Searching for Meaning, Then Searching Again

Memoirist Emily Rapp has the kind of brain that could drive a trivia opponent crazy. “It’s like one of those annoying bug traps that attracts useless information,” she says. But the seemingly disparate nuggets of information at Rapp’s fingertips—lines from Hegel and the Flaming Lips, from Frankenstein or from Tony Hoagland—helped Rapp avoid succumbing completely to grief, she says, after her son Ronan was diagnosed with a terminal illness. When she wrote her new memoir The Still Point of the Turning World, “I was in a state of active despair,” Rapp says. “I was searching for ...

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Three Centuries, Two Women, One Debut Writer

Tara Conklin’s law background directly influenced the plot of her debut novel The House Girl—one of its two main characters, Lina, is a lawyer—but Conklin’s former profession also affected how the story made its way onto the page.

“As a lawyer, you bill in six-minute increments,” Conklin says. “It’s amazing what you can get done in .2 of an hour.” Conklin wrote The House Girl in moving cars, as a passenger, pausing to hand her children snacks in the backseat. She wrote in the mornings, at night, and—don’t tell her bosses—sometimes even ...

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‘The Illicit Happiness of Other People’: Exploring the Postmodern Depths of Joy

Manu Joseph’s new novel The Illicit Happiness of Other People centers around a group of adolescent boys living in the 1980s in Madras asking one another dangerous, if standard, philosophical questions: Is this reality the only reality? Is happiness nothing more than a shared delusion? Do we pursue happiness or does it pursue us?

This part of the novel, Joseph says, is only fiction “in the legal sense.” “When I was an adolescent and growing up in Madras, I was part of a group which got sucked into philosophy in the sense that we were always very sure that ...

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