Ohhhh, here it comes: the review storm. The clouds are roiling, purple and green; the siren’s going off– 

The very first review of THE STORMCHASERS, today, in Publishers’ Weekly!

xoxo, 
Jenna.

Hi, everyone:  

Here’s this week’s great THOSE WHO SAVE US question, courtesy of reader Kris D.  Please send me YOUR questions and I will pick one to post!  Enjoy.

What was the significance of the Obersturmfuhrer having small feet?  Did it have to do with the Nazi obsession with perfection and any flaw had to be hidden?  Or that he couldn’t “fill a man’s shoes”?

Ha–well, really, the guy I based the Obersturmfuhrer on had very little feet, and he often tripped over them while we were walking down the street and then would say, “Heh heh heh, first day with the new feet, m’lady.”  And I would clap my hand to my forehead and think, Why am I WITH you?  You’re such a dork!

But he was also very handsome, and had a job that required him to wear a uniform (he was a pilot), and we had great chemistry.  So one basis for THOSE WHO SAVE US was a short story I wrote called “A Man In Uniform,” about the strangeness of being with somebody you have nothing in common with except chemistry.  And then I thought, What if I put him in a different uniform…..?

The little feet came intact from this story to the novel.  I thought they were a great symbol of the O’s vanity.

It’s always an exciting day when I have something in the paper, whether it’s THOSE WHO SAVE US on the New York Times list or an article in the Boston Globe. This Sunday it was the latter–a description of my encounter with Alec Baldwin.

I hope you enjoy it. I did!

There are some upsides to being a writer procrastinating on Facebook:  once in a while you get good writing discussions going.  One of my former novel students, currently circling a revision, wrote to me this morning to check in and ask how my own novel was going.  Was I writing it the same way as THOSE WHO SAVE US? she asked.  It was her hope that writing one novel would teach you how to write another, but she was starting to think that wasn’t true.  Was it?

Yeahno, for me at least, every book is a learning process. It’s good. It keeps you humble. In fact part of writing this second book, THE STORMCHASERS, is jettisoning what I learned with THOSE WHO SAVE US, because when you’ve finished a novel you’ve gotten used to working with a product that’s as close to perfect/ done as it’s going to get, and you forget how Jackson-Pollack-messy the creative process is. It does what it wants. 

Yet there are similarities: I started with the heart of both books, the situation that affects the characters most lifelong, which is not a chronological process. See, my grub street novelists (my students) would shoot me if they read that! I have become quite the vicious Structuralist in class, insisting that the problems with books are 99.9% of the time architectural, so scrupulous attention must be paid to making the structure symmetrical, non-confusing and strong.  Like the old Sesame Street song:  ’Keep it simple, to last your whole life long.’  Actually, though, the Grubbies know very well that with the first draft, it’s the other part of the song that counts: “Don’t worry if it’s not good enough/ for anyone else to hear.”  You throw it all down on paper.  It’s the revision that’s all about the Structurizing.”

To any writer tackling revisions, I wish you Godspeed.

Last week Andy (my boyfriend) and I went to see THE BOY IN STRIPED PAJAMAS at the Kendall, an art house movie theater in Cambridge, across the river from us in Boston.  I can usually lure Andy to see whatever I want at the Kendall because they have great popcorn salt of many different flavors, including barbecue, with the result that both of us ingest more salt than popcorn and have to have drinks when we come out. All in all, it’s a good evening.

THE BOY IN STRIPED PAJAMAS needed no extra salt.  I’d read the book as soon as it came out and liked it very much…but I loved the movie.  It was like being in a child’s dream of the Holocaust, with all the repetition and sinister undertones that entails.  And the ending, which I had not prepared poor Andy for, required that we sit silently in the theater until  the lights came up.  Even then, we didn’t talk (and those of you who know me know how unusual this is).  Andy dropped a kiss on my hair, just one, and I thought that this moment would stand for me when I am an old lady as a symbol of being understood, and of tenderness.

Now Bernhard Schlink’s THE READER is coming out, starring Kate Winslet.  During the trailer, there was a shot of Ms Winslet, who plays a German woman, in the bath, and I had the oddest deja-vu–because I would love for Kate Winslet to play the young Anna in the movie version of THOSE WHO SAVE US.  With her beautiful, soft, strong European-looking face, Kate is the closest thing we’ve got to Ingrid Bergman these days (she would have been my original pick, but sadly, she is not available).

I am heartened by the emergence of not one but two Holocaust-era movies during this moviegoers’ season, and I wonder if it is because, inconceivable as it is to me, there will come a day not long from now when books and movies are what we have left of survivors?  This seems remarkably unfair, that people who survived the Holocaust should not get a free pass to live forever.  But their legacy and stories, through art in various forms, will live on

Perhaps this is partly what the movie versions of such good Holocaust-era books signify, that the time still grips the contemporary imagination, and it always will.

So.  I am hopeful about the movie version of THOSE WHO SAVE US, enough that I recently stalked Alec Baldwin at a bookstore signing because I want him to play the Obersturmfuhrer. (My essay about the subsequent humiliation will be featured in the Boston Globe’s Sunday magazine on Dec. 14th.)  Who would you cast?  And do you know filmmakers who wants to  make a great Holocaust-era movie?   Send ‘em my way.

