Author One-on-One: Christina Baker Kline and Joshilyn Jackson
Christina Baker Kline is a novelist, nonfiction writer, and editor. Her novels include Orphan Train and Bird in Hand. She lives in an old house in Montclair, New Jersey, with her husband, and three boys.
Christina Baker Kline: Your characters seem to have broken the "rule" that men and women can't be friends. Do you think this is possible only in novels?
Joshilyn Jackson: You might be asking the wrong person. When I was nineteen, I met a gangly, dark-haired, geeky guy with big feet and a weird sense of humor. He quickly became my dearest friend. In those days, I would have said, “Of course they can!”
Seven years later? He’d grown into the big feet and become one helluva man. Reader, I married him. Twenty years and two kids later, I still like him best.
The man/woman thing is powerful, and it can be so sneaky. Attraction can grow between the most unlikely pairings, given time and shared experiences and discovered connections. It doesn’t always happen, but it’s a risk. Better not to mess around with it if you’re sure you do not want it. You can’t get sex back to sleep once it’s good and woken.
Someone Else’s Love Story has two sets of man/woman best friends, and I didn’t want attraction to intrude on the dynamics. I tried several ways to remove it entirely from both equations, but it didn’t work until I attacked sex where it is most powerful—in its mystery. I took away wondering and speculation; both pairs of friends have already had sex with each other before the novel begins.
Men and women can’t get around sex, true, but I thought perhaps these two friend-pairs had elected to move through it. Through it, and into something else.
CBK: This is a story about family and friendship, truth and secrets, and love. But it is not necessarily a love story. Do you think that on some level all stories are love stories?
JJ: Yes. Not all stories are romances, certainly, but all good stories are love stories, in one way or another. “Only connect,” E. M. Forster said, and at these words, a great Amen rises in me.
CBK: Your characters have definite musical tastes—The Pixies, early David Bowie, They Might Be Giants. Are you promoting your own favorite bands through Shandi?
JJ: I am a visual arts person, a museum person. I am much more interested in seeing than hearing. I have embarrassingly pedestrian musical tastes; I listen to cheery pop with my eleven year old daughter. I like music that doesn’t ask me to pay much attention to it. As I write this, Pandora is playing “Jungle Love” for me. I am chagrined to report that I just thumbsed it up.
All the bands mentioned came from hanging out with my husband, my niece Erin Virginia, and my cool friend Lydia. I know this music because it matters so much to them, and they matter so much to me. I used their bands and songs to say things about the characters---not me.
CBK: Your contemporary novel deals with an ancient concept: the miracle. Do you believe in miracles?
JJ: Absolutely. Someone Else's Love Story is full of huge, overblown miracles. A virgin birth, a holy sacrifice, more than one resurrection. But they are all fake. They are all explained away and undercut. They are dust.
The real miracles are smaller. There are at least two in this book, so tiny it is easy to miss them. They are very true and dear and frail and human. They spark and pop for only a moment before they begin to diffuse and spread themselves like mist into the story. They change everything.
Review
“Witty, cleverly constructed and including a truly surprising twist, Someone Else’s Love Story turns out to be a nuanced exploration of faith, family and the things we do for love.” (People (3 ½ stars))
“Witty and insightful...a novel at once funny and touching.” (Publishers Weekly)
“An inspiring story of love, faith and redemption...All of the characters... are so vividly drawn, they fairly leap off the page.” (Booklist on SOMEONE ELSE'S LOVE STORY)
“That rare woman’s novel that is sure to please readers of popular fiction as well as literary fiction. A terrific pageturner!” (Susan Elizabeth Phillips, New York Times bestselling author of THE GREAT ESCAPE)
“Someone Else’s Love Story is worth reading, even studying. Expressions of love come in many forms, as Jackson shows.” (Omaha World-Herald)
“Finely drawn characters make the miraculous plausible, from the opening hostage scene in a North Georgia convenience store to an ending that hits the mark of ‘surprising yet inevitable’ mastered and articulated by Flannery O’Connor.” (Atlanta Magazine)
“A surprising novel, both graceful and tender. You won’t be able to put it down.” (Dallas Morning News on SOMEONE ELSE'S LOVE STORY)
“ Someone Else’s Love Story is never predictable, full of humor and heart and characters you can’t help but love.” (Greenville News)
“[T]here is love at [this novel’s] heart… there is much to gain from a closer read.” (3 out of 4 stars) (USA Today)
“Joshilyn Jackson is a brilliant storyteller and has a unique gift of bringing quirkiness to her characters and a lot of twists and turns to her tale.” (Wichita Falls Times Record Review)
“There are scenes that will make you gasp, pause or even tear up as Jackson’s characters fumble toward imperfect enlightenment. Someone Else’s Love Story will delight and surprise with its unexpected compassion, empathy and humanity.” (BookPage)
“This charming page-turner serves up a twist I never remotely expected, followed by an utterly satisfying conclusion.” (Bookreporter.com)
From the Back Cover
I fell in love with William Ashe at gunpoint, in a Circle K
For single mom Shandi Pierce, life is a juggling act. She's finishing college; raising her delightful three-year-old genius son, Nathan, aka Natty Bumppo; and keeping the peace between her eternally warring, long-divorced Christian mother and Jewish father. She's got enough to deal with before she gets caught in the middle of a stickup in a gas station mini-mart and falls in love with a great wall of a man named William Ashe, who steps between the armed robber and her son to shield the child from danger.
Shandi doesn't know that her blond god has his own baggage. When he looked down the barrel of the gun in the gas station he believed it was destiny: it's been exactly one year since a tragic act of physics shattered his universe. But William doesn't define destiny the way other people do. A brilliant geneticist who believes in science and numbers, destiny to him is about choice.
Now, William and Shandi are about to meet their so-called destinies head-on, making choices that will reveal unexpected truths about love, life, and the world they think they know.
Someone Else's Love Story is Joshilyn Jackson's funny, charming, and poignant novel about science and miracles, secrets and truths, faith and forgiveness; about falling in love and learning that things aren't always what they seem—or what we hope they will be. It's a story about discovering what we want and ultimately finding what we need.
About the Author
Joshilyn Jackson is the New York Times bestselling author of nine novels, including gods in Alabama and The Almost Sisters. Her books have been translated into a dozen languages. A former actor, Jackson is also an award-winning audiobook narrator. She lives in Decatur, Georgia, with her husband and their two children.
