Stephenie Harrison

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…

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…

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…

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…

FictionDebut Fiction

Deborah Harkness

Interview by Stephenie Harrison

Featuring an enchanted manuscript and a forbidden relationship between a witch and a vampire, Deborah Harkness’ debut novel, A Discovery of Witches, is sure to cast a spell over readers worldwide.

A Discovery of Witches has been described as everything from “paranormal romance” to “a magical romp through academia.” How do you think of it?

I don’t think it’s easy to categorize this novel. In some ways, I think it’s a book mystery; it’s a book about books. I love books like Possession, Shadow of the Wind and The Club Dumas, so in my mind, A Discovery of Witches is really about this search for a book that might answer all of our questions—Ashmole 782. Everything else that happens is in some ways just orbiting around this very important book.

Between working as a professor of history and blogging about wine—how did you manage to find the time to write such a huge novel?

[laughing] When I think back on it, I can’t quite put all the pieces together! I was teaching full time, and I kept trying to blog, so honestly I just tried to write in the first couple of hours each day. You know, the time before the phone starts ringing and West Coast email starts leaking in. Somewhere in the back of my mind as I would go through the rest of the day I would think about it and sometimes I’d get a second wind in the evening, but really it was written just a few hours in the morning every day. For me it was a good day if I got two or three pages done. Sometimes if I was on vacation I would write 12 pages in a day, but I just pushed through it one page at a time and it got done! It took 20 months from the first idea to the delivery of the manuscript into the copyeditor’s hands.

You’ve stated that your jumping-off point for the novel was the question of what vampires would do for a living if they really existed. Can you talk a little bit more about that?

What was really behind the question was the notion that it really must be quite difficult to be someone who lives while everyone they love around them dies and while the world that they know changes over and over and over again. For me, my job gives me an enormous amount of joy—I love being a historian, I love teaching, I love the research—but to me, what I’d never seen was a vampire who had that kind of purpose to anchor themselves in. How would you think of something you could do not just for this one life, but conceivably for hundreds or thousands of years?

Did you feel that since vampires are in fact historians of world history that would be a bit of a cheat?

Yes, definitely. I knew that vampires would not want to be historians; it would be too close to home and would offer them no respite from what their whole lives were, which is remembering.

When I started to think about who vampires would spend their time with, I realized that human beings wouldn’t be very interesting to them, so that’s how I stumbled upon the idea of witches and daemons. I realized very quickly that it would be witches who would the historians and the anthropologists. They were the record keepers because of the traditions they have maintained and upheld.

In many ways your own research is very similar to Diana’s—have you also been interested in the supernatural?

I’ve been fascinated with it in terms of how, for so long, the supernatural was just part of the natural. Now we have a very strong divide where we think, there’s the world, and then there’s this supernatural stuff, but that has not been true for most of history. . . . I was really interested in the idea that for such a long time people would think “well, that happened because a witch made it happen,” because there really wasn’t a better explanation.

I always tell my students to try to imagine what people from the 16th century would think if they saw us walk over to a wall and flip a switch and a light on the other side of the room turned on. I couldn’t draw you an electric diagram of how that works, so on some level we take science on faith and that’s our explanation today. In some sense, science is the new magic, especially for those of us who aren’t actively involved in science.

Speaking of science, one of the things that is so refreshing about this novel is the way you create a genetic explanation for the paranormal.

For me, the world of this book really needed to be a world that would make sense. I tried to figure out a way for this world to exist in our world. I realized that modern genetic research would be a problem—for these different species, who we used to differentiate because they could make certain things happen or based on what they ate, suddenly the prospect of having a car accident and having your blood tested and having it revealed that it was different in some significant way, this struck me as being both enormously frightening as well as offering up the prospect of real understanding.

I did a ton of reading about genetics and different theories about chromosomal change and [read] the great studies of spontaneous chromosomal mutations due to pathogen bombardments. It seemed to me that there were all kinds of wonderful possible explanations in the scientific world, so that’s the explanation I went with.

As an aside, I think that alchemy is actually really helpful in terms of trying to marry the fantastical with the real world because alchemy is a scientific discipline where there is a belief that substances change fundamentally from one thing to another. Alchemy has a rich set of images and beliefs about how a seed can turn into a plant, or lead can turn into gold, or the mortal can change into the immortal. So I began to think well, how is neuroscience like magic, or neutron bombardment like alchemy? Those were really fun days when pieces like that began to fall into place.

Diana is such a compelling character. She’s so strong and independent, it was surprising to discover that she wasn’t the starting point for the novel.

Well, Diana was actually the first character name that I wrote down. So, while the questions about the book may have started with vampires—after all, the world was pretty obsessed with vampires in the Fall of 2008!—it all very quickly became about this world, and some of the very first things I wrote down about the book were about witches and daemons. Pretty much as soon as I figured out that witches were the historians, then I began focusing more on them and that element of the story.

Diana’s name came to me very quickly through a combination of thinking about vampires as hunters, since Diana is the goddess of the hunt, but also thinking about some of the first families that were victims of the witch hunts in Salem in 1692 here in America.

It was important to me that Diana be really smart and really independent, but also somebody who was ultimately appealing. I think that a lot of women that I’ve talked to really empathize with some of her struggles about being independent. I think it’s good for fiction to deal with those issues, not necessarily as one of the central things, but as something that gets worked out in the course of the plot.

It sounds like there are quite a few striking parallels between Diana and yourself.

Certainly the fact that she is a historian and working at the Bodleian was something I knew, though I must say what historians actually do in a day is not always how it seems in books. A lot of it just came from tracking situations and thinking what someone with her background and characteristics would do. From that perspective, she often does things that I would never do, because she is not me. In some ways it was almost wish fulfillment of what I’d like more heroines in literature to be, that appealing mix of vulnerable and intelligent that I think most women are in real life.

The sexual tension you develop between Diana and Matthew is incredibly intense. Sex scenes and convincing love stories may be the hardest things to write, so do you have a particular philosophy regarding these elements in writing?

I think the best sex scenes are the ones that leave a lot to the imagination. We’re very unique individuals, so when people are very good they can suggest in a word or a phrase what’s really going on.

I also think sex should be about joy; it shouldn’t be about pain or angst. It should be one of the most joyful things that happens! I wanted their romance to involve some tension, but also lots of laughter and lots of mutual respect and give and take, so that’s what I tried to put in those scenes.

I know there have been some people who have wanted to know where the real sex is, but it’s only been 40 days! These are people with PhDs, and they haven’t picked each other up at a bar for a one-night stand. I wanted it to be realistic about what these two characters would do in these incredibly fraught situations, so I just wouldn’t have bought it as a reader if they had been spending these long days in bed. They need to wait for the right moment, which will happen.

Given the current fervor for vampires, were you worried people would be burnt out?

When I started writing the story, I really started writing it for me. . . . I had spent six or eight weeks on it and had nine chapters completed before I even told anyone else that I was working on something. I didn’t really know exactly what I was doing, so the larger issue of how my writing would fit into the world wasn’t even something I was thinking about. I told the story that I wanted to tell and that I couldn’t keep from telling. Whether it had vampires or witches, whether it would be published or anyone would read it, that wasn’t the issue to me. What did motivate me is that there are so many books out there that draw on history, secret books and alchemy, so I wanted to see if I could put all those pieces together again in a way that seemed more plausible or possible to me as a historian.

Why do you think we just can’t quit vampires? What about them is so appealing?

Because I don’t have children of my own, I was largely oblivious to the more recent young-adult fervor over supernatural and paranormal romances. I mean, you can’t go through an airport or turn on the television without knowing about Twilight, but I hadn’t read those books.

