August is First Fiction month on BookPage.com. Read more first fiction coverage here. 
 

Novelist J. Ryan Stradal spent months working on his vibrant first novel, Kitchens of the Great Midwest, without ever knowing if anything would come of it.

“You spend a lot of time alone in a room thinking, I don’t know who’s going to read this. No one might care,” he says from his home in Los Angeles. “But it’s just what I wanted to do. If someone said, Tell me your perfect day, I would say, I wake up with an idea in my head and I write it. Then I go out with friends around 7:00 for fish and chips.” 

Set in Midwest kitchens in and around the Twin Cities—a region that Stradal, a native of Hastings, Minnesota, knows well—Kitchens of the Great Midwest is a masterfully woven set of stories that all connect, in some way, to the lovely and slightly mysterious Eva Thorvald. Eva’s mother abandoned her as an infant, after deciding she wasn’t ready to be a parent. “I wasn’t cut out to be a mother,” she writes in the note she leaves behind. “The work of being a mom feels like prison to me.” 

Soon after, Eva’s doting father, a chef, suffers a massive heart attack, leaving his daughter to be raised in poverty by her kindhearted but alcoholic uncle and overworked aunt. 

The few food experiences her father imparted in her before his death stick with Eva—or maybe cooking is just in her DNA. She grows to be a wunderkind chef, starting as a child by cultivating searing-hot peppers under grow lamps and selling them to local restaurants. The adult Eva becomes famous for hosting legendary pop-up restaurant meals with years-long waiting lists, inspired by her participation in a Sunday supper club.

When her mother reappears years later at one of Eva’s pop-up restaurants, Eva is faced with her past—and must decide whether her mother can be part of her future.

“Eva, to me, feels like the person I want to be,” says Stradal. “Eva was decisive at points in her life where I felt a lot of us weren’t decisive. The trauma of her childhood made her grow a thicker skin. The vicissitudes of youth, like being attracted to a douche-bag guy—that happens to everyone in their 20s! It was all something she worked through and ultimately assembled a family of choice. You see that a lot in places like LA, where we’re far from where we came from. Eva’s sort of a personification of that.” 

That’s not to say that Stradal has shallow family roots like Eva. In fact, he credits his mother, who died a decade ago, with giving him the desire to write.

“Our house was filled with books,” he says. “She was one of the few voracious readers I knew. From a young age, I got the idea from her that the most important thing you could do was write a novel. It was the pinnacle of human achievement. The process of writing this book was like having a conversation with her every day. It really felt good.”

While his childhood was filled with books, it was not filled with gourmet cuisine. A child of the 1970s and ’80s, he recalls frozen dinners and a local soda he calls “basically suicide in a can.”

“I definitely find myself engaged by the evolution of food consciousness in my life,” he says. “Since 1975, when I was born, it’s stark. I remember the microwave came out and my parents said, this is great! It took such a turn in the 1970s and 1980s toward convenience at the expense of taste and safety, frankly. And now, we’re excited about exotic farmer’s market vegetables. It’s not just hipsters on the coasts who are shopping at farmer’s markets. It’s all across the country.”

Although the book is packed with scrumptious descriptions of food and a bounty of recipes for everything from French onion soup to wild rice casserole to carrot cake, Stradal does not consider himself a foodie. He has worked in publishing and television production, but never in a kitchen. 

“I’m an enthusiastic end user,” he says with a laugh. “I like food quite a bit, but I’m not an accomplished chef. I sure can swipe a credit card with the best of them—I love restaurants and can spend with alacrity.” 

Stradal was inspired by pop-up restaurants in and around Los Angeles, which by their very nature offer a unique dining experience.

“They’re wonderful, especially if they exist for logical reasons other than financial,” he says. “For example, there was an interest in Georgian food, so some local chefs sell it out and serve Georgian food for a night. Then you can maybe hire them as caterers or fund their next pop-up if you’re a real enthusiast.”

Stradal is half-worried that pop-up restaurants, a somewhat unknown phenomenon when he started writing the book, will evolve so quickly that they will be passé soon after publication. 

“I feel like by the time this book comes out, it’ll be historical fiction,” he says. “People will be charged $5,000 and there’ll be a year-long waitlist. At the time I started writing, it felt very in-the-future, borderline satire.” 

Kitchens of the Great Midwest is one of those fantastic, kinetic books that simultaneously entertain and make you hungry. (Think Like Water for Chocolate or Heartburn.) But it is not, Stradal insists, a book about food.

“I feel it’s a food book second,” he says. “It’s a family book first. I really wanted to write a book that was emotional and about families: one with empathy and heart, with interesting, character-driven stories. I set out to write a book with characters I don’t often see—where they live, how they behave. I didn’t think about writing a book about, like, a white guy falling in love in Brooklyn.”

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

In her debut novel, New York Times reporter Stephanie Clifford takes readers to New York City in the years before the 2008 stock market crash. Everybody Rise follows young striver Evelyn Beegan as she attempts to break into some of New York City’s most elite circles—and will go to almost any extreme to make it happen. We spoke to Clifford about her move from reporting to fiction, social power structures and the “unlikeable” female protagonist.

This is your first published novel, but you’ve worked as a court reporter for the New York Times. Given your experience with the legal world and the undoubtedly juicy stories you’ve covered there, were you ever tempted to write a thriller or crime novel?
I’m actually pretty new to courts—I covered business for years at the Times before switching to a courts beat last year, and a lot of my observations from that coverage made it into the book. Reporting on the 2008 crash and its aftermath made a huge impression on me—we were suddenly having a national discussion about wealth, class and how we got into this mess. I wanted Everybody Rise to reflect the lead up to that time, from the easy money that the young bankers are making at first, to their confidence that the stock market will continue to rise and buoy their fortunes.

As Evelyn thinks at one point, the “more” is always there, taunting her, as it was for so many in that time. As to the courts question—I am starting work on a second novel, set in the criminal-justice world, and there is daily fodder for it in Brooklyn’s courts, as you can imagine!

Your heroine, Evelyn Beegan, goes through quite the transformation over the course of the novel and, at times, behaves absolutely abhorrently. How did you approach Evelyn’s metamorphosis and did you ever worry about taking her past the point of redemption?
There were points when I was watching in horror as she made bad decisions, but I tried to follow where Evelyn led, and to put aside worries about whether she was likeable. I was rooting for her—I felt she had this underlying social anxiety that we’ve all felt at some point (well, most of us have felt). We’ve all wanted something that’s not good for us; we’ve all tried to be something we’re not; and Evelyn is so desperate to belong that she’s willing to do anything for it. Once she realizes what she’s done, it was important to me that she figure out how to get back from this bad situation she creates—and to do so on her own, without being redeemed or rescued by a man. She gets terribly lost, but she ultimately figures out how to find her way back to herself.

You revealed on Twitter that you quietly worked on this novel for years. What was the most difficult part of the writing process? How did you manage to find the energy and creative space to write a novel in your spare time?
There are two answers to this—one practical and one theoretical. I was working on this in fits and starts for a couple of years, and then I realized that if I wanted this novel to be finished, I’d need to structure things differently. I needed to set up regular time that wouldn’t be interrupted, so I would get up at 6 and write until 8 every morning before work. Then, theoretically, I had to make sure that every morning when I finished, I’d get up the next day too and keep working at it. So until I finished a draft, I tried to turn off the critical voice in my head, and I made a deal with myself that I just had to get my rear in that chair from 6 to 8, and even if I only typed a single word, I was still ahead of where I was the day before.

