Caitlin Shetterly, PETE AND ALICE IN MAINE
[0:02]Hi, I'm Zippy Owens and you're listening to moms don't have time to read books.
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[1:03]Caitlin Shatterley is the author of Pete and Alice in Maine, a novel.
[1:07]Caitlin is the author of Modify and Made for You and Me and the editor of the best-selling
[1:13]fault lines stories of divorce.
[1:15]Her work has been featured in The New York Times, The New York Times Magazine, Orion
[1:19]L. Self, and on Oprah.com as well as on this American life and various other public
[1:24]radio shows.
[1:26]She is the editor-in-chief of French Lee, a French arts and culture online news magazine.
[1:31]A main native.
[1:32]She graduated with honors from Brown University and now lives with her two sons and husband
[1:36]in her home state.
[1:37]Pete and Alice in Maine is her first novel.
[1:40]Welcome, Caitlin.
[1:41]Thank you so much for coming on mom's don't have time to read books to discuss, Pete
[1:45]and Alice in Maine.
[1:46]Thank you for having me so much.
[1:48]Mom's also don't have time to promote books.
[1:50]It turns out.
[1:51]But I'm coming from a sweaty run, but it's going to be on here and it's so nice to meet
[1:58]you in person.
[1:59]I love the thoughtful things you said about my book, but also just about all books.
[2:04]It means so much to me to read the things you say, because I can tell you really care,
[2:09]and that doesn't happen that much in the world these days.
[2:12]Thank you.
[2:13]I do care.
[2:14]Probably too much.
[2:15]I'm like, what am I even doing with myself?
[2:17]I'm like, what are you reading a ton.
[2:20]I am reading a ton.
[2:21]I know, but I love it.
[2:22]This happened to have been one book that I carried with me on every trip for so long,
[2:27]just meeting it out.
[2:29]I didn't want it to end, like little bits, and so I've been writing it.
[2:32]Sometimes I read in one fell swoop, but this I read over time, and so I feel like I've
[2:36]really gotten to know your character so well, and that I'm friends with them, and I
[2:41]read for them.
[2:42]Anyway, so Pete and Alice are my buds.
[2:44]Why don't you tell listeners what your book is about?
[2:47]It's about a couple that comes to Maine to their second house in Maine, just as COVID
[2:52]descends on New York City.
[2:55]Are the kind of people who are lucky enough to have a second house to retreat to, and
[3:00]they come, and all is not necessarily well in their marriage and in their family, but
[3:06]they're suddenly thrown back together again, and they're stuck in the house, and the neighbors
[3:11]in Maine are not exactly pleased that these New Yorkers have come perhaps carrying COVID
[3:17]right there in March of 2020.
[3:20]I wrote it, I'm born and raised in Maine.
[3:22]I don't have a second house anywhere, but I wrote it because there were all these license
[3:28]plates coming in at the beginning of COVID that we'd see when we were outside of going
[3:34]for a run or a walk or whatever, with Massachusetts plates or New York plates or the New
[3:38]Jersey plates, and at first it was upsetting to those of us who are manors.
[3:43]We're actually a poor state, if you take the whole state into account, not just the coast,
[3:49]which is more affluent, and we don't have a lot of hospital beds.
[3:55]At that point, we didn't have very many ventilators, and many of us were really concerned.
[4:00]We didn't have enough toilet paper.
[4:01]They were meeting it out at the grocery store down the stairs, also down the stairs.
[4:08]Down the road, they were meeting it out at the back of the grocery store, two rolls
[4:12]to a family at design, and it was one of those moments where I think many of us thought
[4:17]how is this ever going to work to have this influx of people?
[4:21]Then this voice came to me in April of 2020.
[4:25]My husband was asleep, I was down at the fridge, and I was getting vitamins as we all were
[4:32]taking copious, fistful, some vitamins at that point in time, and this voice came out,
[4:38]and it was Alice.
[4:39]Literally the first two or three pages of the book just fell out, and I thought, oh, well,
[4:44]this is extremely inconvenient right now.
[4:47]I'm homeschooling my children, everybody's on top of each other.
[4:51]I am working on another book where I was supposed to be, and I thought, you know, this
[4:55]just isn't going to work.
