Calling Me Home
What can you tell us about your new book Calling Me home?
Calling Me Home is about a young white woman who falls in love with the black son of her family's housekeeper in 1930s Kentucky, where it is not only forbidden, but illegal. More than seven decades later, the now elderly Isabelle asks her hairdresser, Dorrie, a black single mom, to drive her from Texas back to Kentucky for a funeral. Along the way, Isabelle shares the story of her past. Dorrie is dealing with her own family issues and is learning to trust a new man, and it turns out that Isabelle's story could shed some light on her troubles. At its heart, Calling Me Home is a love story—but not only the love between star-crossed lovers. It's also about the love between unlikely friends and the love that makes a real family.
The book has been compared to The Help and the Notebook, so how does this make you feel?
I am honoured and humbled to be compared to such iconic stories. People have also mentioned Driving Miss Daisy and Fried Green Tomatoes. What people are implying, I believe, is that Calling Me Home, like these others, deals with issues such as unlikely friendships, race, forbidden love, and heartbreak on a very personal level, yet still tells a very universal story. While writing, I attempted to focus first and foremost on the love relationships between Isabelle and Robert and Isabelle and Dorrie, and then widen the focus to the world around them. I think this is a good method for creating stories that appeal to a wide readership.
Tell us about the research process into this book?
I began with what I already knew, then sought the information I needed to support the setting and plot. I've lived in both Texas and Kentucky. I had some personal knowledge of "sundown towns" because my dad and grandmother grew up in them. I had personal experience being a single parent, and I have a dear friend who is a black single mother and my own long-time hairdresser. I needed to research things like laws on interracial marriage, the history of how American communities have excluded blacks through various methods over the years, the history of blacks in the U.S. armed forces, and other cultural details of the times and settings in which Calling Me Home takes place. I found a lot of information on the Internet, but also talked to people with more knowledge than I had. I did a fair amount of library research and I read many books that dealt with similar topics.
It is inspired by your grandmother's history, so please expand on this for us.
About seven years ago, I learned from my father that my grandmother had fallen in love with a black man when she was a young woman. This explained a lot to me about her personality—she never seemed especially when I was growing up, and I always wondered why. I believe she must have lost her one true love, and that her life was likely never the way she imagined it might have been. Once I knew this, the idea for a story took hold and haunted me for several years until I finally began to write it. I know very few details of her story--she's been deceased for many years--so the story is nearly all fiction, but I felt as though she sat at my shoulder, in a sense, whispering to me of what it was like to be in love in a situation where it was not allowed.
You enjoy travelling in your spare time, so where is your favourite destination?
This is not just flattery, I promise. I visited the UK in 2008 while my husband was there on business and absolutely fell in love! I felt more at home than I have anywhere else I've visited (though I really loved visiting Boston in the U.S., too). I've been planning another visit since, hoping to share the experience with my children. My husband and my daughters and I will be in England, Scotland and Ireland this summer, and I'm so excited about it. With many ancestors from England and Scotland, perhaps it's in my blood. I stood in one place in the Tweed River Valley in Scotland where some of my ancestors likely lived, and felt an eerie connection. I actually had to call my dad and tell him where I was and how it made me feel! I believe we must have some kind of genetic memory.
This is your debut novel, so do you have plans for another?
I am certainly hoping to be a career novelist. I'm making very slow progress on writing a new story. I wrote other novels that didn't get published before Calling Me Home--"practice novels", as I like to call them—so I know I can do it again. I think it's a matter of finding the right story at the right time. I'm a big believer in timing.
You have been compared to some notable writers, but who do you most like to read?
I faithfully buy and read new novels by Chris Cleave, Chris Bohjalian, Barbara Samuel/O'Neal, Elizabeth Berg, Pat Conroy, and Diane Chamberlain, to name just a few. Rosamunde Pilcher and Maeve Binchy were my favourites for years. I have always loved novels about family dynamics and family secrets, issues of social justice and marginalisation--it's no wonder that's what I write about as well.
You have your own blog, so how important is linking in with your readers to you?
I wrote my own blogs for years, but for the last several, I've been a member of two group blogs: What Women Write (www.whatwomenwritetx.blogspot.com) and Book Pregnant (www.bookpregnant.blogspot.com). Blogging with groups is a great way to expand an audience and a community. It's not all about me. It's about the women who are my critique partners. It's about my friends who have recently had first novels published. It's about the various stages we've encountered in the process of trying to get published and in getting published. It's about community.
These days, I connect one-to-one with readers and other writers much more on my Facebook author page, as well as on my personal Facebook page to a degree, though I'm more careful about that because I have a family and their privacy to consider. I really enjoy interacting with readers. I've met with many book clubs here in the U.S., both in person as well as on Skype. I'm sad that I have to turn down some of these requests these days because of scheduling conflicts. That's a good problem to have, I guess! I'm thrilled that so many book clubs have been selecting it, and wish I could meet with each one.
What is your writing process?
I thought I knew. I think I know my writing process after I finish each novel, and then I discover it's different with the next one. Sometimes I outline, sometimes I write by the seat of my pants. Outlining worked really well for Calling Me Home, but I'm not sure my new story's going to cater to it. I'm learning to say to my muses, "Surprise me."
What is next for you?
I'm hoping "next" eventually means another successfully published novel and all the excitement that goes along with it. Right now, "next" means a trip to the UK in July, where I'm looking forward to meeting my publishing team at Pan MacMillan and experiencing first-hand the release of Calling Me Home in one of my favourite places in the world!
Calling Me Home by Julie Kibler is published by Pan @ £7.99