Three Questions for Marilyn Brant (and whispers from the ghost of Jane Austen)

Life is changing for former teacher/librarian Marilyn Brant with the recent release of her debut novel, According to Jane, the story of a modern woman who has the ghost of Jane Austen in her head giving her advice on love and life (and love life) for almost twenty years.

According to NYT bestselling author Susan Wiggs: "Marilyn Brant's debut novel is proof that Jane Austen never goes out of style. This is a warm, witty and charmingly original story of a woman coming of age and finding her own happy ending--with a little help from the ultimate authority--Jane Austen herself."

We caught up with Marilyn for 3 Questions about writing and life...

Where did you find Ellie and Jane, and how did you get them together?
I first read Pride & Prejudice as a high-school freshman. Like my heroine Ellie, I raced through the novel way ahead of the reading assignments. I loved both the story and Austen’s writing style immediately. Her books changed the way I perceived the behavior of everyone around me, and I spent the rest of freshman year trying to figure out which Austen character each of my friends and family members most resembled! Also like Ellie, I had a few (okay, a lot) of less-than-wonderful boyfriends, and I would have loved to have been given romantic advice from the author I most respected and the one who’d written one of my all-time favorite love stories.

Every writer makes her own circuitous journey to that first book contract. How did you find your way?
Aside from being on the newspaper and yearbook staff in high school and publishing some academic work in college, I didn’t take writing seriously until I was about 30. I was a stay-at-home mom with a baby and desperately in need of a creative outlet, so I began writing poems, essays on being a parent and educational articles for family magazines. I wrote my first book having never taken a creative-writing class or even having read a book on the craft of fiction. (The lack of craft is very evident when I reread chapters from that first book, btw! I don’t recommend this level of ignorance…) I got some feedback though--mostly negative--from a prominent literary agency, which led me to study fiction formally, delve into craft books and, eventually, go to my first writing conference. It was there that I heard about RWA. I joined, wrote three more unpublished manuscripts and, then, came up with the idea for According to Jane. My agent signed me on this book and submitted it to editors, but it needed to be significantly restructured before it sold. Nine months after it won the Golden Heart and was revised (again), it finally did sell--to John Scognamiglio at Kensington--on a sunny and surrealistic day in April 2008.

What's your optimum writing environment?
I write in my home office--a messy, absolutely cluttered place--I won’t deny it! There are stacks of paper and towers of books everywhere, but also a very nice window overlooking our backyard. Sometimes I’ll write at a local coffee shop (either with my laptop or, most often, just with pen and notebook paper), and that location has the advantage of endless cups of coffee and occasional snacks.

Visit Marilyn's website to read an excerpt from According to Jane.

Last Night in Montreal (a strangely beautiful story of love and forgetting)

Up to my eyes in research, rough writing, and revisions on a work in progress, I have absolutely no time for pleasure reading right now. So it was a huge mistake to allow even a passing glance at an advance copy of Emily St. John Mandel's lovely debut novel, Last Night in Montreal. I can't help it; I am about to utter the hacky cliche of all book recommendations: I couldn't put it down. The words "pleasure reading" hardly begin to describe it. This was somewhere between a spa treatment and mid-day lovemaking. It's a mystery and a love story, a twisting path through the heart and mind of a richly drawn character.

From the flap:

Lilia Albert has been leaving people behind for her entire life. She spends her childhood and adolescence traveling constantly and changing identities. In adulthood, she finds it impossible to stop. Haunted by an inability to remember her early childhood, she moves restlessly from city to city, abandoning lovers along with way, possibly still followed by a private detective who has pursued her for years. Then her latest lover follows her from New York to Montreal, determined to learn her secrets and make sure she’s safe. Last Night in Montreal is a story of love, amnesia, compulsive travel, the depths and the limits of family bonds, and the nature of obsession. In this extraordinary debut, Emily St. John Mandel casts a powerful spell that captures the reader in a gritty, youthful world—charged with an atmosphere of mystery, promise and foreboding—where small revelations continuously change our understanding of the truth and lead to desperate consequences. Mandel’s characters will resonate with you long after the final page is turned.

This is not the blockbuster you're going to see on an endcap at Borders, but I hope hope hope it catches on with book clubs. There's so much fertile ground for discussion here, and this talented author deserves the affirmation.

Warning: If you read the following excerpt, you will want to read more.

No one stays forever. On the morning of her disappearance Lilia woke early, and lay still for a moment in the bed. It was the last day of October. She slept naked.

