Chris Bohjalian, THE RED LOTUS
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[1:12]I'm thrilled to be here today with Chris Bajillion who's the New York Times best selling author of
[1:17]21 books including his most recent novel The Red Lotus. His other books include The Flight
[1:22]Attended, The Gastrum, and Midwives which was a number one New York Times bestseller and a selection
[1:27]of Oprah's book club. Midwives, along with Secrets of Eden and Past the Bleachers, have all
[1:31]been made into movies. The flight attendant is in development as a limited series. His work has been
[1:36]translated into 30 languages and he's also a playwright. He currently lives in Vermont with his wife.
[1:41]So welcome, Chris. Thanks so much for coming on the show. It's a pleasure to be here. Thanks for
[1:45]having me. Oh, it's my pleasure. This is great. So your new book is The Red Lotus. Would you mind
[1:49]telling listeners what it's about? The Red Lotus is my favorite kind of book. It's a
[1:56]taking clock thriller, the story of Alexis Remnica, New York City E.R. doctor who goes on a
[2:02]bike tour of Vietnam with her new boyfriend and he disappears and in his absence she discovers that
[2:11]almost everything she knew about him was a lie and she is in spectacular amounts of danger.
[2:16]Never what you want to find out when you take a trip with a new pair of more.
[2:21]No, absolutely not. Oh my gosh. And I was wondering if you were a biker or a spinner and then I saw
[2:27]on Instagram a picture of you biking in Vietnam. Was that to prepare for this? Are you a biker or
[2:33]I'm a crazy serious cyclist. I will bike. That's the better word. Sorry. No biker is fine.
[2:38]Biker is absolutely fine too. I will ride 3,500 miles a season in Vermont on my bike. So when I
[2:48]decided that I wanted to explore a novel in Vietnam it seemed natural to research it on my bike.
[2:57]I do my best work in some ways on my bike. I don't recall who said this but someone
[3:04]who said the most important tool a writer can have is a walk. For me it's a bike ride. I do
[3:12]so much thinking about my characters. Who's going to live? Who's going to die? What are their
[3:18]anxieties? What are their dreads? What is their heartbreak? I've pulled over on the side of the road
[3:24]on my bike so often and written whole scenes on my iPhone. Wow. They need like an iPhone case or
[3:31]something so you could just type as you pull over. You know, like a receiver leak. Though I
[3:37]certainly don't mind just dictating whole scenes. Are you dictate? I was picturing you
[3:42]pushing in all the. I've done that too. I've done that too especially if it's just
[3:47]a character observation. Do you feel like you see things differently when you're on your bike?
[3:51]Like if you're in Vietnam getting in such a granular level versus like just
[3:56]was in through the country in the car. What a beautiful expression on a granular level. Yes,
[4:01]that is precisely it. The conversations that I had with the people I met in Vietnam
[4:08]were really different because you just pull over on your bike. In the conversations you can have
[4:15]are just so interesting and intense and surprising when you spend two or three or four days
[4:20]with someone on a bike. I remember one of my guides chatting with him on the third day of our ride
[4:28]and I said to him, what did your mom dad doing what we call the Vietnam war and you call the
[4:33]American war? And he said, my parents were both Viet Cong. They were building the Ho Chi Minh Trail.
[4:39]They'd build it. You'd bomb it. They'd build it. You'd bomb it. And of course that went on for years.
[4:46]And I just loved chatting with him and learning about what his childhood had been like and what his
[4:51]parents experience had been like. And what drew you to Vietnam for this book to begin with? Do you
[4:56]like do you have a personal connection to Vietnam? I know your character Austin has family
[5:00]his dad and his uncle who both had been in the war. Do you have family or is anyone been in the war?
