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Debut novelist Daniel Torday puts a fresh spin on World War II in The Last Flight of Poxl West, a page-turning literary tale about truth, lies and forgiveness. Eli Goldstein idolizes his uncle Poxl, a Czech Jew who served in Britain's Royal Air Force. The novel alternates between the adult Eli's voice and the pages of Poxl's memoir as the two coming-of-age stories converge. We asked Torday a few questions about the book—without spoiling the novel's many pleasurable twists and turns.

Your first published book was a novella. Did you approach the writing of a full-length novel differently? 
You know, it’s funny—I tend to work in the dark a bit on projects and their size. I mean, I know what I’m writing about, but then I just put up blinders for months, years, and work work work the sentences as hard as I can. Which is to say: The Sensualist actually started as a novel, and at one point grew to as big as almost 300 pages. But as I went through successive drafts, over the course of years, it just got chiseled away until it was a novella.

The Last Flight of Poxl West, on the other hand, was about a 70-page novella my first stab at it. I’d just gotten back from a summer in Eastern Europe (more on that below!) and I thought I’d try my hand at getting Poxl’s voice down. Then I realized I had a lot more research and homework to do, so I put it down. At various points it was more like a 400-page novel; a novella with a very brief prologue; a long novel with a short story interspliced in it. At one point an editor I admire even suggested it should just contain a lot of footnotes, like The Brief Wondrous Life of Oscar Wao. Which is I guess just to say: I have to throw a lot up against the wall to see what sticks. It’s not an efficient or smart way to work, I don’t think. But it’s the only way I’ve figured out how. Novel-making is messy business.

"Novel-making is messy business."

This novel alternates between Eli’s point-of-view as he looks back on his childhood, and excerpts from Poxl’s memoir. Which voice was easier to write?
I love the way you’ve asked this question! I could give 180-degree different answers depending on what we end up meaning by “easy.” I always had a strong grasp on how I wanted Poxl to sound—like this kind of Nabakovian Eastern European intellectual of a variety I’d heard bloviating in my Hungarian grandparents’ world when I was a kid. But over the years it actually took a lot of toning Poxl down, layering in some quieter introspection, to really bring his voice off.

Eli, on the other hand, was a very late-breaking development. I’d always known I had to find a way to balance the contemporary story of the publication of Poxl West’s memoir with the memoir itself. But how? For years the other voice was Samuel Gerson, the narrator of my first book. I had this ridiculous notion that I could be like James Joyce, and just do permutations of Stephen Dedalus in book after book. But that didn’t work. And all at once, a couple summers ago, I tried a short-story version of this story out—narrated by a middle-aged guy, Eli, who was looking back on his childhood to decipher this complicated period with his uncle. In the story, he was Uncle Saul. It took my leaving it in a drawer for almost a year before I thought to just call Saul “Poxl,” and integrate it into the manuscript. Which is to say: From one perspective it took no appreciable thought, no effort at all to just go with Eli’s voice—it came to me all at once, effortlessly. From another, it took almost 8 years of toil for it to arrive unbidden. Mysterious.

Poxl is an engaging and entertaining narrator, but as the novel progresses it becomes clear the past may not be as straightforward as he presents it. Do you think it’s possible for a person to get at the truth of their own life?
Great question! In some ways, I think we know each other the least of anyone in our lives. It’s a problem of information overload. We know too much of ourselves to know ourselves well, or as others know us. In a work of fiction, it’s easy enough to say, as Amy Hempel does so brilliantly, something like, He was so great I knew girls who would chew his already-chewed gum. But if we said that about ourselves, we’d look entirely ego-driven, self-aggrandizing.

I heard Tobias Wolff once say his favorite bad line to an apprentice story he’d ever read started, “As I walk down what other men call streets . . .” So good/bad! But put that line in the mouth of another character observing his overblown sense of self-importance, and suddenly it’s genius.

I guess part of what I’m saying, as well, is that every day of our lives we wake up a different Trisha, a different Dan, a different Leopold-whose-nickname-is-Poxl. If someone stopped us on the street and said, So, your childhood—good? Bad? Indifferent? Sum it up in a sentence. Or a chapter. Or a memoir. It would be too hard to just to give a terse response. And that’s what’s so hard in some way for Poxl in writing his memoir. He lived this outsized life—so how to tell it? Flannery O’Connor says somewhere something like, If one can’t make much of little experience, he’s unlikely to make much of a lot. Something like that applies here, I think.

"In some ways, I think we know each other the least of anyone in our lives. . . . He lived this outsized life—so how to tell it?"

At one point, a reporter asks Poxl if we’ve “reached saturation” with first-person accounts of WWII. That’s something readers might wonder as well! How would you answer the question?
It’s a question I grappled with every day of the eight years I worked on this book. I guess in some ways my main answer is that we work with the material we’re given, and a very very very long tail followed the six years of that war. I grew up with a grandfather who survived years in a Hungarian labor camp, and almost all of whose family died in death camps, and a grandmother who was so scarred and scared by the war she never admitted she was Jewish to me or to my family in the 40 years she lived in this country. To deny that as part of who I am because of a question of readership or marketplace would feel somehow disingenuous. Or maybe just a task for a stronger smarter person than me.

But the flip side is that the questions we ask of that experience have to be new questions. Fresh questions. For me in this case, I started to unearth stories about experiences within my family of a kind I’d never heard of before. Around the same time, W.G. Sebald had become, to my understanding of the situation, the first German public intellectual to raise some real questions about the Allied bombing of Germany—in a lecture in the late 1990s that wasn’t published in translation here until about 10 years ago. Then it was published as On the Natural History of Destruction, and now Germans are grappling with it for the first time. U.S., British and Canadian planes destroyed more than 100 German cities, killing hundreds of thousands of civilians and leaving millions without homes. This was all new to me, and I suspect it might be new to some readers. So the history I was grappling with felt like news to me, anyway.

