"It's truly baffling how writers have this seemingly bottomless reserve for tolerating rejection."

Author Jacqueline Ferber on balancing art and the marketplace, navigating loss in publishing, and her twisty thriller, THE DEPARTMENT

Check out the collection of past Words With (Author) Friends, wherein I g-chat with an author and you get to read over my shoulder, and order Jacqueline’s dark academic thriller, available now.

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Me: Jacqueline, hello!

Jackie: Hi, Andrea!

Big congrats on THE DEPARTMENT! How are you feeling post-launch?

Honestly, I'm feeling all the feels. Excitement that it's out there. Terror that it's out there. It's such a deeply vulnerable experience to put a piece of art out into the world.

It really is. Are you managing to pull some pride and awe from the feelings soup?

Haha. Yes! Totally. I feel like I poured myself into this work, so when it resonates with readers, it's very gratifying.

Okay, good! It's easy to forget to look around and acknowledge that you've reached the top of the mountain, haha.

Can you share a little about THE DEPARTMENT?

On the surface, THE DEPARTMENT is a psychological thriller about a college girl who disappears and a philosophy professor who becomes increasingly obsessed with her mystery until it leads him back to his closest friends and colleagues.

But underneath that, it's really a story about our strategies--successful and doomed--for trying to live with our losses.

How'd you start working on it? What was the inspiration?

Back in 2009, I was working on my doctoral dissertation on loss and language. I was steeped in Virginia Woolf, Kafka, Nietzsche--a very theoretical examination of loss. In the midst of all that, my first marriage ended abruptly. Suddenly, I found myself negotiating with a personal loss that felt immediate and anything but theoretical. I think that the early conceptual seeds for this novel were probably planted way back then.

Interesting. How'd you go about turning those seeds into a propulsive plot?