Emily Arsenault reads the tea leaves...

HALLIE EPHRON: I was blown away by Emily Arsenault's clever and brilliant (really) THE BROKEN TEAGLASS in which a pair of lexicographers find mysterious clues in old files. She's a literary writer who knows how to spinout suspense. Now she's out with THE LEAF READER, a young adult mystery about a high school girl whose tea-leaf reading abilities draw her into a missing person case and deep into danger. 

Here's what Kirkus had to say in a starred review:

“Arsenault’s page-ripping whodunit not only will send readers running for their tea kettles, but packs the thrill of self-discovery and acceptance amid base adversity: a rich, rewarding teen debut.” – Kirkus Reviews, Starred Review

Welcome to Jungle Red, Emily! Please tell us about tea-leaf reading. So fascinating. How did you get interested in it?

EMILY ARSENAULT: My first introduction to tea-leaf reading was in 1999, when my husband (then boyfriend) introduced me to his grandmother Ruth in Arizona. He remembered that she did readings when he was a kid, and asked her to demonstrate for me.  

We tore open Lipton teabags and made tea with their contents. (I know tea connoisseurs and practiced tea-leaf readers might be a little aghast that we didn’t use real loose-leaf tea.) When we were done drinking, Ruth studied our tea dregs. 

“I see a lot of dogs,” she said of the clumped formations in my cup. “You must have good friends.” I would later learn that she said this to almost everyone, in almost every reading she gave.

We didn’t get to see Ruth that often, because we lived on the other side of the country, in Massachusetts. But from that time until her death in 2007, whenever we’d visit, we’d ask for a reading. Sometimes she seemed embarrassed by the request, and often seemed to rely on stock predictions (It looks like you’re going to get your wish. But not exactly in the way you wanted it . . .  It looks like you’re going on a trip . . . probably going home.  . . . I see a lot of dogs . . . ). 

But almost every time, she’d look deep into the cup, her eyes would light up, and she’d say something that would later turn out to be uncannily prophetic.

Most memorable to me was a time she said, I think you’re going to have a dispute about a pet. But it’s not really the pet’s fault.

A few weeks later an eccentric neighbor of ours started coming unhinged because our cat was sneaking onto her porch and eating her cats’ food. She’d call us up to scream about how mean our cat was to her cats. She was going to call the pound, she said, or take our cat “for a ride” if he kept coming onto her porch.

One of the last times we saw her, Ruth gave us a small, battered paperback—How to Read Tea Leaves, by Joyce Wilson, published in 1969—and told us we could keep it. Over the following years, my husband and I would occasionally give each other tea leaf readings. We’d have fun joking around with it, but neither of us seemed to have the instinct for it that Ruth had.

Wikimedia 

Like many tea leaf reading guides, Wilson’s book lists all kinds of possible symbols one might find in a cup. (E.g. a fish might mean good news, an hourglass could mean imminent danger, a moon crescent can symbolize good luck.) And from this book we picked up this very basic way of reading a cup: symbols on the rim represent things happening in the immediate future, while symbols in the bottom of the forecast farther into the future. 

I’ve read several tea leaf-reading guides, and this is absolutely not the only way of looking at a cup—but it’s the general principle I’ve used, in real and fictional readings.

Over the years, I would come across Wilson’s book on our shelf and flip through it, thinking: I’d like to have a character who does tea leaf readings in a book someday. But I couldn’t quite decide how to make it work. Until I tried it in a YA novel.

I’ve always been interested in YA. In fact, my first completed (unpublished) manuscript was a YA book. But the result was a story more depressing than I ultimately wanted to inflict on young readers. You see, I was a fairly miserable teenager and didn’t really know how to write teenagers any other way.

I’ve often thought of my sullen high school years and wondered, Wouldn’t I have been a lot happier if I’d just gotten a hobby? (A hobby besides writing gloomy poems, to be clear.)

So the next time I tried to write a YA book—more than a decade after my first attempt—I gave my main character a hobby. A weird hobby—tea leaf reading. But a hobby nonetheless. And from there I was able to develop a character whom I thought wouldn’t completely depress my readers.

