Rakesh Satyal’s second novel is the ambitious and universally relatable tale of three Indian Americans—Harit, Ranjana and Prashant—who set out on individual journeys to carve a space in their lives where they feel they truly belong. Timeless and true, No One Can Pronounce My Name provides a new voice and a 21st-century face to great American fiction.

Unsurprisingly, given the title of the book, your characters are constantly encountering people who butcher and mispronounce their names. What’s the worst/oddest way your own name has been pronounced (outside of a Starbucks)?
This is a tie: I was once called “Raquel”—I wish the person had at least had the presence of mind to append “Welch” to it—and another time, I was called “Rafiki,” as in the monkey from The Lion King. Can you feel the “oof” tonight?

It seems like most American novels featuring immigrants are either set in New York or California, as though foreigners only ever land in one of two places when they settle in America. No One Can Pronounce My Name largely takes place in a rather generic Midwestern city in Ohio, the state where you grew up. Why did you feel it was important to set your novel here? Did you feel that this particular setting allowed you to explore certain themes or ideas that—perhaps somewhat ironically—a larger, more cosmopolitan city would have stifled or restricted?
There is a certain decorum, one might even call it politesse, to living in the Midwest, a kind of geniality tempered by manners, and I find that it often makes it harder to parse out the subtleties of human interaction. There is not necessarily the straightforwardness of being on one of the coasts or the kind of performed grandeur of being in the South, for example. This, to me, makes an ideal setting for challenging what we think of as “ethnic” literature because it almost forces a writer to mine the base-level reactions of people in ordinary social situations, from dining out to driving to attending a religious gathering. Since I was dealing with a collection of characters that has had a hard time navigating tricky social structures, it felt all the more fitting to set the book in the Midwest and have them trying to solve their particular problems as well as the obstacles posed by such an environment.

Another thing that sets No One Can Pronounce My Name apart from many other novels featuring immigrant protagonists is its nuanced and multifaceted exploration of sexuality and gender identity. These are topics that you also explored in your Lambda Literary Award-winning debut novel, Blue Boy. How do you believe your newest novel advances the discussion of these issues?
A key theme of this book is the idea of what society prescribes for people’s understanding of their sexuality versus what they themselves believe to be true. In the case of Harit—one of the main characters—he’s had assumptions made about his sexual identity by other people but has largely avoided such self-introspection, even though he has the benefit of middle age. What I wanted to show in this novel was his journey to exploring that identity—but not defining it in any conventional way that would play directly into the established gender binary. And I wanted to be certain not to recklessly conflate issues of gender with issues of sexuality—a common problem in fiction. What I think/hope that I’ve accomplished here is a nuanced approach to explicating those topics but in a compassionate and humorous way.

Your new book features three main protagonists, each at a different stage in his or her own life. Of the three, which character did you relate to the most and why? Which character did you find the most challenging to write?
Ranjana is quite possibly the closest to me, mainly because she loves writing but isn’t sure to what extent her writing is exceptional or necessary. But Harit was a real challenge. He is based loosely on a man that I met several years ago who was the “uncle” of a high school friend—“uncle” used here, as it often is, to describe a tenuous social connection that may or may not have been familial. This man was in his mid-40s and unmarried and lived with his mother, and there was this unspoken assumption by the community that he must have been gay because of these circumstances. I was fascinated and somewhat disheartened by this assumption because it didn’t allow for how he himself felt about his life and how he saw the world. So, trying to examine the innermost thoughts of a person like that became both my mission and my greatest challenge.

What’s one of the biggest stereotypes that you believe exists about Indian Americans and their families that you hope your book addresses and may help readers to think differently about?
One of my main goals with this book was to take the common tone of an “ethnic” or “Indian” book—which is often tragic or grief-stricken—and instead, to show a lot of humor and joy and farcical misunderstandings. There are a lot of struggles inherent in the process of immigration—and we are certainly seeing that in our current political mome—but I didn’t want to overlook the genuine moments of levity and jollity because there are so many of them, and they more accurately define people’s day-to-day lives, I think.

And indeed, although No One Can Pronounce My Name tackles some very serious and sad topics, there are many moments of levity and throughout the book. Can you talk a bit about your approach to including comedy in your writing?
One thing that I came to learn about myself as a writer in working on this book is that my writing is often about who is happening moreso than what is happening. That is, I love creating characters who feel very true-to-life but who are almost so specific as to be mysteries to themselves as they are to other people. In this book, people from disparate backgrounds who hold very different worldviews bump up against each other, and that, to me, leads to an ideal comedic state, even if some of the things that the characters have experienced are harrowing. It is only through meaningful interaction that people sort out their differences, and I believe that this thinking forms the core of the humor in this book.

In addition to writing fiction, you have also worked in publishing for many years and currently work as a senior editor for a major publishing house. Given the number of manuscripts you’ve worked on, what’s one literary trope or trend you feel has been done to death and hope to never see again?
I know that this may seem like a cop-out, but I really don’t think that anything is off-limits as long as you try to bring a fresh perspective to it. For example, including a narrative about a writer was a very intentional choice I made in this book, and although that is a trope that has occurred many, many times in literature, I saw it as a particular challenge that I wanted to take on and try to tackle in a unique way. I think that I’ve succeeded, but that’s not really for me to say. What I do think I did, however, was bring to that challenge all of the warmth and willingness to understand that I could.

Readers may be surprised to hear that you have quite the set of pipes on you and that you occasionally perform cabaret and even went so far as to sing your acceptance speech at the Lambda Literary Awards. If you’re heading out for an evening of karaoke, what’s your signature song?
The number of times that I have sung George Michael’s “Father Figure” in public likely exceeds the number of pages in this book.

What are you working on next?
I’m already halfway through a new novel, and I’m very happy with it. Just kidding. I have a very murky premise for a new book and am terrified at even trying to get it down on the page until I’ve stopped hyperventilating from seeing this current book into our turbulent world. . . .

ALSO IN BOOKPAGE: Read our review of No One Can Pronounce My Name.

Throughout her time at the Iowa Writers’ Workshop, Dina Nayeri wrote draft after draft of a second novel, and with each revision her editor would say, no, that’s not it, it doesn’t have the Dina magic.

“I remember thinking, what the hell is the Dina magic? I don’t know what that is!” Nayeri says, laughing, during a call to her home outside of London, where she now lives with her partner, the writer Samuel Leader, and their 16-month-old daughter, Elena.

