I have the wonderful
opportunity today to share with you two poignantly powerful novels about
friendship and family set in New York City have been released this month, along
with Q&As with the authors and giveaways of their books.
I want to tell you
about SMALL MERCIES by Eddie Joyce and WHY WE CAME TO THE CITY by
Kristopher Jansma. Thanks to Christopher and the wonderful folks at
Penguin/Viking, I have a print copy of each book to giveaway. Please see the
end of the post for more giveaway details.
ABOUT SMALL MERCIES
Named Martha Stewart
Living’s book club pick, Eddie Joyce’s
debut novel SMALL MERCIES (Penguin Paperback; on sale February 9th) is
the kind of book that will remind you why you love reading. Set on Staten
Island (the most forgotten borough in NYC), it’s is a touching and familiar
story about that most complicated and essential group--family.
An ingeniously layered
narrative, told over the course of one week, Small Mercies
masterfully depicts an Italian-Irish American family and their complicated emotional
history. Ten years after the loss of Bobby—the Amendola family’s youngest
son—everyone is still struggling to recover from the firefighter’s unexpected
death. Bobby’s mother Gail; his widow Tina; his older brothers Peter, the
corporate lawyer, and Franky, the misfit; and his father Michael have all dealt
with their grief in different ways. But as the family gathers together for
Bobby Jr.’s birthday party, they must each find a way to accept a new man in
Tina’s life while reconciling their feelings for their lost loved one
ABOUT WHY WE CAME TO
THE CITY
With incredible magnetism,
Jansma—author of the critically acclaimed novel The Unchangeable Spots of
Leopards—chronicles the trials of a tightly knit group of twentysomethings,
taking on post–9/11 New York City in the midst of the 2008 economic meltdown.
When we first meet Irene, William, George, Sara, and Jacob, they have been in
New York nearly five years. They are overworked, underpaid, and trapped in
coffin-sized apartments. Yet somehow, through the bug infestations, the boozy
late nights, and myriad uncomfortable dates, they have stuck together,
ambitious young professionals on the verge of something bigger. None of them,
however, imagined that that something could be a death that would tug at the
very fabric between them until it nearly unspools.
I have prepared question
and answer segments from both authors from their publishers. This post is quite
lengthy, but well worth the read. I hope you’ll also be sure to check out the
giveaways at the end of the post. The first Q&A is with Eddie Joyce.
Staten Island is probably the last borough people think
about when New York City comes to mind. What sets Staten Island apart from the
other four boroughs? What do you think would surprise people the most about
Staten Island?
Eddie:
Staten Island is
definitely the fifth of five boroughs in most people’s minds. It does stand
apart from the rest of the city in a number of ways: geographically,
demographically, politically, even architecturally. It is easily the most
suburban; parts of the Island are still almost rural, though that’s
disappearing quickly. There are very few tall buildings, no subways, and
there’s not much of the hustle and bustle that people associate with city life.
Of all the boroughs, it ‘feels’ the least like New York City.
On the other hand, in
terms of the people, you’d be hard pressed to find truer New Yorkers. If you
live on Staten Island, chances are you were born there or moved there from
Brooklyn. This has changed a bit in the past ten years with the arrival of more
immigrants to the Island but it’s still largely true. Most people either work
in the city or for the city: cops, firemen, teachers. There’s a streetwise
sensibility that pervades the entire borough. These are mostly working class
and middle class people who have lived through the best and worst days of New York
City, never getting their full share of the best and taking the brunt of the
worst. These are people of contrary qualities: tough but kind-hearted, brusque
but neighborly. And despite the rapidly growing population, Staten Island still
feels like a small town. Most people still read the Advance, Staten Island’s local paper. The high schools all play
each other. And it is an Island, which heightens the insularity in ways good
and bad. So basically it’s like a small town filled with sarcastic, streetwise
New Yorkers. Heaven.
A quick story may
elucidate: for our honeymoon, my wife and I went to New Zealand. We flew 6
hours to LA, then 14 hours to Auckland, then got in a little puddle-hopper and
flew another hour to the northern end of the North Island. We then drove
another forty-five minutes to the first place we were staying. After checking
in, we got in a van to take a tour of the property with some other couples. I
introduced us and from the back of the van, a guy said, “Eddie Joyce, from
Staten Island?” Turns out I’d played basketball against his brother in high
school. And that’s the way Staten Island is: if you’re on the other side of the
world and you meet someone from the Rock, chances are you’ll know each other or
know someone in common.
