Dan Kois, VINTAGE CONTEMPORARIES
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[1:03]Dan Koyce is the author of Vintage Contemporary's A Novel.
[1:07]Dan is an acclaimed journalist, writer, editor, and podcaster at Slate, where his work has
[1:11]been nominated for two national magazine awards and a writer's guild award.
[1:15]He's the author of How to Be a Family, a memoir of parenting around the world, and with Isaac
[1:20]Butler, the co-author of The World Only Spins Forward, an oral history of Tony Kushner's
[1:24]Angels in America, which was in 2019's Stonewall honor book.
[1:29]His work has appeared in The New York Times and The New Yorker.
[1:31]He's a frequent podcast co-host on Slate's cultural gab fest and mom and dad are fighting.
[1:37]And a host of U-Picks Tonight and The Martin Chronicles.
[1:40]This is his debut novel, but his previous works of nonfiction have been featured in
[1:44]reviewed in The New Yorker, New York Times Book Review, Vogue, Los Angeles Times, New York,
[1:49]Washington Post, Long Reads, and Elsewhere.
[1:51]He lives with his family in Arlington, Virginia.
[1:53]Welcome, Dan.
[1:54]Thanks so much for coming on Moms.
[1:55]Don't have time to read books to discuss vintage contemporaries.
[1:58]Thanks for having me, Zippy.
[1:59]Oh, it's a pleasure.
[2:01]Please tell listeners what your book is about.
[2:03]I like to call it a comedy about broken friendships.
[2:06]In 1990's New York City, a young book publishing assistant makes two incredibly important
[2:12]friends to her, friends of her heart, the kind of friends you make in your 20s where
[2:16]you sort of eat each other up, but then she loses them both, and then later, in the 2000's
[2:21]in New York City, she's a book editor, she's a new mom, and these two friends come
[2:26]back into her life in different ways, and she has to decide, do I want these friendships
[2:30]back, even if they can't really be what they once were?
[2:33]That's a great pitch.
[2:34]I love hearing great pitches.
[2:36]I've been thinking about it a lot.
[2:39]Well, it shows.
[2:40]I mean, a lot of people think about it a lot, but doesn't make it great.
[2:43]There is a passage I have to read to you right away, because I'm taking issue with it
[2:46]in terms of what makes good readers special.
[2:49]And let me roll up my sleeves and get ready to fight.
[2:51]Yes, this undermines my entire life here.
[2:54]This is about the power of reading and all of that.
[2:58]She said, even as her belief in her own specialness had bled away, she'd managed an
[3:02]English degree, and even with some modest undergraduate renown as a writer, it helped
[3:06]that she simply read more than everyone else.
[3:08]And so while she knew her short stories were as derivative as as her classmates, they were
[3:13]often derivative of writers, her classmates had not yet read, all thanks to a skill that
[3:17]Emily knew was a fluke, an accident of eye-brain coordination, no different from if she
[3:22]could roll her tongue.
[3:24]I don't know.
[3:25]I don't know how the readers feel about that.
[3:27]So she could read really quickly and all that.
[3:30]Well, that part of the argument of the book is about figuring out what role art plays in
[3:35]our lives.
[3:36]And I think a lot of people who grow up as readers, who were up loving books, end up
[3:42]with an image of themselves as, oh, the person I am revolves around reading and writing,
[3:47]and I'm going to be a writer.
[3:49]I'm going to be a novelist.
[3:50]I'm going to make art.
[3:52]And part of Emily's journey in this book is figuring out that that she can love books
[3:57]and reading.
[3:58]And in fact, be committed to making art, but that doesn't mean she has to be an artist.
[4:02]That doesn't mean she has to put that kind of onus on herself.
[4:05]There are other ways she can facilitate the making of beautiful things.
[4:09]She ends up being an editor, a totally different job, but one that, you know, as you know,
[4:12]is crucially important, but one that doesn't sort of get the, you know, the glory of
[4:17]the novelist up in her garage making the next beautiful thing.
[4:21]Interesting.
[4:22]So tell me about coming up with your characters.
[4:24]And you play with everything.
[4:25]You have such a great sense of humor.
[4:27]It's like this very subtle, like, undercurrent of funny.
