“My great-aunt Ingrid was Charlie Chaplin’s neighbor,” Glen David Gold explained to me as we met for iced tea last month before a bookstore appearance for Sunnyside, his first novel since the bestselling Carter Beats the Devil. (Yep, it’s been eight years!) “Family legend has it she wrote his autobiography—well, he did read his drafts to his neighbors and then take their suggestions.”

Sunnyside is, among other things, the story of how Charlie Chaplin weathered the blows to his public image during the First World War, and taking on Chaplin is a natural follow-up to writing about a character inspired by Harry Houdini, as Carter was. “Houdini was the first ‘most famous person in the world’ in the modern sense of the term,” Gold said. “He was famous because of his act, and Chaplin was his successor—but I knew there was a difference in the quality of their fame. I just wasn’t sure what it was at first…. A lot of his biographies are well-written, but they get to a certain point and they just throw their hands up.” He eventually realized why; it was a point in Chaplin’s life at which his fame had simply spiraled beyond his ability to shape it. “I grew up in Los Angeles,” Gold continued, “so I’ve seen fame happen to people. I’ve seen how gravity realigns around them when they enter the room. So what would it be like to be the first person that had happened to?”

Gold’s exploration of the relationship between the audience and the artist—between the spectacle and the spectator—led some early reviewers of Sunnyside to complain that the novel was too complicated, or required readers to connect too many dots themselves. Gold has taken the complaints in stride. “Some people complained Carter was too fun,” he observed. Citing Dos Passos as an example, he described a storytelling strategy that makes room for historical digressions: “You move off to the side and have faith that the forward momentum comes with the reader’s engagement in the world you’ve created.”

Another source of inspiration comes from John D. MacDonald, whose Travis McGee novels helped Gold realize the importance of giving readers a solid footing in early scenes so they’ll trust you when you begin to knock them off center as the story progresses. And when I mentioned that what I’d read of the novel so far reminded me of Ishmael Reed’s Mumbo Jumbo in its playful treatment of history, Gold’s eyes lit up; he studied under Reed in his graduate creative writing program. “Ishmael was very playful,” he recalled. “but I also admire his ability to both critique and empathize simultaneously. He did not speak with contempt, even of the most contemptible characters… Writing was obviously to him one of the resaons to get out of bed.”

It doesn’t take much to see how fully Gold has inherited the attitude. I love Sunnyside, and I can’t wait to get back into the rest of it.

Wife of the Gods introduces a new contender in the international police procedural genre—Kwei Quartey. The novel is set in the West African nation of Ghana, shifting between the capital city of Ghana and smaller villages several hours’ drive away, and incorporates local superstitions and controversial cultural traditions into the investigation of the death of a young medical student volunteering to teach the villagers about AIDS awareness. Quartey was born in Ghana but, because his mother was an American citizen, he had dual citizenship—a fact that came in handy when he became a “person of interest” to the military government after being caught putting up anti-government posters. He came back to the U.S., and eventually went into medical school; today he practices in the Los Angeles area, but he’s never abandoned his love of writing. I was curious to hear what it was like writing a mystery set in a land he hadn’t seen in many years, and he was kind enough to send the following essay by way of explanation.

I had been living in the United States many years when I began Wife of the Gods. Originally, I set the story in an imaginary West African land, but a literary agent wondered why I had not used Ghana for the setting. After all, I had once lived there. Ostensibly it was because I had been in the States for so long without returning to Ghana to visit that I wasn’t confident that I could portray the country accurately. On a deeper psychological level, though, I seemed more comfortable with a “Ghana-like” country than the real nation with which I had an emotional link. Was I, for some reason, skirting those emotions?

It then became a matter of re-embracing Ghana. When I finally did so, the writing became plainly more enriching. It was like taking a plunge in the pool and discovering that the water was just fine.

I’ve always had a scientific mind. As a boy growing up in Ghana, I was crisply confident that almost everything in life was of a biological, chemical, physical, psychological or medical nature. In my teens, I chose a science curriculum at school, the path that took me on to the study of medicine.

Outside the cocoon of my scientific convictions, there was an alternative world in Ghana. We sometimes heard about juju, which is a fetish or charm, or the magical powers attributed to such an object. At one point in Accra, Ghana’s capital, there was a lively rumor about a juju “going around” the city and making men impotent. Naturally, this was the stuff of nightmares for any believing human male. My amusement at this story of juju-induced impotence was tinged with disdain.

