Cloud Nine

Author Q&A

Describe Cloud Nine…

When I think about Cloud Nine, I think of my experience with my mother. Of how she got sick, and of how I would have done anything to stop that. I think that in Cloud Nine, Sarah, the heroine, wants so badly to stick around to see what’s going to happen to Mike, her teenage son, and she would do anything to be sure that happens. And Mike, as closed off as any eighteen-year-old could be, wants this too, more than anything.

Cloud Nine is a novel of healing, of healing between Sarah and her father, and Sarah and her son.

What was it like as an author for Cloud Nine to have succeeded so well? Did hitting the New York Times bestseller list affect you in any way?

The whole thing was a huge thrill. I was in New York at the time, getting ready to go off on tour to promote Follow The Stars Home (in hardcover). The phone rang, and it was my editor calling. "Are you sitting down?" she asked. "Yes," I replied. To be specific, I was taking a bath. She told me "Cloud Nine is number nine on the New York Times paperback bestseller list." I asked her to please say it again. Then, because I wasn’t exactly sure I’d heard right, I asked her again. But before she finished speaking, I had started to cry.

I’ve been writing for a long time. My first poem was published when I was eleven; my first story when I was fifteen. I quit college to see the world and write fiction. Writing has always been my passion, a dream in itself. To live by writing: who could imagine a better life?

I tell myself rewards don’t matter: the joy is the work. I have the mermaids to keep me company. As a child, I won the praise of my teachers. My mother, a teacher of English, was very proud of me. Every day I wake up, go to my desk and write the next pages. But the New York Times Bestseller List! Wow! I grew up reading the Book Review. I have perused the lists, cheered when my favorite authors—some of them friends now—made it on. When a book appears there, it’s like watching someone’s dream come true. The author has found a readership, a group of people who love their work enough to flock to it.

What writer wouldn’t want such a thing? When I write, I always imagine my reader. I imagine the light on the pages, the curtain moving at the open window, my reader lost in my story. I know certain people are drawn to my work because of the things in their own lives: certain hopes, dreams, losses, secrets. When they come to my books, they are looking for something very particular.

I know what that is. I do, I do. And I am so thrilled you’re still here. I’m so glad I am too.