"I wanted to write about Wisconsin,” Nickolas Butler says of the genesis of his soulful first novel, Shotgun Lovesongs, which gave voice to his homesickness.

“My first semester at the [Iowa] Writers' Workshop, I was down there alone. I was sleeping in this terrible apartment,” Butler says. Picture a fire-engine-red lower section of a bunk bed borrowed from his brother-in-law, a white table borrowed from his mother-in-law, and a folding chair, the only furnishings in the Iowa City apartment where Butler lived from Monday to Thursday before returning to his family.

“I missed my wife; I missed my son; I was just overcome by loneliness and homesickness,” he recalls. “I was sitting at that table, thinking about my hometown, and I started writing. The first 35 pages came basically in one sitting.”

Those opening pages are told from the point of view of Henry “Hank” Brown, who, with his wife Beth and their two young children, struggles to maintain a family farm on the outskirts of a tiny Wisconsin town named Little Wing. Hank’s is one of five voices that tell this story of contemporary small-town Wisconsin life and of close friendships disrupted by the passage of time.

“There’s a little bit of me in every character,” Butler says during a call that reaches him at his home in Fall Creek, Wisconsin, a hamlet outside of Eau Claire, where he grew up. “Hank is probably the moral, ethical side of me. He’s got this strong moral compass. He’s the most boring character in the book for me, frankly. Because basically he’s not going to do anything wrong, and that’s not super exciting.”

Small-town Wisconsin roots link five longtime friends in Butler's lyrical novel.

Most readers won’t actually agree with Butler’s assessment of Hank’s boredom factor. Hank is the novel’s true north, an intelligent, observant exemplar of the best of Midwestern values. He is in many ways a far better man than his close childhood friend, turned not-so-close friend, Leland  “Lee” Sutton, who under the nom de musique Corvus has become an international rock star. Lee’s first album—“Shotgun Lovesongs”—was recorded in a converted chicken coop outside of Little Wing and gives the novel its title. Lee’s ill-advised confession to Hank leads to one of the bigger disruptions among boyhood friends in Little Wing.

The character of Leland has also already brought some national media attention to Shotgun Lovesongs because of Butler’s real-life relationship with Justin Vernon, founder of the Grammy-winning band Bon Iver. Butler went to high school with Vernon, so some early readers have assumed that Leland is a thinly veiled representation of Vernon. Butler says he hasn’t spoken to Vernon in 18 years.

“You have to understand that in this community there was no template for artistic success before him. Justin gave a lot of us this sense of confidence that we could go out and do something different. So the character Leland is inspired by him, but he’s obviously not based on him. Justin has never been shot in the leg, and I don’t think he’s even ever been married. One thing that sets him apart from so many other people is that he went away, gained success, and then came home. He’s really involved in the community. Being homesick for Eau Claire and thinking about its landscape, he was a really nice way to get into all of that.”

Still, Butler says there’s much more of himself than Vernon in the character of Lee. “The story of Lee’s first album is a lot about the pressure I felt with this book. I was nearing the end of grad school. I’d had a string of terrible jobs that never paid any money at all and were at times dangerous, and I didn’t want to go back to that. I had a young kid, and I just wanted to be something more. So I felt a great pressure and urgency to write the book.”

Through Lee’s and Hank’s difficulties with each other, Shotgun Lovesongs vividly portrays the tensions that sometimes develop in male friendships as people grow away from high school and college and into adulthood.

“I’m hitting a point in my life when some of the easy friendships are becoming more difficult because of all the different real-world pressures: money, marriage, kids and jobs,” Butler says. “All of a sudden friends begin wondering why it’s so easy for somebody and so difficult for somebody else to make money. Why is it easy for couple A to have kids when couple B can’t? Something happens when these sorts of jealousies get overlaid on long-term friendships. I was experiencing a little bit of that in my life and was wondering why.”

"For me it was important to say, hey, this is the face of small-town America right now. It’s not what you think.”

Butler’s novel also voices an emphatic love song to what he calls “my place on earth,” and to small-town life in general. Not that Butler is unaware of the difficulties and of the changing nature of America’s small towns. Several characters in the novel end up leaving for greater opportunities in Chicago or Minneapolis. Lee for a while lives in a rural boarding house with Mexican laborers. “I don’t think it’s offensive to say, but a lot of the work being done around here is not being done by natural-born American citizens. It’s being done by really hardworking Mexican people, and that’s not something I’ve seen in literature. For me it was important to say, hey, this is the face of small-town America right now. It’s not what you think.”

For a number of years while he made his weekly trips to Iowa, Butler and his wife, an attorney and “a voracious reader,” and their son lived in the Twin Cities area. As he was revising the novel, the couple had a second child. Butler says they had been saving for years to return to the Eau Claire area, where his wife had also grown up. With the sale of the novel, last August they bought their house and 16 acres of land in Fall Creek. “My kids have all four grandparents within a 10-minute drive,” Butler says. “You can’t beat that.”

And despite the fact that it is 18 below zero outside when we begin our conversation, Butler says, “This world that I inhabit is important to me. It is beautiful to me. . . . I feel extremely fortunate now. I do feel like I’m kind of living inside a dream.”

It’s hard to say whether Ruth Reichl is best known for her scrumptiously honest memoirs (Tender at the Bone, Comfort Me with Apples, Garlic and Sapphires) or her long stints as restaurant reviewer for the New York Times and editor of Gourmet magazine.

But one thing’s for sure: Reichl’s first novel—which comes after a career focused on nonfiction—is well worth the wait. Delicious! tells the story of Billie Breslin, a young woman who moves to New York to pursue a career in food writing and escape her sad life in California. She lands a gig assisting the famous editor of Delicious!, a venerable food magazine on the brink of closing in the midst of the recession. Billie dives into the world of Manhattan cuisine, becoming fast friends with the magazine’s flamboyant travel writer, Sammy, who persuades her to lose the thick glasses and frumpy clothes she’s hidden behind for years.

