Daniel Riley

Daniel Riley's new novel is Fly Me.

From his Q&A with Deborah Kalb:

Q: How did you come up with the idea for Fly Me, and for your main character, Suzy?

A: I grew up in Manhattan Beach, California, the South Bay of Los Angeles near the airport. That’s what [the book’s location] Sela del Mar is based on. I had family and their friends hanging around who had flown as stewardesses in the ‘50s and early ‘60s.

My grandmother’s cousin worked at LAX and started a museum there, the Flight Path Museum. I was there after I graduated from college, spending time with people who had been stewardesses in the 1970s and looking at diaries of theirs and old uniforms.

I was thinking about the early ‘70s, what happened in the beach towns were the pilots and stewardesses lived. What kind of person is that?

With Suzy, I wanted an outsider…I grew up with women in my life; I triangulated the strange and specific consciousness of this character—growing up tomboyish but working in a feminized industry.

I was figuring out what it was like to be a man versus a woman, what happens when you’re born a...[read on]

Visit Daniel Riley's website.

--Marshal Zeringue