A Q&A With Joshilyn Jackson, Author of December’s #1 Indie Next List Pick

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Taking the number one spot on the December 2013  Indie Next List is Joshilyn Jackson’s Someone Else’s Love Story (William Morrow). The novel, set in Georgia, follows Shandi Pierce and William Ashe as their lives collide during a gas station robbery, and the way their dark pasts bubble up and weave together in the weeks that follow.

Jackson is the New York Times bestselling author of five other novels, which have been translated into a dozen languages and have topped the charts, earning her the Book of the Year Award from the Southern Independent Booksellers Alliance, two Georgia Author of the Year Awards, two shortlist nominations for the Townsend Prize, and five previous appearances on the Indie Next List and its predecessor, the Book Sense Picks List, including twice as the number one pick of independent booksellers.

Bookselling This Week recently spoke with Jackson about the young and vibrant character of Shandi in Someone Else’s Love Story and how she imagined the handsome and eccentric William Ashe into existence, as well as William’s rough-and-tumble protector Paula, who Jackson will be bringing back in her next novel.


BTW: In Someone Else’s Love Story, Shandi Pierce comes from a fragmented family, but she manages to create her own, through her friends and her son. Why does the theme of family resonate so strongly in many of your books?

Joshilyn Jackson: It is the building block of human connection. I take my body and your body and we make another human out of that. That’s the traditional formation of the human relationship — that our bodies can make other human beings. The amazing thing about humans to me is that sometimes it doesn’t work , or sometimes it can’t work, and yet we form these families anyway. Nothing else matters except our human relationships.

It’s like oxygen — who thinks about that? Who goes around thinking, “I’m so glad that there’s oxygen in this room?” If you have oxygen, you’re just happy, and when there’s a lack of it, you know it. When you’re trying to create a room full of oxygen for new little people that you’ve come to by biological or other means, that parent-child thing happens in so many ways. I think of that kind of love, not just parent-child love, but that sacrificial you-before-me love. If a train’s getting one of us, I pick me. That kind of love is phenomenal. It’s most often seen in parent-child relationships, no matter how they’re formed. Sometimes you see it in romantic love. Sometimes you see it with friendships even, or in battlefield situations. That is always interesting to me.

BTW: Many of your novels feature fiery, strong, and determined women. Where do these characters and their stories come from, and do you ever find yourself identifying with them? Where did you find the character of Shandi in Someone Else’s Love Story?

JJ: As a writer, I have long been very, very interested in writing female characters who act instead of react. Female characters tend to be reactive characters and I don’t necessarily like that. I myself don’t want to be reactive; I want to act. So, in a lot of ways, it’s been a very, very deliberate choice.

I have that Jane Austin feeling sometimes — she has that famous quote about when she wrote Emma, “I am going to take a heroine whom no one but myself will much like.” I worry a little bit because I don’t necessarily write the world’s most likeable women, but I think they’re super interesting! They’re usually flawed and complicated and terrible in some way, but I would rather write about someone that I’m interested in rather than someone I like. Affable people are nice to work on the PTA committee with, but I don’t want anybody to come out of my book and think, “Wow, that certainly was affable.”

I think Shandi is actually pretty likeable, but a lot of the reason why is because she’s young. That level of indecisiveness might not be attractive at 35, but at 21 it is. But then you also have Paula, who is certainly not the world’s most likeable person, but I love her!

I started out as an actor and character creation, be it in acting or in novels, feels like the same process. I feel the same little chunk of my occipital lobe heat up when I’m doing it. My adult characters don’t ever come from a definable source. I might see in the same character a fleck of my aunt Susan, a fleck of my maternal grandfather and my husband, and a fleck of my daughter. There’s never any one-to-one correlation with adult characters; they are people whose personality types and histories interest me in the context of the questions I’m asking about how life works.

The adults are wholly invented. Children are much more difficult, because they’re so weird. If you try to make up a child whole, it’s hard to get yourself into that mind-space, because their context is so different. Things that we just know as truisms and that we’ve known for years, we’ve forgotten ever learning. A lot of the kid stuff, I don’t make up. I pull it from real kids. I don’t like the constructed children of fiction. I really resent it when someone’s five-year-old is passionately worried about whether or not their mother is satisfied in her romantic life. He’s not! He does not care! He wants to know if there is Sponge Bob Square Pants macaroni and cheese. He doesn’t care if you’re fulfilled as a woman, he doesn’t.

