Trisha Ping

FictionHistorical FictionDebut Fiction

Daniel Torday

Interview by Trisha Ping

Debut novelist Daniel Torday puts a fresh spin on World War II in The Last Flight of Poxl West, a page-turning literary tale about truth, lies and forgiveness. Eli Goldstein idolizes his uncle Poxl, a Czech Jew who served in Britain's Royal Air Force. The novel alternates between the adult Eli's voice and the pages of Poxl's memoir as the two coming-of-age stories converge. We asked Torday a few questions about the book—without spoiling the novel's many pleasurable twists and turns.

Your first published book was a novella. Did you approach the writing of a full-length novel differently? 
You know, it’s funny—I tend to work in the dark a bit on projects and their size. I mean, I know what I’m writing about, but then I just put up blinders for months, years, and work work work the sentences as hard as I can. Which is to say: The Sensualist actually started as a novel, and at one point grew to as big as almost 300 pages. But as I went through successive drafts, over the course of years, it just got chiseled away until it was a novella.

The Last Flight of Poxl West, on the other hand, was about a 70-page novella my first stab at it. I’d just gotten back from a summer in Eastern Europe (more on that below!) and I thought I’d try my hand at getting Poxl’s voice down. Then I realized I had a lot more research and homework to do, so I put it down. At various points it was more like a 400-page novel; a novella with a very brief prologue; a long novel with a short story interspliced in it. At one point an editor I admire even suggested it should just contain a lot of footnotes, like The Brief Wondrous Life of Oscar Wao. Which is I guess just to say: I have to throw a lot up against the wall to see what sticks. It’s not an efficient or smart way to work, I don’t think. But it’s the only way I’ve figured out how. Novel-making is messy business.

"Novel-making is messy business."

This novel alternates between Eli’s point-of-view as he looks back on his childhood, and excerpts from Poxl’s memoir. Which voice was easier to write?
I love the way you’ve asked this question! I could give 180-degree different answers depending on what we end up meaning by “easy.” I always had a strong grasp on how I wanted Poxl to sound—like this kind of Nabakovian Eastern European intellectual of a variety I’d heard bloviating in my Hungarian grandparents’ world when I was a kid. But over the years it actually took a lot of toning Poxl down, layering in some quieter introspection, to really bring his voice off.

Eli, on the other hand, was a very late-breaking development. I’d always known I had to find a way to balance the contemporary story of the publication of Poxl West’s memoir with the memoir itself. But how? For years the other voice was Samuel Gerson, the narrator of my first book. I had this ridiculous notion that I could be like James Joyce, and just do permutations of Stephen Dedalus in book after book. But that didn’t work. And all at once, a couple summers ago, I tried a short-story version of this story out—narrated by a middle-aged guy, Eli, who was looking back on his childhood to decipher this complicated period with his uncle. In the story, he was Uncle Saul. It took my leaving it in a drawer for almost a year before I thought to just call Saul “Poxl,” and integrate it into the manuscript. Which is to say: From one perspective it took no appreciable thought, no effort at all to just go with Eli’s voice—it came to me all at once, effortlessly. From another, it took almost 8 years of toil for it to arrive unbidden. Mysterious.

Poxl is an engaging and entertaining narrator, but as the novel progresses it becomes clear the past may not be as straightforward as he presents it. Do you think it’s possible for a person to get at the truth of their own life?
Great question! In some ways, I think we know each other the least of anyone in our lives. It’s a problem of information overload. We know too much of ourselves to know ourselves well, or as others know us. In a work of fiction, it’s easy enough to say, as Amy Hempel does so brilliantly, something like, He was so great I knew girls who would chew his already-chewed gum. But if we said that about ourselves, we’d look entirely ego-driven, self-aggrandizing.

I heard Tobias Wolff once say his favorite bad line to an apprentice story he’d ever read started, “As I walk down what other men call streets . . .” So good/bad! But put that line in the mouth of another character observing his overblown sense of self-importance, and suddenly it’s genius.

I guess part of what I’m saying, as well, is that every day of our lives we wake up a different Trisha, a different Dan, a different Leopold-whose-nickname-is-Poxl. If someone stopped us on the street and said, So, your childhood—good? Bad? Indifferent? Sum it up in a sentence. Or a chapter. Or a memoir. It would be too hard to just to give a terse response. And that’s what’s so hard in some way for Poxl in writing his memoir. He lived this outsized life—so how to tell it? Flannery O’Connor says somewhere something like, If one can’t make much of little experience, he’s unlikely to make much of a lot. Something like that applies here, I think.

"In some ways, I think we know each other the least of anyone in our lives. . . . He lived this outsized life—so how to tell it?"

At one point, a reporter asks Poxl if we’ve “reached saturation” with first-person accounts of WWII. That’s something readers might wonder as well! How would you answer the question?
It’s a question I grappled with every day of the eight years I worked on this book. I guess in some ways my main answer is that we work with the material we’re given, and a very very very long tail followed the six years of that war. I grew up with a grandfather who survived years in a Hungarian labor camp, and almost all of whose family died in death camps, and a grandmother who was so scarred and scared by the war she never admitted she was Jewish to me or to my family in the 40 years she lived in this country. To deny that as part of who I am because of a question of readership or marketplace would feel somehow disingenuous. Or maybe just a task for a stronger smarter person than me.

But the flip side is that the questions we ask of that experience have to be new questions. Fresh questions. For me in this case, I started to unearth stories about experiences within my family of a kind I’d never heard of before. Around the same time, W.G. Sebald had become, to my understanding of the situation, the first German public intellectual to raise some real questions about the Allied bombing of Germany—in a lecture in the late 1990s that wasn’t published in translation here until about 10 years ago. Then it was published as On the Natural History of Destruction, and now Germans are grappling with it for the first time. U.S., British and Canadian planes destroyed more than 100 German cities, killing hundreds of thousands of civilians and leaving millions without homes. This was all new to me, and I suspect it might be new to some readers. So the history I was grappling with felt like news to me, anyway.

"We work with the material we’re given, and a very very very long tail followed the six years of that war. "

What research did you do for this book?
I’m not a historian, and so I have a very haphazard research method—if you could even call it that. For a couple of summers, I traveled to Europe, where each time I traced the steps Poxl would have taken from his home north of Prague, to Rotterdam and up to London. I visited with the handful of relatives who survived the war. I didn’t hire a translator or anything—I would stay in hostels and hotels, and get on trains and buses and just get a sense of a place. I was gratified to see that in The New York Times Book Review, their reviewer quoted from part of one of Poxl’s descriptions of the Elbe, the river outside of Leitmeritz, that came in part from an afternoon I took to just go walk down by the river and see what it looked like, smelled like.

But of course then I had to follow up by reading a bunch of books. The two main kinds of resources that came to feel helpful to me were a bit of a surprise: very minute military histories of single days during the war, and self-published memoirs. The military histories helped me in being able to be super specific about a single sortie, a single battle Poxl would have experienced (I use that word with all apt caveats!), or a single night in the Blitz, for instance. The self-published memoirs were great for their honesty, the sense of dailiness I really wanted to reproduce here. But they were also helpful for what they weren’t: propulsive, edited, well-written, all that readable. I was so taken with the material, I always had to ask myself the question: What would make the memoir Poxl’s writing publishable, where these ones so obviously weren’t? Some of that is of course a matter of luck, ambition, timing. But some of it does show up in the sentences, the material.

Eli’s discovery of his uncle’s humanity may take place in an unusual context, but a child’s realization that the adults in his life are people, too, is a universal experience. What drew you to write about it?
Just what you said! For years I grappled with the outsized nature of Poxl’s story, the way he was telling it. What I wanted on the other end, from the other voice, was for it to be as close and real and emotionally knowable as possible. What better, more universal way to handle that than to make the thing Eli was dealing with somehow smaller, familiar even, than it seems: Poxl was like a grandfather to him, and when he really saw who this hero of his was, it was deflating and more complicated than what he’d expected to find.

What are you working on next?
I’m always working on a thousand things at once, and waiting to see what’s getting closest to finished. So right now that includes a number of projects. One entails putting a whole bunch of the short stories I’ve been at work on into a single Word file, and seeing if they work as a book. One is either a book-length essay or a collection of essays—or both. I’ve been working for years on a strange novel about a kid who makes a brother for himself out of duct tape. And last summer I got a bunch of pages down on another large-scale new novel that’s a little too new to say much more about, other than that it’s very tentatively titled American Protest right now.

 

Author photo by Matt Barrick.

Debut novelist Daniel Torday puts a fresh spin on World War II in The Last Flight of Poxl West, a page-turning literary tale about truth, lies and forgiveness. Eli Goldstein idolizes his uncle Poxl, a Hungarian Jew who served in Britain's Royal Air Force during WWII. The novel alternates between the adult Eli's voice and the pages of Poxl's memoir as the two coming-of-age stories converge.
FictionPopular Fiction

Sarai Walker

Interview by Trisha Ping

In Dietland, timid Plum Kettle is sure that losing weight is the key that will unlock the life she wants to live. But when she crosses paths with a mysterious young woman, she ends up involved in a full-on riot grrl ride to a feminist awakening. Author Sarai Walker answered a few questions about her edgy, girl-power debut.

