Linda M. Castellitto

RomanceYA FictionYAContemporary Romance

Sandhya Menon

Interview by Linda M. Castellitto

Fans of romantic comedies love a meet cute, and in her young adult debut, Sandhya Menon adds an Indian tradition to this time-tested trope: Her characters’ parents have arranged their marriage.

As When Dimple Met Rishi opens, 18-year-old Dimple Shah has graduated from high school and been accepted to Stanford. She loves iced coffee and coding, but not her mother’s incessant harping about her appearance and future wifehood. She’s thrilled when her parents send her to Insomnia Con, a summer program for budding coders at San Francisco State University. On the first day, Dimple sits on the SFSU campus, eyes closed, sipping iced coffee and feeling hopeful that maybe, just maybe, her parents were “finally beginning to realize she was her own person, with a divergent, more modern belief system.”

But her tranquility is shattered when she hears a friendly male voice say, “Hello, future wife.” A horrified shriek and an iced-coffee-flying-through-the-air later, Rishi Patel is left dripping, and Dimple (fleeing at a dead sprint) is worried she has a stalker.

“There is a magic to true love and finding the perfect person. Even if your parents preordain it—that still helps you find love.”

This doesn’t seem like an auspicious beginning to a beautiful relationship, but—thanks to Menon’s warm, funny characters and a story that sensitively and evenhandedly explores what happens when traditional values and modern ideas collide—readers know better.

At first, though, Dimple doesn’t. She’s spent so many years defending herself against her relentlessly overbearing mother that’s she’s understandably twitchy about dating. Besides, she’s at Insomnia Con to code! Rishi, who’s been accepted to MIT, is there to code, too—but also because his and Dimple’s parents plotted to throw them together and nudge them toward marriage.

“I think arranged marriage is still fairly misunderstood in America,” Menon says from Colorado, where she lives with her husband and two children. “On TV, you usually see really old guys marrying helpless, vulnerable women, but that’s not what it’s like in my family and the families I knew growing up. I wanted to portray arranged marriage as it’s more commonly found in middle-class India.”

Menon grew up in India and came to America at age 15. While her marriage wasn’t arranged, she says, “Pretty much all of my relatives’ were, so it’s pretty normal for me to think about it.”

In Dimple and Rishi’s case, the two have more in common than they realize: Just as Dimple always feels like she’s not good enough for her parents, Rishi feels distant from his own. His dad urges him toward a practical business education, despite Rishi’s love for drawing comics.

However, Rishi is more in tune with his parents when it comes to marriage: He trusts them and believes in the importance of tradition. Of course, because he’s male, he hasn’t experienced a lifetime of being told to wear more makeup and to stop caring about school so he can focus on becoming marriage material.

Menon notes that in Indian culture, especially for daughters, it can be “hard to see past your mother constantly telling you how you should be, how things should be, what you should change. It’s hard to see that as coming from a place of love, or that it’s the only way they know how to communicate [that] they want you to end up in a good place in life.”

For Menon, this divide was a crucial addition to the story. “It’s a very universal experience for anyone with a controlling parent,” she says. “In the end, Dimple’s mom was really proud of her and wanted what was best for her, even if that was communicated in a convoluted way.”

As in any good rom-com, time passes and the two get to know each other, allowing perspectives to shift and defenses to weaken. Dimple realizes that Rishi is a good, talented person who stands up for her when it matters. (It doesn’t hurt that he’s handsome, too.) And Rishi acknowledges that fierce, lovely Dimple has been experiencing arranged-marriage pressure in a very different, demoralizing way—and that perhaps it’s OK to pursue something he’s passionate about.

Menon’s own experience of feeling torn between Indian traditions and American social mores is one of the main reasons why she loved writing this book. “I know what it’s like to grapple with the question, how much Indian am I?”

She explains that it got easier in college. “People came to assume I’d been born here . . . and I started to find my place a bit more. I started writing more and expressing myself through art. It was a really freeing thing for me to do—to feel like there’s this thing I can share with people, and they can accept that, even if they can’t accept every part of me just yet.”

When asked if she’s more like practical Dimple or romantic Rishi, Menon laughs and denies being a romantic. “I love to write [romance] and read it and watch it in Bollywood movies, but in my personal life I’m much more practical,” she says.

“I do think there’s a kind of magic to love. My super-logical brain says it’s all chemistry . . . but there is a magic to true love and finding the perfect person. Even if your parents preordain it—that still helps you find love.”

 

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

Fans of romantic comedies love a meet cute, and in her young adult debut, Sandhya Menon adds an Indian tradition to this time-tested trope: Her characters’ parents have arranged their marriage.

YA FictionYA

Kwame Alexander

Interview by Linda M. Castellitto

Since Kwame Alexander won the 2015 Newbery Medal for The Crossover, he’s been traveling far and wide in a whirl of evangelism for reading, poetry, friendship, self-expression, sports, music and love.

During a call to his Virginia home (where he was resting before lighting out for Ohio, Texas and beyond), Alexander says, “When I won the Newbery, I committed myself to being an ambassador of poetry and literature. Nobody asked me to. I just decided I’d give it two years and go everywhere.”

And so he has, from schools to TED talks, connecting with kids, teachers and librarians. He also continued writing, and his latest YA novel-in-verse, Solo, co-written with Mary Rand Hess, weaves poetry, music and text conversations into a coming-of-age tale.

Seventeen-year-old Blade is a talented musician in Hollywood and the son of a former rock star who’s a longtime addict. His teasingly sarcastic sister, Storm, and secret girlfriend, Chapel (her parents don’t approve), help make life fun sometimes, despite persistently cruel tabloid stories and long-simmering anger at his dad, who’s been emotionally checked out since Blade’s mom died 10 years earlier.

Blade’s mentor, Robert, “a magician / who turns worries / into songs,” is a haven for the teen. Their conversations are a call-and-response rhythm of wisdom and calm that culminates in music. But Blade’s still having a hard time finding serenity, and just as family conflict reaches yet another crescendo, a secret is revealed that has him questioning his very identity.

Thanks to Blade’s songwriting, Storm’s efforts to become a singer and Robert’s improvising, plus name-checks of musicians as varied as Meghan Trainor, Lenny Kravitz and Metallica, there’s plenty of music sounding through Solo.

Alexander says a mutual love of music helped him and Hess find their way from disparate tastes to their own perfectly tailored collection of influences. “Mary’s a hard rock fan, and I’m the 1980s Lloyd Dobler type, the Genesis guy. . . . But there were no arguments, just a frustration and sadness when we had to leave certain people out.”

He jokes, “Whenever it got to a point where there was gonna be a disagreement, I brought out my Newbery Medal,” then says, “No—there were certain things I knew that were not up for discussion, and certain things I trusted that she knew that weren’t up for discussion. You need that level of trust when you’re writing together. And it’s poetry! You’ve got to follow the rules, rhythm, emotion, metaphors, and distill powerful moments into very few words.”

Some of Solo’s most powerful moments take place in Africa, where Blade flees in pursuit of more information about that shocking family secret. Alexander says he chose Ghana for the book because of his own feelings for the place: “In 2012, a friend was becoming a queen in a village, and she wanted me to document it. I went to Konko and fell in love with the people and the children, the possibilities and hope and history.”

Since then, he’s founded LEAP for Ghana, which has provided books, literacy training and more. Last year, when Hess asked if he wanted to team up on a book, he knew the time was right: “I’d always wanted to write about Ghana but hadn’t figured out the story. Mary’s novel-in-progress was set in Kenya, but she’d never been there. I said, let’s put my ideas with yours, and a year later, we were finished.”

In Solo, when Blade goes to Konko, he falls for the place and the people, too, even though he’s nervous about what it might mean for his future. And of course, there’s the culture shock: It’s quite different from what he’s used to in Hollywood.

“I was excited by the concise, rhythmic. . . language that captured the emotional woes and wonders of my world in a few words.”

“This is a kid who has everything, and that’s juxtaposed with the complete opposite, with people and a country that have very little materially,” Alexander says. “Would it be realistic, would people care? That was a challenge, and I think we met it. The readers will tell us.”

They really will, too; for Alexander, an important part of his writing and his travels is the back-and-forth with his enthusiastic and vocal young readers.

“I’ve heard way too many times that boys don’t read,” he says. “I never believed that. You’ve just got to give boys a book they’re interested in reading.”

Alexander’s parents were avid readers and educators, so books were big in his home. But “in middle school, I wasn’t interested in books. . . . I was well-read, intelligent . . . but nobody made the connection that I should be given books I was interested in reading.”

In college, “I found my way back to reading through love poems. . . . I began to write poetry as a way to communicate with girls. I was excited by the concise, rhythmic, figurative, sparse language that captured the emotional woes and wonders of my world in a few words. I knew from college on [that poetry] can transform your life. It transformed mine, and I thought, I’ve got to find a way to share it with the world.”

And now he does, through Solo and his other books, his speaking engagements and his work in Ghana, where this summer LEAP for Ghana will finish building a library. There will be plenty more Alexander books, too, including novels-in-verse Swing (about baseball and jazz, written with Hess) and Rebound, the prequel to The Crossover.

“Most of us have forgotten that we love poetry, but it’s how we learn to communicate as children, in rhythm and rhyme and verse,” Alexander says. “It’s my job to remind us how powerful it is, to help us become more confident, find and raise our voices, become more human. . . . I want everyone to know words are cool, books are cool. They’re the most transformative things.”

 

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

Since Kwame Alexander won the 2015 Newbery Medal for The Crossover, he’s been traveling far and wide in a whirl of evangelism for reading, poetry, friendship, self-expression, sports, music and love.

YA FictionYA

John Green

Interview by Linda M. Castellitto

After his 2012 novel—the hugely popular, critically acclaimed YA hit The Fault in Our Stars—grew into a global phenomenon, Green discovered that returning to writing was not an easy task. But with Turtles All the Way Down, he found a subject very close to his heart—and brain.

The Fault in Our Stars sold 45 million copies worldwide, was translated into 50-plus languages and was made into a movie. In 2014, the year the movie debuted, Green was named one of the 100 Most Influential People in the world by Time magazine. Thrilling stuff—but not surprisingly, it became a hard act for Green to follow.

“For a long time after The Fault in Our Stars came out, I wasn’t able to find pleasure in writing, to find an escape from my brain,” Green says in a call to his Indianapolis home, where he lives with his wife and two children. “When I was writing . . . it was hard not to feel the audience looking over my shoulder.”

But Green kept creating and communicating with fans (affectionately called nerdfighters) in other ways, like the two popular video blog series (“VlogBrothers” and “Crash Course”) he hosts with his brother, Hank, and VidCon, a conference for online video creators and aficionados.

