Project and content management for Contemporary Authors volumes
WORK TITLE: Tell Me Lies
WORK NOTES:
PSEUDONYM(S):
BIRTHDATE:
WEBSITE: http://www.carolalovering.com/
CITY: Brooklyn
STATE: NY
COUNTRY: United States
NATIONALITY: American
RESEARCHER NOTES:
PERSONAL
Female.
EDUCATION:Attended Colorado College.
ADDRESS
CAREER
Writer, novelist, and yoga teacher. Teaches yoga at CorePower, NY.
WRITINGS
Contributor to periodicals, including W magazine, National Geographic, Outside, and Yoga Journal.
SIDELIGHTS
Carol Lovering is a writer and a yoga teacher whose debut novel, Tell Me Lies, is a story about a young woman and young man who meet in college and form an addictive relationship. In an article for Yoga Journal Online, Lovering writes about how yoga helped her write the novel: “I still believe that the root of yoga, its starting point, lies in awareness, and this is how, through the yogic practice, I started to really hone my creative spirit,” adding: “About a year into the writing process, I realized that the thing I had been writing — the thing that was being expelled from me — was possibly more than a journal of free-flowing jibberish.”
A friend suggested to Lovering that she may have the makings of a book of short stories, but Lovering began to think of writing a novel instead. Lovering wrote in Yoga Journal Online, that yoga not only helped in the creative aspect of writing the novel but also through the sometimes arduous process of getting a debut novel published as well, noting: “Through yoga I found the tools to practice patience and persistence and to remember the purpose of the process and the work itself. “
In Tell Me Lies, Lucy Albright comes from her Long Island home to Southern California to begin her freshman year at Baird College, where she hopes to study journalism and eventually become a travel writer. She is more than happy to be away from her mother, still unable to forgive her for something Lucy sees as a betrayal in her early teen years. Looking for a fresh start, Lucy delves into college life with high expectations. Then she meets the handsome and charming Stephen DeMarco. Stephen is confident, perhaps even overconfident. However, there is something complicated about him as well. Still, unlike most people Lucy has known growing up, Stephen sees something special in her.
Stephen is an upperclassman majoring in political science and focused on one day becoming a lawyer. Not long after meeting Stephen, Lucy takes him into her confidence, telling him about the Unforgivable Thing her mother had done to her years earlier. Stephen is good at pretending to listen, but his thoughts are focused on her bra and her nipples showing through her shirt. “Stephen becomes like a drug, luring her despite her knowing that he is a sociopathic liar and a cheat,” wrote Erin Holt in Booklist. Although Lucy quickly catches on that Stephen is a jerk, she cannot seem to leave his orbit, largely because his vision of her gives her strength and confidence. Meanwhile, much like Lucy and her mother, Stephen is trying to get over an incident from his past, something that, if it came to light, would put an end to his dreams. For now, his only focus is on success.
The story is told from the alternating perspectives of Lucy and Stephen as the tale follows their relationship throughout their college years and then in their post-college life in New York City. Their story reveals not only an intense sexual attraction between the two but also takes readers through their individual breakups and infidelities as they consume alcohol and do cocaine. As time goes on, Lucy figures out the dark secret from Stephen’s past. Even more devastating, however, is the fact that Stephen has never shown any signs of feeling guilty over all of the misdeeds he has done during his life. In the process, Lucy learns to differentiate between lust and love. “There are unforgettable beauties in this very sexy story,” wrote a Kirkus Reviews contributor who also noted that Lovering’s depiction of “passion, friendship, heartbreak, and forgiveness ring true.”
BIOCRIT
PERIODICALS
Booklist, May 15, 2018, Erin Holt, review of Tell Me Lies, p. 24.
Kirkus Reviews, April 1, 2018, review of Tell Me Lies.
ONLINE
Carola Lovering website, http://www.carolalovering.com (August 5, 2018).
Yoga Journal Online, https://www.yogajournal.com/ (December 28, 2017), Carola Lovering, “‘How Yoga Helped Me Write a Novel—& Land My First Book Deal.'”
BIO
Carola Lovering attended Colorado College, and her work has appeared in W Magazine, National Geographic, Outside, and Yoga Journal, among other publications. Tell Me Lies is her first novel. In addition to writing, Carola teaches yoga at CorePower. She currently lives in Brooklyn.
“How Yoga Helped Me Write a Novel—& Land My First Book Deal”
Yoga teacher Carola Lovering shares how her practice was instrumental in the writing and selling of her debut novel, Tell Me Lies, coming June 2018.
