Hannah, a Hungarian refugee, is in a loveless, safe marriage to a wealthy British diplomat in Cairo in 1951. She meets Lucien, the charming Swiss manager of the famed Shepheard’s Hotel, after she is bitten by a cobra. He saves her life and awakens a longing in her for everything she has lost. Fast forward to 2022 New England, Mallory is a single mother to 13-year-old Sam who desperately needs a kidney transplant. The one person who might be a kidney match for Mallory’s adored son Sam is his famous singer father Monk Adams. But for reasons undisclosed until the final chapters of this page-turner, Mallory refuses to approach Monk, who she hasn’t seen  since the fateful  summer of 2008.

Below are some highlights from our chat. You can listen to the full interview with Beatriz Williams on my podcast Elena Meets the Author on Spotify, Apple or Substack.

You are a prolific writer, writing under your own name, under a pseudonym and you’ve co-authored several books. How long does it typically take you to write a Beatriz Williams novel?

I tend to do a lot of preparation before I write the book. I don’t mean plotting; I mean thinking about the characters and the key scenes.  I love that state of flow where you know your characters as well as your own children. And so, if I’ve done my preparation, (including) the historical research, the actual drafting of the book takes two to three months. It depends on the complexity of the book, how well I’ve prepared and whether my characters throw any curveballs at me. I love that serendipity of writing where once the characters are there on the page, that’s when the alchemy really happens.

You’re originally from Seattle, went to Stanford and then Columbia Business School. How did you get into writing?

I always wanted to write. I come from a very nerdy background. We went to a lot of Shakespeare and opera as a kid. My father who is British used to tell me, that with writers, many are called, few are chosen. So being kind of a pleaser, and wanting to win my parents’ approval, business seemed easier to be successful at. So, it took a ton of courage to say that while I would be an adequately successful management consultant, I really just wanted to write books.

While I know that Monk Adams is very goodlooking early on in your story, I don’t have an idea about what Mallory looks like until the final chapters.

The heart of my books is the gap between persona which is what we present to the world and our true selves. We tend not to see ourselves the way others see us. To Mallory, she’s just Mallory, not exactly ordinary, but… So, I liked in that final chapter we finally see Mallory through Monk’s eyes, and we realise why he loves her so much. That was such a wonderful chapter to write to see how he sees her and how he perceives himself. This incredibly charismatic guy who doesn’t put a foot wrong and (all he wants) is to have this girl love him.

Were any characters hard to write?

Monk was very easy to write. But Hannah (in Cairo) was very difficult. I had so much trouble with her, and it’s partly because she’s hiding so much hurt. She doesn’t want other characters to get close to the real her, the way she didn’t want me to get close to her. She had a first love in Hungary, then she goes through WWII and undergoes some pretty difficult things. My editor made me take a few things out. Remember this is a summer book. So, I left a few things unspoken at the end of the war. But once I got that about her and what she is looking for in Lucien, once I peeled back all those protective layers that she’s got around her, then writing her became much easier.

Happy End of Summer!

August, 2024

The post Q&A with Beatriz Williams – Husbands & Lovers, an Ideal Summer Read appeared first on Elena Bowes.

Annabel Monaghan’s  latest book, Summer Romance, came out a few weeks ago and is already an instant USA Today and Washington Post bestseller. If you’re wondering what to throw into that beach bag, wonder no more. I loved this book. Annabel has a gift for creating flawed, funny, charming characters that have enviable chemistry. And a whole quirky community and back story that adds layers and challenges to the plot.

I interviewed Annabel in 2022 about her first novel- Nora Goes Off Script–  which I also loved (for the same reasons as above- she’s nailed the formula yet each story is its very much its own)  Here’s that Q&A. Annabel has written three best sellers in the last three years. And I’m happy to report that she’s  working on a fourth for next summer. She  is clearly on a roll. Her books are funny, smart, philosophical without being too heavy. Feel good without ever being stupid.

In this interview you’ll learn about hard pants, , how to write a sex scene and how anthropological it is to be a seventh grade girl and get ditched by your friends, ‘cheetahs going in for the kill’.

Summer Romance is about a woman named Ali Morris who lives in a suburb outside of Manhattan. She’s a professional organizer, but her life is a mess. Her mother died two years ago. Her husband left her a year ago. Her pantry is a sight to behold. She hasn’t worn hard pants, (i. e. pants with a zipper) in she can’t remember how long. She has three kids who she’s trying to hold it together for. Ali is stuck.

Then one day, Ali takes off her wedding ring. She puts on overalls, which kind of count as hard pants. And she goes to the dog park with her little dog. She meets a cute guy named Ethan. And as the title of Annabel’s book suggests, things start looking up for Ali.

