Chris Bohjalian's Blog, page 6

The Doylestown Bookshop in Doylestown, PA -- one week from tonight

Greetings,

One week from tonight -- Wednesday, January 9 -- THE FLIGHT ATTENDANT paperback book tour lands at the Doylestown Bookshop in Doylestown, PA at 7 p.m. Nearby? Please join me for stories and some free flight attendant swag.

I hope to meet many of you on the tour.

To 2019: may our world inch a little closer to sanity and peace.

All the best,

Chris B.

The Greenwich Library in Greenwich, CT one week from tonight

Greetings and Happy New Year,

Just wanted all of you to know that one week from tonight, THE FLIGHT ATTENDANT paperback book tour lands at the Cole Auditorium at the Greenwich Library in Greenwich, CT at 7 p.m. Nearby? Please join me for stories and some free flight attendant swag.

Also? It is the official on-sale date. The paperback goes on sale nationally next Tuesday wherever books are sold.

I hope to meet many of you on the tour.

To 2019: may our world inch a little closer to sanity and peace.

All the best,

Chris B.

An Unlikely Story in Plainville, MA one week from tonight

Greetings,

Just wanted all of you to know that one week from tonight, THE FLIGHT ATTENDANT paperback book tour kicks off at An Unlikely Story in Plainville, Massachusetts at 7 p.m. Nearby? Please join me for stories and some free flight attendant swag. I promise to be extra charming.

The paperback goes on sale on Tuesday, January 8, wherever books are sold.

I hope to meet many of you on the paperback tour.

Thanks so much for your faith in my work.

All the best,

Chris B.

Halloween's a week away. Here's the story behind my ghost story, THE NIGHT STRANGERS.

by Chris Bohjalian

Not too long ago, I was in my basement, which just might be the scariest place on earth. We’re talking Silence of the Lambs scary, Night of the Living Dead scary, “lions ands tigers and bears, oh my” scary.

It’s not merely that a sizable chunk of the floor is dirt, which means that after a good rain or snow melt whole sections become the sort of slop that swallowed humans alive in bad science fiction movies from the 1950s. It’s not the fact that there is a Gordian knot of tubes and pipes along the ceiling (which is little more than a crawlspace in some sections), some of which carry water and some of which carry LP gas to heat the house.

It’s the door.

Along one of the basement foundation walls, below ground, is a door about five and a half feet tall and three feet wide. It’s made of rough, unfinished wooden planks, and was added at some point after the 1898 Victorian above it was first constructed. When my wife and I moved into the house in Vermont, it was nailed shut. That’s right: Nailed.

There was a moldy pile of coal beside it, a decomposing little mesa, and so I convinced myself the door was merely a part of an old coal chute. Sure, I never found the exterior entrance to the chute, but that was a detail. Perhaps it was under a porch added at some point in the 1940s.

Now, I should tell you that the closest I have ever come to accidentally killing myself in my 24 years as a homeowner in northern New England occurred in that basement. Sure, I’ve nearly slid off the roof shoveling snow from atop of the screened porch. I’ve been conked in the head by the blunt side of an ax while hammering away at an ice jam. But the least competent (translation: seriously stupid) thing I have ever done as a homeowner occurred in that basement.

Our first winter in Vermont, our pipes froze. Still under the delusion that I had the slightest idea what I was doing when it came to this old house, I borrowed a friend’s propane torch. His advice? Run it along the pipes and it will thaw the ice. My wife and I descended into the crawlspace and began carefully running the flame over the tubing. We’d been at it two or three minutes when my wife remarked casually, “I wonder if this is a gas pipe or a water pipe?” Yes, it was a gas pipe. My bad. I still get a little queasy when I think about how close I came to blowing up the village.

In any case, it would be years after we had moved in that I would decide to man up and pull that basement door open. The project demanded a crowbar, a wrench, and – at one point – an ax. After hours of toil, behind that door I found . . . nothing. There was a slender cubicle the height and width of the door and maybe eighteen inches deep. The walls were made of wood, and behind them was nothing but earth. It in no way resembled a coal chute. It was more like a closet – or a crypt behind which you might wall up a neighbor alive. So, I nailed the door shut and made a mental note to steer clear of that corner of the basement for as long as we lived in the house.

