What if you had everything everyone thought you should want, only to realize it wasn’t what you wanted at all? That’s the dilemma facing Lily Wilder, who is about to marry the perfect man at the beginning of I Take You. However, tying the knot means the end of her romantic freedom—something that fun-loving Lily has always reveled in. Eliza Kennedy answered a few questions about her debut novel and its unconventional heroine.

Can you tell us a bit about your path to publication? Where were you when you found out your book had sold?
Before I queried agents, only two people had seen my manuscript: my husband and my father. So I went into the process having no idea whether my book would be met with eagerness, horror, or—worse—total indifference. Still, out it went, and after a slightly excruciating weekend, a few agents responded. They were enthusiastic, and I was over the moon. I eventually went with the wonderful Suzanne Gluck of William Morris Endeavor. She made some editorial suggestions and came up with a list of editors. The wait was on. A few days later, my husband and I were at the playground with our son when I got a call from Suzanne. Josh says he watched as I sat down under the jungle gym and covered my mouth with my hand. He could tell from my face it was good news.

For a novel about a woman who’s not sure she wants to get married, your book takes on a lot of serious topics. Was this your original intention for the book?
My goal from the outset was to write a fun, funny, lighthearted novel about a free-spirited woman rushing calamitously toward the altar. I wanted it to be the kind of book you race through and don’t want to put down. But describing Lily’s out-there behavior and point of view raised certain questions in my mind—about why monogamy is our romantic norm, how messed up our beliefs about female sexuality are, and the realities of happily-ever-after. I realized that I had things to say, and just so happened to have created a forum for saying them. After that, it was a matter of balancing the froth with the weightier stuff.

"Describing Lily’s out-there behavior and point of view raised certain questions in my mind—about why monogamy is our romantic norm, how messed up our beliefs about female sexuality are, and the realities of happily-ever-after."

The wacky atmosphere of Key West provides a great backdrop for this book—can you tell us a little bit more about why you chose it and what it means to you?
Key West is one of my favorite places in the world. I love its bizarre combination of  lush tropical beauty, gorgeous architecture, swashbuckling piratical history, and unabashed smuttiness. It’s a place with a sense of humor, with light and dark sides—much like my main character.

More to the point, my husband and I got married in Key West, and as I was developing my idea for the book, I realized that it was the perfect setting for the slightly unhinged wedding I had in mind.

Lily isn’t perfect, but she’s a lot of fun to spend time with. What’s your favorite thing about her?
Her outspokenness. She says exactly what’s on her mind, all the time. It never occurs to her to do otherwise, even though it often gets her in trouble. Out here in the real world, women are often taught, in ways subtle and more overt, that we should hold their tongues, defer, be diplomatic. Lily didn’t get the memo.

I Take You questions a lot of the traditions around and beliefs about relationships. Which was the most challenging to explore?
The most challenging was the notion that someone can be a serial cheater but a fundamentally good person. I was trying to question our collective impulse to judge people in terms of their success at monogamy—cheating equals bad, faithfulness equals good—which fails to recognize the extraordinary complications of actual people and the realities of life and coupledom. Lily loves her family, she’s a loyal friend and she works very hard at her job. She also just happens to love to sleep around. I didn’t want to apologize for her conduct any more than I cared to suggest that she was behaving well. But I did want to show someone who is more than the sum of her misbehavior.

Women who cheat typically face more social censure than men. Did you ever worry that readers wouldn’t relate to a character like Lily?
I did wonder whether some readers will be turned off by Lily’s behavior, whether because she’s a woman, because they’ve been personally affected by infidelity or because they simply think it’s wrong. With any luck, those readers will appreciate other aspects of her personality, or enjoy the book enough that relatability becomes beside the point.

But I’m actually not sure I agree with the premise of the question. I feel like men are condemned and excoriated for cheating more often than women are. Although perhaps that’s because they do it more often. Or, I should say, they get caught more often.            

You’re married to the author Joshua Ferris—do your writing routines differ? Are you the first to read each other’s work?
Our routines are pretty similar: We park ourselves at our desks in the morning and work throughout the day. We currently write in adjoining rooms, which has taken some adjustment—apparently I’m an offensively loud typist, and he feels free to call out random questions like I’m his personal Wikipedia. We are each other’s first reader, and have gradually learned how to accept criticism with grace, good humor and only occasional threats of violence.

RELATED CONTENT: Read a review of I Take You.

Kevin Kwan is not where one might expect to find a best-selling, New York City-dwelling author. “I’m taking a little break before the craziness of three solid months of touring,” Kwan says from an undisclosed southwestern location far, far away from Manhattan. “I thought I’d look at rabbits frolicking in a field for a while first.”