At one point in the novel, a character says to Evelyn that she has been “trying to make it in Edith Wharton’s New York.” In many ways the world depicted in Everybody Rise seems not altogether dissimilar from that of a Wharton novel; in your opinion, how has New York and its society changed in the last century?
Ooh, good question. Parts of the book were inspired by “House of Mirth,” and I think Wharton remains one of the best writers about social class. What’s changing now is that the world is now a lot more diverse and a lot more meritocratic than it was in the Gilded Age. A small cadre of WASPs no longer controls, say, the business world, or colleges, or social life. In fact, growing up in Seattle, where everyone gets the same standard-issue hiking boots and fleece, I didn’t even know this echelon of people still existed. When I shipped myself off to boarding school in the East, I was startled to find not only did they exist, but they held immense social power. The question of why—of what made them so alluring despite the drastically changing times—was one of the sparks for Everybody Rise.

Let’s talk about all the Sondheim and musical theater references in the novel (including the title!)—what was your inspiration for weaving those into the story?
When I was first writing this, after Evelyn was deep into her bad choices, I felt really bad for her. I wanted to give her something that would soften her landing just a little bit. I was listening to Sondheim’s “Merrily We Roll Along” basically on repeat at the time, and that offered an answer. Musicals appeal to Evelyn’s escapism and dreaminess, and remind her—even when she’s throwing herself at this world—that there’s something different out there. The book is also a family story, about Evelyn’s fractious relationship with her parents, whom she’s eager to please and embarrassed about at once. Musicals offered something that Evelyn and her mother could share: as much as Evelyn initially disappoints her mother, and as cold as their relationship can be, they are able to share emotion through musicals. Also, it gave me an outlet for my voluminous and heretofore useless knowledge of musicals lyrics!

The movie rights for this book have already been secured. If casting were left up to you, which actors would you like to see in the film?
I feel achingly old, because my knowledge of twenty-something actresses is not very good—I’m still like, “How about that woman who was in Mystic Pizza?” I actually think the role of Evelyn’s mother, Barbara, would be the most fun to cast—a fifty-something woman who is disappointed with her own life and pushing her daughter into the life she never had. Such a fun Mama Rose role to play.

In recent years, there has been increased discussion about the “whitewashing” of literature, television and film. For instance, the TV show “Girls,” which is also set in present-day New York City, was criticized for its lack of racial diversity, and Everybody Rise is populated almost exclusively with Caucasian characters as well. What is your perception of this issue and what do you feel is your responsibility as writer when it comes to the stories you tell and the characters you populate your novels with?
Not everybody in the novel in white, but it is true that virtually everyone in the stratum Evelyn wants to break into is. While Everybody Rise isn’t journalism, but I approached researching this book as a journalist—interviewing people from this circle, spending time at events, reading sociology about class—and when I spent time in that world, that’s the makeup I found. My responsibility here, I felt, was to write about how something is, not how I wish it were.

One of Evelyn’s biggest downfalls is that once she starts lying, she can’t stop, until her falsehoods get bigger and bigger and she gets trapped by them. Care to share a lie you told but would like to finally come clean about?
Ha! I didn’t brush the cats this morning like I said I had, and I probably won’t do it tonight, either. . . .

Evelyn’s growing lies stemmed from some of the court cases I’ve written about for the Times. As I began to attend more cases, I noticed one commonality: The defendant’s missteps always started small. Giant drug dealers who’d committed multiple murders began by packaging one bag of heroin. White-collar criminals who’d defrauded homeowners of millions of dollars began by fiddling with their taxes. I wondered: how does someone get from a small lie—a place we’ve all been, where we’re futzing with the truth a little—to this life that is off the rails? That journey fascinated me, and I wanted to see what choices Evelyn made, how she rationalized it to herself, as she went from point A to point B.  

One of the major narrative thrusts of Everybody Rise is the pursuit of the “American Dream” in 21st-century America.  What is your personal version of this dream?
Put simply, it’s a world where everybody has a shot. One of the most frustrating things in covering courts is seeing how systemic problems affect regular people: court fines that people can’t afford, records for minor violations that keep them from getting jobs years later, even a midday court appearance that means their hourly job may be in jeopardy. Evelyn’s problems are far removed from those daily pressures, but by the end of the novel, she’s asking some of the same questions: who matters in society, who doesn’t, why some people get punished and others get off scot-free. Those are questions that, judging from political campaigns and national conversations, a lot of Americans are asking nowadays. 

RELATED CONTENT: Read our review of Everybody Rise.

Naomi Jackson's The Star Side of Bird Hill is a lush and lyrical debut set in Barbados during the summer of 1989. Ten-year-old Phaedra and her 16-year-old sister, Dionne, are sent away from their home in Brooklyn to spend some time with their maternal grandmother, Hyacinth, in the Caribbean, but neither girl is quite prepared for what the summer holds in store. Jackson centers her tale around four women in the same family from four different generations and acutely sifts through the emotional landscapes of coming-of-age, claiming a cultural identity, grief and mental illness while including plenty of moments of brash humor and poetic insight.

We asked Jackson a few questions about her own ties to Barbados, her writing process, what she's working on next and more.

What was the initial inspiration for this novel?
I started this novel with just the opening scene of the novel, which features two sisters, Phaedra and Dionne, playing with their friends in a church cemetery in Barbados. I wrote The Star Side of Bird Hill to explore the lives and experiences of Caribbean people both at home and in the diaspora. Writing the book was also a way to answer a question that dogged me—what would happen if, like my parents sometimes joked, they sent me home to the Caribbean for the summer, and left me there for good.

I love the cover! Did you select the artwork?
I love the cover too! I met the cover artist, Sheena Rose, when I was in Barbados writing and researching my novel. A friend gifted me one of Sheena Rose’s paintings, “Too Much Makeup,” when I graduated from the Iowa Writers’ Workshop, and it hung above my desk as I finished the book. I was so glad that my publisher was open to and excited about my idea of featuring the painting on the book cover. I wrote about the cover story for Lit Hub.

Much like Dionne and Phaedra, you grew up in Brooklyn with West Indian parents. Have you spent much time in the Caribbean as a child, and did you travel to Barbados during your writing process?
I grew up in a predominantly West Indian neighborhood in Brooklyn, and I spent many childhood summers in Barbados (where my mother’s from) and in Antigua (where my father’s from) with my sister and a gang of cousins. I spent the summer of 2012 in Barbados researching and writing this novel. I found spending an extended period of time in Barbados to be really helpful. I felt that there was no substitute for listening to people talk and seeing the landscape with a writer’s eye and curiosity.  

Did your characters surprise you at any point during your writing process?
When I began this novel, I was telling the story from the perspective of the younger sister, Phaedra. I broke a number of rules in fiction by eventually choosing a roaming point of view that jumps between Phaedra, her sister Dionne, and their grandmother Hyacinth. I was surprised by the ways in which choosing multiple perspectives enriched the novel, and I was taken aback by how much the other characters had to say.

