One after another, three women marry the same wrong man, each believing her life will be complete once she becomes Mrs. Ken Kimble. In a provocative first novel titled simply Mrs. Kimble, Jennifer Haigh uses portraits of these three characters to question why women think they have to marry.

"Ken Kimble is what I call a serial marrier," Haigh says by phone from Boston, where she moved after graduating from the Iowa Writers Workshop last year. "He has these serious character flaws, but he has no problem finding women to marry." Haigh has firm opinions about why such a man can always find a bride. "We're raised as women to value marriage and family," she says, "and to believe that unless we've achieved those things, the rest of our accomplishments don't really count for very much."

The somewhat controversial subject of the novel, the spare beauty of her writing and the fact that everybody knows someone like Ken made Haigh's manuscript a hot item in the publishing world—the novel sold only a month after she gave it to an agent. "Publishing it was a lot easier than writing it, and a lot faster," Haigh says wryly.

Like most overnight successes, Haigh has practiced her craft all her life. As a bookish little girl growing up in Barresboro, Pennsylvania, she kept journals. Later, at Dickinson College, she began to write fiction seriously. "Very seriously and very badly," she says. "I look back at the stories I wrote as a very young writer, and they're exactly like everybody else's the evil boyfriends, the tragic breakups, the fights with my parents." No story was as good as she wanted it to be. She put fiction aside for five or six years. "I grew up and had a job and worked a little bit, then came back to it when I had a bit more to say."

During those intervening years, Haigh studied in France on a Fulbright scholarship, worked as an editor at Self magazine and taught yoga, which she still practices faithfully. "It's a great, great help for writers in terms of slowing down, being patient and staying focused on the work. Hard, hard things to do."

Before writing Mrs. Kimble, Haigh had been successful with short stories, publishing in Good Housekeeping magazine and various literary journals. Moving from the short story to the novel was not an easy process; two novels she calls "miscarriages" preceded this one.

Haigh, who is 34 and single, maintains that nothing from her personal life inspired her debut novel. "I had this very well-adjusted upbringing. My parents are still married to each other. They live in the same house I grew up in. None of that made it into Mrs. Kimble."

Yet, somehow, Haigh has a gift for empathizing with all Ken's wives. Birdie, the first, is a Southern girl who in 1961, at age 19, fell for the handsome choir director at her all-girl Bible college and bore him two children. The second wife, Joan, is Jewish and a writer for Newsweek, brought South by her father's death in Florida and detained there by breast cancer. Ken steps into her life in 1969, and ends up the richer for it. Third is Dinah, who as a teenager baby-sat for Birdie and Ken's children. After a chance re-encounter, they marry in 1979. 

Birdie seems almost too extreme in her isolation—never having known a white woman who worked, for example—and somewhat unlikely in her youthful romance with a black neighbor. Joan is perfect in her imperfection, as is Dinah, with her unsightly birthmark.

The wives are different types, from different generations, all with different expectations of men. Yet, all three fall for this same worthless blue-eyed charmer, seemingly attuned to their needs but actually caring very little about them.

The idea for the novel began with Birdie. "The first scene in the book I wrote," Haigh says, "was the scene in the store where Birdie is drunk and Charlie is helping her buy groceries . . . Years ago, I was living in Tampa, Florida, and I saw something similar happen in the little corner store a drunk mother with a small child. And that stuck with me."

The scene also sticks with the reader, as do other elements of this clever book.  

Anne Morris is a writer in Austin, Texas.

After publishing two unforgettable collections of short stories (Fitting Ends and National Book Award finalist Among the Missing), Dan Chaon decided several years ago that it was time to attempt a novel.

"I was very interested in the issue of adoption," he says from his home in Cleveland Heights, Ohio, "and for a long time I had been thinking of writing this Hitchcock-like stranger-comes-to-town novel." Chaon (pronounced "shawn") struggled to find the best structure for the novel, but the book he eventually created, You Remind Me of Me, is a work that brims with insight and packs an extraordinary emotional punch.

