An interview with the world’s best-selling children’s author, R.L. Stine…
Q. From what we have heard, everyone who reads and/or writes horror has one — THE book — the one that introduced them to the genre and made them seek out everything they could in the field. What was your first introduction to horror literature? A. Believe it or not, my introduction to scary literature was Pinocchio. My mother read it to me every day before naptime when I was three or four. The original Pinocchio is terrifying. First he smashes Jiminy Cricket to death with a wooden mallet. Then he goes to sleep with his feet up on the stove and burns his feet off! I never forgot it!
Q. It’s easy to scare other people; jumping out from behind a door, a black rubber spider in a running shoe, the list goes on and on. You have made a living by scaring people who encounter you on a page of print. Do you ever come up with anything so wild that you scare yourself, that leaves you wondering where that came from? A. I always wonder where every idea comes from. It’s such a mysterious process. They seem to appear from out of nowhere (thank goodness!). I’ve made myself laugh from some ideas — but I’ve never scared myself.
Q. Beyond your own work (of course), what is your all-time favorite horror book and why? And what is your favorite book outside of the horror genre? A. Something Wicked This Way Comes by Ray Bradbury. I grew up in the Midwest, and the story of a Midwestern boy who sneaks out of his house late at night and encounters an evil carnival really gave me chills. Besides Ray Bradbury, my favorite author — and I know this is bad for my scary image — is P.G. Wodehouse.
Q. Do you look to your own phobias to find subject matter? Are your stories the products of nightmares, childhood experiences, fantasies, or do they come straight from the headlines of contemporary events or other experiences? A. I’ve never dreamed of a story idea. I have such boring dreams. One night I dreamed I was making a bologna sandwich. That was a really exciting dream for me. I was a very fearful child, and when I write I try to remember that feeling of panic. I try to remember what it was like being a kid afraid of the dark, afraid something is lurking in the basement, etc . When I write my Nightmare room books.
Q. How will the genre be affected, if at all, by the events of Sept. 11? With the nation struggling with terror, do you feel horror novels may be in more — or less — demand? A. I feel that good fantasy will always be in demand. I think children especially need literature that helps them escape from the real world, which is very scary to them right now.
Q. What draws people to horror novels? Why do we, as readers, like to be scared? A. Everyone enjoys a good scare — if he or she is safe at the same time. Reading horror novels is like riding a rollercoaster. It’s thrilling and frightening — but you know you’re okay the whole while.
Q. Where do you as an author draw the line on gory descriptions? A. Since I write for kids, I have to be very careful. I have to make sure that my stories are pure fantasy — nothing real. I have to give the kids shivers — but not nightmares.
Q. Do you feel any competitive pressure from horror films? If so, does the increasingly graphic nature of horror in films make your job more difficult? If not, why not? A. Most of my audience can’t be admitted to R-rated films. I don’t really see them as competition for my audience. My stories, The Nightmare Room books and TV show are so much gentler than most movies.
Q. Many of the situations and scenarios in horror novels are so, well, horrible, it seems impossible they could all be products of pure imagination. Do you ever research real events to get ideas? Does the Internet ever come in handy? A. I have to admit I do almost no research. Almost everything comes from my twisted imagination.
Q. The perception of the horror writer is that he/she is maybe just a little bit odder than most. Do you find yourself — and other horror writers — to be more idiosyncratic than the average person? What one stereotype about horror writers is absolutely wrong? What one stereotype is dead on? A. I’ve met a few horror writers and movie directors, and they seem to be shy, quiet, normal people. I think the one thing they have in common is a good sense of humor — because there’s a very close tie between humor and horror.
In this interview…
What he was like in school
His only rule for a book
How Goosebumps became popular
Tales to Drive You Batty
I don’t know why I began writing. I started when I was nine years old. I was a weird kid. I would just stay in my room, typing. I found this old typewriter up in the attic. I dragged it down to my room and started typing little, funny magazines, like Tales to Drive You Insane and Tales to Drive You Batty – just funny magazines, and short stories. My mother would be outside my room, saying, “Go outside and play. What’s the matter with you?”
I’m in there, typing. “I can’t. I’m writing a novel.”
I’m nine years old. I don’t know why I thought it was so interesting…
So, I’d do these little magazines, and I was a very shy kid – very shy – and not social at all. Maybe this is one reason I just stayed in my room, writing this stuff. I would bring it in to school and try to get attention from the other kids. I’d bring these little magazines, and I would pass them around to my friends. The teachers would always grab them and say, “Bob, please. Please stop.”
When I speak at schools now, kids always ask me, “Did your teachers encourage you to write when you were a kid?”
If I’m being honest, I just say they tried to get me to stop.
Fearful himself
Well, I was. I was afraid of lots of things – all the basic kinds of fears – afraid of the dark, afraid of going down to the basement. I had this one fear. I’d have to park my bike in the garage after dark, and I always thought something would be lurking in the garage. I used to take my bike and just throw it in so I wouldn’t have to go in there.
That’s a painful way to go through childhood, I think, having all these fears and being very shy. That was hard. But in a way, it’s kind of lucky. It helped me out later, because now, when I write these scary books for kids, I can think back to that feeling of panic. I can remember what it felt like, and then I can bring that feeling to my books.
On the safe side of scary
I have one rule, and I’ve been doing this a long time, so I pretty much know what’s too scary – and what’s not scary enough. My editors usually are asking me to make things scarier. I’m pretty conservative, because you don’t really want to terrify kids. You want to creep them out a little bit, but you don’t really want to terrify them. I try to make sure that the kids know that these books are fantasies. I keep the real world out. So, I don’t do real serious subjects. I don’t even have divorced parents. I wouldn’t do child abuse, or drugs. I wouldn’t do anything in the real world. They have to know that these are just fantasies and that they’re not really happening. Once you’ve established that, you can get pretty scary.
Jovial Bob
Yes, I was a funny guy for a long time. When I started out, I just wanted to write humor. I wrote humor for kids. My very first book was called How to be Funny. It was about how to get big laughs at the dinner table and how to get laughs in school. Parents hated this book. I wrote joke books, like A Hundred and One Monster Jokes, and other joke books for years. I did maybe a hundred of them. I had a great time, and I did this humor magazine called Bananas for ten years. It was sort of Mad Magazine, but it was all in color, and it was great. That was all I ever wanted to do. I couldn’t believe it.
When that ended, I figured I would just coast for the rest of my career. That was it. I’d already done what I wanted to do. I had no idea what was coming up.
Giving kids the Goosebumps
I wrote 87 Goosebumps books. That’s a lot of books for a human, isn’t it? None of us expected what happened with Goosebumps. We started it in 1992, and by 1994, I was turning out a Goosebumps a month, and it was doing okay for a while. And then it just took off like nothing we’d ever seen. It took off all over the world – not through advertising, hype, or promotions – but just kids telling kids. There’s some kind of secret kids network out there. Just kids telling kids about it, and this thing grew everywhere. It was in 28 languages. At one point, after a couple years, we were selling 4 million Goosebumps books a month.
As scary as an optometrist
Well, I think kids maybe are a little disappointed when I come visit their school and they’re expecting some scary guy wearing a cape. Then I walk in. I try to look a little scary, but I’m not too scary. I went back to my hometown, Columbus, Ohio, and did some appearances. The local newspaper wrote, “In person, R.L. Stine is about as scary as an optometrist.” That’s bad – right? I’m not too scary.
It’s just my dog
Mostly Ghostly has all these funny elements, with poor Max and these ghosts who are always embarrassing him. There’s a lot of funny stuff, but then there are some really terrifying moments. There is a ghost named Fears, who really wants to capture the two ghosts that Max is protecting and will do anything to Max. In the very first book, he’s going to show Max what he can do. Max is out walking his dog; and Fears, in a really disgusting scene, turns Max’s dog inside out. The dog is just there with his organs out. He’s just inside out. That’s kind of creepy. So, it has a lot of stuff like that. Mostly Ghostly is pretty scary. A neighbor drives by and sees Max there, and she says, “Max, did you drop your garbage? Can I help you pick up your garbage?”
He says, “No. It’s just my dog.”
Rotten School
Well, Rotten School is just zany; it’s just crazy. You just try to come up with really funny characters and put them in horrible situations and see what happens. I have this kid Bernie Bridges, who’s this conman who’s always out to win; and he has an arch–enemy in the school – this spoiled, rich kid, Sherman Oaks. Bernie and his buddies live in a dorm called Rotten House, and they pick the third floor because it’s good for dropping things out of the window on people.
Sherman lives across the lawn on this campus in Nice House. I don’t know who would want to live in Nice House. But Sherman Oaks and his pals live in Nice House, so it’s a constant battle between the two groups. Sherman is always showing off his new things. In one of the early books, Sherman’s parents have bought him a new digital watch that has 42 different functions. It has a keyboard on it and a CD player and a movie thing, and it’s got a small George Foreman grill – all on his watch.
Bernie sees this watch, and says, “Oh! I have to have it. I have to have that watch.” And the book is about how Bernie goes about taking that watch away from Sherman Oaks.
Aired August 23, 2002 – 09:44 ET
PAULA ZAHN, CNN ANCHOR: The horrific events of September 11 created some new American heroes. Among them, Todd Beamer, who helped organize his fellow passengers on United Airlines Flight 93 to try to take the plane back from the terrorists who hijacked it. He left behind his pregnant wife, Lisa, who quickly became a national symbol of courage. She and her children have spent most of the year trying to come to terms with their loss.
(BEGIN VIDEO CLIP)
UNIDENTIFIED FEMALE: Thanks, David. This is beautiful. Oh, can I have that one too? Is that for me, too?
UNIDENTIFIED FEMALE: Say, “Happy Mother’s Day.”
UNIDENTIFIED CHILD: Mother’s Day.
UNIDENTIFIED FEMALE: Thank you. Come here. Love you. Those are beautiful.
(END VIDEO CLIP)
ZAHN: And she has written a new book called “Let’s Roll,” Todd’s rallying cry to his fellow passengers, and Lisa Beamer is here now — great to see you in person for a change.
LISA BEAMER, 9/11 WIDOW: Thank you, Paula.
ZAHN: An honor to meet you.
BEAMER: Thank you. Nice to be here.
ZAHN: So I imagine writing this book certainly gave you some emotional ups and downs. When you think about the whole process of what it took to finish this thing, what is it that you learned about yourself and what you learned about Todd?
BEAMER: I think I went back over again just the usual everyday sort of things about who he was, and what our life was like up until September 11, and certainly in revisiting those, there is a whole lot of mourning that goes on, and when you realize again all the things that have been lost. But I think I realized just that, you know, in life there is so many things that swirl around you, but certainly the things that last over time are those deep elements of character and courage and faith that Todd had luckily built up in his short 32 years on earth, and how important that was. ZAHN: I guess what was amazing to me as I read the book is how universally that was accepted. I guess almost every person in here who talks about Todd talked about him being this strong, principled, loving man.
BEAMER: He was only 32 when he died, he didn’t have a long time to leave a legacy, but he was a very thoughtful person, and a person who knew who he wanted to be, and what sort of steps he needed to take to get there, and he worked hard on that in his short time here.
ZAHN: In one of the more dramatic parts of the book, you take us back to September 11 through a phone conversation he had actually made to an operator, and you talk openly about how there was a portion of you that was a little hurt that you hadn’t heard from Todd because he carried two cell phones around with him all the time, and it wasn’t until about a week after September 11 that you found out what he had done. Can you describe that to us this morning?
BEAMER: Well, I did have about four days after September 11 knowing that other passengers had made calls, and wondering why Todd hadn’t, whether he had been injured, and thinking the worst might have happened to him right away, and just thinking those questions would never be answered, so when I did hear from Lisa Jefferson, the operator he spoke to, it was the Saturday following September 11. It was obviously very traumatic to hear, you know, exactly what went on on that plane in a very personal sort of way, but also just an amazing gift to have another message from him, have those questions answered, and just know that even in that horrible circumstance, that he remained the person that I knew and loved in our normal day to day life.
ZAHN: And you even describe how the operator couldn’t run to a recording machine because she was afraid she was going to lose the call, and she told you specifically what? What had Todd said to her?
BEAMER: He went through a variety of different things on a very personal level. He gave her my phone number, my name, our children’s names, and asked to call us, and tell us that he loved us, and just, you know, he still had hope that they could possibly do something to get out of there, but I think deep down inside — he said to her at one point, that I know I am not going to get out of here, and I need to take care of my family, and this is the only way I can do it right now. And then, certainly, beyond that, he was very concerned that the proper action be taken in trying to get her to give advice on what that should be, and once he realized that they were not going to be held as normal hijacked passengers, that this was not going to end well, knowing that they had to take an action, and just following through with that.
ZAHN: How helpful has the government been in trying to help all of you families that were so affected by this better understand exactly what did happen to your loved ones?
BEAMER: We were able as Flight 93 families to hear the cockpit voice recorders back in April, which was a good thing just to sort of put some more facts around what we already knew to be true from our different conversations with our loved ones, just to know that the passengers did, indeed, work together, and they did, indeed, change the course of that plane and change the course of history, and to have more facts around it certainly made me feel more confident telling that story to other people and certainly telling it to my children some day.
ZAHN: Is your oldest one old enough to really understand what happened?
BEAMER: He knows that his daddy died. He knows it was in a plane crash, and he is starting to ask more questions now as to exactly what happened on the plane, and certainly I am going to have to have some difficult conversations with him very soon about the fact that there are very bad people in this world, and sometimes they do very bad things, and it is not a conversation you want to have with a 4-year-old, but it is part of our life now.
ZAHN: We were just looking at a beautiful picture of you with your arms very filled with children, including baby Morgan, who came, obviously, six months after September 11. How is the rest of your family doing, and how are you coping?
BEAMER: You know, having children makes it so much easier to wake up every morning and know exactly what I need to do.
ZAHN: Yes, because you can’t think about yourself.
BEAMER: Right. Right. And certainly I have done a lot of things that I think will help me personally in my healing process, being part of a support group of other 9/11 families, and my own counseling, and just taking time aside to just remember and mourn and grieve and, you know, but certainly with the children, they give me a high priority to know why I am here, and what I need to accomplish, and they have been great, and they are doing wonderful.
ZAHN: But you obviously take very seriously the trauma the children have suffered, not only in this catastrophe, but others along the way, and you have actually created a foundation, the Beamer Foundation, that helps those kids. What is it that these kids will get out of the foundation?
BEAMER: We are actually in the final stages of developing a program for children who have been through a family trauma and we are going to look to partner with them through a variety of different experiences and long-term mentoring to help them use that as a conduit to greatness in their life and character building, and so that they will be able to make heroic choices similar to the ones that Todd made everyday of his life, and then on September 11.
ZAHN: There is a little bit of controversy that you have had to deal with, and that is the phrase “let’s roll,” which happens to be the name of your book. Now you would like to trademark this to prevent the misuse of it, or the exaggeration of it.
BEAMER: Back in the fall, the foundation sought a trademark on it for charitable use to make sure that when we wanted to use it for something, we would be able to without any legal problems, and we have been working on that process, and it is going just fine.
I am just amazed at the life that “let’s roll” has taken for our country, and I am certainly encouraged and honored by its use in helping people look at what little people can obtain when they do big things, and as long as it is used in that way, I am certainly encouraged and inspired by it myself.
ZAHN: So were you surprised when people were a little critical that maybe someone was going to try to trademark it?
BEAMER: Yes, I am surprised that it became an issue at all, and there are people out there trying to trademark it for profit, which isn’t something I would really see as a good use of it, but, you know, I think most of the uses have just been very inspirational for people, and I am encouraged and honored by them.
ZAHN: Well, you probably don’t ever stop long enough to realize how inspiring you have been to many of us who have watched you over this past year. You have shown great dignity and great grace, and I highly recommend people take a look at this book, because it really is a tribute to your husband, his life, and your life together.
BEAMER: Thank you.
ZAHN: Good luck to you. Do you have anybody waiting in the hallway? Do you have a little toddler out there waiting to be hugged or they are all at home.
BEAMER: No, they are at home today. I am going to go home and meet them this afternoon.
ZAHN: Mommy is on her way home. Lisa Beamer. The name of her book is “Let’s Roll,” and we really appreciate your dropping by.
BEAMER: Thanks, Paula.
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Her husband’s words became a rallying cry for the nation
Lisa Beamer talks to Dateline NBC’s Stone Phillips about her life after losing her husband Todd on Sept. 11.
By NBC News
updated 11:17 a.m. ET Sept. 11, 2006
http://www.msnbc.msn.com/id/3080111/
This story aired on Dateline August 20, 2002
Aug. 20 – Lisa Beamer was still sleeping on the morning of September 11, when her husband, Todd, left their home in Cranbury, N.J., to catch his flight to California. A software saleman for Oracle, he was supposed to have flown on September 10, but he and Lisa had just returned from a vacation in Europe and Todd wanted another night with the kids before taking off again on business. September 11 wasn’t just a travel day for Todd. It was marked on his calendar for something he’d been wanting to do for a long time. Remembering it made Lisa Beamer smile. Stone Phillips reports.
