I began writing Margarettown at the end of 2003 just after I had finished my first novel, Elsewhere. I didn't necessarily think I'd want to be writing another novel so soon, but the book came easily and quickly and naturally (a rare experience for me as a writer), so I just went with it.

Another rare experience for me: I can remember exactly what I was doing when I came up with the idea for the book: I was reading Anne of Ingleside.

From the ages of ten through thirteen, my favorite novel was Anne of Green Gables by L.M. Montgomery. In addition to Anne of Green Gables, there are seven other books (and a handful of short stories) that follow Anne Shirley from the age of twelve through college, career, engagement, marriage, motherhood. As a girl, I loved to read the first book, but my interest always waned substantially by about book five. I never was able to get through books six, seven, or eight.

In finishing Elsewhere, I decided to revisit Anne of Green Gables for the first time in about ten years. (Elsewhere, although it has a somewhat extraordinary setting, is really a very traditional coming of age tale like Green Gables, and I have always found it enormously helpful to focus my reading when I am writing.) After finishing Green Gables, I decided that I would tackle the whole series. It struck me as I was reading this time that the Anne of book one (that chatty orphan) was an entirely different person from the Anne of book three (confident college girl) or the Anne of book six (a married woman and mother). These differences may explain my chronic inability to finish the series - as a girl, I wanted to read the adventures of a girl. When Anne was no longer that girl, I (as a young reader) was no longer interested.

At the beginning of book six, Anne of Ingleside, Gilbert Blythe, Anne's husband, says to her after she has returned from a trip to her girlhood home, “ 'To come back at the end of a hard day and find you? Are you happy, Annest of Annes?' ” I was half-asleep when I read this (I like to read before I go to bed), but I immediately sat upright and wrote the phrase down. It was this phrase (“the Annest of Anne”') that was the starting point for Margarettown. And if you've read the book, you'll recognize this from the part in the book where N. addresses Jane as the “Janest of Janes.”

Truthfully though, I think I'd been playing with the idea of a “woman being many women” for many years before that. One of the first plays I ever wrote in high school was called Fugue for Seven Madwomen and it was about a girl who has a bunch of friends over for lunch, but it turns out that all her friends are really her. (The best thing about that particular play was seeing my friend Royce in a dress - if anyone out there should have photographs of that, please feel free to send them here.) And if you happen to have seen the movie I wrote, Conversations with Other Women, you'll probably notice some shared themes between Margarettown and Conversations, too.

But back to Margarettown: it had an easy road to creation and sale and then an extremely bumpy publication - this is a deeply uninteresting story, so I won't bother to tell it. The first review that came in was from the notoriously prickly Kirkus and it was starred; the second review that came in was a roundup in the Washington Post and it was a total slaughter. The Washington Post started with the highly amusing line, “Gabrielle Zevin wants to mess with your head” (Dear Reader, you know I do), and it pretty much went downhill from there. All this was an excellent and early object lesson in not investing too much into reviews one way or the other. This seems to be a lesson I have to keep relearning. In any case, I knew when I was writing it that it wasn't necessarily a book for everyone and, at the risk of sounding like the lady who doth protest too much, I was reasonably okay with that.

I'm currently writing a screenplay of Margarettown for an amazing NYC production company, This Is That. They also produced Eternal Sunshine of the Spotless Mind and 21 Grams.

Reading at the Astor Place, Barnes & Noble
Notice how I am blithely standing under a row of "FOR DUMMIES" books. I believe the one in the middle is Novel Writing For Dummies.

my mom's amazing Margarettown cake