I am half-way through Marisha Pessl’s novel Special Topics in Calamity Physics. So far, I am really enjoying it. It seems to me that whenever one of these new literary stars comes along, there’s usually an outpouring of sour grapes–you know, people complaining that the writer wouldn’t be getting so much attention if she weren’t so young / good looking / wealthy / well-educated / etc.

I guess I can understand that. After all, if you go by sites like this, everyone in the whole world apparently wants to write a novel. So when someone young and pretty does just that, and it is hailed by publicists as The Next Great Novel Everyone Should Read, and that person manages to not only get the ciritcal acclaim but the six-figure advance too, why… that’s just too much for some people to handle.

Personally, I’m glad that a 27-year-old woman can write a good novel and get a huge advance. As a writer, I see that as an encouraging, rather than discouraging, fact. And as long as the book doesn’t take a serious nose-dive in the second half, I think she deserves all the accolades.

However, lest people think that just because a woman is attractive and talented, writing a novel is somehow easy for her, I’d like to point out something I noticed in a radio interview with Pessl, where she talked about how she managed to find the time to write the book (this is also along the lines of what I was talking about in my last entry). I have transcribed that part of the interview:

Interviewer: What were you doing while you were writing this book?

Pessl: I was working as a financial consultant. That was my job out of college. Thankfully I was surrounded by people who knew I was an English major, so they always suspected I wasn’t in financial consulting for the long haul. When I was doing Excel spreadsheets or PowerPoint presentations, I would take chapters of this book with me and work on them in my downtime and during lunch. One of the reasons I don’t talk about my stories while I am working on them is because there is such an impetus to get it down on paper … and when there is that impetus, you’ll find the time.

Interviewer: Well, you make the time.

Pessl: Exactly, you make the time.

Interviewer: Because you have to be very disciplined to make something like this. Did you find that that was impacting your life? Were you missing out on certain things because you were staying home and working on your novel?

Pessl: Oh absolutely, absolutely. My roommate out of college always found me to be–I wasn’t fun like he was. I was always staying in and my nights were spent writing, because usually during the day, I would try to write, but certainly didn’t have enough time. So of course, that impacted my social life.