THE
NEXT is Gangi’s first novel, and has been met with astounding praise.
Cathleen Schine called it “an elegantly written, thoughtfully sharp and surprisingly touching whirlwind of a book.”
Erica Jong said, “I was instantly hooked by Gangi’s vivid
writing, her psychological acumen, and her sharp observation of love and
life. She is a fascinating writer who understands love, sex, men, and
women."
The
tale will hold you captive from the start: Joanna DeAngelis dies wrong.
Consumed by breast cancer, betrayals, disappointments, and a blind lust
to avenge a badly broken heart,
she turns away from her devoted daughters and dog on her deathbed, and
finds herself alone in a darkness of her own making. With no light to
guide her to death’s promised land of peace, Joanna’s ghost plots a
course for revenge on her much-younger ex, Ned
McGowan, the man who abandoned her to take up—and trade up—with another
woman. Joanna’s desperate needs—when she was alive, and now, while
she’s trying to die properly—inspire a deep descent into the seat of the
soul, an unflinching look at choices and consequences,
at the last gasps of lust and love, and the wisdom to know how to go.
But
an equally compelling story is the one of Gangi, who has been living
with breast cancer for 15 years and wrote this first book in her late
fifties.
______________________________________________
A
Conversation with Stephanie Gangi, author of The Next
Right
off the bat, do you believe in ghosts?
In a way I do. Not apparitions rattling
chains or howling through hallways, no. But the ghosts that haunt me in the dark
are the lives and loves lost to me, my secret regrets, missed chances, truths revealed
in ways that I couldn’t see. The memory of crossing the borders of another
person, spirits touching, by way of desire and intimacy. The quest to find that
again! Some of the ghosts swirling inside me are well past their expiration
dates. An old hurt or disappointment rises up and I think, “Not you again, I
thought I laid you to rest.”
Why did
you decide to make The Next a ghost
story?
I was struggling with how to write a
revenge story with which I felt comfortable. I guess I had to give myself
permission to be angry. To imagine doing violence. I chose the ghost device so
I could just let it rip, unrestrained, but as I wrote further and further in to
the story, kind of going deeper into the whys of revenge, rather than just the
acts of revenge, it really felt right. The ghost metaphor fit: To be a woman of
a certain age, the loss of visibility. To be sick, a distortion of your old
healthy self. To be uncoupled and unsure of who you are alone. Older, sick,
single, unseen.
You
are, as you say, a woman of a certain age and this is your debut. Where’ve you
been?
Good question. I guess I’m a late bloomer.
I’ve always been writing, and always had “real” jobs that involved writing and
editing. Life happened, and I was detoured by all the things one is detoured
by: relationships, family, finances, health issues. Lots of writers manage to
work beautifully alongside similar challenges. I didn’t, until I did.
Those
challenges are explored in The Next.
The voice is so authentic, it’s hard not to hear it as autobiographical. Is it?
I’m not a ghost yet, but yes, there’s a lot
that happens in the book that has happened to me.
Like Joanna, I have two daughters, I live
in Manhattan, and I’ve been in relationships that ended in ways that left me
feeling disappointed. I’ve had my feelings hurt, I’ve been angry. I’ve faced
getting older, I’ve faced serious illness, I’ve had to confront how I spend my
days in light of that. Also, I have a very big poodle.
Having said that, I’ve also been very lucky
in love. I’ve had great big romances with good men that didn’t last forever,
but that doesn’t mean they were any less wonderful.
And I’ve never taken revenge. That’s not to
say I haven’t thought about it!
You
mentioned serious illness. Breast cancer?
Yes. I’ve been living with breast cancer
for 15 years or so. A bunch of recurrences along the way. I’m on drug treatment
now and it’s going well for me. I feel great and grateful for the care I’ve
gotten over the years.
Fifteen
years – it’s hard to imagine coping with breast cancer for so long, and yet
it’s hopeful for women newly diagnosed.
Breast cancer has become a chronic illness
rather than a death sentence. A cultural shift in thinking has taken place over
the years of my own experience with the disease. I feel like the poster child
for BC as chronic illness, and very very lucky to have it under control.
And, I have had to figure out how to live
with it. Not battle it. Not just survive it.
Figuring all this out – how to live fully
when well, how to stay ‘you’ when sick – takes up a lot of energy, honestly.
Psychic, physical, financial, you name it. The truth is, it all kept nudging me
along to now, to the next. And The Next!
For
the protagonist in The Next, falling
in love with a younger man is very good medicine until it runs out. Your
protagonist gets betrayed when she’s sick, and then obsessed with the betrayal.
I suffered a broken heart pretty late in
life. It was tough. I spent an embarrassing number of hours rehashing the
details, the injustices, the drama with my friends. And I could see how one
could become kind of obsessive, have it take over and turn into rage if the
stakes were high enough.
