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.

The question that will burn in a reader’s mind when she finishes Some Luck, Jane Smiley’s marvelous new novel, is: How long do I have to wait to read the second volume in The Last Hundred Years trilogy?

Jane Smiley laughs heartily when asked. “Well, that’s up to Knopf,” she says during a call to her home in Carmel Valley, California. Smiley is the author of such best-selling novels as Moo and the Pulitzer Prize-winning A Thousand Acres, as well as five works of nonfiction. She says she has already completed all of the volumes in the trilogy, which covers 100 years in the life of one family, with each chapter focusing on a single year.

Smiley is emphatic in her desire that “all three [volumes] come out as soon as possible. I really do feel that it’s one thing, and it’s important for volumes one and two to be in the reader’s mind when he or she is reading volume three.”

Some Luck opens in 1920 with Walter Langdon, on the eve of his 25th birthday, walking the fence lines of his barely-making-it farm near Denby, Iowa. He is thinking about the vicissitudes of farming; the admonishments of his strict father, a more successful and established farmer who lives down the road; his love for his 20-year-old, self-possessed and talkative wife Rosanna; and his five-month-old son, Frank—the first of five children who grow into memorable individuals over the course of the novel, and, presumably, go on in the next two novels to great and less great things. Some Luck closes in 1953, with the Langdon family—responding to social and economic forces arising from the Great Depression and World War II—having mostly abandoned their hometown and moved to the far ends of the country, as so many other Americans did in that era.

The Langdon family diaspora promises much for Smiley’s exploration of 20th-century American culture and politics in future volumes of the trilogy. But in Some Luck, the family is largely homebound. Only Walter and Rosanna’s final child, Claire, for example, is born in a hospital; the rest are born, sometimes excruciatingly, at home. So, with her vivid, tactile depiction of isolated, rural Iowa farm life, Smiley has imaginatively recaptured the dangers and rewards, the play of good luck and bad luck, in a lost way of life.

“I really wanted to take these characters and follow them from babyhood to death,” Smiley says. “And I want the reader to be reminded that there’s so much that we don’t remember, that there’s so much that we don’t know.”

"I really wanted to take these characters and follow them from babyhood to death."

Smiley lived in Iowa for about 24 years as a student and professor and ended up living for a while in a sort of abandoned farmhouse.

“I used to take long walks in the countryside, and I used to think a lot about farming. It became an interest and continued to be an interest as I stayed in Iowa. How we get our food, who grows the food and what the food is made of is central to any culture. . . . The Langdons love the farm, but they hate the farm. They are suspicious of soybeans, but they love oats. It’s an incredible amount of work, yet they feel a great sense of accomplishment. It was a very great pleasure to write about that.”

Smiley describes in some detail the research that went into creating her trilogy—the stacks of books on her office floor and her gratitude to Wikipedia, “which is great for a novelist because it’s OK—in fact it’s better—for your knowledge of something to be partial.” Remarkably, that research is completely subsumed in the consciousness and conversations of her characters.

As a result, Some Luck moves swiftly and assuredly through just over 33 years of the Langford clan’s experiences. Smiley says the novel’s velocity arises from the quirky year-by-year approach she deploys throughout the trilogy.

“Most trilogies are groups of stories that include some of the same characters and then don’t,” she says. “I wanted to write a book about a family, but I wanted it to progress evenly for 100 years. I didn’t know of anybody who had done that before and thought it would be fun to try. That’s the nerdy side of me. I wanted each volume to cover 33¹⁄₃ years and each chapter to be a certain number of pages. The only way I can justify that is that, in a novel with a plot, the plot gives you a form, but in a book that progresses through time, then something as simple as the divisions of the book give you form. I had to do a lot of research, but the energy that was inherent in that form really carried me along.”

Some Luck ends up being a quiet, almost self-effacing, Midwestern tour de force.

Some Luck ends up being a quiet, almost self-effacing, Midwestern tour de force. Smiley writes about farm life, family life and, suggestively, near the end, national political life. There are farming scenes, sex scenes, combat scenes and table-talk scenes.

Smiley says she began with the concept of the trilogy but ended up being swept away by the trajectories of her characters.

“There are three boys and two girls born over the course of 19 years. I wanted to be able to freely enter into everybody’s mind. So I had to be open to their most likely experiences. Frank at his age obviously is going to go off to the Second World War. So I have to be open to male experiences. And there is Lillian, who is the darling child—I’m really quite fond of Lillian—who realizes as she enters high school that she isn’t going to be everybody’s darling.

“I really did want to enter into the minds of the male characters, the female characters, the teenagers, the 20-year olds, the 40-year olds, and that meant I had to go everywhere that they might go.”

Wherever Smiley goes in Some Luck, most readers will willingly follow. Then wait, with bated breath, for her next steps.

