Sunday means it is time to soak in the words of another amazing writer and I am particularly enthusiastic about our writer today, Torre DeRoche because Love With a Chance of Drowning has been chosen as our Summer Book Club selection! Although I am interviewing her today, we will still be doing an additional interview with her where you can ask your own questions and we will dive deeper (pun intended!) into this month’s book. Torre has graciously offered to speak to me twice, once to get you excited about her and this book, and the second time to really discuss what this experience was all about and any questions YOU have.
Here is what you need to know about our discussion and this book.
1. I am moving our MomAdvice Book Club discussion up to June so that we can hopefully squeeze in two books this summer. Plan on this discussion happening on June 24th! If you want to submit a question for Torre to me directly, you can email me at amy(at)momadvice(dot)com and I will add it to our list. You can also join our Facebook group and either message me through there or you can wait for the request to go up the week before to list any of your questions. I also recommend subscribing to our newsletter (see that box on the right with my mug shot!?!)
2. You will love this book and you will love the author even more after you read this discussion.
Here is a book synopsis for what book we will be discussing! I will reserve my own thoughts for you until our discussion next month!
Love can make a person do crazy things…
Torre DeRoche is a city girl with a morbid fear of deep water. She is not someone you would ordinarily find adrift in the middle of the stormy Pacific Ocean aboard a leaky sailboat – total crew of two – struggling to keep an old boat, a new relationship and her floundering sanity afloat.
But when she meets Ivan, a handsome Argentinean with a humble sailboat and a dream to set off exploring the world, Torre has a hard decision to face: watch the man she loves sail away forever, or head off on the epic watery journey with him. Suddenly the choice seems simple. She gives up her sophisticated city life, faces her fear of water (and tendency towards seasickness) and joins Ivan on a year-long voyage across the Pacific.
Set against the backdrop of the world’s most beautiful and remote destinations, Love with a Chance of Drowning is a sometimes hilarious, often moving and always breathtakingly brave memoir that proves there are some risks in life worth taking.
An engaging storyteller, Torre is also author of The Fearful Adventurer, a blogsite where she posts honest accounts of her deep fears and daring adventures hoping to inspire others to follow their dreams. Film rights for Love with a Chance of Drowning have been optioned and the script adaptation is currently underway.
Torre is daughter to American parents who moved to Australia before she was born. At age 24, Torre decided to make the most of her dual nationality and leave her safe life in Australia for a year of independent fun in San Francisco. A former Graphic Designer, Torre ran her own business in Melbourne before giving it all up to become a Fearful Adventurer.
When she’s not at home in Melbourne, Australia, DeRoche is at large in the world, exploring, writing, painting pictures, and snapping photos, as she faces her fears one terrified step at a time. Stories of her adventures can be found at the The Fearful Adventurer. You can also follow her on Facebook and her travels on Instagram!
Go ahead and grab your coffee and dive into one of the most interesting interviews I have done on here!
As a blog writer to book writer, I went about things in a roundabout kind of way for securing my book deal. You were a graphic designer, turned self-published author, turned published author through a publishing house, and have also been blogging your journey. What did you feel that a publishing house offered you beyond what you were able to accomplish through self-publishing?
My publisher gave me an incredible marketing push, placing enormous backlit billboards of my cover in airports around Australia and giving the book prime positioning in various stores. Love with a Chance of Drowning was reviewed in a lot of major publications, and my publicist landed spots for me on primetime radio and television. You’d need to invest some serious cash if you wanted this level of publicity for a self-published book.
As you mentioned, I have a background in design and my sister is a talented editor too, so I have all the tools I need to self-publish. But when you self-publish, you need to wear 1,000 hats and it’s difficult not to burn out. A good publisher will streamline everything for the author so that she’s left with only one job: to write.
With your graphic design background, did you get a say in the final look of the cover of your book?
I have two covers: one that was designed by Penguin Australia and one designed by Hyperion in the US. The designers at Penguin were inspired by an illustration of a map that I created for the middle of the book. They did the cover artwork, but it matched beautifully with my own illustration. Hyperion came up with a different concept and I wasn’t in love with the typography, so I reworked that myself.
This past week we got to talk to John Green about the film adaptation of The Fault In Our Stars which was really interesting to hear the process from book to film. I understand that Love With a Chance of Drowning may be coming to the big screen! Where are you at in the making of this and do you think you will find this process hard because it is, in fact, your own life story?
I’m so jealous that you got to speak with John Green! I’m a huge fan of his. Love with a Chance of Drowning is currently in script development, and yes, it’s certainly frightening to sign the characterized version of yourself over to filmmakers. It requires a leap of faith to let go and trust that they’ll be respectful of your name, your art, and all the people involved. Admittedly, when I was signing the contract for the option, I paused to question if I really wanted to give someone else the right to butcher my name and art if they so pleased. In the end I thought: You only live once, so why be precious about it.