First question. I’m a big fan of romantic comedies, intelligent romantic comedies, the Harry Met Sally’s of the book world. But they do get a hard time like they’re not proper literature. Annabel, why do you think that is? Do you think it has something to do with how they look like they’re easy to write but are anything but?

 I think it is. They’re easy to read so they probably seem like they’re easy to write but I don’t know why something to have value has to be hard to read to begin with. I read for pleasure. I read for escape. I don’t read to make my life harder than it already is.

 I agree. I love knowing I’m going to go to sleep with a smile on my face after reading a few chapters. I think Summer Romance has got to be made into a movie. Your descriptions of Ethan really made me want to meet him. He’s the perfect guy who not only really sees Ali but is crazy about her. He’s gorgeous without an ounce of vanity. And he’s always bringing her snacks and glasses of wine. If you could choose any actor to play both Ali and Ethan who would they be?

 I think maybe I was hungry while I was writing this book. I really do like how he would show up with chocolate pretzels and a little bit of Sancerre. It’s really not that hard to please a woman. For Ali, I would say Jennifer Lawrence. She is always my first choice, and I would actually have her play any of my heroines in any of my books.

And Ethan, I have a harder time with because I see him as a complete person, but I sort of think of him as a younger Sean Penn, but Sean Penn is not younger, so we couldn’t get him to do it. So, I don’t know who that actor is.

 In your notes at the end of the book, you talk about how after your mother’s death in 2009, a nun who knew your mother emailed your sister to say she’s as close as your breath. What do you think she meant?

I think about that sentence all the time. I think what it means is that if somebody loves you a lot and loves you your whole life, it becomes a part of you. And so, once they’re gone, you don’t feel so much that they’re gone because they’re inside of you and they’re also outside of you, like your breath.

A couple times a week I get in the car, and I say, Mom, can you believe what just happened or what am I going to do? And it’s not like I hear a response from her. I’m not hearing dead people, but I know in my head and in my memory and in my heart what she would say to comfort me in a certain situation.

I read that this is your most personal novel yet. Can you expand on how this book has a lot of parallels to your own life? You talked about your mother. Do you hate dog parks?

I really can’t express how much I hate dog parks. The meet cute in this book (happens when) Ali goes to the dog park and her little dog runs over to this very attractive man, lifts his leg and pees on him. (The dog)  chooses him for Ali in that way.

The first time that I ever took my dog to the dog park was also the last time I ever took my dog to the dog park. He just ran over to this lady, just this perfectly nice lady, lifted up his leg and peed on her flip flop. No joke.

 Oh no!

The look on her face, and I just apologized and backed away and frankly never went back to the dog park again. So certainly, that’s part of my life. And the grieving of my mother is in this book.

But also, this idea that I think about all the time, I put into this book, which is what is the right amount of involvement to have in your children’s lives? You know, what is the right amount to step in? Ali’s mother steps into her marriage a lot while she was alive. Ali’s mother steps in when her husband is absent to sort of make everything okay. And her over-helping in her marriage sort of makes Ali lose her voice and sort of keeps her from ever really learning how to be married.

I think this is a thing that we do as parents as our children get older. We don’t let them learn how to live because we are just trying to prevent them from feeling any kind of pain.

I was raised on a really heavy dose of negligence, and I survived, and it was fine. There’s this idea that I think all of us would love to do everything we can to keep our children from ever suffering. But that is not really best practice. Because they’re going to suffer, and if they haven’t ever suffered along the way, you know, their first step out is, it’s a doozy.

 I agree, all this helicopter parenting is not healthy for the kids or the parents. You have two main older women characters in your book, Ali’s dead mother and Ali’s 94-year-old neighbour, Phyllis. How would you compare these two women and can you talk about the importance of intergenerational friendships.

 I love my intergenerational friendships both up and down. I think they give me so much context. Ali has this neighbour who’s 94 years old, who she’s known forever, but she got closer to after her mother passed away. And Ali’s mother, as I said, was overly involved in everything in her life. Phyllis, her neighbour, has the opposite attitude about things.

She says, pull the weeds and let God do the rest. She’s very hands off about everything. Phyllis is kind of how my mom was. I appreciated Phyllis’s outlook on everything. So, they were a contrast to each other and hopefully to have Ali change throughout the novel.

I think those relationships help wherever we are in our lives. We get so full in our heads about where we are and what we’re doing and what our particular circumstances are. Our older friends give us context for where we’re going and how maybe some of (the things in our head) aren’t so important. And our younger friends give us context for where we’ve been.