Reichl weaves real-life chef James Beard into the story of a young assistant at a failing food magazine.

When Billie discovers a treasure trove of World War II correspondence between James Beard and a young girl named Lulu, she knows she has found something special. But the rest of the letters have been elaborately hidden by a long-forgotten Delicious! staff librarian, and when the magazine is abruptly shuttered, Billie and Sammy race to crack the code to find them before the Delicious! building is sold.

One doesn’t reach the career heights Reichl has without taking chances, but the idea of writing a novel daunted her for many years.

“I’m truly a slave to fiction,” Reichl says in an early spring interview from her home in snowy upstate New York. “I can’t imagine being alive and not having books to read. It’s always been my greatest joy—diving into someone else’s world. But I was afraid that I couldn’t do it. I always said if I didn’t have a day job, I could do it. Then all of a sudden, I didn’t have a day job.”

Reichl is referring, of course, to the closure of Gourmet in 2009 due to declining ad revenue, after she’d been at the helm for 10 years. It was, she said, the best job she’s ever had, one that she plans to write about in a future memoir.

“It was sort of everything that I could have imagined,” she says. “I was surrounded by people who cared passionately about the subject. It was a time in American life where other people were starting to care about food as much as I did. We just said, let’s push the envelope as much as we can.”

With the magazine closed, Reichl branched out to other projects. She is a judge on Bravo’s “Top Chef Masters,” and has hosted food programming on PBS. 

She also realized that the time had come to make good on her pledge to write fiction.

“To me, nonfiction is kind of getting in the shower and deciding how you’re going to go that day,” Reichl says. “After 40-something years, it’s natural to me. Fiction is way harder. It involves a lot of waiting.”

Reichl found a cookbook from the 1940s filled with rationing recipes (“truly awful”) and directions for victory gardens. World War II must have been in her subconscious, because shortly afterward, she got her inspiration.

“It was really a gift,” she recalls. “I walked into a library, and I had a fully formed image of finding letters from a little girl to James Beard during World War II. I sat down and wrote them all. Lulu was a gift who came to me. The rest of the book formed around her.”

"When I thought about what this book was, it was very much about how food connects us across time and space. . . . In some ways, this book is a thank you to James Beard for all he did for Marion Cunningham.”

Reichl actually knew Beard, the cook and author who is widely credited with growing America’s love of cuisine. She was also a close friend of Marion Cunningham, the food writer who served as Beard’s longtime assistant.

“When I thought about what this book was, it was very much about how food connects us across time and space,” Reichl says. “He just seemed like the obvious person. He was extremely generous to his readers, and he is someone I think who might very well have become entranced with a Lulu. In some ways, this book is a thank you to James Beard for all he did for Marion Cunningham.”

It could be argued that the book is also a love letter to New York City. One of the best parts of Delicious! is its very specific, lovingly rendered depiction of Manhattan, from Billie’s office in a gorgeous Federal-style mansion to a hip boutique under the High Line to a fantastic cheese shop tucked into a city block. Readers can practically hear the taxi horns.

“I am a New Yorker to my core,” Reichl declares. “I grew up in Greenwich Village. One of the great joys of my life is wandering New York City—just getting on the subway and getting off somewhere and wandering.”

Since the novel is about a food writer at a famous New York magazine that is suddenly shut down, Reichl understands if readers assume the story is autobiographical. But it most emphatically is not, she says. Billie’s path may mirror Reichl’s in some ways, but that is where the similarity ends, Reichl insists.

“My biggest problem was in focusing so hard on making Billie not like me, I wasn’t letting her be herself,” Reichl says. “I had to get out of my own way. I had to get used to sitting quietly and just letting Billie be herself.”

Billie starts her time in New York as a mousy assistant, uncertain and still smarting from a tragedy she is unwilling to come to grips with. But she comes into her own as the book unfolds, taking on writing assignments, making friends, exploring the city and even finding romance. She is a wholly likable character, and the supporting players at the magazine and in Billie’s neighborhood are a hoot. The letters from Lulu are sweet and evocative (although Billie and Sammy’s search for them drags on a bit too long), and the mouthwatering food descriptions throughout the book are vintage Reichl (she even makes roasted pig’s ears sound appetizing).

Delicious! is like a family-style meal around a big table: fun, loud, at times messy and, ultimately, completely satisfying.

This article was originally published in the May 2014 issue of BookPage. Download the entire issue for the Kindle or Nook.

In a world where writers are eternally reminded to “write what you know,” debut novels are often thinly veiled memoirs, or at least tentatively tied to the author’s own experience through location or life experience. Not so for screenwriter Laline Paull, whose ambitious first novel, The Bees, doesn’t feature a single human character—and it’s set in the labyrinthine world of the hive. There, worker bee Flora 717 discovers she’s also able to lay eggs, a one in 10,000 anomaly that draws the notice of the queen as well as some unseen complications. We asked Paull, who lives in London, a few questions about the inspiration behind this remarkable first book.

Novels that portray animals as human-like in their thoughts and desires aren’t unheard of—from Watership Down to The Evolution of Bruno Littlemore—but insects are an unusual choice. Where did the idea for The Bees come from?
I made a new friend who was a beekeeper, and then I found out that her cancer had returned, and she died soon afterwards. She had a very beautiful conscious death and wrote her own funeral service, in which she mentioned her bees. In the immediate aftermath of her death and as a way of honouring her, I started to read about bees. And then something amazing happened. What had started as a way to try to keep close to someone who had gone became a genuine fascination with the most miraculous creature that is the honeybee. One extraordinary fact led to another, and within a week I was absolutely hooked on finding out more, and then, convinced someone must have seen the dramatic potential for a novel set in a beehive. I combed the Internet, then when I couldn’t find one, raced to make it mine.

