Nell Freudenberger, Author of LOST AND WANTED
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[0:34]I'm here today with Nell Freudenberger, Nell is the author of the short story collection,
[0:38]Lucky Girls, and the novels The Dissident, The Newlyweds, and the upcoming Lost and Wanted,
[0:42]released date April 4, 2019.
[0:45]She is a recipient of the Guggenheim Fellowship, a lighting award, and a common fellowship
[0:49]from the New York Public Library.
[0:51]She was named one of the New Yorkers 20 under 40, which I can now give up on ever attaining
[0:55]myself now that I'm 42.
[0:57]She graduated from Harvard and has an MFA from New York University.
[1:01]She currently lives in Brooklyn, New York, with her family.
[1:04]So welcome, Nell, to Moms, don't have time to read books.
[1:07]Thanks so much for having me.
[1:09]So Lucky Girls, your first collection of stories, was based on a story by the same title
[1:15]that you had published in The New Yorker in 2001.
[1:18]So I want to hear the story, basically, of how that happened.
[1:20]You were working at The New Yorker at the time, go from there.
[1:23]I was working as an editorial assistant, and I'd come there from an MFA program at NYU.
[1:28]So I had some stories, and I had a writing routine, and I would usually get up before
[1:32]work and do a little bit, you know, not a lot, an hour and a half or two hours in the
[1:36]morning.
[1:37]And they had a...
[1:38]I think that's kind of a lot before work.
[1:39]But, yeah.
[1:40]Anyway, I'm about to read.
[1:41]We were young, that was true.
[1:42]That's true.
[1:43]That's true.
[1:44]The publishing doesn't start at eight in the morning.
[1:47]And so I had a story, and the New Yorker was doing a debut fiction contest that was for
[1:52]people who had never published before, and that was definitely me.
[1:57]The only story I had that I felt comfortable showing it was finished took place in India.
[2:01]And I think I thought at the time that I sort of didn't have a right to write about that
[2:07]place.
[2:08]It wasn't my place.
[2:09]I spent a lot of time there.
[2:10]And I think the time I was writing in the morning was a way to kind of escape back there
[2:14]and be in a different world.
[2:16]And so that was what I'd been working on.
[2:18]And I gave it to Bill Buford, who was the fiction editor.
[2:22]It was to the work, you know, was sent in, or sent in by agents of writers who hadn't
[2:26]published yet.
[2:27]And later, one of the other fiction editors told me that Bill had read it, and then
[2:30]they had all read it.
[2:31]And they said that they liked it, but they thought the ending was really abrupt.
[2:34]And it turned out that Bill had dropped the last four pages behind his couch.
[2:39]So, you know, a lot of luck in all sorts of ways, but it was great when it was published.
[2:44]It was really exciting.
[2:45]Wow.
[2:46]So, what happened after that?
[2:47]Were you just like over the moon, did everybody come running and ask you to turn it into
[2:51]a collection of it?
[2:52]Like, how did it turn in from that amazing story to the collection of stories?
[2:56]Yeah, there were agents who were interested in it, just because the New Yorkers, that kind
[2:59]of platform.
[3:00]You know, it wasn't an amazing, happy, I think it's sort of like, you get what you've
[3:05]always wanted, and then it's really scary and you feel kind of like under a spotlight.
[3:10]And I remember it being kind of a tough, a tough time, just feeling really self-conscious
[3:14]and not sure that I could write a book of stories, you know, that was like that one.
[3:19]I think I knew that that was the best thing I had done so far and that I didn't, the
[3:22]old work that I had had a novel that I had written in graduate school and some other stories
[3:25]and I just knew that I would have to start over from the beginning and it was scary to
[3:29]sign a contract for a book that, you know, I didn't know if I could necessarily write.
[3:33]And you were what, like, 26.
[3:34]I was 26.
[3:35]I wasn't, you know, a reasonable age for me, it wasn't.
[3:39]I remember so well reading your book when I was graduating from business school and
[3:44]thinking like, oh my gosh, she's like, my age, this is crazy.
[3:47]So nice that people who were in business school had time to read fiction.
[3:51]I don't know what I was doing in business school.
[3:53]I was like a misfit, but yeah, well anyway, it's so neat to have seen your whole career
[3:58]progress over all this time from 20 years ago when you started and I never would have
[4:02]thought at the time when you were like this rising star that you would be feeling insecure
[4:07]about it.
