It was awful. He cried, awful, awful. Still, the sun was hot. Still, one got over things. Still, life had a way of adding day to day.

And that is so true. One can be miserable one day, think you’ll never be happy again. And then little by little you surprise yourself and you do experience happiness. Below is an edited and abbreviated version of our Q&A. You can listen to the full interview here on my podcast Elena Meets the Author, or wherever you listen to your podcasts. The Q&A also appeared on 26, a UK writer’s site. Also there are some spoilers below. Sorry.

Elena:  Hello Alison. Your main character Phoebe has come to a gorgeous hotel in Newport, Rhode Island that she can barely afford with no luggage, wearing an emerald silk dress, gold heels that hurt and the thick pearls that her husband who has left her gave her on their wedding night. So a very mysterious and sad start.

And then Phoebe is confronted with the wedding people, this happy bunch of strangers who are staying at this same hotel for what’s supposed to be a very happy occasion. Right away I’m intrigued.

How did the character Phoebe come to you?

When you were writing this book, did you start with that first chapter of Phoebe seeing everyone checking in for the wedding or did you think of that elevator scene where Phoebe confesses to the all-consumed bride Lila that she’s come to this hotel to kill herself?

 I started with Phoebe arriving at the hotel. And then worked my way into that elevator scene. That first chapter looks about the same, in terms of plot points as when I started.

I didn’t really know what I was doing until she was in that elevator with the bride. And the bride responded the way she did. After Phoebe says, I’m here to end my life, the bride says, No, it’s my wedding week. And you can’t do that. When I came back to the novel, after abandoning it for a few years, I realized that was actually my voice.

People always think I’m Phoebe, but in some ways, I’m also Lila.  That self-policing of sadness, saying, you can’t be sad now, or you can’t write a sad book. Not that I think this is a sad book, but I was afraid, oh, here I go again writing about something too dark.

 That’s exactly what the bride would say. And I don’t want to listen to the bride. Like I want Phoebe to feel her feelings and I want her to say what she wants to say. So that really actually freed me up to write the rest of the book.

Makes sense. Phoebe has come to the hotel to kill herself and somehow her grief frees her to be truly honest because for the first time in her life, she doesn’t care what people think of her.

She doesn’t need to be liked. That seems like an upside to grief, no more pretence, no more having to say the right thing. Do you think a little grief is good for us, and wouldn’t it be nice if we didn’t need grief to be more honest?

 That is true.  I agree that it would be nice if we didn’t need grief or some horrific life altering event to do it, right?

If I’m thinking back to the years following my brother’s death, my grief did allow me to be free in a way that most teenagers do not feel free, right? Because I thought, oh wow, here I thought all these things mattered. I was working so hard to look a certain way, talk a certain way, get certain grades and all these things that teenagers really care about, and are really small things.

These middle school concerns vanished from my life. None of them mattered, And, that was really nice. It allowed me, in a weird way, to be happier than I think I would have been, or at least less anxious than I would have been.

And then as my life went on and I re-entered the world again, and started caring about those small things, I did feel my anxiety come back. So, I think you’re onto something right? Grief frees us from our pedestrian concerns.

I did have an experience of grief  when I got divorced years ago.  I remember when people asked me how I was, poor person because I was so honest.  I wasn’t doing well and they were going to get to hear all about it. And now that I’m happy again, if someone asks me how I am, I just say I’m good.

 You start hiding.

You do dialogue so well. Here’s one two sentence exchange between the self-obsessed bride, telling suicidal Phoebe now is not a good time to end her life:

“This is the most important week of my life, the bride pleads. Same, Phoebe says.” Does your dialogue just come to you?

 I would say when I first started writing, I was a very dialogue heavy writer. It comes to me most naturally. Whereas, as I got older, I had to really learn how to write setting. I had to deliberately learn certain elements of craft. Dialogue was always the lifeblood of my writing and the books that I loved were always so dialogue heavy. I just I love talking.

I love long conversations in books and real life. I could talk on the phone for hours.

At what point did you realize that Phoebe needed to be a stranger in the story to get the other characters to open up to her?

That was baked in from the start.  I love the stranger’s perspective on things. I love when the character is watching something from afar. The stranger is able to see something that characters who are closer to the action miss.

So that the reader gets to see something also through the stranger’s perspective. I mentioned I worked at weddings. And that really. comes from my job as a photo booth attendant at weddings while I was in graduate school. I used to stand next to these photo booths, wedding after wedding, dressed like a wedding guest because we didn’t have uniforms. I would wear a cocktail dress, and people thought I was part of the wedding, and they would come over and end up talking to me way longer than I would have thought.