Finally, her editor told her to shelve the project and write instead about whatever popped into her head when she thought about her life and what she had experienced as a displaced person. Nayeri fled Iran with her brother and mother, a Christian convert persecuted by Iran’s morality police, when she was 8 years old. She ended up, improbably, in Oklahoma as a refugee. Her father remained in Iran. What popped into Nayeri’s head were the four occasions when she had seen her father, a dentist from Isfahan, after she left the country.

These four visits, fictionally reimagined, of course, but also “pretty closely autobiographical,” are one of three beautifully braided narratives in Refuge, a revelatory novel about the lives of uprooted people. One of the narrative threads concerns Dr. Bahman Hamadi, a vibrant, poetry-loving, opium-addicted dentist who remains behind in Iran and runs afoul of the Iranian authorities during the Green Movement’s protests of 2009. Another focus is his daughter, Niloo, a high-achieving, assimilated immigrant now in her 30s. She is in a listless marriage with a sweet man named Guillaume and living in the Netherlands, where despite its progressive politics, anti-immigrant furor is rising, with shocking results.

Nayeri’s 10-page fictionalized treatment of her visits with her father, submitted at the last minute, earned her a residency at the MacDowell Colony, a “sacred space” for artists in New Hampshire, where in a burst of creative energy she completed a full draft of Refuge. At MacDowell, Nayeri also met Sam, who like her had married his college sweetheart and then divorced after 10 years. “It’s an experience that’s hard to relate to unless you’ve been through it,” she says. “We kind of realized we were each other’s person very quickly. This book is deeply tied into my relationship with Sam.”

Refuge is also deeply tied to Nayeri’s profound experiences as a young refugee. “We escaped from Iran and then spent a couple of years in a refugee camp before coming to the U.S.,”she says. “There were two years when we were completely without a home. And when we arrived in Oklahoma, we were suddenly very poor. I don’t even know the words to describe the sense of loss I lived with for those first few years. I developed this kind of crazy determination to find a place for myself in the world, to have a kind of security that won’t disappear in an instant.”

Drawing on these experiences, Nayeri creates in Niloo a character who is very tightly controlled. Niloo fashions, for example, what her husband names the Perimeter, a fiercely protected corner in every place she lives that is for her alone. Unhappy at the beginning of the novel, Niloo’s journey is toward finding some sense of belonging and happiness.

“Once you’ve lost everything and there’s no going back,” Nayeri explains, “you have this sense of panic that nothing is under control. You develop these OCD-like symptoms. You want some small space that you can control—a space just small enough so you know that whatever happens you can huddle over it and it isn’t going to change.”

Nayeri is quick to emphasize that the character Niloo is not her. “I think the child Niloo is very much based on who I was. But as an adult, Niloo is not at all like me. It was so tempting to just pump in all my own feelings and experiences and reactions. Reining that in was something I had to go through a lot of iterations to do.”

"I don’t even know the words to describe the sense of loss I lived with for those first few years."

Likewise, Nayeri makes a distinction between her real father and her character Bahman. “I just love that character. He’s this other version of my dad. My dad was in his early 30s when I said goodbye to him, and Bahman in his 30s is very close to that person. Then my father and this fictional father branch out in different directions. I think I captured the voice of a real, true person and at the same time gave him a balance that maybe my father’s real life hasn’t had. Bahman is a person who has kept his capacity for joy through all his adversity. He represents to me a kind of wild, animal enjoyment of life, a quality that can’t be stamped out.”

Nayeri says she has not gone back to Iran because “it never feels safe enough.” Her visits with her father were in other countries. But she remains deeply connected to Persian culture.

“I moved away from my Iranian roots for a while in my late 20s when I was very lost and trying to become something different. But as I was becoming a writer, I jumped back in. I immersed myself in Iranian communities. I made sure my Farsi speaking and writing skills didn’t deteriorate. I listened to the music, cooked the food and celebrated the holidays. I recaptured my culture for myself.”

Her immersion in Persian culture, in addition to her experience as a refugee, enables Nayeri to create a nuanced and remarkably textured narrative about a world few of us experience.

That was apparently also the opinion of her editor when on the final day of her MacDowell residency, Nayeri and friends hit the send button on the first complete draft of Refuge.

Nayeri recalls, “Of course we went through a long editing process. But the first thing she said was, ‘This is it! This is the Dina magic!’ . . . And I still don’t know what that is.”

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

Author photo credit Anna Leader.

Jonathan Dee’s keenly insightful, gently humorous seventh novel, set in a small town in western Massachusetts, was scheduled for publication in 2018. Then came the 2016 presidential election.

“Obviously the book reads a certain way now that I couldn’t have foreseen when I started writing it,” Dee says during a call to his home in Syracuse, New York. The Locals is a novel with an enticing ensemble of vivid small-town characters with many stories to tell. But the narrative thread that vaulted the book to the front of the publication queue has to do with Philip Hadi, a somewhat mysterious and very wealthy New York money manager who owns a summer place in Dee’s fictional Berkshires town of Howland. Shortly after the 9/11 attacks, Hadi receives secret intelligence through the elite circles he travels in that more attacks are imminent and moves his family to their summer home in Howland. He eventually is elected first selectman of the town and through a blend of generosity and paranoia begins to reshape the town in his own image.

“The idea that the extremely wealthy not only possess a special skill set but a sort of moral purity has been around for a while,” Dee says, talking about his conception of Hadi. “That only the really rich can lead us seems like a very American idea. I was thinking of Michael Bloomberg and Ross Perot. What fascinates me in terms of the role of class, class conflict and class aspiration in American society is the idea that if you get a little bit rich, you’re venal and corrupt, but if you get really rich, you’re a special kind of human being.”

Then there are Mark Firth, a less-than-rich local contractor, his wife and young daughter, and his increasingly disorderly brother and sister. By chance, Firth, a victim of financial fraud, is in New York for a lawsuit during the 9/11 attacks. The Firths have deep roots in Howland, and simply because Mark returns safely from the 9/11 disaster, he is greeted, to his consternation, as a hometown hero. Firth is soon hired by Hadi to improve the security of Hadi’s home. After a casual conversation with Hadi about his middle-class American aspirations to better himself, Mark decides to buy foreclosed properties and flip them, with increasingly mixed results. From there, this smartly observed story moves forward without looking back, presenting the love and small betrayals of family and village life, and playing out on a small-town scale the bitter conflicts that plague the nation.