The tour is to support China Rich Girlfriend, the raucous sequel to his acclaimed debut, Crazy Rich Asians. In it, we catch up with several familiar faces, as down-to-earth Rachel Chu gets married to professor Nicholas Young, who has given up his inheritance to be with her. Rachel grew up not knowing who her father was, and when she discovers his identity she eagerly hops a plane to China to meet him. Nothing can prepare her for the unbelievable “China rich” culture that awaits her, where an exploding economy allows multibillionaires to look down on regular billionaires.

Kwan, who was raised in a wealthy family in Singapore before moving to the United States at age 11, drew upon his own experiences to color both his novels.

“I grew up with that sort of old world money,” he says. “I was not really conscious of that till I stepped out of it and thought, oh my gosh, that was kind of freaky. You go to houses with sunken pools filled with sharks. It is a world with its own dysfunctions.”

Kwan insists that the over-the-top wealth he describes in China Rich Girlfriend—socialites hopping on their private 747s complete with koi ponds, spending nearly $200 million on a single piece of artwork—is based in reality.

"In many ways, it’s toned down. The truth is so much more fascinating than anything I could fictionalize."

“In many ways, it’s toned down,” he says. “My editor had to step in and say, ‘Kevin, this is bordering on fantasy. It’s like you’re writing Game of Thrones.’ But it was real. The truth is so much more fascinating than anything I could fictionalize. For example, the China rich are importing expensive racecars and killing themselves in these horrible accidents.”

That truth served as the inspiration for Carlton, son of Bao Gaoliang, a prominent politician and heir to a pharmaceutical fortune. When Carlton crashes his car in London, his mother, Bao Shaoyen, rushes in to cover up the death of a girl in the passenger’s seat and—seemingly higher on her priority list—to set her son up with the best plastic surgeons. This is the family Rachel comes into when she discovers Bao Gaoliang is her father. Despite their radically different upbringings, Rachel and Carlton form an unlikely friendship, but Bao Shaoyen refuses to acknowledge her husband’s illegitimate daughter, whom she fears will irreparably harm her family’s reputation. 

China Rich Girlfriend is the most fun I’ve had reading a book in quite some time. The vibrantly drawn characters and equally vivid settings in and around Beijing make for a jam-packed, lively story. And it was just as fun to write, Kwan says.

“I found myself laughing out loud at so many sections as I wrote,” he says. “You become like a demon possessed—I had so much fun traveling and doing the research to saturate this world. I did want an element of gravitas but you have to balance that with lightness. This is not an episode of ‘Oprah.’”

Kwan traveled to China to prepare for writing the sequel, and even after several trips overseas, he was surprised by what he found. 

“Every time I go there, it’s almost utterly a different place,” he says. “It never ceases to amaze me. Mainland Chinese are so utterly different from Asian Americans. Here, cultures and traditions are completely intact, things like foods and festivals, whereas in China, the Cultural Revolution erased the Chinese culture completely in many ways. So I would meet these young Chinese, and they don’t know where the root of their belief system comes from—it’s erased from their memory, which is liberating in a way.” 

The result is a cast of characters who are wholly believable and human. But even with meticulous research, Kwan said writing a sequel to a book that did as well as Crazy Rich Asians was daunting. 

“I was very conscious about whether there should even be a book two,” he says. “To me, there was something kind of perfect about the way I ended the [first] book. Some agreed—and of course I also heard the screams from those who didn’t.”

Among those who claim to have no opinion about either of his books are several members of his family.

“There are a lot of people in my family who claim not to have read my books,” he says wryly. “They genuinely may not have read it. They’re too busy nurturing their fortune. I have many cousins who loved it—they get it—they know this world.” 

Kwan is still getting used to the idea that his books could be hotly anticipated. Entertainment Weekly recently named China Rich Girlfriend one of six books to look forward to this summer, along with offerings by the likes of Stephen King and—wait for it—Harper Lee.

“I was kind of flabbergasted,” he says. “Harper Lee is really one of my favorite authors. To Kill a Mockingbird was such a seminal book for me. I read it in college—it’s a disservice to read it when you’re too young. You need to have already come of age. It was an unbelievable kind of thrill to be even mentioned in the same breath as her.”

For now, though, Kwan is focused on his own calm before the storm of what is sure to be another bestseller. The promotion plans include his hosting an interactive guide of New York City’s craziest, richest Asian hotspots. What is yet to be decided is whether this will become a trilogy.

“It really depends on how well this book does,” Kwan says cheerfully, “and whether people want a third.” 

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

Sometimes a character appears in an author’s imagination fully formed. All the writer needs to do is offer him or her a blank page on which to play.