Stone Phillips: The last day of his life was also the first day of what was supposed to be a new diet and fitness program.
Lisa Beamer: That’s right. That worked out well!
Stone Phillips: Starting September 11, Todd was really going to get in shape.
Lisa Beamer: Yes. Since college, you know, he had spent a lot of time behind a desk, and he really wanted to get that body back. And he was looking to start it all summer. But we kept going on vacation and doing different things.
Stone Phillips: You’d been in Italy packing away the pasta.
Lisa Beamer: That’s right. And gelato. But he had a little program he was going to follow for the next 12 weeks that was really going to, you know, transform him back into this college sports hero again.
September 11 transformed Todd Beamer into another kind of hero when he rallied with his fellow passengers to fight back against the hijackers of Flight 93. His now-famous battle cry, “Let’s roll,” is now emblazoned on U.S. Air Force planes across the country.
But to Lisa Beamer, a widow at 32, Todd was also an everyday hero — a loving husband, a hard worker, and a role model to their sons, David and Drew. Every day, for Lisa, there’s some new reminder of all the things Todd loved.
Lisa Beamer: Baseball was his passion. He was bound and determined that it was going to be the boys’ passion too. He didn’t have to work very hard because it was in their blood I think.
Stone Phillips: And he couldn’t wait to outfit his kids for sports.
Lisa Beamer: No, our kids have all sorts of sporting equipment already intact, ready to go.
In fact, Todd bought three-year-old David an entire catcher’s outfit, piece by piece — everything but the glove. That’s where Mom finally put her foot down.
Lisa Beamer: And I said not until you become a real catcher you can have a catcher’s mitt. And interestingly enough, I was in the basement of our home a few weeks ago cleaning out some last things that I hadn’t gone through yet. And there were some boxes down there. And I found a catcher’s mitt that Todd had bought. And I gave it to David. And he was thrilled. So, now he has the whole gear from — from Daddy.
Stone Phillips: He had bought it and was saving it.
Lisa Beamer: Yes, that was Todd.
A PRECIOUS GIFT
Buying that mitt against Mom’s orders may have been “typical Todd,” but Lisa says something else he bought — the Saturday before 9/11 — was wonderfully out of character: a bracelet she had spotted in a store in Florence.
Lisa Beamer: And he said, ‘Well, should we buy it?’ So, we stood there for probably a half hour going back and forth. And he said, ‘Let’s just get it.’ And as we walked out of the store, I said ‘I can’t believe you did that.’ And he said ‘I can’t believe I did it either.’ He was not usually a fly-by-the-seat-of-his-pants person like that.
Stone Phillips: He hadn’t had time to research it, to check it out, to make sure it was real.
Lisa Beamer: No. To go get his appraiser and all this. He didn’t do any of that. And he just made a very unusual decision for him. But certainly one that is really meaningful to me now.
Stone Phillips: Is that the last gift he gave you?
Lisa Beamer: It is. Besides Morgan.
Morgan, that other gift, arrived last January. She’s the third child they always wanted.
Stone Phillips: What did you think when you first saw her?
Lisa Beamer: I was obviously thrilled.
She was thrilled that she was a girl, thrilled that she was safe, thrilled that there was one more. But it was very bittersweet that he would never know her. And she would never see him.
Stone Phillips: And she’s growing up to be her father’s daughter.
Lisa Beamer: She is. She has a very calm personality. And, you know, just takes life as it comes. And that’s kind of how he was. He was a very peaceful person to be around.
But Morgan may have gotten some of that from her mom as well. In the days after 9/11, Lisa Beamer, five months pregnant, was the picture of composure. When I sat down with her and Todd’s father just one week after the attack, her poise and presence were extraordinary. But what most people didn’t know at the time was that Lisa had endured a devastating loss before. When she was 15, her father died suddenly of an aneurysm.
Stone Phillips: Was the pain of having lost your father in some way helpful to you? Having been through that?
Lisa Beamer: On September 11, I can absolutely assure you that one of the first thoughts I had was, I don’t know if the word is thankful, but appreciating the fact that I had gone through this before and all the things I had learned that I knew were going to enable me to pick up and keep walking.
Over the past year, Lisa Beamer has done more than just keep walking. In the face of adversity, she became a face of strength to many in a shaken nation, a symbol of unshaken faith.
In fact, she has become one of the most sought-after speakers on the planet. She says all the media attention has, at times, left her more than a little bewildered.
Stone Phillips: You have been thrust into a kind of celebrity status. I mean, you became very famous for something very painful. Do you ever just kind of step back and say to yourself, ‘This is all so bizarre?’
Lisa Beamer: Yes. I remember a few days after, probably a few weeks after Morgan was born, I was in Target with my kids, and I went to the checkout line and there was “People” magazine there and there’s a picture of Morgan on the cover. And I was like, I just — so many things like that you can’t put together.”
Stone Phillips: Have there been moments that you just say to yourself, ‘Todd would be laughing?’
Lisa Beamer: He would be laughing at that. Yes, recently, he and a few of the Flight 93 passengers were honored at the ESPY awards. And I was thinking, well, I know Todd can’t come back, but if there’s an opportunity for him to come back, he’s going to do it now.
Stone Phillips: Sports fan that he was.
Lisa Beamer: You know, Cal Ripken, and Dr. J., and everybody was there, and I thought, well, if this doesn’t work then he’s not coming back.
That Daddy isn’t coming back is something that Lisa has been very frank about with the kids.
Lisa Beamer: Who liked the Cubs?
David Beamer: Daddy…
Lisa Beamer: Did your team win?
David Beamer: Uh-huh.
Especially with her oldest, David. He was just 3 1/2 when Flight 93 went down. Lisa told him about it the very next day, explaining it as best she could, hoping he would somehow understand.
Stone Phillips: Something happened later that week that made you believe that he really had understood the finality of this.
Lisa Beamer: Yes. We had, obviously, a lot of visitors in our house that week. My brother-in-law was there, and David was showing him around the house. And he got to our bedroom. And my brother-in-law said, ‘Is this your mommy and daddy’s bedroom?” And David said, ‘No, it’s just my mommy’s bedroom now.’ So as painful as that was to hear, I was also thankful that he was gripping this in a really mature sort of way.
David Beamer: Mom?
Lisa Beamer: What?
David Beamer: Why are you sad?
Lisa Beamer: I’m not sad.
David Beamer: You are sad.
Lisa Beamer: Sometimes.
David Beamer: Why?
Lisa Beamer: Sometimes we’re sad because Daddy’s not here.
Lisa Beamer: He flew on an airplane with me a few weeks ago. And that was the first time he’d been on an airplane. And I wondered if he would raise any issues or concerns or questions.
Stone Phillips: How’d it go?
Lisa Beamer: It was fine. He got on, and he was having a great time watching the movie. And at one point, he leaned over and said to my mom that his Daddy’s airplane had crashed. And she said, ‘Yes, I know.’ But he didn’t have any fears or concerns for his own, which made me happy.
When David and his younger brother and sister get older, they’ll be able to learn more about their dad and what he did. Lisa has written a book for them, she says, about Todd, his family, his faith, his hopes and dreams — everything that went into making him a hero on that fateful day. What else could she call it, but “Let’s Roll.” In it, the children will also learn what their mother went through.
A CRUCIAL PHONE CALL
Stone Phillips: Unlike Deena Burnett and Lyz Glick, you did not talk to your husband by phone from the plane.
Lisa Beamer: No, he spoke to an operator.
Stone Phillips: He spoke to a GTE [Airfone] operator.
Lisa Beamer: Yes.
Stone Phillips: Lisa Jefferson. The other Lisa.
Lisa Beamer: Yes, he spoke to Lisa that day. And I’ve always been thankful that I didn’t speak to him. I wasn’t surprised that he didn’t call me. I was home alone with the kids. And as I talked to Lisa later on, she said he went back and forth quite a few times whether he wanted her to connect him to me or not, because she could have done that. But he said he didn’t want to upset me unnecessarily. He was worried about the baby. And he was just trying to do the right thing. He was just trying to do what he could to get out of there. And he thought Lisa would be better able to help him do that than I would, and he was right.
In his 15 minute conversation with Lisa Jefferson, Todd described the desperate situation on board — and asked her to tell his family how much he loved them. It was Lisa Jefferson who heard him utter, “Let’s roll” to a fellow passenger as the counterattack began. Four days after 9/11, the two Lisas spoke. And over the past year, they have stayed in touch.
Lisa Beamer: You know, if it wasn’t for Lisa Jefferson, I wouldn’t be here talking to you right now. I wouldn’t, you know, have a book. I wouldn’t know for sure what had happened with Todd. You know, I’m in her debt forever.
Stone Phillips: If you could have spoken to Todd that day on the plane, what would you have said to him?
Lisa Beamer: What would I wish I had said to him! I think truly, I would have been very hysterical. But I guess I wish that I would have been similar to what Lisa was to him, just very calm and said, you know, ‘Todd, you’re going to do the right thing here. I trust you. I love you. And you’re going to do what you can do and you’re going to make a difference.’”
Lisa Jefferson also told her that before he put the phone down, Todd asked her to recite the Lord’s Prayer with him.
Stone Phillips: You say you believe that when he recited the part about ‘forgive us our trespasses as we forgive those who trespass against us,’ that in some way, in some sense, he was forgiving the terrorists?
Lisa Beamer: I believe that in that moment, he was trying to get his heart right and know that he was in line with the person that God would have wanted him to be before he took some serious action.”
Stone Phillips: Can you ever forgive the hijackers?
Lisa Beamer: I don’t think about them a lot. You know, bitterness and anger doesn’t get one very far in life. And I won’t allow it to seep in. I won’t allow someone else’s terrible actions to turn me into a person that I don’t want to be. Whether if I could, you know, sit down next to Osama bin Laden right now, would I say, ‘I forgive you?’ I don’t think so quite yet.
What Lisa Beamer focuses on these days is trying to inspire people to follow in the footsteps of her husband, and the other Flight 93 passengers — to fight back, and give back. She started the Todd Beamer Foundation to help children affected by tragedy.
So far, the foundation has raised more than $3 million. But in the end, this famous widow would just as soon fade into anonymity and honor Todd’s memory by raising his children well.
Stone Phillips: What’s the hardest part of each day now for you?
Lisa Beamer: Not being able to call Todd and say, ‘Hey, guess what? David swam across the pool today. Or Morgan rolled over. Or did you hear that funny thing that Drew just said?’ And I have choices every day when something like that happens to just fall apart and just be incredibly sad that the grief… that is an automatic thing or to say, ‘You know what? David did swim across the pool. And that’s a great thing. Good for you.’
Stone Phillips: How do you plan to mark the one-year anniversary?
Lisa Beamer: I’ve actually struggled with that a lot — different opportunities to go to Shanksville or go to a memorial somewhere. And nothing quite seemed like the right thing to do. And I looked at the calendar a few days ago and I realized it was my boys’ second day of pre-school. I thought, ‘That’s where I should be,’ just doing the normal things that they need me for, the normal things that I’d be doing had this not all happened. Todd would want me to be there with them. So I’m just going to do a day with my kids.
Best known for her book “Scarlett” as the chosen author to complete “Gone With the Wind,” Ripley reached the top of the New York Times Bestseller List despite poor reviews of the book. In this article, learn how Alexandra felt about the character Scarlett, learn about other books she’s written and how they were received, and read her New York Times obituary. Scroll down to watch clips from the film.
There’s a shortage of interviews with Ripley and she’s passed away, which is a darned pity because I have a question I’d like to ask her. “Why?”
“Why did you of all people get chosen to write a sequel to the most successful book of all time?”
“Why did you feel the need to use cliches instead of original language?”
“Why did you twist Scarlett and Rhett’s relationship into trash?”
“Why did you write the book about Scarlett when you didn’t even like or admire her?”
I think an author simply must feel an affinity with the main character or readers certainly won’t. Just as actors must learn to identify with the characters that they play, an author who cannot see why a character acts the way he or she does will never offer true insight into the human condition–one of the most important reasons we read novels.
In 1972, Ripley published her first book, “Who’s That Lady in the President’s Bed?” under the pseudonym B.K. Ripley, and followed it up with half a dozen historical novels, including “Charleston,” “The Time Returns” and “A Love Divine.”
In the early 1990 the estate of Margaret Mitchell selected her to pick up the stories of Scarlett O’Hara and Rhett Butler where Mitchell left them in 1936, the year her saga of the Civil War was published.
”There are two reasons why I’m doing this book,” she said in an interview in the reference work Contemporary Authors. ”I can’t resist it, and as soon as this is done I will be able to write anything I want to. I really don’t know why Scarlett has such appeal. When I began writing the sequel, I had a lot of trouble because Scarlett is not my kind of person. She’s virtually illiterate, has no taste, never learns from her mistakes.”
Alexandra Ripley on readable books:
There are two books that I ran out and paid for the other day because I couldn’t wait for the publishers to send them to me. One is Elizabeth Peters’ Night Train to Memphis. She is one of my favorite writers, wonderfully funny with great plots. The hero is an elegant, titled Englishman and a thief of rare jewels and artifacts. I’d love to be a rare-jewel thief, although in a way I am, since I made enough money with Scarlett to buy a few. In nonfiction, to improve my mind, I’m reading Irving Howe’s A Critic’s Notebook. It takes you back to a time when critics thought they were supposed to talk about the book and not themselves. I’m also reading a gardening book, Climbing Roses, by Christopher Warner.
Alexandra Ripley, a writer of historical fiction who was best known for ”Scarlett,” the officially sanctioned sequel to ”Gone With the Wind,” died on Jan. 10 at her home in Richmond, Va. She was 70.
Her daughter, Elizabeth Lyon Ripley, told The Associated Press that death resulted from unspecified natural causes.
Ms. Ripley had written five novels before the estate of Margaret Mitchell selected her in the early 1990′s to pick up the stories of Scarlett O’Hara and Rhett Butler where Mitchell left them in 1936, the year her saga of the Civil War was published. Mitchell died in 1949.
The selection of Ms. Ripley was mired in controversy from the beginning, in part because it was less than clear that Mitchell, who refused to write a sequel herself, would have wanted anyone else to try.
Ms. Ripley made no bones about why she wanted the assignment.
”There are two reasons why I’m doing this book,” she said in an interview in the reference work Contemporary Authors. ”I can’t resist it, and as soon as this is done I will be able to write anything I want to.”
”Scarlett,” which was universally panned by critics, was a considerable commercial success.
In her review for The New York Times in September 1991, Janet Maslin characterized the book as a ”stunningly uneventful 823-page holding action.”
The Ripley version takes the story from Atlanta to Tara to Charleston to Savannah to Ireland, where Scarlett remarks, ”My stars, this country’s positively peppered with castles.”
It engineers at least a temporary reconciliation with Rhett, with Scarlett even cooking breakfast for him, but such touches led many reviewers to say the characters seemed to have mellowed in ways never suggested by the original book.
After a bidding war, Warner Books won the rights to publish the novel for $4.94 million.
Despite the poor reviews, ”Scarlett” catapulted to the top of the best-seller list.
Over the years, sales have remained steady, according to Warner Books, with millions of copies in print in both hardcover and paperback.
CBS bought the television rights to ”Scarlett,” which was presented as an eight-hour mini-series in 1994.
”Thanks to Miss Mitchell and ‘Scarlett,’ right now I can say any damn thing I want to, and people will listen,” Ms. Ripley told those attending the 1991 Southeastern Booksellers Association convention.
Alexandra Ripley was born Jan. 8, 1934, in Charleston, S.C., the only child of Alexander and Elizabeth Braid. She attended the Ashley Hall School in Charleston and graduated from Vassar College in 1955, majoring in Russian.
Although she had always aspired to be a writer, Ms. Ripley did not work up the courage to become a novelist until she had tried a number of other jobs, including manuscript reader and publicity director.
Her first novel, ”Who’s That Lady in the President’s Bed?,” was published by Dodd/Mead in 1972 under the pseudonym B. K. Ripley.
After the publication of ”Scarlett,” Ms. Ripley wrote other novels that drew better reviews, including ”From Fields of Gold,” published by Warner Books in 1994, and ”A Love Divine,” a novel about Joseph of Arimathea, published by Warner Books in 1996.
Ms. Ripley was legally separated from John Graham of Charlottesville, Va. She is survived by her daughter Elizabeth, another daughter, Merrill Ripley Geier, and a granddaughter, all of Richmond.
Watch clips from the film with Timothy Dalton as Rhett:
ExpatWomen:Patricia, congratulations on the success of your book, 1,000 Places To See Before You Die. Seven years is a really long time to commit to any project and we admire your stamina. What kept you going and what do you feel has been your greatest reward?
Patricia: I think the stamina comes from the simple fact that when work equates your passion and interest – well, it no longer is work, then, is it?! I enjoyed every last research trip, every book read for research and every rewrite. I attempted to capture the fun and romance and magic of these special places. My greatest reward is the satisfaction of ultimately knowing this labor of love was not for me alone, but is something being enjoyed by great numbers of readers of all demographics. We have 20 translations in the works, too – well beyond the usual Spanish, French and German – and perhaps that has been the greatest surprise of all. I didn’t think sales could support translating a book this size into Thai, Lithuanian and Turkish but publishers around the world have proved otherwise.
