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.

Yaa Gyasi sounds a bit unnerved by the prepublication buzz surrounding her stunning first novel, Homegoing, and the changes its enthusiastic early reception portend for her life.

“I’ve wanted to be a writer my whole life, so this is really the fulfillment of a long dream,” she says during a call to her home in Berkeley, California. She and her boyfriend, a writer she met when they were both at the Iowa Writers’ Workshop, have recently moved to the Bay Area.

“I feel fortunate not only that my dream came true but that it’s coming true in such a huge way,” Gyasi continues. “On the other hand, the stakes feel really high in a way I hadn’t anticipated. I find myself being a lot more anxious than when I thought no one would read the book. I feel a lot of outside noise has come in now in a way that it never had before. I had always been writing for myself. And now it’s becoming more public. That’s definitely an end goal of a writer, to share their work with readers. But it is a little nerve-racking.”

Gyasi, who turns 27 in late June, spent seven years developing her first novel. Homegoing is a sweeping, emotionally and morally complex epic that begins in the 18th century in the British African colony that is now Ghana. There, two half-sisters—Effia from the slave-trading Fante nation and Esi from the Asante warrior nation—are born and live nearly intersecting lives without ever meeting. Effia is born during a violent fire. As a young woman, she is married off to a British official as a local wife and lives in the upper realms of the Cape Coast Castle, seat of British colonial power. Esi is sold into slavery and imprisoned in the bowels of the castle to await a harrowing journey over the ocean to the American South.

From there, in beautifully textured alternating chapters in which water imagery represents Esi’s line and fire imagery is linked to Effia’s, the novel explores the lives of these women’s descendants. Esi’s progeny live in the U.S. as slaves and then as free people under Jim Crow laws. Effia’s descendants remain in Ghana and experience the effects of British colonialism and bloody internal African warfare. In the end, in the 21st century, the two lines of descendants experience a poignant kind of “homegoing.”

“People in the present have a tendency to believe that we are necessarily better, smarter or more moral than the people who lived before us.”

“The thing that I was most interested in was the question of what does it mean to be black in America today,” Gyasi says. “So I was very much focused on those last two chapters. I wanted to get to the African immigrant and the African American today. When I first thought of this novel all those years ago, I thought I would toggle back and forth between the characters that make up the first few chapters and the characters that make up the last few chapters to show a then-and-now thing. But then at some point I realized that I was more interested in being able to see the way something moves over a long period of time, in this case slavery, how slavery dovetailed off into this colonialism and institutionalized racism depending on where and how you were looking.”

The novel is propelled by a profound and wrenching sense of history. Yet its characters are emotionally compelling rather than didactic. This is partly because of Gyasi’s “exploratory” style of research. “I didn’t want to feel stifled by the research or the need to get everything exactly, exactly right,” she explains. “I just wanted to have it be this atmospheric thing that was in the background, so that the characters were foregrounded and they were just reacting to a moment in history, as we do now. You know, things are happening around us, but they don’t feel like they always explain our actions and our choices.”

The novel is also shaped by Gyasi’s deep imagining of events and by her family’s experiences. Born in Ghana, she came to the United States when she was 2 years old. Her father is a professor of French and Francophile African literature, and her mother is a nurse. She is the middle of three children and the only girl. Before settling in Huntsville, Alabama, when she was 9, the family also lived in Ohio and Illinois. She went to Stanford University and won a Chappell-Lougee scholarship to travel to Ghana and research her novel.

“I’ve only been back [to Ghana] twice,” Gyasi says. “The first time was with my entire family at age 11. And the second time was when I was 20. I had just a very thin idea for a novel in mind. I had never been to the central region where my mother is from. So I wanted to spend some time there.”

