Lisa Grunwald

Lisa Grunwald is the author of the novels The Irresistible Henry House, Whatever Makes You Happy, New Year’s Eve, The Theory of Everything, Summer, and the newly released Time After Time. Along with her husband, Reuters Editor-in-Chief Stephen J. Adler, she has edited the bestselling anthologies Women’s Letters and Letters of the Century. Grunwald is a former contributing editor to Life and a former features editor of Esquire. She and Adler live in New York City.

From Grunwald's Q&A with Deborah Kalb:

Q: What was the inspiration for Time After Time, and for your characters Joe and Nora?

A: This novel started with a story I found in another book, specifically a book called Grand Central, which was written in 1946. There was a ghost story in there—a fairly classic ghost story, as it turned out. But I’d never heard it before.

A young woman shows up at the gold clock in Grand Central early in the morning, lost and confused. A gateman offers to walk her home, but she disappears on the way. Worried about what’s happened to her, he continues to the address she’d given him and rings the doorbell. An old woman answers and says “This happens every year. That was my niece. She died in a gas explosion 35 years ago.”

I was working on something else at the time, but I couldn’t get this story out of my head, and I started to wonder what it would be like to write about a ghost in Grand Central.

Then I had lunch with a friend of mine, an architect and historian named James Sanders. He remembered the book Grand Central, and specifically a passage that described what sunrise was like inside the terminal on several special days of the year. He proceeded to explain Manhattanhenge to me...[read on]

Visit Lisa Grunwald's website.

The Page 69 Test: Time After Time.

--Marshal Zeringue