Omnivoracious

Amazon Asks: Kimberly McCreight on family, yogurt, and Breaking Bad

Reconstructing Amelia is a media-fest of narrative, emails, texts and other bits a tormented mother uses to deconstruct her teenage daughter's life and figure out whether she did or didn't commit suicide. Climbing the charts, it's the first novel by lawyer-turned-author Kimberly McCreight, who knows a bit about motherhood angst and, well... villainy.

What's the elevator pitch for your book?

A page-turning mystery about parenting in the age of cyber-bullying, Reconstructing Amelia follows a mother as she tries to piece together the last troubled days of her daughter's life.

What's on your nightstand/bedside table/Kindle?

My Beloved World by Sonia Sotomayor, Going Clear by Lawrence Wright, and Flannery O'Connor's The Complete Stories.

Top 3-5 favorite books of all time?

The Hours by Michael Cunningham; While I Was Gone by Sue Miller; To the Lighthouse by Virginia Woolf, Plainsong by Kent Haruf; The Fault in Our Stars by John Green.

Important book you never read?

The Odyssey. I want to say that I'll read it soon, but now that I have children, I think that might be a lie. Perhaps, once they go to college.

Favorite book(s) as a child?

The Giving Tree by Shel Silverstein. The story felt so huge and important even though I don't think I fully understood why. Unfortunately, my children don't let me read it to them because I always start bawling on page two.

What's your most memorable author moment?

I quit being a lawyer more than a decade ago to chase a dream. The road was much longer and darker than I ever expected, but I'm lucky to have so many amazing friends who helped see me through. I had dinner with one right after my book sold. When I shared the news, she shouted, jumped out of her chair, and burst into tears, pretty much all at the same time. She wasn't the only friend to cry when I told her either. The outpouring of love and support from so many people in my life has been nothing short of astounding. I feel so insanely fortunate

Getting the call from my editor telling me that I'd made the New York Times Bestseller List was another moment I'll never forget. Assuming it actually happened. I'm still half-convinced I hallucinated it.

What talent or superpower would you like to have (not including flight or invisibility)?

I think it may be more of a super-villain power, but mind-control. That's what I'd want. I promise I'd only use it for good, of course. To be honest, I can't imagine why everyone wouldn't want that. The power to make everyone think and, therefore, do whatever you want? Who wouldn't pick that? As it turns out, my family, that's who. Not only did they all give much more hero-ish answers, but now I think they're all sleeping with one eye open. Except for my older daughter. As she sees it, I already have that power. After all, I'm always making her do whatever I want anyway.

What are you obsessed with now?

Greek frozen yogurt. After claiming for years that it was disgusting, I'm now utterly addicted.

What are you stressed about now?

The end of Breaking Bad. I know they'll pull it off in the same flawless, breathtaking form with which they've executed the rest of the series, so I'm not worried about them. I'm worried about me. What am I going to do without that show? I guess I'll still have the yogurt.

What are you psyched about now?

Summer. I can't wait for late afternoons on the beach when the setting sun turns the whole world gold and there's salt on your skin and you've had way too many ice cream cones for no good reason. I'm looking forward to our family vacation too. My daughters are finally old enough to really travel, and we're taking them to France and England. I can't wait to see all of it again for the first time through their eyes.

What's your most prized/treasured possession?

My husband and my children. And, don't worry, I know they're not possessions. I mean not really. But they're what matters most to me.

Author crush -- who's your current author crush?

Can I have two? John Green and Flannery O'Connor. I so wish the three of us could go out to dinner.

What's next for you?

I'm a few hundred pages into my next novel. It's another dark mystery with a deep emotional core. I'm kind of obsessed with it too. That and, you know, the yogurt.

What's the last dream you remember?

I had a dream that my kids' hamster, Chocolate Chip, escaped from her cage. In the dream, she was about six times as large as she is in real life, which is exceptionally bad news because she's essentially an attack hamster. In the dream—I mean nightmare—we all had to escape from her by crawling out a window and down the fire escape. Which reminds me, I really do need to find a hamster tamer.  

Favorite line?

