Wally Lamb, I KNOW THIS MUCH IS TRUE
[0:08]Hi, I'm Zivee Owens and you're listening to the award-winning podcast.
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[2:08]Now go listen to this episode. Today's sponsor is Violets are Blue, which is an organic,
[2:12]small batch skincare company that gives back to women and treatment for breast cancer started by
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[2:27]For 20% off, use code zivee20ZIBY20. I had the best time doing an Instagram live with Wally
[2:35]Lamb, who is the author of six New York Times bestselling novels. I'll take you there. We are water,
[2:42]wish in and open. The hour I first believed, I know this much is true and she's come undone.
[2:48]I know this much is true and she's come undone. We're both selected for Oprah's book club.
[2:52]Lamb also edited, couldn't keep it to myself and I'll fly away to volumes of essays from students
[2:57]in his writing workshop at York Correctional Institution, which is a women's prison in Connecticut
[3:03]where he's been a volunteer facilitator for the past 17 years. So after keynote speaker,
[3:08]he has spoken at universities and colleges, libraries, arts and lecture venues, and literary
[3:12]festivals around the country and has won a bazillion awards. His latest project, I know this much
[3:19]is true, is an HBO original limited series which just aired. Lamb is a Connecticut native who
[3:26]holds bachelor's in master's degree in teaching from the University of Connecticut and a master's
[3:31]in fine arts in writing degree from Vermont College. He currently lives in Northeastern, Connecticut,
[3:36]and in New York City and is a parent with his wife, Christine, of three cents. Thank you so
[3:42]much for coming on my Instagram live. Thank you for coming on mom's no time to read books.
[3:46]So exciting to have your show to be able to watch it and read it at the same time. It's really,
[3:51]really a pleasure. So thanks. So just because the show has just come out, what is it like for you?
[4:00]Your book came out so long ago and now suddenly here's the show. What does that feel like for you?
[4:05]Well, it's very exciting and has been exciting for a couple of years. I was able to be on the set
[4:10]several times in the past year and working with Mark Ruffalo before that to sort of put everything
[4:15]together and get the right director and so forth. So everything came out beautifully. And you know,
[4:21]it was a long haul back when in 1998 when the novel was first published or predicted up for her
[4:27]book club like right out of the gate. And it was sold to the movies and the attention by a major
[4:34]studio that had bought it was to make a two-hour movie. Now the problem is that it's pretty
[4:40]impossible to turn a 900-page book into a two-hour movie. You know, it's just a small container to put
[4:47]all those pages into. So it went on for about 15 years and they kept trying to write screenplays
[4:53]and so forth and they couldn't get it to work. And then at the end of 15 years, there was this little
[4:58]thing in my contract with this studio that said if they couldn't make the movie in 15 years,
[5:04]the rights would revert back to me. And so, lucky me, along had come, you know, premium series with
[5:10]major actors in them and so forth in those 15 years. So, you know, my agent said, okay, let's
[5:16]shop this around as a series. Who would you like to play the twins? I said, oh, that's easy. My
[5:22]first choice would be Mark Ruffalo. So she sent him the book. He was filming in Europe at the time
[5:29]about maybe a week and a half later. I get this unbelievably sweet email from him saying, you know,
[5:36]Wally, I'm a slow reader. I'm only half of the way through, but I already know I want to do this.
[5:42]You know, he said, these are my people. He says, this is the family that I come from and the place
[5:47]I come from. You know, he was talking about, you know, the similarities between my working class
[5:53]background and his and he just jumped on and was loyal for the next, I think, couple of years
[5:58]until we got the print, you know, the right producer and the right director who is Derek Sienfrotz,
[6:04]amazing, amazing talent between the two of them and everybody else who kind of plugged into,
[6:10]you know, this whole project. Wow. So this is like the one example of why it's great that the
[6:17]film industry can be really slow. You know, it's like you tried to fit a round hole in the square
[6:23]peg 15 years ago and now finally you just didn't know that pegs came in the size. So it's great.
[6:28]That's exactly right. Yeah. Fantastic. So what's it like? So first of all, how and I don't
[6:33]only want to talk about the show, but it's so exactly like the book. I was prepared to watch the show
[6:40]and have some sort of interpretation of the book is so often happens. But this is literally like
[6:45]the same dialogue, the same scenes. How did you get that? How did you do that? It's so present.
