Stranger than fiction… get the scoop on the happenings of the book world!
It isn’t easy being the son of someone famous.
And it’s even harder if you choose a career in the same field. Thomas Steinbeck, son of John, who has made a living writing screenplays and teleplays, has waited until his mid-50s to write his first work of fiction, a collection of short stories he heard around the kitchen table as a child.
“When you’ve got a Nobel prize and a Pulitzer prize in the family,” he explains, “why be greedy? I was just happy to put a roof over my head.” He adds that his father considered being able to feed a family and keep a roof over their heads a sign of success.
“He never thought of it (being a writer) as being an artist – he thought of it like any other craft, like being a butcher or a shoemaker.”
Thomas says his father never taught his children how to write: “But he taught us how to think.” His collection of stories is titled Down to a Soundless Sea.
There’s no such thing as bad publicity.
Take American lifestyle queen Martha Stewart. The stock price of her company has taken a hit since it was revealed she may have acted on insider information when selling ImClone Systems stocks, but her books on entertaining and crafts continue to sell by the truckload. Seems a good recipe for apple pie will always win through – but no-one is suggesting she should write a book of tips on personal investment!
Home spun wisdom.
Adriana Trigiani, has made a big hit with her first three novels set in the remote Appalachian town where she grew up. Now she reveals she is planning a fourth novel in the series. This time, her lead character, Ave Maria, sets out to find love: “Then she has to try to make that love work without having the skills to do it,” Trigiana says. “I don’t think any of us have those skills, we have to develop them.”
Humble-pie.
Award-winning Melbourne children’s book author, Sonya Hartnett, could be excused for feeling she needs a split personality to get by. “My whole life is vastly contradictory,” says the author of Thursday’s Child, which won the Guardian’s children fiction prize late last year and who also works part-time as a bookseller in her hometown Melbourne. “At one end of my career I’m in England in a fancy hotel, winning the Guardian prize, and at the other end the most respect anyone gives you is to chuck their Mastercard at you while continuing to talk on their mobile phone. But it’s kept me humble.”
Celebrity blues.
Seems celebrity memoirs have lost a bit of gloss in the past year. Many publishers have been left holding the bag with unearned advances. The big sellers, such as Billy, which slipped back in the top 10 in the UK over Christmas and Kurt Cobain: The Journals, are becoming a rarity. In Britain, where it was tipped to have its biggest market, Kylie: La La La, was marked down immediately after Christmas to less than half price by one of the major bookstore chains.
And more on celebrity memoirs.
Janie Hampton, working on the life of Joyce Grenfell, stumbled across a revelation – but not the kind she was hoping for. Hampton, who knew the performer all her life, found an entry in Grenfell’s diaries – about her teenage self! Janie, said the diary, had hair that was too short, skirts that were even shorter and was guilty of behaviour that was a “bit slutty”. Janie told the story with good humour at the book’s launch.
Ooh la la
Sarah Turnbull, 36, an Australian backpacking journalist who landed in France in (to the Parisians) shockingly tatty clothes, and who went on to write the bestselling Almost French, admits she still loves trakky daks and can be seen on the streets of Paris wearing them to her Pilates classes. Her book, which has now sold 80,000 copies with rights sold to the US and the UK, is about her love-hate relationship with France, and her affair with Frederic, whom she has since married. Despite the cultural difficulties, Sarah now says “Paris is home”.
More from foreign shores.
Peter Moore, the Australian travel writer whose irreverent and funny books have seen him dubbed the Jim Carrey of travel writing (which he hates), found an unlikely cultural hero on a journey through Ethiopia. During a riot in Addis Ababa he was confronted by a group of angry young men who screamed, “American! American!” He was allowed safe passage when it was explained he was from the land of Skippy. Skippy, which is shown on local television, is a hero.
Scary.
Not content with dominating the adult horror book market, Stephen King is making his first foray into children’sterritory. Little Simon, part of Simon and Schuster, is planning to launch a pop-up book of The Girl who Loved Tom Gordon, aimed at kids aged from three upwards. Says King, “I’ll try not to scare them … well, not too much.” It’s due in 2004. Pop-up books are handmade and take time, it seems.
In the shoes of Francoise Sagan.
At the ripe old age of 21, the Irish prime minister’s daughter, Cecelia Ahern, has made a whopping million dollar two- book deal with US publisher Hyperion. Her first book, provisionally titled P.S. I love you, is about a young Irish woman whose lover dies suddenly, leaving her instructions on how to carry on without him, and is due out later in the year. The book also goes into the importance of friendships, reportedly in the vein of the TV series Friends.
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