All Blog Posts from Author Talk

Jeff Glor talks with Sophie Hannah for her latest book, "The Cradle in the Grave," a psychological thriller about a TV producer unwittingly caught up in a murder scandal.

Jeff Glor: What inspired you to write the book?

Sophie Hannah: Unusually for me, I was inspired by news events: three mothers accused of murdering their own children. Normally the origins of my novels are much more personal than that, but I would never have written "The Cradle in the Grave" if I hadn't been fascinated by the real-life cases of three British women - Sally Clark, Angela Cannings and Trupti Patel - who were tried for the murders of their own babies. Clark lost two infant sons to SIDS (Sudden Infant Death Syndrome), or crib-death. Cannings and Patel each lost three babies, and doctors couldn't find any explanation for the deaths. All three women were accused of murder. Testifying against them was eminent child protection expert Professor Sir Roy Meadow, who coined what came to be known as Meadow's Law: 'One crib death within a family is a tragedy, two is suspicious, three is murder'. Meadow also testified at Sally Clark's trial that the odds of more than one baby in the same nuclear family dying unexpectedly of natural causes were 73 million to 1. On the basis of his testimony along these lines, both Sally Clark and Angela Cannings were found guilty of murder. By the time Trupti Patel came to stand trial, however, the public mood had changed. Many respected statisticians had come forward to say that Meadow's 73 million to 1 statistic was utter nonsense. Campaigners for the exoneration and release of Clark and Cannings pointed out that if a particular family had an undiagnosed genetic condition, the likelihood of more than one baby from that family falling victim to SIDS might actually be very high.

When Trupti Patel stood trial for the murders of her three babies, there were pro-Clark-and-Cannings, anti-Meadow protesters demonstrating outside the court. One medical expert witness who testified for the prosecution told me, 'I knew as soon as I arrived at court and saw the crowd of protesters with their placards and banners, as soon as I was told that I had to be taken in round the back entrance in an armored van - I knew then that, whatever happened inside that courtroom, Trupti Patel would be acquitted. There was a lot of well-publicized anger about so-called evil doctors persecuting innocent crib-death mothers; politically, it would have been impossible to send yet another mother to prison for the murders of her three babies.'

I found this compelling, and chilling. There was no more or less conclusive evidence of either guilt or innocence in the Patel case than in Clark or Cannings. If Angela Cannings had been the third of the three women to stand trial rather than the second, she would almost definitely have been acquitted. If Sally Clark had been third instead of first, she would have secured not-guilty verdicts too. Trupti Patel was fortunate to have been tried at a time when public opinion was heavily weighted in favour of 'the crib-death mothers' rather than 'the child protection hawk doctors'. This was another aspect of the whole affair that I became obsessed with: the way everybody I spoke to about this issue seemed to view it in 'team' terms - the mothers versus the doctors. In the course of my research for "The Cradle in the Grave," I asked many people - almost everyone I met - for their views on these newsworthy cases. Some people were on the doctors' side, and others supported the mothers; it was either 'Those doctors are evil - they demonize innocent women' or 'Those women murdered their babies - it's just that no one can prove it'. Not one single person said, 'Since Sally Clark, Angela Cannings and Trupti Patel are completely distinct individuals, I think it's possible that Roy Meadow was right about one or two of them and wrong about one or two of them. Some of them might be guilty and some innocent'. Everyone in the country seemed to have decided what story they wanted to tell themselves, and was cherry-picking the facts that would make that story work, while disregarding anything that didn't quite fit.

So - very long-winded answer! - I wanted to write a novel about several woman accused of murdering their babies, and to tell the stories of those women as individuals. How do three completely different women who have never met, and who have nothing but motherhood in common, end up in horrific predicaments that are sinisterly similar? And are they really similar, or do they only appear to be? That's where the mystery element comes in!

JG: What else are you reading right now?

SH: I am reading "Shit My Dad Says" by Justin Halpern, a brilliant, baffling, painful book that details a childhood full of what can only be described as psychological abuse in a way that makes the reader suspect the author has no idea quite how dysfunctionly damaging his hilariously sarcastic father is. The book is both laugh-out-loud funny and slightly chilling; its every page demonstrates the difficulty of recognizing abuse when it arrives in the form of extremely witty one-liners from an allegedly loving parent.

