Ann Napolitano, DEAR EDWARD

[2:17]Zibby Owens: Hi. I'm Zibby Owens, and you're listening to moms don't have time to read books. This thirty minute podcast features a new author interviewed by me every single day, three hundred and sixty five days a year for about thirty minutes. I am also the publisher for Zippy Books, which publishes 12 books a year in fiction and memoir. Our books are already out now. You can check it out on zippybooks.com. And we have a magazine called Zippy Mag where we have lots of wonderful essays and lifestyle features. That's at zippymag.com. We have classes at zippyclasses.com. And I recently opened a bookstore in LA called Zibby's Bookshop at 1113 Montana Avenue at 11th Street in Santa Monica. I hope that you are able to enjoy some of our other offerings, but this here podcast is the basis of all of it and started in 2018, and no matter what I do, this is basically my favorite thing. Enjoy. This weekend, I'm re releasing my episode with Anne Napolitano for her book Dear Edward. Now her book Hello Beautiful is Oprah's book pick, topping all the charts, and I'm so excited for her. And after you listen to this interview that I did with her, you will be rooting for her in a whole new way than you were before. For anyone who has read Hello Beautiful or is reading it now or who read Dear Edward or who watched the show or any of it, check out this episode with Anne and root for her too. I'm here today with Anne Napolitano who's the author of Dear Edward which is a December 2019 book of the month club pick, a January Today Show hashtag read with Jenna pick, and the Barnes and Noble January pick among many others. She's also the author of novels A Good Hard Look and Within Arm's Reach. She is the associate editor of One Story Literary Magazine. And in 2019, she was long listed for the Simpson Joyce Carol Oates Literary Prize. Anne received her MFA from New York University and has taught fiction writing at NYU, Brooklyn College, and Gotham Writers' Workshop. She currently lives in Brooklyn with her husband and two children. Welcome, Anne. Thanks for coming on. Moms don't have time to read books. Thank you for having me. Of course. Dear Edward, huge sensation already. Read with Jenna, Today Show pick, Barnes and Noble, won our Book of the Month Club, Books A Million.

[4:36]Anne Napolitano: So amazing. I know. It's very exciting and strange.

[4:40]Zibby Owens: Congratulations. Thank you. And I'm not at all surprised because it's so good. You've spent eight years writing it. So tell listeners

