Elinor Lipman has written eight novels, including Then She Found Me, The Inn at Lake Devine, My Latest Grievance, and most recently The Family Man. A chapter of The Family Man appears in this month’s Open Letters, and Lipman kindly took a little time to answer questions about the book.

Open Letters Monthly: In The Boston Globe review of The Family Man, we’re matter-of-factly told, “In a Lipman novel people match, fates meet, and patience is rewarded.” Would you agree, that the world of your novels is essentially a kind one?

Elinor Lipman: 100%; can’t seem to help it.

OLM: The Family Man is set on the Upper West Side and stars a laid-back middle-aged gay man! When in your creative process, while a new novel is percolating, do topographical and casting choices like these ping? When do you become sure what your focus will be?

EL: In this case, location presents itself immediately. Even though I don’t know where the story’s going, I know where it starts, even if all I’m going on is the opening line. Details come as I move ahead, always in linear fashion. Description doesn’t come easily to me, so I have to stop, look around, home in on the salient details. As for focus, I’m working at that in every chapter, pushing the story forward as I go, making decisions, asking myself, “Why is she–often a first-person narrator–telling us this?” If it isn’t to move the story along or help characterize someone, then I cut it.

OLM: There are a couple of choice points scored on the entertainment industry in The Family Man – post traumatic echoes from having your first novel transformed into a movie, or was that experience bearable?

EL: Very bearable, eventually, though I’d given it up for dead more than once. Then She Found Me Bend It Like Beckham video was optioned in 1989, in manuscript, and came out in 2007. Yes, 19 years. As a result, I’m never sanguine about a movie deal ever reaching fruition. Having said that–I loved the result. Fans of the book complain all the time that Helen Hunt changed the novel. To which I usually say, boo-hoo. I loved it, and it brought the book back to life. The complainers seem to think that the best screenplay would have been the novel, word for word, and it’s very hard to disabuse them of that.

OLM: To put it mildly, the gentle Thackeray-style tone of your novels sets them apart from most of the contemporary fiction in bookstores these days. Why is it, do you suppose, that your characters don’t eat each other’s faces or get high and shiv people?

EL: That’s hard to answer without it sounding like a testimonial to my own big-hearted self. I do grow exceedingly fond of my characters, so I want them to behave, to love and be loved. I don’t set out with that goal, but even the villains–so I’m told–end up being a little menschy. Not Ingrid Berry, though, from The Inn at Lake Devine. I want full credit for her being a nasty piece of anti-Semitic work from beginning to end.

OLM: Care to set up this scene a little for us?

EL: My main character, Henry Archer, has just learned that his boyfriend, Todd a) still lives at home with his mother and b) hasn’t come out to her yet. Over Todd’s initial objections, they are making that first visit. Henry, a lawyer, had a brief, closeted marriage to a woman named Denise who, in fact, has fixed him up with Todd, who works none to proudly in retail at Gracious Home.

Read the chapter here!