[4:56]But I came up and I wrote down everything she said, I went to sleep next morning, the
[5:00]next page came out, and I thought, oh my God, and I said to my husband, I've been visited
[5:05]by this character, and she's talking to me, and he said, just write it down.
[5:09]So I did, and I started going, and what it really became was an exercise in empathy that
[5:14]you know, we might see these cars come in with license plates that aren't ours, right?
[5:19]This is an experience of difference and from away, but how do we be tolerant?
[5:25]How do we have empathy?
[5:26]We don't know what's behind those tinted glass windows necessarily.
[5:29]We don't know what's going on in those lives, and I wanted to know beyond COVID, what was
[5:35]making somebody want to come to Maine to find refuge, like what were they running from?
[5:41]And I feel like so many things were happening, you know, in the world at that time, we
[5:45]had had COVID, we had Trump as our president, the environmental disaster that's ongoing,
[5:53]and what tips the scales and what makes actually the COVID situation in exit hatch.
[6:00]So that's kind of where the book began and why I wrote it, and I loved writing it, and
[6:05]like you, those characters became friends for me.
[6:08]My friend Selena and I would go on walks, and we would like talk about Pete now, it's
[6:12]like, yeah, they lived up the road or something.
[6:14]And I still talk about them.
[6:16]Last night, I didn't know.
[6:17]I was like, well, Pete and Alice are now, they would, my older son's like, oh God, they
[6:21]aren't real, but we feel like they're real.
[6:24]So do you still hear their voices, like, what are they doing now?
[6:28]Do you know?
[6:29]Well, I'm trying to figure that out.
[6:31]You know, I realized I wasn't quite done with them, as you know, the book is on sort of
[6:36]a cliffhanger.
[6:37]Yep.
[6:38]And I wasn't done.
[6:39]And I felt like they were still in my head.
[6:42]And I had to get through all this sort of book stuff, you know, all that crazy time when
[6:46]you're writing essays and doing all these other things, and it feels very discombobulating.
[6:51]But this fall, when I sat down to write again, they came back out.
[6:55]And I realized there was more I wanted to discover with them.
[6:58]And also, I wanted to go back to those girls, they have two daughters, I have sons.
[7:03]So for me, this was, of course, I was a daughter, I have lots of female friends and
[7:08]I know daughters.
[7:09]But for me, this was kind of special because I almost got to create daughters and get
[7:15]to know them a little bit.
[7:16]And I really wanted to go back to those girls, especially Sophie as she's entering her
[7:19]teenage years.
[7:20]I wanted to follow that along a little bit and see what happens.
[7:24]So that's where I am now.
[7:25]So I say you're writing another conclusion, essentially, part two.
[7:30]I mean, you know, I love Elizabeth Strauss work, you know, that takes up with different
[7:35]characters.
[7:36]And John Uptike, who was one of my mentors and somebody who's writing, I just adored, he wrote
[7:42]the rabbit run books, of course, and the maple stories or Richard Ford's novels, it doesn't
[7:48]mean I don't want to write other things.
[7:49]Oh my gosh, there are so many other things I want to write.
[7:51]But I just, I could still hear these characters talking to me and fighting with each other
[7:56]in my head.
[7:58]I had to get them out first and then maybe I can go on to the next thing, love that.
[8:02]No, I love when characters have second lives.
[8:04]Like, you know, all in the family, it goes over to, you know, different strokes or something,
[8:09]you know, like in the, how you have like guest experiences and like you get to see them
[8:13]in different contexts.
[8:14]Like that's also really neat.
[8:15]Like, anyway.
[8:16]I think we all know, I think it's because, you know, that's how our lives work, right?
[8:21]Like a voice, a snapshot of a time usually and an event and there's usually some sort
[8:26]of crescendo.
[8:27]But truthfully, like lives go on.
[8:30]And I think the normal, the quotidian, the normalization of a life going on is very comforting
[8:35]for readers.
[8:36]It is for me anyway.
[8:37]I love it when I read Elizabeth Stroud and I realize, oh gosh, that's Lucy.
[8:40]Oh, that's that guy from that other book, you know, I just find that so sort of exciting.
[8:46]Yeah.
[8:47]Sort of it.
[8:48]Yeah.
[8:49]Recognition.