“I wanted to find some way to write about what I felt had happened in American life in the first 10 or 15 years of this century, the mainstreaming of the once-radical idea that your problems are not my problems,” Dee says of his early musings on the novel. “When I thought about what had happened to our discourse about government and the social fabric, I had the idea that it begins with 9/11—technically the book begins on 9/12—with that intense reaction to what had happened: the coming together, the selflessness, the collective pride. That was real but it was also a reaction to something specific. I feel that gave way to an equal and opposite reaction over time, and a sort of panic about collapse and an every-man-for-himself mindset resulted from that.”

“The book reads a certain way now that I couldn’t have foreseen when I started writing it.”

Dee, who is best known for his fifth novel, The Privileges, a finalist for the Pulitzer Prize, began working on The Locals in 2013 in his tiny Manhattan apartment. He finished the book in the old house in Syracuse that he shares with his partner, novelist Dana Spiotta. Both now teach in the Syracuse University writing program. “It’s a tonic just to be around very talented young artists who are struggling with the same things that you struggled with and continue to struggle with,” he says of teaching. Dee says he grew up in a town not far from the location of and not unlike his fictional Howland. He clearly draws heavily on his personal experiences in creating the novel’s sharply drawn characters and locale. “There was a summer population that really changed the character of the place, particularly economically,” he says of his hometown. “And when the summer ended, the place changed or reverted. That dynamic of both depending on and somewhat resenting the temporary population is a really interesting one.”

Curiously, another source of inspiration for The Locals was George Eliot’s Middlemarch. “One of the models I very modestly had in mind was Middlemarch,” Dee says hesitantly in response to a question about the novel’s portrayal of neighborliness and small-town society. “The surprise for you as a reader is that when you get really far into this long book, you realize that the characters you have grown to know so well and who live in a very confined space don’t know each other all that well, and that’s because they occupy different social realms.”

The action of The Locals unfolds during a span that on the national scene roughly parallels the time between the 9/11 attacks and the Occupy Wall Street movement. Not the most cheerful of eras.

Asked if he thinks his novel is pessimistic or hopeful, Dee points to the character of Mark First’s daughter, Haley, who we meet when she is in second grade. “Ten years in the life of Mark First is momentous, but he’s still Mark First,” Dee says. “But 10 years in the life of somebody who starts the book so young is a much, much bigger deal.”

Dee continues, “I gave a copy of this book to a friend to read. One of the things she said was, it’s interesting, your last three books have been similar in that they’re about well-meaning parents screwing up. But they manage to end on the hopeful figure of the child. Honestly, that would not have occurred to me in a million years. But when I thought about it, I thought she was right. And that seemed like a good reason to dedicate The Locals to my own hopeful child, Claire.”

(Author photo credit Jessica Marx.)

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

At first glance, Celeste Ng may look unassuming, but make no mistake, this bright-eyed writer is a veritable fireball. She starts her books with a bang.

Ng’s narratives reveal families plagued by delicately interwoven secrets and misunderstandings that ultimately yield tragedy. Her debut bestseller, Everything I Never Told You (2014), begins with devastating news for a Chinese-American family. Her latest novel, the mesmerizing Little Fires Everywhere, starts with an equally provocative lead: “Everyone in Shaker Heights was talking about it that summer: how Isabelle, the last of the Richardson children, had finally gone around the bend and burned the house down.”

“That was fun,” Ng says with a grin, referring to her new novel’s incendiary beginning. “In literary fiction, you don’t often get to have explosions. If you think about action movies, Michael Bay gets to blow everything up. And then there are the quiet indie films, and that’s what literary fiction is. So it was fun to get to do that.”

As we talk on a hot summer morning, Ng sits in the corner of a dark cafe near Harvard University, her alma mater. She lives near Cambridge, Massachusetts, with her husband and soon-to-be 7-year-old son. The initial idea for Little Fires Everywhere was sparked by a church fire in Cambridge in 2009. “That gave me the idea of a literary fire that might burn everything to the ground,” Ng recalls. She speaks crisply and quickly, her mind overflowing with ideas and enthusiasm.

While Everything I Never Told You takes place in 1970s small-town Ohio, Ng sets her latest novel in Shaker Heights, Ohio, a wealthy, planned community that prides itself on educational achievement and diversity. Ng spent most of her childhood there, experiencing “that kind of blissful childhood that people think of, where you ride your bike and there are lots of parks and everybody has a front lawn.”

It’s hardly a haven for family arsonists, however.

“I had the idea of a dysfunctional family,” Ng explains. “I started thinking that there’s this one black sheep who is at odds with everything that the family and the community are aligning themselves with. What’s going to happen? How far is that tension going to go?”

Ng’s saga takes place in 1997-98, when Ng herself was a senior in high school, making her the same age as her studious, Yale-bound character, Lexie, the oldest of the four Richardson children. Lexie’s siblings include handsome athlete Trip (a junior); quiet, reflective Moody (a sophomore); and wild Izzy, the fire starter.

Both of Ng’s novels focus on the roles of mothers and daughters and the relationships between the two, but her new book includes a twist. “A lot of times I feel that mothers are supposed to be peacemakers who put out all of the fires,” Ng says, “but in this book, they’re inciting all of the fires.”

At center ring of these mother wars are Mrs. Richardson—a frustrated career woman, local reporter and busybody—and Mia Warren, an artist and single mother who lives hand to mouth and moves into a rental property belonging to the Richardsons. Mia and her teenage daughter, Pearl, soon befriend and infiltrate the Richardson family, with everyone helping to stoke the oncoming firestorm. Ng sees no heroes or villains in the story, just women acting “out of fear of losing their children, especially their daughters.”

The result is a deftly woven plot that examines a multitude of issues, including class, wealth, artistic vision, abortion, race, prejudice and cultural privilege. While all of this could be handled in a heavy-handed way, rest assured that in Ng’s talented hands, the issues arise organically.

“In literary fiction, you don’t often get to have explosions. If you think about action movies, Michael Bay gets to blow everything up. And then there are the quiet indie films, and that’s what literary fiction is. So it was fun to get to do that.”

Ng’s parents, both scientists, emigrated in their early 20s from Hong Kong to the United States, where they married, pursued graduate studies and raised two daughters. The family moved from Pittsburgh to Shaker Heights just before Ng turned 10, when her father began working at NASA’s Lewis Research Center and her mom began teaching chemistry and conducting research at Cleveland State University. The move proved to be transformative for Ng.

“It was the first time that I had been in a place that wasn’t basically completely white, where I was the only nonwhite person,” Ng says. “Before, in my elementary school, there was one black girl, one girl who was Jewish and one Asian girl, who was me.”

