All We Ever Wanted Was A Blog

They say “don’t judge a book by its cover,” and after seeing what publishers in assorted countries have done with mine, I now understand why. It’s hard to imagine that they all belong to the same book.

There’s the rather Victorian Italian cover (with a different title, since the American title didn’t work in translation).

And then there’s the more iconic and sly American cover, with nary a distressed lady in sight. This one got a fair amount of praise (though, oddly, also provoked Janet Maslin to lump it in with a “chick book” story in the New York Times.) 

My American publishers stuck with this cover for the paperback — although they changed the font to a serif font, added a number of quotes and a pink “bestseller!” medallion.

Here’s an early (and fairly generic) Dutch cover….

…. that got scrapped in favor of a version of American sundae cover with a more whimsical font.

The British hardback cover, very American Beauty …

… And then the paperback British cover, which went in a completely different direction. (You can see a flower theme evolving here - trust me, the book doesn’t have anything to do with flowers.)

There’s the German cover, which feels modern and sophisticated. I like this one because of the graphical feeling to it, and the way it’s divided into sextants.

… And the American Large Type cover, which, frankly, I just find perplexing. Are those Faberge eggs?

Authors love to complain about their covers — women often (rightly) argue that they’re being pigeonholed with covers that denote them as “chick books” and ethnic writers bemoan the “exotic” henna-tattoo-type covers that sell them as the next Salman Rushdie-Khaled Hosseini-Jhumpa Lahiri. It’s the rare author that says they’re thrilled with their cover — probably because most have absolutely no say over the finished product.

What I can take away from my own experience is that each cover was designed by publishers who had a specific demographic and marketing plan in mind — and they weren’t always the same. I’m sure they know better than me the tastes of the readers in their individual countries, but the wide spectrum of “tone” on these covers is still very curious. At the least, it provides an interesting glimpse into the minds of marketing departments around the world.

There’s at least one similarity between them all: My novel wasn’t written as a “woman’s book” - despite the fact that it has three women as characters — but it’s clear that across the globe, the marketing is being geared towards that gender. (And no wonder - women make up the majority of fiction readers.) Food, flowers, women in bikinis, women in pretty dresses, and bright colors like Tiffany blue and pink and purple — these, apparently, are considered lady-friendly imagery, no matter what country you live in.   

Tell me - which is your favorite? And for those of you who have read the book, which one do you think most aptly captures the content?

The Today Show picked ALL WE EVER WANTED EVERYTHING as one of its top ten books for the summer. Watch the video below!

My British publishers have posted an extract of the novel on their Web site — go take a peek at the first few pages.

When I was writing All We Ever Wanted Was Everything, I spent a lot of time reading books about suburban malaise and dysfunctional families. These were some of my favorites.

Tom Perotta - Little Children

Such a minimal little book – like all of Tom Perotta’s novels – but it manages to convey with so few words his characters’ feelings of entrapment. He draws, beautifully, the torpid quality of a suburban summer, the small-minded and insular community, the utter boredom of a life of confinement with only children for company. Perotta is a wonderful satirist, probably because he has so much compassion for his subjects. And it’s funny, too.

AM Homes - Music for Torching

This book is the exact antithesis of Tom Perotta. A.M. Homes’ unhappy married couple that burn down their suburban home in an act of petulant childishness are repulsive, unpleasant, selfish people and she seems to find them as distateful as we do. And yet I found this book impossible to put down – both times that I read it. It’s horrifying, surprising, and deeply disturbing.

Jonathan Franzen - The Corrections

Franzen’s portrait of the self-destructive Lambert clan is about as brilliant a portrait of contemporary family dysfunction as I’ve read. I love the sprawl, the humor, the surprise, the poignancy, and, ultimately, the hopefulness of this book – which seems to be a rare quality among suburban novels.  I never get bored with this book, no matter how many times I read it.

Rick Moody - The Ice Storm

I saw the movie before I read this book, and was surprised by how busy and raucous the novel was, especially compared to the serenely clinical hush of Ang Lee’s interpretation of the material.  This book is dark, dark, dark, and sad, sad, sad. It makes me so very glad that I didn’t come of age in the 1970s, which truly has to be one of the most confusing eras in our recent history.

Richard Yates - Revolutionary Road

One of my favorite books of all time. Yates carefully dismantles “the great sentimental lie of the suburbs” – that Leave it To Beaver world that never really existed — and sends his unhappily married couple off to their dooms. In post-war America, Mom is trapped at home, Dad can’t live up to work expectation, and their inspired plans to escape it all by running off to France are brought to an abrupt halt by an unwanted pregnancy. Their relationship is beautifully, subtly rendered and incredibly depressing.

The Complete New Yorker

Not a book, exactly – it’s the entire archive of The New Yorker on CD, and I came back to it again and again when I was writing. Here you’ve got all your classic Cheever (including “The Swimmer ” and “The Housebreaker of Shady Hill”) and nearly 200 stories by John Updike – not to mention thousands of other pieces of short fiction by the greatest writers of the last century. When I need inspiration, I like just to browse through randomly and pick out stories I’ve never heard of.