Book World Live

Among the most potent and poignant new novels to address post-9/11 America is Carolyn See's 'There Will Never Be Another You.' It is potent because the sense of dread and unease that mark almost every moment in the book is palpable; it is poignant because See, who in previous books has proven eminently capable of skewering her characters when they misbehave, has such compassion for the largely villain-less ensemble that populates this tale. -- Review: The Age of Anxiety (May 21).

Author Carolyn See will be online to field questions and comments about her new novel, "There Will Never Be Another You," which explores a post-9/11 America.

The author of five novels, Carolyn See is an adjunct professor of English at University of California at Los Angeles. Her book reviews appear regularly in the Style section of The Washington Post.

Join Book World Live each Tuesday at 3 p.m. ET for a discussion based on a story or review in each Sunday's Book World section.

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Carolyn See: Shall I introduce myself? I'm Friday morning book reviewer for the Post, I taught for more years than there are in the Universe at Loyola Marymount University and then UCLA out here in Los Angeles. "There Will Never Be Another You" is my tenth book -- along with three others that I wrote with John Espey and my older daughterLisa See, under the name of "Monica Highland," books that we fondly thought of as "airplain literature for smart people. And I'm sitting here today with my younger Daughter, Clara Sturak who is former Associate Editor of the Santa Monica Mirror, and now an advocate for the rights of autistic kids. It's 70 degrees here in the Pacific Palisades, and we seem -- at the moment -- to be as happy as anyone can expect to be.

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DuBois, Wyo : After all these years... is this your 1st Post on-line thinggy? I've read your once-a-week book reviews for ages -- how long have you been at it? Also, is your full, real name See? I've always wondered. Thanks!

Carolyn See: My real name is See, because I married a nice boy, Richard See, back when I was 21 years old -- and I'm 72 now. Richard was one quarter Chinese, but it was the Chinese part that stuck in the family, like ink in a tall glass of milk.My daughter Lisa thinks of herself as "Chinese in her heart..."And so do I. My life-partner, John Espey, was born in Shanghai and grew up "Chinese." So, that's the "See" part!

And yes, this is my first on-line-thingy. Clara is here so I don't have a nervous break down...

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Venice, Calif.: just want you to know how much we appreciate yourwitty, refreshing and reassuring (!!??)voice......we love you....and appreciateyour work......

Los Angeles Literary Community

Carolyn See: My dears, has someone paid you to give that comment? I'm more grateful to YOU than I can say. And I love that you're from Venice. I'm just a few miles from you...I don't know what else to say. Witty and refreshing are sometimes pretty close to running amock, as we all know...

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Harrisburg, Pa.: How did the terrorist attacks of September 11, 2001 personally transform you?

Carolyn See: The destruction of the towers were just another straw on the camel's back for me. When I was 11, my dad left and a couple of weeks later the Bomb dropped. Lots later, when the Russians invaded Afghanistan, I wrote "Golden Days," out of combined irritation and terror. I imagine things will go on like this!

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Carolyn See: I was on a cable access talk show the other day and the poor guy had said he'd have me on before he read the book -- which appeared to have come as quite a shock to him. He ended up saying something like "I LOVE you, I HATE your character!!!" He was talking about Dr. Philip Fucks, one of my favorite characters, a hapless guy with a sweet nature who isn't "hard" enough on his kids. I'd like to ask someone out there -- is is OK to judge a book by whether or not you like a particular one of its characters? I mean, if all the characters are serial killers are one thing, but if one of them isn't someone you'd ask to a dinner party...how does that figure in critism? (And I wonder if I do that myself when I'm doing the reviews?)

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Chicago, Ill: Hi Carolyn,

People keep comparing this book to one of your earlier ones: Golden Days. Has your world view changed much since you wrote the earlier book?