A woman ahead of her time, Ng’s mother tried to broaden her daughter’s cultural perspectives through books. “If there was a book that came out in the ’80s or ’90s that has to do with anything in East Asia, I probably had it,” Ng says, laughing.

While race was at the forefront of her first novel, it’s also an important subplot in Little Fires Everywhere, concerning a legal battle between a young Chinese immigrant mom who abandons her baby and a white couple who tries to adopt her child.

Ng, who describes her husband as a “tall white guy,” says she didn’t plan to write about this topic. “But because I’m in a mixed-race marriage and have a biracial child, these issues are just things that are on my mind,” she says. “In Little Fires Everywhere, I wanted to write about it from a different angle. I wanted to show the ways that race is not just an issue for nonwhite people; it’s an issue for everybody.”

As for her next novel, Ng is contemplating two “wildly divergent ideas” and has yet to settle on one. “The best analogy I have is that if you’re walking around a big walled city, you need to keep going around it until you can find a gate. I’m kind of walking around and trying to find where the gate is.”

No doubt she’ll find it, and readers will follow her in.

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

Author photo credit Kevin Day Photography.

“I wanted to tap into that feeling you get when you listen to a piece of music and it feels as if it moves your very soul.”

Jesmyn Ward’s Sing, Unburied, Sing, her first novel since 2012’s National Book Award winner Salvage the Bones, is the story of 13-year-old Jojo, who lives with his black grandparents, his toddler sister and his drug-addicted mother in rural Mississippi, while his white father serves a prison sentence. We spoke with Ward about her lyrical and challenging novel.

Upon reading Sing, Unburied, Sing, I couldn’t help noticing parallels between this work and the books of William Faulkner. But the parallels a reader detects may differ from an author’s intentions. Which books or fellow authors, if any, were your biggest influences in writing this novel?
I was definitely thinking of Faulkner when I wrote this novel. Specifically, I had As I Lay Dying on my mind. There’s so much to admire in As I Lay Dying, but I am in awe of how Faulkner volleys back and forth between multiple first-person POVs and still tells a coherent, moving story. I thought I could try to mimic that in the structure of Sing, Unburied, Sing. I’m also impressed by the way the characters go on a journey through the Mississippi of their time, so I think I was trying to rewrite that journey in a way.

Not surprisingly, music plays a large part in this novel, not only the cadences of your prose but also the role of singing in the narrative. Jojo sings to Kayla; Stag, Pop’s older brother, “walked all over Bois Sauvage every day, singing, swinging a stick”; Jojo says that the songs were the best part of his birthdays. Did you have particular styles of music or certain songs that inspired you as you wrote this book, or that inspire you in general as an artist?
I was thinking about the blues as I wrote this, and when I wasn’t writing, I listened to some old-style blues by artists such as R.L. Burnside, T-Model Ford, Junior Kimbrough and Jesse Robinson. I thought it only fitting since Parchman is in the Delta, the birthplace of blues. My editor also gifted me with a CD and book titled Parchman Farm: Photographs and Field Recordings: 1947-1959, so I listened to those as well. The chorus of those singing voices is transcendent; there’s something in those songs that moves me. I wanted to tap into that feeling you get when you listen to a piece of music and it feels as if it moves your very soul. That resonance we feel when we listen to music is a sign of something larger than ourselves, I think, and that's part of what I was exploring in Richie’s experience of the afterworld.

In the middle of the novel, Jojo says, “Pop always told me you can trust an animal to do exactly what it’s born to do. . . . That no matter how domesticated an animal is, Pop say, the wild nature in it will come through.” To what degree do you think Pop’s maxim explains the behavior of your characters?
The characters, Jojo and Pop and Leonie and Mam and Michael and Richie, are all struggling to live through very human quandaries, through illness and hunger and torture and grief. I think this is the parallel Jojo is understanding: that human beings react in very instinctual ways when dealing with very human ordeals.

Matters of race are very much part of the American experience. And they are very much at the center of this novel, especially in the tension between Big Joseph and Leonie and her family. Every author who writes sensitively about race has a message he or she wants to impart about the subject. What messages about the African-American experience do you hope readers, both white and people of color, will take away from this novel?
I would like readers to realize that at the heart, we are all human beings. We all love and grieve and struggle and hunger and yearn, regardless of our race. I think if we are able to recognize the humanity in each other and empathize with each other, we might be able to see past our preconceived notions about each other and realize that everyone deserves to live with dignity and be accorded kindness.

Your two most recent novels are influenced by Greek mythology. In Salvage the Bones, Esch is enamored of Greek myths, and Sing, Unburied, Sing has similarities to The Odyssey. To what extent, if at all, has Greek mythology influenced your outlook on life? Do you think it has also had an effect on your writing?
The Greeks were frank in their assessment of humanity, in their stories about their heroes and heroines: All are flawed. They were equally frank about life: It is fraught with tragedy. If Greek mythology has informed my work and my outlook on life, it has taught me that.

Was your approach to writing Sing, Unburied, Sing different from that of Salvage the Bones? If so, in what way?
It was very different because Sing, Unburied, Sing required research. I knew nothing of the history of Parchman, and I knew little of Mississippi history, which I last studied in seventh grade. So I read several books on Mississippi history and the history of Parchman Prison before I began writing the first draft of Sing, Unburied, Sing. While I wrote the first draft, I continued to research as the story demanded, because I knew little about Voodoo spirituality and herbal medicine. I then had to incorporate the research into the story so that it was organic to the characters and their world. This was a challenge.

What are you working on now?
I am currently working on a novel set in New Orleans during the height of the domestic slave trade (the early 1800s). I’m at the very beginning of the first draft, and I’m still researching: I’ve read several books on the history of slavery in the United States, on the slave markets in New Orleans, and now I’m reading slave narratives by women from the WPA projects. All of this is allowing me to give this world some texture and give the characters authenticity. I’ve found that it’s a hard world and experience to write about: The stress and grief of the characters’ lives feel very present and real. It’s all very heavy, but I guess readers expect that of me by now.

ALSO IN BOOKPAGE: Read our review of Sing, Unburied, Sing.

Author photo by Beowulf Sheehan

Cristina García’s Here in Berlin is a hypnotic work that, through the effective use of multiple oral histories, creates a portrait of the former East German city, the effect its past still has upon residents old and young, and the fallout from Cuba’s relationship with the Soviet Union. We spoke with García about her haunting new novel.

