I’m pleased to welcome Michele Young-Stone, whose debut novel, THE HANDBOOK FOR LIGHTNING STRIKE SURVIVORS, was chosen as an “Emerging Author” pick by Target and is being featured in Target stores nationwide. The novel is in the running for The First Novelist Award and Michele is being considered for a fellowship to Bread Loaf. 

Q. Tell us about your book and what inspired you to write it. 

From the title, you might think it was an actual handbook or focused solely on lightning, but it’s actually a novel that uses lightning as a metaphor for those things that happen to us that we have no control over. The book tells the stories of two disparate characters, Becca and Buckley, who are seemingly unconnected. It is not a love story. It’s a story about how we save one another. It’s a book about family and forgiveness, about starting over. It’s peppered with zany characters, from a gothic art student to a lecherous professor to a salty sailor. The book is full of reversals, and as Publisher’s Weekly and Our State Magazine have pointed out,  the characters are dysfunctional. They’re as real as you or me.  

Q. Did you need to do any special research for the book? If so, what’s one of the most interesting facts you discovered?

I had to extensively research lightning. Between every chapter there is an excerpt from “The Handbook for Lightning Strike Survivors,” which the character Buckley writes. The most surprising fact I learned is that only 50 percent of people struck by lightning seek medical attention. I bet the percentage is actually even lower.  Having been struck, I know that victims are in severe shock, and oftentimes don’t go to the hospital because they know that no one will believe them. 

Q. Many people are content to just be readers. How did you become a writer? 

Born to it. As soon as I could write, I started writing stories and poems. I always knew that I wanted to be a published writer. I wanted to make people feel the world as intensely as I feel it. 

Q. What do you like to do when you’re not writing? 

Play baseball with my family. Go to the gym. Paint and make collages.

Q. What are you reading right now? 

MIDDLESEX  by Jeffrey Eugenides.

Q. If you were stranded on that proverbial deserted island, what five books would you want to have with you? 

THE WORLD ACCORDING TO GARP, THE TIN DRUM, a book of great works of art, I KNOW THIS MUCH IS TRUE, SULA and ONE HUNDRED YEARS OF SOLITUDE.

Q. What’s your favorite movie? 

Rushmore.

Q. What’s your favorite food?

Pizza

Q. Cats or dogs?

Dogs

Q. Name one thing that people would be surprised to learn about you. 

I like to play and watch football, college and professional. I coach T-Ball. For some reason, people don’t think of me as “athletic.”  Perhaps I seem too delicate. (Joke!) Oh, and I like to read US Weekly. It makes me laugh.

Today, I welcome Norb Vonnegut, who writes thrillers set on Wall Street. His first, TOP PRODUCER, was a featured pick on Today. His latest is THE GODS OF GREENWICH, released last month by Minotaur Books. It explores the dark side of hedge funds and how far one man will go to join the glitterati of money management. A board member with the American Foundation for the Blind, Norb bicycles whenever possible. Visit him online at www.norbvonnegut.com.

Q. Tell us about your book and what inspired you to write it.

I’ve completed two novels now and am well into a third. All three started with a big idea. In THE GODS OF GREENWICH, I became obsessed with two questions. What would you do to keep up with the Joneses if you run a hedge fund and your life’s ambition is to join the glitterati of money management? How far would you go?

But look. I write fiction, not exposés about money management. In THE GODS OF GREENWICH, thriller fans will focus on Rachel Whittier. She’s a pretty young nurse with a Texas twang. Rachel is almost adorable — except that she runs around the pages whacking nice people in their seventies. Readers will ask why. And how does she fit into a war between a hedge fund in Greenwich and a really nasty bank in Iceland?

I tell the story through the eyes of Jimmy Cusack, a guy enduring the tough times we understand all too well since 2008. Cusack’s company collapses. He falls three months behind in his mortgage. And the bank initiates foreclosure proceedings the day he learns his wife is two months pregnant.

When Cusack joins a hedge fund in Greenwich, he thinks his problems are solved. His cash flow picks up, and life is good. So it seems. The reality is that he just landed in the Bermuda triangle of money management.

