Alexandra Alter

“I talk very quietly in a monotone voice where there’s almost zero performance in there, to see if the material holds up,” she said.

Purposefully boring an audience might sound like career suicide for a stand-up, but Wong insists there’s a method to it: If the crowd laughs despite her dull delivery, then she knows the joke is really good.

“It’s all about word choice,” Wong said. “Sometimes I have a joke I know is funny, but I haven’t found the right word, and when I do find it, it’s so satisfying.”

Wong’s conviction that language, even more than performance, is a comedian’s greatest weapon also guided her when she was writing her first book, “Dear Girls,” a collection of essays about her rebellious youth, her struggle to break into comedy, her romantic and sexual exploits, and what it was like to grow up in what she calls a “very atypical Asian-American family.”

Even though Wong seems wildly uninhibited onstage (one of her early signature moves was pulling down her pants to moon the audience), she’s nervous about the reception to her book, which comes out Oct. 15 and is even more personal than some of her stand-up.

“I don’t know how people are going to react and it’s scary,” she said. “I hope my siblings don’t get pissed at me.”

In an interview, Wong spoke about recent controversies in the comedy world, her writing process and the question she hates getting asked. Below is an edited transcript of the conversation.

Q: In the preface, you describe how you panicked while writing the book. Did you really almost quit and return your advance?

A: I almost gave the money back! I love Zadie Smith and I love Ta-Nehisi Coates, and “Homegoing” (by Yaa Gyasi) is one of my favorite books. I feel like I have great taste in books, and I started writing and I was like: “How come I don’t sound like them? This is terrible. This is embarrassing." Then I had this discussion with Sarah Dunn, the creator of “American Housewife,” who said the trick to writing is accepting that you’re not a genius. And then it got easier.

Q: One of the recurring jokes in “Dear Girls” is that the book is formatted as letters to your daughters, who are 1 and 3, but then you tell them extremely inappropriate and scandalous stuff. At what age will you let them read it?

A: It’s funny when people ask me that because, are we trying to pretend like I’m going to have any control over them? I lost my virginity when I was 15, you know what I mean? I would be flattered frankly if they’re interested in anything I do, first of all. But I would feel comfortable with them reading it when they’re 15. They can watch the special when they’re 12.

I do think the book is a lot more scandalous than my act. I’m revealing how naughty I was at a young age, and I don’t really do that in my stand-up. Onstage I talk about sleeping with two homeless people, but it’s like, how old was she, we don’t know, it’s a mystery.

Q: Your husband, Justin Hakuta, writes an afterword to the book, and he’s also the subject of some of your stand-up, which he says sometimes makes him “uncomfortable.” Why did you want him to address readers directly?

A: I wanted to see what he wanted to say, because he has a lot to say too. And frankly, I was tired of writing so many words and I needed to meet a word count.

Q: You describe a humiliating experience early in your career, when the host at a comedy club introduced you as someone who “does your nails” and “does your laundry” and people booed during your act, and you almost quit comedy after that. How did you work up the nerve to try again?

A: Of course I thought about quitting at times, but I just kept going because I liked the process so much. Your attitude after bombing distinguishes the comics who are the real deal from the comics who aren’t the real deal. Like, people would be so devastated after a set, so many grown-ass men kick chairs and cry after a bad set at a place where the stakes could not be lower, you know what I mean? It just motivated me to go up again and fix whatever I did wrong.

Q: In the book you bring up a question that you hate getting, so of course I feel compelled to ask it, which is what it’s like to be an Asian-American woman in comedy. What bothers you about the premise and how do you answer when it comes up, like now?

A: That question comes so much from Asian-American women. They clearly want to be in comedy, but is this how you see yourself? Is this how you’re reducing yourself? And it upsets me when they ask that, because it makes me think that’s how they see themselves: as an Asian-American woman. And also it’s just not a very good question. If their goal is to pick my brain and get some insight on how to succeed, a much better question is, how do you cope with failure, or how do you write a great joke? Not what is it like to be an Asian-American woman in comedy. Underlying that question is this assumption that being an Asian-American woman is a weakness. If you see it as a weakness, it will be a weakness.

Q: Similarly, you talk about how annoying it is when white male comics tell you that you’re lucky to have a “niche” because you’re an Asian-American woman.

A: When they say that to me, it’s a reflection of how they’re not seeing a precedent, with the exception being Margaret Cho, of someone looking like me succeeding. I’ve never felt entitled to a career in comedy, whereas these guys, they’re like, “Hey, I’m good looking, I can make an audience laugh for 10 minutes, where’s my movie career, where’s my TV show?” But I never felt entitled to any of this. This has all been a delightful, lovely surprise. To me, saying I want to be a stand-up comedian felt like saying I want to be president. Those guys are not successful, and it’s because they’re not giving enough credit and weight and importance to the skill of writing, and they’re not giving me credit for writing.

Q: They’re just reducing you to your appearance instead of the quality of your jokes.

