Q&A with Jody Hobbs Hesler

 

 

 

Jody Hobbs Hesler is the author of the new novel Without You Here. She also has written the story collection What Makes You Think You're Supposed to Feel Better. She lives in the foothills of the Blue Ridge Mountains.

 

Q: What inspired you to write Without You Here, and how did you create your character Noreen?

 

A: The simplest answer is that I wrote a short story called “Little Angel” about 25 years ago, and when I shared that with a writer friend, he said he wanted to know more.

 

That needled the back of my mind for ages before the larger story bubbled up, and it bubbled up a little at a time for a long time before I finally committed to engaging it fully as a novel.

 

The original story was a slice of the culminating crisis of the book, a troubled scene between a husband and wife and the wife’s dissociative response mixed with a question of haunting, the possibility that an old loss could linger tangibly enough to destabilize the character years later.

 

But inspiration is a many-splendored thing, and huge swaths of life and personal relationship experience informed this plot and these characters.

 

A distant family member died from suicide when I was a child. His sweetness and tenderness toward me inspired Nonie’s fondness for Noreen.

 

An unexplained breathing sound that my parents and all their friends heard in the house where we lived before my parents’ divorce prompted the echo of sound that subtly haunts Noreen, especially in her most vulnerable moments.

 

The struggle of a friend who stayed in a dangerous marriage for fear that her mental health history would translate into losing custody of her children found some expression in Noreen’s ultimate marriage and also underlies my determination throughout the book to draw both main characters as whole people, not just as functions of their potential diagnoses and circumstances.

 

The question of Noreen’s character is an interesting one, especially since the original story didn’t include Noreen at all and the earliest versions of Without You Here featured Nonie much more heavily than her namesake niece.

 

Noreen’s character began for me mainly as the favored child, the family member Nonie felt most attached to.

 

As the scope of the novel broadened, it began demanding more about the coming-of-age Noreen and the young-adult and adult Noreen. I got to know Nonie a lot more quickly and deeply. Excavating who Noreen would be, growing up in the shadow of Nonie’s loss, required harder work.

 

I had to figure out how alike the two needed to be to make their connection as authentic and enduring as possible, and I had to distinguish them from each other meaningfully too.

 

Noreen’s character emerged from a lot of sculpting over time. Plenty of her chapters didn’t make it to the final draft—episodes from her childhood, her college life. Curating scenes that were the most telling and most essential was a huge task.

 

Q: How would you describe the bond between Noreen and Nonie?

 

A: Nonie and Noreen share a deep, abiding love. They’re both family outliers, people other people don’t quite know what to do with. But together, they’re at peace. They don’t have to make excuses for their oddities, and they can be their authentic selves, free from fear of judgment or other people’s worry.

 

Family worry shadows these two everywhere they go, and it’s exhausting to be the object of other people’s fears, to have people who love you let their worries blinder their ability to see you in totality. Nonie and Noreen find rest and appreciation in each other.

Q: Did you know how the novel would end before you started writing it, or did you make many changes along the way?

 

A: The major scene that the original short story explored was in the novel from the beginning, but it didn’t always land at the end. I rewrote this book several times, following a different structure each time, with different approaches to the timeline.

 

Plus, the original story ended without a clear resolution, which isn’t the case in the novel. A large portion of the novel’s ending came late in the writing process. The final version spirals through time, returning to the past frequently. That structure came later too and was hard won. Splicing past and present in a way that pushed the reader forward took a lot of experimentation and a lot of faith in the reader.

 

Much thanks to Jane Alison for her craft book Spiral, Meander, Explode, which explores and celebrates alternative plot structures. Her book, along with lots of support and productive suggestions from my adult children, gave me the confidence to build this story the way it seemed so desperately to want to be built.

 

Q: The writer Sharon Harrigan called the novel “[h]eartfelt, redemptive, and compassionate.” What do you think of that description, and what do you hope readers take away from the story?