 I was (thinking) your whole family’s here, your friends are here. What are you doing talking to this random stranger? But it seemed to be fun for them to have a break from their friends and family. Or to have just a momentary break where they could actually tell some random woman, I don’t really think the bride is good for the groom or my dad’s a jerk and he’s been that way since I was a kid.

I felt like as the stranger I got the real dirt and no one else at the wedding would because they have to perform for each other.

So you knew Phoebe had to be a stranger and if she’s suicidal she’s even more of a stranger. She feels even more separate.

She’s in a whole world of just her emotions. And everyone else at the wedding is committing to this role for a few days, being their best self. And Phoebe has actually committed to the opposite. No more pretending.

I was intrigued by how Phoebe’s confessional spirit, how that would become contagious. How her honesty and frankness would actually start to rub off on these wedding people and serve as this very tempting way to be.

There’s a lot of death in this book, although that should not turn readers off. The deaths have already happened before page one, and they’re more in terms of how they shape those left behind.  A lot of people are grieving but pretending not to be in pain. Can you talk about grief and societal pressure to pretend you are okay when you’re not?

I think I suffered from that for a long time. Because I was a teenager when I was grieving and almost no one else I knew was, so I was really trying to hide it. And I carried that through for many years into my twenties. It’s like an extra form of grieving on top of the grief. Managing your grief for other people. I really try not to do that anymore.

You mentioned something in another interview, about how when you used to take creative writing classes and the teacher would ask the class to figure out all the traits of these different fictional characters.

You had a really hard time with that. What worked for you was having one thing only that you knew about a character. And then you could go on from there. You said in this interview that you liked the process of figuring out who that person was, from knowing only one thing at the beginning. Can you talk about that?

That is something that I really love about fiction, when fiction writers take someone who seems like a stereotype and then increasingly complicates that stereotype. It mirrors my experience of (life) Like,  if you are meeting a stranger or you’re seeing someone across the way at an airport or at a wedding, you don’t have that much information to work from. You make an assumption about them.

I just love in life when I make this quick judgment about someone and I love it when it’s especially negative.  I’ve had so many experiences where I get to know a person and I discover they’re the opposite of what I thought.

I loved how your book deals with so many heavy life issues like loneliness, life not turning out how you had hoped it would, the betrayal of someone you love, and of course, someone you love dying, and you inject a little levity, a little humor.

Can you explain how you think humor helps us in our darkest moments?

Humor is one of the key things that helps me in my darkest moments. The most profound experience of grieving that I had was losing my brother, and I remember thinking I am never going to laugh again. I don’t see how anything could be funny.

I don’t see how as a family we could ever laugh again. When we’re really in a dark place, we can be very black and white, very apocalyptic.

Humor has surprised me the most. Because you don’t plan for it. It just happens. It’s just spontaneous.  I remember the first day that we found out that he had died, I invited one of my best friends over, just to kind of have some company. And we were sort of struggling in conversation, right? Like who knows what to say in that moment. And so she said at some point, you know, our other friend, she’s really mad at us right now because you didn’t invite her and only invited me…

 Oh, gosh.

The day before his death, that comment would have made me nervous, like, oh no, someone’s mad at me. But on the day of my brother’s death, because of what was going on, we just started laughing hysterically, almost in a trauma like way.

The ridiculousness.

The ridiculous, the absurdity.  And that was such a stupid small thing. But I do think it was key in reframing the whole thing. I wasn’t planning on laughing today, but I did. And I couldn’t have predicted how I would have laughed so it just opened the door. You don’t know what’s coming

Sometimes that’s all you need.

So if the easiest part of writing this book was the dialogue, what was the most challenging part? 

Pushing myself to consistently be honest throughout the book. There were a few parts where I stopped writing for a few months or so mostly because I didn’t feel like going to that dark place, or because I didn’t feel like being in the headspace of someone who is about to take a bunch of cat painkillers.

Cat painkillers that smell like tuna. I loved that little detail. Your book is packed with details that made me chuckle. 

 I’m really just looking for the comedy at every possible moment. (Anyway),  it’s not because I didn’t want to write these things. I would have had no problem writing them if I knew no one was going to read them. But there was just something about wanting to hide my sadness or grief.

 I think other writers feel that too.  That you avoid in your fiction what you tend to avoid in life.  So I felt like if I write this dark character, everyone’s going to think I’m her. Or if I display a knowledge of sadness and grief, people are going to think I’m sad, and not wanting to be perceived that way.

 I had to coach myself through those parts. I found that challenging, but ultimately became the most wonderful part of writing this book. And now getting to connect with people over it and actually finding that people are pretty receptive to those kinds of conversations. Whereas I had only imagined all the negative things they would say.