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

Since its publication last year, Christina Baker Kline’s fifth novel, Orphan Train, which illuminated a little-discussed moment in American history, has fascinated readers. Between 1854 and 1929, trains carried thousands of abandoned children from the East Coast to farmlands in the Midwest. Many were adopted by new families, while others found themselves entering into indentured servitude. Orphan Train intertwines the story of one of these children—Vivian Daly—with that of Molly, a contemporary young woman who has spent her youth in and out of foster care. As a friendship between the two women forms, history is revealed and healing can begin.

The orphan trains ran for many years, but not much has been written about them (at least, not for adults). Why do you think that is?
I think the story has taken a long time to come out, and for people to wrap their heads around what exactly happened and how many people were on these trains, how they got there. The train riders themselves, many of them kept quiet about what happened to them and never told anyone. A lot of people died before relatives even could find out.

Most history is not the history of dispossessed children or the poor. The truth is, this was happening and no one was really writing about it, partly because that wasn’t what was really being written about. It’s only in the 20th century really that the concept of childhood—even of teenage-hood—came into being. Journalists and reporters started uncovering what was happening to poor people in all different kinds of ways. All of this ferment around immigration—and also about Native Americans—was not happening then in the same way. This is a time that people are trying to excavate and figure out what constitutes American history. Even the concept of Columbus Day . . . it feels like a vestige, an evolutionary webbed foot.

Frankly, this story is shocking to us with our 21st-century brains, but it was not shocking in 1920, the idea of sending children to better homes to work, because they were working already.

“The story has been hidden in plain sight in American history. . . . It’s obviously hit a nerve.”

The modern-day storyline shows how things haven’t changed all that much for orphans since the time of trains.
I did a presentation to a room full of social workers, 60 social workers, and one of them said, “We don’t send children on trains anymore, but we do send them all over the state without their knowledge of where they’re going, into homes where they have no idea where it is, to communities they’ve never been in, and the transition is not that different.” The feelings that children have today in the foster care system, even though there are checks and balances in place now, are the same feelings.

This book became a huge word-of-mouth hit since it was published last year. In fact, in reverse of the usual order, it went from paperback original to hardcover. Why do you think that is?
I think that the story has been hidden in plain sight in American history. I think that a lot of people are intrigued by that, that we don’t know about this. I think that the juxtaposition of the contemporary story of a troubled girl . . . to the orphan train-rider a hundred years ago gives it immediacy. You’re not just looking at some sepia-tinted story of a girl from long ago. Immediately you’re faced with what it feels like today to be a child who’s displaced. That creates a lot of room for conversation.

I didn’t do it in a calculated way, thinking that would happen. My publisher had no idea. My agent had no idea. Nobody expected this, for there to be 1.5 million copies in print in 25 countries. It’s obviously hit a nerve.

What are you working on next? Is there another moment in history you’d like to illuminate in this way?
I’m not really a historical novelist. My next novel is inspired by a painting, “Christina’s World” by Andrew Wyeth, and it’s about the girl, the woman in the painting. If you consider the mid-20th century historical, I suppose it is historical fiction, but it’s really a whole different kind of narrative and story.

After seeing how many readers showed up for your session, do you have a fun fan story to share?
What’s most fun for me is when people have gone on adventures with their own families after reading my book. This old guy came up to me at one event—I mean, I’ve had a number of these—but this particular guy, his daughter made him read it. . . . His brother was taken onto the train, and he was adopted. It all came back when he was reading the book. He’d never done anything to try to find out what happened, but he found his brother in California! Not only that, but they’re both members of the Lions Club, and they were a featured story on the cover of the Lions Club magazine a couple of months ago! . . . It was so inspiring and interesting to hear about how the book propelled him to find out about his past. I love hearing those stories.

Who are you most excited to see while you’re here at the Southern Festival of Books?
Well, my good friend Lily King! I love her, and I just read Euphoria, and I loved it.

When Judy Blume was a teenager in Elizabeth, New Jersey, three commercial jets crashed in her town within months of each other, each narrowly avoiding schools and orphanages. In retrospect, it’s shocking that she hasn’t considered telling this dramatic story before. But only now has Blume written about it in a novel, In the Unlikely Event.

“I must have buried this story, because if I hadn’t, why did it take me so long to write about it? I mean, it’s a great story,” Blume says over the phone from her home in Key West, Florida. “It was so far buried. My daughter became a commercial airline pilot and she said, ‘Mother, how could you never tell me this story?’ I don’t keep secrets, I will tell almost anyone almost anything.”

Charming, funny and sounding far younger than her 77 years, Blume recalls the moment when she knew she would write this novel. It was 2009, after Blume heard fellow author Rachel Kushner speak about her new book, which was inspired by her mother’s life in 1950s Cuba. 

