{"id":1331,"date":"2014-04-23T13:38:06","date_gmt":"2014-04-23T19:38:06","guid":{"rendered":"http:\/\/auntagathas.com\/aa\/?p=1331"},"modified":"2014-04-23T13:38:06","modified_gmt":"2014-04-23T19:38:06","slug":"author-interview-lauren-willig","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/auntagathas.com\/aa\/author-interview-lauren-willig\/","title":{"rendered":"Author Interview: Lauren Willig"},"content":{"rendered":"

\"Lauren<\/a>Lauren Willig<\/a> is the bestselling author of the popular \u201cPink Carnation\u201d series, which is drawing to a close.\u00a0 Drawn to the cover of her latest novel, <\/i>The Ashford Affair, <\/i><\/b>I discovered a new author to love as I inhaled this story of London and Africa in the 20\u2019s and a young Manhattan lawyer in the present day.\u00a0 Ms. Willig will be joining us in September at the Kerrytown BookFest and she graciously agreed to be interviewed.\u00a0 Welcome, Lauren!<\/i><\/p>\n

Q: This is the first book of yours I\u2019ve read, though of course I\u2019ve sold MANY of them thanks in part to Tasha Alexander, who told me years back you were one of her favorite authors.\u00a0 I think my first question is about the time period \u2013 have you always wanted to set a novel in this time frame?<\/i><\/p>\n

A: First of all, may I say how much I adore Tasha Alexander?\u00a0 She is both a wonderful writer and a lovely person, and there\u2019s no one I would rather be stuck with on slippery back roads in the middle of a freak snowstorm.\u00a0 (And I speak from experience in this.\u00a0 Somehow, we managed a) not to die, b) to acquire Starbucks, and c) to make it to the library at which we were speaking.)<\/p>\n

Back to the question… The answer is a resounding no.\u00a0 I never intended to set a book in the 1920s.\u00a0 I had always assumed that if I ever left my Napoleonic-set Pink Carnation series, I\u2019d go back in time, and do something set in the sixteenth or seventeenth century, since that was, once upon a time, my area of academic expertise.\u00a0 I\u2019ve always enjoyed vacationing in the 1920s and 30s\u2014I\u2019ve been a P.G. Wodehouse fan since childhood\u2014but I never intended to set up shop there.<\/p>\n

Then a few different things happened all at once: I finished the ninth Pink Carnation book way ahead of schedule, leaving me with time to spare; Nancy Mitford\u2019s Wigs on the Green<\/i> was finally released after a long ban, which set me on a Mitford\/Waugh\/Thirkell reading binge; and a friend gave me a copy of Frances Osborne\u2019s The Bolter<\/i>.\u00a0 And suddenly I found myself thinking a lot more seriously about the 1920s…<\/p>\n

Q: The 20\u2019s are such a rich time period, and you even have one of the characters reflect on how \u201cbig\u201d the women\u2019s lives were as compared to today\u2019s smaller concerns.\u00a0 Do you think that\u2019s true?<\/i><\/p>\n

A: I do.\u00a0 To be fair, I know people who live \u201cbig\u201d lives now\u2014one of my old classmates is in the Sudan right now, advocating for women\u2014 but they\u2019re the ones who have actively sought out those experiences and put themselves in the way of adventure.\u00a0 The generation born around 1900, as Bea and Addie were, found themselves in the center of a series of cataclysmic events whether they wanted it or not.\u00a0 World War I… the Jazz Age revolution in mores… World War II… There was so much happening, so much changing, so many dramas taking place from family to family.<\/p>\n

One of the things that fascinated me as I was writing the historical sections of The Ashford Affair<\/i> was the question of thwarted expectations.\u00a0 My characters, pre-World War I, grow up with sets of expectations about their world and their place in it that are blown sky high by the war and the social changes that follow.\u00a0 They have no choice in the matter.\u00a0 Their world has turned upside down on them.\u00a0 How they adapt\u2014or fail to adapt\u2014to these changes provided the meat of the story for me.<\/p>\n

Q: I loved the dovetailing of the present\/past storyline.\u00a0 I was equally interested in both stories, which is not always the case for me in a book that utilizes this type of structure.\u00a0 Did you yourself feel more passionately about one storyline over the other?<\/i><\/p>\n