[4:30]It's, I love it.
[4:31]But Emily and then, M, they both have the same names, and they have to be like, okay,
[4:35]which one are we talk about those two characters and about their friendship?
[4:39]And we're, and we're, we're talking about the limelight here when you reference this,
[4:42]this club.
[4:43]I don't know from the 90s, I say, I'll leave it to readers to figure out which club
[4:49]the Madonna once danced in.
[4:50]Okay.
[4:51]I'll have to Google it.
[4:52]Our main character finds herself in at the beginning of the book, feeling distinctly uncomfortable
[4:56]like it's not her space.
[4:58]So yeah, she's a young woman named Emily who has just landed in New York after college.
[5:03]She grew up in Wisconsin and went to school in Connecticut.
[5:06]And this is sort of her first big city experience.
[5:08]It's 1991.
[5:10]And she meets another Emily, a much sort of tougher, more loud, more agro, more in-your-face
[5:17]Emily, one who sort of seems to her like the city version of her country mouse.
[5:23]The person she could be, if maybe she just like really got it together.
[5:27]They become instant friends.
[5:28]But as you say, they have to figure out who's going to be, who would be too confusing
[5:32]as they say to the reader if they were both called Emily.
[5:35]So the stronger, more agro Emily immediately declares our main character, M, your M.
[5:42]She says, I'm not M. I could only ever be Emily, but you can change your name.
[5:46]And she does.
[5:47]I think a lot of people have friendships like this in their 20s where you already feel
[5:51]like the same person.
[5:52]And I thought it would be fun in this book to play with that really literally and give
[5:57]them the same name.
[5:58]Make them grapple with the ways that they can't tell each other apart, even from one
[6:04]another.
[6:05]Of course, the council I'd give to every writer is that if you make a decision like that,
[6:09]be prepared for like four years of intense, terrible, copy editing, discovery that you
[6:13]constantly have made mistakes and confused your own characters, M and Emily, over and over
[6:18]again.
[6:19]There's no find in replace and search and all of this.
[6:21]No, it's total disaster.
[6:22]No, no, that's so funny.
[6:24]So I didn't realize with the title, you were really referring to vintage, like as if the publisher
[6:29]and that vintage contemporaries are the type of book that would come out like a whole brand
[6:34]of book, right?
[6:35]As if I said like whatever, you know, pangled random house contemporaries and that that was
[6:38]like also an insider publishing sort of reference.
[6:42]Tell me about that.
[6:43]Temperes was a beloved imprint, a paperback imprint in the late 80s and early 90s.
[6:50]Those published by then just random house.
[6:53]The first book ever published in that line was J. McInerney's Bright Lights Big City,
[6:56]a huge best seller, a sort of zeitgeist defining book about being young in New York.
[7:03]And the book, I think it's very clear from this novel that, M-R-M, the M of this novel,
[7:08]read before she went to New York and thought, oh, geez, is my life going to be like that?
[7:12]I have to do that much coke and I like the way it works.
[7:16]And those books represent to her a certain kind of publishing she aspires to.
[7:21]She aspires to publish hip, new fiction, edgy New York stories.
[7:26]And over the course of the novel, she discovers that that's not actually the kind of book
[7:29]she loves the most and it's not the kind of book that this vintage contemporaries is.
[7:34]I like to think I was once hip, but I'm not certainly not hip anymore and this book
[7:39]is not particularly edgy.
[7:40]It is sweet and a little bit soft and very gentle.
[7:44]But it's still about living in New York and about navigating those problems.
[7:48]And part of the argument of the book is you can have a big city life.
[7:51]You can have a life in the arts that doesn't require you going to clubs,
[7:54]starting cocaine and being mean to people.
[7:57]Yes, I survived the 90s in New York City and I did not have to do cocaine to get through it.
[8:02]I survived.
[8:03]It was, it's fine.
[8:04]I survived being a young person in New York City.
[8:07]And I had a bunch of sort of low level traumas and things that went wrong.
[8:11]But in the end, I was okay.
[8:12]Oh, wait.
[8:13]I want to hear about the low level traumas or even the bigger level traumas.
[8:16]Let's just go right into it.