“It was that phrase, ‘In the ’50s,’” Blume says. “A light bulb went off in my head and it came to me like no book had ever come to me: characters, I knew the plot. Of course, there were surprises along the way, because we would never write if there weren’t surprises.”

Blume started with several months of research, which she calls “the best fun I’ve ever had on a book before. I’ve never done research! I just loved it, I loved the process. People kept saying, ‘Yes, Judy, we know, but then you still have to write the book.’”

Like most of the great Blume books—I could list some of them, but that hardly seems necessary—In the Unlikely Event is a gripping, compulsively readable story of the joys and sorrows of family. But this one is also a study of how communities respond to tragedy.  

Fifteen-year-old Miri Ammerman lives with her single mother, her grandmother and her Uncle Henry, a local newspaper reporter who is about to be married. Like most 1950s American teens, Miri’s biggest worries are friends, homework and boys. At least until a Miami Airlines plane carrying 56 passengers from Newark Airport plunges into the Elizabeth River in December 1951. 

Incredibly, two more planes would crash around Elizabeth in the weeks to come: On January 22, just 37 days after the first crash, an American Airlines flight crashes near a local high school. And on February 11, a National Airlines flight plows into an apartment building. 

Blume brings not just Miri and her family to life, but many of the passengers on those doomed flights, whom she fictionalized but based on historical records.

“I am introducing so many characters in part one,” Blume says. “I told my editor that maybe we need to set up a tree like a Russian novel. She said to me, trust your readers, so I thought, this is not Anna Karenina. Trust your readers. They’ll follow you.” 

While this is a novel, the crashes were all-too-real, and Blume recalls them vividly.

“I remember where I was on the day of the first crash, which was a very nasty Sunday in December.”

“I remember where I was on the day of the first crash, which was a very nasty Sunday in December,” she says. “I was in the car with my parents and my friend Zelda. The radio was on in the car and I remember, ‘We interrupt this program to bring you this news bulletin.’”

She also remembers the distinctly 1950s reactions of her fellow students. 

“The girls thought it was sabotage,” she says. “The boys all thought it was aliens or zombies. It did seem they—whoever ‘they’ were—were after kids. How else could you explain the crashes? One close to the junior high, one almost right through another school. The third one into the playing field by the orphanage in town.”

Blume’s father, a dentist, was called in to identify crash victims by their dental records. The character of Dr. Osner, the father of Miri’s best friend, was pulled from Blume’s recollections of her father, who “was much beloved by all the kids who liked to come to our house because he was warm and friendly and fun. I got ‘Be a good girl, Judy,’ from my mother. My father would have said, ‘You go, girl,’ if that was a phrase then. He always told me to reach for the stars.”

At this point, Blume chokes up. “I’m going to cry,” she says matter-of-factly. “I always do. I’ll recover quickly.

“That’s what I learned from my father,” she continues. “Terrible things happen, and as Henry says to Miri: ‘I’m so sorry, but we go on.’ When she isn’t sure it’s worth it, he reassures her that it is worth it. That’s what I got from my father. I’m a very optimistic person.”

These days, Blume and her husband, the writer George Cooper, make their home most of the year in Key West. It’s a long way from New Jersey.

“You know, it was one of those things where it was winter in New York and I was trying to write Summer Sisters and I said, ‘Oh, I wish I could go someplace warm,’ ” she says. “We knew someone who lived in Key West, and my husband called her. I said, ‘I can’t go to Key West, it’s too hot.’ She said, ‘Tell Judy I’m wearing polar fleece and she should come.’ We rented a house sight unseen and we totally, absolutely fell in love.”

Active members of the community, Blume and her husband started a nonprofit movie theater. On an average day, Blume wakes up and does a two-mile power walk by the ocean before breakfast (“I love my breakfast,” she says). Her office is a guesthouse just steps from the house. “I slide open my glass doors way to the side, and I’m in a garden and it’s so beautiful,” she says. “I work until lunchtime, and if it’s a first draft, I pray for any distraction. I’ll take any phone calls during a first draft.”

She still corresponds with readers, although the nature of that relationship has evolved since she wrote Letters to Judy (1986), which chronicled some of the most personal letters she’d gotten from fans. Rarely does she get snail mail these days.

“I do think that picking up a pencil and writing out what you’re thinking and feeling on a piece of paper and licking an envelope and putting a stamp on it and putting it in a mailbox to someone you don’t know and you feel safe, that’s a whole different thing than sending an email,” she says. “There’s more information for troubled kids out there—they don’t have the same questions they once had. This is good!”

When I mention that my 10-year-old tore through all the Fudge books last year, she laughs.

“It’s a lot of generations [of readers],” she says. “My daughter’s generation was the very first, and to think they are in their 50s now. I love it—how could I not? It’s the best reward for writing anyone could possibly have—to have readers. There’s nothing better than to hear a kid laughing over a book.”

