Stephenie Harrison

Fiction

Rosecrans Baldwin

Interview by Stephenie Harrison

After years at the helm of the online magazine The Morning News, Rosecrans Baldwin has made his fiction debut. And what a debut it is—in addition to being a BookPage top debut for 2010, the LA Times placed You Lost Me There on its Summer Reading List, and TimeOut Chicago named it as one of the Best Summer Reads.

An intimate look into the evanescence of memory and the troubled man who has made his living studying its breakdown, You Lost Me There is an unforgettable read. Before the simmering hype comes to a rolling boil, Baldwin took some time out to talk to BookPage about the union of art and science, his other writing projects and how he plans to celebrate the launch of his first novel.

Throughout the novel, Victor undergoes some rather weighty moments of introspection—do you feel like you learned anything previously unknown about yourself while writing You Lost Me There?
Absolutely, and I wouldn’t think of sharing it in public. That’s what novels are for.

One of the conflicts in You Lost Me There seems to be based on fundamental incompatibilities between Victor and Sara—he is a scientist and she is an artist. Do you think science and art are diametrically opposed, or can they be reconciled?
Artists and scientists have lots in common. They work instinctively through long investigations, where the outcome is unknown. Both fields appeal to those who are drawn to lifelong disciplines, and also dabblers. I don’t think that Sara and Victor’s difficulties necessarily arise from their occupations, but it is their work where those difficulties often play out.

Do you feel like problems in relationships arise because the players change or is it perhaps their inability to change that causes issues?
Both—and six billion reasons more. But those two reasons are significant, absolutely. Sara, quoting Victor, says at one point maybe some marriages aren’t meant to last beyond a certain period—that, like humans, there may be diseases inherent to the body of the relationship that stay hidden for decades, but eventually appear.

One of your characters is a poet, and some of her verses are scattered throughout the novel. What was it like writing those? Have you ever had poetic aspirations?
I wish I could write poetry. I’d say I’m halfway-awful at it, which is what I’d also claim for Regina, the poet in the book. I wrote poetry all through college—and as soon as I graduated, I moved to New York and switched to writing novels in the mornings before work. Recently I’ve gone back to writing poems, but as warm-up exercises. I write really good warm-up poems. They are the equivalent of sweatpants.

As someone who didn’t necessarily excel at the sciences when in school, what was it like to research such a complicated topic like Alzheimer’s?
It was interesting. Less about Alzheimer’s Disease specifically, more in talking to scientists about their daily work—hearing about how labs function, how grant-writing works. For a while I thought academic scientists and writers were very similar; now I think it’s scientists and baseball players. Lots of training, lots of drudgery. Endless scoreless innings, but with occasional flashes of brilliance. And an idea of working in a tradition.

There’s a lot of drinking going on in this novel. What’s your alcoholic drink of choice?
I am a tequila guy.

How was writing a novel different from developing The Morning News and writing for a magazine?
They’re entirely different, but they’re both things I love doing. TMN gives me a venue to collaborate. One of our editors describes working on TMN as like playing in a band with two-dozen close friends, and I think that’s about right.

One thing our readers may not know is that every year The Morning News holds an NCAA-style literary match-up of the year’s most notable books (The Tournament of Books). Any hopes (or fears) that You Lost Me There might make the cut next March?
We instituted a rule that books from the Tournament’s staff are forbidden from competing. Thus Kevin Guilfoile’s new novel, The Thousand, won’t be eligible either. But yeah, if my book was in competition, I would be terrified of fighting in 2010. It’s been a terrific year for novels.

It took you five years to complete this novel—will we have to wait another five for your follow-up or do you already have something in the works?
I’m currently working on two new books, a nonfiction book about Paris and a novel about Tijuana. Hopefully, they won’t take decades, but you never know.

I imagine an author’s first release party for his first novel is kind of like a girl’s sweet 16th birthday party . . . but maybe with fewer frills and less pink. How do you intend to celebrate the release of You Lost Me There?
With roasted pink frilliness. My wife and I live in North Carolina, where the regional delicacy is pork BBQ, so we’re throwing a “pig pickin’ ” in the back yard. That’s where guests arrive to find about 90 pounds of animal smoking in an oil drum, and they tear the meat apart with their fingers.

Author photo by Susie Post Rust

After years at the helm of the online magazine The Morning News, Rosecrans Baldwin has made his fiction debut. And what a debut it is—in addition to being a BookPage top debut for 2010, the LA Times placed You Lost Me There on its Summer Reading List, and TimeOut Chicago named it as one of […]
Fiction

Jasper Fforde

Interview by Stephenie Harrison

While reading any Jasper Fforde novel, the rule of thumb is to expect the unexpected. In his eighth novel, Shades of Grey, the British master of devilish plots and ingenious wordplay proves that rule once again.

Shades of Grey catapults readers into a weird new world where we are all made strangers in a strange land. The novel takes place in the distant future, one in which humans are pretty much the same as they have always been, but with one crucial difference: rather than being able to see the entire spectrum, individuals can only see one color, and the color you can see foretells your destiny. If you’re lucky enough to see Purple, you’re royalty, sitting at the very top of the social order. Just hope you see something other than Grey, which is so low a social standing, you may as well be kneeling.

Eddie Russet, the novel’s unlikely hero, has it slightly better. He’s a Red—just one level above Grey in the grand scheme of things—but a very good Red. He hopes that upon coming of age and taking his Ishihara (the test which determines just how much vision you have of a particular color), he’ll have enough Red vision to qualify for a job working for National Color, the highest governing agency in Eddie’s world. All this changes, however, when he’s sent to East Carmine due to bad behavior and finds himself falling madly in love with a surly serving girl named Jane Grey.

Desperate to win Jane’s friendship, Eddie goes out of his way to impress her every chance he gets. Under her guidance, he begins to push boundaries, and even worse, to question the world around him. Eddie starts to realize that the world may not be quite as rosy as he had previously believed. Sometimes ignorance truly is bliss.

Apart from his dazzling Red abilities, there isn’t much that’s extraordinary about Eddie, but according to Fforde, it’s Eddie’s utter unremarkable-ness that makes his story so important.

“I didn’t want to make him too special,” Fforde muses, speaking from his home in Wales. “When you look at great conflicts like the World Wars, the most interesting characters for me are not the frontline heroes who have been born into a ruler society and could make things happen there, but the people who are basically lower middle class. I think it’s far more interesting for someone like Eddie because he’s only a notch above Grey, so he’s really quite low down, and it would be very, very easy for him to do nothing. And I think that’s really important, because the most extraordinary heroes, I think, of any great conflict or any huge sort of social upheaval are the people who could have done nothing and it would have been okay, and no one would have held it against them.”

Of course, those who have even a passing familiarity with Fforde’s other books know that social satire cloaked in the extraordinary is his bread and butter—his first series features a literary detective, Thursday Next, who can enter works of fiction and frequently goes up against a mega-conglomerate named Goliath that seeks to control the entire world.

Comparing the new series in scope to his previous works, Fforde remarks, “In Shades of Grey, I wasn’t trying to get too serious, because it’s not really a serious book at all.” He continues, “The Thursday series or the Nursery Crime series, they’re kind of silly whimsical books.”

Still, these so-called “whimsical” novels often have a darker tone. Fforde explains that his fiction is all about “being outside of that comfortable area, and tackling the things you don’t really like to write about.”

He says, “With Shades of Grey, I try to start off the book with a slightly Utopian feel, but an uneasy one, so that you might say, ‘Okay, this is not terrific, but maybe it’s the best we can get,’ but then of course as the story progresses, we realize there is a much darker side to this. Also, when you’re creating a story that you want to progress into an adventure story, you’ve got to have a fantastically good baddie, and you have to make things pretty bad for your characters to try to battle against.”

Even if he may have “inadvertently written a serious book,” Fforde is still Fforde here. Shades of Grey is fantastically funny in all the ways Fforde fans have come to anticipate. “Mostly it’s about trying to make the words dance a bit on the page,” he explains. “I think comedy is so important. I think there are so many serious books out there that are not real books because they don’t have comedy in them. Even in the darkest times of human endurance, there will always be comedy.”

All laughing matters aside, with Shades of Grey, it’s obvious that Fforde is breaking new ground. Perhaps the biggest change here is that for the first time, rather than borrowing from pre-existing literature, Fforde created all of his characters and the entire world from scratch. This was a crucial step for him as an author.

“No one will argue when I say it’s a departure,” he says, “but I think it’s a very necessary departure. I think authors have to stretch themselves from time to time to avoid becoming stale. I’ve been stealing other people’s characters for seven books now, and there’s a huge amount of fun to be had there, but it’s not something that can be mined forever, so you have to move either on or sideways or back, but you have to keep moving or else it all goes nasty.”

Is he worried that this departure may leave some fans behind? Fforde acknowledges that he’s taking a risk with his new book, but also says, “Writing without risk is not writing, as far as I’m concerned. . . . Although Shades of Grey is a very different idea from my previous works, I’m hoping people will read it and say, ‘Yeah, it’s not Thursday but it’s definitely a Jasper book.’ ”

A novel containing adventure, romance and a conspiracy involving missing spoons? Even with Thursday Next nowhere in sight, readers will be hard pressed to categorize Shades of Grey as anything other than a “Jasper book”!

RELATED CONTENT:
Read a review of Shades of Grey.

While reading any Jasper Fforde novel, the rule of thumb is to expect the unexpected. In his eighth novel, Shades of Grey, the British master of devilish plots and ingenious wordplay proves that rule once again. Shades of Grey catapults readers into a weird new world where we are all made strangers in a strange […]
Fiction

Anna Jean Mayhew

Interview by Stephenie Harrison
With a debut novel that’s being compared to the best in Southern literature, author Anna Jean Mayhew tells us how her own experiences have influenced her fiction.
 
 
You grew up in Charlotte, North Carolina, which is where your protagonist, Jubie, is from. Did you draw on any specific personal experiences when writing The Dry Grass of August?

 

Yes. My sister and I attended the Daddy Grace Parade with a woman who was working for our family at that time. And, as in my novel, on the bus downtown, my sister and I rode in front and the woman who worked for my family rode in back. I went to Myers Park High School and was in the marching band. I swam at Charlotte Municipal Pool, and I grew up on Queens Road West in a house within walking distance of Freedom Park. The major facts of the book are pure fiction, but some experiences were too good not to use, like the scene where Paula Watts runs out of gas after crossing the Chattahoochee River—two wheels on a ferryboat and two wheels on land. That really happened.
 
