Ellen Barker on The Balance

We’re two years past the “we’re all in this together” phase of the pandemic and two years into rising talk and social clashing over climate, immigration, and a host of other issues. Racial hatred is out in the open. “Truth” has lost its . . . truth. Fires rage throughout the western states.  And then the invasion of Ukraine, a nuclear threat. We need a respite, we need some hope.

Four months into 2022, my book club had finished The Personal Librarian, Defending Jacob, The Girl with the Louding Voice, and The Mountains Sing. Then we took on The Four Winds. “We need a break,” one member wailed. “We need something uplifting.” And she’s right. We choose books, fiction or nonfiction, that will inform us, teach us, get us inside the heads of people whose points of view are not our own. But right now we need to lighten it up a little, for our own sanity. We’re not looking for a beach read, not for book club anyway. But something with a little levity and a good dose of hope. I strongly believe in the power of the novel to inform by engaging our minds and hearts. The best novels make us both laugh and cry, and something about each one lingers. They balance entertainment—which takes us out of ourselves for a while—with something more. Something that raises the book above escapism and makes it worth dragging our attention away from the latest Russian bombing or U.S. school shooting.  Those books are what we need right now.

Fans of Anthony Trollope and Charles Dickens know all about this. Their Victorian-era novels take us right into the politics and social conventions of the times in a way that no history book can, because the characters and their travails and triumphs stick to us and we can relate them to our own times. Or think of Mark Twain: the mental image of Injun Joe dead on the raft in Huck Finn will live with me forever.  To Kill a Mockingbird is another obvious example, with beloved characters and beautiful story-telling wrapped around the stark reality of racial injustice. And The Red Tent, with so much to learn from Anita Diamant’s intriguing novel: fictional history that brings to life the subculture of women in male-dominated societies in all times and places.

Modern novels are just as potent. Alison McGhee’s Never Coming Back gives us a look into something many of us will face: watching a parent lose ground to dementia. It’s a tough topic. But it’s the daughter’s story too, and the daughter has a funky job and her own issues. Her world is populated with quirky friends and an amusing recurring Jeopardy! theme that lighten up the dementia story and leave us entertained along with knowing a little more about Alzheimer’s. 

In Allie and Bea, Catherine Ryan Hyde mixes a glimpse of teens in foster care with a crazy car adventure. You’ve got to love a book that has chapters titled “Rude Checkbook” and “How to Pet a Bat Ray.” If that ever comes up in your world, you’ll know how to do it.

In the category of “nonfiction that reads like a novel,” a lot of great new books are out there. Tyler Merritt’s I Take My Coffee Black and Trevor Noah’s Born a Crime are eye-opening with a side of comedy. Tyler, for example, takes drama class to avoid the gangs because he’s more afraid of his mother than the gang. Trevor’s mother saves money on gas for their VW bug by making Trevor get out and push the car when they are in rush hour and only inching along.

In East of Troost, I put you right inside the head of the first-person narrator as she navigates her new financial reality in a dilapidated house in a sketchy neighborhood. She talks to her dog, talks to herself, and is afraid of her own basement. She takes us out of ourselves and gives us a break from our own persistent worries. We can love her, laugh with her, roll our eyes and yell at her. But she also narrates the social phenomena that reduced her home and neighborhood to the rubble it isn’t quite, but could be soon. The ending of East of Troost can still make me cry, but in a good way, a few tears of relief—and hope.

Ellen Barker grew up in Kansas City and had a front-row seat to the demographic shifts, the hope, and the turmoil of the civil rights era of the 1960s. She has a Bachelor’s degree in Urban Studies from Washington University in Saint Louis, where she developed a passion for how cities work, and don’t. Her first novel, East of Troost, will be published in September 2022. Prior to East of Troost, her most recent publication is “She Gathered it All,” in Art in the Time of Unbearable Crisis (2022, Stephanie Raffelock, ed.). She has also published essays in Fine Homebuilding and the Palo Alto Coop News.

The Enduring Appeal of Missed Connections

To the blonde guy at Kings Cross Station carrying the guitar case. We smiled at each other on the platform but I was too shy to ask for your number before I got on the train. I’ve been kicking myself ever since. Coffee soon? 

From the Brunette with the Blue Satchel 

For years, I used to commute to work in London on the bus. Whenever I got on, I’d look around for a copy of the free newspaper Metro and turn straight to the Rush Hour Crush column. In it, strangers appeal to find someone they saw on a London bus or train and were attracted to, but never dared ask for their number. I was fascinated by this column, and always wondered if they ever worked out; were these lovelorn commuters re-united with their missed love connections?

This question was part of the inspiration behind my new novel, The Lost Ticket. It tells the story of an elderly man who has spent sixty years riding the same bus looking for a girl he fell in love with in his youth, and the strangers on the bus who try to help him find her. I wanted to imagine what would happen if you couldn’t forget a person even decades after one brief encounter, and how you might go about finding them all these years later (including, of course, an advert in Rush Hour Crush).

