My Idle Curiosity: A Guest Post by Daniel M. Lavery
Wander the streets of 1960s New York City and enjoy your stay with Beidermeier’s quirky characters in this big-hearted and hilarious slice-of-life story. Read on for Daniel M. Lavery’s exclusive essay on the creation of Women’s Hotel.
Hardcover $28.99
Women's Hotel: A Novel
Women's Hotel: A Novel
In Stock Online
Hardcover $28.99
From the New York Times bestselling author and advice columnist, a poignant and funny debut novel about the residents of a women’s hotel in 1960s New York City.
From the New York Times bestselling author and advice columnist, a poignant and funny debut novel about the residents of a women’s hotel in 1960s New York City.
Some of my favorite books feature illustrations of buildings in cross-section – David Mcaulay’s Castle, Stephen Biesty’s Incredible Cross-Section series, the Pippi Longstocking books with Nicolaas Hollander’s artwork – and to this day, anything that features a large building with the front facade sawn off is sure to capture my attention. It’s not just that a good cross-section appeals to my innate nosiness, it’s the idea of being able to satisfy my idle curiosity about how multiple people live in an entire community all at once, that proves irresistible. It’s the same curiosity that propelled me through my five years as an advice columnist.
Once I left that job and consequently lost that professional cover for nosiness I figured I’d better start looking for another excuse, and a book seemed to fit the bill admirably. I knew I wanted to write about a group of people living in more or less accidental community for my first novel. I’m a great fan of Vicki Baum’s Grand Hotel, Jean Rhys’ After Leaving Mr. Mackenzie, and Anita Brookner’s Hotel du Lac, and a chance conversation with my agent about Paulina Bren’s nonfiction history of the Barbizon Hotel led me to imagine its slightly less fashionable counterpart – the Biedermeier.
I knew too that I wanted to begin the novel with the loss of an old standby: the breakfast that had for forty years been automatically offered to every resident up-to-date on her rent, was going away. “It was the end of the continental breakfast, and therefore the beginning of the end of everything else.” I wanted to consider how a disparate group of women, many of whom had very little in common with one another, would variously deal with the loss of a certain way of life.
I’m the sort of person who collapses spiritually if I don’t have my meals exactly when I planned on them. If a meeting run five minutes late into the lunch hour, and nobody else seems concerned, I begin to panic. I realize that not everybody in the world is equally food-motivated, but I think one’s sense of cheerfulness and emotional resilience has a lot to do with whether one has had a hearty breakfast (or lunch, if you happen to be the kind of person who doesn’t like to eat breakfast). For many people, life in the mid-1960s is exciting and full of possibility, but I’m always curious about the people who live a little out of step with their own time, who experience as a loss what others experience as an opportunity, who get hungry at odd hours and don’t know how to get by without their 9:00am cup of cocoa. The interesting thing about a residential hotel – more so than an ordinary apartment building – is that even if you don’t care about breakfast, if your neighbor has been bumped off-kilter by its loss, then she’s likelier to start to bother you in the hallways, which can have all kinds of interesting knock-on effects. Forced proximity and a skipped breakfast almost always lead to interesting collisions, I think.
