Born and raised on the Upper West Side of Manhattan, Adam Ross was a child actor who appeared in the 1979 film The Seduction of Joe Tynan with Alan Alda and Meryl Streep. After graduating from Vassar College with a degree in English, he completed an M.A. in creative writing at Hollins University, followed by an M.F.A. in creative writing at Washington University.

From 1999 to 2003, he was special projects editor and staff writer at Nashville’s alternative weekly newspaper, the Nashville Scene, and after his stint there, he taught English at the Harpeth Hall School, a private Nashville girls school.

Ross spent 13 years writing his first novel, Mr. Peanut, in which an apparently loving husband fantasizes about the death of his wife, only to see his horrific dreams come true. With its layered storyline and allusions that range from Hitchcock to Escher, Mr. Peanut is being hailed as one of the season’s best debuts. BookPage asked Ross to elaborate on the novel’s inspirations and themes.

The premise behind the book—a woman’s death at the hands of a peanut—is both absurdly comic and extremely tragic. Where did the idea come from?
In 1995, my father told me about the suspicious death of my second cousin, who was morbidly obese, struggled epically with depression, and also suffered from lethal nut allergies. According to her husband—who was, conveniently, the only witness to her “suicide”—he came home from work to find her sitting at the kitchen table with a plate of peanuts before her. They had an argument, which she interrupted by taking a fistful of nuts in her hand and eating them. She’d also hidden her Epi-pens, and died before his eyes from anaphylactic shock. I was stunned when I heard this story—I was sure she’d been murdered—and immediately afterward wrote three chapters in one sitting that closely resemble those that begin the novel now. But then I pulled up because I’d written myself into something I didn’t fully understand yet. Looking back, I think what’s so compelling about the situation is that it’s a moment of terrible privacy between a husband and wife. Maybe she was sick to death of her life, both on earth and with him; maybe he rammed the nuts down her throat. We’ll never know.

Readers often say they need likeable characters in order to connect with literature. Few, if any, of your characters are objectively likeable, yet Mr. Peanut is almost compulsively readable. Do you find your characters likeable and, if not, how do you at least bring enough humanity to them to make them real?
I find them terribly and, at times, hysterically recognizable, and I’d like to think that’s what makes the novel so readable. Numerous couples have told me that they’ve thought the very things these characters have about their spouses but were afraid to admit; that, and their marriages have been through versions of the same situations, both the ruts and redemptions. I think that part of what we’re drawn to when we read fiction is whether or not the characters bring us news about our world—spiritual, emotional, literal, or otherwise. Humbert Humbert, Nabokov’s famous pedophile, isn’t “likeable,” but the story he tells is enchanting and we’re certainly happy to follow him anywhere, no matter how perverse a place he takes us, because he writes so powerfully and believably about obsession. So it’s not, I think, a question of bringing enough humanity to make them real as much as what Keats demands: beauty and truth, no matter how dark.

Mr. Peanut incorporates a real story—the Sam Sheppard murder case of the 1950s—into its narrative. Was it always your intent to fictionalize this event and how did you negotiate the ‘cold facts’ with your imagining of what occurred?
No, he appeared several years into drafting, again a gift from my father. Initially, the book’s two detectives were allegorical constructs, one assuming all suspects guilty from the get-go, the other the opposite, and after a while I realized I needed a grey-area figure. After my dad and I watched The Fugitive and he told me a brief history of the case, so I read about it and, bingo, there’s my guy: I wanted to rescue the true story from the Hollywood version, because in the remake, Harrison Ford is the paladin knight of marriage, its redeemer in a struggle to regain his good name, whereas what I found so captivating about the Dr. Sam Sheppard murder case was its mystery and muck, what with Sheppard’s serial womanizing, his narcissism, and the way his relationship with his wife anticipated so many moral hazards of the sexual revolution, not to mention the fact that his guilt or innocence remains in question. It’s just a juicy, albeit tragic, mystery, and it required extensive research because I wanted to take Sheppard’s testimony and imagine it from the point of view of the primary suspects—Sheppard, Dr. Lester Hoversten, and window-washer Dick Eberling—as well as Marilyn, the victim. The cold facts are directly incorporated into the novel because you can’t get around them. They’re out there, and so I used them as the plot’s scaffolding.