So it was for British writer Jojo Moyes, who hit the bestseller list in America for the first time with her tear-jerking ninth novel, Me Before You. Will Traynor and Louisa Clark, the central characters in the word-of-mouth hit—which has sold more than 5 million copies since it was published in 2012—came to Moyes fleshed out, ready for action. And as Moyes prepared to revisit Lou in the sequel, After You, that sensation resurfaced. Sometimes, lightning strikes twice.

“It’s the same thing again, where all you have to do is put yourself in a room with a new situation and it’s easy to write,” she says, during a telephone call to her home in London.

This time, the character who hit the ground running is Lily, a teenager who shows up on Lou’s doorstep. Lou has embraced new experiences since Will’s death, including an extended stay in Paris and purchasing a condo in London. But she’s become stuck, unable or unwilling to move forward. 

Lily might provide just the push Lou needs.

“They never left me, those characters. Normally, you move on to something else,” Moyes says. 

This is the first time Moyes, the author of a dozen books, has written a sequel. “I’m wary to be seen as writing [this book] because Me Before You had done so well,” she says. “But literally I had one of those moments where I woke up at 5:30 in the morning and sat bolt upright.”

Even with that epiphany and her so-believable-they-seem-real characters, Moyes says she was well aware of the pressures of writing a sequel as compared to a stand-alone book.

“I felt the weight of expectation. Everything I did in this book, I almost could hear the readers saying, no, I don’t want that to happen!” 

Fear not, readers—Moyes was careful that Lou’s character stayed consistent from the first book to the second. But that means Lou’s decision-making skills remain the same, and she doesn’t always operate in her own best interest.

“Everyone kind of assumed she’d sail off into the sunset and live a new life. But knowing Lou, she’s a sensitive soul. She might do that initially, but what she’d been part of would not be easy to walk away from,” Moyes says.

After You is an immersive experience, inviting readers back into the homes of the characters they fell in love with in Me Before You. They’ll experience the mourning that follows a devastating loss, and the glimmers of hope that propel the brokenhearted forward. And, like Me Before You, After You is a book that is best leapt into without knowing much about the plot, which explains the slight vagueness Moyes uses when discussing it.

“It’s partly a book about what happens when you’re left in the wake of somebody else’s decision, whether that be a divorce or the decision for someone to take their own life,” Moyes says. “I’m always fascinated by the way people are entitled to follow their own path.”

While Lou remains a central character, readers will again visit the Clark and Traynor families in all their glory. The quirky Clarks serve as a lighthearted counterpoint to the grief-laden Traynors, whose marriage has crumbled after the loss of their son. Will’s death weighs heavy, and his presence permeates After You as his loved ones make decisions informed by his life—or their loss.  “[T]he moment you opened the box, let out even a whisper of your sadness, it would mushroom into a cloud that overwhelmed all other conversation,” Lou thinks as she tries to decide how much to tell a new acquaintance about her past.

From that, readers might draw lessons of their own. Moyes is a believer in the power of fiction to change hearts and minds. “Everything I’ve learned, I’ve learned from fiction,” she says. “One of the greatest things you learn from fiction is empathy. If you can’t empathize with someone else’s position, it makes a rigid adult.”

She’s not concerned with maintaining appearances with regard to what she reads; recent titles include a thriller by fellow Brit Lee Child and Humans of New York by Brandon Stanton, a collection of photo essays based on the blog of the same name.

Nor is Moyes worried about how her own work is classified. “I’ve never pretended that my books are literary fiction. But what I do believe is you can write commercial fiction that is quality. I know what I put into my books, how hard I work with the language, to make sure everything has a proper rhythm,” she says.

If sales are anything to go by, Moyes has accomplished that goal. Though her novels are serious page-turners and cover a wide range of topics and time periods, they all contain memorable characters and resonant themes.

Moyes is a hard worker as well; she’s published almost a novel per year since she first started writing in 2002. Now that After You is out in the world, the author is planning on taking a bit of a writing break.

“I’m not going to think about writing another book until the end of the year. I just don’t have the mental space,” she says. 

She’s been busy with movies recently: The film adaptation of Me Before You, which stars Emilia Clark (“Game of Thrones”) as Lou and Sam Claflin (The Hunger Games) as Will, is set to debut next June, and Moyes has a screenwriting credit. 

“I’m also moving house. Before I spoke to you, I spent an hour painting a floor. I thought to myself, oh, the glamorous life of an international bestseller,” Moyes adds, laughing.

In the meantime, she’s looking forward to taking her three children along for the After You American book tour. 

