Q&A with Julie Satow

Julie Satow is the author of the new book The Plaza: The Secret Life of America's Most Famous Hotel. She is a regular contributor to The New York Times, and she lives in New York City.

Q: Why did you decide to write about the history of the Plaza hotel?

A: I cover real estate, mostly for The New York Times, and had been writing about the building over the years. I also grew up in New York City, and was married at the hotel. It’s such an iconic building; it’s dominant on the skyline. The building always intrigued me. When I started to research it, I found no one had written a real history of the hotel since the 1960s. It was ripe for a book project.

Q: How did you research the book?

A: The research was one of the most exciting parts. I’m a journalist, but I couldn’t interview people for the historical part. There are so many newspaper articles that are digitized now, so you can put in key words and amazing articles would come up. I uncovered all these stories—I read through tens of thousands of articles. One of the first things I found was a murder when they constructed the hotel. And for the more recent times, I did the classic journalist thing, and interviewed people.

Q: What impact did Donald Trump’s ownership have on the hotel?

A: It was a pretty critical moment. He bought the hotel at the height of the ‘80s. He was a real estate golden boy at the time. He paid a historic sum—half a million dollars per hotel room. He borrowed it from a consortium of banks—it was a quintessential Trump deal. He acknowledged that it made no financial sense.

He put Ivana in charge—she did an excellent job. She made a success of the hotel. But he made such a bad business deal—the hotel made money, but he couldn’t cover the debt on the hotel. He was the only person to bankrupt the Plaza.

Also as a result of his ownership, creditors took over the hotel, and there was the beginning of foreign ownership of the Plaza. Now the Qatari government owns the hotel. His ownership has affected the way the Plaza is—it was a turning point.

Q: What would you say are some of the most common perceptions and misperceptions about the Plaza?

A: When most people see it, they think of Eloise, or the Beatles staying there, or Truman Capote’s black and white ball. That’s true—it’s been filled with celebrities.

But there’s so much more—it’s a lens to tell a social history of New York. It’s the story of New York—a window to see what happened in New York through the past decades to today.

Q: What do you see looking ahead for the hotel?

A: Now, it’s largely condominiums owned by very wealthy people. Most of them don’t live there full-time. There is still a boutique hotel. That will not change going forward. It’s a landmark so they can’t change the façade. It’s been through a rough patch in recent years. I went to India to visit the [then-] owner—the government wants him to pay billions for a bond scheme. He had financial and legal issues. A year ago it was sold to the Qatari government…their partners may include a Saudi prince and other partners.

My hope is that they’ll spend some money on the hotel. The rooms like the Oak Room and the Edwardian Room are closed. I hope they’ll make a deal with the unions and reopen them, and splurge on the hotel. It won’t be a huge moneymaker, but it’s a symbol of New York.

Q: What are you working on now?

A: I’m working on some articles, and researching a new book proposal. I’m traveling and doing interviews for the book. It’s a lot. I’m excited!

Q: Anything else we should know?

A: The book can appeal to a wide range of readers—people who are interested in history, in investigative reportage. There’s a lot of celebrity stuff in there, but also historical research. I hope people read it!

--Interview with Deborah Kalb

Q&A with Sam Kean

Sam Kean is the author of the new book The Bastard Brigade. His other books include Caesar's Last Breath and The Tale of the Dueling Neurosurgeons, and his work has appeared in a variety of publications, including The New Yorker and The Atlantic. He lives in Washington, D.C.

Q: You write, "The Bastard Brigade is just the sort of physics-adventure tale I always wanted to tell..." How did you decide on this topic?

A: Yeah, as I wrote, I wanted to find a physics story that I found compelling enough, and stopping a Nazi atomic bomb was definitely that! I also got drawn in through the amazing characters like Moe Berg and Joseph Kennedy and Boris Pash and Irene Joliot-Curie. They were too compelling not to write about.

Q: How did you research the book, and what did you learn that especially fascinated you?

A: Most of the research was in archives - in New York, D.C., Palo Alto, Boston, and so on. What really fascinated me was how obsessed the Americans were with the prospect of Hitler getting the bomb, and how much that drove them - both in working harder to build the bomb, and also to undertake some crazy missions.

Q: The book includes an intriguing cast of characters, as you’ve noted. Did you know from the beginning who you'd include, or did you add people as you went along?

A: I mostly knew the from the beginning. What I didn't expect was that some of them would have such fascinating early lives, in addition to the mission they did during the war.

Q: What do you hope readers take away from the book?

A: I hope they just jump in and enjoy the story. That's what it's all about.

Q: What are you working on now?

A: Taking a bit of a break right now, but I should be starting another book soon!

Q: Anything else we should know?

A: That it's a really wild story. All my previous books were like a collection of interconnected short stories, with each chapter standing more or less alone. This book was more like a nonfiction novel - one overarching story And it was a blast to write.