 Yeah. No, no, it was good. It’s very well written. All the flashbacks to her marriage and, her inability to have a baby. It was sad, but it was a good sad, I was happy when she got to a lighter place.

 That was really the question I was having at the time. How do you move on from things that are never going to feel okay. There are just some things that are never going to feel good, like wanting to have a baby and not being able to. That’s never going to feel good.

You have to figure out a way to live your life and be happy, or as happy as one can be.

As a kid, I thought, well, this was my big tragedy, and it’s done early. So, I imagined  the rest of my life was only going to get better and happier, no more loss. But you’re always encountering these things that you can’t make better. So, for me, writing this book is getting Phoebe to that place, thinking about all those small little moments that would help someone move on.

You succeeded. I feel like at the ending, Phoebe has survived and she’s going to be fine. And, that’s the end of my questions.

Thank you so much, Elena

Thank you!

November, 2024

The post Q&A with Alison Espach – The Wedding People appeared first on Elena Bowes.

Signal Fires could only be written by Dani Shapiro- and only now when she’s at the height of her powers. One gets the sense this is the story she has been building toward all these years; a parabolic family drama about the way certain moments echo through time. I’ll never stop thinking about it.”

That quote is from another talented writer, Mary Laura Phillipot. Signal Fires is a book that sticks with you. Not just because of the exquisite writing and unique story that is both haunting and hopeful, a story that crisscrosses time in a purposeful way. But the novel is also unforgettable because of what it implies about death and the universe, the stars, how when we die, it’s not the end. We’re all somehow connected.

The story opens in 1985 on a summer night with a teenage car crash in which one person dies, and the other two are culpable. This accident will become a guarded secret for the respectable Wilf family, shattering each of their lives in different ways. Several years later another family with no knowledge of this tragedy moves in across the street. Events ensue involving that family’s gifted, brilliant and lonely son Waldo that somehow bring grace and forgiveness to the accident that happened decades earlier.

 Here’s my Q&A:

 Dani, can you tell us about the fascinating genesis of this book and its connection to your memoir Inheritance?

 I began Signal Fires a long time ago, before I was really ready to write it. A cast of characters materialized for me who I loved and to whom I felt very attached, but I lost my way in the writing, and after about 100 pages I put the manuscript in a drawer. I was heartbroken, but never thought I’d return to it. I really believed it was the one that got away. But as the years passed, and I wrote more books (Still Writing, Hourglass) some big changes happened in my own life. Perhaps the biggest of these changes occurred when I learned, in 2016, that my dad had not been my biological father. He had raised me, and I adored him. I lost him when I was quite young in a terrible car accident and have missed him every day since. This sudden loss informed much of my work as a writer.

I also had the sense that my parents kept secrets – and I wrote a great deal about the corrosive power of secrets – but never did I entertain the thought that perhaps I was the secret. And this is what turned out to be the case. I was able to meet my biological father and wrote the memoir Inheritance about my discovery. It wasn’t until I completed Inheritance and brought it into the world that I returned to the Signal Fires manuscript. I re-read it and understood for the first time how the story needed to play out. It was as if the characters had slept in that drawer all these years, needing me to grow and evolve into the writer who deserved them.

You begin your story with the word And….

And it’s nothing, really, or might be nothing, or ought to be nothing, as he leans his head forward to press the tip of his cigarette to the car’s lighter. It sizzles on contact, a sound particular to its brief moment in history, in which cars have lighters and otherwise sensible fifteen-year-olds choke down Marlboro Reds and drive their mothers’ Buicks without so much as a learner’s permit.”

 The reader is immediately propelled into the scene that’s already started, knowing somehow, it’s not going to end well. Can you discuss your choice of the word and to start your novel.

When I returned to the novel after my long absence, I hadn’t yet written that very opening scene. And I knew I needed to do so before moving forward. The only thing of which I was certain, though I couldn’t have explained it at the time, was that the first word of this novel had to be “And…” because it felt to me as if it was a world already in motion, and I wanted to convey that to the reader.  I wanted the reader to step into a universe in which past, present, and future all existed at once.

You can read the rest of the interview here on 26’s September newsletter.

September, 2023

The post Q&A with Acclaimed Author Dani Shapiro appeared first on Elena Bowes.

I stared at my new US passport, basking in Elena Bowes and all its official glory. I signed the document with a black ballpoint pen. That felt good too.