Eli heard the sounds of awakening, the rustling of the duvet, her bare footsteps on the hardwood floor, and she kissed the top of his head very lightly en route to the bathroom—he made an agreeable humming noise but didn’t look up—and the shower started on the other side of the almost-closed door. She stayed in the shower for forty-five minutes, but this wasn’t unusual; the day was still unremarkable. Eli glanced up briefly when she emerged from the bathroom. Lilia, naked: pale skin wrapped in a soft white towel, short dark hair wet on her forehead, and she smiled when he met her eyes.

“Good morning,” he said. Smiling back at her. “How did you sleep?” He was already typing again.

She kissed his hair again instead of answering, and left a trail of wet footprints all the way back to the bedroom. He heard her towel fall softly to the bedroom floor and he wanted to go and make love to her just then; but he was immersed so deeply in the work that morning, accomplishing things, and he didn’t want to break the spell. He heard the dresser drawer slide shut in the bedroom.

She came out dressed all in black and carrying the three pieces of a plate that had fallen off the bed the night before; it was a light shade of blue, and sticky with pomegranate juice. He heard her dropping it into the kitchen trashcan before she wandered past him into the living room. She stood in front of his sofa, running her fingers through her hair to test for dampness, her expression a little blank when he glanced up at her, and it seemed to him later that she’d been considering something, perhaps making up her mind. But then, he played the morning back so many times that the tape was ruined—later it seemed possible that she’d simply been thinking about the weather, and later still he was even willing to consider the possibility that she hadn't stood in front of the sofa at all--had merely paused there, perhaps, for an instant that the stretched-out reel extended into a moment, a scene, and finally a major plot point.

The Marriage of True Minds (more fun than a swimming pool full of lobsters)

The PW review of The Marriage of True Minds, Stephen Evans' quirky (and quixotic...and quick) debut novel caught my eye because I'm starting a memoir project with a lawyer who used to share a practice with her attorney ex-husband. A lawyer's life is embroiled in conflict as a matter of course, so two lawyers who deserve each other, for better or worse...it's fertile ground. Evans ran with that dynamic, casting two passionate, engaging characters into the scenario, providing them with pitch-perfectly audible Noel Coward dialogue, which is what really makes this book work for me -- the author gives good banter. Even when actions are over the top, the talk rings true. I read it on the red-eye from Houston to LA last week, and it was well-worth the lost sleep.

From the press kit:

The story of a crossed love that is star to every wandering bark. Together as husband and wife, Nick Ward and Lena Grant ran a successful boutique law firm in Minneapolis, vanquishing all their legal foes side by side. When Nick's charming erratic behavior finally became too much for Lena, the marriage and the partnership ended. But-like C.K. Dexter Haven and Tracy Lord-Lena and Nick just can't quite separate. Lena works out fiercely, keeps her dates with the boring and conventional Preston Winter, and daily battles on against corporate greed. But Nick's not doing so well. Still brilliant and devilishly clever, he is now also almost crazy. He is prone to fantasy and the big gesture, and he engages frantically in guerrilla activism for the sake of animals wild and domestic. Nick doesn't make plans; he has visions. And eventually his antics put him back into Lena's hands. While she tries to navigate the legal waters into which he's thrown them, Nick veers out of her wake and into the midst of a strange set of companions, including Oscar, his psychiatric attendant and Action Comics collector; Ralph and Alice Wilson, the rebellious managers of the city animal shelter; and an aging Russian hound named Wolfram. Often laugh-out-loud funny, with bright wit and brilliant machine-gun dialogue, The Marriage of True Minds sweetly explores modern love, undying idealism, and one cracked partnership that can't be sundered-from without or from within.

The buzz:

“Stephen Evans’ first novel, A Marriage of True Minds, is a funny, poignant, oddly beautiful book about three divergent life forms—animals, people, and lawyers. You will love it if you read it with a true mind.”—Kinky Friedman

“Evans demonstrates his playwright's mastery of dialogue and tension in his accomplished and whimsical first novel...”—Publishers Weekly

"Poignant and outrageous, moving and profound, Evans' delectable novel thrums with zesty dialogue and a memorably zany cast of irresistible characters."—Booklist

Check it out. The Marriage of True Minds is very funny, a fast read, and an all-around delicious little book that reaffirmed my belief in love, marriage, and the redeeming value of going off the deep end. The rightest words ever spoken between husband and wife are built beautifully into, yes, a balcony scene. After Nick climbs to Lena, reciting the Shakespeare sonnet from which the book takes its name, she says...

"Every time the phone rings, my first thought is that someone has found you somewhere, dead. My first thought. Every time."

Nick looked up at her. She stood just inside the doorway. The interior light flickered, revealing and concealing her silhouette.

"Is that a good thought or a bad thought?" he asked.

"Yes," she answered and vanished inside.