 

A: I loved that description. My characters suffer in Without You Here, and there’s a lot of sadness, but the story leans toward possibility and hope.

 

In the end, it’s really a love story, though not a romantic one. I want readers to feel like nothing prevents us from giving and receiving love. No matter how many obstacles we have to hurdle in our lifetime, we have the potential to share our best selves and to feel genuine connection.

 

Q: What are you working on now?

 

A: I’m currently finalizing my next novel, which I hope will be ready to shop around before Without You Here debuts. It involves a family whose parents argue about how worried they should be about their troubled older daughter.

 

Their different ideas about what defines danger and how to handle it tear the family apart when its support is most needed to respond to the unlikeliest scenario unfolding with the neighbor the daughter pet sits for—the real danger.

 

Q: Anything else we should know?

 

A: My publisher, Flexible Press, chooses books with social relevance, and they donate 10 percent of their profits to a nonprofit of the author’s choosing.

 

I’m choosing the Suicide Prevention Awareness and Resource Council (SPARC), a Charlottesville mental health agency. I’ll be making a donation of my own in honor of the book to SPARC and to a local domestic violence shelter, Shelter for Help in Emergency (SHE) because a dangerous intimate partner relationship also features in the story.

 

For me, trauma and injustice are never just props in my work. Representing fictional characters struggling with very real issues requires diligent research along with determination to flesh out characters well beyond diagnoses and circumstances.

 

Without You Here debuts during National Suicide Prevention Month, so I’ll incorporate messages about that into how I present the book to audiences as well.

 

I don’t take it lightly that I can’t talk about this book without talking about suicide. Everyone who comes to a reading, including myself, will have had some experience of losing someone they know this way.

 

Literary fiction is all about empathy, about exploring human experience with new eyes to find new truths, about meeting a stranger in a story and walking in their shoes throughout it. This is fiction’s superpower. Fictional characters can unlock emotions and ideas we might otherwise have difficulty articulating.

 

In talking about a character or event we discover in fiction, we often find that we’re speaking to a larger experience than what’s on the page, to an experience larger than ourselves.

 

My hope is that my characters and their stories will help other people better understand their own experience, and I hope that the empathy readers find for my characters will translate into greater compassion for people who may be suffering silently around them, struggling with mental illness, with grief, with everyday dislocation and loneliness. The world is desperate for more compassion.

 

--Interview with Deborah Kalb. Here's a previous Q&A with Jody Hobbs Hesler.

Q&A with Beth Castrodale

 

 

 

 

 

Beth Castrodale is the author of the new novel The Inhabitants. Her other books include the novel I Mean You No Harm. She is the founding editor of the website Small Press Picks.

 

Q: What inspired you to write The Inhabitants, and how did you create your character Nilda?

 

A: I've always been drawn to ghost stories, and as a kid I used to write and illustrate my own spooky tales, sometimes making little staple-bound books of them.

 

The Inhabitants is essentially my grownup take on the kinds of stories that fascinated me as a child and that continue to captivate me: tales of haunted spaces, and what happens to those who enter them, intentionally or by circumstance.

 

As far as Nilda goes, I’ve always been drawn to writing about artists, especially visual artists. For one thing, I love reading and writing about creative processes. For another, visual and physical details are really important to me in capturing moods and scenes in my novels, and I enjoy seeing these details through an artist’s eyes.

 

I also thought that Nilda’s perspective as an artist would make her an especially sensitive resident of Farleigh House, the shadowy Victorian that’s the scene of much of the novel.

 

Nathaniel Farleigh, the architect who designed the house, was known for incorporating features that were believed to influence the mind, and throughout the novel, Nilda is especially susceptible to these features.

 

In a sense, Farleigh continues to haunt the house he created, and no one is more haunted by him–and by his work–than Nilda. She both identifies with his creative drive and is daunted by the products of that drive.

 

Q: The author Chauna Craig said of the book, “Take the classic Gothic element of a spooky old house, add a dash of modern #MeToo seasoning, and let everything simmer in the warmth of timeless maternal love, and you have Beth Castrodale’s deliciously clever new novel.” What do you think of that description?

