A large-animal veterinarian, the first female Major League pitcher, Dorothy from The Wizard of Oz. Like many kids, I had a lot of far-flung ideas about what I wanted to be when I grew up. But what I really wanted to be was my older sister. 

Three years my senior, Julia was by definition better at everything than I was. She was taller, skinnier and prettier. She had longer hair and neater handwriting. She came up with better stories, funnier Mad Libs. As we passed into our teenage years, I grew jealous of her boyfriends, the effect she had on men. There was nothing worth doing that Julia hadn’t done better—and first. 

And so, when I stumbled upon the name Arsinoe sometime in late 2010, it should come as no surprise that I was immediately drawn to the story of Cleopatra’s forgotten younger sister. An avatar of my childhood and adolescent self, fawning and yearning and aching over her sibling’s successes, she felt deeply familiar. What little can be gleaned about Arsinoe’s life: She metamorphosed from Cleopatra’s close ally (the two fled Alexandria to raise an army against their brother) to the queen’s bitter enemy (two years later, Arsinoe rebelled against her sister). Before I knew it, I was hooked. I wanted to rewrite the famous ruler’s saga, tracing not Cleopatra’s rise and fall but Arsinoe’s: the sisterly bonds fraying and snapping beneath history’s unyielding heft. I envisioned the first scraping of that fray: the moment of their half-sister Berenice’s coup, when their father, King Ptolemy, fled to Rome with Cleopatra, leaving Arsinoe to her fate. 

When I first imagined the book that became Cleopatra’s Shadows, it was as a vehicle for Arsinoe’s story, the younger sister’s story. Though the gaps in our experience were vast and obvious—my family, to my great chagrin, has never ruled a dynasty—we shared that acute feeling of abandonment, betrayal. Julia had never left me in a physical or dramatic sense, but by the time I was 8 or 9—Arsinoe’s age when the novel begins—my sister had hit the throes of preteen angst, as keen to shirk familial ties as I was to cling to them. For middle school, for college, for adulthood, younger siblings are by definition always left behind. And so those sentiments came easily, paired with a reimagining of a Hellenistic childhood interrupted, the idyllic days of a princess torn asunder by revolt. 

Only later, after the idea for the novel had percolated for some time, did I decide to include a second perspective, that of the eldest sister, the rebel Berenice who seized on local hatred of her father and plotted her way onto the throne. At first, this alternate narrator emerged as a foil: Every protagonist needs an antagonist. And yet, the more I wrote, the more I researched—the body of history devoted to Berenice’s rule is slim, but that concerning Arsinoe’s girlhood slimmer still—the more I became fascinated by the elder sister. A decade before Cleopatra had shunted aside her brothers to rule Egypt on her own, another woman of her family had done the same, sending her own father squalling off to Rome, begging for an army to retake his seat. What brilliant and defiant sort of woman managed that? 

I was also intrigued by how family and birth order shaped Berenice’s predicament. Her point of view yielded—for me—a far more alien perspective: the one where life and stability were fragmented by the arrival of babe after squealing babe. As the youngest of four, I was born to my place. No world had ever existed in which I was an only child, no memory where I hadn’t always had a brother and two sisters. Berenice’s identity was rooted in the opposite experience: that of watching her family grow, develop and ultimately collapse. She looked on as her mother’s role was taken by a concubine, as her own was taken by Cleopatra. By the age of 19, Berenice had been dismissed by everyone who mattered at the Alexandrian court—but she refused to accept obscurity. She flailed and fought against it, seizing power at once owed to and stolen from her. Rather than a mirror for Arsinoe, a shadow to the younger sister’s sun, she emerged as a hero unto herself. 

The early drafts of Cleopatra’s Shadows were fueled by my urge to explore a likeness, the pathos that I felt for poor, abandoned Arsinoe. And yet the more time I spent in Berenice’s head, the more obsessed I became with her, the other sister, that eldest child I’d never been. I began this novel because I wanted to tell Arsinoe’s story, not Berenice’s. But by the time I’d written the final words, I had come to love both sisters with equal ferocity. 

Emily Holleman launches a gripping historical saga with Cleopatra’s Shadows, her debut novel. The Tudor court has nothing on the ruthlessness of the Ptolemaic dynasty, built on alliances as shifting as the Egyptian sands. Holleman, a former editor for Salon.com, lives and writes in Brooklyn. She is currently working on a sequel to Cleopatra’s Shadows.

