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Jeff Vasishta

FictionHistorical Fiction

A torch song for a complicated friendship

Review by Jeff Vasishta

It’s hardly surprising that Frances de Pontes Peebles’ award-winning debut novel, The Seamstress, was published a decade ago, as her follow-up, a sweeping, cinematic and thoroughly engrossing tale about an enduring friendship and the story of samba, is a mighty accomplishment—the kind of novel that demands ample time to write.

Two girls—beautiful and privileged Graça, who has a captivating singing voice, and orphan Dores, nicknamed “Jega,” which means “donkey” in Portuguese—grow up in the early 20th century on the same sugar plantation in Brazil, which Graça’s family owns. Dores is the more levelheaded and intelligent of the two, and Graça is an impetuous risk-taker. When they first hear music on the radio, their lives are forever changed. As teens, Graça’s rebellious nature wins over her friend, who harbors an unrequited love for her, and they escape via a boarding school trip to Rio de Janeiro’s gritty Lapa neighborhood, with the aim of pursuing their dreams.

Though the girls are originally a musical duo, it’s clear that Graça is the star. She is renamed Sofia Salvador after finding success in a nightclub owned by a local gangster, and Dores cedes the spotlight to write her friend’s songs. Amid a colorful canvas of sex, corruption, drugs and violence, the history of samba unfolds. The young women’s relationship is often strained, but they remain united through ambition.

When Hollywood calls, Sofia Salvador becomes an international star during World War II, a pin-up for the troops à la Carmen Miranda. But there is a price to pay.

The Air You Breathe unfolds from Dores’ first-person perspective as she reflects on her life and losses. A sense of melancholy imbues the tale, but Dores has a compelling and fascinating voice. She is unashamed of her sexuality and confident in her ability to write songs in a male-dominated arena, and her strength and singularity propel this unforgettable novel.

 

ALSO IN BOOKPAGE: Read our Q&A with Frances de Pontes Peebles.

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

It’s hardly surprising that Frances de Pontes Peebles’ award-winning debut novel, The Seamstress, was published a decade ago, as her follow-up, a sweeping, cinematic and thoroughly engrossing tale about an enduring friendship and the story of samba, is a mighty accomplishment—the kind of novel that demands ample time to write.

FictionWorld FictionLiterary Fiction

A superb character study

Review by Jeff Vasishta

Writing an entire novel in the second person is quite an undertaking and often results in a claustrophobic read. But the construct works well in This Mournable Body with the reintroduction of Tambudzai Sigauke, a character who first appeared in Tsitsi Dangarembga’s debut novel, Nervous Conditions (1988).

It’s clear that Tambudzai’s life has unraveled in the intervening years. She’s now middle-aged, single, living in a hostel without much money and desperately scheming ways to move up the social ladder. At one point she considers trying to date one of her landlady’s sons. She views every other woman around her disparagingly and as competition.

But it’s not just Tambudzai who gives women a hard time in this novel—it’s Zimbabwe itself. An attractive woman is sexually harassed by the passengers on a bus. A man who lives in Tambudzai’s hostel is a serial philanderer. And many of the female characters desire validation from men.

In the midst of this, Tambudzai emerges as an unreliable narrator struggling with deeply entrenched issues. She goes to a club, where she mistakes a white woman for an ex-boss and verbally abuses her. She gets drunk and ends up unconscious in the street. After securing a job as a biology teacher (a position for which she is not qualified), she is fired after she beats a student.

But Tambudzai rallies two-thirds of the way through her story, as she is taken in by her family and given a job at a glamorous ecotourism business by her former boss. But when she is outshone by the receptionist, Tambudzai teeters once again on the brink of self-destruction.

At times This Mournable Body is a difficult read. Tambudzai is a complex character, bitter and not particularly likable, with inner demons that threaten to derail her. But this is what makes the novel compelling—it’s unpredictable, and you can’t help but feel that Tambudzai is always about to snatch defeat from the jaws of victory. Couple this with the complexity of Zimbabwe—political uncertainty, economic instability and a society that seems ready to attack itself—and Dangarembga has written an unflinching account of one woman’s struggles in a country that is rife with them.

