Q and A

A Conversation with the author.
Published by Voice on July 1, 2008

Q: Your heroine, Ellen Flanagan, decides on the book’s first page that she loves her house so much, she’d rather burn it down than let someone else live in it. What sparked this idea?

A: Four years ago, I moved from Oregon to Virginia for my husband’s job. As a freelance writer, my own job was portable. The house we sold in Portland was the first one we ever owned. It was the house we brought our babies home to. We didn’t have a lot of money when we bought it—my husband was working on a PhD and I was working as an editor—so every improvement we made to that house was something we had to scrimp and save for and sweat over.

Selling the house was incredibly painful for me, as was leaving Oregon. I really felt like I’d lost someone I loved. I mourned; I lost weight. I even got up late at night, after my husband and kids were asleep, to stare at the weather and traffic cams on the Oregon Department of Transportation website, so I could see my beloved Oregon live, in real time. Then I found out that the woman who sold our house to us in Virginia felt the same way about leaving her house; she’d been here thirty years and even though she wanted to move she burst into tears in the parking lot after signing the closing papers. It made me think that feeling passionately about a house might not be such an uncommon experience. For me, writing the novel was a way to process all the grief I had over losing my house.

Q: Ellen wrestles with the fact that being wildly attracted to her husband is not necessarily enough to sustain her marriage. Can you talk a bit about the relationship between emotional and financial security as you see it?

A: First, sexual attraction is not the same as emotional security. Real emotional security comes when you know someone well enough to know that they’ve seen all your warts and love you anyway and are in it for the long haul, no matter how bumpy the ride. It’s richer and deeper than sexual attraction, although I’d never minimize how important sexual attraction can be to a relationship. That said, it’s a lot easier to feel emotionally secure if there’s money in the bank. Constant money worries can undermine any relationship; it’s very tough to feel secure about anything when you’re writing checks that might bounce because payday is still three days away.

Q: It seems significant that Ellen names her home furnishings store/café “Coffee@home.” Are women as attached to their places of business as they are to their houses?

A: There’s something more visceral about where you live, especially once you have children. It’s not just a house or an apartment anymore; it’s the place in which you’re providing your kids with their childhoods. It’s tough for a place of business ever to be that emotionally loaded. On the flip side, so many of us who work and are raising families are so busy and so overwhelmed that work can really be a respite from the craziness of home life.

Q: You describe Coffee@home so vividly and invitingly—is it based on a real shop?

A: Yes. When I first moved to Virginia, I was very lonely. I was new to the community; my kids were both at school all day; my husband was working long hours; and I was working as a freelance writer, which meant I spent a lot of time alone in my house. The very first time I went TO Stacy’s Coffee Parlor, a local independent coffee shop, I felt at home. The place was painted in turquoise and yellow and coral. It had old couches and a great chandelier made of Fiestaware teacups and saucers. While it didn’t sell home furnishings like Coffee@home, it reminded me of Oregon.

Stacy, the owner, is a 40-something mom (like me), and a transplant from the West Coast (like me). We hit it off, and within a few weeks I was working at the shop every Friday. Turns out working in a coffee shop requires some of the very skills I’d honed as a mom: fixing meals and drinks, cleaning up, washing dishes. I had a wonderful time working there, found great inspiration for my novel, and met pretty much everyone in town.

Q: What message do you want readers to take away from reading House & Home?

A: I struggle every day with remembering to be grateful enough for the many blessings in my life. I think Ellen was blind to what she had until she almost lost it all. I hope that readers take away the idea that sometimes we focus on the wrong things as our source of happiness. That, and that making a house a home really is a worthwhile vocation, a calling that has meaning.

Q: Do you have a favorite scene?

A: Surprisingly, I really like the scene in which Ellen hops out of the car because she spots Jeffrey, and they stand on the street in the rain. That scene was very vivid for me. I also like the scene the morning after the fire, when Ellen is in bed at Jo’s house and feeling like she’s missed the boat on the whole middle-aged confidence thing—I can relate to that! And I love the opening paragraph of the book, because it was the first thing I ever wrote that actually made me think, “Maybe I can write a novel.”

Q: Ellen tells her best friend, Joanna, “Everything that I am is represented by that house.” Joanna, of course, calls her a nutcase, but can you elaborate on what a house tends to symbolize for the people who live in it?

