Looking for Info about AWAY by Amy Bloom...

And now on with my search to understand Amy Bloom’s Away and to see what others think. Maybe I’ll start with the stuff that’s easiest to find about what people make of the book – book reviews. I’ve already cited Publishers Weekly and The New York Times. Let’s take a closer look at those sources and then check out some other sources…

First look for reviews – I Googled “Amy Bloom Away Book Reviews.” First one up with the NPR review by Maureen Corrigan – so I get to listen rather than read. Corrigan starts by telling me two things that I didn’t know and/or think of myself:
1. she compare it to Toni Morrison’s Beloved, from the one word title to the use of a real woman’s story as a basis;
2. that is the 2nd thing, i.e. I didn’t know there was a real-world model for Lillian.

Corrigan calls it a female on-the-road novel, which I would agree with. It is very much about a journey.She then mostly continues on with the Beloved comparison and thinks it pales in comparison, including what she derides as its “multi-culti chorus line of clichéd characters…” I see what she means, but I think I found those characters more charming than did Corrigan...

Ok, onward in the reviews search… Next I find something that looks very handy, something I’ve actually been searching for – a compendium of reviews at http://www.reviewsofbooks.com/ - this site seems to list all the reviews a book received and link to them. There’s The New York Times, The Washington Post, USA Today, newspapers from Seattle, Pittsburgh, Boston, and more, magazines such as Entertainment Weekly… Ok, I’ve got some reading to do…

Away to Amy Bloom!

I just finished reading a new book by the author Amy Bloom, called Away.

First, a little background:

Amy Bloom is the author of two novels, two collections of short stories, and she has been a nominee for both the National Book Award and the National Book Critics Circle Award. She has written for the New Yorker, the New York Times Magazine, the Atlantic Monthly, Vogue, and many other publications. She is trained as a psychotherapist, lives in Connecticut and teaches at Yale University.

Amy Bloom first attracted readers’ attention in 1993 with the publication of her story collection Come to Me, a finalist for the National Book Award about which the New York Times says: “Her voice is sure and brisk, her language often beautiful; the result is humorous as well as heartrending fiction.”

Oh, look – and here’s something else I recently learned about Amy Bloom – she recently got married! Mazel tov, Amy!


Bloom’s latest bestseller is Away. Set in the Roaring 1920s, Away is told through the eyes of Lillian Leyb, a courageous and beautiful Jewish woman who embarks on a n odyssey that takes her from the world of the Yiddish theater on New York’s Lower East Side, to Seattle’s Jazz District, and up to Alaska to be reunited with the daughter she believed she lost in Russia. Publishers Weekly says: “Bloom’s tale offers linguistic twists, startling imagery, sharp wit and a compelling vision of the past. Bloom has created an extraordinary range of characters, settings and emotions.”

Anyway, I finished reading the book, and in thinking it over I thought “this book is brilliant.” It wasn’t always an easy read, wasn’t always the kind of book that you can’t put down or can’t wait to get back to, but brilliant nonetheless. It occurred to me that what the author was doing in this book was writing a female Jewish Odyssey. And then I wondered – what do other readers think about this book. I decided to go poking around the online book community to see what I can learn about what others think about Amy Bloom’s Away and to see whom I can meet with whom I can chat about this rich and perplexing book.

So that’s what I’m going to do…

David Wroblewski, continued

LR: Who were some other people who were influential in helping to shape the manuscript?

DW: There's a long list of people who helped along the way, in the form of reading drafts and providing feedback, but at the top, by a mile, is Kimberly McClintock, my partner, significant other, amore -- pick your favorite label for committed unmarrieds. Kimberly read more drafts than anyone, suffered through more revisions than anyone, consoled me more than
anyone, and gave me the hardest news of anyone. When something didn't work, she told me.
She was my first and last reader. If something didn't make her happy, it had to change.

There was also a group I called the Edgar Sawtelle Advisory Committee, my creative board of directors for this book, who'd read one or another of the drafts. I felt free to call them for sanity checks: I'm thinking of changing such-and-such, what do you think? They'd have to wrack their brains to recall how important that such-and-such was. It was incredibly valuable to have those minds to draw on. They often didn't agree, but that was perfectly fine with me. I took that as a signal that the decision wasn't simply binary, but a question of proportion, as so many
design decisions turn out to be.

There are also the teachers I studied with while completing an MFA: Ehud Havazelet,
Margot Livesey, Joan Silber, Richard Russo, and Wilton Barnhardt. They were endlessly patient.
I tend to write really wacky first drafts, and they were often confronted with crazy stuff,
out of control experiments. These were followed by many naive questions of the form, "But why NOT do it that way?"

A FINAL NOTE: TAKE A LOOK AT LYNN'S INTERVIEW WITH DAVID!

More Insights on the Writing Process

More Q&A with bestselling author David Wroblewski about the experience of working with his editor...

LR: How did it feel to have an editor to work with after having worked on the book for so long?

DW: I had contradictory emotions. It was a great relief not to be working alone anymore. I understood that I'd taken the book as far as I could on my own, and if it was going to be improved, I needed to work with someone with more experience. On the other hand, I had a fairly clear idea about how this novel ought to work. And I knew that aesthetic decisions can be made collaboratively only up to a point, after which they are emotional, intuitive, irrational. My great fear was that I would find myself in a position where I couldn't explain my reasons for revising (or not revising) something, and look like a nut case. Which I suspect I did, sometimes.

