1st BOOKS: Reading and Writing with Friends

Cara Black, the New York Times bestselling author of the Aimée Leduc mystery series, has a new one out – Murder in Pigalle – which Booklist calls “as tasty as a chunk of French chocolate.”  And lucky for us, Cara is sharing an interview she did with Juliet Grames, the associate publisher of Soho Press. It’s a terrific behind-the-scenes look at how Murder in Pigalle came about. Enjoy! And do check out Cara’s events page. If she’s coming to a bookstore near you (and she’s going to be at lots of bookstores in the next few weeks) you can ask her questions yourself. – Meg

Juliet: You told me when we first started working on Murder in Pigalle that the inspiration had come from a real-life case. Can you tell us a little bit more about the real case?

Cara: Yes, it came from a case that had stymied the flics (slang for French police) for a time. They were quite open about it. By chance, having lunch with a retired Brigade Criminelle officer, his friend joined us. His friend headed what we’d term Crime Investigations against Juveniles division. Quite a striking guy, very nice and he looked like he’d walked out of a medieval tapestry. I can only describe it as a 14th century face and tonsure-like hairstyle. Anyway he, Thierry, gave me his card. Not one to pass up any opportunity I called and Thierry invited me to visit him and tour his branch. I had no intention of writing about crimes against children but it’s a good rule to visit a policeman who invites you to their office to get the feel and see how they really work. Unknown to me at the time, Thierry’s unit had cooperated with a film maker who’d just made a hit movie about their Juvenile division. So Thierry was quite open. His office, on the Seine, and the whole floor of the unit’s suite was lighter and airier than most police branches I’ve seen. His second in command, a youngish female Commandant, toured me and showed where their psychologically trained investigators talk to child victims in colorful rooms with toys. Another woman explained about her work with investigating and suppressing the trafficking of young children. I confess it struck me how hard this job would be to do and not get emotionally involved. How could one leave it at home at the end of the day especially if you had young children the age of the victim’s in your case? The units professionalism, compassion and down-to-earthness really struck me. Out of curiosity I asked the young Commandant if there were any specific crimes they’d dealt with in June 1998 when I was setting my next book – it could be background material or an issue my character would be aware of. Yes, exactly, she said. In June 1998 there was a notorious case and she showed me the file – that of a serial rapist preying on young girls home alone after school. All the girls lived in the same arrondissement and attended schools near each other. The flics hadn’t put the attacks together and the frustrated parents of the quartier went vigilante. Unfortunately it was the wrong guy. The flics did find the serial rapist, he was tried, convicted and sent to prison. He didn’t last long, since the young Commandant told me prisoners don’t like pedophiles.

Juliet: One of your characters, Monsieur Lavigne, a connoisseur of the Pigalle area’s history and culture, has an impressive collection of art done by great quartier artists. Who are some of those great visual artists? What about musical composers? What brought them together in this area of Paris?

Cara: Pigalle, long a nightlife area – Moulin Rouge, le Chat Noir, and nearby Follies Bergere all still going strong are in the 9th arrondissement. Theater thrived here and still does in the thirteen theaters with performances every night. Maybe it’s an artistic sensibility fostered by those who lived here: artists like Degas, Toulouse-Lautrec, Vuillard, writers such as Emile Zola, George Sand. Composers and musicians including Liszt, Chopin, Berlioz who visited each other often, found inspiration in congregating in salons and ateliers fermenting a literary, artistic and musical scene. Where Monsieur Lavigne lives, is in what’s still called la Nouvelle Athenes, an upscale area where the wealthy followed Greek designs in architecture and promoted ‘new thinking’ based on Hellenism and Greek ideals and thought. I’m not sure if that’s still around.

Juliet: In this book, detective Aimée Leduc is pregnant. It’s a big change for her character! What inspired you to lead Aimee down that street?

