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)

Lawyer-turned-author Krassi Zourkova mines the traditions of her Bulgarian childhood in a magical debut, Wildalone. When Thea leaves Bulgaria to study at Princeton, she becomes entwined with two sexy brothers as she works to uncover a long-hidden familiy secret. We asked Zourkova a few questions about love triangles, the literature that inspires her and the appeal of the alpha male.

Like your heroine, Thea, you are Bulgarian born, Princeton educated, and something of a musician—are there any other similarities between the two of you? What’s one way in which the two of you are absolutely not alike?
I hope we are similar, as she is quite the girl! Joking aside, there is a softness and innocence to Thea that I have tried to preserve in myself, no matter how life unfolds. It gets tricky at times, both for me and for her, as these qualities are often misperceived as weakness or naïveté, when in fact they are anything but. True strength doesn’t beg to be loudly manifested.

The main difference between us is that I didn’t grow up in a family damaged by prior loss of a child. My parents were quite strict, and this certainly kept me in check. But they also gave me freedom to make my own choices without the burden of guilt. It was wonderfully liberating.

Wildalone is an enchanting mix and fascinating intersection of both Bulgarian and Greek mythology—can you tell us a little bit about your personal history with these kind of stories? What made you decide to incorporate these specific myths into your first novel?
I grew up in a tiny town in the Balkan mountains where, if you opened the window at night, you would hear crickets and frogs. It was magical. I think that’s when my fascination with Bulgarian folk tales began. The wildalones, in particular, are extraordinary creatures who are vicious by nature but are also susceptible to falling in love, like all of us. They have haunted my imagination for years. I even wrote a poem about them, back in 2001, which a friend of mine liked so much he’s kept it framed on his living room wall ever since. Was that a sign from the universe? Who knows. Maybe the book was asking to be written.

The Greek myths have been another fascination of mine since childhood, but I didn’t set out to write about them. It so happened that, as I delved deeper into the story and its mysticism, the parallels became apparent.

You actually studied law at Harvard and have worked as a lawyer for some time. When did you find the time and inspiration to write?
We hear a lot about the corporate culture on Wall Street and how, in just a few years, it sucks one’s soul out. This hasn’t been my experience, so let me give the world of finance a good name. I’ve had my share of grueling hours (who hasn’t?), but I have also been lucky to work with people whose souls are definitely preserved. My first boss was an extraordinary woman, a mentor in the truest sense of the word. When I signed up for a poetry writing workshop at the New York Public Library, she sat me down and said, “Krassi, when 5pm on Tuesday hits each week, I want you out of here. I’ll cover any fire drills myself. If poetry is what you love, no job should stand in the way.” She has since passed away, but continues to be my role model. The book is partially dedicated to her memory.

You’ve built a smoldering love triangle with Thea and her two suitors. As an author, what do you feel is the key to writing a successful love triangle?
To me, a love triangle is best when it carries no obvious mark of a happy ending. Desiring the impossible—there is a beautiful madness to it. Sartre wrote a smash-hit play about one such doomed triangle: A man falls for a lesbian who falls for another woman who, in turn, falls for the man. It is smoldering gone terribly wrong, to become—quite literally—an infernal flame (the play depicts Sartre’s vision of hell). Not surprisingly, the title is No Exit. And this, I think, is the key: to give the trio no way out.

Love rivalry charges a story with tension early on, but if this is all you have, eventually the reader will yawn. So, I thought, why not give the rivals a reason to be fiercely loyal to each other? Make them best friends. Or even better—brothers. That’s when the real tension kicks in. The most fascinating struggles in literature aren’t between a character and his opponent, but between a character and himself.

If you were in Thea’s shoes, would you choose Jake or Rhys (and why)?
Jake, for sure. He can match Rhys in every respect, but he also has humility. To me, this is one of the sexiest things a man can be. And the lack of it is a nonstarter.

