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.

The title of your book is intriguing. Which is the country that is forgotten, Korea or the United States? Or is it a metaphor for what an immigrant has to leave behind?

The title worked in a few different ways that I liked. It refers to Korea—not only the Korea that the family in the book leaves behind, but the Korea that was lost when it was divided. In my book, I wanted the break between the sisters to be a kind of echo of that split—and for the family’s exile from their homeland (where they belonged, where they felt whole) to be an echo of the loss of that older Korea. On a metaphorical level, the title also refers to the sisters’ estrangement—so the forgotten country is their childhood closeness, their innocence and the past.

You have a degree in mathematics as well as creative writing. What effect, if any, does math have on your writing?

It’s funny: When I was a math major in college I wrote stories all the time, and now whenever I write, I’m always sneaking in some math. I love both disciplines because it seems to me that they’re both ultimately about learning how to make sense of the world, trying to organize the chaos and describe and communicate it in a meaningful and beautiful way.

Siblings play such an important role in your book. Do you have siblings, and what makes that relationship so special?

I have one older brother, and he’s the best. We shared toys and stuffed animals, and we wrote and made books together! The thing about being a younger sibling is that your older sibling is so much more important and large in your world than you are in theirs when you’re kids. Despite my best efforts to be just like him, we’re very different. Still, all the ways that we’re similar make me feel a sense of belonging that I don’t have with anyone else. He knows where I’m from, and he’s the only one in the world who’s from there too. So I feel lucky and happy to have him.

Janie discovers some secrets about an aunt that she thought had died in Korea. This is based on an incident in your own family—can you tell us about it?

I found out in college that my father had a sister I’d never known about, and that she had disappeared when he was a child. I still know almost nothing about what really happened. The North Koreans used to raid dorms and kidnap girls, and this is what my father’s family thought had happened to her, but they didn’t talk about it—at least not to us kids. I think my way of exploring that marked-off territory was to make up stories about the parts of it that interested me.

I love the way the folktales that are told in the novel reinforce some of its themes, such as obedience and sacrifice.

Thanks! Growing up, my parents told me so many stories, night after night—and I loved all of them: folktales, and fairy tales, legends and myths from all different cultures. They shaped my view of the world and my place in it, and they instilled certain expectations and values in me. I still love all those stories, and that’s part of why they’re in the book, but I also wanted to engage with them a little more and push back.

RELATED CONTENT: Read our review of Forgotten Country.

In her debut novel—voted by BookPage readers as their most anticipated book of 2012—Nichole Bernier has written the story of a friendship full of twists, turns and heartache. We asked Bernier a few questions about the book's origin, her life as a mother of five, and her book's place in the literary canon—and got the scoop on where she's going next.

This is your first novel. Can you tell us a little about your publication story?
I’d been a magazine writer for a decade, and though I love reading fiction, I’d never had an urge to write it. But after I lost a friend in the September 11th terrorist attacks, there were things I couldn’t work through in my regular ways of writing. One day in early 2005, shortly after the birth of my third child, I wrote a dream sequence about a woman imagining her friend’s last moments. That sequence became the beginning of chapter three, and it’s never changed.

My big rookie error was in querying immediately after I finished my first draft. My mental timeline was still that of a magazine freelancer: finish, publish, paycheck. I wasn’t used improving something slowly and tortuously with no one in the world even waiting for it. We’d just moved to Boston and I was expecting my fourth child, and eager to cross “Get Agent” off my to-do list. There were some requests for partials and fulls, all leading to rejection.

I put the manuscript aside and fell into the rhythm of life with a newborn, not quite knowing what to do next. A few months passed. Then I received a three-page, thoughtful rejection letter from a well-known agent. Even as a rookie, I recognized this as more of a blessing than a rejection, and threw myself into revisions. When I felt ready to query again, I received three offers of representation, and chose agent Julie Barer.

Julie worked with me for a year, urging me to streamline my story and weave more closely the timelines of my two main characters. After she sold it to Crown, the trajectory of the process suddenly made sense, all the steps and hard work, as if I were viewing it as a whole from a space satellite. 

It was tremendously satisfying to explore that juxtaposition of the faces we show the world and those we hold close.         

