I've pulled together 40ish questions - some bookish, some silly - and have asked authors to limit themselves to answering only 10 of them. That way, it keeps the interviews fresh and connectable for all of us!
Today we are joined by Anna Nordberg. Anna 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.
What made you start writing?
When I was around four years old, I
started dictating stories to my mother from the bathtub. She would write them
down, and then I would illustrate them. She had a lot of patience, and I loved
the time with her, so maybe that was a part of it—getting to have this
wonderful ritual with my mom, who was very no-nonsense and time efficient when
it came to other activities. She wasn’t someone who got on the floor and played
dolls or blocks, but she would tell me stories and write down mine.
My parents were also huge readers, and
my father read the entire Lord of the Rings series to my brother and me when I
was around five or six. LOTR was the Harry Potter of its day, and my brother
and I were obsessed. When I was 8, I attempted to write my own version of a
Middle Earth fantasy novel on a yellow legal pad. I still have it.
But I think the biggest influence on my
writing was watching my mother work on her own novel. She wrote it in her 40s,
when she was recovering from a serious surgery, typing away in the tiny guest
room off our kitchen in our Manhattan apartment. It
was never published, and I think in the end she viewed it as a
failure—I remember her telling me, “The first three times I read it I cried,
and then the fourth time, I thought it was sort of boring.” My mother died when
I was 17, and I know if she’d had more time, she would have written another
book. But what inspired me wasn’t whether her novel got published or not. It
was that she sat down and did it. I wish I could tell her that now.
What’s your kryptonite as a writer?
Fear
of upsetting people—whether it’s a reader, a source for my journalism, the
author of a book I’m reviewing, or a friend or family member who might,
accurately or not, perceive themselves in my writing. Not that I think worrying
about your sources and readers is by definition a bad thing. You should care.
You just don’t want to think about it so much that it paralyzes you, and
sometimes, this can happen to me.
Describe your book in three words.
Families under pressure.
If you could cast your characters in a movie, which
actors would play them and why?
This is such a wonderful question. For
Thea, the mother, who’s a renowned surgeon facing a terminal cancer diagnosis,
my dream casting would be Laura Dern. Not just because she’s made an art of
playing mothers—in Wild, in Big Little Lies, in Little Women,
just recently in Is This Thing On?—but because she has this fierceness
and warmth that never tips over into cliché. Her performance as Marmee in Greta
Gerwig’s adaptation of Little Women is a touchstone, and I thought a lot
about it when I was writing my novel. Marmee is deft at unconditional
love—which is harder than people think—but she’s not perfect; she feels anger.
I found that very real.
Another absolute legend I would cast to
play Thea is Sigourney Weaver. Thea is incredibly strong but also understands
and acknowledges her fear. I think, as much a working mother in 1990s Manhattan
can, Thea has Ripley from Aliens energy.
This is obviously leaning hard into
nepotism but since this is my own fantasy casting, I think that’s okay. For
Thea’s older daughter, Phoebe, I’d pick my absurdly talented niece, the actress
Madison Thompson, who played Janet McTeer’s daughter on Ozark and is in
the current season of Euphoria. Phoebe has to walk this very narrow path
of being the cool girl who’s not mean, someone who is confident in her beauty
and competence but hasn’t let that curdle into arrogance or cruelty. Madison
has known her own mind since she was six years old, but she’s also relentlessly
kind, and I see her as Phoebe.
For Astra, Thea’s college-age daughter,
I love the idea of Angourie Rice, who plays intelligent, vulnerable young women
so well, or Saoirse Ronan, who was so alive and luminous as Jo, also in
Gerwig’s Little Women. If I was really going to cheat, I’d go back in
time and cast 2009 Romola Garai, who did such a beautiful job as Emma in the
BBC miniseries that year. Astra is emotionally astute, and she
desperately wants to be good, but she’s also naïve in many ways, because she’s
young, and she has a rigidity, a certain inflexible idea of what’s right and
wrong, that reminds me of Garai’s Emma before she has her full circle moment.
If you could spend the day with another author, who would
you choose and why?
This is a totally paralyzing question,
but if I am going just with living authors, I’d say Ann Patchett. She has such
incredible range—The Dutch House and Commonwealth are two of my
favorite novels, but her essay collections, These Precious Days and This
is the Story of a Happy Marriage—are also tremendous. I think her essay
“The Getaway Car” is my favorite piece of writers on writing.
