She lives in New Jersey with her husband and two young children, where she is currently at work on her second novel.
Brown applied the Page 69 Test to her debut novel, Olivia Strauss Is Running Out of Time, and reported the following:
It turns out that page 69 is the last page in a chapter and only consists of a few lines. Therefore, I’m going to cheat a bit and talk about page 68, so I have a full page worth of text! On page 68 (and in those brief five lines on actual page 69), the protagonist, Olivia, is at home in her quiet suburb in the evening a few days after her thirty-ninth birthday (earlier that day, she celebrated her birthday with her family). In the scene, she tells her husband, Andrew, that the next day she plans to meet her best friend, Marian, in New York (the events that happen on this day come to serve as the catalyst that propels the remainder of the plot). Halfway down the page, once this conversation is wrapped up, Olivia moves upstairs in her home to tuck her young son, Tommy, into bed, and the two engage in a brief conversation about a dream he was having in which his mother becomes lost.Visit Angela Brown's website.
Honestly, I think I passed the test! I tend to follow a very traditional three-act structure model when I write to help me with my pacing, so it makes sense to me that an important turning point would happen right around this time. This page captures a lot about the story. First, as I mentioned above, it’s the starting point for the big event that pushes the rest of the plot forward. We also get to either see or hear about the novel’s four major characters – Olivia, Andrew, Tommy and Marian – all on this page. There’s a bit of banter between Olivia and Andrew on the top half of the page which I think perfectly captures Olivia as a character – she’s funny and sarcastic and loves to avoid facing her problems head-on, all of which we see about her through the scene here. Later on the page, we also get to watch Olivia as a mother – she’s kind and absolutely in love with her young son though acknowledges that, when it comes to motherhood, she’s definitely not perfect (all things that are really important to her evolution in the book and all of which help her to learn so much about herself over the course of the novel). I think this scene between Olivia and Tommy at bedtime – which is such a private moment between a mother and her child – reveals a very tender side to Olivia’s character, one we don’t always see in the daytime when she’s busy being her sarcastic, sometimes snarky, self. Lastly, the scene (and chapter) ends with Tommy describing a dream he was having at the time his mother walked into his bedroom, in which his mother disappears (Tommy asks her: “Do you promise you’ll never disappear, Mama?”). This is important, I feel, because throughout much of the book this is Olivia’s great fear for herself – that she’ll die young and “disappear.” I wouldn’t call this interaction foreshadowing, though I do think it helps to begin to build upon what ultimately becomes a significant theme in the text.
--Marshal Zeringue
Posts