Kate is responsible for deciding what to do with her recently deceased friend Elizabeth’s trunk of journals. How did this idea of bestowing journals (via a will) come to you?
I’ve always kept a journal, and been fascinated with why, exactly, people do this crazy thing, put private thoughts to paper. What happens if you’re hit by a truck tomorrow? Were you really writing for your own reflection and catharsis, or were you having your say? Years ago for peace of mind I wrote an informal note in my will designating a trustee for my journals, even if it simply meant identifying someone to destroy them.

The what-ifs that generated the novel spooled out from there: what if you inherited the journals of a friend without clear direction what to do with them, and learned you didn’t know your friend nearly as well as you thought, including where she was really going when she died? How might you feel about why she didn’t confide in you, and how might that make you realize ways you were not candid with loved ones, yourself? It was tremendously satisfying to explore that juxtaposition of the faces we show the world and those we hold close, our private ambitions and fears, and what it costs us in the end.

Reading through Elizabeth’s journals, Kate suddenly sees their entire friendship in a different light. Would you read your best friend’s journal, if you had the chance?
No. People have their reasons for what they reveal and what they do not, and I would never want to force that exposure. But many people hold things closer than they in fact need to, assuming they’ll be misunderstood or that people don’t care to get involved. The most useful thing we can do as friends is listen for hints and dare to ask questions, help someone crack open the door. Signal receptiveness, and that we care.

Kate is terribly preoccupied with 9/11 and has a lot of fears/neuroses in its aftermath. Her husband doesn’t really understand this. Do you find yourself sympathizing with Kate, or are you more of the mindset of her husband Chris, who feels we should live each day as if it were our last?
In 2002, it felt as if anything could happen—reservoirs poisoned, Ebola unleashed, that you could wake up and the sky would be magenta. I think most people, myself included, felt for a while these things were not only possible, but probable. Most of us moved on from that paralyzing fear, but it was fascinating to me to create the profile of a person who was a confident and rational person, but became obsessed with protecting her family, and could not move on.

A big part of your novel concerns Elizabeth and Kate’s struggle as working mothers. As a mother of five, how do you manage both raising your kids and finding time to write?
Before I started my novel, my third child was six months old, and I was a fairly multifaceted person. When I became truly serious about my novel, most of my hobbies went down the tubes. It’s amazing how being a busy parent has the laser-like ability to triage what’s really important to you. I have an unscientific theory that if you are an involved parent, regardless of how many children you have, you get about three things to call your own. And the only other things that have remained for me are being involved in my kids’ schools and a base level of exercise, which went from running (reluctant, frenetic) to yoga (strengthening and calming). More than anything else, though, it was critical to have a supportive spouse who’d give me the hours and sometimes days away to really immerse myself in tough sections of writing and revision.

You write on your website, “before there were blogs, there were journals. And in them we’d write as we really were, not as we wanted to appear.” Do you find yourself tailoring your thoughts/emotions when you write somewhere like Twitter, since it’s so much more exposed?
Yes and no. Social media is wonderful in the same triage way that parenting is: it forces you to pick what you want to be known for. In the same way I wouldn’t want to say anything in front of my family that wasn’t sincere or kind, I don’t want that part of my permanent online record. But for social media to be fun and effective for me, I need to be authentic, and sometimes that means being exhausted and irreverent about raising five children. But everyone deals with unruly kids, so even in “authentic” I aim for a value-added, something to lift it above a mundane rant: humor, insight, a different way of seeing things.

One of my favorite parts of the book reads, “it was a gift, solitude. But solitude with another person—that was an art.” Do you think it’s fully possible to share solitude with another person? How do you manage the time to find—and create—that?
That’s the million-dollar question for relationships, I think. If you can be quiet in another person’s company and engaged in your own engrossing activity, with no discomfort or distraction or envy, it’s priceless. But it’s hard. There’s a lot of bustle that has to get done in the downtimes, and even when you go quiet, there are some things that are just difficult to do in the presence of someone else. I can’t write in a room where the TV is on, which is how my husband likes to work at night, but sometimes I join him to do other reading and computer work. I think it’s a matter of finding the common ground, the common setting, choosing where and when you can find that togetherness.

You have already been compared to other successful authors in the “educated women’s lit” group, such as J. Courtney Sullivan and Meg Wolitzer. How would you define educated women’s literature?
I think that phrase first came out of Carolyn See’s review of Nancy Munro’s New World Monkeys. I took it to mean readers who want to be challenged by what they read, be willing to go along with characters who might rub you the wrong way, but you still find them, their voice and their issues and circumstances, fascinating. Unlikeable characters are a hot button in the book world because for some they are riveting, drawn in a train-wreck way that grabs your investment, while others are turned off if they cannot identify with a character. It’s a bit of an excursion and an education, reading beyond your own experience and beyond your comfort zone.