Nevertheless, on some level I understood even then that the basement door was going to lead to a novel. Novelists are asked all the time where our ideas come from, and I have done this long enough that I suspected someday that door would, quite literally, open a novel: “The door was presumed to have been the entry to a coal chute, a perfectly reasonable assumption since a small hillock of damp coal sat moldering before it.”

So begins The Night Strangers.

Now, it would take an Airbus ditching one January afternoon in the Hudson River, the sky cerulean, before I would begin to understand what was going to exist behind those rough wooden planks. But that door was a gift, and it was only a matter of time before a novel would hinge upon it.

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The Night Strangers is available as a trade paperback, ebook, and audiobook. The article originally appeared when the novel was first published.

A book and flowers for mom!

Short post, but I wanted to be sure you all saw it:

Doubleday has a really sweet sweepstakes going on this week in honor of Mother's Day:

Thrill Mom with THE FLIGHT ATTENDANT and $100 in flowers.

Enter to win the novel and a $100 E-Gift Card from The Bouqs.

They'll send it straight to Mom for you!

Good Luck!

Click link below to enter:

https://sweeps.penguinrandomhouse.com...

PS: Sorry to say: US Only; 18+; No Purchase Necessary; See Complete Rules.

"The Flight Attendant" Play List

Greetings!

Music and video has always impacted my writing process, but perhaps never more than while writing THE FLIGHT ATTENDANT.

Here are the songs that inspired me as I wrote THE FLIGHT ATTENDANT.

Everyday I began by watching Sia's Chandelier video. It so perfectly captures one woman's reckless self-disregard and frenzied self-loathing -- and seeming inability to turn it around.

Let me know what you think, and which songs make you think of flight attendant Cassie Bowden.

https://www.youtube.com/playlist?list...

As always, thanks for your faith in my work.

All the best,

Chris B.

Happy listening!

Contemplating the perfect literary crime

by Chris Bohjalian


When I was in college, the school had a series of writers-in-residence, one of whom was a novelist whose work my mother had cherished. At the time, I read one of her books, too, and was mightily impressed. She was teaching a composition course one semester, and I wanted very much to be among the anointed — the few, the proud, the chosen — with whom she was going to share the mysteries of her craft. That meant submitting a short story or essay for her consideration, which dutifully I did.

Days later, I was summoned to her office in the brick monolith that housed the school’s English department, and there I met her for the first time.

She was seated behind a desk the size of a putting green. When she saw me, she said, her voice a little distracted: “You’re Chris. I’m not going to try to pronounce your last name.”

I nodded, only a little apprehensive. I had not yet learned to trust the gift of fear.

She slid my short story across the expanse of desk as if the pages were roadkill. “Well, Chris I’m-Not-Going-to-Try-to-Pronounce-Your-Last-Name,” she began, “I have three words for you.” This clearly wasn’t going to be good, but I am nothing if not optimistic. And so I waited.

“Be a banker,” she said. That was it. I was dismissed.

This might not have been especially troubling counsel, except that I had spent much of my freshman spring trying desperately to pass Economics 11.

At one point the econ professor, trying to be comforting, reminded me: “You’re a writer guy. I see your byline in the newspaper. It’s not like you’re going to be a banker.”

I am honestly not sure that a week has gone by when for one reason or another I haven’t recalled that moment of humiliation in her office. I had a lot of drive before our 30 seconds together, but even more after we had parted company. Some early mornings or late nights when I was in my 20s, writing fiction in the hours before and after my day job in an advertising agency, I would allow myself a dram of righteous anger as I worked.

Although I have told people this story before, rarely (if ever) have I shared the novelist’s name. I was never precisely sure why.

Now I know: It was because over a quarter of a century later, I was going to be given the chance for the most exquisite revenge imaginable. Not too long ago, a book editor at a prestigious newspaper e-mailed me a list of four new novels that would soon be arriving, wondering whether there was one among them I might like to review. There was: The writer-in-residence whose sole critique of my work extended to four syllables had a new book in the pipeline, and it was mine for the taking.

Had I shared this novelist’s name over the years when I told readers this story, there would have been no way I could have reviewed her new book.