[4:08]I just assumed it's like, oh, she must be just over the moon.
[4:10]It's like interesting to hear that that wasn't how you were feeling.
[4:13]Well, I think for women especially it was strange at that age to be, you know, to do photo
[4:18]shoots and be in magazines because, you know, I was just trying to be a writer and it's
[4:23]not that I was very grateful for the attention because it gave me the ability to leave
[4:28]my day job which I loved but, you know, the time to write the book.
[4:32]So selling the book in advance did that and meant that I could go back to India and spend
[4:36]some more time there on my own because I had never been, you know, I had always been with
[4:39]a friend I had never been on my own before and just have, you know, the luxury of that
[4:43]time to write.
[4:44]So, you know, I wasn't, I certainly wasn't, I was grateful for it but I didn't want
[4:48]my picture that I can really necessarily.
[4:50]And a lot of your stories and novels even have focused on other cultures, do you feel
[4:57]now that you have the right to write, even if you're not from other places, like have
[5:00]you gotten sort of over that initial fear that you had?
[5:03]I think it's a really complicated question and I think rightly it's become more sort
[5:07]of a question of the moment and I think I realized quickly that I wasn't writing about
[5:12]India for anywhere else I had been.
[5:14]I was just writing about being an American and it gave me a different lens on it, you
[5:18]know, writing from within another place.
[5:21]I think now that I don't love the idea that we're kind of hemmed in by our cultural
[5:26]perspective and I think we should be able to write, you know, write more broadly than
[5:30]necessarily where we came from but I also think that if you're doing that you have to
[5:35]be aware that you have a responsibility to be clear about who you are when you're writing
[5:39]and why you're writing it.
[5:40]So if you, you know, the times when I have written from a perspective that's not my
[5:45]own culturally I try to put that into the book in us in some kind of way, like in the
[5:49]newlyweds I was writing about a young woman from Bangladesh and there's another woman
[5:53]in an American woman in that book who writes an essay for her for an essay contest, she
[5:59]the heroine of the book wants to get a scholarship and this other woman helps her.
[6:04]I was hoping in that way to show that that perspective was really, you know, it was from
[6:08]my perspective, it was my idea of what this woman's experience was like and we had also
[6:13]she's based on a real person and we had kind of agreed beforehand that I had asked her
[6:17]permission to write it but I still wanted it to be clear in the book that it, you know,
[6:21]that it was my idea of her life.
[6:23]And wasn't the newlyweds based on a couple you met on a plane or something or is that
[6:28]a different story?
[6:29]I met her, I was flying to Rochester from New York City and my grandmother had just
[6:33]died and I was going to help my dad clear out her just massively cluttered house.
[6:38]So I felt like it was sort of an emotional time for me and that maybe I was especially
[6:41]open to strangers sitting next to me on the plane.
[6:43]I don't usually talk to anybody on your plane and I was reading a book by Amtav Ghosh
[6:48]that took place in the Sundarban's that sort of estuayan area between India and Bangladesh
[6:53]and the woman sitting next to me said, is that an Indian writer and I said, yes, you
[6:58]know that, but the book is set in Bangladesh and she said, that's where I'm from.
[7:02]I'm from the Sundarban's that particular area of Bangladesh, which is really distinct
[7:07]and special in its geography and wildlife.
[7:10]And so we started chatting and it turned out she had just moved to marry this man who
[7:14]she met online and they didn't know each other very well.
[7:17]They had spent nine days together in Bangladesh before they decided to get married and
[7:20]he had never left the United States before he took that trip.
[7:25]I mean that's an unusual first trip abroad and she had never been out of her own country
[7:30]and they were both on the plane I chatted with her more, but I was just fascinated by
[7:34]the idea that they were ready to yoke their lives together in this way and they are
[7:38]still married.
[7:39]They love them Florida.
[7:40]Yeah, so we started corresponding over email and it was amazing to me to watch not only
[7:47]her, I mean she was, she already spoke English and she almost taught herself.
[7:52]She's just a very, very smart person and she, to watch her English get better, but also
[7:57]to watch her perspective on the city that her new adopted city changed.
[8:02]She was so over the moon about Rochester when she first got there and she made me see things
[8:07]about it that I, you know, as a kind of a snobby kid coming from New York City.
