Girls in Pants - Ann Brashares [97]
Q. The fourth Sisterhood book is the last you’re planning to write about these characters for now. Are you ambivalent about leaving them? Do you wonder how their lives will turn out, if their dreams will be realized? Would you want to revisit the girls of the Sisterhood as adults at some point?
A. I am terribly ambivalent about leaving them. I love thinking about them and writing about them. I love seeing what they will do next.
At the same time, I think it is good for any literary enterprise to have a shape. The shape of this one—beginning, expanding, and ending—is four books. I wouldn’t feel like a real storyteller if I just left it open-ended, following these characters somewhat aimlessly into the future. Granted, life does tend to amble aimlessly. But my business thus far is fiction.
That said, I do intend, at some point, to figure out what happens to these young women. I am too invested in their futures not to care. I think I would like to march ten or twenty years into their lives and see what’s happened. Maybe there will be a novel in that. Maybe not. I sort of hope there will be.
Q. How has your success influenced your writing, or has it? Has the success of Traveling Pants, Second Summer, and Girls in Pants influenced how you’re approaching Sisterhood #4?
A. I love the fact that my books have connected with a lot of people. That is the luckiest and nicest thing, and I appreciate it all the time. If I forget to appreciate it, even briefly, I give myself a little kick to start again. That lovely feeling of connection has made subsequent books harder to start (the pressure) but somehow easier to finish (I imagine a lot of company along the way).
But success is a term I don’t completely absorb. I have this odd idea that success will mean that brownies won’t make you fat and fashion will become natural to you and that jars of spaghetti sauce will open for you without your having to shout for your husband. I think it should mean you don’t doubt and falter and do incredibly stupid things. In that sense, I have not achieved it.
Q. What types of projects would you like to work on in the future? Do you worry about being able to please all your Sisterhood fans with the next book you write?
A. There are so many other things I want to write. One of them is a freestanding novel—a sort of love triangle with lots of romance and tragedy. I’ve been thinking a lot about that one recently. I can’t wait to start it.
And, yes, it is hard to move beyond the characters of the Sisterhood. But then, I expect those girls to go on to bigger and better things. I ask the same of myself.
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