JG: What's next for you?

SH: I am putting the finishing touches to my next psychological thriller, "Kind of Cruel," and working on an outline for a TV series. In my head, I am also working on ideas for a self-help/popular psychology book for embarrassed British people, called 'How to protect your physical and psychological boundaries without looking like an idiot in public'.

JG: What surprised you the most during the writing process?

SH: Two things really surprised me while I was writing "The Cradle in the Grave." After all the research I did into the real-life cases of Clark, Cannings and Patel, I ended up none the wiser as to their respective guilt or innocence. I wasn't even able to make a guess, in any of the three cases. There was plenty of evidence to support whatever story a person might want to tell. That was a little scary. Also, I found that I had sympathy for everyone involved. Doctors who send innocent women to prison for the murders of their babies don't do it because they're evil. They do it mistakenly, because they genuinely want to protect and defend children. And women who smother their babies don't do it because they're wicked, but rather because they're desperate and ill. If society was more compassionate and less harshly judgmental, more people could admit to the mistakes they'd made and there would be fewer unsolved mysteries.

JG: What would you be doing if you weren't a writer?

SH: I would either be a country singer in the style of Emmylou Harris or Nanci Griffith, or else I would be a psychotherapist - a bossy one, who would get cross if patients didn't promise to leave their unsuitable partners and tell their controlling parents to get stuffed immediately.

For more on "The Cradle in the Grave," visit the Penguin Press website.

Jeff Glor talks to Diana Abu-Jaber about "Birds of Paradise," a "multilayered novel about a family that comes apart at the seams -- and finds its way together again."

Jeff Glor: What inspired you to write the book?

Diana Abu-Jaber: I started writing it, in part, because my husband and I were debating starting a family. But we were really scared--ever since we'd moved to Miami, the news was filled with stories about runaway girls and kidnapped children. And I was thinking a lot about how I'd gone off to college at 16, and what a crazy, overwhelming thing that was, to leave home at such a young age. "Birds of Paradise" became a way for me to think about the things that frightened me the most as a parent, to imagine a family, like the one in the book, who live through the scariest things and those deepest fears. I wanted to know what might happen to the family of a runaway, if they'd endure or be blown apart.

JG: What surprised you the most during the writing process?

DAJ: When I first started writing, I thought I knew the reason why the daughter runs away and I wrote a first draft that way. Once I finished that draft, though, I realized that wasn't it at all--it was just what I'd assumed it would be. When I went back in to write a second draft, the real reason turned out to be much darker and more disturbing than I'd expected.

JG: What would you be doing if you weren't a writer?

DAJ: I'm very much drawn to visual media -- I love painting and drawing and I'm obsessed with film. I hope I'd become a filmmaker ... Then again, I might've focused more on my food passion and become a pastry chef -- which I think is another visual medium.

JG: What else are you reading right now?

DAJ: "A Gate At the Stairs" and a big stack of student papers!

JG: What's next for you?

DAJ: I'm writing a follow up to my cooking memoir, "The Language of Baklava." I think the new one will be called "Grace At the Table" -- it's about being a girl with a traditional immigrant parent, struggling to become a writer and then also a mother -- and all the people who said I should choose one or the other!

For more on "Birds of Paradise," visit the W.W. Norton website.

Jeff Glor talks to Rachel Shteir about "The Steal: A Cultural History of Shoplifting."

Jeff Glor: What inspired you to write the book?

Rachel Shteir: I was interested in why people who had money--movie stars like Winona Ryder, for example--shoplifted.

JG: What surprised you the most during the writing process?

RS: The complexity of the topic and the polarized reactions people had to talking about it--either they wanted to confess everything or they didn't want to reveal anything.

JG: What would you be doing if you weren't a writer?

RS: I've always wanted to be a writer, so it's hard to think about that. Maybe go to cooking school and open a restaurant.

JG: What else are you reading right now?

RS: I always read a lot of books at the same time. I'm reading a novel by the film critic, David Thomson, "Suspects," which imagines the lives of film noir characters off screen, as it were. I'm also reading a book by Mary Catherine Bateson, the daughter of Margaret Mead, called "Composing a Life," which traces the lives of extraordinary women. Those are both older books. In terms of stuff that just came out, I recently read a great first novel by Eleanor Henderson, "Ten Thousand Saints."