When we talk about the novel on a late spring morning, the pollen faeries have whisked low over Ohio during the night, and Chaon is deep in the grip of miserable springtime allergies. He coughs and sniffles and sneezes through the conversation, gamely persevering, pausing occasionally when a sneezing fit overcomes him. Chaon's wry, croupy laugh has a sonority that seems pitch perfect for the Alfred Hitchcock reference in his conversation – as well as for the darkish humor that suffuses much of his fiction.

Chaon doesn't invoke Hitchcock at random. At Northwestern he majored in both film and English. Early on he had ideas of working in the movies, but he notes, laughing, that the film part "didn't actually work out very well. I discovered that I wasn't very good at collaboration, or at least I didn't like collaboration, because I wanted all the power myself. The nice thing about writing is that you get to do all the acting, directing, writing and, you know, even the music all by yourself."

Of course even total power doesn't ensure a smooth transition from the short story form to the novel. Chaon, who has taught in the creative writing department of Oberlin College since 1999, flailed through a scene-less first draft of what would eventually become You Remind Me of Me.

Of that initial struggle, he says, "You can go into a short story not knowing what the ending is. It's like going into a dark room and feeling around, finding the walls, and then finding the switch to turn on the lights. But with a novel, you're not going into a dark room. You're going into a dark gymnasium. Or a desert. It's much harder to just feel your way around."

Chaon finally hit upon a non-chronological structure for telling his story. You Remind Me of Me moves back and forth from the 1960s and 1970s to 1996 and 1997, with most of its action taking place in June of 1997. The result of this brilliant decision is a novel that shows just how extraordinarily strange ordinary life can be. But Chaon's narrative approach is also one that makes it difficult to talk in any depth about the story without ruining a reader's pleasure of discovery.

"With this novel I've got myself into a kind of corner because so much of the plot is withheld for the first part of the novel," Chaon says. "I think part of the pleasure of the book is figuring out what is going on and how things connect, so I really worried about how they wrote the book jacket description. I didn't want them to give away things that are more interesting if you don't know them to begin with."

So let's just say You Remind Me of Me is set mostly in the small town of St. Bonaventure, Nebraska, and concerns the intertwined lives of Jonah Doyle, a line cook who was severely mauled by his mother's dog when he was a child, and Troy Timmens, a local bartender who teeters on the brink of a life as a small-time drug dealer. Around these two orbit a constellation of sharply drawn and deeply felt characters that show Chaon to be one of the best writers of American fiction today.

"I'm interested in writing about the lives of people in their 20s and 30s who don't go to college and who find their opportunities and options limited not only by a lack of education but also by the lack of anything to do in their communities," he says. "A lot of contemporary portrayals of working class people show them as TV-watching, Twinkie-eating hicks. Part of what I wanted to show is that there is a searching intellectual and emotional life in people who aren't educated and who aren't rich."

Of his lead character, Chaon says, "Jonah in particular is somebody who really is intellectually curious and wants to better himself without necessarily bettering himself financially. He doesn't want to go to college to get a good job. He wants to go to college to learn about the world."

"Troy," Chaon continues, "is a character that doesn't appear very often in American fiction – somebody who screws up but really does have good intentions. I wanted to write about somebody who screwed up in many ways but was still a good father. Without getting too autobiographical, my own father had a very hard life in a lot of ways, but he was a really good father. He really loved being a dad. And I wanted Troy to be somebody who represented that kind of pure family love."

Like his character Troy, Chaon was adopted as an infant. "That is something that has always been in my writing – the sense of other identities or other possibilities out there. Then about eight years ago, I had a meeting with my birth father and have gotten to know him a little. As it turned out, he had felt a lot of anguish over the decision to relinquish the baby, had always sort of hoped to meet up, and had been fairly active in trying to track my whereabouts down. The meeting was a very intense and life-changing experience for me. I wanted to figure out a way to get some of the emotion of that into a novel without actually writing an autobiographical novel."

"Besides," Chaon says, laughing, "I'm aware that whenever I use something or a version of someone that could be interpreted as autobiography, then I'm in trouble because people will get offended. I'm very careful about that. As a writer you learn how to find corollaries, how to channel real life into pretend life, how to transform the real impetus into fiction. For me that's a big part of the pleasure."