During the dying days of my relationship, who
explodes on the scene but Adele, with the record 21. I would walk down Broadway and it seemed that every shop was
blasting Adele, Rumour Has It, Rolling in the Deep, Someone Like You, to name
the most obvious. Those songs felt like anthems for betrayed women. For
revenge.
A year later I read Gone Girl. I thought, I want to do that. Little did I know how
hard it was! Anyway, forces converged. I stopped whining and started writing.
Speaking
of Adele, you’ve got a lot of music in the book.
I’m sort of surprised that music doesn’t
permeate more fiction. I hear a song and remember someone, or a moment in time,
or a scent or even, who I was once. Melodies and lyrics pop up in my mind all
the time. Certainly, I can’t imagine falling in love – making love – without
specific songs providing the soundtrack. And no break-up and its subsequent
wallowing is complete without an anthem. Without Adele!
The
title combined with the cover imagery is so intriguing and mysterious. How did
it come about?
The
Next was my first title, first draft. I kept lists
– dozens and dozens –but I always came back to The Next. When I’d test it, readers would say, “The Next what?” And I loved that
response. Because yeah, exactly. Leaving it so open-ended really worked for me.
When Jen Enderlin at St. Martin’s bought the book, she never questioned the
title. I finally got the nerve one day to say, “So, how do you feel about the
title?” and she said, “What do you mean? The title’s perfect.” That was when I knew
I was with the right editor!
When I saw the current cover – there was no
question. They nailed it. It’s a fantastic image that enhances the story and
the title. And the blue was especially calibrated for The Next. Olga Grlic, the creative director at St. Martin’s, calls
it The Next Blue. I love that! My own
blue!
You
alternate between a first person voice, and a close third person. Why did you
choose to tell the story that way?
It was definitely a critical choice.
Joanna’s voice is very strong. She’s ricocheting between rage and sorrow and
joy with extreme intensity, and I thought an entire narrative in that voice
might veer off into a rant. I wanted to let her rant a little, but not a whole
book’s worth.
As I wrote, the other characters – Ned,
Laney and Anna (and Tom!) – came so much to life that a close third-person
worked for them. Alternating the chapters gave me the dimension I was looking
for and also, balanced out Joanna’s intensity.
I was so committed to this structure that
towards the final draft, I separated the two narrative voices and revised so
they could basically stand alone, and then wove them back together. I tried to
make sure that whatever was going on with Joanna teed up the third person
stories, chapter by chapter.
Tom!
The relationship between Joanna and Tom in The
Next is so affecting. Did you plan to write a dog story?
I have a great dog, Enzo, who is absolutely
the model for Tom. He’s a 90-lb standard and just the most expressive and sweet
dog I’ve ever owned. He has literally propped me up when I was sick.
I’d not intended to have Tom become such a
crucial character in the novel. He just popped up one day and I let him have
free run on the page (probably because Enzo is always nudging my arm to get me
to stop typing!). What happened next, the way Tom evolved within the world of
the story, was magical for me. Completely unexpected.
Dogs –and Tom, the poodle in the story –
embody old-fashioned values: faithfulness, reliability, devotion, pure love. I
think Tom displays all of those things in a way that Joanna recognizes.
At
its heart, The Next is a
mother-daughter story. What do your own daughters think?
They think it’s too sexy! Also, they’re
very proud.
The
book is so cinematic. Did you have movies in mind when you wrote it?
I really didn’t but that was a universal
comment from readers along the way.
I was reading a lot of fiction – trying to
see behind the curtain – and reading about craft to teach myself to write a
novel. To get a break, I binged on Breaking Bad, which was enormously helpful –
Walt, after all, is a dying man trying to get what he deserves, with twisted
scruples and a ticking clock.
How
was the experience of writing your first novel? And then selling it!
Fun! I taught myself something new in my
late fifties. I did something I’d always wanted to do. I made my heart’s desire
my priority. I flopped a few times along the way but I didn’t stop. I
course-corrected and pushed on. I had no social life, I was writing at four in
the morning and then going to my day job. But it was a phenomenal experience.
Selling it, honestly, was icing on the
cake. I truly mean that. Not that it’s not fantastic – like winning the lottery
at my age, especially with the tremendous support from St. Martin’s – but I
really did feel very gratified to just write this book and finally meet this
other me. The writer me.
What
are you working on?
Novel #2, still no title. This one’s a
little different – a bigger canvas in a way. It’s another mother-daughter story
that begins in the 1960s and wraps up today. The mother is not so literal a
ghost as in The Next, but she’s still
haunting everyone. I can’t say more – too new and exciting. I don’t want to
jinx it.