And eventually, writing “did start to feel like the release it had always been,” and soon he was crafting what would become Turtles All the Way Down. “When I started working on the book intensely, it was almost impossible for me to write about anything else,” Green says.

Perhaps most importantly, Green felt like he “didn’t have a choice” in the subject matter. The main character, 16-year-old Aza Holmes, struggles daily with Obsessive-Compulsive Disorder (OCD)—which has affected Green’s life since childhood.

“As Aza says in the book, illness is supposed to be story told in past tense—you’re supposed to share your story of how you conquered your demons. That’s not my story,” Green says. “It’s more something I’ve lived with for a long time. It can be so hard to reconcile that, in part because there are such strong cultural voices saying [that] any kind of chronic illness is a weakness, a failure. And that’s just not true.”

It absolutely isn’t, but it’s something Aza contends with, despite having a caring mom and best friend, Daisy. Aza usually tries to handle everything by herself, so it’s hard to pull herself out of spirals of intrusive thoughts—which cause her to turn her focus inward and to feel anxious, which leads to feeling bad about herself. It’s exhausting and seemingly endless.

The spiral motif that’s central to Aza’s story is first referenced in the book’s title, which refers to the philosophical paradox that the Earth is flat and balanced on the back of a giant turtle, which is atop another turtle, and so on and so on. That notion of a never-ending stack of turtles provides an artful, memorable way to envision a line of reasoning that goes on and on without end, spiraling down with no relief or escape—and nicely parallels Aza’s OCD-induced thought spirals that make her feel powerless, out of control and disconnected from her own sense of self.

“You’re supposed to share your story of how you conquered your demons. That’s not my story.”

“OCD can be super isolating, in part because it’s happening within you, so it’s almost impossible to express it in a way to help other people understand,” Green says. “[OCD] can be so consuming that it’s really difficult to even understand there’s a world outside of yourself.”

And sometimes, finding the right treatment can feel impossible, especially if there’s shame and secretiveness involved. “I always felt tremendously embarrassed about my obsessive thought spirals,” Green says. “It’s really difficult to feel something weird about [yourself] that’s sort of disgusting or reprehensible, that you can’t shake.” He adds, “Aza hates being like this, and for much of the book, she really cannot see that she’s not alone.”

In Turtles All the Way Down, Green comes as close as anyone to capturing the thought-spiral experience for readers. Masterfully crafted, skillfully paced, sometimes heartbreaking streams of consciousness draw readers into Aza’s relentless brain and whisk them along as the story ebbs and flows and grows. Will Aza realize that sharing with others what it’s like to be her can help? Or will she retreat from that possibility and return to more familiar territory, courtesy of a mind that seems determined to play the trickster?

That’s not all Turtles All the Way Down has to offer. At the heart of Aza’s story is a weird, entertaining tale of what appears to be your typical find-the-missing-billionaire-and-get-the-$100,000-reward treasure hunt. But the adventure unspools in delightfully unexpected ways, with revelations funny and romantic and bizarre, plus a dose of practicality when it comes to the notion that mental illness is a huge boon to an investigator.

Green has a bone to pick with that. “That’s one thing I’ve always found so strange about the narrative of the obsessive detective,” Green says, referring to a popular trope in literature, film and TV. “In my experience, OCD comes with no superpowers and has made me a terrible detective! When I’m sick, I have no awareness of the world outside myself at all. How could I possibly look at someone’s shirt and figure out what they do for a living? I know that’s not everyone’s experience, but it doesn’t make sense to me at all. I’m just not a very good detective.”

Is Aza? We won’t spoil it, but Green definitely has great fun with the sleuthing aspects of his story. In his trademark style, he also includes lots of fascinating things readers will be inspired to learn more about—from facts about the tuatara (a New Zealand reptile) to hilariously deep dives into Star Wars lore.

There’s also plenty of poetry to learn about and enjoy. Green has always had a knack for crafting phrases that inspire and beg to be shared. Here, he goes a step further, with characters who write poetry and share their favorite poems.

Green says that in writing about OCD, “I really wanted to try to give form or structure to this thing I have trouble accessing via my senses, and one of my favorite ways writers have done this over the centuries is [through] poetry. It’s a way of sense-ifying the ineffable.”

But Green acknowledges that this is only one experience and only one way of representing mental illness. “I don’t want to project Aza’s or my experience on everyone,” Green says. “When you talk about mental health problems, there’s a huge diversity of experiences. . . . I do know the vast majority is treatable, and that there’s real, legitimate cause for hope—that despair is a lie your brain is telling you.” Of course, he adds, “Not any one treatment works for everyone.”

This push and pull, this engaging with the outside world while trying to manage the tempest within—it’s all part of living with OCD. But in that outside world, Green says, there are people who want to understand, learn and help. This is one of the main points he wanted to make with Aza’s story: that she doesn’t have to shoulder this burden in isolation. The effects of OCD touch all of Aza’s relationships, and with the release of Turtles All the Way Down, Green’s relationship with his audience will shift and change anew.

“For the last several years, the book’s been only in my mind, to a large degree, and [now] it isn’t,” Green says. “There’s a bit of a sense of loss in that, and also excitement and nervousness now that it belongs to its readers.”

 

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

(Author photo by Marina Waters.)

After his 2012 novel—the hugely popular, critically acclaimed YA hit The Fault in Our Stars—grew into a global phenomenon, Green discovered that returning to writing was not an easy task. But with Turtles All the Way Down, he found a subject very close to his heart—and brain.

Children's & YAMiddle Grade

Avi

Interview by Linda M. Castellitto

Some sample career advice: “Fake it till you make it.” “Dress for the job you want.” “Pride goes before a fall.” Now imagine all that advice smashed together when you’re 13 years old (or maybe 9, you’re not sure) and all alone in the world, and the new job you’re prepping for is king of England.

With The Player King, inspired by a case of truth being way stranger than fiction, Avi (the author of 75-plus books, including Nothing but the Truth and Newbery Medal-winning Crispin: The Cross of Lead) shares with readers the amazing story of Lambert Simnel, a young boy in 1486 who briefly played at being an actual monarch despite having no royal blood, education or anything else that might qualify or prepare him to rule a country.

In a call to his home in Colorado, where he lives with his wife, Avi explains that it was an exciting day some 15 years ago when he came across the scant facts that inspired him to write The Player King. “I read a lot of British history,” Avi says, “and Lambert was literally a footnote. Considering who I write for, what I write and that he’s still a mystery, what could be better than that? . . . I couldn’t dream this up.”

In Avi’s hands, that footnote blossoms into a fascinating, entertaining, historically accurate story set in the late 15th century, at the beginning of the Tudor period. Henry VII has taken the English throne, even though he wasn’t next in line to reign, and angry, ousted politicians and clerics are casting about for ways to regain the power they believe is rightfully theirs.

“My own personal mantra is that writers don’t write writing, they write reading.”

Meanwhile, Lambert toils away as a scullion at Tackley’s Tavern in Oxford. His existence is an unendingly dreary one. He has no idea where his parents are, and he’s always dirty, hungry and getting yelled at, although he does maintain a wry sense of humor: “In short,” our narrator says, “my life was worth no more than a spot of dry spit.” His only joy comes from bakery runs, when he can pause for a moment to watch street performers poke fun at the royal family, and imagine what it would be like to be a player touring the country and having people laughingly bow to him.

Then, in a confusing, bizarre series of events, a friar named Brother Simonds swoops in and tells Lambert he’s not a lowly orphaned scullion—he’s the rightful king of England. At the behest of the Earl of Lincoln, the friar spirits Lambert away (after buying him from the tavern keeper) so he can train the boy to become—or at least pass for—royalty.

Avi’s singular ability to convey multitudes via carefully crafted, often spare phrases is evident throughout The Player King—but especially so at this point in the story, as Lambert marvels at and is overwhelmed by sights, smells and sensations most modern-day readers likely take for granted.

“My own personal mantra is that writers don’t write writing, they write reading,” Avi says. “I think that if you write well, and I sometimes can, you can get an emotional response just to the structure of the words. You create an image, a sense of place and being that goes beyond plot, that goes to the heart of the experience.”

Lambert’s new experiences are unceasing: When he looks out the window of his new home, “A bird flew by . . . below! I, who had spent my whole remembered life in a cellar, as if in a tomb—it made me dizzy to see such things from such a height.”

As he begins to acclimate to his new life, Lambert slowly gains confidence. There’s a different purpose to his days—and a journey ahead that will shock him—but there’s also a strange yet comforting familiarity in still being constantly reminded to obey.

“A key part of the book for me is his rumination on being told what to do,” Avi says. “He can clear a table, and also be a king. What happens when you start to believe [that] yourself? . . . It’s a little like Pygmalion or My Fair Lady, the idea that you can create this image of class and position by manipulating the surface.”

Speaking of manipulation, Avi says, “Most of the writing [of this era’s history] was done at the behest of the Tudors, who wanted to make sure nobody believed this story. And yet, [someone] did write about it, it was real. . . . It’s all about learning about the propaganda, and understanding why they were so fearful of this kid when they were the ones that created him.”

Curious readers will be glad to know that Avi provides further details of Lambert’s history in an author’s note at the book’s end. They’re tantalizing details, to be sure, but Lambert still remains largely a mystery—a story to be believed, but also to be imagined.

“ ‘The writer’s job is to imagine the truth,’ ” Avi says, quoting writer Paula Fox. “I love the idea that one imagines the truth and tries to create that in readers’ heads.”

He adds, “It’s an interesting concept, I think, that one sees more of the world when you read than you do with your eyes. That’s just extraordinary.”

 

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

(Author photo by Katherine Warde.)

With The Player King, inspired by a case of truth being way stranger than fiction, Avi (the author of 75-plus books, including Nothing but the Truth and Newbery Medal-winning Crispin: The Cross of Lead) shares with readers the amazing story of Lambert Simnel, a young boy in 1486 who briefly played at being an actual monarch despite having no royal blood, education or anything else that might qualify or prepare him to rule a country.

NonfictionMemoir

Kelly Corrigan

Interview by Linda M. Castellitto

Reading Kelly Corrigan’s Tell Me More: Stories About the 12 Hardest Things I’m Learning to Say is like reading a letter from a dear friend whom you can talk to about anything, who makes you laugh when you feel distinctly humorless or who can just sit quietly with you when talking feels like too great an effort.

