Kelly Braffet's first novel, Josie and Jack, was published by Houghton Mifflin in 2005. She was born in Long Beach, California, in 1976, and has lived in Arizona, rural Pennsylvania and Oxford, England. She is a graduate of Sarah Lawrence College and Columbia University. She currently lives in Brooklyn, New York, with her husband, the tall and embarrassingly talented writer Owen King. They have three cats; two and half of them are black.

Scott Snyder: One of the (many) things I love about your writing is the way it incorporates elements of all kinds of different genres. In Josie and Jack, there are hints of the gothic, of fairy-tale, of horror – and Last Seen Leaving often reads like a terrific dark thriller or political mystery. First, there's the mystery of what happened to Miranda's father: did he really die in that plane crash? Is he still out there somewhere? Then there's the mystery of dead girls suddenly washing up on the beach – you had me on the edge of my seat. Yet, like Josie and Jack, Last Seen Leaving is constantly defying conventions and expectations. It's a book that surprises at every turn; it seems to be saying that for every mystery solved, another, darker mystery opens. For every secret discovered, another secret reveals itself. Can you speak to this idea a bit?

Kelly Braffet: That's sort of how life is, isn’t it? It's impossible to really understand why another person does anything, and I don't mean that in a cynical "why-bother-let's-all-just-leap-into-the-void" kind of way. I just mean that our understanding of the people around us is limited to what they're able and willing to communicate to us. Even with the world's most willing-and-able person, we still have to take it on faith that what they're telling us is true - and even if what they're telling us is factually true, there's an emotional, experiential truth that we can't access. You can have all the facts of a situation and still not understand it, and I think that's what the characters in Last Seen Leaving are all trying to come to terms with: not just the inability to get the facts (about Miranda's disappearance, or her father's), but the underlying truth that the facts ultimately don't matter that much. From a writing point of view, every character has to want something. I think it's a lot more interesting when they want something impossible.

You’re the second person in two days to mention the genre influences in my writing, so I’ve been thinking about this a little bit. Normally when I’m asked about it, I sort of slip into this rhapsody about how much I love genre fiction – which I do, of course, not just mysteries and thrillers but also fantasy and science fiction, and that probably comes out pretty clearly in my writing. I think, though, that what I really love is strong stories, with exciting plots and lots of forward momentum. One of my favorite interview quotes ever came from Donna Tartt. When her second book came out, she said that there was no reason why a well-written book couldn’t also have an exciting story.

Also, for better or worse, I grew up watching genre television shows and genre movies, just like everyone else. When my older brother and I were kids, we played Star Trek and Star Wars and the A-Team and Indiana Jones in the back yard. And we never said, “Let’s play the scene where Spock dies, or the one where Hannibal saves the rodeo star;” we made up our own stories. I mean, in our world, Yoda played sax in the Rebel Alliance rock band. (My brother made him a little wire saxophone that he could actually hold.) We made up our own stories, because going by the scripts we’d already seen acted out would have been no fun. I still approach storytelling with this idea that, characters and prose aside, something interesting has to happen, or it’s no fun: no fun for the readers, no fun for me.

For some reason, even though that idea would be totally run-of-the-mill if I were working in television or film, it seems to be sort of a curiosity in fiction. Your writing, for instance, also feels very genre-inspired to me – the stories in Voodoo Heart feel like classic adventure stories to me, with modern sensibilities – and I’m pretty sure you’ve been asked about your genre influences, too. What’s funny about that is that I can name a half-dozen writers off the top of my head that – at least to my eye - are writing wonderful literary fiction with a genre twist – Kate Atkinson, Graham Joyce, Michael Chabon, Susanna Clarke, Jonathan Lethem, you – and if I stared at my bookshelf for a few minutes, I bet I could find another dozen pretty easily. So it’s really not that uncommon these days. I’d be hard-pressed to put forth a theory as to why now as opposed to fifteen years ago – and fifteen years ago, I was fifteen myself, so maybe it was happening then too but I was too busy lacing up my combat boots to notice - but whatever the reason, I think it’s wonderful and terribly exciting.

SS: Josie and Jack is a wonderfully claustrophobic book. Narrated exclusively by Josie, the whole thing focuses on the creepy, tender, and slightly incestuous relationship between her and her brother, who live in an isolated mansion in out in the woods. Last Seen Leaving, on the other hand, is a book about how separate our lives are, how little we know about even the people closest to us, and so has a much broader scope. The narrative follows multiple characters closely. Did you find it difficult or liberating (or both) to write from different points of view and to have so much room?

KB: In retrospect, writing Josie Raeburn was incredibly freaking difficult. I had no idea what I was doing when I started Josie and Jack. If I had that idea now, with a little more experience under my belt, I’d probably dismiss it out of hand. A whole novel from the first-person point of view of an extremely isolated teenager who knows almost nothing about the world outside of her house? From a writer’s point of view, that feels like a hell of a hill to climb with any degree of authenticity. I’m still not sure I got to the top of it. It would be sort of interesting to try to write a book like that again, sometime – to see if I could do it when I knew how hard it was, if that makes any sense, and if maybe I could do it a little better.

