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Carla Jean Whitley

Fiction

Peter Gethers

Interview by Carla Jean Whitley

Writer, producer, Random House Studio publisher and creative powerhouse Peter Gethers is best known to readers as the author of three memoirs about life with his cat Norton. His new novel, Ask Bob, delves into the complicated romantic life of a New York City veterinarian.

Tell us about your pets.
I was always a dog person. But when I got Norton—a gift from a girlfriend—I instantly became a cat nut. Now I have two Scottish Fold cats: an 11-year-old (whose ears didn’t fold) named Harper—a girl—and a 1-year-old boy named Mitch, a total devil. Truth be told, I love all animals, and the menagerie that Dr. Bob has is my fantasy.

What made you decide to carry over the pet theme from the Norton books to your fiction?
This novel didn’t start out with a pet theme. It started out as a novel about human relationships.I wanted to write about someone who had what he thought was a perfect relationship, only to have it yanked away. I then wanted to write about his new relationship—and about the difficulty of competing with “the ghost of perfection,” a phrase once said to me by Roman Polanski.

As I began writing, it occurred to me that by making Bob a vet, I could deal a bit further with the complexities of human relationships. Not only must he compete with the ghost of perfection, he must learn to deal with a "real" relationship—a human one, and a difficult human one—rather than a simple human-to-pet relationship. I think my book is all about celebrating the difficulties of human relationships—romantic and family. Things that come easily are not usually satisfying—nor do they last.

By the way, I’m not in any denigrating human/pet relationships. My relationship with my cats is extraordinary, and I love them deeply. I just think we have to keep some perspective.

How did you end up writing a relationship story about a man who isn't good at relationships?
Well . . . um . . . I have been accused in the past of having better relationships with my cats than I do with people. So it was kind of a natural leap. I don't think I’m too bad at either—but it seemed like a good topic.

You also write thrillers under the pseudonym Russell Andrews, and you’ve worked in TV and theater, most recently with the off-Broadway hit Old Jews Telling Jokes. How does writing a novel differ from a play or screenplay?
I think writing a novel is the hardest thing I do. I think it's one of the hardest things anyone can do—taking several hundred blank pages and filling them up. Screenplays are much, much easier—they're basically blueprints for directors and actors (movies are not a writer's medium—if a screenwriter can turn in something that's well structured and has some character development, his or her job is basically done). TV is about dialogue. Film is about structure. Novel writing is about a lot more. Writing a good play is at least as hard as writing a novel, although it’s a very different skill set. It requires a huge amount of discipline. I can say this because I don’t consider Old Jews Telling Jokes a play—it’s really a revue. I like it, and I’m not putting down how hard it was to do—but it was a lot like writing a sitcom. It’s not exactly August: Osage County.

 

Do your processes differ when you pen different types of books?
Yes. Not so much the thought process, but the voice. I think novels are a lot about voice and, obviously, the voice I’ve chosen to use in Ask Bob is a lot different from the voice I used in the thrillers. Writing those thrillers, though, helped me a lot. They are very plot driven—which my first two novels were definitely not—and as a result, Ask Bob is a much more satisfying novel. Plots are hard. I often say, somewhat snidely, that all too often, when critics use the term “literary” writer, they’re referring to someone who doesn’t know how to tell a story.

 

Which of your books would you most like to see adapted to a different medium?
I’d love to see my last three thrillers—Aphrodite, Midas and Hades—done either as films or as a TV series (they all have the same character and I’m convinced he’d be a great TV character). My deep, dark fantasy is to do a one-man show using the three cat books. I’m a good talker, and I’d love to try that. I’ll never have the nerve to do it, however, especially now that I know how hard it is to get a play going and make any money.

What’s next for you?
I have a lot of stuff going on. In fact, it's gotten a bit out of hand. We’re shooting our first TV series for Random House Studio. It’s based on The New Midwestern Table by Amy Thielen, and airs in September on the Food Network.

We also have several films with my partner, Focus Features, which are on the fast track. So I hope to have three feature films in production within the next 12 months for Random House Studio. I have a pretty solid list of books that I’m editing and publishing, too.

Away from Random House, I’m working with Stephen Sondheim and Wynton Marsalis on a seven-show performance at City Center. I’m also working with my writing and producing partner, Dan Okrent, because Old Jews is opening in Chicago in October and in London in March 2014.

Finally, I have another book to write for Holt. This one's nonfiction. I can tell you the tentative title right now: Into the Fire: The Search for the Meaning of Food, Wine and Life.

Sometime soon I hope to get some sleep.

ALSO IN BOOKPAGE: Read our review of Ask Bob.

Editor's note: The version of this Q&A that appeared in our August 2013 issue was condensed for print.

Writer, producer, Random House Studio publisher and creative powerhouse Peter Gethers is best known to readers as the author of three memoirs about life with his cat Norton. His new novel, Ask Bob, delves into the complicated romantic life of a New York City veterinarian. Tell us about your pets.I was always a dog person. […]
FictionWomen's Fiction

Anna Quindlen

Interview by Carla Jean Whitley

What inspires a female writer whose work runs the gamut from a Pulitzer Prize-winning column to best-selling novels to thought-provoking essays? Anna Quindlen says she admires a number of female writers.

“Where do I begin? With Jane Austen, I suppose, but there’s also Edith Wharton, Mary Wesley, Elizabeth Bowen, George Eliot, Louisa May Alcott, and Maud Hart Lovelace,” Quindlen writes in an email interview. “And some of my contemporaries consistently blow me away, like Alice McDermott and Amy Bloom. Alice Munro won the Nobel. Nuff said.”

Quindlen’s list focuses on novelists, and in fact that’s the direction she has chosen for her career, which began in reporting before she became a columnist. But life and work don’t always carry us in expected directions; Quindlen’s most recent book prior to Still Life with Bread Crumbs was Lots of Candles, Plenty of Cake, a collection of essays on aging.

“The strategy is meant to be that I write fiction fulltime,” she explains. “But as I investigated the new aging in our society, in my own life and those of my friends, I decided I wanted to mull it over in print. Hence Lots of Candles, Plenty of Cake. It just happened.”

"When the notebook is your imagination, it’s often harder to decipher."

She’s back on track with Still Life with Bread Crumbs, which is an exploration of aging through the experiences of a photographer whose life has been lived in the public eye. Rebecca Winter’s iconic photograph “Still Life with Bread Crumbs” made her famous and brought the kind of money that allowed her to comfortably dwell in her upscale Manhattan apartment for some time, even after her husband split. But Winter’s funds are dwindling, so she sublets her apartment and moves to a cabin in rural New York.

Quindlen says she can relate to Winter’s struggle to balance art and commerce. “I think every writer feels she is one book from irrelevancy. It’s such an uncertain way to make a living: no regular paycheck or pension, no healthcare plan or regular hours. We’ve all watched great talents fall in and out of fashion, and that could happen to any of us,” Quindlen says. “That’s why it’s so important to do what Rebecca learns to do: judge yourself by yourself. At a certain point at the very end of a book, I read it over and have an interior conversation: Self, I say to myself, this is good work. It’s no substitute for being able to pay the gas bill, as Rebecca knows well, but it helps to insulate you against the fickle opinion of the world.”