[6:52]I certainly didn't ask for that. What happened was that Derek, you know, he, I saw that he,
[6:58]I saw that he had great instincts right at the beginning and I had loved some of his earlier films,
[7:03]Lou Valentine and The Place Beyond the Pines. And he said to me, I think maybe the first or second
[7:09]time that we met in New York, he said, you know, he said, I want you to know that whatever this
[7:14]turns out to be, I'm going to honor the story that you created. And my response was,
[7:21]well, that's great. I really appreciate that. But don't forget to make it your own. So, you know,
[7:26]I helped them, you know, sort of take a look at the setting, the three rivers Connecticut,
[7:32]sort of a fictional amalgam of some of the some of the towns in Eastern Connecticut,
[7:36]where I grew up and and where I live now. So I did preliminary work with them. And then I just
[7:42]let it go. I said, you know, Derek wanted to write a screen for the screenplay for the six episodes.
[7:49]And I said, yeah, I don't need to see them. I don't need to be consulted. You make it your own.
[7:55]And I could see when I made those visits to the set while they were filming that, okay,
[8:00]this is going to be really special. So, yeah, there are changes. You know, the dialogue is pretty
[8:06]much the same dialogue. Yes, the book, but he made some, you know, he, I think he made some really
[8:12]wise changes. And, you know, there's sort of rollout as the episodes continue. But I was perfectly
[8:18]happy with them. I didn't miss what I had written the book that didn't get into the series. But
[8:22]yeah, all was well. Wow. And so what is it like for you, sort of sitting on the couch or I'm assuming,
[8:28]what's it like for you just turning on the TV? And here is this project that's been in your heart
[8:34]and your world for so long. And suddenly, finally, it's up there. Like, what was that feeling like for
[8:40]you? Did you have like a now in quarantine too? I'm sure ordinarily you would have had a big to do,
[8:45]what was it like for you? Well, I was invited when they were, when Derek was still editing
[8:51]the episodes. And that was just about the time that the that the coronavirus was sort of taken over
[8:57]in New York. And it was kind of on my back burner. And Derek invited me and my wife to come in
[9:04]her two different Mondays to a screening place. Like an editing studio. And he said, you know,
[9:09]these are still kind of rough cuts, but we want to, we want to show you the series. So,
[9:14]we went in on one Monday and saw episodes one through three. And then the following Monday,
[9:19]we saw episodes four, five and six. My wife went back to Connecticut. I hung around at our little
[9:25]apartment in New York to do some work. And every day I walked out, you know, either to go on the
[9:30]subway or, you know, to the movies or something. And it's like, man, you know, there are more masks
[9:36]today than there were yesterday. So finally, after about, I don't know, four or five days, I said,
[9:41]I think I'd better high tail it. So luckily, I didn't, I didn't get the virus while I was
[9:48]hanging around in the city. And so I had that, I had the six episodes sort of, you know, I had seen
[9:54]them, but it was a way different thing on Sunday night. We had a
[10:00]we were invited by the producer, Phil Nation,
[10:03]to have a toast at, so the episode aired at nine,
[10:08]and we all convened by Zoom at eight o'clock,
[10:12]and the actors and the producer and the director
[10:15]and Mark was there and so forth.
[10:17]And we all just sort of expressed how excited we all were
[10:21]because we could finally share it with everybody else.
[10:24]It really had been a labor of love for so many people.
[10:29]Well, congratulations on the show being out in the world
[10:32]as the perfect compliment to this book being out in the world.
[10:35]So, great job, thank you, congratulations.
[10:38]All right, thank you, Phoebe.
[10:39]So, let's go back to the book.
[10:41]So, let's teleport back to the late 1990s.
[10:46]What means you write this book to begin with?
[10:48]Why these characters, why the twins,
[10:51]why paranoid schizophrenia,
[10:53]what drew you to these characters
[10:55]and tell me about writing the book at the beginning?
[10:58]My first book, she's coming down was published in 1992.
[11:01]And I had a breakfast meeting with my then agent
[11:06]out in California and she pulls out some, you know,
[11:10]legal size paper and I said, oh, what's that?
[11:12]I was on book tour free.
[11:13]She's coming down, you know,
[11:15]a modest little story by Wally Hu, you know?
