Jamie Brenner, BLUSH

[0:54]Zibby Owens: 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 a New 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. Okay. Now back to this amazing podcast. Special announcement. I am teaming up with Katie Couric Media's Wake Up Call and Random House to give away 100 copies of the book Stranger Care by Sarah Santilles. I'm really excited about this. Here's a little about Sarah's book, and we collectively are giving away a 100 copies. After their decision not to have a biological child, Sarah Santilles and her husband, Eric, decide to adopt via the foster care system. Despite knowing that the system's goal is the child's reunification with the birth family, Sarah opens their home to a flurry of social workers who question them, evaluate them, and ultimately prepare them to welcome a child into their lives even if it means most likely having to give the child back. Stranger care is an illuminating read, and Sarah will be on this podcast soon. So if you would like to enter for a chance to win, please go to the link in the episode description from right where you clicked on it and enter your email address first and last name. By doing so you're agreeing to the sweepstakes official rules and agree to receive communications and special offers from Katie Couric's wake up call and moms don't have time to read books. Thank you for doing it and enter to win today. Just go back to the episode description. Thanks again. Jamie Brenner is the author of Blush. She grew up in suburban Philadelphia on a steady diet of Jackie Collins and Judith Krantz novels. She studied literature at the George Washington University before moving to New York City to work at HarperCollins Publishers, then Barnes and Noble and Vogue before returning to books and becoming an author. Her novel, The Forever Summer, is a national bestseller. People Magazine called her last novel, A Delightful Escape Wherever You Are. And now it's time for her new novel, Blush. Jamie divides her time between Provincetown and Philadelphia. Congratulations, Jamie. I brought some rose to celebrate you. Cheers, Sydney. Cheers. I'm sorry. We can't be in person tonight. No, but thank you for celebrating

[3:25]Jamie Brenner: with me virtually. Because we did do an event together once in person two years ago, I feel like I still have the the in person vibe.

[3:35]Zibby Owens: Feel like coming home. I feel like we've done two in person events because we did one in Barnes and Noble in New York. Right? And one in Bookhampton last summer, two summers ago. You have so many books. You're like the most prolific author.

[3:47]Jamie Brenner: No. If I had known that the summer of twenty nineteen was gonna be my last in person for for a while, I would have I would have done even more events. Yeah. The last time I saw you was twenty nineteen summer at Book Hampton.

[3:59]Zibby Owens: Wow. And here we are back with Blush, which is so exciting. I am so I mean, it even just looks amazing. It looks like you can't, like, wait to put it down. It's perfect. And what a great story. And of course, your wonderful writing and you just, like, develop characters so with such a sense of, like, immediacy and familiarity that you feel like you're watching a movie about it. I can, like, see them, the glamorous grandmother with her beautiful dresses and, like, you know, this fancy nightgowns or whatever you call them. Anyway, every character has their own thing, and it's just amazing. So in case there's anyone here who doesn't know what Blush is really about, would you mind telling them about it? Sure. So, Blush, first of all, is the book I've always wanted to write, and it just took me some time to figure out how to put this story together.

[4:47]Jamie Brenner: And it's really an ode to the books that I loved reading while I was growing up. Scruples by Judith Kranz, Chances by Jackie Collins, Lace by Shirley Conran, all those really juicy, scandalous blockbuster bestsellers. I had the idea for setting it at a winery and I was messaging you about this. Was researching That's crazy. Yeah, it's crazy. I was researching a previous book called Drawing Home. I was in Sag Harbor. I was having dinner at a restaurant called Wolfer Kitchen when I realized that all their wines were from their family vineyard, Wolfer Estates. And they had a rose called Summer in a Bottle. I'm like, Okay, if that's not a sign that this is a book waiting to happen, I don't know what it is. So I had the idea, setting a book on a vineyard, and of course I love telling family stories and multigenerational family stories. Lush begins with a woman in her 50s who returns to her parents' winery for summer vacation, as she does every summer. And this year she learns that her parents are in jeopardy of losing it all. At the same time, her college age daughter comes out to meet them because she's dealing with a sort of crisis of intellectual sorts. She has writer's block for her thesis. So, she joins her mother and grandmother, and while she's trying to write her paper in the library, she discovers evidence of her grandmother's old trashy novel book club in which she and her friends were reading these blockbuster novels from the 80s. And at first, Sadie, the granddaughter, has, of course, no interest in lowering herself to read such trash. But she finds herself intrigued. And over the course of the summer, these three women put the book club back together again, the three of them. And what they get from these old novels gives them the wherewithal to fight for their family business. Amazing.

