Nina Navisky, THE FORTUNE COOKIE WRITER: A Novel
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[0:41]Nina Navisky is the author of the Fortune Cookie Writer, as well as the novel A Mosaic
[0:45]of Grace.
[0:46]She's the proud mom of two teenagers, one of whom has profound autism, intellectual
[0:50]disability, and severe behavioral challenges.
[0:53]Prior to writing, she worked as a speech-language pathologist, helping children with
[0:57]developmental disabilities improve their communication skills.
[1:01]She holds a master's degree in speech-language pathology from GW, and a bachelor's degree
[1:05]in psychology from Emory.
[1:07]Her fascination with language and human behavior is lifelong, and inspires her to create
[1:11]family dramas, rich with emotion, and steeped in real-world issues.
[1:15]Welcome, Nina.
[1:16]Thank you so much for coming on mom's.
[1:17]Don't have time to read books to discuss the Fortune Cookie Writer, a novel.
[1:21]Thank you.
[1:22]Thank you.
[1:23]So happy to be here.
[1:26]Okay, Nina, first of all, please tell everybody the plot, like, what this book is about,
[1:32]and then how you came up with the idea for this story, and I want to talk about the approach
[1:37]of your deciding to write fiction versus memoir for different characters and the inspiration
[1:44]and just all the good stuff.
[1:46]That's a big question.
[1:48]Okay, let's start with what the book's about.
[1:51]What's this book about?
[1:52]Okay.
[1:53]So sure.
[1:54]So the book opens, and we meet Marissa.
[1:57]She has been blindsided by divorce, and she's determined to support her young son.
[2:03]And she believes him to be musically gifted, and he's burdened by a secret.
[2:09]Marissa's juggling three jobs, one of which is freelance Fortune Cookie writing.
[2:13]Which I loved.
[2:15]And I love how each chapter has a different fortune at the top, and I love her going
[2:20]to the library, like researching the different fortune, like different quotes to adapt
[2:25]to important cookies the whole thing.
[2:27]So that's my town library, and I went to that library, and so that is in fact very true.
[2:34]So that's taken from life, but Marissa is barely skating by with those three jobs.
[2:41]And so one day she bumps into a stranger in her building, and that stranger offers
[2:45]to pay her to pay to cook dinners for Rose, who's an elderly widow, who lives one
[2:51]floor down from her.
[2:53]And Marissa has doubts about this, but she really is the cash.
[2:57]And so she accepts, but it turns out this is a far more difficult proposition than she
[3:04]expected.
[3:05]Rose is not a sweet old lady, she is cranky, she lapses into Yiddish, and she really has
[3:13]no interest since it's from an unfamiliar neighbor.
[3:16]And so Marissa perseveres, and she soon discovers clues about Rose's past.
[3:22]She finds an old piano that isn't used, but is still in tune.
[3:26]And she finds a lot case with an unbreakable code, and three photos with an inscription.
[3:33]And so she saw these many mysteries about Rose's life, she, I would say, she begins
[3:39]to see her present through the prism of Rose's past.
[3:45]And that allows her to see her son's anguish, and it allows her to learn how to create
[3:52]good fortune for the three of them.
[3:54]I love it.
[3:55]I love the image, by the way, of her trying to figure out the code to the lock box.
[4:00]And then I was wondering, I'm like, did you then Google?
[4:02]I'm like, did you?
[4:03]She's obviously trying to tell us how to crack the code for a lock box, and like how
[4:09]many combinations.
[4:10]And it was said, you said something like, after 700 tries, I gave up, and I was like,
[4:14]what?
[4:15]Yeah, I googled.
[4:16]You'd Google some really strange things when you're writing a book, and I also had to
[4:19]Google a lot of the scenes in Greece.
[4:22]And so I was looking for pictures, and then, of course, you want pictures from different
[4:26]angles.
[4:27]And so I ended up looking at TripAdvisor photos, and then TripAdvisor would not leave
[4:32]me alone.
[4:33]I was like, did you really spoke your trip to Greece, I was like, I'm not knowing which
[4:37]it was going, but I know.
[4:40]So these are the things that happen to you when you're writing enough.
[4:43]Did you base the handsome ex has been done, somebody in particular?
[4:47]No, I did not.
[4:48]I mean, my husband is handsome, but he is not based off of me.
[4:54]I know.
[4:55]I'm like, who is this meta-training guy with this?
[4:58]Also, let's talk about the Sun, because I feel like Owen is a huge character in the
[5:03]book, and everything from his ability to hear music and be able to recreate it to some
[5:09]of the behavioral things that start percolating, and as the mom in the book, Merces slowly
[5:17]realizing that things might have more, that these individual behaviors might be a part
[5:23]of a bigger piece.