I gave Marnie a lot of circumstances that resemble my own in high school. I grew up in a Connecticut town that bears some resemblance to Marnie’s.  My position within that town resembled Marnie’s in some vague ways. I’d rather keep the comparisons vague, but Marnie’s house is a little worn down, and her family is a little offbeat. But she is far more laid back about these things than I ever was. Her tea leaf reading is her way of saying, “Yes, I’m a bit of a weirdo in this town. But I’m just going to bide my time and embrace that.” She has a sense of humor about her situation. She realizes she can have fun with it, and manages to see past it. In addition to her hobby, I gave Marnie Ruth’s gift of perception.

Of course, Marnie’s gives her friends and classmates tea leaf readings for fun—and maybe for a little bit of attention. But when a guy named Matt Cotrell—whose best friend disappeared last year—asks for a reading, things get a little more serious. As Marnie’s readings become darker and more prescient, she is pulled into a mystery—a mystery that appears to involve murder.

HALLIE: Does this sound irresistible or what? Have any of you out there had your tea leaves read? Or Tarot cards? Or even your palm? I hope it didn't lead to a murder, but were there any epiphanies? 

Note from yesterday: Libby Dodd is the winner of Edith Maxwell's new book!

Emily Arsenault's Evening Spider & the haunted baby monitor

HALLIE EPHRON: I remember in 2009 reading Emily Arsenault's The Broken Tea Glass and thinking, who is this writer?! I'd ever seen anything like her book. It's set in the editorial offices of a dictionary publisher where clues to a murder are found in the files by a young lexicographer. The book has a bizarre sense of humor and it's a literary page turner. I've been a fan ever since. 

Turns out Emily worked for Merriam-Webster from 1998-2002, and since then she's since then had  daughter I wasn't surprised to discover that motherhood figures prominently in her new novel, The Evening Spider.

I asked her to join us on Jungle Red and talk about motherhood as grist for a murder mystery.

EMILY ARSENAULT: When I agreed to do a post on how early motherhood affected my writing, I realized that there are two different answers for me.

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There’s the subject of how motherhood affected my writing generally. And then there’s the subject of how it influenced my most recent book, The Evening Spider. And that’s a little more spooky of a story.

My daughter was born just a few months before my third book (Miss Me When I'm Gone) came out. It took me a while to start my fourth novel—not just because I was caring for a newborn, but because I wasn’t thrilled with the direction my books were taking. My first book had been a light and funny book, and each subsequent book had become darker and heavier in tone.

As a new mother I didn’t want to dwell in tragedy or violence. It surprised me that I felt this way, but in any case, I started my fourth book, What Strange Creatures, determined to write a funny book. And while some wouldn’t call that a “light” book (there is an untimely death, as in all of my previous books), the heart of the novel is a funny brother-sister relationship.

I was thrilled to get a contract when my daughter was about six months old, and started working on the book in earnest. Writing felt different than it had before—more like a “break” from baby duty than work—a luxury, even. Most days I didn’t have more than two hours to write at a stretch—so I became much more disciplined about producing pages each time I sat down in front of my computer. I didn’t just grow more disciplined, but more grateful to be writing a book. How lucky was I to get to be a mother and a paid writer at the same time? It felt like a nice balance—although I never had much time for housework in this “balance,” and still don’t.

And so all was relatively well, at least on the surface. But while I was busy writing that fourth book—when my daughter was six-to-twelve months old—something strange was happening in my house. One night, I awoke to the sound of my daughter crying, followed by the sound of someone saying Shhhhh over the baby monitor. I felt relieved that my husband had awoken before me, and was tending the baby. Then I turned over and saw that my husband was still lying next to me. So who was with the baby?

I ran down the hall, found my daughter alone in her crib, and picked her up. The next day I forgot about it, but a few weeks later it happened again. And then a few weeks later, again.  Shhhhhh. Often I would spend the following day trying to come up with logical explanations from what I’d heard. Then I’d forget about it—until it would happen again. On a week when it happened a few nights in a row, I held my sleeping daughter well into the night, and couldn’t sleep after I put her down. And then, when I was just about to become entirely unhinged, it stopped altogether. (The picture is Emily's haunted baby monitor.)

