. If I would’ve relied on stereotypes then it would have been impossible to give any of these characters the necessary agency to respond to this kind of tragedy.

You switch between character perspectives with ease, but it seems as though it would be difficult to do so while also providing insight from the characters’ pasts. Did you write the chapters in the order they appear? How did you keep the chronology straight?

I relied on a multi-voice narrative for two reasons. One, I’ve found that when something happens that involves a number of my family members or several of my friends, everyone narrates their version of it based on their individual perspective. I suspect this is the same with other people’s family and friends, but hearing that chorus of voices narrate separate stories that coalesce around a single event always stuck with me. Two, this is a pretty popular model with Southern novels and stories; I’m thinking of Gaines’s A Gathering of Old Men, Faulkner’s As I Lay Dying and The Sound and the Fury, and Thomas Wolfe’s novella The Lost Boy. Each of these works is focused around a single event, but the authors rely on the community or the family to fully communicate that event’s importance.

I felt that the story of A Land More Kind Than Home, especially the tragedy behind it, belonged to the community. It wouldn’t have felt right to assign the narration of the story or the point of view to any one particular character. I believe this is the community’s story; this is why the community has to tell it.

Keeping the chronology straight was pretty difficult sometimes. The biggest challenge was staying clear on what each narrator knows at each point in the story, a problem amplified by the fact that the novel takes place over six days. Aside from the opening scene, the novel is pretty linear, so that made it a little easier to keep the narrators’ stories and their knowledge of events chronological. Toward the end of the revision process, I made calendars to track the development of the story over those six days. I really wish I’d done that earlier. Structuring a novel is a lot like solving an equation, and it helped me to see all the values and integers in the visual equation instead of trying to keep them straight in my head.

How long did it take you to write the novel? Will you tell me more about the process?

In the spring of 2004, I wrote a short story from the perspective of a grandfather whose autistic grandson is smothered during a healing service one Sunday morning. The grandfather and the autistic boy’s father find out the terrible news after the local sheriff comes out to the farm to tell them. The story was about 25 pages, but it wasn’t really a story; it was more of an event. I sat on it for about a year before I went back to it and tried to reimagine the scene. I realized that the story was much larger than one person’s perspective. I decided to attempt to write a novel with the autistic boy’s death at the center. I experimented with several different narrators, and, as a result, the grandfather’s narration was cut even though he remained a very important character.

By the fall of 2008 I’d landed a great agent who represents several authors whose style and regional focus are very similar to mine. This agent submitted the manuscript to a few houses, but it was rejected by all of them. We worked on the manuscript for about a year and a half, and, eventually, it seemed like there was nowhere else to go in terms of revising it. We agreed to go our separate ways in January of 2010.

I turned to Nat Sobel of Sobel Weber. He’d contacted me after reading an excerpt of the novel that had been published in Crab Orchard Review in the fall of 2008, right after I’d agreed to work with my former agent. I called Nat’s office late on a Friday afternoon, and I was very surprised that he remembered my story. He agreed to consider the manuscript, but he made clear that I’d follow the same process everyone else followed, from submitting the query letter, to submitting the first 50 pages, to finally submitting the full manuscript. I was ready to give up on the novel at this point, and I probably would have if my wife hadn’t encouraged me to give it one more shot with Nat.

I submitted the full manuscript to him in February 2010. He read it and offered some comments toward revision. At this point, I had to decide whether or not I wanted to go back and revisit a manuscript that I’d thought was complete months and months earlier. Maybe it was hope, or maybe it was desperation, but I sat down at my desk and considered Nat’s comments. I worked on the novel the entire summer of 2010. Nat started submitting the novel in the fall, and the first editor who saw it purchased it in a two-book deal.  

Did writing while away from the region you wrote about affect you in any way? How?

When I moved to Louisiana in 2003, I suddenly found myself in a region that was very foreign to me. People’s accents were different, the music was different, the food was different and the weather was very different. After just a couple of months, I realized that I was desperately homesick. Because of this I began reading North Carolina authors like Clyde Edgerton, Kaye Gibbons and Charles Chesnutt. I found that in reading about North Carolina I had the chance to return home, and it wasn’t long before I realized that writing about home would make that place even more real to me. The result of that compulsion to recreate North Carolina is A Land More Kind Than Home.

Aside from reading fiction set in North Carolina, I poured through the collected, published photographs of people like Rob Amberg and Tim Barnwell, both of whom are photographers from western North Carolina. Their photos were important to me while I was living in the swamplands of Louisiana. I also studied a few books on the flora and fauna of western North Carolina just to make sure I got the names of trees and flowers correct. I never realized how important that was until I read authors like Fred Chappell and Ron Rash. Recently, I picked up Ron’s new book, The Cove, and saw that his heroine makes fence posts from black locust trunks, and I thought, Hey, I got that right in my book!

Music was also really important to me during while I was writing the novel, especially the songs of North Carolina musicians like Malcolm Holcombe (the best singer/songwriter in America, in my opinion), the Biscuit Burners, David Holt, and many others. Even now I can flip through the pages of the novel and remember exactly what I was listening to when I wrote particular scenes.

On your website, you mention your next novel, which you indicate is also set in western North Carolina. Have you completed this book? Are there any common threads between it and A Land More Kind Than Home?

I’m currently working on a second novel that is set in my hometown of Gastonia, North Carolina. At the novel’s center is a washed-up minor league pitcher named Wade Chesterfield who stumbles upon a cache of stolen money and then kidnaps his daughters from a foster home. Like A Land More Kind Than Home, my next novel has three narrators: 12-year-old Easter, Wade’s world-weary oldest daughter; Brady Weller, a private investigator who’s hired by the girls’ grandparents; and Bobby “Baby Boy” Pruitt, a steroid-pumping ex-slugger turned bounty hunter whose promising career was cut short by an errant pitch to the head by Wade Chesterfield.

How has the experience of publishing your first novel influenced your teaching?

I don’t know that having a novel published has influenced my teaching in any perceivable way. I’ve always been fairly pragmatic when it comes to teaching creative writing. I’ve always encouraged my students to understand that writing is not the overly-romantic process that is portrayed in movies and on television. You’re not supposed to take your leather-bound journal and a pack of clove cigarettes to a local coffee shop and make a public display of being a writer. I tell them that writing is a job; the only difference is that, unlike many jobs, writing is lonely, frustrating, and marked by failure. But failure makes you a better writer. Each rejection slip is an invitation to improve.

 

RELATED CONTENT
Read a review of A Land More Kind Than Home.

