The author on her debut novel set during a single day on Cape Cod, the pressures of growing up in a literary family, and what she’s learned from reading Ali Smith
Miranda Cowley Heller, 59, grew up in New York in a literary and artistic family. She worked as a ghost writer, book doctor and associate editor at Cosmopolitan magazine before becoming senior vice-president and head of drama series at HBO, where she developed shows including The Sopranos and The Wire. Her newly published debut novel, The Paper Palace, is a tense, evocative tale of guilt and forgiveness whose fans include Meg Wolitzer and William Boyd. It pivots on heroine Elle Bishop’s dilemma: to stay with the husband she loves or pursue the life she always imagined sharing with another man, before tragedy intervened.
Your novel takes place during a single day on Cape Cod, with flashbacks stretching 50 years into the past. How did you settle on that structure?
This is going to sound a bit naff, but when I was a kid, I saw the John Lennon quote about how life is what happens while you’re busy making other plans. I cut it out and put it on my wall. That schism was an initial impetus, and then I’ve always had this notion that we’re all just given one old-fashioned carousel of slides, and those slides are the stories that we tell friends or therapists when we’re explaining ourselves. They add up to who you are, they determine your direction. The scenes from the past are the slides of Elle’s life up to the precipice of the 24 hours.
