“No, he is not a ghost; he is a man of Heaven and earth, that is all.”
― Gaston Leroux, The Phantom of the Opera

The Rake

Gaston Leroux came into the world somewhat inconveniently on May 6, 1868, on the road from Le Mans to Normandy. His parents were forced to stop the coach between one train station and another and his mother, Marie-Alphonse, was carried to the nearest house, where she gave birth to a healthy and no doubt squalling baby boy. Years later, Leroux returned to see the house that had served as his inadvertent birthplace, only to discover that it had been converted to an undertaker’s shop. “There, where I sought a cradle,” he wrote, “I found a coffin.”

As metaphors for a life go, this tale seems wildly appropriate: A man who vagabonded around the globe in pursuit of stories is born almost before the carriage carrying his mother has a chance to stop. The writer who would become famous for his gothic tales and dark, sinister novels finds a coffin shop ensconced in his birthplace.

Gaston Louis Alfred Leroux, despite his adventurous introduction into the world, led a relatively normal, if privileged, childhood—his way smoothed by his father’s money, but also by his own easy nature and not insignificant intelligence. The son of a successful Normandy shipbuilder, Leroux was an excellent sailor, a good swimmer, and apparently also proficient at handling a catch of herring.

But of course parents always want something better for their children, so when he was old enough Gaston Leroux was sent to school to study law, where he took the requisite prizes and impressed his teachers. Had anyone asked what would become of M. Leroux at the time he received his degree, all would have avowed that the young man was destined to become a brilliant lawyer.

But two significant things happened in 1889 in the life of young Leroux. He had a sonnet published in the newspaper L’Echo de Paris, and his father died.

At first glance, it would seem that the latter tragedy would be more important than the former small triumph, especially since upon his death Leroux père left his son an inheritance of one million francs. Leroux fils did what any young man would do upon finding himself suddenly independent and very rich—he went on a bender. He dropped his law career and dived head first into the gambling dens, nightclubs, and theatrical shows of fin de siècle Paris, becoming immensely popular with all sorts of dissolute, albeit interesting, types. After six months, Gaston Leroux was broke. And the only thing he seemed to have learned from half a year’s worth of self-indulgence was that he absolutely did not want to be a lawyer.

Instead, he decided to be a writer.

The Romantic

To call Gaston Leroux a late bloomer is something of a misnomer. By the time he wrote The Mystery of the Yellow Room in 1907—the novel that would establish his literary reputation—he already enjoyed near-celebrity status as a journalist. He was the kind of correspondent who would go to almost any lengths to get his story, and became famous for getting interviews with elusive people under unusual circumstances. Leroux had demonstrated this aptitude early in his career, when he took it upon himself to interview a prisoner awaiting trial for a serious crime by posing as a prison anthropologist, even going so far as to produce forged credentials. This was outrageous enough, but much to the chagrin of the courts and the police, the article Leroux wrote exonerated the prisoner completely.

By all rights, he should have been arrested. But sales of the paper skyrocketed, and the editors at his paper Le Matin, knowing a good thing when it fell into their laps, stood by their wunderkind and promptly began dispatching him around the globe in pursuit of breaking news. Leroux’s name at the head of a column became a sure way to increase circulation.

And so Gaston Leroux became a roving investigative reporter, charged with ferreting out the story others couldn’t get. He journeyed from hot spot to hot spot, from one dangerous situation to another—a life of constant adventure that would have made Sir Richard Francis Burton envious, if only there had been more sex in it.

His talent for subterfuge and disguise, his willingness to walk into danger, and his ability to strike up a conversation with anyone under any circumstances became the most useful weapons in Leroux’s arsenal. He reported on an erupting Vesuvius from the edge of the crater, and disguised himself as an Arab to report on riots in Fez. He broke a story about a secret summit between Kaiser Wilhelm II and the Russian Tsar by making friends with a cook in the Tsar’s entourage. He met arctic explorers and Russian revolutionaries, but the man who brought world events to the pages of Le Matin was not a simply a yellow journalist anxious to jump on the most sensational story. His coverage, early in his career, of public executions by the guillotine made him an opponent of capital punishment for the rest of his life. He was also instrumental in the second trial of Captain Alfred Dreyfus, whom Leroux believed unequivocally to be innocent, and spared no ink in attempting to expose the scandal that poisoned France for more than a decade.

