Deanna Larson

Fiction

Sara Gruen

Interview by Deanna Larson

The bright, infectiously enthusiastic Sara Gruen couldn’t be further from the seedy circus subculture portrayed in Water for Elephants, her blockbuster novel that’s getting the Hollywood treatment in an eagerly anticipated new movie.

The story of Jacob Jankowski, an orphaned veterinary student who runs away with the circus and falls in love with sequined star Marlena, thrums with tension and violence, and odd unexpected moments of kindness and unsentimental love, too. The book’s scope and bittersweet atmosphere made it a natural for a feature film adaptation, and the project landed a top-notch cast, including stars Reese Witherspoon and Robert Pattinson. The movie opens in theaters around the world on April 22.

Water for Elephants, which has sold more than 4 million copies to date, was a surprise hit by a little-known author when it was first published in 2006. As excitement for the movie builds, sales of the book are skyrocketing once again, with more than 800,000 copies shipped by publisher Algonquin within the last month.

“It was a very visual experience to write,” Gruen says of the novel. “Strangely, it felt like I was watching a movie. I get to a place where I don’t feel like I’m creating, but recording and capturing it. I’m smelling and hearing all of these things. I feel physically there.”

“If I’m going to spend eight hours a day in a fictional world, I would like to have an animal there as well.”

“My biggest fear as a writer is boring my readers,” Gruen says. “One of my philosophies as a novelist is to ratchet up the tension wherever possible.”

The story is packed with tension and contrasts, from the central love story of Jacob and the married Marlena and their deep connection with abused circus animals, to the camaraderie of a desperate band of strangers doing dirty and often undignified and difficult circus work.

“It was a very fraught time,” Gruen says of the early 20th-century traveling circuses. Both humans and animals were pushed to their limits to sell more tickets and line the pockets of the circus owners. The story features a pachyderm heroine named Rosie and other nameless and victimized animals that act as a kind of wordless Greek chorus to the events happening under the canvas.

Growing up in Canada, Gruen hadn’t even been to a circus before researching the book, but its details feel utterly authentic, especially the human-animal interactions.

“Animals play such an important role in my real world,” says Gruen, who is active in rescue efforts and lives with horses, dogs, cats and other creatures—along with her husband and children—in North Carolina. “If I’m going to spend eight hours a day in a fictional world, I would like to have an animal there as well.”

Despite the sometimes ugly history of circus animals, Gruen made sure that their filmic counterparts were treated well when she signed the movie contract. A stampede and other crucial scenes were produced with a green screen in the film, Gruen says, and she made sure that American Humane Society guidelines were followed on set. She insisted that no apes were used, since they suffer the most from being used in the entertainment industry, according to Gruen (whose most recent novel, Ape House, portrays a fictional ape laboratory).

Gruen and her entire family have cameos in the movie. Her big moment comes when Robert Pattinson (as Jacob) brushes past her during a tense scene with a runaway circus animal. “I’m the astonished woman watching an elephant [Rosie] steal produce!” she says.

Grateful for her “once in a lifetime experience” of spending a few days on a Hollywood set, Gruen was also “absolutely blown away” by the “fabulous” script for the film, by Oscar-nominated screenwriter Richard LaGravenese.

“He combined a few scenes and combined a few characters and it works,” Gruen says. “There are places where it veers away from the book, but then it comes back. I’m really excited to see it.”

The filmmakers invited Gruen to see the tents of the Benzini Brothers Most Spectacular Show on Earth set at the end of the production. “When we drove up over the berm, and there was the Benzini Brothers, I was speechless,” she says. “I still can’t really describe it—just knowing that it was all in my head five years ago . . . it was amazing.”

Gruen and her family are attending the film premiere April 17 in New York City. “Nobody’s going to be looking at the author, but I’ll be there,” she says. “My husband threatens to wear a 20-year-old suit, my oldest son wants to wear a gorilla suit, but me—I want to look glamorous.”

Gruen will have to gear up for the additional wave of popularity that the film will no doubt bring. “It’s still sinking in,” she says of her runaway bestseller, a favorite of book clubs across the country. “I am absolutely flabbergasted. I have no idea why it resonated the way it did.”

For a writer who estimated the chance of getting published at two percent but got a phenomenon instead, this traveling literary circus shows no sign of pulling up stakes and leaving the station any time soon.

The bright, infectiously enthusiastic Sara Gruen couldn’t be further from the seedy circus subculture portrayed in Water for Elephants, her blockbuster novel that’s getting the Hollywood treatment in an eagerly anticipated new movie.

The story of Jacob Jankowski, an orphaned veterinary student who runs away…

Anderson Cooper

Interview by Deanna Larson
He reports, he anchors, he blogs, he gets emotional. Wait, pause. Rewind. Old-school newsmen aren't supposed to react or feel, but Anderson Cooper is a new breed of journalist. He engages with the facts while being "emotionally accessible" to viewers.
 
Cooper says his job is to report what he sees, pursue the facts and demand accountability, but he rejects the idea—especially after Hurricane Katrina—that journalists can remain impassive while observing complex current events.
"The notion that one can see all this stuff and not have it affect you in some way is false," Cooper says. Emotions during war or in the wake of a disaster are palpable, he says, adding that he "wanted to honor that. It felt real. . . . That's part of the story, the emotions that people are going through and that you are going through."
 
Speaking from his car as he prepares to broadcast his nightly CNN show "Anderson Cooper 360" live from Nogales, Arizona, the "ground zero" of illegal immigration (he later wrote in his CNN blog, "It's fascinating to see the border patrol in action up close. For all the talk in Washington, this is where the rhetoric meets reality"), the unpretentious Cooper practically vibrates with the impulse to capture every intense or unspeakable detail of the stories he has covered in his award-winning broadcast career.
 
And he breaks through the "television artifice" and examines the tragedies of both his personal and professional lives and his nearly self-destructive desire to witness the world's worst in his new book, Dispatches from the Edge: A Memoir of War, Disasters and Survival.
 
"It's easy to overwrite, especially with this material," Cooper says. The son of iconic American fashion designer Gloria Vanderbilt, Cooper experienced his own personal destruction after the death of his father and the suicide of his brother. "I tried to strip it away as much as possible and keep it as real as possible."
 
