Half Life by Jillian Cantor (easy to read books for adults list txt) 📕

to my family who always believe in my writing even when I’m struggling to figure it out myself. To Gregg for still being my best friend after all these years, and for always offering to be my first and most enthusiastic reader. And to my kids, who are amazingly wonderful teenagers and readers.

Thank you to all the incredible booksellers and librarians who support my books and get them into the hands of readers. And last but not least, to my readers around the world who keep reading and discussing my books in their book clubs—an enormous thank-you for choosing to read my books and allowing me to keep doing what I love.

About the Author

JILLIAN CANTOR has a BA in English from Penn State University and an MFA from the University of Arizona. She is the author of award-winning and bestselling novels for teens and adults, including The Hours Count, Margot, and The Lost Letter, which was a USA Today bestseller. In Another Time, her latest historical novel, was an Indie Next pick. Born and raised in a suburb of Philadelphia, Cantor lives in Arizona with her husband and two sons.

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About the Author

Q & A with Jillian Cantor

About the Book

Reading Group Guide

Read On

Excerpt from In Another Time

About the AuthorQ & A with Jillian Cantor

Why did you choose to write a novel about Marie Curie set in two timelines, a real and an alternate one?

I knew I wanted to write a novel about Marie Curie and call it Half Life for a year before I figured out exactly what story I wanted to tell. After two false starts, I kept coming back to one detail about Marie’s life that fascinated me most of all: the fact that she had been engaged to Kazimierz Zorawski as a young woman in Poland, and that the only reason she didn’t marry him was because his mother thought she wasn’t good enough for him. So much about this intrigued me! There was the fact that this amazing, brilliant woman, who would later go on to change the course of science and win two Nobel Prizes, was deemed not good enough as a young poor woman in Poland. And then I read that in his later years, Kazimierz would sit in Warsaw and stare at a statue of her, erected after her death. All those years later, did he still regret not marrying her? But what if he had married her? Her life would’ve turned out totally differently if she’d never moved to Paris to get her education or met Pierre.

One of my favorite movies is Sliding Doors, and I’ve always been fascinated by that concept. How would life have turned out differently with one different choice? The train we missed, the job we didn’t take, the person we didn’t date or marry. I imagined that but on an even larger scalefor Marie Curie. What if Marie Curie hadn’t ever become . . . Marie Curie? I was fascinated by the way one choice would not only affect her and her family on a small personal scale but also how it would affect the course of science and history and the world in ways both good and bad.

But the real Marie Curie also had an amazing life filled with personal triumphs and tragedies, and I wanted to delve into that too. So I decided to set her real story side by side with the fictional Marya’s.

What was the most challenging part of telling a story in two timelines, one real and one fictional?

There were so many challenging things! One big one was keeping the two timelines straight and remembering which characters lived (or died) in each. But also it was a challenge to remember how each character was slightly different in each timeline depending on the circumstances. For instance, Pierre Curie in Marie’s timeline is never the same man as Pierre Curie in Marya’s, so I always needed to remember those nuances and keep them straight as I wrote.

Marie’s real life was so fascinating, and filled with so many highs and lows, that it was a challenge as well to stay true to and capture that while also trying to pace the story and make this work as a novel.

But it was Marya’s storyline—the fictional story—that was my biggest challenge of all. I struggled awhile with the right ending for her and with figuring out a way to ultimately make science important in her story, even if it was on a smaller scale.

What was your favorite part of writing this novel? Least favorite?

My favorite part of writing this book was figuring out the ways scenes could echo in both women’s lives but could mean entirely different things. I loved putting Marya and Marie in the same places (in Sweden, for instance, with Pierre and the swans) but deciding how those exact scenes would play out differently due to the differing circumstances. It felt like a really fun puzzle that I was constantly solving and re-solving as I wrote the first draft.

I also loved thinking about all the things Marie might have wanted to change in her own life and giving her the power to do that in Marya’s storyline. She manages to alter the course of her niece’s and nephew’s lives and she stops Pierre from walking in front of a carriage, and her fictional relationship with her musical daughter is much different than the one based on her real-life relationship.

My least favorite part was working on the scenes based on Marie’s life that were marred by tragedy, and there were a lot of them—Pierre’s death and the fallout from her affair and the death of her nephew and niece. I came to have a real fondness and respect for Marie and all the many obstacles she overcame to achieve what she did. So it was emotionally draining to keep reimagining and writing these terrible things that actually