King of the love story turns to divorce
Nicholas Sparks marks 20 years as a romance writer with new novel, Two by Two
NEW YORK— A puddle, 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 — that would be “He” — signs books, hundreds of them, at a Union Square bookstore.
Malik rose well before dawn and drove three hours from her Great Barrington, Mass., 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 Two by Two, 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 fall marks a significant milestone in Sparkslandia: 20 years and as many books since the one-time North Carolina pharmaceutical rep sold his first novel.
The Notebook 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 a meme), and it 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, sitting in his agent’s office, his face blanketed in foundation for the camera and a cavalcade of smartphone snaps. “People read them because they move the reader through the whole range of human emotion.”
More than two decades ago, Sparks was a salesman with a dream: He wanted to produce a book like Erich Segal’s Love Story, Robert James Waller’s The Bridges of Madison County or Nicholas Evans’s The Horse Whisperer, then crushing the bestseller list.
If the love story “doesn’t go,” the Notre Dame graduate 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 sub-genre, 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 (U.S.) at the global box office.
“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,” Sparks says. Every book hit the New York Times bestseller list, often spiking to the top.
So, to celebrate his 20th anniversary in publishing, Sparks wrote a divorce story.
Two by Two, with a first printing of almost one 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.”
Indeed. 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 chil- dren, now ages 15 to 25.
Two by Two 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 2015. Fans lamented on Twitter: “There’s no hope for any of us.”
“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.”
As a gift to his readers, Sparks commissioned an original song for the book by musician JD Eicher, whose previous big break was having a tune selected for an Olive Garden commercial. He’s averaging 1,000 free daily downloads.
Eicher accompanied Sparks on his book tour — literally, singing while fans waited in line to have books signed — and witnessed a proposal at an appearance last week in suburban Denver, a regular Sparks phenomenon.
Two decades after his first tour, Sparks still appears thrilled to meet his fans, 90 per cent of whom, he estimates, are women. His longest appearance, he recalls, lasted 17 hours: “I think I signed 6,000 books.”
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,” he says. “Those are the only two constants.”