Meet Annalena McAfee

Annalena McAfee is a British writer and journalist. She was the editor of The Guardian's literary supplement, the Guardian Review until July 2006. She has written a number of children's books, some which have been translated into French, German and Dutch. McAfee is also the editor of a collection of literary profiles from The Guardian.

In 2003 she served as a judge for the Orange Prize for Fiction, the UK's largest annual literary award. She has also been on the panel for the South Bank Show arts awards, the Ben Pimlott Prize for political writing (2005), the Guardian/Penguin photography competition for cover art (2006), the Samuel Johnson prize for non-fiction, and other awards. Literary festivals where she has spoken include Prague (2003) and Hay-on-Wye (2005). In 2008 she served as a judge for the Orwell Prize (for political writing).

Before moving to the Guardian she was literary journalist at the Financial Times and theatre critic on the Evening Standard. She married the British novelist Ian McEwan in 1997.

Annalena McAfee: 'I see myself as a recovering journalist'

Annalena McAfee finds it 'nerve-wracking' crossing over from journalism to adult fiction. It probably doesn't help having a husband called Ian McEwan…

http://www.guardian.co.uk/books/2011/apr/10/annalena-mcafee-spoiler-ian-mcewan-interview

Annalena McAfee looks apprehensive. Having spent most of her adult life writing about books, interviewing novelists, editing books pages and judging literary prizes, she is about to publish a novel of her own and it feels "nerve-wracking, to be honest". As a journalist, she loathed picture bylines and was happy to hover in the background. "So putting out a book of my own, I feel it's a bit like volunteering for the stocks and handing out the rotten fruit – you know, 'Go on, pelt me.'"


McAfee's novel has already generated considerable interest among her former colleagues and it is easy to see why. For one thing, it is all about them. Called The Spoiler, it is a newspaper-industry satire and a very entertaining one too, in which she pokes wicked fun at the louche behaviour and slack moral code of Fleet Street's finest and lampoons the obsession with sex and celebrity that pervades even the poshest of newsrooms. Insiders will have much fun trying to guess which real-life figures the most outlandish characters are based on.

There is another reason for the attention. McAfee is married to Ian McEwan, which in the celebrity-mad world she so wittily sends up makes her pretty much a celebrity herself. She laughs demurely when I bring this up and says: "I would be very daft if I thought people both inside and outside the media wouldn't pay attention to the fact that I'm married to him, so I guess I'm going to get a bit more coverage because of that. Not necessarily good coverage, but that's the difference it will make. I do feel a bit more exposed than I might otherwise have done but it would be churlish to complain. If people are going to look at the book because I'm married to Ian then I'm not going to snatch it from their hands and say that's not appropriate."

We're talking in the serene and elegant drawing room of McEwan and McAfee's lovely house in central London. It's all pale stone floors and deep leather sofas, everything in shades of cream and brown. There is a Howard Hodgkin painting above the fireplace, a Bridget Riley to the right and – unsurprisingly – books everywhere, stacked on the ceiling-height shelves lining the walls and piled neatly on surfaces and tables. McEwan famously used the house as the location for his 2005 novel, Saturday, and is said to have based his touchingly uxorious portrait of the protagonist Henry Perowne's wife on his own spouse. (His description of Rosalind Perowne's face – "a perfect oval, with eyes of pale green" – fits McAfee perfectly.)

They first met in 1994 when she interviewed him for the Financial Times but did not become a couple until the following year, after the collapse of his first marriage to Penny Allen. "I still have the interview on tape," McAfee says. "But I've never played it since – I always cringe at the sound of my own voice." They married in 1997 and McAfee became stepmother to McEwan's two sons, William and Gregory, then aged 14 and 11. She supported him through a bitter custody battle with Allen, who at one desperate point ran away to France with the younger of the boys in defiance of a court ruling. The courts eventually awarded McEwan sole custody of the children.

By this time, McAfee was an assistant editor at the Guardian, where she founded and edited the Saturday Review. Her career as a respected arts and books journalist had by then spanned more than three decades, taking in the FT, the Sunday Times and the Evening Standard (as well as the more humble Tottenham Herald). She had been a judge for the Orange prize, the Samuel Johnson prize and many other literary awards. "I loved almost every minute. It was fun, always fun," she says. "But I've only ever met one journalist who didn't want to write a book and I am no exception to that." She had written a number of well-received children's books, including The Visitors Who Came to Stay (about an extended family not unlike hers and McEwan's), but never managed to find the "mental space" to write an adult novel. So in 2006 she resigned to write full-time.

It was perhaps inevitable that McAfee's subject matter would be newspapers. "I see myself as a recovering journalist. I am a print addict. I have an ebook and a computer but I remain hooked on print. I read somewhere that Tom Stoppard, who worked as a reporter on a Bristol paper many years ago, still reads the UK Press Gazette. I'm exactly the same."