In his lyrical debut, A Land More Kind Than Home, North Carolina author Wiley Cash uses multiple perspectives to tell the story of an event that divides a community. Here, he talks about the importance of place in fiction, the power of faith…

FictionDebut Fiction

Bill Cheng

Interview by Carla Jean Whitley

One of the spring's most buzzed-about debuts, Bill Cheng's Southern Cross the Dog is the story of Robert Chatham, who was just 8 when the 1927 Mississippi flood destroyed his home and his family. As Robert wanders the Delta, in search of his kin and trying to outrun bad luck, Cheng creates a truly American story that mingles myth, music and a little bit of magic.

Writers are often admonished to write what they know, but you did the opposite with Southern Cross the Dog. You're a Chinese American from New York City; your characters are black and white Southerners from rural Mississippi. Why did you decide to set a novel in the South?

You have to write toward your interests. For me that was the Mississippi Delta of the great country blues singers. When I was a teenager I listened a lot to blues musicians like Robert Johnson, Son House, Big Bill Broonzy, Mississippi John Hurt. There was something about that music—the frustration, the melancholy, the resignation but also this great joy—that resonated with me. When it came time to write my first novel, I knew I wanted it to pay tribute to that world.

What kind of research did you do to help you establish the place and the characters' vernacular?

As a reader, the expectation I have for fiction is that the story be credible without it being obliged to hew too closely to fact. That’s where the real joy is in telling stories—asserting a reality that doesn’t exist and blurring the boundaries between what we believe and what is actual. For me, the research is a means of communing with the novel, fleshing out its contours and seeing what images the brain is pulled towards.

The more I read, the more tools I have. You never know when you’ll need to summon up Chandler or Shakespeare or Springsteen in the treacherous back swamps of the Delta.

Everything short of boarding a plane, I did—I went to the library; pulled old photos out of digital collections; summoned up land masses on Google Maps; read books by folklorists and ethnomusicologists (notably Alan Lomax and John Work); listened to records; perused the radio archive at the Paley Center for Media in New York City; photocopied pages on dynamiting out of an old handbook; read Honeyboy Edwards’s memoir The World Don’t Owe Me Nothing; watched PBS; pulled up clips on YouTube of Mississippi John Hurt on Pete Seeger’s 1965 series Rainbow Quest; watched flood footage recorded by the U.S. Army Corps of Engineers, listened to a recording of Big Bill Broonzy, Memphis Slim and Sonny Boy Williamson talk about life during Jim Crow (“You didn’t say, ‘Give me a can of Prince Albert [Tobacco].’ Not with that white man on that can. You say, ‘Give me a can of that Mister Prince Albert.’”)

Most of that, however, never made it into the book. 

"Southern cross the Dog" is a colloquial term for the geographical point at which two railways intersect. Will you tell us more about the title and its significance?

Literally, there are two railroad lines that used to intersect in Moorehead, Mississippi—the U.S. Southern and the Y.D. or Yazoo-Delta line (colloquially referred to as the Yellow Dog). Apocryphally, the composer W.C. Handy first heard the phrase “Southern cross the Dog” at a train station in Tutwiler, Mississippi, in 1903. According to Handy’s account, he heard a black itinerant musician playing slide guitar and singing “Goin’ where the Southern cross the Dog.” The phrase was later adopted in his song, "The Yellow Dog Rag."

That’s really it as far as fact-based accounts go. But for me “Goin’ where the Southern cross the Dog” calls to mind something mythical—a place of peace and rest and final judgment. A coming home. A Beulah land.

The title also evokes other parts of blues folklore. There are the crossroads where souls are bargained for; there is the idea of being crossed or jinxed through hoodoo magic; there is the notion of dogs, particularly black dogs, as agents of the devil. This imagery shows up a lot, for instance, in the songs of Robert Johnson. It’s exotic and sexy and while there are definitely elements of those things in the book, the way I really think about the title today is that it is simply the story of a boy trying to come home.

The novel focuses on several different characters, and the story is mostly told in third person. But in two chapters, those focused on Dora and Ellis, you switch to first person. Why did you decide to switch between characters throughout the story, and how did you establish whose tales you would tell from the first-person perspective?

There are portions of this book that could only be told from the point-of-view of those characters. If I’d done otherwise, I would’ve been shirking my responsibility to those characters. From the beginning, I knew that Dora’s character would be the hardest for me to write. To render her convincingly I’d have to cross the divides of gender, race, as well as a history of abuse of which I have no first-hand experience. It was a challenge that I think tests the very core of who I believe myself to be as a writer. These are not easy things to write about, but I didn’t come here to write an easy book.

If I told Dora’s or Ellis’ story from the distance of the third-person, the book would be safer, certainly but that’s not what I think fiction should be. My characters—especially Dora and Ellis—experience a tremendous amount of loss. I owe it to them and the reader to try to understand and communicate that loss.

As a first-time author, what writers inspire you?

Depending on what I’m working on and how I’m conceiving it at the time, I’ll draw on different sources for my inspiration. For Southern Cross the Dog, I know Peter Mathiessen’s Shadow Country was hugely influential to me. It has the kind of scope and breadth that I wanted for my own book. There’s also Illywhacker by Peter Carey, which reminded me that books should also be thrilling and joyful and provocative to the imagination.

But when I’m working I try not to limit myself to any one kind of writing. Every book provides its own unique insight on structure, or syntax, or plotting or character development. The more I read, the more tools I have to fix the problems that might arise down the road. You never know when you’ll need to summon up Raymond Chandler or William Shakespeare or Bruce Springsteen in the treacherous back swamps of the Delta.

I will say, however, that a lot of how I think about fiction is informed by the novelist Colum McCann. I had the luck to study with him for my MFA. He really instilled in me this idea that when you write, you have to be unafraid. Every word you set down should be part of an ambitious undertaking—otherwise what would be the point?

I've read that you haven't visited the South, but your book tour includes stops in several Southern cities, so that's about to change. Is there anything you're particularly looking forward to seeing or visiting in the region in which your novel is set?

I’m not sure I’ll have much time to take in the sights, but there are a few things I’d definitely like to do. For instance, I’d like to spend an evening at a functioning jukejoint and listen to some live blues. I got married last year and my friends took me out to this tiny blues club for my bachelor party. They said the whole night I was like a puppy, looking up at the stage. It was like Christmas morning for me.

If I can, I’d also like to make it out to the Panther Swamp National Wildlife Refuge in Yazoo City—see how much of that I got right, how much I got wrong. My wife is also an avid bird-watcher so I think that’ll be something we’ll both enjoy.

What are you working on next?

A novel. At least I think it wants to be a novel. I can say that it’s not set in the American South and that it’s not about me—except in the way that every book is always about the author. With Southern Cross the Dog, the ambition was to make a book that was wide in scope. My inclination now is to go the other way. Something quieter and introspective, but no less ambitious.

