For her interview with Reading Group Choices, Amy Stewart talks about how she captures her characters’ voices on the page, her family’s historical connection to the FBI, what Constance Kopp would think about gender equality and law enforcement if transported to our times, and more…

Reading Group Choices: Dear Miss Kopp is an epistolary novel, which is so fitting because letter writing was how so many people kept in touch during WWI. Each character has their own manner of expressing herself in letter form: did that individual style surprise you at all, or reveal something about their personality that you may not have realized before?

Amy Stewart: I’m glad I didn’t attempt an epistolary novel until the sixth installment, because I know the characters so well by now. I expected Constance to be very forthright and forthcoming, to tell the whole story, to put everything out there. Of course, she was often writing to her boss about her intelligence work and the cases she was pursuing, so she’d be expected to explain herself and provide all the details.

Norma was incredibly busy in France—I know from reading women’s wartime letters that nobody had a minute to write a note—and she had a brusque and businesslike personality. She’s no poet, Norma. Also, her letters would’ve been censored and there would’ve been very little of substance she could have shared. This was something else I saw in the wartime letters I read: you could see how the people stationed in France struggled to come up with anything at all they’d be allowed to divulge. I created Norma’s roommate, Aggie, in part so that someone else could take over the pen and say a little more about what life in France was like!

Fleurette’s voice was the one I worked on the most. Here’s someone who will be in her twenties during the 1920s. She would’ve been very different from her older sisters. So I thought, “Well, who was a great woman letter-writer from the 1920s?” Of course, Dorothy Parker came to mind. But believe it or not, very few of her letters have been collected and published. I read all the ones I could find, and tried to channel this very witty, opinionated, intimate voice. I thought Fleurette might be more willing to reveal herself to her close friend Helen and might hide quite a bit from her judgmental sisters, so you see how the tone of the letters can change depending on who she’s writing to.

RGC: You have mentioned that your great grandfather was an Interim Director of the FBI. Did you know that prior to writing Girl Waits With Gun? If so, is his history part of why you were drawn to Constance Kopp’s story? If not, how did learning about your great grandfather’s history affect your approach or feelings about the story?

Oh yes, everyone in my family knows about my great-grandfather’s work. He was only running the Bureau for about six months in early 1919. This was before the Palmer raids and before the J. Edgar Hoover era. I went to the National Archives and found a great deal of his correspondence, and I did a lot of research into his predecessor, Bruce Bielaski, who actually hired my great-grandfather.

I knew that Constance, in real life, did some sort of intelligence work during the war. So it made sense to put her with the Bureau. Adding my great-grandfather in was really just pure entertainment for me—he basically gets a cameo near the end, it’s not a big role—but it was intriguing for me to think about how he and Constance were contemporaries. It’s not entirely implausible that they could have met.

RGC: Do you personally identify with one of the sisters more than the other, or find that a particular sister’s story stays in your head more often when you’re not writing? And does that identification/allegiance/interest change depending on the book?

Well, in a way, these have always been Constance’s books. She’s the one who had this life-changing job as a deputy sheriff that went on to change the lives of both her sisters. And I think there’s a lot to identify with in Constance. She had big ideas about what she wanted her life to be, but she was thwarted by the society around her. At six feet tall, weighing 180 pounds, she must’ve felt like a misfit, especially back then when very few men were that size. She didn’t want to get married or run a household, which also made her out of step with her era. I think we can all identify with those feelings in one way or another.

RGC: Is there a specific question left unanswered from the documentation of the sisters’ lives you wished you knew the truth about?

Oh, there’s so much! But in terms of this book, I just wish I knew more about what they were really doing during the war. For some reason, they just dropped out of sight for a year or two. Apart from this one tiny clue about Constance doing some type of intelligence work, I just have no idea. I usually feel like my novels must fall short in comparison to whatever was really going on in their lives, but for this one, it’s quite likely that I gave them far more interesting wartime duties than they really had. I have no reason to think that Norma went to France or that Fleurette got to tour with a well-known vaudeville act, and I’m pretty sure Constance’s job was not as prestigious as the one I gave her. I hope they would approve of the lives I made up for them!

RGC: Some of the gender treatment at the time of the novel shares many similarities with contemporary national service and how women and minorities are treated. What do you imagine Constance and Norma would think if you dropped them back into their service fields today?

I think about this a lot—or really, what I wonder about is just what they would think of our lives generally today. To be honest, they might have pretty old-fashioned reactions to our world. I can imagine them being rather horrified at the way we all dress, for instance. I can imagine that we might not seem very courteous to them—that it might seem that we’ve forgotten our manners. And you know, they might have a hard time catching up to our egalitarian society today. Now, we’re all quite aware that we don’t live in a very egalitarian world. But I think it would absolutely make their heads spin to try to catch up to where we are today, and then to step back and try to understand how far we have to go.

In terms of law enforcement specifically, our legal system back then was rudimentary in so many ways. For instance, our Miranda rights—the right to remain silent—only date back to 1966. That’s fifty years after Constance was a cop. In some ways, law enforcement back then wasn’t something you could call a “system,” and there was really no understanding of systemic bias in the way we understand it today. So there again—Constance would have so much catching up to do! It’s hard to imagine her processing the changes that have already happened, and then having to grapple with how much more change is needed.

I do know one thing that would not surprise her. Only about twelve percent of sworn officers today are women. Women are grossly underrepresented in law enforcement, in spite of the fact that we make better cops: Women officers are far less likely to fire their weapons or be involved in any kind of complaint of violence. We tend to be better at the skills required of the job: de-escalation, crisis management, negotiation, communication, and grappling with highly nuanced situations. Hiring more women should be a top priority for any law enforcement agency today, and Constance would agree with that wholeheartedly.

RGC: The ending of Dear Miss Kopp provides glimpses of possible futures for each sister. Did you know when you started writing the book where you wanted each sister to be headed? And more globally, especially since there are more books to come in the series, how far in advance do you plan future installments?

Since I know what they were doing in real life, it’s easy for me to plan out their futures. The historical record picks back up again in the 1920s and I want to stick to their true story as much as I possibly can. So yes, I know where each sister is headed! I’m generally thinking 2 or 3 books ahead, but I often have ideas for many more books than that. I have literally thousands of records from my research into the Kopps and the world they lived in, so there’s no shortage of material for future installments!

Read an excerpt, find discussion questions, and learn more about Amy’s novel Dear Miss Kopp! Revisit our previous chat with her, and browse all of the other great author interviews on our blog!

The post Reading Group Choices Interview with Amy Stewart appeared first on Reading Group Choices.

For her interview with Reading Group Choices, Ellen Alpsten talks about what captured her imagination about Catherine I’s story, Russia past and present, the many sources of research and inspiration, and what’s in store for the sequel…

Reading Group Choices: You mention that you first came across Catherine’s story when you were 13, and knew you had to tell it. Did you have the notion to be a writer that young?

Ellen Alpsten: True – the fascinating story of Catherine I of Russia had never left me, ever since I came across a book called Germans and Russians in my parents’ library, charting the millennial history of those two people. These were pre-screen days and I lived in the countryside in a village home to more cows than people, so I read voraciously and the book was written in a very entertaining way. Despite terrible tragedies and two horrendous wars, there is a deep fascination for each other. Two people and countries that toiled and functioned to terrible ends, but who are equally endowed with an incredible soulfulness and depth, an innate understanding of beauty and life, of tragedy and fate. One chapter in Germans and Russians was devoted to Catharine I: I think she is “my” Tut-Ankh-Amun, as she was always there but had slid into the shadows of history. I was destined to find her, I believe.

As for the idea of becoming a writer, my paternal grandmother had been a published author, unusually so for her time and age. She gave it up to marry, have six children and live through WWII. Also, my teachers always encouraged me to write, from a young age on. I wrote my first novel aged 10 – mercifully, it has been lost.

RGC: How did the story stay alive in your life and imagination until you were ready to write it, and what made you “ready” – life, circumstance, skill, courage, or all of the above?

EA: I love history, despite later studying politics, philosophy and economy. More than that, I love great historic novels. I grew up with Angelique, Desiree and such fabulous works as The Medicus, which were based on solid research and led the reader into a different world. My father had grown up in the GDR (German Democratic Republic) and fled the Soviets at the age of 16 through a night forest. Germans and Russians are linked by a historic hate-love and the Romanovs were a very “German” family at the end of their reign through various marriages. Also, Catherine the Great was originally a German Princess. So, her story was close to my imagination: the fact that she was “the other Catherine” stuck.

As a student in Paris, I dabbled in writing but led a very busy social life. Still, I won the short story competition of my “Grande Ecole” with a novella entitled Meeting Mr. Ghandi. That encouraged me. During my first job in London, I realized that I had to follow some of the best advice I ever got about being a writer. As a student in Paris I worked as an assistant to the bestselling author Benoite Groult: her novel Salt on My Skin was a 90s smash hit and she was a true Parisian intellectual: sharp-witted, smoking like a chimney, wafting about in a huge “enfilade” 7th arrondissement apartment, wearing oversized horn-rimmed glasses. She gave me some valuable advice – be serious about your writing! When I joined a Graduate Trainee Scheme in a big London PR agency, I hardly earned any money and I knew very few people: every evening, I sat and wrote. There is no excuse, I realized. If a story sears your soul, tell it! Tsarina certainly was such a story…

RGC: How did you decide on the structure of the novel? Did you always plan to return to the opening dramatic moment of Peter’s death at the end?

EA: I should really plan more. In truth, I just thought about an exciting starting point, a conflict that would draw the reader right in. These days, one has to want to read on after the first 10 or 20 pages. No modern reader gives an author any more time. We have moved on since the days of the classics such as Moby Dick. There is just too much competition for people’s attention out there and a reader gives us his or her most valuable gift: TIME. Only once I started writing, I realized what a big book this would become. As so often in life, naivety protects! I felt I had to divide the narrative into chunks – Tsarina is a page turner, but not an easy read. The structure imposed itself and the book ends where it begins, which I like. For the Tsarina sequel, I have incidentally chosen a similar structure – again, we have an incredible heroine at crossroads of her life and at a life-or-death moment!

RGC: Which character other than Catherine did you feel the most drawn to while you were writing? Why?

