Boston Book Festival 2019

“Write what you know,” goes the old adage for beginning writers. The three renowned novelists who join us for this session certainly no longer need to follow this advice; nevertheless, in their recent work, all three creatively imagine their way into the lives of real-life characters with whom they share a vocation: writing and publishing. Christopher Castellani’s Leading Men explores the legacy of a pivotal summer in the lives and careers of playwright Tennessee Williams, his lover Frank Merlo, and actress Anja Bloom. The title character in Steven Rowley’s The Editor is none other than Jacqueline Kennedy Onassis, who was a book editor late in her life and who, in Rowley’s novel, develops a friendship and mentorship with a debut novelist. In her exquisitely researched new novel Dawson’s Fall, Roxana Robinson finds inspiration in the letters and diaries of her own great-grandparents as she traces the career of a newspaper publisher struggling to navigate the thorny moral landscape of post–Civil War Charleston. Robin Kall, host of the podcast Reading with Robin and the Cardigan Connection reading series, will lead a discussion about the divide between public figures and private lives and about how fiction writers can use their craft to imagine and elucidate the lives of real-life figures both like and unlike themselves. Sponsored by Greenough Brand Storytellers