Why? Because the people who assign books for review tend to be much bigger people than the novelists who review them. These editors actually worry about objectivity and conflicts of interest.

Novelists? Not so much. We view schadenfreude the way well-adjusted people view dark chocolate gelato. We tattoo La Rochefoucauld onto our souls: “It is not enough to succeed; others must fail.” Trust me, we are really, really small people.

Moreover, I was confident that this other writer would have absolutely no recollection that once, on a dusky afternoon back in the Mesozoic era, she had eviscerated me with three words. I could savage her far more publicly — and with complete impunity.

It was the perfect literary crime.

Nevertheless, I stared at this book editor’s e-mail for a couple of hours.

It’s not that my spine was surgically removed at birth but rather that I’ve always wondered: What if the short story I asked that writer to read so many years ago really was the sort of train wreck that indicated I was indeed better suited for, I don’t know, Enron?

The fact was, in the following years I would manage to amass 250 rejection slips for short stories before I would sell a single word. There’s a good reason I write novels: Apparently, I can’t describe a sneeze in fewer than 50 words.

(Just for the record, my first few novels were pretty awful, too. Exhibit A? “A Killing in the Real World,” which just might be the single worst first novel ever published, bar none.)

And so, in the end, I ’fessed up. I revealed to the book editor my history with one of the writers behind one of those four books — which meant I would not be reviewing it.

The truth is, when I considered the possibility of reviewing this other writer’s new book, the amateurish quality of my own early work nearly smothered me like a landslide. In hindsight, I doubt that short story deserved more than a four-syllable critique. And regardless of whether she meant to inspire me, she did. She did.

Someday I might share with the world who that writer was. But, in the end, I think it’s just as likely that one day I might dedicate a book to her.


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This article originally appeared in the Washington Post on April 8, 2011. Bohjalian is the author of 20 books. His most recent novel, “The Flight Attendant,” was just published.

What Spoken Words Can Mean to the Soul

I’ve been touring this spring for a new book, and that always sounds way more glamorous than it is. Book tour is actually a Latin aviation term that translates roughly to, “Every seat is the middle seat.”

I won’t bore you with the daily indignities of a book tour, especially since I actually rather enjoy them: it wasn’t all that long ago that my books sold briskly, but mostly among people named Bohjalian. I’m pretty sure that I share DNA with almost every single human being who bought a copy of my first novel. (I say “almost,” because there was a book- signing event at a now-defunct store in Manhattan, and a reader browsing there took pity on my loneliness at the table and bought a copy for her daughter, who, she said, “will read just about anything.”)

And so I am always grateful to meet my readers.

In any case, one of the things that makes travel a lot easier is a good audiobook. On this book tour, I savored Tara Westover’s wrenching memoir, Educated, read perfectly by Julia Whelan, and Gabriel Tallent’s jaw-droppingly great first novel, My Absolute Darling, performed beautifully by Alex McKenna. Trust me, an audiobook makes a turbulent ride in a regional jet in the seat by the rear lavatory a whole lot more pleasant.

But I also listen to audiobooks when I am home in Vermont. I always have one in my car (often on compact discs) and one on my phone to help pass the time while doing all manner of home improvements and chores around the house. I painted the guest bedroom one February weekend this year while savoring Greg Sestero’s The Disaster Artist. Co-written with journalist Tom Bissell, the book is the story of the best, worst movie ever made (The Room), and the film adaptation was one of my favorite movies of 2017. Sestero’s narration is wonderful, and I still like to try and recreate the accent of filmmaker Tommy Wiseau.

But I don’t appreciate audiobooks simply because they allow me to “read” while doing something else. It’s not just about multi-tasking. I enjoy audiobooks because they are the latest manifestation of the human desire to listen to stories. As a species, we crave narrative:, it’s how we make sense of the world. And there is something inside us that loves to be read to. These are two separate but linked parts of the human psyche. Yes, once upon a time, we wanted to be ensconced in our mother’s or father’s lap while they read to us the wonderful stories of–for example–Beverly Cleary. (Cleary had such an impact on me when I was reading her Ramona and Beezus books to my daughter, that a key Ramona misunderstanding has a cameo in my new novel, The Flight Attendant.) But even as adults we enjoy listening to someone tell us a tale. Think of the popularity of the Moth celebrations of storytelling. Think of the ways we watch stand-up comedy–which is, at its core, nothing more than storytelling with a punch line.