JG: What's next for you?

RS: Working on some new ideas for books 

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Shteir's research reveals that there are differences in the items that men and women steal. Shteir says that people often shoplift in order to address a "wrong" and often feel that it's okay to steal from a large corporation.

For more on "The Steal," visit the Penguin Group website.

Jeff Glor talks to Marianne LaFrance about "Lip Service," her revealing book about the science of smiles.

Jeff Glor: What inspired you to write this book?

Marianne LaFrance: One of the wonders of my childhood was my mother's ability to tell what was going on between people just by watching them. That began my fascination with the minutia of social interaction, especially how and why people smile. Much later as an experimental social psychologist I had collected a substantial pile of interesting research findings that begged to be heard by a larger audience than those few research psychologists who were interested in facial expression and subscribed to scientific journals.

JG: What surprised you most during the writing?

ML: As a researcher who has mostly written papers for scientific journals, I found it surprising how difficult it was to lose the scientific jargon, the obsessive detail, and the preoccupation with methodology and write in a way that an ordinary person would still appreciate the science supporting the discoveries.

JG: What would you be doing if you weren't a writer?

ML: Mostly everything that I am already doing. My life as a college professor involves conducting research, teaching, supervising graduate students, advising undergrads, and sitting on endless committees.

JG: What are you reading right now?

ML: "State of Wonder" by Ann Patchett, "Started Early, Took My Dog" by Kate Atkinson, "I is an Other: The Secret Life of Metaphor and How It shapes the Way We See the World" by James Geary.

For more on Lip Service, visit the W.W. Norton website.

Jeff Glor talks to Geoffrey Gray for "Skyjack" about a new look at the old case of D.B. Cooper, the daring hijacker who jumped out of a plane forty years ago. He was never found, and the case has never been solved - the only hijacking case in history that remains unsolved. The Cooper case was in the news again recently when a woman came forward claiming her uncle was D.B. Cooper.

Jeff Glor: What inspired you to write the book?

Geoffrey Gray: I didn't find this story, it found me. I had no option to chase it. There was true mystery here, and nothing else seemed as interesting or important.

JG: What surprised you the most during the writing process?

GG: The physical labor. A book is like a muscle lifting competition. You have to be in great shape to go the distance. I found myself literally having to work out and get in top shape to finish work every day.

JG: What would you be doing if you weren't a writer?

GG: I dream often of....playing professional tennis (or pitching for the Yankees), opening a restaurant, becoming an inventor, a cold case detective, a volunteer fireman, and then maybe semi-retiring as a recreational farmer.

JG: What else are you reading right now?

GG: The Horn and the Sword: The History of the Bull as Symbol of Power and Fertility, by Jack Randolph Conrad, and The Billionaire's Vinegar by Ben Wallace.

JG: What's next for you?

GG: I have many superstitions, and one is to never talk about a project before it happens. I will say the mysteries and stories that interest me now are compelling relationships between ordinary people, displays of courage, and moments in time that, when extracted, say all there is about all there is.

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Based on his extensive research, Gray believes that the mysterious highjacker was not the debonair daredevil he is often made out to be. Gray points out that the hijacker's name comes from a comic book character, Dan Cooper, who was a major in the Royal Canadian Air Force.

For more on "Skyjack," visit the Random House website.

Jeff Glor talks to James A. Reeves about "Road to Somewhere," the author's" scattershot journey spanning five years, forty thousand miles, twelve speeding tickets, and several moments of unexpected kindness through the neon corridors and dark corners of America."

Jeff Glor: What inspired you to write the book?

James A. Reeves: Politics at first, then it got personal. In 2004, I was unnerved by how polarized the country had become (although that year seems optimistic compared to the national mood today). I was living in New York City, which is an ultra compressed version of America yet it tends to look inward and there aren't any mountains, so I drove across the country for the first time, thinking I might understand the talk about Main Street and "the real America." Once I hit the road, however, the grouchy political chatter felt like passing static. I was far more interested in the landscape, the endless loop of empty towns and thundering sprawl, the people that I met, and the thoughts that churned up while speeding through the desert. I discovered the same thing that so many others have reported: America is big, beautiful, and strange -- and I fell hard for it. So I kept driving. I became fixated on traveling around the country and, in retrospect, I made several professional choices so that I could rent a cheap car every few months and drive around some part of America that I hadn't seen before. It opened my mind, but I also began to get confused. I started to wonder how I was supposed to function as a man in this country. What should I be doing? After I lost my mother, I drove for a month, unsure of where to go or what to do next. Then I got serious about pulling all my notes and photographs into a book.