[8:17]Like Emily, like am I also worked in book publishing as a young person?
[8:21]And I also really fucked it up.
[8:24]Am I allowed to swear on your podcast?
[8:25]Sure.
[8:26]I just really screwed it up.
[8:27]I found out I wasn't attuned to a job I had in very difficult and painful ways
[8:34]by messing up with the careers of authors I cared about and that super sucked.
[8:40]It also was a thing that I found my way through that did not then define the rest of my
[8:46]life.
[8:47]I worked for lousy bosses who like historically lousy, like you've read about them being
[8:52]canceled lousy bosses and I got through it and I have gotten on with my life and become
[8:57]a person who I'm happy to be.
[8:59]That was the journey I wanted him to be on.
[9:01]If bad things happened to her, I wanted her to be okay.
[9:06]That was the kind of book I needed to write in my mid 40s.
[9:09]There really isn't enough about like recovering, well maybe there is and I haven't searched
[9:14]for it, but recovering from abusive bosses.
[9:18]There's so much about recovering from abusive relationships, but there's this whole undercurrent.
[9:23]Like who has not had a boss maker cry?
[9:25]I've cried in the bathroom at so many jobs when I was younger.
[9:28]That's just what happened.
[9:30]Yet what do we do with all that?
[9:31]Nobody really takes that forward and analyze this that later.
[9:34]It's just shoved away.
[9:35]Aside from me too, I don't mean me too.
[9:38]I just mean like a not so nice boss.
[9:40]What do we do with that in an era now in which that kind of boss hasn't disappeared,
[9:46]but I think young employees, especially in creative industries, are way less likely to encounter
[9:51]those kinds of bosses now.
[9:53]In part because of the changes that that generation, the young generation of 20 to 35
[9:57]year olds have created in the workplace.
[10:00]which in general has been great for working environments, even if old people like me struggle to
[10:05]understand it sometimes. But so what do you do with the experiences that you think of as
[10:10]formative? Like my bad bosses were terrible, but they also created me in a lot of ways. They
[10:15]showed me how not to work, how not to behave. They also probably made me better at what I did,
[10:21]even though it sucked while I was doing it. And then how do I process and think about that
[10:26]kind of experience in an era when that kind of experience has seen instantly and universally
[10:32]as a trauma from what you might never recover? Interesting. So how did you, when you set out to
[10:38]write the book, how did you come up with or like which pieces of it as you went through it where
[10:44]like I have to include this piece? Like this is a scene I must include because this is so funny or
[10:49]this is like like did you have a list of scenes before you started and said this is the one,
[10:54]this one has to go in? Absolutely not. This book was written in a comically haphazard manner.
[10:59]It was written because I turned 40 and I had like a mini midlife crisis about how I had not written
[11:04]a novel. Even though I ostensibly had a master's degree in novel writing, you know, I'm a journalist,
[11:10]I write tons of nonfiction. I've written several nonfiction books, but I'd always thought of myself,
[11:14]you know, the way that M thinks of herself as a storyteller. But I wasn't telling any story,
[11:19]I mean, I was telling stories to my kids at night and that was very nice, but I was not inventing
[11:23]things. And that drove me a little bit crazy. And so for about three or four years, whenever I
[11:28]had the energy at 1045 at night, after my kids went to bed, I would like sit out on the porch for
[11:34]half an hour and just write a scene, any scene. And I had no dream of them cohering into anything.
[11:42]I had no idea where they were coming from or what they would be. I was just writing scenes.
[11:47]I chose a woman at the center of it simply for like as a practical clutch so that I would
[11:53]remember to just not write about myself. So I could every time I went into a scene, I could be like,
[11:58]all right, Dan, this isn't you. This is this totally different character you're inventing.
[12:02]And I did that for three or four years and then I had like 150 pages and that I looked at all of it
[12:07]and put my editor hat on and said, okay, if this was a novel, how would it work? How would you put it
[12:16]together? How would how would it fit together? And from that, that is where vintage contemporaries
[12:21]came from. It came from a bunch of scenes I wrote in the 90s in New York and the 2000s in New York
[12:25]and I didn't know how they went together. And finally, I just decided, you know what? I'm just going
[12:29]to say they're all the same character and go for it. Wow. That's so cool. It's cool, but I would also not
[12:34]recommend it as a technique because it means it ends up taking you like six or seven years to write
[12:39]a book. At my age, who has that kind of time? It's cool that it worked out. Let me say that.