[6:43]Zibby Owens: You even include so many amazing references, especially for people near Book Hampton or on the North Fork or New York City area to what the area was like and what how it's changed over time, what the family, what their journey was to get there from Argentina to California to the North Fork and all the demands on it from the increased popularity of rose to and them not adapting fast enough, like, as a business to the difficulty of grapes. How did you learn so much about the wine business? Like, did you just camp out there at Wolfer? Like, did you pick different vineyards?

[7:20]Jamie Brenner: Tell me about this research. And and by the way, was it amazing? It was. I was sitting there out of vineyard, just drinking and eating cheese and taking notes and thinking this is like really a tough job. But the truth is there was a huge learning curve because I knew very little really about wine when I started this. Fortunately, there are a lot of really great non fiction books about wine. The first one I read was called The Vineyard by a woman named Louisa Thomas Hargrave. And she and her husband started the first North Fork vineyard back in 1971. Like, they were real pioneers. And she chronicles in such detail what that was like. And I really mind her memoir for details to try to understand how my matriarch character would have experienced the transition. I had her as a sort of a high society Manhattan girl who marries someone and is risked off to this defunct potato farm to try to launch a winery because up until that time, the wineries were all in Napa. They were in California. Who would think to do this on the North Fork Of Long Island? But these people did it. As far as the in person research, around the time when I was really putting this together, I was fortunate to meet the CEO of Vidal Cellars, which is another winery on the North Fork. And his winemaker, who's been in the business for thirty years, a man named Rich Olsen Harbich, super talented guy. He taught a class at Murray's Cheese in Manhattan. So I attended that class, and the way Rich spoke about wine made me realize it is a perfect jumping off point for a family story. Because he spoke about something called terroir, which is essentially like taste of a place. And both wine and cheese have that. In other words, no matter, your wine can never escape its place of origin. And as people, neither can we. We can move to New York, we can move to LA, we can reinvent ourselves over and over again, but we can never change where we began. And so I felt that my heroin and the wine and the cheese all had this in common, and it just really bolstered my confidence in trying to tell this complicated story. And I did spend a lot of time at the Dell, walking the fields with the winemaker, sitting in the tasting room and asking the listening to the type of questions people asked. And it was fascinating.

[9:58]Zibby Owens: I mean, genius move to set a book there. I know you do all this research for all your books, and this is fantastic because I still think of you every time I walk by the American Hotel. So by the end of, you know, our relationship, every place I go to, I will be thinking of you and like wanting to send you a Snapchat or whatever. One interesting thing you talked about was what Sadie was reading and the availability of so much more You middle grade, all sorts of fiction for young girls versus what you and I and had Leah had growing up. So whereas you and I, and we've talked about this before, like I was reading Princess Daisy by Judith Krantz and I was reading all my mom's books because I had already blown through all of my own books and there weren't that many of them to choose from. In fact, I have a lot of them like in the closet. I should really pull them out. So what so there's been this sea change in the availability of fiction for young girls, and I wonder actually the impact of that on their sexuality because those books that we were reading were pretty, you know Well Listen. Yeah.