The Writer

So why was it that in 1907, at the height of his fame and the pinnacle of his success as an investigative journalist, did Gaston Leroux decide to hang it all up so he could write novels? George Perry, in his book The Complete Phantom of the Opera, suggests it was an impulsive decision made when Leroux, having just returned from a long foreign assignment, received a late-night phone call from his editor telling him to hop on the next train to Toulon. Leroux responded with something Gallic and unprintable, slammed down the phone, and decided to become a novelist.

But it should not be forgotten that what first inspired Leroux to live by the pen was that sonnet published years before. He fell in love with literature as a young man studying law, going on to become a great reader who admired many important novelists of the age, including Stendhal, Victor Hugo, Alexandre Dumas père, Daphne du Maurier, Edgar Allan Poe, Arthur Conan Doyle, and Émile Zola. And he never really abandoned what we might call “creative” writing, despite the demands of his journalism career; like many writers, his first novel, The Mystery of the Yellow Room, was not, in fact, his first novel. Since 1903 he had been publishing serialized fiction in Le Matin, and one of these—The Seeking of the Morning Treasures, based on the exploits of a famous bandit known as Cartouche—was wildly popular, not least because the paper staged a series of treasure hunts around Paris to publicize it.

The Mystery of the Yellow Room was Leroux’s breakthrough novel. He must have started writing the moment he hung up the phone on his editor, because it was published the very same year.

The Reader

The genre known as “locked room mysteries” is something of an acquired taste. Modern readers tend to prefer their mystery novels for the “whodunnit” and “whydunnit” aspects of the story. The “howdunnit” is somewhat out of fashion in this era of forensic science and computer wizardry.

But in Leroux’s day, howdunnit was all the rage. Edgar Allan Poe’s The Murders in the Rue Morgue and the Sherlock Holmes stories of Arthur Conan Doyle fascinated readers everywhere. So Leroux, like any budding novelist, decided to write what was selling. “When I sat down to pen that story,” he recalled, “I decided to go ‘one better’ than Conan Doyle, and make my ‘mystery’ more complete than even Edgar Allan Poe had ever done.”

This would have been fabulously arrogant if Leroux hadn’t made good with his very first book. The Mystery of the Yellow Room is often cited as one of the original—and best—of the locked room mysteries. John Dickson Carr, the acknowledged master of the genre, cites it as the book to which he aspired.

But why did it make such an impression? The main character, Joseph Rouletabille, is not especially original. A young but brilliant journalist, at the beginning of the story he has already achieved fame for solving a crime that had the police stumped. If the character sounds a little familiar—well, that’s no accident. Nor can the book’s success be attributed to Leroux’s style, which at this point in his literary career still carries the cadences of a journalist. The story, like other novels of the day, is presented as a series of memoirs, journals, letters, and court documents, but there is no real attempt to distinguish one speaker from another in the profusion of sources.

Part of the problem with locked room mysteries is that the narrative tends to sink into a morass of technical details provided so the reader can be absolutely sure that the room in question was, in fact, locked. In the case of the Yellow Room, a woman is attacked in her own bedroom. Her father and a loyal family servant hear a commotion and her cry for help, and attempt to break into the room. It takes a few minutes, during which they are standing at the door—the only way out of the room. They burst in, find the lady unconscious and bloody, and the room otherwise empty. Even the window is still locked and barred. There is nowhere for the perpetrator to hide, no way for him to have escaped, yet he is not in the room.

The solution to this mystery—who tried to kill the young woman and how he could have escaped—occupies the rest of the book, and Leroux takes great pains to explain just how impossible it was for anyone to have escaped unseen. He measures the dimensions of the bedroom, describes the construction of the door and the window, and offers the direction of the corridor and the height of the room from the ground below, going so far as to draw maps of the house’s layout for the reader’s edification. Various characters propose solutions, which the author then, in the character of Rouletabille, demolishes. One person suggests the father was in on it, another that the accomplice was the family servant. A family friend proposes that the would-be murderer hid in the mattress on the lady’s bed. (Rouletabille barely deigns to respond to this). A local magistrate suggests that the murderer slipped past the men while they were looking the other way. At one point, people start to suggest ghosts and apparitions. Rouletabille all but loses his temper:

Novelists build mountains of stupidity out of a footprint on the sand, or from an impression of a hand on the wall. That’s the way innocent men are brought to prison. It might convince an examining magistrate or the head of a detective department, but it’s not proof. You writers forget that what the senses furnish is not proof. If I am taking cognisance of what is offered me by my senses I do so but to bring the results within the circle of my reason. That circle may be the most circumscribed, but if it is, it has this advantage—it holds nothing but the truth! Yes, I swear that I have never used the evidence of the senses but as servants to my reason. I have never permitted them to become my master. They have not made of me that monstrous thing,—worse than a blind man,—a man who sees falsely.