--Interview with Deborah Kalb. Here's a previous Q&A with Sam Kean.

Sept. 25

ON THIS DAY IN HISTORY
Sept. 25, 1897: William Faulkner born.

Q&A with Clare Clark

Clare Clark is the author of the new novel In the Full Light of the Sun. Her other novels include The Great Stink and Savage Lands. She lives in London.

Q: In our previous interview, you noted that after writing a novel about Britain in the post-World War I era, "I really wanted to look at the other side" and examine Germany during the same time period. Did you find that the fact that you'd written about this time period in We That Are Left affected the creation of In the Full Light of the Sun?

A: Yes, absolutely. In writing We That Are Left I had spent two years thinking about the effects of loss, grief, and unprecedentedly cataclysmic war on a family but in Britain at least those families were on the winning side. However devastating the effects, however shattered their lives, they had the crumbs of comfort that came from knowing that their sacrifices and those of their loved ones had been somehow “worth it.”

Germany lost twice as many men as the British Empire – almost 1.8 million, with another 4.2 million wounded – and for what? No one in Germany had thought they would lose the war. Many people hated the government for signing the armistice, they believed politicians had stabbed their brave army in the back. Meanwhile the war had taken a huge economic toll on the country, people were starving. There were violent clashes on the street between political factions on the left and right.

This febrile atmosphere was only intensified by the harsh terms of the Treaty of Versailles, in which Germany as the loser was expected to pay the price of the war.

I wanted to explore what it might have felt like to have lived through these times, to have suffered so much for what turned out to be so little, and to understand better the human experiences that meant that the humiliation of Germany after the First World War led to the rise of Hitler and another catastrophic war.

But I knew I didn’t want to write another family story, I wanted to look at the issues through a very different lens to the one I had deployed in We That Are Left. It was while I was thinking about a fresh way to tell the story that I stumbled upon the story of Otto Wacker and the 32 supposed van Goghs.

Q: The novel is based on actual events. How did you research the book, and what did you see as the right balance between the historical facts and your own fictional work?

A: The question of balance between fact and fiction is always such an important one to me. I have an instinctive resistance to ventriloquising real people – Hilary Mantel does it brilliantly but I think too often it feels contrived and unconvincing, it brings the reader too often up against the reality that the story they are reading is imagined, not true. So I tend to use real people and events as a springboard for my stories.

As for the work behind the book, I researched this book as I do all my novels, beginning with general history and slowly bringing in the focus to particular areas that fascinate me or seem to be taking my story somewhere: diaries, monographs, newspaper articles, letters.

The Wacker affair appeared at first to have generated relatively little coverage, though there were two books upon which I depended heavily: Solar Dance by Modris Eksteins and A Real Van Gogh by Henk Tromp. But of course the twin subjects of Van Gogh and the mythology that surrounds him, and of art forgery, the suspicion of which has dogged a number of Van Gogh’s most famous paintings, have generated reams and reams of material.

It slowly became clear to me that I would be able to read forever if I wished to so in the end I had to put away the books and decide to start writing.

I knew straight away that I would have to diverge from the facts of the Otto Wacker case because not only was it much too complicated for my purposes, it was often so preposterous that I knew if I wrote it as fiction no one would believe it! Instead I wanted to focus on the ideas and questions that his strange history inspired in me: the fascinating pull between the beauty of art and its financial value, our fixation with the artist over the art, the myths and stories we tell ourselves that we find so much more compelling than the ordinary truth.

In my novel, the Wacker character, Matthias Rachmann, is deliberately vague, we only ever see him through the eyes of other characters. He is the composite of their imaginings, his reality is derived from the motivations, desires and attributes that they give him.

The story of the fake paintings runs through the novel like a spine, it gives the book its shape, but the flesh of the novel is formed of the stories of the three characters who carry its narrative, Julius, Emmeline, and Frank. It is their stories that matter the most and of course all three of those characters are completely figments of my imagination, even if Julius is inspired by the real-life critic Julius Meier-Graefe.  

Q: How was the novel's title chosen, and what does it signify for you?

A: The title of the novel comes from a quote by Gauguin, who lived with Van Gogh in the Yellow House in Arles in 1889. Years later, in 1903, the impoverished Gauguin was dying of syphilis in the Marquesas Islands, having worn out his welcome in Tahiti.

In his last months he wrote a memoir, Avant et Après (Before and After) in which he seems to claim that it was he who directed Van Gogh towards the sunflowers as a subject: “I undertook to enlighten him [van Gogh] … From that day on my van Gogh made astonishing progress: he seemed to have an inkling of all he had in him, hence that whole series of sunflowers on sunflowers in the full light of the sun.”