RELATED CONTENT
Read our review of Southern Cross the Dog.

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Fiction

Peter Gethers

Interview by Carla Jean Whitley

Writer, producer, Random House Studio publisher and creative powerhouse Peter Gethers is best known to readers as the author of three memoirs about life with his cat Norton. His new novel, Ask Bob, delves into the complicated romantic life of a New York City veterinarian.

Tell us about your pets.
I was always a dog person. But when I got Norton—a gift from a girlfriend—I instantly became a cat nut. Now I have two Scottish Fold cats: an 11-year-old (whose ears didn’t fold) named Harper—a girl—and a 1-year-old boy named Mitch, a total devil. Truth be told, I love all animals, and the menagerie that Dr. Bob has is my fantasy.

What made you decide to carry over the pet theme from the Norton books to your fiction?
This novel didn’t start out with a pet theme. It started out as a novel about human relationships.I wanted to write about someone who had what he thought was a perfect relationship, only to have it yanked away. I then wanted to write about his new relationship—and about the difficulty of competing with “the ghost of perfection,” a phrase once said to me by Roman Polanski.

As I began writing, it occurred to me that by making Bob a vet, I could deal a bit further with the complexities of human relationships. Not only must he compete with the ghost of perfection, he must learn to deal with a "real" relationship—a human one, and a difficult human one—rather than a simple human-to-pet relationship. I think my book is all about celebrating the difficulties of human relationships—romantic and family. Things that come easily are not usually satisfying—nor do they last.

By the way, I’m not in any denigrating human/pet relationships. My relationship with my cats is extraordinary, and I love them deeply. I just think we have to keep some perspective.

How did you end up writing a relationship story about a man who isn't good at relationships?
Well . . . um . . . I have been accused in the past of having better relationships with my cats than I do with people. So it was kind of a natural leap. I don't think I’m too bad at either—but it seemed like a good topic.

You also write thrillers under the pseudonym Russell Andrews, and you’ve worked in TV and theater, most recently with the off-Broadway hit Old Jews Telling Jokes. How does writing a novel differ from a play or screenplay?
I think writing a novel is the hardest thing I do. I think it's one of the hardest things anyone can do—taking several hundred blank pages and filling them up. Screenplays are much, much easier—they're basically blueprints for directors and actors (movies are not a writer's medium—if a screenwriter can turn in something that's well structured and has some character development, his or her job is basically done). TV is about dialogue. Film is about structure. Novel writing is about a lot more. Writing a good play is at least as hard as writing a novel, although it’s a very different skill set. It requires a huge amount of discipline. I can say this because I don’t consider Old Jews Telling Jokes a play—it’s really a revue. I like it, and I’m not putting down how hard it was to do—but it was a lot like writing a sitcom. It’s not exactly August: Osage County.

 

Do your processes differ when you pen different types of books?
Yes. Not so much the thought process, but the voice. I think novels are a lot about voice and, obviously, the voice I’ve chosen to use in Ask Bob is a lot different from the voice I used in the thrillers. Writing those thrillers, though, helped me a lot. They are very plot driven—which my first two novels were definitely not—and as a result, Ask Bob is a much more satisfying novel. Plots are hard. I often say, somewhat snidely, that all too often, when critics use the term “literary” writer, they’re referring to someone who doesn’t know how to tell a story.

 

Which of your books would you most like to see adapted to a different medium?
I’d love to see my last three thrillers—Aphrodite, Midas and Hades—done either as films or as a TV series (they all have the same character and I’m convinced he’d be a great TV character). My deep, dark fantasy is to do a one-man show using the three cat books. I’m a good talker, and I’d love to try that. I’ll never have the nerve to do it, however, especially now that I know how hard it is to get a play going and make any money.

What’s next for you?
I have a lot of stuff going on. In fact, it's gotten a bit out of hand. We’re shooting our first TV series for Random House Studio. It’s based on The New Midwestern Table by Amy Thielen, and airs in September on the Food Network.

We also have several films with my partner, Focus Features, which are on the fast track. So I hope to have three feature films in production within the next 12 months for Random House Studio. I have a pretty solid list of books that I’m editing and publishing, too.

Away from Random House, I’m working with Stephen Sondheim and Wynton Marsalis on a seven-show performance at City Center. I’m also working with my writing and producing partner, Dan Okrent, because Old Jews is opening in Chicago in October and in London in March 2014.

Finally, I have another book to write for Holt. This one's nonfiction. I can tell you the tentative title right now: Into the Fire: The Search for the Meaning of Food, Wine and Life.

Sometime soon I hope to get some sleep.

ALSO IN BOOKPAGE: Read our review of Ask Bob.

Editor's note: The version of this Q&A that appeared in our August 2013 issue was condensed for print.

Writer, producer, Random House Studio publisher and creative powerhouse Peter Gethers is best known to readers as the author of three memoirs about life with his cat Norton. His new novel, Ask Bob, delves into the complicated romantic life of a New York City…

FictionWomen's Fiction

Anna Quindlen

Interview by Carla Jean Whitley

What inspires a female writer whose work runs the gamut from a Pulitzer Prize-winning column to best-selling novels to thought-provoking essays? Anna Quindlen says she admires a number of female writers.

“Where do I begin? With Jane Austen, I suppose, but there’s also Edith Wharton, Mary Wesley, Elizabeth Bowen, George Eliot, Louisa May Alcott, and Maud Hart Lovelace,” Quindlen writes in an email interview. “And some of my contemporaries consistently blow me away, like Alice McDermott and Amy Bloom. Alice Munro won the Nobel. Nuff said.”

Quindlen’s list focuses on novelists, and in fact that’s the direction she has chosen for her career, which began in reporting before she became a columnist. But life and work don’t always carry us in expected directions; Quindlen’s most recent book prior to Still Life with Bread Crumbs was Lots of Candles, Plenty of Cake, a collection of essays on aging.

“The strategy is meant to be that I write fiction fulltime,” she explains. “But as I investigated the new aging in our society, in my own life and those of my friends, I decided I wanted to mull it over in print. Hence Lots of Candles, Plenty of Cake. It just happened.”

"When the notebook is your imagination, it’s often harder to decipher."

She’s back on track with Still Life with Bread Crumbs, which is an exploration of aging through the experiences of a photographer whose life has been lived in the public eye. Rebecca Winter’s iconic photograph “Still Life with Bread Crumbs” made her famous and brought the kind of money that allowed her to comfortably dwell in her upscale Manhattan apartment for some time, even after her husband split. But Winter’s funds are dwindling, so she sublets her apartment and moves to a cabin in rural New York.