Cara: It’s never easy for Aimée, she’s always attracted to bad boys but I felt it was time for her to grow up. Well, a little. My Parisian friend Anne-Françoise – who I’ve known for years – first as a singleton and we’d go out dancing – now who has two daughters, aged three and seven. Anne’s a career woman, too but I’ve watched (and sometimes helped on visits) since their births how she raises her girls and works full time. Paris, btw, has an amazing affordable childcare system for working parents and subsidies for childcare. Of course, it’s not easy and Anne relies a lot on her partner these days and a wonderful shared nanny. But when I visit I can do the fun stuff and take the girls to the circus or read a story. I don’t have diaper duty any more, but volunteer for after school pickup and boulangerie stops on the way home. I’ve learned a lot from watching her.

Juliet: Aimée is wrestling with lots of questions about motherhood: for example, will she be a good mother, even though she doesn’t have a good relationship with her own mother? How can she balance her baby with her career? Cara, you are a mother yourself—did you channel any of your own experience or thought processes into Aimee for this book?

Cara: Integral to Aimée’s character (we’ve seen this in the series) is a yearning for family, one she’s never really had. She has abandonment issues over her mother who left her, whether to truly protect Aimée as a young child, remains to be seen. Her American mother, is on the World Watch list. Aimée’s starting to see that ‘family’ can be those around you ie. René, her partner at Leduc Detective, Morbier her godfather and Martine her best girlfriend. Without her own mother, Aimée feels the loss of a role model and wants an instruction booklet on having a child. But she there isn’t one. I became closer to my own mother when I had my son, our relationship became different, which I think it does for many women. I could ask my mother things, I was lucky she only lived 30 miles away. It’s hard to explain but watching the relationship grow between my son and mother, how she became part of his life, made me feel more bonded to the world. I’ve seen Anne’s relationship with her own mother deepen after having children. Family, important in French society, and everywhere in the world, takes on a new meaning when you have a child. It’s not just about you anymore, and it never will be again. Aimée suffers doubts, fears about her capability to raise a child and balance a career. She wonders if she’ll turn into her mother, maybe we all do.

When Karen Joy Fowler’s We Are All Completely Beside Ourselves released in hardcover last June, Barbara Kingsolver, in a review on the cover of the New York Times Book Review, called it “A novel so readably juicy and surreptitiously smart, it deserves all the attention it can get . . . this is a story of Everyfamily in which loss engraves relationships, truth is a soulful stalker and coming-of-age means facing down the mirror, recognizing the shape-shifting notion of self.” We Are All Completely Beside Ourselves released in paperback yesterday, and to celebrate I’m rerunning Karen’s post.  The post, “First Words,” is wonderful. The book, absolutely amazing. Read it now! – Meg

When I decided to be serious about writing, I joined a local writers’ group.  This was a critique circle of largely unpublished aspirants and I remained in that group until I moved away almost 30 years later.  I quickly realized that I was not very good, but I minded less than you might think, because I was learning so much and improving so quickly that for a long time all was well.

Then it wasn’t.  A few years in and I had corrected the obvious stuff.  I still hadn’t written anything truly good from beginning to end, but it was no longer easy for my beloved group to pinpoint why.  I spent the next three years writing story after story (and if I’m being honest, submitting story after story) with a sinking understanding that they weren’t good enough, but no idea how to make them better.

The dam finally broke when I attended a lecture by Robert Hass.  He was talking about poems and I was writing stories, but that did not matter.  He talked about complicating your endings, about endings that opened a work up and endings that closed a work down, about endings that could be read simultaneously as Shakespearian tragedy and Mel Brookes comedy, and about writing endings you believed to be true.  He told wonderful stories with wonderful endings.

As I sat and listened, smarter than I usually am because of the need to meet the brilliant Hass if not halfway and least somewhere, I suddenly had a new ending to a story I’d been working on and sending out for months.  Twenty minutes later, I had a new ending to another story in progress.  I went home, rewrote those endings and while doing so, came up with a third new ending for a third story.  All of those stories sold within the month and those were my first three publications.