[11:19]And so, she said to me that the publisher
[11:22]would like to do a second book with you
[11:25]and they would be willing to give you some advanced money
[11:28]and I said, well, you know, that seems a little
[11:31]butt backwards to me.
[11:32]I said, I, you know, I haven't done any work
[11:35]and they're gonna give me money for it.
[11:36]But my agent said, oh, that's an interesting point of view.
[11:40]Would you like a little bit more Chardonnay?
[11:42]I ended up signing on the dotted line.
[11:47]And then I went home and I couldn't think of a damn thing.
[11:49]Zippy, I was like, I was so freaked out that, you know,
[11:53]here I had been hated and I couldn't think of a topic.
[11:56]And then one day, I was sort of facing desperation
[11:59]at that point, I mean, I was, I remember I had extracted
[12:04]one of my kid's toys from, you know,
[12:06]their toy box that they had at that point abandoned.
[12:10]And I, one of those little wooden paddles
[12:12]with the, you know, with the elastic
[12:14]and the rubber ball and so forth.
[12:16]And I had gotten embarrassingly good at, you know,
[12:21]95, 95, 95, and all in that sort of era
[12:26]of panic, I got a little, it was almost like a movie
[12:29]in my head, you know, not longer than five or six seconds.
[12:32]And what I saw in that silent movie was a guy
[12:35]in a pickup truck driving on a sleepy country road.
[12:40]And I didn't know who he was.
[12:42]I didn't know why he was out driving in the middle of the night
[12:45]when everybody else is home sleeping.
[12:47]And so I started riding in this guy's voice
[12:49]and it turned out to be an angry voice.
[12:51]And that was the beginning of Dominic,
[12:55]who was, you know, the main character of the story.
[12:58]And I didn't know, at that point he had a brother,
[13:00]I didn't know certainly that he had a twin brother.
[13:03]But the more I wrote, the more that character reveals himself
[13:07]to make.
[13:08]And earlier, about 1988, 89, 90,
[13:13]I had been high school teacher.
[13:15]I mean, I still was when I started this novel.
[13:17]But I was running a writing center
[13:18]and we were riding across the curriculum.
[13:20]So I had a history class come in.
[13:23]And they had been studying the Great Depression.
[13:25]And I said, well, I think I'll create a program whereby
[13:29]people who had been teenagers during the Great Depression
[13:32]and are now, you know, elderly, retired and so forth.
[13:35]I'll have them come in and the kids can interview,
[13:40]you know, different, these different subjects.
[13:42]So they came in, there was a three or four day program.
[13:45]And the first day, there was a guy who was,
[13:48]he was a little bit unusual, he didn't say anything.
[13:51]And finally, I said to him, Mr. Mayak,
[13:54]would you like to tell us your story
[13:56]of growing up during the Great Depression?
[13:59]And at that point, he took off his dark glasses
[14:02]and he had a missing eye.
[14:03]And he uncooked his arms from, you know,
[14:07]he had his hands in his armpits.
[14:09]And I saw that he had a missing hand.
[14:11]And he proceeded to tell us a story
[14:14]about how he had been a pacifist in World War II.
[14:18]And he had studied his Bible and from that Bible,
[14:22]he had, you know, God had spoken to him
[14:24]that if he could make, you know, a huge,
[14:28]personal sacrifice, then he could stop the war.
[14:32]And so I saw, oh my, I school students looking at each other
[14:37]like,
[14:38]so anyway, he was coming back the next day,
[14:42]but nobody, no, the kids wanted to work with him,
[14:45]they were too freaked out.
[14:46]So I started talking to him.
[14:48]And I got to be friends with him.
[14:49]And I learned a very, you know, his very sad story
[14:52]had been locked away in the state hospital
[14:55]for the mentally ill for years or decades.
[14:59]And he had gotten out back in the 1980s, I think.
[15:02]And so that, you know, Thomas Bursi is an amalgam of this guy,
[15:09]but also he is sort of consumed by the twin thing.
[15:14]And as I realized that Dominic and Thomas were twins,
[15:18]what I began to figure out,
[15:19]and I'm talking about slowly over years,
[15:21]was that the reason for Dominic's anger
[15:24]is that it sort of covered over his fear.
[15:27]You know, these guys had started out as a single fertilized egg
[15:32]that for reasons we don't know split apart
[15:35]and became two different people.
[15:36]One of them develops the disease, one of them does not,
[15:40]but is sort of cast into the role of his brother's keeper.