Other authors have used oral histories in their works, although most of them, such as Studs Terkel and Svetlana Alexievich, have written nonfiction. Did you think about the works of these authors as you wrote this novel, and, if so, to what extent have their achievements influenced Here in Berlin and your work in general?
For me, the compelling first-person voice is one of utter persuasion, not just for the listeners, but for the storytellers themselves. Yet narrative, it seems to me, is always in competition with other narratives—official, familial, political, you name it. What interests me is not just what people remember but why, psychologically and emotionally, they need to remember specific events and details in the particular ways they do. How self-aggrandizing (or self-effacing) are the stories? What’s being left out? Who’s being protected, or vilified? It’s the stories not told in the telling that interest me most.

One assumes you decided that the use of oral histories was a good way to explore the themes you wanted to address. What was it about that type of narrative structure that made it seem the best choice for the story you wanted to tell?
The structure dictated itself through the voices that fought their way to inclusion. I wanted every voice to be individually nuanced and tell a story that no one else could tell, at least not in the same way. And yet the voices as a whole had to work in concert with the others, forge an insistent if dissonant chorus.

Continuing on the topic of the book’s themes, one of the obvious concerns of the book is an investigation into, as you put it, “the human fallout from Cuba’s long association with the Soviet bloc.” I imagine you did a lot of research into the subject as you wrote the book. Did you discover facts about that long association that you didn’t know before? How did those facts shape or alter the novel as you had originally conceived it?
My original idea about illuminating the complexities of Cuba’s political allegiances with Eastern Europe and the Soviet Union was pretty quickly eclipsed by Berlin itself, which had its own tales to tell. My work, as I saw it, then became to listen, listen, listen to the city’s whisperings, to read and wander, eavesdrop and absorb, to get out of my own way and eschew any preordained conclusions about what the novel should be. I became less a journalist/researcher than an observer. It was only when I became passive—not an easy things for me—that the stories began to surface.

Did you travel to Germany to conduct interviews for this book? If so, what did you learn from these interviews?
I lived for three-plus months in Berlin during the spring and summer of 2013. But I spent over three years immersed in the history and literature of the city and World War II. I conducted no formal interviews for the book.

Parts of Here in Berlin are grimly humorous. I’m thinking of people like Horst Galbrech, the minor official in the Ministry of Culture whose superiors asked him to come up with a dance craze that would “give the West a (managed) run for its money.” Was this based on an actual incident? And, in conducting your research, did you learn of other stories that were surprisingly humorous or otherwise unconventionally revelatory?
For me, humor is the ultimate coping mechanism. How else could anyone survive difficult times? In that particular story, I was eager to lift the skirts of East Germany’s notorious grimness and show the ambition, sensuality, desperation, and exultation cohabiting the same terrain.

As a framing device, you used the character of a woman known only as the Visitor, a twice-divorced woman who returns to Germany after an ill-fated job in Frankfurt 31 years earlier. Why did you choose this framing device?
The Visitor became a way to guide readers around Berlin, to introduce them to parts of the city not in the tourist books, and to meet a few of its unlikely citizens. I felt that the Visitor’s initial disorientation then growing familiarity with the city might ultimately mirror the reader’s. That was my hope, anyway.

Several characters in this book are unapologetic about their complicity during World War II. One former Nazi soldier bluntly tells the Visitor, “We were soldiers. We followed orders.” And Anna Wildgrube, a lawyer, defends her job representing war criminals with, “a cog is not the machine.” And yet you also show acts of tenderness, such as the German seamen who were kind to the young night watchman Ernesto Cuadra, whom they had captured onto their submarine. One assumes from past histories of World War II (The Sorrow and the Pity is a notable example) that these stories are rooted in fact. What perspectives on the war, if any, surprised you?
Yes, I wanted to hold the gaze on complicity—something the Germans have done exceedingly well in recent years, if not right after the war—and try to get inside the possibility that we all, under the right circumstances, might become perpetrators. This acknowledgement, I believe, is the beginning of a deeper understanding of the how and why of violence and war. One of the biggest surprises for me was the extent to which German women supported the Nazi war effort, both at home and abroad.

Authors often write about the past to warn about the future. What do you hope readers will take away from the experience of reading your novel?
My hope is the same as it is whenever I pick up a novel: to have a long, engaging conversation with another sensibility that will take me to places that, in retrospect, will seem absolutely necessary to have gone.

What are you working on now?
Presently, I’m working on theater—an exciting new venture for me. My adaptation of King of Cuba, my sixth novel, will be produced at Central Works Theater in Berkeley next summer, starring solo performer Marga Gomez as Fidel Castro. I’m also adapting my first novel, Dreaming in Cuban, for the stage with producer/director Adrian Alea, and we are in conversation with the Public Theater about it.

ALSO IN BOOKPAGE: Read our review of Here in Berlin.

Author photo by Isabelle Selby

After prowling the sweltering streets of Red Hook, Brooklyn, in her 2013 novel, Visitation Street, Ivy Pochoda hops to the opposite coast for Wonder Valley, a Los Angeles portrait as tough and beautiful as desert grasses. The author talks about her accidental Wonder Valley home, New York versus California noir, the ties between writing and playing professional squash and more.

What initially attracted you to the Wonder Valley area, which is both rather remote and obscure, even to longtime Angeleans?
Well, I had intended to rent a house in Joshua Tree for the weekend which is a rite of passage it seems when you move to LA. But I guess I wasn’t exactly paying attention to the map, since the house (which was an amazing place that was entirely covered in Gaudi-style tile) was nearly 30 minutes east in Wonder Valley. I’d never been somewhere like it before. I’d been in New England wilderness, but desert wilderness was wilder and fiercer. I was immediately enthralled.

All of your characters seem somewhat damaged, and there are no clear-cut “heroes,” yet most of them wind up being sympathetic. Do you think there are legitimate white knights among us, or are we all encumbered by baggage that only becomes visible when our lives begin to unravel?
Hmmmm . . . I don’t know. I think that there are certainly people who are driven to help or bring about change more than others. But that does come at a price and often means sacrificing some other part of yourself. And sacrificing yourself for others, being a white knight as you say, definitely changes you for better, but often for worse. So I guess I do think we are all encumbered in some way. How could we not be? We are all products of our past experiences. That’s what allows us to read and interpret the world. And it’s often hard to manage these experiences. They are what inform our decisions, good or bad.