CAROLA LOVERINGDEC 28, 2017
As I thumb through the pages of my novel, at this stage a thick, bound manuscript, I keep my eyes peeled for any final errors and wonder how and when I ever wrote these 341 pages. It all seems to have unfolded the same way as an especially magical yoga class—the kind of class that ends with you lying in Savasana, suspended in a cloud of bliss bombs, vaguely aware that the past hour occurred.
That’s how writing my book felt—very natural, almost like a biological process where my mind surrendered to instinct. I wish I could say that I was in a fancy yoga pose stimulating the second chakra when the idea for what would become my debut novel sparked deep within, but it didn’t happen like that. But, once the seed of inspiration had been planted, yoga became a facilitator for creativity, my mat the drawing board.
How Yoga Facilitated My Creative Process
I have always gone to yoga for answers—that’s what brought me to my practice in the first place. In the beginning, yoga was pure self-exposure. Yoga taught me how to understand my inner world, how to deal with the unhelpful parts of myself and, then, how to harness my strengths.
I still believe that the root of yoga, its starting point, lies in awareness, and this is how, through the yogic practice, I started to really hone my creative spirit. About a year into the writing process, I realized that the thing I had been writing—the thing that was being expelled from me—was possibly more than a journal of free-flowing jibberish.
“You should turn this into a book of short stories,” a friend said.
Or maybe a novel, I thought, because that made more sense to me. It was an alarming thought, but it suddenly made more sense to me than anything. Once I consciously started working on my book, I needed answers more than ever. I needed a timeline and a plan, I needed to understand my characters, I needed to fill in plot gaps and, mostly, I needed to get really clear on my mission.
Just as I had so many times before, I returned to my yoga mat to look for answers. It was within these four corners that I could be still, listen, and become as aware and as receptive as I could in order to let the solutions flood in.
Elizabeth Gilbert gives a remarkable TED Talk during which she discusses the “elusive creative genius.” For writers, painters, dancers—anyone in a creative field—this “genius” is a sense of divine inspiration that is out of our control, a mysterious force that rushes in only at unknowable, opportune moments. This idea dates back to ancient Greece and Rome, when people did not believe that creativity came from human beings. Socrates, for example, believed that he had a spirit who spoke his wisdom to him from the abyss.
In my experience as a writer, I understand how these moments of intense inspiration could be interpreted as divine. But in my longer experience as a yoga teacher and student, I know that by turning inward, quieting the mind, and practicing awareness, I am facilitating a space in which pure magic can happen. So yoga, I believe, may just be a short cut—or at least an enabler—for this so-called creative genius. As Ram Dass said, “the quieter you become, the more you can hear.”
Ultimately yoga is about seeking space—physical space in the body, emotional space in the heart, and space in the mind for new possibilities, for extraordinary transformation. And yoga is also about trusting the balance that holds this space; for me, the pursuit of writing a novel stemmed from feeling daunted in the same place that I felt passionate, and accepting both sensations as two sides of the same river.
See also Mary Beth LaRue’s 10 Favorite Places to Find Creative Inspiration
How Yoga Helped Me Land My First Book Deal
There was—there is—a lot to feel daunted by. If you’re a first-time author and you’re not a celebrity and you don’t have a platform, the odds of selling your book to a major publisher are stacked against you. My agent at Janklow & Nesbit receives approximately 1,300 submissions annually, and can only sign around four new clients per year. My editor at Simon & Schuster (who usually only looks at manuscripts from agented authors) gets hundreds of manuscripts every year and took on only two new authors in 2017. To say the least, book publishing is a wildly subjective industry, one that requires a thick skin.
Like my yoga practice, the process of landing an agent was one of trial and error, and it was far from perfect. When I first pitched my book I faced dozens of rejection emails from agents, only to be told later that I had been pitching my novel as the wrong genre. Once I took a step back and honed my query letter to more accurately reflect the manuscript I had written, I got back out there. In addition to pitching more agents, on a whim I also queried an editor at Simon & Schuster who I'd been in contact with several years earlier, when I'd first graduated from college and had thought about a career in book publishing. In response to my query the editor asked for the first 50 pages—soon after the whole manuscript. She loved it, gave me some notes, and helped me find my now-agent. After working with my agent on a huge revision, we sent the final product back to the editor, who bought the book in the fall of 2016. It wasn't a quick or easy route to that book deal, and it was yoga that carried me there, I think. Through yoga I found the tools to practice patience and persistence and to remember the purpose of the process and the work itself.