A: This book really originated with the historical story, with the tale of two cousins in an Edwardian great house, one the spoiled daughter of the house, one the poor cousin, and the ways in which their lives twist and turn and intersect, taking them all the way up through the twentieth century.\u00a0 But when I sat down to write that story it sounded, in the words of one of my old history professors,\u00a0 like \u201cone damn thing after another.\u201d \u00a0That story, the historical story, needed the modern frame to give it depth and meaning.\u00a0 Once I figured that out, the two went together like peanut butter and chocolate.<\/p>\n

I will admit, for the most part, I felt closer to the historical story.\u00a0 But neither worked for me without the other.\u00a0 I wrote them exactly as you\u2019re reading them, in a rhythm of historical\/modern\/historical\/modern.\u00a0 Oddly, though, my two favorite chapters are both in the modern section.<\/p>\n

In my upcoming book, That Summer<\/i>, which goes back and forth between 2009 and 1849, it was exactly the other way around: I felt much closer to the modern plot-line\u2014but the chapters of which I\u2019m proudest are on the historical side.<\/p>\n

Q: I know you have a law degree.\u00a0 How do the skills you gathered in law school play out in your life as a novelist?\u00a0 I assume research skills are a big one.<\/i><\/p>\n

A: For research, I have to give the credit, not to law school, but to my pre-law school years as a grad student in the Harvard History department.\u00a0 There is nothing like cramming for General Exams to teach you your way around the library or to make you master the art of assimilating large amounts of information in record time.\u00a0 I followed that up with a year of dissertation research in England, which taught me how to navigate everything from the intricacies of the Bodleian to a one room regional archive where none of the papers in the box have been sorted because no one on staff can read seventeenth century handwriting.\u00a0 (And greet you with cries of gratitude as they ask you if you can possibly take the time to catalogue the papers for them before you have to run for your train back to London.)<\/p>\n

At the end of that research year, I came to the conclusion that academia was not for me and moved down the block from the history department to the law school.<\/p>\n

By one of those odd quirks of fate, I signed my first book contract my first month of law school.\u00a0 It was a two book contract.\u00a0 One had already been written while I was avoiding working on my dissertation.\u00a0 The other was only a glint in my eye and a few scribbled notes on scraps of paper.\u00a0 I certainly wasn\u2019t going to say no to the book contract\u2014it was what I\u2019d always wanted\u2014but there I was, right at the beginning of the pressure cooker that is 1L year.<\/p>\n

The biggest skill law school taught me?\u00a0 Just how much caffeine you can consume before life-threatening palpitations ensue.\u00a0 The second biggest skill?\u00a0 How to get books written on deadline while juggling other obligations.\u00a0 (Which, come to think of it, is closely related to point one, caffeine.)\u00a0 I did revisions on my first book 1L year; wrote my second book, The Masque of the Black Tulip<\/i>, 2L year; and scribbled my third book, The Deception of the Emerald Ring<\/i>, 3L year, in between desperately trying to make up my pro bono requirement, complete my 3L project, and deal with those pesky things called classes.<\/p>\n

Currently, I\u2019m putting those juggling skills to the test as I learn how to balance book deadlines with a rather lively eight-month-old who doesn\u2019t seem to understand that Mommy\u2019s laptop is for typing, not eating.<\/p>\n

Q: I am interested in taking a long view of mystery fiction \u2013 I think historical mysteries kind of came of age with Ellis Peters and then Anne Perry.\u00a0 There were many medieval mystery writers who were popular and successful for years and then many Victorian ones, still a strong trend.\u00a0 Presently there\u2019s a strong romantic element to historical mystery fiction, which I\u2019m enjoying.\u00a0 Do you consider yourself primarily a romance or a mystery writer?<\/i><\/p>\n

A: Tracking the evolution of genres is one of my favorite pastimes!\u00a0 It\u2019s fascinating watching how they grow and change over time.\u00a0 As the historical romance market has narrowed, I\u2019ve seen many former romance novelists move to historical mystery, bringing with them that romantic element.<\/p>\n

As for me, I call myself a historical fiction writer, which is my way of squaring the circle.<\/p>\n

When I sold my first book, The Secret History of the Pink Carnation<\/i>, way back in 2003, I thought I\u2019d written a romance, and told my agent so.\u00a0 He politely disagreed.\u00a0 So did my publisher. \u00a0 They decided I\u2019d written something entirely new and different: historical chick lit!\u00a0 (This being in the era where chick lit, the publishing term du jour, was pupping new sub-genres by the second: mommy lit, lad lit, goodness only knows what else lit.)<\/p>\n

