A February 2006 interview with author Garret Freymann-Weyr, author of Stay With Me.

I think the best thing any writer does -- young, old, or in-between -- is read. How we respond to what we read probably shapes how we write. For example, I pick books with characters whom I think are worth my time. This doesn’t mean that the characters are good or nice, just worth my time. If a character is an awful person, that’s fine. He or she just better be interesting. As a result, I write character driven stuff. So, go out and read. Find out what “works” for you as a reader and why. Or why not. You learn just as much from books you hate as those you love.

What authors have influenced you most over the years?

The first person on this list really distresses my parents. P.L Travers wrote the Mary Poppins books, each one of which is darker and smarter than the wretched Disney movie. The rainy afternoon I spent reading the chapter “Bad Wednesday” in which Jane Banks runs off with two boys who normally live in her mother’s prized Royal Doulton Bowl changed my life. That chapter has everything: evil, the yearning to be good, sex, danger, magic and the mundane details of daily life. It’s all in there, at once hidden and revealed.

When I think about why I write, that afternoon never fails to knock on my memory.

In terms of style (both the style I have wound up with and the style I wish I had), the list grows to include people my parents find less odd: Joan Didion, Elizabeth Hardwick, Renatta Adler, A.S. Byatt, Anita Brookner (who takes a sad, lonely life and makes a reader covet it) and Graham Greene, whose work has an austere quality that forbids you from caring, even as it forces you to.

I was really liking Ben up until the end. How did you decide to make him into a "bad guy"?

Okay, I love this question, because I had forgotten that Ben really wasn’t at his best by the end of the book. But I don’t think of Ben as a bad guy. Just the wrong guy for Leila. I know what you mean by “bad guy” because of how he treats her at the end. But to me, that was the inevitable outcome of having suffered one too many humiliations at the hand of a girl he loves. By the time she leaves him for Eamon, she has not only told him she doesn’t want to sleep with him again, but let him know that, for her, the sex wasn’t so great. That’s a lot for a teenage boy to take in stride.

I think that girls become complicated people more quickly than boys do. After Rebecca dies, Leila’s external life (not just her own thoughts and self) becomes much more complicated than Ben’s does. Eamon, older and more experienced with loss as well as difficult families, becomes a better fit.

Do you think you will revisit the story of Leila and Eamon? I'm curious as to what happens later. Do you think they'll stay together?

I know what happens to them -- more clearly than I ever have for any other set of characters. Normally, I don’t develop a picture of how things go for characters until I am done writing, but this was different. Eamon was so scared of becoming involved with Leila that he and I had to think through what, given both of their personalities, might happen. It seemed obvious to me that Eamon was replacing Rebecca as the most important story in Leila’s life. And their love affair was a story she had sought out and starred in. Unlike the small role of observer she had in the story of Rebecca’s life. Based on that, I thought Leila would stay with Eamon long past her being ready to leave him. And Eamon, being responsible and bewilderingly in love, would hold on to her long past his knowing that it was time for them to leave each other. I told him (or he told me, or maybe Leila told us both) that she would go to L.A. for college and, after her freshman year, live with him through school and her first job or two. They would stay together a year or so longer than made sense. Eamon would go on and marry a woman his own age and have children, always a little sorry that the timing with Leila hadn’t worked. And Leila would go out into the world alone, as all women in their twenties must do, always happy to have been loved so well during a critical time.

Are you working on anything now?

Yes. I have a book due in Sept. ‘07 and I have just this week discovered that the 70 pages I had written were nothing more than me writing 20,000 words in the wrong direction. So I have quite a bit to do.

What book -- and any book is fair game -- do you wish you had written?

Possession by A.S. Byatt. It is clever in almost every possible way without ever sacrificing generosity. To both its characters and readers. (I hasten to add that Byatt’s Still Life is a better book, but not necessarily the one I wish I’d written, as the pleasure was all in reading it.)

What is your writing process like?

It’s a mess, as some of my earlier answers must have made clear. I start with a phrase or an image or a character and write a book around that slim glimpse. I have a sign over my desk that says, “Fail. Fail again. Fail better.” That kind of sums up my process.

What are some of your hobbies?

I tend to have obsessions more than hobbies. For a few months, I knit all the time. I spent two years studying Italian, giving up after memorizing the subjunctive verb forms made me forget the conditional. Last summer, I read all about the history of indoor plumbing. And I have seen, much to my amazement, almost every episode of Law & Order: Criminal Intent.

What's the one question you wish an interviewer would ask you (and the answer)?

“In what ways do you think not having children helps your work?”

There is the obvious answer about having more space in both my schedule and my mind. There is also this: the writer in me does not waste time struggling with motherhood. I don’t write to protect or to teach. Only my husband’s well-being keeps me awake with fear, love or panic. I write from memory and observation alone, not with an eye on a child’s future. Certain writers, who come to their desks as mothers, sound different from writers who have found a way to silence their motherhood. I have specific examples in mind, but manners, or perhaps just discretion, make it impossible for me to cite them.

There is one example I feel I can use. My editor, whom I adore for her snarky wit and physical elegance, has two small children. Daughters. As a result, I get two different types of comments from her. One set comes from my editor, whose mind demands clarity and more fully drawn details. The other comes from a mother of small girls. She hated that Leila was so attached to her father’s first wife. She felt that a 16 or 17 year old would, instead, crave her mother’s approval. I was really perplexed and disturbed by these editorial remarks until I figured out that they were not coming from my editor at all, but rather from the mother in her, worrying about the future.