What was it like growing up on Staten Island and how has it
changed since your childhood? What prompted you to set your first novel there?
Do you still live on Staten Island?
Eddie:
Growing up on Staten
Island was fantastic. I grew up in Tottenville, the southernmost town on the
Island. I walked to school through the 8th grade. There were lots of woods to
play in, lots of places to get lost in. There was even a ferry graveyard! It
changed a lot as I was growing up. A lot of the open spaces got developed (and,
arguably, over-developed). The population, particularly on the South Shore,
sky-rocketed. Some of the small town feel disappeared. But overall it was
wonderful.
And the Island is
changing again, as working class immigrants are getting priced out of other
parts of the cities and/or seeking a better life for their families. I think
the next twenty or thirty years are going to be fascinating for Staten Island.
I no longer live on
Staten Island but I’m usually there a couple of times a month: to take the kids
to the Staten Island zoo, to play golf or meet a friend for lunch, to pick up
ravioli, and, of course, to eat pizza.
I set the book on
Staten Island because it was a place whose stories needed to be told. A million
books have been written about Manhattan, half a million about Brooklyn. The
Bronx has its bards. Even Queens has gotten some love lately. But Staten Island
has remained forgotten, silent. I thought that needed to be addressed. Where
you’re from matters and whether you love it or hate it, you can never escape
it.
And I wanted to tell
the story from the inside out. Staten Island does not appear in popular culture
all that frequently but when it does, the formula is always the same: City people come to Staten Island, meet
misanthropic natives who say racist or anti-Semitic things, city people return
to city, shaking their heads. Staten Island is always the butt of the NYC
joke. I wanted to tell a more complete story about the people I grew up with.
Yes, they may be flawed—who isn’t?—but they have a resiliency and even a kind
of grace that is often overlooked. I wanted to show all their beauty, all their
pain, all their strengths, all their sins. To give voice to people who are
exiles in their own city.
SMALL MERCIES is a story about family, and it doesn’t shy
away from any of the complications (and joys) that are inherent in family life.
How did the Amendolas take shape in your mind? What do you hope readers will
take away from this particular family story?
Eddie:
I wanted to show a
real family in all its messy glory. Families are wonderful, bizarre,
confounding. Every family has its own mythology, about who they are
collectively and about the roles that each member occupies in the group. Within
the context of our families, I think we all fall into patterns of behavior that
we’re not entirely aware of. And many positive qualities can stagnate into
negative ones within a family. The Amendolas are a very resilient, very loyal
family and that’s to be admired. But loyalty and resiliency can slide quite
easily into dysfunction and I think that happens with the Amendolas as well,
particularly with respect to their treatment of Franky and their reception of
Wade.
Much of the novel revolves around Gail Amendola, the mother
in the story. Why is her voice central?
Eddie:
The Amendola family
started with a very simple, almost cliché idea: a middle-aged woman—Gail from
the very start—walking on a beach, talking to her dead son. I wrote a short
story about that, Nulla, which had
many of the elements that later ended up in the novel. But it was way too
cluttered, way too busy for a short story. So I let it breathe, so to speak,
and let Gail take me where I had to go. She brought in Tina and Maria and
Michael and Enzo. Even Franky. Every time I got lost, I came back to Gail, doing
something mundane: walking on a beach, sitting at a kitchen table, cooking,
riding the Ferry. And that’s how the structure of the book took shape: Gail has
every other chapter, connecting these sometimes disparate souls.
The only character
who emerged in a different way was Peter. His chapter is the only one which
takes place mostly off of Staten Island. He is the most isolated, the loneliest
member of the family. His life is very different from his parents’ life. I
thought it was important that his chapter have a very distinct feel. So he came
from a different place. And even so, Gail is the one who comes into Manhattan
to meet him and wrestle the narrative away from him and take it back to Staten
Island. She’s still the glue that binds everyone else together.
Gail is an amalgam of
some of the very strong, smart women I grew up with. My paternal grandmother
was widowed when my father was seven. She had to raise him on her own with very
little money. My maternal grandmother raised five daughters and had to go to
back to work in middle age after getting divorced. She never went to college
but was the most well-read person I knew. My mother was also very bright but
had somewhat limited job opportunities. At the time, intelligent, working-class
women had essentially two choices: teaching and nursing. My mom became a
teacher (a job she loved), stopped working to stay home with her children and
eventually went back to work. She also tutored to make extra money.
