A STRANGER LIKE YOU: AUTHOR INTERVIEW AND GIVEAWAY

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A STRANGER LIKE YOU
BY ELIZABETH BRUNDAGE

ABOUT THE BOOK:

A taut and terrifying thriller about the lengths to which we'll go to make our dreams come true !

Hedda Chase is a top-flight executive producer at Gladiator Films, fast-tracked in the business since she graduated from Yale. An aggressive businesswoman, she recently pulled the plug on a film project initiated by one of her predecessors. The screenwriter on the project was Hugh Waters, a wannabe with a dead-end marriage and a day job at an insurance company. This script was his ticket out-until Hedda tampered with his plans, claiming his violence was over the top, his premise not credible, and his ending implausible. Hugh decides to prove otherwise by staging his script's ending and casting Hedda Chase as the victim. He flies to Los Angeles and finds Hedda, kidnaps her, and locks her in the trunk of her vintage BMW in the parking lot at LAX. He leaves the keys in the ignition, the parking ticket on the dash, and lets "destiny" take its course.

This is the set-up for a troubling, smart, deadly look at women and images of women, at media as a high-stakes game and the selling of a war as theatre. (One key character is an Iraq veteran, and one of Hedda's projects is a film about women in Iraq). Brundage's Los Angeles is a casual battleground that trades carelessly in lives and dreams. As always, her characters are complicated, surprising, and intense in this high velocity, provocative novel.

Elizabeth Brundage's new book "A Stranger Like You."

ABOUT THE AUTHOR:

Elizabeth Brundage is a graduate of the Iowa Writers’ Workshop, where she earned an MFA in fiction and a James Michener award. Her short fiction has been published in the Greensboro Review, Witness Magazine, and New Letters, and she contributed to the anthology Thicker Than Blood: I’ve Always Meant to Tell You, Letters to Our Mothers. Her first two novels, Somebody Else’s Daughter and The Doctor’s Wife, were also published by Viking. She lives with her family in New York State.

AUTHOR INTERVIEW:

1. Welcome, Elizabeth, and thank you for agreeing to do this interview. Before we get started, can you tell my readers where they can find out more information about you and your work?

You can go to my website www.elizabethbrundage.com

2. Where did you get the inspiration or idea for this book?

The book took root when I was a film student at The American Film Institute in Los Angeles. I lived in LA for about five years after that, working in the film industry in a variety of capacities. Many of the locations in the novel were places I had actually lived. I had this great funky apartment off of Beachwood Canyon that’s in the novel – it had tall windows that had no screens and you could reach out the kitchen window and grab an avocado from the tree. That place was great and a little spooky. Many of the characters are loosely based on people I met while working at some of the studios. Hollywood is a seductive and fascinating town. I’d go to work during the day and come home and write all night. Being any kind of writer is difficult. Screenwriting is particularly challenging because you are often at the mercy of someone else – a producer, a director, an agent – and some of my own feelings of anxiety and despair went into creating Hugh Waters. I wanted to capture that sense of ambiguity in the book, that your destiny can seem arbitrary, that your dreams are vulnerable to the whims of others. I saw parallels to these sorts of feelings in all three of the characters in the novel, Hugh Waters, a fledgling screenwriter; Hedda Chase, a powerful producer; and Denny Rios, an Iraq War Veteran.

In A Stranger Like You I was interested in writing about a character who is a kind of misplaced person – he isn’t able to easily connect with people and as a result feels like an outsider, a kind of shameful alien. He is someone who has no grasp of what is meaningful in life, or of what characterizes pride or joy. Watching and dreaming from the outskirts, he feels he has been deprived of something essential, something other people seem to have and even squander – some key life-ingredient that he cannot name, but knows he lacks. When his dream of becoming a Hollywood screenwriter fails to materialize, he sets out to seek revenge on the woman responsible for shutting down his project. Not unlike a terrorist, his anger metastasizes as a deadly act against her. The result is an exploration of how terror can be used for strategic effect – in life; in work; in love; in politics; and in war.

3. How did the title of your book come about?

I had reread The Stranger by Albert Camus and saw a parallel between the book’s narrator Meursault and Hugh Waters. It occurred to me that we are all strangers to one another on some level. I had started writing the character of the producer, Hedda Chase, in the third person, and then it struck me that it would be interesting to write her perspective in the second person so that every reader is inside her head, experiencing her power as a Hollywood executive, then her diminishment as Hugh’s victim when she is abducted, her sense of isolation and desperation. I wanted to experiment with the reality of what happens to her, not as a dramatic consequence or plot point as in a traditional thriller – but as a metaphor for what many women have experienced throughout history and continue to experience, and as a real and terrible ordeal from which she will never fully recover.

4. Do you see yourself in your characters? Which characters are easiest or more difficult to write?

I see myself in aspects of all my characters. I think that’s the fun of being a writer, you get to “play” many different roles when you write. The hardest characters for me to write are nice people. I suppose I am a fairly cynical person. I tend to write about darker subjects and complicated problems. Problems are interesting. I’m interested in examining what motivates people to behave in certain ways.

5. What books would you say have made the biggest impression on you, especially starting out? What are you currently reading?

I would say reading Dickens growing up had a huge impact on me. I read mostly poetry in high school and wrote it. I went to see Adrienne Rich read in college and felt certain that I wanted to find that kind of powerful voice inside myself. I started reading novels in high school – I took a Russian novels course – and that was the beginning of my desire to write stories of psychological suspense, as Dostoyevsky so brilliantly did in Crime and Punishment.

6. What is the next or current book/project you are working on?

I’m writing about a scary house that had something terrible happen inside of it and all the people whose lives were affected by it.

7. What is something about you that you would want people to know about you that we probably don’t know?

I write because it’s my way of trying to solve problems. I see problems and I want to address them. I realize I can’t please every reader out there. Some of you will like my work; some won’t. I try to do the best I can. I work very hard.

8. What is your advice to anyone, including young people, who want to be writers?

The best advice I can give anyone who wants to write is this: READ. It’s pretty simple. Read and read some more. And then read a little more after that. Teach yourself how to read better and then teach yourself how to think about what you’ve read, how to break it down. Then teach yourself how to write. Put one word after another. Figure out what turns you on about the words in a particular sentence or paragraph and then figure out how to do that same thing in your own way. Writing is a privilege. Talent has less to do with it than hours and hours of practice and determination. You have to respect the work. You have to give yourself up to it day after day.

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