Trisha Ping

by Trisha Ping

Last year, blogger and writer Lizzie Skurnick set out to revisit a few of her favorite young adult novels. She chronicled the experience in Fine Lines, a weekly column on Jezebel.com. The series was a hit: hundreds of women (including me) had their memories jogged or saw old favorites get their day in the sun. Now, the columns have been turned a book, Shelf Discovery: The Teen Classics We Never Stopped Reading.

Reading Shelf Discovery feels like attending a high school reunion and reminiscing about the best of your teenage escapades with a particulary entertaining friend. Skurnick's witty, conversational and insightful summaries of novels like Flowers in the Attic, Bridge to Terebithia, The Little Princess and Little Women are supplemented by a sprinkling of guest essays from writers like Jennifer Weiner, Tayari Jones and Cecily Von Ziegesar. The collection reminds women of a certain age how the literature we read back then helped us understand our lives—while at the same time explaining that a pig bladder could be the best toy ever (Little House in the Big Woods), the Met was a really cool place at night (From the Mixed-Up Files of Mrs. Basil E. Frankenweiler) and that you should never, ever trust your long-lost twin (Lois Duncan's Stranger With My Face).

BookPage talked with Skurnick about teen crossovers, desert islands and why she hasn't read Anne of Green Gables in a web exclusive Q&A.

Fine Lines got an amazing response. Were you surprised that so many other women remembered your childhood favorites?
The success of Fine Lines is very much a question of a happy meeting of circumstance. On the one hand, you have the rise of the web, which makes it easy to categorize and find fellow obsessesives in just about anything. On the other, you have this generation of women coming of age who've been busy with college and grad school and jobs and families and are suddenly like, Wait—what happened to that great book by Lois Duncan I loved? Oh, here it is for 2 cents on eBay! I did know that this was more than a moment of kitschy nostalgia. It's more that we're only just now grown up enough to see how important to us these books were, and we have the means to have the conversation.

Teen or young adult books that crossover to find adult audiences are all the rage these days (Twilight, the Hunger Games). Do you think this is a new phenomenon?
I think they're an unsurprising development in a society where everyone young wants to be old and everyone old wants to be young. But I rather like some entries into new genre—when you marry the sophistication of an adult books with the absurd fun of YA, basically you've taken an adult book and given it a plot, something a lot of adult books could use. Putting a sophisticated twist on a children's story is a bit trickier. (Disney has been putting double entendres to good use to make their product palatable to parents for centuries.) But if you simply raise the stakes—no pun intended—on a children's story by adding adult histrionics, the results are a little more uneven.

A related question: what do you think YA books offer adults that their intended audience might miss? And vice versa?
Well, I'm not sure I'd say "miss" as much as I'd say each audience is taking away what they need. I can't speak for any particular reader, but I know, as a child, I was much more interested in the small details that showed what people were thinking and feeling. I still remember so well that, in Nicholas and Alexandra, the Empress yells, "Abdique! Abdique!" when Nicholas abdicates–speaking French, not Russian, even as the autocracy crumbles–though why I remember this, I cannot say. Now, I can barely remember the characters' names—I'm much more interested in what people are doing. Adult readers moving some of their bookshelves over for YA may be impatient with the fact that you often only find a decent story–a real story, with an arc and everything—in adult genre writing, not literary fiction.

If we're talking about what children miss when they read adult books, I can safely say, pretty much everything. (What does it mean, technically, to abdicate, after all? Thank God in those pre-Wikipedia days I had a good dictionary, not that I used it that often.) But when you read an adult book as a child, you're doing the literary equivalent of listening in on your parents' fight–you understand the drama, though you have no idea what they are talking about.

Is there a book you revisited that turned out not to live up to its memory?
There were two books out of the nearly 100 I read doing this book that I found I couldn't enjoy as much as I had as a child. The first was Constance C. Greene's Beat the Turtle Drum, which was truly one of my favorite books when I was 8—I must have read it 30 times—and which I remembered as this enormous opus. In fact it's a very slim book with only a few scenes. And it's a good book, too—it's just that's it's actually written for a child. That was instructive to me, because it showed how reader age-agnostic so many of these other books really are.

The second was Are You There God? It's Me, Margaret. I think that book may have actually been too important to me at a certain point in my life to make it decent to return—I wrote a column about how I felt like I was a dotty old aunt spying on a bunch of girls when I tried.

Is there a YA classic that people would be surprised to learn you hadn't read?
There are so many! But I'll give two shockers: Anne of Green Gables (gasp) and most of Nancy Drew. I'll stop there before I alienate anyone else.

Shelf Discovery deals mostly with novels from the 70s and 80s. What do you think is the identifying feature among books published during that time?
I think because they pre-date this idea of teenage girls we have now, the feature they share is that they all resist easy categorization. On the one hand, you have these hilariously inner-directed, wildly curious girls, like Harriet (of Harriet the Spy), of course, but also The Westing Game's Turtle or From the Mixed-Up Files of Mrs. Basil E. Frankweiler's Claudia. Then you have these historical survivalists, like Island of the Blue Dolphin's Karana or The Witch of Blackbird Pond's Kit. Then you've also got Lois Duncan's cadre of ordinary girls suddenly wrestling with supernatural powers, or Norma Klein's Upper West Side sophisticates, who may or may not have lost their virginity but don't hang the idea of their girlhood on it. Even Beverly Cleary's novels are always questioning what being a girl is for—what's good or bad about it, how we can thrive but also protect ourselves in the world. (Fifteen is really quite a provoking novel about what it's like to like a boy.) Madeleine L'Engle manages to pull all of these factors in and add intergalactic time travel.

I think that the feminist movement influenced so many of those novels (as it did women's midlist fiction of the period, like that of authors Marge Piercy or Alix Kates Shulman). There's a far more mutable attitude towards sex and sexuality, what growing up really means, what women are supposed to be and what women are becoming. I also think that so many women had the opportunity to write and publish on a large scale for the first time, so you have this flood of stories about girlhood, about family, about divorce, about marriage. Why these books get steered into YA and the stories in Goodbye, Columbus do not, I can only (ungenerously, I'm sure) speculate.

Do you still read fiction aimed at teens, and if so, do you think it has changed?
I actually signed up to judge a YA fiction prize this year to get a closer look at what is happening. From what I have read, it seems sophisticated in different ways and innocent in other ways (for lack of a better comparison, I'll say it's like "One Day at a Time" versus "Gilmore Girls") while so much of what's interesting seems to be taking place in genre works rather than the kind of realist narrative I'm used to, like Katherine Paterson's Jacob Have I Loved, for instance.

I do think what's changed in literature is what's changed in society: now we have this idea of what teenagers are and should be—movies, stores, TV shows, schools of therapy, books are dedicated entirely to the question. When I was growing up it was Meatballs and friendship bracelets and you were pretty much done. I can't help but thinking the books of my era were devoted to releasing teenage-hood from this opaque prison (look at Paul Zindel!) while now they, like so much else in our lives, are about what happens when you live under a microscope with a pre-determined idea of what you should be. Is it better to have someone assume you're a juvenile deliquent or assume you should speak five languages and be interested in the plight of the homeless? I don't know.

It's clear from your essays that these books helped shape the way you think about the world. Do you think kids get the same benefits from books today?
You would have to talk to the kids today 20 years from now and see if Twilight has damaged them as much as 9,000 pundits seem to feel it will! But I think reading at a young age is almost always world-shaping—it's a very intimate experience, after all, one of the only ways to look deeply at another world when you still barely know your own. One practical change is that the books themselves are a quite a bit more expensive—the books I read growing up cost anywhere from 95 cents $1.25, and it was a big difference when they started going up to $4.95. I think it's unlikely that technology will make books cheaper for children—and it shouldn't, because author should be paid for their work–but I do hope it can make books more available and accessible.

If you had to pick one book featured in Shelf Discovery that everyone should read, what would it be?
I've made it my official campaign position for this book tour that I'd like everyone to buy and read Berthe Amoss' Secret Lives, a wonderful book about a girl growing up in turn-of-the-century New Orleans trying to find out the truth about her mother's death. I forgot the title for years and was only able to actually locate it through the powers of Google four years ago—I don't want that to happen to anyone else.

What's the most surprising thing you have learned from a book?
There's so many: that the Czar and Czarina spoke French at home, of course; that red abalones are the sweetest; that you can nick off enough metal from bullet shavings to make another bullet; that you have not converted a man because just because you have silenced him. (I could keep up with the references, but there are really too many.)

Who would you rather be marooned on a desert island with: Laura Ingalls or Sara Crewe?
Oh, that is so hard! Sara would be fun because she would tell stories, but you get the sense she'd be kind of useless hauling wood and might waste away from a disease if you weren't careful. Laura you'd just fight with, because she'd be as bossy as you are. Can't I just go with Karana?

