Post by Dante on Jan 7, 2009 5:08:29 GMT -5
Scouting around, I've found both an old interview with Handler, and a new interview by Handler.
Here's the two-years old interview with Handler, which I've not personally seen before:
Autumn of a Book-Lover's Contentment
---
But book industry buzz this week concerns two projects with big numbers attached. One is the publication of the most expensive novel ever: Random House paid $8 million for Charles Frazier's Thirteen Moons, his first effort since his Civil War novel-turned-movie, Cold Mountain. Frazier tells of a 12-year-old orphan given a horse, a key, and a map, and sent on a trip that brings him close to the Cherokee Nation, where he is adopted by a chieftain and his tribe.
The other project is a 2.5-million-copy first printing of a novel for children, The End. It has that name because it's the 13th and last volume of a well-marketed, wildly popular children's book series: Twelve "A Series of Unfortunate Events" books by "Lemony Snicket" (pen name for Daniel Handler, a San Francisco author) have sold a total of 26.5 million copies, according to Publishers Weekly.
Number 13 will go on sale in bookstores next Friday, Oct. 13, and many stores are making it a Harry Potter--type event (see "Powerful spell," July 30, 2005). With the type of reverse psychology that underlies the books—tell young readers not to read them—some bookstores are offering "unfortunate prizes" like moldy cheese and socks with holes.
Part of the books' charm is their Perils of Pauline structure: Violet, Klaus, and Sunny Baudelaire, three smart and resolute orphans, spend each volume in and out of the hands of nefarious villains, but the suspense comes with a don't-take-this-seriously wink that older children enjoy. Characters with names like Quigly Quagmire and Jerome Squalor sometimes make dinner reservations at Café Salmonella.
Each book also features reversals of the usual marketing come-ons. Instead of screaming "Buy this," Book 12, The Penultimate Peril, has on its back cover a warning: "Dear Reader, If this is the first book you found while searching for a book to read next, then the first thing you should know is that this next-to-last book is what you should put down first. Sadly, this book presents the next-to-last chronicle of the lives of the Baudelaire orphans, and it is next-to-first in its supply of misery, despair, and unpleasantness."
The books also include, much to parental delight, regular vocabulary lessons. Picking up one of the books at random—ah, here's how Book 6, The Ersatz Elevator, begins: "The book you are holding in your two hands right now—assuming that you are, in fact, holding this book, and that you have only two hands—is one of two books in the world that will show you the difference between the word 'nervous' and the word 'anxious.' The other book, of course, is the dictionary, and if I were you I would read that book instead.
"Like this book, the dictionary shows you that the word 'nervous' means 'worried about something'—you might feel nervous, for instance, if you were served prune ice cream for dessert, because you would be worried that it would taste awful—whereas the word 'anxious' means 'troubled by disturbing suspense,' which you might feel if you were served a live alligator for dessert, because you would be troubled by the disturbing suspense about whether you would eat your dessert or it would eat you."
Many Christian parents do not want their children identifying with Harry Potter, boy wizard—but judging by the 12 Lemony books so far, they need not fear the Baudelaire orphans, who often escape jams via Violet's inventions. Much as fairy tales serve as avenues for children to conquer their fears, so these books work well in a post-9/11 world by having characters face terrible situations and survive.
Even the pen name—Lemony Snicket—of the 36-year-old author, Daniel Handler, is a tip-off to humor amid terror. Bored while working in an office and semi-researching a novel for adults that he was writing, he phoned right-wing organizations to ask for free materials and gave a silly name along with his real address. He still maintains the joke on lemonysnicket.com: "Due to the world-wide web of conspiracy which surrounds him, Mr. Snicket often communicates with the general public through his representative, Daniel Handler."
But who is Daniel Handler? He is 36 and married to illustrator Lisa Brown. They met as students at Wesleyan; like many others it has shed the religious connotation of its name and become standard-issue liberal. Daniel and Lisa have a son, Otto, who is almost 3, loves to play with toy cars, and knows all the models, from Mercedes down.
They live in San Francisco in a three-level house built on a steep hill in 1907, one year after the great earthquake, and now filled with books and works of art. San Francisco is not known for its family values, but Handler clearly values both his immediate family and its extensions: His parents, in their 70s, still live in the San Francisco house where they raised him.
