Jennifer Cody Epstein's Blog, page 4
November 16, 2018
Jamie Ford, NYT bestselling author of Hotel on the Corner of Bitter and Sweet
E.L. Doctorow once said, “The historian will tell you what happened. The novelist will tell you how it felt.” This is one of those magnificent books that will make you feel everything–– love, loss, betrayal, redemption, and how everyday citizens could be swept up in the manic fervor of Nazi Germany. The unintended parallels to today’s political climate are haunting. Reading this book is like reading tea leaves, foretelling a future we desperately want to avoid.
November 12, 2018
Remembering a Fallen Writer — With Her Own Book
Kafka described writing as “utter solitude, the descent into the cold abyss of oneself.” And it’s true enough that the most wrenching part of the creative struggle must be endured alone, often miserably. But communal midwifery often follows—assistance from a coven of trusted voices that writers rely upon to get to the finish line.
But what happens when a book reaches that finish line without its author? It wasn’t a question I’d envisioned confronting when I met Sarah Coleman. A respected film/photography critic and mother of two, she initially struck me as astute, intense, and reserved. But the preface she crafted in a 2009 historical fiction seminar that I led knocked my socks off. Based on the life of sociologist/photographer Lewis Hine (1874–1940), it actually opened on Berenice Abbott (1898–1991), the brash, gay champion of photographic realism. I urged Sarah to keep going and invited her into a Brooklyn writing group I was forming. She was an Upper West Sider but joined despite the commute.
[image error]During the next year, Sarah’s novel evolved into a dual narrative about Hine and Abbott. But in 2013, her agent urged her to make the novel exclusively Abbott’s. Abbott stole every scene, with her hardscrabble origins and a creative wanderlust that carried her from 1920s Paris to ’30s New York and into artistic battle with Man Ray and Alfred Stieglitz. Sarah reworked her novel, and her agent sent the manuscript out in late 2014.
There were regretful refusals. In a historical fiction market dominated by novels about female partners of famous men (think The Paris Wife, The Aviator’s Wife), a gay woman taking on the photographic establishment was a tough sell. “The irony,” Sarah quipped. “If only Abbott had been Man Ray’s straight lover instead of his lesbian protégé…”
Then, in August 2015, as our group prepared to reconvene, Sarah sent me a heart-stopping note: “I got a cancer diagnosis this week. It is lung and liver.” The prognosis was devastating, yet still Sarah thought of her book. “I’m going to work on the novel,” her email concluded. “I’m very close to finishing a full rewrite.”
Over the course of the next year—and a battery of tests and experimental treatments—Sarah trekked to our meetings, sometimes needing a nap upon arrival. In 2016, her agent resubmitted the final revision of her novel as The Realist. Once again, the rejections streamed in—again so laudatory she made them fodder for a satirical piece we workshopped: “I can easily see this book sitting on the shelf next to such classics as I, Claudius; Midnight’s Children; and Wolf Hall,” her imaginary editor crowed. “That said, I am not going to throw my hat into the ring on this one, because—I’ll just put it bluntly—the book is not fuckable enough.”
In early 2017, burned-out by cancer therapies and editorial rejections alike, Sarah announced that she was self-publishing. It was a race against the clock. She selected a London-based private press, SilverWood Books, perfected the cover, and obtained rights to her favorite Abbott photos. The last time I met her, we discussed the book’s website, launch party, and a new clinical study she’d enrolled in. A few weeks later, she’d left the study but was thrilled with her novel’s progress.
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Left to right: Courtney Zoffness, Julia Lichtblau, Jennifer Cody Epstein, Alison Lowenstein and Michelle Brandt
Thanksgiving arrived, and we learned that Sarah was in hospice, though she was fighting death tenaciously. “I think it’s her book launch party [that] she doesn’t want to miss,” her husband texted.