Moreover, audiobooks these days are seriously thoughtful endeavors that are meticulously produced and directed. One of the most remarkable audios I’ve ever listened to is George Saunders’s Lincoln in the Bardo, which had an astonishing 166 narrators. Among them? Nick Offerman, David Sedaris, Julianne Moore, Don Cheadle, and Susan Sarandon. But even a book with a single narrator, such as Amor Towles’s A Gentleman in Moscow, is likely to be an impeccable production. Nicholas Guy Smith brings the aristocratic Russian nobleman to life in a bravura performance.
The reality is that I am still likely to have a book (or two) made of paper on my nightstand. I’m likely to have one with me whenever I travel.

But I have come to depend upon audiobooks, as well, and not simply because of the way they make a rear seat on a regional jet more pleasant or because they help pass the time while painting a guest bedroom. I love them because of the way they remind me of what stories and the spoken word can mean to the soul.

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Chris Bohjalian's 20th novel, "The Flight Attendant," was just published.

Thank you -- from me, and "The Flight Attendant."

23 March 2018

Dear Friends Who Read and Readers Who Are Friends,

It takes a village to make the New York Times Bestseller List, and THE FLIGHT ATTENDANT debuts there at #8 -- and that is because of all of you, the most wonderful readers around, and because of so many booksellers and librarians who champion my work year after year. I thank you all — and I thank the team at Doubleday Books, who are not just brilliant, but patient.

And, of course, I have to thank the spectacularly talented Kaley Cuoco and Warner Brothers Television. I can't wait to see Kaley bring Cassie Bowden to life on the screen.

Truly. Color me grateful.

All the best,

Chris B.

PS: See below. A sampling of what the book critics are saying about "The Flight Attendant" -- and of Cassie Bowden, my wounded bird of a flight attendant.


“Filled with turbulence and sudden plunges in altitude, ‘The Flight Attendant’ is a very rare thriller whose penultimate chapter made me think to myself, ‘I didn’t see that coming.’ The novel — Bohjalian’s 20th — is also enhanced by his deftness in sketching out vivid characters and locales and by his obvious research into the realities of airline work.”
— Maureen Corrigan, The Washington Post

“The stakes couldn’t be higher (literally) as Cassandra pieces together a mystery while working 40,000 above ground in Chris Bohjalian’s gripping THE FLIGHT ATTENDANT. Read it before Kaley Cuoco stars in the upcoming series.”
— Cosmopolitan

An “expertly turned thriller…an assured novel about reckoning not just with some ruthless bad guys, but private sadness as well.”
— Mark Athitakis, USA Today

“The author provides enough twists for a roller coaster fan…The beauty of the book is that, along with the politics of the plot, Cassie’s humanity comes through…the last 100 pages turn tense as you try to follow the unexpected but believable surprises Bohjalian has in store and answers whether Cassie can find salvation.”
— Amanda St. Amand, The St. Louis Post-Dispatch

“Bohjalian twists the tension tight and keeps the surprises startling.”
— Tom Nolan, The Wall Street Journal

“Flight attendant Cassie Bowden: a self-destructive alcoholic who favors one-night stands, a gifted liar, a petty thief. But she’s also someone we can relate to: a soul damaged during childhood, terribly alone, and desperate for love. . .Readers who enjoyed the imperfect heroine in Paula Hawkins’s The Girl on the Train and the anxiety-ridden paranoia of Fyodor Dostoyevsky’s Crime and Punishment will be hooked by this murder mystery.”
— Library Journal (Starred Review)

“Bohjalian is an unfaltering storyteller who crosses genres with fluidity, from historical fiction to literary thrillers. He is also that rare male writer who has mastered the female point of view with adroit credibility, and he is nonjudgmental and sensitive in his portrayal of Cassie’s alcohol and sex addictions. As in previous novels…Bohjalian revisits the notion of what happens when an individual loses control of his or her environment in a read-in-one-sitting escapade that is as intellectually satisfying as it is emotionally entertaining.”
—Booklist (Starred Review)