The comfortable bubble of my scientific world was similar to my family’s socioeconomic status. My brothers and I were the children of two lecturers at the University of Ghana, arguably an ivory tower where life was detached from the common man, woman and child. That was but one example of the inequalities we saw in Ghana. Of course, such contrasts also exist in developed countries, but in emerging nations the disparities, much starker, assault one’s sensibilities.

What does the novel’s title, Wife of the Gods, mean? How does a woman become a wife of the gods? In essence, how does one connect the physical, tangible world with a realm in which gods dwell? For some in Ghana, the answer would be that there is no need to join the two, as they already coexist. Case in point: In the novel, a young woman is murdered and protagonist Detective Darko Dawson soon discovers that some people believe the death is the work of a curse from the gods.

These kinds of convictions come to involve Darko personally. His son, Hosiah, suffers from congenital heart disease. Both the boy’s grandmother and the traditional healer to whom she takes him believe that evil spirits are occupying the boy’s chest and causing his symptoms.

As a physician, I would have provided a well-packaged medical explanation of the mechanism of the Hosiah’s illness, but the evil spirits theory seeks to clarify the why as well as the how. If I were still the self-assured teenager that I was, I would have dismissed such “unscientific” notions out of hand. Now, as an adult and a writer, I examine them with curiosity and fascination, realizing that it is as difficult to prove that curses and evil spirits do not exist as it is to prove they do.

It’s been said that once you’ve been in Ghana, you can’t get Ghana out of you. Indeed, things Ghanaian, dormant in me for years, have been roused and channeled into Wife of the Gods: the flavor of the place, the sights and smells, the traditions of drumming, dancing and libation. But not those alone. So too have the contrasts that I once dismissed or took for granted: status alongside disadvantage, scientific theory versus belief in magical powers, and westernized as against traditional medicine. All of these contrasts also test Darko’s mettle as he investigates the murder of a smart and beautiful young woman.

It’s the first Monday of the month, and that means it’s time for Lady Jane’s Salon, the reading series for romance novelists that helps generate donations for Share the Love, a non-profit organization that donates used romance novels to women’s shelters. This month’s guests include Dianna Love, one-half of the writing team behind Anthea Lawson, and Dee Davis, with a special appearance by Susie Felber, who will tell us about her mother, the late Edith Layton.

The show begins shortly after 7 p.m. at Madame X (94 W. Houston Street, New York NY), and the cover is $5 or at least one used romance novel. Every show has been a blast so far, and the audience keeps growing—I hope you’ll join us!

Brooks Hansen’s new novel, John the Baptizer, was published just shy of two weeks ago, on John’s feast day. But when we met in a café near the offices of his publisher, W.W. Norton, to discuss the book, he confessed early into the interview that he had not been a big fan of the Baptist attending Mass as a child. “I didn’t really buy this guy,” Hansen recalled. “He seemed angry, he seemed cartoonish… he felt like an opening act. What you’re taught to understand about John doesn’t make sense when you’re a little boy—his willingness to point at Jesus and then withdraw. It was only in returning to the story later in life that I felt compelled by him.”

(For more about what drew Hansen to John’s story, be sure to watch the video interview embedded above or on YouTube.)

There are some distinct challenges to building a story around John, however. “The second you make him the central character,” Hansen explained, “Jesus becomes the bad guy, the guy who comes in and steals the spotlight.” In fact, one of Hansen’s primary sources for his version of events was the sacred writings of the Mandaeans, a religious group that reveres John the Baptist as its greatest prophet and Jesus as a false messiah who betrayed John’s teachings. That doesn’t necessarily mean, however, that Hansen’s novel contradicts Christian doctrine. “Even the most controversial aspects of the story I’m telling are found in the Gospels,” he said. “And John’s story concludes before Jesus’ death and resurrection, so you can explore John’s story entirely without having to address the central Christian issue.”

