Leigh Stein’s yellow first novel, The Fallback Plan, is about a girl named Esther who has a degree in acting but has just been coasting since graduation, trying to adjust to a newer, sadder understanding of how the world works. “It was unfair that life was so irrevocable, that nothing could be frozen in time or retracted” she thinks in the final chapter called, appropriately, “Independence Day.” “I loved acting because it was like living inside of a fixed amount of time, looped from start to finish. In rehearsal, I went through the best and worst moments of some woman’s life, again and again, until I’d perfected them.” Now, feeling like a stranger in her parents’ backyard, she sits in the distance and watches the lives of the people around her and it seems like she resolves, at last, to take the long way through her own life. I asked Leigh about that for my last question in this week-long interview (see parts one, two, three and four). READ MORE >

Leigh Stein’s meaningful first novel, The Fallback Plan, is about a girl named Esther who has just graduated from college and is feeling aimless and depressed, which, okay, sounds like a well-visited premise for a novel. But Esther is so witty and likable that you can’t help enjoying her mild misadventures. I’ve been emailing a question to Leigh every day this week, but yesterday she was caught up on her book tour (is she in your town?), so here are two questions

HTMLGIANT: Can I tell you something? Why is the novel so funny? Or, seriously, what was the writing process like? How many revisions did it take to get all the jokes in there? Like, “A small part of me threw up.” Or making a confused facial expression to trick the IPASS sensor, or a mom with a “hairstyle most conducive to storing pencils” instead of one who says “well look at that” when you show her how to enlarge the type in MS Word.

LEIGH: Esther makes jokes as a way of pricking the bubble of despair and stagnation she lives in, because that’s what I do. READ MORE >

Leigh Stein’s laugh-out-loud-funny first novel, The Fallback Plan, is about a girl named Esther who has just graduated from college and, for lack of anything better to do, takes a job babysitting for a girl named May, whose parents, Nate and Amy, lost their first child a few years before. Bored, Esther spends a lot of time imagining a Chronicles of Narnia redux, featuring panda bears.

HTMLGIANT: One thing I am thinking about writing about it is about doors. The Fallback Plan has some good ones — the door to the dead child’s room, the door to the studio, the panda’s doorway to the other world, the father’s security concerns, the throwing of keys, and the whole book represents Esther’s passage into adulthood. Was there anything intentional you were thinking about the doors when you were writing this?

Leigh: I wasn’t thinking intentionally about doors…I wish I was! That would make me seem so smart. One thing I do sometimes to test my memory is try to remember doorknobs. Like in the house I lived in until I was 13 or 14, the doorknobs were very particular (inspiring the doorknob to the attic in my novel) and by remembering them, I feel like I still hold on to a little piece of that house.

Leigh Stein’s laugh-out-loud-funny first novel, The Fallback Plan, is about a girl named Esther who has just graduated from college and, for lack of anything better to do, moves in with her parents. She takes a job babysitting for a girl named May, and she has a tepid affair with May’s father. She also has a crush on a guy named Jack, and they have sex, and right before they do it Esther tries to think about something sexy, so she thinks about a Winnebago. It’s with that in mind that I asked Leigh Stein to do this interview. I only had one question.

Me: Wait, are Winnebagos sexy?
Leigh: Winnebagos are sexy for the following reasons:
1. They suggest adventure, the romance of the open road, Americana.
2. You could say “Let’s run away!” to your loved one, and then actually do it in one of these.
3. A bed + a motor vehicle = sexy.

I can’t recommend this novel, and this manner of thinking, any more highly than I already do.