Her visit to Ghana’s Cape Coast Castle was the revelation that inspired the novel. “The tour guide started talking about the fact that a lot of British soldiers would marry the local Fante women, and the children from these marriages were sometimes sent to England for school and then came back and started to form the region’s middle class. I’d never heard much about the Cape Coast Castle or about Ghana’s participation in the slave trade. All of this was really new to me. And then the tour guide showed us the majesty of the upstairs level of the castle. It’s beautiful. Then after showing us this upstairs level, he takes us down to see the male and female dungeons. That was also a very striking experience for me—kind of the literal upstairs downstairs thing. And I thought, OK, this is where I’ll start.”

Interestingly, Gyasi says it was reading Gabriel García Márquez’s One Hundred Years of Solitude that gave her permission to write her hugely ambitious novel. “That’s such a great book to read, especially if you are about to write a big, messy novel with a lot of family. Just the idea that a reader can look back at the family tree and that doesn’t totally mess up their reading experience was something I got from that book. [Homegoing has a helpful diagram of the characters’ family tree at the beginning of the novel.] I heard from people who had grievances about how many years it was covering or that there are too many characters. But having read Márquez, I could always say he did it, and it was fine.”

Gyasi adds, “People say that first books tend to be more quiet. They tend to be a lot more autobiographical. But I grew up in Alabama. I was a Ghanaian immigrant. When I was in Ghana, I didn’t feel Ghanaian. When I was in America, I didn’t feel quite American. I was kind of living on the edges of these two identities. I’d always been interested in that, and in what we had in common—the African American and the African immigrant. In that way, this book feels incredibly personal to me.”

Asked about the legacy of slavery that Homegoing explores, Gyasi says, “When we talk about slavery today, there’s a sense that it’s this thing that happened a million years ago, so why do we feel like it has any effect on our life today? And I always think that’s a ridiculous way to think about it.

“People in the present have a tendency to believe that we are necessarily better, smarter or more moral than the people who lived before us. We wouldn’t have done this awful thing. We would be the ones who stand up and say, ‘Not me.’ But in the moment I think that is a much harder thing to do. So I was really interested in the people who could say that or who tried to say that, whether they were successful or not. I did want to have their voices in the novel as well. Hopefully, this book is an addition to the conversation about why we still need to think about it today.”

Author photo credit Michael Lionstar.

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

Part mystery, part coming-of-age novel, Joanna Cannon’s debut The Trouble with Goats and Sheep is set during an uncharacteristically hot British summer. When a local woman disappears from the tight-knit community of The Avenue, young Grace and Tilly embark on a quest to find out what happened to their missing neighbor. Cannon discusses how her work as a psychiatrist influences her writing, the nature of outsiders and remembering life in 1970s England.

You’ve had a really interesting career path. Can you tell us how you came to be a writer?  
I started writing a blog when I became a junior doctor, to empty my head of all the distressing things I saw on the wards. Obviously, I didn’t write about real patients, but I found it therapeutic to write about my reaction to the situations in which I found myself. The blog became very popular, and people began suggesting I write a novel. And so (very) secretly, I began writing the book that would eventually become The Trouble with Goats and Sheep.

The 1970s was a time when many of the societal changes that had occurred in the cities had begun to hit the suburbs. How do you see those changes manifest in Grace’s community?
One of the reasons I set Goats and Sheep in the 1970s was because of the changes in the structure of communities. Very much like today, it was a time when people were having to adjust their idea of community and their own preconceptions. This is reflected in The Avenue with Harold, for example, who wraps his racism in a Union Jack and calls it patriotism, and Grace’s father, who understands he has to change, but isn’t quite sure how to go about it.

Because Grace is the narrator, she seems to be the more dominant one in the relationship, but Tilly has the stronger, more assured sense of who she is. How do you think their relationship develops over the course of the book?
I think that’s definitely something for each reader to decide for themselves, but I did want to explore the dynamic between Grace and Tilly as the story progresses. It’s around that age we first start noticing the differences between ourselves and other children, and subconsciously modifying our behavior in order to be accepted. Grace is obviously desperate to be liked by the ‘cooler’ kids, whereas Tilly is more comfortable in her own skin.

