Amy Tan does not have a fabulous closet befitting a world-famous author. She is in the midst of cleaning it when BookPage calls to talk about her lush new novel, The Valley of Amazement.

“It’s a terrible closet,” Tan says with a laugh from her home in New York City. “It’s a teeny-tiny closet. The doors keep going off the hinges and I keep having to figure out where to put my winter clothes.”

Subpar closet notwithstanding, Tan is having a very good year, highlighted by the publication of her first novel in eight years. The Valley of Amazement is the spellbinding story of Violet, a pampered girl raised by her American mother, Lulu, in Lulu’s plush Shanghai courtesan house. When Lulu is tricked into sailing for California during the 1912 revolution, Violet is left behind and sold to another “flower house,” where young girls trade companionship and sex for lavish gifts and the hope of one day becoming someone’s wife or concubine.

An older courtesan in the house, Magic Gourd, takes Violet under her wing, helping her become one of the most successful courtesans in the city. Violet meets many men during her time as a courtesan and eventually marries an American man and gives birth to their daughter. But when her husband dies of Spanish influenza and his spiteful American wife steals the daughter, Violet must decide whether it is worth reconnecting with her own mother in order to find her daughter again.

Tan, the daughter of Chinese immigrants, modeled Violet in some ways after her own grandmother, who was widowed by age 30 and became the concubine of a wealthy man who eventually had seven wives. Whether she joined this household by choice or force is a matter of debate within the family. What is known is that she committed suicide. A haunting photo of her grandmother dressed in the clothing worn by courtesans got Tan wondering how much she really knew about her. Whether her grandmother was actually a courtesan is a fact lost to time, but Tan discovered other surprising things about her during her research.

The courtesans of Shanghai were competitive businesswomen who “wheedled and extracted,” Tan says. “They were competitive and jealous.”

“I found out during the writing that she was not who people said she was,” Tan says. “People had always said she was quiet, traditional, old-fashioned, she stayed home and listened to her husband.” Yet when Tan interviewed an older relative, who had lived with Tan’s grandmother as a toddler, the relative painted a much different picture of her grandmother as the favorite wife who had a fiery streak.

“She said she was very hot-tempered, and if you did not listen to her, you would regret it,” Tan says. “That gave me a sense that she had something more interesting that had tested her more. I think my grandmother had to make her circumstances as best she could.”

Tan began writing fiction when she was in her 30s and burst onto the literary scene in 1989 with the publication of The Joy Luck Club, which sold more than 2 million copies and was adapted into a popular film. In the years since, she has extended her critical and commercial success with several novels, including The Kitchen God’s Wife, The Bonesetter’s Daughter and Saving Fish from Drowning.

As with so many of Tan’s works, her latest book dives deep into the conflicted relationship of a mother and daughter and explores the questions of how much of life is shaped by circumstance and how much by what is passed down through generations.

“It’s such a rich ground for me,” says Tan, who had a complicated but close relationship with her own mother. “When you think of identity, much of that stems from parental influences—that huge, constant guide for so many years of your life.”

This book is a major departure for Tan in one way: It includes explicit sex scenes and graphic dialogue.

“I’ve always steered away from writing about sex,” she says. “Too many people already think I’m writing about my life. I had thoughts while I was writing about sadism—oh, they’re going to think this is based upon my 20 years of experience with beating. But I didn’t really care. What I was worried about was writing corny sex scenes. I didn’t trust myself that I wouldn’t hold back or go overboard.”

She talked to several researchers who study the world of courtesans, and read a famous Chinese pornographic novel as well as the journal of a young Chinese man who regularly visited flower houses. While some of the details in the novel are from that research (an aphrodisiac called “Gates Wide Open,” for example, was one of Tan’s favorites), Tan says she had a great time coming up with other names for aphrodisiacs, genitalia and sexual positions. She also loved imagining the relationships among the courtesans.

“It was fun writing those scenes,” she says. “I felt like I was there. These characters were not retiring flowers. They were businesswomen. They wheedled and extracted. They were competitive and jealous.

“I thought the conversations with my editor [Dan Halpern] would be very awkward, but they turned out to be fun conversations,” Tan says. “At one point, he wrote ‘Lawrence-ian!’ next to one scene. I didn’t know whether he meant that was good or bad or too repressed or what. I sent him a long email and at the end of the email, I said ‘Never mind. I’m taking it out.’ ”

Tan maintains the pace and allure of the story as Violet endures harrowing years of abuse and uncertainty, eventually reconnecting not only with her mother but with the powerful businessman who took her virginity when she was a teenage courtesan.

“Her thing was staying alive,” Tan says. “She thought of [her daughter] Flora all the time. It occurs to her what she has to do is find her mother and forgive her. Today, we can expend money, resources, call the FBI, whatever it takes, to find our kid. In that time, they didn’t have that ability. We impose our American sensibility on the situation.”

Tan may have drawn on her family’s history for many elements of the story, but her own marriage is a far cry from Violet’s tumultuous love life. She has been married to her husband, Lou, since 1974.

“We like to joke that it’s separate closets and separate bathrooms,” she says about the secret to their longevity. “We both share similar politics and respect for people. We have similar generosity. We allow a lot of individuality, but also we share a lot of things.”

At the time of our conversation, Lou was on a bike tour of French wineries, a trip that Tan chose to skip—“I don’t want to get drunk in the afternoon on vacation”—but he will return in time for her upcoming 25-city book tour.

“It’s very hard for me to travel alone these days,” says Tan, 61, who has experienced occasional seizures since being diagnosed with Lyme disease in 2003. “They’re not serious but they leave me very confused. It’s better if I have someone with me. He’s really good and supportive. He fed me three times a day when I was on deadline with this book.”

With that, Tan bids farewell and gets back to working on her closet.

“The exciting life of an author,” she says wryly.

It took Sue Monk Kidd four years to write her sweeping new novel, The Invention of Wings. When the book was finally finished, the last thing she wanted to think about was starting a new project, so she and her husband took a getaway river cruise from Berlin to Prague.

