Michael Frank, WHAT IS MISSING
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[0:39]contests, literary agents, and more. I'm here today with Michael Frank, who's the author of what
[0:44]is missing, a novel. His memoir, The Mighty Frank's, was a Barnes and Noble Discover Great New
[0:49]Writer's selection, one of the telegraphs and the new statesman's best books of 2017,
[0:54]and the winner of the 2018 JQ Wingate Literary Prize. His work has appeared in New York Times,
[1:00]the Wall Street Journal, the Atlantic, and many other publications. He was a contributing writer
[1:04]to the Los Angeles Times book review for almost 10 years. He currently lives with his family
[1:08]in New York City and LaGuardia Italy. Welcome, Michael. Thanks for coming in, Mom's to have time to read
[1:13]books. Thank you, Zibi, for having him delighted. What is missing your novel, which is also missing
[1:19]an eye on the cover? Tell me about what this book is about and why the eye is missing.
[1:25]Well, what is missing? That's a good place to start, I think. The title comes from a poem by
[1:30]Mark Strand, wherever I go, I am. What is missing is the line. And I'll confess that I came to the
[1:36]title rather late in the book, only realizing after I chose it, how many things are in fact missing
[1:42]in this story. And in a few words, it's a triangle. It's a father, a son, and a woman. The woman
[1:49]is Costanza Unsolved, a half American, half Italian translator, who was recently, fairly recently,
[1:57]widowed. Her husband was a leading American novelist who lives not far from where we're
[2:02]taking this wonderful podcast. And with Morton, her husband, she tried to have a baby and wasn't
[2:09]successful. And in her life, she's gone back and forth between this idea of whether she should be
[2:15]you know, back and forth, trying to decide whether she should become a mother. And when we first meet
[2:21]her, she seems to have resolved her mind against becoming a parent. And when we meet her,
[2:26]she's also meeting a young man called Andrew Weissman in Florence, Italy, in a pantheon where they're
[2:32]staying. He's a 17 year old photographer, sensitive, troubled with something he feels not quite right
[2:40]between him and his father. And then she meets his father, Henry Weissman, who is a physician who specializes
[2:49]in and of all things, reproductive medicine. And as these relationships coalesce in this triangle,
[2:56]the novel, which opens in Florence, chances here to New York to the upper east side, and then
[3:00]concludes again in the area. And in the course of it, Castanza, informing a primary relationship with
[3:06]Henry, reawakened her longing to have a baby. And in the process of trying to have one, she
[3:12]undergoes treatment for infertility. And we come to see that the first missing thing in this book is
[3:18]this long for year and for unborn child. But it's not the only thing. I think that there are
[3:26]several missing elements. Sometimes there are people like the dead of the show-off, because Henry's
[3:31]father, Andrew's grandfather is a survivor of Auschwitz. There is the dead husband, the famous writer
[3:38]of Castanza's husband. That is, there's her father who committed suicide. There's her mother
[3:43]who is remote and difficult comes on scene later in the novel. But there are also less obvious
[3:49]missing elements. And they tend to be connections between people, the fathers and sons in this book
[3:55]across three generations. The brothers, there's Henry's ex-wife. They're the pictures on the walls
[4:01]that she took away when she moved out of their Lexington Avenue apartment. And I was very interested
[4:06]in this idea of negative space driving us, negative space pushing people through their lives,
[4:13]whether it's something that is lost as an object, something that is unborn like a child,
[4:20]something that is forgotten, like a memory or something that is withheld like some key information.
[4:27]Very interesting. And did you have anything to do with the missing eye?