JG: What surprised you the most during the writing process?

JR: That stealing five or ten minutes in gas station parking lots and subway stations could add up to a 416-page book. For too many years, I subscribed to the myth of the cloistered writer and the flash of inspiration. I believed that if I cleared my calendar and sat in front of a blank page, I'd become so inspired that I'd crank out a book after a few fiery days of writing. But that magical moment never arrived. Maybe the creative process works that way for some people, but not me. I learned the hard way that it's just slow and steady work, and you need to fight for time to do it. So I try my best to put in one good hour of writing every day, no matter what else is going on in my life, and hopefully it'll add up to something worthwhile after a year or two.

JG: What would you be doing if you weren't a writer?

JR: I don't know if I'll ever afford to be a full-time writer. These days I run a design studio in New Orleans called Civic Center, and we work on projects that champion cities. I also have a background in education, I've started design programs, and I've taught college; I recently finished my first year of law school because I wanted to see what it was like. It wasn't fun. Late at night when I lower my guard, I sometimes wonder if running a design studio or going to law school are little more than incredibly elaborate forms of procrastinating on writing. They might be. The upshot to having a full-time job is that I'm always learning new things and having experiences outside of myself. But hopefully someday the balance will shift a little and I'll find more time to write than I have now.

JG: What else are you reading right now?

JR: I'm trying not to spend so much time reading the Internet. I've been a spastic reader lately. Immediately after my last exam in law school, I surrounded myself with novels because I realized that a good novel is the most important thing to me; the ability to tell a good story that makes you feel like part of something larger is the skill that I admire most. I was craving fiction so I blindly bought about a dozen novels that recently won big awards. This week I'm reading Shirley Hazzard's "The Great Fire," which is a beautiful and dignified book. Peter Matthiessen's "Shadow Country" is next in my queue; I'm excited to read about pioneering in the Everglades.

JG: What's next for you?

JR: Last month I crossed the halfway mark of my first novel: it's about an old man who travels from Jacksonville to Palm Springs to kidnap the host of the third most popular radio show in the country. The working title is "Tragic Americans on the Radio." At first I had the ambition to write a big literary thing about my feelings about living in a country that seems like it's breaking down. Then I discovered my book got more interesting when I fed my characters a lot of booze and gave them guns. Now I simply want to write a novel that keeps you turning pages when you should be doing other things. And hopefully it might say something worthwhile along the way.

I'm also collecting interviews and photographs of people who've been in fights. I think a collection of stories of fistfights across America might offer an interesting portrait of the country. Does a young man on Wall Street get into a fight for the same reasons as a rancher in Wyoming or a kid in St. Louis? What does it take to get into a fight, anyway? And how do these personal stories connect to our obsession with violence as entertainment? Maybe this book will answer these questions. At the very least, I'll meet some interesting people. 

For more on "The Road to Somewhere," visit the W.W Norton website.

Jeff Glor hears from Ernest Cline about "Ready Player One," a novel that takes place in the not-too-distant future, but deals heavily with the past. If you're a fan of 1980s pop culture, this book is a must read.

Jeff Glor: What inspired you to write the book?

Ernest Cline: The initial idea that inspired the story was when I wondered what if Willie Wonka had been a video game designer, and he turned his last will and testament into the greatest video game contest of all time. Once I had that idea, it wouldn't let go of me, and the entire novel grew out of that first flash of inspiration.

JG: What surprised you the most during the writing process?

EC: How much harder it is to write a novel than it is to write a screenplay. I've written over a dozen screenplays, and can usually knock out a first draft in a few months. But writing "Ready Player One" took me years, working on it off and on. But it was also my first novel, so I had a lot to learn during the process of writing it. Hopefully, writing the next novel will go much more quickly.

