The Other Woman
by Jane Green
List Price: $14.00
Pages: 400
Format: Paperback
ISBN: 0452287146
Publisher: Plume
Jane Green lives in Connecticut with her family. She is also the author of Straight Talking, Jemima J, Mr. Maybe, Bookends, Babyville, and To Have and to Hold. Also, be sure to grab her newest book, Swapping Lives, which will be available in Viking hardcover, on June 20, 2006.
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Question: Would you discuss the inspiration for this novel and how it relates to your previous books?
Jane Green: 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?
JG: 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 J 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?
JG: 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?
JG: 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?
JG: 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?
JG: 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?
JG: 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?
JG: 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.
Excerpted from The Other Woman © Copyright 2012 by Jane Green. Reprinted with permission by Plume . All rights reserved.
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