Former PW editor Emily Chenoweth interweaves the story of a daughter's sexual awakening with her mother's terminal illness, culminating in a bittersweet anniversary party, in her debut, Hello Goodbye (reviewed on page 26).
Where did you get the idea to combine the stories of a young woman at the beginning of her adult life with her mother facing the end of life?
The short answer is that it's based on the truth. When I was in my first year of college, my mother was diagnosed with a brain tumor and she died my sophomore year. My dad and my mother and I did go to a hotel in New Hampshire like the family in the book. But everything that goes on in the hotel is made up. While the setting and situation is based on reality, it's still very much an act of the imagination. I had sold it as a memoir, but my editor later said to me, “Maybe this would be better as a novel.” I said, “Great, because I don't remember anything that happened in the hotel.”
So many of the party guests were fantastic, like the campus-touring folksinger, Ruth, and Sylvie, the lone waitress wearing a T-shirt at the topless bar. Did you make them up while you were writing, or did you come up with these characters beforehand?
They came out of the writing. I think most of us have fantasy careers in some ways. Mine has always been to be a musician. Not necessarily a singer-songwriter, but more of a rock star. I made Ruth a singer-songwriter so I could at least toy with the idea of a performer. That was just me trying to have a little fun with the characters. With Sylvie, I wanted someone who wasn't of the parents' generation, a bridge between the world of Abby and the world of her parents.
One of the blurbs has a Dirty Dancing comparison. Did that occur to you while you were writing it?
I used to joke about it, actually. People find out you're writing a book and ask what it's about. It's always an excruciating question to answer. I used to say somewhat jokingly, “It's Dirty Dancing meets Elisabeth Kübler Ross's On Death and Dying, which is a seminal book about the five stages of grief.” And I was definitely playing with it. At the hotel with my family in real life, there were no dancing lessons, but I put them in the book just because I thought it was funny.
What are you working on next?
I just novelized a script for a movie that's coming out in August. I wrote a whole novel in the month of January. It was as though I'd been laboring in this dark cave with Hello Goodbye, and then writing this script novelization was like going swimming in some warm Mediterranean ocean.