[4:49]Anne Napolitano: what Dear Edward is about. It is about a 12 year old boy named Edward who is the sole survivor of a plane crash. And there's two storylines in the book. So the book starts with Edward and his family, his brother and his parents, and several other passengers that we get to know boarding a flight in Newark Airport, which is bound for LAX. And at the end of the first chapter, the flight takes off. And then the second chapter starts later that same day after that plane has crashed. And Edward wakes up in the hospital and he's the sole survivor. And for the rest of the book, you alternate I alternate the two timelines. So we do the arc of the crash or the flight and the crash, and then the arc of Edward's life after the crash and how he figures out how to go on. So, what inspired you to write this book and come up with the story for this? You had said you'd never thought you would write about a plane crash. Tell me how this all came about. Yeah. I'm a I'm a nervous flyer to begin with and I also, fictionally, both as a reader and a writer, I generally tend to gravitate towards quieter stories. I don't I don't read thrillers generally or things with explosions or crashes. So it's unlikely in all manner of speak. But in 2010, I became obsessed with a story that was in the news, and there was a real plane crash. There was a flight from South Africa bound for London, and it crashed in Libya. And there was only one survivor, and it was a nine year old boy, a Dutch boy. And they found him still buckled into his seat like a half mile away from the rest of the wreckage. And he had a punctured lung and a broken leg, but he was otherwise fine. And everyone else in the flight including his parents and his brother had died immediately. And obviously, it was it was so sad. And they had a picture of him in the hospital and he looked so like beautiful and broken and small. And I was like, how could this boy go on? Like how do you go on from that? He just lost everyone that he loved his whole life. His aunt and uncle came and adopted him and they did an amazing job of protecting his privacy like from the first minute. So I couldn't know that he was gonna be alright. And so very quickly, knew that I was gonna have to write a version of this story and try and create a set of circumstances in which a little boy could be okay. Like a way that with the kindness of others sort of propelling him and the passage of time that he would find a place where he wasn't ruined by what happened to him, but he was rebuilt. Your sons were one and three at the time that you wrote this book and are now 10 and 12. How do you think the relationship between your boys affected the relationship that you wrote about in this book between Edward and his brother? I wasn't conscious of it at the time, but obviously seeing this little boy in the hospital and then having two little boys at home was part of the emotional connection I had to this story. The other part that I became aware of was that so there were my sons were one and three. I feel like when they're that age, they're like drunk bear cubs. Like they're not really people yet, they're just kind of like tumbling all over the place and one of them is wearing a bucket on their head and the other one is like sobbing over something you can't even understand what they're talking about. And your job is to like keep them alive until they have a little more sense and to laugh at them and kiss them because they're adorable. But they're ridiculous and you don't really know about who they're gonna be as people at that age. They get a bit older, you can start seeing like what their skill sets are or what their person disposition is. But when they're one and three, the one the only thing that I really knew about them was that they were deeply in love with each other. And husband and I have nothing to do with that and they're still deeply in love with each other. It's kind of like unusual. Feel like when my younger son was born, was for my older son, was like they're being reunited instead of introduced. They just are sort of soulmates, although I don't like that term. So as I started writing about Dear Edward in that world, their love sort of baked into the story. I think before I had children, or maybe even if I didn't have the children that I have, I would have thought that the loss of the parents would have been the most searing blow. But I realized that it actually was the loss of his brother because he loved him so deeply and also you're meant to grow up with your sibling. We leave our parents when we go to college or you know, have our adult lives where that's part of the natural progression, but you're not supposed to lose the you know, your brother or sister. So that love love and that loss really sort of baked itself into the story. It took you eight years to write this book. Tell me about the process that was involved and how you structured both the plot and the character development during that time. My husband had challenged me. The book before this, another novel called A Good Hard Look, took seven years. And in that book, I always had considered myself an intuitive writer. So like I would start with a scene and then someone would walk in the room and say something that surprised me, as well as you know, hopefully the reader. So it was like an act of discovery as I wrote, which I love. It's so fun and and it's like 75% of why writing is this really interesting exciting experience. But when I was moving like that, I ended up writing just many many scenes, many many hundreds of pages that I ended up cutting because I was sort of like muddle my way, feeling my way through the book. So my husband suggested that I take a year before or as the first part of writing this new book, a year where I didn't write but I only researched and took notes and thought. Because actually when I write, it's like a very, as I said, intuitive but like emotional experience. And my brain kind of switches off. So it's very hard for me to like come up with you know, critical or analytical or plot ideas while I'm writing. So I spent a year just using my brain, which was really challenging because I love writing pretty sentences and all I really wanted to do was like dive in and start writing. But it was extremely helpful. So I interviewed a career pilot, I did I had to figure out why my plane crashed So and I as I said, I'm I'm not a plane expert. I never thought I would write about a plane crash, so I had to learn a lot. I read a lot of National Transportation Safety Board reports and black box recordings and articles about plane crashes. And then the plane, knowing that I had these passengers and that they could be anyone because everyone flies, so I could have very different characters than I could have if I was writing about a neighborhood or a set of friends. So that was actually really exciting. So I sort of consciously chose very different people and then I read books and spoke to people for each one. Like Crispin Cox is the octogenarian billionaire who's on the flight, and I read Jack Welch's Straight From the Gut Mhmm. Which is really funny. It's not supposed to be funny, but it's very funny. He has like all this spunk and it's just a very entertaining book. So I read that for Crispin Cox, and then I read War by Sebastian Junger for the soldier that's on the plane, and I have a friend who's in the army that I spoke to. David Foster Wallace wrote a book about math called like Everything and Beyond that I read for the pure mathematician, and I also have a friend who's a pure mathematician, so I spoke to her. And then my husband had also challenged me to read outside of my normal genres that year, so it was like a whole year of experiment. And so I read during that year Neil Gaiman's The Sandman series. And reading that book and how Gaiman plays with time and space and all the boundaries are like gone for him in the most exhilarating way. And that made me create Florida, who's the pastor on the plane who believes that she's lived many lives. So it was all baked into that year. So by the time that I started writing, the plane sections came very easily for me, cause I knew so much already and also it had a beginning, middle and an end and they're they're trapped in a like silver bus. So like, only so much can happen. The stuff with Edward on the ground was what I wrote and rewrote the most. I knew that he was gonna be adopted by his aunt and uncle because that was what had happened to the real boy. And then I knew there was gonna be a girl his age who lived next door, and then he was gonna sleep on her floor. But that was all I knew for that when I started.

