She lives with them, and the accompanying self-loathing. She’s a binge drinker, her job with the airline making it easy to find adventure, and the occasional blackouts seem to be inevitable. Other times they surprise me and, rather like a parent, I’m moved by their resilience.Cassandra Bowden is no stranger to hungover mornings. “Sometimes these characters break my heart. How do women and men deal with the sudden, disastrous and possibly ruinous trials? Will they rise to the challenges or be destroyed by them? I have no idea when I’m in the midst of the book,” he says. “I love stories that begin with cataclysmic disequilibrium. You can only see as far as your headlights, but you can make the whole trip that way.’”īohjalian admits that he likes writing books where a character’s life changes in a heartbeat. Doctorow observation: ‘Writing is like driving at night in the fog. I depend upon my characters to take me by the hand and lead me through the dark of the story. “I’m in awe of writers who outline - or even those writers who know how a book is going to end when they begin,” he says. I think I wrote the first three and a half pages of the novel.”īohjalian doesn’t outline his novels. I asked the bartender for all the scrap paper he had, and for the next 45 minutes I wrote frenetically. I was at a handsome bar and I was jet-lagged just enough to see the aesthetic beauty in the rituals around which we drink: the colors, the bottles, the glasses. I’ve always been fascinated by Russia - the literature, the soul and the fact they always wind up with a Bond villain running the show in the Kremlin.” And then, he says, “there was the booze before me. Second, I had flown through Moscow on Aeroflot.
I had just had breakfast in Yerevan, and now I was having dinner in New York City. I fly a lot, but I’ve never lost my wonder at the miracle of aviation. I had just flown from Armenia to New York and was meeting a friend for dinner in Manhattan. The idea for the novel popped into Bohjalian’s head one evening: “Three ingredients came together alchemically one night in a bar. There’s a “great crimson stain on the pillow, and a slick, still-wet pool on the crisp white sheets.” Furred by the previous night’s vodka, she doesn’t remember what happened. A seasoned flight attendant on a layover in Dubai - a hard-partying, hard-working woman who’s also a functioning alcoholic - wakes up one morning to find the Russian businessman next to her dead, his neck sliced open with the shards of a Stoli bottle. UP IN THE AIR: If you murdered someone, would you know it? That’s the premise of Chris Bohjalian’s new novel, “The Flight Attendant,” which enters the hardcover fiction list at No.
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