So, yes, after that, Last Seen Leaving was incredibly liberating. Writing it, I came to feel like there were actually three different voices in the book: in addition to the two main characters, Anne and Miranda, there was another voice that crept into the flashbacks, particularly Miranda’s. That voice is still inside the perspective of the character, but it sometimes knows more than they do. It’s a bit outside time, for one thing – it knows what the results of their actions will be, and it knows how their feelings will change in the future – and it’s also somehow about their experience, rather than inside it. That’s the closest I’ve ever come to writing in the third-person omniscient voice, and it was incredibly fun. I loved being able to tell the reader things the characters didn’t actually know.

SS: What was it like, writing from the point-of-view of both estranged daughter and mother?

KB: It wasn’t really something that I set out to do. My original conception of the book was that it was mostly Miranda’s story, with a few bits of Anne trying to find her. But as soon as I started writing Anne, I realized that a lot of the story was hers. Miranda’s life is, in a lot of ways, the end result of the decisions that Anne made in her marriage and after her husband’s death, and it’s impossible to come to a solid understanding of the one without a solid understanding of the other. In fact, I guess that’s kind of what the book is about: owning the choices, circumstances and experiences that make us who we are.

Because she’s the closest to me in age and experience, Miranda was actually sort of easy to write (although ironing out her relationships was a trial – they’re pretty wrinkled by nature, so the process of picking and choosing which wrinkles needed to stay was hard). By comparison, Anne wasn’t hard, but she was a little intimidating. She’s a forty-eight-year-old widow with an adult daughter. When I started the book, I was twenty-eight, had never been married, and had no kids. I was always very conscious of that difference.

SS: One of the central mysteries of the book has to do with Miranda's father's disappearance. A pilot for a shadowy government funded airline, he vanishes in the jungles of Central America. Though he really doesn't appear in the book at all, he's a vivid character, partly because you write so convincingly about the pilot's life. Did you have to do a lot of research for this aspect of the book?

KB: I did do quite a bit of research, but researching that time in American history was a bit of a challenge. What I really wanted to read was an account by somebody who had actually been there, working for Southern Air Transport or something similar, but nothing like that has been published yet; memoirs from Vietnam-era CIA operatives have just started appearing in the last ten years, and most of those are from high-ranking officials. So the books that I was looking for are still in the future. I don’t doubt that they’ve been written, but they won’t be published for years to come.

So I didn’t have the memoir I wanted, but I did have my father, who was a Marine Aviator during the early seventies. He didn’t do anything shady himself – or so he claims – but through the years, he’s known some pretty interesting characters and amassed an awesome collection of anecdotes. He also helped with the technical side of flying – FAA forms, which kind of aircraft would be used in a specific situation, stuff like that.

And, of course, my real secret weapon is the fact that Anne and Miranda themselves don’t know very much about Nick’s life. The kind of information I was looking for – that elusive CIA memoir – is exactly the information Anne wants. I was really frustrated for a while by not being able to get an exhaustive resource, but eventually I realized that my frustration kind of informed hers.

SS: If you were about to drive the long haul from Arizona to Virginia Beach, what five CD's would you bring with you?

KB: Actually, I could do it with two: one fast, loud mix for highway driving, and one sleepy, sad mix for late night driving. But if my CD burner broke, I’d bring Forever by Cracker, So Much for the Afterglow by Everclear, Fizzy Fuzzy Big & Buzzy by The Refreshments (a nearly perfect, and highly underrated, album), and the eponymous Social Distortion album. I’d also bring a Greatest Hits album, either Them with Van Morrison or Morrissey – I’d have to flip a coin.

SS: What’s the best book you’ve read by someone you have no connection to?

KB: How many degrees of separation are involved in “no connection?” To be safe, I’m going to go classic: Sweet Thursday by John Steinbeck.

SS: Do you have any good book tour stories?

KB: When I read from Josie and Jack at the Barnes & Noble in the Pennsylvania town where I went to high school, a few of the faculty came, including my guidance counselor. There was also a reporter there from the local paper, who wrote a story about the reading for the society page, if you believe it. Anyway, I was terribly nervous, and it didn’t help when, about two seconds into my reading, I realized that I’d chosen the passage where Josie’s father calls public schools “assembly-line idiot factories catering to the lowest possible denominator” (or something like that). As soon as I read that line, I stopped reading, pointed him out and sheepishly warned him that it was going to get worse. He shrugged and said, “It’s true, isn’t it?” The reporter wrote about me stopping and pointing him out, but she left out his response. Which was probably a good idea, since he still works for the school.

SS: What about weird fan stories?

KB: I don’t think I’m quite at the weird-fan level yet – everybody I’ve ever met or communicated with about Josie and Jack has been really cool. I did recently have a guy tell me that he went back and re-read my book after a nasty break-up. I thought that was rather touching, really, but if he’d asked I probably would have recommended something with a slightly more positive view of human interaction.

Visit Kelly Braffet's Web site.
Purchase Kelly's books online!
Small Spiral Notebook's review of Josie & Jack.

Scott Snyder's first collection of stories, Voodoo Heart, is coming out in June from the Dial Press. His fiction has appeared in Zoetrope, Tin House, one-story, and Epoch. He teaches creative writing at Columbia University in NY. Before returning to NY, he worked at Disney World in Orlando as a janitor, a roller-skating janitor, and eventually a character - playing Pluto, Eyeore and Buzz Lightyear, among others. He is also a big Elvis fan (not in an ironic way).