Christina Baker Kline, THE EXILES
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[3:19]I interviewed Christina Baker Klein twice once for the North Castle Public Library event
[3:25]that I moderated, but unfortunately it was not recorded.
[3:28]And then again later that week when I did a regular podcast with her.
[3:31]So I feel very lucky to have gotten two facts and back sessions
[3:36]because I feel like I could talk to Christina all day.
[3:39]Here's a little more about her.
[3:40]Christina Baker Klein is a number one New York Times best-selling author of eight novels,
[3:45]including Orphan Train.
[3:46]She has been published in 40 countries and her novels have received the New England Prize
[3:50]for Fiction, the Main Literary Award, and a Barnes and Noble Discover Award among many others.
[3:55]Her essays, articles, and reviews have appeared in publications such as the New York Times Book Review,
[3:59]the Boston Globe, the San Francisco Chronicle, Psychology Today, and Salon.
[4:03]Christina's latest novel, The Exiles, was an instant bestseller and was recently
[4:08]optioned for television by the producer of HBO's Big Little Lies and also The Undoing.
[4:13]In addition to writing, Christina serves on many advisory boards
[4:16]as an artist mentor at Duke University and at Stony Brook University
[4:19]and is an author advocate for the literary organization room to read.
[4:23]I hope you enjoy our second conversation and I'm sad that you didn't get to hear our first.
[4:27]Welcome, Christina.
[4:28]Thank you so much for coming on mom's turn-of-time to read books to discuss the exiles.
[4:33]Thank you so much for having me and so happy to be here.
[4:36]And that we just did as we were chatting about before the podcast.
[4:39]We just did this fantastic event for the North Castle Public Library together.
[4:43]Last week, but it wasn't recorded, so we're going to do it again as a podcast.
[4:46]But at least now I got all this inside information about you from that.
[4:49]So sort of like an extra prep session, but I promise this is being recorded.
[4:54]So we're all good.
[4:55]Perfect.
[4:57]So let's start with the exiles.
[4:59]Can you please tell us, nurse, what it's about and what inspired you to write it?
[5:02]Sure.
[5:03]The exiles is the story of the convict women who transformed Australia and the
[5:08]Aboriginal people whose way of life was destroyed when British colonists landed on their shores.
[5:15]That is the sort of epic version of the description.
[5:18]It's about three women essentially who are transported and there's one Aboriginal girl who ends up living
[5:25]with a British aristocratic family and it's not so exciting for her and fun.
[5:31]So I read a piece in the New York Times maybe a decade ago that was in a column
[5:36]at least a balcony used to have called mother load.
[5:39]And to Zibi, I think you've contributed to it.
[5:41]Yes, I did.
[5:42]Yeah.
[5:43]It's a much less high brow of a piece, though.
[5:45]It was about like my kids, my being sad.
[5:47]I couldn't go to like kids and sports or something with them anymore and I had to sit on the sidelines.
[5:52]Oh, that's totally fun.
[5:54]Well, I, you know, I was a mother of kids in the parenting needy ages.
[6:00]And so I always read it.
[6:01]And this one column happened to be about the convict women and how they took care of their
[6:06]children on the ships, which were often repurposed living ships headed to Australia for four
[6:12]to six months at sea.
[6:14]And I read that and I got this sort of tingle and I realized this is what I want to write
[6:19]about next.
[6:20]And it was totally intimidating because it's in the 1840s and it's in Australia and England neither
[6:27]of which I've really written about it.
[6:29]I've written a little bit about one of my novels has a character whose English.
[6:33]I grew up in England for nine years.
[6:34]I was born there and I have dual citizenship.
[6:37]So I feel a little bit unsturdier ground with that, but not so much with Australia.
[6:41]So I knew it would be a big project, but I had been obsessed with Australia ever since
[6:47]going there as a rotary fellow in my 20s and I loved it and I became really interested
[6:52]at the time in the story of the convicts because of course Australia was founded as a
[6:57]penal colony and 20% of Australians today are descended from convicts and also learning
[7:03]about what had happened.
[7:06]It's a similar sort of parallel or inside out version.
[7:09]I suppose of our own story of British settlers coming into America and taking over.
