WomensHistoryReads interview: Paula Butterfield

It’s no secret that women in the arts have long struggled to achieve the recognition of their male peers, and the Impressionists are no exception. The average museum’s Impressionist exhibit might include only one or two female painters of the period, but if you’re lucky, you’ll see a Morisot in among the Monets and Manets. Paula Butterfield’s La Luministe, about Berthe Morisot, was just released, making this the perfect time to interview her for this series. Welcome, Paula!

Paula Butterfield

Greer: Tell us about a woman from the past who has inspired your writing.

Paula: Today Frida Kahlo is a well-known Mexican artist who is the inspiration for everything from merchandise to memes. But when I first encountered Frida in an art history class at the Universidad de la Americas, in Mexico, I had never heard of her. 

During my sophomore year of college, I lost both of my parents. Although pursuing an education was engrained in me, I was in too much pain to face a gloomy Pacific Northwest winter that year, which is how I found myself at school in Mexico. Right away, I was homesick, with no home to go to. When I’d trudge to the campus post office, the postal worker would bring out a pile of B letters to wade through. There were few for me but another B student, the daughter of a celebrity, seemed to receive reams of mail every day with her father’s name stamped on the envelope. I was livid with envy. Why did SHE get to have a doting father, one who no doubt sent her frequent large sums of money? 

Then one day that celebrity’s daughter stood up to give an oral report, Frida’s story. I listened to the litany of Frida’s physical trials—childhood polio and being impaled by the handrail in a street car accident which led to subsequent miscarriages, spinal surgeries, and ultimately the amputation of her leg. And then there was the emotional turmoil of being Diego Rivera’s wife. His fame eclipsed hers, and he was incessantly unfaithful.

My God, this woman knew pain! And yet her paintings were unlike anything I’d ever seen. Self-portraits in which she adorned herself as a work of art. Backgrounds filled with animals from her menagerie, pre-Columbian artifacts, and lush foliage. Vivid colors made each painting look joyful and life-affirming. One was even titled Viva la Vada—live life. 

As an art-history major in days of yore, I’d only been introduced to only two women—Mary Cassatt and Georgia O’Keeffe. Examination of their work was so cursory that it didn’t occur to me that either artist might have something to say to me. But Frida Kahlo did. She might as well have been standing in that classroom, shouting, “Yes, there’s pain! Use it to create something that celebrates life.”

My favorite form of creativity as a child had always been writing stories or plays. But it wasn’t until Frida encouraged me that I began concentrating on writing. It’s been a long road, but my debut novel, La Luministe, released on March 15. (P.S. I learned my lesson about pre-judging people, even ones who are wealthy and fame-adjacent.) 

Greer: What is most challenging or exciting about researching historical women?

Paula: When I started teaching courses about women in the arts during the last days of Second Wave Feminism, there were no textbooks available. But I must give a shout-out to Karen Peterson and J.J. Wilson, who wrote Women Artists: Recognition & Reappraisal, surely the first survey of women in Western Art. Before I discovered that book, I had to collate one of those compilations of articles and essays that students love so well. That was the challenge.

The exciting part about researching women artists during those years was that Nancy Drew-style scholars were making new discoveries. Cleaning a painting attributed to Franz Hals revealed Judith Leyster’s signature! Music by Clara Schumann was discovered in an attic! I stayed up all night when the catalogue for Judy Chicago’s The Dinner Party came out. Reading the mini-biographies of 1,000 women of achievement made my heart race.

Today, women artists are having a moment. This year, we can see work by 20thc. women artists in Vienna (Sothebys, through May 19), Sixty Years of Work by Female Artists (Tate, London, opens in April), the Pre-Raphaelite Sisters (National Portrait Gallery, London, open in October), Lavinia Fontana and Sofonisba Anguissola (Prado, Madrid, also opens in October), and tipping over into 2020, a Joan Mitchell retrospective (San Francisco, SFMoMA, January, 2020.) And we can wallow in recent historical fiction about Judith Leyster, Sofonisba Anguissola, Lee Miller, and Dorothea Lange. And La Luministe, of course!

