Give us your elevator pitch: what’s your book about in
2-3 sentences?
Don’t You Know I Love You is about a young woman,
Angelina, who comes from a chaotic home learning to extricate herself from the
influence of her violent, yet charismatic father – without turning into her
mother, who forfeited her own hopes and ambitions years before. Angelina learns
more about who she is – and more importantly, who she wants to be – through
developing as an artist and falling in love for the first time, but the
patterns she’s grown up with threaten her happiness.
Which character did you most enjoy creating? Why? And,
which character gave you the most trouble, and why?
The character I most enjoyed creating is definitely
Angelina, because she undergoes the most personal growth and change throughout
the course of the novel – she starts off very armored and angry (and
understandably so!), but with a tender, protective side she’s not always sure
how to show. She becomes an artist, and in doing so, she becomes more of who
she’s meant to be, and more importantly, who she wants to be. I feel
like we so rarely see a woman artist’s coming of age, on the page; it seems so
often like it’s still the providence of broody young men. So, it was exciting
and powerful to be able to reimagine that story for a young woman, my own
version of Rebel Without a Cause.
The character who gave me the most trouble was Jack, in part
because I wanted to write about, and from the perspective of, a deeply troubled
and toxic man – without seeming like I glamorized or validated his toxicity. I
think a lot of the rise of the anti-hero we had across media a few years ago
was really instructive because it showed how seductive it can to be render a
person who does bad things in a rose-colored light, to be “edgy,” so I was very
careful to portray how Jack’s violence and destructiveness truly haunted his
daughter and his wife. Still, if I was going to put readers inside Jack’s head,
I knew I had to make it a worthy, if uncomfortable, place to sit and stay a
while – I saw my task as making him complex without exonerating him.
Tell us a bit about the highs and lows of your book’s
road to publication.
I’m always very candid about the fact that it took nearly
three years for this book to find its best home in the world because I feel
like so much of the writing world, and writing lives, that we see on social
media are so carefully curated – just the highest highs and insta-success
stories. We had a lot of so-close but not quite because many publishers were
really skittish about the intensity of the material. I was very lucky that I
have an agent who was supportive and kept sending the book out – I tell all
authors who are talking to agents to please, please, please, ask them what
they’ll do if the book doesn’t sell to the first, or second, or third, or even
fourth round of submissions – and we ended up with the perfect publisher in
Dzanc, a publisher that isn’t afraid of the hard and thorny stories, and a real
collaborator with their authors.
What’s your favorite piece of writing advice?
If something just isn’t gelling – whether that something is
a character or subplot, or even as tiny as a particular sentence structure –
don’t hesitate to let it go. Our intuition is the architect of marvelous
surprises, so trust it.
My favorite writing advice is “write until something
surprises you.” What surprised you in the writing of this book?
My initial concept for Angelina’s art was much more literal
and, in hindsight, sort of blunt. The bone drawings literally just came to me
as I was writing one day and as soon as I described the first one, I had a
lightning strike moment, like, oh yes, this is exactly what her art is supposed
to be like.
How did you find the title of your book?
The title of the book comes from the way Elliott Smith sings
the lyric “don’t you know
that I love you” in his song “Angel in the Snow”: His voice is beautiful
and haunted, knowing and raw – and that’s exactly the feeling I wanted for the
book.
Inquiring foodies and hungry book clubs want to know: Any
food/s associated with your book? (Any recipes I might share?)
I have no recipes,
but anything they’d eat on The Sopranos is definitely applicable here!
[Editor’s note: May I recommend Carmela’s
Baked Ziti?]
*****
ORDER THIS BOOK FOR YOU TBR PILE: https://www.dzancbooks.org/our-books/dont-you-know