[7:15]So it was fascinating to research, but I also gotten a women's prison and I did a book
[7:20]on feminism with my mom and interviewed all these women for it and sort of threw those experiences.
[7:27]All three of them came back when I wrote this book kind of came together.
[7:31]I can't believe that 20% of the people in Australia still are descended from.
[7:36]I mean, isn't that crazy?
[7:37]You would think that it would be like mayhem and disorder and yet it's like the place
[7:40]everybody just wants to go visit and they're so laid back.
[7:43]What do you think?
[7:44]That's that.
[7:45]That's crazy.
[7:46]I do think that the Australian sensibility is in part because of their origins as a
[7:51]penal colony.
[7:52]You know, these these people came from a very stratified world in Britain where there
[7:59]there was no social mobility and you could not go up and down the social ladder and
[8:03]there were no social programs and the poor were just stuck at the bottom and they got
[8:08]to Australia and even though the journey was difficult and prison life was definitely
[8:13]not fun.
[8:15]If you got out and in fact, one descendant of a convict said to me, you know, our character
[8:21]is forged out of having survived all this and then being able to start anew and having
[8:26]all kinds of social mobility once they got out, becoming entrepreneurial, for example,
[8:31]and also the sort of irreverence and this kind of humor that you see a lot of Australian
[8:36]people share.
[8:37]I do think that there's something about that journey that was very specific and it makes
[8:42]them different than Americans.
[8:44]It's just a, you know, they weren't formed by religion was never part of the forming
[8:51]of that country and it's a married feeling.
[8:53]Well, I am sort of deep in American history these days that's been helping my 13-year-old
[8:57]daughter study for her social studies.
[8:59]So it's very fresh in my mind exactly how we became a country so that's all super
[9:04]interesting and sort of timely for what's going on in my house at least.
[9:07]I love how these separate colonies show us different iterations of the British of the
[9:13]effect of British colonialism.
[9:15]How did your family end up like why were you born there and why did you leave in the UK?
[9:20]So my parents are southern and they met at college and my dad was actually in a seminary.
[9:28]He was going to become a minister.
[9:30]They were raised southern Baptist and he got a fellowship for a summer to go to Cambridge
[9:36]and study with Owen Chadwick, this very famous theologian.
[9:40]And he was, my father was the first person to graduate from eighth grade in his white
[9:46]trash southern family basically and my mother had come from a long line of teachers.
[9:51]So they were these two very different backgrounds and I think she influenced him because
[9:55]he agreed to go to Cambridge for the summer.
[9:57]He thought it was just for the summer and then...
[10:00]He fell in love with learning there,
[10:03]and became a professor.
[10:06]He got a PhD, studying with the Ointabic.
[10:08]He became a professor of British labor history of all things.
[10:11]My parents became total hippies
[10:13]and threw off their fabb to shackles, I guess.
[10:16]And it was also at the height of the civil rights movement
[10:19]and the anti-war movement and the women's movement
[10:22]and all that.
[10:22]And they were very radically involved with all that stuff.
[10:26]And so then when we moved back to the South,
[10:29]and my father, and they were sort of rabble routers.
[10:32]And finally, my father was fired
[10:35]from this conservative college.
[10:37]He was teaching in all male college
[10:39]for anti-American activities for housing draft dodges
[10:42]or something.
[10:43]And so they moved to Maine and he became a professor
[10:45]at the University of Maine because I think that was as far
[10:48]as you could get from the South without going to Canada.
[10:52]So that's just a circuitous way of saying
[10:55]that that was how we ended up in England.
[10:58]And my parents became huge angle files
[11:01]and my mother's sister married a novelist.
[11:03]And so we have relatives over there now.
[11:06]And my children even have dual citizenship
[11:09]because I was born there.
[11:10]So it's kind of wonderful.
[11:12]I've trumpet, sorry to be political, but.
[11:13]Yeah, I think I had not changed.
[11:17]We were very much considering.
[11:18]I don't know if you know Jane Green.
[11:20]Yes, yes, yes.
[11:21]She's just relocated to London by now.
[11:24]And I've been watching her redo her house on Instagram.
[11:27]I love it.
[11:28]I love it.
[11:29]A room, her like wallpaper, painting, whatever.
