Goodnight Nobody
by Jennifer Weiner
List Price: $15.00
Pages: 400
Format: Trade Paperback
ISBN: 0743470125
Publisher: Washington Square Press
Jennifer Weiner made her debut with Good in Bed in 2001. Her second book, In Her Shoes, is now a major motion picture starring Cameron Diaz, Toni Collette, and Shirley MacLaine. Little Earthquakes, published in 2004, has been optioned by Universal Pictures. Goodnight Nobody is her fourth novel and first mystery. Jen graduated from Princeton University and worked as a columnist for The Philadelphia Inquirer; the newspaper to which she still occasionally contributes. Her work has also appeared in Glamour, Seventeen, Redbook, TV Guide, YM, and Salon.com. Jennifer grew up in Connecticut and now lives in Philadelphia with her family.
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Q: Goodnight Nobody is a departure from your previous books in that it includes a murder mystery. What appealed to you about creating a crime caper?
JW: A few different things. First, I am a lifelong devotee of Susan Isaacs, the absolute master of the funny yet poignant suburban mystery. Her books, including Compromising Positions and Long Time, No See, feature sharp, sarcastic, ever so slightly out of place suburban mothers who are forced to confront issues in their own lives via the catalyst of a corpse. I love those books and wanted to see if I could pull off that kind of story myself.
In addition, as a resident (survivor?) of the Connecticut suburbs, I'm very familiar with the landscape and the trappings of a certain kind of life---the SUVs that look like crosses between tanks and greenhouses, the little kids with bizarre names who never eat anything that isn't organic and wheat-free, the birthday parties more elaborate than the average American wedding. It seemed like wonderful terrain for satire. Of course, the trouble is that some of the examples that critics perceived as over the top (for instance, Mary Beth Coe's toilet-training her child without diapers) were actually pulled from the real world – which just goes to show that not even the hardest-working satirist can keep up with the strange landscape of the suburbs.
Q: Was it challenging to plot the twists, turns, and red herrings necessary in a mystery while also developing the more emotional aspects of the storyline?
JW: This was, hands-down, the hardest of all of my books to write, perhaps because it's the least autobiographical and because of the plot and pacing that a mystery requires. I've read somewhere that if an author gets fifty percent of her first draft into the final product, that's a good ratio. In this case, I think one in every ten words I originally wrote made it into the book you're holding in your hands. Just to give one example, initially Kitty Cavanaugh wasn't the ghost writer---she was the Laura Lynn Baird character, the hypocritical conservative bitch-goddess. I turned in a draft to one of the editors I worked with. He read it and said, basically, "This woman is so awful that not only do we not care who killed her; we want to kill her ourselves." Which, clearly, was going to be problematic for the story.
Q: In two scenes it's mentioned that Kate is reading books by Ruth Rendell. Is Rendell a favorite author of yours? What other mystery and suspense scribes are on your reading list?
JW: I love Ruth Rendell. I love writers like Peter Straub and Jonathan Kellerman. Kate Atkinson's Case Histories knocked my socks off. And, growing up, I read every single mystery that Lawrence Sanders wrote. I'm not sure how well they're regarded by the critics these days, but I found them endlessly entertaining.
Q: Kate's mother, Reina, is an opera singer. Are you an opera devotee? Did you do any special research for this aspect of the book?
JW: I enjoy opera, but I'm not a devotee, so I had to do a lot of research for that aspect of Reina's character. I knew I wanted her to be larger than life, a magnetic, alluring presence who would easily overshadow her daughter. Opera felt like a natural fit, and I was lucky enough to meet some opera students, as well as working sopranos, and to spend a day hanging out behind the scenes at Juilliard to get some of the details of that kind of life (the sign reading PLEASE DO NOT EMPTY YOUR SPIT VALVE HERE was too good not to make it into the story!)
Q: Your three previous novels were set mostly in Philadelphia. Did setting this story in suburbia present any challenges for you?
JW: I live in Philadelphia now, but I spent seventeen years in a suburb very much like Upchurch. The challenge was making Upchurch satirical, yet believable, and I hope I hit the mark.
