[SPEAKER_00]: and welcome to our show.
[SPEAKER_00]: The shit no one tells you about writing.
[SPEAKER_00]: I'm Bianca Morey and I'm joined by Kali Waters and CC Lira from PS Literary Agency.
[SPEAKER_00]: Hi everyone.
[SPEAKER_00]: Today's guest is an author and freelance writer.
[SPEAKER_00]: She holds a PhD in Comparative Literature from Emory University, where she was the recipient of a Woodruff Scholarship
[SPEAKER_00]: and taught to an expository writing program at New York University, which she received an award for excellence in teaching.
[SPEAKER_00]: She studied philosophy in Belonia, Italy, and received a dissertation grant from Friday University in Berlin, Germany.
[SPEAKER_00]: She writes across genres, including thrillers, romcums, and essays.
[SPEAKER_00]: Her work explores questions about trauma, loss, language, and desire.
[SPEAKER_00]: steeped in philosophical, psychological and literary themes, her writing is granted in studies of character.
[SPEAKER_00]: As a freelance writer, she writes for various companies, including a faith-grade marketplace, for global artisans, where she helps bring the unique stories to life.
[SPEAKER_00]: She lives with her family in Los Angeles.
[SPEAKER_00]: It's my pleasure to welcome Jacqueline Faber.
[SPEAKER_00]: Jacqueline, welcome to the show.
[SPEAKER_00]: Thank you so much for having me.
[SPEAKER_00]: I've been such a huge fan for so long.
[SPEAKER_00]: I'm really honored to be here.
[SPEAKER_00]: It's amazing to have you here and for our listeners who are watching this on our YouTube channel, I'm holding up the cover of the book, The Department, it's a really, really striking cover and this is what we're going to be chatting about today.
[SPEAKER_00]: Okay, so Jacqueline, to kick us off, I would love to hear about your journey to publication.
[SPEAKER_00]: That's the thing most emerging authors want to hear about.
[SPEAKER_01]: Yes, so like many authors, it was a sort of fraught journey.
[SPEAKER_01]: As you mentioned, my background's in academia, so most of the writing I had done was academic writing and at some point when I was actually living in Berlin, I started transitioning to freelance writing and
[SPEAKER_01]: When I took a stab at writing my first novel, which was many years ago, I queried it and got a lot of feedback.
[SPEAKER_01]: Like, I really like you're writing.
[SPEAKER_01]: I'm not sure what to do with this project.
[SPEAKER_01]: And so eventually I table that project, tried another one to couldn't quite pull it together.
[SPEAKER_01]: And then when I wrote the department, I just, it could sort of feel that it came out of me in a different way.
[SPEAKER_01]: But still, you know, the journey to finding an agent was challenging.
[SPEAKER_01]: It took me
[SPEAKER_01]: many, many months, many queries, many rejections, and then I finally found one who really understood what I was trying to do.
[SPEAKER_01]: But then, of course, you're not finished, then you go on submission, and that is its own beast, and that took a while to find my publisher.
[SPEAKER_01]: So, you know, it's not a simple sort of linear journey.
[SPEAKER_01]: There's a lot of starts and stops.
[SPEAKER_00]: Yeah, completely.
[SPEAKER_00]: And that's where the frustration comes in.
[SPEAKER_00]: Can you tell us about while you were querying?
[SPEAKER_00]: Were the instances where you were getting back anything that was useful that could help you revise your query later?
[SPEAKER_00]: Was it mostly form rejections?
[SPEAKER_00]: How did that look?
[SPEAKER_01]: Yeah, I mean, there were form rejections, of course, but sometimes people would say something like,
[SPEAKER_01]: I'm not identifying with this character enough and I sense that something was not working with the beginning of the book and so the book that exists now is the opening is quite different from what it had been and I realize that you know the characters in this novel
[SPEAKER_01]: make a lot of bad decisions and act in ways that are morally suspect.
[SPEAKER_01]: And so I knew that I had to tinker with the opening in a way to pull them in enough to give these characters a chance.
[SPEAKER_01]: But when you start receiving feedback, that's sort of consistent.
[SPEAKER_01]: I mean, when you've got right a book, there's this sort of push and pull between maintaining your artistic vision and staying true to that.
[SPEAKER_01]: And also being very receptive to feedback that comes in.
[SPEAKER_01]: And there is no
[SPEAKER_01]: simple formula, but really paying attention and asking yourself, not is this good, but does this work in the way that I really want it to work.
[SPEAKER_01]: And if it's fine, if you find that it's not working because people aren't responding to it in a certain way, then you really have to dig back in.
[SPEAKER_00]: Yeah, that's the thing is consistency with feedback because the problem is they to readers or even when you get feedback from agent or even at the point when you're pitching editors.
[SPEAKER_00]: I mean, I remember with my debut novel, we were out with editors and one editor would be like, I love this character.
[SPEAKER_00]: She's amazing.
[SPEAKER_00]: This character could not get on board with.
[SPEAKER_00]: And a day later you'd get feedback and they would love the exact opposite character and they were like, this character didn't feel real to me.
[SPEAKER_00]: So when you have those kinds of contradictions, it's impossible to do anything with it.
[SPEAKER_00]: But when people are honing in on something and are like, this is a particular problem.
[SPEAKER_00]: But like you say, it's up to you as the author to decide how to fix it.
[SPEAKER_00]: You know, it doesn't mean you need to change it completely.
[SPEAKER_00]: Sometimes it means you need to change your vision, but sometimes it's saying, I have a vision, it's not creating an effect I want.
[SPEAKER_00]: So how can I tweak that vision to create the effect I want?
[SPEAKER_00]: Do you feel like you found me nailed the beginning before you got an agent or was that something that even happened like at the editing state?
[SPEAKER_01]: I think my agent responded to the beginning as I had it, but editors were not necessarily responding to it.
[SPEAKER_01]: And so, you know, we had sent it out on a first round of submissions.
[SPEAKER_01]: And I think we were getting certain feedback, like, again, not totally connecting with these characters.
[SPEAKER_01]: In my agent had said at the time, like, let's just keep going.
[SPEAKER_01]: And I said, I don't know, I feel like
[SPEAKER_01]: I understand what they're saying, and I want to dig back in.
[SPEAKER_01]: And so this beginning as it is now, probably went out on my third round of submissions.
[SPEAKER_01]: And for some, surely, they finish it.
[SPEAKER_01]: It goes out.
[SPEAKER_01]: It immediately finds a home.
[SPEAKER_01]: But many authors I've spoken to that's not what the trajectory feels like at all.
[SPEAKER_01]: So it certainly didn't for me.
[SPEAKER_01]: And even now, I mean, I think the beginning achieves and I know we'll talk about the beginning a little bit and they were very intentional decisions behind why I started this way, but you know, there are other beginnings I could imagine for this even now.
[SPEAKER_00]: Yeah, well, that's the thing with beginnings.
[SPEAKER_00]: They are infinite number of beginnings, right?
[SPEAKER_00]: Because the further along you move in a novel, you keep closing off options.
[SPEAKER_00]: It's like closing doors and you're like, okay, I can't go that route anymore because the character did X, Y and Z. But the beginning, you can literally open anywhere.
[SPEAKER_00]: And I think that's what makes beginnings so hard.
[SPEAKER_00]: But the problem is those writers, we stubbornly cling to that first idea.
[SPEAKER_00]: It's like that was the first idea.
[SPEAKER_00]: That was the vision I had.
[SPEAKER_00]: And so we cling to that for so long before we find the able to go, okay, let me let it go, let me try something else.