What is it that Sherlock Holmes used to say? When you have eliminated the impossible, whatever left, however improbable, must be the truth.

The particular triumph of The Mystery of the Yellow Room, the reason Leroux might be justified in his claim to have one-upped Mr. Arthur Conan Doyle and Mr. Edgar Allan Poe, and the reason why the book is still cited by aficionados as one of the great locked room mysteries of all time, lies in the answer to how the would-be murderer escaped that room. Poe and Doyle each wrote their own locked room stories, of course. And in each case the solution is exotic, to say the least: strange animals loose in the night, secret passageways and hidden doors.

Leroux dispenses with all such fantastic devices. The police spend a fair amount of time searching for trap doors and secret passages, but Rouletabille is confident at the outset no such thing will be found. Instead, the author relies on misdirection to trap the unwary reader, who would do well to remember Roulatabille’s somewhat heated admonishment: “You writers forget that what the senses furnish is not proof.”

All good mysteries take advantage of that disconnect between what we see and what we expect to see, and this one does so to wonderful effect. The men of the house behold a woman swooning on the floor, but no assailant in the room, and begin to think of supernatural explanations. Rouletabille sees the same picture, but deduces something far more ordinary, logical, and mundane. His reasoning is absolutely sound, but most readers will have to wait for the denouement at the end of the novel to discover it.

At which point, 99 out of a hundred readers will exclaim, “Oh!” and the novel, which up to this point has been a strange collection of testimonies and seemingly sinister coincidences, will suddenly resolve itself into a highly satisfying mystery story.

Gaston Leroux would go on to write dozens of other novels, many featuring Rouletabille and liberally sprinkled with anecdotes from his vast experience as a journalist. He still enjoyed gambling, and was in the habit of writing a new book whenever he had to pay off his gambling debts. “I have to be pushed by deadlines,” he said, the reporter’s discipline never truly leaving him. It wasn’t until 1911 that Leroux wrote the novel that would make him famous forever, The Phantom of the Opera.

Today, The Mystery of the Yellow Room is an all but forgotten story drowned out by the more famous madman behind his mask, banging away, enraged, on the Opera House organ. Inspired by true events—a chandelier counterweight falling into the audience at the Opera House, and the discovery of a skeleton in the catacombs under the building—The Phantom of the Opera became Leroux’s best known and most successful book. Although its fame was somewhat late in coming, having received only lukewarm praise on the continent, Phantom took off once Hollywood turned it into a movie with Lon Cheney almost a dozen years after it was first published. Its success continues unabated into the 21st century, with Andrew Lloyd Webber’s musical adaptation topping the list of Broadway’s longest running shows.

In many ways, The Phantom of the Opera is utterly unlike The Mystery of the Yellow Room: reason gives way to horror, common sense to superstition. Dark and secret passageways abound, and a specter rules the stage of the Paris Opera House. It is only on reflection that one sees the common threads between the early detective story and the late gothic novel. But The Mystery of the Yellow Room is littered with gothic elements: strange animal cries in the night, sinister caped figures that seem to vanish into nowhere, brave young women set upon by evil forces. And the Opera Ghost of The Phantom of the Opera turns out to be not a demon, but as Leroux writes, just “a man of Heaven and Earth, that is all.”

The late but rising popularity of The Phantom of the Opera did not deter Leroux from racking up more gambling debts, which he had to pay off with the advances from more books. He wrote up until his death in 1929, at the age of 59, publishing books at the rate of roughly once a year in a wide variety of genres—fantasy, horror, even romance. He also wrote plays, and screenplays, and even founded a company with the mission of turning novels into films. (He soon lost interest.)

But Phantom’s success in Hollywood did allow Leroux to enjoy the last years of his life in rather sumptuous circumstances. Until he died, Leroux insisted that there really was a Phantom of the Opera House—a real, breathing man who made his home in the catacombs below the building—and his children and grandchildren continue to reaffirm his statement. The book itself is written not as a novel, but as a reporter submitting copy to his editor.

