Maria Savva's Blog - Posts Tagged "random-acts-of-kindness"

I'm thrilled to be introducing you to author Lilian Duval. Her debut novel,You Never Know: Tales of Tobias, an Accidental Lottery Winner is a highly original and fascinating book about a man who wins an enormous amount of money on the Lottery. It is an intricately woven story that contains fabulous insight into human relationships and raises the question about whether luck or chance can really determine how our lives unfold.

I met Lilian through Bookpleasures.com and am very happy to have connected with her. She is delightful and very knowledgeable about many different subjects, as is reflected in her book. I was keen to interview her because I knew she would make a very interesting guest.

As well as agreeing to answer my interview questions, Lilian has also generously offered to give away a Kindle copy of You Never Know to 2 lucky readers of my blog! To enter, all you have to do is leave a comment below, or simply 'Like' the blog post. Winners will be picked at random on 28th January 2012.









Here are Lilian's answers to my interview questions:

You Never Know as the title suggests deals with the fascinating topic of chance and luck and whether or not we can control our own destinies.  Tobias, your main character, is the type of person who seems to plan everything, almost a control freak, whereas his brother, Simeon, is more of a person who lives his life in the moment.  Which character do you most relate to in that respect?

Actually, both. I try to plan ahead, but also enjoy taking life as it comes. And I have to tell you a secret: I chose male protagonists so that I would not make them into “Lilian clones.” Sometimes, if my main character is female, I tend to make her too much like me. I wanted Tobias and his brother Simeon to be completely original characters.



In the prologue to your book, you start out by saying that coincidence defines Tobias.  Do you believe in coincidences

Yes and no. I struggle with the concept of free will vs. fate. My aim in this book is to leave this conclusion up to the readers: does life unfurl according to plan, or are we the masters of our own destinies?



Tobias and his best friend Martin, meet often to play tennis and during those meetings they open up to each other about the ups and downs in their lives.  Do you play tennis?  I thought that the way you wrote about it made you come across as a seasoned professional!

Once again, you have hit the nail on the head. Tennis is my literary trick for getting Tobias and Martin to converse and confide in one another. Women seem to do that more easily than men, who are more likely to chat if they’re doing some other activity.

The tennis games in the book also demonstrate the changing status of who’s up and who’s down in the seesaw relationship between two best friends, Tobias and Martin.

My tennis consultant for all these games was my husband George, who is an accomplished amateur tennis player.




It’s no secret that in this novel, Tobias has a stroke of luck when he wins an enormous amount of money in the lottery.  What would you do if you won that amount of money?

Give some to our three grown kids, make some home improvements, buy a custom-made classical guitar, and take some trips. Then I would establish and staff a no-kill sanctuary for homeless or feral cats. I would let my husband invest the remaining money to keep it growing.


I think you have done a great job in ‘You Never Know’, at showing that sometimes having a dream come true can be a double edged sword.  What was the inspiration behind the novel?

The inspiration was a folder of newspaper and magazine articles about lottery winners that I kept for more than 20 years. A common thread in all these articles was that the winners ended up a rather disappointed lot, in spite of their good luck. Then I read about a psychological study that revealed that accident victims who became paraplegics actually made better long-term adjustments to their new status than lottery winners! You can read about that study here:

Psychological Study Inspired Book

I was impressed by the diverse range of subjects contained within the pages of your novel.  How much research did you have to do?  And how did you go about carrying out the research?

Research is vital to making fiction seem real. My brother, who’s a psychologist, referred me to specialists who answered my questions about brain damage, alcoholism, and related subjects. I bought and borrowed books on the subject as well. My husband provided the info on tennis and financial matters. My friend, a certified art therapist in NY City, answered all my questions on that subject and even gave me two bona fide art therapy sessions so I could experience what I was writing about.



One of my favourite parts of the book was where the family take a tour of the Amazon in Venezuela.  Your descriptions were amazing.  Have you ever taken that tour yourself?  It seemed like you were writing as someone who had been there.