[15:44]But Dominic is reluctant as a brother's keeper.
[15:47]He promises his dying mother,
[15:49]that he'll take care of his brother,
[15:51]but that's a pretty big assignment.
[15:53]So I wanted to, you know, the more I got into it.
[15:56]And, you know, I don't write with an ending in mind.
[15:58]I write to discover on a daily basis
[16:01]what's going on with these people.
[16:03]And so little by little, I realized that Dominic,
[16:05]in his own way, was damaged by their upbringing.
[16:09]And then it calls into question, you know,
[16:11]things like nature or nurture,
[16:13]which is Dominic wanted, you know,
[16:15]did Thomas develop the disease
[16:17]because of his environment
[16:18]or because of his biochemistry?
[16:20]I ended up not, you know, not coming to any conclusion
[16:24]about that, but I investigated.
[16:26]And I think probably fiction writers don't need
[16:29]to answer questions.
[16:31]They just need to ask them.
[16:33]There's one perk of fiction writing.
[16:34]Right.
[16:37]Well, that is a really interesting story.
[16:39]I would never have guessed that that was based on a true
[16:42]occurrence that someone had actually done that.
[16:44]And I'm assuming the depression error man also took
[16:47]out his own eye, like he did his hand.
[16:49]But oh my gosh.
[16:51]He took him high first and was locked away
[16:53]in the hospital, given electroshock treatments.
[16:57]And this is back in the 1940s.
[16:59]And he told me, he said, I had to be cagey
[17:02]or else Paul said, keep giving me those things.
[17:04]So he said, I worked in a defense plan.
[17:06]He worked in a tannery.
[17:08]And he said, I promised that I would go back and work,
[17:11]you know, in this defense plan, if they would let me out
[17:14]and they did let him out.
[17:15]And then a year to the day later, he cut off his hand.
[17:19]And there is a biblical dictate in there.
[17:22]You know, if I write, I set up, you know,
[17:24]pluck it out, you know, for the Lord
[17:26]and, you know, cut off, I write hand and so forth.
[17:29]I do, when I went on a book tour back in 98, 99,
[17:33]I had many people come up to me
[17:36]from the audience afterwards and say,
[17:37]did you write that based on so and so?
[17:41]And, you know, they gave me names that I didn't know.
[17:43]And I realized that, you know,
[17:45]that had motivated a lot of people to mutilate themselves.
[17:49]And, you know, there were a lot of examples of that.
[17:51]Well, when you were on book tour,
[17:52]did people ask if you shared some of these pacifist beliefs?
[17:56]Yeah, yeah, and that was, you know,
[17:57]this was in the time after the Gulf War,
[18:00]but, you know, the wars were still stirring around.
[18:03]And I was very, you know, I was very candid about that.
[18:06]Yes, I do, I do feel that war is a waste
[18:10]and I still feel that way.
[18:12]And so ironically, here's this guy, Peter Mayak,
[18:15]who, you know, was certifiably crazy,
[18:19]and, you know, to some people.
[18:21]And yet, he and I bought a like in terms of, you know,
[18:25]politics.
[18:26]Interesting.
[18:27]When you were working on this book,
[18:28]did you have to do a lot of research
[18:30]on paranoid schizophrenias?
[18:31]Or did you, like, did you go?
[18:33]I know you've done a lot of in-depth work
[18:36]at different prisons.
[18:37]Did you do similar work at state institutions
[18:40]like Hatch and all the rest?
[18:42]No, what happened?
[18:43]See, I had grown up in Norwich, Connecticut,
[18:45]which housed a largest state facility, you know,
[18:48]for the mentally ill.
[18:50]Huge campus, lots of different buildings and so forth.
[18:53]And when I was a kid, you know,
[18:55]I'd be riding in my parents' station wagon in the backseat
[18:58]and whenever they drove by this facility,
[19:01]I would, you know, I would be curious about it
[19:03]and a little bit scared by it,
[19:05]but also fascinated and it just seemed mysterious to me.
[19:08]I never walked the grounds until I started riding this novel.
[19:12]I learned somewhere along the way
[19:13]that my own grandfather, my maternal grandfather,
[19:16]who was an Italian immigrant,
[19:18]had been housed in the last years of his life,
[19:21]not only at that prison, but in the forensic building,
[19:25]you know, with bars on the windows,
[19:26]he had committed a criminal act against my grandmother.
