Many of her titles were optioned for film, translated into different languages, and condensed in magazines. Many of her titles were Best Books of the Year and Indie Next Picks. A New York Foundation of the Arts Fellow, she was also shortlisted for the Maine Readers Prize, and was a Goldenberg Fiction Prize winner. She recently won an award from the MidAtlantic Arts for portions of her next novel, The Inseparables.
My Q&A with Leavitt:
How much work does your title do to take readers into the story?Visit Caroline Leavitt's website and blog.
Days of Wonder is a little deceptive as a name of a book because it’s a title of hope. The book is about two 15-year-olds from different classes in NYC who fall madly in love and are about to be separated by the boy’s abusive father, and so they start fantasizing about killing him. And then the fantasy veers into something realer, and both kids are accused of attempted murder. Both kids were sleep-deprived and drugged-up the night of crime, and neither can really remember just what happened. Jude, with a wealthy dad and a good lawyer, goes free, but Ella gets 25 years. When she’s early released after six years, she’s desperate to find Jude, to find her child, and to find out what really happened that night, and why?
Doesn’t seem like the stuff of wonder, does it? But I wanted to focus on the bright glints of life or hope that appear in a lot of the novel’s darkness. Yes, this great gorgeous young love is destroyed, but like that great old movie, Splendor in the Grass, there is always the memory of it. Things don’t work out the way any of the characters imagine they will, and there is a tremendous cost to everyone, but out of that darkness, there is growth, understanding, and yeah, a sense of wonder about how the world works. I wanted that wonder to be revealed at the end when the real story of the attempted murder comes out.
My publisher wanted to change the name, to call the book, The Second Life of Ella Fitchburg, and I protested, because that title, to me, sounded, too briskly commercial. That word, wonder, has always obsessed me.
What's in a name?
Oh, for me, names are everything. In fact, I actually gave my character family names—and for different reasons. I called Helen, Ella’s mother who grew up in a Hassidic community she was boosted out of, the same name as my own mother. My mom grew up in an Orthodox Jewish family and her father was a rabbi. When he died suddenly, she stopped believing in God and gave up religion, though for the rest of her life, she yearned for that community. I wanted to give fictional Helen that community in a way my mother never had! I called Ella’s later boyfriend Henry, making him a good guy, because for me, it erased the fact that my father had been a brutal bastard to the whole family! And I used the name Ruta for a minor character because I wanted to give my sister the happy life that had escaped her. For me, names are all about the emotions I feel when I hear the name. In a book about the yearning for connection, I satisfied my own yearning for connection with my family that is lost to me now.
How surprised would your teenage reader self be by your novel?
My teenaged reader self would be happy—because I knew I wanted to be a writer when I was in first grade and I told stories to the class (“Adventure With a Lion” was my first!). I persisted through countless teachers telling me I couldn’t write or that wasn’t a profession for me.
Do you find it harder to write beginnings or endings? Which do you change more?
Both, but the beginning has to be right before I can go on, and I often write it through sixteen revisions. I have to have that inkling that something wrong is about to happen, that getting out of it isn’t going to be easy, and I have to know that I am writing about the things that obsess and matter to me, which are usually family, loss, longing. I don’t think about masterpieces when I am first writingas much as I am thinking about getting deeper and deeper into the story-world that I am desperate to inhabit!
I had started Days of Wonder two different ways, one way had Ella snooping on and virtually stalking the little girl she gave up while she was in prison. I liked that, but it didn’t feel like it had enough danger in it for me. So, then I tried to start the book with Ella just getting out of prison at 22 and being the one stalked by an angry media. That felt like the right place for me. It came alive in my mind, so I used that.
Do you see much of yourself in your characters? Do they have any connection to your personality, or are they a world apart?
Their emotions are mine. Like Helen, I always felt, and still feel like an outsider, always struggling for community. Like Ella, I had that wild, passionate young love that I never ever forgot. And like Jude, I often blame myself for things that are not my fault at all. But I always try to get past that feeling, to make the characters live and breathe on their own.
What non-literary inspirations have influenced your writing?
Everything inspires me. A great dinner or a disgusting one. Seeing a lover’s argument on the streets of New York City and watching their body language. Eavesdropping on people next to me at a restaurant, capturing the cadence of their speech in my mind.
The Page 69 Test: Pictures of You.
My Book, the Movie: Pictures of You.
The Page 69 Test: Is This Tomorrow.
My Book, The Movie: Is This Tomorrow.
My Book, The Movie: Cruel Beautiful World.
The Page 69 Test: Cruel Beautiful World.
Writers Read: Caroline Leavitt (October 2016).
My Book, The Movie: Days of Wonder.
--Marshal Zeringue