[SPEAKER_00]: and welcome to our show.
[SPEAKER_00]: The shit no one tells you about writing.
[SPEAKER_00]: I'm best selling author Bianca Marie, and I'm joined by CC Lira of Wendy Sherman Associates and Carly Waters of PS Literary.
[SPEAKER_00]: Hi everyone!
[SPEAKER_00]: Today's guest is a producer for the NPR program 1A.
[SPEAKER_00]: She has written for publications like the New Republic and the New York Times in which she published the viral My Choice isn't marriage or loneliness for modern love.
[SPEAKER_00]: She was one of 12 essayists selected to write a follow her piece for the Colombs 20th anniversary in October 2024.
[SPEAKER_00]: She has also been a guest
[SPEAKER_00]: and NPR's one A.
[SPEAKER_00]: She previously worked on NPR's code switch and weekend addition.
[SPEAKER_00]: She is pursuing an MFA in creative writing from American University.
[SPEAKER_00]: She loves in Washington DC.
[SPEAKER_00]: It's my pleasure to welcome Haley Blassengame.
[SPEAKER_00]: Haley, welcome to the show!
[SPEAKER_01]: Thanks so much for having me, so much MPR in that bio gosh.
[SPEAKER_00]: I mean, you know, you've got to use everything you can in your buyer, right?
[SPEAKER_00]: And we're saying exactly.
[SPEAKER_00]: So all this all the time, up your author buyer, love saying MPR so much.
[SPEAKER_00]: Okay, so for those we who are not watching on our YouTube channel, we'll use a hold up your copy, Haley, because you set the hard cover, there we go.
[SPEAKER_00]: that with the book we're discussing is that all fall in love in the end it's a stunning like hot pink cover kind of paintings almost like it's sort of made me think of blue sisters yeah yeah by right but but it's it's its own work it's just absolutely stunning the cover is stunning so that's you who are not watching on YouTube make sure you look up the cover okay i'm going to quickly redo the flap copy and then we're going to dive in
[SPEAKER_00]: It's a fall of 2024 and 24-year-old cat isn't asking for too much.
[SPEAKER_00]: All she wants is three boyfriends to write a little novels and to survive another chaotic presidential election.
[SPEAKER_00]: She's in an open relationship with her college sweetheart Jay, but non-monogamy isn't just a hot train she's trying.
[SPEAKER_00]: It's a sliver of freedom in a world eager to wrestle it from her, for being a black woman gang after what she once was reckless abandoned.
[SPEAKER_00]: While political tensions, royal the campus we care is slowly earning her creator writing degree, she finds herself drawn to Jay's best friend Tristan, who's smart, super hot and in a monogamous relationship.
[SPEAKER_00]: And then she meets Tristan's girlfriend, Mia, captivating art student with her own gravitational pull.
[SPEAKER_00]: Friends and family urge her to just be happy with Jay, but Cat is determined to have it all, or blow up her life's crime.
[SPEAKER_00]: As she falls for all the wrong people, wrecking up lies, betrayals, and terrible drafts of a novel, she tries to write away to a happy ending.
[SPEAKER_00]: But in art, politics and love, true liberation may take more than rewriting the old script.
[SPEAKER_00]: It may mean
[SPEAKER_00]: Inventing something entirely new.
[SPEAKER_00]: So it got done done.
[SPEAKER_00]: And you know what I read a lot of books for the podcast.
[SPEAKER_00]: I read a lot of books to blood, etc.
[SPEAKER_00]: And this is like one of the most unique stories that I've ever been through.
[SPEAKER_00]: So, you know, it's so funny and publishing publishers always like, I want something completely different, so it's exactly the same as it is.
[SPEAKER_00]: And so I want you to take us through the inspiration for this and your journey to publication, please.
[SPEAKER_01]: Oh, God, do you have 10 hours?
[SPEAKER_01]: Okay, so first the inspiration.
[SPEAKER_01]: I was in an upper relationship for several years in my early 20s.
[SPEAKER_01]: And I really just stumbled into it.
[SPEAKER_01]: It was like my college sweetheart.
[SPEAKER_01]: You'll notice some similarities.
[SPEAKER_01]: And I just remember being like, we should be in a relationship.
[SPEAKER_01]: I was excited.
[SPEAKER_01]: And then I started telling people in my life and they're like, girl, what are you talking about?