[8:11]I thought it was a kind of a backwater where my grandparents lived and which is ridiculous
[8:16]because there's, you know, it's an industrial city, it has all sorts of kind of classic
[8:20]American business businesses there so you're oxen gonna get it.
[8:23]She was amazed, especially by the air quality, she talked about, they had a lilac festival
[8:27]there and she thought that was one of those beautiful things she had seen.
[8:31]She couldn't believe how much space there was and how good the air was and if you're
[8:34]coming from DACA that is notable.
[8:37]And then I think that her perspective became a little bit more nuanced and she started
[8:41]to feel like the friendliness that she experienced when she first got there that there
[8:45]was another layer to it and it wasn't quite as easy to become, you know, to be welcomed
[8:49]as she had first thought and she started seeing bias, you know, in a way that she hadn't
[8:53]before as her language got better and she started to understand kind of what was underneath
[8:57]people's words.
[8:59]So that also is fascinating to me and she had said in the way that South Asian people
[9:04]often do when you're traveling in India, when I first met her she said you'll have
[9:08]to come home and meet my family and it's not just, you know, it's just a politeness.
[9:12]But then we decided we were really gonna do that and said we went back together and we
[9:15]had a funny experience when we had planned to take the same flight and every flight my
[9:20]dad always says having grown up there every flight out of Rochester late nine out of ten
[9:24]will be grounded for snow and so that happened and so I was coming from New York City
[9:30]and I got to JFK and they weren't there and they weren't gonna make it for the flight.
[9:35]So I mean I went and I just had my ticket and once so when I got there her parents were
[9:39]reading for me at the airport and they didn't speak English and I went back with them
[9:42]to their apartment and they, you know, showed me to her room and I slept in her bed that
[9:47]night with her parents in that apartment without her and it was so strange because we
[9:51]already, you know, fire and I had already talked about how it's gonna try to write the story
[9:55]but to wake up in her childhood bedroom as I was trying to imagine, you know, who...
[10:00]She was at that age, and then to kind of struggle
[10:03]to communicate with her parents.
[10:04]It was amazing.
[10:06]And then she arrived.
[10:06]She and her husband arrived a few days later,
[10:08]and we had a really wonderful trip together.
[10:10]Isn't it so weird if you had just been reading
[10:12]a different book on that flight and then
[10:13]and that would have happened?
[10:14]I know.
[10:15]I don't know if she would have chatted me up.
[10:16]She was definitely in the market for a friend in France.
[10:19]And we were kind of, you know, we had things
[10:23]to offer each other.
[10:25]So how did you take that whole experience
[10:28]and turn it into an novel?
[10:29]Did you just sit down and start doing it?
[10:32]Did you have to, like, outline the book?
[10:33]How did you translate it into fiction?
[10:36]I mean, I am so inefficient.
[10:38]I know they're, I was just, I have a writing group
[10:40]in Brooklyn, and we were talking last night
[10:42]until almost talking about how they were outlining
[10:44]their book, and I thought, God, that is, you know,
[10:47]if you can do that from the beginning,
[10:48]it must be so comforting, but it's just not the way
[10:50]I work at all.
[10:51]I just kind of have to figure out who the people are.
[10:52]And I do a lot of extra writing that, you know,
[10:55]I always end up throwing away.
[10:57]And the plot kind of comes in a secondary way
[11:00]that I think is slow, but I'm not sure how else to do it.
[11:03]So you base it more on the characters,
[11:05]and then see what happens.
[11:06]You start with the, well, I mean, I just
[11:07]have to find kind of the voice of the book,
[11:09]and then, you know, things start happening,
[11:10]but like, it's, it's slow.
[11:12]So then you moved on from the newlyweds.
[11:15]No, the dissonant was before the newlyweds.
[11:17]Yeah, I remember what the dissonant
[11:19]and then the newlyweds.
[11:20]And what inspired that novel?
[11:21]The dissonant.
[11:22]You know, I grew up in sort of partly here,
[11:24]and then in LA, when I was 10, we moved to LA.
[11:27]And so it was inspired by a Chinese artist
[11:30]who came to visit our high school
[11:32]and was teaching us, but he had kind of a residency
[11:34]in our high school, and he was teaching us
[11:36]brush painting, traditional brush painting.
[11:38]And I loved his, I kept going back
[11:40]for his little informal classes,
[11:43]and I really liked learning that,
[11:45]and I had spent some time in the med and in the CC Wang wing.