ExpatWomen:How many people were on your team?
Patricia: Team? What team? I was my own team, and I am a very demanding boss! With some exception – to pay the rent, and keep my contacts alive and happy – I took on other assignments, whose information and experiences eventually helped in the completion of the book as well. But for the most part, it was me alone working on this book exclusively for 8 years. However, when approached by me and my pen, friends, strangers and tourism folks opened up and shared with me names and places – everyone has their favorite places, things and memories and images that stay with you a lifetime. And it is a very personal thing – ask 10 people for their favorite places and chances are you’ll get quite different lists.
ExpatWomen:Can you share with us any places that you have actually lived in as an Expat Woman, and any fond memories you have from those places?
Patricia: My greatest experience was a period of 2-3 years when I lived in Florence, Italy (followed by a period of 10 years which I look back on as glorified commuting, meaning that in an average year I returned to Italy 3-4 times a year, usually for many weeks at a time, and sometimes months). There is nothing as enjoyable or rewarding or insightful as the complete immersion of yourself in a different culture – they say you’ve crossed the threshold when you start to dream in the language of your newly adopted home. I miss not waking up in the morning uttering “Buon giorno!” I will always have the joy of returning to the cities large (Florence, Venice, Bologna, Milan) and small (Pienza, Lucca, Ravello, Agrigento), knowing that I can roam the back streets with a certain degree of familiarity, yet finding everything as new and enticing as if visited for the first time. I was lucky enough to have spent a life-altering Junior Year Abroad in Madrid way back when, followed over the years by time lived in Paris and Nice. Living hand-to-mouth in a host country was priceless – encouraging me to believe that the world was mine for the asking and providing me with a wealth of memories and experience that has defined my life and character.
ExpatWomen: To put together this huge travel digest, we are sure that along the way, you came up with more than 1,000 Places. What was your criteria for selecting your 1,000 Places?
Patricia: I aimed at creating an exciting mixed bag of places and things and events around the world that was unpredictable, but always wonderful. The famous and iconic (Taj Mahal, the Grand Canyon, Versailles, Ayers Rock [Uluru]) to the unknown and untrammeled (an estancia in Patagonia, the gorgeously scenic Cabot Trail in Nova Scotia, the mysterious Nazca lines in Peru, the otherworldly landscape of Cappodocia in Turkey). But each of these places I found to be special, romantic, awe-inspiring, exhilarating – and sometimes just downright fun. Have you ever been to the Maine Lobster Festival? Or eaten at the outdoor food courts in Singapore?
ExpatWomen: Do you have some personal favorite places to share with us?
Patricia: These 1000 places are my favorites!! I must say, though, for a country as small as Italy, the combination of scenic possibilities (from the Alps in the north to the Aeolian Islands off Sicily), to the antiquities (Pompei) and history (Middle Ages and Renaissance) and wealth of world-class art (you could spend a month in Florence’s Uffizzi Galleries or Rome Vatican Museums – and feel like you still need to come back again and again). Add in the food and wine and lovely people and a sense that the local people know something about enjoying life that we have overlooked…yes, I guess you could say Italy is my favorite!
ExpatWomen: Can you please tell us more of your family legend (about being related to Mark Twain)?
Patricia: It all evolves around a word-of-mouth tale that has circulated in my family for years that may or may not be exaggerated – namely, that my paternal grandfather attended one of the many talks given by Samuel Clemens (an insatiable traveler who also needed to recuperate from bankruptcy, Mark Twain spent a good many years criss-crossing America and traveling abroad for paid speaking engagements). They met and chatted backstage, exchanged family names and history and mutually agreed that in fact they were first cousins from a family not particularly close-knit. Unambitious family-tree research in my family was invariably aborted by missing links. But I’ll just agree with author William Faulkner who was credited with writing that Twain was “the first truly American writer, and all of us since are his heirs.”
ExpatWomen: In 2005, you released, 1,000 Places To See Before You Die – Traveler’s Journal. In 2007, you plan to release 1,000 Places To See In The USA & Canada Before You Die. Do you think you’ll become the Chicken Soup for the Soul of the travel world – a humble book that has now steamrolled into a very influential book empire?
Patricia: With the ocean of travel books out there, I wonder how it is that the interest in one person’s Life List of places-not-to-be-missed has attracted such attention. Much travel, for the privileged or homebodies among us, takes place from our proverbial armchairs. And that’s not such a horrible thing, though of course there’s nothing like the real thing. Either way, if a book like 1000 Places encourages just a few more people to open their minds and hearts to the untold possibilities of what the world (and, with my upcoming book, the beauties in our backyard) has to offer. I have no doubt that what Mark Twain wrote a century ago holds true: “Travel is fatal to prejudice, bigotry and narrow mindedness, and many of our people need it sorely on these accounts.” A little family advice!!
ExpatWomen:Thank you very much Patricia and wish you every success for the future.
Patricia: Thanks! The pleasure has been mine – really!
Yesterday I was given an amazing opportunity: to be part of a bloggers’ conference call with Nicholas Sparks. I got an email with all of the information at 11:45 am. I had already set up babysitting services with Dad for the afternoon. Mia has a tendency to talk a LOT when I’m on the phone. Dad arrived a little early at 1:30 and had time to fix the van for me. At 2:35 I locked myself in the bedroom and made a comfortable writing spot: hard surface for writing, two phones in case one died, two pens for the same reason, list of interview questions, something to sip in case I got a tickle in my throat, and a notebook. We were supposed to call in at 2:55, but at 2:53 I couldn’t help myself anymore, so I called in and listened to the Muzak and the names of the other callers be announced as they called in. Nicholas called in at 2:59.
The moderators for the day were Kelly Leonard and Miriam Parker (love Miriam!) from Hachette Books. At 3 pm on the dot, Kelly got the conference going by introducing all of the bloggers present (all women) and explaining the inspiration behind the terrific idea of a conference call. Presidential candidates John McCain and Rudy Guiliani have been holding these types of calls with political bloggers. This is the first time Hachette attempted it, and it was such a success, I sincerely hope that they do it again! Kelly also gave the exciting news that Sparks’ newest book, The Choice, had just hit #1 on the New York Times bestseller list. Congratulations were exchanged all around.
What follows is my transcribed notes. They are much shorter than the entire conversation, but I never learned shorthand, and my pen only moves so fast. I know that I missed things, but I did my best to get down his important points. If it’s awkward in spots, I apologize, that’s all me! Let me say that Nicholas was a terrific gentleman, polite and honest. The bloggers present were: Jennifer Donovan from 5 Minutes for Books, Gina Holmes and Ane Mulligan from NovelJourney.blogspot.com, AKA Monty , Sarah Miller, a few other bloggers whose names and sites weren’t available, and me. We had submitted our questions last week and were given an order to ask them so there was no talking over each other.
Kelly: What was the impetus for writing this novel?
Nicholas: A couple of things. It’s been a long time since I had written a two part story like The Notebook. It’s effective story-telling, you read one story, turn the page and now it’s several years later, so let’s see what’s happened. But I wanted it to be different, about happenstance. About the choices that are made at the beginning and at the end.
Jennifer: On your website, your readers are asked to vote for their favorite character from your novels. I know it’s like picking a favorite child, but who is your favorite character and why?
Nicholas: Landon Carter (from A Walk to Remember). He said whatever popped into his head and people would forgive him because he was a 17-year-old boy. He was easy to write because I’ve been a 17-year-old boy. I’ve never been an 80-year-old man like Noah.
Gina: It’s been said that writer’s reveal themselves, their struggles, fears and dreams through their work. Which of your novels reveals the most about you?
Nicholas: Of course, I’ve written a memoir, so that’s the most about me. But if you read the sum total of my novels in the order I wrote them, you’ll know what was going on in my life.
Ane: How do you avoid writing romance, yet be the master of love stories?
Nicholas: They are different genres. Love stories are Greek tragedies. I wrote modern day Greek tragedies. Look at literature, Shakespeare wrote Romeo & Juliet, Hemingway wrote A Farewell to Arms, that’s a love story. Casablanca in film is essentially a love story. Moving to more modern literature, Love Story by Erich Segal, The Bridges of Madison County by Robert James Waller, and The Horse Whisperer by Nicholas Evans are all love stories. I write in that genre, and if I submitted one of my stories as a romance novel it would be rejected. The differences between the two genres are numerous. Romance has to have a certain structure to it.
AKA Monty: You seem to like the idea of women being “rescued” by men, and yet your female characters are usually quite strong and independent. What do you think you’re trying to say, especially since your main audience is female?
Nicholas: You could make a case that the men are equally rescued. Love changes you. It might be a good change or a bad change. Falling in love is a great experience while it’s happening, and that’s what I try to recreate.
Sarah: Your first novel, The Passing, was never published (you’ve said it’s due to your bad 18-year old writing). Will you ever correct the grammar or possibly re-write it and put it out there for the world to enjoy?
Nicholas: No, no, no (laughter). That was the school of my writing. I would no more publish my high school essays than that. It would take more work to fix that story than to write a completely new one from scratch.
Christy: What would you say is the message that you want your books to give to the world?
Nicholas: Well, I would say that I want the world to tell others to read them. I could blow a lot of smoke, but it’s just smoke. You can’t write something with that kind of message. Just write the best conceivable novel that you can. That’s why I only write one novel a year instead of three or four.
Melody:Who inspired The Choice?
Nicholas: Travis was inspired by my brother Michael who works and unwinds by spending time with people. His weekends are made up of roller blading, surfing, BBQing… I married at 23 out of college. He married at 32 so our weekends were very different for 10 years. I’d ask him what he did on his weekend and he’s say: we went biking in the Sierra Madres, gambling…and he say ‘So what did you do this weekend’ and I’d say ‘Umm…I’ve got a wife and kids.’ So that’s where Travis came from: Michael. Gabby is a former assistant of mine who’s now a PA [physician's assistant]. She’s someone I grew to adore, and it follows her progress.
?: Does it anger you when the movie is different from your book?
Nicholas: No, I know what I’m getting into. A novel is a story told in words. A movie is a story told in movies. A car chase in a book is a very boring thing, but in a movie can be very exciting. Introspection in a book is wonderful, but you can’t show a character thinking in a movie. They (movies) make changes, and I feel they capture these things, the important things.
Jennifer: Do you like to surf the net? What are some websites you visit regularly?
Nicholas: I surf the net a little bit, very little. The sites I surf would bore you to tears. I’m a high school track coach. I don’t really have the time. I have a wife, five children, my writing, I work-out two hours a day, coach 3 hours a day, plus I just started this new school. I don’t have time.
Gina: You’ve hit the NYT bestseller list again and again. What, in your opinion, causes a novel to gain this kind of success?
Nicholas: There’s a now and a then. Now, it’s my name. I just put my name on a book, and it gets on the list because they know what to expect.
Gina: Would you put your name on my book?
Nicholas: (laughter) That’s what I mean, it’s my name. Then, the publishers sent out tons of advance copies to reviewers and bookstores. I was working in pharmaceuticals at the time and would sell them whenever I entered an office. “Who wants to buy my book?” and (they’d) slap down the money and but it right there. I sold probably 2000 that way, so between that and the publicity, I worked my way there.
AKA Monty: Is there an idea for a book that you’ve set aside3 because you can’t seem to work it out?
Nicholas: Welcome to my world! All the time! People have been asking me for a sequel to A Walk to Remember. I have the story, but I can’t make it blend. Right now, I have three ideas I’m working on. One will be the next one I work on, the other two who knows if anyone will ever see?
Sarah: You’ve endured a lot of tragedy for being so young. Your mother, your father, and your sister all met untimely and early deaths. Many of your bestselling novels end in (or center around) tragedy. How much of your own misfortune do you draw upon for your writing? Do you find it cathartic to write throughout your pain?
Nicholas: No to answer the latter. You never find it a relief or something pleasant to write about personal pain. There are two types of writing: cathartic, which is pleasing for the author to write, and the other which is pleasing to others. I write firmly in the other camp. I do think these tragedies have shaped my novels because when I have to write about bad stuff happening, I’ve been there. I know what a person would be thinking or feeling, so I can write that.
Christy: Have you had the discussion with your wife that Gabby had with Travis about life support. Would you be able to do what he did knowing that you can’t write a happy ending?
Nicholas: Yes, we’ve had that discussion. This story was about Gabby and Travis, so I can write whatever I want. But I would do whatever my wife has asked me to, and I know what that is, but I think that’s moving into the realm of too personal.
?: Do you write different novels at different times?
Nicholas: The first five books were really inspired by family events. So then you try not to do the same five over again. Since then, I’ve been hunting for good original stories.
?: What are you reading now? Or do you not have time to read?
Nicholas: I try to read between 150-200 books a year. Right now I’m reading Exile by Richard North Patterson. Since I left on tour 10 days ago I’ve read Bowerman and the Men of Oregon [by Kenny Moore], 1453 about the fall of Constantinople [by Roger Crowley], The Case Against Homework [by Sarah Bennett and Nancy Kalish] (since I’ve started this new school, I’m reading things about how not to do things and how to do them better), Post-Birthday World by Lionel Shriver, Unbroken [by Tracey Elliot], and I’ve read [John] Grisham’s newest book, Playing for Pizza. I read fiction and non-fiction.
Kelly: Does touring get any easier?
Nicholas: I don’t find it that hard. But today, I’m as ill as a dog. After I hang up, I’m going to lay down and rest because I have to sign 600-700 books tonight. I haven’t eaten anything today, and I’ve got a fever. I think I have food poisoning.
The interview closed with all of us women mothering Nicholas just a bit and telling him to go lay down. His illness may have been a blessing, because otherwise he never would have gotten us all off of the phone so easily.
I’m still a little high from the whole experience. A big thank you from me to Miriam and Kelly from Hachette, Nicholas Sparks for being so gracious, and to my dad. If he hadn’t kept Mia out of my hair for that half hour, I wouldn’t have been able to take this opportunity.
From Kalli: He’s handsome, isn’t he? And seems like kind of a softie. Makes sense that he writes the kinds of novels that he does. Personally, I wasn’t a huge fan of “The Notebook” but I loved “A Walk to Remember.” You know you’ve made it when three of your books are on the list at one time.
So I’m moving to Germany… Love the German language… and I found this German trailer of “Nights in Rodanthe”
Instead of Hogwarts and evil wizards, she writes of Yale Law School and vast right-wing conspiracies, but otherwise, Hillary Rodham Clinton has a lot in common with J.K. Rowling. According to USA Today, the former first lady’s new memoir, ”Living History,” is the fastest-selling nonfiction book since the newspaper started tracking best-sellers a decade ago, with publisher Simon & Schuster estimating sales of 600,000 copies since it was published last Monday. Only Rowling’s ”Harry Potter and the Goblet of Fire” has sold faster during its first week in stores (3 million copies), though Rowling’s ”Harry Potter and the Order of the Phoenix,” out this Saturday, may well surpass both books.
”We certainly knew that this would be the biggest adult book of the year, and it could be one of the biggest of all time,” S&S exec David Rosenthal tells USA Today. The Wall Street Journal estimates that the publisher has already earned back the $8 million it contracted to pay the New York senator. After an initial printing of 1 million copies, the book is already in a second printing of an additional 600,000 copies.
The book’s sales have been strong despite the widespread repetition of its juiciest revelations, in advance excerpts in magazines, reviews in newspapers, and Sen. Clinton’s high-profile TV appearances promoting the book. Already famous — or maybe notorious — are such passages as this one, describing what she says was her belated discovery that her husband really did cheat on her with Monica Lewinsky: ”As his wife, I wanted to wring Bill’s neck. But he was also my President, and I thought that, in spite of everything, Bill led America and the world in a way that I continued to support.” Or this one, regarding the couple’s early courtship: ”One of the first things I noticed about Bill was the shape of his hands. His wrists are narrow and his fingers tapered and deft, like those of a pianist or a surgeon.” The former president accompanied his wife to a book party in New York Monday night, where he joked to the crowd, ”People keep asking to see my hands.”
Mrs. Clinton’s success has even spilled over to David Letterman, to whom she handed a rare victory over Jay Leno with her appearance on CBS’ ”Late Show” on Monday. According to Nielsen, the show scored its highest numbers since Letterman returned from his monthlong sick leave in March. The host asked her, ”Does it bother you that people like me still make fun of your husband?” She answered, ”Well, one of the reasons I came on your show is I didn’t know you did that.” Letterman replied, ”Oh, so you’re not watching the show.”
Katie Couric interviews Hillary Rodham Clinton as the race for the Democratic presidential nomination between her and Barack Obama grows tighter.
Click here if you’d like to read about Senators Obama or McCain.
10 years on, Hillary Clinton reveals anguish over Lewinsky saga
WASHINGTON (AFP) — Hillary Clinton said in an soul baring interview aired Friday she never doubted her husband’s Bill Clinton’s love for her, despite the former president’s infidelity with a White House intern.
Exactly a decade after the Monica Lewinsky affair was first reported, the former first lady candidly revealed how she worked through the inner torment it caused, as she battles Barack Obama for the Democratic White House nomination.