She had already written a fragment of a story about an ageing female war correspondent looking back on her life, which she showed to McEwan. He encouraged her to develop it. The elderly reporter became Honor Tait, the central figure of The Spoiler, whose ongoing encounters with Tamara Sim, an ambitious young writer of celebrity gossip, provide a rich vein of comedy.

There is pathos, too, in the older woman's obsession with trying to stay young and beautiful, which leads her to Harley Street for plastic surgery and other humiliating medical procedures. It's not a mindset that McAfee shares. She had cancer twice in her 20s and 30s. "So when people complain about getting old I really don't feel the same way," she smiles. "When another birthday comes around I think, 'Hooray.' Wrinkles and bits dropping off here and there hold no fear for me. I'm still here – that's the main thing."
The book is set in 1997 on the eve of the general election that ushered in Tony Blair and New Labour. Why then? "I was hugely interested in the technological transition that was about to be made. In a way, it was a prelapsarian age before the advent of the internet, which sent circulations spiralling into freefall.

"Like most journalists, I'm a real admirer of Michael Frayn's Towards the End of the Morning, which describes the twilight of Fleet Street as a physical entity when television was coming and newspapers ceased to be the senior service, as it were. What I wanted was to describe a comparable time of arguably even greater change for journalism when nobody knew what was coming. It was a time of transition politically, too – the Tory regime was coming to an end and there was a fragile hope in the air. I wanted to capture that as well."

Although barely more than a decade ago, the time she describes seems like another era, a forgotten world of boozy lunches and capacious expense accounts. ("We could have taught those MPs a thing or two about fiddling expenses," McAfee says, only half joking.) She thinks it is harder for us to remember relatively recent history than things that happened far longer ago. "I mean, can we imagine a world now without universal mobile phones? Can you remember trying to put coins into a call box? It wasn't so very long ago that there was no email. The changes have been so swift and they were mainly unforeseen. Even some of the most respected commentators in the land thought in 1997 that the internet was just a passing phase."

The Spoiler's satire is biting but also fond. "My feelings towards the newspapers are very affectionate. You could say they wield too much power without responsibility and sometimes one feels a species shame for the bullying, prurience and political dishonesty that goes on in some quarters. But overall I hope I'm not too harsh. I might come back looking for a job one day."

I ask tentatively about the downsides for a fledgling novelist like herself of living with the man who is arguably Britain's foremost fiction writer, but she cannot think of a single one. "It sounds unbearably smug but it's very companionable and not at all competitive. It's a shared interest, it's one of the things that drew us together," she says.

Most days, she and McEwan work quietly in their separate studies three floors away from each other. With his children now grown up, there are few distractions. "We are very good at ignoring each other during the day and getting on with our work. He is a very good role model in that way. We might see each other for a sandwich at lunchtime but that is all." Come the evening, they discuss the day's progress over dinner and McEwan finds it helpful to read his new work aloud to her. "I'm a very appreciative listener," she says. He, in turn, is always her first reader.

She has already started her next book, or is at least "nibbling at the corners of a new one". She won't say what it is about, only that it is definitely not about journalism. "I've got to try and move on – hopefully this book has got it out of my system, at least for now."

June 2012 Book: The Spoiler

Becky has selected our June 2012 book (when we'll be meeting at Amy's house because I'll have a brand new baby and probably a very dirty house!). She's picked the "The Spoiler" by Annalena McAfee, drawn to it because of her newspaper background. I've got to say I'm really looking forward to this book -- because of my newspaper background!

ABOUT THE BOOK

A deft, impressive debut novel—a dark hyper-comedy—published in Britain to great acclaim (“Wily, insightful, engaging” —The Times; “Brilliant . . . It grips from the first with verbal polish and razor-sharp satire” —The Mail on Sunday) is set in London in the late 1990s during the height of the newspaper wars just before the dot-com tidal wave. 

It is a novel about two women at different times in their careers—one a legendary war correspondent (called in her day “The Newsroom Dietrich” because of her luminescent beauty) now in her eighties, who, over the decades, as the golden girl of the press has been on the frontlines or in the foxholes in every major theater of war in the twentieth century (Madrid, Normandy, Buchenwald, Berlin, Algiers, Korea, Vietnam). The other, a young feature writer out of Media Studies, a list compiler (what’s in/what’s out . . . the ten best of anything), who writes for a newspaper gossip magazine and is sent to interview the doyenne of British journalists. 

The eminent correspondent is about to have a new collection of her dispatches published. She is famously tricky and has made it clear to her publisher that the details of her private life are off-limits to interviewers. 

The young feature writer doesn’t have the time or the inclination to read either the woman’s books or her clips. She’s after the dirt on the old gal: who the former beauty palled around with, slept with, and the truth about her three failed marriages. The correspondent’s life work—her courage, her objective prize-winning reporting—is of little interest to the young feature writer. 