 

It feels like a bit of an understatement to say that this is an unusual premise for a novel! What was your starting point for the story?
I would say it had two starting points. The first was when I saw the film Fight Club many years ago. As soon as the film ended, I knew I wanted to write something for women that had that defiant, punk spirit. (It’s not fair that men get to have all the fun.) But at the time this was nothing more than a vague idea, a gut feeling.

Several years after that, when I was studying for my M.F.A. in creative writing, I wrote a short story about a young fat woman who works at a teen magazine. As a veteran of teen magazines myself, this story was very personal to me.

This short story and the Fight Club idea eventually merged into one, which I think explains the unusual premise of the novel!

The structure is also unusual—Dietland includes book excerpts, complete with footnotes, plus news stories and even a journal. How did you decide to include all these elements?
I wish I could say I invented this, but I was influenced by other novels that use this “pastiche” effect. The one that comes to mind is Margaret Atwood’s The Blind Assassin, which includes a book-within-a-book and news articles. I read Atwood’s novel around the time I was first attempting to write Dietland and thought this technique looked like great fun, so decided to try it myself. I adapted it for my own purposes and love what it adds to the novel. Dietland uses an intense first-person voice and I think it benefits from the inclusion of these other voices.

What do you like the most about Plum?
I like that she’s brave. I aspire to be as brave as she is.

In her book, your character Marlowe says that “being a woman is being a faker.” What’s your take on that statement?
She’s really commenting on all the ways that we as women are socialized to pretend to be what we’re not. We wear make-up to appear prettier and younger; we use various techniques to appear thinner and shapelier and bustier; we often deny that we have appetites, pretending not to be hungry and so forth; we’re encouraged to act dumb and weak and helpless sometimes; and the list goes on. Being a woman in our society too often means concealing who we really are. Girls learn this at a young age.

 "Being a woman in our society too often means concealing who we really are. Girls learn this at a young age."

You wrote most of this book while living in Europe. What differences (if any) did you see in women’s lives in Europe vs. the United States?
What was most interesting to me was the difference in my life while I was living there. I spent most of my time living in London and this influenced the novel in key ways. I’ll probably get into trouble for saying this, but the U.K. is the most overtly sexist place I’ve ever experienced, as well as the most fat-shaming. There’s a chapter in the novel that takes place in London and explores the sexist media scene there; I felt compelled to write that chapter as a form of catharsis.

"The U.K. is the most overtly sexist place I’ve ever experienced, as well as the most fat-shaming."

Who are your feminist heroes?
I have way too many to list, but I’ll mention two women who should receive more attention. As I wrote Dietland, I was influenced by feminism of the 1970s and into the early 1980s, both the fiction and nonfiction of that period.

Joanna Russ should not be forgotten. She wrote a wonderfully irreverent work of feminist literary criticism called How to Suppress Women’s Writing. I also love her essay “What Can a Heroine Do? or Why Women Can’t Write.” She is perhaps most known for her science-fiction novel The Female Man.

I also want to mention Dorothy Bryant. Her early feminist novel Ella Price’s Journal is one of my favorites and it deserves to be discovered by many more readers today. It has to be read and considered within the historical context in which it was written, but it is a moving exploration of a woman’s consciousness-raising during the early days of Second Wave feminism.

"It’s important to have kindred spirits however you can find them."

Dietland is something of a manifesto. What would you say to readers who finish the book wanting to change the world?
I’ve actually already been contacted by readers who had this response, which is terrific, but also a lot of pressure for me!

I think one of the things that Dietland can do for certain readers is raise their consciousness, to use an old-school feminist term (which I love). Consciousness-raising is the process of coming to see the personal as the political; after your consciousness is raised, you see the world through a different lens. This is an important first step in creating change.

My advice for readers is to find a like-minded community of people, as Plum does in the novel with the women of Calliope House. An in-person community is great, but online works as well. It’s important to have kindred spirits however you can find them. I also think expanding your knowledge by reading up on the topics you’re interested in is essential. For readers interested in fat acceptance, there are lots of great websites, blogs and books to explore. The insights you gain this way can help you make the change you want to see in the world around you.

Many feminists in the 1970s believed that many small personal “revolutions” have the potential to add up to a large revolution. I really like that idea.

What are you working on next?
I’m researching and thinking about my second novel. I had hoped to be writing it already, but I don’t have the mental space or distance from Dietland yet. I’m also writing essays.

RELATED CONTENT: Read a review of Dietland.

Author photo by Marion Ettlinger.

 

In Dietland, timid Plum Kettle is sure that losing weight is the key that will unlock the life she wants to live. But when she crosses paths with a mysterious young woman, she ends up involved in a full-on riot grrl ride to a feminist awakening. Sarai Walker answers a few questions about her edgy, girl-power debut.
FictionPopular Fiction

Eliza Kennedy

Interview by Trisha Ping

What if you had everything everyone thought you should want, only to realize it wasn’t what you wanted at all? That’s the dilemma facing Lily Wilder, who is about to marry the perfect man at the beginning of I Take You. However, tying the knot means the end of her romantic freedom—something that fun-loving Lily has always reveled in. Eliza Kennedy answered a few questions about her debut novel and its unconventional heroine.

Can you tell us a bit about your path to publication? Where were you when you found out your book had sold?
Before I queried agents, only two people had seen my manuscript: my husband and my father. So I went into the process having no idea whether my book would be met with eagerness, horror, or—worse—total indifference. Still, out it went, and after a slightly excruciating weekend, a few agents responded. They were enthusiastic, and I was over the moon. I eventually went with the wonderful Suzanne Gluck of William Morris Endeavor. She made some editorial suggestions and came up with a list of editors. The wait was on. A few days later, my husband and I were at the playground with our son when I got a call from Suzanne. Josh says he watched as I sat down under the jungle gym and covered my mouth with my hand. He could tell from my face it was good news.

For a novel about a woman who’s not sure she wants to get married, your book takes on a lot of serious topics. Was this your original intention for the book?
My goal from the outset was to write a fun, funny, lighthearted novel about a free-spirited woman rushing calamitously toward the altar. I wanted it to be the kind of book you race through and don’t want to put down. But describing Lily’s out-there behavior and point of view raised certain questions in my mind—about why monogamy is our romantic norm, how messed up our beliefs about female sexuality are, and the realities of happily-ever-after. I realized that I had things to say, and just so happened to have created a forum for saying them. After that, it was a matter of balancing the froth with the weightier stuff.

"Describing Lily’s out-there behavior and point of view raised certain questions in my mind—about why monogamy is our romantic norm, how messed up our beliefs about female sexuality are, and the realities of happily-ever-after."

The wacky atmosphere of Key West provides a great backdrop for this book—can you tell us a little bit more about why you chose it and what it means to you?
Key West is one of my favorite places in the world. I love its bizarre combination of  lush tropical beauty, gorgeous architecture, swashbuckling piratical history, and unabashed smuttiness. It’s a place with a sense of humor, with light and dark sides—much like my main character.

More to the point, my husband and I got married in Key West, and as I was developing my idea for the book, I realized that it was the perfect setting for the slightly unhinged wedding I had in mind.

Lily isn’t perfect, but she’s a lot of fun to spend time with. What’s your favorite thing about her?
Her outspokenness. She says exactly what’s on her mind, all the time. It never occurs to her to do otherwise, even though it often gets her in trouble. Out here in the real world, women are often taught, in ways subtle and more overt, that we should hold their tongues, defer, be diplomatic. Lily didn’t get the memo.

I Take You questions a lot of the traditions around and beliefs about relationships. Which was the most challenging to explore?
The most challenging was the notion that someone can be a serial cheater but a fundamentally good person. I was trying to question our collective impulse to judge people in terms of their success at monogamy—cheating equals bad, faithfulness equals good—which fails to recognize the extraordinary complications of actual people and the realities of life and coupledom. Lily loves her family, she’s a loyal friend and she works very hard at her job. She also just happens to love to sleep around. I didn’t want to apologize for her conduct any more than I cared to suggest that she was behaving well. But I did want to show someone who is more than the sum of her misbehavior.

Women who cheat typically face more social censure than men. Did you ever worry that readers wouldn’t relate to a character like Lily?
I did wonder whether some readers will be turned off by Lily’s behavior, whether because she’s a woman, because they’ve been personally affected by infidelity or because they simply think it’s wrong. With any luck, those readers will appreciate other aspects of her personality, or enjoy the book enough that relatability becomes beside the point.

But I’m actually not sure I agree with the premise of the question. I feel like men are condemned and excoriated for cheating more often than women are. Although perhaps that’s because they do it more often. Or, I should say, they get caught more often.            

You’re married to the author Joshua Ferris—do your writing routines differ? Are you the first to read each other’s work?
Our routines are pretty similar: We park ourselves at our desks in the morning and work throughout the day. We currently write in adjoining rooms, which has taken some adjustment—apparently I’m an offensively loud typist, and he feels free to call out random questions like I’m his personal Wikipedia. We are each other’s first reader, and have gradually learned how to accept criticism with grace, good humor and only occasional threats of violence.