[SPEAKER_01]: Like, I got a lot of communal pushback that I hadn't anticipated.
[SPEAKER_01]: And this is around the time that Sally Rune wrote conversation with me.
[SPEAKER_01]: friends at 2017.
[SPEAKER_01]: So you had some books that gesture at nominography, but weren't necessarily dealing with what it means to exist not in a vacuum with it.
[SPEAKER_01]: And so I think as a black woman that was what I was saying I went to school in the south.
[SPEAKER_01]: an HBCU and so my experience was entirely different where it was like coming out and I had and I was not trying to come out with everything.
[SPEAKER_01]: And so I really was trying to look for models on how to be in an open relationship and like many writers I turned to stories.
[SPEAKER_01]: So I was like reading novels.
[SPEAKER_01]: I was watching movies, I was just trying to find anything to sort of
[SPEAKER_01]: Locate myself in this kind of relationship modality and could not find anything and I was okay Well, I'll write a book and this will help me figure it out because as one does right so what happened was I had started this book in like
[SPEAKER_01]: January 2020, which is a great time to start a book, right?
[SPEAKER_01]: That's set, quote unquote now, which, you know, then the pandemic happens.
[SPEAKER_01]: Okay, you can never set a book now again.
[SPEAKER_01]: If it's real, you know, real is fiction.
[SPEAKER_01]: So I've been working on it.
[SPEAKER_01]: I ended up writing a modern love essay at the end of the year that was about my experience in an open relationship and just trying to fight.
[SPEAKER_01]: figure out myself through that relationship and why it ended.
[SPEAKER_01]: And that is a funny story because I had recently purchased a house because interest rates were so low.
[SPEAKER_01]: And I just was out of money and I needed a new couch.
[SPEAKER_01]: I was like, what can I do to make money?
[SPEAKER_01]: Oh, I'll read a modern love as they were just thinking about it.
[SPEAKER_01]: Now I'm like, that's like,
[SPEAKER_01]: I was 25, but they picked it up.
[SPEAKER_01]: I hadn't heard of modern love, but I didn't understand the scale of it.
[SPEAKER_01]: So I had when I knew it was being published, I was reading things like, oh, you could get an agent or book deal from this.
[SPEAKER_01]: I'm like, okay, I'm not going to get an agent from this essay.
[SPEAKER_01]: Then the essay came out and I got an email from my current agent saying, have you ever wanted to write a book?
[SPEAKER_01]: Hello from book agent in the subject class.
[SPEAKER_01]: And I was like, yeah, so it's charmed.
[SPEAKER_01]: That's how I got my agent based off of that modern love essay.
[SPEAKER_01]: And so I always do tell writers like, get yourself out there.
[SPEAKER_01]: You don't know what is going to be the thing.
[SPEAKER_01]: So we'd started working for memoir because that was sort of the pipeline.
[SPEAKER_01]: You'd write a modern love essay and then you'd write a memoir, Bell Borden did that, but she's a unique case.
[SPEAKER_01]: I think that pipeline has kind of dried up a little.
[SPEAKER_01]: memoirs very difficult if you're not a celebrity.
[SPEAKER_01]: So but like back then in 2021 I think we were kind of at the tail end of it, but but still it still existed So I started working on a memoir and I was just like I'm 25 who cared like I just didn't feel like I had anything to say in the memoir form
[SPEAKER_01]: I had already had that novel.
[SPEAKER_01]: I had started working on right before the pandemic and so I revisited it that and I was like, I can really funnel these questions into that in a more interesting way.
[SPEAKER_01]: I'm not bound to the events of my life.
[SPEAKER_01]: And so that's essentially what I did.
[SPEAKER_01]: Revised it for years because again, I wrote the novel while I had an agent which means she got the first draft from a 25-year-old writer who had never revised.
[SPEAKER_01]: I had written books, and I was like that person who wrote a book.
[SPEAKER_01]: I was like, okay, I'm done.
[SPEAKER_01]: I'm about to do that.
[SPEAKER_01]: I had, you know, all those starter novels I never revised, and that was really when I learned to revise, which is kind of what makes you a writer and author.
[SPEAKER_01]: And so we worked on that for years.
[SPEAKER_01]: I rewrote it from scratch.
[SPEAKER_01]: I always say that CC's webinar on stakes, tensions, and conflicts actually totally changed the way I wrote story.
