Pump Up Your Book Chats with Bestselling Author Hope Edelman
Author Interviews, Featured — By Dorothy Thompson on November 11, 2009 at 11:14 am* * * * * * * * * *
Editor’s Note: Hope will be right in this very spot live on Monday, Dec. 14 from 8 a.m. until 8 p.m., answering any questions you may have about her book or her life in general. Leave a question for Hope below and she’ll be here to answer them for you on Dec. 14. We will also be hosting a book giveaway! If you would like a chance to win a FREE copy of her book, The Possibility of Everything, leave a question below with your email address underneath your comment. The winner will be announced on Dec. 15. Good luck!
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Hope Edelman is the author of five nonfiction books, including the bestsellers Motherless Daughters and Motherless Mothers. Her articles and reviews have appeared in numerous publications, including the New York Times, the Chicago Tribune, the San Francisco Chronicle, the Washington Post, The Huffington Post, Glamour, Child, Seventeen, Real Simple, Parents, Writer’s Digest, and Self, and her original essays have appeared in several anthologies, including The Bitch in the House; Toddler; Blindsided by a Diaper; and Behind the Bedroom Door (2008). Her work has received a New York Times notable book of the year designation and a Pushcart Prize for creative nonfiction. She taught in the MFA program at Antioch University-LA for six years, and can be found every summer teaching at the Iowa Summer Writing Festival. She lives in Topanga Canyon, California, with her husband and their two daughters. You can read more about her at www.hopeedelman.com and about her newest book at www.thepossibilityofeverything.com.
Thank you for this interview, Hope. Do you remember writing stories as a child or did the writing bug come later? Do you remember your first published piece?
Hope: I started writing stories in Mrs. Masarky’s first-grade class. The earliest one I remember was about a snowflake factory run by cloud-borne elves who were hard-pressed to come up with enough unique designs. In high school I lived for creative writing class, but I knew I’d have to support myself the day after college graduation so I applied to journalism schools instead. My first published piece was for the Daily Northwestern’s Halloween issue during my freshman year. It was a roundup of haunted sites around Chicago. I got to speak with honest-to-god ghostbusters. No on-site reporting, though.
What do you consider as the most frustrating side of becoming a published author and what has been the most rewarding?
Hope: The most frustrating: readers who don’t understand the distinction between the author and the narrative character she creates to represent herself, and pass judgment on the person.
The most rewarding: hearing from readers who’ve read my work and say it’s changed their lives.
The Possibility of Everything by Hope Edelman (click on cover to purchase)
Are you married or single and how do you combine the writing life with home life? Do you have support?
Hope: I’ve been married for twelve years and have two school-age daughters. I’m afraid I don’t combine my writing and home lives very well. I function better when I compartmentalize them. I’ve written the majority of my past two books via binge-writing weekends, where my husband watches the kids for two or three days in a row and I check into an inexpensive hotel up the coast and write from the moment I wake up until late into the night. During the week I usually have part-time babysitting help, but I’ve also gone for long stretches where I’ve done it on my own. When I’m traveling on a book tour, we try to find someone who can live with us for a month or two for consistent extra help.
What do you like to do for fun when you’re not writing? Where do you like to vacation? Can you tell us briefly about this?
Hope: We’re a family of skiers, and we try to do at least one ski vacation a year. As a New Yorker transplanted to Southern California, I need my winter fix. My daughters and I also spend every July in Iowa City, where I teach for two weeks and they go to summer camp. It’s a working vacation for me, but a big treat for all of us to live walking distance from everything we need.
If you could be anywhere in the world for one hour right now, where would that place be and why?
Hope: I just spent ten minutes thinking about this, and came up blank. So I guess I’d have to say exactly where I am right now, except with a better imagination.
Who is your biggest fan?
Hope: My sister. Every time a review or interview about my book is posted online, she blasts all of her 772 Facebook friends with the link.
Where’s your favorite place to write at home?
Hope: At the kitchen island, late at night, after everyone else is asleep. It’s just me and the cats and a cup of tea.
What’s your favorite library and why?
Hope: The Deering Library at Northwestern University. It’s a beautiful old building accessed only by a tunnel from the main library, and the lobby is filled with spooky gargoyle statues and worn stone stairwells. The Special Collections room has long tables and towering Gothic windows, and it’s never crowded.
What’s your favorite bookstore and why?
Hope: The old Barnes and Noble Sale Annex on Fifth Ave. and 18th Street in New York. It was right across from the flagship store, which was on the other side of Fifth Ave. This was in the 1970s and early 1980s, before Barnes and Noble became a national chain. When I was growing up, my father worked on 18th Street and Sixth Avenue, and on school vacation days I’d go in to work with him and walk a block east to spend afternoons sitting on the floor of the sale annex, thumbing through books. I was introduced to a long list of classics this way. I read all of Jane Eyre there one afternoon.
Do you have any pets?
Hope: Two cats: Timmy, a gray tabby and Sherman, an orange-and-white kitten we recently rescued. We also have a tarantula whom my daughters named Billy Bob Joe Bob Karen Robert Junior Senior Paul, but we call him Billy Bob for short.