[11:48]And I was interested in the idea of copying
[11:51]and originality, the idea that originality
[11:54]was so important in Western art.
[11:55]And that in China, it was a different method
[11:58]where at least in traditional Chinese art,
[12:00]there was a lot of copying and learning
[12:02]from kind of a teacher.
[12:04]And I wanted to explore that.
[12:06]And so I had the idea of a man like him coming
[12:09]to Los Angeles and staying with this wealthy family.
[12:11]And my best friend in Almeggi School
[12:13]was from a really kind of glamorous Chinese family.
[12:15]And they had this house in Beverly Hills.
[12:17]It was just, I told my mom when I first went to play there.
[12:20]You know, I felt like I was, I would just pretend
[12:22]that I was a princess when I was there.
[12:24]And so that house was really impressed in my memory.
[12:27]I thought I would set it in that house
[12:29]and write about this man.
[12:30]And my husband and I went before we were married
[12:33]and interviewed some of the artists
[12:34]who were part of the Beijing East Village.
[12:36]And so their work also kind of influenced
[12:40]who the character became.
[12:42]So you do the dissident and then the newlyweds.
[12:44]And now, last and wanted.
[12:46]So how long has it been between these books?
[12:48]Have you been working on this book the whole time?
[12:50]Or how long has this book been in the works?
[12:51]It's been a while.
[12:52]I think I sold this book in 2013,
[12:56]but it really was a different book at that time.
[12:58]I wrote a whole draft that I ended up getting rid of.
[13:03]And then, you know, this book that is actually this book
[13:05]probably took about two years,
[13:06]but there were, you know, three years before that
[13:09]of writing around.
[13:11]And I was stunned as I was reading it.
[13:14]I was like, how does she know this much about physics
[13:16]and all the science?
[13:18]And like, did you study all that?
[13:20]There was like so much detail and texture
[13:22]to all that information.
[13:24]Well, there might be too much detail for some people.
[13:26]No, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, I'm sorry.
[13:29]No, no, no, no, I did not work.
[13:31]I just, I worry that I got sort of too
[13:33]darkly immersed in the science,
[13:34]but the thing that made me throw away the old draft
[13:36]and start this one was that I really wanted the narrator
[13:39]to be a physicist.
[13:40]And when I had written the other draft,
[13:42]I made her a writer and it just,
[13:43]it was too close.
[13:44]I did want to write something that was set in the United
[13:46]States and it was a little bit closer to my experience
[13:48]and that included the experience of being a mother.
[13:50]But when I was writing about her as a writer,
[13:52]it just was so boring to me.
[13:53]I think the character was boring
[13:55]and there was a physicist in the book,
[13:56]but I, you know, had safely made it a man
[13:59]who was a secondary character.
[14:01]So I wouldn't have to understand the physics.
[14:02]And then I thought to myself,
[14:03]you know, it's always worked better when something,
[14:06]when an idea seems like something that I couldn't do,
[14:08]you know, that seems kind of too hard.
[14:11]And maybe I should try.
[14:11]And so I got in touch with an astrophysicist
[14:14]who I had known in college and I said,
[14:15]you know, I want to start at the beginning.
[14:17]I don't have a science background.
[14:18]Can you just recommend like a very basic college textbook
[14:21]like Physics for Poets, you know,
[14:23]and he sent me one and then from there.
[14:25]I mean, the wonderful thing about learning about physics
[14:27]is that there's just,
[14:27]there's so many people whose hobby is reading about it
[14:30]that there are so many books for a general audience
[14:32]and some of the best physicists in the world right
[14:34]for regular people.
[14:35]And so, you know, discovering that
[14:38]and then discovering the online archive of physics papers
[14:41]that are published in journals,
[14:43]that all of that is accessible
[14:45]and you don't even need an account or a password.
[14:47]I mean, it's one of the most open places
[14:48]on the internet that I've ever found
[14:50]and it was really exciting to see that, you know,
[14:52]once I'd done a little bit of the background reading,
[14:54]I could never understand the math that goes with it.
[14:57]But one physicist said to me, you know,
[14:59]we don't read the math either as we think it's wrong.
[15:01]And that was very encouraging, you know,
[15:04]the idea that you could take something away.
[15:06]Not what a scientist would take away,
[15:07]but something from these papers.