What prompted you to use the naked man as the starting point for your book? After all, these people could have initially intersected at the airport or at an AA meeting or at some sort of event that brings people from disparate backgrounds together.
I was, as always, inspired by Don DeLillo’s Pafko at the Wall (the prologue to Underworld) in which he uses the famous “Shot Heard Round the World” as a nexus around which to focus not simply the entire city and its various inhabitants but also the entire global nuclear anxiety. So I wanted to kick my story off with an event, something to which all of Los Angeles, at least for one moment, might pay attention. And it’s based on something I remember from my teenage years—a friend of friend, who, after a rather late night, ran naked across the Brooklyn Bridge with fatal consequences.

There’s a very visual, almost cinematic, element to Wonder Valley. Do you imagine joining (or hope to join) some of your writing peers such as Michael Connelly and T. Jefferson Parker on the big screen?
The fact that you call them my peers! I can retire now. Joking aside, that’s something I’d like to do, but I’m conflicted about. I’m not a screenwriter by nature. I love the strange, deep texture of a novel—the way there isn’t pressure to make things HAPPEN ALL THE TIME! I like the languid, lazy river quality. And I don’t want to lose that. I don’t like rules. However, given the right project (my own I’d say) I’d definitely give it a whirl. But I’m not one of those Hollywood-or-bust types.

You played squash professionally. Does your experience as an athlete inform your writing, or was squash just an activity you used to escape from the drudgery of sitting in front of a screen?
Other way around—I used writing to give meaning to the repetitive drudgery of training! But the two activities definitely complement each other. There’s an immediate gratification when you win a squash match, but finishing a novel is a slow burn with a huge payout. There are similarities, too. Writing and professional sports both teach you self-reliance and self-motivation. No one is going to make you write, and no one is going to make you train. And you only have yourself to blame for your own laziness.

You moved from Brooklyn nearly a decade ago, which, much like the West Adams area in which you live now, has some rough edges but is gentrifying. What do you find different about life on the West Coast, and what effect do you think being a transplant has on your insights into Los Angeles?
LA remains a mystery to me in many ways. And I like that. I feel that even driving my normal routes, I can manage to look at everything with fresh eyes. And perhaps since I came out rather recently and don’t have much to do with Hollywood or the beach, I have less of a preconception about LA. I’ve had to stake out my own neighborhoods which are not the ones most people traditionally associate with Los Angeles. My city seems to stretch farther to the east and to the south than is typical.

Visitation Street was East Coast; Wonder Valley is West Coast. What differentiates New York and California noir, and do you have a preference?
I’m not really a huge student of noir. But I think that the abundant sunshine in Los Angeles certain provides a brilliant contrast with nefarious doings. We expect darker behaviors in a place like New York. But out here, noir is stealthy and surprising. I happen to really like California noir for that reason—the contrast between place and subject matter is incredibly appealing. The sunshine is deceptive and definitely capable of making you crazy.

What are you working on next?
I’m thinking of writing another LA novel. I have to write about the place I live. I’d wanted to write a novel set in Maine where I spend time in the summers. But it’s not as immediate to me. So LA, it is. Perhaps something set close to my home in West Adams.

Thane Tierney lives in Inglewood, California, and spent several years commuting daily on the 110 from his home in Inglewood to his office at Warner Bros. Records in Burbank. He never saw a naked guy jogging on it.

As a blizzard blows through New York City, 60-year-old NYU professor Richard Bowmaster faces a series of surprises. His car slams into the back of a white Lexus. The young Latina driver emerges, tries in vain to shut the trunk lid that is popping open, and speeds away as Richard hands her a card with his contact information. Baffled by the suspicious event, Richard heads home to end his hectic day, but soon finds the driver of the other car on his doorstep needing help.

More surprising twists are in store, as readers of Isabel Allende's delightful and deeply moving new novel, In the Midst of Winter, will soon learn. Richard's journey is enriched and entwined with two women who enter his life: Evelyn, an immigrant from Guatelmala, and Lucia, a visiting professor who lives in the downstairs apartment of his home. This beautifully told story—a blend of mystery, romance and historical fiction—embraces the personal histories of these three unique characters, uniting them in unpredictable ways.

Allende, who lives in Northern California, has written more than 20 books since her international bestseller, The House of the Spirits, was published in 1982. We asked her about the inspiration for In the Midst of Winter, the origin of the title, the novel's three fascinating central characters and more.

You said in a TED talk, “All stories interest me and some haunt me until I end up writing them.” What was it about this story that haunted you?
At the beginning I really didn't have a story, I had a time, a place and a snowstorm, and then the characters came to me. They were hiding somewhere, waiting for me to find them. Each one of them had a traumatic past, especially the young Guatemalan immigrant, who was inspired by real cases like hers that I have seen in my foundation. Those stories haunted me and still do, months after I finished the book.

Can you tell us a bit about the quote from Albert Camus that inspired the book’s title: “In the midst of winter, I found there was, within me, an invincible summer.” When did you first read it and why did this passage stick with you? 
I heard the quote at a conference in the Omega Institute, a spiritual retreat upstate NewYork, which the characters in my novel end up visiting. It resonated with me because I was going through one of those apparently endless winters that sometimes happen in life. I was getting divorced after 28 years of marriage, my beloved agent and three close friends died, also my dog had died. I felt that I was stuck in a grey and cold place, but the quote reminded me that I have an invincible summer in me. That summer has saved me from many dark periods, except the illness and death of my daughter. That was the longest winter in my life.

In the Midst of Winter skillfully combines three personal narratives, the beginnings of a love story and an evolving mystery. While writing, how did you work to blend all of these elements into one cohesive story?
I imagined the structure of the novel like a braid. My job was to blend three strands evenly and neatly. Each piece of the braid represented one of the stories. The characters were very different but they had something in common: they were emotionally wounded by events of their past.

“I have to admit that, like Lucia, I am vain, bossy and impulsive; I get in trouble and fall in love easily.”  

Lucia seems similar to you in many ways—she’s passionate, romantic and eager to get the most out of life as she grows older. Do these personal similarities between you and your character make it easier, or harder, to write about her?
Although Lucia resembles me, I was not thinking of me when I developed the character.  I based Lucia on a couple of Chilean journalists who had similar experiences. One of them was a feisty, powerful, sentimental, smart and generous friend who unfortunately died of recurrent cancer some time ago. But I have to admit that, like Lucia, I am vain, bossy and impulsive; I get in trouble and fall in love easily. 