"We work with the material we’re given, and a very very very long tail followed the six years of that war. "

What research did you do for this book?
I’m not a historian, and so I have a very haphazard research method—if you could even call it that. For a couple of summers, I traveled to Europe, where each time I traced the steps Poxl would have taken from his home north of Prague, to Rotterdam and up to London. I visited with the handful of relatives who survived the war. I didn’t hire a translator or anything—I would stay in hostels and hotels, and get on trains and buses and just get a sense of a place. I was gratified to see that in The New York Times Book Review, their reviewer quoted from part of one of Poxl’s descriptions of the Elbe, the river outside of Leitmeritz, that came in part from an afternoon I took to just go walk down by the river and see what it looked like, smelled like.

But of course then I had to follow up by reading a bunch of books. The two main kinds of resources that came to feel helpful to me were a bit of a surprise: very minute military histories of single days during the war, and self-published memoirs. The military histories helped me in being able to be super specific about a single sortie, a single battle Poxl would have experienced (I use that word with all apt caveats!), or a single night in the Blitz, for instance. The self-published memoirs were great for their honesty, the sense of dailiness I really wanted to reproduce here. But they were also helpful for what they weren’t: propulsive, edited, well-written, all that readable. I was so taken with the material, I always had to ask myself the question: What would make the memoir Poxl’s writing publishable, where these ones so obviously weren’t? Some of that is of course a matter of luck, ambition, timing. But some of it does show up in the sentences, the material.

Eli’s discovery of his uncle’s humanity may take place in an unusual context, but a child’s realization that the adults in his life are people, too, is a universal experience. What drew you to write about it?
Just what you said! For years I grappled with the outsized nature of Poxl’s story, the way he was telling it. What I wanted on the other end, from the other voice, was for it to be as close and real and emotionally knowable as possible. What better, more universal way to handle that than to make the thing Eli was dealing with somehow smaller, familiar even, than it seems: Poxl was like a grandfather to him, and when he really saw who this hero of his was, it was deflating and more complicated than what he’d expected to find.

What are you working on next?
I’m always working on a thousand things at once, and waiting to see what’s getting closest to finished. So right now that includes a number of projects. One entails putting a whole bunch of the short stories I’ve been at work on into a single Word file, and seeing if they work as a book. One is either a book-length essay or a collection of essays—or both. I’ve been working for years on a strange novel about a kid who makes a brother for himself out of duct tape. And last summer I got a bunch of pages down on another large-scale new novel that’s a little too new to say much more about, other than that it’s very tentatively titled American Protest right now.

 

Author photo by Matt Barrick.

Debut novelist Daniel Torday puts a fresh spin on World War II in The Last Flight of Poxl West, a page-turning literary tale about truth, lies and forgiveness. Eli Goldstein idolizes his uncle Poxl, a Hungarian Jew who served in Britain's Royal Air Force during WWII. The novel alternates between the adult Eli's voice and the pages of Poxl's memoir as the two coming-of-age stories converge.
Interview by

Readers who know Elizabeth Wein’s award-winning books Code Name Verity and Rose Under Fire, both set during World War II, may be surprised by the 1930s Ethiopian setting of her warm-hearted, ambitious new novel, Black Dove, White Raven.

In fact, Wein is revisiting a place she’s written about several times before. When planning the first novel in her Lion Hunters series, The Winter Prince (1993), Wein turned to sixth-century Ethiopia to find a counterpoint for the Anglo-Saxon characters of the Arthurian legend. “My interest was sparked because, in fact, Ethiopia was one of the four great empires of the world at the time,” says the author from her home in Scotland, where she and her husband have lived since 2000.

Readers familiar with the older characters in her WWII novels might also be surprised to find that when we first meet Emilia Drummond Menotti and Teodros Gedeyon, the two narrators in Black Dove, White Raven, they are only 5 years old, sharing early memories of being strapped together in the open cockpit of a biplane.

As it happens, Wein is not one to worry much about age ranges when she spins her stories. “I tend to be very ambitious with my subject matter and don’t think too much about the ages of my main characters,” she admits with a laugh. “I just write the sort of book I wanted to read when I was 15 or 16.”

Black Dove, White Raven is certainly a book that teens (and younger readers, too) will want to read. Em and Teo share an incredible history, which brought them together as infants when their mothers were daredevil flying partners in a double act called Black Dove and White Raven. As Em recalls in that early memory of being in a plane, Teo’s mother proclaims, “Look at our kids—they are a double act, just like us.” And so they are.

The novel has the scope of a complex family saga, as the paths of the women and their children intertwine and, sometimes painfully, separate. Through the form of school essays and flight logs, Em and Teo reveal their memories of loss and love, observations about the sometimes confusing and dangerous world around them and hopes for the future.

Wein’s own interest in small planes began in high school, but it was not until she met her husband, Tim, that she took up flying. She was a graduate student at the University of Pennsylvania, where she would eventually receive her Ph.D. in Folklore; he was working in Raleigh, North Carolina; both were bell-ringers at their respective churches. “At the time there were a lot of eligible young women ringing at Philadelphia and several eligible young men ringing in Raleigh, and the tower captain at Raleigh decided he needed to get them together!”

Wein’s first experience with “real” flying was in a small plane in Kenya, with her future husband as the pilot. “[It] was as amazing as you might imagine it to be after watching Out of Africa or reading West with the Night.”

Wein takes her flying research seriously, so for Black Dove, White Raven, she had to take a stab at wing walking. Insurance issues apparently make this a rather difficult stunt to pull off. Nevertheless, says Wein, “I actually did a half-hour wing-walking experience at an old, well-kept World War I airfield that was nothing more than grass—no runways.”

Fortunately, Wein’s venture into wing walking went smoothly. And while there is a plane accident in Black Dove, White Raven, it’s the result of a collision with a bird, not a fall. This tragedy kills Teo’s mother and leaves Em’s mother, the White Raven, devastated and with two children to raise. She does so with the help of her Quaker parents.