You are absolutely right. My husband and I took a tour of the Amazon in which many of those events actually happened, including a jungle hike that ended in darkness, and a scorpion sting (I was the victim). As for the visit to the Yanomami natives, I did a lot of reading on the subject, but never actually visited their villages.


In your bio it states that you are a survivor of the World Trade Center terrorist attack.  In your book there is a chapter which describes the characters’ experiences on the day.  It is a haunting read.  How much of the content in You Never Know reflects your own personal experience of that terrible day?  Were you near the World Trade Center then?

Yes. My husband and I are both survivors of the 2001 terrorist attacks on the World Trade Center in New York.

On that day, I was heading to New York to my job as a computer consultant for Lehman Brothers in One World Trade Center. My commuter train was in the middle of the New Jersey Meadowlands when the first plane hit, and a conductor came walking through the cars telling everybody.

I got out my Walkman radio and put on headphones to listen, and soon a crowd gathered around me. “A jet plane hit World Trade Center No. 1,” I told them. The radio announcer said it was a 747, and I told them that, too. “And the Kennedy Center,” the radio man said nervously. I repeated it. “No, it was the Pentagon!” the radio man said.
I repeated that to the people huddled around me, and one man said, “We’re at war.” Two of the commuters started crying. Through the windows, we could see smoke coming from downtown Manhattan.

When we arrived at Hoboken Terminal, just across the Hudson River from the attack, the police and FBI were all over the terminal, sending everybody home—no subway trains under the river, no ferry over the river, no buses, no crossing over to New York City.

I got onto a very crowded train heading back to my home town in New Jersey, and one of my colleagues ended up standing next to me in the vestibule. All the way home, I was frantically trying to call my husband in his office at a brokerage firm in the first tower. No answer.

Two weeks later, my colleague reminded me that we had seen the towers crumble from the vestibule of our very slow train. I simply had no memory of that. “No,” I told him, “We didn’t see that. You’re joking.”

“No, I wouldn’t joke about that,” he told me. “Your memory was lost because it was too traumatic.”

I rode my bike home from the train station and sat in front of the TV alone, crying, worrying about my husband, George. At 2:00 in the afternoon, after dozens of phone calls from family and friends, George’s friend called to say that he was safe and he had escaped, but couldn’t call home because of all the cellphone difficulties. Only an hour later did I hear from a relative whom George had been able to reach.

It was 8:00 p.m. before George came home, traumatized and pale, but safe. Two days later, during one of many phone calls to family members, I learned how close he’d come: George had been invited to a presentation in Windows on the World that day, a breakfast meeting, on the 107th floor. His schedule had been so overloaded that he’d forgotten to attend. He didn’t want to tell me that at first, because the catastrophe was so overwhelming.

We didn’t sleep that night, but held hands the whole night. We hardly slept for several nights afterward. Our grown son, who lived in NY City at the time, came home to NJ as soon as traffic was permitted. He and his wife stayed with us for a week or so because they didn’t want us to be alone.

We both returned to work soon after the attack—my husband George as an officer in a brokerage firm, and me as a computer programmer for Lehman Brothers (R.I.P.) But it was never the same. George eventually retired early because of post-traumatic stress disorder. He had watched, horrified, as all the firefighters climbed up the stairs to their deaths, while he and his colleagues climbed down the stairs to safety. In his heart, he knew they were all going to die. As for me, a few months later, I switched careers, from high-pressured programming to technical writing.

We’re both all right now, thankful that our lives were spared, and deeply mournful for those who lost theirs, and for their loved ones who remain.



Simeon, Tobias’s brother is a fabulous artist.  You described many of his works as if they were real.  Do you draw or paint or have any background in art?

No, I’m an amateur musician. However, I love art and I go to art museums whenever I have the time. I also like to include art in my fiction writing.



I’m always interested in hearing from authors about whether they base their characters on anyone they know, or if they are purely fictional.  So, what’s your answer?