In addition to the Mandaean scriptures and the Christian gospels, Hansen also drew upon the Roman historian Josephus (particularly when it comes to the Herods). Altogether, he spent seven years writing John the Baptizer, although he admits some of that time was spent working on another project. “But the only way of getting away with this was to tell the story as if I knew it like the back of my hand,” he confided. “You can’t shoot from the hip with this story.” As far as I’m concerned, he’s done a fantastic job—in prose that recalls the majesty of scriptural language but remains modern enough to engage contemporary audiences. But don’t just take my word for it: You can listen to Hansen reading excerpts from the novel on YouTube, starting with the fate of John’s head.

For the last three years, Peter Neofotis has been performing his short stories in various venues around New York City—all of them set in a fictional community which gives his debut collection its title: Concord, Virginia: A Southern Town in Eleven Stories. As I was reading the first stories, given that one of them is about a Korean War veteran fending off an inquisitive reporter’s attempts to get him to say something inspiring for the young men heading out to Vietnam, I made assumptions about Neofotis’s age that proved completely off base; turns out he’s still on the young side of 30. And yet his voice is already clearly identifiable as his own, and it’s unlikely, once you’ve read one or two of his stories, you’d mistake any others you come across for anybody else’s. When I asked if he would discuss his literary inspirations, he picked a story that helped shape both his writing and his performances.

I have just reread James Hurst’s “The Scarlet Ibis,” and once again, it has made me weep—just as it did when I read it in my high school freshman English class ten years ago. I remember the entire class—a very mixed bunch in a public high school—had been moved by the story. Mrs. Lynda Gray, a terrifyingly brilliant teacher, even cracked a tear when she read a few lines from its pages:

“It’s strange that all this is still so clear to me, now that that summer has long since fled and time had had its way…”

The tale behind the “The Scarlet Ibis” is as lonesome and beautiful as the story itself. James Hurst wrote it in his 30s, a few years after taking a job at a bank, to express his grief over his failed career as an opera singer. And though it is his only writing to ever receive national attention, it was a phenomenal success: first published in The Atlantic Monthly in July 1960, it won the magazine’s annual fiction prize then, as Hurst has commented, “took on a life of its own” and has been republished in several anthologies. Often, it is used to teach symbolism. For the death of the stray scarlet ibis foreshadows the death of the narrator’s frail but wondrously lucid brother Doodle.

“the sick-sweet smell of bay flowers hung everywhere like a mournful song…”

I loved the story so much that while a high school senior, I memorized it. A few teachers then asked me perform it for their classes. One student—who had made fun of me in the hallways, because I am effeminate—approached me in the hallway a few days after seeing my rendition. Telling me it was “amazing,” he then reached out and shook my hand.

“I did not know then than pride is a wonderful, terrible, thing, a seed that bears two vines, life and death…”

And so, years later, when I was writing my own short stories, I submitted one to Greenwich Village’s Cornelia Street Café and asked if I could do a reading. My story, “The Abandoned Church,” like the “The Scarlet Ibis,” was a story about a death—which served as symbol for the fear and hopes of an aspiring artist as well an expression of grief for a friend and teacher who had just passed away. When the café curator called me and gave me his OK, I’d been given life. I started memorizing my story immediately, bought books on acting and speech, and every night would practice the script, pulling out the tools I had learned in memorizing Mr. Hurst’s masterwork. Every night for five months, I practiced that one story, often slapping myself when I did not get it right. And from my first performance of “The Abandoned Church” started the saga of shows that I have been performing regularly since then, the first 11 scripts of which are being now published as Concord: Virginia.

“Even death did not mar its grace, for it lay on the earth like a broken vase of red flowers, and we stood around it, awed by its exotic beauty.”

David Plante, my writing professor, has often told me that what he most admires about my stories is that I cry from some deep wound. Well, the narrator in James Hurst’s “The Scarlet Ibis” cries out from one of the most human wounds in the most resonating and honest voice. He was given something special. Something very sensitive, primordial, yet faithful. And though he nurtured it a great deal, he pushed it too hard out of his arrogant pride to be accepted in the material world. So he murdered his gift. Such murders, whether among brothers, parents and child, or artists, are all too common in the modern world. For we all want to be loved and admired, if not for ourselves, for the people and things that surround us.