Is the character of Walter Bishop based on a real person?
No, Walter (and all the other characters) are very much products of my imagination. Working in psychiatry, however, I do meet a lot of people (like Walter) who live on the periphery of a community, and are never really noticed until something goes wrong. I wrote Goats and Sheep because I wanted to give them a voice, and also to explore what it must feel like to be subjected to so much misunderstanding and prejudice.

Were you a big reader as a kid? Who are some of your favorite literary heroes or heroines from childhood?
I am an only child of an only child, and as a kid, some of my best friends lived within the pages of a book. I was very fortunate that my parents had the foresight to take me to my local library every week, where I would always renew Little Women and The Lion, the Witch and the Wardrobe, because I couldn’t bear the thought of the books going home with anyone else.

I read that you created a Spotify list of 1970s music to get you in the mood of the novel. What are some of the songs on it?
Oh my word, all sorts of ’70s gems! There’s a lot of Suzi Quatro on there, some UK glam rock, and (of course) Elvis. It wouldn’t be a ’70s playlist without a good dose of Elvis.

Grace and Tilly interview their neighbors about the whereabouts of God, eliciting a variety of ideas and personal concepts. Did writing this novel change your own point of view about religion?  
I think the concept of religion is such a personal one, and it means so many different things to so many different people. There is “traditional” religion in the book, of course, in the shape of the vicar and St. Anthony’s (and Mrs. Roper and Mrs. Forbes fighting over who loves Jesus more), but you can also find God (or love, or spirituality) in many different places (God is everywhere, as Grace often points out to the adults around her). I don’t think it changed my point of view, but it certainly made me explore the idea.

This novel has been optioned for television. Do you think you’ll be involved in the production at all? What would your dream cast be?
It would be wonderful to be involved, because it’s an area I know very little about and it would be so fascinating. I think for that reason, I’m more than happy to hand over the reins to someone else. It would be good to watch from the edge, though, and keep an eye on my characters. I’m very visual when I’m writing, and I tend to see things cinematographically, so it’s very exciting to see how someone else interprets my words. I’m not sure about a dream cast. I think, especially for Grace and Tilly, it would be good to have completely unknown actors, who don’t arrive with a history of other roles behind them.

Describe your perfect writing day.
My perfect writing day definitely starts with a very long dog walk to clear my head. I always get up around 3 a.m. (which is a hangover from medical school and working on the wards), and I walk my German Shepherd six miles through the fields and we watch the sun come up. I tend to write in the morning and early afternoon, so I think my perfect writing day would have to be one where there were few distractions. Maybe if Twitter crashed, it would help!

What are you working on now?
I’m currently working on Book Two. When I wrote Goats and Sheep, I never expected it to escape from my laptop, so it was truly just me and a blank sheet of paper. I had no idea people would be analyzing my words in newspapers and on the television, whereas now, I’ve had experience of that, and I’m aware of people out there, who will read my thoughts. I think you have to try to put that to one side, and tell the story you want to tell, in the way you want to tell it. It’s the best way to write: just you, a pen and paper and a story you believe in.

Author photograph by Philippa Edge.

ALSO IN BOOKPAGE: Read our review of The Trouble with Goats and Sheep.

Unlike most first-time authors, Cynthia D’Aprix Sweeney didn’t start writing fiction until her mid 40s. But that’s not the only thing that makes Sweeney and her debut novel stand out.

As of press time, The Nest, which was published in March, has spent 13 weeks on the New York Times bestseller list. Ecco, which paid a seven-figure advance for the manuscript, has printed 275,000 copies and sold rights in 22 countries; meanwhile, the novel has been optioned for film with “Transparent” creator Jill Soloway (who is also a friend of Sweeney’s) as a producer. Clearly, this story of four adult siblings, who lose an anticipated inheritance thanks to their eldest brother’s big mistake, is resonating in a major way.

We asked Sweeney, who lives in Los Angeles, a few questions about her breakout debut. 

How did it feel to see your first novel hit the bestseller list?
Like everything else that’s happened in my life this year, it was a completely surreal experience. I think the morning I was at a hotel with my husband and the New York Times Book Review was delivered to us—the week my book was at number 2—along with room service breakfast was the most out-of-body moment. I’m still not sure I’ve processed the whole thing.