Southern heroines rarely leap off the page as full of life and trouble as Arlene Fleet, the headstrong protagonist and erstwhile alter ego of young Atlanta writer Joshilyn Jackson, whose marvelous debut, gods in Alabama, is fixing to slap some sense into modern Southern fiction. Before we've even finished the first page of this most unladylike romp through the Southern gothic hymnal, we learn that Arlene left podunk Possett, Alabama, a dozen years earlier after secretly murdering the high-school quarterback and kicking his body deep into the kudzu. What's more, we're already inexplicably cheering her on. Shouldn't someone at least ask, Lord, what's gotten into that girl?

Well, the Lord truly works in mysterious ways in Arlene's case. When she headed to Chicago for college, she made a pact with the Man Upstairs: in exchange for keeping Jim Beverly's body from the light of day, she vowed to neither lie, engage in sex outside of marriage, nor return to Possett, which she calls "the fourth rack of hell." But when Jim's old girlfriend Rose Mae Lolly shows up in Chicago looking for answers, Arlene figures all bets are off and reluctantly returns to Possett, where she reunites with her loving, racist Aunt Florence and introduces everyone to her very black, very Yankee boyfriend Burr.

'Sweet Home Alabama' meets 'Guess Who's Coming to Dinner' as Arlene stumbles toward a redemption that even Rhett and Scarlett would never have imagined.

Sweet Home Alabama meets Guess Who's Coming to Dinner as Arlene stumbles toward a redemption that even Rhett and Scarlett would never have imagined. Foulmouthed and hilariously frank, gods in Alabama is just the shot of sour to counter the diabetic-coma-inducing sweetness that seems to have overtaken Southern literature lately. Seekers of nostalgia should try the next book on the left.

It is both surprising and charming to find that Jackson, a happily married 30-something mother of two, still fumbles the one question she'll face ad nauseum this year.

"The first thing my editor asked was, so, how much of you is in Arlene? REALLY NOT A LOT!" she recalls by phone from Atlanta, with extended laughter. "Sure, OK, for the record, if we're doing bedpost notches, Arlene wins hands-down, she wins on an Olympic level, I'm pleased to say. She lives a lot more intensely than I do, and I hope, Lord, that I make better choices. I love Arlene. I think she has a good heart and she's funny and she's smart. I wouldn't want to be her, but I'd hang out with her."

In fact, Jackson was something of the anti-Arlene in high school, being raised, as she puts it, "by a tribe of wild fundamentalists."

"I was the nicest girl. I was a missionary, I went to Guyana with my church group and I dated nice boys. I was good; I shone with the white light of goodness," she says. "Now college was a different story. If I hit an Arlene phase, it was in college."

Jackson caught the theater bug and pursued it, first at the University of West Florida, then at other Southern campuses. "If there was a college in the Southeast, honey, I stopped there," she says. "It was a checkered career path." She ultimately dropped out to pursue acting. She worked in regional repertory and dinner theater before returning to Georgia State, where she graduated with honors in English.

Jackson fell in love with her best friend Scott, a fellow theater major, and followed him to Chicago, where he worked in trade show production. Six years later, the couple returned to the Atlanta area, where they live now and are raising their seven-year-old son and two-year-old daughter.

According to Jackson, Arlene and Burr first appeared as minor characters in a short story eight years ago. The author loved the dynamic between the two and used it to explore modern relationships in gods in Alabama. Burr's low-key love for his high-strung Southern belle helps endear them both to readers.

"I had a few Jane Austen moments; like Emma, I'm writing a heroine that nobody but me will love. But you know why I think Arlene is eventually a sympathetic character? I think a lot of it is Burr. She's a consummate bull****-er and she chooses to love the one guy who always sees through her. I think that says a lot about her, that she wants to be seen through; she wants honesty, she wants goodness, she's yearning for goodness. I think that ultimately makes her a really likable person, because we all do crappy things. It's the people who keep trying to choose what is right that you like. We all screw up."