Eventually Momma, as both children now call her, is able to recover enough to find a way to fulfill the dream the women had been working toward: to go to Ethiopia, the home of Teo’s father, where their family can live free from the racial prejudice of late-1920s America. Momma goes first, leaving Grandma and Grandfather to bring the children to join her two years later. It’s a hallmark of Wein’s work that even minor characters feel like people we would like to know, and that’s especially true when we see the city of Addis Ababa through Em’s grandparents’ eyes.

As Teo and Em grow into adolescence on a cooperative coffee farm in pre-WWII Ethiopia, they continue to nurture their imaginative world. But outside political forces begin to transform their fantasy life into real-life challenges. As an Ethiopian citizen, Teo will be required to fight in any future wars, so Momma begins to teach both children how to fly. But danger is already closing in on this small family, and Teo and Em—the new Black Dove and White Raven—will need all their courage to survive.

Black Dove, White Raven shares with Code Name Verity and Rose Under Fire the characteristics that have drawn readers so passionately to Wein’s work: fierce and powerful storytelling; strong and complex characters; an authenticity that comes with thorough and dedicated research; and, of course, a love of flying.

 

Deborah Hopkinson’s next book, Courage & Defiance, will be released this fall.

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

Readers who know Elizabeth Wein’s award-winning books Code Name Verity and Rose Under Fire, both set during World War II, may be surprised by the 1930s Ethiopian setting of her warm-hearted, ambitious new novel, Black Dove, White Raven.
Interview by

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 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.
Interview by

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.

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.
Interview by

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.

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.
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Writing a gripping mystery is a lot like performing a masterful magic trick—knowing when to grab the audience’s attention, when to provide distractions and how to wrap it all up with a dazzling finale.

British mystery master Elly Griffiths enters the world of illusionists with The Zig Zag Girl, the first in a new series that has us looking behind the curtain in a whole new way.

 
Playbill

One of Griffiths' grandfather's playbills: Dennis Lawes "on laughter service."

Tell us a little about the World War II Magic Gang that inspired this new series—including your own family connection.
My granddad, Frederick Goodwin (stage name Dennis Lawes), was a music hall comedian, modestly famous between the wars. Granddad was often on the bill with a well-known magician called Jasper Maskelyne. During the Second World War, Maskelyne was a part of a group called the Magic Gang, recruited for their skills in camouflage and stage magic. The Magic Gang were based in North Africa where they created dummy tanks, ghostly platoons and a fake battleship called HMS Houdin. I’ve adapted some of these escapades for the Magic Men in The Zig Zag Girl.

The Magic Men are flamboyant showmen, very different from what fans might expect from the creator of Ruth Galloway, forensic archaeologist. What drew you to these characters?
I was passionate about acting at school and university and would have loved to pursue it as a career. But I was drawn to the world of music hall by my grandfather and—more specifically—by the playbills that he left me in his will. These bills are a treasure trove of long-forgotten acts: Lavanda’s Feats with the Feet, Lou Lenny and her Unrideable Mule, Raydini the Gay Deceiver. I knew that one day I would have to write about them.

How was it different to write about 1950s Brighton than the Norfolk marshes featured in your Ruth Galloway series?
I’ve lived in Brighton since I was 5, so in some ways it was a lot easier. If I needed to research a location I’d just pop out and have a look. But in other ways it was more difficult. I think there is something to be said for writing about somewhere slightly alien to you. I spent a lot of time in Norfolk as a child, but it still seems huge and slightly frightening. I almost know Brighton too well, and it’s a safe and happy place for me. However, the 1950s setting helped make it seem more mysterious.

Some of the murders here are pretty gruesome, yet the book doesn’t have a dark tone. Do you consider it important to focus on the optimism of your investigators rather than the depravity of the villain?
The Zig Zag Girl definitely contains my more gruesome murders to date! However, I don’t like writing—or reading—about gratuitous violence. I haven’t described any of the crimes in too much detail, and I have tried to lighten things up with a bit of humor here and there. For me, it’s important to focus on the characters and not on the mechanics of murder.

Is the charismatic Max Mephisto based on a particular magician?
His career is based on Jasper Maskelyne’s. However, I think Max also owes a bit to my father and grandfather—both handsome, urbane, charming men. My grandfather had three wives—all dancers—and was still a debonair man-about-town in his 80s.

ALSO IN BOOKPAGE: Read our review of The Zig Zag Girl

 

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

British mystery master Elly Griffiths enters the world of illusionists with The Zig Zag Girl, the first in a new series that has us looking behind the curtain in a whole new way.
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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.

RELATED CONTENT: Read our review of Black Deutschland.

Author photo by Beowulf Sheehan. 

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

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.

The sparkly disco ball on the cover of Meg Medina’s mesmerizing new YA novel, Burn Baby Burn, evokes the summer of 1977. But there are flames on the disco ball, too, burning with an intensity that hints at something much more dangerous than disco. In New York City, this was the summer of a relentless heat wave, ever-escalating crime and a serial killer dubbed Son of Sam.

“I like the notion of disco ball as time bomb,” Medina tells BookPage in a call from her home in Richmond, Virginia. In Burn Baby Burn, the explosion comes in the form of a citywide blackout, a real-life incident that Medina remembers well. She was 13 years old and living in Queens.

Medina is the author of five previous books, including the 2014 Pura Belpré Author Award-winning Yaqui Delgado Wants to Kick Your Ass, but this is her first novel of historial fiction. She quickly realized it wasn’t enough to draw from her own memories, and so she delved into newspapers to help re-experience that summer’s terror. “I wanted to write the story as respectfully as possible,” Medina says. “It’s part of the historical record of the city, eBand I didn’t want to glamorize it or make it sensational. What I wanted to capture was the sense of horror and dread that we felt.”

