Rebecca Makkai, I HAVE SOME QUESTIONS FOR YOU
[0:02]Hi, I'm Zippy Owens, and you're listening to moms don't have time to read books.
[0:06]This 30 minute podcast features a new author interviewed by me every single day, 365 days
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[0:58]Enjoy.
[1:03]Zippy Magai is the author of, I have some questions for you, a novel.
[1:07]And by the way, I picked this book for Zippy's Book Club, so go online to Zippy's Book
[1:12]Club on book clubs or on my website, and you can sign up to be a member and to have a great
[1:20]event with Rebecca herself coming in person on zoom.
[1:23]Rebecca Magai's last novel, The Great Believers, was a finalist for both the Pulitzer Prize
[1:27]and the National Book Award.
[1:29]It was the winner of the ALA Carnegie Medal, the Stonewall Book Award, the Clark Prize
[1:33]and the Los Angeles Times Book Prize.
[1:35]And it was chosen as one of the 10 best books of 2018 by the New York Times.
[1:40]Her other books are the novels the borrower and the hundred-year house and the collection
[1:44]music for wartime, four stories of which appeared in the best American short stories.
[1:49]A 2022 Guggenheim Fellow, Rebecca is on the MFA faculties of the University of Nevada,
[1:54]Reno at Lake Tahoe, and Northwestern University, and is artistic director of Story Studio,
[2:00]Chicago.
[2:01]Now we will talk about, I have some questions for you.
[2:03]Welcome, Rebecca.
[2:04]I'm so excited to have you back on Momstone of Time to Read Books.
[2:07]This time for I have some questions for you last time, The Great Believers.
[2:11]So welcome back.
[2:12]Thank you.
[2:13]I'm so excited to talk to you again.
[2:15]As I was just saying, I love this book so much, I couldn't wait to talk to you about
[2:20]it, and you're going to come to Zippy's Book Club and talk to all the book club members
[2:24]about it, which I'm so excited about.
[2:26]Okay.
[2:27]Why don't you start off by giving the little elevator pitch about what you're, what's
[2:32]your book about, Rebecca?
[2:33]Yeah.
[2:34]So the way I've been pitching it is it's the literary feminist boarding school murder
[2:38]mystery that you didn't know you needed.
[2:42]It is a lot of things.
[2:43]It sounds like a lot of things, and it is a lot of things, but yeah, the basic story
[2:46]is there's a woman who returns to the boarding school where she was pretty unhappy as
[2:51]a teenager to teach it to eat class.
[2:54]And while she's there, some of her students start looking into for a project, the murder
[3:01]of one of her classmates.
[3:03]There's someone in prison for this murder that happened their senior year, but a lot of
[3:07]people in the internet think it's the wrong guy.
[3:09]And the students think it's the wrong guy and pretty soon this woman, Bodie, is herself
[3:15]convinced that the wrong person is in prison.
[3:17]And so she's revisiting her past questioning things.
[3:21]It's set mostly in 2018.
[3:23]So right after me too, would a lot of us were casting an eye back, not necessarily on
[3:28]the biggest things that had happened to us in that realm, but on all the little things
[3:32]that added up, and she's looking back on a lot of those from her high school years and
[3:37]trying to figure out what actually happened.
[3:39]But then you take us through like all the way to post COVID and like, you know, it's almost
[3:44]like you end up on my doorstep.
[3:47]Do you know what I mean?
[3:48]I feel like I'm back there and all of a sudden it's like, well this happened at, I don't
[3:52]know.
[3:53]Like I'm looking in your window.
[3:54]Exactly.
[3:55]Exactly.
[3:56]I was trying to analyze what made this book just so great.
[4:00]And I think, I mean, it sounds obvious, but the writing of it is so amazing.
[4:04]It's not like the and the plot and the way you interwove everything, but some of your
[4:08]sentences and just the way that you look at the world and describe things, which is
[4:12]probably why you were a Pulitzer Prize finalist.
[4:15]But just the way you write is so different.
[4:18]I'm just like anywhere I pick, I dogured like a thousand pages, but where can I, let
[4:22]me try to read some examples of just like beautiful prose, I mean, they're all really
[4:27]given now.
[4:28]I'm finding all the parts that are quotes.
[4:29]There was one when you were driving in the car on the way, well here, I'll just read
[4:33]this one.