You have three sons, no daughters, yet you really captured what Greer is going through. How did you know how traumatic it is to be a seventh-grade girl?

 I was doing an event this week and I asked the crowd of a hundred people, I said, who here knows what it is to be a seventh-grade girl and get ditched? And every single one of them raised their hands, every single person in the audience. It is the most universal feeling. So, I don’t have a daughter, but I was in the seventh grade, and I remember what it was like.

It’s anthropological. It’s like when the cheetahs are going in for a kill and they surround the prey. They pick out the weaker girl and pounce and then everybody turns on her. It’s bananas. I wrote about what I remembered.

Changing tack here. Your sex scenes hit just the right note. They’re suggestive and sexy without anything too embarrassing. No Fifty Shades of Grey. Do you have any tips on writing about sex?

 When I wrote Nora Goes Off Script, I needed to write a sex scene, and I just panicked. I didn’t know how to approach that, and I actually googled it.  I talked to a bunch of people. What I realized is that there are two kinds of sex scenes, and you just have to make a decision. One is a scene where there are body parts. And you are seeing where the body parts are going and that’s spicier. And then the other kind is where the people are together and you know how it feels that they’re together emotionally and you can kind of feel it, but you’re not seeing any body parts. That’s where I’m comfortable.

My editor always says, especially in this book, I want to be dying for that kiss. Make us just die for it. That takes a lot of revision to get right.

 I also liked how Ethan dealt with ex-husband Pete’s put downs. He deflected rather than replied aggressively. Were those scenes fun to write?

 So fun. I really like writing a horrible guy. And the thing about Pete, her ex-husband, is he’s not physically abusive. He just talks to her in a way that can literally wear you down after time. It’s just belittling and demeaning and dismissive in a way that just makes you want to punch him in the face.

So, in the scenes where Ethan is just quietly putting him in his place, it was very satisfying writing. I loved writing those scenes.

 Are there some constants that we can always expect from an Annabel Monaghan novel?

 I will always write a love story. I have tried to write a murder, I’ve tried to write a thriller, and they’ve been disasters. They’ve crumbled because I’ve turned them into a love story immediately. I can’t stay in the darkness for very long when I’m writing. So, it’ll always be a love story.

There will always be a heroine who, starts out in a certain situation and ends up just being more herself. And it will not be because of the relationship, she’ll never have a man solve all her problems. It drives me crazy, where everything’s terrible, but then the guy calls and everything’s fine.

That’s not how it works in real life. She will always, come back to her truer self by the end. For me that’s really satisfying. I think that’s the journey we’re all on, just to get back to ourselves and away from all the nonsense that we learn for 50 years.

To who we once were. Can you promise us a happy ending?

 That goes without saying. And I’ll never kill a dog.

 Very reassuring. Thank you so much. In the words of the Morris family, I’d like to wish you a champagne summer.

 So far so good with the champagne summer over here. It’s been great.

You can read the rest of my edited Q&A here on 26.

June 2024

The post Q&A with Bestselling Author Annabel Monaghan… Summer Romance appeared first on Elena Bowes.

Here’s Shelbie talking…

Or an author whose bio on Amazon reads like this:

Laura Zigman grew up in Newton, Massachusetts (where she felt she never quite fit in), and graduated from the University of Massachusetts at Amherst (where she didn’t fit in either) and the Radcliffe Publishing Procedures Course (where she finally started to feel like she fit in). She spent ten years working (slaving away) in New York in book publishing where she was a (much-abused under-appreciated) publicist for Times Books, Vintage Books, Turtle Bay Books, Atlantic Monthly Press, and Alfred A. Knopf. After moving to Washington, D.C. (because she was burnt out and didn’t know where else to go) and working briefly as a project manager for The Smithsonian Associates (she had a cubicle) and a consultant for Share Our Strength, an anti-poverty non-profit group (she didn’t even have a cubicle), she (finally) finished her first novel (that she’d been writing in her ‘spare time’ for the last five years).

That first novel Animal Husbandry became a  chick lit hit, was sold in about 22 countries and was made into the 2001 rom-com Someone Like You starring Ashley Judd and Hugh Jackman.  Three more books followed, the last coming out in 2006, the same year Zigman’s son was born and that she was diagnosed with breast cancer. A lot of other personal losses followed. And so did 14 years of writer’s block.

Luckily for us, Zigman got unblocked (not sure how that sounds) and penned this marvellous novel, a sad and funny semi-autobiographical story about middle age disappointments and what pulls us through- the kindness of others.  Separation Anxiety (working title was “Wearing the Dog”) – will keep you flipping the pages, and wondering if maybe you should try wearing your dog.

