Ann Napolitano on the Oprah effect: ‘95 per cent of the credit goes to her, not my book’

When Ann Napolitano is teaching writing classes in her native New York, she advises her students to pay attention to their obsessions. This creative credo has been a guiding principle for the author throughout her writing life, which began in earnest when she was in her early 20s and confined at home during her third year at college, after contracting mononucleosis.

“I had only two hours of energy a day,” she says via Zoom from her Brooklyn home office, where a large print of the Brooklyn Bridge looms behind her desk. “So I had to figure out what it was that nurtured me... I had to ask myself, what did I need and want to do in those two hours. I had been writing before that, but I was very shy, and I had convinced myself that I should plan to do something better than writing. Something in publishing, maybe, or something with a salary that my parents would be proud of. But in those two hours a day, I realised that all I wanted to do was write.”

I decided I would leap off the cliff and try to be a writer. If I failed it would be my failure

Napolitano also realised “that life can change on a dime, in a way that people in their early 20s normally don’t. I thought, ‘I could wake up some morning and be hit by a bus’. I decided, then, that I would leap off the cliff and try to be a writer. I had no idea whether I could be remotely successful at it, but at least if I failed it would be my failure.”

For the first decade of her newly committed artistic life, it seemed that Napolitano had indeed failed. She couldn’t get an agent for her first novel. She secured one for her second, but the book didn’t sell. The third novel, the taut family drama Within Arm’s Reach, was published to modest sales in 2012. A Good Hard Look, a novel about the life of Flannery O’Connor, followed soon after.

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The books were well-received but “had little readership”, the author admits, and when she began her third novel she “honestly thought, I’m a mid-list, middle-aged writer with low sales; this probably won’t be published, so I might as well just write the book I want to”. That book, “a labour of love”, was Dear Edward.

Published in 2020, it centres on the story of a 12-year-old boy who is the sole survivor of a plane crash. The novel is partly inspired by the fate of Afriqiyah Airways flight 771, which crashed at Tripoli Airport in 2010: everyone on board died except for a young boy. Napolitano became obsessed by the idea of how this young man might find the emotional strength to go on with his life in the face of such tragedy. The novel answers that question, providing a nuanced portrait of survivor guilt and spirited resilience. The propulsive plot and emotional landscape of the book made it an instant bestseller. It also made it a great fit for a TV adaptation: a miniseries was released on Apple TV+ earlier this year.

The explosive success that followed Dear Edward, Napolitano says, was “a genuine shock. It really did change my life. I had never made anything close to a living writing before that.”

Napolitano has just published her fourth novel, Hello Beautiful, and in the months since its US release her life has changed even more profoundly. The story of a tightly knit group of sisters and their relationship with an emotionally damaged basketball player called William Waters was chosen by Oprah Winfrey for her enormously popular Oprah’s Book Club, an accolade heightened by the fact that Dear Beautiful is the 100th title to receive the honour.

As a result, the book has been an instant bestseller. Napolitano modestly marvels at the “Oprah effect: 95 per cent of the credit goes to her, not my book. She is a force of nature and has been a force for good within literature for the last 30 years, elevating the attention that books get and putting authors like me in front of people who wouldn’t have known I existed.”

Hello Beautiful is set in Chicago in the early 1980s; the relationship at its heart between the four Padavano siblings bears the blueprint of one of Napolitano’s very first literary obsessions: Louisa May Alcott’s Little Women. A pillar of American literature, the book, Napolitano argues, “has this enormous resonance for women, striking chords that continue to ring into the current day: the fact of the four sisters being so very different from each other but so fully themselves; the fact they are more powerful and alive as a whole than when separated, but still so distinct; how they carry the loss of Beth” – the second-youngest of the four March sisters, who dies of scarlet fever – “as a loss of themselves, a loss of that wholeness”.

“That was the heartbeat that resonated for me within my own book,” Napolitano says, “the idea of four young girls and none of them wants to be Beth, but that will happen in everyone’s family. Someone has to die first, and it will be a devastating loss.”

While writing the book, during the isolated periods of the pandemic, Napolitano wasn’t at first conscious of how deeply the template of Little Women was informing her writing. She laughs. “I wasn’t smart enough to realise that it was an homage until the Padavano sisters told me when I was writing a piece of dialogue.” The sisters have that exact conversation about which of the March girls they each are.

A different, more recent obsession informed the character of William from the very beginning of Napolitano’s drafting of the book: the appearance of the history of basketball on her personal “magnet board”. “It was kind of embarrassing,” she says about her sudden interest in the sport, which was sparked by the Black Lives Matter protests in the United States during 2020. “I never would have actively chosen the subject,” she exclaims, “but I was reading a lot about the social-justice movement in America, and the thing that caught my attention was the intersection of the history of basketball with the civil-rights movement in America: how they ran in parallel. So in some ways, while my obsessiveness made no sense, I thought – the same way I advise my students – You have to follow this.”

I’m interested in the idea that we, as writers, should be diversifying our stories, not just in terms of representing the diversity of humans but in pulling back and really examining the world we live in.

In the end, basketball became the defining characteristic of fragile William Waters’s life. “When I started writing about him,” Napolitano says, “I knew immediately that he was going to be someone who suffers a great loss and that he would be a basketball player. But I also knew he wasn’t going to make it as a professional. At the start, I wasn’t sure if it would be because he wasn’t good enough or because of some injury, but in the end it became both. He isn’t good enough, but his injury also takes basketball away from him entirely. It is the only thing that has allowed him to pretend his way through life, the only thing that gave him solace and pleasure, so there’s nothing propping him up any more.”

Napolitano wrote Hello Beautiful quickly, the speed aided by her writing method, which involves nine disciplined months during which she doesn’t put pen to paper instead but reads and plans in her head; by the time she sits at her desk, imagined worlds come quickly. She is about to pull her office chair out again in the coming weeks and start committing her fifth book to the page.

Napolitano isn’t quite sure what it will be about just yet, but she does acknowledge the bright red pin of obsession that has driven the last nine months of her reading: trees. “I’m interested in the idea that we, as writers, should be diversifying our stories, not just in terms of representing the diversity of humans but in pulling back and really examining the world we live in. It’s an important part of raising consciousness around the environmental crisis,” she says, which will, with luck, “allow us to continue humaning on this planet” – and so, in turn, continue to tell intimate stories about human life.

Hello Beautiful is published by Viking