Author Biography | Interview | Books by this Author | Read-Alikes
Joy Fielding submitted her first story to Jack and Jill when she was eight years old, and the story was rejected. At twelve, she wrote her first TV script, the story of a twelve-year-old girl who murders her parents. Like the magazine story, it, too was rejected, but the thought of it caused her parents many a sleepless night. In her last year of high school her English teacher announced to the class that Joy Fielding was going to be a writer, though she hadn't decided that yet for herself.
At the University of Toronto, Fielding decided she wanted to be an actress. She performed in numerous campus productions and starred in the student movie, "Winter Kept Us Warm", a fixture on the art house circuit even today. After she graduated from the University of Toronto in 1966, with a BA in English literature, she went into acting full-time, moving to Los Angeles, where she acted in an episode of Gunsmoke and got to kiss Elvis Presley. Eventually she returned to Toronto and went back to writing.
Fielding is an avid golfer and the mother of two adult daughters. She is a Canadian citizen and divides her time between Toronto and Palm Beach, Florida.
Her works include The Best of Friends (1972), The Transformation (1976), Kiss Mommy Goodbye (1981), The Other Woman (1983), See Jane Run (1991), Tell Me No Secrets (1993), Don't Cry Now (1995), Grand Avenue (2001), Whispers and Lies (2002), Mad River Road (2006), Still Life (2009), Now You See Her (2011) and Shadow Creek (2012).
Joy Fielding's website
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The First Time moves back and forth between three points of view, Mattie, Kim, and Jake. Why did you create three perspectives? Was it difficult to create Jake's point of view?
This is the first time in a long while that I've told a story from several different perspectives, and the first time ever that I've attempted to speak with a man's voice. My readers know that I don't like to repeat myself, that I make a conscious effort to do something a little different with each book, that I like to experiment with different styles. It was fun watching this complex story unfold through the eyes of three different people, to try to convey the wide variety of emotions each is feeling, to make the reader understand and care about all of them.
Surprisingly, writing from the male perspective wasn't as difficult as I thought it might be. I just thought of the various men in my life, husband, friends, relatives, and tried to imagine how they might think and react in similar circumstances, remembering how they had reacted in other situations and expanding on that.
The teenage daughter Kim…is she based on your own daughter? Why did a teenage character play such a major role in this story?
As the mother of two ...
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