“My husband’s from Mississippi, so [river cruising] is his favorite thing to do,” Kidd says by phone in her slow Southern drawl. “But it’s very hard to turn off the writer brain. I tell myself I’m not looking for an idea. Please, Sue, no ideas.”

But while she was traveling in Europe, she toured a concentration camp. “It was an overwhelmingly emotional experience for me,” she recalls. “I felt a couple of writer antennae go up, and I thought, oh no! Tap those down. It’s important to have fallow time.”

Kidd certainly deserves downtime after finishing her latest novel, which is based on a pair of real-life abolitionist sisters who lived in 19th-century Charleston. Writing about real people—albeit in fiction—was a demanding task.

“It’s certainly a challenge to write from a place where history and imagination intersect, as I found out,” Kidd says. “It became part of my challenge: I wanted to do them justice and have their history all there. At the same time, I’m a novelist. I’m not a historian, I’m not a biographer. I had to serve the story first.”

An exquisitely told tale of loss and triumph, The Invention of Wings is based on the real lives of Sarah and Angelina (Nina) Grimké, unconventional women who broke from their high-society family to fight against slavery and for women’s rights. Kidd first learned about these radical but largely forgotten sisters at an exhibit at the Brooklyn Museum.

“It’s certainly a challenge to write from a place where history and imagination intersect, as I found out.”

Sarah is plain but smart, and she realizes from a young age that her dream of becoming a lawyer like her father is impossible; society judged her success simply on whether she could avoid spinsterhood. Angelina is beautiful and could have her choice of Charleston bachelors, but like her older sister, she has no interest in traditional roles.

When Sarah turns 11, her mother gives her a 10-year-old slave as a gift. Even at that age, Sarah knows she shouldn’t own Hetty, or “Handful” as everyone in the house calls her. Handful’s mother makes Sarah secretly promise that she’ll free Handful as soon as she can. In many ways, Sarah spends the rest of her life trying to keep that promise: Sarah and Handful become friends, and Sarah breaks the law by teaching her to read and write. The book follows their complicated friendship over more than three decades, as well as the attempts by all three women to make their way in a world that has already defined their path.

While historical records mention that Sarah Grimké had a slave, there is not much more known about her. This is where Kidd let her imagination go.

“Historical accuracy mattered a great deal to me,” she says. “I used it as scaffolding. I followed the truth as close as I possibly could, but I also invented a lot to bring them alive on the page. I went to their house [in Charleston]. I walked up and down the streets I thought they’d have walked. When I saw the stairway leading up to the upper floors, I could picture Sarah walking down. I could picture Handful sitting on one of the steps.”

In the end, it was easier for Kidd to fully realize Handful on the page. “Handful came alive much more easily than Sarah did,” she says. “That was a surprise to me. I tried to write her in third person, but it just didn’t work—she wanted to talk! She didn’t come with that heavy historical script that I had to be faithful to with Sarah and Nina. I could just let go.”

Kidd, who was raised in Georgia and remembers seeing the Ku Klux Klan in her hometown, says she relied on “voices from my childhood” to write from Handful’s viewpoint.

“I think you have to love your characters, and I just loved her,” Kidd says. “She started talking and talking and talking. I could not keep up with her. There was this unleashing of a character’s voice. I came of age in the ’60s—one of those baby boomers. I remember so much of that whole Civil Rights time—it was the background I lived in. It made a mark on me. Their voices stayed with me—the musicality and some of their expressions.”

After growing up in the pre-feminist South, Kidd was drawn to explorations of a woman’s place in society. This theme runs through much of her work, including her first novel, The Secret Life of Bees (2002), and its follow-up, The Mermaid Chair (2005). Kidd realized tremendous success with both: Millions of copies of her novels are in print in nearly 40 languages. In some ways, she still sounds amazed by that success.

“It’s been such a surprising part of my life,” she says. “The Secret Life of Bees—I don’t think I’ve ever been more floored by anything. It took a while to wrap my head around it. It seemed like the success belonged to someone else. Did I really deserve all that? But mostly, to be honest, it’s been pure gratitude that someone wants to read my work and that you’re able to get your stories into the world.

“I felt some pressure after The Secret Life of Bees to produce something beyond myself. But I’d do it again, believe me! It’s been a wonderful and wondrous experience, but it’s not a pure experience. It has its nuances.”

Kidd isn’t the only writer in her family. Her daughter, Ann Kidd Taylor, also caught the writing bug.

“I sort of knew when she was young that she was a writer—she had all the little signs,” Kidd says with a hint of pride in her voice. “She reminded me of myself. She’d graduated from college, and I was turning 50. She was really searching for what she was going to do with her life, and the truth was, I was, too. I was trying to find the courage to write fiction. I told her later, ‘I knew you were a writer! But I didn’t want to step in there and influence that.’ She had to come to that herself.”

During their search, mother and daughter traveled together to ancient sites in Greece and France. They chronicled their explorations in Traveling with Pomegranates: A Mother-Daughter Story (2009), which Kidd counts as one of her favorite writing experiences.

After becoming empty nesters, Kidd and her husband moved from Charleston to the Florida coast, downsizing from two homes to one.

“You get to a certain place in life and want to simplify,” she says. “We finally took Thoreau’s advice and simplified.”

Judging by the breathtaking photos she regularly Tweets of the ocean view from her home, it’s a wonder she ever gets any work done.

“It’s kind of muse-like; it’s beautiful,” she says. “Beauty is good for the soul. I open the study door, and the rhythm of the waves in the room is soothing. But I get so immersed that I disappear in my work.”

A self-proclaimed introvert, Kidd is preparing to emerge from her cocoon to promote The Invention of Wings. A planned two-month tour will include stops at libraries and bookstores in 19 states., with a Canadian tour also on the horizon.

