Answer: Oh, go on! I'm blushing! Because basically, the truth is that Cannie is a much more funny, and much more honest, version of me.

Here's how the story started --- I got dumped. Or, rather, I broke up with a long-term boyfriend and, shortly thereafter, decided that he was the love of my life and that I couldn't live without him (I know...it sounds crazy, but I think it actually happens quite a bit).

Except --- and raise your hand if you saw this coming --- my ex-boyfriend wanted nothing to do with me, in part, I think, because I'd hurt him, and in part because the reasons we'd ended the relationship were valid reasons. We really weren't going to have an easy time of making a future together, and we both knew it. And also, acting with a speed and acuity he rarely displayed during our years together, he'd acquired a new girlfriend. Like, immediately.

So there I was, mooning most piteously over a guy who wanted no part of me whatsoever. Reading his horoscope every day, counting how long it had been since we'd spoken, observing every meaningless anniversary, generally being pathetic. And worse than being pathetic was being clichéd. As a writer, you're trained to root out clichés from your writing...but, of course, there's no new or original way to have your heart broken.

I decided that, if I had to live with this misery, I could at least try to turn it toward a positive end. I decided to write the story of a girl who'd had her heart broken in the way my heart was broken, only I'd give her a much more interesting, eventful life than I had. I'd give her all of my demons, and I'd guarantee her a happy ending (which was something I wasn't sure I'd get in my real life). It started out as a story I was telling myself, to distract myself from the unhappiness of being apart from Mr. Not Quite Right, to keep myself from calling him, or writing to him, or thinking about what might have been.

So that's where Cannie came from. After I had that voice in my head --- that sad, sad voice of someone who felt her losses so freshly and acutely --- it was a question of figuring out how to get her to the happy ending I'd promised. At that point, the book became an exercise in "What if?" "What if my ex-boyfriend and I had gotten back together?" "What if that movie star who stood me up in New York actually became my friend?" The voice actually came pretty easily. I gave Cannie what I call my 3am voice --- that is, every smart, witty, devastating thing I'd think of to say at 3am (usually a week or so after the event in question took place), I could put in her mouth.

It was a lot of fun to write in Cannie's voice, and tell the story of Good in Bed. At times, it felt like I was predicting my own future, like the happy ending I wrote for her became my own happy ending (unfortunately, nobody's redecorated my apartment yet!).

Q: Many authors say that it is much harder to write comedy than tragedy. Do you agree? What are the challenges of blending humor and drama? Why do you suppose "comic" and "slice-of-life" novels, no matter how well-crafted and accomplished, are generally perceived as separate from the "serious" literary canon?

A: I can't speak to whether it's harder to write comedy or tragedy, or how to blend them effectively, because I think that most of what I've written just naturally wound up as a mixture of both. I've never tried to sit down and say, "now I'll be writing a funny scene" or, "okay, now I'm really going to give those heartstrings a yank." It was just, "now I'm going to sit down and tell this woman's story," and the story encompassed both comedy and tragedy --- just like all of our lives do --- and frequently with them coming basically at the same time.

I will say that when the book was finally finished, my agent was trying to figure out whether it would appeal to more "literary" houses (the places that publish books by people who earn MFAs at Iowa and get their first short story published in The New Yorker) or "commercial houses" (Judith Krantz, Susan Isaacs, et al.). The literary houses dropped out really fast --- we got lots of "this is good, just not for us" comments. I'm not sure whether that had to do with the humor, or with the unfashionable fairy-tale ending, which is very different than much of what I read in The New Yorker, where short stories seem to end with someone staring off at the white walls of a white room, and you think that something's happened but you're not quite sure what.

I agree that funny things aren't generally perceived as "literary" or "serious" these days, but I wrote Good in Bed as a story I was telling myself, and as the kind of book I wanted to read, and so far I'm thrilled with how it turned out, and with the way readers seem to respond to it.

Q: On the strength of its humor alone, Good in Bed is a great read. But Cannie's story is so much more than just an extended comic vignette. Tell us about the particular issues and themes you contend with in your portrait of Cannie and her journey as a single, urban woman.

A: First and foremost, I think, is the theme of finding love, and of building a family of choice, even in the face of your own damaged history. For years, we've been reading the research about what divorce does to people, how they grow up wounded, or wanting, or in young women's cases, mistrustful of their idea to inspire lasting love. From my own life, I know how true that can be.

