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Behind the Book by

The character Jane Chisolm in my new novel, Miss Jane, was inspired (an insufficient term I don’t really like) by my great-aunt, Mary Ellis “Jane” Clay, born in 1888 on a farm in east-central Mississippi. That is to say, there was the real person, my great-aunt, about whom we knew very little aside from her apparent (but secret, in terms of details) urogenital birth defect that left her incontinent and alone her entire life; and then there was, is, the character Jane Chisolm, about whom I’ve written, trying to imagine what it must have been like to live a life like that of my Aunt Jane. Jane Chisolm, the character in my novel, is born in 1915 and dies—well, that date is not certain. My Aunt Jane died in my nearby hometown of Meridian in 1975 at the age of 87.

I have only one personal memory of ever seeing Aunt Jane. When I was a boy, my mother’s extended family gathered every Sunday afternoon at my grandmother’s farmhouse in the country. One day, a car came up the red dirt road and parked beneath the oak tree near where we children stood. A man got out, went around to the passenger door, and helped out an old, thin, frail-looking woman dressed entirely in black, her long gaunt face obscured by a black lace veil pinned to the front of her little black hat. An uncle trotted over from the house to help, and the old woman was carefully conveyed across the yard to the house, the men’s hands gently gripping her bony elbows and resting against the small of her back. All we children had fallen silent and still as we watched the grave and strange processional.

One of my cousins whispered: “That’s Aunt Jane.”

“Who?” someone else said.

“Granddaddy Spurge’s sister,” another said.

Then we kept quiet, watching. We knew there was something remarkable about this old woman, this frail relic in black. Our parents would say, vaguely, when we asked, that “something was wrong” with Aunt Jane. Though what that might be we had no earthly idea at the time.

Years later, I was going through a box of old photographs and came across a black-and-white snapshot of a pretty girl wearing a dark dress and wide-brimmed hat, looking back over her shoulder at the photographer. Her expression and pose struck me as flirtatious. When I asked my mother who it was, she said it was Aunt Jane. Great-Aunt Jane.

I was surprised, and curious. This picture looked like it could have been taken by a boyfriend or lover.

My mother said that there were community dances back then, and Jane loved to go to them. She was quite popular with the boys.

“How did she manage that?” I said.

My mother didn’t know.

“But nothing ever came of it,” I said. “With a boy or man, I mean.”

“No.”

That’s when I became fascinated with my Aunt Jane and what her life must have been like. What her condition may have or could have been. How she managed it. How she managed being a person who found a way to enjoy the early, flirtatious part of courtship but no doubt had to back away from it at some point and become an “old maid.” Not only an old maid, but an old maid with what was, in that day, considered to be a shameful secret.

I never really stopped being curious about Jane. I never forgot the photograph. Never stopped being deeply curious about the story behind it.

No one knew exactly what was “wrong” with Jane. It wasn’t spoken of among people, even relatives, with any candor. Jane did not discuss it with anyone. My mother didn’t know. Distant relatives in Texas, children of her siblings, didn’t know. Her medical records had been disposed of or destroyed. The rest home where she’d lived out her last days was defunct and I couldn’t find anyone who’d worked there. All I had to go on was the fact that, in her last days, she’d told my mother’s older sister that she had only one opening for the elimination of waste. I had that, and the fact of her lifelong incontinence, and the fact that apparently she was relatively healthy, urogenital “deformity” aside. And nothing else, really.

Add to that the odd disappearance of the photograph that first fascinated me: It disappeared, and my mother could not recall ever having seen it. As if I’d invented it, made it up. I may as well have. Now I had an entire life to invent, make up, after all.

ALSO IN BOOKPAGE: Read our review of Miss Jane.

The character Jane Chisolm in my new novel, Miss Jane, was inspired (an insufficient term I don’t really like) by my great-aunt, Mary Ellis “Jane” Clay, born in 1888 on a farm in east-central Mississippi.
Behind the Book by

I joined a book club for the first time in the late 1980s in Park Slope, Brooklyn. Back then, Park Slope was still a new frontier of dilapidated brownstones and streets littered with empty crack vials. Book clubs, too, were a new frontier. I’d never even heard of such a thing the day I saw a sign for one at my local ATM. A book club? Where members read books? To an English major and a full-time writer, that sounded pretty dreamy. I called the number at the bottom of the sign, and a couple weeks later walked into the apartment of Pete and Karen May, a dermatologist and an opera singer who had just moved to the neighborhood and wanted to make friends who loved to read, like they did.

Pete wasn’t the only guy in our book club. There was also Doug, a young copywriter at Scholastic with a burning desire to read the classics. Maybe because none of us knew anything about how these things worked, it never occurred to me that males and book clubs aren’t always simpatico. Somehow—and our process is kind of fuzzy to me now—we took turns selecting books, among them a biography of Montgomery Clift, Doris Lessing’s Diary of a Good Neighbor and If Beale Street Could Talk by James Baldwin. Doug had us read Emile Zola; Pete chose John Cheever’s Falconer. It didn’t strike me then, nor does it now, that their selections were particularly male. In fact, our book club of eight, never even discussed gender.

Perhaps this is why, when I formed a fictional book club for my new novel, The Book That Matters Most, it didn’t occur to me to leave men out of it. True, in the almost 30 years since I walked into that book club in Park Slope, I have visited hundreds of book clubs around the country and I can count on three fingers how many times a man was in one of them. And that’s including the husband of the hostess who felt compelled to join in only as a matter of etiquette.

There are some all-male book clubs in which manly books like The Things They Carried or Nobody’s Fool are read. “We do not read so-called chick lit,” Andrew McCullough, a member of the eponymously named Man Book Club, has said. In fact, the club’s website states its criteria as: “No books by women about women (our cardinal rule).” An all-male book club that meets in a Boston bookstore not only chooses manly books to read, but offers single malt whisky and cigars during the discussion.