What starts out as a tango of wills and egos fast turns into a high-stakes game of cat and mouse, as secrets are revealed, lies unearthed and the stakes ratcheted up as two vying newspapers are drawn into the tug-of-war, with what each thinks is an explosive story, and with one paper playing off against another in a ruthless, desperate grab for sensation and circulation

Meet Leif Enger

Leif Enger was born in 1961 and raised in Osakis, Minnesota. Since his teens, he wanted to write fiction. He worked as a reporter and producer for Minnesota Public Radio from 1984 until the sale of Peace Like a River to publisher Grove/Atlantic allowed him to take time off to write. In the early 1990s, he and his older brother, Lin, writing under the pen name L.L. Enger, produced a series of mystery novels featuring a retired baseball player.

Peace Like a River, published in 2001, has been described as "high-spirited and unflagging" and has received some notable acclaim in literary circles.

His second novel, So Brave, Young, and Handsome appeared in May 2008. It was called, “A superbly written, utterly compelling story of self-discovery and redemption disguised as a cracking good adventure tale . . . Enger has created a work of great humanity and huge heart, a riveting piece of fiction that while highly accessible is never shallow. This story of an ordinary man's discovery of who he is and his place in the world is exciting, admirable and ultimately very affecting. . ..After reading the final page, don't be surprised if you find yourself shaking your head and murmuring, Wow. What a good book.″—Peter Moore, Minneapolis Star Tribune


He is currently working on his third book.

He lives on a farm in Minnesota with his wife and two sons.

Q&A WITH LEIF ENGER

Interview conducted by Mark LaFramboise, of Politics & Prose Bookstore, Washington D.C.

ML: Booksellers I know have been raving about PEACE LIKE A RIVER for a while now.  Now that you know how well the book is being received, how is the inevitable prepublication waiting affecting your life?  Are you about to burst, or maybe even a little frightened?

LE: I'm a little anxious; when you've put so much work into a novel, and been backed so generously by your publisher, naturally you hope it doesn't disappoint.  But the waiting's been relaxed and pleasant.  Robin, my wife, and I home educate the boys and I've been able to take a bigger role in that. Our youngest is building a canoe -- I'm there to cut the tricky angles.  We've camped lately in Minnesota's Boundary Waters and also the Teton and Bighorn ranges of Wyoming, and now we're painting the farmhouse and hanging some wallpaper.  Grove/Atlantic introduced me to a number of booksellers over the summer, which was enormous fun, but until the past few weeks publication has seemed like something sweet and far-off and hazy.  It's exciting, now, to have things coming into focus -- to be thinking of the book tour, and seeing new places.

ML: This isn't your first book.  What was your earlier experience in writing and publishing?

LE: Back in the 80s my brother Lin, then at the Iowa Writer's Workshop, wrote to me suggesting we have some fun and collaborate on a crime novel—he had a character in mind, an ex-major-league ballplayer living reclusively in the north woods.  We sketched out the plot on note cards, one card per chapter, and sent each other chapters through the mail.  We ended up publishing five books with Pocket and Simon & Schuster.  They were widely ignored, but we had a great time -- we'd get together, rub our hands over sinister plots, and then pitch batting practice to each other until dark.  Lin's the better hitter, and also taught me most of what I know about writing fiction.

ML: How do you think your role as husband and father affected the telling of PEACE LIKE A RIVER?  Are there insights into character that you couldn't have gained any other way?

LE: Robin and the boys were the book's first audience.  I read them almost every scene in first draft, and usually based my rewriting on their responses.  Kids have a dead-on instinct for what makes a good story (outlaws on horseback, hidden treasure, secret caves, dynamite) and Robin, who would rather praise than criticize, was always brave enough to recognize when I'd gotten off track or written needless pages.  Also, without my own family it's doubtful I could've written convincingly of Jeremiah's relationship with his children, or with Roxanna.  What father hasn't wished he could take a child's pain on himself?  Who knows better than a husband what's gained by courtship, or lost when courtship ends?

ML: Setting is so important in this novel.  The family's name, Land, even suggests this.  Are there certain personal characteristics that you think arise from the upper Midwest, from Minnesota in particular?

LE: Acceptance, probably.  Perseverance.  I grew up squinting from the backseat at gently rolling hills and true flatlands, where you could top a rise and see a tractor raising dust three miles away.  So much world and sky is visible it's hard to put much stock in your own influence -- it's a perfect landscape for cultivating gratitude.

ML: Also, while the book is contained geographically within western Minnesota and the Dakotas, a variety of landscapes are described: the town, the country, and open road, and the nearly mystical place of snow and steam where the family occasionally gathers.  Can you suggest any way(s) these different places inform the story, or the interior lives of its participants?

