Meet the Author: Elin Hilderbrand

 

Meet the Author: Elin Hilderbrand

May 4, 2020 | Homepage Bottom, Homepage Hero, Lifestyle, Meet A 

I was so thrilled to get the chance to connect with the lovely, talented and very busy writer, Elin Hilderbrand. I just love breezing through her books and am excited to share she has two new books coming out this Summer and Fall!

 

28 SUMMERS will be out June 16 and TROUBLES IN PARADISE on October 3. Just what we need these days – something to look forward to, so preorder yours today and if you haven’t read all of her books, well, now is the tim to do so (with all this extra time on your hands). Enjoy diving head first into Elin’s books! Her writing is witty, engaging and entertaining. Let’s get to know the writer and mom behind the pages…

 

 

◇ Elin, thank you so much for taking the time to chat with The South Shore Moms. Tell us a bit about your background.

 

I grew up outside of Philadelphia but my family would spend the month of July in Brewster, Mass on the Cape.  Those summers were the happiest times of my life.  It was my father, my stepmother and their blended family of five children.  We rented a cottage on a sandy lane that led to the sound and we had all of these summer traditions — outdoor showers, beach days, grilling out, miniature golf, soft-serve ice cream, falling asleep with sand in the sheets.  Then, when I was sixteen, my father was killed in a plane crash and those summers came to an end.  I spent my seventeenth summer working in a factory that made Halloween costumes.  It was 1986 and I spent 8 hours a day folding Rambo headbands.  I made a promise to myself that somehow I would find a way back to the beach.  When I graduated from college (Johns Hopkins, in Baltimore) I moved to New York City.  I taught 8th grade English — first in the NYC public schools, and then I got a better job teaching in Westchester county (fun fact: the actor Max Greenfield of NEW GIRL was my student that year!) . I had the summer between those two years off so I headed back up to the Cape and Islands, specifically Nantucket, where I had rented a room in a house for the summer.  And I fell so in love with it that as soon as that second school year was over, I moved to Nantucket permanently.  That was in 1994.

 

◇ Wow, what an incredible story. I’m sorry to hear about your father. I love how you found your happy place at such a young age and made it your mission to get back there. Tell me about your kids. 

 

I have three children.  Maxx, 20, is a sophomore at the University of South Carolina.  Dawson, 18, is a junior at Brewster Academy in Wolfeboro, NH.  And Shelby, 14, is in eighth grade at the public school on Nantucket.

 

◇ What is your favorite moment as a mom to date?

 

All three of my kids are incredible athletes.  My best memory was with my oldest, Maxx.  When he was 11, he was invited to play on the 12-year old baseball all-star team.  After his first or second practice, he was visibly upset when I went to pick him up.  When I asked what was wrong, he said “Joey said I didn’t belong on this team because I’m not good enough.”  The following year, Maxx was a 12-year old on the 12-year old all star team.  The team went to Cooperstown for a week-long tournament and in their final game, Maxx hit three home runs in a row, the last of which was a grand slam.  And Joey was there to witness it.  It was a moment of such ridiculous poetic justice, I can’t believe it’s real.  But yes, it happened.  

 

◇ Ha, Go Maxx! Incredible. What would you say is the toughest part about being a mom?

 

Everything is tough!  But I had a couple of wham-doozy years in there.  When the kids were 13, 11 and 7, my husband and I got divorced and I moved out.  And then the following year, when the kids were 14, 12 and 8, I was diagnosed with breast cancer.  When I look back, I think: How on earth did we make it through all that?  But now, it’s 5+ years later, my ex-husband and I are great friends and I’m healthy.  I will also say that traveling when the kids were younger was very difficult.  There’s a saying about working moms: When you’re at work, you feel like you should be with the kids.  When you’re with the kids, you feel like you should be at work.  That is my life.

 

◇ Wham-Doozy. That’s a good way to put it. What is the best advice you have ever received as a mom?

 

There is no such thing as a “good” mother.  There is only such a thing as a “good enough” mother.  And I’m confident that most of us are good enough.