Hitchcock figures heavily into both your plot and themes. So does Escher and, of course, the iconic wrong man detective story. What other writers and artists inspire you?
The writers who had the biggest impact on me while I was drafting were first Milan Kundera, whose novel The Unbearable Lightness of Being also has overlapping chronologies and is told from different points of view that, taken together, deliver a huge emotional charge at the story’s end. Italo Calvino, the great Italian fabulist, writes formally complex and wildly inventive narratives, like The Castle of Crossed Destinies, which he generated using tarot cards. When it comes to dark tales, I regularly returned to John Hawkes’s The Lime Twig, which is about very bad men and women doing very, very bad things, and you can’t put it down. As for artists, music-wise give me Beethoven’s heavy metal any day along with Miles Davis’s lightness; throw in Calder’s subtraction of weight from giant structures, Rothko’s emotionally super-charged color combinations, and the purity of Brancusi’s abstract sculptures.

In many ways,  Mr. Peanut resists traditional chronology and narrative arc. Was this a conscious choice, or something that emerged naturally as you wrote?
It emerged naturally though I wish it were otherwise since it might not have taken so long to write, about 13 years of off-and-on work. I’ve got nothing against classic Aristotelian structure, though I believe you can achieve Aristotelian catharsis by countless other means, but the truth is this: the games the novel plays with chronology, arc, Hitchcock allusions, and names demand the reader be the detective, which I think we all have to be when it comes to identifying both the good and evil that lurk in our hearts.

What do you hope readers will take away from this book?
Husbands and wives of America: do good housekeeping! Take care of your spouse! Nurture your marriage and be very careful what you wish for when it comes to things like, oh, freedom from it: you might just get it, and the attendant tragedy, loneliness, and guilt that come with it—see Dr. Sheppard above or your neighbor’s recent divorce—are potentially horrible.

We have to ask: what does your wife think of all of this? 
She read it for the first time last year and hasn’t spoken to me since. No, seriously, she was very moved by it because she hung tough while I labored to finish and recognizes moments in it from our marriage that make us both happy: like David and Alice in the novel, we met in a Hitchcock seminar at Hollins University and spent our first months together falling in love with his films and each other. Years into our marriage, we went to Kauai, again just like the main characters, but whereas that trip marks the beginning of the end of their relationship for us it was where we learned we were pregnant with our first daughter. Our life is the Escher-obverse of the book. Plus the Detective Hastroll section cracks her up. And sometimes she wants to kill me too.

What’s up next for you?
I’m adding several new stories to my collection entitled Ladies & Gentlemen, due out next summer, and they’re dark and comic too, but nearly all of them are traditionally chronological with classic narrative arcs. No more crazy outlines for me.

Related content:
Review of Mr. Peanut.

In her spellbinding debut novel, The People in the Trees, Hanya Yanagihara drew on her life as a well traveled woman and editor at Conde Nast Traveler to compose stunning, visual descriptions of place. In these fictional memoirs of a scientist who has fallen from grace, readers find themselves seduced by a remote jungle setting and all the mysteries it holds. BookPage spoke with Yanagihara about her experiences as a travel writer, the love of reading and the joy of exploration.

The story that you’ve woven is utterly captivating, but one of the things that truly makes The People in the Trees shine is the writing. How have you developed your craft? Are there any authors that you turn to for inspiration or that have been particularly influential for you in terms of shaping your own authorial voice?

Thank you for the kind words. I don’t know that I’ve done anything to consciously develop my voice, but some of my favorite living fiction writers are John Banville, Jonathan Coe, Hilary Mantel, Jennifer Egan, J.M. Coetzee, Anita Brookner, Margaret Atwood, Paul Theroux, Aatish Taseer, Mohsin Hamid, Rose Tremain, Peter Rock, Anne Tyler, Steven Millhauser, David Mitchell, Kazuo Ishiguro, Zoë Heller, Michael Cunningham . . . and, well, I know I’m forgetting lots of people.

Prior to writing The People in the Trees, you worked as a travel writer. If your next assignment saw you heading off to Ivu’ivu, what would be the three items you’d be sure to pack?

I actually still am an editor at Conde Nast Traveler (unasked-for tip to first-time novelists: For a variety of reasons, don’t quit your day job); I’m on the road about a fourth to a third of the year, but the rest of my time is spent in our offices in Times Square, assigning and editing pieces. But if I were going off to Ivu’ivu—hmm. I actually think the characters do a pretty good job of packing. So I’d bring a knife (to kill one of the turtles); a cooler (to bring back orchid cuttings); and a wider diversity of food than I allowed my characters.

"Travelers, like readers, are united by our sense of curiosity, as well as a willingness to have our most closely held notions—of a people, of a place, of human behavior—be dispelled, sometimes crushingly."

As someone who has primarily written nonfiction previously, what prompted you to shift your focus to literary fiction? Do you feel that your previous experience as a travel writer was a natural stepping-stone to writing novels?

