"Compulsively readable... highly entertaining." — Kirkus Reviews

Why the Middle Ages?

Where do you get your ideas from?

It's different every time, but it always takes me by surprise. Usually it's my wanting to answer a question that's of personal interest, and it's usually a question about human behavior. Then I project it into another time and place, and get to pretend it has nothing to do with me. With The Fool's Tale the question was about how powerless people claim a sense of power. With the second novel, it was about the things people hide, and why. The third novel, my current project, was inspired in a totally different way: In response to the current state of the world, I had the passing thought, "Somebody who knows something about the Middle Ages and writes fiction ought to write a novel about the Crusades, because we're heading back to that mentality." About four minutes later I remembered that, hey, I know something about the Middle Ages, and I write fiction…

I've been Googling and don't see anything about your screenwriting.

That's right, you don't. One of the weird things about screenwriting is that you can make a living at it without ever seeing your scripts get produced. Your work gets optioned; you're hired to do rewrites or polishes; you're brought in as a script consultant. Also the award I won — the Massachusetts Film Office Screenwriting Prize -- was a modest one (although one for which I am eternally grateful) but since Hollywood loves awards, it quickly got me an agent, a manager, a production company, an A-list director and one of Hollywood's greatest-ever leading ladies attached to it. And then, a month after I moved to LA, the project fell through. I wrote a monthly newsletter called Nicki's Hollywood Diary accounting my hilariously painful experiences there over the course of the following three years, during which I took up the banjo (I play horribly, thanks for asking) and planted a lot of trees. If you must spend time in Hollywood, these are excellent diversions.

What are your favorite books?

I used to have listed here a long list of books I've loved, but I read too
much to keep it updated. There is no satisfactory way to answer this
question. Some of my favorite writers follow here, but I'd be lying to say
I've read all of their works, and I know I'm forgetting plenty of others...
And by the time you've read this, I have probably discovered new ones. The
following are in absolutely no order and is not an exhaustive list:

Italo Calvino, Kurt Vonnegut Jr., Ursula K. LeGuin, J.D. Salinger, Philip
K. Dick, Fannie Flagg, Virginia Woolf, Nick Hornby, Dorothy Dunnett, AM
Homes, William Goldman, Tolstoy, Annie Proulx, Alice Munro, Dostoevsky,
Shakespeare, Pirandello, Norton Juster, Samuel Beckett, Caryl Churchill,
Thoreau, Emerson, Sarah Ruhl, Christopher Moore, Isabel Allende, Diana
Evans, Kazuo Ishiguro, Dave Barry, Yukio Mishima

Because I write historical fiction, here are some medievalists I especially
appreciate: Georges Duby, Henri Pirenne, Eileen Power

What advice can you give me on becoming a writer?

I don't know enough to give anyone advice. But I know what works for me, which is to just write what I have to write. Not "what will sell"; not what will make me feel "literary" or "important." Just whatever is in there that wants to come out. I have to turn off the inner critic that says, "I can't believe you think that's any good," and just open a vein. But that's just me; the bestseller lists are full of great books that probably spring from a more commercial sensibility. On a more practical level, Stephen King's advice, "Read a lot and write a lot" is pretty darn good, as is Bernard Malamud's truism: "You start by sitting down and writing."

How do you write?

For my first draft, and in-depth rewrites, I do best with 15-to-18-hour stretches for days at a time, with short breaks to eat, sleep, get some fresh air and socialize with sentient beings. I can't often get an 18-hour stretch, but if I don't have at least four uninterrupted hours, I just can't settle into actual writing - there are so many paper weights to position, plants to water, e-mails to respond to, maps and references to re-check, paperweights to reposition, plants to water again, etc. For polishes, it's easier; I'm less fussy and I can get plenty done in a couple of hours. And of course I have all my persnickety writer's habits: can't work with my back to an open door, always use unlined paper, clear space to pace back and forth, and so on. If these sorts of details really enthrall you, click here:

Didn't you do a lot of weird things to earn a living along the way?

Weird is such an ugly word. I prefer eclectic. In no particular order, I've put in my time as actor, director, producer, theatre teacher, lighting designer, therapeutic massage therapist (massage school being the obvious thing to do after graduation from Harvard), magazine editor, copy editor, copy writer, script doctor, riding instructor, art school model, environmental activist, personal assistant to a TV star, and of course — temp, waitress and barrista. I'm sure I've left out a few things, but those are the highlights. In hindsight, nearly all of those jobs taught me things that are good to know as a novelist (As an artist's model, for example, I learned to stay in one position without moving for long periods, which now happens frequently at the keyboard.)

What's it like growing up on a chic summer resort island?

Living on Martha's Vineyard year-round, especially for a kid, is nothing at all like vacationing there. I read a report saying that in the decades I was growing up there, it was actually the poorest county in Massachusetts. It was deathly quiet in winter — the ferries ran less frequently, only one of the four movie theatres stayed open and that was only on weekends, that sort of thing. I actually got off-island more than most of my friends, to visit relatives. Today, the Vineyard is far more developed, almost alarmingly so: more than half of the houses in my home town (which has been settled by white guys for about 300 years) have been built since 1980.

You mean your family still lives there?

My mom and step-dad do, yes. In fact my mother's roots there go back to the 1600's.

And the other side of your family?

On my father's side, I'm first-generation American. My father was born in Bombay, where his parents had met by chance during the upheaval of WWII: Grandpa is a Berlin Jew and Grandma is an Iraqi-Kurdish Jew. These grandparents raised me when I was very young, so I went from a household that was Old-World cosmopolitan and very consciously Jewish, to a cabin my Yankee step-dad built by hand in the New England woods. I very dearly treasure having had both of those environments in my life, but my creating characters who are straddling cultures is probably autobiographical in impulse. "Nuclear family" is not a phrase I really understand on a gut level. "Pantheon," however, has great resonance.