 

A: I love the way that Chauna brought together aspects of the novel that I see as key elements of the narrative. We’ve already touched a bit on the spooky old house.

 

As far as the #MeToo angle goes, I’ll just say that a #MeToo-related offense against a dear friend of Nilda’s inspires Nilda to take a new direction with a portrait she’d been commissioned to paint, and this allows us to see her agency and strengths as an artist even as she’s struggling with other aspects of her life–for example, grief over the recent loss of her mother and unsettling events that have started to occur in the house she inherited, the house designed by Nathaniel Farleigh.

 

As far as maternal love goes, that’s a really important thread in the novel. Nilda is struggling to be an attentive and caring mom while she’s dealing with grief and other difficulties; her late mother, another artist, is continuing to have an influence on Nilda and on events in the novel; and Nilda’s housekeeper, Helen, is serving as a kind of mother figure for Nilda while also grieving the loss of her son.

 

Through all of these characters, we see that although maternal love is largely a force for good, its power can sometimes verge on destructiveness.

Q: Did you know how the story would end before you started writing it, or did you make many changes along the way?

 

A: With The Inhabitants, as with every other novel I've written, I like to have a general sense of the story arc early on, though I don't always have a vision for the ending.

I'm a big fan of rough outlines, which I've found invaluable for working out story arcs for first drafts, and for helping me complete those drafts in a reasonable time frame.

That said, I never hew strictly to outlines. They're just general guides, and once I get down to writing, stories and characters inevitably take on a life of their own. This was definitely the case with The Inhabitants, and I did a good amount of rethinking and rewriting over time.

One thing that came as a surprise to me was the twist at the end of the novel. I wasn't writing when I thought of it--I believe I was out for a run. When the idea struck me, I didn't have any doubt that I should go with it. It just felt completely right given the place the characters had arrived at by the end of the story.

 

The ending also spooked me, and I'm hoping it will have that effect on readers.

 

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

 

A: Several possibilities come to mind. If I had to pick one, I hope the novel might encourage readers to reflect on places they’ve lived and how these places have affected them.

 

My view is that everywhere we live leaves some kind of mark on us, sometimes for the rest of our lives.

 

To give a couple of examples from my own life, memories of the first house I lived in–a brick ranch in a suburb of Pittsburgh–became inseparable from my ideas of what it means to feel safe and loved.

 

A lot of that had to do with my close relationship with my parents and brothers. But there was also something about the house itself that contributed to those feelings.

 

For one thing, it was small and cozy, and that made the land it sat on feel huge and protective. Though the yard was just a half-acre, that felt like a whole park to me at the time, and it was a great place to play and explore.

 

Then there was the first apartment I lived in alone, in a neighborhood of Boston. Although it had a lot of things going for it, the floors tilted slightly from back to front, and the landlord was scary and threatening.

 

Also, I lived there during my late 20s, when my life felt unsettled in a lot of ways. Looking back at that time, scenes of that apartment’s interior mingle with memories and feelings of being lost.

 

Q: What are you working on now?

 

A: I'm working on a novel about a fourth-generation farmer who's struggling to hold onto her land in the face of pressure from a developer, and from a cousin who would benefit from the developer's plans. In the process, she ends up getting support from a farmhand drifter who turns out to have an agenda of her own.

 

The setting of this novel is based on a small farm that's still in my family and that's sacred ground for my cousins and me. So it's been rewarding to immerse myself in that setting for hours at a time.

 

Q: Anything else we should know?

 

A: I feel as if every novel I’ve written has taught me something new about writing and storytelling, and I’m really grateful for those lessons. Although setting and sense of place are important in all of my novels, writing The Inhabitants made me stretch myself in this regard as I got into the details of Farleigh House and how they influence Nilda.