What's next on your reading list?
I just moved and donated half of my books, a process during which I unearthed a biography of Frances Hodgson Burnett I've been meaning to read for years. Then Wharton, Summer, and then A Summer to Die, which my friend Elizabeth has insisted I write about, and maybe Seventeenth Summer, just to stick with the theme.

Fiction, Historical Fiction

Fiction Historical Fiction

Sarah Blake

Interview by Trisha Ping

by Trisha Ping

Just when you think you’ve read every possible take on World War II, along comes a story like The Postmistress. Though the effects of that worldwide conflict permeate every page of Sarah Blake’s second novel, she takes on the war from a different angle: the home front. Set in 1940, just before the U.S. entered the war, The Postmistress is a subtle, nuanced portrayal of the impact war has on three women: Frankie, a British journalist covering the Blitz; Emma, a newlywed whose doctor husband brings her back to his New England hometown; and Iris, aka the postmistress. These three very different women are ultimately connected by a letter that brings an unwelcome truth back to their small town—and by the shared hardships of a world forever changed by conflict.

Blake, a poet and essayist as well as a novelist, took some time to answer a few questions about the book, her favorite historical novels and the one secret she couldn’t wait to share.

The Postmistress is set during World War II, but there are no battlefield scenes. What inspired you to keep a WWII novel entirely on the home front?
Towards the middle of the book, Frankie Bard writes, “We think we know the story, because there’s a man and a woman sitting together in a funk hole in the dark. There are bombs. It’s a war. There was a war before, and we’ve read the stories; but every story—love or war—is a story about looking left when we should have been looking right.” I wanted to try and write a story about women in war, and one that wasn’t about waiting for the men to come home, or about picking up a weapon and fighting, but about making it through the gauntlet of chance that war, it seems to me, thrusts upon human beings. When war is part of daily life, as it was in the Blitz, and as it was in Europe, what does the daily look like?

That daily life is often as harrowing as a battlefield scene would be, with Frankie dodging bombs and Harry looking for German U-boats off the coast of New England. It's a sharp contrast to today, where we are fighting wars but see little to no impact on our day-to-day lives. What do you think about this shift in attitudes?
Ironically, though we have access to almost instantaneous news, I do feel that so much information buffers us from what is happening. To a certain degree I think that hearing news over the radio—through the medium of someone’s voice—or reading the news in a newspaper—by its nature a slower means of apprehending information than merely seeing a visual image—may have been a more potent, more immediate means of getting the news. It’s hard to buffer yourself from the sound of fear, or of sorrow in a radio announcer’s voice as they describe what they saw, or as they record the sound of someone telling you what happened. As always, single human witnesses have a profound impact. I think, for instance, of all the cellphone dispatches that were sent out last spring during the Iranian protests, and how electrifying their impact. To a certain degree, those were a return to the kind of radio broadcasts you might have heard during WWII. I think of Edward R. Murrow’s nightly greeting, “This is London.”

Your novel follows a linear narrative, but the story is carried forward by different characters at different points. How did you approach writing a novel with multiple narrators? Was it a challenge to make sure each woman had her own distinct voice? When did you decide that this was a story about not just one woman, but many?
The novel began many years ago when I had a sudden picture in my head of a woman in a small post office looking down at a letter in her hand and thrusting it into her pocket rather than in one of the mailboxes she was clearly in charge of. Who was that? And what was she doing? And whose letter did she not deliver? That’s how Iris came to be. And then the town of Franklin, and Will and Emma grew out of answering those questions. The novel kept growing, sideways and backwards really, as I tried to get myself to the point at the boxes when Iris holds onto a letter for Emma. Then, about 100 pages into that early draft, Frankie Bard arrived on the bus. I had no idea what she was doing there, just that she was a reporter and had come from Europe. What happened to her in Europe? So, then I went back and wrote that. My challenge at this point was not in keeping the women distinct, but in keeping them together. In some senses I wrote three different novels all of them aiming at that moment of Iris’ at the mailboxes, but it wasn’t until I began to weave the stories together by moving back and forth on the radio broadcasts that I started to see how the three women’s stories could intertwine. And then at that point, I have to say that I had the benefit of a truly gifted editor. Amy Einhorn was able to see how the stories could combine and move in and out of each other, all the while moving forward.

What kind of research did you do for the book?
I spoke to a lot of people; and often their memories or information guided the novel in a new direction. Though I had been researching the presence of German U-boats along the coast at this time, it wasn’t until I spoke to a 90 year-old resident of Provincetown, Mass., that I understood the palpable danger people felt at the time. It was she who told me that there were some inhabitants who felt certain the Germans could land on the Back Shore and march up the Cape to Boston. And when a German bread-wrapper washed up on shore, clearly having fallen off a U-boat, the town grew a bit more unified. I tried as hard as I could, in many drafts, to use that bread-wrapper, but couldn’t in the end find a place for it!

For a couple of years I read as much as I could about the history of World War II, trying to understand the timeline of events as much as the cultural and social attitudes at the time. And I visited the Holocaust Museum, the National Postal Museum, and the Museum of Radio. At the same time, I watched movies made between 1939 and 1941—Bette Davis in The Letter, being a little-remembered but wonderful discovery—paying attention to clothing, hairstyles, and slang; and I read novels written during that period, trawling for diction and rhythms of speech. Mary McCarthy’s The Group and Robert Penn Warren’s All the President’s Men were favorites.

At the beginning of the novel, it’s acknowledged that a postmaster not delivering the mail was far more serious in the 1940s than it would be today. What are your views on social media in the 21st century (e.g., Twitter, Facebook, etc.,)? Do you think letters will ever be replaced?
I have to confess to being a bit of a Luddite in terms of social media. I eddied out at email, not following in the rush forward into Facebook, or Twitter, though I do have a Facebook page now, which I approach gingerly. I do think it’s fantastic to be able to be in touch with people right in the very moment, it allows for a kind of global dailiness. But there is nothing like the physical presence of a handwritten letter. I think that being able to hold something in your hand that traveled to get to you, that holds the person writing it in his or her handwriting is very powerful, and for the time that it takes to read the letter, you are with that person who wrote you in a way that email or Facebook cannot replicate. I think, sadly, that this kind of connection will vanish, if it hasn’t already. With it goes too, the art of letter writing, a wonderful mix of personal essay and meditation, gossip and humor.

The Postmistress has already received some rave reviews from readers. As a reader yourself, what are some of your favorite historical novels?
Oh, there are so many! I just finished reading Hilary Mantel’s Wolf Hall, and remain slightly in a Tudor daze—it’s a wide, fantastically made tapestry, an incredible feat that wears its scholarship invisibly. I return repeatedly to Patrick Suskind’s Perfume, which, like the Mantel, utterly absorbs you in another place and time, though this time, improbably, through the sense of smell. And perhaps one of my favorite historical novels—though I’m not sure if it qualifies as such—is Colm Toibin’s The Master, about the inner life of Henry James. But then, I came to love reading through the novels of the 19th century. And I return there. I repeatedly read and reread the Brontes, George Eliot’s Middlemarch, Wilkie Collins, Thomas Hardy and Henry James.

There are a lot of secrets and information that is withheld in The Postmistress, but in the end, there is no stopping the truth. Do you have a secret you’d finally like to get off your chest?
Yes! That I’m so thankful to have this book out in the world. It has been the secret passion, obsession, joy and trial that I have been living with for the last 10 years. I have been tied to these three women, listening to them—as if I’ve had my ear against a safe waiting to hear the click that would pop the door to set them freely walking and talking, the sign that I had cracked the code on their story at last. It’s been a tremendous process writing this book, and I am so grateful that Iris and Frankie and Emma are out into the world, and no longer talking to me in my head!

What are you working on next?
I am in the very early stages of a novel about an old money WASP family that finds itself at the end of its old money. It takes place over the course of two summers, 1959 and 2009, and moves back and forth in the same old house in Maine, between those time periods and across three generations of women.

RELATED CONTENT

Review of The Postmistress

Review of Hilary Mantel's Wolf Hall

Review of Colm Toibin's The Master

Environment, Lifestyles

Lifestyles Environment

Bill McKibben

Interview by Trisha Ping

by Trisha Ping

Environmental scientist Bill McKibben has spent the last 20 years thinking about climate change. Since the release of his 1989 bestseller, The End of Nature, he has warned that without action, global warming would reshape our environment. Now, in Eaarth, McKibben argues that the window to change the future has closed. We have created a new planet (hence the new name, “Eaarth”). Preserving our current way of life will be impossible; to even survive we must alter our lifestyles drastically.

Presenting evidence from a wide range of sources, Eaarth is a manifesto without being a polemic. It puts many of the latest natural disasters in context (let’s just say McKibben asserts that the new Eaarth is even less stable than the old) and predicts a future that will give “act locally” a whole new meaning. Readers will walk away from McKibben’s latest with much food for thought, and a changed view of our changed planet.