Quindlen says she can relate to Winter’s struggle to balance art and commerce. “I think every writer feels she is one book from irrelevancy. It’s such an uncertain way to make a living: no regular paycheck or pension, no healthcare plan or regular hours. We’ve all watched great talents fall in and out of fashion, and that could happen to any of us,” Quindlen says. “That’s why it’s so important to do what Rebecca learns to do: judge yourself by yourself. At a certain point at the very end of a book, I read it over and have an interior conversation: Self, I say to myself, this is good work. It’s no substitute for being able to pay the gas bill, as Rebecca knows well, but it helps to insulate you against the fickle opinion of the world.”

Like Winter, Quindlen has houses both in New York City and the country, but she says the city is home. “New York City and I have the same metabolism. I’m like cockroaches; I’m here for the duration.” But the more meandering pace of country life is certainly reflected in the novel. Still Life utilizes shorter chapters, each with telling titles, and the story isn’t always linear.

“I decided I wanted to deconstruct the conventional novel. We absorb the notion that backstory should fit seamlessly into present action, that every aspect needs to be spun out into lengthy observation. I decided to take the sandwich apart: ham, cheese, bread. Current action, backstory, supporting materials. The chapter titles are mustard, I guess. (Now I’m hungry.),” Quindlen says. And we should expect to see echoes of this approach in the future: “I really enjoyed doing this; it’s gotten under my skin and is definitely coloring the novel I’m working on now, although it’s quite different.”

Though she draws from the same well of talents whether she's reporting or dreaming up fiction, Quindlen says fiction challenges her in very different ways than journalism. “Not having the reporting to rely upon means that I’m a good deal more adrift. More of what I do comes to me at random times: cooking dinner, powerwalking. When I’m struggling with nonfiction, I can always look in my notebooks. When the notebook is your imagination, it’s often harder to decipher.”

Even so, common threads remain through her present work and that of her past. In the aforementioned New York Times essay, Quindlen concluded, “I am a reporter of invented stories now, but no less a reporter because of that.”

Carla Jean Whitley is a writer and editor based in Birmingham, Alabama. 

 

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Read our review of Still Life with Bread Crumbs.

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Fiction

Judith Claire Mitchell

Interview by Carla Jean Whitley

The heroines of Judith Claire Mitchell’s engrossing new novel—sisters Vee, Delph and Lady Alter—don’t bear a lot of similarity to their creator. The three were raised with a family legacy of suicide: Their great-grandmother Iris became the first to kill herself after her husband’s chemical inventions were used as World War I weapons.

All told, six members of the generations before Vee, Delph and Lady died by their own hand, with four of them committing suicide in their 40s. Now in that decade themselves, the Alters view their fate as inevitable. In A Reunion of Ghosts, the sisters recount their family history as they seek to understand its relationship to their own stories.

Although this is Mitchell’s second novel with ties to World War I, her interest is incidental. Her grandparents all came to America from Europe, some before the war and others after.

“But it wasn’t a big family thing. Historically, I find World War I so fascinating because I feel it’s when the 20th century became the 20th century. It’s when the Victorian era died completely,” explains Mitchell, who is a professor of English at the University of Wisconsin. “The horrors of that war—it introduced chemical warfare, it introduced a level of violence that, as bad as war had been, it had not been experienced quite this way. The peace treaty afterward was so poorly wrought that I firmly believe the wars we’re fighting right this minute are a product of this peace.”

A Reunion of Ghosts originated after Mitchell saw a bit of a PBS program featuring Clara Haber, on whom the character Iris is based. Clara did, in fact, kill herself after work by her husband, Fritz Haber, became the basis for chemical warfare during World War I.

“That seemed so dramatic to me. That stayed with me,” Mitchell says. “I tried to work them in as characters in the novel I thought I was working on.”

But gradually, the Haber-​inspired storyline took over. “The more I found out about them, the more I found out about their descendants, the more I became fascinated with this entire family. Finally, I came up with the idea of completely inventing the fourth generation and telling the story from their point of view,” Mitchell says.

Ultimately, the novel became a suicide note from the three sisters, who set their expiration date as December 31, 1999. “It’s also about the 20th century and all the terrible things that go wrong,” Mitchell says with a laugh, “and I kind of dump it on this poor family.” So it seemed fitting, she explains, “to end it with the end of the century.”

Once Mitchell decided to write the novel as a suicide note, it began to flow. Throughout the novel, the sisters refer to themselves as “we,” as though one’s life story is a reflection of all three. It’s an unusual stylistic choice, but one that draws the reader ever closer to the narrators.

“That voice and that format just helped me,” she says. “I wasn’t really influenced by other writers or other books, I really felt like I was kind of alone in a bunker with this family, some of whom were real and some of whom I was inventing, and just had to figure it out on my own.”

The resulting tale recounts the tight-knit relationship of the three sisters and the family’s history of suicides, two of which take place in the Upper West Side apartment in New York City that has been handed down through the generations. (The Alter girls’ grandfather and mother both killed themselves in the master bedroom, which the girls refer to as the “Dead and Dying Room.”) But even with all its darkness, A Reunion of Ghosts is a surprisingly funny novel with three dry but witty women at its heart.

“I totally referred to this as the book that would never sell.” 

“I totally referred to this as the book that would never sell,” Mitchell admits. “Here, it’s a 400-page suicide note, do you want to read it? Yeah, no,” she says with a laugh. “But I couldn’t stop working on it.”

“People say to me, it’s a little dark, and I’m like, well life is a little dark, but we still manage to love and laugh our way through it.”

Although her subject matter isn’t light, Mitchell, who prefers to go by Judy, is as quick to laugh as she is to share literary insight. An hour of conversation with her suggests enthusiasm for her craft and warmth that must spill over into the classroom.

And the classroom is, in fact, an important part of Mitchell’s story. As a child and again in higher education, she encountered teachers who were skeptical that Mitchell could have a career as a writer.

One encouraged her to prepare for life as a secretary instead—a more acceptable profession for girls. Mitchell also encountered professors who believed the world would knock students down, and so the professors took the first swings to help students prepare.

“My philosophy is, the world is going to knock you down, so I’m going to help you get up.” 

“My philosophy is, the world is going to knock you down, so I’m going to help you get up,” Mitchell says. “It’s looking at the same situation but having a completely different way of responding to it. I think artists and writers are big balls of insecurity. The experience of being introverted and yet wanting the whole world to read what you’re writing, it’s very strange. I hit my stride in my 40s, so to tell someone in their 20s that they don’t have it, well, you just don’t know. They may have some growing and living to do.”