“American audiences are so demonstrative. English audiences are usually not as demonstrative,” Moyes says. (She has carried observations like these into her work; in After You, Moyes writes of Lou’s reaction to Will’s father: “If he had been anybody else I might have hugged him just then, but we were English and he had once been my boss of sorts, so we simply smiled awkwardly at each other.”)

There’s one more national difference that’s pretty important to a best-selling author like Moyes.

“In the United States, if they ask how many books you’ve sold, you say 5 million copies, and they break into applause. In England, they’re like, oh, stop showing off.

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

Janice Y.K. Lee’s 2009 debut, The Piano Teacher, was beloved by readers and critics for its pitch-perfect portrayal of Hong Kong in the years after World War II. In her second novel, The Expatriates, the author—who was born in Hong Kong and educated in the U.S.—explores modern-day Hong Kong through the eyes of three American women who are all struggling to find their roles in a land far from home. 

Lee answered a few questions about the new novel, her writing process and the reasons that being between cultures can be a good thing for both a writer and her characters. 

It’s been a while since your debut, The Piano Teacher. How long have you been working on this novel, and how did the experience of writing a second novel compare to the first? 
Both books took around five years, which I've come to think of as my normal gestation period, if you can draw any conclusions from a sample of two. When I was writing The Piano Teacher, there were a lot of unknowns for me: Could I finish a novel? Could I sell it? Would it ever see the light of day? So I labored at it, sort of in the dark and without telling most people what I was doing when I disappeared into the library or was at my desk. It was a fraught and anxious time but I've romanticized it in my head as a glorious time of discovery. 

When I started The Expatriates, I also didn't know if I could finish another novel. I always remember a short essay that Jeffrey Eugenides wrote in the New Yorker about how being a novelist is the only profession in which you sign up to be an amateur every single time you start a book (paraphrasing wildly, with apologies to him) and I felt that acutely. I never write with an outline or a plot in mind so it really does feel like fumbling around, looking for a lifeline. This time, though, I felt comfortable saying, "I'm working" when people asked me what I was doing, and the greatest benefit was that I could spend my afternoons reading books and calling it work. 

The book opens with a lovely set piece about the expatriate mindset and the different reasons people try to start a new life somewhere else that immediately establishes the tone of the story and gives insight into the characters. Did you always plan to frame the story that way?
I wish I could say I had had a plan, any plan! I never had an inkling where it would all go. I started The Expatriates with the image of a woman, lying on her bed, unable, unwilling to get up. That's all I had. Then, after I had delved into that character for several dozen pages and found another character for her to interact with, I understood the novel was set in contemporary Hong Kong. After that realization, I wrote the opening passage in a feverish rush, sort of channeling the arrivals that happen every day, trying to get right at the feel of the world the reader would be entering. I wanted the readers to be plunged into this world. 

This story is told from the points of view of three very different women. How did you settle on this structure, and did one voice come more easily than another?
When I was entangled in it, I wished more than once that I had written a simple A to Z timeline with one perspective. I got bogged down in the weeds trying to figure it out but it just worked out that way. I wish I was able to be more deliberate with the way I write, or that I had more control, but I sort of nose around in the dark until it feels right, print it out, read it, and change what feels wrong. It's a very inefficient, laborious process but the only way I know. When I began The Expatriates, it was with this image of the woman in bed. From there, I started to develop a story and eventually another woman came along. A year into it, one of the woman started acting erratically and unlike herself. I could not figure her out. 

It was at this critical juncture that I had coincidentally managed to carve out some time to go to Yaddo, the artist colony. When I was there, away from family obligations and life stresses, I was really able to delve deeply into the women, and I suddenly realized that that odd woman was actually two women. She had been acting oddly because those had not been her actions, her words, her thoughts. The book was about three women. It was such a relief and so obvious when I realized it, and from there the story started to unspool in a much more organic way. 

You grew up in Hong Kong, but you have said that, as a Korean, you didn’t feel at home there. How did that experience shape this novel?
I've always felt more at home in America than in Hong Kong. I love Hong Kong and it's an amazing city and a wonderful place to grow up and raise children but I never saw myself there permanently. So I think you'll see that feeling infused into the novel. Very few expatriates choose to make Hong Kong their permanent home so there's always a temporary feel to their experience. I have never lived in Korea either, so I don't know how that would feel. I always tell people that I am not an expatriate but I'm not a local either. I think being between worlds is a good thing for a writer. 

What is your relationship with Hong Kong these days? Do you think it will continue to inspire as a setting for your fiction?
I'm nostalgic about Hong Kong. We just moved back to the U.S. this summer, and there's a lot we miss about Hong Kong, my children especially. We miss hiking the beautiful mountains, swimming in November, everything being 15 minutes away. Life in Hong Kong is easy, in a way, because it feels like your life is on pause. Hong Kong will always be in my DNA and I love it but I'm not sure that it will be the setting of my next book. I think I'd like to venture further afield. 

