Sonya Walger, LION
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[0:45]Sonya Walger is the author of Lion.
[0:47]Sonya is a British American actress, writer, and podcaster.
[0:52]Sonya began her career as a film and television actress in 1998, and is perhaps best known
[0:56]for her role as Penny Woodmore in the ABC series Lost, and later for starring
[1:01]as Molly Cobb in the Apple TV Plus original For All Mankind.
[1:06]A student of English literature at Christ Church College at the University of Oxford,
[1:11]and host of the literature podcast bookish, Sonya is a longtime literary enthusiast whose
[1:16]debut novel Lion is a work of auto fiction about her relationship with her father.
[1:21]Sonya is one of our featured authors at our Santa Barbara Retreat, March 28th to 30th.
[1:26]Welcome, Sonya.
[1:27]Thank you so much for coming on Totally Booked with Zibi to talk about your absolutely
[1:31]stunning beautiful book Lion.
[1:33]Congrats.
[1:34]Thank you so much.
[1:35]Thank you for having me.
[1:37]Oh my gosh.
[1:38]Sonya, this book was gorgeous, like truly gorgeous.
[1:42]I, every sentence was beautiful.
[1:44]I feel like you have taken me all over the place.
[1:47]I feel like I spent the summer in your grandparents' apartment trying to figure out what
[1:50]to do with myself.
[1:51]I feel like I was sitting in your dad's place with his girlfriend wearing the sparkly gold
[1:58]shirt.
[1:59]I feel like I have lived in all of these experiences.
[2:02]It was so powerful.
[2:04]Well done.
[2:05]Thank you.
[2:06]I'm so thrilled.
[2:07]I have goosebumps.
[2:08]What are you hopeful?
[2:09]It's just great.
[2:10]Oh, well, you're a beautiful writer.
[2:13]Okay.
[2:14]Why don't you tell everybody what this is about, and also it's being marketed as auto
[2:18]fiction.
[2:19]So maybe explain what auto fiction is, and what is real, what is not real, and all
[2:24]that.
[2:25]Well, I hate the phrase auto fiction.
[2:27]I think it sounds like a drive-thru.
[2:29]It just, you know, I'm, I'm anti that phrase, grab a sandwich and a novel, see what
[2:34]happens.
[2:35]But in five minutes, it's a work of fiction in which everything happened is, is my
[2:40]line on this book.
[2:42]So it is a story about my dad who was a very charismatic, extraordinary guy who lived enough
[2:50]lives for multiple men and was the kind of, the kind of human you just, you hope you sit
[2:57]next to a dinner or that maybe you have as a godfather, but not necessarily as your dad.
[3:02]You know, he was a Formula One racing car driver.
[3:05]He was a polo player.
[3:06]He was a serial lover of women.
[3:10]He was a cocaine addict.
[3:11]He went to jail.
[3:12]He took up skydiving.
[3:13]And then these are just the headlines of, of the human that my, my father was.
[3:19]And he died, spoiler, but he died very suddenly and an accident some years ago and seven
[3:25]years ago.
[3:26]And my kids were very little and they didn't know him.
[3:28]And so I felt very strongly that I needed to write these stories down.
[3:35]They met him, but not that they would remember, and also because I had the most terrible
[3:39]memory.
[3:40]God, if I don't write them down, I really won't remember them.
[3:43]So, so the, so the desire to write was, was really born out of, out of that.
[3:48]And then as I started racing, it was very clear to me that it was just needed to be a
[3:53]work of fiction.
[3:54]It just, I didn't want to write a memoir.
[3:58]I didn't want to write.
[3:59]I didn't think anybody cared about some dude from Argentina and his wildlife.
[4:03]I didn't think anybody cared about me and, you know, I have my, my other life as I'm
[4:09]an actress and I just was allergic to the idea of, you know, penny from lost tells
[4:14]all it none of these things were going to hold it.
[4:17]So sort of to subvert any expectations that might come with the word memoir, I just said
[4:24]it's just going to be fiction.
[4:26]And then I have huge license to breathe life into these characters to supplement what
[4:32]feels thin, because as I say, my memory is lamentable.