[19:30]He had a brain tumor and it turned to him violent
[19:34]and he tried to kill my grandmother.
[19:36]I knew my grandmother and loved her very much,
[19:39]but my grandfather, I didn't know at all, you know,
[19:43]deep dark family secret, you know,
[19:45]sort of old school Italians, you know,
[19:48]you didn't talk about, you know, the shame
[19:50]but this and so forth.
[19:51]So I didn't know anything about him
[19:53]until I was about a teenager.
[19:54]So in some ways, I think I was reaching
[19:58]without realizing it while I was...
[20:00]I think I was reaching out to create a grandfather in the vacuum
[20:05]of the one I didn't know anything about.
[20:08]But of course, the grandfather I created is not a nice guy.
[20:12]Yeah, I was going to say you could have made him a little warmer
[20:14]and fuzzier if you were going to make yourself a grandfather.
[20:17]But anyway, it came from that too.
[20:21]You know, that my curiosity about mental illness.
[20:24]Did I do a lot of research?
[20:26]Well, the first research I did was I got myself a tour
[20:29]of the Norwich State Hospital.
[20:31]It is closing days, it was closing down building by building.
[20:34]I think there were two buildings left.
[20:36]And this was in the early 90s.
[20:39]And during the tour that I got,
[20:42]I button-hold a psychiatrist who happened to be walking by.
[20:45]And I was introduced to him and I said,
[20:47]hey, I got this character.
[20:49]And at that point I started writing Thomas,
[20:51]but I didn't know what his mental illness was.
[20:54]And I said, so this guy is saying this
[20:56]and he's doing this and so forth.
[20:58]And he was the one who said to me,
[21:00]sounds like paranoid schizophrenia.
[21:02]So now it was incumbent on me to learn all I could
[21:06]about that disease.
[21:08]It's not in my family, thank goodness.
[21:10]But I really felt like, you know,
[21:12]I needed to do my homework.
[21:14]And the best homework,
[21:15]I mean, obviously I read, I read a lot of books.
[21:17]I read a lot of articles,
[21:19]but the most useful research I did was talking to people.
[21:23]Family members of people who have this disease,
[21:26]psychiatric nurses, that kind of thing.
[21:29]Wow.
[21:30]And then you end up writing a 900 page book about it.
[21:33]How did you do that?
[21:35]How did you keep it all straight?
[21:37]I know you said you didn't have an ending in mind,
[21:40]but was this like you just,
[21:42]did you write it by hand?
[21:43]Did you write it on the computer?
[21:44]Did you have papers everywhere?
[21:46]Like what was it like and how long did it take
[21:48]for you to craft the whole narrative?
[21:50]Yeah.
[21:51]Well, she's coming down my first novel.
[21:53]I had written all in long hand with big pens and loosely paper.
[21:58]But then I got, you know, very modern with number two.
[22:01]And I had one of those 800 pound computers with,
[22:05]with dot makers printer and all that kind of stuff.
[22:08]And so I started writing, you know,
[22:10]with the technology that was available at the time.
[22:13]And it just sort of lived in the hard drive of my computer for years.
[22:17]I had index cards all over the wall in the office where I wrote
[22:21]so that if I forgot a section or if I forgot something
[22:24]that had happened or a date or something,
[22:26]I could just look up and see that.
[22:28]So I had those kind of visual aids.
[22:31]I didn't know it about maybe it took me six years to write that novel.
[22:35]Somewhere around year number four, I decided.
[22:37]Well, you know, I should put this out to see how long it is.
[22:40]And then that dot matrix printer was still going about an hour
[22:45]and a half later.
[22:46]I said, who the hell is going to read, you know, book this long?
[22:51]But, you know, I just kept going because I needed,
[22:54]I needed to find out what was going to happen.
[22:56]And when it came in at about 900 pages,
[22:59]like with a great deal of trepidation,
[23:01]I sent her off to my editor.
[23:03]And she said the whole story was worth it.
[23:05]And they were going to print it, you know, with some editing.
[23:08]But as he is.
[23:09]Wow.
[23:10]That's amazing.
[23:11]I mean, it wasn't luck.
[23:13]I mean, it's really fantastic.
[23:15]I wonder if that would happen today if people have editors would be like,
[23:18]sure, no problem, 900 pages.