[5:05]I have no family who served in the Vietnam war. My father and my my uncles were all in the army
[5:13]but they were all you know that they timed it so that they were they were they were not part of
[5:20]the Vietnam war. The book had its origins when I was having lunch with a neighbor of mine
[5:26]in my Vermont village and the Ken Burns remarkable documentary in the Vietnam war had recently
[5:33]and so our conversation rather naturally gravitated there. He was a Vietnam veteran and I started
[5:40]asking him questions and he started telling me stories. He was one of those guys who when he'd been a
[5:47]kid had been a gunner on a helicopter sitting on his helmet or his flat jacket so that his most
[5:56]private parts would be protected from ground fire and he saw friends die and he saw helicopters crash
[6:03]he saw the Vietnamese children with birth defects. We know now we're likely the result of agent orange
[6:11]and he said to me so many times and so many Vietnam veterans I interviewed for this book said this
[6:17]to me so many times. I never told anyone that no one asked me that never told my wife that
[6:26]and I knew I wanted to write a book about the legacy of the Vietnam war. It wasn't going to be
[6:33]a war novel Carl Marlantis and Tim O'Brien and and and and they've given us those.
[6:40]The world doesn't need me to add that to the bookshelf but I knew that one of the parts of my
[6:46]next book was going to involve the legacies of the Vietnam war and so I went there.
[6:53]Wow and how much research goes into your books? I know you've written 21 books at this point.
[6:58]How like for example this one? How much research? How long do you spend researching versus the
[7:02]actual writing? I will usually spend at least three weeks or four weeks researching a book before
[7:11]I write a word just so I can understand if the concept is viable. If what I'm thinking I want to do
[7:18]makes sense and then I will begin to write and I will be doing so much research as I am writing.
[7:27]I've never had writers block but I've had those mornings where the scene just isn't working
[7:33]and usually that's because I haven't done my homework and so over this book in addition of course
[7:39]to interviewing human beings on both sides of the Pacific who witnessed the Vietnam war it meant
[7:46]researching the emergency room and oh my gosh did I love interviewing ER doctors? I mean it felt
[7:55]so real the way you described the scenes and even just in the beginning in the opening all
[7:59]different people coming in I was thinking to myself I wonder if he had just if you positioned yourself
[8:04]in an ER for days on end and watch this or if you just talked to people about it or was it both?
[8:09]It was both it was both I had I interviewed a lot of ER doctors and I enjoyed chatting with them
[8:16]immensely if there's an ER doctor in your world you have to drop everything and say what is the
[8:25]weirdest thing you've ever experienced or seen and you know invariably they're going to begin with
[8:31]a story about an inappropriate object in an orifice and very often they're even going to have an
[8:37]x-ray of the object in the human body on their phone but then they will tell you the stories that
[8:43]are either unbelievably beautiful because the thing about ER doctors is their spectacular empathy
[8:50]we all talk about them as adrenaline junkies and many are but they see us at our worst they see us
[8:57]when we're in pain when we're embarrassed when we've done something stupid when we're
[9:03]bleeding you know if we're in a senior citizen at an ER you might have a diaper that needs to be
[9:09]changed if you're a young person your breath might be toxic and they're unbelievable multitaskers
[9:16]they might have seven eight nine individuals and cubicles who they have to be vaguely aware of what
[9:23]the heck is going on and they've all got great senses of humor I mean okay here are two two things
[9:31]I just love learning about the ER in New York City what are two of the most likely reasons
[9:37]you are to go to an ER in Manhattan over the weekend number one tripping over your pet
[9:43]no yep number two slicing a bagel
[9:48]you know but you wouldn't expect that I laughed too and I think a gunshot wound of course
[9:53]that's what you think and of course they've all seen horrific gunshot wounds and they
[10:00]dealt with horrific gunshot wounds, but they've also dealt with, you know, the senior citizen
[10:07]who tripped over his or her, you know, best friend dog, and they've dealt with, you know,
[10:13]the 19-year-old who sliced the heck out of her finger, you know, slicing a bagel one morning,
[10:19]they're just amazing to me. And here's the other thing that fascinated me about ER doctors,
[10:24]and it was an ER doctor who pointed this out to me. Especially years ago, an ER doctor was first and
[10:32]foremost, a detective who's all about pattern recognition, and he reminded me, think about Arthur
[10:40]Conan Doyle, the creator of Sherlock Holmes was a physician. No surprise then. I was fascinated
[10:46]by that. One thing I always wonder when I'm in the ER because I'm sure everybody, we've all been
[10:52]in there at certain times. And the intensity of it is so much. And I usually, I can't wait to get
[10:57]out of there. It's like, it's too much for me. And I wonder, like, how do people who work here just
[11:03]leave? How do they punch out at the end of the day and go out to dinner? Like, how do you
[11:07]transition back into, sort of, civilian life when you're in this war zone atmosphere day and
[11:13]day out? Like, what kind of effects long-term does that have on a person? I found it so interesting
[11:18]in your book, how Alexis actually uses that adrenaline to sort of get over her own mental health
[11:24]issues and her anxiety and how she used to cut herself. And she triutes, like, the helpfulness of
[11:29]the adrenaline of the ER to helping her get through that. So what did you find in that?