This novel took you 18 years to write. What was it like dedicating yourself to a creative project for such an extensive period of time?

 

The book was never out of my mind for long. I was working full time—for some years more than full time—but I stuck with it, developed my style, became a better writer. I was obsessed with accuracy. I began my novel before there was public access to the Internet, and my early research slowed me down; I did it via books, magazines from the 1950s, encyclopedia yearbooks for 1954, etc.
 
Were there any other pieces of writing that inspired you?

 

I’ve read To Kill a Mockingbird so many times that before I submitted my book for publication, I had to double-check to be sure I hadn’t inadvertently plagiarized anything. I’ve read extensively from Eudora Welty, Robert Penn Warren, Ernest J. Gaines, Josephine Humphreys, Lewis Nordan, Truman Capote, Lee Smith, Zora Neale Hurston. In my 30s, I discovered Flannery O’Connor’s “A Good Man is Hard to Find.” Over the next decade I read all her novels and stories, and in the late 1970s, The Habit of Being—a collection of her selected letters, the closest thing we have to an autobiography. I’m glad I finished the first complete draft of my book by the time other books came out that dealt with blacks and whites in the South on the cusp of the civil rights movement, e.g., The Secret Life of Bees, The Help and my favorites, Mudbound and The Queen of Palmyra.
 
 
Obviously the issue of race is still one that is deeply felt across the United States; what made you decide to focus on the 1950s when it came to telling this story?

 

Brown v. Board of Education of Topeka—the single most important civil rights case of the 20th century—was decided unanimously for the plaintiffs on May 17, 1954, ending the doctrine of “separate but equal.” Emmett Till was murdered in August of 1955, and the Montgomery bus boycott started in early December. Martin Luther King participated in that boycott, and formed the Southern Christian Leadership Conference two years later. Before all these events, there was an attitude among many Southern whites that they were superior and blacks were inferior. I tried to show how jeopardized that frame of mind was by the effect of Brown v. Board. In June of 1954, “under God” was added to our Pledge of Allegiance, which ends, “. . . with liberty and justice for all.” Fascinating that the protection of the Almighty was evoked when Jim Crow laws were still on the books.
 
It is so easy to get attached to the wonderful characters you have created, and seeing certain events through the lens of the 21st century makes some moments in the book particularly painful and discomfiting to read. Were there any scenes in the book that you found particularly difficult to write?

 

The scene where Jubie is savagely beaten by her father was tough to write. I had thoughts that abused children often have, “You’re exaggerating. It wasn’t that bad. Jubie deserved the beating; look at how much she hurt Stell.” I struggled for a long time with the scene where Jubie goes into the bus station with Leesum. I really wanted them to hold hands, something that would have attracted dangerous attention in that time of strict segregation. So I had to find a way to convey Jubie’s feelings for Leesum without breaking the social rules of the South in 1954.
 
 
A recent edition of Adventures of Huckleberry Finn has caused controversy because the original text has been modified so that a certain racially provocative term has been replaced. The Dry Grass of August does make use of the ‘N’ word; what are your feelings about using this word in fiction?

The ‘N’ word has a gut-wrenching history. No one should use it except as Mark Twain did, to make a point about characters, and to paint a picture of the times. If we allow such unlicensed editing—as in the re-issue of Huckleberry Finn—the next step is to fulfill Bradbury’s prophesy in Fahrenheit 451: burn the “offensive” books! A reviewer looking at my synopsis changed my term “colored maid” (I used quotes to indicate it was a phrase of the ‘50s) to “African American domestic.” The term “African American” didn’t come into common usage until long after the setting of my book (1954-55); I fault that reviewer for inappropriate political correctness. And, if the re-issued Huckleberry Finn sets a precedent, then that sin will be perpetuated in books like To Kill a Mockingbird, in the works of O’Connor and Faulkner, in the novels of Lewis Nordan, and certainly in The Dry Grass of August. Many black authors will be affected as well: Ernest J. Gaines, Zora Neale Hurston, Langston Hughes, Wallace Thurman, et al. I’m offended by the word “girl” when it’s applied to a grown woman. So let’s re-issue The Great Gatsby and change the use of the word “girl” to “woman” when Fitzgerald refers to a female over the age of 18 (e.g., Daisy is described as “the golden girl”). Such debates are futile; you cannot change the existence of a word by deleting it from books and re-issuing them.
 
Jubie is only 13 years old, a girl on the cusp of womanhood. How did you manage to so authentically capture the voice of someone who is so young and innocent?

 

It’s been a long time, but I once was a 13-year-old girl. Early in the writing of the novel Jubie’s voice was not consistent, and that kept coming up in critiques. So I made it a point to be around adolescent girls as much as possible, at my church, in our community, wherever I could be with them and talk with them. I watched movies with girls that age, like Fly Away Home, in which Anna Paquin plays a 13-year-old girl struggling with some pretty heavy life problems. Your question gets it precisely right: “on the cusp of womanhood.” Maybe subconsciously that’s why I chose that age, with my recollections of a confusing mix of knowledge—becoming aware that life’s not fair—and helplessness: the inability to really change things.
 
What would you say is the biggest misconception people have about the South?

 

In the early 1970s I was at a sales meeting in New York City. The New Yorker sitting next to me said he would be flying into Charlotte on Monday evening of the following week. I said, “No, you’ll have to fly in during the day. We don’t have lights on the runways.” He stammered, “Really?” I told him I was kidding, but it was obvious that he’d taken me literally. Also non-Southerners often assume that race relations in the South are much more problematic than they are in other parts of the country, when in fact I’ve seen sweeping changes in my lifetime. We’ve come a long way, and we have a long way yet to go.
 
You are already working on your second novel, Tomorrow’s Bread. Can you share a little bit about what we can expect from that book?

 

It’s set in Charlotte in 1970; there are two narrators. One is a 24-year-old black single mother who lives in an inner-city neighborhood on the brink of destruction via urban renewal. Her six-year-old son is bused to a suburban, formerly all-white elementary school. The second narrator is a 32-year-old married white mother of two. Her husband is an architect who has a hand in the urban renewal; their nine-year-old son is bused to a formerly all-black elementary school. The title comes from “Freedom,” by Langston Hughes, who had grown impatient with how slowly things were changing after Brown v. Boardand the Civil Rights Act. This book is in no way a sequel to The Dry Grass of August, but I’m still drawn to writing about race relations and about Charlotte.
 
What is the best advice you can give to aspiring writers?

Write. 

 

With a debut novel that’s being compared to the best in Southern literature, author Anna Jean Mayhew tells us how her own experiences have influenced her fiction.    You grew up in Charlotte, North Carolina, which is where your protagonist, Jubie, is from. Did you draw on any specific personal experiences when writing The Dry […]
Fiction

Emily St. John Mandel

Interview by Stephenie Harrison

Canadian-born author Emily St. John Mandel burst onto the literary scene in 2009 with her debut, Last Night in Montreal. Her second novel, The Singer’s Gun, is May 2010’s #1 Indie Next Pick, and praise is mounting from booksellers and reviewers alike. BookPage spoke with St. John Mandel about the inspiration behind her novels, immigration issues and the worst job she’s ever had.

There are a lot of heavy issues (ranging from immigration fraud to human trafficking) in The Singer’s Gun. Where did you get your inspiration for the book, and why did you feel you needed to tell this story?
I've always had an interest in immigration. My father emigrated from the United States to Canada, and then 30 years later I emigrated from Canada to the United States. Human trafficking is immigration’s dark shadow.

Around the time I began the book I was thinking a lot about marriage, having spent the previous months planning my wedding, and there was a story I'd recently heard that stayed with me—it concerned a man who’d realized on his honeymoon that he’d made a mistake. The feeling was apparently mutual; the couple divorced amicably about six months later. I feel that it should be possible to base a novel on just about anything, so I began with that premise: What if a man left his wife on their honeymoon? The entire novel unwound from there. Various interests (immigration, passport fraud, figureheads, container ships, the idea of holiness) adhered themselves over time, and after a few years of concentrated effort I had a book.

This might of course change with future books, but for my first two novels it hasn’t really been a matter of needing to tell any particular story—it’s more that I start with an image, or a sentence, or some vague premise, and the final book is the story I end up with at the end of the process.

One of the main characters in The Singer’s Gun is a Canadian whose lifelong dream is to live in New York City, even if it means living there illegally. You also happen to be Canadian and live in Brooklyn—how did you wind up there? Are there any other parallels between you and your Canadian literary counterpart?
I gave my Canadian literary counterpart an unpleasant work environment that had aspects of one or two of my least favorite jobs, and when I first came here I thought I was an illegal alien—it was a happy surprise to discover that because my father was born and raised in California, I’d actually been an American all along—but the similarities end there. None of my characters are based on anyone in particular.

I took a circuitous route from Canada to Brooklyn. Living in New York City wasn’t my lifelong dream—I actually never thought when I was younger that I’d end up living in the United States. I grew up on the west coast of British Columbia, and went to school in Toronto, so that was what brought me over to this side of the continent. A year or so after I graduated from the School of Toronto Dance Theatre, I had a boyfriend in New York, so I moved down there to be with him. After five months or so we ended up moving to Montreal together, and then after a few months in Montreal I missed New York City so much that I moved back here on my own. I’ve been in New York for about seven years.

Before you broke into publishing, you studied dance, which seems like an unconventional warm-up to becoming an author. What made you switch paths?
I was home-schooled as a child, and one of the very few requirements of my somewhat haphazard curriculum was that I write something every day. So I’d actually been writing for almost as long as I can remember—I was in the habit of writing short stories and poems from a very early age. Even when I was a dancer, I used to take notes for stories all the time. At a certain point in my early 20s, I found that dance was beginning to feel like more of a burden than a joy, and I started taking fewer and fewer dance classes, going to fewer auditions, and writing much more seriously than I ever had before. It was a very slow and gradual progression from thinking of myself as a dancer who sometimes wrote to thinking of myself as a writer who used to be a dancer.

There’s a very international scope to your fiction. Do you attribute this to your own experiences of having lived as an immigrant in a foreign country?
Yes, I think it’s probably fair to say that my experience of having lived in more than one country has shaped the way I write. Living in a country other than the one you grew up in is an experience that I think everyone should have at some point in their lives, if at all possible—it changes the way you see the world.

