Author Joan Leegant on Inspiration

I’m one of those fiction writers who doesn’t plan the story out ahead of time. Instead, I’ll conjure some characters and a setting and follow them to see what they do and where they take me. I might have a dim sense of their struggles and passions, what might be driving them, but I try not to think about that too much before I start writing. Otherwise the story tends to come out as too engineered; there’s no room for surprise, for letting the characters develop the way they need to develop, not the way I might want them to develop.

With Wherever You Go, I knew only two things when I started the book: that I wanted to write a novel set in Israel and that I wanted to write about young Americans in Israel. I’ve spent a lot of my adult life either in Israel – since 2007, I’ve been teaching in Tel Aviv a semester each year—or thinking or reading or worrying about Israel. So it was a natural place for me to explore through fiction. I came up with 3 Americans, all in the country for different reasons. Finding the characters sounds straightforward, but coming up with those particular characters took several years. Though the character Yona is the first one you meet in the book, she was the last one I wrote. For a long time, I had another woman in her place, a holdover from an early draft that had a very different tone and an entirely different storyline. Eventually I realized that the first woman didn’t belong in the book; she wasn’t a fit. I had to send her back to her own story and find someone else. When I found Yona, the novel began to fall into place.

Not surprisingly, my characters took me straight into the heart of the West Bank and the contentious matter of the settlement cause. I’m very interested in people who attach themselves to causes, who live for “the movement,” whatever that movement might be—and that’s what I wanted to explore in the book. What draws people to causes, especially ones that involve violence? How much is ideology and how much is psychology? The power of such fierce attachments was something I first became aware of when I was a student during the Vietnam war. There were anti-war protests and feminism and all kinds of radical movements sweeping the US then. People who exhibit that kind of revolutionary fervor fascinate me.

I’m also very interested in religion and how embracing a religious discipline can save a person, but can also destroy a person. This was something I explored in the book through the character of Mark Greenglass, who’s lost his religious passion when the book opens and doesn’t know why. I didn’t know why either, so I had to write the book to find out. That’s one of the pleasures of writing fiction that you don’t plan out ahead of time. You get to find out what happens the same way a reader does: by discovering it as you go.

Joan Leegant is the author of WHEREVER YOU GO, and AN HOUR IN PARADISE. Formerly an attorney, she taught at Harvard University for eight years. Since 2007, she has lived half the year in Tel Aviv where she is the visiting writer at Bar-Ilan University and lectures for the U.S. State Department. When not in Israel she lives in Newton, Massachusetts.

Thanks so much to Joan for taking the time to stop by In The Next Room. You can find my review of her beautiful yet horrifying novel, Wherever You Go, here. To connect with Joan, visit her website, http://www.joanleegant.com/.

Wherever You Go by Joan Leegant

Wherever You Go by Joan Leegant weaves together three individuals whose lives become entangled in the volatile climate of Israeli society. Yona travels to Israel to try to mend things with her sister, estranged for over ten years, a woman whose life has become the polar opposite of her own. Meanwhile Mark travels back to New York City, the place where he was saved from drugs by his faith, from Jerusalem, to give lectures on the Talmud, trying to ignore the sensation that what he is speaking about isn't what he believes anymore. Finally, Aaron is a college dropout who has a famous writer for a father but can't seem to find a place he belongs so he quits school during his year-abroad and joins an extreme Israeli fringe group. Yona, Mark and Aaron are tied together by the impact faith and Judaism will have on their lives, changing them forever in a moment that can never be undone.

Wherever You Go is the debut novel from Leegant, but it is filled with a wisdom and maturity that is far from amateur. It's an intelligent book, and despite it's slender size- under 300 pages- it is certainly not a light read. The reader is instantly sucked into a rich and vibrant world, beautiful yet violent, three lives teetering on the edge of breaking. Wherever You Go is incredibly powerful, beautiful, well written, and absolutely horrifying at the same time. Two weeks after finishing it I'm still unable to get it out of my mind. The stories it tells are both unique- I've never read anything like it before- and extremely relevant. Leegant has her finger on the pulse of Israeli society and takes the reader into this foreign yet fascinating environment with skill of an insider, unsurprising considering she spends part of her time living in Israel while teaching there.

All the reasons that Wherever You Go is upsetting are the same reasons it is such an important book. Normally when I read a book which follows the narrative of multiple characters I find myself more enchanted by one storyline and impatient for my "favourite" character to return to centre stage. In this case, all three stories are not only absolutely riveting, but definitely distinct from each other as well, three separate voices that at no point become muffled together. I only wished that a little more time had been spent with the characters near the ending; possibly it is my own desire for closure but the conclusion felt slightly rushed. Perhaps being Jewish myself biased me when deciding to pick up Wherever You Go, but regardless of the reader's faith- if any-  the novel offers complex characters as well as a thought-provoking narrative and compelling setting.

My biggest complaint? That Leegant's work isn't more widely available, I had to special order her first book An Hour in Paradise, which is a collection of short stories, from the States. Fortunately, I know it'll be worth the wait. I'll also be certain to pre-order whatever Leegant publishes next and if there's a smile on my face when it arrives it's not because I expect the story to be completely bright and cheerful but because I know that whatever she writes it'll be incredibly beautiful and powerful, just like Wherever You Go is.

Release Date: July 10th, 2010
Pages: 272
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This review was a part of TLC Book Tours. Click here to read what other tour hosts thought. For the purpose of this review I was provided with a copy of the book which did not require a positive review. The opinions expressed in this post are completely my own.