Depression and mental illness have large roles in this novel. Why was it important for you to openly and honestly explore this topic?
I wanted to write a book that honestly tackled mental health in black communities head on, like Bebe Moore Campbell’s 72 Hour Hold. I was inspired by Campbell’s book and related advocacy for mental health issues. I felt that writing honestly about this issue was an important way to lift the veil on a conversation about mental health that is often hushed and avoided altogether in Caribbean communities. I felt I was uniquely equipped to change hearts and minds by telling a nuanced, complex story about mental illness and how it affects Caribbean families.

As a graduate of many prestigious writing programs, what’s the best piece of writing advice you’ve received so far?
Writers write.

Aside from writing, do you have any other creative outlets and pursuits?
I enjoy the other creative arts—the visual arts, music, dance and theatre. I also love watching films; ideally, I get to see a few films each week.

Who are some of the authors that you turn to for inspiration?
Shay Youngblood, Marlon James, Tiphanie Yanique, Jamaica Kincaid, Sherman Alexie.

What are you working on next?
I am working on my second novel, a multigenerational family saga set in Brooklyn and the Caribbean from the 1930s to the 2000s. I am also writing a screenplay adaptation of my short story, “Ladies,” with Barbadian filmmaker Lisa Harewood.

Author photo by Lola Flash

Garth Risk Hallberg’s debut novel—sold for $2 million in a 10-publisher bidding war—has been the most anticipated, hyped and ballyhooed book of 2015. If the literary gods are fair, it’ll wind up on many shortlists. But unless you’re a connoisseur of literary criticism, you’ve probably never heard of the author.

Hallberg grew up in the small college town of Greenville, North Carolina, where he was the “resident beatnik.” Until now, he’s had a quiet career as an award-winning book critic for The Millions and a writing professor at Sarah Lawrence College. That’s about to change with the arrival of his first novel.

City on Fire is a postmodern epic in the vein of Roberto Bolaño’s 2666. Beginning with a mysterious shooting in Central Park and culminating in the real-life New York City blackout of 1977, Hallberg weaves a complex story with an ensemble cast. The book’s seven parts are divided by and interspersed with letters, news clippings and images, similar in form to Marisha Pessl’s Night Film. City on Fire encapsulates the many cities that are somehow one New York City during its most dramatic moment in the 20th century.

We spoke with Hallberg about City on Fire, New York City and how the book was inspired by September 11.

Let’s start with the obvious: most debut novels aren’t 900 pages long. Did you set out to write something so sprawling in scope?
The scope of the book was very much a part of the initial conception. The whole idea came to me in a period of about 90 seconds in 2003, and one of the things I saw about the book was that it would have the scale and sweep of Bleak House. And that was almost scary for me, so after writing a single page of it, I shut the notebook and said, “Oh boy, I don’t have the chops to do something like that. I’ll come back to it in 10 years.” But I came back to it about four years later. It had been building in my subconscious until the world was fully formed, so when I sat down to write, it was like going through the wardrobe into Narnia.

You’ve already been compared to DeLillo, Franzen and David Foster Wallace. What does that feel like as a debut novelist?
It’s sort of like asking a fish how the water feels. You’re inside it, but not necessarily aware of what’s being said around you. If there’s one predominant feeling, it’s surprise.

I loved the book’s interludes with letters, news clippings and images. What made you decide to play around with those?
I had a dream in which I saw the finished book, and I was giving it to someone. And as I was flipping through it, I could see that some pages weren’t just pure type. So I woke up and thought, either that’s a crazy dream that I’ll just forget about, or there’s something to it, and I’ll figure it out down the road. But I had written this letter, and it started to revolve around a magazine article, and I knew I had to write it, and I knew where it went.

As a native of a small town, what drew you to New York?
I used to go up to New York with my friends as a teenager and just drive around, and it was completely intoxicating. New York was a place where everything that had been repressed or frowned upon or discouraged in the town I grew up in was given freedom of expression.

You’ve said New York seemed like a fantastical place when you were young. Why?
When I first started to read, New York was where all the books came from. Almost every book that I encountered as a kid was like a doorway to the wider world, and a world that I would return to the real world enriched by. Stuart Little, Harriet the Spy, Tales of a Fourth Grade Nothing, And to Think That I Saw It on Mulberry Street—in many of those books the world that you walk into is altered and exciting and transformed.

This might be a strange analogy, but your conception of the city reminds me of the “multiverse” in Marvel and DC Comics, with all these different continuities and realities that somehow coexist in the same city at the same time.
I think that’s a good analogy! In my experience, we actually live in a multiverse, but that’s so challenging to keep remembering. We’re constantly tempted to imagine that we live in a world that’s less complex, or that’s just about us.

Do you think the New York City of 2015 is a less magical place than it once was?
I’m hesitant to pontificate on what New York might be in general. After September 11, there was this extraordinary feeling that everyone was still grieving. And for that reason, people seemed vulnerable and more open to change, in the same way people do at a bar after a funeral, this feeling that it would be a tribute to the people we lost to change your life for the better. But that feeling didn’t last. You can’t live inside that feeling forever. In 2015, it’s hard for me to say what New York means to anyone besides me.

I’ve heard you say that September 11 partially motivated your writing. What do you mean by that?
September 11 was seeing something I cared deeply about suddenly put in risk of not existing. I was just out of college, so it was my first initiation into life as an adult in America. Between then and 2003, there was a lot of ideological work going on in the culture, trying to say what September 11 really meant, and increasingly what people were saying was not what I knew to be true. So I think, subconsciously, I was looking for a way to talk about that period from September 2001 up until 2003, about what it meant for me.

This might be way too early, but what’s next for you?
Another writer asked me that a few months ago, and when I said I couldn’t answer, he said, “Good, if you were able to talk about it now, I’d think you were crazy.” So I’m among the healthy minority who won’t answer that question yet!

ALSO IN BOOKPAGE: Read a review of City on Fire.
Adam Morgan is a writer and lecturer living in Chicago. His latest book is North Carolina’s Wild Piedmont: A Natural History.

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

Claire Vaye Watkins’ award-winning short story collection, Battleborn (2012), explored the West and the often disappointing truths behind its rich mythology. Watkins returns to the West in her luminous debut novel, Gold Fame Citrus, although it’s a West that has been drastically altered. 

The California of Gold Fame Citrus has been ravaged by unending drought, and only a handful of drifters remain, including disillusioned couple Luz and Ray, who are squatting in a starlet’s abandoned house until they take on the care of a strange, enigmatic toddler and begin to look east toward a more stable life. However, a vast stretch of sand has engulfed the West, and crossing the unmapped terrain is treacherous. When the trio encounters Levi, a prophet-like dowser, and his followers, more strange dangers present themselves in unexpected ways. 

I got the chance to sit down with Watkins during the Southern Festival of Books earlier this month, and we talked about the power of setting, the myths of motherhood and more.

This novel is firmly rooted in the West, and you grew up in the Mojave Desert. I was wondering what about the West really inspires your writing.
It’s hard to separate what inspires me from just who I am. I grew up there, and when I moved away from the West, I started to see it through more mythic eyes, to see how other people who never have been there saw it. And I started to think it was a really captivating place, and kind of haunted. I like the way that history seems to gurgle up to the surface a lot of times, wherever you are. It’s a relatively new place, but there are a lot of stories all layered on top of each other. And I think the landscape is beautiful, and I like putting characters who are in trouble in really beautiful places and seeing what that might do to who they are.