However, I grew up with Anne Rice, so vampires are not a new thing! I am really fascinated with the cycles that these topics go through, because they are useful symbols for us to think about life through.

I think we have a very complicated relationship to creatures and people who aren’t like us. On the one hand, we are enormously attracted to them, we are fascinated by them and want to know more. There is also some fear and drawing back from people who aren’t like us. I think the vampire is an extreme example of that attraction and withdrawal mechanism. Witches serve similar but not identical purposes.

Throughout history there has been some kind of human sense of some people not being like us and struggling with how to explain that. Some of the most enduring ways [of explaining the unknown] in literature have been about people with paranormal abilities. Interestingly, in most western countries, vampires in their current form are rather late to the party!

Who are some of your favorite fictional vampires (or witches)?

I always go back to Anne Rice. Those are really the witch and vampire books that made the biggest impression on me as a young adult growing up. The Mayfair witches that she wrote about in The Witching Hour and the characters she created in The Vampire Chronicles really made a big impression [on me]. I was always a big fan of Louis in Interview with the Vampire, more so than Lestat.

I also have to say that I have an enormous fondness for the Buffy the Vampire Slayer’s vampires. I was an Angel girl for a very long time, but by the end I was with Spike all the way. I also really loved Drusilla, who was wonderful. I loved the humor in Joss Whedon’s vampires. They took themselves so seriously while they were in the moment but then realized their actions were huge clichés.

So far, the response to the book and the pre-publication buzz has been overwhelmingly positive. Did you ever expect your book would garner this kind of response?

No! I am a history professor so this was very unexpected! The first responses from foreign publishers were so wonderful because they knew very early on that they wanted to translate it and make it available to readers. I think that was my first sign that people would embrace the book, but you never know whether people are going to adopt your characters and bring them into their homes and have them become part of their imaginative lives.

I’ve really loved having readers write me and tell me that they love some of the more minor characters other than Matthew and Diana, because they all seem so real to me. In the end, I think getting that kind of response is really what it’s about for an author. I’m just so happy the book has been getting this kind of response as I hope it helps it find itself into the hands of other readers who will enjoy it. When you write non-fiction, you don’t have that same kind of emotional impact on your readers!

A Discovery of Witches will be published in more than 30 translated editions. Is there a particular version you’re especially excited to see?

Oh gosh! I think that I will have a very special place in my heart for the French edition because it will be in Matthew’s language. It’s also one of the languages I’m slightly more adept at . . . I’m not sure how I’ll fare with the Czech version!

Really, it’s just so astonishing it’s going to go into so many languages that on some level every single one is just such a kick. I’ve had the pleasure of being in contact with some of the translators and they’re all just so smart and the care that they’re taking with this book to get it right is amazing.

When you’re not busy writing, teaching and researching, what do you like to read? Are there any particular authors or works that inspire you as a writer?

Honestly, the thing I read most is nonfiction because of my work. I really read an eclectic blend of things when I’m not reading nonfiction. I love poetry. I certainly have a real soft spot for Diana Gabaldon and her Outlander series. I think I’m drawn to big, thick chunky books regardless of the genre. I like being caught up in a story and getting lost in it for more than just a day or two. From there it can be straight fiction, romance, fantasy or mystery. I love Elizabeth George! For me it’s about loving the characters and being able to go visit friends again. When I go on trips I usually take a book that I already have read because I know I will love it so re-reading is a big treat for me.

With popular books it always seems like the next step is Hollywood. Do you have any plans or aspirations to turn your books into movies? Have you had any thoughts on who you’d like to play Diana or Matthew?

I think it would be an enormous treat to see what a really smart filmmaker would do with this book. Film is an adaptation of the book, not word-for-word, but so that it conveys the right meaning and tone. That said, if it doesn’t happen, I’m absolutely fine with having every reader make that movie in their own head, since that’s what we all do anyway.

I can say with all honesty that I can think of absolutely no one I have seen who can play Matthew! If a filmmaker can come up with that, more power to them, but I can’t say I can picture that individual.

The novel ends on a bit of a cliffhanger. Did you know from the outset that you’d be writing more than one book?

When I thought about the story, I always thought of it in three distinct movements and this was always the first movement. It was sold as a stand-alone book so it needed to stand on its own merits and there needed to be some kind of closure at the end, but for me the story has always been three. I actually wrote the first chapter of the first book and the last chapter of the last book, so these bookend chapters were the first two things I wrote.

Are all the books written then?

No. I know a lot more about how they get from point A to point B than I used to, and I am actively working on the second one right now, which presents new challenges and is proving to be a great learning experience. So that’s my focus right now, the next stage of the adventure.

Matthew and Diana’s relationship will continue to evolve and truly the best is yet to come. I think we often do not pay enough attention to sustaining relationships, so I think people often go into the world with some strange ideas and it’s no wonder so many people are disappointed all the time! The really challenge and the real beauty of a relationship is building something that can really last, so that’s what we’ll be seeing a little bit more of.

Stephenie Harrison writes from Nashville, where she studies science at Vanderbilt University and blogs about books at Steph & Tony Investigate!

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RELATED CONTENT
Don’t miss our review of A Discovery of Witches.

BookPage got the scoop on what a history professor is doing writing fiction, the current craze for vampires and where her heroes are headed next.
Fiction

Jennifer Haigh

Interview by Stephenie Harrison

Jennifer Haigh’s fourth novel focuses on a complicated Boston family struggling to come to terms with secrets they would rather not face. The Irish-American McGann clan have always been close, but when oldest brother Art, a priest, is accused of improper behavior by a parishioner, their mother and his two siblings find their close relationships torn apart. Combining a ripped-from-the-headlines plot with Haigh’s trademark emotionally elegant writing, Faith is a gripping and honest novel that will keep readers turning pages.

The word “faith” means a lot of different things to different people. What exactly does “faith” mean to you? Why did you choose it as the title of your book?

The novel deals with religious faith, of course—the story revolves around a priest accused of sexual abuse, and many of the characters are observant Catholics. In a broader sense, the events of the story make all the characters reevaluate what they believe about themselves and each other.

Many authors take inspiration from their own lives—your second novel, Baker Towers, was set in a western Pennsylvania coal town much like the place where you were born. Where did the idea for Faith come from?

When I moved to Boston from Iowa in 2002, the city was reeling from revelations that Catholic priests had molested children, and that the Archdiocese had covered up the abuse. I was reeling too: I was raised in a Catholic family, spent 12 years in parochial schools and had extremely fond memories of my interactions with Catholic clergy. It’s no exaggeration to say that nuns and priests were the heroes of my childhood. Like many people, I was horrified by what had happened in Boston—and, as later became clear, in Catholic dioceses across the country. Faith was my attempt to explain the inexplicable, to understand what I couldn’t make sense of in any other way.

What is it about family dynamics that makes them such a literary touchstone for you?

You know, I wouldn’t say I have a particular interest in writing about families. In fact I’m just trying to write complex, realistic, well-developed characters—and to do that, I need to consider where my characters came from, what their early years were like, what sorts of people brought them into the world.

Faith revolves around what happens when a young priest is accused of sexual misconduct with a young boy. Was it difficult for you to tackle such a sensitive subject?

Starting any book is difficult. I approached Faith the way I have approached all my novels: by thinking my way into the characters, and knowing them from the inside.

One of the things that is so impressive about your novels is how atmospheric they are. Faith takes place in Boston, which is where you currently live—if you could travel and settle anywhere with the intention of some day setting a book there, where would you choose to go?

Hm. Is someone else buying my plane ticket?