Handler says his life was not "A Series of Unfortunate Events" for him, but as a child "I was always attracted to the gothic tradition in literature—mysterious goings-on, sinister villains, people crying all the time." He played with those stereotypes in writing the first draft of a gothic novel and then turned good and bad characters into the mainstays of a series.
When his agent encouraged him to write a series proposal to publishers, Handler offered plot summaries for three books and received a contract for four. His response was, "I can't believe they want four volumes," and his agent comforted him, saying, "Don't worry, they'll never publish four." Handler thought that at best the series "would have a very tiny audience, more likely it would disappear."
Handler knows more about how the books became commercially successful than why. The "how" is that they received strong initial support from independent bookstores, and their reputation then grew. Now, the corporate marketing is intense: The shelves of the office on the lowest floor of his house include not only copies of books in the series but add-ons like Lemony Snicket: The Unauthorized Autobiography and The Beatrice Letters, a publication with folders that contain a poster and correspondence between Lemony and a mysterious lady.
(Also available: Lemony Snicket calendars, activity books, blank journals, CDs, and so on. A Lemony Snicket movie two years ago was mediocre, despite the talent of Jim Carrey and Meryl Streep.)
As to the why of series success, Handler says he used to explain that "the books make no bones about the world being a chaotic and confusing place where one's behavior does not lead to one's just rewards," but he recognizes that "plenty of books say that and are not popular." When pushed he is hesitant to "talk in large, abstract terms," but he notes that the Baudelaire children in his novels are "not in control of their own fate. Even good behavior doesn't seem to get them ahead. They behave well anyway."
Handler is a good cook, is reputed to be a good accordion player, and is certainly a doting dad. He and his wife "come from a long line of observant but not particularly religious Jews." By "observant" he means "celebration of holidays, observance of customs associated with those holidays, not necessarily belief in God." But he and Lisa want their son to have a Jewish education: "We'd like him to know where he comes from" and (here comes a characteristic joke) "we'd like him to reject the same religious tenets we rejected."
Adult reaction to Handler's books has varied: "Some people have complimented me for turning their kids onto reading, and others have said I scared the heck out of their children and ought to be punished." He recalls a letter from an evangelical thanking him for "sneaking in Christian allegorical notes . . . something about steadfastness through suffering."
Handler says he's "pretty much" an atheist, but the subject of belief in God does not come up much among his friends and associates in San Francisco: "I'm not a believer in predetermined fates, being rewarded for one's efforts. I'm not a believer in karma. The reason why I try to be a good person is because I think it's the right thing to do. If I commit fewer bad acts there will be fewer bad acts, maybe other people will join in committing fewer bad acts, and in time there'll be fewer and fewer of them."
This humanistic vision differs radically from a biblical worldview, but its optimism seems appropriate for this autumn's bibliophiles. The fall publishing season is like March for baseball: hope springs eternal.
---
Daniel Handler helped judge the most recent National Book Award, and here he interviews the Young People's Literature winner:
The Great Unknown: Daniel Handler Interviews National Book Award-Winner Judy Blundell
---
If you haven’t heard of Judy Blundell until recently, join the club. For nearly 20 years, Blundell has toiled in anonymity, turning out more than 100 mysteries, romances, and media tie-ins under various pen names, such as Jude Watson. But in mid-November, the writer-for-hire was suddenly shoved into the spotlight. That’s when What I Saw and How I Lied (Scholastic, 2008)—the first title Blundell has put her name on—won the prestigious National Book Award for Young People’s Literature. The novel—an anything-but-ordinary tale of romance, betrayal, and murder set in 1947—follows 15-year-old Evie and her family as they seek a new start in Florida.
SLJ invited Daniel Handler, chair of the most recent National Book Award committee, to interview the winner. After all, we figured, who better than the author of the best-selling “Lemony Snicket” books to unearth Blundell’s darkest and, perhaps, most unfortunate secrets? And besides, we were dying to know which member of his committee fell asleep during an important conference call—something Handler alluded to in his National Book Award speech.—Rick Margolis
Daniel Handler (DH): There’s something so strange about interviewing the person to whom you’ve given the prize. It seems almost like I’m patting myself on the back to congratulate you.