Not surprisingly, in the 10 years since her first book, the bestselling memoir The Middle Place, Corrigan has become a voice that people really like to hear, whether in TED Talks, her podcast series “Exactly” or in her subsequent memoirs, Lift (2010) and Glitter and Glue (2014). Her latest memoir, Tell Me More, is a collection of essays about 12 phrases that she is working on saying more and have proved central to Corrigan’s life. They can be difficult things to say, like “I don’t know” and “No,” or phrases that are ostensibly easier to utter—but perhaps aren’t—like “Yes” and “I love you.” In every entry, Corrigan unpacks her life with poignancy and humor as she wrestles with relatable issues, from family blow-ups to unruly pets to debilitating grief, and muses on the things that give life levity and beauty.

But beneath every illuminating, empathetic entry in Tell Me More, there is grief and love that ebb and flow for Corrigan’s friend Liz, who recently died of cancer. Corrigan is a cancer survivor herself, and the disease marks a place in each of her books. “I’m 50, and it feels like half the people I know have had cancer,” Corrigan says during a call to her home outside San Francisco, where she lives with her husband, two daughters and their dog. “Frankly, cancer, in the ways I’m dealing with it in the book, is just my version of crisis. . . . Your version might be unemployment, financial setbacks, your parents have Alzheimer’s—you can sub in anything you want. [Tell Me More] is not so much about cancer, but about crisis.”

Cancer played a part in Corrigan’s initial decision to pursue a career in writing over a decade ago. “I’ve always written in a journal to help make sense of my life, and I’m a huge letter-writer,” she says. But her father’s terminal illness provided a new, urgent deadline to begin writing. “Self-publishing was just becoming a thing [10 years ago], so I self-published The Middle Place. The visual of handing my dad a book was enough to motivate me to write it.” The book’s later traditional publication, she says, was the “realization of a lifetime fantasy.”

It also began a transition into a writer’s life, one that’s grounded in communicating stories and learning about others’ lives. That’s a dream setup for Corrigan. “I ask a lot of questions. I’ve definitely been teased by friends for wanting a conversation to go deeper or further.” After all, she says, “That’s why readers are readers: We have some unanswered questions. Every friend I have, I’m asking them hard questions all the time. I want to know how everyone’s doing everything, [about] their relationship with their parents, their biggest fight with their spouse, who they despise at work and why. I want to know! I think that’s more interesting than almost anything.”

Corrigan’s burning curiosity isn’t one-sided, though, and in Tell Me More, she turns that gaze on herself with great skill and insight. During the writing of the book, Corrigan says she “needed and wanted something to hold onto. . . . My father and friend died, and I’m not a much better person for it—I’m still getting sucked into trivial, quotidian bulls**t. I’m still feeling sorry for myself.”

“It’s the ultimate compliment you could give me, that I helped you understand your life better.”

The result is a mix of workaday aggravation and philosophical beauty. For example, the chapter titled “It’s Like This” is about a hectic weekday morning gone maddeningly wrong, but it’s also a meditation on grief, impatience, her daughters’ quirks and the ways she and her husband handle stress. It’s also an excellent representation of how our initial reactions to events might be influenced by something else entirely. As the author writes, “Hidden in the morning’s frustrations, like a rattlesnake in the woodpile, is something else. I close my eyes so I can listen for the other thing—the further-away, much worse thing—in the quiet of my own head.”

When asked why she thinks people respond so well to her, both on the page and in person, she says, “Articulating emotions and notions is something I’ve done before you hear it coming out of my mouth. . . . I think that’s why people say, ‘I wish I could put my finger on it the way you do.’ I say, right, because I’m trying hard to, that’s my job, that’s my profession. I’m very happy to do that for all of us. It’s a total thrill for me, that I’m being useful in this way. It’s the ultimate compliment you could give me, that I helped you understand your life better or put words to something you couldn’t articulate.”

Tell Me More will be perhaps even more overtly useful than Corrigan’s earlier books. Its phrasal chapter headings like “I Was Wrong” and “Good Enough” make it easy for readers to turn to sections that speak to them. “To me, Tell Me More is all the more useful [because of] the way it’s laid out,” Corrigan says. “I could be more subtle about it. . . . But again, a huge impetus for me is to be useful—to make myself useful. I needed to boil it down to something memorable for my own sake.”

During her 20-city book tour for Tell Me More, Corrigan is looking forward to hearing which of the 12 phrases most resonate with readers: “One thing I’m really psyched to hear is what other sentences people are clinging to.” Plus, she says with a laugh, “I’m so grateful anyone wants to talk about my writing.”

 

This article was originally published in the January 2018 issue of BookPage. Download the entire issue for the Kindle or Nook.

Author photo by Mellie T. Williams

Reading Kelly Corrigan’s Tell Me More: Stories About the 12 Hardest Things I’m Learning to Say is like reading a letter from a dear friend whom you can talk to about anything, who makes you laugh when you feel distinctly humorless or who can just sit quietly with you when talking feels like too great an effort.

YA FictionYAHorror

R.L. Stine

Interview by Linda M. Castellitto

Millions of readers delight in R.L. Stine’s delightfully sinister, subversive world, whether they’re teens experiencing his spooky stories for the first time, millennials for whom his books figure prominently in their misty memories of 1990s childhoods or anyone who’s checked out his hilariously weird Twitter feed.

Sure, he’s the acclaimed author of more than 350 books—including the uber-popular Goosebumps series—that feature kids and teens in all kinds of spooky situations. But he’s also a grandfather who started writing picture books (two so far, with Marc Brown, the creator of Arthur) in hopes of making a literary connection with his grandson.

There’s still hope that Dylan, who’s only 4, will read Stine’s books one day, but there’s perhaps not so much hope for Matt, Dylan’s father and Stine’s 30-something son, who has never read a single one of his father’s novels.

“He bragged about it in the New York Times . . . even though he was the right age for Goosebumps and everything,” Stine says during a call to his Manhattan home. “That’s how you get Dad! He knew it would make me crazy.”

Stine doesn’t dwell on it, probably because he got the last laugh: “I wrote a Fear Street book about him called Goodnight Kiss [1992]. It’s a vampire novel, and the main character is based on him. . . . In the very last paragraph, he gets bitten on the neck!”

“I think horror’s funny. It’s part of the appeal for me.”

On the flip side, Stine’s wife, Jane, has read every word of every book, thanks to her role as his editor and life partner since 1969. Obviously, the two have a good thing going: Stine published his first teen horror novel, Blind Date, in 1986 and now has over 350 million books in print worldwide that are beloved by readers of all ages. His new book, the highly anticipated Return to Fear Street: You May Now Kill the Bride, kicks off the revival of his Fear Street series, which has lain dormant for 20 years.

For those new to the Fear Street series, here’s a quick rundown: The books are set in the fictional town of Shadyside, and the teens who live there encounter all sorts of paranormal, murderous and generally terrifying goings-on. Fear Street is named after the Fear family, who have experienced years of strange and spine-chilling misery.

The deliciously creepy You May Now Kill the Bride is centered on two Fear family weddings, one in 1923 and one in the present day. In both eras, there are two sisters: One is a happy soon-to-be wife, while the other hides her interest in the dark arts. Mystery, betrayal and twisty family ties combine in a suspenseful tale that explores whether a family’s gruesome past is destined to poison their present.

Stine says You May Now Kill the Bride “may be the best book I’ve written in a long time. For one thing, it’s two time periods, and it all ties beautifully together. At first it’s confusing—you can’t really figure it out. I like this one.”

And with a title that so blatantly subverts the classic wedding-vow line, readers know You May Now Kill the Bride will be as funny as it is thrilling. Devoted Stine readers won’t be surprised that this horror-humor combo is central to his writing. In fact, Stine wrote humor books for kids and created teen humor magazine Bananas in the 1970s and ’80s, before creating Fear Street.

“I think horror’s funny,” Stine says. “It’s part of the appeal for me.” The author clearly delights in eliciting opposing emotions: “You know when you sneak up on someone and say ‘Boo!’—first, they jump, then they’re scared, and then they laugh. Horror and humor are so close together.”

Stine has clearly had a prolific and varied writing career outside of Fear Street. He says that his prolific output is all about planning ahead, rather than waiting for inspiration to strike.

“When I start to write a book, I know everything that’s going to happen. I do all the thinking in the outline, all the twists and all chapter endings,” he says. “For me, it just makes the writing so much easier.

“The writers who go into a school, do an assembly and say to write from the heart, write your passion, write what you know . . . the kids who listen to them will never write a word,” he says. “I’ve written 350 books, and not one has come from my heart, not a single one. It’s true! They’re all written to entertain people, for people to enjoy and have fun. But you don’t have to write from the heart.”

That sort of pragmatism and drive may come easier to some than others, he concedes, although he’s been this way for as long as he can remember. “[Writing] is the only thing I’m good at . . . and it’s the only thing I wanted to do from when I was 9 years old.”

Telling stories may have been Stine’s destiny, but ironically, the Goosebumps series—with more than 60 titles, plus multiple spin-off series and a TV show—was never part of his plan. “I have terrible instincts!” he says. “My wife and her business partner at Parachute Press said no one’s ever done a scary series for 7- to 12-year-olds, and we should try it. I said no way. I didn’t want to mess up Fear Street. Can you imagine? They kept after me, so I said alright, if I can think of a good name for the series, we can try two or three. Here it is, 25 years later!”

In addition to writing hundreds of scary tales, Stine’s been taking his brand of delightfully sinister entertainment on the road for years, speaking to school groups and fans of all ages.

“I’m so lucky I can go out and talk to people,” he says, adding, “In Green Bay, Wisconsin, we had 1,800 kids come, fourth- and fifth-graders. They filled the auditorium, three balconies, all kids. I got them all screaming at once. It was a great, great sound. The teachers hated it! It was really fun.”

 

This article was originally published in the August 2018 issue of BookPage. Download the entire issue for the Kindle or Nook.

Author photo by Dan Nelken.

Millions of readers delight in R.L. Stine’s delightfully sinister, subversive world, whether they’re teens experiencing his spooky stories for the first time, millennials for whom his books figure prominently in their misty memories of 1990s childhoods or anyone who’s checked out his hilariously weird Twitter feed.

Nonfiction

Heather B. Armstrong

Interview by Linda M. Castellitto

We’re all familiar with the concept of a reboot, whether it’s a finicky computer, a TV show that trades in nostalgia or a health-centric resolve  to start fresh. Heather B. Armstrong took the reboot concept many, many steps further in a bid to save her own life.

As Armstrong explains in The Valedictorian of Being Dead: The True Story of Dying Ten Times to Live, she recently took part in an experimental medical treatment in which doctors put her in a coma akin to brain death 10 times—a series of reboots meant to calm her brain activity and offer relief from severe depression.

