Q & A and Giveaway ~ Hotel No Tell by Daphne Uviller

Q&A with Daphne Uviller, author of Hotel No Tell

Q: You used to work for a New York City law enforcement agency. How much of Zephyr’s adventures in Hotel No Tell come from your actual experience? 

A: I worked for a watchdog group that investigates crime and corruption in the public school system. None of the cases that the fictional SIC handles is identical to any real one I worked on. But, certainly, I drew on the hubris of our perps and the astounding ability of people to deny to themselves that they’re committing a crime. For instance, I make mention of a school principal taking kickbacks, which was the theme of more than a few of our cases. I also borrowed from the enormous and enormously entertaining personalities of my former colleagues. One thing that is completely true: most of the investigators were named Tommy.

Q: Zephyr’s investigative skills could use a little honing. Is this the right career for her?

A: She’s definitely not the smooth, gun-slinging, clear-thinking cop of so much popular fiction. She fails to catch last names, she can’t describe what people look like, she’s a little rash in a lot of her actions. But she’s nosy, genuinely curious, and innately caring. She gets people to talk to her. I wanted to capture the reality of people having unusual talents, not uniform ones, of showing how people can have skills that can’t be described on a resume. She’s learning on the job and I love that about her. She’s who a lot of us would be if we were thrown into her position.

Q: Zephyr is adamant about her decision not to have children, so much so that, at the beginning of the book, she and Gregory have broken up over it. You have two kids; are you worried what they’ll read into this?

A: First of all, I hope they’ll remember that I’m not Zephyr. Fiction is many things for a writer, including an outlet for exploring paths not taken. I felt very strongly that Zephyr not go the mommy route. I’m living it; I don’t want to read about it, let alone write about it. (That said, I shoveled some of my darkest feelings onto Lucy, and doubled it by saddling her with twins.) So I started there – my lack of interest in making her a mother – and then went further. Why not have her struggle to make peace with her child-free status be her personal challenge, as the quest for professional identity was in Super? Let’s examine the societal assumption that we’re all supposed to have kids, when the truth is that parenthood is tough, so tough that at some point, all parents wonder why they took it on. Without children there would be, as Zephyr says, more time, more money, less stress, more sleep, more growth of the mind. But by the end of the book I was more convinced than ever that I had made the right decision for myself and that Zephyr had made the right one for herself.

Q: Which is quite an accomplishment, given that Zephyr is often plagued by a lack of resolution to her problems.

A: One of Zephyr’s stumbling blocks is her belief that you need to tie up loose ends in order to move on to the next stage of life. By the end of Hotel, Zephyr is accepting the discomfiting fact that you can’t wait for certain unknowns to resolve – both in the criminal case she has mostly solved, and in her personal struggle with potential parenthood – in order to move forward. Wait forever and you’ll never grow up.

Q: But wouldn’t you say the book itself has an almost comical number of closures in the final chapter?

A: It’s true – in the plot itself, I love not only to tie up loose ends but to provide delicious and, I hope, funny and satisfying and surprising connections – perhaps as an antidote to those pesky loose ends. E.M. Forster’s directive [“only connect”] can be applied to storytelling as much as to real life.

Q: Right after Super in the City was published, you, like Lucy, were unwillingly transplanted to the suburbs. How has it been living away from the city while writing so intimately about it?

A: When we first moved away, I complained so much that a friend of mine who’s a lit professor rolled her eyes and promised to list me on her syllabus for Writers in Exile, right next to Salman Rushdie. Friends had lofty hopes for my situation, suggesting that it could be some deep new angle from which to view my city. It hasn’t been. What it has been is a great way to keep living there in my head, even as I live somewhere else. In fact, continuing to write about the city may contribute to my current identity problem: I still haven’t managed to say “I live in the Hudson Valley.” I say, “We’re living in the Hudson Valley, but we still own my childhood apartment in the Village.” It’s juvenile, I know.


Q:How did you come up with the idea of an egg donor scam? 

A: Close friends were going through the process of selecting a donor and asked my opinion of the three finalists. It’s not like I didn’t know about egg donation, but watching people I loved go through the process -- and getting to have a small voice in selecting the seeds of my future niece or nephew -- really set my mind racing. I remembered seeing ads in my college newspaper recruiting egg donors, and I’ve always wondered why society treats it as a much bigger deal to give eggs than sperm.

Q:Other than the invasive process (and because of that, the money), why is it a bigger deal?

