David Thayer

It’s been a while since I posted an author interview. Today Sara Gran is with us through the miracle of cyberspace and email to share some thoughts. Her novel Dope was released by Putnam a few months back garnering major praise in places like Newsday, the San Diego Union Tribune, New Orleans Times-Picayune, Boston Globe, Tribe’s blog and Sarah Weinman. Sara is the author of Come Closer and Saturn’s Return to New York. Reading her books is like discovering the drawing that you found in your attic is by Salvador Dali.

Q: Come Closer is being released as a paperback. What’s the release date and who is bringing it out?

Berkeley is releasing it May 2. There’s a long strange story behind that that I recently posted on my blog, but suffice to say, I am totally thrilled that the book is being reincarnated yet again. These guys are a sister imprint to Putnam, who published Dope, and I could not be happier with the whole operation. These guys are always professional and always kind, which is all us writers want from our publishers, and almost every day they seem to go above and beyond and do something unexpectedly wonderful.

Q: Dan Conaway blogged about Dope before anyone knew he was Dan Conaway and before anyone knew he was blogging about your novel. Was that weird for you or fun for you to know what Mad Max was on about before all was revealed?

I have a funny story, which is, I was pretty sure that was Dan before he told me, when I still didn’t know him very well. As you can imagine I was extremely proud of myself, but I shouldn’t be; Conaway has a very distinctive and wonderful way of writing which was easy to spot. It was very fun, I only wish he would do it all over again.

Q: If I had the money I’d make Saturn’s Return to New York into a movie because of your main character’s mother. How did you manage to capture the Village locale through her eyes so well?

Thank you, David. The kind and wonderful Domenica Cameron-Scorcese is doing exactly that. My own mother lived in the village for years before she was married, and we had always spent a lot of time there, so there was some stealing from my mother there. Also, I think there’s a uniquely New York way of feeling affection for a neighborhood that translates well from one neighborhood to another; what I mean is, even though I’d always lived in Brooklyn, it was fairly easy to translate my strong feelings about Park Slope into strong feelings for the West Village.

Q: Dope’s final scene is mentioned in many reviews and some of the reviewers seem confused or disappointed with it; did the book end the way you envisioned when you started?

Yes, that’s exactly the ending I had in mind from the beginning. Some things reviewers kvetched about were quite helpful—for example, a few folks noticed that the narrator often spoke improbably given her level of education, and I will definitely be more careful about that in the future, and I’m grateful to people for pointing that out to me. But the ending? They just didn’t get it. Of course, I need to take some responsibility for that: if that didn’t seem like the perfect ending, the only possible ending, I didn’t do my job well enough. It’s hard to argue with the reader. Possible, but hard.

Q: Can you tell from your book store appearances who your audience is? Crime fans, literati?

You know, I couldn’t tell too much from the readings, but from letters I’ve gotten, it’s mostly other writers, mystery and literary. Fortunately there’s enough of them to be an audience in and of themselves; or maybe those are just the people who are getting in touch with me. I’ve also
heard from a good number of former addicts who have read dope, which has been quite moving.

Thank you Sara.

This entry was posted on Monday, April 17th, 2006 at 9:57 pm and is filed under Interviews. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. You can leave a response, or trackback from your own site.