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SPECIAL EPISODE: Delia Owens (re-release), WHERE THE CRAWDADS SING

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SPECIAL EPISODE: Delia Owens (re-release), WHERE THE CRAWDADS SING

Delia: I've written poetry all my life. I'm not saying I'm good at it at all. Words just come to my mind a lot. I feel a lot when I write poetry. I feel that the words themselves can be so inspiring to readers. Most people who love good prose and literature, even if they don't have time or the inclination to read poetry, when they do read a verse, they feel a lot. That was the number one thing I wanted about this book. I wanted people to feel. Poetry makes you feel. You can get your thoughts into a few words. You can do it in a way that it’s like putting a drug straight into your bloodstream. You have to read a whole novel sometimes to feel certain things and get the point. A poem can say so much in a few words. That's a reason it’s so powerful.

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Elyssa Friedland & Kermit Roosevelt III, FIRST STREET

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Elyssa Friedland & Kermit Roosevelt III, FIRST STREET

Kermit Roosevelt III: First Street is a character-driven drama that's set inside the United States Supreme Court. The main characters are law clerks for the supreme court. We thought it would be very interesting to take this powerful important branch of government that operates mostly in secrecy and try to give people a look inside it through the lives of the people who work behind the scenes. You read about the justices sometimes. You never read about the clerks, but they're there. They're working on all these cases. In some situations, they're actually very important. Sometimes they affect the outcome of the case.

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Julie Valerie, HOLLY BANKS FULL OF ANGST

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Julie Valerie, HOLLY BANKS FULL OF ANGST

Julie: My husband used to tell me when I would get frustrated with that manuscript, he would say, “Don't write that. That's not you. You should write what you're writing in your emails.” I had a number of emails about mom life that were funny. They were kind of going viral in our social group. He was like, “You need to tap into that. That's what resonates with you. You're a funny writer.” I was trying to write a serious novel, but I think I'm more for humorous novels. He said, “Write what you write in your emails.” Then I remember thinking, that is the craziest thing, looking at email and saying, how do I take an email and build that into a whole storyline? There was a kernel of something in there. I think it was a kernel of truth, the truth that I was living and my friends were living in motherhood that needed exploring. Then I set the other manuscript aside after many, many years and started with my twenty-six letters and set of punctuation marks, black ink on white paper. I started letter by letter, word by word building out the story that eventually became the first book in the Village of Primm series, Holly Banks Full of Angst.

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Elliot Ackerman, WAITING FOR EDEN

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Elliot Ackerman, WAITING FOR EDEN

Elliot: You've got to work, do the work. It sounds really obvious. Sometimes it’s not obvious that you have to do the work. You have to read. People sometimes don't recognize that -- my process, too, is I read. I read as much as I write. I try to read really widely without a very specific agenda because that's how you get the good stuff. Don't let rejection beat you down too much. It’s horrible to say. I want to use a sports metaphor. I call it up-at-bats. You have to get up to bat. You have to keep getting up to bat because that's the thing you can control, is how much you're putting yourself out there. If you only connect on something, get something published or whatever it is, one out of twenty times, if you're getting up to bat a hundred times, that's pretty good. You're in the door. If you only get up and try once or twice or three times, you might be great, but you're not trying enough. You're going to think you're failing. One of the great things about writing is in so many respects you have the control. One of the horrible things about writing is that you have the control. [laughter]

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Torrey Maldonado, TIGHT

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Torrey Maldonado, TIGHT

Torrey: I get to meet lots of different adult groups and also student groups who know the book. One of the things that I ask is, “How many of you have been peer-pressured? How many of you have done a dare? How many of you have been in a situation that you know is tight and not right, but you stayed in that situation?” Ninety percent of the honest adults raise their hands. A hundred percent of the kids raise their hands. Peer pressure is this perennial issue that we all go through. The teacher in me wanted to write a book that gave kids a model of, “If I'm ever in this tight situation, here are some other options.”

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Cathleen Schine, THE GRAMMARIANS

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Cathleen Schine, THE GRAMMARIANS

Cathleen: Someone reminded of Ann Landers and Dear Abby who were identical twins and had a long, long feud. They each had warring advice columns. I first thought, no, I don't want to write about twins. It’s too difficult. I don't understand them. I'm not a twin. I don't even know any twins very well. Then once that idea got in my head, the twins kept at me. I thought, this is it. This is what I have to write about. Then … someone gave me a book called English as She is Spoke, which is a hilarious book that was a viral -- it was a sensation in the nineteenth century. Supposedly, it was a phrase book for Portuguese travelers in England. Every phrase was insane. It didn't make any sense. It became a comic sensation. Mark Twain wrote an introduction to it. It was so funny. It made me realize I could write about one of my passions, which is language and linguistics and words.

