May Cobb

May Cobb earned her MA in literature from San Francisco State University, and her essays and interviews have appeared in the Washington Post, the Rumpus, Edible Austin, and Austin Monthly. Her novels include Big Woods, The Hunting Wives, and the recently released My Summer Darlings. A Texas native, Cobb lives in Austin with her family.

My Q&A with the author:

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

For My Summer Darlings, title was very important to me. This one came to out of the blue, and very much hints at the villain's manipulation of the main characters. I also wanted to make clear that it was a summer book! There was some back and forth with my editor about the title - we considered naming it something else - but at the end of the day My Summer Darlings won out!

What's in a name?

I think the name that was most important to me as I sat down to write My Summer Darlings was the name of the neighborhood, Eden Place. I knew going in that I wanted to set myself some structural boundaries--that the novel takes place over a summer and that it takes place wholly within the confines of the neighborhood--so I knew that naming Eden Place would be important. In calling it Eden Place, I wanted to tap into the book's themes of temptation, seduction, and betrayal, and also, the shattering of innocence.

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

Ha! Great question! I would say very surprised. When I was a teenager, I didn't really know I wanted to become a writer but if you'd asked me then what I wanted to write about, it would've probably been a serious, nonfiction book about U2 or something.

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

I honestly find the middle of the book to be the most challenging. Beginnings for me are the fun, exploratory times when my characters are coming to life on the page for the first time for me and there's a million possibilities about what could happen and I'm just trying to listen to them, get it all down, set the tone of what's to come. This is my favorite part of writing the book. And endings are fun in their own way, too, because it's like, oh my goodness I can see the finish line and (usually!) how to get there! So there's this energy in writing endings that kicks in and my daily word count shoots up! It's the in between--the middle section--that gets draggy and tedious for me!

Visit May Cobb's website.

--Marshal Zeringue