https://www.lisagenova.com/single-post/2014/04/15/Lisas-6-Rules-of-Research
https://www.lisagenova.com/single-post/2014/02/19/Lisas-10-Rules-of-Writing
Knowing so many people with ALS who were approaching their imminent deaths and facing it with them definitely affected the way I chose to write this novel. Although I’d touched on mortality and death in all of my previous books, death is almost an unavoidable main character in a story about ALS. There’s no dancing around it. I had many candid conversations about death and dying with the people I knew with ALS, and I read many books on this topic, including When Breath Becomes Air by Paul Kalanithi, Being Mortal by Atul Gawande, The Tibetan Book of Living and Dying by Sogyal Rinpoche, Awake at the Bedside by Koshin Paley Ellison and Matt Weingast, and How We Die by Sherwin B. Nuland.
Plot turns that took me by surprise? I was shocked when Richard’s father died. I did NOT see that coming!
Do you have any favorite scenes in Every Note Played? What are they?
My favorite scenes were:
The “This One Smells Like Cherries” fight between Richard and Karina
Every scene with Bill
The chapter with Richard’s brothers
Music plays an important role in the lives of Richard and Karina, and you wrote about each of their styles with such authenticity. How did you accomplish this? What were you listening to while you wrote?
I knew very little about classical and jazz piano before writing Every Note Played, but that had to change if I was going to write about playing, hearing, and loving piano from the perspectives of these highly trained pianists with any believability. I read Thinking in Jazz: The Infinite Art of Improvisation by Paul Berliner, Miles: The Autobiography by Miles Davis, and Journey of a Thousand Miles by Lang Lang. I saw and heard Jeremy Denk play classical piano in Miami, Joey Alexander play jazz in Boston, and Wynton Marsalis play jazz in New Orleans. I watched many YouTube videos of pianists. My favorite is Vladimir Horowitz. I interviewed several professional pianists, including Simon Tedeschi, Jesse Lynch, David Kuehn, and Dianne Goolkasian Rahbee. And I took piano lessons from Monica Rizzio and Abigail Field! I often listened to Bach, Schumann, Chopin, Debussy, and Liszt while writing this story. You can find a playlist with all of the classical pieces mentioned in Every Note Played at my website: www.LisaGenova.com
What would you like your readers to take away from Every Note Played?
Maybe prior to reading Every Note Played, readers read Tuesdays with Morrie, watched The Theory of Everything, or dumped buckets of ice water over their heads. They probably had some awareness of ALS. I hope they now have a deeper and more compassionate understanding of what it feels like to live and die with this disease.
Also, when people think about ALS, their first thoughts and fears focus on the horror of not being able to move or speak, on being locked in. Alongside Richard’s ALS, we additionally saw the many ways he and Karina were stuck in narratives of blame, fear, and excuses, trapped in psychological and emotional prisons. Before ALS steals Richard’s ability to speak, both were perfectly capable of saying anything. Their voices were physically intact. And yet, they weren’t able to say what needed to be said to set each other free, to speak the needed words of apology, to offer forgiveness. I hope readers also use this story to reflect on the ways in which they might be paralyzed in their own lives, and maybe with a shift in perspective, they’ll see that “the door is so wide open.”
Are you working on anything now? Can you tell us about it?
I’m writing a nonfiction book about memory. My next novel will be about bipolar disorder. Oh, and I’m right now re-reading the script for Inside the O’Briens! J
ABOUT THE AUTHOR
Acclaimed as the Oliver Sacks of fiction and the Michael Crichton of brain science, LISA GENOVA is the New York Times bestselling author of Still Alice, Left Neglected, Love Anthony, and Inside the O’Briens Still Alice was adapted into an Oscar-winning film starring Julianne Moore, Alec Baldwin, and Kristen Stewart. Lisa graduated valedictorian from Bates College with a degree in biopsychology and holds a PhD in neuroscience from Harvard University. She travels worldwide speaking about the neurological diseases she writes about, and has appeared on The Dr. Oz Show, Today, PBS NewsHour, CNN, and NPR. Her TED Talk, “What You Can Do to Prevent Alzheimer’s,” has been viewed more than two million times.
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ALSO BY LISA GENOVA
Still Alice
Left Neglected
Love Anthony
Inside the O’Briens
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Scout Press
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This book is a work of fiction. Any references to historical events, real people, or real places are used fictitiously. Other names, characters, places, and events are products of the author’s imagination, and any resemblance to actual events or places or persons, living or dead, is entirely coincidental.
Copyright © 2018 by Lisa Genova
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First Scout Press hardcover edition March 2018
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Interior design by Davina Mock-Maniscalco
Jacket design by Donna Cheng
Jacket art by plainpicture/Benjamin Harte (paper); Yay Media AS/Alamy Stock Vector (birds)
Author photograph by Greg Mentzer
Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication Data is available.
ISBN 978-1-4767-1780-7
ISBN 978-1-4767-1782-1 (ebook)
Lisa Genova, Every Note Played
(Series: # )
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