LE: It's hard for me to fully picture a character without the ground he occupies, or his responses to new landscapes.  When I was seven or eight we visited family in Montana, where my uncle showed us a lignite vein that had caught fire years before and was burning still.  The fire had worked so deeply into the ground flames were no longer visible and what we saw was a blackened cut through the badlands where heat shimmered out.  Though old enough to realize this was geography and not Hell itself I confess to many fearful imaginings involving underground trolls, anvils, and long-fingered hands that might snake out and grab a boy's ankle.  The coal-vein scene in the book is one of great hope, but at the same time the surface of Reuben's confidence in the family's quest is beginning to crack, and steam to issue forth.

ML: Although the narrator tells the story in retrospect, we see the world through the eleven- year old eyes of Reuben.  How were you able to capture the wonder, fears, and curiosity of such a young protagonist?

LE: First, my parents gave me the sort of childhood now rarely encountered.  Summers were beautiful unorganized eternities where we wandered in the timber unencumbered by scoutmasters.  We dressed in breechclouts and carried willow branch bows, and after supper Dad hit us fly balls.  It was probably most idyllic for me as the youngest of four, since three worthy imaginations were out beating the ground in front of me – who knew what might jump up?  Now I see that same freedom in the lives of our two sons, whose interests cover the known map.  It's easy to witness the world through the eyes of a boy when you have two observant ones with you at all times. But the ruinous thing about growing up is that we stop creating mysteries where none exist, and worse, we usually try to deconstruct and deny the genuine mysteries that remain.  We argue against God, against true romance, against loyalty and self-sacrifice.  What allows Reuben to keep his youthful perspective is that he's seen all these things in action -- he is the beneficiary of his father's faith.  He is a witness of wonders.  To forget them would be to deny they happened, and denying the truth is the beginning of death.

ML: Reuben's asthma figures prominently in the story.  Unless you yourself are afflicted, how were you able to describe the condition with such detail?

LE: Our oldest son was gripped by severe childhood asthma when I started the novel -- he was seven years old and working hard just to get his breath.  Of course we'd have given anything for a gigantic, lung-clearing miracle, but since it didn't happen the only course was to treat him medically the best we could, and try to comprehend his struggle.  That wasn't difficult because twice in my life, at 13 and again at 21,  I had isolated, terrifying asthmatic episodes -- times when breathing was wrenching muscular effort and I didn't dare go to sleep.  But for me it never became chronic, and the good news is that our son just turned 14 and his asthma has diminished to the point where he rarely needs medicine.  Teddy Roosevelt is much admired in this house, and we aspire to the strenuous life.

ML: Reuben's sister, Swede, is perhaps the most engaging character in the book and the only female in the motherless Land family.  Her personality is so vibrant that she feels very real.  Is she or anyone else in the story based on people you've known in your life?

LE: Swede is the potent mixture of several remarkable women, most notably my own sister, mother, and wife, who share the qualities of cleverness and brute honesty.  This wasn't intentional; Swede just stepped into an early scene and wouldn't leave.  The other characters are also composites of adventurers among my family and friends, of coworkers, of people met once and not forgotten.  To lift someone whole from life and drop them into a novel would be difficult, and also impractical in a legal sense.

ML: Swede has a penchant for epic poetry.  How does her poetic saga of Sunny Sundown relate to or parallel the family's struggle after Davy's trouble with the law?

LE: The poetry began simply because my son, who was four at the time, thought there should be a cowboy named Sunny Sundown in the book.  But the verse quickly became useful both in foreshadowing coming events and in revealing Swede's response to Davy's actions.  In any family there's the real unfolding of life, and then there are the rewrites, the way each person tells himself what happened.  Swede believes we all live epics, and I agree.  A few heroic stanzas would do most families a lot of good.

ML: Magic plays such a great role in this story.  Is it important that we as readers believe the veracity of these events: e.g. the tornado, Jeremiah walking off a platform into space, Reuben's journey to the beyond, to name a few, or just that Reuben believes?

LE: I hope even skeptical readers will enjoy the novel, but my own suspicion is that miracles, big obvious ones as well the more comfortable variety (kittens in springtime, Puckett's homer in Game Six) are underway around us.  I was raised to this belief and have as yet no proof that it is not so.  Why lessen our joy by throwing out what the author of Hebrews called "the substance of things hoped for, the evidence of things not seen"? 

May 2012 Book Pick

Amy has selected "Peace Like A River" by Leif Enger as our May 2012 read. Enger is a Minnesota author.

