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" When did the idea to use your own experiences as a college admissions counselor, eventually becoming Early Decision, take root?  I had been working with students for more than a decade when my first child was born, and my husband and I moved to San Francisco, a city second only to New York City in having a competitive school-admission scene. Friends there told me we were already too late to apply for some preschools\u2014our baby was 4 months old. So I panicked, and started filling out applications. One school asked several essay questions, such as, &amp;quot;What about your child&amp;#039;s developing character makes our school a good fit for you?&amp;quot; I&amp;#039;d been helping students answer these sorts of questions for years, so I felt like a pro and set to work. Then I looked over at the baby, lying on his back on a blanket, and it hit me: I was writing about the developing character of a boy who weighed 12 pounds. For years, I had been silently judging all of those miserably anxious parents who hired me, sweating the Ivy League even though they had great kids. Now I was starting on that same path. I marveled at what a trap it is to want the best for your child, but come up against competitive admissions processes that claim to be\u2014but aren&amp;#039;t actually\u2014merit-based. I set aside the application, choosing instead to play with my baby, and started taking notes for the book. How much of the novel is based on actual events? Early Decision is based entirely on actual events, though once I had my characters I found that they did things I hadn&amp;#039;t anticipated. Fiction took over. But there are lines spoken, and crimes committed, that are straight from my own experience. How much of Anne&amp;#039;s character is based on your personality? Did you experience any of the post-grad ambivalence about career choice and life purpose that she did? I wouldn&amp;#039;t say her character is based on my personality\u2014Early Decision is not a memoir\u2014but her circumstances are similar to my own around that time in my life. I did indeed find my 20s to be very difficult, and I was surprised that they were so hard\u2014there is a sense, when one is an adolescent in a certain sort of community, that if you can just get through a good college, all the world awaits. This is only sort of true. I made Anne&amp;#039;s ambivalence about her work and future a prominent aspect of her character, in part because I was interested in how very little wisdom separates her from the students she is trying to help\u2014she is not a guru, she&amp;#039;s struggling the same way they are\u2014and in part because I&amp;#039;m fascinated by the ways even top colleges fail to prepare students for life after graduation. The skills necessary for building an adult life don&amp;#039;t come from college. They come from character. I think the development of character is a piece of education that gets lost in the college admissions madness, and I wanted to draw that out. In other words, even if everything academic goes your way, Harvard is not life. How did you come up with the structure of the book\u2014rotating through a cast of different characters: Anne&amp;#039;s students and their crazy families, plus Anne&amp;#039;s own personal life and drama?  I began imagining the novel with the students&amp;#039; essays, and the first scenes I wrote were between the students and Anne. The emotional and intellectual heart of the novel, for me, is what can happen when a generous editor helps a young person learn to write the truth. I wanted to capture that, and then let the craziness billow out all around. Anne&amp;#039;s characterization developed later, in revisions, and much at the suggestion of my agent, who wished for a more full character to anchor the narrative. What was really fun was finding ways to bring characters together. I wondered, How can I get them in the same room? How can I force X into conversation with Y? It&amp;#039;s wonderful\u2014like doing the seating for a sharp dinner party. Given the fact that this book was inspired by your own experiences, can you share how accurate some of the parental personalities are? With one big exception, this is all true. I have changed many details so no one will ever be revealed, but the judo-throws of shaming, envy, and misplaced ambition that parents display in the book were all drawn directly from my experience. At least once a year, I would be stunned into silence by the cruelty of a parent, either to a child or to me; and I was always amazed that the students didn&amp;#039;t even seem to register these slights. They were miserable, but they often didn&amp;#039;t know why; they overlooked the pain in their own homes and blamed the process of applying to college instead. No doubt the process is tough and makes everyone crazy, but it took time and experience for some of them to come to understand that their parents, in seeming to want the best for them, were actually doing real damage. That said, Early Decision is a satire, and I wanted to give the reader a good story. So I left out all the perfectly wonderful parents who are anxious but still thoughtful, who have perspective and are grateful to have good kids and the chance to send them to college. They wouldn&amp;#039;t have made for quite as good reading. The challenges Anne faced as mediator between child and parents were ones you faced. How did you handle that? Have you ever have to make a tough choice like Anne did with her students&amp;#039; essays? Sometimes, in the course of working on essays over weeks and months, a student would find her way to a subject that she did not feel comfortable sharing with her parents. (It&amp;#039;s true that I did have one student come out to me in a draft.) I would never show parents a student&amp;#039;s work, but I did require that students show their parents the work they ultimately submitted. Almost every time, parents were thrilled by the final product, and hopeful about the process. And almost every student was thrilled by the choices they had, come spring. On occasion, however, I had parents rewrite essays at the penultimate moment, or argue loudly that a student could not submit the essay he had worked so hard on, and of which he was so proud. In those cases, I left the choice up to the student. I would not, could not, condone submitting a parent&amp;#039;s rewrite, or tearing up a terrific essay because someone&amp;#039;s father&amp;#039;s felt the truth was socially inappropriate. Which student do you think had the most influence on Anne in terms of helping catalyze change in her life?  Several of Anne&amp;#039;s students are savvy young people who have learned to navigate a perilous portion of high society in spite of characteristics that keep them from being fully to the manor born. But William Kantor is the only one who chooses to change how he lives his life\u2014maybe not an upheaval, but also no longer a life of repression. Anne sees this, and understands how it is the natural evolution of his quiet pursuit of his passion\u2014theater\u2014in spite of indifference (or worse) from his family. He just quietly gets on with the thing he wants to do, and there is real inspiration in that. What&amp;#039;s the last great book you read? The Examined Life by Stephen Grosz. Do you have an all-time favorite author or book? The Transit of Venus by Shirley Hazzard. What are you working on now?  In the foreground: raising my 3- and 1-year old boys. In the background: another novel, this one not about college applications. Do you have any advice for aspiring novelists?  Read excellent books and then read excellent critics on what makes those books work. Fall in love over and over with books and then figure out what caught your heart. Don&amp;#039;t feel you need to gauge the market, to read books that seem like your target\u2014books by people like you, or about your topic\u2014let all that go. Just pursue your voice, your story, and learn everything you can from the best books you can find. Read our review of Lacy Crawford&amp;#039;s novel, Early Decision, here. "^^<http://www.w3.org/2001/XMLSchema#string>
<http://www.redbookmag.com/life/interviews/a15989/lacy-crawford-interview/>