Interview with Sybil Baker, Author of The Life Plan

Sybil Baker spent twelve years teaching in South Korea prior to accepting a position as an assistant professor of English at the University of Tennessee at Chattanooga after earning her MFA in Writing from the Vermont College of Fine Arts. During her extensive travels throughout Asia, she became increasingly interested in the allure and alienation of American travelers and expatriates, and this has heavily influenced her writing. Her fiction and essays have appeared in numerous journals, including upstreet, The Bitter Oleander, Paper Street, and Alehouse. Her essay on American expatriate literature appeared in AWP’s The Writer’s Chronicle in September 2005. Her website can be found at www.sybilbaker.com.

Thanks for being my guest today, Sybil. It's a pleasure to have you here at Blogcritics. Why don't you start by telling us a little about yourself and how you started writing?

Well, I actually started writing stories when I first learned to write in the first grade. I’ve been writing creatively ever since.

I started The Life Plan in late fall 2004. I was living in Seoul, South Korea, and wanted to write a comic novel that took place in Thailand and chronicled a couple’s marriage in crisis. I finished the first draft about a year later.

What was inspiration for your novel, The Life Plan?

From 2003-2005, I was a student in Vermont College’s MFA program. In spring 2004, I told my advisor Patricia Henley that I was recently divorced, and she suggested I write about it. I agreed with her but was afraid I was too close to the subject and that whatever I wrote would be a bitter, self-involved pity party. I used to write humor columns when I was an undergraduate at Virginia Tech, so I thought that if I made the character different from me and wrote with humor I might have the distance to pull the story off.

At that point I’d been living in South Korea for about nine years and had traveled around Asia extensively. I’d always loved Thailand and thought it would be a great place to set a novel.

Tell us a bit about the plot and about the protagonist.

I think the best way to learn about The Life Plan is to watch the book trailer:

If I have to describe the plot of the Life Plan in ten words or fewer I say the plot is Bridget Jones meets Eat, Pray, Love. Here’s the longer version.

Kat, a lawyer in DC, is a woman with a Life Plan — written and documented so that nothing will go wrong. When Kat’s husband Dan enrolls for a course in Thailand to study massage, Kat is compelled to go with him to save the marriage. Soon Kat finds herself not only fighting for her marriage, but her career and reputation as well. Yet when Kat has a chance to regain all that she has lost, she finally questions her own reasons for pursuing her rigid life plan.

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