Pat Barker

Rosie Blau of the Financial Times interviewed Pat Barker about her new book, Life Class.

Part of the article reporting their conversation:

Life Class returns to the subject Barker is best known for: the first world war. Her Regeneration trilogy was a bestseller - she won the Booker prize in 1995 for the final volume, The Ghost Road. The books were based around the wartime experiences of the poets Siegfried Sassoon and Wilfred Owen, and the neurologist who treated them for shellshock, William Rivers.

Barker’s novels have covered many subjects: working-class poverty, war in Bosnia and Afghanistan, child psychology. But this book will inevitably be seen as a return to her “home territory”. So how does she feel about that? She pauses. “Rotten, really, in lots of ways, I think it’s a bit of a caricature. I’ve not thought about it [the first world war] all that much in the intervening years.”

Read the entire article.

--Marshal Zeringue

Mark Oppenheimer

Last year Shmuel Rosner interviewed Mark Oppenheimer for the Israeli newspaper Haaretz.

One exchange from the interview:

Dear Mark,

Now here's a tricky question: you must have heard of the Bar-Mitzvah oral sex legend, recently mentioned in an Atlantic Monthly story by Caitlin Flanagan. "The story [a mother] told me about a Bar Mitzvah dinner dance on the North Shore of Chicago where the girls serviced all the boys on the chartered bus from the temple to the reception hall was so preposterous that I burst out laughing,|" wrote Flanagan. But maybe this was something to be taken more seriously. The mother who told Flanagan the story definitely thought so and started crying. "It was as though I had taken lightly the news that a pedophile had moved into my friend's neighborhood," Flanagan wrote. "It was as though I had laughed about a leukemia cluster or a lethal stretch of freeway. I apologized profusely; I told her I hadn't known." And there are more signs that this is becoming a serious problem. The leader of the Reform movement, Rabbi Eric Yoffee, included the subject of teenage oral sex as one of the main themes of his biennial speech. People are talking about this story as if it is a real, yet in your book you merely discard it as an urban legend. Did this really happen? And if so, how did it come about? Best, Rosner

Dear Shmuel,

Well, now you're getting into a minor obsession of mine, which is urban legends. In general, when a story has no evidence to back it up - when it's always "a friend of a friend told me" - it's best to discount it as false. Some urban legends are true; for example, it is true that there was a Bar Mitzvah boy whose party featured a bust of his head made out of chopped liver. His name was Mark Moskowitz, he was from suburban Philadelphia, and the story was reported in an article in Philadelphia Magazine in the 1970s (I tracked it down for my book, and I was totally surprised to find out it was true). But a bunch of 12-year-old girls servicing boys in the bathroom at a bar mitzvah? This just defies common sense.

Now, that's not to say that children aren't having oral sex at young ages. There's good sociological evidence that they are. But I think they're less likely to do that at a bar or bat mitzvah (think of all the parents walking around), and I think they're very unlikely to do it en masse.

But above all, I discount the story simply because there's no good evidence that it's true. Urban legends can be so widely repeated that they take on the statusof fact, but that doesn't make them so. There's a Hollywood actress who's widely rumored to be a hermaphrodite - biologically male or intersexed. I have known doctors who believe this story and even use it in their lectures. Yet there is not one shred of evidence that it is true - no reputable article in the popular or scholarly press, no admission from the actress herself or any of her doctors (it would be highly unethical to come from her doctors, of course). The only evidence people will point to is that her children are adopted, as if that's conclusive. Yet I have known dozens of people who believe it is unquestionably true. Human nature is very odd...

So am I concerned about youngsters have oral sex at too young an age? Of course. But do I think it's a feature of the modern bar or bat mitzvah? There's no good evidence that it is. However, I do think the persistence of the urban legend points to an anxiety that's very real, and that should be listened to. Parents rightly sense that these parties are sexualizing their children too soon. There's too much suggestive dancing, too many girls in too much makeup and too many slinky dresses, too many boys who believe their manhood depends on making out with a girl, whether or not they are emotionally ready for that kind of intimacy. I think some parents may sublimate their very real worries into these oral sex horror stories - somehow that may be easier for them than to deal with the more subtle ways that they are letting their children grow up too soon.

Yours, as ever,

Mark

Read the entire interview.

Mark Oppenheimer is the coordinator of the Yale Journalism Initiative, and the author of two books: Knocking on Heaven's Door: American Religion in the Age of Counterculture and Thirteen and a Day: The Bar and Bat Mitzvah Across America.