The issue of identity theft and escape comes into play in this novel. If you could be anyone else, who would you be and why?
Good question . . . there are certain aspects of other peoples’ lives and careers that I admire—it would be nice to be able to play the piano like Horowitz, for example, or to have enough money to travel the world and spend concentrated amounts of time in southern Italy—but I can’t think of anyone else I’d rather be. I think I’ve been very lucky.

One of the interesting similarities between The Singer’s Gun and your first novel, Last Night in Montreal, is that both novels deal with issues of identity. Is this a topic that you’ve personally struggled with?
Not really, although it’s certainly a topic that I’ve thought about a lot. At a certain point in my life I acquired a second passport, and suddenly having citizenship in more than one country of course somewhat complicates the way you think of yourself. I also changed my name when I got married, and changing your name forces you to consider questions of identity—I took my husband’s last name, Mandel, and dropped my maiden name altogether. (St. John is my middle name; it was my grandmother’s surname.)

Anton has many secrets that he’s willing to risk his life for . . . what about you?
There are a few people I’d risk my life for, and possibly even a cause or two, but I can’t say that I have any secrets that fall under that category.

Some of the characters in your novel have some pretty terrible jobs—what’s the worst job you’ve ever had?
I think the worst job I ever had was probably my two-week stint as a cocktail waitress in Toronto. I liked making martinis and I thought the bar where I worked was beautiful, but I got yelled at a lot, the pay was terrible, the manager’s 70-year-old dad kept hitting on me and the management stole most of my tips. There was another job where I had to unload trucks outdoors at 7 a.m. in Montreal in the wintertime, which was difficult only because it was so breathtakingly cold and it involved getting up at 5:30 a.m.

In general, the worst jobs for me have been the ones where I’ve had to work for unpleasant people, or where the work environment has been generally tense, and I’ve had three jobs like that over the years—the waitressing job and two offices that I worked in. But in case my boss is reading this, let me hasten to add that I very much enjoy my present position.

RELATED CONTENT

Read a review of The Singer's Gun.

Canadian-born author Emily St. John Mandel burst onto the literary scene in 2009 with her debut, Last Night in Montreal. Her second novel, The Singer’s Gun, is May 2010’s #1 Indie Next Pick, and praise is mounting from booksellers and reviewers alike. BookPage spoke with St. John Mandel about the inspiration behind her novels, immigration […]
Mystery & SuspenseMystery

Elizabeth George

Interview by Stephenie Harrison

It seems New York Times best-selling author Elizabeth George can do it all. She’s written 23 books, many of them novels of psychological suspense featuring Scotland Yard and the now-iconic Inspector Lynley, and she’s won the Anthony Award, the Agatha Award and France’s Le Grand Prix de Literature Policiere for her first novel, The Great Deliverance. Her latest Lynley novel, This Body of Death, is on sale this month.

George took time out of her busy touring schedule to answer a few questions from BookPage.

Is there a specific writing exercise you find particularly helpful in getting your creative juices flowing?
For many years now, I have kept a Journal of a Novel for each book that I write. I do this in advance of my writing each day. Each day I also begin by reading a day in the novel’s Journal of a Novel to remind myself that anything I’m going through now is something I’ve gone through and survived before.

You’ve been publishing for well over 20 years now—how would you say your approach to writing has changed over the years?
After my third novel, I had developed an approach that really worked for me, involving an enormous amount of advance work prior to sitting down to begin the rough draft. This approach allowed me to turn in finished manuscripts that were close to perfect in the eyes of my editors, thus obviating the necessity for revisions. Because of this, I’ve not amended that approach since the creation of my third novel.

You’ve spoken about how you believe the division between crime/mystery fiction and literature is superfluous and superficial, but do you believe that there are specific talents that are called into play when creating a mystery series that is often overlooked by those who dismiss the genre?
My guess is that anyone who dismisses the genre hasn’t spent a lot of time reading within it. Anyone who’s read Mystic River by Dennis Lehane, Gaudy Night by Dorothy L. Sayers, A Dark Adapted Eye by Ruth Rendell or any one of a number of authors on a list that could go on and on knows that crime writers call upon strengths in the area of characterization, plotting and narrative that are often unmatched by anyone else writing.

You teach a five-day writing seminar annually in California, yet you consider yourself to be self-taught. In your mind, is writing an art that can be taught? What do think are the ultimate goals of these types of courses?
Actually, to clarify your question, I have not taught my writing seminar in California for a number of years. However, a few years ago I put all of my lectures and all of the examples that I used in this course into a book on writing called Write Away, which is now actually used in creative writing classes in various programs in the United States. I’ve never claimed that any art form can be taught, nor do I make this claim in Write Away, nor did I ever attempt to teach an art form. What I taught was the craft of novel writing, which is entirely different from the art. Art is how the artist interprets the craft itself. If you have no foundation in craft, you have nothing to interpret.

Do you find that British fans of the Inspector Lynley series respond differently to your work than North American readers?
No. They respond identically.

Often times, mystery writers who have long-standing series wind up feeling tired and limited by their characters. For instance, Sir Arthur Conan Doyle killed Sherlock Holmes out of frustration, and Dame Agatha Christie found Hercule Poirot insufferable near the end of his run. Do you ever feel this could happen for you with Lynley?
Both Conan Doyle and Christie froze their characters in time, place and circumstance, forcing themselves to deal continually with an unchanging character in unchanging times. I didn’t do that, and it was a deliberate choice on my part so that I would not tire of the characters.

Many authors claim that when they write, they start with few preconceived notions and just see where the characters take them. It seems that with mysteries, this would be problematic since precision and careful planning is critical to success. Do you ever find yourself writing yourself into a corner, or surprised by your characters, or do you view yourself as a puppet-master, always in control behind the scenes?
Writing a crime novel by letting oneself see where the characters will go is an exercise in creating a plot with holes through which a Mack truck could drive. What I know in advance is the arc of the main plot: the killer, the victim, the motive, the means and the opportunity. What I don’t know is what will constitute the subplots. What I also don’t know is how the detectives will solve the case. When I create the characters, I begin to learn from them what the subplots will be in that they tell me how they relate to each other and to the story as a whole. I don’t create a plot and force my characters through it. Characters who are well drawn and executed are going to be true to themselves and not necessarily true to what a writer “wants” them to be and to do.

For authors, books are like children and they’re not meant to have favorites, but which of your books are you proudest of? Least satisfied?
I’m proudest of Missing Joseph. As largely a meditation on motherhood set inside a crime novel, it was a huge stretch for me since I myself have no children. The book ended just as I wanted it to end, and numerous readers told me that they felt devastated by the ending, which was how I wanted them to feel since that was how Lynley felt. So I was quite pleased that my stretch paid off. I am least please with a short story I wrote called “The Evidence Exposed,” which was originally published in Volume II of Sisters in Crime. Even when I reworked it and rewrote it for my short story collection called I, Richard, I was not entirely happy with it.

RELATED CONTENT

Interview with Elizabeth George about What Came Before He Shot Her

It seems New York Times best-selling author Elizabeth George can do it all. She’s written 23 books, many of them novels of psychological suspense featuring Scotland Yard and the now-iconic Inspector Lynley, and she’s won the Anthony Award, the Agatha Award and France’s Le Grand Prix de Literature Policiere for her first novel, The Great […]
Fiction

Aimee Bender

Interview by Stephenie Harrison

A boy with keys for fingers. A woman who gives birth to her own mother. Imps and mermaids falling in love. If all of this sounds too strange—even for fiction—then you’ve obviously never read anything by Aimee Bender. 

But now, with the publication of her second novel, The Particular Sadness of Lemon Cake, it’s clearly time that you should.

In her latest literary confection, Bender introduces readers to perhaps her most dazzling creation to date: a girl named Rose who can taste the deepest feelings of others, just by taking a single bite of the food they prepare. As the flavors of the food flow over her tongue, Rose is inundated with the underlying emotions of the person who cooked the meal, even if it’s something as simple as a peanut butter sandwich. All of a sudden, Rose is privy to an onslaught of sensations that aren’t her own, and she realizes that nothing will ever be truly simple again.

The Particular Sadness of Lemon Cake focuses on Rose’s formative years, from the age of nine through her early 20s, as she struggles to form meaningful connections with her family and her peers. Intimidated by her austere and deeply intellectual brother, Joseph, Rose tries to understand what makes him tick. It is only with George, Joseph’s best friend, that Rose feels she can truly express herself without fear of misunderstanding or judgment: the two share great tenderness, their relationship tinged with the poignant melancholy that pervades most of the novel.

Unable to stop the feelings that stem from the food she eats, it is up to Rose to discover a means of coping with her unwanted ability. Through much trial and error, Rose discovers there are alternatives to simply cutting herself off from others. With time she comes to see that her “curse” might actually have the potential to set her free, but first she must make peace with herself.

Speaking from her home in Los Angeles, Bender recalls where the ingenious idea for the story originated. “I think I was primarily interested in the food at first,” she says. “I kept going back to the idea of ‘what if food was carrying more than just food?’ [So] the idea was sort of floating in my mind for years, and then when I hit on that character [Rose] it was all about developing her.”

Although Rose’s story plays center stage, if readers dig deeper, they will see that her brother Joseph’s extreme reclusiveness, her father’s intense aversion to hospitals and her mother’s newfound obsession with carpentry all tell their own stories, each filled with pain and longing. The family is like a concert of tops, spinning together, but each ultimately orbiting its own axis. And yet, Bender balks at the idea that she has depicted a dysfunctional family. “I can see how some would think about this as a dysfunctional family,” she allows, “but it’s not a term I would pick because it can be a kind of catchall. My hope is that the family is experiencing a unique unhappiness.”

When it comes to the author’s own family, however, nary a storm cloud is in sight. Bender credits her mother, a modern dance instructor, as a critical influence on her willingness to defy convention. She recalls, “[My mother] would always take me to these concerts, and modern dance can be so bizarre! She also pointed me toward theater of the absurd writers when I was in junior high and high school; I loved that they were funny and weird and this was literature, and there was some feeling of permission in all of it that felt very good to me.”

