BookBrowsers Ask Author Chris Bohjalian

Ask the Author
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We’d like to welcome author Chris Bohjalian to our discussion. Over the years BookBrowse has reviewed many of Mr. Bohjalian’s works, and we recently hosted a discussion of his latest novel, The Jackal’s Mistress, here on the Community Forum. You can find information about the book on BookBrowse and the BookBrowse Book Club discussion here.

BTW, according to the author, his name is pronounced “Bow (as in ribbon) - Jail (as in prison) - Yen (as in, I have a yen to visit BookBrowse)”

Please feel free to reply to this post (use the blue Reply button at the bottom) with additional questions for @Chris_B

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Which of your books was your favorite to write? Which one are you most proud of? Which was the most challenging?

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How do you determine what subjects to write about? Do you usually have more than a single book in the works at any one time, or do you work to completion on one before moving to the next?

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How do you go about researching your books? Has that changed since your first novel was published in 1988?

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How involved do you get in the creation of the audio versions of your novels? How about with the screenplays (e.g., The Flight Attendant)?

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Favorite to write? Perhaps The Flight Attendant or The Lioness. I had a blast interviewing flight attendants (my aunt was a flight attendant). I find their job unbelievably hard and under appreciated, and yet they are so tolerant of the people they see at their worst. And they have all seen wild stuff while trying to keep us safe at 35,000 feet.

And writing a novel such as The Lioness demanded going on a safari and researching old Hollywood. I loved every moment of both elements.

Now, I can tell you that I am LEAST proud of A Killing in the Real World, the single worst first novel ever published, bar none.

I think my historical fiction — novels such as Hour of the Witch, Skeletons at the Feast, The Jackal’s Mistress, and The Sandcastle Girls — may be better than my thrillers, and so, perhaps, I take more pride in them. But it’s obviously subjective, and my opinion changes daily. Ask me tomorrow, and I might be feeling that The Red Lotus is my best novel. Or, some days, Midwives.

The most challenging novel to write was The Double Bind. That’s the only book I’ve written where I knew the ending when I started to write, and I found it difficult for me to get from point A to point Z. It was like having a jigsaw puzzle with the border complete, but no idea what the image was inside.

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I never begin a new novel until I have turned in the second draft of its predecessor. (My books always go through five or six drafts.)

But given the time a book spends in production, I am always polishing one novel while I am writing the next one.

And I only write a book if it’s interesting to me: if I’m not enthusiastic while writing it, it’s unlikely a reader will be enthusiastic while reading it. I have cut bait many times.

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Lord, 1988 was the Mesozoic era. Everything has changed. I wrote my first novel in longhand, using fine point Bic pins and yellow legal pads.

To research a novel such as The Jackal’s Mistress:

  • I read secondary sources, books about the Civil War, especially those that had a focus on the Shenandoah Valley.

  • I read primary sources, letters and memoirs from the era.

  • I interviewed historians who knew about the Vermont Brigade, Civil War medicine, and the war in Northern Virginia.

  • I traveled from the Museum of Civil War Medicine in Frederick, Maryland to Harper’s Ferry, West Virginia, then through the Shenandoah Valley in Virginia (visiting such key sites as the Third Battle of Winchester), and into Richmond.

I also had expert historians read rough drafts of the novel.

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Kelly Gildea of Penguin Random House Audio has been producing (and sometimes directing) my audiobooks since 2011. She’s brilliant. I trust her to find the perfect narrators. And I’m thrilled when it seems to her the right narrator is my daughter, Grace Experience. Grace is not “merely” my daughter: she is also a terrific actor and one of my three principal manuscript readers, along with her mother, Victoria Blewer, and my editor, Jenny Jackson. They are three of the smartest people I know — and they’re always honest with me about what works and what doesn’t.

I’ve had three books become movies and one that became a TV series. My principal involvement has been hanging out at craft services and trying to stay out of the way when I’m on the set.

Now, I did write teleplays for episodes of two other books and a screenplay for a third, but they never went anywhere.

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Where does your inspiration come from, though? I’m curious about how you came up with the idea of writing about a safari gone wrong during the Golden Age of Hollywood, for example. Your books cover a wide range of time periods and topics. Are you constantly thinking, “Hmmm… that might make a good book”? Or do you have people approaching you all the time saying, “You know, [this] would make a GREAT book…”?