 

--Interview with Deborah Kalb

Q&A with Amber and Danielle Brown

 

Photo by Deidhra Fahey Photography

 

 

Amber and Danielle Brown are the authors of the new novel Zetas Till We Die.  Their other novels include Perfect Little Lives. They are twins, and they live in Los Angeles.

 

Q: What inspired you to write Zetas Till We Die, and how did you create your character Priscilla?

 

A: We really wanted to create a story about a fictional Black sorority because they’re underrepresented in the book world. This project was the perfect opportunity because a reunion setting was ideal for igniting all the drama.

 

Like our second book, Perfect Little Lives, Zetas Till We Die is a thriller that intertwines a past murder with a present-day mystery. But this time the stakes are even higher because bodies start turning up dead. 

 

Creating Priscilla was a key part of bringing this story to life. She’s our anchor, the president of her chapter, the Beyoncé of the group. But even though she’s always been well-adored, an ‘it’s girl, this story shows the other side of her kind of popularity and how what you see on the outside doesn’t always match what’s really going on in the inside.

 

Like all of the female main characters we create, Priscilla is very strong-willed, smart and flawed. We wanted her to seem like a real person, navigating the ups and downs of life, marriage, female friendship and tragedy the best she can.

 

Q: How did you collaborate on the book? Can you describe your writing process?

 

A: Before any actual writing took place, we had a very long, intense (but also very fun) conversation where we discussed characters, plot, theme, tone and the overall vibe we were going for.

 

That way we both were on the same page of the direction of the project and once we agreed on all of the big stuff, we jotted everything down into a joint Google doc. It wasn’t a strict outline, just all the major beats we knew we wanted to hit. This step was mostly to prove to ourselves that we had a solid idea on our hands.

 

The actual outline came after the idea was green-lit by our editor, which honestly was just a paragraph-by-paragraph description of every scene we needed to actual use the plot and major character moments. This includes any pertinent relevant details, nothing fancy or professional.

 

We then wrote out what we call a skeleton—the structure of all the major scenes and all the dialogue, which mostly stayed the same in the subsequent drafting stages. After that we wrote the actual first draft which didn’t take long since we’d already worked out all the kinks. It’s really downhill after we complete the skeleton.

 

When it comes to editing, we both took turns in a Google Doc, writing comments to each other and making suggestions. Once we came to a consensus on everything, we sent it to our editor.

 

Q: Without giving anything away, did you know how the novel would end before you started writing it, or did you make many changes along the way?

 

A: We never know exactly how a novel will end when we start writing. We have a general idea of the direction we’re heading, but we don’t worry about finalizing the ending until we get there. It’s much more exciting this way.

 

We’ve written a lot of thrillers and while we always try to make them stand out from either other, writing in the same genre can get sort of repetitive so in order to keep the writing process fresh and suspenseful, we leave the details of the climax and resolution open until we reach that point. For some writers, this might be anxiety-inducing, but for us, it feels liberating.

 

With Zetas, we always knew who the killer would be because that was the impetus of the story, but the specific scenes that would lead up to the climax and details of the final twist reveal came together as we drafted.

 

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

 

A: We hope readers have fun with this one. It’s super-fast-paced, features a broad cast of equally flawed and dynamic characters, multiple twists and turns, plenty of reveals and reversals, and out of all of our books, this one has the most surprising ending. It’s not outlandish, but we think it’ll definitely make you go, “Okay, how did I not see that coming?”

 

But as important as delivering a great ending is, creating a thrilling ride that makes the book impossible to put down is just as crucial as pulling off a final reveal that no one ever saw coming.

 

Our goal is always to keep readers constantly on the edge of their seats. We want them to be continually guessing who the killer is, trying to get ahead of the plot twists but also getting deeply invested in the interpersonal drama of the characters.

 

Also, in more ways than one, the big theme of the book is how you can ever really know what a person is going through, so our defaults should be to be kind. That’s a message we’re passionate about and hope readers walk away with. 

 

Q: What are you working on now?