[12:43]Right. Yeah. It's great. I'm not, I'm going to try to maybe write the next one faster.
[12:50]No, it's, you know, I feel like people when they're writing and they have on these moments where
[12:55]they're like, I'm just going to do this. They put themselves under so much pressure. Like, well,
[12:59]I don't know what this is going to be. So it's nothing, but it turned out it's not nothing. Like,
[13:04]it couldn't be something. Part of the point is that you can just decide that it's something.
[13:10]Yeah. Right. You can decide that the thing that you're working on is a book, whether it really
[13:14]is or not. And then that is the future that you are making for yourself. And it just, you just need
[13:20]to do a shit load of work to make it happen. Wait. Take me back. Where are like, how did you get into
[13:25]this industry to begin with? Where are you from? Like, were you a big reader and like, what were
[13:29]you like in high school and just give me like more of a background here? I like I'm grew up in
[13:34]Wisconsin. I like I'm a very fast reader and that did define my childhood. We diverged then
[13:39]later because I didn't end up in New York till much later in my life. While I was doing an MFA
[13:43]in fiction, I worked for a literary agency in Washington, D.C. And I think kind of really flopped.
[13:49]It both of those things. I flopped at my MFA and I flopped at that literary agency. And then I
[13:54]sort of went out into the world and just tried to write. I wanted to be writing arts criticism.
[14:00]I wanted to be reporting. I wanted to be doing journalism of some kind. And I eventually found
[14:06]to Slate magazine, which where I've been working for 11 years now as an editor and writer.
[14:11]And I've sort of carved out a niche for myself at that magazine writing about culture and
[14:15]parenting and stuff that I'm interested in. But I definitely remember those days in my 20s when I
[14:23]was flailing and trying to figure out what it is I could possibly be good at after a whole
[14:29]teenage hood spent being really, really good at reading fast and not understanding that
[14:34]only in some fields is that a marketable skill. How fast are we talking here?
[14:40]Well, I'm having a metrics associated with this. I've never done a page per minute deal.
[14:46]But I definitely can knock off a solid length novel in a couple of hours. And amazingly,
[14:52]my daughter, who's now 17, reads so much faster than me that I now ask her the same thing my
[14:59]parents asked me what I would be like, okay, I'm done with this book. I like grill her.
[15:03]Oh yeah, what happens in that book? What happens in the middle? What happens to this character?
[15:07]And she always knows. She just reads really freaking fast. It is evident to me that though I
[15:12]haven't necessarily seen it, my brain is clearly deteriorating, being subsumed into hers and she is
[15:18]stolen all my power. I've actually found that the speed of reading is not fixed. It's like a
[15:25]variable skill. I have sped up. The more I've read the last few years, I mean, I've always read
[15:31]quickly myself. But the more and more I read and the more I work at it, the faster I get running,
[15:36]not that I'm getting any faster run. Yes, you're training in a way. It also varies, of course,
[15:41]according to what you're reading and your engagement with the material, certain kinds of books fly,
[15:45]certain kinds of books are work. And that work isn't always bad. Sometimes it can be really
[15:51]rewarding, but it's a totally different experience. But yeah, for those of us who have sort of
[15:55]always thought of ourselves as reading people, often we share that that weird skill of just being
[16:01]able to process stuff fast. And that meant that from an early age, that was the thing we were good at,
[16:07]right? Like I think of the friends I had in high school who were just natural athletes.
[16:12]They were always rewarded for that instantly from a very young age. People said, oh, you're so
[16:17]you're so great at baseball or you have such a great army or so fast. I was fast, but only with
[16:21]a book in front of me. I was very slow and every other capacity. Well, most of those people have
[16:26]slowed down anyway. As have I. All our bodies become decrepit in different ways. That's just the way it
[16:32]goes. Oh my gosh, that's really funny. So you also podcast, as I do, obviously, because here we are,
[16:40]tell me about getting into podcasting and also podcasting with your daughter. Tell me about that.