Dispatches from the Edge is a terse, spare script narrating highlights of Cooper's career written from journals he has kept and a document of the personal losses that he couldn't admit to himself even as he witnessed and recorded the shared anguish of whole communities and countries.
 
Cooper got an unorthodox start in the business, graduating from Yale with a political science degree, then boarding planes without assignments, armed only with a home video camera and running toward what repulsed him most, driven by a sense that he had to "figure these things out."
 
"I felt my options were limited," he says. "It was less about trying to make a career for myself and more about trying to understand things about myself and the way the world worked. I was willing to take a lot of risks to make it happen."
 
Cooper eventually sold his work to Channel One News, ABC News and then CNN, covering the Bosnian civil war, famine in Somalia, elections in Iraq, genocide and starvation in Africa, and later, Sri Lanka after the tsunami and New Orleans and the Gulf Coast after Hurricane Katrina.
 
The memoir gives readers a behind-the-scenes look at many topics and moments Cooper can't explore in depth on TV ("I'm continually disappointed . . . it's tragic when what you see isn't transmitted completely") like the building in Sri Lanka apparently exhibiting a photography exhibit—until closer inspection reveals that these are gruesome pictures of hundreds of bodies being stored at the makeshift morgue before burial in mass graves, taken as a record for families still searching for their loved ones. Or the woman in Louisiana who tries to keep a beached seal alive after the hurricane by throwing cups of water over its skin—until police shoot the animal in the head after she leaves.
 
Working in post-hurricane New Orleans and Mississippi, where his father spent some of his life, surrounded by "all these places I had been to as a child with my father," Cooper found a way to honor his own personal traumas while recording senseless tragedy.
 
"It's easy to become overwhelmed by the things you see in the news," he says. "What I've learned, and what gives me hope, is that people are capable of anything. They're capable of horrific brutalities but also amazing acts of kindness."

 

He reports, he anchors, he blogs, he gets emotional. Wait, pause. Rewind. Old-school newsmen aren't supposed to react or feel, but Anderson Cooper is a new breed of journalist. He engages with the facts while being "emotionally accessible" to viewers.
 
Cooper says his job…
LifestylesHealth & Fitness

Mireille Guiliano

Interview by Deanna Larson

Big grins will break out on faces across America when readers check out the diet menus devised by Mireille Guiliano for French Women for All Seasons: A Year of Secrets, Recipes and Pleasure, the sequel to her surprise bestseller, French Women Don’t Get Fat.

Chocolate, champagne, cauliflower gratin, duck breasts with honey glaze, pork chops with apples this isn’t crash dieting, but a liberating philosophy that imbues life and eating with joy, satisfaction and sensory sensation. Guiliano has already received thousands of e-mails describing how her approach has created newly minted Francophiles with a fresh way of seeing the world.

"The best compliment is from friends who say the book is like having a conversation with you," Guiliano says with an accent full of the energy and charm that fill her books. "I write like I speak . . . and I speak my mind."   Fans of the first book will recall that Guiliano gorged on pastries and became chubby while in America as an exchange student, and began her quest to lose the weight after a blunt comment from her father ("You look like a sack of potatoes") upon her return home to France.

Enlisting the help of family physician Dr. Miracle, Guiliano reacquainted herself with fresh, homemade food and revisited the tenets her mother and grandmother taught her about tiny indulgences. She eventually returned, svelte and stylish, to the U.S., married an American and landed a job as CEO of Veuve Clicquot, the venerable champagne house established during the French Revolution with Barbe-Nicole Clicquot Ponsardin, an equally impressive female, at the helm. Before Guiliano ever thought of writing a book, however, women often noted that while she traveled the world, entertained constantly and was passionate about food and wine, she didn’t become fat. Not wanting to share her personal history ("I couldn’t say been there done that," she says) she would instead shrug in the French way and say offhandedly that French women don’t get fat.

After her co-workers and friends begged her for more specific advice and began to lose weight with her approach, a Francophile friend finally persuaded Guiliano over lunch in a Paris café to sit down and write about what she had taught them.

French Women for All Seasons presents more easy recipes from family and friends featuring fresh, seasonal ingredients, along with Guiliano’s recommendations for adding gentle exercise and simple, sensual pleasures throughout the day, from dressing and working to relaxing, eating and entertaining (she even shares the secrets of tying scarves à la Francaise).

"The first one is about joie de vivre,"  Guiliano says of her books,  "the second about the art of living." Guiliano’s cheerful confidence and flair have made her popular on the speaking circuit where she presents her ideas to women’s groups and college students, and continues to inspire readers of both sexes and all ages to shed pounds and tons of anxiety. "I’ve learned a lot since the first book came out,"  she says.  "People like being made aware of quality and freshness." Call it natural female suspicion, or looking for evidence of theory in action, but women are now scrutinizing every detail of Guiliano’s life ("Oh, yes, it’s crazy,"  she says) as she moves from continent to continent, from green market to café to charity cocktail function, watching what she buys and eats for proof that her secrets really work.

And it does: The balance of indulgences and compensations can lead to good health, and she often hears comments that "it’s a shame that it had to come from someone outside the culture,"  Guiliano says. Americans apparently needed to hear the message from someone representing a culture known for its rigorous dedication to aesthetics flabby and fat is something the French won’t abide, even in their pigeons. "If I were a sociologist or anthropologist, I could write about it,"  she laughs. But Guiliano somehow manages to turn unrealistic European standards into a gentle, non-recriminatory exercise in living well in her two sensible guides.  "When you desire it, eat a rich crepe take the time to savor it and eat it with pleasure. Eating on autopilot is the biggest no-no,"  Guiliano says.  "Don’t deprive your body, because we all know everything is in the mind."

"And,"  she finishes with characteristic, no-nonsense flair, "it’s just not necessary."  

Deanna Larson writes from Nashville.

 

Big grins will break out on faces across America when readers check out the diet menus devised by Mireille Guiliano for French Women for All Seasons: A Year of Secrets, Recipes and Pleasure, the sequel to her surprise bestseller, French Women Don't Get Fat.

Fiction

Mitch Albom

Interview by Deanna Larson

Like many legendary sports writers before him, Mitch Albom embodies that plain-spoken but big-hearted guy you want to bear hug, then buy a beer. Not like Albom needs the favor: The sports journalist and radio host wrote Tuesdays with Morrie, a memoir about his relationship with his dying college professor that spent four years on the New York Times bestseller list and became the best-selling memoir of all time an outcome that Albom never anticipated.