Your debut novel was set in Hong Kong in the 1950s, and this book is contemporary. Was it harder to capture the past or the present? 
I did a lot of research for The Piano Teacher, in libraries and universities. I'd have to stop and find out how much a ferry ticket cost in 1950, what movie would have been playing in the theaters, or what people would have worn on an airplane flight, a rare luxury at the time. I loved that process, as it was fun to be a student again. For this book, I didn't have to do any research, just live my life and take from it liberally. So that was very different. Sometimes, I found myself longing for the structure of the library and the materials. But it was also freeing, to know that I was already an expert in the field, as it were. 

For a lifestyle that is outside the norm in many ways, expatriate life can be very traditional, especially for the so-called “trailing spouse.” Could you talk a little bit about this and the way it affects your characters?
It's an odd situation that's hard to describe. Imagine giving up your friends, family, and most likely, job, to follow your spouse halfway around the world. Imagine when you get there, you are given a house, a servant, possibly a driver, and a country club membership. And then imagine that you suddenly have eight more hours in your day. Because that's what it feels like. 

It's hard to generalize because everyone has such a different experience but I saw spouses who ran the gamut from ultra-traditional housewife to globetrotting entrepreneurs. But the stereotype is of the housewife “trailing spouse” because a lot of people do come because of their spouse's job. So people do different things with their new worlds. Some women get very into charities, some get very fit, some start small businesses. What I came away is that everyone is trying to do the best that they can in the situation they find themselves in, so I think that's the positive part of it.

One of the novel’s central themes is forgiveness: how to get it, who deserves it, etc. One of the main characters is even named Mercy. What made you want to explore this topic?
As I get older, I realize that all those tropes you're told when you're younger—Be kind and people will be kind to you; Be open; Be generous; Give without expectation—they are all true. They seem wildly impractical and somewhat insane when presented to you as a child and young adult, not to mention impossible. But to move forward in life, you have to forgive and go on. I don't pretend to be able to keep to these ideals but I like to remember that that is the goal.

The men in the lives of these women don’t seem to struggle with guilt and the need for forgiveness as much as the women do. If the book were told from a male point of view, how would it be different?
Oh, I don't know. Men seem an utterly different species to me, a species that I cherish and adore, but I don't pretend to know anything about how the male mind thinks. I have a wonderful husband and three amazing boys, but their existence on Earth seems to run on a parallel plane to the one women are on. Of course, we interact closely, but what the other takes away from any given situation seems to be wildly different. I have a lot of close girlfriends and we share our experiences. Men don't seem to share their experiences in the same way. They blow off steam by doing physical activities together, and women get closer by exchanging confidences, at least that's what it's been in my experience. I think I know something about motherhood and women but I don't ever claim to know a lot about men. If this book were told from a male perspective, I think it would have been a lot shorter and had a lot more action! I don't know about how men forgive themselves either. I don't think they find it easier, but I think they find it easier to compartmentalize their anger and sorrow. I think that's a skill well worth having and I envy them that. 

What are you working on next? 
I'm working on getting on the pre-publication work done for The Expatriates, so nothing is on my radar yet for next project. I'd like to write for television, and so I get to watch a lot of television and call it work. But also noodling on images and characters, which may then go forth to populate a future novel. 

Author photo by Xue Tan.

RELATED CONTENT: Read our review of The Expatriates. 

Elizabeth McKenzie’s new novel, The Portable Veblen, is a delightful story about 30-year-old Veblen Amundsen-Hovda, a single woman who makes her own clothes and works as a temp at the Stanford School of Medicine. There, she meets and falls in love with Paul Vreeland, a 34-year-old researcher who has designed a device that will help medics perform emergency craniotomies on the front lines of combat. The book is a humorous, multilayered tale of Veblen and Paul’s engagement, their relationships with their respective families and a pharmaceutical conglomerate of dubious ethics that has expressed interest in the device Paul wants to test.

We recently spoke with McKenzie about her novel, her writing process, and her plans for future projects.

Your female protagonist was named after Thorstein Veblen, the early 20th-century economist who coined the phrase “conspicuous consumption” and, as you state in the novel, “espoused antimateralistic beliefs.” Why did you choose this economist as your protagonist’s namesake?
When I began this novel her name was Jane, but I realized very soon that Thorstein Veblen’s work was informing the atmosphere of the book, as it had for me growing up—my family held very antimaterialistic beliefs, not entirely to the liking of my younger self!  And then I thought about what it would mean if Veblen’s mother bestowed that name on her daughter—which opened up lots of other possibilities.