[SPEAKER_01]: And that was really fundamental in rewriting this book.
[SPEAKER_01]: And so it was like 2024.
[SPEAKER_01]: And I mean, the other big thing that happened was, remember how I said I had started right for the pandemic.
[SPEAKER_01]: And I was like, oh, I'll just set it.
[SPEAKER_01]: When this is all over in 2024,
[SPEAKER_01]: And of course, it was the presidential election.
[SPEAKER_01]: And I'm in DC and I was like, okay, you got to talk about this, like you can't.
[SPEAKER_01]: But if it's a realist novel, that wouldn't make sense.
[SPEAKER_01]: And so I had to rewrite it to incorporate that.
[SPEAKER_01]: And it was both four Trump won.
[SPEAKER_01]: So I was, I mean,
[SPEAKER_01]: thinking back, it was a totally crazy process.
[SPEAKER_01]: So we basically wrote it as like, it might be alternative history or it might be actually what happens.
[SPEAKER_01]: But I knew that we had to put it on submission before the election.
[SPEAKER_01]: Like, I just felt in my gut, like, we got to go out with this.
[SPEAKER_01]: And we went out.
[SPEAKER_01]: Like two weeks before the election or something, it was like we were cutting it really close.
[SPEAKER_01]: I just had a feeling that there were going to be too many questions if the outcome was different from the novel.
[SPEAKER_01]: And I didn't want to feel those and it sold in like it sold in a week.
[SPEAKER_01]: the week before the election to my wonderful editor, and Spire at Scrimmar.
[SPEAKER_00]: So that's all for my journey.
[SPEAKER_00]: I love that.
[SPEAKER_00]: And we always focusing on the many different paths to publication.
[SPEAKER_00]: And like you say, put yourself out there.
[SPEAKER_00]: You never know who's going to reach out.
[SPEAKER_00]: I mean, I feel like this is specific to them, because I don't know about you now, Haley, but they're Mount of Spam.
[SPEAKER_00]: I get that's directed at writers and it's like, oh, I mean, I've had Jane Austen email me to tell me what an incredible writer I am.
[SPEAKER_00]: I'm like, thank you Jane.
[SPEAKER_00]: Thank you so much for that.
[SPEAKER_00]: She had a comeback to life just to tell you exactly.
[SPEAKER_00]: Exactly.
[SPEAKER_00]: I'm glad I made a wager board so that her and I were able to have this conversation, but like at that point like writers now are getting emails saying, I want to represent you and it's all spam.
[SPEAKER_00]: So again, like,
[SPEAKER_00]: You know, this stood out there and this was before we were getting all the slop, right.
[SPEAKER_00]: So, it is amazing how all of that came together.
[SPEAKER_00]: And what I agree with Hayley is that writing is rewriting.
[SPEAKER_00]: I also didn't understand that with the first two books I wrote, I just wrote them and sent them off and I was like, these are amazing.
[SPEAKER_00]: And if you haven't revised the book extensively, you have not written a book.
[SPEAKER_00]: It is such an essential part of the process.
[SPEAKER_00]: So let's talk about the sneaky prologue.
[SPEAKER_00]: Oh, yeah.
[SPEAKER_00]: The sneaky prologue, because it's not.
[SPEAKER_00]: It doesn't say it's a prologue.
[SPEAKER_00]: It's just there.
[SPEAKER_00]: Can you read it for us?
[SPEAKER_00]: And then I'd love for you to discuss, if it was there all along, if it was added later.
[SPEAKER_01]: Yes.
[SPEAKER_01]: All right.
[SPEAKER_01]: Sometimes we don't tell the story.
[SPEAKER_01]: Sometimes it tells us that was just one of the mini ass backward algorithms.
[SPEAKER_01]: My grandma used to say that I never forgot.
[SPEAKER_01]: Later, I understood how was saying like that could stick.
[SPEAKER_01]: How it could haunt.
[SPEAKER_01]: My grandma's stories never made sense.
[SPEAKER_01]: The endings were locked off, plots unfolded backward.
[SPEAKER_01]: Characters died, then were resurrected.
[SPEAKER_01]: They used to kill me the way her endings felt like being shoved off a cliff.
[SPEAKER_01]: The way threads got dropped like dirty pennies.
[SPEAKER_01]: The way capital M meaning never materialized.
[SPEAKER_01]: I wanted Disney Channel.
