Marie Benedict and Victoria Christopher Murray, THE PERSONAL LIBRARIAN

[1:50]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. Marie Benedict and Victoria Christopher Murray are the coauthors of The Personal Librarian. Marie Benedict is a lawyer with more than ten years experience as a litigator. A graduate of Boston College and the Boston University School of Law, she is the New York Times and USA Today bestselling author of The Only Woman in the Room, The Mystery of Mrs. Christie, Carnegie's Maid, The Other Einstein, and Lady Clementine. All have been translated into multiple languages. She currently lives in Pittsburgh with her family. Victoria Christopher Murray is an acclaimed author with more than 1,000,000 books in print. She has written more than 20 novels including Stand Your Ground, an NAACP Image Award winner for outstanding fiction, and a library journal best book of the year. She holds an MBA from the NYU Stern School of Business. And by the way, the personal librarian was the Good Morning America book pick. I hope you enjoy it. Hi. Hi. How are you guys?

[3:23]Victoria Christopher Murray: We're really good and surprised that we're both here at the same time. I'm shocked.

[3:28]Marie Benedict: Was amazing. We

[3:31]Zibby Owens: have a whole series of tech failures in our past year. I'm sure everybody can relate to that. Hold on. I'm just turning the volume up because I can barely hear you. Okay. Let's try that. Yes. Okay. Much better. Now you're blasting all over my room here. My dog is, like, running away. Anyway.

[3:47]Marie Benedict: Thank you so much for having them. I think you probably know I've been following you for a while, and I love what you're doing with the book community. It's just gosh. It's so amazing, and I feel like you connected so many readers and so many writers together during the pandemic, especially. We're super grateful for you. Yes, definitely.

[4:07]Zibby Owens: Thank you. That makes me feel really good. Thank you. Thank you. Well, that's awesome. Well, you've also connected lots of readers over this particular book. By the way, obviously each other. I mean, this was like a love letter. I was like, I feel like I'm on a spa vacation with two best friends at this point. I love going back and forth between the two of you. Tell me about this relationship that you two have developed and why you're like sisters now.

[4:34]Marie Benedict: Do you want me to kick it off? Yes. You kick it off. So the book kind of all began a long time ago when I was still a New York City lawyer, not so happy with my big firm practice, and I would sneak off. I lived in New York City. I would sneak off to places like the Morgan Library. And one day, a docent there happened to mention this fabulous Belle de Costa Greene who helped was really the right hand person to the famous JP Morgan who built the library for people who haven't been there. It's holds really Gorgeous. Collection of priceless manuscripts. And she kind of made my way onto my list as a woman I wanted to write about when I turned from lawyering to writing. And the more I learned about her and the more I learned about her unbelievable heritage as the daughter of the famous activist Richard T. Greener, first black graduate of Harvard, and gosh, had a mother with such a rich heritage of her own as part of this long tradition to commune free community of color in Washington DC, I knew I wanted and needed to have a black woman write the story with me, that Bell deserved it. I couldn't possibly imagine what it would be like to be a black woman then or now. And right around that time, I happened to read Victoria's incredible novel, Stand Your Ground, which is such a fresh, really sympathetic, beautiful look at a really terrible problem of the shooting of young black men in our country. And it looked at the perspective from the women, which, of course, is what I do in my books, debate historical women. So I reached out through, her agent about her interest possibly in working with me.