 

◇ What is the best advice you would like to give to a young mom or a new mom reading this?

 

Have something of your own: a career, an interest, hobby, purpose.  Otherwise it’s just too easy to get subsumed into the house and the kids and losing yourself.

 

◇ So true. Elin, how did you decide to become an author?

 

In second grade at the end of the year, my teacher gave everyone in our class an award.  And my award was the Top Author award.  I said to myself, “Yes, I am an author.”  Age seven.

 

◇ Wow. Amazing! What do you love most about writing?

 

I love bringing Nantucket specifically and summertime in general to people who maybe don’t have a chance to experience summer the way that I do.  

I love creating characters and getting to know them.  And then pragmatically, I love the freedom that writing novels affords me.  I don’t have a boss and I don’t have to report to an office.  

 

◇ What is the toughest part about being a writer?

 

Everything is tough!  When I was at the Iowa Writers Workshop, John Irving came to speak.  He said, “If you can do something other than write, do something else.”  Writing, much like parenting, means you succeed and fail every day. 

 

◇ It must be such a journey. What was it like becoming a successful writer?

 

When I graduated from Johns Hopkins in 1991, I went to my writing professor, Madison Smartt Bell, and asked him what to do next if I wanted to be a writer.  He said, “Go out in the world and live.”  I moved to New York City, worked in publishing for nine months, hated it, then realized what I needed was a job that would give me blocks of time to write.  I taught English, first in the NYC public schools, and then in Dobbs Ferry (suburbs).  The summer between the two school years, I sublet my apartment and rented a room in a house on Nantucket.  The house I lived in was a complete hovel.  Now, when I drive my kids past it, they don’t believe I used to live there.  Despite this, that summer was revelatory.  I fell madly in love with Nantucket and I decided that I wanted to go back to live permanently.  That happened the following summer, 1994.  I traveled the globe in the off season, backpacking through Southeast Asia, Australia, New Zealand, South and Central America.  Then, feeling like I had sufficiently “lived,” I applied to graduate school.  I attended the University of Iowa Writers Workshop, which is the best writing program in the country — but, guess what, it’s in Iowa.  I was miserable.  I missed everything about Nantucket and was so depressed that I used to go to therapy every week (it was free for students) and cry.  Eventually, I decided I could create my own therapy — and I started writing a novel set on Nantucket.  That novel was THE BEACH CLUB.  In my final Iowa workshop, my professor invited his agent to the class.  The agent asked which one of us lived on Nantucket.  I raised my hand and he asked for me to stay after class.  (I didn’t want to — my U-Haul was parked in front of my apartment and ready to go!). But thank goodness I did, because that agent, Michael Carlisle took me on as a client (he had grown up spending summer on Nantucket) and he has been my agent for 20 years.

 

I want to say that just getting my first book, THE BEACH CLUB, published did not a successful career make.  This happens VERY rarely — let’s say a book like Crawdads, which is a success right out of the blocks.  I didn’t have a “break out” book until I switched publishers in 2006.  My first five novels sold modestly and I used to cry out of frustration because I didn’t feel like my publisher was promoting them properly (they weren’t).  When I wrote BAREFOOT, my agent suggested we switch publishers and I ended up at Little, Brown.  They turned the next 19 books into NYT best sellers, building my career book by book, summer by summer, year by year.  This past summer, my novel SUMMER OF ’69 debuted at #1 on the NYTBSL.  Dream come true.

 

◇ Incredible. I love your books, and love knowing so much more about your background now. Tell us about your new book coming out in 2020.

 

My 2020 novel is called 28 SUMMERS.  It’s based on the play “Same Time Next Year.”  A couple gets together every summer on Nantucket for 28 summers.  The twist is that the man in the couple is married to a woman who is running for President.  Should be very timely for summer 2020!  It’s out June 16th.

 

◇ Can’t wait to read it. Do you have a favorite passage or quote from one of your books?