You build a very strong case that our planet is already changed for the worse. At this point, is there anything people can do as individuals, or is a worldwide initiative our only hope?
There’s lots that people can do as individuals and communities—at 350.org, for instance, we’re organizing a huge planet-scale Work Party for Oct. 10 this fall—there will be solar panels going up, houses being insulated, community gardens dug. They’ll help—but they’ll mostly help because we’ll use all that activity to say to our leaders: Why aren’t you doing your job, which is passing the laws that would change the price of carbon and get us really moving on climate change. We work locally and globally at the same time—that’s the odd thing about 350.org, as I try to explain in the last pages of the book. It’s campaigning that looks like the architecture of the Internet

After 20-plus years of talking about it, why do you think it’s so difficult to convince people that climate change is happening?
Because of 1) the enormous vested interest of a few of the most profitable corporations on earth and 2) the enormous inertia in all our lives. Doing something about climate will require changing, and changing is hard.

The book contains several favorable references to Obama’s environmental policies. Do you feel the changes he’s trying to make will have any effect on our current situation?
I think he very much needs to lead us in the changes I describe above. He’s the one guy with the platform to really make the case that climate and energy are the key issues for our time, and that we have to get to work. So far he hasn’t done it very powerfully, but we keep hoping!

The Internet, along with food and energy, is on your essentials list for the future, despite arguing that the world is going to have to get more local if we are to survive. Do you think sustaining the Internet is possible in the future you envision?
Sure—the Internet doesn’t use much in the way of energy—you can take a thousand trips on Google more efficiently than one mile in a car. I think it’s a crucial survival tool for the future—it’s what will let us live more local lives without feeling parochial and shut in.

What do you think is the biggest challenge we will face on the new Eaarth?
There are all kinds of practical challenges that I describe around food, energy and so on. But the biggest may be simply getting our heads around the idea that we can’t keep growing forever, that we need to mature quickly. (That’s for us. If you live in Bangladesh, the biggest challenges will be more . . . immediate).

The first part of the book describes a future that sounds quite dire—cities submerged, crops failing, dirty air, etc. Later on you say the new Eaarth will require a back-to-basics, local lifestyle that doesn’t sound all that bad and might even be appealing to the average overscheduled, overstimulated American. But will the changed planet be able to support these endeavors?
We’ve got some margin. We use most of our cropland growing corn to feed to cows—which is good, because it means we have good soil that we could grow food for ourselves on someday. We’ve got lots of wind and sun—we can’t use them as profligately as we’ve used coal and gas and oil. The real problem is that we’re going to need to be dealing with the ever-increasing effects of an unraveling climate, which will be costly and hard. But not impossible, not if we think clearly, calmly and as communities.

As conditions change on Earth, the effects of climate change often manifest in ways we haven’t been able to foresee (for example, the deforestation of the Amazon, in addition to the changes you would expect, also put the area at a higher risk of fire and disrupted the pattern of rainfall across the continent). Is there any way to predict what other complications might lie in our future?
The inability to predict everything is part of the problem—we’re gong from a world of very predictable stability, to one full of surprises. So far all the surprises (Arctic melting, say) have come faster and more violently than people imagined. And some things have appeared very unexpectedly: the acidification of seawater, say. Let’s hope we don’t have similar surprises with methane leaking from the Arctic, or monsoons shifting.

Climate change disproportionately affects poor people and people in third-world countries. How can those of us in better economic circumstances help alleviate their burden?
Two ways. We can send them the aid they need to leapfrog past fossil fuel and into the renewable future. (It’s money we essentially owe them, having filled the atmosphere and thus taken away their ability to burn coal and oil to get rich as we did). And we can cut our own emissions dramatically and quickly, which will help slow the progress of climate change that threatens them so badly.

When your first book, The End of Nature, was published in 1989, could you have predicted that two decades later you would be writing a book about how the Earth has already changed into a fundamentally different planet? What do you expect to be writing about in another 20 years?
I understood the basic science in 1989, and it’s stayed much the same. But what no one knew was how quickly it would develop, or where the red lines would be. We didn’t know in 1989 that we’d have to cut back the atmospheric concentration of CO2 to 350 parts per million; we thought 550 ppm might be safe.

In 20 years? I have the feeling we won’t yet have solved this biggest of challenges. But hopefully I’ll be writing about some of the changes we’ve made, and how well they’re working.

What do you say to those who don’t agree with the conclusions you make in this book?
Boy I hope you’re right.

RELATED CONTENT:

Review of McKibben’s Deep Economy

Fiction, Mystery & Suspense, Suspense

Mystery & Suspense Fiction Suspense

Charlaine Harris

Interview by Trisha Ping

by Trisha Ping

For an author who gives a lot of interviews, Charlaine Harris knows how to keep a secret. She's working on a new series, but can’t share the details (“people who talk don’t write”), she's cagey about where Sookie’s telepathic abilities came from, and she won’t say whether Sookie really wants to live her life with a vampire.

But with the skill of a Southern lady born and bred, she manages to avoid revealing those trade secrets very graciously during a phone conversation to her Little Rock home, where, she says, “a storm is rolling in.”

Storms are definitely rolling in to Bon Temps, Louisiana, in the 10th Southern Vampire novel, Dead in the Family. After being kidnapped and tortured during the Fae War in last year's Dead and Gone, you'd think Sookie Stackhouse might be in for some happier times. But though there are a few bright spots in Dead in the Family, there are also more obstacles for our intrepid heroine, especially when it comes to her relationship with Eric, the vampire sheriff in her district. There's a dead body in Sookie’s yard. Eric's maker returns, bringing a new “little brother” with some psychotic tendencies. Her first vampire beau, Bill, is slowly wasting away from silver poisoning. And Sookie's fairy cousin, Claude, is now her roommate.

“She’s facing a lot of challenges,” Harris says, “and she’s having to change in order to rise to them or to sink to them, as the case may be.”

Sometimes Sookie herself can’t decide. Though she’s still a churchgoer who wonders “what would Gran do,” her recent experiences have brought out a dark side. As Bill says, “No one could be . . . carefree and sunny . . . after coming as close to death as you did.” Sookie’s newfound anger is focused on two deserving vampires, however: Victor Madden, who oversees the Louisiana vampires and kept Eric from coming to Sookie’s rescue; and a Roman named Appius Livius Ocella, who happens to be Eric’s maker. Ocella has rolled into town unannounced with a new “child” in tow: Alexei, the Romanov tsarevich, whose violent past has left him even more bloodthirsty than your average vamp.

“She’s facing a lot of challenges, and she’s having to change in order to rise to them or to sink to them, as the case may be.”

Another family member who shows up to complicate Sookie and Eric’s relationship in Dead in the Family is Hunter, the five-year-old son of Sookie’s late cousin Hadley. After spending the weekend with Hunter—who’s also a telepath—Sookie can’t help but think about what she’d be missing if she stayed with Eric. “Certainly, when she looks at a child and realizes she can’t have one with Eric, that’s a sobering thought,” says Harris, who is the mother of three children, now grown.

Those are just a few of the conflicts that the inventive Harris, 58, manages to throw into the action-packed Dead in the Family—and the other Southern Vampire novels. “I’m easily bored and I’m always trying to think of ways to keep myself amused,” she says, and she takes readers along for the ride.

One of those readers is Alan Ball, the creator of shows like “Six Feet Under,” who used the novels as inspiration for the HBO series “True Blood,” now in its third season. She is a fan of the show, and has “a pretty good relationship” with the cast after accompanying them to events like Comic-Con and even making a cameo in the series’ second season. “I certainly think Kristin Bauer is very close to Pam. And Chris Bauer, who plays Andy Bellefleur, is exactly the way I imagined Andy Bellefleur!”

Though the novels were selling briskly before the TV adaptation, now Harris’ career has reached a whole new level—at one point last summer, all nine books in the Southern Vampire series were on the New York Times bestseller list, and she just returned from her first European book tour, which included Italy, England, Portugal and Poland. “They were all enthusiastic; it was really eye-opening and I’m really glad I did it,” she says.

Dead in the Family comes to an uneasy close, leaving several tantalizing storylines open for development in book 11—such as a possible new love interest for Bill. Like any good suspense author, Harris doesn’t want to spoil the surprise for fans, but she did offer one hint at an entirely new plot line: “There’s an elf in the next book. And believe me, you don’t want to meet up with an elf.”

Mystery & Suspense, Suspense

Mystery & Suspense Suspense

Andrew Gross

Interview by Trisha Ping

by Trisha Ping

Thriller writer Andrew Gross honed his writing skills collaborating with James Patterson on books like Jester. Four solo novels later, he's become a best-selling author in his own right and has started a popular series starring police detective Ty Hauck, a tough guy who always tries to do the right thing. In Reckless, Gross pits Hauck against a group of unlikely terrorists whose target is America's financial system. Though Hauck is no longer a detective, he can't let this case go since in solving it he will also avenge the death of a friend.

We asked Gross a few questions about the book, the thriller genre and what sparks a writer's imagination.