When I was writing The Book That Matters Most, I asked male friends of mine if they’d ever been in a book club. Most of them answered no, and those who had were in co-ed book clubs rather than gender-exclusive ones. But none of them lasted very long. They didn’t like the books or the discussion or the lack of discussion. And women I spoke to claimed that a male changed the mix too much. “Men have a way of taking over the conversation,” one told me.

Fiction writers have to make a lot of decisions for the sake of plot. I wanted my main character, Ava, to have a romance. And I wanted her to also make a new friend who was male to help her trust men again after her divorce. That meant my fictional book club had to have at least two males in it. In the novel, each member has to choose the book that matters most to them. Although in my personal experience men didn’t choose “manly” novels, my initial instinct was to have one of my male characters choose Atlas Shrugged, a book I admit having no affinity for but that seemed appropriate for a certain type of guy to select. However, the more I wrote, the less my character became that type of guy. Instead, he emerged as a tender man trying to overcome the loss of his wife. By the time his book was going to be discussed, I jettisoned Atlas Shrugged in favor of Slaughter-House Five, a novel that examines grief in an unusual way.

My other male character? Well, he was the love interest and so I gave him The Great Gatsby as the book that mattered most to him. What woman wouldn’t fall for a guy who liked a novel about a man who did everything for love? 

Ann Hood is the author of the bestselling novels The Knitting Circle and The Red Thread, among others. She has won two Pushcart Prizes and lives with her family in Providence, Rhode Island.

RELATED CONTENT: Read our review of The Book That Matters Most.

 

Author photo by Christina Sebastian.

Author Ann Hood opens up about her first brush with book clubs in a behind the book essay on her new novel, The Book That Matters Most.
Behind the Book by

Where do your ideas come from? It’s a rather boring, frequently asked question of writers. But what if a debut author actually tries to track down where their book first began to sprout? Sally Rooney attempts to find the original seed of Conversations with Friends.


I don’t remember how I came by the idea for my book. Digital evidence suggests it happened on October 27, 2014: the date I created a Pages file titled “Melissa,” a short story idea that would later develop into my debut novel, Conversations with Friends. The basic premise of the book has survived intact since that early draft: Two college students, Frances the narrator and Bobbi her ex-girlfriend, become entangled in the lives of a charismatic married couple, Melissa and Nick. Did something happen on October 27 to trigger the idea in my mind? Something I read, watched or noticed?

Without the aid of the internet, I would remember almost nothing specific about that month, never mind that day. This would probably unsettle me—this sense of having no record of my own life, of allowing my days and years to slip away from me forgotten—if it were not for the vast, permanent internet, acting as a kind of external hard drive to my own consciousness. A few quick searches through my Gmail account produce considerable amounts of information about October 27, 2014, and the days and weeks preceding it: the assigned reading on my Master’s program, the friends I was most frequently in touch with, reminders from my counseling service not to miss an appointment. A strange, disjointed portrait of someone I no longer fully recognize.

The only emails I received on the day in question were newsletters. One of them, from which I’ve since unsubscribed, consisted that day of the famous packing list from Joan Didion’s The White Album—a list of items Didion drew up and taped inside her closet door, allowing her to pack quickly for her frequent travel as a journalist. The list is iconically, almost exaggeratedly glamorous, including items like “bourbon” and “mohair throw” but neglecting, for example, clean underwear. Did some of this aesthetic performance, and my own ambivalent response to it, sneak its way into the opening pages of Conversations with Friends, in which Frances coldly notices Melissa’s “hairbrush” and “open tube of lipstick” in the hallway of her home?

More strangely, I discover an email sent to the editor of Stonecutter, a magazine in New York, on October 25—two days before I began work on the novel. In it, I discuss the idea of writing a critical essay about monogamy. Though I couldn’t have known it at the time, I was about to begin writing a book in which the exploration of monogamy plays a significant role. Do I remember writing that email? Sure, kind of—but I could have sworn, and would have, that I had written it much later, when the book was already well underway, or even finished.

To discover that the thematic concerns of the novel were on my mind before I started writing it—that I even considered writing a critical essay on the same subject instead—is genuinely weird for me. I believed, and have even stated in interviews, that those concerns developed organically from the characters. That made sense to me as an account of my book’s development, and even my own development as a writer: Characters and situations come first, intellectual concerns much later. Now, thanks to the search functionality of my email account, I’m forced to admit I may not really understand much about my writing process at all.

 

Author photo credit Jonny L Davies.

Where do your ideas come from? It’s a rather boring, frequently asked question of writers. But what if a debut author actually tries to track down where their book first began to sprout? Sally Rooney attempts to find the original seed of Conversations with Friends.

Behind the Book by

I started writing when I was in college. I had plans to become a doctor, which obviously made my parents very happy. My mother was born in South Africa, and my father’s mother was from Trinidad, and he grew up in the heavily West Indian neighborhood of Jamaica, Queens. Both were strict disciplinarians. Both had nice families but modest childhoods and, like so many immigrant families in this country, believed in hard work and sacrifice as much as they did in God.

They were devastated when, in my second year of college, I realized that no matter how proud medicine made my parents, studying it made me profoundly unhappy. So I signed up for a creative writing class on a whim and began my journey as a writer.

There was never much of a question that I would write about my mother. She was a larger-than-life figure, at turns aggressive, funny and generous. Strong-willed and acid-tongued, she spoke her mind as a matter of principle, and even though she had a tendency to offend, she was incredibly well liked. Her brash, contradictory personality was the source of constant wonder for me as a child. Our fights were legendary, ranging in topic from the mundane to the serious. I didn’t have to do much inventing when I wrote the mother character in my novel. With my own mother as inspiration, the character wrote itself. Nevertheless, What We Lose is a novel of ideas, primarily about how larger forces like race, nationality and gender shape our lives consciously and unconsciously.

However, my mother’s influence and likeness appeared often in my early work. For example, my hair was a constant flashpoint of tension in our relationship. I grew up in the ’90s, and the natural hair renaissance that would take place around the mid-2000s was still a long way off. It was still the norm for black women to straighten their hair with harsh chemicals or scalding-hot irons, both of which usually left your scalp covered in burns, not to mention the permanent damage done to the hair itself. As a tomboy and an A-student, I could see little use for perfectly coiffed hair and would avoid my mother’s straightening sessions and hair appointments like the plague. Of course, this only made her angrier.