"When I moved away from the West, I started to see how people who never have been there saw it. I started to think it was a really captivating place, and kind of haunted."

Obviously this novel is coming out while there’s a major drought in the West, and I was wondering how that affected your writing. Did you keep abreast of the situation or did you try to ignore it and do your own thing?
I was born in the Owens Valley, which is the place where Owens Lake used to be, and Owens Lake was drained by the Los Angeles Aqueduct System in the 1920s. It set off what’s called the California Water Wars which is—have you ever seen the movie Chinatown?

I haven’t.
Well, it’s basically about the people in Owens Valley who try to resist—they dynamite the dams or the projects—so it was sort of like a microcosm of what happens in a much bigger scale in this book. So I was born there, and my family knew those stories and told those stories all the time. I mean, for most people in California, especially the dry part of California, drought and water has been on their minds their whole lives. So it was more like I was watching the rest of the country catch up to those people who have always been worried about it. Which was kind of nice, or at least refreshing. When I first started working on the book about five years ago, nobody even knew what I was talking about when I said I was writing about water and the Southwest, and some people would be like, “Oh yeah, it is kind of dry there, isn’t it?” But now, pretty much everybody knows. It’s a major issue.

Do you think at this point you’ll stick to the Western world in your writing, or do you think you’ll move out of the West?
I don’t know yet. I am getting increasingly interested in a less place-driven way of writing. I’ve always started with the setting in any piece of fiction, or at least the piece doesn’t really cohere until I know where it’s set. But I'm reading Lydia Davis’ stories right now, and a lot of them have no setting at all. There’s just a really minimalistic approach to place. And probably because I’ve been writing in that mode now for two books, I'm getting interested in other ways of writing. So not necessarily that I’ll be interested in writing about other regions. I don’t think I could write about any region other than the American West the way that I do, because I don’t know it as well. I don’t feel like it’s a part of me, even though I’ve lived in the Midwest and the Rust Belt.

Luz was a model before the West was abandoned. I was wondering about your thoughts on her beauty in this completely blown out world.
I think what’s interesting about Luz is that she is one of these models who’s really striking looking, but sometimes that can be seen as an ugliness. But sometimes, in the right campaign, with the right makeup and the right advertising, it can be really exotic. So her beauty is particularly exoticized. She would never be mistaken for the girl next door. I think I was drawn to that because it would be almost like she had this secret identity. And there’s some stuff about her race going on there, that they want her for this particular kind of look. Her job is always telling her, “You’re like this.” But she actually feels really, completely different. And then her whole childhood she was this baby Dunn symbol. I like that all of the characters have three or four different identities that they can slip into and out of depending on the situation.

I love the character Luz, and I strongly identified with her, but I was also distraught by her irresponsible—albeit realistic—choices. Did you intend for the reader to really connect with Luz?
Yeah, definitely. I mean, I like the idea that you would be allied with someone who would make really bad decisions, but she makes bad decisions for good reasons. I like the muddiness and the complication. I didn’t set out to do this explicitly, but it was important for me to really lodge the reader with a young woman who is a product of our culture and is trying to move around in a culture in which she is objectified. I mean, she is professionally objectified, but there’s threats of sexual violence here and there, and that’s just what it is to be a woman, you know? And it’s funny, because every once and a while I’ll get feedback that someone wishes Luz was more strong or powerful, and I'm like, “Yeah, I bet she wishes that too!” If only we could just make the characters that way. But I don’t think that’s the goal of a novel. Dora the Explorer should be a powerful young woman with agency, right? But that’s not what the novel is doing, it’s not a role-model project. It’s a mirror, it’s not aspirational. One of my teachers used to say that you can only give characters the endings that they deserve.

"Dora the Explorer should be a powerful young woman with agency, right? But that’s not what the novel is doing, it’s not a role-model project. It’s a mirror, it’s not aspirational."

In the same vein, we spend a lot of time with Luz, and we spend a lot of time inspecting her failures as Ray’s lover and as a surrogate mother, but we don’t spend as much time with Ray, who arguably makes just as many mistakes. I was wondering, what if it had been Ray’s book? Was the focus on feminine failure intentional?
It was probably just that I am more familiar with feminine failure. But I did want Ray to also be wrestling with masculine archetypes. He’s a veteran, so the word “hero” is often adhered to him, and he’s uncomfortable with that. Yet, a lot of the mistakes he makes are because he’s trying to be a hero, or he thinks this is what a "manly man" ought to do. What he would like to do, just as a little guy, a little speck on the earth, is not hardly ever the same thing as what man as hero and actor should do. I wanted to show that there’s a difference between being true to yourself and being heroic, and then being this cardboard cutout of masculinity, which is often just that. I mean it’s flimsy and frail and made of trash.

I noticed that the two central male figures in Luz’s life, Ray and Levi, are doling out sedatives, which I thought was interesting. Could you say a little more about that?
They are, aren’t they? I mean, you can certainly imagine the appeal of sedatives, just in our world right here in Nashville! Let alone in this near-apocalyptic hellscape. Maybe it goes back to that idea that they’re trying to be heroic, or they’re trying to help people, and they develop these coping mechanisms. And of course, in situations like the one Luz finds herself in in the colony, drugs are often used to control. I'm interested in drug use as being seen as a way to higher consciousness. Because I think that’s so alluring—I would love for that to be true! If I could just take a drop of acid and then access another dimension of existence. That’d be so cool! But I also kind of doubt it. Then again I haven’t taken acid. But maybe that’s my family.

Their central characters, Ray and Luz and the baby Estrella, are all named after forms of light. I was wondering how you settled on those names?
Luz is from the film Giant with James Dean. It’s kind of like Gone with the Wind but with cowboys? It's just a big epic, and one of the sister characters, her name is Luz. You never really know—I guess it’s because they’re Texans—why it’s pronounced that way. Ray—well, I think I wanted them both to be tight, short, three-letter names. And I had a dear friend who passed away whose middle name was Ray. He liked to go by Ray sometimes when he was up to no good. It was almost like an alter ego for him. I thought about him a lot as I was writing this. Then once I realized, of course, Luz is Spanish for light and Ray, like a ray of light, I thought they would have to be aware of this. I hate it when there’s symbols or some thematic thing going on and the characters are just totally oblivious, you know? I think it’s always a good idea to let your characters be as smart as you are if not smarter.

"I hate it when there’s symbols or some thematic thing going on and the characters are just totally oblivious, you know? I think it’s always a good idea to let your characters be as smart as you are if not smarter."

In society, motherhood is kind of held up on a pedestal and invested with these transformative powers and the ability to make women better people. I'm wondering—is that true? Luz has a lot of failings as a surrogate mother. Are we just doomed to be who we are—there’s no magic transformations out there?
That’s so interesting. You know, I didn’t realize that part of the myth of motherhood is that it can be transformational until I was pregnant, and so many people would describe it to me as this transformation. I read that one of the theories about natural birth is that it’s such a profound experience that it actually wipes away your past traumas.