"The stories that I write, people seem to be able to grab onto as their own," says Albom, who often encounters people with their own Morrie stories at his signings. "It was my story, but they read it and applied it to their own life. I just wrote it to pay Morrie’s medical bills. It was more of an obligation than anything else. . . . The only way I knew I’d be able to help is if I wrote something."

Albom felt paralyzed when he realized that all people wanted for his follow-up was "Wednesdays with Morrie or Chicken Soup with Morrie. I kept saying I didn’t write the book to become a self-help author, and I didn’t write the book to become a guru, and I’m not gonna turn it into a franchise. That would be wrong, and I don’t think Morrie would be very proud of me." Always imagining he’d create things from scratch like novels, plays or movies, Albom decided that the time was right to tackle fiction. "I figured I needed to live long enough to observe things for real before I could start making them up," he says. But halfway through the process, Albom realized that setting a novel in heaven didn’t make for the easiest debut.

"It doesn’t follow the old ‘write what you know’ axiom, does it?" Albom laughs. That long-awaited work, The Five People You Meet in Heaven, became the most successful American hardback fiction debut ever, according to albom.com, selling more than 8 million copies worldwide. His new novel, For One More Day, is another book with supernatural overtones that hit the top of the bestseller lists within a week of its October publication. It has also sold more than 45,000 copies at Starbucks across the country and once again has hit a universal chord.

"That isn’t something I intend," he says. "I just write stories. I don’t think a whole lot about it. I just write them to move me. I figure if I can’t feel something . . . then nobody else will." The novel begins with washed-up baseball player Chuck Chick Benetto telling his life story to a sports reporter, starting from the moment he decided to kill himself. This attempt—like his former sports career, marriage, fatherhood and role as son—seemed a failure. But instead of a cowardly ending, Chick enters a dreamlike realm where he encounters his late mother and gets to share a final day with her, discovering family secrets, the reason his father abandoned the family, and finally saying all he wished he had said to her when she was alive.

Like many newspapermen-turned-novelists before him, Albom concentrates on character and storytelling and doesn’t torture himself over fancy technique or plots." I guess if you’re writing detective novels it’s all about plot or what will happen next," he says, "but you’re searching for something that gives you a shiver or brings a tear to your eye. You can’t force it." Albom’s favored themes of regret, forgiveness and redemption permeate his modern fables, along with the importance of caring as much about yourself on the way down as you did on the way up, and ring true with audiences young and old. But his book career almost stalled as publisher after publisher turned down the Tuesdays manuscript. One large publishing house even told Albom that he wasn’t capable of writing a memoir, "that I didn’t understand what a memoir was," Albom says."I never forget that nobody wanted that book."

The lessons learned writing for newspapers compact stories with emotional punch might make traditional publishers cringe, but those qualities have made Albom’s titles household names. " It’s hard to write short," Albom says. "People always think, they’re such small books, they can’t be significant. I think it’s a lot harder to write short than write long." Albom has already tackled blockbuster books, made-for-television movies (the Oprah-produced, Emmy award winner Tuesdays with Morrie and the screenplay for The Five People You Meet in Heaven) and plays (the off-Broadway adaptation of Tuesdays with Morrie). He’s even performed with the The Rock Bottom Remainders, a band featuring fellow writers Stephen King, Dave Barry, Scott Turow, Amy Tan and Ridley Pearson. Can Hollywood be far behind?

"I’ve been approached to do a number of sports movies and even came close on a couple," Albom says. No doubt he’ll be patient and wait for the right pitch before knocking it out of the park. "I do know how it looks," Albom says of the sports milieu he’s spent much of his life describing. "And that’s the key for Hollywood movies: how it looks, how it feels and what they say. I do have a lot of that knowledge and it would be silly to throw it away. "

 

Like many legendary sports writers before him, Mitch Albom embodies that plain-spoken but big-hearted guy you want to bear hug, then buy a beer. Not like Albom needs the favor: The sports journalist and radio host wrote Tuesdays with Morrie, a memoir about his…

FictionWomen's Fiction

Jill Conner Browne

Interview by Deanna Larson

Jill Conner Browne, the self-appointed Sweet Potato Queen, captured hearts from the start with her outrageously outspoken debut, The Sweet Potato Queens' Book of Love, which documented her exploits with a bunch of gal pals in Jackson, Mississippi, including taking over the local St. Patrick's Day parade dressed in green sequins and long gloves. Her best-selling, Southern-fried empire now features a series of books including The Sweet Potato Queen's Field Guide to Men: Every Man I Love Is Either Married, Gay or Dead; a stage musical in development, with book by Rupert Holmes, music by Melissa Manchester and lyrics by noted songwriter Sharon Vaughn; a reality show pitch; and a website with gaudy spud stuff. Doing so well for herownself, Browne celebrates the publication of The Sweet Potato Queens' First Big-Ass Novel by answering questions that many Queens-in-training want answered but are too-busy-being-fabulous to ask.

As the title makes clear, this is your first novel. Which makes us wonder: What's harder writing the truth or making things up?
Making things up is way harder. Closely akin to lying, it requires that one constantly remember what one has said previously. Makes me nervous.

How did you spend your time before becoming a bestseller?
Before I became a bestseller, I never got to sleep late; I had to work hard every single day even on Saturday and Sunday. I also had to clean my own house and take care of my daughter and my sick mama. I had to do all the grocery shopping and cooking and errand-running. There was never enough time to do it all, it seemed. Hey! I still have to do all that stuff what's the deal?

Who is the funniest person you've ever met?
My daddy.

The doorbell rings, and it's unexpected guests. Name three things you'd grab from the closet and fridge.
You're saying I have to let them in, right? Can't drop them in the moat with the alligators? OK, if I must then I'd just hit the fridge. I could feed 'em something that would entertain them it'd take forever to make myself presentable. Most people are perfectly willing to be distracted by good eats.

What do you have on your nightstand?
A book light, a glass of ice water, lip balm, and at the moment, a book by Dan Jenkins.

Thong or granny pants?
Sweet Potato Queens Never Wear Panties to Parties. It's a rule.

Why are only Southern women described as sassy?
Only Southern women would utter the word sassy. And even though I suppose we are, by definition, sassy, it's one of those words like zany and wacky that if a person uses them, it changes how I feel about them as human beings. Not in a good way. Those are display words only they were never intended to be used.