Stories about hair have made their way into several of my short stories and my novel. I use these episodes as a way of discussing intergenerational conflict—how race impacts our conceptions of beauty, colorism and gender. Similar arguments arose around my clothes, grades and career choices. They mostly had the same result: My mother would double down on her objections, and I would become increasingly alienated from both her and the rest of my family. My father, an immensely agreeable man, was forced to play mediator during holidays when I would visit home. These visits would always be marked by at least one fight that, if we were lucky, wouldn’t balloon beyond my visit. But often, it did.

Our relationship eased, as tends to happen, when my mother became gravely ill. About six months before she died at 55, mere days after I finished my MFA program at Columbia University, I moved back into my parents’ Philadelphia house to help care for her. This decision in itself was shaped by the gender norms inherent in both Caribbean and South African culture. It is the daughter’s job to take care of the parents. Even though I volunteered, my brother stayed in New Mexico, where he had relocated for work. I missed my brother and felt incredibly alone, and I resented my parents for not placing the same responsibilities on him that they did on me. These gendered cultural expectations—as well as the experience of living in hospitals, caring for her nearly around the clock, my sadness at her impending death—all later became part of What We Lose.

I wrote most of What We Lose after my mother’s death, and in so doing, I was finally able to gain a higher understanding of who she was. By delving into her history, both in her home country of South Africa and in the U.S., I began to realize that much of her behavior in my childhood had sprung out of fear: fear that she wouldn’t be able to succeed in a new country, fear that her children wouldn’t make it. Fear of what harm might befall me as a young, rebellious black woman, and the ever-present fear of raising black children in the United States.

In addition to providing some closure, the stories of our conflicts illustrated how systemic issues play out in our everyday lives. Our fights about my hair were also about the expectations placed on young black women, and how the failure to live up to those expectations would reflect on my mother. My appearance, my friends and my career were all constantly judged by our mostly white community. Growing up and leaving my hometown would only provide bigger dangers, when these choices could impact my ability to find a job, a family and in certain cases (usually involving law enforcement) whether I lived or died. By investigating my relationship with my mother—the years we spent at odds and our short armistice at the end of her life—I ultimately realized how these larger forces shaped my life as well, and how deeply I’d internalized them. To me, this is the most important part of What We Lose, the point from which all of the book’s relationships and drama emanates. The same was always true of my life, long before I even recognized it.

 

Zinzi Clemmons is the co-founder of Apogee Journal and a contributing editor to Literary Hub. She lives in Los Angeles with her husband, where she teaches at The Colburn Conservatory and Occidental College. What We Lose, her debut novel, is a poignant exploration of womanhood and identity.

Author photo credit Nina Subin.

This article was originally published in the August 2017 issue of BookPage. Download the entire issue for the Kindle or Nook.

Zinzi Clemmons explores how her own relationship with her mother inspired her superb debut novel, What We Lose.

Behind the Book by

As crushing as it is beautiful, Shobha Rao’s debut novel follows two Indian girls through the most hopeless of circumstances, but their enduring friendship burns brightly—endlessly—through it all. Girls Burn Brighter is a light that will not go out. Here, Rao shares a look behind her book.


In November of 1999, two young Indian girls were found unconscious from carbon monoxide poisoning in an apartment building in Berkeley, California. One of the girls, who was 13 years old, died from the poisoning; the other survived. The building was owned by Lakireddy Bali Reddy. And as it turned out, so were the girls. Over the course of the investigation into the girl’s death, it was found that Reddy had trafficked the two girls, along with an alleged 99 other women and girls, into the United States over the course of a 13-year period. The girl who died, Sitha V., had served as a sexual and domestic slave to Reddy. These findings eventually led to the conviction of Reddy, one of the wealthiest and most powerful landlords in Berkeley, to eight years in prison.

Many years later, I found myself working at a South Asian domestic violence agency in nearby San Jose, whereupon I came into contact with one of the victims. She never told me her story, as all documentation related to the case was sealed, but meeting her—witnessing her warmth, her laughter—made me think more deeply about the case.

In this thinking, the first question that came to me was: How much did Reddy pay for Sitha?

The second question was: How much was she worth?

The answer to the first question was simple. I didn’t know it, but it was most certainly simple. At some point, in a small village in South India, Reddy had approached the destitute parents of a young girl. He had handed them money: a set amount of money, decided upon, bargained, negotiated by the powerless parents of a powerless girl. The exact amount he paid for her may be unknown, but it is not a mystery, it is currency: Somebody paid it, somebody accepted it, and a girl was bought.

It happens every day.

The second question though. The second question is what haunted me: How much is a girl worth?

It is this question that I set out to explore in Girls Burn Brighter. In some ways, the writing of the novel, the exploration of what a girl is worth is as straightforward as taking a knife to a frog on a dissecting table. There is a body. You can cut up the body, carve away the limbs; you can make a slit, take out the organs, put them back in. That is a body. It is, for instance, generally worth less without all the limbs intact, without all the organs in place. It is worth less if there’s a slit. Or if there’s a scar. Or if it is too fat. Too thin. Too short. Too tall. Or if the skin is too dark. It is worth less if the frog isn’t the exact shade of green that is preferred by the men of the country it is born into, and the culture and proclivities and notions of beauty that dictate its mores. The frog is worth less if it questions a single one of these mores.

In other ways though, writing the novel was nothing like looking at a frog on a dissecting table. It was instead like looking at a frog in a stream. The same frog, let’s say, but now sunning itself on a rock. The light glinting off the silk of its skin. Its eyes deepened by the memory of that first step onto land, feeling in that step the density of the waiting shore, its unending promise. But this frog on the rock is a girl frog, and so that promise is sometimes meager and offers hardly anything. It is sometimes false and feeds her with lies. It sometimes says to her, you are on a rock, dreaming, but you might as well be on a dissecting table, dead.

