Helene Wecker

Helene Wecker’s first novel, The Golem and the Jinni, was awarded the Mythopoeic Award for Adult Literature, the VCU Cabell Award for First Novel, and the Harold U. Ribalow Prize, and was nominated for a Nebula Award and a World Fantasy Award. A Midwest native, Wecker holds a B.A. in English from Carleton College and an M.F.A. in Fiction Writing from Columbia University. Her work has appeared in literary journals such as Joyland and Catamaran, as well as the fantasy anthology The Djinn Falls in Love and Other Stories. She currently lives in the San Francisco Bay Area with her husband and children.

Wecker's new novel, The Gates of Midnight, is the much-anticipated conclusion to The Golem and the Jinni trilogy.

My Q&A with the author:

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

It took me so long to come up with The Gates of Midnight! It's both a vibes-based title (dark, foreboding, a point of no return) and a direct reference to two different elements of the book. “Gate” comes from the wrought-iron gate to Chava the golem's house in Brooklyn, which is the threshold (both real and symbolic) between her own personal realm and the rest of the human world. And “Midnight” refers to Ahmad's regularly scheduled phone call to Chava, which he places every night at midnight. A long-distance call was an expensive proposition back in 1930, and it was never guaranteed to go through properly -- but since they live thousands of miles apart now, it's the only way to keep their relationship alive. I always second guess myself when it comes to titles, but The Gates of Midnight has really grown on me. And frankly I was shocked that it wasn't already taken!

What's in a name?

There’s so much significance in a name – sometimes too much for comfort! The act of choosing and changing a name, either one’s own or someone else’s, is a running theme in the Golem and the Jinni series. Ahmad used to be known as Ahmad al-Hadid, back when he lived a humble tinsmith's life in Manhattan -- but in The Gates of Midnight he works at an architecture firm under the name John Ahmad, as a concession to the racial realities of white- collar hiring at the time. He knows he needs to blend in, but also resents being expected to conform and knows he'll never truly be accepted, no matter what his name is. It doesn’t say so in the book, but my head canon is that he picked John because it was the least threatening first name he could think of, but then stubbornly reclaimed Ahmad as a last name because he couldn’t bear to part with it.

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

I think she'd be surprised by the true-to-life historical setting more than anything else. I read a lot of fantasy when I was in middle school and high school, but it was mostly high fantasy in invented worlds, quests and dragons and so on. At some point closer to college I got very into Gael Baudino and read her Strands of Starlight series, which begins in medieval Europe and moves forward in time through each book until it reaches the modern U.S.. A number of her characters are near-immortal elves who live among humans, and they pop up here and there through the different time periods. Looking back, that might've been my first exposure to historical fantasy, and the idea that you could bring the same characters forward in time from book to book. My time jumps aren't quite as drastic, though!

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

They're both difficult, but endings are worse. They have to carry so much more weight than beginnings. I tend to shove most of the action into the back third of any given book, and that was certainly true with The Gates of Midnight. The lead-up to the end involves multiple plot threads, each seen from several points of view, as they converge for the final showdown -- at which point the characters have to achieve their epiphanies and/or comeuppances on schedule. It took a lot of tinkering and shuffling scenes around to get the pacing right. And since this is the end of a trilogy, I needed to make Chava and Ahmad's ending feel extra expansive and meaningful so it could be a capstone for the larger story. The larger ending didn’t change much from how I imagined it, except for a handful of details. But the process of getting there made me question my life choices.

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

Oh, my characters definitely have parts of my personality. Especially Chava! We're both neurotic Jewish women who are scared of being noticed, but who also want to be told what a good job we're doing. (I, however, am not afraid of accidentally killing someone with my brute berserker strength.) I also made Chava extremely curious about the larger world, mostly in order to broaden her character -- but it gets her into trouble in the same way that my own curiosity does, especially when I let it push me over a social boundary. Kreindel Altschul, who is one of the main characters of The Gates of Midnight, has my stubbornness and my love of studying. Seriously, I could go to college for the rest of my life and be utterly content. In fact, I wonder sometimes if I only ended up in historical fantasy because a part of me wanted to research something!

Visit Helene Wecker's website.

Writers Read: Helene Wecker (June 2013).

The Page 69 Test: The Golem and the Jinni.

Writers Read: Helene Wecker.

--Marshal Zeringue