Welcome to the inaugural Five Questions! In each edition, I’ll be asking an author five questions and letting her or him introduce herself to you. Today, we’re chatting with the New York Times bestselling author of Cruel Beautiful World, Is This Tomorrow, and Pictures of You (among others).

How does a book start for you?

It always starts for me with a haunting. Something gets under my skin and I wonder about it and I don’t know the answer to it. Sometimes I don’t have the experience for it. I wanted to write Cruel Beautiful World since I was 17, when a friend of mine was murdered by her controlling boyfriend, but I had no experience of being controlled, or how that could happen and why someone might put up with it. Not until it happened to me about 20 years later!

Who in your latest book has surprised you most – and why?

I sold a novel to Algonquin that we are editing now, so all this might change, but what really surprised me was how much of a character this Woodstock house in the novel became. One main character hated it, felt it was haunted, but his girlfriend loves it. It made me think about homes and what they mean.

When and/or where is your latest book set and is there a story behind that setting?

This is my very first novel set in New York City! Always before it’s been in Ann Arbor, where I lived for many years, or Boston, where I grew up, and I’ve been in NYC since 1980!  It felt like I had grown in setting a book there, in Chelsea, where I lived.

What are you working on now?

While I am doing edits with my Algonquin editor Chuck Adams (Oh my God, he’s so smart! So funny and so gentlemanly!)  I cannot sit around obsessing, so I started a new novel, with a crime at its heart. I was wondering and wondering how come as a nation, we just pay lip service to redemption? Why can’t a person ever really be forgiven?  It’s a terrible, fascinating mystery to me and I’m hoping to figure out the answer in my book. I’m about 90 pages in and terrified, which feels about right.

What didn’t I ask you that I should have?

Why can’t you title your novels?

It’s pathetic. I can’t. I’m a professional namer at EatMyWords and I’m great at my job, and for years I named clothing lines for Macy’s. But when I look at a novel, I go blank. Cruel Beautiful World was actually named by my son, Max!  Pictures of You was named by my editor! I get superstitious and thinking, oh I have to have a three-word title. The novel that Chuck is now editing is called This Other Life OR Wake Up Now but I don’t love either.

Thank you Clea!

Thank you, Caroline!

Caroline Leavitt is the New York Times bestselling author of Pictures of You and Is This Tomorrow, as well as the critically acclaimed author of Cruel Beautiful World, and nine other novels. The recipient of a New York Foundation of the Arts Fellowship and a finalist int he Sundance Screenwriting Lab, she is a book critic for People magazine and the San Francisco Chronicle. She teaches writing at Stanford and UCLA, and works privately with writers. Visit her at www.carolineleavitt.com