Joanna Smith Rakoff among 100 writers at N.C. fest

Author appearanches

n 7 p.m. tonight

The Regulator Bookshop

720 Ninth St., Durham

n 2 p.m. Friday

McIntyre's Fine Books

Fearrington Village, Pittsboro

n 12:20 p.m. Saturday

N.C. Literary Festival

Manning Hall, UNC Chapel Hill

For a complete festival schedule, visit www.ncliteraryfestival.org

"A Fortunate Age" by Joanna Smith Rakoff

(Scribner, 399 pages, $26, hardcover)

BY DAWN BAUMGARTNER VAUGHAN

dvaughan@heraldsun.com; 419-6563

CHAPEL HILL -- Anyone who graduated college in the mid- and late-1990s or lived in Brooklyn during the same time will recognize aspects of their life in a novel set there -- "A Fortunate Age," by Joanna Smith Rakoff. The debut novelist who now lives in Manhattan is one of the 100 authors taking part in this weekend's North Carolina Literary Festival at UNC Chapel Hill. While she's in town, Rakoff is also giving readings at local bookstores.

The original title for her debut novel was "Brooklyn," but the episodic novel extends beyond one borough as the characters' stories progress over six years. They are a group of 1994 Oberlin graduates who reunite in 1998 for a wedding. The book is a homage to Mary McCarthy's "The Group," using the same framework as the mid-20th century novel about 1930s Vassar grads. The issues about women and men, parenting, mental health and life choices are updated but timeless.

Rakoff, an Oberlin grad herself, had been working on a short story about three characters in New York that was getting longer and longer, she said. Rakoff had been thinking about writing a book about men and women in New York living bohemian lives, and how those lives diverge. After Sept. 11, 2001, she read "The Group" for the first time and was intrigued. Already familiar with McCarthy's nonfiction, she assumed the older novel would be dated. Instead, "It felt funny and alive. I was struck by the crises of the women in "The Group" that were the same as my friends' difficulties with men," Rakoff said earlier this week in Chapel Hill. Those crises included "problems that we as undergrads and feminists at Oberlin didn't think we'd have in our own lives," she said.

In 2001, she and her friends were all about 29 or 30 years old, and dealing with balancing different aspects of life. So Rakoff decided to write a contemporary version of "The Group." "A Fortunate Age" was published in April. Just a few of the plots and topics are similar to her and her friends' own lives. Rakoff lived in Williamsburg, Brooklyn, for a few years and the book has details from restaurants to street intersections.

Like a character in the novel, she inherited an apartment outside Brooklyn, on the Lower East Side, where she has now lived for 11 years. She met her husband in graduate school at Columbia. They have two children, a son, 4, and daughter, 9 months. Rakoff has been a book reviewer, online magazine editor and freelance writer.

After being a book critic for several years, Rakoff won't read criticism of her own writing.

"I've reviewed hundreds of books. I just know it would be too agonizing for me," she said. For the first book she ever reviewed, glowingly, she was upset to read that another critic slammed it. And she didn't even know the author whose work she so enjoyed. "I feel protective, proprietary of not only my work, but others'," she said.

Rakoff is already at work on her next novel, which will be set in North Africa as well as upstate New York and Germany and features a Peace Corps worker. She is also working on a short nonfiction book about her family.