Leslie Carroll

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Tracy Farnsworth

Tracy – MISS MATCH is your first book. Care to tell readers a little more about yourself?

Leslie - I’m a native New Yorker, born, raised, and educated here. I’m a Bronx girl who went to Cornell University, then came back to Manhattan, where, apart from a brief stint in Brooklyn, I’ve resided for several years. Being a professional actress in New York City, even with three union cards, means that you’re one of tens of thousands of others and that also means that it’s not an easy way to make a living. So I’ve had jobs that took me into the worlds of politics, law, journalism, advertising, and public relations, which have broadened my horizons and stood me in good stead in the artistic and creative part of my life.  Founding and then running my own theatre company for several years taught me a lot about art as a business. The knowledge and experience I gained running a non-profit, especially during the 1990s when the arts suffered severe cutbacks in funding, was invaluable…sort of an artistic equivalent of growing up during the Great Depression. I really learned how to stretch a dollar into the shape of my dream.

All that stuff I just mentioned is what I’ve done, which is only part of who I am. I’m a hopeless romantic who has always loved the sea, Pre-Raphaelite paintings, and the cities of Bath and Venice. I have an unshakable belief in happily-ever-after. I’m also an Anglophile and a redhead.

Tracy – Kathryn is a wonderful heroine, sharp-tongued, yet very emotional. There were certain aspects of her character that I found to be similar to what I have read in your bio. Did you pattern her after yourself to an extent?

Leslie - You’ve just paid me a wonderful compliment as a writer. Thank you! So, maybe I should just say “yeah, that’s me up there—that ‘wonderful’ woman.” Kathryn is a fictional creation, yet I’ll admit that there have been occasions in my life where my own too-smart-for-my-own-damn-good mouth and emotional reactions to things weren’t always traits to be applauded. I am an emotional person; I laugh hard, loud, and often and cry very easily, and sometimes I operate on sheer empathy. There are fictionalized autobiographical elements in Kathryn, but that’s only a part of her character. Because of my training and background as an actress, I’ve found that when I write, that I’m always asking “what would I do or say now” in the given situation of the scene. I do the same thing with every character I write, not just the heroines. No matter how major or minor the character, I try to get inside each of the people in the scene to find the truth of who they are, where they’ve been, what they ultimately want, and what’s going on for them at that moment in the story. I like to believe that in my novels, there are no small parts, just characters who have less page time than others. 

Tracy – Not only are you now a published author, but you are an actress and own your own non-profit theatre company. Do you find it hard to balance acting and writing?

Leslie - I have found that the two disciplines of acting and writing feed each other and I’d like to think I’ve become stronger in each of them because of this bifurcated artistic career. For example, my desire to create entertaining memorable and believable characters on the page comes from years of stage work of getting under the skin of someone else’s creation. My writing tends to have a lot of dialogue and I certainly attribute that to years of listening to and performing dialogue as an actress. As I write, I hear the dialogue in my head and if the words can’t be said aloud and sound like a real person with real feelings is saying them, then they get re-written until they do. Even with romantic comedy, a joke or funny line must come out of who the character is and what they’re feeling when they say it; it can’t just be a one-liner. So there, too, my acting background and experience stands me in good stead when I write. Story lines, arcs, development of plot and character—with all those elements, I would say that working on countless plays has given me a solid foundation for translating those elements into fiction; bringing a long-practiced and studied craft from the stage to the page, so to speak. I haven’t produced anything with my non-profit theatre company in a few years because I decided to take my life in other directions, which have since become extremely fulfilling. At the moment I can’t see returning to producing “in the trenches” of New York City’s Off-Off-Broadway scene unless there were a project I was so in love with that I was willing to sacrifice or at least put on hold so many of the things I now enjoy doing.

Tracy – You have also done some work on commercials and daytime TV. Are these anything fans would recognize?

Leslie -- I did background work on the soap opera "One Life to Live" from time to time over the years. But giving the detail that I worked as an extra doesn't sound nearly as glamorous as simply saying that I did daytime drama. The TV commercials I did were also years ago -- for a product called "ZAR" -- their wood stain and polyurethane products. The commercials, which were non-union (I didn't get my Screen Actors Guild Card until a couple of years later) were shot in the mid-80s and ran for years.  Because they were non-union (which means basically that actors can really get taken advantage of!) I got a flat $350 for being the principal performer (the only performer, actually -- it was me talking to a voiceover) on two different commercials for two different products with two entirely different scripts. I never received residuals either and the commercials ran for years all across the country. It even played on CNN during the Gulf War coverage.

Tracy – You have a few other unfinished stories. Which is your favorite? Do you have any plans to polish them up and get them off to a publisher?