Sarah passed away on Dec. 3, 2017, a week before copies of The Realist arrived at her apartment. At the memorial service, our group wept together, then assembled, as always, to workshop—only this time, we were workshopping Sarah’s now-orphaned novel’s future. Over Kleenex and laptops, we plotted carrying on. We had a common purpose: to celebrate The Realist and launch it into the world. And celebrate we did.
The launch party featured a cabaret singer and champagne cocktails. Copies of the book flew off the sales table. The word spreading part has been harder, though we’ve landed pieces in the Los Angeles Review of Books and The Common, and are planning events in the New York area. Whether or not this boosts sales, there is comfort in knowing that just as we were there after the “cold abyss” of The Realist’s creation, we are here to launch The Realist after the loss of its author.
Buy copies of The Realist here:
The Deplorable Within Us
My forthcoming novel Wunderland evolved from an impulse to explore a history that — at first — seemed comfortably removed from my own. I’d long been fascinated by Nazi Germany, not so much by the “those monsters” narratives but by those of everyday Germans: the ordinary, even decent people who, through action and inaction alike, helped propel their nation’s atrocious descent. To me, these decidedly human stories seemed at least as important to comprehending the Holocaust as those of its fully demonic leaders — a conviction fueled by an extraordinary memoir I happened upon in 2013.
[image error]In Account Rendered, Melita Maschmann — a lower-level Nazi interned and “de-Nazified” by the Allies — set out to examine the breadcrumb trail of decisions and moral lapses that led to her catastrophic downfall. An early disciple of the Hitler Youth, she’d scaled the ranks of its girls’ division, the Bund Deutscher Madel, eventually landing in the top echelons of its propaganda division. Maschmann ponders these fascistic writings, and her role in evicting doomed Poles from farms that the Reich then reassigned to German farmers. But the crime that haunts her most is her betrayal to the Gestapo of a Jewish best friend from her childhood. Account Rendered is shaped as a long and at times pleading letter to that friend — though Maschmann denies she is asking for forgiveness. What she is after is clarity about her past—and her nation’s. “Wrongs once committed,” she writes, “can never be undone by [mere] reflection. But perhaps it enables the individual to recognize a wrong more quickly and not to be seduced by one again.”
This proposition struck a chord of recognition, and thus was born Ilse von Fischer, one of Wunderland’s three central voices. Bookish, idealistic, and profoundly traumatized by the economic chaos that ravaged interwar Germany, she’s initially a sympathetic character, both intrigued by the BDM’s bright optimism and capable of breaking a Brownshirt boycott of a Jewish business (“Herr Schloss is a good baker,” she reasons). But as Wunderland unfolds she adopts the National Socialist agenda in its entirety, a slow slide into an ethical and ultimately deadly abyss from which she — like her country — will never fully escape.
It was intimidating material. But in 2013 it also could not have felt more removed. Donald Trump was a reality TV star with penchant for bad suits and half-dressed teenage beauty pageant contestants. America had just re-elected its first black president. We were legalizing gay marriage, having tough talks about race and privilege, embarking on a national health plan. My future seemed bright too: my second novel had launched to modest critical acclaim, and my filmmaker husband had just landed the project we thought would make his career.
Three years later, things looked very different. Trump had nailed the GOP presidential nomination, tapping into a toxic swell of voter partisanship, economic fear, and xenophobia. Then, surreally, came November 8th. In Wunderland I described flickering torchlight, fluttering flags, a buffoon-turned–brash leader promising Germany renewed ascent in the world while dismissing the independent media as Lügenpresse (“the lying press”). On CNN Trump stood before a red sea of MAGA hats, promising to renew the American dream while calling the media dishonest scum.