And “The Scarlet Ibis” confesses this sin of pushing those we love too hard and letting ourselves be pushed as a great warning, one that I am continuing to learn but so far has served me very well. That he does it in the humble form of a short story is a wonder and testament to his sincerity. The result is a work of art of such stunningly beauty and vividness that it creates literary lightning, as powerful as the bolt that shatters the gum tree “like a Roman Candle” in the story’s final pages. The boys are running through the rain. Doodle, begging his brother not to leave him in the storm, falls behind. The narrator, turning back, then finds his brother, Doodle, bleeding to death under a red nightshade bush.

“For a long time, it seemed forever, I lay there crying, sheltering my fallen scarlet ibis from the heresy of rain.”

Nearly a year ago, I published a guest essay from Kate Furnivall about addressing her uncovered Russian ancestry through fiction. This summer, she returns to the world of The Russian Concubine with a new novel called The Girl from Junchow… except in the United Kingdom, where it’s known as The Concubine’s Secret. As the possibility of a new guest essay emerged, I found myself wondering about those two titles—so I asked if she’d be willing to explain how they came about.

Titles are magic keys. They open the door to a book. They are designed to give a sense of what lies between the covers but in such an intriguing way that they tempt the reader to pick the book off the shelf in the bookstore.

Question: What makes a good title? Answer: One that sells books.

This is the holy grail of both novelists and publishers. Ideally, any writer will tell you, it is preferable to have settled on a title before even starting to put pen to paper because it means you have worked out exactly what lies at the heart of your book, what your focus is as its author. It means that every day when you open up the file on your computer, it is there in front of you in large letters—the title of the book. Reminding you what it is about.

Wouldn’t it be nice to live in such an ideal world? But sadly we don’t. So titles do not always slot into the brain as conveniently as authors would wish. Think about the titles that have attracted acclaim. There are some great ones out there—For Whom The Bell Tolls and Gone With The Wind. And more recently of course the supremely simple The Da Vinci Code. I’d really like to know how convoluted was the process by which those titles were chosen.

An author can spend months trying to drum up the right title. I know. I’ve done it. As the days and months tick by while you’re writing the book, endless wakeful hours in bed are spent with your mind churning, trying out every different combination of words. Whether you’re mowing the lawn, cleaning your teeth or feeding the cat, your mind keeps tugging at the knotty problem. It can end up driving you mad. And that’s when—if you’ve any sense—you rope in your publisher and agent to help.

Then the lists begin. We email each other a bunch of title suggestions every few days. We scour the manuscript for ideas and phrases. We plague colleagues, friends and family, trying out titles on them. We’re getting desperate. Losing our sense of what suits the story and what doesn’t. We make long lists. We make short lists. But before we know it, the deadline for publicity has barged its way into the discussions and the marketing experts step in. Presented with a final list at a ‘titles meeting,’ they choose with a fine eye for the market.

Even when an author submits a manuscript with what he or she thinks is the perfect ready-made title, too often we choose from a position too close to our beloved brainchild. A publisher will often suggest very gently that it isn’t ‘quite right.’ The trouble is, I see their point of view. Yes, now they’ve pointed it out I see my title is perhaps too obscure, too tame, too long, too short, too misleading or just not leading anywhere.

Take my latest novel, for example. I was convinced I was on to a winner. The Russian Daughter was typed proudly in bold script on the front page of the manuscript when I submitted it. It says it all, I thought. That it takes place in Russia. The struggle of a daughter to find her father. Simple and to the point.

Nope. Both my US publisher, Berkley, and my UK publisher, Sphere, dismissed it—politely—as unusable. Too many ‘daughter’ books on the shelves already. So the dreaded lists began.

This is where an unforeseen problem arises: two different publishers in the English language, with two different preferences for the choice of title. Very quickly Berkley in the US settled on The Girl from Junchow. I liked it very much. It ties in neatly with my earlier book, The Russian Concubine, which took place in Junchow. Delighted, I passed it on to Sphere in the UK. The answer came back—very politely—No. They had decided to go with The Concubine’s Secret. Another excellent title, again with a strong echo of The Russian Concubine.

So here I am with two brilliant but different titles for the same book. It wouldn’t be a problem at all if it weren’t for the Internet. Both titles are available online, with no mention of the fact that they are the same book. So be warned!

But—I whisper this quietly—it’s looking good so far for the book I’m writing at the moment. My suggested title is producing contented murmurs from both sides of the Atlantic. So maybe I’m at last getting the hang of this title business, finding the magic key.