[16:45]Well, the magazine at Work at Slate was a real forerunner in the podcasting revolution. We had one
[16:49]of the first commercial podcasts ever released. And so when parenting young children had completely
[16:54]taken over my life as it does for basically anyone who has any kid between like zero and 12.
[17:01]I thought this is the thing I'm thinking about the most. This is all I want to talk about.
[17:04]Slate needs a parenting podcast. So I pitched one at Slate and they said, sure, and I launched it
[17:09]with Allison Benedict two was then at Slate. And she's now at the opinion section of the New York
[17:13]Times. And for many years, we every week would just get together and talk about our triumphs and
[17:18]fails as parents. Talk about what was in the news, answer questions from listeners, and it really
[17:23]connected us to this amazing community, an amazing supportive, and sometimes critical community of
[17:29]other parents out there who are having the same struggles as us and who are all struggling most of
[17:35]all not to judge each other too harshly because that is the thing that every parent wants to do
[17:41]but that we were really trying to steer clear from. And then a couple of years ago in the middle of
[17:46]the pandemic, my daughter and I have two daughters and we were all going completely insane stuck
[17:50]inside the house. And so I suggested to my older daughter, let's launch a podcast. I've got this
[17:56]microphone. I got this stuff. We like watching movies. We like talking about movies. Let's just launch
[18:03]a podcast. So we did. It's called You Pick Tonight. In each show, she picks a movie for us to watch
[18:08]and I pick a movie for us to watch. And then we argue about them, which is how we end up, for example,
[18:12]having a whole show where I have to come to grips with the fact that she doesn't think
[18:16]eternal sunshine of the spotless mind is a particularly good movie. And I need her to like
[18:22]explain Akira to me. I feel like I have to do that with my kids and TV shows. We have to like
[18:30]balance the, what is the one watching Lego masters? I don't know. I have younger kids and older
[18:35]kids, but yeah, we have the older kids face off against the younger kids for which kids
[18:40]were watching all the time. Maybe I should have the two of them do. The two groups of them do podcast.
[18:44]I don't know. Right. So the older kids explain things to the younger kids and then the older
[18:47]kids are shocked to discover that in fact, the younger kids could explain things to them as well.
[18:52]Very true. They do not actually know everything as I have unfortunately learned recently.
[18:57]Did you always, when you were editing and writing and all of that, was this novel? And I know
[19:04]you referenced this earlier, was it in the background or was it very much like this is like how big
[19:10]a dream was this? Are we talking like to write a novel? It was a huge dream, but it was one that I
[19:15]did absolutely zilch about between the ages of 23 and 40. Like I finished my MFA. I like
[19:21]abandoned a novel halfway through that process. And in the end, just was like, I'm just going to
[19:25]take a bunch of the stories that wrote for workshops and say they're a collection and that's my
[19:30]thesis. And that I didn't write a single word, a fiction, or really even think about writing fiction
[19:36]other than in my head saying, God, I can't believe I'm not writing any fiction until I turn 40.
[19:41]I just had like I had too much going on. And I was too invested in this idea of myself as a guy
[19:48]who had really blown it. It is one chance to write fiction full time, right? I done an MFA.
[19:53]I'd taken out all these fucking loans. And then all I learned at the end of it was that I couldn't
[20:00]like a hip edgy, intense novel with characters like having weird sex and being mean to each other.
[20:06]The thing that I thought was like a literary novel at that point. And one of the reasons that I
[20:11]finally was able to write something was abandoning that idea of the novel I'm supposed to write
[20:17]or realizing that there are things I like to write better and that I'm better at writing and
[20:22]that I'm better at being funny and writing nice characters and putting them in funny situations
[20:30]and writing books in which friendships matter and all the sex is somewhat wholesome.