[23:20]Like, it's harder and harder to do that.
[23:22]But yeah, I think because of the technology,
[23:25]maybe other factors too,
[23:27]I think all of our attention span is sort of reduced from what it used to be.
[23:32]But I don't know.
[23:33]I don't know.
[23:34]Thank goodness too.
[23:35]Phil Nation and HBO decided to go with a six-up episode series as well.
[23:40]That's true.
[23:41]Although when it ended on Sunday, I was sad.
[23:44]You know, sometimes it was two at once in the beginning.
[23:46]But now just one at a time.
[23:47]Oh, we have to wait.
[23:49]Yeah.
[23:50]How did you always know you wanted to be a writer?
[23:52]I guess it's something that you always aspire to.
[23:55]Like, how did you end up doing it?
[23:57]She's come undone.
[23:58]How did that not to take too much of your time?
[24:01]But just how do you realize you're such a gifted writer?
[24:03]How does that happen?
[24:04]Well, first of all, I would quibble on whether
[24:07]how gifted I am or not.
[24:09]I always feel sort of apologetic about anything that I've written.
[24:12]I hate it when I go to a reading of a book that I'm giving a reading
[24:17]of a book that I've published sometimes years before.
[24:20]And I hate it when people are sitting in the audience reading along
[24:23]from their copy of the book because I'm still fixing it,
[24:26]you know, from my microphone.
[24:27]I'm changing this and that and everything because, you know,
[24:30]I feel that my writing is, you know, imperfect.
[24:33]But as far as how I started, I didn't want to be a writer.
[24:37]I talked to a lot of writers who were journaling when they were, you know,
[24:41]eight, nine years old.
[24:42]That wasn't me.
[24:43]I was too busy, you know, plopped in front of the TV.
[24:46]You know, watching things.
[24:48]But I did always draw.
[24:51]And I love drawing still.
[24:53]I did, you know, when I wasn't watching TV, I was drawing.
[24:56]And sometimes doing both at the same time.
[24:59]And I think that was without realizing that was my leg up into
[25:03]preparing to be a fiction writer.
[25:05]Also, as far as she's come undone is concerned,
[25:08]I grew up in a very girl-centric neighborhood.
[25:11]I have two older sisters.
[25:13]I always wanted a brother that never happened.
[25:15]And every other kid on the street on McKinley Avenue,
[25:19]where I grew up was a girl.
[25:21]And there was one boy,
[25:23]veto signerino.
[25:24]But whenever I went outside, he used to throw rocks at me.
[25:27]So, you know, he wasn't exactly good material for a playmate.
[25:32]Anyway, so I wasn't really such a lonely kid,
[25:35]but I was a solitary kid.
[25:37]Occasionally, I would be, you know, cast and some fantasy thing
[25:41]that my sisters and their friends would be.
[25:44]You know, one time they were nurses at a hospital
[25:48]and they let me play with them so that I could be the patient
[25:51]and they could, you know, give me shots.
[25:53]They would stick, you know, comment pins into my arm and stuff
[25:56]like that.
[25:57]But other than that,
[25:58]I would kind of be an observer of their weird games and, you know,
[26:02]play.
[26:03]And so I think that's not a bad thing.
[26:05]You know, if you're going to grow up to be a writer,
[26:07]a particular writer of a book with a female character
[26:11]who is speaking to the readers.
[26:13]And so, you know, I mean, all this is, you know,
[26:16]Monday morning quarterbacking, you know,
[26:18]this is looking back out of life.
[26:19]But I think all of those things.
[26:21]And also the fact that I was a high school teacher
[26:23]for about 25 years.
[26:25]And about maybe nine years into teaching,
[26:30]writing, you know, in the English classroom,
[26:33]I became a writer myself.
[26:35]I hadn't been that in the early years of my teaching.
[26:39]And when I started writing fiction,
[26:41]I threw out all that I thought I knew about how to teach writing.
[26:46]And instead of assigning writing,
[26:48]I would play games with the kids to figure out
[26:51]so they could figure out what they wanted to write about
[26:54]or more importantly what they needed to write about.
[26:57]And so what they needed to write about was themselves,
[27:00]you know, being adolescents.
[27:02]And so now I'm on the receiving end,
[27:04]particularly with the girls of a lot of confessional kind of writing.
[27:08]And I think that helped me to, you know,
[27:10]I certainly didn't steal anybody's life or story or anything.