[4:30]I think I might have originally proposed it, but Alex Merter, who designed this beautiful cover,
[4:35]I think, got what the book was about. The cover is missing color. It's missing the eye. There's a
[4:42]drawing by a French artist called Vitti Fleurice, who is missing the... Oh, I'm sorry, which is
[4:49]missing the face, but it's clearly the body of a woman lost in thought. And I think Costanza loses
[4:56]herself in thought quite a bit in this novel. My daughter was trying to re-enact. How exactly do
[5:02]you think this person is sitting? What's going on? I'm like, you try it. I'll try it. No,
[5:06]it's a beautiful cover. And I don't mean to belabor it, but it's really neat. Did you have another
[5:10]working title the whole time? Was there no title? There were a number of titles, which I'm not
[5:15]going to reveal to you today, because they've been so roundly rejected. Most one of them,
[5:19]several of them by my brother, who is also a writer and a teacher, he writes novels for middle
[5:24]grade readers and young adults. And he's very liberal with his use of the red pen, starting with
[5:30]the title and then moving through the manuscript. And I've learned to take it because I think it's
[5:34]his great chance as a younger brother to express all that pent-up aggression and hostility that he has
[5:39]resulted in brother. And he got rid of several of the titles along the way. I don't know if I would
[5:43]listen to my brother. That's another podcast. Yeah, that's another podcast. There are so many
[5:50]different ways into writing a novel. And one interesting thing that you wrote in the novel,
[5:56]and I don't know if this is actually the way you do it, but you, Costanza is a translator,
[6:01]and you wrote, when Costanza wrote a story, she always began by thinking about the setting,
[6:05]then the people, then what happened to the people in that setting? Before she could imagine,
[6:09]she had to visualize everything from the carpet to the lighting to the view out the window.
[6:13]She approached her translations in the same way. She always mapped out the locations in the book first.
[6:18]So I was wondering, is that how you approach it? Is that how you approach this book?
[6:21]Typically, I need to see a place in order to inhabit it and inhabit it with language.
[6:26]I knew I wanted to start the book in Florence, somewhere I had lived in my 20s,
[6:31]and which has been a very central place in my imagination and in my heart ever since as
[6:36]has the whole country of Italy for various reasons. But quite honestly, I had an image of a woman
[6:42]walking away, and that became Costanza. And I think her walking away in a sense pervades the whole
[6:48]book because she's often somewhat difficult to understand by the people around her. She's difficult
[6:55]to understand even to herself. And that idea that you don't always read someone because they
[7:03]have their back turned toward you, whether it's actual or figurative, is another missing element
[7:09]that compelled me. I wanted to discover who she was and why she would do some of the things she does
[7:16]in this book. I don't know if I succeed it, but I try. And I think that's the role of the novelist
[7:22]not to have answers, but to pose questions and to do his or her best to try to find stories that
[7:29]will answer them. Well, I think your ability to create a sense of place, it's unbelievable.
[7:35]I mean, I feel like, and the characters too. And as I said this year, I feel like I would recognize
[7:40]I'm walking in the room, but you can see yourself in their and Henry's apartment. You can see
[7:46]and just all of it. Everything is so visual. And that's why I was when I read this line,
[7:51]I was like, ah, see, he must be doing this. Because I can have like the floor plan of the whole
[7:56]apartment in my head now. Yes, funny. My memoir, which was published a couple of years ago, also by
[8:01]F.S.G. was called The Mighty Franks, was translated in a number of languages. One of them was
[8:08]Danish. And I met my translator in Copenhagen. We had a wonderful conversation which he told me that
[8:13]in order to translate any book, he needs this kind of visual specificity to the degree that he
[8:19]will Google settings in large them to see if the writer has a character walking down the street was
[8:25]he or she more likely to have walked on the right side or the left side. And he needs for his own
[8:31]sense of owning a space mentally and linguistically, he needs to see it. And I thought that really
[8:38]resonated because I do pretty much the same thing. In fact, the memoir, though it's not overtly
[8:45]spelled out in this way, is structured very much around each section around a room, a house
[8:52]or place. And that was really my way in was to say. And I think that's very true of a story
[8:57]about childhood because we're very tuned to our settings to where we live as children,
[9:02]probably more so than we are as adults. And certainly for me, I would recreate, for example,
[9:08]as in it really well into my adulthood, the apartment of my dad, grandmothers who live together,
[9:14]I would revisit it wall by wall. I think as a way of trying to bring them back kind of grieving
[9:20]if you were longing for what is missing. I thought your essay where you had an essay you published
[9:25]with the translator and how it was almost creepy, how he knew so much about you for your memory.