Like Winter, Quindlen has houses both in New York City and the country, but she says the city is home. “New York City and I have the same metabolism. I’m like cockroaches; I’m here for the duration.” But the more meandering pace of country life is certainly reflected in the novel. Still Life utilizes shorter chapters, each with telling titles, and the story isn’t always linear.

“I decided I wanted to deconstruct the conventional novel. We absorb the notion that backstory should fit seamlessly into present action, that every aspect needs to be spun out into lengthy observation. I decided to take the sandwich apart: ham, cheese, bread. Current action, backstory, supporting materials. The chapter titles are mustard, I guess. (Now I’m hungry.),” Quindlen says. And we should expect to see echoes of this approach in the future: “I really enjoyed doing this; it’s gotten under my skin and is definitely coloring the novel I’m working on now, although it’s quite different.”

Though she draws from the same well of talents whether she's reporting or dreaming up fiction, Quindlen says fiction challenges her in very different ways than journalism. “Not having the reporting to rely upon means that I’m a good deal more adrift. More of what I do comes to me at random times: cooking dinner, powerwalking. When I’m struggling with nonfiction, I can always look in my notebooks. When the notebook is your imagination, it’s often harder to decipher.”

Even so, common threads remain through her present work and that of her past. In the aforementioned New York Times essay, Quindlen concluded, “I am a reporter of invented stories now, but no less a reporter because of that.”

Carla Jean Whitley is a writer and editor based in Birmingham, Alabama. 

 

RELATED CONTENT
Read our review of Still Life with Bread Crumbs.

What inspires a female writer whose work runs the gamut from a Pulitzer Prize-winning column to best-selling novels to thought-provoking essays? Anna Quindlen says she admires a number of female writers.

Fiction

Judith Claire Mitchell

Interview by Carla Jean Whitley

The heroines of Judith Claire Mitchell’s engrossing new novel—sisters Vee, Delph and Lady Alter—don’t bear a lot of similarity to their creator. The three were raised with a family legacy of suicide: Their great-grandmother Iris became the first to kill herself after her husband’s chemical inventions were used as World War I weapons.

All told, six members of the generations before Vee, Delph and Lady died by their own hand, with four of them committing suicide in their 40s. Now in that decade themselves, the Alters view their fate as inevitable. In A Reunion of Ghosts, the sisters recount their family history as they seek to understand its relationship to their own stories.

Although this is Mitchell’s second novel with ties to World War I, her interest is incidental. Her grandparents all came to America from Europe, some before the war and others after.

“But it wasn’t a big family thing. Historically, I find World War I so fascinating because I feel it’s when the 20th century became the 20th century. It’s when the Victorian era died completely,” explains Mitchell, who is a professor of English at the University of Wisconsin. “The horrors of that war—it introduced chemical warfare, it introduced a level of violence that, as bad as war had been, it had not been experienced quite this way. The peace treaty afterward was so poorly wrought that I firmly believe the wars we’re fighting right this minute are a product of this peace.”

A Reunion of Ghosts originated after Mitchell saw a bit of a PBS program featuring Clara Haber, on whom the character Iris is based. Clara did, in fact, kill herself after work by her husband, Fritz Haber, became the basis for chemical warfare during World War I.

“That seemed so dramatic to me. That stayed with me,” Mitchell says. “I tried to work them in as characters in the novel I thought I was working on.”

But gradually, the Haber-​inspired storyline took over. “The more I found out about them, the more I found out about their descendants, the more I became fascinated with this entire family. Finally, I came up with the idea of completely inventing the fourth generation and telling the story from their point of view,” Mitchell says.

Ultimately, the novel became a suicide note from the three sisters, who set their expiration date as December 31, 1999. “It’s also about the 20th century and all the terrible things that go wrong,” Mitchell says with a laugh, “and I kind of dump it on this poor family.” So it seemed fitting, she explains, “to end it with the end of the century.”

Once Mitchell decided to write the novel as a suicide note, it began to flow. Throughout the novel, the sisters refer to themselves as “we,” as though one’s life story is a reflection of all three. It’s an unusual stylistic choice, but one that draws the reader ever closer to the narrators.

“That voice and that format just helped me,” she says. “I wasn’t really influenced by other writers or other books, I really felt like I was kind of alone in a bunker with this family, some of whom were real and some of whom I was inventing, and just had to figure it out on my own.”

The resulting tale recounts the tight-knit relationship of the three sisters and the family’s history of suicides, two of which take place in the Upper West Side apartment in New York City that has been handed down through the generations. (The Alter girls’ grandfather and mother both killed themselves in the master bedroom, which the girls refer to as the “Dead and Dying Room.”) But even with all its darkness, A Reunion of Ghosts is a surprisingly funny novel with three dry but witty women at its heart.

“I totally referred to this as the book that would never sell.” 

“I totally referred to this as the book that would never sell,” Mitchell admits. “Here, it’s a 400-page suicide note, do you want to read it? Yeah, no,” she says with a laugh. “But I couldn’t stop working on it.”

“People say to me, it’s a little dark, and I’m like, well life is a little dark, but we still manage to love and laugh our way through it.”

Although her subject matter isn’t light, Mitchell, who prefers to go by Judy, is as quick to laugh as she is to share literary insight. An hour of conversation with her suggests enthusiasm for her craft and warmth that must spill over into the classroom.

And the classroom is, in fact, an important part of Mitchell’s story. As a child and again in higher education, she encountered teachers who were skeptical that Mitchell could have a career as a writer.

One encouraged her to prepare for life as a secretary instead—a more acceptable profession for girls. Mitchell also encountered professors who believed the world would knock students down, and so the professors took the first swings to help students prepare.

“My philosophy is, the world is going to knock you down, so I’m going to help you get up.” 

“My philosophy is, the world is going to knock you down, so I’m going to help you get up,” Mitchell says. “It’s looking at the same situation but having a completely different way of responding to it. I think artists and writers are big balls of insecurity. The experience of being introverted and yet wanting the whole world to read what you’re writing, it’s very strange. I hit my stride in my 40s, so to tell someone in their 20s that they don’t have it, well, you just don’t know. They may have some growing and living to do.”

But it was also a teacher whose advice gave Mitchell the nerve to pursue such sprawling stories. Pulitzer Prize-winning short story writer James Alan McPherson was among her professors at the acclaimed Iowa Writers Workshop.

“One day, out of the blue, we were in workshop and he looked around and said, ‘Some of you are going to publish books. If you do, I just want to suggest you write about things that are important.’ ”

Without that advice, Mitchell says, she would have written about people much more like herself. “When he said that, it was like giving me permission to write outside my world.”

And of course, the learning process never truly ends. Mitchell continues to seek improvement herself as she balances her roles as writer and teacher.