You are one of the creators of the popular literary blog Beyond the Margins. Can you tell us a little about how that came about?

This has been such fun. We were a dozen writers who’d met in the literary circles around Boston, and two years ago decided to create a vehicle for daily essays on the craft and business of publishing. It started as a platform for our writing, as many of us were in the chute toward getting agents and novels sold. But it developed into an online literary magazine run amok—a place to showcase the writing of great guest authors, celebrate and promote other authors’ releases, and yes, interact with agents and editors.

We run fun monthly features such as The Page Turner—booksellers writing about their favorite lesser-known books—and Out Of My Comfort Zone, authors describing a recent bit of research or writing that made them distinctly uneasy. Save the Bookstore Day is a monthly feature that grew out of our passion and fear for independent bookstores, which seem to be dropping like flies. We also maintain an active Twitter feed, @BTMargins, to share news, essays and jobs in the writing world.

What are you working on next?
I’ve become somewhat obsessed with an eerie island, a fascinating and disturbing place that spans three distinct phases of history. The ruins are vivid, and haunting. It’s off-limits to the public, but I had the good fortune to spend a day there shadowing the Park Service. I’m at the point now where I’m fleshing out the story, and trying not to let the nightmares keep me awake at night.

Read our review of The Unfinished Life of Elizabeth D.

Who among us hasn’t wished for more hours in a day? In Karen Thompson Walker’s exciting debut novel, The Age of Miracles, we get exactly that—with dire consequences.

Eleven-year-old Julia is going about the business of growing up in suburban San Diego—piano lessons, sleepovers, a cute skater boy—when the inexplicable occurs: The earth begins to slow on its axis. Days stretch out, growing first by a few minutes, then by hours. Clocks become absurd, gravity goes wonky, the sun becomes a menace, the long nights are cold and terrifying. Society must decide whether to follow “clock time” (the government’s choice) or real time (the anarchic, countercultural approach). Kids wait for the school bus in pitch-dark; people hang blackout curtains to sleep through the bright sun of night. No one knows how long the slowing might last or if it will get worse. Suddenly, adolescence is the least of Julia’s worries.

Speaking by phone from her home in Brooklyn, Walker says the idea for The Age of Miracles came from a newspaper article about the 2004 tsunami in Indonesia. The earthquake that preceded the tsunami was so powerful it affected the speed of the earth on its axis, shortening the length of a day by fractions of a second. “I just found that very haunting,” Walker says. “Something we think of as stable and steady—sunset and sunrise.”

She immediately wrote a short story inspired by the notion. Years later she went back to the story and felt there was more to say. She also made a crucial change: to slow the earth, rather than speed it up. A grown-up Julia tells the story, looking back on the profound and rapid changes that happened to the world as she grew up. The result is an enthralling novel with multiple layers of tension between the pace of life and the pace of the story.

To adolescents, it can seem as if the world is moving at a glacial pace, that adulthood and its freedoms are endlessly far away. For Julia, this is literally true. Her days are twice as long as they should be. Nevertheless, she’s still in most ways an ordinary (confused, alienated, hopeful) adolescent, beset by life-changing events and emotional upheaval. Walker’s much buzzed-about novel captures all this with eerie precision. “I often had the feeling in those days that I was being watched,” Julia says in the book, “but I think the sensation was a product of the exact opposite conditions.”

Walker credits the authenticity of Julia’s voice to “the emotional memory” of her teenage years. “It’s just an age that I remember well,” she says. “It’s when you first start noticing things in the adult world, and so much is changing. It’s visceral.”

“Everything in the book is invented,” she adds. “None of it happened to me—but I do remember the feeling. As you grow up, certain friends drift away, and there’s your first love, your first interest.”

To make the science of the book feel equally authentic, Walker says, she had to maintain a balance between imagination and hard facts.

“I did some research but it needed to also come from my imagination,” she says. “So it was a combination of my imagination and real science.”

She filed away details from newspaper articles that were tangentially related to her story—things like how the earth’s magnetic field works, how to grow crops in greenhouses, the effects of radiation. Once she had a completed draft, she summoned the courage to show it to an astrophysicist to make sure nothing she’d written was glaringly implausible. “That was scary,” she says, laughing. “I was relieved by how many of the things I wrote were plausible.”

