Author Jane L. Rosen's Next Title Will Have You Summering "On Fire Island"
We talk screenwriting vs novel writing, what summering on Fire Island is really like, and the surprising circumstances she can write under.
With summer right around the corner, avid readers have already started adding titles to their beach reads piles.
If you’re anything like me, your seasonal stack is ambitious. Unfortunately, summer flies like a long weekend, and it isn’t always feasible to check every book off your list in such a short amount of time.
But if there’s one title you make a priority in the upcoming months, one book that you put on the tippy-top of your already toppling pile, make it On Fire Island by Jane L. Rosen.
Jane L. Rosen started her career as a screenwriter.
“The first script I ever sold, I re-wrote it 30 times,” Rosen told me during our video call last week. “It was kind of ridiculous,” she said, referring to the tens of revisions. What I found ridiculous, however, was the fact that, while Rosen’s screenplays had been sold, they never made it to production.
Ridiculous, and a shame, I thought to myself, because if her screenplays were anything like her books, the entertainment industry has done us a gross disservice.
Then again, had things gone differently, maybe Rosen wouldn’t have ventured into the realm of novel writing.
Now that would have been a travesty.
Rosen published her debut novel, Nine Women, One Dress, back in 2016. In 2020, she published Eliza Starts A Rumor, which is currently being adapted into a drama series on NBC. Her third novel, A Shoe Story, hit shelves in 2022.
On Fire Island is Rosen’s fourth standalone novel, and one of the only books to make me cry to date.
The story is narrated by Julia Morse, a 37-year-old book editor who decides not to follow the light at the end of the tunnel when she passes. Instead, Julia opts to follow her now-widowed husband to Fire Island for one last summer in her favorite place, with the ones she loves most.
But the story isn’t about Julia. Not really, just partially. It’s mostly about Ben (the aforementioned widower), and a man named Shep (an older gentleman who’d lost his wife, too) and how they help one another grieve. It’s also about two teenagers toeing the line between adolescence and adulthood, and occasionally follows Julia’s best friend, Renee, as she overcomes heartbreak and opens herself up to new love.
And speaking of love, Rosen had me falling for this community of kooky characters from page one.
I’ve yet to come across a book as pure as On Fire Island. It is everything I want a beach read to be.
It’s heartwarming, and a little heartbreaking.
It’s sweet, with traces of life’s sour parts sprinkled throughout.
Rosen’s characters may not be based on individual people from her real life, but they read like real people. Real people, experiencing real emotions. It’s fiction, but it doesn’t feel fictional.
I implore you to trust me when I say, these are the people you want to spend your summer with, and this is the island you want to spend your summer on.
And if, somehow, my sparkling review doesn’t have you convinced, I have no doubt that my conversation with Rosen below will have you picking up not only On Fire Island but her entire body of works (something I, too, will be doing this summer).
On Fire Island:
Photo courtesy of @juliee_girl
I love to ask authors about their ah-hah moments. The moment they know a story is brewing. When did the premise for On Fire Island first come to you?
JR: I wrote a screenplay before I wrote my first novel. I wanted to write it as a novel, but I was so attached to the story that I wanted to do it justice. It was the basic story of the three men: Ben, Shep, and Matty. That story, not told by Julia, was my screenplay. Then, after I became a novelist mostly read by women, we decided to bring Julia to life by making her the narrator and make On Fire Island what it is right now.
Julia is an omniscient narrator, keeping tabs on everyone. Why did you choose to have Julia narrate the book, rather than a third-person omniscient narrator, or even Ben?
JR: I like developing strong female characters and it was wonderful to write it from the perspective of someone who’s dead. It was really interesting, and I think the combination of the story of the three men, told by this woman, worked.
I also wanted it to be… not sad. The only way to really do that was to have Julia’s point of view in there. She wasn’t really that scared to die. She didn’t want to die, but I thought it was really interesting to have her point of view. I took a six-week online class on the afterlife in Judaism according to Kabbalah during Covid. That taught me so much and I used that, with my own feelings about death and about people that I’d lost. I brought it all together so that, if you lose someone, and you read this book, you would have a feeling afterward that the person is still with you.
I was wondering about Julia’s perspective on death because I know if I were a 37-year-old dying, I would be frantic. She seemed very accepting of everything.
