Katia Lief

Katia Lief is the author of A Map of the Dark and Last Night published by Mulholland Books/Little, Brown under the pseudonym Karen Ellis. Earlier work includes USA Today and international bestselling novels Five Days in Summer, One Cold Night, and The Money Kill, the fourth installment of her Karin Schaeffer series published by HarperCollins and nominated for the Mary Higgins Clark Award. She teaches fiction writing at The New School in Manhattan and lives with her family in Brooklyn.

Lief's new novel is Invisible Woman.

My Q&A with the author:

How much work does your title do to take readers into the story?

The title Invisible Woman should instantly tell the reader a lot about the book. It clearly imparts a sentiment that we women often experience the world from behind a veil of invisibility, overlooked and silenced and unheard. Since the #MeToo and #TimesUp movements burst on the scene in 2018 and ripped the veil aside, we’ve at least been able to openly name the experience. The novel’s protagonist Joni peers back into her past through a newly focused lens and is surprised by what she sees. There’s also a hidden secret tucked into the title that reveals itself much later in the book; obviously I won’t discuss that here.

What's in a name?

Joni Ackerman is the novel’s main character. Joni comes from my love of Joni Mitchell’s music. Ackerman was a name that felt right for reasons I can’t begin to explain.

How surprised would your teenage reader self be by your new novel?

My teenage self wouldn’t be at all surprised that her older self wrote this novel because she never hesitated to say exactly what she thought. What would surprise (and disappoint) her would be learning that the times of her future life would not have kept the promises of her youth. In the seventies, when I was a teenager, the second wave of feminism was everywhere. In the idealism of my youth, I never imagined how quickly it would vanish.

Do you find it harder to write beginnings or endings? Which do you change more?

The beginnings are much harder. There’s so much to do at the start of a novel, from jump starting the plot to creating characters to establishing place. They’re all important and they have to develop simultaneously. I will go back again and again until the beginning is just right, and once the first draft is finished it’s not unusual for me to completely rewrite the first chapter.

Do you see much of yourself in your characters? Do they have any connection to your personality, or are they a world apart?

The answer is yes and no. Characters grow out of a writer’s imagination, and the stuff of our imagination is fed by the world around us as it’s filtered through our perceptions. In other worlds, our minds are a filter for the world, and what gets in becomes the material we work with. So yes, in that sense, I’m in all my characters. No one character, though, is literally ‘me.’

What non-literary inspirations have influenced your writing?

Everything!

Visit Katia Lief's website.

The Page 69 Test: Next Time You See Me.

My Book, The Movie: Next Time You See Me.

The Page 69 Test: Vanishing Girls.

My Book, The Movie: The Money Kill.

The Page 69 Test: Last Night.

--Marshal Zeringue