A: Right. So it’s like, if that were true, how come my mom’s not, like, Richard Pryor? She’s hilarious, she’s an Asian woman. Geez, why couldn’t she just snap her fingers and have like two specials or something? I don’t know.

Q: There’s been a recent controversy in the comedy world that I wanted to ask you about, since it’s opened up a debate about using racial stereotypes in comedy.

A: Oh my God, I’m so out of it right now. I know what you’re going to ask about and I haven’t read enough about it to make an informed comment. I’ve been really out of it. My husband was on a trip with his friends from business school and it’s been just me and the kids so I haven’t been on my phone reading everything. I know what you’re going to ask about.

Q: Right, I wanted to ask you about the controversy over Shane Gillis’ use of racial slurs and stereotypes about Asians on his podcast, and also ask you about a different episode of the podcast that people also found offensive, which references you.

Q: Gillis and his co-host rank comedians by race and gender, and Gillis says, “Ali Wong is making it so Asian chicks are funnier than white chicks.”

A: He said Ali Wong is making it so that Asian chicks are funnier than white chicks?

Q: Yeah, and I was going to ask you what your response was when you heard about it, but it sounds like you hadn’t heard about it before.

A: No. And you know, for these things I don’t feel comfortable commenting on it if I don’t know the full context. You gave me some context, but before I give any official comment I should really read and watch those clips and stuff. Because, I don’t know, I heard he had said some slurs and people were really disturbed by it and that “SNL” had rescinded its offer. I was just really excited about Bowen [Yang] because I know Bowen. I just want to make sure to take the time to celebrate Bowen and not focus on this too much because it’s a bigass deal that Bowen is going to be in the main cast. He’s a smart guy who’s hilarious and is such a fresh voice in comedy and on top of that he’s this Asian-American man. I love it. I’m sorry I can’t give you more.

Q: One thing the Shane Gillis controversy highlights is this ongoing debate in the comedy world about sensitivity and what lines shouldn’t be crossed. In your comedy you talk about racial stereotypes, sometimes invoking a stereotype to disarm it or other times pointing out truth in a cliché. What’s your view, should some material be avoided because it’s insensitive and offensive?

A: People can get away with doing really offensive things as long as it’s funny. Because if it’s funny, then the laughter wins over the feelings of hurt and then you’re doing something right. It comes down to writing and instinct. Also, when you know different people from all different walks of life and you’re a compassionate person, then you’re probably more capable of writing something that’s really offensive that’s funny, because there’s truth in it and it’s something that you haven’t heard before. Come up with something that’s fresh and true and unexpected.

Q: In the book you tell your daughters “you can be whatever you want to be, but not a vlogger. Never a vlogger. Videoing yourself and putting on makeup or unboxing candles is not a job.” You also tell them, “you can be whatever you want to be, but I’ll be worried if you want to do stand-up.” Why would you discourage them from pursuing stand-up?

A: It’s the safety thing. I stayed in so many shady-ass motels by myself. You have to put yourself in those situations. Even now I’ll go to dive bars and I always ask some other comics to walk me back to my car.

Q: So you’d rather have your daughters grow up to be vloggers than stand-ups?

A: I guess so, because then they’d be safe. But not from my ridicule.

This article originally appeared in

Ali Wong Is Crossing Lines Again,This Time in a Book

When Ali Wong is testing new jokes in front of an audience, she does something strange.

Scandalized by Ali Wong's Stand-Up? Brace Yourself for Her Book

James, who won the Man Booker Prize in 2015 for his novel “A Brief History of Seven Killings,” is up against two debut authors, Kali Fajardo-Anstine, for her story collection “Sabrina &amp; Corina,” and Julia Phillips, for her novel “Disappearing Earth,” about two sisters who are lured into a stranger’s car and disappear in Russia’s remote Kamchatka Peninsula. The two others, both of them previously Pulitzer finalists, are Susan Choi, for “Trust Exercise,” and Laila Lalami, for “The Other Americans.”

The nonfiction finalists include “Solitary,” the memoir of Albert Woodfox, a man who served more than four decades in solitary confinement, and “The Yellow House,” Sarah M. Broom’s memoir of her New Orleans family and how its members were scattered after Hurricane Katrina. They will compete with Tressie McMillan Cottom’s “Thick: And Other Essays,” Carolyn Forché’s “What You Have Heard Is True: A Memoir of Witness and Resistance” and David Treuer’s “The Heartbeat of Wounded Knee: Native America from 1890 to the Present.”

The finalists in translated literature include works originally written in Arabic, Finnish, French, Hungarian and Japanese.

All of the winners will be announced Nov. 20 at an awards ceremony in New York City.

Below is a complete list of the 2019 finalists in fiction, nonfiction, translated literature, young people’s literature and poetry.