RELATED CONTENT: Read our review of The Portable Veblen.

The novel is written with a wonderful light touch, but you also include complicated medical terms and descriptions of medical procedures. Did you need to conduct a lot of research for those aspects of the novel?
Yes, the research took me all over the place—I’d find myself following various leads, very absorbed in veterans issues and news about traumatic brain injury or facts about the workings of the FDA and the Department of Defense or the pharmaceutical industry. I also spent time in a number of locations pertinent to the story, such as the Stanford Hospital (where I once worked as a temp), the Menlo Park VA and a medical device conference.  There was a feeling of timeliness to these subjects, as new things on all fronts kept appearing in the daily paper.  It’s exciting to feel connected that way.

Product marketing comes in for considerable criticism here. Paul’s father cautions him to watch out for the sharks at Hutmacher Pharmaceuticals. At DeviceCON in San Jose, Paul, who is to speak as a “Key Innovator,” learns of a Pre-Wounded Summit and asks, “Is there any limit to the marketing of warfare?” Do you think there should be limits to what is marketed? Do you think it’s possible to use marketing for good?
Definitely for books! (In my opinion, booksellers have the purest motives in sales!) But yes, the medical and defense marketing I stumbled into surprised me. I’d come across a product for some really sobering purpose—such as an air freshener for use around corpses—and the description of it would have exclamation points, as if it was going to be really exciting to buy it and use it. My favorite book about marketing and advertising is Our Masters Voice by James Rorty. He elucidates all this with gleeful disgust.

Another theme that runs through the book is mental illness. Paul’s brother, Justin, has emotional issues. Veblen’s father is in an institution, and her mother, Melanie, is a hypochondriac. You handled these elements of the story with delicacy and discretion. Was it difficult to write about these issues?
Thank you for mentioning this! Mental illness and its effects on others was a really important theme for me in this book, and yes, it was difficult. I’d been wanting to write about the subject for a long time but from an impartial and empathetic vantage point, and with the shield of humor.

That Veblen believes she can communicate with a squirrel suggests that you’re fond of Beatrix Potter’s The Tale of Squirrel Nutkin. You even mention the story in your book. Was the Potter book one of your favorites when you were growing up? And what books, adult as well as children’s, have shaped your sensibility as a writer?
I did love the Potter books as a child, especially the illustrations. But The Tale of Squirrel Nutkin actually scared me. Nutkin’s antics, which were clearly going to lead to no good, filled me with dread. But I did love the riddles and rhymes!  I’ve been shaped and moved by so many books—early on I loved the Beat poets and the comic imagination of Richard Brautigan and Vonnegut and Tom Robbins and John Nichols. Later heroes include Henry James and James Joyce and Edith Wharton and Flannery O’Connor and Flaubert. I could go on and on!

You have written about furry creatures before. In “Savage Breast,” a story published in the New Yorker in December 2014, you wrote about a woman who wakes up one day to discover her house filled with furry beasts. In this novel, squirrels feature prominently. Is it coincidence that some of your recent work features animals? What do you think writing about animals allows you to do that writing about people might not?
You’re right, the furries have been taking over in my stories—I’ve just written one about chinchillas! I’m superstitious about analyzing why because it might make them go away, but there’s something very touching in the way people let down their guards with animals and that’s usually the focus for me.

The Portable Veblen is densely packed with much detail, many characters, and multiple story lines. The book obviously required a lot of preparation and planning. How do you approaching the writing of a novel or short story?
In this case I had diagrams on large sheets of paper and something in my head like a musical score.  I also did more drafts than I can count, and stumbled into many dead ends.  There was a constant back and forth between making practical assessments of the progress (and damage), and writing spontaneously, letting the narrative develop unplanned.

What are you working on now?
I have a few unfinished novel ideas, and about five or six new stories I’m shifting between. The one I’m liking the most right now is about a woman who is about to win an award for service to her company and is growing paranoid as she waits in the audience for the announcement. The situation is really uncomfortable and now I hope to discover what her problem is.

Author photo © Linda Ozaki

Reimagine a book as beloved and timeless as Pride and Prejudice? Inconceivable! Curtis Sittenfeld is probably one of the few modern authors self-assured—and talented—enough to try.

And she succeeds, wonderfully. In Eligible, Liz Bennet is a New York City magazine editor on the verge of turning 40. She’s in a dead-end relationship, but she doesn’t know it yet. When her father suffers a health scare, Liz and her beautiful older sister, Jane, decamp to the family home in Cincinnati for the summer to help care for him. 

