Bookpleasures.com  welcomes as our guest Ellen Pall. Ellen is the author of more than a dozen novels, including  Among the Ginzburgs, Corpse de Ballet, and Slightly Abridged. Her most recent novel, MUST READ WELL will shortly be published.

She has also written many features about people in the arts for The New Yorker and The New York Times, and published numerous personal essays, most recently in The New York Review of Books. 

Ellen grew up on Long Island, went to college at U.C. Santa Barbara, then moved to Los Angeles. There, she wrote eight Regency Romances under the pen name Fiona Hill. (Not to be confused with the former U.S. National Security Council official Fiona Hill. Very different person.) 

After ten years, she left California for New York, where she promptly began work as a journalist, wrote novels under her own name, and met her husband, the international human rights advocate Richard Dicker. She now divides her time between New York and L.A.

Norm: Good day Ellen and thanks for taking part in our interview.

Ellen: My pleasure entirely!

Norm: How did you get started in writing? What keeps you going?  

Ellen: I was a natural reader. My mother died when I was very young, and after that loss, books became my refuge. I’ve pretty much had my nose in a book ever since.

Writing also came naturally to me. I knew from the age of twelve that I wanted to be a writer. I loved creating imaginary worlds even as a little girl, worlds not unlike my own but full of different people, with different histories and desires.

They would just come to me through the ether. Even now, when I’m writing a novel, the world I’m building there is a place of private retreat for me, a retreat I carry inside my head wherever I go. 

Norm: What advice can you give aspiring writers that you wished you had received, or that you wished you would have listened to?

Ellen: For one thing, I like to point out to that trying to write is a very low stakes game. If you start writing something and later you realize it’s not working, all you’ve wasted is some paper and ink and maybe some time. We’re not sculpting in marble here. I wish someone had told me that early on.

I also wish someone had told me that not every writer needs to “make a statement” in a novel, or be “the voice of their generation.”

I wish I’d been told that bringing people into another world, an imagined world, or giving them a way to see our real, shared world from another point of view, is valuable all by itself. And also that it’s a gift just to entertain people. We all need escape sometimes. Life is sometimes very hard.

Norm: How has your environment/upbringing colored your writing?

Ellen: As for the fact that I made a life for myself in the arts, my mother was an artist, and even though I was very young when she died, as a little girl I did sit and watch her paint, and that gave me a sense that creativity was natural and worthwhile.

My father was a scientist and inventor, so he was a creator too, but in a much different way.

He grew up very poor in rural Canada but eventually received a National Medal of Technology from the President of the United States.

He was a man of great achievement, so without saying a word, he set a very high standard. I felt the pressure of that, and for better or worse, it pushed me to achieve—to write a lot of books, to publish early and often, to write where my work would be seen. I wanted his respect.

As to what I write, or what my style is, as you can imagine, it was very painful to lose my mother so young, and confusing, and traumatic. (I wrote an essay about this that ran in the New York Review of Books in August of 2020.)

My father remarried almost immediately and I was plunged into another culture—a much more formal culture, the culture of his new wife’s family.

I became very quiet there, listened a lot and spoke very little.

While I sat at dinners and holiday gatherings, I began to memorize conversations—eventually I could remember up to an hour of conversation among half a dozen people or more, verbatim. So that gave me an ear for dialogue.

And even more importantly, the painfulness of losing my old life and being plunged into this new one gave me a reason to live in my imagination.  For a long time, my real life was a very uncomfortable place to be.

Norm: Do you write more by logic or intuition, or some combination of the two? Please summarize your writing process.  

Ellen: Oh gosh. I’d have to say I write fiction through a combination of logic and intuition, but the proportions vary from book to book.

When I wrote my two mysteries (Corpse de Ballet and Slightly Abridged), I plotted them out all the way to the end before I wrote page one.

You really don’t want to get to the end of a mystery and realize you don’t know whodunnit.

