Ann Putnam is the Author of I Will Leave You Never and this week’s featured interview
What is the book about?
That’s probably the easiest and the hardest question to answer! Any book is about a hundred things, and some of them are tucked away between the lines. In the broadest sense, I Will Leave You Never explores how one learns to live in joy, not fear, when the sky is falling. The main character’s most devout wish is to keep her family safe. Her greatest fear is that she cannot.
The book begins in a perilous season of drought in the Northwest, as a serial arsonist sets fires near the tinder dry woods where Jay and Zoe Penney live with their three children. It gives Zoe nightmares about her home rising in explosions of fire, and haunting dreams of a little boy deep in the forest.
Winter brings the longed-for rains but also a cancer diagnosis for Jay which plunges the family into disbelief and fear. The children lean in close to their parents, can’t stop touching them. As Jay’s treatment begins, nature lets loose with strange and startling encounters, while a shadowy figure hovers about the corners of the house.
I Will Leave You Never is also the story of a marriage. Zoe’s fear turns to anger: How can I love you if I am to lose you? Finally, Zoe learns that it’s possible to love anything, even terrible things, if you can love them for what they are teaching you. Love is part of life’s very gamble, and only everything they have.
Why did you want to write this book?
I began it on the drive home from Glacier National Park where we’d taken the children, not knowing a grizzly bear had just killed three people. The experience of the bear was far more real to me than to them. They thought it was a grand adventure and loved wearing bear bells tied to their shoes. The terror of that bear has never left me, nor the sense that I would never be big enough or brave enough to protect my children from it wherever it was. But it began my thinking about motherhood and mortality, safety and peril—and thus the urgency of writing this story, which as it turned out has no actual bear in it at all
What was the most difficult part of writing this book?
Since this is my most autobiographical novel, I would say the most difficult part was setting my imagination free from the bonds of factual things. This was far harder than I’d ever dreamed it would be and so it took many revisions to do it. But then to watch the birth of a brand-new thing that was neither wholly one nor the other. What a surprise! So this book ultimately came out of the magic that occurs when memory and the imagination meet in completely strange and startling ways.
The most rewarding?
I’d say writing the descriptions of the children. They came so easily and from my very heart. The feel of them, the sound and smell of them, the cadences of their speaking, their little ways and habits, their fears and joys.
What do you hope other people will take away from reading this book?
My protagonist asks of her husband: How can I love you if I am to lose you? But she learns that you can learn to love anything, even terrible things, if you can love them for what they are teaching you. I want the reader to fall in love with this book’s characters, worry over them, laugh with them, root for them, and then cry for them. I want the reader to feel wrenched apart, then surprised into joy and ultimately transformed.
How long did it take to write your book?
I began it in the car, on the drive home from Glacier National Park I mentioned earlier. That experience wound up as a short story, called “Zoe’s Bear,” but the novel that came out of it had no bear in it at all, except for a giant stuffed polar bear my protagonist buys in a hospital gift shop. But then “Zoe’s Bear” became another story, then another yet again, my constant companion over the miles and years. But throughout the revisions, it retained the shadow of the bear as metaphor for mortality in various forms both strange and familiar. I wrote it at my desk at home, on planes, in emergency rooms, doctor’s offices, PTA meetings, gymnastic and track meets, traffic lights. It took days, months, years, and went through many iterations, before it finally became, I Will Leave You Never.
What is the best writing advice you ever received?
Find a story that needs to be told and you are the only one who can tell it.
What’s next for you?
I love this question because I can talk about the new book I’m in love with and can’t wait to get back to!
It’s Georgia, 1939. A drowning, a mysterious healing, a cottonmouth snake, and Virginia Woolf. I’m writing about all of them. I don’t quite know how this happened but all I can say right now is, thank you! At the heart of the book is an inexplicable boating accident—three went into the water, only one survived. Lily O’Connor, the survivor and main character, experiences both the terror and ecstasy of love. Yet all characters suffer loss of one kind or the other. There is a villain to be sure, with auburn hair and ice-blue eyes, but he too, has loss in his benighted, damaged heart. In the end, this book takes the reader from ordinary life to a place as far from the ordinary as one could get, only to find that it is as profoundly familiar as it is strange. The book asks: what can I believe in if everything I have loved is lost? It’s called The World in Woe and Splendor.
Where can our readers get a copy of your book?
Amazon – Amazon.com
BookShop – https://bookshop.org/p/books/i-will-leave-you-never-ann-putnam/18706711?ean=9781647424244
Barnes and Noble – https://www.barnesandnoble.com/w/i-will-leave-you-never-ann-putnam/1141942067
Target – https://www.target.com/p/i-will-leave-you-never-by-ann-putnam-paperback/-/A-87405070
What is the best way for our readers to connect with you?
www.annputnamwriter.com
https://www.facebook.com/annputnamwriter
https://www.facebook.com/ann.putnam.98
