Felicia C. Sullivan: Let me just start off by saying it was a privilege to discover your work. As I noted in my PW review of With or Without You, “your second novel is a send-up of America’s obsession with pop culture, B-list celebrities and prison life, peopled by a cast of lonely, desperate characters whose only fault is that they love too much”. Past the glitz of supermarket tabloids, you render your Hollywood cast lost, tragic with its own rules and codes of conduct. What brought you to examine this world in your sophomore effort? What drew you to juxtapose “reality” with the false reality dictated by Hollywood?

Lauren Sanders: The easy answer is I’m an American. I’ve been obsessed with Hollywood and the notion of celebrity for as long as I can remember, probably less so now than ever. Maybe I’m finally growing up or too busy or celebrities have gotten so boring, but years of Hollywood imagery, Hollywood standards, Hollywood logic — the false reality, as you put it — are scrambled into memories of my own childhood. So when the book was taking form and I knew the main character was going to be a teenager, I wanted to explore the sway of celebrity, among other things, on a young mind, when other cultural systems fail. At first I thought about making Brooke Harrison a movie star, but there’s something more personal about soap stars. They’re in your home every day, and you can follow their comings and goings over the course of many years…it’s a tricky kind of bonding. I also wanted to keep the view of Hollywood somewhat voyeuristic. In other words, it’s not an insider’s tale. The only view you get of Brooke Harrison is filtered either through her mother’s story, Lillian, or the media.

FS: Even more intriguing are the three parallel stories: Lillian’s confessional narrative in prison where she stands trial for murder, the rise of soap star Brooke Harrison and the plastic Long Island suburbia inhabited by Lillian’s wealthy, selfish and loveless drug toting parents. With the exception of money & social class, one could speculate that these worlds aren’t really any different – all the characters are trapped, in their proverbial lock-up. Your thoughts?

LS: You’re getting right to the heart of things. All of the characters are indeed locked up. While I was writing the book, I had a lot of recurring images in my head and one was an old cover of The Captive Mind by Czeslaw Milosz. There’s a new edition now that’s glossy and angular, but this old one, if I’m remembering it correctly, was a head wrapped in a chain and padlock. It was simple and perfect. We’re all subject to the lockdown of the cultures or subcultures we inhabit. Milosz — if I’m remembering the book correctly, it’s been a while — uses this notion to investigate the allure of totalitarianism. You can see it play out watching kids on the playground. It’s terribly difficult to be the one who breaks away from the pack…and I’m not talking about the one picked on, you’ve got no choice there, but the one who stands up and says this is wrong, or this doesn’t feel right. People crave groups—whether they’re thrust into them or they choose them—and you’ll be okay as long as you don’t question the core values of that group, but for me, this is where things start to get interesting.

FS: Was there ever a turning back for Lillian? If her parents loved her more, the drunken stewardess didn’t leave?

LS: I’m not sure if I would pinpoint any one event as the one that might have changed everything. If anything, perhaps if she didn’t find her way to a gun (and this was a very passive aggressive acquisition for her—the gun practically knocks her over the head), Brooke Harrison might not have died, but I still don’t see a better ending for Lily. She’s just too damaged. In a way the murder saves her. This is a young woman who has a very misguided sense of right and wrong, remember. The world she’s grown up in is utterly amoral. She would have drowned in the American university system, probably killed herself, or spent years after in a drug-buffed haze…Who knows? That said, the parental equation is key. Our families are the primary system we encounter and if they fail, I think we spend a lot of time looking for substitutes. I’m told this is true for a lot of animals. Along the same lines, someone recently asked me if the magic bullet was a role model, that if it were ten, fifteen years later and there were visible queer people in the media, and in her school for that matter, Lily would have been ok, but I don’t buy that. Lily’s perceptions were so skewed. I can’t see her putting up posters of Melissa Ethridge instead of Brooke Harrison or heading off to a Pride march. I think she would have sneered at any aspects of an inclusive and welcoming queer culture. One of the big reasons she fixates on Brooke Harrison is that she decides they are both outsiders. And this is the purity of obsession, the object becomes anything you want them to be, but that’s another question…so, no, no turning-back point.

FS: Along the same lines as my previous question, this thread of life imitating art imitating life. Everything in Lillian’s life is somewhat staged – from visiting her grandparents and soaked in soap opera and fake Navajo restaurants to visiting the soundstage for “World Without End” to her own life with her parents – although Lillian takes responsibility for her crime, knows what she has done, on some level, was this murder a fantasy for her – another tragic soap opera episode?

LS: You don’t have to be a sociologist to see how much of popular culture is staged and replicated. I’m thinking Las Vegas, with its little Paris, New York, or video games based on movies based on video game characters. Then there’s the staging of life events like weddings, graduations…I think it’s difficult not to feel like you’re living the same life that millions of people around you are living. Some people are comforted by this, of course; I find it sort of creepy. I made up the fake Navajo restaurant, by the way, but that Old West town really exists…I read about it in a guidebook and thought it was a fascinating juxtaposition to the soap opera world Lily discovers while she’s staying with her grandparents in Arizona. Everything out there is a replication to some extent. But so much of America is like this. I’ve been driving around a lot, touring for this book, and it amazes me how much of the country looks like other parts of the country. So here we have Lily craving authenticity and finding it sometimes in the wrong places, and all of this leads to a tragic murder that is indeed part of her grand fantasy at first. When the book opens she’s almost too excited to tell the police what she’s done—and in the language of TV cop shows. By the end of the book, while there is no easy redemption…I loathe books about redemption, but I think, I hope, she gets to a little bit of clarity. I did a lot of reading for this book about obsessed fans and assassins and found a really interesting article about John Hinckley Jr. that talked about how he became suicidal only after he’d been in prison for years and had been in therapy and started “healing,” for lack of a better word. For the first time, he really saw that he had no relationship to Jodie Foster—remember, he shot Reagan to win her love—and therefore his act was meaningless, making his life meaningless. His entire system collapsed with the dissolution of that fantasy. This seemed very poignant to me, and I thought Lily would go through something similar.

