Before becoming a full-time writer, Jackie Townsend received her MBA from UC Berkeley and worked as a financial consultant in the Bay Area alongside her Italian husband, who worked in Silicon Valley and other parts of the world before starting and running his own tech company. That career, both exciting and exhausting, fuels Jackie’s novels and essays, as well as the blogs she posts at jackietownsend.com, as do her travels and exposure to foreign cultures. Meanwhile, her husband continues the pursuit. Jackie’s previous two books, The Absence of Evelyn (Spark Press) and Imperfect Pairings, both won or placed in a variety of Indie Awards. She is a native of Southern California who lived for many years in the Bay Area before she and her husband landed themselves in New York City, where they live today.
We chat with author Jackie Townsend about her latest book release Riding High In April, along with writing, book recommendations, and more!
Hi, Jackie! Can you tell our readers a bit about yourself?
I am a native of a small beach town in Southern California married to a native of Italy who grew up all over the world. We met at UC Berkeley, where I received my MBA and went on to pursue a management consulting career in the Bay Area. He worked in Silicon Valley and other parts of the world before starting and running his own tech company. While I gave up the big business ghost a long time ago to write fiction, he still continues the tech pursuit. It is the stories from those respective careers, both exciting and exhausting, that fuel my novels and essays, as does my travel and exposure to foreign cultures, and my obsession with connections, relationships, and what makes them tick. My themes tend to revolve around displacement, crossing borders, belonging (or not belonging), loss, and love. Riding High in April is my fourth novel.
When did you first discover your love for writing?
When I first understood loneliness. Melancholia. Early on, before I can even remember remembering. And yet I couldn’t write yet so I drew, or tried to. I wanted to sketch, as if my blood were the color of charcoal and I wanted it to pour out onto the page in the form of beautiful swirls. But then came the words. I wrote some terrible poetry as a child. For myself, for my mother, but mostly for my father, who was essentially a big teddy bear stuffed with deep-seeded unhappiness. It took me a long time to come to writing as a career, a long, fraught road, but the words, even in their crudest form, before all the editing, have always soothed.
Quick lightning round! Tell us the first book you ever remember reading, the one that made you want to become an author, and one that you can’t stop thinking about!
When asked this question, I’ve always responded, hands down, with To Kill a Mockingbird. In the fifth grade, I wrote a book report on it for school and received an A+. I’d never received an A+ before. I was a painfully shy child and the teacher made me read my report out loud to the class. So perhaps it was this traumatic event around the book that changed me, rather than the book itself. I say this only now because, recently, our Italian cousin requested an English version of Agatha Christie’s Ten Little Indians for his oldest child’s school assignment, and a halting memory came reeling back at me. I devoured that book when I was ten or so. There was something of me in each one of those ten, fated characters, closed up in that gigantic castle on the edge of the windswept cliffs. Like each of them, one by one, I too was disappearing. It was spooky and moving and ghostly and while it may not always be on the forefront of my mind, I’ve never forgotten how Ms. Christie made me feel. How an author could do that to another person.
Your latest novel Riding High In April is out now! If you could only describe it in five words, what would they be?
Man’s pursuit of the unattainable.
What can readers expect?
Expect to move fast, to see the world, to cross borders, and keep crossing them. Expect lots of highs and lows (Riding High in April, aka, Shot Down in May). Expect to see inside of the guts of one man’s relentless pursuit to build something great. Expect to see the black box of tech opened, for all its worms to come spilling out in the form of Linux boxes, network nodes, firewalls and puffy white clouds. This is no circle or ring or app these global tech migrants are attempting to build. But don’t worry. You will be accompanied by lots of sake and soju drinking along the way. Expect a wild ride.
Where did the inspiration for Riding High In April come from?
Many years ago, before I became a writer, I worked for an investment firm in Silicon Valley writing business plans for start-ups. There was only one creed, the valuation had to be BIG, otherwise what was the point. Fast forward twenty years, during which time I became a full-time writer who watched her husband from the sidelines as he continued the tech pursuit. The unicorns, the evangelists, the press focusing on the few but not the many, I’ve become so tired of hearing only about Elon Musk, Steve Jobs, and Mark Zuckerberg. I wanted to write a story about the guys, and a few gals out there, fighting to keep the nuts and bolts of technology churning, growing, changing, and evolving. Under-the-radar guys, and those few gals, working from all corners of the world, dedicated day in and day out so that we users can go about our blissful, screen-filled days unfettered. These guys strive just like everyone else, they too want to build something great, have been trying since the dawn of time. These guys are as old as time. There is no Silicon Valley cover story about these guys.
Can you tell us about any challenges you faced while writing and how you were able to overcome them?
I wrote two different versions of the book before this third version came to be. In the first version, the couple in the story adopt an Asian teen while living in South Korea and bring her back to the states. Sung-min. I loved that girl, but there was something always missing inside her, so I brought her voice to life in the third person. I got inside her head, and yet there was still something missing. I finally realized it stemmed from the fact that I knew nothing of what it was like to be an under-privileged Korean teen uprooted from her homeland to live with strangers in the U.S., no matter how much I read or researched about them. It didn’t feel right for me to take on that responsibility. I blew up the book and started over. Poor Sung-min, I still think about her.
Were there any favourite moments or characters you really enjoyed writing or exploring?
The tech industry’s bastion is Silicon Valley. So, naturally, initially, I had large portions of the book set in the Bay Area. But then the more I wrote the less, apparently, I wanted to be in the Bay Area—the place fills my stomach with knots—and so, slowly, subconsciously, those large portions became less large, then smaller, and then smaller still, until it became a Silicon Valley story set everywhere BUT Silicon Valley, in cities like Singapore, Tokyo, Seoul, and Jaipur, cities that feel alive and, perhaps more importantly, make the story unique.
What’s the best and the worst writing advice you have received?
Best advice: From George Saunders’ recently published book on writing, Swimming in the Pond in the Rain:
To put it another way: having gone about as high up Hemingway Mountain as I could go, having realized that even at my best I could only hope to be an acolyte up there, resolving never again to commit to the sin of being imitative, I stumbled back down into the valley and came upon a little shit-hill labeled ‘Saunders Mountain.”
“Hmm,’ I thought. “It’s so little. And it’s a shit-hill.”
Then again, that was my name on it.
Worst advice: “Never leave your day job.”
What’s next for you?
I’ve been doing a lot of book marketing lately, and I’m itching to get back into the thick of writing, to take the draft of my fifth book (one I wrote during covid) and rip it apart, or, if I’m lucky, maybe for once I won’t have to. An American woman is visiting her Italian mother-in-law in Italy. Their relationship is troubled, but then something happens unrelated to any of their monotonous and beleaguered miscommunications—an elderly woman shows up at the door. She lives in the crumbling old villa up the hill and has come to spending her days comatose in an easy chair, incapacitated, and under the care of her ever more reclusive, hoarder husband, or so the town whispers go. No one sees her anymore. Until this very moment when she knocks frantically on the mother-in-law’s door, not looking so comatose at all.
Lastly, do you have any book recommendations for our readers?
- A Burning: A novel, by Megha Majumdar
- A Swim in a Pond in the Rain: In Which Four Russians Give a Master Class on Writing, Reading, and Life, by George Saunders
- A Terrible Country: A Novel, by Keith Gessen
- Open City, by Teju Cole
- What Are You Going Through, by Sigrid Nunez
You can find Jackie on Facebook, Twitter, and Instagram, along with at her website.