FICTION

Kali Fajardo-Anstine, “Sabrina &amp; Corina: Stories”

Marlon James, “Black Leopard, Red Wolf”

Laila Lalami, “The Other Americans”

Julia Phillips, “Disappearing Earth”

NONFICTION

Sarah M. Broom, “The Yellow House”

Tressie McMillan Cottom, “Thick: And Other Essays”

Carolyn Forché, “What You Have Heard Is True: A Memoir of Witness and Resistance”

David Treuer, “The Heartbeat of Wounded Knee: Native America from 1890 to the Present”

Albert Woodfox with Leslie George, “Solitary”

TRANSLATED LITERATURE

Khaled Khalifa, “Death Is Hard Work”

Translated from the Arabic by Leri Price

László Krasznahorkai, “Baron Wenckheim’s Homecoming”

Translated from the Hungarian by Ottilie Mulzet

Scholastique Mukasonga, “The Barefoot Woman”

Translated from the French by Jordan Stump

Yoko Ogawa, “The Memory Police”

Translated from the Japanese by Stephen Snyder

Translated from the Finnish by David Hackston

YOUNG PEOPLE’S LITERATURE

Jason Reynolds, “Look Both Ways: A Tale Told in Ten Blocks”

Randy Ribay, “Patron Saints of Nothing”

Laura Ruby, “Thirteen Doorways, Wolves Behind Them All”

Martin W. Sandler, “1919: The Year That Changed America”

POETRY

Jericho Brown, “The Tradition”

Toi Derricotte, “I: New and Selected Poems”

Ilya Kaminsky, “Deaf Republic”

Carmen Giménez Smith, “Be Recorder”

National Book Awards Names 2019 Finalists

Marlon James’ novel “Black Leopard, Red Wolf,” an epic fantasy about a bounty hunter on the trail of a mysterious boy, on Tuesday was named one of the five fiction finalists for the National Book Award.

“You have brought shame to the family and your company through your misbehavior,” Bob Weinstein wrote. “Your reaction was once more to blame the victims, or to minimize the misbehavior in various ways. If you think nothing is wrong with your misbehavior so in this area then announce it to your wife and family.”

The previously unreported letter is reprinted in full in “She Said: Breaking the Sexual Harassment Story That Helped Ignite a Movement,” a new book by Jodi Kantor and Megan Twohey, two reporters at The New York Times who broke the story of Harvey Weinstein’s alleged misdeeds, helping to spark the global #MeToo reckoning. The book, to be published Tuesday by Penguin Press, sheds new light on the roles that several figures played in enabling Weinstein and covering up his misdeeds, and names key sources who helped reporters break the story — including company officials, Hollywood stars and other victims of the producer’s alleged abuse.

Drawing on new reporting and previously undisclosed corporate records, emails and text messages, “She Said” uncovers more on the extent of Weinstein’s alleged transgressions, and the labyrinth of secret settlements and restrictive nondisclosure agreements that allowed Weinstein and other men in positions of power to conceal their behavior and thrive in their careers, in some cases finding new victims.

Weinstein, who is facing a criminal trial on charges of sexual assault and rape, has denied ever having had nonconsensual sex and pleaded not guilty.

One of the central figures of “She Said” is a former top executive at the Weinstein Co.: Irwin Reiter. Reiter, an accountant who worked for Weinstein for decades, was increasingly alarmed by his behavior toward women and had raised concerns within the company, to no avail. The book discloses that it was Reiter who provided the reporters with an explosive internal memo from an employee who described Weinstein’s routine harassment of junior female employees and actresses. Reiter also alerted Kantor and Twohey, who were investigating financial settlements for sexual harassment from decades ago, to other recent accusations against Weinstein, bringing new urgency to the investigation.

“She Said” similarly discloses the identity of a Weinstein accuser who has put off inquiries from journalists for 15 years, Rowena Chiu, a former assistant at Miramax who received a settlement in 1998 after Weinstein allegedly assaulted her in a hotel room. In Chiu’s account, which she shares in detail for the first time, she describes being silenced by a restrictive nondisclosure agreement and lured back to a job at Miramax in an apparent effort by Weinstein to keep her close. She struggled with depression and attempted suicide. She stayed silent for nearly 20 years, even declining to tell her husband about the predation or the settlement. (Weinstein has disputed her story.)

In his first extensive comments since the Weinstein story broke, Bob Weinstein explains that he mistakenly saw his brother’s problem as sex addiction, a rationale rooted in his own previously unreported recovery from substance abuse, and how he abandoned his attempts to intervene. “I got worn out,” he told the journalists. “I said, ‘I surrender,’ see?”

“She Said,” one of several forthcoming books about Harvey Weinstein and the #MeToo movement, is also an exploration of investigative journalism and how The Times executed a sensitive investigation. The book chronicles how the reporting came together behind the scenes, with accounts of the journalists’ first calls to actresses who they suspected had stories about Weinstein, and their efforts to identify recipients of confidential settlements. Gwyneth Paltrow, one of Weinstein’s biggest stars over the years, was scared to go on the record but became an early, crucial source, sharing her account of sexual harassment and trying to recruit other actresses to speak.