Full disclosure: Soon after I started reading an advance copy of James W. Fuerst’s debut novel, Huge, earlier this year, I immediately glommed onto the idea of getting him to come in for the reading series I’ve been curating and do a theme night devoted to literary novels with adolescent protagonists. That idea didn’t pan out (although the event I wound up producing was a success), but I’m still interested in seeing what other readers will make of Fuerst… and when the opportunity to learn more about how Huge came into being presented itself, I didn’t hesitate.

When I first got the idea for Huge, I’d been living in London for about seven months or so and had experienced a couple of surprises. Before my wife and I had even arrived there, I’d landed an interview for a teaching position at a university in London, and we took up residence in the U.K. with a good deal of anticipation. That I didn’t get the position wasn’t the surprise—the academic job market is like playing basketball against a much taller person; rejection is a big part of the game—but that none of the many CV’s, resumes, and applications I sent out from that point forward resulted in anything at all, not even so much as an e-mail confirming receipt, well, that was surprising. I’d never earned much money in the various jobs I’d held over the years, but I’d never been unemployed or without prospects, either, so the experience was kind of new to me.

But I was in luck. My wife’s job kept us from being homeless and starving on the streets of a foreign country, I’d already begun working on a novel, and I now had time to devote to it, or at least a bit of time until something else panned out. So, I wrote; I wrote a lot, actually, ten to twelve hours a day, six days a week. It did not go well. After a few months, it began to dawn on me that my first attempt at a novel was turning into a monstrosity, an unsalvageable mess; it was ponderous, convoluted, plodding, and dull, and, worst of all, it was supposed to be a comedy. Why I’d expected anything else is really anyone’s guess, but I have to admit that I had the gall to be surprised.

I decided to take a short break from the first project—which, like Huge, I’d intended to be a kind of detective story with humorous elements—to try to write something that was actually funny. I cheated a little by reading some novels in Terry Pratchett’s Discworld and Gregory McDonald’s Fletch series, among others, and then by giggling my way through an anthology of short stories edited by Maxim Jakubowski called The Mammoth Book of Comic Crime. There are a number of gems in that collection, but Mat Coward’s “And the Buttocks Gleamed by Night,” about a hard-boiled cat detective, had me laughing for days.

More than that, Coward’s story seemed to shake something loose for me, or perhaps simply cleared something out of the way, because I started writing Huge, as what I thought would be a long short or a novella, pretty much immediately. At the time, my wife, who is a lawyer, was working on a case in Zurich that kept her in Switzerland Monday through Friday over a five-month stretch. When she returned to London on the weekends, I would have our flat all clean and tidy and a nice meal ready and waiting for her—remember, I was unemployed—and, at some point over the next couple of days, I would read her the latest installment of what I had written. Her keen interest in the work was a welcome change from the quizzical, side-eyed glances and grumbling that the earlier project had so frequently elicited, and her repeated requests for me to write more helped me to realize that I had enough material to extend Huge into a full-length novel.

Since I’d already taught a college writing seminar on the “Art of Detective Fiction,” I was well versed enough in the genre to know where I wanted the rest of the work to go, and from there it was basically re-reading Raymond Chandler’s novels while trying to imagine what is conspicuously absent from them—how Philip Marlowe actually became Philip Marlowe—from the perspective of a twelve-going-on-thirteen year-old boy growing up by the Jersey shore.

But that’s a different matter, I guess, and a little far a field from the surprises I experienced in London. Just over three years there and I never landed a job; my first attempts at a novel were almost comically inept; I did some reading to get the juices flowing, got a different idea, and ran with it; I had all the support and encouragement a person could want along the way, far more than I deserve; and I got a novel, a novel that I enjoyed writing, out of the bargain. It wasn’t all that easy, of course, but that’s neither here nor there. It was a good time, a productive time, and I hope at least some of that comes off for anyone who reads Huge.

I’m still in the middle of—and very much admiring—The Visibles, the first “adult novel” by Sara Shepard, a writer who already has a strong track record with YA fiction. In fact, when I first approached her to write an essay for Beatrice, I suggested she discuss her transition from one market to the other—and though she gave that subject a go, what she ultimately found herself writing was something much more personal.