Greer: What can you tell us about your next book? 

Paula: I’m always reluctant to talk too much about my WIP. I’m of the school which holds that talking about a new book dilutes its strength. I need to keep all of my ideas percolating away in the back of my brain until they boil over onto the page. All I want to say is that my next book is about two rival American women artists. The idea of how there is only room for one outstanding woman in any given field, turning colleagues into competitors, is a construct that has no place in our world anymore. It never did.

And my question for you: What books did you read in your youth that might have led you to write about women detectives? The aforementioned Nancy Drew series? Or possibly From the Mixed-Up Files of Mrs. Basil E. Frankweiler? Or maybe my favorite, Harriet the Spy?

Greer: I did read most of those (ah, Harriet) but the girl-detective series that will always be closest to my heart was Trixie Belden. My local library had every single book in the series except one — they’d been sent a book with the wrong cover and never gotten around to replacing it, but I checked it regularly, just in case. And it’s great to see real women detectives of the past — Constance Kopp in Amy Stewart’s Girl Waits With Gun and subsequent novels, Kate Warne in my novel Girl in Disguise — inspiring more of today’s fiction. As you mentioned, historical fiction about women artists is bringing their stories back into the spotlight. I’m thrilled by this trend toward biographical fiction inspired by women of the past — artists, detectives, spies, scientists, warriors, everyone — because so many of these are stories we should have been celebrating all along.

Find out more about Paula and La Luministe at twitter.com/@pbutterwriter or paula-butterfield.com.

WomensHistoryReads interview: Lauren Willig

I was already excited to read Lauren Willig’s next book, The Summer Country, and after this interview, I’m even more excited! Lauren has a wealth of knowledge on history (“Back then, I was a professional historian.  Now I think of myself as a practical historian”), wonderful insights on why the historical record can be unkind to women, and a great sense of humor — you won’t want to miss her comparison of a certain British monarch to Winnie the Pooh. Let’s dive in!

Lauren Willig Photo Credit: Amanda Suanne

Greer: What’s your next book about and when will we see it?

Lauren: For nearly a decade now, I’ve been obsessing over a story I heard on a plantation tour in the Caribbean, about a fire, and a lost child (the “Portuguese ward” of the owner, who, of course, was really neither Portuguese nor his ward, but his child by an enslaved woman), and a mother who’s never mentioned in the story but really ought to be at the heart of it.  I talked about it so much that my agent finally said, “Just shut up and write it already.”  So I did. 

Coming to you in June 2019, The Summer Country is a big, sweeping historical epic set in colonial Barbados, spanning from a rising of enslaved people in 1816 to a cholera epidemic in 1854.  I call it my M.M. Kaye meets The Thorn Birds book.  (Extra points to anyone who can guess which M.M. Kaye book.)  

Greer: Do you consider yourself a historian?

Lauren: I was just re-reading Dorothy Sayers’s Gaudy Night—one of my favorite books of all time—and there’s a line that always goes straight to my heart: “Once I was a scholar.”  

There was a time, many a year ago, when I had my own little carrel in Widener Library; when I wrote conference papers with titles that were at least two lines long and always had a colon in the middle; and I could tell you with some certainty exactly where Charles I had been on any given day. (And whether he’d been stuck in a window, and if so, for how long.  No, seriously.  The misfortunate monarch went full on Winnie the Pooh, only it was a castle window, he was trying to escape Parliamentarian custody, and there were no honey pots involved.)  

Back then, I was a professional historian.  Now I think of myself as a practical historian.  I used to worry about things like the causes of the English Civil Wars. And whether one should properly refer to the conflict as the English Civil War or the English Civil Wars.  Now?  I worry about what it felt like to live through it.  What was it like in London when there was no coal coming in from Newcastle because confused armies were marauding back and forth?  (Sometimes accidentally fighting their own side, but that’s a whole other story.)  I worry about the details of daily life, about the materials of the clothes people wore—and whether those clothes itched.  I worry about the books they read, the songs they sang, the foods they ate, the words they used.  The meta questions still interest me, of course.  But what I really aim to do now is recreate the experience of someone living through a given time, not debating about it after with all the value of hindsight and an index.  