[5:24]So talk a little bit about that.
[5:27]Yeah, about the character of Owen, and I read that you're article on authority magazine
[5:32]about your own son, and how you've experienced with your own son, and just go there.
[5:41]Just go.
[5:42]I'm sensing general.
[5:43]It's my sense in general.
[5:44]How did you decide to make Owen the character starting with the tapping and the rituals
[5:49]at nighttime, and as his behaviors progress?
[5:53]So even how you deal with that with an ex-husband who you're not getting along with when
[5:57]a child starts having an issue, which you did such a good job, I mean, sorry, I'm rambling
[6:02]here, but the way you depicted the ex-husband relationship and the fury, and the, oh my gosh,
[6:10]it was so good.
[6:11]It was just so good from the dialogue to the inner monologue.
[6:15]But anyway, let's go back to Owen, the Sun, and even how you depicted the realization
[6:22]and how parents pick up on these little things, and when you know it's an issue versus
[6:28]when to ignore and all of that.
[6:30]So my older son has profound autism, and so what that means is he is on the severe end
[6:37]of the spectrum.
[6:39]He is also, he is minimally verbal.
[6:43]He also has, he's severely intellectually disabled, and he will need 24, seven care the rest
[6:49]of his life.
[6:50]He also has challenging behaviors, which sounds like, I'm not going to bed, but that's
[6:56]not what challenging behaviors means for autism.
[6:59]He can be self-injurious, he can be violent, he can be property destruction.
[7:03]He also has a host of medical, you know, concomitant medical conditions.
[7:08]That is what I wrote about in my first novel, and so that wasn't really going to work
[7:13]in this novel, because it had to be symptoms that Owen could hide for a while, and he
[7:18]really can't hide that.
[7:19]But when I could take it from it, which is my older son does have types of obsessive
[7:25]compulsive issues, and in autism, they're just called repetitive behaviors.
[7:33]But the thing is, you don't really know what kids with autism are assessing about because
[7:37]they can't tell you.
[7:39]So you know, with kids who aren't autistic, they can tell you.
[7:42]Depending on how much language they have, but those symptoms are my son's symptoms.
[7:47]He does temperature test the floor.
[7:50]He does touch the walls.
[7:51]He does have all those symptoms.
[7:54]And it was interesting because when I was reading about how to write it for a child who
[7:57]does not have autism, what was said was they often, young children often explain it
[8:02]as, I just have to do it until it feels right.
[8:06]And I thought, that is what my son would say to me if he had those words.
[8:14]You know, my husband, for example, once took him after he had, you know, caught his hand
[8:20]on a broken window, and they were outside the ER.
[8:24]And at that point, he had an issue where he had to sit down the street, stand up, sit
[8:28]down the street, stand up.
[8:29]And they're in front of the ER.
[8:30]And he's bleeding and ambulances have to get by.
[8:32]And he's sitting down standing up, sitting down standing up.
[8:34]And he wouldn't stop.
[8:35]And there was no amount of controlling that could get out of there.
[8:38]They could promise him this.
[8:39]They could promise him that.
[8:40]They could explain that he couldn't be in the street.
[8:41]They could do anything.
[8:43]But he had to do it until it just felt right.
[8:47]There's something internal that has to happen.
[8:51]And so I can explain the symptoms very well.
[8:55]I've seen that.
[8:56]I've seen the broken laws.
[8:57]I've seen all of that.
[8:58]So that was very easy for me to explain in terms of how parents react to it and the,
[9:03]oh, now it all makes sense.
[9:06]That is also, I think, something that happens with parents independent of what the diagnosis
[9:09]is lots of times of, oh, that's right.
[9:13]That's what that needs now.
[9:15]I get it.
[9:16]I think that happens with parents a lot.
[9:17]Well, that's a lot for you to manage, like with your son.
[9:22]I mean, how does it help?
[9:25]Have you been writing about it and does that help?
[9:28]How do you have a community of other people who have been going through something similar?
[9:34]Like how does that?
[9:36]So, you know, my, and I don't mean to pride.
[9:38]We don't have to talk about it.
[9:39]No, no, no.
[9:40]No, that's what brought me into writing.
[9:42]So I was not the child who had a diary all the time and wrote stories and was constantly,
[9:50]you know, constantly writing and, you know, in my head.
[9:53]What happened was my older son at 11 became so self-injurious and so violent.
[10:00]we couldn't keep him safe and we couldn't keep the family safe. And so he needed to go to a residential
[10:05]school, which is a boring school for kids with challenging behaviors and audits of your autism.