What are you reading right now?
Hope: Bless Me, Ultima by Rudolfo Anaya, the 1972 novel about a young Chicano boy in small-town New Mexico and the curandera who comes to live with his family during World War II. It was recommended to me because I write about several native healers in my newest book.
Tell us a secret no one else knows.
Hope: I wish I could sing.
What’s the first thing you notice when you meet someone?
Hope: Their smile (or lack thereof)
Have you ever won anything?
Hope: My first writing award was my high school’s annual creative writing award when I was a junior, but nobody told me I’d won it, so I missed the award ceremony and only learned about it the next day.
What’s on your to do list today?
Hope: Get the kids off to school, brew a pot of coffee, take a shower, write a blog post for bookreporter.com, send my class descriptions in to the Iowa Summer Writing Festival director, have a 12:30 meeting with a communications strategist, go to the dry cleaner and post office, drive an hour south to Newport Beach, have dinner with a friend from my writing group who lives there, appear at a 7 p.m. house salon for the book at a private home, drive back to Los Angeles late at night.
I understand that you are touring with Pump Up Your Book Promotion in December via a virtual book tour. Can you tell us all why you chose a virtual book tour to promote your book online?
Hope: My publishing house, Ballantine, chose it but I could not be more pleased.
Thank you for this interview, Hope. Good luck on your virtual book tour!
Hope: Thanks to you, as well!
Visit Hope Edleman’s official tour page here.
Tags: author publicity, Balize, Ballantine Books, blog tour, book campaign, book promotions, book publicity, book tour, Central America, Cristo Bay, faith, healing, hope, Hope Edelman, Letters from Motherless Daughters, Mother of My Mother, Motherless Daughters, New York Times Notable Book of the Year, online book campaign, online book promotion, personal memoir, promote your book, Pushcart Prize, Random House, San Antonio, sell your book, Shamanism, spirituality, The Possibility of Everything, virtual blog tour, virtual book tour, women
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29 Comments
Welcome to Pump Up Your Book, Hope!
I was very, very fortunate to be able to review Hope’s book, The Possibility of Everything. So, I may be disqualified for the contest, if not, I am entering as I would love to give a copy of this amasing book to my sister-in-law.
I look forward to the questions and answers. There is so much to learn from Hope Edelman!
Hi Jennifer, and thank you, Dorothy, for the interview! It’s been a fantastic ride so far with this book. Sending gratitude to all the readers and reviewers who keep the passion for words alive–
I am looking forward to picking this up! IT looks great!
A non-book-related question – how’s the weather there in sunny California?
For those who don’t know, your daughter had an imaginary friend that got out of hand? Would you like to tell us about that?
How sad about missing your award! …but makes a good story now. I was fortunate to review your book but would so love to give it to my sister if I still qualify to win. My copy is making the rounds with friends reading it locally and I know she would love it being recently widowed and stuck in the cold and snow in MA, she is reading lots now. Thanks for a lovely interview and amazing book!
We had a huge rainstorm this weekend, Dorothy, but it’s sunny and bright in L.A. today. Colder than usual though, like most of the country right now.
So, my daughter’s imaginary friend…that was definitely one of the more unusual experiences my husband and I have faced as parents. He first showed up when she was on the cusp of turning three. Most imaginary friends are benign (I had one as a child whom I remember very fondly) but this one was extremely odd from the start. Instead of getting companionship or comfort from his existence, my daughter seemed to be tormented by him, and her negative behavior increased dramatically over the next few months. Tantrums, night terrors, aggressive behaviors she’d never been prone to before, those kind of things. Now, lots of three-year-olds act this way, but the change in her happened so abruptly, and she could articulate how much it upset her.
Everyone told me she’s grow out of the imaginary friend, but as time passed, she seemed to be growing more into him. She’d always been a challenging kid, but this was something else entirely. Also, with a history of mental illness in my family, I went straight to a place of concern. (I’m the catastrophizer of our family, probably due to losing my mother at an early age, so this wasn’t anything unexpected!)
We already had a family vacation planned to Belize, and we’d learned that native healers there were often effective with this kind of situation, so we made the choice to seek one out. The full story is much more detailed and complicated than this, but the short version is that I never expected it to work–yet it did.
Does Maya remember Dodo? I liked how raw the emotions were in your writing and how descriptive your writing was in this book, I felt as if I too, was in Belize.
She remembers having an imaginary friend, but she doesn’t remember him being quite as negative as the adults who were around back then remember him to be. And she remembers some of the trip to Belize in 2000, but mostly from the second half, when we’d left the rainforest for the beach.
Thanks for saying that about the descriptions! I went back to Belize on two research trips to recreate our family journey and make sure I was getting all of the details right. I’d remembered about 80 percent of it accurately, but that other 20 percent would have been very embarrassing to have gotten wrong. The most challenging part of this was returning to Placencia, because much of the town had been destroyed by a hurricane the year after we visited, so many of the places I wrote about don’t exist any more. I had to interview locals and look at old photos online to make sure I was getting the details right.
Wow, wasn’t that interesting. And how did you find out about the native healers in Balize? Internet? Friends?
