Five Questions with Grace: Nancy Pearl

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Welcome to the newly relaunched Five Questions With Grace! After a much needed hiatus, I’m back with a long list of fun interviews with your favorite authors!

I decided to relaunch on the pub day for the fiction debut of America’s favorite librarian, Nancy Pearl! She has published several non-fiction books, is a regular contributor to NPR, and has a popular monthly show, Book Lust With Nancy Pearl, on the Seattle Channel. Nancy’s novel, George and Lizzie (Touchstone) came out on September 9th and has been highly anticipated! She gave me an advanced copy when I saw her a week ago, so I’ve been getting lost in the exquisitely-crafted tale. Be sure to pick up your own copy of this wonderful book!

Here are Nancy’s answers to my Five Questions:

 

 

1. If you could have been the author of any book that has ever been published, what would it be and why?

There’s so many books that came to mind when I read this question, among them Lorrie Moore’s Birds of America, Ruth Doan Macdougall’s The Cheerleader, Laurie Colwin’s Shine On, Bright and Dangerous Object, Leah Hager Cohen’s Heart, You Bully, You Punk, but if forced to choose just one, it would be Anne Tyler’s Searching for Caleb. It was a difficult choice between that and Tyler’s novel Dinner at the Homesick Restaurant because they both have everything I look for in a book: wonderfully quirky characters, beautiful but not baroque or self-conscious writing, and a plot that grows out of the character of the characters, rather than having the story thrust upon them. Yes, Searching for Caleb for sure.

 

 

 

 

2. What do you need around you when you start working on a book? (E.g. Gallons of coffee, absolute quiet, a lucky pen…)

Diet Pepsi and almost total quiet. Also, a place to write that isn’t at home and has no Internet access. I live in a pretty small and narrow townhouse, so I have to write in the center of everything, at the dining room table, and of course we have Internet. It’s too easy to sit down at the computer and check my email or Twitter or Facebook, then look around the house at the things I need to do (make dinner, dust the shelves, take out the trash, and, of course, read all the books that have come in for review). My best writing is done when I’m visiting someone who’s gone all day and their house is empty and I have no responsibilities for it.

 

 

3. For some horribly twisted reason you are forced to condense your book collection to just one small shelf. What six books would make the cut?

The Collected Poems of A.E. Housman
The Collected Poems of Edna St. Vincent Millay
Neal Stephenson: Cryptonomicon
Anne Tyler: Searching for Caleb
The Collected Poems of Philip Larkin
Merle Miller : A Gay and Melancholy Sound

 

 

 

 

4. What one piece of advice would you go back in time to give yourself when you were first starting off as a writer?

I’m going to sneak in two bits of advice, because they’re short: 1) Write for yourself, not for the thought of possible publication; and 2) To manage to create a balance between believing in yourself and your work and heeding the advice of people who give you suggestions for making your work better.

 

 

 

 

 

5. SPOILER ALERT Which character from your new book, George and Lizzie, was the hardest to write and why?

All the character were pretty easy to write about because I felt I understood who they were and why they were that way. For that reason, even Lydia and Mendel, Lizzie’s parents, were easy to write about even though I disliked them intensely. The one character I felt the most distance from is Alicia, and luckily for me (and Lizzie, who feels the same way I do), she’s not around a lot.

Please watch this site for the next set of Five Questions – this time with best-selling picture book author and illustrator, Ben Clanton.