Perhaps her mother’s gift of promoting the bizarre is something Bender is passing on to her readers. The wild and fanciful worlds of her imagination have been showcased in two short story collections, The Girl in the Flammable Skirt and Willful Creatures, and in her acclaimed first novel, An Invisible Sign of My Own. Asked about her ability to ground the outlandish in a place that is real, Bender says that writing this way is the only way she knows how. “My impulse is always to take an idea that is a little off-center, which means I can kind of get my hands in it, and then I can use that to climb into the character,” she says.

Although The Particular Sadness of Lemon Cake is liberally frosted with the foreign and the fantastic, the emotions at its center are undeniably real. Readers who like to give their imaginations a workout are in for a satisfying treat that is both bitter and sweet.
 

A boy with keys for fingers. A woman who gives birth to her own mother. Imps and mermaids falling in love. If all of this sounds too strange—even for fiction—then you’ve obviously never read anything by Aimee Bender.  But now, with the publication of her second novel, The Particular Sadness of Lemon Cake, it’s clearly […]
Mystery & SuspenseMystery

David Morrell

Interview by Stephenie Harrison

These days it seems there’s a club for everything and everyone, but perhaps the coolest association you’ve never heard about is the International Thriller Writers (ITW). First founded in 2004, ITW is now made up of the best writers whose main aim is to get the pulses of their readers thumping. BookPage spoke with David Morrell and Hank Wagner, the co-editors of Thrillers: 100 Must-Reads, a compendium of essays by today’s top thriller authors on the books every fan of the genre needs to read. Together, Morrell and Wagner discuss the origin of their book, sexism in the genre and how thrillers have changed over time.

How did the book come into being? Did you approach each author who contributed essays with a particular title, or did each author bring their own favorites to the table?
Hank Wagner: The book came out of David asking several [ITW] members for their “Top Twenty” thrillers of all time. When he called me, I suggested expanding the list, because 20 titles wouldn’t cover the topic properly. When we decided on 100, it occurred to me we should do a book similar to others I had enjoyed over the years, namely Horror: 100 Best Books, and similar tomes on the science fiction, mystery and fantasy genres. David liked the idea, and presented it to the ITW board, who embraced it.

Armed with suggestions from ITW members and friends, we crafted the final list, which we then presented to members of the ITW, suggesting to those interested that they submit their top three choices to write about. We then tried to accommodate everyone as best we could in handing out assignments. Of course, some essays screamed to be written by a particular author—the essay on From Russia, With Love written by Raymond Benson, for instance. Raymond is an expert on the character, and has written several Bond novels himself.

Your book covers thrillers from 1500 B.C. to present-day novels—how would you say thrillers have changed (or stayed the same) over this huge period of time?
Wagner: Thrillers have stayed the same in that their basic goal—to give readers a thrill, to create a feeling or sensation of excitement—has remained constant. How individual thrillers accomplish that goal has evolved over the decades. In former times, the appearance of a monster, or a ghost, or a man being stranded on an island was enough to do that. Now the stakes have risen; it’s usually about a race against time or, literally, about the impending end of the world. The amazing thing is that ITW members keep coming up with new ways to engage increasingly demanding audiences.

Were there any titles you would have liked to see included that didn’t make the cut?
Wagner: This is precisely why we called the book 100 Must-Reads, rather than 100 Best Books. Of course there are books we, or some of the other contributors, would have liked to have squeezed in; we all love the genre, and we’re all passionate about books. There were several long, sometimes heated discussions about this book or that: Is it really a thriller? Did we cover that ground through another title? Was a particular book truly unique or groundbreaking? Right to the end, we’d often slap our foreheads in disgust, lamenting, “How could we have forgotten such and such a book?” In the end, we think we came up with a list that’s truly representative of the genre, demonstrating its breadth and potential. Still, it only presents the keys to a vast kingdom; we’re confident that readers can use this tome as a springboard to further reading in the genre. Think about it: We list 100 great books and stories right off the bat; many of the authors who penned the essays are successful novelists, with numerous works to their credit; and finally, the essays themselves mention dozens of titles as reference. All we can say is, “Bon appetit!”

Often there can be a kind of snobbism in the literary world, with certain readers turning their noses up at particular genres. Do you think this affects the thriller genre?
Wagner: Certainly not in terms of sales, based on recent scans of the bookracks and the bestseller lists. Most of the alleged snobbism turns up in reviews, but readers are a bright bunch—they can and do make up their own minds about what they want to read. Personally, David and I are always on the prowl for a good and interesting read, and find things to like about each book we pick up, whether it be the use of language or a creative plot, clever cultural references or just well constructed set pieces/scenes. If you are lucky, the book you are currently reading does all these things well.

Do you think thrillers are easily translated to film, or is there something special about the thriller in book form that gets lost in the conversion?
Wagner: It depends on the property, and the individual creators, whether a book translates well into film. It’s the eternal debate: What’s better, the book or the movie? Both forms try to accomplish different things; both have their own advantages and limitations.

What makes a great thriller?
David Morrell: The genre’s name is self-defining. A thriller must be thrilling. A mystery may or may not be a thriller depending on how much breathless emotion it has, as opposed to cerebral calculation. Agatha Christie’s And Then There Were None is on our list because it’s as breathless and scary as it is puzzling. Of course, what’s thrilling to one generation might not be thrilling to the next. Similarly, one generation’s idea of fast pace might be different from a later generation’s. In fact, that’s one of the points in Thrillers: 100 Must-Reads—that this type of fiction evolved, and that it’s entertaining to chart the evolution. In 1860, Wilkie Collins was credited with inventing ”the novel of sensation” in The Woman in White. Contemporary readers found the book shocking, but today we appreciate it more for its place in literary history. Once we pretend we’re in 1860, the book becomes shocking again. So much depends on perspective.

On another level, a thriller becomes great when it carries a feeling of reality and truth. That’s one reason John le Carré’s work is admired. He not only delivers intrigue, but he also teaches us about our world.

Do you think that male and female thriller authors approach the genre differently?
Morrell: Twelve of the books on our list are by women. They include Mary Shelley, Baroness Orczy, Marie Belloc Lowndes, Daphne Du Maurier, Agatha Christie, Helen MacInnes, Very Caspary, Patricia Highsmith, Katherine Neville, Sandra Brown and Gayle Lynds. Why isn’t the ratio more balanced? Because, until recently, publishers didn’t encourage (or sometimes even allow) female authors to work in the genre. Frankenstein was published anonymously and was well-received. As soon as it became known that the author was a woman, critics found fault. Writing Frankenstein wasn’t a ladylike thing to do. Fortunately, things have changed. A lot of that is due to Gayle Lynds, co-founder of International Thriller Writers. Gayle used to be a newspaper reporter and had a security clearance when she later worked for a think tank. But when she submitted her early espionage novels, editors and critics stupidly complained that a female author couldn’t possibly know about the world of espionage. Gayle’s career helped to change these attitudes and opened the way for a lot of current women thriller authors.

With hundreds of years of thrillers behind us, how can thrillers continue to be relevant and fresh?
Morrell: At their best, thrillers not only entertain. Ideally they also reflect the society in which they are set, analyzing our fears and how we perceive the world. Author/law enforcement officer James O. Born wrote an essay about Joseph Wambaugh’s The Choirboys (1975) in which he points out that Wambaugh’s novels were the first honest insider dramatizations of police work. They were set against the major social changes of the 1970s. Wambaugh made a huge difference in how we look at law enforcement personnel. As long as thriller authors teach us about our world, they’ll be relevant.

Do you remember the first thriller you ever read?
Morrell: It seems tame now, but Nancy Drew and The Hidden Staircase really made an impression on me when I was a boy. By comparison, I don’t think the Hardy Boys novels were as exciting. After that came several Tarzan novels and The Lone Wolf and The Saint. But as an adult and an apprentice writer looking for a direction, I was most impressed by Geoffrey Household’s Rogue Male, a 1939 novel about a British big-game hunter who stalks Hitler on the eve of WWII. Household’s outdoor action scenes, with their mystical evocation of nature and the primordial relationship between hunter and hunted, showed me a path that I continue to explore more than 50 years later.

Wagner: The first thriller I ever read (also the first novel I ever read, also the first novel I ever bought with my own money) was Bram Stoker’s Dracula. The fifth-grade me couldn’t put it down; I read it obsessively during class, hiding it in my lap, near the opening of my desk. That was the beginning of a lifelong love affair with books. I quickly moved on to Tarzan, John Carter of Mars, The Shadow and Doc Savage, and countless comic books.

If you had to choose, who are your favorite thriller writers? All-time favorites.
Morrell: Geoffrey Household will always be important to me. Rogue Male is on the list, and I was delighted to write the essay about it. My Penn State master’s thesis was on Hemingway’s style, and parts of his work—sections of To Have and Have Not and For Whom the Bell Tolls, for example—demonstrate a high caliber of action writing that continue to influence my writing. I also learned a lot from James M. Cain’s The Postman Always Rings Twice, which is on our list. And Dracula. People who know various movie versions don’t really know the story. Stoker displays a remarkably sophisticated technique, and his chase scenes are exemplary. Take away the vampire element, and you have one of the first novels about a serial killer.

Wagner: If I had to choose one, I’d go with William Goldman. I was lucky enough to do an essay on his classic novel Marathon Man for 100 Must-Reads. It was a joy to reread that book; he really caught lightning in a bottle there, and it still holds up. Magic is another classic. Other top choices would include Stephen King, Peter Straub, John D. MacDonald and a fellow named . . . David Morrell!

These days it seems there’s a club for everything and everyone, but perhaps the coolest association you’ve never heard about is the International Thriller Writers (ITW). First founded in 2004, ITW is now made up of the best writers whose main aim is to get the pulses of their readers thumping. BookPage spoke with David […]
Fiction

Lily King

Interview by Stephenie Harrison

Author Lily King is known for her sensitive exploration of family ties. In her third book, Father of the Rain, she follows the tumultuous relationship of a father and a daughter. She answered a few questions for BookPage about her work, the place and ideas that inspire it, and the dangers of falling in love with your characters.

You published your first book just a little over 10 years ago. In that time, how would you say you have evolved as a writer?
Great question. So hard to answer. Each novel seems to demand a different voice, a different structure, a whole different ethos, really. It doesn’t feel so much like evolution as just responding to the different circumstances in each book.  When I finished this new novel, Father of the Rain, I was surprised to notice how much dialogue there is, and how little exposition. I hadn’t really been conscious of that. But I don’t feel like I’m evolving into a writer who uses more dialogue at the expense of the kind of description I used in The Pleasing Hour, for example. It’s just that these particular characters had a lot to say to each other, and they needed so little narration to tell their story.

