Douglas Kennedy is the author of more than a dozen novels, including the international bestsellers The Big Picture, The Pursuit of Happiness, Leaving the World and The Moment. His latest novel, The Heat of Betrayal, is now available in English and in French as Mirage (with an American publication in Feb. 2016 under the title, The Blue Hour). He is also the author of three highly-praised travel books. Several of his novels have been filmed, including The Big Picture (starring Romain Duris and Catherine Deneuve) and The Woman in the Fifth (with Ethan Hawke and Kristen Scott Thomas).
Born in Manhattan in 1955, he has two children, Max and Amelia, and currently divides his time between Manhattan, Paris, London, Montreal and Maine
Douglas Kennedy's website
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Douglas Kennedy discusses life, love, the possibility of change and his novel Five Days
So let's begin with that most obvious of opening questions: How did Five Days start forming in your imagination?
I would love to report that there was that ecstatic moment of instant inspiration when the proverbial electric lightbulb was illuminated over my head and the entire novel fell into place in a matter of moments. But if there is one thing I know after writing eleven novels (besides the fact that it never gets easier), it's the fact that inspiration is such a gradual and disparately ordered business. And in the case of Five Days, an image kickstarted the imaginative process.
The image was one that I saw before boarding a transatlantic flight to London in January 2011. I was heading to the security checkpoint at Logan Airport in Boston and passed a woman standing alone by the barrier. She was in her early forties, diminutive, attractive in a reserved sort of way, the sort of austerely beautiful New England woman who, in the 1880s, would have been the subject of a John Singer Sargent portrait. But what caught my attention was the fact that her face was awash in tears. Something immensely unsettling ...
On the whole, human beings want to be good, but not too good and not quite all the time
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