- No Experience Necessary
- Restaurants
- Health
- For Fun Solutions
- 2010
- Real Estate
- Jobs
- Home Furnishings
- Childcare
- Classes
- July
- Retreat For Rent
- A Dad's Perspective
- August
- September
- October
- Behind The Scenes
- Television
- November
- Mommyhood
- Parenting
- December
- January
- 2011
- February
- March
- April
- May
- June
- Rant & Rave
- July
- August
- Events
- Collective Decor
- Recipes
- Fitness
- Lending A Hand
- Fashionable Finds
- Family Vacation
- Editors' Pick
- Books
- Uncategorized
- Local Greens
- Music
- My Own Boss
- In The Kitchen
- Ticket To Ride
- Entertaining
- Beauty
- Great Escape
- Master Class
- Green
- Radio
- Our Finds
- Cocktail / Mocktail
- Day Trip
- House Calls
- Entertainment
- Art
- Living
- Wine
- Kids
- Home
- Style
- Food & Drink
- Travel
- Home & Garden
- Featured
- Health & Fitness
- More Information
- Calendar
- The Scene
- In This Issue
- Classifieds
- Ipod App
- Where To Find Us
15 Minuters with Julie Orringer
Barrett Bookstore of Darien was the place to be Thursday night as critically acclaimed author, Julie Orringer, spoke about her latest novel, The Invisible Bridge. Orringer tells the story of Andras Lévi, a Hungarian Jew, who travels to study at the École Spéciale d’Architecture in Paris. As the plot unfolds, Andras teams up with other Jewish students, defying the Nazi uprising, and falls in love with an enchanting Hungarian ballet dancer. Through Orringer’s vivid language and wonderfully thought provoking prose, the reader is taken on a journey — the kind of journey that has become difficult to find in today’s busy world.
At Barrett’s, Orringer read a few pages from her book, discussed the fascinating derivation of the story and fielded every question that was thrown her way.
Interview by Connor Ryan
Connor Ryan: The book before The Invisible Bridge, How to Breathe Underwater, was a collection of short stories. What was the transition like from writing a collection of short stories to moving on to a novel? Was it difficult to switch gears?
Julie Orringer:I love the short story form, but I was glad to get to work on a novel. One difficulty came in the form of having to be willing to proceed for such a long time without knowing what was coming next; I didn’t begin with an outline or follow a set structure, except that I wanted the book to follow the progression of historical events. I loved getting to stay with the characters for a longer time. Of course that meant that their problems stayed with me too, but generally that was a welcome challenge.
CR: After writing your first novel, do you feel like you’ve grown as a writer?
JO: At the very least, I’ve grown seven years older! And now I know what it feels like to revise an 800-page manuscript. I feel less frightened about moving into the next novel, though every writer I know says that each book presents an utterly new and baffling set of difficulties.
CR:You have said that your grandfather and the stories he would tell you of his youth inspired The Invisible Bridge. How so?
JO:It meant learning both about the exciting and triumphant parts of his experience—arriving in Paris, beginning school, starting a job, meeting other students—and about the devastatingly difficult years he spent in Hungarian forced labor. I’d never known what actually happened in those camps, what kinds of work the men did, what they ate, where they lived, how they survived; when those details emerged, I felt a new kind of amazement that anyone could withstand what they went through.
CR: Why did it take you seven years to write The Invisible Bridge? Do you consider seven years to be a long time for writing a novel?
JO: The research and the writing itself took a great deal of time, but part of what required such a long stretch was simply the process of learning how to write a novel. That is to say, I needed time to make mistakes in the first draft, and then go back and address those mistakes in subsequent drafts. The first draft took about three years to write, and the revisions another four.
CR: What is it about the Brooklyn community of artists and writers that you most love? What is it about New York you most love?
JO: There’s a great deal of energy, it seems to me, in knowing that other writers are actively at work close by—that they’re sitting at their desks getting the words down, taking chances that might not occur to you, looking at sources that might be different from your own, pushing their fiction into territories unmapped by anyone else. What do I love about New York? Among other things, that you feel the multitudes of stories all around you everywhere you go. There’s an unpredictability of experience every time you step through the door; you’re never in the same city two days in a row. At the same time, each neighborhood is like a small town where everyone knows each other.
CR: What is your process as a writer? Describe your writing studio. Do you ever write with people around (i.e. in a coffee shop)?
JO: My husband and I rent a little studio in a building a couple doors down from our own. I go there in the mornings with my laptop and books and get down to work. I have a nine-month-old son, which means that I don’t have as much time to work right now as I used to, but I’ve learned to be more efficient with the time I have. It’s always been hard for me to work at cafés—I get distracted by conversation, music, smells, sights—but I do like to go read at a café sometimes, just to hear other people around me.
CR: You have said that you find a particular peace between the hours of 10 pm and 3 am when writing. Why do you think that is?
JO: I enjoy the freedom that comes with late-night work—it seems a particularly permissive time. Everyone’s asleep. No one’s watching. What’s to stop me from taking a chance with the work?
CR: What advice would you give to kids/teens who want to eventually become writers?
JO: Start by reading as much as possible. There’s no way to learn to write a novel except by reading dozens or hundreds of novels and letting them make their imprint in your mind.
CR: Your next novel is about Varian Fry. Can you tell us a little bit about the plotline and when you think it will be completed?
JO: Varian Fry was a New York journalist who went to Marseille in 1940 to save about 200 Jewish and anti-Nazi writers, artists, and intellectuals who’d been blacklisted by the Gestapo. He ended up staying for more than a year and saving almost two thousand people. The new book is about his real experiences and about the fictional experiences of another person doing similar work. It’ll take a few years, at least, but hopefully not seven.