ABOUT THE BOOK
Set in the Minnesota countryside and North Dakota Badlands of the early 1960s, Peace Like a River is a moving, engrossing, beautifully told story about one family's quest to retrieve its most wayward member. Reuben Land, the novel's asthmatic and self-effacing eleven-year-old narrator, recounts an unforgettable journey riddled with outlaw tales, heartfelt insights, and bona fide miracles. Born without air in his lungs, Reuben is keenly aware of the gift of breath—and, by extension, the gift of life. Time and again, both gifts are bestowed on Reuben by his father, a gentlemanly soul who works as a school janitor and has the power—and faith—to bestow true miracles. But when Davy (Reuben's brother) kills two intruders who break into the Land home with evil intent, and then escapes from prison while his trial is in progress, events seem to have worsened beyond the aid of miracles. Or have they? For, once Reuben and his family set out to find Davy, the reader eventually witnesses rivers, plains, and city lights unseen by mortal eyes.

Equal parts tragedy, romance, adventure yarn, and meditation, Peace Like a River is an inspired story of family love, religious faith, and the lifelong work and trust required of both. Leif Enger's first novel is a work of easy generosity and uncommon wisdom, a book to be shared with friends and loved ones.


CRITICAL ACCLAIM
"Not since Charles Frazier's Cold Mountain or Cormac McCarthy's Cities of the Plain have I been so engrossed in the reading of a book, and in a story told so beautifully. Peace Like a River is the loveliest of gifts, a truly great book, into which the reader can sink deliciously and completely. The characters fill the reader's days and nights; and in the reading of it, we cross over into amazing territory."

—Rick Bass

"This is a stunning debut novel, one that sneaks up on you like a whisper and warms you like a quilt . . . a novel about faith, miracles, and family that is, ultimately, miraculous."

—Publishers Weekly (starred review)

"Peace Like a River serves as a reminder of why we read fiction to begin with: to commune with a vividly, lovingly rendered world, to lose ourselves in story and language and beauty, to savor what we don't want to end yet know must."

—Andrew Roe, San Francisco Chronicle

"A rich mixture of adventure, tragedy, and healing," Peace Like a River is "a collage of legends from sources sacred and profane from the Old Testament to the Old West, from the Gospels to police dramas."

—Ron Charles, The Christian Science Monitor

Birth order traits

I don't feel like I did a good job laying out the birth order traits earlier this week at book club. So I gleaned some more information today. Alot of the stuff out there is a bit negative, but I liked these descriptions because they're more positive.

The First Born

Strongest Personality – First borns are usually the leaders. They usually have the characteristics and qualities that enable them to make decisions easily. This maybe due to the special attention they receive since they are the first, and parents would be very excited with them.

Family Minded – First borns take the position of their parents when they are not around, making them the decision makers. They would then think of the family as their own, thus they are protective and responsible for their siblings. They are unselfish and caring by nature.

The Middle Child

Peacekeepers – Middle children are peacekeepers by default. They are the mediators between the siblings. They are sometimes associated as “people pleasers” due to their weak personalities, but not all of them have this characteristic.

Attention Getter – By being born at the middle, middle children do not receive much attention. This causes them to get attention whenever they can through any means possible, so often they become the black sheep of the family. Lack of attention can cause a chain reaction making them lose confidence, friends and so on.

The Last Born

Smartest – By being the last, they have seen the rights and wrongs of their siblings, making them the smartest. Often, the youngest will be exposed to matters between their siblings which are older, thus making them a bit mature for their age.

Spoiled – By this time, the parents are tired of their children. Most of their energies in disciplining the children have been used up, thus having none for the youngest. Because of this, the child becomes accustomed to no discipline at all, making them spoiled and hard headed.

Note: There are a lot of cases where the birth order traits are not consistent. Some factors may alter the effect of birth order, like gender, death and other unusual circumstances.

MORE

Alfred Adler (the pioneer of birth order theory) believed there were four basic types of birth order positions. The oldest child is supplanted by the younger child, which can lead negatively to insecurity or positively to responsibility. A middle child has an older sibling to model his behavior after, which can lead positively to healthy ambition or negatively to rebellious behavior. The youngest child is typically showered in attention, which can lead positively to confidence or negatively to feelings of inferiority. Only children who enjoy the undivided attention of both parents may become spoiled in the negative and confident in the positive. Read more: http://www.livestrong.com/article/73327-adler-birth-order-theory/#ixzz1sUzAcRQl

More on Eleanor Brown

Well, actually, this is about her partner, JC Hutchins, who is a novelist himself.

http://jchutchins.net/site/about-the-author/

About J.C.

If you’d like to collaborate with J.C., learn more about his creative and professional experience here.

J.C. Hutchins is an award-winning fiction and nonfiction storyteller, with 15 years of professional writing experience.  His two novels – 7th Son: Descent andPersonal Effects: Dark Art — were published in 2009 by St. Martin’s Press.

Hutchins is a successful New Media storytelling pioneer and marketer, best known for his innovative use of written fiction, podcasting, video and fan-fueled crowdsourcing to create thriller stories, which he distributes online.  With more than 5 million episodic downloads of his fiction to date, Hutchins is one of the most popular “podcast novelists” in the world.  His work has been featured in The New York Times, The Washington Post,NPR’s Weekend Edition, Fast Company, Starlog, the BBC, Time.com, AdWeek.com, Wired.com UK, and BoingBoing.net.