[10:10]And it was the greatest blessing of our lives. It is an amazing place stuffed with wonderful people.
[10:18]But at that time, it felt like such a failure, such failure. And we didn't know, you know,
[10:26]were we sending him to a place for what if he got abused that he would never be able to tell us,
[10:32]it was such a leap of faith. And so I began writing and I began sort of giving my problems to other
[10:38]people. And I didn't want to write it from my perspective. I think the wounds were too fresh.
[10:44]And just from a also a another perspective, I didn't really have a platform to sell them more to.
[10:51]And so I gave my problems to someone very unlike me and sold it from a grandfather's perspective
[10:56]and wrote a broad story from, you know, families that were enmeshed over 30 years. And it
[11:02]it helped me deal with issues. And then I was able to move on to writing another novel and
[11:06]found that I really liked it as a process. What was your first novel called?
[11:10]A mosaic of grace. A mosaic of grace. Wow. I love how even included the grandparent generation in both.
[11:17]Yeah, the elderly. And you were noticed that. Oh, well, there you go.
[11:21]No, I love these feisty older characters. I don't know. I was so close with my own grandmother
[11:27]that I feel like when I read books and I reconnect with older women. I mean, she wasn't as
[11:33]cranky as Rose. And I don't think kept a lot of secrets. She was like an open book. But if I handed her
[11:40]a lasagna and a tin thing, she might roll her eyes. And be like, all right, you like and bring the
[11:47]glass or, you know, anyway. So no, and I don't know. I think about it like a movie, like how there
[11:53]aren't, are there enough roles for older women? It's almost the same in fiction, right? Are there
[11:58]enough? I love seeing strong roles of older people. Anyway, whatever. You did a good job is all
[12:02]I'm trying to say. No, I'm not doing good job even saying it. You also, and I don't know if this
[12:09]was another of your Google searches, but you seem to know what you're talking about with the piano.
[12:13]Do you play the piano? Are you a music person yourself or what? I do not know. Oh my gosh. Okay.
[12:22]People think I'm glad. Yeah, Google comes in very handy. I know what I'm talking about with Yiddish
[12:32]because my grandparents were Holocaust survivors and I grew up with a lot of Yiddish. So I think that
[12:38]was part of wanting to sort of hear that again. My grandparents were not cranky. Like Rose is cranky,
[12:45]but I think I wanted to hear that again in my life, which is part of the character of Rose, but no
[12:50]piano. I can't claim to know that. What was there? Can you share their story? I can. I don't know it
[12:57]well. And I didn't know it well enough to write a whole novel about it. But I do know that when my
[13:03]grandmother and my grandmother got married in the last day that it was legal for Jews to get married,
[13:08]they were in Austria. And my grandmother ended up going to the Polish embassy,
[13:15]as my grandfather was originally Polish. And they got a list of, I believe, the addresses of all
[13:22]the people whose last name was the same in New York and wrote and asked for visas. And they got
[13:29]three responses and two were for my grandfather to marry the daughter and leave my grandmother
[13:38]behind. And one was yes. And that incredibly kind man ended up sending visas for my entire extended
[13:47]family. And because of that, there are now second cousins and third cousins all here. And my mom's
[13:55]middle name is after him. Oh, that's amazing. It's a lowly story. Yeah, I had family in Austria.
[14:02]That's where my grandfather on one side came from. I feel like every, you know, it's like every country,
[14:06]but yeah, I mean, that's what happens in Exodus. Yeah. Well, tell me about the process of writing
[14:15]this book. How long did it take? Where did you like, what's your, did you write in the town library?
[14:20]Do you actually have a coffee shop called Common Grands? Because I love that.
[14:23]We actually have coffee shop, but it's not called Common Grands because I didn't, I didn't
[14:28]have some advanced bike to use their name. But it is in that same spot. And so yeah, I beat up the name
[14:35]for them. But that is how our taught our, the town, common is laid out and the library is
[14:41]exactly in that direction from it. And I do use the library, but I do mostly write from home in
[14:45]the mornings. And how the process of writing works is I just like to write in the mornings mostly.
[14:50]And I'm not prolific. I don't crank a book out every six months. I wish I could. But it takes me
[14:58]longer than that. And I don't know this one I did write in, I do remember going to
[15:05]the library and thinking I did write this one in more of the linear fashion. And I remember with
[15:11]my last book, there were more sort of episodic things that I needed to then construct and put
[15:16]together. I'd be since it was more nonlinear. But this one came out in one strip, which was nice.
