In Philip Beard’s first novel, Dear Zoe, a family grieves for a loved-one killed on September 11, 2001. Not at The World Trade Center or the Pentagon or on Flight 93. This is a four-year-old child who happened to be hit by a car on that particular day, and the story is told in the form of a letter written to her by her fourteen-year-old half-sister, Tess, who holds herself responsible. Taken separately, any one of these could have been just another story––about September 11, about teen angst, about a family torn apart by a child’s death. By weaving them together, Philip Beard has created a rich blend of often searing pain, a bit of humor, and a constant undercurrent of hope.
Published by Viking in 2005, Dear Zoe was a Book Sense Pick, a Borders Original Voices Selection, and was named by the American Library Association's Booklist as one of the Ten Best First Novels of 2005. It was also a School Library Journal “Best Book” of 2005 in the category of “Best Adult Books for High School Students,” and a Book Sense Summer Paperback Selection in 2006. Beard’s second novel, Lost in the Garden, about––to simplify in the extreme––a man trying to save his marriage while playing a round of golf, was published by Vikingto critical acclaim and was nominated for the USGA’s 2006 International Book Award (more about that later).
Both books are now available as Plume Paperbacks.
Recently, Philip Beard, who continues to work part-time as a lawyer in Pittsburgh, Pennsylvania, took some time to answer our questions about his books, two careers, the writing process, and more.
R&T: In Dear Zoe a family grieves for a child killed in an accident on September 11. I found myself re-living my own memories of that day while wondering what it must have been like suffering a personal loss while most of the country was mourning complete strangers. What inspired you to connect the two events for your novel?
Beard: I actually started writing Dear Zoe in the summer of 2001. I was writing about this little family tragedy, and then 9/11 happened. I think we forget how all-encompassing, how all-consuming that day was for months afterward. There was nothing else. I stopped writing because I didn’t know how to tell Tess’s quiet story in a world where something like that could happen. A single death seemed almost irrelevant. Gradually, the more frustrated I became with my own inability to tell Tess’s story, the more I realized: That’s how she would feel. She would feel as if her own tragedy had been silenced by the enormity of what happened in New York and Washington and Central Pennsylvania. Once I came to terms with the fact that 9/11 had to become part of Tess’s experience, I was able to finish the novel.
R&T: Do you think it would have been the same story without that connection?
Beard: That’s a tough one. The arc of the story would have been the same, I think, but the resonance would feel different somehow. I’m unwilling to say that 9/11 deepened the story, but it gave it a different context, a different lens through which to view Tess’s personal loss.
R&T: Dear Zoe is very movingly told as a letter written to the four-year-old, deceased Zoe by her teenage half-sister. What made you decide to tell the story in that way?
Beard: You have no idea what a loaded question that is. The short answer is that it just felt right. From the beginning of my very first notes, my narrator was speaking directly to her sister…. After the first six Dear Zoe rejection letters arrived in my agent’s office, I was advised by more than one person that I should change the point of view before submitting to any more publishers––that the epistolary format of Dear Zoe took away from the intimacy between narrator and reader and should be re-thought. I had resisted that advice for months. To me, it always felt as if Tess needed, as part of her healing process, to be speaking directly to Zoe, not to us. And being able to eavesdrop on those conversations created, I believed, an even more intimate experience for readers. But, having already had one novel rejected by every major house in New York, I was willing to do just about anything to avoid the same fate for the second. I spent a month revising the novel to standard first person, changed the title to "Z," then sat and cried when I sent it off that way.
The change didn’t help. Three months later, the last of the twenty-eight rejection letters arrived. We came close more than once, but in the end I was faced with the prospect of starting work on a third novel without any faith that it would find a home. I couldn't do it. Knowing that others had found success with their third or fourth books didn’t help. I felt lost, directionless, paralyzed by the first real failure of my life. I couldn't picture myself going back to the practice of law full-time, yet three attempts to start a new novel went nowhere. Then I saw an article in the New York Times about self-publishing and decided to take back control of my new career.