Your novels are very emotionally investing for readers, so they must demand a lot from you as a writer. What do you do when you need to unwind from all the drama you create on the page?!

I like to take a walk, or maybe cook something.

You graduated with an MFA from the Iowa Writers' Workshop in 2002—what is the most important thing that you learned during your time there?

Iowa was a formative experience for me. I grew a great deal as a writer, and learned values and habits I use every day of my writing life. It’s hard to single out one particular lesson. I will say that Frank Conroy was a man who honored the sentence, and I try to do that too.

Along with novels you also write short stories—do you find one format more rewarding or challenging than the other?

Different rewards, different challenges. I enjoy both and struggle with both. If pressed I’d say I prefer the novel, mostly because I hate starting and finishing. Breaking ground on a new project terrifies me, and finishing one is profoundly depressing, if only because I know I’ll soon have to start all over again. My favorite part is the long, boring middle stage of writing a novel, when the end is still distant, and the next beginning even more so.

Recently there has been a lot of attention devoted to gender bias in the publishing industry. Your previous works have won some rather prestigious awards, but as a female author, do you feel like you have a harder time reaching a broad readership?

No—in fact, just the opposite. Reaching a broad audience isn’t the problem. If anything, female writers have an edge in that regard, since the vast majority of fiction readers are women. The real issue is that female writers are far less likely to be reviewed, which creates the impression that their work is less serious. This is a persistent and vexing problem, but because I can’t do anything about it, I try to put it out of my mind.

With so many other modern innovations and ways to spend our time, why is it important for people to still read books?

I can only respond with the reasons I still read books: It’s the most powerful way I know to augment the experience of living. Reading a great novel opens an entire world to me; it lets me inhabit another person’s skin. Of course, movies tell stories too; but as a viewer you’re a passive recipient of the experience; your own imagination has no hand in creating it.

 

Jennifer Haigh’s fourth novel focuses on a complicated Boston family struggling to come to terms with secrets they would rather not face. The Irish-American McGann clan have always been close, but when oldest brother Art, a priest, is accused of improper behavior by a parishioner,…

FictionWomen's FictionHistorical Fiction

Lisa See

Interview by Stephenie Harrison

The author of Shanghai Girls brings back three of her favorite characters in a new novel set during one of China’s darkest periods.

Dreams of Joy is a sequel to one of your previous novels, Shanghai Girls. What made you decide to revisit that story and its characters?
I didn’t plan to write a sequel. I thought the end of Shanghai Girls was a new beginning. Readers thought otherwise. Absolutely everyone, including my publisher, asked for a sequel. I loved spending more time with Pearl, Joy and May. I’ve now been thinking and writing about them for four years, so I know them really, really well. It was interesting to go even deeper emotionally with all of them.

This novel offers a vivid picture of the hardships endured by the Chinese people during Mao’s Great Leap Forward. How did you conduct your research and what obstacles did you encounter?
There are a handful of nonfiction books written about the Great Leap Forward, which helped me with the straight facts. When I was in China, I interviewed people in Huangcun Village who had lived through that time. I also talked to younger people in China to see what their impressions were of the Great Leap Forward and what their parents had gone through. The main obstacle I encountered, even with young, educated people, is the belief—after years of education—that the famine that occurred during the Great Leap Forward was caused by “three years of bad weather.”

All of your books are rooted in fact and real historical events, so why do you choose to write fiction rather than nonfiction?
What I love about books—as a reader myself—is opening the pages, stepping into another world, connecting to the characters, and by extension to larger things like an historical moment, the human condition, how women were treated and things like that. I’m willing to go on a journey and read about history if there are characters, relationships and emotions I can connect to. It’s those things that keep me turning the pages, and along the way I learn a lot. That’s what I love in the books I read, and that’s what I hope for readers of the books I write.

Your fiction has opened a new window on China and its people for many American readers. Do you feel that there are any stereotypes about China that continue to persist despite your efforts?
I actually think people are very confused about China. Is it an economic global superpower or a rigid Communist country known for its human rights violations? Is it one of the most advanced countries in the world in terms of gender equality or is it a place where people give up their daughters for adoption? Is it the country with the third largest number of millionaires and billionaires in the world or a country of dire poverty? On any given day, any stereotype can be accurate, even in this country.

The movie version of your novel Snow Flower and the Secret Fan will premiere this summer. How does it feel to see your characters come to life on the screen?
It’s both wonderful and weird. The parts of the film that are true to the book are absolutely true—lifted word for word from the novel. But I’m sure that many readers of the book will be just as surprised as I was to see a singing and dancing Hugh Jackman.

Dreams of Joy makes plenty of references to the Chinese Zodiac: Dogs are likeable, Rabbits are friendly, Dragons are ferocious. Your Chinese zodiac sign is the Sheep; how well do you think you embody your sign?
A Sheep really loves home. I also love to be at home. It’s one of the reasons I became a writer. I can stay at home all day.

What is the most important thing you have learned about writing from your mother, novelist Carolyn See?
Her work habits. Write 1,000 words a day, plus one charming note or phone call.

Your Chinese heritage is obviously very important to you as a writer; are there any other Chinese (or Chinese-American) writers that you feel deserve wider readership?
I love Ha Jin and Yiyun Li. They’re both critically acclaimed, but they haven’t had the readership they deserve.

With bookstores closing and eBooks and self-publishing exploding, the literary world is in a period of rapid change. Are you concerned about what the future holds for books and reading?
Of course I’m concerned. Who isn’t? I love real books, but I also have a Kindle that I use on trips. As soon as I come home, though, I’m back to a real book.

 

The author of Shanghai Girls brings back three of her favorite characters in a new novel set during one of China’s darkest periods.

Dreams of Joy is a sequel to one of your previous novels, Shanghai Girls. What made you decide to revisit that story…

Self-Help

Charles Duhigg

Interview by Stephenie Harrison

In his breakthrough bestseller, The Power of Habit, New York Times reporter Charles Duhigg uses science to pull back the curtain on some of our most mystifying behaviors—and reveals how we can change them.

When you get down to it, it seems like a lot of the time we're pretty oblivious about why we do the things we do! Why do you think this is?

When a habit takes hold, something interesting happens within our brain: activity moves from the prefrontal cortex (where decision-making occurs) to the basal ganglia (one of the oldest parts of the brain, where automatic patterns are stored). In a sense, we stop thinking when we're in the grip of a habit—and so as a result, it often feels like we're acting without realizing what is going on.

Yet that doesn't mean that these behaviors are out of our control. In the last 15 years, scientists have learned an enormous amount about how habits work. Once you understand how to take a habit apart, how to fiddle with its gears, you learn how to design behavioral patterns and take control of these automatic habits.

You say there are certain "keystone habits" that, if changed, can change a person's life. How do you identify these habits?

Keystone habits influence how we work, eat, play, live, spend and communicate. They start a process that, over time, transforms everything. Identifying keystone habits, however, is tricky. Most keystone habits create daily victories—what are known within psychology as the “science of small wins.” So to identify the keystone habits in your life, look for those patterns that give you numerous, small senses of victory; places where momentum can start to build.

"No matter how old someone is, or how ingrained the behavior, it can be shifted once they start analyzing the cues and rewards."

You cite evidence that the brains of people who suffer from certain purportedly uncontrollable habits (e.g., gambling or alcoholism) differ from those who don't. Many people would likely say that our brains determine behavior, but to what extent do you think behavior can change the brain?

The brain is incredibly plastic—it is constantly changing as we expose ourselves to different stimuli and engage in different behaviors. One of the things that we've learned from laboratory experiments is that no habit is destiny. Every behavioral pattern can be changed. No matter how old someone is, or how ingrained the behavior, it can be shifted once they start analyzing the cues and rewards. And once we start behaving differently, our brains start to shift.

