Sunday, July 22, 2012

"Gone"

Cathi Hanauer is the author of the novels My Sister’s Bones and Sweet Ruin and the editor of the New York Times bestselling essay anthology The Bitch in the House: 26 Women Tell the Truth About Sex, Solitude, Work, Motherhood, and Marriage. Her articles, essays, and/or criticism have appeared in the New York Times, Elle, O, The Oprah Magazine, Glamour, Self, Parenting, Whole Living, and other magazines. She lives with her family in western Massachusetts.

She applied the Page 69 Test to Gone, her new novel, and reported the following:
Page 69 of Gone happens to have a lot of dialogue by a fairly minor character, but I think it's representative of my writing--in Gone and my other novels, too--in that I try to make my dialogue both very real and also a little unusual--something that might make you smile--and I tend toward slightly quirky characters in minor roles. On this page, the main character Eric is listening to the 22-year-old babysitter, Dria, tell him about her life. She's young and sexy and naive, and he's a little turned on by her--that too is common in my books (including this one), there's often a subtle sexual undercurrent (if not actual sex) when a male and female who are potentially attracted to each other are together--but he also is a married man who loves his wife, so he's a little bit torn about all that. He's listening to this young woman, finding her intriguing and amusing both visually and in what she's saying, but he's also somewhat tortured, slightly depressed--he's a formerly famous sculptor who's been blocked and unproductive for a long time now--and that comes out too, his insecurity, his ambivalence about everything. If you go one graph onto p. 70, you get a slightly better sense of Eric. 69 is a lot of Dria. But again, she's fairly representative of how I write a minor character--both in Gone and in my other novels.
Learn more about the book and author at Cathi Hanauer's website.

My Book, The Movie: Gone.

--Marshal Zeringue