Rachel Kapelke-Dale, THE INGENUE: A Novel

[2:02]Zibby Owens: Hi. I'm Zibby Owens, the creator and host of the award winning podcast that you're listening to right now, thank you so much, called Moms Don't Have Time to Read Books. It is a daily podcast three hundred and sixty five days a year, and each day we talk to an author about all of the things related to their career, their book, their life, and more in thirty minutes or less because who has time? I am now an author myself, although I wasn't when I started this podcast, and you can get my new memoir, A Memoir of Love, Loss, and Literature wherever books are sold starting July 1, and my children's book, Princess Charming. You can learn more about me at zibbyowens.com. But really, you're here to learn more about the authors, and that is what we're going to do. Also, sure to check out all the other podcasts in the ZCast Podcast Network. You can learn more at zcastnetwork.com and definitely check out those shows as well. Rachel Capelke Dale is the author of The Ingenieux, a novel. She's also the author of The Ballerinas and coauthor of Graduates in Wonderland, a memoir about the significance and nuances of female friendships. Capelke Dale spent years in intensive ballet training before receiving a BA from Brown University, an MA from the Universite de Paris seven or set, and a PhD from University College London. She currently lives in Paris. Alright. Welcome, Rachel. Thank you so much for coming on. Mom's don't have time to read books to discuss the How do? Did Thank you so much for having me. I'm so excited to be here. Okay. Can you please tell listeners

[3:37]Rachel Kapelke-Dale: what this book of yours is about? Absolutely. So Angenieux is about Saskia Christ, who is in her late thirties and a former piano prodigy. And she comes home to Milwaukee, Wisconsin after her mother's unexpected death, believing that she's going to inherit this massive family estate, only to find that it's been left to this mysterious family friend with whom Saskia has a complicated past. So the book is about her kind of unraveling both what led her mother to do that, how she can reclaim what she thinks is rightfully hers, and, yeah, and reframing events from the past and various relationships.

[4:26]Zibby Owens: I found it so interesting how her complicated relationship made even her death seem like an insult to her, like that they had grown apart. And so her mom hadn't told her that she was sick, and it was, like, somehow the nail in the coffin of their relationship. Like, of course, this would happen.

[4:45]Rachel Kapelke-Dale: Yeah. I think there's a way in which this this for me is really kind of a coming of age book, which is funny to say about a character who's, you know, 37 at the time. But I think I think as Saskia yeah, as the book begins, Saskia is still seeing a lot of, you know, what's happened in her relationship with her mother as things that are really kind of exclusively about her. Right. You know, she's still very much, you know, clinging to this idea, this concept of herself as she was as a teenager. And so it's very reactive, you know, this relationship with her mother. And I think, I don't know, I think that for me at least, a big part of getting older, if not growing up, was, you know, coming to terms and understanding my parents as people and not just as, you know, for the roles that they played and play in my life, you know. And, you know, I've always had wonderful relationships with them, looked up to them a lot. But I think, you know, there's still that tendency, matter how old you are, to go, Well, you know, you did this and, you know, you did that, you did that to me. And it's not that simple, although I think we'd like it to be sometimes. Yes, that is very mature. Very like, Well,

[6:02]Zibby Owens: I feel like that's easier said than done. I know. I'm like, that is like you're like a therapist dream right now. Like, this is the place where we should all get with our relationships with our parents. But we can get my therapist on conference call and see what she has to say about that. I should actually do that podcast. I think that would be hilarious, except it would, like, breach every form of confidentiality. But to interview an author and their therapist, that would be so much. Oh my god. I'm a 100% in. Yeah. I think every single author has some diagnosable something. Oh, absolutely. Usually anxiety. Anxiety. But I don't know. This

[6:39]Rachel Kapelke-Dale: is why I feel like I relate so much to every author. I'm like, Oh, oh, yeah. Oh, I'm another data point for you. Yes.

[6:46]Zibby Owens: High anxiety. Well, can you explain your so you live? You got a Ph. D. In Paris, but you went to Brown. Tell me your life story, basically.