EA: I read for one year before daring to write the opening sentence – and realized that the biggest challenge would be to not make another oeuvre about Peter the Great, who tried to usurp the narrative with his larger than life character wherever possible – men! He looms impossibly large, and readers have qualified Catherine’s and his very modern relationship – it’s sex and attraction, but also a deep friendship and admiration – as either “married to the devil himself” or as “beyond interesting.” Peter the Great was an avaricious learner; soaking all and everything he sees and learns up like a sponge, and then squeezing that knowledge out over Russia, drowning his country in a flood of ideas. He turned the semi-Asian Muscovy into the semi-European Russia and in all his ticks and spleens, he’s a simply fantastic character: interested in everything, callously cruel, with utter disregard to anything or anyone that doesn’t match his ideas, always ready to pay the highest possible price for the fulfillment of his wishes, a huge sensuous appetite for be it food, drink or love – LIFE.

He is a truly Baroque character, bridging influences from the Renaissance towards Enlightenment. I love his confidence in his fate and his destiny, the trust with which he pursued his dreams: conquering the Baltics and making that earth forever Russian by stomping St. Petersburg out of the earth, conjuring a first small timber cabin from muddy swamps which were home to bears and wolves. He is mesmerizing, but shocking as well, as multi-layered as any human can be: deeply disturbed ever since witnessing the brutal execution of half his family at the age of nine, he suffered from epilepsy and perhaps never quite trusted the sun to rise the next day. Was it for that that he loved “turning the world upside down”? Possibly the heroine of Tsarina as well as his best friend Menshikov, a former pie-baker, are the utmost expression of that desire for tomfoolery. Had he wished for Catherine to rule? We don’t know, for the decision was taken off his hands – and she set the stage for everything that was to follow politically, an unprecedented century of female rule in Russia.

RGC: You mention that not much is know about Marta’s/Catherine’s life until she enters the Glück household. Is there a specific question from her early life – or even later – left unanswered from the documentation you wished you knew the truth about?

EA: There is as good as no documentation about her early life – her full name, and her parents’ names, are as much disputed as is her possible birth date. However, in true fairy tale fashion, she went on to search for her family in the vastness of the Russian Empire and found them. That anchored her past to a degree. My research focused on the circumstances of the serfs, who are unfree peasants attached to an estate. I wonder what took her into service at the Glucks – again, like in the fairy-tale, they met again. Ernst Gluck was such a learned man that the Tsar was eager to employ him. Marta/Catherine promoted the family greatly. She never forgot anyone who showed her kindness and generosity, as it was such a rare quality in those days. Was it luck that had led her to their household in Marienburg, which subsequently was taken by the Russians, or destiny…?

RGC: You mention in your author letter that Russia at the time of the novel shares many similarities with contemporary Russia in how it is ruled and how the citizens are treated. What do you imagine Catherine would think if you dropped her back into the country today?

EA: What an interesting question! Tsarina is an historic novel, but in our age of female empowerment, it does feel shockingly modern and contemporary. Catherine is a woman who overcomes every obstacle, even if fate rages against her. She rises from dirt poor beginnings to the most dizzying heights of power and unimaginable riches. It still happens in Russia today – think of Supermodel Natalia Vodianova, who once sold vegetables at dawn on a Kiev market and who just got married to the son of LVMH founder Bernard Arnault! Marta/Catherine loved a practical joke, and she would have been amused by how little things had changed. What makes Tsarina special is that she is a foreigner, a Baltic German, observing Russia and the Russians. The reader learns about a past which is the present. We have the opulence of the Russian ruling class as much as the deprivation and helplessness of the Russian people. Nothing is as abundant and as superfluous as human life. There are still forced laborers in Russian prison camps, and everyday humiliation, if not quite the mock executions the Soviets specialized in, is omnipresent.

On a more metaphysical level, her story is as contrasting – and unchanging – as the Russian soul itself, casually combining seemingly insurmountable contrasts: callous cruelty and overwhelming empathy; overt hostility towards all things foreign, yet selfless hospitality to strangers; freezing, interminable winters – zima – and the summers’ white nights. So, who knows, if she was around today, she might first seduce Putin and then wrestle power of him?

RGC: You create such a visceral world, and don’t shy away from the brutal realities that occupied the serfs: harsh winters, pollution and disease, how Marta and others like her are bought and sold, and assaulted by those with power. Can you talk about how that constant hardship connects to Catherine’s character and her will to survive, and how unglamorous the real lives of historical figures – both high and low – really were?

EA: Growing up as a serf – an unfree peasant attached to the estate of the Russian church in Swedish Livonia (today Estonia and Latvia) – did not allow for airs and graces. Marta/Catherine was destined for a life of hard labor from dawn till dusk. When she met Peter aged nineteen or twenty, her character was set, and her stratospheric rise did not change her. She won Peter with her earthy sex-appeal, her beauty and quick wit as well as her crude sense of humor – they both adored practical jokes – her level-headedness, her courage and also her soft heart: “Nobody can be so evil as for you not to find some good in him,” he wrote to her.

Peter’s world, too, was harsh, cruel, and lonely. She was his one true companion, an invaluable asset. As Tsarina, she preferred peace and prosperity, as well as a policy of contracts and alliances, to war-mongering. During her years at the Tsar’s side she had carefully fostered and nurtured relationships – both her female friendships as well as with Peter’s cronies and companions, be they in the military or court administrators. Peter was incalculable in his ambitions and his anger, and she often softened the blow of his knout – quite literally. When he died, everyone at court owed her. Was this behavior cunning, or simply her character? Probably a blend of both in this incalculable world. If you don’t know in the morning if you shall see the sun set, you live the hell out of that day!

As for the real lives of historic figures – yes, that is one reason that people like historical fiction. It is hugely cathartic to think that Peter the Great and Henry VIII suffered from their disability to father a son, or any healthy child for that after a certain point in his life, or that Napoleon must have died in insufferable pain from his stomach cancer. As for Marta/Catherine, giving birth a dozen times and seeing ten of those children die? Par for the course for a woman in those days, be she high or low born.

RGC: One perennial question with historical novels is how an author balances research with the writing. How do you avoid getting bogged down in the research process, and decide how much historical information to include without sacrificing the story?

EA: The story seemed like a structure of a house, the research the wattle and daub to fill it out, especially when I realized that, amazingly enough, there was no book about her: no thesis, no biography, no novel, no nothing. But there were sources galore, and infinitely fascinating ones: early travel descriptions, such as the German Adam Olearius visiting Tsar Mikhail Romanov, letters of foreigners at the Russian Court such as Mrs. Rondeau, and, last but not least, Prof. Lindsey Hughes fabulous tome Russia in the Time of Peter the Great. I watched Nureyev and Baryshnikov dance on YouTube as well as the Dogma movie The Ark. I even read Russian fairy tales, which tell you everything about the imagination of a people – an invaluable help. I love Baba Yaga’s house and the invariable ending – the storyteller eats so much honey that his beard drips with it. The book is stuffed to the brim with soul, detail, and truth – and an attempted answer to the question: So, what was her life really like? I slid deeper and deeper into the strange, shocking, sensuous world that is the Russian Baroque, and the Russian soul, reading for almost a year before writing my first word, immersing myself completely into her life and rise.

While writing, I always had at least five books open, all annotated and marked with Post-its, and it was an all-encompassing endeavor – I did so whilst working night shifts as a presenter on live breakfast TV. Normally I got up at 2am and left the house at 2:30 (my neighbor in the flat beneath thought I worked as an escort, as I cantered down the stairs at any ungodly hour!) came home at 12:00 noon, slept 3 hours, went running in the park, wrote, ate dinner, and went to bed at 21:00 to be fresh for live TV. Repeat, for 1.5 years. In the end I suffered anxiety and depression from sleep deprivation. I really gave this book my all! From that original version 300 pages have since been edited out – so Tsarina as she is today is also a HUGE team effort and I can not thank my editors and publishers enough.

RGC: Catherine’s journey to become the ruler of Russia gets all the attention in the novel, while straightforward historical accounts may have focused instead on her reign. What makes this process of becoming Tsarina more attractive from a storytelling perspective?

EA: As Tsarina of Russia, she preferred peace and prosperity, as well as a policy of contracts and alliances, to war-mongering, an absolute rarity in the Russian history. Her rule was short – two years only – and she was mostly influenced by her advisors who were governed by huge self-interest; Russia was torn apart by Peter’s reforms and opposition to his policies. As such, in her rise from rags to Romanov we witness a milestone in female emancipation and empowerment. It but bears testimony of the strength of human nature and the absolute will to survive. Every possible card in the world was stacked against her, yet she rose to the most unimaginable height of history.

But not only her psychological strength is impressive, her physical condition, too: she bore the Tsar a dozen children, only to see most of them die. She travelled with him all over Russia and Central Asia and accompanied him into the field. Peter the Great and her were lovers, but above all great friends, which is also modern and interesting. He loved her courage, her practical jokes, and her level-headedness, and appreciated her mildness. When we look at her portraits today, people might struggle to see her appeal – though that is a very modern message, too. You can make it happen without adhering to a beauty ideal. If a contemporary wrote: “She wasn’t beautiful, but as warm as an animal,” he speaks of her sex appeal, but above all about her indomitable spirit! Hers is the “ultimate Cinderella story”, as Daisy Goodwin called it – and thus one of the “Seven Big Plots”.

RGC: Are there other powerful female figures from history whose untold stories attract you?

EA: The sequel of Tsarina will answer that – The Tsarina’s Daughter tells the story of her daughter Elizabeth, a beautiful ingenue turning sexy badass, who refuses to adhere to the expectations of her time and who takes a hard decision where she must, and who does things her own very hard way, before she becomes who she is. Any reader who loves Tsarina will be back with the family, which is fantastic. Lots of questions get answered and some of the lives take truly shocking and surprising turns.

And yes, there is much more to come, but I cannot tell yet. There are so many interesting people in that time, and I like the way Star Wars fans out, for example, giving side characters center stage…

RGC: Tsarina is a sweeping tale. How did other epic Russian novels from the same era inform how your story would be told, if they did have an influence? Which other novels would you recommend, modern or recent, that focus on the same subject or time period?

EA: I grew up in the African Highlands without TV and my brothers were in boarding school. If any movie ever reached the tiny village cinema, it was a Bollywood production – glaringly colorful and SO wonderfully over the top: Princesses! Witches! Ogres! Magic animals! You say it, they had it. My first books were beautifully illustrated copies of the Greek and Roman myths, which take no prisoners. That certainly influenced the love for sweeping epics. I never wondered: can I write this? It was just what her story demanded. I also read both Anna Karenina and War and Peace and it certainly helped me decide to go all in and to not shy away from anything – least of all the Russian naming system which can be confusing, as people are called by their name & patronym, their family name or their pet-name. We have Alexander Danilovich, who can also be Menshikov, or Alekasha. Thankfully, there is a cast of characters included. If you do it, do it properly. As far as other books are concerned, I enjoyed reading Henri Troyat about Peter the Great and Catherine the Great – it is non-fiction, but hugely entertaining.