While the book was in production, chick lit died an abrupt death (picture a Monty Python character grasping his throat, emitting a loud \u201cargh!\u201d and keeling over).\u00a0 On the eve of my first interview, I got a panicked call from my publisher, advising me that, whatever I did, I was not to call my book chick lit.\u00a0 Or romance.\u00a0 Just call it historical fiction, they said.<\/p>\n

On my first book tour, my very first stop was at a mystery bookstore, where I was informed that it was, in fact, a mystery, and hadn\u2019t I realized this?\u00a0 I hadn\u2019t, but it didn\u2019t overly surprise me.\u00a0 My favorite tipple of choice was a bit of Elizabeth Peters or Dorothy Cannell, so it was no wonder that mystery had seeped into the bones of my book.<\/p>\n

During that first year, my book was called pretty much everything except sci-fi.\u00a0 I was just happy to have it out there, whatever it was.\u00a0 Since The Secret History of the Pink Carnation<\/i> was shelved in that wonderful catch-all, Fiction & Literature, I was spared the agonizing question of what it really was, or, for that matter, what I really was.<\/p>\n

These days, I\u2019ve complicated life for myself yet again.\u00a0 The Pink Carnation books were primarily historical, making it simplest for me to clump them as historical fiction (or historical romance, or historical mystery, depending on who I was talking to).\u00a0 My recent stand-alones, The Ashford Affair<\/i> and That Summer<\/i>, have been in the new genre called time slip, a mix of historical fiction and women\u2019s fiction.\u00a0 While they do have a strong historical component, there\u2019s enough women\u2019s fiction in them that it\u2019s no longer an easy out to call them historical fiction.\u00a0 And, of course, there\u2019s that mystery element in both of them, too…<\/p>\n

So maybe I should just say that I write a little bit of everything?<\/p>\n

Q: I also liked the contrast of Addie and Bea.\u00a0 That must have been fun to write.\u00a0 Did you feel it was difficult to explicate Bea\u2019s character, and make her if not likeable, understandable?<\/i><\/p>\n

A: I\u2019ve always enjoyed writing about anti-heroines, taking difficult characters and trying to show what makes them tick.<\/p>\n

For those who haven\u2019t read the book yet, Ashford<\/i> is the story of two cousins: Bea, the daughter of an earl, and Addie, the poor cousin, who become fast friends as children, a friendship that is tested by time and events, and, most of all, by their own characters.<\/p>\n

The idea that motivated me, writing about Addie and Bea, was what I think of as a \u201cpoison friendship,\u201d one of those legacy friendships that you maintain because of a childhood bond, but where the characters of the friends are such that, despite a deep and real affection, they consistently bring out the worst in each other.\u00a0 In the case of Addie and Bea, each has something the other lacks.\u00a0 In Bea, Addie sees the social status, the easy sense of belonging, that she herself will never have; in Addie, Bea sees someone who can navigate this strange, new, post-war world.\u00a0 Each is uncomfortable and defensive with the other, but that resentment is complicated by a very real affection for each other and a nostalgia for their shared childhood.\u00a0 Bea, in particular, is threatened by Addie\u2019s growing independence and attempts to meddle in Addie\u2019s life, \u201cfor her own good\u201d\u2014or, at least, so she tells herself.<\/p>\n

As you say, it was, indeed, often difficult to present Bea in a sympathetic light.\u00a0 But I felt, strongly, that I wanted to show how much her actions were motivated by insecurity and unhappiness rather than meanness, and how much, at the base of it, she really does love her cousin, even if that love sometimes takes rather warped forms.\u00a0 That\u2019s why I chose to have three narrators for the book: Clemmie, our modern heroine; Addie, the historical heroine\u2014and Bea.\u00a0 It was crucial for me to get Bea\u2019s voice in there, so we could see her on her own terms.<\/p>\n

Those Bea chapters were the most fun to write.\u00a0 There\u2019s nothing like a bitter, confused character to make for a very strong narrative voice…<\/p>\n

Q: Do you feel like romance and\/or historical novels are placed in a type of\u00a0 fiction \u201cghetto\u201d?\u00a0 In our store it\u2019s a solid, steady selling segment and we feature these books, but I don\u2019t know if that\u2019s the case everywhere.<\/i><\/p>\n