[11:31]Yes, I love it.
[11:32]Her bathroom, it's fantastic.
[11:34]Yeah, she's so fun.
[11:35]She is so fun.
[11:36]So we're just from living through her.
[11:37]I'm sort of living through her.
[11:39]Yes, me too.
[11:40]And this also gives more context because the other night
[11:42]we discussed your dad and how you didn't mean to,
[11:46]but ended up emulating his deep research skills
[11:48]and how you thought you were a novelist.
[11:50]Only in that you sort of poo-pooed that whole cerebral
[11:54]like sitting just pawing through research.
[11:56]And yet your historical fiction has become a cross
[12:00]between him and what you thought you were gonna do.
[12:02]And now that I hear his trajectory,
[12:04]it's even more interesting.
[12:06]Yeah, I mean, he was sort of an auto-didact,
[12:09]I guess you would say, for a long growing up.
[12:11]And then the more educated,
[12:13]he just was in love with learning always.
[12:15]And so, but it was, he was meticulous.
[12:18]And he has like a dozen books.
[12:20]And like he, I'm really proud of him
[12:23]because his brother and sister then went to college
[12:25]also and then of course subsequent generations.
[12:29]So it's like this whole, it's like this American success story
[12:32]of education changing your life kind of thing.
[12:37]But yeah, I started out writing contemporary novels
[12:39]and I loved that.
[12:41]And I stumbled into the orphan train story
[12:43]because my husband's grandfather was an orphan train rider,
[12:47]was featured in this article.
[12:50]None of us knew he was dead.
[12:52]And we discovered that he had this whole past
[12:54]that my mother-in-law never knew.
[12:56]So orphan train, only a third of that novel
[13:00]is set in the past 100 pages.
[13:01]But that's what people think of when they think of the novel
[13:04]and obviously the title and all of that.
[13:07]But also because it was just such an unusual,
[13:08]people didn't know the story even though
[13:11]a quarter of a million American children went on trains
[13:13]to the Midwest in a labor program ending in 1929.
[13:17]So that was how I got into researching.
[13:19]And I realized it's terrifying to write about the past.
[13:22]You know what?
[13:23]I remember reading a book by Katherine Harrison,
[13:26]a novel that was about foot binding.
[13:28]I think it was, she wrote contemporary books
[13:31]and memoir novels and memoirs.
[13:34]And then she wrote this book set in the past.
[13:37]And I thought, my first thought was,
[13:39]why would she do that?
[13:40]So that's so weird.
[13:42]And then my second thought was, that's way too hard.
[13:45]I could never do that.
[13:46]I would never presume to understand any culture
[13:50]other than my own.
[13:51]That seems ridiculous.
[13:53]And then Orphan Train, I sort of was terrified every second
[13:57]that I was writing the stuff set in the past.
[13:59]But I kind of learned I could do it.
[14:01]And then the next book was a whole different challenge
[14:03]about Andrew Wyatt and the subject
[14:06]of his painting Christina's world.
[14:07]And then this book was an entirely different challenge.
[14:10]But I guess writing Orphan Train made me realize
[14:13]that I big lesson.
[14:15]Here's a big lesson for aspiring writers.
[14:17]Don't box yourself in.
[14:19]Don't tell yourself what your style is
[14:22]or what your subject is or what your interests are
[14:25]or what you're capable of.
[14:27]You never know.
[14:28]And if you take chances, you'll surprise yourself always.
[14:33]And it might not always work.
[14:34]But in the case of my writing these books,
[14:36]like I wrote my way into learning
[14:38]that I could write this way.
[14:41]And that you obviously liked it.
[14:43]I mean, you must have enjoyed it.
[14:44]Yeah, that was the thing, right?
[14:46]That was your original point.
[14:47]But just that my father, his research style
[14:50]and everything, I would thought, like, I will never do that.
[14:52]And I do do that.
[14:54]I do do that.
[14:55]I take notes the same way he did.
[14:57]And we both write long hand.
[14:59]We talked about that the other night.
[15:00]And yeah, I love that part of it.
[15:03]With that said, I was just,
[15:06]I didn't have that with Lily King last month.
[15:08]And we were talking about her too.
[15:10]I know, I love her too.
[15:11]She's so great.
