Q&A

Frequently Asked Questions (also see Essays, Questions, Links)

1)How do you pronounce your name?

Maile is pronounced MY-lee. Or Miley. It’s Hawaiian. Meloy is pronounced like Molloy.
2)What’s your new book about?

It’s a Cold War spy novel with kids and magic, but a kind of magic that’s more akin to science: it has to be learned. The book is set in 1952, and it’s about a girl, Janie Scott, whose parents are on the Hollywood blacklist, so they have to move to England to work. In London, which is still reeling from the war, Janie meets a mysterious apothecary and his defiant son, Benjamin, and gets drawn into their world. It’s about a boy confronting his destiny, and a girl finding a new life, and it’s set in the atmosphere of fear and anxiety of the early fifties, of “Duck and Cover” bomb drills and a mounting nuclear threat.
3)What advice do you have for writers who have trouble focusing?

Set aside time to write, even if it’s only an hour or two a day, and think of the time as the requirement. So you just have to be there, and it doesn’t matter what you finish. I think it takes the pressure off the individual story or chapter, and you’ll end up working on the ideas that seem most promising. I start many, many stories and abandon most of them, but eventually some pay off.
4)Do you like writing short stories or novels better?

I like going back and forth between the two. It’s like the difference between a long marriage and dating, and there are advantages to each. With a novel, you know you have the book there to work on every morning. With stories, you have new characters and fresh situations. (Although some of my stories have taken me as long as the novels, with long periods in which I put the stories aside.) Some of the stories in Both Ways Is the Only Way I Want It were written (or started) before and between the novels, and some after.
5)Do you outline your novels and stories before you begin?

No—I wish I could. It might be more efficient. I figure the story out as I go along, and then revise heavily when I know what it is. The story “O Tannenbaum,” in Both Ways Is the Only Way I Want It, started with the idea of a family out cutting down a Christmas tree, and choosing one that’s crowding another tree so that the one left behind would have room to grow. We used to do that, when I was growing up in Montana, and it seemed like a promising idea, but I didn’t have anything more in mind than that. The hitchhikers showed up for me as they do in the story, under a tree in the snow.
6)When did you decide to write A Family Daughter? Were you planning it when you were writing Liars and Saints?

I wrote Liars and Saints first, with no thought of writing another novel about the Santerre family. I really thought I was finished with them. It wasn’t until after Liars and Saints came out that I started thinking about writing a book about someone who’s written a novel, and about the way people wonder what’s true in it. Then it seemed interesting to have one of the secret-keeping Santerres write one, so that A Family Daughter would seem to be the bigger, messier, less-streamlined source material that Liars and Saints came from.

Everything I’d written until then had been very straightforwardly realistic, and this new novel would have a meta-fictional aspect to it, but only in relation to the other book. A Family Daughter also had to work on its own, if you hadn’t read Liars and Saints. The mental exercise of doing both things at once seemed interesting and entertaining to me (and you have to find things that are interesting and entertaining to you, if you’re going to plug away at a novel.)

The people who seem to have had the best experience of the two books are the ones who let a little time pass—enough time to read another book—in between.
7)What are you working on?

The Apothecary, my first novel for kids, just came out. It’s beautifully illustrated by Ian Schoenherr. I’m working on a second book about Janie and Benjamin, the kids in the novel. I thought I was going to work on a novel for adults next, but this one has taken over.

maile meloy