Erica Bauermeister

Erica Bauermeister is the author of the bestselling novel The School of Essential Ingredients, Joy for Beginners, The Lost Art of Mixing, and The Scent Keeper, which was a Reese’s Book Club pick. She is also the co-author of non-fiction works, 500 Great Books by Women: A Reader’s Guide and Let’s Hear It For the Girls: 375 Great Books for Readers 2-14, and the memoir, House Lessons: Renovating a Life.

Bauermeister has a PhD in literature from the University of Washington, and has taught there and at Antioch University.

Her new novel is No Two Persons.

My Q&A with the author:

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

A lot, I hope. No Two Persons comes from the saying “no two persons ever read the same book.” It’s a concept I’ve thought a lot about over my years of teaching and writing books, and meeting with book clubs. We may all read the same words, but we never see the same story. I wanted to write a book that would explore the effect of one fictional book on its writer and nine very different readers, each character with their own story and chapter. I knew it was a complicated concept with an unusual structure, and it would be useful if the title could help set expectations. It didn’t hurt that I liked the sound of No Two Persons.

What's in a name?

My characters usually arrive in my imagination with their own names, but the writer in No Two Persons needed to be Alice—as in Alice in Wonderland. Her brother is Peter, as in Peter Pan. Each of those names is a tiny moment of rebellion on the part of their mother in the face of her authoritarian husband. My guess is that few readers will ever realize the meanings behind the names, but I love leaving Easter Eggs for readers who like to dig in.

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

In some ways not at all. The first fictional piece I ever wrote was presented from the points of view of a mother, a daughter, and her grandmother. The entire idea was how differently the three of them saw the same scene. But then I decided for some reason that I couldn’t write fiction, and I stepped away from it for almost twenty years. No Two Persons feels like coming full circle, writing the book I was always meant to. It did help to have forty years of life experience under my belt when I returned to the idea, though.

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

I love writing beginnings. Sometimes I write them first, and sometimes I write them last, but I love the challenge of setting a scene and creating a narrative atmosphere. In addition, there is the challenge of including the major themes so that later a reader can go back and see that everything was there from the very first moment.

Endings are trickier. When you are writing a novel, there is one ending, and the expectation is that it will wrap everything up in a (fairly) neat bow. But with interconnected short stories, which is really what No Two Persons is, the job of each ending is to open up its story, potentially sending the reader back to the beginning with a new and different perspective. And the final ending is that concept on steroids, because you are bringing a whole set of narrative threads together. To find that ending, I had to let all the stories simmer in the back of my brain until one morning I woke up and just knew what it would be. I think it’s my favorite of all the endings I have written, but I can’t tell you what it is.

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

I agree with authors who say all our characters are us and none of them are us. I never base any of my characters on people I know, or on myself. But there are elements in all of my characters—an insight, a fear, a love—that are intrinsic to me as well. And I often find when I am done writing a story it can feel as if I wrote it to figure something out for myself. Those unexpected lessons are one of the most fascinating aspects of writing for me.

What non-literary inspirations have influenced your writing?

My goal is to learn something new with every book I write. My topics often have something to do with the subliminal—the way that food, or our sense of smell, or the lay-out of our houses affect us without our ever consciously knowing. In No Two Persons the larger theme is how reading a particular book can change us, but in order to create deeply immersive worlds for each character I ended up researching free diving, intimacy coordination in movies, ghost towns, leap seconds, homelessness, audiobook narration, curious animal facts… the list goes on. So I suppose I would say my non-literary inspiration is the desire to never stop learning.

Visit Erica Bauermeister's website.

The Page 69 Test: The School of Essential Ingredients.

The Page 69 Test: The Lost Art of Mixing.

The Page 69 Test: The Scent Keeper.

The Page 69 Test: No Two Persons.

--Marshal Zeringue