[15:12]And but she has written a contemporary novel
[15:15]after writing once in the past.
[15:17]And she was like, oh my God, it's so much easier.
[15:19]And I was reminded that it is a little easier
[15:22]to write about the world you know.
[15:24]And so at some point, I will definitely do it again.
[15:27]And maybe I'll bring some of the,
[15:29]what I learned about this stuff to the present day,
[15:32]but we'll see.
[15:33]But then you said your next one,
[15:35]you're like making the same thing again
[15:36]by delving into civil war history and like it's so stupid.
[15:40]The civil war is like the worst period to write about
[15:43]because there are so many real experts.
[15:46]I mean, what am I doing?
[15:48]So I'm just gonna, it's about two couples and sort of,
[15:52]yeah.
[15:52]And I'm just gonna sort of few closely to their world.
[15:56]So we'll see.
[15:58]It's great.
[15:59]I mean, you're, you obviously enjoy challenging
[16:01]yourself on some level and that's okay.
[16:03]I mean, you're doing it.
[16:04]I mean, maybe it's too easy.
[16:06]Maybe you thrive on it.
[16:07]I don't know.
[16:09]You know what?
[16:09]Here's another secret that's not secret.
[16:12]I think that writing about the past in some ways
[16:15]makes it easier to have or makes quite easier
[16:19]because writing about the present is sort of a morphous.
[16:24]And if you're writing about people in your own sort of world
[16:28]in a way, then you have to make terrible things happen to that.
[16:32]I mean, you know, something has to happen in a novel.
[16:34]So you put people through misery in one way or another.
[16:38]That's sort of the plot of every novel.
[16:40]And in some ways, writing stories set in the past
[16:45]gives you more of a frame for the story.
[16:48]And that's what I have trouble with.
[16:50]Like the words on the page are one thing,
[16:52]but really the structure and the plot.
[16:56]I could just write and write and not have a plot,
[16:58]but that is not how a novel works, you know?
[17:01]I was just talking to people about, you know,
[17:05]some Holocaust era fiction and how just knowing it's about
[17:09]the world war two or the Holocaust or something.
[17:11]You already know the general plot.
[17:14]You might not know the sub stories
[17:15]and exactly what the book's about,
[17:17]but you already are like moved and emotional
[17:19]and you know where your emotions are gonna go because of that.
[17:22]So it's almost like, not, I mean,
[17:25]this is gonna come out the wrong way.
[17:27]It's not cheating, but it's you're relying on
[17:31]an inherent structure, which is sort of what you're saying
[17:34]about some of your stories.
[17:35]Not cheating.
[17:36]Of course, I think it's your limit.
[17:37]No, no, no, I totally know what you mean.
[17:38]And actually, I've never writing that way.
[17:40]I am flabbergasted at the ongoing interest
[17:45]in novels about World War II.
[17:46]And of course, I get them all across my desk,
[17:48]you know, in advanced reading copy form
[17:50]because I write about the past.
[17:52]So, but there I can't, it's amazing to me
[17:56]that appetite for World War II fiction, it doesn't end.
[18:00]And in fact, I was talking to an editor about it
[18:02]who said, we thought, we really thought it was a trend
[18:05]that, you know, they have all these trends in publishing
[18:08]like, chick lit, whatever.
[18:09]And then you never hear that anymore, right?
[18:11]But she said, what we're finding is that there's an
[18:14]endless appetite, like not all the books succeed,
[18:16]but you're exactly right.
[18:18]And I actually Zippy had never thought of it that way
[18:20]that it is about knowing what you're getting
[18:23]in a certain way when you read a book about World War II,
[18:25]especially a novel and not to be, not to generalize too much.
[18:29]But a novel by women with a certain kind of figure
[18:33]on the cover is going to yield a certain kind of story
[18:36]about World War II.
[18:37]So, and I feel like that, then you can just keep dipping
[18:40]into that well.
[18:41]I mean, one of the things for me is that I get,
[18:43]I don't want to, and maybe someday I will,
[18:45]but I don't want to revisit the same territory.
[18:49]So I've all my, even though I've written three books,
[18:51]some of the past are all very different from each other
[18:54]and they're all very different parts of the world
[18:56]and of the past.
