
A Book Chat with Debut Novelist Nicole Dieker
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Nicole Dieker is no stranger to the world of online magazine – she makes her living as a freelance writer and editor. This year, however, she released her first novel, The Biographies of Ordinary People, and the characters are just as entranced by books as any Rioter here. I called up Nicole Dieker to talk about her influences, the books she loves, and the process of writing novels about childhood.
Tell us a little about The Biographies of Ordinary People.
Nicole Dieker: Sure, it’s a novel about family, friendship, art, and the past 30 years. It begins in 1989 with Rosemary Gruber’s 35th birthday, so she’s the mother in the story, and the two book series ends in 2016, when her oldest daughter turns 35. So in between we see, sort of everything that has happened in the world, but more specifically everything that’s happened in their life. They move to a small town in rural Missouri, there are 3 Gruber sisters, who all have artistic and social interests. They do all the things that many people do in their lives.
What makes it interesting and compelling is because the characters are driving the story – what makes doing homework interesting? What makes putting on a play interesting? What makes having friends interesting? It’s how you approach it! We get to see how ordinary people approach life events.
Definitely. I was really struck by the way that Meredith looks to books she’s read as a guide for how the world works; I was wondering how you think books helped guide you as you navigated the world as a child?
I think they still guide me, tremendously. Books provided two things for me: they provided a social guide, because many books, especially for children, are about behaviors, if someone is nicer they can make a friend! You are reading and absorbing that, but in addition you are having this outlet for your emotions – kids have such big emotions! I probably still have big emotions. Often, I turn to books where the characters are feeling the same things I’m feeling, so we can have this emotional moment together.
In addition to some of the books that the children read in this novel, what would be some novels or other books that inspired you as a writer?
I kept a boxed set of Lev Grossman’s Magicians series on my desk while I was writing, to remind me that you can write a book where the characters are very smart and very ambitious and where they live inside their heads and where they reference a gob of pop culture and literature, and Grossman never goes back and explains himself. He just drops it in, and you are going to pick it up or you can Google it.