Caroline Leavitt Recommends...

"For me, the best novels have a never-ending quality. Nothing is tied up neatly by the last page. You continue to ache, dream and wonder about the characters’ lives. And the thing that has helped me the most to achieve this in my work are movies. I live by Elia Kazan’s Splendor in the Grass. In the last scene, Warren Beatty and Natalie Wood are together after years apart. They belong together, but they have other relationships, and what was, can’t be anymore. It’s heartbreakingly subtle—and it inspires me to use gesture and subtext—and open-ended moral choices—in my work." 
—Caroline Leavitt, author of Pictures of You (Algonquin Books, 2011)