"We changed again, and yet again, and it was now too late and too far to go back, and I went on. And the mists had all solemnly risen now, and the world lay spread before me." Charles Dickens, Great Expectations.

What's your favorite vice?

Candy. I consume all kinds, often in huge quantities. In fact, I consider myself something of a connoisseur. However, if someone happens to stumble on my enormous secret stash, I always lie and tell them it belongs to my children. Of course, that has the unintended side effect of making me look like a terrible parent. But you can't have everything, can you?

What do you collect?

I love the idea of collecting and I'm completely fascinated by people who do. But I'm more of a purger myself. In fact, if there's a disorder that's the opposite of hoarding, I think I might have that.

Best piece of fan mail you ever got?

I heard from someone who'd read Reconstructing Amelia after a loss in his own family. He wanted me to know how the story had helped him process his own grief. It was the warmest, most lovely note, and, reading it, I so felt the love for this person who was no longer here. I was in tears before I'd even stepped away from my mailbox.

“A Curious Man”: Neal Thompson Talks Ripley with Sara Nelson

Leroy Robert Ripley was a brilliant oddball--a lonely, funny-looking kid who grew up to be a fabulously successful connoisseur of the weird, the fantastical, the gross. Amazon Senior Editor Neal Thompson channeled his own fascination with Ripley into A Curious Man: The Strange & Brilliant Life of Robert 'Believe It or Not' Ripley, one of our Best of the Month Picks for May.

Thompson sat down with his boss, Amazon Editorial Director Sara Nelson, to explain why.

Life After Life: An Interview With Kate Atkinson

She was running late. Her appointment to interview a famous, favorite author was at 12:30 across town, and for once she knew not to try to brave the traffic in a taxi, even if it was right in front of her when she exited her building. She raced instead across the street toward the subway, when splat--her ankle twisted and she fell to hands and knees on the sidewalk. This being New York, ten passersby turned to ask if she was all right; none of them stopped.

And darkness fell.

For once, she was going to be on time, so she left the office a full half hour early and grabbed the cab that had stopped right in front of her building. But she'd miscalculated, and at 12:30--when she was supposed to be inside the publisher's office interviewing a famous, favorite author--she was stuck in midtown traffic with a dying cell phone.

And darkness fell.

OK, so the above is a hamhanded attempt to imitate the main trope in Kate Atkinson's fantastic Life After Life, in which a rather ordinary British woman is born, dies, is born and lives again several times throughout the twentieth century. In far less capable hands (see above) such a setup would seem gimmicky at best, or at least just tiresome. But Life After Life has received uniformly excellent reviews, been a best book of the month and currently hovers around No. 37 on our bestsellers list precisely because it is neither; instead it is smart, funny, and a little odd, much like its creator.

By the time we meet, Kate Atkinson, indeed sitting in her publisher's office, has been on tour for a few weeks and has spent plenty of time talking about what her book means. And yet, though she has surely been asked these questions many times, she has a meandering, very British way of making it seem as if she's just discovering the answers as she goes along.

When I refer, for instance, to Life After Life as a "literary do-over," a term that has been in the press already, she says until this week she hadn't heard that expression; "we don't have it in England," she says. And besides, she doesn't think our heroine, Ursula, is having "do overs" because the locution suggests Ursula is aware of what's happening and that she has a choice. "From my point of view, as the constructor of this narrative, I see what happens to Ursula as character changing. Things happen to her, and she accrues layers," Atkinson says.

In fact, to Atkinson, who has written eight books, including the beloved Behind the Scenes at the Museum and a literary mystery series involving a detective named Jackson Brodie, Life After Life, despite its unusual conceit, was actually more straightforward and easier to write.

"I really enjoyed writing this book, much more than I usually enjoy writing. I felt a huge emotional engagement with it," she says, particularly with the parts about WWII. "I feel I have a very British emotional relationship with the Blitz," she says. What does that mean? I ask. "That's what we English do," she says. "We have a very emotional relationship with the Blitz. We see it as a period at which we were at our lowest and at our best."

