Interview: Anna Godbersen

Quick! Describe Bright Young Things in 7 words or less!  

Innocence, experience, sin, gin and friendship.  

What inspired you to write about the Jazz Age?  

I had just written four books set in the uptight Gilded Age, so I wanted to write about a time that was really wild and anything-goes. Plus, I think our culture is perpetually fascinated with Gatsby-era tragic romance, and I wanted to take a crack at all that myself. 

Any teaser lines for Bright Young Things that you can share? 

“Cordelia’s eyes were wild, and there was so much electricity in every corner of her head and heart—she was too alive with awake dreams to try to have any of the other variety. She wanted to see the sun coming up in another state, and everything else the world had been holding just out of reach.”  

What do you absolutely need in order to write a novel (example: caffeine, music, et cetera)? 

A comfy sweater and a dreary day. (Okay, obviously ‘need’ is strong re: the dreary day, but it does help!)   

If you could spend a day in any time and place in the past, when and where would you choose & why? 

I don’t have any particular historical episode I’d want to drop in on, but I wouldn’t mind sitting on the beach on some sunshiny day in the mid-1920s French Riviera, where F. Scott and Zelda Fitzgerald lived for a while, along with their sometime friends and foils Gerald and Sara Murphy, who were fantastical bohemian hosts to the big names of their day (Picasso, etc).  

Thanks so much to Anna, and to The Teen {Book} Scene for setting up the tour! Want to know the next stops? Click here! 

Bright Young Things is in stores now (and I highly recommend it)!