[6:16]Victoria Christopher Murray: And so I'll take over from here because when I got the treatment, my agent told me that she wanted me to do a collaboration or consider a collaboration. And I had done six books with another author, Ashanda Tate Billingsley, so I was used to that. So I said, sure, I'll look at this. So the first thing I did was Google. I didn't look at the treatment at all. I Googled Marie Benedict and I was very impressed. She, but she wrote historical fiction about women lost in the folds of history. I just couldn't understand what it had to do with me, this contemporary writer. And I called my agent back and I said, so Marie Benedict, like has she seen me? You know, has she seen a picture of me? Is she looking for me or another Victoria Christopher Murray? And my agent told me to go ahead and read it. And then it still took me about two months because the first page was just about JP Morgan and I just couldn't connect with them. I just didn't connect. But finally, when my agent said, look, you're not that busy. Can you just read two pages? Rachanda Tate Billingsley and I sat down and we read those two pages and I couldn't get on the phone fast enough to get to Marie after that. And our agents connected us through a phone call. And, you know, people always say these cliches about, you know, instant, it was instant friendship with us. I knew we'd be able to do it within five minutes of talking to her. Because I felt like she was a friend already. After five minutes, I wasn't sure if she was convinced because collaborations are very special. I think you need a soulmate. I think you need your writing soulmate. And I knew I had found her in Marie, but I wasn't sure if Marie knew that yet.

[8:07]Marie Benedict: I knew. I knew from the start. I knew from that first conversation. I didn't know if I could be a collaborator. You know, I had never done that before. But Victoria had so much experience writing six books with Roshanda, writing different sorts of books, different sorts of collaborations. I just knew that between our kind of instant connection and her experience, we could work it out. Because as she let me know, it's not a formula. It's not a formula. Print based on the format and the themes and and really the evolution of the book. And for us, the evolution of the book was really moment really momentous.

[8:47]Zibby Owens: Yeah. So tell me about how your friendship and how the book ended up changing over the course of COVID and how the two of you seem to have just completely been lifting each other up through the whole thing, like each other's life rafts in a way. You know, when we finished that first draft,

[9:04]Victoria Christopher Murray: we were friends already. Like she, like Marie would be a person I'd wanna go hang out with at Christmas or New Year, you know, already. But then we got our edits during COVID. The pandemic had just hit basically. And it was the first time that both Marie and I were home, you know, because we traveled so much. And so now I only had to travel from my living room to my office, to the kitchen, you know, that was, that kept us in one place. And we started talking to each other over Zoom every day, every day for like hours, not fifteen hours a day. We were rolling up our sleeves full into edits. And then George Floyd happened, like in the middle of it. And suddenly everything that we were trying to understand about Bell struggling with race, we were struggling with. And we were struggling with from two different perspectives at the beginning of the pandemic. But by the end, we were struggling together. Because every day for the first hour of our conversations, Marie would be checking with me and she gave me a very safe place to land. I have other white friends, but I've never had a friend who wasn't black that I talked to honestly about race and all the little microaggressions that I suffer every day. And as much as it was interesting for me to tell Marie about it, it was interesting for me to hear her responses. She didn't know. She just didn't know. All of the things we talked about made its way onto the pages. Don't you agree, Marie? Everything did.

[10:56]Marie Benedict: Yeah. I mean, as we were know, we we were we had already opened up the conversation to race. You know, we had to. You know, we have a woman who is passing as white, who lives in a society that's incredibly racist, segregated, even even if not on the books, certainly in practice. And she wields all this power, and she's she's walking this tightrope about discovery. You know, is she gonna be found out? And and the really horrific repercussions that could happen if if she was. You know, her family depended on her financially and socially. You know, Bell's status as a white woman affected her their family status as white people in their communities. They had married white people. They worked in white focused sorts of careers. So there was so much at stake, and she herself had made so many sacrifices to pass. You know, she had the whole family really had given up their connections to their extended family with with whom they were very close and very proud. She herself couldn't marry or have children. You know, she couldn't risk the fact that she would have a child that would be darker and would really reveal the secret that she was keeping on behalf of herself and her family. So we were kind of already in that first draft, Victoria. Right? Really Yeah. Definitely. About what that was like. And and Victoria was starting to share with me, you know, what it what it was like to move as a person of color in the world. Her own grandmother had passed for convenience, not as a lifestyle, but, you know, in a in a situation which which somebody made that assumption or someone it might be safer for her to ride in a particular train car than in another. And she shared all of those experiences with me, and I had started to to see a little bit the world through Bell and Victoria's eyes, but it wasn't until the pandemic. I mean, it wasn't until this the, you know, the the social unrest that was happening all around us. And those conversations, had been I don't wanna say theoretical, but they had been maybe a little bit more historical, started to become very, very personal. And Victoria started to open up to me more. I mean, we already had, as she said, such trust between us, certainly professional trust, but we we, at that point, developed a lot more trust. And I felt so honored that she that she felt comfortable enough to talk to me about the sorts of discrimination she had suffered and and just the way she had to move around the world. And we became really close, and I started to look at the world through I I would never say be presumptuous enough to say that I was looking at the world through her eyes, but I started to my eyes started to open wider, and my lens started to become wider. And I started to understand, I think, a little bit better what a black person, a black woman in our world and in Belle's world has to has to shoulder in order to make it through the day. And we became so close as friends, sisters in that process, and then all of that, I I feel really turned Belle into a very rich, very alive, I hope anyway, character. Because Mhmm. You know, she was we write fiction, of course, and she was a real person, but, you know, she very she's very much our Belle in many ways.