[18:57]It's not like the past is limiting, right?
[19:00]That's right.
[19:01]I don't have anything anywhere.
[19:03]It's like the world is your oyster.
[19:04]You could do this forever.
[19:05]I mean, you probably won't do this forever, right?
[19:07]I mean, there's an endless amount of really interesting things
[19:10]and particularly with the exiles.
[19:11]I mean, I didn't know a lot about this at all.
[19:14]And I feel kind of like a moron, like even with all the things
[19:17]that I've learned from you about it.
[19:19]But even the idea of being like trapped on a boat
[19:23]with your children for three to six months,
[19:25]even that alone at little tidbit
[19:27]when like I can't even like drive from here
[19:29]to the grocery store with all four of my kids sometimes.
[19:32]And I'm like, how do people do that for months on end
[19:35]with like no iPads or nothing to the shopping?
[19:38]Oh, God, I know it's just amazing what they went through.
[19:42]But we don't know the stories of the poor
[19:46]and the dispossessed because that is not,
[19:48]those are not the people who write history,
[19:50]who write the history.
[19:52]You know, history is wars and presidents and generals
[19:57]and treaties and robber barons and, you know,
[20:00]and the wealthy and the educated,
[20:02]the people who are in power
[20:04]and the people I write about are not in power,
[20:07]are not the people in power.
[20:09]They're the quiet stories.
[20:10]They're the stories that nobody has heard.
[20:12]And you know, this story of the comic women,
[20:15]as you say, every continent has its own stories like this
[20:20]and a lot of them are still ongoing.
[20:22]So it's, that's one of the things
[20:24]that writing about the past opened you up too,
[20:26]I think is the realization,
[20:27]I think we talked about this the other night too.
[20:29]That's okay.
[20:30]The realization that yes things have changed
[20:33]in some amazing ways and it's great to recognize that.
[20:37]But a lot of things stay the same character
[20:39]is the same in some ways.
[20:40]In other words,
[20:41]the feelings people have in 1840 are as real
[20:43]and as deeply experienced as the ones we have today.
[20:47]And I think that's what I try to do in these novels
[20:50]is to stay very close to the bone in terms of,
[20:53]in terms of making my characters feel
[20:57]as if they could live now
[20:58]so that readers experience these situations
[21:02]through their eyes in a way that feels familiar in some ways.
[21:05]I'm not trying to approximate
[21:08]what someone wrote like in 1840.
[21:11]I'm writing as a contemporary writer about the past.
[21:14]And so if the book succeeded all,
[21:17]I think it has something to do with that,
[21:19]that sort of impulse to make it feel fresh and modern.
[21:23]To make 1840 feels relevant as 2020,
[21:29]which you totally did.
[21:30]And you also do it by letting the reader
[21:33]into sort of the inner world of your characters.
[21:36]And even though, like if you were to see a picture,
[21:38]not even that there were pictures,
[21:39]but like a sepia donned brown and white picture,
[21:44]people seem so different, right?
[21:46]Oh, they must look, but they're not.
[21:48]Like the child, I always forget her name,
[21:50]but thank you.
[21:52]It's still just an, like she's an orphan who's looking for,
[21:54]it doesn't want to go off with strangers.
[21:56]I mean, that's any child today, right?
[21:58]Yeah.
[21:59]And of course you poke fun at the people
[22:00]who actually were real people in real life
[22:02]with their snootiness and wanting to like, you know,
[22:04]dabble in basically child snatching
[22:06]for their own amusement, right?
[22:08]So you immediately put us there
[22:10]and it feels so real, which is great.
[22:13]When I was researching orphan train,
[22:14]I was in New York Public Library a lot
[22:16]and the Lewis Hind collection of photographs
[22:19]of immigrant children working in factories,
[22:22]you know, the lives of the poor, really interesting stuff.
[22:25]And a friend of mine on Facebook, Margaret Brutechuck,
[22:29]is doing a project where she's working
[22:31]with an expert colorist and they're taking his photographs
[22:35]and it's stunning.
[22:37]I'm going to send you one of them.
[22:38]Oh, good.
[22:39]It looks like my child or me or standing there
[22:42]because she makes it like as if it's today.
