SCOTT SIMON, HOST:
Kate Bright loves her husband, Vic, and their two children. She's also enjoying the latest installment of a long-standing assignation she has with her married lover, James. When the news begins to buzz, the very hotel in which they are ensconced in Room 706 has been taken over by gunmen. And that's the setup for Ellie Levenson's new novel "Room 706." She's a journalist who's written for The Guardian and Cosmopolitan UK and joins us from the studios for the BBC in London. Thanks so much for being with us.
ELLIE LEVENSON: Thank you so much for having me.
SIMON: Help us understand what brings Kate to Room 706.
LEVENSON: Well, in the book, it's termed a kind of me time. Kate justifies her affair by thinking it could be a secret drink after work by herself or a facial or maybe a kind of habit - buying shoes or something like that. It's purely an escape from her everyday life.
SIMON: And does this crisis, this sudden crisis, cause her to review her life and who and what's truly important in it?
LEVENSON: That's right. So she's stuck in the hotel room. She doesn't know how long she's going to have in there, or, indeed, if she's going to live or die. So she starts to kind of think through her life, the kind of idea that maybe life flashes before your eyes when you're going to die, except that it doesn't so much flash because she's got a lot of time, so it goes quite slowly.
SIMON: Yeah. Why tell a modern story of what it is to be a woman and a mother through the lens of this extraordinary incident?
LEVENSON: Well, I think that Kate is a complicated woman, and I like that. I like reading about people who are neither all good or all bad. And I wanted to write something for modern women and men - but probably mostly women - who can handle complicated characters whose own lives are complicated and who will kind of have something to think about and ponder and discuss with their friends.
SIMON: I must say, without giving away too much. It's almost more terrifying that we never really meet the terrorists. And then it occurred to me, well, Alan Rickman's gone. So I mean, what can you do?
LEVENSON: (Laughter) Well, I'm so pleased you mentioned him because I feel "Die Hard" is a very big influence on this book. And I watched it again at Christmas time and realized just how much of an influence it has been on me, even though the book is very different. But it was deliberate that you don't meet the terrorists because perhaps everybody's idea of a terrorist is different, and the causes and the reasons for terrorism change. So kind of the things that I was scared of encountering when I was a teenager are different to those that I now worry about for my own teenagers. And so it's really a vehicle to put Kate and James in the room and to show how little control people have over events.
SIMON: I enjoyed reading the text messages that she sends to Vic, which are filled with love, but also very practical instructions, aren't they?
LEVENSON: Yeah. It's a really funny mix - isn't it? - of kind of thinking this might be my last chance to tell my husband that I love him. But also I need to make sure he has kind of the passwords for all the supermarket shop or the car insurance. That kind of thing.
SIMON: Does James, the dashing lover, wilt a little in her eyes during this period in Room 706?
LEVENSON: Yeah. I think as Kate gets to know him not as a lover but as a person, and they have kind of conversations for the first time since they met, she realizes that he's just like anyone else. You know, he can be annoying, irritating. Maybe the grass isn't greener, but then she wasn't looking for an alternative husband. It was something different to that.
SIMON: I say this as a father. I really liked Vic.
LEVENSON: Lots of people say that. I like him, too. I like all of them in their own way. But maybe he's a little bit too nice at times. I mean, you know...
SIMON: (Laughter).
LEVENSON: ...You want to marry someone nice. Of course, you do. But...
SIMON: Yeah.
LEVENSON: And this isn't me. This is my character, of course. It's fiction. But maybe she - maybe Kate finds her husband sometimes maybe a little bit too accommodating.
SIMON: Our editor saw you give a talk to student journalists on feature writing, and says you gave a very confident talk about how those ideas and inspiration can abound. Does that translate into writing this, your debut novel?
LEVENSON: What a lovely thing to hear. I'm so pleased you had an impact. Yes, I think it does, because, although, of course, in journalism, you're seeking to find the truth, and in fiction, you're doing kind of the opposite of that. You're making things up as you go. It gives you a way of thinking to explore ideas to the full. And I often felt when I was thinking about the idea for this novel, that I wanted to take the kind of feature you might have in a magazine about, you know, how to make your lover leave their partner or how do you know if your partner is having an affair and turn it on its head. So I've - it made me think about characters who don't want their lover to leave their partner or don't want their affair to become something more.
SIMON: Words invoked a couple of times at the end of the novel - sonder. Can you help us with that?
LEVENSON: Yeah. So sonder, I first saw as a meme from a kind of public art project, really, and it was called The Dictionary of Obscure Sorrows, and it was a website where John Koenig came up with words that he thought should exist in English but that don't exist. And sonder really struck me. It's the idea that everybody else's life is as complex as yours and so that you are just an extra in their life as they are in yours, if you sit next to somebody on the bus or walk past somebody in a restaurant and that - I guess it's the idea that your life isn't more important or more complicated than anyone else's. And I thought that was really, really interesting. It really stuck with me because in the hotel in which Kate and James are, every other room could have an equally complicated story. We just don't know it.
SIMON: Your novel does remind us we have very limited influence as to how we'll be remembered by our loved ones.
LEVENSON: That's true. But I was really influenced in many ways by the notes that people left on 9/11 when they - particularly the people in the airplane that crashed in Pennsylvania, and when people knew they were going to die and they wrote notes to their loved ones if they had time, it all boiled down to, I love you. And it didn't matter if they were young or if they were old. It was the same sentiment the whole time. And I just thought that was such a kind of beautiful idea.
SIMON: Ellie Levenson's new novel is "Room 706." Thanks so much for being with us.
LEVENSON: Thank you so much for having me.
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