Archives for May 2016

Mary Kubica is the bestselling author of The Good Girl and Pretty Baby. She holds a Bachelor of Arts degree in History and American Literature from Miami University in Ohio.

Her third novel, Don’t You Cry, features a dual narrative focusing on a young woman, Quinn Collins, and an 18 year old man, Alex Gallo. Quinn’s roommate, Esther, disappears from their Chicago apartment, leaving Quinn wondering what happened to her. She finds a strange letter addressed to Esther, which makes her question if she knew anything at all about her roommate.

Meanwhile, in a small Michigan harbor town, a mysterious young woman shows up in a coffee shop and catches the eye of 18 year old dishwasher, Alex. The story takes unexpected twists down a sinister narrative trail in which the past and present collide in a shattering conclusion.

The first lines of Don’t You Cry are, ‘In hindsight, I should have known right away that something wasn’t quite right. The jarring noise in the middle of the night, the open window, the empty bed.’ Tell us your thoughts about the opening lines of a thriller.

The opening lines need to grab and suck the reader in. I want to lay the groundwork of a problem at the beginning of the book. We know right away that something is wrong, that a sinister event happened or will occur. Quinn has discovered something and hopefully, that will grab the reader. The reader wants to know ‘What is this jarring noise and why is the bed empty?

Don’t You Cry is written in the first person, present tense, as are The Good Girl and Pretty Baby. What makes you prefer this style?

I love getting into my characters’ heads. I want to be ‘at one’ with my character. I feel a character is presented more effectively when I’m in his or her head, when I feel those things intrinsically, rather than as an outsider. I feel the first person perspective does it best.

The present tense creates a sense of urgency. Whatever is happening is going on now, not in the past. The narrative is propelled forward rapidly.

I found Quinn Collins to be an intriguing character. Tell us a bit about her.

Quin, in some ways, reminds me a little of myself when I was twenty-three. She’s out of college, not quite sure what she wants to do with her life, and she’s living on her own for the first time. She has insecurities, having come from a loving and sheltered environment. I think readers will relate to her. It’s the time of life when a young person must come to terms with reality for the first time.

 

Quinn makes mistakes, and learns there’s a bigger problem facing her than just finding Esther. In the process, she discovers a great deal about herself, and becomes a stronger person.

Speaking of mistakes, don’t most readers love flawed and very fallible characters?

Yes, we all do. They’re real. We all make mistakes. We can relate to that, and though a reader may wonder why Quinn is making such obvious errors in judgment, it’s clear she’s very human, and more like we are, not just a character in a novel.

Both The Good Girl and Don’t You Cry have dual narratives. What makes this form so effective?

I love writing a story from two perspectives because, I can tell two stories and then at some point, merge them. At times, one character will see a situation one way, while the other narrator portrays it differently. It keeps readers on their toes. They wonder whom they can trust. Is there an unreliable narrator mixed in?

With The Good Girl, I told the story from three perspectives. If I’d told the story from only one point of view, it would have been a very different one. And, much of the plot and certain relationships between characters would have been excluded from the novel. The same thing is true with Don’t You Cry. I don’t think I’d have been able to tell the same story with only one narrator.

Also, the mystery element of the novel is enhanced by there being two stories because the reader may wonder, ‘When are these two stories going to come together?’ That’s one of the unanswered questions.

What draws you to writing suspense novels?

I didn’t start out writing suspense. Before, I wrote quite a bit of women’s fiction, though nothing was published. I felt something was missing in my writing—I’d create characters, but wasn’t grabbed by the storyline.

When I started writing The Good Girl, I was captivated as an author by having a mystery to solve. I found I loved putting together intricate puzzle pieces, and figuring out how they would come together. It was also a challenge to think of ways to surprise the reader. Once I’d written The Good Girl, I knew the suspense element was what had been missing from my previous writing. Now, I can’t see myself writing anything other than suspense.

What has surprised you about the writing life?

I have to say the authors I’ve been connected with have been wonderful, generous and warm. Writing is such a solitary career, but when I’ve had to go out there and show my work, I’ve been so pleasantly surprised by the support and generosity shown by so many authors.

What do you love about the writing life?

