An Interview with Julie Buxbaum on her novels,
THE OPPOSITE OF LOVE and AFTER YOU

Q. THE OPPOSITE OF LOVE received terrific reviews and film rights have been sold, with Anne Hathaway rumored to play the leading role. Why do you think this story resonated with so many readers?

A. I’ve been unbelievably gratified by the response to the book. According to the emails I receive, Emily Haxby’s experiences with the consequences of delaying the grief brought on by an early traumatic event in her life seem to have spoken to readers. THE OPPOSITE OF LOVE is, in many ways, a delayed coming of age story—a look at how one woman negotiates love and career and the pressures of adulthood. There is something universal about Emily’s struggle to figure out who she wants to be in the big, scary world. I think that quest for identity is something we’ve all been through.

Q. Your new novel, AFTER YOU, takes on more serious subject matter since your story involves a woman whose closest friend is murdered. What inspired this darker, more complex story?

A. AFTER YOU turned out to be a departure from THE OPPOSITE OF LOVE because I was in a different place in my life when I wrote my second novel. When I quit practicing law to become a novelist, my life was much like Emily Haxby’s—I was still struggling to figure out the question: “Who am I going to be when I grow up?” In the past couple of years, I’ve gotten married, committed to this wonderful career as a novelist, and started a new life in a different country. As a result, while writing AFTER YOU, I was much less interested in watching a character come of age, and more in the unique challenges we face once we meet our adult selves and they don’t necessarily match our expectations. The darker set-up of the novel, with Ellie Lerner heading to London after her childhood friend is murdered, provided the ideal context for my characters to tackle these issues.

Q. Ellie leaves her Massachusetts home and moves to London to care for her best friend Lucy’s eight-year-old daughter, Sophie. She connects with Sophie by reading a chapter from the children’s novel, The Secret Garden, with her very night. What significance does this novel have in your own life, and why did you choose to incorporate this literary reference in your story?

A. For me, The Secret Garden is a rare example of a book that not only has deep personal significance, but also one that I think stands on its own as a timeless classic. Some of my favorite childhood memories involve my mother and I reading this book—my old, torn mint-green copy is one of my most prized possessions—and in adulthood I’ve turned to the book on countless occasions for refuge and comfort. (I even had a favorite passage read at my wedding.) AFTER YOU is, in many ways, an homage to The Secret Garden—it too is a story of redemption and the restoration of self—and so it was important to me to work it in as an integral and natural part of the story.

Q. Both of your novels involve the loss of a mother. Why have you tackled such personal subject matter twice in your fiction?

A. I feel like when writing a first novel, you can’t help but discover what you’re interested in; but with a second one, you find out what you should probably be talking to a therapist about! What’s fascinating to me is not only that both of my novels deal with motherless daughters in particular—which is something I have personal experience with (I lost my mother at the age of fourteen)—but that, at their core, both books are a meditation on the aftermath of loss more generally. AFTER YOU is not only about Sophie’s dealing with the loss of her mother, but also about how Ellie has dealt with the recent loss of a baby. I seem to be a little obsessed with the ways in which we manage to botch up our lives and then (hopefully) self-heal in the wake of grief.

Q. How does Ellie’s experience of losing her unborn baby influence her actions AFTER YOU?

A. I do think this is an essential part of Ellie’s character and it helps explain her motivations in picking up and moving to London. As the novel unfolds, the reader learns that there is more going on in Ellie’s old life in Boston than originally suspected (and in Lucy’s in London, too, for that matter). AFTER YOU then becomes less a story about a woman comforting a grieving child and very much a story about a woman running away.

Q. Both THE OPPOSITE OF LOVE and AFTER YOU deal with relationships at crossroads. Why does this subject fascinate you, and how does it impact Ellie’s life?

A. I’ve always been fascinated by relationships of all kinds, but during the time I wrote AFTER YOU—maybe because I had just gotten engaged—I became very interested in exploring the idea of how well we really know and understand the people we love. How strange that we can commit to spending the rest of our lives with someone, but still at the end of the day, their internal lives remain essentially opaque and unknowable! With AFTER YOU, I wanted to create a unique set of circumstances where one person would get the opportunity to stand in the shoes of another. For Ellie, when she steps into her deceased friend Lucy’s world, she learns that all of her basic assumptions about her life, her friend’s life, and their friendship were completely wrong. In other words, she gets to see through her own myth-making.

Q. AFTER YOU is set in London, where you now live. What was it like being an American expatriate writing in and about London?

A. When I first moved to London, I channeled all of my first impressions into AFTER YOU. It turns out, though, that not all first impressions are created equal, and I had to undergo an extensive editing process to weed out all my own personal rants like eighty different descriptions of the bleak London sky. (I was in sun withdrawal after moving from Los Angeles.) As I began to understand the dynamic of London life, I was able to weave in the more interesting and telling details: its unique blend of multiculturalism, some of its class consciousness, and the blend of old and new. In one surprising way, writing has become more difficult since moving: I find that I have to fight to keep my American ears. British expressions started creeping onto the page—the word “lovely” and the expression, “I can’t be bothered.” Worst of all, I’ve adopted that terrible British habit of apologizing for everything.