But then I got to the emergency contact section. The passport agency requires not one, but two contacts. I wrote Stretch’s details for the 1^st one, a perk to being married, not having those ‘next of kin’ questions depress me anymore. But that second, now that was a problem. If I put one of my three childrens’ names down, and Stretch was with me on that doomed flight where only my passport survived, that would mean one of my kids would get the call. This would be troublesome in two ways. 1) I’d be too dead to explain to the other two that I didn’t love them less for having not chosen them, and 2)  A British Airways bureaucrat would be left telling whichever lucky child I did choose that their dear mother was now departed, terminated, kaput, sayonara’d,  a goner. I clearly couldn’t put my child’s name on that emergency contact. They would never recover.

This passport that only five minutes ago was bringing me great Gloria Steinem joy was now doing just the opposite.

Stretch, what do you put for your emergency contacts?”

Where?”

On your passport?”

Oh, I don’t. I leave ‘em blank. Why?”

That in a nutshell is the difference between Stretch and me. He never thinks that extra mile. He’s happy to play the odds, the odds of survival. Not me. If something has a 98% success rate, I know I’ll be in the 2%. There isn’t a worse-case scenario that I haven’t considered. Like could a deer suddenly turn vicious?

I saw one last night in our garden, happily chomping on our apples. He saw me, stopped munching and stared…ominously.. I tried to act like a tough, noisy human but he didn’t blink. He saw right through me. Still as a statue. That’s when I noticed his antlers. That deer could be the exception, the one deer who decided to charge at me, beheading me with those horns, my head tossed aside next to a half eaten apple. Note to self mid stare down: stop watching SAW films—way too many dismemberment scenes. Just as I was considering back stepping to my door, Rudolph pranced away. Phew, dodged another bullet.

Meanwhile, Stretch has been pestering me for months to join him at his golf club’s weekly pickleball clinic. I’m not sure which word I hate more: golf or clinic. And of course, the word pickleball is problematic in a number of ways.

“It’ll be fun,” Stretch enthuses. “And we can meet people, make new friends.”

 ‘I don’t want to make new friends.”

That line can only work for so long. The truth is I’m scared—scared of injuring myself either physically or emotionally. Stretch mentions that the clinics are mostly women. So catastrophist me imagines him falling for the pickleball-star, golf-playing, clinic-loving housewife. I give in and Stretch immediately signs us up for the next clinic. This turns out to be the same day the NYT publishes an article called  ”Pickleball, Sport of the Future Injury?” on its front page.

My worse-case scenarios aren’t limited to the outside world. There are dangers in my very own home. Yours too, by the way. When I see the expiration date on a carton of eggs, I subtract a week for safe salmonella-free consumption. My husband, on the other hand, likes to roll the dice. He adds a month to the expiration date. I kid you not.

They put that date just to scare people, make ‘em buy more eggs.”

What, does he have some inside track with the hens? How does he know these things?

Stretch got stung by a scorpion in Africa once, when he was 20. This was pre-Google. He watched the poison pulse through his veins up his arm towards his heart. And did nothing! He knew he’d survive. How? How did anyone know anything before Google? Was he carrying an Encyclopedia Britannica around with him in the bush? He was certainly no entomologist. He was just playing the odds.  I often think Stretch’s attitude towards life is a bit cavalier. And the same goes for his attitude towards death.

The other day we were walking by the Long Island Sound.

Apparently, Hindus like to scatter the ashes of their loved ones over the Ganges river,” I said. “They don’t like people to hold onto the ashes. The grievers need to let go—psychologically, emotionally, spiritually.”

Stretch pointed to the Long Island Sound, and said as if it just came to him, no ponderous thought whatsoever.

This is where I want my ashes spread.”

But you’ll be so cold. The water is so grey”

Elena, I’ll be dead.”

And you won’t be with me because I don’t want to be in the freezing, grey Atlantic.”

He laughed and walked on. Oblivious to the fact that we don’t have a proper death plan—And by proper, I mean he needs to join me wherever I choose to go. Which is certainly not going to be in the Atlantic Ocean.

 I think I’d like my ashes—and Stretch’s—scattered somewhere warm where there are no hurricanes or scary weather patterns. I don’t want my ashes to be flailing around amongst dead fish on a dried-out river even if the locals speak French. I think ideally, we should have our ashes scattered over an enormous bathtub filled with rose petals and scented candles, maybe someplace with a big terrace and daily room (and bath) servicing. And this wouldn’t be for a long romantic weekend. This would be forever.

So, amongst all the other things I need to worry about—like murderous deer and don’t get me started on ticks—we now need to start saving up for our Aman Cremation Getaway.

Post-script: There were no women in our pickleball clinic. In fact, the only other person in the clinic besides Stretch and me and the attractive male Croatian pro (conveniently my partner)

was a very competitive man who kept swearing at himself for hitting the fake ball into the low net. I kind of enjoyed that. I hope he comes back next week.

August, 2022

The post Being a Catastrophist Is Not the End of the World appeared first on Elena Bowes.