I love creating. It’s a job, but it rarely feels like one to me. I generally write early in the morning before the rest of the house is awake. Before going to bed each night, I feel a sense of excitement that in eight hours, I get to wake up and rejoin my characters. It’s great to forge these people on the page, to give them personalities. It’s a thrill to craft these characters and make them do and say what I want in the story.

If you weren’t a writer, what would you be doing?

I was a high school history teacher before my daughter was born. If I wasn’t writing, now that my kids are a little bit older, I’d go back to teaching.

I also volunteer at an animal shelter. My bucket list includes owning my own shelter.

What’s coming next from Mary Kubica?

My next novel will come out in 2017. It involves the death of a young father in an automobile accident. His very young daughter was sitting in the back seat, and was unharmed. Soon, after the accident, she begins having nightmares of a car following them, and things take off from there.

Congratulations on writing Don’t You Cry a suspense-packed novel plumbing the psychology of both narrators, and a book ending with a twist every bit as mind-boggling as the one in The Good Girl.

 

 

L.S. Hilton grew up in England and has lived in Key West, New York City, Paris and Milan. After graduating from Oxford, she studied art history in Paris and Florence. She has worked as a journalist, art critic, and broadcaster.

Her debut novel and the first in a trilogy, Maestra, is a psychological thriller about Judith Rashleigh, an assistant at a London art gallery. By night, she’s a hostess at a champagne bar and is familiar with the ways of the wealthy. When she’s fired from her art gallery job, she accompanies one of the champagne bar’s biggest clients on a trip to the French Riviera. While there, a fatal accident befalls that client. For various reasons, Judith must assume a different identity, and she turns herself into an extraordinary femme fatale.

Judith Rashleigh is a fascinating character. Tell us a little about her.

She’s ambitious and extremely independent, as well as quite funny and just slightly sociopathic [Laughter]. To me, she’s a very modern young woman and totally unapologetic about her desires and ambitions. She’s also unapologetic about her body. She tends to make some people very angry, which I suppose, is a good thing. I’ve been living with her for quite some time, and have become very fond of her. She’s become a slightly strange friend of mine.

Maestra’s descriptions of the glossy, sleek life of the super-rich are fabulous. Are they based on your own experiences?

I wish they were. [Laughter]. When I wrote the book, I had in mind the sort of books I liked reading when on holidays. I would call them sunburn books—the kind where you tell yourself, ‘I’ll read one more page before I leave the beach’ and before you know it, you’ve been sunburned.

As an adolescent, I really loved the 70s and 80s blockbusters which were often about pleasure and fun. They took me to different worlds. So, I wanted to write something that would transport the reader to a very different and glamorous world. The exotic locations in the novel enhance that experience.

Judith seems to be a morally complex ‘anti-heroine.’ Do you agree with that?

I do. In many ways, she is an anti-heroine. At times, she can be quite nasty. The challenge for me was to make the reader stay with and root for her, even though she’s horrible in certain respects. She’s not a typical heroine in the way she makes her way through the world. But I hope readers will find her a sympathetic character. She’s capable of friendship; has a good sense of humor; has a strong sense of fair play; and most importantly, doesn’t take herself too seriously.

She’s also been described as reminiscent of Lisbeth Salander from The Girl with the Dragon Tattoo. Do you feel that’s accurate?

Actually, I don’t, though I’m flattered by the comparison. Lisbeth Salander is motivated primarily by revenge. Lisbeth was also horribly traumatized as a young woman. And she’s considerably more imaginative and violent than Judith.

Judith is certainly murderous when she needs to be, but she’s practically minded. She doesn’t kill unnecessarily. Both protagonists are complex and powerful, so in that sense, I can see the connection between them.

 You’re obviously comfortable with writing graphic scenes of sexual activity. Will you talk about that?

Yes, they are graphic. I think Judith is part of a sexually graphic generation—she’s part of the ‘hook-up’ culture. I think the Internet has changed the way people interact socially and sexually.  Like it or not, we’ve undergone another sexual revolution in the last ten years. People talk and think about sex differently now than before.