But it was also a teacher whose advice gave Mitchell the nerve to pursue such sprawling stories. Pulitzer Prize-winning short story writer James Alan McPherson was among her professors at the acclaimed Iowa Writers Workshop.

“One day, out of the blue, we were in workshop and he looked around and said, ‘Some of you are going to publish books. If you do, I just want to suggest you write about things that are important.’ ”

Without that advice, Mitchell says, she would have written about people much more like herself. “When he said that, it was like giving me permission to write outside my world.”

And of course, the learning process never truly ends. Mitchell continues to seek improvement herself as she balances her roles as writer and teacher.

“I balance it badly. When I’m teaching, I tend to put most of my energy into that, into the teaching and into the huge amount of service that professors have to do to maintain a program,” she says. “I do tend to put my energy into the actual living people who need something from me. The manuscript tends to get back-burnered. Because I’m a novelist, I also feel I need to sink into that world, and it’s hard for me to bounce in and out of it.”

Mitchell says this accounts for the 10-year gap between her first novel, The Last Day of the War, and A Reunion of Ghosts. During that span, Mitchell directed Wisconsin’s MFA program twice and directed its post-graduate program in between. She focuses on her own writing during the summers, and has taken residencies to allow chunks of time for focusing on the book. “I try to write when I can squeeze it in,” she says.

With a third novel under way, Mitchell attempts to set aside non-teaching days as writing days. But her students take precedence; if a student can only meet on that day, Mitchell accommodates them.

“I’m hoping my third book doesn’t take me 10 years, because I will be very old then!” she says.

Students will often say they dream of the life she’s living, but Mitchell cautions them to be careful what they wish for. “Sometimes I think if I were a barista, I would have [written] more books. I tell them that, too,” she says, explaining that writing “is not the way you make your living, it’s what you do because you have to. It’s not that fun sometimes, even . . . but you have a story you’re impelled to tell.”

 

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

The heroines of Judith Claire Mitchell’s engrossing new novel—sisters Vee, Delph and Lady Alter—don’t bear a lot of similarity to their creator. The three were raised with a family legacy of suicide: Their great-grandmother Iris became the first to kill herself after her husband’s chemical inventions were used as World War I weapons.
FictionPopular Fiction

Jojo Moyes

Interview by Carla Jean Whitley

Sometimes a character appears in an author’s imagination fully formed. All the writer needs to do is offer him or her a blank page on which to play.

So it was for British writer Jojo Moyes, who hit the bestseller list in America for the first time with her tear-jerking ninth novel, Me Before You. Will Traynor and Louisa Clark, the central characters in the word-of-mouth hit—which has sold more than 5 million copies since it was published in 2012—came to Moyes fleshed out, ready for action. And as Moyes prepared to revisit Lou in the sequel, After You, that sensation resurfaced. Sometimes, lightning strikes twice.

“It’s the same thing again, where all you have to do is put yourself in a room with a new situation and it’s easy to write,” she says, during a telephone call to her home in London.

This time, the character who hit the ground running is Lily, a teenager who shows up on Lou’s doorstep. Lou has embraced new experiences since Will’s death, including an extended stay in Paris and purchasing a condo in London. But she’s become stuck, unable or unwilling to move forward. 

Lily might provide just the push Lou needs.

“They never left me, those characters. Normally, you move on to something else,” Moyes says. 

This is the first time Moyes, the author of a dozen books, has written a sequel. “I’m wary to be seen as writing [this book] because Me Before You had done so well,” she says. “But literally I had one of those moments where I woke up at 5:30 in the morning and sat bolt upright.”

Even with that epiphany and her so-believable-they-seem-real characters, Moyes says she was well aware of the pressures of writing a sequel as compared to a stand-alone book.

“I felt the weight of expectation. Everything I did in this book, I almost could hear the readers saying, no, I don’t want that to happen!” 

Fear not, readers—Moyes was careful that Lou’s character stayed consistent from the first book to the second. But that means Lou’s decision-making skills remain the same, and she doesn’t always operate in her own best interest.

“Everyone kind of assumed she’d sail off into the sunset and live a new life. But knowing Lou, she’s a sensitive soul. She might do that initially, but what she’d been part of would not be easy to walk away from,” Moyes says.

After You is an immersive experience, inviting readers back into the homes of the characters they fell in love with in Me Before You. They’ll experience the mourning that follows a devastating loss, and the glimmers of hope that propel the brokenhearted forward. And, like Me Before You, After You is a book that is best leapt into without knowing much about the plot, which explains the slight vagueness Moyes uses when discussing it.

“It’s partly a book about what happens when you’re left in the wake of somebody else’s decision, whether that be a divorce or the decision for someone to take their own life,” Moyes says. “I’m always fascinated by the way people are entitled to follow their own path.”

While Lou remains a central character, readers will again visit the Clark and Traynor families in all their glory. The quirky Clarks serve as a lighthearted counterpoint to the grief-laden Traynors, whose marriage has crumbled after the loss of their son. Will’s death weighs heavy, and his presence permeates After You as his loved ones make decisions informed by his life—or their loss.  “[T]he moment you opened the box, let out even a whisper of your sadness, it would mushroom into a cloud that overwhelmed all other conversation,” Lou thinks as she tries to decide how much to tell a new acquaintance about her past.

From that, readers might draw lessons of their own. Moyes is a believer in the power of fiction to change hearts and minds. “Everything I’ve learned, I’ve learned from fiction,” she says. “One of the greatest things you learn from fiction is empathy. If you can’t empathize with someone else’s position, it makes a rigid adult.”

She’s not concerned with maintaining appearances with regard to what she reads; recent titles include a thriller by fellow Brit Lee Child and Humans of New York by Brandon Stanton, a collection of photo essays based on the blog of the same name.

Nor is Moyes worried about how her own work is classified. “I’ve never pretended that my books are literary fiction. But what I do believe is you can write commercial fiction that is quality. I know what I put into my books, how hard I work with the language, to make sure everything has a proper rhythm,” she says.

If sales are anything to go by, Moyes has accomplished that goal. Though her novels are serious page-turners and cover a wide range of topics and time periods, they all contain memorable characters and resonant themes.

Moyes is a hard worker as well; she’s published almost a novel per year since she first started writing in 2002. Now that After You is out in the world, the author is planning on taking a bit of a writing break.

“I’m not going to think about writing another book until the end of the year. I just don’t have the mental space,” she says. 

She’s been busy with movies recently: The film adaptation of Me Before You, which stars Emilia Clark (“Game of Thrones”) as Lou and Sam Claflin (The Hunger Games) as Will, is set to debut next June, and Moyes has a screenwriting credit. 