I also plotted my Regency romances chapter by chapter before starting to write, but that was because I was writing on a typewriter—my life writing Regencies as Fiona Hill happened so long ago that people didn’t have personal computers.

When you write on a typewriter, you absolutely have to think ahead. If you take a wrong turn in Chapter Three, it’s a whole lot harder to go back from Chapter Seven and fix everything in between.

But both of those, mysteries and Regencies, are genre books.

Writing mainstream literary fiction has been very different for me. The first thing that usually happens is I hear the voices of a couple of characters talking in my head.

Then comes the situation they’re in, then a skeletal idea of the story, something to propel movement or a kernel around which to build a world.

Then I start moving forward by instinct, step by step, letting the characters develop, finding new ones, getting deeper and deeper into the conflicts that arise among them.

With Must Read Well, this was a very long process. I knew Anne Taussig Weil’s voice years before I heard Liz Miller’s.

Once I could hear Liz, things started rolling out fast, especially because Liz’s nature and motive brought an element of suspense that automatically gave the story traction. Still, even after that cat-and-mouse element was in place, I did plenty of rewriting. 

Norm: In fiction as well as in non-fiction, writers very often take liberties with their material to tell a good story or make a point. But how much is too much?  

Ellen: Such an interesting question. I think there’s an understanding, or an unwritten rule, that novelists are allowed to set the level of reality for whatever novel they’re writing.

Then the reader gets to decide whether that’s a world they want to accept and enter.

For myself, as long as I’m engaged with a book and living inside a fully imagined reality the writer has created, a reality consistent with its own rules, I’m willing to go wherever the story takes me.

In Must Read Well, there are a number of details that don’t square with reality.

For example, Liz teaches at Columbia, and one of the days she teaches is a Friday. After I wrote the book, which has a very carefully charted timeline, I learned that Columbia seldom schedules classes on Fridays. Does this matter to the reader? I sure hope not. 

Norm: How did you become involved with the subject or theme of  MUST READ WELL?

Ellen: Must Read Well started as a note I scribbled to myself about five years before I started writing the book. It said, “A woman whose vision has deteriorated so much that she can’t read her own writing hires someone to read her journals to her in her old age.”

That struck me as a predicament that could be a very poignant starting point for a book—wanting to revisit something very personal and private from your past, but being unable to do that without literally letting someone else “read all about it.”

When I finally came back to the note, it was still poignant, but I also saw that it could be a great jumping-off point for what turned out to be a very suspenseful book.

The other source of Must Read Well is Henry James’ The Aspern Papers.

In that book, too, an unscrupulous scholar deceives a very elderly woman to gain access to documents he desperately wants—in his case, love letters written to her by Jeffrey Aspern (a stand-in for Lord Byron) many decades before.

I pretty much stole the narrative spine of Must Read Well from The Aspern Papers. “We stand on the shoulders of giants . . . ”

Norm: What purpose do you believe your story serves and what matters to you about the story? As a follow up, did you write the story to express something you believe or was it just for entertainment?  

Ellen: I very much hope that readers will find the story entertaining. That’s really my primary goal. But I also think there’s some substance to it.

It touches on questions of trust and trustworthiness, both between men and women who love each other and between two women who are essentially, if informally, working together.

It touches on two generations of feminism. I hope it makes people think about old age and the fact that being old doesn’t mean you’re no longer the person you’ve always been.

In a minor way, it’s also about some aspects of alcoholism and recovery. All of those are things I have strong feelings about.  

Norm: How did you go about creating the characters of Elizabeth Miller and Anne Taussig Weil?

Ellen: Anne came easily and pretty much all at once. I modeled her unusual voice and her looks and her very mannered manner on a dear family friend. She is a writer, which is something I share with her, and we’re similar in other ways as well, especially in our habit of observing others carefully and often keeping our own counsel.

She has a dry but very active sense of humor, too, which I hope is true of me as well. 