Judy Blundell (JB): I thought you were going to say, “There’s something incestuous about it,” and I was going to say, “You know about that, don’t you?”
DH: Don’t I always. But congratulations on having written such a fine book, and I do hope that the National Book Award gives it the exposure to which it is entitled.
JB: Thank you. It was a huge shock, of course.
DH: You’ve written such a large number of books on assignment under various pseudonyms that in your acceptance speech you said you couldn’t come up with the exact number. Can you talk a little bit about that, and why you decided to take the big step to write your own self-induced book?
JB: I was very underconfident when I was younger. I really felt that writers were these exalted beings, and it would just be way too much hubris for me to ever be one. I got a job as a temp at Simon & Schuster, and I started writing on the side. Through knowing editors, I made my way into publishing through the back door, as a writer-for-hire and doing media tie-ins. If you’re good at it and you meet your deadlines and you’re not a scary person, you can make a living that way.
I did that for many years, while I wrote other things on the side. I was working on an adult novel for many years that never got published. So when I wrote What I Saw and How I Lied, I really did not expect it to be a huge break for me, and I didn’t think I was going to put my name on it. It was really my editor who said, “You need to put your own name on this book, because it’s different.”
DH: Did your long career of writing on assignment help shape the book?
JB: Writing on assignment, you learn to live in fear of having a reader put down your book, and you learn how important it is to keep a plot moving. I’d say that’s probably the most important thing I learned, because I really live in horror of boring a reader. Not that I would put a cliff-hanger at the end of every chapter, like in thrillers or adventure books, but I felt very conscious of writing a page-turner as well as writing a good book.
DH: One of the things that excited our panel about your book was the fact that it was diverting entertainment as well as having a real serious purpose. I always think that’s part of the tightrope of writing for children. In What I Saw, you dove into the world of noir, which is scarcely used in children’s literature, except in parody form. Was that because you liked that form, or were you excited that it was a new thing to bring to children’s lit?
JB: I wasn’t consciously using noir as an inspiration from the beginning. It didn’t really occur to me. What I was more focused on was the mood of 1947 and the postwar mood in America, which is often seen as this tremendously exciting and positive time. Yet when I went back and looked at books that were being written at that time—like James Jones’s Some Came Running—I found they were very dark and full of anxiety.
If you read Laura Hobson’s 1947 novel Gentlemen’s Agreement, the fact that we had just fought World War II and found out what we found out and yet there was still so much anti-Semitism in the United States, that was really interesting to me, too. And obviously I wove that into my book.
DH: Let’s talk about Evie. She’s a very complex character.
JB: She was raised in an urban environment by a single mother. So she had to have a certain amount of street smarts growing up. Yet at the same time, the period of World War II was very romantic. I listened to a lot of music while I wrote this book, and it was so romantic. Love was going to save the world. People were marrying and there was the agony of parting from your loved one—of soldiers going overseas—and all of that must have really influenced Evie, even though she had to have been a very pragmatic person.
Also growing up without a father made her more romantic, because she was always looking for that sort of love. The plot really turns on all of that emotion inside of her—how she reacts to issues like first love and betrayal and having a stepfather and wanting to believe in him no matter what.
DH: I also listen almost constantly to music that’s appropriate to whatever kind of book I’m writing. How else did you immerse yourself in that time?
JB: I tried to filter out the contemporary world. I tried not to read anything contemporary except the newspaper. I really like original source materials. My mother had saved newspapers during World War II—from December 7, 1941, all the way up to the Japanese surrender. I actually touched those newspapers, which was really wonderful. I looked at the advertisements and what was on the front pages. I also used Google to look at original newspaper articles and transcripts whenever I could.
And then there were things that never made it into the book. I had my mother teach me the Lindy. As she taught me the basic steps—I’m a terrible dancer, but the Lindy’s pretty easy—I was looking at the way she moved. My mother’s in her 80s, and I realized that they had a different way of moving back then and a different rhythm in their speech. It’s impossible to truly capture it, because I wasn’t alive then, but just that act of learning the Lindy made me really think about the whole rhythm of a culture and how that changes during different eras.
DH: Did you have the idea for the story first? Or did you want to inhabit that particular time period first and then find a story?