[11:01]Jamie Brenner: And I was in I saw Jackie Collins the documentary about Jackie Collins called Lady Boss. And in it, her daughter says she was not allowed to read her mother's books until she was 18. And I was like 12 reading those books. So that gives you some perspective. Yeah.

[11:17]Zibby Owens: What do you think the change will is doing for kids? Like, do you think that now that there are so many more things available, would people even be drawn to those? Like, what do they lose? What do we what does a generation lose by not reading some of that stuff? Because it also was great. And as your book sort of highlights over and over again, there are strengths to these books, this escapist phenomenon and even, you know, the wiles of women. There's just so much in there.

[11:46]Jamie Brenner: So what do you think? Don't know. I think it's a great question. And I think when you package something specifically for demographic, there is some purity lost to people who just discover something on their own. So, while there are so many brilliantly written You books, I don't know if the experience for a teenager could ever be as raw and as guilty, but heightened as the experience we had discovering these books that were not for us, and yet somehow spoke to us. If someone had put a teenager on the cover of Chances and basically hand sold it to me, I don't know if I would have taken it as much to heart. Because for me, it felt so personal. I found this book and I'm not supposed to read it, but it is speaking to me and therefore like there's something for me in here that's going to take me where I need to go. And I'm thankful that, like you said, we only had a handful of appropriate

[12:47]Zibby Owens: books, and we were left to our own devices to fill in the rest of our reading. I mean, I guess I could have read, like, Dickens and I mean, I could have gone literary,

[12:57]Jamie Brenner: but I was not going there. No. Who is? Who is and frankly, what is Dickens gonna tell us? Like, we need to hear and we needed to hear, as a woman, you can go out and do whatever you want and you can be sexy and you can have relationships on your own terms. Mean, though I read these books in 1985, I was still not getting that message from the people in my real life. When I told my teacher that I wanted to be a novelist when I grew up, she said, well, maybe you can be a teacher. So, you know, Billy Eichorn Orsini was the only one telling me you don't need permission and you don't need validation

[13:42]Zibby Owens: to do what you want to do. You just have to do it. I love that. Yeah, it's true. Sometimes books give us really what's missing in our own lives, whether it's coming into our own or something deeper. We always look to books and not having the other ones available anyway. And you have characters obviously going through all sorts of different things, right? You have the middle aged couple with a sort of a reckoning and you have this whole section. I don't know why I keep going back to all this like sexuality talk. But on, you know, what it was like for them at the beginning and what happens after you've been in a marriage for a very long time. And there aren't always that many books written about, like, what happens to the married couple a lot later in life? Like, how do you keep that? Do you wanna keep that spark alive? And even when Steven wants to sort of help out with the business, what does it do to a woman who's used to being in charge? And is that actually sexy or is it not? Yeah. Well, I

[14:37]Jamie Brenner: really believe that midlife is a fascinating moment in time where you can still look ahead and not necessarily know where you're going to be in twenty years, but you also have all the wealth of experience behind you. But it's challenging and I think about marriage a lot and I've been told, and it seems obviously doesn't need to be said, but marriages work when you change together because no one stays the same. And there's really no way to know when you start out in life if you're going to change in ways that continue to make you compatible. Also, women go through physical changes that men just don't have to deal with. And the changes we go through are physical, they're mental, and they can really force a reckoning. Because when your body is changing and telling you things, you cannot ignore it, even though we have mastered shutting down our mind when we have to. And I really wanted to approach that in some way. And I really, in some drafts, went much more into menopause and what it forces us to work on in a relationship for ourselves. I dialed it back a little bit because I was losing my focus. But I think it's something I still want to continue exploring in future books.

[16:02]Zibby Owens: Interesting. You know, it's so funny. So I do this podcast now called sex talk with Zivvy and Tracy, which is like sort of sex education thing. And Tracy Cox is my cohost. She wrote a book called great you know, hot sex after 50. And she just said to me earlier today, she's like, yeah, the sales of this book aren't as strong as my other ones. Like, maybe women really don't wanna have sex after 50.