Her job was made a little easier, she adds, because the story focuses on the lives of the people involved, keeping the science in the background. In fact the science behind what’s happening is often mysterious to the characters; the effects of the slowing only have to be explained to the degree that a very bright, observant 11-year-old narrator would be able to grasp.

Julia is a sharp and funny character, and the story has its share of humor and light. But it’s also a grim look at high-speed ecological disaster, and could easily be read as a warning about the importance of treasuring the planet. Walker says she herself is no doomsayer. But, she adds, “I am drawn to stories that have some sort of threat or danger; it has a way of raising the stakes.”

Walker, who wrote the novel while working as an editor at Simon & Schuster, has since quit her job to focus on writing, something she’d never imagined she would have the opportunity to do. “I didn’t realize how tempting it would be,” she says. “It’s been really unexpected, amazing, but also hard to process.”

Tell the Wolves I’m Home is a coming-of-age story that may be one of the best books of the year. In it, 14-year-old June grieves after her Uncle Finn dies of AIDS. In BookPage, Stephenie Harrison writes, “The narrative is as tender and raw as an exposed nerve, pulsing with the sharpest agonies and ecstasies of the human condition.”

Debut author Carol Rifka Brunt explains why an emotional connection with readers is so important.

What was the inspiration for Tell the Wolves I’m Home? I know you worked on the novel over the course of several years. Did the characters, plot or setting come first?
For me, stories always start with the language, the voice. Until I can hear the voice, I’m lost. I can start to write, but the words feel flat. The first line: “My sister Greta and I were having our portrait painted by our uncle Finn that afternoon because he knew he was dying” is pretty much the first line of Tell the Wolves I’m Home I wrote. Over three and a half years, this line stayed the same.

Before that I just had an idea of an uncle painting a final portrait of his niece. I was working on a few short stories at the time and this scenario just came to me one day. I didn’t know what he was dying of or what the relationship between the two was like. I just knew that he was making the painting as a last ditch attempt at leaving something in the world, forging a final relationship that would outlast him. Once I had June’s voice I could start to feel my way into the story.

Much later—like maybe two years into the process—I realized that part of the inspiration for the AIDS aspect of the story very likely came from an experience surrounding my eighth grade English teacher. He was an exchange teacher from England, very well-liked. He left to return to London at the end of the year and a few months later we heard that he’d died. He was only in his 30s, so this was really shocking. Not long after that we heard that he’d had AIDS. With all the confusion and fear around AIDS at that time, this seemed almost unreal. It was the first time AIDS had entered our lives and it made a big impression. It feels strange that I didn’t see the connection between that teacher and this story. My physical descriptions of Toby in Tell the Wolves could just as easily be descriptions of that teacher. So similar. And yet I didn’t even notice.

My book about a friendship between a teenager and a man dying of AIDS was getting attention from multiple editors at big houses? Not what I was expecting at all.

What was your reaction when you found out your first novel would be published?
Stunned? Elated? I was actually on a writers retreat in a big old country house in rural England with a group of people I’d never met when it all started happening. My agent had submitted the novel on a Friday and by Monday we had a couple editors interested.  My book about a friendship between a teenager and a man dying of AIDS was getting attention from multiple editors at big houses? Not what I was expecting at all.  I sequestered the library and spoke to editor after editor about the book. That alone was an amazing experience. Just hearing editorial ideas, having people who seemed passionate about my work, was wonderful.

An auction was scheduled and I actually left the retreat for a day so I could deal with whatever was about to happen. I was home alone when I heard that we had sold to Dial Press (Random House) and I remember just jumping up and down in my kitchen like a maniac. After three and a half years of writing and revising, five months of submitting to agents with a collection of about 50 agent rejections over that time, I just couldn’t quite believe it was all really happening.

Your main character, June, is 14 when the novel begins. Can you describe your life at that age? Did anything significant happen to you then that led you to write June as a teenager?
You know, I really tried to avoid falling into the “autobiographical first novel” trap. I would have loved for this story not to have been set in Westchester in the late '80s where I grew up, but that setting just worked so well for the story. I seem to have a very clear memory of my 14-year-old mindset. Maybe too clear! I gave June a lot of the geeky preoccupations I had at her age—a romantic notion of the Middle Ages, a collection of Choose Your Own Adventure books, a love of escapist period movies—and also maybe the sense of trying to figure out my place in the world. Like June, I remember a strong sense of viewing things from the outside, of not really being part of things that were going on around me, of feeling like a watcher rather than a participant.