I’m definitely not the only person who is intrigued by this idea of missed connections; just look at the number of wonderful romance novels and films that explore this theme. When I was a teenager, one of my favorite movies was Sliding Doors, in which two versions of Gwenyth Paltrow’s life play out: one in which she catches the train and marries the handsome man from the lift, and one in which she misses the train and never meets him again. And Josie Silver’s gorgeous book One Day in December takes the idea even further by giving her main character not one but ten missed opportunities with the guy she falls in love with through the bus window.

I think one reason this ‘missed connections’ trope is so interesting is because it plays into the ideal of love at first sight. Can we really tell someone is our soulmate from a brief eye contact through a bus window or across a crowded room? What if the guy with the guitar case really was her one true love? If you’re a romantic, like I am, this idea is hugely appealing. In fact, more than one couple who met through the Rush Hour Crush column have since got married, with one man proposing to his fiancé on the same station platform where he first spotted her!

Another reason I’m so drawn to these stories is because of the question of fate. If the guy with the guitar is her soulmate, are they destined to meet again one day, or will they never find each other again? The film Serendipity plays with this question brilliantly. Kate Beckinsale’s Sara falls for a stranger she meets in a shop, but after one night together, the wind blows her phone number out of his hand. Rather than give him her number again, Sara decides that she’ll leave it up to fate: if they’re meant to be together then they’ll meet again, and if not it was never meant to be. The film then flashes forward several years, and is filled with lots of wonderful missed connections.

Finally, I think many of us enjoy these kind of stories because they speak to the ‘what ifs’ in our own lives. However happy we may be, many of us still have those question marks in the back of our brains. What if I’d plucked up the courage to ask that boy out at school? What if I’d stayed on the platform to talk to the handsome man with the guitar, rather than jumping on my train? Perhaps I’d be a rock star’s wife right now, sipping cocktails by a pool in Malibu. But then would I be an author, reading Rush Hour Crush on the bus and musing about missed connections? Probably not! Maybe some connections we’re supposed to miss...

Freya Sampson is the author of two novels, The Last Chance Library and The Lost Ticket/The Girl on the 88 Bus. She worked in TV as an executive producer and her credits include two documentary series for the BBC about the British Royal Family, and a number of factual and entertainment series. She studied History at Cambridge University and in 2018 was shortlisted for the Exeter Novel Prize.

May-lee Chai On Writing Short Stories That Reflect The Moment

Inspiration is a funny thing. It can come to us like a lightning bolt, through the lyrics of a song, or in the fog of a dream. Ask any writer where their stories come from and you’ll get a myriad of answers, and in that vein I created the WHAT (What the Hell Are you Thinking?) interview.

Today’s guest for the WHAT is May-lee Chai, author of Tomorrow in Shanghai. May-lee Chai is a writer and educator. She is the recipient of an American Book Award and a National Endowment for the Arts Fellowship. In addition to her books, she has published numerous short stories and essays in journals, magazines, and anthologies,

Ideas for our books can come from just about anywhere, and sometimes even we can’t pinpoint exactly how or why. Did you have a specific origin point for your book

I wrote the stories in Tomorrow in Shanghai over many years, but I started putting the collection together during the pandemic amid a series of anti-Asian attacks. Those twin phenomena really shaped which stories I wrote and/or selected for the collection. None of my stories are set in this contemporary moment, but I wanted all the stories to reflect the anxiety of trying to survive amidst various kinds of violence and pressure.

Once the original concept existed, how did you build a plot around it?

For all my stories, I usually start with the image of a character or a setting for a character. For example, in “Life on Mars” it was Yu being driven from the airport in Denver to his new town and his realizing the world looks very different from his home in China. I wanted to see how he’d adapt in a place that felt completely alien to him, so I started throwing problems at him to see how his character would react. In “Hong’s Mother,” I knew the mother and daughter were going to end up in Lourdes, France on a pilgrimage of sorts, one that the mother wanted for religious reasons and the daughter for completely different reasons. I wanted to see if I could write towards them having an epiphany in their relationship, but I didn’t know when I began how they’d reach that point or what it would look like.

Have you ever had the plot firmly in place, only to find it changing as the story moved from your mind to paper?

Yes! In “Life on Mars,” I originally imagined that the story was going to end differently, but as I wrote into the character, his capacity for resilience and optimism ultimately proved more interesting to me than my original plot point.

Do story ideas come to you often, or is fresh material hard to come by?

I am constantly working on different projects, some short and some long. If I feel stuck in one, then I move on to the others. And when I feel refreshed, and my mind is ready to return to one of the long-term projects, I can go back and work on it again.

How do you choose which story to write next, if you’ve got more than one percolating?

 I write what I’m interested in developing and discovering more about.

I have 6 cats and a Dalmatian (seriously, check my Instagram feed) and I usually have at least one or two snuggling with me when I write. Do you have a writing buddy, or do you find it distracting?

Distracting! I write with headphones on and need to try to block out all other sensory distractions.