Like all my friends, I denounced both his victory and his voters, seeking solace in the dependable echo chambers of outrage on social media. Privately, though, my feelings were more fraught. My second novel hadn’t sold. My husband couldn’t find funding for his film. We’d scraped by selling our tiny Brooklyn apartment. But by 2016 those funds were running out, and formerly ordinary expenses — health insurance, a replacement iPhone — felt like progressive steps towards insolvency. At the supermarket I’d hold my breath as my debit card processed, terrified it would come back declined. And in those moments, I understood viscerally what I’d only explored fictively in my novel: how easily ideology might buckle beneath desperation, before the seductive appeal of a candidate promising he alone can fix it. As images of clashing demonstrators crowded the news, I also found myself pondering my reflexive disdain for the right. When Hitler took over the Nazi party, German democracy had splintered into thirty different political factions whose members brawled — often fatally — on Berlin’s streets. That violent partisanship, combined with the public fatigue it engendered, and a media prioritizing money-generating tabloid topics over serious political coverage, paved the way for Hitler’s ascent.
Of course, Trump’s no Hitler. He owes his elite education and business fortune to his wealthy father, while Hitler (born solidly middle-class) failed art school admittance and spent years impoverished. Trump secured five draft deferrals, Hitler two Iron Crosses. Pre-election, Trump displayed less interest in grasping for public office than in grabbing the genitals of non-consenting women, while Hitler’s political ambitions dated at least to his 1920s Beer Hall Putsch. And when it came to principles and patriotism, Hitler arguably had both, albeit in appallingly twisted form. Trump, meanwhile, seems entirely and indeed blithely unprincipled, with allegiances that still swing closer to his bank accounts and his golf greens than to the nation he’s been chosen to lead.
Still, the similarities between Wunderland and this strange new America only seem to be mounting. In the time I took to write this piece, Trump has supplemented his Lügenpresse drumbeat by threatening to strip credentials from press organizations he deems “untruthful.” He’s used terms like “infest” and “animals” to describe undocumented immigrants (both are terms Himmler used to describe Jews; Hitler preferred the more clinical “bacillus” and “parasites”), and his administration has ripped children from undocumented parents at the border and concentrated them in military warehouses.
It’s not lost on me that such parallels arguably helped me sell my book. (“The subject’s certainly timely,” my agent noted.) But they also keep me up at night. Not just because all these wrongs are, in Maschmann’s terms, so terrifyingly “recognizable,” but also because recognition alone won’t save us any more than it saved 1970s Cambodia, 1990s Bosnia and Rwanda, or 2018 Myanmar.
So what will?
The answer, I believe, lies in recognizing not just the wrongs repeating around us, but also the failings within ourselves. It means stripping away the harmful rhetoric and easy fictions that blind us to the factors behind Trump’s ascent, and opening ourselves to discussions addressing the very real desperation of many of his followers, even as we fight the lies with which he seeks to seduce them. It means holding the media to a journalistic standard beyond accrued clicks and ratings, and ourselves to political awareness beyond our social-media feeds, one that engages the often messy outside world.
And for myself, it means continuing to create art that challenges, and characters who, like Ilse, are perhaps “deplorable,” but still complex enough for us to recognize within them something of ourselves.
November 5, 2018
Chris Bohjalian, #1 New York Times Bestselling Author of The Flight Attendant
“Wunderland is a beautiful and haunting and utterly magnificent novel: a wrenching tale of friendship and betrayal in Nazi Germany. It’s also a page-turner that kept me reading until two in the morning one night and three in the morning the next. It’s that good.”
Joanna Hershon, author of Swimming and A Dual Inheritance
“Not only an original and searing investigation into the seductive and terrifying world of Hitler’s National Socialist movement and its aftermath, but also a suspenseful and profoundly moving story of love, hate, passion and devotion.”
Wunderland
Pre-order a copy of Wunderland –
Amazon | Barnes & Noble | IndieBound | iBooks
An intimate portrait of a friendship severed by history, and a sweeping saga of wartime, motherhood, and legacy by an award-winning novelist.
East Village, 1989
Things had never been easy between Ava Fisher and her estranged mother Ilse. Too many questions hovered between them: Who was Ava’s father? Where had Ilse been during the war? Why had she left her only child in a German orphanage during the war’s final months? But now Ilse’s ashes have arrived from Germany, and with them, a trove of unsent letters addressed to someone else unknown to Ava: Renate Bauer, a childhood friend. As her mother’s letters unfurl a dark past, Ava spirals deep into the shocking history of a woman she never truly knew.
