One of them was a long story that became Seating Arrangements. Shipstead offered to drive Gradinger back to the airport and a year and a half later sent her some stories. Interestingly, Gradinger recalls, Shipstead was not one of the students who signed up for her talk. Remember those? I couldn’t stop reading it: it was so crisp and funny and insightful.” We had an amazing conversation, didn’t talk about work, but she did send me a story I read on my BlackBerry. Gradinger remembers traveling to Iowa when she was a “baby agent”: “I didn’t have a driver’s license, and Connie kindly sent to pick me up. At that point, I only had a few short stories.” “When I said I didn’t, she sent me to pick up Rebecca, who was coming to talk to the students. “During my second year, Connie Brothers called me to ask if I had an agent,” she says. Iowa is also where Shipstead also met her literary agent, Rebecca Gradinger, of Fletcher & Company. A Harvard graduate, she says she applied to the Iowa Writers’ Workshop in 2005 “not expecting to get in”-but when she was accepted, she thought, “Amazing-I have a life plan for the next two years.” While at Iowa, she began to think of writing as a feasible career. This is Shipstead’s third novel, after her 2012 bestselling debut, Seating Arrangements, and 2014’s Astonish Me.
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