“I really had to dig down deep and think hard about what was right for me, what was right for my family,” Clinton said on the Tyra Banks talk show on Fox television.
“I never doubted Bill’s love for me, ever, and I never doubted my faith and my commitment to our daughter and our extended family.
“But I had to decide what I ought to do, I think it is so important to be able to hear yourself at a moment when it is hard … there are so many times when you really have to listen to yourself.”
Asked by Banks whether she was embarrassed by the public scrutiny of Clinton’s transgression, which eventually led to his impeachment, she said “sure, all of that.”
“The momentary feelings — you are mad, you are really upset, you are disappointed, all of that goes through your mind.
“I have found you really shouldn’t make decisions in the heat of those moments.
Clinton also said she was asked by other women “all the time” about what to do with unfaithful husbands.
“I say you have to be true to yourself, no one story is the same as any other story,” she said.
“‘I don’t know your reality. I cannot possibly substitute my judgment for yours, but what I can tell you is you must be true to yourself, you have to do what is right for you.’”
Clinton’s comments, some of her most open and public on the Lewinsky episode were broadcast 10 years and one day after news of the affair broke on the Drudge Report website, and shocked the world.
A decade on from the scandal which tainted his legacy, former president Clinton is now his wife’s most outspoken campaign surrogate, and a key behind-the-scenes strategist who has recently denounced what he sees as an easy ride being given to Obama in the press.
Despite his impeachment, Clinton left office with approval ratings of around 65 percent, and has since further bolstered his reputation by working for his global foundation, on issues like AIDS relief.
The Lewinsky affair has never been mentioned directly by Clinton’s opponents, though some have indirectly made reference to the hyper-partisanship and political scandals of his two terms in office.
Late last year Obama argued it would be better to elect a president who was untainted with the political fights of the past.
“Because of the history of some of the battles that have taken place back in the ’90s, it is true that she tends to galvanise the other side,” he said on CBS television.
The more than year-long-battle by former president Bill Clinton to stave off attempts by rivals to have him thrown out of office for lying under oath about the affair consumed Washington in a poisonous political storm.
He was acquitted in the Senate after the Republican-led House of Representatives impeached him, but the battle, in which Hillary Clinton played a key role, drained political capital at a key moment of his second term.
Two Little Girls In Blue, your new suspense novel, is the story of twins being kidnapped with only one child returning home. Is this based on a real kidnapping or a combination of cases?
Two Little Girls in Blue is totally fiction. It evolved from all my research on the almost mystical bond between some identical twins.
How did you view the idea of twin telepathy before you wrote this novel and how did it change throughout your writing process?
Psychic phenomena has always been an interest of mine. Then over the years I have read articles about the bonding between twins and have been fascinated by the fact that even separated at birth and raised in totally different environments, there were still remarkable similarities in the way they dressed, the colors they used in their homes. In some cases they even married men with the same first name and called their children the same names. Then when I read about the telepathy between some identical twins, a story started to form in my mind.
How did the song “Two Little Girls in Blue” become part of your story?
I love to use song titles or a line from a song as a title for my books. For some reason a very old song, “Two little girls in blue” always stuck in my mind. When I decided to write the twin story it just seemed appropriate to use the title of this song for my book.
Having reached the pinnacle of success, could you visualize a life of leisure?
No — never. Somebody once said, if you want to be happy for a year, win the lottery. If you want to be happy for a lifetime, love what you do. That’s the way it is for me — I love to spin yarns.
How has your recent re-marriage affected your life?
My marriage to John J. Conheeney in November 1996 greatly expanded my family. In addition to my five children and six grandchildren, there are now his four children and ten grandchildren. Soon there will be an eleventh. John’s daughter, Trish, is adopting a baby from Kazakhstan.
What are your children doing at present?
My daughter, Carol, is the author of nine suspense novels: her newest one is Hitched. My daughter, Marilyn, is a superior court judge, and my daughter, Patty, an executive assistant at the Mercantile Exchange. My son, Warren, a lawyer, is a municipal court judge; my son, David, is president and CEO of Talk Marketing Enterprises, Inc.
You are known as “The Queen of Suspense.” What do you consider the essence of your talent?
Being a storyteller. Isaac Bashevis Singer, who was a dedicated suspense reader, made a simple, but profound observation on receiving the Mystery Writers of America award as Mystery Reader of the Year. He said that a writer must think of himself or herself primarily as a storyteller. Every book or story should figuratively begin with the words ‘once upon a time.’ It is true now as it was in the long ago days of wandering minstrels, that when these words are uttered, the room becomes quiet, everyone draws closer to the fire and the magic begins.
Your books are world-wide bestsellers. What is the secret of your popularity?
Readers identify with my characters. I write about people going about their daily lives, not looking for trouble, who are suddenly plunged into menacing situations.
When did you first realize that you wanted to be a writer?
I knew it as a child. The first thing I wrote was a poem, when I was seven. I still have it. It’s pretty bad, but my mother thought it was beautiful and made me recite it for everyone who came in. I am sure the captive audience was ready to shoot me, but that kind of encouragement nurtures a budding talent. From the time I was seven, I also kept diaries. I can read them now and look back at what I was like at different ages. I still keep diaries; they are a great help to my novels. No one has seen them — they are locked in a trunk.
What early experiences influenced you?
I grew up in the Bronx, where my father was the owner of Higgins Bar and Grille. When I was ten years old, I had a terrible shock. Coming home from early mass one morning, I found a crowd of neighbors outside the house. My father had died in his sleep. My mother went on to raise me and my two brothers alone. When I had said goodnight to my father, I didn’t know it was for the last time. His sudden death jolted me into awareness of the fragility of life. My mother’s example taught me resilience. The characters in my books are resilient and resourceful. When calamity strikes, they carry on.
How did your father’s death influence the course of your life?
Our whole existence changed. My mother tried to get a job, but at that time it was practically impossible for women in late middle-age to return to the job market. She took babysitting jobs and, while I was in high school, I worked as a babysitter and switchboard operator. After graduating from high school, I went to secretarial school, so I could get a job and help with the family finances.
So you had to sacrifice your college education?
Only postpone it. I went to college after my children were grown and I was already an established writer. In 1979, I graduated from Fordham University at Lincoln Center summa cum laude with a B.A. in philosophy. To celebrate, I gave myself a graduation party. The card read: “this invitation is 25 years overdue — help prove it’s not too late.”
What happened in the years before you became a professional writer?
After completing secretarial school, I worked for a couple of years in an advertising agency. Then, one day, a friend — a Pan Am stewardess — spoke seven words that changed my life: “God, it was beastly hot in Calcutta.’ I decided that I, too, wanted to see the world and signed up as a Pan Am stewardess. My run was Europe, Africa and Asia. I was in a revolution in Syria and on the last flight into Czechoslovakia before the Iron Curtain went down. I flew for a year and then got married to Warren Clark, on whom I had a crush since I was 16. He was nine years older than I and a friend of my brother Joe’s.
After I got married, I signed up for a writing course at New York University. There, I got advice from a professor which has always served me well. He said: “Write about what you know. Take a dramatic incident you are familiar with and go with it.” I thought of my experience on the last flight to Czechoslovakia and gave my imagination free rein. “Suppose,” I reflected, “the stewardess finds an 18-year old member of the Czech underground hiding on the plane as it is about to leave.” The story was called “Stowaway.” It took six years and 40 rejection slips before I sold it to Extension magazine in 1956 for $100. I framed that first letter of acceptance.
You were widowed at an early age, with five young children. Did that discourage you from pursuing your goal?
No, on the contrary. To help fill the gap, I decided to concentrate on writing. My children ranged in age from 13 down to five. Because of his heart condition, Warren wasn’t insurable, so I had to work. Just a few hours before he died of a heart attack, I had called a friend who did radio script writing. She had often asked me to join her company in writing for radio and I began writing radio shows. But I knew that wasn’t enough. I wanted to write books.
How did you find time to write books, while raising five children and holding a job?
When my children were young, I used to get up at five and write at the kitchen table until seven, when I had to get them ready for school. For me, writing is a need. It’s the degree of yearning that separates the real writer from the “would-be’s.” Those who say “I’ll write when I have time, when the kids are grown up or when I have a quiet place to work,” will probably never do it.
What was your first book?
A biographical novel about George Washington, Aspire to the Heavens, based on a radio series I was then writing called Portrait of a Patriot, vignettes about presidents. It was a commercial disaster and remaindered as it came off the press. But it showed that I could write a book and get it published.
What made you turn to the field of mystery and suspense?
I decided to write a book that would, hopefully, outsell Aspire to the Heavens. One of the best clues about what to write is what one likes to read. I decided to see if I could write a suspense novel. It was like a prospector stumbling on a vein of gold. I wrote Where Are The Children?, my first bestseller and a turning point in my life and career.
What is the basis of your first bestseller, Where Are the Children?
In New York, there was a sensational case, in which a beautiful young mother was on trial for murdering her two small children. I didn’t write about that case, but asked myself the question: ‘suppose your children disappear and you are accused of killing them — and then it happens again.’ Where Are the Children? is about a woman whose past holds a terrible secret. Nancy Harmon had been found guilty of murdering her two children and only released from prison on a legal technicality. She abandons her old life, changes her appearance and leaves San Francisco, to seek tranquillity on Cape Cod. Now she has married again, has two more lovely children and a life filled with happiness…until the morning when she looks for her children, finds only a tattered mitten and knows that the nightmare is beginning again. The theme of a missing child struck a personal chord in me. Once, when we moved to a new home, my youngest daughter Patty was briefly missing. That’s when I experienced the panic any mother feels under these circumstances.
What stimulated you to write A Stranger Is Watching?
The book brings out the issue of capital punishment, from the viewpoints of a victim and an objective observer. It also shows how life and death can hinge on tiny twists of fate. Steve Peterson’s wife, Nina, has been murdered by a man who had changed her flat tire. Two years later, an innocent 19-year old boy is about to be executed for the crime. Steve, an advocate of capital punishment, is involved with Sharon Martin, an opponent of the death sentence. Their different views on this issue, however, are an obstacle to their relationship. Then, one day, Sharon and Neil, Steve’s six-year-old son, are abducted by the psychopath who had murdered Nina. They are held in a room in the bowels of Grand Central station, with a bomb rigged to the door.
The Cradle Will Fall deals with women victimized by a ruthless doctor. Is medicine a subject of particular interest to you?
Yes. Particularly the subject covered in this book — medical research in fertility. The so-called ‘test-tube’ baby had just been born in England and there were many arguments about the legal and ethical aspects of in-vitro fertilization. One article predicted that there would soon be surrogate mothers and host mothers. I thought, ‘suppose a brilliant doctor is experimenting with his patients’ lives in his desire to make a breakthrough’ — and I was on my way with the book.
In The Cradle Will Fall, Dr. Edgar Highley, a highly respected gynecologist and fertility specialist, runs an expensive clinic in a New Jersey hospital, where he is considered to achieve ‘miracle cures’ for infertile women. Katie DeMaio, a young prosecutor and widow of a judge, comes to the hospital after a minor car accident. That night, from her window, she sees a man load a woman’s body into the trunk of a car. Katie, who is heavily sedated, thinks she is having a nightmare. Released the next day, she starts work on a suicide case that looks more like murder. While initial evidence points elsewhere, the medical examiner establishes a trail leading to Dr. Highley. He suspects that the famous doctor’s work was more than controversial — that it was deadly. Before he can tell Katie, she has left the office for the weekend and an appointment for surgery with Dr. Highley, who had seen her at the window on that fateful night. At the time I wrote this novel, one of my daughters was an assistant prosecutor. She was the source of in-house advice about the legal aspects of this novel.
A Cinderella story gone wrong is the theme of A Cry in the Night. What inspired this novel?
I was thinking about the fact that in our society so many single mothers are struggling to raise children alone and most of them would love to meet ‘Prince Charming.’
Jenny MacPartland is a beautiful young divorcee, working in a New York art gallery and struggling to support her two little girls. There, she meets Erich Krueger, a newly-discovered Midwest artist, who has come into fame and fortune. Married within a month, Jenny is sure she will grow to love living on Erich Krueger’s Minnesota farm, until lonely days and eerie nights strain her nerves to the breaking point and a chain of terrifying events threatens her marriage, her children and her life.
The book was made into a television film, starring my daughter, actress-writer Carol Higgins Clark, released in the U.S. in 1992.
Stillwatch is set in Washington. What drew you to this milieu?
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The 1984 election was coming up. I anticipated the Democrats ‘talking’ a woman vice-president and decided to beat them to it. You can imagine my glee when, just as the book was coming out, Walter Mondale chose Geraldine Ferraro as his running mate.
In this novel, there are two women protagonists. Pat Traymore comes to Washington to produce a television program on Senator Abigail Jennings, about to be appointed vice-president. Pat’s task is to ‘humanize’ the Senator — to shed light on aspects of her life unknown to the public. As Pat delves into Abigail’s past, she learns of facts that could destroy Abigail, just as she is on the verge of attaining her goal. Pat has also come to Washington for unfinished business of her own — to uncover secrets of her past. She moves back into her childhood home, the scene of a terrible crime never explained. Pat does not realize that her quest may cost her life.
In Stillwatch, I deal with two women’s relationship to their past — one determined to learn the truth at all costs — another, for whom emergence of the truth will mean the end of her dreams. In creating the setting, I was aided in part by my friend, Francis Humphrey Howard, sister of the late Senator Hubert Humphrey, who introduced me to Washington life.
Weep No More, My Lady takes place in a luxurious spa. Why did you choose this setting for a suspense novel?
It used to be only the rich could afford to go to spas. Today, with the wide-spread interest in health and beauty, there are affordable spas all over the country. An intriguing thought crossed my mind — ‘suppose a killer in a wet suit is stalking the grounds of one of these spas.’
The plot in Weep No More, My Lady revolves around the mysterious death of stage and screen star Leila LaSalle. Was her fall from her penthouse terrace suicide or murder? This is the question plaguing her sister, beautiful Elizabeth Lange. Min, an old friend of Leila’s, is the owner of luxurious Cypress Point Spa. She invites Elizabeth to the spa, where she encounters a cast of characters each of whom had a motive for killing her sister — and one who is now trying to murder her.
Alvirah, the cleaning woman who has won the $40 million dollar lottery, and her husband Willy, a plumber, made their debut in this novel. Alvirah came to Cypress Point Spa not only to relax and enjoy herself, but to write a gossip column for the New York Globe. The killer stalking Elizabeth, the main protagonist, decides to get Alvirah out of the way. His scheme fails, though, and she provides important clues to his identity.
Your novel, While My Pretty One Sleeps, is set in the world of high fashion. How did you get such intimate knowledge of the fashion world?
I grew up hearing about the world of fashion from my mother, who had been the bridal buyer at B. Altman’s. I also wrote a syndicated radio show, ‘Women Today,’ for which I regularly interviewed designers and fashion editors and attended fashion events. It gave me the chance to see both the glamour and the agony of the fashion industry.
Ethel Lambston, prominent gossip writer, is about to rock the fashion industry with an expose revealing the secrets of top fashion designers. The story opens with Ethel’s killer driving, in a blinding snowstorm, to a state park in Rockland County, N.Y., to bury Ethel’s body. The first to notice Ethel’s disappearance is Neeve Kearney, beautiful young owner of an exclusive Madison Avenue boutique, where Ethel bought all her clothes. She lives with her father, Myles Kearney. A retired police commissioner, he has never forgiven himself because his wife was murdered after he ignored a threat to her life. Neeve becomes deeply involved in the investigation of Ethel’s murder. She also becomes a target for the killer.
In While My Pretty One Sleeps, I have included themes based on my view of family relations. I created a strong father-daughter relationship because I am tired of books about parents and children at each other’s throats. I got along well with my parents and I get along fine with my children. The book also has a strong love story reflecting my belief that some people are meant for each other.
The Anastasia Syndrome & Other Stories, a novella and short stories, covers such themes as parapsychology and supernatural phenomena. Have you delved into these subjects?
Yes. I took a course in parapsychology at New York’s New School of Social Research, during which I observed people being regressed to former lifetimes. I don’t believe in reincarnation, but I am fascinated by its dramatic possibilities.
The novella, The Anastasia Syndrome, was inspired by the true story of Anna Anderson, the woman who claimed to be the Grand Duchess Anastasia — a claim debated and tried in court for over 50 years which remains, to this day, an enigma. In The Anastasia Syndrome, Judith Chase, a prominent historical writer, is living in London and becoming traumatized by early childhood memories of bombing raids during World War II, in which she was orphaned. She goes to a prominent psychiatrist for help and becomes the victim of his experiments in regression. She is regressed not only to her childhood tragedy, but to 1660, the era of the Civil War in England. In this regression process, she absorbs the persona of murderous Lady Margaret Carew, a woman with a mission of vengeance. In her persona of Lady Carew, Judith becomes the subject of a massive hunt by Scotland Yard.