Early on, you considered going into publishing. How do you think your writing career would be different if you had? What do you think your years as a marketing copywriter brought to this book? 
The first question isn’t one I can really answer. I don’t look back and try to reimagine decades of my life on a different path—it’s too vertigo inducing. I also try to find value in my past decisions, even the ones that I quickly regretted or realized I had to undo. My years as a freelance writer were incredibly important because I grew into a very disciplined and focused worker. I understand that writing is a job, and you need to show up for work every day. I believe that some days are easier than others, but I don’t believe in waiting for inspiration to strike. 

Now that The Nest is in the hands of readers, have there been any reactions to it that surprised you?
I always described the book as being about family. It’s surprised me to hear it described by other people as a book about money. The plot centers on money, of course, but I don’t think it’s what the book is about, per se. We don’t talk a lot about money in this country—I think the book has given people the opportunity to talk about something that is important in everyone’s life but rarely discussed in public.

This book really delves into the relationships between adult siblings—the deep connection, but also the way that the family you create can sometimes be a point of conflict with the family you were born into. Why did writing about adult siblings appeal to you?
I grew up in a very Irish-Italian Catholic environment and almost everyone I grew up with had lots of brothers and sisters. I’m the oldest of four, and I always described our family as “small”—and it was small compared to most of my friends’ families. I’ve always been interested in sibling dynamics and how those relationships become more intense as everyone ages.

Again, from a plot perspective The Nest is about four adult siblings fighting over money, but I believe the book is really about the one thing we all inherit simply by being born: our place in a family narrative. We just become the youngest or the oldest and often are assigned other convenient labels—the smart one, the pretty one, the funny one—that may be rooted in truth but are still reductive and hard to shake off. 

I’m also interested in the idea that because you share DNA and a history with people, you will necessarily share values or a common vision for the future. Sometimes you will and sometimes you won’t and either way is okay!

The characters in The Nest are struggling with something we all have to face—to differing degrees depending on circumstances—but all of us, eventually, have to reconcile the story we inherit with the one we want to write for ourselves. It’s hard to claim your own desires and take responsibility for your own choices—and mistakes. The Nest is definitely a book about making mistakes and discovering who in your life will forgive you and help you when things are tough. 

Do you agree with Warren Buffet’s maxim that “a very rich person should leave his kids enough to do anything but not enough to do nothing”?
I am the worst financial adviser on Earth, but that sounds like a wise plan! I mainly believe that it’s a very complicated, personal decision and depends on the people involved.

You’ve lived on both coasts. How do you think attitudes about money and wealth are different in Los Angeles vs. New York City?
New York City is a much older city than Los Angeles and so it has layers of old money, which is a very particular and exclusive kind of club. Los Angeles money is newer and it’s a little flashier, but more inclusive. If you can pay, you belong! There’s plenty of that in New York City, too, but there is also plenty of the “who are your parents and grandparents and Yale or Harvard?” kind of exclusivity that doesn’t really exist in Los Angeles, a place where people can reinvent themselves week to week if they choose. 

What would you blow a huge inheritance on?
An apartment in New York City, and if there was any left over, a little place in Rome.

What are you working on next?
I hope I’m working on a new novel, but it’s a little too soon to tell.

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

What does it mean to pursue the American dream in the 21st century? To find the answer, writer Imbolo Mbue traces the lives of two very different couples in the wake of the financial crisis of 2008 in her insightful debut. We asked her a few questions about her own experience moving to America from Cameroon, her love for New York City and who she’d like to see play her characters on screen.

Your own immigration story is almost as dramatic as the Jongas’. Can you tell us about it?
My immigration story has some parallels to the Jongas. Like them, I moved from Limbe, Cameroon, to the United States, though I came here at a younger age to attend college, unlike Jende and Neni who moved here as adults. I lived in Harlem for several years, so like them, I was also an African immigrant living in Harlem. That, however, is where much of our similarities end—most of their story, and the struggles they endured, was inspired by stories told to me by other immigrants.

