Deborah Goodrich Royce, RUBY FALLS

[1:51]Zibby Owens: Hi. This is Zippy Owens, and you're listening to the award winning podcast, moms don't have time to read books. I'm also the host of moms don't have time to lose weight, and I'm the editor of the anthology, which you should run out and buy, called Moms Don't Have Time to: A Quarantine Anthology. All proceeds of that book go to COVID nineteen Vaccine Research. And I'm the editor in chief of Moms Don't Have Time to Write, Publication on Medium, and we're accepting submissions, so please send your personal essays there. And if all that isn't enough, you can follow me on Instagram at Zibby Owens, and my website is zibbyowens.com.

[2:25]Deborah Goodrich Royce: Okay, now back to this amazing podcast. Deborah Goodrich Royce is the author of Ruby Falls, a novel. Her first novel, Finding Mrs. Ford, debuted in 2019 to rave reviews. She divides her time between the Northeast and Florida, where she writes, reads, watches lots of movies, and spends time with her family. She serves on the governing and advisory boards of the Avon Theatre, the American Film Institute, New York Botanical Garden, the Greenwich International Film Festival, the Greenwich Historical Society, the Preservation Foundation of Palm Beach, the Preservation Society of Newport, and the Prasad Project. She and her husband have restored more buildings than she can count, including the Ocean House Hotel and the Deer Mountain Inn. And by the way, Deborah is the owner of the Ocean House and that is why we are having our retreat there for moms don't have time to travel in October. So go to zibbyowens.com and go to my travel part and you will see all about it. And Deborah is lovingly co hosting, which I'm so excited about. More about her. Deborah holds a BA in French and Italian from Lake Erie College and an honorary doctorate from the same institution. In an earlier life she was an actress in film and television and a story editor at Miramax Films. Ruby Falls is her second psychological thriller and she owes a debt of gratitude for its inspiration to Daphne DuMaurier and Alfred Hitchcock. Welcome, Deborah. Thank you so much for coming on Moms Don't Have Time to Read Books. It's so exciting to have you on. Thank you. I'm happy to be here. I just finished Ruby Falls, which is so good. Lots of twists and turns. I didn't know what was going to happen next. Didn't see a lot of it coming. It was really great and beautifully written. And I read Finding Mrs. Ford, which was about Rhode Island and Watch Hill and the Ocean House as I was in the Ocean House, which was the coolest thing. I was like, oh, I've never read a book like where I'm actually in the exact spot where it takes place. So that was really cool. So anyway, congratulations on both of your book. Thank you. Well, that's a fun place to start when you talk about place and book. It's one of my favorite things in fiction, if I recognize places, so I tend to prefer real places inserted in fiction. Yeah, because that was, I actually flipped to the front and I was like, is this, this is a novel, right? Because, but then I realized it was a fictitious house, right? Or is it one of the houses next door? Because you then you referenced the Ocean House in the book. It's actually our house, it's where we live. So, my husband, who is not an architect, he's in the financial world, but he has this great passion for beautiful buildings and history and things like that. He and his very eccentric builder friends spent six years building that house. And when I met him over twenty years ago, and I walked into that house, I thought, I would love to see the ghost in Mrs. Muir reset in this house. So, Finding Mrs. Ford is not, you know, a rewrite of the ghost in Mrs. Muir, but it has threads of, I mean, you know at the beginning that her husband is dead. And it isn't the ghost of Mrs. Muir, but his presence is felt in the house. And I do think that there are feelings in places. So, I wanted to write that house in that place, and people photograph, I don't know if you went around that area of Watch Hill, we have a Port Cochere with this beautiful arch that you drive under. You might not have gone in that way. You go through a gatehouse to get to the main house, and people are always photographing it and putting it on social media. That's the house of missus Smith. Oh my gosh. Well, great. I was right there, and maybe I didn't I'll have to well, maybe I'll go back. I'm telling you, I might just head out there this weekend. I'm, like, obsessed with the hotel now. Well, it definitely you described the whole neighborhood really well too and you just are really, really good at creating worlds. Even if I hadn't been living there, it would have made me feel as if I