For me, the words Judith uses and the things she does are honest and feel modern to me. I describe them so graphically for two reasons: the first is I felt it was realistic for the character and consistent with her voice. These are the words she would use to describe sex. Second, it’s a technically interesting challenge for a writer to describe sexuality in an effective way.

I don’t know if you’re aware of the British Bad Sex Award. It’s an award given every year by The Literary Review to a literary novel which is spoiled by a sex scene. The award has been given to John Updike and Jonathan Littel, among other luminaries.

The problem with writing about sex is one person’s erotic scene can very quickly become someone else’s comic scene. I wanted to write about sex in a way that was clear. To do that, you must get rid of metaphors; you have to minimize adjectives; and you have to use proper nouns. I wanted to write about things adults do, using the words adults use. There was no place for euphemisms or sentimentality in Maestra.

Judith assumes and sheds identities with ease, so I must ask if Maestra partly concerns questions about self-definition.

Yes, I think it very much concerns self-definition. It’s about a woman who tries to do things the right way, but that doesn’t quite work out for her. She realizes she’s been reduced to a sex object, so she turns certain prejudices against the person with those pre-judgements. Her journey is very much towards self-definition. She’s not actually interested in money or in living a luxurious lifestyle. She’s intent on being free and living her life on her own terms. Her self-definition isn’t found in material things. It’s found in those things to which she has the most passionate emotional response; and those things involve beauty. She wants to live a gracious life amongst beautiful things.

I understand Sony’s TriStar Pictures purchased the film rights. Who do you see playing Judith?

Of course, that won’t be my decision. I would be interested in seeing an unknown actress playing the part. I think readers want to see the character, but not see a star playing her.

Two more books about Judith are coming. Where will her travels take her?

There’s a clue in the first book about something quite unexpected happening in the second one. The second book has something to do with Caravaggio and features some Eastern European locations. The third goes back to Italy with certain characters reappearing. But Judith herself evolves over the course of the three books.

Congratulations on penning Maestra, the opening salvo of a trilogy about a ferocious heroine, a page-turning novel that’s also been described as dipping into the same psychological waters as Patricia Highsmith’s The Talented Mr. Ripley.

Just received this letter from U.S. Senator Christopher Murphy regarding The Lovers’ Tango winning the Benjamin Franklin Award in Popular Fiction

Lynn Rosen has lived in the Midwest, on the East Coast, and in Japan. After earning three graduate degrees at the University of Rochester, she served on its faculty. She was the Dean of Liberal Arts at Cuyahoga Community College in Cleveland. Her literary work has appeared in The Texas Quarterly and Caprice. A Man of Genius is her literary debut novel, which she completed after 15 years of writing, and had published at age 84.

A Man of Genius centers on Samuel Grafton-Hall, an architect whose work is revered the world over. Arthur Dolinger—Grafton-Hall’s lawyer and the executor of his estate—tries to piece together a mystery prompted by a strange codicil to the architect’s will. Reading the novel, the reader is made privy to the mind and misdeeds of a genius who revels in his cynicism and disdain, a man who leaves colleagues, lovers, and friends deeply scarred for having known him. There is also the matter of a murder: who committed it, and the conundrum of who actually died; and what the answers to those questions mean for those left behind.

Samuel Grafton-Hall is an extraordinary character. Tell us a bit about him.

The novel is really driven by the backstory of Samuel Grafton-Hall. As a character, he raises many questions I think apply to today’s world. Samuel’s story and his character traits drove me to look at how we pick our idols, authority figures, and those we trust or follow.

The media are so instrumental in anointing authority figures, and we often blindly trust and follow these people without question. Once something occurs which forces us to examine these leaders, do we allow ourselves to forgive them for being human and fallible?

Samuel Grafton-Hall is so flawed, and if we look at him in the context of comparing him to those in whom we, in our real lives, vest authority, what does it say about us and our own moral obligations? The flaws in Samuel’s character are so compelling, they drove me to keep writing this novel, which took a very long time. From my perspective, these questions transcend the book.

How long did it take to write the novel?

It took a span of fifteen years, nine of which were taken up by writing draft after draft. I lacked faith in myself since I had never before attempted to write a novel.