JG: What would you be doing if you weren't a writer?

EC: I'd probably still be sitting in a cubicle, helping people fix their computers and slowly going mad. So I'm very grateful the writing gig worked out.

JG: What else are you reading right now?

EC: I just picked up "Super Sad True Love Story," by Gary Shteyngart. A lot of people have been recommending it to me, because they say it has some similarities with "Ready Player One."

JG: What's next for you?

EC: My book tour starts today. I'm driving my 1982 DeLorean across the country, traveling from book store to book store. It's going to be geekiest book tour ever. Then I plan to spend a few weeks recovering and playing in the back yard with my daughter. After that, it will probably be time to start working on the next book.

For more on "Ready Player One," visit the Random House website.

Jeff Glor talks to Helen Schulman about "This Beautiful Life," a chilling, emotional drama that focuses on an unsuspecting family suddenly caught up in a modern-day sex scandal.

Jeff Glor: What inspired you to write the book?

Helen Schulman: The novel was inspired by many real life events -- more than I reckoned for when I first starting thinking about it. "This Beautiful Life" is set in 2003, the year I sort of woke up to the fact that incidents that once would have lived and died in a private sphere of embarrassment had through a quick press of forward and send become large Internet scandals with an international audience. Over email, a friend sent me a photo of a bridesmaid reaching joyously to catch a bouquet at a wedding, only to have her breasts pop out of her strapless dress. A young woman in the U.K. sent a recent date a sexy email and he gallantly forwarded it to a few friends and within days the email had gone global and the woman was afraid to leave her house. And then there were kids and their indiscretions, incidents I read about in the New York Times about cyber-bullying, but also thoughtlessly self-inflicted wounds where kids sent pictures and videos of themselves naked or performing sexual acts. I was working on my last book then, "A Day At The Beach," and was thinking ahead to my next project.

JG: What surprised you the most during the writing process?

HS: What surprised me most was how fast the world was changing -- I couldn't keep up with it. The first few Internet incidents that I came in contact with were followed by a flood of indiscreet sexts, texts etc. not only by teenagers, whose very job description requires them to act recklessly and passionately, but by adults who were too smart or too educated or too famous to not have known better -- Anthony Weiner comes to mind. New questions were raised all the time, including variations on the impact that a momentary bit of bad judgment might inflict upon a life. Even the laws surrounding sexting are changing and changing fast. And then all the other issues I was grappling with, post-9/11 society, the rush to greed that led to the banking crises, changing attitudes about sex roles etc., were hard to keep up with -- so I decided to set the story in 2003, a year I could actually research and wrap my literary arms around.

JG: What would you be doing if you weren't a writer?

HS: What would I like to be doing or what would I actually be doing? Since I am 50 years old and never had the physique for it, it seems ludicrous to say that I still dream of being a ballerina -- but in my heart that would be my wish. Bio-ethics also appeals to me.

JG: What else are you reading right now?

HS: I am reading Keith Richard's autobiography, "Life," which I find completely compelling. Deborah Landau's haunting and elegant book of poems, "The Last Usable Hour," sits by my bed. Next in the pile are novels by two beloved former students, "Ten Thousand Saints" by Eleanor Henderson, and "Girls In White Dresses" by Jennifer Close.

JG: What's next for you?

HS: I am writing a screenplay based on a short (very short) story of mine called "Parent's Night for Revision Productions" and dreaming ahead to my next book.

For more on "This Beautiful Life," visit the Harper Collins website.

Jeff Glor talks to Enrique Krauze about, "Redeemers: Ideas and Power in Latin America."

Jeff Glor: What inspired you to write the book?

Enrique Krauze: Redeemers is the product of more than thirty years of intellectual activity. Through most of the 20th Century and especially after the triumph of the Cuban Revolution, a commitment to revolution was much more popular in Latin America than support for democracy. I worked -for 23 years - as Assistant Editor of the journal Vuelta directed by Octavio Paz. The journal stood for democracy, criticizing both right-wing dictatorships and left-wing guerrillas. After Paz died in 1998, I started a new journal, called Letras Libres, to continue this tradition of commitment to democracy by publishing and writing essays intended to analyze, understand and criticize the continuing passion for revolution in Latin America. I've tried to do this somewhat like Isaiah Berlin in his Russian Thinkers or Edmund Wilson in To the Finland Station: focusing on the lives and ideas of writers, artists and revolutionaries.