 

RELATED CONTENT: Read a review of I Take You.

What if you had everything everyone thought you should want, only to realize it wasn’t what you wanted at all? That’s the dilemma facing Lily Wilder, who is about to marry the perfect man at the beginning of I Take You. However, tying the knot means the end of her romantic freedom—something that fun-loving Lily has always reveled in. Eliza Kennedy answered a few questions about her debut novel and its unconventional heroine.
RomanceFictionWomen's FictionContemporary Romance

Chris Harrison

Interview by Trisha Ping

The longtime host of "The Bachelor" and "The Bachelorette" is branching out into a new form of media: the novel. In his first work of fiction, Chris Harrison follows in the time-honored tradition of writers like Nicholas Sparks and Robert James Waller with The Perfect Letter, a story of two star-crossed Texas lovers who have a second chance at rekindling their romance after a decade apart. Here, Harrison dishes on his switch to fiction, his writing inspirations and his continued belief in true love.

Has writing always been a hobby of yours?
My goal was always to be a television host, but I've always enjoyed writing. I think it took an opportunity like this to make this become a reality. 

Were you able to transfer any of the skills you learned during your TV work to writing?
I didn't transfer any skills, as these are two very different disciplines. But I certainly have learned lessons over the last 13 years of hosting “The Bachelor” that have helped shape this novel and how I write romance and love stories. 

Your main character, Leigh, is caught between a man from her past and one who could be her future. What do you think makes for an effective love triangle?
You asked if anything from my "day" job as host of “The Bachelor” is involved in this book. Well, if there's anything I understand, it's love triangles. I know more than probably anybody in the world how we have the capacity to love more than one person at a time. I've seen it firsthand many times over, and it's incredible to see how people react. This was a very easy subject for me to tackle in my first novel.

"If there's anything I understand, it's love triangles. I know more than probably anybody in the world how we have the capacity to love more than one person at a time."

Has hosting “The Bachelor” made you more or less of a romantic, and why?
I've always been a hopeless romantic. When people ask if I believe in “The Bachelor,” I always say yes. I'm a sucker for love and even more so for a good love story. I hope The Perfect Letter is one of those love stories people will fall in love with. 

You set The Perfect Letter in Texas—what was the best thing about writing about your home state? The hardest thing?
While I live in California now, the Lone Star state will always be home for me and certainly holds a special place in my heart. If the theory “write about what you know” holds true, then I definitely went that way by setting this novel in the heart of Texas. Austin in particular is one of my favorite towns.

The most difficult thing is that when you know a subject so well you have to be careful not to overdo it. It's easy to get caught up in naming specific places or too many details that can take the reader out of the "fiction.” So I was careful to try and walk that line and combine just enough reality with imagination so the reader can truly escape while reading the story.

What do you think “a perfect letter” should include?
The tradition of sitting down to write a personal handwritten letter is a lost art. There's something special about getting a letter. I don't necessarily think it matters as much about what's inside, as long as it is real, honest and from the heart. Text messages and emails just don't cut it! 

What is the #1 misunderstanding people have about “The Bachelor” and “The Bachelorette”?
I think something that gets lost is that these are just regular real people. Yes, they are on TV now and they become psuedo-celebs, but at the end of the day it's just two normal people who fell in love. I think people tend to forget that. It's what makes the show so relatable and why it works so well. 

Which writers do you admire?
Well if we're staying in the romance genre, obviously Nicholas Sparks leads the pack. I'll admit I’m a little biased as we've met and I consider him a friend. Nora Roberts would certainly also have to be in that conversation of best romance writers. Dan Jenkins is an old sportswriter from Texas I grew up on who has churned out several great novels. Laura Hillenbrand is an incredible talent who has written two of my favorite books: Unbroken and Seabiscuit. Growing up loving the outdoors in Texas, it's hard not to love Hemingway. I thank my brother for introducing me to him.

What’s next for you?
Well, you don't write a second novel if the first one isn't good. I think The Perfect Letter is really good, but it's not up to me! I'm putting it out into the world and the readers will tell me what's next. I hope they tell me to write another!

Author photo by Bob D’Amico/ABC

The longtime host of "The Bachelor" and "The Bachelorette" is branching out into a new form of media: the novel. In his first work of fiction, Chris Harrison follows in the time-honored tradition of writers like Nicholas Sparks and Robert James Waller with The Perfect Letter, a story of two star-crossed Texas lovers who have a second chance at rekindling their romance after a decade apart. Here, Harrison dishes on his switch to fiction, his writing inspirations and his continued belief in true love.
FictionHistorical Fiction

Philippa Gregory

Interview by Trisha Ping

British writer Philippa Gregory has been telling the story of England’s most infamous king—and his equally famous coterie of wives—for nearly 15 years. In Taming the Queen, she brings Henry VIII’s final wife, Kateryn Parr, to the forefront. We asked Gregory a few questions about her latest book, the TV and film adaptations of her works and what readers can expect next.

You’ve written about all of Henry VIII’s wives, and Kateryn Parr is the last. Did you have a favorite? Which one did you identify with most?
All of Henry’s wives mean a lot to me—they were so much more than just wives and nothing like the stereotypes history has led us to believe. Take Katherine of Aragon for instance. I felt certain this successful queen militant, a daughter of Isabella of Spain, was far more interesting and active than the “old” wife that Henry put aside for Anne Boleyn. I wouldn’t say I identify with one in particular, but I admire parts of all of them.

What about Henry? Do you feel like you know him better after writing about him in so many books?
I have spent more that 20 years writing and researching Henry; but as a character in history it’s impossible to say I know him: All I have to go on, all anyone has to go on are the accounts which were written about him during his life, and the evidence of his actions. These show us a young man of remarkable talents, energy and charm who fell under the influence of a series of advisors and each time, turned against them. When I think about his later years I see a man disappointed in love and in his work who became delusional and progressively psychotic. There is some very exciting new research into Henry’s health—a suggestion that he may have carried the Kell positive gene with McLeod’s Syndrome as a complication. That may have been an explanation for the many miscarriages his wives endured and his paranoia.

For me, my time with Henry means I see him not as the jolly king who composed “Greensleeves,” but as a wonderfully promising boy who became a dark and dangerous man, descending into madness.

What (if anything) is different about the relationship between Henry and Kateryn, versus his relationships with his previous wives?
This was a brief marriage, cut short by Henry’s death, but Kateryn was not a nurse to a failing husband. He married her for love, in the hopes of getting another heir, and she undoubtedly married him because she could not refuse the king of England. If he had not died I think he would have sent her for trial and execution—this was a time of major religious controversy and Kateryn was a reformer who and made enemies at court. They hoped to see her tried for heresy and wanted the king married to a woman who would not influence him at all. Henry even signed a warrant for her arrest. Kateryn was the only one of his victims who was able to talk herself out of trouble. She was an older bride—in her 30s, very aware of her situation and so much wiser than his previous wives. After all, she had seen him behead two predecessors and divorce one. Like Anne of Cleeves, she had a life after Henry—but unlike Anne, she married for love.

Do you ever have qualms about imagining the emotional lives and motivations of real people, especially those who are relatively well documented by history? What do you think is the greater responsibility of a historical novelist: telling a good story, or telling an accurate one?
The emotional lives of the people of the past is exactly what historical fiction is supposed to relate—a novel based in history is supposed to take this risk. The form is a hybrid, and as luck would have it I am a trained historian who became a novelist and I love both research and imaginative writing. I don’t think it is a good historical novel if the facts are sacrificed for the story—I would never do that. But sometimes we don’t know the facts, even of well-recorded lives, and often there are differing historical theories. The medieval records did not record thoughts and motivations—the inner lives of even famous people—that comes later in history. My job is to look at what we do have—dates; letter; Ambassador reports: birth records; building plans; and wardrobe records—and imagine emotions and the motivations that sit behind them.

Why do you think readers find the Tudor era so endlessly fascinating?
That’s the million-dollar question. I know why I love them but I don’t think I can answer for everyone else. I think the period is a time of terrific change and uncertainty and that’s always interesting as a background. It’s a time when the modern world comes into being, so very interesting in terms of monarchy, nationalism, law and empire. For many people it will be the extraordinary characters—the Tudor dynasty is a usurping power in England and all of the Tudors are extreme characters in dangerous circumstances.

You’re best known for writing about the Tudors, but you’ve also written about pre-Tudor history, the Industrial Revolution and modern-day life. Is there another time period you’d like to dig into?
I am constantly finding new and interesting characters and I’m not restricted to a particular time period. Of course, the research builds and builds so if I am moving to another period it is a new challenge. My more fictional series, The Order of Darkness, has taken me further into Europe, which has been a wonderful to research. Looking ahead, I am staying in the Tudor period for at least another two books—then who knows? I have some ideas but it’s too far ahead for me to predict.

