Skipping A Beat

Skipping A Beat

From the outside, Julia and Michael seem to have it all. Both products of difficult childhoods in rural West Virginia, they become high school sweethearts. Now in their thirties, they're living a rarified life in a multi-million-dollar, Washington, D.C. home. Julia is a sought-after party planner and Michael has just sold his beverage company for $70 million.

Then Michael collapses. Four minutes and eight seconds after his cardiac arrest, a portable defibrillator jumpstarts his heart. But in those lost minutes he becomes a different man. Money is meaningless to him and he wants to give it all away. Julia, who sees her life reflected in scenes from the world's great operas, has three weeks to make a choice: Walk away from the man she once adored, but who became a stranger to her even before this pronouncement, or give in to her husband's pleas for a second chance and a promise of a poorer but happier life?

Sarah Pekkanen is the author of The Opposite of Me and Skipping a Beat. Her work has been published in People, The Washington Post, USA Today, The New Republic, The Baltimore Sun, Reader's Digest, and Washingtonian, among others. She writes a monthly Erma Bombeck type column for Bethesda Magazine, and has been an on-air contributor to NPR and E! Entertainment's "Gossip Show." She is the winner of a Dateline award and the Paul Miller Reporting Fellowship. Sarah lives in Chevy Chase, Maryland with her husband and three young sons.

Skipping A Beat
Simon and Schuster
Author: Sarah Pekkanen
ISBN: 9780731815180
Price: $29.99

Interview with Sarah Pekkanen

Question: What inspired Skipping A Beat?

Sarah Pekkanen: I started this book with a question that popped into my mind one day: What would you do if your husband suddenly changed into a completely different person? I loved the idea of writing about a complicated, intense marriage and revealing how a couple could grow so close - and then fall apart. Skipping a Beat is a love story, but an unusual one.


Question: How much of your inspiration comes from real life and real people?

Sarah Pekkanen: So much of it! I think that most of my experiences in life make it into my novels - but in a camouflaged way. It's as if all of my thoughts and feelings and impressions of people are fed through a kaleidoscope and sprinkled onto the page. A few times friends or family members have been convinced I secretly based a character on them, but I promise I didn't!


Question: There are several issues raised in this book. Was this deliberate or did the story evolve this way?

Sarah Pekkanen: Definitely deliberate; I plot my books out in advance of writing them. I loved creating my main character, Julia, as a woman living a life that appeared luxurious and enviable to outsiders, but that was actually empty and lonely. As Skipping a Beat opens, Julia and her husband Michael are thrust into a crisis and Julia has to make a decision: Should she leave the man who has suddenly become a stranger to her, or stay with him and embark upon a new kind of life? Before she can decide whether to move forward with Michael, she needs to take a look back at the moments, both big and small, that shaped their marriage.

I've also always been intrigued by opera, and I jumped at the chance to learn more about it for Skipping a Beat. So many of the themes in the world's great operas - love, fear, jealousy, revenge - are just as relevant today, and Julia is stunned when she begins to see scenes from the operas she loves suddenly reflected in her own life.


Question: What is the best thing about creating a character like Michael?

Sarah Pekkanen: Michael was a fun character because he's so complicated. He came from a tough background; his mother left the family when he was just a kid, and he was a brilliant, skinny, awkward boy - and we all know how difficult the teenage years can be for guys like that. So Michael developed an intense, fiery drive to succeed. He felt that money equalled power and respect. But he wasn't ever satisfied, even after he became one of the wealthiest men in a city of very rich men. Then one day, Michael suffered cardiac arrest and collapsed at the head of the table in his company's boardroom. When he was revived four minutes and eight seconds later, he was a totally different man. That's how Skipping a Beat begins.


Question: What advice do you have for aspiring writers or artists?

Sarah Pekkanen: Treat writing like exercise - you need to do it every day to get results. Of course, I still don't have the exercise thing down perfectly yet, but I do carve out time for writing each and every day - even if it's just fifteen minutes or so in the carpool line while I'm waiting to pick up the kids from school. And don't be scared of a terrible first draft. Those early words are just the clay you throw down on the wheel; it's the process of revision that lets you mold them into something special.


Interview by Brooke Hunter