[SPEAKER_00]: So yes, I would like you to read the first three pages because I'd love for our listeners to hear how you framed the narrative, but just I'm going to read the flat copy just so that everybody gets a context first.
[SPEAKER_00]: So it starts with some secrets we keep even from ourselves.
[SPEAKER_00]: Philosophy professor Neil Webb can't think of one good reason to get up in the morning.
[SPEAKER_00]: His wife's left him is academic researchers, spattered, and the prospect of tenure is more remote than ever.
[SPEAKER_00]: until Luchier the Nazi vanishes.
[SPEAKER_00]: A college student at the Southern University when Niel teaches Luchier has a secret of her own.
[SPEAKER_00]: One that ponds her relationships and leads to destructive reckless behavior when Niel is drawn into the mystery of her disappearance, he finds himself suddenly relevant again, but at what cost?
[SPEAKER_00]: Each crew pulls him deeper until the chairs passed, but also into the hidden lives of his closest friends and colleagues.
[SPEAKER_00]: What drove the chair to risk everything and might as Neil a professor who hardly knew her, cared to find her.
[SPEAKER_00]: From campus classrooms to sex, dance, to backward highways,
[SPEAKER_00]: The department shows the world through the eyes of Lichere and Niel as they descend into obsession, delusion and the dangers terrain of memory and covering the trauma that drives them to behave in ways, even they themselves could never have predicted.
[SPEAKER_00]: Okay, so read us those first three pages.
[SPEAKER_00]: Okay.
[SPEAKER_01]: So it starts in Neil's perspective.
[SPEAKER_01]: Now, what can I say about Fager Lewis, except from the moment I met her, I wanted her.
[SPEAKER_01]: I still remember the early days sitting at the bar, burning down cigarette after cigarette, like we wanted to inflict real damage, gin and tonics on the counter, swirbling on our stools in the dim orange light.
[SPEAKER_01]: Where are you here?
[SPEAKER_01]: She asked me one night.
[SPEAKER_01]: Like, here at the bar, here at school.
[SPEAKER_01]: It was our first year as graduate students in philosophy.
[SPEAKER_01]: I was already wasted, but I poured back the rest of my gin.
[SPEAKER_01]: Guns of bricks and came on the Jeep box in a group of girls stumbled in.
[SPEAKER_01]: I think because I watched a woman die once.
[SPEAKER_01]: I had never uttered the words out loud before.
[SPEAKER_01]: So Adrian's eyes widened and I felt her lean in.
[SPEAKER_01]: That's not what I was expecting.
[SPEAKER_01]: Wisps of her blonde hair floated like strands of a spider web in the blurred bar light.
[SPEAKER_01]: Truth be told, most of my memories are fragments, broken bits, cut glass.
[SPEAKER_01]: But this one, this memory of the woman drowning, was different.
[SPEAKER_01]: It was summertime, I must have been six years old, my brother Ethan only for.
[SPEAKER_01]: Our family had piled into my dad's automobile cutlass, and we'd driven across the country from Indiana to California.
[SPEAKER_01]: Rose and Rose of crops, sun scorched fields that touched the sky.
[SPEAKER_01]: My comic books spread across the back seat, motels and fast food chains.
[SPEAKER_01]: Then one day we sat on a beach and Los Angeles, hot sand beneath us, waves crashing, seagulls overhead, like we've been cast in a commercial for something that looked like real life but wasn't.
[SPEAKER_01]: Ethan and I dug a trench that filled with water when the tide came in.
[SPEAKER_01]: My mother was lying on a towel, a t-shirt draped over her face to block the sun.
[SPEAKER_01]: From somewhere down the beach, someone started shouting.
[SPEAKER_01]: We all leaped up.
[SPEAKER_01]: My mother grabbed our hands and held on tight.
[SPEAKER_01]: The sun bounced off the ocean and I could see a woman swimming out past the breakers.
[SPEAKER_01]: One minute, her head was bobbing.
[SPEAKER_01]: The next, it slipped below the waves.
[SPEAKER_01]: It was like a video game.
[SPEAKER_01]: They're gone, they're again.
[SPEAKER_01]: Up and down the beach, people ran into the water, but no one dared to swim out.
[SPEAKER_01]: The reptile was too strong.
[SPEAKER_01]: When help eventually came, they carried her body out of the surf and later in the sand.
[SPEAKER_01]: They did chest compressions and affixed a breathing apparatus, but even I could see it was too late.
[SPEAKER_01]: Even a nice student friend of our trench, the water filling and draining, while the dead woman lay on the beach.
[SPEAKER_01]: You know what I think about all these years later, I said to Fadreau that night,
[SPEAKER_01]: the quietness, all of us just standing there.
[SPEAKER_01]: So you looked at me, ashamed to her eyes.
[SPEAKER_01]: You think someone should have done more?
[SPEAKER_01]: I don't know.
[SPEAKER_01]: I smashed the butt of my cigarette into an astray and tugged another from the pack.
[SPEAKER_01]: Later, we found out that the woman's husband was on the beach and her kids, two boys, same ages as me and Ethan.
[SPEAKER_01]: Jesus, they'd just said, that's horrifying.
[SPEAKER_01]: It was then that she told me about Kitty Genevieve's.
[SPEAKER_01]: In nineteen sixty four, a young woman was raped and stabbed to death in Queens, New York.
[SPEAKER_01]: While thirty eight people watched from the safety of their apartments.
[SPEAKER_01]: I mean, what does that say about who we really are?
[SPEAKER_01]: She asked.
[SPEAKER_01]: Thirty eight sets of eyes.
[SPEAKER_01]: You know how many called the cops?
[SPEAKER_01]: None.
[SPEAKER_01]: Major shook her head.
[SPEAKER_01]: We all think we'd be different that we'd be the ethical one.
[SPEAKER_01]: Five years later, I would be married to Fadre Lewis and writing my dissertation on bystander apathy.
[SPEAKER_01]: Kitty Genevieve is the center of my work.
[SPEAKER_01]: Even now, all these years later, it's hard for me to separate the smell of gin.
[SPEAKER_01]: Fadre is a beautiful face, the drowning woman and Kitty Genevieve.
[SPEAKER_01]: all those pieces seem to find each other that night and I felt certain of only two things in the entire world.
[SPEAKER_01]: I was falling in love with this beautiful girl and I would never be a bystander.
[SPEAKER_00]: Goosebumps stuff man.
[SPEAKER_00]: So I know this was a very intentional opening to frame the narrative.
[SPEAKER_00]: So take us through each decision in terms of that intentionality.
[SPEAKER_00]: Why you set it up this way?
[SPEAKER_01]: Well, as I mentioned, Bianca, I mean, this opening was so hard for me to get right.
[SPEAKER_01]: Originally, I'd started it with, I know the terrible word of a pro luck.
[SPEAKER_01]: But I'd started it with a pro luck.
[SPEAKER_01]: pulling something from closer to the end.
[SPEAKER_01]: I wanted to ramp up tension early, but it wasn't really working because it was sort of confusing and you really had to have certain information going into it.
[SPEAKER_01]: So I knew I needed to abandon that.
[SPEAKER_01]: And I ultimately made this decision to begin here.
[SPEAKER_01]: In Niels perspective, although the book does sort of move back and forth between their two perspectives which she is and Niels, I knew I wanted it to be in Niels perspective the time of now and that was going to sort of drive the story that kept the pacing up.
[SPEAKER_01]: But also, you know, this is a thriller and I think when you have an opening of a book,
[SPEAKER_01]: That opening is making a certain kind of a promise to readers, right?
[SPEAKER_01]: And so with each book, you're looking for who your readers are and also who your readers aren't.
