I've been following Margo Rabb's blog tour since it started here last week and I've found it to be quite interesting. I always enjoy a good author interview - I like to know where authors get ideas from, what kind of research they've done, how personal books are, etc. - and really enjoyed emailing Scarlett Thomas and putting together my Bookslut interview with her recently. (Lots of folks have read this interview and commented on it as well, so I know it was a very good thing to do for both Scarlett and her many fans.) Margo has done some "conventional" interviews as well, but this blog tour thing really has proven to be more interesting, fun and personal then most interviews get. I'm sure the only reason why that is so is because there are so many different people interviewing Margo.

Consider the following:

In my interview I asked Margo how hard it was to return to such an emotional time in her life (the death of her mother and subsequent illness of her father) for her fiction:

It was often very hard. Sometimes, while I was writing these stories, I’d end up crying hysterically over some stupid thing—losing my keys, or my car breaking down—when in fact I wasn’t crying over the keys or the car at all, but over my mother’s death, since I’d been writing about it intensely. I once attended the funeral of a distant relative I barely knew at all, and during the proceedings I couldn’t stop weeping. People must have thought I was his secret mistress. Of course I was really crying because I’d been dredging up all this grief while writing fiction.

On Day #2, The Old Hag gave a long excerpt of Margo's book, Cures for Heartbreak, for readers, prompting more than one to seek out the book for themselves.

On Day #3: Jen Robinson asked if she had always wanted to be a writer, specfically for teens:

I've wanted to be a writer for as long as I can remember, and I've always loved young adult novels. I'm drawn to teenage narrators since those years still feel so fresh in my mind. As a teen you have so many of the problems an adult has, but no experience or knowledge of how to cope with them. When I was writing CURES, however, I didn't actually think of it as a young adult novel. I thought it was an adult book until the day it sold to a young adult publisher. Even though it featured a teen narrator, I thought the structure of the book (a novel in stories) and the retrospective tone made it adult. I'm convinced that for many novels, the designation of adult vs. young adult is the publisher's decision. The same is true for short stories—the chapter "Seduce Me" in CURES appeared both in Seventeen and the literary magazine Shenandoah, which has an adult readership.

On Day #4 Betsy Bird asked Margo how her writing career got started:

I’ve been writing fiction seriously for fifteen years, and I wrote "World History", which, after many revisions, would later become a chapter in CURES, in 1996. (I didn’t write the book exclusively over all those years, though—in the interim I wrote lots of short stories, part of an abandoned novel, and the Missing Persons series.) As to how I got started with publishing: when I was twenty-three I enrolled in the M.F.A. program at the University of Arizona in Tuscson. As a student, I kept sending stories out nonstop. My rule was to have stories at thirty places at all times. Eventually, after tons of rejections, they started getting plucked out of the slush pile and getting published. After having stories in The Atlantic Monthly and Zoetrope I started hearing from agents, and eventually met my agent, who sold CURES to Delacorte, an imprint at Random House.

On Day #5 Kelly Herold asked some personal questions ("Who's your favorite writer?" Alice Munro. The only fan letter I've ever written (aside from one to Shaun Cassidy when I was 12) was to Alice Munro. She wrote back, though Shaun never did.) And some book questions:

"One sentence on the final page of the novel is particularly moving. Mia thinks, while on the roof with her beau--"cancer boy" Sasha--"If grief had a permanence, then didn't also love?" Do you find both grief and love permanent, or do they both fade over time?"

I think both are absolutely permanent. I'll never get over the grief I've felt for my parents, and will always love them. I've kept a journal almost daily since I was fifteen, and whenever I read back on old loves the feelings return--they haven’t gone away, they're just buried under new ones.

On Day #6, Liz Burns wondered about the book cover (which is really well done):

"'Don't judge a book by it's cover' is one of those lies people tell. Covers do matter; and "Cures for Heartbreak" has a fabulous cover. How excited were you when you saw it? Did you have any input into the creative process or the selection? I know I've spent way too much time looking at all the images to figure out how they fit into the story.

Actually, the current cover isn’t the original one—neither my agent nor I felt the first cover design was right for the book. My editor came up with the idea for the current cover, and when I saw it I absolutely loved it. I’ve heard that lot of authors don’t get any say in their covers—I was lucky.

And on Day #7, Jackie brought up one particularly funny part of the book:

"So, have you got something against Precious Moments? I mean, I, personally, read Mia's hatred of the figurines you called 'Zingy-Dell' as a veiled guise of those creepy porcelain collectibles of my youth. Am I off base here?"

I’ve always found Precious Moments to be pretty horrifying, but when I was writing that scene I googled “figurines� and apparently there are legions of figurine companies out there. We are living in a frighteningly figurine-filled world these days, I’m sorry to say.

There are still three more days in the tour: Little Willow, Bookshelves of Doom and Proper Noun. I think cumulatively these interviews give an outstanding picture of who Margo Rabb is and how her new book came to be. It's a very thorough and well balanced way to interview and a lot more authors need to be thinking about doing this.

Margo got the word out on her book to thousands of readers during this tour - when's the last time anyone saw that kind of group at the local B&N?