As well as being a beautiful encapsulation of Van Gogh’s most famous paintings, this piece of gratuitous myth-making struck me as soon as I read it as the perfect encapsulation of the themes of my novel. In fact Van Gogh painted the sunflowers before Gauguin’s arrival, as a welcome to his friend and to decorate his room, but, alone and obscure, terrified that posterity would forget him, Gauguin chose to remember things differently. He forged his involvement in his friend’s work, knowing that he was no longer alive to contradict him.

Q: What do you hope readers take away from the story?

A: I hope with this novel, as I do with all my books, that readers will feel themselves transported to another time, and that they will feel able to experience that time through the eyes of characters whose reality they entirely believe in. My starting point when I write a story is always, “What would it have felt like to live in these times, to face these unfamiliar challenges?”

But of course it is impossible for me not to bring our present into that process, our times and the issues we face now are the lenses through which we all must view the past.

I hope that In the Full Light of the Sun is a completely transporting story, that all a reader will find him or herself immersed in the characters and their particular experiences and dilemmas. But I also hope that, when the book is finished and put back on the shelf, that it will continue to metabolise in a reader’s mind and in their heart, that it will press them, very gently, to think more deeply about the stories we tell ourselves and the dangers of those stories to what we consider to be the truth.

Q: What are you working on now?

A: All six of my novels have had historical subjects, from the construction of the great underground city of the sewers in Victorian London to the first French settlers in Louisiana and the long shadows of war in both England and Germany after the catastrophe of World War I.

In each case, as I have already mentioned, I found myself asking myself how I, or a version of myself, would have understood what was happening to me, what I would have done in what, to us, are entirely extraordinary circumstances.

Until now I have chosen to open up a period of history, to look at it from a new and unexpected angle, to bring light to moments in the past that that we have ignored or forgotten. Instead of writing directly about what is happening in the here and now, I have looked to the past to illuminate the present.

But in Britain and in the United States too things are happening that make me feel differently. I am increasingly driven to ask those questions of our own times, to use my fiction to turn them upside down and inside out and try and make sense of them as best I can. So I am currently working on a departure for me, a contemporary project. I’ll keep you posted!

--Interview with Deborah Kalb. Here's a previous Q&A with Clare Clark.

Q&A with Andrea Simon

Andrea Simon is the author of the new novel in stories Floating in the Neversink. She also has written the books Bashert and Esfir Is Alive. Also a photographer, she is based in New York City.

Q: Over how long a period did you write the stories that make up this novel-in-stories, and at what point did you realize they would form a book?

A: About 30 years ago, I was making the transition from professional medical and corporate writing to personal literary prose and began with a freewriting prompt about a magical time in childhood.

After a few minutes, my pen dug into the paper and the words tumbled out as if they had been waiting years to spill onto the page. It formed a story called “A Horizontal Weed on a Country Road,” which focused on a traumatic childhood incident in the Catskill Mountains of my youth.

This story inspired me to explore other childhood-inspired events, including those from my city life in Brooklyn during the 1950s and 1960s. Soon, I realized that in order to fully realize these stories — and to protect the identities of real people — I needed to fictionalize them. I added completely made-up characters and plot devices; the pages added up and a novel materialized. Unsure of its audience, I put the book aside and concentrated on other writing.

Years later, when I became an MFA graduate student, I used some chapters for short story workshops, shaping each into stand-alone pieces. Enthusiastic responses encouraged me to write new stories along a chronological continuum. 

Finally, I stopped at this form, seeming to fulfill two functions: self-contained short stories and a fuller body of work that tied them together with similar characters, setting, and themes.

Q: How was the book’s title — also the title of one of the stories —chosen, and what does it signify for you?

A: As a story, “Floating in the Neversink” symbolizes many elements of the collection. It shows the protagonist, Mandy, in the Catskills with both her country cousin and her Brooklyn best friend and contrasts the differences in their relationships.

It includes a dramatic plot line with Mandy’s father, encapsulating their difficulties in communication. When she begs her father to hold her up so she can float on the river, he breaks that trust and helps build an explanation for his remote behavior. As a metaphor, the title evokes the symbols of the era and the girl’s disappearance from the scene, lending an air of mystery and potential danger.

Q: What do you see as the difference between a novel and a novel-in-stories?

A: The novel-in-stories contains developed individual stories, with beginnings, middles, and endings, with tension points and potential resolutions. Some of these stories have been published. As a collection, each story features the same protagonist and a cast of familiar characters, as well as new relationships and revelations, building interest that propel the reader to turn the page for more.

Q: How did you create your characters?

A: Many characters are based on real people, though each has morphed into unrecognizable facsimiles. Some characters, like Benny and Brenda, are entirely fictional and serve as plot motivators and foils. Others appear as means to depict a setting, enhance an emotion, present an idea, cause tension, or resolve an issue.