In contrast to Lucia, Richard appears to be a taciturn and distant loner. What are his redeeming qualities?
Lucia likes Richard because he is very smart and quite handsome, but mostly because she guesses that under his cautious and cold appearance he has a kind heart. She was right, as is proven in their common adventure. Also, she believes that he is a wounded man in need of a good woman. That has irresistible appeal to most Chilean women. We love projects. Richard is a long-term project, a challenge that would require a lot of work. Perfect for Lucia.

You’ve been a longtime resident of the San Francisco Bay area. Why did you decide to set this novel primarily in Brooklyn? As a Californian, what’s your attitude toward New York City?
The closest people in my life are my son, Nicolas, and Lori, my daughter-in-law. She is from Brooklyn and every year we all come from California (my grandchildren included) to spend the holidays with her Italian family.  Brooklyn has become my second home and I am blessed to be part of Lori's noisy and sentimental extended family. I like New York City . . . for a week or two, when I visit for work or for the theater and restaurants, but it is too intense for me, I can't handle it alone. In California I live in a cottage by a lagoon, in silence and in nature, in the company of a silly dog, ducks, geese and some insane swimmers who train in the cold waters of the lagoon.

Snow, cold, blizzards, wind—how do you react to winter weather? Love it or loathe it?
I love my Northern California weather, but if I was forced to choose, I prefer cold winter. I do very badly in the heat. In winter one can always add layers of clothing and survive, but there's no escape from humid heat. How can you look good and think straight if you are sweating? Also, when placing my characters in a novel, winter is way more dramatic than summer. I can't imagine Anna Karenina in Jamaica, can you?

You are known not only as a writer, but as a feminist. How do Lucia, Evelyn and/or Richard exemplify the message of women’s rights and liberation? 
I never try to give a message in my fiction. When I see that an author is trying to preach to me in a novel, I feel insulted. If I find a message, it should come between the lines; I will discover it if it resonates with me. The ideas, feelings and experiences of the author appear unavoidably in the writing. Why does the author choose those stories and no others? Because he or she cares about those issues. Why those characters and no others? Because they speak for the author. I write about strong women who overcome great obstacles and manage to do so without bitterness. I don't invent them, I meet them in my life and in my foundation. Those women don't preach feminism, they live it.

Your account of Evelyn’s experiences in Guatemala and her journey to the United States is harrowing. What was your research process for that storyline?
Enrique's Journey by Sonia Nazarios gave me a detailed account of the crossing of Mexico and the border with the United States. Beatriz Manz, from the Center for Latin American Studies in UC Berkeley helped me with the research about the genocide of Indigenous people perpetrated by the government in Guatemala in the '80s and its legacy of violence, corruption, poverty and gangs. Of course, I have been there a couple of times. I have traveled extensively for many years and I can testify that Guatemala is one of the most beautiful countries in the world. The character of Evelyn and her story is based on cases I see in my foundation, as I said before. We work with refugees.

Lucia and Richard show true compassion and empathy for the undocumented immigrant Evelyn. Do you believe this is a timely or a timeless message? 
The world is experiencing a refugee crisis, not the first or the last. After the Second World War there were millions of refugees in search of a place to plant roots. Now that refugees have reached the shores of Europe, it is called a crisis, but really the great migrations of refugees happen in Africa  and Asia. Most refugees are escaping from a situation of life and death, they are escaping from extreme poverty, violence, war or natural disasters, yet they are seldom received with compassion, quite the opposite, they usually face hostility and discrimination. Compassion is always timely and timeless. Why do we forget this essential truth?

You’ve written more than 20 bestselling books and won countless awards, including the Presidential Medal of Freedom. What inspires you to keep writing? 
The loyalty of my readers keeps me going in those rare moments when I suspect that I may have reached the age of rest. I love writing, I love storytelling and I love the innumerable messages of encouragement and gratitude I get from my readers. I suppose I will keep on trying to write for as long as I have a brain.

Author photo (c) Lori Bara
 

Asked what he’s reading now that work on his psychologically compelling fifth novel is complete and the book will soon arrive in bookstores, Olaf Olafsson says he is rereading the novels of his father, the award-winning Icelandic novelist Olafur Sigurdsson.

“My dad passed away in 1988,” Olafsson explains during a call to his home in Manhattan’s Carnegie Hill neighborhood, where he and his wife—now parents of two adult sons and a teenage daughter—have lived since 1989. “We were very close. It’s strange, in that his voice is so clear in his writing. It’s like he’s here again.”

Those close paternal ties are certainly not shared by Magnus, the central character of Olafsson’s latest novel, One Station Away. Magnus, a New York-based neurologist, grew up in England, the only child of a narcissistic mother who believes the world has ignored her great talents as a pianist and a hustler father who lovingly caters to and promotes his wife’s injured ambitions. Without musical talent or creative interest, Magnus is largely rejected by his parents, whom he is expected to call Margaret and Vincent, rather than Mom and Dad.

No wonder then that Magnus’ research interest involves another kind of alienation, the separation of mind from body. Magnus and his scientific colleagues search for consciousness in people who are believed to be brain dead, with unexpected repercussions.

“I came upon an article years and years ago about a British neuroscientist who had begun to search for consciousness in people who were believed to be ‘vegetables,’” Olafsson says of the origin of the novels. “To me this state of being fully conscious but unable to communicate at all is the definition of hell.”

Olafsson, who seems to be drawn to conjoined themes and multiple plotlines, also read about a British pianist named Joyce Hatto, “who got involved with her husband in a fraudulent exercise” to pass off the recordings of other musicians as her own work. Olafsson used quite a bit of Hatto’s story to fill in the love-deprived background of his nonmusical central character. The result is a novel that braids together these seemingly disparate themes and thus raises as many profound questions about personal relationships and love as it answers.

“Needless to say, I like gray,” Olafsson says. “Everybody will come to different conclusions. I want my characters to be complicated.”

Olafsson wrote his first work of fiction as an undergraduate studying physics at Brandeis University in an international scholarship program. “I grew up reading a lot of literature, so when I came here, I wanted to study something else.” His first collection of stories was published in Iceland in 1986 to critical acclaim.

“My physics professor had a higher opinion of me as a physicist than I do,” he says with a laugh. “And he wanted me to finish my Ph.D. I said I didn’t think so because I didn’t have the passion for it, and I was writing my first book. To make a long story short, he introduced me to a former student of his who was supposed to persuade me to continue in physics. That gentleman had just left science and was the CEO of Sony. When he couldn’t help my professor convince me to spend my life doing physics, he offered me a job.

“It never occurred to me that I would go into business. I thought I’d try it for a couple of years. At least I’d learn something that I could use in a book.”