There has been a real resurgence of the “alpha male” in popular fiction and Wildalone’s Rhys joins that list. What do you believe is the allure of such a dominant (and dominating) love interest?
You mean, what is the allure of a man who takes on the world, loves like a hurricane, and has depth to boot?! Unfortunately, being an “alpha male” is often equated with arrogance, but that misses the point. An arrogant man can be (and often is) a coward. A true alpha man is fearless. He is a creature of impetus and intent. He has vision. While all the “beta” boys cower in a corner, he compels momentum, forcing the universe to accelerate. So it’s no surprise that, in response, something in a woman’s DNA tingles.

"A true alpha man is fearless. He is a creature of impetus and intent. . . . it’s no surprise that, in response, something in a woman’s DNA tingles."

Can readers and writers still be good feminists while enjoying these types of relationships in their fiction?
Absolutely. And not only in fiction. Dominance and submission are a rite of heightened intimacy; a consensual role play which, at its best, has the complexity and nuance of an art form. For a woman who is independent and confident, surrendering control this way can be an incredible turn-on. Of course, this shouldn’t be confused with needing to be “saved” by a man—emotionally, financially, socially. Unless there is absolute free choice, dominance falls on the abuse spectrum. But barring that, if you want to explore those sides of yourself (and aren’t forced or coaxed into it), by all means surrender away!

How would you say growing up in Bulgaria—particularly during times of heavy Communist censorship—influenced your approach to storytelling, writing and books?
The censorship was much less heavy than people here were led to believe. No books were banned when I was growing up. One that I recall as being kept out of print was Gone with the Wind, and this had nothing to do with Communist propaganda per se, but with the novel’s supposedly favorable portrayal of slavery. Everything else was published—in smaller print runs for the foreign titles, making them a hot commodity sort of like the Super Bowl tickets here in the U.S.—and very widely read. You could be on a crowded bus, and two out of three people would be reading a book.

I was lucky to grow up in such an environment. The thing about a centralized economy is, there is no corporate pressure on the bottom line. No strategic advertising. No budget boosts to “brand” a product and inflate demand. Instead, there was a genuine obsession with merit. Everyone, writers included, had to stand his or her ground. For me personally, this translated into a compulsive disregard for formula. When a story works, it works. 

Many authors report having a “soundtrack” to which they write their novels; given the huge role that music plays in this book, were there any songs or pieces of music that you found yourself listening to while you wrote?
Yes. I listened to a lot of music, and chose for the story those pieces that I thought would affect people most viscerally. I still have the entire soundtrack mapped out in my work files. I even had a fantasy that a multimedia eBook device would allow the reader to click and listen to each piece right after its description in the text. I have no idea whether technology has come that far. As a fallback, I wrote the story with specific references, so all the music can be found online. My personal nod goes to the French pianist Alexandre Tharaud, whose Chopin I am in awe of. His “Journal intime” on YouTube starts with a nocturne that is also the last thing Rhys plays in the book. Look at his hands, his face—he doesn’t just play the music, he lives it.

As a first-time novelist, did you encounter any unexpected challenges while writing?
Way too many to list. You read a good book, and it tricks you into believing that writing can be effortless. Someone obviously had talent, so the story just poured out, right? It doesn’t work that way. At least for me it didn’t. Rewarding as the process was, I also found it to be isolating, consuming, and so fraught with hoping against the odds, that I often had to re-examine my own sanity.

What shocked me most were the random acts of cruelty or kindness. I remember one agent’s rejection in particular, saying there was no way those first 50 pages could ever keep a reader’s interest. A personalized sting from a complete stranger, meant to damage and linger. It was hard to go back to writing after that. Then there were also people who were incredibly generous with their time and advice, and whose attention was kept—in the 50 pages and beyond. Which is what makes this universe of ours a beautiful place: There’s room under the sun for everyone.

"The most fascinating struggles in literature aren’t between a character and his opponent, but between a character and himself."

What is the best piece of advice you have received that has influenced you as an author?
That perfection is achieved not when there is nothing left to add, but when there is nothing left to take away. The man who said it wrote one of the most unforgettable—and shortest—gems of literature, The Little Prince. So much wisdom and heart are packed into that book, it could easily have been 500 pages. But it’s tiny. And that’s part of the magic of it.