JB: I had the idea for the story first. I knew that it took place after a war. So originally I toyed with the idea of placing it in the ’20s, but then it became clear to me that it was post-World War II. When you’re planning a book, there are all these threads, and it seems impossible to weave them together. They’re just a mess, they’re a tangle, and you don’t know which one to pull. So I had the character of Evie, and I had certain elements of the story in place. But it was really the moment when I read about the gold train [which carried valuables that had been seized by the Nazis] that I was able to put a frame around the threads and see that they actually made a picture.
DH: How did you come to work with your editor, David Levithan? His name was on something like 60 of the submissions that we read, and he also wrote a book that was submitted for consideration. Early in the process, we were joking that his name was going to be somewhere on the National Book Award, and sure enough, it kind of is.
JB: I’ve been with David for a long time. I started with him on a “Star Wars” book long ago and...
DH: In a galaxy far, far away?
JB: In a galaxy far, far away. We did a few mysteries together, but primarily we’ve worked on the “Star Wars” series. He’s a really genius editor, and he’s just so much fun to work with. When we first started together, he wasn’t yet writing, but I always knew he would write. He is the most amazingly prolific, hardworking person. I don’t know when he sleeps, but I’m not allowed to say that to him anymore, because I say it in such an accusatory, snotty way.
DH: It’s never good to ask your editors about what they do in bed, anyway.
JB: True. So who fell asleep on the phone? That’s what I want to know.
DH: You know, I almost didn’t say anything about that in my speech, because she fell asleep for a perfectly good reason. It was Angela Johnson who fell asleep on the phone. In the last couple of months of our process, she was hugely active all around Ohio, campaigning for Barack Obama. So she had been up all night, calling people, and then had driven three hours to get home for the conference call.
JB: But you still brought it up.
DH: I still brought it up, because it was fun to talk about. I don’t know. [Standing at the podium] I was most self-conscious, because I thought there were five extremely tense people in the audience.
JB: No, four, because one of them didn’t think she was going to win.
DH: Well, you should have been tenser.
JB: I ate my dinner. I had blini. I was having fun. Until you announced my name and terror struck my heart.
DH: I promise I’ll never do it again.
JB: No, don’t say that.
DH: I’ll never give you the National Book Award again, as God is my witness.
---
Here's the two-years old interview with Handler, which I've not personally seen before:
Autumn of a Book-Lover's Contentment
---
But book industry buzz this week concerns two projects with big numbers attached. One is the publication of the most expensive novel ever: Random House paid $8 million for Charles Frazier's Thirteen Moons, his first effort since his Civil War novel-turned-movie, Cold Mountain. Frazier tells of a 12-year-old orphan given a horse, a key, and a map, and sent on a trip that brings him close to the Cherokee Nation, where he is adopted by a chieftain and his tribe.
The other project is a 2.5-million-copy first printing of a novel for children, The End. It has that name because it's the 13th and last volume of a well-marketed, wildly popular children's book series: Twelve "A Series of Unfortunate Events" books by "Lemony Snicket" (pen name for Daniel Handler, a San Francisco author) have sold a total of 26.5 million copies, according to Publishers Weekly.
Number 13 will go on sale in bookstores next Friday, Oct. 13, and many stores are making it a Harry Potter--type event (see "Powerful spell," July 30, 2005). With the type of reverse psychology that underlies the books—tell young readers not to read them—some bookstores are offering "unfortunate prizes" like moldy cheese and socks with holes.
Part of the books' charm is their Perils of Pauline structure: Violet, Klaus, and Sunny Baudelaire, three smart and resolute orphans, spend each volume in and out of the hands of nefarious villains, but the suspense comes with a don't-take-this-seriously wink that older children enjoy. Characters with names like Quigly Quagmire and Jerome Squalor sometimes make dinner reservations at Café Salmonella.
Each book also features reversals of the usual marketing come-ons. Instead of screaming "Buy this," Book 12, The Penultimate Peril, has on its back cover a warning: "Dear Reader, If this is the first book you found while searching for a book to read next, then the first thing you should know is that this next-to-last book is what you should put down first. Sadly, this book presents the next-to-last chronicle of the lives of the Baudelaire orphans, and it is next-to-first in its supply of misery, despair, and unpleasantness."
