Liese O'Halloran Schwarz: The ER and the Writing Life

INGRID THOFT

It's such a treat to have Liese O'Halloran Schwarz as my guest today.  I first learned about Liese's novel from her talented writer sister, Carla Buckley.  Talk about a gifted literary gene pool!  I was immediately sucked in to Liese's novel, "The Possible World," and my admiration grew when I learned that she is also an emergency medicine doctor.  I'm sure you'll find Liese and her book just as fascinating as I do!

INGRID THOFT: "The Possible World” features three main characters—an ER doc at a crossroads in her life, a young boy who is connected to a horrific crime, and an elderly woman coming to terms with the life she’s led.  Their lives intersect in unexpected ways, but at the heart of the story is the idea that there is the life you live and the life that was possible.  What prompted you to write this particular story?

LIESE O'HALLORAN SCHWARZ: First — thank you so much, Ingrid, for having me as a guest on your wonderful blog! 

I think the main thing that pushed me to write the "The Possible World" was a need to tell a story that affirmed the presence of good in the world, even when it is hidden. Especially when it is hidden. My years in medicine showed me a lot of terribly sad things, and a belief in the essential goodness of existence can be hard to hold on to sometimes! I also wanted to pay tribute to the power of non-blood relationships, such as friendship and non-mother care taking roles. I think those types of relationships are hugely important in the lives of most people.

IPT:  I agree, and I think readers appreciate seeing those types of relationships reflected in the books they read.

In addition to being a published writer, you’re also an emergency room doctor.  Did you always want to write?  How do you find the time to do both?  Do they complement one another?

LOS:  Yes, I always wanted to write—I wrote my first book at three-years-old! (I still have it, and let’s just say the narrative could use some work.) I went into medicine for a lot of reasons, chief among them the need to contribute in a meaningful, helpful way to the world while I figured out how and what I wanted to write. Please note: I did use to write and practice medicine at the same time, but I don’t practice medicine now. Writing was on hiatus for most of my training—that was an absorptive and not a creative time—and then I remember a joyful stretch of time after finishing training, as a young attending physician in Manhattan, writing in the morning before an 11 a.m - 9 p.m. ER shift, then going out with friends after, sleeping a little bit and getting up to do it all again.

That wasn’t the rule, though; it was the exception. For one thing, the ER shift schedule varied (the night shifts, as I note in "The Possible World," smash one's entire life to hell), so I couldn’t fall into a groove. For another thing, I couldn’t allow myself to burn the candle at both ends too much, for fear of compromising the level of care I provided in the ER. I had to cheat writing in favor of medicine, of course, because (not to be dramatic about it) lives were at stake. I think for the period of time that I was doing both at once, they did occasionally complement one another, as writing is very interior and quiet, and emergency medicine is rather hectic and outward-directed. However, sometimes (often), a day or night in the ER would be too draining to allow anything but recovery afterward, and then when I’d get a day or two off, I would be far too depleted to do anything more intellectual than vacuuming and laundry (and feel lucky if I accomplished that!). So it was very up and down. Quitting medicine to focus on writing wasn’t an abrupt career change for me as much as a natural evolution—although I loved many things about the practice of medicine, I always hoped I would get to this place. 

IPT:  Which of the three characters was your favorite to write?

LOS:  I enjoyed writing them all, once I had a handle on them and the characters were “speaking” to me. I liked the challenge of writing 6-year-old Ben; he has post-traumatic amnesia, and as some memories begin to come back they are alarming to him and inexplicable to others around him. It was important to show his personality along with his odd circumstances—he's a smart, anxious kid who needs peace and safety in order to bloom. Writing Lucy the, ER doctor, was fun; I enjoyed trying to show a little about medicine to the reader. The challenging part of writing Lucy was knowing what not to write, trying to capture the essence of her character and show just enough of her world without overwhelming the reader. The characters of Ben and Lucy both feel very flesh and blood to me.

But Clare! She’s a 99-year-old woman; at first she may seem irrelevant to the others. But like the other characters — and like the whole plot of the book—she is more than she may appear to be. Clare is probably closest to my heart. Her voice needed to have a patina of nostalgia, but also convey fresh emotion raked up by the process of sharing. Things happened to Clare, as they happen to all of us, and she was imprisoned, in the ways that society imprisons women—and through terrible events that she would not have chosen, she broke free and became the agent of her own life. I hope I did justice to all three main characters …but the character I truly adored writing was a fourth, Gloria, who has an important role in the book—she’s a major catalyst, and I love how unfettered and joyous she is. Our lives are improved by the Glorias of the world.