After finishing her research, writing the novel (20 three-ring binders’ worth of drafts) and touring to promote it this summer, Blume says she is ready for a different creative challenge. 

 “I said after Summer Sisters, I’m never doing this again, and I meant it at the time,” Blume says with a laugh. “Then this came along, and this time I do mean it, I’m never doing it again. I’m 77! But I have that creative spirit that lives inside of me. I’m not saying I won’t do something again, but it won’t be a long novel. This is the one that I was meant to write. I feel that.”

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

When her writing is going really well, when she is “all in,” Paula McLain, author of the best-selling historical novel The Paris Wife, calls herself “a head in a jar.” All brain, no body.

The feeling, McLain says, is “of being in a deep-sea diving bell. You go down, down, down until you hear those pings coming off the ocean floor. You’re not reachable. You’re not conscious of time passing. Whole hours disappear and you’re completely absorbed.”

That was the opposite of what McLain was feeling a few years ago when her brother-in-law, a doctor and pilot, forced upon her a copy of West with the Night, a memoir by Beryl Markham, the British-born Kenyan bush pilot who, in 1936, became the first woman to fly solo across the Atlantic from east to west. At that time McLain was writing a historical novel about Marie Curie. It wasn’t working. When she wrote The Paris Wife, McLain had felt a deep connection to Ernest Hemingway’s first wife, Hadley, that allowed her “to believe absolutely, unequivocally that I understood her enough that I could follow her down a rabbit hole to Paris in 1922. But with Marie it was like being kicked out of heaven every single day of the writing.”

The Markham memoir sat on McLain’s bookshelf unread while she suffered. “Then one day when I was in the midst of despair, I picked it up and read one paragraph about her African childhood and thought: What have I been doing!” says McLain, who, when excited, speaks in a headlong rush. 

“There was nothing subtle about it. I just knew I was going to write about her. In fact I wrote my agent that day and said, I’m ditching the Marie Curie book and writing about Beryl Markham. And she’s like, oh, please let’s not tell Random House. So for months and months I had to lie to my editor, I had to lie to my publisher. How are things going? Still working, still working. And, meanwhile, I was just lighting up the African bush in my imagination, writing really fast and having a really good time.” McLain finished a near-final draft of Circling the Sun, her novel about Markham, in five months.

In addition to being an aviation pioneer, Markham was the first licensed female racehorse trainer in Kenya. Her mother moved home to England when Markham was very young, and she grew up a wild child, running with the native Kipsigis children while her father built up his farm and stable of racing horses. As a young woman she was unusually tall and strikingly attractive. She was thrice married, unhappily, beginning at age 16. Because of her beauty, independence and adventurousness, she was a magnet for rumors about her romantic life, some of them undoubtedly true. Even today, almost 30 years after her death at age 83, Markham remains a subject of salacious gossip, as McLain discovered during a recent research trip to Kenya.

Writing a convincing, memorable novel about Markham and the society of that era in Kenya, as she has done in Circling the Sun, presented McLain with a host of challenges. First off was the fact the Markham had already told her own story in West with the Night. 

Re-reading the memoir and comparing it to biographies of Markham, McLain began to notice that “Beryl was very, very selective in what she chose to tell.” McLain examined the gaps and “thought, oh my god! This is a woman on the run. This is a sphinx. This is a woman like Ernest Hemingway in A Moveable Feast who leaves all the pertinent stuff out. There are almost no women here. She doesn’t talk about her friendship with Karen Blixen. She uses a kind of dazzle camouflage. I wanted to figure out what created the engine of her psyche. I wondered, how does a person like Beryl get made.”

So Circling the Sun became a coming-of-age story that explored the emotional complexity of Markham’s personal and romantic life. The transatlantic flight bookends the novel as a near-death experience that permits Markham to acknowledge some difficult truths about her life. “Someone like Beryl would actually need to be at the verge of death in order to confess some of this stuff,” McLain explains.

McLain feels the reason she was able to write so vividly about Markham’s childhood is her deep sense of connection with her heroine. Like Markham, McLain and her sisters, who grew up in Fresno, California, were abandoned by their mother at an early age, a subject she wrote about in the 2003 memoir Like Family. “I believed I knew something about the wildness she was talking about. I felt I knew what it was like to be let loose to explore that really difficult world.”

Some of the best scenes in the novel are the horseracing scenes, where Markham proves herself in a male-dominated world. Here too, McLain attributes the success of these scenes to her connectedness with Markham. “I grew up sort of the way Beryl did, meaning that from childhood I was super physical with horses. Like saddling up the pony and launching over the landscape with my sisters and not coming back until dinnertime. I understand Beryl’s attachment to the physical animal and that sense of freedom, of flying along in an untethered, unbounded way.”