[20:35]There's always your next book, you know, you can try again. Right, I don't know that every book
[20:39]is going to be like that, but realizing that a book could be like that. And that didn't mean
[20:44]that it wasn't literary. And it didn't mean it was a lesser book. And it was dumb that it took me
[20:49]so long to realize that about my own writing. You know, I had been reading Lori Cohen and Eleanor
[20:54]Lipman and novelist who do this. I've been reading them for years and loving them, loving what
[20:59]those books did to my brain and my emotions. But yet I had this vision of myself as well. I could
[21:05]never, I would never write something like that. And like getting over myself and my idea of what
[21:11]a novel should be if I write it was basically what I had to do. I do feel that it's this like maybe
[21:18]not so unspoken, but pressure when you're in dealing with the literary world at all. Like
[21:25]that it has to be more literary. Like I tried to write, I've written, I just wrote a novel
[21:31]in my own voice, finally, that was like so much easier. Right. But I tried to write, I even
[21:35]wrote like an entire prose poem for a novel. And like what was I doing? I know it was not good.
[21:41]But it's like we all have to try. I'm like, well, this must, I can write a literary sentence,
[21:45]like this must be what I'm supposed to do. But no, right? It takes a while to learn.
[21:50]And it takes a while to learn that literary does not necessarily mean the same thing as like
[21:56]groundbreaking or difficult. Right. Like there are groundbreaking difficult books that I love,
[22:02]but there are also books that feel like warm baths that are still literary, that still explore
[22:09]characters, emotions and politics in new and surprising ways. They just part of their goal is
[22:17]not to make you feel bad. And that is like a totally legitimate structure for a literary novel.
[22:22]But it, you know, just to me a while to get over myself and realize that.
[22:27]And so are you working on a new novel? And what is that a bad? I mean, you feel free to give
[22:31]my editor a call and let her know that you're on board. But my editor is looking at a second
[22:36]novel from me right now and trying to decide whether to buy it or not. Seriously? Go on.
[22:40]Oh, yeah. We're, yeah. We're right in the thick of it. It was my option book. I don't,
[22:43]you know, your listeners may or may not know that when you sign a book contract, usually it
[22:47]involves the same publisher getting the first look at the next thing you write. And so I wrote a
[22:53]novel, a second novel, much quicker. I'm happy to say in the run up to this one being published
[22:57]because I so desperately wanted to think of or do anything else other than stress out about this
[23:02]novel. That was what gave me the impetus to actually write something this time. And she has it.
[23:08]It is indeed totally different. I would not say it's intense and gritty, but it does have
[23:13]monsters and it's set among a bunch of 12 year old boys. So that's an extremely different vibe.
[23:19]And I had to tap into a very different sense of character than I did with these
[23:24]young and middle-aged, very intelligent women who hardly ever make fart jokes.
[23:30]Well, good luck with, good luck with the editor. Feel free to send it over to me.
[23:37]I'll let her know. Oh my goodness. Sarah, I'll say the entire audience of this podcast is begging
[23:45]for this novel. 100%. Yeah, built-in audience. You're good. You're good for life. I mean, you know.
[23:52]So what, what are you reading right now? Like what's on your bedside table?
[23:55]I just finished Eleanor Caton's new book, Burnham Wood. She wrote the luminaries about 10 years ago.
[24:01]She became the youngest person to win the Booker Prize. She's a New Zealander. I lived in New
[24:05]Zealand for a while with my family and wrote a book about the trip that included that stay.
[24:10]I really love New Zealand. I love New Zealand literature and I totally loved Burnham Wood.
[24:16]Eleanor Caton's new book, which unlike the luminaries is set in the present in this instant,
[24:21]it is a techno thriller, an eco thriller about a gorilla gardening group who get mixed up with
[24:28]an Elon Musk-esque American billionaire who's making a panic room bolt hole for himself
[24:35]in the wilds of the South Island of New Zealand. It's got guns. It's got murders. It's got drones.
[24:40]It's got great character work. It's totally, it's totally great ride. I love this book. I had a
[24:46]a great time reading it. Have you read it? I have not, but I have it. I have it. Super fun.
[24:50]I know. Everybody's recommending it. I have to get to it. I know. I feel terrible about it.