[8:50]Yeah.
[8:51]Anyway, talk about when you were writing, how and all the things that were going on and
[8:57]how you said it was so inconvenient.
[9:00]How did you actually fit this in?
[9:01]Because we can all imagine what that time was like in our various lives and being, you
[9:06]know, home and stressed and talk about like when you found the time and how you managed
[9:14]to carve it out and what even the act of writing did for you emotionally during that time.
[9:18]Yeah.
[9:19]That's a great, great question.
[9:21]Like so many mothers, parents, you know, it's so hard to find the time to do anything
[9:27]for yourself.
[9:28]Even that 10 minute run, you know, or do a few sit ups, whatever it is, make a separate
[9:33]dinner that isn't the same mac and cheese for the fourth night in a row or whatever.
[9:38]But you know, during that time, COVID gave me this unusual break, Zibi.
[9:42]It was like, I mean, it wasn't a break, but it strangely was a lot of the things that
[9:47]believers my life is how much driving I do.
[9:50]And that was suddenly wiped away, like taken out of my life.
[9:53]I find that driving is the biggest energy zap of my existence.
[9:58]I mean, there was a period left.
[10:00]year where I said to my husband, if I have to drive down 295, one more time, I am going to be so
[10:07]spiritually bankrupt by the first of June. I may have to just lie down for three weeks.
[10:12]You know, I just felt like it was sucking my life blood. And I think that those of us who, you know,
[10:18]driver, ferry our kids to activities and want to give them these rich lives, maybe even
[10:22]richer lives that we had, there's this great responsibility to ferry them lots of places and to be
[10:28]there with the water bottle and this and that. So immediately some time was made that way. My
[10:33]husband also was really excited about this story. I wrote the first chapter, thinking it would be a
[10:40]short story that I would send out to, you know, the five magazines that still take a short fiction
[10:46]and they would all say no. We would all be relieved and be able to move on. But I wrote it and I
[10:52]read it to my husband one night and it was like midnight. And he said, oh my god, what's happening now?
[10:59]And I said, well, no, I think you've misunderstood. Like this is down. That was a period. I'm over
[11:05]with this. Like that was a short story. And he said, no, no, no, I need to know what happens next. You
[11:09]got to write this for me. And he went downstairs and he got us each a glass of wine. And he made,
[11:14]we had four oysters that somebody had dropped off for us. And we never used oysters. But he
[11:19]like found this David Tanis recipe and fried them up and let me eat them. And he was, we
[11:24]sat on the couch and we talked about it. And he just gave me this pinch. Those basically like,
[11:28]I really think these characters like, you know, these are all the things that are going on and why
[11:33]I want to hear more. So I sat down to write the next thing thing. You know, people, this will be like
[11:38]a long short story. Hearts one and two of a short story. I have to see short stories do that.
[11:43]And then it was kind of like, okay, well, what happens after that? And I just kept going,
[11:48]one thing that COVID gave us, though I was homeschooling my kids, I mean, it was kind of funny because
[11:54]my kids did not do online school. They took one look and were like, no way. That is not for us.
[12:00]And I had one in preschool at the time. God, the other one, I guess was in fifth grade. But part of
[12:07]the reason they did that is that in late February when the, the flu was, the, the COVID was
[12:13]breaking out in China and other places. I had this feelings, thinking suspicion that, you know,
[12:17]globalization that would come here. But, you know, like everybody, I thought it was going to be a
[12:21]flu and it was going to be like two weeks. So I asked my kids casually one night, what would you
[12:26]want to do during those two weeks to say if we all got the flu and got sick, is there anything
[12:31]you might have to not go to school for a couple of weeks? My older one said French and French
[12:35]culture and my younger one said Egypt and Mummies. And so I went to the library because between
[12:41]three of us, we all had library cards and I got out 150 books on everything to do with Egypt,
[12:46]France, France, French culture, language, whatever. And I hid them under a blanket in my office.
[12:51]And so when COVID happened, I was sort of like, tada. And my kids books. And so we had this
[12:57]ready-made sort of curriculum that we built together in the next few days, the kids and Dan and I.