This article was originally published in the October 2015 issue of BookPage. Download the entire issue for the Kindle or Nook.

From the moment that first audacious thought crossed my mind—I will write a novel!—I knew only one thing for sure: the setting would be Japan.

I’d studied the language and I’d spent time living there. In my career as an academic librarian, I’d specialized in working with Japanese materials. I knew exactly where I wanted my novel to be set. What I didn’t yet know was when. 

Initially, I assumed I would write about the present. This seemed perfectly logical, as I had already written several short stories set in contemporary Japan. I thought I had lots of ideas for a novel, but each time I sat down to write, I couldn’t seem to work up momentum. I went back to working on my short story collection. Maybe I was not meant to write a novel after all. 

And then I read about the letters sent by the Japanese people to General MacArthur during the Occupation, and I knew I had found my time period. It was the past, not the present, that I needed to explore in the story that would become The Translation of Love. 

The book that sparked my imagination, Dear General MacArthur by Rinjiro Sodei, is a study of the correspondence sent to MacArthur while he was in Japan. In their scope and variety, the letters were very interesting, but most astonishing of all was this: Altogether, MacArthur received a staggering 500,000 letters from the Japanese people.

Half a million letters? From the people you just conquered? It seemed improbable, absurd, preposterous and . . . well, absolutely fascinating. I couldn’t stop thinking about it. Somewhere in this intriguing, little-known piece of history was a novel waiting to be written. I knew that the Occupation period was a time of tumult and upheaval, of great optimism and crushing despair. There was homelessness, starvation, black market profiteering, prostitution. On the other hand, many people were filled with hope for what they saw as a new direction for their country. Democracy and freedom were the hot new catchwords, and learning English was all the rage.

What kind of person would write a letter to MacArthur? The question kept coming back to me. What if that person wasn’t an adult, I wondered. What if she were a young girl? And so I decided to create Fumi, a 12-year-old girl with a desperate need to write to MacArthur. I didn’t yet know what her letter would be about, but I was eager to find out. 

As soon as I had Fumi, I knew she needed a friend, and Aya, a 13-year-old Japanese-Canadian girl, sprang to life. Aya and her father are among the 4,000 Japanese Canadians who were repatriated to Japan after spending the war in an internment camp. As a third-generation Japanese Canadian whose own parents were interned during the war, I realized that Aya’s history was one that I absolutely needed to include. 

I immersed myself in the Occupation period by reading anything I could get my hands on, starting with John W. Dower’s extraordinary Embracing Defeat: Japan in the Wake of World War II. I devoured history books, academic studies, memoirs, journalistic accounts, biographies of MacArthur. Anything with photographs made me especially excited. 

During the writing of The Translation of Love, I spent some time in Japan. I walked around the area where MacArthur had his headquarters—the original building is still standing!—and tried to look at the landscape not through my own eyes but through the eyes of my characters. Back home, I did some traveling to places I had never been before. I joined a tour of the Japanese-Canadian internment camp sites in the interior of British Columbia, and I visited a friend in California who took me to see Manzanar, one of the biggest of the Japanese-American internment sites. Each time I came back to my writing after a trip, it was with a stronger sense of the past. Most importantly, I came to appreciate the powerful imprint that history leaves upon a particular place—and upon our understanding of ourselves. 

Recently, I went back to Japan and strolled in the famous Ginza district along with all the tourists. People were taking pictures of themselves in front of Wako, the most luxurious jewelry store in Japan, and I wondered how many of them knew that it had once housed the PX where only the Occupation forces could shop. Everywhere I looked, the streets were clean, the shoppers sleek and well dressed, and the store windows overflowing with abundance. It seemed as if not a single trace of the past remained, and yet I knew that if I listened hard, I might hear the sound of my two young characters—Fumi and Aya—running down a dirty alley that no longer exists.

A third-generation Japanese Canadian, Lynne Kutsukake worked for many years as a librarian at the University of Toronto, specializing in Japanese materials. Her short fiction has appeared in The Dalhousie Review, Ricepaper and Prairie Fire. The Translation of Love is her first novel.