That’d be neat.
Right? And that’s a cousin to the idea that you can take a pill and reach a higher plane of existence. We’re looking for something and hoping that maybe this experience will give us something. So I think that Luz is hoping that [motherhood] will be a major transformation and an upheaval for her. But of course, as with major transformations, you can’t really predict them. It’s funny. I have felt like motherhood is completely transformative, but in absolutely unpredictable ways. I wrote this book—I think I turned it in a week before I went into labor with my daughter—and sometimes when I'm talking about it or reading from it, I feel like it was written by somebody else, somebody that I don't even know anymore. An old friend or something.

How so? When you’re reading it, what strikes you as odd?
Partly that my worldview has been radically redesigned by being a parent. And the worldview in the book is still my old one that I used to have. Partly, in a lot of this book I was kind of rehearsing. My friend Peter Ho Davies talks about how, a lot of times in our books, people mistakenly think that writers are writing about their experience, but they’re actually maybe more rehearsing for experience. So for me, it was motherhood; I was thinking about what it would be like to have a child. And in some ways, I got a lot right about motherhood. Not for me, but for Luz. But then there are other things that I could never really have imagined till I did it.

And it’s interesting that it’s not Luz’s child.
That’s kind of another interesting layer on it. We treat mothers generally with more delicacy than we do non-mothers. It’s just the way it is; I don’t think it’s a great thing. And suddenly Luz, who’s been treated kind of roughly her whole life—she’s been objectified a lot, she was sexually abused when she was a model—now she’s suddenly treated like a mother. She’s been on the whore side of the Madonna-whore binary. And then just in an instant, she’s on the Madonna side.

This is embarrassing to admit, but I’ve never been farther west than Arkansas. So for a while, I thought the Amargosa Dune Sea was real. It very much melded myth and reality. I was really amazed by your ability to create this landscape, and I was wondering about the process of creating the myth and this dune sea.
There’s a big long chapter about the dune sea in the middle of this book, and that was the first thing I ever wrote. It ended up being about a hundred pages in, but I wrote that first, and I think it was because I needed to do exactly what you’re saying. I needed to figure out what this thing was from all different angles. How does the geology of it work—I mean of course it doesn’t really work, this would take millions of years and this happens in like half a generation. But let’s just suspend our disbelief for a little bit—and the culture of it. I found that if I figured out the mundane details, it made it more real for me. Like, whose jurisdiction is this? What kind of animals do or don’t live there? What happens to the houses?

I loved the fact that the foot of the dune crushes; it doesn’t cover anything up, and that’s what ends up convincing the people to leave. Their homes aren’t covered up, they’re gone.
Right! You know, there’s a wonderful Tony Earley story about a dam keeper called “The Prophet from Jupiter,” and it has this image of this town that’s submerged by the dam. It’s totally spooky. So I wanted to do a terrestrial version of that. But then I realized that the idea of the sand just gently coming—it was too gentle, it was romantic. So instead I thought about glaciers, how they scrape the land and leave these gauges and turn things into rock right away.

I felt that the drive for sex and companionship in this novel was really powerful, as well as being a huge threat and a tool for manipulation. I was wondering why sex is such a driving force and comfort for these characters.
I just like the idea that even though this is a disastrous landscape, that people would still be whole, they would still have their needs. They would still laugh, they would still need to go to the bathroom, they would still have sex. They would still get bored. They would still need something to occupy their time, they might like to play music. That we would just continue to be ourselves. So often when I read dystopian literature, it just seems like all people do is eat. And drink and sleep and eat and drink and sleep and eat. It just doesn’t seem real to me, or wholly imagined. They’re also young people, and they don’t have a whole lot to do.

Battleborn has a lot to do with the West’s history, and in “Ghosts, Cowboys,” there’s elements of your family’s history, as well. I was wondering if your mother and father influenced this novel.
Oh yeah, definitely. My mom’s the one who told me about the California Water Wars in the 20s and 30s and taught me the way the geology of the West works. She ran a museum—a very small little rock shop and museum at the edge of Death Valley, and I basically grew up there. So I learned about rocks, but I also learned about interpreting history. I don’t really know nearly as much about geology or natural history or talc mining or any of the thing I write about. I just learned what a good story feels like. If we’re trying to understand the past, what is the shape of that genre. So absolutely.

Are you looking forward to anything in particular at the festival?
That I get to be with Ben Percy on the panel is so fun. I think we’re going to run our panel more like a survivalist boot camp. Between Ben and I think we can teach everybody a lot about surviving the apocalypse.  

(Author photo by Heike Steinweg)

Hannah Rothschild is an established insider of the London art world. Recently appointed Chair of the National Gallery, she is respected as both connoisseur and patron, and a champion of art education. 

It has therefore been a cause for both delight and frisson in England that Rothschild—whose previous book was a biography—has written her first novel, The Improbability of Love, as a blistering, uninhibited and hilarious satire of the London art scene. Moreover, the writing is so good, interweaving a complex set of love stories of different kinds: romantic love, filial love, love of art. 

The action hinges on the 18th-century French artist Antoine Watteau, whose fictional “lost” painting gives the novel its title. Rothschild mischievously invents this artwork and drops it in a London junk shop, where her 31-year-old heroine, Annie McDee, purchases it on a whim. Why Watteau? 

“I’ve always been intrigued by Watteau’s paintings,” Rothschild tells us during a call to her London home. “The first one I ever saw was the ’Pierrot’ in the Louvre, that very mournful, clown-like figure. I was 16, on an exchange program to France, unsure about who I was or where I was going or what I was doing. ’Pierrot’ seemed to completely personify and captivate and reflect what I was feeling.” 

A long-lost (and rather chatty) painting helps tell its story in this imaginative debut.

The artist’s somewhat obscure past helped as well. “We know almost nothing about Watteau himself,” says Rothschild, “and from a novelist’s point of view that’s quite useful because I can make stuff up about him, use my imagination.” 

The painting is pursued by a roster of colorful characters, ranging from an aging drag queen who caters to the super-rich to a Russian oligarch to . . . well, someone very much like the author herself, a person of authority at the National Gallery of Art. Most surprising of all, the painting is a character in its own right, with a garrulous ability to narrate its history. This imaginative plot twist came from Rothschild’s childhood, during which she spent considerable time in museums with her father. 

“All the pictures were just hanging around and I thought, if only they could talk!” she recalls. “Perhaps they would tell us what they’ve seen and heard,” as they hung in the ballrooms and boudoirs of great leaders.

Alongside the story of Annie and her painting, The Improbability of Love gives us a complex father-daughter relationship. Art purveyors Memling and Rebecca Winkleman present themselves as a Holocaust survivor and his faithful daughter, whose untold suffering seems to ennoble the work they do. But things are (very darkly) not what they seem. This thread of the book is, in some sense, a sustained meditation on the tendency of art to corrupt as readily as it can edify. The idea is central to the novel’s workings, though it can be eclipsed by the breezy mechanics of the plot and its wicked satirical pleasures. 

“There is a thing about beauty which is both corrupting and exonerating,” Rothschild says. “Art corrupts because people want to possess something beautiful. It brings out some of the baser instincts.”

But then there is Annie, who has a passion for a different art. “Annie is a gourmet chef who knows very little about art, and she is really the only person in the novel who actually likes Watteau’s picture! Everyone else just wants to have it.”

