Susan Isaacs, TAKES ONE TO KNOW ONE
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[1:53]field snacks for being a sponsor. This is a special recording of a podcast I did with Susan
[1:58]Isaacs at an event at Temple Emanuel in New York City for their women's group who invited me to
[2:04]join an interview her. So I'll be reading her bio now and then everything else will have taken place
[2:11]at Temple Emanuel, so I hope you enjoy our conversation which we did live in front of an audience.
[2:16]Here's her bio. Susan Isaacs is the best-selling author of 14 novels, including her latest
[2:21]It Takes One to Know One. Her first novel, Compromising Positions,
[2:24]became a New York Times bestseller and a movie with Susan Sarandon and Raul Julia
[2:29]for which Susan wrote the screenplay. She also wrote and co-produced Tolo again with Shelley Long,
[2:33]Gabriel Byrne and Judith Ivy. Shining through, her fourth novel was turned into a movie
[2:38]with Michael Douglas and Liam Neeson. She has reviewed books for The New York Times, Los Angeles Times,
[2:42]Washington Post and News Day, and has contributed op-eds, essays and more to many other publications.
[2:48]She was a freelance political speechwriter and a senior editor at Seventeen Magazine.
[2:52]She is the recipient of the Writer for Writers Award, the Mary Mount Manhattan Writing Center Award,
[2:58]and the John Steinbeck Award. She's chairman of the board of poets and writers, the literary
[3:02]organization, also a past sponsor of this podcast, by the way, and a past president of Mystery
[3:07]Writers of America. Originally from Brooklyn, Susan attended Queen's College. She currently lives
[3:12]on Long Island with her husband. Thanks, everybody, for being here. I'm going to be doing this
[3:17]as a live podcast for moms don't have time to read books, so I will be releasing this episode
[3:21]in the coming weeks if you care to listen or tell your kids or grandkids about it. That would be great.
[3:27]I'm really excited to be here with Susan Isaac, so thanks so much for doing this with me today.
[3:31]Delighted. Your latest book takes one to know what. Can you please tell everybody here what this
[3:36]novel is about? Ah, it is about a woman who wants normality, but also wants adventure.
[3:46]Corey Geller, who's the protagonist, has joined the FBI after 9-11. She's an Arabic speaker
[3:58]and was absolutely great at interviewing people and getting information. So she had a thrilling and
[4:08]sometimes dangerous career at the BRO, but she was burning out and except she met a lovely man,
[4:18]a federal judge or widower, and she wound up marrying him, adopting his daughter, and moving to
[4:28]the suburbs. She grew up in Queens, and so it's even 15 miles east in Nassau County, was culture
[4:38]shock. And she joins a group of freelance people who work from home just to kind of get to know
[4:48]people in the community. And she starts thinking that one of the men in the group is something's not
[4:58]right. Now look, she's used to hiding her identity. She doesn't talk about having been in the BRO.
[5:07]She still does some contract work for them. And she's saying there's something that he's hiding.
[5:17]And her best friend says, well, maybe you're just looking for a story, you know, a nice little
[5:27]adventure to, because you need it. It's kind of boring. And she she suggests her friend is a lifestyle
[5:35]designer and thinks the answer to everything is redecoration. And so it's about Corey's decision
[5:46]to follow up on this guy who just doesn't seem right. And she says maybe it takes one to know one.
[5:56]And she lists her dad who was a retired and depressed former NYPD detective. And it's really
[6:09]the story of a search that becomes slightly dangerous. But she can handle herself. She's been trained.
[6:20]She also knows Crav Maga, which is the Israeli form of martial arts of self-defense that they
[6:32]use in the IDF. But then it becomes even more dangerous. And it's a quite really almost a question
[6:42]not with it. She'll live or die. But how long she'll live. And it seems hours if not days.
[6:53]So does she get out of it? And what happens? And also it's about her relationships. And also
[7:02]it was a satire on suburbia, on women's relationships with women. And the best part of, well,
[7:13]for me, the best after part was part of the book tour, which was I'm babbling away.
[7:20]You're doing my job for me. Yeah. The book tour was terrific. Someone came over to me afterward.
[7:30]I don't know. Somewhere midwest. And said to me, I am so glad you're not dead.
[7:41]I said, well, you know what? I am. I am too. It gives me great comfort. She said, no,
[7:46]because then you know there's going to be another story. And I love that. And I love her.
[7:53]And so yes, there is going to be, I'm writing this equal now. And it's great fun. And I got
[8:02]the New York trifecta of The Times, The Wall Street Journal, and Newsday all gave it fabulous reviews.