[4:34]Rita was a pinball bounce from one spot to the next.
[4:37]I related.
[4:38]What had my childhood been, but a constant ricochet from one place and one disaster
[4:41]to the next, but to be fair, that's most childhoods.
[4:44]I have to resist the urge to self-methylogize, to paint my own journey as harder than anyone
[4:48]else's just so I can give myself credit for getting out.
[4:51]I'm allowed to take that credit regardless, so declareth my shrink, but that's not the
[4:56]one I was talking about, but I will find, I just want to read how you described the landscape
[5:01]when you were driving, but I guess I won't because I can't find it, but I'll see if it's
[5:06]no, no, it's easier.
[5:07]I know they have to read the book to find out.
[5:09]Now they have to read the book, exactly.
[5:11]Well the point is, the way you describe things in the simplest terms used in a different
[5:17]way, so it makes you think about something differently.
[5:21]It's just really an interesting question.
[5:24]And then of course in this book, you interspersed the narrative with these little, I don't
[5:28]know how to describe them, interstitial questioning sections, so talk about that piece of
[5:36]it.
[5:38]It's a second person book, not in like the choose your own adventure sense, not like
[5:42]you walk into a room, which would have been fun, but not the book that I wrote, but it's
[5:46]a dress, and I don't think this is too much of a spoiler because we learned really early.
[5:50]The you of the book, it's addressed to this music teacher at the school who was a big mentor
[5:58]to go to the main character way back, but she's starting to realize might have known
[6:02]a lot more, but involved in the death of this student who he might have been romantically
[6:06]involved with as well.
[6:08]So there are quite a few sections that, you know, there are places where she's dressing
[6:12]him directly.
[6:13]There are other places where we really leave the narrative behind for a minute to do other
[6:18]things, like to talk about Rita Hayworth, which is what that passage was about, because
[6:23]she's a film historian, or to talk about different ways that she can imagine the night
[6:27]of the crime having unfolded, so we have these kind of different theories and visions
[6:31]of what could have happened.
[6:33]There are a couple of sections that are all just questions addressed to this guy.
[6:38]I'm never too interested in really straightforward narrative.
[6:44]If I look back on my other three novels, the great believers was probably the most traditional
[6:50]narrative, but even so it went back and forth between two time periods.
[6:54]Other ones, the bar where my first book, it's about a children's librarian who accidentally
[6:59]kidnapped someone, and there are sections throughout that are written, short sections
[7:03]just written in the style of different famous children's books.
[7:07]So there's a section that's written like the Very Hungry Cat or Pillar, and a section
[7:10]that's written like Good Night Moon.
[7:11]I think it's just me breaking things up, not wanting to get bored myself, not wanting
[7:16]to bore people, and feeling like there are things that fiction can do that say film
[7:22]can't.
[7:24]Things that novels can do that a shorter narrative could have a hard time with, and delving
[7:30]into those other modes of telling without losing the main narrative can be really, really
[7:36]fun.
[7:37]It's one of those things that I'm always, you know, like, film has a lot going for it over
[7:42]books, right?
[7:43]Like, you got the music, and you get the closeups, and you got Sean Penn's face and
[7:47]whatever, right?
[7:48]But the things that film can do, and I mean, the fiction can do in breaking that fourth
[7:53]wall, or going down these roads, these flights of fancy, these other ways of telling
[7:58]can be really, really fun.
[8:00]And I feel like you totally have this like crime detective mentality and the way that
[8:08]it must be you, because your character does it, like has to come from somewhere, like
[8:11]just how you analyze even the dimensions and geometry of like the falls and the wounds and
[8:17]what it would mean, and just like taking the whole thing apart, and how you have as
[8:21]literally like in the pool, in the cold, I mean, it's just so immersive and awesome.
[8:28]Thanks.
[8:29]Did you take a real place and even the vantage point on the bike, like all of this, you
[8:33]have an accident of the crime and theorizing, how did you get to all that?
[8:38]Well, it's okay.
[8:39]So let's start with the fact that I live on campus at a boarding school, but it'll take
[8:44]you in a picture of my office.
[8:45]So this isn't an office, that's the door to my apartment, that is the door to a dorm
[8:52]of 40 teenage girls.
[8:54]So my husband is the one who teaches here.
[8:56]I don't buy, and my daughter's a freshman now, which is just a small.