When we read, language often stands in the way. It demands effort, which ruins the intimacy. So, every word must earn its place. I didn’t want to write a 500-page book, and I deleted obsessively, to a point where I wouldn’t allow myself even the natural “he said/she said” in dialogue. This probably has to do with my background in poetry too, but to me the white space on the page is as important as the text. It belongs to the readers; they are the ones who get to fill it in. As a writer, I am still learning the art of not claiming that space. I think of Hemingway, who squeezed his own 500-page book into a six-word short story: “For sale: Baby shoes. Never worn.” Now try to top that!

Your book has been compared to everything from Twilight to Jane Eyre, and is a truly fascinating mash-up of genres. What books or writers have influenced you that you would urge them to check out?Ironically, perhaps, the biggest influence on me while writing this novel has been the theater. I say “ironically,” because there isn’t apparent connection of genres or themes. “What’s hard isn’t writing,” the saying goes, “but writing what you mean.” And, as a writer, I love to watch live theater and learn from it, from its unforgiving economy of language, time, and setting.

My top list? Beckett, who seduces us into dwelling for hours on a single word. Ibsen, who turns his frail, baby-doll heroines into the kind of women hurricanes are named after. Lorca’s poetic reveries of love and revenge. And, of course, Chekhov, in whose hands the human heart becomes a force of nature. So, if you aren’t a theater buff already, check out your local stages—these plays are classic staples, and the performances are often stunning. Or rent them on DVD. Or read them. The spell carries through, I promise!

In terms of fiction, I was influenced by the magical realism of Gabriel García Márquez (and what to me remains the ultimate love story, Love in the Time of Cholera); the fairy tales and fantasies of Hermann Hesse; the unapologetic eroticism of Anaïs Nin and Marguerite Duras; the mysticism of Paulo Coelho. And Nabokov. Don’t get me started on Nabokov.

The story isn't neatly tied up by novel’s end, suggesting a sequel is in the works. Is that what you’re working on next and, if so, how long will we have to wait to read the next installment of Thea’s tale?
Hopefully, not very long! This book took five years, although most of that time was spent learning how not to write. As for the story itself, it came to me within a week, back in 2009, and it ran through my mind with surprising clarity like a film reel, big-bang ending and all. But it had a much longer plot arc, which scared me. I felt that, if given enough space, Thea’s tale could turn into a saga. So I made a deal with myself: Write the first part, and if people react well to it—do the rest. It was a stroke of luck to be able to work on this book and know where the characters were headed in the long run. And since nobody writes about witches without being a bit of one, I planted a few clues of what’s coming next. You know, for good luck.

Stephenie Harrison writes for BookPage from around the world. Follow her journey on her blog, 20 Years Hence.

RELATED CONTENT: Read our review of Wildalone.

Much like Ana, the heroine of her engrossing debut novel, Sara Nović isn’t entirely sure where to call home. “This is what I’m trying to figure out,” the author says, laughing, in a recent interview. “I really don’t know.”

Nović, 28, has lived in Queens for about a year, and in New York City for a few years, but she grew up dividing her time between the U.S. and Croatia, where she has friends and family. The dual perspective informs her powerful story.

Remarkably well-crafted and emotionally mature, Girl at War plunges readers instantly into the world of 10-year-old Ana, who lives in a tiny flat in Zagreb with her parents and baby sister, Rahela. The city seethes in the oppressive summer heat, and Ana hears whispered rumors of “disturbances” in nearby towns, but she’s still relatively carefree, spending her days playing football and riding bicycles with her best pal, Luka.

Then one day the guy at the corner store refuses to sell her the usual pack of cigarettes for her uncle unless she can tell him whether it’s a Serbian or a Croatian brand. War has arrived. In Nović’s skilled hands, it takes the form of such concrete details, interruptions of daily life—small at first, then catastrophic. Ana and her family adjust to the sudden chaos: They forgo their annual trip to the coast, make do with severely restricted food and water and hide in underground shelters during air-raids. But when Rahela falls ill and no local hospital can help, the family is forced to take a huge risk. The consequences of that decision will shape Ana’s entire future. When we see her again 10 years later, in New York City in 2001, Ana is still reeling.