“She Said” shows how some figures who have presented themselves as allies of victims have profited from financial settlements that silence them.

Attorney Gloria Allred is one of the most vocal crusaders against sexual harassment and assault. Privately, her firm helped negotiate a settlement that muffled one of Weinstein’s victims in 2004, taking a 40% cut. (The firm has also worked on settlements that silenced victims of Larry Nassar and Bill O’Reilly.) In an interview for “She Said,” Allred defends her use of confidential settlements, arguing that clients are not forced to sign them and often prefer them for reasons of privacy.

Allred’s daughter, lawyer Lisa Bloom, a prominent victims’ rights attorney, was working behind the scenes with Weinstein — at a rate of $895 an hour — to quash the journalists’ investigation and thwart his accusers. In a confidential memo to Weinstein that Bloom wrote in December 2016, which is reproduced in “She Said,” she offered to help him damage the reputation of one of his accusers, Rose McGowan, and portrayed her background as a victims’ rights advocate as an asset.

“I feel equipped to help you against the Roses of the world, because I have represented so many of them,” Bloom wrote, before laying out a multistep playbook for how to intimidate accusers or paint them as liars. One of Bloom’s suggested tactics for undermining McGowan: “We can place an article re her becoming increasingly unglued, so that when someone Googles her this is what pops up and she’s discredited.”

Bloom accompanied Weinstein on a surprise visit to the Times the day before the initial article was published, to present the journalists with information intended to portray several accusers — including Ashley Judd, the first actress to go on the record — as unreliable and mentally unstable.

Bloom has said she was crossing sides to work for Weinstein to encourage him to apologize for his behavior. She later told the reporters that she “deeply regretted” representing him, which she said was a “colossal mistake.”

Another member of Weinstein’s legal team, attorney David Boies, helped Weinstein evade scrutiny for his treatment of women over 15 years, working to halt reporting on the producer by news outlets, blocking the board of Weinstein’s company from reviewing his personnel file, and helping Weinstein execute a contract with Black Cube, an Israeli private investigations firm, that was promised a $300,000 bonus if it stopped the Times investigation. (Ronan Farrow, who published a separate Weinstein exposé in The New Yorker in October 2017, later broke the news of Black Cube’s work for Weinstein.) “She Said” reveals emails showing that during the time that Boies represented Weinstein, the two men discussed potential film roles for Boies’ daughter, an aspiring actress.

In an interview for the book, Boies said he was unaware of the underhanded tactics that Black Cube used against journalists and regretted not paying closer attention to that firm’s work. But he defended the assistance he provided to Weinstein as the producer sought to conceal allegations and said he didn’t have “any regret that I represented him the way I did.”

“She Said” is among the first in a wave of new books about Weinstein and other powerful men accused of sexual misconduct. Earlier this year, Penguin Press acquired another Weinstein book by the New Yorker writer Ken Auletta. Little, Brown and Co. plans to release Farrow’s book “Catch and Kill: Lies, Spies, and a Conspiracy to Protect Predators,” an account of his own investigation into Weinstein, scheduled for publication in October.

Other recent and forthcoming books that grew out of the #MeToo movement and its aftermath include journalist Abigail Pesta’s account of serial sexual abuse of young gymnasts by Larry Nassar; a book by the Times reporters Rachel Abrams and James B. Stewart about former CBS chief executive Les Moonves, who was accused of sexual harassment and assault by multiple women; and a book by Miami Herald reporter Julie K. Brown about the serial sexual abuse by Jeffrey Epstein. There are also new books that grew out of reporting about Christine Blasey Ford’s accusations of sexual assault against Supreme Court Justice Brett Kavanaugh, including the forthcoming “The Education of Brett Kavanaugh,” by Times reporters Robin Pogrebin and Kate Kelly.

Ford receives attention in “She Said,” providing for the first time an extensive account of her experience as an ambivalent figure at the center of a polarizing national scandal. She told her lawyers she did not want to testify — even as they spoke publicly about her willingness to do so in order to keep her options open.

Ford’s story is often held up as a cautionary tale about the limitations of the #MeToo movement in a politically divided nation, and the cost for victims whose stories are often met with disbelief, scorn and threats. But “She Said” shows how Ford has motivated other women to open up about sexual assault.

Kantor and Twohey write about a group interview they conducted that included Ford and women who had made accusations against President Donald Trump and Weinstein, including Judd, Paltrow and Chiu, the former Miramax employee. As the women spoke, Chiu felt inspired by Ford and soon afterward, decided she would go on the record for the first time.

Previously Unknown Sources Come Forward in a New Book About Harvey Weinstein

Two years before the allegations of sexual harassment and abuse against Harvey Weinstein became public, his own brother and business partner, Bob Weinstein, confronted him, pleading with him to get medical treatment for what he described as many years of “misbehavior.”