IPT:  What has surprised you most about being a published author?

LOS:  The shocking lack of parades. Where is the confetti? The river of champagne? LOL! Actually, the part that is most surprising to me is how alive the book has become after publication. After the final revision, I thought the book was “done," that once it was in press it would be a static thing that maybe (I hoped) people would read, and maybe (I hoped) they would like. I really didn’t expect the book to enter this new dynamic state of being read. Readers who have contacted me on Facebook or via my website have been amazingly passionate and engaged—they noticed details I honestly didn’t expect anyone to notice; some have also picked up on nuances that I wasn’t aware of while I was writing, but that I can see are definitely there, now that they’ve been pointed out to me! The book is different in the hands of each different reader.

If writing and publishing a book can be compared in some ways to gestation and childbirth, then the state of being read is the book’s whole life. Having a book “in the drawer” is an accomplishment (finishing a manuscript is a milestone to be celebrated!) but a book going out into the world, among readers who will engage with it and make it their own and give it a totally new life, is a spectacular experience. It’s impossible to express how grateful I am to every reader, for reading the book. Also: I’ve been surprised by the sheer variety of public places audio book listeners have told me they happened to be when the book made them cry.

IPT:  Is there a wannabe book lurking in the back of your brain, something you would write if you didn’t have to consider agents, editors, and fans?  A romance?  Non-fiction?  Cookbook?

LOS:  I’d write them all if I could! Honestly, I think every book I will write will be a kind of wannabe—it’ll be the book I feel I must write, and I just have to hope that agents/editors/readers will like it. I wish I could write nonfiction (I enjoy reading it so much!), but I so enjoy making stuff up. 

Liese will be joining us today to answer your questions and is giving away a copy of "The Possible World" to one lucky reader.  Just comment to enter!

The Possible World
An astonishing, deeply moving novel about the converging lives of a young boy who witnesses a brutal crime, the doctor who tends to him, and a woman guarding her long-buried past. 

It seems like just another night shift for Lucy, an overworked ER physician in Providence, Rhode Island, until six-year-old Ben is brought in as the sole survivor from a horrifying crime scene. It’s not clear what he saw, or what he remembers.

Lucy, who’s grappling with a personal upheaval of her own, feels a profound, unexpected connection to the little boy. She wants to help him, but will recovering his memory heal him, or damage him further?

Across town, Clare will soon be turning one hundred years old. She has long believed that the lifetime of secrets she’s been keeping don’t matter to anyone anymore, but a surprising encounter makes her realize that the time has come to tell her story.

As Ben, Lucy, and Clare struggle to confront the events that shattered their lives, something stronger than fate is working to bring them together.

An expertly stitched story that spans nearly a century—from the Great Depression through the Vietnam War era and into the present—The Possible World is a captivating novel about the complicated ways our pasts shape our identities, the power of maternal love, the loneliness born out of loss, and how timeless bonds can help us triumph over grief.

Liese O'Halloran Schwarz grew up in Washington, DC after an early childhood overseas. She attended Harvard University and then medical school at University of Virginia. While in medical school, she won the Henfield/Transatlantic Review Prize and also published her first novel, Near Canaan.

She specialized in emergency medicine and like most doctors, she can thoroughly ruin dinner parties with tales of medical believe-it-or-not. But she won't do that, because she knows how hard you worked to make a nice meal.

The Possible World, coming from Scribner (US) and Hutchinson (Random House UK/Cornerstone) in June 2018, is her second novel.

She currently lives in Chapel Hill, North Carolina, and is at work on the next book.

Carla Buckley Talks Domestic Suspense

INGRID THOFT

I'm so excited to welcome my wonderful friend and writer Carla Buckley to Jungle Red.  Carla and I have been conference buddies since my first book came out, and it's always a treat to spot her across the hotel lobby and spend time catching up.  Carla's latest book, The Good Goodbye, was just released in paperback, and it's a perfect summer read.  It's suspenseful and nuanced, but I'll let her tell you all about it!

INGRID THOFT:  The Good Goodbye is the story about two young women who are cousins and the way their families intersect, both good and bad.  A theme running throughout the story is how well can you know another person, even your own child?  What prompted you to write this particular story?