The mixed-race couple enabled Jackson to explore racial friction in the New South. Her conclusion: get over it. "When you're dealing with racism in the South, my tolerance policy is, if you're 80 years old and you're a racist, what are you gonna do? OK, I'm sorry. And then the younger you get, the less tolerant I am about it, to where if you're my age or younger, I can't stomach it. It's like, what's wrong with you? I grew up like you grew up. This is not mandatory at this point."

When Kate Racculia finished her master’s in fine arts from Emerson College, her first thought was, wow, this is great, now I can be a writer and write fulltime! “Then I realized I had to pay off my loans,” laughs Racculia. 

As a result of this buzz-killing reality check, she found a 9-to-5 job in financial services marketing in Boston, and spent two and a half years’ worth of weekends writing what would become her first novel, This Must Be the Place. It’s a book bursting with ideas about grief, choices and what it means to belong, anchored by the quirky, exquisite story of Mona Jones, baker of wedding cakes and young proprietor of an upstate New York boardinghouse, and her teenage daughter Oneida, two perfectly content outsiders in their small town of Ruby Falls.

Racculia's remarkable debut is book bursting with ideas about grief, choices and what it means to belong.

Mona has a secret she’s held tight for more than a decade, one she shares only with her estranged friend Amy. When Amy is electrocuted while working on a Hollywood movie set, her grief-stricken husband Arthur realizes he didn’t know much about his wife at all. Determined to unravel his wife’s foggy past, Arthur travels to Ruby Falls with a pink shoebox filled with clues that only Mona understands, including an old postcard on which Amy wrote:

Mona Jones, I’m sorry. I should have told you. You knew me better than anyone—I think you knew me better than me. Don’t worry, I swear I’m happier dead. Anyway, I left you the best parts of myself. You know where to look.

Throughout her remarkably self-assured debut, Racculia sprinkles allusions to her childhood inspirations, including repeated references to special effects master Ray Harryhausen. It’s only fitting for this self-described “bit of a geek.”

“I feel like people have very different definitions of a geek versus a nerd versus a dork,” Racculia says matter-of-factly. “I think a geek is someone who is really passionate and really interested in things. I love learning things, knowing things. I love trivia. I’m a super science fiction fan. I grew up watching Star Trek and Dark Crystals.”

As an only child in a close-knit family in suburban Syracuse, she grew up writing from the time she could put her thoughts to paper—or rope someone else into doing it for her.

“I would dictate things to people who could write, my grandparents and parents, and then make little illustrations,” she says. “I think I’ve always thought of myself as a writer. I was lucky enough to grow up in a family that never said, ‘Kate, you shouldn’t go to school for that.’ I always had support from my family, teachers and friends.”

Considering Racculia’s own idyllic childhood and close-knit family (the only two readings on her publicity schedule so far are Boston and Syracuse, where extended family will pack the house—accordingly, she’s selecting non-racy excerpts to read), This Must Be the Place is at times surprisingly dark, tinged with regret over choices not made, paths not taken. After growing up together, inseparable, Amy and Mona run away one summer to the Jersey shore. Without consulting Mona, Amy makes a choice there that changes both their lives forever. 

Admirably, Racculia didn’t shy away from drawing out the imperfections in her characters, especially Amy.

“[In] a lot of fiction, when someone dies it’s very sad and books about grief are about letting that person go. There’s this tendency to make that person truly perfect, this wonderful person who has left us. I wanted to write about a person who made some horrible decisions,” Racculia says. “At first you see [Amy] through Arthur, you meet her and you like her, and then you find out more and like her less.”

That’s not to say This Must Be the Place is all doom and gloom. In Oneida, Racculia draws a particularly poignant, vibrant portrait of an awkward, frizzy-haired teenager just beginning to come into her own.

Oneida puts a tentative toe in the treacherous waters of the teenage dating pool when she is paired with fellow outcast Eugene on a class project. Eugene has his own issues: His father, a security guard, steals artwork from the museums he patrols and replaces the art with forgeries. His mother and sister spend all their free time rehearsing with their rock band. Eugene’s ham-handed wooing of Oneida is one of the highlights of the book, particularly when he blurts out to her, “If I don’t have real sex soon, I will die.”