[9:00]Don't my daughter's a freshman at boarding school now, too.
[9:02]Okay.
[9:03]I wonder if she, I wonder if she's outside.
[9:06]Yeah.
[9:07]Right.
[9:08]That'd be amazing.
[9:09]I think I would have heard, I think I would have heard, but anyway, I've lived here for
[9:14]quite a while, but a few years.
[9:16]This is also, here's where it gets really weird.
[9:18]This is also the boarding school that I attended as a day student, as a teenager, before
[9:24]my husband taught here, I dragged him to Chicago, he was not my teacher.
[9:29]So I have lived on campus at my high school, my boarding school even though I was a day
[9:34]student for a lot of my adult life.
[9:37]So that said, I was always going to, at some point where the boarding school novel, I just
[9:42]think they're fascinating places.
[9:44]I was never going to write about this school, and I have not.
[9:48]One big difference is, I lived near Chicago, you know, it's a lot of Midwestern kids
[9:53]to love Chicago kids, it's international, too, but it's a very, very Chicago kind of place.
[9:59]I made this.
[10:00]a classic New Hampshire in the woods, old boarding school.
[10:05]And really, I imagine the campus.
[10:08]A lot of fun drawing maps for myself.
[10:12]And actually, the marketing department at Penguin,
[10:15]they were like, can you send us a map?
[10:16]And I was like, it's going to be really ugly.
[10:18]And I sent it to them.
[10:19]And they've made this beautiful watercolor version.
[10:22]They're going to put out there at some point.
[10:24]I'm so excited about it.
[10:26]Looking made, it actually makes sense and look pretty.
[10:29]But it's a lot of things in my head coming together at once.
[10:32]It's partly, weirdly, the campus of Reed College in Oregon,
[10:36]because I was teaching at a summer program there.
[10:39]That clicked its partly other campuses I've visited.
[10:43]It's partly my imagination.
[10:45]And then there's a little bit of a tiny bit of this campus
[10:48]where I live, especially in just envisioning the scene of the crime.
[10:53]And for people who haven't read it yet,
[10:56]this young woman, Thalia, drowned in the campus pool
[10:59]in the middle of the night, but with severe injuries to her body.
[11:03]And there's a lot of question about entrances and exits
[11:07]and access and changed a bunch of stuff,
[11:10]but was able to take the basic footprint of a pool
[11:15]with a backdoor and a football field near and picture things
[11:20]a little bit better that way.
[11:22]I guess.
[11:23]Oh, so long answer to your question.
[11:25]Yeah, no, I like long answers.
[11:26]That's great.
[11:27]It's my job here easier, and I'm kidding.
[11:29]Yeah, you also went into a lot of different people
[11:33]sort of family interior lives.
[11:35]So we have friends on campus who are a couple.
[11:38]And then we even have the mom of the alleged killer
[11:42]who's been imprisoned.
[11:44]And that was particularly heartbreaking.
[11:45]I thought her whole storyline and the way she spoke about it.
[11:49]How did you, when you were going into all these different lives
[11:54]and letting us in inside, essentially,
[11:57]like was that the plan from the beginning?
[11:59]And I guess how did you structure the whole book
[12:01]from the outset?
[12:02]Did you know where it was going and how many lives
[12:05]would be affected or did you just keep going and say,
[12:08]like, oh, well, now what would be behind this curtain?
[12:11]And then all that, you know,
[12:13]I had it all in my head and then I just typed.
[12:15]So I didn't.
[12:16]Oh, all that line or something, I don't know.
[12:20]Yeah, no, I mean, it changes a ton.
[12:22]So the initial idea that I had actually
[12:26]was I was really interested in the fact
[12:29]that when people need to reconvene for a trial,
[12:34]like a retrial, they were a hearing for retrial,
[12:39]which is what ends up happening in the book.
[12:41]The state has to put them up if they're traveling
[12:44]and from over a certain distance.
[12:46]And, you know, very often most people still live
[12:49]in the area where the crime occurred,
[12:51]but if you had gone to a boarding school
[12:52]in the woods in New Hampshire,
[12:54]most people do not still live in the county
[12:57]in New Hampshire where this happened.
[12:59]And so with limited resources,
[13:02]they would all probably be staying in the same hotel.