When I was growing up
on Staten Island, most families conformed to traditional gender roles: husband
worked, wife stayed at home to raise the kids. Yet, despite these old-fashioned
arrangements, these families were matriarchal at their core: the mother was the
heart of the family, sure, but also the head. They were making the key
decisions for the family. They were handling the finances. They were probably
working as well, at least part time. And I think Gail is representative of that
enigma. Without question, she’s the center of the Amendola family.
SMALL MERCIES will strike a chord with many Americans,
especially those who lost loved ones on 9/11. How did you decide to include
this in the book?
Eddie:
It was not a decision
I made lightly. I thought about it at the outset and revisited the question
many times. A few times, I even considered changing the nature of Bobby’s
death: maybe he could have died in a random fire, maybe his death could have
been purely accidental, entirely unrelated to his job as a firefighter. But
those seemed like safe choices, like deliberately ignoring the elephant in the
room because it might be difficult to write about.
One of my readers was
someone who lost a family member on 9/11 and I occasionally ran things by him
to gauge his reaction. I didn’t idealize Bobby or his family. They didn’t need
to be perfect; they needed to be real. I included some of the uglier aspects of
the response to 9/11 without demonizing anyone. I tried to walk a very fine
line, being respectful but realistic. I hope I succeeded.
I started writing the
novel in earnest shortly after I read a Talk of the Town piece in the New Yorker about the so-called Ground
Zero Mosque. The piece was basically saying that the opposition to the mosque
was wrong-headed, and the outcry against it was being led by non-New
Yorkers—Newt Gingrich, Sarah Palin—who had no stake in a New York issue. I
mostly agreed with those points.
But the piece went on
to dismiss the concerns of Staten Islanders, who were largely against the
mosque, because they were distant, in a geographic sense, from Ground Zero. The
piece was essentially lumping Staten Islanders in with non-New Yorkers who were
using the issue solely for political purposes. That really, really pissed me
off. It evinced a complete lack of understanding about how deeply affected
Staten Island (and places like it) was affected by 9/11. I thought to myself, they don’t know, and that sentiment
actually makes its way into the novel.
9/11 is imbedded in
the psyche on Staten Island. 274 Staten Island residents were killed on 9/11. I
don’t think it’s hyberbole to say that every person on Staten Island knew
someone who was killed on 9/11. Most people knew multiple victims. You cannot
walk into a bar or restaurant or shop on Staten Island without seeing a Never
Forget sticker or poster. There are memorial races, memorial 3 on 3 basketball
tournaments, memorial cookouts, etc. It’s part of the fabric of the community.
And people who’d never spent significant time on Staten Island didn’t seem to
understand that.
I’ve read a lot of
the 9/11 novels—a somewhat limiting characterization, to my mind—but the two
that resonated the most with me were Joseph O’Neill’s Netherland and Colum McCann’s Let
The Great World Spin. And it struck me that both were written by people who
came to New York later in life. Both authors were immigrants actually, which is
New York through and through. McCann captures one of the great things about New
York at the end of his book, which is (and I’m paraphrasing): people are here
for ten minutes and they think it belongs to them. And that does make New York
great. It’s why people come here from all over the country and all over the
world. We welcome everyone here. Bring your energy and bring your dreams.
That’s all you need to be considered a New Yorker.
At the same time,
there are actually a lot of people who were born and raised in the New York
area, and sometimes these people get marginalized or overlooked or just plain
ignored. The bridge and tunnel (and ferry) crowd. People from the outer
boroughs or Long Island or New Jersey. People who live in the shadows of the
great city. So, when all these 9/11 novels were coming out, I kept waiting for
the one that was going to tell the story of those people. I kept waiting and
waiting. I was practicing law at the time and I thought, surely someone is going to tell this story. And finally, I thought,
maybe I should tell this story. Which
was pure, utter hubris. But that’s writing in a nutshell: pure hubris.
You decided to quit your job as a lawyer to stay at home
with your twin daughters and pursue a writing career. How do you balance
writing with stay-at-home parenting?