You have been in the United States for more than 10 years. Do you get to visit Limbe? What do you miss about it?
I’ve been back to Limbe a couple of times to visit and even after all these years, I still miss it. I miss the utter simplicity of life there, and the delicious food and laid-back ambiance.

What made you decide to write a novel?
I was inspired to write this story after I saw chauffeurs and executives on a Manhattan street. Being that I had lost my job in the recession, I was curious about how the recession had affected New Yorkers from different walks of life, so I began writing a story about a fictional Lehman Brothers executive and his chauffeur, and the different ways in which their lives were impacted after Lehman Brothers collapsed. The more I wrote the story, the more obsessed I became with telling it.

Neni is such an incredible character. There is almost nothing she won’t do to make her dreams come true, and some of her actions are pretty shocking. How do you feel about Neni, and what inspired her character?
Thank you—she is indeed an incredible character. She believes in the accessibility of the American Dream, and she is convinced America can give her the life she could never have gotten in Limbe. Because she had limited opportunities to make something out of her life in Limbe, she is mindful of what a privilege it is to be living in New York City and attending college with aspirations of one day becoming a pharmacist. As a result, she will not let anything or anyone stand in the way of her dream, something I find admirable even if I do not entirely agree with how she goes about doing it. Still, I do empathize with her, because she was inspired by women I grew up around in Limbe, and immigrant women I’ve met in America—strong-willed women with limited power and resources who make tough choices because they believe they have to do what they need to do for themselves and their children.

There is so much about New York City in this novel—Jende considers Columbus Circle the center of the world since it is in the center of New York City, and Neni muses that “while there existed great towns and cities all over the world, there was a certain kind of pleasure, a certain type of adventurous and audacious childhood, that only New York City could offer a child.” What does New York City mean to you?
I love New York. It’s a pity that phrase has become a cliché but there really is no better way for me to express how I feel about my adopted hometown. As strange and chaotic a place as it can be sometimes, it was only when I moved to New York City that I finally felt at home in America. Maybe something about New York reminds me of Limbe. Or perhaps it’s because the city, in my opinion, welcomes anyone from anywhere. I’m not entirely sure. What I’m sure is that I have a great sense of belonging here, and as an immigrant, that means a lot.

The Edwards family has achieved the American dream, but it certainly hasn’t made them happy. Do you think observing the Edwardses made Jende and Neni see America and their dreams of success differently?
No, I don’t think so. The Jongas, Neni in particular, are so determined to achieve career and material success that not even seeing the price of holding unto it will deter them. The truth is that both the Edwards and Jongas are unhappy in their own ways, à la Tolstoy. One family is dreaming of achieving material success and the other family already has material success, but we can see the prices they each have to pay.

The themes of this novel are very timely. One character says of America that “we as a country have forgotten how to welcome all kinds of strangers to our home.” How do you see novels like yours fitting into the debate on immigration?
I think it’s a novel people on either side of the immigration debate can use to support their arguments. If you’re pro-immigration, there’s something in the novel to support your argument. If you’re anti-immigration, there’s something in there to support your argument, too. My goal was to tell the story completely and leave it up to the reader to interpret it in whichever way fits their worldviews.

I don’t want to give away the ending. But when you were writing, did you know what was going to happen to the Jongas?
Yes, from the very first draft, I knew how the story was going to end and I couldn’t change it even if I wanted to.

This book has been optioned for film—do you have any news on that project? A dream cast?
I don’t have any news but if someday the movie is made, I’d be very eager to see the scenes between Neni Jonga and Cindy Edwards—those two women are fire and ice and their relationship exposes a lot about class and power.

Who are some of your favorite African writers? Anyone new that we should be looking for?
I read Chigozie Obioma’s The Fishermen last year and deeply loved it. It took me back to my childhood in Limbe, and to me there’s nothing quite like a book that reminds me of what it was like being an African child growing up in Africa. I had a similar experience reading NoViolet Bulawayo’s We Need New Names, another novel I loved by a young African writer. I’m very much looking forward to both of their second novels.

