Author shares story of success
Print Edition
IN the opening of Gabrielle Zevin’s novel “The Storied Life of A.J. Fikry” Maya, a toddler, is abandoned in a bookstore by a mother who wants her to “grow up to be a reader.” The store’s owner, 39-year-old widower A.J. Fikry, becomes Maya’s adopted father as he also runs the only bookstore in their island community.
Published in 2014 in the United States, “The Storied Life of A.J. Fikry,” spent over four months on the New York Times’ Best Seller List, reached No.1 on the National Indie Bestseller List, and has been a bestseller in multiple countries.
The Chinese-language version of the book came out in May and quickly caught the attention of local readers. Since its publication, more than 2 million copies have been sold.
Zevin was in Shanghai last week for the International Literary Week and attended several talks with readers at the annual Shanghai Book Fair during her stay. This was Zevin’s first book tour in China.
“It’s interesting to me that the questions are often similar anywhere I go. I would think Chinese people would have different sets of questions. In fact, we share the same concerns about the novel,” Zevin told Shanghai Daily, having already sat through a number of interviews with local media.
“I have always wanted to write a book on books and reading,” Zevin said. “I like to hear people say what their favorite books are. It’s a better way, rather than to say something physically about somebody, to see the inside of them.”
A voracious reader since an early age, Zevin said reading has always been her way to understand other people and the world. It also awakens empathy, especially among young people, something she appreciates as the author of young-adult as well as adult fiction.
Zevin’s book is a celebration to the joys of reading. Each chapter in “The Storied Life of A.J. Fikry” is named after the title of a short story or book and comes with a note from Fikry describing what he likes about it.
Not that two people need identical reading tastes to click. Zevin and her partner of 21 years don’t; nor do Fikry and Amelia, or, for that matter, Frikry and the island police chief, Lambiase, whose policeman’s book club proves to be one of the book’s most charming aspects.
According to Zevin, “The Storied Life of A.J. Fikry” will become a movie in China before it is in the US. For the moment, she has been working on promotional activities and is involved in writing the film’s script.
She answers more questions about the making of the book and love.
Did you expect “The Storied Life of A.J. Fikry” to be such a huge success when it came out in 2014? What does the book’s success mean to you?
I hoped it would do well, but I certainly didn’t expect anything. What I do mind is the book itself, not the reception of it.
I am very much heartened by the success though, because it speaks to the fact that people still care about reading all around the world. I feel grateful that I’m part of that. Novels are extremely important in terms of marking history and what it means to be human. It’s good to have novels; it’s good to have readers.
One way it did change me a little bit is that I have even more freedom in my work. I don’t think I could feel free to only publish what I want the readers to read without a certain level of finance freedom.
With a bit of love, romance and suspense, the story is such a page turner that you want to finish reading it at one setting. What was the process of writing it like?
I have never written two books in exactly the same way. In case of “The Storied Life of A.J. Fikry,” I had the idea for a book on the Maya character first and wrote a few hundred pages on her. But it wasn’t the right time for it, so I put it aside. Now and then, I was working on something for eight years. And then I had a notion that Maya’s father was a bookseller. That happened to overlap a lot of my obsessions about what e-readers mean, why bookstores are important, etc. Suddenly it felt like the right time to do it. In six months, the first script of the book was done.
What do you do when you don’t know what to write next?
I stop and go research more. The big key turning for me while writing this story was researching Fikry’s stolen manuscript “Tamerlane.”
“Tamerlane” was the first thing Edgar Allan Poe ever wrote, back when he was eighteen. Copies were extremely rare because the publisher stole it from Poe and had it published without permission... It’s the most expensive book at the Christie’s auction house in the United States, or in the world probably, but all literary scholars say it was terribly written — with no literary merit. As a writer, I like the irony of it. The conflict between the cost of things and their value thus became the major theme of my book.
This year will see your book “Margarettown” also translated into Chinese. It focuses on love’s many forms. What do you think is important for women to love?
Women go through a lot more changes than men do in life. Even the biological changes are more extreme. So that book is about women loving “yourselves” at all the ages. Be satisfied and always look forward to being old. It’s a cliché to say, but a woman really has to love herself first.
What hobbies do you have, other than reading and writing books?
I have dogs. I’m a voracious dog walker. Also I like to draw, and I find it is a good release from the writing activity. I love music, I love cooking… I think I love all of the things in life. And all of these things are part of my books, too. How you live is, to an extent, how you write.
Before I came to Shanghai, the only thing I knew was the Chinese character for people... I feel I’d be interested to learn some Mandarin when I go back. So, life is a wonderful hobby.
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