I’ve also broadened my scope dramatically.  Back then, one of my favorite scholarly catchphrases was “That’s not my field.” Now I get to roam where I’d like. I’ve written books set in Portugal during the Napoleonic Wars, in Jazz Age Kenya, in Victorian London, and, most recently, in the colonial Caribbean.  

Although I’ve been thinking a lot about my scholarly roots recently, and I think it may be time for me to finally tackle the English Civil War once again….  Except this time, with dialogue! (And far fewer footnotes.)

Greer: What do you find most challenging or most exciting about researching historical women?

Lauren: Have you noticed that when people talk about women, they tend to put them into certain very basic buckets?  It’s the old maiden-mother-crone problem—or the Madonna/whore problem, if you prefer. Women in history tend to be portrayed as either vamps or doormats.  Gossip gets repeated as fact.  If you’re an author researching a historical woman, it can be maddening slogging through the misinformation to get to the core of the character.

For a case in point (otherwise known as the opportunity to rant about something that’s been annoying me this week), I’ve just been reading up on Lucy Percy Hay, Countess of Carlisle. If you believe that old gossip the Duc de Rouchefoucauld, she’s the woman who stole the diamond tags Anne of Austria gave to the Duke of Buckingham—and if you think that sounds like a familiar story, it’s because Dumas used it, replacing the Countess of Carlisle with Milady de Winter.  Her historical reputation is dodgy, to say the least.  She’s portrayed as sexually rapacious, as vain, and venal, and scheming, a spy who spies for the sake of making trouble, a woman who uses men for her own gain.  Hmmm. Have we heard that sort of story about an ambitious woman before?  Recent attempts to rehabilitate her, though, are just as problematic.  One version I read claimed that her husband pimped her out to the Duke of Buckingham (disclaimer: slightly different phrasing may have been used).  There are a couple of problems with that.  One is that the affair began while her husband was out of the country.  The other is that, in trying to clear her of the taint of sexual vixen, it turns her into a victim, a woman acted upon rather than acting.  (And, really, let’s be honest, George Villiers, Duke of Buckingham, was a bit of something back then.  You can’t blame Lucy for going there.  She was a teenager.  Which of us didn’t fall for a handsome face as a teenager?)  

For the women whose lives are well-documented, we have to fight through prejudice, misinformation, or mind-numbing hagiography, in which the woman’s life is so white-washed and limned in virtue that you might as well have little birds tweeting on her shoulders like a Disney heroine.  And then you get the other end of the spectrum.  The women whose lives haven’t been recorded at all.  You go to the archives and come away with… nothing.  An emptiness where they ought to have been. My most recent book, The Summer Country, is set in colonial Barbados. One of my two heroines is an enslaved woman on a sugar plantation in the early nineteenth century. (She’s that missing mother I was talking about above.) In her book, Dispossessed Lives: Enslaved Women, Violence, and the Archive, Marisa J. Fuentes writes feelingly about how you put reconstruct a life from the gaps in the archive.  Because we have so painfully little.  A woman called Nanny Grigg, one of the (real) instigators of the 1816 rising of enslaved people, is one of the side characters in The Summer Country.  Here’s what we know about Nanny Grigg: she worked at Harrow Plantation.  She was valued at £130.  And that’s it.  We have some testimony from her own mouth (to be taken with a grain of salt, of course, given the circumstances), but otherwise that’s the sum total of our information.  On the plus side, of the two per cent of the enslaved population on Barbados that was literate, the majority of that two per cent were female.  So we do have some primary sources directly penned by women in my heroine’s situation, letters where the voices ring through after all this time.  

And that is what’s so exciting about researching and writing historical women.  When you manage to dig beneath the verbiage surrounding someone too well known and get a glimpse of the real woman beneath, or when you manage to put the scrap here and scrap here together to reconstruct the world of someone whose life wasn’t recorded (or was only recorded as a financial entry in a ledger book).  When you can find the real women despite it all—and bring them back to life on the page—that’s the best.