Leroux led a story-filled life, which he turned into novel after novel. So it is hard not to imagine that the lines between what was real and what was fiction might have become a little blurred. “In Paris,” as Leroux writes, “our lives are one masked ball.”

Nicki Leone showed her proclivities at a young age when she asked her parents if she could exchange a gift of jewelry for a hardcover Merriam-Webster. Later, her college career and attending loans supported her predilection for working as a bookseller. Currently she works with the Southern Independent Booksellers Alliance, developing marketing and outreach programs for independent bookstores. She has been a book reviewer for local magazines and newspapers, and the on-air book commentator for her local public radio and television stations. She is also past president and a current member of the board of the North Carolina Writers Network. She lives in Wilmington, North Carolina with a varying numbers of dogs and cats.

Homepage photo credit: Universal Pictures

1.

“Who is that?”
“That is … the world’s oldest living freshman, and the walking epitome of the decline of modern education.”
—Dr. Philip Barbay, Back to School

I find myself thinking of Rodney Dangerfield often these days. And just to be clear, that’s not a line I would have ever imagined myself writing before. But it’s true. Not the eye-rolling mournful schtick of “I don’t get no respect,” though—rather, I’ve been rewinding my mental tape of Back to School, the mid-’80s hit movie about a rags-to-riches tycoon who follows his teenage son to college. It’s one of those grownup comedies that were popular at the time, trying to cash in on an Animal House audience that had grown up a little, drowning in double-entendres with a liberal seasoning of slapstick and the thinnest veneer of substance. Dangerfield’s character is wealthy but uneducated, well-intentioned but crude; he’s a fish out of water in academia, and therein hangs the movie’s humor. Because hey, what’s funnier than a middle-aged schmuck at a frat party, right?

I ask myself that a lot.

In the fall of 2011, I went back to school too. I had just finished up a contract editing a small journal at a large academic library, which wasn’t as glamorous as it might sound. The library had acquired the journal’s archives, and as part of the deal our executive editor wrangled a commitment out of them to give us office space and the support to publish it for five more years. I was kind of a poker bride, a redheaded stepchild, and although I liked the work I was just as glad to get out of there when our time was up as they were to get rid of us.

I did like the librarians I worked with, though. They were a smart, funny, cynical bunch, both erudite and technologically adept. All in all, it looked like a good racket. Publishing was going through a bad patch of simultaneous upheaval and constriction, and as I fired off a series of resumes that spring I began to realize how poorly my odd little niche job had equipped me for the marketplace. This was already a second career for me, and I just wasn’t high enough up the ladder to make that elegant lateral hop. I needed a bump. And that bump, it turns out, was library school.

2.
I can’t quite remember, now, how I reached the decision to actually do it. A friend and I used to bandy about the idea of going back to school while we walked our dogs in the morning, and then out of the blue my partner brought it up as well. I had certainly been a bookish, pro-library kind of person all my life, and as I looked around at available programs I was heartened to see that they were also highly tech-positive—a good combination for me. Life was relatively stable. My partner was both employed and supportive of the whole enterprise, my health was good and my energy high, and I already spent a good portion of my time reading and then writing about it online; how hard could grad school be? In the end, though, I think my mental process invoked a high degree of Fuck It. I’ve always been fond of taking chances, of making the grand leap when it looked good, and my hunches have played out well. I enrolled at Pratt Institute’s School of Library and Information Science, and that fall, at the age of 48, showed up with my laptop and textbooks and gray hair, ready for the grand experiment.

3.
There was a period of adjustment, to be sure. But not a bad one. The hardest part was relearning how to read those long, dense, academic texts, if I’d ever really known in the first place; my undergrad degree was a Bachelor of Fine Arts, and I had not been the most stellar student who ever slouched, chain-smoking and hung over, in the back of a classroom. That’s right—the last time I was in school you could smoke in class. And in banks. And, God help us, in supermarkets.

And that was the other adjustment: most of the people I go to school with don’t remember when you could smoke in bars. They are 24, 28, some in their early 30s. A handful are in their 40s, but I’m consistently the oldest person in every class of mine. As it turns out, that’s not a bad thing by a long shot. True, it takes me longer to read and retain than it used to. Years of pleasure reading have spoiled me, so I’ve learned to give myself extra time, to backtrack if my mind is wandering, and also to skim when necessary—all that good reading was also close reading, and it’s been a surprisingly hard habit to break.

