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The novel hits shelves May 16.
Read more in Segal and Hornbys conversation, below.
Credit: Miriam Douglas;Riverhead Books;Laura Hart
Is James your favorite writer?
I know you adore Anne Tyler.
I think my Anne Tylers are you and AS Byatt.
Those are the writers I turn to over and over and think, How does this work?
How is it all put together?
NH: What had you written beforeThe Innocents?
It seems to me your voice was clear and formed in that first book.
How did that happen?FS:Thank you!
I will just have to trust the friends I sent it to not to use it as blackmail.
Have you got anything stashed under the bed?
NH:All the things stashed under my bed are scripts.
Thats what I started writing.
My first book wasFever Pitch, but that voice had partly been formed by journalism, too.
Your parents were American, right?
I end up slightly homesick everywhere.
When I am in New York, I miss my family in London.
When I am in London, I long for the electricity and speed of New York.
Certainly, my formative childhood television was entirely American.
And no one in London then knew the literary wonders ofThe Baby-Sitters Club.
NH: I suspect its too late for me andThe Baby-Sitters Club.
How did the book start?
With the kids, the parents, the situation?FS:Too little, too late.
In my early youth, I obviously had less pedantic leanings.
I think I read it in an article about blended families.
It felt worthy of emotional exploration.
You have four great lead characters, but the minor roles are fantastic.
Was she ever merely divorced, in your early thinking?FS:Never.
She was always a widow.
Are they still her in-laws if the man who bound them together is no longer there?
I loved that complex devotion between Julia and her late husbands parents.
It was somehow unexpected and yet felt right to me.
And they are so generous with her, now that she has met James.
Forbidding myself is also a way of making it feel seductive again.
Sooner or later the obsession will creep up again, and then Ill start writing book three.