“Eugene is kind of so clueless about who he really is,” says Racculia. “It was so fun to write about that family. It was the purest, completely made up part of the story. Obviously, I’ve never met an art forger.”

It’s this complete originality and fresh voice that has generated considerable buzz about Racculia’s novel. Her parents recently sent her a photo of the book’s poster in the window of a Barnes and Noble bookstore where she worked while in college.

“It’s so strange,” she said. “My high school friend posted that picture to Facebook. Friends my dad went to high school with were sending me pictures.”

It’s a time in her life that she calls “exciting and totally surreal,” an excitement that’s likely to grow as word spreads about her remarkable new book. 

How does it feel to be immortalized in fiction by a parent? That’s the central question of Mr Toppit, British author Charles Elton’s debut.

Mr Toppit is your first novel, but you’ve worked in the book business for many years. Have you seen fame affect a writer and his family the way it does the Hayman clan?
When I was a Literary Agent in the 1980's I worked for the firm that represented the Estate of A.A.Milne and I learnt the story of how much his son, Christopher Robin Milne, hated being in Winnie The Pooh and how it blighted his life. He ended up totally estranged from his parents. I also knew the huge sums of money that came in for the Estate, more than 50 years after the books' publication. That was the inspiration for my book—really the only idea I had when I started it, though the details. I was lucky in that, during the 15 years it took me to write my book, the Harry Potter books began to be published and suddenly my notion of a series of children's books “taking over the world” didn't seem so far-fetched. Since I've worked in television drama, I've seen many actors affected by the sudden fame a part can bring them. Not always a pretty sight.

Speaking of the Hayman clan, they’re an extremely compelling and absurd bunch. Were these portraits drawn from anyone in your life?
There are many autobiographical elements in the book. Sometimes, I took real characters I knew and put them in my fictional setting. Lila, the German illustrator, is based entirely on my sisters' German teacher at school, who became obsessed with our family. Laurie's mother Alma is based on my sister's mother-in-law, who really did call the police accusing her blameless son of trying to kill her. My mother was run over and killed by a cement truck, in the way that happens to the father in my book.

With Luke as the series’ star and Rachel omitted entirely, you’ve set up an interesting dichotomy. Which child do you think got the better deal?
It's interesting to weigh up whether Rachel or Luke get the better deal. In an ideal world, if Rachel had been a more stable character, I think she would have got the better deal, but her own demons bring her down. In a strange way, Luke—because of his detachment—is probably the best able to cope with the fame the Hayseed books bring, even though he hates it.

Was it always your intent to leave out the plot of The Hayseed Chronicles? Why did you choose to do so?
It was a very conscious decision. I wanted to give a flavour and hint at the enigmas but leave it to the reader to imagine what the books might be like. If I had included more, it would have all become too “solid.” As one of the reasons for the Hayseed books’ success is the way that everyone interprets the character of Mr Toppit in their own ways, I wanted my small excerpts to do the same thing.

The success of the Hayseed Chronicles is due almost entirely to chance. These days, it’s said that a publisher’s commitment dictates sales, but do you think there are still real-life books that could take off in such a fashion?
I think it happens less than it used to, but there are examples of books taking off by chance, or just word of mouth. The first Harry Potter book was bought by the publishers for a tiny advance and there was no marketing push. Also (I think) Lionel Shriver's We Need to Talk About Kevin took off (in England, anyway) without any pushing by the publishers. With the proliferation of Reading Groups, I think it could happen more. Conversely, there are many examples of large advances and massive hype that don't pay off in sales for publishers. I'm not even sure that good reviews help that much always. There's nothing like people simply loving a book and passing it on.