[SPEAKER_01]: I wanted rom-coms with Ryan Reynolds.
[SPEAKER_01]: I can see her now, waiting her white hair on that plastic covered sofa.
[SPEAKER_01]: Trying to teach me a lesson.
[SPEAKER_01]: One, I practically ruined myself, trying to me learn, he was after she died.
[SPEAKER_01]: absolutely lovely lovely thank you tone of the novel they so much there so what's it there at the beginning was one of the things they gave about in the no if I could send you the first draft you be like what is this I mean it's totally different I mean in that sort of you know the novel is a lot about writing a novel and how you have to write it to learn what it is and that was very much this process and I think I couldn't have written that
[SPEAKER_01]: And I, so I learned sneaky prologue, I think it was from Rebecca McCye, I think she talks about this, because I think she has one in her mystery novel.
[SPEAKER_01]: I have some questions for you, and I love that, because it's sort of like, it doesn't bring someone for prologue.
[SPEAKER_01]: But yeah, so when I got to the end of writing the book, I understood that this was also a book about our dependence on stories to understand who we are and how that can be dangerous.
[SPEAKER_01]: Especially when you talk about, you know, politics is really who told the better story, you know, doesn't have to be true.
[SPEAKER_01]: And it's about sort of the beauty of locating yourself and inserting yourself into a story where you don't exist, but also the limitations of a story that they, you know, the resolutions we get in a story are not the resolutions we get in life.
[SPEAKER_01]: And I think
[SPEAKER_01]: I needed a way to set that insight up in the beginning or else I don't think it would have paid off in the way and also it's a tone thing as well just looking at the cover and the way that the book is framed a lot of people are calling it a romance and we can maybe get into the romance is a versus loves to do.
[SPEAKER_01]: But I knew that I needed people to know that this is going to be a bit more than the love story that you got on the back cover And I felt like that was the most efficient way to say, okay, there's a bigger idea here about just like the value But also the danger of our over-reliance on stories to tell us who we are.
[SPEAKER_01]: So yeah, that's how that came back It became pretty late in the process
[SPEAKER_00]: Yeah, I always love seeing how these things get picked apart and stitched back together becomes like a quilt.
[SPEAKER_00]: So there's another excerpt I'd like you to read and how it ends with the sucker punch, especially for writers.
[SPEAKER_01]: Okay, great.
[SPEAKER_01]: I found an interview with Janine from the 70s on YouTube.
[SPEAKER_01]: She's in her mid 20s.
[SPEAKER_01]: Her black feathery hair rippling away from her face.
[SPEAKER_01]: Many critics didn't know what to make of your first novel, the interviewer says, legs crossed in his armchair.
[SPEAKER_01]: It was controversial to say the least.
[SPEAKER_01]: What was it you were trying to say?
[SPEAKER_01]: I wanted to write about love and being young, but also rebellion, Janine aggressively smokes a cigarette in luxury and bowel sleeves.
[SPEAKER_01]: I guess I was writing against respectability.
[SPEAKER_01]: Bonnie at one point she argues with her professor that racial uplift is a sham.
[SPEAKER_01]: She does.
[SPEAKER_01]: Why is it a sham?
[SPEAKER_01]: Maybe sham isn't right, but it's certainly a trap.
[SPEAKER_01]: You can't moralize your way out of a racist system by, say, getting married, being a good Christian, adopting white nuclear family practices.
[SPEAKER_01]: But black people have and continue to believe this.
[SPEAKER_01]: Does they just do this or that?
[SPEAKER_01]: The quality will be attained.
[SPEAKER_01]: There was never about what you do or don't do.
[SPEAKER_01]: You don't attain equality.
[SPEAKER_01]: It's yours already.
[SPEAKER_01]: It's the claiming of what's already yours.
[SPEAKER_01]: That's the struggle.
[SPEAKER_01]: Bonnie understands this.
[SPEAKER_01]: So she does what she wants.
[SPEAKER_01]: The novel didn't do well.
[SPEAKER_01]: Janine laughs.
[SPEAKER_01]: Define well.
[SPEAKER_01]: Your publisher dropped you.
[SPEAKER_01]: And as far as I know, your second book has and found another publisher.
[SPEAKER_01]: That's because I don't keep my mouth shut.
[SPEAKER_01]: Howard wasn't thrilled about your novel taking place on their campus.