In Reckless, Ty Hauk is no longer a cop. How does this change his ability to act in the story? Has it changed his character?
No, he's not a cop—or I should say, head of detectives—but he's still an investigator at heart and what he finds at the outset of Reckless hurtles him back, unofficially, into his old role. He is constrained by the fact that he has no badge, but he learns to piece things together through guile and stubbornness and by circumventing the proper authorities. And his new boss, too, who wants this investigation tabled.

In the book he's forced to weigh his own immediate interest agains the vow he has made to a dead friend to avenge her death. He never feels completely at home in his new role, but his toughness, smarts and clear sense of right and wrong are still prominent, though, as you say, he is swimming in a different pond.

You have said you try to combine the personal and the global in your thrillers. In this novel, terrorists attack America through our financial system. Do you think such a thing is likely to happen in the future? Are you surprised it hasn't already?
I don't really think of myself as a "this could happen" guy, but more of a "what if" guy. I’m not sounding any alarm bells. I'm trying to entertain. What I like to do is deal in conspiracies—with something important at stake, and with meaningful consequences worth covering up, and, of course, killing for. That's why my books always build from something local and personal to something much wider with more at stake. I would say that, for sure, financial terrorism and attempts to destabilize our economy are underway on a large scale—and there is no doubt to me, after the names of the dead have been read and read many times over, the true, lasting cost of 9/11—between two wars, global security, etc. is reflected in our national deficit and the spending of trillions of needless and unproductive dollars.

What kind of research do you do for your books?
Not as much as some, but enough to sell my characters and scenes to the readers. I'm not an information source. I don't want to be thought of as some kind of expert. Certainly not on finance. I want to be credible for sure—but I want to entertain a hundred times more than edify. You don’t exactly need an MBA to enjoy Reckless. In years of business and living where I do [Westchester, NY], I’ve known dozens of high-up financial guys, but it's the desperation and panic of someone whose once-secure world has been turned upside down I wanted to get at. And to me, panic is universal.

Before writing your own (four) books, you previously collaborated with James Patterson on six novels. What did you learn from him about the writing process?
Jeez, that's a big question. Lots. Jim's brilliant, if not as a stylist, then as a conceiver of ideas, an editor and an innovator in thriller structure. Here are three examples: short, dramatic chapters that end with a punch and insidiously draw you to the next one. Tons of surprises and plot reversals right to the end. And making sure the reader is invested in your hero's plight within the first 10 pages. I think all writers could learn from that. Oh yeah—and maybe something about keeping the story moving, too!

What scares you?
Well, my 401k scares me! And I don't do creepy well. Not in the books, and I surely don't go to "scary" movies. But if it's a serious question, what truly scares me is probably the potential deterioration of our country through polarization, divisiveness, lack of education, poor use of capital and lack of a cohesive long-term strategy that may render us non-competitive in the next decades. Not very thriller-esque perhaps, but it's at the top of the list of what worries me.

Suspense is one of the most popular genres in the world. How do you explain its appeal?
You could make the case that genre fiction crime, suspense, etc., instead of being dismissed, is actually the most relevant form of fiction being written today—dealing with the issues and events that reflect the headlines and the crises that affect the world today. I like to write about life and death matters; I like to write about everyday characters measuring themselves up to heroism; I like to write stories with large consequences at stake. I like to raise the blood pressure and keep people gripped. I like my stories to move fast. And I think those things are what captivate readers of suspense, as well.

What are you working on next?
Not a Ty Hauck book—a stand-alone. It's called One Last Thing. We had a personal tragedy in my family last summer. My 21-year-old nephew, a troubled bi-polar kid, jumped off a cliff and sadly killed himself in California. My brother's only child. So I’m working on a plotline about teenage suicide, mental illness, and a 30-year-old revenge killing that leads back to a Manson-like family. It's a very personal book for me; some of the stories, true or apocryphal, are about my family. I think it will please. Then I'll go back to a Hauck book on the next one.

Fiction

Fiction

Leah Stewart

Interview by Trisha Ping

by Trisha Ping

Sarah and Nathan are just your average American couple: still in love after more than 10 years together, they have a toddler daughter and an infant son; Nathan is a well-regarded novelist poised for commercial success with the release of his new book, Infidelity. Sure, Sarah isn’t writing poetry much anymore, and she hates her day job, but sacrifices must be made in the name of family. Then Sarah learns that Nathan’s new book isn’t all drawn from his imagination. He cheated on her, at a writer’s retreat, while she was pregnant with their son.

Destroyed by Nathan’s confession, Sarah finds herself fixating on the affair she might have had—with an old friend who confessed his love for her on the eve of her marriage to Nathan. Though things never progressed further than an email flirtation, Sarah puts Rajiv on the list of things she gave up to become a wife and mother, and spends much of the book trying to figure out if that tally evens out at the end.

Heartbreaking and darkly humorous, Husband and Wife takes readers through the fallout from Nathan’s revelation. Infidelity has been the topic of novels since time immemorial, but Leah Stewart (Body of a Girl, The Myth of You and Me) is an acute social observer, and her take on this oldest of stories goes beyond the simple chronicling of an affair to ask deeper questions about how people change once they become adults, mates and eventually parents. Stewart answered a few questions about the book from her home in Cincinnati, Ohio, where she lives with her husband and two children.

Your previous novel, the Myth of You & Me, dealt with a rupture between friends, something that gets far less screen—or in this case, page!—time than a topic like infidelity. What made you tackle the topic? Did you worry about being able to bring fresh insight to it?
When I saw Todd Haynes' movie I'm Not There, I was really struck by the Heath Ledger/Charlotte Gainsbourg storyline. Their characters begin a romance as artists in perfect harmony with each others' priorities and needs, and then, after marriage and children, are pulled apart by the fact that she changes and he doesn't, and his resulting infidelity. This had me thinking about the affect of motherhood on both marriage and a woman's artistic identity, issues which had been on my mind not only because of personal experience but because of what I'd observed in the lives of my friends. Nathan's infidelity, and the resulting crisis in his marriage to Sarah, gave me an impetus for Sarah's examination of where her life has brought her and how happy she is with that.

I was worried about bringing fresh insight to the topic, but I always worry about that, and the only viable course of action with any well-trod topic is to focus on what interests you most about it and so hope to make your treatment of it particular. One of the things that was most interesting to me was the question of forgiveness, and whether the ability to forgive suggests weakness or strength. (This was an issue in my last novel as well.)

Sarah feels that becoming a mother and a wife has meant losing touch with herself as an artist, a poet. As a mother yourself, is that something you also struggle with?
It's something I struggled with in the year after the birth of my first child, when I didn't write at all and felt increasingly unmoored. Being a writer is such a large part of my identity that I had to find a way to go back to it, or I would have certainly become depressed. Sarah says at some point that being an artist requires a certain amount of selfishness. You have to insist on your right to the time to do the work, and on the value of that work and that time. Sometimes it's difficult to do be selfish in that way in the face of a small child's needs, especially as many women I know, whether they work or not, believe they're supposed to be perfect mothers, a belief the culture certainly reinforces. So I know some women who have set the artist part of themselves aside, or at least put it on hold, and chosen to make being a mother their primary identity. Having talked to them about that choice, and glimpsed that possibility in my own life, I'm curious about it. What do you gain? What do you lose?

One of the major themes in Husband & Wife is whether women can really have it all. Do you feel that they can?
Only if they have supportive husbands and/or good childcare.

How do men and women approach being a parent differently? Why do you think men are more able to keep their roles as person/father separate?
In the beginning, in my case anyway, part of it is hormones. As time goes on my guess is that the essential difference is in cultural concepts of motherhood vs. fatherhood. "Mother" is an identity in a way that "Father" is not. We still, as a culture, don't like for women to say that motherhood isn't enough for them, whereas men are expected to want more out of life than fatherhood. I was just talking to a friend, a male writer, about this. He's written articles on fatherhood and been showered with affection for the sentiments he expresses, and he said he gets credit just for saying he loves his children and wants to spend time with them. The bar is set a lot higher for women. We're supposed to love our children and want to spend time with them, so we have to go well beyond that before we qualify as good mothers. And often ambitious women want to succeed at motherhood as much as they have at other aspects of life. I have noticed that while women fret generally about being good mothers, some men fret specifically about being a good father to a son, which must be about worrying that they're not sufficiently manly to teach manliness to a boy. So I assume that's where men are feeling the cultural pressure to fulfill a gender role.

Many times Sarah wishes Nathan hadn't told her about the other woman in his life—and she has never told him about her feelings for Rajiv. Is honesty really the best policy?
My equivocal answer is: Not always. Nathan's honesty provokes Sarah to an evaluation of her life that perhaps will help her in the long run. But it also adds to her burdens at a time when she already has a lot of them. If his secret was making him behave differently than he otherwise would have, perhaps it was best to confess it. Otherwise he could have saved them a lot of heartache by keeping it to himself. And when Sarah keeps quiet, that's complicated, too. On the one hand she's choosing to forgo the revenge she'd get from hurting Nathan the same way he hurt her. But she's also retaining the power she has as the aggrieved party.