She admits that she usually frets (her word) a lot during the writing process, especially when a book is heavy on plotting. But this novel, for all its twist and turns, was more linear, she says. "For me, the structure was simple, not like writing a crime novel at all," she laughs. "Writing the last book, Started Early, Took My Dog, drove me mad; it's knotty, four different narratives that need to go like this," she demonstrates, knitting her hands together. "[With Ursula] I knew she was born, going to die, be born, die."

Yet, much as she loves Ursula--her own (and many readers') favorite in a cast of beloved characters--Atkinson says Life After Life is really not about a single person at all so much as it is about the war itself.

"I've always wanted to write a book about the war. It sounds very cold, but as a novelist, I knew how much mileage narrative mileage there is in it." And, as many reviewers have noted, some of its most inventive, interesting scenes involve Hitler's mistress, Eva Braun, with whom Atkinson says she became "obsessed" during the researching of the novel.

"She's fascinating in the way that she's not fascinating. There's nothing extraordinary about her; she was completely ordinary. She loved makeup and posing for photos. She loved her body, she swam she skied. She was this healthy Bavarian female who was ready to get married and be fecund and have children. Instead, she was with someone who never showed any public demonstration of affection or even acknowledgement. But she was clearly obsessed with him in a kind of erotomania way. Women, so many German women, shared the same erotomania for him, weeping and shouting after him."

But if her depiction of the war is dramatic, it is also worrisome, in terms of how Life After Life will be received, especially in Germany, where Atkinson will soon be touring. "I'm a little worried," she says, "about being asked questions there because the book is about fighting the war, and about patriotism... The German publishers love the book so I'm taking that as a basis, but... I suppose it will either do really well or really badly."

Here, of course, there's no question about its future. In the top 100 Amazon bestsellers almost from the day it appeared, Life After Life is by any definition Atkinson's breakthrough, the title that will make her--has already made her--as famous and successful here as she has long been in the UK.

"When I finished this book, I thought: 'I'll never write a book as good as this,'" she says, with a mix of pride and modesty and anxiety that has become, in this hourlong conversation, characteristic. "I do think it's my best book."

Virtual armies of passionate readers will agree.

Amazon Asks: Mary Beth Keane on Typhoid Mary, Irish writers, and her wish for an unusual superpower

Novels based on historical figures are hardly uncommon these days; you could even say they were more than a bit of a trend. (Loving Frank.The Paris Wife. The Master's Muse. The upcoming Freud's Mistress).

Right now, we're crazy about Fever by Mary Beth Keane; it tells the story of Mary Mallon, better known to most of us as Typhoid Mary. Keane's novel is a thoughtful, sympathetic look at the working class cook who may or may not have infected much of haute New York on the eve of the 20th century; equally compelling is the portrait Keane draws of immigrant life, of politics (sexual and otherwise) and of the city that, somehow, we can never hear enough about.

I asked Keane, currently on tour in the UK, to answer a few questions about her book.

What's the elevator pitch for your book?

It's a novel about Mary Mallon, who was the woman known as "Typhoid Mary."

What's on your nightstand/bedside table/Kindle?

The Flamethrowers by Rachel Kushner is on my bedside table. I'm about halfway through and loving every word. I just pre-ordered Americanah by Chimamanda Ngozi Adichie on my Kindle and look forward to when it magically appears.

Top 3-5 favorite books of all time?

Oh Wow. Can I do this? This is a list that's always in flux. Dubliners. The Collected Poems of Seamus Heaney. Pale Horse Pale Rider by Katherine Anne Porter. My Antonia by Willa Cather. The Heart is a Lonely Hunter by Carson McCullers. Ask me next week and the list will be different.

Important book you never read?

For Whom the Bell Tolls

Book that changed your life?

The Barrytown Trilogy by Roddy Doyle

What's your most memorable author moment?

While on tour for Fever, I boarded a plane in Boston and sat next to a person who was reading a review of my book in The Boston Globe. When she finished reading it she removed the page from the rest of the paper, folded it, and put it in the side pocket of her bag. I spent the next six hours thinking of ways I might tell her that I wrote that book, but the longer I waited the weirder it would have been to let her know that I'd been reading over her shoulder.