Ana’s difficulty dealing with her past is complicated by the general ignorance of the American public about the Croatian War of Independence, which Nović was awakened to after her first extended trip to the country. “I was shocked that nobody [in the U.S.] had heard about the war. It kind of freaked me out, because it still feels very fresh there.”

In response, she wrote a short story for a creative writing class. In it, the character who would become Ana was “having a meltdown,” as Nović puts it, triggered by news of the death of Slobodan Milošević and the memories it dredged up.

After she’d turned in the story, her professor called her into his office; she assumed she was about to be scolded. Instead, he told her, “You are going to write this novel, and you’re not going to pull any punches.”

“I kind of doubted that I had a novel in me,” she says now. “I was like 18! But eventually I just kind of started writing out in a web from that starting spot.” She kept working at the story, in chunks, for a few years. Getting the structure right was especially tricky.

“I knew I didn’t want it to be chronological,” Nović says. “I wanted readers to have a break after what happens in Part 1. I tried all sorts of weird stuff—I tried starting the book in the present, but that was terrible.” Then, while working on her MFA at Columbia, she had a meeting with writer Sam Lipsyte. He hadn’t read the novel yet, but he said, “Just tell me about it.” That did the trick: “I just spilled my guts, and he drew a picture on an envelope, and that ended up being the order in which things are now.”

As it stands, the narrative structure works beautifully, adding a whole extra layer of tension to the story. Readers slowly discover that there’s a secret buried in Ana’s past, even beyond the dark history she keeps from even her closest friends, but uncovering it is not a simple process.

Ana’s ambivalence about discussing the war might also reflect Nović’s experience. “Some people adapt better than others,” she says. “There are people in Croatia now that just don’t want to talk about it. Then there are other people who want to get it all out, and there’s a lot of cool art coming out of it.” She mentions, for example, a theater group called Heartefact that stages performances in some of the villages that were hit hardest because of their ethnically mixed populations. Still, she says, “It’ll take a long time for things to get better.”

She’s certainly not one to sit around waiting; Nović is busy. In addition to fiction, she writes essays and nonfiction, works as an editor at Blunderbuss magazine, teaches at Columbia and is the founder of the deaf-rights website Redeafined.

Nović, who is deaf, says the site started as “an anger project, but a productive one.” She’d been reading some op-eds about parents of deaf kids advocating for cochlear implant surgery, and she wrote a counterpoint op-ed in response, but no one wanted it. So eventually she decided to publish it herself, and Redeafined was born. To her surprise, “people are reading it!”

The topic is heated, she acknowledges, in part because it’s usually the case that a deaf kid has hearing parents. That means “it’s a weird kind of identity . . . you probably don’t share it with your family.”

She’s working on a story now that’s set at a deaf school, and she’s been trying to figure out a good way to put sign language on paper.

“When I finished this book I thought, well, that’s it, those are all the thoughts I really had,” she says, which is probably how everyone feels after their first novel. “It’s literally everything you’ve ever thought about. But now I have thoughts again, so that’s encouraging!”

Nović also loves teaching. There’s a character in Girl at War, a professor who acts as a sort of book angel, lending Ana new books each week and guiding her reading. Nović says he was inspired by a professor she had at Emerson as an undergrad, whose office was similarly crammed with piled-up books. “I’ve been really lucky to have a couple of teachers like that who just feed me books,” she says. “I hope to become that person.”

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

RELATED CONTENT: Read our review of Girl at War.

The carnival scene in Gilded Age New York City forms the colorful backdrop of Leslie Parry's remarkable first novel, Church of Marvels. Here, the Chicago-based writer opens up about the inspiration behind this high-wire act of historical fiction, reveals her dream sideshow act and shares her instant cure for writer's block.

Church of Marvels takes place in and around New York City at the end of the 19th century—what about this setting appealed to you as a writer?
The Gilded Age was a time of such extremes—unprecedented wealth and abject poverty, sumptuous mansions and teeming slums, booming industry and westward expansion and an unprecedented wave of immigration. And nowhere was that more visible than in New York City, hub of both robber barons and rag-ships. It’s a world in which a dizzying number of cultures and subcultures co-existed, often within the same square feet. I was curious about those people who had perhaps slipped away from history, who had disappeared among all that color and noise. What did they fight for; how did the live? Not only is the city in the late 19th century a spectacular sensory experience to imagine as a writer, but the stakes would also be very high for its denizens. I wanted to feel what it might be like to walk those streets with a sense of urgency and desire.