JG: What surprised you the most during the writing process?

EK: The composition of the book suddenly became autobiographical, because I discovered more about the past of Octavio Paz himself who became, in a sense, the pivotal personage in the book. He had been a Marxist, had gone to Spain in the Spanish Civil War, wrote fiery revolutionary poems, and then gradually lost his devotion to Marxism and came to believe in liberal democracy. In considerable part, the book reflects our intellectual friendship and our shared critical passion.

JG: What would you be doing if you weren't a writer?

EK: I like what I'm doing at present besides my writing. I edit a literary and critical journal and direct a company that produces historical documentaries (shown nationally on A History Hour that has run for many years on Mexican television). But if I had to choose a different occupation, I think I would like to be an archaeologist.

JG: What else are you reading right now?

EK: A Dutch historian who teaches at Princeton and whose work I find fascinating, named Jonathan Israel. I don't know him personally but I've read various books by him and I'm now immersed in his great history of the Jewish diaspora in America during the 16th and 17th centuries: "Diaspora within a Diaspora." I'm also reading a very beautiful, very personal and original book on 20th Century Cuba: "The Sugar King of Havana" by John Paul Rathbone.

JG: What's next for you?

EK: I want to closely explore the history of a crypto-Jewish (marrano) family of Portuguese origin in early 17th-century Mexico. I've done a lot of research on them in the archives of the Holy Inquisition. And I'd like to link it, literally, with some of the history of my own family, Jewish immigrants from Poland, who have lived since the '30s of the 20th Century in the same places as those remote personages. My grandparents - through the chance of emigration - were saved from the ovens of Auschwitz but those others, in 1649, died in the flames of the Inquisition.

For more on "Redeemers," visit the Harper Collins website.

Jeff Glor talks to M.J. McGrath about, "White Heat," her intriguing murder mystery set in the Arctic Circle.

Jeff Glor: What inspired you to write the book?

M.J. McGrath: Three things: I'd been up in the Arctic doing research for a nonfiction book and realized then that it would be a great location for a series of mysteries. Nothing rots up there, so the tundra is littered with bones. Being hunters, the local people are very used to tracking animals (and other people) and they're familiar with what guns and knives can do to flesh. But as well as being a place full of physical drama, the Arctic is also the scene of great geopolitical tensions. There's a new kind of cold war going on up there - a battle for resources, yes, but also, ultimately, because of the Arctic's importance in climate change, a battle for the survival of the planet as we know it. So that was the first thing. Then, while I was up there one time I met a female polar bear hunter, an Inuit woman, tiny but very fierce. She became my inspiration for my protagonist, Edie Kiglatuk. So, I had my setting and a basis for my character, but the real impetus to get on and write the book came not long after I got back home, when I witnessed a horrific attack and found myself wrapped up in an attempted murder trial. Things came together after that.

JG: What surprised you the most during the writing process?

MM: I think probably how much my travels in the Arctic impacted on me as a person and as a writer. Being up there is in some ways as close as you can get to living on another planet. It's no coincidence that NASA uses the place as a training ground for its Mars missions. But in other ways, life is very familiar. People watch TV and eat junk food, kids go to school, families squabble, couples fall in love. It's that tension between regular lives and the weirdness of the world in which they're played out which really struck me.

JG: What would you be doing if you weren't a writer?

MM: I've been an educator, and loved that, but really I've no idea. I'm fascinated by people and I love cities but I'm also thunderstruck by the wonders of nature. Is there something you can do, other than writing, which combines all three? I guess so, but I'm not sure what it would be.

JG: What else are you reading right now?

MM: The great Dennis Lehane was speaking at the Theakston's Old Peculier Crime Writing Festival in Harrogate, England, recently and recommended the work of Boston-based crime writer, Robert B Parker, so I'm working my way through some of Parker's Spenser mysteries and at the same time reading Antonio Damasio's fascinating book on the biology of rational thought, "Descartes' Error."

JG: What's next for you?

MM: I'm finishing up another Edie Kiglatuk mystery, this time set in Alaska.

For more on "White Heat," visit the Penguin Group website.