The four stories in The Anastasia Syndrome & Other Stories deal with such themes as obsession and supernatural phenomena. Obsessive love is the theme of Terror Stalks the Class Reunion. A supernatural phenomenon occurs in Double Vision. Lucky Day begins with a premonition of imminent danger. The Lost Angel is a Christmas story, in which a mother’s intuition becomes the overpowering force in the search for a lost child. The book reflects an intense personal interest on my part in such phenomena as sixth sense and thought transference.
What prompted you to choose the world of personal ads as a background for Loves Music, Loves to Dance?
People in all walks of life are turning to personal ads to find romance or companionship. Personal ads are risky, but they are big business in America. The scary aspect is that you are taking on faith what a stranger tells you — his name, his job, his marital status, his background. Women can fall prey to sexual harassment, rape, even murder.
I attended a lecture by an FBI agent when I was Chairman of the International Crime Congress in 1987, who was talking about a serial killer who had enticed his victims through personal ads. The words ‘loves music, loves to dance’ walked through my mind and the seed for the book was planted. The speaker that day was Robert Ressler, Director of Behavioral Forensic Sciences, who has since retired from the FBI. As the FBI’s top Criminologist and Serial Murder and Violent Crime Expert, Robert Ressler had conducted original research in violent criminal behavior and interviewed some of the most notorious criminals, such as David Berkowitz, the ‘Son of Sam Killer;’ Ted Bundy, killer of over 35 women; Richard T. Chase, the ‘Vampire Killer;’ John Wayne Gacy, Chicago killer of 33 boys; and Charles Manson. Robert Ressler acted as my consultant on Loves Music, Loves to Dance.
Loves Music, Loves to Dance revolves around a serial killer who uses personal ads to entice his victims. Erin Kelly, a talented young jewelry designer and her best friend, Darcy Scott, a decorator, have been dating men through personal ads. They were helping a friend, a television producer, to research a documentary on the kinds of people who place and answer personal ads and their experiences. Darcy had persuaded the reluctant Erin to participate. One day, Erin is missing. Soon after, her body is found on an abandoned Manhattan pier. On one foot is her own shoe; on the other, a high-heeled dancing slipper. Guilt-stricken over Erin’s death, Darcy decides to meet the men Erin dated, to find her killer. What Darcy does not realize, what she cannot know until it is too late, is that she has been targeted as the killer’s next victim.
All Around the Town deals with a young woman with multiple personalities, accused of murder. How did you get the idea for this book?
It emanated from the request for an autograph. My daughter Carol’s friend came to visit, an art therapist from the National Center for Treatment of Dissociative Disorders in Denver, specializing in the treatment of multiple personality disorder. She wanted me to sign a book for one of her patients. When I asked for the name, she hesitated and said: ‘Now which one of her personalities reads your books?’ This aroused my interest and led to my writing this book.
Laurie Kenyon, the main protagonist in All Around the Town, a 21-year old college senior, is accused of murdering her English professor, Allan Grant. When he is found stabbed to death, her fingerprints are everywhere — on the door, on the curtain, on the knife. Arraigned on a murder charge, Laurie has no memory of the crime. Traumatized by abuse she suffered after she was kidnapped at the age of four and held for two years, she has developed multiple personalities. Laurie, the host personality, does not know that others co-exist with her, nor is she aware that one of her alternates, Leona, has been writing Allan Grant crazed love letters and secretly entering his home.
Bic Hawkins, Laurie’s abductor, an unsavory drifter, had been scratching out a living singing in taverns and as a fundamentalist preacher. Now he has become a celebrated television evangelist. Before releasing her, Bic had threatened six-year old Laurie with death if she ever talked about what he had done to her and, terrified, she erased the experience from her mind.
Attorney Sarah Kenyon has quit her job as assistant prosecutor to defend her younger sister. Her strategy is to prove that Laurie’s childhood trauma was the direct cause of Allan Grant’s murder. Sarah brings in Dr. Justin Donnelly, a specialist in the treatment of multiple personalities, to unlock the unbearable memories she has been suppressing. As her multiple personalities emerge in therapy and the date for her trial approaches, her fate hangs on the question: if one of her alternate personalities perpetrated Allan Grant’s murder, is she to be held accountable?
What triggered off your interest in in-vitro fertilization and human cloning — themes in your novel, I’ll Be Seeing You?
The first test-tube baby was born in England in the 70s. This stimulated my interest in the issue of in-vitro fertilization and led to my writing the novel, The Cradle Will Fall, published in 1980.
The ‘what if’ of in-vitro fertilization and human cloning is a theme in I’ll Be Seeing You. Published in hardcover in 1993, the scenario of the attempt to clone identical twins preceded a medical breakthrough in human cloning — the Hall-Stillman experiment at George Washington University — which aroused world-wide controversy.
In I’ll Be Seeing You, Meghan Collins, a television news reporter, is covering a story in the emergency room of a large metropolitan hospital when an unidentified stabbing victim is brought in. Attempts to revive her fail. When Meghan looks at the dead girl’s face, she recoils in horror — she is looking at a mirror image of her own. As she attempts to learn the identity of the dead girl, her search becomes linked to a story she is doing at the Manning Clinic.
The Manning Clinic, an assisted reproduction facility, has a remarkably high success rate in helping childless women conceive through in-vitro fertilization. Now, they have ventured into cloning of embryos and a woman is about to deliver the identical twin of her three-year old son. At first, the director, Dr. George Manning, welcomes the idea of television coverage, but bars Meghan when Dr. Helene Petrovic, embryologist in charge of the laboratory, abruptly quits. He refuses Meghan further access to the clinic. That evening, Helene Petrovic’s body is found — she has been shot to death. Then, a scandal erupts at the Manning Clinic.
Petrovic is linked to Meghan’s father, Edwin Collins, whose executive search firm had placed her in the lab. For nearly a year, Collins had been missing and presumed dead. Now, suspicion arises about his disappearance. Meghan is sure that Petrovic’s death is the key to learning the truth about her father, the dead girl and the Manning Clinic.
Remember Me, a psychological thriller, is set on Cape Cod. What motivated you to choose this locale?
The idea originated twenty years ago, when I visited a bookstore on the Cape, where I have a home, and came across a book on its legends and history. At that time, the idea for a novel titled ‘Remember House’ first took root in my mind. It became Remember Me, in which the main character, Menley, goes to ‘Remember House.’ I realized that the story of the early settlers, their lifestyles and their homes, would provide a rich historical background for a suspense story in which today and yesterday become inexorably linked.
Menley, heroine of Remember Me, suffers from post-traumatic stress syndrome. What made you use this as a theme in your novel?
The medical profession has only recently recognized that a traumatic event can be re-experienced if something triggers off the memory of a contributing factor to the trauma — earthquake victims may panic if a subway train rumbles underneath; a woman who has been attacked in an elevator may find it impossible to enter an elevator again.
In Remember Me, Menley drives across an unguarded railroad crossing and the train hits the back of the car, killing her little boy. The sight of the railroad crossing, the sound of a train whistle, the sound of screaming, are enough to make her re-live that awful moment with the same desperate anxiety and panic she experienced at the time. Menley has never stopped blaming herself for the death of her two-year old son Bobby, though she was blameless. In the aftermath, as Menley suffers from post-traumatic stress syndrome, her marriage to Adam, a high-profile criminal lawyer, starts to fall apart. The birth of their daughter, Hannah, revitalizes their relationship.
Seeking tranquillity, Menley and Adam rent ‘Remember House’ on Cape Cod, where strange things begin to happen. Incidents occur which make Menley relive the horror of the accident and make Adam fear for Hannah’s safety. Menley and Adam become involved with Scott Covey, a strikingly handsome, but impecunious young man, who is suspected of murder when his wealthy young bride of only three months drowns in a storm. Sympathetic to his plight, Menley persuades her husband to take on his case.
Step by step, they are drawn into a dark and threatening web of events that disrupt this seemingly peaceful town. Remember Me builds to a climax, as Menley faces a mounting threat to her sanity — and to her life.
When you first introduced Alvirah Meehan as a character in Weep No More, My Lady, did you plan to make her and her husband Willy ongoing characters in your work?
No — on the contrary. I intended to kill off Alvirah in Weep No More, My Lady. My daughter, suspense writer Carol Higgins Clark, prevailed on me to keep her alive. Alvirah and Willy are now the protagonists of a series, the first of which was The Lottery Winner: Alvirah & Willy Stories.
What kind of people are Alvirah and Willy?
They had worked all their lives — she as a cleaning woman and he as a plumber. Winning $40 million in the New York State lottery released Alvirah’s sense of adventure to pursue a new career as a New York Globe columnist and amateur sleuth, often to the dismay of not only criminals, but also the police. But it never changed Alvirah and Willy’s innate wisdom about what really matters in life.
Your suspense novel, Let Me Call You Sweetheart, has an unusual twist — a plot revolving around plastic surgery. What inspired this theme?
The idea of using plastic surgery as a theme emanated from a conversation with my long-time editor, Michael Korda. He raised the question ‘what if a plastic surgeon keeps giving the exact same face to a number of women?’ I found the idea intriguing.
What is the plot of Let Me Call You Sweetheart?
Kerry McGrath, a young assistant prosecutor, learns that her ten-year-old daughter, Robin, has been injured in a car accident while out with her father, Kerry’s ex-husband Bob Kinellen. Robin’s face has been cut by flying glass and she has to be taken to the hospital. When Kerry arrives there, Robin is in surgery with the prominent plastic surgeon, Dr. Charles Smith.
A week later, Kerry is in Dr. Smith’s office with Robin, to have her stitches removed. There, Kerry sees a young woman, who appears to be in her mid-twenties, a cloud of dark hair framing her face. ‘I know you,’ she thought. ‘But from where? That face — I have seen her before.’ The woman’s name, she finds out, is Barbara Tompkins, a name which means nothing to her. On her next visit to Dr. Smith’s office, Kerry sees another woman with the same face. Her name is Pamela Worth — a name also unknown to her.
Kerry cannot get the face out of her mind and starts having nightmares. In the first, she is in the doctor’s waiting room, and sees a young woman lying on the floor, a knotted cord twisted around her neck. In the next, sweetheart roses are scattered around her body. Now Kerry knew. The women resembled Suzanne Reardon, the victim in the ‘Sweetheart Murder Case.’
Nearly eleven years ago, when Kerry McGrath had just begun work in the county prosecutor’s office, Suzanne Reardon had been murdered. Her husband had been convicted of the murder. Was there a connection between the crime and the look-alikes of the victim?
Kerry decides to probe into the ‘Sweetheart Murder Case,’ knowing that it may jeopardize her career, but unaware that there is more at stake — her life and that of her daughter, Robin. The story builds to a climax as the murderer targets Kerry and Robin for his next strike.
You wrote a suspense novel with a Christmas theme, Silent Night. What is it about?
Catherine Dornan has come to New York with her two sons, ten-year old Michael and seven-year old Brian, to be near Tom, her husband, who is lying critically ill in the Sloan Kettering Cancer Center. It is Christmas Eve and they are on Fifth Avenue, near Rockefeller Center. Later on, they plan to go to the hospital to give Tom the St. Christopher’s medal which saved her father’s life in World War II by deflecting a bullet — Catherine’s mother and little Brian firmly believe that it will make him well. Suddenly, Catherine realizes that her wallet with the St. Christopher’s medal is missing and that Brian has disappeared.
Cally Hunter, a woman from the other side of the tracks, is also on Fifth Avenue on Christmas Eve, looking for a man who sells dolls on the street, so she can buy one cheaply for her four-year old daughter, Gigi. Cally had just served a 15-month prison sentence for aiding her brother, a cop killer. When Cally sees Catherine’s wallet drop to the sidewalk, she grabs it and makes off. Brian has seen what happened and knows he must retrieve the St. Christopher’s medal. He follows Cally into the subway, all the way into her dilapidated building in lower Manhattan. As he hovers around Cally’s apartment door, a man comes out and yanks him in. The man is Jimmy Siddons, Cally’s brother, who has escaped from prison and come to get money from Cally. Jimmy Siddons abducts Brian, as traveling with a little boy at Christmas is the ideal camouflage for his planned escape to Canada in a stolen car. The story reaches its climax when Jimmy realizes he is being followed and Brian knows that Jimmy is about to kill him. Brian decides to take action.
He knows he has a mission to fulfill — to bring the St. Christopher Medal to his father.
Describe the plot of Moonlight Becomes You.
Maggie Holloway, a young photographer, becomes the target of a killer with a twisted mind when she discovers a link between the murder of her stepmother, Nuala Moore, and several deaths at Latham Manor, a magnificent Newport mansion, now a residence for wealthy retirees. She has a chance encounter with her stepmother, Nuala Moore, at a cocktail party in Manhattan — a family reunion for the Moore clan of Newport. Nuala, a painter, had brightened her childhood, but they lost touch after her divorce from her father. When Nuala invites Maggie to visit her in Newport, she readily accepts. Nuala plans a dinner for a group of friends to welcome her, but when Maggie arrives, she finds the house ransacked and Nuala dead.
Nuala had planned to sell her house and move into Latham Manor, but changed her mind at the last moment. Maggie learns that just the day before she died, Nuala had changed her will, leaving the house and everything she owned to her. Nuala’s only request was that Maggie visit her friend Greta Shipley at Latham Manor as often as possible. In carrying out Nuala’s wish, Maggie gets to know the other residents and learns that several women there had died suddenly.
When Maggie accompanies Greta Shipley to the cemetery to visit Nuala’s grave and those of her other friends, she notices something odd. She decides to return and take photographs. When she goes back with the pictures, she makes a strange discovery, not only about Nuala’s grave, but also the graves of four other women who recently died at Latham Manor. Soon after, Greta Shipley herself dies and Maggie begins her own investigation.
As Maggie begins to unravel the thread linking Nuala’s murder to the deaths of the women at Latham Manor, she comes closer and closer to uncovering the identity of a killer with his own strange signature. What she does not know is that she is now the killer’s target and that each clue brings her closer to an unimaginable fate.
My Gal Sunday: Henry and Sunday Stories, revolves around Henry Britland IV, a former president of the United States, and his bride, Congresswoman Sandra O’Brien. Tell us about Henry and Sunday.
Henry is young, rich and handsome, the scion of a wealthy and influential family. Sandra, known as Sunday, is the daughter of a New Jersey motorman. I derived the idea for these characters from my favorite radio series as a child, the once wildly popular soap opera, ‘Our Gal Sunday.’
What are the stories about?
The four stories in My Gal Sunday deal with the indictment of Henry’s close friend and former Secretary of State for the murder of his mistress, the kidnapping of Sunday, the mysterious disappearance from the Britland’s yacht of a Latin American Prime Minister and a Christmas story about a little boy who has been abducted and is reunited with his family by Henry and Sunday.
Some of the characters in My Gal Sunday are portrayed tongue-in-cheek. Isn’t that unusual in your writing?
In my novels, I set out to scare people. Here, it is suspense with a touch of whimsy.
How did you acquire the knowledge of the presidential lifestyle and Secret Service protocol, reflected in these stories?
I have been a guest at the Bush and Clinton White House and also spent time in Washington doing research on protection of former presidents by the Secret Service.
Pretend You Don’t See Her revolves around a young woman who has to go into the federal witness protection program after witnessing a murder.
Lacey Farrell, a real estate agent in the New York firm of Parker & Parker, is asked by Isabelle Waring to handle the sale of her daughter’s apartment, Heather Landi, a young singer and actress who had been killed in a car accident on her way back from a weekend of skiing in Vermont. Isabelle never believed that Heather’s death was an accident and had moved into her apartment, obsessively looking for clues to her death. Heather’s father, however, famed restaurateur Jimmy Landi, does not share her doubts. He insists that Isabelle, his former wife, accept their daughter’s death and sell the apartment. Lacey takes a prospective buyer to see it — Curtis Caldwell, a lawyer from a prestigious law firm. He makes an immediate offer. It is with horror that Lacey encounters him at the apartment later that day and realizes that he is Isabelle’s killer.
Isabelle had made a dying wish to Lacey — to take a sheaf of papers to Heather’s father. They were Heather’s journal and, she believed, held the key to her death. To keep her word, Lacey does not give the papers to the police and before handing them to Jimmy Landi, makes a copy for herself. While Lacey is in trouble with the police for removing evidence from the crime scene, her description of the killer enables her to identify him — Sandy Savarano, a professional hitman, who had eluded jail by staging his own death some years ago. Savarano now receives orders to silence Lacey, who knows more about Isabelle’s and Heather’s deaths than would allow her to live.
In You Belong To Me, Regina Clausen, a prominent investment banker, falls prey to a serial killer on a luxury cruise. Could this happen in real life?
Women traveling alone are receptive to romance, hoping they’ll meet a ‘special someone’ — even successful, sophisticated women can be lured into dangerous, sometimes fatal relationships.
During a call-in radio program on the topic of vanished women, a married woman calls under an alias, saying she had a shipboard romance which might shed light on the case of Regina Clausen. Why did you use a call-in show as a major plot element?
People reveal their most intimate feelings and experiences on TV and radio shows. And, as in this novel, their revelations sometimes lead to frightening consequences.