Eddie:
First of all, we have
help. I could not have written the book and taken care of the kids all the
time, especially when they were little. At one point, we had three kids under
the age of two. That was crazy. I’m sure some people do it—by writing at night
or sneaking in an hour here or there—but I’m not wired that way. Also, my wife
is a lawyer and took on the full financial burden of the household while I
wrote the book. I’m extremely lucky in that regard. She never pushed me to
hurry or to produce something. I felt internal pressure to finish the novel but
that was entirely internal. I had the luxury of not having to worry about
bringing in money while I was writing it. Taking care of the kids—again, with
help—was part of the overall situation.
When you have young
kids, a lot of your schedule is out of your control. They get sick, you get
sick, they need to go to an appointment and so on. There’s always something and
sometimes, the writing just got pushed to the side. I didn’t get an MFA and
when I started writing, I would sometimes look for guidance by reading the
advice of established writers. I specifically remember reading one of Richard
Ford’s rules which was, “Don’t have kids.” My twin daughters were probably one
at the time. And I thought, well, that ship has sailed. Better make my own
rules.
I try to take it week
by week. If I get a good start on Monday, it usually means I’ll have a
productive week. But if there’s a doctor’s appointment or there’s no food and I
have to go shopping or whatever, it may get off to rocky start and suddenly,
it’s Wednesday and I’ve written two sentences. Probably not gonna get a lot
done that week. I try not to let it frustrate me. There are other productive
things you can do: You can read or you can go for a long walk and let your
subconscious unspool.
If I have a good
week, I try to stay in rhythm, stack a few good weeks together. I only really
need 2-3 hours a day, preferably in the morning. I tend to burn out after that
anyway and I like to end in a good frame of mind so that I’m eager to return
the next day, instead of dreading it. And if the writing’s going well, there
are little problems that I’m working out in my head all day, long after I’ve
left the desk.
It’s not the typical,
monastic, fully devoted existence that many writers aspire to. But you know
what? That’s fine. I get to walk my kids to and from school every day. I get to
put them to bed most nights. I get to hear the funny things they say. I’m not
saying there are no frustrations. I get
frustrated, particularly if a good bit of time passes when I’m not being
productive. And raising kids can be frustrating. It’s wonderful but it’s also
frustrating. But I try to go with the flow. I try to take the writing seriously
without taking myself too seriously.
There’s a lot of good Italian food in SMALL MERCIES. Where
are some of your favorite places to eat on The Rock?
Eddie:
Oh, boy. This could
be a book unto itself. Let’s start with a fundamental truth: Denino’s is the
best pizza in the world. I will countenance no dissent on this subject. But
there are many other great pizzerias on the Rock: Lee’s, Joe and Pat’s,
Nunzio’s, Brothers. People on Staten Island are very tribal when it comes to
pizza. You’re either a Denino’s person or a Lee’s person or a Joe and Pat’s person.
The truth is they’re all fantastic. It’s just that Denino’s is the best.
You’d be hard pressed
to find a bad Italian restaurant on Staten Island. As a good friend of mine has
noted, “If the food’s not good, it’s ovah. You’re done.” I like the old school
joints, places that have been around for a while. Two of my favorites are
Trattoria Romano and Basilio’s Inn. Growing up, we ordered a lot from Villa
Monte, which has a few locations. It’s more casual, more of a take-out place.
The chicken marsala is to die for. Good pizza, too.
Can’t forget Ralph’s
Italian Ices. The original store is right across the street from Denino’s so
two birds, one stone. I get the same thing every time: a scoop of lemon ice, a
scoop of raspberry. When the weather starts getting nice in the spring, I start
fiending for Ralph’s.
There’s some great,
non-Italian food as well: Duffy’s has a great burger with waffle fries.
Schaffer’s Tavern is an institution: great pastrami and corned beef.
Killmeyer’s has great beer and German food. And Real Madrid is a great
throwback Spanish place. Keep it simple: paella and sangria. A great thing
about all these places is that they’re not expensive. A couple can get a great
dinner and a couple beers or a bottle of wine for well under a hundred bucks. A
family can eat a great meal and have leftovers, also for under a hundred bucks.
Finally, I’d be
remiss if I didn’t mention the newly opened Flagship Brewing Company, Staten
Island’s own addition to the craft brewing industry. Great beer and it’s run by
Staten Island guys. They have a very cool tasting room within walking distance
of the ferry.
There’s a March Madness pool in the novel that is a big
tradition for the Amendolas. Is this based on real life? Are you also a
basketball fan?