[13:04]And I thought that would be a fascinating book to write,
[13:08]kind of like the big chill,
[13:10]but like the Western game,
[13:12]which was my favorite book as a kid.
[13:14]That was the book that I thought I was gonna write.
[13:17]And when I first sat down and started to write,
[13:20]I was writing, okay, they're back.
[13:22]It's a retrial.
[13:24]They're checking each other out.
[13:26]And I was gonna need to put in a lot of backstory.
[13:29]And I was like, I'm like working,
[13:31]like there's so much backstory.
[13:33]How am I gonna tell not only what happened,
[13:35]but then how they got to the point of having a retrial?
[13:39]I guess I'd better start with, you know,
[13:42]the recent past, and I'll have a little bit of that.
[13:45]And then I'll get to the,
[13:46]and the, what I originally thought was gonna be sort of
[13:49]a prologue ended up being the recorders of the book.
[13:52]I wanna say that.
[13:53]And only in the last quarter,
[13:55]do they actually get to the hotel as adults?
[13:59]I mean, they're also, you know, the whole book just back,
[14:01]but you know, the hotel part.
[14:03]Yeah, that was a surprise.
[14:05]And then in terms of whose lives you go into,
[14:08]that was definitely a surprise.
[14:10]You know, Omar, the guy who is in prison for the crime,
[14:14]he was getting me a lot of trouble because it was not
[14:18]in the beginning gonna be a story about her going
[14:20]to the state prison and listening to this guy is narrative,
[14:24]because she, for a lot of the beginning of the book,
[14:26]still thinks he's guilty.
[14:28]So why would she be doing that?
[14:29]And how can I get his story in?
[14:32]And I'm not gonna give, you know,
[14:34]I would not know how to write a story where I gave half
[14:37]it to a guy who's incarcerated in federal prison.
[14:40]I'm not the right person for that.
[14:42]But I realized that there were ways in, for instance,
[14:46]a television interview with this guy's mother,
[14:48]who's like a lot of people who, you know,
[14:51]they've really worked through their narrative,
[14:53]they've talked about it a lot,
[14:55]is able to express really well in this interview,
[14:58]the ways that this has destroyed her family,
[15:00]having this young man taken away.
[15:03]So that came later in the night, you know,
[15:05]something that clicked, and I was like, yeah,
[15:06]this is the point of view that I need
[15:10]in order to see the thing that I can't yet show us directly.
[15:14]Okay, well, so neat.
[15:16]Many times in the book, you kind of poke fun
[15:20]at how often people ask, like,
[15:23]what did you do with your kids?
[15:24]How are your kids doing?
[15:25]Like, who's taking care of your kids?
[15:27]Because you're here for two weeks teaching.
[15:29]Tell me about that.
[15:30]Oh my God.
[15:31]I mean, it's something that if you ask kind of any woman
[15:35]with children who travels for work,
[15:37]there's this sort of constant, like,
[15:39]most often from other women,
[15:41]honestly, I do understand often
[15:44]from an older generation of women,
[15:46]with the underlying question,
[15:48]when they say who's watching your kids while you're here,
[15:51]part of the underlying question is like,
[15:53]I would not have been able to do this amount of travel,
[15:56]how are you doing this amount of travel?
[15:58]What's change?
[16:00]Other times, I think it's just,
[16:02]it's just a conversation starter,
[16:03]that they're not realizing the subtext
[16:06]of what they're saying.
[16:07]Where men do not get asked this question,
[16:09]men do not get asked who's watching your kids
[16:12]while you're unbooked to our while you're here for a week.
[16:17]It's something, honestly, just for me, personally,
[16:19]this does come from my own life,
[16:22]as well as lives of women who travel, sorry.
[16:25]Where's the way you after a while?
[16:27]Where you start, you know, as much as I'm like,
[16:31]I'm on the book tour, shut up.
[16:32]Like my, their father is watching them.
[16:34]But it's all good.
[16:35]After a while, you start to internalize this guilt of like,
[16:39]oh my God, yes, I have left my children alone.
[16:41]They will be scarred that men would just not internalize
[16:48]because they're not getting that constant pecking away.
[16:51]And it was important to me,
[16:53]partly here to write a book about someone who was a mother,
[16:58]that's part of her identity.
[17:00]But this book is not about her being a mother.
[17:04]We never see her with her children.
[17:05]We only see her when she's on the road away from them.