Much of your work has been adapted for TV and film. What is it like to go through this process? Do you have a favorite adaptation of your work?
When I write and love a book, sometimes working on it for years—the book is always going to be my favorite medium. When I have to open it up to allow a huge team of writers, actors, directors and producers to work on it too, it’s always a disturbing process. But TV and film can also do things that the books can’t: For instance, the beauty of the landscapes and the clothes have more impact on screen than they do on the page and the performances of great actors can be transformational for a character. I love also how when I see something on screen it’s like the first time—I too can get caught up in the magic of the story.

If you weren’t a writer, what do you think you would be doing?
I think I would still be reading and writing—it’s something that I have always done. I first trained as a journalist, and then I did a degree in history and a PhD in the 18th century. I have a fascination with history that is constant, and I love the form of the novel. I enjoy many other things too—animals, conservation, nature, and my family; but I think I was always going to be a writer.

What are you working on next?
I am having a terrific time with Henry VIII’s sister Margaret. She’s a typical Tudor: larger than life, self-righteous, spoiled, brave, energetic and she has a life which is nonstop drama and tragedy—much of it of her own making. I had not known much about her before and I am reading and thinking about her all the time. I shall go to Scotland later in the summer and see the wonderful palaces where she lived. It’s early days so I don’t yet know how the novel will turn out, but I really like her—and that’s the main thing for someone that I will be working on for more than a year.

 

Author photo by Santi U.

British writer Philippa Gregory has been telling the story of England’s most infamous king—and his equally famous coterie of wives—for nearly 15 years. In Taming the Queen, she brings Henry VIII’s final wife, Kateryn Parr, to the forefront. We asked Gregory a few questions about her latest book, the TV and film adaptations of her works and what readers can expect next.
FictionLiterary Fiction

Eli Gottlieb

Interview by Trisha Ping

Todd Aaron has been institutionalized at Payton LivingCenter since the age of 11. Despite occasional thoughts about living back home, Todd is mostly content at Payton, where he’s something of an ambassador to new residents. But when a series of events shakes up Todd’s quiet life, returning home takes on a new urgency.

In his fourth novel, Best Boy, Eli Gottlieb channels the voice of a middle-aged autistic man with uncanny authenticity and power. We asked the author a few questions about his remarkable new book and its unforgettable narrator.

You have written that your first novel, told from the point of view of a teen with an autistic brother, was somewhat autobiographical. Are there autobiographical elements in Best Boy as well?
Yes, the book is loosely inspired by my childhood with my brother, who has been institutionalized for autism since he was 11 years old. It’s also informed by the many years I spent visiting him in his various therapeutic communities.

Todd’s narration is shaped by his autism and the limits of what he can express. This leads to some unique and even poetic imagery, as well as unexpected humor. How did you develop this voice?
I initially wrote the book in the second person. The second person, with its peculiar ambiguity—is the writer addressing himself or the reader—was useful as a mapping tool to chart the perceptual universe of the narrator.

I then rewrote it in the first person, while trying to retain not only the freshness of his perception but the strangeness within the individual sentences. That was the real labor—to make do without my literary reliance on simile, metaphor and the conventionally prettifying resources of “style.” There are very few commas in the book. The sentences are bluntly declarative. It was refreshing and also difficult to work against my own grain, but I hope it added to the verisimilitude of the finished product. As for the deeper wellsprings of that voice—they remain a mystery. 

You include so many details that show how Todd experiences the world. My favorite is his mistrust of animals, which he sees as people “who had been crushed into strange bodies.” Did details like this come from your research? Did you find any first-person accounts of adults living with autism?
I read here and there on autism and the history of the malady, but no, I didn’t read any accounts to find the particularities of the narrator’s outlook. I simply drew on my memories. A fear of cats and dogs, by the way, is a characteristic of classical autism, and in the example you cite I attempted to come up with a reason why the most innocent, floppy-eared beagle should be a terrifying beast to my brother.

After the book was done, I did read a powerful memoir called Boy Alone, by Karl Taro Greenfeld. His younger brother was Noah, the autistic boy who became a huge celebrity in the 1970s when his dad wrote a book about him. Karl’s upbringing had uncanny similarities to my own.

Even though Todd’s mother is long dead by the time the book opens, you manage to provide a truly touching portrait of their relationship. How did his mother shape Todd?
Clearly, her relationship to him was one of intense, nearly interwoven closeness, as often happens between mothers and developmentally disabled children. Her love for him is a kind of inner landscape he longs to return to, or a sea whose tides he feels moving in his own chest.

The idea of his childhood home is a powerful draw for Todd, even though it holds as many bad memories as good ones. Can you tell us a little about what home represents in this book?
I think home in this book represents a warmth and wholeness, a time, in the words of Wordsworth, the great poet of childhood, “when meadow, grove and stream . . . did seem apparalled in celestial light.” Almost everybody misses their home-world on some level, even if, as in the case of Todd, it was a place and time where he had to endure a tremendous amount of difficulty. 

Because of his lack of understanding of the full emotional range of what’s going on around him, and his inability to express a lot of what he does understand, Todd is almost childlike. And just as they are for children, these qualities are both insulating and dangerous. What do you think is the difference between a child narrator and an autistic narrator?
That’s a wonderful question. I think the two narrators, child and autistic, can merge in many ways—the vulnerability coupled with an openness to experience and the freshness of perception.

The autistic narrator has the added burden of an actual malady, which skews things inevitably—it can turn him deeply rageful, as when Todd gets his “volts,” which are nearly epileptoid in their fury—or when, despite his apparent innocence, he has to deal with the social shame of looking and behaving differently, a fact that filters in to his consciousness despite his seeming indifference to it. There’s a reason that older autistic men and women are often, characteristically, stooped.

How and where do you write?
Kafka wanted to be lowered in a bucket to the bottom of a well shaft. I’ll settle for anywhere quiet, away from the Internet and social stimulation. Much of Best Boy was written in a submarine-like garden apartment in Brooklyn, along with many solitary weeks spent at a friend’s isolated house on Shelter Island.

What are you working on next?
Something entirely new—a historical novel. It’s killing me.

In his fourth novel, Best Boy, Eli Gottlieb channels the voice of a middle-aged autistic man with uncanny authenticity and power. We asked the author a few questions about his remarkable new book and its unforgettable narrator.
FictionPopular Fiction

Janice Y.K. Lee

Interview by Trisha Ping

Janice Y.K. Lee’s 2009 debut, The Piano Teacher, was beloved by readers and critics for its pitch-perfect portrayal of Hong Kong in the years after World War II. In her second novel, The Expatriates, the author—who was born in Hong Kong and educated in the U.S.—explores modern-day Hong Kong through the eyes of three American women who are all struggling to find their roles in a land far from home. 

Lee answered a few questions about the new novel, her writing process and the reasons that being between cultures can be a good thing for both a writer and her characters. 

It’s been a while since your debut, The Piano Teacher. How long have you been working on this novel, and how did the experience of writing a second novel compare to the first? 
Both books took around five years, which I've come to think of as my normal gestation period, if you can draw any conclusions from a sample of two. When I was writing The Piano Teacher, there were a lot of unknowns for me: Could I finish a novel? Could I sell it? Would it ever see the light of day? So I labored at it, sort of in the dark and without telling most people what I was doing when I disappeared into the library or was at my desk. It was a fraught and anxious time but I've romanticized it in my head as a glorious time of discovery. 

When I started The Expatriates, I also didn't know if I could finish another novel. I always remember a short essay that Jeffrey Eugenides wrote in the New Yorker about how being a novelist is the only profession in which you sign up to be an amateur every single time you start a book (paraphrasing wildly, with apologies to him) and I felt that acutely. I never write with an outline or a plot in mind so it really does feel like fumbling around, looking for a lifeline. This time, though, I felt comfortable saying, "I'm working" when people asked me what I was doing, and the greatest benefit was that I could spend my afternoons reading books and calling it work. 

The book opens with a lovely set piece about the expatriate mindset and the different reasons people try to start a new life somewhere else that immediately establishes the tone of the story and gives insight into the characters. Did you always plan to frame the story that way?
I wish I could say I had had a plan, any plan! I never had an inkling where it would all go. I started The Expatriates with the image of a woman, lying on her bed, unable, unwilling to get up. That's all I had. Then, after I had delved into that character for several dozen pages and found another character for her to interact with, I understood the novel was set in contemporary Hong Kong. After that realization, I wrote the opening passage in a feverish rush, sort of channeling the arrivals that happen every day, trying to get right at the feel of the world the reader would be entering. I wanted the readers to be plunged into this world. 

This story is told from the points of view of three very different women. How did you settle on this structure, and did one voice come more easily than another?
When I was entangled in it, I wished more than once that I had written a simple A to Z timeline with one perspective. I got bogged down in the weeds trying to figure it out but it just worked out that way. I wish I was able to be more deliberate with the way I write, or that I had more control, but I sort of nose around in the dark until it feels right, print it out, read it, and change what feels wrong. It's a very inefficient, laborious process but the only way I know. When I began The Expatriates, it was with this image of the woman in bed. From there, I started to develop a story and eventually another woman came along. A year into it, one of the woman started acting erratically and unlike herself. I could not figure her out. 