All of the main characters in You Never Know are completely fictional: Tobias, Simeon, Martin, and Carmela. Some peripheral characters were based on real people. Near the beginning, there’s an annoying customer in a bookstore who just can’t be pleased, and who brags about not having a television set. He’s based on my rather conceited former guitar teacher. Near the end, there’s an empathetic art therapist. With permission, he’s based on the great Giora Carmi of New York, an outstanding art therapist. Also near the end, there’s a cameo of my husband, who appears as the philosophical tennis coach Ezekiel Lim.

A very important peripheral character is the blind man in the train station. He’s lost in the terminal a couple of weeks before Christmas, and nobody bothers stopping to help him find his track. At the last moment, Tobias, my protagonist, jumps forward and helps the blind man. In so doing, he alters his own fate; shortly after that, he buys a winning lottery ticket to while away the time because he missed his train.

Well, that blind man was real, and that incident really happened to me—all except for the lottery win. It still shakes me up when I remember all those callous people passing by someone who clearly needed help. And just before Christmas, when people are supposed to be nice…



In You Never Know you touch upon the subjects of Art Therapy and Music Therapy.  I have long been a believer that art and music can help the healing process especially of the mind.  What are your opinions of these types of therapies and did you come across any interesting stories whilst researching for your book that you can share with us on these topics?

Oh, I agree with you on the benefits of these therapies, but don’t know anybody personally who has experienced them, except for me. As part of my research, I participated in two full-length art therapy sessions in New York. After only two sessions, separated by two weeks, I surprisingly found myself waking up in the morning in a cheerful and positive mood.




How long did it take to write You Never Know?

From start to finish, fourteen months.




I understand that you are soon going to publish a short story collection, Random Acts of Kindness.  I am eagerly awaiting that! I am also a short story writer and often find that people seem hesitant to read short stories, seeing them as somehow inferior to novels.  I love short stories and am always trying to convince people to read more.  What would you say to convince people to read more short stories?

Oh, I love these questions. Dear readers: you can read a well-crafted short story in one sitting. In only 20 or 30 minutes, you meet interesting characters, get involved in their lives, feel their struggles, and wonder what you would do in the same situation. Because they have only a few pages in which to reach you, short-story characters are more vivid and colourful than those who inhabit the rambling pages of novels.



Is your upcoming collection of short stories a themed collection, or is each story based on a different theme?  Can you tell us anything about any of the stories in the collection?

The general theme uniting all the stories is that somebody performs an act of kindness that was not expected—or, ironically, an expected act of kindness was not performed. Here is a synopsis of all the stories in the collection:


Wish
Marlon Liu, a survivor of the Cultural Revolution in China, escapes from the World Trade Center the day of the 9/11 attack, but life is never the same again for him and his Chinese-American wife Christine, who tries everything possible to cure his post-traumatic stress disorder, including matching him up with a date from a service that provides companions for married people. Therapy is not an option because of cultural prohibitions.

Prodigy
Julian Norman is four years old at the beginning of this story and eighteen by the end. In between, he astonishes adults and defies predictions. His parents’ marriage does not survive. Julian’s piano playing is second to none, but it’s his friendship with a retarded boy of the same age that has the most profound effect on his character development.

Oil on Canvas
Marla, age 36, is the gallery director of a museum and paints nature scenes as a hobby. Blind dates that her friends arrange for her never work out. A neighbor with whom she has little in common falls in love with her artwork, culminating in an unlikely romantic conflict with no easy resolution.

Lucky Two-Dollar Bill
Conrad, a Chinese-American professor, and Lexie, his rebellious teenage daughter, visit his ancestral home in Singapore, where an aging relative teaches them a lesson they never could have anticipated. Conrad is amazed that he and Lexie had to travel halfway around the world to learn how to communicate with each other.