Hutchins writes novels, short stories, screenplays and groundbreaking multimedia narratives.  A motion picture adaptation of his thriller novel 7th Son: Descent is currently in development at Warner Bros. He recently collaborated as Head Writer with creative agency Campfire on an immersive online transmedia experience for the Discovery Channel. Learn how J.C. can help you achieve your creative and business goals.

His groundbreaking thriller novel Personal Effects: Dark Art also features transmedia elements that blur the reader’s role from passive spectator to active participant.  He has collaborated with legendary game designers and mainstream film directors.

J.C. lives in Denver with fellow novelist Eleanor Brown, and their cat, Chester.

Discussion questions for The Weird Sisters

DISCUSSION QUESTIONS

1. The Andreas family is dedicated to books, particularly Shakespeare. Would the family be different if their father were an expert on a different writer? Edgar Allan Poe, let’s say, or Mark Twain? What if they were a family of musicians or athletes, rather than readers? How might that change their dynamic? Is there an interest that unites your family in the same way that reading unites the Andreas family?

2. The narration is omniscient first person plural (“we” rather than “I”). Why do you think the author chose to write the novel in this way? Did you like it?

3. Which sister is your favorite? Why? Which sister do you most identify with? Are they the same character?

4. Do you have any siblings? If so, in what way is your relationship with them similar to the relationship among the Andreas sisters? In what way is it different?

5. Each of the sisters has a feeling of failure about where she is in her life and an uncertainty about her position as a grown-up. Are there certain markers that make you an adult, and if so, what are they?6. In what ways are the sisters’ problems of their own making? Does this make them more or less sympathetic?

7. The narrator says that God was always there if the family needed him, “kind of like an extra tube of toothpaste under the sink.” Is that true, or does the family’s religion have a larger effect on the sisters than they claim? How does your own family’s faith, or lack thereof, influence you?

8. In many ways, the Andreas sisters’ personalities align with proposed birth-order roles: Rose, the driven caregiver; Bean, the rebellious pragmatist; and Cordy, the free-spirited performer. How important do you think birth order is? Do you see those traits in your own family or in people you know?

9. Father Aidan tells Bean, “Your story, Bean, is the story of your sisters. And it is past time, I think, for you to stop telling that particular story, and tell the story of yourself. Stop defining yourself in terms of them. You don’t just have to exist in the empty spaces they leave.” Do you agree with Father Aidan? Is it possible to identify one’s self not in relationship to one’s siblings or family?

10. Is it irresponsible of Cordy to keep her baby?

11. How does the Andreas family deal with the mother’s illness? How would your family have coped differently?

12. The sisters say that “We have always wondered why there is not more research done on the children of happy marriages.” How does their parents’ love story affect the sisters? How did your own parents’ relationship affect you?

13. What do you think of the sisters’ father, James? Is he a good parent? What about their mother?

14. Why do you think the mother is never given a name?

15. The narrators’ mother admits that she ended up with the girls’ father because she was scared to venture out into the world. Yet she doesn’t seem to have any regrets. Do you think there are people who are just not meant to leave home or their comfort zone?

16. Bean and Cordy initially want to leave Barnwell behind, yet they remain, while Rose is the one off living in Europe. Do you think people sometimes become constrained by childhood perceptions of themselves and how their lives will be? How is your own life different from the way you thought it would turn out?

17. When you first saw the title, The Weird Sisters, what did you think the book would be about? What do you think the title really means?

The Weird Sisters hits #2 on Indie List

From author Eleanor Brown's blog: http://www.eleanor-brown.com/blog/

"I've been so happy to see The Weird Sisters doing well in paperback - the first week it was released, it was #14 on the New York Times paperback bestseller list, and #7 on the Indie Bestsellers list (that includes sales from independent bookstores).

"[The last week of February, it was] #5 (!) on the NYT list, and #2 (!!!) on the Indie list. Just to give you a frame of reference, The Help is #3 on the Indie list. Kind of amazing. AND it hit all these regional Indie bestseller lists:

#2 The Southern Indie Bestseller List 

#2 The Southern Indie Bestseller List

#2 The New Atlantic Indie Bestseller List

#3 The Mountains and Plains Indie Bestseller List

#3 The Heartland Indie Bestseller List

#3 The New England Indie Bestseller List

#3 The SoCal Indie Bestseller List

#3 The Northern California Indie Bestseller List

#10 The Pacific Northwest Indie Bestseller List

Q & A with Eleanor Brown

1. What inspired you to write this novel?

I got serious about writing a novel the year I turned 30. I said to myself, “Self, this is the year you either do it or give up the dream forever.” So, I wrote some really terrible novels in all kinds of genres that helped teach me a great deal about the craft, and finally I thought of a story I’d played around with years before, and that became The Weird Sisters.