But if the reading required some recalibration, the writing has been nothing but a gift. Remember when blog sounded like the stupidest word ever coined? It still does, to tell the truth, but seven years of sitting down to write about something and then writing about it ends up to have been good discipline. I can coax a storyline out of just about anything—and, trust me, when a professor has 20 papers to read, she’ll grab onto a narrative thread like a drowning woman with a life preserver. I know just how long it takes me to write ten pages, how long I need for a thousand words. But mostly, I can write, period. It gives me an edge. In every class after the first batch of papers has been graded, the instructor will invariably give a little pep talk about how this is a profession that requires proficiency in the written word, and then post the writing tutor’s email on the whiteboard. If I sound like a stereotypical curmudgeon, blaming the decline of this country’s educational standards over the past 10 and 20 years, then so be it. In the meantime, I’m deeply grateful for all that sentence-mapping they drilled into us in fifth grade.

My other advantage, I’ve found—and it’s a huge one—is just knowing more. Not that I’m in any way presuming that I’m smarter than anyone, or better educated. It’s just that extra 10 or 20 years of input, of reading books and papers and following the news and generally being a good little cultural consumer, knocking around New York City for more than 30 years. At least some of it has stuck.

4.
There, in fact, lies another major factor in my decision. The New York Times has recently run a few articles about the middle-aged back-to-school cohort. Most cite the economy, and the jobless trying to get a leg up. But at least one piece has declared it a proactive form of exercise for aging brains:

“As adults we have these well-trodden paths in our synapses,” Dr. [Kathleen] Taylor says. “We have to crack the cognitive egg and scramble it up. And if you learn something this way, when you think of it again you’ll have an overlay of complexity you didn’t have before—and help your brain keep developing as well.”

To be honest, that was as much a consideration as any career goals. If I’d lost both parents to early heart attacks, I’d probably be writing this piece about what it’s like to run my first marathon at nearly 50 (and I’d probably have been in bed hours ago). Instead, both of my parents developed dementia. And nothing—absolutely nothing—terrifies me more. So like the religious runner, I am fiercely disciplined and possibly over-serious. I don’t watch TV, don’t play Sudoku, don’t get into political arguments on Facebook. It’s not that I think there’s anything inherently wrong with those pursuits. It’s just that I don’t have time.

I feel that way about my own perceived cerebral future, but it’s also literally true right now. To stick with the metaphor, as I close in on finishing my degree—I’ll be done at the end of this fall—I’m feeling like one of those runners who’s been training just a bit too hard: grizzled, sinewy, perpetually dehydrated. It’s not that school has proven so difficult as it is relentless. This, then, is where I feel my age. Everyone who’s been in grad school knows it’s a slog, but the longer I’m there the more slowly I bounce back. Whereas I assumed the experience would toughen me up as I went along, lately I feel it abrading me in small degrees, the nonstop grind of school and poverty and the endless tiny soul-sucking domestic tasks that somehow pile up to surprise me when it’s 1 in the morning and I thought I could go to sleep. Sometimes I’d trade a few of those years of experience for the option of going home to an imaginary mom and dad for the weekend, getting a cup of hot cocoa and a back rub and sleeping until noon. That particular Faustian deal isn’t in the cards, though, so I put my head down and keep going forward.

This sounds grimmer, perhaps, than I mean it to. There’s been a lot of real joy in my grad school experience—over the past couple of years I’ve learned all sorts of new things that fill me with pride: how to write code, conduct a reference interview, edit video, put together a lit review, give a good ten-minute PowerPoint, work on a team. I’ve read thousands of pages of theory, history, technical specs, and critique. I’ve had some very cool professors, classes that turned into graduate assistantships, internships that became paying jobs. Most of all, I have not looked silly.

In Back to School, Rodney Dangerfield spends the entire movie, up until the inevitable warmly redeeming moment, playing the fool. He’s too old, too fat, too undereducated, too uncouth for the ivied halls. That’s the whole joke, right there. And while his character is rich and dumb, whereas I am poor and smart, for a long time after I made the decision to go back to school I still had the small, quiet fear of appearing buffoonish. Of seeming desperate. Of being obviously, glaringly out of place.

That apprehension has faded, for the most part. I feel like I’ve made a place for myself there. I have a few friends; the faculty like me. Last week in a Digital Archives class we were looking at a cassette tape from 1978, and the professor was riffing on the year: “1978! That was before you all were born—that was before I was born!”