“I’m also moving house. Before I spoke to you, I spent an hour painting a floor. I thought to myself, oh, the glamorous life of an international bestseller,” Moyes adds, laughing.

In the meantime, she’s looking forward to taking her three children along for the After You American book tour. 

“American audiences are so demonstrative. English audiences are usually not as demonstrative,” Moyes says. (She has carried observations like these into her work; in After You, Moyes writes of Lou’s reaction to Will’s father: “If he had been anybody else I might have hugged him just then, but we were English and he had once been my boss of sorts, so we simply smiled awkwardly at each other.”)

There’s one more national difference that’s pretty important to a best-selling author like Moyes.

“In the United States, if they ask how many books you’ve sold, you say 5 million copies, and they break into applause. In England, they’re like, oh, stop showing off.

 

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

Sometimes a character appears in an author’s imagination fully formed. All the writer needs to do is offer him or her a blank page on which to play.
Mystery & SuspenseSuspense

Lisa Jackson

Interview by Carla Jean Whitley

When rising star Allie Kramer goes missing and her stunt double is shot on the set of her latest film, Allie’s sister, struggling actress Cassie Kramer, is considered a person of interest. The sisters have already been through more than their share of drama after a killer stalked them and their once-famous mother, and Cassie has never been the same. But she’s determined to find Allie, despite their strained relationship.

Combining the hot genre of dark, female-driven suspense (think The Girl on the Train) with the evergreen topic of sibling rivalry, Lisa Jackson’s After She’s Gone takes readers along for the chase as Cassie tries to solve the mystery of her sister’s disappearance.

Jackson’s new thriller is a long-awaited follow-up to two of her most popular books: The West Coast Series’ Deep Freeze (2005) and Fatal Burn (2006), which are being reissued in new mass-market editions to coincide with the release of the latest book in the series.

Jackson, who has published 37 books with Kensington and has almost 20 million copies of her books in print, knows something about sisters—she periodically collaborates with her real-life sister, fellow bestseller Nancy Bush. Jackson talked to us about the role of sisters in After She’s Gone, as well as the source for her energetic writing.

A pair of sisters is at the heart of this story, and you have a close relationship with your sister—one I assume does not parallel the story of Cassie and Allie! How does your relationship with your sister influence your writing?
When we were growing up, there was some sibling rivalry, but we were always pretty close. There were a couple of years between us, and in high school I would say, oh, do I have to hang out with Nancy? [Now] we only have each other. I’ve talked to her four times today and been over to her house once, and it’s only 11 o’clock. 

My sister and I think a lot alike, although we play off each other’s strengths and weaknesses. For example, I’m the worst with typos. She notices those. She balances her checkbook to the penny. If my checkbook is kind of close, it’s good enough. 

Conversely, I’ve always said I’m a big picture person. I am very much, and Nancy is a detail person.

How do you and Nancy determine which projects to collaborate on?
The first book we ever wrote was a collaboration with another gal and it never went anywhere, and that was 35 years ago. About 10 years ago, we were on a road trip and we said, let’s do something together a little different than what we would usually write. [The Wicked series] had a paranormal aspect—all these sisters who have been sequestered away. Let’s give them all a gift and play with that. We had so much fun. 

Sometimes it’s a grind, but we try to keep having fun and mix it up a little bit to keep it fresh. We’ve been at this for 37 years. When we had children it was easier because we were more hip, the kids were more hip. Now I have grandchildren, and they’re a little too young to be hip. They’re 5 and under, and they’re not cool yet.

With After She’s Gone, you’ve returned to your West Coast Series. Why did you go back to this story almost 10 years after the publication of the first two books?
I love the characters. I loved writing Deep Freeze and Fatal Burn. The series was very popular, my editor [John Scognamiglio] loved it, and he wanted to see where the girls were today. . . . I ended Deep Freeze with a cliffhanger that I wanted to go into the next book. Then John brought it up again and said, ‘What if we have a stalker and he really likes Hollywood.’ I said, ‘John, that’s Deep Freeze. We can’t do that again!’

I wanted to flip it. I wanted it to be about the sisters and the rivalry. I read Deep Freeze and Fatal Burn again and thought, what am I going to do to these sisters to make them hate each other? It was a switch. It was a challenge. But I also had a lot of fun with it. 


Jackson celebrates 20 years at Kensington with her editor, John Scognamiglio.

It sure seems like you enjoyed writing After She’s Gone.
I felt like this book had a lot of energy. . . . If I have high energy in my life, it translates in the book I’m writing. 

How do you pursue that invigoration in your life?
My life is never dull. That’s not by choice. I have lots and lots of interests. I have a big interest in my family and my grandchildren and the generation above me, which is falling left and right now. I have business interests and I have charitable interests. I have friends that I don’t get to see enough of. I have a very, very busy life. I think that energy translates. 

I don’t get in my chair—which I used to, but I can’t do it anymore—and just sit down and let the day unroll. Now I feel like I have to exercise three times a week because you can’t put it off. You can put it off in your 30s and 40s, but you can’t in your 50s and 60s because [stuff] falls apart.

I read a lot, I watch TV, I read the newspapers. I have more story ideas filed away than I have years in my life left.

 

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

Combining the hot genre of dark, female-driven suspense (think The Girl on the Train) with the evergreen topic of sibling rivalry, Lisa Jackson’s After She’s Gone takes readers along for the chase as Cassie tries to solve the mystery of her sister’s disappearance.
Fiction

Alice Hoffman

Interview by Carla Jean Whitley

Bestselling author Alice Hoffman returns to contemporary fiction with Faithful, a heartrending coming-of-age story.

In the novel, teenager Shelby Richmond must try to rebuild her life after a car accident leaves her best friend, Helene, in a vegetative state. We talked to Hoffman, who has published more than 25 novels for adults and teens, about love, grief, postcards and Paul McCartney.

Faithful leaves readers feeling as though they’ve spent time with Shelby and her family and friends. Is there a teenager or young woman in your life who in some way inspired Shelby and her friends?
I think there’s a bit of Shelby in every woman and girl. For me, she’s her own person—one I fell in love with despite her troubles and hard times. And I think her relationship with her mother, Sue, is very relatable to everyone who has ever had a difficult daughter, or been one.

The postcards Shelby receives throughout Faithful serve as tangible words of encouragement. Do you keep such encouraging messages around you? 
I always think words can get us through the toughest times—it may not be postcards for me personally, but it is books. Books have been a survival mechanism for me—a life raft, and so I think it’s fitting that words help to save Shelby.

