Category: NJ Monthly

A Q&A with Author Harlan Coben

(This story originally appeared in the March 2020 edition of New Jersey Monthly).

Nothing fancy here, just a Q&A with a writer whose work I really enjoy. Harlan Coben’s books aren’t going to win any Pulitzers, but they’re fun and propulsive, and the guy pumps them out with machine-like precision. They’re also really consistent — it’s some kind of amazing that Coben hasn’t run out of ideas or at least motivation.

This Q&A was pulled from about a 50-minute interview, so you cutting it to size was quite a challenge. I really loved our conversation, though, particularly as someone who’s in awe of people who can write novels. I keep trying to find the right idea for one, and keep bailing out. Someday … 

In the meantime, I think this is a fun and quick look at the writing process, and of how a writer continues to find motivation and excitement in a form.

https://njmonthly.com/articles/arts-entertainment/harlan-coben/

Twist of Fate

(This article originally appeared in New Jersey Monthly.)

Almost four years to the day before this article ran in NJ Monthly, my family was at a birthday party for a friend’s 2-year-old, and the entertainment was a guy named Miguel Cervantes. We knew Miguel as our then-5-year-old son’s music teacher, so we were excited to see him at the party.

A few months later, randomly scanning the Playbill.com website, I saw an announcement of the new star of the Hamilton production opening in Chicago: Miguel Cervantes!

It was an incredible thing to confront, this idea that maybe should have been obvious but hadn’t impacted me yet. How many of the people that we confront every day — our kids’ baseball coaches, their teachers, our waiters — could one day become one of the biggest stars in the theater world.

Cervantes led the Chicago cast for all three years that it ran, and while there, he suffered an unimaginable tragedy, losing a daughter to a brutal struggle with epilepsy. He and his wife were very open about the whole process, and when Adelaide finally succumbed to the disease, the entire theater community embraced the couple. Despite having just a middling connection to Cervantes, I felt heartbroken, too.

So when he was announced as the new lead of the Broadway production, I pitched a piece about him, not expecting that just days after our interview, the entire industry would go dark indefinitely. Someday, though, Cervantes will be back on Broadway in the role of a lifetime, and I’ll always remember the chat we had, and the moment that I realized that my kid’s music teacher was Alexander F’ing Hamilton.