Have you ever had a literary catfight with your sister Judy?
I have never had any kind of fight with my seester, Judy; but, if we were going to fight, it would more likely be over bacon than literature.

A librarian called your first book heavy handed. If you met her, you'd say:
a) but I'll wake up sparkly and fabulous in the morning and you will still be dull
b) I'm about to open a big-ass can of queenly whoop on your bottom, and ermine won't help you now, or
c) sneer silently while tossing a hot pink boa across your shoulders
Well, how unkind of her! I have learned that no matter who you are and no matter what you have written, Somebody Somewhere Hates It. Whatever. As my dear friend Willie Morris once said in response to a caustic critic, I'm sure I don't know what people will be reading 500 years from now but I do feel fairly certain it will not be the Collected Criticisms of _____! I'm proud of my books . . . but the humor is just the vehicle by which the Greater Message is delivered. Bless her heart, she didn't even get the laughs and that's the easiest part.

Which celebrity should play you in your biopic?
Reba McEntire because she's tiny and redheaded and sings up a storm. She is everything I would have been had I gotten any of my druthers!

Tattoo? Where?
No tatts. Can't commit. I never owned a garment I wanted to wear every single day for the rest of my life.

Jill Conner Browne, the self-appointed Sweet Potato Queen, captured hearts from the start with her outrageously outspoken debut, The Sweet Potato Queens' Book of Love, which documented her exploits with a bunch of gal pals in Jackson, Mississippi, including taking over the local St. Patrick's…

Memoir

Mark Doty

Interview by Deanna Larson

Life is ultimately about death, and nowhere is the reminder more poignant than in the brief and bittersweet relationship with a companion animal. Intense gratitude and joy mingled with sadness is a sort of concrete upon which adult life is built, writes Mark Doty, and this bedrock underlies the complex relationships with two special dogs captured in his memoir, Dog Years.

Good writing about animals is almost always about something else, says Doty, an award-winning poet and writer who has been honored with the National Book Critics Circle Award, the PEN/Martha Albrand Award for Nonfiction, the T.S. Eliot Prize and a Guggenheim Fellowship. The dogs as they always are are a vehicle to think about other things. Those things include an intimate chunk of Doty's life nursing his partner Wally who was dying of AIDS; writing; teaching college students; fixing up their 200-year-old house in Provincetown on Cape Cod; and caring for their dog, a shaggy black Lab-Newfie mix named Arden, an animal utterly devoted to the sick man.

When Wally requests a little lap dog to comfort him (Arden has gained so much weight after being fed the bacon meant to tempt the patient that he can't jump on the bed), Doty comes back with shelter dog Beau, a skinny, rambunctious Saluki-golden retriever mix who brings a much-needed chaotic, bounding energy to their house.

If you set out to write a full-length memoir about your pets, you're asking for trouble, Doty admits with a laugh. Who's not going to roll their eyes? People lack distance from their pets, just like they do from their children or their dreams. I thought from the beginning that I was doing something unlikely with this book. Determined to make this compelling to the reader, even though it shouldn't be, Doty is careful with telling moments and scenes that flesh out the laconic and contemplative Arden and the young whirlwind Beau, companions on the trajectory of his life. Elegiac and funny chapters are trailed by brief, delicate entr'actes, with tiny observations, like the thump of an arthritic dog's tail, and huge gaping gashes in life, like the death of a loved one, given equal weight and clarity.

Animals' lack of language feels like an invitation to the writer, Doty says. I wanted to talk about the role they had played in my adventures, but I also wanted them to stand on their own four feet, as distinct characters. He catalogs their sweet routines (one involves Arden being stretched by the legs between the two men as he growls appreciatively), their winsome quirks (Beau's obsession with the minute crumbs and leftovers tossed from seafood shacks and Dumpsters along the sea) and their hair-raising escapades (Arden is hit by a car after chasing a rabbit from a hedge, but found a bit dazed the following day, thanks to their tight-knit community). They're animals, that's part of what makes their company so pleasurable, Doty notes. They're not human beings! We can know that about them, without forgetting that they also have real emotional lives, and that they are complicated beings that we get to know at least to some degree. Animal company invites us to language, Doty said, because there they are, brimming with feeling and clearly thinking, but not having any words at all. There's a part of me that's a little jealous of that. How wonderful to be immersed in experience and not caught up in the world of words. But the bright always has a shadow, and so come the inevitable leave-takings: first Wally, then Beau as a young dog from kidney disease, and then most heartbreakingly, the valiant Arden. Cloaked in nearly unthinkable abundance and unutterable sorrow, the book is a deadened twinkling landscape of the human heart, with snow-covered undulating dunes and twisting roads, but also shining bright spots: Doty falls in love again and gains another companion who shares his love of dogs, and the emotional landscape, always slanted downhill, remains buoyant and oddly hopeful.

Cute dog stories and cute dog pictures don't really satisfy me, Doty said. So often they don't quite get it right. They make it cute instead of true. Dog Years points out what is true and dignified and magical about life with animals; rather than seeking out the exotic or new, we want to see the ordinary more clearly, Doty said, and there is no better way than through our dogs.

Somehow, memory seems too slight a word, too evanescent, Doty writes about taking a walk after the death of Beau. This is almost a physical sensation, the sound of those paws, and it comes allied to the color and heat of him, the smell of warm fur, the kinetic life of being hardly ever still: what lives in me.

Life is ultimately about death, and nowhere is the reminder more poignant than in the brief and bittersweet relationship with a companion animal. Intense gratitude and joy mingled with sadness is a sort of concrete upon which adult life is built, writes Mark Doty, and…

Self-HelpLifestyles

Sara Davidson

Interview by Deanna Larson

A flower child who attended the University of California at Berkeley in the 1960s, Sara Davidson epitomized her trailblazing generation. After studying at Columbia University's Graduate School of Journalism, she became a national correspondent for the Boston Globe, covering the election campaigns of Bobby Kennedy and Richard Nixon, as well as Woodstock. She helped establish the new journalism movement with articles for Harper's, Esquire, Atlantic Monthly and Rolling Stone, then became the literary voice of the baby boomer generation with her 1977 book Loose Change: Three Women of the Sixties. Davidson then alternated between writing books (including the best-selling novel Cowboy) and producing and writing for television, including her Golden-Globe-nominated tenure as writer/producer of "Dr. Quinn, Medicine Woman."

