As much as Brashares enjoyed books and making things up, the idea of becoming a writer didn’t occur until much later. “As I look back, and make a story of it, I realize that I was temperamentally suited to it. But I didn’t know how to get there,” she says. “Many writers know they want to be writers, they feel they were meant to be writers. I can’t claim that. I thought writing was so elevated—not that everything I read was elevated. But I didn’t have a massive amount of self-confidence that I had something to offer the world.”
In her teens, Brashares developed friendships that continue to this day. One of those friends is actress and Saturday Night Live comedian Ana Gasteyer. “As an adult looking back, it is no surprise that Ann became the writer she is today,” Gasteyer writes in an e-mail (she is currently working on a film). “Even as a teen, Ann was smart, intensely verbal and observant.” Their tightly knit, though not exclusive, circle, Gasteyer writes, “was unified by a unique shared humor, a sense of ourselves as individuals, and an adolescent awareness of the weaknesses of the adult world.”
Of her circle, Brashares says, “It would shift…we weren’t all friends together. It didn’t hold and have a center, the way the girls in the books do.” She says the four protagonists in her novels—Lena, Tibby, Carmen and Bee—are not based on her high school friends, but “bear a kind of indirect and blurry relationship to my own life.” Lena and Tibby, both reserved, cautious and artistically inclined, are perhaps closest to her own personality, Brashares says. Bee—athletic, fearless and headstrong—is a girl she likes to fantasize she was. Carmen, whose mother and father are divorced and who must cope, unwillingly, with her single parents’ new partners, is modeled to some extent on Brashares’ own experience, though she says Carmen’s chaotic anger wasn’t hers. “I wasn’t an angry kid,” she says.
Brashares was 18 and a freshman at Barnard College in New York City when her future husband, 21-year-old Columbia history major Jacob Collins, spotted her in the Philosophy Reading Room at Columbia University’s Butler Library. He was immediately struck by her beauty and surreptitiously sketched her portrait. Then he approached her and showed her the result. “Basically, we’ve been together ever since,” Brashares says. It sounds like a scene from one of Brashares’ novels: her appealing, attractive characters tend to fall in love with the right person at a young age.
When she graduated from Barnard in 1989, Brashares was awarded the Gertrude Braun Rich Prize “for promise of excellence by a student majoring in philosophy.” She had planned to work for a year or two before enrolling in graduate school to study philosophy. She took a job with 17th Street Productions, on 17th Street in Manhattan, which specialized in books for children and young adults. Brashares’ work involved putting together children’s series, which were often “packaged” around an idea for which a writer was hired. The final product was then sold to a publisher. Brashares enjoyed the work and changed her mind about graduate school; in 1998 she was named the company’s co-president and editor-in-chief. In 2000, 17th Street Productions was bought by the online multi-media company Alloy, but Brashares stayed on in her positions.
Being so closely involved with turning ideas into books gradually demystified the writing process for her. “I was getting more and more involved in the creative parts of it,” Brashares says, “until I finally thought, ‘why am I not just writing?’ Midwifery is wonderful, but I want to have a baby.”
A colleague, Jodi Anderson, told her about a summer when she’d shared a pair of blue jeans with three friends, an anecdote that immediately struck Brashares as novel material. Despite growing up without sisters, Brashares had had her own experience with shared clothing. While planning her wedding, she’d cut out a picture of a dress she liked and put it away in a drawer. Not long afterward, she met a young woman named Hope, whose wedding had fallen through. Hope urged Brashares to take her unused wedding dress off her hands. Not knowing Hope very well, Brashares demurred. But Hope was strangely insistent, eventually sending the dress to Brashares’ home. It was the same dress as the one in the cut-out picture. Brashares decided that the coincidence had a mystical element that couldn’t be ignored, and she wore the dress for her wedding, as have her three sisters-in-law.
After their 1994 marriage, Collins founded The Water Street Atelier, an art school and studio dedicated to the traditional techniques and aesthetics of the Old Masters. His light-filled, realistic style has been compared with Andrew Wyeth’s work, and he has been commissioned for portraits of former President George Herbert Walker Bush and former U.S. Supreme Court Chief Justice Warren E. Burger. Wanting to combine home and studio, the couple moved from Brooklyn in 2003 to a converted four-story carriage house on Manhattan’s East Side. Collins’ landscapes, still lifes and occasional portraits of his wife cover the walls of their home. The high-ceilinged ground floor is devoted to the atelier. Brashares’ office occupies the top floor. And what she calls “the madness of our lives” fills floors two and three.
In the spring of 2001, while pregnant with her third child, Brashares took a three-month leave of absence and wrote The Sisterhood of the Traveling Pants. The release date was Sept. 11, 2001. That morning, Brashares walked to the Barnes & Noble near her Brooklyn home to see whether her book was on the shelves. On the way, she says, she noticed people gathered around cars and listening to radios, and thought that a big news event must have occurred. Forgetting the reason she’d gone to the bookstore, she hurried to the information desk at Barnes & Noble to ask what had happened, and was told that a plane had just flown into the World Trade Center. “People still thought, at that point, that it was maybe something like a pilot error. But I had three children by then—the youngest was only 4 months old. I was discomfited enough that I ran home. And all thoughts of my book were gone.”
It was many months, Brashares says, “until the publishing world became important again, as our lives crept back to us all.” By that time, the Sisterhood had become a bestseller. In 2005, it was made into a popular film starring Blake Lively and America Ferrera. The fourth and final volume of the series, Forever in Blue, was published in 2007 and has sold more than one million copies. A movie based on that book is due out in August.