were, which is why I feel like I was sitting in bed that night being like, it's like I'm being watched and here I am in a pub. Well, let's talk about Ruby Falls for a minute. So would you tell listeners what Ruby Falls is about? And also what inspired you to write it? Ruby Falls, in many ways, I would call it a Gothic novel, but my publisher at a certain point said, why are you using that word? Don't use that word. Because nowadays people think of vampires. It's not Gothic in the vampire sense. It's Gothic like the books you read when you were a teenage girl, it is like Jane Eyre or Rebecca or the woman in white, it's really an homage to that genre, where you have something of a damsel in distress, you have a male figure who may be benign, may be malevolent, you don't really know. And you spend the book trying to sort out what's what. So, Ruby Falls takes off from there. It goes to, I think, a spookier and stranger place. So, I want to tell you how this book started. I was sitting in this room. This is a conservatory where I write. It's a kind of a garden room. And the first two chapters of the book downloaded into my little brain one day several years ago, and I thought, what? That's not the book I was intending to write. The whole beginning where this child is abandoned in a cave in Tennessee, scared me witless. And yes, I was in Ruby Falls Cave when I was a child, my family did not leave me there. I figured. Completely fictionalized, but I thought it was such a scary place to start a book. And then the second chapter, you go to a girl, now a young woman, and she's an actress. She's been written out of her television show, which is an American soap opera, almost a disappeared genre twenty years later. And she's been fired, and you don't know why, and something's not quite right, ends up in Europe, marries the mysterious stranger, and they're about to go in the Catacombs Of Rome when she has a big attack of claustrophobia and thinks, maybe I should tell him about this thing that happened to me as a child, but she decides not to. So, she begins this marriage to this handsome stranger with a secret. And so that's what kind of came to me in a flash. Then I spent a couple of years trying to figure out a book out of it. But I loved the premise, because in Rebecca, the secret about her is her name, you never know her name. And that is such an interesting conceit to use in a book. And I play with names because her name is Eleanor Ruby Russell. She uses Ruby as a child, and then just Eleanor as a young actress. So, all of those things came into the mix. Wow. And you had so many other hilarious and interesting characters too. I mean, I feel like this would be so much fun to cast if I were like a film casting director. Right? You have Howard, the agent who's like, you know, the father figure and then Dottie, the crazy lady across the way and Mindy, the neighbor who may or may not be tempting her husband and you know, the film I mean, it's like such an eccentric cast, right? Well, and everybody's somebody. So, I was an actress back in the olden days, I was on a soap opera called All My Children. And then I went out to LA to have more of a film career. And my agent was this extraordinary man, Howard Goldberg. He died in the early 90s, one of the, not the earliest, but in people who died of HIV AIDS. He was really an incredible man. I did not have the intimate relationship with him that Eleanor has with her, Howard. But that character is really a little bit of an homage to that special person. And Dottie, the crazy cat lady, I did live in the Hollywood Hills, I did live across the street, her name was Kathy. And she had, what I remember, so my children, mean, you're in the mom stage, my children, I had one little baby, and Kathy, the cat lady lived across the street, and she had dozens of cats, and she invited us over for dinner. And I had a pause, I thought, I don't know if I can carry this brand new baby into that house. I didn't have a nanny or anything yet, but we did go over there. She was a very sweet lady. So I guess she rattled around in my head and etcetera, etcetera. Wow. I know. I felt like the cat scene, there was a moment where I was like, I I just can't look at a cat right now. Like, I wasn't sure what was gonna happen with the cat. And anyway, that was yeah. That was and then, of course, not knowing what reality really even is in the book. Right? And you're so sort of unmoored because what you think is true. Is it true? Is it not true? Like, do we believe her? Or do we not believe Ruby? What's with the dad? What happened? Like, all these questions, it makes you keep reading and trying to dig deeper and deeper into it. So when you've after you figured out what to do to make this into a