[12:37]Zibby Owens: Sorry for all the sirens here, by the way. I am so sorry. And if anyone's listening in their cars, the sirens are from my recording. You do not have to look behind you to see if there's a policeman chasing you. Anyway, my apologies. It's New York City. You did such a great job of capturing Edward's sense isolation and loneliness, especially being the sole survivor of this plane crash. Is there anything in your own life that has made you able to tap into these feelings so successfully? I had an experience when I was right after my junior year of college, I got sick with a virus called Epstein Barr. It's like a big mononucleosis

[13:10]Anne Napolitano: is the smaller version of it kind of. Epstein Barr is the umbrella that goes above that. And having been healthy my whole life and then healthy after that, I was sick for three years. And what it did basically is wipes out your immune system, so you catch like everything that comes near you. You get food poisoning all the time and it's not fun, I don't recommend it. When I so I got it after my junior year and I actually went back to college my senior year, but I took a half load of classes. It took me an extra year to finish college and I basically went back to college just so that I wouldn't be deeply depressed on my parents couch. Like, it was like more a social thing than an academic thing at that point because my brain was not I wasn't able to do the high level work that I had been doing at that point. But so I spent that year at college sort of pretending to be a 20 year old because I didn't have the energy. I would have like three hours of energy a day, so I would figure out where to dole it out. And then I would be with my friends and someone would say something and I would think, okay, I should laugh at that because that was a joke. Like, I I was I was not one with them, I was pretending to be one of them. And so for Edward, he's in a worse and similar situation where he's 12, but he's not a 12 year old anymore. Like if something that absolutely enormous happens to you, it removes you from being a kid, but he was literally still a kid, so he had to figure out how to behave as a 12 year old even though he didn't feel like one. So I felt I had had that experience before which which fit into it and was very helpful. And then, you know, I think all of us have, for us are terrible things happen to us that feel impossible to get over at the time, even if it's like a huge breakup or you know, the loss of a parent or you know, even if it's a grandparent who you love deeply dies. Know, whatever it is that rocks our foundation is completely individual. And we've all had those experiences. You include a lot of different people's stories. What inspires you to come up with all the different stories of all the different characters? Well, I think part of it is I've spent my whole life going on planes and trains, etcetera, and making up stories for the people around me. Like, I I find people innately fascinating. So if I go to like a music concert or something, I'll just make up stories about everyone who's on stage and like twice divorced or you know, like I don't you know, I don't necessarily know. So that's something that I love to do but also I feel like what ends up happening with the plane and and the opportunity that we all have around us all the time is to make connections. And that we we need to make connections. And the people who are on the plane, they don't know that they're going to die until the very end. So they're having a normal day in the sky, like they're flirting, they're taking pregnancy tests, they're worried about their sexuality, like they're they're going through their life in a very, you know, day to day way. And then whereas what's happening on the ground with, Edward is soaked in grief because the terrible thing has already happened. So I think that the people in the air were for instance, this woman in Florida befriends another woman, Linda, sitting next to her. And it's like there's there's real power in that connection because we know that their life's about to end and it's so meaningful and sweet that they've reached out to each other in what is for them a normal day. So I feel like it calls to the need for all of us to sort of not only notice the people around us, but like be open to having those small connections because they really do feed us. Today's episode is sponsored by Quince.

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[19:51]Zibby Owens: Talk

[19:51]Anne Napolitano: to me a little about how you can form an impression of somebody when you first meet them. That's like so interesting to me that you can meet someone and be like, oh, I do not like that person. But you're like, I literally just bet you, like what is happening with the electrons between us where I'm picking up something that's, know, antipathetic to who I am. Mhmm. Or that you meet someone and you're like, I wanna be friends with that person. You know, it's just so interesting. It makes life, you know, rich and fascinating. It's like there's all these emotional microfibers, you know, making up all the minutes of our lives. And if you become aware of them, it makes life more interesting, but it also I'm much quicker to love now. Like, like y'all meet someone like it's like I I met my editor and I was like, oh, I love her. Like and I don't even care if she loves me back like because it's it's like a such a boon for me to be filled with love. Whereas when I was younger, used to I used to like get stuck on like, know, do they like me? Am I Is my hair look weird? Like, am I talking strangely? Am I talking too much? You know, like all these sort of thoughts, but all the like emotional tracks in me now feel like, I think largely just because of aging, are cleared out. So like, I will meet someone and very quickly be like, oh, I love that person. And like, what a benefit to me. I don't even care if they love me back. You know, because I'm the one who benefits from the love. And I think the open endedness that you have Edward feeling,