Have you ever had a pen pal? What role did that person’s correspondence play in your life?
I wrote to Paul McCartney but he never wrote back! My professor of writing and his wife, also a writer, were my mentors. We wrote to each other for nearly 30 years and I treasured their letters.

Dogs also play a significant role in this story. Were you inspired by pets in your life?
Growing up, my dog was the “person” I related to most. I’ve always had dogs and can’t imagine my life without them. In fact, I named my most recent dog “Shelby” after Shelby in Faithful.

Your books often deal with place, and lately you’ve shared a number of pictures of lovely places on your social media channels. Where do you feel most at home? Most creative?
I love the Cape, and Manhattan, and Paris, and so many other places. But to write I just need a chair anywhere.

You’re a prolific writer, capable of turning out deeply felt, thoughtful novels at a rate of sometimes one per year. What are your writing habits? 
I tend to write early in the day, and I set my alarm to do so. I outline, and I rewrite and rewrite, many drafts. I have a few people I trust who are my earliest readers.

What are you working on next?
I’m very excited to be working on the prequel to my novel Practical Magic, called The Rules of Magic. It takes place in New York City in the 1960s and follows the lives of the aunts in Practical Magic. It was great fun to write, and, I hope, to read.

 

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

Bestselling author Alice Hoffman returns to contemporary fiction with Faithful, a heartrending coming-of-age story.
FictionFamily Saga

Laurie Frankel

Interview by Carla Jean Whitley

Novelist Laurie Frankel has a track record of writing stories that are sensitive and deeply felt. With her latest, This Is How It Always Is, she takes that to a new level. The story follows a family whose youngest child is born a boy, but in kindergarten becomes known instead as Poppy. It's a timely subject, but also one that hits close to home; Frankel's daughter is also a transgender child.

The novel will make readers think, and may challenge some preconceived notions about transgender people. BookPage spoke to Frankel about the process of writing a story that has some obvious parallels with her own.

As the mother of a transgender child, you had a deep personal connection to this novel. Why did you feel compelled to write it now?
Now is an exciting time to be talking about these issues because, for the first time in history, lots of transgender kids and adults are coming out to acceptance, understanding, and celebration from their loved ones and communities. Great strides have been made. Horizons have widened. More and more people around the world are starting to see gender as a broad and complex spectrum along which there are infinite wonderful possibilities. But now is also a critical time to be talking about these issues. Legislators all over the country are proposing bills to restrict and remove transgender people’s rights and indeed safety. They’re doing it with lies. They’re doing it with cruelty. They are making the world are meaner, harder, scarier, less fair, more dangerous place for all of us, trans and otherwise. So part of the reason to write this book right now is to spread the love, spread the understanding, spread the truth and combat the other stuff.

Why did you choose to fictionalize your experience rather than writing a memoir?
Well, the easy answer is I am a novelist, not a memoirist. I love fiction. I believe in fiction. And I also believe fiction is truer than memoir. Just because it didn’t actually happen doesn’t make it less true. Fiction allows you to tell the stories that should happen, with the perfect arrangement of events and characters and relationships, rather than the imperfect ones that actually do happen. It’s also true that I am keen to protect my kid’s privacy. And frankly, thankfully, our own story is pretty boring and plot-free—great for living, poor for book-writing, so I got to make it up instead. Transgender identity can be a difficult concept for some people to grasp.

What is one thing you wish people understood about children like Poppy?
Actually, I wish people understood that children who aren’t like Poppy are in fact just like Poppy. All kids are average in some ways and outliers in others. All kids conform sometimes and struggle others. All kids face challenges and change unpredictably and grow in directions other than the ones their parents imagined. And all should be loved and honored and celebrated for who they are. This is how it always is. Over the course of the novel, Poppy grows to be older than your own daughter and faces medical questions regarding puberty.

All kids face challenges and change unpredictably and grow in directions other than the ones their parents imagined. This is how it always is.

How did you research the medical implications of the story?
My friend Carol Cassella is a great novelist and also a great doctor, and she helped me with the medical stuff for this book, though mostly I needed her assistance with the hospital scenes because the mom in the book is an emergency room physician (and I am very much not). The medical questions for transgender kids are important and complex but fairly comprehensible for a layperson. I read books. I read studies. I went to conferences and consulted experts. I met a lot of people. I asked a lot of questions. I listened. There’s a lot of information available now. I took in as much as possible.

I'm always curious about process. Did writing a book so close to home come quickly or was it more challenging? This book wrote pretty smoothly. Who knows why? Some books come easy; some come hard. It didn’t feel so close to home while I was writing it because in my head it’s so made up. The family in the book looks nothing like mine. Poppy is really nothing like my kid. From the outside, they seem so close. But because I know them both so well—and because for one of them I consciously made up every single thing—they don’t seem alike to me at all. As you say, for most of the book, Poppy’s older than my child, so writing her was very much an act of imagination.

Sibling dynamics are an important part of the novel, with the four brothers reacting in different ways to decisions their parents make regarding Poppy. And of course, those dynamics can be an important part of our life stories. You're the mother of one child. Do you have siblings yourself? Did your experience growing up with them inform this part of the story?
I have one sister. We were nothing like the horde of boys in this novel. The large family was part of the original idea for this book though. Lots of the details come later in the process, but that wasn’t one of them; that one was in the seed of the thing. For a while, I couldn’t decide whether I wanted them to be boys or girls, but I knew I wanted five siblings from the get-go, even though I also knew it would be hard to fully develop all those characters (and it was). So many siblings allowed me to explore how growing up is tough for everyone—in different ways but no matter what. All kids surprise you, need accommodation sometimes, love and understanding always.

The idea of finding community and sharing answers and questions and secrets and stories is the reason I write books.

The notion of finding community and answers by sharing our secrets is powerful. Did that come to you in the process of writing, or was that idea what set you on this path?
The idea of finding community and sharing answers and questions and secrets and stories is the reason I write books. It’s also the reason I read them (and I do so voraciously). There has maybe never been a more important time to find commonalities with one another, to read lives and perspectives which are different from our own, to seek strength in our communities, to share our stories. Those are the ideas that set me not just on this path but on all my paths.

What are you working on next? I’m at work on a new novel, which I’m not talking about yet I’m afraid (writers are superstitious like that), and making plans for the one after that. I’m also writing lots of essays around This Is How It Always Is to answer some of the very important, very timely questions like the sort you pose (and thank you so much for doing so). I think for the most part people’s curiosity about this topic comes from a place of love and recognition so I am eager to answer questions, share stories and talk about how great these kids are. So thanks for asking!

 

ALSO IN BOOKPAGE: Read our review of This Is How It Always Is.