Your book explains how companies have used insight into the ways habits work to exploit target markets. Is awareness of things like Target's couponing strategies enough, or are there other techniques shoppers can use in order to make sure they're only buying what they need/want?

I don't know if awareness is sufficient protection, but it's a great place to start. One of the defenses that companies offer is that by studying habits, they can anticipate their customers' needs better. Indeed, when I was reporting on Target's use of habit studies to predict which customers were pregnant, my wife and I were expecting our second child. Lo and behold, we started receiving coupons for diapers and formula and a crib. And I was overjoyed: I really needed a crib! It was great to get a coupon that was so useful!

So, awareness is a great defense—but so is appreciating the usefulness of companies understanding our habits. From one perspective, it might be an invasion of privacy. From another, it’s helping me get the coupons I need at just the right time.

In his breakthrough bestseller, The Power of Habit, New York Times reporter Charles Duhigg uses science to pull back the curtain on some of our most mystifying behaviors—and reveals how we can change them.

When you get down to it, it seems like a lot of…

Mystery & SuspenseFictionSuspense

Elizabeth Haynes

Interview by Stephenie Harrison

British author Elizabeth Haynes started a novel one November, little suspecting that her story of a young woman who falls in love with the wrong man would eventually become a big bestseller—and Amazon U.K.'s reader-selected Best Book of 2011. With a movie adaptation and the book's U.S. publication date on the horizon, Haynes took some time out to answer our questions about this chilling first novel.

Into the Darkest Corner began as a National Novel Writing Month project. What was it about NaNoWriMo that worked so well for you?
I wouldn’t have completed a novel (and so never have been published) without NaNoWriMo. It’s very difficult to find time to write while working, being a mum and a wife and a daughter, and so having one month a year when I could prioritise writing was a complete gift. More than anything, in November writing is such great fun that it’s surprisingly easy to get carried away with the story. I still find it very difficult to write at other times of the year, so the first draft of all my books is written in November and I will carry on doing this.

Your book deals with heavy topics such as domestic abuse and mental illness, particularly PTSD and OCD. How much research did you do into these topics, and to what extent do you think writing fiction requires thorough background research?
I think research is pretty essential. There’s nothing that ruins a story more than some glaring inaccuracy or improbability, and besides that I think if you are going to write about something that, for real people all over the world, is a condition they have to live with day to day, the least you can do as an author is paint a reasonable picture of what it is they go through. Whatever I read, I like to learn something, and my expectation as a reader even from fiction is that what’s presented is reliable. For Into the Darkest Corner, after I’d finished the first draft I spoke at some length to a close friend who is a Consultant Clinical Psychologist—she was able to explain what would happen when Cathy sought help with her condition, and she recommended some great books which really helped to get a feel for how people live with OCD. More importantly, she recognised that the way I’d written Cathy’s symptoms showed that it was likely she had elements of PTSD as well, which led to further research.

There are some graphic scenes of sexual violence in Into the Darkest Corner that are truly terrifying. Were you ever surprised or scared that you were able to take your characters to such dark places?
It was scary writing some of those scenes so I hope that feeling comes across for the readers, too. The more time I spent with the traumatised Catherine, the more I realised that I was building up to writing the scene detailing what actually happened to her, and that it was going to have to be bad. By the time I got there it had become very difficult to write, not only because having got to know these characters so well it’s hard to put them in that dark, terrible place, but also because I was aware in writing it that this sort of thing does happen to real people, every day. So yes, it was difficult but it had to be done, and I think if I’d turned away from that scene or glossed over it, I would have done a disservice to the people who have survived assaults like that, and worse.

Fear makes everything in life unnecessarily harder to deal with.

It’s fairly safe to say that Cathy, your heroine, has experienced one of the worst boyfriends and breakups that one could ever imagine. Care to share your own worst breakup story?
I’ve never experienced physical violence or aggression in a relationship, but I have had relationships that have been controlling. For a while in my late 20s I behaved pretty much as Catherine did before she met Lee. When I was writing Into the Darkest Corner I was very aware that the relationship she falls into is something that could have happened to me and I was very lucky to have come out of what I recognise now as a crazy and reckless time unscathed. I learned a lot from it; perhaps most of all that it’s important to make your intentions clear, and to consider the other person’s point of view. I had a relationship with a guy that I believed was a casual one, since I often didn’t see him for weeks or months at a time, and was based around whether I happened to see him when I was out with friends—so when I went into a serious relationship I didn’t really consider that he might not be happy with our association coming to an end. He called me out of the blue hoping to meet up and I told him I wasn’t free; the next few nights I kept getting calls from strangers and it turned out that my name and phone number had been posted on a singles website. I assume it was his revenge.

One of the scariest things about this book is that it paints a very convincing picture of just how easy it can be to get trapped in an abusive relationship; initially, Lee really does seem like the perfect boyfriend. In the work you’ve done as an intelligence analyst for the police, you’ve come across hundreds of cases involving domestic abuse, so are there any particular warning signs you think women should be on the look out for when embarking on a new relationship?
Controlling behaviour is easy to spot in someone else’s relationship, but very difficult to see in your own, because emotions get in the way. This is why I think close friends and family have such a responsibility to look out for you, and also why trying to isolate you from the people who care about you, controlling who you can see and when, is a big warning sign for a potentially abusive relationship. It’s portrayed by the abuser as a sign of their love for you, that they need you, that your friends don’t care about you in the same way—and once you are focused on that, you end up isolating yourself still further.

As hard as it is, I think one of the best defences against a relationship like this is the ability to remain objective about it—if this was happening to a friend, what advice would you give: put up with it, or get out? Being honest with yourself is so important—but so difficult to do when emotions are involved.

Quite understandably, Cathy has a slew of fears that plague her on a daily basis. One thing she winds up finding quite helpful is ranking them in order of most to least threatening. If you had to name your biggest fear, what would it be?
My biggest fear is probably the same one that most people have—something happening to my loved ones. Most of the time, though, I make a conscious effort not to be afraid. Fear makes everything in life unnecessarily harder to deal with. When I was pregnant with my son, I read a lot about how fear reduces your pain threshold and so I really tried not to be afraid of labour and childbirth. Admittedly I was lucky and everything went well, but I still went through nearly 24 hours of labour with no pain relief stronger than two Advil. He was 9lbs 3oz.

One of my favourite books is Susan Jeffers’ Feel the Fear and Do It Anyway which I first read in my early 20s. It taught me a lot about how any fear at all is at its most basic level a fear of loss of control, or of not being able to handle a situation. Once you recognise that and consider what, realistically, will happen, everything becomes much easier.

Prior to writing your own thriller, were you a big fan of the genre? Are there any authors that your particularly admire?
I’ve been a fan of the thriller genre since I first read Agatha Christie as a teenager. I love police procedurals although having worked in the police environment some of them are now difficult to read because they are quite unrealistic. An exception to this, however, is John Harvey—his books, as well as being brilliant, have a great note of authenticity. I am a big fan of Ruth Rendell, Nicci French and Mo Hayder, each for different reasons: Rendell is a genius at unpicking the most disturbing threads of the human psyche; French explores narrative structure in each book, making for an intriguing and fresh read every time; and Hayder is not afraid to tackle violence as it often is, dirty, grim, painful—even when this makes for an uncomfortable read.