Berlin, 1933
As the Nazi party tightens its grip on the city, Ilse and Renate find their friendship under siege—and Ilse’s increasing involvement in the Hitler Youth movement leaves them on opposing sides of the gathering storm. Then the Nuremburg Laws force Renate to confront a long-buried past, and a catastrophic betrayal is set in motion…
An unflinching exploration of Nazi Germany and its legacy, Wunderland is a at once a powerful portrait of an unspeakable crime and a page-turning contemplation of womanhood, wartime, and just how far we might go in order to belong.
“Through the friendship of two teenaged girls in 1930s Germany, Wunderland depicts, in intimate and chilling detail, how fascism, racism, and xenophobia are made normal and acceptable; how ordinary people, beguiled by the siren call of nationalism, are led willingly into acts of inhumanity–and could be again, if we ignore the lessons of the past. But this novel is more than a history lesson; it’s a heart-in-your-mouth page-turner that leaves you thinking about its characters, and imagining how things might have gone for them in a different world, long afterwards.”
—Hillary Jordan, author of Mudbound and When She Woke
July 25, 2018
March 16, 2014
Holy Moly! For This Week Only, “Gods” is (Almost) Free!
Exciting news for those who haven’t yet read The Gods of Heavenly Punishment and still want to—or want to introduce someone else to a “page turning” “exquisite” “achingly ”miraculously constructed” and now award-winning ”epic” that is “bursting with characters and locales” (thank you O Magazine, Library Journal, Publishers Weekly, et al). For this one week, you can get the Kindle version of Gods for just $1.99 via Amazon’s Kindle Daily Deals. That’s $13.89 off the list price!
Here’s the link: http://amzn.to/1eFzyk6
But the offer ends March 24, so hurry!
February 24, 2014
Thoughts from a Great Book Club Discussion
In part because writing is such a solitary endeavor, one of the things I really love is connecting with book groups who have chosen one of my novels to hear their thoughts on and reactions to it. Last week I had a particularly interesting and thought-provoking chat with one of the groups that entered my quarterly book group drawing (see top right of my website homepage), and won signed editions of The Gods of Heavenly Punishment for each of its twelve members. As I told them, I thought they brought up some excellent questions that really made me think about the choices I’d made as an author. I thought they might be of interest to other Gods readers I decided to recap a few of them.
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Q: Why did you set the first scene in Buffalo, New York?
A: In part, because my family and I have a longstanding love affair with Upstate New York. We try to go to Columbia County at least twice a yea, since it’s one of the most physically beautiful and peaceful places I know. (I actually have a fantasy of retiring there with my husband and breeding Springer Spaniel puppies between future novels.) For the first scene of the novel, I wanted to evoke a sense of quiet and peace before the coming storm of the Pacific War, and it seemed a natural setting for that. I also wanted to have it take place near a major university (in this case, University of Buffalo). And I wanted Cam to come from a farming background, which seemed to work well there as well.
Q: As the mother of a son who is gay, I was interested in your decision to make Billy Reynolds gay rather than straight. Initially I was afraid it was going to be a gratuitous detail and was preparing myself to be offended by it—but I found in the end that it was really touching and quite personal, and he ended up being one of my favorite characters. Can you talk a little about why you depicted his sexuality in this way?
A: I’m so glad you liked him! I always feel like Billy gets a little overlooked in the shadow of all the other more dramatic characters like Hana Kobayashi and, of course, his Tokyo-architect-turned-Tokyo firebomber dad Anton Reynolds. The funny thing is that I didn’t start out really thinking about his sexuality very much. For me, he was just a sort of eccentric, bookish kid who felt even more of an outsider than his status as resident gaijin in Japan would merit. I kind of hate it when authors say “Oh, he/she made me do that” about their characters (I mean, we are their creators, after all!). With Billy, though, that aspect of his personality really did kind of form itself as I wrote him. I pretty much just sat down to write one day and realized: “Wow. I think Billy’s gay!”