book, what did you do then? Did you, like, plot out the whole thing? Or did you kind of figure it out as you went? Like, what was that part of the process like for you? So, I do two things. I do plot out somewhat, but I don't do a chart. Well, I do a couple of things. I keep a calendar, like you can go online and download, you know, if you're writing a chapter from July 1979, or August 1987, or whatever you're picking, you can download those calendars. So, I make my notes on the calendars, make my notes just on a word document that's separate. My first book is very non linear, so those calendars were extremely important, because I go back and forth in time twice. Ruby falls, that doesn't happen so much. But I think it's very important to have a fix of what's happening on a particular day, so you don't mess it up. Then from there, I write. And that becomes the point when the characters start to change the story, or things are added. Like Ruby, as you know, she's obsessed with what happened to her father after he abandoned her. And she's a bit of a, what we would call now a conspiracy theorist. And she goes down the rabbit hole of so many things that were going on at the time. She's abandoned in the 1960s. And she thinks about the Kennedy assassination and Jack Ruby, and is that why she was named that? And this wacko thing called the Dixie Mafia, which is real, I read two books on it. She looks at Cuba and Russia and all this stuff. And the book was just option for either a film or a TV series. And the producer was saying, what would you feel if this became now, if it were contemporary? Tricky things taking a story like that and making it now, because a conspiracy theorist now, wow, with the internet can go very far down different rabbit holes that I distracting. But it'll be interesting to see if that's what they choose to do, what options they would come up with. Also, lack of a cell phone is a very important device to keep that kind of thriller moving forward when you don't have that option of, you know, calling the police or 911, whatever. That's true. Well, that's exciting that it'll be I mean, you could see how it's gonna play out. I can't wait to watch it as well. That's exciting. Wow. And what about even all the international elements of this book? Like, tell me how you decided on, you know, there's so many European influences. Like, I feel like this is a a jaunt across the globe. Right? I've, you know, I can start in perhaps Italy or I can go to, you know, Zurich or, you know, all these places. Tell me about having that be an influence too because it's very LA centered, and I love that it's like the Chateau Marmont beginning and all that. But then you have these other influences. So anyway, just tell me about sort of the landscape of it. Well, so the first two chapters just came to me. So the thing in Italy just came to me. I have no idea where it came from. I have been to Rome, I have been to the Catacombs, I am a little claustrophobic. So that was that. And then in, so this idea of identity, who are people? Who do they tell you they are? Who are they really? What do they reveal? What do they conceal? That's a puzzle that is endlessly fascinating to me. So, this part of Ruby, Eleanor, who is she? And what is she really showing us the reader? The international element became interesting, also the husband. I loved the idea. So, he's Anglo Chinese, and he's handsome, and he's exotic to her. He has this British accent, and I'm picturing like Henry Golding in Crazy Rich Asians, that I see him as that character. So, to me, he typified that remove, that distance, that exoticism, that there's something about him that she doesn't fully understand. She's a girl from the Midwest with Southern roots, and she picks this man who embodies something glamorous and different. So, would say that is why the whole European connection. I love when Howard is laughs out loud when she's like, Oh, no, he's from the aristocracy and like British royalty and count, you know, Montague or whatever. He's like, Don't you see how much of a joke this is? She's like, What? Yeah. Exactly. Very funny. Well, let's go back to your earlier career if you don't mind. I love how you have to say a soap opera called All My Children. Like, I grew up I'm in my forties. Like, that was on in my house a lot. My to be honest, my housekeeper, like, watched it every single afternoon and, like, general Hospital was on every day when I got home from school. And I don't know. What has happened with soap opera genre? I'm not even sure. But tell me about going from being an actress to being a writer and how your earlier experiences have influenced your writing. So, was an interesting journey. So, my college major was French and Italian literature