Elizabeth Harlan talks about 'Becoming Carly Klein'

An autobiographical coming-of-age story with a teen protagonist is a typical debut for many young authors. But Flanders-based writer Elizabeth Harlan's new novel, "Becoming Carly Klein" (SparkPress, $17.99), defies that stereotype in several ways.

First of all, this is Harlan's fourth book, following two YA titles in the 1980s and a biography of George Sand in 2004. And Carly is no thinly veiled Elizabeth. In fact, on the eve of her 80th birthday, Harlan has hatched a suspenseful, emotionally gripping drama featuring a 16-year-old girl in the age of the Swatch watch. How did that happen?

From her home on the East End, the grandmother of four chatted via Zoom about the book.

Are some elements of this story autobiographical? You grew up in Manhattan, right?

Yes, though I have Carly growing up in the '80s, while I grew up in the '50s. Also, Carly's mother is a therapist and mine was not. However, in my teens, I did see a therapist who worked out of her apartment. She had young children who would sometimes appear in the hall. Once I saw a child peeking around a door, which I knew she wasn't supposed to be doing, and that moment was the germ of this book. Carly is intrigued by her mother's patients, one handsome young man in particular. She reads her mother's session notes about him, secretly tracks him dow and falls in love.

Certain other elements are close to my own experience — my best girlfriend, Bunny, lived in my apartment building and her mother was French, just like [Carly's best friend] Lauren’s mom, Tibou, in the book. And while my mother's house was sanitized, immaculate, silent — a basket of eggs or a rope of garlic hanging from the ceiling was not a remote possibility — theirs was filled with food and music. Bunny was literally allowed to draw on the furniture.

Carly's love interest, Daniel, is blind. What inspired that?

Structurally, it eliminated a potential problem — that Daniel might have seen Carly in the hall the way I saw my therapist's daughter long ago. And once I made him blind, it created opportunities for Carly to construct her false identity. She answers an ad he posts looking for someone to read to him, and when she meets him, she lies about her name, her age, and many other things. This goes more smoothly than it might have if he were sighted.

Was it difficult to write a blind character?

As I wrote Daniel, in my mind I pictured the character Jack Damon in "This Is Us," played by the gifted actor Blake Stadnik. And since I write about him from Carly's perspective, it was quite a bit simpler than if he were a point-of-view character.

It's intriguing that you chose the perspective of a rebellious adolescent.

I originally wrote this novel from the point of view of Carly's mother, but one of my first readers, my former literary agent, now retired, suggested I try putting it in Carly's point of view. When I did, it all just flowed. While I was pretty rebellious growing up, my own children — now in their 40s and 50s — really were not. I think parents in my demographic were so understanding, so liberal and permissive, that we didn't give them much to rebel against.

Why did you set the novel in the 1980s?

My coming of age was in the 1960s — I was involved in the resistance to the Vietnam War and the whole hippy dippy flower power thing — but I feel like that period has been done to death. My daughter-in-law, Micol Ostow, a very successful YA author, recommended I make the story more current, but I knew I couldn't get the details right if I set it in the present day. My 12-year-old granddaughter speaks a whole different language than we did. I felt the '80s was close enough to my era that I could pull it off.

What's next?

I lived in France for years, and I became very interested in a French cheese called Reblochon, manufactured in the Haute Savoie region. The cheese was developed in the Middle Ages by tenant farmers who held back from fully milking their cows when the landlords’ agents came to collect the milk they were due. Once the agents left, the farmers would finish the milking, producing a very rich milk that they used to make Reblochon.

I love this cheese, which was born in an act of rebellion and continued to play a subversive role throughout history. I’ve set my novel during World War II, when Reblochon was used to provision the Maquis Resistance during the German occupation in World War II. My main character is the daughter of a cheese-producing family. Her father is a Vichy sympathizer, but she's in love with one of the Maquis. So it's back to rebellion, but in quite a different way.