 

A: Our next book is completely different than anything we’ve ever done. It definitely leans more psychological horror, which has been fun to dive into so far. It takes place in a single location over one week and there’s a lot of drama going on. And there’s a couple resists we’re super excited about. 

 

--Interview with Deborah Kalb

Q&A with Abigail Pogrebin and Dov Linzer

 

Abigail Pogrebin

 

 

 

Abigail Pogrebin and Rabbi Dov Linzer are the authors of the new book It Takes Two to Torah: An Orthodox Rabbi and Reform Journalist Discuss and Debate Their Way Through the Five Books of Moses. Pogrebin's other books include My Jewish Year. Linzer is the president and Rosh HaYeshiva of YCT Rabbinical School.

 

Q: What inspired you both to create this book, and how did you collaborate on the project?

 

A: We met in 2009 at a conference convened by The Jewish Week, which invited Jewish clergy, journalists and professionals to talk off the record about the most pressing Jewish questions. Somehow we found ourselves gravitating towards the same sessions and intrigued by each other’s opinions, so we stayed in touch for years after the conference ended.

 

Fast forward to 2018, when Dov suggested to Abby that we have a real-time podcast conversation about the Torah, sharing our candid perspectives on how each parsha (Torah chapter) speaks to our lives and the national moment. 

Dov Linzer

Tablet Magazine agreed to produce Parsha in Progress, and over two years Dov and Abby had a biweekly dialogue about the parsha of the week, until we had covered all 54 chapters. We would schedule a preparatory phone call to talk through possible themes for each parsha, but then we recorded without a script – totally spontaneously. 

 

Many listeners told us they loved the spontaneity and substance, but couldn’t keep up with every episode; they suggested we assemble all 54 chapters into one volume and Fig Tree Books stepped in – to help us reimagine the conversation as a book.

 

We are truly thrilled that It Takes Two to Torah now reads as one narrative: we were two very different Jews (and personalities) coming together around a crucial book that belongs to us all. 

 

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

 

A: Dov came up with the book title and we instantly felt it was right because 1) it conveys both the fun of our ongoing give-and-take (and yes, we needle and nudge each other in every conversation) and 2) it highlights the primacy of partnership– studying with someone else, pushing each other to think differently and react more honestly. 

 

Torah is hard to unpack alone, and so much magic and clarity happens when the text is parsed and debated out loud with someone you trust. 

 

Q: The actor and author Julianna Margulies said of your book, “They give us permission to question and interpret the layers of the text and in so doing, realize that it is the questioning that makes us human.” What do you think of that description?

 

A: We so appreciate Julianna’s takeaway because it exactly captures our experience working on the podcast and the book together: Torah’s text comes to life when it’s challenged, and our lives are challenged by its text. Our very human, day-to-day hurdles, priorities, principles, and beliefs are instantly relevant in the questions posed by every parsha.

 

If there is anything we hope readers discover, it is that they are entitled to and invited to this ancient story – from whatever base of knowledge they have – and that when you open up these verses, they speak back. 

 

Q: What impact did it have on you to write the book, and what do you hope readers take away from it?

 

Abby: I felt, for the first time, how powerfully Torah becomes the prism through which everything is refracted. Whether it was the protests after George Floyd’s death or the shock of the global pandemic or something as mundane as my synagogue presidency – I found that this book meets you where you are. 

 

And talking to Dov – who invites me to kick the tires on ideas or plot points that have me stuck or confused – is such a rare pleasure because his knowledge is deep and his humility is just as expansive. 

 

Dov: Working on this project with Abby made me realize what being a true learner is really about. It is not the amount of time spent with your head in the books. It’s about cultivating genuine curiosity and an openness to other perspectives that can at times be radically different from your own.

 

Most of my life is spent between the walls of the beit midrash, the study hall, learning Torah with people who think similarly, who ask certain questions but not others. Abby is deeply committed to Torah and to Judaism, but in a very different way. Our learning together forced me to see very familiar texts with fresh layers.