“What they were begging for was a continuation in the voice of Offred, which I would not have been able to do,” she said over tea and juice at a cafe near her home. “You can climb the Empire State Building barehanded once. When you try again, you’ll fall off. It was a wildly improbable thing to have done in the first place. That voice was there. She said her thing. There’s nothing you can really add in her voice.”

But a few years ago, Atwood started plotting a way to continue her 1985 dystopian classic about the women of Gilead, a religious autocracy in what was formerly the United States, where fertile women are subjected to ritualized rape and forced to bear children for the upper class citizens.

Between then and now, “The Handmaid’s Tale” became a pop culture phenomenon, a political rallying cry and a hit television series on Hulu, starring Elisabeth Moss as Offred, the narrator. The English-language edition of the novel has sold more than 8 million copies worldwide. Women dressed as handmaids have flooded Congress and state capitols to protest new restrictions on reproductive rights. Expectations for Atwood’s sequel, which this month was named to the Booker Prize shortlist ahead of its release on Tuesday, are stratospheric.

Adding to those pressures is that a “Handmaid’s Tale” sequel effectively exists already. The TV adaptation, created by Bruce Miller, has extended Offred’s saga beyond the scope of the novel. So Atwood and Miller had to calibrate plot and character developments in the show, so that the series didn’t contradict her sequel, or vice versa.

“Margaret offered me more restrictions, and I gave her more information,” Miller said in an interview. “I had to be careful about where I was going and what I was doing. She controls the world.”

The sequel, titled “The Testaments,” takes place roughly 15 years after the end of “The Handmaid’s Tale,” when Offred is led into a black van. The sequel features two new narrators — a young woman who has been brought up in Gilead and a Canadian teenager who escaped the regime as an infant — and a third who will be familiar to fans of the original novel and show: Aunt Lydia, the terrifying, vindictive architect of Gilead’s system for training women for reproductive servitude. As their intertwined stories unfold, Atwood reveals new facets of how Gilead’s power structure came to be, and how it eventually crumbles. (A TV adaptation of “The Testaments” is also in the works.)

Atwood, who will turn 80 this year, was in high spirits as she reflected on her work, mortality and the surprising prescience of “The Handmaid’s Tale.” These are edited excerpts from the conversation.

Q: When you announced the sequel, you said that you were aiming to answer questions that readers had been asking about Gilead for years. What were some of those questions?

A: They all begin with “what if.” And one of the what ifs was this: Totalitarian systems don’t last, it is my fervent belief. Some of them have lasted longer than others. When they come apart, what is it that causes them to fall apart? Well, there’s a lot of different scenarios. Crumbling from within, corruption and inter-purging among the elites; attacks from without; generational succession. The first generation generally comes with righteous fervor, the second is focused on administration; and the third generation starts to think, What are we doing?

Q: After the election of President Donald Trump, sales of “The Handmaid’s Tale” surged and readers noted how timely it felt. Some elements have become even more aligned with current events, with the erosion of reproductive rights, separation of parents from their children at the border and the targeting of minorities by white supremacists. Did you want to write a sequel in part to address some of those new parallels?

A: No, no. It’s always bubbling away in any country. White supremacists are there and then they come out when conditions are favorable, as they are in the United States right now.

Q: “The Testaments” picks up 15 years later, but it weaves in plot elements that were introduced in the TV show. Were you consciously trying to build off it?

A: I was trying to make it so that there weren’t any glaring inconsistencies. They updated the timeline, so we leave a lot of things open.

Q: In the show’s second season, Offred’s baby, Nicole, is smuggled out of the country to Canada. Baby Nicole is central to the plot of your new novel. Did you get the idea for that character from the show and decide to expand on her in the sequel?

A: No, Nicole was my name. You’ll notice that I’ve left them a lot of blank wall paper to draw on behind the scenes, so it’s up to them how they get people across the border in their part of the plot.

Q: You’ve been very involved in the show, which continues Offred’s story beyond the scope of your first novel. What has that process been like?

A: I have influence but no power. There’s a big difference. I’m not the person who can ultimately sign off on anything. So, I’m in communication with Bruce, and I say things like, You can’t kill that person.

Q: Does that work?

A: Well, he didn’t kill her. But he wasn’t going to kill her anyway. She’s too good to kill.

Q: Which character?

Q: Have there been times where the showrunners wanted to take the plot and characters in a direction that you felt violated the rules of the world you built?

A: There’s a couple of things that are in the book that they didn’t entirely pick up, but you can see why they didn’t — it’s a television show.

In the book they go full white supremacy. I give them an out for the show. They make the cast multiracial in the TV series for a few reasons: No. 1, they updated it to now, and No. 2, Hulu has a diversity clause, and No. 3, a show in which everybody was white would be very boring to look at.

Q: Have there been plot developments that you’ve disagreed with?

A: I’ve done some yelling, but it was fairly effective yelling. I think it’s a bit of a problem for people that know about real totalitarianism that some of these characters have survived for as long as they did. Surely they would have been shot by now. Quite a few too many people know what June has been up to.

