How Early Nicolas Cage Helped Me Write This Book

Peggy Sue, Paula Fox, and the other ingredients in This Time Tomorrow's recipe.

Hi friends!

Let’s talk influences. 

Often, in press interviews and on book tours, people will ask a question that is some variation of this: What are your influences? All writers have their go-to answers, of course—both project-specific and life-long favorites. My answer is usually a little roll around in the Meg Wolitzer/Lorrie Moore valley, but this time, things were different.

I had a phone call with Sarah, my editor, to tell her my idea. I was nervous—Time Travel! Death! The 90s!—these were scary concepts, and I wasn’t sure if she was going to laugh and tell me to go back to the drawing board. 

Here’s what I told her: I wanted to write a book that was part Desperate Characters and part Peggy Sue Got Married. I also mentioned Ian MacEwan’s Atonement, which I think, really, is sort of a high literary Peggy Sue Got Married, if you squint a certain way, and Colson Whitehead’s The Colossus of New York. My book isn’t at all like any of those books, just like a fresh tomato isn’t anything like rigatoni bolognese, but they’re in there, in one way or another, because they’re in me.

Desperate Characters, if you haven’t yet had the pleasure, is a slim (156-page!) 1970 novel by Paula Fox. It takes place in what I would call Boerum Hill, or what some readers might think of as Jonathan Lethem country, a neighborhood I walk through several times a day. It begins with a married couple arguing about a feral cat, which then bites one of them, and the book spins out from there. It’s a New York City real estate novel, in some ways—about money and gentrification and dissatisfaction. The book is both glittery and grimy, full of bars and parties and rich people and snobs and jerks and bad romantic partnerships. It’s also a lot of walking through New York at night, though, and that’s what I like the most. I’m sure most people feel this way about the places they grew up in. At least one of those pandemic Taylor Swift songs is about this feeling—walking through the place you know the best when other people are asleep. It’s a feeling I never have anymore, because I have small children and go to bed early, but when I was a teenager, I used to walk through the city streets for hours and hours, with friends and alone. That was what I wanted to capture—the endlessness of nights in one’s youth; the way city streets sparkle under the streetlights; the timelessness of Central Park West, once you’re past the monstrosity of Columbus Circle. (Side note: I was able to meet Paula Fox a few times, because she lived near BookCourt, and my favorite thing about Jonathan Franzen is how quickly he rushed to Fox’s side when she came to his event for Freedom. Franzen was partially responsible for getting Fox’s books back into print, which is an excellent use of one’s literary clout.) 

Peggy Sue Got Married, in case you happen not to be a geriatric millennial or a young Gen X-er or a person who watched a lot of cable TV in the late 1980s, is first and foremost a movie that stars Kathleen Turner, which more movies should. (Note to self: have a Kathleen Turner film festival! Romancing the Stone! Serial Mom!) It’s a 1986 Francis Ford Coppola movie about a woman who is getting divorced from her high school sweetheart, faints at her reunion, and wakes up in her teenage body. It’s a very good movie—full of young actors still figuring out what kind of actors they were going to be, and funny, too. Nicolas Cage is pre-Moonstruck, with his demented wildness still buried just beneath the surface. It’s not my favorite kind of time travel movie, because the ending is (spoiler alert) is Peggy Sue waking up in a hospital bed, and the movie seems to want to have it both ways, in terms of whether she did or didn’t actually travel through time. (Helen Hunt, who was made to be middle-aged, plays Peggy Sue’s daughter—its own sort of time travel.) Nevertheless, I love it—the tone, the humor, the ability to go back and fix things. How intoxicating!

Luckily, Sarah didn’t laugh at me. She told me it sounded great, and to keep going, which I did. Anyway, those were two of the things I was thinking about as I started writing This Time Tomorrow. 

A few time travel novels I think are great:

• Octavia Butler’s Kindred

• Jack Finney’s Time and Again

• Madeleine L'Engle’s Wrinkle in Time

Literally every book is a time travel book, if you think about it, only you’re the one who is traveling. All of the Books Are Magic booksellers would sell you This is How You Lose the Time War in sixty seconds flat. My father’s best friend told me to read Ted Chiang’s Exhalation, which I did, and yes, wow. What is nice about time travel is that it’s an idea we are all swimming in, and comfortable with, and therefore, it can be anything. Romance, mystery, art. Or it can be a funny/sad book in which people think about Keanu Reeves.

Here is my subjective ranking of Keanu Reeves time travel movies:

• The Lake House

• Bill and Ted’s Excellent Adventure

• Something’s Gotta Give (I travel back in time and marry him)

• The other two Bill and Ted movies

I think what I love the very most about Keanu Reeves is how much he runs in movies and how little I think he runs in real life, and how he looks when he’s running, and how he looks when he’s not running. 

If literally any of this is interesting to you, please consider pre-ordering This Time Tomorrow. 

What I’m Reading:

Riverman, by Ben McGrath, who happens to be my editor’s brother. It’s a incredible work of non-fiction, about Dick Conant, who McGrath meets by happenstance. Conant spends decades canoeing across America’s rivers, and is painted as a Santa Claus/Walt Whitman of the water—round of belly and friendly to all. It’s a great book for people like me, who read Into the Wild but have settled into middle-age. This will make you want to buy a canoe. Not live in it, but just have one. And maybe spend less time on Instagram. 

What I’m Listening To:

Dave Holmes and I have a lot in common, specifically that we both have deep feelings about Joey McIntyre, and so his podcast Waiting For Impact (which is ostensibly about his search for a boy band from the early 1990s) is very much up my alley, but when Joey himself shows up on the podcast? Heaven.