“I balance it badly. When I’m teaching, I tend to put most of my energy into that, into the teaching and into the huge amount of service that professors have to do to maintain a program,” she says. “I do tend to put my energy into the actual living people who need something from me. The manuscript tends to get back-burnered. Because I’m a novelist, I also feel I need to sink into that world, and it’s hard for me to bounce in and out of it.”

Mitchell says this accounts for the 10-year gap between her first novel, The Last Day of the War, and A Reunion of Ghosts. During that span, Mitchell directed Wisconsin’s MFA program twice and directed its post-graduate program in between. She focuses on her own writing during the summers, and has taken residencies to allow chunks of time for focusing on the book. “I try to write when I can squeeze it in,” she says.

With a third novel under way, Mitchell attempts to set aside non-teaching days as writing days. But her students take precedence; if a student can only meet on that day, Mitchell accommodates them.

“I’m hoping my third book doesn’t take me 10 years, because I will be very old then!” she says.

Students will often say they dream of the life she’s living, but Mitchell cautions them to be careful what they wish for. “Sometimes I think if I were a barista, I would have [written] more books. I tell them that, too,” she says, explaining that writing “is not the way you make your living, it’s what you do because you have to. It’s not that fun sometimes, even . . . but you have a story you’re impelled to tell.”

 

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

The heroines of Judith Claire Mitchell’s engrossing new novel—sisters Vee, Delph and Lady Alter—don’t bear a lot of similarity to their creator. The three were raised with a family legacy of suicide: Their great-grandmother Iris became the first to kill herself after her husband’s chemical inventions were used as World War I weapons.
FictionPopular Fiction

Jojo Moyes

Interview by Carla Jean Whitley

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.

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.
Mystery & SuspenseSuspense

Lisa Jackson

Interview by Carla Jean Whitley

When rising star Allie Kramer goes missing and her stunt double is shot on the set of her latest film, Allie’s sister, struggling actress Cassie Kramer, is considered a person of interest. The sisters have already been through more than their share of drama after a killer stalked them and their once-famous mother, and Cassie has never been the same. But she’s determined to find Allie, despite their strained relationship.

Combining the hot genre of dark, female-driven suspense (think The Girl on the Train) with the evergreen topic of sibling rivalry, Lisa Jackson’s After She’s Gone takes readers along for the chase as Cassie tries to solve the mystery of her sister’s disappearance.

Jackson’s new thriller is a long-awaited follow-up to two of her most popular books: The West Coast Series’ Deep Freeze (2005) and Fatal Burn (2006), which are being reissued in new mass-market editions to coincide with the release of the latest book in the series.

Jackson, who has published 37 books with Kensington and has almost 20 million copies of her books in print, knows something about sisters—she periodically collaborates with her real-life sister, fellow bestseller Nancy Bush. Jackson talked to us about the role of sisters in After She’s Gone, as well as the source for her energetic writing.

A pair of sisters is at the heart of this story, and you have a close relationship with your sister—one I assume does not parallel the story of Cassie and Allie! How does your relationship with your sister influence your writing?
When we were growing up, there was some sibling rivalry, but we were always pretty close. There were a couple of years between us, and in high school I would say, oh, do I have to hang out with Nancy? [Now] we only have each other. I’ve talked to her four times today and been over to her house once, and it’s only 11 o’clock. 

My sister and I think a lot alike, although we play off each other’s strengths and weaknesses. For example, I’m the worst with typos. She notices those. She balances her checkbook to the penny. If my checkbook is kind of close, it’s good enough. 

Conversely, I’ve always said I’m a big picture person. I am very much, and Nancy is a detail person.

How do you and Nancy determine which projects to collaborate on?
The first book we ever wrote was a collaboration with another gal and it never went anywhere, and that was 35 years ago. About 10 years ago, we were on a road trip and we said, let’s do something together a little different than what we would usually write. [The Wicked series] had a paranormal aspect—all these sisters who have been sequestered away. Let’s give them all a gift and play with that. We had so much fun. 

Sometimes it’s a grind, but we try to keep having fun and mix it up a little bit to keep it fresh. We’ve been at this for 37 years. When we had children it was easier because we were more hip, the kids were more hip. Now I have grandchildren, and they’re a little too young to be hip. They’re 5 and under, and they’re not cool yet.

With After She’s Gone, you’ve returned to your West Coast Series. Why did you go back to this story almost 10 years after the publication of the first two books?
I love the characters. I loved writing Deep Freeze and Fatal Burn. The series was very popular, my editor [John Scognamiglio] loved it, and he wanted to see where the girls were today. . . . I ended Deep Freeze with a cliffhanger that I wanted to go into the next book. Then John brought it up again and said, ‘What if we have a stalker and he really likes Hollywood.’ I said, ‘John, that’s Deep Freeze. We can’t do that again!’

I wanted to flip it. I wanted it to be about the sisters and the rivalry. I read Deep Freeze and Fatal Burn again and thought, what am I going to do to these sisters to make them hate each other? It was a switch. It was a challenge. But I also had a lot of fun with it. 


Jackson celebrates 20 years at Kensington with her editor, John Scognamiglio.

It sure seems like you enjoyed writing After She’s Gone.
I felt like this book had a lot of energy. . . . If I have high energy in my life, it translates in the book I’m writing. 

How do you pursue that invigoration in your life?
My life is never dull. That’s not by choice. I have lots and lots of interests. I have a big interest in my family and my grandchildren and the generation above me, which is falling left and right now. I have business interests and I have charitable interests. I have friends that I don’t get to see enough of. I have a very, very busy life. I think that energy translates. 

I don’t get in my chair—which I used to, but I can’t do it anymore—and just sit down and let the day unroll. Now I feel like I have to exercise three times a week because you can’t put it off. You can put it off in your 30s and 40s, but you can’t in your 50s and 60s because [stuff] falls apart.

I read a lot, I watch TV, I read the newspapers. I have more story ideas filed away than I have years in my life left.

 

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

Combining the hot genre of dark, female-driven suspense (think The Girl on the Train) with the evergreen topic of sibling rivalry, Lisa Jackson’s After She’s Gone takes readers along for the chase as Cassie tries to solve the mystery of her sister’s disappearance.
Fiction

Alice Hoffman

Interview by Carla Jean Whitley

Bestselling author Alice Hoffman returns to contemporary fiction with Faithful, a heartrending coming-of-age story.

In the novel, teenager Shelby Richmond must try to rebuild her life after a car accident leaves her best friend, Helene, in a vegetative state. We talked to Hoffman, who has published more than 25 novels for adults and teens, about love, grief, postcards and Paul McCartney.

Faithful leaves readers feeling as though they’ve spent time with Shelby and her family and friends. Is there a teenager or young woman in your life who in some way inspired Shelby and her friends?
I think there’s a bit of Shelby in every woman and girl. For me, she’s her own person—one I fell in love with despite her troubles and hard times. And I think her relationship with her mother, Sue, is very relatable to everyone who has ever had a difficult daughter, or been one.

The postcards Shelby receives throughout Faithful serve as tangible words of encouragement. Do you keep such encouraging messages around you? 
I always think words can get us through the toughest times—it may not be postcards for me personally, but it is books. Books have been a survival mechanism for me—a life raft, and so I think it’s fitting that words help to save Shelby.

