Is This Tomorrow is a New York Times bestselling novel about being different, being an outsider, being an outcast. Set in the Cold-War 1950s, it follows the mysterious vanishing of a young boy in a closed neighborhood, and the fate of the Jewish divorced mother who's somehow suspect.
1. You have successfully written your tenth
novel, what keeps your writing fruitful?
I wish I knew the answer to that. I think it
is that I'm an obsessive personality. I'm always haunted by one thing or
another and I worry about it, and can't let it go unless I somehow figure it
out by writing about it. I always think that I am writing about something
that has nothing to do with me whatsoever, and then, around the 9th rewrite, I
realize it's an issue that has been totally haunting me. Is This Tomorrow was a lot about how I
felt growing up as an outcast in a working class town. The book I'm just
finishing up now is about a girl I knew casually in high school who was
murdered by her older boyfriend.
2. In Is This Tomorrow, why did you choose 1950's Boston as a
setting?
I grew up in Waltham, which is right outside
of Boston, and like Ava Lark and her son Lewis, my family was the only Jewish
family in a working class Christian block. (It was the 60s, not the 50s, but I
set it back a decade because the whole Cold War "us against them"
mentality was so much more pervasive.) I learned early on that kids were not
allowed to play with me because "I killed Christ." In grade school, I
was given a test where the questions were things like, "What did Jesus say
to Mary at the well? I had no idea, so I wrote, "Do you want a glass of
water?" The teacher failed me! But I remember out much I yearned to be a
part of something, and how painful that time was for me. I was mocked, ignored,
and threatened to be beaten up in high school all the time!
I thought I could make so much more of this by
setting Is This Tomorrow in the 50s,
because there was such paranoia around anyone who might be different. If you
read too much? You were a Communist. Did you use multi-syllabic words?
Communist! The suburbs in the 50s were supposed to be safe, so why better place
to have a child suddenly vanish?
3. Ava and her son are powerful characters,
how much of you is evident in their personalities?
I love Ava. LOVE Ava. I wish she was my
neighbor--but the only thing we share is that we both wanted to belong and were
both shut out. I am more like Lewis in that I worry about everything; I make
lists of things to worry about (really! Isn't that pathetic?) and in
school, like Lewis, my teacher yelled at my mother for teaching me to read
before everyone else knew how to read. Unlike Lewis, I was not directionless.
I knew early on that I was going to fight my way out of that neighborhood
and be a writer, no matter what anyone said.
I wanted Ava to be a triple threat. Not only is
she divorced at a time when no one got divorced, not even celebrities, but she
works. No woman worked unless she was looking for a husband at a job, and to
actually like your job or want to try to be something more was suspect. Being
Jewish in a Christian neighborhood was even worse. I used a lot of my own
upbringing for that!
5. Was the plot inspired by real events?
Only as far as how I felt like an outsider
growing up. The rest I totally made up!
6. How did you conduct your research and how
long did you do it?
Research was the most fun. I hired two high
school research assistants and I had a wonderful librarian I hired, but some of
the most interesting things I found were when I just went on FB and asked,
"Are there any male nurses from the 1950s? Any cops? Any pie bakers?"
I got a huge response and I got to talk on the phone with these fascinating
people. The cop was brilliant--he told me that in the 1950s, kids didn't
vanish. They ran around to abandoned buildings and into the woods and no one
worried. No one locked their doors. When a kid didn't come home, the cops
treated it the way they would an adult vanishing--you wait. But with a kid,
that's too late! I talked to a male nurse who was fascinating. He told me that
not only did doctors smoke in the 50s while they were examining patients, but
they also encouraged their patients to smoke, because it would relax them!
I found vintage pamphlets about Communism (How
you can tell if your neighbor is a Commie! Does he laugh at jokes you don't
quite get? That's because it's in code! He's a Communist!) and about how to
survive the nuclear war that they knew was coming. (Wipe your feet before you
go inside the house to get off the pesky radiation!)
I also found fabulous vintage cookbooks. In
the 50s, you were supposed to boil vegetables for about 45 minutes! And the
most popular dish was a meat loaf train! You shaped the meatloaf to look
like a train and made windows out of celery and passengers out of peas!
7. Why did you choose this voice to tell your
story?
When I write, I like to get inside everyone's
head, everyone's point of view. I just want the experience to be raw, intimate
and real.
8. What is your writing protocol and process?
I try to write every day, usually about 4-5
hours and then I'm exhausted. Plus I have a son and a husband, and I also teach
writing online at Stanford, UCLA, the University of Toronto, and I have private
clients (CarolineLeavittConsults.com). And I review for People and the San
Francisco Chronicle. I am a big believer in structure, so I always map out my
novels before I start to write, which takes me about six months, and then I
have a 30 page synopsis, which I continually rewrite and throw out right
up to the 9th revision. (And yes, there are always 9 to 20 revisions!)
9. Explain this quote by unknown:
"Everyone has a story; telling it well is the key."
I think part of telling a story well has to do
with making it alive and intimate, and making the reader feel as if he or she
is living that particular story. To do that well, I think you need to know
where to start, how to build tension, how to up the stakes, and how to end with
what I call the never-ending story--which means that you don't want to tie
things up neatly at the end. You want the reader to close the book and still be
wondering about the lives of your characters!
10. What are you future projects and current
muses?
My new novel, Cruel Beautiful World is due to
Algonquin this March, so I am really working to finish. I don't believe in the
muse. But I do believe in inspiration and craft. I always mention John Irving
because he writes what I consider moral fiction--he isn't just telling a
wonderful story about wonderful characters, he's making points about how to
live better or differently in the world, or simply, how to deal with a crazy
world.
Next up, I'm starting a new novel. It's too
new to say anything about it without it sounding silly and ridiculous. I have
to clasp it to my heart and hope for the best!
Caroline Leavitt is the New
York Times and USA Today
bestselling author of Is This Tomorrow, plus ten other
novels. Pictures of You was on the Best of 2011 Lists from the San Francisco Chronicle, the Providence Journal, Bookmarks Magazine and was one of the Top Five Books on the Family
and Love from Kirkus Reviews. She is
a book critic for People Magazine and
the Boston Globe. She teaches novel writing
at UCLA Writer's Program online and mentors writers privately. She lives with
her husband, the writer Jeff Tamarkin, and their son Max, in Hoboken, NJ. She
can be reached at www.carolineleavitt.com.