[11:35]Okay, you said you did. It was a long question. I'm sorry.
[11:38]No, it was a great question. And you pointed out a couple of things that are absolutely brilliant
[11:43]and spot on. First of all, if you're in ER physician, you often don't get the closure the way
[11:55]other kinds of physicians do. You bring a lot more home with you in different ways because you will
[12:02]often leave somebody in the cubicle. You've done everything you can and now you're waiting for
[12:09]the neurologist to arrive. Or you're waiting for, waiting for their specialist to arrive.
[12:14]Or you're waiting for the OR to open up. That's the first bit of interesting trauma that
[12:20]ER doctors learn to manage. Secondly, the utter unpredictability of what you're going to say.
[12:29]You might do a shift where it's pretty chill. You take care of a couple of kids who are
[12:36]brought in by their parents with fevers. And you take care of the fever. You might deal with
[12:44]some people to think they have the coronavirus and it's the flu. And you're done.
[12:48]But then yes, then there's the horrific car accident. There's the violent unexpected shooting.
[12:56]And all of the sudden, you look at the ER and it looks like a mesh unit.
[13:03]And those are the kinds of moments that if you're an ER doctor, you either take
[13:07]enormous satisfaction that I help keep that person alive. And then there are the moments when
[13:14]you realize there's nothing I could do and you call it. And you have to go out from the ER
[13:23]into the waiting room and tell someone a spouse or whomever that we did everything we could
[13:32]but it wasn't enough. You had this one quote in the book about a patient who had had, I think, a
[13:37]coronary artery and had a stroke. I don't even, I'm not even going to try to do the medical terms.
[13:44]But you said you just never know when a stroke was going to leave you a stringless marionette
[13:49]on the dining room floor beside the half eaten remains of your supper, which is what happened to
[13:53]this man. And so that's how you learn how to live your life a little differently. Do you feel
[13:58]like you take that with you as a guiding principle? I do. I've taken that with me as a guiding
[14:05]principle. However, not simply from writing this book, but simply because I'm now on the far side
[14:11]of 50. And when you're on the far side of 50, you lose people. They die. Your friends die. Your parents
[14:18]are, you know, might be near death or have just died. And so yeah, I really do try to
[14:25]live my life on the assumption that if I have a stroke right now, is the last thing that I've
[14:31]done decent and kind or at least not unbelievably horrific, is the last thing that I've done
[14:40]my isn't said something unbelievably untoward and awful. So does it make you make big decisions?
[14:47]It does make me differently or just yeah, it does make me make decisions differently.
[14:52]This stage in my life, if there's something I care about, I do it. If I want to see lines in
[14:58]the Serengeti, I go. If there's suddenly tickets to see emoji land, I'm going to go right now.
[15:07]It's just life is short and it's precious. And I definitely approach life that way. And
[15:16]certainly writing the red lotus, encouraged that. I think it will encourage readers also,
[15:22]because sometimes just the reminder of it helps. I mean, I feel like when there are times and
[15:27]periods of loss where you get that clarity that oh my gosh, like nothing is promised and this could
[15:32]this could be it. And then you live that way for a little while, but then it's easy to become
[15:37]kind of lulled into the fake security of life everlasting. I don't remember which
[15:43]Bill Bryson memoir it's in, but Bill Bryson has got this. Howlingly funny observation about that.
