Elena Bowes caught up with Lynda Cohen Loigman about her latest novel, The Love Elixir of Augusta Stern. Below are some edited highlights from their Q&A. You can listen to the full episode here on Elena Meets the Author or wherever you listen to podcasts.
Alternating between a pharmacy in 1920’s Brooklyn, and a drama-filled retirement home in Florida in 1987, The Love Elixir of Augusta Stern is a story about second chances, how whether we’re 16 or 76 inside, we’re still the same person, and how it’s always possible to recapture that magical feeling of our youth. The story is full of old-world charm, suspense, romance, history, and it’s very funny.
Aunt Esther and Irving Rivkin had me chuckling throughout. There are some bootlegging gangsters thrown in with Mitzi and Zip Diamond in their furs and fancy cars. The book starts with 79-year-old Augusta Stern, who works for a hospital in New York City. She loves to work and has been lying about her age for decades until on the eve of her 80th birthday, her boss tells her in so many words that it’s time for Augusta to move on. Augusta hates the idea of retirement but has no choice. So, on the suggestion of her beloved niece, Augusta moves to her retirement community in Florida. No sooner has she arrived than who should she bump into, but the man who broke her heart 60 years ago.
Elena: Lynda let’s start with what inspired you to write this wonderful book. Your author’s note is fabulous and anyone reading The Love Elixir might want to skip to the back of the book and read that first.
Lynda: The inspiration really came from two different places. All of my books are inspired by my family, mostly my mom’s side of the family. But this book is a little different because the initial idea for a story about an aging pharmacist came from what I had learned about my husband’s great-grandmother.
She was a pharmacist. She graduated from Fordham Pharmacy College in 1921, which was a very unusual thing. There were very few women in her class. But I didn’t really have a story. I keep story ideas in my head. I have this imaginary basket of ideas I keep in my head. So that was in my basket of ideas. And then I wrote The Matchmaker’s Gift and that was the first book where I added a little bit of magical realism to my writing. It was definitely a more joyful story than my first two books and more heartwarming.
After I wrote that book, a lot of readers wrote to me or told me in person how much they loved it, how it brought them all this joy. Before writing that book. I had never really thought about that. I thought about what I wanted my stories to say. I thought about the messages that I wanted to convey in my stories, but I never really thought about the emotional impact on the reader.
I always want to make people cry for better or for worse. If a reader’s crying, that’s good, it means they’re connecting. But I never thought about getting people through tough times, making people feel happy. And I wanted to write another story like that.
But I still really had no story. My mom died many years ago. In the summer of 2021 my dad, who was 84, had a bad fall. He lived in Florida on his own. He was in rehab; he was in the hospital. It’s a very familiar story to anybody who’s my age. I’m in my mid-fifties. I was down in Florida that whole summer, and he needed an aid. He couldn’t do anything really on his own anymore.
By the end of the summer, my brother and I decided we had to move him to assisted living, and he was very reluctant at first because he was thinking about the nursing homes of his grandparents’ time. But when we went to look at these places, he got more excited because my dad was a really social person and he liked being with people. And so, I moved him there. Every time I would visit him, I would sit with him in the lobby. It was like a middle school cafeteria. Everyone was gathering there and there was a lot of chitter chatter and flirting and gossiping and all kinds of stuff. My dad was looking for companionship up until the day he died. He had dated a lot of women throughout the 15 years that he had without my mom. And some of the relationships were really nice and some were not. Some of the women were nice and some were not.
I had this moment of panic the first day that I moved him into the assisted living place: What if one of the women who he had dated previously, where it had ended badly, what if she lived there?
Wouldn’t that be very awkward and very bad? And that was sort of where the beginnings of the story came from. Augusta lives in a very active retirement community, not assisted living, but same idea, right? You know, you’re in this small community looking back at someone from your past, who’s staring you in the face, who you don’t want to be nearby.
Elena: Can you talk about the role the pharmacy of the 1920’s played in the community?
Lynda I read a lot of memoirs by pharmacists, and I talked to as many pharmacists as I could talk to about the old pharmacies. People didn’t go to doctors first. If you had a rash, a stomach problem, whatever it was, you went to your pharmacist first. And they would make their own, specific creams based on what you told them.
They were like your priest, your confessor, your rabbi and your therapist, all rolled up into one. Solomon Stern was definitely that for people. So, he really talks about how important it is to keep people’s confidence. It’s one of the things that he stresses to his daughter Augusta, that you don’t talk about the customers.
Elena: Timing is a recurring theme in your story. Bad timing accounts for the fate of Augusta and Irving until there’s good timing. Can you expand on the role of timing?
Lynda: Well, first, this is a dual timeline novel. So, we have 1980s Florida, and then to figure out what went wrong with Irving and Augusta, I take you back to 1920s Brooklyn. So, you get to see them when they’re young and they’re falling in love, and that was really important to me because I feel like a younger reader especially might not appreciate an older love story between Augusta and Irving. But if you see them when they’re young and you see them fall in love, then you appreciate it more. You feel the pain of them not working out the first time around, and so you’re rooting for them more.
Timing, missed opportunities, the sliding doors idea of Augusta and Irving is a technique that many of us writers use in our books because if they’re so in love, why don’t they end up together? You have to figure something out to put a wrench in their plans.
Elena: You mention a lot of talented writers in the book, Shakespeare, Jane Austen, Robert Frost, and your title is an homage to O. Henry. Can you talk a bit about your title?
Lynda: When I was researching, I was looking for pharmacy things in the 1920s. And I came across this short story by O. Henry that I had never heard of. I’ve read a bunch of his short stories. They all have these really interesting little twists. So, this story is called The Love Philtre of Ike Stein. A philtre is an elixir or a concoction. It’s about a pharmacist in the 1920s, and someone comes and asks him for a love potion, and he obliges, though of course it’s not a love potion at all, and the ending is super funny. When I read that story, the tone was very gritty, but also very comical. I loved the tone of it.
I read that before I started writing my book, and (thought, my story) could really have a lot of humour in it. If there’s an elixir that gets made and it goes awry, it could be super funny, not just sad.
I made my working title The Love Elixir of Augusta Stern, and it is an homage to O. Henry’s title. I was so happy that (my editor) let me keep it because, I have working titles all the time. Some are good, some are like book number four, whatever.
Elena: What is your writing process? Sounds like you do a ton of reading before you even start?
Lynda: So, for Matchmaker and Love Elixir, I did about three months of research before I really started writing. The research goes hand in hand with the outlining. When I research, I’m really looking for inspiration. I’m looking for the timing, and titbits that I know will make the story rich and interesting. I’m trying to find the fun, whimsical, interesting things.
Elena: One of the things that you said at the beginning of this Q&A is that it hadn’t occurred to you that you could bring joy to your readers. You really did that with this book.
Lynda: Thanks. I just feel like we need books like that now. I don’t want to teach anybody anything. I want to teach myself things. It’s interesting to do the research, but I just really want to tell a good story. There are books that can be beautifully written, they can be literary, whatever. But I want a good story. I want a story that you can sink into. And it doesn’t need to be so complicated. The more I write, the more I want to simplify my stories. Readers can relate to it when it’s not so intensely complicated. And this is a simple story. This woman moves to Florida, and she runs into the man who broke her heart 60 years earlier. That is the story. The more I write, the more I realize how important it is to know your story before you start writing…