Dear world: Here’s a story

Who writes epistolary novels these days? Who even knows what they are? Even though the concept of telling a fictional story through letters seemed so, well, 18th century, Elisabeth Robinson went ahead with it anyway.

“People were saying, ‘Don’t do it’; they’d say it was unsellable,” says the author of the new novel “The True and Outstanding Adventures of the Hunt Sisters,” a first novel receiving the kind of advance hype usually reserved for movies starring hobbits. “I find there’s something very direct about writing a letter. I conceive of this as more of a dialogue, even a monologue.”

The “Hunt Sisters” (Little, Brown) is that, and more. Told through letters written to friends, lovers and business acquaintances by Olivia Hunt, a stand-in for the author, it’s a roman a clef based on two aspects of Robinson’s life: the death of her younger sister, Laurie, in 1998 from leukemia, and Robinson’s former career as a film producer, particularly the time she spent with director Fred Schepisi trying to make a film of “Don Quixote” with John Cleese and Robin Williams as stars.

The novel is a real juggling act, combining the horrors of her sister’s drawn-out illness (which included chemotherapy, remission and then a bone marrow transplant) with the insanity of the filmmaking process. That Robinson manages to pull this off successfully is one of the book’s major accomplishments.

“I wrote this because I was really grieving and I needed to figure out how you can live with hope, knowing your odds are dismal,” says Robinson. “I was really moved by my sister’s optimism. But after I started writing about her I felt the need for comedy in the book, and that led me to Hollywood. I thought ‘Don Quixote’ was a perfect echo for what I wanted to do in my book, which was have a cynical practical character seemingly rescued by a dopey idealistic character.”

Although she sees a little of Olivia in herself, Robinson does not come off as particularly cynical. A pretty, petite 43-year-old who looks 10 years younger, she is a voluble talker who punctuates her comments with frequent bursts of laughter. Robinson loves to read poetry and lives in a cozy Upper East Side apartment dominated by overstuffed, floor-to-ceiling bookcases.

Creative impulse satisfied

A Michigan native, Robinson moved to New York after college and eventually wound up in the film industry, first as a book scout for Warner Bros., then as an executive at MGM and for Alan Ladd Jr. at Paramount.

But moviemaking proved unrewarding. “I didn’t feel that personal achievement you feel when you actually make something yourself,” says Robinson. “The collaborative part of it is fantastic, but as an executive it felt more managerial than creative, and I had an impulse to just create something myself.”

So shortly after producing the 2001 feature “Last Orders,” a British film with Michael Caine and Tom Courtenay about old friends who come together to honor a dead comrade, Robinson decided to take a year off to write. She found her authorial voice in the easiest way possible: by employing the first person.

“I cheated, in a way, by writing letters,” says Robinson. “It’s close to first person. At first I thought I’d write this as if I were writing a letter, and later take off the ‘Dear so and so.’ But then I found by writing to someone specific, I’d be telling the reader something about what was going on. So then I created characters for Olivia to write to.”

Robinson is the first to admit that her Hollywood experience helped her with the novel. Reading books to find potential film projects made Robinson aware of basic story elements such as pacing, suspense and the withholding of information. And as a screenwriter herself, “I always thought in terms of scenes,” she says. “In writing letters, there’s a familiar modularity; there’s going to be a letter where this happens, where she tells someone that, and I’ll fill in the rest as I go along. So this was scenes in the form of letters.”

Shades of Robinson’s own reality crept into “The Hunt Sisters” in other ways too. In the novel, thirtysomething Olivia has to decide whether she wants to pursue her “Don Quixote” project or move to New Mexico to be with her artist boyfriend.

In real life, Robinson chose one career over another when she moved from L.A. back to New York because she prefers the East Coast and wants to work full time as a writer. Her decision didn’t involve a romantic component, but Robinson feels “the romantic stuff in the book is relatable to young women who have conflicting desires that often come to a head in their 30s. It’s me or the job. It’s a complicated time for people, and I wanted a complicated character who basically wanted to have her cake and eat it too.”

Yet it is the Hollywood riffs that may attract the most attention. “The Hunt Sisters” is filled with comments on movie-star perks, psychotic auteur directors and incredibly nasty, culturally clueless, Tinseltown insiders, like the agent who wants to rename the “Don Quixote” film “Sancho Panza” (to which Olivia replies sarcastically: “I thought about how the novel has been called ‘Don Quixote’ for over 400 years, but it’s hardly a bestseller anymore, is it?”).

Behind the scenes no more

It’s obvious Robinson is having fun with all this, but now the worm is about to turn: She’s the one who’s in the center of the media spotlight. As a first novel, “The Hunt Sisters” has an unusually large first printing of 100,000 copies, some really strong advance reviews and has already been sold in nearly a dozen foreign languages. Interview requests are rolling in.

All this is not making her feel terribly comfortable. Robinson has been a behind-the-scenes person for years and is used to the anonymity. She doesn’t have any pictures of herself with movie stars hanging on her walls and is the kind of down-to-earth person who says she likes New York “because I can walk out my door and get a slice of pizza anytime.” The attention also bothers her because “my movie business experience has made me deeply skeptical of hype.”

But regardless of the book’s reception, writing it was a life-altering experience: It turned a glass-half-empty person into a glass-half-full one. “They say you die the way you live,” says Robinson. “So when death arrives, an optimist would say, ‘There must be some mistake, and I’m going to live even more, just to prove you’re wrong.’ I wanted to be more like that and I thought that if I wrote about my sister, I would maybe get a little optimistic by doing it. And I am.”