“I love my solitude, and I love my anonymity,” she says. “But it’s great meeting my readers. I need that. I retreated into the world of the 19th century for four years. I told my friend I felt like I was living in a cave in Afghanistan! I’m eager to start a conversation with the reader.”

First the woman behind Frank Lloyd Wright and now Robert Louis Stevenson’s wife—author Nancy Horan has carved a niche for herself as a novelist who gives voice to strong, influential yet largely forgotten women.

“Women have been underrepresented in the history books,” Horan says by phone from her home on an island near Seattle. “I’ve chosen to write about two women who were very strong in their own right.”

Horan’s 2007 debut novel, Loving Frank, focused on the life of Mamah Borthwick Cheney, Wright’s partner in a scandalous affair. The book struck a chord with readers and remained on the New York Times bestseller list for more than a year. 

Fanny was fiercely protective of her often-ill husband, Scottish writer Robert Louis Stevenson.

Her new novel, Under the Wide and Starry Sky, is a dazzling love story that unspools across years and continents. Horan deftly brings to life a woman shamefully overlooked by history, and celebrates her contributions to the man whom history remembered. 

Fanny van de Grift Osbourne was a smart, pretty, strong-willed American artist who took her three children from San Francisco to Europe to get away from her unfaithful husband. She met and fell in love with Stevenson, a sickly aspiring writer 10 years her junior, at a French inn. But the death of one of her children ultimately led her to return to America and an attempted reconciliation with her husband.

Stevenson followed, sailing across the Atlantic and then taking a train to California to find her, a trip that nearly killed him. Horan heard about this dramatic expedition when she visited Monterey, California, where he lived for some time. 

“I learned that Stevenson had taken this incredible journey across the ocean and across America seeking this woman he had met: an American woman nearly 10 years his senior,” she says. Horan was further intrigued when she read Stevenson’s memoirs of the trip, including The Amateur Emigrant and Across the Plains. Sure, he was the world-famous author, but it was Fanny who grabbed Horan’s attention.

“He struck me as really interesting, but when I read about Fanny, I thought, whoa,” Horan recalls. “Stevenson took on a strong character. There was a disparity in age. There was a disparity in class. There was a disparity in education. I just knew they were going to be good company for the ride, and it was a five-year ride. They had to be worthy of the companionship.”

After reuniting in California, and marrying in 1880, the pair lived in different places with Fanny’s young son. They both devoted themselves to writing, with Fanny often nursing Stevenson (whom she called Louis) through tuberculosis-like illnesses. After Fanny’s daughter moved to Honolulu, the pair set sail for the South Pacific. Fanny was seasick from the moment they set foot on a ship. But the sea air was almost magical for Stevenson, who felt in the best health of his life as they island-hopped in the tropics, finally settling in Samoa. 

“Fanny understood that when he was at sea, he was well,” Horan says. “And she was seasick every single day. There’s someone who was tough. She had rats run on her face on one of the ships!”

Fanny and Louis settled in, building a luxurious home among the natives. Over time, Fanny’s children and Louis’ mother joined them. 

The couple was adventurous, to be sure, but it still proved difficult to write about Stevenson.

“The challenge was he was a sickly man and he was bed-bound,” Horan says. “How do you write about a writer who was moving a pen across paper and was stuck in bed? Luckily, he left rich documents of his feelings in his letters.”

Fanny, it turned out, was a much more complicated—and therefore easier—subject. Fiercely protective of her often-ill husband, she watched as his literary star rose while she was labeled difficult and mercurial. She continued writing, but didn’t achieve the success of her husband, who became a worldwide celebrity. His closest friends from Scotland viewed her with suspicion and in some cases contempt, calling her an American from “the land of bilge and spew.”

“Fanny was not as introspective as Stevenson. She was active,” Horan says. “Here’s a woman who saved his life repeatedly. She was a woman who had aspirations before she ever met him. She put aside her own aspirations. She earned a bad reputation because she kept his friends away because they weren’t healthy. She probably was overprotective.” 

An English major, Horan had read the Stevenson works listed on most syllabi—Treasure Island and The Strange Case of Dr Jekyll and Mr Hyde—but hadn’t delved deeper until she began her research.

“I hadn’t gone further than that,” she says. “I didn’t think much about him at all. What I learned is he was a literary athlete. He wrote Jekyll and Hyde in three days. He was extraordinary. So I tried to read everything I could. I found some things were more accessible than others.”

Horan was especially drawn to his short stories, and the novel Kidnapped and its sequel, David Balfour. 

“His essays are fabulous,” she says. “I don’t think people think of him as an essayist, and we don’t realize that he’s quoted a lot. I think about Mandela, who was imprisoned and had a lot of time to think, and Stevenson had some of the same situation. Even as a child, he was not a normal kid. He couldn’t go out and play. He was pale and long and stringy and wore his hair long to keep drafts off his neck.”

Bringing these long-gone people to life meant piles of research. But rather than being daunted, Horan embraced sifting through information.

“I deal with a whole scaffolding of facts,” she says. “I feel, in a way, liberated by them. If I find them interesting, someone else will, too. Truths and themes just bubble up in the space between the facts.”

A central theme in Horan’s novel is identity and how it impacts choices. Stevenson identified strongly as a Scotsman and a writer, and his life was shaped by his recurring illness. Fanny, who was in many ways a woman light-years ahead of her time, was more multi-faceted. 

“I loved exploring Fanny’s strong identity as a woman, a mother, an artist, a single mother and an American,” Horan says. “That’s the big payoff when you’re writing fiction: those themes that emerge.”

Not to say that every day as a writer is golden for Horan.

“There are times when it’s very frustrating,” she admits. “You have days when you toss what you write, and it’s no good, and you’re going down the wrong alley.”

But she’s not in total solitude while spending years shaping a book.

“I have a very funny husband who takes the journey with me,” Horan says. “It’s a conversation. And I think I need a sounding board while I’m working my way through.”

