Jean Hanff Korelitz is the author of the new novel The Sequel. It's a sequel to her novel The Plot. She's also the creator of the group Book the Writer. She lives in New York City.
Q: At what point did you decide to write a sequel to The Plot?
A: I never actually decided, and if you’d asked me, when The Plot was published, if I intended to revisit the characters, I’d have told you: No! Why would I?
But in the process of packing for a move I suddenly found myself thinking about Anna. She blithely tells an audience, at the end of The Plot, that she’s thinking of writing a novel of her own, and the surge of approval is undeniable.
What if she actually did that? What if she became one of the writers she so disparages? Wouldn’t that be funny? And then what if someone actually called her out? Then I kind of had to do it.
Q: The Publishers Weekly review of the novel said of you and the book, “She also offers satisfying glimpses into what makes Anna tick, placing her alongside Tom Ripley in the pantheon of amoral antiheroes.” What do you think of that description, and how would you define an antihero?
A: Someone compares my creation to Patricia Highsmith’s most infamous villain? I’ll take it! Of course I named the institution where Jake taught creative writing “Ripley” as a direct homage to that infamous character, so I certainly aspired to be in the Highsmith zone, but it’s always nice to be mentioned in the same sentence as writers you’ve enjoyed.
As for Anna, we’ll never know the entirety of what makes her tick, and I’m certainly not asking anyone to be sympathetic, but at least we come away from The Sequel with a bit more information.
I’m not always clear on literary terms like “antihero,” but I have always been drawn to unlikeable protagonists. They’re much more fun to write.
Q: In our Q&A about The Plot, you described writing that book as “[a]bsurdly easy.” Was that the case this time as well?
A: I said that? I don’t think I’d ever characterize writing as easy, absurdly or otherwise. But what’s undeniable is that it was fast, especially given how long and gruesomely I’d been laboring on The Latecomer.
The writing of The Plot was aided and abetted by the fact that we were all under the dome of a global pandemic, and I was in a lather of rage and fear and under a self-imposed news blackout and literally writing it under the covers, all circumstances that were happily not the case this time. But it’s never easy, and this one was no exception.
Q: What do you think The Sequel says about the publishing industry?
A: Perhaps that we writers are as plagued by ego as any other practitioners, or possibly even more so because writing books remains a spectacularly bad way to become wealthy. (I constantly remind myself that even my most successful books are on par with the first-year salary for recent college grads in finance, but what can you do?)
We do tend to fixate on silly things, like – as Anna herself observes – “whether a review had a box around it or a star next to it, or who’d been invited to some festival to read their pages to the empty seats in the tent, or whether they’d been deemed a twenty-under-twenty or a thirty-under-thirty, or, for all she knew, a ninety-under-ninety.”
Q: What are you working on now? Will you return to these characters again?
A: I’m writing an original screenplay for a television series about a long-ago murder on a prestigious college campus, and how it reverberates 25 years into the present. Will I revisit Anna & co.? Possibly.
Q: Anything else we should know?
A: Pay attention to the chapter titles in The Sequel. (There’s a key at the end of the book.)
--Interview with Deborah Kalb. Here's a previous Q&A with Jean Hanff Korelitz.
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