[SPEAKER_01]: And so I wanted to signal to my reader, like, yes, you're about to read a thriller.
[SPEAKER_01]: You know it from the back copy.
[SPEAKER_01]: But this is not going to be a certain kind of thriller.
[SPEAKER_01]: This is going to be a different kind of thriller where we're going to be engaging with
[SPEAKER_01]: certain kinds of questions, there's going to be a certain kind of language philosophy is all over this book.
[SPEAKER_01]: And so to me, this opening acknowledges that there are heavy themes that are going on and someone is going to be missing.
[SPEAKER_01]: But it's going to be rooted in questions of memory and witnessing
[SPEAKER_01]: and trauma and really what we can ever offer one another in terms of being bystanders.
[SPEAKER_01]: So I sort of felt like this made the right kind of promise and it was a promise that I could fulfill with the book.
[SPEAKER_01]: This is not a police procedural, for example.
[SPEAKER_01]: So if that's what you're looking for and you come to this opening, you're going to get the message that it's probably not going to move in that way.
[SPEAKER_00]: Yeah, there's so much here in terms of what defines us, what shapes us, what can happen in our childhood that haunts us for the rest of our lives and makes us believe certain things.
[SPEAKER_00]: How reliable is memory, how reliable are our versions of events, especially scoring ones that shape us for the rest of our lives.
[SPEAKER_00]: So I loved that you did that.
[SPEAKER_00]: And I want to read four hour listeners, the endings of the lost paragraphs.
[SPEAKER_00]: in two different chapters.
[SPEAKER_00]: It goes later I would look back and marvel at the day when Lucia was just the name of some girl I did not know.
[SPEAKER_00]: Soon of course she would be everywhere.
[SPEAKER_00]: On the news in the papers whispered about in the hallways and I would struggle to remember a time when Lucia of a naughty did not consume my every waking moment.
[SPEAKER_00]: And then we have it later here another chapter ending.
[SPEAKER_00]: As Fager disappeared around the corner toward the bathrooms, I watched him watch her go, then leaned down his ear closed to the brunette's mouth as if he was having trouble hearing her.
[SPEAKER_00]: He's thin, leaps broken to a smile and then a laugh.
[SPEAKER_00]: He put his hand on the small of the brunette's back.
[SPEAKER_00]: and held it there for a moment before pulling it away.
[SPEAKER_00]: When Pedro returned, he left the grenade and stood by his wife.
[SPEAKER_00]: At the time, there were things I didn't understand.
[SPEAKER_00]: Things I would eventually learn, like the fact that Pedro accused him beforehand of being separate from his work.
[SPEAKER_00]: It doesn't keep you upshirt said, it's just a logic game to you.
[SPEAKER_00]: To figure out there was no greater insult, Tim's lecture had been an answer of sorts.
[SPEAKER_00]: Proof of just how personal it was.
[SPEAKER_00]: Of course, I didn't know that then as I stood there, downing my third glass of wine, watching them circling each other like shocks.
[SPEAKER_00]: At the time, there was only one thing I felt with any certainty at all.
[SPEAKER_00]: Tim, Janek, was having an affair.
[SPEAKER_00]: Okay, so
[SPEAKER_00]: This looking back vibe through at the book, again that was very intentional because you could write a book in a linear time frame, other in past tense or in present tense, but not from a point in the future where this character is constantly looking back.
[SPEAKER_00]: So we have Luchia now and then we have Neil now and then.
[SPEAKER_00]: My question to you is, how does this dual timeline narrative and this looking back vibe?
[SPEAKER_00]: How does that enhance the story rather than writing it linearly?
[SPEAKER_00]: What was the intentionality there?
[SPEAKER_00]: That's a great question.
[SPEAKER_01]: Well, first of all, I do just want to draw attention to those sections that you picked out and they impact the timeline, but they also impact the tension.
[SPEAKER_01]: And so I think that sometimes for those of us who write sort of very character driven novels, so in a work, you can have what I like to think of as sort of an organic tension, right?
[SPEAKER_01]: There's attention that builds just through the action of the present tense.
[SPEAKER_01]: Sometimes if you need a kind of hit of tension, that looking back and you can't do it all the time, I think a reader, it starts feeling sort of manipulative in a way, and I'm thinking of it as a kind of inorganic tension, that your sort of constructing for the reader, but you're signaling to that reader, you've just been immersed maybe in a chapter or a section that's very
[SPEAKER_01]: character driven maybe the pacing isn't super high and you can sort of leverage that feeling of looking back and signaling to the reader something really significant is happening here and it's sort of like a trust me on this one feeling it affects the timeline but it also affects
[SPEAKER_01]: that kind of unspoken relationship you have with that reader where they turn the page at that point.
[SPEAKER_01]: And so I don't for listeners who are finding themselves like if you're getting feedback like the beginning is sagging or the beginning is that the pacing isn't working or something like that.
[SPEAKER_01]: These are devices that that you can try to see if it if it gives that hit of tension that may be a chapter needs.
[SPEAKER_01]: In terms of the timeline of this book, I mean, it was really challenging because, as you mentioned, there is the time of now, and then there's the time of then, and Neil's exists, and then now, and that she has exists in the then.
[SPEAKER_01]: However, as you mentioned,
[SPEAKER_01]: both of them have paths that go even further back than that.
[SPEAKER_01]: And because this is a book, it's a book about a missing girl, but really it's a book about memory.
[SPEAKER_01]: And even that opening, when I wrote that opening, I really wanted it to be the case that if you finished the book and went back and read that opening again, every single thing in that opening,
[SPEAKER_01]: you know, from his introduction of Fadra to the memory of California and even how he talks about California, they're all relevant.
[SPEAKER_01]: And so it really became a kind of like tricky thing for me to create a story in which memory feels sort of dislodged in a way and time
[SPEAKER_01]: as a kind of linearity because that's how a mystery works, but also where we're being pulled out of a kind of linear time and shuffled around.
[SPEAKER_01]: But I do think that those moments that you read are really kind of orienting for a reader and telling them, hey, attention to this thing here.
[SPEAKER_01]: This is relevant.
[SPEAKER_01]: So yeah.
[SPEAKER_00]: It allows for foreshadowing as well, it allows with playing that tension because you know that the narrator knows more than what you as the reader knows or creates a tension between the reader and the narrator, et cetera, et cetera.
[SPEAKER_00]: And it also creates the sense that things can happen in the past, but still have such immediacy, that we can have things that happen ten years ago, but feel like they happen today in terms of the echoing effects that they still
[SPEAKER_00]: have on us and that makes sense in this kind of story.
[SPEAKER_00]: So I love the way you went backwards and forwards on that and played around for that tension because as you say,
[SPEAKER_00]: There are many ways to uptention.
[SPEAKER_00]: Tension is not just a car driving on a dark night and they can't see very far in front of them and all the zombies following them, right?
[SPEAKER_00]: Tension can be created in so many different ways and this novel did it brilliantly.
[SPEAKER_00]: When it came to actually writing the story like this happened and then this happened in terms of causality and knowing how the dominoes tip.
[SPEAKER_00]: Did you have to put up like a board with all your posted notes so that you knew this is what happened from start to finish and then move those pieces around or was a very clear in your mind that you would start with the now move to the past, come back to the now etc.
[SPEAKER_00]: How did you outline all of that?
[SPEAKER_01]: Well, you know, initially, when I can see to this book, I had this sort of visual of this young woman's face on a missing person poster.
[SPEAKER_01]: And it was sort of haunting me.
[SPEAKER_01]: And I originally thought I would just write it from Neil's perspective.
[SPEAKER_01]: Neil, like me, was trying to access this woman and her story.
