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. 

YAY for YA

HANK PHILLIPPI RYAN: Raise your hand if you read YA. Yes, right? Everyone. (Almost, okay, maybe not everyone, but you get my point.) Okay, now, authors. Raise your hand if you’ve thought about writing a YA? Yes, right?  (I am trying to type and raise my hand at the same time.)

We know good YA when we read it, of course—does Edward Eager count? My FAVE--but what is it that makes it special?

Okay, read this:

A solar powered girl. A ballerina vigilante. A boy with an alien living inside his brain. A werewolf with confidence issues. A girl with a black hole for a heart. Five teenagers, each with their own unique abilities, are gathered by veteran hero Doc Silence to become their generation’s super-team.

Well, I’m sold. Instantly. This is from the debut novel of Matthew Phillion. (Who I’d certainly get to sit by if  life was alphabetical.) (And, who, see bio below, is pretty darn fabulous).

What does the author of THE INDESTRUCTIBLES  think is the key to YA? It’s—well, let him tell us.

YA and Crossover Appeal

    By Matthew Phillion

I’ve been asked a few times to describe the thought process of writing a YA book. The word I keep coming back to is “sophisticated.”

I don’t know if younger readers are more sophisticated now than they were twenty years ago. But they feel more worldly, and they feel more aware, and I knew the one thing I had to do was make sure I didn’t insult their intelligence with this story.

So I set rules for myself. Don’t insult their intelligence. Don’t play into gender stereotypes. Try not to swear. (I used that one a lot. I have a tendency toward blue language in my daily life, and it was a struggle to not let my young characters drop a curse word once in a while. Had a yellow Post-It over my desk to remind me.)

 YA fiction has always been, or the best of it has been, unafraid to dig into hard issues. Love and loss, political allegory, the sense of being a pawn in the bigger picture. They all share the same sense of wonder and the need to find one’s self, but the older I get, the more I think that finding one’s self isn’t just the purview of YA readers.

And that brings me to my other struggle as a YA writer—we no longer write for just that younger audience. Again, I can’t tell if it’s a sign of the times and that YA literature has needed to become more sophisticated and thus it’s become more attractive to older readers, or if some other factor is at play. I was chatting with another writer a few weeks back, a fellow occasional filmmaker, and he was pleading with the universe for pop culture to get off its superhero kick.

“This can’t go on forever, can it?” he asked.

Selfishly, I wouldn’t mind if it did go on forever. I’m a superhero writer, after all. But even before I put words on the page for The Indestructibles, I’d had a theory about this—the prevalence of adult audiences gravitating to YA novels like Harry Potter and Hunger Games, grown men and women lining up to see the X-Men and Captain America save the world.

I think our YA readers are more sophisticated, and our adult readers are drawn to the relative simplicity of YA fiction, in both cases due to the fact that we are living in such challenging times. I don’t have any hard evidence to back it up. But it is hard out there, and people are frustrated and scared and lonely. And for the young, these stories give them escapism and hope. For older readers, they are a window, if not into an easier time, then into a world where the challenges are still great but the solutions can be found in heroism and courage.

We face love and loss, we face political reality, we face villains on the evening news, and there are steps we can take to make things better… but in those quiet moments curled up with a good book, isn’t it more comforting to think these things could be fixed with a magic spell, or the power of flight, or simply having the courage to take up arms against a sea of trouble and make the world a better place?

I can see a time when YA fiction may not be so prevalent, or where adults might not seek solace so much in stories of adventure. I hope when we get there, it means we live in a place where we don’t need quite so many ways to escape.

Until then, well, up, up and away.

Is YA fiction on your radar as a reader? Do you find it has a different feel now than it did when you were a young reader?

HANK: And what are your favorite YA books? (What's the age of YA, anyway?) 

********************************************* 

A solar powered girl. A ballerina vigilante. A boy with an alien living inside his brain. A werewolf with confidence issues. A girl with a black hole for a heart. Five teenagers, each with their own unique abilities, are gathered by veteran hero Doc Silence to become their generation’s super-team.

But when they find out someone else is building their own monsters to change the world, will the Indestructibles be ready in time? Or will their inexperience be their downfall?

Matthew Phillion is a writer, actor, and film director based in Salem, Massachusetts.  He has also appeared in feature films including the sci-fi romance Harvest Moon and the independent horror flick Livestock, and his screenwriting and directing debut, the romantic comedy Certainly Never, premiered in 2013 at the Massachusetts Independent Film Festival, where it was nominated for five awards including best screenplay and best New England film. An active freelance writer, Phillion continues to write about both local issues and the medical industry. The Indestructibles is his first novel  (Ed. note: And he has a dog named Watson.)

http://www.theindestructiblesbook.com/