[15:09]And then I met some amazing people at Columbia and MIT
[15:13]who took me on tours of their labs.
[15:14]It was especially interested in like,
[15:16]oh, in the gravitational wave detection project.
[15:18]And so, it was incredible to walk through those places
[15:21]with the people who were working there.
[15:22]And physicists are fabulous to talk to.
[15:25]They just are, everyone I met was just obsessed
[15:27]with their work and loved trying to make it clear
[15:30]for an outsider's tale.
[15:31]Actually, Mr. Pippia, my physics teacher in high school
[15:34]was one of my favorite teachers while there.
[15:36]So, maybe there's something to that.
[15:38]I think that's my one data point on physics, basically.
[15:41]But yeah, yeah, I took a physics class
[15:44]on high school where we, it was an all-girls school in LA.
[15:46]And we took the P, I remember taking,
[15:49]it wasn't really physics.
[15:50]It was called physical science.
[15:52]So it was like a match up with chemistry.
[15:53]And the one thing I remember is taking the pH
[15:54]of our different shampoos.
[15:56]And I was like, yeah, I mean, it was really,
[15:59]it was pretty basic.
[16:00]And this was exciting for me.
[16:02]Well, I didn't mean to imply there was too much physics,
[16:04]but I did feel a little bit smarter.
[16:06]And there may be too much to do.
[16:07]I felt like smarter reading.
[16:09]And I was like, wow, now I'm actually like learning.
[16:11]I was like, aside, benefit.
[16:12]Like, I get this great story.
[16:13]But I feel a little bit more.
[16:15]I mean, seeing it with writing, it was exciting to feel it.
[16:19]If you're going to spend five years working on a book,
[16:21]it's really nice to learn today at the same time.
[16:25]That's funny.
[16:26]And did you base it on the friendship between Charlie
[16:29]and of course, I'm blanking.
[16:30]I have talent in Charlie.
[16:31]Yes, Helen and Charlie, was that based on a friendship
[16:33]that you had?
[16:34]Or did I still have the, luckily, the woman,
[16:37]that Charlie is really a cool bunch of people together.
[16:41]But I had a really close friend in college.
[16:43]So I'm still friends with.
[16:44]But she lived somewhere else.
[16:45]And it's just hard to keep in touch.
[16:47]And I thought when I was starting to write this book,
[16:49]that for years, romantic relationships
[16:52]seemed important.
[16:54]And there was always kind of a romance in the books.
[16:58]And that feeling of loss, especially, the love ending
[17:01]was important, especially for the first book of stories.
[17:04]And I thought if I could write that about romantic relationships,
[17:07]why would it be any less powerful to write it about a friend?
[17:10]So I felt in a certain way, I had lost.
[17:13]And at that point, in this point in my life,
[17:15]that loss was resonating more than old boyfriends I had
[17:19]forgotten about, you know?
[17:21]It's funny, one of the things I really liked,
[17:24]I've had, as I'm sure all this now, that we're in our 40s,
[17:28]I have lost a lot of people along the way.
[17:31]And whenever the loss happens, you stop and reflect
[17:35]on the whole relationship.
[17:37]And I feel like, depending on where you are
[17:40]at the time of the loss, it makes you feel like, well,
[17:42]am I allowed to be this sad?
[17:44]Like, be worse, super close.
[17:46]But right now, we're not like, right now,
[17:47]she lives across the country or right now,
[17:49]I'm so in my kid world or whatever, that it's like, is it OK?
[17:54]And I feel like there was a lot of that in this book.
[17:56]Like, will we kind of lost touch or do they
[17:59]really want me to speak?
[18:00]And when you actually, when someone dies
[18:03]and you realize that there was this time
[18:06]that you had that you could have at this point,
[18:09]we've all lost a friend in a more permanent way.
[18:11]And you realize, God, there were all those nights,
[18:14]what was I doing when I could have been out with him or her?
[18:18]And now that it seems incredible at this age
[18:21]when someone's life was cut short.
[18:23]So there was that too, just trying to write about grief.
[18:26]No one just asked me yesterday, like, one of those,
[18:28]like, what would you tell yourself if you were younger?
[18:30]And I was like, honestly, I would have said,
[18:31]like, go spend more time without those people.
[18:33]It's you just don't know.
[18:34]Spend time with people you love, you just never know.
[18:37]Not to sound like, you know, trite or whatever.