[13:03]And then when the online things started, they just thought, well, this is more interesting. And
[13:08]so Dan and I really threw ourselves into it. What that meant was that we weren't on anyone
[13:13]else's schedule. You know, so I got to carve out little bits of time while he took them out in the
[13:20]woods or whatever. And it was really special because we got to put down so much of the busyness
[13:27]and so much that's about as mothers carving our lives around the schedules of other people.
[13:35]And I didn't have to do that anymore. I didn't have to heed by everyone else's rules. You know,
[13:41]I could just exist in a very slow way. And in some ways, I was really scared that I wasn't
[13:47]going to be able to start writing again this fall because I thought, what if I need a plague in order
[13:52]to write? What if I can't do it otherwise? But I'm noticing that it's a little different. I'm
[13:59]hectic. But I try to sit down. I'm a person who has a writer never looks back. I write the next
[14:07]I never go back. I always write the next bit. And I try to leave a little bit for myself to pick
[14:11]like a sentence that's quite not quite finished. I thought that isn't quite finished. And I just
[14:16]write forward. And I write for 20 minutes, 30 minutes an hour, whatever I can do. And then it's done.
[14:21]And you know, I don't do it every day because I can't. But that's what I try to do.
[14:25]I love that. As you were talking, I was thinking about when I was a state home mom before I
[14:31]started any of this stuff. And I realized one day with all the calendars and drop offs and pickups,
[14:35]I was like, I had like this color coded as I still do. But I didn't even have a calendar for me.
[14:41]Like I didn't have a calendar. My calendar was a calendar. I was like, how could I have my own
[14:45]calendar? There's no room in the schedule from my own. That's how we all feel none of us. I
[14:51]can't imagine having a calendar for me. Yeah. Anyway. Well, that's first of all, I haven't heard
[14:56]of anybody who had the creativity to get a curriculum sort of hidden. I mean, that's so smart of you.
[15:02]And how extraordinary for your kids to have their interests met and that you devoted your life to
[15:09]just sort of fostering their interest. And I mean, that's just the coolest. That's really
[15:12]we had an awesome time. I mean, we, you know, we studied eels and then we've made math problems
[15:18]out of the eels and we studied running as part of and we sort of measured and depth did math with
[15:23]the amount of how far we were running. And you know, we just made everything into a learning thing.
[15:28]And that was great. One time we, we did French Fridays where we, we cooked together. We made
[15:34]something, some sort of thing from Julia Child or the Times or whatever and tried to learn how to
[15:40]cook a French dish. And that was really enjoyable. I mean, we had lots of mistakes, but we had
[15:45]great times and we'd like candles and eat it. But I remember one time we took these, they're called
[15:50]Pan Banyap, which is like a tuna fish sandwich that sort of soaked with olive oil and vinegar and stuff
[15:56]and olives. And we took these to the beach. And my husband and my sons, not me, I was far down the
[16:03]beach, exhumed an entire seal, like rotting seal corpse. And he stepped back together to figure out
[16:10]how it worked. And that I'll forever not be able to eat those sandwiches ever again. But it was,
[16:16]you know, we did these sort of unusual things that we would never have done on a Tuesday in September
[16:23]at any other point in our lives. That is the craziness of the time that families got so much time
[16:29]together and for good food for bad. That's amazing. Yeah. Did your husband have any issues with
[16:36]Pete? Because, you know, he does some sort of reprehensible things. I feel like the reader is
[16:41]sympathetic to Pete when we understand him more as well. But I don't know. How does he feel about it?
[16:49]That's a great question. I think, you know, there were some people who were worried or might have
[16:53]been thought that Pete was my husband, Dan. They couldn't be more different. He actually, he really
[17:00]was touched by how I understood a lot of the male psyche. He, I remember saying to me at one point,
[17:06]well, I don't know how you do that. And, you know, I've known a lot of men and I've known guys
[17:13]like Pete. I didn't marry a guy like Pete. My husband's sort of the most loyal. He'll do anything
[17:20]for me and the kids. He's so devoted to us. But I've known lots of Pete's. And, you know, any
[17:27]strife in any marriage, of course, you can take your own experience and just overlay it on a larger
[17:33]problem to look at culture and gender and gen X. I mean, there's so much that I related to about Alice,
[17:41]which is like, you know, being overburdened. Not every time to write. I mean, that's one of her
[17:45]problems. She's a mom does not have time to write. And she writes little notes who puts them in
[17:49]notebooks and then they end up in vinyl bins under her bed. And she can never quite get back there
[17:55]because he's got the big fancy job. And she desperately wants the time taking care of her kids.