R&T: Dear Zoe was actually just about to go to print as a self-published novel when you heard that Viking was interested in it.
Beard: I spent six months treating the publication of Dear Zoe as my full-time job, eventually hiring a cover designer, printer and publicist. I went back to the earlier version of the manuscript — restoring both the original title and the original letter format––and I sent the manuscript to every published writer I had ever met (and some I hadn't) asking them to read Dear Zoe and consider providing a blurb for the back cover. I wasn’t naïve enough to think I was going to sell 100,000 copies, but I was enjoying being in control of every aspect of the process.
At some point during the project, I was in my favorite independent bookstore, The Aspinwall Bookshop, two blocks from my home. The proprietor, John Towle, told me that his Penguin sales rep, Jason Gobble, was due to stop in later that week, and that Jason was someone who "has some credibility with the editors at Penguin." I told John that the book had already been rejected by most of the Penguin imprints, but agreed to drop off a copy of the manuscript the next day.
A few months later, John called to tell me that Jason loved Dear Zoe and wanted permission to send it to Viking. I agreed but with no expectations. I had already wallpapered my office with rejection letters from New York, and I was certain this was going to be one more. What I was excited about, though, was the possibility of having an influential regional sales rep behind my book. Jason Gobble and I struck up an e-mail friendship, and although he couldn’t "officially" represent my book to the independents in his 5-state territory, he agreed to distribute my galleys informally to all of his best hand-sellers with a strong recommendation.
On March 23, 2004, I was sitting at my computer, corresponding with my cover designer on the final jacket layout. The overall design had been set for weeks, but we had been struggling with the logo for Van Buren Books that would appear on the spine. To stay within my publication timeline, we needed to have the final design mechanicals to our printer within a couple of days. At the same time, I would write the largest check of my life to print books I couldn’t be sure anyone beyond my Christmas card list would buy. I sent an e-mail with my final decision on the logo, confirmed with the printer that we were on schedule, and told the publicist I had hired to start sending galleys out to the advance reviewers. When I clicked back to my in-box, there was an e-mail from the receptionist at my law firm that said the following:
"Clare Ferraro from Viking called and would like you to call her back. She said to say she works with Jason Gobble."
I stared at that message, motionless, for what must have been a full minute. I knew that Clare Ferraro didn’t just "work with Jason Gobble," that she was the president of Viking Penguin. And although I couldn't imagine how a call from her could possibly be bad news, it just didn't seem possible that, after four years, a novel of mine was going to find a home in New York on the same day I was finalizing plans to print it myself. Of course, that's exactly what happened. By the end of the day, my agent, Jane Dystel, had come to an agreement with Viking, and I had notified everyone involved in my self-publishing effort that Van Buren Books was suspending operations. Three weeks later, Dear Zoe appeared in the "Hot Deals" column of Publishers Weekly. Unbelievable.
When I went to New York for the first time to meet with Clare and my assigned editor, I told them this story about the change in the point of view. They both said that the epistolary format was what they loved most about the voice, and that they probably wouldn’t have bought the novel in another form.
R&T: Did having your novel picked up by a major publisher affect the way you viewed yourself as a writer?
Beard: More than I’d like to admit. I always thought of myself as a confident person until I started writing. The craft itself is hard enough, but throw in the barriers to publication, the constant rejection, and it’s enough to humble anyone. The notes that Viking gave me on the manuscript resulted in the changing of exactly five words from the original manuscript, but the published novel gave me something that the self-published version never would have: Affirmation. That’s a powerful thing to a writer.
R&T: After publishing one successful novel, some writers find themselves almost paralyzed at the thought of the second. You published your second novel, Lost in the Garden, to critical acclaim the next year. Did you ever experience or do you experience writer's block?
Beard: I cheated. Lost in the Garden was my first novel, waiting in the drawer. My block has come with number three, which I’ve started and abandoned three times already. I don’t think of it as writer’s block though, because I’m writing. Or, that is, I’m doing what I do every other day, which is mostly staring. A reality TV series about my writing day would look like one continuous case of writer’s block. I’m brutally deliberate, and I’m a constant self-editor. I can’t move on to the next sentence until the one I’m working on sounds just the way I want it to. I’ve never understood the advice to “get it all down and then edit later.” I can’t work that way. As a result, I think I’m difficult for editors to work with, because when I’m done, I feel as if I’m done.