How has writing The Bees changed the way you look at insects, flowers? What surprised you the most in your research about bees?
The more I found out about the natural world and the genius all around us that is so far beyond human invention, the more awestruck I became. I can see why scientists become abstracted and obsessed—I certainly did for a while, during my research. Even today I have to stop and watch a bee foraging. Today in my garden I saw a fantastic big bumblebee queen house-hunting for a good site to make a burrow. I watched her for so long that my coffee was cold when I went back to it. And the most surprising thing about my research into bees was getting in touch with that feeling of child-like wonder when you look at the world and think: Wow!

The hive is such a complex structure, like a cathedral or castle. Did you have any architectural model in mind when you were creating it?
I’m so glad that that aspect of the book succeeds—I worked very hard to make the hive feel real and knowable. I looked at the floor plans of 5th-century B.C. Minoan palaces, I thought about the Tower of London, I looked at oil rigs, cathedrals. I thought about the infrastructure of a massive luxury hotel, and the staff required to keep those penthouse suites going, I thought about ocean liners—but in the end, I had to turn the hive on its side to make all the verticals horizontals, to be more familiar to a reader—and easier to write. The topography of the hive took me a long time and many bad drawings to get right. My 11-year-old stepson helped me; he’s a good cartoonist. I did one scribbled map that worked, not pretty, but accurate—and I stuck with that.

"I worked very hard to make the hive feel real and knowable. I looked at the floor plans of 5th-century B.C. Minoan palaces, I thought about the Tower of London, I looked at oil rigs, cathedrals. I thought about the infrastructure of a massive luxury hotel . . ."

Flora is a classic heroine—she is loyal to her kin and to her hive, yet is willing to risk her life to try new things. She stands for both tradition and change. Can you talk about creating her?
The key to writing Flora came when I found out in my research about the real fact of the laying worker, a one in 10,000 anomaly in the hive. I imagined being devout and orderly and never questioning the status quo—and then you find you’re pregnant. You become a sinner, a traitor, and yet you’ve never felt such love in your life—and how can that possibly be wrong? It was the ultimate opposition of instinct and duty, and that makes for great drama. And I’m a mother too, so I know that the law would mean nothing if your child’s life was at stake.

 "It was the ultimate opposition of instinct and duty, and that makes for great drama."

You write about the communication between the bees but also about their emotional states. Do you think insects are capable of feeling and thought?
Ah, I am not sure at all about that. We know that insects are irresistibly attracted to flowers, to what we, with our supposed “higher” consciousness, think of as beauty. Flowers are the sex organs of plants, pollen the sperm. Nectar, the lure to bring in the pollinators. Might insects feel some sort of arousal, at the sight of beauty? Men do. Might insects feel lust for each other? Why choose to mate with one, not another of their kind? The honest answer is I have no idea if insects can think and feel—but intuitively I feel they must, if not in any way that we can understand. I suppose I wrote The Bees in response to that very question.

Did you read other books about utopias and dystopias before writing The Bees? What other dystopian fictions or film would you recommend?
The Bees has been called a dystopia, and I suppose it is, but I didn’t conceive of it as such. I love books like Brave New World by the great Aldous Huxley, and of course 1984 and Animal Farm by George Orwell. I love most things Margaret Atwood writes, and I also love Mervyn Peake’s Ghormenghast. I was addicted to” Game of Thrones” on television while I was writing, so fantasy worlds are clearly attractive to me. And I bend the knee to JG Ballard—High-Rise, in particular.

Utopias I think are rather dull, compared to their opposites. We like to look over the wall of law and order, manners and good behavior. We like to see the wild side let out.

In what ways was writing a novel different than a screenplay? What surprised you about the process?
Compared to a screenplay, writing a novel was both harder and easier. I found it incredibly liberating to be able to tell as well as show, and I found that the discipline of working with story and visual images very useful in writing the novel. I love both forms—film and book. But the novel exists on its own terms—the screenplay still needs interpretation to truly live.

What’s next for you?
My next novel is set in the natural world again, as a character in itself, but also as the arena for much human conflict. More than that I don’t want to say right now, only because the spell is still binding.

ALSO IN BOOKPAGE: Read our review of The Bees.

British author Emma Healey may be only 29 years old, but she has created a poignant portrait of a woman with dementia in her luminous debut novel, which contains a double mystery.

Was there a specific inspiration for the character of Maud?
Although my father’s mother, Nancy, has dementia and her experiences gave me ideas for some of the scenes in the book, it was my mother’s mother, Vera, who most influenced the character of Maud. Vera died in 2008, before I’d gotten very far into writing Elizabeth Is Missing, but her voice is very like Maud’s. In fact my mother recently rediscovered a tape recording of Vera, telling stories about her childhood, and I was surprised at how alike the two voices are: both slightly jokey, sometimes irritable, curious about people and full of detail.

You are in your 20s—how did you get yourself into the mindset of a pensioner with dementia?
I’m not sure I know, but that process was certainly the interest the book held for me. Writing as Maud was incredibly freeing, as I knew readers wouldn’t immediately assume her thoughts were mine or that her life was a thinly veiled version of my own.

Similarly, you obviously weren’t alive in the 1940s! How did you research that part of the book?
Part of that was down to the stories from Vera, which I’d written down during her lifetime, but I also read a lot of postwar British fiction, as well as nonfiction, published diaries and old newspapers. I watched old films (both feature films and Pathé newsreels) and spoke to anyone I knew who could remember that time.