Stephen King: I’m great in lots of ways. I’m still getting what they call chronic pain in the leg and the hip, but I’m getting a lot of motion back… When I drove up here when you get out, you’re totally stiff. It’s like my body is 52 years old except for my hip where it’s about 85 now. I never think anymore ‘I’m going to New York,’ its like ‘I’m taking my leg to New York.’ But I’ve been off crutches for two or three weeks now…
TA: Do you need to have more surgery and so on?
SK: The doctor just did some more X-rays. They always get around to blaming you. ‘All that metal,’ he says ‘wouldn’t bother you so much if you were heavier, if you had fat over that part of your body…’ So it’s my fault for not gaining weight…
TA: I really enjoyed your memoir [On Writing], did you find it hard to write?
SK: It was a lot harder to write than I thought it would be. For years I’ve had people saying to me how do you do this or that. And so I thought I’ll write a book and I won’t have to answer these same questions over and over anymore. I got about 150 pages in and then what I wanted to say kind of drifted away from me, and I stopped and then I was about ready to go back to it when I had the accident.
TA: How did it compare to writing fiction?
SK: One of the things that happened half way through the writing book was that there was a novel I really wanted to write. I mean its like sex in a way: you’d rather do it than write about it. But I hope the book will be valuable. I sort of hope it will be a renegade primer. I don’t think teachers will get away with assigning it to 13 year olds, but I hope the 13 year olds will find it on their own.
TA: What made you want to include the autbiographical elements of the book? SK: I wanted to address that central question: why do you write the awful things that you write? and there’s no direct way to answer that question, in a way its like saying ‘why do you like broccoli?’ You can’t explain that, its wired into your system, it’s genetic. But I think there are a set of experiences that turn a potential writer into a working writer, and then there are places in your life were you start to recognise what you want to do.
TA: Was it a therapeutic thing to do?
SK: I wasn’t trying to clear things up with this book. I’m not a big fan of psychoanalysis: I think if you have mental problems what you need are good pills. But I do think that if you have thinks that bother you, things that are unresolved, the more that you talk about them, write about them, the less serious they become. At least that’s how I see my work in retrospect. [Laughs] This was not an attenmpt to write about my life, but in a way I can’t separate, of course, the life from the work. I called the first section of the book CV because I wanted to say, here are my references, ‘here’s where I’ve been. This is how I got here.’
TA: What else have you been working on?
SK: I’ve been finishing a novel called Dreamcatcher, and I’m working on a book with Peter Straub called Talisman II
TA: How does that colaboration work?
SK: It’s like playing tennis, we drew the court, a synopsis, and now we just bat this thing back to each other on e-mail
TA: Whose voice dominates?
SK: At the moment to me the voice that this book has seems more Peter Straub, so I’m trying to wrestle it back a bit…
TA: You seem at pains to try new things. Before your accident you were talking about giving up writing all together. Is that still a possibility?
SK: Well, I’m like a drug addict, I’m always saying I’m going to stop, and then I don’t, what I’ve said consistently is that I hope I know when to stop: when it starts to get repetitive. And I do know that I’m a lot closer to the end than I am to the beginning. I have these Dark Tower books that I’d like to finish, but then things come along and you get interested in them.
TA: What kind of things?
SK: There’s this rock and roll guy, John Mellenkamp, he got in touch with me last November and said ‘I have an idea for a musical, a play,’ so he came over to the house, tuned my guitar for me – and it never sounded better – and he told me this story, a ghost story, sounded great. So then we kind of worked something out. So now he’s sent me a CD of a demo he’d done. So I got charged up by that. I’ve never written for music… And if you want ghosts I guess I’m the “go to” guy… I don’t have a problem with that, but I am interested in trying new things. For a long time I’ve thought about the stage. Misery, for example, is almost a play in a book.
TA: Are you still finding time to play your own music?
SK: Well The Remainders are going to go out this fall and play with Roger McGuinn of The Byrds. Very odd. So no, I’m not playing enough really.
TA: Did you dream of being a rock star as a kid?
SK: I was never really good enough. I played keyboards in a group, and I played a lot of coffee house guitar, you know in that period when Donovan was into his denim look. And then I didn’t play for a long time. Then we got the band together for the American Booksellers convention in 93, and after a while we got pretty good, to the extent that drunks wouldn’t throw things at us. Probably.
TA: What’s your repertoire?
SK: We do American garage music from the sixties; ‘Louie, louie’. They get me to do things like ‘Last Kiss’ a lot of Bo Diddely stuff…
TA: Reading your book, it seems that there was never a doubt you’d become a storyteller. It feels very much like a writer’s childhood.
SK: I was talking about this with my daughter in law recently. We once gave my son a sax, because he had an idea he wanted to be in the E Street Band, but he never really wanted to play. You’ve got to be hungry for it. My mother said that when she was pregnant with me she’d go out to the road and take the tar up, and chew the tar, because there was something in that tar, that, she, I, needed. It’s like a craving. We like to think about how smart we are. But I think talent as a writer is hard-wired in, it’s all there, at least the basic elements of it. You can’t change it any more than you can choose whether to be right handed or left handed.
TA: Your dad wrote stories, do you think some of your talent was inherited?
SK: I never saw any of my dad’s stories. My mother said he had piles and piles of manuscripts. He was in the merchant marine before that. And he used to send these things to magazines like Argosy, and True. Magazines that don’t really have an equivalent now, with, like, pictures on the front of guys fighting off grizzly bears with knives. But I never knew that till later… Both of my sons write fiction. My wife’s published five novels, and I’ve done 35 or 36. It’s a gene, like the colour of your eyes…’
TA: Do you think in that sense genetics has altered our ideas of fate, suggested our lives are predetermined?
SK: I don’t know. To a degree. But still there are all sorts of possible variations. Our daughter, for example, is in Divinity School.
TA: What kind of stuff do your sons write?
SK: My younger son is on the fiction program at Columbia grad school. He writes stuff somewhere between bret Easton Ellis and Laverne and Shirley, I guess. Funny, cockeyed stuff. Like that guy T. Coraghessan Boyle… My elder son does a lot of different stuff. Crazy stuff, but great..
TA: Did you encourage or dissaude them from writing?
SK: I wouldn’t want to be blocking their sun, so to speak, but writing is a great job, no heavy lifting, though the pay for most writers isn’t that great, but still, hey, its great, its fine…
TA: You seemed incredibly driven from the time you started out… Were there ever periods of doubt, when you thought it might not happen?
SK: I had a period where I thought I might not be good enough to publish. I started to sell short fiction to men’s magazines while I was in college. I got married six or seven months after graduating, and for two years I sold maybe six stories a year, and I had the money I was making teaching, too, and it was a decent income. And then I sort of got out of the Zone. And for a year or so, I couldn’t sell anything, and I was drinking a lot, wasn’t drugging, couldn’t afford it, and I was writing mostly shit, and then Carrie came along and I was OK again. But during that one year, I just thought I’m going to be a high school teacher, and nothing’s ever going to happen to me.
TA: Can you remember the point where the drinking became a problem?
SK: Well I always drank, from when it was legal for me to drink. And there was never a time for me when the goal wasn’t to get as hammered as I could possibly afford to. I never understood social drinking, that’s always seemed to me like kissing your sister. To this day I can’t imagine why anyone wants to be a social drinker.
TA: There seemed to be a lot of anger in you in your teenage years. Was the drinking a symptom of that?
SK: Not really. I had a very innocent childhood. Very bucolic. I grew up in a small town. Innocence would describe it. No drugs, no needles, no gang fights. It was a big deal for us if our parents were out and we could play spin the bottle with the girls. Put a few records on. The Sting Rays would play Saturday nights at the Grange Hall.
TA: So where did the darkness of some thing like Rage come from?
SK: I was 18 when I wrote that. I was coming out of the high school experience. I think anger is a key or governing emotion in boys from say 14 to 18. A lot of rage, a lot of hormones. The only reason I think that in England there haven’t been Eric Harrises and Dylan Kliebolds, you know the kids who cleaned up Columbine High is that English kids don’t have access to guns. It’s interesting if you go back to a high school reunion, and this happened to me. There were women at this reunion who, you know, as a 15 or 16 year old girls I felt like throwing myself at their feet yelling about their beauty or something. And they will talk about those times now and say that they felt ugly and they didn’t have any friends and everyone was talking behind their backs.
TA: If only you’d known then…
SK [Laughs]: Exactly. But everyone has that rage, has that insecurity. Rage allows people to find some catharsis
TA: It sounds like you were sort of on the edge of things at school. Both an insider and an outsider…
SK: That’s exactly right. I was in enough to get along with people. I was never socially inarticulate. Not a loner. And that saved my life, saved my sanity. That and the writing. But to this day I distrust anybody who thought school was a good time. ANYBODY. You can be happy at 8 or even at 28. But if you say you were happy at 16, I’d say you were a — liar, or you were abnormal, disturbed…
TA: What was the motivation behind you keeping a scrapbook on Charlie Starkweather, the serial killer?
SK: Well, it was never like ‘Yeah go Charlie, kill some more.’ It was more like ‘Charlie: if I ever see anyone like you, I’ll be able to get the hell away.’ And I do think that the very first time I saw a picture of him, I knew I was looking at the future. His eyes were a double zero. There was just nothing there. He was like an outrider of What America might become.
TA: Do you think that impulse – to keep the scrapbook – was a similar one to that which prompted you to write?
SK: The writing was an outlet certainly. I was always fascinated by tales of violence and suspense and horror. Now maybe that’s because I have a particular double x chromosome, or something, and maybe if it wasn’t for the writing I would be an extremely dangerous person. Certainly I’ve written enough really nasty stuff to make that a possiblity. But I’ve tried to be a good citizen, in the sense that I had an ability to talk about these things, and as long as you can keep talking everything will be OK…
TA: Were you ever consciously writing visions of the American future?
SK: No it was always more about situational stuff. Take Rage, it was like what happens if you take a kid, give him a gun, and put him in the class. And then you think well what kind of a kid would do that. And you think well, fucked up, probably, and brilliant, probably. and then you work the whole thing out. The book was the Stockholm Syndrome before the Stockholm Syndrome. These kids all start to swing over to his side. The supposition of the book is that kids at 16 are crazy. Essentially crazy. And I think they are…
TA: Was Lord of the Flies a big influence?
SK: It was. It had a strong influence..
TA: To what extent did you feel you inhabited a character like Charlie Decker in Rage. Or did he inhabit you?
SK: Was Charlie Decker me? Well yes of course in that all the characters are me. The women are me in skirts I guess. But there’s another element involved. It’s that element of inspiration which lifts you past the point where the characters are just you, where you do achieve something almost transcendental and the people are really people in the story. They walk off. That happened the first time in Rage.
TA: Can you create the conditions for that imaginative leap to happen. Can you predict it?
SK: It usually takes you by surprise. When I sat down to work on Dreamcatcher I was in terrible pain, taking all these heavy drugs by the jarful, and I was on crutches, a brace on my leg, and all I knew was when I went to bed at night, I would lie there and I’d think of this guy on a hunter stand, in a tree, like a shooter’s platform, where you go when you’ve been hurt sometimes. And I thought here’s this guy, it’s starting to snow, he wants to get his deer because it’s hunting season, and here comes this thing he thinks is a deer, but it’s a person… That’s all I had. I didn’t know more than that. And I started to write it long hand, not expecting much, hoping it might help with the pain a bit. And suddenly I had this huge, huge book, a thousand pages long. All out of that one situation.
TA: So the story was really a metaphor for your own pain?
SK: It’s related in two ways. The character in the tree stand had been hit by a car and was recuperating, I knew how that felt. And then when I wrote about it, I didn’t think about the pain as much. It’s like being hypnotised…
TA: Do you ever fear what might come out when you are in that state?
SK: On a couple of occasions I’ve shocked myself. Pet Sematery was appalling when it first came out on to the page.
TA: Is there ever a self-censor at work?
SK: I think I’ve pretty much stunned him into submission [Laughs]…
TA: You must, in that sense have great faith in human nature, trusting yor instincts.
SK: To some degree. There are things in Dreamcatcher which has become an extremely gruesome book, where I found myself pulling back a bit. But I’m older now, it’s a bit harder to do that stuff. Still, I’d hate to think I’d got so case-hardened I couldn’t scare myself.
TA: Has it become harder to stay ahead of real life horrors?
SK: Well certainly since I’ve been writing, I don’t think that society has become any finer. Have you seen that programme Survivor. Pretty close to Lord of the Flies. They kick one guy off the island every week. They don’t actually chase him with sharpened sticks, but you get the feeling they’d kind of like to. I started a book like that about 15 years ago. It was called On the island, and it was about rich people who talked these street kids into going to an island and being hunted, with paintballs. And they get there and they find these guys are actually shooting live rounds,and in my story there were two or three who escaped and waited for these rich guys to come back. I’ve got it on the shelf somewhere. Survivor is a sort of a Stephen King idea, and its a huge hit.
TA: Is there a satirical element in books like that?
SK: I’m not a satirist. I have a sense of humour but I’m very much an American, and in love with my country for better or worse. I’m in this cultre up to my eyeballs. New York isn’t America. LA isn’t America. This is America. New york is just buzz, just this gaseous hype, there’s no story there, not really. The stories are all here, if you know where to look. I can’t satirise my fellow Americans. I am them.
TA: Do you get away from Maine much?
SK: My wife and I have got a place in Florida. So we’ve been down there. Still we are here eight, nine months of the year. I think there was a time when I liked New York and LA more. When I’m in Bangor people treat me as a neighbour not as a celebrity freak with two heads, and that’s too good to give up.
TA: Is that one of the reasons, do you think, for the tremendous loyalty of your readership?
SK: I’m the literary version of the Grateful Dead, I guess…
TA: No one else, no other novelist really, has such a loyal following… What do you put that down to?
SK: John Grisham’s only been in the business ten years… But, no, he doesn’t really have that connection. It really is a kind of Jerry Garcia phenomenon. Whatever they are getting from me in the stories, from my voice, is something that makes them feel comfortable, safe. And that’s funny when you think what it is I write. But that has to be the case.
TA: Do you ever fear your stories will get into the wrong heads?
SK: Every now and then something strange will happen. Some years ago I went to Philadephia with my son to see a basketball game. Tabby was here, and she heard the windonw break and there was this guy there and he claimed he had a bomb (in fact it was a bunch of pencils and erasers and stuff and paperclips). He was an escapee from a mental instititution and he had this rant about how I’d stolen Misery from him. Tabby fled in her bathrobe and the police came… And every now and then there’ll be a letter from someone who is obviously out there in the ozone, people who are convinced I’ve stolen their ideas. One lady wrote to explain how I had overflown her house in a U2 plane and stolen her thoughts for The Shining. But no one has ever actually threatened to kill me, knock on wood. Though there’s a guy out in California, Steven lightfoot, who believes that me and Ronald Reagan conspired to kill John lennon…
TA: Do you get paranoid about such things?
SK: No. I’m not afraid of unusual things. I’m not a compulsive hand-washer, I don’t think there are aliens hearing our thoughts, and I don’t think anyone is coming to kill me. There are things I’ve used that I am afraid of or revolted by: spiders, bats. So no I’m not unusual in that way.
TA: Reading you book your uncles and aunt seemed tremendous characters. SK: Everybody that I knew told stories it seemed, or maybe I just liked the stories and remembered them.
TA: Did they tell stories about your Dad?
SK: No he was like an unperson.
TA: Did you want to hear more stuff about him?
SK: I think we were ashamed not to have a father. I think my mother was deeply ashamed to have been left, with these two young boys, when her other sisters kept their husbands. And I think shame is the most readily communicable of emotions and I think she communicated that shame to us. When we went off to school I can remember her very clearly saying to us, ‘now, if anybody asks about your father, tell them he’s in the navy. That’s not a lie.’ Now it wasn’t a lie as far as we knew. But I got the point. I did have a father. No I wasn’t a bastard. So that’s what I said word for word and, of course, there was never any divorce either.
TA: Did you never attempt to find out what happened to him?
SK: Well we did find him, actually. My brother found him. What happened was this. The CBS TV network does these celebrity bios, they’re generally unauthorised, but they are softball, they don’t give you a hard time. They did one about me a little while ago, and they talked to my brother, and my brother had, he remembered, my dad’s social security number, and one of these documentary guys went out and found him… Or I should say at least he found out what had happened to him. My father, it turned out, apparently died in Pennsylvania in the mid-eighties. We even got some pictures of him. He had started a new family: three boys and a girl. My half brothers and my half sister.
TA: You’ve never met?
SK: Not at all. No. Never. They don’t know of my existence, and I think that’s the way it should be.’
TA: Why?
SK: Well, the woman that my father married, and remember he never divorced my mother, the woman was a Brazilian – very beautiful from the pictures I saw – and its reasonable to assume she was Catholic. In that case bigamy is a very serious thing, and it would have serious consequences for those children, and I couldn’t do that to them, couldn’t bring that knowledge. Let sleeping dogs lie, I say… I haven’t talked about all this before because I don’t want that story widely published in the United States, for obvious reasons…’
Tim Adams: Explain the motivation behind the Richard Bachmann books.
