Q: Hello, Ms. Leibow, and welcome. Please briefly introduce yourself.
A: Hello to you, too. Please, call me Lisa. It’s great to be here. For quite some time I’ve been introducing myself as Lisa Lipkind Leibow, recovering attorney/aspiring novelist. Now that my debut novel has released and hit the Red Rose Publishing bestseller list, I get to delete “aspiring” and move things around a bit. My new introduction is, “Hello, I’m Lisa Lipkind Leibow bestselling author.” This has been a very exciting time!
Q: You’re currently on virtual tour with your book Double Out and Back. Will you tell us about the book?
A: I’m thrilled to share the blurb for Double Out and Back. Thanks for asking.
After more than a decade, of mourning her parents’ deaths, anal-retentive Amelia Schwartz decides to take control of her life, pursuing single motherhood via embryo adoption. While her fertility doctor, Chandy, is preoccupied with the destruction of the cosmopolitan Cape Town of her youth and her first love in apartheid-torn South Africa, believing all is lost, her niece, a young, married, overachieving attorney Summer Curtis, juggles zealous career ambitions, demanding bosses, and friction with her husband over family and fertility issues. They must confront the painful reality that, no matter what technology humans devise to manipulate reproduction, prolong life, and construct family units, they have not yet mastered control over their beginnings and endings.
Thrown all into this is one story that can make or break. Are you up to it?
Q: Double Out and Back has the huge focus of the rollercoaster of fertility treatments and embryo adoption. What brought about this subject being so special to you that you wrote a novel about it?
A: My husband and I rode the roller coaster of fertility treatments together with a great outcome. However, as we underwent treatment, I listened carefully to every warning and statistical possibilities our doctors shared with us. Since I have a vivid imagination, I started to wonder about what it would be like if everything our doctor warned of actually happened?
I wrote Double Out and Back because as I pondered the possibilities, I became curious and fascinated with the sociological and societal impacts of assisted reproductive technologies. There are so many different ways we can start families these days, ranging from good old fashioned sex and adoption, to artificial insemination, in vitro fertilization, and donated eggs, sperm, or embryos. Children may grow up in homes with a mother and father, single parents, or same-sex parents. Women can give birth to babies not biologically related to them, and the list goes on. I wanted to explore these issues from a literary perspective.
Q: What kind of research did you do for your book?
A: Let’s see, my novel is complex. Infertility is just one aspect I needed to research to ensure veracity. Readers of Double Out and Back will be transported to several settings including Washington, D.C., San Francisco, and Cape Town, South Africa. They will be introduced to characters with diverse careers including law, medicine, marketing, and winemaking. To make the infertility-related experiences believable, my research included reading books and periodicals, interviewing experts and those who have undergone treatments for infertility or who have adopted children, and participating in on-line discussions at various support groups like the ones at www.Resolve.org.
To bring my settings to life, I visited locations in the U.S. However, I created much of the world in South Africa by gleaning information from books, internet research, virtual tours, travel guides, museums, and interviews with South African immigrants in the U.S. I hope I’ll get to visit South Africa soon.
Further, I have the huge advantage of living in the Washington, D.C. metropolitan area. The Smithsonian Institution and the Library of Congress, as well as a multitude of university libraries provide collections of information without parallel in the world. I’m lucky I’m able to access information and view artifacts to stimulate both my intellectual curiosity and my muse.