Rothschild’s family name—her father is the Fourth Baron Roths-child and comes from a long line of successful bankers—is associated with a grand legacy of artistic acquisition and patronage. Adding this to her professional experience, Rothschild has an unusual degree of insight into the art world. We asked her if the novel’s frank exposure of the wackiness of the London art scene has gotten her into any professional hot water. 

“No, not at all. In some ways, I’ve been quite restrained!” she says. “One of the riveting things about the art world is that you’ve got this very strange dichotomy between serious, low-paid, passionate, erudite individuals—curators, writers, the artists themselves—and almost their complete polar opposites: people who’ve got too much money and too little morals. And it all happens in one room! That’s why it’s such a gift to a novelist.”

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

Sunil Yapa, author of the gripping, profoundly humane first novel Your Heart Is a Muscle the Size of a Fist, used to hide his laptop in the oven of the beach house he was renting in Chile.

“That was my security measure,” Yapa says with a bemused laugh during a call to Woodstock, New York, where he currently lives. “I’d put it in a baking tray and hide it in the oven!”

What Yapa was protecting was the 604-page first draft of his novel about the chaotic protest during the 1999 World Trade Organization meeting in Seattle that erupted into violence. In Chile, where he lived frugally while he was teaching himself to write, Yapa didn’t have access to a printer, the cloud or a backup hard drive. The novel lived only on his laptop. Maybe you can guess where this is going.

But first, a little more background: Yapa grew up mostly in State College, Pennsylvania. He knew from a young age that he wanted to write fiction. Libraries were his favorite haunt. And while he had many friends as a child, his mother often had to tell him to stop reading and shoo him out of the house to play. But as the son of an immigrant—his father is a recently retired Penn State geography professor from Sri Lanka; his mother is from Montana—“there was a sense that being a writer wasn’t a serious occupation or a useful use of your time. My father never said that to me, and in fact he’s very proud that I’m doing it. But it’s something that I absorbed and something I’ve heard reflected from other second-generation immigrant kids. It was very difficult to think about all he had sacrificed to get here and raise my brother and me in a middle-class life and take being an artist seriously.”

So from the age of 17 to 27, Yapa tried to follow in his father’s footsteps and get a Ph.D. in geography. But then he began to travel, “and I realized I didn’t want to be an academic; what I wanted to do was write fiction.”

Yapa also discovered a surprising way to support his writing habit. “I worked as a traveling salesman. A friend and I would travel all over the country to the biggest colleges and universities and sell posters. We would compress a year’s work into two intense months and make $10,000 or $15,000—not enough to live in New York or San Francisco or, really, anywhere in the U.S.” But with help from his grandfather, who encouraged his writing, he and his friend discovered that they could live on what they had made for a whole year in Chile or Guatemala without working. “We didn’t live the high life, but I was able to teach myself to write for almost seven years before I sent anything out.”

Yapa was eventually accepted to the Hunter College M.F.A. program, where he honed his talents with guidance from writers like Peter Carey, Colum McCann and Claire Messud. After graduating, he returned to his traveling-salesman gig to support the completion of his novel. One night on a sales trip to Chicago, the laptop containing the only copy of his book was stolen from his hotel room.

"I thought, oh god, I’m going to write this thing again because it’s not going to leave me alone.”

“I never recovered it. It was just gone. I was devastated, of course. I was depressed for three months. But I honestly think it was a moment when I knew I must be a writer because the story started bubbling up again in my brain, and I thought, oh god, I’m going to write this thing again because it’s not going to leave me alone.”

Yapa now thinks there were benefits to the loss of the first draft. The disappeared draft had more than 50 characters. The published book includes a streamlined and compelling cast of characters—fully realized personalities who dramatize the stories of the people who clashed in Seattle on the first day of the WTO meeting. These include Victor, an initially apolitical, homeless teenager with a connection to Police Chief Bishop; demonstrators Kingfisher and John Henry, who struggle throughout a brutal day to remain nonviolent; police officers Park and “Ju,” who are overwhelmed by the sheer number of protesters; and Dr. Charles Wickramsinghe, a Sri Lankan diplomat caught up in the fray.

“I was thinking about the protest and about globalization,” says Yapa, explaining the inception of the book, “and I found this picture of a woman on the street in Seattle, almost wreathed in tear gas. She was on her knees and there was blood coming from her forehead. Someone, he looks like a medic, is tending to her scalp. Her hands are clasped together and it looks like she’s praying, but she might just be in pain. You can’t tell. I saw that, and I thought, wow, what would make a woman like that risk tear gas, pepper spray, beatings for a protest? Because this was a different kind of protest. It was about someone else’s rights three continents away. It wasn’t about an expansion of this person’s own rights, necessarily, but about a recognition of living in a globally connected world, where our lives overlap with each other. That, to me, was both inspiring and totally confusing.” 

Yapa, who lived in Seattle when he was 19—the same age as his luminous character Victor—did an enormous amount of research to bring a startling clarity to his narrative. “Almost everything that happens in the book happened, at some point, in the protest,” Yapa says. “I wanted the experience for a reader to be accurate, not sensationalized.”

So a reader will experience the incredible discipline of the nonviolent protesters; the utter confusion and fear of a police force of 900 at most trying—and finally failing—to maintain order when faced with 60,000 demonstrators; and the tension within all of Yapa’s characters between their public actions and their complex inner thoughts and emotions.

This ends up making Your Heart Is a Muscle the Size of a Fist an absolutely compelling read. Many of the scenes are simply electrifying and some are quite violent. “I really, really wanted this book to be a page-turner,” Yapa says. “But I didn’t want to sensationalize the violence. And yet [violent acts] happened. I wanted a reader to experience what courage it must have taken for people to sit through this.”

In addition, Yapa is interested in the ideas behind the protests and the WTO. “I also wanted readers to experience the politics and economics of IMF deals and World Bank loans, structural adjustments and austerity programs. All that stuff is very academic and kind of boring.” In the novel, Yapa somehow manages to put human faces and human consequences on these abstractions.

The book probably succeeds so well because Yapa “tried to have no villains in the book. The whole book is a project to empathize with all the characters. I wanted a reader to think, yeah, it’s not just that this character seems terrible, he is terrible! And yet he has a history, and that history doesn’t forgive his actions, but it does complicate our view of him. I think the essence of compassion is to hold two contradictory feelings for someone at the same time.”

Asked how he arrived at such a view, Yapa points to his experiences as a biracial child. “I have double vision. In mainstream white culture, I felt kind of Sri Lankan. But I don’t speak the language and I didn’t grow up there. So when I was around Sri Lankan culture, I felt very white. I am always straddling two worlds. As a kid you struggle with feeling like an outsider. But as a writer that’s an excellent place to be.”

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

Idra Novey’s Ways to Disappear is a clever literary mystery involving the disappearance of a Brazilian novelist and the American translator who travels to South America to find her. Novey is a prize-winning poet and translator, who has also taught writing to men and women in prison.

Your debut is full of the most vivid images: the author disappearing into an almond tree, a mutilated ear in the plastic sandwich bag. Is there a scene you began with, something that started the whole novel off?
Absolutely. I’d had the idea for some time of writing a novel about a translator in search of her author. But once the idea came to me of Beatriz disappearing into the almond tree with her book and cigar, everything else came much more quickly.