[15:50]He's flying into a tiny little airport in West Lebanon, New Hampshire. It's when he was living in
[15:56]New Hampshire and he's on this little regional jet and they're bumping around like crazy. And it's
[16:02]a horrifying flight. It's one of those 45 minutes where you're just miserable. You're nauseous and
[16:08]you're terrified. And he says to himself, God, if I land, I'm going to really be a decent person.
[16:14]I'm really going to be a decent person. And he lands and he's grateful and his wife meets him and
[16:20]she gives him a big hug and he says, I made meatloaf for dinner. He says, me love, I friggin hate
[16:24]meatloaf. Why in the name of God have you made me meatloaf? And he realized that we are incapable of being
[16:31]our best selves for 45 seconds. And I feel that way too. But that's why that's such a nice idea
[16:39]just to live your life making sure the last comment was something kind. I mean, that's much easier
[16:45]and much more of a not easy but actionable than going to take big trips to Africa whenever I get
[16:52]the chance. I mean, wouldn't Twitter be a better place? Wouldn't Twitter be a magnificent place
[16:57]if everybody said, okay, if this is the last tweet I'm ever going to send, what do I want it to say?
[17:02]I feel like they should just get rid of Twitter. It's such an angry place. I'm like, why does
[17:06]the, why do we need this? It's just stirs. It's like, it's stirs the pot. That's all it is. It's like,
[17:11]it's like a friend you want to just, you know, not be friends with anyone. No, I understand completely.
[17:17]Maybe I should say that, but so I found it so interesting. So your daughter reads your audiobooks. Is
[17:23]that true? My daughter is a spectacular actor and a spectacular audiobook reader and she reads a
[17:28]lot of my audiobooks. She doesn't read all of them. For example, she doesn't read the red lotus.
[17:33]Penguin Random House audio are, you know, the producers and the directors, they are fantastic
[17:38]and they're going to use my amazing grace experience when she's the right voice.
[17:42]As she was for the Russian assassin Elena in the flight attendant or the Armenian sex slave in
[17:50]the guest room or Emily Shepard in close your eyes, hold hands. But if they want an older sounding
[17:55]voice such as Alexis Ramnik in the red lotus, they will use a different reader. But I'm always
[18:02]so thrilled when Grace experience reads one of my audiobooks because she's just, she's just such
[18:07]a great actor and such a great narrator. And is that what, did you name her Grace? Where did
[18:12]the, what's the stage name? What's what you gave her? Her full, okay. I am married to the immensely
[18:17]talented artist, Victoria Blur. Our daughter's full name is Grace Experience Blur.
[18:24]Victoria and I decided if we had a boy, we will give him my last name. If we have a girl,
[18:29]we will give her Victoria's last name. Now, the experience is her middle name and it's a family name.
[18:35]Though my family, my Armenian half of my family has only been in this country since the early part
[18:42]of the 20th century. I'm a grandson of survivors of the Armenian Genocide. Victoria's family
[18:48]literally goes back to 1620 and Brewster. And Brewster had some, I don't remember whether they
[18:54]were grandchildren or great grandchildren because now we're in the middle part of the 17th century.
[19:00]And among the grand sons was a man named experience, great sort of, you know, 17th century New England
[19:11]name. And my wife and I just thought, okay, we have to use that. How could we not use that?
[19:17]And just over time, Grace went from Grace to Grace Experience. And yes, that is her
[19:22]screen actor's guild name. And her equity name is Grace Experience. So cool.
[19:27]She's so cool. I bet. I thought I was, I thought her picture is not to star.
[19:32]And she's in one of your plates, right? She's actually been in two of my plates.
[19:35]Two of your plates. She's starred with K. K. Glick, odd mom out, you know, that great,
[19:39]great sitcom in Grounded, directed by Alexander De Nolaris in 1559. And she just closed midwives
[19:46]at the George Street Playhouse. She played Anne Austin, the midwife's apprentice.
[19:50]I remember reading midwives when it came out and I've not forgotten it.