[6:56]Rachel Kapelke-Dale: How long have we got? Such a question to ask a writer. But it's only fair because I have to say I've been, you know, I've spent last weekend just pouring through bookends. So, know, Oh, you did. Me and you. You. Oh, incredibly powerful. Yeah. Oh, wow. But yeah, so yeah, I grew up in Milwaukee, Wisconsin. I went to Brown. I actually laughed because I was waitlisted at Yale. So I think we had these alternate lives where

[7:24]Zibby Owens: I I I yeah. I was so disappointed. I still am like, have a little, you know, chip on my shoulder about the whole thing. So I'm like, what if? My

[7:33]Rachel Kapelke-Dale: next novel is set at Yale, actually. Oh, really? Oh, my gosh. We can get into that later. Yeah,

[7:40]Zibby Owens: Maybe I could be your expert, you know, I don't know, reality check or something. I don't know. Exactly.

[7:46]Rachel Kapelke-Dale: Exactly. And, yeah, I went to Brown, spent a year, a semester abroad in Paris, and then worked in New York in the art world for a couple of years after graduation. I had this strange incident where I was hit by a car in Brooklyn, and I got this small financial settlement that came out of it. And I thought, I can do anything with my life. What am I going to do? And I thought, I'm going to go to grad school in Paris because tuition here at the public universities is just it's like €200 a year. And, you know, it was an at the time, it was another €200 for health insurance, which was, you know, my parents' big thing, will you have health insurance? So I did my master's here, but

[8:31]Zibby Owens: Wait, wait. Can you go back to the car accident? Go back to that for a second. What happened?

[8:36]Rachel Kapelke-Dale: Yeah. So I was off work. I was running late to dinner at my friend's apartment, and I was crossing the street, which was also an entrance to a highway on the light, and a guy makes an illegal left turn out of nowhere and just smacked me down. But first of all, I have a lot of social anxiety and I was also in some kind of shock. So I just kept being like, I gotta go to this party. I'm so late for this party. And he's like, you don't look good. I was like, No, no, it's fine. Let me get your license plate and your number in case I have to go to the hospital later. But it'd be like after the party. I showed up to my friend's party. They're like, We can see the bone on your forehead. My forehead was open. They're like, One of us is taking you to the hospital. I was like, But I brought wine. And, like, the Like, I just had the top of the bottle, you know, clutching. It was Yeah. What happened, I sprained my thumb, and I Yeah, I had that cut on my forehead, which was It's one of those life events that, at the time, just feels like the worst thing that's ever happened to you. You know, I had a pretty fortunate childhood. But, you know, in the end, you know, the way that it was complicated and, you know, with legal stuff, but the guy had to pay my bills, my hospital bills, because my insurance, it wasn't it was his fault, the accident and this and that, but, like, with the lawyer. And anyway, so, yeah, there ended up being enough for for graduate school. And so I yeah. I said, well, I'm, you know, going to go to Paris and do a master's and be a student again. I I loved being a student so much. My parents are both professors, and I kind of grown up, you know, at their heels at universities, and kind of my happy place. So yeah. So then I I came here and did my master's, and I wanted to go on and do my PhD in film. But here and in Europe more generally, it's just there's no coursework. It's just the written part. And my French is fairly good. My written French is awful. It is just so hard for me to write in good French, you know, and the, you know, at that point, thinking that I'd follow my parent in my parents footsteps and become a professor. You know, my adviser was saying, why would you want the major professional document of your career to be in a language you don't write very well? You know that he was, you know, straight to the point. You don't write this very well. Why would you do this? Okay. So I but at that point, I'd done the coursework. And so I thought, well, I want to stay in Europe. I'll do it in London. So I went to London, did my PhD there. And at the same time, my best friend from college, Jess Pan, had moved there. She married a Brit, and we'd had these long email exchanges. Well, you know, I'd been hopping all over the world. She'd been living in China and Australia and all of these places. We put those together as a book. So, you know, and that was the first book that I I published, Graduates in Wonderland. But, you know, London wasn't the place for me, even though, you know, it's an experience I wouldn't trade for anything. And it was a little bit like the car accident in that, you know, I never would have had that first book with Jess if I hadn't been in London. So, know, certain things seemed meant to be in retrospect, even though not at the time. Where what part of London did you live in? I think this was a real symptom of how how the city wasn't a good fit for me. It's seven different apartments in six years. Oh, my gosh. So I was all over the place. I was in Notting Hill, South Kensington, Chelsea at one point, but also the longest point was up in Highbury, North London, all over the place. Okay. I won't ask more about that.