Q. Did you need to do any special research for the book? If so, what’s one of the most interesting facts you discovered?

THE GODS OF GREENWICH was a great book to research, in part because Greenwich, Conn., is such a lovely place. The town cares about details, from the unique trashcans that resemble squat, doublewide mailboxes to the black lampposts that look like exclamation points for everything perfect.

Inside Two Greenwich Plaza, an office building outside the train stop, there’s a statue of two wings mounted on a heavy base. The work is entitled “Pegasus.” And because I’m a sucker for mythology, I looked up the genealogy for the winged horse. Here’s what I discovered and subsequently wrote:

“Down in the lobby Cusack headed past a chest-high sculpture of disembodied wings. The artist named the work Pegasus after the horse from Greek mythology whose father was Poseidon the god of everything underwater and whose mother was the snake-headed Medusa. Jimmy thought the lineage a fine choice for a building full of hedge funds.”

Q. Many people are content to just be readers. How did you become a writer?

I’ve been telling stories all my life, as a kid at the dinner table, and later as a stockbroker building a business that peaked at $10 billion in assets in-house. I have a million anecdotes: the misadventures of my mother’s world-famous shrimp casserole; the hornets that ate my first novel; or the most embarrassing author experience of all time. Writing novels seems like a natural progression.

There are short vignettes woven into all my books. In TOP PRODUCER, you’ll meet a stockbroker who takes clients to a strip bar and sees his nanny on stage. And wait until you read about the $1,700/night divorce suite in THE GODS OF GREENWICH or the recipe for Spaghetti Bolognese.

Maybe I should stop here.

Q. What do you like to do when you’re not writing?

I bicycle. Rhode Island is a great place to ride. The shoulders along the roads are extra wide, so I don’t worry about drivers on cell phones inside their SUVs. Not much anyway. My training loop goes from Narragansett to Wickford, about 27 miles with great ocean views. It just doesn’t get any better.

My wife and I once biked 1,500 miles across Europe. We started in Copenhagen and zigzagged our way to the Loire Valley in France. It was one of the greatest adventures of our lives.

Q. What are you reading right now?

Actually, I’m listening to THE FIFTH WITNESS by Michael Connelly. Love it. I’ve listened to thousands of books on tape through the years, which is one reason I got involved with the American Foundation for the Blind, where I am a member of the Board of Trustees. The AFB was the first organization to make audio recordings, although we sold that business a few years ago. We’re about to celebrate our ninetieth anniversary.

Oops, sorry to get off track and plug the AFB. But I care about the organization deeply. Think about all the wonderful hours we spend reading. The AFB makes that experience far more accessible to the visually impaired.

Q. If you were stranded on that proverbial deserted island, what five books would you want to have with you?

Don’t shipwreck me without a box of pencils and a really thick, empty notebook. I’d go crazy. Okay, that said, here are my five:

THE LORD OF DISCIPLINE by Pat Conroy

Anything by James Lee Burke, but I’ll go with THE TIN ROOF BLOWDOWN

SKIN TIGHT by Carl Hiassen

THE KITE RUNNER by Khaled Hosseini

THE IDIOT’S GUIDE TO GETTING OFF DESERTED ISLANDS.

Q. What’s your favorite movie?

Tough, tough question. I love movies. In college I took a course from Alan Trustman, who wrote Bullitt and The Thomas Crown Affair. It was my favorite course of all time.

Where to begin? At various intervals during my life, I would have answered The Great Escape or Cool Hand Luke. With complete conviction, I can also answer The King’s Speech, The Godfather, Schindler’s List or North by Northwest.

Right now, I’ll go with The Departed as my favorite movie. There’s just something about tough guys with Boston accents. The cast is terrific — Jack Nicholson, Matt Damon, Leonardo DiCaprio, Martin Sheen. But I think Dignam (played by Mark Wahlberg) is my favorite character in the movie. I like his line about the mushroom school of management.

Q. What’s your favorite food?

Spaghetti Bolognese. We whip up a big batch every Sunday night for dinner. We can’t afford the recipe I describe in THE GODS OF GREENWICH.

Q. Cats or dogs?

Dogs. There’s something wrong about pets that cough up hairballs. My apologies to cat lovers out there.