and history, but I was a dance minor. And I went to a miniscule Midwestern college. And because it was so small, I acted in plays, so I could kind of go in and out of the theater department without being a theater major. And the summer before my senior year, and I'm not kidding, this sounds so hokey, a movie came to town. A United Artist picture with Frank Langella and Tom Hulse called Those Lips, Those Eyes, which sounds maybe a little salacious. It wasn't, it was about Summer Stock Theatre a hundred years ago, And Those Lips, Those Eyes is a piece of a lyric from an old song. So, I was cast as a background dancer in this movie, which gave me probably the false impression that it was very easy to be cast as a dancer in New York City. So, the choreographer of the film was the in house choreographer for the Goodspeed Opera House in East Tatham, Connecticut, which was, I mean, Annie started there, A Chorus Line, all of these, it's a musical theater in Connecticut that still exists. I didn't know what it was. I was from Warren, Michigan. I thought, that sounds kind of fancy. And he was friendly, shall we say. And he kept saying, you should come to New York and audition for me. So, as a good Midwesterner, I was extraordinarily literal. So, I thought when he said, come to New York and audition for me, he meant come to New York and audition for me. Today's episode is sponsored by Quince. 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[21:25]Deborah Goodrich Royce: So I finished college. I was back in Michigan. I didn't have a concrete plan. I had this vague amorphous idea that I could maybe go to Georgetown for, you know, foreign service, which sounded kind of exotic. I don't even know if I knew what it was. I finished college early, it was February. I stopped at a bookstore, I picked up a copy of Variety, the theatrical publication, and I opened it in the back it said he, his name was Dan Sarega, was casting the summer season of the Goodspeed Opera House at the Minskoff Theater in New York City. And I thought, well, I'll just call him because he told me. I'm making myself sound almost half witted, I wasn't really so stupid, but I was very naive. So, I called the Minskoff Theater, I told the man who answered, Hi, this is Deborah Goodrich. I'm calling Dan Serrata. He's like, he's in auditions right now. I said, well, will you just tell him I'm on the phone? So finally, twenty minutes later, he comes to the phone and he is, as you can imagine, very cool. He's like, yes. I said, hi, you know, you said I should come and audition for you. He's like, ah, yeah, I can't guarantee you anything. So, I moved to New York the next day, which sounds like a big deal. I was 20 years old, I packed two suitcases, and I stayed with the widow of the head of our theater department from my college. He had died young, she was in New York, she lived at 95th And Riverside. I stayed with her, I auditioned at the Minskoff Theater, I was not cast in this Goodspeed Opera House summer season. But I started up and down Broadway at the time, there were dance studios everywhere, up stairs, downstairs. So, I took class every day, I auditioned for everything. I got close to the finish of everything. I auditioned for Agnes de Mille herself, and I got so close to everything. But after a year, I realized I wasn't good enough. So, I thought I will give acting a try before I go to Georgetown. Georgetown didn't know anything about me, by the way, this was all in my mind. And then it was a very short passage of one year from, you know, putting my hat in the ring as an actor, getting an agent, getting a ton of commercials. I actually danced in a couple commercials, a Coca Cola and bacon flavored Cheetos, which was a failed product. It was terrible, but that was the era of fame. So, we were dancing up and down the corridors of high schools in New York City. And after a year, I got all my children, which I thought I would do forever, which I didn't. I was written out after a year, I played Susan Lucci's sister, she had this very crazy sister, Silver, which was based on All About Eve, the Betty Davis and Baxter movie. Did that, then I flew out to LA to do a project with Christopher Lloyd, if you remember him, Back to the Future, really worked steadily for a decade, and got married, had two children, and moved to Paris with my first husband who grew up there. And that was oddly the beginning of my transition to writing. Because I was hired by Studio Canal plus which is a French film studio, they were looking for native English speaking readers. A reader is the lowest level, you know, piecework, freelance position at any studio, but studios keep a stable of readers on, you're the person who reads everything that comes in the door, you read