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

I have always been intrigued by the history of buildings, whether I’m wandering around Blenheim Palace in England or the Tenement Museum in New York City. During an apartment hunt a couple of years ago, I was brought to the Barbizon 63 condo on Manhattan’s Upper East Side, formerly known as the Barbizon Hotel for Women.

Built in 1927, the Barbizon stands out among its neighbors, a 23-story tower of salmon-colored brick studded with Gothic and Moorish architectural elements. It housed thousands of women, including several icons-in-the-making like Grace Kelly, Joan Crawford, Joan Didion, Eudora Welty and Sylvia Plath. 

Potential guests were required to provide three character references and, once registered, obey the hotel’s strict dress codes and rules. The contradiction between establishing one’s independence while being treated like a child seemed to capture the paradoxical message of that time period: You can pretend to be a career girl for now, as long as you settle down and have a family once Prince Charming puts a ring on it. 

I’d seen photos of the hotel before the renovation, and the change was striking. What had been a virtual beehive of small rooms off dark hallways was transformed in 2005 into sleek apartments with rosewood floors and marble bathrooms. When the broker mentioned that a dozen or so longtime residents had been “grandfathered” into the building after it went condo and were sequestered in rental units on the fourth floor, I couldn’t help but wonder how they viewed the changes that had been made to the building—and the equally dramatic transformation of their city—after so many decades in residence. What a perfect setup for a novel. 

As a journalist, I love crafting a story from research and interviews, and when I decided to write the book I approached the project in the same way. In addition to reading everything I could get my hands on about the hotel and that era, I interviewed several women who lived in the Barbizon during the 1950s and ’60s. I looked through women’s magazines from the early ’50s and scoured old issues of the New York Times to get a sense of what day-to-day life was like back then. 

The more I researched, the more pressing it became to provide a glimpse into the way women were expected to live and behave in the early ’50s, and show just how hard it was to break out of that mold. For example, one women’s magazine from 1951 suggested that women stick to part-time jobs so as not to interfere with the “satisfactions of housekeeping.” Another dictated that a woman dining out with a man should never speak directly to the waiter. Talk about being voiceless!

Since the conversation regarding women’s roles continues even today, I included parallel timelines in the book: Darby shows up at the Barbizon Hotel in 1952, eager to do well at secretarial school and never marry. Rose, who moves into the condo of today, finds herself in a prickly situation with her boyfriend. In The Dollhouse, two very different generations of women challenge each other to stand up and be counted.

The book is definitely a love letter to New York City, my home for the past 30 years, and the city played a large role in my research. A visit to Lior Lev Sercarz’s legendary spice shop in midtown, La Boîte, gave me the idea for developing one character’s passion for blending spices. When I decided to include a downtown jazz club as a setting, I signed up for a class on bebop at Jazz at Lincoln Center’s Swing University, taught by the brilliant trombonist Vincent Gardner. It seemed that inspiration was everywhere.

The Barbizon Hotel holds a special place in the hearts of the women who stayed there, as a refuge where they launched successful careers and declared their independence. Every time I pass by, I look up and marvel at the beauty of the building and feel the same thrill I did a few years ago, when I first realized there was a novel within its walls waiting to be told. The cycle of inspiration continues.

Fiona Davis worked as a stage actress for nearly 10 years before becoming a freelance journalist and writer. A graduate of the Columbia University Graduate School of Journalism, she now lives in New York City. The Dollhouse, her first novel, is the story of a 21st-century journalist who uncovers a 50-year-old mystery in the Barbizon Hotel for Women.

ALSO IN BOOKPAGE: Read a review of The Dollhouse.

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

Who knew that the infamous crime figure Bonnie Parker was once a straight A student who liked to sing at church? 

At some point during my adolescent years, I caught the 1967 film Bonnie and Clyde on TV. Nearly 20 years later, while brainstorming an idea for a novel inspired by an iconic figure, their names popped into my mind. Interestingly enough, I couldn’t recall too much from the film, or about Bonnie and Clyde for that matter, except that the duo were fiercely loyal to one another. Their story intrigued me, especially what made these partners tick. I was pleasantly surprised to find that their story wasn’t one yet told in a novel, and I dove into research. I was also pleasantly surprised by their backstories, particularly Bonnie Parker’s.