The books also include, much to parental delight, regular vocabulary lessons. Picking up one of the books at random—ah, here's how Book 6, The Ersatz Elevator, begins: "The book you are holding in your two hands right now—assuming that you are, in fact, holding this book, and that you have only two hands—is one of two books in the world that will show you the difference between the word 'nervous' and the word 'anxious.' The other book, of course, is the dictionary, and if I were you I would read that book instead.
"Like this book, the dictionary shows you that the word 'nervous' means 'worried about something'—you might feel nervous, for instance, if you were served prune ice cream for dessert, because you would be worried that it would taste awful—whereas the word 'anxious' means 'troubled by disturbing suspense,' which you might feel if you were served a live alligator for dessert, because you would be troubled by the disturbing suspense about whether you would eat your dessert or it would eat you."
Many Christian parents do not want their children identifying with Harry Potter, boy wizard—but judging by the 12 Lemony books so far, they need not fear the Baudelaire orphans, who often escape jams via Violet's inventions. Much as fairy tales serve as avenues for children to conquer their fears, so these books work well in a post-9/11 world by having characters face terrible situations and survive.
Even the pen name—Lemony Snicket—of the 36-year-old author, Daniel Handler, is a tip-off to humor amid terror. Bored while working in an office and semi-researching a novel for adults that he was writing, he phoned right-wing organizations to ask for free materials and gave a silly name along with his real address. He still maintains the joke on lemonysnicket.com: "Due to the world-wide web of conspiracy which surrounds him, Mr. Snicket often communicates with the general public through his representative, Daniel Handler."
But who is Daniel Handler? He is 36 and married to illustrator Lisa Brown. They met as students at Wesleyan; like many others it has shed the religious connotation of its name and become standard-issue liberal. Daniel and Lisa have a son, Otto, who is almost 3, loves to play with toy cars, and knows all the models, from Mercedes down.
They live in San Francisco in a three-level house built on a steep hill in 1907, one year after the great earthquake, and now filled with books and works of art. San Francisco is not known for its family values, but Handler clearly values both his immediate family and its extensions: His parents, in their 70s, still live in the San Francisco house where they raised him.
Handler says his life was not "A Series of Unfortunate Events" for him, but as a child "I was always attracted to the gothic tradition in literature—mysterious goings-on, sinister villains, people crying all the time." He played with those stereotypes in writing the first draft of a gothic novel and then turned good and bad characters into the mainstays of a series.
When his agent encouraged him to write a series proposal to publishers, Handler offered plot summaries for three books and received a contract for four. His response was, "I can't believe they want four volumes," and his agent comforted him, saying, "Don't worry, they'll never publish four." Handler thought that at best the series "would have a very tiny audience, more likely it would disappear."
Handler knows more about how the books became commercially successful than why. The "how" is that they received strong initial support from independent bookstores, and their reputation then grew. Now, the corporate marketing is intense: The shelves of the office on the lowest floor of his house include not only copies of books in the series but add-ons like Lemony Snicket: The Unauthorized Autobiography and The Beatrice Letters, a publication with folders that contain a poster and correspondence between Lemony and a mysterious lady.
(Also available: Lemony Snicket calendars, activity books, blank journals, CDs, and so on. A Lemony Snicket movie two years ago was mediocre, despite the talent of Jim Carrey and Meryl Streep.)
As to the why of series success, Handler says he used to explain that "the books make no bones about the world being a chaotic and confusing place where one's behavior does not lead to one's just rewards," but he recognizes that "plenty of books say that and are not popular." When pushed he is hesitant to "talk in large, abstract terms," but he notes that the Baudelaire children in his novels are "not in control of their own fate. Even good behavior doesn't seem to get them ahead. They behave well anyway."
Handler is a good cook, is reputed to be a good accordion player, and is certainly a doting dad. He and his wife "come from a long line of observant but not particularly religious Jews." By "observant" he means "celebration of holidays, observance of customs associated with those holidays, not necessarily belief in God." But he and Lisa want their son to have a Jewish education: "We'd like him to know where he comes from" and (here comes a characteristic joke) "we'd like him to reject the same religious tenets we rejected."
Adult reaction to Handler's books has varied: "Some people have complimented me for turning their kids onto reading, and others have said I scared the heck out of their children and ought to be punished." He recalls a letter from an evangelical thanking him for "sneaking in Christian allegorical notes . . . something about steadfastness through suffering."