--Marshal Zeringue

Linda Greenlaw

Linda Greenlaw is a former swordfishing captain who was celebrated in The Perfect Storm, Sebastian Junger's best selling book about a fishing disaster. Greenlaw wrote a memoir, The Hungry Ocean, followed by The Lobster Chronicles and All Fishermen Are Liars. Her first novel, Slipknot, is a murder mystery set in a Maine fishing village.

Bob Minzesheimer interviewed Greenlaw for USA Today. One exchange:

Is fiction easier than non-fiction?

No. That's what I thought, but it's harder. It's totally different to look at a blank screen. For the first time, I needed an outline. I was 100 pages into it, and I had a dead body and didn't know who did it or why.

Read the entire interview.

--Marshal Zeringue

Jonathan Stroud

Emma Madden interviewed Jonathan Stroud last year for Write Away!.

One exchange from the interview:

Arrogance and vanity, although amusing, are the negative traits of most of your magicians (and djinnis). Is there any significance to those characteristics?

Well, I think the books are really about power and the imbalance of power. A lot of fantasy books show characters wielding power, of one sort or another. Traditionally heroes seem to be able to wield it fairly easily. In children’s fiction particularly, you have heroic magicians, like Gandalf, who are tremendously virtuous. I wanted to experiment, so that the humans with power would not be virtuous and so that I could explore the down side of having power up your sleeve. Nathaniel is the key character. He is quite idealistic in Book 1, but as he grows up the corruption around him accentuates his natural arrogance and vanity and these qualities become more extreme. The parallel in the real world is that no matter who you are there is the danger of the powerful becoming the elite. I don’t want any of these points to become didactic. It’s just a question of having issues floating around under the surface, which the readers can pick up on if they choose.

Read the entire interview.

--Marshal Zeringue

James Lee Burke

In October 2004 Anthony Rainone interviewed James Lee Burke for January Magazine.

One exchange from the Q & A:

Why do you set your books in Montana and Louisiana? Why are those locales important to you?

They're both great places to write about, because their story -- the microcosm -- really reflects a much larger population, really reflects national issues. As Dave Robicheaux says, wars are fought in places nobody cares about. And the national issues that are probably most critical, most important, the war over them is being waged in places like Montana and Louisiana. And those issues are resources, energies and extracted industries. That's what it's all about. From Iraq to Afghanistan to the offshore oil fields of the Gulf of Mexico, that's what it's all about -- energy. There's no question about the flag we're operating under today -- it's energy. A massive need for it. You see, in Montana, extracted industries are trying to get into wilderness areas. That's the big issue. They're trying to drill right now on the edges of Glacier National Park. If they get in there, say good-bye to it, man, it's gone. No matter what they say, it's gone. It's like the discovery of gold by [General George Armstrong] Custer's expedition of 1873. The dye was cast as soon as gold was discovered on Indian lands.

Read the entire interview.

The Page 69 Test: The Tin Roof Blowdown.

--Marshal Zeringue

Bob Morris

Last year Julia Buckley interviewed Bob Morris, author of Bermuda Schwartz and other mystery novels.

The opening exchange:

Dave Barry called you “funny as hell.” This is a pretty amazing compliment, coming as it does from a Pulitzer-winning humorist. Do you know Mr. Barry?

Dave and I go way, way back. We first met when I was a newspaper columnist for the Orlando Sentinel and was sent out on the road to cover the 1988 presidential campaign. Dave and I were the only humor columnists covering the caucuses, primaries and conventions, which was odd because those things are just totally laughable. While all the serious journalists were listening to speeches, Dave and I would be doing things like getting drunk with Kitty Dukakis or crashing parties for high-rollers or staging mock political protests. At the Democratic Convention in Atlanta in 1992, we put up signs all over the press headquarters notifying all these serious political reporters about a demonstration by a group called “People with Boxes on their Heads.” This group consisted of me, Dave and Eric Lacetus, from the Seattle Times. We put boxes on our heads, stood in the official protest area and dozens of serious journalists showed up to ask us questions like, “What does this protest symbolize?” And we’d answer: “It symbolizes that we are people with boxes on our heads.” We made it on CNN and some of the major newspapers, and when the serious reporters found out they’d been scammed they tried to act indignant, but it was way too late for that.

Read the entire interview.

--Marshal Zeringue

Alafair Burke

New Mystery Reader Magazine interviewed Alafair Burke, author of the successful legal series featuring DA Samantha Kincaid and Dead Connection, a new novel introducing New York City Detective Ellie Hatcher.

The first two questions and answers from the interview:

Congratulations on your new title! This latest is quite the departure from your previous legal thrillers; so why don't you tell us a bit about your new character and where she comes from?