Developing the details of other sections of the novel—colonial and native life in Kenya during the early years of the 20th century, for example—McLain employed a sort of just-in-time research, gathering facts just ahead of composing the next section of her novel. Her biggest challenge, she says, was sorting through all the conflicting accounts and gossip about Markham’s life, especially her love life. “I had to let some of this stuff go,” she says, laughing. “It’s provocative, it’s scintillating, but I’m not writing Fifty Shades of Grey.”

Instead, the novel concentrates on dramatizing Markham’s most important relationships: her complex lifelong friendship with a Kenyan man named Ruta, the circumstances of her three unsatisfying marriages; and her emotionally fraught affair with the love of her life, pilot and hunting guide Denys Finch Hatton, who was at the same time in a relationship with her friend Karen Blixen, author of the memoir Out of Africa under the pseudonym Isak Dinesen. 

Movie fans will remember Meryl Streep’s portrayal of Blixen and Robert Redford’s portrayal of Finch Hatton in the film Out of Africa. McLain admits, laughing, that it was impossible for her not to picture Redford as she wrote about this relationship. 

“It’s my favorite movie. All I have to do is watch two minutes in the middle of the night, and I’m reduced to tears. But I had to dismember and complicate it to tell my story. I know that there will be readers who will be really ticked with me for doing that. But telling the true story doesn’t mean that Denys and Karen didn’t really love each other. It just means that they were really, really intricate people.”

McLain pauses and shifts subjects to say that, in her view, Markham was sustained throughout her life by a warrior spirit she developed as a child. When her life went off the rails, as it did in many of her romantic relationships, it was because “she crosses her own lines and loses herself. She loses the connection with her personal power that came from that early childhood identity.”

Then McLain returns to the impact on Markham and Blixen of the death of Finch Hatton. “You know, there’s a line at the end of my book that goes, ‘This time with Denys would fade, and it would last forever.’ That’s something I actually believe about love. Sometimes we don’t get to keep the people we love the most and who change us the most. That’s an unromantic, uncommercial view of love. But to me it feels absolutely true.”

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

British writer Philippa Gregory has been telling the story of England’s most infamous king—and his equally famous coterie of wives—for nearly 15 years. In Taming the Queen, she brings Henry VIII’s final wife, Kateryn Parr, to the forefront. We asked Gregory a few questions about her latest book, the TV and film adaptations of her works and what readers can expect next.

You’ve written about all of Henry VIII’s wives, and Kateryn Parr is the last. Did you have a favorite? Which one did you identify with most?
All of Henry’s wives mean a lot to me—they were so much more than just wives and nothing like the stereotypes history has led us to believe. Take Katherine of Aragon for instance. I felt certain this successful queen militant, a daughter of Isabella of Spain, was far more interesting and active than the “old” wife that Henry put aside for Anne Boleyn. I wouldn’t say I identify with one in particular, but I admire parts of all of them.

What about Henry? Do you feel like you know him better after writing about him in so many books?
I have spent more that 20 years writing and researching Henry; but as a character in history it’s impossible to say I know him: All I have to go on, all anyone has to go on are the accounts which were written about him during his life, and the evidence of his actions. These show us a young man of remarkable talents, energy and charm who fell under the influence of a series of advisors and each time, turned against them. When I think about his later years I see a man disappointed in love and in his work who became delusional and progressively psychotic. There is some very exciting new research into Henry’s health—a suggestion that he may have carried the Kell positive gene with McLeod’s Syndrome as a complication. That may have been an explanation for the many miscarriages his wives endured and his paranoia.

For me, my time with Henry means I see him not as the jolly king who composed “Greensleeves,” but as a wonderfully promising boy who became a dark and dangerous man, descending into madness.

What (if anything) is different about the relationship between Henry and Kateryn, versus his relationships with his previous wives?
This was a brief marriage, cut short by Henry’s death, but Kateryn was not a nurse to a failing husband. He married her for love, in the hopes of getting another heir, and she undoubtedly married him because she could not refuse the king of England. If he had not died I think he would have sent her for trial and execution—this was a time of major religious controversy and Kateryn was a reformer who and made enemies at court. They hoped to see her tried for heresy and wanted the king married to a woman who would not influence him at all. Henry even signed a warrant for her arrest. Kateryn was the only one of his victims who was able to talk herself out of trouble. She was an older bride—in her 30s, very aware of her situation and so much wiser than his previous wives. After all, she had seen him behead two predecessors and divorce one. Like Anne of Cleeves, she had a life after Henry—but unlike Anne, she married for love.

Do you ever have qualms about imagining the emotional lives and motivations of real people, especially those who are relatively well documented by history? What do you think is the greater responsibility of a historical novelist: telling a good story, or telling an accurate one?
The emotional lives of the people of the past is exactly what historical fiction is supposed to relate—a novel based in history is supposed to take this risk. The form is a hybrid, and as luck would have it I am a trained historian who became a novelist and I love both research and imaginative writing. I don’t think it is a good historical novel if the facts are sacrificed for the story—I would never do that. But sometimes we don’t know the facts, even of well-recorded lives, and often there are differing historical theories. The medieval records did not record thoughts and motivations—the inner lives of even famous people—that comes later in history. My job is to look at what we do have—dates; letter; Ambassador reports: birth records; building plans; and wardrobe records—and imagine emotions and the motivations that sit behind them.