I would like to think that I’m getting better at getting the words on the page with less angst. I used to revise everything I wrote previously before I went on. But I’ve learned that it’s better to just keep moving, and put on your editor’s hat much later in the process. When I’m writing a first draft, I have to imagine a white canvas, how a painter does not go from left to right filling in every little detail, but makes a rough outline in blue and then begins putting on the colors, sharpening the shapes, layer upon layer. I’ve taught myself to trust that this is how a book is made, too.

In your last novel, The English Teacher, you focused on the relationship between a mother and a son. In Father of the Rain you focus on the relationship between a father and a daughter. In what way do you think the dynamics are different between these two types of fundamental parental relationships?
I am no psychologist, and I have no support for this statement, but I do think that a person’s relationship with his or her mother tends to shape the way that person feels about him or herself, and the relationship with the father has more of an effect on the way that person feels the world is responding to that self. Peter, in The English Teacher, really struggles internally, with his own personality, whereas Daley, in Father of the Rain, doesn’t wrestle with who she is but has to overcome the assumption that people don’t want her around, the she is not valuable in this world.

One of the problems Daley struggles with in this novel is finding a compromise between her romantic life, professional ambitions and family obligations. Do you think this conflict is still one that affects women more than men?
I do, though I think that is changing, and more men are making career decisions with partner and family in mind. But Daley’s own dysfunctional role in her family is what really stagnates her in this situation. She is really unable to pursue her goals because she feels her father’s life is far more important than her own.

Are you an author who draws from experience when you write, or do you see a very clear line between yourself and the characters you write?
I think that line is always changing, from book to book, and from scene to scene. There are entirely fictional elements in all my novels, and a few autobiographical elements that drop in, usually unexpectedly. The narrators and other characters are very distinct from me and my experiences. With Daley, the narrator of Father of the Rain, the line blurred slightly. She is probably the closest of all my characters to who I am, especially in the first and third parts—the impulses she has in Part II are not part of my personality.

One popular and vibrant niche in American fiction is Southern fiction, but some might argue that another salient pocket is East Coast fiction. What do you think are hallmarks of this type of novel (beside the obvious geographical element!)?
The first thing that comes to mind is claustrophobia. The characters tend to spend more time indoors, in small rooms, sort of gnawing on each other. Money is a character, and the alcohol flows freely. The talk is often cerebral and the characters entirely self-conscious, and most of the conflict is roiling far below the surface.

Father of the Rain is an intensely powerful and emotional read. As an author, do you ever find yourself overcome by the feelings and experiences of your characters, or do you keep yourself tightly reined?
This one was very emotional for me to write. Writing that first part, and I suppose the second part, too, could really bring me low for weeks at a time. I had to take many breaks.  I’m sure I could find a few notebook pages of the first draft that are buckled from tears. It was hard to be in that world. And pretty much every time I’ve read over the last section I’ve cried, too, at different moments for more joyful reasons.  Not to mention I think I was as in love with Jonathan as Daley was. I’d get into bed at night and sigh, “I just love Jonathan.” My husband was worried. But he knows the things I love about Jonathan are the qualities I love in him.

As an author, do you write the kind of books you like to read, or do you find yourself indulging in reading material that is quite different from the books you write?
My reading is all over the map. I read for beautiful sentences, for rich characters, for a great story, for an original voice, for an unfamiliar setting, for new ideas. It’s hard to find all that in one book, so I spread myself thin.

I’m not sure I know what kind of books I write. People always say my children look alike. But I can’t see that, just as I can’t see the similarities between my books or their styles. What kind of books do I write? I honestly don’t know. I think there is still a great gap between what I’m aiming for and what I reach. But that’s what keeps it exciting.

What are you working on next?
I’m working on a collection of short stories. Something that sells even less than a literary novel—just what my publisher wants to hear!

Author Lily King is known for her sensitive exploration of family ties. In her third book, Father of the Rain, she follows the tumultuous relationship of a father and a daughter. She answered a few questions for BookPage about her work, the place and ideas that inspire it, and the dangers of falling in love […]
FictionHistorical Fiction

Kathe Koja

Interview by Stephenie Harrison

Under the Poppy takes place in the 1870s—was there anything in particular about that decade that specifically ignited your fire to tell this story?
I came to historical fiction the way I pretty much come to all my novels: led by strong images and intrigued by the varied places these images may eventually take the story.  Though I can never really pinpoint the absolute genesis of any of my novels, each has a sparking-point, and I remember very well writing a sticky note that said "les mecs," as I saw in my mind's eye the four puppets who come to the Poppy: lovely Miss Lucinda, the solemn Bishop, the ultra-bawdy Chevalier, and the ur-provocateur Pan Loudermilk. And with the mecs I saw Istvan, and . . . away we go.

This novel is filled with so much drama! There are brothels, love triangles and puppet shows, just to mention some of the elements. Was it hard writing a novel with so many lively elements?
It was a BLAST.  It was like a fantastic, long-running, multimedia show, and I got to see it all from backstage, so to speak.

Brussels is well known for its history of puppet shows—have you ever had the opportunity to visit the city and perhaps take in a show?
Not yet—I would love to go there, and to Prague as well. The history of European puppetry is a magnificent one and it would be fantastic to see some of it  firsthand.

And speaking of puppets: It's interesting that to call a human being a "puppet" means to imply that that person is weak, controlled by someone else's power. But what I found in my research was that a real puppet is unpredictable, funny, mysterious and always slightly dangerous—or more than slightly. I find puppets' inherent lawlessness to be very appealing. And they make fearless actors, of course, if you let them. 

Alongside all of the interpersonal excitement that occurs in the novel, there’s also a good deal of historical drama that acts as a backdrop (and sometimes a catalyst) to the personal struggles of the characters. Do you think there are certain common pitfalls that are part and parcel of historical fiction?
Being new to the genre, I can only hope there are common mistakes I didn't make!  What was exciting for me as a writer was having that panorama of the past, the politics, the fashion, the language, the little daily details that make up so much of the bedrock of life, available for my wonderment, learning, and use. And the social attitudes that are so different from our own: For one quick example, there's a moment when the character Lucy catches a little boy smoking in the theatre.  Instead of being horrified that he's smoking at all, she boxes his ears for putting the props at risk! 

Seeing the world in this novel through that scrim of history, an imaginative recreation of what that time, the feel and smell and texture of those days, might have been like to those who lived there, was fascinating. What I tried not to do was put in every single buttonhook and chamber pot—it's a real temptation, because hey, I wouldn't be writing about this world if I wasn't interested in it, and I'm interested in all of it.  But I tried to keep only what the story demanded.

One striking element of this novel is the fact that along with an omniscient narrator, there are also several first-person accounts scattered throughout. What was it like inhabiting so many characters and giving them all distinct voices?
In a word, fun. I had a tremendous amount of fun writing this book—being able to tell the story from so many different angles, through so many sensibilities, was a great treat. We see the world we inhabit through others' eyes as well as—and sometimes better, more clearly than!—our own, and I hope this multiple-viewpoint narrative enhances not only the story itself but the reader's experience of the story, too. 

When you strip back the many layers in this novel, what do you feel was the core story that you were trying to get at with Under the Poppy?
Love and faithfulness, what it means to really be true: to a person, a vocation, through tremendous struggle and unavoidable pain. Under the Poppy is at its deepest heart the love story of Rupert and Istvan.

You’ve long been an enthusiastic proponent of writer workshops, citing the Clarion Workshop as the real turning point in your career as an author. Some people have been rather pessimistic about sessions and programs aimed at those who dream of writing and being published. To you, what makes these programs so valuable?
For me Clarion was an experience of recognition: other writers, both my peers and the workshop's professional writers-in-residence, accepted me as a writer, took me seriously as a writer, treated me like a writer, and that dispelled any chance for self-doubt.  And once I saw myself as a real writer, recognized that I belonged there, reading, writing, critiquing—I started to act like one.  Being known for what you really are is a very powerful thing. Now, when I teach workshops, especially for young writers, I bring this mindset and this memory, and establish at once that we are all colleagues, and we must treat each other accordingly.

That said, certainly not every workshop is equally valuable to every writer, or to any writer.  The ones that seem to work best are ones that are seriously respectful and seriously honest in equal measures: being told that your work is good, if it is good, is one thing, but being assured that your mediocre work is peachy-keen helps nobody and sets you up for severe disappointment later on. 

Prior to this novel, readers may be most familiar with you in terms of Young Adult (YA) fiction. However, lately it seems like many YA titles are showing a lot of cross-generational appeal. Do you think that this is a function of certain elements within the genre changing, or would you say that readers are simply becoming more open-minded? In your mind, is there a clear division between YA fiction and that meant for an older audience?
I'd hope that every reader would come to every book with an open mind, but it's true that the genre label is sometimes used as a way to pigeonhole a book and so pass it completely by.  Though we each have our individual tastes in fiction, it's beneficial to keep adding delicious new stuff new to the menu.  And who doesn't love finding a new writer, a new voice, to enjoy? 

Life of Pi is a great example of a book that works well cross-generationally, and I would hope some of my own YA fiction—books like Going Under and Headlong and Talk—could make that leap to older readers, too. 

Your previous books have been published by a variety of publishers, such as Farrar, Straus & Giroux as well as Bantam Dell. What was it like working with Small Beer Press this time around?
As everyone who reads knows, publishing is a fairly fraught arena these days, so having the chance to work with an editor and publisher who are as passionate about making books as Kelly Link and Gavin Grant was both a comfort and a thrill.  I knew from day one that my vision for Under the Poppy was shared and respected, and I've had the satisfaction of watching the novel go from file to real live book in the best company possible.  Gavin and Kelly are true writers' publishers and there is no higher compliment than that. 