Handler says he's "pretty much" an atheist, but the subject of belief in God does not come up much among his friends and associates in San Francisco: "I'm not a believer in predetermined fates, being rewarded for one's efforts. I'm not a believer in karma. The reason why I try to be a good person is because I think it's the right thing to do. If I commit fewer bad acts there will be fewer bad acts, maybe other people will join in committing fewer bad acts, and in time there'll be fewer and fewer of them."
This humanistic vision differs radically from a biblical worldview, but its optimism seems appropriate for this autumn's bibliophiles. The fall publishing season is like March for baseball: hope springs eternal.
---
Daniel Handler helped judge the most recent National Book Award, and here he interviews the Young People's Literature winner:
The Great Unknown: Daniel Handler Interviews National Book Award-Winner Judy Blundell
---
If you haven’t heard of Judy Blundell until recently, join the club. For nearly 20 years, Blundell has toiled in anonymity, turning out more than 100 mysteries, romances, and media tie-ins under various pen names, such as Jude Watson. But in mid-November, the writer-for-hire was suddenly shoved into the spotlight. That’s when What I Saw and How I Lied (Scholastic, 2008)—the first title Blundell has put her name on—won the prestigious National Book Award for Young People’s Literature. The novel—an anything-but-ordinary tale of romance, betrayal, and murder set in 1947—follows 15-year-old Evie and her family as they seek a new start in Florida.
SLJ invited Daniel Handler, chair of the most recent National Book Award committee, to interview the winner. After all, we figured, who better than the author of the best-selling “Lemony Snicket” books to unearth Blundell’s darkest and, perhaps, most unfortunate secrets? And besides, we were dying to know which member of his committee fell asleep during an important conference call—something Handler alluded to in his National Book Award speech.—Rick Margolis
Daniel Handler (DH): There’s something so strange about interviewing the person to whom you’ve given the prize. It seems almost like I’m patting myself on the back to congratulate you.
Judy Blundell (JB): I thought you were going to say, “There’s something incestuous about it,” and I was going to say, “You know about that, don’t you?”
DH: Don’t I always. But congratulations on having written such a fine book, and I do hope that the National Book Award gives it the exposure to which it is entitled.
JB: Thank you. It was a huge shock, of course.
DH: You’ve written such a large number of books on assignment under various pseudonyms that in your acceptance speech you said you couldn’t come up with the exact number. Can you talk a little bit about that, and why you decided to take the big step to write your own self-induced book?
JB: I was very underconfident when I was younger. I really felt that writers were these exalted beings, and it would just be way too much hubris for me to ever be one. I got a job as a temp at Simon & Schuster, and I started writing on the side. Through knowing editors, I made my way into publishing through the back door, as a writer-for-hire and doing media tie-ins. If you’re good at it and you meet your deadlines and you’re not a scary person, you can make a living that way.
I did that for many years, while I wrote other things on the side. I was working on an adult novel for many years that never got published. So when I wrote What I Saw and How I Lied, I really did not expect it to be a huge break for me, and I didn’t think I was going to put my name on it. It was really my editor who said, “You need to put your own name on this book, because it’s different.”
DH: Did your long career of writing on assignment help shape the book?
JB: Writing on assignment, you learn to live in fear of having a reader put down your book, and you learn how important it is to keep a plot moving. I’d say that’s probably the most important thing I learned, because I really live in horror of boring a reader. Not that I would put a cliff-hanger at the end of every chapter, like in thrillers or adventure books, but I felt very conscious of writing a page-turner as well as writing a good book.
DH: One of the things that excited our panel about your book was the fact that it was diverting entertainment as well as having a real serious purpose. I always think that’s part of the tightrope of writing for children. In What I Saw, you dove into the world of noir, which is scarcely used in children’s literature, except in parody form. Was that because you liked that form, or were you excited that it was a new thing to bring to children’s lit?
JB: I wasn’t consciously using noir as an inspiration from the beginning. It didn’t really occur to me. What I was more focused on was the mood of 1947 and the postwar mood in America, which is often seen as this tremendously exciting and positive time. Yet when I went back and looked at books that were being written at that time—like James Jones’s Some Came Running—I found they were very dark and full of anxiety.