Were you a big reader as a kid? What were some of your favorite books?
I was a voracious reader as a kid, though I barely read any children’s books. My favorite stories growing up were Shakespeare’s The Merchant of Venice and Dickens’ A Tale of Two Cities, even though thinking about it now, I have no idea how such books could deeply affect a young child.

What are you working on next?
I’m working on my reading list—too many wonderful books coming out and not enough time to read them, so I’m trying to read as fast as I can!

RELATED CONTENT: Read our review of Behold the Dreamers.

Our October Top Pick in Fiction is Brit Bennett's The Mothers, an elegant and insightful coming of-age story set in Southern California. We asked the 26-year-old Bennett, who has just been named one of the National Book Award Foundation's "5 under 35," a few questions about her engrossing debut.

You started writing The Mothers when you were around the same age that Nadia is at the start of the story, and now you’re more or less the same age as Nadia at the novel’s end. Are there parts of this book that could only have been written by 20-something Brit (or, conversely, only by 18-year-old Brit)?
I think the Nadia and Aubrey scenes were important to write when I was younger because there’s nothing like the passion of friendship when you’re in high school. The Nadia and Luke or Aubrey and Luke scenes benefited from me growing a little older. Heartbreak and romantic disappointment were just abstract ideas to me when I was 18; they became much realer once I had lived a little longer.

What’s one major difference in the version of The Mothers that readers will experience today versus those early drafts? 
The novel changed a ton over time. One major difference is that originally, Aubrey was the main character. Nadia was a minor character, hovering in the background with a big secret that would affect the church. Eventually, though, I realized that Nadia’s secret interested me more and beyond that, her secret was the engine driving the entire story forward.

Are there any aspects or elements that remained constant over the years?
The element that surprised me with its consistency is the opening line. I recently found a draft from 2009 and was stunned to realize that even back then, the opening sentence was the same.

"Heartbreak and romantic disappointment were just abstract ideas to me when I was 18; they became much realer once I had lived a little longer."

One of the things that can be the most striking when we revisit a book is that our sympathies for and alliances with the characters can shift. Did you find while writing this book that your sympathy migrated to and from different characters or that you identified more or less with certain characters? 
As I grew older, my sympathies expanded beyond the characters who are easily likable. Originally, I conceived of Mrs. Sheppard, the pastor’s wife, as a villain, but I challenged myself to write sections from her point of view and consider how her past motivates her actions. Luke, also, was an easy character to dismiss at first. He’s incredibly frustrating, but again, I wanted to explore the nuance of his character and try to provide him with a rich interior life. The toughest character to get on the page, though, has always been Nadia. She’s naturally guarded, so her inclination is to push you away and keep you out. It was tough to get close to her.

The Mothers features a cast of richly drawn and multidimensional characters, but we spend the most time with Nadia, watching her grow from a wounded girl into a complex and complicated young woman. What do you love most about her?
She does what she wants to do. I’ve also been cautious, so I admire Nadia’s willfulness, even when it borders on impulsiveness. She’s daring, in a way I often hesitate to be.

One of the most impressive things about this book is its strong and clear point of view. Certainly the omniscient church mothers who act as a Greek chorus and narrate and comment on portions of the novel are one of the biggest contributing factors to that. Can you tell us a bit about how that particular element of the book came to be?
I originally wrote the book in a gossipy, omniscient third person voice, but toward the end of revising, I wondered what would happen if I located that voice in an actual character. The church mothers were the obvious choice. They had already been hovering around the story, watching and observing and commenting, so I began to play around with the idea of their collective voice narrating the story.

