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"  What inspired you to write The Art Forger? My original inspiration was Isabella Stewart Gardner. Known as Belle to her close friends (I now consider myself a member of that group), she was a tough-minded lady who didn&amp;#039;t accept the prescribed role of women in her time and social circle: Upper-class Boston at the turn of the twentieth century. She defied everyone by walking lions down the main street of the city, wearing a &amp;quot;Go Red Sox&amp;quot; headband to the symphony, and becoming the first great American art collector \u2014 man or woman. Then there&amp;#039;s my fascination with the 1990 robbery at the Gardner Museum, during which $500 million of art was stolen \u2014 none of which has ever been recovered \u2014 plus, of course, my own love of art. How did you come up with the idea for the Degas forgery scheme? I knew I couldn&amp;#039;t resolve the Gardner heist in my novel. What would happen if I did, and then the FBI actually solved it? I needed a mystery though, a secret \u2014 a story from the past that Claire would have to unravel. I searched for artists whom Isabella Stewart Gardner might have encountered while amassing her collection, and found that Edgar Degas, who has always been one of my favorites, fit the bill. When I added the element of forgery, it began to take shape. Where did your vision for Claire&amp;#039;s character stem from? Are there parts of you in her character? Aha, the autobiographical protagonist question. Much as I would like to deny this, I can&amp;#039;t. Claire is a struggling artist, driven by her desire to create art and to be acknowledged, frustrated by all the hurdles in her way. When I was writing The Art Forger, I was a struggling writer, driven by my desire to create stories and to be acknowledged, likewise frustrated by challenges. The funny, meta part is that now that both Claire and I have achieved more than we ever expected, her response to the attention turns out to be the same as mine: we both wonder if after years of believing in our work, are we good enough? Fiction becomes fact. Claire was such a likable heroine to me, in part, I think because she doesn&amp;#039;t care what other people think of her. And yet, her reputation and career depend on what other people believe about her past and present. Can you discuss this contradiction? With every novel I write, I set a new challenge for myself. With The Art Forger, it was to create a character who does something bad, but remains likable. Claire does the wrong things for the right reasons and the right things for the wrong reasons, as so many of us do. She&amp;#039;s also faced with a common human dilemma: How far am I willing to go to get what I want most? So I think maybe she&amp;#039;s every woman, struggling with the same things we all struggle with, sometimes making the right choices and sometimes not, just like the rest of us. Why did you structure the novel the way you did \u2014 with flashbacks of Claire&amp;#039;s relationship with Isaac, rather than having the reader get to know him in the present? Claire&amp;#039;s relationship with her former lover, Isaac, is complex, and mirrors many of the themes played out in the book: doing the right things for the wrong reasons, questioning the American cult of celebrity, and what any of us are willing to do to get what we desire \u2014 especially in love. The Isaac story takes place three years before the opening of the book, and contains answers to some of the questions raised about Claire early on. I decided it would be more vivid for the reader if Isaac and Claire were shown in real time \u2014 and discovered that I could use revelations of the past to push the present story forward. And I wanted the reader to see Claire as she is, and then discover her backstory slowly, the same way we do when we first meet a new friend. Can you speak to the difference between Claire&amp;#039;s relationship with Isaac and with Aiden? Ah, my poor Claire. She&amp;#039;s a romantic at heart, and has a difficult time seeing the negative sides of the men in her life. With Aiden, Claire has many suspicions, but her romantic nature overrules her practical side. She loves both men, Isaac the most desperately, and ultimately tries to help each one \u2014 with disastrous consequences for everyone. She believes she&amp;#039;s learned from her mistakes with Isaac, but clearly hasn&amp;#039;t, although she isn&amp;#039;t quite as foolish as before. Claire has grown up a little between the two relationships, but clearly not enough.  How did you balance the forgery scheme with Claire&amp;#039;s love life so well, without making it too much about one or the other? A novel, at its heart, I think, is about character. The reader experiences the world through another&amp;#039;s eyes and hopefully understands something more about the human condition as a result. So Claire&amp;#039;s personal life is integrally tied to the plot and all its details. How she reacts to situations and what she learns powers the story, expresses the themes, and deepens her character. Who was your favorite character to write about? Who was the hardest for you to relate to? This is a difficult call because I love Claire, but honestly my favorite character is Belle. I thought about her, read about her, and wished I could hang out with her for twenty years \u2014 and when I wrote the book I got to be, or at least channel, her. When I&amp;#039;m writing, particularly in the first person, I imagine myself as an actor and try to inhabit the character, to think and act like they would, and this was great fun with Belle, who was such a &amp;quot;character&amp;quot; in her own right. For me, the bad guys are the most difficult to relate to, though in The Art Forger there aren&amp;#039;t so many because, like Claire, they do the right things for the wrong reasons and vice versa. I used to teach a sociology course at Tufts University called Social Deviance, and one thing I wanted my students to understand was that even the most hardened criminals act civilized most of the time: They brush their teeth, call their mothers, have friends and often families they love. But most important is the understanding that all characters, good or bad, view themselves as the heroes of their own stories. Once you figure that out, even the worst of them become much easier to write about. What&amp;#039;s the last great book you read?Olive Kitteridge by Elizabeth Strout. I was awed by the effectiveness of her unusual, brave and brilliant structure, and how she built such a full character and story from it. It also gives an honest glimpse into a life that is at once specific and universal. Do you have an all-time favorite author or book? I don&amp;#039;t know what my all-time favorite book is, but I do know which was the most influential to my writing career: Gone With the Wind by Margaret Mitchell. I was about ten years old when I first read it and immediately decided I wanted to be a novelist when I grew up. That and Scarlett O&amp;#039;Hara. What are you working on now? I&amp;#039;m on the third draft of a novel with the working title Montage. It&amp;#039;s the story of an up-and-coming young French-American artist, who disappears in New York City on the eve of WWII amidst personal and political turmoil. It&amp;#039;s a mix of fictional characters and real people, including Jackson Pollock, Lee Krasner, Mark Rothko, Willem de Kooning, Eleanor Roosevelt, Joseph Kennedy and Charles Lindbergh. I&amp;#039;m having a lot of fun with it. Sounds fascinating! Can&amp;#039;t wait to read it. Do you have any advice for aspiring novelists?The Art Forger was rejected by numerous publishers, and I was about to give up, but my agent wouldn&amp;#039;t let me. She kept pushing and pushing, and finally found the manuscript a home at Algonquin Books, and now here I am thinking about what&amp;#039;s next. They say the three most important words in real estate are location, location, location. In novel writing, they are persistence, persistence, persistence. From November 13 through December 18, Barbara Shaprio will be responding to reader questions about The Art Forger here. Read our review of the novel, and weigh in! "^^<http://www.w3.org/2001/XMLSchema#string>
<http://www.redbookmag.com/life/interviews/a14607/barbara-shapiro-interview/>