 

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

Writing an entire novel in the second person is quite an undertaking and often results in a claustrophobic read. But the construct works well in This Mournable Body with the reintroduction of Tambudzai Sigauke, a character who first appeared in Tsitsi Dangarembga’s debut novel, Nervous Conditions (1988).

FictionLiterary FictionDebut Fiction

Before, after and during the wedding

Review by Jeff Vasishta

A Place for Us has been guaranteed a certain amount of prerelease publicity as the first novel under actress, producer and designer Sarah Jessica Parker’s new imprint, SJP for Hogarth. The author, Fatima Farheen Mirza, is a 26-year-old graduate of the highly respected Iowa Writers’ Workshop. The novel concerns itself with the lives of an Indian-American Muslim family living in California. The opening scene is the wedding of eldest daughter Hadia. The bride’s prodigal brother, Amar, has returned after an absence of several years, and the reasons for this absence unfold in ensuing chapters.

Hadia and Amar, along with sister Huda, are the children of Layla and Rafiq, and the interior lives of these characters are explored in continually shifting timelines. Early on, these multiple points of view and the seeming lack of plot make the story confusing, but A Place for Us gains traction when Amar is bullied at school around 9/11. He is also involved in a forbidden romance with Amira Ali, the daughter of a well-respected local family whose eldest son died in a car accident.

Overshadowing all these events are the parameters of a deeply traditional Muslim culture—arranged marriages, the differing set of standards and expectations for men and women, the pressure for academic achievement—and the looming sense of being an “other” in American society.

Immigrant novels often center on conflict and the juxtaposition between Old World values and modern Western culture. In seeking a better life for their children, Layla and Rafiq must contend with this and the effect it has on their family. A Place for Us resonates at the crossroads of culture, character, storytelling and poignancy.

 

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

A Place for Us has been guaranteed a certain amount of prerelease publicity as the first novel under actress, producer and designer Sarah Jessica Parker’s new imprint, SJP for Hogarth. The author, Fatima Farheen Mirza, is a 26-year-old graduate of the highly respected Iowa Writers’ Workshop. The novel concerns itself with the lives of an Indian-American Muslim family living in California. The opening scene is the wedding of eldest daughter Hadia. The bride’s prodigal brother, Amar, has returned after an absence of several years, and the reasons for this absence unfold in ensuing chapters.

FictionLiterary FictionComing of Age

A man reflects on his youthful affair with an older woman

Review by Jeff Vasishta

With its generational clash of cultures, the 1960s have always been fertile ground for fiction. Like The Graduate, The Only Story by British novelist and Man Booker Prize winner Julian Barnes concerns a young man’s affair with an older woman who is suffocating in a loveless, sexless marriage.

Nineteen-year-old Paul, on a summer break from university, is encouraged to join the club by his mother, who is hopeful he’ll make social connections. Susan Macleod is married with two daughters at university, and is keeping up appearances by playing at the stuffy local tennis club. She encourages a reckless affair that consumes and taints much of Paul’s life. As an older man reflecting on it, Paul says it left him “walking wounded.”

It’s Susan, not Paul, who dominates the page. At first it seems absurd that her pent-up civil servant husband, Gordon, can tolerate her relationship with a teenager, referring to him as “your fancy boy.” Gordon even allows Paul to eat dinner with them. Gordon typifies that era’s English middle class and its inability to express emotion. Instead, an inner rage seethes inside him. We gather the extent of this when Paul meets Susan outside a London doctor’s office and discovers she’s nursing a broken jaw.

Susan’s mental and physical decline and its effect on Paul—who is almost Samaritan-like in his inability to leave—are torturous. Susan’s quiet, suburban devastation turns into a full-blown catastrophe as Paul takes on the role of caretaker, being mistaken at one point as his former lover’s grandson.

The skill in Barnes’ writing is a complete lack of sentimentality, his unflinching depiction the equivalent of slowing down to observe a car crash. You can’t help but stare.

