E. Lockhart Q&A – FHCtoday.com

Q: What was your favorite book you wrote, and what’s your connection to it?

Lockhart: Probably my favorite is always the most recent book I wrote, and that’s because my connection to it is high at the moment that someone asked me the question, we fell apart is my newest therefore I feel connected to it, partly because it’s a story about found family, a young woman who comes across the country looking for the biological father that she’s never met, and instead, she finds that he’s not at his house, and there are, instead, these three teenager boys who are living there, and she spends a summer with them, and that changes her life.

Q: What was your inspiration for the series?

Lockhart: I started, really, with an interest in writing about a private island.  I grew up going to the island of Martha’s Vineyard,  as a kid, where my grandparents, on my mom’s side, had a little modest house. But in taking the ferry across to Martha’s Vineyard, you pass privately owned islands. And then you would have, like, one or two houses on them, and I was always just very curious about them, and I thought that would be a good setting for a novel. And, uh, then I started asking myself, you know, what would happen on a private island, and, it might be really hard to get there in an emergency, and you might start to feel like the world of the island was the whole world, and that might lead people to do some very drastic things.

Q: When did you start writing books?

Lockhart: I mean I tried writing books, you know, when I was a child. I wrote these long, uh, fictional, uh, imitations of my favorite books. You know… Work really hard at it, actually, but I didn’t publish a book until I was, I think, 31.

Q: Have you drawn any characters from real life people?

Lockhart: Not really. I think sometimes characters are composites of people I’ve known, or they could be composites of characters I’ve seen in films or on TV. She was there, like, 30 seconds ago. I think… Really, there’s something of me in every major character. And that is something I consciously look for, especially in the revision process, is how can I put something that I feel emotionally connected to, into the villain character, or into the love interest character, or into… really anybody who’s important, like, I don’t feel like I’m gonna be able to write them truthfully, unless I can find my points of connection to them. Okay.

Q; With the series becoming so big, how has that impacted your life?

Lockhart: Mostly it doesn’t impact my life at all. I have a little more mild than I used to.

Q; What do you hope to communicate to students with these visits?

Lockhart: I… had a funny visit at your high school because I couldn’t show my slides, and… So I kind of spoke off the cuff for the most part, but… what I usually am trying to do is… one spark excitement about literature. my own and other people’s. And to spark excitement and empowerment around, creativity.

Q:How is your writing process different from other authors that you’ve met or have just come to realize?

Lockhart: Well, I’m a very referential writer. And so, uh, I have a PhD in 19th century British novel. And so sometimes I’m working in reference to those texts that I spent so much time studying, but also sometimes in reference to other texts. So, we fell apart, for example, references, or is, I would say, in conversation with, Shirley Jackson’s, we have always lived in the castle, and Dodie Smith’s, I capture the castle, and Charlotte Bronte’s Jane Eyre, and Iris Murdoch’s, The Good Apprentice, and several other stories. In the novel, it’s, none of those are necessarily up on the surface, but up on the surface is, uh, the fairy tale of Cinderella. The video game, Luigi’s Haunted Mansion, the story of Hamlet. So, you know, those are three very far separated stories, but to me, they all had something to do with the story that I was telling, and so I’m bringing those in, and my characters are interacting with those stories. Okay.

Q: When visiting, like, doing author visits, what has been a meaningful moment for you?

Lockhart: Well… The only kids that I end up talking to are either the journalists or… the young people who’ve already read my work or watched the TV show. Yes. And… one of my favorite things that so, in other words, I don’t always know who connected with my talk, if they don’t come up to me after. Right? They might, I was not a kid who would have gone up to an author after a talk, but I would have come home with a lot in my heart. But one thing that people often say about the Sinclair family on, in, We Were Liars, is, that’s my family, too. And they don’t mean, we are super rich, racist white people. What they mean is, we compete for parental love. We are, or my parents fight, too, or my, or my, my people, they add all to my family fight, too. Or I’ve started to question the values of my family of origin, and it’s hard, right? So I think it’s, you know, it’s a fun, big mystery with, like, all kinds of drama and a love story and all of that. But I think hearing that people also, like, see family truths that, you know, that… that touch home, even though, obviously, they’re not living the lives that I’m describing in the book, that makes me happy. Okay.

Q: With your book becoming a TV series, what has been, like, a change between the book and a series that you maybe thought, like, I didn’t think of that, or maybe I should have thought of that, or just something you’d like that was different?

Lockhart: Well, I said this a little bit in the talk. You know, most of the characters in this… in, We Were Liars, are… Sorry, I was thinking, I was like, Yeah, I think we can do… White and very privileged, and… the characters of Gat and his Uncle Ed are our middle class and New Yorkers, and, In making the TV show, uh, oh, and of Indian heritage, I should add. We brought in four different writers of Indian heritage, as well as another bunch of writers of diverse backgrounds, to work in the writer’s room. And so, those writers of Indian heritage were very generous with their life stories, but also their storytelling skills and their understanding of how, uh, they wanted these characters to be fleshed out, and, uh, made more, more nuanced and deeper and more complex. And they didn’t always agree with each other, and I think it was a really nice thing that there were enough people with that background that they could have, a variety of opinions, and then, you know, come to an agreement about these characters, and I just felt really good about putting something out of the world that had authentic authorship and own voices behind it. After this series, it became so big.

Q: What do you think will happen for you as a writer in the future? I’m gonna write some more TV, which will be fun.

Lockhart: I think novel writing will always be my main thing, but, uh, it’s nice to have that chance to write some more TD in film.

Q: Have you read any books that you feel have shaped you as a person?

Lockhart:  Well, I mean, a lot. But we were liars is connected… a fair amount to Emily Bronte’s Wuthering Heights, which is about to come out as a movie, so I know it’s on people’s radar. And I think if people have read, we were liars, or watched it, they would get a lot out of reading, Wathering Heights, or seeing the movie.

Q: Do you, or why do you believe that reading or literature is important, especially for students or younger? Like, you know? Well, books are empathy machines. Right?

Lockhart: I mean, they’re, every single book you read is a chance to understand another person’s way of thinking and life experience. You know, they can be windows, they can be doors, in other words, a window onto someone’s experience, uh, that’s different from yours, or a doorway that opens, uh, that you feel like you could, you know, you’re represented right in there, but I think it’s a chance to empathize with people differently from yourself, which is very important for growing as a human being. And also, you have the chance to see yourself reflected and that might be in a book by somebody who identifies on the surface exactly like you do, and seeing your own experience represented, but it also might be actually seeing and finding your family in some, or your life represented in something written by somebody 100 years ago.

Q: Who has been a big mentor or help throughout your journey of writing, producing?

Lockhart: Well, I have a community of fellow author friends, and so I wouldn’t call them mentors, but that is the biggest help, is having other people who do this weird job to talk to about it. That has been a huge support.

Q: How long have you, with this series, how long have you been thinking about writing or creating these books?

Lockhart: We were letters came out in 2014, so I probably started it in 2012 or 2011.

Q: Finally, what is the last good thing you’ve read?

Lockhart: I’ve read a lot of duds lately, and not finished a bunch of books, to be honest.  Oh, right here, we have… I saw a film called Sorry Baby, by Ava Victor, that I thought was exquisite. It’s… really, really funny and really sad at the same time, and I love things that are both of those at once