Amy Gentry is a book reviewer for the Chicago Tribune whose work has also appeared in Salon, LA Review of Books, and the Best Food Writing of 2014. Good as Gone is her first novel, so to mark its release she tells us ten things about her.
Amy Gentry
I love decorating fancy cakes. When I was a child I found my mother’s old Wilton yearbooks and became obsessed with them. By high school, I was making tiered cakes covered with icing flowers. My greatest triumph was a Shakespearian sonnet made entirely of petit fours. I even made my own wedding cake. (I don’t recommend it. Everyone told me not to, and they were right.)
I watch a lot of horror movies. The gorier the better—I like to think about mortality in the most literal terms possible. Plus, the horror genre has always been more feminist than most people give it credit for. And lately there’s been a boom in female-directed horror films like The Babadook that look into the most terrifying parts of everyday women’s lives. My cup of tea!
I used to write sketch comedy. I performed with an all-female troupe called Every Girl’s Annual. We did Little Women spoofs and talked a lot about tampons. It was wonderful. We were all too busy to keep it up, but I miss it.
I live in Austin, Texas. They call it “The Velvet Coffin” because people come for the University of Texas (as I did) and never leave. I managed to get out twice—once for fun and once for grad school—but they kept pulling me back in. What can I say, it’s 70 degrees (24 C) in March, and you can swim in natural springs year round.
I wrote a fashion column for a year. I was covering books for a local alt-weekly and took an assignment to cover the Texas Book Festival. Bored with the panels, I started taking “street style” pictures with my iPhone, and lo, a fashion columnist was born. The fashion beat in Austin is pretty low-pressure—style here is mostly limited to hippie dresses and cowboy boots—but I still felt like a fraud covering runway shows when I spend 99% of my time in pajamas. Writing a weekly column, though, gave me invaluable experience meeting deadlines.
I have two cats named Shakira and Barrister. One of them is in my lap right now. And pretty much always is!
I thought I was going to be an English professor. I went to graduate school and wrote a dissertation on Henry James and American modernism. It turns out the market for professors of American modernism is dismal. Spoiler alert: I’m not going to be an English professor.
I volunteered at a women’s shelter. My experiences working with victims of sexual assault and domestic abuse informed not just the plot of Good as Gone, but the way I ordered the narrative. I was particularly interested in the way trauma can fragment a story—even the very personal stories we call identity, relationships, and family.
I didn’t know Good as Gone was a thriller when I began writing it. In fact, I didn’t even know it was a crime novel. I was massively ignorant about the genre, and thought it was a family drama. Only halfway through did it occur to me that there was a whole genre just for girls gone missing. I have since sunk happily into a life of crime.
My favorite crime writers are Patricia Highsmith and Ruth Rendell. I read them compulsively. Among the living, I favor the brilliant Tana French. The joy of coming to a genre late is that no matter how much catching up I do, I’ll never get through them all. That’s how I like it.
Good as Gone by Amy Gentry is out on 6th April (HQ, £7.99)