"I was curious about those people who had perhaps slipped away from history, who had disappeared among all that color and noise."

Prior to writing Church of Marvels, you focused largely on short stories. Did you approach writing a novel in the same way as you would a short story?
It’s interesting. I wrote the first pages of what would become this novel early on, before I’d ever really written—let alone published—a short story. And I grew quickly overwhelmed. I set the project aside (for years!), uncertain what it was or how to proceed. During that time I wrote only short fiction—a form I wasn’t completely comfortable with, but it afforded me the discipline that I needed and craved. It required a kind of hyper-focus, a distillation, a strong sense of scene. I was able to concentrate on specific tasks: characterization, mood, setting, the building of tension, etc. I think I built up my individual muscles during those years (in terms of confidence and discipline, if nothing else). Then I was ready to run.

Writing the novel was a little more freeing. It was gleefully sloppier. I went down all sorts of divergent pathways and colorful loop-de-loops. It was challenging to keep the tone consistent, the characters curious and active, and the momentum up (both on the page and in life). In the end I felt supremely exhausted—but vital, too.

One of the impressive things about Church of Marvels is how meticulously it is plotted and how cleverly the various storylines flow together. How much of the novel did you have planned out before you sat down to write it, and how did you approach the writing process?
I pretty much knew nothing about the book when I began to write it—except that these four people intrigued me, and I wanted to know who they were and how they lived. Gradually I developed a loose outline, but left enough room for discovery and improvisation. At one point I tried to write the novel in discrete blocks, character by character, but that was short-lived. I would lose the thread of the plot, or the overall tone and voice; I’d forget the rhythm. Writing sequentially had its challenges, but overall it worked far better for me—and when I got stuck with one character, I just ran off with another. Instant cure for writer’s block!

Did you do any specific research in preparation for writing this book? If so, what was the weirdest bit of information that you stumbled upon (and did you include it in the book)?
I did read a lot—mostly out of curiosity, just to get a sense of the world these characters lived in. While it’s very tempting to cram everything in—there is so much fascinating stuff—I tried to use only what was relevant to the world of the novel. And the great joy of historical fiction (in my mind, anyway), isn’t analysis or even accuracy, but imaginative interpretation. Some details I had to invent—either because I couldn’t unearth all the morsels of information I wanted, or because the imagined details were truer to the characters’ situations and inner lives.

The weirdest bit of information, which I didn’t use in the novel, was the concept of dentistry as a sideshow act. I read about it in a book on dime museums and medicine shows. People would gather to watch these very real, very bloody tooth extractions, replete with costumes and props (sometimes performed by actual dentists, sometimes not). One hustler, who went by the moniker of Painless Parker, became so successful that he started his own Dental Circus and entered the show on the back of an elephant.

Sylvan is particularly intriguing by virtue of the fact that in a novel populated largely by women, he is a man. What was your thought process involving this character, and was it a conscious choice on your part that the action of the novel revolves nearly exclusively around women?
That’s a good question. It wasn’t a conscious choice, although I’ve always been intrigued by women who don’t conform to the expectations of their era (not because they have a specific desire to outrage or rebel, but because their own lifestyle is normal to them—and true). Sylvan was the character who came to me first, actually, years ago. I had an image of a man finding a newborn in an outhouse. I wonder what that story would be? I remember thinking. Even though Sylvan is independent, self-sufficient and muscular—qualities we associate with masculinity—I don’t think of those as his greatest strengths. I was interested in the side that he was kind of frightened of showing: his compassion, his nurturing, his need for love, for family, a sense of belonging—as much as those impulses might scare him at times, as much as he might try to dismiss or conceal them. I think it’s his sensitivity that keeps him grounded, that humanizes him in a world that doesn’t always see him as worthy or capable of much. How do you hold on to that bit of vulnerability, I wondered, especially in a world that leaves you so hardened, where your own preservation is paramount?