[17:09]And she face times them a couple times and that's it.
[17:11]Acknowledging that question that other characters have
[17:14]of like, where are your kids, where are your kids?
[17:16]It's partly reality, it's partly a little like,
[17:18]if there were any readers or reviewers
[17:20]who were gonna be like, well, she's a mother,
[17:22]but we never see her mother in this.
[17:26]Here, this is like, we're allowed to have this story.
[17:31]It's okay.
[17:32]That's really funny.
[17:34]Your answer to this question is like,
[17:36]you know, you can't even get them.
[17:37]That's awesome, really awesome.
[17:39]And you have another storyline that you don't develop too much,
[17:43]but still her backstory, you have her kids
[17:45]which don't make an appearance,
[17:47]but she is going through this sort of,
[17:49]not bizarre, all divorces are bizarre,
[17:51]but just divorce in which she sometimes gets to get people.
[17:54]and her husband who lives next door
[17:56]and it's like a whole thing.
[17:57]And they text, but she's kind of saying something else.
[17:59]And I don't know, I just thought it was so interesting
[18:01]how you wove all of that in, carried it through.
[18:04]And you're like, it's almost like saying,
[18:07]you know, nobody has their life totally figured out.
[18:09]Like we're all in this mix of, I don't know,
[18:12]like it just tied in so much to all the uncertainty
[18:16]and how she felt even as a kid in boarding school.
[18:19]Just sort of like this, like she always just didn't feel
[18:22]like quite like on the straight narrow in a way.
[18:25]Yeah, yeah.
[18:27]She's definitely, you know, a human character.
[18:31]She's flawed and not sure of herself
[18:33]and makes mistakes, puts her foot in her mouth
[18:37]very much a few times.
[18:39]He's constantly unsure of like,
[18:40]am I getting over-involved in this case
[18:43]or was the whole problem to begin with
[18:45]that I wasn't involved and I should have been
[18:47]because I actually knew stuff and where's that line?
[18:50]And then my job as an author is to complicate issues.
[18:54]It's not to simplify that,
[18:55]but it's not to pretend there's an answer.
[18:57]It's to take an issue that's already complex
[19:00]and kind of mess it up more.
[19:02]All right, well, what if, you know,
[19:03]what about this?
[19:04]What if this happened?
[19:06]And even as she's looking back on her own adolescence
[19:12]with sort of a modern eye, a me too kind of eye,
[19:15]someone online is trying to me to her husband
[19:19]or her ex, soon to the ex.
[19:21]And in a way that she really doesn't agree with,
[19:25]she's looking at the story and going,
[19:26]wait, I don't see what the problem is.
[19:28]And that complexity and that contradiction or paradox
[19:33]was important for me in part because that's real.
[19:37]You know, the conversations,
[19:39]especially that women have had in real life
[19:42]not online about looking back or about,
[19:45]well, you know, this guy got me too,
[19:46]but this one, I don't see what the bouncy would he do.
[19:50]Like everyone knew he was a jerk,
[19:52]but does he need to not ever get published again?
[19:54]Like it's messy and, you know,
[19:59]the ver-
[20:00]that we're going to be public about is either we're going to shut up, or we're going to say a very
[20:05]kind of black and white type thing, rather than the three-hour conversation that you'd actually
[20:10]have in real life with glasses of wine, with your friends, about like, well, yeah, but
[20:16]you know, it's the job I think of fiction to get in there and to look at that gray area, there's
[20:23]you know, it's hard in public discourse to find that gray area and fiction is one of the places
[20:29]where we can find it. I love that. I love how you said that the job of the author is to complicate
[20:35]things. That's a different way to look at a story, right? Yeah. And I just love that. I was crocheting
[20:41]the other night, and this is what I always do because I have ADHD and I'm very impatient, but like
[20:48]the skein of yarn was kind of getting tangled, and rather than work it out, I just like yanked
[20:55]and now it's like more, and all I can do is get in there and try to do this, but it makes it worse,
[21:00]and then I cut something and then I tie it, and I think it's going to get better, but it gets worse,
[21:05]and I was like, this is actually like how I write, just like look, but you know, with
[21:12]hopefully, you know, with fiction, there's a purpose to that. With my yarn, it's just a disaster,
[21:17]and like, why do I not take the time to sort this out first? Oh my god.