Her husband, a photojournalist and “outdoors fanatic,” convinced her to move to the Pacific Northwest after 24 years in the Chicago suburb of Oak Park.

“When the kids went off to college, we decided to come out here,” she says. “He’s a mountain climber; he likes to go ice camping. I don’t, but I can appreciate the beauty.”

Appropriately enough, Horan took her book’s title, Under the Wide and Starry Sky, from the opening line of one of Stevenson’s best-known poems, “Requiem.” The poem, which was later engraved on Stevenson’s gravestone, concludes: Here he lies where he longed to be, / Home is the sailor, home from the sea / And the hunter home from the hill.

Nebraska author Timothy Schaffert sets his sweeping new novel against the dramatic backdrop of the 1898 World's Fair, where a con man falls in love with a beautiful magician's assistant. We caught up with Schaffert, currently a professor at the University of Nebraska in Lincoln, to ask him a few questions about the book.

Your novel's narrator is Ferret Skerritt, “ventriloquist by trade, con man by birth.” To what extent are you, as an author, a ventriloquist or a con man?
As a fiction writer, you’re creating a kind of illusion, I suppose. And with that illusion, you seek to convince. But unlike a con man (or con woman, as there was great gender equality in the field of thievery in the 1890s), an author doesn’t want to take anything. You want to leave it all behind. So you’re kind of a reverse thief, sidling up to folks so you can leave something in their pockets.

Ferret’s dummy Oscar is a character in his own right. What did you learn about the history of ventriloquism when researching this book?
I read issues of a turn-of-the-century magazine called Magic, which was “devoted solely to the interests of magicians, jugglers, hand shadowists, ventriloquists, lightning cartoonists and specialty entertainers.” Just in that description on the magazine’s front page, you gain insights into the entertainment of the day. But it was a how-to guide by Charles H. Olin that taught me how a ventriloquist of the day would have developed the physical skills required, and I worked some of that into Ferret’s own apprenticeship—things like how to prepare the throat both externally and internally, and how to keep your lips still. I don’t know if any of it was good advice, but Ferret swore by it.

"[A]s a writer, you get into character, like an actor. You explore your own emotions and sensibilities, so that what you’re expressing is genuine."

Did dummies really have hidden bells and whistles—as Oscar does?
There were all varieties of homunculi in the age of the dime museum and vaudeville theater. You would have seen the most bells and whistles in the automaton, which came in all sorts of sizes and characters. One of the attractions at the Omaha World’s Fair was Psycho, a small wax figure that did some meager magic tricks—most notoriously he could win at any game of whist—via remote control and compressed air.

And how about the rest of your research? What were some of the craziest facts you learned about the 1898 Omaha World Fair?
The Fair gave the reporters of the local dailies an endless supply of craziness—at once you had all the high-mindedness of the endeavor with its commitment to art and beauty and majesty, and meanwhile the city attracted all sorts of crime and corruption. One man was threatened with his life when he refused to pay the exorbitant fee he was charged by a local barber for a mustache dye. And, of course, there were the prostitutes who did swift business. But I think my favorite story is about the Salvation Army lieutenant who was so disgusted by the classical statuary of naked cherubs and such, she took a hatchet to them. But the statues were mostly just plaster of Paris, so the woman was arrested and the statues quickly repaired. Her vandalism inspired a cartoon in LIFE magazine.

You’re an Omaha native. Is the World’s Fair still part of the collective consciousness there?
Not really. There are certainly many people devoted to its study, and to its artifacts, but Omaha’s collective consciousness seems mostly focused on the city’s future rather than its past; we’re keen to help shape the national culture. And that was certainly the sensibility that drove the very design and development of the Fair. We wanted the world to take notice. For over a century now, Omaha has been on the verge of discovery.

The threat of war is quietly present throughout the novel. Did you want the sinking of the Maine to play a role in your story?
If you’re going to write a book set in 1898, you’re going to have to write about the Maine. “Remember the Maine” was a national catchphrase—memorializing the Maine was an industry in and of itself, influencing music and fashion and design. But, of course, we’ve forgotten the Maine. The Spanish-American War isn’t a war we study in school, is it? Nonetheless, it’s fascinating how the politics and ambitions of the time so starkly parallel ours today—economic turmoil, big business, agricultural anxieties, populist movements, the role of media in the fighting of a war.

From tornados to emerald cathedrals, your writing seems influenced by The Wizard of Oz. Are you an L. Frank Baum fan?
The Wizard of Oz, we’re told in the original book of 1900, was from Omaha; he worked as a ventriloquist and entertainer, and finally left in a balloon. So that character was an inspiration for my novel, and I definitely drew from Baum’s world, and from the illustrations by W.W. Denslow.

Let’s talk about Ferret’s love interest, Cecily, who has her head chopped off nightly in a traveling magic show. Do you think she’s a tragic character?
Women at the time didn’t have a great number of opportunities if they were unmarried past a certain age. There were few jobs available to them, and those jobs didn’t pay well. There were indeed women who achieved a great deal at the time, and forged the paths for women of the 20th century, but if you were poor—as so many women were then—you struggled.

For a book that’s unabashedly romantic, The Swan Gondola never becomes schmaltzy or melodramatic. How do you strike a balance?
Melodrama was at the heart of so much entertainment at the time; and my characters are in the entertainment business. They thrive on melodrama. They navigate all its possibilities. And the choices they make reflect somewhat the natures of the characters they play on stage. But yes, as a writer, I wanted to avoid melodrama in the writing of the novel itself. But as a writer, you get into character, like an actor. You explore your own emotions and sensibilities, so that what you’re expressing is genuine.

As a creative writing teacher, what’s the one thing you tell your students to never do?
Never stop writing. There are any number of obstacles, and any number of reasons to give up. Even if nobody is publishing what you write, write anyway. My students are all so young—they’re just finding their voices.

What are you working on next?
A novel about a child vaudeville star who becomes the most famous man in America. But, of course, things don’t go quite as he’d hoped.

