There’s Nothing Like Old-School In-Person Connection

This post was originally published on this site

Ever since my debut novel, Storybook Ending, was published last spring—and even before that—I keep getting asked the same questions, over and over. Some are easy to answer: No, there won’t be a sequel; no, as of this moment there isn’t a movie deal; no, I didn’t write it in longhand. (The people who ask the latter question have clearly never seen my handwriting.) Some are silly, like the earnest query “Are you tired of people telling you that they love your novel?” (Public service announcement: No author is ever tired of hearing that. Ever.) And some are a little more complicated, though they sound simple: “What made you write this book? Why now?”

Fair questions, to be sure. I’ve been a journalist for nearly 30 years, most of that time as an arts critic for The Seattle Times, and you’d think that a yearning to write fiction might have popped up in my life a bit earlier. But things happen when the time is right, and I think that the writing of Storybook Ending, a comedy of manners centering around an unusual romantic triangle, was for me in many ways a response to pandemic isolation. It’s a story of very old-school connection, in which the main characters connect via a handwritten note left in a book at a neighborhood bookstore. Mistaken identity, confusion, and community ensue.

I wrote most of the book while on leave from my Times job during the spring and summer of 2022, from the same work-from-home desk I’d occupied for the previous two years. During the pandemic, I’d sat at that desk communicating with my colleagues through Zoom and Slack, wondering when we’d see each other in person again, and worrying about younger coworkers who were likely finding the isolation especially hard. Among the many things I missed was my neighborhood bookstore, which like all other such businesses closed for a while. After it reopened in a strange socially distanced fashion, I returned right away, standing in line in my mask, just to once again have that feeling of being in a roomful of stories.

It wasn’t long afterward that I happened to gaze at an employee behind the used-book desk and think, “hmm, if someone wanted to communicate with him, they could just slip a note into one of the books on his desk.” (Paging Nora Ephron!) And it wasn’t too long afterward that I, not finding the exact brand of literary comedy that I was looking for on the shelves, noticed a quote from Toni Morrison on the wall behind the front desk: “If you cannot find the book you want to read, then you must write it.”

Storybook Ending isn’t a pandemic novel; I didn’t want to write one, and I thought it might be too soon for anyone to want to read one. But the impact of that time is quietly echoed in its pages—and in my decision to sit down and write the novel that I’d always planned to get to someday. Someday finally came. And I think my book celebrates some things that we might have taken for granted before that time: browsing in a bookstore, meeting new people, lingering over coffee with a coworker, gathering around a table with friends. It’s a book about finding community, born at a time when community seemed a happy dream—and written in the hope that it would make readers smile.