Eddie:
The pool in the book
is a thinly veiled version of the well-known Jody’s pool, which did shut down a
few years back, though not at all in the way portrayed in the book. The Jody’s
pool was an Island tradition which got bigger and bigger over the years. Since it
closed down, other versions have popped up, run out of different bars, but
nothing that rivals the original.
I’m a huge basketball
fan. I played in high school and played JV in college at Harvard. New York City
has such a great basketball tradition and, as with so many other things, Staten
Island hoops hardly gets noticed. But that’s starting to change as more and
more players come off the Island and go to big time Division I programs. Staten
Island is still intimate enough that the high school games have a different
feel. The rivalries are real. The guys you played against in high school? You
see them for the rest of your life. They remember specific games, even specific
plays. A lot of “Glory Days” type reminiscing goes on in the bars along Forest
Avenue and elsewhere.
My love for
basketball comes from my mother. She played in college and she was very
involved in the youth league we played in growing up. She started a program for
girls. She refereed the games, she coached a team. We watched a lot of basketball
in the house. Some of my fondest memories are sitting in the kitchen with my
mom, watching college basketball on a small black and white television. She was
usually cooking food for my father to put out at the bar and periodically
checking in on the game. We were big St. John’s fans. I loved Chris Mullin. She
loved Mark Jackson.
We had a hoop in the
backyard. I would play Around the World or Horse with one of our neighbors,
Skip. He would smoke a cigar while he shot. As I got older, I started taking
the bus to play at P.S. 8 and later I would take the train down to Cromwell
Center. Cromwell was like hoop heaven. It was an old pier that extended out
into New York harbor. You walked in and there were weight rooms and offices on
either side of a long atrium. At the end of the atrium, there were 5 or 6
courts lined up side to side, extending further out into harbor.
The best players
played on the first court. I still remember the first time I played on that
court. It was exhilarating. It closed for renovation a few years back and then
part of the pier collapsed into the water so they had to demolish the whole
thing. I loved everything about that place: the constant creak of wood, the
intensity of the games, even the smell of sweat. I wrote a draft chapter that
was about one of Bobby’s summers playing ball down at Cromwell. It didn’t end
up making it into the book but I hope to use some of that stuff in a different
project.
ABOUT THE AUTHOR:
 |
| Author Eddie Joyce_Credit Kerry Kehoe |
Eddie Joyce was born and
raised on Staten Island. After graduating from Harvard University, he taught
for a year on Staten Island before attending Georgetown Law Center. Before he
started writing, he practiced law in Manhattan for ten years, mostly white
collar criminal defense. He lives in Brooklyn with his wife and three daughters.
Now the Q&A with
Kristopher Jansma.
Was there any particular event that compelled you to write
this novel?
Kristopher:
Nine years ago, my younger
sister, Jennifer, was diagnosed with cancer. She’d had a small bump on her
tongue for months that wouldn’t go away. She was only twenty-one at the time (I
was twenty-four) and nobody thought it could be a tumor, but that’s what it turned
out to be. She began treatment in North Carolina, where she continued to live
and dance professionally in a ballet company. But when a new lump appeared,
Jenn came to New York City to begin more aggressive treatment at Sloan
Kettering.
For five or six months she
stayed with me and my fiancée in the cramped one-bedroom apartment where we had
to continue facing all the usual day-to-day challenges and excitements of being
in New York City in our twenties while also getting Jenn to and from her
treatments, managing their many awful side effects, and trying to keep her
strong enough to carry on.
After a while it became
clear that as hard as we fought, it was a losing battle. Jenn passed away about
a year after her initial diagnosis, and my family and I were left to deal with
our grief, which in many ways I felt even less prepared for than her illness.
Although we were all grieving the same loss, but none of us grieved in the same
way, and so the experience became even lonelier.
It was a long time before
I was able to begin writing about some of this in my fiction, but once I
started I couldn’t stop, and Why We Came
to the City took its shape from all that love and failure and grief and
hope.
What kind of research went into writing the book, particularly
when it came to writing about the character Irene’s cancer symptoms, diagnosis,
and treatment?
Kristopher:
There was a lot to learn.
When Jenn was sick there was so much that happened so quickly, and so much that
we left in the hands of her doctors. I wasn’t really all that concerned with
the mechanics of a chemotherapy drug, for instance. I just wanted to know how
long it would take and when she’d feel better. But in writing the novel, I
needed to know everything. Irene’s cancer is a different type, and its spread
and treatments were also different. So I did a lot of reading, and I consulted
some friends who had become doctors and were willing to share their knowledge.