Carolyn See: Hi honey! I think of "There Will Never Be Another You" as a kid brother to "Golden Days." "Golden Days" came at a time when the war mongers were threatening the total, awful, absolute, double-scary end of the world, and little peace-ladies were wailing,oh don't let it be the absolute, total, worse than we can ever imagine end of the world!!! The rhetorical din was awful. I kept imagining different ways we could just politely edge our ways out of the conversation -- wear a tee shirt, perhaps, that said on one side, YOU CAN KILL ME, and on the other BUT YOU CAN'T IMPRESS ME.

This new book is very much like that, since we're forced to listen to several sides of a very unpleasant argument. People who hold our lives in their hands are not going to be inclined to let us forget that. So, again, I tried to figure out ways we could just sneak out of the playground where the bullies -- on EVERY SIDE -- are holding forth. But this book is more comic, more mellow, in my opinion.

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Anonymous: In matters of the heart, what is the biggest threat today--as opposed to, let's say, 12 years ago?

a friend in Gaithersburg, MD

Carolyn See: In my mind, in matters of the heart and in everything else, the greatest threat, the greatest disadvantage, the biggest thing to be afraid of, is a failure of the imagination. We fall back on easy cliches -- "Martha was always the good hearted one..." "George would never do that." Is something wrong? Lets have a WAR on it, like we can have a war in Iraq, on drugs, on cancer, on illiteracy, but it's all slugged under the rubric of WAR. And lets not forget the war on immigrants, which has genuine minutemen and everything. I'm not against "War," per se, but I am worried that our brains are so slack and low we can't be bothered to figure out whatever it is that we're "against," and how we should address it...

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Ventura, Calif: Hi, Carolyn. I'm just curious if you have based any characters on anyone in reality? Would we know any of them, even if you're using different names?

Carolyn See: Hello, nice person in Ventura! When I'm "using" someone I "know" in a novel, I'll usually take three people and put them in a blender. The character of Vern, for instance, in "Another You," is a combination of my beautiful autistic grandson, Dash, Harvard, an old friend to whom the book is partly dedicated, and me. I'm the major "one" in everyone, of course. Thus, Felicia, the fretful wife in the same book, is prettier and younger than I am, but she's absolutely me -- back when they put up the Berlin Wall and I was desperate to get out of the country or off the planet, whatever came first. People often recognize "Themselves" in a narrative, and I haven't even thought of them, or I'll put someone in in and they won't recognize themselves. That's because the "self" is a fictional construct, at best. The closest I took or stole a character was the handyman in "The Handyman," and it was just his body, his sweet nature, and one distorted incident. I told him about it and told him I wasn't stalking him. He was pleased.

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Chicago Ill: If you could be any other writer in the world, who would it be?

Carolyn See: I'd be E.M. Forster. He was a gay guy, I'm a straight woman; he was well-brought and upper-class and I'm neither, but he told -- not just the truth, but what he knew was RIGHT. I know that can be a tiresome trait, but there it is. I also admire, more than I can say, the fact that he gets so close to the details of everyday living -- how hard it can be to plan a picnic, how three women can squabble over who gets to sit on two little tarps on damp grass. Just the way life flows in its wonderfully intricate ways. I'm crazy about him, and I wish I were half the writer he was.

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Washington, DC: Do you think the fact that you are yourself a novelist makes you a gentler critic? The courage and the discipline it takes to write a novel are so praiseworthy that a book has to be really, really, deliberately aggressively bad for me not to give it a respectful read and a kind word. Wondering if your perspective is similar.

Carolyn See: Yes, I think I'm a much more gentle critic than a person who's never attempted to write a book. That has another side though. When I'm reading a REALLY AWFUL book, first I get mad at the publishers, then the editors, then the writer. My thoughts run to: I DON'T GET PAID ENOUGH TO READ THIS!!! But that's not often. Not often at all. Often I see a soft place in a story, like a brown place in a piece of fruit, and mark it, and think -- if I were the editor, I'd get the writer to fix this -- but I tend to think that the average reader doesn't even notice this stuff. And you're right: It takes such reckless bravery to write a book that I really think twice or four times before I take a cheap shot.