Leslie - I’ll answer the last part of your question first: you bet! Closest to my heart is SENSE AND SENSUALITY, a fully completed manuscript subtitled “The Picaresque Adventures of a Georgian Time Traveller.” Lucia Macro at Avon Books called the novel “a wonderful read and possibly possessing the most intense love scene I have ever read.” The itals are Lucia’s, not mine! The premise is based on an experience I had performing the role of Jane Austen in a two-character romantic drama by the great, exceptionally prolific novelist Howard Fast. Long after the final curtain came down, I wondered what would have happened if the contemporary actress playing Jane went through the door on the set and ended up not backstage in the New York theatre, but in England—specifically in Bath in 1801—the year the Austens moved there. In theatre, this is called “the magic if.” Jane Austen herself plays a large supporting role in my novel, often using her own words. It seemed hubristic to put my words in Jane’s mouth. I had a fantastic time doing the historical research. Being an actress, of course I always envision the movie version. SENSE AND SENSUALITY has a plum role for Colin Firth. 

Because it doesn’t fall into a single niche (it’s an adventure romp, historical fiction, a love story, a time-travel) it may be a harder sell than my contemporary romantic comedies, but I love this book with all my heart and have faith that a courageous publisher will take it on.

I plan to finish an historical novel I began to work on a few years ago, called A MATTER OF HONOUR, which takes place on the East End of Long Island just after the American Revolution. There are still many historic sites out there in the Hamptons and in Sag Harbor (where there was a major Revolutionary War skirmish and where, if you know where to look, you can check out the remnants of the British fort and visit an old cemetery that marks the final resting place of some of our Colonial heroes. It may sound a bit macabre, but I’ve read some very moving headstones there.). I’ve always enjoyed combining real-life historic personages with fictional ones and I do that in both SENSE AND SENSUALITY and A MATTER OF HONOUR. 

Also, I’ve been doing a lot of research and prep work for a project I call The Mandalay Mysteries, a series of noir novels featuring an ex-husband and wife private detective team. The books are set in post-war 1940s New York City, when prices were low and spirits were high; when people partied at The Stork Club and Jackie Robinson was a rookie. Reviewers have pinpointed certain hallmarks of my romance writing, mentioning the crackling sexual tension, snappy, fast-paced action, witty dialogue, vivid characters, and all of those elements will be in the Mandalay Mysteries as well. I can’t wait to get going on these books. I wish there were more hours in the day to write all the stories I’ve got stored in my head.

Tracy – Between acting, writing and the usual errands, do you ever find time to curl up with a book? Who are some of your favorites?

Leslie - I read constantly. And I do mean “constantly.” There’s a charming scene in the Disney version of Beauty and the Beast where Belle is walking through town with her nose in a book oblivious to everything that’s going on around her. That’s me.  

A lot of the time as I’m walking down the street, dialogue or plot elements from the book I’m writing will pop into my head and bang around there for a while. If that’s not going on, I’ve got a book in my hand. I read while I’m getting from point A to point B on the bus and subway, I read at bus stops, I read while the TV is on. I’m also a member of a book club, and we chose things that run the gamut from women’s fiction to Mark Twain to war novels. 

A few times a year I like to catch up with favorite classics that bring me back to why I fell in love with literature: books like Pride and Prejudice, The Great Gatsby, The Sun Also Rises, and noir fiction like The Thin Man or The Maltese Falcon. I like biographies, too, particularly (and I guess not surprisingly), books about writers and actors, or on women who had a tremendous impact on their worlds; I’m about to begin reading Savage Beauty, the new Edna St.Vincent Millay biography. I love the Harry Potter and Bridget Jones books for the sheer joy I get from Rowling and Fielding’s writing; their “wordsmithing” is delicious fun.  And I very much enjoy reading what my friends write—other Ballantine/Ivy authors like Millie Criswell and Mary Jo Putney, for example.

Tracy – What can readers expect from you next?

Leslie - My second romantic comedy from Ballantine, REALITY CHECK, is scheduled to come out in the Spring of 2003. The first chapter is published in the back of MISS MATCH.

REALITY CHECK is also set in Manhattan and features a trio of roommates, all of whom get cast on a reality TV show called “Bad Date” where contestants are hooked up to polygraph electrodes and each week have to tell the studio audience and the rest of the world, on live TV, about a date from hell that they’ve been on. After each episode, the audience votes one of the contestants off the show (the one with the least objectionable date from hell) and the contestant who survives the 13-episode season (the most pathetic single) wins a check for a million dollars and a trip to Paris.

As in MISS MATCH, REALITY CHECK is also full of colorful, eccentric characters, and Rick Byron, the Very Famous Actor in MISS MATCH makes a re-appearance in REALITY CHECK. The novel takes a wry look at our cult of celebrity and also explores how the dynamic of female friendship changes when one of the women begins a relationship and the other two are still unattached. It also examines trust issues both in friendships and in love relationships, especially when competition and the lure of piles of money and instant notoriety rear their ugly heads. In the course of the story, some of the characters get a major reality check about what’s really important in life, and sometimes that journey can be a bit of a bumpy ride. 

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