[12:43]Zibby Owens: Okay. Okay. So then after London, what happened?

[12:47]Rachel Kapelke-Dale: Well, finished the PhD, and it was in film studies. And I'd always thought of you know, my parents both taught English. My parents are both also writers. My mother's a poet. My father's done, you know, many short stories, writes fiction. And I'd always thought this is so a child's view of their jobs. But I was like, well, this looks like the best job to, know, have time to write, you know, to be involved with creative people and students and, you know, be in an intellectual community, you know, and still have this time and make a good living. But the fact is that to be a good professor, I mean, you need to have the same passion for it that I really only had for writing, you know, and everybody's going, okay, well, got to turn your thesis into a book now. I was going, I don't you know, I liked writing my thesis. It was interesting. It was fun at times, but it was going, you know, that's not the if I'm going to spend a year of my life doing a book, it's not going to be that book. You know, oh, you have to publish articles. Well, I'd rather write a short story. If I'm going to spend, you know, and the people who were in my cohort, you know, it's now been seven years since I finished, you know, I see just the absolute, you know, passion that has to drive that work, you know, and I just I thought, well, you know what, I'm going to go out without a safety net. I'm going to piece together freelance jobs and I can do that from anywhere in the world. So, you know, I was really that's the point where, you know, I've gone as far as I could in the university system and other than doing another PhD in something else. I was going, you know what? It's time to really make a decision, and I'm going to throw this all into writing and just, you know, just trust that it will happen. You know,

[14:36]Zibby Owens: hope that it will happen. What was your thesis about?

[14:40]Rachel Kapelke-Dale: My thesis was about foreign women in Hollywood of the 1930s, about their representations and the kind of the their value, monetary and otherwise, to studios. So it had a lot to do with US immigration policy at the time. It had a lot to do with, you know, the certain concepts of whiteness and, you know, virtue that were these just these incredible, you know, it's not that long ago. And you look back at these incredibly horrifying explicit statements made by, you know, public intellectuals and senators and all of that. Then, you know, working with the films, which was always my my the great pleasure of it, you know, putting them in their context.

[15:29]Zibby Owens: So interesting. Oh, my gosh. I love hearing how your brain works. Okay. So keep going. So you did that, and then you moved back to Paris? Yeah. Yeah. I find Paris

[15:39]Rachel Kapelke-Dale: for me, it's a much more livable city. London's enormous. Just geographically a lot bigger. It's very, you know, it's very expensive in a lot of ways. It's, you know, and I was going, well, if I'm going to do this freelance life, there's a lot about Paris culturally, just in terms of the size, getting around, you know, in terms of the food, in terms of a lot of the things that were important to me, in terms of what kind of life I wanted for myself, that were more accessible here. And, yeah, I moved back in, what would have been, 2018.

