Author Interview with Karen Thompson Walker

1. The science behind the slowing and the events that follow in The Age of Miracles was really interesting, how did you come up with it? Did you decide on the story or the series of natural disasters first?

I got the idea from something that really happened. In 2004, the earthquake that caused the tsunami in Indonesia also affected the rotation of the earth, shortening our 24-hour days by a few microseconds. I began to wonder right away what would happen if a much larger change ever took place. From the beginning of the process, though, I also knew that I wanted to tell this story through the perspective of a woman looking back on her childhood and that the events in her life would be central to the novel. I wrote the book in chronological order, gradually and simultaneously charting the small-scale events in Julia’s life as well as the large-scale consequences of the global disaster.

2. As an editor as well as a writer, do you have to take yourself out of one mindset in order to do the other task? If so, how do you manage and what's the difference? Does being an editor give you any advantage as a writer, and vice versa? 

For me, the two things are intimately connected, and I do both at the same time. I like to edit as I write, sentence by sentence, rearranging the words again and again as I go.

3. What five books are you most excited about at the moment? They can be ones you've read recently, are reading, or are just really looking forward to.

The Buddha in the Attic by Julia Otsuka
The Girl Giant by Kristen den Hartog
The Life Boat by Charlotte Rogan
Swamplandia! by Karen Russell
The Marriage Plot by Jeffrey Eugenides

4. Where do you do your reading and writing?

I wrote almost all of The Age of Miracles at one desk in a little studio apartment in Brooklyn, in the mornings before work. I still do most of my writing at home, but now that I’ve left my full time job, I sometimes also write at nearby coffee shops, especially in the afternoons. As for reading, I read in all kinds of places, wherever I happen to be.

5. How did you feel when you found out about the bidding war and incredible support behind The Age of Miracles? Did you do anything to celebrate selling your first novel (and with such fanfare!)?

Shocked. (And elated, obviously.) I’m still a bit shocked, actually. I knew from working in book publishing how hard it is to sell a novel, so I was really bracing for disappointment. My husband and I went out to dinner to celebrate that first night, but we both had a hard time believing that it was real.

6.  Now that you've published your awesome debut novel, what's next?

I’m working on a new novel, but I feel too superstitious to say much about it. It’s about another extreme situation, though, and I’m exciting to settle into it.


Karen Thompson Walker is a graduate of UCLA and the Columbia MFA program. A former book editor, she wrote The Age of Miracles in the mornings before work. Born and raised in San Diego, California, she now lives in Brooklyn with her husband. 

Thanks so much to Karen for stopping by In The Next Room! To learn more about her incredible debut novel, The Age of Miracles, stop by the book's website www.TheAgeofMiracles.com, and Facebook page.  Click here to read my review of The Age of Miracles at In The Next Room.

The Age of Miracles by Karen Thompson Walker

The Age of Miracles by Karen Thompson Walker

Release Date: June 19th 2012
Pages: 288
Format: Hardcover
Source: Publisher / TLC Book Tours
Publisher: Random House
Buy It: Book Depository

On a seemingly ordinary Saturday in a California suburb, Julia and her family awake to discover, along with the rest of the world, that the rotation of the earth has suddenly begun to slow. The days and nights grow longer and longer, gravity is affected, the environment is thrown into disarray. Yet as she struggles to navigate an ever-shifting landscape, Julia is also coping with the normal disasters of everyday life—the fissures in her parents’ marriage, the loss of old friends, the hopeful anguish of first love, the bizarre behavior of her grandfather who, convinced of a government conspiracy, spends his days obsessively cataloging his possessions. As Julia adjusts to the new normal, the slowing inexorably continues.

What an incredible debut novel. Easily one of my favourite novels of 2012, The Age of Miracles captured my attention from the first paragraph. It begins:

"We didn’t notice right away. We couldn’t feel it.
We did not sense at first the extra time, bulging from the smooth edge of each day like a tumor blooming beneath skin."

This perfect simplicity, this beautiful description, is a staple of Walker's and though at first I was riveted by her words, they would have been nothing without a strong and dimensional cast of characters to back them up. At the center of the story is Julia, an adult reflected back on when everything changed, when the earth began to slow on its axis and time piled up, each day getting longer than the last. Even though Julia is twelve at the time of the story, The Age of Miracles isn't young adult because she has the adult perspective. At the same time, the clarity and ease of Walker's writing, as well as the content, means that like Vaclav and Lena by Haley Tanner this could definitely appeal to a younger audience too.

Despite all the natural disasters that occur, The Age of Miracles is not a traditional science fiction or post-apocalyptic story; it's really a coming of age novel. Even as the world around her falls apart, Julia still has to navigate the normal struggles of growing up: friendship, love, family. It is these struggles that allowed me to connect with her as a reader, and I found them realistic and heart-breaking. At its core, this is a story about Julia, and not the broken planet.

Still, as a science grad student myself I sometimes have a hard time suspending belief when reading novels where things happen without explanation (like The Way We Fall by Megan Crewe). While I'm not entirely sure why the slowing occurred, otherwise the vision of the future that Walker creates comes with the appropriate science to back it up. What I mean is that the events that follow have logic behind them– for example, as the days slow, certain plants can no longer survive in the extended darkness. Each disasters that follows has a similar reasoning behind it, so that as a reader I was never thrown out the story and left questioning but instead remained fully immersed in Walker's world.

Even though I enjoyed Walker's vision of the future, ultimately, it is the words not the world that made me fall in love with this novel. Combining a simple and eloquent voice, perfect moments of description, and genuine characters, Walker's debut novel The Age of Miracles was everything I hoped it would be from that first perfect sentence.