BTW: William is the first male narrator you’ve ever written, and he’s a complex character, intelligent and handsome — and on the Autism spectrum. How did you approach writing William’s story?

JJ: I’ve been wanting to write a book with William for 10 years, but I never had because he’s so sad. I couldn’t find a way to write about somebody who’s so sad: “Chapter 1: ‘I’m very sad,’ William said, and walked into the sea. The end.” That’s not a good book!

So I started writing the Shandi book. Shandi was dealing thematically with everything my imagined William book was going to deal with. When I first imagined William, he was a little more esoteric and studying mollusks — he really liked mollusks a lot. When I wrote Shandi, I had 40,000 words and I realized it was the William book. How can they meet? Well, it has to be some great clashing thing that feels like destiny. I put them in a room with a gun!

William is my first published male narrator, but I’ve written male narrators before. It helps, too, that William is not the first character that I’ve written who is on the Autism spectrum. Because Autism’s in my genetic history and family tree, I wanted a romantic lead like William. I was also playing with that Southern Gothic thing where you take a trope or an archetype and then you twist it to make a point about social justice. He’s the worst romance novel hero ever. He’s this good looking superstar except that he looks like one thing and he’s sort of another.

BTW: You also just released a novella, My Own Miraculous, featuring Shandi from Someone Else’s Love Story. Do you have anything else in the works that readers and booksellers can look forward to?

JJ: I’m always writing. Right now what I’m really interested in is urban New South stories, because I like that  you can set a story in Atlanta that could be set in New York or San Francisco but at the same time you can bring somebody Old South into that. I’ve gotten very interested in this world that Shandi has come into. Shandi is sort of an Old South mountain person, although you can see the New South coming into her town, where William lives and where Paula lives.

I’ve never written a sequel and I always said I’d never write a sequel, because I think that if you make it alive all the way through the end of my book, I should leave you alone. You’ve earned whatever rest I’ve brought you to — god knows what I’ve done to you over the course of 320 pages. But Paula is such a compelling character to me, so Paula’s narrating a book. It’s called Nobody’s Nothing. Paula doesn’t belong to anybody, and she’ll tell you that.

Paula’s very hard to write. I find myself getting in front of her and trying to apologize as a novelist for the god-awful, terrifying things she’s about to do. It’s four pages of me justifying it, when Paula’s already done it and moved on through the wreckage.

Paula’s pretty hard and she’s pretty fierce and she causes trouble wherever she goes, which is great in terms of plot, but you also have to not want her to die in a fire, so it’s finding those places where you get a window into her and you see not just why you should forgive her for being awful but what is beautiful and noble in her. I don’t know anybody more loyal than Paula. And she also has a huge heart for the underdog. If you are oppressed and suffering, she will come and kick butt, and that’s attractive to me.

BTW: Independent booksellers have nominated your titles to the Indie Next List over the years, and December’s list features Someone Else’s Love Story as the number one pick. What does it mean to you to have the support of independent bookstores for so many of your titles?

JJ: I’m so excited to be the number one Indie Next Pick, and I’m so excited to be on the cover [of the December flier]. This now is happening because of the indies, in a bigger way. Gods in Alabama [Jackson’s 2005 debut novel] had the craziest sales arc that you’ve ever seen. The one thing that happened was that booksellers chose it as their number one Book Sense pick. It came out to sales that were not bad but not great. It wasn’t a disaster, but it wasn’t what everyone had hoped. And then the next week the sales figures stayed the same ... and the next week the sales figures stayed the same ... and that went on for 35 or 40 weeks. The sales figures never dropped. It was because of the number one Book Sense pick that all these hand-sellers read it, and they got really personal about it, and they just kept putting it into the hands of readers. There are a lot of really good books that come out every year that just fall into the water and are gone, but this chorus of voices said, “I’m not going to let this happen to that book.”

With all that handselling and placing the book into the hands of readers, I had a readership ready for the second book, liking the third book, liking the fourth book. The reason I have a career, and the readership, is because a bunch of righteous handsellers decided to make everyone within the sound of their voices read it because they loved it. I can’t tell you what that feels like — these are book people! This isn’t like my third grade teacher who thinks I’m adorable; it’s not my mom. These are book people, who read a lot of books, putting it into people’s hands and creating a readership for me sale by individual sale. I know where it started and I understand why I have the job that I have, and I will never forget that.