Established in 2018, TBR [to be read] is a semi-regular, invitation-only interview series with authors of newly released/forthcoming, interesting books.
Give us your elevator pitch: what’s your book about in 2-3 sentences?
At a remote Southern university in the late 1980s, student
Leah Gavin becomes obsessed with a classmate’s unexplained fall from the bell
tower, then begins to realize the mystery might implicate people close to her. It’s
a literary thriller and heartfelt coming-of-age story with a kick-ass mixtape
soundtrack.
Which character did you most enjoy creating? Why? And which
character gave you the most trouble, and why?
My most enjoyable character, a frat boy named Quinn Cooper,
was intended to have only a minor role in the story: a sort-of friend Leah
doesn’t trust who has some information to deliver. But he showed up with this outsized
personality and rapacious desires and a vestigial conscience, and he just kept
demanding more space, until he became my Iago—which, in John Updike’s
terminology, is less the villain than the character who pushes all the other
characters around. He completely took over the book, in large part because he
was so much fun to write. I had the most difficulty with Leah, who is not me
but is very often standing in my place, within my emotional experience. So it
was hard to keep her vividly and precisely herself.
Tell us a bit about the highs and lows of your book’s
road to publication.
The less said about that, the better! My agent sent it out
to editors for years, but what happens to most writers who have published a few
books without selling any great numbers is that no one not already attached to
the writer will read the book. Editors just let the manuscript sit on their
desk until they have the pressure of another offer to compel them to pick it
up. Even if they do read it and love it, “the numbers” don’t support taking the
risk. So I took the book to a wonderful small press, Regal House, which has
more freedom to avoid the really destructive business model of bigger
publishers and can just publish good books.
What’s your favorite piece of writing advice?
As a teacher of writing, I have a few hundred go-to
favorites! Most of them require a whiteboard and a weird approximate drawing of
what a story looks like inside my head, just as a starting point. Maybe that’s
more instruction than advice. The best advice I’ve ever received about my own
work was “Be more forthcoming.” That’s one I’m often repeating to students who
overvalue mystery. And my evergreen, bedrock advice is read. Reading is the
best teacher. Read widely at the level of quality you hope to achieve in your
own work.
My favorite writing advice is “write until something
surprises you.” What surprised you in the writing of this book?
I’m with you on that advice! Almost everything I write
surprises me because I start from a compelling situation I don’t fully understand,
then I write to discover what’s going on. In this book, that included about 80%
of the central mystery. Also, most of Leah’s love life and several key
friendships got pulled in directions I did not expect. And some of my favorite
scenes came from just asking myself a question mid-draft like “What’s Leah’s
most intense relationship with a professor?” then writing toward that.
What’s something about your book that you want readers to
know?
The campus setting, Rockhaven, is very closely based on my
alma mater, as will be obvious to anyone who knows and loves Sewanee. I renamed
everything only to give myself the smallest room for fiction. My goal was to
write a memoir of emotion and place, a novel in which everything is true except
all of the characters and all of the events. Rockhaven as a place is so very
Sewanee in the 80s that I worry it’s going to be hard for some alums to avoid
thinking it’s a code pointing to real people and events. So I’m here to declare
that 1) none of this happened and 2) (almost) no one I know is in this book! The
exceptions are my late, great professor Douglas Paschall, who is dropped into
the book as I remember him with only a name change, and two of our presumably
late horses, Jojo and Matchless, who are playing themselves.
Inquiring foodies and hungry book clubs want to know: Any
food/s associated with your book? (Any recipes I might share?)
Leah is a poor college student and thus fairly obsessed with
food. There’s a scene in which she attends a dinner at a professor’s house and
eats a whole menu of food that’s new to her (lettuce from a garden! cheese from
a goat!). But her true love is the greasy pub food she generally has to watch
others eat, like the local delicacy known as the Granger (I kept the Sewanee name
for this as well as for our go-to cheap beer, which was literally and
meaningfully Falstaff).
The Granger
Plain bagel, toasted
½ inch of cream cheese
Bacon, cooked
2 slices of Swiss cheese
Nuke it
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READ MORE ABOUT THIS AUTHOR: www.sherijoseph.com
ORDER THIS BOOK FOR YOUR OWN TBR STACK: https://bookshop.org/p/books/angels-at-the-gate-sheri-joseph/22326772?ean=9781646036530&next=t