[9:30]I've walked your exact route to that tree. I have to say at first, I was a bit put off by it.
[9:37]It felt stalkerish. I think I said that. But I've come to cherish that encounter very much,
[9:43]because it's also just simply the joy of knowing that you've been read so closely, right, that your
[9:48]wars have been paid attention to as such detail. I guess he earned a little stalkering,
[9:54]a stalker-ish-ing-ness, if you will. He earned the right to be a stalker. And speaking-
[10:00]of your past articles. When I uncovered your Time Magazine piece, it was called what almost
[10:04]four years in the land of infertility taught me about waiting. I immediately wondered
[10:09]is this where? Because your book, what is missing is probably the most literary interpretation
[10:14]of infertility ever. It goes into detail less science than experience of it and in such
[10:21]a beautiful way. I mean, if you can make giving yourself a shot, beautiful. I mean, it was,
[10:27]there's, it's a literary quality to all of it. And you wrote, the next time my wife and I
[10:32]walked through the door of that fertility clinic, we might as well have been moving to a new country,
[10:36]one where we ended up living for almost four years. It was a country with its own language,
[10:39]its own calendar, its own leadership, its own climate, well, emotional climate and its own sense of time.
[10:44]People often send reports from the land of infertility, but I wasn't prepared for the agony of
[10:49]living through these cycles of treatment where waiting is consistently broken down to slow,
[10:54]painful, fractal, like interludes of subwaiting. It's not just your body you hand over to complete
[10:59]strangers, but your mind too. That was beautiful. I feel like you took that and made it into a whole
[11:05]novel. Is that what happened? In fact, yes, I have talked about this. So I don't mind sharing with
[11:11]you that my wife and I had considerable difficulty conceiving our daughter over many years. And
[11:19]as often when I find myself in uncomfortable, painful, anxious, or just unpleasant situations,
[11:24]I pay attention. I find that for me is the best way to navigate unhappiness, let's say.
[11:30]And so I paid a lot of attention to what we went through. I made notes. I thought even at the time,
[11:35]this is a place to set a story. I think it's sort of my way of maybe also detaching and thinking,
[11:41]okay, I'm here doing research. Now, I'm here gambling on the future of a possible family,
[11:46]which is what you're really doing. And you can feel your heart breaking over and over again
[11:52]individually as a couple as you long for this thing that is missing. And so I tucked that away
[12:00]through these years I paid attention. I read, I read, of course, about the science. I talk to
[12:05]other people because going through infertility treatment and infertility experiences is a little bit,
[12:11]I like to say like grief. You know, until you grieve, you can't really talk to other people
[12:17]about grief and until you've gone through something like infertility treatment, it's very difficult,
[12:22]I'm not saying impossible, but very difficult to speak profoundly and honestly and with compassion
[12:29]to other people who people have gone through it. And you can't speak to your siblings who are having
[12:34]their children so easily or your parents who had you without a problem. Most of your friends
[12:40]in every even registers on them because it's just so remote from from their experience that these
[12:46]people have spent their lives trying not to get pregnant, then they stop and they get pregnant,
[12:49]they have their families, they move forward to the next life challenges and there you are stuck
[12:54]in this limbo not knowing what's going to come, not knowing what's going to happen. It's not as though
[12:59]you walk through those the doors of those clinics that give you their treatment and boom done,
[13:04]it's your full of raised and hopes and disappointment, physical discomfort challenges to
[13:13]individually and to the marriage to the couple. And I thought, well, this is really rich material
[13:20]for a novel. This book is not, I should say, autobiographical in any sense, but it's very personal,
[13:27]which I think is different. You know, I gave to these characters and I gave to this story
[13:33]what I had lived and what we had lived together. I did my best anyway.