And now that I’ve babbled on, it’s back over to you, Greer!  What’s the first historical fiction novel you remember reading?  And did you know then that this was what you wanted to do?

Greer: It’s funny how our paths to historical fiction can be so different, even though we’ve ended up in the same place! In my early teens I roared through my local library’s complete collection of the Wagons West series by Dana Fuller Ross, completely transported to a world where 1830s pioneers braved the numerous dangers of America’s Western frontier, racing to Oregon to start new lives there — or die trying. Considering how much I loved that series, it’s kind of surprising how long it took me to come around to historical fiction as my genre! I actually ended up writing my first historical novel somewhat by accident. Most of my book ideas had been contemporary, but when I got the idea for The Magician’s Lie—we always hear about male stage magicians cutting women in half, but why not a woman cutting a man in half?—I realized I wanted to set it in the golden age of magic. So first I had to figure out when that was, and then find enough details to build out that world. It was a struggle to re-learn writing in that genre — all that research! — but now I love it. And with every book I get deeper into finding those details and using them to build worlds of the past for readers to enter. Historical fiction has such power. If I’m doing my job right, the reader can climb all the way into the world and get lost inside.

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loving those WOMAN 99 reader reviews!

My goodness, the last 10 days have FLOWN. How is it possible that Woman 99 only came out last week? Last week! The warm reception has been so wonderful to see. Pictures of the book on Instagram, reader reviews all over the place, in-person discussion at events — I’m so glad to have readers’ support and enthusiasm, since that’s what it’s all about.

And those reader reviews have been pouring in! There are already 200 ratings and 130 reviews on Goodreads, not to mention 40 reviews on Amazon. (Yes, I read them all, even the negative ones — and I appreciate them all, even the negative ones! Though obviously I enjoy reading the positive ones a lot more.)

Book bloggers have been reading and reviewing on their own blogs too, and here are highlights from a few I really loved (click on the blog name for the full review!):

“Woman 99 is powerful, upsetting, and incredibly descriptive, showing us through Charlotte’s struggles the restricted roles available to women, the way certain women could be so easily discarded by society, and the shocking lack of value a woman was deemed to have if she dared step outside society’s norms.” — Bookshelf Fantasies

“WOMAN 99 is historical fiction, women’s fiction, mystery, and thriller all rolled into one.  If you enjoy those genres, some nasty characters, and strong female characters, you will want to read this book.” — Silver’s Reviews

“Beautifully crafted with rich historical detail, flawless and fleshed out characters as well as an engaging storyline, WOMAN 99 by Greer Macallister is an unforgettable treat to read and savor.” - Fresh Fiction

And now back to more WomensHistoryReads — we’ve got half of March still to go!

WomensHistoryReads interview: Pam Jenoff

NYT bestseller Pam Jenoff is one of those triple-threat authors: author, mom, and professional in a non-writing field (in this case, law.) And she carries it all off with panache. The first of her books I read was The Diplomat’s Wife, more than a decade ago, and her upward trajectory since then has been wonderful to watch. I’m so glad to have her participate in this Q&Q&Q&A.

Pam Jenoff

Greer: Tell us about a woman (or group of women) from the past who has inspired your writing.

Pam: My new book, The Lost Girls of Paris, was inspired by the women who served in Britain’s Special Operations Executive during World War II.  These very brave women came from all walks of life to serve and were dropped behind enemy lines to engage in sabotage and subversion and work as couriers and radio operators.  They went knowing their life expectancy once deployed might only be a few weeks. Many were captured and some never came home.  The scope and magnitude of their heroism is breathtaking.

Greer: Do you consider yourself a historian?

Pam: I have a master’s degree in history from Cambridge so in some sense I am a trained historian, but when I write I am not principally wearing that hat.  I am a novelist and whenever someone says “based on true history” I cross it out and say “inspired by actual events” because while I endeavor to remain true to the past, I take great liberties with fiction and never want to stake too large a claim on past truth – that belongs to the people who lived it.