Clearly, Davidson wouldn't accept a conventional retirement of baking bread and knitting baby blankets in a McMansion by the links. But after her children left for college, her lover abandoned her, and Hollywood suddenly stopped knocking on her door, Davidson was stripped of every meaningful role she had known almost overnight. What was she supposed to do with the next 30 years? It is so hard to make a dent in the culture now, Davidson admitted. So she picked up her tape recorder and started interviewing boomer friends and acquaintances about their own final-chapter transitions. Leap! What Will We Do with the Rest of Our Lives? reads like a long, meandering and fascinating Esquire profile, documenting Davidson's own experiences, and those of more than 150 interview subjects including Jane Fonda, Dam Rass, Tom Hayden and Carly Simon, along with plenty of juicy facts from studies on aging.

Boomers forge their own way and look to each other, Davidson discovered. Following the struggle with every demon inside what you should do, what you're due, a lust for joyful work and personal excellence re-emerges in this laid-back generation. There's air and possibility at the end, Davidson says. We can be freer now. We've checked off so many things. The author answered questions about the book from her home in the mountains near Boulder, Colorado.

Leap! is categorized as self-help. Do you consider this a self-help book?
I never set out to write a self-help book because I don't get help from books. I love story, I love narrative and I learn from narrative. I think people learn through story, and it's so much more enjoyable.

The book is full of anecdotes, but few directives on how to age. Was this intentional?
I didn't want to make a list of things people should do, because there's no one blueprint. This is our last best shot. At this point in life, you shouldn't give a damn about what people are thinking. I wanted to stimulate people to think and come up with what's authentic for themselves.

Were you surprised by what you discovered?
Every interview was full of surprises . . . everyone was changing all the time. Nothing was as I expected it to be. People who made adamant statements changed. I went away feeling inspired and happy and envious that I didn't have what they had. Everything I learned was affirming. It's okay that it changed. I have a very different relationship with change now. Nothing else has the solidity that's the reality.

Did the process of writing the book ease your own transition?
I was so moved that I wasn't in this alone, that I wouldn't fall that far. We all have networks, so many people we can call.

How would you sum up the aging process?
Going through the narrows that rough passage everybody has to go through. If you don't volunteer, your body or the world will force you to.

What does being relentless and fearless mean now that you've passed 50?
I'm fearless about my career future. I have no idea what work I'll do next. I don't have a stack of things lined up. I have no clue, but I have trust that it will be OK.

Every person has gifts and nobody can take those away . . . and what your gift is, matters. You have a rhythm with that one tune that's yours to play. What else is there? At the end it's going to be about the moment[s] you're fully alive, loving and being loved.

 

A flower child who attended the University of California at Berkeley in the 1960s, Sara Davidson epitomized her trailblazing generation. After studying at Columbia University's Graduate School of Journalism, she became a national correspondent for the Boston Globe, covering the election campaigns of Bobby…

John Grogan

Interview by Deanna Larson

John Grogan is more like Marley than he might want to believe. An affable, unassuming rabble – rouser, the author who penned a bestseller about his goofy dog gets up to some hilarious antics of his own in a new coming-of age memoir, The Longest Trip Home.

Our phone call to Grogan's home office near Philadelphia interrupts the former journalist and editor as he writes an entry in his journal, which he has kept since he was a teenager. "All my writing is steeped in 25 years of journal experience," Grogan says. "A lot of it makes you cringe, but important things surface." Things like the effect of an untrainable Labrador retriever on his marriage and young family. Grogan first wrote about Marley in a column for the Philadelphia Inquirer, in which he bid a sad goodbye to the naughty dog. The column got such a strong response from readers that he expanded it into a book, Marley & Me: Life and Love with the World's Worst Dog. Grogan's account of life with Marley became one of the biggest sellers of the year, spending 23 weeks at the top of the New York Times bestseller list. Readers from all over the world discovered universal truths in the minutiae of Grogan's life as he juggled marriage, kids, family, jobs, in – laws and a rambunctious canine. "I didn't connect the dots at the time, but [Marley & Me] was about accepting loved ones, flaws and all," Grogan says.

That universal theme began to bubble inside him as he sat in church at Christmastime, "feeling unmoored" on the first anniversary of his father's death. It dawned on Grogan that he should write about his funny and painful youth being raised by devout and loving Catholic Midwestern parents, while at the same time having serious doubts about God.

Despite all the "misery memoirs out there," Grogan could only write what was true: that he had a happy life with typical growing pains while searching for his place in the world."My parents were the epitome of unconditional love," he says. "It was an important lesson to me as a parent." Trying to reach their lofty expectations, he grows up in the process – but not without a series of "Leave It to Beaver" – style mishaps first.

His humorous teenage exploits in suburban Detroit in the '60s and '70s would test even the most patient parent – like the time he was told to stay away from a notorious beach popular with burnouts and potheads but manages to rationalize taking the family boat over "for a look" and ends up on the front page of the local paper after the beach gets busted."Growing up in that period, with older brothers and sisters, it was a culture of throwing the establishment out and going down this new path," Grogan says. "Lots of kids got lost in that period and never came back."

Grogan manages to absorb the best of his parents' teachings while struggling to make his own decisions against their old – world thinking, editing the weed – inspired counterculture newspaperInnervisions in high school, being hauled to the principal's office twice, and later sleeping with girls in college."Before I could answer," he writes about his mother's long – distance grilling, "she started in about the sanctity of marriage and the need for God's blessing of sexual relations, and the repercussions of one irresponsible act. It was time to abandon ship. The SS Honesty was going down."After fudging about where his girlfriend slept during homecoming, "they finally seemed to buy it," he writes.

John Grogan is more like Marley than he might want to believe. An affable, unassuming rabble - rouser, the author who penned a bestseller about his goofy dog gets up to some hilarious antics of his own in a new coming-of age memoir, The Longest…

Animals

Temple Grandin

Interview by Deanna Larson

The smart mischievous chicken, the sweet sensitive cow and the problem-solving pig are the stuff of cartoons. But these almost human qualities are based in reality, according to scientist and animal welfare pioneer Dr. Temple Grandin, and that’s hard to swallow when the animals become breakfast or dinner.

