interviews
What inspired you to change careers and
follow your dreams and become an author?
Andrew Gross is the author of New York
Times and international bestsellers The Blue
Zone, Don't Look Twice, and The Dark Tide,
which was nominated for the Best Thriller
of the Year award by the International
Thriller Writers, Reckless, and most recently,
Eyes Wide Open. He is also coauthor of five
number one bestsellers with James
Patterson, including Judge & Jury and
Lifeguard. He lives in Westchester County,
New York, with his wife, Lynn. You can
follow Andrew Gross on Facebook, Twitter,
MySpace, and at AndrewGrossBooks.com.
Now, let’s dive into my
conversation with Andrew Gross:
Initially, you worked at various clothing
line companies, including your families
company “Leslie Fay.” Did you dream of
becoming an author back then?
The answer then was no. I was perfectly
happy doing what I was doing. We were a
public company on the New York Stock
Exchange. It was somewhat substantial, and
I guess towards the end of it I was
managing about a third of it so it had my
attention and I’d gotten an MBA from
Columbia, and I was only interested in
being as devoted and successful a manager
and an operator of business as I could be.
When I was in college, I wrote and edited
www.TopShelfMagazine.net
So what was going through your mind
then, and how did that feel?
AN EXCLUSIVE INTERVIEW
WITH ANDREW GROSS
I got fired. I was doing a series of turn-
arounds with different companies, and I got
involved with the third one that didn’t turn
around so well, and I ended up on the beach.
I told my wife that I just couldn't do this
anymore. When you take these turnarounds
on, they can be pretty intense. Sometimes
people lose their jobs. We had three kids in
private schools in Greenwich, Connecticut.
She just looked at me. I’d come home literally
without preparation for her. I got into, if I
remembered correctly, a disagreement (I was
President of this Canadian firm) with the
Chairman and ended up leaving that day
without a job. I came home, and she said
“What are we going to do?” and I said,
“Honey, I know you’re not prepared to hear
me say this, but we’re going to write a novel.”
It didn’t go so well at first, but, I just asked for
a year and sort of couched in on all of these
quantitative business school-like terms about
auditing my progress and taking input from
mentors and things of that nature. My wife
was a Yoga teacher at that stage, she’d done it
for ten years, so self-actualization was pretty
high on her list of priorities, so I knew I had
to sell it from the start. So I got my year but
as I’m sure any of your readers would know
who have attempted this sort of thing, it
doesn’t take a year to write the first novel. It
might take a year to get the words on paper
and then maybe another year to polish them
and put them in some presentabl e form, and
then, in my case, it took a third year to try to
get the book sold. Finally, I did connect with
a hotshot agent in New York, and it looked
like everything was going to happen. We
were all excited as anyone can imagine. We
weren’t broke but when you’ve just gone
three years without a dime coming in...
The book was called Hydra, and it was a
political conspiracy novel about a
radical wing of the NRA that took over
the Presidency. When I finally got it out
there, with a lot of optimism, about
twenty-five publishers passed on it. I
had no idea what my next step was in
life, and I looked at myself and said:
“How did you possibly ruin this life that
had this great trajectory to it?” I was
sitting around in my den trying to
decide what cliff I was going to drive
my SUV off of, then I get this call from
someone who says, “Can you take a call
from James Patterson?”
the literary magazine. I went to a Middlebury
College and I was active in the writing
community there, but after I graduated, I
made a commitment to pursue the business.
I was pretty single-mindedly focused on
business when I was working, not only with
“Leslie Fay” but then I left that firm and got
into a bunch of active sports oriented lines.
INTERVIEWS
I’ve done eleven books. This was like
seventeen years ago, amazingly. I can’t
even believe I’m saying that. I actually
had never read Jim at all, but I knew his
name of course, and I knew he was a big
selling author. He basically, had been given
my manuscript, which I assumed was in
every garbage can on Madison Avenue, by
the President of Warner Books who was his
publisher at the time, with the words, “This
guy does women well.” written on the cover,
which I assume meant that I wrote them
well because the hero of my novel Hydra was
a gal who had to perform the acts of valor.
He got on the phone with me and basically
told me that I had the goods. And I was like
“Uhh?” and he said “I read your
manuscript... let’s have lunch.” At lunch a
couple of days later he proposed this idea of
four women who were engaged in crime-
fighting to some degree. Well, I didn’t have a
plan B so believe me that when I heard he
was looking to form a writing partnership
with someone, I was in––no matter what it
was about. I went home that day, wrote two
chapters, and sent it to him. Within a day or
two we were working together. So that’s
how it started. I don’t think anybody came
into this business quite like I did...
Read more of our interview with Andrew Gross at:
www.TopShelfMagazine.net
TOPShelf magazine
OCTOBER2017 23