Dead Connection introduces NYPD Detective Ellie Hatcher. Ellie has been a detective for only a year when a more seasoned but controversial and publicity-hungry detective in the homicide squad taps her to help him track down a killer. The killer is using an online dating service to target young women. Ellie fits the profile of the victims, and she herself is haunted by thoughts of a serial killer who she believes killed her detective father where she grew up in Wichita, Kansas.

Ellie is a very different character from Samantha Kincaid, the protagonist from my first three novels. Although both excel at their jobs in fields dominated by men, Ellie shoulders more responsibility in her life as a woman outside of work. She has a second job taking care of her family -- long distance in the case of her mother, still living in Wichita, Kansas, and on the couch of her living room in the case of her mooching older brother, Jess. She also has more at stake in her cases.

With your background being in criminal law, it was no doubt a familiar world in which you created your legal series; so how fun and/or difficult was it to create a story from this new perspective of investigation?

I’m still writing from experience, but from a different perspective. For two years while I was a prosecutor, I worked directly out of a police precinct, going on ride-alongs with cops, leading in-service trainings, and teaming up on pre-indictment investigations. I learned more about policing in my first month at that precinct than I’d learned my entire time at the D.A.’s Office. There’s no question it’s helping me write about policing with authenticity. It’s been a fun change for me.

Read the entire interview.

The Page 69 Test: Dead Connection.

--Marshal Zeringue

Pia Z. Ehrhardt

In May 2003, Claire Zulkey interviewed Pia Z. Ehrhardt, who has since published Famous Fathers & Other Stories.

One Q & A from the interview:

What's the key to writing a good sex scene?

Are you saying I do? Or that I need to keep trying? Trying is okay. I work hard to get the Vaseline off the lens and look at it flat, like a video camera might. Where's the arm, where are the legs, what do they kiss on each other that isn't a cliché? The fingers? What are they doing? This process doesn't sound very sexy, does it? Oh, hell, I'll admit it: there's not a lot of love in my sex scenes. Anger helps me write them.

Read the entire interview.

The Page 99 Test: Famous Fathers & Other Stories.

--Marshal Zeringue

Peter Heather

Peter Heather, author of The Fall of the Roman Empire: A New History of Roman and the Barbarians, fielded a few questions at the OUP blog, including:

OUP: Have you always been interested in Roman history? What inspired you to write this book about the fall of Rome, rather than tackle an easier Roman period?

Peter Heather: My interest in Roman history is all my mother’s fault. She was a frustrated historian, I think, and we were always going to Roman forts and villas, of which there are plenty in Britain. She’d visited Pompeii when young, but we never left Britain when I was a kid; my parents both found ‘abroad’ rather threatening I think.

The whole point of the fall of Rome is that it is difficult and therefore interesting. Trundling one more time through Caesar, Augustus, or Caligula would hold no pleasure for me. Fundamentally, I like complicated puzzles, where the answer slowly emerges from lots of interlocking lines of inquiry, and the late Roman period entirely suits that mentality.

OUP: Why is there so much controversy over the fall of Rome? Why don’t we know what happened?

Heather: There’s a huge amount of controversy because, in a sense, there’s just the right amount of surviving information to stimulate it. The fourth and fifth centuries are very well documented in relative terms for Ancient History both in terms of texts and - now - archeology, so there’s lots to get your teeth into, but not so well documented that final answers can be read off from the sources. Add to that the fact that its such an iconic event in European history. For classicists, who’ve dominated European educational thinking from the Renaissance until very recently, it was a huge disaster: the end of the ancient world of philosophy and rationality. In the era of nationalism, from the nineteenth century, on the other hand, Rome’s fall seemed to give birth to the direct ancestors of modern nation states and this could only be a good thing. What we’ve got, therefore, is an explosive cocktail of vested interests quarreling over a very big event.

Read the entire Q & A, and learn more about Peter Heather's The Fall of the Roman Empire.

--Marshal Zeringue

Martin Cruz Smith

Anna Metcalfe interviewed Martin Cruz Smith for the Financial Times. The author is best known for his series of crime novels featuring the fictional Russian investigator Arkady Renko. The first book in the series, Gorky Park (1981), sold more than a million copies and won a Golden Dagger Award from the British Crime Writers’ Association.

A couple of the questions and answers:

What is the last thing you read that made you laugh out loud?

Roy Blount Jr’s Long Time Leaving: Dispatches from Up South.

* * *

What book do you wish you’d written?

An Artist of the Floating World by Kazuo Ishiguro.

Read the entire Q & A.

--Marshal Zeringue