That instability and uncertainty permeate the pages of Burn Baby Burn and the life-changing summer of its protagonist, 17-year-old Nora Lopez. Nora has plans for her post-high school life: She’s saving money from her part-time deli job so she can move out of the apartment she shares with her mother, Mima, and brother, Hector. In the meantime, she’s enjoying the beach and disco dancing with her college-bound best friend, Kathleen, even as they alter their daily plans to ensure they aren’t vulnerable to the serial killer. That’s something Medina remembers well: Under Son of Sam’s shadow, running routine errands “felt like a really close call . . . like he could be anywhere and anybody.”

In addition to the fear that casts a pall over the city, Nora’s daily life is marked by exhausting, ultimately fruitless attempts to avoid setting off Hector’s increasingly explosive temper. It’s clear to Nora that Mima, who’s never disciplined Hector for his behavior, isn’t going to start handling things now. It’s up to Nora to save herself.

This is a daunting prospect for a teen with limited resources. Fortunately, Nora is surrounded by a coterie of supportive and caring spirits, including Kathleen and her parents, a badass neighbor named Stiller and the funny deli owner.

“It’s important to keep young people in contact with the idea that what your situation is right now isn’t what it will always be for you,” Medina says. “There are other people around from whom you can draw strength.”

Through the people who encourage Nora to think bigger (a guidance counselor urges her to apply to colleges) and broader (Kathleen’s mother and Stiller bring the girls to women’s rights rallies), Medina skillfully and movingly demonstrates that change can come in small increments, and though there may be setbacks, that doesn’t mean it’s not worth the effort.

Take feminism, for example. Nora is growing up during the movement’s second wave, filled with marches and Bella Abzug’s bullhorn. “It’s so painful to me when we see young women now disavow that and say they’re not feminists,” Medina says. “So much of what they take for granted and are allowed to do came on the backs of women who took to the street, marching and being ‘difficult.’ So I wanted to write a story about young women in the beginning of that.”

There’s much that readers will take away from Burn Baby Burn, with its dramatic and all-too-real backdrop of a city in trouble and transition, and characters who are doing their best while realizing that it’s OK to want to do better.

“I believe in the relief of naming hard experiences,” Medina says. “There is a comfort in removing the shame around them. They happen to all kinds of people, and it’s not a character flaw in you, it’s humanity.”

 

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

The sparkly disco ball on the cover of Meg Medina’s mesmerizing new YA novel, Burn Baby Burn, evokes the summer of 1977. But there are flames on the disco ball, too, burning with an intensity that hints at something much more dangerous than disco.
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In her third novel, Chicago-born author Andromeda Romano-Lax chronicles the life of one of America's earliest female scientists, Rosalie Rayner. After landing a job at Johns Hopkins in the early 1920s, the bright and talented Rosalie becomes the protegée of the founder of Behavioralism, John Watson, and works with him on some of his most famous experiments. Though Watson is married, the two launch an affair that leads to a headline-making divorce trial. Rosalie trades her career as a scentist for motherhood, but she and John collaborate on a seminal parenting guide—and practice their theories on their own two children.

Behave is a page-turning exploration of a complicated relationship, full of themes that will resonate with modern readers—the enduring debate of nature vs. nurture, as well as the eternal struggle women face to balance family life and career opportunities. We asked Romano-Lax a few questions about the book and the intriguing heroine at its center.

Not much is known about the personal life of Rosalie Rayner. Can you talk a little bit about how you constructed her character?
Only two popular magazine articles written by Rosalie, plus a few unpublished manuscript notes, are available to give us a sense of Rosalie’s voice. To imagine my way into her character, I had to start with her life choices. Interestingly, this has parallels to Behaviorism itself, which suggested that we can never really know what people think, only what they do. In contrast with John Watson, who would have testily asserted that it doesn’t matter what people think or feel anyway, I was fiercely interested in that inner, private world. I wanted to know what was going inside Rosalie’s head and heart as she experimented on babies, fell in love, lost her job, coped with her husband’s infidelities and struggled as a young mother.

I wanted to know what was going inside Rosalie’s head and heart as she experimented on babies, fell in love, lost her job, coped with her husband’s infidelities and struggled as a young mother.

Aside from looking at actions, my other strategy was to delve as deeply as possible into the lives—including thoughts and emotions—of other women of Rosalie’s time period, including people she knew personally, like psychologist and fellow Vassar grad Mary Cover Jones and their teacher, Margaret Floy Washburn. Those women left a better paper trail and were more self-revealing.

Did you always plan to make this a first-person narrative?
I never considered any other point of view, perhaps because the motivation behind the book was to give voice to a woman whose voice was largely taken away by the circumstances of history. (It didn’t help that John Watson burned many of their private papers after her death.) Rosalie was a woman of the shadows, but even from that place I wanted to coax her to reveal, in her own words, as much as possible given what I imagined her personality would allow. She is not always a reliable narrator, but she moves toward insight and honesty with age.

Rosalie is bright and has a promising future, but she still ends living in the shadow of her husband, unlike her college friend and fellow scientist Mary Cover Jones. How do you explain this? 
Discovering Mary Cover Jones was a gift, because her life story and tremendous professional and personal success (she was a pioneering researcher who also raised a family) show us what was possible at the time—not easily achieved, but possible. My best guess is that Rosalie was more of a co-dependent (pardon the jargon) type from the beginning. She seemed to desire a close partnership with a strong figure. She needed to be needed. In that way, she was the ideal wife for John Watson—willing to spar with him and play the role of smart lab partner and sassy lover, while still supporting his goals above her own.

What do you think Rosalie’s life would have been like if she were born in 1988 instead of 1898?
If Rosalie were born in 1988 with the same personality, she might achieve more, especially if she avoided having babies early or worked outside the house regardless of having children. But I still imagine her losing herself at least partially to another person or cause and aiming for impossible perfection while trying to keep a smile on her face. There’s that wonderful line about Ginger Rogers—that she did everything Fred Astaire did, only backwards and in high heels. I think that line applies to many women, in every profession and in every era.

There’s that wonderful line about Ginger Rogers—that she did everything Fred Astaire did, only backwards and in high heels. I think that line applies to many women, in every profession and in every era.