JR: My sister passed away when she was 39 and she had two children. I think having the two children was the thing that really tortured her about dying. I really believe that if it wasn’t for those two children, even though she had a wonderful marriage and she loved her husband and she loved me and the rest of her family, I think she would have gone more peacefully. She loved her life, but I could see that she had accepted that it was going to be over. So, I think that’s how Julia feels. I wanted her to be able to go in peace.
Was Julia inspired by your sister?
JR: No. I mean, yes and no. Yes in terms of, I saw someone go through all that. But no. She’s her own person. She’s nothing like my sister.
I quickly fell in love with the townspeople of Bay Harbor. They are quite the characters. I've never been to Fire Island, nor was my family the kind to stay down the shore for the summer. You live on Fire Island, so I was hoping you could tell me about the townspeople. Who inspired them? Are they a true or fictionalized representation of your own neighbors on Fire Island?
JR: No one’s based on any one person, but if i took everyone, put them in a big pot, and whipped them around, I’d come out with these characters very easily. There are bits and pieces of each person all over the book. There are a million old guys playing baseball all summer and I sat there and watched for hours (because my husband plays baseball), and the things that they said, a lot of times I wrote them right down. I wouldn’t even say it was research. It was just years of existing with these people.
Is it a tight-knit community over there, like it is in the book?
JR: Yup. Yes, very. My daughter once had a stomach issue and she went to the doctor [on Fire Island]. The next day in the market, someone asked, “Hey, did she poop?” They knew my kid was constipated! And I didn’t tell them.
But it was so nice living in the city and then being able to bring my children there. When they grew up, I spent all of June, July, and August on Fire Island. I would have to scrub my feet at the end of August because I didn’t wear shoes for months. I’d have to hold [my kids] little hands on the city sidewalks because I was afraid they were going to walk right into the street [after getting] used to no cars. It was a big adjustment.
It was also a beautiful way for them to get that small-town experience, for them to have the freedom of just going to the market, signing their name for a sandwich at seven. They could ride to camp in the morning on their bicycles with the other kids. Obviously, that’s not happening in Manhattan. It was a great balance for city life.
There's a lot going on in this book. Multiple storylines tackle some hard-hitting topics: Death, adultery, divorce, first love, what physical intimacy means and looks like at different stages of life, growing older, the loss of a dream, the loss of a child. And yet, you approached these topics in such a way that didn't feel rushed, even under 300 pages. From a writing standpoint, what was your process like to make sure every subject matter was given the attention and care it deserved?
JR: Because it was a screenplay first, and a screenplay is between 90 and 120 pages (it’s a page per minute), the outline for the book was small. I think it was a 90-page script, and I kind of used that as an outline. That helped make it a tight story. I also tend to write like a screenwriter, and I tend to get in and out as fast as I can.
For example, when you’re writing a screenplay, you don’t describe the room around you. You don’t even really describe what the person’s wearing or anything unless it’s really a key part of the story. It’s someone else’s job to interpret what she’s wearing and what the room should look like and all these different things. Imagine if you had to see someone leave the house, walk to their office. You just get to the office. So I think my tendency in writing is to get to the point more. That’s what I think makes my books shorter.
How did you decide, even when you were writing the screenplay, that you wanted to cover these kinds of topics? Because I think a lot of books today are pumped with political topics, but this book felt like an organic conversation about things people go through on the day-to-day.
JR: Yeah, this book was completely pure. There was no pumping anything into it. On Fire Island is really just a sweet story about an old man showing a younger man how to get through grieving. I didn’t want to dampen it with side stories that didn’t really involve the community and the struggle of Ben and Julia and their relationship.
The whole book was a lesson in mourning, in a lot of ways. A lot of people are like “Oh, this sounds so heavy.” But it’s not. It’s not a heavy book. It doesn’t have to be the end when someone dies, which is really what I wanted people to walk away with. My mom’s gone, my dad’s gone, and my sister’s gone, but I talk to them all the time. Obviously, I would die to see them in person. But they’re still part of my life.
There’s a part in the book in which the character, Matty is eating a bowl of Lucky Charms, and contemplating how sex will change his cereal preferences. The cereal is metaphorical, right? Sex is like a door. Open it, and you're thought to be an adult. Keep it closed, and you maintain your innocence. That concept could be applied to so many things and I wanted to ask how you think it relates to being a writer and having your first thing published, because that’s a kind of door opening, too.