[SPEAKER_01]: But Lucia,
[SPEAKER_01]: Her voice felt very strong in my head and at some point I realized I wanted to move back and forth between the two of them.
[SPEAKER_01]: But on my first draft, I really didn't know what happened.
[SPEAKER_01]: I didn't know what happened to her.
[SPEAKER_01]: I knew that she was missing.
[SPEAKER_01]: That's all I knew.
[SPEAKER_01]: And like one of her openings, I think her opening chapter, she's like at a frapp party and she's hooking up with some guy and she goes downstairs and her boyfriend is there.
[SPEAKER_01]: And so I had these glimpses into her and to some of her choices and a certain kind of like I call it recklessness, but I didn't understand what was driving all this.
[SPEAKER_01]: So really the first draft, which there was no board, there were no notes.
[SPEAKER_01]: It was just a mess.
[SPEAKER_01]: It was me really trying to write my way to understand what happened to this girl.
[SPEAKER_01]: and along the way, what happened to some of these characters.
[SPEAKER_01]: And once I figured out what had happened to her, because again, I'm more comfortable writing characters.
[SPEAKER_01]: So I needed the onists to be on me for plot.
[SPEAKER_01]: I was like, I need to get through this first draft to figure out, like, can I move a story along?
[SPEAKER_01]: And once I figured out what happened to her and who was involved, I was like, why would these characters behave in this way?
[SPEAKER_01]: So then subsequent drafts were going back and really trying to lay down
[SPEAKER_01]: the foundations for these other characters so it would have been like a very helpful for me to have a board as you describe it's just that's not how this book came out and then really it became a kind of tricky thing where I was like art what would the timeline be and an anchoring it in
[SPEAKER_01]: in a certain moment in history and writing down.
[SPEAKER_01]: If this happens on this day, then this would happen on this day.
[SPEAKER_01]: And so that became some of the minutiae logistics that had to get worked out.
[SPEAKER_01]: But I have found in the past, I mentioned a book that I tried to write that I couldn't write, which hopefully one day I'll come back to.
[SPEAKER_01]: But that book was sort of heavy on like a research.
[SPEAKER_01]: And what I have found is when I get to bog down in
[SPEAKER_01]: Logistics or research, some of that energy that I need to really propel me through the writing of a book gets lost.
[SPEAKER_01]: And so I sensed in an early draft of this, like just follow it as far as you can with just this energy.
[SPEAKER_01]: You can always go back and work out those details, but grab hold of this because this book is going to work or not work on the characters.
[SPEAKER_00]: Listen, as a pancer who really hates plotting, I feel you completely like it's very organic for me.
[SPEAKER_00]: It's not the most efficient way of writing by any means.
[SPEAKER_00]: I think the people who put up their posted notes are much more efficient writers, but I mean that's the thing.
[SPEAKER_00]: The writing doesn't have to be efficient.
[SPEAKER_00]: It just has to be done and I feel like when we get surprised,
[SPEAKER_00]: the read that gets surprised.
[SPEAKER_01]: I do want to say one thing on that note because I'm now writing in scrivener.
[SPEAKER_01]: I don't know if you use scrivener, but scrivener sort of allows you to have the best of both worlds.
[SPEAKER_01]: So right now, project I'm working on, where I'm like, I don't know, I'm sensing something's coming down the line and because I'm using scrivener as opposed to a word document, I can just sort of go down, make a note of it, and so it feels like I can maintain that energy, but be a little bit more of a plotter at the same time.
[SPEAKER_00]: Yeah, I use scrubbingers while I'm under the very useful tool.
[SPEAKER_00]: I used to sing their praises from the rooftops and then one day I had a word, the word Snigger, which is similar to Snigger, but not the same word, which is why I chose the word Snigger, changed it to the violently offensive inward.
[SPEAKER_00]: And when I have spent months reaching out to scrubbing her to ask them to please change this and they haven't really been very bothered by it and then they try to blame Apple.
[SPEAKER_00]: for their software and correcting it, etc.
[SPEAKER_00]: So now I no longer recommend scrubbing up for that reason, but it does have very hard pinching.
[SPEAKER_00]: So if anybody from scrubbing is listening, if you could please sort of fix the inherent racism
[SPEAKER_00]: that is in your software that would be great to make it easier for us to write us to endorse it and to work on it.
[SPEAKER_00]: And we've already somebody actually gave a shit about that, but it's been a year now and I'm kind of giving up on that.
[SPEAKER_00]: Okay, so I think I've got time for like one last question.
[SPEAKER_00]: Neal's struggle with his past.
[SPEAKER_00]: and his memories, and how that drives this narrative forward, rather than mirroring us in the past, was nothing short of masterful.
[SPEAKER_00]: It was just incredible to see somebody keep coming back to the past, to the past, and you set it up so early on, and often when I see that in novels, it just drags down the pacing, keeps dragging us back.
[SPEAKER_00]: But we needed, it was like an undertow that needed to pull him back,
[SPEAKER_00]: to finally set him free.
[SPEAKER_00]: Was that something you were planning?
[SPEAKER_00]: Was that one of the things that came out in the multiple rewrites as you were figuring things out?
[SPEAKER_01]: I don't think anyone's ever asked me that great question.
[SPEAKER_01]: You know, I think Serenil, like the thing I went in understanding about him was that he was a figure who
[SPEAKER_01]: whose life did not turn out the way he had expected it.
[SPEAKER_01]: And that is something that I think so many people can understand.
[SPEAKER_01]: And I didn't really know why.
[SPEAKER_01]: And it happens for a certain external reasons, but I sense that that wasn't the whole story with him.
[SPEAKER_01]: And I didn't know, I think on the first draft, I didn't know what had happened to him.
[SPEAKER_01]: I didn't know what kind of sort of baggage he was carrying around.
[SPEAKER_01]: But I knew that
[SPEAKER_01]: his fascination or obsession with being a bystander with ketiginavies who there's a much more complicated story about ketiginavies in here and what happens with that sort of actual narrative that is in the sort of popular vernacular, but I knew that his fixation with this would have to be rooted in something
[SPEAKER_01]: that was probably like repressed in some way.
[SPEAKER_01]: But I don't think it fully took shape until, you know, one of the many drafts.
[SPEAKER_01]: And really, you know, what I have found is the closer you can get to a character, the greater specificity you can bring to a character, the feeling of a character sitting in a dining hall, looking across a space and seeing his ex-wife sit at a table with her new husband who is also in your department.
[SPEAKER_01]: Like to really inhabit that feeling,
[SPEAKER_01]: all of these things that bring you closer to character are at the same time building a backstory that you might not even realize at the moment.
[SPEAKER_01]: And they start becoming very real to you.
[SPEAKER_01]: And so it's almost like you're interrogating their backs right in a way like a psychiatrist would be there.
[SPEAKER_01]: It's like college just like being interrogating their backs.
[SPEAKER_01]: I don't know if you've had that feeling, but you're nodding.
[SPEAKER_01]: So I think you have.
[SPEAKER_01]: And I do think that once a character hits that level of truth for you as the writer,
[SPEAKER_01]: like they start coming with all of this stuff and offering enough to you in this really amazing way.
[SPEAKER_00]: Yeah, and it does feel weird, but it doesn't feel like they're not going to tell you everything upfront.
[SPEAKER_00]: They don't trust you yet, right?
[SPEAKER_00]: It's like a relationship with time.
[SPEAKER_00]: They're going to be like, oh, by the way, I'm actually kind of fucked up about this.
[SPEAKER_00]: And this is how I feel about it.
[SPEAKER_00]: Well, I wasn't going to tell you the first day I made you at the bar.