The fact that Sarah and Nathan have two children makes his betrayal worse, while at the same time making it harder, perhaps, for Sarah to refuse to take him back, since it's not only their romantic union at stake, but the preservation of the family unit. At one point in the novel Sarah says that "you become your choices. You embody them." Do you think forgiveness is a choice? How about love?
I started to say yes, I think both those things are choices, and then I hesitated. One of the things that fascinates me about human behavior is the degree to which we're programmed to make the choices we do. I've witnessed several friends endure difficult relationships for months or years before they end them. For a while they can't end them, and then at some point they can. So eventually they make a choice to walk away, but why were they able to make it then when they couldn't before? Something must have changed, in the situation, in their feelings, to make the choice possible. Here, for Sarah, the choice to end her marriage is theoretically possible, but one of the things she's wrestling with is that she's not sure she's capable of making it.

Without giving too much away, would you say your novel has a happy ending?
I'd say it has an adult version of a happy ending.

What are you working on next?
I'm working on a novel about siblings, and Cincinnati, and the ballet.

Arts & Culture, Literature

Literature Arts & Culture

Sam Barry

Interview by Trisha Ping

by Trisha Ping

There are a lot of confused would-be writers out there—a fact that no one knows better than our own Author Enablers, Kathi Kamen Goldmark and Sam Barry. Both published authors in their own right, they've now compliled some of their best advice in Write That Book Already!, a compendium of tough love and savvy advice for writers of all stripes. We asked Sam & Kathi (hey, after 5 years we're on a first-name basis) to share a few of their #1 tips. Want more? Read their book already, or check their column in every issue of BookPage.

What is the #1 reason writers should buy your book?
Write That Book Already! provides an accessible, no-nonsense, complete overview of the publishing process from inspiration to backlist. We also include insight and personal stories from other authors and publishing professionals, a handy glossary of publishing terms, tips for getting through the rough spots, and a laugh or two.

What’s the #1 myth about getting a book published?
That becoming a published author will automatically make you rich and famous—or even just make it possible for you to quit your day job. The vast majority of published authors also do other work to make a living.

What’s the #1 thing that keeps someone from writing the book they’ve always dreamed of writing?
It’s tough to maintain the discipline and confidence required to go the distance. Some writers have trouble getting a manuscript completed; others have trouble with the business end, i.e. the hard work of finding a publisher.

What’s the #1 question you get from prospective authors?
“How do I find an agent?” The funniest question came from a middle-school student who wanted us to do his homework for him.

What's the #1 way to tell that you're meant to be an author?
You love reading, you can’t stop writing, and your lifelong fantasy involves a book cover that says by You, the Author.

What is the #1 skill prospective authors should have (besides, ahem, the ability to write)?
The discipline to keep at it day after day over time, no matter what distractions come your way.

What's the #1 way for an author to reach #1 on the bestseller list?
Oprah. Just call her up. And please, put in a good word for us.

Fiction

Fiction

Justin Cronin

Interview by Trisha Ping

by Trisha Ping

The vampire craze sweeping literature is not unlike the virus that decimates the world in Justin Cronin’s The Passage. Sure, there are isolated enclaves of holdouts, defending literature as they know it from the onslaught of supernatural beings, but most of the reading public seems to have developed an insatiable thirst for stories featuring the undead, from writers like Charlaine Harris and Stephenie Meyer.

A note to those who thought they were immune: I dare you to crack open The Passage and read page one. From the first sentence, Cronin’s epic establishes itself as something both equal to and greater than the supernatural suspense novels that have been eating up more and more bookshelf real estate since Elizabeth Kostova’s The Historian became a surprise bestseller in 2005. As Cronin says during a call to his home on the outskirts of Houston, “these are not your teenage daughter’s vampires.”

He’s right. Cronin’s vampires—which are more often called “virals,” “flyers,” “slims” or “smokes”—inspire fear, hate and confusion, but never love. Spawned from a virus in a failed government effort to engineer a supersoldier, these undead share a hive-mind mentality, an aversion to sunlight and a hunger for human blood. The virus is tested on 12 felons—and one abandoned 6-year-old girl, Amy Harper Bellafonte. She alone survives the testing with her humanity intact (albeit with added strength, healing ability and longevity); the others escape and alternately hunt and infect the rest of the world.

“Most vampire stories are essentially stories of magic. The magic of my lifetime is science. So I decided to ground it in a scientific reality and see what would follow from that,” Cronin says. “The experiment that produces the great viral cataclysm is essentially an act of human greed—it’s trying to steal the future from your kids. The scientists who are seeking to engineer a virus that makes human beings so long-lived that they are essentially immortal have missed the true immortality that we possess, which is that the future we will not live to see is the future our children will live in.”

This act of hubris, and its devastating consequences, are meticulously detailed. The Passage takes its time setting up the characters and story to create a solid foundation for the strange future readers enter when, 93 years later, Amy—who now looks about 16—stumbles into one of the last human settlements after a viral attack. Her arrival comes at a bad time. Vampires are getting bolder, coming near the settlement’s walls even during the daylight hours. The aging batteries powering the city’s 24-hour lights—their best defense—have little juice left. Some of the citizens are having violent nightmares and coming down with a strange illness that causes them to go insane. A silent, mysterious girl makes a convenient scapegoat.

But Peter senses that Amy’s otherness is a good thing. When they discover a transmitter in her neck with GPS coordinates for a place in Colorado that is broadcasting the message “If you find her, bring her here,” Peter and a group of loyal friends set off on an incredible journey.

Suspenseful and surprising, The Passage is something of a departure for Cronin, a Harvard grad and English professor at Rice University whose previous works—The Summer Guest and Mary and O’Neil—were quiet literary successes.

The reception of The Passage, however, has been anything but quiet. Cronin’s agent submitted the partial manuscript and an outline for auction in 2007 under the pen name Jordan Ainsley, an intentionally gender-neutral name. “I didn’t want anybody to read this book and categorize it in any way in advance. And indeed what happened is people came to it with an open mind, which I think every book deserves,” Cronin says.

He got more than open minds: Ballantine bought the trilogy for a reported $3.75 million, and a movie deal with Ridley Scott followed. Pre-publication buzz has been tremendous, and Cronin has already met with booksellers and librarians like Nancy Pearl, something the “extremely social” author has enjoyed, though he says his life has not otherwise changed. “You write any book with the hope that it will do well enough that you are able to write more, and The Passage has done that for me—spectacularly. Still, you’ve got to write for love, and I wrote this book for love.”

He also wrote it for his daughter, Iris, now 13. When she was about to turn 9, she asked if she could ride her bike along with her dad when he went on his evening runs. Cronin agreed, but “it’s hot in Texas and you’ve gotta do something to pass the time.” So he suggested they come up with an idea for a novel, “with no expectations whatsoever. Maybe I was sort of introducing my kid to the family business.”

Iris had a stipulation: She wanted to plot a story about a girl who saves the world, “which seemed a little ambitious,” Cronin says with a laugh, “but OK. So for a period of weeks we went through the streets of my suburban Houston neighborhood tossing ideas back and forth, building a story, building characters. It was really just for fun, and it was tremendous fun.”

But it soon became more than that. “By the time the cold weather came and the bike went into the garage, I thought maybe I was on to something. I wrote an outline and was amazed at how much was there. And so I thought, OK, what the hell, let’s write the first chapter, give the book a voice, see how it feels. And it felt terrific.”

Which brings us back to the book’s incredible opening, which was the first part of The Passage that Cronin wrote. “That sentence told me it was going to have this global overview, this very large canvas, which is what I wanted, but it was always going to be an intimate story of people. Once I hammered that one into place, my fate was sealed: I was going to write it.”

Though Iris’ participation ended in 2006, she has now read the book. “It took her a day and a half, that’s the kind of kid she is—she probably read it faster than anyone in America. And she blessed it, which is what I wanted. Everything a man does in his life he does in some ways to impress a girl, and she was the girl I wanted to impress.”

Brimming with memorable characters, action and adventure, the book brings to mind classics like The Stand and the Lord of the Rings trilogy, and shows the deep understanding of humanity and literary skill that is also present in Cronin’s earlier works. Cronin says he dared himself to write “a book that rules out no reader,” and The Passage is definitely that.

“One of the things I wanted to do with this book, and the two that will follow, is to write every kind of story I ever loved,” he says. In addition to the post-apocalyptic setting and vampire element, The Passage is a road novel, a coming-of-age story, a thriller and even something of a romance. Last but not least, “it has a runaway train! Everything I think is great in a story, that nails me to my chair, it’s going to find its way into these three books,” promises Cronin, who has plotted out the entire series and is already deep into writing Volume Two, to be published in 2012.