I will add this cautionary note that my improved endings are, I hear, still not for everyone.  You can take that up with Robert Hass. – Karen

When Cathy Marie Buchanan asked if I’d read her new novel, The Painted Girls, I jumped at the chance. I loved her debut, The Day the Falls Stood Still, and this one … Sisters, dance, art, ambition, and intrigue in late 1800s Paris – what was there not to like? It went on in hardcover to be a People Magazine Pick, a Good Housekeeping Book Pick, an Indie Next pick, a USA Today New and Notable selection, a Barnes & Noble Staff Pick, and an Entertainment Weekly Must List pick. Now, to celebrate her paperback release, I’m rerunning the post she did here last year about how she settle into the writing life. - Meg

I’m often asked if I always wanted to be a writer, and I answer is a definitive no. My teenage years were spent disgracing myself in high school English, often getting upwards of twenty percent deducted for spelling mistakes on exams.  When it came time to head off to university, one of the criteria I used for picking my courses was that no essay writing?that is spelling?was required.  I ended up at Western University and graduated with a degree in biochemistry without writing a single essay.  Afterward I went on to do an M.B.A.

I spent the bulk of my non-writing work life at IBM—ten years, in fact—at first in finance and then in technical sales.  It was while I was at IBM that spell-check started to be commonly used, and all of a sudden my world shifted.  Shocking though it was, I became the departmental wordsmith, the person who would give the proposals the final read through before they were sent off to the customers. Still, I suspected this supposed ability to write had more to do with the fact that I was mostly working with engineers, and math and computer science grads.  It wasn’t so much that I could write but that they could not.

Given my education and early work life choices, you probably would not suspect it, but there was lots of evidence early on of my creative leanings.  In high school, I was quite serious about classical ballet, spending four or five nights a week taking class or performing, and I sewed and designed most of my clothes.  I think now that I was able to satisfy my creative yearnings through the dance and the sewing. 

While I was working at IBM, I was always enrolled in a continuing education course, always something with an artistic bent, no doubt an effort to fuel my creative side.  I took drawing and painting and art history and woodworking and interior design.  Eventually I hit on creative writing but taking that first course was more of a whim than anything else.  I had a continuing education catalogue at home and was flipping pages and thought, well, why not give creative writing a try?  Right from the first class, though, I was smitten.  Long last, I’d found what I was meant to do. – Cathy

My dear friend Michelle Richmond has a new novel out today, Golden State, which has already received starred reviews from Booklist and from Library Journal, which calls it “gripping, multi-layered, must-read fiction.” To celebrate, I’m rerunning a post Michelle did on 1st Books some time ago, on the occasion of the publication of her third novel, No One You Know. Enjoy! – Meg

I began writing the stories that would appear in my first book, a story collection entitled The Girl in the Fall-Away Dress, one winter while living alone in a shabby duplex with no heat in a dodgy part of Knoxville, Tennessee. During the day I went to my job as a copywriter at an ad agency, and at night in my scruffy little apartment I bundled up in coat and scarf and typed away on my Mac duo-doc, while the couple next door fought so loudly I came to know the intimate nature of their marital troubles. I was 23 years old, and the thing I wanted more than anything in the world was to become a writer.

Two years later I went to grad school—one year in Arkansas, which I quit, another in Miami, which I finished—and during that time I continued writing stories on the duo-doc, although in much better apartments. One was a seventh-floor studio on Miami Beach. This was 1996, and the $700/month studio was hard on my budget, but I paid for it with my teaching stipend from the University of Miami and considered it my own writing retreat. Those were solitary years, and the solitude suited me. I had a feverish work ethic in those days when it came to writing, and it was in graduate school that I began publishing short stories in literary magazines. That little taste of getting my stories out in the world was all it took to keep me going.

On to New York City in 1998. More jobs, more writing of stories, publications here and there, and rejections galore. Then, in 2000, on the cusp of turning thirty, living in San Francisco with my fiancé and teaching composition at City College, a phone call from the Associated Writing Programs to say that The Girl in the Fall-Away Dress had won the AWP Award for Fiction and would be published byUniversity of Massachusetts Press. Bliss and more bliss. That book was my most exciting publication to date, because it was my first. To this day, that collection of linked stories, which probably sold no more than a couple thousand copies, is closer to my heart than any of my subsequent books.