If you read Laura Hobson’s 1947 novel Gentlemen’s Agreement, the fact that we had just fought World War II and found out what we found out and yet there was still so much anti-Semitism in the United States, that was really interesting to me, too. And obviously I wove that into my book.
DH: Let’s talk about Evie. She’s a very complex character.
JB: She was raised in an urban environment by a single mother. So she had to have a certain amount of street smarts growing up. Yet at the same time, the period of World War II was very romantic. I listened to a lot of music while I wrote this book, and it was so romantic. Love was going to save the world. People were marrying and there was the agony of parting from your loved one—of soldiers going overseas—and all of that must have really influenced Evie, even though she had to have been a very pragmatic person.
Also growing up without a father made her more romantic, because she was always looking for that sort of love. The plot really turns on all of that emotion inside of her—how she reacts to issues like first love and betrayal and having a stepfather and wanting to believe in him no matter what.
DH: I also listen almost constantly to music that’s appropriate to whatever kind of book I’m writing. How else did you immerse yourself in that time?
JB: I tried to filter out the contemporary world. I tried not to read anything contemporary except the newspaper. I really like original source materials. My mother had saved newspapers during World War II—from December 7, 1941, all the way up to the Japanese surrender. I actually touched those newspapers, which was really wonderful. I looked at the advertisements and what was on the front pages. I also used Google to look at original newspaper articles and transcripts whenever I could.
And then there were things that never made it into the book. I had my mother teach me the Lindy. As she taught me the basic steps—I’m a terrible dancer, but the Lindy’s pretty easy—I was looking at the way she moved. My mother’s in her 80s, and I realized that they had a different way of moving back then and a different rhythm in their speech. It’s impossible to truly capture it, because I wasn’t alive then, but just that act of learning the Lindy made me really think about the whole rhythm of a culture and how that changes during different eras.
DH: Did you have the idea for the story first? Or did you want to inhabit that particular time period first and then find a story?
JB: I had the idea for the story first. I knew that it took place after a war. So originally I toyed with the idea of placing it in the ’20s, but then it became clear to me that it was post-World War II. When you’re planning a book, there are all these threads, and it seems impossible to weave them together. They’re just a mess, they’re a tangle, and you don’t know which one to pull. So I had the character of Evie, and I had certain elements of the story in place. But it was really the moment when I read about the gold train [which carried valuables that had been seized by the Nazis] that I was able to put a frame around the threads and see that they actually made a picture.
DH: How did you come to work with your editor, David Levithan? His name was on something like 60 of the submissions that we read, and he also wrote a book that was submitted for consideration. Early in the process, we were joking that his name was going to be somewhere on the National Book Award, and sure enough, it kind of is.
JB: I’ve been with David for a long time. I started with him on a “Star Wars” book long ago and...
DH: In a galaxy far, far away?
JB: In a galaxy far, far away. We did a few mysteries together, but primarily we’ve worked on the “Star Wars” series. He’s a really genius editor, and he’s just so much fun to work with. When we first started together, he wasn’t yet writing, but I always knew he would write. He is the most amazingly prolific, hardworking person. I don’t know when he sleeps, but I’m not allowed to say that to him anymore, because I say it in such an accusatory, snotty way.
DH: It’s never good to ask your editors about what they do in bed, anyway.
JB: True. So who fell asleep on the phone? That’s what I want to know.
DH: You know, I almost didn’t say anything about that in my speech, because she fell asleep for a perfectly good reason. It was Angela Johnson who fell asleep on the phone. In the last couple of months of our process, she was hugely active all around Ohio, campaigning for Barack Obama. So she had been up all night, calling people, and then had driven three hours to get home for the conference call.
JB: But you still brought it up.
DH: I still brought it up, because it was fun to talk about. I don’t know. [Standing at the podium] I was most self-conscious, because I thought there were five extremely tense people in the audience.
JB: No, four, because one of them didn’t think she was going to win.
DH: Well, you should have been tenser.
JB: I ate my dinner. I had blini. I was having fun. Until you announced my name and terror struck my heart.
DH: I promise I’ll never do it again.
JB: No, don’t say that.
DH: I’ll never give you the National Book Award again, as God is my witness.
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