[SPEAKER_00]: So to me, that's the magic in the alchemy of writing in this very organic way.
[SPEAKER_01]: I love that.
[SPEAKER_01]: I think that's really great.
[SPEAKER_00]: Okay, well we're at the end of our time.
[SPEAKER_00]: So for our listeners, we are linking to the department on our bookshop.org affiliate page.
[SPEAKER_00]: You get the book there.
[SPEAKER_00]: You support an independent bookstore and the podcast at the same time.
[SPEAKER_00]: Jacqueline was such a joy chatting to you.
[SPEAKER_00]: I know I'm interviewing you long after the book sort of came out.
[SPEAKER_00]: It's just because it was a book that I got to later, but I loved it so much that I had to have you back on.
[SPEAKER_00]: And I'm so looking forward to seeing what you come up with next.
[SPEAKER_00]: Thank you so much to such a pleasure.
[SPEAKER_02]: Hi everybody.
[SPEAKER_02]: Welcome to another episode of our podcast.
[SPEAKER_02]: It's Carly today of your author interviewer.
[SPEAKER_02]: I'd like to take my turn in Bianca's chair and talk to my clients.
[SPEAKER_02]: So today we have Jane Haley, a historical fiction author, a lovely talented client of mine who was a friend of the pod.
[SPEAKER_02]: She's been on before, but we have a new book to talk about.
[SPEAKER_02]: Women of Arlington Hall, which I am so excited about.
[SPEAKER_02]: I cried through almost the entire middle of it because it's just so emotional in so many ways.
[SPEAKER_02]: So we're going to get into everything that makes a Jane Healey book, a Jane Healey book, and we're just so glad to have you on the show.
[SPEAKER_02]: Welcome, Jane.
[SPEAKER_03]: Thank you so much for having me, Carly.
[SPEAKER_03]: I'm so excited to be on, and as you know, I was a fan of the pod before I was a client, so it's such a thrill.
[SPEAKER_03]: Thank you.
[SPEAKER_02]: Yeah, we're so happy for you.
[SPEAKER_02]: So tell us about the woman of Arlington Hall.
[SPEAKER_02]: What makes this new book so special in such a Jane book?
[SPEAKER_03]: So the women of Arlington Hall is based on the true stories of a group of female code breakers in the early days of the Cold War in Washington, D.C.
[SPEAKER_03]: And they were responsible for tracking down Soviet spies in the United States by decoding Russian telegrams from the war years.
[SPEAKER_03]: And I was inspired to write this book.
[SPEAKER_03]: Actually, there was an article in twenty eighteen by the brilliant historian in author Liza Mundi.
[SPEAKER_03]: She wrote about the last living code breaker her name was Angelina and Angelina was this she was in her I think she was ninety nine and she was this amazing woman she had kept these secrets of her code breaking years her entire life and she talked about it in the friendships that she formed and how brilliant and Amazing these women were and how they were ahead of her time and so I this was an article from twenty eighteen and I held on to it because I was like I
[SPEAKER_03]: have to find a way into this story and tell these women's stories because they were so extraordinary.
[SPEAKER_03]: And it took me a little while to the books coming out very soon.
[SPEAKER_03]: But yeah, that was the original inspiration that I finally kind of figured out how I was going to write this book.
[SPEAKER_02]: Yeah, I love that.
[SPEAKER_02]: There's a line in the book where they're kind of in their code breaking rooms.
[SPEAKER_02]: They are having a big meeting and they're like, I'm so excited to tell you this big news, but you'll never be able to tell your grandchildren about it.
[SPEAKER_02]: Like that's how like
[SPEAKER_02]: deep, deep, top secret.
[SPEAKER_02]: These cases were, it's all, as he said, true story.
[SPEAKER_02]: So do you want to run us through, you know, how you fictionalize something that is really, you have an incredible author's note at the back where you say, like, you know, this was true.
[SPEAKER_02]: And this timeline was adjusted a bit.
[SPEAKER_02]: How do you give yourself that creative freedom?
[SPEAKER_02]: Obviously, over the course of many books.
[SPEAKER_02]: I mean, I don't know, are you this book six or your book six?
[SPEAKER_03]: It's book five.
[SPEAKER_03]: Yeah, it's five.
[SPEAKER_02]: Yeah, it's five.
[SPEAKER_02]: So how do you decide how you're going to massage the truth in historical fiction like that to make it work for the narrative?
[SPEAKER_03]: That's such a good question, so as biographical fiction, and so the main character in the story drew late in tartare was a real person in history.
[SPEAKER_03]: And this time out, as I was doing the research, I decided that I wanted the main characters, including Catherine Colleen, the protagonist, to be fictional.
[SPEAKER_03]: So they're all, all the main characters are composites of the various women I read about in my research.
[SPEAKER_03]: And the reason I chose to do that is because I wanted the creative freedom to tell a story about
[SPEAKER_03]: these strong group of women, the friendships they form, the romances.
[SPEAKER_03]: Because let's be honest, like this is barely recent history.
[SPEAKER_03]: So I knew that there are people out there who were related to these co-breakers.
[SPEAKER_03]: In fact, Nancy, my editors, has a family member.
[SPEAKER_03]: Her husband's grandmother, I believe, was one of these women.
[SPEAKER_03]: And so I didn't want to use real people in history as the main characters.
[SPEAKER_03]: I wanted that creative freedom to
[SPEAKER_03]: creative narrative arc that was fun and thrilling and high stake.
[SPEAKER_03]: So that's why it shows to make the main character and her surrounding close friends fictional.
[SPEAKER_02]: Yeah, I love that.
[SPEAKER_02]: So this is a type of book where it's like, if you loved Oppenheimer, if you loved our woman in Moscow, like this is such an incredible mashup of those two things.
[SPEAKER_02]: It's such a page-turner because you obviously want to figure out like what's happening, but it's also one of those things where we kind of all know what happened and they're called more.
[SPEAKER_02]: We understand the concept, but there's still something so urgent about it and the way that you wrote it felt so pressing and we want to know what happened to these characters in that situation and the way that you brought it to life and such a
[SPEAKER_02]: incredible way in the horrific parts of it, but still hit so hard again in your author note you talk about like these are things that you know in terms of nuclear bombs and things that actually happened and you know was was a real health challenge for so many people you know in these environments who are exposed to these
[SPEAKER_02]: So, you know, there's just so many levels to this and you keep it.
[SPEAKER_02]: Obviously, like, fine, we have the female friendships.
[SPEAKER_02]: One of the things that really stuck out to me in this latest read, obviously, the proposal that we submitted this and sold it on and read a draft and I just finished the final manuscript.
[SPEAKER_02]: The one thing that really stuck out with me in this draft and I was reading it was
[SPEAKER_02]: this idea of like what is women's work and how we define women's work, especially in a time where a lot of women didn't work.
[SPEAKER_02]: And I think you tackle it so head on.
[SPEAKER_02]: You're just like, these are women that wanted to work and wanted jobs and they're incredibly smart and intelligent women.
[SPEAKER_02]: There's also a lot of women that worked in this office.
[SPEAKER_02]: And so because it was secretive, maybe they were quote unquote, allowed to have these secretive jobs because they weren't like front of office, FBI, CIA type of jobs.
[SPEAKER_02]: Just talk to me a little bit about how you structured that and you didn't
[SPEAKER_02]: over intellectualize it to the reader of like, I don't know, kind of like, participating about women's work.
[SPEAKER_02]: I just found it so interesting that they were just so unabashedly passionate about their careers and their intelligence and they knew who they were.
[SPEAKER_03]: Yes, thank you.
[SPEAKER_03]: Thank you for all those kind of words.