Q: In “The Testaments,” Aunt Lydia becomes much more complex and sympathetic, a victim as well as a perpetrator. How did she evolve in your mind over the decades and why did you decide to make her a central character in the sequel?

A: How do you get to be a high-ranking person within a totalitarian dictatorship? Either you’re a true believer from the beginning, at which point you’re probably going to get purged later on, or you’re an opportunist. Or it can be fear, or it can be a combination of all of them. I would put fear as No. 1: If I don’t do this, I will be killed.

Aunt Lydia’s always been a climber, so she climbed up. She’s not easily disturbed, but she’s not a true believer like some of the others. As J. Edgar Hoover did, she realizes the power of having dirt on people that you don’t reveal publicly.

Q: When did you first have the idea to write the sequel, and was it something that you had considered before but never gotten around to?

A: I’ve always been thinking about it. I went back in my notes recently and found out that I was thinking about a “Handmaid’s Tale” sequel back in 1991. So then you just jump in and see what happens.

Q: I wondered if the success of the television show factored into your decision to write a sequel, and how it shaped your understanding of the world and the characters. Were you aiming to reassert creative control over the world that you created?

A: I can see why you might think that, but no, not really. It really is what I told you at first: how do totalitarianisms fall apart.

Q: With a work that’s as beloved as “The Handmaid’s Tale,” you face enormous pressure to produce a satisfying sequel. Were you nervous about meeting fans’ expectations?

A: Will this ruin my future, my literary reputation? If I were 35, you would be absolutely right to ask that question. But it’s not a chief concern of mine.

Q: Did you reread “The Handmaid’s Tale” before you wrote “The Testaments”? What struck you about it?

A: Of course. I also went back through my clippings file, because in those days, there was no internet, so we clipped things out of newspapers. And all of the things that are now such topics of conversation and such topics of agony, they were all being talked about then. The rise of white supremacy, that layer has never gone away, it’s always been there, but somebody opened a door. Religious cults subordinating women was being talked about. Baby stealing is an age-old human motif. Forcing women to have babies, it happens in the Trojan War, for heaven’s sake.

Q: What recent events shaped your thinking?

A: I don’t want to be too specific, because you’re just dictating to the reader, and I would rather let them do their own thinking. That’s why when people say, what happened to Offred, I say, your choice. History is full of people who disappear and you can’t find any trace of them. What ending would you like to have?

Q: The sequel is not as ambiguous and open-ended as the original. Was that deliberate on your part, to give the story a feeling of finality?

Oh, I don’t know. This one has more closure. Someone said, oh, it’s such a happy ending, well, not for everyone in the story. It is a more positive ending than one might have expected at certain points of the story. I’m a World War II baby. Things looked pretty dark in 1942.

Q: How do you feel about the fact that your book has taken on new political resonance and that you’re sometimes held up as a figurehead of the resistance?

A: I have no control over it. I think using the handmaids’ costume as a protest mechanism is brilliant. You can’t be thrown out, you’re not making a disturbance, and you’re not saying anything, but you’re very visible and everybody knows what you mean. So it has been a brilliant tactic.

Q: Is it also kind of depressing that people are seeing echoes of your fictional dystopia in contemporary politics?

A: From a political point of view, the desired outcome of “The Handmaid’s Tale” would have been that it would fade into obscurity as a period piece, so that my dire warnings would not prove to be correct. That’s not the turn that history has taken.

Q: Both Offred in “The Handmaid’s Tale” and Aunt Lydia in “The Testaments” wonder if anyone will ever read the words they set down, if their stories will matter. I wondered if that reflected your own views on writing and your desire to connect with readers, and your fear that maybe your work won’t have an impact.

A: That’s true of every writer. Every writer. Even as you write, I see you writing away there, what if your editor kills your piece? Then you will never have a reader. Every time when you set implement to surface, I won’t even say pen to paper, because it could be a stone, it could be a tree, you’re implying a reader, and it’s always a future reader, unless the person’s standing looking over your shoulder. The writer is always in that position because you’re always separated in time and place from whoever’s reading your book. It’s always a leap into the unknown future to write anything.

Q: In the past, you’ve rejected the feminist label, yet so many readers and critics see feminist ideas in your work. I wonder how you feel about being held up as a feminist icon.

A: I’m uncomfortable with the label if the other person won’t define it. You have to ask, what kind of feminism are you talking about? Like if someone asks you, are you a Christian, what kind of Christian? Are you someone who dances with snakes, do I think the Pope is infallible, what are we talking about here? Where are we on the spectrum, ‘cause there’s a lot of varieties. Similarly with feminists, who are frequently denouncing one another. So what kind am I? Because I’m interested in fairness, I’m of an egalitarian kind, in which equal means equal, it doesn’t mean superior. So you don’t get extra points.

Q: You don’t mind your work being labeled dystopian, though.