I also think it had to do with my desire to make his connection to Yoshi Kobayashi, the girl he rescues from the firebombing’s aftermath, more textured and less traditionally “romantic.” I knew I wanted them to fall in love in a way, but I wasn’t interested in creating a knight in shining armor who simply appears and solve all of her problems. Lastly, I was actually really interested in the issue of gays in the military—particularly back in this time period, when there were so many more layers of secrecy and controversy around having a non-traditional sexual identity. There was a fascinating memoir on the subject—My Queer War by James Lord, which really gave some insight on how hard it was to be gay and in the army back then.
Q: My son has red hair, and I was interested in the fact that you decided to give Billy red hair too. Was there any specific reason for it?
A: Once more, in part he simply came to me that way—perhaps because it was a way to make him seem even more of an outsider, particularly in Japan. But I suspect it was also influenced by the fact that I have a redheaded, blue-eyed daughter, which for me has been especially fascinating since I’m dark-haired and dark-eyed, as are my husband and my other daughter. As I write in the book, it really does feel like you belong to a kind of special, secret society—whenever I walk with her and see other moms with redheads there’s a kind of “Ah, you too!” look and smile that passes between us.
Q: Do you consider this an “anti-war” book, per se?
A: I think in the end it is for me. But I wasn’t interested in writing personal polemic. I was rather trying to portray war in all of its facets in as objective and unvarnished a way as was possible, and to let the readers decide for themselves. It was an approach inspired in part by three extraordinary women I had the privilege of interviewing in Tokyo in 2009. All three had lived through the firebombing, and all three had dedicated their lives afterwards to telling and re-telling their traumatizing stories to as many people as they could. Their goal wasn’t to demonize the U.S. for unleashing the bombings on them, but to simply spread the word: “This is what war is. This is the reality. We have to work to not let it happen.”
Q: My experience is that most men who we know who were in WWII simply don’t talk about it. Do you think women would be more forthcoming and open about their experiences and their thoughts on those experiences?
A: Such an interesting question! I think it’s true that many men who have experienced war in all of its horrific realities don’t want to open the wounds again—they are just too traumatizing, and the truth is that anyone who hasn’t actually lived through those experiences isn’t going to be able to relate to them. That said, I did find it interesting that the women I spoke with in Tokyo were so focused on relating their experiences in such detail to anyone who would listen—while the men that I interviewed really didn’t have much to say about their recollections. It could very well be due to a gender difference—it’s certainly been my observation that women tend to need much more intense and in-depth connections with other people than do men. It’s part of why we also tend to be more social—almost all of my girlfriends agree that we get together much more often than our husbands do with their male friends.
Q: For the most part, I found that this book wasn’t overtly political, which I liked. But I did wonder about the section where Billy, in training to go back to Japan as part of the Occupying Forces, has this exchange with a colleague:
“Who else? Bombs-away LeMay. You know this was all part of his lobbying effort to get the government to fund an independent Air Force.”
“What?” Billy gaped. “That’s bullshit. They did it to shorten the war.”
“Like the London Blitz shortened the war for Germany?” Sanger lifted an eyebrow. “Don’t believe it. What I heard is that the Army was getting ready to can the AAF altogether—too costly, too many accidents. And of course, all that money that could be going into the Army proper. This was LeMay’s way of showing Truman that air power is a military force to be reckoned with.”
Why did you include this comment? Do you believe that the sole intent of the firebombings was to “prove” something about the Air Force?
A: I don’t know if you could say it was the “sole” intent, but I do think there is a pretty persuasive argument that LeMay—who almost singlehandedly planned and carried out the firebombing of 68 Japanese cities, with hardly any governmental oversight—was trying to make a case for the viability of air power in coming conflicts. Max Hastings, in his exceptional book Retribution: The Battle for Japan—lays out the reasons he believes this to be the case, and I found them provocative and compelling enough to want to include them. I did, however, frame them as an opinion from a young man with Marxist leanings who will later be kicked out of the Occupation program, precisely because I didn’t want to be lobbying for or against the argument itself. I simply wanted to put it out there.