A: Houses can say a lot about who we are, or even who we want people to think we are. I think we all hold an image of that perfect family and perfect family life, and a house can come to symbolize all of that. Of course, as Ellen discovers, the “perfect” family doesn’t exist; neither does the “perfect” home—and if it did, I wouldn’t want to live there. What has been amazing to me in the process of writing and publishing this book is how many people have felt compelled to tell me their own house stories. Everyone seems to have a story about a house they loved and lost. All those lost houses symbolize something—comfort, love, security, passion, predictability—whatever it is that was important in someone’s life at that moment.

Q: Joanna is such a great character — is she based on a real person?

A: Joanna is a composite of two of my oldest friends, women I’ve known since middle school. They both are eminently practical, loyal, smart, and just plain fun. I’m not a real extrovert so my circle of close friends is fairly small, but I couldn’t live without them.

Q: Are you Ellen Flanagan?

A: Yes and no. Ellen’s feelings about her house are mine, although I never tried to burn mine down! I think Ellen is more intense than I am; I can easily forget what exact day the Visa bill is due, or that I should have changed the batteries in the smoke detector. But her passion for her family and home life are very much mine.

Q: Have you always been a writer? I understand that there’s a pretty amazing story about how this book came to be written/published.

A: I’ve been a journalist for twenty-odd years, but had never written any fiction until I started this book four years ago. I’d always wanted to write a novel; I just never had an idea that seemed very good. Then when we moved and I sold the house, I just had so much emotion that I needed to put somewhere. I wrote the opening paragraph, and that was it for a couple months. But I kept thinking about it, especially during my daily walks. Then I got the idea about Ellen selling the house to someone she didn’t like, followed by the idea about a possible affair with the new owner’s husband. I wrote a chapter but felt like I had no idea what I was doing.

I signed up for an online novel writing class through mediabistro.com which really got me going. It forced me to write a plot summary, to think about characters, and most importantly, to write regularly so I could post my work for the instructor and others to read. I took the class twice! I was freelancing part time then, and working at the coffee shop and doing all the usual mom stuff—soccer practice, Brownies, Odyssey of the Mind, dive team, etc. I squeezed in the time to write when I could, mostly early in the morning and late at night.

When I finally finished the book, I bought a guide to Literary Agents and sent out letters to agents I thought might be interested. I had an amazing response from a bunch of agents who all wanted to represent me. Since I knew nothing about any of them, I dusted off my one good outfit and took a train to New York to meet them in person. I really clicked with Ann Rittenberg, my current agent, and she sent out the manuscript right away.

A week later she called with the news that multiple publishers were interested and I needed to come to New York the next day. “I can’t,” I said. “I’m coaching my nine-year-old’s Odyssey of the Mind team and the big competition is in three days.” “You are about to sell your first novel!” she said. “I’m sorry, but that trumps your other commitments.” “But I only have one good outfit,” I wailed, “and I wore it to meet you and now it’s at the dry cleaners!” My usual work outfit here consists of jeans from The Gap, flip-flops, and a t-shirt. She told me to call a personal shopper and get my butt to a department store, which I did. I bought a surprisingly expensive outfit and was on the train the next day. We sold the book the day after that. It was a wild ride. Now I have two good outfits!

Q: Ellen makes some hilarious cracks about differences between small talk on the East Coast and West Coast. What differences struck you immediately when you first moved to the East Coast?

A: Two things. First, it really did seem that people on the East Coast spend an inordinate amount of time talking about where they went to college. Since I haven’t attended school in more than twenty years, I just don’t get why this is important. Second, children on the East Coast address adults as “Mr.” or “Mrs.” In Portland, all the kids we knew (including our own) called adults by their first names. It’s just more formal on the East Coast.

Q: Without giving too much away, was the ending ever in doubt?

A: No. I knew from the first paragraph what the climactic scene of the book would be; which characters would actually be involved and exactly what their roles would be still weren’t clear to me at that point. I actually wrote the penultimate scene right after I wrote the first chapter. I just didn’t know how I was going to get all the way from A to Z.

Q: What’s the difference between a house and a home?

A: If I could bottle it, I’d make a million dollars, right? I’ll tell you, you know it when you feel it. I think Sam puts it well in the book when he tells Ellen that it’s not about “the stuff.” A genuine home is all about the feeling a place evokes, much more so than the objects it contains.

To request an interview with Kathleen McCleary, please contact:
Allison McGeehon, Hyperion & Voice, allison.mcgeehon@abc.com / 212-456-0173
www.EveryWomansVoice.com