Who knew Bonnie got straight A’s, participated in spelling bees and talent shows, and sang at church? I found an amusing anecdote that Bonnie, at the age of three, stood up in front of a church congregation to belt out a tune. The youngster before her sang “Jesus Loves Me,” but Bonnie, she sang “He’s a Devil in His Own Home Town.” I can only imagine the mixture of muted laugher and out-right gasps that filled the chapel. A picture of Bonnie before Clyde began to form in my mind: an intelligent yet feisty young woman. Still, how did a seemingly wholesome girl end up in a life of crime with a convicted felon like Clyde Barrow? 

While I originally sought to tell Bonnie and Clyde’s crime spree story, it didn’t take long before I decided I needed to back up nearly five years and bring Bonnie’s origin story to life. I recently re-watched the film, and Bonnie is portrayed as a young West Dallas woman who is bored working as a waitress and wants to be one of the gals she sees in the motion pictures. From my research, I found this characterization to be pretty on the mark, but I also saw a lot more to Bonnie than what’s generally depicted:

• Prior to meeting Clyde, Bonnie was married to a fella who didn’t treat her right.  

• Bonnie was fiercely devoted to her family.

• She wrote poetry and songs.

• Her father died when she was young, leaving her family struggling to make ends meet. 

• She was a middle child.

• Bonnie was an impressionable young adult during the Roaring ’20s.

Thing is, besides these tidbits of information, not much is known about Bonnie Parker’s childhood or adolescent years. I excitedly rubbed my hands together and got to work, combining limited historical facts with my own imagination to create a well-rounded picture of who Bonnie Parker could’ve been during the era of speakeasies, bootlegs and later the stock market crash of 1929. In Becoming Bonnie, Bonnie’s a girl with stars in her eyes, who also has practical aspirations for her life, driven by the need to be somebody who will make her daddy proud. 

One of the biggest fictional elements of the novel, which has been described as a female “Breaking Bad,” is that Bonnie begins the story with the name Bonnelyn. By the novel’s end, she’s Bonnie, and I’ll give ya one guess who coins her new name.

I’m excited to introduce readers to my version of Bonnie Parker, including how she meets Clyde Barrow and how the infamous duo begins their life of crime. In Summer 2018, I’ll be continuing their escapades in Bonnie, showing Bonnie’s role in their 27-month crime spree across Depression-ridden America.

Jenni L. Walsh has worked as an award-winning advertising copywriter for the past decade. She is a graduate of Villanova University and lives near Philadelphia with her husband, daughter, and son. Becoming Bonnie is her first novel.

Debut novelist Emanuel Bergmann shares a look behind his sweet and dazzling first book, The Trick, a Holocaust tale with a touch of magic.

I like to think of my novel as a comedy about divorce and the Holocaust. (And stage magic!) Divorce is something I’m very familiar with—I was one of those kids who, at an early age, got to experience their parents’ separation. It left a deep impression. Many years later, after my own marriage had failed, I started writing it all down.

At the time, I hadn’t planned on writing a book. I just wanted to get some thoughts on paper. I had gone to see a circus show for the first time in 30 years, and that triggered one of the key scenes of the book. Suddenly, it all came together.

My ex-wife was a magician’s assistant, and so I decided to set The Trick in the world of stage magic. It’s a world I knew very well; I had spent many, many hours backstage at magic shows, and I felt that magicians were generally portrayed inaccurately in literature and cinema. More often than not, they are depicted as dark, brooding, handsome men. But in my experience, they were—by and large—needy and narcissistic.

That insight led to my main character, Moshe Goldenhirsch, aka the Great Zabbatini, a middling and highly egotistical stage magician. I decided to make him an immigrant, a German Jew who came to America during the dark years of the Shoah. This is another topic close to my heart. In fact, I’ve been known to be able to turn any perfectly normal and pleasant dinner conversation into a lengthy discourse on Holocaust minutiae. But it’s not my fault! I grew up Jewish in postwar Germany. My grandmother was a survivor of the Shoah, and she raised me with constant tales of atrocities. The moral always seemed to be: One day your friends at school will turn you over to the Nazis, so you better eat your spinach, young man!

It’s one of the reasons I came to America—I didn’t want to live like that anymore, one of the last Jews of Germany. But coming here had its own challenges. I was 19 or 20 years old when I arrived in Los Angeles, and I had no friends or family there. The character of the Great Zabbatini allowed me to put it all into words. He’s a lonely man, a stranger in a strange land, a refugee. But he’s also a selfish man, and his only passion is his art, stage magic. One day, he’s approached by a young boy, Max Cohn, whose parents are about to get divorced. Max is convinced that only magic can save his family . . .