With its generational clash of cultures, the 1960s have always been fertile ground for fiction. Like The Graduate, The Only Story by British novelist and Man Booker Prize winner Julian Barnes concerns a young man’s affair with an older woman who is suffocating in a loveless, sexless marriage.

FictionWorld FictionComing of Age

A lush, absorbing coming-of-age novel

Review by Jeff Vasishta

Considering its wealth of details and the intimacy of its first-person voice, it’s hard to believe that The Eight Mountains by Paolo Cognetti is a work of fiction and not a memoir.

The novel’s narrator, Pietro, is from a middle-class family that holidays in the foothills of the Dolomites along Italy’s northeastern border. Here he meets Bruno, a cow herder from a poor family, and the two boys form a tight bond. Like Pietro, the author divides his time between Milan and his cabin in the Italian Alps. Because of this, mountaineering, the outdoors and homebuilding are described throughout The Eight Mountains with such specificity that these sections are part instruction manual, part diary: “Four screws were necessary for each bracket, which meant thirty-two holes in all. According to Bruno these numbers were crucial: the whole viability of the roof depended on them.” Descriptions of nature are especially delightful: “I startled roe deer foraging in the abandoned pastures; bolt upright with their ears at attention, they would look at me in alarm for an instant, then flee to the woods like thieves.”

The Eight Mountains evokes a hunger and passion for the outdoors that is entwined with the boys’ enduring friendship and their bond with Pietro’s father. (Pietro often feels that rugged Bruno is the son his aloof, intense father always longed for.) This is juxtaposed with an aching sense of melancholy when Pietro’s and Bruno’s lives unspool in adulthood, as money concerns and failed relationships take hold.

A literary sensation in Italy, this isn’t so much a page-turner as a novel that draws you in, gets into your soul and never leaves.

 

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

Considering its wealth of details and the intimacy of its first-person voice, it’s hard to believe that The Eight Mountains by Paolo Cognetti is a work of fiction and not a memoir.

FictionHistorical Fiction

Frances de Pontes Peebles

Interview by Jeff Vasishta

Ten years after the publication of her first novel, Frances de Pontes Peebles returns with The Air You Breathe. Set in 1920s Brazil, it’s a captivating tale of female friendship, music, love and ambition.

You were born in Brazil, grew up in Miami and now live in Chicago. Where are you most at home?
I’m most at home around the people I love, and who love me. I have this in all three places, so they are all my homes.

The Air You Breathe started as a fictional account of Carmen Miranda’s life, but then you decided to create your own Brazilian star, Sofia Salvador. Why?
Carmen Miranda’s story is compelling, but ultimately I felt hemmed in by having to faithfully follow the trajectory of her life. It felt like a story about a Hollywood star that has already been told many times, in many forms. I didn’t want to tell the same story over again. This was very early in my writing process, when the novel was more an idea than a fully formed manuscript. At the time, I was also reading a biography of Édith Piaf, written by Piaf’s former friend. I was fascinated by the tone of the book, how much love and jealousy was in her account of their friendship, how music bound them and also broke them apart. My instincts told me that my novel wasn’t about an actual Hollywood star but about music, friendship, loss and memory. I had to be true to my original impulse, so I re-envisioned the novel and started over.

Your research for this must have been extensive. Is that part of the reason it has been a decade since The Seamstress?
I did a lot of research, which I really enjoy. But research wasn’t the reason for the extended timeline between books. My husband and I moved back to Brazil and managed my family’s farm, building a business there. Farming is a 24/7 endeavor. While on the farm I gave birth to my daughter, which was wonderful, but I also went through postpartum depression, which wasn’t. After I had a child, my brain worked differently. I had less writing time and had to adjust to this new reality. I’d write while my daughter napped. When I had childcare, I’d write a few days a week. As she got older and went to preschool, I gained more time. Like many women who are mothers and do creative work, I felt like I had to fight for my time and my ideas. But the beautiful thing was that this book, this idea, also fought for me. It stayed with me all those years and through all those life changes. It was stubborn. It said, I’ll be here when you’re ready. It was my duty to learn how to be the writer that this particular book needed. I’m not sure I could have written Dores’ character—her wise, wry voice full of love and regrets—without having experienced my own decade of heartache and love and transformation. As Mary Oliver says, “Things take the time they take. Don’t worry.”

