Brought up by books

Indie screenwriter, novelist and avid reader Gabrielle Zevin says books are her "religion".

"My mother is Catholic and my father is Jewish, so I was brought up in the religion of books. Every Saturday we'd go to the library," explains the 36-year-old American, who shares her love of fiction and bookstores in her newest and eighth novel.

The Collected Works Of A.J. Fikry was brought out this month by Little, Brown in the United Kingdom and published as The Storied Life Of A.J. Fikry by Algonquin in the United States.

The novel about an independent bookstore owner who adopts a baby abandoned in his store is Zevin's way of endorsing books and bookstore culture.

"Anybody who loves reading is raised by the books they love," she says in a telephone interview from her Los Angeles home, which she shares with her partner of 18 years, film director Hans Canosa, and their two dogs.

Her parents worked for IT company IBM - her mother is Korean-American, while her father's side of the family were Russian immigrants - and were often transferred around the United States.

As a result, libraries and local bookstores were places where the young Zevin could find comfort and fictional friends in new places.

Later in 2005, as a novelist launching her debut books, bittersweet romance Margarettown (for adults) and teenage after-life tale Elsewhere, bookstores and readings were at the forefront of the publicity machine, with today's social media platforms either new or unheard of.

"There was no Facebook, no YouTube, no Twitter, I didn't have a website. It was like publishing in the 1950s," she says. "Publishing has been, in the last decade I've been working, moving at this incredible pace."

Now she has a website and multiple social media tools to reach out to readers. But as bookstores shut down in the United States, citing rental pressures, she feels it is timely to remind readers of why they need to support neighbourhood bookshops.

Author of three novels for adults and five in the Young Adult genre, Zevin knew she wanted to be a writer as early as age nine. That year she won an honourable mention in a writing contest run by the local newspaper, which later printed her essay on racism.

"Written after watching Oprah, so you can imagine how good it was," says the writer.

At age 14, she wrote to the Fort Lauderdale Sentinel, criticising a music review it published and ended up working for three years as music reviewer for that newspaper. It had a circulation of 600,000 but she has mixed feelings about her work there. "Having read a number of reviews, I suppose I was deeply imitative. I do think writers learn to write by mimicry."

She moved on to write plays and screenplays while reading English and American literature at Harvard, where she met Canosa, now 44. The two worked together on the critically acclaimed 2005 romantic comedy Conversation(s) With Other Women, starring Helena Bonham-Carter and Aaron Eckhart. The movie won several international film festival awards, including best actress and a special jury prize at the Tokyo Film Festival.

Thanks to that success and a promotional tour for the movie in Japan, television production company Toei Productions turned her 2007 young adult romance, Memoirs Of A Teenage Amnesiac into a Japanese film, Dareka Ga Watashi Ni Kiss Wo Shita (Somebody Kissed Me), also directed by Canosa. It was released in 2010.

Zevin is currently focused on fiction, including her ongoing young adult series starring teenager Anya Balanchine, who lives in a future world where chocolate is illegal.

When the author gets the time, she enjoys reading books and prefers paper to e-readers.

"One of the things I really miss is, with e-books, I don't have the accident of reading whatever Hans has in the house," says the book-snoop, who lived for years in New York and enjoyed taking the subway so she could look at what people were reading on the train.

She knows she is not alone because on book tours around the United States, readers and distributors always want to show her their local bookstores. Hence The Collected Works Of A.J. Fikry, which should hopefully remind readers of the charm and necessity of having a bookshop in the neighbourhood.

Indie bookstores are essential for readers and writers like her - readers who want to be challenged and are willing to try different things, and writers who are hard to classify. Such stores provide a niche for books that are not "monster bestsellers", since they are stocked according to the owners' tastes, she says.

"When publishing becomes really populist, you're going to eliminate a lot of different points of view," she says, adding. "I benefited more than anybody from bookstores."

akshitan@sph.com.sg

Get a copy of The Straits Times or go to straitstimes.com for more stories.