It was important to me to
get the medical facts correct, but even more important to portray the
experience of illness honestly. There’s so much that you don’t understand while
it’s happening. The treatments create side effects, which have to be managed
with medications that have other side effects. It becomes a daily whack-a-mole
challenge. Every time you think that you’ve found some kind of stability,
something new comes along and you start all over again. Capturing that constant
uncertainty was the most significant challenge.
The city of New York looms large in your book, which is set in
a post–9/11 world and in the midst of the Great Recession. What made you decide
on this particular time and place?
Kristopher:
9/11 happened when I was
halfway through college and hardly knew New York, so my experience of it was
very much from the outside, and seeing the way it changed the whole future
ahead of us.
When I moved to New York
City in 2003, to begin graduate school at Columbia University, I came with two
college friends, and a few more joined us in 2005. Our first few years there
were difficult but we all felt like we were making progress. The city, too, was
getting back on its feet. Our internships soon became assistant positions, and
then some of my friends had interns of their own. I was adjuncting, teaching
freshman essay writing at one school, then two, and then two more. It was
incredibly hard, but even when we were putting in insane hours and scraping by
on meager salaries, we had this sense that things were moving in the right
direction. The city seemed to be supporting us and we were rising up with it.
Then in 2008 the market
crash happened and everything just sort of stopped. So many people we knew lost
their jobs. Those of us lucky enough to keep ours felt like we’d managed to get
ahead just before an axe fell.
And then . . . nothing
happened. Our bosses went from panic mode to wait-and-see mode. We kept working
as hard as ever only to stay still. There was a year when my rent actually
didn’t increase and, at the time, I remember it was the only reason I was able
to stay. But everything was uncertain, and it seemed like the perfect moment
for the events of Why We Came to the City,
because those characters are suddenly being gripped by forces beyond their
control.
Like the characters in your book, you also moved to NYC after college.
How did your early experiences here shape the course of the narrative for WHY
WE CAME TO THE CITY?
Kristopher:
To be perfectly honest,
for the first two years that I lived in New York, I did not love it. At least
not the way I came to, eventually. I was overwhelmed and terrified. I’d come
from Baltimore, which is a very different kind of city, and my life there as a
college student involved lots of friends nearby. I knew my way around and
understood how things worked.
Suddenly, I was in New
York City, only an hour and a half from the New Jersey town where I grew up,
but somewhere I’d never spent much time and never expected to call home. I had,
literally, two friends. I was scared to walk either east or south of my
apartment (which was in a very safe part of Morningside Heights). My entire
social calendar involved meeting those friends, every Wednesday night, to eat
cheap food (Thai, Indian, sushi) and watch TV in one of our apartments. It took
about two years before I began to branch out and connect the dots between
various places I’d randomly been. Slowly the city became familiar. Every week
more friends came to join us, and we were all making new connections through
our jobs. I felt a huge swell of ownership and belonging that I’d never felt
before. I would find myself just staring around in Union Square sometimes,
unable to believe that I really lived there. It really was a life beyond even
my wildest dreams.
Why We Came to the City begins about six years after these friends
arrived in the city, which was around when I first felt that glow begin to
fade. Some friends were beginning to leave. We didn’t feel so young or so
blessed. Manhattan was getting more expensive every minute. All the difficult
and frustrating parts of the city began to come back into focus, just as old
college friendships began to show signs of strain. We were becoming different
people, growing in different directions, and not quite sure why, or if, we
still needed each other. That’s where the novel opens—as that second change is beginning
to happen to these characters.
Your novel centers on a tight-knit group of five friends with
vastly different careers and personalities. Do any of these characters bear a
resemblance to any of your own friends or friendships?
Kristopher:
Well, I hope that they
resemble my own friends to a certain degree, in the same way that I hope these
characters will feel, to many readers, like people they know or like
themselves.
Certainly there are
details borrowed from real life. One of the first apartments I saw when I was
moving up was this tiny, windowless room, with a Murphy bed that folded out of
the wall and a bathtub in the kitchen. The funniest part of that visit was how
the realtor kept stressing that it was a prime location for schools—as if you could
have squeezed a child in there! I passed, but always wondered what it would
have been like to live there, and so one character, George, lives in a similar
apartment.
