Interview with Joanne Leedom-Ackerman
Joanne Leedom-Ackerman is one of those authors that are not only prolific and accomplished, but have a knack for crafting creative novels that have earned wide acclaim. She took some time from her busy schedule to chat with us. We hope you’ll enjoy this interview as much as we did and you’ll check out her latest cracking thriller Burning Distance.
TSM: Tell us about your latest novel Burning Distance?
JA: Burning Distance has been described as a modern-day Romeo and Juliet set against the backdrop of arms trafficking in the Middle East. The novel spans 1982-1996, including the run up to the first Gulf War. The story sets off with two high school students at the American School in London—one an American girl who has lost her father in a plane crash in the Persian Gulf—and a Palestinian/Lebanese boy—who has lost his mother in a bombing in Beirut. They fall in love.
They meet in 1987, a time when the political landscape was shifting with the advent of the European Union, the impending breakup of the Soviet Union, the turning of Eastern Europe to the West and democracy and increasing arms sales into the Middle East.
The students at the American School were connected to parents who were at the controls as diplomats, government officials, lawyers and in one case a member of a “terrorist” organization. These students were figuring out their own worlds even as the world around them shifted and inevitably shaped their future.
There are two murders in the novel, one the original plane crash of Elizabeth West’s father and the other…. you’ll have to read the book.
TSM: It’s been described in Shakespearean terms—how do you modernize and a create a thriller from a very old tale?
JA: I didn’t set out to write a modern-day Romeo and Juliet, but the character Elizabeth (Lizzy) West and Adil Hassan are young like Romeo and Juliet when they meet, and their parents and culture throw up obstacles in their path; but they have a different journey and outcome. Conflict heightens until this love story/mystery evolves into a thriller. I don’t want to give away more.
TSM: How much of a historical background is there in this novel, which feels in a way ripped from headlines and I say ripped in the prescient sense.
JA: The writing of Burning Distance has been over decades, literally. Had it been published when I first thought I had finished it, the novel might have been prescient of events to come, but now it is more like historical fiction. In the interim, I’ve written several more novels. After each, I went back and revised and wrote further drafts of Burning Distance. The novel has also had several titles along the way. Because I began researching the arms trade and the trafficking of weapons and components for weapons of mass destruction before the internet and Google and search engines were options, I have four giant notebooks of news clippings—actual newsprint in plastic sheaves.
Publishers couldn’t figure out if Burning Distance was a thriller, a love story or a mystery. But I kept writing. I learned how to transform all the research into story and characters, especially how to transform very un-literary words like isopropyl methylethylphosponoflourodite into literary language and form.
TSM: Who are some of your favorite thriller authors?
JA: My all-time favorite is John LeCarré, the writer who first showed me the power of the thriller. I didn’t consider myself a thriller writer, but as I am now being published as such, I’m reading more and more thrillers and mysteries. I enjoy David Ignatius, Steve Berry, James Grippando, Deborah Goodrich Royce, Adam Sikes, Daniel Silva, and mysteries and crime writers James Lee Burke, Patricia Highsmith, P.D. James and Susan Issacs.
TSM: What are you reading now?
JA: Right now I am reading a galley of my son Elliot Ackerman’s new novel Halcyon to be published in May by Knopf.
TSM: I’d love to know your journalistic background, did that help with the book?
JA: I was a reporter for The Christian Science Monitor after I finished graduate school. Before that I worked in the summers during college for a newspaper in Dallas, Texas and one summer for the Monitor in London. My journalism background definitely contributed to my work on Burning Distance, particularly all the research. Several of my former colleagues reported regularly from the Middle East. One of them arranged for me to interview a man who had been Saddam Hussein’s Minister in charge of acquiring many of the components for nuclear and chemical warfare. However, when Saddam told him he wanted to build an atomic bomb, the man refused, and Saddam put him into prison. During the First Gulf War, the man escaped to Iran. He eventually made his way to London where we met for a very long interview in a pub, constantly watching the door with an eye out for the Mukhabarat. He was able to confirm a great deal of the research I had been doing.
TSM: What was the craziest thing that ever happened to you as a journalist?
JA: I don’t know that this is the craziest, but it is memorable. It was right after I had stepped away from daily journalism to write fiction. I was still occasionally writing stories, and I’d begun my first novel. I was also teaching at NYU. I lived in New York City, and the room where I wrote looked out on the apartment building across the street on West 90th Street. Every day I looked out at this building while I wrote. It turned out that in that building one of the most wanted people of the day was hiding out. Patty Hearst was living there, but I missed the scoop!
TSM: What can your book teach us about contemporary events?
JA: I hope the reader will remember Lizzy’s father’s advice to her. From Proverbs:
Keep thy heart with all diligence; for out of it are the issues of life. The novel shows how we often miss what is happening right under our eyes because we are focusing on the wrong thing. In current affairs we often get so focused on one point, we miss what is happening just off stage. That was in part what was happening as the West exalted in the breakup of the Soviet Union while Saddam was accumulating a vast array of weapons and components for weapons of mass destruction. Then as we focused on Iraq, the Balkans festered. In all of those global events, the importance for the characters was to focus on the issues of the human heart and to honor those.