We’ll go ahead and confirm that Armstrong is no longer in crisis. Rather, she’s in advocate mode. As she says during a call to her Utah home, “As much as I want [this book] to help people suffering from depression, I also really want to reach people who don’t understand it.” She adds, “If I can offer the slightest glimpse of where our brains go, that’s what I want this book to accomplish.”

Armstrong’s wildly popular blog, Dooce.com, celebrated its 18th anniversary in February. Around that time, Armstrong also recorded the audiobook of The Valedictorian of Being Dead. “It was such an emotional experience to read it out loud . . . and really brutal. Who wrote this?” she says with a laugh.

There is a sort of beautiful brutality in Armstrong’s memoir, to be sure. She writes movingly, and often with dark humor, about the 18 months of psychic pain that led her to the medical trial: “Even though I wanted to be dead, I needed to get my kids to piano practice the following night. If I died, they would be late.”

That determination to survive her illness while being present and strong for her kids was a struggle that routinely drained her and left her screaming and sobbing in countless phone calls to her ever-supportive mother. “My mother has given so much to all of us,” Armstrong says. “She always picks up the phone, is always empathetic and just so giving.”

But despite Armstrong’s loving relationship with her kids and family, nothing was working. She felt as if her body was “an upright corpse.” She also feared that her ex-husband, who “intended to take away my kids in 2014,” would do so again if she admitted she was suffering so badly.

Her psychiatrist insisted she get help despite these concerns and told her about the study that would change her life. In it, the patient is given IV anesthesia three times a week for 10 sessions. “The study is designed to determine if ‘burst suppression’—quieting the brain’s electrical activity—can alleviate the symptoms of depression,” Armstrong writes. 

She chronicles her journey in fascinating detail, from her eerie experiences after emerging from “the abyss” to an astonishing 10-day bout of constipation, an unfortunate side effect of the drugs. She also includes her parents’ and siblings’ perspectives, as well as the profound experience of the treatment itself. As on her blog, her writing  feels off the cuff, by turns moving and irreverent, always conveying gratitude for the help she received from her family and the medical team.

Such gratitude wasn’t new for Armstrong, but asking for help and allowing herself to receive it was. After all, the book’s title refers to her urge to be the valedictorian of every-thing since childhood, when she became a high achiever to feel some control over a tumultuous family life.

“I was going to be the best,” she says. “I show up and perform; you can always count on me to get the job done. In the process, part of my soul is really hurting.” And so, learning to accept help from her mother and stepfather (who drove her to and from every appointment) “did feel selfish—this time I took away from my parents. For me, needing anything is being super-selfish.”

Throughout The Valedictorian of Being Dead, Armstrong pays a visit to her past. She writes of the legacy of depression that has been passed down from her great-grandmother, who was institutionalized for her mental illness. And she casts fresh eyes on her triggers, from issues with food to toxic relationships to unresolved emotional pain.

“It’s something I’m very hyperaware of, getting into situations that will trigger anxiety and depression,” she says. “It’s surrounding myself with nontoxic relationships or being able to call my mother and say, I can’t drive the kids this week. I have to go against a lot of my personality—I don’t ask for help, I have to do it all myself—and go into uncomfortable places. But I didn’t realize how amazing it is to get help.”

Armstrong hopes to spread awareness about depression and the potential of this new treatment approach via The Valedictorian of Being Dead (which includes an afterword by study creator Dr. Brian Mickey) and her upcoming book tour. “[I wish] people could understand that depression is an illness,” she says. “It has really detrimental effects on how we process and see the world. I want this book to be successful in the sense of reaching as many people as I can. I really feel like it’s the most important thing I’ve done.”

 

Author photo by Angela Monson.

We’re all familiar with the concept of a reboot, whether it’s a finicky computer, a TV show that trades in nostalgia or a health-centric resolve  to start fresh. Heather B. Armstrong took the reboot concept many, many steps further in a bid to save her own life.

As…

Mystery & SuspenseSuspense

John Galligan

Interview by Linda M. Castellitto

Wisconsin sheriff Heidi Kick has enough to deal with—an ice storm, her tragic past, the lack of support from her rural community—without a murder case to solve. But when she encounters a decade-old corpse while trying to track down a missing girl, the trail leads her to uncover some of Bad Axe County’s dark secrets. We talked to author John Galligan about the allure and the danger of sports, how fly fishing is an excellent hobby for a writer and why Wisconsin fascinates him.

Whew! Bad Axe County is truly a thriller—so many gasp-inducing action scenes, lots of people to whom the word “evil” would apply sans hyperbole, a landscape of drug abuse and sex trafficking, and several suspenseful plot threads to follow. Was the book as much of a heart-pounding endeavor to write as it was to read? Do you have a routine, or mantra or some such, that helps you emerge from your stories as you create them?
To answer your first question in a word, no. I wish that writing a thriller were a thrill. I’m so glad to know that the book worked for you, making you gasp and your heart pound. That’s what every writer wants to hear. But reading and writing are very different experiences, and the old saw applies about eating the sausage versus watching it get made. At least for me, the writing process is slow, layered, recursive and often arduous, usually involving plenty of false starts, frustrations, flushes and back-to-the-drawing-board moments—in short, a grind. Not to say that there aren’t many moments when I feel excited by what I’m writing and get totally immersed in a scene or a chapter or a plot line. There are. But it’s far from the “vivid and continuous dream” (John Gardner) that I’m striving to create for the reader.

That brings us to your excellent second question: How do I maintain a healthy perspective while in the process? This was especially important in the writing of Bad Axe County due to the darkness of the subject matter and some of the scenes. Creating and then revising scenes of sexual violence didn’t feel good, and there were plenty of times, especially when I wasn’t sure the story was working, when the whole thing felt misbegotten and grotesque and I wasn’t sure I could continue. And I was alone with these doubts, since there really is no one else involved in the process at these early phases. So basically my formula for survival is patience (take the long view and trust the process), stubbornness (believe and don’t give up) and clear the mind daily (exercise, fly fishing, etc.).

Heidi experienced a crime in her past that still affects her and seems to drive a lot of her choices in the present day. Although I confess I haven’t read your Fly-Fishing Mystery books (yet!), I did see in a review that your Ned Ogilvie character also struggles to reconcile his very different past. What about that—the persistence of our past selves, let’s say—has inspired you to explore it in your work? Do you think a need for closure helps make for good case-closers in the ranks of law enforcement?
My protagonist in the Fly-Fishing Mysteries is dealing with overwhelming guilt and grief, and my line about him is that he is “crisscrossing the country in an old RV trying to fish himself to death.” But somebody always beats him to the “death” part, and that’s what keeps him alive. You put it well: We are all about the persistence of our past selves, and our happiness or lack thereof is a function of the relationships we maintain with those selves. What I think happens with Ned Oglivie and to an extent Heidi Kick is that their pasts are unresolvable, their past selves are unforgiveable, and this directs relentless energy at the solutions to “proxy” problems that can be solved. The cases they get involved in are both projections and diversions, and there is always sadness (but also sequels) that comes with resolution, because the protagonist then returns to his or her own original torment.

Heidi Kick is the first female sheriff in Bad Axe and your first female protagonist. What made you decide to write her, and really go for it, by putting her in a setting so rife with misogyny, from daily workplace sexism to heinous crimes against women? Did the recent increase in women speaking up about their experiences spark something for you?
You’re right that the cultural moment had an influence on Bad Axe County. I researched harassment in the workplace, and some of the things that were said/tweeted/posted to/at/about women in positions of power just took my breath away. In Bad Axe County, the horrific tweets directed at Sheriff Heidi Kick (“why dont you drink bleech ill buy the bleech”) are actual tweets from my research. Also . . . Bill Cosby? And then to find out that it’s not just him, but this is a thing, there is a drug you can get, and a whole bunch of men make a practice of drugging and raping women? How much do you have to hate women to get satisfaction from that? How powerful is the patriarchy that this goes unnoticed, unprosecuted, that the victims stay silent? I didn’t set out to catch the cultural wave so much as the wave arose while I was writing about sexual harassment and sex trafficking, and that groundswell of women’s voices telling dark truths gave me the confidence to continue. Like I said in the answer above, there were tough times for me in the writing process, but at a certain point I knew I was being real. Having the wind of the zeitgeist at my back really helped.

Heidi and her office ally, Denise, preemptively crack sexist jokes as a way to vaccinate against said chauvinism. Was it a challenge to calibrate the jokes, to ensure that they landed as sardonic rather than self-flagellating? Do you think there’s hope for change in the workplace, for a day when such inoculation won’t be needed quite so much?
The jokes were a huge risk . . . yet somehow as soon as the idea occurred, I knew it was a winner if I could pull it off. You would not believe how many hours I spent combing through bad sexist jokes to find just the right ones for the moment. Fortunately, I’m the kind of person who cannot remember a joke to save his life, otherwise I think I would be permanently brain-damaged. The jokes had to hit just the right note: appropriate to the moment in the story, the particular flavor of sexism at issue, strong enough to have a bite, funny in their disgusting way, and overall they had to leave both Heidi Kick and the reader feeling refreshed and empowered. Sure, I have hope that the workplace will improve, with respect not only to gender equity but also to race and sexuality. I think improvement will be slow and painful, though, with plenty of backlash, as we are witnessing on the national stage. I think at some point we reach “peak white male” (or “peak orange male”—please don’t quote me), go through an excruciating transition and emerge in a more balanced place. I mean, if I can’t hope for that, then . . .

Sports are a strong throughline in Bad Axe County: Heidi’s husband Harley is a local legend; a central character, Angus Beavers, is a gifted player; and the corruption in town flows directly through the baseball team. I see that your earlier books have hockey and fly fishing in them, too. What do sports represent for you, and why is it important for you to include this in your books?
I grew up as a full-on jock, so my connection with sports is deep and personal. To me, sports represent institutionalized masculinity and both the strengths and dangers of that. My understanding, I think, is nuanced, paradoxical, maybe conflicted. A lot of successful male athletes are misunderstood and unfairly judged. They are complex people who are good at sports because their intelligence and discipline make them good at everything they do. I think “dumb jock” is mostly wishful thinking practiced by people who can’t or don’t play sports. So there is that.

But on the other hand, all-male sports teams, at least in my day and in my personal experience, were hotbeds of misogyny, racism and homophobia, and much of this was passed down and reinforced through the leadership of older players and coaches. Clearly I have strong feelings all over the map about sports, so it’s fertile ground for me as a writer.

I wouldn’t call fly fishing a “sport” in the sense that I’m using the word above. But to me it involves much of what I love about sports—physical skill is required to do it well, and you can always get much better than you are—and it strips away the team and all the negatives and replaces those with the challenge to be present and immerse yourself in nature. Lots can go wrong—both outside and inside the self. You get to be a fool on a regular basis. You also get to touch what feels to me like the source of life. Fly fishing is also very fertile ground for me as a writer.

