Shelf Unbound: Your previous novel, Second Son, got great reviews but would not have been described as a “page-turner.” What prompted your change in style?

Stephen Stark: In a very basic sense, I just wanted to tell a good story. It’s been a long time since Second Son, nearly 20 years, and the world has gotten weirder and weirder since then. It’s not by any means an original statement, but it seems to me that the kind of realism that I was working in then just isn’t up to the task of reflecting the world I see around me. Still, I don’t know that I’d say it was a change in style so much as a change in approach.

From the start, with Final Appearance, everything was on the table. I made the conscious decision to use every tool I possibly could to open the story up and give depth to the narrative. The main character, Ellen Gregory, is a public figure, a very public figure, and so you’ve got parts that are newspaper stories, parts that are TV news reports, a magazine-style interview with Ellen, and then there’s some “genre” stuff mixed in. Above all, I wanted to entertain myself. Which isn’t to say that the earlier novels didn’t entertain me, only that I was going through some very difficult life transitions during the time I was writing Final Appearance and I wanted to laugh, but I also wanted to say something worth saying.

Shelf: How'd you come up with your the character of Ellen, a, stand-up comic turned sitcom star?

Stark: To the best of my recollection, she just kind of came out of nowhere—this killer comic from the Midwest with the black thong tutu, fishnet stockings, and shitkicker Timberland® boots. This sort of thing happens all the time—I was actually working on another novel entirely, and at some point, I began a chapter that had Ellen in it and, bang, suddenly that other novel was history.

Like a lot of people who chase particular dreams, Ellen does a lot of self-invention to get where she’s going. On one hand, she’s Ellen, the fresh-faced, corn-fed blonde, girl next door from the Midwest, but on the other, she’s ELLEN!, the take-no-prisoners comic, that crazy chick in the tutu. I’m totally fascinated by this whole idea of being two people at once. To me, a significant part of the novel is her terror at reconciling the two, the struggle she has with those two identities.

Shelf: You explore ambition in this novel. Do you see ambition as inherently dangerous?

Stark: Ellen says at one point that her ambition was her first true love. I'm not sure I ever thought of whether it was a good or a bad thing. I have a very American sense of accomplishment—which is to say that success is directly related to money. But this sense is also informed by my Scottish Presbyterian heritage. In my worldview, ambition and pride have a dangerous relationship, and of course pride is a sin. (I'm not a particularly religious person, so when I use the word “sin,” that's more or less synonymous with “really bad thing.”) As a craftsman—comic, writer, or plumber—ambition is the thing that keeps you working and trying to do your work better, because, in this worldview, which Ellen shares, work is what defines you.

But the complicated part is that, in order to avoid the sin of pride, you have ambition for your work, ambition to make your work better, ambition for your work to succeed, not so much ambition for yourself.

Frankly, the question freaks me out a little, because I could never quite articulate why it is that Ellen has to flee Hollywood, I only knew that she had to. Yes, there’s the stalker, but he’s just a symptom. When the story opens, Ellen is pretty much standing there with the brass ring, and if you’re a truly ambitious person and you get the brass ring, what do you do next? And combine that with the willed, if subconscious, disconnect between ambition and pride. When she sees herself on TV and feels as though that woman is more authentic than the one that she sees in the mirror, it's because there's a part of her that can't or won’t accept that she deserves the success that she's achieved.

Shelf: Final Appearance is a deeply romantic, character-driven novel, with some very hot sex scenes. Which is more of a challenge to write: intimate, authentic dialog or intimate, authentic sex?

Stark: Just for the record, I've forbidden my children from reading my novels—the ones with sex in them, anyway—until they're eighteen. And of course my daughter, Julia, when she turned eighteen, did. I told her maybe she ought to wait. She thinks I’m a prude, and got kind of pissed at me for not giving her enough credit. She was right.

I'd say that intimate, authentic dialogue and intimate, authentic sex are simply two facets of the same thing. I've gotten a certain amount of attention for my sex scenes over the years, particularly regarding their alleged hotness, but it almost makes me feel as though people are missing the point.

So much of what we do and how we think is suffused with sex that leaving it out of a novel (or my novels) would be a disservice to my characters. That doesn’t necessarily mean it has to be explicit, although sometimes it does, which can be tremendously revealing of character. When I approach a sex scene, I write it as authentically as I can. What would Michael do and how would Ellen react? Or the obverse. The same is true of intimate dialogue. What would Michael say and how would Ellen respond? Sometimes the circumstance calls only for something like, “later, after they’d made love,” but sometimes the motion of the story calls for the whole business of two adult human beings being naked together. And it’s almost exactly the way I approach intimate dialogue, which is often, at least figuratively, two people being naked together. It's been said that character derives from action, and of course that's true, but I think that the right kind of dialogue—the confusions, the caesurae, the misunderstandings, the nakedness or the guardedness—is also hugely revelatory of character.

Shelf: Final Appearance is available only as an e-book. Is this the future of book publishing?

Stark: No. It’s not the future of publishing, it’s the present. And it’s an unnerving and uncertain present for a lot of people in the book publishing industry. It’s a moment of great tectonic movement and, for me, tremendously exciting. I think that what we’re doing with Final Appearance is, if not unique, then completely cutting edge, all of the benefits of an indie publisher lashed up with the technology of self-publishing. There will come a time, in the not-too-distant future, when all of this is figured out. But right now, there’s a wave that’s swelling, but not cresting. I think we—Shelf and I—are on the top of that swell with Final Appearance. I have no idea whether Final Appearance, or other of my subsequent novels, will be riding that wave when it breaks. But I really think it’s important to be a part of the gaggle of surfers who are out there, slightly ahead of the swell, betting on when it’s going to break. Not just for the success of the novel itself, but to shape the industry in some small way — get out there and paddle like crazy. I think Shelf is out there, its board waxed, its toes curled right alongside of me.