What talent or superpower would you like to have (not including flight or invisibility)?

I've often fantasized about not needing sleep and feeling no physical side effects whatsoever. I'd be willing to plug myself in somewhere for, say, an hour a day (as long as the recharge system was hands-free and I could read or use a laptop during this period), but other than that I could just do what I liked with the WHOLE day and not have to waste all those precious hours snoozing. This superpower is only useful if I'm the only person who has it. If other people also get this ability -– and start ringing the phone at 3 a.m. –- then I'd like to select a new superpower.

What are you obsessed with now?

Time. Finding it, using it, stretching it, somehow.

What are you stressed about now?

Time. See above.

What are you psyched about now?

I'm excited and anxious to be starting a new book. I'm at the horrible part right now where every day is a blank page moment, but hopefully it won't be too long until I'm sure about where it's headed and I can feel good about it.

What's your most prized/treasured possession?

When I see this question asked and answered in other places people often say their kids. I don't consider my children to be my possessions, which is the only reason I'm not naming them here. As for material possessions, I have a box of letters my high school boyfriend -– who is now my husband –- wrote to me back in '93 and '94. In the same box is my high school diary. Though I don't think I've actually looked at any of the contents since 1995, I carted that little shoe box with me to college, and to every apartment and city I've lived in since, so I guess that means I treasure it, but I'm still afraid to reread what's in there. I'm SURE twenty years is not long enough. One day.

Author crush -- who's your current author crush?

Louise Erdrich

What's the last dream you remember?

It was too disturbing to share. People will think I'm insane.

Favorite line?

From Ulysses, Episode 17: "The heaventree of stars hung with humid nightblue fruit."

Best piece of fan mail you ever got?

I got a letter a few weeks ago from a retired gynecologist who'd worked for Planned Parenthood in the 1960s and 1970s. He told me the highlights of his biography and it was just riveting! The letter was handwritten, four pages front and back, and at the very bottom of the second page when he'd run out of room he wrote in teeny tiny print, "by the way I'm writing because I liked your novel."

Ruth Ozeki on Zen and the Art of Creativity

Fans of Ruth Ozeki's first two books -- My Year of Meats and All Over Creation -- could be forgiven for asking what kind of food her new book A Tale for the Time Being is about. Meats, was, on the surface about the cattle industry (even though it was really about the culture clash between Japanese and American attitudes toward food and everything else). Creation was about potato farming. Sort of. But Time Being is a little bit different -- and a lot the same.

"This book is kind of an outgrowth of the themes what I was most interested in the last two," Ozeki says, as we chat in her publisher's office on the author's 57th birthday. "Like the others, it's about the search for authenticity, and the ways authenticity becomes distorted and used and abused."

Sounds heady, right? Well, it is -- and it isn't. Like both of Ozeki's other books, this one can be read on at least two levels: it's a story within a story about a lonely Japanese girl and it's a way to write about old Japan vs. new, about traditional Japanese womanhood versus contemporary Japanese American women, about, as Ozeki says, authenticity.

Double meanings, duality, is nothing new to this biracial daughter of a Japanese woman and a Wisconsin-born Caucasian father. Ozeki spent much of her childhood in New Haven, Connecticut, idenitifying herself -- "or being identified" -- as "the Asian Kid." 

"I saw myself as that and I behaved in all of the Asia-appropriate ways." So, it was a shock when she finally, as a young adult, visited Japan. While Ozeki might have expected to feel either very much at home or uncomfortably other in her mother's homeland, she actually felt happy with her outsideryness. "It was an enormous relief to realize that I was also American and that was OK. There was a huge sense of liberation that I could suddenly express all of the parts of myself that had been suppressed by the [American] stereotypes [of Asians]. "I remember feeling 'Oh my God, it's OK to have a sense of humor. I can be obnoxious and loud and all of these other things because I'm American.' Before that, I'd been holding myself to some equally stereotypical Japanese ideal."