The core of the story – three very different sisters and their belated coming-of-age – had been with me for a long time, but they were never quite the right sisters and it was never quite the right time. When I’d written absolutely everything I wasn’t meant to write, I finally sat down and let the Andreas sisters in.

2. The sisters in the novel are each named after one of Shakespeare’s famous heroines: Rosalind from As You Like It, Bianca from The Taming of the Shrew, and Cordelia from King Lear. Why did you choose these three Shakespearean characters in particular, to name the sisters after? How much do the personalities of Rose, Bean, and Cordy align with their Shakespearean counterparts?

Bianca and Cordelia’s names actually came first – Bianca is the beautiful second daughter in The Taming of the Shrew, so with what I knew about her character when I began, that was the natural choice. And Cordelia is the devoted youngest of three daughters in King Lear, so that was another obvious one. I struggled with Rosalind’s name for much longer, but I wanted her to be a little bit in love with the idea of being in love. I had a memory of seeing the Royal Shakespeare Company doing As You Like It in Stratford-upon-Avon. There is a scene where Rosalind – this bright, intelligent, opinionated woman – is running around the forest, plucking the love poems Orlando has written for her off the branches of trees, and they had staged it so beautifully, and I just thought, ‘Yes. That’s exactly what she’s like.’ And so she became Rose.

The sisters do bear some resemblance to Shakespeare’s characters, and that’s something each of them wrestles with in the novel. But I didn’t want their stories to be a retelling of the plays (Shakespeare’s done that already, and he’s rather good), so each sister ultimately follows her own path.

3. How did the title of the novel come about? What is its significance?

For a long time, the working title of the book was “Trinity.” I really wanted to focus on the importance of the number three, and religion was going to be abigger part of the novel. But when I created the father and the family began to take shape around the form of his devotion to Shakespeare, I knew I was going to need a different title. There’s a portion of the book where the sisters explain that “weird” didn’t mean to Shakespeare what it means to us – the three witches in Macbeth are really the three Fates. The Andreas sisters are quite tied to the idea of destiny, and part of the story is their learning to accept what their fates really are, rather than heading grimly down the path of what they think they ought to be.

4. The novel offers a vivid portrait of the conflicted relationship between sisters. As one of three sisters yourself, how much of the novel is based on your own sibling experience?

I don’t know anyone who has a purely positive relationship with his or her family – I think it’s impossible to be that close to anyone and not have moments where your family drives you absolutely crazy. And that’s what the Andreas sisters have – they don’t hate each other, and they share a wonderful family history that binds them whether they like it or not, but they’ve never bothered to discover what they love about each other. I think the core of what’s difficult about having three siblings – someone always gets left out, the competition for family ”roles” – is something I experienced, but the Andreas sisters are all their own.

5. If you were one of the three sisters – Rose, Bean, or Cordy – which would you be?

I already am all three of them! I think there’s a little bit of each of the sisters in all of us – a little bit of longing for adventure or glamour, a little bit of wanting nothing but safety, a little bit of care-taking and a little bit of risk-taking. I definitely drew on those conflicting desires in myself when I was creating the Andreas sisters.

6. How do you explore the theory of birth order (the idea that sibling personalities are in part shaped by the order in which they were born) in the book? What interests you about this idea?

Birth order theory has always fascinated me – the idea that a large part of our personality comes from where we are in our family – only, first, middle, youngest – and the ways our families keep us in those roles even as we grow up. With many people I find it easy to tell where they fall in their family’s birth order, no matter how old they are or what their relationship with that family is like. It’s something we carry with us whether we like it or not.

With The Weird Sisters, I wondered what would happen if life forced us to step out of those prescribed roles: if you’ve always been the responsible one, how do you deal with being asked to take risks? If you’ve been cast as undependable, how could you prove that you are capable of more?

7. The novel is in part an homage to books and reading—the Andreas family is one of compulsive readers. Their love of literature is a large part of their familial bond. What role did books play in your own life growing up?

My parents raised my two older sisters and me in a house full of books, where the most important life lesson we learned was never to go anywhere without taking something to read, and no dinner conversation is complete without the consultation of at least one reference book.

Reading was – and is – the center of my life. I was lucky to be raised by parents who considered reading the most important thing we could do. We took weekly trips to the library, filling canvas bags with books until they overflowed. I was allowed a half hour of television per week, and at the time I chafed at that, but now I’m incredibly grateful. I’ve always been a daydreamer, and books let my imagination run wild in the most delightful ways.

8. The father in the novel is a renowned Shakespearean professor, and Shakespearean verse is woven throughout the book. How did this element of the book come about? Is the Bard a personal passion of yours?