This book is really about the power of novels—writing them, reading them, translating them. Were you an avid reader as a child?
I read constantly as a child and also randomly. I’d pick up the medical magazines off my father’s desk and read those and also old newspapers in the garage. I read Anne of Green Gables and Flowers in the Attic and everything my friends in the neighborhood talked about, but I also loved reading odd things no one knew or ever asked me about. I didn’t understand most of the sentences in the medical magazines, but I liked trying to decipher them. I guess even then I was drawn to the mysteries of translation.

The story is part literary mystery, part romance but with a comic, almost surreal streak. How did you work to balance these different sensibilities in one novel?
I tried to just trust my instincts about what tone to use to get closest to the emotional truth of any given scene. I find moving between sensibilities as a writer is like moving between languages. Once you feel comfortable with that kind of movement, it feels natural. I speak mostly Spanish at home with my family, but sometimes what’s funny about something we’re discussing only makes sense in English and instinctively we all switch over. That often happens when I speak with the various Brazilian writers I’ve translated from Portuguese as well. Moving between sensibilities keeps things interesting.

How did you start working as a translator?
I was a Comparative Literature major in college and translated a poem for a class my sophomore year. The professor told me he thought the translation was good enough to send out to a literary journal, so I did and they took it. After that, I started publishing my own poems in journals, too. First in campus publications, and then elsewhere. The more I translated the more I changed and grew as a writer, which led me to seek out other writers to translate, and on it went.

There is an intimacy that develops between a writer and translator and we certainly see that in Emma’s response to the novelist’s disappearance. How does translating another person’s work change your experience of that writer?
That is such an insightful question and gets at one of the most fascinating aspects of being a translator. Every book I’ve translated has changed the way I think about writing, both my own and that of the authors I translate, but also about life in general. After a few hours translating Clarice Lispector, I asked myself more spiritual questions. After translating the Argentine writer Vizconde Lascano Tegui, who is very funny and absurd, I noticed more of the humor and absurdity of wherever I happened to go next.

You are a poet, a translator, an essayist and now a novelist. Do you see ways in which the different forms of writing intersect?
As with the back and forth between writing and translating, a similar syncretism happens when working in more than one genre. You end up bringing some poetry into your fiction. Or some narrative suspense into an essay. Or the reflective tone of an essay into a poem. It’s exciting to move between genres and see how they feed into each other.

How has being a translator specifically influenced your work as a poet?
What sounds beautiful to a reader’s ear is different in every language. What makes a sentence lyrical in English wouldn’t necessarily make for a beautiful sentence in Portuguese, for example. In translation you have to invent an equivalent music and inventing music is always good for a poet’s ear.

Who are some new South American writers that we should be looking for?
I’d recommend The Obscene Madame D by the Brazilian writer Hilda Hilst. It was only recently published in English for the first time so it’s new to readers here though Hilst died in 2004. Like the American writer Lucia Berlin, many celebrated women writers in Brazil like Hilst and Clarice Lispector didn’t get to see their work reach the international audience it’s finally reaching now.

Your book Exit, Civilian, as well as your work with Bard College’s Prison Initiative and with the PEN Prison Writing Committee, has focused on the incarcerated. What drew you to working with this population?
I’ve always sought out opportunities to teach outside academia. When I lived in Chile, I volunteered at a domestic violence center and organized an informal writing group there and I’ve taught poetry in various public schools in New York City. Nicole Wallack, who directs the University Writing Program at Columbia University, where I taught at one point, recommended me for the Bard Prison Initiative because she knew that kind of teaching was important to me.

You have lived in both North and South America. Describe your perfect writing day in any of the places where you’ve lived.
An ideal writing day would begin at dawn on Boipeba or some other Brazilian island that takes multiple boats to reach. Late in the day, after lunch by the ocean, I’d step out into Buenos Aires and roam through its glorious used bookstores or see a play and then magically transport myself to Brooklyn to meet a friend for Bikram yoga and dinner. But an early dinner, so I could get back in time to Boipeba to read in bed with the sound of the ocean outside.

Author photo by Donata Zannotti.

ALSO IN BOOKPAGE: Read our review of How to Disappear.

Inheriting land might seem like winning the lottery to many men in 1920s Alabama, but to Roscoe T. Martin, his father-in-law’s farm is a burden. Moving to the country with his wife and son meant leaving Alabama Power, where he was able to work with the electricity that fascinates him.

Then one day Roscoe sees an opportunity: He’ll siphon off the grid to electrify the farm and save the family’s failing finances. But when a man is killed on one of Roscoe’s illegal lines, the lives of everyone on the farm are changed forever.

In her evocative debut novel, Work Like Any Other, Virginia Reeves immerses readers in the hardscrabble world of early 20th-century Alabama and a time when electricity still felt like magic.  

I was surprised to learn you grew up in Montana and now live in Texas—you conjure 1920s Alabama so vividly. Do you have any ties to Alabama?
My grandparents retired to Lillian, Alabama, when I was in elementary school, and I visited nearly every year. My parents moved quite a bit, and in adulthood I have as well, but my grandmother still lives in their original house. In a way, Alabama is a constant, a place that has not changed. 

What drew you to this topic?
In my second year at the Michener Center for Writers, I took a history writing course with H.W. Brands, with the intention of digging into Alabama history. I was a novice when it came to historical research, and I remember typing “Alabama history” into a search engine at the University of Texas library. The first book I pulled off the shelves was a bound graduate thesis, published in the early 1930s, called “These Came Back.” It explored chances of breaking parole based upon specific characteristics of parolees, and it made for one of the best character sketches I’ve ever seen. I built Roscoe from those statistics. 

The descriptions of electricity in this book really convey the excitement that Roscoe feels about something that we take for granted today. Can you talk a little bit about why it was so revolutionary? 
Like any new technology, electricity met with its share of skeptics, embodied in the book by Roscoe’s father-in-law and Bean, the store owner. Think of light linked only to fire—oil lamps, candles—and then see it burning in a light bulb. It feels like sorcery, magic. This force can do what fire does, and it can also do what men do. It is power, fierce and raw. When that magic fed into rural communities, it took on endless potential. Roscoe sees it this way. 

Some readers might find Roscoe’s wife, Marie, unsympathetic: She doesn’t hire a lawyer for Roscoe and she refuses to allow their son to communicate with him. How do you feel about Marie?
I don’t want to defend Marie’s actions, but I do understand her. I have known people like her, people who shut down in the face of tragedy, who simply put it to the side. [Their farmhand] Wilson’s free life was something Marie and her father fought for, and she sees Roscoe as the one who took that freedom away. She simply cannot reconcile it, and so she removes him from her life.

Roscoe’s actions affect everyone on the farm, but arguably the biggest impact falls on Wilson, who is arrested along with him. Because Wilson is black, he’s sent to work as forced labor in the mines rather than being incarcerated with Roscoe. But he is also the one who picks Roscoe up from prison when he is released. Why do you think Wilson is more able to forgive—or at least understand—Roscoe’s actions?
Wilson is the hero of this story. He retains his dignity and his humanity even in the face of extreme loss and degradation. He is willing to own his responsibility, which we see early—he is a reluctant participant in the crime, but a participant all the same. Wilson won’t deny his involvement; he won’t underplay it, even if he should.