A Tale for the Time Being is also very much an outgrowth of Ozeki's study of Zen, a practice she has been involved with since the mid-1990s, and which helped her through the nursing of her dying mother. In fact, writing, for Ozeki, is very close to a Zen practice. "They're both contemplative," she says. "They both require studying the self. Both require enormous patience, and in both pursuits you spend a lot of time sitting and waiting for nothing; you don't know what you're waiting for, you just wait. The main difference is that in meditation practice, you're studying your thoughts, they eventually arise, and you let them go. In writing, you study your thoughts, then you write them down, and then you let them go."

This novel is about another relationship, though, too –- and that is about the deep connection between writers and their readers. The Japanese girl, Nao (pronounced, pun intended "Now"), is in pain and journaling into the void, but when her book falls into Ruth's hands, her story (and she) is saved.

"All writers understand that we are writing across time, speaking to someone in the future," Ozeki says. "To live is to be in the story. Our lives are our story." So,  A Tale for the Time Being is also about the relationsihip between the storyteller and her audience. "What happens when the right book falls into the right reader's hands?" she asks, and then answers: "It's magic."

Sara Says: Nora Ephron Knew From Lucky Guys

On the one hand, Lucky Guy seems like a strange thing to have been written by the late Nora Ephron. It's a play, for one thing; it's about tabloid journalism in New York in the 1980s; it centers around a very hard drinking, Irish-American columnist named Mike McAlary, who won a Pulitzer Prize after some very public career ups and downs; it has no love story (a la Sleepless in Seattle), no sisterhood of wise cracking women (ditto, plus You've Got Mail, plus the fact of Ephron's three writer sisters in real life); no whimsy (unless you count the little bit of singing Lucky Guy's characters do in their many bars); it has no happy ending. And yet the play –- which runs on Broadway through June 16 –- turns out to be as Ephronesque as it could be, as longtime fans of the author/screenwriter will note.

Ephron was once a journalist for The New York Post, one of the tabloids that also employed McAlary, albeit in a different era. It's about writers and their sometimes blind ambitions (see characters throughout Ephron's oeuvre, and the fact that she was famously married to Carl "Watergate" Bernstein, as well as journalists Dan Greenberg and Nick Pileggi). And yes it's a play -– but so was Love, Loss and What I Wore, which Ephron and her sister Delia adapted from a charming novel. It's also -- most lovingly, if in a slightly sharper, more masculine way -- about New York, Ephron's longtime hometown, the setting for most of her writings, and a character in itself. And it stars Tom Hanks as McAlary; Hanks, as you recall, was in Sleepless, and was one of Ephron's good friends.

Photo: Joan Marcus

But even more than all that, there are lines and bits in this play that are vintage Nora, that display her unerring ear for dialogue. (One of my favorites: Eddie Hayes, the celebrity lawyer/operator who handles McAlary's career , brags he can get McAlary so much money that he could buy a house that "could have six kids" in it. "Eight, if they aren't too big." And, as one of McAlary's frenemies proclaims, McAlary is "a two-bit hack who got [Jimmy] Breslin's slot but not his talent."

Still, the word that comes to mind most throughout Lucky Guy is "legendary." In a couple of dozen short scenes, Ephron manages to evoke a whole world that might have been small, in that it took up only a little time and space, but that lives large in its own legend. It's only the reporters onstage, but they remind us of so many other people and places of the time: Donald Trump as he's divorcing Ivana, Elaine's (now defunct) restaurant, The Lion's Head (the writers' bar), Joey Buttafuocco, Rudy Giuliani, McAlary himself. Writing about legends, of course, should come as no surprise, since Ephron was and has, since her death last June, become pretty legendary herself.

If you can't get to the Broadhurst theater by June 16, console yourself with some of other Ephron's great writing: Wallflower at the Orgy (written close to the time of the events in the play); Heartburn; I feel Bad About My Neck; I Remember Nothing; and Scribble Scribble (which is expected to be reissued this fall).

 

Sara Says: A Poetic Happy Birthday to Philip Roth

A Birthday Poem for a Favorite Writer

Whose books these are I think I know.
He says he's quitting writing though.
Goodbye, Columbus, Portnoy, Swede.
He’s leaving Houghton Mifflin low.