It’s a process that continues to feel daunting, even when it’s rewarding. For every moment of ecstatic excitement I’ve felt over the upcoming launch of my book this spring, I have also experienced a twinge of fear over what’s at stake. And the impending, anxiety-inducing question is ever looming: will I be able to do this again? Will I be able to sit down in front of a blinking cursor and find a way to write a second book? The less fearful part of me knows that I will. I don’t know how, but I know when I go looking for the answers, I’ll start on my yoga mat.
See also Elena Brower's Yoga Sequence to Create Space + Find Clarity
About Our Expert
Carola Lovering is an author and yoga teacher based in Brooklyn. She attended Colorado College, and her work has appeared in W Magazine, National Geographic, Outside, Runner's World, and Yoga Journal, among other publications. Her first novel,Tell Me Lies, will be published by Simon & Schuster in June 2018.
BY CAROLA LOVERING
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Print Marked Items
Tell Me Lies
Erin Holt
Booklist.
114.18 (May 15, 2018): p24.
COPYRIGHT 2018 American Library Association
http://www.ala.org/aboutala/offices/publishing/booklist/
Full Text:
Tell Me Lies.
By Carola Lovering.
June 2018.352p. Atria, $26 (9781501169649).
Lucy Albright is excited to be leaving her small Long Island town for college in California, craving distance
from her mother for the Unforgivable Thing. She falls into college life quickly, making friends, going to
parties, doing drugs, and drinking--all while keeping up with her studies. At a houseboat party during
freshman year, she meets Stephen Demarco and is mesmerized by his piercing eyes and impeccable charm.
Stephen becomes like a drug, luring her despite her knowing that he is a sociopathic liar and a cheat. Their
relationship runs deep, taking twists and turns that neither expected, with consequences that could prove to
be deadly. Lovering's debut is like a chemical reaction, exploding with sex, drugs, and all things that make a
relationship toxic. Told by alternating point-of-view between Lucy and Stephen, this coming-of-age story
will strike a chord with readers. From the emotionally raw, vulnerable, yet addicting lure that Lucy
experiences with Stephen to his lack of guilt over his misdeeds, readers will be enraptured by this story that
explores the darkest sides of a relationship gone wrong.--Erin Holt
YA/M: Lucy's coming-of-age, filled with vivid descriptions of sex and drug use, might appeal to older teens
who love suspenseful, character-driven novels. EH.
Source Citation (MLA 8th
Edition)
Holt, Erin. "Tell Me Lies." Booklist, 15 May 2018, p. 24. General OneFile,
http://link.galegroup.com/apps/doc/A541400806/ITOF?u=schlager&sid=ITOF&xid=68802529.
Accessed 14 July 2018.
Gale Document Number: GALE|A541400806
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Lovering, Carola: TELL ME LIES
Kirkus Reviews.
(Apr. 1, 2018):
COPYRIGHT 2018 Kirkus Media LLC
http://www.kirkusreviews.com/
Full Text:
Lovering, Carola TELL ME LIES Atria (Adult Fiction) $26.00 6, 12 ISBN: 978-1-5011-6964-9
Passion, friendship, heartbreak, and forgiveness ring true in Lovering's debut, the tale of a young woman's
obsession with a man who's "good at being charming."
Long Island native Lucy Albright, starts her freshman year at Baird College in Southern California,
intending to study English and journalism and become a travel writer. Stephen DeMarco, an upperclassman,
is a political science major who plans to become a lawyer. Soon after they meet, Lucy tells Stephen an
intensely personal story about the Unforgivable Thing, a betrayal that turned Lucy against her mother.
Stephen pretends to listen to Lucy's painful disclosure, but all his thoughts are about her exposed black bra
strap and her nipples pressing against her thin cotton T-shirt. It doesn't take Lucy long to realize Stephen's a
"manipulative jerk" and she is "beyond pathetic" in her desire for him, but their lives are now intertwined.
Their story takes seven years to unfold, but it's a fast-paced ride through hookups, breakups, and infidelities
fueled by alcohol and cocaine, and with oodles of sizzling sexual tension. "Lucy was an itch, a song stuck in
your head or a movie you need to rewatch or a food you suddenly crave," Stephen says in one of his pointof-view
chapters, which alternate with Lucy's. The ending is perfect, as Lucy figures out the dark secret
Stephen has kept hidden and learns the difference between lustful addiction and mature love.
There are unforgettable beauties in this very sexy story.
Source Citation (MLA 8th
Edition)
"Lovering, Carola: TELL ME LIES." Kirkus Reviews, 1 Apr. 2018. General OneFile,
http://link.galegroup.com/apps/doc/A532700568/ITOF?u=schlager&sid=ITOF&xid=e3a5daf6.
Accessed 14 July 2018.
Gale Document Number: GALE|A532700568