Jacquelyn Mitchard, author of No Time To Wave Goodbye, appears on Sunday, October 11 at 2 p.m. on the Powell’s Books Stage.
What are you reading now? Who is your favorite new author? What is your favorite book of the year? Favorite book of all time?
Right now, I’m reading Daniel James Brown’s amazing account of one young woman’s experience as a young bride whose family went west with another family called Donner, The Indifferent Stars Above. The way Brown examines the hardships of the Donner party in modern terms, with modern biological and distance measuring, is almost unbearable. This is my favorite new book of this year.
I think that, despite The Likeness not being the equal of In The Woods, Tana French is my favorite new fiction writer. My favorite book of all time — you can ask my daughter, Francie Nolan, about this — is A Tree Grows in Brooklyn.
What is your favorite food?
My favorite food is anything Indian and vegetarian, from Aloo Gobi to curry to Nan.
Which writers have most influenced you?
I wish they’d influenced me more but … Rumer Godden, Daphne du Maurier, Willa Cather, Wallace Stegner, Judith Guest and Betty Smith.
What are you working on now?
I’m writing a novel about the unlikely transformation and impossible choice faced by a young woman who is the survivor of a school fire in Chicago. There was a horrific fire on the west side when I was a little kid, at a school called Our Lady of the Angels, and I’ve thought about it all my life. This story is about the intersection of modern medicine and ancient instinct, I guess. I mean, I hope it is.
What is your favorite website for writing, literature, etc.
Love Book Glutton and Wowowow….