JR: That’s a great question. As a screenwriter, nobody reads your stuff. Some people in Hollywood and maybe your family, unless it gets picked up. Then all of a sudden I write this book, Nine Women, One Dress. My first novel. It’s fun! My family reads it. It sells. All of a sudden, that’s it. I’m on the other side like you said. Now, anyone can review it. Anyone can say whatever they want about it. There are sales numbers. There are all these things that didn’t exist before. It is kind of like losing your virginity. Now you’re a published author and everything is different.
It’s like you’re exposed. When you have sex, you’re showing someone your whole self, and when you share you’re writing, that is a part of you.
JR: Yes. It’s interesting. You never write the way you wrote that first book. I always try to write like no one’s reading it. Your first book, when you think no one’s ever going to read it, you write whatever the hell you want, with no worry!
Congratulations on the TV adaptation of Eliza Starts A Rumor, by the way! If you were to adapt On Fire Island to film, who would your dream cast be?
JR: Hm. I was thinking about this for a very long time, and I really don’t have the answer. I go back and forth. Like Shep, for example. I used to think it was Bill Murray, and then Robert DeNiro, or Kevin Costner. Well, Kevin Costner is still too young, right? He’s too old for Ben and he’s too young for Shep. But, anyway, baseball guys like that. I have crazy pipe dreams about this. Like Robert Redford. Could you imagine? That would be unbelievable!
On Writing:
You've been a screenwriter and a novelist. Can you tell me a little about the experiences - the biggest differences and any similarities - between screenwriting and writing a book?
JR: Screenwriting is much more collaborative, and not in a good way. Collaborating with an editor in novel writing is fantastic. I love working with my editor. I loved working with my last editor. It only raises the quality of your work. My editor will point out holes and places I can expand and places I neglected. With screenwriting, there’s a whole team of people and they’re not necessarily out to make it better, as much as sometimes they’re out to make themselves look better. It’s a big difference.
You also have total control [with your book] and that amazed me. When you’re a screenwriter, you can get fired in a second. Let’s say you’re not giving them what they want. You’ll get fired the next day, and they’ll replace you with someone else. It’s just different. You can’t get fired from writing your book. They can’t bring in someone else to write your book. It’s your book. It’s not your script after you sell it.
But, in screenwriting, on the plus side, it’s much easier. You can literally say “Julia and Jane are talking on Zoom.” And then you’d write our dialogue. If that was a book, you’d have to go through the whole thing. Which is fun, sometimes, but it is a lot. It’s harder to write a novel, but it’s much easier to publish a novel.
What are 3 of your must-haves to set the tone for a writing session?
JR: I literally wake up and write. My husband brings me a cup of coffee. So, coffee! That’s it. I write in silence, but I end up editing or figuring out things better in noise. I figured that out when I was writing Eliza Starts A Rumor and I was getting my hair blown out at Drybar. A rom-com was playing on the television, a rap song in the background, and the woman was blowing my hair and talking to me at the same time. There was something about the chaos coming at me from every angle; I was able to figure something out that I had been stuck on. It happens to me when I go to Orange Theory, too. I’m working out and it’s loud as can be. I’ll figure something out, run out of the room, and write it down in a note on my phone. I could write on the Subway! I could write almost anywhere.
What is the best advice you can give writers battling writer's block?
JR: I don’t really believe in writer’s block. Maybe you’re just not in the mood to write. Go outside, take a walk, and come back. But I also think you should just write through it. It doesn’t matter if you end up being like “Oh, this is crap” the next day. So what? Just keep going. And if you’re really stuck on something, skip it! Write some Xs and keep going. Just keep going. It will come to you.
What advice do you have for writers who hope to publish their work someday?
JR: Don’t quit. I had this old entertainment lawyer when I was a screenwriter and he said to me, “Jane, this is why you’re going to make it one day because you’re not going to give up. You never give up.” And that’s the thing. Don’t quit. You’re not going to make it if you quit, so just keep going!
Lastly, if you could pull an Alice in Wonderland, but instead of stepping through a looking glass, you can step into a book, which would it be, and what role would you play in the plot?
JR: What a question! Right away I want to go into To Kill A Mockingbird and sit with Atticus on the porch. Or as a fly on the wall, and just listen to them talk. I don’t think I would step into a book where I would change something or a book that was stressful. I think I would just want to sit with Atticus, Scout, and Jem, on the porch, with a cup of iced tea.
On Fire Island will be available on May 23rd. Links to purchase: Amazon, Target, Barnes and Noble, Audible, Thrift Books, Walmart
Be sure to follow Jane L. Rosen on social media! Links to her platforms: Instagram, Facebook, Twitter, and TikTok
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