[SPEAKER_03]: One thing that, you know, this is post-war war, which you write.
[SPEAKER_03]: So all the men are returning home.
[SPEAKER_03]: So these women were ending up in these amazing jobs that were really fulfilling professionally while we're all the men were at war.
[SPEAKER_03]: But then they found themselves marginalized again when these men got home.
[SPEAKER_03]: And in the forty's and fifty's, what could you do if you were a really smart woman who went to college, being a nurse, you could be a teacher?
[SPEAKER_03]: That was like pretty much your path.
[SPEAKER_03]: And like I said, they're all inspired by real women, many of them
[SPEAKER_03]: went on to be CIA and FBI executives in the top top echelons of those who's organizations.
[SPEAKER_03]: But at the time, they found their way into this organization and they discovered a true passion for the work.
[SPEAKER_03]: Many of them, you know, they stayed friends during entire lives.
[SPEAKER_03]: A lot of them didn't marry because the work was so secretive.
[SPEAKER_03]: I mean, this project, it was called of a known a project, this co-breaking of the Soviet telegrams to track down Russian spies.
[SPEAKER_03]: And it was not to class life until nineteen ninety five.
[SPEAKER_03]: And so a lot of these women's, you know, grandkids or the nieces and nephews after the fact found out that these women were working on this like when they were in their eighties and nineties or had passed on, they were like, what do you mean?
[SPEAKER_03]: You know, so I think that they were really trailblazers in all the way as women in these professions.
[SPEAKER_03]: And they behaved the way for, you know, all the FBI and CIA female members today.
[SPEAKER_02]: Yeah, it makes me teary, I didn't think about, like, I do imagine being so good at your job, so passionate about your work, like literally making a difference in your nation's security.
[SPEAKER_02]: I mean, you can't, you can't mistakenly tell a spouse or a partner and as noted in the book, like these women live together, right?
[SPEAKER_02]: Because it's so much easier to be kind of contained in that environment where it's like, okay, at least I know I can talk to these women in my household about this.
[SPEAKER_02]: And there's a really exciting part in the book where they think maybe the house is bugged and it's like very dramatic and they have to like write notes to each other back and forth like bug doesn't hear I'm like, oh, so exciting.
[SPEAKER_02]: But yeah, I just want to read one line on this topic, which I thought really highlighted it.
[SPEAKER_02]: You said
[SPEAKER_02]: In the end, there was only one obvious choice to make, and this is our main character deciding what job she's going to take.
[SPEAKER_02]: So yes to this job, and finally, for probably the first time in my life, say no to what was expected of me.
[SPEAKER_02]: I realized that the most important before and after moments in life don't happen to you, or the ones you make happen.
[SPEAKER_02]: I just wish it hadn't taken me until my wedding day to know for certain what I wanted.
[SPEAKER_02]: So this character she's a runaway bride, she leaves her fiance behind and starts this new path in career.
[SPEAKER_02]: It's just really incredible and empowering and I think no matter how many times you've made me like quote unquote like hurt a story obviously about women who kind of step into these roles or something really powerful about the way that you told the story that I think is really special.
[SPEAKER_03]: Oh, thank you very much.
[SPEAKER_03]: Once again, too, it comes down to the source material, like the real women who the stories based are more just so inspiring, their stories so incredible and all true.
[SPEAKER_03]: So having that type of research and reading about all these profiles, Jean Grabeel is one of them and many others who did go on to have careers in the CIA and FBI, but that primary source material was huge.
[SPEAKER_03]: It's what made the stories.
[SPEAKER_02]: Um, absolutely.
[SPEAKER_02]: I also want to talk about office culture a little bit.
[SPEAKER_02]: So I've had I've actually never technically worked very long in an office because I've always worked from home and so I've had internships at offices and like when I was starting out my career in an office a few times, but the way that office culture works in this kind of like mad men era is also so fascinating.
[SPEAKER_02]: to me, but like they're literally working six and a seven days a week on these very intense projects.
[SPEAKER_02]: Another thing I really liked about this book.
[SPEAKER_02]: Anybody that's a fan of the television show Slow Horses, which was also a Macaron novel series.
[SPEAKER_02]: And so I just love that you like kind of have this like mist fit office environment.
[SPEAKER_02]: So there are so many characters and Jane doesn't incredible job.
[SPEAKER_02]: I know obviously a lot of you guys are listening or writers.
[SPEAKER_02]: Jane doesn't incredible job with a very large cast of characters.
[SPEAKER_02]: If you were curious about how to create differentiations and all of that type of uniqueness between a huge cast, Jane doesn't incredible job of this.
[SPEAKER_02]: So definitely make sure that you read this with an eagle eye for that type of thing.
[SPEAKER_02]: Like speaking of things, Jane does well.
[SPEAKER_02]: One really small thing you did that I really loved was, so in the break room, there's this Coke machine.
[SPEAKER_02]: And so instead of being like, everybody goes to the Coke machine, puts their money and gets their Coke,
[SPEAKER_02]: Jane created this Coke machine that doesn't work.
[SPEAKER_02]: So they get to just like whack it.
[SPEAKER_02]: It's like a free machine and they all get like free Coke.
[SPEAKER_02]: So like it's such a subtle thing.
[SPEAKER_02]: Like have you ever, is this happened to you or you're just like, I'm going to make the Coke machine not work.
[SPEAKER_02]: And that's what's going to be interesting about this environment.
[SPEAKER_03]: That was actually based on a true story.
[SPEAKER_03]: There's a few great sources for like the office culture of our LinkedIn Hall and
[SPEAKER_03]: One of them was FBI KGV wars by the FBI agent who was involved.
[SPEAKER_03]: The other one was inside the enemies house by Howard Bloom.
[SPEAKER_03]: And there was a lot of other sources as well.
[SPEAKER_03]: But there were some great stories about the office culture there.
[SPEAKER_03]: And these were brilliant people.
[SPEAKER_03]: But often brilliant people are kind of quirky.
[SPEAKER_03]: You know, like real geniuses are quirky.
[SPEAKER_03]: And one of them had rigged a whole machine.
[SPEAKER_03]: So that everyone could get the COVID, they broke the code on the code, wishing and we're so proud of themselves.
[SPEAKER_03]: And something like, oh, that is, that's so going in the book.
[SPEAKER_02]: That's such a nerdy thing to do.
[SPEAKER_02]: I love it.
[SPEAKER_03]: Such a nerdy thing.
[SPEAKER_03]: And in terms of characters too, you know, and thank you for their hard words about that.
[SPEAKER_03]: But I really, you know, this was a group of characters reading about the real ones that were definitely what would be called neurodivergent today.
[SPEAKER_03]: You know, ADHD may be on the spectrum because again, brilliantly, sometimes tortilla, you know, people who are really brilliant have different personalities and different quirks.
[SPEAKER_03]: And I wanted to show that range of personalities and people and totally
[SPEAKER_02]: Yeah, and like you don't define it.
[SPEAKER_02]: We didn't have a definitions for like these people are neurodivergent.
[SPEAKER_02]: Like they wouldn't have used those terms back then, right?
[SPEAKER_02]: And so the way that you exhibit it so well in the boss, Meredith, he goes, my wife told me I need to do this way.
[SPEAKER_02]: He's like my wife says I should bring in donuts for you guys on the Saturday morning if you're working.
[SPEAKER_02]: Like, I can just imagine him being like, my wife said I need to be nicer to you guys.
[SPEAKER_03]: What exactly?
[SPEAKER_03]: So Meredith Barnett, who was ahead of the known a project, and was a genius.
[SPEAKER_03]: Like, by all accounts, he historically a genius and responsible for this whole project.