How did you celebrate when you found out that Into the Darkest Corner had been named Amazon UK’s Best Book of 2011?
I found out almost by accident! I knew the results of the Rising Star of the Year were going to be announced and I was checking the page regularly. As this is based on the number of positive reviews, I was aware that Into the Darkest Corner was marginally in the lead, so it was wonderful but not a massive surprise when I saw the announcement that it had won. Then I noticed the phrase “click here to see why this is our book of the year” and I clicked the link to the Amazon Best Book of 2011 chart, showing Into the Darkest Corner as the number one. This was so completely unexpected that I genuinely thought it was a mistake. The next day at work I got someone to check the list on their smartphone to see if I’d misunderstood it somehow. Even when I knew it was real, I still had no idea what a big deal it was and how much it would change things for me and for the books—if I had, I think I would have celebrated a whole lot more than I did!

Each step of the publication process has been amazing for me—if you look on my Facebook page there are some pictures of me watching the first print run being bound into books at the printers, and it’s quite clear that I’m practically delirious with excitement. I don’t take anything for granted, because I still can’t quite believe all the things I’ve dreamed of my whole life are coming true.

There are plans to turn Into the Darkest Corner into a film. How involved are you going to be in bringing your novel to the screen? If you had your way, who would you love to see playing Cathy, Lee and Stuart?
I’ve been immensely lucky here, too: the director of the film version of Into the Darkest Corner is Tinge Krishnan, and she is also writing the script. We’ve had plenty of in-depth discussions about the plot and the characters and she has even met up with some of my police colleagues to get a proper “feel” for Lee and his environment. I believe the way Tinge has allowed me to be involved like this is quite unusual but it’s worked well for us—she completely understands what I was trying to bring across with the book. I recently got the chance to read an early draft of the script, and it just blew my mind. Tinge is such a genius. It felt to me like she had taken the characters I’d described in black and white, and coloured them in.

As to the cast . . . well, I had some clear ideas when I was writing the story, but these have changed completely since reading the script—and will no doubt change again when the casting gets underway!

Now that you’ve published one novel to such great acclaim are you writing full time or have you still kept your “day job” working for the police?
I’ve just started a two year career break, so although I’m still in touch with the organisation but I have a fantastic opportunity to write and see where it takes me.

It was a hard decision to make because it was a fantastic job, and I worked with a really great team of people. I’m still in touch with a lot of them and they’ve been very supportive of my writing, for which I am eternally grateful. I miss them all—but who knows? Maybe I will be back in a couple of years if there is still room for me!

 

RELATED CONTENT
Read our review of Into the Darkest Corner.

British author Elizabeth Haynes started a novel one November, little suspecting that her story of a young woman who falls in love with the wrong man would eventually become a big bestseller—and Amazon U.K.'s reader-selected Best Book of 2011. With a movie adaptation and the…

FictionLiterary FictionDebut Fiction

Hanya Yanagihara

Interview by Stephenie Harrison

In her spellbinding debut novel, The People in the Trees, Hanya Yanagihara drew on her life as a well traveled woman and editor at Conde Nast Traveler to compose stunning, visual descriptions of place. In these fictional memoirs of a scientist who has fallen from grace, readers find themselves seduced by a remote jungle setting and all the mysteries it holds. BookPage spoke with Yanagihara about her experiences as a travel writer, the love of reading and the joy of exploration.

The story that you’ve woven is utterly captivating, but one of the things that truly makes The People in the Trees shine is the writing. How have you developed your craft? Are there any authors that you turn to for inspiration or that have been particularly influential for you in terms of shaping your own authorial voice?

Thank you for the kind words. I don’t know that I’ve done anything to consciously develop my voice, but some of my favorite living fiction writers are John Banville, Jonathan Coe, Hilary Mantel, Jennifer Egan, J.M. Coetzee, Anita Brookner, Margaret Atwood, Paul Theroux, Aatish Taseer, Mohsin Hamid, Rose Tremain, Peter Rock, Anne Tyler, Steven Millhauser, David Mitchell, Kazuo Ishiguro, Zoë Heller, Michael Cunningham . . . and, well, I know I’m forgetting lots of people.

Prior to writing The People in the Trees, you worked as a travel writer. If your next assignment saw you heading off to Ivu’ivu, what would be the three items you’d be sure to pack?

I actually still am an editor at Conde Nast Traveler (unasked-for tip to first-time novelists: For a variety of reasons, don’t quit your day job); I’m on the road about a fourth to a third of the year, but the rest of my time is spent in our offices in Times Square, assigning and editing pieces. But if I were going off to Ivu’ivu—hmm. I actually think the characters do a pretty good job of packing. So I’d bring a knife (to kill one of the turtles); a cooler (to bring back orchid cuttings); and a wider diversity of food than I allowed my characters.

"Travelers, like readers, are united by our sense of curiosity, as well as a willingness to have our most closely held notions—of a people, of a place, of human behavior—be dispelled, sometimes crushingly."

As someone who has primarily written nonfiction previously, what prompted you to shift your focus to literary fiction? Do you feel that your previous experience as a travel writer was a natural stepping-stone to writing novels?

I don’t really consider myself a nonfiction writer: I mean, I do it for work, but that’s a very specific type of writing—less essayistic and more practical, and more about the whats and wheres (as opposed to the hows and whys) of a given destination. I worked on this book for so long—I was in book publishing, not magazines at all, when I began it—that I can honestly say that the writing I do at work is something I was simply lucky enough to tumble into.

However, I can also say that working as a magazine editor has helped me enormously as a writer. When you’re publishing a magazine story, the editor has the final say. When you’re publishing a book, the author has the final say. Being a magazine editor has taught me to be more ruthless about my own writing—it’s made me more aware of repetition, for example, and the importance of pacing—but it’s also taught me when and how to not compromise, which is an underrated skill but one every writer must develop.

Given all that you’ve seen throughout the world, do you believe the old adage that “truth is stranger than fiction”?

It always is. In fact, there’s only one specific incident in the book that I took from my own life—and, of course, it was the one incident that my editor found unconvincing. But I kept it anyway.

After finishing your book, many readers will wonder whether places like Ivu’ivu truly exist. Based on your own rather extensive travels through Asia, what destinations would you offer up as real-world substitutes for those with a taste for untouched paradise?

Although much of Ivu’ivu’s history—from discovery through the ruins of Christian colonization—is borrowed from the history of Hawaii, I found its physical contours in Angra dos Reis, which is an archipelago off the coast of southern Brazil. When I went there for work—this was probably in 2008—I was still trying to decide how I wanted Ivu’ivu to look and feel. I knew I wanted it to be densely, lushly tropical, but Hawaii itself wasn’t quite florid enough for my imaginings to be an appropriate visual reference. But when I stepped onto my first island in Angra, I knew that this was Ivu’ivu: I had never before been to a square of land so intimidatingly green, so suffocatingly overgrown.

I stayed at a hotel on one of the islands, but the next day I took a speedboat and did some island-hopping, including to a number of rocks that’ve remained untouched by construction and are still as wild and untamed as they probably were a thousand years ago.

Would you say that travelers tend to be pretty voracious readers? If so, why do you think this might be?

Travelers, like readers, are united by our sense of curiosity, as well as a willingness to have our most closely held notions—of a people, of a place, of human behavior—be dispelled, sometimes crushingly.

There’s also something about the act of travel itself, its sense of suspension, that pairs beautifully with the sense of suspension that reading, especially reading fiction, encourages. One of the most exhilarating states of being is to find yourself in a strange place, surrounded by strange scenery, reading about places both familiar and not. Whenever I travel, I like to take a book that’s set in a location far different than the one I’ll be in, so that the foreignness of one experience plays against the foreignness of the other: it makes every sensation seem sharper and more vivid. I’ll always associate the Nigeria of Half of a Yellow Sun or the Mumbai of Maximum City with Tokyo, for example, which is where I read them.