It was at this critical juncture that I had coincidentally managed to carve out some time to go to Yaddo, the artist colony. When I was there, away from family obligations and life stresses, I was really able to delve deeply into the women, and I suddenly realized that that odd woman was actually two women. She had been acting oddly because those had not been her actions, her words, her thoughts. The book was about three women. It was such a relief and so obvious when I realized it, and from there the story started to unspool in a much more organic way. 

You grew up in Hong Kong, but you have said that, as a Korean, you didn’t feel at home there. How did that experience shape this novel?
I've always felt more at home in America than in Hong Kong. I love Hong Kong and it's an amazing city and a wonderful place to grow up and raise children but I never saw myself there permanently. So I think you'll see that feeling infused into the novel. Very few expatriates choose to make Hong Kong their permanent home so there's always a temporary feel to their experience. I have never lived in Korea either, so I don't know how that would feel. I always tell people that I am not an expatriate but I'm not a local either. I think being between worlds is a good thing for a writer. 

What is your relationship with Hong Kong these days? Do you think it will continue to inspire as a setting for your fiction?
I'm nostalgic about Hong Kong. We just moved back to the U.S. this summer, and there's a lot we miss about Hong Kong, my children especially. We miss hiking the beautiful mountains, swimming in November, everything being 15 minutes away. Life in Hong Kong is easy, in a way, because it feels like your life is on pause. Hong Kong will always be in my DNA and I love it but I'm not sure that it will be the setting of my next book. I think I'd like to venture further afield. 

Your debut novel was set in Hong Kong in the 1950s, and this book is contemporary. Was it harder to capture the past or the present? 
I did a lot of research for The Piano Teacher, in libraries and universities. I'd have to stop and find out how much a ferry ticket cost in 1950, what movie would have been playing in the theaters, or what people would have worn on an airplane flight, a rare luxury at the time. I loved that process, as it was fun to be a student again. For this book, I didn't have to do any research, just live my life and take from it liberally. So that was very different. Sometimes, I found myself longing for the structure of the library and the materials. But it was also freeing, to know that I was already an expert in the field, as it were. 

For a lifestyle that is outside the norm in many ways, expatriate life can be very traditional, especially for the so-called “trailing spouse.” Could you talk a little bit about this and the way it affects your characters?
It's an odd situation that's hard to describe. Imagine giving up your friends, family, and most likely, job, to follow your spouse halfway around the world. Imagine when you get there, you are given a house, a servant, possibly a driver, and a country club membership. And then imagine that you suddenly have eight more hours in your day. Because that's what it feels like. 

It's hard to generalize because everyone has such a different experience but I saw spouses who ran the gamut from ultra-traditional housewife to globetrotting entrepreneurs. But the stereotype is of the housewife “trailing spouse” because a lot of people do come because of their spouse's job. So people do different things with their new worlds. Some women get very into charities, some get very fit, some start small businesses. What I came away is that everyone is trying to do the best that they can in the situation they find themselves in, so I think that's the positive part of it.

One of the novel’s central themes is forgiveness: how to get it, who deserves it, etc. One of the main characters is even named Mercy. What made you want to explore this topic?
As I get older, I realize that all those tropes you're told when you're younger—Be kind and people will be kind to you; Be open; Be generous; Give without expectation—they are all true. They seem wildly impractical and somewhat insane when presented to you as a child and young adult, not to mention impossible. But to move forward in life, you have to forgive and go on. I don't pretend to be able to keep to these ideals but I like to remember that that is the goal.

The men in the lives of these women don’t seem to struggle with guilt and the need for forgiveness as much as the women do. If the book were told from a male point of view, how would it be different?
Oh, I don't know. Men seem an utterly different species to me, a species that I cherish and adore, but I don't pretend to know anything about how the male mind thinks. I have a wonderful husband and three amazing boys, but their existence on Earth seems to run on a parallel plane to the one women are on. Of course, we interact closely, but what the other takes away from any given situation seems to be wildly different. I have a lot of close girlfriends and we share our experiences. Men don't seem to share their experiences in the same way. They blow off steam by doing physical activities together, and women get closer by exchanging confidences, at least that's what it's been in my experience. I think I know something about motherhood and women but I don't ever claim to know a lot about men. If this book were told from a male perspective, I think it would have been a lot shorter and had a lot more action! I don't know about how men forgive themselves either. I don't think they find it easier, but I think they find it easier to compartmentalize their anger and sorrow. I think that's a skill well worth having and I envy them that. 

What are you working on next? 
I'm working on getting on the pre-publication work done for The Expatriates, so nothing is on my radar yet for next project. I'd like to write for television, and so I get to watch a lot of television and call it work. But also noodling on images and characters, which may then go forth to populate a future novel. 

Author photo by Xue Tan.

 

RELATED CONTENT: Read our review of The Expatriates. 

Janice Y.K. Lee’s 2009 debut, The Piano Teacher, was beloved by readers and critics for its pitch-perfect portrayal of Hong Kong in the years after World War II. In her second novel, The Expatriates, the author—who was born in Hong Kong and educated in the U.S.—explores modern-day Hong Kong through the eyes of three American women who are all struggling to find their roles in a land far from home.
FictionLiterary Fiction

Shilpi Somaya Gowda

Interview by Trisha Ping

In Shilpi Somaya Gowda’s compelling second novel, childhood best friends Anil and Leena choose very different life paths.

Anil leaves India to become a doctor in America, while Leena marries a man in a neighboring village—but they are soon confronted with changes that make them wonder whether they’ve made the right choices. Gowda confronts the universal question of how much our lives are shaped by family and cultural expectations in The Golden Son, a thoughtful family saga. 

You were born in Canada and live in California, but you describe life in India very evocatively. What is your relationship to India like?
I come from a long line of immigrants. My grandfather left India to set up a trading business in East Africa. My parents left India and eventually settled in Canada. I came to the U.S. for university and have lived here ever since, and my children were born here. The idea of having multiple cultures is very much my own experience. I’ve visited India all through my life, and it does feel like “home” in some way. When I took my children to India for the first time, they too fell easily into the rhythms of family and culture, and I have to believe there’s some connection there on a deep level.

The idea of arbitration as practiced in Anil’s home village is likely unfamiliar to many American readers. How did you come across it?
I have long been intrigued by the Indian tradition of settling disputes within a community. I grew up hearing stories about lives that were changed: women granted divorces from abusive marriages, for example, before there were laws in place to protect them. Of course, not all disputes were settled happily, and afterward they had to go back to living together in the same community. It’s so different from the nearly anonymous, transactional way we administer justice.

What do you wish more people understood about immigrants and their reasons for seeking a life in North America?
I am drawn to stories of characters who have to navigate cross-cultural issues, because there are an infinite number of ways an individual can react to the particular opportunities and challenges of being an immigrant. At the same time, it’s also a universal theme: Almost everyone can point to a story in their family history that features a personal uprooting and resettling. Both Canada and America have been built on this tradition. It’s this diversity that makes Western society so strong, rich and innovative, and we would do well to remember that.

There is a lot of information about the medical field in this novel—how did you research those aspects of the story?
As someone who didn’t study science past high school and is squeamish about blood, it was not a likely (or wise) choice for me to write about a young doctor in his residency. But I thought Anil Patel belonged in the field of medicine, with its high stakes and prevalent moral questions. So, I dove into research. I read about the residency experience [and] interviewed many, many doctors. I’m very grateful to all the physicians who helped me learn how to tell this story. Fortunately, I never fainted on one of them.

 

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

In Shilpi Somaya Gowda’s compelling second novel, childhood best friends Anil and Leena choose very different life paths.
FictionDebut Fiction

Virginia Reeves

Interview by Trisha Ping

Inheriting land might seem like winning the lottery to many men in 1920s Alabama, but to Roscoe T. Martin, his father-in-law’s farm is a burden. Moving to the country with his wife and son meant leaving Alabama Power, where he was able to work with the electricity that fascinates him.

Then one day Roscoe sees an opportunity: He’ll siphon off the grid to electrify the farm and save the family’s failing finances. But when a man is killed on one of Roscoe’s illegal lines, the lives of everyone on the farm are changed forever.

In her evocative debut novel, Work Like Any Other, Virginia Reeves immerses readers in the hardscrabble world of early 20th-century Alabama and a time when electricity still felt like magic.  

I was surprised to learn you grew up in Montana and now live in Texas—you conjure 1920s Alabama so vividly. Do you have any ties to Alabama?
My grandparents retired to Lillian, Alabama, when I was in elementary school, and I visited nearly every year. My parents moved quite a bit, and in adulthood I have as well, but my grandmother still lives in their original house. In a way, Alabama is a constant, a place that has not changed. 