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Rene Denfeld, THE BUTTERFLY GIRL

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Rene Denfeld, THE BUTTERFLY GIRL

Rene: This a very hopeful story. It’s a story not just about surviving. It’s a story about surviving even after really significant trauma. It’s something I can bring to people. We all experience trauma. We all have grief and loss and hardship. We live in this culture where we’re told, particularly if we have certain kinds of traumas happen to us like I did -- I got all these messages growing up that I was broken and damaged. You get these messages. I really internalized it for a long time. The way I actually survived -- my saving grace was the public library. Starting when I was little, I would run to the public library every day after school. I would surround myself with these walls of books. I escaped into story. I escaped into my imagination. That's a really significant theme in this story too, was how the power of story -- I think it’s true with most of us. We can all cite one or two books that really changed our lives. That's what saved me, was the power of books and stories and this eternal hope I always had that things could be better.

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VC Chickering, TWISTED FAMILY VALUES & NOOKIETOWN

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VC Chickering, TWISTED FAMILY VALUES & NOOKIETOWN

VC: I had a two-book deal with St. Martin’s Press. They were like, “What's next?” I thought, how about another taboo? Since that was so much fun to explore, what are the other American taboos out there? Twisted Family Values came about from a guy that I dated years ago for about ten minutes. He told me a story about a flirtation he had with his first cousin when they were young and the innocent childhood exploratory that kids do and how it carried on for longer than decorum would allow or should allow at the time. I thought, boy, that might be an interesting juxtaposition to take that scenario and drop it in a well-to-do community. How would that family and how would that community respond to something that, in theory, shouldn't be done?

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Lisa Jewell, THE FAMILY UPSTAIRS

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Lisa Jewell, THE FAMILY UPSTAIRS

Lisa: The Family Upstairs [is] a story told from the point of view of three different people. The first person we meet is Libby Jones. Libby is twenty-five years old. She lives in a small town just outside London. She sells design kitchens for a living. She's a very sensible girl. She's a very organized girl. She doesn't really do spontaneity or surprising things. She was adopted as a baby. She's known all her life that on her twenty-fifth birthday she’ll find out what her birth parents have been holding in trust for her. She's got no idea what it is. We meet her in the first chapter opening a letter from the solicitors to tell her what this is, her bequest from her birth parents. She discovers that she has inherited an eight-bedroom mansion in Chelsea overlooking the River Thames, which is a quite extraordinary thing. She also finds out when she goes to visit the house with the solicitor that this house comes with a whole host of terrible, terrible, dark secrets.

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Jeanne McWilliams Blasberg, THE NINE

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Jeanne McWilliams Blasberg, THE NINE

Jeanne: The Nine is the story of a boy who goes off to a very prestigious boarding school. It was his mother’s hope and dream to get him into this school. She really is under the impression she's got him all set and he's headed off for a stellar future. When he gets to the school, he uncovers an underground world. The Nine is the name of the secret society that taps him. He uncovers a crime as he's cavorting around with this group. He becomes more obsessed with solving the crime than making his mother’s hopes and dreams come true. Their realities need to reconcile. It’s about a family’s experience as this boy goes off and the redefinition of success for them.

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Vanessa Lillie, LITTLE VOICES

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Vanessa Lillie, LITTLE VOICES

Vanessa: Little Voices is the story of a woman postpartum who is both struggling as a new mom, but then also her friend was murdered actually on the night she went into labor. She very much wants to return to who she was before, to be able to investigate, to be able to help find justice for her friend. It’s the story of an investigation. It’s also the story of motherhood, which is something I really wanted to read. I thought of this story and wrote a lot as a new mom. I wanted to see a new mom at the heart of a thriller, which is my favorite genre.

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Tui Sutherland, THE HIDDEN KINGDOM

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Tui Sutherland, THE HIDDEN KINGDOM

Tui: I'd written a bunch of books before Wings of Fire, as you mentioned. A unifying theme of all of them is I really am interested in telling stories from different perspectives. When you read one book, you'll see the other characters. You'll find out more about them as you read their books. That was one thing that I was really interested in. I also really just love writing fantasy. I've always read fantasy. I find it one of the most fun genres to read. With Wings of Fire, it started with -- my agent and I were talking about all of my ideas for different projects. He said, “Have you ever thought about doing something that was focused on dragons” -- he knew that I loved dragons -- “with them as the heroes of the story?” I immediately got excited because it fit into those themes I'd been thinking about. All the books that I'd read, the humans were the heroes of the story. The dragon were there, but they were the sidekicks or the transportation or the bad guys. They never got to be the center hero. I thought wouldn't it be interesting to write a whole series where the dragons get to tell their own stories? I thought that would be really fun to do.

