JH: Is there a question you address in your fiction -- all five novels to date -- that you are seeking to answer in your own life?

MS: I remember once having a problem in my personal life and trying to determine from War and Peace what to do about it and an older writer I respected said, It's not a HOW-TO book. And yet, for the writer, I think novels are explorations of how to live, how to do good, how to make beauty, how to contend with evil, how to make the world a little bit better on balance than it was before the blink that is your life.

JH: The idea of a love triangle of sorts between a mother, her infant son, and her son's nanny, is fascinating. How did you come up with this idea?

MS: For My Hollywood, as well as my next novel, I'm thinking a lot about love stories and their various proportions of fairytale and reality -- or, as Edmund White once said about the composition of fiction, part wish fulfillment and part repetition compulsion. He said that "literary" fiction was two parts repetition, one part wish, commercial fiction the inverse. Anyone trying to fashion an authentic modern love story wrings their hands over our lack of obstacles. (We have birth control! No fault divorce! Few tribal alliances! No Capulets and Montagues in California.) We have the romantic problems associated with choice. Phillip Roth once said of the difference between literature under repressive regimes and in the west, was that under censorship nothing was allowed and everything mattered, whereas in the west, everything was allowed and nothing matters.

The next thing I'm working on is an outright love story seen through a door open only an acute wedge. It's taken me a long time, in life and in work, to understand adult sexual love. I grew up mostly with women. But as we all know, feelings go somewhere. As Lola says, "I had my love, too, mine not the shape of romance. But I am old enough to understand it is the same as big, the same as true." I think Lola and Claire and William begin as a love triangle, with those classical strains of competition, and end as a family.

JH: Was one of the narrators, Lola (the nanny) or Claire (the mother) more challenging for you to write? How did you get into character to tell each of their stories?

MS: Lola was much more compelling and important to me than Claire. The book started with Lola and the majority of my time and energy was in her world, under the sway of her voice. I had fun with Lola.

I suppose Claire felt more familiar to me from the get-go - for reasons that range from my tens of thousands of hours reading books in which the heroines had more means than the servants, who quietly keep the houses running and the children clean in the background, to my own life, which has been lived as an American woman with children. I didn't set out to put Lola center stage as a correction to all those books I'd read and loved, which had servants I'd forgotten about for hundred page swaths, but when I realized I'd found access to a woman in that position, I did feel a certain thrill. (I'd grown up as the daughter of a single speech therapist in Beverly Hills; I'd come along when my mom worked in some of the big houses where I imagined Lola.) I wanted to resist the temptation to vilify Claire or to sentimentalize her.

The biggest problem I had with Claire was the sense that I didn't want the book to become her book, I wanted her position, her dramas, her life, in a way, to be secondary in this book. She's also the character whose situation resembles mine. I grew up as the girl along with the hired person in a certain kind of large household, but as an adult I am an American woman who works and who hires babysitters (and many other people, to help me with my children). I suppose when creating a character and placing her in your own position, the potions you pour in involve an admixture of glamour and accusation, wish and guilt, depending on whether you're given to self hatred or the tendency to romanticize your life. I sometimes think I didn't invest Claire with quite enough love. I sprinkled my worst traits onto her liberally and with exaggeration. I probably should have given her a bit more moxie.

JH: What might people be surprised to know about your writing life and how you approach putting together a novel?

MS: I think anyone, with a hidden camera running on the life of a novelist, would be surprised by the sheer amount of practice, practice, practice that goes on behind the curtains. This novel, for example, was once going to be told in three sections. I loved the idea of three novellas, one narrated by Lola, another by Claire, the third by the boy they raised, consisting of only one sentence. I couldn't finally make that structure work. I kept the one sentence.

This is all work that's done mostly alone, with much frustration and shame, which is why the stories of famous collaborations are so exhilarating. In Garcia Marquez's Paris Review interview, he writes about reshuffling the structure of 100 Years of Solitude with a scissors and tape on a huge table in his publisher's office. I remember My Hollywood broken into sections, each stapled, then assembled on my living room floor and rearranged by a novelist friend with a genius for structure.

There are also thrilling moments near the end of a novel, when things come together by themselves. I'm not sure I believe in "meant to be" in love, but I know I believe in "meant to be" in novels. One has a complete ideal and the unconscious can sometimes find bits of it. There's a certain amount of magic, as if you open a dictionary looking for a word to discover a state of feeling you want to describe, and there it is, on the page you open, in all its manifold glory.

JH: Do you have any superstitions around writing -- something you have to do before you begin?

MS: I think I need more superstitions.

JH: What's the one true thing you learned from writing My Hollywood?

MS: I learned to be courageous. This book gave me many pleasures, but its problems were the hardest I've ever faced. I learned so many ancillary things too, writing My Hollywood, often the hard way, about my own limitations, perseverance, patience and forgiveness.

JH: What's next for you?

MS: I'm finishing a short novel now that I started in the fall of 2008. It's completely different -- it's in the voice of a boy and concerns two nerdy teenagers who are amateur detectives and who discover more than they wish they had. At a time when their own ideas about love and sex are just forming, they've been exposed, through their accidental discovery, to some dangerous and destructive results of romance. They then have to figure out what to do with their knowledge and how to keep their families safe and intact and how to become men who love without harming.