What drew you to this topic?
In my second year at the Michener Center for Writers, I took a history writing course with H.W. Brands, with the intention of digging into Alabama history. I was a novice when it came to historical research, and I remember typing “Alabama history” into a search engine at the University of Texas library. The first book I pulled off the shelves was a bound graduate thesis, published in the early 1930s, called “These Came Back.” It explored chances of breaking parole based upon specific characteristics of parolees, and it made for one of the best character sketches I’ve ever seen. I built Roscoe from those statistics. 

The descriptions of electricity in this book really convey the excitement that Roscoe feels about something that we take for granted today. Can you talk a little bit about why it was so revolutionary? 
Like any new technology, electricity met with its share of skeptics, embodied in the book by Roscoe’s father-in-law and Bean, the store owner. Think of light linked only to fire—oil lamps, candles—and then see it burning in a light bulb. It feels like sorcery, magic. This force can do what fire does, and it can also do what men do. It is power, fierce and raw. When that magic fed into rural communities, it took on endless potential. Roscoe sees it this way. 

Some readers might find Roscoe’s wife, Marie, unsympathetic: She doesn’t hire a lawyer for Roscoe and she refuses to allow their son to communicate with him. How do you feel about Marie?
I don’t want to defend Marie’s actions, but I do understand her. I have known people like her, people who shut down in the face of tragedy, who simply put it to the side. [Their farmhand] Wilson’s free life was something Marie and her father fought for, and she sees Roscoe as the one who took that freedom away. She simply cannot reconcile it, and so she removes him from her life.

Roscoe’s actions affect everyone on the farm, but arguably the biggest impact falls on Wilson, who is arrested along with him. Because Wilson is black, he’s sent to work as forced labor in the mines rather than being incarcerated with Roscoe. But he is also the one who picks Roscoe up from prison when he is released. Why do you think Wilson is more able to forgive—or at least understand—Roscoe’s actions?
Wilson is the hero of this story. He retains his dignity and his humanity even in the face of extreme loss and degradation. He is willing to own his responsibility, which we see early—he is a reluctant participant in the crime, but a participant all the same. Wilson won’t deny his involvement; he won’t underplay it, even if he should.

Unlike Marie, I don’t think Wilson would’ve been able to live with himself had he abandoned Roscoe. He is accustomed to the racial injustices of the time, and he feels fortunate (in some ways) to have escaped the mines, to be reunited with his family, to be alive. He is able to recognize all that he hasn’t lost and to hold that alongside all that Roscoe has—his livelihood, his wife, his child. 

Race is treated with a light hand in this novel. Roscoe notes injustices but, being a character of his time, they are not as egregious to him as they appear to modern readers. How did you approach writing about race? 
It was incredibly difficult to write about race, and there are many previous iterations of this novel that reflect my sentiments, rather than Roscoe’s, or Wilson’s, for that matter. I uncovered innumerable atrocities, and I had to wade through them, selecting the ones that actually intersected this story. The Banner Mine explosion that Wilson retells to Roscoe is a real event. It took many tries to write it in a way that felt true to my characters.

Was there anything you learned in your research that surprised you?
Convict leasing was by far the most surprising thing that I explored in my research. Convict leasing was slavery. Young, African-American men would be picked up on street corners, arrested for vagrancy and sold to private coal mines, turpentine camps, lumber yards. Alabama was the last state to abolish it—in 1928, more than 60 years after the abolition of slavery. There’s an incredible book on the subject, Slavery by Another Name by Douglas A. Blackmon, that’s been made into a PBS documentary. 

What are you working on next?
I’m currently working on a novel set in Montana that explores the deinstitutionalization of the state’s developmentally disabled and mentally ill populations. Like Work Like Any Other, there is fascinating research involved.

 

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

In her evocative debut novel, Work Like Any Other, Virginia Reeves immerses readers in the hardscrabble world of early 20th-century Alabama and a time when electricity still felt like magic.
FictionHistorical Fiction

Andromeda Romano-Lax

Interview by Trisha Ping

In her third novel, Chicago-born author Andromeda Romano-Lax chronicles the life of one of America's earliest female scientists, Rosalie Rayner. After landing a job at Johns Hopkins in the early 1920s, the bright and talented Rosalie becomes the protegée of the founder of Behavioralism, John Watson, and works with him on some of his most famous experiments. Though Watson is married, the two launch an affair that leads to a headline-making divorce trial. Rosalie trades her career as a scentist for motherhood, but she and John collaborate on a seminal parenting guide—and practice their theories on their own two children.

Behave is a page-turning exploration of a complicated relationship, full of themes that will resonate with modern readers—the enduring debate of nature vs. nurture, as well as the eternal struggle women face to balance family life and career opportunities. We asked Romano-Lax a few questions about the book and the intriguing heroine at its center.

Not much is known about the personal life of Rosalie Rayner. Can you talk a little bit about how you constructed her character?
Only two popular magazine articles written by Rosalie, plus a few unpublished manuscript notes, are available to give us a sense of Rosalie’s voice. To imagine my way into her character, I had to start with her life choices. Interestingly, this has parallels to Behaviorism itself, which suggested that we can never really know what people think, only what they do. In contrast with John Watson, who would have testily asserted that it doesn’t matter what people think or feel anyway, I was fiercely interested in that inner, private world. I wanted to know what was going inside Rosalie’s head and heart as she experimented on babies, fell in love, lost her job, coped with her husband’s infidelities and struggled as a young mother.

I wanted to know what was going inside Rosalie’s head and heart as she experimented on babies, fell in love, lost her job, coped with her husband’s infidelities and struggled as a young mother.

Aside from looking at actions, my other strategy was to delve as deeply as possible into the lives—including thoughts and emotions—of other women of Rosalie’s time period, including people she knew personally, like psychologist and fellow Vassar grad Mary Cover Jones and their teacher, Margaret Floy Washburn. Those women left a better paper trail and were more self-revealing.

Did you always plan to make this a first-person narrative?
I never considered any other point of view, perhaps because the motivation behind the book was to give voice to a woman whose voice was largely taken away by the circumstances of history. (It didn’t help that John Watson burned many of their private papers after her death.) Rosalie was a woman of the shadows, but even from that place I wanted to coax her to reveal, in her own words, as much as possible given what I imagined her personality would allow. She is not always a reliable narrator, but she moves toward insight and honesty with age.

Rosalie is bright and has a promising future, but she still ends living in the shadow of her husband, unlike her college friend and fellow scientist Mary Cover Jones. How do you explain this? 
Discovering Mary Cover Jones was a gift, because her life story and tremendous professional and personal success (she was a pioneering researcher who also raised a family) show us what was possible at the time—not easily achieved, but possible. My best guess is that Rosalie was more of a co-dependent (pardon the jargon) type from the beginning. She seemed to desire a close partnership with a strong figure. She needed to be needed. In that way, she was the ideal wife for John Watson—willing to spar with him and play the role of smart lab partner and sassy lover, while still supporting his goals above her own.

What do you think Rosalie’s life would have been like if she were born in 1988 instead of 1898?
If Rosalie were born in 1988 with the same personality, she might achieve more, especially if she avoided having babies early or worked outside the house regardless of having children. But I still imagine her losing herself at least partially to another person or cause and aiming for impossible perfection while trying to keep a smile on her face. There’s that wonderful line about Ginger Rogers—that she did everything Fred Astaire did, only backwards and in high heels. I think that line applies to many women, in every profession and in every era.

There’s that wonderful line about Ginger Rogers—that she did everything Fred Astaire did, only backwards and in high heels. I think that line applies to many women, in every profession and in every era.

Carried by their unshakeable belief in science, the Watsons proposed a strict and clinical approach to childrearing—their book even claims that mothers commit “psychological murder” by expressing affection to their children. Why do you think a theory that discounted so much accumulated knowledge and instinct was so attractive to 1920s parents?
The 1920s was the perfect time to throw the baby out with the bathwater and turn a blind eye to accumulated wisdom. The incredible death toll of the First World War seemed proof that mankind was on the wrong path. Scientific progress, especially social engineering, provided hope—as well as the danger of false prophets. John Watson wasn’t the first parenting expert to say that mothers did nearly everything wrong. Blaming mothers, grandmothers, nurses and nannies was already commonplace. Watson had the added weight of a new school of psychology behind him—one that promised to explain and predict all behaviors and to ultimately engineer a more perfect human being.

John Watson’s most famous experiment, which fear-conditioned babies, would be impossible to replicate today due to its dubious ethics, and the schedule for the Watsons’ first son, Billy—which includes time strapped to a toilet—sounds like child abuse today. What was it like to read and write about these events?
I was less shocked by the infant experiments than my readers seem to be. As a mother, I wouldn’t easily put up with people causing my own child unnecessary pain and emotional distress. But I have little trouble imagining that scientists John Watson and Rosalie Rayner believed that these well-meaning experiments, swiftly carried out, would be mostly forgotten by the infants themselves. The end—reforming human nature—was seen to be more important than the means—dunking babies in water, dropping them and conditioning them to be fearful of furry animals.

The end—reforming human nature—was seen to be more important than the means—dunking babies in water, dropping them and conditioning them to be fearful of furry animals.

