Master of the tear de force
Nicholas Sparks sparks off range of human emotions, writes
APUDDLE, that’s what Tyler Malik has been reduced to, a veritable puddle. “He reaches and touches me to the core,” she says mid-sob, face raw, as Nicholas Sparks signs books, hundreds of them, at a Union Square bookstore.
Malik rose before dawn and drove three hours from her home to be rendered a wreck. “Your stories mean more to me than I could ever explain in words,” she tells the author, clutching two copies of his latest tear de force.
Fans purchased more than 98 000 copies of the new novel in the opening week, further proof of Sparks’s indomitable appeal. His total sales number more than 100 million in 50 languages. This new novel marks a significant milestone in Sparkslandia: 20 years and as many books since the onetime North Carolina pharmaceutical rep sold his first novel.
crowned the bestseller list for more than a year. The movie, stuck for years in what the author calls “development heck”, finally appeared in 2004 and made Ryan Gosling a star, and transformed Sparks into the undisputed king of tear-soaked literature.
“I write in this strange little subgenre of what’s called a love story,” says Sparks, 50. “People read them because they move the reader through the whole range of human emotion.”
A former champion runner, Sparks has the powerful physique of a man who SIGNING ON: Nicholas Sparks signs copies of his latest book, The novel sold nearly 100000 copies in the first week of sales.
Two by Two
works out religiously. He tends to answer questions with an intense earnestness that borders on confession, “oh, gosh” punctuating many of his sentences.
More than two decades ago, Sparks was a salesman with a dream: He wanted to produce a book like Erich Segal’s Robert James Waller’s or Nicholas Evans’s
then crushing the bestseller list.
If the love story “doesn’t go”, Sparks thought, “maybe my next book would be a horror story or a thriller”.
There would be no thrillers. Instead, Sparks accomplished what almost no one else in his strange little subgenre, which tends to consist of one-hit wonders, has: He became a brand.
Eleven books became movies about ordinary people in love who happened to be portrayed by extraordinarily gorgeous actors, grossing $885 million at the global box office. Says Sparks, “I think these movies lend themselves to people wanting to be cast in them because the actors themselves get to act and go through the entire range of human emotion.” Every book hit the New York Times bestseller list, often spiking to the top.
To celebrate his 20th anniversary in publishing, Sparks wrote a divorce story.
with a first printing of almost 1 million, refers to the adman hero, Russ, and his young daughter, whom he is left to raise alone after his wife leaves. Russ, Sparks says, is “empathetic and at times a little bit clueless”.
When his wife begins labour, Russ jumps in the shower so he can look fresh for the birth photos, something Sparks admits he did when his wife, Cathy, went into labour with the first of their five children, now ages 15 to 25.
features a salad bar of turmoil – illness, death, despair, adultery – but divorce dominates the narrative. (Fear not, the book also contains a love story.)
Divorce, alas, is something Sparks now knows. After 25 years of marriage, the laureate of love and Cathy, who long served as his muse, divorced last October, no reason given. “For our children’s sake, we regard this as a private matter,” Sparks said when the couple separated in January last year. “The vast majority of the book was written after my divorce,” Sparks says. But, he adds: “I wanted to make sure the story felt authentic, the dissolution felt authentic, the pain felt authentic, the achingly slow healing felt authentic. Anyone who’s been through anything like this knows the healing is slow.”
He hopes, however, that his audience won’t confuse his experience with the novel, especially the wife, Vivian, who will win no popularity contests. “Vivian is not Cathy,” he says. “We remain friends. Our story is different.”
There’s no formula to his stories. “Each time I think the well will be dry and I’ll run out of ideas,” he says. “One of the goals is to make each of these novels feel unique. To do that I vary as much as I conceivably can per novel. I’ll vary the theme. I’ll vary the ending: happy, bittersweet, tragic. I’ll vary the voice: first person, third person or some are combinations, like third person limited omniscient. I’ll vary the period, I’ll vary the length. Importantly, I’ll vary the age of the characters.”
But he knows what keep readers happy. “They know there will be a love story and it will be set in North Carolina. Those are the only two constants.”
Sparks, concerned he might be a onenovel wonder, kept the salesman job for another 15 months after selling
He became a very rich writer, but chose to stay in New Bern, North Carolina, a central coastal town of 30 000. “It’s a very quiet life,” he says.
Quiet, but hardly simple. Sparks lives in a 2 230m2 house, a villa built from kisses, with a screening room, a bowling alley and a napping room, in addition to his writing room, where he plays TV shows in the background while he writes.
After three Sparks movies were released in 18 months, his team decided to hold back the movie rights on
as his team unrolled his latest book to weeping fans like Malik, Sparks felt the weight of his readers’ expectations.
He had scanned the packed house, the line snaking through the bookstore, and declared that the signing would last a little over an hour. Almost two hours, about 500 books and so many tears later, Sparks was done.
He professed fatigue, but looked rejuvenated while obsessing about the next book, No. 21, with the team. – The Washington Post