You do a terrific (and often quite funny) job of showing the difference between English and American sentiments. You’ve already published to much acclaim in the U.K.; do you think your book will be received differently in the States?
When my book came out in England last year, there was a lot of publicity. Penguin constructed a campaign and a website that looked like a fan site devoted to the (fictional) Hayseed books. On the day of publication, they took out a full-page ad in The London Times purporting to be a statement from 'The Hayseed Foundation' threatening legal action against my book Mr Toppit as if it were an unauthorized and possibly libelous biography of the Hayman family. The morning radio picked up the news and I got a lot of calls from friends worried that I might be heading for prison. The reviews were lovely, and getting onto the “Richard and Judy Book Show” (the U.K. equivalent of “Oprah”) helped turn it into a success. But, of course, the U.S. is a different market and it means a huge amount to me that the book works in the U.S. For one thing, I love the U.S. and lived in Los Angeles when I was an agent. But I think, because quite a lot of the book takes place in America, it will read differently to a U.S. audience—for one thing, the English sections will be the “foreign” ones. And, as Mr Toppit is about a series of books that become famous in America, I'd find it pretty painful if my book falls flat there!

Even though Mr Toppit is very much an adult book, what do you think grownups can learn from children’s literature?
One of the themes of my book is the difference between being a child and an adult. What I love about the best children's books—and one of the reasons I adapted several into films when I was producing drama—is that they show how clear-sighted children are, how things tend to be right or wrong, and how this gets compromised by the adult world for whom the gradations between right and wrong are infinite and confusing. To Kill a Mockingbird is one of the best examples of this, and a book I (and everyone else) love.

We have to ask. Who is Mr Toppit and what would finding him achieve?
I wish I knew the answer to this, and one of the points of my book is how differently he can be interpreted. For me, he's the dark at the top of the stairs, the questions we don't want answered, the place in our soul that we'd rather not go to, but mostly The Man Who Knows Too Much about all of us. But maybe—on the other hand—he's just a mirage, or some kind of mental optical illusion signifying a lot, but meaning nothing.

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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Read a review of Old Border Road

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Are all the books written then?

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

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

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

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

Describe your book in one sentence.
A young woman marries the wrong man and learns to live with the consequences of that choice.

What was your reaction when you found out your first novel would be published?
My heart started beating a little faster, and I made a series of phone calls, in rapid succession: first, to my mother; then, to my best writer friend; then, to my friend who inspired me to start writing fiction. I used many exclamation marks in my voice. The part of the day I remember the most, though, was actually the seconds right before I got the news, when I saw my agent’s number flashing on my cell phone. We never speak on the phone, so that was the moment I knew.

“Lizzie Bennet’s early refusal of Darcy greatly resonated with me, as I pondered the permanence of choice. What if she hadn’t been able to undo that so easily?”

Name one book you think everyone should read, and why.
Pride and Prejudice. While Austen is still—wrongly—considered by some parochial and limited in her scope, I do think her books contain a panoramic view of society, if not the entire world: social climbing, parental and romantic love, foolish and clever people and that incredible alchemy of emotions and tensions that happen when you put two lovers together in a room. Lizzie Bennet’s early refusal of Darcy greatly resonated with me, as I pondered the permanence of choice. What if she hadn’t been able to undo that so easily? I like to think of my own novel as Pride and Prejudice in South Korea.

“I think every great love, but especially unrequited love, is a secret to some extent. And secrets make you particularly vulnerable.”

Your main character, Soo-Ja, is married to one man and in love with another. What do you think is most interesting about unrequited love stories? Do you have a personal favorite literary love story?
Unrequited love has a purity and intensity that lends itself to a dramatic, conflict-ridden story. Because you don’t have the lover, you have to either try to get to the lover, or try to work through your feelings for the lover. This means lots of external and internal conflict. It also means you have a secret, and I think every great love, but especially unrequited love, is a secret to some extent. And secrets make you particularly vulnerable. One my favorite literary love stories, aside from Lizzie and Darcy, is Dr. Zhivago, which was one of my inspirations—I liked the idea of setting an intimate love story against a dramatic, historical background.

Can you tell us about your next project?
My next novel is about a mother and a daughter relationship. It’s very different from This Burns My Heart in the sense that it’s contemporary, and set in America. But it’s still going to deal with a lot of strong emotions.