"All animals and people have the same core emotion systems in the brain," she writes. All sentient beings—from wildlife and zoo residents to farm animals and family pets—deserve greater understanding, humane treatment and respect, according to Grandin, who has targeted massive industrial farming companies and meat plants as well as the average pet owner with her award-winning animal welfare work.

"I feel strongly we have to give animals a decent life," she says by phone from Fort Collins, where she is a professor of animal science at Colorado State University.

Grandin’s work with animals has been strongly influenced by her own autism, a condition that has helped her understand how animals perceive the world. She has explored the connection in two best-selling books, Thinking in Pictures and Animals in Translation: Using the Mysteries of Autism to Decode Animal Behavior.

Her extraordinary new book, Animals Make Us Human: Creating the Best Life for Animals makes a connection between the humane treatment of farm animals and the physically and emotionally healthy life that household pets deserve. 

Most animal behavior—pleasant or obnoxious—is driven by "the blue ribbon emotions," according to Grandin, which include seeking (searching, investigating and making sense of the environment); rage (frustration sparked by mental and/or physical restraint); fear; lust; care (maternal love and caring); and play.

She identifies the primary emotions motivating animals in various locations: the wild, the "enriched environments" of zoos, industrial farms, ranches and homes. Then she explains how to recognize the physical and behavioral signs of both stress and satisfaction to bring out the best in any species.

"Usually—but not always—the more freedom you give an animal to act naturally, the better, because normal behaviors evolved to satisfy the core emotions," she writes.

Grandin’s interest in animal welfare dates back to her childhood, when she can recall happy, emotionally healthy dogs wandering her childhood neighborhood ("We never had leash aggression," Grandin says), which contrasts with her current observations of lonely dogs barking and whining in isolated backyards.

But the "normal" behaviors for a dog—roaming the countryside for miles per day—usually aren’t possible for the modern pet owner, so Grandin identifies good substitute behaviors like off-leash romps, plenty of games with humans and a rotating stash of toys which stimulate the play and seeking drives.

"Dominance aggression" or leash aggression has become extremely common in modern dogs. But Grandin suggests that aggression—which isn’t an animal emotion—has its basis in fear and anxiety, which are painful emotions that can be addressed through frustration tolerance and obedience training.

Her own childhood struggles with autism and her perception in pictures rather than words helped Grandin comprehend how animals see the world. Observing how cattle became calm in the "squeeze" chutes used to perform veterinary procedures on her aunt’s ranch, she discovered the same calming sensation for her own hyper-awareness and anxiety. After earning degrees in animal science at Arizona State and the University of Illinois she then designed a similar, humane chute now used by more than half of the beef processing plants in America.

In Animals Make Us Human, her anecdotes about working with the meat industry, zoo keepers, ranchers, farmers and other animal owners make for fascinating reading. She helps cowboys shoo "riperian loafers" grazing on protected land by getting them to work with the cattle’s nature instead of against it. She explores why cats are trained effectively with a clicker. ("A cat . . . hasn’t evolved to read people, and he isn’t motivated to scrutinize his owner for signs. You know a cat is going to hear a click.") She helps a horse owner figure out why his mare went "berserk" when a carriage harness was put on after discovering that a previous owner had made his harnesses out of rubber, snapping the horse’s skin like a big rubber band. And she stares at the flip side of abuse, the farm workers too tenderhearted to put runts or sick animals down. "When employees repeatedly go through the pain of holding onto an animal and watching it suffer and then finally euthanizing it or watching it die, eventually they’re going to become desensitized to animal suffering. That’s how habituation works."

Grandin has dedicated her entire career to meat-industry reform and animal welfare, designing plant audits for huge corporate buyers like McDonald’s, and showing often-reluctant CEOs that animals can be processed quickly and humanely with a few often inexpensive modifications, as well as better training and monitoring of staff.

"I would have liked that they just stopped being mean to the animals," Grandin says. "But if you want change to happen, you have to do it on business terms."

She encourages her students to enter the animal welfare field, and encourages ordinary animal lovers to find out where their food comes from, then consider writing a hand-crafted note to big corporations rather than a form letter or e-mail ("Those count," Grandin says). And she hopes that her insights into horses, dogs and cats in the book will perhaps turn a "mere" pet owner into a gentle agitator, bringing "real change on the ground."

"You have to be consistently insistent," Grandin says of her tireless and unsentimental work on behalf of animals. "Activists soften the steel, then I bend it into pretty grill work."

 

 

Deanna Larson writes from Nashville.

Author photo by Joel Benjamin.

The smart mischievous chicken, the sweet sensitive cow and the problem-solving pig are the stuff of cartoons. But these almost human qualities are based in reality, according to scientist and animal welfare pioneer Dr. Temple Grandin, and that's hard to swallow when the animals become…

Memoir

Betty White

Interview by Deanna Larson

Betty White has been on a roll—a tear, really—for decades. Her show business career has only paused a few times since the late 1940s, when she debuted at the dawn of television with the ad-libbed “Hollywood on Television,” then moved to her own pioneering sitcom “Life with Elizabeth,” which she co-created, co-wrote and produced in the 1950s at the ripe old age of 31.

“I didn’t know any better,” says White, who is now 89. “There wasn’t an alternative—the job was there to be done and you did it. I was so lucky to get in television on the ground floor when it was starting out. I was on five and a half hours a day, six days a week, so it was like going to television college.”

"I have been so blessed. If you ever hear me complain about anything, throw me away!"

While attending “television college,” White hosted classic TV game shows and starred in many award-winning sitcoms including “The Mary Tyler Moore Show” and “The Golden Girls.” Last fall she hosted “Saturday Night Live” and now she stars in the cable television hit “Hot in Cleveland.” All the while, White was writing books about her time in Hollywood and her love of animals, beginning with Pet-Love: How Pets Take Care of Us in 1985.

“The bottom line is: I’m the luckiest old broad!” White says by phone from her Hollywood home, her beloved Golden Retriever Ponti on her lap. “I have been so blessed. If you ever hear me complain about anything, throw me away!”

Her new book, If You Ask Me (And of Course You Won’t), has the scoop on her white-hot career and latest projects, including impressions from the sets of SNL and “Hot in Cleveland” and her work on films like The Proposal with Sandra Bullock and The Lost Valentine with Jennifer Love Hewitt.