A: I know what that means. It’s a society which we find less preferable than the one we’re living in, and utopian is one in which we assume that things will be better than the one we’re living in. But as I point out, some people’s dystopia is other people’s utopia, and vice versa.

Q: What scares you the most right now?

A: I’m too old to be scared by much. You’re scared when you’re young you don’t know the plot. You haven’t achieved much when you’re 20, so you’re scared about your future, of course you are. You’re hopeful, you’re excited, but you’re also scared.

So what I’m hopeful about, rather than scared, are the young people. They are changing the political discourse.

Q: Have you thought about writing another book about Gilead, making it a trilogy?

Q: Are you working on another novel?

A: It’s just a question of the timeline, how much is left? At my age, let’s say it takes me four years to write a novel. Who knows? These are theoretical questions. How many milestone birthdays can you have?

Q: It sounds like you don’t feel a lot of pressure to write more, like you’ve got nothing left to prove.

A: It’s just that there isn’t a lot of time left. And that’s why they’re going so wild over the promotion of this book. I know what they’re thinking. They’re thinking, What if she dies? Ooh, we better do it now. Go all out. Last chance. I say that and they just sort of blush and shuffle their feet. They can’t deny they’re thinking of it. [laughs]

Q: What are you working on now?

A: I’m working on my collection of poems. It’s short.

'I'm Too Old to Be Scared by Much': Margaret Atwood on Her 'Handmaid's Tale' Sequel

TORONTO — Margaret Atwood wasn’t sure she had a “Handmaid’s Tale” sequel in her, even as fans clamored for one.

The first section of the book, a spellbinding true crime story, follows the Rev. Willie Maxwell, who allegedly killed five family members for insurance money in the 1970s. In a stranger-than-fiction twist, Maxwell himself was killed in 1977, shot at a funeral ceremony for one of his alleged victims by one of her grieving relatives.

But the other mystery proved even knottier. It involved reconstructing years of investigative work done by Harper Lee, who was fascinated by the Maxwell murders and worked on a true crime book about the case that she titled “The Reverend.” To this day, it remains unclear how much she wrote, why she stopped writing or whether she finished the book.

Cep first learned about the existence of “The Reverend” in 2015, when the literary world was stunned by the news that Lee was publishing another novel, titled “Go Set a Watchman.” When Cep went to Alabama to report on the circumstances surrounding the new book, she learned about another old Harper Lee project that hardly anyone was talking about — a rumored masterpiece of true crime that people close to Lee said rivaled Capote’s “In Cold Blood” (which Lee famously helped to research but received little credit for).

Cep may not have fully solved the cases, but she collected enough clues and vivid details to tell a captivating story. Below is an edited transcript of a recent interview with Cep about how she retraced Harper Lee’s steps.

Q: Which was the harder mystery to unravel, the story behind the alleged murders, or what happened to Harper Lee’s unfinished manuscript?

A: I’m not sure I solved either of them. But I hope I’ve given people all the evidence that I can for readers to draw their own conclusions about everything, from did the Reverend do it to how did he do it if he did it, and what did Harper Lee write, what didn’t she write or why couldn’t she write?

Q: What was the most challenging thing about taking Lee on as a subject?

A: There’s a tremendous amount of her inner life that remains enigmatic even to those who knew her best. She just was exceedingly private. It was not even just a public-facing privacy; it was even with people who knew her well, and I think in some of those core instances, she was inscrutable even to herself.

Q: The thing that was surprising to me in your book was how confident and how committed to the material she seemed to be. Why do you think she abandoned it, or never tried to publish it?

A: It is the big mystery of what became of Harper Lee, and this is one iteration of it. I think for a lot of readers, it’s unsatisfying because I don’t put my thumb on the scale. I think a different writer would have made a guess. It’s something I really think Harper Lee would appreciate about the book, the degree to which I tried to be scrupulous.

Q: But if you had to make a guess …

A: I am an optimist in general, and I’m an optimist about Harper Lee. She was an extraordinary writer and thinker, and there’s a way in which she had everything going for her with this book. Look, I did it, so of course she could have, and probably did, and there’s probably no one more excited to read whatever exists of “The Reverend” than me. I’m pretty sanguine. I think there’s potential for her to have written the whole thing. People who lived around her on the Upper East Side heard the typewriter at all hours of the day and night.

Q: And by your account, she gathered an incredible amount of material.

A: It was clear she had a mind for the investigation. She had all the pieces. She should be able to write it, and then we have to sit with the question of, what happened?

Q: Were you at all intimidated taking on a literary project that Lee had failed to complete?

A: I think “Mockingbird” is one of the most extraordinary novels in the English language, and the idea that the woman who wrote that couldn’t do it doesn’t bode well for the likes of Casey Cep. Imagine if you thought Harper Lee was going to tell your story, and then Casey Cep, this writer you’ve never heard of who’s never written a book, she’s not even from Alabama, I think for some of these people it was like, “We get you? We were supposed to get Harper Lee and we get you?”

