“Warning: Cape does not enable user to fly.”— label from a Batman costume

—from Learning to Fly, Chapter One

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FAQ

Q. Has there been any movie interest in your books?

A. Circles of Confusion was at one time on Drew Barrymore’s short list—but she made Riding in Cars With Boys instead. Learning to Fly has been kicking around. More details later if something develops.

Q. Have you ever been a bone marrow donor?

A. No, although I have been called back in for further testing. The man who needed a transplant lived back East and was in his forties. Unfortunately, I did not match. Being tested to be a bone marrow donor is as simple as giving blood, and being an actual donor is not much more complicated. If you are interested, I strongly advise that you contact your local branch of the American Red Cross. Since your bone marrow reflects your genetic heritage, there is a huge need for minority donors.

Q. Have you yourself been to a high school reunion?

A. Yes, I went to both my 10th and then my 20th a couple of years ago. My high school was much bigger than Claire's. I actually met people for the first time while standing in line for the banquet—even though we had gone to the same high school and graduated the same year. However, I should say that none of the characters in Heart-Shaped Box are based on real people, whether living, dead or lying really, really still.

Q. Have you sold any foreign rights?

A. Yes, a French textbook company paid $100 for the right to translate a single page of Circles and run it side-by-side with the English in a textbook for teenagers learning English. Most of my books have sold in Japan. (They don’t translate the license plates, just run them in English). Learning to Fly and Buried Diamonds have sold in France. Learning to Fly was translated into Dutch. Shock Point will come out in German at the end of 2006.

Q. What are you working on now?

A. I like to write both light and dark books. Right now, I’m working on a thriller about a 16 year old who is an undercover FBI informant for an extreme environmental group. And there’s something funny in the works.

Q. In Learning to Fly, the main character is handed a
chance to reinvent herself. Do you think this is a common fantasy?

A. I think we all dream of what we might have been, or might still be. On this dream has been built every gambling establishment, every Glamour Shots franchise, every lottery game, every makeover in a magazine or on TV, every diet from cabbage soup to high protein, etc. In reality, even if you change the way you look, you still don’t have much money, or if you win a bunch of money you still have the unhappy marriage, or if you run off with the man of your dreams, you still have your bad habits. It was fun to write about a woman who ends up with a lot of money and the ties to her past completely severed.

Q. In Learning to Fly, one character is on the run from her abusive husband. Do you have any personal experience with domestic violence?

A. I used to work with a psychologist who had a big blind spot when it came to his own staff. Our receptionist would come in with her face masked with heavy foundation, but underneath you could still see the bruises left by her husband’s fist. She told me about how he was convinced she was having sex with every man she met—our nerdy boss, the bag boy at the grocery store, men she walked past in parks. Every time she returned home, he used to make her take off her clothes and examine them and her body for “evidence.” She was a beautiful young woman with very low self esteem. I encouraged her to leave her husband, offered to take her and her daughter in, and gave her the number for a woman’s shelter. When I left that job, she was still with her husband.

Q. The details of the multi-car accident that takes place at the beginning of Learning to Fly are so vividly described. It it based on a real accident?

A. Yes. In September of 1999, after a long dry summer, a farmer was plowing his wheat fields in Eastern Oregon on a blue-sky day. A freak wind whipped up and dust covered the roadway. Instantly, everything went black. Later, they found dead people in cars with the cruise controls still set at 75 miles an hour. One person involved in the accident tried to go back to warn others. He waved at them, but the passing drivers either just waved back or gave him the finger. The last sight the young man had of one trucker was the trucker driving full bore into the
dust storm, both hands off the wheel as he waved at the young man. The dust storm caused several chain reaction car accidents. I combined them into one.

Oregon is also notorious for field-burning accidents. Grass seed growers burn their fields, and the resulting smoke can drift over the freeway, causing the same kind of absolute darkness and chain-reaction accidents. In the 1980s, one such accident caused the deaths of author William Wharton’s daughter, son-in-law, and two grandchildren.

One more real event inspired some of the details in the book: the London train fire. This fire burned so hot they had no idea who had been involved in the accident. It destroyed all evidence. The police were reduced to going to train stations and looking for cars that had been parked there for a long time, then tracking down the owners to see if they were missing.

Q. I understand that one of your main characters in Learning to Fly ended up going in a different direction when you were the victim of a real-life crime. Can you tell me more about that—and what you learned that you never wanted to?

A. When I began writing the book, I had a character who was a generic patrol cop. After we were burglarized in August of 2000, a criminalist came to our house to take fingerprints. He was so interesting that I ended up changing my patrol cop into a criminalist. That night, he showed me all the contents of his kit and taught me how to dust for fingerprints. Later I interviewed him to learn more about his job and why he had chosen it.
When I first entered our house after the burglary, I rationalized what I saw. All the doors and cupboards gaped open, but it was a Friday and our house often looks especially messy on a Friday. Our new phone was gone, but perhaps my husband had taken it with him when he left for work for some reason. The further in the house I got, though, the more I knew something was wrong.
I called 911 on my cell phone from the porch. While I was out there, some boys pulled up in our neighbor’s driveway and stared at me. I noticed them because our neighbors are Cambodian, as are all their visitors, and these boys were white with backwards baseball caps. I thought I would remember their license plate, but I didn’t. So the first lesson I learned was to write down anything you think might be important. Because an unrelated murder had happened shortly before, the cops were slow in responding. My husband got home before they did. The burglars had left a walkie-talkie behind, one of those sets that people sometimes buy to keep track of their children at malls. The cop said they no longer had to rely on the lookout on the corner whistling to warn them. He took the walkie-talkie with him to see if it could be fingerprinted. Later, the cop stormed back into the driveway, shouting “Have those jerk-offs been here?” I thought that wasn’t a very professional way to refer to his fellow officers, but it turned out he meant the burglars, not the criminalist. It seems the burglars had discovered the loss of their walkie-talkie and were taunting us on it, saying “We took your fax machine. We took your camera,” in a song-song voice. If that wasn’t enough of a clue that our burglars were probably just out of school for the summer, there was also the fact that among the items they stole was a box of Trix cereal.