[14:13]Zibby Owens: Well, not like you ladies need any more projects. But I think that even though you instilled so much of your conversations and the sensibility sort of behind the conversations that you were having in Belle's character, and yes, a 100%, she's like jumping off the page. You nailed it with her as a character. Totally. But I selfishly would love to have been, you know, a fly on the wall of your two your conversations. And like, you should write that. It doesn't have to be a whole book, like write it in, write an essay, write something where

[14:45]Victoria Christopher Murray: you share a few of those things. Like, because honestly, this is like, it's one woman to another, right? This is how we Right, it's one way to learn. And you do it, this is how you do it one person at a time, what's one step at a time. And what I love about this book is that it can open up the conversation because sometimes people don't know where to begin. And so I don't think I would have just walked up to Marie and started talking about this, but every day we had to talk about it. And we had to talk about it in the past, and we had to talk about it and what was happening today. And we had to say, this is exactly what Belle's mother meant when she did this. Belle's mother never wanted them to pass to be white. She wanted them to pass to be equal. And that was what she was going after. And sometimes Marie and I say, we wish we had taped those conversations. Like it like it could have been a great documentary, you know, just two, not only two writers coming together because you it can't just be any two writers. You have to find your writing soulmate. You really do. And so how do two writers come together? And then how did two women come together from black America, white America? Hopefully one day we can get to one America.

[16:02]Zibby Owens: Maybe this could be a whole thing. Maybe there could be like a, you know, not a program, you know, they're all these like writing things and writing prompts and writing prizes and writing everything. Like, maybe this should be a thing where there's, like, a whole series of co written but you know what I mean? Like, make these partnerships together, and it becomes, like, a whole thing. I know what I mean in my head, but I'm not do do you know what I mean? Like, if you can scale what happened with you Right. Even let's take 50 women. Right. Maybe maybe we could just say, like, are there 50 women who would wanna do this? And, like, you pair them up, like, a blind date out of a, you know, out of a bag will, like, pick names and say, you two go off and try this. And, you know, what what do you learn? And then you report back. Today's episode is sponsored by Quince.

[19:42]Marie Benedict: Well, you know, it's funny you say that, Zvi, because I think that's our kind of like our dream for this book. Right, Victoria? I mean Yes. For us, the discussions about Bell and the trust we developed over those discussions about race led to the trust and the openness that we were able to have about discussions about race in our current situation. And our dream is kind of to bring black and white book clubs, black and white readers together and use our book or different books as a bridge to conversation. You know, it's it's hard and intimidating and difficult sometimes at first to just as Victoria said, just kinda launch into those conversations. But if you're approaching them from a common ground, a a book, a story, you know how well, probably better than anyone, how a book is a gateway to an entirely not just different world, but but can be a gateway to empathy and understanding. And in that way, we would you know, our greatest dream is really really to create a you know, almost like a unified book club experience and Yeah. And replicate to the extent possible. We know it's unique and unusual, the kind of experience that Victoria and I had together with that that bridge with that bridge of a book. Yeah. I love that. Because it's it's real. It's so funny now because