Greer: What do you find most challenging or most exciting about researching historical women?

Pam: I love writing about a female character, who through normal events would have lived in a very set path, but due to war or other catastrophe finds herself thrown off that path.  She often finds herself in circumstances she never could have imagined, with no skills or experience to handle them.  I like to see how she is tested and challenged, and how she changes and grows in response.

Greer: Beautifully put.

Pam: Question for you:  How did you do the research for Woman 99?

Greer: More so than for my previous books, I think, I had to research in a bunch of directions at once. My primary historical inspiration was Nellie Bly and her stint in Blackwell’s Asylum for “Ten Days in a Mad-House,” but that was really just the starting point. I read a number of first-hand narratives from women who were institutionalized during the time period I was writing about, including Charlotte Perkins Gilman, known to most as author of “The Yellow Wallpaper.” I feel like first-hand narratives, whenever you can get them, are the fastest route to the heart of a story. Partway through the final editing process I got to visit San Francisco, which definitely helped me fine-tune some of my descriptions. I don’t always find travel helpful since the locations described have generally changed so much since the period I’m writing about, but in this case, it really helped. Then there was the usual research, online and in books — what were people wearing? eating and drinking? what was in the news at the time? — to select the details that were really going to make the time come alive.

For more, visit pamjenoff.com .

WomensHistoryReads interview: Ellen Marie Wiseman

One of my favorite things about doing the WomensHistoryReads series is the opportunity to connect personally for the first time with writers whose work I admire. Every connection starts somewhere — and so often, with a book!

When I first decided to write a historical novel set in an insane asylum, I of course checked out books that shared that setting, and one of the most well-read and beloved of those is Ellen Marie Wiseman’s What She Left Behind. I was riveted by its twists and turns. Several years later, this series gave me the chance to reach out to Ellen for a Q&Q&Q&A, and I’m sure you’ll love reading her thoughts here as much as I did.

Ellen Marie Wiseman

Greer: Tell us about a woman (or group of women) from the past who has inspired your writing. 

Ellen: My mother and grandmother were the inspiration behind my first novel, THE PLUM TREE, which was the book that got me into this crazy author gig. The seeds for my debut were planted in my childhood, during numerous trips to visit my family in Germany. My mother came to America alone by ship when she was twenty to marry an American soldier she met while working at the PX outside her village, so I grew up listening to her stories about living in poverty in Germany during WWII.

I can’t describe what it felt like to go inside the root-cellar turned bomb-shelter where my mother hid as a child, along with her mother and siblings and as many other villagers as they could fit inside, everyone sitting on benches and mattresses, terrified and hungry, sometimes for days and nights on end. I was awed by my mother’s tales about food shortages and ration lines, the time she had to jump in a ditch with my grandmother to avoid being strafed by Allied planes, and how she and her brothers developed earaches from the constant wail of the air raid siren. My grandmother hid her illegal short-band radio so she could listen to foreign broadcasts instead of the Nazi controlled radio — a crime punishable by death. She also risked her life under the cover of night to put food out on the streets for the Jewish prisoners being marched by her house on their way to work at the air base, even though she could barely feed her own children. My grandfather was drafted, captured on the Russian front, and sent to a POW camp in Siberia. He eventually escaped and made his way back home, but my grandmother didn’t know if he was dead or alive for two years until he showed up on her doorstep one day. While he was gone, she mended military uniforms to survive. 

Those stories percolated in my head for years, until one day I realized I needed to write about what it was like for the average German family during WWII while still being sensitive to what the Nazis did to the Jewish people. I also wanted to give a voice to the wives and mothers who were trying to keep their children alive on the German home front while the men were off fighting. 

Greer: How would you describe what you write? 

Ellen: I write about women dealing with tough issues—WWII, the Holocaust, insane asylums, child labor, animal abuse, how we treat those considered “different”—while trying to show another perspective by using historical events we often didn’t learn about in school, at the same time offering hope that humans have the opportunity to grow and change, and the strength to survive almost anything. 