George’s fiancée, Sara,
moves in with him, leaving behind a beautiful railroad apartment where her
roommate’s boyfriend has inconveniently taken up residence. That was a
situation a friend of mine found herself in. And, well, let’s just say that,
like Jacob, I had another friend whose apartment in Spanish Harlem we were
never invited to, and which we never saw, and which we believe to this day he
barely stayed in, if it existed at all.
But these are just a few
of the kinds of uncomfortable positions that every new city-goer finds
themselves in, and they’re what make it all so exciting and complicated.
One of the main themes of the novel is friendship. Irene,
William, Jacob, George, and Sara have known one another since college and
remain incredibly close, despite the many challenges they each face
individually. Friendship also plays a big role in your first book, The Unchangeable Spots of Leopards. Is
there a reason this theme is so prominent in your work?
Kristopher:
It’s true that friendship
plays a huge role in both books. In many ways it becomes more prominent than
the romantic plots. I think that can be really true for people at this time in
their lives. Certainly it was true for me. My friends got me through those
first few years in the city, and through everything that happened when my
sister got sick. At the same time it was hard to resume life as usual, after
she died, and I pulled away from a lot of people.
Like any relationships,
friendships can grow stale or even become toxic over time, and that’s also very
interesting to me. You can wake up one day and feel that someone you’ve always
needed in your life is now holding you back. Especially in the city, just as no
one grieves in quite the same way, no one grows in quite the same way either.
What’s really incredible, though, is when these friendships do manage to find
ways of evolving with the times. I’m still quite close with those first few
friends I came to the city with, twelve years ago now, and though none of us
are the same people we were then, and our friendships aren’t the same, we all
love each other in new and sustaining ways.
What are you working on now, and what’s next for you?
Kristopher:
I’m finally teaching
creative writing full time, which is a goal I worked toward for almost ten
years as an adjunct. Now that I have this opportunity, I’m loving it. Working
with students, and with brilliant writers on the faculty, always inspires and
pushes me in my new work.
Recently I spent time at
the wonderful Ucross artist’s colony in Wyoming, where I began working on a new
novel, which I believe will be about family—a subject that isn’t as prominent
in my first two novels.
Two years ago I became a
father and my family is a huge part of my life now. It may even be what finally
convinces me that it is time to leave the city. Either way it marks a whole new
chapter for me. I’m finding that all of that is very fertile ground for fiction
right now.
ABOUT THE AUTHOR:
 |
| Author Kristopher Jansma credit Michael Levy |
Kristopher grew up in
Lincroft, New Jersey. He received his B.A. in The Writing Seminars from Johns
Hopkins University and an M.F.A. in Fiction from Columbia University. His
critically-acclaimed debut novel, THE UNCHANGEABLE SPOTS OF LEOPARDS, was
published by Viking/Penguin in 2013. He is the winner of the 2014 Sherwood Anderson Fiction Award.
He is an Assistant
Professor of Creative Writing at SUNY New Paltz College and lives in Brooklyn
with his wife and son.
GIVEAWAY DETAILS:
Thanks to Christopher and the
wonderful folks at Penguin/Random House, I have a print copy SMALL MERCIES by Eddie Joyce and WHY WE CAME TO THE CITY by
Kristopher Jansma to giveaway. The giveaways are open to residents of the U.S.
only and will end at 12 a.m. (EST) on Sunday, March 6.
To enter either or both giveaways,
just click on the Rafflecopter widgets below and follow the instructions. The
widgets may take a few seconds to load so please be patient. Winners will be
selected by the Rafflecopter widget and I’ll send an email with the subject
line “Thoughts in Progress Eddie Joyce
Book Giveaway” and “Thoughts in
Progress Kristopher Jansma Book Giveaway.” The winners will have 72 hours
to reply to the emails or another winner will be selected. PLEASE be sure to check your spam folder from time to time after
the giveaway ends to make sure the notification email doesn’t end up there. If
you win and you’ve already won the book somewhere else or you just decided for
whatever reason you don’t want to win (which is fine), once again PLEASE let me know.
Thanks so much for
stopping by today. I hope I’ve enticed you to check one or both of these
fascinating books. Do you enjoy reading Q&As with authors?
a Rafflecopter giveaway
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A light-hearted mystery that will
tug at your heart-strings, CAT SHOUT
FOR JOY by Shirley Rousseau Murphy will also keep you guessing as to
the reason and the culprit of the crimes.