It wasn’t until at least a year later that I considered putting this experience in a book. (And I still don’t have an explanation.) But eventually, I wrote it up as one of my opening scenes of The Evening Spider. And so begins a novel that was a departure for me. The book is part psychological suspense, part ghost story, part true crime, and on some level, an exploration of the potentially bizarre psychological effects of new motherhood.

Writing about this experience made me feel better about it—and made it feel more like a “story” than an “experience.” It was fodder for one of my books and therefore somehow less real. And I was in control of it—what it meant and where it led. The result is The Evening Spider.

My daughter no longer has a monitor in her room and I no longer hear phantom shushing at night. Recently, my daughter got up in the middle of the night to report that there was a “visitor” in her room. Yes, that is the word my three-year-old used—“visitor.” And yes, I know how creepy that sounds, and no, I absolutely have not told her of my experiences with her the room or encouraged her to speak this way. Perhaps she’s just inherited my ominous imagination.  Or maybe there is a gentle presence in her room, after all. And whoever or whatever it is, maybe I haven’t written it away, after all. 

HALLIE: Is that spooky or what? I love the book's title because when I saw it I immediately thought about Miss Muffet and the spider who sat down beside her. Gives me chills thinking about a spider in my baby's crib. Nooooo!

Has anyone else out there experienced anything akin to a haunted baby monitor? It would make a great X-Files episode, dontcha think?

In Search of the Rose Notes--Emily Arsenault

DEBORAH CROMBIE: Emily Arsenault burst onto the literary horizon with her debut novel, THE BROKEN TEAGLASS. The New York Times called it "a literary gem," and designated it a Notable Crime Book of 2009. Other reviews were glowing, and Emily's second novel, IN SEARCH OF THE ROSE NOTES, is garnering equal acclaim. A starred review in Publisher's Weekly calls it "an emotionally complex and deeply satisfying read,"and I certainly agree.

Told in alternating narratives from the past and present, this is a mystery about broken friendship and the unease of revisiting adolescent memory.

At age eleven, Nora and Charlotte are the best of friends—until their teenager babysitter, Rose, disappears under mysterious circumstances. They decide to “investigate,” using paranormal theories and techniques they glean from a hand-me-down collection of Time-Life books. But their search goes nowhere, and leaves both girls distraught and angry with each other.

In her late twenties, Nora is drawn back to her old neighborhood, and to Charlotte, when Rose’s bones are found. She was probably murdered, and Charlotte is adamant that they solve the crime. Nora—who was the last known person to see Rose alive—is forced to reconsider her memory of the events surrounding the disappearance, and her own troubled adolescence following those fateful days. And she’s not sure if she’s ready to face the secrets that begin to surface.

DEBS: Elements of your first novel, The Broken Teaglass (and this is going straight on my To Read list. It sounds wonderful!) are obviously drawn from your personal and professional experience. (Emily worked in the editorial department of the Merriam-Webster dictionary company from 1998 to 2002, and the protagonists in TEAGLASS work for a venerable but fictional publisher of dictionaries.)

But where did you get the idea for In Search of the Rose Notes?

EMILY: In Search of the Rose Notes was more of a mishmash of ideas I’d been meaning to try for a long time. It started with a relatively dark story about two old friends, a lonely adolescence and a mysterious death. Then I added the Time-Life element (which came from my own childhood wish for the Mysteries of the Unknown books), because I thought it would add some much-needed humor. With that addition, I ended up changing the ages of the characters (in the past scenes) to eleven, instead of sixteen or so, and gave them the “babysitter mystery” instead of something that was originally connected to their own high school experience. So it evolved over time with lots of trial and error.

DEBS: The Rose Notes is as much an intimate and haunting exploration of childhood as it is a mystery. Did you see yourself more as Nora, the narrator, or Charlotte, her best friend? Or even Rose, the baby sitter who vanishes?