1) Can you tell us a bit about how you conquered your writer’s block and how it and other life disappointments became the subject matter for your new book?

Animal Husbandry, was published almost 22 years ago, in 1998, and my fourth and last novel, Piece of Work, was published almost 14 years ago in 2006. Then there was nothing. In one way, my publishing-math is just a set of numbers, but in another way, those numbers mean everything to me. They mark the time between writing and not writing; publishing and not publishing. But mostly they mark the time between when life was fairly easy and full of possibility, and when it went dark.

Almost everyone goes through the kind of rough patch that I did — a period of time when they’ve grieved people they’ve lost or a version of a themselves they once were. Not everything in life works out – in fact, most things don’t, and sometimes life feels like a series of moments that require difficult acceptance: This is who I thought I would be; this is who I now know I’ll never become. It happens to all of us.

For me, that rough patch lasted almost a decade — from my mid 40s to my mid 50s. I’d had breast cancer, lost both my parents and several friends, and, along with those deaths, had lost the version of myself that identified as a writer and a novelist. I started ghostwriting to earn a living. And while it helped financially, it contributed to me losing my own voice because I was now writing in someone else’s. I was grateful for the work, but I always hoped to return to my own writing someday, even though that seemed impossible: I felt hopelessly blocked, as if that part of my brain had just shorted out.

In 2015, after moving to Harvard Square, friends kept encouraging me to write – to try again. Finally, in between ghostwriting projects and having an actual job-job, I decided to try. I went on Craig’s List and found out that I could rent a shrink’s office when it wasn’t in use — by the hour. So, in four-hour blocks of time on Sundays and Mondays, I’d walk into Harvard Square and sit in an empty psychiatrist’s office. Sometimes, I would write something. Other times I would just play stupid games on my phone. But eventually I took a few sections from a screenplay I’d written a few years earlier and that got me started. It took about three and a half years, in between ongoing ghostwriting projects, to finish a draft of Wearing The Dog, which eventually was retitled Separation Anxiety.

I can honestly say that I never thought I’d ever finish it. Having this second chance at publishing my own work, after so many years of not-writing and of ghostwriting, feels like a miracle.

2) Your main character Judy wears her dog in a sling, a form of emotional support as she struggles with the loneliness of middle age, a teenage child who is pulling away, a husband who smokes a lot of pot and sleeps in the basement,  a dwindling career that once had such promise and a dying best friend. These middle age struggles that you write about so poignantly and with humour are very relatable. Did you think your novel about a woman who wears her dog in a sling could speak to so many?

I think of this novel as starting in a still point: like when you turn your computer off to reset it and the screen goes black. You’re waiting for the power to come back on – you assume it will, but, if you’re like me, there’s a part of you that fears maybe it won’t; that maybe things will stay dark; that maybe the light will never return.

I knew I wanted to write about a woman set in that still point-moment: when loss seems overwhelming; when the sense of possibility you feel when you’re young and when your family is young is lost and has been replaced by melancholy. People you love are gone; dreams you had for yourself haven’t been realized; most things haven’t turned out the way you thought they would. Loss and grief for big and small things can wear you down and wear you out and that’s where Judy is at the beginning of the book. It’s what I knew and what so many people I know have experienced. Everyone I know has hit this point in one form or another – in their marriages; in their careers; following the loss of friends and family – so writing about it felt like channelling a kind of collective consciousness. I didn’t want to sugar-coat Judy’s pain or the pain of anyone in the book.

And yet: I still wanted the book to be funny somehow, because often there is still humor and absurdity happening right alongside everything else. It was very important to me to be honest about the sadness at this point in mid-life because we all struggle with it. We all hit these walls and for some reason we feel like failures when we do. Why not admit it that it’s a normal part of life? Why are we all so ashamed?

3) What books are on your summer reading list? 

I love a few that are out right now: Debra Jo Immergut’s You Again, Jennifer Weiner’s Big Summer, and Curtis Sittenfeld’s Rodham, and I’m dying to read Want by Lynn Steger Strong. I just read Sue Miller’s Monogamy (coming in the fall), and I’ve got galleys for Alice Hoffman’s prequel to the Practical Magic trilogy, Magic Lessons, and Rumaan Alam’s Leave the World Behind.

4) What’s next?

What’s next is a novel called The Ghostwriter about two sisters who move back in together as adults. It’s so hard concentrating in this era of terrible-and-terrifying news, but when I’m able to work it’s such a welcome distraction.

The rest of my Q&A with Zigman can be found here in 26’s monthly newsletter.

Happy reading

July, 2020

The post Author Laura Zigman talks about Painful Writer’s Block and Her New Book Separation Anxiety appeared first on Elena Bowes.