SK: I wanted to see what was in the name, but I also wanted to publish those books. They thought I would clog the market. They weren’t really Stephen King books as it was then understood, they were short for a start.
TA: Do you worry that there is an element of chance in your success?
SK: Not worried, but curious. Curious to know whether there’s something in me, or whether I just won the publishing lottery. And I guess its both. But primarily a lot of things came together for me at around the time of Carrie. The book, and the film that was successful. But even then I was not the blue-eyed boy of the season. Peter Benchley was. And where is he now?
TA: Did you feel a pressure to repeat the success, after your career took off?
SK: No it was always a pleasure to write. I can never think of a time when I just hacked something out to fulfil a contract or meet a deadline. I might have hacked things out, but it was always stuff I loved.
TA: Did the alcohol ever get in the way?
SK: With alcohol I was just an alcoholic personality. But it was a slow growing thing, compared to the drugs, that is I drank x amount in 1975 and in 1976 it was maybe x plus 20.
TA: And always beer?
SK: Well, beer was what I wanted, but if I couldn’t get beer, I’d drink anything else really. The drugs were different. With cocaine, one snort, and it just owned me body and soul. Something in my system wanted that, and once cocaine was there it was like the missing link: click. Like when you turn on lights it’s on or off, there’s no half way. Cocaine was like my ‘on’ switch. I started in 79 I guess. Did it for about eight years. Not a terribly long time to be an addict I guess, but it is longer than World War II. [Laughs] And that’s how it felt a lot of the time. I didn’t really hide my drinking, but I hid my drugs because I knew right away it was a problem. Nobody lives one day at a time like a drug addict. You don’t think yesterday or tomorrow. You just think now, where is it. I was high much of the eighties, and I’m not a very reflective person, so it never crossed my mind that it was an existential thing, or that it was wasteful or anything else. It was just what I was doing that day
TA: In your book you talk about the effect drinking had on the books. What effect did it have on family?
SK: It’s tough to say. I hid it pretty well, in that they never really knew what was distorting my mood. The tide goes in, the tide goes out and if you don’t know that its the moon pulling those tides you still know when its safe to go to the beach.
TA: Were you lucid most of the time?
SK: My wife has told me since that I was hungover every mornng until about two in the afternoon, and from five until midnight I was drunk out of my mind. So she says there was this period of about three hours when she could talk to me like a rational human being…
TA: That must have been pretty tough on her and the kids?
SK: Well, I suppose it must have had an effect. I was never the guy who said ‘lets have a gin and tonic before dinner.’ I’d have to have like twelve gin and tonics and then I’d have to say ‘__ dinner’ and have twelve more. So I guess that was difficult to live with from time to time.
TA: Why did she stay with you?
SK: Well she stuck. But she made it clear that she wouldn’t stick if I didn’t clean up my act… But that was after maybe twenty years. I mean the first time we ever went out I got loaded.
TA: What kind of a drunk were you. Was Jack Torrance [of The Shining] for example, ever close to home?
SK: It never about swinging from the chandeliers or throwing people through the window, or getting laid, or partying. I didn’t go to bars much. One drunken asshole was all I could handle and that was me. I wrote. I don’t remember a lot of it. The kids accepted my drinking as a part of life. Not a particularly pernicious part. I didn’t beat up on them. Basically I don’t think I was so different from a lot of dads who have three or four martinis when they get in from work, wine with dinner and so on.
TA: Well, maybe a little different…
SK: There’s a story I loved about this big blizzard in 76, much worse than the perfect storm, it paralysed everything. The outside world looked like __ Venus or something: no houses, just snow. Boston was shut down for 12 days and the commuter trains were stranded, and the commuters were taken to school gymnasiums. And that night, the police were forced to break into liquor stores, no word of a lie, because these businessmen were getting delirium tremors, they were scaring the children, because they were not used to life where they couldn’t get a shot of whiskey at five or six o’clock. So its a fairly oiled society. And I wasn’t much more out of control than anyone else.
TA: What about your health… have their been lasting effects?
SK: I like to think my coke addiction was a blessing in disguise, because I think without coke, I’d have gone on drinking until about the age of fifty-five and it would have been in the New York Times, ‘writer Steven King dies of stroke’. Once you add the coke, you eventiually tip over, because I know from experience that stuff eats you from the inside out…
TA: When that point came, when your wife emptied all your empties and crap on floor in 1987, did you clean up straight away?
SK: Not really… At that time I was this very successful author, and that kind of success does not really lead you humbly to say ‘yeah, I guess you’re right. I’m an –hole.’ It rather leads you to say ‘who the — are you to tell me to settle down. Don’t you understand? I’m king of the — universe, you know. So it took me about a year to get my –t together, get back on track. The worst of it was 87 to 88 when I was looking for a detente, a way I could live with booze and drugs without giving them up altogether. Needless to say I was not successful in this.
TA: But the writng stayed constant throughout this time?
SK: There were nine months when I was out of gas, depressed. And despite what some people say depression is not conducive to good writing or to bad writing. But then it came back. When I gave up dope and alcohol, my immediate feeling was ‘I’ve saved my life, but there’ll be a price because I’ll have nothing that buzzes me any more. But I enjoyed my kids. My wife loved me and I loved her. And eventually the writing came back and I discovered that the writing was enough. Stupid thing is that probably it always had been.
TA: After the accident were you tempted to back to drinking?
SK: Nah never. If that guy had hit me in 1986 he’d have killed me on the spot because my body was already fucked then, but I was in pretty good shape when he hit me, I exercised a lot. You come out of something like that and you don’t think about alcohol. You think about how you hurt like a bastard all the time.
TA: When you are fit I understand you plan to take it out on the truck that hit you. Do you feel the same way about its driver?
SK: Well, this is a guy who only has a little bit of brains. I can’t blame the guy. If he’d hit me on purpose sure. I mean I sometimes have fantasies about confronting the guy. But Brian Smith is like Gertrude Stein said about LA: ‘There’s no there, there’.
TA: It almost seemed scripted, the whole accident in a grim kind of way. Has it changed your ideas of fate?
SK: That a big question, Tim. I don’t know. I lean more toward the idea that some force is running things than not. Call it fate, call it god. There are so many things: if I’d left the house five minutes later, or if Tabby had come along as she often did, and maybe I’m then walking a little further out on the shoulder; you go on with the variables. So what you’re left with is this guy who hits me on an empty road when say NASA can’t get a missile to land on Mars with all the brains and technology in the world, then maybe you think there’s something going on. Or maybe NASA should just hire Brian Smith.
TA: Has the accident given you a new subject?
SK: It’s given me new things to write about, sure. Gruesome though it is to say. you have to put it to work for you. Otherwise it doesn’t mean anything. And jeez I could probably walk a mile wihtout the crutch. So that’s OK. I’m fine.
TA: You must feel differently about death too?
SK: In a way you sort of feel like you have a free pass. the number next to yours came up. You missed the draft.
[Break. King goes to next door office to answer phone]
TA: What made you want to publish yourself on the internet?
SK: I did it once before with ‘Riding the Bullet’. That had 500,000 hits but in some cases they gave the thing away, trying to pump e-book readers. It was encrypted, but it broke down under the weight of the encryption. It was like a fucking dinosaur. And that drove me crazy. But the publisher loved that part. They say, like a rallying cry, “Don’t get napstered”. Don’t let the fruits of your artistic endeavour, ie our money, get stolen. You know as well as I do that publishers, music publishers, studio heads, they could not give a shit for the writer, the creator. They care about their bankbooks and that’s about all they care about.
TA: Have you been frustrated over the years with the way you have been published?
SK: Ohhh. The short answer is no. I’ve tried in a polite way to work against that. If I see the red gels and the underlighting come out when someone comes to photograph me, I walk out these days. All that shit to make me look spooky. I ask them if when they are photographing a black writer they bring a watermelon and a barrel for him to sit on, you know. It’s degrading to be treated as someone who’s one dimensional. But you’ve got to be careful if you go down that route. Once they decide you’re a whore, they want to put you in a skirt don’t they?’
TA: So The Plant was a response to that?
SK: I thought I’d just put it out on the website. Marsha [his assistant] is coming along in a moment to help me put the first chapter on just now. Can you steal it? Yes. Do you have to lie to steal it? Yes. So if you feel good about cheating me out of a buck go ahead. I’m as nervous as I was before we did the serial novel The Green Mile… Its been a headache and a hassle for me because there’s a lot of people on the publishing side who hope I will fail.
TA: Do you see the era of the book coming to an end?
SK: I like books, and I think publishing is vital and that books will continue to be the most important cultural touchstone of our society for years. There’s all these guys, these Kingsley Amis kind of guys, who for years have been saying, you know: ‘books are dead, society going down hill, blah blah, cultural wasteland, idiots, idiots, TV, pop music, degradation’ and then something comes along like Harry Potter, — thing is 734 pages long, and it sells five million copies in twelve hours. That’s up there with Britney Spears and Eminem. So the only recourse these people have is to say [Kingsley again...] ‘well, JK Rowling or Stephen King is not Literature.’ Well, I’m sorry! It may not be Literature in their terms but it’s sure as — a few rungs up from ‘The Real Slim Shady’, and that’s from someone who loves that Eminem album… The age of the book is not over. No way… But maybe the age of some books is over. People say to me sometimes ‘Steve, are you ever going to write a straight novel, a serious novel and by that they mean a novel about college professors who are having impotence problems or something like that. And I have to say those things just don’t interest me. Why? I don’t know. But it took me about twenty years to get over that question, and not be kind of ashamed about what I do, of the books I write… There’ll always be a market for — of course. Just look at Jeffrey Archer! He writes like old people — doesn’t he?
Well there you have it. Stephen King’s a bit of a hard character, but he’s real, honest–and possibly the most popular author of our time. If he writes a book, it’s going on the List, no question.
Stephen King on the Early Show in 2001 after his accident.
When the last battle was over and the last secrets of the seven-book, 17-year journey were spilled, Jo Rowling did what grieving, grateful and emotionally exhausted people do: she ransacked the minibar.
What J.K. Rowling Wrought
She’d known from the start that Harry Potter would survive his ordeal; the question was how she would handle her own. This time a year ago, she was holed up on deadline in the Balmoral Hotel in Edinburgh to escape the bedlam at home, writing the climactic chapter in which her hero walks into the dark forest to give his life for those he loves. And while she knew that all would be well in the end, “I really was walking him to his death, because I was about to finish writing about him,” she says. It’s her favorite chapter in her favorite book — but when she finished, “I just burst into tears and couldn’t stop crying. I opened up the minibar and drank down one of those pathetic little bottles of champagne.”
Rowling calls her time with Harry “one of the longest relationships of my adult life,” her rock through bereavement, a turbulent marriage and divorce, single motherhood, changes of country, fear of failure — and transcendent joy, on the day a wise man at Bloomsbury offered her $2,250 and agreed to print 1,000 books. When Harry Potter and the Deathly Hallows went on sale last July, it sold 15 million copies worldwide in 24 hours, breaking the record that had been held by each of the previous three books. (To put that in perspective, 2005′s Half-Blood Prince moved more copies on its first day than The Da Vinci Code did in an entire year.) Meanwhile, the movie version of Book 5 — Order of the Phoenix — made $645 million, and plans for an Orlando, Fla., theme park were unveiled. Forbes magazine put Rowling second only to Oprah as the richest woman in entertainment, ahead of Martha Stewart and Madonna — and as the first person to become a billionaire by writing books.
So the journey that began in 1990 finally ended in 2007, leaving Rowling a little more margin to savor ballet recitals and grocery shopping and intensive, often ingenious charitable work. A woman of high energy and a short fuse, she looks almost serene now, dressed in black with a long gray belted sweater, dark red nails and a funky black ring the size of a walnut. But as we sit and talk over coffee, you hear the longing when the conversation shifts back to Hogwarts, as though we’ve retreated to a safe place but can’t stay there long. “I can only say, and many of my more militant fans will find this almost impossible to believe,” she says, “but I don’t think anyone has mourned more than I have. It’s left the most enormous gaping hole in my life.”
You can tell that she still doesn’t give many interviews. She’s funny and self-mocking and earnest by turns but always unguarded and unrehearsed, especially since now, after all this time, she can talk about the things she had to keep secret because her readers did not want their pleasure spoiled by knowing how things would turn out. “It’s a massive, massive sense of release,” she says, to be able to answer any question, tell the backstory in Web chats with obsessive fans who want to know the middle names of characters down to the third generation. She doesn’t actually need to talk to Barbara Walters (who named her the most fascinating person of the year), because her fans know where to find her: her website, which includes news, a diary, a rubbish bin for addressing the more idiotic rumors, and answers to both the frequently and the never asked questions. She has them all in her head or her notebooks, with nothing to hide anymore.
It’s not just Harry’s secrets that can now be revealed. It is hers as well. The biggest mystery, appropriately, had to do with Rowling’s own soul. As soon as her tales achieved fame, they were denounced by fundamentalist clerics from the U.S. to Russia to the Muslim world. The Pope warned about their “subtle seductions” that might “distort Christianity in the soul.” One day when Rowling was shopping for toys in New York City, a man recognized her. Her voice gets hard as she recalls how he brought his face very close to hers. “He says, ‘I’m praying for you,’ in tones that were more appropriate to saying, ‘Burn in hell,’” she says, “and I didn’t like that ’cause I was with my kids. It was unnerving. If ever I expected to come face to face with an angry Christian fundamentalist, it wasn’t in FAO Schwarz.”
Through it all, Rowling didn’t really fight back. Talk too much about her faith, she feared, and it would become clear who would live and who would die and who might actually do both. After six books with no mention of God or Scripture, in the last book Harry discovers on his parents’ graves a Bible verse that, Rowling says, is the theme for the entire series. It’s a passage from I Corinthians in which Paul discusses Jesus’ Resurrection: “The last enemy that shall be destroyed is death.”
It turns out that Rowling, like her hero, is a Seeker. She talks about having a great religious curiosity, going back to childhood. “No one in my family was a believer. But I was very drawn to faith, even while doubting,” she says. “I certainly had this need for something that I wasn’t getting at home, so I was the one who went out looking for religion.” As a girl, she would go to church by herself. She still attends regularly, and her children were all christened. Her Christian defenders always thought her faith shined through her stories. One called the books the “greatest evangelistic opportunity the church has ever missed.” But Rowling notes that there was always another side to the holy war. “At least as much as they’ve been attacked from a theological point of view,” she says, the books “have been lauded and taken into pulpit, and most interesting and satisfying for me, it’s been by several different faiths.” The values in the books, she observes, are by no means exclusively Christian, and she is wary of appearing to promote one faith over another rather than inviting people to explore and struggle with the hard questions.
Rowling’s religious agenda is very clear: she does not have one. “I did not set out to convert anyone to Christianity. I wasn’t trying to do what C.S. Lewis did. It is perfectly possible to live a very moral life without a belief in God, and I think it’s perfectly possible to live a life peppered with ill-doing and believe in God.” And now she climbs into a pulpit of her own, and you can tell how much this all matters to her, if it weren’t already clear from her 4,100-page treatise on tolerance. “I’m opposed to fundamentalism in any form,” she says. “And that includes in my own religion.”
She has certainly found her disciples. Critics can dismiss Rowling’s grownup fans as “kidults,” but especially as the series unfolded, her audience expanded far beyond children and her impact well beyond entertainment. In addition to some 300 wizard rock bands, reams of fan fiction and countless websites, the books have inspired outfits like the Harry Potter Alliance, an online group founded by Andrew Slack, 28, a consultant in Boston, around the rallying cry “The weapon we have is love.” When Deathly Hallows was released, the group organized house parties from Australia to South America and coast to coast in the U.S. to raise awareness of genocide in Darfur, in a kind of “What Would Harry Do?” campaign. The parties featured performances by such bands as the Remus Lupins and the Moaning Myrtles and a podcast by Africa experts, including Joe Wilson, a.k.a. Mr. Valerie Plame. “We can be like Dumbledore’s army, who woke the world up to Voldemort’s return, and wake our ministries and our world to ending the genocide in Darfur,” Slack urged Harry Potter Alliance members in tones of earnest camaraderie. In the days that followed, the student antigenocide coalition stand saw a 40% increase in sign-ups for high school chapters and a 52% increase in calls to its hotline, 1-800-GENOCIDE.
When asked about the group, Rowling practically levitates off the couch, spilling her coffee along the way. “It’s incredible, it’s humbling, and it’s uplifting to see people going out there and doing that in the name of your character,” she says. She’s especially pleased by the group’s choice of mission, and the old Amnesty International worker in her surfaces. “What did my books preach against throughout? Bigotry, violence, struggles for power, no matter what. All of these things are happening in Darfur. So they really couldn’t have chosen a better cause.”