[4:36]So that became the sort of working template for what the book would be interesting.
[4:42]So in scenes then, so did you make up, for instance, you have this beautiful scene where
[4:47]you are with your dad, he's with his new two year old daughter at the time.
[4:52]And it's a very moving scene where she is pushing away his hand as he tries to reach
[4:56]for her and you are saying, I've spent my whole life wishing that hand would reach out
[5:01]for me.
[5:02]And I was like, oh my gosh, talk about goosebumps.
[5:04]So did that not happen?
[5:06]I mean, it doesn't matter, I guess, really.
[5:09]It doesn't matter, but it did happen and it happened over and over.
[5:12]And I think that's what the book is, is in the same way that a poem is a sort of distillation
[5:18]of moments, you know, I think that's what the book is, is why that's why, it's one of
[5:25]the many reasons I call it fiction, it's a crystallizing and a feeling to down to the essence
[5:32]of things.
[5:33]So when I say it's a work of fiction in which everything happened, I know I sound sort
[5:41]of, I have the gluten with that or something, but I really can't be more accurate than
[5:45]that.
[5:46]It really means both things are true.
[5:48]Yeah, no, I understand.
[5:49]It's almost like a historical novel about your own life.
[5:53]Yes, they, yeah, something like that.
[5:56]In the book, yes, it's about your dad, right, but it is so much more about you and your
[6:01]relationship to him, even though you take us back to his relationship with your mom and
[6:07]how their whole life started and her like deep disappointment and what it's like to get married
[6:12]at such a young age and all of that.
[6:15]But we take it all back to you as the child and the experiences that having a dad like
[6:22]that, specifically him, leads you to you.
[6:25]You have a whole scene with not just a, like a whole section, I guess, about boarding
[6:31]school classmates' father and how he was, I don't know, basically inculcating you to
[6:36]like some sort of a cult essentially that you narrowly avoid it and you're like, he was
[6:41]filling a need that you did not fill.
[6:44]So tell me about like that moment, for instance, and how you saw it then and did that
[6:49]differ when you started writing about it, were you then able to contextualize or did you
[6:53]know all along?
[6:54]No, it's a great question.
[6:56]I think so much of this book.
[6:59]So much of writing for me, I've now written a second book I'm halfway through my third.
[7:04]So much of writing for me is the process of finding myself out on a bunch of actually
[7:12]realizing that this is what I think about something.
[7:15]Writing is really where I synthesize things and integrate them, I think, where I take disparate
[7:22]ideas and realize that it's not even conscious the weaving of a thread.
[7:27]The thread is already there, it's just for me to lay it out on the page.
[7:32]And I think that was what Lion was in lots of ways for me was less, you know, therapeutic
[7:39]or cathartic or something, none of which are bad words, but it was less that and more
[7:44]realizing that this was what I actually thought and then these were and that, you know,
[7:50]I think you're so astute to point out that it isn't actually a book about my dad, although
[7:55]it purports to be, that the question that I asked myself and that Lion is the answer
[8:00]to was, what does it mean to have been this man's daughter?
[8:05]In what way has this man informed who I am, how I parent, what are the choices I make?
[8:15]And I'm still and will be for the rest of my life because I will always be his daughter.
[8:19]I'm still in dialogue with that question, you know, I'm still holding that up to the
[8:23]light.
[8:24]There's still, you know, recent events, I've just lost our home in the fires.
[8:30]You know, this becomes a whole other piece where I'm like, wow, how would my dad react
[8:37]to this moment?
[8:39]Would my dad have chosen to live on the very edge of the wilderness in California with
[8:44]a high risk of fire?
[8:45]And here's me writing a whole book about how I chose, have consciously chosen stability,
[8:52]not conformity, but carefully holding my family against chaos.
[8:57]And here I am against everything I have wanted thrown into absolute chaos, literally,
[9:04]you know, two weeks before the launch of Lion, it's an extraordinary time and it makes
[9:11]me wonder if I have to rise another book.
[9:13]Of course you have to write another book.