It’s not an exaggeration to say that you were courted by publishers who wanted this novel. How did that feel?
It was very strange indeed, overwhelming but brilliant. Like most new writers, I could only hope that one day one publisher might agree to publish one of my books; I couldn’t imagine several publishers all wanting to buy the first book I’d written. It was very difficult to decide on which publisher to go with— they were all lovely and well-respected and all had great ideas. In the end, I went with the publisher whose vision for the book most nearly matched my own.

Many authors are active on social media, but your stop-motion book videos on Vine are so unique! How does that creative outlet compare to writing?
Thank you! My UK publishers told me about Vine, and as soon as they described the app I was keen to try it out.

They are quite different. Writing is the thing that pervades my whole day—I’m always wondering how I might describe something or improve my understanding, I’m constantly trying to remember an eavesdropped conversation or an idea for a story. Whereas the Vines are spur-of-the-moment and just for fun. They are wonderfully refreshing to make in that respect—taking a matter of hours rather than years.

What are you working on next?
While I was writing Elizabeth Is Missing, and struggling with the intricacies of the plot, I told myself the next book would be really simple and linear and I’d have it all worked out before I set down a single word. Now that I’m trying to begin the second book, I’ve found I have no facility for that, so I already have a very complicated novel plan. I’m still experimenting with voice at the moment, but I’m also, once again, exploring themes around memory and how the past and present interlink. 

Author photo credit Martin Figura.

This article was originally published in the June 2014 issue of BookPage. Download the entire issue for the Kindle or Nook.

ALSO IN BOOKPAGE: Read a review of this book.

Mary Kubica’s debut, The Good Girl, is a constant game of cat and mouse. In this tense psychological thriller, Mia Dennett’s abduction poses questions about relationships, their boundaries and their limits.

The Good Girl offers an unusual perspective on Stockholm syndrome. Do you believe there are situations when a captor can actually be a protector—and vice versa?
Yes, I absolutely do. I feel that in certain situations where the victim and perpetrator must rely on each other for survival, their roles can evolve from a hierarchical system into a relationship based on mutual understanding—and a knowledge of the fact that their very existence may depend on the other. That dependence on one another could certainly allow a captor to take on the role of protector, or the victim to take on a more assertive role in the relationship.

Mia’s mother plays a major role in the kidnapping investigation. How did your own fears as a mother play into this story?
I sympathize with Eve Dennett on every level. For a mother, having your child vanish into thin air is utterly incomprehensible. I tried hard to explore the emotions I may have felt had it been my child who disappeared, considering everything from fear to sadness to anger. But Eve has more to deal with than just a missing child. She’s also trying to make amends for poor decisions she’s made in the past and suffers from grief, regret and longing all at the same time. This too I can sympathize with; as a mother, it’s easy to make spur-of-the-moment decisions we later regret. Raising children is no easy task, a fact which I’ve tried to make evident in the case of Eve.

Shifting before-and-after perspectives keep readers guessing throughout The Good Girl. What did you find to be the greatest challenge in crafting such a puzzling thriller?
I’d have to say that the greatest challenge came in the editing process. Because of the various twists and turns and the overlapping storylines, every aspect of The Good Girl is tightly connected. As any one detail—no matter how trivial—changed, it unraveled a seemingly endless number of threads, so that I would need to reread the manuscript again and again—and yet again—to make sure I had revised all other mentions of the change—a challenging task, and yet one I enjoyed!

You seem equally at home setting your story in busy Chicago streets or quiet Minnesota woods. Are you a city girl or a country girl?
This is a great question! By and large I’m a city girl. I like a little noise and the close proximity of neighbors; I like the luxuries of city life and knowing there is a grocery store and a coffee shop nearby. That said, I also love the beauty and serenity of the country; I’m always up for a walk through the woods or exploring the countryside—though I have a strong aversion to bugs. Would I like to be trapped inside a rural, rustic cabin for months on end? No, thank you. But a long weekend in the country . . . that’s much more my style, as long as I can get back to the city as soon as the weekend is through.

This article was originally published in the August 2014 issue of BookPage. Download the entire issue for the Kindle or Nook.

If a writer should follow Ernest Hemingway’s well-known dictum to write what he knows, then first-time novelist Jess Row just might be in the wrong business.

Case in point? In his highly regarded collection of short stories, The Train to Lo Wu (2005), Row, who taught English for two years in Hong Kong, wrote audaciously and movingly from the point of view of Chinese characters.

And, now, in his imaginative and thought-provoking first novel, Your Face in Mine, Row writes about a white man named Martin Lipkin who has “racial reassignment surgery” and becomes a black entrepreneur named Martin Wilkinson. In the process, Martin’s predicament allows Row to explore the perplexing, emotionally and politically charged issues of black and white identity. Row also invents a syndrome—Racial Identity Dysphoria Syndrome, or RIDS—that may leap from the pages of fiction to the pages of medical or psychology textbooks some day in the not-too-distant future.

Row's novel poses a startling question: What if we could change our racial identity through surgery?

“I was thinking, what if there was racial reassignment surgery that was like the gender reassignment surgery of our time?” Row says of the conception of the novel during a call to his home in NYU housing in Manhattan’s West Village. Named one of Granta’s Best Young American Novelists in 2007, Row teaches creative writing and literature at The College of New Jersey. His wife is a poet and scholar of African-American literature and black diaspora literature at NYU, hence their housing situation. “Then I thought, what if there were people who believed themselves to be born in the wrong racial body and had the surgical means to change that,” Row adds.

Sounds like science fiction, right? But on a research trip to Thailand where he interviewed plastic surgeons doing sex change operations, Row found that his premise was not so far-fetched. “When I told them what my book was about, one of them said that is already happening, we just don’t use those words for it. And when I asked if they had clients they thought would do this if it were available, they said absolutely, we talk to people all the time who want to transform themselves in this way.”