White also touches on her childhood, her funny parents and her charmed early days in show business, as well as her present popularity, with anecdotes about the perils of typecasting and fascinating stories from her long performing career. Chapters include Body and Mind (“Somewhere along the line there is a breaking point, where you go from not discussing how old you are to bragging about it.”); Love and Friendship (including being a stepmom and dating when most interesting prospects are “much younger men—maybe only 80”); and Animal Kingdom, with touching but unsentimental stories about the animals she has rescued, loved and lost. The final section, Since You Asked, features White’s spirited ruminations on integrity, aging, keeping your head on your shoulders and remaining relevant in a “tough business.”

“Right now I’m doing ‘Hot in Cleveland’ with the greatest gals in show business,” White says. “We all adore each other! From the word go, we fell in love. I’m having the best best time. But that’s a whole different experience from going home and writing.”

White and husband Allen Ludden (who died in 1981) were good friends with John Steinbeck, and she was inspired by the author’s work ethic, right down to his habit of writing with a dog lying on his feet. She writes all of her books in longhand and finds that a fresh pack of paper is her greatest incentive to write. This funny, gregarious lady can think of nothing better than being alone with her animals, writing.

“It’s such a private thing,” White says. “You work it out in your head and you can work anywhere. All of a sudden, if something hits you that you want to put down on paper—it’s just a lovely experience.”

White wanted to be a park ranger or writer when she grew up and jokes that her first book was written at 14. “I wrote it with a pen dipped in ink, in longhand. It was a wonderful original story,” she deadpans. “A girl on a ranch and her brother was sick. I didn’t know quite how to finish it off. It was 106 pages. Finally I had an idea: It turned out to be a dream. She woke up and her brother was well and everything was fine. I just thought it was genius.”

If You Ask Me is White’s sixth book (her recently reissued book, Here We Go Again: My Life in Television, “is the closest to an autobiography”) and she has another one planned for next summer, a photography book with anecdotes about the animals at the Los Angeles Zoo, where she was zoo commissioner for three years and an active board member for 47 years. The little girl who collected blown-glass animal figures rather than dolls has been a lifelong advocate for animals, also spending 48 years on the board of the Morris Animal Foundation. The organization funds studies into specific health problems of dogs, cats, horses and wildlife, including gorillas in Rwanda.

In the book, White tells about her up-close visits with Koko the signing gorilla at the zoo.

“She’s my baby!” White says. “I had the privilege of visiting with Koko three times. She knows me now—she calls me ‘Lipstick.’ When she sees me she runs her fingers across her lips. She’s so magnificent, I can tell you.

“That’s my love—my animal work,” White says. “I have to stay in show business to pay for all my animal work!”

From her 1950s TV appearances to her recent SNL skits, Betty White has been the very definition of a trooper, throwing herself into making people smile. But this feisty octogenarian refuses to take credit for her incredible likability with audiences across generations.

“Have I got you fooled,” she says. “But I’m not going to talk you out of it.”

Betty White has been on a roll—a tear, really—for decades. Her show business career has only paused a few times since the late 1940s, when she debuted at the dawn of television with the ad-libbed “Hollywood on Television,” then moved to her own pioneering sitcom…

Food & DrinkCookbooks

Guy Fieri

Interview by Deanna Larson

When you bite into a burger, a steak sandwich or pile of juicy wings—and sauce drips down your wrist and your jaw aches from opening wide—you’re having a classic Guy Fieri moment.

The restaurateur, author and top-rated Food Network personality is best known for his hit show “Diners, Drive-ins & Dives” and the best-selling cookbooks of the same name, in which he travels the nation in his ’67 Camaro in search of the best hole-in-the-wall joints with “good food by good people.” 

But long before “Triple D” (as Fieri refers to it), his quirky rock-’n’-roll, adrenaline-fueled food philosophy helped him win season two of “The Next Food Network Star.”

“I didn’t want to do ‘The Next Food Network Star,’” the very busy Fieri says in a phone interview. “I had no interest—go on national TV and lose? But I always had this mantra in my company: Take that hill. Be all that you can be. That’s the challenge.”

He sized up the competition and realized that most of the contestants were younger and had been to culinary school. He decided to focus on “having a good time, and maybe I’d get to meet Emeril and hang out with Bobby Flay.”

Fieri ended up winning the whole thing, and made his Food Network debut with “Guy’s Big Bite.” Ditching the traditional chef’s coat and bandana for bowling shirts, spiky dyed blond hair, tattoos and man-bling, he created a big, bold, in-your-face food category that he has made his own.

“I’m comfortable with who I am and how I cook and what I do,” Fieri says. “I don’t believe in luck. I think it all comes back to surrounding yourself with good people, surrounding yourself with information and, more importantly, feeling comfortable in your own skin.”

On May 3, Fieri moves a bit beyond his bad-boy, rock-’n’-roll image with his first cookbook of original recipes, Guy Fieri Food, which includes more than 125 recipes, plus color photos and cooking tips. The same goofball humor and big flavors are there, and the same emphasis on quality ingredients and expert preparation, whether it’s a hot dog or filet mignon. But this book focuses on how he cooks at home in Northern California, where he also owns and manages a small chain of fusion restaurants.

“I’m very into ethnic food, fresh food, vegetables,” Fieri says. “I’m a huge texture person. Love BBQ, love stuff that has to cook for 12-16 hours, love Asian food, love complexities, love French food, Italian food, love making pasta, love making food and working with it.”

Guy Fieri Food features twists on everyday classics from appetizers, soups, salads, sandwiches, pizza and pastas, to main course meats and seafood, vegetables and sides, sauces and marinades, a smattering of desserts and drinks, all with a funky fusion of flavors (Irish Nachos, anyone?).

“The recipes are out of bounds,” Fieri says. “Everything from Asian to All-American to cooking with your kids, to homemade whole wheat pizza dough to juicing fresh vegetables, making chicken stock, tomato sauce and meatballs—not that I’m trying to be everything to everybody. I just opened up my Rolodex to the 150 recipes that I’ve been cooking at home and this is what you get.”

While Blackened Sesame Salmon with Cellophane Noodle Salad, Caramelized Leek and Apple Pizza and Lamb Loin Chops with Mint Pesto could be at home in any California restaurant, Fieri adds Bacon Jalapeno Duck Nuggets, No Can Beato This Taquito, and Good-to-Go Pizza Dough to the mix. It’s the high and low he’s known for.