Little Albert was an extreme case, and Watson cruelly joked about how the child might end up phobic and needing therapy down the road. But it’s important to remember: Watson thought all children ended up irrationally plagued by unhelpful emotions, due to bad parenting and even to natural events like thunder. In other words, he didn’t think he was doing anything worse than what would happen naturally to children, in time.

As for describing scenes of cruel parenting, the Watson’s methods don’t seem too different from the methods of strict parents in our own time. As a young mom, I winced to hear of other moms letting newborn babies “cry it out.” It seems to me that if we look at the long sweep of human history and raise children the way most children have been raised everywhere in the world—with skin-to-skin contact, lots of stimulation and love, and less concern about measurements and strict schedules—we do just fine.

John Watson may have been a genius and a visionary, but he was not the easiest person to be married to. Do you think he truly loved Rosalie? How did you end up feeling about him after writing this book?
I do believe John Watson loved Rosalie passionately, and though it was easy to poke fun at his particular behaviors while writing the book, in the end, I think he had a lot of likable qualities. He surrounded himself with smart people, including ambitious women, and he appreciated colleagues who challenged him. He fought for the underdog and dedicated himself to improving mankind. He seemed to be aware of his own faults and foibles. From all accounts, he was not only “most handsome professor on campus” but also charming, funny, and endlessly energetic. I ended up feeling sympathy for him while also feeling immensely wary of overconfident men like him who misuse their charisma and power and shout so loudly that quieter voices can’t be heard.

The nature-nurture debate still rages on, and, of course, so does the debate over how to be a “good” parent. What links did you see between these issues in the 1920s and the way they are thought about today?
I think that after seesawing from one extreme position to another we have ended up in nearly the same place, and I hope the perspective from a century ago helps people see our own times and our own debates more clearly. When it comes to many scientific issues, the right answer is often “a little of both,” or “it depends.” Nature and nature both affect us. People are in some ways—but absolutely not all ways—blank slates. Parenting requires both firm boundaries and abundant affection, with plenty of room for mothers’ intuition.

Though the idea of expressing affection to children is no longer frowned upon, some behaviorist principles—like scheduled feedings and sleep-training—are practiced today. What would you say is the Watsons’ most important legacy?
Despite 70 years of wisdom from Dr. Spock, the pediatrician whose “parents know more than they think” philosophy overturned much of Watson’s “don’t trust any mother” dogma, we still worry a lot about when babies will stop crying and when they will be potty trained. So Watson and the anxiety he fostered are still with us. But let me emphasize one benign part of his legacy: the general idea of routines. Children and adults do adapt well to many forms of regularity. Furthermore, Watson suggested that routines and mild, consistent training could replace physical punishment, which he believed had little effect on the shaping of behavior. This stance was unusual in Watson’s time and probably surprised readers.

What is a typical writing day like for you?
There are very typical days, especially in the last two and a half years, since I’ve been living mostly abroad (first in rural Taiwan, later in Mexico). But a really good writing day includes two to three hours of drafting or editing material, another hour or three of research, work-related correspondence, long-distance teaching work, and more emails. Then there is language study for an hour or two daily, exercise (usually running), cooking, shopping. In a foreign country, extra hours are spent waiting in line, dealing with bureaucracy, and doing errands. If I’m not careful, the side jobs and home and family maintenance take over everything, just as they did for Rosalie in the 1920s.

What are you working on next?
My next novel is a story of love, migration and secrets, weaving a forgotten indigenous culture and the plight of social robots, set in 1920s rural Taiwan and 2030s Tokyo. My next nonfiction book is about living in Mexico and struggling toward Spanish fluency.

 

 

In her third novel, Chicago-born author Andromeda Romano-Lax chronicles the life of one of America's earliest female scientists, Rosalie Rayner.
FictionHistorical Fiction

Helen Simonson’s sly comedy of manners

Interview by Trisha Ping

As the summer of 1914 draws to a close, 23-year-old Beatrice Nash is headed to East Sussex by train. The small town of Rye doesn’t know it yet, but her arrival is about to shake up the status quo—not to mention the lives of town matron Agatha Kent and her two nephews.

In her long-awaited second novel, following the 2011 word-of-mouth hit Major Pettigrew’s Last Stand, Helen Simonson returns readers to her hometown of Rye, East Sussex—although, as she admits during a phone call to her adopted hometown of Brooklyn, she’s able to view it through “somewhat rose-colored glasses. I don’t have to put up with the rain or the warm beer, so I’m left to plumb all these deep emotional wells without any of the hindrances of daily, petty annoyances!”

Simonson has spent most of her adult life in the United States, where she moved with her American husband to pursue a career in advertising, and eventually raised two sons. While she loves the States, and visits England often, Simonson admits to “a deep longing for home. I’m one of those people who believes that children need to go out in the world—the farther the better—but those of us who go off to explore are left with a hole . . . it’s this kind of push-pull situation,” she says in a voice that still sounds quite English to this American interviewer.

Simonson’s writing has a distinctly English flavor . . . moving, but not sentimental.

Simonson’s writing also has a distinctly English flavor, but her books are unlikely to be described as “cozy.” Though she uses a small-town setting, Simonson is interested in the ways people interact. Her novels are moving but not sentimental—sly comedies of manners that have more in common with Jane Austen than Jan Karon.

“I believe the whole world can be explained in a small town,” says Simonson with a laugh—and The Summer Before the War opens up a whole world to readers. From socialites to refugees, this rich, beautifully written social comedy encompasses a range of nationalities and classes and is told from three perspectives. It’s the first time Simonson has written from a female point of view.

“There’s a long history of women wanting to go out into the world dressed as a man, and that’s essentially what I got to do writing Major Pettigrew. So it was funny to come back and write as a woman—I almost felt more exposed.”

Writing historical fiction was also a new step for Simonson. Using her hometown—and her fascination with the Edwardian writers Henry James and Edith Wharton, who spent time there—as a touchstone, Simonson decided to “prove myself as a real writer by taking people on a time-travel journey.”

That journey begins as Beatrice Nash arrives in Rye. Both prettier and younger than expected, the new teacher is almost immediately required to defend her position—which she desperately needs after the death of her father—against Agatha Kent’s scheming society nemesis, Lady Emily. Siding with Agatha and her husband, John, in support of the new teacher are the couple’s two nephews, cousins Daniel and Hugh. Carefree poet Daniel is Simonson’s homage to “all the young men who went off to war writing poetry,” while practical Hugh is completing his surgical training. The two are like sons to the Kents, who never had children of their own, and their relationships with Agatha are among the most compelling in the novel.

“I was really interested in how difficult it is to be an aunt who would love to be a mother,” says Simonson. She adds that she needed distance between Agatha and the two boys for other reasons as well. “As a mother of two sons, I’m just unable to write about the mother of two sons. I think my writing would come across as impossibly cheesy because I love my sons to death and would be totally incapable of writing anything nuanced about them!”

There may not be a better word to describe the characters in The Summer Before the War than “nuanced.” Even background players are fully rounded and alive, thanks to Simonson’s textured writing. By the time World War I breaks out, the reader knows this community, which makes the “very, very small” approach that Simonson takes to portraying the war feel right.

“When we go to war, I focus very closely on Hugh, working in the hospital. There are no epic battle scenes. By keeping things small and hopefully somewhat mundane, I try to navigate the geography of the battlefield without making any great claims to expertise in discussing war or the pain that it brings people.”

Like the best historical fiction, The Summer Before the War not only takes readers back to the past, but also gives them a new perspective on the present.

Like the best historical fiction, The Summer Before the War not only takes readers back to the past, but also gives them a new perspective on the present. Take Hugh’s observation that “spirited debate was the first casualty of any war,” or the discussion between Agatha and Beatrice about whether the best way to advance women’s rights is to work within the system, or defy it. Perhaps the most topical of these is the Belgian refugee crisis, which is largely forgotten in the U.K. today.

“I had no idea until I read a Henry James essay on the subject that there were Belgian refugees in my hometown,” says Simonson. “England took in 250,000 Belgian refugees and housed them and fed them and found them work for four years, all on a charitable basis. Perhaps it’s a lesson we could learn from today.”

Though there are plenty of lessons to ponder in this novel, it is also very, very funny. The crackling repartee between Agatha and Lady Emily recalls Isobel Crawley and Lady Violet on “Downton Abbey.” Hugh and Daniel, close as brothers, “spend endless hours trying to prove the other one wrong,” says Simonson, to a reader’s delight.

Full of trenchant observations on human nature and featuring a lovable cast of characters, The Summer Before the War is a second novel that satisfies.

Author photo © Nina Subin
This article was originally published in the April 2016 issue of BookPage. Download the entire issue for the Kindle or Nook.

Like the best historical fiction, The Summer Before the War not only takes readers back to the past, but also gives them a new perspective on the present. We talked to Simonson about her charming second novel.
Science Fiction & FantasyFictionDystopian Fiction

Justin Cronin

Interview by Trisha Ping

Justin Cronin leapt to the top of the crowded field of post-apocalyptic fiction in 2010 with the publication of The Passage, the first in a trilogy. An instant bestseller, the novel imagined a future where mankind has been decimated thanks to a vampire-creating virus. 