EMILY: I think I have a little of each girl in me, but I was probably most like Nora when I was a kid. I was relatively quiet, and like Nora, I’m afraid I was often a rather morbid eleven-year-old. I was relatively cheerful around friends and family, but whenever by myself, or trying to sleep at night, I would worry a lot about death and disasters, immortality and the soul. Nora has an excuse—the traumatic disappearance of Rose gives her a pretty dark and serious outlook on life. I was just naturally very grave at that age, for no apparent reason. (After age thirteen or so, I stopped worrying about such heavy topics—they were replaced, fortunately or unfortunately, by concerns about grades, personal appearance, clothing, popularity, and boys.) Probably kids around that tween age often have a much deeper inner life than we realize.

DEBS: The novel segues so beautifully between past and present, allowing the reader to see how the girls' pasts influenced the women they have become. Did you plan the construction from the beginning?

EMILY: Yes. From the beginning, I knew it wouldn’t be a book just about eleven year olds, or just about twenty-seven year olds. I wanted the reader to be able to see the characters both as kids and adults, to reflect on how they’d changed and in some respects, how they’d stayed exactly the same. I was also interested in having their adolescent selves (approximately age 16) shadow over certain scenes of the novel, even though they’re not generally treated directly, with their own scenes. For Nora in particular, that’s a version of herself that she really needs to come to terms with.

I wanted the present to inform the past, and vice versa. In the book, the girls once mention something called “future ghosts.” They are at a slumber party séance, at which some of the attendees are too frightened to conjure real ghosts. So Charlotte suggests they try conjuring “future ghosts”—ghosts of people from the future. Nora wonders why a “future ghost” would be any less scary than a regular ghosts. (I got this idea from a similar slumber party experience I had had.) I liked the idea of slipping that in. While their past selves obviously haunt the adult women, it’s possible that “future ghosts” haunt the young girls as well—specters of the women they will become.

DEBS: You've written two very different novels in The Broken Teaglass and In Search of the Rose Notes. What are you working on now? You and your husband spent time in the Peace Corp in Africa. Will that experience work its way into a novel at some point?

EMILY: I probably shouldn’t say much about the book I’m working on now, as I’m doing a fairly major revision and things are likely to change. I can say that it’s not much like either TEAGLASS or ROSE—except that it’s a little bit of a mystery and a little bit of something else.

I do hope to write about South Africa at some point. In fact, I keep taking out the beginning scraps of my “South Africa book” whenever I’m between projects—but I always keep setting it aside for something else. I’ve struggled with deciding how best to treat the subject in a way that will be most engaging to readers who’ve never been to that country. I haven’t really decided how I’ll do that yet. But it’s a book that I know I will write eventually.

DEBS: Whatever you write, we'll all look forward to reading it, and we wish you tremendous success with IN SEARCH OF THE ROSE NOTES, a truly lovely and memorable novel.

Those Little Addictions

Deborah Crombie: Don't worry, I'm not talking about Twelve Step stuff
here, but about the little things that creep into our lives. The things we take for granted, then assume we can't do without.

Not that there aren't little addictions that we consciously deem necessary--I confess, mine is tea. I did go without tea once, when I was pregnant with my daughter. I swore I'd never do it again, and I
still stand by my resolution. Well, I probably could write without tea, but it wouldn't be nearly as much fun. . .

But I recently discovered that something I'd thought a necessity was surprisingly easy to give up--the daily newspaper. I grew up in a household where my parents read both the local paper, the Dallas Morning News, and the Wall Street Journal, so newspapers had been a part of my life for as long as I could remember. And I'd subscribed to the Dallas Morning News for, well, most of my adult life. It was such a part of my morning routine: flipping through the sections to find the ones I liked, perusing them over breakfast and then another cup or two of tea.

But the paper got smaller and smaller, the subscription price didn't go down, and I found I was getting most of my news online. So at the beginning of the summer, after a lot of agonizing over the decision, I went cold turkey. No "Just the Sunday edition." No paper, period.

And what I've found is that I don't miss it at all. Not the least little bit. In fact, it's been liberating. I can read a book while I eat my toast. Or listen to a book. Or make notes for my own book. Or--the best thing--stare out the kitchen window at the hummingbirds zipping around the feeder. Quiet time.

I am not advocating or applauding the slow decline of print newspapers, by the way. I am as distressed as anyone over the demise of many of the best book review sections, and perhaps if the DMNs hadn't become a shade of its former self, I'd have found the parting harder. But for me giving up the paper has been a welcome bit of simplification.