[SPEAKER_01]: They approved my point about respectability.
[SPEAKER_01]: The interviewer says, not many people liked Bonnie.
[SPEAKER_01]: That was maybe the biggest critique of the novel, her character.
[SPEAKER_01]: Janine laughs, a throaty laugh.
[SPEAKER_01]: I could almost see her anger and the wet pink of her gums.
[SPEAKER_01]: You think Bonnie cares?
[SPEAKER_01]: I doubt it.
[SPEAKER_01]: You rarely see black woman like Bonnie and literature,
[SPEAKER_01]: You're a teacher now.
[SPEAKER_01]: What do you tell your students?
[SPEAKER_01]: Janine pauses to smoke.
[SPEAKER_01]: Every writer has that project.
[SPEAKER_01]: They don't have the worst or right, but they must write in order to find the words.
[SPEAKER_01]: That's why you have to write it to learn what it is.
[SPEAKER_01]: You said it on the page, you said it free.
[SPEAKER_01]: You set yourself another free, too.
[SPEAKER_01]: Miss Janine for it, thank you for your time.
[SPEAKER_01]: Thank you, Robert.
[SPEAKER_01]: When the interview went dark, I rushed online to buy her debut novel.
[SPEAKER_01]: It was out of print.
[SPEAKER_01]: I couldn't even find it second hand.
[SPEAKER_01]: The shimmering pink hope I'd had adopted a gray cast, like ruined footage that couldn't be restored.
[SPEAKER_01]: It was like she never sat down to write the book at all.
[SPEAKER_00]: So that gave me goose bumps, really gave me goose bumps.
[SPEAKER_00]: So can we speak about using a technique like that so that you can find a video of a character like Janine and why it's necessary for her to watch that and for the reader to have access to that information in a way that the main character wouldn't just be able to access that information.
[SPEAKER_01]: Yeah, I mean, I was also thinking about during the pandemic, a lot of old videos and writers like James Baldwin were resurfacing and I think it was actually his also his sort of conversation with Nikki Giovanni, which is a lot about gender and so I was thinking about these old 70, you know, these like glamorous writers who were very profound.
[SPEAKER_01]: but they were coming back up because of the moment.
[SPEAKER_01]: And so I was thinking, okay, like she would eat, you know, could easily probably find this clip.
[SPEAKER_01]: She's this is her professor and sort of
[SPEAKER_01]: I love playing with medium and the different mediums that exist.
[SPEAKER_01]: Obviously, we have tax news notifications and YouTube, which is like, I think I don't I'm going to put you this by I think the most watched streaming platform ever is YouTube.
[SPEAKER_01]: And so I think the way I was thinking about this was also seeing Janie and, you know, almost cats age, not exactly, but young.
[SPEAKER_01]: And I think when you
[SPEAKER_01]: Have someone you look up to and you see them around your age.
[SPEAKER_01]: It can be a quiet sort of
[SPEAKER_01]: intense emotional experience.
[SPEAKER_01]: So I think I wanted to show us that Janina had always been confident.
[SPEAKER_01]: Like, you know, she didn't change, but also what she would have been up against in the 70s as a black writer and how that has shaped her into the type of teacher she is now.
[SPEAKER_01]: So it's sort of a little bit of an orange or an orange story.
[SPEAKER_01]: I also wanted to the other thing with the when you when you're online you're getting these little clips and they're out of context too.
[SPEAKER_01]: So I think with
[SPEAKER_01]: you would see her, you would see this confident woman smoking and bowel sleeves.
[SPEAKER_01]: But there's almost always some sort of sad story behind these clips, where you find out, like, I mean, Zornu Harrison is an example where you find out they died in poverty.
[SPEAKER_01]: You know, it's never that clip.
[SPEAKER_01]: And so I think,
[SPEAKER_01]: having her watch that video and feel like a sense of pride and connection and then finding out the story behind the story that you see made it the most impactful and also, you know, being like at the young black writer herself and like already feeling unsure about, you know, was the point of me writing the story.
[SPEAKER_01]: And that was the reality for, you know, many writers who some who we don't
[SPEAKER_00]: I love the way that the thing that happened a long time resonates with her now.
[SPEAKER_00]: It shows that golden thread between generations and what past generations are fought for.
[SPEAKER_00]: You've got a lot of how things are politically in that conversation as well.