Have you ever had a pen pal? What role did that person’s correspondence play in your life?
I wrote to Paul McCartney but he never wrote back! My professor of writing and his wife, also a writer, were my mentors. We wrote to each other for nearly 30 years and I treasured their letters.

Dogs also play a significant role in this story. Were you inspired by pets in your life?
Growing up, my dog was the “person” I related to most. I’ve always had dogs and can’t imagine my life without them. In fact, I named my most recent dog “Shelby” after Shelby in Faithful.

Your books often deal with place, and lately you’ve shared a number of pictures of lovely places on your social media channels. Where do you feel most at home? Most creative?
I love the Cape, and Manhattan, and Paris, and so many other places. But to write I just need a chair anywhere.

You’re a prolific writer, capable of turning out deeply felt, thoughtful novels at a rate of sometimes one per year. What are your writing habits? 
I tend to write early in the day, and I set my alarm to do so. I outline, and I rewrite and rewrite, many drafts. I have a few people I trust who are my earliest readers.

What are you working on next?
I’m very excited to be working on the prequel to my novel Practical Magic, called The Rules of Magic. It takes place in New York City in the 1960s and follows the lives of the aunts in Practical Magic. It was great fun to write, and, I hope, to read.

 

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

Bestselling author Alice Hoffman returns to contemporary fiction with Faithful, a heartrending coming-of-age story.
FictionFamily Saga

Laurie Frankel

Interview by Carla Jean Whitley

Novelist Laurie Frankel has a track record of writing stories that are sensitive and deeply felt. With her latest, This Is How It Always Is, she takes that to a new level. The story follows a family whose youngest child is born a boy, but in kindergarten becomes known instead as Poppy. It's a timely subject, but also one that hits close to home; Frankel's daughter is also a transgender child.

The novel will make readers think, and may challenge some preconceived notions about transgender people. BookPage spoke to Frankel about the process of writing a story that has some obvious parallels with her own.

As the mother of a transgender child, you had a deep personal connection to this novel. Why did you feel compelled to write it now?
Now is an exciting time to be talking about these issues because, for the first time in history, lots of transgender kids and adults are coming out to acceptance, understanding, and celebration from their loved ones and communities. Great strides have been made. Horizons have widened. More and more people around the world are starting to see gender as a broad and complex spectrum along which there are infinite wonderful possibilities. But now is also a critical time to be talking about these issues. Legislators all over the country are proposing bills to restrict and remove transgender people’s rights and indeed safety. They’re doing it with lies. They’re doing it with cruelty. They are making the world are meaner, harder, scarier, less fair, more dangerous place for all of us, trans and otherwise. So part of the reason to write this book right now is to spread the love, spread the understanding, spread the truth and combat the other stuff.

Why did you choose to fictionalize your experience rather than writing a memoir?
Well, the easy answer is I am a novelist, not a memoirist. I love fiction. I believe in fiction. And I also believe fiction is truer than memoir. Just because it didn’t actually happen doesn’t make it less true. Fiction allows you to tell the stories that should happen, with the perfect arrangement of events and characters and relationships, rather than the imperfect ones that actually do happen. It’s also true that I am keen to protect my kid’s privacy. And frankly, thankfully, our own story is pretty boring and plot-free—great for living, poor for book-writing, so I got to make it up instead. Transgender identity can be a difficult concept for some people to grasp.

What is one thing you wish people understood about children like Poppy?
Actually, I wish people understood that children who aren’t like Poppy are in fact just like Poppy. All kids are average in some ways and outliers in others. All kids conform sometimes and struggle others. All kids face challenges and change unpredictably and grow in directions other than the ones their parents imagined. And all should be loved and honored and celebrated for who they are. This is how it always is. Over the course of the novel, Poppy grows to be older than your own daughter and faces medical questions regarding puberty.

All kids face challenges and change unpredictably and grow in directions other than the ones their parents imagined. This is how it always is.

How did you research the medical implications of the story?
My friend Carol Cassella is a great novelist and also a great doctor, and she helped me with the medical stuff for this book, though mostly I needed her assistance with the hospital scenes because the mom in the book is an emergency room physician (and I am very much not). The medical questions for transgender kids are important and complex but fairly comprehensible for a layperson. I read books. I read studies. I went to conferences and consulted experts. I met a lot of people. I asked a lot of questions. I listened. There’s a lot of information available now. I took in as much as possible.

I'm always curious about process. Did writing a book so close to home come quickly or was it more challenging? This book wrote pretty smoothly. Who knows why? Some books come easy; some come hard. It didn’t feel so close to home while I was writing it because in my head it’s so made up. The family in the book looks nothing like mine. Poppy is really nothing like my kid. From the outside, they seem so close. But because I know them both so well—and because for one of them I consciously made up every single thing—they don’t seem alike to me at all. As you say, for most of the book, Poppy’s older than my child, so writing her was very much an act of imagination.

Sibling dynamics are an important part of the novel, with the four brothers reacting in different ways to decisions their parents make regarding Poppy. And of course, those dynamics can be an important part of our life stories. You're the mother of one child. Do you have siblings yourself? Did your experience growing up with them inform this part of the story?
I have one sister. We were nothing like the horde of boys in this novel. The large family was part of the original idea for this book though. Lots of the details come later in the process, but that wasn’t one of them; that one was in the seed of the thing. For a while, I couldn’t decide whether I wanted them to be boys or girls, but I knew I wanted five siblings from the get-go, even though I also knew it would be hard to fully develop all those characters (and it was). So many siblings allowed me to explore how growing up is tough for everyone—in different ways but no matter what. All kids surprise you, need accommodation sometimes, love and understanding always.

The idea of finding community and sharing answers and questions and secrets and stories is the reason I write books.

The notion of finding community and answers by sharing our secrets is powerful. Did that come to you in the process of writing, or was that idea what set you on this path?
The idea of finding community and sharing answers and questions and secrets and stories is the reason I write books. It’s also the reason I read them (and I do so voraciously). There has maybe never been a more important time to find commonalities with one another, to read lives and perspectives which are different from our own, to seek strength in our communities, to share our stories. Those are the ideas that set me not just on this path but on all my paths.

What are you working on next? I’m at work on a new novel, which I’m not talking about yet I’m afraid (writers are superstitious like that), and making plans for the one after that. I’m also writing lots of essays around This Is How It Always Is to answer some of the very important, very timely questions like the sort you pose (and thank you so much for doing so). I think for the most part people’s curiosity about this topic comes from a place of love and recognition so I am eager to answer questions, share stories and talk about how great these kids are. So thanks for asking!

 

ALSO IN BOOKPAGE: Read our review of This Is How It Always Is.

Novelist Laurie Frankel has a track record of writing stories that are sensitive and deeply felt. With her latest, This Is How It Always Is, she takes that to a new level. The story follows a family whose youngest child is born a boy, but in kindergarten becomes known instead as Poppy. It's a timely subject, but also one that hits close to home; Frankel's daughter is also a transgender child.