“There are some steak sandwiches, there is some crazy food in there,” Fieri says of the new book that aims to teach as well as make cooks salivate. “But what you’re going to see is a lot of fresh ingredients. I broke down all the vegetables, cuts of meat. I try to give some insight. Chili from dried beans—that’s just the energy. It’s the life of Guy with food.”

Long before he became known as a fearless rock-’n’-roll chef, Fieri fell in love with food as a 16-year-old exchange student in France. Today, he shows great respect for all the cooks he visits on his “Diners, Drive-ins & Dives” show. “The guy making the burger, that’s what he wants to make, how he wants to live. That’s his domain,” he says. “When you walk into somebody’s castle, you’ve got to respect that. That’s how I was raised.”

Fieri’s new cookbook reflects the way he and his family really eat. His children have never been to McDonald’s.

“Probably the last thing you’ll ever see me eat is a hamburger,” Fieri says. “I’d much rather have a tri-tip sandwich—I can’t even tell you the last time I had fried food, and not because it’s wrong. I love a good french fry like anybody [else], but I have to keep a balance.”

“I’m not saying I’m a purist—you can look at my petite 215-pound structure and tell I’m not some dietary wizard,” he says. “It’s about eating good food by good people. Make a french fry the right way, use good beef, fresh baked buns, lettuce that wasn’t sliced two weeks ago and packed in a bag in Schenectady. Keep it real.”

It also reflects how Fieri spends his off-camera time. He helped draft California legislation proclaiming the second Saturday in May as “Cook With Your Kids Day” and just launched Cooking with Kids, a program that promotes healthy eating habits and encourages families to share quality time in the kitchen. Fieri has also visited military bases as a guest of the U.S. Navy, entertaining troops and consulting with their cooks.

Whether he’s cooking for family, hosting hopefuls on the hit game show “Minute to Win It,” “bustin’ down” another best-selling book or cooking show, or hitting the culinary highway with “The Guy Fieri Road Show,” his focus is always clear: quality food and maximum fun.

 

When you bite into a burger, a steak sandwich or pile of juicy wings—and sauce drips down your wrist and your jaw aches from opening wide—you’re having a classic Guy Fieri moment.

The restaurateur, author and top-rated Food Network personality is best known for his hit…

FictionWomen's Fiction

Vanessa Diffenbaugh

Interview by Deanna Larson

Each year, nearly 20,000 young people “age out” of America’s foster care system, and many of them have nowhere to go. Writer Vanessa Diffenbaugh has transformed this sad statistic into an extraordinary debut novel.

The focus of a fierce bidding war among publishers, The Language of Flowers tells the visceral and deeply touching story of Victoria, a teen who has been discharged from foster care, leaving her alone and emotionally barricaded. It’s also a compelling story about spiritual hunger and the power of nature—and human connection—to help heal hearts.

“My book is helping to tell a story that needs to be told.”

“It came pouring out of me,” Diffenbaugh says of the six-month process of writing the book. “It was about a year and a half from the time I started it to the time I sold it. Pretty quick for a first-time novel and a bunch of kids in the house,” Diffenbaugh laughs, as she juggles a bit of background chaos, plus kids and a babysitter’s schedule, at home in Cambridge, Massachusetts.

Set in San Francisco and Napa Valley, The Language of Flowers draws heavily on Diffenbaugh’s upbringing in Northern California, with its fertile farms and vineyards, as well as her experience as a foster parent. Born in San Francisco, she studied creative writing at Stanford and taught art and writing to young people in low-income communities before becoming a full-time parent. She and her husband, PK Diffenbaugh, have two biological children, and have fostered children throughout their marriage. They recently moved from California to Cambridge, first dropping their foster son Tre’von, 18, at New York University, which he is attending on a Gates Millennium Scholarship.

In the novel, Diffenbaugh takes two strands—nature and created family—and spins them into an absorbing story that is as complicated and exhilarating as any human relationship. But instead of reading like a polemic disguised as fiction, The Language of Flowers is full of startling and masterful dialogue, intense, emotional scenes that crackle and come alive as they unspool, and flawed yet sympathetic characters.

“As you can tell, I’m passionate about two things: writing and helping kids in foster care,” Diffenbaugh says. “I could recite statistics that would blow your mind about what is happening to these kids, especially as they emancipate from the system—25 percent become homeless within two years—but you’re not going to . . . feel empowered to do something about it if you haven’t had some kind of connection with a story that helps you feel on an emotional level. My book is helping to tell a story that needs to be told.”

Narrated by Victoria in flashbacks, the novel follows her life as she bounces from one foster situation to the next until she’s emancipated from foster care at 18. Her most significant relationship is with Elizabeth, a gardener who grew up on a Northern California vineyard and is now estranged from her family. Elizabeth introduces her to the Victorian-era symbolism of flowers and their secret meanings, and Victoria embraces it as a way to express difficult emotions to the adults in her life. She describes the situations that led her to become an often abrasive young adult, the self-sabotage that left her homeless in a San Francisco park, and the twists of fate that lead to her work with a high-end city florist and her guarded relationship with a Napa Valley farmer who understands her secret language like no one else. 

From the smell of warm summer fruit to the sounds of a busy farmer’s market on a Saturday morning, every scene in the novel feels authentic and immediate. (Red Wagon Productions has optioned the book for a film adaptation.)

Diffenbaugh says the truth about foster care lies somewhere between the frequent demonization of foster children in the media and the rosy picture of fostering a child portrayed in the film The Blind Side. 

“We’re all human and we’re all struggling. I didn’t want to end the story tied up with a ribbon, but it’s possible for people to change, it’s possible for people to overcome, it’s possible for people to reconnect even when they’ve been so hurt,” she says. “I wanted to show the whole picture.” 

While she’s already working on her next book, Diffenbaugh is also launching a new organization, The Camellia Network, to help build support for young adults leaving foster care. “I think it’s one of the most pressing and most disastrous issues facing foster care right now,” she says.

“In the language of flowers, camellia means ‘my destiny is in your hands,’ and the idea is that we’re all interconnected. The destiny of our country lies in the hands of the youngest citizens.”

 

Each year, nearly 20,000 young people “age out” of America’s foster care system, and many of them have nowhere to go. Writer Vanessa Diffenbaugh has transformed this sad statistic into an extraordinary debut novel.

The focus of a fierce bidding war among…

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