Greer: What’s your next book about and when will we see it? 

Ellen: My next book is set in the slums of Philadelphia during the Spanish Flu of 1918, the worst pandemic the world has ever known. The story follows a young immigrant whose mother dies during the epidemic, leaving her to care for her twin baby brothers until her father returns from the war. Eventually she’s forced to search the quarantined city for food and leaves her brothers sleeping in a bedroom cubby, with bottles, blankets, and promises to return as soon as possible. But when she comes back, they’re gone. 

The manuscript is currently in my editor’s hands, so I’m not sure of the title (although I have one in mind) or the release date. Hopefully it will be out by the end of the year!

Greer: Sounds amazing! Can’t wait to read it.

Ellen: A question for you: While writing my second book, WHAT SHE LEFT BEHIND, which is set at Willard State Lunatic Asylum, I found the research into the early treatment of mental patients shocking, yet fascinating. What I want to know is, what was the most surprising thing you learned during your research for WOMAN 99? (which I’m really looking forward to by the way!) 

Greer: Thanks! I’m sure my research experience was similar to yours in many ways. Some of the treatment of those institutionalized for mental illness was just appalling, and the doctors, each well-intentioned or utter quacks, attempted all sorts of “cures” that we now know fly in the face of science. Water cures, rest cures, benches, pulling teeth — they’d just throw whatever they could at the problem. If anything, I found myself surprised when I came across treatments that do now make sense given what we know. Some asylums offered fresh air in a beautiful setting, light work, regular exercise, and removal from the everyday environment. Which sounds like the kind of yoga retreat modern people would pay a lot of money for! So one really has to look at particular institutions and not paint them all with the same brush. I invented Goldengrove Asylum so I could combine strengths and weaknesses of different institutions to tell the story I wanted to tell.

For more on Ellen and her books: 

Facebook: https://www.facebook.com/EllenMarieWisemanAuthor

Website: http://ellenmariewiseman.com

Amazon: https://www.amazon.com/Ellen-Marie-Wiseman/e/B0084VL3Z8/ref=dp_byline_cont_book_1

Bookbub: https://www.bookbub.com/profile/ellen-marie-wiseman?list=about

Goodreads: https://www.goodreads.com/author/show/5416814.Ellen_Marie_Wiseman

Twitter: https://twitter.com/EllenMarieWise

Instagram: https://www.instagram.com/ellenmariewiseman

Pinterest: https://www.pinterest.com/emwauthor/

NY Journal of Books review of WOMAN 99 is in!

I love reading reviews of my books. Yes, it’s a lot more fun when the reviews are positive, but I also read the negative ones, and sometimes I even find something to like and appreciate about them. They can be very amusing. But do I enjoy positive ones more? Sure do!

So I really enjoyed this one from the New York Journal of Books. ““Macallister’s exploration of both the public and the personal takes this novel to a higher level.” (Need to add that to my Praise page!)

And it’s always gratifying when a reviewer picks up exactly what I’m putting down. This is exactly the kind of conclusion I hoped readers would draw from these pages, and so well-expressed: “As with the best historical novels, Woman 99 resonates with our current social upheavals. It illuminates how far we, as a society, have come and how far we have yet to go.“

Read the full review here.

More Best Books Honors for WOMAN 99!

Oh, this has been so fun. Adding to my Honors page, like adding to my Praise page, makes my day.

So in addition to the She Reads and Smart Bitches honors I already blogged about, three more to mention:

1. Best New Books of March, Chicago Review of Books

2. Best New Books of the week, Avalon Public Library

3. March’s Biggest Books on the Professional Book Nerds podcast

As you can imagine, it’s been quite a week! Can’t wait to see what next week will bring. (For one thing, I know it’ll bring more WomensHistoryReads interviews…)

WOMAN 99 is in the world!

SO MUCH CRAZINESS!