NonfictionLiteratureArts & Culture

Anne Boyd Rioux

Interview by Carla Jean Whitley

In the loving and extensively researched Meg, Jo, Beth, Amy, Anne Boyd Rioux explores the history and enduring power of Louisa May Alcott’s Little Women on the 150th anniversary of its publication. In a Q&A with Rioux, we asked her about her own relationship with Alcott’s novel, the March sisters and other female authors of the era. 

You first read Little Women in your 20s. What led you to the book at this time? How did it affect you upon first reading?
I first read Little Women in graduate school. It was assigned in a course on American literary realism as a kind of companion piece to Adventures of Huckleberry Finn. It meant a lot to me then to read about Jo’s literary ambitions and her conviction, as she says at the end of the book, that she believes she will write better books one day for her experiences as a wife and mother. When my daughter was born about 10 years later, I gave her the middle name Josephine, so obviously it really stayed with me.

When and why did Little Women become a subject of scholarship?
It was largely ignored by academics, who were mostly male, until feminist critics began to establish themselves in the 1970s. The first truly scholarly examination was in 1975 in Patricia Meyer Spacks’ The Female Imagination. Then Judith Fetterley’s essay “Little Women: Alcott’s Civil War,” published in the journal Feminist Studies in 1979, really showed what could be done in an extended analysis that applied the new tools of feminist criticism to Alcott’s novel. Ever since, the novel has proven to be a rich text for scholars using a wide variety of approaches, including Marxist criticism, cultural studies and queer theory.

Which March sister do you find the most relatable? 
Jo always meant the most to me. Her ambitions made her the kind of foremother I needed—someone who had grappled in the mid-19th century with the same things I was still grappling with in the late-20th century.

Why isn’t Little Women included on more teachers’ syllabi?
To put it quite simply, because it’s viewed as a book for girls. There is no room in today’s classrooms, (as far as I can tell from national surveys, what teachers across the county have told me, and my own knowledge about schools in my area) for books about girls—unless they focus on other issues such as civil rights or the Holocaust, as is the case with To Kill a Mockingbird and The Diary of Anne Frank. Teachers feel as if they have to teach books about boys because they believe boys won’t read about girls, but girls don’t mind reading about boys. As one school librarian told me, there is a lot of concern with making sure that students read books from the perspective of other cultures, races, socioeconomic backgrounds, etc., but no one appears to be concerned that boys aren’t reading books about the other half of the population. As I talk about in Meg, Jo, Beth, Amy, there is plenty of evidence that boys can and will read Little Women and other books about girls if we help them overcome the stigma attached to all things female and feminine. And that is a larger project that will benefit boys and girls.

How have you seen your own students impacted as they study the novel at a collegiate level?
I’ve seen a range of responses. Initially, they are dismayed at its length (nearly 500 pages), and some wonder why we were reading a children’s book (until I remind them that Huck Finn is a children’s book, and it’s often taught in college literature courses). But once we start reading Little Women, they grow attached to the March sisters and Laurie and find themselves quite invested in the choices they are making as they mature. They realize that the book is dealing with some of the same life choices they are also facing, so it isn’t the children’s book they were expecting. Although I did have one male student who obviously refused to even buy the book, I’ve also found that many of the men are as affected by it as the female students. One man came into class very upset the day we read the part where Jo turns down Laurie. Another wrote in his final response that even though he was a 30-year-old man, he was so glad to have read the book and was sorry it was over.

In Meg, Jo, Beth, Amy, you write about literary heroines who have followed in Jo March’s path. Is there one character in this tradition whom you find the most appealing?
Rory Gilmore, from the television series Gilmore Girls, is particularly interesting because we see her grow and develop over the course of about seven years. The summer my daughter spent binge-watching the series on Netflix, I realized that Rory was to her what Jo March has been for generations—she was a touchstone, a girl whose personality, experiences and life choices my daughter could identify with, measure herself against and learn from. And Rory’s choices aren’t always what we’d want them to be, just as Jo’s weren’t. But it’s the way that girls and young women see themselves reflected in these characters and how they judge and compare themselves to them that really interests me.

You’ve written extensively about Alcott’s contemporaries, including Constance Fenimore Woolson. Who are other female writers of the era you believe merit more recognition?
There are many, but I will mention particularly Fanny Fern, Elizabeth Stoddard, Sui Sin Far and Zitkala-Sa. And when we examine the writings of women from these earlier eras, we need to be able to evaluate them on their own terms as well as ours. Looking back and expecting women writers to conform to our contemporary ideas of what makes great writing is not going to help us understand the paths that earlier women writers have forged. Each of these writers is available in print with introductions or essays that can help put them into the context in which they lived and wrote. I highly recommend them!

Why do you believe it’s valuable to tell the stories of these 19th-century female writers?
In addition to the fact that if we forget the past we are in danger of repeating it, I’m also concerned that so many women writers today seem to feel, as Virginia Woolf did in the 1920s, that there isn’t much of a tradition behind them. Or they might not want to think of themselves as belonging to a separate tradition of female writers. But it’s important to recognize that they aren’t the first women writers to feel that way and to struggle to belong to an American literary tradition. There have been many who’ve been there before and whose legacies have been forgotten, ignored or suppressed. I see women writers today struggling with many of the same issues that early women writers did: wondering if they can combine their lives as writers with motherhood, trying to assert their value as writers and not only as women writers, pushing against male critics’ expectations, and resenting the bias they feel directed toward them as women writers. How can we move beyond these issues if we don’t recognize how long-standing they are and continually repress them as each new generation of women writers is largely forgotten?

What’s next for you?
I’ve actually become very interested in a forgotten woman writer from the 20th century: Kay Boyle. I have the same feeling when I read her stories as I did about Constance Fenimore Woolson’s—namely, why don’t I know her, why is she not read today, and what can I do about it? For now, I’d like to help get more of her incredible stories into print. She wrote about the rise of fascism in Europe, the German occupation of France and the aftermath of World War II in Germany. Her stories make you feel as if you are right there living the experience with her. I’ve never read anything like them.

Author photo by Jennifer Zdon.

In the loving and extensively researched Meg, Jo, Beth, Amy, Anne Boyd Rioux explores the history and enduring power of Louisa May Alcott’s Little Women on the 150th anniversary of its publication. In a Q&A with Rioux, we asked her about her own relationship with Alcott’s novel, the March sisters and other female authors of the era. 
FictionPopular FictionDebut Fiction

Hank Green

Interview by Carla Jean Whitley

If you’re into YouTube, Hank Green is already a familiar name. He’s co-CEO of Complexly, the video production company behind more than a dozen popular YouTube shows, including Crash Course. He’s co-founder of VidCon, the online video conference that drew 40,000 attendees in 2017. He’s one half of the VlogBrothers, whose YouTube channel has more than 3 million subscribers.

He shares those titles with his older brother, John. If you’re not into YouTube, you’re likely familiar with Hank’s big brother’s bestselling young adult novels, including The Fault in Our Stars. Hank Green’s background has ensured his debut novel is eagerly anticipated, and An Absolutely Remarkable Things delivers on its promise.