The very human desire for transformation is palpable throughout Your Face in Mine. The story is told by Kelly Thorndike, a former bandmate of the young, white Martin. As the novel opens, Kelly, now in his 30s, meets the financially successful, black Martin on a Baltimore street and becomes, shall we say, critically involved in the story. Kelly has recently lost his Chinese-born wife and daughter in a horrific car crash and as a result has his own burning need for a transformation.

But transformation is a difficult business, as Row, a longtime practitioner of Zen Buddhism, well knows. “In this novel, there’s something very deep that the characters don’t understand about themselves. They follow what is to me a mistaken path toward trying to alleviate what they’ve lost in their lives by transforming themselves. In no case does it solve their problems. I would say that the fiction I write, and fiction in general—if you look at it from the Buddhist perspective—is about modeling karma, how one event gives rise to another event, how actions have consequences. That’s the way in which fiction and Buddhism come together. They’re both really in some sense about causality.”

How Martin and Kelly work out their separate karmic paths in the novel allows Row to examine very complicated issues of racial identity in America. “My feeling is that black culture is American culture. Anyone with an American identity is in some sense rooted in a common experience that can’t be separated from the experience of black Americans and the experience of black culture. You can’t separate rock and roll from the history of black music. You can’t separate contemporary American culture from hip hop. You can’t separate the story of America from the story of slavery.”

Still, Row acknowledges, it’s possible for many Americans to live in what his narrator calls “white dreamtime,” an idea that “very much comes from my own experience. I’m turning 40 this year, which means I was born at the tail end of the Civil Rights movement. I had liberal, very well-meaning, relatively self-aware parents. But I lived an existence where, for the most part, people of color were at a distance, were not my intimate friends. Looking back on that time, it became clear to me that it’s possible for a variety of reasons for white Americans to imagine themselves in a world where people of color—it’s not that they don’t exist entirely—but they don’t meaningfully exist. And that is what Kelly describes in the novel.”

Baltimore, where most the novel’s events take place, is the perfect setting to illustrate this kind of divide. It’s also where Row went to high school. “I really love Baltimore and I grieve over it at the same time,” Row says. “From the time I moved away until now, which is more than 20 years, this city has been in an absolutely dire economic situation. That’s partly because it’s so close to Washington, D.C. It’s been used as a kind of laboratory for so-called solutions to urban poverty. And . . . none of those solutions has worked. So I wanted the novel to be a kind of love song to Baltimore and also a kind of wail of despair.”

Like other good works of fiction, Your Face in Mine is not merely a report on what the author knows from experience but an imaginative act. And in this case, it is an act with big risks. “A white person engaging with black culture is a very, very tricky business,” Row admits. “And in some sense there’s no way to get it right. But from my perspective that doesn’t mean that one should stop trying.”

Author photo by Sarah Shatz

This article was originally published in the August 2014 issue of BookPage. Download the entire issue for the Kindle or Nook.

Lawyer Carrie La Seur makes her debut as a novelist this month with The Home Place, a searing novel about the power of family bonds that is also a compelling whodunit. Set against the stark backdrop of rural Montana, a place that big-city lawyer Alma Terrebonne thought she’d escaped forever, the novel follows Alma’s search for the reasons behind her estranged sister’s untimely death. We asked La Seur a few questions about writing, Montana and the draw of family.

Like Alma, you also are from Montana and left home to attend college and law school. Are there other ways that you relate to Alma?
Alma finds human connection difficult. She puts relationships into labeled boxes to be opened when she needs something specific. That’s an element of my personality that I try to overcome but can never eliminate. I wanted to communicate not just that traumatic events take place, but that they cause a shift within Alma toward responsibility to others and the abdication of self that makes a person a parent. For her, those changes are tectonic. Also, my bike is named Shadowfax too.

As a lawyer, how and when did you find the time to write?
I worked on The Home Place for nearly a decade. Around the time I was trying to push through to a final version I could send to agents, my grad school friend Siddhartha Mukherjee won the Pulitzer for The Emperor of Maladies. I was thrilled for him, and reading one of his interviews, I picked up an incredibly important tip. He said that his wife, the artist Sarah Sze, told him to work just five minutes a day on the book, and even if that was all he managed, it would keep him moving forward. It was the best thing I could have heard at that time. Five minutes becomes a half hour, or three, and things happen. So thanks, Sid and Sarah.

What effect does your work have on your writing?
I practice agricultural, energy and environmental law for a small firm that does what we call “white hat” law. We represent a lot of underdogs. My clients’ stories influence my writing constantly, and some of them are great storytellers. It’s more material than any writer could ever use. It’s also a relief sometimes to set aside a piece of writing that isn’t working and tackle a legal research project that I can do exactly right. A lawyer’s focus on deadlines is also helpful. Give me a deadline and I will hit it.

This is a book that’s very interested in the idea of what “home” means to different people. What does it mean to you?
My upbringing was big on the theory of home and sparse on practice. We were “from” Montana for many generations and both my parents were born and raised here, but I was born while they were out in southern California for a few years. We moved back to Montana, but later my dad took jobs in Nebraska and North Dakota, where I graduated from high school. We’d road trip back to Montana every summer to stay in my grandparents’ back rooms, then drive further to visit relatives strung all over southern Montana. Family was very important, but always a little out of reach. There’s my pathology, right there.

Billings, the novel’s setting, is more of a character than a place. Why does it play such a big role in the novel?
It would be the convenient and rational thing for Alma to take her niece, Brittany, back to Seattle to live. The vividness of Billings takes us into the history and present that bind Alma to the place she fled and forces her to consider less rational options. Without a powerful sense of the place, Alma’s dilemma would make no sense. Billings has resonance with her that Seattle, for all its virtues, can never have. I wanted to create a sense of how being back in Billings knocked the wind out of Alma, but not in an entirely negative way. It gave her a space to breathe and reflect that she hadn’t had in years. The place acts on Alma as much as any character.