Under the Poppy has one of the best book trailers I’ve seen in a long while. The trailer really seems to capture the seductive energy of the novel as well as its aesthetic vibe. Did you play any part in the creation of the trailer? What do you think about book trailers as an element of book promotion?
They've become quite necessary, I think, a direct and immediate way for a reader to get a taste of a book, especially online, and so I'm justifiably proud of the creative team I assembled to make the trailer for Under the Poppy: director Diane Cheklich, puppeteer/compositor Al Bogdan, motion graphics artist Aaron Mustamaa, and musician/composer Joe Stacey—superlative artists and superlative work. (A shout-out to our human actors Madison, Julanne, and Jon, and Fred and Randy, our auxiliary puppeteers!) I was involved in the making-of in a few ways—from getting the team together to storyboard assistance to helping out with the puppets (I'm no good at all with an X-Acto knife, but I do OK with a rod-puppet).

And this seems like the right place to note that Under the Poppy is also making the leap to the stage: I've adapted the novel for an immersive presentation involving live actors, live music, film, and, yes, puppetry, that will be mounted at the Chrysler Black Box Theatre at the Detroit Opera House in 2011.  Diane Cheklich, Aaron Mustamaa and Joe Stacey are already involved in that project, as is designer Monika Essen, and we're having a marvelous time reimagining the story in 3D. 

If a reader loves Under the Poppy and can’t wait for your next novel, do you have any suggestions for other authors or titles they might want to seek out?
Two books I'd suggest at once are Sarah Waters' Affinity and Anthony Burgess' A Dead Man in Deptford: engrossing historical novels (Victorian and Elizabethan eras respectively), passionate narratives, and both tremendously, gorgeously well-written.  Do yourself a huge favor and get them both. 

Under the Poppy takes place in the 1870s—was there anything in particular about that decade that specifically ignited your fire to tell this story?I came to historical fiction the way I pretty much come to all my novels: led by strong images and intrigued by the varied places these images may eventually take the story.  Though […]
Fiction

Nicole Krauss

Interview by Stephenie Harrison

The line between fact and fiction sometimes blurs in unusual ways, something acclaimed author Nicole Krauss discovered when working on her much-anticipated third novel, Great House.

Krauss’ own workstation wound up performing double duty as both the platform and the unwitting muse for the new novel about a seemingly disparate group of characters linked by a mysterious desk.

“What ultimately became the first half of the first chapter of Great House was initially published as ‘From the Desk of Daniel Varsky’ in the 2008 volume of The Best American Short Stories,” Krauss says by phone from Tel Aviv, Israel, where she has stayed for several months as part of a writers residency program.

It is a novel about the connections between people, which Krauss terms "one of the deepest existential questions there is."

“I had to write a blurb to accompany the story about the inspiration [behind it], and I legitimately had no idea what I would say, but I sat down to write in my office. I looked down at my writing desk and it was almost the same as the desk that I had described in the story!”

Interestingly, the desk in question is not one Krauss selected but one she inherited from the previous owners of her family’s home in the Park Slope neighborhood of Brooklyn. According to Krauss, the desk in question is “so huge and very masculine. It’s really overburdening, but we’d have to cut it into pieces to get it out. The previous owners had a painted panel that they had removed with them, so now this desk has a gaping hole that I can’t fill.”

For Krauss, this is why the desk that has such an important place in her life also has such prominence in the book. “It’s not a book about a desk, obviously,” she muses. “It was more about the idea of the desk; it became a symbol, in a way, about what passes from person to person and generation to generation. Its material existence was really beside the point, although I did make it very large with all these drawers. I was really trying to take this very daunting, abstract idea and give it physicality.”

Great House is perhaps best thought of as a series of vignettes centering on four characters whose lives gradually intersect as the novel progresses. Initially the most striking link between these people is a large and imposing desk, which each has owned at some point. This remarkable piece of furniture is the source of both agony and inspiration for each character, acting as an embodiment of sublimated disappointments and desires. Shuttling across time and space, the lives of writers, parents and lovers are gradually revealed, their superficial layers slowly stripped away, until all that remains are the cores upon which identity is based.

While the desk may have offered Krauss a tangible symbol during the early stages of the writing process, there was something even stronger motivating her. In recent interviews, her husband, novelist Jonathan Safran Foer, admitted that much of the impetus for his first work of nonfiction, Eating Animals, came from the birth of his first child and the quandary he faced regarding what to feed his son. For Krauss, becoming a parent also clearly had an important impact.

“I started Great House about a year after having my first child,” she says. “I started to think about what parents pass on to their children genetically, but also the transference that goes beyond that, such as personality and fears. I was connected to my son through the umbilical cord and so much was going into him whether I liked it or not, and it made me think about myself as a child and what things my son would inherit from me. As I continued to write the book, the phrase ‘the burden of inheritance’ began to haunt me.”

Krauss is very clear, however, that just as Great House is a novel composed of many characters, it is also one of many ideas. It is a novel about the connections between people, something Krauss has explored in her two earlier novels, and something that she claims is “one of the deepest existential questions there is.” But it is also a novel that more deeply explores Krauss’ own Jewish roots. “I was raised Jewish,” she says, “but what interests me most is not faith, which I’ve never had, but the tradition of argument, dissent, dissatisfaction and questioning that is so central to Judaism. Perhaps the best word to use is ‘doubt.’ In Great House, almost every character in the book grapples with uncertainty, whether it’s existential, or moral, or has to do with the limits of how fully known we can ever be to one another, how often we must live unknown and unknowing.”

About one thing there is no doubt: There’s a lot riding on this new novel. Krauss’ deeply moving and intensely personal 2005 novel, The History of Love, captivated readers worldwide and was a bona fide publishing phenomenon. The news that her follow-up would be published this month was accompanied by rumblings of excitement in the literary world. Adding to the hubbub was Krauss’ recent inclusion on the New Yorker’s 20 Under 40 list, which highlights young authors worth watching.

It is the rare author who can acknowledge such fervent accolades from both critics and readers alike, but not allow the hype to infect her work. When asked if she worries about whether her new novel will live up to the hopes many have pinned on it, she answers candidly. “I’m aware my books ask a lot from my readers, and I love the dedication of those readers who stay with [my books] and come through the other side,” she replies. “Ultimately, I write from a mindset where I have to please myself first. I feel that I wrote a better book here [than The History of Love?], and I think I’m becoming a better writer.”

But what of those folks at the New Yorker for whom 40 is the cutoff for a young author to make an impression? At 36, Krauss’ time on the venerable list is limited, but she’s not too worried about inspiration running dry; if there’s such a thing as a pragmatic poet, Krauss is it. “Life is a progression of questions,” she says. “Each question evolves and expands, and as your life changes, the questions do too. The work of a writer is not necessarily answering the questions, but exploring. . . . In my mind, when I’m past 40, I always expect and hope that I will continue to write books and get closer to the book I am meant to write. One always hopes one’s getting a little closer.”

If Great House is any indication, Krauss must be very close indeed. Surely if there is one book each author is meant to write, then there might also be one book each reader is meant to read. For plenty of Krauss’ fans out there, Great House just might be that book.

The line between fact and fiction sometimes blurs in unusual ways, something acclaimed author Nicole Krauss discovered when working on her much-anticipated third novel, Great House. Krauss’ own workstation wound up performing double duty as both the platform and the unwitting muse for the new novel about a seemingly disparate group of characters linked by […]
Pop CultureArts & Culture

Tilar J. Mazzeo

Interview by Stephenie Harrison

Think you know all there is to know about Chanel No. 5? Think again. The perfume that famously was the only thing Marilyn Monroe wore to bed has a fascinating history revealed by English professor Tilar J. Mazzeo in The Secret of Chanel No. 5. Read on for more.

Before The Secret of Chanel No. 5 you published The Widow Clicquot, a book about the woman behind Veuve Cliquot. How did one luxury item lead to another?
It was my interest in wine and scent that led me to perfume. If you think about it, there are very close connections there. Essentially, both are aromatic volatiles suspended in alcohol—just in wine it’s alcohol we can drink. I got the idea for the book one day at the kitchen counter of a good friend who is a perfume collector of sorts, when I had just come back from three months(!) of wine-tasting research for my book on The Back Lane Wineries of Napa. My nose was very acute after all that tasting, and I realized that perfume was a fascinating subject that I wanted to know more about.

"The idea that it’s an older woman’s perfume always makes me laugh a bit though. That’s like saying diamonds are for little old ladies just because your grandmother had the good sense to wear them."

When it came to writing The Secret of Chanel No. 5, were you initially motivated by the perfume, or were you more interested in the woman behind the bottle?
It was definitely the perfume. I wanted to know what made a great perfume. I mean, if we know how to talk about great wines, why not think about great perfumes? And of course that led me to Chanel No. 5 immediately, because it’s not just the world’s most famous perfume but also a scent that the experts still praise as one of the most beautiful scents from the golden age of the 1920s and 1930s.

So much has already been written about Coco Chanel—how did you manage to take someone who has spawned countless books and films and keep her fresh?
Yes, Coco Chanel certainly is experiencing a revival at the moment. She’s emblematic of style and savvy for a lot of women especially. What I wanted to understand was how Chanel No. 5 had its own unique destiny apart from her—because by the mid-1920s she wasn’t the entrepreneurial genius behind it already. At the same time, it’s really interesting: looking at Coco Chanel’s intimate relationship with her most famous “creation” reveals whole new aspects of her personality and art. There are sides of Coco Chanel we’ve never seen.

Can you tell us a little bit about what goes into researching something as iconic as Chanel No. 5?
This was some of the most fun research I’ve ever done—and for someone whose last book was on one of the great figures of French champagne, that’s saying something. Of course there was the library research. There was a lot of it. And that was fascinating if not fun exactly. But my writing is always personal too, so I visited with perfumers around the world, everywhere from Paris and Berlin to New York, the south of France, and Bermuda. I was lucky enough to work for a bit with the perfume professor at International Flavors and Fragrances in New York City and to learn some of the technical aspects of perfume appreciation there. I met with the odor artist Sissel Tolaas in Berlin, visited the rose harvest in Grasse, and talked with dozens and dozens of interesting people who have made perfume their passion. If I had life to do over again, I would be a perfumer. No question.

In your mind, is there a quintessential woman who wears Chanel No. 5?
Well, it’s an adaptable scent, but it’s a very distinctive perfume too. I think a woman has to have confidence to wear it. For me that’s the key thing about Chanel No. 5. It’s not your retiring wallflower fragrance, and I think of it as a scent for women in their 20s and 30s and 40s and not as a teenager’s first perfume. The idea that it’s an older woman’s perfume always makes me laugh a bit though. That’s like saying diamonds are for little old ladies just because your grandmother had the good sense to wear them.