[9:15]I mean, of course I have to write another book, but I'm so sorry, I know we've discussed
[9:21]this in the past, but I'm so sorry about the loss of your home, by the way, nobody
[9:26]living in the palisades or Malibu or any of the areas affected, particularly on the
[9:30]west side.
[9:31]I don't know as many people on these, nobody felt like they were living in a risky territory.
[9:37]Like it felt like the most stable place, even though, like I thought the biggest risk kind
[9:42]of was earthquakes eventually, right?
[9:45]And like, yeah, they're always alerts, but so I don't feel like that counteracts the narrative
[9:50]you tell yourself.
[9:51]Personally, right, because for all intents and purposes, like palisades was like 1950s life
[9:59]today.
[10:00]Absolutely. Absolutely was. We didn't have a hilltop in my way. I would melt it. Okay.
[10:04]It was a little more, it was more risk assessment involved. But anyway, it still felt very safe to me
[10:10]and no longer does. So it was an interesting, this is just an interesting question of what would
[10:17]my dad have made of this moment. You know, I'm trying to think. I'm trying to think of
[10:21]knowing him from the book, you know, what his response would be. But um, but then one time that
[10:26]you really needed him, when your grandmother died, right? He came running and he was stable in
[10:32]that moment and he was there for you. So I like to think that he would be on the next flight and
[10:37]he would be there and setting you up where you are. He'd be, he'd be there. And I thank you. I do,
[10:43]I love that you point that moment out because it really mattered that moment when my grandmother
[10:47]died and I said for the first time in my life, I need you. And um, and he, and he was there. And it was,
[10:55]it's a lovely moment to sing aloud. Now, I don't several interviews on this and nobody's
[10:59]mentioned that, you know, because people get so fixated on his negligence and, and, uh, which is
[11:05]abundant. But the, but the rare moment where he, where he could, where he could offer that kind of
[11:10]solace was really lovely. It was, it was, it was momentous. Yeah. Uh, and he even made it almost
[11:17]joyful. This like reunion with your hands and everything. And he brought his sort of Guajevi
[11:23]Yeah, exactly. And his next, you know, I think one thing that you point out in the book, which
[11:28]was such a sort of wise assessment and can affect, can, can summarize probably so many
[11:34]people who have have a parent or two who, whose behavior is, is perhaps not what they wanted,
[11:40]but that adrenaline seeking is completely the opposite of parenting, right? He always was
[11:47]searching for the next high, whatever it was, and that sense of excitement. And you're like,
[11:53]ask any mom that this is like the height of drudgery, right? It's like the bedtimes and the
[11:58]beds and the bottles and the, like the amount of patience required cannot like if, if what you're
[12:05]seeking is constant stimulation, like this is not for you.
[12:11]It's very true. Exactly. Yeah. No, I remember landing on that sentence and being like, Oh,
[12:17]yes, that's right. Adrenaline is the opposite of parenting, the absolute opposite. And not
[12:24]to defend your dad, but it seemed like it was, it could have, jail could have been very easily
[12:30]avoided, right? He was in the wrong place at the wrong time. Yes, it could. It just was, you know,
[12:35]yet another of his full risk assessment and this living life, like the sort of demigod that I
[12:42]think he thought he was and that others thought he was. It wasn't just his own delusion. There was,
[12:48]there was collusion in that because he looked like a French movie, he looked like Alan Delon,
[12:55]my dad, and, and what was sort of a dark James Dean at these extraordinary cheekbones and,
[13:00]and he was, I mean, really sort of empirically speaking, he was one of the most charismatic
[13:06]people you've ever met. People just leaned in dogs and animals would just come and literally
[13:13]eat from his head. Little kids would come round kind of intrigued by him. He just had that kind
[13:21]of mesmerizing quality that men, you know, even men was seduced by my dad. It's an interesting
[13:30]thing. I think they were threatened and irritated and combative, but largely even in his lifetime,
[13:37]men that I talked to, my dad's friends would talk about with sort of tenderness about him.
[13:44]There was such an agreement that this man was set apart, if in some way, and he just kept
[13:51]cashing in on that, and he was not. He was more human than any of us, if there is such a
[13:56]thing as to me, more human than any of us, but he was eminently mortal. My gosh.