The book is largely about the relationship between Alma and Vicky, but other sibling relationships also play an important role, including the relationship between the two sisters and their brother, Pete, and the relationship between Alma's father and her uncle, Walt. What is the importance of bonds between siblings and how do they change, for better or worse, over time?
My interest in sibling relationships comes in part from having an older brother I met when I was 23. My mother had given him up for adoption when she was 20, and he came looking for her. Now my younger brother and I are incredibly lucky to have a brother, sister-in-law, nephew and niece who might never have been part of our lives. That bond transcends so much. It’s part of what drew Alma back.

Though they’re very different people, the Terrebonnes are connected by their “home place.” What inspired the home place?
In my family, both sides homesteaded in territorial Montana or the early days of statehood. There were home places, but one was lost in the Depression and others came down through distant branches of the family. Part of what I’m doing in The Home Place is telling myself a bedtime story about what my home place would be like if I still had it. I think that’s a common longing for Americans, that nostalgia for a rootedness we no longer have.

Mining is mentioned several times—and in different contexts—throughout the novel, from stories of company representatives threatening locals to characters feeling nostalgic about landscapes they remember from their childhoods. What are your feelings about this industry?
I live just north of the Powder River Basin, the epicenter of U.S. coal surface mining. From the air, the mines look like a hungry giant has been face down gnawing on the earth, hundreds of feet down, through the aquifers. My firm represents people—mostly ranchers and tribal members—fighting long odds to defend a quiet, rural, not-very-profitable way of life against the advance of the draglines. Do I have contempt for a global corporation that wants to use eminent domain to run a railroad across 40 miles of undeveloped land owned by unwilling ranchers, to ship coal to Asia? You bet I do.

What kinds of books do you enjoy reading?
I’m a terrible reader of novels. I’m hypercritical. I keep looking for that childhood experience of being so swept away in a book that I can’t bear for it to end and I want to read it over and over, like I did with C.S. Lewis or L.M. Montgomery or L’Engle or Tolkien. Something about Doris Lessing satisfies me lately, although I couldn’t say exactly what. It has to do with puzzling out big questions in a very engaging way. I love biography, history and histories of ideas. Agrarians have been blowing my mind lately. I could read Wendell Berry, Wes Jackson, Michael Pollen or farm memoirists like Kristin Kimball all day and night. It’s probably consistent that Barbara Kingsolver’s Prodigal Summer made me very happy. I like to read about people having complex, long-term interactions with places, delving into seasons and soil. And then Neil Stephenson and William Gibson and Arthur C. Clarke because my husband said they were geniuses and made me read them, and he was right. Tomorrow I will change my mind about all of this.

What do you do in your spare time?
I have spare time? Okay, hypothetically then. Cook. Read. Hike. Fish. Garden. Bike. Run. Renovate. Run a nonprofit. Play with the kids. Brush the Newfoundland. Ski. Write.

What are you working on next?
For fun, I write terrible short stories. I have a fairly advanced draft of a second novel that includes some of The Home Place characters, and some new ones. It’s loosely based on Hamlet, with not quite as much death, because Hamlet is an outrageous melodrama. But look around you: life is a melodrama. I get a kick out of reviewers who say things like, “Oh, your landman is a cartoon villain.” I have newspaper clippings about these guys. Life is full of people nobody would believe if you wrote them down just the way they are. I want to write books that people like my legal clients will read and enjoy, because the stories are compelling and true to them, and I’ve captured a place they know better than anyone. If some old stockman thumps a heavy, work-rough fist on my book and says, “This is a good story,” to me that’s the highest praise.

RELATED CONTENT: Read our review of The Home Place.

Feminist, columnist, activist, humorist, memoirist—Caitlin Moran is a woman of many descriptors. She can now add "novelist" to that list thanks to How to Build a Girl. Something of a roman à clef, this hilarious, poignant and no-holds-barred coming-of-age tale stars a girl from a council estate in the Midlands who, like Moran herself, became a rock critic at a young age. We asked Moran a few questions about writing, class, feminism, celebrity interviews and, of course, her new book.

How to Build a Girl shares some common themes with your memoir, How to Be a Woman. What are the differences when approaching similar material for fiction?
Well obviously the thrill was that I could make things up. Sticking to the truth, and my own experiences, for How to Be a Woman was often quite frustrating. Now I get to use all the weird, mad adolescent experiences my friends have, then ramp them up for comic effect. You get to exaggerate. I love exaggerating. I would say I am definitely the best exaggerator IN THE UNIVERSE.

"I love exaggerating. I would say I am definitely the best exaggerator IN THE UNIVERSE."

On a related note, you were also a music critic at a fairly early age. How does Johanna’s experience as a pop critic compare to yours?
Well, although Johanna is, like me, a fat working-class teenage rock critic from the West Midlands, she's based on the journalist Julie Burchill, who started working at the NME in the punk era when she was just 17. She was a hip young gunslinger—often more famous than the bands she interviewed, the centre of the storm. A bit of a legend. When I was a teenage rock critic, however, I used to hide in the corner of the office of Melody Maker whispering "I like Crowded House. I wish I had a friend." It was much more fun to write about a girl like Julie Burchill than a girl like me. I kind of stole her life a bit. She inspired me.

Can we expect more books about Johanna Morrigan?

Yes! This is the first of a trilogy about all those characters. The next is called How to Be Famous, and then How to Change the World. I love Johanna and her drinking buddy John Kite so much. I kind of want to hang out with them and have sex with them. This is part of the essential patheticness of being an author—we invent these people, then fall in love with them. You adore them. But, of course, they're just a part of you, from your brain. Does that make you an egotistic mental? Probably. So that’s why we drink a lot, as well.

"This is part of the essential patheticness of being an author—we invent these people, then fall in love with them. Does that make you an egotistic mental? Probably."