Read more about Ellen’s novel Tsarina, and browse all of the great author interviews on our blog!

Image: Catherine I of Russia by Jean-Marc Nattier

The post Reading Group Choices Interview with Ellen Alpsten appeared first on Reading Group Choices.

For his interview with Reading Group Choices, Adrien Goetz talks about the lure of mysteries, what inspires him at the Louvre, why the past is present (and future), and why useless pursuits are the best ones to follow…

Reading Group Choices: In Villa of Delirium, Achilles returns to Kérylos decades after he left it, in search of a hidden treasure. You’ve also written a series of novels that revolve around art-inspired mysteries. To discover the past, it seems, is to engage in a mystery. Can you speak about that connection?

Adrien Goetz: I love mysteries, to find the missing piece, to solve puzzles. Villa of Delirium is not a crime novel, of course, but this villa is a setting which lends itself to this type of investigation.

RGC: Achilles remarks on the childlike energy and excitement with which the Reinach brothers (and Gustave Eiffel) launched their grand projects. Do you feel that way about novel writing?

AG: In all modesty, yes, you’ve got it right. Constructing a novel is like building a house just as you want to, where you alone reign, with the need to invite everyone there once it will be finished.

RGC: One recurring notion in the novel is the pleasure of the useless. Learning ancient Greek, for example, is all the better for not being practical. Theodore Reinach tells Achilles that “it is precisely with what serves no purpose that one achieves great things”. Has that idea been a guiding principle in your own pursuits?

AG: But you intuit all! I’m trying to teach this idea to my students right now at the Sorbonne: to always privilege the useless, to interest oneself in what isn’t “on the syllabus”, to read for pleasure and forget the lists of books that are hard to digest… They think I’m joking!

RGC: Given your knowledge of the Louvre, in particular as editor of its quarterly magazine, Grande Galerie, what spirit or frame of mind would you advise someone to assume as they visit? Where would we find you among its galleries?

AG: Right now there is a gallery that I like very much and which is one of the least visited in the museum. It’s the gallery of Baouît, where an Egyptian church from the paleo-Christian era has been constructed, a very poetic and very beautiful place. It’s there that the action of my new novel begins, an historical crime story this time, Intrigue in Egypt, which has just been published by Grasset. At the Louvre, let yourself be guided by your inspiration and have confidence in chance, and above all come back. Each time, I discover something!

RGC: Can you talk about the interplay of fact and imagination, and what the fictional character of Achilles helps us learn about the historical figures of the Reinach brothers? Did you feel particular pressure when writing about the Reinachs, Gustave Eiffel, or any of the other real-life artists and cultural icons who appear in the novel?

AG: I wanted to place them at a bit of distance. I had to be an external observer which watches, not understanding everything, and makes hypotheses. I didn’t want to lend to the Reinachs feelings which wouldn’t be correct. Thanks to Achilles, I put myself in the skin of a young man a little naive who is fascinated by what he discovers…

RGC: Given your life’s work and extensive scholarship in the field of art history, do you feel more at home in the past than in the present (or future)?

AG: The past is always here, with us, and hopefully for the future. A novel of Victor Hugo is not a book of the past, it is present in our library. The Villa Kérylos is not a place of the past, it exists today, since we visit it, we enter it, we go there with friends, and where maybe we even make plans… I feel myself at ease there, in our time.

RGC: Villa of Delirium will introduce Anglophone readers to your work as a novelist. Do you anticipate any particular ways in which these readers will respond to the novel? Do you have thoughts about the relationship between a young country like the United States and antiquity?

AG: In the U.S., there are extraordinary homes everywhere that have beautiful stories. I think that the Americans have this sensibility. I trembled when visiting Monticello or the beautiful villas of Newport. Renaissance homes, Trianons, Roman villas have been built in the U.S. The most celebrated and most beautiful are those of J. Paul Getty at Malibu, a Villa Kérylos from the 1970s.

RGC: Forgery versus authenticity is a recurring subject in the novel, most notably in the controversy surrounding the Oblia tiara, which threatens the Reinachs’ reputation. What can the shifting definitions of “real” and “fake” in relation to objects of the past teach us about the current era of fake news and mistrust in information?

AG: It’s one of the subjects of this book, indeed. It’s the question that I would like for visiters to ask themselves when they visit an historic monument: when was what we see really built? In another of my novels, which takes place at Versailles, this theme was already central. The tiara is an evil twin of the villa. I had the chance to hold it in my hands, in the storage of the Louvre. It is truly “too beautiful to be true”, an incontestable masterpiece… from the 19th century!

RGC: The novel makes clear how the First World War brought a blunt, modern end to romantic thinking. Is some of that innocence and idealism recoverable?

AG: In books, perhaps, at least, and it is just as beautiful…

RGC: Theodore Reinach tells his wife that his studies and architectural projects will allow him “to enter the minds of the ancients”. Has your work with art given you similar access? And if so, what have you learned?

AG: Theodore builds his house also so that his wife, his children, can enter his mind. He’s a lonely soul, who grew up locked away in a library. It’s not only a metaphor. We have all felt during our studies these moments where it is difficult to open ourselves to others. Maybe because we are too deep in the spirit of another time, in the understanding of a mathematic or philosophical question. I wanted to try to make this felt to my readers. Everyone at one time has stopped themselves to dream at Pompeii, in Rome, before the Temple of Dendur transported to the Metropolitan Museum, or at the summit of the Empire State Building. These places put us in communication with other eras, they permit unique moments of meditation, of admiration, of sharing! One can experience love stories across centuries when entering these places conceived by the minds of the past. It is what the Romantics knew at the time, when the “poetry of ruins” kindled the spirit.

RGC: Could you have predicted you would write a novel based around Kérylos during your first visit to the villa?

AG: As soon as I entered there, I felt good vibes, and I knew that this house had a thousand things to tell…

Thank you for your questions. They are a true reward for an author !

Read more about Adrien’s novel Villa of Delirium.

Take a spellbinding virtual visit of the Villa Kérylos.

Browse all of the great author interviews on our blog, including other French authors such as Antoine Laurain and Timothée de Fombelle!

Photo Villa Kérylos: Christophe Recoura – CC BY-SA 3.0
Photo mosaic: Hélène Grenier – CC BY-SA 3.o

The post Reading Group Choices Interview with Adrien Goetz appeared first on Reading Group Choices.

For her interview with Reading Group Choices, Tsui talks about lost water arts, equal access to pools, and her dream swimming destination…

Reading Group Choices: There is so much interesting research in this book. What was your research process like?

Bonnie Tsui: Incredibly varied. I dug into historical archives, interviewed paleontologists at their labs, traveled to Japan, Iceland, and elsewhere. I loved every minute of it.

RGC: There are a few central characters and settings: Gudlaugur Fridporsson, Kim Chambers and Jay Taylor, for example. We feel that any of them could have been developed into their own book! How did you choose which would become central? Was there anyone you left out that you wish you could go back and include?

BT: I really enjoyed most every person I spoke with for this book, and so I tried very hard not to be too precious or sentimental when making editorial decisions. In the end, those main characters you mention were so clearly central — especially after I spent more time with them — that it wasn’t too hard to decide whose stories to spotlight and whose to trim for the purpose of narrative cohesion.

RGC: Some of the topics you present, such as the art of Nihon eiho, open vast new worlds for readers who are unfamiliar with them, and are rich enough to inspire their own books, novels, and further study. Were these subjects already known to you before writing the book, or discoveries?

BT: Nihon eiho was such a rich and delightful discovery for me, and I continue to be amazed that more people don’t know about the Japanese swimming martial art — not just internationally, but within Japan itself! The philosophical principles attached to various strokes and techniques continue to inspire me with how much they tilt toward whole personhood in swimming — it’s taught as not just a bodily exercise, but a spiritual and mental one.

RGC: You refer to the book Contested Waters and provide a brief history of public and private swimming pools and clubs. You also include your own experience swimming at a pool that was more racially diverse than your school and other activities. Today there is still a large racial disparity in the sport of swimming, and even its simple enjoyment. Can you talk about steps you’d like to see to increase equal access and greater diversity when it comes to swimming?

BT: I would love to see universal swimming lessons as part of public school education in the United States — I’ve seen that in several other countries, and it would go a long way toward closing that legacy racial gap in swimming ability and access.

RGC: What thoughts do you have about any long-term impacts of COVID and confinement on how we incorporate swimming into our lives? What has been the impact on your own practice and habits? Have you continued to swim in the bay?

BT: I’ve shifted my practice almost entirely from the pool to open water — swimming in San Francisco Bay, surfing in the Pacific. It takes a little more time and effort to stay dedicated, but for me it’s more than worth it for my well-being. I feel for those for whom open water swimming is not an option, and I wish them a speedy return to the pools near them.

RGC: In terms of structure, how did you decide to separate the book into parts? 

BT: Once I decided on the question of Why We Swim being posed in the title, all the stories really did easily sort into five different ways we can answer that question: Survival, Well-Being, Community, Competition, and Flow. I think the structure works because there’s a natural progression from beginning to end, and yet the themes are all related and run together in some way.

RGC: You have had the fortunate opportunity to swim in a number of beautiful locations around the world. What is the number one place you still want to swim?

BT: I would love to swim in Hearst Castle’s Neptune Pool before I die. It is just such a crazy baroque creation, and I think it would be pretty extraordinary to know what it feels like to be in that pool.

We’ve got more great author interviews on our blog, including other nonfiction writers like Megan Stielstra and Robert Kurson!

The post Reading Group Choices Interview with Bonnie Tsui appeared first on Reading Group Choices.

For her interview with Reading Group Choices, Graudin talks about the symbolism of wolves, championing the female “Hero’s Quest”, and what history teaches us about racism and injustice…

Reading Group Choices: Did you know from the outset that Wolf by Wolf would have a sequel? If so, why did you know you wanted it to be two books instead of one? And do you have plans to revisit the characters in a third volume?

Ryan Graudin: The books were sold to my publisher as a duology, so yes, I had the sequel in mind from the get go. I didn’t really consider it a sequel when I was plotting the series—more like the second volume of a story that was too big to fit in a single book. As for a third book, I often find myself missing Yael’s voice and while I know where she goes after Blood for Blood, I’m not sure it’s enough of a story to justify another novel. My motto for future projects is never say never though, so… we’ll just say a third installment is unlikely.