[13:37]As I was sort of thinking, like, you're not to put a gender spin of how do you write from a
[13:42]one's perspective as a man, but Costanza's cycle when she went through her first round and IVF and
[13:49]I'm not, that's like a main thing away, but with so vivid, the things that the woman got the
[13:55]effect of the drugs, the effect physically, her waiting, her stress, the things she noticed about her
[14:01]body. I mean, it was so almost graphic and yet you're a man writing it. How did you do that? Is
[14:07]it all from observing and imagining yourself in that situation? Well, here's the things that
[14:12]be if you are married, you are living with, and if you're married to a woman, you're living with
[14:17]someone who is living these vivid experiences right alongside you. And I think you have to be utterly
[14:23]blind or, you know, atomic, you know, closed off not to notice.
[14:30]There are many men who could be right next to a woman experiencing this and not be able to
[14:35]even observe or imagine the interior life that she was doing.
[14:39]Okay. So not a wonderful writer. I think, first and start writing a book, okay. So all right,
[14:45]as a writer, how can you live in the company of a woman going through an experience like this
[14:50]and not speculate because your job is a writer or your, or your calling, if I can say that, your
[14:57]nature is a writer is to wonder what other people are feeling and thinking, you know, and I've
[15:02]done that since I was a child, I think observing both setting its and people and the dynamics between
[15:09]people starting in my rather complicated family and moving outward has been the way I've conducted
[15:15]my life, navigated my life in my experience. And so yeah, I paid very close attention and trust me,
[15:21]if I hadn't been, I think my wife would have made it abundantly clear because she's not,
[15:26]let's say, a wilting daisy of a personality. You know, she made very clear how difficult this
[15:32]experience was and there were those waiting rooms full of other women and I looked at them.
[15:39]What can I say? I studied them. I talked to the nurses. I asked the doctors. I was very curious.
[15:44]Again, I'm sure in a psychological setting, one could diagnose this as some weird,
[15:50]defensive, self-protective toolkit that I was drawing on, but it is what I do or what I try to do.
[15:56]It's a great toolkit to have. I mean, because you end up helping other people.
[16:00]Well, I hope, you know, I do. I don't really think there has been, or to my knowledge,
[16:04]there hasn't been another literary novel that takes on this particular topic. And the book is
[16:11]about so many other things. No, I know. And I know about, it's about family structures. It's about
[16:15]how do you build a family. It's about difficulty between fathers and sons. You know, I have a friend,
[16:21]my friend Sarah Boxer, who's a writer on critic in DC. It says, this is the man's novel. It's not
[16:25]the woman's novel. So she means it very differently. People find different ways in because it's
[16:30]told from multiple points of view that shift. And part of the way I kept it, I hope dynamic was
[16:37]moving among these different characters. And then there are the B-line characters, the grandfather,
[16:43]the Costanza's mother, Andrew's brother, briefly, also Henry's ex-wife. There's the dead writer
[16:50]and his secretary. All of these people in this somewhat kaleidoscopic way, let's say, come in and
[16:55]move their chips of color through the story. But central, of course, is Costanza and her quest.
[17:01]Yeah. And I didn't mean to say this is only about infertility. Just one of the many
[17:05]stories. No, and I'm very happy for it to be recognized as that. Absolutely.
[17:09]The last question about infertility, because I really am wondering this, you said in the book
[17:14]that, well, a doctor reports in the book that he can tell from the outside who's ultimately
[17:18]going to be successful in infertility treatments by their attitude, by something intangible that
[17:24]over time he recognizes is what somehow will lead to success. Is that what a doctor told you?
