Jean Hanff Korelitz: ‘I wanted to be a literary novelist. But I realised that I liked plot’

The author of the book behind TV smash The Undoing talks about her new novel The Plot, a thriller about plagiarism – and how she fell for Hugh Grant

In January 2020, the American novelist Jean Hanff Korelitz was “all in all, not in a great place”, despite the runaway success of the HBO series The Undoing, based on her novel You Should Have Known. She was extremely anxious about a new virus in China that she was reading about (she reads a lot of books on epidemiology). “I was pretty much the only person I knew at that point who was really freaking out,” she says cheerfully from her bedroom in upstate New York, her dog Sherlock snoozing serenely beside her. “And I was really freaking out. It felt like we were in the opening chapters of Stephen King’s The Stand.” She was also furious about the first impeachment of President Trump, the outcome of which seemed all too clear. “I think if I had been scared without being angry, or I had been angry without being scared, it wouldn’t have been so combustible, but I was both.”

More personally, she was exhausted by wrestling with the second draft of a novel that was refusing to come together. She was so nervous about a meeting with her editor, who had already turned the book down once, that she forced her husband, the Pulitzer prize-winning Irish poet Paul Muldoon, to come with her. He waited in a nearby coffee shop while she went off to her publishers in a state of “total meltdown”. Her editor still didn’t think the book was ready, but suddenly an idea “just popped” into Korelitz’s head, and she began outlining a story that she barely knew herself. “I’d gone into that meeting unable to sell one novel and apparently I had left with a two-book deal, which I’ve never had before.”

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from The Guardian https://ift.tt/3iGAFtb