 

At a time when so many of us are living in our own echo chambers, one thing I hope people come away with is how we can develop deep friendships over a book that has endured this long for a reason.

 

Q: What are you working on now?

 

A: Abby is continuing to moderate the roundtable series for Tablet Magazine called “The Minyan,” which looks at one specific lens on Jewish life through 10 people who just happen to live that experience – for instance: Orthodox women, atheist Jews, converts, LGBTQ-identifying Jews, Black Jews, and Israeli ex-pats. 

 

Abby is also collaborating closely with her rabbi, Angela Buchdahl, on Buchdahl’s book about her life and her spiritual vision for a life of crossing boundaries. 

 

Dov is finishing up another book which will be a collection of answers he’s given to questions of Jewish law that rabbis-in-the-field have asked him about life-cycle events: birth, brit milah, bar and bat mitzvahs, weddings and funerals.

 

In his professional capacity, he is working on expanding YCT’s reach, bringing its Torah to new audiences and furthering its work doing in Israel – training forward-looking Israeli rabbis, both men and women.

 

Q: Anything else we should know?

 

A: We are blunt with each other in a way that’s refreshing and doesn’t waste time. And we make each other laugh, though Dov doesn’t always understand why I think he’s so funny.

 

--Interview with Deborah Kalb. Here's a previous Q&A with Abigail Pogrebin.

Q&A with Lori Dubbin

 

 

Lori Dubbin is the author of the new children's picture book Perfect Match: The Story of Althea Gibson and Angela Buxton. She lives in Miami.

 

Q: What inspired you to write Perfect Match? How did you learn about the story of Althea Gibson and Angela Buxton?

 

A: My son had received a nonfiction book, Great Jews in Sports by Robert Slater, as a gift for his bar mitzvah. I started leafing through it one day in 2015 (he had received it in 1995) and landed on a page about Angela Buxton.

 

There was a picture of Angela in her tennis outfit and the text mentioned her doubles partner had been Althea Gibson, whose name was familiar to me. But I didn’t know their story and I wanted to find out more about how they met, became doubles partners, and ultimately champions (which the blurb in the book briefly describes).

 

Something else may have subconsciously contributed to my interest in the story. I am Jewish and I had an unexpected experience in junior high in the late 1960s – students, who I thought were my friends, wrote antisemitic remarks in my textbooks. 

 

It was hurtful. I was surprised by the incident. My parents came to school and the students ultimately apologized. It stung a lot, but I accepted their apologies and moved on. I transferred to another school the following year.

 

The more I learned about the intolerance Althea and Angela faced and how they both continued to play the game they loved despite the discrimination of the time (the 1950s), the more determined I became to put the story in the hands of young readers who might be facing similar challenges today.

 

Q: How would you describe the dynamic between the two?

 

A: Angela and Althea had a tight bond from the beginning. They had a lot in common, from their love of tennis to their love of films.

 

When they first became doubles partners, however, they got in each other’s way. Althea was used to having her side of the court to herself and Angela would waver about which shot to take.

 

They realized they each needed to stick to their strengths – Althea at the net and Angela in the back court – and they became a great team. Moreover, after being treated as outsiders, they each finally found an ally, someone they could trust on and off the court.

 

After Angela retired from tennis because of a wrist injury, Althea always stayed at Angela’s London home when she came for tournaments. They became lifelong friends and called each other when they needed help, comfort, or guidance, especially Althea when she was very ill later in the 1990s. Angela raised money from the tennis community for Althea’s medical expenses.

 

Unfortunately, Althea and Angela didn’t earn big purses in the 1950s like players do today, and Althea desperately needed Angela’s help to live comfortably and afford medical care.

 

When Althea died in 2003, Angela committed herself to honoring and publicizing Althea’s achievements. She successfully fought for the creation of a monument honoring Althea, which was unveiled at the USTA Billie Jean King National Tennis Center in 2019.