Having a parent leave your life is one of the most devastating things I can imagine. I think, in a way, it's worse than having a parent die, or be sick, because those are things outside of the person's control, whereas divorce is a choice, and it feels like the most devastating kind of rejection --- that person could have stayed, but chose not to, ergo, there must be something wrong with me. So divorce is rough, but part of Cannie's journey is growing past that pain, and learning that there is the possibility of love in her life, no matter what messages her father gave her, no matter what messages the culture sends. The second theme is equally important --- the notion of growing up and picking your own family, of finding good friends and making them your brothers and your sisters. Cannie has her best friend, and her little dog, and Maxi, who plays the role of a fairy godmother. She has her mother, and Tanya (for better or worse!), and her sister and her brother. One of the most poignant and powerful images for me is of Joy's naming ceremony, when Cannie gathers her loved ones under the chuppah. The chuppah, of course, is more commonly found at Jewish weddings, where it shelters your basic nuclear family --- the bride and the groom, his mother and father, her mother and father. In Cannie's case, I wanted to reinvent that image, and have the chuppah sheltering everyone she's chosen to bring into her life, and into her daughter's life, to signify that a family can be more than the people you're biologically connected to --- it can include everyone you've chosen to love.

Q: It's so refreshing to read a novel that features a "larger" woman as the central character --- not just the comic-relief sidekick to the lithesome ingénue. And even better, it doesn't end with Cannie dropping seven dress-sizes and achieving blissful contentment as a result. Was part of your reason for writing this to fill the void on the bookshelves for stories like these?

A: One of the great frustrations in my life as a reader has been the paucity of characters who look like me. There are books where the characters start off plus-size, but, through some miracle of fiction, some deus ex machina of a diet, end up skinny by the end of the book (for example, She's Come Undone --- one of my favorites!). There are plenty of books where the characters think they're fat, but aren't (like Bridget Jones's Diary), and spend time obsessing anyhow. But I'd never, ever read a book where the character was plus-size, or "larger," or festively plump, or fat, or insert-your-favorite-euphemism-here, and ended up happy without ending up thin. I'd never read a book that really expressed the reality of what it's like to live in a larger-than-average body. My experience has been this: sure, there's misery involved in not looking like a Friends cast member, because that's what the world expects of women. Like Cannie, I've certainly put in my time as a foot soldier in the body wars. Like Cannie, I've lived with envy, and the understanding that my body makes me an outsider, a de facto rebel in a world where women are expected to either be thin, or to be trying desperately, unceasingly, to get that way. Like Cannie, I've suffered with the culture that never shows women who look like me unless they're desperately trying to look some other way, or when they're there for comic relief (I quit watching Friends after I flipped it on one night and was thrilled for an instant to see a character who looked like me. "Finally!" I said...and then I realized it was Courteney Cox in a fat suit during a flashback).

It's true that being big can give you all kinds of unhappiness, but it doesn't mean that you're destined for a life of misery and/or comic relief. There are stretches of time --- minutes, hours, days, weeks --- where my body is just something I live in, and I'm not obsessing over it, fretting over it, wishing it was different --- because I'm busy writing, or working, or riding my bike.

Fat women might be punch lines in the movies or on TV, but in real life, we have jobs, and babies, and lovers and husbands, and not all of us are going to end up size two's. When I set out to write Good in Bed, there was no question that Cannie was going to be my size --- and there was no question that her reality was going to reflect my reality. I wanted to encompass the unhappiness of living in a plus-size body, but also show that it's not pure, unadulterated, 200-proof misery. I wanted to show the whole scope of things --- professional success, rewarding friendships, a loving, if vexing family, a weird little dog, great meals, great adventures, and love, and self-acceptance at the end. Whether it fills a void in bookstores, or in readers' personal collections, I can't say, but I know it filled a void for me!

Q: Cannie Shapiro: feminist heroine? Is Good in Bed a "message" novel?… And are labels like these reductive?

A: Lord knows, I've never sat down at my laptop and said, "I'm going to write a political novel that will have women storming the barricades and bring the weight-loss industry to its knees!" I really just wanted to tell a story where I could draw from my own experience, and where there'd be a happy ending (at the time I was writing, I wasn't sure my own life would feature a happy ending, so I wanted to be very sure that my heroine got what I so desperately wanted.) And I knew that ending up thin was not going to be part of Cannie's happy ending.

Also, I started writing in the midst of the Lewinsky backlash, which upset me a lot. I mean, here we had issues of perjury, of infidelity, of an employer carrying on with his employees in ways that would have gotten any CEO fired, and what did we as a culture do? Crack fat jokes. Talk about how the president could have at least betrayed his wife with a more stereotypical beauty. Say unbelievably horrible things about Monica Lewinsky and Linda Tripp's looks, and treat what to me were the central issues as peripheral. It made me crazy...and it made me really sad. Because if you're someone whose body looked more like Monica's --- or like Linda Tripp's --- the message came through loud and clear --- you're not worthy. You're not worthy of respect, you're not worthy of love, you're not even really worthy of lust.