When you travel, do you go paper or digital when it comes to your reading material?

Only paper. Last year, I took a 51-day trip through Asia for work and brought along 27 books: galleys, mostly, so I could discard them as I went (I like the idea of someone coming across a book I’ve left behind in a hotel room night table drawer and being drawn to it as they lie awake with jetlag). I always figure a book per every two days, plus a book for every 15-hour-plus long-haul flight.

What are you working on next?

Last month I finished a novel about male friendship that spans 30 years. Unlike The People in the Trees, which took almost 16 years [to write], this one took 18 months; but it was a book I’d had plotted in my head—down to the last lines—for years. And that period between selling your first book and its actual publication is, I learned, a wonderful, singular year and a half or so in which to write: you have all the validation you need, and none of the disappointments.

ALSO IN BOOKPAGE: Read our review of The People in the Trees.

In her spellbinding debut novel, The People in the Trees, Hanya Yanagihara drew on her life as a well traveled woman and editor at Conde Nast Traveler to compose stunning, visual descriptions of place. In these fictional memoirs of a scientist who has fallen…

FictionLiterary FictionDebut Fiction

Mary Miller

Interview by Stephenie Harrison

The Last Days of California centers on a family preparing for the end of world. If you knew you had one week left on earth, how (and where) would you spend it?
I would need more details. Am I sick? Is a meteor about to crash into the earth, i.e. are there a bunch of really great parties going on? I wouldn’t want to spend any of that precious time hungover, though. I’d stay close to home, maybe take a quick trip down to New Orleans. I’d eat whatever I wanted, see the people I love most in the world and tell them how much I love them. Things I would not do: worry, read, watch TV, remain a vegetarian. If the world’s going to end, I’d definitely want a cheeseburger.

This is your first novel, but you have previously written and published short stories, including the collection Big World. What made you make the leap to longer fiction and did you find that the transition presented you with new challenges as a writer?
I’ve tried to write novels in the past, but The Last Days of California is the only one I’ve completed. This book surprised me. I drafted it quickly, over the course of one summer, and it was fun and fairly easy to write, as I was interested in the characters and what would happen to them. I didn’t know if they’d make it to California, or if the rapture would occur, so I wrote my way toward these things.

 "If the world’s going to end, I’d definitely want a cheeseburger."

Because it’s a road-trip novel that takes place over the course of four days, the structure was inherently more manageable than the other novels I’ve attempted. When the story begins, the family has already fallen behind schedule, so there was an immediate tension. They have to keep moving! They must push on! And I felt that push, as well.

There are a lot of pop culture references in this novel that very concretely ground it in the present era and current moment—did you ever worry that by so explicitly dating your novel might also give it an expiration date?
I don’t think I could have written a road-trip story without using these references, and I have a feeling that we’ll have Targets, Taco Bells, and Burger Kings for a long time to come. Same with snack foods—I don't see the Snickers bar going anywhere. Of course, there are also a lot of TV, movie and pop cultural references that will date it. My goal was to try to fully capture a time and place—to ground the novel in the everydayness of these characters’ lives.

Is it possible for a work of art to be unambiguously of a time as well as timeless?
That’s an excellent question—I think so. I really appreciate specificity in fiction, whether the book is set in 1890, 1955 or 2013. I want to know what they’re reading, what they’re eating, what their home décor is like. I want to know everything because these details allow me to fully inhabit someone else’s world, and this makes for timeless literature.

Tolstoy famously wrote, “All happy families are alike; each unhappy family is unhappy in its own way.” To what extent do you think this is true? Is there room in modern fiction to explore the domestic family life through a lens unmarred by dysfunction and melancholy?
All families, even the happy ones, are unhappy in certain ways. Whenever you have a bunch of people living together in a house, there are going to be problems, tensions. There’s just no way around this. As beautiful as Tolstoy’s sentence is, it’s a flawed idea. Every happy family is unhappy in its own way. And most unhappy families have many happy moments. Maybe I’m too cynical, but I believe there will always be some level of dysfunction and sadness within the family unit. As a writer, this is a good thing; domestic fiction would be very dull, otherwise.

Like Jess, you grew up and lived most of your life in the South, an area of the country with an incredibly rich and distinct literary tradition. In your opinion, does Southern fiction have its roots in a physical state (or group of states) or is it defined more by a state of mind?  To what extent do you feel like living there has shaped your authorial voice?
I don’t think the physical place can be separated from the state of mind. I’ve spent the majority of my life in Mississippi, and there are still parts of it that remain virtually untouched by modern life. As a largely rural and sparsely populated state, we don’t get many visitors and almost no one moves here unless it’s for the military. I once dated a man who came to Jackson from California to run his family’s business. Everywhere we went, people asked where he was from. He couldn’t walk into a gas station without someone asking him this question. We’re also constantly reminded of our history here. As a teenager, my friends and I used to drink daiquiris while running the hills of Vicksburg’s National Military Park. My mother and father grew up in a place where blacks and whites couldn’t eat together at a lunch counter, couldn’t drink from the same water fountain at the zoo. There’s so much to remember here, things and people we can’t forget: James Meredith, Emmett Till, “Freedom Summer.”

Except for a year in Nashville and three-and-a-half in Austin, my life has been spent in Mississippi. The people I know and the culture I know are integral to who I am. It’s also hard for me to describe what this culture is like—how it’s different from other places. My father hunts and fishes; there’s always deer sausage in the freezer. My parents go to church every Sunday. There is meat in all of the vegetables (except the corn). We say y’all. Growing up, we sang “Dixie” in choir. As an undergraduate at Mississippi State, we rang cowbells at footballs games. It’s nearly impossible to get a direct flight anywhere. How many of these things are typical of the South and how many are simply a part of rural life?

It’s fair to say that about as much goes wrong as it does right during the course of the Metcalfs’ road trip—what are your top tips for guaranteed success on long haul car journeys?
Travel with people you like, preferably non-family members. Make sure your AAA membership is active. Stay in a decent hotel at least one night if you can afford it, and eat six-dollar mini-cans of Pringles. It’s also nice to have some audiobooks to distract you—nothing overly literary—think suspense, horror, crime.

Writing wise, what’s next for you: another novel, more short fiction or something else entirely?
I’m currently working on short fiction and essays. This past summer, I started another novel—a historical novel loosely based on the story of Typhoid Mary—and I liked the idea of it, but had no idea what I was doing. When the time came to make some major decisions, I balked. I was scared to mess it up, or that it wasn’t good enough, or I had forgotten what story I wanted to tell. I’m not sure. I’m definitely going to revisit it at some point; perhaps I just need to spend a few months researching communicable diseases and islands in order to become inspired again.

author photo by Doris Ulmer

Former BookPage intern Stephenie Harrison is currently writing from Asia. She blogs at 20 Years Hence. 

RELATED CONTENT
Read our review of The Last Days of California.

The Last Days of California centers on a family preparing for the end of world. If you knew you had one week left on earth, how (and where) would you spend it?
I would need more details. Am I sick? Is a meteor about to crash into the earth, i.e. are there a bunch of really great parties going on? I wouldn’t want to spend any of that precious time hungover, though. I’d stay close to home, maybe take a quick trip down to New Orleans. I’d eat whatever I wanted, see the people I love most in the world and tell them how much I love them. Things I would not do: worry, read, watch TV, remain a vegetarian. If the world’s going to end, I’d definitely want a cheeseburger.