Q: Tell us about the title, which comes from a phrase in the children's book Goodnight Moon. What about it resonated with you? Were any other titles considered before you decided on this one?
JW: True confession: The original title of this book was Momicide. I loved it. My editor and my agent, not so much. (Every time I'd say it out loud, my agent would tell me she had another phone call). They thought---and, in retrospect, I can see their point---that the title I loved was too broad and too jokey. Goodnight Nobody is a line from the children's classic Goodnight Moon. As anyone with a baby or toddler can probably tell you, it's part of a quartet that reads "Goodnight comb and goodnight brush; goodnight nobody, goodnight, mush." The words "goodnight nobody" appear by themselves on a blank page. For a story about one woman's search for identity, about the invisibility, the erasure, to use a fancy word, of stay-at-home moms, it felt like a pretty decent second choice.
Q: Laura Lynn Baird, a woman whose work consists of "flying around the country or appearing on television to tell other women that they were bad mothers if they had jobs that took them outside of the home," seems to be a loosely veiled take on Dr. Laura Schlessinger. Did you intend for the book to touch on the different opinions about motherhood that are rampant in our society, or did this evolve as you were writing the story?
JW: I actually wasn't thinking about Laura Schlessinger that much. There's another conservative critic, one who writes for some pretty high-brow magazines, who takes a very hard line on upper-class educated women who return to work and leave their children with nannies. She was actually the one I was thinking of when I created Laura Lynn. I did want to talk about the so-called mommy wars, the way women who work and those who stay at home get pitted against each other via media that seem to want to turn every conversation into a cat fight, especially the way women internalize guilt and inferiority---the sense that no matter what we're doing, we're not doing it well enough, and either our careers or our kids or our marriage, will wind up suffering as a result of our failure. (Interesting the way men just seem to take it for granted that they'll be "working fathers", and don't seem to spend much time agonizing over that choice!)
Q: We have to ask. Is your own mothering style more like that of Kate or the other Upchurch mothers?
JW: Oh, Lord. I'm Kate on my good days...and I've got only one toddler to deal with!
Q: In the book Kevin Dolan says to Kate, "I think it was kind of the usual thing. Bad boyfriends, bad bosses. Aren't there a whole bunch of books with pink covers about stuff like that?" And when Kate traveled to London to see her mother, she purchased "two paperback novels with candy pink covers." Was the reference to pink book covers intended as a statement about chick lit?
JW: Heh. Yes. Although the biggest statement about chick lit---one that only other nerdy former English majors like me would get – is when Janie uses the framed pages of The Scarlet Letter to check her lip gloss. The Scarlet Letter was written by Nathaniel Hawthorne, the original chick-lit hata, the man who railed against the mob of "damn'd scribbling women" whose cheap romances were usurping his book's sales.
The point that I wanted to make in the two more direct references to chick lit is that yes, these books are accessible and entertaining and that accessible, entertaining books have a place in the world (like when you've just been dumped, your mother isn't helping, and you're stuck next to an overinquisitive stranger on a trans-Atlantic flight). This doesn't seem like such a crazy idea, but at this particular moment in time, believe it or not, the notion that a book is "merely" entertaining---especially if the book concerns young women who care about their shoes, clothes, and love lives---is seen as somehow morally questionable. An infamous recent book review began with its author opining that calling another woman's work "chick lit" was sort of like saying someone is a slut. To which I, as both the author and long-time fan of entertaining books starring smart, funny women who care about their appearance and their romantic futures, said, "Huh?" And "ouch." And "Oh, no she didn't!" Hence, the little shout-out to the books with bad boyfriends, bad bosses, and pink covers. Long may they wave!
Q: Which character in Goodnight Nobody did you have the most fun writing?
JW: Hands-down Janie. She's funny, she doesn't give a damn what people think of her, and she'll say whatever's on her mind.
Q: What are you working on now? Can you share any details about it?
JW: I've got an idea for my next book bubbling around in the back of my head, but honestly, right now I'm gearing up for the film premiere of In Her Shoes, and working steadily through the laundry that accumulated during my first week of book tour.
Excerpted from Goodnight Nobody © Copyright 2008 by Jennifer Weiner. Reprinted with permission by Washington Square Press. All rights reserved.
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