RGC: The wolves are an important symbol in both books. How did you decide to use wolves? 

Graudin: In most stories, wolves are painted as one-dimensional creatures: evil predators. And yes, it’s true that wolves hunt and kill, but if you take the time to study their behaviors, you’ll find that they’re affectionate creatures who form strong bonds with their pack members.

This duality resonated with me when I was drafting Wolf by Wolf. World War II has been well-mythologized, and I believe one of the reasons people are so fascinated with this historical conflict is because of how it frames humanity. Both the worst and best sides of our nature emerged during that era. Acts of unspeakable evil were carried out by Hitler and the SS, while others, such as Sophie Scholl, sacrificed their lives to protect people who could not protect themselves.

Wolves were Hitler’s favorite animal, mostly because of their “Big Bad Wolf” mythos. He lauded them as the “purer” warrior form of dog and took great pride in the fact that Adolf meant “noble wolf” in Old High German. Those in his innermost circle frequently called him ‘Wolf’ and one of Hitler’s Eastern front headquarters in Poland was named the Wolfsschanze (or Wolf’s Lair).

My choice to use wolves as a symbol for Yael’s pack—or the people from her past whose stories guide her forward—was an ode to the duality of human nature and free will. During times of conflict and crises, we can choose how we respond. Are we predators or pack members? Do we fight to destroy or do we fight to save? All of us have the capacity for both. It just depends on “which wolf we feed.” (To reference the two wolves inside of you legend.)

RGC: Names seem to hold important meanings and value for each character. How did you choose the characters’ names in the books? 

Graudin: I’m a sucker for allusions. Yael’s name is a nod to Jael from the Book of Judges, a woman who saved the nation of Israel by driving a tent peg through an enemy general’s temple. Miriam and Aaron-Klaus are references to Moses’s siblings in the Book of Exodus.

I’m also a sucker for the meanings behind names. Löwe (Luka’s surname) means lion and Wolfe (Adele and Felix’s surnames) means… well, wolf. Geyer means vulture. The list goes on. I also try to find names that fit a character, sounding exactly the way I envision them in my head.

RGC: The novels present a female undertaking a traditionally male journey. Was this intentional? Have you received responses from female readers who identify with the main character because of this role?

Graudin: I’ve always been drawn to books where the “Hero’s Quest’’ features a heroine, so it never occurred to me to write anything else! As a young girl, I hungered for books that affirmed that I too could go on an adventure and have a story worth telling. I’ve certainly had a lot of feedback from readers who relate to Yael. Many of them are female, but what I find interesting is that Wolf by Wolf has become a book that teachers and librarians offer to “reluctant readers” (who are, more often than not, teenage boys). It’s the motorcycle race—the traditional male journey—that draws these boys in, but as they keep reading, they too find themselves relating to Yael.

Obviously, this thrills me! Female-centric narratives deserve a wide readership—a small, but important step in addressing misogyny and sexism.

RGC: How did you begin to tackle the historical research for the book? Did you already have a pretty robust knowledge about the Axis powers and World War II, or was a lot of the information and detail new to you when you started writing the books? Was there anything in particular that was a surprise or shock for you to learn?

Graudin: Thanks to a father who loves history, years of independent reading, and college courses, I had a good baseline knowledge of World War II. But creating this alternate history took a much deeper dive into how the Nazi party operated. I started by reading William L. Shirer’s The Rise and Fall of the Third Reich from cover to cover. It’s an incredibly thorough account, beginning before Adolf Hitler’s birth and ending with a detailed account of Hitler’s vision for the world, had he won the war. This was a good springboard for the rest of my research, which spanned everything from books and documentaries to shooting WWII pistols at a gun range.

I love writing stories based on history, because the past is, more often than not, stranger than fiction. For example, did you know that the Volkswagen Beetle was the brainchild of Adolf Hitler? Yep. The car we associate with peace and love and hippies was designed by the leader of the Third Reich. He wanted a “people’s car” (which is the literal translation of Volkswagen), and personally helped produce the Beetle.

RGC: Along with your historical research, did you also spend a lot of time researching motorcycles? Is there a specific connection you have with motorcycles? How did you choose the specific motorcycle for the race?

Graudin: One of the inspirations for Wolf by Wolf was Long Way Round, a BBC miniseries documentary that follows Ewan McGregor and his friend Charley Boorman on a motorcycle journey from London to New York via the Road of Bones in Siberia. This trip is vast and beautiful and, at times, harrowing. The road is filled with mud pits, river crossings, navigational issues, and encounters with strangers. There’s so much that could go wrong! Watching it, I thought to myself, this would be a great concept for a YA novel.

Motorcycles also fit into Wolf by Wolf’s historical context. There was an entire branch of Hitler Youth devoted to riding and caring for motorcycles (the Motor-Hitlerjugend or Motor-HJ) and given Joseph Goebbels’s love of propaganda and fanfare, a competition like the Axis Tour isn’t actually that far-fetched.

When I was writing the first draft, my husband and I visited a dirt-biking park in the middle of South Carolina. Having never operated a motorbike before, I went from knowing absolutely nothing to zooming through forests and sand pits in a day! It gave me a taste of what I was putting Yael through…bruises and scrapes and burns and eventual saddle-soreness!

RGC: Many characters in the book take great personal risk to help the main character. Can you talk about what compels people to take such risks? Who have been your own helpers and mentors?

Graudin: I think this question ties back to my thoughts about the duality of human nature, and how—in a time of crises—some people react destructively while others act selflessly. Which way someone goes, I believe, is the result of “which wolf” that person has “fed” throughout their lives. The good or the evil. This is why I seeded in Yael’s backstory the way I did: it helps readers understand why she’s making her present choices.

As for my own mentors—my parents have been a big one. My mother, especially, took great pains to raise me as a critical thinker. She took me to the library every week to instill a love of reading, she worked extra hospital shifts to ensure I had the best possible education, and she kept working these shifts even when she decided to homeschool me for a few years. Her work ethic and compassion made me the writer I am today.

I also have to give teachers their due credit. Throughout my years in school, I had countless educators who went the extra mile to help me think critically and hone my creative voice.

Teachers and parents have some of the hardest, most rewarding jobs in the world. Children are impressionable. They mirror the behavior they see around them. As a new-ish parent myself, I want to help my daughter “feed” the “good wolf.” I want her to grow up to be a compassionate, creative critical thinker.

And so the cycle goes…

RGC: Loss is such a large part of the book, as it is such a large part of growing up. What loss was the hardest for you to write about? Was loss something you struggled to accept growing up?

Graudin: As a child, I hated change: moving houses, switching schools, saying goodbye to friends.

All of this paled by comparison when my mother was diagnosed with Grade 4 Astrocytoma, a brain tumor that had a very low survival rate. I was eighteen when she first got sick, and even though she went into remission after several surgeries, radiation, and chemotherapy, the fallout from these treatments caused almost more damage than the tumor itself. Over the next fourteen years my mom experienced a slow loss of mobility and language, among other things. Walking this path with her and trying to navigate the strange grief of losing your mother without having actually lost her yet, was something from that informed one of the flashbacks in Wolf By Wolf. Yael’s (brief) estrangement from her mother before she dies was told through this lens.

In hindsight, that’s probably what made the scene such a tough one to write.

RGC: What draws you to the idea of “what could have been,” both in writing and in life? 

Graudin: Studying history, traveling the globe, and trying to see hints of magic in everyday life have been my biggest inspirations. The what if question helps me take the ingredients I gather on these ventures and grow them into a book-sized idea. I think it’s also a natural side effect of being a perpetual day dreamer. I’ve never not thought this way, and I feel incredibly grateful that I’ve found a job where I can capitalize on this!

RGC: The skinshifts allow Yael to take on other’s appearances, and highlights ideas of racial identity and superiority. It challenges the reader to think about how we may judge others, and how society judges on the basis of physical appearances and race still today. What do you hope readers take away or understand about racism after they’ve read the books? What action do you wish they would take upon reading?

Graudin: I hope they read more. Wolf by Wolf was always intended to serve as a gateway book, to draw in reluctant readers and transform history for those who’ve found the subject boring. This is a sentiment I hear a lot, unfortunately, and it’s understandable if you’ve only been exposed to lackluster teachers and textbooks.

History is full of lessons. Ones humanity has been slow to learn. Racism has plagued our society for a very long time, and it’s important for us to understand just how pervasive it is—how systems we’ve come to accept as default are actually grown out of intense prejudice and injustice. To begin uprooting them, we have to understand how deep they go. We also need to approach this work with open hearts. Hearts that are willing to listen and learn. Hearts seeded with empathy and cultivated by education.

Obviously, reading is a key component to this. Reading history especially. We need to understand where we’ve been to inform where we’re going. I hope Wolf by Wolf introduces young readers to the true history of World War II and the Holocaust. I hope this, in turn, ignites a love of learning. I hope my readers keep their hearts soft and their minds sharp. I hope they find themselves brave enough to face our broken world and compassionate enough to change it.

RGC: Have you been working on anything recently, and can you tell us about your next project? 

Graudin: My next book is a middle-grade novel called The World Between Blinks, co-authored with Amie Kaufman. It’s slated to hit shelves on January 5^th 2021. Here’s a small teaser:

The World Between Blinks follows two cousins who stumble from our world into a magical place where all lost things end up. Amid ghost ships, lost cities, and keys to vanished doors, Jake and Marisol find themselves responsible for the fate of not just one world—but two.

As for more YA novels, I’ve been hard at work crafting things that involve lots of twisty history, but there’s no official word on anything yet. One of the best ways to stay in the loop about my upcoming releases is to follow me on Twitter or sign up for my newsletter.

Looking for more? Check out all of the great author interviews on our blog, including other YA authors like Avi and Anne Nesbet!

The post Reading Group Choices Interview with Ryan Graudin appeared first on Reading Group Choices.

For his interview with Reading Group Choices, Antoine talks about writing famous figures into his novels, why technology doesn’t make for a good love story, what a stranger would think about his apartment, and his role as ambassador of French charm…

Reading Group Choices: Your books present a diverse variety of characters in terms of gender, age, occupation, social and economic level. Do certain perspectives come to you more naturally or attract you more than others? And are there challenges when writing about well-known people, such as Patrick Modiano, Edith Piaf, Francois Mitterand, among others?