What also finds its way into the story, and what perhaps draws readers to post-apocalyptic fiction, is the hope that humanity can survive even the worst trials. As Cronin explains, the characters in The Passage “live in constant and overwhelming danger, but they have a job, they have families, they form relationships, they have a sense of clan and kin. So the world as we know it has in some way continued. It’s at the brink, and there’s not much left, but it’s there.

“I wanted the reader to know that not all is lost. And then show, within the story, what was worth saving.”

Author photo © Gasper Tringale

___________________

An excerpt from The Passage:
___________________

Before she became The Girl from Nowhere—the One Who Walked In, The First and Last and Only, who lived a thousand years—she was just a little girl in Iowa, named Amy. Amy Harper Bellafonte.

The day Amy was born, her mother, Jeanette, was nineteen years old. Jeanette named her baby Amy for her own mother, who’d died when Jeanette was little, and gave her the middle name Harper for Harper Lee, the lady who’d written To Kill a Mockingbird, Jeanette’s favorite book—truth be told, the only book she’d made it all the way through in high school. She might have named her Scout, after the little girl in the story, because she wanted her little girl to grow up like that, tough and funny and wise, in a way that she, Jeannette, had never managed to be. But Scout was a name for a boy, and she didn’t want her daughter to have to go around her whole life explaining something like that.

Amy’s father was a man who came in one day to the restaurant where Jeanette had waited tables since she turned sixteen, a diner that everyone called the Box, because it looked like one: like a big chrome shoe-box sitting off the county road, backed by fields of corn and beans, nothing else around for miles except a self-serve car wash, the kind where you had to put coins into the machine and do all the work yourself. The man, whose name was Bill Reynolds, sold combines and harvesters, big things like that, and he was a sweet talker who told Jeanette as she poured his coffee and then later, again and again, how pretty she was, how he liked her coal-black hair and hazel eyes and slender wrists, said it all in a way that sounded like he meant it, not the way boys in school had, as if the words were just something that needed to get said along the way to her letting them do as they liked. He had a big car, a new Pontiac, with a dashboard that glowed like a spaceship and leather seats creamy as butter. She could have loved that man, she thought, really and truly loved him. But he stayed in town only a few days, and then went on his way.

Excerpted from The Passage by Justin Cronin
Copyright © 2010 by Justin Cronin. Excerpted by permission of Ballantine Group, a division of Random House, Inc. All rights reserved. No part of this excerpt may be reproduced or reprinted without permission in writing from the publisher.

Memoir

Memoir

Avis Cardella

Interview by Trisha Ping

by Trisha Ping

In her new memoir, Spent, fashion journalist Avis Cardella shares her struggle with compulsive shopping—and how she eventually beat the habit. We asked her a few questions about why we shop, why she shopped and why we should all be more conscious about our spending.

There have been many compulsive shoppers throughout history, from Mary Todd Lincoln to Princess Di. Which do you most identify with, and why?
I can relate to many compulsive shoppers in different ways, but the shopper I feel I most identify with is Andy Warhol. Warhol was a compulsive shopper and something of a hoarder. Upon his death, his apartment was discovered to be over run with “stuff” including many unopened shopping bags. However, this isn’t why I relate to Warhol. I relate to Warhol because his art is based on desire and therefore on commerce. He understood commerce in this way—and he understood consuming.

This to me is thoroughly modern. Even though there have been reports of compulsive shoppers in the past, I think of this addiction as being modern. The scaffolds of social and economic supports that exist for a shopping addict to thrive are fascinating: easy credit, status chasing, shopping as entertainment, mall culture, are a few examples.

You mention the buying habits of celebrities, who conspicuously consume items like purses and shoes. Is this compulsive shopping, or someone who has the means simply indulging in collecting luxury items? Where do you draw the line between collection and compulsion?
Certainly, anyone who enjoys to shop and does so without any negative impact to his or her life is not a compulsive shopper. I do mention some celebrities in Spent, and their shopping habits, because I think we often look to celebrities for setting a standard. We want to see what they are buying and how much they are spending in order to emulate or approximate their style.

In terms of drawing a line, the thing mental health professionals say to look out for is when the shopping impinges on normal aspects of your life. If you obsess about shopping, if you are shopping when you should be working or taking care of other responsibilities, if you continually use shopping to avoid life and certainly if you are going into unmanageable debt, there is a problem.

Many Americans struggle to pay bills and afford basic necessities—were you worried that a shopping addiction might come across as frivolous to readers, or do you think the need to consume will resonate with everyone?
I wrote Spent because I wanted to understand why I had been consumed by the desire to consume. Why are we all consumed by desires to consume? I think many people today, not just shopping addicts, are questioning their relationship to spending and what fuels their desire to buy.

I was very conscious of the fact that shopping addiction has been depicted as being silly and frivolous in the media, and I wrote my story with honesty and seriousness because I know that it wasn’t frivolous at all. I believe this will resonate with a large part of the population.

How big a role do fashion and women’s magazines play in the growing number of women with a shopping addiction? In your own story?
There is very interesting research and theory on this subject and I’ve only read a fraction of it. I think there’s so much to question and observe on this subject. For the sake of brevity, here I’ll just respond to my own situation. There was a point when I was shopping compulsively and my self-esteem was low, and I may have placed too much emphasis on the pursuit of the perfected images I saw in fashion magazines. I know from my own experience how easy it was to fall into this pattern. I realize that we are bombarded with perfected images today and mostly from advertising that relates obtaining a product to obtaining the perfected self.

Lately, magazines seem to be trying to address concerns about unrealistic images and their impact. One thing I’ve learned though, is that it is possible to simply read fashion magazines to instruct and inform about new things or something that may be relevant to your life and understand that those perfected images are not real.

Do you still write freelance articles for fashion magazines, or is researching and writing about the industry a “trigger”?
I do still work as a freelance writer but write about fashion infrequently. But writing about fashion is not a trigger for any compulsive shopping today. When I’ve analyzed my own shopping addiction I realized that the event that precipitated excessive shopping was my mother’s death. I couldn’t cope with that tragedy and shopping came to the rescue. It was an activity in which I could hide. Part of my hiding meant hiding behind a mask of perfection. Therefore, clothing, accessories, and cosmetics became the tools of creating that perfect me.

Today, I no longer feel that need to hide or desire to escape and this leaves me to relate to fashion in a healthier way. I love clothing and dressing up but not in order to avoid my feelings or my self. Sometimes I’m in a store and do worry if one purchase will set off an avalanche and I’ll want to buy the entire place. However, that has never happened. I think it’s just a residual feeling. I do wonder, at times, if an emotional trauma, could trigger shopping again. But I’m guessing that I’ve traveled far from where I was 20 years ago and it probably wouldn’t be the case.

Of the 1990s, you say "fashion had replaced drugs as the defining cultural pulse point of the decade." How do you think that changed (or did it) in the 2000s? What do you see fashion’s role in society being during the 2010s?
There seem to be more ways to shop than ever! Online, on television, on your smart phone! 2010 looks like the year of exploding shopping opportunities. I think fashion and shopping is still a big cultural pulse point. I’ve noticed many things that indicate this is not going away anytime soon: hauling videos, reality shows about the fashion industry, websites such as polyvore.com where you can log on and be your own fashion editor.

That said, I do find more people talking about reevaluating their shopping. A consciousness about what acquiring all this “stuff” means, to us as a culture is creeping into more conversations. I’m hoping to open a dialogue on this: What is the difference between wanting and needing? When do we have enough? What are we searching for? I do still enjoy fashion and shopping and have found a healthier relationship to both. So, I know it is possible to rethink our relationship to consuming.

Describe the moment when you realized the depth of your problem with shopping.
I think the moment in the beginning of my book when I’m buying all that lingerie was when I realized I was in trouble. I wanted to believe that shopping was normal and that the way I related to it was perfectly normal. But that day, as I walked out of Barneys with my 20 pairs of underwear, and various other items, in my black glossy bag, it struck me that that kind of shopping was anything but normal.

At the end of Spent, you write about your shopping habits now—you allow yourself to “truly desire” something before making a purchase. Are there any items you currently have your heart set on? What designers or types of clothing/accessories are you drawn to today?
I’ve been so immersed in my book promotion and tour that I really have not had too much time to think about wanting anything! Regarding what I’m drawn to, I find myself drawn to things that have longevity. For example, a classic handbag that I’ll wear for years as opposed to the latest “it.” item. So my mandate now is craftsmanship, good materials and good design. I’m not as interested in a particular label as I am in things being well designed and well made.

You often talk about the way you used clothes to try on different personas and figure out who you were. What do you think your clothes say about you now?
I wear more color now and I think that’s a reflection of my being a happier person.