[18:01]So she doesn't want a nanny, but she also resents it. And she's one of these gen X women like
[18:07]that I feel like I was in lots of women. I know are that she's been told she can do it all.
[18:13]But truthfully, there aren't enough pieces of her body to do it all, to have the successful career,
[18:19]to be the kind of mom, to stay home and make cookies, to, you know, be it every PTA meeting,
[18:25]you know, to be the kind of wife, to go out the dinner with her husband, to look good. You know,
[18:29]and so she always sort of feels like a slob because she just can't muster it. And so they drift
[18:34]apart, you know, any difficulty between the kids or anything makes them far the drift farther apart.
[18:41]And so in answer to your question, I think that Dan really felt that I was making a very
[18:47]real portrait of a marriage and a family, but I don't think he ever felt like it was us.
[18:54]You know, it's amazing how you can make up stuff.
[18:59]No, it's amazing. You don't have to write a novel about yourself. I know. It's wild.
[19:06]It's amazing. It's amazing. I want to talk about you as a writer and how you went down this
[19:12]path. I just want to read that sentence, which I don't know why. Just it's embodies your skill
[19:18]of writing, I think. Finding Alice was like making some sort of grave rubbing with a thick charcoal
[19:24]pencil on thin translucent paper. The more of those dark scratches he made on the sheet,
[19:29]the more interesting the little blobs of light and texture appeared. And the more invested
[19:33]he became as she came into focus. I don't know. That's just beautiful. You don't really think
[19:40]about applying that imagery to that. I don't know. I just was like, wow, that's a beautiful sentence.
[19:46]How did you become a writer? And I know you went to Brown because I'm working with Sam Gray now.
[19:52]Tell me like how you got from Maine to there and when writing became a thing and just the quick
[19:58]you know, quick and dirty of your life.
[20:00]Yeah, I mean, I can't, you know, I think I was always a writer. I think those of us who are storytellers, you know, we just are
[20:08]You you sort of write your thoughts down my mother's a writer and my dad's an artist and so I grew up in a family with lots of books and poetry and writing around
[20:18]Me, but I also found that I also felt very isolated in some ways in my family for reasons
[20:23]I won't go into but the thing is is that I found writing to be a refuge for myself
[20:28]And it was a wait place. I could sort of close the bathroom door or lock it sit on the toilet seat and just write down in my journal
[20:35]Or a story or whatever what was going on for myself and I was really profoundly moved by books and loved books, you know
[20:42]I would spend hours reading. I was just a voracious reader and I was very touched by the world, you know, so everything
[20:50]You know, I was sort of would coalesce in my brain as thoughts imagery
[20:55]words, but as far as you know, I grew up in a small town in Maine and I just
[21:01]applied I went to visit ecologists and I went to Brown and thought it seemed great and
[21:07]Got in and loved it. I had just absolutely loved it. I had a blast and I wish I could go back
[21:15]Sort so anyone out there who was listening or watching who's about to go to college like savor it because it's gone before you know it and
[21:22]And then I took a year off and went to France for a year because I had visited France and I just felt like the pressure of
[21:30]Trying to get into college and all that was something I need to unravel a bit from and then I went to school
[21:36]So I was a little more mature at that point and then
[21:39]Yeah, so that's that's it. And then I started writing. I actually really wanted to be an actress and I still do
[21:46]Not necessarily one of those dreams. It's just like you know never happened, but I was writing all the time
[21:53]so I just kept writing and
[21:55]being an actress seemed
[21:58]Complicated and hard and my family didn't understand why I would ever want to be an actress
[22:03]So the path of least resistance a long ways that was in some ways less threatening and challenging and
[22:11]Less brave was being a writer because I already knew I had a I had a roadmap for that
[22:17]But what's been cool about that and what about I went to acting school in New York and then is that I love to think in the voices of other people
[22:25]And I had this acting teacher one time who
[22:28]Really talked about falling in love with even your worst characters. So like if you're playing Yago
[22:34]You have to love Yago. You have to really connect with what Yago is struggling with so
[22:39]To go back to Pete and to get into the mentality of Pete of somebody who's hurting his family
[22:44]You know, I had to fall in love with him and care about him and want to protect him just as much as I did
[22:50]Alice and his truth. That's something you really have to do to be a good actor
[22:54]I think I mean it's deep sensitivity that enables all of the things right. Yeah, yeah
[23:00]Listening and feeling like you're someone else. I remember saying this like I went to some career development class in business school
[23:07]And I was like well, I'm really good at like being in other people's brains like I can imagine
[23:12]I can put myself in other people's shoes. They're like congratulations. How about marketing?