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Read our review of The Swan Gondola.

Louis Bayard blends historical narrative and otherworldly mystery in his reimagining of Theodore and Kermit Roosevelt’s 1914 Amazon expedition.

What was the initial inspiration for Roosevelt’s Beast?
That’s a bit shrouded in mystery. All I can remember is standing in a Borders— that’s how long ago this was—and thinking: “Wait, didn’t Teddy Roosevelt go on some crazy journey through the Amazon jungle?” 

At that point, I hadn’t yet read Candace Millard’s The River of Doubt, so I didn’t know how close Roosevelt came to death or how harrowing that journey really was—backbreaking labor, disease, starvation, drowning. The only thing I had, really, was a question. What would that experience have done to Roosevelt’s mind—or, to be metaphysical about it, his soul? The rest of the book just flowed from there. 

Did you get the chance to see the Rio Roosevelt for yourself?
If there’s one thing I’ve learned from writing historical novels, it’s how elusive the past can be. You can go to Paris, you can go to London, and I’ve done that, but if you want to reconstruct Napoleonic Paris or Victorian London, you have to head back to the library. And that’s what I did with Roosevelt’s Beast. I immersed myself in primary sources until I had the clearest possible picture of Teddy Roosevelt’s jungle. (Plus I’m fortunate to live in a city that gets pretty damned tropical in the summer.)

What made you decide to focus your novel on Kermit instead of his much more famous father, Theodore Roosevelt?
I’m always looking for the blanks in the historical canvas—the people and things that nobody really knows about. When it comes to the Roosevelts, we know a hell of a lot about Teddy, but Kermit remains a mystery. Here was this gifted, courageous, accomplished young man who should have had a golden career—a golden life—and instead he lost his way. And to this day, nobody can say why. Even his own family didn’t know why. So this book is an effort to figure out, at both the psychological and symbolic levels, what happened. 

The beast in this story is quite mythical and supernatural in nature—is the beast based on any particular Amazonian or Brazilian legends?
I refer in the book to the Brazilian figure of Curupira, who supposedly defends the forest and its creatures from invaders. But I think all legends, no matter how local, draw on the same notes. Terror and the sublime, in some combination.

Many have noted echoes of Joseph Conrad’s Heart of Darkness in your novel—was this particularly inspirational?
I can’t imagine a writer who wouldn’t be inspired by it, it’s such an extraordinary work. What I particularly love is how Conrad keeps buzzing around the central mystery, coming at it in fragments, but never making the grand definitive statement. Even that famous line—“The horror! The horror!”—that’s an open-ended line. The horror of what? Conrad leaves it for us to decide. 

You have written pieces for CBS News and Salon about your experiences with depression: do you personally identify with Kermit, who was also diagnosed?
Yeah, that part of the book required zero research on my part. And it makes perfect sense to me, by the way, that he would have medicated himself with alcohol because, in those days, what else was there? You begin to understand why alcohol was such a force in American life—far more than it is today.

From Mr. Timothy on, many of your novels have dealt with complicated father-son relationships, and this one is no exception. Why are you drawn to this particular dynamic? Do you have a favorite father-son relationship in literature?
I do keep coming back to that theme, and I’m not sure why. Maybe because being a father is always kicking my ass. It’s the one job I never seem to master. On the page, maybe I can get it right. 

As for fathers and sons in literature, it’s hard to pick just one. The Road was pretty damn beautiful. The Brothers Karamazov. Seize the Day. Gloucester and Edgar in King Lear. If I can pluck from the film medium, Vittorio de Sica’s The Bicycle Thief has a father-son relationship that will destroy you. 

What do you love most about writing mysteries?
They’re always in motion. Which is a great way to get your characters in motion—and to address the same themes that “serious” literature does, only without calling a lot of attention to yourself. I guess mysteries save me from ponderousness.

When teaching creative writing to university students, what’s the one piece of advice you try most to impart?
Put the story first. I find that young writers, in that first intoxication of language, want to create all these magical word-spells, and the spells don’t work unless there’s something to anchor them. If you get the story right, the poetry comes out of it naturally. You don’t have to lift a finger.

What project are you working on next?
I’m writing a young-adult novel, also historical, with a teenaged female protagonist. A daughter this time! I can’t wait.

Novelist Ayelet Waldman takes a detour from contemporary fiction in her latest book, Love & Treasure. The novel is something of a triptych, weaving three disparate stories together through their shared connection to one of history’s darkest moments: the Holocaust. We asked Waldman a few questions about this compelling story.

This novel is a treasure trove of information about the early suffragette movement, the Gold Train and the art appraisal process. How much time did you spend researching, and where did you draw the line between research enriching your novel and distracting you from writing it?
Research is so much more fun than writing that it can be a delicious trap. I began this novel with research. I found the story of the Gold Train, and then began reading about Budapest. Very quickly I realized I wanted to set some part of the story during the period immediately before World War I, a period of great security for the Jews of Budapest. That’s pretty much all I knew when I packed my bags for Budapest and Salzburg. 

"When writing historical fiction—really, all fiction—research must deepen and contextualize without distracting."

It was in Budapest that I learned about the International Women’s Suffrage Conference, which inspired the third section of the novel. In Salzburg I learned about the DP camps, and then visiting Dachau I found out more about the fate of Hungary’s Jews. That was enough for me to begin the novel. I kept researching throughout, but I forced myself to write at the same time, both because then my research could be more focused, and because otherwise I knew I could luxuriate in research for decades and never begin the hard work of writing the novel.

When writing historical fiction—really, all fiction—research must deepen and contextualize without distracting. I didn’t want the detail to overwhelm the story, but I also know that historical verisimilitude is one of the great pleasures of reading historical fiction. 

With its three very disparate points of view, the novel at times feels like three interconnected novellas. Did you write them in order? Which one was the easiest for you to write? The most challenging?
I wrote them in order, though there was a time when I wondered if I should break them up and intersperse them. I quickly decided that that would be confusing, and it would rob the novel of one of its primary pleasures, the suspense in the search for and ultimate discovery of to whom the necklace belonged. 