I just returned from five days in Florida, where I spoke at the Lions of Judah luncheon in Fort Lauderdale on Nov. 5 and Nancy Solomon’s book club the following day–both events scheduled somewhere back in the mists of time! and both utterly delightful.  What a treat it is for me to meet readers. 

And what an unusual question I was asked at the Lions of Judah luncheon.  I had told the ladies in attendance that despite my three years of speaking about THOSE WHO SAVE US, there is always, always one question I’ve never heard before.  One Lion of Judah reader then called my bluff beautifully by saying, “I’m sorry to ask, but is that your real hair?”

I did indeed have, em, architectural hair for this occasion.  I’ve recently realized that one fun part of getting older is getting updos, particularly when readers are kind enough to invite you to big lunches.  Before leaving Boston on Election Day, the day before the luncheon, I’d gone to my stylist and asked for an coiffure that would survive two plane flights, Election Night hysteria, a few hours’ sleep, and the luncheon the next day.  The stylist, a little tiny woman, looked dubious but said, “I’ll try.”  She threw all 100 pounds of her weight behind each of the 117 bobby pins she thrust into my head, with the result that my gorgeous, swirly birds’-nest of hair set off the metal detector at Logan and remained serenely bouffant well into the Lions of Judah luncheon.  (The Homeland Security lady at Logan was especially nice to me, I must say, and we bonded over my Obama t-shirt, our hopes for our country, and whether Sarah Palin’s hair was routinely subjected to the metal-detection wand–SP could hide a nuke in her ‘do, we agreed.)

I was delighted to have the chance to tell this story, and subsequently answer, “How about your pearls, where’d they come from?”  (my kind neighbor, Hope lent them to me), and my dress (Ann Taylor), and my shoes (Bandolino).  I stopped at describing my underwear but assured my audience that it was, like my hair, architectural.   I have reached what the French call “a certain age,” you know.

I used to tell my students, “There are no stupid questions, just stupid people who don’t ask questions.”  The questionner at this luncheon enabled a roomful of over a hundred ladies to rock with laughter and proved me right.

Today I’m opening my reader email delightedly as always, and I receive a comment that consists of only three words: “Shame on you.” Another reader lets me know that her copy of THOSE WHO SAVE US, because of the sexual content, ended up in a wastebasket in a major European city. This saddens me. I’m puzzled, too: I’ve noticed an uptick in negative responses to my novel’s sexual content in the past month. Why now, four years after the book’s release, is this reaction coming to the surface? Is it a reflection of our times? And, of course, as a teacher, I always want to help alleviate any reader confusion–such as I saw in the gently bewildered Amazon discussion of THOSE WHO SAVE US that asks why authors put so much sex in their books, anyway. Do they do it because their publishers tell them to? Because “sex sells”?

I’m not in the habit of apologizing for my authorial decisions; after all, if we limited ourselves to only pleasant subjects, there would be no good fiction–because fiction’s job is to reflect life, and life is often unpleasant. Nor is it good for a writer to over-explain why she did this or that because then there’s no mystery left in the story, and mystery is part of life–and reading–too.

But I respect my readers, and enough of them have voiced this confusion about the sexual content of THOSE WHO SAVE US that I’m happy to provide a response. Here’s what I wrote to the reader who tossed the novel in the wastebasket:

 ”…I’m sorry the sexual scenes disturbed you, but to me they were absolutely necessary–not window dressing or thrown in because ’sex sells.’ In fact, the scenes between Anna and the Obersturmfuhrer were, for me, the emotional engine that drove the novel. Why? Because Anna is a prime example of Stockholm Syndrome–moreover, she is a sexual victim of war. Many, many women suffered such ravages during wartime, and it would have been dishonest of me to write Anna’s story without this realistic component. And it’s precisely this aspect of her abuse, which Anna is unable to either understand or verbalize, that renders her so ashamed she is unable to speak to her daughter about their past.”

I also voiced the hope that, although I was unhappy about this reader’s copy of THOSE WHO SAVE US meeting an untimely demise in the rubbish bin, perhaps another reader rescued it from the trash, picked it up, and read it….who knows? As long as the story gets out into the world, I don’t much care how it does.

Happy reading,

Jenna.

Hello, hello, and welcome to the new JennaBlum.com! I’ve spent many happy days working with the heroically tolerant folks at AuthorBytes to put this site together, which on my end meant writing 50 pages of content on my books and the backgrounds. Literally!  50!  I was actually relieved to discover this. For one thing, I thought I’d spent the last three months indulging in shopping procrastination, and it turns out I was more productive than that. 

For another, I hope the illustrated stories here will give you an expanded understanding  of Those Who Save Us and a decent sneak preview of my second novel, The Stormchasers.  You won’t see much of The Stormchasers’ characters or story, which must be kept behind the curtain until the book is done. But you will get a glimpse of the novel’s architecture. I’m always fascinated by what goes into the writing of a novel–the research an author does, where the idea came from–and now, thanks to interactive media, you can see some of what’s going into The Stormchasers even as I’m constructing it. 

Since this website is emblematic of a writer’s imagination, I think it’s a little like a bazaar full of curiosities. I wish you much happy browsing here.