CARLA BUCKLEY:  First of all, thank you, Ingrid, for inviting me to appear on Jungle Red. It’s a true honor.

IPT: It really is my pleasure!

CB:  As for your question: I’m endlessly fascinated by the secrets people keep from one another, especially from those they love the most. One of the biggest surprises I’ve had as a parent is the realization that around the age of eleven or twelve, children really do start to lead separate lives. They keep secrets. They experiment and push boundaries. For better or for worse, they make their own choices. All you can do is hope they remember the lessons you taught them back when they were little and (maybe) paying attention.

The inspiration for The Good Goodbye was actually twofold. I’d been in the middle of writing my previous novel when it suddenly struck me to structure my next novel around a key event, told from three points of view. One narrator would tell her story from a point in the past leading up to and stopping at the key event. The second narrator would tell her story from the moment of the event onward. And the third would skip back and forth in time. Together, they’d end up painting a full and complete picture of what really had happened in these families’ lives. 

But what should the key event be?

Several years ago, a dramatic story played out in headlines across the nation. The two families involved ended up writing a memoir about what had happened to them. Their horrifying experience raised haunting questions in my mind, and I tucked it away for a time when I might be able to explore what it might be like to walk in their shoes.

IPT:  You’ve been featured on conference panels about the “domestic suspense” genre.  Is that how you’ve always thought about your work?  Do you think that’s an apt description of the stories you tell?

CB:  When I sold my first novel back in 2007 (The Things That Keep Us Here) the question that cropped up between my agent and my publisher was, what is this book and how do we categorize it? Back then, there was no such thing as a domestic thriller, or at least, there was no such term.  The Things That Keep Us Here talked about a deadly flu pandemic but played out in the setting of one family’s living room, and that’s pretty much what all my stories do.

I take families in crisis and make things worse. I don’t tell you what the President is doing, or what the terrorists are up to. I just talk about real people facing real dilemmas. I want my readers to be able to put themselves in my characters’ shoes; I want them to ask themselves the same, hard questions. I don’t know why domestic thrillers are on the rise—but I’m glad they are! 

IPT:  Two of the characters own a restaurant in the book, and I love your descriptions of the food, but also the specifics of running a restaurant.  What kind of research did you do?

CB:  Okay, I confess. I picked a restaurant because I thought the research would be fun. I mean, I’d have to go to a restaurant. I’d probably have to eat there, too. I watch Food Network. I love "Top Chef." I wanted to find my own top chef and ask this burning question: how is it possible to be passionate about working so hard to make something that lasts so briefly?

I knew what kind of restaurant I wanted to write about—beautiful, intimate, with one-of-a-kind menu items, and a devotion to locally sourced foods. Most importantly, it had to be run by a female chef. I was lucky to find it in real life just a few miles away: [One] restaurant in Chapel Hill. I showed up one morning before the restaurant was open for lunch and introduced myself to the executive chef, Kim Floresca. Over the course of several weeks, she showed me around her restaurant, and answered a million questions. I watched her prepare food, interact with her staff and customers, and then one magical night, I and my husband had an incredible meal comprised of items she’d specially selected. 

And Kim gave me the answer to my burning question: the joy in being a chef is all about bringing people together.

Being interviewed by your friends is always more fun!

IPT:  That's one of the perks of being a writer!  You get to chose your subject matter!  So what has surprised you most about being a published author?

CB:  I never imagined, when I was growing up and dreaming of one day being published that I would end up writing about family life in the suburbs. I wrote eight novels about everything else, and every single one was rejected. It wasn’t until I turned to my own life to talk about the things that truly mattered the most to me—discovering who you are and what you’re made of when you’re driven to your knees by circumstances outside your control—that I finally broke through. My hope is that my readers see themselves in my stories and ask themselves: what would I do if something like that happened to me?

IPT:  Is there a wannabe book lurking in the back of your brain, something you would write if you didn’t have to consider agents, editors, and fans?  A romance?  Essays?  Cookbook?

CB:  There is! There are two of them, actually. One’s a young adult novel, and the other’s set in North Dakota in the middle of winter. They’re both dystopian and somewhat bleak, so I’m a little afraid of what that says about what’s lurking in the back of my brain. 

IPT:  It says you're a writer!

Carla will be joining us today, and two lucky readers will get copies of The Good Goodbye.  Comment to enter!