Honesty (and the lack thereof) is a theme that resonates throughout your book. There are old, buried secrets that affect the present day; lies and shame passed down through generations; and present-day secrets among Heidi and her husband, colleagues and more. The fate of many in Bad Axe County are excellent testaments to the ways in which secrets and lies can be debilitating and damaging. Did a desire to explore this motivate you to write the book? Are you good at spotting liars (or spinning falsehoods) yourself?
I think I’m about average in terms of both promulgating and spotting b.s. I do think that shame, especially, is a powerful and fascinating engine for a character and a story, and I think that shame involves a secret world inside the self, an epic struggle hidden from others, and the perfectly solved crime for me means not so much the capture of the criminal but the reader’s epiphany as to what dark yet universal force, in all of us, drives the crime.

We often hear that Manhattan is itself a character in a story, or Hollywood, or Paris . . . the usual cities. Bad Axe is the newest entry in that category! Online images of coulees convey just how dangerous nighttime car chases, let alone daytime jaunts, can be in such a landscape. Did you travel to that area in order to really capture what it might feel like to grow up and/or live there? What stood out to you the most? Do you think it’s harder for people to leave or to stay?
Yes, the Driftless area, or coulees, of Wisconsin is my favorite place to be, and I spend as much time there as I can. I have a camper, and I stay out there to write and fish. I immerse myself in the landscape and the culture. Bad Axe County is a fictional county inserted between two real ones. The region’s beauty and its challenges fascinate me. There are hundreds of miles of spring creeks where wild trout still thrive. At the same time factory farms and sand-fracking outfits are moving in, and climate change is having a devastating impact, with seven “100-year floods” in the last 10 years. That region is losing family farms faster than any place in the state and perhaps the country. At the same time, it has one of the highest concentrations of Amish people anywhere in the country and the highest concentration of organic farms. Hunting is a religion. The military is a fetish. Neighbors look out for each other. Meth is a scourge. You can find a pancake breakfast or a brat fry on any day of the week. People both leave and stay with equal degrees of passion, but my reading (of what high school graduates say about their futures) is that most kids who grow up there are taught to love the place and the lifestyle and want to stay (i.e., go to the tech college for diesel mechanics or dental hygiene). For sure the economy and the culture are shifting, and the ecosystem is under threat.

Per your website, you’ve had some interesting-sounding jobs. After reading Bad Axe County, “freezer boy in a salmon cannery” sure did catch my eye. Did you draw from any of your own experiences, whether lived/observed/imagined, when creating the book?
I have deep connections and experiences in the region, and I have a background in sports and in baseball in particular that informs some of the story. I can identify with Angus being channeled a certain way by adults in his life, for their own purposes, and belatedly coming to the realization that this is his life to live. My experience as a parent, for sure, informs my relationship to Heidi as a mother. It just feels so easy for me to relate to the challenges she faces in being a mother and a wife while handling a pressure-packed job. (As for “freezer boy,” I rode on tender ships out to meet fishing boats in the ocean off Alaska, jumped into holds with dead salmon up to my armpits and one-by-one heaved those fat, slippery suckers out over my head. Later, after they were gutted, I would ice-glaze them together in triplets and file them in boxcar freezers for shipment to Japan.)

You teach writing at Madison College. Do you think your teaching informs your writing and vice versa? Do your students read and give you feedback on your books?
Yes, teaching informs my writing. Imagine the human experience, the characters, after 32 years at a rate of about 250 students per year (wow, 8,000 in total!). The coolest thing about teaching where I do is the diversity of students, especially non-traditional students, whom I have the privilege of working with—literally from every corner, both local and worldwide. No . . . I don’t even let on to my students that I do what I do. They get a link to my website, and if they’re curious enough and interested enough to discover it, great, I’m happy to meet them as John Galligan, author of Bad Axe County. But I’ve never felt comfortable wearing that up front. Serious writing students have it all figured out and take my classes for that reason. The rest are free to see me just as the guy standing between them and three credits.

What’s coming up next for you?
I have a two-book contract with Simon & Schuster, and I’m working on the next book set in the coulees featuring Sheriff Heidi Kick, tentatively titled Dead Man Polka.

 

ALSO IN BOOKPAGE: Read our review of Bad Axe County.

Author photo by Ya-Ling Tsai.

We talked to Bad Axe County author John Galligan about the allure and the danger of sports, how fly fishing is an excellent hobby for a writer and why Wisconsin fascinates him.

FictionThriller

Daniel Nieh

Interview by Linda M. Castellitto

Debut author Daniel Nieh’s Beijing Payback is an international thriller, a meditation on grief and an action-packed coming-of-age story. College student Victor Li and his sister, Jules, are shattered by their father’s murder. But they’ve only just begun to mourn when they learn the shocking truth about their dad’s past: He wasn’t just the successful owner of three Chinese restaurants. Rather, he’d been a member of a global crime organization for decades, and he wants vengeance from beyond the grave.

We talked to Nieh about the genesis of the book, how his other careers have influenced his writing and the power of secrets.

At the very beginning of Beijing Payback, you include a Note on Language to help readers understand who’s speaking which language when, pronunciations, etc.—an extension, presumably, of your work as a Chinese-English translator. After serving as a conduit for communication among others, did sharing your own stories directly with readers seem like a natural next step for you? Via your translation work, are there things you’ve learned about yourself, about others, about communicating, that were particularly important to your writing?
Translation is great writing practice, because it requires being sensitive to idiom and turn of phrase. But the decision to write Beijing Payback in both English and Chinese stems less from my work as a translator and more from my experience as an American. In our incredibly diverse country, there are many places where another language is just as important as English, and the starting point of this book, the San Gabriel Valley of Los Angeles, is one of them. In the same way that Junot Díaz and Cormac McCarthy have used Spanish in their novels to demonstrate the fluidity in which some Americans switch between the two, I wanted to show how Victor Li’s American family spans two languages.

Your work as a model is another way to convey messages, emotions and artistic intentions. How do you think your aptitude for such performance might inform your work as an author (not just writing, but doing readings, events, etc.)?
Being a model means facing the scrutiny of others and the insecurities of one’s self all the time. I remember when I first learned how to walk for a fashion show from one of my bookers at my agency in Beijing. In the dark hallway between half-built offices, he showed me how, throwing his head back and walking strong and straight without looking around—he was short, with long, flowing hair, and his self-chosen English name was Fab. He said there were two keys to success on the catwalk: being relaxed and being confident. As a model, failure is your friend. If you book 10% of the jobs you go to castings for, you’re doing great. Those experiences are a reason why I was able to complete a manuscript in the first place: I’m not afraid of failure, my own imperfections or the judgments of others.

“Being a model means facing the scrutiny of others and the insecurities of one’s self all the time. . . . I’m not afraid of failure, my own imperfections or the judgments of others.”

Victor Li plays basketball in college. Even though he’s not likely to make the sport a profession like his super-talented best friend Andre, he practices, plays and considers it a defining aspect of his life. What about his dedication to basketball, and the way he feels about the sport, helps him handle what happens when his life goes haywire? You’ve played basketball, too—what does the sport mean to you?
Like Victor, I was obsessed with basketball as a teenager and a young adult. I started out as an uncoordinated bench warmer, but eventually I became pretty good. The stuff people say about sports is true: You learn the value of concentration and perseverance. You achieve flow states. At a time when I didn’t know how to talk to girls or wear my pants, I could at least shut down the other team’s best scorer and then make a reverse layup on the fast break. In other words, basketball gave me my first taste of mastery, which is an incredibly engaging sensation. I later achieved mastery in the Chinese language and am working on achieving it in storytelling and prose.

Speaking of Victor’s life going haywire, the revelation that his recently murdered dad, Vincent, was not just a beloved restaurateur but also a founding member of a Chinese crime syndicate is shocking, to say the least! And a great way to kick off a series of ever-wilder adventures. Is the notion that we all have secrets something that strikes a chord with you and makes you want to explore it in fiction? Are you good at keeping secrets, or sensing when someone has one?
I’m terrible at keeping secrets! I love to converse and share with people, and to talk about people, because people are so interesting. I’m working on becoming less of a gossip. So this loquaciousness is a way in which I’m different from Victor and Vincent Li. I’m interested in the secrets that immigrant parents might try to separate from their new American lives—including their new American children. My father never speaks much about his life before he arrived in the United States on a refugee visa. Perhaps they aren’t fond memories. That’s the case with Vincent Li, who grew up in the Communist China that my father escaped. He wants to look forward, not backward. He doesn’t want his children to know what he’s done to make their lives possible.

“I’m interested in the secrets that immigrant parents might try to separate from their new American lives—including their new American children.”

Victor, Jules and Victor’s friends are all in their early 20s. What is it about that life stage that compelled you to choose it for Beijing Payback’s central characters?
My understanding of the world opened up when I went to college and then to China. I learned that my privileged life was just one kind of life out there, and in fact, it was only possible because, elsewhere, people were working incredibly hard for very little pay. Those years are also the heart of that second phase of the child-parent relationship, when we have stopped idolizing our parents and started resenting them. There’s a third phase as well, when we learn how to appreciate our parents for who they really are. But the second phase is fascinating because it’s the time in which we define ourselves in contrast to the people who shaped us.

The desire for revenge, or at least comeuppance, is something we all experience, some much more intensely or dramatically than others. The Li family’s experience is certainly intense and dramatic! What do you think about revenge and the way it can intersect with grief or regret? Do you think Victor’s quest was ultimately a good or bad decision? Have you ever had the urge for retribution? Do any favorite revenge-themed stories inspire you?
I think we all have some experience of those urges, but they aren’t appealing to me. I don’t believe in the concept of “just desserts.” Without spoiling anything, I will say that this story is more about empathizing with people who do bad things—even to you or your family—than about deriving satisfaction from harming them. And the stories that inspired me—such as Motherless Brooklyn and Rule of the Bone—are also stories of confused young men setting out with a certain goal, being disappointed and growing up in the process.

The action scenes are exciting and suspenseful, and Victor’s what-the-hell-is-going-on asides inject some fun, too. Was crafting the action scenes a different process for you, versus writing scenes that were more focused on dialogue, inner monologue, etc.? Did you do anything to help visualize how those scenes might look and feel?
It’s hard to know how much detail to give. “He lifted his left foot, shifted his weight, raised his right hand”—snore. I eventually realized that I hold my breath when I read action scenes. I want to skip to the bottom, to the next set of quotation marks, and see how things turn out. So when I’m writing action, I try to avoid clichés and make it so the prose is too interesting to skim over. And I put myself in Victor’s shoes—if I were in a Beijing skyscraper at age 22 and bullets were whizzing by my head, what would I be focused on? In this way, the action is also character development: We see that Victor is freaking out in a relatable way, just like we would be, but at the same time, he’s skilled and resourceful, and he never loses his sense of humor.