I felt like there was one thing I could do which she was never going to do, which was talk about her. It’s the story behind the story. She would never have included herself.

Q: There’s an amazing moment near the end of the book when you get this trove of documents about the Maxwell case that Maxwell’s lawyer, Tom Radney, had given to Harper Lee. What were some other breakthrough moments in your reporting?

A: I had been told the court reporter from the murder trials was dead. At some point I realized I didn’t know that for sure, and I was looking for women by that name, and it turned out she was alive and well. I go knock on the door, we get to talking about the Maxwell case and a couple of minutes into that conversation she goes, “Gosh, I haven’t talked about this since I talked to Harper Lee.”

Q: Were there any questions that you tried really hard to answer that you were unable to crack?

A: Harper Lee smoked cigarettes like a chimney. You will notice that I do not name the brand of cigarettes she smoked in the book. She’s shown holding them in some photographs but the pack is never visible. As much as I want to tell you I think they were Chesterfields, I could not say that with certainty. So I just tell you she smoked.

Q: One gets the sense that you have a real affection for Harper Lee and yet you expose her demons, her heavy drinking, her insecurities, her disdain for her hometown. Was it difficult to draw out sources on those aspects of her life?

A: People were happy to finally get to talk about it, trusting that it would be represented in a responsible way and not a sensational way. A lot of people felt like they didn’t want to embarrass her in her lifetime, but they wanted to let the world know that she struggled.

Q: What do you think Harper Lee would have made of your effort to finish the story she never told?

A: People ask me sometimes, do I think she would like the book? I respect her enough to say, probably not. I don’t think she would have approved of someone looking so seriously at her life. And yet I think that she valued the truth a great deal and would have admired the extent to which this is a book that tried to tell the truth.

This article originally appeared in <a href="https://www.nytimes.com/2019/05/03/books/furious-hours-casey-cep-harper-lee.html" id="07f16907-6fce-35b1-a4d6-bc588fbc8967">The New York Times</a>.

There are two intertwined mysteries at the heart of “Furious Hours,” Casey Cep’s meticulously researched narrative about an Alabama preacher accused of multiple murders, and the Pulitzer Prize-winning novelist who tried and failed to tell his story.

The Murderer and the Novelist: What Happened to Harper Lee's Unpublished True Crime Book?

Her aversion to publicity can be inconvenient, and somewhat impractical. As one of the world’s most famous and in-demand authors, she must occasionally submit to public interrogations, particularly when she has a new book to promote. But she’s not happy about it.

“She hates it,” her agent, Valerie Hoskins, tells me ominously on the phone a week before James and I meet.

Normally, this sort of stance — a notch more hostile than a celebrity’s typical ambivalence toward nosy reporters — would make for an uncomfortable interview. But when James greets me at her bright, airy home in Ealing, a placid suburban borough in west London where she lives with her husband, writer Niall Leonard, and their two Westies, she doesn’t seem remotely ill at ease, at least not outwardly.

She suggests we sit in her enormous, spotless kitchen overlooking the garden for coffee and croissants before we move to her office to talk about her new romance novel, “The Mister,” and suggests the pastries will be better with apricot jam. She talks about her sons, ages 22 and 24, and TV shows she’s obsessed with (“Game of Thrones” and “Stranger Things”). She laments her lack of hobbies after I ask her what she does in her spare time, when she’s not writing or running the elaborate business of being EL James. She can’t think of anything she does for fun.

“I need to get a hobby,” she says. “Writing used to be my hobby.”

Over the past eight years, that hobby has morphed into a billion-dollar entertainment franchise, and James has gone from being an anonymous writer posting lusty fantasies online, to an erotica industry mogul who’s running her own small empire of kink.

When James first released “Fifty Shades of Grey” through a small Australian press in 2011, she hoped to sell a few thousand copies and prevent online copycats from stealing her work. Instead, her erotic trilogy went on to sell more than 150 million copies worldwide, and was translated into roughly 50 languages, including Arabic and Mongolian. The series was adapted into a feature film series that grossed more than $1 billion globally, which James coproduced. It helped popularize niche sexual fetishes involving bondage and anal plugs, bringing them from the fringes into the mainstream.

“It’s still a bit of a shock to me,” says James, who comes across in person as funny, casually profane and surprisingly unguarded. “I’ve been looking at it going, what the hell happened?”

Overseeing a wildly successful multimedia franchise left little time for James’ one-time hobby, writing. On top of that, James, 56, faced impossible expectations set by her blockbuster debut, as ravenous fans kept clamoring for more sequels. Inevitably, many of her readers will be disappointed by any story that doesn’t involve the dominant-submissive relationship between the sadomasochistic billionaire Christian Grey and his demure conquest Anastasia Steele, who becomes his willing sexual servant.

So it’s taken her a while to write something new.

LONDON — EL James does not like speaking to journalists, who often want to know deeply personal things, like how much money she makes and whether she has a sex dungeon in her basement.

Alexandra Alter

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