Antoine Laurain: In fact, I try to give at the same time an originality to the character but also a job and social position that you can perfectly understand — because you have a friend, a brother, a sister, the friend of a friend who does this type of work. You aren’t lost. What I’m describing to you is familiar, but I try to add a small oddity… For example, in my book The Portrait, Pierre-François Chaumont is a lawyer. We all know a lawyer. Only with him, he collects objects of art and his wife detests it. There’s the oddity.

Otherwise, when there are many characters in a book, like Vintage 1954, The President’s Hat or French Rhapsody, there must not be two characters who resemble each other. This is how it works with the cast of a novel. Sometimes I am inspired by people I know or that I have met, at other times I do a lot of research about a job that interests me and don’t know very well. It depends.

To capture characters who exist or have existed in real life, it’s rather amusing. It’s risky. I can’t get it wrong. I always pay attention to make them say what they could have said. To find their voice, by that I mean their diction, the timbre of their voice. Mitterand doesn’t speak like Truffaut who doesn’t speak like Gabin who doesn’t speak like Modiano. It is a very particular exercise. They are only kindly apparitions during the space of a chapter. But the exercise is not so easy.

RGC: What has surprised you most when working on your newest book, The Readers’ Room? What does it share, or not, with your previous novels?

AL: A taste of mystery. An investigation. A search for oneself. With this time an aspect of a whodunnit in the second part. And you will only get the solution in the final pages.

This novel also asks a question that borders on the fantastic or supernatural: Does what we write lead to what ends up happening?

RGC: Much of your stories are centered around French culture, history, politics and the arts. Are you surprised by the resonance they have had with people outside of France? Do you worry that some readers in other parts of the world will miss some of the historical or philosophical importance of these references?

AL: In the beginning, yes, I was surprised. The success of The President’s Hat in the UK and US stunned me because it was a very French book, which made reference to many details from the 1980s in France: songs, TV shows, a radio presenter. I noticed that the readers from abroad were not bothered by this, for two reasons: first, because the story and the narrative are more important than the details. A lucky hat, a woman’s bag found in the street… The readers understand the story. They follow the story above all.

Secondly, all these details are part of the charm and are in the end very relatable. In The President’s Hat, you don’t know who the TV presenter Yves Mourousi is. However you understand he is very famous. If you are an American, you can think of an equivalent in the US, like Larry King. It’s not likely you know the song “Ainsi soit je” by Mylène Farmer in the eighties, but we can say in the US it was like “Sweetest Taboo” by the singer Sade.

A last thought: my novels are occurring in France and mainly in Paris. There is a good reason for this: I am French and was born in Paris! The Duchess of Cornwall honored me by citing my book The Red Notebook in her list of 9 recommended novels.

“A clever, funny novel . . . a masterpiece of Parisian perfection,” she said.

So it’s not intentionally that the charm of my city can be felt in my books, but I think that for many readers, it’s like visiting there for the duration of the novel. I am a sort of ambassador of French charm and culture, as Michael Caine is for British charm and culture!

RGC: Do you have a specific attachment to any one of your books? Perhaps because of the process of writing it, or the enjoyment of reading it, or from a personal connection to it that makes it a bit different to you than the rest?

AL: I like all of my books, some more than others. Let’s say I keep a special affection for the first, The Portrait. Because it is the first to have been published, it was a kind of adventure to move from a text in my computer to a novel in a bookshop, and I wrote it in the store of the antique dealer for whom I was working then. It belongs to a certain period in my life.

RGC: All of the characters in your books seem to be on a search — for a hat, for a painting, for a person, for a new or past life. It’s almost as if the characters are not whole until they find the missing item or person or feeling. Do you believe this search is something all people feel in a way? Is it something you find yourself considering in your own life and so becomes part of your writing?

AL: Your analysis is very good. It is indeed the common point of my novels, but incidentally… maybe we are always writing the same story in different forms? That is also why my novels have been compared to tales. The tale is the quest and the success of this quest by the end, after having overcome trials. My characters are all going after a secret, a secret which is, I think, simply themselves. At the end, they are appeased. They have found the answers to their questions. That’s it… At last, they are in peace.

I think we all feel this desire to be at peace with ourselves. Novels have to be greater than life. They have to in some sense show us the way…

RGC: Can you share something you are reading or writing during this quarantine time?

AL: Reading and looking through all the albums of Jean-Jacques Sempé. Whichever ones. They are all good. Sempé is a genius.

RGC: In The Red Notebook, Laurent explores Laure’s apartment when she is absent, and is left to learn about her solely from what he finds: “The apartment was itself like a sort of giant bag with thousands of nooks and crannies, each one containing a tiny portion of its occupant’s life.” What would a stranger surmise about you from your own apartment, from observing only your possessions and decorations?

AL: I attach much importance to places. I think that they resemble their owners. From my flat, what could you deduce? It is full of beautiful objects from the past, whose uses are unknown to you for the most part… that the man living there could be a former antique dealer, that he has a cat. That this interior is very warm but also a little unnerving. What to think about someone who collects keys that he will never know what doors they open? I am sending you a photo of one of my keys, it comes from England, from the 18th century, they had excellent locksmiths. Look closely at this object and tell yourself that originally it was a rectangular iron block of one kilogram, which has been heated up, forged, sawed, carved, polished to become like this.

RGC: In The Red Notebook, there are references to email and smartphones, but overall technology stays offstage. Is a love story more romantic without technology? More generally, is magic and myth hindered by our digital world?

AL: Good question. I have mixed feelings… I still think it is better to meet somebody, to see each other, talk, have a drink in the sun rather than go through digital filters. These days, you can find poetry also in emails, pictures, texts and even emoticons. But if all this technology can have charm in the reality of our lives, I don’t see how it can be transcribed into a novel. You can reproduce an email exchange for a chapter, but not much more. It’s an abstract material, cold, which doesn’t go along with literature. And then, there is no action: when you read an email, you are seated in front of a screen, the same when you write one. Even if what you read is very interesting, there is no action, the body doesn’t do anything, there is no movement. There is nothing. It is purely cerebral and dematerialised. It is contrary to life. We are leaving two strange months of confinment linked to Covid-19, what did we have other than technology to connect us? But honestly, the limits of these tools have been demonstrated by this occasion. It is not life. Rather a novel is life, done better.

RGC: In Vintage 1954, the allure of the past is tempered by the inequalities that existed for women and minority groups, for example. We’re thinking of the moment in the train when the time travelers inform another passenger about the political and social future. Can you talk about the tension between romanticizing the past and remembering its limitations ? What qualities from the past — habits, customs, rituals — would you most like to welcome back to the present ?

AL: It is the whole question with relation to the past. Often it’s a bit reinvented to be better. Take your childhood vacations, I am sure that the first memories that come to you are happy and there is sun. You have forgotten a little about those long rainy afternoons or how bored you were… I was one of the last to do my military service in France, I can guarantee you that in the moment I found it extremely disagreeable, but you see, after all this time, today I remember instead some picturesque anecdotes and they make me smile. However at that time it didn’t make me laugh at all.

It’s a little similar for history, I think that one idealises certain times. America in the fifties, we prefer to think about a multicolor jukebox and a beautiful pale blue Cadillac rather than the condition of black Americans. Nina Simone was not allowed to have a career as a classical pianist because of the color of her skin. So, my 1950s in Vintage 54 are also a little idealised, but all that I describe as charming and beautiful truly existed: the shopkeepers, people who talked to each other in the bus, the central market (Les Halles)… I sometimes have a bit of nostalgia for this France. I own that. It doesn’t pose a problem to me to be attached to the past of my country.

Photo credit for Antoine Laurain: Pascal Ito © Flammiron

Read more about Antoine’s novels The Red Notebook and Vintage 1954, and browse all the great author interviews on our blog, including other French authors such as Timothée de Fombelle!

The post Reading Group Choices Interview with Antoine Laurain appeared first on Reading Group Choices.

For his interview with Reading Group Choices, Timothée de Fombelle talks about what defines YA literature, what he learned from writing for the theater, how all minor characters are major, and the search for home…

Reading Group Choices: Vango revels in the play of time. Multiple events happen in different locations around the world — Scotland, Sotchi, Salina, and others — at the same moment. How did you logistically manage the plot threads across time and space while writing? And do you often wonder about what might be happening elsewhere in any given moment?

Timothée de Fombelle: Indeed, I weave my stories with the threads of space and time. It results in a very tight fabric. When I am with a character in Salina, I have to think about all the others and where they are. Their lives are continuing. They keep on living, even though I choose to focus my camera on one at a time. It’s my luck that I started writing for the theater. So the characters for me are concrete beings, I cannot forget them in the backstage! Otherwise, the actors will complain…

RGC: What is a defining characteristic of literature for young readers? Is it connected to theme, language, spirit, or something else?

TdF: For me, it’s simply a literature of desire. Adolescence is the age of desire. Young readers have so many temptations — screens, friends, music — that you have to catch them with the lasso of writing and not let them go. Clarity, mystery, emotion, action, sincerity, these are what respond to their desires. But to be honest, I think all true literature corresponds to these rules. A good book is an object of desire. Literature for young readers is not so different than others.

RGC: Vango presents a journey in the classic heroic sense: a protagonist is called to adventure, ready or not, to discover their past and fulfill a destiny. What was the call to adventure for you originally as a writer?

TdF: I think that I write adventures to tell the reader: come with me, you are not going to regret it. Then, in between the plot lines of the adventure, I allow myself more contemplative moments, in the middle of a chapter. All of a sudden, I can slip in a little philosophy, history, poetry. I can do it because I have made a pact with the reader. The promise of rhythm, urgency. It’s maybe Alexander Dumas who gave me this key of the pleasure of adventure. When I read The Count of Monte Cristo, I told myself that a book must be a trap… but a trap that gives pleasure.

RGC: Vango is aided by a number of helpers during his quest, from parental figures like Zefiro, Mademoiselle, and Mother Elisabeth, to other lost souls like The Cat and Simon the bell ringer at Notre Dame, arriving at just the right moment. Can you share one or two of your mentors, and how they arrived in your life?

TdF: I am thinking about my grandfather, who during my childhood told me his life stories: his escapes during the war, the important choices he had to make. He was a great storyteller, but above all a great man. He had a lot of responsibility, he had worked for a long time with General De Gaulle, then as president of Air France, an ambassador… But fundamentally his family was most important for him. His children and grandchildren were the priority. He was here to serve others. And I think also about a very important teacher I had when I was 12, Mr. Pinson. He made me discover the power and radical nature of literature. He told us that once a month, you have to read all night long. At 12 years old, nobody had ever told us this.