[16:22]Jamie Brenner: Well, I know I think they do, but I think women don't wanna be told about you should go on hormones or you should do that. I think one of the most interesting things to me is just how much is mental and how important it is for us to be okay and happy. And when we're okay, like really okay, the rest follows. When we're scrambling in the child rearing years and even in our 40s, we can kind of get by with not taking care of ourselves. And then I think you hit 50 or so, and sort of like the chickens come home to roost and you have to deal with your stuff. And when you do, things are fine. Like, I feel better now than I ever have. But like, you have to work at it. It doesn't just come to you the way it did know, when you're in your twenties.

[17:12]Zibby Owens: Let's talk also about the glamour that you give to Vivian and the her whole aura and how she was on the cover of Town and Country and, like, you know, always shows up in these beautiful outfits and her hair, you know, she's like just in the the what did you have hanging around her neck? Like a leopard or something? Like some brute or something like that? Oh, yeah. Yeah. A jaguar, maybe a jaguar. Right. Anyway, just like she's such a presence. Right? And she's obviously so, you know, disgusted by the fact that people are showing up at the vineyard now wearing like cutoffs and tank tops and all of that. Because there is also not only from the books of that time, but there is there is definitely like a glamour lost from not to say that the 80s were glamorous, but this whole like dynasty time where things were very fancy. Like, I used to play in my mom's closet with all her ball gowns all the time and the beading and like, the shimmers and the furs. I mean, it was like all this stuff and it's not like that today. Like what are my kids going do? Look at my sweatpant collection? There's just something that's not the same. Like what do you think the impact of that is? Or have you noticed that and all of that? Oh, absolutely.

[18:23]Jamie Brenner: I mean, everything was so extra. And, you know, Escada and Nolan Miller and Joan Collins on Dynasty with like the I mean, look, I cannot I feel like a slob if I'm not wearing makeup and lipstick. Why? Because I grew up in the 80s. That's where my aesthetic was formed. Just like the books we read as teenagers stay with us, the visual messaging we get at that age is very formative. But I'm not I mean, my teenage daughters say, I wish we They say we wish we grew up in the 80s and looked like so much fun. People didn't take things so seriously and people didn't judge each other so much. And I really feel lucky that I got to experience growing up in a time where there were these over the top TV shows. The miniseries like Lace, where Phoebe Cates waltzes in her little slip dress and says, Which one of you bitches is my mother? Now we look at it like camp, but at the time, I was just like I mean, it inspired me. It made me want things. And it made me dream. And I think that's what art is supposed to do for us, even bad art. So I feel sad for this generation that some of that's been lost. Today's episode is sponsored by Quince.

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[22:34]Zibby Owens: Yeah. That's true. It's an unfortunate byproduct, I guess, of today. I love also your male characters in the book and how from the second they come on the scene, so to speak, I feel like the whole thing is so visual. There's just like this intrigue and what's gonna happen with this guy and wow, he really went to Stanford and like the sun and the I don't know. It's like, I don't know. It was just you're so great at creating these like question marks. Right? Like what is gonna happen next? Thank you. What are the guy what it's all about these guys and also needing to, you know, look elsewhere if the business really is about to be sold and all of that. So tell me a little bit about how you create your characters and how you win about this book in particular, figuring out who everybody was and how they would all get along and how this whole plot unfolded and got written