You’re well-established in the world of online creativity. Why did you choose to move to the written word, and why now?
There are some ideas that don’t fit into a four-minute video or a tweet or a blog post, and I had a story to tell that couldn’t fit into any of the other media I was working in.

An Absolutely Remarkable Thing explores many complex issues, including how the internet and fame can affect our sense of identity. How have you grappled with that over the years?
Well, one big way was writing a whole book about it. I worked through a lot of issues while writing this, and the fact that I was able to spend so much time focused on that problem was really helpful for me. But yes, I have been grappling with fame and power and identity for a long time. The worst part is when you don’t realize your influence, and you end up making a situation worse or hurting people’s feelings. For me, the process has been about a lot of introspection and compassion and talking with people who care about me.

You live in the rather remote state of Montana. Does life in a small city help you balance your internet visibility?
It’s not really about visibility—there are plenty of people who recognize me in Missoula, maybe more than the average place because it’s a college town. I don’t live in Montana for any particular reason, it’s just home. All of my friends are here!

Your work combines creativity and education, but that’s not overt in your novel. How did your process differ here?
Interesting question! For me, this is all about trying to convey complicated ideas efficiently. That might be a character’s emotional state during a fight with a friend; it might be photosynthesis. It’s all about getting into the head of the person who is reading (or watching) the book (or video). People are complicated, and the predicaments these characters are in are complicated. In many ways, telling this story was a more difficult puzzle than teaching someone physiology.

The world looks to April May for guidance during a confusing time. Did you internalize any lessons from your main character?
Oh yes. April and I struggle with a lot of the same things, including our need for attention and approval as well as our addiction to internet outrage. I don’t think we’re alone there. But the moments in which April makes better decisions, or even simply recognizes that she has a problem, were very helpful for me.

Did you fully immerse yourself in writing the book, or did you have to work it around your other obligations? What was that balance like?
This book took me around four years to write, and it was never the only thing on my plate. I’m very good at focusing for one- to two-hour periods, but after that I have to shift my attention. Luckily, I have lots to do!

Do you have another book in the works?
I sure do. I hope a lot of people will want more from this story, but I already know my wife does, so a sequel is in the works!

 

ALSO IN BOOKPAGE: Read our review of An Absolutely Remarkable Thing.

Author photo credit Ashe Walker

If you’re into YouTube, Hank Green is already a familiar name. He’s co-CEO of Complexly, the video production company behind more than a dozen popular YouTube shows, including Crash Course. He’s co-founder of VidCon, the online video conference that drew 40,000 attendees in 2017. He’s one half of the VlogBrothers, whose YouTube channel has more than 3 million subscribers.

He shares those titles with his older brother, John. If you’re not into YouTube, you’re likely familiar with Hank’s big brother’s bestselling young adult novels, including The Fault in Our Stars. Hank Green’s background has ensured his debut novel is eagerly anticipated, and An Absolutely Remarkable Things delivers on its promise.

NonfictionMemoir

Nicole Chung

Interview by Carla Jean Whitley

In her memoir, All You Can Ever Know, Nicole Chung, who was adopted as a baby by a couple in Oregon, explores how the truths that were revealed upon finding her birth parents changed her life. Here Chung discusses growing up Asian-American in a white family, her writing and editing career and more. 

What prompted you to turn your experience into a book, and why at this particular point in your life?
I’ve tried to answer people’s questions about adoption my whole life. My thoughts about it—and of course, the answers to which I’ve had access—have undergone some real change over the years. I’d tried to tell pieces of the story in essays, and it finally just became clear that only a book-length project was going to provide the space I needed to explore the whole story with all its nuances.

I really wanted to write this for families like mine and for younger readers who don’t see themselves in the books they adore. Ideally, reading this story will also encourage some people to reconsider issues around transracial adoption and identity and multiracial families and people who exist between cultures. I fervently hope this book helps make room for more adopted people to tell our stories, as opposed to others telling them for us.

As for why I wrote it now, I don’t believe I’d have been ready to write this 10 years ago, right after I searched for my birth family. I was writing about it at the time, of course, but mostly in journals and letters; it would be five years before I published anything at all about it. I could perhaps have written this book three or four years ago, when I first had the idea, but you know, it takes a while to find an agent and write a proposal and convince someone to let you write the book! And I’m glad it happened now. It’s probably a better book because I had a lot of time to think about it, and to fully consider and process what happened during my first pregnancy and my search, and see how the choices we all made at the time continued to play out in our lives.

As a child, you felt out of place in a predominantly white town, and you mention that you found solace in writing your own Asian-American characters. You are now frequently able to interview and write about people of color. Has being able to address race helped you develop as a writer?
Almost everything I write about has helped me develop as a writer! I do love talking with interesting people, learning more about their art and their work and why they do what they do. I love to interview people, and I love research; writing about other subjects and figuring out which questions to ask have certainly helped me grow as a writer. I hope I get to do a lot more of that in the future.

While All You Can Ever Know is respectful and considerate of all your family, uncovering the story of your adoption was clearly not an emotionally easy task. How has your family walked with you through the publishing process?
So much of the story belongs to my sister Cindy as well, so she was the first person I shared a draft with. I asked her to tell me if she wanted me to change or take anything out, but she didn’t, though she did help me by answering my annoying questions and correcting a few tiny things. She and my brother-in-law, Rick, are proud of the book, and have been so supportive throughout this process. I’ve also shared the book with my birth father, who is working his way through it more slowly: He’s fluent in English, but Korean is his first language, and I don’t think he reads a ton of memoirs in English. He encouraged me to write whatever I needed to write and said I could check facts with him and Cindy, but he didn’t feel it was his place to tell me what to say about my adoption.

My adoptive parents have been very supportive, and also just very interested in the whole publishing experience and what it involves. I sent them a draft right after I sent it to Cindy. My mother has read the book, and she really likes it. As I wrote about here, my adoptive father suddenly passed away while I was working on the book; he only got through about half of it before he died.

Do you feel that becoming a mother yourself gave you any greater understanding of your family, both adoptive and biological?
Becoming a mother certainly changed my understanding of myself, and encouraged me to reconsider what I thought I knew about my families—my family of origin, the one I grew up in and the one I was starting with my husband. I was thinking a lot about the kind of parent I wanted to be, the things I wanted my own children to have and to know. Before, I’d only been able to consider that in the most hypothetical sense!

Becoming a parent makes you question so much about yourself, I think, and that’s true whether or not you’re adopted. But in my case, because I am adopted, expecting a child of my own pushed me into asking questions about my history and my families that I hadn’t been 100 percent ready to ask before.

Your work at Catapult magazine helps elevate a variety of voices, and Catapult’s publishing arm released All You Can Ever Know. Will you share your perspective on the value of these sorts of independent outlets?
I am far from an expert in traditional publishing, as my background is really in the digital space—but I really do appreciate how indie publishers can and will take risks, often inspired ones, for books and authors they believe in. Many of them are starting with a diverse list of beautiful writers and making that their foundation. They are centering these writers and throwing everything they’ve got behind them. I don’t think Catapult ever saw my book as a risk, exactly—at least, no more so than any other book. They’ve told me all along it’s great, which I appreciate deeply because I am, like many writers, insecure about my work. I feel very lucky that they bought it before I went to work for the magazine, actually, because if I’d already been an employee I don’t think I’d have even sent it to Julie Buntin (my editor there).