The relationship with John Kite is such an important one for Johanna. Is he based on anyone?
I was so annoyed with all the usual rock stars you see invented in books, and films—all in black leather and sunglasses, skinny, whining, spoiled, a bit thick. That's not like all the great working-class boys in bands I used to interview in the early 1990s—Teenage Fanclub, the Boo Radleys and now Elbow. Clever, self-taught, whimsical hilarious boys who you could while away the afternoon in the pub with, smoking and drinking and shooting the breeze about anything. So I made John Kite out of all those lovely boys. He's basically Richard Burton, in a fur coat, singing the songs of American Music Club. I know exactly how all his songs sound.

American readers may be less aware of the class and financial issues that are so key to the plot of How to Build a Girl. What can you tell our readers that would help them understand what is at stake for Johanna and the Morrigan family?

Class is a HUGE issue in the U.K. Let me put it like this: I'm a columnist for The Times, I write a sitcom for Channel 4, I'm making a film of How to Be a Woman and I publish books and novels. In my dealings with all the people, across all these different media and cultural companies, I've met precisely ONE OTHER person who was raised on welfare. In the last 20 YEARS. And yet, 60% of our country claims some form of benefit or other.

"Working class/poor people just don't get to tell their stories in this country. I am one of the very few lucky ones."

So, as you see, working class/poor people just don't get to tell their stories in this country. They don't have access to the media. I am one of the very few lucky ones. And so all our films and TV shows and book end up being what the world's continuing impression of Britain is: depictions of lovely middle-class/upper-class life, all picnic and brittle dinner-party chat and public schoolboys in the rain and balls and chintzy dresses and old maids on bicycles and vicars drinking tea.

And that's all fine, but I love the working classes: We do it differently. The power and energy and inventiveness and joy and euphoria and hedonism and anger and sideways thinking that powered the revolution, then the 1960s, then Britpop.

What's working class culture? The Beatles, Joe Orton, Anthony Hopkins, Michael Caine, Tracey Emin, Danny Boyle, Irvine Welsh, Roxy Music, Alexander McQueen, The Sex Pistols, The Who, The Fall, Julie Walters, Steve McQueen, Shane Meadows, Pulp, Slade, Black Sabbath, Amy Winehouse, Richard Burton . . . oh I'm turning myself on. I need to stop.

Music is such a key part of this book. If you were creating a soundtrack for it, what songs and performers would you include?
All the guys in there, man—it's the story of music in the early 1990s. Sonic Youth, Stone Roses, Happy Mondays, Jane's Addiction, Pixies, New Order, Cure, Hole, American Music Club, Levitation, Suede, Manic Street Preachers, Primal Scream, Teenage Fanclub, Massive Attack, Blur, Mazzy Star, PJ Harvey, Ride, Lush, Cocteau Twins, My Bloody Valentine, U2's big dark reinvention—it was such an exciting time.

Every week there seemed to be some new fabulous blast of colour being fired up into the sky—every week the music press would make you feel desperate to get some new album, or single, or go down the front of a gig and get your head blown up.

I was so obsessed with Pavement I got my friend Julie—who could drive, and who only liked New Kids on the Block—to drive me all the way from Wolverhampton to Derby to see Pavement live, by lying to her, and telling her they sounded like New Kids on the Block. Amazingly, she didn't punch me in the tits when a band who sounded like The Fall, exploding, came on stage. She actually got quite into them. It was a time of wonder.

You have two daughters. Have your ideas about feminism changed at all after having children?
Yes—I realised how URGENT feminism is. That there could easily be another two or three GENERATIONS of girls before we even get something as basic as pay equality—it's not predicted to come about until 2070, despite it being ILLEGAL to pay women less than men. If any other law was being broken as frequently as the Equal Pay Act, there'd be an outcry. Instead, we just ignore it. IT'S ILLEGAL HELLO HELLO IS THIS MICROPHONE ON? 

"If any other law was being broken as frequently as the Equal Pay Act, there'd be an outcry. Instead, we just ignore it. IT'S ILLEGAL HELLO HELLO IS THIS MICROPHONE ON?" 

You were a judge of the Bailey Prize, which is Britain’s top prize for women in fiction. What was that experience like?
Exhilarating. To judge in a year where there were books as astonishing and truly genius as The Goldfinch and Eimear McBride's a Girl Is a Half-Formed Thing is a total joy. Tartt runs with Dickens' legacy, McBride with Joyce's, and they both fashion something new and euphoric and freeing and utterly beautiful.

Who have been some of your best interviews?
Going to a sex club with Lady Gaga; getting pissed with Benedict Cumberbatch and me going "Do Sherlock!" and him just . . . doing some Sherlock. Asking Keith Richards if he wears a wig, and him making me pull his hair to prove it was real. Courtney Love describing what it was like the first time she fucked Kurt Cobain. Turning up late to interview the Prime Minister in a shitty minicab that looked like the kind of thing terrorists would use as a suicide vehicle. Challenging Jeff Buckley to make himself look ugly (he stuck jellybeans on his teeth and gurned. He still looked astonishingly handsome.).

What is your idea of a perfect night out with women friends?
Oh I don't like to go out. I like to get no more than six people over to my house, and we sit on the patio smoking fags, drinking gin from mugs and launching into impassioned manifestoes about what we would do if we managed Madonna (make her “go hag”! Age! Go grey and angry! Or get her back out with the gays again!) Around the piano by 10 p.m. for a sing-song—all killer no filler: Queen, Jesus Christ Superstar, Beatles, Kate Bush—and then overly sexual disco-dancing in the kitchen to Rihanna from 11.30 p.m. onwards. Crisps at 1 a.m.

RELATED CONTENT: Read our review of How to Build a Girl.