[21:14]Zibby Owens: what is your path? Like, feels like he needs because he survived, right? That he's been he has something more to that he has to do in life, right? Like, there must be a reason I've been chosen, what should I do? And really, as you point out, he just has to live his life. Yeah. Like that he just he doesn't have to follow a certain path and like that none of us have a path that we have to really

[21:37]Anne Napolitano: Well, he's in this like very stark situation where he's the sole survivor and one hundred and ninety one people died and so all the spotlight is on him. But in truth, that same spotlight exists on all of us. He has to figure out how he wants to live his life and who he wants to be and how he wants to connect and love and what that looks like for him. And it's only because of the sort of barren landscape that he stepped out of that everyone's paying attention to that. But we all have the same onus on each one of us. And to be like, this person's more important than this person is completely untrue.

[22:13]Zibby Owens: Did writing this book make you a less nervous flyer? You have a quote in there about how it's all it's so normal to all of us that we're we're just sitting in the sky. Yeah. That's just part of our daily lives. Do you feel any better about it or do you feel like all the research you did on flying makes you

[22:28]Anne Napolitano: less confident or I have like a list of planes that I prefer to fly on that like my publishing house has. Yeah. If you could just email those to me. I just say, don't think anyone needs to know this kind of information. I know a lot now, but I feel actually pretty much the same as I did before. It is the thing where I think I was always like, oh my god, we are a bus in the sky. Like, and that's amazing. So it's amazing that humans invented such a thing, and that it works, and that we do it casually, all day long, all year long. But I'm also hyper aware that I'm in a bus in the sky, which is not I don't think it's like I don't think we should feel comfortable in that situation. But it did not you know, it didn't give me a phobia. I also I'm just more aware of the people around me even than I was before. So I find it all interesting. Did you always know you wanted to be a writer? Yes. Basically, in fourth grade, you would get those vocab lists that that would get sent home, the the list of words, and there was one week in fourth grade where the teacher said, now I want you to write them into sentences that connect. They're like all part of one thing, which had never happened before. And I sat down to write the homework and I finished it and I looked up and I thought five minutes had passed and forty minutes had passed. And that was the first time as a child I had ever experienced time disappearing not in play. And I was just like I just remember thinking like, this is magic. Like, time just went away and I was doing homework like and so like, I think the next day I started writing a novel about a wartime orphan. And then that I wrote about 15 pages, and then I wrote about a wartime nurse. So like and that also was about 15 pages. I think I had, like, very serious literary aspirations from the first minute. I thought it had to be during wartime in order for it to be, like, a serious piece of work. And then, that was always what I wanted to do. And have you always been drawn to fiction only? Yeah, I can't even write short stories, they just got longer and longer. So, I mean, there are pros and cons to all of that. It just means that also, I never published anything until I was 30 years old even though that it was my main preoccupation. I worked as a personal assistant. I mean, I went to graduate school. I, you know, I I was making a living, but I didn't publish anything for that long because I could not write stories, and my first two novels that I wrote didn't get published. So it wasn't until the third novel that I wrote that was published when I was 30 or 31. How did you regroup after those rejections and just sit down and write another book? The first novel I wrote was during graduate school, and I think it's it was terrible. I mean, I think I think for many people and certainly for me, had to write a book in order to figure out how to write a book. Like, there's no way to just know how to write a novel, like the pacing and the just how long it is and how it works. And that one was rejected by like 80 agents. And so I put it in a drawer. And then I finished graduate school and I was working as personal assistant and I wrote another novel. And that one I got an agent for, but she couldn't sell it. So I ended up putting that one in a drawer. And at that point, I got depressed. I was like 28 years old or something like that, 27 maybe. And I had never published anything. I'd built my whole life around. I was working as a personal assistant so that I had time to write. It wasn't like that was a career track or whatever for me. And my father was sending me pamphlets for law school in the mail. And I realized that the only way out of my depression was writing. So like, I I started writing again to feel less depressed. And at that time, I realized that I was gonna write for the rest of my life whether I published or not, and at that point I assumed I wouldn't. But that's like huge weight lifted because I realized that it was part of me. And even to this day, I mean, I won't stop writing because I am not like a whole human being if I'm not writing. So, you know, it took the choice away from me, which was good. And I'm interested how at the beginning of our conversation, you were talking about how your husband insisted, you know, suggested you do this year and all this. Tell me about his relationship to your writing and how you two work together, how great to have some sort of like a personal coach of your time and everything. What's that like? Would love to hear that. He doesn't well, so I have two writers that I'm Helen Ellis and Hannah Tinti, who wrote The 12 Lives of Samuel Holly and The Good Thief. We met in graduate school, and we've been each other's first readers since then. So that's like twenty two years or something like that. So they are the only ones who read my work, like say for Dear Edward, for like seven and a half years, they were the only ones who read it. Then I gave it to my agent and my husband, like at the end. So my husband is very helpful with like big picture issues. If I have a problem I wanna talk through, then he is very helpful in that way. And he also he's very helpful in looking at and being like a problem solver, whereas I'm more like in the muck. Is he in the literary world at all? No, he used to be a filmmaker and now he's a tutor. So he's very like academically he's brainy, which is not like where my brain is. So, it's a very helpful combination. And I read on your Instagram about your daily routine and how you sit in your kitchen and have like an oat milk latte or all the rest of it. I kept reading and I'm like, oh, she's like so healthy. She's having like oat milk and a vegan muffin, and this is like so Brooklyn of her. It's like the whole thing. Very, very Brooklyn. So, you always like to write in your kitchen while the boys are at school? Yeah, I mean, that's the ideal, but I mean, ever since I had kids, I write wherever I need to and whenever I need to. I've become much more flexible. I mean, I used to write every morning first thing and then, like, not let myself leave my apartment until I'd written, what, three pages or something like that. And I would like hang little carrots for myself, you know, through the day to get things done, but none of that exists anymore. But I mean, now I I think then I was like, it was younger and I I was more nervous about it and more ambitious in wanting to like have a finished product and and have it be published. And for this book, I loved writing this book even though it was very sad. Like it was a joyful period for me in the work, I think a lot of it was just that I realized how much I love writing. And I let myself love writing without worrying about it. So that also lifted other restrictions where it didn't matter where I was or what time it was. Although, I can't write at night. I have no brain.