[SPEAKER_00]: There's just so much to love there.
[SPEAKER_00]: And I love how she says Bonnie wouldn't care.
[SPEAKER_00]: Yeah, I wouldn't care when Eddie would be thinks of her.
[SPEAKER_00]: And so, you know, that takes us again to the challenges of writing a character like this because when you write about cat and like I said, this is one of the most unusual books that I've read in a long time.
[SPEAKER_00]: Thank you.
[SPEAKER_00]: is difficult to do because you are writing a character that people generally don't see in the mainstream that people generally don't understand and that a lot of people are immediately going to have their backs up and be like, why does she have to be dating three men?
[SPEAKER_00]: Because people bring all their morals and all their own bullshit to every story, right?
[SPEAKER_00]: So you must have realized when you said that and to write this that to make her
[SPEAKER_00]: And again, I hate saying, yeah, characters need to be likeable because male characters don't need to be, but she needs to be relatable and she needs to be vulnerable enough that the reader connects with her.
[SPEAKER_00]: So what was your approach to that?
[SPEAKER_01]: Why I think I caught a lot of practice.
[SPEAKER_01]: I think it helped having written the modern love as I say with such blindness because I got a lot of online hate from that.
[SPEAKER_01]: And I kept like sampling into things like not even understanding the scope of things and I think what the novel was the same thing were like, I don't see her as unlikable.
[SPEAKER_01]: I mean, now I'm getting reviews where people found her challenging.
[SPEAKER_01]: I'm like, she's funded me, but I don't know, maybe might have definition of like a false difference for everyone.
[SPEAKER_01]: So I actually didn't think about how do I make her likable because to me, likable is interesting.
[SPEAKER_01]: So I don't want to read a character about a character who goes to church every week and does everything for charity.
[SPEAKER_01]: Unless there's like some secret evil that they're hiding enough.
[SPEAKER_01]: What they're doing it, but if it's literally just that,
[SPEAKER_01]: That's not interesting to me.
[SPEAKER_01]: And I think fiction has a certain imperative to go certain places in the psyche, like, you know, just because someone does something and then all doesn't mean I think they should do it in real life like I don't hold the same standards that I do with real life and so.
[SPEAKER_01]: I was more interested in making her compelling.
[SPEAKER_01]: And I think the most compelling characters are the ones who are complex, and that means they're gonna have good and bad, that means that they're gonna be likable and dislikable, just like any flawed human.
[SPEAKER_01]: And she is very similar to me.
[SPEAKER_01]: She's younger than me now, I'm 30, so I don't necessarily act like this anymore, but it wasn't super difficult to,
[SPEAKER_01]: be inside her brain because it's like, you know, and I also like, and this is a taste thing.
[SPEAKER_01]: I also like bold, brash, female characters, who have a lot of agency even, if their agency is restricted, they're acting.
[SPEAKER_01]: They're using as much agency as they can within the box at their end.
[SPEAKER_01]: Those are my favorite female characters.
[SPEAKER_00]: Yeah, and you know what, when we say unlikeable characters, this is how readers bring their expectations to something, they'll be like, I didn't like this character because she did this and I didn't like this character because she did this and I would never do this, but this is why we read is the experience other lives that we would not necessarily inhabit something else and I mean that she was so lay it like this was such a multi lay it character.
[SPEAKER_00]: Each time I felt a care, a new her, a new whatever, there'd be another layer introduced.
[SPEAKER_00]: So like you say, you made her compelling.
[SPEAKER_00]: And for our listeners out there, that's something if you are portraying a character that's kind of different to what readers expect or what they see on the page, make them vulnerable, make them compelling, highly absolutely nailed that.
[SPEAKER_00]: I want to
[SPEAKER_00]: It's just like a whole page of dialogue.
[SPEAKER_01]: Oh, yeah.
[SPEAKER_00]: If you can just read, just pay just 74 to the end of page 75.
[SPEAKER_01]: All evening at the restaurant, I was frazzled.
[SPEAKER_01]: The jitters had broken through this morning's trooper, the outcome of the election, looming now with menacing height.
[SPEAKER_01]: I rushed to the fire escape on my break to call Jay.
[SPEAKER_01]: My voice of reason.
[SPEAKER_01]: But when the phone stopped ringing, it wasn't Jay's
[SPEAKER_01]: Hello, Tristan set again.