Q. Name one thing that people would be surprised to learn about you.

I almost hired an inflatable eighteen-foot union rat to picket outside Morgan Stanley, one of my previous employers. Instead, I exercised discretion and vented my frustrations inside the pages of TOP PRODUCER.

The next writer to tackle the Wednesdays With questionnaire is Wallace Stroby, another veteran of The Star-Ledger. He spent 23 years working in daily newspapers, ending in 2008. He’s the author of four novels — COLD SHOT TO THE HEART, GONE ‘TIL NOVEMBER, THE HEARTBREAK LOUNGE and THE BARBED-WIRE KISS, which was a finalist for the Barry Award for Best First Novel. A graduate of Rutgers University, he’s a lifelong resident of the real Jersey Shore. (Don’t get him started on that.) Visit his website at www.wallacestroby.com.

Q. Tell us about your book and what inspired you to write it.

I’ve always wanted to write a novel where the hero, for want of a better word, was a career criminal. I came close a couple times, especially in GONE ‘TIL NOVEMBER, where half the book was told from the POV of an aging black hitman. But with COLD SHOT TO THE HEART I was able to go all out in that direction, with a lead character — Crissa Stone — who was not only a professional thief, but a woman struggling to make her way in a man’s world.

Q. Did you need to do any special research for the book? If so, what’s one of the most interesting facts you discovered?

Research was tough. I read some magazine/newspaper articles about high-level thieves, and I found a couple books, including a scholarly text titled “Armed Robbers in Action,” that were very useful. I  learned that in almost all cases, women who were in the criminal life had been led into it by a man, usually a lover. That gave me another insight into Crissa — that she would have an older lover in prison whose freedom she was trying to buy. And that relationship made it all the more interesting for me.

Q. Many people are content to just be readers. How did you become a writer?

When I was a child, I was obsessed with classic Universal horror films (still am, to a certain extent),  which were then airing late at night on New York-area TV. In those pre-video days, once you saw the film on television, that was it. You had no further contact with it until they decided to air it again one day — if they ever did. So the first writing I can remember doing — which would be about age 8 — is taking sheets of white, lined paper, one per movie, and writing a synopsis of each film, just to relive it in my head. I think the first one I did was “The Wolf Man.”

By age 10, I was publishing a little mimeographed fanzine called “Speaking of Monsters,” which featured film reviews, trivia quizzes, etc. A mention of it appeared in the legendary FAMOUS MONSTERS OF FILMLAND magazine, and I got about 100 letters in response, from monster fans all over the world who wanted to subscribe. I published seven issues over about a year and half, and then eventually had to give it up. It was just too much work (hey, I was only 11). I still have a couple copies around somewhere.

Q. What do you like to do when you’re not writing?

I don’t know, but I’d love to find out.

Q. What are you reading right now?

Jean-Patrick Manchette’s FATALE, a semi-comic existential French noir. On deck are Lawrence Block’s A DROP OF THE HARD STUFF and an ARC of George Pelecanos’ THE CUT. They’re two of the best crime writers working today.

Q. If you were stranded on that proverbial deserted island, what five books would you want to have with you?

Baltasar Gracian’s THE ART OF WORLDLY WISDOM, to help guide my relations with other people, if any should happen to come along. MOBY-DICK, because it would fit the maritime theme, and last a while. The other three would be THE U.S. ARMED FORCES SURVIVAL MANUAL, BOAT-BUILDING FOR DUMMIES and a flare gun manual, preferably with flare gun attached.

Q. What’s your favorite movie?

TAXI DRIVER. I have an original one-sheet poster from it framed in my living room. You thought I was going to say LOVE, ACTUALLY?

Q. What’s your favorite food?
Chicken and sausage gumbo, if it’s prepared well. Other than that, almost anything southern that’s guaranteed to clog my arteries.

Q. Cats or dogs?
Dogs, though I don’t own either. You can wrestle with a dog, make friends with it. All they want is attention. Cats couldn’t care less.

Q. Name one thing that people would be surprised to learn about you.
I’ve been to more than 100 Springsteen shows over the years, but I’m also a huge fan of minimalist composer Philip Glass. I have dozens of his CDs. His music – especially his film scores – was almost all I listened to while writing COLD SHOT. It seemed to fit the mood.