Angela was there for the event and gave a speech about her friend. It was Angela’s last public appearance. She passed away in 2020, just before her 86th birthday.

 

One other incident, which wasn’t able to go in the book, shows the strength of Althea and Angela’s friendship. In 1956, they competed against each other in the women’s singles semifinal at the French Championships (now called the French Open) – the same tournament where they first won women’s doubles.

 

At the end of the second set, they were tied. Suddenly, in the middle of a swing, Althea’s undergarment shoulder strap snapped. Angela saw what happened and ran from her side of the court to Althea’s. She walked Althea from the jeering crowd to the locker room to change.

 

The authorities wanted to disqualify Althea for stepping off the court. They wanted Angela to play in the final, even though she had left the court too. Angela refused. She would play against Althea or she wouldn’t play at all.

 

Angela and Althea were finally allowed to finish their match. Althea beat Angela and became the first African-American to advance to the French final. Angela was thrilled for her friend. Althea then went on to win in the final, becoming the first African-American to win a Grand Slam Championship. Angela beamed from the stands.

 

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

 

A: I feel so fortunate I was able to interview Angela in 2015. She lived half the year in Pompano Beach, Florida, about an hour away from me, and we met for dinner. She was lovely and quite tickled that I wanted to write about her friendship and doubles partnership with Althea.

 

In addition, I read articles online and watched documentaries about Althea, in which Angela was also interviewed. I also read and stuck post-it notes all over The Match: Althea Gibson and Angela Buxton by sportswriter Bruce Schoenfeld.

 

While doing research, it surprised me to learn that Althea considered joining the Army after the Asian Goodwill Tour (where she met Angela) for economic reasons. Angela, however, encouraged Althea to keep entering international tournaments, so she could improve her game and wouldn’t have to stay at separate hotels from her teammates, like she did in the United States.

 

Althea followed Angela’s advice and won 16 of the 18 tournaments she entered in Europe and Asia, showing she could compete with the best, all thanks to Angela’s encouragement. And it was the following year, in 1957, that Althea became the women’s singles champion at Wimbledon! She also won the championship there in 1958.

 

Here's a disappointing surprise I learned in regard to Angela – even though she won the 1956 Wimbledon women’s doubles tournament at Wimbledon, she never received an acceptance of membership at the All-England Lawn Tennis Club, the host club at Wimbledon. She applied but never heard back from them.

 

Q: What do you think Amanda Quartey’s illustrations add to the book?

 

A: I love Amanda’s illustrations and how beautifully she’s drawn Althea and Angela in action on the tennis court. I’m also partial to how she captured their hug when they met for the second time at the French Championships in Paris in 1956. The color combinations Amanda uses add warmth to the spreads depicting their budding friendship.

 

I also got excited about how Amanda made a distinction between the orange clay French courts and the two-toned green grass Wimbledon courts. And all I’ll say is – take a look at the endpapers!

 

Q: What are you working on now?

 

A: I have two nonfiction picture book manuscripts out on submission right now. I’m also enjoying working on a manuscript which is a reinterpretation of an old Yiddish folktale.

 

Q: Anything else we should know?

 

A: I wish Angela was alive to see and read Perfect Match since she was so excited about it. She might have even come to readings with me to explain the significance of eating strawberries and cream at Wimbledon.

 

Thank you for having me, Deborah. It was a pleasure to be on your blog!

 

--Interview with Deborah Kalb

Q&A with Aurélie Thiele

 

 

Aurélie Thiele is the author of the new 

novel The Paris Understudy. She is also an associate professor at the Lyle School of Engineering of Southern Methodist University. She lives in Dallas. 

 

Q: What inspired you to write The Paris Understudy, and how did you create your characters Madeleine and Yvonne?  

 

A: Years ago, I heard about the French soprano Germaine Lubin, who sang Wagner and collaborated with the Nazis during the Occupation.  

 

I realized, however, that she wouldn’t make a good protagonist in a novel because she had no character growth: she never expressed any remorse for her behavior during the war, including having a German officer as her lover, and justified herself by saying she’d wanted to sing.  