Q: What are you working on now?

A: I am editing a collection of short stories that I have written over the years, trying to consolidate them into an overall theme for marketing purposes. I am also revising a novel I began last year which examines what happens when an older person revisits the sites of her youth (New York’s Greenwich Village in the 1960s and 1970s) and wonders if she had the life she once envisioned. 

--Interview with Deborah Kalb

Sept. 24

ON THIS DAY IN HISTORY
Sept. 24, 1896: F. Scott Fitzgerald born.

Q&A with Allison Sarnoff Soffer

Allison Sarnoff Soffer is the author of the children's picture book Apple Days: A Rosh Hashanah Story. The book focuses on the Jewish New Year holiday. She has a background in journalism, and she teaches at Temple Sinai Nursery School in Washington, D.C. She lives in Chevy Chase, Maryland.

Q: How did you come up with the idea for Apple Days?

A: The idea for Apple Days is a deep story. When I was growing up, I had wonderful memories of Rosh Hashanah and my family, preparing, cooking, getting ready for everyone to come over. It was a joyful time.

Very sadly, my mom passed away before my children were born. The idea of Rosh Hashanah and how to celebrate was weighing heavily on me. I wanted to give my children the same sense of joy, but the holiday brought up painful memories.

A friend suggested we go to Homestead Farm to go apple picking. It was around Rosh Hashanah. We came home and made everything with apples—applesauce, apple pie, apple cake. It was so much fun, and it smelled so good. It was great to get outside and have this experience. I had a sense I was going back to the earth.

It ended up becoming a tradition. I realized I was starting to look forward to this aspect of the holiday in a new way. It helped me get through the early holidays and turn it into something new.

It was a personal story. I ended up telling the story at a retreat. We were tasked with bringing our favorite fruit, and I brought apples. I found myself telling the story, and people seemed very interested in it.

At the retreat, they ended up making fruit salad. It inspired the idea about all the people bringing something to contribute to a community dish.

Q: What do you see as the role of food-related traditions in the book?

A: I think food is such an intrinsic part of any holiday—Thanksgiving is obvious; others less so, but if you tap into anybody’s holiday experience, there will always be food. The smell, the preparation, the feel of it, the sensory experience has a huge effect on a child. They’re so open to sensory experiences. I was trying to focus on all that.

Q: What does a new year symbolize for your character Katy?

A: When the book starts, it symbolizes the apple picking ritual. But if you look deeper, it means she’s going to be with her family and they’re going to have a meal she’s going to contribute to.

Hopefully by the end, she’s learned more about what it means to be part of a community. Maybe by the time she’s a year older, it will have significance beyond her family.

Q: What do you think Bob McMahon’s illustrations add to the story?

A: Bob McMahon did a really beautiful job capturing relationships between characters, especially the parent-child relationship. It’s a very gentle connection, particularly in their eyes and the way the characters are placed in relationship to each other. The book is a lot about relationships, and that’s not always the easiest thing to convey, and he did a good job.

He also did a particularly beautiful job on the disappointment page, when her mom is talking to Katy about the fact that they’re not going to be able to go apple picking. He really conveyed that sadness—mostly in the eyes, but in the position of the mom. She’s getting on her knees and empathizing.

It’s interesting—the way Katy is drawn is very different from how I originally envisaged her, and in some ways he changed the emotional arc of the story in drawing a very spunky little girl. I originally thought she was more reserved and shy, and what happens in the story brings her out of herself. But now this is Katy!

Q: What do you hope kids take away from the story?

A: What I hope is captured on the page where all the children are handing Katy an apple to put in her backpack—that’s the essence of the story. There’s an illustration on the title page of a child’s hand holding an apple. That pretty much says it all. Children can help, can be part of the community, can make a big difference in their own way.

Q: What are you working on now?

A: I’ve been thinking a lot as a teacher about kindness, and how to convey the idea of kindness and empathy, even in a very young nursery school class. I came up with an experimental way of taking pictures of the children in moments when they’re being kind to each other—sharing, or comforting each other.

They’re little moments in a school that focuses on social-emotional learning. If I could capture it and bring it back to the children: What do you see here? It inspired the most meaningful conversations, and became a reference point. I’m trying to develop that into a children’s book.

Q: Anything else we should know?

A: My training is as a journalist, so the first thing you’re trained as is to recognize: This is a story. What I realized I’ve done is internalize that as a teacher. I’ve studied the Reggio philosophy—every child is the protagonist in their own story. That really resonated with me. It’s a fun and interesting way to be a teacher—to bring my training as a journalist into the classroom, where news has a different connotation.

What’s news in a nursery school classroom is a child seeing something for the first time, or moments of growth. Each could become a story arc for that child. 

--Interview with Deborah Kalb