[21:01]Victoria Christopher Murray: whenever I experience little things in the world, normally, I would text one of my friends, one of my black friends and, you know, say what's going on. Depending on what it is, now I text Marie. Only be and I don't think of her as the white friend or black friend. She's my sister who needs to know that she may need bail money. Yeah. She wants to get me out of something. And so it's so natural for me now. No matter what's going on, I just tell her. And then I'm reminded by her reaction because my black friends kinda go, oh, well, you know, that's what we all suffered from. Not Marie, she's ready to raise the roof, and then I'm the one that needs to collect the bail money,

[21:48]Marie Benedict: you know, for her. I mean, it's it is amaze you know, it's one thing to read about and be kind of be aware of the microaggressions that Victoria suffers every day. Right? It you know, you as as I think a a reading person in the world, I I had some cognizance of that. But to actually have her tell me real time and, you know, I love Victoria. So it's like someone's doing it to to me, to my to my loved one. It just oh my gosh.

[22:16]Victoria Christopher Murray: It drives her nuts. It drives her nuts. But it's too late. She's, like, connected to me, so I have to keep sending it, you know? It's too late. Other people Book it, it won't end.

[22:27]Marie Benedict: It won't. But I I feel like if if we could, you know, kind of replicate that experience Yeah. Because it's one thing to read it on a page, and it's another to actually experience it together.

[22:43]Zibby Owens: And let's talk about all the great stuff in the book a little bit too. I couldn't believe, and I was like, well, this must have happened in real life because it's historical fiction. So I'm guessing you couldn't change like the major plot points. But the fact that Belle and her mom and siblings were able to keep this secret, having so much extended family in the world, right? Like, the one scene where she messes up and almost reveals that her grandmother liked to print a fridge or something, right? And, you know, even this random Portugal grandmother, like, nobody did any digging on that. Right? Like, what what is that? Anyway but and, like, they would never have seen each other. The dad almost never came back in. Like, how did this happen? Like, I couldn't believe, like today this could never have happened. Yeah, it was the early twentieth century. That's how it happened. That's the explanation.

[23:31]Victoria Christopher Murray: When, you know, there weren't telephones to just pick up and call someone, There certainly wasn't Instagram and Instagram live. We couldn't and so we're looking back on it with twenty first century eyes. Right. And I always remind the readers because a lot of my readers say, how in the world did she even pass? She looks black. But now we know about biracial and mixed, and it would never have worked in today's times because and it you know, there were lots of situations that we didn't put in the book where I'm sure Belle had a couple of close calls. Mhmm. You know, when when you don't have that Belle destroyed all of her personal correspondence.

[24:13]Marie Benedict: She didn't want people to know, to the extent that correspondence reflect how she felt about passing or the fact that she was passing, she didn't want that to impact the legacy she left behind in in this incredible, not just the private Morgan Library, but helping turn the Morgan Library into a public institution, which for those of you who've been there or have no sort of the legacy that it's left is really astonishing. So some of that those feelings were things that we had to kind of I don't wanna say conjure because it's really more like an extrapolation based on, you know, personal personal experiences, additional research that we did. But it was an incredible experience that she had an incredible period of time. Wow.