 

There’s a passage in my novel BAREFOOT where my main character, Vicki, thinks she’s dying and she tells her sister, Brenda, all the things Brenda will need to do for her kids once Vicki is dead.  And then she says, “No one else can do this.  To do this, there is only you.”  It’s a poignant mom moment and also a poignant sister moment.

 

◇ Do you have a favorite book?

 

A couple of truly extraordinary books I’ve read recently include WHITE FUR by Jardine Libaire and THE MOST FUN WE EVER HAD by Claire Lombardo

 

◇ I will have to add those to my list of books to read during quarantine. Tell us, who inspires you?

 

I’m inspired by women who succeed on their own merit.  Diane von Furstenberg, Lady Gaga, Christine Lagarde, Ann Patchett, Margaret Atwood.

 

◇ How do you balance being an author and a mother?

 

Now that I’ve been at it twenty years, I can say that I have eliminated a lot of things in my life that aren’t writing or parenting.  Those are my two foci and everything else takes a backseat — the committees and the charities and the friend drama and all the stuff that created white noise in my twenties and thirties, I’ve gotten rid of.  It’s liberating.

 

◇ Love that. Anything else you would like to share with our readers?

Well, I’m writing these answers during the pandemic, so I guess I’d like to ask you all, if you can, to support local businesses, and especially local bookstores.  If you’d like to pre-order a copy of 28 SUMMERS and want it signed and personalized, you can visit the Nantucket Book Partners and order it and they’ll ship.  Many thanks!

 

 

Thank you, Elin!

https://thesouthshoremoms.com/meet-the-author-elin-hilderbrand/

THE SOUTH SHORE MOMS

BOOK OF THE DAY
BOOKS OF THE YEAR

The Employees: A Workplace Novel of the 22nd Century by Olga Ravn review – ‘Am I human?’

Shortlisted for the International Booker prize, this science-fiction satire on corporate language is a miracle of concision

Five of the best science fiction and fantasy books of 2021

Justine Jordan
Wed 12 May 2021

From the mysterious monoliths in 2001: A Space Odyssey to the impossible spaceship in Arrival, one of science fiction’s favourite tropes is the alien artefact that defies human comprehension. Danish author Olga Ravn’s brilliantly unusual novel The Employees, which has been shortlisted for the International Booker prize, is an SF epic in miniature, but it takes a prosaic approach to our dreams of extraterrestrial transcendence. “It’s not hard to clean them,” says a crew member of the strange objects found on the faraway planet New Discovery, now housed in the Six-Thousand Ship orbiting above. “I normally use a little brush.”

The Employees is not only a disconcertingly quotidian space opera; it’s also an audacious satire of corporate language and the late-capitalist workplace, and a winningly abstracted investigation into what it means to be human. The book takes the form of a series of statements – some missing, some with material redacted – made by the crew to a bureaucratic committee investigating the effects of the strange objects: not what they might be or reveal, but how they might “precipitate reduction or enhancement of performance, task-related understanding and the acquisition of new knowledge and skills”.

“I’m not sure, but isn’t it female?” asks that same cleaner about one of the objects. The novel is saturated from the outset in ontological uncertainty; the crew is made up of both humans and humanoids, the born and the grown, but it is not always possible to work out from their statements which is which. Where one humanoid cannot imagine any meaningful activity beyond the work they were created for, another insists on their burgeoning selfhood: “I may have been made, but now I’m making myself.” It might merely be a question of bureaucracy. “Am I human? Does it say in your files what I am?” asks one crew member. The statement that reads in its entirety “My body isn’t like yours” is a reminder that humanity may lie in the eye of the beholder.

In the midst of corporate jargon, the novel is haunted by longings, dreams, lyrical fragments of memory from a long-lost Earth. It is haunted too by its genesis as a companion piece to a 2018 art installation by Lea Guldditte Hestelund exploring “the relationship between different types of presence and body”, both human and not. The alien finds in the novel that draw, repel and provoke the different crew members are recognisably the objects in the exhibition, now archived online. Ravn maps the exhibition room on to the spaceship: the same white walls, sterile spaces, corridors between installations; even the “niches in the walls where you can hang your suit”. Art galleries and spaceships are both playgrounds for the cultural imagination; in another uncanny layer to an eerily rich text, by the end of the novel the ship itself becomes a macabre kind of museum piece.