We have so very few memoirs by adopted writers writing about adoption—the cultural narrative around it has really been dominated by nonadoptees—and so few by Asian-American women. And it’s really not always easy to convince someone to let you be one of the few or one of the first. But for Catapult, I think all of that was actually a selling point. Julie was the perfect editor for this book, and I’ve had the kind of institutional support many debut writers can only dream of.

As for my editorial work at the magazine, it’s a constant thrill to get to publish so many wonderful writers every single day. Before Catapult, I was at the Toast, and as a freelancer I’ve also had the privilege of writing for many outlets and publications, many of them independent. We publish a wide range of voices, some more established than others, but to be honest my favorite thing is working with emerging writers—being someone’s first byline.

How did your work at Catapult and other outlets, where you focus on shorter pieces, inform the process of writing your memoir?
Writing a lot makes you a better writer! I’ve been lucky to be edited often, and well, and that has taught me a great deal. Editing other writers on the daily has also made me a better writer—I can look at a piece of work (even my own) and identify things that are working and things that aren’t. I also know that even if I write a draft that isn’t super, I can tear it apart later and maybe turn it into something I don’t hate.

I was a little nervous about writing an entire book when my longest published essay was around, I don’t know, 4,000 words? And I knew I was writing a memoir with one continuous narrative arc, as opposed to a collection of essays. As an essayist and editor, though, I possess a bottomless well of faith in the writing/editorial process. And I trusted my editor entirely. That is probably what got me through.

You also write quite a bit about books, so I’ve got to ask: What are you reading?
I just finished The Great Believers by Rebecca Makkai, and I’m currently in the middle of way too many books, as usual: Sanpaku by Kate Gavino, The Lonesome Bodybuilder by Yukiko Motoya (translated by Asa Yoneda), A Kind of Freedom by Margaret Wilkerson Sexton and The Poet X by Elizabeth Acevedo.

While this book is deeply personal, you also write about a range of other topics (some family-oriented, others not). What’s next on your radar?
I’m working on a few different projects, nothing I’m quite ready to go into detail about, but I hope to talk and collaborate with more great people and write more books. I’ve started a novel. I imagine I’ll keep doing my day job, because I really enjoy it! I would particularly like to help more of our magazine contributors think about and develop book-length projects if that is their goal. I also want to teach more, and I’ll keep freelancing whenever I get the chance.

In the more immediate short-term, when I get through book tour, I will probably be looking into the grief counseling I have not had any time or space for this year. And—it’s probably not going to happen!—but I think a month-long vacation would be lovely.

 

ALSO IN BOOKPAGE: Read our review of All You Can Ever Know.

Author photo by Erica B. Tappis

In her memoir, All You Can Ever Know, Nicole Chung, who was adopted as a baby by a couple in Oregon, explores how the truths that were revealed upon finding her birth parents changed her life. Here Chung discusses growing up Asian-American in a white family, her writing and editing career and more. 

NonfictionEssays

Pam Houston

Interview by Carla Jean Whitley

Pam Houston takes readers to her Colorado ranch in her new memoir, Deep Creek. 

How long did you spend working on this book? How does that compare to your others?
This book took longer than any other book I have written so far. Like every book, it started out fast, and during the first year, I thought, wow, I am going to knock this out in no time. And then I hit the wall I always hit around page 100, but it took me longer to get around the wall with this book. There are a few reasons for that. I had said to myself early on, I am not going to rely on all of my old tricks with this one. God knows what exactly I meant. God knows why I wanted to torture myself that way. I meant something about motion and quick changes. This book was about staying put, and none of my others have been. I kept saying I wanted to write deeply into the tall grass. This book is my most earnest book by far, in a career of fairly earnest books, and I was afraid that earnestness would bore people to death. Without the flash. Without the motion. It took every bit of six years to write. That is two years longer than pretty much all of the others. 

Did this writing process change you? 
Sure. Every book changes me. I told myself I wasn’t going to rely on my old tricks, so I learned some new ones. Or maybe I learned it was OK to be a little more generous with myself, with my thoughts and feelings. Maybe I completed another chapter in the lifelong lesson in how it is better to be kind than cool, less important to be smart than sincere.

What prompted you to begin this self-exploration?
My whole career has been about self-exploration. Every book. This particular self-exploration happened because Alane, my editor, suggested I go on a book-length adventure. She wanted a memoir from me for a change. Not autobiographical fiction. Not something in the middle, as Contents May Have Shifted was. I thought about an adventure. I have always wanted to sail the entire coast of Turkey. I have always wanted to complete a long journey on a dog sled. There were several options. Then one day I was driving home to the ranch after 10 weeks of teaching in California. The drive is 18 hours, and the dogs and I get so happy at hour three, when we get back over to the leashless side of the Sierras. We are elated to be coming home. I got halfway across Utah and thought, wait a minute. The ranch is my book-length adventure. My life-length adventure. This ranch. Sitting still. Becoming responsible for something over the long haul. So I proposed that to Alane, and she accepted. 

Any public self-expression is a vulnerable act, but memoir seems especially so. How do you process this?
Telling the truth, the deepest truth, or as close as I can get to it, has always been my objective, whether the book is called fiction or nonfiction. I honestly don’t see any way to be a writer without being vulnerable, and without telling your most delicate and dangerous truths. I guess I just think of it as the price of admission, and when bad things happen because of it, when I get hurt or threatened or shamed, that is just part of that price. There are a lot of benefits to it, too. Like a really great job and sanity. 

You’ve spent years living part-time on the ranch, part-time on the road, speaking and teaching. Does the split still feed both your desires for metropolitan amenities and connection to the land? 
Yes. As much as I love the land—and I do—I still love an adventure. (I am writing to you from far eastern Uruguay right now, surrounded by Criollo horses, in the middle of a lightning storm.) I also like sushi and bookstores and mass transit. I imagine I will take some version of this split with me to the grave. 

Have your neighbors in your small community read the book? How do you think they’ll feel about it?
I can’t speak for my neighbors. I have read the portions of it to those folks who figure in it directly, and they are OK with how they are portrayed. As for the others, a few of them will like it, and more of them won’t like it, and some of them will ask me, if the book is called “Deep Creek,” why is the dog on the front standing in an inch and a half of water.

 

ALSO IN BOOKPAGE: Read our review of Deep Creek.

This article was originally published in the February 2019 issue of BookPage. Download the entire issue for the Kindle or Nook.

Pam Houston takes readers to her Colorado ranch in her new memoir, Deep Creek. 