One famous writer I knew told me my attempts to write a Gothic novel while leaving loose ends were ill-advised, so I wrote and re-wrote. Finally, after so many years, a friend looked at a draft and said, ‘Finish it your way.’

So that’s exactly what I did.

A Man of Genius is told through the words of Grafton-Hall’s attorney, Arthur Dolinger, an unreliable narrator. What thoughts do you have about such narrators?

I think all narrative voices are unreliable. The truth is, we all struggle with narration. In fact, none of our memories are pure. They become distorted over time, and while we may think we’re reliable narrators, we really provide our own versions of what happened in the past.  My narrator, Arthur Dolinger, says at the outset that he can’t be sure of his facts and he struggles with some parts of his narration.

That’s part of what I liked about him. He says early on in the novel, ‘You may not be able to trust everything I say but I’ll do my best.’

That’s exactly it. He recognized the universal tendency for memory of long-ago events to be terribly unreliable.

In A Man of Genius, Grafton-Hall’s first wife, Catherine, makes significant—but not publically acknowledged—contributions to his work. Tell us about the barriers women experience in relation to achievement.

I lived them. As you said, I have three graduate degrees and personally experienced a great deal of resistance and many barriers. I’ll give you two examples.

After getting my Master’s degree in English, I applied for the Ph.D. program in the Gothic novel at the University of Rochester. I was already teaching concurrently with my course work, and had graduated with honors. During my interview for the Ph.D. program, the chairman of the department told me if I persisted on pursuing admission, they would seat me ‘under the seminar table.’ That’s an exact quote. This was well before Title IX was enacted and they weren’t accepting women. A dean who had come over from Columbia suggested I get a doctorate in higher education, which is what I did. But I suffered by that compromise because I really wanted that doctorate in the Gothic novel.

When I was in public relations, I had major clients—Rod Serling, Peter Lorre, and others. Yet, my credit card wasn’t accepted at restaurants when I took those clients to lunch or dinner. In some places, I couldn’t sit at a table waiting for a client because a woman seated alone was not acceptable. I must tell you, my sadness isn’t that it occurred; it’s that young woman today don’t have a sense of what we went through.

At age eighty-four, your debut novel has been published. What made you undertake writing a novel beginning at age seventy?

I don’t consider myself a writer. I’m a storyteller. Some stories just stay with me—not in pure form because our memories don’t retain events as they actually happened. They’ve been reconfigured. A certain story stayed with me—one concerning my 1949 visit to Taliesin, Frank Lloyd Wright’s home in Wisconsin.

I’d read a great deal about him and his architecture. I was privileged to have Mrs. Frank Lloyd Wright take me on a personal tour of Taliesin and invite me to have tea with her. During our conversation, the question I wanted to ask was, ‘Mrs. Wright, did your husband really kill his mistress?’ Of course, I didn’t pose that question to her.

There had been stories about the relationship between Mamah Borthwick Cheney and Frank Lloyd Wright, which ended when she was murdered. Stories circulated that he had arranged the murder because he was looking at a prison term on morals charges. The story of Wright, his mistress and wife stayed with me. And then, other notions materialized—about idolatry and authority—and became reconfigured in my mind. So, I finally began to write it as a novel.

The writing style of A Man of Genius is reminiscent of Daphne Du Maurier and Emily Bronte, with its evocative literary quality. Talk about your writing style and literary influences.

My writing style is simply the voice in my head. I write down what that voice tells me. I’m very interested in Gothic literature for its sublime elements and psychology. For me, the creative and performing arts involve transcendence beyond the moment. Gothic literature pushes you toward that state. I’m engrossed by the question of how we access art and process our feelings about it, and that informs my writing. I admire Du Maurier, but I don’t write the way I do in a purposeful way. It’s simply a result of how I think.

As for my literary influences, I’m an enormous admirer of Laurence Stern and Tristram Shandy. The plot manipulations in that novel are mind-blowing.

What’s coming next from Lynn Rosen?

I have several ideas bubbling in my mind. They all derive from experiences—little vignettes from my life that have stayed with me.

Congratulations on penning A Man of Genius a lyrical contemporary novel with Gothic elements addressing themes of morality, memory, guilt, and hubris while providing unremitting suspense for the reader.