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Maria in Los Angeles, Calif.: Hi Carolyn! I'm really looking forward to reading this book. I just ordered it on Amazon. As a writer myself, I know how sometimes a book can come from a personal event as much as a response to outer events. Can you tell us a little about what inner events spurred you to write this story?

Carolyn See: Hi Maria in LA!

The personal events that inspired this book was/were a plethora of deaths in my friends and family. The death of my life-partner, John Espey, who died here at home, the death Harvard Gordon, to whom the book is dedicated, the death of my mother -- who was so mad at me she cut me dead -- so to say -- on her death bed. Just after this flurry, the World Trade Center came down. The thing about death -- and god knows this is not an original thought -- is that there's a before and an after to it. Before it happens to someone close to you, it hasn't really happened. It's like the trip you're going to take to Europe next week. After it's happened and you've seen it happen, all the circuses in the world are going to be hardpressed to cheer you up. You really do see that your swaddling clothes are your shroud. You live, die, then it's over and out. Loss is EVERYWHERE. To quote myself from another book, How do we see life clear and love it too?

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Palo Alto, Calif: Can you get the Post to let you review less unusual books? They seem to give you stuff with a twist (plot, setting, narrated backwards, something). Which is fine, but I would like to see your opinion on, say, Anne Tyler's latest or even some other one.

Carolyn See: Let me be straight about this: I write from Los Angeles. The wonderful people at the Post -- I imagine -- have meetings where they decide which books to assign to whom. They're tired and bored after an hour or two and a book comes up about Siamese twins or a rat who makes his living in vaudeville and they hold it up, everyone cringes and shakes their heads, then somebody snickers and says, "Let's send this one to Carolyn! Let's see what SHE can do with it. Hee Hee." Of course, that's just my thought. And it truly may be that I attract "idiosyncratic" books like a magnet attracts iron fillings.

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Washington, DC: I know you must tire of this question, but how in the world do you manage to write novels, teach and write your weekly book reviews (which I look forward to each Friday in the Washington Post)? And now it seems, based on your introduction, that you have a personal life as well!

Carolyn See: Not only that, I watch hours of bad TV! The secret, if there is one, is just the thousand words a day. You can't be writing all the time anymore than you can be raising kids all the time (as in, the kids are out playing or watching bad TV themselves, or lolling about). So there's plenty of time, actually, for us to do "what we want." For myself, I know I sepend way too much time gazing morosely out the window or dithering about what I should make for dinner or whether or not I'm going to pull myself together to go to the beach -- that's where my time goes (and let's not forget the crossword puzzle, which I completed this morning at 8:45). My point is, time is elastic. Think of all those English statesmen in WWI who managed an impossible war and carried on affairs with 14 mistresses and went skeet shooting at dawn.

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Los Angeles, Calif: Hello Carolyn!I'm a struggling writer, dealing with writer's block, and I'm just wondering - what inspires you - and, do you wait for inspiration, or do you just sit down and work, no matter what?

Carolyn See: A thousand words a day! That's my motto. That's four pages, double spaced. And if you write 12 lines, you've only got three-and-a-half pages to go. I suggest -- for encouragement -- you take a look at Julia Cameron's "The Artist's Way," (she's very good about reminding us that all we need to do is "show up," do the work, and "god" will take care of the quality.) Or take a look at my own "Making a Literary Life," which attempts to turn the whole process into fun. If you write four pages everyday, the block melts away.

Waiting for inspiration is like waiting for Mr. Right -- it might come along, or again, it might not...

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Philadelphia, Pa.: Tell your critic that a memorable villain means there obviously was a good story that caused such a memorable reaction. Every great hero has overcome a great adversary, and often it is defeating a villain. Good villains in stories is something that is positive.

Carolyn See: You nice person! Thank you for standing up for me. I appreciate it. And I send you a hug.

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Carolyn See: This afternoon has been so much fun! I really want to thank you guys for writing in. It's wonderful to make this kind of connection with readers. And it makes me happy that there are still so many people out there for whom the printed word is important. Remember that you can always get in touch with me (and find my schedule of events) at www.carolynsee.com.

Thanks,

Carolyn

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