PRESS

GLOBE AND MAIL
7/22/06

Living on a tight schedule
She went from lawyer to writer in just a year, writes SARAH HAMPSON, and she's still working to beat the clock

SARAH HAMPSON

Emily Giffin loves deadlines.

One was her 30th birthday. At the age of 29, she was working as an associate in the New York law office of Winston and Strawn, but wasn't happy.

So she quit, moved to London, and started to write a novel. The year was 2001.

"I was turning 30 the following year, and I had this sense that if I didn't do this now, I never will," she says.

She gave herself a deadline: one year to complete a manuscript. She did it, and the result was the best-selling Something Borrowed, a chick-lit tale about Rachel, a Manhattan lawyer who has an affair with her best friend's fiancé.

Giffin never looked back. Last year, with the sequel, Something Blue, which took the perspective of the best friend, Darcy, Giffin was counted among the top three selling authors of women's fiction, alongside Sophie Kinsella (she of the Shopaholic novels) and Jennifer Weiner (In Her Shoes, Good in Bed). Something Borrowed has also been optioned as a movie.

Giffin's third novel, Baby Proof, released this summer with an impressive initial print run of 300,000, has reached No. 1 in Canada and is rising on The New York Times bestseller list. Another easy summer read about love, family and the inner emotional landscape of hairpin turns and murky swamps, it concerns Claudia Parr, who marries her true love, Ben, only to discover that he has what she doesn't -- an urge to have a baby -- even though they had both decided that they would remain childless.

Giffin's deadline has been a book a year. A driven personality, fit and tiny in her jeans, cotton camisole and pointy shoes, the 34-year-old is completely present and unfailingly polite.

She aims to please, whether it's an interviewer, a reader or an editor. She regularly responds to readers who e-mail her. "One of the major reasons I write commercial fiction is to connect with readers," she says. "It does wonders for writer's block when you get up in the morning and get e-mails from people who say how much they identified with your work."

She didn't even let a pregnancy with twins stop her. When she was writing Something Blue, she didn't dare tell her editors she was pregnant. "I didn't want them to fear that I'd miss the deadline," she says. She wrote a good portion of the book in the hospital, where she had to stay on bed rest for over a month at the end of the pregnancy. "I wrote it lying on my side with nurses telling me to put away my laptop," she confides with a laugh. The twins, identical boys, were born six weeks early at five pounds each.

Being deadline-oriented means she loves a sense of accomplishment, she acknowledges. But it hasn't always served her well. "Going to law school was done more for the sake of achievement rather than passion," she confesses.

"I had this stellar transcript [of grades from Wake Forest University in North Carolina], so what do you do with that? You don't travel through Europe and meander and write. You go to the top law school [at the University of Virginia] because that's what you can do."

But even law didn't erase the desire (and discipline) she has to write. While working full-time for the law firm, she wrote a coming-of-age novel, Lily Holding True, in her spare time. "I wrote at night and on the road. As a junior lawyer, I had to go to a lot of unglamorous places, so I took my laptop and wrote whenever I could."

It took three years to complete. She actually set off for London hoping that a publisher would accept it. But her agent at the time sent her an e-mail dashing all hope. "The agent was very mean-spirited. She wrote, 'they all rejected it,' without capitalization, without punctuation. I was devastated."

But Giffin's determination won out. "I printed out the e-mail, and saved it," she states. "I thought, 'Okay, I tried to write a book and it didn't work out, so I can either pack it up or I can try to write another one.' "

Commercial success was not on her mind, Giffin says. "If I had, I would have tried to write a legal thriller." She didn't even think about chick-lit. "I didn't have marketing and pretty covers and publishers and reviewers in mind when I wrote [Something Borrowed]. I wrote with the door closed. I wrote the story I wanted to tell."

Not that she minds the genre. "I think that chick-lit is just a way of saying that these books are relationship-driven and they are about who we are as sisters and friends and lovers and professional people trying to conquer our fears and tap into what we want and taking risks to get what we want."

Still, for all her determination and drive, Giffin says that her writing process is highly "inefficient." She never has an outline and doesn't know how the story will unfold. She simply begins with a general concept. For Baby Proof, it was the question of whether there's a deal-breaker in true love. Then she "gets into the head of my protagonist, getting to know her, what she is about, what she wants, what is her conflict. Relationships form. Everything evolves. And it is the relationships that drive the plot." That process sometimes sends her down the wrong path. She worked on Baby Proof for almost three months with Claudia being the one who changed her mind about having a baby. "But it was flat. And it became more interesting to me when it was Ben who changed." She threw out more than 100 pages of work and started over.

Giffin writes for four hours a day in the morning. Currently living in Atlanta, where her husband, Hartley (Buddy) Blaha, is president of corporate development at Newell Rubbermaid, she has a nanny come to the house four days a week to look after her boys, now 2½ years old. On the other days, she writes in her attic office while the children nap. "I try to stay with the characters. I don't like to leave them for three days at a time. I lose them."

The last five years have been a whirlwind. When she moved to London, she and Blaha were dating, but not engaged. He followed her there, found a job, and halfway through the year, moved in with her. They got engaged, married and promptly had children. With three bestsellers to her name, she is working on her fourth.

But Giffin can laugh about her need for control and how she has had to learn to let life take its twists and turns just as her novels do. "I was, like, 'We're not having sex in March because we're not having a baby born during the [Christmas] holidays,' and I also thought that pregnancy with identical twins is sort of freakish. So what happens? I get pregnant in May with a due date in February, the egg splits, and they come on New Year's Eve!"

It's unclear whether she managed to deliver them before the midnight deadline.

Emily's story

Born in Baltimore, Md., Emily Giffin has one older sister. Her father worked as an executive with Sears, so the family moved around a lot, later settling near Chicago. Her mother is a librarian. They divorced when Giffin was in college. "It was a friendly divorce," she says. "It would have been better if my family were more maladjusted; then I would have had more to drawn upon." She always wrote as a child. From Grade Five until she was 25 years old, she kept a daily journal. "I never had to hide it or lock it, because it was so mind-numbingly dull," she says. She still writes in a journal, but not every day. -- S.H.