Yesterday, my third novel, No One You Know, hit the shelves. It’s a book about the stories we tell ourselves, and the stories others tell about us. It’s also a book about sisters, and obsession. And I didn’t realize until I was halfway into it that it’s the book I’ve been wanting to write, in many ways, for the last ten years. And in this vein a character from my very first published story makes an appearance, however brief, in the final chapter of No One You Know. In the final chapter of the book, the narrator, Ellie Enderlin, is walking through the streets of San Francisco late at night and finds herself on an unfamiliar block. “In a second-floor apartment, a girl in a yellow nightgown walked slowly past the window. A tall figure moved toward her. A slender arm reached out to turn off a lamp, and the room went dark. Everything about the moment was startlingly familiar. Had I been here before? Had someone described this very scene to me? Or maybe, I had simply read it all in a book. Sometimes it felt as if books and life formed a strange origami, the intricate folds and secret shadows so inextricably connected, it was impossible to tell one from the other.” – Michelle Richmond

I’m just delighted to host Ariel Lawhon, whose debut novel, The Wife, the Maid, and the Mistress released yesterday. People Magazine says of it, “Inspired by a real-life unsolved mystery, this mesmerizing novel features characters that make a lasting impression.” Ariel is a co-founder of She Reads who hails from my old stomping grounds, in the rolling hills outside Nashville, and I know you will love her post! – Meg

I’m not much of a painter. In my thirty-five years of life I’ve only created one decent watercolor. And that was on accident in the third grade. But as the daughter of a prolific artist I have a deep respect for those who can create beauty with a brush, a bit of paint, and a canvas. I admire the way they dream things into being.

Yet sometimes I wonder if we place more importance on the being than the dreaming, as though imagining something doesn’t make it real. As though it doesn’t exist if others can’t see it and touch it. Read it. Of all people, J.R.R. Tolkien has helped me see that what we imagine is every bit as important as what we create. In his short story “Leaf: by Niggle,” (by far my favorite piece of his writing) he introduces us to a would-be painter named Niggle who wants to create something beautiful and lasting:

“[Niggle] was the sort of painter who can paint leaves better than trees. He used to spend a long time on a single leaf, trying to catch its shape, and its sheen, and the glistening of dewdrops on its edges. Yet he wanted to paint a whole tree, with all of its leaves in the same style, and all of them different.”

(Sounds quite like the desire to write a novel to me)

I relate to Niggle in many ways. He is tired and distracted and faces constant interruptions. He dreams better than he actually does. And in this story it takes him years to begin painting his tree. Niggle imagines it in a meadow surrounded by mountains and valleys and streams that stretch on right to the edges of his canvas. But he never gets around to painting them. As a matter of fact only a handful of leaves are completed to his satisfaction. Niggle dies while still obsessing over his leaves.

But.

And this is where I break down and cry every time I read the story.

But when Niggle is taken to Paradise, he stands in a lush green meadow, so like the one he wanted to paint and:

“Before him stood the Tree, his Tree, finished. If you could say that of a Tree that was alive, its leaves opening, its branches growing and bending in the wind that Niggle had so often felt or guessed, and had so often failed to catch.

He gazed at the Tree, and slowly he lifted his arms and opened them wide. “It’s a gift!” he said. He was referring to his art, and also to the result; but he was using the word quite literally.

He went on looking at the Tree. All the leaves he had ever labored at were there, as he had imagined them rather than as he had made them; and there were others that had only budded in his mind, and many that might have budded, if only he had had time.”

Eighteen months ago I sold a novel to Doubleday. It was published yesterday. I held nothing back in the telling of this story. From conception to completion it took seven years and countless drafts and more effort that I ever dreamed I would put into a manuscript. I love this book in the way that only an exhausted, hopeful, terrified writer can. The writing of it made me a better person.

Maybe I painted a leaf. Maybe I came closer to the whole tree. But what I know for sure is that the act of creating this novel was the gift. And I’m so very thankful for it.

Your mission (should you choose to accept it) read “Leaf By Niggle.” Just read it. And see if your dreaming doesn’t become doing after all. – Ariel