And so, then came the true question. What am I worth? What are you worth? Your body, your memories, the depth of your eyes, the fall of your foot, what you give to the world, what you take. What do they add up to?

It’s easy to blurt out a number: a million trillion dollars! A number that has no meaning. A number that is not a true reflection of anything but our fragile egos. A number that we hope and want to believe is maybe not even a number. But whatever it is, whether it is coins of gold or coins of light, we know, in the depth of our hearts, that our number is most certainly larger than Sitha V.’s number.

Is it cruel to admit this? Or is it cruel to not admit this?

And really, why admit anything at all? Why talk about the body of a girl? Now long dead. And why ask what she was worth? Why ask ourselves what we are worth? For surely, you and I will never be for sale. We will never be so poor as to be forced to sell our daughters. We will not lay awake, wondering if there is another way, aching to find it. We will not drop to our knees and clasp her in our arms, wordless, silenced by poverty, by inequity, by the ruthlessness of birth and chance. We will not (no, never) live in a place so horrible and unenlightened and remote as Berkeley, California. We will not let it happen in our midst, nor under our noses.

So why worry about a thing that is not our concern? That is not relevant to us. That is not worth our time.

I was talking once to a friend about overpopulation. I was having a pragmatic conversation about food distribution, water scarcity, land resources. But he was having none of it. He looked right at me, his eyes afire, and he said, “Saying there are too many people in the world is like saying there are too many stars in the sky.”

Too many stars in the sky. How romantic.

See. See how one of them is felled. A 13-year-old girl—born into poverty in India, sold by her poor parents to a rich man, trafficked to the United States, fettered into forced labor and raped repeatedly, before dying alone on a dirty floor. She was born and she was bought and then she died.

And like all stars, she hung for a time in the sky. She burned.


ALSO IN BOOKPAGE: Read our review of Girls Burn Brighter.

Photo credit Carlos Avila Gonzalez

As crushing as it is beautiful, Shobha Rao’s debut novel follows two Indian girls through the most hopeless of circumstances, but their enduring friendship burns brightly—endlessly—through it all. Girls Burn Brighter is a light that will not go out. Here, Rao shares a look behind her book.

Behind the Book by

Like a 17-year cicada, my novel, Bearskin, spent a long time underground before emerging. I was in my early 30s and just starting at a graduate writing program when I heard about people finding mutilated bear carcasses in the Virginia mountains where I grew up. Poachers were killing black bears out of season and cutting off their paws and gallbladders for sale on the black market. The big money was in exporting the bear parts to East and Southeast Asia, where the native bear species had been hunted to rarity. Back then, the profit margins approached those in the narcotics trade, and organized crime outfits were moving into the bear parts market. All of this struck me as a compelling backdrop for a story, and I decided I would write about a guy who has to confront bear poachers on his property.

Most of the original story depended only on my own memory of the forest where I’d spent a lot of my childhood, but there was still a bit of interesting legwork to be done. I interviewed an undercover game warden who was infiltrating a bear poaching ring. I researched the worldwide black market in wildlife (at the time, it was just behind trafficking of drugs and weapons in terms of total annual dollar value). I learned bear paws are a delicacy in certain cultures, a prized and prestigious dish—the front paws are supposedly more tender than the back paws, but all four get eaten. And bear bile, used for thousands of years in traditional Chinese medicine, contains ursodeoxycholic acid, which helps bears avoid losing muscle when they’re dormant during the winter. The acid has real therapeutic effects in humans—so much so that it was synthesized from cow bile in the 1950s, and you can buy FDA-approved, bear-free medicine with brand names like Actigall, Ursodiol and Urso Forte (“strong bear”).


Read our review of Bearskin.


I finished Bearskin 1.0 while I was in the writing program, but it wasn’t what I’d hoped, and after another year or so of revisions I set it aside. Most of a decade passed while I worked on another novel, stories, essays. My wife and I moved west; I helped start a small business. When a good friend who’d read the first Bearskin suggested I go back to the book and try again, I spent a few weeks stripping it to the essentials, inventing new characters and rewriting the first few chapters. This exercise led to a published novella, agent inquiries and . . . several more years of work extending the novella into a novel.

Writing the second version of Bearskin involved far more research than the first (note: as a cicada nymph nears maturity, it burrows deeper into the soil, searching for larger tree roots to feed on). My new main character was a completely different person, much more interesting and dangerous than the original protagonist. He has a violent history in the cross-border drug trade in southern Arizona, so I spent a lot of time looking into the Mexican cartels and the ways drugs are smuggled north—and how cash and other easy-to-carry valuables are smuggled south. I had an excuse to visit Tucson and explore the Arizona-Mexico border. I learned about local law enforcement, gunfighting and how to disappear and start a new life with a new identity. I had nearly finished the book when it occurred to me that I should update my research on bear poaching.

What I found out was complicated, and it required some tweaks to my plot. While bears in Asia are still under tremendous pressure from poachers, bear poaching for gallbladders and paws has fallen off in the U.S., and the American black bear population in most areas has increased dramatically. The law enforcement efforts I’d witnessed in the late ’90s presumably had an effect, and responsible bear hunters have pushed for more sophisticated management of the species by state agencies. Wildlife and animal rights groups reported some success, at least in the U.S., with convincing traditional medicine practitioners to substitute herbal ingredients for bear bile. And a more troubling development was the growth of “bear farms” in parts of Asia, horribly inhumane institutions that have become a significant source of bear bile in Asian markets.

Given those findings, I had to make some quick revisions to plausibly account for a resurgence of bear poaching in the Virginia mountains circa 2011. And those plot changes in turn opened up an entirely new criminal dimension for my book, and another series of interesting rabbit holes for me to dive into. But the process was dragging on by then, and I finally managed to quit the research and finish the book so it could crawl up out of the earth like one of those cicadas, molt and start making noise.

