Cynthia Swanson

Cynthia Swanson is the Denver-based author of the psychological suspense novels The Bookseller, The Glass Forest, and the newly released Anyone But Her. An Indie Next selection, New York Times bestseller, and winner of the WILLA Literary Award, The Bookseller is slated to be a motion picture produced by Julia Roberts. Swanson is also the editor of the award-winning anthology Denver Noir, which features dark, morally ambiguous stories set in and around Denver, written by 14 notable literary and mystery authors.

My Q&A with the author:

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

On page 7 of Anyone But Her, we hear these exact words (“anyone but her”) spoken by Alex, mom of Suzanne, the novel’s main character. Six months earlier, Alex was killed during an armed robbery of her record store on Colfax Avenue in Denver. Now, she appears as a ghost to 14-year-old Suzanne, a clairvoyant, and urges Suzanne to intervene in the relationship between Suzanne’s father James, and his girlfriend, Peggy, whom he’d dated in high school. Alex explains that after meeting Peggy at James and Peggy’s high school reunion, she’d jokingly told him that if she died, he could marry “anyone but her.”

Lost in grief and loneliness, Suzanne heeds her mother’s warnings and does what she can to break up James and Peggy. The repercussions of this decision are severe and long-lasting, both when Suzanne is a teen in 1979, and in 2004, twenty-five years later, when she returns to live in Denver with her husband and children after decades away.

What's in a name?

Ooh, I worked long and hard on this one! As a record store owner, Alex obviously loved music, so I wanted her to give her daughter a name inspired by a musician or a song. I ultimately landed on Suzanne, after the Leonard Cohen song. I made up a scene in which Alex, pregnant at the time with Suzanne, hears Judy Collins sing “Suzanne” in a little club in Denver in 1964. The scene is purely fiction, in no small part because Cohen didn’t publish “Suzanne” as a poem until 1966, so I had to take poetic license there. However, Judy Collins did record the song that same year (1966). She was a graduate of the high school that Suzanne attends, Denver East High. Collins was in the class of 1957—the year before James and Peggy also graduated from East.

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

Suzanne and I are about the same age, so my teenage self would definitely recognize the cultural references in Anyone But Her—music, clothes, movies, books. I’m not clairvoyant, but I’ve always had an affinity for ghost stories. My teenage self wouldn’t be a bit surprised that I wrote one.

Teenage Cynthia might be surprised that the novel is set in Denver, because I didn’t grow up here. However, I think she might (as I do) sort of wish that I did. I have numerous friends my age who are Denver natives, and their stories helped shape the narrative—and also made me a bit envious that I didn’t share their experiences here in the seventies and eighties. I would have loved going to a concert at Red Rocks when I was a high schooler!

I didn’t plan this, of course (I started writing the novel in 2019), but Gen X/Gen Jones is having a moment right now, and it’s fun to have a novel coming out that’s set in the era when those generations were young. Like many of us born in the 1960s, my teenage self would be pretty excited about that.

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

For me, it’s the middle that gets tough! I usually have a solid beginning and at least somewhat of an idea where things are going to land. With a clear picture of where to start and a general sense of where I’m ultimately headed, it’s the “getting there” that can be a challenge. I completely rewrote Anyone But Her, top-to-bottom, five times, changing key elements and plot lines—this is not counting dozens of interim revisions. Because of this, the ending changed quite a bit, as did much of the middle. But the beginning never did; it always started with that scene between Suzanne and the ghost of her mother, Alex.

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

As mentioned above, Suzanne and I are similar in age and share many cultural references. Additionally, like I was as a teen, Suzanne is introverted and trying to figure herself out. That’s where the similarity ends; she’s otherwise way more badass than me. In the 2004 timeline, adult Suzanne has married and had children at a much younger age than I did—and as the mother of a teen and a 9 year old, she faces motherhood challenges that I did not in 2004, when my first two children, twins, were infants. Despite these differences, Suzanne is one of my favorite characters that I’ve ever written, in both her teen and adult lives.

What non-literary inspirations have influenced your writing?

For Anyone But Her, certainly music played a big part. I have 1970s playlists that I listened to as I wrote. And as anyone familiar with my writing knows, I’m greatly influenced by setting. When I was younger, I had aspirations of being an architect, and this shows in my writing via the homes that often play a part in my novels. In Anyone But Her, the house where the family lives is an 1888 Queen Anne Victorian, complete with turret. This house, while fictional, is common in its neighborhood, Capitol Hill, and throughout much of Denver. I’m currently writing a new novel—a mystery set in Denver and the Colorado mountains in 1938—and readers will recognize this same house playing a role in that book, too.

Visit Cynthia Swanson's website.

The Page 69 Test: The Bookseller.

The Page 69 Test: The Glass Forest.

Writers Read: Cynthia Swanson (February 2018).

--Marshal Zeringue