A: I don’t think it is. I think it’s all a huge deal. In fact, I wonder whether the boys I knew when I was nineteen who were donating to get some beer money now have any regrets. It has repercussions: imagine learning that your husband donated when he was younger, that your children have biological half-siblings you don’t know about.

Q: Zephyr’s newest friend, Macy St. John, is a lovable but cursed wedding planner whose company is called No Divas. Fess up: were you a bridal diva?

A: I can safely say I was not. I err in the other direction, which has caused my husband to declare me so low maintenance that I’m high maintenance. I came up with the idea for a business for no-frills clients after our caterer tried to schedule a two-hour meeting about our wedding cake. I declined and told him to make it white and make it taste good. A similarly non-diva friend who was planning her wedding at the same time came up with the name of the imaginary company that, years later, would find its way into this book.

Q: But you didn’t wear $13 sandals from Payless on your wedding day, the way Macy’s client does.

A: Yes, in fact. I did.

Q: Why a sequel?

A: I considered doing an entirely unrelated book, but suspected that any protagonist I created would be Zephyr again, with a different name. I was preoccupied with my recent exodus from the city and new status as mother of two. I inflicted both these states onto Zephyr’s good friend Lucy, which then freed me up to write about Zephyr and the life I was fantasizing about – still in the city and childless. It was clear to me that, if these were my preoccupations, it would be natural to keep writing about Zephyr. That said, it's definitely a stand-alone book, too -- you don't have to have read Super to enjoy Hotel.

Q: Will this be a trilogy?

A: I doubt I’m done with Zephyr, but I plan to take a break from her and first write something completely different. I’m toying with historical fiction, something I swore I wouldn’t touch with a ten-foot cursor.

About the author ~ 

A former Books/​Poetry editor at Time Out New York, Daphne's reviews, profiles, and articles have been published in The Washington Post, The New York Times, Newsday, The Forward, New York Magazine, Oxygen, Allure, and Self, for which she used to write an ethics column.

Super in the City, her debut novel, is available in paperback and Kindle editions, and still getting rave reviews!  Click on the right side of the screen for more information.

Daphne also co-edited, with Deborah Siegel, the acclaimed anthology Only Child: Writers on the Singular Joys and Solitary Sorrows of Growing Up Solo.  Available in paperback and Kindle editions.

A third-generation West Villager, Daphne lives in the Hudson Valley with her husband and two children.

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Email ~ DaphneUviller AT ​gmail DOT com

The latest book ~

Hotel No Tell: A Novel

Hotel No Tell features the return of Super in the City's beloved Zephyr Zuckerman. On the verge of 31, Zephyr is now a junior investigator with New York City’s Special Investigations Commission (SIC). She’s undercover as a concierge at the Greenwich Village Hotel, trying – and failing – to track down a missing hundred grand. Her detective boyfriend has moved out because of their disagreement about reproducing (he wants kids, Zephyr doesn’t), and she’s left with her Holland Lop bunny named after a famous atheist, an old friend who’s married and miserable in suburban motherhood, and one new friend who’s a wedding planner in dire need of an exorcist.

It soon becomes clear that the trouble at the hotel goes much, much deeper than a little old-fashioned laundering. Before Zephyr can master the reservation system, she is yanking at the threads of a multi-million dollar egg donation scandal and re-examining her own motives for opting out of parenthood.

On sale NOW

Her other books ~

Super in the City

Only Child: Writers on the Singular Joys and Solitary Sorrows of Growing Up Solo

Thanks to the publicist, I have two (2) copies of Hotel No Tell: A Novel to give away.

GIVEAWAY Rules for entering:

* This contest is open to residents of USA only.

* Please complete the form below - do not leave information in the comments - it will not count.

* One entry per person. Duplicate entries will be deleted.

* The contest will end on May 20th at 11:59PM EST; 2 winners will be selected and contacted thereafter.

* Once the winners are contacted, they will have 48 hours to respond to my email or another winner will be chosen (make sure to check your spam filters!).

* Book will be shipped directly from the publisher.

Guest Post & Giveaway ~ Frances Lefkowitz - To Have Not

Book by its Cover

“Is that you?” people ask, pointing to front cover of my book. It’s a fair question: the book is a memoir, a true story of my journey from childhood to adulthood, and the picture on the cover is of a little girl. She’s wearing a pink mask, obviously homemade, but it can’t hide a playful yet knowing look in her eyes, a smile that is holding something back. It could very well be me. But it’s not.