The message thing was never intentional, but by the end of the writing, I could see very clearly that the book had one...and, luckily, it's one I agreed with (I think it would have been entirely dismaying if Cannie's empowerment had resulted not in radical self-acceptance but in white supremacy or something like that).

Q: "Women are going to love this," Violet says about Cannie's screenplay. The same can be said about Good in Bed itself, no question. But what about men? They're of course going to be coming at Good in Bed from a completely different perspective. Were any of your early, pre-publication readers guys?

A: Wait, what!!?? You mean we're letting men buy this book, too? Okay. Sorry about that...I guess men can buy whatever they want. The truth is that Good in Bed had no early readers. I wrote it all by myself, in my spare bedroom, and I wasn't sure whether anyone else would ever be interested. When I finished it, I made four copies and sent three of them off to various New York City agents whose names I'd seen on the dedication pages of books I'd loved. I gave the fourth copy to the man who was then my boyfriend, is now my husband. He was my first reader of all. He'd send me emails or call me through the day and tell me that he loved it, and I always asked him what page he was on, because I wanted to be able to pinpoint the exact moment when he decided that I was (A), nuts, or (B), pathetic, and that he didn't want to date me any more! I think the second guy who read it was my brother Jake. That was pretty embarrassing. I wanted to give him a redacted version, with all of the sex scenes crossed out. But I think he handled it okay. I just kept telling him, "It's fiction! Don't worry! I made this stuff up!" So at this point, I'm not sure how men who aren't related to me or planning to marry me will react to the book. I hope it will give them a look at a life they probably can't imagine. Men in our culture are still judged largely by their actions, their successes, and their incomes, whereas women are still judged by their bodies, their faces, and their failure or success to conform to what the world says is "beautiful," and I think men are constantly surprised and horrified at how hard life can be for women who don't fit those definitions.

Q: Maxi, Samantha, Cannie's mother, and Tanya are all wonderfully developed, totally believable characters. (I also love the little bit of Violet we get to see.) Are they based on any real-life models?

A: I've known a lot of very interesting, smart, funny women through the years --- and also some not so great ones --- and I think there are bits and pieces of real-life people in all of the women in Good in Bed. Samantha is based somewhat on my friend Susan, and Cannie's mother, Ann, is pretty darn close to my mom, Fran. As for Violet, the Incredible Cursing Agent, I will admit that she looks a little bit like my own agent, the divine and beneficent Joanna Pulcini, but I've never heard Joanna say anything stronger than "darn." And readers should know that the result of putting real people (even bits and pieces of them) into your novels is that folks can get very weird. My family, for instance. "OH, NO!" they'll say at the top of their lungs, "IT'S JEN! DON'T TALK TO HER! SHE'LL PUT YOU IN A BOOK!"

Q: How did you begin writing? Did your parents play a role in your aspirations?

A: I've been writing ever since I learned how. I don't remember a time when I wasn't interested in writing poems and in telling stories, when I didn't care about language, and characters, and the worlds that existed on paper alone. My parents encouraged me as a writer, but, more than that, they encouraged me as a reader. My father would read to me when I was little, and both of my parents provided me with a never-ending stream of books from the local library and the local bookstores. Our house was full of books, and I was allowed to read any of them, as long as I could give a decent explanation of what I was reading to show I understood. This made for some very interesting moments --- some of the books we had around were my father's medical-school textbooks, filled with alluring illustrations of every kind of grotesque malady known to man, and a few that I'm sure have been cured by now. They gave me nightmares, sometimes, but I still looked at the pictures.

Q: How does your work at The Philadelphia Inquirer feed your work as a novelist, and vice-versa?

A: My work at the Inquirer, and as a journalist in general, has given me a way of seeing the world that not a lot of people get. It's let me stand right at the edges of tragedies, comedies, and really boring school board meetings, and it's let me meet people I'd never come into contact with otherwise, which is about the best day job a novelist could ask for. It's given me unlimited fodder...for example, the dreadful April is an amalgam of every horrid publicist I've ever had to deal with in my quest to interview various movie stars.

Q: Who would make the perfect Cannie Shapiro in a movie adaptation?

A: To tell you the truth, I can't think of a single actress who'd be just right --- which to me is one of the tragedies of Hollywood. As of this writing, Janeane Garofalo's been on another one of her cigarettes-and-black-coffee diets, so she's out. Kate Winslet's been dieting too --- she gave a very rueful interview where she said she hated herself for doing it, but she can't get parts otherwise --- so forget her. I think Drew Barrymore has the right spirit and spunk --- and a beautiful smile to boot, and she's almost the right age --- but she's way smaller than the Cannie I had in mind. I'm willing to sell out in all sorts of ways, but if Good in Bed ever became a movie --- and it's not looking likely, because of the size thing --- I'd really try to insist that the actress who played her be genuinely plus-sized, not just Renee Zellweger with twelve extra pounds, and certainly not Gwyneth Paltrow in a fat suit!

