Q&A with Caroline Bock

  

 

 

 

Caroline Bock is the author of the new novel The Other Beautiful People. Her other books include the story collection Carry Her Home. She is the co-president and prose editor of the Washington Writers' Publishing House, and she lives in Maryland.

 

Q: What inspired you to write The Other Beautiful People, and how did you create your character Amy Greene?

 

A: Amy Greene, a driven marketing and public relations executive at a struggling but beloved cable network, torn between her work family and home, with all her secrets, is directly inspired by my own life. I spent 20 years working in the cable television industry at USA, AMC, BRAVO, IFC, and IFC FILMS.

 

The Other Beautiful People and Amy Greene are as much autofiction, autobiographical fiction, a blend of fiction and memory, as they are anything.

 

Q: This is your first novel for adults--how did writing this book compare to your previous experiences writing for younger audiences?

 

A: This new novel draws so much inspiration from my own life as the more straightforward fiction of the young adult novels.

 

The Other Beautiful People was a much more complex novel to write—because it is a much more sensual novel. In my young adult novels (LIE and Before My Eyes), there is the confusion of first love. But in The Other Beautiful People, there’s the fully realized, deeply felt knowledge of mature love with all its implications.

 

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

 

A: I really struggled with the title. One day, I was volunteering at my daughter’s high school theater production, and the theater teacher shouted out to the young actors that snack break was over by saying, “You, over there, beautiful people, time to rehearse,” and then to another group, “You, over there, the other beautiful people, time for the tech run-through.”

 

And it just struck me. I am writing this novel for all those other beautiful people, for all the below-the-line, behind-the-scenes people who make movies and theater, and really, all the arts, happen. So, in some ways, this title was a gift to me from a talented high school theater teacher. Thank you, Dr. Lazarus.

 

Q: The writer Mary Kay Zuravleff said of the book, “As her main character struggles to love and be loved, Bock captures the challenge—and wonder—of paying attention to our life as we live it.” What do you think of that description?

 

A: I love it. This is the first time I’ve written a novel entirely from a single point of view – The Other Beautiful People is all in the first-person point of view of Amy Greene.

 

She has spent her life trying to get past her traumatic childhood, trying to understand what it means to love and be loved, and now, at the top of her field, in her early 40s, her carefully managed world is breaking apart.

 

On the lighter side, she also sees the world through the lens of movies, especially classic ones, and compares everyone to their movie doppelgängers—Paul Newman, Lauren Bacall, Marlon Brando, and more—make cameo appearances as she tries to understand this crazy world we live in through the movies she loves.

 

Q: What are you working on now?

 

A: Beyond all the promotion for this novel, I am writing a series of linked short, short stories. I’ve had a few published in SmokeLong Quarterly, Artwife, and The Hopkins Review, and the latter nominated one of my pieces for the Best of Microfiction 2026, and Pulitzer Prize-winning poet Diane Seuss selected it. Here’s a link to the story, Newsboy. The entire work-in-progress collection is entitled I Should Have Slept With Them All, so yes, more autofiction.

 

Q: Anything else we should know?

 

A: Just that I’m grateful that The Other Beautiful People is being published now. It’s the 25th anniversary of 9/11 this September. This novel opens in December 2001, and 9/11 has deeply affected the main character, Amy Greene, and her husband, Jack, as it affected my husband and me and so many others.

 

I never thought I would write about that time, but I guess I should learn never to say never about what I will write about. 

 

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