[16:15]Zibby Owens: Do you know the author Sutania Dekers who lives in Paris? I don't. Do I wanna put you two in touch. I just did a podcast with her about her book called dinner for one, and it's a really interesting story post her post relationship, how she learned how to cook for herself. And, anyway Oh, I love that. I It was it a fun memoir. I mean, not fun. I mean, it was heartfelt and fun is the wrong word, but it was really good. But, anyway, you're both there, and you should hang out. Yeah. I'd love that. Today's episode is sponsored by Quince. Summer always makes me rethink what I'm reaching for every day. Lighter fabrics, better materials, pieces that just feel good the moment you put them on and look effortless. That's why I keep coming back to Quince. They focus on high quality essentials. Think breathable linen, soft organic cotton, washable silk, but without the luxury markup. It's that rare balance where everything feels elevated but still easy. Quince has beautiful everyday pieces like 100% European linen pants, dresses, and tops with styles starting at $32. Their denim is soft and easy to wear. I wear my jean jacket all the time. And their organic cotton sweaters are perfect for layering on cool summer nights. Everything at Quince is priced 50 to 80% less than similar brands. Quince works directly with ethical factories and cuts out the middlemen, so you're paying for quality, not brand markup. And it's not just clothing. Quince has really become a destination for elevated essentials across home, kitchen, bedding, and beyond, making it easy to bring a more premium feel into everyday life. In addition to my jean jacket, I recently got a white tank top dress with a beautiful cotton skirt that is absolutely gorgeous, and I can't wait for it to be warm enough so I can wear it every day, but it has been a cool spring. Elevate your summer wardrobe. Go to quince.com/zippy for free shipping on your order and three hundred and sixty five day returns. Now available in Canada too. That's quince.com/zippy for free shipping and three sixty five day returns. Quince.com/zippy.

[19:23]Zibby Owens: Okay. So then talk about the ballerinas. Well, I've always loved this.

[19:28]Rachel Kapelke-Dale: I've always had this this this idea of returning home is something that's always really struck a chord with me. These kind of stories about going home again or, you know, being in the same place and seeing the ghosts of the people that you were before in the same place. I was returning to Paris at 34, which at the time felt very old to me. And you know, what happens is you just keep getting older. And you're like, when is it 80? You know, there's no going back. The last time I'd been here, I would have been 25. That was a very different life stage. And, you know, there's it's the same people. It's the same I'm even living in the same neighborhood, you know. And all of these things about my past. You know, I'd done ballet training as a teenager. Know, there was so much that was coming up for me. And at the same time, I think I was starting to kind of grapple with ideas of visibility and aging and, you know, what happens and I think this ties into the second book as well. But what happens when so much of your identity is predicated on being young or being precocious? Or, you know, ballet dancer, you know, they have to retire so young. Is like tennis, so punishing on the body. You don't see a lot of dancers, you know, in their forties or especially in their fifties. And, you know, I'm going, well, I think when I was young, I had this concept that youth was this inherent characteristic that I had. And then, you know, there's some point, you know, in the past decade or so where I think me and a lot of my friends have looked around and gone, Oh, my God, are we the adults in the room? When did that happen? Know, there's Oh, You know, there's a friend was telling a story about somebody having a medical emergency on the bus, and she was like, Oh, oh, I'm the one who's supposed to be called, you know, I've got to mobilize now. I've got to step up. And so, you know, how you grapple with that at the same time that there are lots of messages saying that the things that made you valuable. And I think this is particularly true for women of our generation. You know, this kind of elder millennial, Gen X, know, that was being young was treated like a characteristic, you know, that was celebrated, you know, almost fetishized. And it's like, yeah, but that's not anything to do with me as a person, you know, that's not anything to do with the core of who I am. And I think getting caught up in that and dealing with that as you get older and you say, well, okay, well, who am I beyond that? I think that, yeah, those questions started to really haunt me. Yeah, I playing with them a little bit. There's

[22:22]Zibby Owens: a new young woman on my team named Faith Tomlin who is a former ballerina, and she finished she, like, retired right before also Yale, actually. I think maybe it would be fun if she interviewed you for something, like some feature for a magazine or some I think that would be fun. Anyway, it might be. Okay. I'm like, I'm not letting you go here, Rachel. These are the three things we have to do after the Oh, I love it. Okay. So when book when The Ballerinas came out, what was that like for you? And then when did you start working on the ingenue? And what how did like, where do you see your whole trajectory going? And where does this sort of dark element come in? This is like I mean, The Elf House was like creepy, you know? And I'm like, Oh, I can't read this one before bed necessarily. Like, you know, these little statues that no one knows where they came from and like sort of you do this like montage of the house through time where you're just like, how did this get here? And you, like, suddenly it's like a fast forward film thing. Actually, it's so funny, I guess, now you have this whole film studies background because it does feel like you just did a like, where the seasons change, you know, you're in the same place how you introduce that. Anyway, so where is the dark? Where is that coming from? My mom would say that it's my Scorpio side coming out