[21:22]It may seem like that in your head, but the way it comes across is not messing in metal.
[21:26]Well, thanks. I mean, it's it's purposefully, you know, it's like what I want to write, I don't
[21:32]want to write, I never want to confuse anyone. I never want to bore, I never want to confuse. Those
[21:37]are two just like, I'll bend over backwards to make sure those don't happen. So I don't want
[21:43]to write a messy narrative in that sense, but I want to dig into the mass of human life, human
[21:50]psychology, you know, the gray area, right? Take me back a little. How did you get into writing?
[21:56]Where did you grow up? Yeah. Like, I know you went to the boarding school, but like, who did you
[22:01]read? How did you become this? Like, how did you get to hear? So my parents were both linguistics
[22:09]professors, which, you know, was an interesting childhood, like both of them spoke a lot of
[22:14]languages, traveled a lot, grew up going to a lot of linguistics conferences in the summer
[22:21]on various empty college spaces, looking at kids. And they were both teaching at a public
[22:27]university in Chicago. There's nothing like fancy about this. It's just like, you know, the privilege
[22:32]was was educational and linguistic rather than like, you know, we're not living in some
[22:40]gorgeous, you know, how's next to the Harvard campus or something. I was not an only child,
[22:45]but my only sibling is 10 years older than me. So I was in many ways essentially an only child with
[22:53]parents in their 40s when I was born and like no neighbor kids. So I was just reading a lot
[23:00]and playing with remember the little people, they're like, little people, little people,
[23:06]little people, yeah, yeah. We all sit in school bus and we had a boat and in my bathtub with my
[23:13]yeah, they're so the plastic ones, yeah, the plastic ones. And I had my sister's old wooden ones
[23:19]too. They wouldn't get along. They were like the wooden people and the plastic people.
[23:26]You know, I just spent a lot of time alone reading, thinking, Lois Lowry was my favorite
[23:31]childhood author. I just interviewed her. What's that? I just interviewed her. No way. Yes.
[23:38]Oh my god. I'm so jealous. I know. I was like, what? She has a new book out. Yes. I'm
[23:44]interviewing her. Yeah. She I just wanted all I need is for her to adopt me. That's really just
[23:48]I want to live with her for like a year. Not too much to us. She yeah, she was my favorite author.
[23:55]And then the Western game I mentioned earlier by Ellen Raskin was my favorite book. So
[23:59]different different on the author in the book. And at a certain point, you know, it was just kind
[24:04]of always writing. I would write puppet shows and make my friends be in them. I'd write
[24:09]plays at school. I'd write stories and and then by about eighth grade realized that this was
[24:17]something I was getting really positive feedback for. And then by about ninth grade abandoned my
[24:24]other career aspirations, I think the last other one was historian, which I would not say
[24:29]I'm not doing. Right. So not saying I'm not doing, especially with something like the great
[24:35]believers, which took a huge amount of historical research. And from that point out, I was just kind
[24:40]of hell bent on being a writer and was lucky. You know, I was a scholarship kid at the school,
[24:46]incredibly fortunate and incredibly fortunate to have great English teachers. After college,
[24:51]taught Montessori Elementary School for 12 years, just, you know, to support myself. And it was
[24:57]really, really fun while I was writing my first novel and a bunch of my first short stories.
[25:01]And then since then, you know, publishing it, I still teach, but now I teach grad students and
[25:06]adults. Wow. I'm glad your backstory is not as devastating as the main character's
[25:12]backstory in the book. All the trauma and tragedy and all that. So one way, I mean, there was plenty
[25:19]I'm leaving. There's plenty I'm leaving out. It was a lot of people childhood actually. But
[25:24]there was a lot of people. There was, there was some, you know, bad trauma stuff. But I just,
[25:29]I got amazed to get a great education. And that is, you know, perhaps one reason that I'm,
[25:35]I mean, you know, really willing to revisit education in this book, like, you know, adolescence isn't
[25:43]easy for anyone, but you might have, you know, gotten some incredible things out of that time
[25:47]and maybe who you are. I know where I'm a set of time. But now you've said, you touched on
[25:54]bad trauma stuff. Is there anything you want to talk about? Or can we? I'm pretty open about,
[26:00]you know, people can see, I have an essay that was in the New Yorker online right after the
[26:06]Brock Turner verdict, the Stanford swimmer thing that was about. I, when I was 16, I put someone
[26:16]in prison for childhood sexual abuse. And I wrote this essay. It was about victim impact statements.