FS: Akin to your award-winning Kamikaze Lust, you artfully undermine stereotypes of gays, porn stars and here in WOWY of TV stars, prisoners and suburban elite – you show them as real, flawed people in both books. What fascinates you about playing with stereotypes in both books?

LS: Stereotypes are fascinating. You say someone’s a “porn star,” for instance, and you can probably come up with a composite of what this person’s life is like before you ever meet them. Where we get into trouble as a society is when we keep people in these boxes and, to get political for a second, use these boxes to determine people’s place in the pecking order. So I think it’s a deeply political statement to break down stereotypes—particularly when you’re dealing with marginalized groups—and get to that point where we’re all alike. It becomes even more interesting when you can get to that common core in a person who you think you’d never have anything in common with, a porn star, a murderer, whoever, based on what you see on the surface. The stereotype. I absolutely love playing with the tension between what a person puts out there for the world to see and what’s hidden underneath.

FS: In WOWY, the book is rife with lost children and parents who either act as children or fall to the whims of their children. Any thoughts on this theme?

LS: Sometimes I feel like a motherless child… But beyond my own bratty lost-child syndrome, I really wanted to explore the notion of parental obligation and what it means to different people. That’s one of the reasons I included the story of Brooke Harrison’s mother in the book, although a few people along the way told me to take it out, that it detracts from the primary narrative. To me it supports the primary narrative in showing a mother who is involved in her child’s life, perhaps too much, but in the end she still has no control over what will happen when she sends that child off into the world. I think being a good parent has got to be the most difficult job out there…sometimes I’m amazed by the ease with which people take it on.

FS: What’s your take on the recent hot trend of reality shows and how “real” they are?

LS: I’ve been both fascinated and repelled by them. Across the board, I can’t stand the entire wedding genre. The privileging of romantic coupling in our culture is so nefarious. I can’t believe the retro-messaging that’s going on there. Oddly, I am mildly obsessed with The Apprentice. I’ve spent so much of my adult life in offices, so the deconstruction of team building and task mastering fascinates me. And, actually, to me it feels less like watching a car wreck than some of the others. But clearly reality shows have completely upped the ante on what it means to be a celebrity. It’s easier than ever to rack up your 15 minutes—you don’t even have to excel at anything anymore, you simply have to show up and humiliate yourself to varying degrees. And, for some reason, there is something so addictive about watching people humiliate themselves. On American Idol last season there was that kid who was so bad he was knocked out in the first round but he got a record contract because he was hilariously bad—and that is the kind of celebrity these shows thrive on. But I can’t imagine when all is said and done that these new “stars” will ultimately have the same kind of cultural currency as movie stars. And we haven’t really seen much crossover in this country in terms of the charismatic reality TV personality who becomes a big TV or movie star, which is good. I think it’s important to maintain a hierarchy of celebrity in America.

FS: What are your bookshelf mainstays?

LS: It’s funny, I’ve recently been consolidating my books and getting rid of some—I’m trying to downsize—so I’ve been asking myself what stays. I answered this question a different way on a panel recently…what are the books that inspire me? I’m babbling because you always want to answer this question in a way that makes you sound thoughtful, intelligent, writerly…I can only think about the short list of the books I’d take to that proverbial desert island (if I were leaving today; tomorrow’s list might be different): Gertrude Stein’s Wars I have Seen, Nightwood by Djuna Barnes, everything by Haruki Murakami, anything by Paula Fox, Underworld by Don Dellilo, Nabokov’s Lolita and Pale Fire, Salinger’s The Catcher in the Rye.

FS: You’ve got a wonderful national tour schedule. Congrats! Any advice for authors venturing off on their first book tour? Do’s/Don’ts. What to bring? How to survive?

LS: Most essential tour item: a sleeping bag. On an indy book tour, you can end up anywhere, so the sleeping bag becomes a security blanket. Most essential tour strategy: double up with a partner—it makes the long hours on the road a lot easier, as long as you don’t start hating each other, which is always a risk. Other than that, the best advice I can give is don’t let the readings get you down. No matter how much attention you get, unless you’re really famous, it’s hard to get a crowd out to readings when you don’t know many people in town. But all of the elements around the reading—the press coverage, the posters in stores, the chance to sign books—will get your work out there in way that never would have happened if you stayed home. And try to enjoy the downtime. Visit with friends you haven’t seen in years and see something of this insane, glorious country.

FS: And the obligatory question: what’s next?

LS: I’m about to start the next novel, which is a bit daunting. Every time before (and there have been a few if you include the unpublished novels), I set out with a specific idea for a story before writing a word. This time I’m feeling myself drawn to themes but nothing has crawled through the murky swamp of my imagination yet. I’m trusting this will happen on the page although I have no idea what sort of book this will eventually produce. But I do have a lot of faith in the process…so, here we go again.