[17:30]I think someone said that to us. I'm not sure it was a doctor or a nurse. And I thought at the time,
[17:35]this is absolute nonsense. And I still think it's absolute nonsense. If they knew that, I'm sure
[17:42]they could bottle it and share that attitude or train people in that attitude. It is not about
[17:47]the state of mind. In fact, one of the most destructive things I think that happens
[17:52]humanly to people going through infertility treatment is that the world around them, those people who
[17:56]haven't gone through it offer up these bromides or this unsolicited advice. Just go away for a
[18:02]weekend. Just calm down. Just have a romantic dinner. Just meditate. Just take this vitamin. Just
[18:09]wear loose clothing. You know, just go to the gym. I'm so sorry. It's just not like that.
[18:16]Just glad to hear that. Just tell me more about your writing process.
[18:21]Did you outline the story first? I know we talked about setting, but did you outline the plot?
[18:26]Did you go deep first into the characters? And then where exactly? Let me picture where you were
[18:31]when you were sitting and writing this book. Well, I work at home. I live in Greenwich Village.
[18:36]I'm very fortunate to have a room of my own. An important thing for someone who likes to
[18:41]shut himself up in a room with the doors closed for many, many hours. This book took a lot of time
[18:47]and took quite a lot out of me, I will say. It may have had to do with the infertility theme.
[18:52]It may have had to do with the fact that I don't think I knew quite what I was doing when I set off.
[18:57]I don't know that many writers do. Then those who do say they know absolutely from the beginning,
[19:01]I think are not being 100% truthful. In my case, though, I had started this book before the memoir,
[19:08]I had written an enormous number of pages like twice what ended up being used. As I felt my way
[19:14]into the story, I wrangled with Costanza, I wrangled with Henry, he does things that I don't
[19:20]always like. And that's a very strange relationship to be in with an imagined character whom you
[19:25]might not want to sit down to dinner with regularly, but who might fascinate you and might serve
[19:31]a purpose, narratively, psychologically and thematically. I wanted to figure him out.
[19:36]And Andrew, I had to figure him out. I was once a 17 turning 18-year-old boy. I was not
[19:42]unlike Andrew, but I wasn't Andrew. And so it took a lot of writing, a lot of going down certain
[19:49]paths, coming to forks, making the wrong choice and then losing a month of work out the door.
[19:56]I knew having this triangle, it just really...
[20:00]relationship of a triangle at the center of the book that I would want to be twisting
[20:03]that triangle.
[20:04]So turning on its different, three different sides through the story.
[20:08]And so that was as much structure as I had.
[20:11]And but the more I wrote, the more I discovered I need to know more.
[20:15]And so I need to know the parents.
[20:16]I need to know the brother.
[20:18]I need to know the apartments.
[20:20]I need to know the medical office.
[20:22]I followed Henry for several months through his work life.
[20:26]And then eventually I got rid of all that material, but I knew it.
[20:29]And so it was under my knowledge of him.
[20:32]And sometimes I work that way.
[20:33]Sometimes I don't.
[20:34]But it was like improvising as an actor maybe or rehearsing.
[20:39]And then thinking, OK, I have this under my belt.
[20:42]Now let me move forward to the essence of the story.
[20:46]I always have readers.
[20:48]I have three good friends and my brother, my younger brother, who read.
[20:51]Of course, I have my wonderful editor, Eileen Smith, who early on pointed
[20:56]certain things out that took me a while to hear.
[20:59]And even a longer while to implement.
[21:01]So this book, this book was a bit of a puzzle.
[21:04]And eventually it slimmed down.
[21:07]It became more dramatic.
[21:08]I think I think it became the best version of itself,
[21:13]but it took a lot of time.
[21:14]I know you used to do a lot of book reviews
[21:16]for the less endless times.
[21:17]Did you feel like your time reviewing other books
[21:22]and thinking about them so critically helped you craft this?
[21:26]Well, I've been a passionate reader since I was a child.
[21:30]And that was probably one of the most intense reading periods
[21:33]of my adulthood, because I was reading two books a month,
[21:36]which to you who read five of them.
