Julia Glass is the author of Three Junes, winner of the 2002 National Book Award for Fiction; The Whole World Over; and I See You Everywhere, winner of the 2009 Binghamton University John Gardner Book Award. She has received fellowships from the National Endowment for the Arts, the New York Foundation for the Arts, and the Radcliffe Institute for Advanced Study. Her short fiction has won several prizes, and her personal essays have been widely anthologized. Her new novel is The Widower's Tale.

1. How would you summarize your book in one sentence?

In a tale that pits the fear of change against the yearning for same, Percival Darling, a cantankerous retired librarian, discovers that sacrifice does not always yield gratitude, that it's never too late for love, and that children never cease to surprise you . . . while his bright, studious grandson, Robert Barnes, discovers that idealism carried to extremes may lead to incendiary consequences.

2. How long did it take you to write this book?

From the cold snowy night on which I conceived of the main character, it took four and a half years of far more daydreaming, procrastination, and diverse distractions (including my last book) than actual workaday writing.

3. Where is your favorite place to write?

I alternate between a sunny but chaotic office on the attic level of our house and, when the chaos overwhelms me or the climate's too harsh up there, our kitchen table downstairs. In high summer, when the garden threatens to sabotage all indoor endeavors, I head for the public library.

4. How do you choose your characters' names?

Some names I save up for years, waiting for the right personae to claim them; others seem to drop from the sky; still others I change again and again, though this would be rare for any characters with speaking roles. I also get to use the names I wanted for my two sons that were vetoed by their father--and the names I'd have given to the daughters I never had.

5. How many drafts do you go through?

One. I proceed at the speed of a tortoise lumbering laps: forward and back, forward and back, over and over and over. When I reach the last page, I am mere weeks from sending the book to my editor, the best reader I'll ever have.

6. If there was one book you wish you had written what would it be?

The answer to this question is like the eye of a dragonfly, too many in one. The flip answer: My next one. A slightly less flip answer: Any collection of stories by Alice Munro or the late Andre Dubus. Maybe the most truthful answer: The reason I write fiction is that there are thousands of books already out there I would love to have written and I'm trying mightily to write them all over again. Or: Each book I write is a love letter to all the books that have stolen my heart. I want them to love me back.

7. If your book were to become a movie, who would you like to see star in it?

I see from his answers to these questions that I am going to be duking it out with David Mitchell for Tom Wilkinson, who has simply got to play Percy (as well as Paul McLeod, the widower in my first novel, Three Junes). I have to wonder if this means that my protagonist has a soul mate in David Mitchell's novel (which happens to be sitting on my kitchen counter). I'm also hoping Tobey Maguire isn't too old to play Percy's grandson Robert.

8. What's your favourite city in the world?

I'm too promiscuous to choose just one among those I know--and am still dreaming of many I've never seen. In my memory, it's Paris, where I lived for a year after college. On book tour, it's San Francisco. When I want to feel nostalgically at home, it's New York, where I lived through so many important changes for the best years of my youth. But oh, there's Edinburgh, too. . . .

9. If you could talk to any writer living or dead who would it be, and what would you ask?

Can I stop here to complain that all these choices you're requesting are cruel? But, okay, no more whining. One writer I would love to have known is Ted Geisel, aka Dr. Seuss. "Ted," I'd have said, "would you mind letting me work in your studio? Just a little desk in a dusty corner, and I promise not to make any noise!" I'd love to have spied on him as he worked. I can't imagine not being stupendously inspired.




10. Do you listen to music while you write? If so, what kind?

Never. The music I love (jazz vocalists; musicals; Bach, Beethoven, Handel; seventies soul) monopolizes my psyche and influences my mood of the moment so completely that my imagination loses its authentic voice. (But I would learn to work around any music that Ted, as my studio mate, insisted on playing.)

11. Who is the first person who gets to read your manuscript?

My agent, my editor, and my mate read it at the same time--as soon as it feels finished.

12. Do you have a guilty pleasure read?

My favorite "mindless" reading comprises mail-order catalogs and cookbooks, also the gossip pages and the real estate spread in The Week, my favorite magazine. But I don't feel too guilty about reading of any kind.

13. What's on your nightstand right now?

I'm going to answer this honestly, though I'll list only books, not ambient debris: Is Sex Necessary? by E.B. White and James Thurber; All Fires the Fire, by Julio Cortzar; A Student of Living Things, by Susan Richards Shreve; and Get Out of My Life, But First Could You Drive Me and Cheryl to the Mall? by Anthony Wolf. Also, two back issues of One Story, my other favorite magazine.

14. What is the first book you remember reading?

Roar and More, by Karla Kuskin. After Captain Kangaroo read it out loud on TV, I asked my parents to buy it. They did. I still have it.

15. Did you always want to be a writer?

According to my mother, I declared my intention to grow up and be "an author or an artist" around age four. If I'd been sensible, I'd have stuck with "author" from the get-go, but I veered toward "artist" first, in college and through my twenties. A dozen years of drawings, prints, and paintings occupy my parents' barn, the space beneath my bed, and the walls of a hallway in my house. In retrospect, it was a fruitful detour, but for the next decade, during which I was struggling to gain a foothold with my first stories written as an adult, I was kicking myself for losing all that time.

16. What do you drink or eat while you write?

Too much coffee, especially in winter. Chocolate, when it's around. But I'm too worried about compromising the keyboard to consume actual meals while writing.

17. Typewriter, laptop, or pen & paper?

Laptop--which I'm ashamed to admit when I quibble so often with the evils of modern gizmology. I worry that I can no longer comfortably compose more than a paragraph or two via pen and paper. Once upon a time, I was extremely proud of my elegant handwriting and wrote with a special fountain pen, varying the color of ink according to whim. How I'd love to reclaim that pretension.

18. What did you do immediately after hearing that you were being published for the very first time?

First story: I bought budget champagne and went to my mate's photographic studio to pick him up for dinner with an old friend; at the friend's house, I opened the wine and shared my news. First book (seven years later): I put down the phone and went back to nursing my second son, who was less than a week old. Just shy of my forty-fifth birthday, I was the luckiest woman on the planet. No contest.

19. How do you decide which narrative point of view to write from?

This choice is almost always instinctual, though I will deliberately audition other points of view, just to challenge my assumptions.

20. What is the best gift someone could give a writer?

Ample funding; isn't that the obvious if blunt answer? That aside, however, an idyllic place in which to write: for me, a small rustic shed, nestled in a garden, with a view of the ocean (close enough to hear as well as see), a fireplace, a comfy couch (though not one big enough to sleep on), shelves to hold favorite books, and a judicious but inexhaustible supply of chocolate.