[23:45]Rachel Kapelke-Dale: for sure. I'll tell you what, when I sat down to write ballerinas, I wanted to write I don't know if you know the book Summer Sisters by Judy Blum. Yes. Totally. Yes. Oh, just like just a pivotal book for me, you know, when I when I read that, because I think to that point, I hadn't read anything about really the complexities of female friendship. Know, it's just like, oh, and they're buddies. You know, it's just like, no. It's so it's as if not more complex than other relationships. But I was like, yeah, I want to do this reunion and, you know, these they're working through the issues of their past and they're, pulling things just turned dark on me. Yeah. It's just I think there's something in me that really wants to push it as, you know, as far as it'll go and just explore that. And with Anjanew as well, you know, I sat down saying, you know, I want to write something about fathers and daughters because I don't think that this has been there are a few are a few works that explore exceptionally well. Like, the play Proof is just That was so good. Oh, my gosh. Just So good. You know, knocked the wind out of me. You know? But this I think it's such a for me, it's been you know, I'm I'm very close with my father. It's been, you know, one of the most important relationships in my life. You know, and I, you know, I thought about something like, you know, American pastoral, like the Philip Roth, where it's like the daughter's gradually becoming this monster that he doesn't recognize. So, yeah, but what if they're kind of carried along together and, you know, and then, you know, yeah, and it just turned into this. These gothic elements just kept creeping in there. But the elf house, actually, that's a real place. There's a it's based on a real place. There's a mansion in Wisconsin a few blocks away from where I grew up with two I guess they're gnomes. This has been clarified for me. I like elves better. But in real life, they're gnomes sitting on the front of the house. One of the reasons that, you know, I was thinking that when I started to write ingenue about, you know, boomer millennial tensions and this idea that, you know, when we were growing up, was, know, you're going to save the world and, you know, girls can do anything. And these kind of really facile statements, I mean, the kind that you do give to kids. Then somewhere along the way, it flipped into, like, well, you're eating too much avocado toast and you're not buying houses. And, you know, it's nice. It's like, well, you know, these things aren't happening in a vacuum. And I think the way that the house played into that is like a lot of people, I think in my age, I'm very obsessed with houses and with, you know, with real estate. And, you know, back before the Internet, they would have these little boxes in front of the house with flyers that showed you, you know, the insides of the rooms and the floor plan. It was this weird little kid going around being like, what's the inside of this house look like? I got it now. Oh, I'm gonna say my house. By the way, they still have those in some places.

[26:33]Zibby Owens: Yeah. Like, because they they have them in some houses in LA and in the because I still sometimes grab the things. I also go to open houses anytime there's an open house no matter what I'm doing. Absolutely.

[26:45]Rachel Kapelke-Dale: Love open I'm obsessed. And that house was one of the flyers I'd grabbed as a little kid, and it was on sale. And it's a huge house. It's not as huge as the house in the book for something like $500. Now Milwaukee real estate is notably a bargain. It is not New York, not L. A. But you know, this would have been in the 90s. And then it recently went on the market again for several million. Oh, gosh. And you know, salaries haven't changed that much since that point, you know. So, you know, you're looking at that house in the 90s, you're going, Well, somebody with a moderately well paying job could take on that kind of mortgage for that house. You know? And, you know, at this point, it's going, no, you got to, you know, this is it's very hard to earn the kind of money you'd need for a house like that now, you know? And this is, you know, this it's impossible. You know, it's yeah, I think this book let me kind of fulfill some of my dreams of home ownership

[27:48]Zibby Owens: of certain properties I've had my eye on for decades. Well, I feel like this also needed a bunch of work. I feel like the house needs work. Like, we need, like, a refresh. We might need to get an architect in there, do a little, you know, rejiggering and, you know, freshen it up. Mix her up. Next thing you know, it's on HGTV. You should do that. You should try to get you should have HGTV come and do the elf house, like, renovation. Did someone buy it? Yeah.