Victor and Jules have to grapple not only with a host of new information about their father but also with how they feel about the privileges and safety they enjoyed even as Vincent’s crime syndicate caused others so much pain. What about the notion of the past being able to upend the present intrigues you? Do you think present-day beneficiaries owe something to those who were harmed in the past?
Every part of the United States is built upon the blood, sweat and tears of immigrants, many of whom crawled over corpses just to get into the country. The peaceful suburb where Victor grows up is no exception. I chose San Dimas because it’s the setting of Bill and Ted’s Excellent Adventure, which is really a story about being oblivious to history. The globalized moment we live in is a truly bizarre pastiche that only seems mundane if we’re as oblivious as Bill and Ted. We drive Japanese cars, eat Mexican produce, shave our bodies with German razors and listen to music created by the descendants of African slaves. We live on stolen land. We live within a bloody history, and it’s still unfolding, even though the bleeding mostly occurs out of sight of those who have benefited the most.

At the end of the book (no spoilers here!), it feels like, just maybe, Victor’s story hasn’t been fully told just yet. Do you indeed have plans to continue his adventures? If so, any preliminary thoughts you want to share about that—or other writerly things you’ve got coming up?
I have always envisioned Victor’s story as a three-book epic. Rather than repeating a mystery formula, these books will show his evolution. I just spent six months overseas, researching the sequel. I won’t say where, but I will say that the main language spoken there is neither Chinese nor English.

 

ALSO IN BOOKPAGE: Read our review of Beijing Payback.

Author photo by Steven Patenaude

We talked to Daniel Nieh about the genesis of his book Beijing Payback, how his other careers have influenced his writing and the power of secrets.

NonfictionMemoir

Augusten Burroughs

Interview by Linda M. Castellitto

Careful observers will note that something is missing from the cover of Augusten Burroughs’ new memoir, Toil & Trouble, in which he reveals his biggest secret yet: He is a witch. 

What is on the cover: graceful, charcoal-gray ombre loops and swirls that wend their way behind and through acid green and stark white lettering. The undulating background and crisp type artfully combine into a visual that’s wholly intriguing, a bit unsettling and a touch electrifying, hinting at what readers will find inside.

But the cover doesn’t inform in the ways you might expect. There’s no “#1 New York Times bestselling author” banner, nor a mention of Burroughs’ best-known book (later adapted into a film), 2002’s Running With Scissors. 

Rather, the author told BookPage in a call to his Connecticut home, “My only direction was, on the cover, just take off ‘#1 bestselling,’ take off every book I’ve ever written.” (Toil & Trouble is his 10th.)

He explains, “This is not a book for people who have read and loved my previous books—although it is! But really, this is for people who feel like they’re the only ones [who are witches], because I literally feel like the only one. I’ve felt like a freak my whole life because I’m a witch, a thing that doesn’t exist that absolutely exists.” 

He adds, “I know from experience that if I feel this way, and I’m one, there are others that feel the same way who will hopefully find themselves in this book.”

What does Burroughs mean by witch, exactly? Well, he’s not the black hat-wearing, broomstick-riding, cauldron-stirring cackler the word so often conjures up. Think less Halloween, more Hogwarts—except, instead of having loads of similarly gifted classmates and teachers with whom to practice the craft, Burroughs discussed his abilities only with his mother and select relatives who were witches themselves. 

Burroughs first learned of his witch-hood when he was 9 years old, he explains in Toil & Trouble. One day his school bus ride home was filled with anxiety and distress; he was certain something terrible had happened to his grandmother. It turned out she’d been in a car accident, which he had sensed because, his mother said, he was the latest in a long family line of witches.

This revelation was, he wrote, “simultaneously the most confusing and the most comforting thing anyone had ever said to me.”

Burroughs’ mother taught him to understand his unusual abilities and to keep them hidden. When she became overwhelmed by mental illness and sent him to live with another family (a stage of his life he chronicled in Running With Scissors), he no longer had anyone to talk to about this aspect of himself. 

It became a secret he kept from everyone, including his husband, until he wrote Toil & Trouble, an experience that was itself more of a bursting forth than a planned endeavor. 

He recalls, “Our Great Dane had horrible invasive surgery, and the vet said he couldn’t move [during his recovery], so we had to bring a foam mattress into the living room . . . and make a giant playpen.” The dog, Otis, stayed still if Burroughs was there watching him, so the author hunkered down with his laptop—and the words started pouring out.

“I destroyed my laptop, I broke the keyboard, it just exploded out of me—like it or not, there it was!” he says. He adds that his husband, Christopher, who is also Burroughs’ longtime agent, “didn’t have any idea what I was doing. As far as he knew, I was writing a thriller. I gave it to him, and he was like, wow.”

Wow, indeed. Not only was Burroughs’ typing ferocious enough to destroy his laptop, it also gave him tendinitis in his shoulder for about six months afterward. But with the damage, and with the freedom of declaring this is all of me, came relief. He acknowledges that this might seem surprising to those who’ve read his previous work.

I’ve felt like a freak my whole life because I’m a witch, a thing that doesn’t exist that absolutely exists.

“After writing so many memoirs, journalists would ask me if there’s anything in my life I haven’t written about, since I’ve written about stuff people would be embarrassed by, like sexual abuse, alcoholism, addiction,” Burroughs says. “But I always felt like, no, there’s nothing about myself I wouldn’t write about—except, obviously, the one thing I’m never going to write about! It was so off the table, I didn’t even realize I wasn’t replying accurately.”

Not least because, he says, “I get it, I really do. . . . ‘Oh my god, now he’s a witch!’ I wouldn’t believe it either, except I do.” However, those early years under his mother’s tutelage weren’t characterized by dissonance. He knew what he experienced, so it wasn’t strange to him that his mother or aunt practiced witchcraft in addition to their scholarly pursuits.

“My mother’s approach to witchcraft was not about spells, cloaks and herbs so much as, look, we possess neuroanatomy people haven’t found yet,” he says. “We have the ability to influence matter in ways that seem impossible and that would be called laughable and not taken seriously.”

There is the occasional spell in Toil & Trouble, particularly during Burroughs’ efforts to get Christopher to see the upsides of moving from New York City to the Connecticut country-side. These finely crafted snippets of poetry do help his goals come to fruition, but the author says spells aren’t a necessity. 

“Magic is about specificity, about needing to know exactly what needs to happen, and writing can be a way to shape that,” he says. 

But this shouldn’t be confused with mere wishing: “You do want to achieve an outcome, but you don’t achieve it through wanting. You achieve it through an incredibly disciplined and crafted and powerful focus in the mind.”

The men and their dogs ultimately did move to Connecticut, where they encountered neighbors whom Burroughs describes with a mix of acerbic wit and genuine warmth, from a foul-mouthed and highly skilled contractor to an aggressively odd opera singer. There’s also a realtor named Maura who takes Burroughs on some truly astonishing house tours (keep an eye out for the phrase “cake abattoir”) and is a witch, too. 

Majestic old trees loom over the couple’s new house in a way that sets Burroughs’ senses tingling, even as they prompt a deeper look at the eternal push-pull between humans and nature. The author also muses on things ranging from illness and addiction to gardening and tattoos, as well as the 1960s TV show “Bewitched.”

Woven throughout these topics—sometimes densely, sometimes more loosely—are Burroughs’ reflections on what being a witch has meant to him, from the teachings passed down via his ancestors to how he lives his life as a witch every day. 

Of course, it remains to be seen what life will be like for Burroughs, now that he’s put Toil & Trouble out into the world and his being a witch is no longer hidden. “My husband says witchcraft needs a new name and a new PR agent. People immediately think of bat wings being boiled,” he says. Then he clarifies, “All those words . . . like ‘eye of newt,’ are just words for different herbs.”

He adds, “The thing we call ‘witchcraft’ is really a sense and an ability that probably a lot of people have, who would never say they believe in witchcraft—yet, through the sheer power of focus, they have achieved things that would seemingly be impossible. . . . It’s time to come out of the closet and be legitimized, because it’s not some fringe weirdo thing. It’s not actually supernatural, it’s hypernatural . . . the fundamental nature of the universe.”

Ultimately, though, Burroughs knows readers will come to their own conclusions. “Either I’m completely lying, or life is a little bit more complicated than we think it is.”

 

Author photo credit: AXB

Beloved memoirist Augusten Burroughs writes about the one thing he thought he’d never confess: He’s a witch.
Mystery & SuspenseSuspense

Catriona McPherson

Interview by Linda M. Castellitto

Catriona McPherson’s Strangers at the Gate is a twisty-turny, darkly atmospheric novel that begins with Finn and Paddy Lamb embarking on a promising new chapter of their lives: Husband Paddy has just landed a partnership at a law firm in a small town, a rent-free cottage on his employer’s property and a deacon job for wife Finn at the parish church. But their optimism turns to horror when they stumble upon a bloody-murder tableaux—and decide to pretend they didn’t. As the days pass and they wait for someone, anyone, to find the bodies and report the crime, their paranoia grows. Did someone see them? Was it a murder-suicide, or just plain murder? Are the neighbors eccentric, or something worse?

We spoke with McPherson about secrets and lies, her writing process and the dramatic landscape that serves as a spooky backdrop for her newest book.

What an exciting, creepy, suspenseful book you’ve written! I ended up reading Strangers at the Gate in one sitting (and putting off other things in the meantime—oops). Do you find yourself getting swept up in your stories and writing wherever and whenever the muse takes you, or are you a more methodical sort who uses outlines, set hours or words per day, that sort of thing?
Well, thank you! That’s just about the best thing any author can hear. Sorry not sorry about your derailed day.

I’m a mixture between the two types of writer. I don’t outline or make any kind of plans before I start. I just write the first draft out of my system—no reading, no editing—then see what I’ve got afterwards. However, that process goes on at two thousand words a day, five days a week. Ideally. Life gets in the way, of course, and I miss days, work weekends, etc. Always at the end I find myself, crab-handed and lunching on peanut butter a la spoon, hunched over my desk trying to get to the end. But then I print it out and dance around—“Uptown Funk,” “Cake by the Ocean” (it’s no time to be cool)—truly feeling like a room without a roof. (That’s another good one.)