Six years and more than a thousand pages later, Cronin brings the Passage trilogy to a brilliantly plotted, thrilling conclusion with The City of Mirrors. We asked him a few questions about how it feels to take a series across the finish line.

First of all—congratulations on finishing such an epic trilogy! How did you reward yourself after finishing The City of Mirrors?
A glass of Scotch and a piece of pie. It’s a ritual I always observe. It usually happens at about 3:00 in the morning.

The world of the Passage trilogy has always been a large one, but it expands even more in this book. Was it satisfying to get more of that world out of your head and onto the page?
It was a lot of fun in this novel to go back to Fanning’s college life, which borrows a great deal from my own. I’d wanted to use Harvard as a setting for years, but the occasion hadn’t arisen until now.

You’ve been with most of these characters for a decade. How does it feel to let them go? Was there one in particular that you’ll miss most?
Though Amy stands at the center, the Passage trilogy is an ensemble piece, and I felt close to all the major players, although my affinities differed from character to character at various times. Into Amy I poured a lot of my feelings about being a father, and Wolgast’s love for her really touches me. Carter is the most long-suffering, patient soul I will ever meet, a man full of an incredible decency. Peter’s bravery has an automatic quality I admire intensely; he simply can’t stop himself. Alicia’s struggles both break and mend my heart. It’s odd and rather lonely to say goodbye to these people, like standing on the pier while I watch them sail away.

Has this project and its success changed the way you see yourself as a writer? 
As someone who writes sentences all day long, my goals and habits are the same, so to that extent, nothing has changed at all. I go to my office, I think really hard, the world sort of melts away and my fingers begin to move over the keyboard. I write how I write, and that’s always been true and always will be. But success means readers—a lot of them. I’m more aware of my audience now and want them to be happy with the work I do. It also means I don’t have to have a second job, which is a colossal luxury for any artist. Writing can get 100 percent of my attention during the workday.

What’s next for you?
More novels. But maybe first I’ll take a nap. 

RELATED CONTENT: Read our review of The City of Mirrors.

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

Justin Cronin leapt to the top of the crowded field of post-apocalyptic fiction in 2010 with the publication of The Passage, the first in a trilogy. An instant bestseller, the novel imagined a future where mankind has been decimated thanks to a vampire-creating virus.
FictionPopular FictionDebut Fiction

Liz Kay

Interview by Trisha Ping

Poet Liz Kay makes her fiction debut with the darkly funny Monsters: A Love Story. Nebraska poet Stacey Lane and Hollywood bad boy Tommy DeMarco launch a whirlwind romance when he options her poetry collection for his latest film project, but their story is no fairy tale. Both Tommy and Stacey have hot tempers, sharp tongues and plenty of baggage, but Kay manages to make readers root for them even when their flaws aren't especially lovable. In a Q&A, Kay talks about messy characters, the romance of Gone Girl (yes, really) and the reason she feels sorry for Gwyneth Paltrow.

Monsters is an unusual choice for the title of a love story. Can you tell us the story behind how it was chosen?
Well, I have to admit that Monsters was a working title. I assumed someone along the way was going to make me change it so I didn’t dwell on the title as I might have otherwise. I did want a title that would give readers a clear sense of what to expect or at least that they should definitely not expect a typical love story. Like the monster in Stacey’s book of poetry, Tommy and Stacey are beautiful on the outside, and their story, told in brief might read beautifully too, but scratch that glamorous surface and the raw mess that comes with being human bubbles up. 

On the surface, the story of an ordinary woman falling in love with a Hollywood star sounds like a fairy tale, but Monsters is actually a very realistic look at a relationship between two adults. Why were you drawn to writing this type of romance?
I’ve really always been drawn toward messier characters and stories. I have never, that I can remember, rooted for a plucky heroine, so it was especially important to me that Stacey be real in ways that might challenge us. As a culture, we seem to like our female characters flawed, but only in superficial ways, only in ways that make them more relatable—an extra few pounds around the middle, a little clumsy on her feet. That’s just not that interesting to me. I am more interested, ultimately, in readers’ reactions to the characters than anything, and I didn’t want characters that went down too easily. 

"I didn’t want characters that went down too easily."

A few years ago, I was reading Animal Farm to my sons (I know it’s not a children’s story, but like Tommy, I don’t have the best boundaries), and the youngest was really upset with Napoleon. He just hated him, hated what he was doing to the other characters. The middle kid, who takes after me, said, “Well they can’t just sit around drinking tea all the time. That wouldn’t be a good story at all.” I think he was 11, but this captures my aesthetic pretty accurately.

The behind-the-scenes stuff in the movie industry really rings true. How did you research this part of the book?
I read a lot about the specifics of adaptation and the process of making a movie start to finish. I wanted to get the vocabulary right, and I wanted to have enough reference points for that world to feel solid, but the fact that Stacey, the narrator, is new to all of it gave me a good bit of leeway. I particularly liked reading interviews, and most of them quickly confirmed what I’d already suspected, which is that artists are pretty typical across the board. Whatever medium they’re working in, they’re plagued with the same peculiar mix of ego and insecurity and bravado. For me, the focus was always the characters, even the minor ones like Joe, the screenwriter. As a reader, if I believe in the characters, I believe in the world they introduce me to. 

How does your background as a poet inform your fiction writing?
I felt a lot of freedom writing Monsters, in part because I had zero expectations going into it. It was really self-indulgent in a lot of ways—I was head-over-heels in love with these characters and I just wanted to be with them and to see what happened to them, and I didn’t actually care if it was any good. I haven’t written a word of fiction since a short story class maybe my sophomore year of college, so failure seemed not just possible, but inevitable. I think once you’ve embraced failure as the most likely outcome, you can approach the work with a level of enthusiasm and almost recklessness that’s really energizing. 

That said, I still write very much like a poet—line by line. I count syllables and read it aloud to listen for rhythm. I can’t really move on from a scene until it’s perfect, so I polish every page, every paragraph, every sentence as I go. I’m also pretty discerning about description, and having a poet for a narrator allowed me to exploit that. If Stacey sees something, it matters. I wanted every image she bothers to tell you about to carry a lot of weight.

The banter in this book is topnotch. How did you manage to make your dialogue crackle? 
Thank you! Maybe the dialogue picked up some energy because I loved writing it so much. Dialogue is something I don’t use at all in poetry, so it was one part of the novel that really felt like the opposite of work. It’s definitely not something I’ve ever studied in the novels I’ve read, but I always perk up when I come across dialogue that sounds real. If it doesn’t sound like something a living person would say, I’m not that interested in reading it. The best preparation for me is probably the fact that I’ve surrounded myself with smart, funny, slightly profane friends, and because many of my friends are either artists or academics our conversations can shift rapidly across subjects and levels of import much like Tommy’s and Stacey’s. 

If Monsters were turned into a Hollywood film, who would you pick to star as Stacey and Tommy?
It took me all of about a tenth of a second to settle on who would be Stacey. Gwyneth Paltrow obviously doesn’t match the physical descriptions of Stacey, but what I love about Gwyneth Paltrow is that she captures the catch-22 for women. She does everything right. She really works at doing and being all the things we demand of her (and all women), and then we hate her even more for it. Be very, very thin, we say, and then Gwyneth makes her kale smoothies and doesn’t give her children Cheetos and we’re all like Jesus Christ, lighten up. Eat a cheeseburger. She, or at least her public persona, captures the fact that in a culture that’s still as deeply misogynistic as ours, it’s just impossible to win at being a woman. 

"[I]n a culture that’s still as deeply misogynistic as ours, it’s just impossible to win at being a woman."

Tommy was much harder to figure out. He’s such an amalgamation of things. Maybe he has James Franco’s literary interests and Leonardo DiCaprio’s dating habits and George Clooney’s fame. But ultimately, whoever it was I was imagining, their public persona would start to get in the way. In any case, I did stumble upon an answer, which is Tom Hardy. And it works for me primarily because I don’t know that much about him. I certainly didn’t have him in mind in writing the book and so he works as kind of a blank slate. Physically, he’s a good fit—a little pretty, a little scruffed up. He looks mean in a lot of the pictures I’ve seen, so that works. 

Do you have a favorite love story?
In recent years, I’d have to say Gone Girl, which I know no one else reads as a love story so that likely tells you a good deal about me. I’m also just a huge Jane Austen fan, and I love how she’s able to communicate so much about the dynamics of attraction in these very careful, polite exchanges. 

What are you working on next?
I have a couple of projects in the works, but I’m probably most interested in a novel that’s examining how comfortable the patriarchy can be for the women at the top. I’m really interested in critiquing not just the culture itself but the ways that we’re all complicit in it. Moments when our ideals come into conflict with our desires tend to give off the most spark for me, so that’s the project I keep coming back to these days.

RELATED CONTENT: Read our review of Monsters.

Poet Liz Kay talks about messy characters, the romance of Gone Girl (yes, really) and the reason she feels sorry for Gwyneth Paltrow.

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