RGC: Vango unfolds in the 1930’s across Europe and the US. You mentioned in a past interview with Télérama that research comes before, and never during, your writing of a novel. Can you talk about both parts of the process, and how you learned to keep them separate? Does each hold a fascination for you?

TdF: It is very important for me to write without an encyclopedia open next to me. We have to write by bare hand! Yes, I read many documents, I do long research, and then I put everything aside and keep only what stays in my memory. I’m not writing a documentary but an adventure story.

For example, I just finished writing Alma, the first volume of a long novel about the end of 18^th century, with an African heroine. I researched for several years, I travelled, but what remains in the novel is a kind of “compost” of all this reading. What counts for me is, for example, to feel in my body the precise space a slave had in the boat that was taking her or him to America. How do you live for three months in a boat between two floors 70cm apart, with three captives per square meter?

RGC: Did you know from the outset that Vango would take place over two volumes? If so, why did you want it to be two? And do you have plans to revisit the characters in a third volume (we’re hesitant to ask, because we want to assume everyone lives happily ever after…)?

TdF: Yes, since the beginning I knew Vango would be two volumes. I designed everything with this in mind. However, the closer I got to the end of the second volume, the more I felt I could have lived ten more years with my characters. So I obliged myself to contain everything in these two books. If you look again at it, the third part of the second volume could have been a third book. And even the last chapter itself could have been a fourth one! There you have it. I believe I will stop with these two, but I could have taken more space to tell them…

RGC: You pay close attention to even the smallest of characters: Weber, the seminary concierge; Alma, the waitress in Little Italy; Tom, the boy who helps Zefiro in the second volume. Each has their own desires and brushes with the larger events in history. To us it shows your compassion as an author. Is there a minor character who intrigues you in particular, who may have had a larger role if the story allowed it? And can you reflect on the idea that all minor characters are major?

TdF: I’m very glad that you said that. Yes, I don’t manage to create minor characters. It only takes a few lines for me to become attached to them, and I cannot leave them. In life, there are no minor characters, and those who seem minor are always the most interesting. Consider the hero in Camus’ The Stranger, it is a perfect example of a minor character, we wouldn’t even notice him in the street, he is invisible, and yet he is the only character in the novel. In Vango, The Cat was only supposed to appear in one scene, but in the end, she became perhaps my favorite character.

RGC: Which character do you miss spending time with as a writer?

TdF: I have a very intense connection with my female characters. I talked about The Cat, but I can say that Ethel is a character I was sad to leave, and I felt a big heartbreak at the last page. I always need to be a little afraid of my female characters. Ethel in Vango, Elisha in Toby Alone are strong personalities. I am a male writer, but I always identify myself more with the females in my stories, and I am always moved when young female readers speak to me about my female characters.

RGC: Chance encounters and synchronicity play an important role in the story, with certain characters — Simon the bell ringer, Nina Bienvenue, and others — reappearing in the same places. What is the role of chance or fate in the paths people take in their lives?

TdF: It is the privilege of writers. We have a “right to a miracle”. We can create these favorable or unfavorable coincidences that are so rare in life. So I must confess I take the opportunity. I write books to make life more intense, more beautiful, more tragic, more grand.

RGC: There are different “homes” in the story that shift, change, or are lost: The Cat’s residence in Paris, Zefiro’s monastery (whose discovery is threatened), Hugo’s zeppelin, and even countries like Germany in the lead up to WWII. Vango’s home on the island is touched by tragedy, yet he still finds comfort and protection whenever he returns. What draws you to the idea of finding “home”? Which places or spaces are “home” to you?

TdF: You are right. When I think about it, my stories are built around these lost paradises. People often say that my heroes are travelers, mobile, but you are right: all my characters have roots. What counts for me are the places that made us. For example, when I started writing Vango, I settled in for four months in the house in Salina, in Sicily, where I wanted my hero to have spent his childhood. I had to live in this place, to watch the cliffs becoming green with the first rains of September, to watch the caper trees flowering, or the Regina falcon flying. Today I am answering your questions while settled in the house of my childhood, in the west of France, next to a river and some forests. It is here where my imagination was born.

RGC: We read Vango partly in English and partly in French. What has been your experience reading one of your own works in translation, or working with translators? A character list appears in the second volume of the US edition, but not in the French. Does that suggest a different approach to these two audiences? From your own reading, have you noticed differences between young adult literature in France versus the US in terms of subject or style?

TdF: I know that my publishers and translators are very attentive to these cultural differences between young readers from both sides of the Atlantic. I trust them because they do extraordinary work, but as an author, I am not able to think about these differences. I’m thinking of the reader as a unique being, who resembles me enormously and is very close to me. Writing and reading are two activities very closely connected… so it is like a tête-a-tête, a one-on-one conversation. Childhood and adolescence have something universal, it is our common territory, whether someone is American, French or Ivoirian…

RGC: What would you like readers to take away when they finish the books? Or what have readers told you about their experience reading Vango, from encounters at author events or messages you’ve received?

TdF: My dream is that my books leave an impression on my readers, as some meetings do in life. I would like that one remembers my stories as if they were living people who stay with you for a long time. You don’t remember their face, their voice, but the sensation they create in us remains. When I was 20, I saw a woman exiting the Paris metro. I passed her five seconds at most. There were many people around. She doesn’t have anything spectacular about her. And I never saw her again. But today, being 47, I have the mark of these few seconds forever. Here is the trace that I would like someone to keep from a brief encounter with one of my books…

Read more about both Vango novels: Between Sky and Earth and A Prince Without a Kingdom, including an excerpt and discussion questions, and find other great author interviews on our blog!

The post Reading Group Choices Interview with Timothée de Fombelle appeared first on Reading Group Choices.

For her interview with Reading Group Choices, Natalie Jenner talks about literary pilgrimages, visiting Jane Austen’s residence, fascinating facts about the author you may not know, and which Austen novel is her current favorite…

Reading Group Choices: Adeline comments to Dr. Gray, as they notice tourists in front of the Austen cottage: “That someone could spin such stories from this: this walk, this lane, this little church.” Can you talk about how the ordinary becomes extraordinary, how the sights and sounds of our daily lives can become, if seen and captured a certain way, worthy of great literature?

Natalie Jenner: Well, first I do believe it takes a great writer to make the rest of us see the very beauty in front of us that we so often miss while subsumed in the busyness of our daily lives. What in turn makes literature itself great, especially when it is based on the more ordinary aspects of our lives, is its ability to show universality. When an author like Jane Austen presents regular village life, full of regular people going about everyday things, and manages to elevate it to something so universal and lasting that it moves us centuries later, what she is really doing is using the very commonness of the sights and sounds of daily life to help us connect with the characters and their experiences, and not only is this worthy of great literature, I believe it is the foundation of it.

RGC: Several of the characters are on their second (or usually more) read of Austen’s novels. What pleasures do you take from re-reading, and which authors or books other than Austen do you return to?

NJ: The famous film director Howard Hawks once said that it takes three great scenes (and no bad ones!) to make a good movie—one that you will watch over and over again—but a book has to hold our attention for far longer than that. So, for me, the very thing I will encounter the most upon rereading—the language itself—is why I return to the page. I rush to meet favourite passages of description, to luxuriate in the poetry of the text now that I know how the actual plot will turn out. Also, certain authors’ language and style of writing is so perfect, that it calms me just to hear their “voice” inside my head. Next to Austen, I particularly love rereading Henry James and Edith Wharton, who like Austen are masterful in their control of language but in a very different, more elaborate and much more psychological way.

RGC: Adam Berwick is at times embarrassed for admitting that he reads Austen. And Mimi mentions during their first encounter that, “I would never judge anyone for what they read.” Can you talk in general about being embarrassed by reading tastes, whether it’s “high” or “low” literature, or males reading books aimed at female audiences and vice versa? Was there ever a time when you felt ashamed to admit a reading pleasure?

NJ: I love this question because one of the things my research into Austen showed me was the extent to which some of her earliest and most influential “fans” were indeed men, which runs contrary to modern culture’s portrayal of her as a woman’s writer due, in part, to her use of the marriage plot (a very common literary device 200 years ago for both male and female authors). I think, in retrospect, this is one reason why I very much wanted the eight main characters in my own book to be evenly split between men and women, so that I could reflect the historically strong male response to her writing. I myself have never been ashamed to admit any kind of reading pleasure because I have extremely eclectic tastes, which may stem from coming of age in the late 70s and witnessing the seismic rise of Roots, Jaws, Shogun, The Shining, The Thorn Birds—all these great, seminal books of their respective genres, that every summer you would catch every parent reading in a lawn chair. There is nothing better than a fat, juicy book you can’t put down.

RGC: What readerly societies do you belong to (this can mean whatever you like!)? Or if you created one around a particular author, whom would it honor, and who among your family or friends would be members?

NJ: In my case, the idea of a readerly society means the very special group of writer friends I recently made through social media. Called the 2020 Debuts, we are constantly sending each other advance copies of our work. I have to say, reading books before they are widely available is truly one of the great highlights and perks of becoming a published author. It has opened me up to so many genres that I had been missing out on, particularly fantasy, thrillers and romance, and has helped break down my own biases and barriers when it comes to reading.

RGC: Mimi recounts how a creaking door in the Austen cottage warned Jane of someone entering while she was working, prompting her to hide her writing. That physical detail truly brings the cottage to life. What physical details struck you during your own visits to the Great House and Austen cottage?

NJ: I honestly put all of them in my book: the stile at the back of the St. Nicholas churchyard, through which I caught my first real glimpse of the Great House, now known as Chawton House, and the huge towering hedges clipped into cylinders that mark its approach; the massive curtain-covered window seats in the dining room (where I once managed to grab half an hour alone, to read Austen, naturally!); the stained glass windows on the second floor where the character of Frances first came to life, sitting there spying on Dr. Gray and Adeline in the courtyard below. And I love everything about the Austen cottage, now called the Jane Austen’s House Museum, but I particularly love the front dining parlour and how you can look out the very window where Austen herself sat and wrote, and see the entire world of modern Chawton pass by. That view always makes me feel so close to Austen and her “author’s eye.”

RGC: What literary pilgrimage have you not taken yet, but most want to take?