[15:22]And are you working on anything now? So my next one is, I'm thinking maybe not memoir, but I
[15:30]remember hybrid if there is such a thing. I would like to return to autism, profound autism.
[15:39]But I feel that it's not that I want to share my story. It's that I want to share because I feel
[15:46]that it's not my story that's important. It's my story and the tapestry of stories that are
[15:54]related to it. So there is a school that my son could make it to, but those schools are very rare.
[16:02]So my story is intricately connected to the family who has a son just like mine, but there was no
[16:08]school to go to. And so there's a son was in out of psych wards, or the family who had to consider
[16:15]giving up parental rights to making it their son's services. It's intricately connected to the
[16:21]people who saw the need for a school, those amazing people and started one or the incredible
[16:27]direct service professionals who see the humanity in my child and work with him every day. And so
[16:35]I would love to make some small contribution towards changing public perception. That sounds so
[16:45]grandiose, but I think what is seen in the media is not reality. So I don't know if that's possible
[16:51]as a self publisher, but that is the ideal certainly. I think that's great. I think that's great.
[16:58]I can see, you know, there's also something called auto fiction. I'm not entirely sure what it is,
[17:03]but everybody keeps talking about it. But I think it's like a blend to what you're talking about
[17:07]behind, but yours is more like nonfiction, almost like an expose of families. You could almost
[17:12]have it like, well, anyway, it sounds really, it sounds poignant and interesting in a story that
[17:17]should be told. So it's great. What's your favorite fortune cookie line from the book?
[17:24]Oh, I mean, so the final one, I can't remember all of the things that like my actual fortune,
[17:33]the actual, I can't remember the actual fortunes, but I can tell you that the last fortune is the one
[17:40]that is the one that gives meaning to the whole book. And so the last fortune, which I think is
[17:46]roughly if your neighbor's plate isn't full, the most delicious poem will taste like rotten fish.
[17:53]It's something to that extent. And that is basically the point of the book that this friendship
[17:59]that Marissa and Rose makes is what's necessary for them, their friendship is what's necessary
[18:04]for them to move forward. So I don't know if that was the funniest one, but it was the one that
[18:09]was the crux of the book. Love it. Amazing. Do you have any advice for aspiring authors? Now,
[18:15]you wrote five things that are like really important to have as part of this article I read.
[18:25]So I have one really quirky thing that I do, which I don't know if it will work for anyone else,
[18:31]but it's one weird thing I do that. I don't know if it's just my mind, but it really works for me,
[18:35]which is whenever I can't figure something out in a book and I just really stuck, I stop working
[18:42]on it and I think about it right before I'm going to bed. I just repeat what the problem is over
[18:47]and over and over again. And then when I wake up in the morning, sometimes the problem is fixed.
[18:52]And I think it's just because your conscious mind has too many nose in it. And you have to go
[18:59]to the place where there can be a polka dot sky for the problem to be fixed. That's just
[19:04]might be a weird quirk of me. But in terms of just a regular piece of advice, I would say the rules
[19:13]of writing are the rules because, you know, there are plenty of great people who have come before
[19:18]you, but sometimes they can be tweaked a little bit. I mean, I know the rules are don't use
[19:26]at, don't use adverbs, but sometimes you need an adverb. You know, that's what I would say.
[19:34]Amazing. Well, Nina, thank you. Thank you for your patience while we scheduled this from so long
[19:41]ago. It didn't finally arrive. I'm really glad I got to spend time with your book and your characters
[19:46]and, you know, this little family and also to be so amused by the ex-husband divorce angle,
[19:54]which we didn't talk enough about. But it was like so awesome for anybody who's going through
[19:58]a divorce or has been through a divorce.
[20:00]and I have been through a divorce so I'm not going to comment on my own relationship but I'll
[20:04]to say this is uh it was it was great to see it in fiction the way some of the challenges present
[20:11]themselves. Oh well it was so lovely to speak with you and I'm so glad to hear you say that because
[20:17]that's something I haven't experienced and so I'm glad to hear you and to have heard some of my
[20:22]friends say that it was displayed authentically. That's wonderful. A wonderful compliment.
[20:28]So I was sure you were divorced. I was like oh she must have gone through that. I'm like she's
[20:32]processing all this stuff. Oh and you're like no I'm happily married thanks very much.
[20:37]Thank you thank you for that comment. Next time I feel like your dedication should have been
[20:41]to your Google searches or whatever it is that made you so knowledgeable on all these things.
[20:46]Thank you Google yes. All right well thanks a lot Nina.
[20:52]Hey guys take care bye bye. Hi I'm Zibi Owens and you're listening to the award-winning podcast
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