“A turbulent behind-the-scenes look at the lives of cabin crew members and a pitiless profile of a woman destined for a psychological crash landing. . .While structured as a thriller, the novel is strongest as a character study. Cassie is a hot, frighteningly believable mess, as endangered by alcoholism as by espionage. Bohjalian nails the floating loneliness that can affect flight crew members, and all business road warriors, amidst their untethered schedules; mixed with a splash of self-loathing it can lead to a life on the rocks.”
— Passport Magazine, (April’s Book of the Month)

“Heart-stopping intrigue in [an] excellently written novel that involves Russian conspiracy, narrow escapes and a mystery that sinks as deep as the depths the protagonist must go to before she can save her own life.”
— Asheville Citizen Times

“‘The Flight Attendant’ is the sort of book that one can’t help but read quickly. The writing is dynamic and the plot is seductive; the reader is helpless against the urge to know what happens next. It’s remarkable enough that Chris Bohjalian continues to produce work with such prolificacy, but to create stories this energetic and exciting and flat-out fun … it’s really something special.”
— The Maine Edge

“Chris Bohjalian is a master of suspense and pacing. . .Brace yourself for a blockbuster ending!”
— Kate Ayers, Bookreporter

“This cat-and-mouse game will have your heart in your throat until the crazy twist at the end. Anyone who is a fan of TV’s ‘The Americans,’ about Russian spies among us, should put ‘The Flight Attendant’ on their list.”
— Diane LaRue, the Auburn Citizen

“From this gripping opening, Bohjalian spins out a tale that is half jet-setting international thriller and half character study.”
— Seven Days

“Exciting and suspenseful and hugely entertaining. ‘The Flight Attendant’ is rich with detail gleaned from years of observation and inquiry, but its real power is as a page-turner. I loved it.”
— Addison Independent

“Here’s a milestone: Bohjalian is publishing his 20th novel, and as always it combines popular tropes with a serious examination of social issues. Binge-drinking flight attendant Cassandra Bowden wakes up with another bad hangover in a Dubai hotel room and finds the man she spent the night with lying dead beside her. She flees, lying her way from the ride to the airport through the flight to Paris to her encounter with FBI agents at flight’s end. What really happened? And what are the consequences of addiction, deception, and denial? Fans are lining up.”
— Barbara Hoffert, Library Journal

“Exciting. . .Bohjalian’s fans will have fun.”
— Publishers Weekly

“Between Elmore Leonard’s Rum Punch and the Air France cocaine scandals, you would think flight attendants would be staple of crime fiction. What better profession for a story about a man/woman on the run, caught up in international intrigue? And yet their appearances in the canon are few and far between. Thankfully, suspense master Chris Bohjalian is on the beat with this year’s new release, about a hard living airline employee who wakes up in Dubai next to a dead body and has to piece together the sordid story.”
— Literary Hub

The Fugitive Life of an Airline Employee

When I was a boy, I had an uncle who married a flight attendant—or what we called back then a (forgive me) stewardess.

It was his second marriage and I was too young to understand the enticing aroma of scandal that swirled around the divorce from his first wife, but even as an elementary school kid I picked up on the glamour of his new bride. She was beautiful, in her late-twenties, and already had traveled all over the world. She had a dachshund that she carried with her like a purse. Her uniform was cerulean: bluer than the skies in which she lived a sizable part of her life.

Further adding to the romance of their marriage was the fact that years earlier my uncle had jumped out of airplanes. He was a paratrooper and had jumped over Normandy in June, 1944, and three and a half months later over the Netherlands. In the decades since his days as a member of the 101st Airborne, he had continued to travel for business. It was how he had met his second wife: on an airplane.

Sometimes, my family joked that his new wife was a spy.

Or, perhaps, given his service in the war and the amount of time he spent now at 35,000 feet, they both were.