Carried by their unshakeable belief in science, the Watsons proposed a strict and clinical approach to childrearing—their book even claims that mothers commit “psychological murder” by expressing affection to their children. Why do you think a theory that discounted so much accumulated knowledge and instinct was so attractive to 1920s parents?
The 1920s was the perfect time to throw the baby out with the bathwater and turn a blind eye to accumulated wisdom. The incredible death toll of the First World War seemed proof that mankind was on the wrong path. Scientific progress, especially social engineering, provided hope—as well as the danger of false prophets. John Watson wasn’t the first parenting expert to say that mothers did nearly everything wrong. Blaming mothers, grandmothers, nurses and nannies was already commonplace. Watson had the added weight of a new school of psychology behind him—one that promised to explain and predict all behaviors and to ultimately engineer a more perfect human being.

John Watson’s most famous experiment, which fear-conditioned babies, would be impossible to replicate today due to its dubious ethics, and the schedule for the Watsons’ first son, Billy—which includes time strapped to a toilet—sounds like child abuse today. What was it like to read and write about these events?
I was less shocked by the infant experiments than my readers seem to be. As a mother, I wouldn’t easily put up with people causing my own child unnecessary pain and emotional distress. But I have little trouble imagining that scientists John Watson and Rosalie Rayner believed that these well-meaning experiments, swiftly carried out, would be mostly forgotten by the infants themselves. The end—reforming human nature—was seen to be more important than the means—dunking babies in water, dropping them and conditioning them to be fearful of furry animals.

The end—reforming human nature—was seen to be more important than the means—dunking babies in water, dropping them and conditioning them to be fearful of furry animals.

Little Albert was an extreme case, and Watson cruelly joked about how the child might end up phobic and needing therapy down the road. But it’s important to remember: Watson thought all children ended up irrationally plagued by unhelpful emotions, due to bad parenting and even to natural events like thunder. In other words, he didn’t think he was doing anything worse than what would happen naturally to children, in time.

As for describing scenes of cruel parenting, the Watson’s methods don’t seem too different from the methods of strict parents in our own time. As a young mom, I winced to hear of other moms letting newborn babies “cry it out.” It seems to me that if we look at the long sweep of human history and raise children the way most children have been raised everywhere in the world—with skin-to-skin contact, lots of stimulation and love, and less concern about measurements and strict schedules—we do just fine.

John Watson may have been a genius and a visionary, but he was not the easiest person to be married to. Do you think he truly loved Rosalie? How did you end up feeling about him after writing this book?
I do believe John Watson loved Rosalie passionately, and though it was easy to poke fun at his particular behaviors while writing the book, in the end, I think he had a lot of likable qualities. He surrounded himself with smart people, including ambitious women, and he appreciated colleagues who challenged him. He fought for the underdog and dedicated himself to improving mankind. He seemed to be aware of his own faults and foibles. From all accounts, he was not only “most handsome professor on campus” but also charming, funny, and endlessly energetic. I ended up feeling sympathy for him while also feeling immensely wary of overconfident men like him who misuse their charisma and power and shout so loudly that quieter voices can’t be heard.

The nature-nurture debate still rages on, and, of course, so does the debate over how to be a “good” parent. What links did you see between these issues in the 1920s and the way they are thought about today?
I think that after seesawing from one extreme position to another we have ended up in nearly the same place, and I hope the perspective from a century ago helps people see our own times and our own debates more clearly. When it comes to many scientific issues, the right answer is often “a little of both,” or “it depends.” Nature and nature both affect us. People are in some ways—but absolutely not all ways—blank slates. Parenting requires both firm boundaries and abundant affection, with plenty of room for mothers’ intuition.

Though the idea of expressing affection to children is no longer frowned upon, some behaviorist principles—like scheduled feedings and sleep-training—are practiced today. What would you say is the Watsons’ most important legacy?
Despite 70 years of wisdom from Dr. Spock, the pediatrician whose “parents know more than they think” philosophy overturned much of Watson’s “don’t trust any mother” dogma, we still worry a lot about when babies will stop crying and when they will be potty trained. So Watson and the anxiety he fostered are still with us. But let me emphasize one benign part of his legacy: the general idea of routines. Children and adults do adapt well to many forms of regularity. Furthermore, Watson suggested that routines and mild, consistent training could replace physical punishment, which he believed had little effect on the shaping of behavior. This stance was unusual in Watson’s time and probably surprised readers.

What is a typical writing day like for you?
There are very typical days, especially in the last two and a half years, since I’ve been living mostly abroad (first in rural Taiwan, later in Mexico). But a really good writing day includes two to three hours of drafting or editing material, another hour or three of research, work-related correspondence, long-distance teaching work, and more emails. Then there is language study for an hour or two daily, exercise (usually running), cooking, shopping. In a foreign country, extra hours are spent waiting in line, dealing with bureaucracy, and doing errands. If I’m not careful, the side jobs and home and family maintenance take over everything, just as they did for Rosalie in the 1920s.

What are you working on next?
My next novel is a story of love, migration and secrets, weaving a forgotten indigenous culture and the plight of social robots, set in 1920s rural Taiwan and 2030s Tokyo. My next nonfiction book is about living in Mexico and struggling toward Spanish fluency.

 

 

In her third novel, Chicago-born author Andromeda Romano-Lax chronicles the life of one of America's earliest female scientists, Rosalie Rayner.
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As the summer of 1914 draws to a close, 23-year-old Beatrice Nash is headed to East Sussex by train. The small town of Rye doesn’t know it yet, but her arrival is about to shake up the status quo—not to mention the lives of town matron Agatha Kent and her two nephews.

In her long-awaited second novel, following the 2011 word-of-mouth hit Major Pettigrew’s Last Stand, Helen Simonson returns readers to her hometown of Rye, East Sussex—although, as she admits during a phone call to her adopted hometown of Brooklyn, she’s able to view it through “somewhat rose-colored glasses. I don’t have to put up with the rain or the warm beer, so I’m left to plumb all these deep emotional wells without any of the hindrances of daily, petty annoyances!”

