Ann Napolitano on the power of sisterhood

Agreeing on one book among hundreds is no easy task. But when our Best Books of the Year committee cracked open Hello Beautiful, they just couldn’t put it down. “From the first chapter, I knew that I just had to find out what happened to this family,” says Amanda Gauthier, category director. “That feeling of being invited into a world where you immediately care about the outcome—it’s the perfect read.” In our exclusive interview, Ann Napolitano answers our most burning questions about the making of this year’s winner.

Where were you emotionally and physically when you started writing Hello Beautiful?

“Part of my process has been that once I have an idea for the book, for nine months I’m not allowed to write … It allows me to try to figure things out with the ‘smart’ part of my brain before I am allowed to do the lyrical part. So, my nine-month schedule expired in April 2020, which happened to be the beginning of the pandemic. I live in New York City and we were fully shut down. And my father died the same month. And because of the timing, we weren’t able to be with him when he was dying. And then we weren’t able to gather when he died …

“I began writing during this intensely emotional time where I had a lot of grief and fear and uncertainty, and something about the cocktail of that made the writing experience very, very intense, where I cared about these characters immediately and what happened to them felt like it really mattered.”

How did you find hope within this story?

“What I always want to do is write about love in all of its forms, in all of its nuances, and if I’m writing about love and writing into love, then I feel like it can’t be that dark—the heartbeat in the story is there, even if the sisters are breaking apart and upsetting things are happening. That way it never feels fully devastating to me while I’m writing it, even though I don’t know where I’m going, because I’m always writing towards the love.”

There’s a common thread of forgiveness in the characters’ lives. What were you hoping to portray?

“The novel spans 30 years, and part of why I wanted it to do that was so I could keep saying to myself and to these characters, ‘There’s still time, you can make a different choice today.’ It’s never too late to say to your father, ‘I’m sorry that I said that to you 20 years ago.’ And that moment changes the history, it changes everything … Each of the characters always has that possibility within themselves, and many of them end up taking it, so I wanted to show that it is deeply complex and often the right thing—not in this book per se—is to walk away.”

Did you have a favourite character to write?

“Well, the easy answer is Sylvie. We bear a lot of similarities, including the book loving, etcetera. But I honestly think that I share DNA with all of the characters except for Julia and Rose, and that doesn’t mean I don’t love them, too, but they are just a different kind of person than I am. I don’t have the same stuff inside me that they have inside them, which may be why Julia was the most challenging character to write.”

Did you think that mental health would be a theme for a particular reason or did it just emerge with William’s character?

“I knew he was going to travel through some darkness because of his childhood. I didn’t know what that was going to look like; I just felt like I was walking next to him and charting what happened to him as truthfully as possible. And what happened to him ends up being fairly bleak … It’s only afterwards that you say there’s a theme of mental health. We all struggle with mental health—hopefully not to the extent that William does—but if we haven’t suffered with it ourselves, we love people who do. So, it’s very much a part of life. It’s almost impossible to me that I would write about 12 people and one of them wouldn’t be [struggling].”

Why basketball and not another sport?

“A few years before I started writing this book, I became obsessed with the history of basketball. I was doing some reading about the Civil Rights Movement in America, and I was really interested to see how the history of basketball in America really runs in parallel and overlaps with the Civil Rights Movement in this country.… And even though I didn’t understand it, I’ve been writing for long enough to know that when I get an obsession like that, it has something to do with my work. And when I started to think about this book, I pictured this sad little boy dribbling a basketball. And I was like, ‘OK, so there’s going to be basketball in this book.’”

How did Little Women come into play?

“I should have planned it, but it didn’t occur to me. My best friend growing up … her mother has six sisters, and they used to come in and out of the house all the time, and they all had slightly different versions of the same face and they seemed more themselves when they were together. I was fascinated by them. I used to watch them like they were a TV set. So, it was really those sisters that I wanted to write my way into, trying to understand the magic of that kind of sisterhood … And then, when I was about 60 pages into the book, I was writing a scene and the sisters start comparing which of the March sisters they were, and I was like, ‘Oh, of course.’”