Five Fun Things From the Lit Life

A big announcement, a mysterious woman writer + missing your vacation.

I’ve got big news! Do you know the women’s clothing store, Chicos?

Well, how cool is this? The apparel company chose ON GIN LANE as their summer book club pick. This means that Chicos will feature my novel in all 500 of their retail stores, there will be a live event featuring my book — and I have to do a photo shoot holding my book and wearing Chicos-brand clothes. Free duds! Woot! Woot! I selected this dress and this dress for photos, and I’m loving these shoes. Fingers crossed everything fits when the order arrives today!

Do you ever miss your vacation?

It’s been a month since we returned from drizzly, moody London (two of my fave pics above and below), and I can’t stop thinking about the city. My friend, writer Karen Dukess, recently told me that she loved England when she’d visited because she’d experienced so much of the country from reading novels. Being there felt like she was re-living many of the iconic scenes in some of her favorite books.

I couldn’t agree more. When I traveled to London, I felt reconnected to so many literary touchstones from the past, whether it was gawking at architecture, recognizing street names or exploring neighborhoods that figured into my favorite books. In thinking about stories that sparked my creative imagination in high school, I came back Oliver Twist and Wuthering Heights, Pride and Prejudice and Jane Eyre, A Midsummer Night’s Dream and David Copperfield — not to mention all of the more recent works that I love that are set in the environs. (I mean, do you see the ornate carving on that stone fireplace at the Thomas Cubitt Pub in Belgravia? See photos below!)

This month, my one year book subscription from Heywood Hill Books in Mayfair will begin. Every other month I’ll receive two books personally selected for me by the staff of the London bookshop, and I can’t wait to see what they put in my package first. When it arrives, I’ll tell you everything. But in the meantime, I’m curious: Do you longingly look back on some of your vacations? I want to get back to England to see even more of the country, explore the beaches and countryside, visit some of the homes of my favorite authors and spend a morning at the Churchill War Rooms. So much to see and do!

And for tonight…Broadway.

After our trip to London, I became obsessed with going to see SIX on Broadway. It’s about the six wives of Henry XIII, who happens to be one of the stars of London history, particularly when you visit the Tower of London. Also, if you haven't seen the 2008 movie The Other Boelyn Girl, starring Natalie Portman and Scarlett Johannsson as the sisters who share a complicated past with the egotistical (and crazy) king, watch it. Their stories fall into the “weird but true” category.

Someone recently asked me what my favorite Broadway show was, and I didn’t have to reach very far to name it: Kimberly Akimbo. The show, recently nominated for 8 Tony awards including Best Musical, is about a teenage girl that ages a decade for every year she’s alive and has the body of a septuagenarian. It’s a tear-jerker — the mind of a young person stuck in an old person’s body — but the show is also inspirational and dare I say, happy in the end? Still, there was an insightful profile of the actress Victoria Clark who plays Kimberly in the story in the Times. In her sixties now, she’d given up on her voice after it changed dramatically post-menopause (yet another way women get screwed!). But then Broadway came calling on her for the lead, and the changes in her voice worked perfect for this part. She brings so much heart to the role, too. Def check out this show if you’re planning a trip to NYC. (A recent visit to see a local production of Miss Saigon proves that some former hits don’t stand the test of time — this one will.)

Why Haven’t We Heard of Nancy Hale?

There was an article in the Times over the weekend about relatively unknown author Nancy Hale, a novelist in the 1930s who published 21 books in her lifetime and 80 short stories in the New Yorker. (Ten of her stories won the O. Henry award.) What fascinated me most though is that she was doing all of these things at a time when it’s often thought that women donned cloche hats and threw back whiskey sours without much ambition at all. As the Times writer, Kate Bolick says, “That this was possible both staggered and vexed me. I grew up in Hale’s small, salty corner of northeastern Massachusetts, driven by similar aspirations, which makes my ignorance of her existence all the more disheartening.”

I love articles about women outliers, and this one illustrated just how well this author straddled women’s liberation while also writing about the realities of women’s lives. It reminded me so much of this one character I’ve been developing in my latest novel. No matter what decade you’re portraying, there are always a select few that don’t play by the rules.

Buzzy Summer Books

When Emma Cline’s The Girls was released in 2017, I devoured the novel in one sitting. Her new book, The Guest came out yesterday, and it has an equally compelling plot: Main character Alex follows her boyfriend to his family’s Hamptons estate, and when they break up, it becomes clear that she lost her Manhattan apartment and has nowhere to go. Alex spends the summer couch surfing while pretending to fit in Ana Delvey-style, bouncing from one Hamptons manse to another. With Cline’s keen observations, you just know this one is going to be juicy. But in typical literary fashion, expect a big takeaway, too.

I’m also hearing a ton about Yellowface by R. H. Kuang. In the same week, I read an article about her in Salon, the Washington Post and listened to an interview on NPR. In this book, the main character, an Asian American editor in the publishing world, steals a recently-deceased author’s masterpiece novel and tries to pass it off as a her own in this takedown of racism within editorial publishing houses. Def on my list now!

Good news in the Writing Life

Lastly, my fourth novel is finally coming together. After cobbling together 77,000 words of uninspired junk, I can finally see the novel — and I’m actually enjoying sitting down to my computer again.

Here’s when I know my book is finally shaping up: I hear the characters talking to me as I’m preparing dinner. Or I fall asleep realizing what scene I need to write the following day. The book is off to the races in my head! It took so long this time to find my way, and I’ve rewritten most of the first ten chapters already. It’s singing!

I’ll share more when I can! Whee!

Have a great weekend, everyone! xoxo