[8:11]So, you know, it was a good feeling.
[8:17]So this brings me to a question I had Phoebe who's one of the characters in your novel.
[8:21]And also my daughter's name, by the way, she says to Corey, the protagonist. She says,
[8:25]how things in the pub is. I read real books or making it come back. So I wondered if you think
[8:32]it has to do with that need for people just to hear stories and be entertained, even in the
[8:37]most difficult of times. Yes, I absolutely do. I think people need narrative. My daughter has
[8:48]Ph.D. in philosophy. And her field is aesthetics. But she believes we are hard-wired for narrative.
[8:59]We need a story, not necessarily once upon a time, but we need to make sense out of things. And we
[9:09]need to hear about other experiences. It's not only books. I love the name of your podcast.
[9:18]But actually, when I was a mom, I did have time to read. I had, I'd say, a bad crime fiction
[9:30]addiction. And would go to the library and read three, four, five mysteries a week. And,
[9:38]you know, at some point you become deranged. And I said, I can do this.
[9:45]And that started me on my first book. But look, we all know that there's one, this is the golden age
[9:57]of TV. And...
[10:00]There's wonderful narrative on TV,
[10:04]which is very much the series and the streaming series
[10:10]is reminds me very much of the era of Dickens
[10:15]and Dostoyevsky when their work used to come out
[10:20]as a serial, and people would wait for the next.
[10:26]So there's more, when I was reading all those mysteries,
[10:32]there's now much more competition,
[10:35]but people are still reading,
[10:38]and I think are going back to books.
[10:41]I mean, Phoebe is, well,
[10:46]what is it?
[10:46]Not the brightest candle on the menorah.
[10:49]But she, well, or the bulb on the tree,
[10:55]but I don't know why that's true.
[10:58]There's a comfort in holding a book,
[11:02]and I think it's also something visual,
[11:05]that even though you get the book jacket on the e-book,
[11:09]it seems when you pick up your iPad,
[11:13]or your Kindle, or whatever,
[11:16]that you're picking up the same book over and over,
[11:20]and there's a kind of sensual pleasure
[11:24]in picking up a fat book, a thin book,
[11:26]a large one, a small one,
[11:29]looking at the jacket art,
[11:31]trying not to read the flap copy
[11:33]because sometimes it gives away too much,
[11:36]but then succumbing.
[11:38]There's much pleasure on that.
[11:40]And so they are making,
[11:41]and even among younger readers.
[11:44]I agree.
[11:44]Trying to help moms get back into that.
[11:46]Yeah, good.
[11:47]It's an easiest escape, but just open a book,
[11:49]and you're in the toilet room.
[11:50]And it's also for moms who are so stressed out,
[11:55]not only by their responsibilities,
[11:59]but by their kids constantly moving their thumbs around,
[12:06]and, you know, being on their devices
[12:10]that you need a kind of quiet trip,
[12:16]a silent trip to another universe.
[12:19]And this certainly books get you there.
[12:23]You know, I mean, I listened to the part of the audio of this,
[12:28]and it was very well done.
[12:31]The audio book,
[12:32]and there are times that it's nice to be told a story,
[12:36]rather, but most of the, you know,
[12:39]obviously I knew the ending,
[12:40]but I, you know, I just have myself gone back to the book.
[12:46]So let's talk about the journey of how you got here.
[12:50]So if you're reading all this crime fiction in the library,
[12:53]you think to yourself, I can do this, why not try?
[12:56]And then your first book, Compromising Positions,
[12:59]you wrote it when your kids were little,
[13:00]it was chosen for the Book of the Month Club,
[13:02]auctioned for paperback, sold to the movies,
[13:04]translated into 30 languages,
[13:06]and obviously became a bestseller.
[13:08]Right. What was that like for you and your life at that time?
[13:11]Well, actually it was hugely exciting,
[13:17]but it was not a major change except I had a career.
[13:24]And I was now part of a community of writers,
[13:28]but when you're living as I was in the suburbs
[13:35]and your kids are in preschool or in the early,
[13:41]early grades and your friends tend to be
[13:46]the mothers of kids, your kids age, et cetera.
[13:52]You don't walk around with a Maribou Boa
[13:56]and, you know, and four-inch heels.
[14:01]It's a life that forces ordinaryness on you
[14:06]in terms of the your activities,
[14:10]in terms of what goes on in your head.
[14:13]Obviously anything goes and you don't have to be a writer.
[14:17]So it changed my life in that I had something to do every day
[14:25]that stopped at three o'clock.
[14:29]And then I, you know, did my mother thing.