The Good Goodbye
The first thing you should know is that everyone lies. The second thing is that it matters. 

On her way to her nineteenth wedding anniversary celebration, Natalie Falcone leaves the struggling restaurant she owns with her brother-in-law, Vince. She doesn't speak to him on her way out; they haven't spoken in months. But out on the sidewalk, she gets a phone call every mother dreads: It's from the emergency room where her daughter, Arden, attends college. Arden's been in a fire, along with Natalie's niece, Rory—Vince's daughter and Arden's best friend.

Natalie rushes to the hospital and learns that both Arden and Rory lie unconscious, and that another student has died in the blaze. The police suspect arson.

As the investigation mounts, Natalie struggles to piece together the elusive details of Arden's and Rory's freshman year. Growing up, Rory was charming, popular, and charismatic, while Arden was artistic, perceptive, and reserved. They were different yet inseparable, more like sisters than cousins. But the case unearths a different portrait—of a complex friendship, a love triangle, a fight, and a girl who was struggling more than anyone realized. To discover what really happened that tragic night, Natalie's and Vince's families must confront the one truth that ultimately emerges: Nothing is ever exactly what it seems.


Carla Buckley was born in Washington, D.C. She has worked as an assistant press secretary for a U.S. senator, an analyst with the Smithsonian Institution, and a technical writer for a defense contractor. She lives in Chapel Hill, North Carolina, with her husband, an environmental scientist, and their three children. She is the author of The Good Goodbye, The Deepest Secret, Invisible, and The Things That Keep Us Here, which was nominated for a Thriller Award as a Best First novel and the Ohioana Book Award for fiction. She is currently at work on her next novel. 

Carla Buckley's THE GOOD GOODBYE

“The first thing you should know is everyone lies. The second thing is that it matters.”

SUSAN ELIA MACNEAL: I love this line from Carla Buckley's fourth novel, THE GOOD GOODBYE, a captivating domestic thriller about an estranged extended family. They're brought together in a hospital's ICU when two cousins, close as sisters, are burned in an arsonist's fire. No one's sure who set it, or why. And everyone's lying.

I read it in one night — that's how much I wanted — no, needed — to know more about if the girls' survive, what was going on with their families, and who really set the fire. And so I'm happy to have novelist Carla Buckley with us today. (Full disclosure, we share the same editor.) 

OK, Carla — I read that THE GOOD GOODBYE is based on a true event? How did you hear about it? Did you immediately think, “Oh, I’ve got to write about that” or did it take a while for the idea to percolate?

Carla Buckley: Hi, Susan! Thank you and Jungle Red for having me here today.

The central twist in the story was inspired by an event that occurred involving two families and their college-aged daughters. At the time, the incident received national attention because it raised so many terrifying possibilities. It didn’t occur to me to write about it until several years later when I was in the middle of sending my own daughter off to college and I suddenly remembered what had happened to those families. I thought to myself, maybe there’s something there.

SEM: While I was reading, I kept thinking of the Winston Churchill quote, “a riddle wrapped in a mystery, wrapped in an enigma” and picturing those Russian nesting dolls. THE GOOD GOODBYE has secrets within secrets within secrets — did you have it all planned and outlined from the beginning? Or did you add as you went along? How many revisions did you do?

CB: I usually have some sort of idea of how my story will play out before I begin. I know the inciting incident, midpoint, climax, and a few key revelations. I spend some time thinking about my characters and what they want—where they’ll begin their journey and where they’ll finish it. Despite all this careful preparation, my story usually falls apart as I begin writing. Choices I’d made reveal beforehand themselves to be improbable, or just plain wrong. I follow many false leads. I eat a lot of chocolate.

But The Good Goodbye proved to be different. Every day I sat down and let the narrator whose turn it was to speak tell her part. What she had to say often surprised me. I wrote more slowly than I normally do (1000 words a day instead of my usual 2000) but what I wrote stuck, and I didn’t end up going back as much as I normally do in compiling an initial draft.

Still, there were lots of revisions ahead of me—as there always seem to be! My editor usually puts me through six or so rounds, but this time, the story more or less stayed intact and I focused on characterization.

SEM: Which leads to my next question — one of the things I love about the novel is that it’s told from different character’s viewpoints, and at different times in their lives, so we as readers are always slightly off-balance. What made you take that approach?