***

Once upon a time, flying was considered so exciting—and not in a “brace for impact” sort of way—that we looked at those remarkable people who flew those Boeing 707s or brought us our playing cards and presumed that they lived lives far more interesting than ours. It wasn’t just the exotic destinations they saw; often it was something more. We told ourselves that they worked for the CIA or the KGB. Or they smuggled carry-on bags of cocaine in and out of America. Or they laundered whole suitcases of cash.

Flying was, after all, the perfect cover for someone who was either a patriot (for our side or theirs) or up to all manner of nefarious activities. In some ways, it still is. You have a reason to go to Moscow. You have an excuse to go Berlin. (There were always stories about Pan Am’s role in the Cold War.) Obviously cabin crews pass through security, just like the rest of us. But the security is different.

Moreover, back then there was a special allure because there were no cell phones or computers to keep these shooting stars tethered to us mere mortals back on earth. When I was interviewing flight attendants for my new novel, a veteran who had been flying over thirty years told me, “When I was young, I might be the extra or the replacement, and I’d get a call at the last minute to be on the next flight to Paris. I’d phone my parents or my sister, but if I didn’t reach them, they’d have no idea where I was. I’d be off radar for the next couple of days. It was exhilarating to just disappear like that.”

There were also fewer flights then, and so the layovers were longer, especially if you were off to India, the Middle East, or Asia.

And even when we referred to them dismissively as—the sexism appalling—stewies, we knew this: they had what Napolean Dynamite would call “mad skills.” Incredible training. If that plane goes down, they won’t be the ones screaming into their yellow oxygen masks.

I think it was only a matter of time before I would write a novel about one.

***

Hollywood has latched on to the idea of the flight attendant as a criminal or spy more often than literature, and even those TV shows and films have been rare. I think that’s because while people often think the job of a flight attendant is one of alluring escape, the reality is the exact opposite. They live out of suitcases (no one packs as brilliantly and as compactly as a flight attendant); they constantly have to desert their homes or families; and these days they see little more of a city than the airport hotels. And then there are all of us, the passengers, who sometimes misbehave with despicable abandon. We’ve all seen people fight for space in the overhead bins as if they’re trying to grab the last spot in the lifeboat; we’ve all seen passengers nearly come to blows over the right to recline a seat; and we’ve all see flight attendants have to chastise or discipline entitled passengers who drink too much or won’t switch their devices to airplane mode or simply demand that someone in the cabin crew perform a miracle and get the plane to Chicago in time to make their connection.

One retired FBI agent I interviewed did share with me that the bureau has stables of professionals that can play small roles in an operation, usually surveillance, and certainly flight attendants are among them. They can be the eyes the bureau needs at 35,000 feet, after the jet bridge is retracted.

But the stories that I came across in my research that left me most surprised were less about the clandestine activities of flight attendants than they were about the ways passengers can make their lives hell: climbing atop the drink cart. A parent allowing a little boy to try (and fail!) to use an air sickness bag as a urinal while standing in the aisle beside their seat. Or simply forgetting that please and thank-you can make a world of different to flight attendants on their fourth flight of the day.

And so with my new novel, I was after something different: a case of mistaken identity. My flight attendant would not be a criminal or a spy, but she would be caught up in a tsunami of international intrigue and assassination both because of what she does for a living and her own peccadillos. She’s a scarred, wounded bird who drinks far too much and one day awakes hungover in a hotel room in a faraway land beside a dead body. I had Roger Thornhill in mind, the hard-drinking ad man from Alfred Hitchcock’s wonderful 1959 movie, “North by Northwest.” Thornhill (the always impeccable, even when soused, Cary Grant) is caught in a web of Russian and American spies, but he doesn’t know who wants to kill him—or why. Perhaps that was a more plausible and a more interesting scenario for a professional who spends her time moving from one airport hotel to another, living out of an expertly packed suitcase, and interacting with an endless stream of strangers. If the flight attendant’s life is akin to a fugitive’s, the overwhelming sensation, even more than departure, must be one of disorientation.

Looking back, I think it’s unlikely that my aunt the flight attendant was a spy. But novels have long gestation periods, and I’m not sure my new thriller would exist if it weren’t for her—and for all those wondrous eddies of intrigue, real or imagined, that she left in her wake.

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Chris’s most recent novel, The Flight Attendant, was just published. This essay appeared originally on “Crime Reads.”