Unlike Marie, I don’t think Wilson would’ve been able to live with himself had he abandoned Roscoe. He is accustomed to the racial injustices of the time, and he feels fortunate (in some ways) to have escaped the mines, to be reunited with his family, to be alive. He is able to recognize all that he hasn’t lost and to hold that alongside all that Roscoe has—his livelihood, his wife, his child. 

Race is treated with a light hand in this novel. Roscoe notes injustices but, being a character of his time, they are not as egregious to him as they appear to modern readers. How did you approach writing about race? 
It was incredibly difficult to write about race, and there are many previous iterations of this novel that reflect my sentiments, rather than Roscoe’s, or Wilson’s, for that matter. I uncovered innumerable atrocities, and I had to wade through them, selecting the ones that actually intersected this story. The Banner Mine explosion that Wilson retells to Roscoe is a real event. It took many tries to write it in a way that felt true to my characters.

Was there anything you learned in your research that surprised you?
Convict leasing was by far the most surprising thing that I explored in my research. Convict leasing was slavery. Young, African-American men would be picked up on street corners, arrested for vagrancy and sold to private coal mines, turpentine camps, lumber yards. Alabama was the last state to abolish it—in 1928, more than 60 years after the abolition of slavery. There’s an incredible book on the subject, Slavery by Another Name by Douglas A. Blackmon, that’s been made into a PBS documentary. 

What are you working on next?
I’m currently working on a novel set in Montana that explores the deinstitutionalization of the state’s developmentally disabled and mentally ill populations. Like Work Like Any Other, there is fascinating research involved.

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

Lisa Owens' debut, Not Working, has been on so many "most anticipated" lists, we've just about lost count. Well, the wait for her highly inventive, hilarious and poignant novel about Millennial professional Claire and her desperate search for her ideal career (if such a thing even exists) is finally over. 

We caught up with Owens and asked her a few questions about the issues facing Millennials, her own quest for a dream job and more. 

What was your initial inspiration for Not Working?
The work theme was something I’d been thinking about for a while, not as a subject for a novel, necessarily, but a preoccupation I’d noticed in many of my peers who were beginning to question whether the jobs they’d fallen into (or gratefully snatched up) as graduates might not be the thing they wanted to do for the rest of their working lives. At the time I started writing, I  had no idea whether it was a substantial enough subject for a book (and I should say Not Working is about other things besides—families, long-term relationships, city living) but I did know I hadn’t read anything that dealt with this particular sense of feeling like you’ve ended up in the wrong place, and not knowing how to go about making it right.

Millennials often get a bad rap in think pieces. Was it important for you to humanize them and delve into their very real, everyday struggles in today’s world?
When I was writing the book, I honestly didn’t think of Claire as a Millennial, but as someone going through a particular (if contemporary) personal crisis. I’ve been pleasantly surprised that older readers as well as people my age have identified with Claire on different levels.

The "everyday" aspect was very important to me: I love fiction that deals with the texture of day-to-day life as it’s experienced and wanted to build a story around those micro moments that make up the weeks, months and years around the major life events—meals with your parents, nights in with your partner, going to the supermarket—which can, in their own small way, hold as much truth and import as the big, dramatic, macro events like births, deaths and marriage.

You left your own career in publishing after six years in order to pursue writing. How did you deal with the pressure to find your “dream job,” and what advice do you have for those in a similar situation?
Perhaps I’m imposing a narrative on my experience with hindsight, but I think if I’m really honest, I did always want to write, and working in publishing was an excellent displacement career while I worked up the courage to go for it (and pay the bills in the meantime). As career changes go, though, it might be as un-dramatic as it gets—unlike say, going from being a vet to cordon bleu chef.

To anyone in a similar situation, I would suggest trying to approach the dream job by degrees if possible—I did an evening course in creative writing before I left my job to do the full time M.A. and then made the decision to try & finish my novel. I needed to know I could actually hack the lifestyle and knuckle down to deadlines. The courses were instrumental in showing that I could do both.  

Much of the novel unfolds in a kind of stream-of-consciousness series of vignettes that further highlight the Millennial mentality and their fast-paced lives. Was this a conscious decision, or did this happen naturally during your writing process?
The very earliest seed for the book came from a document I’d been keeping for a while of fragments and observations: not fully fledged ideas, but scraps of dialogue and images. One day I looked at it and realized they all shared a tone so I began to expand them into vignettes and experiment with how to arrange them. The narrator, Claire, emerged pretty quickly, and her circumstances (jobless, aimlessly roaming the city) soon became clear when I asked myself: who would have the time to notice these incidental things? The vignette structure seemed to marry well with the work / purpose theme and the voice: that of someone who is lacking direction and focus but desperately seeking it.

Claire is a character that is easy to connect with when it comes to her big questions and concerns about career happiness and her everyday moments of reflection, but there are plenty of moments where her degree of privilege and outlook make for some painfully funny scenarios. How important is humor to your writing?
Humour in literature is often looked down on as being un-literary, but some of my favourite authors—Lorrie Moore, Lydia Davis, Mary Robison, George Saunders—write with great wit as well as humanity. When I realized Not Working had a comic tone, I decided to embrace it rather than shy away from it.  I’m a huge fan of comedy in general, so in a way it’s not surprising if some of that has seeped into my writing.  

Not Working was involved in a pretty high-profile publisher auction. What have been the most exciting and unexpected moments so far in your debut publishing experience?
The auction itself was the most surreal and incredible experience. Meeting publishers and hearing them talk about something I’d written as a viable book was really like a dream come true. The very first deal was weirdly a foreign one for Danish rights – I remember thinking at the time, well, if it doesn’t sell in English I’ll just relocate to Denmark. Talking to the editors (in the U.K., U.S. and Canada) who ended up buying the book was particularly special: they just got exactly what I was trying to do. It was so gratifying after 18 months shuttered away in the library to hear people responding with such passion to what at times felt like a totally insane pursuit.

Which authors do you look to for inspiration? Do elements of pop culture also inform your writing?
The authors I’ve mentioned above (Lorrie Moore, etc.) all cropped up at various times when I was writing – they each have such a singular and appealing style, and on the days when I was struggling I would reach for their books to help me find my way back to the basics of what I was trying to achieve. I also really like A.M. Homes and Ben Lerner. In terms of pop culture, definitely: "The Office" (U.K. version) and "Seinfeld" were both inspiring in the way that they deal with ennui and minutiae respectively. In terms of music, my anthem for the book was the song Helplessness Blues by Fleet Foxes which seemed to tap into some of the same questions Claire is facing: what is my place in the world, and why won’t someone tell me what it is? I used to listen to it on my way to the library to write. Lena Dunham and Noah Baumbach & Greta Gerwig also work with similar themes about contemporary living and purpose: I watched their work while I was writing and felt a real kinship in terms of their concerns.

What are you working on next?
Good question! I’ve recently had a baby so suddenly all the time I had to write & read & think has not-so-mysteriously disappeared . . . I know I want to write another novel, but if you come back to me in a year hopefully I’ll be able to answer this more effectively. In the meantime, lets say I’m working on being a good mother.