“Needless to say, I like gray. . . I want my characters to be complicated.”

To his surprise, Olafsson became an exceptionally successful businessman. He worked first on a brand new technology called the CD-ROM, and then led the introduction of the Sony Playstation in 1995, for which he is viewed as a sort of demigod in some quarters.

About this gaming legacy, Olafsson demurs, “Back then there was the hope that this form of storytelling would mature and develop and stop being a toylike activity. I don’t follow it very closely now, but I think it’s still pretty rudimentary. It just looks better. And sounds better. I’ve always looked at technology as a set of tools. It serves a purpose, but you can’t be a slave to it. What I was interested in then was introducing a new product and building a business, which I enjoyed back then. And then I left it.”

Since 1999, Olafsson has worked as an executive at Time Warner. Yet he has somehow continued to write fiction. “If there’s one thing I’m decent at, it’s discipline with time,” he says. “If I can write two or three hours before I go to the Time Warner offices, I’m happy.” He writes mainly in an office at the top of his house in Manhattan, but also in outbuildings at the family retreats in Iceland and on Long Island.

Today Olafsson, who along with his wife remains an Icelandic citizen, is executive vice president of Time Warner. “I have a green card. I’m what you call a resident alien,” he says, laughing. “At Time Warner, I’m in charge of corporate strategy. Time Warner has a lot of different businesses so my job is basically to figure out the right composition of assets within the company. So I guess my work is predicting how the world is going to evolve.”

So how is the future looking?

Olafsson laughs. “The media landscape is changing enormously. At dinner with my wife and my publisher last night, we were saying that we’ve been through all kinds of technology changes. But the smartphone? The only thing to call it is a revolution, because of the behavioral changes it has brought through the years. But my hope is that the future is also looking good for books. Needless to say, for me personally, that’s the thing I care about most.”

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

(Author photo by Johann Pall Valdimarsson.)

It’s fitting that Chloe Benjamin was born on All Soul’s Day, a religious festival remembering those who have died. Her latest novel, The Immortalists, explores the eternal mysteries of death and the boundaries of science, religion and magic.

“The Immortalists felt like the book that I was always meant to write,” Benjamin says during a phone call from her home in Madison, Wisconsin. “If I died now, at least I would have written this. I don’t think I’ll ever have a book like this again.”

That’s a somewhat startling statement coming from a young writer, but at just age 29, Benjamin is well on her way to being an established author. Her first novel, the award-winning The Anatomy of Dreams, explored another intangible—the surprising power of lucid dreaming.

Benjamin says of her two novels, “The Anatomy of Dreams is a more internal look at the conscious and the subconscious, and an almost claustrophobic exploration of the central relationship. With The Immortalists, I wanted to cover more ground socially, culturally and historically, as well as interpersonally. It felt important to challenge myself to write a book with greater scope and diversity.”

“It was really one of the hardest writing experiences I’ve had.”

The premise of The Immortalists is immediately gripping: In 1969, the four siblings of the Gold family (Varya, age 13; Daniel, 11; Klara, 9; Simon, 7) live in Manhattan’s Lower East Side, where their father owns a tailor shop. When Daniel gets wind of a mysterious fortuneteller, the children track her down and have an encounter that will forever change their lives. The soothsayer predicts the exact date of each of their deaths.

The four sections of the book address each sibling’s life in order of their predicted demise. Simon was told he would die young, while Varya seems destined to live until a ripe old age. Or is she? One of the book’s central questions is whether the fortuneteller is clairvoyant, or whether her prophecies simply become self-fulfilling.

“I wanted to leave this open to interpretation, to see what the reader thinks,” Benjamin says. “I’ve always really been drawn to books with multiple perspectives or books that show how different people can interpret the same event in such varied ways.”

The book’s beginning brings to mind the four siblings who step through the wardrobe in The Chronicles of Narnia: The Lion, the Witch and the Wardrobe. What’s more, at one point in The Immortalists, Klara’s daughter cries out, “It’s like Narnia!” when it begins to snow.

Benjamin laughs at the reference, explaining, “That was actually something I said when I arrived at college on the East Coast. Everyone made very prompt fun of me, because I was coming from California.”

As for parallels to the C.S. Lewis classic, Benjamin says they were unintentional, although she admits, “I think those books were in the petri dish that created this one.”

The Gold children all take strikingly different paths: Daniel, the oldest Gold boy, becomes a military doctor, while Varya ends up a scientist. Simon and Klara run away to San Francisco, where Simon dances, both ballet and in a gay bar. Klara becomes a Las Vegas magician, following in the footsteps of her namesake grandmother. She even takes to performing her grandmother’s act, the Jaws of Life, in which she hangs from a rope by her teeth, calling herself “The Immortalist.”

Benjamin, who initially knew nothing about magic, modeled the Jaws of Life trick after a real act she stumbled upon during her research. A Hungarian immigrant who called herself Tiny Kline once performed this extraordinary feat over Times Square and later played a flying Tinker Bell in Disneyland. “I think she just held on with her teeth,” Benjamin says. “It was so dangerous and unbelievable.”

It’s not surprising that showmanship is at the forefront of so much of the novel. Benjamin’s mother is a stage actor, and as a child Benjamin was involved in theater and active in ballet until college.

“I miss those things a lot,” she admits, “but I don’t feel brave enough to perform at this point in my life. I’m more comfortable writing something where I can make it as perfect as I can and then put it out there for consumption. But that level of risk and uncertainty and vulnerability—and also a kind of flash and dazzle—was a part of my childhood.”

Benjamin did substantial research for each section of the book, adding: “I don’t make it easy on myself. There’s an adage to write what you know; I’m more interested in writing about what I want to know.”

The research for Varya’s section proved most vexing. At first Benjamin had Varya study a species known as the immortal jellyfish, which seemed to be a perfect thematic fit­­—although the subject had its own challenges.

“I had to read so much molecular biology,” Benjamin recalls, “and that is not the way my brain works. So I’d be practically crying, sitting with this stack of academic journals that I couldn’t possibly understand. I worked on that section for years.” Ultimately, she ended up starting it over. “It was really one of the hardest writing experiences I’ve had.”

The completed novel spans decades, explores a variety of philosophical questions and addresses everything from gay life in 1970s San Francisco to the ethics of scientific research on animals.

As for her next novel, Benjamin is already at work. “I get an idea maybe once every five years,” she says, “and it’s like, OK, well I guess that’s what I’m writing. So as much as it’s driving me crazy, I have faith.”

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