[21:38]It's like nothing.
[21:40]To read them and have to figure out what you want to say about them
[21:42]and then write it and then like what you've written takes
[21:45]a bit of time.
[21:46]And I think, sure, I learned a lot about how I think things
[21:49]would work best and things would work less well.
[21:52]But you know, I remember Phillip Roth had said once at one point
[21:56]that the writing, the profession is the only one
[21:59]in which you don't accumulate any worthwhile experience.
[22:02]So I think it was a little bit over dramatic.
[22:04]But what he was saying as I took it was that every book,
[22:08]every project is like starting over.
[22:10]It's not just the blank page, but it has its own vocabulary
[22:14]that you have to master.
[22:16]It has its own needs, its own exigencies.
[22:19]And you have no idea what they are when you start off,
[22:23]because the book does take you in different directions.
[22:25]Often where you begin is not even where you end up beginning.
[22:29]That kind of thing.
[22:29]And so you learn a certain amount.
[22:32]But a lot of it has to be figured out along the way.
[22:34]I think that's the most candid response to that question.
[22:37]And this experience now that the book is out there,
[22:40]does it make you want to write another book?
[22:41]Are you already working on another novel?
[22:43]Yes, of course.
[22:44]I'm working on a couple of things.
[22:45]Well, I've always written short stories.
[22:46]So I've taken a treat myself to a short story,
[22:49]another very difficult form in between longer projects.
[22:53]But I have two things underway at the moment.
[22:54]The first one is, sorry, the second one is a novel that
[22:59]is going to be pretty ambitious.
[23:01]And it's interesting that we started out today
[23:03]talking about place, because it's
[23:05]going to be a multi-generational novel
[23:07]set in the same street, the same house.
[23:10]So it would have been the house of the grandparents,
[23:13]the children, and the grandchildren over time,
[23:15]which is something that fascinates me
[23:17]that how the container of a family can keep going,
[23:20]as the people come and go, as lives are remade,
[23:23]as people die, and as people are born.
[23:26]But more approximately, I'm working on a book
[23:29]that is going to be a kind of hybrid, a strange animal,
[23:33]in which I'm going to tell the story of a most remarkable woman
[23:37]I met four years ago called Stella Levy.
[23:39]Stella is a 96-year-old survivor of the Jewish community
[23:44]of the island of Rhodes.
[23:45]Have you ever heard about the story of Jews of Rhodes?
[23:48]It's interesting how few people have.
[23:50]I hadn't before.
[23:51]I met her because I was researching another Italian story
[23:56]set during the war eras, which is a period of a particular
[23:58]interest to me.
[24:00]And did you have family in the long?
[24:02]I had none, no connection, no Italian in me, plenty of Jews.
[24:07]But it's just an interesting puzzle
[24:09]that I've always wanted to work at, which
[24:11]is what was it like to be Jewish in Italy and particularly
[24:14]during the war years.
[24:16]And Stella is Italian because Rhodes was a possession
[24:21]of Italy, one in 1912, and the Itel Turkish War,
[24:25]one of the wars that was going on as the Ottoman Empire
[24:28]was breaking apart.
[24:30]And from 1912 into World War II,
[24:33]the island where there was a community of Jews who
[24:36]lived in the Judea there were 1700 or so of them
[24:39]underwent a major transformation.
[24:41]They had been there since antiquity,
[24:44]but more approximately since the expulsion from Spain.
[24:47]So they were Spanish speaking.
[24:49]They had cohabited in a multi-culturally successful way
[24:55]in terms that we use today, but wouldn't have
[24:57]no one would have used them with Greeks,
[24:59]with Turks, with ancient Greeks, with the knights,
[25:03]with eventually the Italians.
[25:05]And Stella was a young, intellectually curious,
[25:09]and ambitious child.
[25:12]She used to keep a suitcase packed because she
[25:15]wanted to go off to university more than anything.