Photo credit Nancy Assaf McLaughlin

James A. McLaughlin explores the brutal and beautiful Appalachian terrain with his debut novel, Bearskin, a tale of bear poaching and one man on the run.

Behind the Book by

I first started writing Severance around the time I realized I was going to lose my job, although I did not know that I was working on a novel. The company I worked for was downsizing and consolidating their West Coast and Midwest offices. As a result, many employees in the Midwest office would be let go, some who had been there their entire careers, spanning several decades.

Most colleagues felt like they had been screwed over by management. As we came to the office day in and day out, the low morale in the work environment was palpable.

I needed to figure out what I was going to do, but instead of applying to other jobs and taking interviews, all it seemed that I could do was write stories. In those final weeks of my job, I wrote more fiction than I had in years. Since some of our tasks were drying up, I would write those stories at the office. Taking a break during lunch hour, I would walk around through downtown, drinking iced coffee and eating pastries. Buoyed by sugar and caffeine, plot ideas and character details would come to me. All around me, people went about their days, using their lunch breaks to window shop, to take dentist appointments, to go to the gym.

One of the pieces I worked on was an apocalyptic short story. Writing anything apocalyptic just seemed fun—the destructive glee of toppling office buildings, of disrupting everyone’s routines, of crushing clamshell containers of sad desk salads. My target was all of these things and none of these things. My target was the larger system, the capitalist power structures that enabled all of this. The authorial power that a writer gets to wield is irresistible, especially to someone (like me) who does not have a lot of power.

Originally, the story was written in the first-person plural—one collective voice that embodied all of these disgruntled employees. But one voice kept breaking out from the rest of the pack, and that was the voice of Candace Chen, who eventually became the protagonist of Severance. I knew her job right away. She worked in New York, as a production coordinator for the manufacturing of Bibles, which was all taking place in China and other Asian countries. It became clear that the apocalyptic story was really a meditation on work, of its routines and its conciliatory satisfactions in the age of globalism.

When I first interviewed at the company, a VP had perceptively mentioned to me, “I think you’re qualified for this position, but you’re going to get bored in two years.” He said he would recommend me for the job, but that I might reconsider my options after two years. Around the time of the corporate downsizing, I had been working at the same job going on three years. I wondered, what kept me working there? This is a question that many of my friends also asked of themselves, about why they still stuck at their jobs. I think writing the novel was also a way of trying to answer that question.

“The feeling was one of liberation, and maybe that feeling comes during apocalyptic, chaotic times.”

As I wrote, I found inspiration by reading the works of Kafka, everything from his short stories to his journals, in which he complained about how a job disrupted his writing. Kazuo Ishiguro’s The Remains of the Day, about an English butler, always seemed like the ultimate office novel to me. The TV shows I watched were at heart narratives about work: “The Sopranos,” “The X-Files” and “Mad Men.” I’ve always maintained that I learned how to plot by watching eight seasons of “Mad Men,” the way that the storylines were organized more by thematic layering than a string of causal events. I didn’t write the novel in any particular order, simply jumping to whichever scene felt the most urgent at the time, and organizing the novel around those guideposts.

Severance
Read our starred review of Severance.

As for my job, the closer the end date neared, the emptier the office became. Some employees found new positions at other companies and left, while others made the move to another branch office. All the rules flew out the window. Going to work was a surreal experience. I have this memory, set during those final days, of coming into the office at nine in the morning and being handed a plastic flute of champagne and a donut. There was no one watching us. The feeling was despair, but also one of giddiness. The feeling was one of liberation, and maybe that feeling comes during apocalyptic, chaotic times.

After my last day at the company, I took my severance and got on unemployment. I called it my arts fellowship. I continued working on the novel. However, in order to secure more funding, I ended up applying to MFA programs and was accepted by Cornell University. I moved to the remote town of Ithaca, New York, and spent the next four years steadily working on Severance. During the summers, I established a writing routine that was very similar to my office routine: I would begin writing at nine in the morning, take a long lunch break and then resume writing until six in the evening. It serves me still.

 

This article was originally published in the August 2018 issue of BookPage. Download the entire issue for the Kindle or Nook.

Ling Ma shares a closer look at the creation of her debut novel, an end-of-the-world tale that transforms the mundane into a creeping horror. It’s the story of a millennial daughter of Chinese immigrants who watches as nearly everyone around her falls prey to a spreading fever that leaves its victims in a zombielike state, repeating the day-to-day tasks of their former lives.
Behind the Book by

Debut novelist Lauren Wilkinson’s American Spy is the best kind of spy thriller, centering on a richly drawn lead character and drawing from a complicated history. Wilkinson shares a look behind the creation of her spy, Marie Mitchell, and the true story of Marie’s real-life mark.


American Spy got its start as an assignment in graduate school—a boring origin story, I realize. My professor instructed the class to write a story that subverted common clichés about life in the American suburbs. Given that prompt, an image immediately popped into my mind: It was of a woman who seems to be a “normal” suburban mother, until an attempt on her life reveals that there is more to her story. I didn’t set out to make this woman a spy, or to write a spy novel. It’s more accurate to say that I stumbled toward that backstory because it was an interesting answer to the question of who it might be that wanted her dead.

But once I understood that I was writing a spy novel, I realized that I’d have to read as many as I could. My favorites were The Spy Who Came in from the Cold by John le Carré and The Quiet American by Graham Greene because of their cynical representations of intelligence work. I felt that Marie Mitchell, my main character, who is a black woman as well as an American spy, would have a lot of good reasons to articulate similar cynicism about serving a country that isn’t particularly invested in serving her as a citizen.

My novel also revolves around a fictionalized account of a real historical figure: Thomas Sankara, who was a Marxist revolutionary leader of Burkina Faso during the 1980s. My precise reason for including him is obscure even to me—the only thing I can say for certain is that I found it surprising that so charismatic a figure, and one with such a compelling life story, is not better known outside the country of his birth. I hoped to change that.