The 1913 section just spilled out of me in a frantic rush. I have no idea where the voice of the psychoanalyst came from. It was like he was lying in wait for me for years, hovering anxiously, looking for a chance to be brought to life. 

The hardest part was definitely the contemporary section. It needed to stand up to the other two, both of which had the benefit of being historical. The unfamiliar is inherently fascinating. It takes work to make the familiar interesting. 

Amitai discusses his parents growing up on a Kibbutz and how important it was for his parents (and family) to continue their bloodline and only date Syrian Jews. Having lived on a kibbutz in Israel for a year, was that something you witnessed or felt firsthand?
I lived in Israel for much longer than a year. I started going to the kibbutz on which I based Amitai’s when I was in sixth grade, ultimately spending my summers there in high school, a year there in college, and another (almost) year when I graduated. For six years I dated a boy from the kibbutz whose family history I borrowed for Amitai’s.  The complex covenants of the Syrian Jewish community in the United States was something I read about in a terrific New York Times article in 2007.

Recently, there have been several popular novels that were inspired by real-life paintings (The Goldfinch, The Art Thief). Does the peacock necklace or portrait in the novel exist in real life? 
Nope. I made that all up! 

In one passage in the first section, Ilona stated, “But now I study Hebrew. . . . It took Hitler to make me a good Jew.” You later continue with, “could a religious identity be crafted from anger and disgust?” Could you expand this a bit?
One of the ironies of having experienced as a people a near (but not total) genocide, is that it engenders a feeling of responsibility and of identification. Had the Holocaust never happened, my Jewish identity would probably not be so important to me. But even 70 years later, the idea of being part of the “remnant” influences how I think about and define myself. Because Hitler and his hundreds of thousands of willing compatriots worked so hard to murder us, I feel like I must take a public stand, no matter that I was also raised to be an atheistic, deeply suspicious of religion. 

"Had the Holocaust never happened, my Jewish identity would probably not be so important to me."

Amitai states, “one theft does not make a man a thief.” Do you believe this to be true?
I think it can be true (we aren’t necessarily defined by our worst deeds), but it can also be a convenient thing one tells oneself if one is seeking to avoid responsibility for one’s actions. In the case of Jack, it seems his crime was a minor one, given the historical context. But all minor crimes do, in the end, add up. 

This is your second book with the word “love” in the title. Was this a conscious choice? If not (or even if so), what is the inspiration behind the title?
I actually sort of hate the idea that the two titles share the word “love.” But Love & Treasure was just the perfect title. I couldn’t resist it. I’ve never been a huge fan of the title Love and Other Impossible Pursuits (I didn’t choose it), and I couldn’t bear to sacrifice a really apt and pithy title because of one I wasn’t fond of. 

What are you working on next?
Since finishing the novel, I’ve written no fewer than six TV pilots (none of them picked up), but I have only just recently begun a new novel. It’s too soon really to know what it’s about, but I can say that it, like Love & Treasure, will have both historical and contemporary elements. If things go as planned, there will be sections in the French Riviera immediately before World War II, in Hollywood in the 1940s and 1950s, and in New England in the 1960s.

Author photo by Reenie Raschke

Francine Prose has written more than 20 books, including the National Book Award finalist Blue Angel, so the term “breakout book” doesn’t really apply. But her new historical novel, Lovers at the Chameleon Club, Paris 1932, is poised to become her biggest hit yet. Told from various perspectives, the novel pieces together the life of Lou Villars—auto racer, cross-dresser and eventual Nazi sympathizer—against the turbulent backdrop of Jazz Age Paris. We asked Prose a few questions about the new book. Read on to find out about her own double identity and why she writes for readers like herself.

One thing that makes this novel so compelling is the masterful way you blend fact with fiction—it’s not always clear exactly how much of the story is real and how much you have made up.
To be perfectly honest, by the time I got through writing the novel—five years—I was no longer precisely sure how much was “real” and how much I’d made up. Yes, history is a narrative, like fiction, but the one thing I wanted to avoid was what I mostly dislike about the sort of “historical fiction” that puts so much emphasis put on period details that it detracts from the characters—who, I hope, are central in this novel. I see the book as a contemporary novel that happens to be set in the past.

"I see the book as a contemporary novel that happens to be set in the past."

From the title alone, it’s made clear that sex and romance will play a large part in this story, but one of the really exciting things about this novel is its straightforward (and some might feel, quite modern) approach to sexuality and gender politics. Can you talk a about where your inspiration for the Chameleon Club and its little coterie of outcasts and lovers came from?
The inspiration came from a photo by the great Hungarian-French photographer, Brassai, and then a series of photos. Brassai took a lot of pictures at a club called Le Monocle in Paris. Most of its customers were cross-dressers, mostly women. Just lately, I was reading a biography of Jane Bowles, and I found out that during a trip to Paris she’d hung out at Le Monocle. That was very exciting to me: I hadn’t known.

Villain or not, Lou Villars is really the star—she’s complicated, confused, the antithesis of boring, and definitely an enigma. Perhaps most striking, in a book filled with so many voices, she’s also the one main character who doesn’t get to speak for herself. What was the motivation behind that decision?
Lou was by far the hardest character to write, and I tried writing her sections many different ways—first person, second person, in letters, etc., etc. And nothing quite worked. It wasn’t until I hit upon the device of the “biography” that I was able to do it, partly because I was able to pass my problems along: my problems with, and confusions about, such a deeply conflicted and complex character became the biographer’s problems. And her understanding of Lou helped me understand her.

As any book about World War II must, yours takes on the character of Hitler. What was it like to tackle such a prominent, infamous figure within the scope of fiction?
I can’t tell you how much fun it was to write a dinner party scene that included Hitler, and to capture something about the way people describe being in his presence. There’s a book called Hitler’s Table Talk—a transcription of his dinner table monologues—that was very helpful. Hannah Arendt created an enduring controversy when she wrote about the banality of evil, but Hitler was a living example: profoundly evil, shockingly banal.