The guy who gave us much to read
From writing pressure must be freed.
But Letting Go at eighty now,
May be our loss, but it's his need.

So, Philip Roth, please take a bow
For eight great decades,  Oh, and how!
Sex, Pastorals and Lindbergh, too
Of course your Newark should be proud.

So here's our wish. It's nothing new.
It's sappy and it's also true
More great life and lit for you
More great life and lit for you.

Some Things You Might Not Know About Sheryl Sandberg...But Lucky Us, We Got the Chance to Ask

By any measure, Sheryl Sandberg is a big success. Smart, rich, powerful, the 43-year-old COO of Facebook, wife, mother-of-two "has it all," as they used to say. But Sandberg doesn't take her successes for granted -- hell, no! She worked hard for them -- and she's intent on helping other women learn to lead.

Her book, Lean In: Women, Work, and the Will to Lead, is out March 12, and has already garnered lots of passionate opinions. We chose her book as one of the Best of the Month and chatted with her a week or so before it went on sale.

Some things we learned:

Sandberg considers Lean In (the book) and Lean In (the foundation the book launches), to be unisex and ageless. Men and women need to work together to change the culture, she says. "I think this is everyone's issue," she says. She then tells me that even her 70-something mother was inspired by it -- and is now planning to have a Bat Mitzvah, an opportunity not available to her when she was 13.

She doesn't seem particularly surprised by the flack she's gotten in some corners of the press for "blaming" women instead of corporations and government. "I always knew this topic would incite strong debate. It's about us, about our passions."

Some critics also suggest Sandberg's opinions are mere clones of last century's feminism -- which, ironically, Sandberg admits to having undervalued at the time. "Looking back, it made no sense for my college friends and me to distance ourselves from the hard-won achievements of earlier feminists. We should have cheered their efforts."

Even this very privileged, super successful woman -- she has two Harvard degrees and has worked in the White House -- has self doubt. When I ask her how she got over the typical fears she elucidates in the book, she says, "The simple answer is I'm not sure I have. Like many women, I have a complicated relationship with leadership, with the word 'power.'"

Also, to those who think Sandberg must be "tough," she explains that she has, on occasion cried in the office and that she has come to understand that the occasional personal sharing can be conducive to a good working relationship. Example: Sandberg first turned down a job with her former professor, Larry Summers, for the most personal of reasons -- she wanted to get away from DC, where her ex-husband was living -- and declares that particular choice to have been the "best thing to do."

Real cultural change doesn't happen overnight -- "Social gains are never handed out. They must be seized," she writes -- but Sandberg evokes the night Obama was first elected President as an indicator of what can happen in just one generation. "I was standing behind my couch with my arms around my sister, crying [and watching the returns] and we said, 'You know what's the best thing about this?'" Answer: Her kids -- then one and three years old -- would grow up never knowing a time when it was unusual or special to have an African American president. So maybe the generation being born now will grow up free of gender stereotypes.

Two of the strongest chapters in the book -- the ones that resonated in our offices, which employ many brilliant women in the early stages of their careers -- are 1) Don't Leave Before You Leave (i.e. Don't be like the woman Sandberg cites who discusses her child-rearing plans with an employer when she was not only not pregnant... "but she didn't even have a boyfriend.") And 2) Are You My Mentor? (which takes its name from the popular children's book about ducklings: Are You My Mother?). Women need mentors, sure, but those mentors have to be earned, the relationship has to grow organically, and -- guess what? -- a woman is even allowed to have a male mentor.

She doesn't seem to care how she will be remembered. When I ask her what search terms on Google (her former employer) would bring up her name, she pauses. "I don't know," she says. I suggest "feminist leader," or "visionary," or "troublemaker" and she doesn't bite. "You know, it really doesn't matter," she says. "This is not about me. What matters is that we're having the conversation."

Sara Says: Scientology, Again? How the Two Newest Books Stack Up

Every couple of years, like clockwork, the world seems to come around to an interest in books about Scientology -- the controversial religion started by a minor science fiction writer named L. Ron Hubbard in the '50s. For example: Blown for Good - Behind the Iron Curtain of Scientology (2010), My Billion Year Contract: Memoir of a Former Scientologist (2009), and Inside Scientology: The Story of America's Most Secretive Religion (2011), just to name a few.

