The Hot Author Report

Interview with Hope Edelman – Author of The Possibility of Everything

Hope Edelman is the author of five nonfiction books, including the bestsellers The Possibility of Everything, Motherless Daughters, and Motherless Mothers. Her articles, essays, and reviews have appeared in numerous publications, including the New York Times, the Chicago Tribune, the San Francisco Chronicle, the Washington Post, Glamour, Child, Real Simple, Writer’s Digest, the Huffington Post, and Self, and she has contributed to several anthologies, including The Bitch in the House, Blindsided by a Diaper, and the forthcoming Behind the Bedroom Door. She is the recipient of a New York Times notable book of the year designation and a Pushcart Prize for creative nonfiction. She lives in Topanga Canyon, California, with her husband and their two daughters.

You can visit her website at www.thepossibilityofeverything.com.

Q: It’s rare today to find an author who does nothing but write for a living. Do you have a ‘real’ job other than writing, and if so, what is it? What are some other jobs you’ve had in your life? Have they influenced/inspired your writing?

Nearly all of my jobs during adulthood have been writing related. After college my first job was as a magazine editor, and then I went to graduate school for nonfiction writing. In graduate school I taught freshman composition and also did freelance writing for magazines, and immediately after graduation I started writing my first book and teaching nonfiction workshops. If I reach way back though, to high school and college, I had a wide variety of jobs, from weaver’s assistant to ticket-taker at a drive-in to shoe salesperson to waitress at an Italian restaurant. Maybe that’s why I write so many pieces set during adolescence—because for me it was a much more eclectic and interesting time.

Q: What compelled you to write your first book?

My first book was Motherless Daughters, which was about the long-term effects of early mother loss on women. My mother died when I was seventeen and I spent nearly ten years fruitlessly looking for a book that addressed the issues daughters like me faced. Eventually I decided to write the book I needed to read.

Q: Have you always wanted to be a writer?

Yes, for as long as I can remember. I was an early reader and therefore an early writer. The first story I can remember writing was in the first grade. It was about a set of elves who ran a snowflake factory and were starting to run out of original designs. My first-grade teacher, Mrs. Masarky, called our house and asked my mother not to write my stories for me. After my mother said she hadn’t, the teacher became my biggest fan. Twenty-five years later when I was on my first book tour, Mrs. Masarky sat in the front row at a bookstore in our hometown and proudly told everyone, “I knew it!”

Q: How did you feel the day you held the copy of your first book in your hands?

I was living in the West Village in New York, and I walked into Crown Books on the corner of Eighth Street and Sixth Avenue the day before my official release date. When I saw my book already displayed in the front of the store, I screamed. Then I picked it up and started to cry.

Q: What type of music, if any, do you listen to while you write? Do you need the noise or the silence?

I write in silence, usually, but sometimes when I’m editing I listen to John Gorka or Neil Young. When I’m writing a book I often start the day by taking a two-mile walk along the beach with my iPod and thinking about what I’ll write about when I get to my office. I have a mix of songs I listen to on those walks. The first four are “Ain’t Wastin’ Time No More” by the Allman Brothers, “Taking the Long Way Home” by the Dixie Chicks, “Can’t You See” by the Marshall Tucker Band and “I’m On My Way” by the Pretenders. There are also songs in there by Counting Crows, R.E.M., Billy Bragg, James McMurtry, and Fleetwood Mac.

Q: How do you balance out the writer’s life and the rest of life? Do you get up early? Stay up late? Ignore friends and family for certain periods of time?

I get up on weekdays around 6:15 a.m., get my kids ready for school, drop them at the bus stop, and then start my workday. Most days I work until 2:30, when it’s time to pick them up. The problem with this is that I’m naturally a night writer. I do my best work after 9 p.m. So I often write for an hour or two after they go to bed. When I’m on a book deadline, about once a month my husband watches the kids for a weekend and I check into an inexpensive hotel up the coast for two nights and write nonstop. I can get more done in those two-and-a-half day marathons than I can accomplish in two weeks of regular workdays.

Q: Is there an established writer you admire and emulate in your own writing? Do you have a writing mentor?

I’m a big fan of Margaret Mead for her ability to marshal large amounts of anthropological data and package it in a very presentable manner for the layperson. I also appreciate her attention to detail. My writing mentors in graduate school were two of my professors, Carl Klaus and Mary Swander. Carl is now retired but continues to be very prolific, and Mary was recently named the Poet Laureate of Iowa. I still send them my books before they’re published.

Q: When growing up, did you have a favorite author, book series, or book?