CB: As a reader, I always love it when an author reveals something to me that the characters don’t know. Isn’t that true of real life? Don’t we all know just bits and pieces of one another’s lives, the bits we choose to share? I wanted to play with all the repercussions that can come out of misunderstanding and silence, and so I took a central pivotal event (a fatal dorm fire) and rotated three narrators around it, telling their stories from various vantage points: leading up to the fire and moving beyond it into the future.

SEM: How did you, as the author, keep it all straight?

CB: I kept a journal beside me to jot down ideas as they arose, and threads I needed to follow. I drew diagrams and tracked where I was in the story. I ended up filling three notebooks that, for some reason, I’ve held onto. I don’t know why—they’re mostly gibberish scrawled in different colored inks!

SEM: The details of the worlds of THE GOOD GOODBYE are so very real — the university, the hospital, the family restaurant. Are these places you knew intimately already or did you research?

CB: I made it all up! I’ve lived in a number of cities and as a mom, I’ve had my share of middle of the night ER visits. Arden’s home is the one I lived in when I was a teenager and Rory’s is one of my childhood homes. The restaurant is a mélange of Georgetown restaurants I used to haunt. I did do a lot of research, though, in order to depict the ICU and the girls’ medical conditions, and I interviewed a local executive chef at length.

SEM: How did you put yourself in the mind-frame of contemporary teenage girls?

CB: I have a secret weapon—my three children. They’re often willing to stop and help me figure things out, from their perspectives What am I going to do when they all leave the house? I might have to start knocking on my neighbors’ doors and asking if I can babysit.

SEM: You have teenagers. How do they feel about your books? Do they read them?

CB: Growing up, my kids watched me write eight novels that never got published. They watched the rejections come in, and they were there when I finally got my first book deal. They’ve all read my books—but only in the final, polished form—and they each have their favorite. I think of them as I write. It helps focus me.

SEM: Hey, I heard something about a movie deal? What can you tell us?

CB: I was thrilled when my film agent called to tell me that Marc Platt Productions wanted to option The Deepest Secret with Gregory Crewdson—an extraordinary photographer—to direct and Juliane Hiam to write the screenplay. The minute I saw Gregory’s work, I felt an immediate connection. He explores the same suburban world that fascinates me, and seems to have the same dark viewpoint. Juliane’s written the screenplay, and things are moving along. I’ve got everything crossed…

SEM: What do you want readers to take away from THE GOOD GOODBYE?

CB: Last year, I got the call every parent dreads. My son, away at college, had been in an accident and was undergoing emergency surgery. My husband and I dropped everything and rushed to be with our child. We sat in his darkened hospital room while machines hummed. I was already at work on The Good Goodbye in which the mother of my story also receives a horrifying phone call telling her that her daughter has been in a fire and was now clinging to life. I looked at my son lying unconscious before me. Here was my nightmare come to life.

In the end, my son recovered completely and our lives went on, but I now felt a powerful connection to this mother I was writing about in a way I hadn’t before. I thought of all the parents sitting vigil by their children’s bedsides. We’d do anything to save our children, but some of us don’t get the chance. At its heart, that’s what The Good Goodbye is about: how vulnerable parenthood makes us, but how joyful the journey can be.

SEM: What can you tell us about your work-in-progress, THE RELUCTANT MOTHER?

CB: The Reluctant Mother is about a woman running from her past who crosses paths with a family in crisis and is forced to make some shocking choices. It’s about friendship and love, and most of all, hope arising from unexpected places.

SEM: Thank you, Carla! Reds and lovely readers, as a mom who's spent plenty of time in hospital rooms with my son, this book really hit home with me — and honestly freaked me out a bit. I tend not to read about kids in danger in fiction because I just find it just too scary. (But I'm glad I stuck it out with THE GOOD GOODBYE!) What are some books that are difficult for you to read, because of the subject matter? Do you read them anyway? Do you think it's good to confront these fears? Please tell us in the comments!

Carla Buckley is the author of The Good Goodbye, The Deepest Secret, Invisible, and The Things That Keep Us Here, which was nominated for a Thriller Award as a best first novel and the Ohioana Book Award for fiction. She is a graduate of Oberlin College and the Wharton School of Business, and lives in Chapel Hill, North Carolina. She serves on the board of the International Thriller Writers as Vice President, Awards, and is currently at work on her next novel.