There’s a lot of detail regarding Graça’s family’s sugar plantation and the rituals and customs of the servants. Was this history something you’ve always been aware of, or was it part of the research?
In Pernambuco, where I was born, sugar still drives a big part of the agricultural economy. Ever since the 1600s, sugar was king. There are many working sugar plantations today, but the old mills, Great Houses, chapels and slave quarters are abandoned. They are relics. Driving through the countryside, I used to see them and wonder what life was like on those plantations, especially as Brazil began to modernize. I wanted my two main characters—Maria das Dores and Maria das Graças—to be from Pernambuco, and to have them migrate south to Rio, as so many Brazilians did and still do. I always wanted the young Graça to have a position of power over Dores. When I started writing Dores’ character, I imagined a little girl wandering through a Great House on a sugar plantation, not as part of the family but as a servant, born into this role that she desperately wants to escape. So it started there.

The novel chops back and forth in time. Did you originally write it linearly, or was it always your intention to give the reader snippets of what was going to happen? 
I always wanted the reader to see Dores as an old woman in the present day, as the last living member of the Blue Moon Band. I always wanted the reader to experience her regrets and to see the outcome of her life. I was inspired by Margaret Atwood’s The Blind Assassin in terms of structure, and having a narrator who is alive in the present day but who focuses mostly on her past.

You based Dores on singer/songwriter Chavela Vargas, who was very open about the fact that she’s attracted to women, and is one of the few women in a male-dominated music scene. What were the challenges in writing the story from Dores’ perspective?
Whenever you have a first-person narrator with secrets and flaws, the challenge is how to be in their heads for the entire span of a book and not feel suffocated. Dores speaks to the reader as if addressing a long-lost friend. The challenge was how to build this relationship over the course of the book—how to have Dores slowly reveal her regrets and misdeeds, and how, in spite of these revelations, the reader (hopefully) grows to understand Dores and empathize with her.

Madam Lucifer is an interesting character: a killer and gangster who dresses in full drag during Carnival. He’s very empathetic toward Dores and never mocks her because of her sexuality. Where did he come from?
He’s inspired by a Brazilian man called Madame Satã. He died in the 1970s, but he’s a legend today. Satã basically ruled Rio’s bohemian Lapa neighborhood in the 1930s. By day he was a gangster, providing businesses protection from thieves and corrupt police. By night, in Lapa’s cabarets, he transformed into his famous drag persona, Madame Satã. He was openly gay and unashamed of his sexuality at a time in Brazilian history when gay men were sent to mental hospitals and administered electroshock conversion therapy. Satã was elegant, brutally violent and tenacious, surviving a 27-year stint in one of Brazil’s most notorious penitentiaries. In a country that still suffers from homophobia and racism, the fact that Satã became a legend—with several biographies and a popular 2002 feature film based on his life—is pretty amazing.

Did you have a sound or duo in mind when you created Dores and Vinicius’ band Sal e Pimenta?
I guess I was inspired by Ellis Regina’s and Tom Jobim’s Bossa Nova record from 1974. Although, in the book, Dor and Vinicius are antecedents to Bossa. They are Bossa’s fictionalized founders.

How did the Iowa Writers’ Workshop shape you as a writer?
My teachers and peers at Iowa were incredibly smart, intensely focused and very generous readers. They made me push myself to be a better writer and reader, and they still do. I read their work and feel this great mix of inspiration, jealousy (in the best sense) and awe. Iowa taught me to keep striving, keep working, keep reading. For me, the best thing about writing is being at my desk and feeling completely immersed and transported, even if it’s only for 10 minutes. Those 10 minutes are incredible! I live for those moments when I’m totally engrossed and in love with whatever I’m working on. Iowa taught me to fight for those moments, to never diminish them.