When I went to Burkina in 2013, it was because I felt it was a moral imperative to visit the country if I was going to be writing about its most celebrated former leader. Mostly, I enjoyed my time there, scooting around the capital city on a rented moped and talking to as many people as I could in my embarrassing French. The one fly in the ointment was that I got terribly sick with a stomach flu—this, like several other experiences, eventually made its way into my novel. I did a lot of that while writing: trying to ground the elaborate inventions that overrun my book with mundane, true experiences. I did it in hope of creating the illusion of realism.

I sold a version of my novel at the end of 2014 and spent the next several years rewriting it. During that time I produced a half-dozen versions of the same story. This felt like a wildly inefficient approach—it still does—but now I think that inefficiency is an inescapable part of creating a narrative. In my experience, you have to find the story you want to tell and the only way you can do so is by writing toward it. Put another way, it felt like I’d been following a stranger around with a video camera for most of her life, and then had to go over the film to look for the moments that would let me tell the story that I wanted to about her. So I know Marie very well because I know the things that have happened to her for which there was no space in the book. Because of that she seems real to me, real enough to illicit feeling: sympathy for her, anger at her. I even find her funny. This is all very bizarre for me, because I also know better than anyone that Marie isn’t real.

After I sold my book, I wrote almost every day (or at least sat at my desk, staring at my computer) for 12 hours a day. It was a big story, and approaching my telling of it with intense discipline was the only reliable method that I knew. Now I feel like I wrote too hard for too long. These days, I tell myself that I won’t write a book that way again because if I couldn’t assure myself of that I would likely never write another novel.

The act of working on American Spy—not the finished product—defined my life for four years. And now the book is done and on the verge of being out in the world. It’s been tricky for me to recalibrate, to find a new way to define myself. But I will though, eventually. I have no other choice.

 

ALSO IN BOOKPAGE: Read our review of American Spy.

Author photo by Niqui Carter

Debut novelist Lauren Wilkinson’s American Spy is the best kind of spy thriller, centering on a richly drawn lead character and drawing from a complicated history. Wilkinson shares a look behind the creation of her spy, Marie Mitchell, and the true story of Marie’s real-life mark.

Behind the Book by

Debut novelist Sarah Blake offers a new heroine of biblical proportions: Naamah, wife of Noah, who finds hope amid an interminable sea.


I have been writing poetry since I was 10 years old, and I never thought I would write anything else. Poems are perfect. They’re stimulating little machines of power and grace. They can take different forms, registers and presences. They can be read aloud or in your head, and that changes how you experience them. You can ask anything of a poem—to be short or epically long, to have one voice or multiple, to be quiet and subtle or brash and bold, to quote sources or to forget the real world, or to be a mix of it all. If someone makes you think poetry is a small wedge of the written word, they’re wrong.

After my son was born, my relationship to poetry changed. For a year, I could hardly read or write. And as I began to read again, after that year, reading felt strange. I felt removed from it. An observer. And what I observed was that every poem, whether it was lyric, narrative, language or experimental, was engaging my brain in the same way, hitting it in the same spot. I had never noticed it before, and in trying to figure it out, I started writing very long narrative poems that were attempting to develop a different kind of relationship between reader and character. I’d never written anything longer than five pages, and suddenly 60-page epics were pouring out of me while my son was in childcare at the YMCA.

Soon I wasn’t writing poems anymore. I was writing screenplays. I was flooded by dialogue. It was the only way I wanted to tell stories. My brain was working something out, and I wasn’t sure what it was. And then my friend, who’s a director, asked me to write her a screenplay for a short film, about anything I wanted. And I immediately thought of Naamah, the wife of Noah, stuck on the ark. I imagined her taking up swimming, swimming in floodwaters filled with the dead. I sent the screenplay to my friend, and we chatted about it, envisioning it set on a stage with strange props and big fans and everyone naked. I loved it in that moment, and when the moment passed, I didn’t think about it again.

But after the 2016 election, I experienced a kind of hopelessness I didn’t know how to confront. Art seemed dwarfed. I didn’t want it to feel that way, but it did. When I wrote poems, they came out didactic, and I couldn’t stand them. And the dialogue stopped coming to me. Everything stopped. I started planning ways to volunteer in my community and ways to flee the country, all in the same few days. It felt like living a dual life: one of determination, to help stop the erosion of rights in our country, and one to prepare myself to get out.

And all of this led me back to Naamah. I thought of her stuck on that ark for over a year, with no communication with God, with everyone she knew dead, with all those animals needing her. That was hopeless. That was miserable. It was clear that she was someone I needed to spend time with: the woman who’d faced it all and held it together. 

The setting of the ark unlocked something in me. All the senses at work there. All the animals to learn about. The large family in their faith. The real and surreal already blurring at the story’s outset. There was the scale of the ark itself to try to understand. I drew pictures of it, what it might look like on the water. I returned to the book of Genesis, reading the passages over and over again. Next to my document window, I kept open a timeline of the ark, from the coming of the rains to the release of the birds. One part of me always rooted in the story as it has been told for millennia.

As I wrote Naamah’s story, I worried that I wasn’t writing a novel. I thought, Maybe I’m just figuring out more ways that narrative works. I will look up, and the story will have ended, but it will have been for me alone, not for Naamah. It was a difficult feeling to navigate: Was the story mine or Naamah’s? If it were solely mine, it would sit happily in a drawer. If it were Naamah’s, the world might yearn to know it as I had yearned to know it. 

When Naamah became entwined with an underwater village of dead children and the angel who’d created the village, I had to know what she would do, who she would choose to stay with—the angel or Noah. Every day I sat in my house and wrote about the animals, the family, the dangers and isolation, the ways to escape. Everything needed to be considered; the choices had to be made. Mine or not, the story could not continue without me returning to the page. I owed it to Naamah to continue. And the book became hers, through and through. 

Sarah Blake has previously authored two poetry collections, Mr. West and Let’s Not Live on Earth. In Blake’s debut novel, Naamah provides guidance and stability to both humans and animals aboard Noah’s ark, but she also seeks solace in the mysteries underwater, where a seductive angel watches over a flooded world.