"I can’t tell you how much fun it was to write a dinner party scene that included Hitler."

One particularly lovely passage is when Gabor, a photographer, talks about how he has cultivated his eye for detail by pounding the pavement and increasing his likelihood of observing the miraculous. Is there a writer’s corollary for those who attempt to capture the world through words rather than pictures?
Same process: pounding the pavement. You just keep looking at the world, overhearing, watching and trying to figure things out.

There’s something about the 1920s and '30s—and definitely about Paris—that people today find endlessly romantic, even with the knowledge of what will historically follow. Why do you think that is?
So much was happening then—in art, in music, in writing. Just to list the artists at work during that period in Paris is stunning. People were finally freeing themselves from the restraints of the 19th century and trying to lead lives that were creative, interesting, adventurous and rewarding.

If you could travel back in time to spend one decade in one city, when and where would you go and why?
Obviously, I’d like to have been in Paris in the 1920s and ‘30s—that’s partly why I had to write a novel in which I could imagine myself back there.

At one point in the novel, a character posits that each of us leads a double life. If this is indeed true, what two lives do you lead?
I’m a writer (being a novelist implies a certain amount of control) and a total slave to my beloved granddaughters.

One bookish tome you have written is entitled Reading Like a Writer. If we were to flip that title, what would you say it means to write like a reader?
Readers (I’m using myself as an example) want to read writing that’s original and persuasive and perhaps even beautiful, and to keep interested in what they’re reading. That’s the reader I write for: the one with the intense interest in prose style and the short attention span.

What resources did you draw upon to write this book? For readers who are interested in learning more about Paris leading up to and during World War II, are there any books you would recommend?
I read a great deal and then forgot almost all of it. There are many fascinating memoirs of the period such as John Glassco’s Memoirs of Montparnasse, as well as history books, especially about Paris between the wars and during the Occupation. Many heroes and heroines of French Resistance have written memoirs. I watched Leni Riefenstahl’s Olympiad for its footage of the Berlin Olympics, and Marcel Ophuls’ The Sorrow and the Pity for its marvelous portrayal of France during the war: the collaborationists and the resistance. Two of the most helpful books were And the Show Went On by Alan Riding, and Bad Faith by Carmen Callil.

What are you currently working on?
I’m beginning to think about a new novel—and also writing a brief biography of Peggy Guggenheim, who knew many of the historical figures in my novel; I’m obviously not ready to let go of that time.

RELATED IN BOOKPAGE: Read our review of this book. 

World War II-era nurse Claire Randall stumbled through a stone circle into the 18th century—and straight into the hearts of readers, who have gobbled up Diana Gabaldon’s Outlander series since its 1991 debut.

Gabaldon returned this summer with Written in My Own Heart’s Blood, the eighth book in the series—and this month the first book, Outlander, has been turned into a TV series that will air on Starz. We asked Gabaldon a few questions about the series and the new book.

Fans can be notoriously picky about screen adaptations of their favorite books. Do you think they’ll be pleased with the upcoming TV adaptation of “Outlander”?
Yes, I do.

What was your favorite moment from the book to see on the screen? 
I won't know until I've seen the show in its entirety. I did, though, tell Sam Heughan during a fan event in L.A. that I was looking forward to seeing him raped and tortured.

As an author, do you worry that the TV series will put increased pressure on you to finish the series, as George R.R. Martin has experienced after the adaptation of “Game of Thrones”?
No. I write much faster than George. No, really—it's not a problem. I have eight books of the series in print! Several of them quite long (meaning that the material could well extend over more than one season). It isn't going to take me eight years to write another book.

Like all your books, Written in My Own Heart’s Blood has a lot of interwoven storylines. Which one was your favorite?
Ah . . . well, I tell you what. Pick up your favorite shirt. Look at the fabric closely. Which thread is your favorite?

If a fabric is well-woven, all the threads will be in the right place, providing support or ornament. Just so in a well-constructed book.

You’ve said that some characters are “mushrooms”—people who just show up in a storyline and run away with it. Were there any of those in the new novel?
Oh, yes. They're always there. I can't tell you about them, though, as so many people have hysterics if they encounter anything they think is a spoiler for the new book.

It seems like every Outlander book is rumored to be the last. Do you see a likely end point?
Rumors, forsooth. It's just silly hysteria, and entirely pointless. I've never said this or that book is the last one. I can't think why people think they have to know how many books there will be in a series—but if some mental compulsion afflicts them, I'm afraid they're out of luck. I don't plan the books out ahead of time, I don't write with an outline, and I don't write in a straight line—so I have no idea.

You write very long books in an era of short attention spans. Have you received any pushback about this? What pleasures do you think longer books afford to readers?
Oh, the publishers used to have fits about the length, but they've pretty much accepted reality of recent years and just deal with it. As for readers with short attention spans, there are plenty of short books out there. It's not my job to worry about What Readers Want; it's my job to write the best book I can, and then people can like it or not, up to them.

Your fans are particularly fervent—a 900-seat auditorium in Portland sold out soon after tickets went on sale, and you just had a fan retreat outside Seattle. Do you have a favorite fan moment?
I have wonderful fans: educated, literate, intelligent, sane (something many of my fellow-authors envy) and amazingly kind. Which is not to say that some of them don't show up at signings with "Da mi basia Mille" tattooed on their rumpuses, or present me with hand knitted teddy bears (in pale blue) playing bagpipes, but I love them all, regardless.

You’ve mentioned your work on a contemporary mystery—is that still something fans can look forward to?
Yes, in the fullness of time.

After decades in the business, what advice do you wish you’d had when you first launched your publishing career?
Actually, I had a lot of great advice from established writers, and do my best to pass it on to new writers. Can't think of anything I should have known but didn't, though.

