The actress Jane Fonda recently commented in an interview in the New York Times that she would like to play Nora, the famous heroine from Henrik Ibsen’s play A Doll’s House. Nora, of course, is also the heroine of my novel, Searching for Nora: After the Doll’s House. When friends saw Fonda’s comment, several of them fired off emails: “Send Fonda your book! She wants to play Nora!” In the New York Times piece, Fonda admitted she had played Nora once before, in a 1973 film directed by Joseph Losey. But, as she told the Times, “I didn’t dig deep… 

The hardest thing about writing a book is marketing it, particularly in this day and age. Compared to the quiet and intense focus of the writing process, marketing takes chutzpah, salesmanship and an entrepreneurial spirit. It’s about cold-calling prospective groups, arranging appearances, and handing out chocolates (and smiles) at Barnes and Noble in hopes that a few people might stop for a look. Not easy in the best of circumstances. But marketing a book during a pandemic? Please. Some people say the shut-down has given them more time to read, yet others report feeling too distracted to relax with a… 

When I was working on my novel Searching for Nora: After the Doll’s House, I spent many hours driving around the beautiful open prairie of western Minnesota and the Dakotas. I grew quite enchanted by the land, with its huge bowl of sky and tall grass dancing in the wind. I was particularly fond of the birds I spotted – goldfinch, grasshopper sparrows, bobolink – that burst from the scrub along the road as I whooshed by. I loved the yellow-headed blackbirds best. Being from the east coast, I’d never seen one before. Sometimes I drove along the empty roads just… 

My novel Searching for Nora has two story lines: one about what happens to Nora Helmer, the character from Ibsen’s play A Doll’s House, and the other about a young university student in Norway right after the end of World War I. Nora’s story is set mostly in the 1880s, but Solvi’s story begins in 1918, nearly 40 years later. I did this for several reasons. I have long been fascinated by the generation of women who came of age during the Great War, a generation marked by an explosion of opportunity for women in nearly every part of life…. 

Because my novel Searching for Nora is a sequel to Henrik Ibsen’s play A Doll’s House, many people have asked me if they should read the play before they read my book. It’s a good question, and I always tell them “it depends.” It depends on whether they have seen the play or read it in the past. It depends on what they remember. It depends on how much time they have, and how much patience. In truth, readers don’t need to read A Doll’s House before reading Searching for Nora because I wove the play’s important plot points into…