Kim Edwards, author of the huge bestseller The Memory Keeper's Daughter, has just released her first new book since that success in 2006. It is called The Lake of Dreams and she is currently on tour across the country promoting the book.
I caught up with Kim at The Margaret Mitchell House in Atlanta and we sat down for a chat about her earlier success and the release of the new book. Here is a little of our conversation:
DB: How has your life changed since The Memory Keeper’s Daughter became such a big hit?
KE: Well it happened so quickly. It was really quite a whirlwind. The paperback was published in May of 2006 and by July, it had hit the New York Times bestseller list and it stayed there for two and a half years. So, for a long time there was a lot of travel and a lot of excitement and talking to people and interviews and so forth, and then I tried to take the changes in my life pretty incrementally. Before all this happened, I was in a pretty happy place and I didn’t want to throw everything over and move to Tahiti or something like that. I wanted to just slowly do some things with my family to celebrate the success of the book. But I’d say my life is substantially the same.
DB: Did the success of The Memory Keeper’s Daughter put a lot of pressure on you as you were writing the next book?
KE: Well, it would have except that I had started the new book, The Lake of Dreams, before The Memory Keeper’s Daughter was published so I got interrupted with all the travel and excitement, but I had a place to come back to, which was wonderful. I’m grateful that I did because I had already found the voice and was already captivated by the story and interested in it. It was good to be able to come back to the familiar, but I will say it took me a couple of months to make that transition. At first I felt very scattered and I didn’t have that sense of the world watching. So I turned off the Internet and took the games off the computer and focused.
DB: The Lake of Dreams is set primarily in the Finger Lakes region in New York state and also partly in Japan, both places you have lived. Why did you want to go back to those familiar places with this book?
KE: I like to use familiar geography when I write because it frees up my imagination for the characters. If I’m grounded in a place I understand then I can really focus on the story and characters. I did the same thing in The Memory Keeper’s Daughter, which is set in Lexington, Kentucky where I live. But I wanted to use the Finger Lakes especially because I grew up there and it is very beautiful part of the world.
DB: The book is basically the story of Lucy Jarrett and her discovery of a part of her family’s past that has been kept secret. There are really three periods of time in the book that are all connected. There’s the present where Lucy has come home to the Lake of Dreams, the time of Lucy’s father’s death 10 or so year’s earlier and the time of Rose and Iris in the early 1900s. So tell me about those three time periods for you and how they all connect and why it was important to tell this story this way.
KE: At first when I started writing The Lake of Dreams, I started with Lucy’s story in the present and the story 10 years prior when her father drowned just as she was leaving for college. So that dynamic was very clear to me. I also had a sense that there was something in the deeper past, but it wasn’t until I started writing that the voice of one of those characters sort of became very persistent. So I thought I would just write them down and get them out of the way so that I could get back to Lucy’s story. Then the past story just became really important. They’re really two parallel stories that unfold in The Lake of Dreams and I became very engrossed in both of them.
As the interview continued, we talked about some of the themes in The Lake of Dreams and a little inside joke Kim tucked about half way in to the book! Listen to the interview on MidtownReview.com by clicking here.
Though the book is very different than her first, I can tell you that there are themes, time periods and secrets-a-plenty to keep your book club talking for hours!
-- Dana Barrett, Contributing Editor
