Author B.A. Shapiro On Following Your Fascination

[image description: The cover of The Art Forger, a novel by B.A. Shapiro. The cover is a photo of an art studio with abstract paintings on the wall, a large window, a table with paint buckets, a chair, and an easel.]
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CW: suicide

So much of the reading experience is beyond the author’s control. It’s about the right book finding you at the right time. How the book impacts you isn’t in any way objective and because it’s almost entirely a subjective experience it doesn’t matter what critics thought of the book or whether it wins awards. It’s about how the book hits you in a particular time, in a particular place, as you’re reading it.

That’s what happened for me reading The Art Forger. It was a couple of years ago and I’d recently moved to Columbus. I’d moved so recently, in fact, that I hadn’t made a single friend and was missing all my friends back in Birmingham, so I decided to spend Christmas back in my hometown.

However, I’d made a miscalculation. I’d counted on my notoriously dramatic and opinionated family not being raging assholes. It seemed from the moment I arrived, my presence was a cause for complaint and stupidity. My mother whining about how I’d moved and it upset her (never mind what I wanted), my grandfather spewing racist epithets, and my grandmother being frustratingly centrist with her “can’t we all just get along and have a good Christmas?” which translates to her desire for me to be an entirely different person.

I left before the realization sank in that all my friends would be busy with their own families for Christmas. And there’s few things more depressing than crashing another family’s holiday celebrations where they’re all being a normal, kind, healthily functioning family. I thought about going back to Ohio, but I’d made plans with friends in the days after Christmas, which meant I was stuck in town celebrating the holidays alone.

I’d be lying if I said it wasn’t a low point in my life. I avoided telling my then-boyfriend-now-husband how depressed I was feeling because I didn’t want him to not be able to enjoy the holiday with his family because he was worrying about me. Instead, I cried on the phone to the suicide help line, not because I was necessarily suicidal, but because the loneliness I felt was crushing and I mostly just needed someone to listen and not pity me or sound like I was bothering them.

After I cried myself out, I did what I always do: I turned to books. But I’d cried so hard my eyes were swollen and it hurt to keep them open, so I scrolled through the Libby app on my phone for an audiobook. I just wanted something that was available immediately and not too serious. If I was ever in need of an escapist book, it was now.

That was how I found The Art Forger by B.A. Shapiro.

I’d never heard of it before, but I can’t turn down a book about an art heist. So I laid on a slowly deflating air mattress in my old roommate’s empty apartment while she was out of town with her family and listened to the whole audiobook in one sitting. I was mentally and emotionally exhausted, but too upset to sleep, so that’s how I passed the time. That book got me through a miserable Christmas Eve and a lonely Christmas Day. I was immediately sucked in and was so enraptured by the story of the Gardner Heist and an art forger remaking the stolen Degas paintings that I nearly forgot about my family and loneliness and how much I fucking hate the holidays.

That was in 2015 and it’s not an experience you easily forget. So I knew when I heard B.A. Shapiro was coming to Columbus and giving a talk at the Columbus Museum of Art, I had to be there.

I knew I’d like her immediately when she took the stage wearing all black with a funky rainbow scarf, knee boots, and a shag of curly red hair. She didn’t talk standing behind a podium. I appreciate a writer who’s confident enough to take a stage like she owns it.

B.A. has written eight novels, three of which, including The Art Forger, are in her art trilogy. The books in the trilogy don’t have to be read in any particular order since they all have different characters and settings. She wanted to be an artist growing up or Mrs. Whatsit from A Wrinkle in Time. I got the impression she still does.

After her second kid, she was tired of trying to do everything––get a Ph.D. in sociology, work in software and statistics, in addition to life responsibilities. She wanted to write more and spend more time with her kids. She said a writer needs a room of her own and a spouse with benefits, adding a modern twist to Virginia Woolf’s timeless wisdom.

After writing five novels that were published and flopped and a couple more novels that weren’t published at all, she wrote the novel of her heart: The Art Forger. You’re never guaranteed success as a writer, but there’s a much better chance of it when you follow your fascination. B.A. had been interested in art from a young age and that fascination never left her. It wasn’t until she decided to follow that fascination that she wrote a successful book.

None of the Big 5 publishers wanted The Art Forger because it didn’t fit cleanly into any particular genre, which is comical to me as a reader. So Algonquin, a mid-sized publisher acquired it and turned it into a New York Times bestseller.

If you’re like me, even the idea of writing historically inspired fiction is overwhelming because it takes so much research to get it right and you need a compelling story on top of that!

That’s why B.A.’s editing process is intense. She said every page gets rewritten at least 20 times and she has a statistical method of writing and revision. She plots the plot points on a normal curve, then divides the curve into four parts representing the four acts of the novel. She charts the tension and makes Venn diagrams for how the characters relate to one another. If the graph of the tension is too straight, she adds more in. She makes notecards for each character then rearranges them on her dining room table. She makes spreadsheets for everything and uses colored sticky flags liberally. She’s an academic by training and enjoys the research.

If you’re feeling inspired by read The Art Forger, I hope you’ll use my link to purchase it from your local indie.