[SPEAKER_03]: He spoke something like eleven languages.
[SPEAKER_03]: He, you know, he led this team, but he was
[SPEAKER_03]: certainly someone who would probably consider it on the autism spectrum today and they just didn't have the language for it at the time.
[SPEAKER_03]: So you talk about who didn't pick up on social cues.
[SPEAKER_03]: He didn't care about social.
[SPEAKER_03]: You know, he cared about getting the job done and he married the love of his life who also was a code breaker actually at Arlington Hall.
[SPEAKER_03]: That's how they meant and she was the one who kind of helped finesse him.
[SPEAKER_03]: and Halton with those social cues and things like that.
[SPEAKER_03]: But he was really a fascinating character to research and to write about it.
[SPEAKER_02]: Yeah, he was, anyway, I could totally picture him.
[SPEAKER_02]: And again, a throwback to this little horse is mentioned too.
[SPEAKER_02]: Yes.
[SPEAKER_02]: Like, you know, when there's like an enigmatic boss where it's like, they're just beaten, you know, they're going to the beat of their own drum.
[SPEAKER_02]: Yeah.
[SPEAKER_02]: And a very different way, obviously, Meredith has said to not call it like this little horse thing.
[SPEAKER_02]: bus, but yeah, so oh, I would talk about the love story.
[SPEAKER_02]: So obviously, we could tackle the historical elements, some of the characterization.
[SPEAKER_02]: I want to talk about the love story, which is obviously a huge element of this.
[SPEAKER_02]: And obviously, in historical fiction, there's so many things to juggle, right?
[SPEAKER_02]: Again, you have this setting, and we need a lot of plot.
[SPEAKER_02]: And often there is a love interest here.
[SPEAKER_02]: And I think what's so special about this love story was the tension that you're able to create by keeping them apart.
[SPEAKER_02]: One of the hardest things in a romance novel, again, for you guys, writing romance novels, or writing a love story is, how do we keep these people apart?
[SPEAKER_02]: Like, what is the reason for these two not getting together, if they're obviously meant to be together?
[SPEAKER_02]: So there's a lot of really subtle ways that you do such a great job of keeping these two wonderful people apart.
[SPEAKER_02]: So one of them is a female coldbreaker.
[SPEAKER_02]: The other one was a kind of classmate.
[SPEAKER_02]: So one was a Radcliffe woman's at Harvard.
[SPEAKER_02]: They had one class together.
[SPEAKER_02]: And so he goes off at two, is the FBI, right?
[SPEAKER_02]: Or is he see a guy?
[SPEAKER_03]: Yeah, he joins the FBI.
[SPEAKER_03]: Yep.
[SPEAKER_02]: Yeah, yeah, he joins the FBI.
[SPEAKER_02]: And so it's like, yeah, we have to bring these two together, Keith and her part, so do you want to talk with the dance of again, how you bring these two people together and and separate them tragically to start cross pepper.
[SPEAKER_03]: Yeah, so I wanted, you know, the last book again, good night from Paris, I had kind of a bittersweet ending because that's what happened in her real life and your late in real life.
[SPEAKER_03]: And so this time I'm like, oh, I want a big, soony, slow burn room.
[SPEAKER_03]: It's like, how's what I do this?
[SPEAKER_03]: And I kind of took myself back to school before I started writing this.
[SPEAKER_03]: I took a like online virtual class through BBC My Stro with JoJo Moys.
[SPEAKER_03]: I've read some of my old craft books.
[SPEAKER_03]: I was like, how do I do this?
[SPEAKER_03]: The best way I can.
[SPEAKER_03]: And so the origins of Jonathan who's at the eye agent at who is the co-breaker was the fact that the FBI and
[SPEAKER_03]: Meredith Gardner's group at Arlington Hall formed a partnership to try to track down the Soviet spies in the U.S.
[SPEAKER_03]: that really happened.
[SPEAKER_03]: And it was kind of this odd couple.
[SPEAKER_03]: There's Meredith Gardner who's head of the Northern Project.
[SPEAKER_03]: And then there's Robert Lampear who's the FBI guy in charge of the Soviet group.
[SPEAKER_03]: And so my origin story was like, what if one of the FBI guys agents working underneath
[SPEAKER_03]: Robert falls for one of the female co-breakers because it was predominantly female team besides Meredith and end up together somehow.
[SPEAKER_03]: And so that was my origin for Jonathan and Kat.
[SPEAKER_03]: But like I said, I wanted it to be slow burn.
[SPEAKER_03]: And so they first run into each other in Washington DC.
[SPEAKER_03]: They were kind of rivals in class.
[SPEAKER_03]: She's dating someone else when her friends
[SPEAKER_03]: from Arlington Hall.
[SPEAKER_03]: And so then I kind of was like, OK, how do I pull this thread and keep them apart?
[SPEAKER_03]: So he ends up being transferred over to the UK for some time.
[SPEAKER_03]: So that was another distance issue.
[SPEAKER_03]: And then he shipped up to New York.
[SPEAKER_03]: So it was all like, will they or won't they?
[SPEAKER_03]: And keeping that tension going and not, you know, giving just enough, but not too much.
[SPEAKER_03]: You know, and that's a balancing act.
[SPEAKER_03]: And in fact, when I was editing it with my editor faith,
[SPEAKER_03]: There was a couple of times I'm like, I think I need to pull this back a little bit.
[SPEAKER_03]: I think I need to not let them get together yet in the way that everyone wants them to.
[SPEAKER_03]: You know, because that's the fun, you know, I just read an abby him and his book.
[SPEAKER_03]: I like that is the fun of romance, right?
[SPEAKER_03]: Like, will they or won't they?
[SPEAKER_03]: What's going to happen with them?
[SPEAKER_03]: You know, cheering them on, but then it's like, it's like Ross and Rachel and Frank.
[SPEAKER_03]: You almost don't want them to get together yet because it's so fun to watch.
[SPEAKER_02]: Yeah.
[SPEAKER_02]: And it means the end is coming when they get together, right?
[SPEAKER_02]: So there's like so much plot that has to happen.
[SPEAKER_02]: Obviously, I'm going to spoil it for everybody, but there's a lot of plot that happens and they have to work together.
[SPEAKER_02]: And sometimes working together means they can't be together romantically because they have to work together to solve this huge larger than life, you know, national, international problem.
[SPEAKER_02]: And then I guess.
[SPEAKER_02]: There's time for them in the end to have their moment in the side.
[SPEAKER_02]: Another theme that came up a lot in this book for me was the blood versus chosen family theme.
[SPEAKER_02]: Like we talked a little bit earlier on about obviously the women living together and you also have a female theme of relationship between the the code breakers in there.
[SPEAKER_02]: And so there's so much just like you know chosen family because of the nature of the the business and the women working together.
[SPEAKER_02]: But then there's also the blood family theme here as well to kind of balance out
[SPEAKER_02]: I don't know, I get it.
[SPEAKER_02]: I'm trying to work around my words, so I don't spoil the ending for anybody.
[SPEAKER_02]: But do you want to talk about how you kind of wrestled with the blood versus chosen family?
[SPEAKER_02]: Trump.
[SPEAKER_03]: Yeah, I think that in the protagonist comes from a big Irish family in Boston, but she has a tragedy.
[SPEAKER_03]: You know, when this is not a spoiler, like her mother died in childbirth with her, and so she has this whole other side of her family and her mother's family that she never knew.
[SPEAKER_03]: And it's kind of this black box and her father doesn't talk about it.
[SPEAKER_03]: So that added an element of mystery of like what was going on with her side of the family, and that actually ends up being part of the story, moving forward in the women of college to haul a story.