[23:26]Jamie Brenner: into this book. It's a roundabout way of asking. So I always start with my female characters or my bedrock and I figure out whose point of view it's going to be. So in this book, tell it from all three. Yeah, it's all three. I tell it from the matriarch Vivian's point of view, her daughter Leah's point of view, and the granddaughter Sadie's point of view. One challenge was, well, I reread Chances and Schuylkill's and Lace before I wrote this book. And it was really eye opening to read it at age 48, 49. And I experienced it very differently than I did as a teenager. So, I'm like, okay, how do I convey these different perspectives? So the three women had to be differentiated. So we have the matriarch who wouldn't be caught dead out of her glam on the vineyard floor. We have the middle generation, who's more like us, who's, know, she has a job and she's grounded. And then we have the 20, who's idealistic, she's super progressive, she's a feminist, she's no nonsense, and in some ways she's not very fun initially. Then I take and each woman has her counterpart. And the men have to be someone to work with in terms of conflict because every relationship has its internal tension. And I found in truth that there's a lot of discrimination against women traditionally in winemaking and that they were not even allowed around wine that was fermenting in the barrel at a time because it was believed women could turn the wine. So it was really not a jump to make Leonard chauvinistic. It was not a jump to have him marginalize his daughter in preference for his son, who is much less savvy and much less interested in even having a hand in the business. But because he's male, it was given to him. And then for Sadie, when you're in your 20s, you don't really know who you are, let alone who's the right partner for you. So, it's always fun to write a 20 grappling with their love life because they really are just clueless. And it's so easy to have them wandering around lost until you

[25:48]Zibby Owens: bring them to an understanding or a moment of connection. So that's kind of where I was with these characters. So funny, it's like you wish you could do that with your own kids, right? While they wander and lost, know that you could just like pull them out and like when you're ready, boom, there you go. I know. Well, I think so much of writing for me is like wish fulfillment.

[26:06]Jamie Brenner: Like the people like, yes, wanting to be able to neatly wrap up my child's problem in one summer or having this mother or this sister, like that is so much of my creative engine.

[26:22]Zibby Owens: Wow. And once again, just like in Drawing Home, you have such a strong older woman protagonist as one of the main characters, which is just and I guess in forever. I mean, mean, you always guess you always do. But anyway, her she's particularly vivid in my mind after our conversation about it. And I think that the way you instill this extra layer of dignity sort of on the elderly, if you will, is just amazing to see in fiction and something that hopefully people will take that sort of the reverence that you show and sort of the multidimensionality, if you will, of of the characters that they're not just forgotten older women. Right? That they actually have the most interesting stories of all. Absolutely.

[27:06]Jamie Brenner: I mean, I think it's a real shame that our culture doesn't exalt our older generation because know, think of how much more you know now than you did twenty years ago. And then imagine like what a richer person you're going to be twenty years from now. And, you know, my grandmother was the most nurturing, interesting, supportive person I ever knew. And I miss her every day. And I think, like I said, it's very much bringing her back in these characters. Fortunately, I think with social media and Instagram, I'm having so much fun looking at these amazing older women with their Silver Fox Instagrams. I really love looking at Linda Roden and the way she dresses and carries herself, like Iris Appel, being in these advertisements in her nineties. Like, I think we're entering a really interesting time for older women and I'm I'm thrilled.

[28:16]Zibby Owens: Yeah. So, but when you were doing the plotting of this whole book, did you have it all outlined out? Like, did you how long did was the thinking about it versus the actual putting words on the page part of it? Like, when you were writing it, like, how much and how much time do you spend making the sentences sort of nice and pretty versus Not enough. Putting it all

[28:37]Jamie Brenner: I don't think I spend enough time making them pretty, but I spend a lot of time outlining and I always think, Oh my God, I totally have this down. And then I hand in a first draft to my agent, Adam Cromie, and he tells me, like, it's basically not working. And I'm always like, What? So then I go and I rewrite, like I fix it. This book was really challenging because I was done, except I was missing the penultimate scene. I was missing that thing that was going to bring everyone together, that thing that was going to give everyone their final moment of realization. And I said to him, I just don't see it. And we sat down and we went through my research and he was like, This is what you should be using in that scene. This is where that belongs. This was literally three weeks before everything shut down. And that was the last piece of the puzzle of the book. So there's always something in a book that isn't clicking and that makes me panic and that I have to talk to someone about, talk to my agent about, because he's always my first reader. And then I don't, you know, the sentences, you know, I'm not like a literary writer, you know? Still though, you have to to, focus on the sentences or it's not Yeah. The thing is, I really want people to be able to see what I'm seeing. I feel like if I've done that, if you can see Vivian, if you can smell the wine in the barrel room and if you can see the flowers, then I feel like I've done my job. Yes.

