Paullina Simons | On Trains

Sometimes you start out writing one kind of book, and you end up writing another. Every once in a while life intrudes on your fictional plans and turns them upside down. Take LONE STAR. It had started out as a fairly straightforward story of a girl traveling cross-country to college and running into a scruffy boy with a guitar heading off to war. They met on an Amtrak train somewhere in southern Maine. Nice, familiar, safe tale about love and faith.

And then I went to Poland on a book tour. Usually when I tour, I travel by plane, and sometimes by hired car, but in Warsaw, my publicist Zofia informed me that me and my three giant suitcases would be traveling south to Krakow by train. I balked. I peevishly fretted, made noises of displeasure, I outlined in Eloquent Whine why it was a terrible idea and could never work and would bring nothing but trouble and problems and stress.

I made my case well, but to no avail.

I had traveled on European trains before, a generation earlier when I was a generation younger. I had forgotten many of the trains’ salient details. Like for example: the compartment you sit in has seven other tense people in it, all with their own giant suitcases. Sometimes it has inebriated people in it.

It was in just such a compartment—as I was sitting squeezed between Zofia and a zaftig unfriendly intoxicated foreigner, staring warily across at four other unhappy people—when I suddenly saw a new direction, an untapped potential for my unwritten book. Oh, sure, the American Amtrak all sterile and open, with comfy seats and luggage racks and a lounge car, could be just fine as backdrop. But here, I saw something better. I saw chaos—and in it, Johnny strolling into Chloe’s life and reordering it. She is put upon and stressed out, in other words inimically ill- disposed to love and antagonistic to a friendly young man who is focused only on her. How perfect that was.

Then at night the power went out, and Zofia and I were pitched into inky blackness. We rode this way for many minutes in our crowded compartment. I imagined my heroine riding like this, as if in a dream, and as if in a dream being wildly kissed by a humming strumming troubadour, a singing soldier with secrets shadowing him and reality darkening his path. A Pandora’s box of life was flung open in my compartment and then in the compartment with Chloe and Johnny on a foreign train. My story got better. Everything was alien to my heroine, including the fire in her heart.

Poland brought me that fire. The trains, the crowds, the unfamiliar language, the extreme discomfort, the heat, the cold, the darkness, all of it wove its threads into the tapestry that transformed LONE STAR. Because unlike the singular Chloe in the U.S.-only story, this new Maine-raised, Europe-bound Chloe could not travel through untamed lands by herself. She needed friends. And these friends altered the scope and narrative of my novel. Because they brought their own unspoken, elephant-sized past with them to Europe on a trek across the continent, with new love and old love and conflicted Chloe in a vise between them all. That was never going to happen on an empty train from Maine to Mission Bay.

It goes to show you: you find something every place you look. You just have to open your eyes and see.

About Paullina Simons

Paullina Simons is an author of twelve novels, two children’s books, a memoir, and cookbook. Born and raised in the Soviet Union, she immigrated to the United States with her family in the 1970s. She has lived in Kansas, Texas, England, and Italy and now makes her home in New York, she hopes temporarily until she can move to warm climes and sunny skies.

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About LONE STAR

From the bestselling, acclaimed author of TULLY and THE BRONZE HORSEMAN comes the unforgettable love story between a college-bound young woman and a traveling troubadour on his way to war—a moving, compelling novel of love lost and found set against the stunning backdrop of Eastern Europe.

Chloe is just weeks away from heading off to college and starting a new life far from her home in Maine when she embarks on a great European adventure with her boyfriend and two best friends. Their destination is Barcelona, but first they must detour through the historic cities of Eastern Europe to keep an old family promise.

Here, in this fledgling post-Communist world, Chloe meets a charming American vagabond named Johnny, who carries a guitar, an easy smile—and a lifetime of secrets. From Treblinka to Trieste, from Karnikava to Krakow, from Vilnius to Venice, the unlikely band of friends and lovers traverse the old world on a train trip that becomes a treacherous journey into Europe’s and Johnny’s darkest past—a journey that jeopardizes Chloe’s plans for the future and all she ever thought she wanted.

But the lifelong bonds Chloe and her friends share are about to be put to the ultimate test—and whether or not they reach Barcelona, they can only be certain that their lives will never be the same again.

A sweeping, beautiful tale that mesmerizes and enchants, LONE STAR will linger long in the memory once the final page is turned.