 

ALSO IN BOOKPAGE: Read our review of Naamah.

Debut novelist Sarah Blake offers a new heroine of biblical proportions: Naamah, wife of Noah, who finds hope amid an interminable sea.

Behind the Book by

For the heartbroken and heart-hungry, there’s no better book than The Regrets, Amy Bonnaffons’ debut novel of haunted love. Here, the author writes about the inspiration for this compelling story.


When I was in my 20s, living alone in New York, I spent a lot of time reading my own tarot cards. I used the Rider-Waite deck. Here are some cards I got a lot:

 

If you understand tarot, you might be able to guess that my romantic life wasn’t exactly calm and stable. I’d develop deep mutual infatuations with love-objects who were inaccessible in one way or another—because they lived across the country, because they were already in another relationship, because they were battling extreme trauma or mental illness—and it would be great for a while, for the time when there was enough distance between me and the person for our mutual fantasies to thrive, for a gauzy web of dreams to spin between us. Then, one of two things would happen. The distance between us would stretch too thin, and the gauzy threads would unravel, and we’d drift apart. Or we’d come too close to each other, bump up against the hard reality of the other person and turn away in disappointment. Each time, I found myself grieving as though a marriage had died.

I read my own tarot to try and find a way through this murky emotional territory. Over and over, it told me the same thing: Fantasy (the seven of cups) combined with imprecise or inscrutable intuition (the moon) would lead to heartbreak (the three of swords). But I always had the ability to walk away, to cut my losses and venture into new territory (the five and eight of cups).

At least, that’s how I see it now. But at the time, full of fantasy and fear, I’d pull these cards and just hear one message: doom, doom, doom. All I could see was an endless cycle of heartbreak and loss. Eventually I stopped doing readings for myself—which was a good thing, because I’d grown too dependent on the idea that they carried some kind of outside wisdom. What I needed was to learn directly from my own experience.

During this time, I started writing The Regrets. The story is about a young woman named Rachel who lives a rich interior life suffused with books and daydreams while finding actual real-life romance consistently underwhelming. At the beginning of the novel, Rachel meets a handsome man named Thomas with whom she shares an exciting, electric connection. The only problem is that he happens to be a ghost. Rachel, dreamer and storyteller that she is, bravely tries to make it work anyway. As you can imagine, complications ensue.

As I wrote the book, I articulated to myself what love felt like for me. Rachel says, “There is a danger to daydreaming. It’s not that the daydream bears too little relationship to reality. It’s the opposite: the daydream can create reality. It can become so powerful that it transforms the face of the world, then encounters its own image and falls in love with itself.  This is not what psychologists call ‘projection.’ It is not a delusion of the brain. It is real as rocks, as teeth, as nerve endings. I have fallen in love with my own daydreams and then they have gone out into the world and returned to me embodied as men.” 

I also articulated to myself what it felt like to love someone who was only partly “there”—and then be haunted by a love that hadn’t worked out. In this case, since the lover is a ghost, both the partial there-ness and the haunting are literal.

I can say, without giving anything away, that Rachel finds herself in a different place at the end from where she started. The same happened to me, partly through the writing of the book. I learned to face some hard facts about what I was (unconsciously) refusing and what I was (unconsciously) choosing. This allowed me to choose something different.

By the time I turned in the final draft of the book, I’d moved from New York to Georgia (no offense to New York, which I’ll always love fiercely, but this was the best decision I ever made) and was living with the man I’m now planning to marry. This man is similar in some ways to the lovers of my 20s. Like several of them, he’s a Leo who plays in a band; like many of them, he is goofy and sweet. But he is wildly different, too, in ways that are absolutely crucial. He’s open, honest, willing to be vulnerable, unwilling to be scared away (by conflict, by moments of boredom, by hard truth). In other words, as they say, “available.” And he is interested in seeing me accurately as the complex person I am, not as a screen for his fantasies.

But this isn’t a fairy tale about finding the right man (the book isn’t, and neither is my life). I love my partner, and I’m deeply grateful for him. It seems like a miracle that he’s still here. But being with him is a choice I made, one that came out of a deep clarity about what I actually needed, not about what I fantasized about needing. It’s hard-won clarity, the kind that can only be wrung out of previous heartbreak, tender solitude and the long, slow process of becoming a friend and ally to oneself. It looks like this (the two of cups—the meeting of lovers): 

But really, it feels like this, the freedom to be oneself at home in the world, not because someone loves you but because you know yourself:

And none of it could have happened without this, the introspection of the hermit:

Or the fool—the willingness to jump in and make mistakes:

 

Tarot isn’t linear; we become the fool again and again. As I approach marriage, which both excites and terrifies me—after all, it’s not the end of the story but a different kind of beginning, with its own joys and hard-earned rewards and steep risks—I feel again like the fool, like someone leaping into something she has absolutely no idea about. But that’s what it means to participate in life. And now I feel like I’m actually participating. That—not marriage or partnership itself—is the real reward of this journey.

I couldn’t have gotten here without writing the book. I have such affection for the characters, whom I think of as teachers, and for the book itself—the companion and guide of a transformative time in my life. But it feels like a different person wrote it. My hope is that it goes out into the world and finds its way into the hands of people wrestling with similar vulnerabilities. If this is you, here is what I would say to you, something I often repeat in different forms to myself: We, like Thomas, may live our lives trying not to incur regrets—but we are always incurring experience. If we surrender to the lessons of our experience, there is ultimately nothing to regret.

 

Author photo by Brittainy Lauback

For the heartbroken and heart-hungry, there’s no better book than Amy Bonnaffons’ debut novel of haunted love. Here, the author writes about the inspiration for this compelling story.
Review by

At some point while reading James Han Mattson’s novel Reprieve, you’ll think, “This can’t be real. This better not be real.” On its surface, Reprieve is about four ordinary people who venture into a haunted house for the chance of a monetary reward. You could say it’s a story adjacent to The Haunting of Hill House, but even more disturbing. 