2013 is no exception: Lawrence Wright's Going Clear, out a month, is getting great reviews and is, at the time of this writing, No. 34 on our Bestsellers List with 25 days in the Top 100. This week, Jenna Miscavige Hill's Beyond Belief (a great title!) appears; I predict it too will sell well.

Why the everlasting fascination with Scientology, which may or may not have tens of thousands of members (the numbers, like most for this group, vary widely)? "I'm just not that interested in it," one noted journalist recently told me. "It's really very small." And yet, like the proverbial train wreck, a good book about the cult-or-religion (you decide) is hard to resist. Here's a partial list of the way the two newest entries in the category compare.

 

CELEBRITY FOCUS

Going Clear: While the subtitle of Wright's book makes reference to Hollywood's involvement with the Church, his main Hollywood contact seems to be Paul Haggis (screenwriter for such films as "Million Dollar Baby" and "Letters from Iwo Jima" and director of such short-lived TV series as "Family Law" and "The Black Donnellys"). He only nods at information about the more famous members, Tom Cruise and Travolta

Beyond Belief: Hill's is much more personal story. She was essentially born Scientologist; her uncle David Miscavige is the sect's leader and her parents were, for a time, high up in the organization. She focuses, therefore, more on regular people, though there are some interesting passages about how the Church treats celebrities: Lisa Marie Presley in particular.

OBJECTIVITY

Going Clear: While it is clear that Wright has a particular point of view about Scientology, he approaches the topic journalistically and lets other people (Haggis, predominantely) reveal information. He also adds a lot of history and biographical information about L. Ron Hubbard, which can make this book feel a bit padded.

Beyond Belief: Jenna Miscavige Hill is no journalist, and she knew the history of Scientology from the inside. Only after she left the main Church and went to Australia did she gain some perspective. "I had been under the impression that everyone loved L. Ron Hubbard," she writes, "and that Scientology was flourishing and expanding all over the world. However, it seemed like most people in Australia did not even know what it was, and those who did often were skeptical."

NEWS

Going Clear: Wright's book is exhaustively researched and gives a new reader a very good overview of the religion, although it never completely makes clear what the tenets of the Church are. (Or perhaps they're so muddled as to be unexplainable.)

Beyond Belief: Hill is very specific about Scientology practices. Apparently, all powerful people senior to her are addressed as "Mr," regardless of their gender. She also describes her punishments -– usually for "misunderstood words," a seemingly weird psychosemantic education all young Scientologists must endure; scrubbing bathrooms for days at a time was not unusual. She also reveals that "an out 2d is an unacceptable relationship, like the one that got her once-powerful mother declared an SP (Suppressed Person), the Scientology equivalent of excommunication.

FEAR FACTOR

Going Clear: Writing about scientology is risky business, as every writer (including this one) knows, and Wright is extra careful to show his methods –- one of the strongest scenes in the book is a how-I-got-the-story passage about meeting with the Church's spokespeople to check facts. One of the most chilling moments comes when Wright wonders aloud to Paul Haggis as to his future, now that he has spoken out. Haggis replies, in essence, that he wouldn't be surprised to be caught up a few years from now in some sort of scandal that doesn't appear to involve Scientology.

Beyond Belief: While she writes perhaps in more detail than even the most curious care to know about the punishments and threats made to her and her fellow renegade husband, Dallas Hill, the author seems strangely calm about her final decision to leave the Church. And how Byzantine that departure was; even while the Church threatened to punish the Hills by declaring them SPs (Suppressed Persons) and trying to extract payments for behavioral "violations," Hill spent weeks and months making her decision. Today, she's totally estranged from Scientology, unabashedly and seemingly fearlessly declaring the Church "a dangerous organization whose beliefs allow it to ... violate basic human rights."

Amazon Asks: Rebecca Dana, on Sulfates, Sudoku and Her Vespa

Jujitsu Rabbi and the Godless Blonde (a January Best of the Month pick) is the funny-and-smart memoir by journalist Rebecca Dana, who came to New York from Pittsburgh (and, well, yes, via Yale) to make her name as a writer in the city fabled for writers. Here’s how she explains herself... 