NJ: Well, I have tried twice in my life to walk on the Yorkshire Moors in England and see the ruins of the rumoured Wuthering Heights, and both times I have massively failed! The first time was thirty years ago as an undergraduate student abroad, when I had no time left after touring the incredible Bronte Parsonage Museum to make the journey into the flat hills above. Most recently, I returned with my now-university-age daughter who was fighting a terrible chest cold from our travels, and this time the weather on the Moors was so stormy and prohibitive (it really is such a high, exposed spot in the world, and you really do feel sometimes as if you are about to get blown over!), that we had to give up and take shelter in a nearby pub. I am hoping that the third time’s the charm!

RGC: The quick pace of Hollywood and financial dealings of Jack Leonard stand in contrast to the slower life and sense of heritage in Chawton. Can you discuss the benefits of traditions and lineage, even when today’s world threatens to make them seem obsolete? And share thoughts about the balance between tourism and the preservation of surrounding communities?

NJ: I guess I have a healthy trust in countries and cultures not erring in over-preserving: I have yet to travel anywhere in the world and see something that I thought, “now that was a waste of money to hold onto.” Even worse, if you lose an historically important building or collection of some kind, it is pretty much impossible to ever get it back; this risk of loss is something that the fictional society in my book must grapple with at one point, and is one of the key reasons I personally believe in fairly aggressive historical preservation. Although the benefits of preservation suffer in modern culture for being very intangible, in the long run we know for a fact that it is so often the past (written history, old buildings, physical artifacts) that lights the spark for future artists, movers and thinkers. When it comes to balancing tourism and the surrounding communities, this tension is exactly what my book explores: I have no easy answers, but I always look to the UK where charitable institutions such as the National Trust and English Heritage take a macro, collective, and informed look at properties in need of preservation.

RGC: There’s pleasure in seeing how, when it comes to love, characters like Dr. Gray are just as blind as the characters in Austen. Did you have a sense from the beginning of who would be paired with whom by the end of the book?

NJ: When I start a first draft, I never know what the next sentence is going to be until I type it, let alone what romances or friendships might also transpire. But I will say that, with two of the couples, I knew pretty soon within their first scene together that they would end up in love. My characters appear to me fully formed on the page, both in terms of appearance and personality, so as they engage with others, I start to pick up on strange and unexpected vibes that I then want to explore. In this way, my characters truly do drive the plot of my novels. This sounds very “voodoo” to say out loud here, but it’s true!

RGC: What fact about Austen or her work do you believe is the most fascinating for readers who have read her novels but are unfamiliar with her life?

NJ: The fact that she went fairly radio silent with her writing for a good chunk of her life, from approximately 1801 until 1809, while she and her parents and sister moved about between lodgings following her father’s retirement and eventual death, and that the minute Austen moved into that cottage in Chawton, she suddenly churned out a book a year until her incredibly tragic early death in 1817. Imagine hitting some kind of writer’s block, willingly or not, and then sitting down at that little table by the window and, year after year, producing final versions for publication in 1811 and 1812 of Sense and Sensibility and Pride and Prejudice respectively, and then generating from scratch Mansfield Park in 1813, Emma by early 1815, and Persuasion in 1816. I don’t know if there is a tighter time-frame for so many masterpieces in all of literature.

RGC: Which novel do you recommend for readers who are new to Austen? And which is your current favorite?

NJ: Always start with Pride and Prejudice first, if you can: it is very fresh to modern eyes, with a lot of dialogue-heavy scenes, and I find it the funniest of all her books. The words “current favourite” are very apt, because I love different books of Austen’s at different times in my own life. Right now I am fascinated with Emma again, partly because of the recent sumptuous film, but also because it is the most intricately and expertly plotted of her books, and the one that repays the act of rereading the most—there is not an unnecessary happening in Emma even though, on the surface, it is full of many of the most unnecessary happenings you could ever find in a book. That was something I wanted to convey and, frankly, strongarm with my own book: the deceptive genius of Emma and how anyone unimpressed upon first reading simply must give it another try. Everything that is happening in Emma is happening around the events of the plot, and part of the magic is in trying to figure out how she pulled that all off.

Austen House Photo CC BY-SA 2.0

Read more about The Jane Austen Society, including an excerpt, and find other great author interviews on our blog!

The post Reading Group Choices Interview with Natalie Jenner appeared first on Reading Group Choices.

For her interview with Reading Group Choices, Kim Michele Richardson talks about the power of literacy and librarians, surviving prejudices and abuse, and how history and her homeland inspired her latest novel…

Reading Group Choices: The local Pack Horse supervisors, Harriett and Eula, ceaselessly taunt and belittle Cussy Mary. Yet when she gives Harriett a book that will please her, the torments are momentarily forgotten. Cussy reflects: “I loved the way Harriett loved her books. It changed her into something different, better, and for a minute I forgot who she was — who I wasn’t.” Can you talk about the way books can remove us, however briefly, from our prejudices?

Kim Michele Richardson: Harriet’s love of books softened her bitter heart and helped humanize her. Books can inform, educate as well as entertain—but more importantly, lead to change. In The Book Woman of Troublesome Creek we see this with the school children, Pa, R.C., Devil John and others throughout, and recognize the powerful impact literacy has on people.

RGC: Cussy and the other librarians create scrapbooks from recipes, newspaper clippings, handwritten home remedies, and more to circulate among their patrons. What personal document or contribution would you include in such a book?

KMR: Part of The Future Farmers of America Creed would’ve fit nicely.

“I believe in less dependence on begging and more power in bargaining; in the life abundant and enough honest wealth to help make it so–for others as well as myself; in less need for charity and more of it when needed; in being happy myself and playing square with those whose happiness depends upon me.” —The creed was written in 1930 by E.M. Tiffany and adopted at the Third National FFA Convention.

RGC: The government rules for Pack Horse librarians prohibit a married woman from keeping the job. Pa’s efforts to find a husband for Cussy put her in the middle of this conflict. The choices that women continue to face between work and home make her situation keenly felt, still relevant to our social expectations and issues like parental leave. Can you comment on the parallels between Cussy’s world in the 1930s and women’s lives nearly 100 years later?

KMR: Changes for women do not feel as if they are coming fast enough sometimes, though we have progressed with the #MeToo movement and the push of celebrity voices. Still, I would like to see more changes, and wish a spotlight could also focus on survivors who are not famous. I’m a survivor of abuse and know how difficult it is to be heard.

Over a decade ago my memoir on the subject was submitted to publishing houses. One editor gave it glowing praise but rejected it with a comment that said he would’ve preferred the story to have been about a male, from a male victim’s point of view. It was crushing. And although I’m sure that wasn’t the intent, hearing this was akin to saying your life, your pain and suffering has less value because you’re a female.

I can also remember living in foster care and being whipped with a belt. The neighbors called the police. When they arrived, the foster parent shoved me toward the officers, then yanked down my pants and underwear to show the surprised policemen my red bottom, insisting that as man of the house, he had a right to discipline me any way he saw fit.

It was painful and humiliating and I wanted to crawl into a hole. Up until as late as the 1990s, police had their hands tied when dealing with domestic violence. A woman or child could be standing in front of officers, bruised and bloody, but state law mandated that police in Kentucky and other states had to witness the misdemeanor assault, a battering against a woman or child before they could arrest the perpetrator on the scene. This of course resulted in violent deaths for countless women and children.

RGC: Cussy is so much more than a carrier of books. She’s entrusted with tasks ranging from reading family letters to delivering marriage intentions to alerting doctors to the injuries of rural residents. Can you reflect on how the roles of librarians and libraries extend into the personal lives of their patrons?

KMR: Librarians are nothing short of having a national treasure in your community. We hear their selfless stories daily. From a librarian helping a patron fill out job applications to libraries having a tie and briefcase collection on loan for patrons to use for job interviews. One reader told me how a librarian helped her family gather all her loved one’s medical test results, and then also had the info emailed and faxed to the right medical facility for free. Another reader recalled how she used the library to escape domestic violence in her home.

On my Facebook author page, KimMicheleRichardson, you can read the hundreds of inspirational praises that readers have left for libraries and librarians. Librarians provide powerful lifelines, and in addition to helping match the perfect book to a reader, they are fostering literacy by helping books find their way into the hands and hearts of readers.

RGC: The mountain residents give the Book Woman an assortment of gifts, ranging from bread to a single pineapple Life Saver. What’s a valuable gift you’ve received, tangible or otherwise, from telling this story or during your encounters with readers?

KMR: To be able to tell my tale about a little-known American portrait of the indomitable spirit of literacy pioneers that highlights the remarkable journey of my brave, Kentucky sisters who worked for the packhorse librarian initiative project has been a wondrous gift and a privilege and one of my greatest honors.

Other cherished gifts included early praise for The Book Woman of Troublesome Creek from Texas librarian Kelly Moore— “As I turned the last page, I found myself wanting to be more kind, compassionate, tolerant and charitable as I began a new year.” When writing this novel, I knew it wouldn’t change the world, but if I’d planted seeds of kindness, courage and empathy in the tumultuous and charged world we now live in, I think that’s all I could hope for.

Another; waking up to a surprise email from Douglas Fugate, a former librarian and a descendant of the blue-skinned people of Kentucky. Mr. Fugate had just finished reading The Book Woman of Troublesome Creek and gave the work glowing praise and his highest rating. It was the strongest validation I could ever receive for my most important work. I may’ve cried a lot that day.

Author and dear friend, Sara Gruen, created a cool graphic inspired by The Book Woman of Troublesome Creek. Then the folks at the Alleghany Public Library in N.C. secretly commissioned an artist who then made it into a pillow using old overalls to surprise me. Singer Ruby Friedman Orchestra, whose songs have been heard on the Justified FX series, Netflix’s Godless series, HBO’s Mean Streets and more, read the book. Inspired, Ruby created a beautiful, soul-stirring tribute song titled “Book Woman of Troublesome Creek”.

I am so very grateful for the gift of smart and gracious readers who have embraced Cussy Mary’s journey and reached out and shared their inspirational stories about the power of books. There have been so many priceless and thoughtful gifts, it would take pages to honor them.

RGC: Books are feared at times by Cussy’s patrons. One wants only to read the Bible, while another, Devil John Smith, complains that his children are using up valuable resources and time to read. What do you feel is at the heart of the suspicion about the written word, then and now?

KMR: In the early history of eastern Kentucky, mountainfolk lived in isolation except for visits from peddlers and traveling preachers, etc. They mined timber and coal, survived off the land, hunted, farmed and raised livestock. The mid-1800s saw missionaries, churches, government and the coal companies coming in, calling for change, pushing their ideology, and buying up the Kentucky man’s land at cheap prices.