[24:57]Zibby Owens: And also her relationship. There's there's also workplace dynamics at play here. And this is almost verging on like a Me Too. Like you guys have touched on all the hot topics of the day with this story, but there was such an interesting undercurrent throughout between Belle and Pierpont or JP, whatever we wanna call it. Yeah. You know, I know you put that scene, you know, not to give anything away, but what do we know? Well, we put a couple of we put a couple of scenes in there because we don't know, you know, talking about extrapolating

[25:27]Victoria Christopher Murray: something, the only thing we had about their relationship, we knew that she worked for him, we knew when it started, when it ended, when he passed away. And we know that after his death, in an interview, someone asked if they had ever had a relationship. And her response was, we tried with a chuckle. And so Marie and I sat for a week saying, what does that mean? What does that mean? And so we tried it a couple of different ways. You know what I mean? We didn't commit to anything until we got to what we thought it was because she was a lot of things to that man. Yeah. That was one of the things that Marie and I discovered together. She was a lot of things. Right, Marie?

[26:12]Marie Benedict: Yeah. Mean, they had such a at the end of his life, she was, we think, and and from sort of secondary accounts from the time period we've read, that she was really one of the closest people to him at the end of his life. You know, she served in so many capacities to him. She was his, as Victoria said, his business partner. She was his representative. But she also would read the bible to him, and they'd play solitaire together, and he would ask her advice on things. And she went to family dinners and birthday parties and a ball. So she had this very multilayered relationship with him that that really lent itself to a variety of interpretations. And he, of course, was notoriously mercurial and also a major philanderer. So Victoria and I had to kind of in envision at various points in time what actually might have transpired between them because, again, certainly rumors floated around, and some of those rumors have been recorded in in the data. But the actual interchange between them is something that we just don't know what happened. And we wrote it quite a few ways. Right, Victoria? We did Before we settled. And I think that's one of the things we did discover that she was a lot of things to this man.

[27:24]Victoria Christopher Murray: Yeah. And so but we we stayed as close to the facts as we could. Like one of the the things that Marie loves to talk about is when during the interview, that was an interesting process because know when that she was interviewed and we know she got the job. We don't know what happened in between, but we know who they were. So we could imagine how he looked at her like a piece of art. Right. And what how and we know how she would react because she would only do what her mother told her to do at that point in her life. So it was just so interesting. You know, I don't write genres. I just write books, except now I am stuck on historical fiction. Marie just exposed me to this new genre that I love.

[28:13]Zibby Owens: That's amazing. So are you gonna do another book together? Someone in the chat was asking for anyway, we're talking about The Personal Librarian here, The Personal Librarian by Marie Benedict and Victoria Christopher Murray, which is the GMA Book Club pick of the month for anyone just joining, even though we're almost out of time. But anyway, but somebody was asking. So there we go. Okay. So do you have any more collaborations We in

[28:35]Marie Benedict: do. You wanna go, Marie? Sure. We are actually in the process of conjuring up, but we we know what we're writing. It's tentatively called the first ladies, and it's the story of a friendship. It's one that we really you know, given our own friendship, really the transformative power that we've seen of a friendship, we wanted to explore that a little bit further. And in this story, we're going to explore the friendship between Eleanor Roosevelt and Mary McLeod Bethune, who was a an educator, an activist kind of in her own right. And these two women became long before FDR became president, these two women became very close personal friends against a lot of backlash in both the white and the black communities. That was certainly something that wasn't accepted at the time, and that friendship

[29:26]Victoria Christopher Murray: worked in front of and behind the scenes to really create transformation in its own right. So we're really We're we're really excited about it. I like to think about, you know, one of the things that I love about my sisterhood, because this lady is not my friend, she's my sister. One of the things I love about my sisterhood with Marie is that she's such an ally, Such an ally. And but allies will make mistakes. Allies will say the wrong things. Allies will and I like to I know that they were allies before, but I envision this book with Eleanor and Mary, like Eleanor being like the first ally, the first public ally. And I just can't wait to get into it. I mean, we love Belle. We love Belle. We don't want Belle listening that we don't love her. But I'm very excited because I think it's going to be a reflection of our friendship too.

[30:21]Marie Benedict: Yeah. I do. It can really on a new level. And, you know, we're we are looking for things that are both historic and modern in these stories. And certainly, obviously, Belle's story has all of those those elements. And and we really think that Eleanor and Mary's story will as well.