[30:15]Zibby Owens: Yeah. I think you're selling yourself a little short. That's okay. Thank you. So what are you working on now? Now, okay. So,

[30:23]Jamie Brenner: I have a book coming out next summer, which is called Gilt, G I L T, which is a similar story of a family dynasty. This time it's a jewelry company, kind of like Tiffany. A jewelry family that sort of became synonymous with engagements and the diamond engagement ring. And of course, none of the women in the family have had any luck in love, ironically. And it's what happens when the sort of cast out heir to this jewelry dynasty comes back to reclaim what's hers. That sounds good. Yeah. It was a lot of fun. Yeah. So this one, you got to just go try on diamonds all day. The research was definitely dangerous.

[31:02]Zibby Owens: Like Your next book should be about spas.

[31:05]Jamie Brenner: You should I mean, I probably I probably should write one that's like set in a gym so I can finally like exercise

[31:10]Zibby Owens: and stop just eating and buying jewelry. That's Okay. Make it gym and spa. It could be like spa. Yeah. Women spa so you can feel a little more virtuous part of the time. Right. Actually, that would be really interesting, sort of especially over the years with the changing of all the fitness trends, and you can have someone sort of stuck back in those ways and fasting. Okay, I'm just gonna, you know,

[31:30]Jamie Brenner: I'm sure you're I'm sure you have plenty of others. So you must be writing the book after that then now, right? I just started putting thoughts down for the book after that, but I'm a little I used to be way, way ahead of the curve and now I'm sort of just on pace. Like I just Now, hand the next yeah, basically I lost all discipline during the pandemic.

[31:54]Zibby Owens: Did you end up writing at all during the pandemic? Like how was that for you? Yeah, I wrote

[31:59]Jamie Brenner: the book for next year. I wrote the whole thing. Oh my gosh. I was in Provincetown for six months, and it's the first time I wrote a book in the place where I've been setting the book. Because I've written other books. My next book's set back in Provincetown, and I've already written a book there. This time I was really, that was my home for six, seven months, which actually made it harder. I always thought, oh, if I could live in Provincetown, I'll write even better. But oddly enough, visiting a place and then going somewhere else and writing the book gives you some distance and it gives you the ability to translate it. And I found while I was living there, I was not conveying it as clearly on the page. Oh, that's interesting. Yeah. It was very interesting.

[32:43]Zibby Owens: Well, somebody is asking this one question, and we don't have to go full on to question and answer, but because this has been here a while. So somebody is asking that you how you mentioned Judith Krantz and Jackie Collins and that you had also mentioned Norma Klein. And so she wants to know, Carolyn, do you keep these authors and others in mind when conceptualizing or writing your books? And she also wants to know, what do you hope that readers are inspired by in your book? Wow. Okay. Well, Norma Klein, first of all, was one of my favorite writers, and I feel like she doesn't get enough attention.

[33:13]Jamie Brenner: She was a contemporary of Judy Blum. She died at age 50 after writing maybe fifteen, twenty groundbreaking novels. She was censored. I mean, she was as raw and honest as you get, And I wish so much she'd had more time to write more books. Like Mom, the Wolfman, and Me, I could go on and on. So, don't model my books after these writers I admire because, you know, I can't write like them, you know? And if I tried, it would just trip me up. I could only pay like tribute to them, you know, in the best way I can. And as far as what I would like my readers to take away from my book, I think the most important thing, and I think I've explored this in many of my books, is it's never too late. You know, like life is full of second and third acts if you have the courage to reach out and create them. And I really believe that. And that's something I want to keep kind of like hammering home as write future books, because I don't think we see it or hear it enough. I certainly didn't see it enough growing up. I dreaded getting older. I thought 50 was the end. And now I feel like it's literally just the beginning. Judith Kranz didn't publish Scruples until she was 50. So, I'm super into this time, and I want to keep you know, I mean, I love younger readers too. Of course, like twenties is great, thirties is great. But there is still something to be said for taking everything you've learned and all of your relationships and all that, like foundation and like