By the time the packhorse initiative arrived in 1935, eastern Kentucky was in the midst of its most violent era, the bloody coal mine wars. Many were wary, as well weary of outsiders’ new ideas, agendas—especially any ideas the government might push on them. The people of eastern Kentucky have long endured many hardships and sufferings. Even in today’s news we witness the Kentucky coal miners working 16-hour shifts down in the mines, and the appalling theft of paychecks by rich coal companies—the wealthy who come in to stomp down on the poor’s back to make themselves stand taller.

RGC: Cussy’s blue skin is a source of trouble, given the dangerous prejudices that exist, but also a source of power, given the doctor’s interest in her and his promise of protection. Can you talk about this complex relationship, and how you captured the experience of being one of the blue-skinned Kentuckians?

KMR: Doc is a complicated man, and at first we see that he is motivated to help Cussy Mary only to advance his standing in the medical community, gain fame and fortune and be given prestigious recognition in medical journals. Then we see a different kinship slowly unfold as he spends more time with the young packhorse librarian…

As a Kentuckian, I have a great love for the land and my people. I can relate to marginalized people and have much empathy for Cussy and her family and the people of eastern Kentucky—anyone who has faced or faces prejudices and hardship. It’s not hard to feel pain deeply, particularly if you’ve gone through hardships in your own life.

RGC: After meeting Cussy’s clients, who are often in the grip of extreme poverty and hunger, yet yearning for books, along with the treacherous conditions of arriving at their homes, it’s hard not to finish The Book Woman of Troublesome Creek without gratitude for the ability to own and access books. Did writing this story have the same effect for you? Can you share a book you’re particularly grateful for lately?

KMR: One of the greatest joys is having access to books, and the freedom to read any book of your choosing. I was raised in a rural Kentucky orphanage for my first ten years. On rare occasions, a tattered children’s book would make its way into our dormitories. A rarity, and a gift, I didn’t take for granted. To be able to be transported beyond the ugly, dull institution’s walls to a magical place was joy. I was enthralled over the influence of the written word, the empowerment of literacy, and where a single book could lead you.

There are so many glorious reads I’m grateful for so it would be difficult to single-out just one. I’m also excited for a lot of books coming out in 2020 that I’ve had the opportunity to read in advance and I would love to share them with you. Before Familiar Woods by Ian Pisarcik is a haunting debut with unforgettable characters set in a poor and desolate landscape, along with Ashley Blooms’ Every Bone A Prayer, a powerful, heart wrenching and healing tale set in Appalachia. Oona Out of Order by Margarita Montimore will mesmerize and blow your mind. For the nonfiction reader, the paperback release of The Ghosts of Eden Park by Karen Abbott arrives in the spring. It’s a stranger than fiction tale, the nonfiction answer to The Great Gatsby, and the best nonfiction tale you’ve read in years.

Visit Kim Michele Richardson’s website to read more, and discover other great author interviews on the Reading Group Choices blog!

The post Reading Group Choices Interview with Kim Michele Richardson appeared first on Reading Group Choices.

For her interview with Reading Group Choices, Tracey Garvis Graves discusses her path as a writer, exploring a character with autism, and what makes romance and relationships work…

Reading Group Choices: The story shifts back and forth in time from 1991 to 2001. Annika and Jonathan both reflect on how they are not the people they used to be, something readers can all relate to on some level. What sort of person were you ten years ago versus now, either in general or specifically as a writer?

Tracey Garvis Graves: I’ve actually been reflecting on this question quite a bit over the last few weeks as the current decade marched toward its final days. At the end of 2009, I couldn’t get the idea of trying to write a novel out of my head. For the previous ten years, I had been a stay-at-home-mom starting with the birth of my son in 1999 (his sister came along in 2002). I went back to work in 2009 because they were now both in school, but I distinctly remember feeling as though I needed something more. Something just for myself outside of being a wife, mother, and employee.

I started getting up at 5:00am and I wrote my debut novel, On the Island, from 5:30-7:00 every morning before heading off to my day job. It was truly the most joyous thing I’d ever done. That novel was published in 2011 and I was able to turn writing into my full-time job in 2012. I was 43 years old. And now, at the end of 2019, one child has already left the nest and the other will be doing the same in less than two years. I am now the author of 8 published titles and I’m working on number 9. When I look back on all that change, it makes me so excited for the future because I can’t wait to see what the next 10 years will bring.

RGC: The relationships in the book let us see the various ways love and attraction strike people differently, whether it’s Annika and Jonathan, their past relationships with Ryan and Liz, or Janice and Joe. Can you talk about how you work with your characters and find out who’s compatible (and who isn’t)? Does a spark or a fizzle between characters sometimes surprise you?

TGG: One of my very favorite things about writing contemporary fiction (or romantic women’s fiction as I often refer to my work) is that relationships play such a huge part. I love examining all of the aspects of a character, including their individual characteristics and idiosyncrasies. Plot reveals character, so my characters’ actions help me figure out what drives them, what their strengths and flaws are, and if they’re compatible with others. If they aren’t compatible, I can turn them into antagonists (Ryan and Jake are both good examples of this).

I’m not usually surprised when a relationship either sparks or fizzles between two characters, but the characters themselves often are, and that’s all part of their arc. I like to use the relationships that aren’t particularly strong or that don’t work out as a contrast to the relationships that do work. It strengthens the character development if I can show the reader that my characters have learned something from their previous relationships and that they can apply this knowledge going forward. Sometimes characters think they know the kind of partner they want, but only after the relationship has run its course can they see its flaws. Hindsight is a valuable tool.

RGC: Certain chapters are told from Jonathan’s perspective, and we get a first-hand experience of his sensitivity to Annika and her needs, and the vulnerability he carries from his divorce. What differences exist in how you approach male versus female characters?

TGG: My biggest concern when developing male characters is that I’m going to portray them—not like an actual male character—but what a female thinks a male should act like. It’s not unheard of for me to grill the men in my life for their perspective. I do like showing vulnerability in my male characters because I know it’s something that is realistically present in everyone regardless of whether they’re a man or a woman. It’s human nature to have periods of time where we don’t feel good about ourselves or we second-guess our choices. I feel like if I can dig a little bit deeper into these issues it helps me paint a character with more depth. I don’t want to just skim the surface. Showing their vulnerabilities, regardless if they’re male or female, is what makes them human and makes us empathize with them.

RGC: The episode of bullying in seventh grade is a key moment for Annika, and convinces her mother to choose homeschooling. What thoughts do you have about the effects of bullying on girls, especially for individuals with social challenges?

TGG: I’m so lucky that neither of my children were tormented by bullying although they both dealt with the normal ups and downs of friendships, etc. I am truly saddened by the amount of bullying going on in our schools these days. I feel that any child who is being bullied at school is lucky if they have parents who listen and put their safety and mental well-being first, even if it means homeschooling or taking classes online.

I just can’t imagine the pain of going to school every day and knowing that your life is going to be miserable for the whole time you are there. Individuals with challenges of any kind already have a harder time of it and there is absolutely no reason why they should be subjected to bullying on top of it. It breaks my heart. The scene where Annika flashes back to the day she was physically bullied was very difficult to write. It was one more reason I loved Annika’s mother so much. She listened to her daughter and she protected her.

RGC: Annika says about Janice, her college roommate turned life-long friend: “Living with her had been like a crash course in how to be normal.” Yet the qualities that Annika considers abnormal are the same ones that make her a vivid, lovable partner to Jonathan and to readers. How did Annika arrive to you, and what was your own relationship to her as she developed on the page?

TGG: When I first began outlining the story and thinking about the characters who would be telling it, Annika was more of a bohemian type who didn’t fit in with Jonathan’s wealthy frat boy image. She didn’t care about money and preferred books and animals over people. Jonathan had big aspirations and wanted to earn a lot of money (and have the perfect wife on his arm). But as I went on, that didn’t interest or excite me in any way. Frankly, it’s a story that’s been told many times before. But then one day I thought, ‘What if Annika doesn’t change because she can’t. And what if Jonathan accepts her and falls in love with her just the way she is?” That was the story I was burning to write. As I spent more time with Annika, she became the underdog I desperately wanted to champion.

RGC: Comments about being “on the spectrum” are often used casually, without being sensitive to individuals who have social challenges or the real risks that can come with autism. In what ways was capturing this way of being in the world a motivation for Annika and the book?

TGG: I was very worried about portraying Annika with the utmost sensitivity and awareness. I wanted readers to see all the gifts she brought to her relationships and how many extra steps it required for her to just be. I also wanted to make sure that Annika was given a voice and the chance to explain that being on the spectrum was not something she could just turn on and off. She didn’t have the ability to do that because of the way her brain was wired. Life was a daily struggle for her and she desperately wished for understanding and empathy from others, and to be loved by someone. Jonathan became that person for her, that safe harbor she’d always wished for. I know it sounds odd, but Jonathan and Annika became very real characters to me.

RGC: A lot of readers can relate to Annika’s desire to be surrounded by books and her pleasure in solitude — yet also her loneliness. As a writer, can you talk about those competing desires, if they exist for you?

TGG: I am definitely the stereotypical introverted writer. I need quiet and solitude and peace for my creative brain to function at its best. I don’t listen to music when I write. I can’t have the TV on. I don’t like anyone in the room with me which is why I never write at coffee shops. I’m happiest when one of my two cats are cuddled up next to me and there’s a fire in the fireplace. But unlike Annika, I have plenty of people who want to be around me all the time, so I’m lucky that I have the best of both worlds. I will say that my friends sometime wonder why I’ll pass up on a night out in favor of staying home. But home is where I’m truly content. That being said, I love going on book tours. It’s a nice change of pace after being holed up inside my own little world, creating.

RGC: Having written a number of novels about relationships and romance, what new insights did The Girl He Used to Know bring you about the subject?

TGG: I had never really done a deep dive into a relationship that had so many obstacles before. Yes, I had T.J. and Anna from On the Island, and that relationship had many, many seemingly insurmountable things to overcome. But The Girl He Used to Know was a much more realistic situation. I really had to put myself in both Annika’s and Jonathan’s shoes and that was not easy at all. I also had to explore how Jonathan and Annika brought issues from their past relationship into the present and then figure out how they would overcome them. This was just a really hard book to write, but I grew a lot as a writer. I try to learn something new with every single book I write.

Visit Tracey Garvis Graves’ website to read more about her novels, and discover other great author interviews on the Reading Group Choices blog!

The post Reading Group Choices Interview with Tracey Garvis Graves appeared first on Reading Group Choices.