[25:17]That was her, she expected that to be her fate
[25:20]in her dream, her destiny.
[25:22]She was the youngest and the family.
[25:25]In fact, her oldest, her first born oldest brother,
[25:27]had already left the island before she was born.
[25:29]She never met him until after the war.
[25:32]She at 96 has one of the most remarkable memories
[25:36]known to man.
[25:37]And she can tell you everything from what they ate,
[25:39]to what they wore, to what they read,
[25:41]to what they talked about, to what their interrelationships
[25:44]work, as you can imagine, 1700 of them
[25:46]living in the same, within the ancient walls of the same
[25:49]story plays, had a lot of interrelationships.
[25:52]And I went to see her four years ago.
[25:54]She needed help as it turned out
[25:56]to adjust a little something.
[25:57]She was writing.
[25:59]And I asked her, she'd never really properly told her story.
[26:01]And for various reasons, she hadn't.
[26:03]She's not been one of those survivors
[26:06]who has been public about her experience.
[26:09]And so we started to talk about it, both her life,
[26:11]essentially her life before the war.
[26:13]And then of course through the horrible things
[26:16]that happened when in 1944, very late in the war.
[26:20]The entire community was packed up and sent
[26:22]on the longest physical journey from roads to Auschwitz
[26:26]and the longest temporal journey of 14 or so days
[26:30]by train and boat to the very unhappy fate.
[26:33]And this book is going to be an account of her story.
[26:37]It's an account of our friendship as it's
[26:39]developed through some roadblocks over these years.
[26:42]It's about listening to people's stories.
[26:45]It's about the difficulty of both transmitting and accepting
[26:50]a story and translating one since our conversations
[26:54]are in Italy, but they're all Italian, sorry.
[26:56]But also there are cross other barriers, generational,
[26:59]they're across a barrier, gender of sensibility.
[27:04]And it's also going to be a portrait of old age,
[27:08]because she has one of the most interesting old ages
[27:10]I have ever seen.
[27:11]And I completely compelled by how one goes on,
[27:16]living with connection and depth, with awakeness,
[27:20]with purpose.
[27:22]Stella's secret, I think, has been, of course,
[27:26]she's blessed with physical well-being,
[27:28]but, and this incredible memory, but she has curiosity.
[27:32]And that curiosity allows her to connect with people.
[27:34]It allows her to read and study, to try to figure out
[27:38]how her life unfolded the way it did,
[27:41]how the life of her people, her parents, her community,
[27:45]unfolded the way that it did.
[27:46]And it's just one I've been one of the most profound
[27:49]encounters of my life.
[27:50]And I want to make a book out of it, that's what I'm doing.
[27:54]Oh, now I want to read it.
[27:55]OK, well, thank you.
[27:56]I'll come back.
[27:57]I'm kind of sad to even be close to the end of this conversation,
[28:02]because I've been trying to analyze
[28:03]why I feel so close to your characters,
[28:05]and why I'm sad that now I'm finished the book,
[28:08]and the book is closed, and now this interview
[28:09]is going to be over.
[28:10]And I'm going to miss them.
[28:13]I feel like they're actual, feel like I can smell
[28:15]because Dan's are making her pesto and all the rest.
[28:18]And I wonder if there's anything,
[28:20]are you going to ever do anything else with these characters?
[28:22]Like, will this be a film?
[28:23]Would you do this as a play, maybe?
[28:25]Like, I can see it on TV.
[28:26]There's been a nibble of interest already, I think.
[28:28]It's early.
[28:29]I would love to see it as a movie.
[28:31]I think it's the timeframe of the novel
[28:34]is in actual time, actually, a little bit more
[28:38]than a year or maybe a year and a half.
[28:40]It has a fairly clear, three-act structure.
[28:43]I think it would lend itself beautifully to a movie.
[28:47]It's an incredible role for an actress of around 40,
[28:50]and we are gifted with a number of really talented,
[28:54]amazingly talented women out there.