When my publisher first showed me the cover, designed by the very talented and patient art director Dorothy Carico Smith, I balked. “That’s not me,” I thought. I’d been a tomboy, and would never have worn pink. My face would not have been quite so clean, my clothes not quite so pristine. Plus my eyes are green, not brown. So I asked Dorothy to fiddle with the image. Could she scuff up the face a bit, add a smudge of dirt to the chin, as if I’d just come in from the playground? Could she change the color of the sweater from pink to blue, maybe add a little rip? And the mask...I would probably have made it out of cardboard, not fabric.

Computer graphics programs can create magic, but not miracles. The smudge we added looked like an ominous bruise instead of harmless dirt. So we tried to shoot our own version of the photo. Dorothy cut a mask out of cardboard, and recruited her nine-year-old neighbor to wear it. But photographing someone in a mask turns out to be a very tricky proposition. The cut-outs in the mask create shadows that obscure the features of the face, especially the eyes. You’d need a studio, lights, technicians. The pink photo, though it looks casual, was done in just such a setting.

My next thought was to use a drawing instead of a photo, to avoid all the technical difficulties. An artist friend of mine drew a charming sketch of a girl in a mask. But when Dorothy enlarged the drawing into a mock-up of the book cover, something was missing. Eye contact. The eyes of the girl in the original pink photo look straight into the camera, and straight into the viewer’s eyes. Along with the bold pink and the puzzling mask, those arresting eyes stop you in your tracks. And that’s pretty much all you could ask for in a book cover.

We ended up using the original cover that Dorothy first created. Only now I loved it and knew it was perfect for the book. Sometimes you have to take a circuitous route to get back home. And sometimes authors should stick with the writing, and leave the design to the professionals.

About the author ~ 

Frances Lefkowitz writes for love and money, and sometimes both at the same time. She comes from humble urban California beginnings, spent her young adulthood in New England, and has garnered many boast-worthy accomplishments. Still, she is one of those women who feels she has not quite lived up to her potential.

Frances was born in San Francisco to parents who straddled the philosophical and demographic lines between beatniks and hippies. Food stamps, welfare, and free medical clinics played key parts in the life of her family, which moved nine times in seventeen years, mostly within the confines of the city. After twelve years of public school, she attended Brown University on scholarship, earned a degree in anthropology, and then worked in archaeology, palynology (the study of fossil pollen!), catering, the music business, and low-budget films before becoming a magazine writer and editor.

Formerly the senior editor at Body+Soul magazine (now Whole Living), Frances is now the Good Housekeeping book reviewer and a freelance writer and editor. She also teaches at the Sun Magazine’s writing workshops and the Writer in West Marin program. Generally the bridesmaid rather than the bride, her essays have been nominated for two Pushcart Prizes, named as “Notable” in the Best American Essays 2007, and placed as runner-up for a James Beard Award for food writing. Fortunately, there have been some actual awards, too: the Fellowship in Literature from the Rhode Island State Council on the Arts, The Martin Dibner Award for Maine Writers, and a residency at the Hedgebrook Writing Retreat.

Frances divides her time between Southern Maine and Northern California. Her hobbies are surfing and speaking Spanish, and she especially likes going to Central America, where she can do both at the same time. Her most boast-worthy accomplishment, in fact, might be the eight-foot wave she caught a few years ago in Costa Rica. Buena ola!

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Email Frances ~ frances AT franceslefkowitz DOT net

Her book ~ 

 

To Have Not 

Poverty has many guises: a lack of money, of course, but it can also be a lack of love or choice, pleasure or safety, faith or confidence or possibility. Poverty seeps into the soul and deadens the spirit. In To Have Not, Frances Lefkowitz reflects on her own life of poverties. A poor white girl from 1970s San Francisco, Lefkowitz tries to escape her upbringing through an Ivy League scholarship, only to realize that upward mobility is not all it s cracked up to be: being a Have Not and not having aren't necessarily the same thing. Crashing headfirst into boundaries of class, race, and sex, Lefkowitz emerges scarred but whole, humor intact. To Have Not speaks to anyone who has ever battled the feeling of being cut off from the world s abundance, and then settled, eventually, somewhere between resignation and appreciation for all they do have.  

Thanks to the publicist, I have 1 copy of this book to give away.

GIVEAWAY Rules for entering:

* This contest is open to residents of USA & Canada only. No PO boxes.

* Please complete the form below - do not leave information in the comments - it will not count.

* The contest will end on February 2nd at 11:59PM EST; 1 winners will be selected and contacted thereafter.