[30:38]Zibby Owens: And someone in the chat earlier had asked, is this going to be a movie?

[30:42]Marie Benedict: We hope so. We're hopeful, let's put it that way. Yes. TBD.

[30:49]Zibby Owens: Yes. TBD. Do you ladies have advice for aspiring authors, both in terms of just writing historical fiction, but also in collaborating?

[30:59]Marie Benedict: Wow. I'm I'm I'll you wanna take collaboration? I'll take this one. Yes. So historical fiction, I feel like I'm a history nerd from way back. There was a long period of time I thought I'd be a history professor and archaeologist until I learned that I could really explore all that stuff through fiction. And I think in writing historical fiction, you have to follow where your interests are. You know, very often, I think we feel very swayed by what seems popular and what doesn't seem popular. And I really think you have to follow your passions. And, you know, in my particular case, I go where the women take me. You know, I've gone to into the realm of science in the eighteen hundreds. I've gone to World War II. I've gone all over. And and I feel like each of those stories has something really to offer, and your readers will see that passion in the story. So it's it's best if you're writing historical fiction to really follow your own passions and interests.

[31:53]Victoria Christopher Murray: Yes. And that's perfect because I, you know, now I'm interested in historical fiction. So I'm listening to Marie and following the things that interest me. So, and for collaborations, you know, you really have to find your soulmate. I don't think just any two authors can collaborate. I know authors who work together and then they're no longer friends because it didn't work out. So it really is first you have to like the person. I think you have to have a friendship. It's like a soulmate. And then it doesn't make sense unless you totally compliment each other. So for example, we totally I mean, when we talk about complimenting each other, we compliment Marie, like when they give us a deadline, she is like, let's do it. I'm like, man, the deadline is just a suggestion. That's how I treat deadlines. And so we have that. Marie loves the first draft. Writing a first draft for me is like pulling teeth without any medication and then sticking the tooth back in and pulling it out again. But then once Marie writes that first draft, she's done. She's like the book is finished. I told the story. That's when I love to grab it and layer it and just go into the deepness of the characters. And so we had to do both of the things that we didn't enjoy in this book, because I tell everybody, we wrote this entire book together. Every word in this book is from both of us.

[33:27]Marie Benedict: And one last thing I would say is if you're gonna collaborate, like Victoria said, you have to really trust in each other. You have to be with someone who you feel like you can trust, someone who for whom the best product, the best story is really goal. That's the goal. And trust in that person.

[33:47]Victoria Christopher Murray: I wanna give can I give a really quick example of that? There was a scene we worked with everything together, but there was a scene that we had written that we really liked. And one day Marie didn't even wait to get on Zoom. She called me. And that's, you know, we were always on Zoom and she's like, we have to change that scene. And I had written it and she was like, And my reaction was, okay, what do we do? My reaction would have never been, are you kidding me? Wrote that scene. Love so I was like, okay, what happened? What did you find out? And then we changed it. It's amazing.

[34:20]Marie Benedict: And that's really a critical juncture, but unless we if Victoria trusted me and kind of let go of of that scene that she had written, we wouldn't have had that end result. Amazing. We're just feel fortunate.

[34:33]Zibby Owens: Someone in the comments said this message was for me. Thank you so much. You're helping people out there. Thank you both so much for coming on. Thank you for having us. So exciting.

[34:43]Victoria Christopher Murray: Well, you know, being the book club pick was like the best thing ever. Ever.

[34:49]Zibby Owens: Aw, so amazing. Alright. Well, you ladies.

[34:53]Victoria Christopher Murray: Thank you. Bye bye. You. Have a good day. Okay. Bye

[34:58]Zibby Owens: Thanks for listening to this episode of Moms Don't Have Time to Read Books. Don't forget to follow me on Instagram ZibbyOwens and momsdonthavetimetoreadbooks. 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.