After I wrote the first draft of the manuscript, I was surprised how personal the story had become. None of the events in the book are autobiographical, but the emotional foundation is deeply personal. When I wrote it, I didn’t think it would ever be published. There was no plan. But then I decided to send it out—who knew, maybe someone would like it? But no one liked it. After dozens of rejections, I finally gave up on it. The manuscript went into my drawer. Years later, through a series of coincidences, the book landed on the desk of an editor who did like it. To my surprise, seven years after I had written the manuscript, I suddenly received an email from a publisher in Germany expressing interest in it. I ignored the email. I thought it was some kind of prank. But they kept at it. And now, I am grateful that there’s an actual book that people can hold in their hand and flip through, and even read, if they like.

Love and music, grief and guilt swirl in Leesa Cross-Smith’s debut novel. Whiskey & Ribbons dances around the death of a police officer, unfolding through the voices of three of its characters: the officer’s wife, Evi, months after his death, when she’s snowed in with her late husband’s adopted brother; the officer, Eamon, before he’s killed, as he anticipates the birth of his son; and Dalton, the brother, who’s trying to track down his own father. In gorgeous writing, Cross-Smith renders the relationships between these three characters sacred. We asked Cross-Smith why she wrote her novel, and her answer is simple: because she is a novelist.

I’ve always wanted to be a novelist. I love the word. Novelist. It’s pretty and it’s something I wanted to be. Something I am. Something I love being. I wrote a novel that wasn’t really a novel. I wrote a short story collection. I wrote a young adult novel. I wrote another novel. I wrote my debut novel Whiskey & Ribbons. Whiskey & Ribbons began as a short story and turned into a longer story. For a moment it was a play. I’ve always wanted to be a novelist. I talked myself out of it. I was semi-content only writing short stories. I love writing flash fiction. I’ve written a story that is only 26 words long. I decided to expand on “Whiskey & Ribbons” the short story because I couldn’t stop thinking about it. I decided to write Whiskey & Ribbons because I wanted to be a novelist.

I read everything. I listened. I kept writing. I read books re: time in fiction. I read books about plot. I spent a lot of time considering intimacy, a lot of time considering grief, a lot of time considering family—the ones we’re born into, the ones we (sometimes accidentally) find ourselves in. I spent a lot of time considering secrets and complicated relationships and comfort. I started and stopped writing Whiskey & Ribbons because I couldn’t figure out how to structure it. I would walk and wander around, two miles, three miles, listening to Swan Lake and Romeo and Juliet. I listened to Chopin and Bach. Mozart. I am not a composer, I am a novelist.

I decided to structure Whiskey & Ribbons the way a composer would structure a fugue. A piece of music consisting of three voices, three different points of view. But they come together. They blend. And later, one voice drops out. I kill a character. I kill him in the first line of the first page. This is no surprise. But I can still barely read his obituary without crying. He is very alive to me, and I am in love with him. I am in love with all of these characters because they are real to me because I am a novelist.

I’ve written about three people who love one another deeply. I’ve written about two of those people attempting to find their way . . . together . . . after losing someone they both love so deeply. I’ve written about how they hold and honor that space, that piece of them that is now forever missing. I’ve written about a mother, simultaneously grieving her husband and celebrating the birth of the son she was pregnant with when her husband was killed in a random act of violence. I’ve written about a woman who is falling in love with her husband’s adopted brother—her brother-in-law—and the complications that brings. I’ve written about a police officer who loves his job, who loves his wife. I’ve written about a black family in Kentucky. I’ve written about a ballerina and a man who is an exquisite pianist—who was a piano prodigy—a man who owns a bike shop. I’ve written about a blizzard, trapping them inside, a kiss at the piano—sparking a weekend of confession and storytelling and sexual tension.

I’ve written a novel about grief and hope and desire and brotherhood and the slick ribbons that hold families together, even when one of them slips away. I almost talked myself out of writing it, but it wouldn’t let me go. I am so glad it wouldn’t let me go. Whiskey & Ribbons is my debut novel and I am a novelist.