[34:48]Zibby Owens: doing something. Love it. So let's talk about the cover too, because the cover is so, as I said at the very beginning, like so enticing enticing and beautiful and visually appealing and just what it was just awesome. Tell me about that. Did did you have input? Was that

[35:02]Jamie Brenner: how did that come to be? I love this cover so much. And there was an earlier cover that wasn't quite there. And luckily, my team at Putnam were so hardworking and just there's such great communication. And I was saying to my publisher, Sally Kim, like, I'm just not feeling it. Like, I'm so sorry. And she said, Okay, I have an idea. Let me put some thoughts out there. And then they came back with this. And I just, when I opened, there's this moment where they send you the cover and it's downloading and you have to wait. And it's like the longest thirty seconds and it opened and I was just like, that is perfection. And I really love it. I'm so grateful to the thought and care that went into it. Wow. That gave me goosebumps.

[35:49]Zibby Owens: And how did you end up and I don't know if you don't want to discuss, we don't have to. But how did you end up at Putnam versus Little Brown with your other books? So, you know, I did four

[35:58]Jamie Brenner: like summery beach books with Little Brown and it was great. And I love those books. I just felt like I wanted to keep trying something a little bit different. And it just gave me sort of a new angle on storytelling to be with a refreshed team. Sometimes it's just good artistically to have a change. And when you're with the same people, it's hard for them to see you through a different lens if you want to just do a slight left turn. So, think overall it was just what I needed to keep progressing and growing with my storytelling. Interesting.

[36:39]Zibby Owens: I like it. Well, somebody wanted to yeah. What inspired the shift in this? Why did you write this now? I guess is a better way of saying not a better sorry to Stacy Ann. But I mean, what is like, why did you go in this slightly different direction now? I know you said this is the book you always wanted to write. But what in your mind, like, how did it differ? How did you see it as like, oh, no, this is like a totally different type? Like, what was the main point of differentiation and what inspired that piece of it?

[37:11]Jamie Brenner: So my previous four novels were very much driven by a sense of place. And I set each of them in different beach towns, Provincetown, Jersey Shore, Sag Harbor. And the place, as you mentioned, the American Hotel, I would just be at a place and it would grab me, and I'd have to set a story there. This time, I really you know, the idea of paying homage to these old novels is what got me going. And I was looking for a way to match it to a setting. And just the beaches weren't clicking for me. So when I thought of the vineyard, when I had the idea, the vineyard, the wine, the books, it just came together in a way that the story made sense. And as I mentioned, I wanted to tell this book before. I just didn't have all the pieces in place. So I didn't say, Oh, I don't want to set this book at a beach. It's just that the setting and the story have to work together for the book to really click. And once I had these two pieces, the direction showed me, you know, it sort of all came together and I just followed it.

[38:22]Zibby Owens: Got it. So it was more grabbing on to the inspiration as it hit versus like, now is the time in my life that I'd like to try this.

[38:30]Jamie Brenner: Yeah, it was like, you know, something had been booing and it just came together. And this was how it came together. Got it. I see Patty popping up in the corner here.

[38:40]Zibby Owens: All right, I think we're winding down. I know you've got another event coming up. Good luck. Congratulations

[38:46]Jamie Brenner: on pub day. Thank you, Thank Zibby. Thank you so

[38:50]Zibby Owens: you. Thank you everyone. Bye bye.