Please welcome Julie Buxbaum, author of The Opposite of Love. Julie will be chatting on LibraryThing until June 19th.

Hi Everyone,
The Opposite of Love will be released tomorrow in paperback, so I'm very excited to get this opportunity to talk to you about the book. I'm, of course, thrilled to answer any questions you may have about pretty much anything, so please ask away.

I very much look forward to hearing from you.

Cheers,
Julie

Well, I have a question. Julie, you were a lawyer? What made you turn from law to writing? And how has that experience influenced your books?

Julie,

So often it seems to me that my own readings of a book and my classifications of them (as romance, mystery, chick lit, general fiction, whatever) don't match the spot where I found them in the bookstore. Did you set out to write in a particular genre? Do you think your book falls best into one particular area or another?

I was a lawyer, but I think it's fair to say I was a miserable one! A couple of years ago, it suddenly occurred to me that I was wasting my life in a job that I truly hated, and that it was time to figure out what I really wanted to be when I grew up. So as part of a New Year's Resolution, I quit my job as a litigator, and started writing that novel I had always said I wanted to write. About eight months later I had my first (very rough) draft of THE OPPOSITE OF LOVE.

Being a lawyer influenced my first novel directly, since it is about a young woman litigator in New York. As a result, I was able to channel some of my own experiences and observations into the book. (That's not to say I'm my main character, but I guess that's a whole other question.)

My next book AFTER YOU (which comes out end of August) is almost lawyer free, but I do think my background in legal writing still affects my work. I'm a little too obsessed with clarity and sometimes bring to bear an overly linear style as a result of three years of law school and my years writing legal briefs, not novels. The truth is I am still deprogramming myself...

That's such an interesting question. No, I didn't set out to write a particular genre, and I too find that such classifications can be misleading. If you were to ask my agent or someone in the publishing industry, I think they would call my novels "upmarket women's fiction." But, to be honest, I have no idea what that means. Since my books are generally about women and women's experiences, for whatever reason it is presumed that my audience will be mostly women. (The general rule of thumb seems to be that women will read books about women or men, but men stick to books about men. Not sure if this is true. I have received emails from both male and female readers who have enjoyed THE OPPOSITE OF LOVE, though to be fair the majority do seem to be women.)

I do think in the industry there is this desire to categorize, and in particular draw a dividing line between commercial and literary fiction. I am not sure if this tendency is beneficial to readers, since it seems to divide not based on the merit of the book at hand, but its readability, which to me is just plain silly. (I am talking here about the presumption that literary work, by definition, has to be difficult to slog through.)

But again, I am getting away from your question. I think if your plan is write a straight up genre novel (ie, mystery or romance), it is important to understand the general conventions of the genre, so if you choose to follow them or reject them, you are doing so consciously. At the same time, the hang-up over where a book will be classified in a bookstore, whether a reviewer will call your work chick lit or literary fiction, should have no place in the actual writing process. There is plenty of time to worry about all that stuff later. I think as a writer your job is to write the best book you can possibly write, regardless of how it will one day be classified.

So I guess, in short, the truth is I don't really care how people classify my novels, so long as they read them and, better yet, enjoy them!

LOL! Thanks, Julie! (I definitely see that "if it's literary, it must be difficult" thing in action when I look at the classifications at the bookstore.)

It's so silly, isn't it? I think unnecessary divisions like that make people hesitant to read, which is such a shame.

Yes...and it means people miss things they might otherwise like because they're shelved someplace odd. Of course, they have to be shelved SOMEWHERE, but it's one of those things that has always made me say "there has to be a better way." One of the nice things about communities like LibraryThing is that you hear about books you might not run across in the bookstore.