Nancy Pearl Interviews … a Hollywood Screenwriter
Nancy Pearl inadvertently goes Hollywood in her most recent interview with Jon Cohen, the author of The Man in the Window, (Amazon Publishing; Brilliance Audio; originally published by Warner Books in 1991).
It’s one of the titles in Nancy’s Book Lust Rediscoveries series, which brings some of her favorites back in print. We asked Nancy for some background and she replied, “the hardest part of getting this book signed up was finding Jon Cohen.” Google kept taking her to the author of the screenplay for the Steven Spielberg movie starring Tom Cruise, Minority Report. That made no sense to her because “it’s so different from The Man in the Window.”
Finally she and her editor at Amazon decided it was worth getting in touch with that Jon Cohen, just in case, and it turned out he was indeed the same person. “He was thrilled to learn that we wanted his novel to be part of the series, and I was thrilled because it’s long been one of my favorites.” Cohen explains in the interview below how he went from a career as a registered nurse to one as a full-time writer.
About the book, Nancy adds,
It’s the kind of novel you just want to hug, and, as I say in my introduction, it’s the sort of novel that I don’t usually enjoy because this kind of plot can feel manipulative and awfully saccharine. But Jon leavens the plot both with both humor and a bit of magic realism, and it all works wonderfully well. [Main characters] Louis and Iris are indelibly sketched in my heart.