Kate Feiffer

Kate Feiffer, a former television news producer, is an illustrator, and author of eleven highly acclaimed books for children, including Henry the Dog with No Tail and My Mom Is Trying to Ruin My Life. Morning Pages is her first novel for adults. Feiffer currently divides her time between Martha’s Vineyard, where she raised her daughter Maddy, and New York City, where she grew up.

My Q&A with the author:

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

Morning Pages — three pages written every morning, the moment you wake up. This was Julia Cameron's suggestion to help creatives get over their blocks in her beloved book The Artist’s Way. Just write, it doesn't matter what you're writing, what matters is that you’re writing. The story in my novel Morning Pages is revealed through the main character’s morning pages. I titled my novel for the device used to tell the story. I suppose if her story was told through diary entries, I would have titled the book Diary.

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

We like to believe that we've evolved since our gnarly teenage years, that we think about different things, that the years behind us have provided us with new experiences to contemplate. But I recently discovered that I'm not only thinking about the same things, I’m even writing about the same things that I did when I was teenager.

Let me explain.

Morning Pages is about a blocked playwright trying to finish a play she was commissioned to write while life is throwing obstacles at her. There are scenes from the play she is writing within the book, and the play reads as a story within the story.

The play is about a 40-year-old single, professionally successful, woman whose parents had an acrimonious divorce when she was a child. During the first act of the play, both her mother and father find themselves needing a place to live, and they each end up having to move in with her. For the first time since she was eight, she is living with her mother and father, and it isn’t going well.

Recently I was sorting through a box that had a few papers I had written in high school that for some reason I had saved. And there I found it - a short story I had written about an adult woman whose divorced parents move in with her.

Apparently my teenage self was waiting all this time to be heard.

Do you find it harder to write beginnings or endings?

Endings! In fact, my novel is about a playwright who can’t figure out how to end her play. Finishing things, or the difficulty in doing so, is an on-going theme in the novel and in my life. I love writing beginnings. If books could just be beginnings, I would be a prolific author. I have hundreds of beginnings filed away.

The main character in Morning Pages has her own thoughts about beginnings, however. This from page 15:

I used to love beginnings. The sloppy adrenaline rush of starting something new. Thinking faster than I could type. Not anymore. These days, beginnings feel ravenous and needy. “Give us a middle!” they shout. Middles are hungry for conflict though, and that’s a problem for someone as conflict-averse as I am.

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

I am all over many of my characters. Some of the characters in the novel are heavily influenced by my life and the people in my life, and others are intentionally drawn to resemble no one I know.

Visit Kate Feiffer's website.

The Page 69 Test: Morning Pages.

--Marshal Zeringue