A: Back in my grad school days, romance and mystery were kept underground, tucked away in the basement of the Harvard Coop.\u00a0 Geography as metaphor?\u00a0 Of course, even that basement section was a small triumph.\u00a0 When I started at the Harvard history department, in 1999, there had been no romance in the Coop at all.\u00a0 For my romance fix, I had to take the train down to the big B&N at Downtown Crossing, carrying away piles of novels to keep me until my next jaunt downtown.<\/p>\n

That being said, I do believe that bit by bit, the barriers are being eroded.\u00a0 My own suspicion is that the thin end of the wedge came with chick lit, which, in trade paperback, infiltrated the upper regions of the bookstore.\u00a0 Over the past few years, romance has made inroads into previously hostile territory: Kirkus Reviews<\/em> and the Washington Post<\/em>, among others, now have romance blogs.<\/p>\n

The real issue, though, is how we as readers treat these sorts of fiction.\u00a0 I\u2019ve heard so many friends qualify their enjoyment of a book with, \u201cOf course, it\u2019s not literature, but…\u201d or \u201cIt\u2019s just a romance, but…\u201d\u00a0 No matter where these books are placed in the store, if we belittle our own reading preferences, then we keep genre fiction in a metaphorical ghetto.<\/p>\n

Q: I have to ask what your influences were writing this novel \u2013 obviously there\u2019s some <\/i>Out of\u00a0 Africa\/Isak Dinesen influence, and I always think of Vera Brittain\u2019s <\/i>Testament of Youth when I read a story set in this period. There\u2019s even a bit of a “Downton Abbey” feel.<\/i><\/p>\n

A: The direct catalyst for this book was Frances Osborne\u2019s The Bolter<\/i>, about the life of the notorious Idina Sackville, who racketed back and forth between England and Kenya, acquiring and discarding husbands along the way.\u00a0 The entire Happy Valley set, of which Idina was at the center, and their associates, provided rich background reading for this novel\u2014there are excellent biographies of Beryl Markham, Denys Finch-Hatton, and Alice de Janze among others.\u00a0 In terms of the Kenya portion of the book, I also owe a great debt to Elspeth Huxley, whose semi-autobiographical books about life in Kenya (her most famous is The Flame Trees of Thika<\/i>) provided a great deal of the sensory details of life as a settler.<\/p>\n

But that\u2019s just the Kenya bit.\u00a0 On the England side, I wallowed in novels, biographies, and letters.\u00a0 I\u2019ve been a Mitfordian for a long time, so I used this as an excuse to re-read all my Mitford biographies, and the writings of the various Mitfords themselves, from Jessica Mitford\u2019s Hons and Rebels<\/i> to all of Nancy Mitford\u2019s novels, and any collected correspondence I could get my hands on.\u00a0 Anne de Courcy\u2019s biography of the Curzon girls, which I\u2019d devoured years before, when I was living in England, provided a very real sense of what it was like to be a debutante in those immediate post-war years, as well as life in a great house with aristocratic and distant parents.\u00a0 I also found myself both appalled and fascinated by the many World War I memoirs that illustrated just how much that war shattered the men who came back from it, particularly Rupert Graves\u2019s Goodbye to All That<\/i>, which is funny and heart-breaking all at once.\u00a0 For the post-War period, I was very much struck by Juliet Nicolson\u2019s monograph, The Great Silence<\/i>, and\u2014how could I leave it out?\u2014the Testament of Youth<\/i>.<\/p>\n

Working my way back in time, there was also, over all of it, the shadow of the Edwardians.\u00a0 My Addie\u2019s parents were Bloomsbury sorts, so I got to use this as an excuse to re-read Howard\u2019s End<\/em> and generally wallow in E.M. Forster.<\/p>\n

I guess the short answer to your question is that this book was a long-simmering stew of literature and monographs and biographies I\u2019d read for the sheer joy of it over the years.\u00a0 Looking back, it\u2019s hard to pick apart just what influenced what.<\/p>\n

I\u2019d say a lifetime watching “Masterpiece Theatre” on Sunday evenings probably also played a large part in it!\u00a0\u00a0“Upstairs, Downstairs,” “House of Elliot,” vaguely remembered programs about the Sackvilles that aired when I was in my teens, all of these went into the stew.\u00a0 (Although, ironically, I didn\u2019t start watching “Downton” until I was about three quarters of the way through writing Ashford<\/i>.)<\/p>\n

