The Other Woman
by Eric Jerome Dickey
List Price: $12.95
Pages: 336
Format: Paperback
ISBN: 0451211936
Publisher: NAL
Eric Jerome Dickey was born in Memphis, Tennessee and attended the University of Memphis (the former Memphis State), where he pledged Alpha phi Alpha Fraternity and earned a degree in Computer System Technology. In 1983, he moved to Los Angeles to pursue a career in engineering.
After landing a job in the aerospace industry working as a software developer, Eric Jerome Dickey's artistic talents surfaced, inspiring him to become an actor and a stand-up comedian. He soon began working the local and national comedy circuit. In the early 1990's the aerospace industry took a downward turn and Dickey found himself "downsized," but took this as an opportunity to embark on a writing career.
Having written several comedy scripts for his personal comedy act, Eric Jerome Dickey started writing poetry and short stories. He joined the IBWA (International Black Writers and Artists), participated in their development workshops, and became a recipient of the IBWA SEED Scholarship to attend UCLA's Creative Writing classes. In 1994 his first published short story "Thirteen" appeared in the IBWA's River Crossing, Voices of the Diaspora--an Anthology of the International Black Experience. A second short story "Days Gone By" was published in the magazine A Place to Enter.
With those successes behind him, Eric Jerome Dickey decided to fine-tune some of his earlier work and developed a screenplay called "Cappuccino." "Cappuccino" was directed and produced by Craig Ross Jr. and appeared in coffeehouses around the Los Angeles area. In February 1998, "Cappuccino" made its local debut during the Pan African Film Festival at the Magic Johnson Theater in Los Angeles and is currently on the film festival circuit.
Eric Jerome Dickey's booksigning tours for Sister, Sister, Friends and Lovers, and Milk in My Coffee took him coast to coast and helped propel these novels to #1 on the "Blackboard Bestsellers List." His books have been featured in many publications, including Essence magazine, USA Today and The Los Angeles Times, and have appeared on the bestseller lists of the "Blackboard," The Wall Street Journal and The New York Times. Dickey has appeared as a guest on many shows, including BET's "Our Voices" and CNN's "Sunday Morning Live."
Fans of Eric Jerome Dickey have been served a heaping portion of laughter from his character driven stories in Sister, Sister, Friends and Lovers, Milk in My Coffee, and Cheaters.
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Question: Would you discuss the inspiration for this novel and how it relates to your previous books?
Eric Jerome Dickey: My books tend to have charted my life experiences and themes that crop up at different times that interest me. Being married with four children, I found it fascinating how often mothers-in-law were the topic of conversation amongst women my age and how almost everyone has a story to tell. I started thinking about what a complex and difficult relationship it is and tried to see it from both sides --- the challenges of inheriting a second mother and then the converse view of suddenly not being the most important woman in your son's life anymore.
Q: You've had a successful writing career, building a large fan base in both the UK and the United States. Is there any difference between your British and American readers in terms of their expectations of or reactions to your work?
EJD: Different books seem to be popular in the respective countries. A lot of Americans loved Bookends, which was one of the less popular books in the UK --- loved partly over here, I'm sure, because it is so quintessentially British. Jemima is still the book that inspires the strongest reactions both here and in the UK --- people love it or hate it.
Q: Do you have an ideal reader in mind as you write each novel? If so, whom did you have in mind when writing The Other Woman?
EJD: I'm constantly surprised by the people who read my books and so don't tend to have a reader in mind. I receive letters from twelve-year-olds through to women in their seventies, plus of course there are the letters from men. My aim is that my books still have an emotional honesty that resonates with women, and more so if they've experienced the things I'm writing about. But my themes tend to be universal, and my hope is that even if the girls reading my books haven't reached motherhood and mother-in-law-dom yet, at some point they will, at which point they will revisit. I don't think the absence of direct experience makes the book less enjoyable; it just becomes a different experience.
Q: The Other Woman is narrated in Ellie's intimate yet casual voice, and her personality resonates from the very first page. Is it difficult to create that sense of instant familiarity between reader and character?
EJD: I always think it's very easy to create that sense of familiarity when you're writing in the first person, and far harder when you're writing in the third. I think people struggled more with Alice in To Have and to Hold, and mostly because that chatty, informal voice is absent.
Q: Ellie is a charmingly flawed character, which allows readers to relate to her struggles as their own. Are there any fictional heroines whom you identify with or admire? Have they influenced the characters you create?
EJD: Whenever I'm asked questions like this I'm tempted to come up with some extraordinarily intellectual response or, at the very least, some intelligent heroines, Madame Bovary perhaps, or Jane Eyre. But the truth is I have no memory whatsoever, and although I am a voracious reader, characters rarely stay with me very long.
Q: Both Ellie and Emma struggle with Linda's expectations and behavior. Why do you think the mother/daughter dynamic is often so challenging? Did you find in writing these conflicts that your allegiance rested more with one character than others?
EJD: The more I wrote from Linda's perspective, the more sympathetic I found her. I remember very clearly when I came up with this idea that I didn't want to do the obvious: I didn't want to write about a mother-in-law who thought the daughter-in-law wasn't good enough for the darling son. I think it is far more common to find mothers-in-law who have all the right intentions, who think they are doing the right thing in welcoming a new daughter into the bosom of the family, in phoning all the time in a bid to befriend her, in being what they perceive to be simply a warm, loving mother, and for the daughter-in-law to feel completely overwhelmed by this unwanted attention. And I do also think it true that we so rarely realize that we are never just marrying the man, we are always marrying his family.
Q: Where do you see Ellie progressing after the end of the novel? What is the main experience you'd like your readers to gain from their time with her?
EJD: Forgiveness. That all of us are human, and all of us are flawed, and that it shouldn't be held against us. Ellie is so angry when we first meet her, and, as with so many women, is softened by motherhood, but not before experiencing some of that awful hormonal postpartum madness. I also love the idea of acceptance. That everything is exactly how it is supposed to be, and once you stop fighting it and accept it, life inevitably runs far more smoothly.
Q: Do you organize your novels in advance or do they develop of their own accord?
EJD: I tend to organize them in thirds. I always start off with a theme, an underlying message, and have a rough idea of the beginning, middle and end. I only plot them out in thirds, though, because generally by the time I've reached the end of the first third the story has gone in a completely different direction: characters who I thought were crucial often turn out to be irrelevant and naturally vice versa.
Q: Are you currently writing anything? What are your plans for the future?
EJD: I have just finished a novella that will be coming out as part of a three-author collection just before Christmas 2005 and am trying to work up the discipline to sit down and start my next novel. I have my idea, my theme, and even my title and am in the middle of jotting notes about the characters. Occasionally I have written books with no idea of where the story is going --- Straight Talking and Bookends come to mind --- but these days I have to have more of an idea as I have to be more disciplined --- I don't have the luxury of spending all day idling at my computer as I let my imagination pour forth. These days I'm lucky if I can squeeze in three hours.
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Excerpted from The Other Woman © Copyright 2008 by Eric Jerome Dickey. Reprinted with permission by NAL. All rights reserved.
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