Q&A with Caroline Leavitt

 

 

 

Caroline Leavitt is the author of the new novel Days of Wonder. Her many other novels include With or Without You. She lives in Hoboken, New Jersey.

 

Q: In a piece for BookTrib, you wrote about using your family’s names for some of the characters in Days of Wonder. Can you say something about that, and about how those names made you feel about the characters?

 

A: My mother, Helen, died a few years ago, and I've been missing her and yearning to hear her tell her stories. Like the Helen in the book, she had grown up in an orthodox Jewish home with seven siblings (her father was a rabbi) and she had loved all the comfort.

 

But when her father died young suddenly, my mom lost her faith, but still always yearned for the comfort of a community that no longer existed for her. I wanted to give her a solution in the book--a way to find her way into community!

 

I also used my father's name, Henry, because I wanted to redeem that name! My father was an abusive brute, but my character Henry is kind!

 

And I used my sister's name because she has estranged herself from all the family, in hopes that I could give her the happy life that was denied her in real life.

 

Q: How did you create your character Ella, and how would you describe the relationship between her and her mother, Helen?

 

A: Ella and Helen were a lot like my mom and me. I always have photographs up on my filing cabinet near my desk so I can see the characters and after a while, they seem to talk to me. I do a lot of early structure work, figuring out what the characters want and why it's usually not what they need!

 

I didn't want Helen to be a bad mother, just a scared-to-be-alone one, which was a lot like my mom. She would have been happy if my sister and I lived down the street all our lives, or even in the same house that she lived in!

 

I wanted to explore the whole mother-daughter bond, and how as your child grows into an adult, they need you less even as you might need them more!

 

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

 

A: I did a ton of research! First with the Poison Lady, who helps authors about poison. I talked to ER doctors who told me the signs of foxwood poisoning, and I talked to lawyers, too, and to my alarm I found that the law actually has nothing to do with justice a lot of the time. Lawyers want to win the cases!

 

The most fascinating research was with women who had been put on probation after getting out of jail. I went to attend prison activist and author Jean Trounstine's Changing Lives Through Literature classes in Massachusetts, where I was in a room with a judge, a probation officer, and 10 women on probation.

 

They very slowly started to warm to me, and in the end, I stayed in touch with them all. They told me all sorts of things about being in prison, the myths (Don't go by Orange is the New Black! It's all wrong) and how sometimes for fun, they could create their own slip 'n slide using dish liquid.

 

Q: The writer Jamie Ford said of the book, “As compassionate as it is complex, Days of Wonder is a completely absorbing story of loss, injustice, and the canyons of misconception left behind.” What do you think of that description?

 

A: Well, I love Jamie Ford for saying that! Media shapes a lot of misconceptions about people, especially people in prison for notorious crimes.

 

I wrote an essay about it for the Daily Beast about how Leslie Van Houton, who had been a Manson girl when she was 17, had been a model prisoner up into her early 70s.

 

People got angry with me for saying that she had served her time, and she deserved to be freed. She had changed. She was repentant. No, you don't have to forget what she did, but you can forgive since she made amends, and since she is a very different person now.

There was dire media influence about my character Ella, who was young (a 15-year-old attempted murderer makes good press) and from a poor family--so people had a field day with her. And her boyfriend Jude, the son of a prominent New York judge, seemed to get a free pass. The law is not fair all the time. 

 

Q: What are you working on now?

 

A: Two different novels at the same time (I'm torn between two lovers!) but I am much too superstitious to talk about them!

 

Q: Anything else we should know?

A: I signed a film shopping agreement for Days of Wonder already! Hollywood has broken my heart countless times, but hey, you never know!

 

Madonna was going to make my early novel Into Thin Air her debut but then didn't. My first novel was signed to Paramount who dropped it during a lengthy director and writers strike. Cruel Beautiful World also has a shopping agreement--and everything else never came through! 

 

I thought about writing the script myself (I won a finalist shot in the Sundance Screenwriter Lab contest) but I'm told my scripts read like novels.

 

--Interview with Deborah Kalb. Here's a previous Q&A with Caroline Leavitt.