Check out what inspired Alexis Soloski to write "Flashout," and more.
What was your inspiration behind your most recent book?
I’ve always felt that I showed up at the party too late. I was a theater kid, then a theater major, then a theater critic. Always I was drawn to work that felt edgy, reckless, work that made me think, "My God, I didn’t know you could do that onstage." But even then, I knew real experiment was already in the rearview. The true revolutionaries, the radical troupes of the ‘60s and ‘70s were already gone. Reading scripts and squinting at performance capture, I would wonder how it would have felt to have been a part of them. “Flashout,” which is set largely in the experimental theater world of the early 1970s, is one answer.
What does Reading Rainbow mean to you?
To me, Reading Rainbow means acknowledging the variety and richness of human life. Sometimes that means recognizing commonalities, and sometimes it means learning from difference.
Why do you feel representation of a variety of people is so important when it comes to writing books?
I live in New York City, and I’d feel ashamed if I wrote work that was less varied than the average subway car. To withhold that is to deny visibility and leave the imagined world poorer.
Tell us a little more about the book and why you decided to write it.
I wrote “Flashout” to imagine myself into a world that fascinated me. And as a recovering actress, I also wanted to capture the enchantment and risk of making art in a collective setting. That’s a magic all its own. So I invented a theater of my own, Theater Negative, and a young woman, Allison Hayes, who would become captivated by all that it promised and dared. I also hoped to explore how we change as we age and how we don’t. There will always be a part of me that sill wants to be onstage, under those blinding lights. “Flashout” is about that, too — how we reconcile the roles played by our past selves with the characters we have become.
What can fans expect from your book?
Thrills, I hope! And surprise. And also a reminder of what it feels like to want something so desperately, so intensely. And what it feels like to get it.
What's up next for you in the bookish world?
There’s a new book I’ve started, another novel of suspense, this one set in and around the writers' room of a prestige TV series in present-day Los Angeles.
