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Bestselling Author T.J. Newman Shares Her Favorite Books
By Michael Giltz,
5 hours ago
Bestselling author T.J. Newman shares some of her favorite books exclusively with Parade. The flight attendant turned best-selling author of thrillers has her latest airplane disaster book Worst Case Scenario hitting stores August 12. It captures the tension and high drama when a commercial airline pilot has a sudden heart attack and the craft plummets down to earth…hitting a nuclear power plant.
Literally everything goes wrong (after all, the book is called Worst Case Scenario ) and Newman is delighted when you say she’s cruel because you were a nervous wreck worrying about a little boy stuck in a car dangling off a bridge, watching the people of a small town struggle to prevent a nuclear disaster and up till 3 in the morning to find out what happens next.
“I'm sorry to say, I'm thrilled to hear it,” laughs Newman. “When a reader says, 'I stayed up all night, I sobbed hysterically, I was so scared,’ you know, that's music to my ears, which maybe does say something about me and other authors.”
Newman burst onto the bestseller lists in 2021 with her debut novel Falling, in which a pilot is blackmailed by terrorists: crash the plane you’re flying or we kill your family. Her second hit was 2023’s Drowning, with a plane crashing into the Pacific. Newman is working on the screenplay for the first film for Universal, while the blue chip team of writer Steve Kloves (the Harry Potter films) and director Paul Greengrass (the Bourne films) are handling the second book.
And you can see the impact of her work for Hollywood. Newman’s writing is getting stronger and more cinematic with each book.
“Writing the screenplay for Falling has been the greatest learning experience,” says Newman. “It’s like learning a new language. How do I take a story that took 300 pages to tell and compress it to 100 pages without losing anything? It really has made me a better novelist because it forces you to look at a scene, look at dialog, look at what's happening and go, Is this necessary? You have no choice but to just trim it to the essence of what the story is. And when I went to write Worst Case Scenario , having that experience gave me a laser focus.”
The novel certainly has the sweep and big cast of characters like the classic disaster movies of Hollywood. It features characters like the youngest President of the US in history, a loner who distrusts the government, a crew of fire rescue people who can’t bring themselves to abandon that little boy trapped in a car and workers at the nuclear power plant, each with their own vivid backstory and driving impulses. The pace is relentless and the scenes jump from one to another without letting you catch your breath. So if you read Newman’s novel and see the movie in your head, she’s right there with you.
“Those big 90s action thrillers–you know, Armageddon, Air Force One, Jurassic Park, Twister– those were my bread and butter growing up. It's how my brain works. It's the way that I see stories. And that's why I write the way that I write.”
Newman loves popcorn movies. And of course she loves books. Here she talks about the first book to really move her, the author she couldn’t read until she was older and makes other great book recommendations.
“Growing up, I remember the first time I read the book Where the Red Fern Grows, ” says Newman. “I remember laying on the floor of my childhood bedroom, clutching the book to my chest and sobbing hysterically. It was the moment when I realized literature could do that, could make me feel like that. Something clicked in that moment and completely changed the way I related to books. And I think that was sort of the first moment that I was like, I want to do that. I want to see if I can, you know, do that kind of magic trick….
“It was a library book from the Dobson Ranch Library [in Mesa, Arizona, where Newman grew up]. I still have that library card somewhere in my parents’ house, in my childhood bedroom. You know, a yellow library card from the Dobson Ranch branch library with my tiny little kid signature on the back of the card. We would walk to the library and just get book after book after book after book.”
“My parents are both readers," says Newman. "They read to us every night. If I wasn’t allowed to read something it was only because they knew what would follow. If I started reading Stephen King at a young age, they know that I'm coming into their bedroom at night saying, ‘Mom, I can't sleep.’ If there was any sort of censorship, it was only because they knew me well enough to know how scared I would get by things. When I was a kid, if I would get in trouble, they would take my books. That was my punishment. I was never grounded, but, ‘Okay, we're taking your book.’ I used to hide in the bathroom with my books and read in there because it's harder to tell [me] to do whatever it was I'm supposed to be doing if I'm in the bathroom.”
“I remember one birthday that I got a box set of The Babysitters Club," says Newman, when asked about a book that was her favorite gift. "That was a great library read because there's hundreds of them and you can just pick them up in a stack and come home with them. But I remember for my birthday I also got some of the super special editions that had the white covers and they were about three times the length of the regular ones. I can remember the first time I read one of the super special editions–whatever they were called–that was novel length almost, a couple hundred pages as opposed to the shorter ones. And I felt like an adult. I remember feeling excited, that it was like a rite of passage. This looks heavier! This is a bigger book!”
Newman was part of a special program as a kid; one day a week she’d be pulled out of class and have coursework with a handful of other kids pulled from other classes. She credits the experience as being the most important educational experience of her childhood.
“When we were in third grade, we read Animal Farm, which is not a [normal] choice for a third grader,” says Newman about the satire of Stalin which coincidentally was first published on August 17, 1945, almost 79 years to the day as the publication of Newman’s latest.
“We read it in [this special] class and sort of talked about it. That book–maybe more than any other one–changed the way I see the world. It made me as a third grader, go, ‘Oh, humans, we are…interesting.’ Kids can read and comprehend bigger books than I think we give them credit for. I'm not sure that that program would be able to get away with it nowadays, because we also read Fahrenheit 451. I think that was fifth grade when we read that. So, yeah, I was always surrounded by a healthy balance of we're going to read The Babysitters Club, but we're also going to read Animal Farm .
“Michael Crichton was my North Star growing up 100%,” says Newman. “I mean, Jurassic Park! The first time I read Jurassic Park and saw the movie, it just blew my mind wide open as to what the possibilities were and could be. His career and the types of stories that he tells–if I could imitate any writer and the career that they had, it would be him. He was a massive influence on me creatively.”
“I read a lot of nonfiction and biographies,” says Newman. “One of my favorite nonfiction books is called Flight 232 . It’s the true story of a flight from Denver to Chicago that suffered complete hydraulic loss. They flew it like a glider and were able to actually land it at an airfield in Sioux City, Iowa. Miraculously about half the people on that plane survived, which is just unbelievable. It's by Laurence Gonzales, who wrote another book I like called Surviving Survival. He's written many nonfiction books on survival situations, which were very helpful for writing, well, all of my books, quite frankly.”
“That is the latest biography that I read,” says Newman. “I'm fascinated by how people accomplish great things. How did he go from having a shoe that he couldn't get anybody to buy into Nike? I always want to know how the magic trick is done, right?”
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