David SchulzeAdvertisement – Continue Reading Below

When I arrive a few minutes late for my lunch date with Marisha Pessl, the author of the 2006 best-selling novel Special Topics in Calamity Physics, she’s already seated by the window of the restaurant, serenely waiting. Here to discuss her second novel, Pessl gleams. She wears a black lace shirt by Isabel Marant, jeans, and a leather coat. Her long blond hair hangs in perfect curls. As a preternaturally telegenic personality in a field of solitary introverts, she has a reputation as something of a lit-world anomaly. Still, the level of smooth confidence that she possesses really is dazzling in person.

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It’s also slightly off-putting. Perhaps only because I was an ardent fan of Special Topics—a coming-of-age mystery whose 16-year-old narrator, Blue van Meer, raised by her widowed-professor father, constantly references everyone from T. S. Eliot to Homer—I’d imagined the two of us feeding off my enthusiasm for her work, batting around ideas big and small, sharing confidences about life in New York and our favorite books. Instead, Pessl is measured and professional, rarely straying from the topics at hand: her new book, Night Film, and the logistics of her creative process.

“I can’t wait until I’m on my seventh novel,” she enthuses at one point. Which is when I realize that her demeanor has thrown me for a loop: Is she saying this in some kind of entrepreneurial, build-the-brand kind of way, I wonder, or is she expressing the wish of a writer’s writer, the woman who just a few minutes earlier listed Philip Roth among her favorite novelists? Or maybe it’s literary pretension to think that a great writer shouldn’t try to sell her books.

Marisha Pessl was 26 when her fairy-tale romance with the publishing world began. Born to an Austrian father and an American mother who divorced when she was three, she grew up with her mother and elder sister in Asheville, North Carolina, with frequent visits to her engineer father in Austria. Pessl’s parents put a premium on intellectual and artistic pursuits; her rigorous slate of extracurriculars included French, harp, theater, and painting.

After high school, she studied film at Northwestern University for two years before transferring to Barnard College, a change inspired when she visited New York City and decided that she “needed to move here as soon as possible.” She majored in comparative literature with a minor in playwriting, but writing novels was always her primary ambition. Upon graduation, Pessl took an entry-level job at the accounting giant PricewaterhouseCoopers. “I was just biding my time until I could support myself doing something I loved,” she says, adding that during that short-lived detour she spent mornings, nights, sick days, and the occasional slow workday writing. At 23 she met hedge-fund manager Nic Caiano, whom she married in 2003 and whose job took the couple to London, where Pessl devoted herself full-time to finishing what would become Special Topics.

Asked if she ever feels like she missed out on the usual rites of passage for a New York writer in her twenties—roommates in Brooklyn, a community of like-minded literary people—she laughs. “No,” she says. “I think I am willing to take chances, like creatively and in my personal life, so of course I don’t regret anything.” And then: “I actually don’t know very many writers.”

In 2004, Pessl cold-e-mailed 15 literary agents about her novel, including Susan Golomb, who represents Jonathan Franzen. Golomb was charmed by Pessl’s note—in particular, by her blurbworthy description of her own work: “a funny, encyclopedic and wildly ambitious literary tale about love and loss, youth and yearning, treachery and terror”—and blown away by the manuscript. As I myself can attest, Blue’s know-it-all, child-genius voice felt bracingly original, as did the book’s extratextual gimmicks: illustrations hand-drawn by Pessl, a chapter structure modeled after a course syllabus, and an afterword presented as the novel’s “Final Exam.” The publishing house Viking acquired the book for $615,000, according to an industry source, the kind of money that put Pessl in an elite club of debut novelists such as Jonathan Safran Foer and Khaled Hosseini.

Courtesy of Marisha PesslAdvertisement – Continue Reading Below