If anyone is curious about the books I used when researching Ashford<\/i>, you can find a much longer list on my website<\/a>.<\/p>\n

Q: And what are your influences generally?\u00a0 Favorite writers?\u00a0 I usually forbid the answer \u201cJane Austen\u201d because it\u2019s so common, but in your case it makes sense!<\/i><\/p>\n

A: Oddly enough, Austen wasn\u2019t really the first person to pop to mind!\u00a0 Although, of course, it would be disingenuous to deny her influence.\u00a0 It seeps into everything I write, whether I mean it to or not.\u00a0 My primary influences?\u00a0 A hodge podge of L.M. Montgomery, M.M. Kaye, P.G. Wodehouse, Nancy Mitford, Angela Thirkell, Dorothy Sayers, Mary Stewart, Diana Gabaldon, Judith Merkle Riley, and, really, above all, Elizabeth Peters\/Barbara Michaels.\u00a0 I stumbled upon Elizabeth Peters when I was twelve, and there was no looking back from there.<\/p>\n

Q: And what\u2019s next?\u00a0 What are you working on now?<\/i><\/p>\n

A: My next book, That Summer<\/i>, comes out on June 3rd<\/sup>. \u00a0 (Appearing soon on the shelves of Aunt Agatha\u2019s!)\u00a0 A modern woman inherits an old house in a suburb of London, where she discovers a lost Pre-Raphaelite painting hidden in the back of a wardrobe.\u00a0 Her quest to discover the painting\u2019s provenance uncovers secrets deep in the family\u2019s past\u2014and her own childhood.\u00a0 The story goes back and forth between 2009 and the early days of the Pre-Raphaelite movement in 1849.\u00a0 Naturally, I couldn\u2019t resist co-opting Dante Gabriel Rossetti as a side character!<\/p>\n

Right now, I\u2019m finishing up another stand alone.\u00a0 This one is set in 1927, about a young woman who discovers that the father she believed long dead is really alive\u2014and an earl, with a whole other legitimate family.\u00a0 Stung by this long betrayal, she enters society under an assumed name.\u00a0 But is revenge really what she wants? \u00a0 The 1927 book\u2014still untitled\u2014will come out in 2015.<\/p>\n

In addition to these stand-alone novels, I\u2019m also rounding off my long-running Pink Carnation series.\u00a0 The eleventh book in the series, The Mark of the Midnight Manzanilla<\/i>, comes out this August, to be followed by the twelfth\u2014and last!\u2014book in the series, The Lure of the Moonflower<\/i>, in August 2015.<\/p>\n

It\u2019s hard to say goodbye to the Pink Carnation series after all this time, but I\u2019m having a ball working on the last book, which is set in Portugal in 1807.\u00a0 And it does mean more free time to start working on other projects… possibly even a mystery series!<\/p>\n

Thanks so much for having me here to the Aunt Agatha\u2019s blog! (Or newsletter \u2013 ed.)<\/i> If anyone wants to know more about The Ashford Affair<\/i> or any of my other books, please do come visit me on my website (www.laurenwillig.com<\/a>) or my Facebook author page (https:\/\/www.facebook.com\/LaurenWillig<\/a>).\u00a0 I\u2019m always delighted to have an excuse to procrastinate!<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"

Lauren Willig is the bestselling author of the popular \u201cPink Carnation\u201d series, which is drawing to a close.\u00a0 Drawn to the cover of her latest novel, The Ashford Affair, I discovered a new author to love as I inhaled this story of London and Africa in the 20\u2019s and a young Manhattan lawyer in the … Read more<\/a><\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":2,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"closed","ping_status":"closed","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[9],"tags":[],"class_list":["post-1331","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","hentry","category-interviews"],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/auntagathas.com\/aa\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/1331","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/auntagathas.com\/aa\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/auntagathas.com\/aa\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/auntagathas.com\/aa\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/2"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/auntagathas.com\/aa\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=1331"}],"version-history":[{"count":1,"href":"https:\/\/auntagathas.com\/aa\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/1331\/revisions"}],"predecessor-version":[{"id":1333,"href":"https:\/\/auntagathas.com\/aa\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/1331\/revisions\/1333"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/auntagathas.com\/aa\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=1331"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/auntagathas.com\/aa\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=1331"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/auntagathas.com\/aa\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=1331"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}