[SPEAKER_03]: And then in terms of
[SPEAKER_03]: chosen family I think you know like my older daughter just graduated from college and she has this amazing group of girlfriends and they're everything to her and I remember that feeling and in my twenties I like that is everything and because these women had just you know swearing with a secrecy or end up in prison they became close
[SPEAKER_03]: you know, by default because they were living together.
[SPEAKER_03]: They were working together.
[SPEAKER_03]: The romance between the two women in the story is based on a true story of two women who were in these jobs and one of them went on to be, you know, one of the top heads of the CIA later on.
[SPEAKER_03]: So yeah, I just wanted to capture that feeling of like, when your friends are everything and when they do feel like family and you lean on them more than your actual family for all the reasons at that stage of your life.
[SPEAKER_02]: Yeah, it felt so real, it obviously cat had spent so much time in all female environments.
[SPEAKER_02]: Like, have it got to Radcliffe and that sort of thing.
[SPEAKER_02]: And it did feel like a natural extension of them working it out.
[SPEAKER_02]: I don't know when your research did you figure out why there were so many women working in code breaking in your research or was it just like the men wanted more, I don't know, more like adventurous job.
[SPEAKER_02]: Like, again, I'm being sexist, but I'm just curious about why why there were so many women in the code breaking side of things.
[SPEAKER_03]: I think part of it was, I mean, it lies among the road, the nonfiction book code girls about code breakers, female co-breakers during World War II, which is another source that I relied on.
[SPEAKER_03]: And after the war, a lot of these women were highly trained and loved the work.
[SPEAKER_03]: and we're not willing to give up those jobs.
[SPEAKER_03]: You know, and the fact that they had training in such a base of experience, this was not easy work.
[SPEAKER_03]: I think, you know, one of the things I talked to you about in terms of writing it is code breaking was incredibly complex and dense and also tedious and boring.
[SPEAKER_03]: And I'm like, how do I write about code breaking and explain it without boring my readers?
[SPEAKER_03]: You know, so these are finally trained females and they a lot of them just who are legacies from World War II and stayed on.
[SPEAKER_03]: But also, I mean, you know, a lot of them recruited various ways through friends and through taking the civil service exam and finding that they had, I mean, it wasn't necessarily intelligence.
[SPEAKER_03]: It was a certain kind of intelligence.
[SPEAKER_03]: You had to be very good at puzzles.
[SPEAKER_03]: They found that people who were musically talented were really good code breakers.
[SPEAKER_03]: You know, people who were pros or pros or pros were an ultimately really good code breakers.
[SPEAKER_03]: So it was when they found people that were a fit, didn't enter if they were women, they would often ended up with the job.
[SPEAKER_02]: That makes sense.
[SPEAKER_02]: Yeah, in the name of national security, they're willing to live women into that world.
[SPEAKER_02]: Yeah, and it makes sense.
[SPEAKER_02]: Yeah, if they learned the skill, they don't want to give up that skill, then the next time in a national emergency comes around, like they're the best versions of the job.
[SPEAKER_02]: So yeah, that makes sense.
[SPEAKER_02]: That makes a lot of sense.
[SPEAKER_02]: So what was your favorite part of writing this book?
[SPEAKER_02]: Again, five books later, you know, every book creates a song challenges and it's a fun.
[SPEAKER_02]: What was I guess what was the most challenging part of writing this one and the most fun part of writing this one?
[SPEAKER_03]: The most challenging and this remains through all five books is getting that first draft down.
[SPEAKER_03]: For me, is the most challenging because of the research, because of that like,
[SPEAKER_03]: fear uncertainty and doubt on my shoulder.
[SPEAKER_03]: Like, can I do this again?
[SPEAKER_03]: I've done this four times.
[SPEAKER_03]: What if I can't do it at a time?
[SPEAKER_03]: And just making sure the narrative arc is all holding together and not letting my perfectionist tendencies get in the way of getting the draft down.
[SPEAKER_03]: I think that's that's always the most challenging for me.
[SPEAKER_03]: And I like I just mentioned co-breaking is hard.
[SPEAKER_03]: Like it's complex and
[SPEAKER_03]: That's one of the reasons I kind of sat on the street for a while.
[SPEAKER_03]: I'm like, how do I write about this?
[SPEAKER_03]: You can't just say, oh, she was a codebreaker without, you know, showing that she was a codebreaker.
[SPEAKER_03]: That was a challenge.
[SPEAKER_03]: For me, I always enjoy the revision process.
[SPEAKER_03]: I read and joined my own revisions.
[SPEAKER_03]: I enjoy working with faith.
[SPEAKER_03]: My editor, Faith Black Ross, I've worked with her for all five books and Nancy is a new editor, but she was amazing.
[SPEAKER_03]: So that whole process, I always love it.
[SPEAKER_03]: It's not always easy, but I love it.
[SPEAKER_02]: Yeah, yeah, that's amazing.
[SPEAKER_02]: Yeah, there's so many, so many parts of this book I just loved and I'm so excited for everybody to read it.
[SPEAKER_02]: Like, if you liked Oppenheimer, if you liked our woman in Moscow, if you like slow horses, which I talked about of buying, I think it will, you'll really like this one.
[SPEAKER_02]: It's a complete page turner, has the love story, as I already said, I cried through the middle, because it's very, it's emotional.
[SPEAKER_02]: Like, the stakes are so high for them and it feels really real.
[SPEAKER_02]: And I want to cook machine that I get free coats from as well.
[SPEAKER_03]: Oh, so much for all that you do in all your supports.
[SPEAKER_03]: I'm so, so grateful to you, Carly.
[SPEAKER_03]: And I'm so thrilled.
[SPEAKER_03]: I feel like it's, it just means so much that you loved it because I know your taste is so amazing.
[SPEAKER_03]: So I'm just so excited for everyone to read it.
[SPEAKER_03]: And I'm really grateful for your support.
[SPEAKER_02]: Yeah, yeah, I'm excited.
[SPEAKER_02]: So women of Arlington Hall, I think it's just about out by the time this episode goes live, obviously me record ahead of time.
[SPEAKER_02]: So women of Arlington Hall, you're either pre-ordering it or you're buying it, it's such a great book, whether it's book clubs or a giftable, just so everybody knows that the love scenes are kind of like not completely open, not completely closed or so you can like, you can give it to a mother-in-law, you can, you can buy it for your mom.
[SPEAKER_02]: your mother-in-law, but it really has a lot of emotional heft and weight in such a beautiful story and a heartbreaking.
[SPEAKER_02]: So I really hope everybody enjoys it.
[SPEAKER_03]: Thank you, and I also have to give a shout out to the audiobook narrator, Gael Shalen.
[SPEAKER_03]: She was incredible.
[SPEAKER_03]: She sent me some samples.
[SPEAKER_03]: So if you're an audiobook fan, she did a beautiful, beautiful job.
[SPEAKER_03]: All the audiobook narrators are just so incredibly talented and she just nailed it.
[SPEAKER_03]: So if that will also be out by the time this podcast comes out, I think.
[SPEAKER_03]: I'm excited for people to experience that as well.
[SPEAKER_02]: Absolutely, in all the formats.
[SPEAKER_02]: So yeah, congratulations Jane on another incredible book and I will see everybody online.
[SPEAKER_03]: Thanks for everything, Carly.
[SPEAKER_03]: Thank you, everybody.
[SPEAKER_00]: And that's it for today's episode.
[SPEAKER_00]: I hope you'll join us for next week's show.
[SPEAKER_00]: In the meantime, keep at it.
[SPEAKER_00]: Remember, it just takes one yes.