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Read a Q & A with Kate Jacobs (Continued...)

The Friday Night Knitting Club was extremely popular with reading groups, and you spoke to many of them by phone. Will you do the same thing for Knit Two?

Absolutely! I talk to about 40 clubs every month. It's good fun. The telephone call-ins started when a group from Minnesota invited me to chat with them during their meeting. I was nervous but I ended up having such a good time that I blogged about the experience at katejacobs.com. Suddenly, I had more invitations, and that's when I decided to put a button on my website. Now I talk to clubs any day of the week. I've talked to clubs from the back of a cab, standing in a line for missing luggage at the airport, driving a rental car on a visit home to see my parents. (I had a headset so I was driving hands free!) Setting up the calls is easy: A member of a group just needs to send me the date & time of their club's get-together and if I can fit it in, I will!

A big part of Knit Two takes place in Italy. Did you travel there on research? How tough a trip was that?

Oh, terribly difficult, trying to figure out how to eat everything and see everything! No, it was delightful, of course, every day filled with new discoveries. My husband was with me and we both love history and walking and hearty dishes of pasta, so it was a perfect trip for us. We learned a lot, I would say, as do the characters in Knit Two. Isn't it funny how sometimes we have to go somewhere else to see what we already know?

Food plays an important role in both The Friday Night Knitting Club and Knit Two. You've also written a novel about a cooking show called Comfort Food. Are knitting and friendship and food all intimately connected with one another? Is that why you include both knitting instructions and recipes at the end of Knit Two?

Well, food keeps us going, after all. I write often about characters trying to nourish themselves, typically in an emotional sense but also in a physical sense. And whereas cooking is an important part of many characters' lives in Comfort Food, baking is significant to one member of the Friday Night Knitting Club. I know sometimes kids change their ideas of what they want to do multiple times, but I always knew what I wanted to do. So does Dakota. As for the pattern and recipes, it can be fun to have little extras in a book. Not to mention that almost every book club I speak with has made Dakota's muffins from The Friday Night Knitting Club, so I thought they needed a new recipe to try!

New York City—the Upper West Side of Manhattan, to be specific—is almost another character in the book. You grew up in western Canada, lived in New York for a long time, and now live in Los Angeles. But New York continues to have a hold on your imagination. Why?

That's something I've thought about very often, in fact. You know, I didn't like New York very much when I initially moved there. Too loud, too busy. It didn't feel like my place. But a couple of things happened. For one thing, I made a great group of friends - we used to always get together on Tuesday nights (and no, we didn't knit!) - and that helped make New York feel more like a community. For another, I met the man who became my husband, and he grew up just outside the city. But I suppose also the mix of having my first apartment, my first job, becoming an adult, all happened in New York. And being in the city on 9/11 solidifies a connection, that's for sure. While I do love California - the weather is amazing, the people friendly - right now I feel that I understand, in an intimate way, small-town Canada and urban Manhattan. And I don't think I'll ever be done exploring the lives of New Yorkers. Frankly, I think of myself as a Canadian-born New Yorker who just happens to live on the West Coast. As I say in my books, it's all about defining yourself as you want to be.

Are you working on a new book now?

I've been asked this question often lately - which I suppose is a good thing! Yes, I am happily working on a new book already. There are a lot of stories I want to tell. But I'm a bit particular about not talking about what I'm writing until it's quite far along. So you won't get any details yet!

What is the core message of Knit Two? What do you hope readers take away from it?

The Friday Night Knitting Club was about forgiveness, about getting beyond regret and moving forward. It was also about becoming independent and learning to live on one's own terms, as well as this idea of how important it is to have strong female friendships, and to recognize and honor those relationships. Knit Two is about the power of legacy, about how we hold on so tightly because we're afraid to let go - and how sometimes the letting go allows us to keep a better hold on things in the long run. This story is about falling into patterns and figuring out if and when it's time to break those patterns. About when it's time for acceptance and when it's time to be courageous and be bold. It's about the idea that success is a journey, not a sprint, and that the answers for one moment in our lives may not be the answers for another. Ultimately, Knit Two is a novel about hope.

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