I read you’re already well into your next novel. How’s it going? Any clues?
I’m a slow writer. It takes me a long time to understand a book and to shape it. This new book feels very different from anything I’ve done before. It feels more like my short stories. I’m excited about this and terrified, too. I’m striving to be the writer this book deserves. I’m going to fight for it.

 

ALSO IN BOOKPAGE: Read our review of The Air You Breathe.

Author photo by Elaine Melko.

Ten years after the publication of her first novel, Frances de Pontes Peebles returns with The Air You Breathe. Set in 1920s Brazil, it’s a captivating tale of female friendship, music, love and ambition.

FictionDebut Fiction

Madhuri Vijay

Interview by Jeff Vasishta

Bangalore-born author Madhuri Vijay covers a lot of ground in The Far Field: politics, corruption, mental illness and coming of age, not to mention India’s vast landscape. The story is narrated by Shalini, a young woman who hopes to find closure after her mother’s death by tracking down a charismatic figure from her youth, Bashir Ahmed‚ a traveling salesman and one of the few people with whom her erratic mother seemed to connect. 

I found The Far Field fascinating. What was the novel’s journey?
Thank you for saying that. I suspect most novelists think of their first novels as a culmination, in one way or another, of their entire lives up to that point, and I certainly agree. The Far Field feels to me like the inevitable result of all the books I read as a child, all the places I traveled, the influence of teachers and mentors and friends, my social and family circumstances, the news I watched and, of course, a substantial portion of luck. But I know that is an unhelpfully vague answer, so I’ll try to be specific: In 2010, I wrote a short story about a mother and a daughter and a Kashmiri man. It was a maudlin story—abysmal, really—but I grew interested in writing a novel about Kashmir. It took a few years of false starts before I arrived at anything resembling a draft, and several subsequent years of work with my extraordinary (and extraordinarily patient) editors at Grove to bring the novel to its current form. 

The novel tackles many different themes: mental illness, the Kashmir conflict, army corruption, sexism. Did you have these things in mind when you first came up with the plot, or did they evolve in the writing?
All I told myself when I began the novel was that I wouldn’t try to control any part of it, so those themes emerged naturally as part of the writing. I didn’t come up with the plot beforehand either. I just put Shalini on the train to Jammu. The rest of it . . . was a surprise to me. Insofar as there was a plot, I vaguely knew Shalini would return to Bangalore at the end of the novel, so I kept writing until she did.

Where did the character of Bashir Ahmed come from?
All through my childhood, a succession of different Kashmiri salesmen visited our neighborhood to sell clothes and carpets. Some visited several times, others only once. None of them was remotely like Bashir Ahmed in terms of personality, but the pattern of their visits was certainly the model for his.

Shalini seems very conflicted. Her intentions are good, but she makes bad choices along the way. How did you craft her personality?
Shalini’s voice and character were, without question, my biggest challenges in writing the book. She seemed so closed-off and remote, even to me, which often made her frustrating to write. What helped in the end was understanding that the novel could function in some way as a criticism of Shalini and of people like her: intelligent, educated people with the means to travel, who nonetheless remain willfully oblivious to the injustices around them, as well as their part in those injustices. This is not to say that I think of her as some cold tool of social instruction. I have a lot of affection for Shalini, actually, and a lot of sympathy. She is the way she is because of a number of factors, her mother being the most influential. Shalini’s mother casts a long, dubious shadow over her life, and realizing that—and more importantly, allowing her to realize it—was an important turning point in the novel.

I felt bad for Amina, Bashir Ahmed’s daughter-in-law. It seemed like she couldn’t catch a break. What inspired her character?
I truly had no idea that Amina would walk around the corner until she did. The second she was on the page, though, she breathed life and fun into everything around her, and I knew she would be a vital character. Amina is a funny, capable, generous, gregarious person who manages to surround herself with selfish, bitter recluses, and that doesn’t turn out well for her. But she freely offers to Shalini what nobody else in the novel does: genuine, uncomplicated friendship. It was important to me that someone offer her that, even if she proves in the end unable to reciprocate.