Simonson has spent most of her adult life in the United States, where she moved with her American husband to pursue a career in advertising, and eventually raised two sons. While she loves the States, and visits England often, Simonson admits to “a deep longing for home. I’m one of those people who believes that children need to go out in the world—the farther the better—but those of us who go off to explore are left with a hole . . . it’s this kind of push-pull situation,” she says in a voice that still sounds quite English to this American interviewer.

Simonson’s writing has a distinctly English flavor . . . moving, but not sentimental.

Simonson’s writing also has a distinctly English flavor, but her books are unlikely to be described as “cozy.” Though she uses a small-town setting, Simonson is interested in the ways people interact. Her novels are moving but not sentimental—sly comedies of manners that have more in common with Jane Austen than Jan Karon.

“I believe the whole world can be explained in a small town,” says Simonson with a laugh—and The Summer Before the War opens up a whole world to readers. From socialites to refugees, this rich, beautifully written social comedy encompasses a range of nationalities and classes and is told from three perspectives. It’s the first time Simonson has written from a female point of view.

“There’s a long history of women wanting to go out into the world dressed as a man, and that’s essentially what I got to do writing Major Pettigrew. So it was funny to come back and write as a woman—I almost felt more exposed.”

Writing historical fiction was also a new step for Simonson. Using her hometown—and her fascination with the Edwardian writers Henry James and Edith Wharton, who spent time there—as a touchstone, Simonson decided to “prove myself as a real writer by taking people on a time-travel journey.”

That journey begins as Beatrice Nash arrives in Rye. Both prettier and younger than expected, the new teacher is almost immediately required to defend her position—which she desperately needs after the death of her father—against Agatha Kent’s scheming society nemesis, Lady Emily. Siding with Agatha and her husband, John, in support of the new teacher are the couple’s two nephews, cousins Daniel and Hugh. Carefree poet Daniel is Simonson’s homage to “all the young men who went off to war writing poetry,” while practical Hugh is completing his surgical training. The two are like sons to the Kents, who never had children of their own, and their relationships with Agatha are among the most compelling in the novel.

“I was really interested in how difficult it is to be an aunt who would love to be a mother,” says Simonson. She adds that she needed distance between Agatha and the two boys for other reasons as well. “As a mother of two sons, I’m just unable to write about the mother of two sons. I think my writing would come across as impossibly cheesy because I love my sons to death and would be totally incapable of writing anything nuanced about them!”

There may not be a better word to describe the characters in The Summer Before the War than “nuanced.” Even background players are fully rounded and alive, thanks to Simonson’s textured writing. By the time World War I breaks out, the reader knows this community, which makes the “very, very small” approach that Simonson takes to portraying the war feel right.

“When we go to war, I focus very closely on Hugh, working in the hospital. There are no epic battle scenes. By keeping things small and hopefully somewhat mundane, I try to navigate the geography of the battlefield without making any great claims to expertise in discussing war or the pain that it brings people.”

Like the best historical fiction, The Summer Before the War not only takes readers back to the past, but also gives them a new perspective on the present.

Like the best historical fiction, The Summer Before the War not only takes readers back to the past, but also gives them a new perspective on the present. Take Hugh’s observation that “spirited debate was the first casualty of any war,” or the discussion between Agatha and Beatrice about whether the best way to advance women’s rights is to work within the system, or defy it. Perhaps the most topical of these is the Belgian refugee crisis, which is largely forgotten in the U.K. today.

“I had no idea until I read a Henry James essay on the subject that there were Belgian refugees in my hometown,” says Simonson. “England took in 250,000 Belgian refugees and housed them and fed them and found them work for four years, all on a charitable basis. Perhaps it’s a lesson we could learn from today.”

Though there are plenty of lessons to ponder in this novel, it is also very, very funny. The crackling repartee between Agatha and Lady Emily recalls Isobel Crawley and Lady Violet on “Downton Abbey.” Hugh and Daniel, close as brothers, “spend endless hours trying to prove the other one wrong,” says Simonson, to a reader’s delight.

Full of trenchant observations on human nature and featuring a lovable cast of characters, The Summer Before the War is a second novel that satisfies.

Author photo © Nina Subin
This article was originally published in the April 2016 issue of BookPage. Download the entire issue for the Kindle or Nook.

Like the best historical fiction, The Summer Before the War not only takes readers back to the past, but also gives them a new perspective on the present. We talked to Simonson about her charming second novel.
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The biggest emotional challenge Chris Cleave faced in writing his scintillating fourth novel, Everyone Brave Is Forgiven, was the duty he felt to honor the memory of his grandparents.

Their experiences in the grim opening years of World War II, when Britain’s defeat by Germany was a distinct possibility, helped to inspire the book. 

“I didn’t feel a need to accurately portray their lives,” Cleave says during a call to the home in suburban London that he shares with his Paris-born wife, a chef turned nutritionist, and their three children, ages 6, 9 and 12. “In fact, I carefully didn’t. But I did feel the need to do justice to their memory. More than anything I felt my mother reading over my shoulder when I was writing this one. I felt a familial duty to deliver something my family would find beautiful. And they’re a tough crowd.”

"I felt a familial duty to deliver something my family would find beautiful."

Powered by crackling dialogue among his characters, Cleave’s novel is beautiful, though in a darkling sort of way. The story opens with teenage socialite Mary North fleeing her Swiss finishing school as soon as war is declared and signing on to be, she hopes, a British spy. Instead she’s assigned to be a teacher, replacing male instructors sent off to war. While her mother and her best friend, Hilda, think teaching is beneath her social station, Mary discovers she actually likes it. She develops a special bond with a black American child named Zachary Lee, whose father performs in a minstrel show, a popular form of entertainment in London at that time.