Those who have read The Visibles often ask, “What inspired you to write this story?” It’s a fairly common question—I get it for my young adult novels as well—but this time around, it trips me up. The information I think a lot of people are looking for makes me uncomfortable. The Visibles is about a girl coming of age in Brooklyn and Western Pennsylvania, DNA, secrets, prejudice, cancer, and depression—and the depression part of the novel springs from incidents in my own life. But it’s not exactly something I want to get into.

Fiction and memoir are two different things, obviously, but as a fiction writer, I can’t help but draw from what I’ve experienced firsthand. When reading someone else’s novel, I similarly wonder why the author chose to go in such-and-such direction, when there are so many avenues from which to choose: Is it because she’s drawing from her experiences? Did she have a husband who fathered a child with someone else? Did she have a wayward brother who’d been molested by a family friend? It’s not always the case, of course: I’ve written enough fantastical plotlines—in my young adult series, Pretty Little Liars, anything from student-teacher affairs, near-fatal blindings, hit-and-run accidents, and appearing and disappearing dead bodies prevail—to know that events need not happen to you for you to make them your own. You approximate, you empathize, you work the passage over and over until it feels right. The nut of The Visibles didn’t emerge from some sort of cosmic abyss in a bolt of blind inspiration, though—it emerged from a personal experience. Something I’m reluctant to talk about when someone asks me that question after they’ve read the novel.

I was very close to it back when I was writing the first draft of The Visibles. Back then, the book was set in the Outer Banks of North Carolina, and Summer Davis, the main character, was in her thirties with two children, teaching biology and falling in love with an awkward but precocious student. Flashbacks to Summer’s previous life in New York, caring for her ailing father, kept poking their way in, invading each passage. The flashbacks, which related to my own life and were probably a therapeutic way by which to work it out, began to take over the novel, more or less stealing the show. I used up all my energy to write them; I took a week off work to pound out the flashback section so that I could be done with it and never return to it again. Following Summer’s flashback to its end was cathartic. I’d written it down; I’d gotten it out of my system.

I liked those passages, though. I liked them, in fact, more than I liked the rest of the novel. They were real, they said something. I came from a very strong emotional place when writing them, and that felt more authentic to me than the rest of the book. As seasons passed, I wrestled with that version of the novel, trying to marry its troubled, indolent front story with its sharp, raw back story. Even the writing styles of the two sections were different. I spent months deconstructing the book and setting off in different directions, but nothing worked. It was like I was a kid, pulling a pair of pants from last year and realizing they now come up above my ankles: the novel was something I’d outgrown. After a while, I abandoned it and started working on something else, a story set in Brooklyn in the early 1990s about an imaginative and melancholy teenager wrestling with her mother’s apathy and subsequent abandonment. I would start fresh. All remnants of that previous novel were gone.

But the problem is, unlike my young adult novels, which are outlined to within an inch of their lives, I had no idea where I was going with this story, simply following it along and seeing where it went. And there I was, writing happily, when that same back story crept in again. Except this time, it was the front story. Problem was, it felt right for this book. The illness fit Summer’s father, and caring for him fit who Summer was and shaped who she would become. It was as if I’d written the situation before I met the characters. So what could I do but run with it? Time had passed, after all. I was no longer as close to my own experience; I’d gained needed perspective. I could now deal with it in a clear-headed way, looking at the events closely, changing details, reinventing the situation entirely so that it was now about my characters and not me. The illness became something very unique to Summer’s father, the symptoms and magnitude and treatment all his own, and Summer’s reaction and subsequent choices (or, as it was, subsequent avoidance of choices) all her own. I was able to let go and allow the novel’s characters to take over and change it to what it became. And it worked, I think. Except now that the book is out in the world, I get The Question.

What made you want to write this book?

This leads me to questions of my own. By having written this book, am I obligated to share where the idea came from? What gave me the right to plumb and exploit what happened, anyway? What do writers have rights to, and where’s that line that shouldn’t be crossed? For some people, does that line not exist? This wasn’t my story to tell. It happened to me, but it happened to other people, too, many people far more directly. Laying claim to it, parsing through its details with readers, feels like an invasion of privacy, which is probably why I tried to change as much as I could for The Visibles, holding on to the feelings it evoked but altering every single detail.