Bret Anthony Johnston's haunting, evocative debut novel, Remember Me Like This, follows a family's agonizing journey toward a sense of unity after Justin, the first-born son, miraculously returns home four years after his kidnapping. His return, however, is tempered by the pain and grief each member of the family has experienced during Justin's absence.  

I was able to chat with the immensely entertaining Johnston, who is also the Creative Writing Director at Harvard and an avid skateboarder, over a lunch of fried catfish at the Southern Festival of Books.

In Remember Me Like This, the reader is able to gain insight into all the main character’s thoughts, but not Justin's. What made you decide to keep his thoughts private and be vague about what happened to him during the kidnapping?
When people have asked me that before, they always follow it up with the idea that, by not telling the reader what happened to Justin and leaving his perspective out of it, it makes it all the more menacing and terrifying. Because what we’re going to imagine is far worse than what could be on the page. But that’s just not the case. We’re all imagining exactly what it is, and I don’t think you can make up something worse than what actually happened. I wasn’t trying to be coy or intensify anything. I was trying to put the reader in the position that the family members are in. They don’t feel like they can ask Justin directly what happened to him, and he’s not offering anything to them. I wanted us to be in that same kind of limbo, where we want to know what happened, but it’s not the right time for him to tell us. I wanted us to empathize with the other family members. And you know, this sounds dorky, but I wanted to respect Justin’s privacy. At no point in writing the book did it feel like he wanted to share anything. I didn’t want to pry. I wanted to respect that.  

How long did you work on this novel?
I think the writing of the book took about six years. But in one way or another, I had been thinking about the characters, particularly Laura, for probably about 25 years.

What drew you so powerfully to the character of Justin's mother, Laura, who finds comfort after Justin's disappearance in her volunteer work rehabilitating an injured dolphin?
I grew up in South Texas, and one of the things that happens there—and also happens in the book—is that bottlenose dolphins will strand themselves on the beach. When I was in my late teens, that happened, and they put out a bulletin. They needed volunteers to sit with this dolphin and take notes. So I went, and I loved it.

I remember the rescue coordinators said that the hardest shifts to fill were the overnight shifts. Nobody wants to come out to the bad part of town alone in the middle of the night and sit in a warehouse for three hours with a dolphin. But I thought, 'Well, I don’t have anything going on.' And yet, every time I’d go to sign up for a night shift, they were always full. I could never get in there. Every couple of years I would just think, 'Who was that person taking all those shifts?' I'd sit with [different theories about] that for a few years . . . . But for the whole time I’d been thinking about this character, it had never crossed my mind that she had a kid. I always thought that she was married, she was signing up for shifts under her maiden name, she can’t sleep, but it had never crossed my mind that she had a kid. When that crystallized in my mind, I got really interested. Maybe the reason I hadn’t thought about her having a kid is because the kid was missing in her thoughts, too. That’s why she can’t sleep: Her kid’s gone missing.

I love the title Remember Me Like This. How did you decide on it?
That wasn’t the title until about two days before it went into galleys. For the entire six years I was writing it, it was always, without equivocation, The Unaccompanied. And if anyone is ever inclined, and they certainly should not be, to read the book again, they’ll notice how many ways being accompanied and unaccompanied shows up in this book. I worked my tail off to sew that into the book. And then the editor called and said we had to change the title for all these different reasons, and it kind of came down to Remember Me Like This or To Bring You My Love, which is in the epigraph of the book. I think the reason it won out is because they somehow didn’t like having 'you' in the title. They’d rather have 'me.' But I don’t really think of the book as The Unaccompanied anymore, I do think of it as Remember Me Like This. I’ve been lucky enough to have so many people respond to the title in such a way that it feels more like y’all’s title than mine. So I love it for that reason.

Since Remember Me Like This deals with such a difficult topic, did you do anything to unwind while writing the novel?
Not on a daily basis. But every Sunday morning, I would go skateboarding. That was almost like church for me. But on a daily basis, I just tried to stay in the thick of it, to occupy that space. I did a lot of research for the book. I’ve read countless accounts, scholarly texts and memoirs of people who have been through what Justin has been through, and you don’t have to read much of that before you feel it changing you. To spend so much time trying to get that right on the page, you come out of it feeling transformed. I really wanted to stay with it on a day-to-day basis. But by Sunday I would need to get out of there, and I’d go skate.

Do you think there’s any aspect of skateboarding that has helped you as a writer?
Oh my god, we’re going to run out of tape. I could hold forth for about five days on this. I think the biggest similarity between skaters and writers, and the thing that I absolutely have taken from skating and applied to my writing, is what might be summed up as resilience. I mean, I certainly get frustrated, confused, pissed off, frightened—all the typical things that writers feel towards their writing—but I don’t ever feel the impulse to quit. I don’t get discouraged just because I have to throw away 200 pages. I think that absolutely comes from skating. There are tricks I’ve been working on for 15 years that I still haven’t done, and I’m still trying to learn them. Once I’ve committed to the process, it doesn’t occur to me to stop.

And I think skaters, like writers, view the world differently. I think when someone who doesn’t skate is walking down the steps, they don’t notice how many cracks there are leading up to the handrail. But skaters do, and I think it’s the same thing with being a writer. I think we pay attention. A lot of the time, stories come from the smallest, smallest thing.

Are there any musicians that have influenced your work?
There’s a bunch. I think the clearest one Is PJ Harvey. I think her album “To Bring You My Love” is almost a soundtrack to the book. And Willie Nelson and Waylon Jennings, both of whom have cameos in the book, because the mice get named after them. I think the texture and tenor of their voices and some specific songs feel like background music to the book.

Are you going to see any musicians while you’re here in Nashville?
I wanted to go see Loretta Lynn, but I’ll be in the Literary Death Match that night! 

(Author photo by Nina Subin)