Anna Nordberg
Author Interview - Anna Nordberg
Author of When She Was Ours
As Thea Erickson watched her daughters twirl around the dancefloor on a lovely June night in 1995, she savored the bittersweet moment. But while she was overjoyed to witness her eldest Phoebe’s wedding, she could not escape the knowledge that she would not live long enough to see life’s other milestones; to know if her youngest, Astra, would find love or graduate from college. A surgeon, Thea had done everything she could to prepare her family in the wake of her terminal cancer diagnosis. She knew that her daughters’ lives were about to change, and she was right, but for all the wrong reasons.
Set in the years leading up to and following Astra’s mother’s death, this is a novel about how loss unfolds in a life, but also the unusual and powerful and even hopeful ways loss changes us. Even in death, Thea’s fierce dedication to her family and love for her daughters will exert a force, as Thea’s journals, letters, and the secret oath she arranged in her final months come to light.
Author Interview - Anna Nordberg
Author I draw inspiration from:
Elizabeth Strout. I came to Strout very late, right before Covid, when my aunt gave me "Oh William!" I plunged right in, completely out of order in the Lucy Barton series, and was haunted by it. Strout is such a sharp observer of human nature without being harsh, and there’s a real suffering to her characters that she doesn’t exploit. In "My Name is Lucy Barton," the central character Lucy has a textbook “bad mother”—abusive, neglectful, estranged. And yet the entire novel is about their longing for each other, their attempts to connect. That’s what I love about fiction. In another medium, those bad mother credentials would simply be the end, there would be nowhere to go. But here, this mother, who has failed her daughter completely, gets on a plane for the first time in her life, overcomes her terror, in order to visit Lucy when she is sick. That’s an interesting story.
Author Interview - Anna Nordberg | Author I Draw Inspiration From
Favorite place to read a book:
In bed
Book character I’d like to be stuck in an elevator with:
Cassandra Mortmain in "I Capture the Castle," by Dodie Smith. Never has a character been so charming and delightful while narrating a series of slow-rolling disasters. Or Raja from "The True True Story of Raja the Gullible (and his mother)," by Rabih Alameddine, which won the National Book Award this year. Raja narrates with beautiful, devastating hilarity the experience of growing up in Beirut during decades of civil war. Neither Cassandra nor Raja would be at all fazed by a malfunctioning elevator. I’d want those vibes.
Author Interview - Anna Nordberg | Book Character I’d Like to be Stuck in an Elevator With
The moment I knew I wanted to become an author:
Every child gets asked “what do you want to be when you grow up” at least eleven times a week. From my earlier memory, it was always the same. I wanted to be a writer, like my mom, who was a magazine editor and editor of academic journals, but burned to write a novel.
Hardback, paperback, ebook or audiobook:
I love hardbacks—they signal a book’s first life, they have heft. Paperbacks I like for travel, of course. I’ve never actually read an e-book for pleasure, though I have read a lot of digital galleys for work and that is totally fine—in a way it signals my work brain to get into gear. I used to be an exclusively print girl but I’ve started getting into more audiobooks, especially when they come highly recommended as audio, like "Theo of Golden." One of the books on my list to read this year is "The Fire Next Time" by James Baldwin, and normally this would be a hardback for me, but it's narrated by the actor Jesse L. Martin, and I grew up on "Law & Order," so I think I may listen!
The last book I read:
"Yesteryear" by Caro Claire Burke. Yowzers. The internet has broken hard for this novel, and I can see why. Her dark satire of tradwife culture is not what you expect at all, and it spares no one.
Author Interview - Anna Nordberg | The Last Book I Read
Pen & paper or computer:
Well, now all my writing is on a computer, though I do always carry a little notebook in my bag and jot down notes if I’m away from my desk. I also have a journal by my bed, since I tend to get ideas right before I go to sleep. When I first went freelance as a journalist, and was utterly at sea and wondering if I'd made a terrible mistake, my husband gave me a tiny leather notebook with “make it happen” on the front. I still carry it.
As for my writing process, twenty years of deadline journalism and having two exuberant and very noisy young kids around for a large chunk of my writing life trained me to have zero fussiness about my work. I’ll write anywhere—at the kitchen table, at a coffee shop between school pickups, in an uber on my way to a meeting, whatever. I’ll write if I have ten minutes or several hours and if it’s terrible, I’ll rewrite it the next day.
Book character I think I’d be best friends with:
Elinor Dashwood in "Sense and Sensibility" by Jane Austen. She’s so steady and competent, and she has a strong sense of duty without being a total bore or killjoy. So many characters like her in fiction—dutiful, responsible, always having their impulses under control—are treated as spiritless, but Elinor is not. Jane Austen makes her interesting, makes you root for her, because she knows the world would absolutely fall apart without its Elinors. I think we all have people in our life who bring out our best qualities and our worst qualities. Elinor is a best qualities friend.
Author Interview - Anna Nordberg | Book Character I’d be Best Friends With
If I weren’t an author, I’d be a:
If I was to do something completely different than writing, I would want to be involved in child care policy. I reported a lot on child care and parenting as a journalist, and it remains unfathomable to me why we treat the 0 to 5 years as simply a private problem for parents to solve. There’s still so much cultural baggage around care and its worth. This could be a whole separate interview, so I’ll leave it at that.
Favorite decade in fashion history:
I think the 2000s were underrated. If you look at Oscar fashion alone, you had Halle Berry in that unbelievable Elie Saab dress, Julia Roberts winning her Erin Brockovich Oscar in vintage Valentino, and what GenXer can ever forget Bjork’s swan dress? A legend.
Place I’d most like to travel:
Well, it’s having a moment right now with "Wuthering Heights," but I’d love to visit the Yorkshire moors in the U.K. As my kids know, and make fun of me for, there’s nothing I like to do more than tromp around outdoors, in all sorts of wild weather. I’m always pushing for walks and my family complains, but then we get outside, and everyone is like, this is great!
My signature drink:
I love an Americano, which is Campari, vermouth, and club soda. I call it my weekday negroni.
Favorite artist:
John Lennon
Find more from the author:
www.annanordberg.com (author website)
https://www.instagram.com/annanordberg_writer/ (IG)
https://www.tiktok.com/@annanordberg_writer (TikTok)
About Anna Nordberg:
Anna Nordberg
Anna Nordberg is a journalist and culture writer whose essays have appeared in Slate magazine, The Washington Post, The New York Times, and the San Francisco Chronicle. She grew up in New York City and now lives in San Francisco with her husband and two children. When She Was Ours is her first novel.