Quigley House in Lincoln, Nebraska, is a full-contact escape room, in which staff are allowed to physically engage with contestants. A group of participants enters and passes through several “cells” in the old mansion, collecting a number of envelopes in the allotted time and then moving to the next cell. If things get too intense, a member of the group can shout, “Reprieve!” at which point the game and its torment ends, though no one wins the prize money. It’s all perfectly safe, according to John, the man who runs the haunted house.


ALSO IN BOOKPAGE: Leave the lights on! We picked seven books for Halloween reading, rated from slightly spooky to totally terrifying.


Unlike Hill House, Quigley House is not a nefarious entity, but something or someone within it is. Is it John, or perhaps one of the actors hired to play ghouls and freaks? Maybe it’s the folks responsible for the house’s ghastly special effects, if they are indeed special effects. Or is it someone among the latest group of thrill-seekers who have taken on the challenge of this grisly obstacle course?

Local college student Bryan is the leader of this group of contestants. Jaidee, his roommate, is an entitled Thai student who developed a crush on his English teacher, Victor, and followed him all the way to Nebraska. Victor and his fiancée, Jane, round out the foursome. We also meet Kendra, Bryan’s cousin and an avid fan of horror, who works for John. And though he’s not a member of the group, we also learn about Leonard, whose first action toward the woman he’s attracted to is to mow her down (accidentally or on purpose?) with a shopping cart. 

There are many ways to look at a book with so many flavors of madness. It could be a study of the effects of thwarted desire on people who are basically incapable of empathy, which we see in Jaidee and Leonard. John goes out of his way to befriend Kendra, to get her to enlist Bryan to endure a whole lot of trauma for a chance to win what, in the end, isn’t a whole lot of money. After all, there aren’t that many African Americans in Lincoln, and Quigley House needs the press that would follow Brian’s win.

As the book’s horrifying events unfold, Reprieve can be read as a commentary on, or even an allegory of, American racism. Are we fighting to succeed in a fun house whose rewards aren’t worth the pain? As a study of systems of power at their most perverse, Reprieve is a horror story, certainly, but it’s not as scary as it is deeply disturbing.

At some point while reading James Han Mattson’s harrowing novel, you’ll think, “This can’t be real. This better not be real.”
Review by

“Part of our friendship, of any relationship really, is the tacit agreement to allow a generous latitude for flaws and grievances.” These are the words of Riley Wilson, speaking about her lifelong bond with her best friend, Jenny Murphy. But while this agreement has worked for them in the past, it won’t anymore. 

In We Are Not Like Them, written by co-authors Christine Pride and Jo Piazza, we meet Riley and Jenny as their friendship is tested as never before: Riley is a Black journalist covering the recent murder of a Black teenage boy by a white police officer, who turns out to be Jenny’s husband, Kevin. 

In chapters that alternate between Riley’s and Jenny’s points of view, we begin to understand each woman’s perspective on events. Through Riley, we see how traumatizing it is for a Black journalist to cover police-involved killings, and we see her unease in broadcasting other people’s trauma in order to further her career. Through Jenny, we understand the private fears of a police officer’s spouse and the relentless pressure on cops and their families to “back the blue,” no matter what. 

While We Are Not Like Them is fundamentally about the loyalties and betrayals among their communities—and each other—Riley and Jenny are not caricatures. Pride, a Black writer, editor and publishing veteran, and Piazza, a white journalist and podcast host, have written these women as complex, layered people who do their best to navigate infertility, shame, absent maternal figures and the generational trauma wrought by racist violence. 

Hopelessness is certainly a theme in the novel, especially in the epilogue that centers on Tamara, the murdered boy’s grieving mother. But We Are Not Like Them is ultimately about the inherently hopeful act of having grace when the people we love make mistakes—even terrible ones. This is an excellent book club selection or a starting point for interracial friend groups or families to talk candidly about race. 

Hopelessness is certainly a theme in We Are Not Like Them, but it’s ultimately about having grace when the people we love make mistakes—even terrible ones.
Review by

Award-winning Lebanese American author Rabih Alameddine’s sixth novel, The Wrong End of the Telescope, is as complex and multifaceted as its narrator. The story is a shape-shifting kaleidoscope, a collection of moments—funny, devastating, absurd—that bear witness to the violence of war and displacement without sensationalizing it.

Mina Simpson, a transgender Lebanese American doctor, arrives on the Greek island of Lesbos to volunteer at a refugee camp. It’s the closest she’s been to Lebanon since she left her home country decades ago, and the first time she’s seen her brother (who flies in to visit her) in years. On Lesbos, Mina meets a family from Syria and becomes close with the family’s mother, who is dying of cancer and whom Mina steps in to help however she can.

As Mina struggles to make sense of the crisis unfolding before her, she recounts the winding path of her life: her Lebanese childhood, her experiences in medical school in the U.S. and her comfortable middle age in Chicago with her wife. Moving between past and present, the novel unfolds in short chapters with whimsical titles that perfectly encapsulate Mina’s dry humor, wisdom and compassion (e.g., “When You Don’t Know What to Say, Have a Cookie”). 

Interspersed with these chapters are sections addressed to a gay Lebanese writer whose work has had a profound impact on Mina’s life, and who seems to be a reflection of Alameddine himself. “Writing does not force coherence onto a discordant narrative,” Mina tells the unnamed writer in one of these chapters, an unsettling truth that Alameddine embraces in this novel. He refuses to offer easy solutions to impossible situations; his characters do not learn lessons. This is not a novel about transformation. Its strength lies in its slipperiness, its thoughtful engagement with the messy in-betweens and the harsh but revelatory realities of liminality.

Mina, her fellow volunteers and the refugees they meet are all seeking something: safety or wholeness, a new home, old friends, a different narrative through which to understand their lives. The Wrong End of the Telescope is a gorgeously written, darkly funny and refreshingly queer witness to that seeking.

“Writing does not force coherence onto a discordant narrative,” Rabih Alameddine writes in his latest novel, a slippery tale of seeking and messy in-betweens.

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