Novelist Laurie Frankel has a track record of writing stories that are sensitive and deeply felt. With her latest, This Is How It Always Is, she takes that to a new level. The story follows a family whose youngest child is born a boy, but in kindergarten becomes known instead as Poppy. It's a timely subject, but also one that hits close to home; Frankel's daughter is also a transgender child.

NonfictionLiteratureArts & Culture

Anne Boyd Rioux

Interview by Carla Jean Whitley

In the loving and extensively researched Meg, Jo, Beth, Amy, Anne Boyd Rioux explores the history and enduring power of Louisa May Alcott’s Little Women on the 150th anniversary of its publication. In a Q&A with Rioux, we asked her about her own relationship with Alcott’s novel, the March sisters and other female authors of the era. 

You first read Little Women in your 20s. What led you to the book at this time? How did it affect you upon first reading?
I first read Little Women in graduate school. It was assigned in a course on American literary realism as a kind of companion piece to Adventures of Huckleberry Finn. It meant a lot to me then to read about Jo’s literary ambitions and her conviction, as she says at the end of the book, that she believes she will write better books one day for her experiences as a wife and mother. When my daughter was born about 10 years later, I gave her the middle name Josephine, so obviously it really stayed with me.

When and why did Little Women become a subject of scholarship?
It was largely ignored by academics, who were mostly male, until feminist critics began to establish themselves in the 1970s. The first truly scholarly examination was in 1975 in Patricia Meyer Spacks’ The Female Imagination. Then Judith Fetterley’s essay “Little Women: Alcott’s Civil War,” published in the journal Feminist Studies in 1979, really showed what could be done in an extended analysis that applied the new tools of feminist criticism to Alcott’s novel. Ever since, the novel has proven to be a rich text for scholars using a wide variety of approaches, including Marxist criticism, cultural studies and queer theory.

Which March sister do you find the most relatable? 
Jo always meant the most to me. Her ambitions made her the kind of foremother I needed—someone who had grappled in the mid-19th century with the same things I was still grappling with in the late-20th century.

Why isn’t Little Women included on more teachers’ syllabi?
To put it quite simply, because it’s viewed as a book for girls. There is no room in today’s classrooms, (as far as I can tell from national surveys, what teachers across the county have told me, and my own knowledge about schools in my area) for books about girls—unless they focus on other issues such as civil rights or the Holocaust, as is the case with To Kill a Mockingbird and The Diary of Anne Frank. Teachers feel as if they have to teach books about boys because they believe boys won’t read about girls, but girls don’t mind reading about boys. As one school librarian told me, there is a lot of concern with making sure that students read books from the perspective of other cultures, races, socioeconomic backgrounds, etc., but no one appears to be concerned that boys aren’t reading books about the other half of the population. As I talk about in Meg, Jo, Beth, Amy, there is plenty of evidence that boys can and will read Little Women and other books about girls if we help them overcome the stigma attached to all things female and feminine. And that is a larger project that will benefit boys and girls.

How have you seen your own students impacted as they study the novel at a collegiate level?
I’ve seen a range of responses. Initially, they are dismayed at its length (nearly 500 pages), and some wonder why we were reading a children’s book (until I remind them that Huck Finn is a children’s book, and it’s often taught in college literature courses). But once we start reading Little Women, they grow attached to the March sisters and Laurie and find themselves quite invested in the choices they are making as they mature. They realize that the book is dealing with some of the same life choices they are also facing, so it isn’t the children’s book they were expecting. Although I did have one male student who obviously refused to even buy the book, I’ve also found that many of the men are as affected by it as the female students. One man came into class very upset the day we read the part where Jo turns down Laurie. Another wrote in his final response that even though he was a 30-year-old man, he was so glad to have read the book and was sorry it was over.

In Meg, Jo, Beth, Amy, you write about literary heroines who have followed in Jo March’s path. Is there one character in this tradition whom you find the most appealing?
Rory Gilmore, from the television series Gilmore Girls, is particularly interesting because we see her grow and develop over the course of about seven years. The summer my daughter spent binge-watching the series on Netflix, I realized that Rory was to her what Jo March has been for generations—she was a touchstone, a girl whose personality, experiences and life choices my daughter could identify with, measure herself against and learn from. And Rory’s choices aren’t always what we’d want them to be, just as Jo’s weren’t. But it’s the way that girls and young women see themselves reflected in these characters and how they judge and compare themselves to them that really interests me.

You’ve written extensively about Alcott’s contemporaries, including Constance Fenimore Woolson. Who are other female writers of the era you believe merit more recognition?
There are many, but I will mention particularly Fanny Fern, Elizabeth Stoddard, Sui Sin Far and Zitkala-Sa. And when we examine the writings of women from these earlier eras, we need to be able to evaluate them on their own terms as well as ours. Looking back and expecting women writers to conform to our contemporary ideas of what makes great writing is not going to help us understand the paths that earlier women writers have forged. Each of these writers is available in print with introductions or essays that can help put them into the context in which they lived and wrote. I highly recommend them!

Why do you believe it’s valuable to tell the stories of these 19th-century female writers?
In addition to the fact that if we forget the past we are in danger of repeating it, I’m also concerned that so many women writers today seem to feel, as Virginia Woolf did in the 1920s, that there isn’t much of a tradition behind them. Or they might not want to think of themselves as belonging to a separate tradition of female writers. But it’s important to recognize that they aren’t the first women writers to feel that way and to struggle to belong to an American literary tradition. There have been many who’ve been there before and whose legacies have been forgotten, ignored or suppressed. I see women writers today struggling with many of the same issues that early women writers did: wondering if they can combine their lives as writers with motherhood, trying to assert their value as writers and not only as women writers, pushing against male critics’ expectations, and resenting the bias they feel directed toward them as women writers. How can we move beyond these issues if we don’t recognize how long-standing they are and continually repress them as each new generation of women writers is largely forgotten?

What’s next for you?
I’ve actually become very interested in a forgotten woman writer from the 20th century: Kay Boyle. I have the same feeling when I read her stories as I did about Constance Fenimore Woolson’s—namely, why don’t I know her, why is she not read today, and what can I do about it? For now, I’d like to help get more of her incredible stories into print. She wrote about the rise of fascism in Europe, the German occupation of France and the aftermath of World War II in Germany. Her stories make you feel as if you are right there living the experience with her. I’ve never read anything like them.

Author photo by Jennifer Zdon.

In the loving and extensively researched Meg, Jo, Beth, Amy, Anne Boyd Rioux explores the history and enduring power of Louisa May Alcott’s Little Women on the 150th anniversary of its publication. In a Q&A with Rioux, we asked her about her own relationship with Alcott’s novel, the March sisters and other female authors of the era. 

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