Elizabeth, or Liz as I think of her, is very unlike me, and she had quite a long evolution.

At the start, she was all muscle and drive, no sentimentality at all. But as the writing and rewriting went on, she got warmer and warmer, more likeable, more relatable, and morally, more conflicted about her actions in the book. 

Norm: Do you agree that to have good drama there must be an emotional charge that usually comes from the individual squaring off against antagonists either out in the world or within himself or herself? If so, please elaborate and how does it fit into you novel? 

Ellen: The way I would put it is that good drama requires traction. There has to be something in the story that keeps pulling us forward, that keeps us engaged and wanting to turn the page. In Must Read Well, the traction springs from Liz’s act of deception, which happens just a few pages into Chapter One. From then on, we are wondering how this game is going to play out. 

Norm: There is quite a surprising ending to your novel. Did you know the end of your book at the beginning?

Ellen: Nope. Didn’t have a clue.

Norm: If MUST READ WELL were turned into a movie, who would you like to see in the parts of Elizabeth and Anne, and why?

Ellen: Hm. First, let me just say “May it be so!” and then go knock on some wood. 

Okay. Now for Elizabeth, if I had my druthers, Julia Garner, who plays Ruth in the series Ozark. Despite her character’s name, she manages to bring a certain ruthlessness and flintiness to that role while at the same time being emotionally vulnerable and morally centered.

Also, Anya Taylor-Joy, who is quietly powerful, emotionally complex and also a bit ruthless in Queen’s Gambit. Or Hailee Steinfeld, or Kathryn Newton, or Daisy Edgar Jones; any one of them would be terrific.

As for Anne, Ellen Burstyn would be wonderful—elegant, intelligent, a little chilly and emotionally contained, yet also capable of passion. It has to be someone with elegance and backbone and a really good sense of humor.

Helen Mirren, while we’re dreaming. Glenn Close. Judy Davis. Maggie Smith. Vanessa Redgrave. Meryl Streep. 

But we have to keep in mind that at the heart of the book is the story within the story—the story of the secret, passionate, disastrous love affair Anne had with a married man when she was much younger. So for that younger Anne, I would love to cast Elisabeth Moss, Natalie Portman, Rachel Weisz—there are so many possibilities . . .

Norm: Did you learn anything from writing your book and what was it? 

Ellen: Yes I did. I learned that you don’t always end up where you thought you were going when you started out. My first draft was very, very different from my last.

Norm: Where can our readers find out more about you and MUST READ WELL?

Ellen: I have a WEBSITE of course, cryptically named Ellen Pall. There are links there to summaries and reviews of all my novels, and to many of the articles I wrote for The New York Times Magazine and Arts & Leisure sections, as well as short pieces that ran in The New Yorker, and a more recent, long personal essay that appeared in The New York Review of Books. 

Norm: What is next for Ellen Pall?

Ellen: I’m working on some personal essays that I think are separate from each other but that might end up all being part of some kind of memoir. (A short memoir, I hope.) I also have the bare bones of a new novel—the two protagonists, the setting, and what I will call the inciting incident. But I still have a lot of living with these ideas to do before I’m ready to write Sentence One. So stuff is on my desk, waiting for me. 

Norm: As this interview comes to an end, if you were organizing a literary dinner party, which three writers, dead or alive, would you invite and why?

Ellen: Oh my goodness, thank you so much for offering me both the dead and the living, and for such a tempting purpose.

As I ponder this, I realize there are a lot of writers I revere, writers whose works have changed me forever, whose words I will never forget, but with whom I would definitely prefer not to eat a meal.

So I would say Barbara Pym—a great listener, I have no doubt—and Grace Paley (who I imagine was a terrific talker), and maybe Karl Ove Knausgaard, just to mix things up. Or even better, Lee Child. We’d have fun!

Norm: Thanks once again and good luck with all of your future endeavors.

Ellen: Thank you!

Follow Here To Read Norm's Review of Must Read Well