Q: There is a scene in which Yoshi’s husband Masahiro relates the atrocities he saw and participated in as an Imperial soldier in Northern China. It was so chilling—I haven’t been able to stop thinking about it. Did you come up with that yourself, and if so, how?
A: No—I don’t think I could have come up with some of those things on my own. They are simply too unthinkable. I did, however, get a lot of background on Japanese atrocities in China from an extraordinary documentary entitled Riben Guizui, or “Japanese Devils.” It was done by independent filmmaker Minoru Matsui, who interviewed 14 ex-servicemen from a broad range of backgrounds (from farmers to doctors) and ranks, who were incredibly open with him about the atrocities they had personally committed during the war in China. It was so amazing to me on so many levels—first, that human beings can actually do these things to other human beings. How do they descend to that level? What so-called “training” system is in place to strip them of their humanity to that degree? (This too is something I try to explore in my depiction of Masahiro). But it was also just astonishing to me that these men had the courage to openly discuss and reflect on their acts—especially given Japan’s general reticence as a nation to publically own up to its wartime past. It’s an amazing film, though obviously not easy to watch.
Q: I was interested in your use of photographs at the beginning of each new section. Was this your idea, and did you actually choose all of the photographs? And if so, why?
A: It was. I tend to rely a lot on visual aids when I write—for my first novel, The Painter from Shanghai—I had covered my wall with copies of Pan Yuliang’s paintings, since they gave me such a strong sense of her as a woman and as a character. With this novel too I found that there were images that really spoke to me about the things I was trying to encapsulate in words—the main example, of course, being that fantastic image of the woman on the roof with which I open the book, and which is also the paperback cover. It’s by Tadahiko Hayashi, a Japanese photographer known for his dramatic photography, and when I saw it I literally had to drop everything and just study it for about half an hour. Somehow, it summed up so many of my themes—the clean innocence of the young woman, her pristine white and very Western-style bikini, contrasted with the gray industrial ruins of the city below her. I also love the title: Dancer on a Rooftop. After finding that one I began to see that I’d found similarly inspiring images to help me through other sections—and it struck me that they might be as helpful and interesting to readers as I’d found them. I had to pay for the rights to use many of them out of pocket, which is pretty standard in the publishing world. But I felt it was a worthwhile investment!
Q: Why did you have a King-sized bed for Cam and Lacey in the Niagra Falls hotel? Those weren’t invented until the mid-fifties.
A: One word: Oops! As I wrote in my post below about writing historical fiction, any ambitious historical novel is bound to have a few errors, no matter how hard the author tries to vet for them. And I do try to vet pretty thoroughly—in my last version I go through with a pencil and put a check over every “fact,” confirming it’s been verified. To be honest, this wasn’t a term it occurred to me to even wonder about. So great catch! We will change it to “double” in future editions.
***
Many thanks once more to the “Wednesday Book Club that meets on Thursdays” from Honeoye Falls N.Y. for a truly engaging and thoughtful hour of discussion! (And if you’d like your book club to win a free, signed set of books and a chat with me, don’t forget to enter your email on this site! Next drawing is in April!)
February 6, 2014
“Gods” Wins APALA Honor Award!
I was thrilled to learn that The Gods of Heavenly Punishment won the honor award for fiction in the 2014 Asian/Pacific American Awards for Literature (APAAL)!. The Asian/Pacific American Librar- ians Association (APALA) is an affiliate of the American Library Association, and the AAAL awards promote Asian/Pacific American culture and heritage and are given in five categories, based on literary and artistic merit. Just as cool is that I won in the same category as Ruth Ozeki–one of my literary heroes–who won the fiction award for A Tale for the Time Being (and was also shortlisted for the National Book Award and the National Book Critics Circle Award). Such an honor to be mentioned in the same paragraph!
To read the complete list of winners–and about APALA in general–go here.
[And read this!]