So much about fashion and style is ephemeral—what is it about Chanel No. 5 that has made it timeless?
That’s really the question isn’t it? That was what I wanted to figure out in researching this cultural icon. Technically, it’s a wonderful fragrance, but of course there are other wonderful fragrances out there that haven’t become legends. And in the beginning, it wasn’t just Coco Chanel or marketing either that made it famous. So it was something of a riddle. But in the end, what makes it timeless is that way that it became a larger symbol of luxury during the Second World War, when it was one of the few beautiful things to cut across international borders. It captures so much of the complexity of the last century—and that’s what makes it so essentially relevant to the modern woman’s identity.

Tell the truth: do you wear Chanel No. 5?
Yes, I do wear Chanel No. 5 sometimes. I have a bottle on my bureau at home always. But it’s not my daily perfume. I actually prefer Chanel’sEau Première, which is a lighter and I think ultra-modern version of Chanel No. 5. It’s basically the same notes but more angular, and that’s my regular scent. I am also a huge fan of iris scents, but those can get fabulously expensive.

If someone were going to give you a gift, which would you prefer: a bottle of Veuve Clicquot, or a bottle of Chanel No. 5?
Unfair question! I hope the Widow will forgive me—because goodness knows there are few things in this world I love more than a bottle of Veuve—but I think I’d have to take the bottle of Chanel No. 5 just because a bottle of champagne lasts a night and a bottle of perfume lasts a year. That’s part of the reason during the Second World War perfume became the ultimate luxury. It was an indulgence that, in hard economic times, you could enjoy a little bit every day.

We don't want you to spill all your secrets, but what's one surprising thing readers will discover in The Secret of Chanel No. 5?
For me, one of the most surprising things was that Coco Chanel wasn’t the force behind Chanel No. 5. By the time she came to “invent” Chanel No. 5, this was already a scent with a fascinating history. And part of why she both loved and, at moments, hated her creation was because, quite early in its history, Chanel No. 5 slipped free of the woman whose name it carried. It was a perfume with a life of its own.

Think you know all there is to know about Chanel No. 5? Think again. The perfume that famously was the only thing Marilyn Monroe wore to bed has a fascinating history revealed by English professor Tilar J. Mazzeo in The Secret of Chanel No. 5. Read on for more. Before The Secret of Chanel No. 5 you published The […]
FictionDebut Fiction

Susan Froderberg

Interview by Stephenie Harrison

Debut novelist Susan Froderberg caught the attention of fans of Southwestern fiction with Old Border Road, an atmospheric story set in rural Arizona. Froderberg took the time to answer our questions about the novel, sharing her influences, writing theories and more.

This is your first book to be published, so to start, congratulations! Can you tell us a little about what prompted you to write a novel and what it was like trying to get it published?
Old Border Road began as a short story, published in a literary journal and later anthologized. I went back to the story because I believed there was still more to be said. I had found a place where I could wander about, and with it a way of speaking that was coming to me pretty easily. So I wrote a first chapter, “A Home to Go Home To,” which was published as a new short story. There was enough to keep me going after this, and I carried on. From there it was a matter of patience and will and discipline.

I had written a novel before, but put the thing into a drawer thinking it not worthy of publication. I was satisfied enough with Old Border Road to read parts of it over the telephone to my friend Gordon Lish when it was finished. He encouraged me to send it out, and I took his advice and did. My agent was the first person to read the book.

You lived in Arizona during your high school years, and you set your novel there as well. Although you have since lived elsewhere, and now live in New York City, why did you choose to set your novel in Arizona? Did you feel you had some unfinished business there?
It was more that I still had feelings for the place. I was 16 years old when I moved to Arizona, a time of acute memory, and with it lots of adolescent daydreaming and yearning. I wanted to be an artist at the time, more than anything. My mother advised me to think about finding a job, as mothers are wont to do. I went to nursing school, and soon after graduation left Arizona and moved back home to Seattle, where the rest of my family was living.

At times, this novel is a fairly harrowing read. As an author, do you find it difficult to put your characters through such hardships.
No, for two reasons. First, characters are words, not people. Second, human existence is filled with hardship. Every epic or dramatic poem or great novel is about a struggle of some kind; it’s a striving for happiness, it’s about someone trying to get something. There are endless wishes and wants. Unless we’re able to strangle all desire and thereby achieve nothingness, or Nirvana, there remains to us a state of being in which one desire necessarily follows another. If there is no such thing as lasting contentment or absolute happiness, how could it be a subject of art? I am with Schopenhauer here.

One piece of advice that is frequently offered to aspiring authors is that you should write about what you know. To what extent would you say you apply this principle to your own work?
Sure, it helps to be familiar with the subject matter you’re delving into. Melville’s experience on a whaling boat gave him the authority to write about whaling. On the other hand, I don’t believe Melville necessarily threw a harpoon or survived a sinking ship, just as McCarthy did not scalp Indians or make love to dead bodies in order to write what he did. As for myself, it’s true I have run barrels, and have even tried to throw a rope to heel a calf, however inexpertly. But I lay no claim to ever preparing for any kind of rodeo, except for that of hollering bystander.

As an author, what is harder to write when it comes to a book: the first sentence or the last?
I would say they are equally difficult, or equally not difficult. Trying to find a rhythm or a meter specific to the telling of a particular story, and keeping on with it beginning to end, is the trickier thing.

Are there any particular authors who inspire you or that you feel have had a notable impact on your own writing?
Certainly Schopenhauer, as I mentioned earlier. And absolutely Emerson. Add to the list Frost and Stevens, Joyce and Beckett, O’Conner and Robinson, among others. To my mind, there is no greater American writer alive than Cormac McCarthy. All of us, as writers—as artists—come out of some Petri dish, and I will admit to coming out of his. There is no such thing as the innocent eye, or the innocent ear, no matter what anybody tells you. On the other hand, we are each of us necessarily what no one else can possibly be.

Do you find your philosophy background has enriched your writing?
Probably, as the opportunity to study philosophy has enriched my life. But I’m happier being a writer than I would have been if I were doing philosophy work, as writing has set me free in a way that philosophy—specifically, Western philosophy—could not have. For in Western philosophy you must follow formal logic—if A, then not B. In fiction, you may have both A and B, if you so choose. You can be exhausted and you can be exhilarated at the same time: one state need not negate the other. Or you can be derived and you can be unique, without contradiction. This is not to say we can do away with logic: there would be no language without it. But in writing, it’s possible to bend language toward a more Eastern way of thinking.

Also, I would say my background—both practical and educational—has been so various that philosophy is only a part of it. My time as a critical care nurse enriched my life: sometimes, I consider it the most important work I’ve done, though at the time I was too busy to realize it. My undergraduate degree (after nursing school) was in economics; that too opened me to a better way of understanding the world. And my Ph.D. was a joint degree: I was in Columbia’s School of Public Health as well as in the Philosophy Department. It was the era of interdisciplinary studies, and I was lucky to have been able to invent mine—no one there before had formally done anything in Medical Ethics.

What are you working on next?
Another novel, this one also inspired by a particular landscape, though it isn’t set in the desert. I know where I am, but I have no idea where I’ll end up. It’s a voyage of discovery. I’m setting forth, trying to leave things behind.

RELATED CONTENT
Read a review of Old Border Road

Debut novelist Susan Froderberg caught the attention of fans of Southwestern fiction with Old Border Road, an atmospheric story set in rural Arizona. Froderberg took the time to answer our questions about the novel, sharing her influences, writing theories and more. This is your first book to be published, so to start, congratulations! Can you […]
Biography

Ron Reagan

Interview by Stephenie Harrison

Ron Reagan is no stranger to sharing his father with the world, but in his new memoir, My Father at 100, he delves deep into the past of a man that few truly knew but many claim as their own. The younger son of our 40th president was kind enough to take time out of his busy schedule for a spirited chat with BookPage about his father’s roots, the current state of American politics and much more.

So much of My Father At 100 reads as a personal meditation on your relationship with your father. What prompted you to take your investigation into your family and enigmatic father's past and make it public?
I suppose I could have written a journal and kept it all to myself but there was the sense that people would actually find this interesting. Also, everybody else lays claim to him in one way or another as I’ve said in the book, so I suppose in some way I’m staking my own claim here since I actually knew him. I feel like if anyone has a right to say anything about him, it’s someone like me.

Was it hard sharing your father with an entire country?
In a way. I think anyone who has a parent, or perhaps any other family member who is a very well-known public figure—a big celebrity if you will—I think there is going to be an element of some resentment on some level that you have to share them all the time. And so many people seem so attached to my father and claim him. So there was some of that, although I never doubted that I knew him better than 99.99% of those people.

I think what you had when my father was president that you don’t see now is people of good will on both sides recognizing that whatever our differences are, we’ve got to get some things done here.

At one point in My Father at 100, you mention that your father was a very charismatic man with many facets, and yet you had the feeling that when you were out of his sight, it was almost as though you ceased to exist to him.
The thing about “out of sight out of mind” [is that] it didn’t really have so much to do with his relationship to the public versus his relationship to his family. I think he was just often in his own head somewhere. He did have a tendency at times to put people into an abstract category, and he could even do that on occasion with his own family. For example, I mention in the book about when he wrote a letter to me when I got a D in Algebra in high school. This letter had hardly anything to do with me! It could have been a form letter that somebody had asked him to write to any young man. So you kind of got the impression that he was playing a role himself in that instance and had assigned you a role and you were enacting this kind of drama that really had nothing to do with either one of you. But this wasn’t a constant thing, and I suspect that if I had been face-to-face with him for that conversation it would have been an entirely different thing.

I didn’t share this story in the book—though I probably should have—but many people thought that he was callous toward the poor, for instance, and yet that wasn’t true when it was somebody who had a face, when it was an individual. While he was at the White House, he saw on television one night a young woman who was a single mother who was down and out and this moved him. So he sat down and took out his personal checkbook and wrote her a check for $2000 and mailed it to her. And two nights later he’s watching the news again and there she is on the news again with a framed copy of his check, which she is now hanging on the wall of her meager apartment. And he’s thinking, “Well this isn’t what I intended!” so he writes her another check for $2000 and sends it to her along with a little note saying “For God’s sake, cash this!” But she was an individual to him, she had a particular story. She wasn’t just “the poor.” If you wanted to move him on an issue, if you wanted to capture his interest, [you had to] personalize it, put a face on it, make it a human being.