The novel is particularly unflinching in its depiction of the Indian army and its corruption. Do you fear a backlash?
I started writing the novel roughly six years ago, and India, as a country, has changed since then. There’s no way to escape noticing the proliferation of chest-beating, nationalist politicians; the lynchings of Muslims and Dalits; the attacks (sometimes fatal) on writers who challenge the status quo. If there is any backlash to my book, it would be foolish of me to be totally surprised. 

As Ben Fountain has said, it’s hard to believe you’re a first-time novelist. The prose is really strong, and the plot keeps turning until the last page. Not an easy feat. How did you develop as a writer?
Thank you. I wish I had a more original answer, but like so many writers, I spent the major part of my childhood inside books. I read everything I could get my hands on, from P.G. Wodehouse to R.L. Stine to Jane Austen to a very steamy biography of Marilyn Monroe that was lying about our house for some reason. My two years in graduate school were also invaluable, because there I was forced, for the first time, to articulate to other people what I valued and admired in fiction and what disgusted me. Above all, I’m lucky to have found friends and readers far smarter than I am. If there is any fluidity or economy to my prose, it’s the direct result of their refusal to be satisfied with bullshit.

You attended the Iowa Writers’ Workshop after attending Lawrence University. Was it always your intention to study fiction in the U.S.?
It couldn’t have been further from my intention, actually. At Lawrence, I majored in Psychology as well as in English, and I was all set to be an academic; I even had an acceptance in hand to a graduate program in social psychology at Northwestern. How I ended up in Iowa will, I think, be forever a matter of some astonishment to me, but I’m very glad I did.

 

ALSO IN BOOKPAGE: Read our review of The Far Field.

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

Bangalore-born author Madhuri Vijay covers a lot of ground in The Far Field: politics, corruption, mental illness and coming of age, not to mention India’s vast landscape. The story is narrated by Shalini, a young woman who hopes to find closure after her mother’s death by tracking down a charismatic figure from her youth, Bashir Ahmed‚ a traveling salesman and one of the few people with whom her erratic mother seemed to connect. 

FictionComing of Age

Ann Napolitano on healing after all is lost

Interview by Jeff Vasishta

What inspired Dear Edward?
It started with my obsession with a real plane crash from 2010. A commercial flight from South Africa to London—filled with mostly Dutch passengers on their way home from vacation—crashed in Libya, and everyone on the flight died except for one 9-year-old boy named Ruben van Assouw. Ruben was found still strapped in to his seat about a half-mile away from the wreckage. Investigators speculated that he’d been sitting near the fuselage and had been ejected from the plane. He had a badly broken leg and a punctured lung but was otherwise fine. Everyone else, including his parents and brother, died immediately. I couldn’t read enough about this story, and I knew fairly quickly that I was going to have to write my way into understanding how this little boy could possibly walk away from this crash, from the loss of his entire family, and find a way to not only survive but live.

“I couldn’t read enough about this story, and I knew fairly quickly that I was going to have to write my way into understanding how this little boy could possibly walk away from this crash, from the loss of his entire family, and find a way to not only survive but live.”

What is your relationship with flying?
After doing a lot of research on worst-case scenarios and spending eight years in the heads of characters on a plane that was doomed to crash, I don’t love it. But I do fly, and in promoting this book, I’ve flown more in the past six months than I have in years. When I’m in the air, I feel hyperaware that I’m at 35,000 feet in a metal bus. And half of me thinks that fact is AMAZING, and I’m in awe of the ingenuity of my fellow, smarter humans for inventing a miracle. The other half of me is anxious, though, because I’m at 35,000 feet in a metal bus.