Between Seasons
Deborah, a professional speech therapist, revisits Greenwich Village, where she landed her first summer job as a girl from an immigrant family. She then nearly derailed her college plans and her life, until a routine visit to the family dentist put her in her right mind. Looking back on the scene from adulthood, she wonders who really saved her from catastrophe. Deborah suspects that her parents, now dead, intervened, and she achieves a bittersweet understanding of them.

Hand Me Down
Nessa Foley is the local paragon of righteousness in a Pittsburgh, Pennsylvania suburb. She offers her neighbor Jolene a hand-me-down jacket for her small daughter, Corinna. Jolene is embarrassed when she discovers that Nessa’s own child still needs the jacket. Nessa wants to censor books in the public school library, while Jolene and her husband are proudly open-minded. But little Corinna’s request at the end surprises everyone. “Your children are not your children” is one possible conclusion.

Outsourcing
A research assistant on Wall Street in Manhattan almost loses her job to a brilliant young Indian economist, and then falls in love with him. Their culture clash threatens her sanity as well as her job, while she struggles back to equilibrium at the end of the affair.

Random Acts of Kindness (novella)
Seth Glassman is a middle-aged orthopedic surgeon in New York at the height of his career. His much younger wife Belinda, a black medical resident from Jamaica, is killed on a city street in a random act of violence. Seth closes his practice and moves to rural Massachusetts to grieve alone. After a few months, he begins performing anonymous, random acts of kindness that eventually lead him to a new purpose in life and a love he never would have imagined.



Who are your favourite authors and what is it about their writing that you like?

Tender is the Night by F. Scott Fitzgerald A perfect masterpiece; took 10 years to write.
Into The Heart: One Man's Pursuit of Love and Knowledge Among the Yanomami by Kenneth Good The best adventure story ever.
The Sun Also Rises by Ernest Hemingway In Hemingwayese: “It was a good book, a very good book.”
Inherit the Wind by Jerome Lawrence and Robert E. Lee. All of my ideals in one perfect play.
The Assistant by Bernard Malamud. An impeccable chronicle of conflict and resolution.
Angela's Ashes by Frank McCourt. The most exquisite memoir of all.
The Heart is a Lonely Hunter by Carson McCullers The story of a young girl who craves music.
The Crucible by Arthur Miller. McCarthyism then and now.
Lolita by Vladimir Nabokov. The Bible of all novels. No one could do better.



Is there a book you own that you’ve read more than once?

Oh, yes, many. I read Angela's Ashes and Into the Heart twice in a row. I read Lolita and Inherit the Wind four times each.



Are you reading a book at the moment?

Yes, The London Train by Tessa Hadley, a British author.



What do you think of ebooks as compared to print books?

I myself prefer printed books, but if the invention of ebooks gets people to read more, then I’m a fan!



How important are reviews for you as a writer?

Very important. Reviews are a mirror—I get to see whether people see what I see; whether they are touched by what I wrote. Some analyses of You Never Know taught me things about the book that I hadn’t been aware of myself.



How did you go about choosing the cover for You Never Know?

My publisher designed the foreground. And my brother, an accomplished amateur photographer, provided the background image of the waterfall.



Are you working on any projects at the moment?

Yes, I am fine-tuning the stories in Random Acts of Kindness for publication later this year.



When you’re not writing, what are your favourite pastimes?

I’m an avid amateur classical guitarist and practice 3 hours per day. Once a week I take lessons with a virtuoso guitarist in New York City, and I occasionally give free performances.



Where can people buy your book?

For those who want to see all the reviews, please look at Amazon in the U.S.:


Amazon US

And this is the link for Amazon U.K.:
You Never Know

Do you have your own website or blog where people can read more about your work?

Yes, this is my author website:
Lilian Duval author website

And this is the website for my professional writing service:
Lilian Duval - writing service



Thank you for answering my questions, Lilian!

Thank you so much for inviting me as a guest on your blog, Maria! I wish you all the good things.

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Remember, if you'd like the chance to win a Kindle copy of Lilian's book, please leave a comment below, or 'Like' this blog post. We'll pick the winners on 28th January 2012. Good luck!