* Once the winners are contacted, they will have 48 hours to respond to my email or another winner will be chosen (make sure to check your spam filters!).

* Book will be shipped directly from the publicist.

Guest Post ~ Alice Eve Cohen

WRITING IN MY HEAD

#1: My head in Central Park

A computer is essential. Notebooks aren’t bad. In a pinch, scribbling on a napkin will suffice. I sometimes prefer to write in my head. The where is important. I can write in my head while staring out a window or riding on a train (but not on the subway). Crowded streets are iffy. To the degree possible in the limited horizons of my New York City habitat, outdoors is best, especially if I’m in motion.

Central Park is my favorite place for writing in my head. Before the winter cold settles in, turtles line up on the boulders bordering the Lake. Brilliant yellow leaves carpet the trails near the Boat House. Jugglers and musicians practice at the Bethesda Fountain. In a hidden pond, I count five large orange carp swimming, while above water, pond-skimmers skim and dragonflies fly. My walk is accompanied by birdcalls and crunching leaves, the smell of dirt, dried grass, wet rocks, fallen leaves. I scramble to the top of boulders, pretending that I’m on the Appalachian Trail, rather than in the middle of Manhattan.

Signs at trailheads designate The Ramble, a wooded area of the park, as Forever Wild—albeit a loose definition of wild. Central Park is a carefully landscaped illusion of nature, designed in 1858 by Frederick Law Olmstead, and maintained these days by the Central Park Conservancy. The purported “Wild” parts are fenced in. Obedient tourists and locals stay on the paved paths. A man-made waterfall flows into the man-made lake. I wonder about the boulders. I’m sure the multi-ton behemoths were deposited here by retreating glaciers in the last Ice Age. But what about that gorgeous gray slab of stone, perched on an expanse of granite, artfully silhouetted against the lake? Was that the work of glaciers or of Olmstead’s imagination?

I’m amused by the sleight of hand, the trompe l'oeils effect. I buy it. I like being tricked into thinking I’m in nature, when this park is as carefully contrived as Disneyland. But the thing about Central Park is that, in the balance of real and make-believe, nature trumps artifice. The trees don’t give a damn that they were planted by a landscape designer. The ducks don’t care that the lake is an elaborate ruse, fed by an underground plumbing system. To the thousands of migratory birds that land in Central Park each spring and fall, Central Park is an oasis of forest and ponds, not an elaborate stage set. They have no argument with the human landscaping, or with humans for that matter. I figure if birds are tricked by Central Park, there’s no shame in being tricked myself

I’ve been mulling over questions of artifice and illusion for a new book I’m writing. My walk through Central Park has clarified some ideas and fueled more questions. I walk back to my apartment, in hopes of translating the writing in my head onto my computer.

About the author ~ 

Alice Eve Cohen is a solo theatre artist, playwright, and memoirist. Her memoir, What I Thought I Knew (Viking /​ Penguin, 2009) won the Elle's Lettres 2009 Grand Prix for Nonfiction, it was selected as one of Oprah Magazine’s 25 Best Books of Summer, and has been optioned for a television movie by Lifetime. She has written for Nickelodeon, PBS, and CBS. Her plays have been presented at theatres throughout the country, and she has toured her solo theatre works internationally. Her writing about arts in education has been published in nine languages. The recipient of fellowships and grants from the New York State Council on the Arts and the National Endowment for the Arts, she holds a BA from Princeton University and an MFA from The New School. She teaches at The New School in New York City.

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Her book ~ 

 

What I Thought I Knew: A Memoir 

A personal and medical odyssey beyond anything most women would believe possible

At age forty-four, Alice Eve Cohen was happy for the first time in years. After a difficult divorce, she was engaged to an inspiring man, joyfully raising her adopted daughter, and her career was blossoming. Alice tells her fiancé that she's never been happier. And then the stomach pains begin.

In her unflinchingly honest and ruefully witty voice, Alice nimbly carries us through her metamorphosis from a woman who has come to terms with infertility to one who struggles to love a heartbeat found in her womb - six months into a high-risk pregnancy.

What I Thought I Knew is a page-turner filled with vivid characters, humor, and many surprises and twists of fate. With the suspense of a thriller and the intimacy of a diary, Cohen describes her unexpected journey through doubt, a broken medical system, and the hotly contested terrain of motherhood and family in today's society. Timely and compelling, What I Thought I Knew will capture readers of memoirs such as Eat, Pray, Love; The Glass Castle; and A Three Dog Life.