"I’ve always been intrigued by women who don’t conform to the expectations of their era."

Sexuality plays an important role throughout this novel, and at times make what is a historical story feel very current and modern. Can you talk a bit about the gender politics of Church of Marvels and what you hope readers will take away from it?
Sexuality and gender were obviously discussed and understood differently in 1895 (as were things we take for granted now: psychology, biology, codes of masculinity and femininity, sexual drive and desire). But that doesn’t mean homosexual or “androgyne” subcultures didn’t exist, or (in certain circles) even thrive. It may be easy to forget—especially in an era that favors speed, access and instant phenomena (the flipside of which is instant amnesia)—that there’s a long, vibrant history to what seems like a modern issue. And I hope that gives some people comfort, and others perspective. Language may change, circumstances may change, politics and social spheres may change—but the heart remains familiar and constant.

It may be impolitic to pick favorites, but if forced to choose, which of the characters in this novel do you relate to the most? Which character was the most challenging for you to “crack”?
All the characters have traits I relate to: Sylvan’s solitary nature and occasional prickliness, Odile’s stubbornness and loyalty, Alphie’s romantic sensibility. Initially Alphie was the most challenging character, because she’s clever in many ways, but also naïve. She doesn’t think of herself as savvy or particularly strong, and yet she’s forced to be cunning, often out of sheer desperation. That was a difficult—but rewarding—conflict to explore.

Two of the characters in this novel are performers in a sideshow and perform incredible feats. If you could have your own act in a sideshow, what would it be and why?
Great question! I would be a snake-charmer. The L.A. Zoo had a two-headed snake when I was a kid. I was absolutely terrified of it—and also transfixed.

There are some really incredible twists and surprises throughout this novel—what’s one novel that you recommend to readers who like a mystery that keeps them on their toes?
The Woman in White by Wilkie Collins.

Now that you have your first novel under you belt, what are you working on next?
I have a few projects underway—another novel, a play. I’m curious to see what takes shape. Otherwise I’ll have to go join the circus.

RELATED CONTENT: Read our review of Church of Marvels.

In her perceptive debut novel, Among the Ten Thousand Things, Julia Pierpont examines the effect that an extramarital affair has on one artistic New York City family. We asked Pierpont a few questions about the allure of the affair as a plot device, the brother-sister bond and smutty "Seinfeld" fan fiction.

Many novels are about marital affairs—why people have them, what comes next. Why do you think readers have such an endless appetite for this perennial family conflict?
I think adultery, really affairs of any sort, will forever compel our attention: It’s certainly the sexiest of the Ten Commandments one can break.

In my case, I was interested in depicting the sort of betrayal that would affect each member of a family, though in different ways. Why should children be so injured by their father’s betrayal of the vows he made, not to them, but to their mother? It isn’t about the children directly, and yet for that very same reason it is, it does hurt them. And then there is the added complication for the parents, once the kids are brought into it. How much more difficult does it become for parents to move beyond such transgressions without seeming to condone the same amoral behavior that we are taught, as children, to reject?

“I think adultery will forever compel our attention: It’s certainly the sexiest of the Ten Commandments one can break.”

I enjoyed observing the development of Kay and Simon’s relationship. Do you think their parents’ marital troubles brought them closer?
I’m glad that relationship resonated with you. Initially, yes, when Kay realizes that the only person she feels free to confide in is her brother, that recognition is something that really binds them to each other. They are both their parents’ children: The only two people in the world equipped to share the same burden. But then the way they each process their father’s affair is so different, which is pretty inevitable given their respective ages.

When we meet Simon, he is just embarking on the world of girls and popularity and mild drug use. He’s affected by his parents’ problems, but he’s reluctant to admit it on a conscious level. Kay’s world hasn’t opened up in the same way yet, she’s too young—her family is still everything to her. So Simon finds it irritating to be around his sister’s devastation, while Kay feels estranged by her brother’s apparent indifference.