“I think 80 percent of London’s children were evacuated at the start of the war,” Cleave explains. “I was looking at all these evacuation photos, children getting onto trains in their duffel coats, looking very cute, and being taken to a place of safety in the countryside. Then I was looking at a lot of photos of street scenes of London in the 1930s, and there were a lot of black and mixed-race children in the East End. But the evacuation photos were almost universally of white kids. I became curious about where that was coming from.”

Readers of Cleave’s 2009 bestseller, Little Bee, know him to be a keen observer of political and social divides. Amid the devastating German Blitz, Mary falls for Tom Shaw, a middle-class school administrator, but she is also attracted to his more sophisticated apartment-mate, Alistair Heath, who enlists to fight in France, suffers from what we now call PTSD and later nearly starves to death during the siege of Malta. Mary’s dalliances put her at odds with her friend Hilda. As the novel progresses, Cleave’s portrayal of the ins and outs of these socially and psychologically complex relationships is gripping.

“I was very interested in competitive friendships. These are very young people—Hilda and Mary are 18 when the book starts—and they’re jostling for position. In a world of socialites, where the competition was all about who you were going to marry, I felt it might take a long time before their competition was transcended by the competition against the greater evil. By that, I don’t mean Germany. I mean that the enemy is the terror and the danger itself. I didn’t want to write a novel where my characters have great solidarity to begin with and then stoically face down the enemy threat. I wanted the threat to exacerbate the tensions that existed in the friendships and within the society they inhabit. I’m very interested in the fracture lines—between Hilda and Mary, between white and black, between high class and working class, between town and country. For me, the story lies in those tensions. I think there are two wars we have to win. One of them is against the enemy, yes, but the other one is against the tendency of our own society to divide, to polarize, to fracture.”

Cleave says the technical challenge in writing Everyone Brave Is Forgiven was getting the period details right. In his writing room, which he describes as “monastic,” he has a large aluminum suitcase to remind him that he needs to get out and do his research. “I have a rule for myself that I must physically visit the places I’m talking about. I sort of immerse myself in the worlds of the characters.” So he read novels by Evelyn Waugh, Dorothy L. Sayers and others that his characters would have been reading at the time. He listened to the music and radio shows his characters would have heard. “I tried to learn what they would have done on a Friday night in wartime.” He collected census data and bomb damage maps. He researched in libraries instead of on Google. And he lost 22 pounds eating London war rations from that period.

“It was quite dramatic and not that much fun. One of the things I noticed was how much our eating behavior has changed since then. The things that were rationed were sugar, lard, butter, margarine and bacon, which are things I don’t eat at all. The biggest thing I discovered was not how hungry I felt, but how I didn’t want to eat that stuff,” he wryly notes.

"Cleave’s characters, both at home and on the battlefield, confront not just privation but shocking and unexpected losses."

In those early, difficult days of World War II, Cleave’s characters, both at home and on the battlefield, confront not just privation but shocking and unexpected losses, something Cleave brilliantly conveys to his readers.

“It was one of those things where I just woke up in the middle of the night and worked it out. I had particular points in mind where the characters died. Then I went back and just arbitrarily killed them 25 pages earlier. It was brutal. I gave myself huge problems because they had died at very inconvenient moments. But that’s war—horrible, brutal, arbitrary. Death comes unexpectedly. I just cut them off midsentence. It was a real nightmare to fix the book.”

Despite the self-inflicted challenges of writing the novel, Cleave says writing historical fiction was liberating. 

“You have to raise your game. The penny dropped when I went to see the Royal Shakespeare Company perform. I’m a big fan. Given that Shakespeare can conjure these brilliant, bloodthirsty tragedies, I wondered why so many history plays, why so many Henrys, Edwards and Richards? And I realized that because he’s talking about this platform of our shared history, because we know the great currents behind the play and we know the ending, what we are curious about is character. So by writing historical fiction, he gets to go straight to the heart of character. That’s what I loved about it. . . . I discovered with historical fiction that I can go straight in there and open with strong dialogue and do the thing that I love most of all, which is character and dialogue and letting the development of the characters inform the progress of the novel.”

Writing about war, Cleave says, surprisingly freed him “from having to have bad guys. I’ve discovered—it took me years to work this out—that bad guys make for terrible dialogue. Something that was really good about writing a wartime book is that the enemy is evil itself. There’s no need to have a bad character in order to create the tension in the story. And that means that you have dialogue between people for whom dialogue is a realistic possibility.”

And the dialogue in Everyone Brave Is Forgiven is excellent—sharp and witty. “A novel for me is a fight to give the characters more space to talk in. I like to win space for my characters to talk in a way that advances their character rather than the plot. If I’m doing my job well as a storyteller, then I can keep the story going where it needs to go and still give my characters space to breathe and be themselves.”

Asked if writing this novel was different from writing his previous books, Cleave says, “For the first time I felt that writing the book was its own reward. I was really loving the process of writing it, and I was learning a lot about myself. I didn’t mind what happened as long as I was happy to show it to my mum.”

 

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

The biggest emotional challenge Chris Cleave faced in writing his scintillating fourth novel, Everyone Brave Is Forgiven, was the duty he felt to honor the memory of his grandparents.
Interview by

Anton DiSclafani follows up her bestselling debut, The Yonahlossee Riding Camp for Girlswith another morally complex and compelling historical novel. The After Party charts the ups and downs of a friendship between two women who are navigating society in the wealthy Houston community of River Oaks. Cece, married with children, has the typical life of a 20-something woman in the 1950s—and she can't help but worry about the less conventional choices made by her beautiful best friend, Joan. As Cece tries to protect her unpredictable friend, dark secrets surface. 

We asked DiSclafani, who now teaches Creative Writing at Auburn University, a few questions about her new book.

For your first novel, you had a personal connection to the North Carolina region in which it is set. What drew you to Houston in general, and the River Oaks community in particular?
​My entire extended family lived in Texas at one point (many of them still do), so I spent a lot of childhood vacations staring out the backseat of our rental car. We used to drive through River Oaks so my mother could admire the houses; after a while, I started to admire them, too.