Another lesson I learned is to walk through your house with a video camera, lingering on all of your CDs, and then take the video and put it someplace else, like at your office. Not only would this have provided proof of what we lost, it also would have helped us remember what we had to replace. A year and a half later, my husband is still remembering the titles of stolen CDs.

Here are some other lessons I learned:
- Burglars will steal your suitcases so they can use them to carry away your stuff.
- According to the criminalist, burglars avoid houses with neatly trimmed hedges. You could now put a level on top of our hedge.
- It’s a lot harder to recover decent finger prints from a crime scene than you might think.
- I asked the criminalist if they had a special way to deal with fingerprint powder that got on their clothes. He said, "Yes. It’s called throwing them away." This is why criminalists often dress in black.

Q. Have you ever done anything so you could write about it later?

A. As much as possible, I try to experience what my main character might. I’ve had my husband grab me from behind so that I could describe what it would feel like more accurately, for example. I’ve dressed up as a giant mascot bug and observed how people interacted with me—or more accurately, the bug I was portraying. In Learning to Fly, Free is kidnapped and has her hands tied behind her with duct-tape. I tore off a strip, handed it to my daughter, put my hands behind my back, and persuaded her to wrap it around my wrists. Then she wandered off to play. When I finally got her attention again, she had a hard time undoing the tape. I finally was forced to free myself. It certainly lent a verisimilitude to writing that scene. I also drove my car for a short distance (down a deserted street) with my hands tied in front of me.

Q. In Learning to Fly, one of your main characters has panic attacks. Have you ever experienced a panic attack?

A. For a period of six months, I suffered panic attacks when I drove. Not all the time, which was almost worse. My scalp would prickle and I would be overcome with the feeling that I was shutting down, about to pass out or die. Needless to say, this was very scary, especially driving 55 miles per hour on the freeway. While my life doesn’t have any more or less stress than it did then, panic attacks no longer trouble me. And if I ever feel that prickly sensation, I’ve learned to distract myself and to take deep breaths.

Q. How is writing a thriller different from writing a mystery?

A. . In a mystery, the reader discovers along with the sleuth, who the killer or the do-er of the evil deed is. In a thriller, the question usually isn’t who the murderer is. The question is—will the main character make it out alive?

Q. Your first published book, Circles of Confusion, sold in two days. Was this an example of overnight success?

A. I wish I could say yes, but my “overnight success” was built on three previous novels that never found a publisher. For these, I garnered over a hundred rejection slips, first from agents and then, once I found an agent, from publishers. During this time I
met other talented writers who gave up after a handful of rejections. I decided to persevere. I truly believe that tenacity is as important as talent.

Q. Has the Internet changed the way you do your research?

A. Completely. Rather than having to go down to the library, look in the Readers’ Guide, find the relevant source, etc, I can get a lot of the basics off the Internet. Say I wanted to know how alarm systems work, as I did for Square in the Face, or how to go about making meth, which played a part in Learning to Fly, then I can use a search engine and hit gold within a few minutes. While I always think its good to supplement research into printed pieces—whether they are on paper or on the Internet—with talking to people, the Internet gives me a great first step. The Internet has also allowed me to email sources with questions or with chapters to review and get their response much quicker than if I were using the mail. For Heart-Shaped Box, I relied on firearms instructors in Colorado and Florida to know such things as whether an AK 47 has a matte or shiny surface. In the book I’m finishing up now, Buried Diamonds, I emailed a chapter about a dog with strychnine poisoning to a vet at the local animal hospital. By e-mail, she was able to give me details (like dogs assume a "sawhorse stance" with this type of poisoning) that I hadn’t gotten through Web searches alone.

Q. Do you think writing about murder and violence capitalizes on it?

A. In real life, the motive for murder is often banal or springs from so much craziness that we’ll never understand it. Killers aren’t brought to justice, or when they are, they are revealed to be pathetic losers or psychopaths. Novels make more sense than real life, which is why we read them. In a mystery, you can imagine yourself matching wits with the killer, get a little frightened, be relieved when justice is served, and then close the covers and go off to bed. All that being said, most writers I know told me that they were sticking to “comfort reads” in the weeks immediately following Sept. 11.

Q. How do you manage to sustain your productive writing career while working full-time and raising a child?

A. The secret is that I’ve realized I can’t be the best at everything, all the time. There have been times I’ve been an inattentive mother, a crappy cook, a less-than-creative writer, a messy housekeeper, and a runner who walks more than she runs. I just try to rotate my areas of poor performance, so that no one area is bad all the time.

Q. What is a typical day like for you?

A. I get up at 5 am, check my email, and either go for a run or ride an exercise bike. Running allows me to think and riding allows me to read great books. I spend my work hours writing for our employees and patients, which can involve anything from learning about new medical research to interviewing an ex-Hell’s angel about his motorcycle accident. I also answer calls from the media. My worst nightmare is to be talking to be a reporter and hear the tell-tale click-clack of keys. I’m too much of an extrovert to be a good media flack. When I leave work I pick up my daughter, make a quick dinner, and then try to write for an hour or a little more. I also help my daughter with her homework, read to her, talk to my husband, leaf through the New York Times, and do a million other things before falling into bed about 10. The good thing about this crazy life is that I now sleep very soundly.

Q. What do I do if I have a question for April?

A.

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