[14:01]Well, your life and your upbringing ended up being quite isolated at times and you talk about
[14:07]how you felt despite the fact that you had three sisters and we learned about all these different
[14:13]very interesting stories along the way, that you were an only child and you say in context,
[14:20]in the context of raising your own kids, that you ask your husband, like, is this right? Are
[14:25]our kids supposed to fight like this? Like, does this seem normal to you? And I found that so
[14:29]endearing too, because like, I always worry, you know, like, I don't know. Are they fighting too much?
[14:34]Is this when I'm supposed to back away? Like, do any of us even know? No? Okay, good. Are you
[14:39]an only child? No, I have a brother, but I still look at my kids and I'm just like, I don't know.
[14:45]Like, it seems pretty rough to me, but they say not to interfere, but I'm yelling at them anyways,
[14:50]so it's true. Okay, well, I'm glad to hear that. I just assumed that it was the condition of
[14:56]being an only child that you were just completely unequipped to deal with siblings, but I'm relieved
[15:01]to hear that it happens to the best of us. How else do you feel that your dad's influence affects
[15:08]your parenting? I mean, like I say, I think, you know, I look at it. It's just so inextricable,
[15:15]isn't it, when you're in a marriage? It's in some ways it's easy to see like, oh, well,
[15:21]I do this and he does that. And in other ways, you can't really tell whether you have assumed that
[15:27]role in the absence of the other person, your partner, providing that, you know, rigid as your
[15:33]stunness or whatever, whether that is where you on your own, would you be, would I be more
[15:39]playful, more flexible, more those qualities? But it's such a symbiosis, right? It's just so
[15:46]interesting to know what's the vine and what's the branch of you like. You know, my husband is,
[15:52]is tends to be the playful one and the one that wakes them up to show them a blood moon. He
[15:58]is, he tends to be the one that is, you know, delighting them, in dancing them with sort of
[16:05]interesting things. And we talk slash bicker about it where I'm like, but if I weren't keeping
[16:13]all the trains running and running all the meals and getting everyone to school, I too would
[16:16]might show them a blood moon. Truthfully, I don't know if I would, but it's hard to know where
[16:24]you're reacting to the partner, your words and where you are bringing your intrinsic self in the
[16:30]way that you were parented. You know, I was parented by an extremely both overwhelmed and very
[16:36]competent mum, single mum essentially with this sort of intimate and dazzling beam of my dad,
[16:43]but we can't really call that parenting. That was more like a visitation or something.
[16:47]So I inherit from my mum sort of extreme competency, and which doesn't always allow for
[16:56]the sort of delightful, delightful part. And sometimes, you know, I took my daughter to London recently
[17:02]to visit my mum, and it was just us on our own for a week. And I really got a taste of like,
[17:08]oh, this is delightful. This is so enjoyable. I'm not, because it's just me and her, and we're
[17:15]not wrangling the little guy, and I'm not pruning my husband to remind him to do this or there.
[17:20]Because it was the two of us, there was an element, there was a blood moon, the element
[17:24]of ease and of me being much more client than I, that I sort of usually am. And that was interesting
[17:32]to me. I was, that was felt like a revelation that perhaps intuitively I might not have arrived
[17:37]there. Interesting. Yeah, I get that too. And it's like one kid, and you're not at home,
[17:41]and I think he's taken care of, and you go out to dinner, and you're like, oh, this isn't so hard.
[17:46]What was, what was it? You're like, oh, it's because I'm on vacation.
[17:51]Can I just like read a passage or two? I love it. Okay, this is all just to show how amazing
[17:58]of an author you are, and I want to talk about sort of how you came into your writing style.
[18:02]My stepmother slips on her dark glasses. My adopted sister, Doses, and her mother's lap.
[18:07]I pull out my book. I read Uncle Tom's cabin at the top of Machu Picchu. There was a photo of me
[18:12]reading it. I'm wearing a brown poncho and a cowboy hat. I am sitting cross-legged. I read about
[18:16]a scape and the white man's dominion over brown bodies while sitting on the top of a mountain to
[18:21]which centuries earlier, more brown bodies fled to escape the white man's fist. But I know none of
[18:26]this. I only know how to plunge my pain like a hot blade into the cool depths of the written page.