[14:34]I can't say I'm a mother the way
[14:39]this new generation of mothers are, you know,
[14:43]who were just put so much thought
[14:46]into a Halloween costume or, you know,
[14:51]or really, and I mean, both my children now
[14:58]live within 10 minutes of us.
[15:02]They're lovely people, you know.
[15:06]Professional, a philosopher, a lawyer.
[15:10]They married wonderful people.
[15:12]Their children are great people.
[15:14]All of that said, I didn't find them riveting.
[15:21]Consul, so, but they seem, they seem to have survived.
[15:27]And that's why I think in, you know,
[15:31]I've really covered the waterfront in my fiction
[15:36]and, you know, written about people
[15:39]with different backgrounds.
[15:42]But I want to say is that, you know, even when,
[15:47]when the books start getting read in Bulgarian and Japanese,
[15:52]you know, it's not your relatives.
[15:55]Buying them.
[15:56]And that there's a, a universality about fiction,
[16:03]but there's also the universality
[16:06]that women have a life and thoughts and needs
[16:12]that aren't what they're supposed to be.
[16:17]That they're far more complex, far more in need of people.
[16:25]And that's just the woman who's kids in your kids,
[16:27]third grade class.
[16:29]So, I enjoy doing it.
[16:31]I enjoy getting into another life other than mine.
[16:36]In Corey's case, she adapted her husband's life
[16:40]and her husband's life.
[16:42]So, I enjoy doing it.
[16:45]I enjoy getting into another life other than mine.
[16:48]In Corey's case, she adapted her husband's life
[16:53]and her husband's daughter.
[16:55]And the daughter is not the stereotypical step,
[17:02]you know, well, originally a step-child
[17:05]or even a teenager.
[17:07]She's a nice, right kid.
[17:10]And so Corey turns out to be a better person than I,
[17:15]but still close enough to me
[17:18]that I feel her thoughts.
[17:20]But in another book, say, Magic Hour,
[17:24]my narrator, my protagonist,
[17:27]was a Vietnam vet, Suffolk County homicide cop,
[17:33]recovering alcoholic, recovering heroin addict from Vietnam,
[17:39]and half Protestants, half Catholic.
[17:43]So, I lived his life as well.
[17:46]I mean, that's the joy of it.
[17:49]When I'm in that other universe,
[17:51]I leave this one and I leave myself.
[17:54]And it's the same thing.
[17:56]I think for you as readers,
[17:58]sometimes when you have the phone rings
[18:01]or something happens,
[18:03]you close a book and it takes just a second
[18:07]for you to reorient yourself.
[18:09]And that happens to me.
[18:11]Yeah.
[18:13]You even have a line in there with Corey again,
[18:16]who says, maybe I was spending too much time these days
[18:19]in make-believe worlds,
[18:21]an excess of fiction could make reality seem supremely dull,
[18:24]with its crappy dialogue and lack of coincidences.
[18:27]It could lead to an unfulfilled longing for scintillation.
[18:30]So perhaps you're feeling this way has led to all these stories.
[18:34]Sure.
[18:35]And I was also wondering,
[18:36]so Corey's, the husband, she marries
[18:39]his former wife, Don, ends up dying during a Pilates,
[18:42]during a Pilates session.
[18:44]So she comes, she comes,
[18:46]and she has an undiagnosed hard condition.
[18:48]And she comes in and becomes the new stepmother
[18:51]and then a doctor of mother to the daughter.
[18:54]Did you, when you put yourself in all these worlds,
[18:56]the Vietnam vet, Corey's life,
[18:58]do you interview people who actually have had these things happen to them?
[19:01]Or do you just use your amazing empathy skills
[19:05]to sort of insert yourself into their lives?
[19:07]Do you research?
[19:08]Oh, I do a lot of research.
[19:10]Because number one, you don't want to make any egregious mistakes
[19:15]and give the wrong ear for the battle of Britain or whatever
[19:21]and embarrass yourself.
[19:23]Some of the work is easy since I write a lot of fair amount of crime fiction,
[19:30]mysteries.
[19:31]My husband is a criminal defense lawyer,
[19:34]but was in the Southern District,
[19:36]he was in Assistant U.S. Attorney,
[19:38]and then left.
[19:40]He was an assistant on the Bob Morgan Fop.
[19:43]One Bob was, and I know he's a member,
[19:46]but he was a member of this congregation.
[19:49]And then he came back years later as a chief of the criminal division.
[19:54]So he still practices that he knows procedure.
[20:00]He knows, you know, people who have gone on to be, you know,
[20:07]in the Bureau, in the CIA, in various law enforcement,
[20:11]which makes it slightly easier.