None of the five Bennet daughters is married—to their mother’s shame—and only Liz and Jane have actual jobs. Kitty and Lydia spend their days at the local CrossFit, and Mary is a perpetual college student.

When Liz is introduced to the handsome but arrogant Fitzwilliam Darcy, a Cincinnati neurosurgeon, she is immediately put off by his arrogance. But Darcy’s friend Chip Bingley, a recent star of a “Bachelor”-like reality TV show, falls for Jane. Liz and Darcy keep crossing paths (literally—they jog the same route), and their hate-hate relationship slowly transforms into something else.

Eligible sparkles with Austen-esque wit and intelligence and is a pure pleasure to read. How did Sittenfeld, the author of four previous novels, including the bestsellers Prep and American Wife, decide to remake a bona fide classic? She was recruited as part of The Austen Project, in which bestselling authors retell Austen stories in a modern way. 

“When someone offers to pay you to spend a few years in the world of Pride and Prejudice, it’s very hard to say no,” Sittenfeld says during a call to her home in St. Louis. 

Sittenfeld is quick to point out that the project is not meant to improve upon the original.

“I definitely see this as an act of homage and admiration, and it’s not like I thought, well, Pride and Prejudice has gotten stale and it falls to me to make it relevant,” she says. “I think Pride and Prejudice is perfect. I understand different people will have different reactions to Eligible, and I’m OK with that.”

Making Austen-era characters seem modern took some planning on Sittenfeld’s part. 

“I tried to think about how the characters act in Pride and Prejudice, and how they spend their time, and to find present-day equivalents,” she explains. “The characters arose out of that. If you were to describe the characters in Pride and Prejudice, you’d probably use the same or similar adjectives to describe their counterparts in Eligible. I wanted them to be recognizable as themselves but also wanted to make it feel fresh.”

“I tried to think about how the characters act in Pride and Prejudice, and how they spend their time, and to find present-day equivalents. . . . I wanted them to be recognizable as themselves but also wanted to make it feel fresh.”

The first modern twist is positioning Bingley as a reality TV star. 

“Pride and Prejudice starts with this bachelor arriving in town. In the present day in a medium-sized Midwestern city, if a new eligible man arrived, how would everyone know he was single?” Sittenfeld says. “The reality show seems like a plausible explanation.”

Secondly, Liz and Jane are independent professionals, twice as old as the original characters. And Liz (gasp) has a sex life.

“Some readers may not like that she’s sexually active,” Sittenfeld says. “She’s 38, and it’s 2013 in the book, so that seems fairly realistic to me. In no way do I consider her to be trashy; it isn’t meant to be a comment on the fact that people’s morals have fallen.

“I have enormous affection for all my characters in general and in Eligible specifically,” she says. “I actually think the way I can be most generous to them is just by liking them. If I as a writer am condescending to my own characters, it makes them unappealing to the reader and doesn’t make them three–dimensional.”

Though she’s a Cincinnati native, Sittenfeld hasn’t lived in her hometown for years and had never set a novel there before.

“I did have to do research,” she says. “It was fun. I was home with my own family. I was visiting my parents for Christmas and literally walking around with my cell phone trying to decide what apartment building Darcy would live in.”

Her brother, P.G. Sittenfeld, a city councilman, kept close tabs on how she wrote about the city.

“My brother is Mr. Cincinnati,” she says with a laugh. “He’s a little protective of the city and wanted to be sure I depicted the city in a flattering way.”

The busy mother of two children, ages 5 and 7, Sittenfeld has become fiercely mindful of her writing time.

“Because I’m lucky to have flexibility in my schedule, that actually means I need to be more careful. In theory, I could have lunch with friends every day. In practice, it means I would never finish a book.”

As a mom, Sittenfeld says she has a whole new respect for reading as a source of pleasure as well as food for thought.

“After I became a parent, I developed a greater appreciation for a book or TV show or movie that is light or fun but still smart,” she says. “Maybe I’m tired at the end of the day and I have half an hour before bed to devote to pure entertainment, so I want something that doesn’t make me feel incredibly depressed. I feel like Eligible is supposed to be that thing for people. There are very few books that are engrossing and smart but not depressing. It was a fun challenge to write a fun, fizzy, but still intelligent book.”

“My other books—I’m proud of them, but I don’t know if ‘fun’ is the first word I would use to describe any of them,” she says. “I feel like this is fun. It’s good to learn to be fun at 40—it’s never too late!”

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

Life, death, love, loneliness and grief are the building blocks of Jon Cohen’s wondrous new novel, along with nonstop action, humor and a broad cast of characters whose actions converge like a perfectly crafted jigsaw puzzle.