Fiction

Fiction

Alexander McCall Smith

Interview by Trisha Ping

by Trisha Ping

Alexander McCall Smith is one of the world's most beloved authors—his No. 1 Ladies' Detective Agency books, which inspired an HBO series, have sold more than 20 million copies, and most of his 60-plus novels have become bestsellers. Though they're set in disparate locales, Smith's works are linked by their gentle humor and generous spirit. His latest book, Corduroy Mansions, depends on the chaos that can arise when many people simply go about the job of living their lives in a small pocket within a larger city—London. It was first published as a serial—in print, and via podcast—by the U.K.'s Daily Telegraph newspaper and has just been released in the U.S. McCall Smith took a moment to speak to BookPage about the appeal of writing series and where he gets his sense of humor.

Writing series (at last count you have five on the go now) is your bread and butter. What is the allure to writing continuing series rather than stand-alone fiction? Do you ever feel overwhelmed by all of your creations?

I love getting back to the same characters. Going back to a series is like meeting an old friend. Sometimes, though, I feel that I have rather many fictional characters milling about me—but I don't lose any sleep over it!

In some sense Corduroy Mansions feels very English and almost like a print version of such British staples as the long-running soap Coronation Street. Were you at all influenced by that show (or any other)?

I don't think that I have been influenced by any television show. Soap operas, of course, are simply long-running stories—sagas, I suppose. I think that the idea of people leading fairly intimate lives in the middle of a great city is an intriguing one—I often think about that when I am in a large city and see people conducting their lives as if they were in a village—meeting neighbours, taking an interest in local issues and so on. We create such spaces for ourselves in the middle of these large conurbations.

Corduroy Mansions is the first in a new series set in London. How is writing about it different than writing about Edinburgh or Botswana? What made you choose London as the setting for this story?

I wrote this for the Daily Telegraph, which has a large circulation in England. I thought that it would be interesting for my English readers to have a story set in London.

A lot of the fun of your books is the humor you put into them. Are there other writers whose sense of humor you admire?

I very much admire the English humorous writer, E.F. Benson (the Mapp and Lucia novels). Barbara Pym was very funny, in an understated sort of way. David Sedaris is wickedly amusing.

Philosophy plays a part in much of your work—there's a great scene in Corduroy Mansions where a character speculates on Freud as applied to the banking crisis. Do you often find yourself applying a philosophical outlook to everyday life?

I suppose that I do. Philosophy should be about everyday life as well as about more theoretical issues.

You’ve published serial fiction, short story collections, children’s books and even academic texts on law and ethics. Is there any genre you haven’t tackled yet that you’d love to have a go at?

No, I don't think so. Mind you, now that you come to mention it, I suppose that it would be interesting to tackle a stage play. Yes, now let's think . . .

Corduroy Mansions was first released as weekly serial online, much as the works of Charles Dickens and other Victorian writers were. What made you decide to write a new series in this way?

I have always been aware that Dickens used this method of publishing, but I don't think that is what inspired me. I was more inspired, I suppose, by Armistead Maupin, who revived this form of novel with his Tales of the City. In fact, it was a meeting with Armistead in San Francisco, at a party at Amy Tan's house, that gave me the idea. I am most grateful to him for that inspiration! My first newspaper novel was Scotland Street—now coming up for its sixth year. I started this new series because I enjoyed the form so much.

With the ever-increasing popularity of the internet and ebooks, several notable authors have taken to releasing their books for free online. To some extent Corduroy Mansions is an expansion on this concept. What were your motivations in releasing the book online for free first?

It was the newspaper's idea. I was very pleased that we would reach a new audience. I also liked the idea of a daily conversation with my readers.

>One of your most popular works is The No. 1 Ladies’ Detective Agency series. Given that those novels always involve a dash of mystery, they must involve some degree of plotting. Did you find that in writing this way your writing became more flexible and spontaneous? To what extent was plot influenced by reader reactions?

Corduory Mansions just evolved as I wrote it. I had no idea of the plot beforehand—other than a general idea of who the characters would be. I responded to readers as I went along. The internet made it possible for this response to be quite quick.

When it comes to publication rates, few authors are as prodigious as you! How do you manage to write so unceasingly? Do you ever worry you might one day find your creative well has run dry?
I hope it won't! I very much enjoy what I do, and I suppose that helps.

Fiction

Fiction

Susan Gregg Gilmore

Interview by Trisha Ping

by Trisha Ping

Susan Gregg Gilmore hit the Southern fiction scene with a bang with her delicious debut, Looking for Salvation at the Dairy Queen. Her second novel, The Improper Life of Bezellia Grove, is a coming-of-age story set in Gilmore's own hometown of Nashville during the 1950s and 1960s. As the title indicates, Bezellia is not the prim and proper Southern belle that her white-glove aristocratic family wants her to be. As she finds her way in a society that is changing by the day, Bezellia faces the Civil Rights movement, Vietnam and debutante balls with grace and courage. Gilmore, who now lives in Chattanooga, took some time from her busy tour schedule to answer a few questions about the novel and its charming heroine.

You grew up in Nashville, and this book makes a lot of references to iconic Nashville institutions that still exist today. Which one were you happiest to include? Was there something else you wish you could have fit in to the book?
I'm not sure I had a favorite. But it was deliciously fun to write about all of these places that are a part of my childhood memory. It is a bit like taking a ride in a time machine.

Bezeillia's story begins around the time you were born. How did you research this time period?
I spent a lot of time down at the Nashville Public Library reading through old copies of the Nashville Banner, particularly the society and obit pages. I also watched every film in the Civil Rights Room as well as talked to Nashvillians who would have been of age during the 1950s and '60s. Beyond that, I was a child of the '60s and '70s and I applied a lot of what I saw then, the emotions that I felt then, to Bezellia.

As Bezellia comes of age, she begins to notice the discrepancies between the way blacks and whites are treated. Was this something you experienced growing up in the South as well?
Most definitely. Even as a little girl, I was very aware of racial inequality in the South and in Nashville specifically. I knew it was wrong, not to the extent obviously that I do as an adult, but I knew in my bones it wasn't right. I was very fortunate that my parents set an excellent example for me—they believed in a world where people are not judged by the color of their skin.

Without giving too much away, this above all a realistic story and you're not afraid to put your main character through the wringer. Is it hard as an author to see your characters suffer?
Actually it is. And quite truthfully, there are times when the writing makes me physically uncomfortable, and I desperately want that section or chapter to end so I can turn to something a bit more lighthearted. But on the other hand, those are the days I know I'm probably doing something right.

The mother-daughter relationship is very central to this story—Bezelia is never quite sure that her mother loves her. How does this affect her life? Her sister's life?
In some ways, I think it ultimately empowers Bezellia. She becomes determined to know a better life, a life where she is genuinely and honestly loved. Her poor sister, Adelaide, does improve and comes to know a better way, but I think those early years with her mother clearly damaged her sweet spirit.

The novel makes a lot of jumps through time, and articles from the Nashville social pages or newspaper help the reader through. As a former journalist, were these mock articles fun to write?
Actually the articles only move the reader forward a bit, not big leaps in time, until the very end. But they were extremely fun to write. They were particularly fun because I had to write them in a style specific to the 1950s and 1960s. It was a little different, especially the society page. And I have missed writing for newspapers so it gave me a chance to do something I will always love to do.

Name one thing people should know about the South, but probably don't.
If we're talking to people outside the South, hmm, I would have to say that although our history of racial equality has been tragic at times, we are a people fiercely proud of the land that we call home. And at the end of the day, our tea really is sweeter than anybody's!

What are you working on next?
It's called The Funeral Dress, and it's set back in East Tennessee in the Sequatchie Valley. I love to write about funerals apparently so I just thought I would get it out of my system.

Biography

Biography

Laura Hillenbrand

Interview by Trisha Ping

by Trisha Ping

It's a story almost too amazing to be true: An Olympic runner serving as an airman in World War II is marooned on a raft after a plane crash. He and his companion are rescued—by the enemy—and held in a POW camp. But even the remarkable bare bones of the story don't convey all of what there is to discover in Unbroken, a true tale of survival, strength and resilience that Laura Hillenbrand's fans have been waiting for ever since they turned the last page of Seabiscuit. Unbroken is our top pick in nonfiction for November, and Hillenbrand answered a few questions about her new book from her home in Washington, D.C.

First, we have to ask: How did your life change after Seabiscuit?
The success of Seabiscuit was a startling experience. Thanks to a chronic illness, I had been largely isolated for many years. I wrote this book without any expectation of great success with it—I was just trying to tell the story as well as I could. The book was published, and suddenly found this huge audience. I went from living in obscurity and isolation to having TV crews in my living room, literally overnight. It was a lot to take in all at once, but it was wonderful. Since then, it has brought me only joy: amazing experiences, so many new friendships. It has enabled me to connect with the world in a way I never imagined. I am still in wonder over what happened, and I am immensely grateful.

"I'm drawn to subjects whose lives are a study in resilience, and I'm fascinated by the attributes that enable men to survive."