Launch day for Woman 99 was so crazy I didn’t get a chance to update the blog or even switch things over on my site to say that the book was OUT instead of COMING SOON. But it’s out now! Available wherever books are sold. (Which I think always makes it sound like I don’t KNOW where books are sold, but it just means you should be able to find it in bookstores or online.)

And another list! Avalon Library named Woman 99 one of their best new books of the week.

More to come soon, when I get a spare moment! Just back from a fantastic event in conversation with Kate Quinn, whose The Huntress is every bit as mind-blowing as The Alice Network. Kate also happens to be one of the most generous, hardworking, and kind-spirited writers I know. So her success is really just wonderful to see. Catch her on tour if you can — she’s a great speaker — and definitely get your own copy of The Huntress to devour.

Celebrating Women's History Month

As you can tell from my #WomensHistoryReads series and pieces like this one on BookBub that are timed to Women’s History Month, I think the month is worth celebrating. But when Pamela D. Toler, author of Women Warriors: An Unexpected History — which you should definitely pick up — interviewed me and included a question about the month itself, I took the opportunity to dig a little deeper into my thoughts, assumptions and hopes for what Women’s History Month means.

Part of my answer: “It’s no excuse not to call attention to great books by and/or about women the rest of the year, but it’s an excellent occasion to dig deeper and shout louder.”

You can read the complete answer, and the rest of the interview, at History in the Margins.

WomensHistoryReads interview: Jenna Blum

As we roll forward with Women’s History Month — and of course WomensHistoryReads — I’m thrilled to welcome Jenna Blum to the blog for today’s Q&Q&Q&A. If you’ve encountered Jenna online or in life, you know she’s warm, smart and charming, so I was thrilled when she agreed to answer some questions for this series. And her question stumped me for days! Without further ado…

Jenna Blum

Greer: How would you describe what you write? 

Jenna: Literary fiction, by which I mean the characters drive the story as opposed to a genre-driven plot. As a reader and writer—and person!—I’m interested in people and why they do what they do, particularly when they have to make difficult decisions and when they make awful ones, as we all do, because of their circumstances or psyches, trauma or love. And then: What happens as a result?

Greer: What’s your next book about and when will we see it? 

Jenna: My next novel is a prequel-sequel to my latest novel, The Lost Family—but it will also be a standalone (so although of course I highly recommend you read The Lost Family, if you don’t, you’ll still be able to enjoy Book 4!). It’s about a German-Jewish Auschwitz survivor named Peter Rashkin who has emigrated to the States and had a great career as a restaurateur/ chef in New York; in his 70s, a catalyst from his long-buried past returns to Peter’s life, forcing him to go back to Germany, where he hasn’t set foot since 1945–and where he discovers that nothing about his past there as a young man is what it seems. 

Greer: I love this prequel-sequel idea! Last question for you: What book, movie or TV show would your readers probably be surprised to find out you love? 

Stephen King’s novel The Stand—and his early short stories from Night Shift and Skeleton Crew. People think of King primarily as a horror writer, but I love his writing for its portraiture of individual and group psychology in extreme circumstances—and the man can make a story MOVE.

Jenna: If you could choose one Book Boyfriend, who would it be and why? (Question inspired by Andrea Peskind Katz of Great Thoughts, Great Readers and PopSugar’s Brenda Janowitz, who fight over my chef protagonist from The Lost Family, Peter Raskin!) 

Greer: I have been thinking about this question for weeks! So many to choose from! Of course the first potential boyfriend candidates that come to mind are from my own books — a girl could do much worse than Henry from Woman 99 or Clyde from The Magician’s Lie (OK, he has his flaws, but he’s ambitious, dreamy, and good with numbers! And he, too, loves books.) But I think I’d better cast a wider net for the sake of fairness. Ah, got it. I just finished reading Crazy Rich Asians and definitely put Nick Young in the upper echelons of the swoon-worthy category. He’s not perfect, but he’s tender, thoughtful, loyal, and smoking hot — plus there’s that whole sinfully-rich thing. Yes, I think Nick sounds like a good way to go.

For more, check out www.jennablum.com.