The Christmas Cookie Club by Ann Pearlman is a first novel about "a group of women who get together once a year and bring cookies, give to charity and tell the story of what's going on in their lives," as Curr put it. Pearlman has been a family psychotherapist for 30 years and "really knows the dynamics women face in their lives and tells it with deep understanding." At the same time, "it's fun."
Pearlman has also written Getting Free: Women and Psychotherapy, Keep the Home Fires Burning and Infidelity: A Memoir and, for a change of pace, was co-writer of Inside the Crips: Life Inside L.A.'s Most Notorious Gang by Colton Simpson, the memoir of a former Crips member.
Emily Bestler, v-p and executive editorial director, called The Christmas Cookie Club "warm, inspiring and wise, but with a bit of an edge" because of some of its topics: adultery, divorce, a baby in jeopardy, a son has died. "It's Desperate Housewives meets The Friday Night Knitting Club."
Amazingly the story of a club of a dozen women who meet once a year and bring cookies and talk about the cookies and their lives as they "sit around and have wine and dance to the radio" is based on a club that Pearlman has been a member of for many years.
The Christmas Cookie Club features a recipe at the beginning of each chapter. "The recipes are delicious and were vetted by Williams-Sonoma tasters," Bestler said. "We're going to have a great time with publicity," which will include a lot online, cooking and food angles as well as the obvious: reaching out to book clubs.
CBS, S&S's parent company, has picked up The Christmas Cookie Club as a movie. The book will be served up October 20.
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Here Ann Pearlman answers questions we posed:
On your nightstand now:
The Guernsey Literary and Potato Peel Pie Society by Mary Ann Shaffer and Annie Barrows, The Elegance of the Hedgehog by Muriel Barbery, Eavesdropping: A Memoir of Blindness and Listening by Stephen Kuusisto, Three Junes by Julia Glass, Handle with Care by Jodi Picoult, Michigan Review of Prisoner Creative Writing and The Botany of Desire by Michael Pollan. I have a nightstand that's piled high!
Favorite book when you were a child:
Carolyn Haywood's The B Is for Betsy books and then Pearl Buck's The Good Earth. By the time I was a teenager, I immersed myself in Eugene O'Neil's heavily psychoanalytic plays.
Your top five authors:
I'm a promiscuous reader and have been since I was a kid. There are so many books that have enriched my life, so many authors who were there for me when I needed them. It's difficult to pick one without a bunch of others shouting, "What about me?" and "What about me?" Each book is a door into another world and another mind. Each book represents the great diversity of our fascinations and sensibilities. Nevertheless:
Margaret Atwood, Philip Roth, Russell Banks, Toni Morrison, William Styron.
Book you've faked reading:
I've never faked reading.
Book you're an evangelist for:
Right now it's The Last of Her Kind by Sigrid Nunez and The History of Love by Nicole Krauss. I'm also pushing graphic novels like Fun Home: A Family Tragicomic by Alison Bechdel, Persepolis: The Story of a Childhood by Marjane Satrapi, The Watchmen by Alan Moore and Dave Gibbons.
Book you've bought for the cover:
Hiawatha by Susan Jeffers. I love her illustrations of poems and fairy tales. In fact, I have bought a lot of children's books for their covers and illustrations.
Book that changed your life:
I read Truman Capote's In Cold Blood as a teenager, and it riveted me as I began to understand Smith and Hickock's lives and motivations. It was the first time biographies and nonfiction had used the fictive techniques that bring the reader into another worldview. Likewise, Ragtime by E.L Doctorow with its fictional use of historical people recognized the blur between truth and fiction. As a therapist, I'm aware of the narrative involved in each of our memories as we try to make sense of our lives.
Favorite line from a book:
"Let us treat men and women well: treat them as if they were real: perhaps they are."--Ralph Waldo Emerson, Experience. This deceptively simple line captures the importance of each of us and drives home the seriousness of our interactions.
Book you most want to read again for the first time:
The Blind Assassin by Margaret Atwood.
Have you always wanted to be a writer?
When I was in eighth grade, we were asked to write an essay on a painting that had been donated to our school. I found myself writing a poem, and its creation transported me. I wanted to recapture that feeling and knew I'd always write.
Are you working on another book?
Yes. I'm writing a novel about Tara and Sky, the sisters, who appeared in The Christmas Cookie Club.
How did your background as a psychotherapist affect the story you tell in The Christmas Cookie Club?
In both my writing and my therapy, I bring a love and fascination with people and seeing the world from another's eyes. I hear about lives from the inside out and have the privilege of witnessing the decades-long sweep of human drama as we struggle to be the heroes of our own stories. I am well aware of our foibles, sins, resilience, forgiveness and courage. As a therapist, I'm impressed by people's survival in spite of trauma and joy in spite of tragedy. Regardless of backgrounds, life events and temperaments, each of us brings our entire history to bear in the experience of every single day. I hope that the arc of individual history, loving friendships between these diverse women and their amazing resilience is apparent on the one Monday night in early December portrayed in The Christmas Cookie Club.