[18:39]But anyway, I thought that was one of the things
[18:41]I really enjoyed in this particular book.
[18:43]And the way you just made Charlie, like, come so alive
[18:46]in so many ways, but just off the page.
[18:48]Like, I feel like she could walk in here.
[18:49]And I would be like, oh, that's nice.
[18:52]I hope I hope that that's the goal of my life.
[18:55]I'm pretty sure.
[18:56]So I read one interview that you did with women on writing.
[18:59]And you said that you write very slowly,
[19:02]so you don't always have time to share your work.
[19:04]So how slow, and you mentioned just now, of course,
[19:06]that you took you several years.
[19:07]How slow is slow?
[19:08]Like, do you have a word count a day?
[19:10]Do you have, do you just, like, meander?
[19:13]Is it that you write slowly or that you take your time
[19:15]to think through the stories?
[19:16]I don't remember saying that.
[19:17]I definitely share my work before.
[19:19]Like, a lot of Mrs. Wiley, maybe I dug a seven.
[19:22]Yeah, no, well, I don't know.
[19:23]I have friends who I show things to.
[19:25]I have this wonderful group of women in Brooklyn.
[19:28]We don't actually share work at our meetings
[19:31]because a lot of us, or most people, are teaching as well
[19:34]and have families.
[19:35]And you know, you don't want to add extra homework.
[19:37]But we do make kind of individual partnerships
[19:39]within the group.
[19:40]And I have some other sort of old writing friends
[19:43]who I share with.
[19:43]I do more of a, like, sit down three hours sort of thing.
[19:47]I don't like to, the word count seems kind of counterproductive
[19:50]to me because, you know, you can put words down
[19:52]and they're not the right words.
[19:53]But I try to just kind of get to my desk.
[19:56]It's different than it was before I had kids.
[19:58]It was very regimented.
[19:59]A bit.
[20:00]It's just kind of characteristic of my personality and job.
[20:03]But like I really like to have the same three hours
[20:06]of new writing time.
[20:07]And then in the afternoon, I do a lot of freelance work
[20:09]before my kids were born.
[20:11]I would be working on an article, or maybe going back
[20:14]to what I would head down in the morning and revising.
[20:16]But just to have those hours that were supposed
[20:18]to be for new writing.
[20:19]And I still try to stick with that,
[20:20]although I'm not quite as good at it.
[20:23]You don't do any teaching, do you?
[20:25]You mentioned that.
[20:26]I mean, I occasionally teach a class at the Y or something.
[20:29]But I do or visit classes.
[20:31]But I'm not employed at a university.
[20:34]And do you do some freelancing now?
[20:37]Yeah, I do a little bit.
[20:38]I mean, sometimes an essay or book review
[20:41]or something, that's awesome.
[20:43]And so what do you want to have happen next in your life?
[20:46]Like, are you going to do another book for the next couple
[20:48]years?
[20:48]Do you have?
[20:49]Yeah.
[20:49]I mean, I want to write another non-life
[20:50]as sort of a vague idea, but really vague.
[20:53]So I just, and I also love writing short stories.
[20:55]So I usually do that when I have a sometimes.
[20:58]I mean, I do it whenever I have an idea.
[21:00]I don't feel like I have ideas for stories that often.
[21:02]So when I have when I try to stop, you know,
[21:03]if it's not an absolute crunch time with the book,
[21:05]I usually try to stop and write it.
[21:07]I love the idea that when I'm old,
[21:10]I can have even older than I am now.
[21:13]I can stop, you know, at the end.
[21:15]You can't call yourself old, because that's
[21:16]like, I'm so assuming that.
[21:18]I would like someday to be able to publish a book of all
[21:21]the stories, because the stories,
[21:22]they're a little bit less influenced by anyone else.
[21:25]I mean, you get stories are added in usually,
[21:27]but usually only after they're accepted somewhere,
[21:29]and it's usually light-addening.
[21:31]I feel like they're the place where I can do the most
[21:33]experimenting, and if I have an idea that seems really weird
[21:36]to me, I can try it.
[21:38]And so, you know, someday I would love to collect
[21:40]all the stories together, but I'm not in a rush to do that.
[21:43]They just feel like absolute kind of free play time.
[21:46]It should be fun, right?
[21:47]Yeah.