[20:13]But I'm a great believer in having lunch with cops
[20:19]or lunch with former spies or lunch with designers
[20:26]who ever can, or interviews.
[20:29]I mean, just someone who can not only give me the facts.
[20:35]So I don't embarrass myself, but give me the language,
[20:39]give me the sense of how they talk about it, how they view.
[20:46]And they're jargon, they're professional jargon.
[20:50]I remember going into the Suffolk County homicide headquarters,
[20:57]and they have a big sign up there.
[21:01]Thou shalt not kill.
[21:03]And when I was talking to one of the cops there,
[21:08]I was questioning him about something he said, you know,
[21:13]without confronting him because he was doing me a favor
[21:17]by talking, but there was just a little question of ethics.
[21:22]And he said to me, so, you know, to be a good cop,
[21:28]you've got to have walked on both sides of the street.
[21:31]Now, I don't know whether that's true or not,
[21:34]but it certainly was true for him.
[21:37]And he probably was a good cop,
[21:40]but it also became true for my protagonist, Steve Brady, in Magic Hour.
[21:48]He had walked on both sides of the streets,
[21:50]and ultimately chose the right one.
[21:54]But the novel is about his coming of middle age.
[22:00]And so you do have to do your homework.
[22:05]Sometimes it's only a question for a red, white, and blue,
[22:10]which is about, it's a saga.
[22:13]It's about a Jewish family, comes over a brother and a sister,
[22:20]and one goes, stays in New York.
[22:23]The other gets caught cheating in a poker game
[22:27]and kind of hops a train, gets caught cheating on the train,
[22:32]and gets thrown out in Wyoming,
[22:35]which actually happened to a friend's grandfather.
[22:39]And so he changes his name, settles in Wyoming.
[22:45]And this is the story of their great-grandchildren
[22:50]who turn out to be a Wyoming FBI agent and a Jewish reporter.
[22:59]I made up the Jewish news, which I call the Juneau,
[23:03]or she calls it the Juneau.
[23:05]And she wants to find out and go there.
[23:09]And it was about domestic terrorism.
[23:13]This was written right around the time of,
[23:16]I might have even started it before Oklahoma,
[23:20]the Oklahoma City bombing.
[23:22]But she said, why do people who don't know me,
[23:27]who've never met a Jew in their life, want me dead?
[23:30]And this is an investigation.
[23:34]But they, of course, they never find out that they're cousins.
[23:39]They never find out they're related,
[23:41]because they're, you know, what happens to people in America.
[23:48]And I was fascinated by that, a friend of mine
[23:52]who was president of Queens College,
[23:54]and then if Stony Brook grew up in a tiny town in Texas,
[23:59]where they were the only Jewish family.
[24:01]And she gave me a book called Pioneer Jews.
[24:05]And that, that became my go-to book and really inspired me.
[24:11]So tell me a little more about your process of writing.
[24:14]Every book you've written has become a bestseller,
[24:17]which is pretty amazing.
[24:19]I mean, that's like crazy.
[24:21]How do you do that?
[24:22]And do you ever get sort of racked with anxiety or nerves
[24:26]starting a book thinking, is this going to be a bomb?
[24:28]Like, yes, every time, every time.
[24:31]And do I get racked?
[24:33]I get racked.
[24:34]How do you get, how do you push past that?
[24:35]It was a difficulty and occasionally a little medication,
[24:41]truthfully.
[24:42]But overall, you know, you get to a point where you know,
[24:48]this is something I've been through before.
[24:50]It doesn't stop the anxiety or the hesitation to leap in,
[24:57]but you know that you get past it.
[25:00]So that's reassuring.
[25:03]But when I did my first novel,
[25:08]my daughter was in preschool,
[25:10]or as they used to call it, nursery school,
[25:12]for three hours a day.
[25:15]So I put her on the little school bus.
[25:18]She went off.
[25:20]Three hours later, she's back, you know, in a larm rank.
[25:24]So I had time to get downstairs and get her off the bus.
[25:29]And that was, those were my working hours.
[25:32]And I couldn't, I didn't,
[25:35]my husband was then chief of the criminal division.
[25:38]So I couldn't, he couldn't babysit
[25:40]because he was working late hours.
[25:42]And so I bought a book, something like writing a novel
[25:47]and or had a writing novel.
[25:49]And it says, make up a list of characters,
[25:53]make up an outline of no more than four or five, six pages.
[25:59]And so I did.
[26:01]And it's like the Montessori method of tying a shoelace.
[26:09]You break it down, you break down a complex task
[26:15]into small pieces.
[26:18]So I can make up a list of characters names.