[SPEAKER_01]: Did you mean to call?
[SPEAKER_01]: My hand tightened around the phone.
[SPEAKER_01]: Oh, hi!
[SPEAKER_01]: He paused.
[SPEAKER_01]: Why do you sound so happy?
[SPEAKER_01]: I'm not happy.
[SPEAKER_01]: Did you mean to call me?
[SPEAKER_01]: I was actually trying to call Jay.
[SPEAKER_01]: Weird.
[SPEAKER_01]: How'd you end up calling me?
[SPEAKER_01]: I don't know.
[SPEAKER_01]: I waited for one of us to hang up.
[SPEAKER_01]: So you have a girlfriend, she's cool.
[SPEAKER_01]: Yeah, I mean, it's new.
[SPEAKER_01]: She's completely out of my league.
[SPEAKER_01]: I wondered what league he thought he was in, whether I was in it or not.
[SPEAKER_01]: He paused for a long time.
[SPEAKER_01]: Should we, do you want to talk about the last time we saw each other?
[SPEAKER_01]: When we were getting chased with a chainsaw, he didn't laugh.
[SPEAKER_01]: No, at the coffee shop.
[SPEAKER_01]: My hearing went out, like someone had cupped earbuds over my ears.
[SPEAKER_01]: I don't know what to say.
[SPEAKER_01]: How did you feel about it?
[SPEAKER_01]: I, how did you feel?
[SPEAKER_01]: I asked you first.
[SPEAKER_01]: I know, but I don't know.
[SPEAKER_01]: I don't know either.
[SPEAKER_01]: You wanted to talk about it, so you must know.
[SPEAKER_01]: It's not that.
[SPEAKER_01]: It's not simple like that, he paused.
[SPEAKER_01]: Did you tell Jay?
[SPEAKER_01]: No.
[SPEAKER_00]: But that's perfect.
[SPEAKER_00]: It just shows how conversations get interrupted and people jump in and people have short hand for certain things.
[SPEAKER_00]: And if you give too much information, it feels like the exposition for the sake of the reader.
[SPEAKER_00]: And you just like get into the flow.
[SPEAKER_00]: You teach the reader how to read that kind of choppy dialogue.
[SPEAKER_00]: And it's just really excellently done.
[SPEAKER_00]: I love it.
[SPEAKER_00]: Thank you.
[SPEAKER_00]: We'll almost at the end of our interview.
[SPEAKER_00]: So now I'm freaking out because there was so much
[SPEAKER_00]: emails.
[SPEAKER_00]: She plays around the structure which we're brilliantly throughout.
[SPEAKER_00]: I love the political backdrop to this.
[SPEAKER_00]: I loved her own struggles with this.
[SPEAKER_00]: Can you just as we wrap it up for our listeners?
[SPEAKER_00]: Talk about writing something when you have a message and there's something you want to convey but not belaboring it.
[SPEAKER_00]: Just making it organic to the story so doesn't feel like you're
[SPEAKER_00]: sort of convey that without beating people over the head because this was so organic it was so natural and the restraint you showed was incredible, especially for a debut.
[SPEAKER_01]: Thank you.
[SPEAKER_01]: I mean, I think my goal with this wasn't
[SPEAKER_01]: to sort of wait into the political discourse.
[SPEAKER_01]: My goal was almost archival.
[SPEAKER_01]: I was thinking about the fact that we are living in a singular moment in history.
[SPEAKER_01]: And obviously, there's always something around the history, but really to be in the nation's capital.
[SPEAKER_01]: And at this point, 2025, where the book tastes place, it was, I don't wanna use the word, I'm presser than it, but we understood that we were living history as it happened.
[SPEAKER_01]: I'm not sure that it's always like that for people when they're living.
[SPEAKER_01]: And I do think the work of fiction,
[SPEAKER_01]: is archival is to be able to have people look back and to not just know in a dry historical sense what happened, but how people were living.
[SPEAKER_01]: And I think because that was my goal, I didn't have to stand on the soapbox.
[SPEAKER_01]: I just captured what it felt like to be in DC and it felt insane.
[SPEAKER_01]: My mom was a federal worker.
[SPEAKER_01]: So she's been, was a far, far worker for 38 years.
[SPEAKER_01]: So she was getting all these emails about show us your work.
[SPEAKER_01]: And then I was a journalist at public radio station that was, it's funding.
