She gave a TEDx talk at the 2018 TEDx Bend, entitled “We Need to Teach Boys to Read Stories About Girls.” Her talk emphasized the importance of empathy and how it helps us to connect with others. She believes that stories have the power to teach us how to empathize. Center did not mention her TEDx talk at the High Point Library event, but she did express other philosophical thoughts.

“I have a theory that we should all follow our own compasses on reading, that you should read the books that you love, not the other books that people think you ought to love,” said Center. “You should read the books that work for you in a certain moment in your life. That is why my battle cry has become ‘Read for Joy’ because I think you can teach yourself things you need to learn when you follow your own compass about what you want to read.”

“There are things that I need to learn as a human that I sort of try to teach myself through stories. I think fiction is uniquely qualified to help us learn to do things. You kind of merge with the main character. Whatever that main character is learning, you get to learn it too. I like to write stories about how life knocks us down, and we find a way to get up and keep going. That is why people’s lives fall apart at the beginnings of my stories, and we watch as they figure out ways to put things back together. I would never run a main character over with a bus in the last chapter of my books, but I might do it in the first chapter because I want to see how that person pulls it together in the wake of that moment.”

She also commented on the prevalence of humor in her otherwise tragic tales. “For me, comedy and tragedy live side by side. I think humans need comedy because we know exactly how hard life is, exactly how hard we are going to have to struggle and exactly how much our hearts are going to be broken. We need something to help make it better.”

After several brief synopses and discussion about the connections between her latest novels “How to Walk Away” and “Things You Save in a Fire,” Center revealed her fourth novel, “The Lost Husband,” is currently in film production, starring Josh Duhamel, Leslie Bibb and Nora Dunn. The movie’s release date has not been announced.

When asked about her development as a writer from the sixth grade to the present and the different hurdles she has encountered along the way, Center explained some of her arduous journey and inspirational practices.

“I did everything you could possibly do to be a writer,” said Center. “I did everything I could think of. I wrote poems about heartbreak. I wrote for the school newspaper. I did creative writing classes.”

After winning a creative writing scholarship in high school, Center went on to attend Vassar College to major in creative writing, where she also won the Vassar College Fiction Prize. She returned home to Houston, Texas, after winning a fellowship to attend graduate school at the University of Houston’s Creative Writing Program.

“I had plans to become Jane Austen very quickly, you know,” said Center. “I thought, ‘How hard could that be?’ I had all this early encouragement and success, and then it all kind of came to a halt. I kept sending out these stories and trying to get them published. Back then, there was no internet. I spent a lot of years questioning the meaning of life, and lying on the floor and quitting. I had a lot of training, and I always studied really hard. I also kept journals from sixth grade all the way through college.

I think what made me better, and I think this is a great tip for life, is I think when you learn how to read stories, and how to talk about stories, you learn how to criticize. You learn how to pick stories apart and see what is not working. Somewhere along the way, I stopped doing that when I was reading, and I started looking for what was right with the stories that I was reading.

When I review a book, I write about what I loved about the story, what delighted me, what caught my attention, what made me curious. Once I started doing that, I got better as a writer because I started looking for what was right, and I learned a lot from doing that.”