it, you write a synopsis, and you write a page of notes. And in the film business, you always write comps, you know, this is a cross between Gone with the Wind and The Wizard of Oz, or whatever you say, what is this? What does it compare to? So, I did that there. Then my first husband was hired by Julia Roberts to run her production company, she had a deal at Disney, And I was hired by Harvey Weinstein to be the story editor at Miramax in New York. So, we moved back to New York. And that's what we did from where we were in the 90s. And as that was all becoming a bit much, my children were very small, MiraMax was a wonderful place, but very intense. I mean, this was the heyday of MiraMax. And so, for me, MiraMax was like my writing school, because I got to edit the work of the finest writers really in all areas of writing at that time. And then we divorced, I remarried, moved to Connecticut and kept writing, writing, writing on my own kind of secretly. And to tie this back to moms don't have time to read, write, whatever. I was one of those people whose I did a lot while my children were young, I worked at Miramax, you know, did all that stuff, all the restoration projects, my husband and I now do. But the writing, that deep cone of silence and absorption required for writing, I really didn't get serious about it until the youngest child left the house. Then I felt like I got the real estate in my brain back, fully back, and I could shut up the world and write. So, that's a long story. Was great story. There should be a movie of your life. You should sell your life rights and try that next. That's very funny. Well Think about it. Are you thinking about it? No, no, I'm not. But I do put bits and pieces in books, in fiction. I do think fiction is a great vehicle for truth. I think it's a way of embedding kind of a distilled version truth. Of truth into what you're saying. And I think that's why we like it so much. I think we get caught up in a good story. But I also think we see something, and we say, Oh, yes, that, I felt that, I recognize that. That's the thing. Wow. So, at Miramax, when you got divorced, is that when you left Miramax? No, I left Miramax before that. The volume was intense. And you, I don't know how you do what you do, I'd love to hear But the week I read was often 12 scripts and a novel, and I would often have to synopsize that for my immediate bosses. So, was pretty intense. And the commute was crazy. We lived at 77th And Lexington, and Miramax was in Tribeca. Hardest single Well, leaving Brooklyn out of it, hardest Manhattan commute, shall we say, but I loved it. I mean, it was a thrilling place, and I have a great feeling of gratitude for my years there, because I learned so much, and it was a huge opportunity. Thank you to my parents that I went to college, and I didn't go straight into acting, because I was able, so that's one of the things I feel. I feel a woman's life can be very episodic, to use a television term, you know, your childhood, your college years, your young career years, etc, etc. And I think we're used to that as women, and we are nimble with that, we're very nimble. I think men are increasingly having lives like that. And they are less adept at that kind of what am I going to do now moment that that door has closed, that chapter has ended, and how do I reinvent myself? And I think we're awfully good at it as women. I agree. And it's a necessary You have to, right? Your roles are shifting so often, even with this, I mean, this whole childbirth piece thrown in, even women who don't have kids, there's just so much required to navigate. You have to. I mean, it's just, it's not an option. Right. Right. And I don't think, and I think having it as an option, you know, men historically in the wealthy Western world have had jobs for great lengths of time, whether they were at the corner office or they were on the factory line, there was some stability expected. And I don't think that's the case anymore for them either. So, they should take a page out of our book. Well, I have to say also, and I don't know if I emailed this to you or not, but when I was sort of researching, I realized you were in Just One of the Guys, which was like one of my favorite movies growing up. My brother and I watched that one all the time. Yeah, so I'm in touch with Joyce Heiser. She's great. She's fabulous. She does a non for profit in South Central LA called the Ubuntu Foundation, and she works with children. So, she's wonderful. I'm in touch with Tony Hudson. She's writing and acting. Who else? Clayton Rohner a little bit. I did my first two movies with Clayton Rohner, just one of the guys in April Fool's Day. Love interest in both movies. And we never dated, we never had anything