For the love of books | The Excerpt Podcast
Bestselling author James Patterson and viral librarian Mychal Threets talk about their shared love of books.
Is there a point when you stop being the Flight Attendant author? Is it after several bestsellers? Or after two multimillion-dollar movies based on your books? Maybe after your third book comes out? Is that the point when you’re known only as the author?
TJ Newman experiences all this in real time.
For her, authenticity is important in storytelling. Newman didn’t seem overly concerned when asked about the labels that stick to her in the world of writing.
“I think I can only be exactly what I am. This is my past, this is my path. I am a failed actress who became a bookseller, a flight attendant and finally a published author. This is my past, and I am proud of it,” says Newman, whose highly anticipated thriller “Worse Case Scenario” (Little Brown, 336 pages) is out on Tuesday. The book is about a commercial airliner that crashes into a nuclear power plant in a small town in Minnesota. The drama is about ordinary people who have to fight against a nuclear meltdown that could kill millions or leave millions homeless. Newman describes unremarkable characters who have to face heroic challenges and make enormous sacrifices.
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Newman is in many ways a model of resilience and, although she would never admit it, she may be one of the everyday heroes who serves as inspiration for her own stories.
She’s calling from Los Angeles, where she’s currently working on a screenplay for a film with Universal based on her first novel, “Falling,” serving as executive producer on a film based on her second novel, “Drowning: Flight 1421,” and beginning media promotion for her third novel. Sometimes, though, Newman just thinks about a vacation.
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An overnight success
When Newman’s first book, Falling, came out in 2021, legendary author Don Winslow called it “breathtaking and relentless,” although Newman’s stint as a flight attendant still seemed to be talked about as much as the book.
Newman has always loved telling stories, and after graduating with a degree in musical theater, she first tried to break into Broadway.
When that didn’t work out, Newman moved home – into her childhood bedroom in her parents’ house in the Phoenix area – and got a job at an independent bookstore. Here she was surrounded by people who loved stories. Then she got a job as a flight attendant – a job her mother and sister both had. It was there that she found the inspiration for her first book after asking a pilot a “what if” question.
Her story was told as a seemingly overnight success – she wrote the first details of the plot on a Virgin Atlantic napkin on the overnight flight between LA and New York.
Newman probably finds the overnight part of the success story funny.
She received 41 rejections from publishers before she found an agent who would take on an unknown author. But after all that, a bidding war broke out for that book – and soon the flight attendant was an author with several seven-figure offers before her first book was even published.
In the acknowledgments of her first book, Newman thanks her mother for her help in the past, saying, “I pushed this book from draft to draft because my mother would not let me settle for less than everything I ever wanted.”
She also effusively thanked her agent Shane Salerno, whom she compared to a “mentor like Mr. Miyagi.” Newman’s humble nature comes through in both her fictional characters and in interviews. When asked about her many perceptions and labels, she seemed most proud of her resilience, saying, “I think people can relate to being told ‘no,’ they can relate to rejection, and pursuing a dream and then being told you’re not good enough. And since I’m the example of someone who was told ‘no’ and ultimately got a yes, I’m OK with that label because it shows people that if it can happen to me, it can happen to them too.”
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Be inspired by ordinary people
Worst Case Scenario is Newman’s first novel that is not primarily set in an airplane, but rather deals with a possible nuclear disaster in a small Midwestern town. Worst Case Scenario is another page-turner from Newman that kept me awake longer than expected because I couldn’t put the book down.
For this novel, Newman was once again inspired by asking real pilots about their worst fears, and once again delivers a cast of compelling characters and blockbuster-like suspense.
Newman seems to see the best in all of us, telling me, “As scary as the stories I write are, their essence, their heart and their essence are ordinary people in extraordinary situations rising to the occasion. I believe deeply in the everyday hero in all of us and that ordinary people just need the opportunity to be the heroes they really are.”
Newman also says that Worst Case Scenario was the most difficult book for her to date, and half-joked that she wanted to write a list of “complaints” instead of the usual acknowledgements section.
One reason why researching this novel was so difficult for Newman—aside from the main obstacle of dealing with a rather niche subject such as nuclear energy—was the fact that Newman found the research unsettling.
“I was hesitant to write this book when I started researching it because I realized that the premise of the book was completely plausible and I wasn’t sure I wanted to put myself in that world,” she says, also admitting, “This research scared the hell out of me.”
But she also said it also invigorated her because she believed she could turn that fear into something that could make a blockbuster.
“I write big summer action movies, but they’re books, and Michael Crichton is basically my guiding light,” she says. After praising Crichton’s versatility, she goes back over 30 years: “When I saw Jurassic Park in the cinema as a little girl in 1993, I remember standing in the foyer, holding up my hand and seeing it shaking with fear. That book and that movie connected something in my mind. If you can bring dinosaurs back, anything is possible, it has only expanded my creative possibilities.”
Newman was also quick to give flowers to her firefighter Jeremy “Cousin Jer” Newman and her brother-in-law, an engineer, and described them both as invaluable aids to her research and writing process. It’s possible that the heroic fictional firefighters Dani or Steve were inspired by these real-life characters, or perhaps the cantankerous and tangled nuclear engineers Joss or Ethan. Perhaps you see shades of your grandfather in the heroic figure of retired nuclear engineer Marion. Perhaps the small town coalescing against the backdrop of Waketa, Minnesota, reminds you of a community you grew up in or once visited.
What’s next for TJ Newman?
Newman has been working on Falling in Los Angeles and writing the screenplay for her second novel. There are no release dates for either yet. When asked if she could ever imagine acting in a film based on one of her books, given that she already has acting experience, Newman gives another modest answer: Although she would love to perform, she knows “what it’s like to need that job, to need that role, and even just an extra, even just an extra. Maybe that’s the difference for an actor between having health insurance or not, maybe the difference between giving up on your dream or going on.”
At the moment, Newman is working on another story, as she always has a story alive and something in the works. She also hopes that her work could inspire more girls to write, saying, “If my success can show other women or little girls who are like me, and I knowledge they’re out there, I know I’m not the only woman who has these stories (great psychological thrillers) to tell, and if my success can encourage women to write the stories they want to tell, not just the stories they should tell or are allowed to tell, but to write what they want to tell, then that would be a huge, huge privilege and I hope that can happen.”
But now it might be time for a break, as Newman tells me: “But if I’m being completely honest, I’m going to go on holiday somewhere as soon as this book is published. Three books, a film and a screenplay in three years, I desperately need a good holiday and a breather.”