Angela Flournoy, author of The Turner House, has said that any book featuring people that is set in the United States is a book that is ultimately about race. To what extent do you agree with this sentiment and see it reflected in The Mothers?
I think Angela’s point is that it’s ridiculous to think that the only books about race are books about people of color. We all live in raced bodies, so we all have racialized experiences and perceptions and opinions. Whiteness is still a racialized experience, so a book that, for example, only contains white characters is still engaging with race. That being said, I think The Mothers engages with race but without foregrounding racism. The characters’ experiences and perceptions and expectations are inflected by race, but racism isn’t their biggest conflict. I resent the idea that black lives only have meaning if they are presented in conflict against white racism. I was more interested in exploring a black community made up of complicated people living complicated lives shaped by race but not solely defined by racism.

"I resent the idea that black lives only have meaning if they are presented in conflict against white racism. I was more interested in exploring a black community made up of complicated people living complicated lives shaped by race but not solely defined by racism."

It sometimes feels like there are few genuine taboos remaining in modern American society, but abortion still remains hugely controversial if not outright scandalous; it’s still incredibly rare for it to be discussed and explored in fiction, film or television. Why do you think that is? 
I think the political debate over abortion surrounds some pretty huge questions. When does life begin? How much autonomy does a woman have over her body? Does the right to life supersede the right to control what happens inside your own body? These are huge, complicated, emotional questions that often trigger larger debates about sexuality, morality, religion and politics. Any one of those issues might make people uncomfortable; conversations about abortion often invoke all of them.

Politics aside, I think abortion is also rare in narratives because it can be difficult to write. It doesn’t generate story as naturally as a pregnancy might. If you write a pregnant character, for example, you can write the various stages of the pregnancy, the birth, the relationship with the baby, etc. With an abortion, there is no obvious next step, so it requires more work from the writer than writing a pregnancy might.

Have you encountered any resistance to the book (either before its publishing or since) because one of the characters elects to terminate a pregnancy?
So far, I surprisingly haven’t encountered much resistance about the abortion within the novel. I think it helps that the novel doesn’t try to convince the reader to feel one way or another about abortion. I’m not interested in making a political argument. Abortion is complicated, and I wanted to explore how these characters would experience that complexity.

Since you started writing at a young age, you must have been a voracious reader as well. Was there a particular book that inspired you to want to write one of your own? 
In elementary or middle school, a teacher gave me a copy of The Outsiders, which I loved. I was also inspired by the fact that S.E. Hinton published the book when she was 18, and I took that as a personal challenge to see if I too could write a novel while I was still a teenager.

"I was inspired by the fact that S.E. Hinton published ['The Outsiders'] when she was 18 and I took that as a personal challenge to see if I too could write a novel while I was still a teenager."

Like your protagonist, you also grew up in Southern California before moving to attend the University of Michigan. What was your favorite (and least favorite) thing about living in the Midwest? About California?
My favorite thing about Ann Arbor was the community I found there. I’d never had writer friends until I pursued an MFA, and my friends were so vital in keeping me sane through three very cold winters. When I was in Michigan, I missed the year-round sunshine of California. I could weather the cold, but the gray skies depressed me. Now that I’m living in Los Angeles, I do miss the seasons in Ann Arbor. Winter suffering aside, there was nothing like that happiness I felt on the first spring day.

While you were pursuing your MFA and working on this novel, you spent some time teaching undergraduate courses, including Introduction to Creative Writing. What was your favorite writing exercise to assign and what was the best piece of writing advice you have given your students (or that someone gave you)?
My favorite writing exercise to assign was for my students to craft a character based on someone they’d Facebook-stalked. It was a fun way to engage the voyeuristic curiosity we all feel online and to challenge them to turn a few observed details into a fully fleshed-out character. The best advice I received is from an MFA professor who encouraged us to always begin with a question in mind. I think about this in my nonfiction as well as my fiction. The work becomes more interesting and open if you begin with a question, rather than an argument or a claim.

What are you working on next?
A new novel set in the South about a pair of sisters who get separated. 

Canadian writer Stephenie Harrison lives in Playa del Carmen, Mexico. She blogs about the expat life at 20 Years Hence.

(Author photo by Emma Trim.)

RELATED CONTENT: Read our review of The Mothers.