I don’t really consider myself a nonfiction writer: I mean, I do it for work, but that’s a very specific type of writing—less essayistic and more practical, and more about the whats and wheres (as opposed to the hows and whys) of a given destination. I worked on this book for so long—I was in book publishing, not magazines at all, when I began it—that I can honestly say that the writing I do at work is something I was simply lucky enough to tumble into.

However, I can also say that working as a magazine editor has helped me enormously as a writer. When you’re publishing a magazine story, the editor has the final say. When you’re publishing a book, the author has the final say. Being a magazine editor has taught me to be more ruthless about my own writing—it’s made me more aware of repetition, for example, and the importance of pacing—but it’s also taught me when and how to not compromise, which is an underrated skill but one every writer must develop.

Given all that you’ve seen throughout the world, do you believe the old adage that “truth is stranger than fiction”?

It always is. In fact, there’s only one specific incident in the book that I took from my own life—and, of course, it was the one incident that my editor found unconvincing. But I kept it anyway.

After finishing your book, many readers will wonder whether places like Ivu’ivu truly exist. Based on your own rather extensive travels through Asia, what destinations would you offer up as real-world substitutes for those with a taste for untouched paradise?

Although much of Ivu’ivu’s history—from discovery through the ruins of Christian colonization—is borrowed from the history of Hawaii, I found its physical contours in Angra dos Reis, which is an archipelago off the coast of southern Brazil. When I went there for work—this was probably in 2008—I was still trying to decide how I wanted Ivu’ivu to look and feel. I knew I wanted it to be densely, lushly tropical, but Hawaii itself wasn’t quite florid enough for my imaginings to be an appropriate visual reference. But when I stepped onto my first island in Angra, I knew that this was Ivu’ivu: I had never before been to a square of land so intimidatingly green, so suffocatingly overgrown.

I stayed at a hotel on one of the islands, but the next day I took a speedboat and did some island-hopping, including to a number of rocks that’ve remained untouched by construction and are still as wild and untamed as they probably were a thousand years ago.

Would you say that travelers tend to be pretty voracious readers? If so, why do you think this might be?

Travelers, like readers, are united by our sense of curiosity, as well as a willingness to have our most closely held notions—of a people, of a place, of human behavior—be dispelled, sometimes crushingly.

There’s also something about the act of travel itself, its sense of suspension, that pairs beautifully with the sense of suspension that reading, especially reading fiction, encourages. One of the most exhilarating states of being is to find yourself in a strange place, surrounded by strange scenery, reading about places both familiar and not. Whenever I travel, I like to take a book that’s set in a location far different than the one I’ll be in, so that the foreignness of one experience plays against the foreignness of the other: it makes every sensation seem sharper and more vivid. I’ll always associate the Nigeria of Half of a Yellow Sun or the Mumbai of Maximum City with Tokyo, for example, which is where I read them.

When you travel, do you go paper or digital when it comes to your reading material?

Only paper. Last year, I took a 51-day trip through Asia for work and brought along 27 books: galleys, mostly, so I could discard them as I went (I like the idea of someone coming across a book I’ve left behind in a hotel room night table drawer and being drawn to it as they lie awake with jetlag). I always figure a book per every two days, plus a book for every 15-hour-plus long-haul flight.

What are you working on next?

Last month I finished a novel about male friendship that spans 30 years. Unlike The People in the Trees, which took almost 16 years [to write], this one took 18 months; but it was a book I’d had plotted in my head—down to the last lines—for years. And that period between selling your first book and its actual publication is, I learned, a wonderful, singular year and a half or so in which to write: you have all the validation you need, and none of the disappointments.

ALSO IN BOOKPAGE: Read our review of The People in the Trees.

The Last Days of California centers on a family preparing for the end of world. If you knew you had one week left on earth, how (and where) would you spend it?
I would need more details. Am I sick? Is a meteor about to crash into the earth, i.e. are there a bunch of really great parties going on? I wouldn’t want to spend any of that precious time hungover, though. I’d stay close to home, maybe take a quick trip down to New Orleans. I’d eat whatever I wanted, see the people I love most in the world and tell them how much I love them. Things I would not do: worry, read, watch TV, remain a vegetarian. If the world’s going to end, I’d definitely want a cheeseburger.

This is your first novel, but you have previously written and published short stories, including the collection Big World. What made you make the leap to longer fiction and did you find that the transition presented you with new challenges as a writer?
I’ve tried to write novels in the past, but The Last Days of California is the only one I’ve completed. This book surprised me. I drafted it quickly, over the course of one summer, and it was fun and fairly easy to write, as I was interested in the characters and what would happen to them. I didn’t know if they’d make it to California, or if the rapture would occur, so I wrote my way toward these things.

 "If the world’s going to end, I’d definitely want a cheeseburger."