You’ve written some 25 books and often publish more than one a year. Is it challenging for you to toggle between your Dandy Gilver and Lexy Campbell series and your standalone work? Or is it perhaps more fun to change things up on a regular basis?
Honestly? If every year had about 13 and a half months, I could do it comfortably. As it stands, I’m a quarter-turn too tightly wound, but I do a lot of yoga, and I take two weeks off in the summer and two weeks for Christmas. Ha! I’ve just realized as I write that—I don’t need a 13-month year; I just need to give up my 11-month one. Well, I’m not going to. Those weeks are probably helping, eh?

I do think that writing completely different books in succession helps. I’m drawing on different bits of my brain and writing in very different tones. But the main thing for me is that I was bewildered, unhappy and unsuccessful doing what I trained to do—academic linguistics—and even after nearly 20 years of writing fiction full-time, I still feel relieved and lucky that I’m doing something I understand now. I think that’s what keeps me going.

“I can spot a lie, a half-truth, a quarter truth or an eighth truth and draw you a diagram of where the element of falsehood is lurking.”

Finn and Paddy are offered, all at once, some wonderful things: a law partnership for Paddy, a church deacon job for Finn and a rent-free cottage on Paddy’s employer’s land. Finn does, of course, think it might be too good to be true—and it certainly turns out to be! Is the havoc that can occur when we ignore our instincts something you like to explore in your work in general, as well as specifically in this book? It seems to be something we’re often told, to follow our instincts, but it seems to be easier said than done, yes?
I went off and made tea to ponder this one, and I think you’re right. I do often write about people trying to believe something and slowly becoming unable to ignore the truth they don’t want to see. And you’re right, too, that we know we should follow our instincts, but we talk ourselves out of it all the time. I certainly did that a couple of times in a professional setting, signing up to work with people I knew weren’t a good fit and didn’t get me or my books. No one I’m working with now, I hasten to add—this was years and years ago.

#MeToo made us all think more clearly about the perils of ignoring instincts as well, didn’t it? A few short years ago, when creepers were being creepy, I’d still wonder if I was misreading the situation, and I’d hesitate to speak up. Not actual flashers and gropers, you understand—I’m talking about the really skillful ones who do the deniability dance and react with authentic-looking shock when you call them on their crummy behavior. That’s been scraped up and double-bagged now, thank God.

The landscape of Strangers at the Gate feels darkly beautiful and quite eerie. You do an excellent job of conveying Finn’s uncertainty and unease amid the looming trees and deep valleys of small-town Simmerton versus the city streets that she’s used to. Are you more of a country or city mouse? Did you go back to Scotland to immerse yourself in the landscape in preparation for the book, or does it stay fresh in your mind?
I’m absolutely a country mouse. I gave Finnie similar experiences to some of mine when I first moved to the country and learned what a vixen scream sounds like (it sounds like a woman being murdered) and why you should never shine a light up at an owl (it’ll dive bomb the light). But the same silent blackness that freaks Finnie out felt like being snuggled up in a velvety blanket to me. It’s all still there in my memory, but I do go back pretty much every year to top up.

It’s fascinating (and frightening) to think about how we can be married to, or be friends with or live next to people for years and never really know them. Is that a theme that resonates with you as a writer—the differences between people’s public and private faces, and the surprising things that are revealed?
I’ve not been aware of it, but now you mention it and as I cast my mind back over my books . . . you’ve got me bang to rights. It’s not the first time someone else has revealed what I write about. A few years ago, as I handed a book over to my agent she said, in a throwaway remark: “Where’s the missing child in this one then?” I was taken aback, but she was dead right. There is always a lost or missing child somewhere in my books, including this one. Paging Dr. Freud!

Secrets and lies play a central role in this book from start to finish, and the various revelations are delightfully shocking—not least because your characters are so good at being personable even as they hide important truths. Gaslighting virtuosos! Are you good at telling when that’s happening in real life? Are there any skilled fibbers you know, in real life or in literature, movies, etc., who inspired you?
I’m a trained BS detector. Seriously—for my linguistics Ph.D. my thesis topic was truth in spoken discourse. I can spot a lie, a half-truth, a quarter truth or an eighth truth and draw you a diagram of where the element of falsehood is lurking. Mostly that translates into shouting at the radio as if the interviewer can hear me telling them what question they need to ask the politician who’s dishing it out. My favorite liars in fiction are the sneaky gaslighters in Joy Fielding’s books. Kiss Mommy Goodbye and See Jane Run are master classes.

Finn’s stress builds and builds over the course of a week; it was such fun to experience things as they happened, so to speak, right along with her and the other characters. Do you like to read stories or watch movies or plays like this? Is it easier or more difficult, do you think, for you to build tension within a defined timeframe?
I love books and movies like that! Dog Day Afternoon, Clockwise, Independence Day, Jurassic Park, The Da Vinci Code. They’re so propulsive. As for writing them—this takes me back to one of the earlier questions. I know I couldn’t write more than one book a year if the books I wrote took place over generations. Somehow, if the duration of the events in the novel is short, it’s easier to write quickly. Even when I recently wrote a book that covered a year, it was a year consisting of four weekends, one in each season.

You’ve been shortlisted for and won numerous awards—Agatha, Edgar, Mary Higgins Clark, among others. Congratulations! How has this recognition changed (or not) your writing life?
Thank you! It is lovely to be recognized, whether by judges (as in the Edgars) or peers (as in the Anthonys). If I needed more evidence that I’m in the right job now, that would do it. But it doesn’t change the main bit of the work. I still need to make sure the next book is as good as I can possibly make it, and I still feel sick with nerves while I’m waiting to hear if the publisher wants to buy it. In fact, I think the awards make that worse. They raise expectations, and they would make the career-ending humiliation and scorching failure that could be waiting round the next corner that bit more painful.

Oh, God. I wish I hadn’t let that thought bubble to the surface. I’m glad there’s another question. Hurrying on then . . .

What’s coming up next for you? Eager readers will want to know!
I’ve got a book in the historical series coming out in the U.S. next month, A Step So Grave—it’s the one with the four seasons. And there’s another two written and on my editor’s desk in London at various stages. Then the third in the Last Ditch series, working title Scot on the Rocks, comes out in the U.S. and U.K. next summer. August, I think. The next standalone is still being polished before I hand it over (gulp—see above!). I’m hoping it’ll be called A Gingerbread House, but who knows—I was thrilled when the Minotaur editor came up with Strangers at the Gate as a title for this book. I gave up on my working title without a backward glance. When something’s right, it’s right. Right?

 

ALSO IN BOOKPAGE: Read our review of Strangers at the Gate.

We spoke with Catriona McPherson about secrets and lies, her writing process and the dramatic landscape that serves as a spooky backdrop for her newest book.

YA FictionYA

Sarah Deming

Interview by Linda M. Castellitto

Debut YA novelist and boxing champion Sarah Deming on writing, fighting and the will to win

The acknowledgments at the end of Sarah Deming’s new YA novel, Gravity, are six pages long. The author thanks boxers—women she fought on her road to becoming a New York Golden Gloves champion—as well as trainers, students, gym owners, fellow boxing journalists, editors, her agent and publisher, family, friends and her husband. It’s a lovely testament to the veritable village that underlies Deming’s experience of boxing, writing, publishing and living a life. 

“I’m really grateful,” she tells BookPage in a call to her Brooklyn home. “If you’re telling a story not just for your own ego’s sake but for a lot of people . . . people will help you along, and it’s not as lonely, not as hard.”

The value of such encouragement is an ever-present theme in Gravity, a thrilling, moving story about a Dominican Jewish girl who boxes her way to a better life. It’s the culmination of Deming’s 20-some years in the world of boxing as a competitor, reporter and coach.

Gravity Delgado began training at 12 years old at a boxing gym in a rough area of Brooklyn. By 16, she’s a Golden Gloves champion angling for a spot on the 2016 Summer Olympics team. Her desire burns brightly as she runs miles in a plastic suit, protects her little brother from their abusive, alcoholic mother and wonders if her father (who abandoned the family when she was 8) thinks about her, too.

The gym that’s long been Deming’s boxing home inspired Gravity’s gym, but the author says she doesn’t miss competing. “Oh God, no. It was so hard! It’s for young people. I’m happy to be around it, but it’s a grueling sport.” 

She now channels her energy into coaching and writing. Deming says, “I’ve always had a lot of drive and been really competitive, really hard on myself. The years when I was boxing, it gave me an external focus for that. . . . I was really living in my aggression.”

Deming felt strongly about capturing how, in order to succeed, boxers must be comfortable with (enjoy, even) competition and full contact. In writing Gravity, she says, “I wanted to give kids, especially girls, permission to be hungry and driven. . . . I wanted to give a portrait that would be aspirational for young women, and I really hoped it would be accessible for people who don’t know anything about boxing.” 

Gravity is indeed those things. Gravity is talented and determined, and while she must be intensely focused if she wants to make it to the Olympics, she also works to balance friendship and sport, being a sister and being a boxer. She makes mistakes, of course, and readers who’ve faced similar tensions will empathize with her lessons learned.

When it comes to the boxing elements of the book, Gravity is exciting and suspenseful. The road to Rio for the young boxers at Gravity’s gym is artfully described via intermittent news dispatches from a boxing journalist, compelling blow-by-blow descriptions of various bouts and vignettes that amp up the suspense, such as a will-they-make-weight-or-not scene that will leave readers chuckling and a bit grossed out. (“Spitting was my favorite way to make weight,” Deming says.) 

The author says she’s experienced the same inner conflict Gravity does when fighting against her friends, or when playfully chatting with an opponent one minute and whaling on them the next. “A rival is a very powerful thing,” she says. “I wanted to show that relationship, and that [Gravity and her friends] could strive against each other. You can see things in your friends that you don’t like and want to react against that and do better than them, but at the end of the day still care about each other.”

That’s a battle fought within, something each boxer must come to terms with in their own way. “The real message,” Deming says, “is that your true competition is with yourself. As a writer, I always try to remember that. I should feel abundant, that there’s enough success in the world for everyone. I’m in competition with myself, and nobody else can write the book I want to write.” 

Ultimately, she says, “Gravity is everything I had to say about boxing.  It’s my love song to boxing, warts and all.” 

 

ALSO IN BOOKPAGE: Read our starred review of Gravity.

Author photo by Gordon Erikson.

Debut YA novelist and boxing champion Sarah Deming on writing, fighting and the will to win.
Mystery & SuspenseMystery

Judy Melinek and T.J. Mitchell

Interview by Linda M. Castellitto

Cool new city (San Francisco), fun new apartment (converted cable car), impressive new job (medical examiner): On paper, Dr. Jessie Teska’s got a lot to look forward to. But in reality, she’s still struggling to move past the painful breakup that prompted her to leave L.A.—and it’s not long before her challenging and interesting new job plops her right in the path of murderous criminals.