[18:32]I know how to submerge and disappear. And every book I ever read has opened its pages to me
[18:38]with the promise that it will hold me. It will never abandon me. It will never let me go.
[18:42]My father returns empty handed. He does not speak to anyone for the rest of the evening.
[18:47]In silence, we ride down that mountain, slide back to the hotel to our rooms. He holds silence
[18:52]like a lost fortress, and we wander around his ruin. Oh, so good. Thank you. So good.
[19:02]I mean, the analogies, I was trying to analyze what makes your sentences so deeply powerful.
[19:08]I think it's the many analogies that are not expected, holding something like a fortress or
[19:15]having the air feel like corduroy or flannel or you said something about the flannel feeling
[19:21]air. I'm like, oh, I know what she means when air feels like a flannel shirt. Yes, but you don't
[19:26]think about it like that. So tell me a little bit about how you became the writer that you are
[19:31]and how you developed the style, which is really poetic. Thank you. I honestly credit just years
[19:38]and years of reading. I mean, you know, my mum was a nursery school teacher. And so you learned
[19:43]to read pretty young when you're the single child of a nursery school teacher because she's like,
[19:49]just read a book and do your thing. So I started at two and a half. And I really haven't
[19:54]looked back. They, they really have been my company and as I, as I was saying, that passage,
[19:58]they've been my solace. And I
[20:00]you know, for being an actor, I'm a hopeless actor and that I never watch anything ever.
[20:04]My agents are always sort of rolling their eyes because they're like, well, you've got a meeting
[20:08]with so and so. And I'm like, I don't know who that is. And it's, you know, the director of something
[20:12]that everybody's watching it. I just never, never watch anything. But I do read voraciously. And
[20:20]and I think I have, you know, I've been writing for years, but I have been so, I hold the
[20:26]the boss so high for what I think good literature is. I really do. I, I, I have no other
[20:33]phrase for it. I just hold the bar really high. And so it's made me terribly intimidated. It
[20:38]had made me very intimidated of writing a book because as I kept saying to my husband, I just
[20:43]can't write a bad book. I just, I'll die if I write a bad book. And I hosted a podcast for a
[20:49]a while called bookish where I interviewed interesting people about the five books that had shaped
[20:54]the most. And I loved it. I absolutely loved it. And I love the research involved and the whole
[20:59]thing. But as you know, better than anybody's, I mean, it's, it's an enormous amount of work. And
[21:04]you know, you need great producer really in order to sort of help make it run. And it didn't
[21:11]matter. I kept doing it. But I had this moment of insight where I was interviewing Douglas Stewart,
[21:16]actually, who wrote Shuggy Bay in a book I loved. And I was listening to Douglas and he was
[21:21]talking about his five books. And he was talking so sensitively and with such intelligence. And I just
[21:27]had this moment of being like, I don't want to interview another author. I want to be one. I just,
[21:35]it was such an interesting revelation. And it would just feel like a bell. And then COVID happened.
[21:43]And we all retreated to our houses and our rooms and drove ourselves mad trying to keep children
[21:49]in chairs during Zoom school and all of that. And so my retreat in the afternoons when I finally,
[21:55]you know, caved and let the kids watch a movie or something, I'd go to my little shed. And
[22:01]you know, I think we all just lived on the, on the membrane of our own mortality in that time.
[22:07]This very again, clear bell-like story for me of, I will, if I die and I haven't written a book,
[22:16]this is not okay. If I don't make another TV show, I am fine. But if I haven't written a book,
[22:23]that feels incomplete to me that my life feels hate to say that word as being a mum with children.