Despite the sterile setting and often chilly prose, The Employees is a deeply sensory book, suffused with aroma and alert to tactility. The materiality of the objects makes crew members long to put them in their mouth; to discover where the limits of the self end, like babies learning about their new world. The image recurs of a marble or wooden sphere rolling around inside a mouth, person and possession in intimate proximity. The pages crawl, also, with disturbing up-close descriptions of egg clusters, open pores with tiny stones in, flesh specked with dots, pomegranates stuffed with seeds. It is as though Ravn is channeling trypophobia, disgust for clusters of holes or bumps, to evoke fear of the nonhuman. “Repetitive, organic structures are unbearable,” reads one statement. “They cannot be destroyed and will continue to regenerate.” There are affinities here with the unleashed vegetal energies in Jeff VanderMeer’s novels about mutation and nonhuman sentience. As relations break down between human and humanoid, one declares, “I’m a pomegranate ripe with moist seeds, each seed a killing I’m going to carry out.”

It is astonishing how much Ravn achieves in her small canvas of 130-odd pages: she muses on transhumanism, illuminates the dreamlike logic of inner lives, contrasts artistic and religious impulses with the anti-human reductionism of corporate jargon. And she does all this while retaining an elliptical, open-ended mystery and a delicately elegiac tone. Translator Martin Aitken perfectly balances all the different registers and voices (though DIY enthusiasts may be jolted by repeated references to taking the alien objects “back to Homebase”).

Like humans, the humanoids are always chasing their own metaphysical tail. “In the programme, beneath my interface, there’s another interface, which is also me…” This clever, endlessly thought-provoking novel catches something of our recursive search for the nature of consciousness; a question that answers itself, a voice in the darkness, an object moving through space.

 The Employees: A Workplace Novel of the 22nd Century is translated by Martin Aitken and published by Lolli Editions (£12.99).

THE GUARDIAN

Ne Me Quitte Pas by Cristina Peri Rossi

 

Ne Me Quitte Pas 

By Cristina Peri Rossi

Translated from Spanish by Megan Berkobien

“I can’t seem to remember her,” the man said in anguish. “I can’t remember her face or her body or her voice—that voice that I once adored. I have this mental image that her voice was pleasing, but the sound isn’t there. Do you understand? How can you be in love with someone whom you can’t seem to remember? We’ve only been separated for six months.” (The psychologist jotted something down in his notepad that passed unnoticed by the man who couldn’t remember. Igor Caruso, a famous psychoanalyst during the ’70s, wrote a lucid and heartbreaking essay about the separation of lovers; he observed that separated lovers cannot remember the face of their beloved ones.)

The Arbor by : In the footsteps of Rita, Sue and Bob

 

Andrea Dunbar

The Arbor: In the footsteps of Rita, Sue and Bob

By Liam Allen
22 October 2010

Innovative documentary The Arbor uses lip-synching techniques to give life to audio interviews telling the story of tragic playwright Andrea Dunbar.

The raw, working-class realism of 1986 film Rita, Sue and Bob Too - written by Dunbar and set on Bradford's Buttershaw estate - has helped to make it a cult classic.

Her story of the friendship between two schoolgirls who begin an affair with a married man was straplined: "Thatcher's Britain with her knickers down."

Image caption,

Rita, Sue and Bob Too was straplined: "Thatcher's Britain with her knickers down"

"I really love the film, I really love the friendship between the two girls, I really love the fact that it doesn't really moralise about them enjoying sex," says the documentary's director Clio Barnard, also from Bradford.

"But I suppose I didn't really know much about Andrea so I hadn't really realised where that writing came from, or where that talent came from, and I didn't know her plays."

The director's journey of discovery began with visits to the Buttershaw estate and Dunbar's street, Brafferton Arbor, to meet those who knew the writer - a heavy drinker who died of a brain haemorrhage in 1990, aged 29.