When we were researching the country online we found a memoir called Sastun: My Apprenticeship with a Maya Healer by Rosita Arvigo, an American woman now living in Belize. The case studies in the book were pretty incredible, and introduced us to the idea of spiritual healing.
A lot of referrals in Belize happen by word-of-mouth. When we arrived we asked the first person we met if he knew of any local healers and he brought us to a respected one that afternoon. In some cases you don’t even call first for an appointment–you just show up, and get in line.
Now it isn’t a secret everyone knows your secret. You’ll have to find a new secret. Nice interview. I’d love to win your book. thanks
Great interview!
I love that Hope spends a few days alone in a hotel by herself writing!
I think we all should getaway by ourselves once in a while!!
Forgot my email: readingatthebeach at gmail dot com
Hope’s book sounds fascinating and I look forward to reading it. I can understand her determination to try to find a solution to her daughters problems. I have a child with health issues and can understand that need to find answers and to help your child. I haven’t taken my son to a spirtual healer but have sought out alternative health care that others deem unproven. It sounds like Hope’s book can enlighten us as parents and outsiders to get an understanding of the path she chose to go down to help her daughter.
Hope, did you first try mainstream medicine or alternative health care or was the spiritual healer your first choice?
Hi Bonnie,
I think more and more parents are starting to pursue alternative methods for children’s issues that Western approaches can’t easily solve. We’re definitely seeing a spate of books about this (like Rupert Isaacson’s The Horse Boy, and Monica Holloway’s Cowboy & Wills).
To answer your question, we first consulted with our pediatrician and with a social worker, both of whom told us what warning signs to look for (e.g. withdrawal from other children) before bringing our daughter to a child psychiatrist. When we started seeing those signs, we decided to try the alternative route first, partly because I was concerned about having my daughter incorrectly diagnosed and possibly being pressured to give her medication, as I’d seen happen to other children.
Also, the timing was exactly right, since we started seeing the signs just a few weeks before we were scheduled to go to Belize. Had our encounters with healers there not had any effect, I imagine we would have then come home to L.A. and started looking for a child psychiatrist.
When we left for Belize my daughter was getting over a case of croup and on the pediatrician’s advice we made the trip anyway. But she got much sicker on the way down, very unexpectedly, and we then gave her the medicine the mainstream doctor had prescribed. The first healer we met in Belize also gave her a chest ointment made from rainforest plants, which seemed to help a lot. So on the physical side of things we were doing both, but as far as the imaginary friend went–we tried the native healers first.
What a great interview!
I love the execution of thinking outside our social norms. I believe there is so much we don’t understand, and allow our fears to accept settling for mediocrity, or worse, a bandaid. I’ve read so many good things about your book, and hope someday to be able to read it.
I haven’t any question, but wanted to be sure and say hello and great job on the interview :^)
Thanks, J.W.! Very nice to meet you here.
Hope,
My neighbour moved here from the Appalachia Mountains and he grew up with no doctors, only medicines gathered on the mountain. To this day he uses his me-maw’s recipes. One is of plants he collects and boils and does I do not know what to and guess what, the salve it makes to put on one’s chest is very similar to Vick’s Vapo-Rub (and I think works better-nothing against the company that makes Vick’s). I think one can learn a lot if one is willing to realise this “new age” medicine is not at all new, but tested throughout history. I know your book showed me to look outside of the box.
I meant to add I am a mum to 3 teen boys, and yes, I do use the remedies my neighbour makes. So far none have failed.
We had a kid here from Chincoteague named Abraham Cherrix. I don’t know if any of you have heard of him but when the media got hold of his story, he was like on every talk show you can imagine. What happened with him is he got cancer and refused chemo. Had everyone all fired up – social services, court system. What he did was travel to New Mexico to find a natural cure and between that and Reiki, he was cancer free. Now, it took a court battle – they almost took him away from his parents because they weren’t forcing him to go through chemo but the chemo made him sicker than sick – he almost died. The problem I think is that the medical society doesn’t want you to know you can get cured holistic ways because that’s money out of their pocket but if more people would come out in the open with this, maybe we could see medical treatment go down in price?
To add to that, I kept telling him I would love to write about this…if I don’t, someone else will. He and his family were great friends when they still lived on the island. Actually I think the dad and one sister lives here but the mom and the rest of the kids moved across the bay.
I remember that story, Dorothy. The mom and her son headed out this way, I believe, and even may have stayed in Topanga Canyon (where I live) on their way to New Mexico. Or maybe their lawyer lives here. There was some kind of Topanga connection, as I recall.
Heartbreaking story…I’m so glad it turned out well for him, healthwise.
Hope has chosen a winner! Congratulations, Bonnie! You have until Dec. 18th to get us your email address. Send it to thewriterslife@yahoo.com. You will enjoy this one and congrats!
Thanks so much Hope and Dorothy! I am thrilled to be the winner and I am looking forward to reading Hope’s book. I’ve sent you an email Dorothy.
Congratulations Bonnie! Happy reading!
This looks like a really interesting book. I’ll cross my fingers that my name is picked!