[26:25]It's interesting. I actually have a different view on victim impact statements since I wrote that
[26:29]he's just from having learned more about the ways that people can be advantaged or disadvantaged
[26:37]in those by their educational background by how well they write by all kinds of things that
[26:42]I sort of took for granted, especially as a teenager. But what I was reacting to was
[26:48]Chantal Miller, who now her name is out there because she's written a wonderful book.
[26:54]But she was the spectacular writer in her victim impact statement went public in that
[26:58]Brock Turner case and was just, you know, just overwhelming, the beautifuls, the wrong word,
[27:04]but it was beautiful writing about a terrible thing. There definitely is, you know, as I explore
[27:11]in this book, as I explore, looking back on predation and looking, looking at the carceral system,
[27:21]looking at what it means to speak out against someone that is all very personal stuff for me.
[27:26]It's, it is in its details, very, very far removed from, from anything that I went through.
[27:34]But there, there are certainly reasons why that's something that I'm, I'm trying to revisit
[27:39]in fiction. And then, you know, so to like, you know, my parents got divorced when I was 10
[27:45]and then my father was moved to Asia and my mother was not in a great place and my sister,
[27:54]who was 10 years older, was gone. And so this, it's a total exaggeration because my mom was,
[28:00]my mom was fantastic. And she was, she did everything she could. But this sense that
[28:04]in this book has of sort of being on her own a little prematurely was definitely me exaggerating,
[28:13]but also working some stuff out. So that makes sense. Well, I'm really sorry that I did not know
[28:21]that. And I'm going to go back now and read the essay and it actually gives me a whole
[28:26]different understanding and context to the book. So I'm glad, at least for people listening,
[28:31]if they haven't read the book yet, they can go in sort of with that as a backstory,
[28:34]not that it should inform everything, but just like that we've added context. But I'm sorry for
[28:41]all of that as well. No, but you know, it's, it's, it's one of those things that I, you know,
[28:46]those experiences that make you who you are. And then also, you know, I look back and go,
[28:51]oh my God, I did that when I was 16. And that's like very proud of myself for that, you know,
[28:56]but not that people who are unable or unwilling to do that should not be both of themselves,
[29:04]but like, you know, we're back and go, oh my God, what the hell, like I don't know,
[29:10]you know, that I would have been able to do that at other ages in my life,
[29:14]but somehow at 16, I was able to. And I don't think it's a bad thing at all to go into a book
[29:20]with a sense of the authors, biography in your head, as long as you know that what you're reading
[29:25]is fiction. And certainly as a writer, most of the living writers that I read are people I know.
[29:32]And I might know them really well or I might know them a little bit. And it's sometimes
[29:37]it's a memoir and you're like, wow, really. But even when it's fiction, it just, you know,
[29:42]you read it in a different way when you know the author. And I think that because of podcasts
[29:48]like this, more people can have that experience, not literally known, some of it feeling like
[29:53]you understand where the art comes from in a way that maybe some theoretical literary
[29:59]person would be like.
[30:00]No, no, you can't consider biography,
[30:01]but I think it makes a lot more fun.
[30:03]Hey, Greg.
[30:04]Yeah, me too.
[30:06]Rebecca, thank you.
[30:07]This was wonderful.
[30:08]I'd love chatting with you again.
[30:10]I just absolutely love the book
[30:12]and I'm just so impressed of so much respect.
[30:15]And so thank you.
[30:16]I really appreciate it.
[30:17]Okay, all right.
[30:19]Well, thanks.
[30:19]Have a great day.
[30:20]Thank you for your time.
[30:22]I'll see you at book club.
[30:25]Thanks for listening to this episode of Moms.
[30:27]Don't have time to read books.
[30:28]Don't forget to follow me on Instagram,
[30:31]at Zebie Owens and at Moms.
[30:32]Don't have time to read books.
[30:33]Also sign up for my newsletter at zebie Owens.com
[30:36]and sign up for my virtual book club
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[30:40]Thanks so much to Steve and Ryan.
[30:42]In fact, texture sound for the sound editing.
[30:44]And thank you to Morning Moon Productions
[30:46]for providing this fantastic intro and now trim music.