And even so, I still wonder if all my efforts were too transparent—it’s like the announcement at the beginning of a juicy true-crime show: Names have been changed to protect the innocent. The innocent people, if watching, certainly know it’s about them, don’t they? And how about the innocents’ families, friends, acquaintances, people who may have heard rumors here and there—is it easy for them to see through the ruse, too? Who gets hurt if a story veers too close to fact? If a story is told in a way that’s meaningful—if big questions are asked, if characters learn and change, if all those parties affected come out stronger and healed in the end, does it make it okay?

It’s something I’ll never really know and something I’ll always have trouble with. But I want to believe that something good came out of writing it down and turning it into the book it became. So when I’m asked that question, I usually gloss over that answer, concentrating on something with which I feel more comfortable. Like the other inspirations I took for the novel, things I’m giddy to reveal: Summer’s great-aunt, Stella, for instance, who is fiercely independent, convinced that the afterlife is like an episode of The Price Is Right, and obsessed with eBay and velvet paintings of deer and Frank Sinatra, is an amalgam of every wonderful family member—my grandfather, my grandmother, my mother, my aunts. Just like the troubling events that inspired the crux of this book, I felt that I needed to tell Stella’s story. I needed to create her and get her out into the world, and I tried to render has as carefully and as truthfully as I could. And that, I suppose, is the best I can ever do.

If you were at last week’s “Beatrice at the Merc” season finale, you know how awesome the combination of debut novelists and the singer/songwriters of the Bushwick Book Club can be—but if you missed it, I’ve got good news: Next Wednesday, June 10, I’m going back to the Slipper Room (167 Orchard St.) with four writers—Judy Blundell, Matthew Aaron Goodman, Theresa Rebeck, and Sung J. Woo—and five musicians—Franz Nicolay, Susan Hwang, Dibson Hoffweiler, Tom Curtin, and Phoebe Kreutz—and we’re going to put on another no cover/cash bar extravaganza. (Doors open 7 p.m.)

The theme of the evening is “literary novels with adolescent protagonists,” and while the authors read from their own work, the Bushwick Book Club will be paying tribute to other classics of the genre; think The Catcher in the Rye or The Member of the Wedding. (Or maybe not: I don’t actually know what books they’ve picked!) The Slipper Room is a great venue for this sort of event, and I hope you’ll come check us out!

National Book Award winner Judy Blundell (What I Saw and How I Lied) has written books for middle grade, young adult, and adult readers under several pseudonyms. Under the pen name Jude Watson, she is the author of several New York Times bestselling and award winning series and media tie-in novels. Her novel, Premonitions, was an ALA Reluctant Readers Best Picks and was chosen by the New York Public Library as a 2004 Best Books for the Teen Age.

Matthew Aaron Goodman (Hold Love Strong) earned a BA from Brandeis University and an MFA from Emerson College. Working hand and hand with formerly incarcerated men and women, he helped to create The Leadership Alliance, a community empowerment project with The Doe Fund that unites recently freed people and volunteer partners. Matthew now lives with Nadia, his wife, in Brooklyn, New York. Currently, he leads a literacy program for exalt, a nonprofit organization that assists youth on the spectrum of criminal justice involvement.

Theresa Rebeck is a multi-dimensional talent whose written works include all mediums from television, to film, theater and books. As a Pulitzer Prize nominated author for co-writing the play Omnium Gatherum, she continues to shine as a widely produced and respected literary talent in the United States and abroad—her most recent play, Our House, just opened at Playwrites Horizons. Her debut novel, Three Girls and Their Brother, was received rave reviews from everyone from People to Entertainment Weekly and received a 2009 Alex Award as one of the year’s “10 best books that appeal to teen audiences.” Booklist also named it as one of the top ten first novels of the year.

Sung J. Woo’s short stories and essays have appeared in The New York Times, McSweeney’s, and KoreAm Journal. His debut novel, Everything Asian, has received praises from Publisher’s Weekly, Kirkus Reviews, Booklist, and School Library Journal. A graduate of Cornell University with an MFA from New York University, he lives in Washington, New Jersey.

This video is of special relevance to my New York readers, because the New York Public Library needs our support, but really, what these celebrities say, you could say about any public library. They’re all valuable community resources—or at least they can be when they’re adequately funded.

Oh, and you can follow the NYPL on Twitter. It’s kind of fun!