[22:46]And this kid standing on the factory floor
[22:48]and you're like, wow, this is not this cracked
[22:52]zevia tone photo.
[22:54]This could be now.
[22:55]Wow. Yeah, it's cool.
[22:56]And so that's sort of what I'm trying to do,
[22:57]I guess, is a written form of that idea of colorizing,
[23:01]you know, making a story come to life
[23:04]that seems as if it's in the dusty pages of an old book.
[23:09]And tell me about all the different movie-ish,
[23:12]whatever adaptations of the various projects
[23:15]you have going on.
[23:16]Well, my three latest novels have all been option two
[23:20]for, does the big screen name exist anymore?
[23:23]For who are these?
[23:24]And the latest one for a series,
[23:27]which is where everything is going these days.
[23:29]And the team that bought the exiles is all female.
[23:34]They're half in Australia,
[23:35]half in Sydney, half in LA.
[23:37]And they're just so fun and wonderful.
[23:39]And I'll be executive producing
[23:41]and hope to be quite involved.
[23:42]The COVID has delayed everything,
[23:44]but they did big little lies
[23:46]and the undoing that we saw recently on HBO
[23:49]and which we watched start to finish from like 8 p.m.
[23:53]to 2 a.m. non-stop.
[23:55]We could not get off the couch.
[23:56]Whole thing, I couldn't believe it.
[23:57]This is like last weekend, by the way.
[23:59]Well, isn't that, don't you live somewhere near
[24:03]where they filmed the house?
[24:05]Yeah, I live in the middle of every scene.
[24:07]I felt like I would eat the movie.
[24:09]And I'm glad I watched it while it was in the city
[24:11]because I was like, you know,
[24:12]she could have been walking down my block
[24:14]as I was watching it.
[24:15]Yes, totally.
[24:16]I've just found it really, it's, I mean, fun and stylish.
[24:21]And anyway, I think all of us got a little boost
[24:25]in the dark days of November watching that.
[24:27]Though I have heard from some of Bree said moms,
[24:29]like nobody would dress like that.
[24:31]So anyway, but all those folks don't have to look.
[24:34]Yeah.
[24:35]Anyway, well, Christina, thank you for doing another,
[24:38]you know, conversation with me that's so fun.
[24:40]I feel like I could just like chitchat with you
[24:42]about your work and why you do the things
[24:45]you do and, you know,
[24:46]well, next time we'll talk about you
[24:48]because I know you are very into life
[24:50]and I want to hear more about it.
[24:52]And I can't wait till we can hopefully get together
[24:54]in person.
[24:55]Hey, too.
[24:56]I really, that'll be great.
[24:57]Thank you so much for having me.
[24:58]I really appreciate it.
[25:00]Thank you.
[25:00]This is so delightful.
[25:02]And I'm thrilled to have gotten to do it twice.
[25:04]Yay.
[25:05]I hope it's entertaining for people.
[25:07]It was entertaining for me.
[25:08]So that's all I care about.
[25:09]That's good.
[25:10]We'll have a great day, a snow day.
[25:13]And I hope to see you again.
[25:15]You too.
[25:16]Bye.
[25:16]Bye.
[25:18]And just to remind her again,
[25:20]please pre-order a copy of my book,
[25:22]Moms Don't Have Time to A Quarantine Anthology
[25:25]and go to my website under the anthology tab
[25:29]for the fundraiser.
[25:30]And I hope you'll buy a ticket and join me
[25:33]for, and I should have mentioned,
[25:35]all proceeds go to COVID-19 research.
[25:37]So please join me for the fundraiser.
[25:40]Thanks so much.
[25:41]Thanks for listening to this episode of Moms Don't Have Time
[25:43]to Read Books.
[25:44]Don't forget to follow me on Instagram,
[25:46]at Zebie Owens and at Moms Don't Have Time to Read Books.
[25:49]Also sign up for my newsletter at Zebie Owens.com
[25:52]and sign up for my virtual book club
[25:54]and meet lots of authors on Zoom every other week.
[25:56]Thanks so much to Steve and Ryan at Textures Sound
[25:59]for the Sound Editing.
[26:00]And thank you to Morning Moon Productions
[26:02]for providing this fantastic intro and now trim music.