Married co-authors Dr. Judy Melinek and T.J. Mitchell first partnered on the New York Times bestselling memoir Working Stiff: Two Years, 262 Bodies, and the Making of a Medical Examiner. Now, they’re back with First Cut, which kicks off a new thriller series. We talked with the duo about how they work together, what makes medical examiners so fascinating and how to maintain a sense of humor while working an extraordinarily tough job.

You’re married, have three children, co-wrote a New York Times bestselling memoir about Dr. Melinek’s training at the Office of the Chief Medical Examiner in New York City—and now, you’re launching a new thriller series. Congratulations! How do you best work together? Do you, say, collaborate via email, or sit together and take turns talking and typing, or etc.? Can you share a bit about how you get into writerly sync?
We collaborate in a variety of ways. Our first book, the memoir Working Stiff, was nonfiction, and the process of writing it helped us find our voice as co-authors of the detective novel series we are launching with First Cut. Other than that, though, the process of writing that book was entirely different from the process we have adopted when working together on medical-examiner fiction.

When we first start shaping the story for a novel, we go on a lot of walks together and talk out what we know has already happened, what’s going to happen and how we can get there. When it comes time to put things on paper, we sit down together and brainstorm into a long, messy outline.

Then we divide roles for a while. Judy continues her day job as a forensic pathologist, performing autopsy death investigation in the real world, while T.J. molds our story into the beats, scenes and acts that form a detective novel. When he gets stuck, we brainstorm again—at that point, often by email or text. Once the rough draft is on paper, Judy will read it out loud and we will both make changes based on what we hear. Our books are written from a first-person point of view and our protagonist, Dr. Jessie Teska, has a strong personality that is best explored out loud while we’re composing the manuscript.

Dr. Melinek, you’re the forensics expert, and T.J., you’ve worked in the film business as a writer and editor. Do you essentially divide your authorial duties along those lines, too? How would you say your work informs your writing, or vice versa? Do either of you get veto power over particular aspects of character or story?
As co-authors—and married ones—we’re fortunate in this way: We have no overlapping skill set. Judy has, in her 20 years of experience as a forensic pathologist, seen it all. She has the stories about deaths we can fictionalize in the frame of our detective novels. The science you read in our books is real. Dr. Jessie Teska’s investigative methods are as close as you will find in a mystery or thriller to the way real medical examiners work with cops, district attorneys, clinical physicians, lab professionals and the whole range of specialists and experts in the death-investigation system.

Writing fiction is T.J.’s domain. He loves to sit in a room and wrestle with words all day. He loves to agonize over commas. He really does. Judy has the stories and T.J. has the time and the drive to craft them. That’s how we collaborate as co-authors.

Neither of us steps on the other’s toes all that often; not in a way we can’t resolve. When we do come to a storytelling impasse, Judy might declare a veto over a scientific or investigative method, or T.J. might declare one over a structural element of the narrative. Honestly, though, these vetoes are rare.

One of Jessie’s colleagues reminds her that they work within a legal system, not a justice system. It’s a poignant truth that, alas, not every criminal will be jailed, let alone caught or prosecuted. But Jessie tries her hardest, sometimes at great personal cost. Is that something that’s meaningful to you—exploring the conflict that can arise between wanting to excel at a job vs. doing what feels right, or between longing for closure vs. accepting it’s not in the cards?
Jessie’s watchword is integrity. She is a noir detective of the old school, one who pursues the truth about the cases she investigates with a doggedness that steps over into recklessness. The word autopsy means “see for yourself,” and that’s exactly what Dr. Jessie Teska does, no matter the consequences to herself.

But when the consequences of her unrelenting search for the truth start to affect other people in her life? Well, that’s when things get dirty and hard. That’s what we’re here, as storytellers, to give you!

“The real world of forensic pathology can be, at times, fully absurd.”

There’s plenty of funny stuff in your book, not least a memorably and hilariously gross weapon used in a physical fight. It’s got to be a delicate balance—everyone needs humor to cope with the vagaries of work life, but not everyone is doing such difficult work while being held accountable to so many. Did your own personal experience with that push-pull inform your desire/decision to explore it in your novel?
The real world of forensic pathology can be, at times, fully absurd. The truth surely is stranger than fiction, and sometimes the awful, weird and unexpected circumstances of an unforeseen death can be so dark as to become, yes, funny. One thing we hope we never do in the course of our books, though, is the one thing that Dr. Melinek and her colleagues assiduously do not do: We do not mock the dead. The gallows humor you see in TV dramas does not represent the attitude that the best forensic professionals take toward their job in the morgue.

San Francisco serves as the backdrop to Jessie’s new life: She’s got to adjust to the persistent fog, make a home in a converted cable car and go on work calls all over the city. What is it about San Francisco (besides, perhaps, excellent taco places) that made you choose it as the setting for First Cut?
Write what you know! T.J. comes from Nahant, Massachusetts, a fishing town north of Boston (and next door to Lynn, our protagonist’s hometown), and Judy is an immigrant to the United States who grew up in the Bronx. We moved together to California for work a long time ago, and have lived in San Francisco’s Outer Richmond District for 15 years. We fell immediately and passionately in love with the city. Judy held Jessie’s job as an assistant medical examiner at the San Francisco Office of Chief Medical Examiner for nine years, and today works in an adjacent county. Her description of the morgue in the basement of the Hall of Justice at 850 Bryant Street is taken from her own experience. That morgue isn’t there anymore—there’s a brand new facility that forms the backdrop of Dr. Teska’s adventures in the next book in the series, Cross Cut. We’ve fictionalized here and there, but, for the most part, the facilities where Dr. Teska performs death investigation are just like the ones where Dr. Melinek did the same.

Female medical examiners have been the stars of popular book and TV series with beloved characters like Kay Scarpetta, Temperance Brennan, Maura Isles, Jordan Cavanaugh and more. Why, do you think, this particular profession makes for such enduringly appealing material for storytelling? Are there any persistent tropes that you wanted to upend, or have fun with, in First Cut?
Judy has a popular blog post at PathologyExpert.com called 7 CSI Fails. Among them: Don’t wear high heels (Louboutins?!) to a crime scene. Lab tests take time. Someone turn on the lights!

Now, Dr. Teska is not Dr. Melinek. Jessie makes some bad choices that Judy definitely would not, and Judy’s life is nowhere near as convoluted as Jessie’s. We enjoy taking Judy’s real experiences in her work life and twisting them, just enough, to have fun on the page.

The equipment in Jessie’s lab is frustratingly vintage, but your Bitcoin-centric subplot is decidedly of our cultural moment. What about Bitcoin caught your fancy, in terms of making it an element of your novel?
That’s a theme in the book: the disconnect between the high-tech ecosystem of Silicon Valley and the disconcertingly low-tech city morgue. Our fictional medical examiner employs many of the same tools as her professional forebears did a century ago. Like Dr. Melinek, Dr. Teska uses scalpels to slice through tissue, kitchen knives to bread loaf organs and hardware store tree loppers to cut ribs. Modern forensic pathology may require DNA and advanced toxicologic analysis to ensure convictions, but the process starts with basic medicine and very basic tools.

In addition to the outdated equipment, Jessie’s office also suffers from understaffing, underfunding and a lack of oversight. This, of course, increases stress and pressure, opportunities for error, etc. In your experience, are these problems common at M.E. facilities? Over your years in and writing about the forensics field, have you seen potential for improvement, facilities that’ve employed new approaches to temper these issues, that sort of thing?
The understaffing and underfunding of medical examiner and coroner systems is a nationwide problem. Currently only around 1 percent of medical students go into the field of pathology, and fewer still take the additional year of fellowship training to become forensic pathologists. There are only around 500 board-certified forensic pathologists like Dr. Teska in the United States. That’s half the number we need to cover our country’s current death-investigation workload, and that workload is growing.

Funding for forensic services is done on a county level, and the county’s dead don’t vote. So forensic labs and morgues are frequently the victims of government cutbacks during lean times, and rarely the recipient of financial investment in a good economy. In Dr. Melinek’s career she has not seen much improvement in this cycle. Our fiction reflects this funding crisis and its consequences—as bent through a noir lens.

“. . . when your heroine is a medical examiner, your books are chock full of corpses.”

With the intricacies of Jessie’s job and relationships, the complexity of the various crimes and the countless medical details that feel so natural in First Cut, there must’ve been so, so much to keep track of as you created. Did you plan out the story, maybe even the series, before the writing began, or do you employ a more free-flowing approach?
When we start out, we riff—and then we outline. The impetus for First Cut came from a real case that Dr. Melinek investigated in San Francisco. A man is sitting in a cyber café with his laptop in front of him. Another man comes through the door (this is all captured on security cameras), looks around, and then grabs that laptop and runs for the door. The laptop’s owner pulls out a gun and starts shooting while he chases the thief. He corners him, kills him, takes the laptop back . . . and walks away.

When Dr. Melinek arrived at this scene as the on-call medical examiner and was told this story by the investigating homicide detectives while she stood over the dead body, the first thing she thought was, “What the hell is on that laptop that’s worth murdering somebody over?” That was the kernel for our story, the death that sets everything in motion.

In a gripping detective story, that motion necessarily includes a lot of parts. Once we had the rough idea of what the story was and where it would go, we worked up a series of auxiliary documents—a structural outline, a timeline, a character list. These are typical for any novelist. Less typical is our document called Dead Bodies Timeline. We need this last one because, when your heroine is a medical examiner, your books are chock full of corpses. Some of them are central to the mystery, some are incidental and some might even be diversionary. Gotta keep ’em straight!

We do have ideas for a series arc, but it’s highly flexible. That’s one of the perks of working in the death investigation field in real life: There’s no shortage of stories to explore in the realm of fiction.

Can you share anything about what’s coming up next for Jessie and her colleagues (and Bea the beagle)? And what’s coming up next for the two of you?
The second book in the series, Cross Cut is well underway, and will be coming to bookshelves and glow-screens and earphones in 2021. We don’t want to reveal too much, of course. We can tell you that Bea gets to go digging; that we get to listen in to a comically stilted phone call between Jessie and her mother; and that, along the way, people die.

It’s all in a day’s work.

 

ALSO IN BOOKPAGE: Read our review of First Cut.

Author photo © Amal Bisharat.

Married co-authors Dr. Judy Melinek and T.J. Mitchell first partnered on the New York Times bestselling memoir Working Stiff: Two Years, 262 Bodies, and the Making of a Medical Examiner. Now, they’re back with First Cut, which kicks off a new thriller series. We talked with the duo about how they work together, what makes medical examiners so fascinating, and how to maintain a sense of humor while working an extraordinarily tough job.

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