[19:54]Well, thank you. I know I'm one of a zillion people who read that book. But anyway, I
[20:00]You know, in some ways there's a link between midwives and red lotus and it's
[20:05]Connie Danforth, the narrator of midwives and Alexis Remnick, the main character of the red lotus,
[20:11]they're both physicians. They are both damaged. They are both really, really strong women who are
[20:21]trying to understand and injustice. The difference is that midwives is a courtroom drama and
[20:27]the red lotus is a thriller. But I definitely view Alexis Remnick as a literary descendant
[20:32]of Connie Danforth. Maybe that's why this book is so good. I mean, they're all good. Thank you.
[20:37]Thank you. How did you become, and this is a very big question, but how did you get to be such a
[20:43]good writer? Do you feel like your first book was as good as this or do you feel like you're getting
[20:46]better as you go? Do you feel like it's something you learned in school or you were born this way?
[20:51]First of all, thank you. Second of all, I am responsible for the single worst first novel ever
[20:57]published, Barnum. There is no book worse than a killing in the real world. It's terrible.
[21:03]My first three books, a killing in the real world, Hangman, past the bleachers, as well as another
[21:09]book from that era, which was not published, are just train wrecks. They're terrible. Malcolm Gladwell
[21:15]and outliers talks about 10,000 hours. And I think it's worth noting that I once calculated it.
[21:23]When I started writing midwives, that was, I'd been writing fiction about 10,000 hours. John Gardner
[21:28]in the Art of Fiction talks a lot about how being a good writer is a bit like being a good tennis
[21:35]player. If you work at it, you can get really, really good. Now, there are, you know, the
[21:41]Andre Agassiz and there are found vowels, you know, the Serena Williams of the world who are just
[21:46]genetically born to be tennis stars. They're just, that's just who they are. That's what's in
[21:53]their DNA. But they still, of course, had to work like crazy. And not every human being, no matter
[21:59]how much they work, is going to become Margaret Atwood. That's just a reality. But all of us,
[22:06]all of us, can become a lot better writers by writing very often. I write every day,
[22:14]and I've written almost every day of my life since Gosh, you know, I graduated from college. I mean,
[22:21]my first jobs were in advertising, and I would write from five to seven AM in the morning before
[22:26]going to J. Walter Thompson in New York City to do my day job. And then Monday and Tuesday and
[22:32]nights when I came home from work, I wrote my first three novels working at agencies.
[22:37]And the best part, okay, fun fact, the best part of the worst novel ever, killing in the real
[22:43]world, is the one blurb on the back. Because the one blurb on the back was from a person who worked
[22:49]at J. Walter Thompson with me. I was the very, very bottom of the pyramid and assistant account
[22:53]executive. This person was the creative director, but, you know, he published four or five books at
[22:58]the time, and he was gracious and kind enough to blurb my terrible book. It was drum roll, James
[23:05]Patterson. No way. Yeah. Wow. It's impressive. It's the best part of the book. His blurb.
[23:09]By far. I worked at Ogilvy and Meather and also Young and River Camp when I was just starting it.
[23:15]Oh my gosh. I didn't realize that. Okay. Well, you know, I was doing it in the Mesozoic era.
[23:22]I love the fact that we share that mad, mad woman DNA. Is that great? Did you love it?
[23:28]I loved it. I loved figuring out, like, what inspires consumer behavior. What makes people
[23:33]buy certain things, understanding all that, like the psychology behind it, and how to make
[23:37]that research and turn it into a campaign. It's kind of so neat.
[23:41]Creative department account management, media research. I was in brand strategy. Brilliant.
[23:45]Love it. Which was really fun. But not for very long. But it was great.
[23:48]Well, I was responsible for some of the most ridiculous line extensions imaginable. I won't
[23:55]bore you with them. But off the high, I got to tell you some of the tragedies, consumer
[23:59]product tragedies that are on my resume. Yeah. Well, no. In the brand planning department,
[24:03]I got to do, like, pepperish farm cookies. Perfect. I did a toy company. There's nothing
[24:09]better than a mint melonna. Yeah. That's true. Yeah. It is the great cookie.
[24:13]I like just mint melonna. Oh my god. Yes. My grandmother always has those and
[24:17]it's the same cabinet my entire life. So there's something very nice about it. I agree.
