Sarah Beth Durst’s second book, Out of the Wild is out today, and in celebration of the event I’m proud to present an interview with Sarah herself. First, a bit about her novels:
Into the Wild, Sarah’s first book, was a hilarious and thrilling romp involving fairy tale characters who had escaped their endlessly repeating stories to live in the real world. Our heroine, Julie, is actually the daughter of Rapunzel and her prince, and the granddaughter of a reformed wicked witch. She’s also the adoptive sister of Puss in Boots. If that doesn’t reflect a nice sense of whimsy, I don’t know what does.
Sarah’s first novel explores what happens when “The Wild,” the magical forest that contains fairy tale characters, tries to take them back. Her second picks up where the first left off: with the ultimate cross-country road trip, taken by Julie and her princely father. It’s a fantastic read, and I heartily encourage you all to rush out and gobble it down. Preferably in a tub full of rose-scented bubble bath.
Now that explanations and exhortations are out of the way, we move onward, my friends, to the interview:
• On the topic of Sarah’s favorite fairy tale:
“Beauty and the Beast. It’s the only one that’s really about true love. All the other ones, they do this love at first sight thing. Cinderella, she goes on one date, Sleeping Beauty, she’s in a coma. The only thing I don’t like about [Beauty and the Beast] is that he turns human at the end.”
Sarah, like me, believes in real love. You know, the kind of love that is blind to unsightly beasts. The kind that grows over time. We’re thinking Meg Ryan and Billy Crystal, rather than Meg Ryan and Tom Hanks. And really, if Billy Crystal ever turned into Tom Hanks, we’d all be kind of freaked out, wouldn’t we?
• About the Disney movie adaptations of classic fairy tales:
“I adore Disney, which really surprises people that know the original tales. I think without Disney that the fairy tales, a lot of them would have disappeared. … I think the thing about fairy tales it that they’re designed the to be reinvented, intended to be retold.”
• On the setting, which is Sarah’s own hometown of Northborough, Massachusetts:
“It was completely wish fulfillment to set it in my hometown. I always wanted magic in my town, and this was a way to do that. Every place in the books, with the exception of the Wishing Well Motel itself, has a real life equivalent.”
• In which we reveal that Sarah, who is now in her early thirties, had the original idea for Into the Wild when she was still in high school:
“Yeah. My school did these little musical plays and I decided I wanted to write one and I had the idea that I wanted to do fairy tale characters in the real world.”
The play, Sarah said, was entitled “Rapunzel’s Hair Salon, and she never showed it to anyone because it was ‘terrible’ and, Sarah claims, because she’s actually tone deaf.
• Another whimsical idea that contributed to Sarah’s idea for the first book:
“What if there was a girl who had a monster under her bed, and her mom knew about it?”
Umm. I’d say that would be pretty bad parenting in most situations. You know. Move the monster out to the garage or something. But who am I to criticize? Sarah’s the one who wrote the awesome book, and Rapunzel does make a pretty decent mom, even if there is a monster under Julie’s bed. (Oh, by the way. There’s a monster under Julie’s bed.)
• In which Sarah talks about writing the sequel, which was an overnight process compared to her first labor of love, which she’d carried with her throughout the years:
“It was actually so much fun to write. It was like hanging out with old friends. … And it was easier because I knew the world, I knew the characters.”
Finally, Sarah’s book recommendations for our readers: City of Ashes
Sarah will be back in NYC next Wednesday, June 25, at 6 p.m., when she’ll be reading at the New York Public Library’s Jefferson Market Branch. 425 Sixth Ave. at 10th St.
Buy Out of the Wild
i love her 1st book. and i want 2 get the second. i hope she makes a 3rd.