Lee, to her great credit, understood how to manage this dynamic much better than I. Immovable object v. irresistible force situations rarely happened, and when it looked like we were getting close, we talked things through. Have I mentioned that Lee is hilariously funny? She made me laugh during our editorial discussions, often precisely when we were talking about the most difficult issues.

Plus, Lee worked HARD on the editing. Sections of the manuscript had pace problems, where the drama should never have flagged and yet did. Several times, I simply could not see how to go about making repairs. When that happened, Lee pushed up her sleeves and mapped out a solution (or several) and got me rolling again. 2007 evaporated in the process. When I looked up, it was August. Then November.

more to come...

A Bestseller!

Hello All,

Since my last post about The Story of Edgar Sawtelle, the book has been steadily climbing the New York Times bestseller list, where it currently resides at #5 - very exciting for this first-time author! He has taken some time out of what is no doubt a frantically-busy schedule to answer a few more questions for us.

LR: Tell us about your experience working with your editor, Lee Boudreaux. At what point in the life of the book did she first read it? How much did it change since you two began working together?

[Note to readers: many of you who aren't in the book publishing business may never become aware of who edits a particular book, but the editor can often have a significant influence on a work. This editor, Lee Boudreaux, is well-known and respected in the industry, and is the force behind a number of high-quality works of literary fiction.]

DW: Lee first saw the book in December 2006. It had been a "completed manuscript" several times over at that point. I'd been working on Edgar for so long that I'd declared a moratorium on changing anything until some editor put the book under contract, which I expected would be never (despite the prediction of my superstar agent, Eleanor Jackson, who said it would be placed by the end of the year.) In fact, I was so sure Edgar wasn't going to be published that
I accepted a new, demanding job that November and resigned my old, comfortable job. During my two weeks' notice period, we went from no interest to several interested editors, to an auction.

Note to self: never doubt Eleanor.

That manuscript -- the one Lee accepted -- was the result of a cutting-only draft that took four months and reduced the length of the book by about 15 percent. I thought I'd cut everything that could be cut, maybe even a little more. I was wrong, of course.

LR: How did you work together – was she a hands-on editor or not?

DW: I have nothing to compare our work with, so I can't say in any absolute sense. Lee might answer quite differently than I. But it FELT as if she was hands-on, in a good way. The number one thing to know about Lee Boudreaux is that she eats rocket fuel for breakfast. Every once in a while she slows down to my speed, but it takes an effort of will on her part, and I can almost hear the thunderclap when she hangs up the phone and shifts back into her regular gear.

Lee went over that manuscript with an eye for detail that was, to put it mildly, alarming. Since I had recently cut so much, I knew she was bound to find continuity errors. But Lee probed everything, including story elements that had been givens from day one. She'd warned me, but I was still floored. It took several months to think through all her questions, and I'd be lying if I said I enjoyed it. But her questions were legitimate, across the board, and she was always
asking what was best for the book. We ended up going through the book twice more, with varying emphasis, before calling it done.

The end result was that the manuscript shrunk by an additional ten percent as we cleared away extraneous details and narrative tangents that obscured the story's larger movement. That was a surprise. I'd thought the final result might actually be longer.

[more to come...]

Wroblewski continued

LR: Many writers wish to become published authors. Being one who has achieved this lofty goal, can you describe something of how it feels?

DW: It feels like a natural outgrowth of the work, to be honest. I'm very proud of my experience in making software -- thirty years or so – which can be every bit as creative as writing a novel or making a photograph. You learn from those disciplines how arbitrary such boundaries are, between the work-in-progress and the work that is "done". It's never done. You could always do more. But nevertheless, you're finished with it, and it becomes this beautiful, foreign artifact that looks nothing like the stack of laser printer paper you've lived with for so long. Just when it becomes perfectly real to everyone else, it looks least like what you've known it to be as the writer.

I remember calling one of my writing teachers, Joan Silber, and asking how I would know when I was done with this book. I thought maybe I WAS done, I told her, but the result was by no means perfect. She said that perfection wasn't something to strive for, or even possible, in a novel. Maybe a short story, but not a novel. I've always been glad I made that phone call. I surely take comfort in that idea right now.

More Words with David Wroblewski

LR: Can you describe the contrast between the solitary work of writing and the work of promoting the book: shaking hands, signing books, smiling, posing for photos, giving interviews?

DW: As much as possible, I'm trying to approach all those activities as a wide-eyed first-timer. I don't think a person stops learning from a novel just because it is printed and on the shelves; in fact, it seems like that's when all sorts of new, interesting feedback should begin to come in. The trick, I think, is to let it accumulate before trying to make sense of it, rather than jumping on each comment as it arrives.

The question I want to answer for myself is, what is there to be learned from these things? The interviews have been great fun, by and large -- it's mainly a function of how well prepared the interviewer is, and the majority have been thoughtful and interesting. But oftentimes only 2% of what was discussed winds up in print, and the reduction can be disappointing, even when it is done well. The signings are enjoyable, but the chance to talk to people is all too brief.

We'll see. Shut up and watch, I tell myself. The received attitude from some writers is that these things are a pain in the backside. And yes, they fragment your time terribly, and take you away from your family and your routine. Unless you are that rare person who can write amidst chaos, they are hell on your writing. But they feel like a privilege to me, most especially the chance to talk with readers at bookstores.