NonfictionHumorEssays

Kathleen Hale

Interview by Carla Jean Whitley

Kathleen Hale isn’t hiding from the controversy that inspired the title of her new essay collection, Kathleen Hale Is a Crazy Stalker. When she published her essay “Catfish” in The Guardian in 2014—about stalking a Goodreads reviewer who gave her book a one-star review and exposing the reviewer as someone using a false identity online—it inspired a wave of online criticism that led Hale to quit the internet for good. Now, with the release of her first book since those events, we asked her some questions about mental health, the “toxic hellscape” of the internet and how to keep writing when your every word is being scrutinized.

I noticed that the version of “Catfish” that appears in this book has a different ending than the version that originally appeared in The Guardian. This ending is more vulnerable; it gives more details about your stay in the psychiatric hospital following the essay’s blowback and delves into the ramifications for your mental health. Do you hope the new ending will give people a fuller view of the story? How do you hope they will respond?
The new ending is the linchpin to my essay’s original thesis, which is that the internet and in particular social media breed psychosis. I might have been an extreme case. But I feel like my case is on a continuum with what non-mentally ill people experience.

Four years removed from the essay’s original publication, how do you feel about it now? Has that changed at all over the years? 
It’s more obvious now than it was in 2014 that the internet is a toxic hellscape. Since then we have literally elected an internet troll as our president, which says a lot about the power trolls wield on Twitter, and social media has ruined lots of lives. People born in the 2000s seem to have a healthy distrust of things like Facebook. I realize looking back at myself how unsophisticated and naive I was. I got sucked into the internet, and it made me go crazy.

Has this experience—and the critique that is resurfacing now, with this book’s publication—affected how you interact with social media and the internet as a whole?
Very much so. I’m no longer on social media. I don’t write for free. And I don’t read what other people write about me, which has made me saner and a lot more productive.

Has this experience affected your view of “cancel culture”? How so?
I was at a party the other day and someone asked, “Has anyone read XYZ?”—some article online that was apparently controversial. And the first thing people asked was, “No, what are people saying about it?” I find that fascinating: that the first question is not about the work itself but about its reception. That is a very post-Zuckerberg phenomenon.

Though “Catfish” is already generating a lot of attention, it’s not the only essay in which you're vulnerable. What motivates you to continue to reveal yourself in this way?
During the recession in the early 2000s, women’s personal essays were referred to as “confessional essays” and were some of the only things I could get paid to write. During that time I published a ton of essays that really embarrass me now, because they’re revealing to no end. But under more ideal circumstances, I try very hard to differentiate between “secrets” and “story,” and to only pick those “confessions” that drive the story forward.

My hope is that the six essays in this collection productively harness revelatory details. They have been revised since their original publications to knit together a story of insanity in my 20s, which is only a phase if you survive it, and my desire to seek out the external danger that mirrored my internal experience.

But the collection is also a swan song to my 20s, and to memoir writing in general, in the sense that I don’t think I’ll ever write about myself again, at least not like this. Six good essays over eight years simply isn’t good math. And ironically, it turns out that I’m a pretty private person. It’s a Catch-22: part of the creative process naturally involves sharing one’s work with other people. But I’m shy, so there’s also desire to hide, or remain pseudonymous, which is a right that is still enjoyed by trolls but no longer afforded to artists.

Do you have a response for those who question why someone who harassed a book reviewer should have the opportunity to continue publishing?
I think the essay shocked people in part because we like to think that what we do and say online has no repercussions for us whatsoever. But what if the owner of that restaurant we smeared on Yelp, under multiple user names, lowering its overall rating to, say, 2 out of 5, all because the hostess had a “bitchy” demeanor, showed up at our front door? Nobody wants that. That’s scary. But is it fear we feel when the restaurant owner rings our bell, or an unwelcome sense of responsibility for our online conduct? Maybe it’s a little of both.

What do you hope readers, skeptics or otherwise, take from this collection?
After dealing with some very dedicated internet trolls, who’ve been with me now for nearly five years (happy anniversary), I began to realize that I couldn’t effectively sit down and try to tell a story while simultaneously trying to gauge or mitigate potential backlash to it. This collection contains honest essays about my life, which obviously opens me up to scathing analysis about how I lead my life. But allowing myself to hope that “readers, skeptics or otherwise” take it the right way spins me out of sorts and hurts my productivity. The way I’ve survived since getting offline is by thinking, “My job is just to write,” and now that the collection has been published, I must move on to the next thing.

Sometimes you juxtapose one subject with another, as in “Cricket,” in which you write about the Miss America pageant and a woman who overdoses in a bathroom. What does your writing process look like, and how does it allow these seemingly disparate concepts to come together in your mind?
Disparate concepts are always coming together in my mind because I have mental illness. As a writer, I try to weed out the random thoughts from the relevant ones and string the latter batch together into a narrative that isn’t boring.

You seem to be drawn to unusual or difficult subjects in general, such as the community of environmentally ill people in Snowflake, Arizona. What prompts this curiosity?
I can’t take credit for coming up with the idea for the Snowflake essay—that one belongs to Mae Ryan, an amazingly talented filmmaker who had pitched the story to The Guardian and was originally going to report it with Jon Ronson, but he couldn’t make it, so they called me. It was one of my first real gigs after getting out of the psych hospital, and I found the experience so refreshing, because it allowed me to write about a community of people suffering in ways I could relate to, while also taking a break from being a main character in my own stories. Susie and Deb were fascinating people and generous hosts. I can’t thank Mae enough for finding them and letting me tag along. The whole experience really seeded my current interest in writing exclusively about other people.

Though you’ve published a number of essays, this collection is a genre shift as far as your books go. Do you anticipate continuing in young adult fiction?
No, my career in young adult fiction is over. No YA publisher will work with me out of fear of offending my anonymous online critics/trolls. I still get to write professionally about teenagers, but it’s always for television and film, where I can remain anonymous. I love it.

You address mental health several times throughout this collection, including mention of a psychiatric hospital visit that followed the incident from which the book takes its title. How has your own mental health journey continued since that time?
Perhaps in another five years, when a decade has passed since I published something “inappropriate” online and caused a minor uproar on Twitter, I’ll finally be known for something other than an essay that landed me in a mental hospital. That said, it’s a pretty good story, and the title of my collection, Kathleen Hale Is a Crazy Stalker, is clearly in part a callout to that story. But the title also refers to the theme of predation that unites all six essays and to the gaslighting that women endure in a sexist society that recapitulates female aggression as insanity. In my case, however, the word “crazy” is absolutely true, and I own it completely! I am crazy. The internet drove me crazy.

How are you caring for yourself surrounding this book release, as people critique your publisher’s decision to publish it and you personally?
I stay offline and sit down at my desk in the real world and work on my next thing.

What are you working on now?
In my 20s I was interested in myself. But now that I’m in my 30s, I realize that other people are much more interesting than I am. My next book is a work of nonfiction about an unusual community where something tragic happened. Most people have heard of it. But they don’t know the whole story.

 

ALSO IN BOOKPAGE: Read our review of Kathleen Hale Is a Crazy Stalker.

Kathleen Hale discusses mental health, the “toxic hellscape” of the internet and how to keep writing when your every word is being scrutinized.

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