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Katharine McGee, AMERICAN ROYALS

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Katharine McGee, AMERICAN ROYALS

Katie: American Royals is essentially Crazy Rich Asians meets The Crown. It is a what-if scenario. What if, instead of being our first president, George Washington had been our first king and present-day America is still a monarchy? It follows the love lives and relationships and adventures of the three children who are all the current generation of heirs to the throne. There's Princess Beatrice, who will be the very first Queen of America, and then her two younger siblings, Samantha and Jefferson.

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Danielle Ganek, THE SUMMER WE READ GATSBY

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Danielle Ganek, THE SUMMER WE READ GATSBY

Danielle: I'm always so interested in writing about women who wrestle with their creative ambitions. I'm particularly fascinated, obviously, with writers and people who are doing it with writing. Working with art and wanting to express yourself through art is something in all of the characters that I explored. I'm always trying to get inside that kind of thing and maybe understand it for myself, but create characters who are trying to do that.

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Jennifer Blecher, OUT OF PLACE

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Jennifer Blecher, OUT OF PLACE

Jennifer: Out of Place is the story of a twelve-year-old girl named Cove who lives on Martha’s Vineyard, which is an island off of Cape Code, with her mom. She's never left the island once in her entire life, which was fine with her until the day that her best friend Nina comes and tells Cove that Nina’s going to be moving to New York City with Nina’s two fathers. In that moment, Cove’s entire life feels like it’s falling apart. She has no idea how to make it better. It’s a story about friendship and mistakes and big acts of courage.

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Lauren Gershell, Co-Author, THAT'S WHAT FRENEMIES ARE FOR

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Lauren Gershell, Co-Author, THAT'S WHAT FRENEMIES ARE FOR

Lauren: The book is about a woman who lives in New York City who has it all. She has everything she thinks she's ever wanted. She puts a lot of importance on her own social capital. She starts to feel as though her star is fading. She takes on a young spin instructor and in a very mammalian fashion, decides that she's going to make her into a superstar, not necessarily out of the kindness of her own heart but to regain some of the social capital that she thinks she's lost.

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Holly Peterson, IT'S HOT IN THE HAMPTONS

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Holly Peterson, IT'S HOT IN THE HAMPTONS

Holly: I like to set books in a summer community, not just because it’s hot and fun and sexy and lots of great things happen and food is eaten and hopefully good sex scenes and all kinds of juicy stuff, but also because the basis for it is really rife with current issues of inequality and class and differences and learning to talk to each other and deal with each other and have problems. It’s a look at society and where we are today, not just a lite beach read.

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Jane Green, THE FRIENDS WE KEEP

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Jane Green, THE FRIENDS WE KEEP

Jane: A group of people meet at university in the UK in the 1980s. Half are American. Half are English. They live together at university. They become best friends. They swear that they're going to be friends forever and ever. Of course, life gets in the way. They graduate. One of them is harboring this great secret. She really has to withdraw from the others. We follow them individually throughout their lives. Evvie is a model who then is in an abusive marriage and a single mother. We have Topher who’s a soap actor who is gay but has tremendous issues with intimacy. Then we have Maggie. All Maggie has ever wanted is a big country house filled with animals and children. She doesn't get to have the life that she wants. We follow them throughout the course of their lives. Then at their thirtieth reunion, by which time they’ve all completely lost touch, they all show up at their thirtieth reunion. Within minutes, it’s as if time has stopped. They’ve been swept back to those early days. What starts as a fancy, “Hey, wouldn't it be great if we lived together?” becomes a reality. They all move into together. Of course, there is still this secret from the past that is going to show up and threaten to explode and destroy everything that they’ve created.

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Karen Dukess, THE LAST BOOK PARTY

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Karen Dukess, THE LAST BOOK PARTY

Karen: I had this amazing, magical day in my twenties. I had gone to a party like the one that opens the book, this literary crowd, and met a guy, an artist. Soon after, we had this amazing day at the beach, the ocean. It was deserted and after a storm. A buoy from a lobster pod was quite close to shore. We danced around in waves. We pulled it in, very much like I described in the book. We took the lobsters. Being in our twenties, we didn't think that this is poaching. [laughter] We walked carrying the lobsters by the tail back to his house. We had dinner. Many years later, this guy died. Many years after that, I wanted to capture this day in writing because it was very magical at the time and became more special later. I had lost touch with him. I wanted to write about it.

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Fiona Davis, THE CHELSEA GIRLS

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Fiona Davis, THE CHELSEA GIRLS

Fiona: Each of my books are situated around a landmark New York City building. The building for this one is of course the Chelsea Hotel. It’s about female friendship and the theater in New York City and politics, which is something new that I'm layering in. It takes place in 1950 from the point of view of an actress and a playwright, both women, who are trying to mount a play on Broadway during the McCarthy era. That was a very interesting time for actors in New York City.

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