romantic. And I thought, this is really weird. Are we just gonna do movies together forever? Didn't turn off that way. So, the writing front, are you working on a new project now? I am. So, my mother's best friend was murdered savagely when my mother and this girl were 12 years old in Pittsburgh in 1948. And it is an unsolved crime, and it has had a big effect on my mother's life. And I've always been interested in this concept of an act of violence, and the ripple effects it has on people who were not part of that act of violence. If you think of Mystic River by Dennis Lehane, the book, and then the movie that was made with Tim Robbins, it very much examines that premise, something happens to a child, and then it plays out the rest of his life. So, I've thought about this incident, and I've been able to research it more. And a year ago, when the pandemic started, and I happened to be on book tour in Florida, and ended up staying in Florida when everything was canceled, it is turning into a complicated book with two sections. There's a fictionalized version of a writer who's researching the murder of her mother's best friend, Unsolved Crime, and she's writing almost a film noir kind of story of a woman in Palm Beach, who's about 40, who's married to an Argentine. I just love those international men. I know, guess so. Married to an Argentine, and the pandemic kicks off and he disappears. And he gets the last plane to Buenos Aires with the two children, and she can't follow him. So, the pandemic offers a lot of constraints that don't exist. Normally, offers the face mask, which is a very good one. It offers the closing of air travel. So, he disappears, and you start following this writer who's, I don't even know if it works, it might be terrible. The writer is going off in these tangents about this idea of violent crimes, and people who become obsessed with violent crimes, like Dominic Dung, completely obsessed with violent crime after the murder of his daughter. And the one in California, the Golden State Killer, Michelle McNamara, who was obsessed with violent crime after something happened in her childhood. So the writer is off on these tangents, but she's also writing this story, and you don't quite know how it's going to thread together, but it does. That sounds great. So I have a draft of that now, and it's called Reef Road for now. Because Reef Road is a street in Palm Beach. I like that title right now, because it sounds a little bit like Cape Fear or Lookout Mountain, spooky place name. Oh, that's great. That sounds amazing. Do you have any advice for aspiring authors? I do. One, I would always keep your hope alive, because I'm a woman of a certain age, let's be honest. And I think there's a false belief that we have to do everything when we're young. And we don't. We can keep having those sequences in our life. The other thing I would say is find your time and your pattern to make it work. Like there are people who are so dogmatic, you know, you have to write in the morning and it has to be the same time every day. For years, couldn't do that. In the pandemic, I've been able to do it. I have a busy life, I sit on boards, we're doing restoration. So, what I did with the trusty iPhone is I would block out three to five hour blocks every day, sometime. And when it became sacred, I would go into the room without my phone and just do it. So, your schedule that works for you. Don't be browbeaten by people who say you have to do this, you have to do that. And also just know that there's, if you're lucky, there can be more time than you think, I know there isn't always for everyone. But you kind of have to find that balance of living your life as though there isn't, but also as though there is. So, you don't fall into, you know, the sloughs of despawn, because you didn't do everything in a single day, which is a young mom thing, that despair at the end of the day, when all the things you did wrong, because you will. I had one of those days yesterday. Wow. Well, thank you so much. This has been great. Thank you for the enjoyment of Ruby Falls, which was fantastic. And I can't wait to watch that show or movie after and keep in touch. This was fantastic. So thank you. Thank you. The pleasure was mine. Have a great day. Bye. Bye. Thanks for listening to this episode of Moms Don't Have Time to Read Books. Don't forget to follow me on Instagram at Zibby Owens and at moms don't have time to read books. Also, sign up for my newsletter at zibbyowens.com and sign up for my virtual book club and meet lots of authors on Zoom every other week. Thanks so much to Steve and Ryan at Texture Sound for the sound editing, and thank you to Morning Moon Productions for providing this fantastic intro and outro music.