I coughed politely, and he said, “Oh, Lisa was born then. Lisa can tell us all about 1978.”

People laughed, and it was a good laugh; there was kindness and respect in it, and for some reason that little exchange cheered me. Maybe that was the version of Rodney Dangerfield I feared after all. If that’s true, then I guess I’m doing all right. I’m not quite the world’s oldest living freshman, and I’m getting some respect.

Lisa Peet is a writer, editor, artist, Library & Information Science student, proprietor of the literary blog Like Fire, and a card-carrying bloomer herself.

Homepage photo credit: Lewis Wickes Hine via NYPL Digital Gallery
Back to School photo credit: © 1986 Metro-Goldwyn-Mayer Studios Inc. via IMDB
Running man photo credit: Eadweard Muybridge/Bettmann Corbis

Nicole Wolverton: Being a writer—a professional creative writer—always seemed like a long shot, although it’s always what I wanted to do (aside from a strange, brief period when I wanted to be the next Dr. Ruth). I’m a practical person, so when it came time to decide what I wanted to be when I grew up, I set aside the dream in favor of doing something less risky, less fraught with the potential for failure. For that reason, I never felt pressure to publish at all.

In many ways, I’m glad I didn’t pursue a career in writing early on. There’s something about having forty-ish years of experience that makes writing a different experience. I’ve kept all my writing over the years, and my earlier short stories lack something . . . something I can’t quite put my finger on, but it’s there, just below the surface. There are amazing young writers, but I would not have been one of them.

Bloom: The Trajectory of Dreams is your first published novel but in an interview at The Author-In-Training you mention there where other novels before this. What was the experience like setting aside these novels and moving onto new ones? What did you carry on with you as you moved onto this next novel?

NW: Who was it that said you have to write a million horrible words before your writing improves? I’m a firm believer that it’s true in a lot of cases. I used my first million words—the first novels I wrote—to learn what my bad habits are. Every writer has words they overuse or bad grammatical habits or gaps in their knowledge about plotting and structure.

I’ve never been the type of writer who thinks every word that flows from my fingers is literary gold. I’m full of self-doubt, and so it’s easy for me to set aside a novel without feeling like I’d wasted time . . . because I didn’t. For each novel I’ve finished, I learned and improved. I may be my own worst critic (what writer isn’t?), but that’s what makes it so surprising to re-read something I’ve written only to discover it’s not bad at all. Those first million words made a world of difference.

Bloom:  How did you know The Trajectory of Dreams was the novel you wanted to pursue publishing?

NW: Just like when you know when you’ve fallen in love, you suddenly know when a novel works. When I finished The Trajectory of Dreams, there was something about it. It was different than other things I’d written. There was something inherently disquieting about Lela White (the protagonist), and the plot came together just as I’d envisioned. The language worked. One of my critique partners threatened never to speak to me again if I didn’t give the novel a shot. That’s when I started looking at my options for publication.

Bloom: The bio on your website states, “Nicole Wolverton fears many things, chief amongst them that something lurks in the dark.” Is a fear often a prompt for your work?  Was there a specific fear that inspired you to write The Trajectory of Dreams?

NW: I might be practical and rational, but I also have a lot of fears. Those fears aren’t unusual because we’re all either secretly or not-so-secretly afraid of things. I’m not ashamed to admit that I worry about someone breaking into my house while I sleep. It’s a completely normal fear; otherwise, why would people lock up their houses tight before going to bed? You’ve vulnerable when you sleep—an intruder could do anything to you, to your family, or to your home. There are those urban legends about the number of spiders the average person eats each year while asleep. Those are the things I think about when I’m lying in bed, and I can’t get to sleep. That fear is a large part of The Trajectory of Dreams. Lela White plays on that fear in a terrifying way by breaking into the homes of astronauts and watching them sleep. And that’s Lela at her most benign. To say that I had more trouble sleeping while writing the novel is an understatement.

Bloom: Lela’s relationship with literature appears to be one of the more stable ones in her life. She maintains what she refers to as an “almost private book club” with the librarian and family friend, Mrs. Gerhardt.  She is able to talk with Zory Korchagin, her love interest, in a calm and logical way about her views on novels. Yet poetry affects her differently. Her reaction to it is more visceral and in line with the traits of her mental illness. Was it a conscious decision for there to be a distinction between her reaction to these two different forms?