[24:21]The chest one's a great cookie. So in terms of advice, people should write all the time,
[24:26]and they will get better. They work at it. Is there any other advice you would have?
[24:30]Yeah. You know, this is something I think about a lot. And here's one piece of advice that I've
[24:35]given for a lot of years. But here's a piece of advice I think about a lot more in 2020 than I
[24:40]ever thought about in 2014. Here's the piece of advice I've thought about forever.
[24:44]Read what you love and write in the genre that you love. If you love romance,
[24:54]then for crying out loud, write a romance. If you love science fiction, write romance. If you
[24:58]love literary fiction, write literary fiction. But you have to write what you love to read
[25:05]and read vast amounts in that genre. Now, my writing has changed a lot since midwives.
[25:14]And it's changed a lot in the last decade because of streaming television and the digital age.
[25:22]I write differently now than I did 20 years ago because of Mad Men and Sopranos and the Marvelous
[25:30]Mrs. Maisel and secession and just so many spectacular television shows that are now in existence.
[25:38]And what I mean is that specifically is that when my books work and God knows they don't always
[25:44]work. But when they work, they are about two things, heartbreak and dread. And because of programs
[25:50]like Breaking Bad and Sopranos and Mad Men, my books begin with a level of dread that they
[25:57]did not used to begin with. And they do that because as a reader and as a viewer, I find dread,
[26:04]the ultimate thing that makes me turn the pages. I mean, think of the red lotus and how much
[26:10]of the red lotus. I mean, first 100 pages of the red lotus is the dread of what has happened
[26:16]to Austin, Alexis Remnick's boyfriend who's disappeared. That's what it's about dread.
[26:23]And then the second two thirds of the book are about is Alexis is going to get out of here alive.
[26:29]And I love that. And then there's that heartbreak notion. So much of Mad Men isn't just about
[26:35]dread, but it's about heartbreak and all the bad choices that we make. I think secession
[26:43]works because it's about heartbreak. And I hope that to a certain extent,
[26:50]the underlying layer of the red lotus beneath all that dread is heartbreak. Heartbreak about
[26:57]Alexis realizing how little she knew about Austin. Alexis trying to overcome those
[27:05]childhood demons you brought up so eloquently when we started to speak.
[27:09]Well, somebody working on now. I've got a lot going on now and it's really fun.
[27:15]I've got a new book coming out in 12 months, which is about the first divorce in North America
[27:21]for domestic violence. It's called the devil herself. It's set in 1662 Boston. I've got
[27:29]a couple TV series in development, none of which I actually have any to do with it all,
[27:35]which is fine because the smarter people than me who know more about these things than me are
[27:39]making them the flight attendant is well on the way. I think they've probably filmed at least
[27:44]the first four or five hours. And that will start streaming on HBO Max starring the amazing
[27:49]Kayleigh Cuoco, Xiaoyceman, Rosie Perez, Merle Dandridge, T.R. and I just a great, great cast.
[27:54]I can't reveal the details here, but the red lotus has its movie TV deal. Yes, excellent.
[28:00]And I've got a play that just closed at the George Street Playhouse that I'm going to be
[28:05]work shopping this summer based on my novel midwives to take it to the next level so that hopefully
[28:12]it will be in New York City in the next 12 to 18 months. Fantastic. That's great.
[28:18]Oh, can we draw your new stuff? Thank you. Well, thanks so much for coming in the show.
[28:22]Was it be thank you for all that you do to celebrate with words and reading and books can mean
[28:26]to the soul? You're just crushing it reminding us how beautiful books are. Thank you.
[28:32]Thanks. You've been listening to moms don't have time to read books with Zibi Owens.
[28:36]Please make sure to sign up for my newsletter at zibiowans.com to get more updates about episodes
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[28:52]on Instagram at moms don't have time to read books. Thanks so much to Steve and Ryan at
[28:57]Textures Sound for the Sound Editing and thank you to Morningmoon Productions for providing
[29:02]this fantastic intro and out trim music. Thanks for listening. You can always email me at zibiowans.com.