So, given that he was so introverted—or perhaps introspective is a better word for it—was it ever surprising to you how strongly the public responded to him given how wrapped up in his own mind he could be?
No, not really. I’m not sure I would put it as either introverted or introspective; there is probably some other “intro” word that neither one of us are thinking of at the moment! He dwelled inside his own head a lot of the time, but when you say introspective that implies some kind of critical self-examination, and that really wasn’t what was going on, I don’t think. He was building and rehearsing and solidifying his personal narrative in his own head.

On the other hand, he was very charismatic, and in person I defy anybody to have met him and not liked him having spent any time in his company. He was very affable, very warm, he made you feel like you were his good friend even if you had just met him. And it was not because he was cynical and manipulative, but just because that’s the way he acted around people. So no, it wasn’t surprising at all that people responded to him. People got the 90% that everybody got, but it was that 10%, metaphorically speaking, that he kept close and private. Even his own wife, my mother, admitted that she rarely felt that she got to that last, tiny innermost room.

In your mind, did you ever reconcile "Ronald Reagan: president" with "Ronald Reagan: father," or were the two figures very distinct to you?
They were part of unified whole. I know that some people who saw him as president didn’t appreciate his personal qualities because they didn’t know him personally, but I didn’t really see them as being two different people so there wasn’t any urge to reconcile that. He was very consistent as a person. There was the public versus private element to his character, but it was all very consistent. He wasn’t a very changeable or mercurial person.

Much of this book recounts your journey to discover a side to your father that you knew little about. So without giving away too much, what's one thing you uncovered that people would be surprised to learn about your father?
He was a fairly big, athletic guy, but as a little boy growing up, he was actually undersized and very insecure. He was picked on by bullies at school, he was often the new kid because [his family] moved around a lot, he spent a lot of time alone, and he was overshadowed to some extent by his older brother and even by his parents, who were both very charismatic and extroverted people with forceful personalities. I think that this was part of the reason why he retreated into himself as a little boy and spent a lot of time alone, a lot of time daydreaming. . . . He was dreaming often of the West; he was fascinated by the West, dreaming of himself as a kind of hero in a wide-open landscape.

I don’t think I quite appreciated that solitude when he was young boy, and his vulnerability.

At times this exploration into your father’s and your family’s past must have been painful, perhaps even because it just hammered home the fact that he is no longer with you. So what was the most rewarding element to this entire project?
I think just overall the sense that I know not just my father better—I think I knew him pretty well and there weren’t any huge surprises; it’s not like I suddenly discovered he was a cross-dressing serial killer (though perhaps I should have to boost sales!)—but finding out about my family and getting back into that country and getting back into Illinois. Nobody in my family, until I started looking into this, was really aware that my father had an uncle and two aunts on his side of the family. He never mentioned it to my mother or to any of us. He mentions in his autobiography in passing, without ever naming them. So to go back and discover that there was this larger family on both parents’ sides and find out what happened with them was really rewarding and interesting. As far as we know, those two aunts of my father died very young before he was born, and his father’s brother drank himself insane and died in the Dixon Insane Asylum in 1925 when my father was a teenager. Hard to believe he wouldn’t have known about that, but we never heard about it.

So that was tremendously rewarding, to do that and trace back and do what little independent or original research I was able to contribute to this.

What is one of the most important lessons your father taught you?
Kindness. He could be distant and he could be inattentive at times, perhaps from a sort of obliviousness, but he was a tremendously kind person to everybody he met. He treated everybody the same. Now that’s a double-edged sword when you’re his family wondering whether you should be treated extra special nice, but he treated everybody from the guy who shined his shoes to a foreign head of state the same. Also, I never saw him enter a room and give any indication that he thought he was less or lesser than anybody in that room. Not that he was arrogant. He wasn’t one of those people who needed to dominate a room; he’s not a Bill Clinton type where he’s got to be the center of attention all the time, since if you’re president, most of the time you are! He just had this serene confidence about him where you really believed that he wasn’t the type of guy who would kowtow or suck-up. He didn’t do that. He had tremendous dignity and self-respect, and I think that’s a good example to have growing up.

You are a very vocal liberal and atheist whereas your father was very much not, so how did this affect your relationship with your father?
Well, we could disagree about politics and we could even disagree about the existence of a deity and still remain close and friends. I think he was probably a little frustrated with my politics because my father believed that he was right, and was sure that if he could get you alone for five or 10 minutes that he could convince you of his position. So I think it was terribly frustrating to him that he couldn’t convince me and change my mind in many instances.

The atheism was, I think, a deeper worry for him because he was a deeply religious person, though not in a florid or evangelical way. He just thought I was ruining my life by not believing in God. But he was also wise enough to realize that you can’t force that on anyone, people have to come to that or not as they will, so beyond trying to strong-arm me back into church when I was 12 years old, he just let me go my own way. It wasn’t really an issue between us, even if it might have been a sore spot for him.

If your father were alive today, what do you think he would feel is the most pressing issue America faces in 2011?
On domestic issues, I think we have to be very careful going back 20 to 30 years since he was elected; times have changed and as stubborn as he could be, one assumes he would change with them. I can’t say that he would be a carbon copy of himself in 1980 in 2011.

On the foreign front though, I think he would continue to be highly motivated by the idea of ridding the world of nuclear weapons. That was something that animated him for a long, long time, and I see no reason why he would feel any different now. The problem still exists; it’s arguably even more serious now with the threat of loose nukes and terror and all of that. I think he would have been appalled at the Republican intransigence over the START treaty and holding that hostage to parochial political concern. I think that would have disgusted him. I think someone like Jon Kyl, he’d have wanted to pinch his little head off. It would have been unconscionable, unpatriotic and un-American as far as he was concerned.

Beyond that I hesitate to speculate too much. The only other issue I would raise where I absolutely know how he would feel is the torture issue. He would be utterly disgusted and appalled that the United States of America practiced torture under George Bush. That kind of moral turpitude was just not in him. The cowardice that is required to do something like that was just not part of his character.

Your father began his career in the entertainment industry, much like yourself. Yet you have said that you have no intention of running for office because your atheist views would likely prevent you from ever being elected. Is that truly all that is holding you back?
It’s not the only reason why I wouldn’t run for office, I’m just not by nature a politician. But the fact that I am an atheist, that would make it tough if I did choose to run.

 

Do you think that Americans too often blur the line between church and state?
Well there are certainly people who try very often to do that! There is [a significant percentage] of the country that really does somehow believe that we were founded specifically as a Christian nation and the only way we can be right as a nation is to embrace a particular strain of Christianity. But yes, there is always an attempt to blur that line and we have people on the Supreme Court now who would be happy to blur that line.

I mean, if you want to legislate biblical law, then none of us would be allowed to wear stripes and I would have had to have been stoned to death by my parents as a young man when I announced I was an atheist, and slavery is ok, and child murder is fine and wives should be bought and sold like livestock. People who say that our laws are based on the Ten Commandments, well what’s the first commandment? Our first commandment is that you shall have no other gods before me. And what’s the first amendment? Congress shall make no law respecting the establishment of religion. So you cannot marry the Ten Commandments to the Constitution; they are diametrically opposed.

It’s a little disturbing that anybody gives these [fundamentalists] the time of day. I think in other countries they would be fodder for comedy, briefly, before they disappeared. But not here! Here you’ve got a FOX news network that hires these people and makes money off of them.

We’ve talked about how the world has changed since your father was in office, but do you feel like the world of politics has changed in the 20 years since your father was president?
Yes, I do. When he was president, it’s not that there wasn’t a pretty stark right-left divide. But even with all of that, I think what you had when my father was president that you don’t see now is people of good will on both sides recognizing that whatever our differences are, we’ve got to get some things done here. There are things that need to be done for the country. Certainly in foreign policy you more often saw politics stopping at the water’s edge. I don’t think you would have seen the same kind of kerfuffle over the START Treaty back in the ‘80s that you saw just recently where it really was just being tossed around like a political football; that would have been regarded as really unseemly back then.

So there was more mutual respect, the personal venom wasn’t as noxious and toxic. My mother, for instance, as First Lady caught some grief for using personal, private donations to buy a new set of china for the White House. By the time Bill Clinton was in office, you had the First Lady not only accused of having an affair, but of murdering the person she had an affair with. So we’ve gone from the First Lady puts on airs and buys fancy china to the First Lady has someone whacked . . . that’s a big jump! Can you imagine someone back in the ‘80s accusing my mother of having someone murdered? Can you imagine my father’s reaction? The notion of my father sitting still while somebody accused his wife of murder . . . he would have called Rush Limbaugh and beaten him to a pulp. That just wouldn’t have happened.

The animosity and the invectiveness that has been aimed at this president, much of it racially tinged, particularly coming from the Limbaughs and Glenn Becks, is way beyond anything that existed back in the ‘80s.

This isn’t the first time your writing has been published, although it is your first book. Now that you’ve written this memoir, do you have any immediate plans or inclinations to write any other books?
That’s something I’d definitely like to think about. I’ve done all sorts of things in my life, starting out as a ballet dancer, doing a bit of acting and television and radio, and some writing for magazines along the way. I enjoyed this process, but it’s a little bit difficult to judge because it was such a personal effort. Would it be as enticing if it was something that was farther from me? It’s hard to say. But my guess is that this is something that I’d like to pursue if I could. I’ll grant you of course that I won’t be able to write anything that interests people as much as a book about my father . . .

What about Ronald Reagan: Vampire?
[laughing] That might do it! Or my father at 102. In all seriousness, though, I’m not sure exactly what it would be at this point, but I’d certainly like to explore the opportunity of future books.

You mention near the end of My Father at 100 that you still listen for your father's voice letting you know that he's ok. If in turn you could tell your father one more thing, what would it be?
I suppose I’d just remind him that he’s loved and not just by people who don’t know him! But by the people who do know him and that he left behind. We still think of him and care for him and hold a warm spot for him in our hearts.

 

Ron Reagan is no stranger to sharing his father with the world, but in his new memoir, My Father at 100, he delves deep into the past of a man that few truly knew but many claim as their own. The younger son of our 40th president was kind enough to take time out of […]

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