Undergirding everything in Harry’s Trees is the belief that “the ordinary world is extraordinary, all the time, for everyone.” That guiding principle becomes a recipe for magic that remains firmly rooted in reality, notes Cohen, speaking by phone from his home outside Philadelphia, Pennsylvania.

Harry Crane is a U.S. Forest Service analyst who literally can’t see the forest for the trees. This paper-pushing bureaucrat spends his days “in a building utterly bereft of wood,” longing for the smell of pinesap. Although his wife, Beth, urges him to quit and work in a local arboretum, Harry settles for buying a lottery ticket each week and yearning for a stroke of good luck.

Instead, misfortune strikes. After urging her husband to forget his lottery ticket “just this once,” Beth is killed in a freak accident while waiting for Harry. In the aftermath, as Harry tries to find his way past grief and guilt, his world collides with that of a nurse, Amanda Jeffers, and her 10-year-old daughter, Oriana, who are reeling from the sudden death of their husband and father, Dean. After they meet in a forest deemed enchanted by the fairy tale-loving Oriana, Harry begins living in an elaborate tree house built by Dean before he died.

“The call of a tree and the childhood beckoning of a treehouse—that’s interesting to me,” Cohen says. “Everybody’s got a special tree, whether currently as an adult, or a tree from childhood.” He goes on to describe a mulberry tree at the end of his boyhood street that was overgrown with honeysuckle and made for a great nest.

“I’ve had all sorts of trees,” he adds. “Still do.”

Cohen sets his novel in the Endless Mountains of Pennsylvania, where Cohen and his wife once owned a small farmhouse and barn. The property and nearby landmarks provided inspiration, especially for a picturesque library where a beloved librarian, Olive, lends Oriana a strange handmade book called The Grum’s Ledger. This fairy tale about an ogre-like creature becomes pivotal to an amazing cascade of events. Throw in the fact that Oriana wears a red coat and Harry has an evil brother named Wolf, and you’ve got yourself a grown-up fairy tale.

Almost. “There’s not a single thing in there that can’t happen,” Cohen observes. “The world is imbued with a little magic. But I made darn sure that there were real-world explanations for what seem like magical events.”

Grief is the force that unites Harry, Amanda and Oriana, and as Cohen explains, “Again and again, reality-based people are ready for magic. I truly believe that when you are in love or when you grieve, you cross a line and see the world in an altered way.”

It’s no accident that both a librarian and a nurse are major players in Harry’s Trees. Those two details help explain Cohen’s unique career trajectory. He was raised by a children’s librarian mother and an English professor father who was a renowned Herman Melville scholar.

“It was a world immersed in books,” he recalls. “You would think I would go right to writing.”

“I truly believe that when you are in love or when you grieve, you cross a line and see the world in an altered way.”

Ironically, he didn’t write in high school or college. “Not a single story,” Cohen says. He earned an English degree at Connecticut College, but after working as a hospital orderly during a college gap year, he made an unexpected move and obtained a second degree in nursing.

“That ignited everything,” Cohen says. “My 10 years as a registered nurse—working on a cancer ward and then ICU/CCU—that turned me into a storyteller.

“My job was to help people in crisis,” he elaborates. “So many personalities, so many ways to cope, so many intimate and amazing details. So much life. [It was] narrative, action, a ticking clock, something at stake—all right there in a hospital room. And that’s the way I write—something is always happening, constant momentum.”

This surgically precise narrative style is what makes Cohen’s writing so readable. And his plot is exactly like an operating room—controlled chaos that leads to a carefully planned outcome.

In his time off from the hospital, Cohen finally began writing stories. He eventually wrote two novels (Max Lakeman and the Beautiful Stranger and The Man in the Window), received a National Endowment for the Arts fellowship and left medicine. Nonetheless, he feels that nursing became his muse, and each of his novels features a nurse.

But this nurse-turned-writer had yet another career change up his sleeve. After his novels were optioned for movies, he taught himself screenwriting with help from a book titled Making a Good Script Great by Linda Seger. He caught the attention of director Jan de Bont (Twister, Speed), which led to Cohen writing the screenplay for the 2002 blockbuster Minority Report.

“I was happy to have the experience and very lucky,” Cohen says. “It’s nice to have my name on the poster.” Although he describes his screenwriting adventures as “a lark and an oddity,” Cohen always approached the experience pragmatically: “It helped pay some of the bills, but I treated it very rationally and saved the money. I didn’t buy a Jaguar.”

With Harry’s Trees, Cohen has returned to his writing roots. He’s a novelist once more, writing “the one and true voice that I do over and over again—the small, decent guy overwhelmed by events.”

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

Author photo by Andy Shelter.