R&T: Lost in the Garden is very different from Dear Zoe, though there are some connections, like the death of a child. While the narrator of Lost, Michael Benedict, seems more like someone you may have modeled on yourself, you still chose a less-standard approach. The narrator not only speaks directly to the reader but makes it clear that he is at his desk writing the story that is unfolding. The entire story also takes place around one game of golf. Did you experiment with different approaches or did this also feel like the only way to go?
Beard: It just felt right. Since Lost was actually my first novel, I think the round of golf helped to give it structure for me. (The unfortunate side-effect of that structure has been the labeling of Lost as a “golf novel,” which it decidedly is not.) As for the writer/narrator addressing his audience, there’s a long tradition of that kind of interaction––Salinger/Buddy Glass, Dave Eggers, etc.––so I’m not doing anything new there. Michael Benedict thinks he’s self-aware, but he’s really just a rationalizer. Those asides, and his awareness of his audience, grow out of his need to rationalize his bad behavior.
R&T: Both of your books contain strong autobiographical elements. Is it difficult, when sharing so much in common with your novel's character, to inject every parent's worst nightmare, the death of a child?
Beard: I think most writers of character-driven fiction are drawn to exploring their deepest fears and human flaws through their characters. I think what drove me away from writing for a time was my lack of willingness to “go there” every day. That prospect was somehow less daunting when I became a father, because when I’m with my kids I seldom give any thought to whatever I’m working on. They give me a rest from those difficult places. (For the record, my wife isn’t so lucky. We’ll be in the car, on our way to dinner or a movie, and she’ll catch me staring out the car window. “You’re writing, aren’t you?” she’ll say.)
R&T: What is the writing life to you? You practiced law before becoming a writer. What was it that drew you to writing?
Beard: I was raised in a very literate household. My mother was an English teacher and was instrumental in the founding of the Pittsburgh chapter of the International Poetry Forum. Galway Kinnell was a guest in our house a number of times when I was a child, and my mother hosted literature study groups for my friends in our dining room throughout high school. I wrote some very bad short fiction in college, some less bad in law school, and then didn’t write a word of fiction for the first ten years of my legal career. I had asked two of my mentors (Frederick Busch and Lewis Nordan) how I would know if I was meant to be a writer, and they both said essentially the same thing: “You don’t choose to be a writer. Writing chooses you.” During that decade that I was away from it, I just assumed writing hadn’t chosen me. I can’t name what drew me back, except to say that, once my two daughters were born, I felt for the first time in my life as if I had something to say. It was scary as hell, leaving what had been a good career for my family and me, but I really did feel as if I had no choice. Although I still practice law (“Don’t quit your day-job” applies to nearly everyone), I can’t imagine doing it full-time ever again. I spend part of my day reading, part writing. I see my daughters off to school every morning and I am home for dinner every night. It’s a life I highly recommend.
R&T: Many of our readers are also writers. What advice do you have for someone just starting out?
Beard: You need to be an absolutely ruthless editor of your own work, and make sure you have at least one trusted reader who will be honest and cut what you don’t. The most consistent flaw I see in unpublished writing given to me for critique, by far, is that there is simply too much of it: nice moments surrounded by overly earnest fluff. The second most important quality is tenacity. If you’re not driven to do this, don’t bother.
To learn more about Philip Beard and his writing visit his website.
Read a review of Dear Zoe and other books reviewed by The Rose & Thorn at Roses & Thorns Book Reviews.
Nannette Croce is Co-Managing Editor at The Rose & Thorn. Two of her short stories, At the Edge of the Woods, and Dora’s Memoir, appeared in the Summer 2004 and Fall 2006 issues, respectively. Other stories, articles, and book reviews have appeared in various online and print publications including The Philadelphia Inquirer.
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