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

Readers of Amy Bloom’s riotous new novel, Lucky Us, might want to pack a few snacks and buckle their seatbelts for this highly entertaining ride, which kicks off when half-sisters Eva and Iris hightail it from small-town Ohio to pursue their dreams in Hollywood.

Bloom herself has always loved a good road trip. “My first road trip was the day after I graduated from high school,” she says during a phone interview in which it is clear that her own warmth and humor is the source for much of the wit found in her fiction. “I went with two girlfriends, we borrowed a car from someone’s overly indulgent father, and we drove from Long Island to Vancouver, down the West Coast and back again. And it was great. I always have a positive feeling when I see people getting into a car with a bag of chips. I even told my daughters all they needed to hit the road was 50 bucks and a couple of Tampax.”

I told my daughters all they needed to hit the road was 50 bucks and a couple of Tampax.

At its wildly beating heart, Lucky Us is a novel of rebirth and reinvention told with the kind of candor that Bloom—the author of two previous novels and three short-story collections—is known for. At the age of 12, Eva is abandoned by her mother at her father and half-sister Iris’ house. The teenagers don’t have much in common, except their shared parent, Edgar—and even he isn’t quite who they thought he was. Bloom was intrigued by the idea of writing about sisters.

“I had never written about sisters before. And though I think there are, as always for any writer, lots of sources, I happen to have a sister, and she is six years older than me. We both say we paid almost no attention to each other until she was going off to college. I was crawling around on the floor while she was riding her bike. So the idea of what it is to get to know a sister later, when you don’t have all that shared history, interested me.”

The charismatic Iris shows early talent as a performer, winning every local and regional speech competition, and Eva becomes her loyal sidekick, dresser and confidante. After the girls catch their father trying to steal Iris’ winnings, they hop a Greyhound bus to Hollywood, where Iris hopes to break into the movies. A scandal ensues and the girls are soon back on the road to New York, but this time, via station wagon, with their father in tow. Their friend Francisco, a hair and make-up artist to the stars, finds them jobs as domestics for the Torellis, a wealthy family on Long Island.

But that’s only the beginning of the girls’ madcap adventures: Later in the novel, an orphan is abducted; a friend is accused of being a German spy; and Eva takes a job as a fortune-teller at a local beauty parlor. At times, the book feels almost like a series of outtakes from some screwball comedy—but these are scenes that would have never made it past the censors, like the lushly described party at the home of Hollywood’s most decadent lesbians, or the sisters conspiring to kidnap a little boy from the local Jewish orphanage for Iris’ childless lover. But Bloom’s command of her characters keeps the novel from spilling over into satire just as her judiciously chosen details keep the plot moving forward.

Though she was born in the 1950s, Bloom is as tuned in to the spirit of the 1940s as she was to the 1920s in her award-winning novel Away. Lucky Us gives her a way to look at how life at home provided new opportunities for change and reinvention, especially for women and African Americans.

“Part of what happened when this country went to war are things that would have been unthinkable 10 years earlier,” Bloom explains. “Women not only going to work, but doing difficult physical labor and being in challenging leadership positions—things that the dominant culture had fought against since its founding. Now, it’s true the war ended and we sent those women packing, the war ended and the level of integration between African Americans and the dominant white culture dripped dramatically, but my own sense is that once you open the door, you cannot completely and forever close it again.”

Each chapter of Lucky Us is headed by a song title from the 1940s, drawn from jazz, blues and pop. These evocative headings are both a distillation of the chapter content and reminder of the rich diversity of the times, while also working as representations of some of the decade’s most profound social changes. “This was a time when music was everywhere, and though there were cultural divides, most popular music was heard by everyone. The high school girl, her science teacher, the principal, the custodian and the guy who delivered school supplies all listened to the same music,” Bloom says, adding with a laugh, “I had such a wonderful time choosing these. Can’t carry a tune, but I sure do like to listen.”

Bloom published a complete playlist of the songs on her website, but says, “If you know the songs, that’s a little plus for you, but even if you don’t, the titles are so evocative they still bring something fresh.”

Most of the novel is told from Eva’s wry perspective, but Lucky Us includes letters, both sent and unsent, from the sisters, their father and Gus, who works with them in Long Island, but through a series of unfortunate events, winds up in a German prison camp. The letters move the plot forward, but more importantly, they give the reader an additional glimpse at the inner thoughts of the characters as well as their joys, frustrations and hidden desires.

“I love the epistolary form. There is something very moving to me about letters. The wish to communicate—which is sometimes successful and sometimes not—something happens in the presence of that intention.”

Bloom’s short stories are known for their wise assurance that the very complexity of human expression—conversational, emotional and even sexual—is not only acceptable but also cause for celebration. In addition to the humor and fast-paced high jinks, Lucky Us contains a similar wisdom as it investigates how we engage with our families, both the ones we are born into and the ones we create.

Bloom, who is now the distinguished University Writer-in-Residence at Wesleyan University in Connecticut, also has a master’s in social work and worked as a psychotherapist. She credits her training for giving her empathy for her characters’ deeply human foibles.

“I learned to not interrupt,” she says, “to pay attention to what was said and how, and what was said before and what was said after. I learned to make as few assumptions as possible. To recognize that people are, in their nature, complex. So that training was really useful, especially the listening part. I don’t think you can be a good writer and a bad listener.”

I don’t think you can be a good writer and a bad listener.

About halfway through the novel, Edgar remembers that his mother once told him, “It’s good to be smart, it’s better to be lucky.” But Lucky Us reminds us that not all luck is good luck. As Bloom puts it, “Luck is a roll of the dice and we are all subject to it. So, better to be lucky than smart? Sure. But better to be lucky and smart, so you have a plan when the dice go against you, which they will—sometimes.”

Her playful novel reminds us that life can only be what we make of it and that the biggest setbacks often result in the most gratifying results. Her readers are all the luckier for it.

Author photo by Deborah Feingold

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