[26:21]I can write an outline.
[26:23]But then as you're writing the outline,
[26:26]you're developing the story.
[26:27]You're developing the structure
[26:30]and bringing in more characters.
[26:33]So the first one, it was, you know, was a who done it.
[26:38]And I had to find someone to kill.
[26:42]And so I was undergoing some dental work.
[26:46]And so I'm a period dentist, yes,
[26:51]on the theory of who better deserves to die.
[26:54]And then the second novel was close relations,
[26:59]which was deliberately not a mystery,
[27:03]which was a novel based on my experiences
[27:07]of political speech writer.
[27:09]And it's about politics, politics,
[27:12]about in New York's South Democratic primary.
[27:17]So it's a comedy.
[27:19]And it's also about sexual politics and family politics.
[27:27]They want to marry a certain guy.
[27:31]And she doesn't want it.
[27:34]And so it's finally, it's taken me just about 40 years
[27:41]to come to the point where I wanted to write a series.
[27:44]But then I wanted to make Corey and family
[27:48]and, you know, people in the bureau
[27:51]and especially her mom and dad.
[27:55]I wanted to make them rich enough and interesting enough.
[27:58]And Corey works both her job and her cover
[28:03]as a livery scout for contemporary Arabic fiction.
[28:08]So I read a lot in English about
[28:12]contemporary Arabic fiction.
[28:14]And that was, you know, all of it
[28:17]is wonderful because you just go into these worlds,
[28:21]some of which really interests me.
[28:25]But I had no idea of the world of Arabic mysteries,
[28:31]of Arabic science fiction,
[28:34]of all this genre writing and how the different cultures effect
[28:41]the work in the political situation affects the work.
[28:45]So it's been fun.
[28:47]Do you have any advice to aspiring writers?
[28:49]Sure.
[28:50]Well, you know, well, everyone else is right.
[28:55]But that's, that's simplistic.
[28:58]I think you before you start, you know,
[29:02]you should feel and need to write about something.
[29:05]You know, something comes into your head.
[29:08]Then it's a job.
[29:10]And people don't view it as a job.
[29:12]They view it as an art or a craft
[29:16]and they wait for the views to
[29:20]perch on their shoulder and whisper to them.
[29:23]And it doesn't, in most cases, it doesn't work that way.
[29:29]What you have to do is if you already have a job,
[29:34]whether it's being a mother who stays home
[29:38]or an anesthesiologist or a tap dancer,
[29:42]you have to take on a second job, which is writing.
[29:48]Now, you may not do it five days a week,
[29:51]but you have to be a real stinker of a boss to yourself.
[29:57]And you have to say, I'm...
[30:00]We're going to write on Mondays, Wednesdays, and Fridays,
[30:05]or I'm going to take every Sunday,
[30:09]I'm going to go from three in the afternoon till seven
[30:15]o'clock and right, and I'm going to write regularly,
[30:20]and it's going to take me longer, because I'm only working.
[30:24]What was that?
[30:24]Four hours?
[30:25]Somebody would do the mechanism.
[30:27]Yeah.
[30:28]I forgot what I said.
[30:29]But you have to force yourself to do that.
[30:34]Otherwise, it'll never happen.
[30:37]And if you write three chapters, you
[30:40]should pat yourself on the back.
[30:42]And at that's the point that people sort of fade away.
[30:46]Well, thank you for doing this live podcast with me here
[30:49]at Temple of Manual.
[30:49]I really appreciate it.
[30:50]Thank you.
[30:51]You've been listening to Moms and have time to read books
[30:54]with Zibi Owens.
[30:55]Please make sure to sign up for my newsletter
[30:57]at zibiowans.com to get more updates about episodes like these
[31:01]and also lots of live events.
[31:03]Thanks for listening.
[31:04]Thanks again to Peeled Snacks for being a sponsor
[31:06]of this week's episodes.
[31:08]Peeled Snacks, again, discount code
[31:10]Zibi15, capital ZZibi15, for 15% off your purchase
[31:15]for this week only.
[31:17]And go check out the WeFoundTime.com essays.
[31:19]They're so good.
[31:20]And they'll make you laugh and think and feel
[31:24]and all the good things.
[31:25]Have a great week.
[31:26]You can follow me on Instagram at Moms Don't Have Time
[31:29]to Read Books.
[31:30]Thanks so much to Steve and Ryan,
[31:31]like Texture Sound for the Sound Editing.
[31:34]And thank you to Morningland Productions
[31:36]for providing this fantastic intro and now trim music.
[31:38]Thanks for listening.
[31:39]You could always email me at zibi at zibiowans.com.