NW: It was not at first conscious decision. I knew Lela quite well before I started writing, but the difference in her reactions is something that popped up as I went along. Characters do things that surprise you sometimes. I came to see Lela’s link to literature and Mrs. Gerhardt as the link to her “normal” exterior self, whereas her reaction to poetry functions as an indication of her more emotional inner self.

Maybe this is some of my personality sinking into the narrative—I’ve always had a much different relationship with poetry than with other types of writing.

Bloom: Lela is a wonderfully unreliable narrator. In the novel she mentions a strange “fondness for Chuck Palahniuk.” Were you alluding to Fight Club, or another novel with an unreliable narrator?

NW: I have a weird and complicated relationship with Chuck Palahniuk. Not personally—he wouldn’t know me if he tripped over me. There’s a lot to like about Fight Club, though, and it was one of the books I read when I was thinking about writing in first person from an unreliable narrator’s point of view. Because of that, I could not resist making Lela a Palahniuk fan.

Bloom: Lela suffers from an unnamed mental disorder. Why did you decide not to reveal it in the novel?

NW: The mental order goes unnamed because Lela doesn’t have any idea that she’s mentally ill. Sure, she recognizes that she’s different from other people, but not different in a bad way—she believes herself to be a hero, on a mission that benefits mankind. Because the novel is told in first person point-of-view, there’s no good way to disclose a diagnosis of which she’s unaware.

There’s one opportunity in the novel to reveal her specific disorder, but it didn’t seem necessary to the plot. I’d rather allow the reader to speculate on that point.

Bloom: You’ve spoken about the extensive research you did on sleep disorders, mental illness, and the space program for The Trajectory of Dreams. How does research influence or shape your writing beyond solidifying the scientific facts?

NW: Facts are one thing, but what characters do with those facts is quite another. Lela White’s personality is the result of extensive research on her particular psychology. She couldn’t have a thought, undertake an action without it making sense within her mental disorder. Nearly every character in the novel has habits or thoughts that were shaped by research. It’s inevitable—nearly every fact you learn in life shapes your personality and opinions, and the same is true of fictional characters.

Bloom: Until recently you were the moderator of “5 Minute Fiction,” a weekly online flash fiction contest. You also did an online book tour for the release of your novel. How significant is the presence of a virtual literary community in your life and in what ways does it influence you as a writer? Did you seek this out or did you fall into it?

NW: Writing is a lonely thing. So many of us sequester ourselves in our offices and only poke our heads out for food and water. It’s hard to maintain that and keep your sanity. Having friends who can empathize is critical, and a virtual community makes it easier to find the right group. While I didn’t initially seek out other writers online at first, my network has grown to include them.

Several years ago when I was looking for some fresh eyes for a manuscript, I did look specifically online. As a result, I developed a fantastic relationship with another writer who has become my critique partner. And I’ve met some amazing people through “5 Minute Fiction” and other online flash fiction challenges, Twitter, Facebook, etc. I know some people think of their online platforms as sales tools, but it’s definitely more than that for me.

Bloom: Are you working on anything now? And will we be seeing anymore of Lela White?

NW: Lela White’s story has come to an end, but there are two other manuscripts on my agent’s desk right now. Both are young adult novels, one horror and one suspense. It’s an incredibly exciting time for me! While going through the submission process, I’m doing research for my next novel, which is a young adult ghost story set in Philadelphia.

Bloom: In Monday’s feature, Emily St. John Mandel wrote that The Trajectory of Dreams is a “fearlessly dark novel,” and that Lela, the protagonist, is “heartbreaking, because for the moment at least she is lost.”  Is your work that is geared toward young readers also dark?  Do you see the degree of darkness and hope as a difference between adult and YA literature?

NW: My writing tends to be a little on the dark side, no matter whether adult or young adult. Writers, reviewers, agents, and editors like to speculate about the difference between adult and young adult work, trying to pin down defining characteristics, but in the end it’s really the age of the main characters, and even that’s not entirely definitive. Take, for instance, The White Devil by Justin Evans. Almost all the characters are young adult, yet it was marketed as an adult novel for no reason that I can discern. Novels marketed to the young adult audience aren’t any less complicated or nuanced, any less dark, or any more hopeful than novels geared toward an adult audience. There is also Patrick Ness‘ Chaos Walking series. That is incredibly dark (and so, so good).

Click here to read Emily St. John Mandel’s feature piece on Nicole Wolverton’s The Trajectory of Dreams.