And even though I've been discouraged, and disgusted, by some of the responses I've gotten from Hollywood types (the 'only one bankable fat actress' line that the slimeball agent gives Cannie is actually a verbatim quote that a similarly slimeball agent gave me about an early draft of Good in Bed), I still have hopes that Good in Bed will be a movie, or a TV show --- mostly because I believe that at the same time Hollywood is telling me that there aren't any plus-size actresses, I have a sneaking feeling that they're telling plus-size actresses that they should lose weight because there isn't any work!

Q: Fill in the blanks: 1) I never miss a new novel by [blank]. 2) I've lost count of how many times I've re-read [blank], by my favorite author, [blank]. 3) A fitting soundtrack in readers' heads as they read Good in Bed might include music by [blank].

A: Oh, you can't expect me to play favorites...it's like asking a mother to choose between her children! But here goes: I never miss a new novel by Susan Isaacs, Andrew Vachss, John Irving, and Nicholas Christopher. I've lost track of how many times I've re-read Pearl by Tabitha King, and A Prayer for Owen Meany by John Irving. A fitting soundtrack in readers' heads as they read Good in Bed might include music by Liz Phair (Exile in Guyville and Whitechocolatespaceegg), Emmylou Harris, Dar Williams, Richard Thompson, plenty of Ani DiFranco and, of course, Warren Zevon and Bruce Springsteen.

Q: Tell us about the novel's epigraphs. Philip Larkin and Liz Phair make for an intriguing pair.

A: When I was in college, I took a class in Modern British Poets. Larkin was my absolute favorite, because it was the first time I came across poetry that could make you laugh out loud...and then, five minutes later, realize that you'd just read something heartbreaking. The poem that Cannie and her siblings quote --- the one that starts, "They fuck you up, your mum and dad, they do not mean to, but they do," is a perfect example. On the one hand, you're shocked and titillated to hear a curse-word in a "serious" poem, and you're nodding your head and laughing at the truth of it, because everyone who has parents know that they do fuck you up, and no, they don't mean to do it, but yup, that's what happens, and the way the nursery-rhyme rhythm works its way into your head, like a jingle for bubble bath. But when you get to the end --- the image of misery that "deepens like the coastal shelf," and that bitter, bitter warning that concludes the poem --- it's like feeling a knife twist in your heart, after you've been rendered defenseless by your laughter. That was the effect I was looking for with my own writing --- something that was funny, but could also twist the knife. Liz Phair is one of my heroes. I think her writing is so brilliant and brave, and I was listening to her song "Polyester Bride" almost constantly during those early months of writing Good in Bed...but "Polyester Bride" seemed too obvious, and the line about love being "nothing, nothing, nothing like they say" really fit both the tone and the plot of Good in Bed.

Q: What is your sense of who your readers are? What do they want from a novel? Describe your ideal reader.

A: My ideal reader is any woman who's ever felt like she needed to get undressed in the dark, any woman who's ever felt miserable about the size of her hips or the shape of her face or the texture of her hair...which is to say, lamentably, every single woman in America, and probably beyond, judging from the reception Good in Bed has gotten abroad.

I think what people want from a novel is entertainment, first and foremost --- characters they can hold on to, characters they want to spend time with...and somewhere in there, a message that reinforces the truths that they already know. The readers who come to Good in Bed are going to be a lot like Cannie herself --- smart, a little cynical, fed up with a culture that tells them they're not good enough, and willing to open their hearts to the possibilities of love --- even if only in fiction.

Q: Is Cannie's story finished? Can we look forward to a sequel? What are you working on these days?

A: I get asked that a lot --- "will we ever see Cannie again?" To quote The Simpsons, short answer, no with a but, long answer, yes with a maybe. The deal with Cannie is this --- she's happy now. She's completed her journey, and she's ended up in a great place that's right where she needs to be. Which is fabulous for her as a character, but not so great for me as a novelist, because happy characters aren't as interesting as those in the midst of some extravagant life crisis.

But we haven't seen the last of her. Cannie and Joy and Nifkin, of course, all show up in the book I'm working on now, tentatively titled In Her Shoes. It's not a sequel --- it's a story about two sisters who don't get along, and how they finally make peace --- but it is set in the same Philadelphia that Cannie inhabits, so she'll be back.

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