I read the entire Little House series several times, and at one point even believed I was the reincarnation of Laura Ingalls Wilder. And I was extremely moved by The Hiding Place by Corrie Ten Boom, a Holocaust narrative written by a Dutch woman whose family had been arrested for hiding Jews. She became one of my childhood heroines both for her courage and her writing. Earlier this year we were on a family vacation in the Netherlands and I saw a sign in Haarlem pointing to the Ten Boom House. It was already dusk and the house—which is now a museum—was closed, but it was well worth it for me to stand on the street outside and just place my hands on its outer walls. How many adults get to visit the homes of their childhood heroines?

Q: Where you have lived and what you have experienced can influence your writing in many ways. Are there any specific locations or experiences that have popped up in your books?

I think everywhere I’ve lived has popped up at one time or another. I’m very influenced by place, and believe that setting often determines the kind of experiences we have. My hometown of Spring Valley, New York, which was a rather nondescript suburb, became the setting of an essay I wrote about Bruce Springsteen and my high school boyfriend, and both Evanston, Illinois, where I went to college and Knoxville, Tennessee, where I lived for three years afterward, appeared in Motherless Daughters. In my newest book, I write some about Iowa and quite a bit about Topanga Canyon, where we live now.

Q: What is your writing space like? Do you have a designated space? What does it look like? On the couch, laptop, desk? Music? Lighting? Typing? Handwriting?

When I’m at home I often write at night at the dark wood table in our dining area (where I am right now) or sitting at the island in the middle of the kitchen. I also have an office in Topanga where I do much of my administrative work for classes, and store all my books and files for research, but I’m more likely to be found writing in one of our local cafes. I write on a white Sony Vaio laptop that travels with me from place to place.

Q: Is there any particular book that, when you read it, you thought, “I wish I had written that!”?

The Time Traveler’s Wife. I thought the writing was absolutely gorgeous, and that I could have fixed some of the small holes in the story. But since I couldn’t ever have come up with that story myself, maybe what I really wished was that I’d been its editor.

Q: In my experience, some things come quite easily (like creating the setting) and other things aren’t so easy (like deciding on a title). What comes easily to you and what do you find more difficult?

Titles always come easy to me. Dialogue is my biggest challenge. In nonfiction it’s a matter of recreating dialogue, and while I can often remember the gist of what was said I’m not as effective at putting it into words that reveal character and nuance and humor. I often have to rewrite passages of dialogue fifteen or twenty times until I’m happy with the way they sound.

Q: Have you ever had a character take over a story and move it in a different direction than you had originally intended? How did you handle it?

Since I write nonfiction, I have to stick to the storyline as it actually developed, so I can’t move off in different directions no matter how much I think it will improve the story. But when I was writing The Possibility of Everything I fell in love with the character of Shakti, a woman we meet at a jungle lodge in Belize. At a certain point, I thought, You know, in the movie version of this book the character of Shakti would be the one to bring the family to the healer even though in real life it was the son of the resort owner who brought us. I knew it would make the story better to tinker with that detail, but since this was memoir I couldn’t change things that much. Also, I’ve found that in memoir once you change one detail it requires that you change another, and another, and before you know it you’re writing something that feels more like fiction.

Q: Now that you are a published author, does it feel differently than you had imagined?

It feels wonderful to be able to say “I’m a writer” when people ask what I do. But given that about 10 percent of my time is spent generating material and 90 percent is spent revising it, “I’m a rewriter” is probably more accurate.

Use this space to tell us more about who you. Anything you want your readers to know. Include information on where to find your books, any blogs you may have, or how a reader can learn more about you and writing.

In this strange new world of author self-promotion, book authors find that they’ve needed to become fluent in blogging and social networking. I blog at www.455girls.blogspot.com. Postings there also go by direct feed to the blog page at www.thepossibilityofeverything.com. I also have a Twitter account–@hopeedelman–and a Facebook Fan page at http://www.facebook.com/search/?q=Hope+Edelman&init=quick#/pages/Hope-Edelman/88415723217?ref=search&sid=720019937.2764746596..1.

I’ve been teaching writing workshops for the past fourteen years and have several on the calendar for 2010 so far. In February I’ll be doing a weeklong workshop at Lake Atitlan, Guatemala with authors Joyce Maynard, Ann Hood, and Francisco Sedita. More information is available at: www.joycemaynard.com/Joyce_Maynard/WRITING_ WORKSHOPS.html

Every July I teach two classes at the Iowa Summer Writing Festival in Iowa City: www.continuetolearn.uiowa.edu/iswfest This summer I’ll be teaching two weeklong workshops there, one in Family Memoir and one called Writing About the Extraordinary.