•  What's the elevator pitch for your book?

It’s a funny book about a very odd year in my life, when I was living in the middle of an ultra-Orthodox Jewish community in Brooklyn, as the roommate of a bass-playing, jujitsu-practicing Russian rabbi while working as a fashion writer. "Sex and the City" meets the "Odd Couple" meets "A Stranger Among Us," I guess you would say. But all true.

•  What's on your nightstand/bedside table/Kindle?

Tenth of December, by George Saunders. Going Clear, by Lawrence Wright. And A Place of Greater Safety, by Hilary Mantel.

•  Top 3-5 favorite books of all time?

Heartburn, by Nora Ephron. War and Peace, by Leo Tolstoy. The New Journalism, by Tom Wolfe. Valley of the Dolls, by Jacqueline Susann. The Heart is a Lonely Hunter, by Carson McCullers.

•  Important book you never read?

The Old Testament. Lord did I try, but never made it all the way through.

•  Book that changed your life?

The White Album, by Joan Didion. I got my first copy from a former boss, who had a tattoo of a dancing lady on his arm and who once insisted I hold his gun. (His actual firearm, I mean. Not, like, “his gun.”)

•  What's your most memorable author moment?

Recording my audiobook. It was torture. After years of working on this thing, you finally sign off on the final draft, after which you absolutely cannot make any more changes. And then they put you in a cold, dry, soundproof room and make you read the entire book out loud, alone, so you see every little detail you wish you could tweak but no longer can. I mean, it was really fun. But also, excruciating.

•  What talent or superpower would you like to have (not including flight or invisibility)?

Sara Says: All I Want for New Years is...

All I want for New Year’s is ... a handful of great books.

Whether you were a Gone Girl lover, or a fan of the pretty racy Fifty Shades of Grey, you have to agree that 2012 was a great year for books. Fiction (The Round House), nonfiction (The Signal and the Noise), a whole shelf full of music bios (Bruce, Neil, Pete, Mick and more) and hundreds of other faves. But what’s next?

Here are the five titles I’ve either gotten a look at or am most interested in grabbing as soon as I can in 2013.

Lawrence Wright: Going Clear: Scientology, Hollywood, and the Prison of Belief

Why are so many creative types lured by the church of L. Ron Hubbard? Wright, who wrote previously about another impenetrable group -- Al Qaeda -- turns his considerable attentions to the religion proud to count Tom Cruise and John Travolta among its many members.

Michael Pollan: Cooked
Remember when Mom used to slave all day over a hot stove to feed us all at the table at night? So does Michael Pollan, who is, in equal parts, nostalgic for the old days and worried about what our era of prepared and processed foods does to our health and happiness.

 

A TRIO OF NOVELS

Meg Wolitzer: The Interestings
Listen closely; the sound you hear when you crack the spine of this big, fat, funny, sad, and smart novel is the sound of Wolitzer hitting one out of the park. Or lighting a firecracker. Or some other cliché that Wolitzer -– author also of the brilliantly mean The Wife and the dazzling The Uncoupling-- would never ever use. She’s way too, well, interesting.

Elizabeth Strout: The Burgess Boys
The author’s Olive Kitteridge -- which won the Pulitzer Prize -- was a triumph of overlapping tales in which a not-terribly-likable school teacher regularly figured. This novel about three siblings (interesting, though, that the title omits mention of the lone sister) torn between their history in small town Maine and the lure of New York, is similarly quiet and winning. As always, Strout’s great gift is for the small moments, and for the unsayable familial things that sometimes get said.

Kate Atkinson: Life After Life
What if life could be a series of re-dos? That’s the question at the heart of Atkinson’s amazing novel that traces the life -- and the potential deaths -- of one fairly ordinary woman in 20th century Britain. Sound gimmicky? It’s not. By 20 pages in, you’ve completely forgotten the conceit and are riding alongside Ursula, who careens through experiences without imagining repercussions -- just like the rest of us.