[28:56]Of course, my daughter sees Timothy as the young man,
[28:59]but all those girls of a certain age are obsessed with Timothy.
[29:02]How old is your daughter?
[29:03]At 14, now I would love to see it have new life
[29:06]in another genre, absolutely.
[29:09]It's funny, I had a letter from a friend of a fellow writer
[29:13]who said, you know, I actually wanted a sequel,
[29:16]and I thought it was such a funny thing,
[29:17]because it is not at least in my head at the moment
[29:20]to write a sequel.
[29:21]But I think it's a great sign when you speculate
[29:24]about the future of the character or several characters.
[29:27]For me, whether in biography or in fiction,
[29:31]when you come to that last page,
[29:32]and you're still hungry, it can only be positive.
[29:35]Yeah, well, it's testament to also how you ended it.
[29:38]There is a little system.
[29:40]Oh, come on.
[29:42]It does have a dramatic game, but let's not reveal that.
[29:44]Okay, I'm not going to say a word.
[29:46]I won't say a word.
[29:46]Do you have any advice to aspiring authors?
[29:49]Read, read, and read, and read some more.
[29:52]And then find yourself a community of like-minded people,
[29:55]friends or classmates, if that's right,
[29:59]with whom you can share.
[30:00]your work, because I think it's important to be open to outside perspectives on what you've
[30:06]done, because I think really a lot of writing is about getting distance, almost like a painter
[30:11]stepping back. Writing is also requires some stepping back to see, am I doing what I think I'm
[30:18]doing? You know, there's that moment where you feel I've written a masterpiece, of course,
[30:22]it's very short lived in my case, but you, you know, you've written something that comes out of
[30:27]you feel like you've licked it. There's a kind of relief when you come to the end of a long project,
[30:33]but it the end is only the beginning, because I think so much of the really important work is done
[30:38]in revisiting, revising, no-on't-sing, trimming, adding, shaping. And just not to put words in your
[30:45]mouth, but thinking about how you wrote so much more than you ended up using, and you said,
[30:50]like, a whole month of my life I tossed out, I don't think you did. Like, I think that's, I think that
[30:55]writers shouldn't think that just because they don't use those pages the time was wasted.
[30:59]I try to, I try to tell myself that, you know, I think it's true that it's part of it.
[31:03]I think you have to accept that it's not going to be, it's not a factory, right? And you're not
[31:08]going to have at the end of the day a box of widgets that then can go into the world. Half those
[31:14]widgets are, or you made learning how to make the other half, I think is the right, is the right
[31:19]attitude, but it can be so much depressing when you wake up the next day, and you look at 20 or 30
[31:24]pages and you think, who wrote this garbage, or maybe it's not garbage, but this really isn't
[31:29]where the story wants to be right now. Maybe we should make trash cans, and on the outside,
[31:34]say this is just part of the process. Yeah, something like that. Something like that, where when you
[31:38]throw away the pages, you know that actually it makes the story better. I love that idea.
[31:44]Okay, I'll do that after I make my umbrellas. The other 57 things I want to make. Okay,
[31:48]well, thank you so much for coming on mom's time to read books. And Zibi, it's been wonderful.
[31:52]Thank you for having me. You've been listening to moms don't have time to read books with
[31:56]Zibi Owens. Please make sure to sign up for my newsletter at Zibi Owens.com to get more updates
[32:02]about episodes like these and also lots of live events. Thanks so much. Today's episode has been
[32:07]sponsored by poets and writers. Visit pw.org to get inspired, connect with other writers,
[32:13]and explore a treasure trove of information about writing contests, literary agents, and more.
[32:18]You can follow me on Instagram at moms don't have time to read books.
[32:22]Thanks so much to Steve and Ryan at Texture Sound for the Sound Editing. And thank you to
[32:27]Morning Moon Productions for providing this fantastic intro and out trim music.
[32:30]Thanks for listening. You can always email me at Zibi at Zibi Owens.com.