Louis Zamperini has already told his story in two autobiographies. How does Unbroken add to or differ from his accounts, and what was his reaction to your interest in writing about his life?
When Louie first told me his story, I was struck by its wealth of narrative possibilities. Autobiography is a wonderful and worthy genre, but it is a narrow one, offering only one perspective on a life. I wanted to open up the narrative to include the perspectives of Louie's fellow Depression-era Olympians and WWII airmen, the men on the raft with him and the airmen searching the ocean for him, his fellow POWs and the family he left behind. I wanted to place Louie in his historical context and present him as a representative of the broader experience of WWII airmen and prisoners of war, and the hardships they faced. Along the way, I learned many things about Louie's life, and the surrounding events and personalities, that he never knew. When I was done, Louie joked, "When I want to know what happened to me in Japan, I call Laura."

When I initially approached Louie, he assumed I wanted to write his autobiography with him, something he had recently done. But I mailed him a copy of Seabiscuit and explained the different direction I wanted to take his story, and he was game.

One thing your books have in common is their focus on resilience—people overcoming the odds, etc. Many of your readers see the echo of that spirit in your struggle with Chronic Fatigue Syndrome. Do you feel that experience has helped you identify with the people you write about?
Because I've been struggling with a terrible, intractable disease for nearly 24 years, I identify very strongly with people who find a way to endure, and overcome, extreme hardship. Of course I can't compare my experiences to Louie's, but my history has given me an intimate understanding of suffering, and that understanding helped me commune with him as he moved through his most difficult hours. I'm drawn to subjects whose lives are a study in resilience, and I'm fascinated by the attributes that enable men to survive. In that sense, I couldn't have found a richer subject than Louie. As I worked on this book, my health collapsed once again. At times, I couldn't find hope in my life, but I always found it in his.

With fewer and fewer World War II veterans remaining to tell their stories, did you feel a particular urgency for writing about this topic? What was it like to hear accounts of the events they experienced firsthand?
I caught this story just as the living memory of it was slipping away. A number of my interviewees, including all of Louie's siblings, his lifelong best friend, one of his high school classmates and several men who were airmen or POWs alongside him, died before my book went to press. This broke my heart; I wanted so badly for them to see their stories told.

I was nervous about asking men to walk me through their memories of being tormented in POW camp, or enduring hellish combat—it felt like a terrible imposition. One or two men whom I approached said they just didn't want to talk about those events, but to my surprise, most were eager to talk. During a few of my interviews, men cried as they spoke. But even these men wanted to tell me these stories; they wanted this history to be recorded, and they wanted the world to understand the price they had paid to save the world. It was deeply moving, and I feel honored that they shared their memories with me. They had incredible stories to tell, and I took very seriously the responsibility to get those stories right.

Your chronicle of Zamperini's days on the raft is especially harrowing, and his survival seems almost miraculous. What qualities would you say allowed him to survive when others did not?
Physically and mentally, Louie was singularly well prepared to endure 47 days on a life raft. He was in world-class running condition when his plane crashed, and this surely helped. But his biggest attribute was mental. Louie was a born optimist, and his childhood as an artful dodger, using his clever mind to get himself out of trouble, gave him the conviction that he could think his way out of any problem. He simply refused to believe he was going to die out there. It was a completely unrealistic belief—the odds of being rescued when down at sea were very poor—but it carried him forward and gave him the impulse to keep working for his survival. He was also a tremendously resourceful person. He devised ways to fish using hooks tied to his fingers, and a hook made from his lieutenant's pin. He came up with a way to save rainwater. He even figured out how to wrestle sharks aboard the raft and kill them. And, knowing that it was very common for raftbound men to go insane, he and his raftmates played memory games hour after hour to keep their minds sharp.

On a related note, even before his wartime travails, Zamperini's athletic abilities had already guaranteed him a notable life. Do you think certain people are predisposed to greatness, or do situations bring it out in them?
I think there is greatness in many of us, but we have to be thrown into extreme hardship to discover it. That's the fascinating thing about extremity: It unveils the true character of people, and finds in them attributes, or weaknesses, that they didn't know they had. This book explores that issue. Louie was an extraordinary athlete, but that didn't necessarily mean that when he got out on a life raft, he would have the character to endure it. Phil, his raftmate, was this quiet, recessive, unassuming man. No one could have guessed that in combat, his veins would run icewater, or that on the raft, he would prove just as resilient and enduring as Louie. And earlier, when Phil, Louie and their crew were caught in ferocious combat with Zeros, no one would have thought that the hero would turn out to be a sweet-tempered kid from Shapleigh, Maine, top turret gunner Stanley Pillsbury, who ignored the horrendous cannon wounds to his leg and shot down a Zero that was an instant from downing their bomber. It took extremity to reveal these things in these men.

You have a talent for describing historical events vividly. Tell us about the research this requires.
Thanks for the compliment! I think the secret to vivid storytelling is detail-oriented research. The more telling detail you can provide, the more vividly the reader can see the story. When I do interviews, I ask a huge number of questions, often going over and over an event to mine my interviewee's memory for every tidbit they can recall. I did this a great deal with Louie, and he was very patient with me. With this story and with Seabiscuit, I tried to get as many perspectives that I could on each event, and when one source yielded a detail, I'd run that detail past the other living sources to see if that would jog their memories. It often would, and new memories would emerge. Eventually you have a mosaic that you can piece together. I was fortunate in that there were many witnesses to Louie's life—some living interviewees, others who had left their accounts in diaries, letters, memoirs, affidavits and military reports—enabling me to put together a remarkably complete picture of many of the events, even though they took place as long as 70 years ago.

If you could go back in time to observe any historical event, what would it be?
That's a tough question! There are so many things I would like to see. I'd like to see the Colossus at Rhodes. I'd like to walk the deck of the Titanic. I'd like to see Lincoln deliver the Gettysburg Address. And I would love to see the Seabiscuit-War Admiral match race. But the first thing that comes to mind, in the context of this book, is the end of the war. I would love to have been there when Louie was finally free. I won't give anything away, but it happened in a manner that was breathtakingly dramatic.

Are there plans to turn Unbroken into a movie?
There has been a lot of talk about that, and we are looking into it. I would love to see Louie's story told on film. So much of his life is spectacular—his races, air combat, a plane crash, his time on the raft—and would translate beautifully to film.

You've said you didn't intend to write another book after Seabiscuit, so maybe this question can't be answered right now—but do you see a third book in your future?
I always wanted to write another book after Seabiscuit, but didn't know if my health would allow it. I feel so blessed that my body held up enough to get me through Unbroken, and body-willing, I will write another book, if I can find a story that engages me as the first two did.

Author photo by John Huba.

Inspirational Fiction, Women's Fiction

Women's Fiction Inspirational Fiction

Kim Cash Tate

Interview by Trisha Ping

by Trisha Ping

Kim Cash Tate went from law partner to novelist when her first book, Heavenly Places, was published in 2008. Her second novel, Faithful, has just been released by Thomas Nelson and tells the story of three successful best friends facing personal, work and romantic challenges. Tate took the time to answer a few questions about writing from her home in St. Louis.

What's the best writing advice you've ever gotten?
I think the best writing advice I’ve gotten is to write from the heart. It can be tempting to look around and see what’s hot and trending, and try to conform. But true passion and satisfaction flow when I write the stories of my heart.

Of all the characters you've ever written, which one is your favorite?
My favorite character is Treva from my novel, Heavenly Places [read our review]. I had such a heart for her because I knew women like her, women who’d been treated in an inferior manner by their mothers and grew up trying to find self-worth wherever they could. I loved taking her on a journey where she would begin to see herself, not through her mother’s eyes, but through God’s eyes. And it was just plain ol’ fun writing her because she had attitude and would say things that many of us might think but never give voice to.

What was the proudest moment of your career so far?
The proudest moment of my writing career thus far was being signed by Thomas Nelson Fiction. I had always admired them as a premier publisher, but because I didn’t see any fiction by African-American authors coming from them, I didn’t think it was a “natural” path for me. When they expressed an interest in signing me, I was elated! And the experience of partnering with them has far surpassed what I imagined.

Name one book you think everyone should read.
Definitely the Bible. That’s the one book that has completely changed my life. I’m also a HUGE Lord of the Rings fan. I love the epic story of good versus evil, of the unlikeliest of people being used to do great things. There are so many life nuggets I’ve taken away from that story. But I admit I kind of cheated—that story is actually contained in three books.

What book are you embarrassed NOT to have read?
The Help is staring at me right now, so that’s what comes to mind. So many have told me that I need to read it, and I’ve had it in eye-shot for the longest. Admitting my embarrassment might be the very motivation I need to crack it open!

How would you earn a living if you weren't a writer?
I practiced law for a number of years as a civil litigator, so if I had to earn a living outside of writing, I’d probably return to that. Or not. I’ve always wanted to start my own business, so maybe I’d throw caution to the wind and make some crafty little thing and sell it . . . except I’ve never really been the artsy-crafty type. Hmm . . . guess I’d better hope this writing thing works out.

What are you working on now?
I’m editing my Fall 2011 release, Cherished, and beginning work on the novel that will follow that one. I’m really excited about what’s on the horizon.

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