Because it’s a road-trip novel that takes place over the course of four days, the structure was inherently more manageable than the other novels I’ve attempted. When the story begins, the family has already fallen behind schedule, so there was an immediate tension. They have to keep moving! They must push on! And I felt that push, as well.

There are a lot of pop culture references in this novel that very concretely ground it in the present era and current moment—did you ever worry that by so explicitly dating your novel might also give it an expiration date?
I don’t think I could have written a road-trip story without using these references, and I have a feeling that we’ll have Targets, Taco Bells, and Burger Kings for a long time to come. Same with snack foods—I don't see the Snickers bar going anywhere. Of course, there are also a lot of TV, movie and pop cultural references that will date it. My goal was to try to fully capture a time and place—to ground the novel in the everydayness of these characters’ lives.

Is it possible for a work of art to be unambiguously of a time as well as timeless?
That’s an excellent question—I think so. I really appreciate specificity in fiction, whether the book is set in 1890, 1955 or 2013. I want to know what they’re reading, what they’re eating, what their home décor is like. I want to know everything because these details allow me to fully inhabit someone else’s world, and this makes for timeless literature.

Tolstoy famously wrote, “All happy families are alike; each unhappy family is unhappy in its own way.” To what extent do you think this is true? Is there room in modern fiction to explore the domestic family life through a lens unmarred by dysfunction and melancholy?
All families, even the happy ones, are unhappy in certain ways. Whenever you have a bunch of people living together in a house, there are going to be problems, tensions. There’s just no way around this. As beautiful as Tolstoy’s sentence is, it’s a flawed idea. Every happy family is unhappy in its own way. And most unhappy families have many happy moments. Maybe I’m too cynical, but I believe there will always be some level of dysfunction and sadness within the family unit. As a writer, this is a good thing; domestic fiction would be very dull, otherwise.

Like Jess, you grew up and lived most of your life in the South, an area of the country with an incredibly rich and distinct literary tradition. In your opinion, does Southern fiction have its roots in a physical state (or group of states) or is it defined more by a state of mind?  To what extent do you feel like living there has shaped your authorial voice?
I don’t think the physical place can be separated from the state of mind. I’ve spent the majority of my life in Mississippi, and there are still parts of it that remain virtually untouched by modern life. As a largely rural and sparsely populated state, we don’t get many visitors and almost no one moves here unless it’s for the military. I once dated a man who came to Jackson from California to run his family’s business. Everywhere we went, people asked where he was from. He couldn’t walk into a gas station without someone asking him this question. We’re also constantly reminded of our history here. As a teenager, my friends and I used to drink daiquiris while running the hills of Vicksburg’s National Military Park. My mother and father grew up in a place where blacks and whites couldn’t eat together at a lunch counter, couldn’t drink from the same water fountain at the zoo. There’s so much to remember here, things and people we can’t forget: James Meredith, Emmett Till, “Freedom Summer.”

Except for a year in Nashville and three-and-a-half in Austin, my life has been spent in Mississippi. The people I know and the culture I know are integral to who I am. It’s also hard for me to describe what this culture is like—how it’s different from other places. My father hunts and fishes; there’s always deer sausage in the freezer. My parents go to church every Sunday. There is meat in all of the vegetables (except the corn). We say y’all. Growing up, we sang “Dixie” in choir. As an undergraduate at Mississippi State, we rang cowbells at footballs games. It’s nearly impossible to get a direct flight anywhere. How many of these things are typical of the South and how many are simply a part of rural life?

It’s fair to say that about as much goes wrong as it does right during the course of the Metcalfs’ road trip—what are your top tips for guaranteed success on long haul car journeys?
Travel with people you like, preferably non-family members. Make sure your AAA membership is active. Stay in a decent hotel at least one night if you can afford it, and eat six-dollar mini-cans of Pringles. It’s also nice to have some audiobooks to distract you—nothing overly literary—think suspense, horror, crime.

Writing wise, what’s next for you: another novel, more short fiction or something else entirely?
I’m currently working on short fiction and essays. This past summer, I started another novel—a historical novel loosely based on the story of Typhoid Mary—and I liked the idea of it, but had no idea what I was doing. When the time came to make some major decisions, I balked. I was scared to mess it up, or that it wasn’t good enough, or I had forgotten what story I wanted to tell. I’m not sure. I’m definitely going to revisit it at some point; perhaps I just need to spend a few months researching communicable diseases and islands in order to become inspired again.

author photo by Doris Ulmer

Former BookPage intern Stephenie Harrison is currently writing from Asia. She blogs at 20 Years Hence. 

RELATED CONTENT
Read our review of The Last Days of California.