Having said all that, the story itself isn’t autobiographical at all. There was no charismatic uncle in the city and the relationship between June and Greta is very different from my relationship with my own sister. Even June’s parents are nothing like my own.

For June, the Middle Ages are her happy place—where she imagines herself when she wants comfort. Do you have something that gives you the same kind of solace in your imagination?
I think looking to another place or time to give you happiness is really the wrong way to go about it. I think it’s something that’s appealing when the here and now isn’t a particularly fulfilling place or when you can’t really see where you fit in the world. In Tell the Wolves there’s June with her feeling that she would be more at home in an earlier time and the quite nerdy Ben who is immersed in Dungeons & Dragons. Both of those pursuits seem to speak to a desire to reinvent oneself as more important or more powerful somehow. So, to answer the question, at this point in my life I don’t really look to escape as a way to feel comfortable. I try to live my real life in a way that gives me the things I need.

On the other hand, maybe writing is the most escapist pursuit of all. Hour after hour spent dreaming up other places and lives. Maybe that’s my way of removing myself.

How do you make emotions feel so real on the page?
I think writing in first person is a big help with really getting into the emotions of your characters. Writing first person is almost like being an actor. You’re directly voicing somebody else. I think I was often feeling what June was feeling when I was writing.

Also, like so much in novel writing, emotion is tied in closely with other elements. Robert Olen Butler, in his book From Where You Dream, talks about the importance of the sense of yearning in a work. Once you have an understanding of what your character yearns for, her deepest longing (and this might be something she’s not even aware she wants), I think you immediately set up a situation where anything affecting that has a certain power. From page one the reader can see how much June loves her Uncle Finn. She loses him quite early in the book, but he’s still there on every page. You feel her winning him and losing him again and again over the course of the book. I think that the evocation of emotion isn’t about the poignant events, but about that character with that particular yearning encountering those events. The job of the writer is to frontload the situation.

One final thing about this: I figured out at some point in the writing that the emotional arc of the story and even of each scene was as important, if not more important, than the arc of the plot. The event happens and then the emotional response to that is where the story really lies. The whole story is in the reaction. If you shortchange the reader of the character’s full reaction to an event you lose the emotional pull of the story.

Did you have to do any research in preparing to write this novel?
I did quite a bit of reading around AIDS—the timeline for availability of blood tests and AZT and the attitudes and atmosphere of the time—but I also relied a lot on my own memories of the late '80s. Since the book is narrated by a 14-year-old, I had the luxury of not including things she wouldn’t have known.

I had a look at Ryan White’s autobiography, which contained a few helpful nuggets. I also looked around for essays written at the time and came across John Weir’s piece “AIDS Stories,” which appeared in Harper’s close to the time the book is set. Weir writes about running a writing workshop for men with/dying from AIDS. That essay really gave me a window on the feeling of helplessness that many people must have felt around that time.

As a writer, do you have a personal mission statement or purpose?
I’ve been reading a lot of truly excellent narrative nonfiction over the last few years. While writing Wolves I found myself wondering what the novel could bring to the table that nonfiction couldn’t. I’ll admit that it was a hard question to answer. The nonfiction I’d been reading—and none of it was memoir, but rather general narrative nonfiction—was gripping and filled with compelling characters, plus it had the added bonus of revealing something of the real world. So if there were all these amazing true stories, what was the point of writing about invented characters and situations?

After much thought, I concluded that the gift of the novel lies in the emotional connection it can provide. A novel has the ability to put the reader right inside a character, to let the reader understand the way another person thinks and feels. So, that’s my mission as a novelist—to use the novel to emotionally connect with readers. If I want to make an intellectual argument or explore an issue or examine something political, I’d do it through nonfiction. Story and connection are the only goals I have for novel writing.

What’s next for you?
I’m working on several short stories and the beginnings of a new novel at the moment. I would love to talk about the new novel idea, but I have an irrational fear of jinxing it if I reveal anything too soon. Plus, I have only a small amount of faith that I’ll be able to pull off what I’d like to do.

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Read a review of Tell the Wolves I'm Home.