Why do you think readers find the Tudor era so endlessly fascinating?
That’s the million-dollar question. I know why I love them but I don’t think I can answer for everyone else. I think the period is a time of terrific change and uncertainty and that’s always interesting as a background. It’s a time when the modern world comes into being, so very interesting in terms of monarchy, nationalism, law and empire. For many people it will be the extraordinary characters—the Tudor dynasty is a usurping power in England and all of the Tudors are extreme characters in dangerous circumstances.

You’re best known for writing about the Tudors, but you’ve also written about pre-Tudor history, the Industrial Revolution and modern-day life. Is there another time period you’d like to dig into?
I am constantly finding new and interesting characters and I’m not restricted to a particular time period. Of course, the research builds and builds so if I am moving to another period it is a new challenge. My more fictional series, The Order of Darkness, has taken me further into Europe, which has been a wonderful to research. Looking ahead, I am staying in the Tudor period for at least another two books—then who knows? I have some ideas but it’s too far ahead for me to predict.

Much of your work has been adapted for TV and film. What is it like to go through this process? Do you have a favorite adaptation of your work?
When I write and love a book, sometimes working on it for years—the book is always going to be my favorite medium. When I have to open it up to allow a huge team of writers, actors, directors and producers to work on it too, it’s always a disturbing process. But TV and film can also do things that the books can’t: For instance, the beauty of the landscapes and the clothes have more impact on screen than they do on the page and the performances of great actors can be transformational for a character. I love also how when I see something on screen it’s like the first time—I too can get caught up in the magic of the story.

If you weren’t a writer, what do you think you would be doing?
I think I would still be reading and writing—it’s something that I have always done. I first trained as a journalist, and then I did a degree in history and a PhD in the 18th century. I have a fascination with history that is constant, and I love the form of the novel. I enjoy many other things too—animals, conservation, nature, and my family; but I think I was always going to be a writer.

What are you working on next?
I am having a terrific time with Henry VIII’s sister Margaret. She’s a typical Tudor: larger than life, self-righteous, spoiled, brave, energetic and she has a life which is nonstop drama and tragedy—much of it of her own making. I had not known much about her before and I am reading and thinking about her all the time. I shall go to Scotland later in the summer and see the wonderful palaces where she lived. It’s early days so I don’t yet know how the novel will turn out, but I really like her—and that’s the main thing for someone that I will be working on for more than a year.

Author photo by Santi U.

Jed Goodfinch is young, gay, black and trying to make a go of it in West Berlin in the 1980s in Darryl Pinckney’s second novel, Black Deutschland. The book is a provocative exploration of city, sexuality and self, written with the intellectual verve and dry wit that Pinckney is known for.

Your previous novel, High Cotton, was published more than 20 years ago. I don’t want to say what took you so long, but . . . what made you want to tell this story now?
When the Times asked Frank Conroy why it took him nearly 40 years to publish a second book, the filmmaker Jay Anania told him to say that he’d been out doing errands.

Your narrator, Jed, refers to Christopher Isherwood and his fictionalized account of being a British expat in The Berlin Stories. There is so much Isherwood wasn’t able to say when that book was published in 1937. Do you think there are still taboo subjects in fiction?
Christopher and His Kind, Isherwood’s memoir of his years in the early 1930s in Germany, came out in 1977. As a concordance to The Berlin Stories, he goes through everything he couldn’t say back then or where he feels he copped out and gets furious that he was not able to be open. That was my window those boys had been whistling up to, though I pretended that they were signaling girlfriends!

Although Isherwood was what we would now call a sexual tourist, an upper-class gentleman who trawled among working-class youth in need, he was brave enough in his way, and he really did fall in love with the boy he could not get out of Nazi Germany. In The Berlin Stories, Sally Bowles is not the narrator’s beard, or even a hetero fling. Isherwood finds a way for the women in Herr Issyvoo’s life to pronounce him unsatisfactory as boyfriend material, leaving him uncompromised and free to be the observer. It’s hard for me to think people who read the story, “On Ruegen Island,” could not figure out what is going on in it, even in 1937. Are there still taboo subjects? We want to say no, but of course there are and some for good reason, so it seems to me.

Where is the title Black Deutschland from?
Years ago I had a plan to write about black American soldiers stationed in West Germany. And in the early 1980s there were a couple of gay films about blacks on the West Berlin scene. And for years now black Germans have been making themselves more visible as a group. Black Deutschland went from being a title I had for nonfiction to the title of a novel. I saw recently that a documentary from a few years ago has the same title. Fortunately, titles cannot be copyrighted.