[24:55]And she's great. She's like, she's now written three books. Each one of them insanely different
[25:00]from the last one. What they all share, which is a thing that I don't have at all, but maybe I
[25:05]could learn from is they share a really amazing sense of structure. She is a writer who goes into
[25:13]knowing the structure, like the luminaries was literally built around the Zodiac. That was the structure
[25:18]she gave herself. Burn them wood is in ways that I won't spoil, built around McBeth. That is the
[25:23]structure she gave herself. And she has said in interviews, like it's so useful and freeing to give
[25:30]yourself that structure because, you know, when you're stuck, you can always go back to the source
[25:35]and say, all right, what does this give me? You know, you are obviously still making things up,
[25:39]you're still inventing, but you have this like backstop behind you. So whenever you're a little
[25:45]bit lost, or maybe the right metaphor is a map, whenever you're a little bit lost, you have a map
[25:50]that helps suggest the next place to go. Interesting. Cool. And what are you most excited about
[25:56]that you're working on now at Slate? Is there a piece coming out or what are you excited about?
[26:00]Oh, my editors and bosses are so delighted that you asked. I am writing a piece right now
[26:08]about the second most popular play performed in American high schools. It is insanely popular.
[26:16]It's been produced hundreds of times around the country in the last couple of years.
[26:19]And unless your child is a high school student, you almost certainly have never heard of this play.
[26:25]It is an unauthorized Harry Potter parody called Puffs, which is about the seven years of Harry
[26:32]Potter's Hogwarts experience as seen through the eyes of the Huffle Puffs. It is extremely funny,
[26:39]totally delightful, enjoyable, and like a legitimate theatrical hit, like a show that that any theater
[26:48]kid growing up in America today probably knows and loves, but the entire generation above them
[26:54]basically has no idea that this play even exists. And so I'm writing about high school theater and
[26:58]how that ecosystem works and how it is that a show can be a monster hit in that universe
[27:04]and be essentially totally unknown in a different universe. Was this like inside Intel from your
[27:08]daughters? My daughter was in a production of Puffs this fall. Yes. And I was like, what the hell
[27:13]is this? Like I, you know, I write about theater. I was a theater critic in New York City. Like
[27:18]I never heard of it. It was so funny and charming. And I was like, surely this, we must be the
[27:25]first school that's ever done this. And then I looked it up and it's like, clue is number one
[27:29]and Puffs is number two among American ice schools. It's like done everywhere. That's so funny.
[27:34]Oh my gosh. Last question. But what do people get wrong about you? Like what's a misperception?
[27:41]Like what do people think about you that actually is not true? They think I'm cool, but I'm not at
[27:47]all. No, no, no, I'm thankful. That's not actually a misperception anyone has. I don't know. I actually
[27:53]think I put what seems to me at least to be a fairly open and correct version of myself out
[28:02]into the world. Like social media, I think accurately reflects both my best and worst qualities.
[28:10]So I don't think anyone is fooled into thinking I'm actually like nice all the time or not super
[28:16]judgey or mean sometimes. But I would say if I had to say one thing, I think people usually assume
[28:23]that I'm like five, three, but actually I'm just regular, I'm like five, nine. Okay.
[28:29]But I have like short guy energy, I think. Did you see the thing in the near post today about
[28:35]all these parents giving their kids growth hormones and how that's all the rage?
[28:41]We are definitely like two years away from parents sending their kids in for that like
[28:45]like breaking like extension surgery that costs $40,000 and only occasionally works.
[28:50]But the parenting universe has completely been honest right now as you know.
[28:55]As I know, I know. My son's like, hey, can I get this? I'm like five, seven. And I'm like,
[29:00]you're amazing. What are you talking about? I'm five, too. How tall do you think you're going to be?
[29:03]You know, so anyway, oh, well, we get what we get and we don't set the great lesson of parenting.
[29:11]Anyway, well, thanks for coming on the podcast and thanks for vintage contemporaries. So great
[29:17]and hope to stand up. Thanks so much, Libby. I had a great time. Okay, take care. Bye bye.
[29:23]Thanks for listening to this episode of Moms Don't Have Time to Read Books. Don't forget to
[29:27]follow me on Instagram at zebi Owens and at Moms Don't Have Time to Read Books. Also sign
[29:32]up for my newsletter at zebiowens.com and sign up for my virtual book club and meet lots of authors
[29:37]on zoom every other week. Thanks so much to Steve and Ryan at Textures Sound for the Sound Editing
[29:42]and thank you to Morning Moon Productions for providing this fantastic intro and outro music.