[21:49]Do you feel a little more confident now
[21:51]at this stage of life than when you were starting out
[21:53]with all that pressure on you?
[21:55]Like when you have a book coming in now,
[21:56]are you, like, how do you feel about going into the publicity
[22:00]of this and the reception of it?
[22:02]Like, are you as nervous as you were when you were younger?
[22:04]No, I mean, so I definitely have moments of it,
[22:06]but I am more, I am definitely more confident speaking
[22:09]in front of people.
[22:11]I feel like public speaking is something I had to grow into,
[22:13]but I think I understand it a little better now.
[22:16]It seemed great to me.
[22:17]We're not public, it's like in my office.
[22:20]Yeah, this is easier.
[22:22]Yeah, I mean, you know, I'm grateful when people read the book
[22:25]and I'm happy to do the book clubs and, you know,
[22:27]go please to a bookstore where people, you know,
[22:29]want to come listen.
[22:31]I think it's nice a lot of times
[22:32]where when you can have a conversation instead of just stand up
[22:36]there and read a lot of people like that more.
[22:38]And so, and bookstores are more open to all different kinds
[22:41]of formats now.
[22:42]So it has gotten easier.
[22:44]I'm going to end tonight with, like, four people talking
[22:46]for the lunch of, like, Brooklyn actually, thank you anyway.
[22:49]But I agree, those are really fun to watch.
[22:51]Yeah.
[22:52]I think there should be a way for people who can't end up
[22:53]going to the book events to see all that great content.
[22:56]You know, I feel like it should be like...
[22:58]No, absolutely.
[22:59]I always talked to, so Julie Orringer,
[23:01]and I started this group in Brooklyn,
[23:03]and we met because we were doing an event in Phoenix
[23:06]with our first books.
[23:07]And her husband was also there.
[23:08]He had his book out at that time,
[23:10]and then it was another writer.
[23:11]And we, it was in a bar, but it was outside,
[23:14]and it was near the airport.
[23:15]And so there was planes flying overhead.
[23:17]And we were like, oh my God, how's this going to work?
[23:19]Because I have fabulous event because they were serving beer.
[23:22]I mean, it's so simple, but it needs to feel fun.
[23:25]You know, it's much nicer to listen to somebody
[23:27]read from their work of literature
[23:30]while you're drinking a beer.
[23:31]Yeah.
[23:33]I went to, and so I had Greer Hendrix on,
[23:35]the day that anonymous girl came out,
[23:37]and she was telling me about their lunch event.
[23:39]And she's like, put my husband's being really good one.
[23:41]So we don't make all the difference.
[23:43]I'm like, okay.
[23:45]Yeah, and with more people, you know,
[23:47]the more writers, the better.
[23:49]Well, your whole sketch will be on your website
[23:51]or your, yeah, it will.
[23:52]I just actually am only just making a website right now,
[23:55]which I probably should have done earlier,
[23:57]but it will be on my website.
[23:59]Good Twitter.
[24:00]And do you have any advice to aspiring authors?
[24:04]Yeah, definitely.
[24:05]I mean, I think if you're not already
[24:06]a completely passionate reader,
[24:08]then there's no point in doing it
[24:10]and reading is how you learn.
[24:11]Writing every day is really helpful, I think.
[24:13]And I think also the, you know,
[24:15]I think most of us, myself included,
[24:17]don't know what our interesting stories are.
[24:19]We think that there's something that people want to hear
[24:23]and it's almost never what's interesting about you.
[24:24]It's almost never what you think is interesting, are you?
[24:27]And so I think, you know, kind of writing the thing
[24:29]that scares you or the thing that seems, you know,
[24:32]the thing that you can't forget what seems too strange
[24:35]or too hard is probably the way to go, you know,
[24:38]to kind of push yourself to do what's uncomfortable.
[24:40]Well, thank you so much.
[24:41]Thank you so much for talking to you
[24:43]and good luck with the lunch.
[24:44]Thank you.
[24:45]It's really exciting.
[24:45]Okay.
[24:46]So it was sponsored by cereal box.
[24:48]S-E-R-I-E-L-B-O-X.com, cereal box.com,
[24:52]delivering addictive book content in short listen
[24:55]or read installments.
[24:56]Thanks to Ryan and Steve at Texture Sound
[24:58]for the audio editing and mixing.
[25:00]Thanks for listening to Momstone,
[25:01]have time to read books.