Jed experiences several key historical events, such as the death of Harold Washington and the end of a divided Berlin. What are the challenges of integrating historical incidents into a work of fiction?
Victor Serge, a wonderful writer who believed in Communist revolution but not in Stalin, said that the truth of the novelist cannot be confounded with the truth of the historian or chronicler. Maybe so, but the best fiction becomes history, a way to imagine the past, much as narrative history can have the drama of fiction: character, motive, plot. A lot depends on how recent or long ago the history is, just as genre determines to what uses a given history will be put. There are novels with historical settings and novels about a specific historical event, certain Civil War novels—or look at the number of works taking off from the assassination of JFK. Where would we put Slaughterhouse Five? In American literature, E.L. Doctorow’s Ragtime stands out for me as a defining moment in creating a world on the page inhabited by both fictional and historical characters.

Looking back over this year and in to the future, do you think there will be ever be fictional accounts about Ferguson, about the shootings in Colorado or the anti-Muslim backlash in the U.S?.
Is the appetite for stories built into language, and even those about what we know can take us to someplace we’ve not been before. Writers can come from anywhere; the challenge is to find a way to write. People do and will continue to do so and change the language yet again.

You’ve worked in theater, as a book reviewer and a longtime contributor to the New York Review of Books. Where do you see overlaps in the types of writing you do? Are there subjects that beg to be written about in a certain way?
Book reviewing can sometimes give the young writer the validation of seeing his or her name in print. From where do we get the belief that this life is possible? It’s harder to write about what you like than what you don’t. To grow up at The New York Review of Books, working for Robert Silvers and Barbara Epstein, was an education. And I appreciate the encouragement I was given in its pages to reflect on African-American literature. Fiction and criticism have the same source: a wish to add to the literature that you care about.

My experience in the theatre has been as an adapter, dramaturg and text machine for the director Robert Wilson, whose work fascinates me in its beauty. Because of Wilson, I was able to stay in Berlin. My first job with Wilson was to try and make Heiner Mueller, a distinguished East German playwright, sit down and produce the text Bob was expecting for The Forest, a piece they were doing with David Byrne. I failed, but in chasing Mueller from one cigar-filled bar to another I got an extraordinary seminar in German literature. I’d never before met anyone who hated Thomas Mann.

In your book Out There: Mavericks of Black Literature, you focused on three writers you thought were under-read or underappreciated.  Are there other writers—black or white, male or female, gay or straight—that you think deserve another look?
Elizabeth Hardwick once noted that Newton Arvin, a gay professor at Smith in the days of the closet, brought back Melville, while the equally closeted F.O. Matthiesson at Harvard ignited the Henry James revival. Somebody being found again is usually the first time around for most everyone in the audience. Quentin Bell’s biography of Virginia Woolf was my introduction to her work. But I wasn’t alone in my discovery of Bloomsbury. Its principled bohemianism spoke to multiple constituencies in the 1970s. Maybe Mrs. Woolf had never gone out of fashion. Jean Rhys was making a true comeback around the same time. Feminism brought her back. Similarly, many black writers were being republished. When I was a student, the past was giving up its treasures in mass editions. New translations, new literatures in translation. I am enthralled by reprint series—Library of America or New York Review Books, Modern Library or Penguin. Oxford paperbacks. The New Directions backlist fills me with emotion. There is so much out there, you have to assume that you are missing many great things. I am glad for most of what has returned, among them Nella Larsen, a Harlem Renaissance novelist I much admire.

Reputations come and go for different reasons. I was talking not long ago to two very brilliant young writers who were entirely clear that Norman Mailer is out, out. Maybe the ideal reader is in your future and you write for that, for the in/out, in/out. Sometimes you’re just out. Gore Vidal was always trying to promote Frederic Prokosch and not really succeeding.

You just edited James Baldwin’s later novels for a new Library of American edition. What did you learn about his work that you didn’t know before?
Baldwin’s late novels used to be in my mind as his failures and although I am still unconvinced by If Beale Street Could Talk, the other two are worth going back to, because Baldwin always manages to infuse his prose with the magnetism of his personality, no matter what else is going on.  

I read that you worked briefly for the American novelist Djuna Barnes. What was that like? 
In High Cotton, the narrator works briefly for Djuna Barnes, which was based on actual experience. I was Fran McCullough’s secretary at Harper & Row. She was the kind of editor who took care of her writers. So she hired me out to Miss Barnes as a handyman. Miss Barnes had lost none of her fire or style. But some writers you have to read when you’re young. I wouldn’t dare read Barnes again. Or Gertrude Stein.

You have lived in New York and in England with your partner, James Fenton.  Describe your ideal day in each place.
We are only in New York now, in Harlem, where James has managed to make an English cottage garden. My ideal day is to find that we have both woken up and are together and well enough. I am not being corny, and if I am I do not mind it.