[SPEAKER_01]: I mean, this is what it was like.
[SPEAKER_01]: The plane crashed into the Potomac like two weeks in.
[SPEAKER_01]: I mean, it really felt, I was like, OK, this is one of those moments in history where DC, as a place, was sort of ground zero for the second treatment
[SPEAKER_01]: We were going to see happen.
[SPEAKER_01]: We were seeing it before the rest of the country in many ways.
[SPEAKER_01]: And of course, the most vulnerable as well around the country.
[SPEAKER_01]: And so I think because that was my focus, I was able to just simply show things as they were.
[SPEAKER_01]: And of course, that the characters have their own opinions, but it really was a portrait of the period in time and a specific place.
[SPEAKER_00]: Yeah, seeing your character interact with the moment in time is so important because a lot of times the story will just happen and we don't know when it's taking place and there's nothing to differentiate it.
[SPEAKER_00]: But like even the biggest love story takes place in a context of that time, you know, and I loved how you work that in last question.
[SPEAKER_00]: Have you got time for one last question?
[SPEAKER_00]: I know, yes, I have time for whatever.
[SPEAKER_00]: Okay.
[SPEAKER_00]: So let's talk about your Palestinian
[SPEAKER_00]: You know, we say on the podcast all the time, you need sensitivity readers, you need authenticity readers, so can you speak a bit about that?
[SPEAKER_00]: The necessity of it and how you found them and how you worked with them.
[SPEAKER_01]: Yeah, so I, this was a very simple process.
[SPEAKER_01]: So I just found this like organization that connected people with readers and fatigue was, I sort of gave her the just of the book.
[SPEAKER_01]: And I sent her the sections on the hat on war who is the Palestinian character in the book.
[SPEAKER_01]: And I told her what I was looking for, like it's just like let me know if there's anything that feels on true that sticks out to you.
[SPEAKER_01]: I feel like as a Black writer, I was able to write that character because the the most important thing is that they're a person first so you're not centering their identity and the way that they talk like they're not always talking about their pressure and like I was able to draw from that what would sort of off put me and then then you have the nuances and the specifics and the language and that sort of how my sensitive reader helped me and she didn't have a ton of notes so yeah I mean I think it's important
[SPEAKER_01]: I think it's important to know that you will probably get things wrong and a novel, but you have to get yourself permission to get it wrong, but you do the best that you can.
[SPEAKER_01]: And I think we're back on my kiosk talks about this is sort of like it's it's worse not to do it to only write characters like yourself because you're afraid, but you do the best you're can and you recruit help where it's needed.
[SPEAKER_00]: So yeah, and you do it with vulnerability and respect.
[SPEAKER_00]: I think that's of the two most important things.
[SPEAKER_00]: Right.
[SPEAKER_00]: So, okay.
[SPEAKER_00]: So, we are holding up the book again.
[SPEAKER_00]: They're all falling in love at the end.
[SPEAKER_00]: We're linking to it on our bookshop.org affiliate page.
[SPEAKER_00]: If you buy the book, they're used to put an independent bookstores and the podcast at the same time.
[SPEAKER_00]: Haley, please tell me you are having an event at East City Bookshop.
[SPEAKER_01]: I'm having an event at Lost City Books.
[SPEAKER_01]: I'm June 4th.
[SPEAKER_01]: Yep.
[SPEAKER_01]: And then I'm doing something at politics and pros and August.
[SPEAKER_00]: Okay, so for our listeners, but if you go and visit East City, please yes, below all the kisses and send all I love to the book sellers, they we absolutely adore them
[SPEAKER_01]: Yes.
[SPEAKER_01]: Oh, so you know, East City bookshop.
[SPEAKER_00]: Yeah.
[SPEAKER_00]: I, for each of my books, I launched there the only time I didn't was last year when I cancelled all of my US trips thanks to the Canadian elbows up saying we are not coming to the US and we're not spending money there and it broke my heart to not get to go on to it with my last book, but yeah, absolutely adore everybody at East City bookshop.
[SPEAKER_00]: They're just the best.
[SPEAKER_01]: I have
[SPEAKER_00]: Yeah, so we wish you so much like with us and hopefully our listeners can come out to some of those events and yeah, we can't wait to see which you come up with next.
[SPEAKER_01]: Thank you so much, Bianca.
[SPEAKER_01]: This was so much fun.
[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.