FictionLiterary Fiction

Maggie Shipstead

Interview by Stephenie Harrison

California-born author Maggie Shipstead returns with a dazzling second novel, Astonish Me. The story of a ballerina that spans decades, it's as sharply observed as it is entertaining—and was our April 2014 Top Pick in Fiction. We asked Shipstead a few questions about the book.

Where did the inspiration for this book come from? Do you have a personal history with ballet?
I’m not a dancer, but I’ve been going to the ballet since I was five. My mom, who’s a lifelong ballet fan, took me about four times a year until I left for college, and now I go whenever I have the chance. Back in 2010, I wrote a short story about a disappointed ballet dancer and her academically gifted son and their conflicts with their next-door neighbors. It jumped through 20 years in short sections and didn’t really work. I liked writing about dance, though, and as I tinkered with revising the story, it seemed to want to expand. So I just kind of went with it, and once I came up with the defector character of Arslan Ruskov, the shape of a book started to become clear.

Given that Astonish Me focuses on the world of ballet, did you ever worry that your subject matter might get the book prematurely dismissed by readers?
You’d think I would have learned my lesson after writing a first novel set at a wedding. The short answer is yes, although the whole conversation about what is and is not chick lit is unappealingly thorny and fraught and difficult to engage in without trashing other writers. Inevitably, lots of people will assume Astonish Me is a fluffier book than it is. I had to work pretty hard to keep a woman in a bathing suit off the jacket of Seating Arrangements (a book that’s primarily about a 59-year-old man), and even so, there were newspaper reviews that started out “I thought this would be chick lit, but . . .” which was honestly really galling. It’s an old chorus, but I think male authors get the benefit of an assumption of seriousness that their female counterparts don’t.

"I think male authors get the benefit of an assumption of seriousness that their female counterparts don’t."

For me, writing a novel is such an epic grind that, in order not to be miserable, I have to write about what fascinates and moves me, even if that brings me to subjects and settings that aren’t immediately identifiable as weighty. And, of course, subject matter doesn’t determine the value of a piece of fiction. You can write about something as heavy as, say, the horrors of war without necessarily generating any worthwhile prose or thought. In the end, all I (or anyone else) can do is try to build a story and characters I find compelling and write as attentively and thoughtfully as possible and revise my face off and hope for the best.

There is a lot of discussion in the novel about how ballerinas are vessels for creativity—do you feel this is also true for authors? Are there any other parallels you would draw between dancers and writers?
I’m fascinated by the practices of artists of all kinds and by the relationships they have with their own talents and limitations. The idea in the Astonish Me of a dancer as a vessel has to do with how a choreographer will make a dance “on” a dancer or dancers and use the bodies of others to explore and realize a personal vision. Dancers, I think, have vastly different lives than writers. Their medium is the body and their work is dynamic and almost always collaborative, while writing is solitary and rooted in the mind and is, unless I’ve been going about things all wrong, best done while stationary. Dancers peak when they’re very young; writers have at least the possibility of continuing to work into old age. But I think there’s a common experience among writers and dancers (and probably most artists) of what it’s like to spend all your time trying to do something that’s extremely difficult, something that requires a massive amount of practice and dedication and might give you a rush of satisfaction one day and then leave you feeling utterly defeated the next. It’s a precarious way to live.

"Dancers, I think, have vastly different lives than writers. Their medium is the body and their work is dynamic and almost always collaborative, while writing is solitary and rooted in the mind and is, unless I’ve been going about things all wrong, best done while stationary." 

What made you decide to tell this story in a linear, but recursive, way?
The early drafts were actually slightly weirder, structurally, than the final version. The narrative jumped forward and back in time according to an internal logic I thought made sense but that my editor gently informed me was confusing. So I eventually had to simplify somewhat by not skipping around so much, combining some sections, sticking with particular arcs longer. The book is written in present tense, but covers almost 30 years, from 1973 to 2002, and isn’t quite sequential. The earliest years fall in the middle of the book. From the beginning, I knew I wanted a structure that let me dip in and out of the story, creating questions and then answering them. The book is meant to have a strong sense of movement and, in some ways, to mimic the feel of a ballet, how small vignettes come together and build toward a dramatic, even breathless, ending.

It seems like a lot of younger authors today hold advanced degrees in creative writing. How did your own time at the Iowa Writer’s Workshop shape you as a writer, and what is the best lesson you learned there?
Before I went to Iowa I had no idea that I could be a writer. I’d taken a couple writing workshops in college but didn’t think fiction was at all a viable career. Then I graduated and was having a hard time coming up with any better ideas as far as viable careers, and I applied to Iowa as a shot in the dark. Being there—being exposed to those teachers and all the writers who come through and being part of a community of people who all care passionately about words—that’s what made me get serious. Learning how to write confidently, and how to fake it when necessary, was probably my most important takeaway. The endless debate about whether or not MFAs are worthwhile honestly baffles me. Of course not every writer needs or should want a graduate degree, and no program is perfect, but, for me, going to Iowa was a no-brainer. It meant time and money to try to become a better writer. What’s the downside?

Many of the characters in this novel are on a never-ending quest for perfection, a plight that seems to afflict many artists. As a writer, are you concerned with achieving perfection or is there some other goal that motivates you?
It’s funny—I was definitely one of those little kids whose elementary school teachers are always like, “Maggie, do you know what a perfectionist is?” I’m very competitive; I don’t like making mistakes. But, perhaps oddly, I’m also pretty accepting of the inherent imperfection of my writing. I’m concerned with writing the best book I can squeeze out of myself at any given time. If I held out for a perfect book, I’d never publish, and I’d be miserable. I do wish my books were better—nothing I write down will ever quite be what I want it to be—but when I’m done, I’m done. And then I move on. The prospect of starting something new is actually a big source of motivation for me. Maybe it’s that my impatience is stronger than my perfectionism.

 "I’m concerned with writing the best book I can squeeze out of myself at any given time." 

Readers who have read your first novel will likely remark that Astonish Me is very different. As an author, were you consciously trying to push yourself with this new novel? Is there anything that you feel like you did more successfully here than in your previous book?
I’ve published maybe 12 or 13 short stories, and I tend to write about wildly disparate things from one to the next. Like I have a Montana cowboy story and a story set on a guano-mining Pacific atoll in the 1910s and one about an actress who marries into a Hollywood cult and one about a couple honeymooning in Romania in the early 70s. So, to me, it seems natural to seek novelty in my novels. I’m also not starting from an autobiographical place and then branching out: the WASPy world of Seating Arrangements interested me but wasn’t any more my world than ballet is. I hope I always try to push myself. I think I would be bored if I didn’t. Because my two novels are so different, though, it’s difficult to compare them. Astonish Me is a more compressed book as far as length but ranges more broadly in terms of time and geography and variety of characters. It also has more momentum than Seating Arrangements, I think, and that momentum builds over the course of the book, which is hopefully a good thing.

Even readers who don’t have an interest in ballet will probably find themselves utterly engrossed by this book if they give it a chance—have you ever found yourself astonished by a book, initially assuming it wouldn’t appeal only to find yourself incapable of putting it down?
That happened to me all the time as a child. I would read more or less at random. I’d find myself up late with my flashlight under the covers reading something unlikely like, say, a novel about aerial combat in World War I. I was never put off by being a little confused. I think I was a very trusting reader, too. I had the idea that all books were good, and if I didn’t like one, it was my fault. These days my reading is more constrained by time and by the need to do research for what I’m writing or to read galleys or to keep up with books my friends publish. I’m also less game than I used to be because I’ve become critical. Still, sometimes I’ll get talked into reading something I’d been resisting (usually for no good reason) and love it. That happened with The Art of Fielding, actually. I hadn’t read it because, paradoxically, I’d heard too many good things and didn’t think it could measure up. Then someone gave me a copy when I was traveling alone, and it became my new best friend.