Author photo by Beowulf Sheehan. 

She was the Princess Diana of her time, a storied beauty who longed for more than the trappings of royalty. So why has Sisi been largely lost to history?

Allison Pataki’s new novel, Sisi: Empress on Her Own covers the turbulent later life of the Empress Elisabeth of Austria-Hungary, known to her subjects as Sisi. While her husband, Emperor Franz Joseph, struggles to maintain the power of his monarchy, Sisi seeks refuge from the stifling halls of the royal court in late 19th-century Vienna, where her every move is watched and analyzed.

Sisi travels around Europe, often accompanied by her youngest daughter, Valerie, the only one of her three children she was allowed to raise without the interference of her mother-in-law, the Archduchess Sophie. Whispers start at Sisi’s frequent trips away from the Hofburg Palace and her close relationships with other men—namely the darkly handsome Count Andrássy, a key advisor to her husband.

Pataki, whose own family roots trace to Hungary, the Czech Republic and Austria, became intrigued with the empress during a trip to Austria a decade ago.

“Everywhere I went, I saw images of this striking woman,” Pataki says during a call to her home in Chicago, where she lives with her husband—a resident in ortho-pedic surgery—and their newborn daughter. 

“Her smile looked a little mysterious, a little sad, like there was more behind it. I thought, this is a really intriguing woman. Why don’t I know more about her?”

Pataki began researching and soon realized she had struck literary gold—enough for two books. (The first, The Accidental Empress, was published in 2015.)

“I didn’t know how much I could rely on the historical record, but the more I looked into it, the blueprint for the story was right there in the facts,” she says. “You have the stunning settings of the Alps and palaces and courts. You have the characters of the most powerful man in Europe [Franz Joseph] and Mad King Ludwig [Sisi’s cousin, the King of Bavaria].”

And, of course, you have Sisi, a woman Pataki calls “larger than life even in her own life. She inspired mythology the way a Princess Diana or a Jackie Kennedy did.”

Pataki, the daughter of former New York Gov. George Pataki, grew up in New York and moved to Chicago for her husband’s residency. The lifelong New Yorker is acclimating to her new home. 

“What I love about New York is the layer upon layer upon layer of history,” she says. “Chicago is so wonderful because it’s so livable and friendly. You get all the wonderful aspects of New York—great restaurants, great museums—but a slower pace. I consider them both home.”

Pataki began her career in journalism, mostly working for cable news. It was not for her.

"I love getting to the bottom of people’s stories."

“I love history. I love writing. I love narrative. I love getting to the bottom of people’s stories. I thought that meant I should be a journalist,” she says. “But it was get in, get out, boil the story down to 15 seconds or less. I was told, use less big words, be more snarky.

“I was going home at the end of the day and writing fiction. It was writing therapy. It was so much fun I thought it couldn’t actually be a job. It was everything I thought I would love about journalism. I decided I would give myself a short window to see if I could make this a career.”

Pataki quickly learned that historical fiction was her niche. “My whole bookshelf is historical fiction,” she says. “Historical fiction makes history accessible and entertaining.”

While Pataki does meticulous research before diving into a novel, she wants readers to understand the difference between historical fiction and biographies.

“I’m not intending to write dry, historical text,” she says. “I’m not a historian, I’m a novelist. Don’t take my version as the Bible. This is a novel.”

Still, Pataki shows deep reverence for and understanding of her subject, and draws a sympathetic portrait that shows the empress was more than her beauty. Where The Accidental Empress focused on Sisi as a young, naive woman—she was married in 1854 at only 16—Sisi portrays a woman at midlife who very much understands her place in the world, even as she resists it. Though she was disappointed in her marriage and disconnected from her older children, Sisi found happiness in travel and horse riding.

“Sisi was never one to derive her greatest joy from her husband and children,” Pataki says. “She was such a wandering, restless spirit.”

After spending so much time reading and writing about Sisi, Pataki struggled to write about the empress’ 1898 death in Geneva at the early age of 60, at the hands of an assassin. The Italian anarchist had another target in mind, and stabbed Sisi only after his initial plan failed.

“It was incredibly different at times to write about the tragedy of it all,” she says. “It was a split-second decision . . . just the dumb bad luck of that really struck me.”

Still, Pataki believes that, for a woman so defined by her legendary beauty, dying before she became an old woman might have been Sisi’s wish. Conscious of the public’s scrutiny, the empress maintained her legendary slender waistline through exercise, fasting and tight corset lacing, and she spent hours grooming her famously long and thick hair. 

“Sisi wrote very often to family and in journals that she wanted death to take her quickly and young,” Pataki says. “In some ways, it was eerie that she almost prophesied her death.”

Sisi is a deeply moving book about a complex character.

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