Julia Glass Biography, Books, and Similar Authors

Interview

Three Junes took Glass many years to write. Find out how it evolved and why she eventually divided it into three parts.

What led you to create Three Junes?
Sometimes it's hard for me to think of this novel as something I created, because I never sat down and planned it out as a whole, the way you might cut and piece together a suit from a bolt of cloth (as I'd always imagined a novel gets written). Three Junes grew over several years, like a tree--organically and at first in odd, sporadic bursts--starting out as a short story called "Souvenirs," which was based on an experience I had while traveling in Greece after college. One of the first stories I wrote as an adult, it was your typical ingenue-abroad, loss-of-innocence tale with a predictably idyllic setting, and I was hoping to sell it to Cosmopolitan magazine, where I was working as a copy editor. (In those days, short stories--some by wonderful writers like Laurie Colwin, Lorrie Moore, and Elinor Lipman--were a fixture of the magazine. Often, there were two in a single issue, just as there once were in the New Yorker.) Reportedly, Helen Gurley Brown read my story but thought the heroine too "privileged" for her readers--that is, not your good old "mouseburger" COSMO Girl--so into a drawer it went. A few years later, I looked at the story again and decided that Paul...