 

I decided to split the personality of Germaine Lubin into two characters: the wealth and status as a famous opera singer went to Madeleine, and the associations with the Nazis went to Yvonne. Both go through many changes throughout the novel as they grapple with the choices they must make in pursuit of their art.

 

Q: How did you research the novel, and did you learn anything that especially surprised you?  

 

A: I studied in Paris as an undergraduate, so I was already familiar with the city, including the Palais Garnier, which was the site of the opera house at the time. (Now it’s used for ballet.)  

 

I read a couple of biographies of opera singers, diaries of French intellectuals who lived during that time and listened to Wagner. I also attended the Bayreuth festival, which plays a key role in the novel. Germaine Lubin sang Isolde there in 1939 and I managed to attend Tristan und Isolde there. It was eerie to imagine Lubin singing that role on that stage decades earlier.  

 

For the rest, I used the Internet, especially for descriptions of the opera house and maps of Paris.  

 

One thing that surprised me is that the real-life director of the opera house during the war, Jacques Rouché, kept Jewish musicians on the payroll until the Vél d’Hiv roundup although it was against the new laws introduced by the Nazis. After the roundup it became too dangerous.

Q: The writer M.B. Henry called the book an “engrossing tale about war and choices--wrong ones, right ones, yet always difficult ones.” What do you think of that description? 

 

A: I love it! It’s spot-on. There are many novels set during World War II, and I find that they often emphasize the “good vs evil” angle.  

 

It’s always inspiring to read, but a sad truth of the Occupation by the Nazis (and I can say it because I’m French) is that many French people didn’t actively resist the Nazis. Some collaborated with the enemy, and most of the others kept their heads down and hoped it’d be over someday. Only a small percentage of the population joined the Résistance, in part because of the immense risks.  

 

Now that we know the outcome of the war, it’s easy to forget how bleak things seemed for the Allies in the first few years of the war. The Vél d’Hiv roundup in particular was a great source of shame for the French after the war because the roundup was done by the French police.  

 

I wanted to write a novel set during World War II that captured the complexities of living in an occupied country, not knowing when it’d end and, for one of the characters, finding herself more and more entangled with the wrong side even if she doesn’t support their politics.

 

Q: What did you see as the right balance between fiction and history as you wrote this novel?  

 

A: Compelling characters faced with inner and outer conflict make the reader turn the pages. It’s important to get the historical facts right, but there are plenty of history books about World War II. Readers don’t pick up a novel to get a history lesson.  

 

This being said, I was careful to check all the details, especially the weapons, vehicles and uniforms, because there are so many World War II buffs out there.  

 

It’s easy to fall down a rabbit hole of historical research without writing, though, especially regarding a war that killed so many, because you want to honor the dead by getting the facts right.

 

Personally, I am an “overwriter.” I tend to write in too many historical details and have to edit them out when I revise. I think you can intuit the balance when you reread your manuscript after not working on it for a while and you catch yourself skipping over those details. But it’s good to be aware of historical details to create the world of the novel, even if I don’t use them in the final draft.

 

Q: What are you working on now?  

 

A: I am finishing a novel set in Madrid at the end of the Spanish Civil War and doing research for the next one, which involves ballet and the Soviet Union. I like to have multiple projects at different stages. It makes me feel like I’m traveling the world in a time machine.  

 

Q: Anything else we should know?  

 

A: It took me 12 years, on and off, to write this novel! It went through multiple iterations of full drafts, meaning that there are several hundreds of pages I wrote that didn’t make it into the final product.  

 

A couple of years ago I had shelved it but the story wouldn’t leave me, so I decided to make a final push to complete it. It took several more years of revisions before my agent, Betsy Amster, found the perfect editor and home for the book, Holly Ingraham at Alcove Press. There were many times where I thought I was foolish to be so obstinate, but it paid off in the end. 

 

--Interview with Deborah Kalb