We know at the very beginning that the plane crashes and Edward is the only survivor. Yet we live with the characters on the plane through the whole novel. Was it challenging to pull off that structure?
I knew that the two storylines had to sit side by side, in part because I thought that if something this absolutely devastating happened to a person, he would carry it with him for the rest of his life. It wouldn’t be a matter of whether he was able to set that trauma down, it would be a matter of learning to bear its weight. That’s why the two storylines alternate and have (roughly) equal space in the novel. And perhaps because I saw the structure as inevitable, I found it to be a creative positive. I had two arcs I was following at all times, and that kept me on track.

Read our review of Dear Edward.

Why did you choose the passenger characters that you did—the curmudgeonly billionaire, the gay soldier, the libidinous flight attendant and particularly Florida, who remembered past lives?
When I was beginning to think about this book, my husband suggested I spend a year taking notes, reading and researching before I actually started writing. Writing sentences is perhaps my favorite thing to do, and I am very good at making things up. However, writing is more intuitive than cerebral for me; in my prior novel, A Good Hard Look, I had struggled with the plot and struggled to pull the narrative into the shape of a book. I ended up having to cut hundreds of pages I’d written. My husband’s suggestion was a reaction to watching me write that novel; he thought I should engage my problem-solving brain before I began to make up stories willy-nilly.

I found that year of note-taking frustrating, because I couldn’t write pretty sentences, but he was right. A lot of my planning that year went into the characters on the plane. It was an exciting opportunity to choose who I wanted to delve into, because every kind of person flies. I wanted the characters to be very different from each other, and once I sketched out the idea for a character, I would read a book or two in research for him or her. For Crispin Cox—the curmudgeonly billionaire—I read Jack Welch’s Jack: Straight From the Gut (which is unintentionally hilarious). I came up with Florida after reading Neil Gaiman’s Sandman series, inspired by how Gaiman disregards boundaries like time. For Benjamin, the soldier, I read War by Sebastian Junger and also spoke to a friend who is a captain in the army.

You focused on the small details in Edward’s life during his recovery—his wanting to leave the house for nighttime walks and not wanting to sleep upstairs. Tell us about this portrayal of his trauma.
Edward’s first year after the crash, which takes place in part one of the book, felt very clear to me from the start. His focus was on physical survival: Could he eat, could he walk, could he sleep? After his first year, though, I struggled with his chapters. The possibilities for his forward motion felt infinite, and in fact there’s a version of the book in which we see Edward’s entire life, ending when he’s about 75 years old. Eventually (like, after five years of writing), I decided to align his recovery with the psychological framework known as Maslow’s hierarchy of needs. The hierarchy is shaped like a triangle, and the bottom, largest “need” is for survival, shelter, food and water. It narrows gradually through the need for safety, then love and belonging, then esteem and finally self-actualization. I used these stages as reference points as Edward grew, grieved and healed.

Edward is filled with decency. He refuses to cash the check that’s given to him, he’s horrified when Shay’s mother suspects he’s been sleeping with her daughter, and he rejects some undoubtedly excellent universities because he wants to remain with Shay. His moral compass is unwavering. Were there other versions of Edward in which he wasn’t so upstanding?
Hm. No. There were other versions in which Edward was more boring, though. I wanted to write a book about kind people maneuvering a terrible situation. I had no interest in Edward being immoral, and he felt so soaked in sadness that true anger or rage felt inaccessible from inside him. In the weakest/worst drafts, Edward was too muted, though, and too passive. I had to fight to bring him to his own surface, in order for him to show up in his new life.

You edit a literary magazine and teach creative writing as well as having your own family. How does your writing process work within that dynamic? Do you write at the same place every day for a certain amount of time, or cram it in when you get the time?
Before I had children, I had routines and word count goals and strong preferences for my work environment—in the morning, on my couch, in an empty apartment—but that ended with the birth of my older son. For the past 12 years I’ve written whenever and wherever possible, which I’ve come to feel fine about. It feels like another layer of acceptance that writing is part of me, as elemental as brushing my teeth, and if I only have five minutes to write after brushing my teeth on a given day, I say thank you and take it.

Author photo © Dan Wilde

Ann Napolitano discusses her tenderhearted novel about a boy who’s the only survivor of a devastating plane crash.

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