Interviews were recorded "to create a sort of a screenplay that you listen to rather than read".

Insightful reminiscences from figures from the writer's past - and two of the three children she had with three different fathers - are brought to life by actors who mime along.

"The actors did a phenomenal job because they had to learn it like a piece of music - technically it's very challenging," says Barnard, 45.

"In addition, they had to give a nuanced performance so I think they really did a remarkable job."

The "verbatim" technique used by Barnard was partly inspired by Dunbar's ear for raw dialogue that is such a central part of her autobiographical writing style.

"Part of what I really like about Andrea's writing is it uses peoples words as they say them, that it's verbatim - it felt important that it was in people's own words."

As Barnard's unique documentary progresses, the focus shifts from Andrea to what became of her eldest daughter, Lorraine, now 29 - the age her mother was when she died.

The interviews with Lorraine, a former drug addict, were recorded in prison where she was serving a sentence following the accidental death of her two-year-old son, who died after ingesting drugs.

Image caption,

Lorraine Dunbar is played by Manjinder Virk

Lorraine's interviews in The Arbor - mimed by actress Manjinder Virk - show that she shares Andrea's way with words, succinctly putting across her feelings about her mother's work, her bitter childhood memories and her own troubles.

"I think she can talk about very complex, difficult things, very directly with very few words - I think she's got a real gift for that," says Barnard.

Lorraine's younger sister Lisa, whose voice is also prominent, says watching actress Christine Bottomley mouth her words was "very strange - I had to keep pinching myself 'cos I thought it was me".

Lisa - who was 10 when Andrea died - has a more idolized view of her mother than sister Lorraine, who she says she has not spoken to for years.

"She used to always write at night-time in her bedroom," she remembers.

Image caption,

Dunbar had three plays produced - The Arbor, Rita, Sue and Bob, and Shirley

"In the morning, you'd go in and there'd be a little bedside bin and it would just be full of screwed-up paper."

Her abiding memory of the first time she watched Rita, Sue and Bob Too is of feeling "disgust at all the swearing".

"When I was 14, I saw it for the first time and everyone at middle school had seen it at about that time and everybody wanted to talk to me and sit near me."

Although Andrea Dunbar's masterpiece was made into a film by Scum director Alan Clarke in 1986, it was originally performed as a stage play - the writer's second - four years earlier.

Barnard's documentary is interspersed with both archive footage and excerpts from a modern-day performance of her first play - also called The Arbor.

Her debut work - which she began as part of a school project - was premiered at London's Royal Court in 1980 after her raw talent was spotted by theatre director Max Stafford-Clark.

Like Rita, Sue and Bob Too, it explores themes familiar to Andrea including abusive relationships, teenage pregnancy and alcoholism.

Image caption,

Newcomer Natalie Gavin performed alongside Jimi Mistry in an open-air performance of The Arbor

For the treatment featured in the documentary, open auditions were held on the Buttershaw estate ahead of an open-air performance to residents of the Brafferton Arbor.

The cast is led by former Buttershaw resident Natalie Gavin - a theatre studies student at Huddersfield University - who gives a wholly believable performance as a young Andrea.

Gavin, 23, says the atmosphere while filming the play on Brafferton Arbor was "kinetic" because residents "were involved in it and they were allowed to be in it, and it made it magic".

She says her involvement is fated because of the connections she shares with Andrea - they went to the same school and her father lived on Brafferton Arbor where he knew Andrea.

"I want to pursue my talent and she wanted to pursue hers," she says.

"She went out there and did it and that's exactly what I'm doing, through her, as well as being in her surroundings."

For Andrea's youngest daughter Lisa, meanwhile, the project has been "amazing - weird, but in a good way".

"I'm very proud of my mum.

"When I was younger, nobody really spoke about the film but, after she died and I understood more, it was like: 'That's her whose mum wrote Rita, Sue and Bob Too.'

"The only thing that upsets me is that she's not here to have this fame for herself.

"She didn't get much fame when the film first got released - it's after her death that it's all taken off."

BBC