Q&A and Reading with Eliza Kennedy, author of "I Take You"

Eliza Kennedy attended the University of Iowa and Harvard Law School, where she was an editor of the Harvard Law Review. After graduation she served as a law clerk for a federal judge, then practiced litigation for several years at a prestigious Manhattan law firm. She lives in New York with her husband and son. I Take You is her first novel.

 

 

I was running on a treadmill at the gym, bored and irritated. I started thinking about an effort I’d made years earlier to write a novel about a wedding, and why I had failed. A question popped into my head: What if the bride didn’t want to get married? Followed by another question: Why not? And finally, an answer: Because she loves to sleep around. I raced home and wrote the first chapter that afternoon. 

 

This is the only good thing that has ever happened to me at a gym.

 

 

Patrick Leigh Fermor’s A Time of Gifts, a memoir of the time he spent as a teenager walking through 1930s Europe, which that has convinced me that the time I spent in college was completely wasted; and The Collected Poems of Jack Gilbert.

 

 

One of my favorites is Ada, or Ardor, by Vladimir Nabokov. I tore through it, and as soon as I was finished I turned back to page one and started over. It’s lush and dense and sexy and funny and magical and nonsensical, the kind of novel you fall into headfirst and have to paddle very very hard to keep yourself from drowning in. Worth it.

 

 

I’m halfway finished with my next novel, which, like my first, is about sex and infidelity, with a sprinkling of law.