Do you have a sibling yourself? If so, did you draw from your own sibling relationship to create the dynamic between Kay and Simon?
I’m an only child, which I’m sure has only amplified my interest in sibling dynamics. I remember begging my mother to have another kid—but what I really wanted was an older brother or sister. I would have loved it if she’d somehow managed that.

The four main characters in your novel have very distinct personalities and characteristics—though they’re all relatable in different ways, and it’s a pleasure to follow their stories. Do you have a special fondness for one specific character? Why?
I really did come to love them all—it’s strange now to go on without them. Jack was actually the most fun to write, though he’s liable to be the most difficult character for a reader to like. I think it was his way of looking at the world—even when circumstances were terrible, he’d notice what was funny or absurd about them. He also happens to be the only character with whom I have the least life experience in common, and so in a way he arrived more fully formed, separate from me.

Your novel has an unconventional plot structure. I don’t want to give too much away, so I’ll say only that readers do not discover the beginning, the middle, and the end in their natural order. Why did you decide to structure your book in this way? In your opinion, what do readers gain from this choice?
I knew early on that I wanted to look at time. In our lives, just as in the stories we read, there’s always a great deal of importance placed on endings. It’s an understandable, and very human—uniquely human—focus to have, but it can be detrimental to our days as we live them. In the Galway Kinnell poem from which I took my title, as well as the novel’s epigraph, we hear a father address his young daughter about the passing of time, though she is still far too young to understand, urging her to soak up her days on this earth though they will soon be over. There’s a passage in my book that refers to “between-time,” time that we spend waiting to see what will happen next, but which really winds up constituting our whole lives. The structure of the book is meant to remind us: These are the days we have.

Kay’s “Seinfeld” fan fiction is a hilarious entry into the young girl’s creative mind, and it’s a clever way to show how she understands her dad’s infidelity. Why “Seinfeld”? (Did you grow up catching those after-school re-runs?)
Thank you, those sections were fun to write. I watched reruns of sitcoms religiously after school, though when I was really young I was under the impression that the episodes were premiering that day, the way it is with soap operas. I knew I wanted a way into Kay, who’s a very shy, closed-off child—closed off to herself as well as to the people around her—and I thought her feelings could be more believably explored through her writing.

Why “Seinfeld” in particular? Putting aside the fact that I was already tremendously familiar with the show, I liked that it didn’t fall into any of the genres one typically associates with fan fiction, and that the more mature themes Kay would ultimately integrate into her writing would be especially incongruous with the cartoonishness of its characters.

How did you conceive of Jack’s art installation, complete with explosives? Did any real-life artists or installations inspire his work?
It was very important to me that the work be credible. For the most part, Jack’s projects weren’t inspired by any artist’s in particular; rather, they were the product of what I’d been able to glean about the art world and the kind of artist I imagined Jack to be.

There was one real-life artist who inspired some of Jack’s later art, in which he makes images by using the smoke of burning objects to singe his canvases. That artist’s name is Rob Tarbell and I found his smoke art online by total accident a few years ago; he makes these haunting pieces that really stuck with me.

What books are on your own personal summer reading list?
I’m reading Edward St Aubyn’s Melrose novels right now. Then I mean to pick up where I left off with Elena Ferrante’s Neapolitan novels. So many series lately! Summer’s a good time for them. I read all of Patricia Highsmith’s Ripley books one summer while I was working behind a dark bar, wishing I were traipsing around Paris or Tangier or wherever Highsmith sent him.

Are there any authors who inspire you over and over? 
Oh sure, there are so many. Virginia Woolf and E.M. Forster are big for me. Richard Yates, Harold Brodkey. Amy Hempel, Philip Roth, Nicholson Baker. I’m just reading what I love, that’s as inspiring as it gets for me. Lorrie Moore’s “Who Will Run the Frog Hospital?” was the first book I read that made me want to write. I loved what she was doing and I remember thinking, that, I want to do that.

What can you tell us about your next project?
Not as much as I’d like to! I’ve been working with siblings again, sisters, only this time the characters are closer to my own age, which is something I’ve been predisposed to avoid. It’s enough just to live it, without going home and writing about it too.
 

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