The beginning of this book came about when I was in graduate school, getting my Master’s degree, and some of my professors were encouraging me to go for a Ph.D. And my immediate and visceral reaction was – I don’t want to know that much about any one thing. But people who do want to know that much about one subject fascinate me, and I wondered what it would be like to be in a family with someone who was so completely obsessed with a single topic.

I’m not a Shakespearean scholar, though I did take a wonderful course on Shakespeare in graduate school with a professor in whose memory the father is named – James Andreas. I’ve read and seen a number of the plays, but definitely not all. I did an enormous amount of research while writing the book, but a lot of that fell by the wayside as I wrote, because what I realized is that when you live in a world so focused on one thing, it becomes part of the landscape. The verse the family quotes to each other is absolutely stripped of any context or meaning; they’ve long ago had all the deep thoughts about Shakespeare that they’re going to have. But the sheer volume of Shakespeare’s work, as well as his continuing prominence, made him the natural choice.

9. The novel is written in first person plural, narrated from the collective perspective of the three sisters. How did you make this stylistic choice? What is its effect?

Like any writer, I have done a lot of playing around with different styles and voices, and I noticed that while there were people doing first and third, and even, rarely, second-person narration, almost no one did first person plural. When I mentioned I was working on something in this voice, a professor and friend of mine mentioned Faulkner’s “A Rose for Emily”, and I immediately went and read it. It’s a tricky voice, and I had to devise a lot of rules for how to use it – how to make it readable and noticeable without its being disruptive.

I chose it because this is a story about family, and one of the ideas I wanted to raise is that we carry our families of origin with us always. They helped form the way in which we see the world, for better or worse, and no matter how we may feel about them now, they are part of us. Even though Rose and Bean and Cordy are not close, they cannot separate themselves from their common history.

10. In the novel, the sisters have reached a crisis point in their lives, where they have to reassess who they are and what their lives have become. How do the sisters struggle with the idea of adulthood? What does it mean to be an adult?

Each of the sisters has a strong idea about what it means to be an adult, and each of them is at least partially wrong. Each sister’s figuring out how to be an adult is a major theme of the novel, and it was something I continue to wrestle with. Most days my friends and I still don’t feel like grown-ups, even though we have mortgages or kids or careers or retirement savings or wrinkles, and many of us have all of the above. I wrote the book partly as an effort to figure out what it means to be an adult, and I have to say I’m still not sure. Maybe what I came out with was the idea that it’s more important to build a life that’s meaningful to you than to worry about when, precisely, you get to call yourself a responsible adult, and whether your version of adulthood is as good as everyone else’s.

11. In the novel, the Andreas sisters have come home in part because their mother has been diagnosed with breast cancer. Did this element of the novel arise out of your personal experience?

Absolutely. My mother was diagnosed with breast cancer when I was a teenager (she’s just celebrated her 20th anniversary as a survivor). I remember her battle in flashes – seeing her scar when she stepped out of the shower, the darkness and stillness of her bedroom in the days following her chemo treatments, the way one of our cats loved to sleep laid out along the side of her body where she no longer had a breast. I’ve been trying to write out what that meant to me and to my family ever since.

12. What was your process of writing this book? How long did it take you?

The seed of it started years before I ever actually produced The Weird Sisters as it is now. I had a number of fits and starts on a story of three sisters, but when I finally got serious about it, it took me about a year to write the first draft. Writing for me starts slowly, and then I hit a point where I just fall in love with the characters and absolutely cannot stay away from them, to the point that when I’m

not actually writing, I’m wondering what they’re up to or what they’re going to do next.

13. When did you decide to become a writer? Was it something you always aspired to?

I can’t remember a time when I wasn’t writing, and I always knew, despite many people’s cautions that I should do something more reliable with my time, that I’d end up as a writer of some sort.

But mostly writing is just an excuse to daydream and read, my two very favorite activities.

14. What writers have inspired or influenced your work?

Like the Andreas sisters, I will read anything that lands front of me: shampoo bottles, grocery store flyers, short stories, magazine articles, but novels are my favorite form of storytelling. Jodi Picoult’s work taught me how to manage multiple narrators, and to write not just what I know, but what I am willing to research. Maeve Binchy’s writing taught me how multiple storylines can weave together and support each other, and the importance of writing loveable characters, even if they’re not nice people. If I can ever produce one sentence half as beautiful as what Alice Hoffman and Pat Conroy write on their grocery lists, I’d die happy – they are two of the most lyrical prose writers I’ve encountered.

I’m a big fan of Steve Almond’s writing, and a class I took with him crystallized some really important things about writing, lessons I took back to revisions of The Weird Sisters and the next novel I’m working on. I’m tremendously grateful to him for that.

15. What do you plan to write next?

I’m working on a novel about love and weddings and marriage and divorce, and what happens when they all intersect.