[28:35]Zibby Owens: I am or morning Yeah. Person. Do you feel like having a 12 year old son as this book is coming out about a 12 year old boy is just like It's so sweet. I had it only occurred to me recently that he was 12, and he

[28:48]Anne Napolitano: came to both my readings this week. My the ten year old came to the first one and then was like, I'd rather go to soccer practice than go to the second one. But the 12 year old is like very excited. It feels so nice. I mean, it just obviously worked out that way. And it is like it's a really lovely age, think, where there's still children, but they're on the cusp of and they're so interested in adults and at least he is, and what we're talking about and, you know, getting information from us so that he understands the world better. And it feels very sweet to walk Edward into the world with my son, Maliki, sort of cheering. It's so nice. It is nice. And what do you have coming next? Are you working on anything else? I'm in the first year process for the second book where I'm not letting myself write. Actually, it'll be like a year in February or March. So I'm taking notes and thinking and researching, and I think Edward and Shay are in it, it's ten years later. Oh,

[29:42]Zibby Owens: that's exciting. We'll see. We'll see. Yeah. Do

[29:45]Anne Napolitano: you have any advice for aspiring authors? Well, when I was young, there was really only MFA programs. Now, that's no longer the case. There's so many great classes that you can take. I mean, I think what I would urge is for people to find a community, a writing community of some kind, Even if it's one or two other people, like Helen and Hannah have been the most important part of my writing development, and I have you know, I met them in an MFA program. But now you can take classes. One Story where I work has online classes and in person classes. There's Gotham Writers Workshop. There's Saket Street. There's Catapult. There's a lot of sort of national, not just in New York programs where you can take like a five week workshop. And it's so important to have other people read your work and to read other people's work. You can learn so much in that dynamic. So I think a lot of people close themselves off because they're worried that it's not good and they just do it by themselves for like fifteen years. And you can make so much more progress if you allow other people into that space. So I would urge you, if you think it's terrible, that's fine. Like I was terrible, we're all terrible. My dear Edward was terrible in the beginning. You have to keep going and having other people look at it and like tell you the truth about it is I think the most helpful thing. Well, thank you for coming on the show, and congratulations

[31:00]Zibby Owens: on all the success already, just even in the beginning of this launch month. So I feel so honored to have talked to you because this book is really one of my favorites. Thank you so much for having me on. This was very nice. Thanks 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.