Interview

Chris Bohjalian discusses his 2012 novel, Sandcastle Girls, which explores the Armenian Genocide - a novel which he says has been gestating since his childhood visits to the home of his Armenian grandparents.

For additional interviews with Chris Bohjalian, please see the reading guides for Midwives and Skeletons at the Feast

The story behind the story: The kernel that led to the novel, The Sandcastle Girls

Sometimes my novels have positively elephantine gestation periods - and even that, in some cases, is an underestimate. A mother elephant carries her young for not quite two years; I have spent, in some cases, not quite two decades contemplating the tiniest seed of a story and wondering how it might grow into a novel.

Moreover, in the quarter-century I've been writing books, I've realized two things about a lengthy gestation period. First, the longer I spend allowing an idea to take root inside me, the better the finished book; second, the more time I spend thinking about a book, the less time I spend actually writing it. Here's a confession: The first draft of the novel for which I may always be known best, Midwives, took a mere (and eerily appropriate) nine months to write. Skeletons at the Feast, another book I will always be proud of, took only 10. But I spent a long time pondering both of these novels before ever setting a single word down on paper.

Perhaps in no case has the relationship between ...