[27:13]But I think that helped me to figure out the voice of Dolores.
[27:17]And that's interesting.
[27:19]Wow. Well, I'm glad you weren't.
[27:21]I mean, I can't imagine you being my high school English teacher
[27:23]and then going on to write all these books.
[27:25]like I would be very intimidated in that classroom.
[27:28]Well, they did.
[27:29]Oh, that was going to happen.
[27:30]Yeah. Okay. Fine.
[27:31]That's true. That's true.
[27:33]Well, once you started writing and realized you were,
[27:36]let's pretend you're not gifted just to make you feel better,
[27:38]but I can believe what I believe.
[27:40]But anyway, let's just say,
[27:41]let's at least both agree that you are a writer.
[27:44]So now that you agreed that you're a writer,
[27:47]what kept you going?
[27:49]Like what did you like about it?
[27:50]And what made you keep turning out beautiful books?
[27:54]Or let's not say beautiful books.
[27:57]What was it about it that appealed to you the most?
[27:59]What did you love about it?
[28:00]Or what kept you coming back to starting new projects?
[28:04]I think I think, and this has happened with every single novel
[28:08]that I've written.
[28:09]I think I'm working on number seven right now.
[28:11]But I had starting novels is always difficult for me.
[28:15]I spend my wheels for a long time before I get traction on something
[28:20]and start going.
[28:22]And I have to fall in love with and in worry about the character
[28:28]in whose voice I'm speaking.
[28:30]It's only then that I can sort of move forward.
[28:33]And like I said, I don't, you know,
[28:35]I don't plan out, you know, a plot line
[28:38]or I don't know what the climax is going to be
[28:41]that I can write toward.
[28:43]I'm sort of envious of writers who can do that,
[28:45]but that's not me.
[28:46]And so it's the daily discovery
[28:49]and on the best at writing days,
[28:52]it's the surprises that occur in the middle of writing.
[28:56]You know, I'll maybe plan out what's going to happen
[28:59]in the middle of a sudden.
[29:00]It turns into something else.
[29:02]And I like chasing those surprises.
[29:05]I certainly didn't write for royalty checks
[29:08]or anything like that.
[29:09]I still don't.
[29:10]I'm not a very good money manager of my wife.
[29:13]She's the controller.
[29:15]She's the accountant in our relationship.
[29:18]So she handles that.
[29:19]You know, that's how I do it.
[29:21]And what?
[29:22]I'm sorry.
[29:23]I just want to know what your latest book is about.
[29:25]Yeah, I can talk a little bit about that.
[29:27]I, you know, I write, I realize I write to address my fears
[29:32]lots of times.
[29:33]And one of my biggest fears when my kids were little
[29:37]and now that I have little grandchildren,
[29:40]we have a, we have a grandson who's five
[29:43]and two granddaughters who are two years old
[29:45]and I think seven months old.
[29:48]And so my fear has sort of been relegated
[29:52]to fear of my grandchildren's safety.
[29:55]And what I'm writing about is a guy in the voice of a guy who
[30:00]who is incarcerated doing a three year prison sentence
[30:05]for involuntary manslaughter
[30:07]because he has backed his car up
[30:10]without realizing that one of the kids was there.
[30:13]So it's a dark beginning,
[30:15]but I'm rooting for this guy
[30:18]and I'm rooting for his marriage,
[30:21]which is crumbling because of this.
[30:23]And I'm also, I've done that volunteer work in the prison.
[30:27]So I have that kind of knowledge,
[30:29]even though I volunteered in a women's prison,
[30:32]but I've got a lot of the material about the restrictions
[30:37]and the craziness and the abuse of power
[30:40]that goes on in prison.
[30:41]So I'm writing both of his prison experience
[30:44]and what happens when it gets out of prison.
[30:47]Wow, sounds really good.
[30:49]Well, whatever happens while you're spinning your wheels,
[30:51]you end up with these great ideas.
[30:52]So I guess that's just part of the process.
[30:55]Okay.
[30:56]Wait, that was a good idea.
[30:57]You've been so generous of your time.
[30:59]Just one last question.
[31:00]Do you have any advice for aspiring authors?
[31:02]I know you've sprinkled some already,
[31:05]but just any parting advice.