Houston in the 1950s is a fiction writer’s dream. Anything went. People were spectacularly rich, but the societal rules that dictated other, older parts of the country didn’t exist there.

In the Author’s Note, you mention that you spent a good deal of time researching the Shamrock Hotel, one of the centerpieces to this novel where more than a few pivotal moments occur. Did you dig up any juicy tidbits about the hotel that you weren’t able to incorporate into the book?
Rumor has it that Frank Lloyd Wright took one look at the Shamrock and asked: “Why?”

One of the areas where The After Party particularly shines is in its candid depiction of the complexities of female friendship—the devotion, but also the resentments and viciousness that can crop up. Can you talk a bit about Joan and Cece’s relationship and the dynamics that you wanted to explore between them?
I wanted to explore what a friendship looks like in all its agony and glory. The extreme, instinctive closeness that characterizes a friendship between girls, first, and then how, in this case, that closeness continues through adolescence and into adulthood. People move around so much now, but until relatively recently it wasn’t unusual to die in the same place you were born in. So that kind of friendship interested me—a friendship that began in girlhood and continued into adulthood.

But what happens when one friend pulls away? When the friendship sours? Will the one friend survive without the other? That’s what The After Party is about—surviving friendship.

"That’s what The After Party is about—surviving friendship."

As a writer, what is the personal appeal to setting books in the past as opposed to the present? In your mind, does historical fiction offer any advantages over novels with contemporary settings?
There are all sorts of historical pressures a novelist can use to her advantage. It was a different world for women (for everyone, of course, but especially for those who weren’t white, wealthy men); I find that world fascinating to write about. Choices were very limited, and the limits built tension. In this case, what happens when a woman didn’t want to get married at 22 and have her first child at 23? That wouldn’t be a source of conflict if the book were set in present day. Everyone would understand.

The immediacy of the modern world is exhausting. You can’t remember a tiny piece of trivia at a dinner party, you look it up. You send a text to a friend and you expect a response immediately, and worry when you don’t get one. I like that the past isn’t so rushed. From a novelist’s perspective, there’s a lot more stewing, a lot more wondering about what someone else is thinking without receiving any sort of electronic signal.

In the 1950s, acceptable standards of behavior for women and what constituted a scandal were quite a bit more conservative than they are now. Without giving anything away, what was your thought process when it came to constructing a storyline that was faithful to the time but would still appeal to and (hopefully!) surprise and titillate modern readers?
We’ve grown up and moved forward, in some ways, but in other ways we’re still shocked by certain attitudes and behavior on the part of women. I think it’s easy for a modern reader to relate to the past’s codes of decorum. And, in a way, when you’re writing historical fiction you’re not writing about the past. You’re writing about the present, and you set in the past to emphasize certain things.

"[W]hen you’re writing historical fiction you’re not writing about the past. You’re writing about the present, and you set in the past to emphasize certain things."

Were there any specific lessons you learned when writing The Yonahlosee Riding Camp for Girls that you applied to your second novel?
It was a beast of a different order. Yonahlossee felt like it wrote itself (or perhaps I’m flirting with nostalgia). But I had just graduated from my MFA program when I started Yonahlossee. Nobody expected anything of me. This time around, of course, there was pressure. First I wrote a failed book (or 250 pages of one) that I had to set aside, and then start over. Now I see that the failed book was my way into The After Party (I took one of the less important characters, Cece, and made her the main character), but at the time my outlook wasn’t so rosy.

Once I found the story, I wrote the book quickly. And it didn’t require nearly as much revision as Yonahlossee. So I think the process of writing the first draft was more difficult because I was thinking harder. I was trying to layer the book in ways that would pay off a hundred, two hundred pages down the road.

In addition to a being a published author, you’re also an Assistant Professor in the English department at Auburn University and have taught creative writing courses as well. What’s your favorite class to teach and what do you love most about being in the classroom?
Perhaps unsurprisingly, I love teaching historical fiction! I love revealing to students how to choose a little patch of history and stake a story on it. And I love everything about being in the classroom. It doesn’t feel like work. There’s an energy there I haven’t found anywhere else.

You’re originally from Florida, but currently live in Alabama and spent good chunks of your formative years in North Carolina and Georgia. What do you love most about living in the American South and why do you think it makes such a rich place for exploration in literature?
I’ve just moved back to the Deep South after spending 10 years away, in the Midwest. My immediate answer is I love how nice everyone is here. There’s a friendliness in the South that makes it a really pleasant place to live. You don’t ever meet a stranger when you’re out and about. It’s also beautiful—people love their yards and homes. Why is it such a rich place for exploration in literature? I don’t know—it’s a good question that I’ve thought a lot about. We have such a history in the South, much of it fraught, and I think (I hope) that part of being a Southerner is constantly reexamining who you are in the world, where you come from: what the South was, what it is now, what it should become. There’s also a deep love for the past in the South. Antiques, cemeteries, homes. And the past—is there any greater territory for fiction?

The ladies in this novel spend a lot of time living it up and sipping on boozy beverages—from dirty gin martinis and Manhattans, to champagne and daiquiris. When you indulge in a tipple, what’s your preferred poison?
I actually wrote this book while I was pregnant, so it was kind of torture, writing about all of these boozy beverages and not being able to indulge. Now that I am not pregnant, I love a good gin martini, dry with olives.

What are you working on next?
A Southern gothic ghost story, set in the 1940s.

RELATED CONTENT: Read our review of The After Party.

 

Author photo by Nina Subin.

Anton DiSclafani follows up her bestselling debut, The Yonahlosee Riding Camp for Girlswith another morally complex and compelling historical novel. The After Party charts the ups and downs of a friendship between two women who are navigating society in the wealthy Houston community of River Oaks. Cece, married with children, has the typical life of a 20-something woman in the 1950s—and she can't help but worry about the less conventional choices made by her beautiful best friend, Joan. As Cece tries to protect her unpredictable friend, dark secrets surface. 

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