[23:19]What do I do with this is such a random thing. I can't even explain it. But anyway, it turns out
[23:24]You know, I think so there you go. Yes
[23:28]Any words of advice for other writers people who are drawn to this
[23:34]crazy world of of wanting to create and listen to the voices in their head and and all of that what advice would you give?
[23:41]I think the things I try to say to people are
[23:44]One always carry a little notebook. I carry lots of these like little things like this
[23:49]I've got tons and tons of them and some of them are just like the little need spiral notebooks
[23:54]I keep them in my back pocket in my car in my apricot down in the kitchen
[23:59]You know next to the phone just everywhere because ideas strike anytime and most of us don't have time to actually go
[24:06]sit down and sort of conjure the genius we have to you know pieces together later
[24:11]So though you may have many many many notebooks and you don't do anything with them
[24:16]at least you've
[24:17]Validated that idea that spark and you may come back to it. The other thing is I would throw out the window this idea
[24:24]You have to write for two hours every day. I mean, I find that ridiculous absurd and punishing
[24:29]I mean, I think that's for like
[24:31]Men whose wives are doing everything and they can sort of conjure the genius and sit in their study for two hours
[24:38]Well, the mother makes breakfast and ferries everybody everywhere
[24:41]I don't know how you do that two to four hours a day or something
[24:44]I write for 20 minutes sometimes 15 minutes
[24:47]Andrei to abuse the third who wrote house of sand and fog
[24:50]He was working on a construction crew and he would write for 15 minutes. It is truck
[24:54]You know, you can put a story together and the third most important thing is to never
[25:00]Really end a thought like end it while you're feeling like you're chugging along
[25:05]And leave the sentence dangling dangling or the thought dangling
[25:09]You're laying and then come back to it. So you've got
[25:11]Somewhere to jump in. I think that's really
[25:14]Important and don't look back like don't reread your writing from the day before
[25:18]That that's just the surest way to
[25:21]Shoot yourself in the foot you need pages not you know criticism from your inner critic
[25:27]I think I feel like I always forget like I'm like wait. What did I have what happened?
[25:33]What did I who was this person? What did they look like?
[25:35]Like I feel like every time I go like I have to like start from the beginning like okay fine here
[25:40]I am
[25:40]Maybe that's my well, yeah, maybe just go back like a sentence or two
[25:43]And if you get it wrong like what I do is I keep a notebook open
[25:48]And I write down okay
[25:50]When were Iris and Sophie when were there birthdays how old are they that's why I did the other day
[25:55]But it doesn't matter because they're about this age for what I'm writing
[25:59]Yep, and I'll be okay. I'll fix that later
[26:01]You know some of it you just have to say
[26:04]I'm gonna fix this later and it's fixable
[26:06]And anything is fixable on a rewrite
[26:09]True. It's great advice. Caitlin. This was so fun. I hope I get to meet you
[26:14]It's so great
[26:16]I hope we get to meet in real life. Yes. It's so great
[26:20]And thank you so much for your deep empathy that you bring to all this book. Thank you. It's really special. Thank you
[26:27]Congratulations. So awesome. Thank you. All right. So much for having me. Of course
[26:32]Bye
[26:34]Thanks for listening to this episode of moms don't have time to read books
[26:38]Don't forget to follow me on Instagram at the meowans and at moms don't have time to read books
[26:43]Also sign up for my newsletter at zabioans.com and sign up for my virtual book club and meet lots of authors on zoom
[26:49]Every other week. Thanks so much to Steve and Ryan at texture sound for the sound editing and thank you to morning moon
[26:55]productions for providing this fantastic intro and out trim music