What about you, Jungle Reds? Are there any little things that steal your time that you might find you could do without?

ROSEMARY HARRIS: It's hardly original to say that the computer is stealing my time - but that doesn't make it any less true. One thing I've done to fight back is to turn off the sound notifying me that I have a new email. I felt like a complete dope for never having done it before. And I suppose I could live without watching the early rounds of a tennis tournament - do I really need to see Rafa Nadal humiliate some poor guy from Uzbekistan?

What I can't do without are my periodic walks around my garden. A few times a day I feel the need to "walk the back 40" as I refer to it. I prune, I plan, I think, I chill. Then I come back and sometimes check emails.

LUCY BURDETTE: (AKA Roberta) We get the NEW YORK TIMES delivered daily. There are plenty of days that I can't get through all of it, but I nibble on it across the day--a little at breakfast, a little at lunch, and then maybe a bit more while making a cup of coffee. And Sundays, forget about it. I would HATE to give up the real estate and style sections. Not that I'll ever own a place in New York, but I love reading about the hunt for the right apartment. And the food section on Wednesday, of course. No not giving those up Debs!

DEBS: Okay, I have to confess. I do miss the food section. My friend usually saves it for me, but I have about three weeks worth of those I haven't read (maybe partly because it's too hot to even think about cooking here.) And you are talking about The New York Times, which I think would a little harder to part with . . .

HANK PHILLIPPI RYAN: Yes, we do "the back forty" too--every night when we get home from work. Lovely, and now the dahlias are starting. But--my addictions have to do with food, too. And they're like--serial addictions. For awhile, a few years ago, I was craving toasted sesame bagels with strawberry jam. I mean--I loved them, wanted them, had them every day. I could have lived on only that.

Before that, it was-and you can tell it was when I was single--baked potatoes with sour cream and broccoli. Honestly, I would start thinking about it on the subway on the way home from work ,and I just could not wait to have that for dinner. I bet--I had it for a year.

And then, just like the strawberry jam bagels--there comes a moment when I think--ACCK! Never never never again.

And Debs, we've gotta talk. You can't give up the newspaper. Gosh, I really couldn't. If I don't read the papers in the morning, I feel like--I'm missing something. And Sundays? Ritual.

RHYS BOWEN: My kids have always told me that I'm addicted to tea at tea time. Have to have my cup on the dot of 4 p.m. On the beach in Hawaii I'd suddenly leap up and start looking for a tea shop while the kids teased me.

Facebook--I'm on the way to becoming addicted. Project Runway for a while. Now I've taken the twelve step and I'm over that. I wish I had a garden to walk around--I'm on a hill so steep that only the deer can walk without slipping.

I could watch tennis non-stop every day--even Raffa against a guy from Uzbekistan. And I'm thrilled to say I have two days of tennis next year at the Olympics. Yeah!

HALLIE EPHRON: Say it ain't so, Debs - you gave up the NEWSPAPER?! Sure, there are "little things that steal [my] time that [I] might find [I] could do without, but my morning paper isn't one of them. I get up and write; and after a few hours the paper is my reward. The real on paper paper -- reading it online is so not the same experience, don't ask me why.

What I wish I could do without: blow drying my hair.

And I so agree with Ro - the big time sink is the computer -- specifically the Internet. On a good day I disconnect from the network when I start to write.

DEBS: Hallie, there wasn't much left to read in the Dallas Morning News. Funny, I read more than one paper every day obsessively when I'm in the UK. But you are all right about the internet. I think I'm going to have to start going somewhere without wi-fi to write, and turn off my phone. Don't get me wrong, I love my phone, but with smart phones you NEVER get away from it.

Unless, of course, you can go somewhere like the Reading Room in the Bodleian Library in Oxford, which is not only my fantasy work space, but a little tease for the upcoming week.

Later this week we have Susan Conant chatting about her new Holly Winter book, Emily Arsenault on In Search of the Rose Notes, and on Friday, Deborah Harkness will be here to tell us some unexpected things about one of this year's publishing sensations, A Discovery of Witches.

So, JR readers, are there things you could give up that would make your lives a wee bit simpler? (And that would not include BOOKS.)