[31:07]Yeah, it's the same advice that I always give people
[31:09]who are sort of at the starting gate of writing
[31:12]or who want to write a book
[31:15]or who want me to write their book.
[31:17]Oh, I got a great story.
[31:18]You want to write it,
[31:19]but if you're serious about writing,
[31:22]then I think that you,
[31:23]what you need to do is to spell your fantasies
[31:26]about what's going to happen when it's finished.
[31:30]What you need to do is get excited about
[31:32]what's happening as you're writing it.
[31:34]Reject any fantasy you have a bestseller them.
[31:38]That's a crap shoot.
[31:39]That's like winning a lottery if it's going to happen.
[31:42]But what you need to do is humble yourself to the process
[31:48]and you need to realize that nobody gets it right
[31:52]and first draft.
[31:53]My first drafts are kind of embarrassing actually,
[31:56]but you humble yourself to know
[31:59]that real writing comes in rewriting and revising.
[32:03]I also feel that if people do what I did,
[32:07]which is join a writing group and stay with it
[32:12]and get not only give feedback to other writers,
[32:17]but also receive feedback in a humble and generous way,
[32:21]that both of those things teach you how to be a writer.
[32:26]Thanks, Glenn.
[32:27]Well, thank you so much.
[32:28]Thank you for coming on Monton Hotel and Treatx
[32:31]and this Instagram Live.
[32:32]And I'm so excited to watch the rest
[32:35]and of your show and now that I read it
[32:39]and after college and I'm reading it again
[32:41]and it's just, this is such a treat for me
[32:43]and for my listeners, I'm sure.
[32:44]So thank you so much and congratulations.
[32:46]Thank you.
[32:47]And despite the technical difficulties of being in,
[32:49]I really enjoyed this exchange.
[32:52]You had great questions and I was instantly,
[32:54]once I mastered the technology,
[32:57]I was instantly comfortable being your interview.
[33:00]Oh, good.
[33:01]I'm so glad to hear that.
[33:02]That makes me happy.
[33:04]Sorry about my kids.
[33:05]I can't believe it,
[33:06]but I don't mind these things happening.
[33:08]Can you tell me their names and their ages?
[33:09]I'll tell you their ages,
[33:11]but they're five and almost seven
[33:13]and then I also have twins there about to be 13.
[33:15]Oh, wow.
[33:16]Yeah.
[33:17]Identicals are fraternal.
[33:19]Fraternal boy, girl.
[33:20]Although I do have identical twin uncles.
[33:22]So I had them in mind as I was reading
[33:25]about Dominic and Thomas.
[33:27]My wife and I are doing,
[33:28]our kids, our grandkids live in New Orleans
[33:30]and we're doing like literacy lessons.
[33:34]We have class with our five-year-old,
[33:36]even every weekday and sometimes on the weekends too.
[33:40]That's a lot of fun.
[33:41]That's so nice to do that.
[33:42]Yeah.
[33:43]Now I try to homeschool and I don't know.
[33:45]I don't know who's more frustrated than for me,
[33:47]but I don't know how people do it.
[33:51]And I'm just doing our rest every day, one day at a time.
[33:54]Well, thanks so much.
[33:55]It was really fun and have a great day
[33:57]and I'll be watching this Sunday again,
[33:59]every Sunday until it's over.
[34:00]Very much and I just want to tell all your listeners
[34:03]and your viewers to stay safe and stay healthy.
[34:07]Thank you and to you too.
[34:09]All right, thank you.
[34:10]Bye, thank you.
[34:11]Thanks again for listening to my podcast.
[34:13]Moms don't have time to read books.
[34:15]If you liked this episode, please follow me on Instagram
[34:18]at zippyowens and at moms don't have time to read books
[34:22]and sign up for my mailing list at zippyowens.com
[34:25]so you can always hear about the latest things I'm up to.
[34:27]Thanks a lot.
[34:28]Today's episode has been sponsored
[34:30]by Bylitzer Blue, the organic small-batch skincare company
[34:33]that's giving back to women in treatment for breast cancer.
[34:36]Use code zippy20 for 20% off
[34:39]by litzerblueskincare.com.
[34:41]Thanks so much to Steve and Ryan at Texture Sound
[34:43]for the sound editing and thank you
[34:45]to Morning Moon Productions for providing
[34:47]this fantastic intro and out trim music.
[34:49]Thanks for listening.
[34:50]You can always email me at zippyowens.com.