The book is less a story collection than a guide to life in a hostile world. In ‘The Isabel Fish’ Maddy is a canker in her brother Sage’s life and while she attempts not to drown in the scuba-diving class at the local swimming pool, he painfully confronts the loss of his first girlfriend. In ‘Note to Sixth-Grade Self’ a young girl offers tips on how to get through school, its desperate humiliations and its gentle surprises. In ‘Care’ a young woman shows us just how many wrong ways there are to take care of a six-year-old on a hot day by the sea, while ‘Stations of the Cross’ warns of the dangers of mixing religion with adolescent games.

Julie Orringer’s characters struggle mightily against the engulfing forces that threaten to overtake us all. In these stories that sing with compassion and humanity all of them finally learn, gloriously if at great cost, how to breathe underwater.

How to Breathe Underwater received extraordinary reviews on publication. Nick Hornby called it 'Outstanding' and Monica Ali said the book was 'Unbelievably good: the humiliations and cruelties and passions of childhood, sparkling fresh prose, a writer with a big heart and an acute sense of the small things that loom large in our lives'

Watch out for the book on BBC's Page Turners on Friday 8th April.

When I was a kid, my favorite books were things like Francis Hodgson
Burnett's A Little Princess and Maud Hart Lovelace's Betsy-Tacy and Laura Ingalls Wilder's Little House series--all books about girls who were storytellers or who would someday grow up to be writers.  But I didn't know until college that it was possible to make a living as a writer.  My parents were doctors, and so I always assumed I'd go into medicine when I grew up. My college failures at chemistry and calculus gave the lie to that.  I figured it was time to stop envying my friends who were taking literature classes and begin studying writing and English instead.
 
Which authors influenced you?

In college, my favorites were Nabokov and Flannery O'Connor and Virginia Woolf.  At the Iowa Writers' Workshop I started reading Charles Baxter, Denis Johnson, Tobias Wolff, Lorrie Moore; my favorite was probably Alice Munro.  I also love George Saunders and Lynda Barry.

How did you feel when you heard that How to Breathe Underwater was going to be published?

Thrilled, and perhaps a bit scared.  It was hard to believe that this very private stack of pages was going to be edited, typeset, bound, and distributed.  I worried a lot about how readers would respond to the book. I knew there would be a lot I wanted to change, even after the book was published.  But a professor of mine, Elizabeth Tallent, gave me some advice that seemed rather wise: "If you're going to write," she said, "you have to write a first book.  You have to write the book you can write today.  With every subsequent book, you'll learn more.  But you've got to start somewhere."  It was helpful to think of what was happening as a beginning, rather than as a culmination.

Many of the voices in How to Breathe belong to children. Are there autobiographical elements to this? How difficult was it to write from the point of view of a child?

I have a brother and sister who are five and eight years younger; they kept childhood a bit closer to my mind, even when I was in my early twenties.  We were all fantastically immature together, which probably helped too.  Of course, there are a lot of autobiographical elements in the stories; but everything changes in the process of making fiction.  Lorrie Moore says that the proper relationship of a writer to his or her own life is similar to a cook with a cupboard.  What the cook makes from the cupboard is not the same as what's in the cupboard.
 
Are you tempted to expand any of the stories into longer works? What is the difference in your approach between writing the short stories and a novel? Which format do you think is most effective?

The form that's most effective depends on the material.  The pieces in How to Breathe Underwater were conceived as stories, and it's difficult to imagine them any other way; their scope feels more appropriate for twenty pages rather than three or four hundred.  As I was finishing the book, though, I started thinking about another narrative, one that seemed not to fit the relatively abbreviated form of the short story.  That's the piece I've been working on for the past two years.  It's a novel about a young Hungarian Jewish man who goes to Paris to study architecture just before the Second World War, and who then has to go back to Hungary when the war begins.  It's based on some of my grandfather's experiences from those years.  I've loved writing and researching the book.  The short story seems to me like a very carefully arranged room, whereas the novel is more like an entire house, or a neighborhood, or perhaps even an entire city.

How do you write?

I write on computer but I take notes and write out some scenes in a variety of little notebooks that are presently scattered all over my desk and the study floor.

Could you recommend two paperback books for reading groups?

1. Andrew Sean Greer's The Confessions of Max Tivoli.  Max is an unusual child: born looking like an old man, his body ages backward while his mind ages in the usual fashion.  The story opens in nineteenth-century San Francisco, and Greer renders the city and his protagonist's situation with incredible sensitivity and detail.