FLY AWAY HOME
by Jennifer Weiner
Commercial Fiction
www.JenniferWeiner.com
3 autographed copies will be given away on Friday, July 16, 2010
New York Times Bestselling Author!
About the Book:When Sylvie Serfer met Richard Woodruff in law school, she had wild curls, wide hips, and lots of opinions. Decades later, Sylvie has remade herself as the ideal politician’s wife—her hair dyed and straightened, her hippie-chick wardrobe replaced by tailored knit suits. At fifty-seven, she ruefully acknowledges that her job is staying twenty pounds thinner than she was in her twenties and tending to her husband, the senator.
Lizzie, the Woodruffs’ younger daughter, is at twenty-four a recovering addict, whose mantra HALT (Hungry? Angry? Lonely? Tired?) helps her keep her life under control. Still, trouble always seems to find her. Her older sister, Diana, an emergency room physician, has everything Lizzie failed to achieve—a husband, a young son, the perfect home—and yet she’s trapped in a loveless marriage. With temptation waiting in one of the ER’s exam rooms, she finds herself craving more.
After Richard’s extramarital affair makes headlines, the three women are drawn into the painful glare of the national spotlight. Once the press conference is over, each is forced to reconsider her life, who she is and who she is meant to be.
Written with an irresistible blend of heartbreak and hilarity, Fly Away Home is an unforgettable story of a mother and two daughters who after a lifetime of distance finally learn to find refuge in one another.
1) No matter how many books you write, I’m sure each one has its own challenges. How was this book more challenging to write than your others? How was it easier?
I think, like many writers, my first book had the “me-character,” the character who looked like I looked, felt like I felt, talked like I talked, and was, essentially, the on-paper version of the twenty-eight-year-old me. With every book there have been bits and pieces of a me-character, but with FLY AWAY HOME I’ve got three female protagonists who are not much like me at all, including a fifty-seven-year-old married, not-really-working woman who says that her only real job is staying twenty pounds thinner than she was in law school. Not only is she not me, she’s not much like me at all, and writing in her voice was a real challenge.
Every book is a challenge, but now that I’ve written seven novels, I’ve learned what to do if I get stuck on a scene or a plot point.
2) What kind of research did you have to do to bring this story to life on the page?
I read every spouse-of-politician biography that I could get my hands on. I followed the John Edwards and Eliot Spitzer scandals obsessively (true, I probably would have anyhow – they were so juicy! – but the book gave me a legitimizing excuse).
3) What scene or bit of dialogue in the book are you most proud of and why?
In FLY AWAY HOME, there’s as scene where a couple – a physician and a med student – are role-playing in an exam room, acting as if they just met, and there’s a moment where the action is slipping from PG-13 to R, and the med student murmurs, “Does my insurance cover this?” That line made me laugh.
4) If you could have dinner with one of your characters who would it be?
Probably Maggie from IN HER SHOES.” She’s not a big eater, so I’d get to finish her French fries, and I could give her the talking-to that she so richly deserves.
5) Since becoming a writer, what’s the most exciting thing to ever happen to you?
I’d have to say the whole experience of watching IN HER SHOES become a movie. When the book was first optioned, I educated myself about the realities of Hollywood and knew that there was a very, very small chance that the project would actually end up on-screen. I think I educated myself right into a permanent state of disbelief: with every new development – about the amazing screenwriter who signed on to do the adaption, the Academy Award-winning director who was going to helm it, the stars who’d come on board – I’d say, “Yeah, yeah, that’s great, tell me when they start shooting…” Figuring, of course, that that day would never come. And when it did – and then when I got to see my grandmother, who was an extra at the ‘senior prom’ scene, shoot her dance, and go to the Toronto Film Festival, and walk the red carpet at the Los Angeles premiere, the whole thing seemed like a dream. This dream culminated after the Los Angeles premiere where, at the party at Spago, a man asked for my mother’s phone number. My mother, of course, said, “I’m a lesbian in a committed relationship!” This being Los Angeles, her would-be suitor was undeterred. “That’s okay,” he said. “Can I watch?”
At the end of the night, my siblings and I gathered outside the restaurant to wait for our cars, and all of us were laughing about the night…everyone, that is, except my Nanna, who kept poking my mother in her arm and saying, “You see that, Frances? You see? You wear a little makeup, you could get right back in the game!”
About The Author:
Jennifer Weiner is the #1 New York Times bestselling author of eight books, including Good in Bed, In Her Shoes, which was made into a major motion picture, and Best Friends Forever. A graduate of Princeton University, Weiner lives in Philadelphia with her family. Visit the author online at: www.JenniferWeiner.com
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1 comments:
I can't wait to read this, it's already on my list of books I need to get. I've read just about everything Jennifer has written and loved all of them!
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