[28:17]Rachel Kapelke-Dale: It's actually it's wonderful on the inside. I mean, they did a huge renovation a few years ago. And, you know, it's got the pool, which in Milwaukee you can use for about three weeks a year. You know, sauna, wine cellar, you know, all of that. It's gorgeous. Amazing.

[28:35]Zibby Owens: Okay. What are you working on now?

[28:38]Rachel Kapelke-Dale: So I just finished book three. And so I was about to go off to copy editing. So there are few more stages. And that's the it's a Yale equestrian mystery from another part of my life. I was I was very obsessed with it as a child with just every kind of lesson, and I would be you know, take each lesson for about, you know, three months, and the only ones that really stuck were ballet and writing. But, you know, I'm I'm going through now all of them. So eventually, we're gonna have weird ice skating stories, and I don't even know what. And then immediately started book four, which is going to be, I think, an art book set in France. But it's far too early days for me to I don't even know more about it at this point. Yeah.

[29:29]Zibby Owens: Still imagining it. I like the idea of taking all your extracurricular

[29:33]Rachel Kapelke-Dale: activities as a child, and each one becomes a book. It's like you're finally monetizing all of that, all of those classes. That would be great. I'm thinking. You remember I don't know if you remember the series, like a very young blank. They had a very young Yeah. Jill Cremins. Yes. Oh, yes. Yeah. We had those and I was obsessed and I feel like I'm really working my way through that series now. But like just adding like murder like a very young ballet murder. Yeah, no, vianist murder, you know. Circus fire. Didn't they have a circus fire? Yes. My sister keeps joking about that. So, you know, your next one's going be a very young clown murder. Yeah, exactly. Oh, that would be terrible. Clowns are already scary.

[30:14]Zibby Owens: My gosh. Don't give me any ideas. Yeah, I can see that, you know, twenty twenty seven. Units. Anyway. Well, Rachel, it was so lovely to chat with you. I'm so excited to have gotten to know you better. What advice do you have for aspiring authors? Okay, so before

[30:30]Rachel Kapelke-Dale: I say this, I should preface it. I have ADHD, so I get into periods of hyper focus. My brain works very differently than other people. So my this may not apply to everybody, but you have to finish the first draft as fast as you possibly can without falling in love with anything. You know, with keeping in mind that everything can change and that I mean, my it's it's the Anne Lamott thing of these shitty first drafts. My first drafts are junk, and I know that as I'm writing. But the thing is that the you can't figure out what's what the story is until you know what you're working with. You can't figure you can't make it match that ideal that you have in your head or you know, the vibes that you're going for until you have something, you know, that you're comparing to that, you know, to actually work with and to, you know, to start identifying, you know, and I think there are a lot of people who get caught up. When I was young, I would write like this too, just imperfecting every sentence as you go along. And when you do that, you don't want to throw it out because you're like, that sentence is so perfect and this and that. Know? And like a lot of writers, have my junk file where I'm like, I do love that sentence. It's going in there 90% of the time. It never sees the light of day again. But, you know, sometimes it does. The last line of Angenieux is from a short story I wrote when I was 16, which was just an absolute mess, except for that last line, which I always wanted to use. And this was the book that

[32:08]Zibby Owens: came to This one, she watches the light, the light as it plays chicks across time. That's it. Yeah. Amazing. That's beautiful. Thank you. Wow. Well, you guys I won't read the previous two lines at the end of this book for future major reveals. Well, all this is great. Thank you so much. Good luck. I'm going to email you all the follow ups.

[32:33]Rachel Kapelke-Dale: Amazing. Thank you so much, Have Zibby. A great day. Bye, Rachel. You too. Bye. Thanks

[32:39]Zibby Owens: 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.