Let’s just say that you could pick anyone, ANYONE to play you and Ivan. What is your dream casting of this film?
I think Gabriel Garcia Bernal would play Ivan perfectly because they’re both soulful Latin types. Bernal would be great in a role as a man who is fed up with society and longs to escape to wild places. I’d pick Mia Wasikowska for me because she’s an insanely talented Australian actress.
Writing a memoir really puts your life out there for scrutiny and, I would think, a very vulnerable place to be writing from. Was anyone unhappy with how they were portrayed in the book and did you have any moments that you wished you could include, but guarded because you were protecting people in your life or were worried how they would be perceived?
Strangely, one-dimensional, perfect characters end up being more unlikable on the page than those who have flaws, because readers like real people with dilemmas they can relate to. Flaws endear a character to the reader because they offer a precious gift of insight and therefore an opportunity for learning and growth. That’s powerful.
It’s important to tell warts and all stories for this reason, and it does indeed put me in a tricky position as the writer. I run the risk of damaging a relationship every time I write about someone I know, even when it’s buried in fiction. Writing is an incredibly risky pursuit for this reason and many others, and there is no way around that.
So I write the truth and then, with sweaty hands, I seek approval from the person involved before I publish. If someone hates how I’ve portrayed them on the page, I respect that and find way to work around it. Most often, people have no issues or they want small tweaks. Like, my Grandma asked me to remove the word “affair.” I think I used “fling” instead and she was fine with that. (She told me I could say anything at all after she died, and since she has now passed away I can say: Grandma had an affair.)
One thing you have to overcome in your journey is your fear of deep water. This is truly a fear of my own and I really can’t picture having the bravery to even get on that boat to start this journey. It seems like you overcame many, many fears though in your book. Now that you have overcome one of your biggest fears, what fears could possibly be left?
I’m still kind of scared of the dark.
I was heartbroken to read that your father recently passed away, as we can read in your book that he is such a special part of your life and offered so much encouragement to you in this journey. The fact that he flew from Australia to spend a week on a sailboat with you speaks volumes. What is one thing you wish you could share with the world about your Dad?
Thank you, I appreciate that. My dad made a career out of scriptwriting, supporting six daughters and my mother with his craft. He was the most successful scriptwriter in Australia and he was always my creative hero. When he came to visit us on the boat in Tonga, he brought along a DVD that he couldn’t wait to show us. It featured unedited footage for a documentary called Not Quite Hollywood, about Australian genre film, including my dad’s. On the DVD, there’s an interview with Quentin Tarantino during which he confesses: “Almost everything that Everett DeRoche wrote is one of my favorite films.” That’s my dad. I’m so proud of him. I’m sad to have lost him, but he certainly lived a rich life.
Since you have traveled the world, what is one place you wish everyone could travel to in the world and what is one place that was surprisingly amazing just in the little ol’ United States?
As for my favorite place in the United States, I was really taken by Nashville. I had gone in expecting fanny packs, ill-fitting jeans and huge country hairdos, but it was so young and hip and inspiring. My parents immigrated to Australia from the US before I was born, and brought with them several cultural quirks, like country music. I grew up with bluegrass and country, which made me an anomaly in Australia. So I felt kind of at home in Nashville.
And where do I wish everyone would travel to? To the protected world heritage sites so that there can be a broad understanding of what we need to fight for. I recently went to Tasmania and stood in ancient forests that were breathtaking and humbling and throbbing with life. These areas are constantly under threat because the wood there is so valuable. But we let these places get defiled forever because a tiny newspaper headline at the bottom of page 12 that reads Tasmania’s Forests to Undergo Logging means nothing to us.
If you could tell anyone to read one book (other than your own) what would that book be?
I don’t think I can prescribe a cure-all because books are so personal to each individual, but I’ll share with you the most important book I ever read—a book that burst open my imagination and taught me that it’s possible to create an incredible alternate reality on the page.
When I was thirteen, my older sister told me I had to read this book, giving me only the title and a pinch of her fingers to demonstrate its approximate spine width. I went to my school library to look for the book and, having no idea where to start my search, I said to a friend, “I’m looking for a book that’s about this thick.” I extended my finger to poke the spine of a random book. It was Clan of the Cave Bear by Jean M. Auel: the very book my sister told me I must read. It was a bizarre, serendipitous first encounter. That book rocked my world.
And here’s where it gets really weird: Jean M. Auel’s manuscript was discovered by a New York Literary agent named Jean V. Naggar, and was published in 1980 (the year I was born). Why is this amazing? Because my agent is Elizabeth Evans from the Jean V. Naggar Literary Agency.