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Thanks, Kim! Ah, THE LIONESS. The novel was born in a movie theater. I emerged from a matinee in August 2019, squinting against the high summer sun, and thought to myself, "My God, I love movies. Why have I never written a Hollywood novel?”

When my books work, and heaven knows they do not always work, one of the emotions that keeps you turning the pages is dread. I know so many of my favorite novels, movies, and TV series live at the nexus of anxiety and fear.

Moreover, I tend to be writing novels these days that have multiple geographies, some that are romantic or (and this is an important distinction) romanticized. In the last ten years, I have set novels with scenes in Syria, Armenia, Italy, Manhattan, Dubai, Moscow, Sochi, Vietnam, 1662 Boston, 1864 Virginia, 2022 Las Vegas, and (yes) my beloved Vermont.

So, I wanted a venue in addition to Hollywood: where I could send a Hollywood entourage that would put them completely out of their element, and in deep and real danger? Who would rise to the challenge of survival and who would not? I knew this would be set in one of Hollywood’s big screen golden ages from my childhood, which meant it would be set during the Cold War.

And that led me to East Africa. I was originally thinking the book would be The Poisonwood Bible meets And Then There Were None. But now, thanks to Jordy’s Book Club, I view it more as Evelyn Hugo meets Jurassic Park.

And, yes, like most novelists, I am always thrilled when I have one of those epiphanies, those “ah-ha” moments when I have found what might be my next novel.

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The historical research must consume a bit of time. Primary sources are enlightening yet are written from the view and bias of the author. How do you treat conflicting information? Do you find “nuggets” that you write into the story? If so, what might be an example? Personally, I find cemeteries fascinating sources of history. Have you ventured into this resource? Perhaps they’re not of consequence for your research.

BTW, I so enjoyed The Lioness. I, too, have been on safari and recall seeing a lioness enter a campsite searching for food. Our guide was awed by this behavior as it wasn’t natural. And then there were the two lions closely guarding the entrance to the women’s bathroom; the one and only located in the outer reaches.

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Hello Chris and thank you for entertaining our questions about The Jackal’s Mistress. When I read that the book was 20 years in the writing, I couldn’t help but wonder what might be your feelings regarding how very little has changed, fundamentally, with regard to racial intolerance in this country. Not just in the past 20 years, but going all the way back to the era in which the story takes place. And how might have these feelings informed or influenced the telling of the story? Thank you.

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Oh, my gosh, those safari stories of yours are fascinating. Thank you!

I love historical research. Actually, I love researching all my books, including the thrillers.

And there will usually be conflicting information, but:

– There are facts. There’s a reason we call them facts.

– So long as I don’t change history, I can make things up. It’s what I do. As John Gardner has observed, you never want to wake the reader from the fictional dream with inauthenticity or inaccuracies. (Now, I understand that lots of great novels and movies involve “changing” history, and I have really enjoyed them. But that’s not what I do.)

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It wasn’t nineteen years in the writing. It was one.

It was nineteen years from when I wrote the Reader’s Digest article about Bettie Van Metre and Henry Bedell in 2003, and 2022 when I realized it was a possible novel.

And it was precisely because I was in Richmond in 2022, two years after the monuments of the Confederate generals and Jefferson Davis were finally taken down, that it dawned on me: now was the moment for this novel.

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My favorite novel of yours (of the five or so I’ve read) is The Sandcastle Girls. I confess I’d never heard of the Armenian Genocide, and it was eye-opening to learn about it - thanks for that.

I know your heritage is Armenian. If it’s not too personal, can you tell us what kind of connection your family had to the Armenian Genocide? Was it part of your family’s story that you knew about growing up, or was it something you learned about later?

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Thank you, Chris, for the clarification about the length of time for writing the novel, and also for succinctly sharing your thoughts about the influence and importance of timing.

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Oh, of course! It was a great question and I thank YOU.

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I have read several of your books which are always engaging. I really enjoyed The Jackal’s Mistress which I recommended to my book club. Now 10 other people are reading it. Thank you!

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Do you decide the title of your books? I wish the title of The Jackal’s Mistress had not been an almost spoiler alert. (I very much enjoyed the book though.)