But it’s also one more example of how she will never really be in control of Harry again. She knows he’s bigger than she is now and not always in ways she likes. Parents may need to let go of their children, but artists want eternal ownership, and you can feel her ambivalence — or even something more fierce and protective — at the prospect of legions of writers who want to take up Harry’s story as their own. One declared at last summer’s biggest Potterfest that, as Rowling had left the sandbox, it was open for all to play in. But this is no game to her. She can tell you exactly which character she was sketching on New Year’s Eve 1990 at the moment her mother died. (It was Professor Sprout, McGonagall’s “pragmatic foil,” she says. “I was six months in, and I was finalizing the composition of the head table.”) Knowing where you were when you first read Harry Potter, she says, is not the same as knowing where you were when you created him. If you can solve the puzzles and break the codes on her website, you can see her earliest drawings and edited manuscript pages and glimpse just how deep her devotion goes. “He’s still mine,” she says. “Many people may feel that they own him. But he’s a very real character to me, and no one’s thought about him more than I have.”
He is also a billion-dollar media property and a global cultural figure. Now translated into 65 languages, the books have joined a canon that stretches from Cinderella to Star Wars, giving people a way to discuss culture and commerce, politics and values. Princeton English professor William Gleason compares the series’ impact to the frenzy that surrounded Uncle Tom’s Cabin before the Civil War. “That book penetrated all levels of society,” he says. “It’s remarkable how similar the two moments are.” And he does not see this as a passing fad or some triumph of clever marketing. “They’ve spoken profoundly to enough readers that they will be read and reread by children and by adults for a long time,” he says. Feminist scholars write papers on Hermione’s road to self-determination. Law professors cite Dobby’s tale to teach contract law and civil rights. University of Tennessee law professor Benjamin Barton published “Harry Potter and the Half-Crazed Bureaucracy,” in the Michigan Law Review, which examined Rowling’s view of the legitimacy of government. His conclusion? “Rowling may do more for libertarianism than anyone since John Stuart Mill.” A Rutgers researcher named a rare rain-forest plant in Ecuador apparata after her verb apparate because it seemed to appear out of nowhere. French intellectuals debate whether the stories indoctrinate kids into free-market capitalism. In Turkey, the books were absorbed into the argument over Turkey’s cultural geography: Is Harry a symbol of Western imperialism or of lost Eastern traditions of mysticism and alchemy? A seventh-grade teacher in Pakistan in November invited her class to compare the country’s crisis to Harry Potter. The class immediately cast Pervez Musharraf as Voldemort and Benazir Bhutto as Bellatrix. “Potter is like a Rorschach blot,” says Georgetown government professor Daniel Nexon, “for people articulating concerns about globalization in their cultural setting. It’s incredibly significant that Potter even enters these debates.”
And that is on top of the impact, even her critics acknowledge, of inspiring a generation of obsessive readers unafraid of fat books and complex plots. “They’re easy to underestimate because of what I call the three Deathly Hallows for academics,” says James Thomas, a professor of English at Pepperdine University. “They couldn’t possibly be good because they’re too recent, they’re too popular, and they’re too juvenile.” But he argues that the books do more than entertain. “They’ve made millions of kids smarter, more sensitive, certainly more literate and probably more ethical and aware of hypocrisy and lust for power. They’ve made children better adults, I think. I don’t know of any books that have worked that kind of magic on so many millions of readers in so short a time in the history of publications.”
It was the end of a long January day when the last page of the last chapter was complete. Rowling had finished putting on the page numbers and found herself alone in her suite at the Balmoral feeling, she recalls, some “end-of-epic euphoria.” So she danced around the room a bit and then in a fit of creative destruction took out her pen and wrote on the base of the bust of Hermes that stood in the window alcove, “J.K. Rowling finished writing Harry Potter and the Deathly Hallows in this room (552) on 11th Jan 2007.”
The ending, naturally, was the most controversial part of the book. It would have been so much neater just to kill Harry. “I’ve known that all along,” she says, but that was never her plan. To her, the most noble thing, the real bravery, is to rebuild after a trauma. Some fans were disappointed that after all his adventures, Harry’s greatest concern in the end is whether his son will fit in at Hogwarts. “It’s a bittersweet ending,” she says. “But that’s perfect, because that is what happens to our heroes. We’re human. I kept arguing that ‘love is the most important force, love is the most important force.’ So I wanted to show him loving. Sometimes it’s dramatic: it means you lay down your life. But sometimes it means making sure someone’s trunk is packed and hoping they’ll be O.K. at school.”
Rowling has some rebuilding of her own to do. Her time, she says, will be divided among her children, her charities and her writing. But she has only to look at George Lucas to appreciate that the pressure to return to Hogwarts will be ferocious — and some of it self-inflicted. She’s already had to cope with the pressure of not disappointing the fan closest to her: her daughter Jessica, 14. What will happen when her two younger children a decade from now discover the stories for themselves and know that Mom has the power to make more of them? “There have been times since finishing, weak moments,” she says, “when I’ve said, ‘Yeah, all right,’ to the eighth novel.” But she’s convinced she’s doing the right thing to take some time away, do something else. She’s working on two projects now, an adult novel and a “political fairy tale.” “If, and it’s a big if, I ever write an eighth book about the [wizarding ] world, I doubt that Harry would be the central character,” she says. “I feel like I’ve already told his story. But these are big ifs. Let’s give it 10 years and see how we feel then.” It’s a pretty safe bet how her audience will feel. But we’ll just have to wait and prepare to be surprised.
All right, so here’s another interview that Harry Potter fans may find enjoyable. Although J.K. Rowling didn’t give a whole lot of detail in her epilogue, apparently what she didn’t spill in her writing she’s willing to share in interviews. Find out more details about the lives of her characters below. It’s like the whole “Dumbledore’s a homosexual” thing. Although she doesn’t want to put that fact into the book because it’s irrelevant, I suppose it’s relevant in real life? Hmmm…
Source: http://www.msnbc.msn.com/id/19959323/
Finished ‘Potter’? Rowling tells what happens next
Exclusive: Author gives details on events after the book’s final epilogue
Exclusive: J.K. Rowling on final ‘Potter’
July 26: J.K. Rowling talks to TODAY’s Meredith Vieira about the final “Harry Potter” book and the aftermath of certain characters.
And here for your viewing pleasure: An interview of J.K. Rowling on the day the final Harry Potter book was released:
Exclusive interview with J.K. Rowling
By Jen Brown
TODAYShow.com contributor
updated 5:38 a.m. MT, Thurs., July. 26, 2007
Spoiler alert: This story reveals some key plot points in the final Harry Potter book. So if you’ve haven’t finished the book, J.K. Rowling asks that you not read this story.
If you found the epilogue of “Harry Potter and the Deathly Hallows” rather vague, then J.K. Rowling achieved her goal.
The author was shooting for “nebulous,” something “poetic.” She wanted the readers to feel as if they were looking at Platform 9¾ through the mist, unable to make out exactly who was there and who was not.
“I do, of course, have that information for you, should you require it,” she told TODAY’s Meredith Vieira rather coyly in her first interview since fans got their hands on the final book.
Ummm … yes, please!
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Rowling said her original epilogue was “a lot more detailed,” including the name of every child born to the Weasley clan in the past 19 years. (Victoire, who was snogging Teddy — Lupin and Tonks’ son — is Bill and Fleur’s eldest.)
“But it didn’t work very well as a piece of writing,” Rowling said. “It felt very much that I had crowbarred in every bit of information I could … In a novel you have to resist the urge to tell everything.”
But now that the seventh and final novel is in the hands of her adoring public, Rowling no longer has to hold back any information about Harry Potter from her fans. And when 14 fans crowded around her in Edinburgh Castle in Scotland earlier this week as part of TODAY’s interview, Rowling was more than willing to share her thoughts about what Harry and his friends are up to now.
Harry, Ron and Hermione
We know that Harry marries Ginny and has three kids, essentially, as Rowling explains, creating the family and the peace and calm he never had as a child.
As for his occupation, Harry, along with Ron, is working at the Auror Department at the Ministry of Magic. After all these years, Harry is now the department head.
“Harry and Ron utterly revolutionized the Auror Department,” Rowling said. “They are now the experts. It doesn’t matter how old they are or what else they’ve done.”
Meanwhile, Hermione, Ron’s wife, is “pretty high up” in the Department of Magical Law Enforcement, despite laughing at the idea of becoming a lawyer in “Deathly Hallows.”
“I would imagine that her brainpower and her knowledge of how the Dark Arts operate would really give her a sound grounding,” Rowling said.
Harry, Ron and Hermione don’t join the same Ministry of Magic they had been at odds with for years; they revolutionize it and the ministry evolves into a “really good place to be.”
“They made a new world,” Rowling said.
The wizarding naturalist
Luna Lovegood, the eccentric Ravenclaw who was fascinated with Crumple-Horned Snorkacks and Umgubular Slashkilters, continues to march to the beat of her own drum.
“I think that Luna is now traveling the world looking for various mad creatures,” Rowling said. “She’s a naturalist, whatever the wizarding equivalent of that is.”
Luna comes to see the truth about her father, eventually acknowledging there are some creatures that don’t exist.
“But I do think that she’s so open-minded and just an incredible person that she probably would be uncovering things that no one’s ever seen before,” Rowling said.
Luna and Neville Longbottom?
It’s possible Luna has also found love with another member of the D.A.
When she was first asked about the possibility of Luna hooking up with Neville Longbottom several years ago, Rowling’s response was “Definitely not.” But as time passed and she watched her characters mature, Rowling started to “feel a bit of a pull” between the unlikely pair.
Ultimately, Rowling left the question of their relationship open at the end of the book because doing otherwise “felt too neat.”
Mr. and Mrs. Longbottom: “The damage is done.”
There is no chance, however, that Neville’s parents, who were tortured into madness by Bellatrix Lestrange, ever left St. Mungo’s Hospital for Magical Maladies.
“I know people really wanted some hope for that, and I can quite see why because, in a way, what happens to Neville’s parents is even worse than what happened to Harry’s parents,” Rowling said. “The damage that is done, in some cases with very dark magic, is done permanently.”
Photos by Andrew Kandel for TODAYshow.com
Rowling said Neville finds happiness in his grandmother’s acceptance of him as a gifted wizard and as the new herbology professor at Hogwarts.
The fate of Hogwarts
Nineteen years after the Battle of Hogwarts, the school for witchcraft and wizardry is led by an entirely new headmaster (“McGonagall was really getting on a bit”) as well as a new Defense Against the Dark Arts teacher. That position is now as safe as the other teaching posts at Hogwarts, since Voldemort’s death broke the jinx that kept a Defense Against the Dark Arts professor from remaining for more than a year.
While Rowling didn’t clarify whether Harry, Ron and Hermione ever return to school to finish their seventh year, she did say she could see Harry popping up every now and again to give the “odd talk” on Defense Against the Dark Arts.
More details to come?
Rowling said she may eventually reveal more details in a Harry Potter encyclopedia, but even then, it will never be enough to satisfy the most ardent of her fans.
“I’m dealing with a level of obsession in some of my fans that will not rest until they know the middle names of Harry’s great-great-grandparents,” she said. Not that she’s discouraging the Potter devotion!
This interview sure makes McCain sound like a real jerk… is the media left-leaning or is this the real McCain?
Scroll down to watch Paris Hilton’s mockery of John McCain’s ad. It’s hilarious.
McCain’s Prickly TIME Interview
Thursday, Aug. 28, 2008
Christopher Morris / VII for TIME
For years, John McCain’s marathon bull sessions with reporters were more than a means of delivering a message; they were the message. McCain proudly, flagrantly refused direction from handlers, rarely dodged tough questions and considered those who did wimps and frauds. The style told voters that he was unafraid, that he had nothing to hide and that what you see is what you get. “Anything you want to talk about,” he promised reporters aboard the Straight Talk Express in Iowa back in March 2007. “One of the fundamental principles of the bus is that there is no such thing as a dumb question.” When asked if he would keep the straight talk coming, McCain replied, “You think I could survive if I didn’t? We’d never be forgiven … I’d have to hire a food taster, somebody to start my car in the morning.” Even after he won the GOP nomination, he demanded that his new campaign plane be configured to include a sofa up front so he could re-create the Straight Talk Express at 30,000 ft.
Related
Audio
TIME Washington Bureau Chief James Carney and political correspondent Michael Scherer sit down with Sen. John McCain on the eve of the GOP convention
Sticking to the old formula seemed like a good idea. But with the press focused on Obama, McCain got attention only when he slipped up during one of his patented freewheeling encounters with reporters. And so in July, the campaign decided to clamp down on the candidate. Open-ended question time was reduced to almost nothing, and the famously unscripted McCain began heeding his talking points, even as his aides maintained he missed the old informality.
And so when TIME’s James Carney and Michael Scherer were invited to the front of McCain’s plane recently for an interview, they were ushered forward, past the curtain that now separates reporters from the candidate, past the sofa that was designed for his gabfests with the press and taken straight to the candidate’s seat. McCain at first seemed happy enough to do the interview. But his mood quickly soured. The McCain on display in the 24-minute interview was prickly, at times abrasive, and determined not to stray off message. An excerpt:
Click to Buy McCain Bestselling Books
What do you want voters to know coming out of the Republican Convention — about you, about your candidacy?
I’m prepared to be President of the United States, and I’ll put my country first.
There’s a theme that recurs in your books and your speeches, both about putting country first but also about honor. I wonder if you could define honor for us?
Read it in my books.
I’ve read your books.
No, I’m not going to define it.
But honor in politics?
I defined it in five books. Read my books.
[Your] campaign today is more disciplined, more traditional, more aggressive. From your point of view, why the change?
I will do as much as we possibly can do to provide as much access to the press as possible.
But beyond the press, sir, just in terms of …
I think we’re running a fine campaign, and this is where we are.
Do you miss the old way of doing it?
I don’t know what you’re talking about.
Really? Come on, Senator.
I’ll provide as much access as possible …
In 2000, after the primaries, you went back to South Carolina to talk about what you felt was a mistake you had made on the Confederate flag. Is there anything so far about this campaign that you wish you could take back or you might revisit when it’s over? [Does not answer.]
Do I know you? [Says with a laugh.] [Long pause.] I’m very happy with the way our campaign has been conducted, and I am very pleased and humbled to have the nomination of the Republican Party.
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You do acknowledge there was a change in the campaign, in the way you had run the campaign? [Shakes his head.]
You don’t acknowledge that? O.K., when your aides came to you and you decided, having been attacked by Barack Obama, to run some of those ads, was there a debate?
The campaign responded as planned.
Jumping around a bit: in your books, you’ve talked about what it was like to go through the Keating Five experience, and you’ve been quoted as saying it was one of the worst experiences of your life. Someone else quoted you as saying it was even worse than being a POW …
That’s another one of those statements made 17 or 18 years ago which was out of the context of the conversation I was having. Of course the worst, the toughest experience of my life was being imprisoned, so people can pluck phrases from 17 or 18 years ago …
I wasn’t suggesting it as a negative thing. I was just saying that …
I’m just suggesting it was taken out of context. I understand how comments are taken out of context from time to time. But obviously, the toughest time of my life, physically and [in] every other way, would be the time that I almost died in prison camp. And I think most Americans understand that.
How different are you from President Bush? Are you in step with your party? Are you independent from your party?
My record shows that I have put my country first and I follow the philosophy and traditions of Abraham Lincoln and Theodore Roosevelt and Ronald Reagan. Sometimes that is not in keeping with the present Administration or my colleagues, but I’ve always put my country first, whether it’s saying I didn’t support the decision to go to Lebanon or my fighting against the corruption in Washington or out-of-control pork-barrel spending, which has led to members of Congress residing in federal prison. So I’ve always stood up for a set of principles and a philosophy that I think have been pretty consistent over the years.
Your tougher line on Russia, which predated [the Russian invasion of Georgia], now to many looks prescient. Others say it’s indicative of a belligerent approach to foreign policy that would perhaps further exacerbate the tensions being created with our allies and others around the world under the Bush Administration. How do you respond to that critique?
Well, it reminds me of some of the arguments we went through when Ronald Reagan became President of the United States. I think Russian behavior has been very clear, and I’ve pointed it out for quite a period of time, and the chronicle of their actions has been well known since President [Vladimir] Putin came to power, and I believe that it’s very important that Russia behave in a manner befitting a very strong nation. They’re not doing so at this time, so therefore I will criticize and in some cases — in the case of the aggression against Georgia — condemn them.
You were a very enthusiastic supporter of the invasion of Iraq and, in the early stages, of the Bush Administration’s handling of the war. Are those judgments you’d like to revisit?
Well, my record is clear. I believe that the world is better off without Saddam Hussein. I believe it’s clear that he had every intention to acquire and use weapons of mass destruction. I can only imagine what Saddam Hussein would be doing with the wealth he would acquire with oil at $110 and $120 a barrel. I was one of the first to point out the failure of strategy in Iraq under [former Defense Secretary Donald] Rumsfeld. I was criticized for being disloyal to the Republicans and the President. I was the first to say I would lose a campaign rather than lose a war. I supported the surge. No observer over the last two years would say the surge hasn’t succeeded. I believe we did the right thing.
A lot of people know about your service from your books, but most people don’t know that you have two sons currently in the military. Can you describe what it means to have Jack and Jimmy in uniform?
We don’t discuss our sons.
Kalli began reading books at the age of four. Her favorite book at that time was something about animals in a tree. Her tastes have fortunately since expanded... Click here to read more.
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