In Astonish Me, one of the characters posits that if you really connect with a story, it is possible for things to be true even if they never really happened. Would you say that this is the goal of fiction, to take universal truths and make them personal?
I don’t really know if there are universal truths, but I do think fiction can absolutely be true while also being entirely invented. When I read, I’m after that feeling of recognition, like, “Yes, that’s exactly how it is.” Which I might get just from an especially apt word or incisive sentence or which might come from a character who’s particularly alive or a plot that feels entirely unforced and organic to the characters. Fiction doesn’t have to mimic exactly how life is, but spectacular things happen when fiction captures how life seems. I also believe, as does the character you mentioned, that if a story is important to you and feels real to you and alters how you see the world in some small way, it’s immaterial that it didn’t really happen. We dwell in our imaginations more than we realize, I think. Unreality helps us process reality.

"We dwell in our imaginations more than we realize, I think. Unreality helps us process reality."

What is your favorite part of the writing process: starting a new project or finishing one?
Far and away finishing one. Starting can be exciting and full of high hopes, but the early stages are also fraught with anxiety, especially since I don’t outline. I start with a vaguely formed idea and cross my fingers that the rest will follow. I don’t get comfortable until I’m midway through a draft.

What are you working on next?
I have a handful of stories I’d like to finish, and I’ve started a third novel. 

Photo of Maggie Shipstead by Michelle Legro

California-born author Maggie Shipstead returns to fiction with a dazzling second novel, Astonish Me. The story of a ballerina that spans decades, it's as sharply observed as it is entertaining—and was our April 2014 Top Pick in Fiction. We asked Shipstead a few questions about the book.

FictionHistorical Fiction

Francine Prose

Interview by Stephenie Harrison

Francine Prose has written more than 20 books, including the National Book Award finalist Blue Angel, so the term “breakout book” doesn’t really apply. But her new historical novel, Lovers at the Chameleon Club, Paris 1932, is poised to become her biggest hit yet. Told from various perspectives, the novel pieces together the life of Lou Villars—auto racer, cross-dresser and eventual Nazi sympathizer—against the turbulent backdrop of Jazz Age Paris. We asked Prose a few questions about the new book. Read on to find out about her own double identity and why she writes for readers like herself.

 

One thing that makes this novel so compelling is the masterful way you blend fact with fiction—it’s not always clear exactly how much of the story is real and how much you have made up.
To be perfectly honest, by the time I got through writing the novel—five years—I was no longer precisely sure how much was “real” and how much I’d made up. Yes, history is a narrative, like fiction, but the one thing I wanted to avoid was what I mostly dislike about the sort of “historical fiction” that puts so much emphasis put on period details that it detracts from the characters—who, I hope, are central in this novel. I see the book as a contemporary novel that happens to be set in the past.

"I see the book as a contemporary novel that happens to be set in the past."

From the title alone, it’s made clear that sex and romance will play a large part in this story, but one of the really exciting things about this novel is its straightforward (and some might feel, quite modern) approach to sexuality and gender politics. Can you talk a about where your inspiration for the Chameleon Club and its little coterie of outcasts and lovers came from?
The inspiration came from a photo by the great Hungarian-French photographer, Brassai, and then a series of photos. Brassai took a lot of pictures at a club called Le Monocle in Paris. Most of its customers were cross-dressers, mostly women. Just lately, I was reading a biography of Jane Bowles, and I found out that during a trip to Paris she’d hung out at Le Monocle. That was very exciting to me: I hadn’t known.

Villain or not, Lou Villars is really the star—she’s complicated, confused, the antithesis of boring, and definitely an enigma. Perhaps most striking, in a book filled with so many voices, she’s also the one main character who doesn’t get to speak for herself. What was the motivation behind that decision?
Lou was by far the hardest character to write, and I tried writing her sections many different ways—first person, second person, in letters, etc., etc. And nothing quite worked. It wasn’t until I hit upon the device of the “biography” that I was able to do it, partly because I was able to pass my problems along: my problems with, and confusions about, such a deeply conflicted and complex character became the biographer’s problems. And her understanding of Lou helped me understand her.

As any book about World War II must, yours takes on the character of Hitler. What was it like to tackle such a prominent, infamous figure within the scope of fiction?
I can’t tell you how much fun it was to write a dinner party scene that included Hitler, and to capture something about the way people describe being in his presence. There’s a book called Hitler’s Table Talk—a transcription of his dinner table monologues—that was very helpful. Hannah Arendt created an enduring controversy when she wrote about the banality of evil, but Hitler was a living example: profoundly evil, shockingly banal.

"I can’t tell you how much fun it was to write a dinner party scene that included Hitler."

One particularly lovely passage is when Gabor, a photographer, talks about how he has cultivated his eye for detail by pounding the pavement and increasing his likelihood of observing the miraculous. Is there a writer’s corollary for those who attempt to capture the world through words rather than pictures?
Same process: pounding the pavement. You just keep looking at the world, overhearing, watching and trying to figure things out.

There’s something about the 1920s and '30s—and definitely about Paris—that people today find endlessly romantic, even with the knowledge of what will historically follow. Why do you think that is?
So much was happening then—in art, in music, in writing. Just to list the artists at work during that period in Paris is stunning. People were finally freeing themselves from the restraints of the 19th century and trying to lead lives that were creative, interesting, adventurous and rewarding.

If you could travel back in time to spend one decade in one city, when and where would you go and why?
Obviously, I’d like to have been in Paris in the 1920s and ‘30s—that’s partly why I had to write a novel in which I could imagine myself back there.

At one point in the novel, a character posits that each of us leads a double life. If this is indeed true, what two lives do you lead?
I’m a writer (being a novelist implies a certain amount of control) and a total slave to my beloved granddaughters.

One bookish tome you have written is entitled Reading Like a Writer. If we were to flip that title, what would you say it means to write like a reader?
Readers (I’m using myself as an example) want to read writing that’s original and persuasive and perhaps even beautiful, and to keep interested in what they’re reading. That’s the reader I write for: the one with the intense interest in prose style and the short attention span.

What resources did you draw upon to write this book? For readers who are interested in learning more about Paris leading up to and during World War II, are there any books you would recommend?
I read a great deal and then forgot almost all of it. There are many fascinating memoirs of the period such as John Glassco’s Memoirs of Montparnasse, as well as history books, especially about Paris between the wars and during the Occupation. Many heroes and heroines of French Resistance have written memoirs. I watched Leni Riefenstahl’s Olympiad for its footage of the Berlin Olympics, and Marcel Ophuls’ The Sorrow and the Pity for its marvelous portrayal of France during the war: the collaborationists and the resistance. Two of the most helpful books were And the Show Went On by Alan Riding, and Bad Faith by Carmen Callil.

What are you currently working on?
I’m beginning to think about a new novel—and also writing a brief biography of Peggy Guggenheim, who knew many of the historical figures in my novel; I’m obviously not ready to let go of that time.

 

RELATED IN BOOKPAGE: Read our review of this book. 

 

 

 

Francine Prose has written more than 20 books, including the National Book Award finalist Blue Angel, so the term “breakout book” doesn’t really apply. But her new historical novel, Lovers at the Chameleon Club, Paris 1932, is poised to become her biggest hit yet. Told from various perspectives, the novel pieces together the life of Lou Villars—auto racer, cross-dresser and eventual Nazi sympathizer—against the turbulent backdrop of Jazz Age Paris. We asked Prose a few questions about the new book. Read on to find out about her own double identity and why she writes for readers like herself.

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