I reviewed These Precious Days
for the San Francisco Chronicle years ago, and it influenced me deeply as a
writer. In her essay “Three Fathers,” she writes about her father’s concern
that she could not support herself as a writer made her fierce. “Without ever
meaning to, my father taught me at a very early age to give up on the idea of
approval. I wish I could bottle that freedom now and give it to every young
writer I meet, with an extra bottle for the women.” I think about that line all
the time.
What
are some of your favorite websites or social media platforms?
I
think Books
+ Bits by Pandora Sykes is the best newsletter on books in
Substack. Sykes is the kind of person who eats her books—she reads all the
time, almost compulsively—and she’s really attuned to the culture. She used to
do the podcast The
High Low and is really good about understanding media, including
film and TV, and how it all feeds into the zeitgeist.
What is your favorite way to waste time?
Watching videos of Tom
Hiddleston dance. And if we’re truly going down a rabbit hole, I could also
watch Ben
Fensome’s Instagram re-enactments of Jane Austen
adaptations on a loop until the end of time. Stuffing socks down his shirt in
place of a cravat to play Mr. Darcy? Utter brilliance.
What are you currently reading?
Brawler by
Lauren Groff. I have one story left to go. It’s completely exceeding my very
high expectations. Groff’s short stories feel like Flannery O’Connor meets
Alice Munro, and Munro was one of my favorite authors, perhaps my favorite,
until the revelations from her daughter that were publicized after Munro’s
death. It came out not just that she failed to protect her daughter from abuse
from her stepfather, but that she used that failure, that dark secret, as the
engine of her writing. That absolutely broke my heart, and I can’t read her
stories the same way. But I’d never encountered a writer as gifted as Munro,
until Groff. Her stories are sharp enough to cut yourself on; a universe built
in a few pages.
What genres won’t you read?
I don’t read romance, which is silly, because there’s so much amazing
romance writing out there! It’s so different than the bodice rippers of my
youth, and I know that Romantasy is basically saving book publishing right now.
But it’s never a genre I was drawn to so maybe it just feels too late to start
now. That said, if readers have any recommendations, I will take them!
What’s the one thing you wish you knew when you were younger?
It actually gets better.
~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~
Lake Union Publishing | August 2026
Thea Erickson, a renowned surgeon, is filled with both joy and grief as her family gathers at their home on a summer night in 1995. Her elder daughter Phoebe is getting married, but even the happiness of the day feels bittersweet, as Thea grapples with a terminal cancer diagnosis. She worries she won’t be around to support her younger daughter Astra, who’s still in college, but even Thea cannot foresee what is to come―a terrible accident the night of the wedding that changes Astra’s life forever.
In a last-ditch
effort to protect her family, Thea arranges a secret meeting with an old family
friend and extracts a promise that will reverberate long after she’s gone.
Years after her mother’s death, Astra has moved forward with a career and
relationship, but she still struggles with her grief. When a man reaches out to
her and Phoebe, offering a window into their mother’s past, Astra must make a
choice, and her decision forces her to face what it means to love someone after
they’re gone, who we decide to forgive, and how families reckon with the past.
ADVANCE PRAISE FOR WHEN SHE WAS OURS:
“When
She Was Ours is an affecting debut about the fault lines that run
through families and the resilience that emerges when they’re exposed. Nordberg
writes with clarity and compassion about the secrets that shape a family as she
traces a mother’s final choices and the long shadow they cast on her daughters.
The result is an insightful and gripping story about grief, forgiveness, and
the stubborn love that binds us, even when it hurts.”―Jacqueline Friedland, USA
Today bestselling author of He Gets That from Me and Counting
Backwards
“Beautifully
told, this deeply moving story about mothers and daughters, grief and memory
will resonate with anyone who has ever looked at their mother and thought, but
how will I go on without you?”―Nicola Kraus, #1 New York Times
bestselling author of The Best We Could Hope For
“When
She Was Ours is a spellbinding portrait of love in its fiercest and most
fragile forms: between partners, between sisters, and above all, between
mothers and daughters. I read with my heart in my throat, swept away by
Nordberg’s deeply human characters and their quest for wholeness in the wake of
loss and rupture. An unforgettable tale by a brilliant magician of a
storyteller.” ―Nicole Graev Lipson, USA Today bestselling author of Mothers
and Other Fictional Characters
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