[22:31]But I have to say, I felt incomplete. And so, sorry, this is a long answer to your question,
[22:38]but I think all of these things informed sitting down to write. And I love poetry. And my
[22:46]favorite is the poetry of Mary Oliver who just is clear as a bell and so much distilled into
[22:53]this deceptively simple musical lyricism. But, but it feels like a conversation. It just feels
[23:01]like she's talking to you. And, and I wanted that, I mean, she's in there that then so many
[23:08]others are in there. Ocean vlogged, you know, on earth with briefly gorgeous. And I was really
[23:13]interested in these people who were writing about their lives in a way that still carried some
[23:18]magic to it, that wasn't, you know, linear, that wasn't. He was born in 52 and he died and
[23:24]none of that's interesting. I'm not very good with facts. My husband will agree with this
[23:28]harshly. I don't hold them. I'm not interested in them. I hate instruction manuals. I throw them
[23:34]out. You know, I like, I like distilled things. I like things that have come to their essence and
[23:40]then finding a way to lay that down on the page. I love that. So, are you like whiskey on the rocks?
[23:47]No, I'm the granny girl. I'm a granny, okay.
[23:52]Oh my gosh, that's so funny.
[23:54]Well, when you sat down to write, and it said, in the book you talk about talking to your
[23:58]mom and sort of interviewing her during COVID and getting her stories down and all of that as well,
[24:03]how long, like how long does a sentence take you? Do you know what, like, you know, I am not a
[24:09]literary writer at all. I could write like an entire page in like two seconds because it's not,
[24:13]I don't take my time. And I look like, I think you, it looks like every sentence has been
[24:20]like painted with a, the watercolor brush or something, like so deliberate.
[24:26]I mean, it's interesting. Thank you. Lime is a mixture. It, you know, it's also harvested from
[24:31]journals. I'm a long long term journal keeper. And so I sort of went through and highlighted
[24:36]sentences that I liked. They were less like, oh, I like that term of phrase. It was more like,
[24:41]oh, I've gotten that moment. I forgot what happened. So the journals, the highlight journals
[24:46]became the sort of starting point. And then I transcribed moments into my laptop and then
[24:53]started. I've used this phrase before, but it, it's because it works. I started sort of working
[24:58]the clay. It felt like a little bit of cold clay in my hands. And if I just stayed with it and
[25:03]needed it, I would get a story out of it. I would get a moment out of it. I could breed that
[25:09]into a paragraph or maybe even a whole section. I kept telling myself, you have everything you need
[25:16]you have everything you need. You don't, don't go reaching for extra. You have it. Just work
[25:22]what you have. It's a helpful mantra in my life. I find it stops me, you know, impulse buying on
[25:28]Amazon. But, but it also is, it was, it's a helpful mantra as a writer. I think when it that impulse
[25:34]to go and reach for the outlandish and jumper shark and something, it's actually great to just keep
[25:40]coming back to, to this sense of you have what you need. You can, you can just keep working what
[25:46]you have. And if you feel you haven't, you probably haven't worked what you have. That said,
[25:53]lion did come together quite quickly. I can say that compared to my third book, which is a really
[25:59]hot. I didn't, my struggle was what to make of all these stories in the past. And I wasn't,
[26:05]because I knew, as I say, I knew I didn't want memoir. And so I would just journal in between
[26:11]being like, I'm stuck and I don't want to do and it's Jakey's birthday and I'm the kid. I got the cake
[26:15]is all wrong. And then I started realizing that actually what I needed to thread these stories
[26:20]together was to include the present. And then the realization that actually what I needed to do
[26:25]set the whole book in the present. So to begin each paragraph with I am 18 and 45, I am two,
[26:32]I am two and three. That continuous present became an extremely, as soon as I had that,
[26:39]then the book came together really quite quickly after that. But yes, I am glad if the
[26:46]sentence sentences feel deliberate and intentional, then that's, that's, then Michelle accomplished,
[26:52]you know, you're officially a potter. So that's great.
[26:58]Sonia, congratulations. So beautiful. I mean, I could talk to you all day about, and I'm excited
[27:04]you're going to be a featured guest that I were tree coming up because so much more to hear from
[27:08]you and your career. And I didn't even get to the fact that you were an actor, which I didn't know
[27:12]as I mentioned so sorry, but you didn't know what we had for. I didn't like to talk about it.
[27:18]Okay. Well, I will see you soon. And thank you so much. I really love you.
[27:21]I really have a really beautiful book. Okay. Bye bye.
[27:24]Thank you for listening to totally booked with Zibi, formerly momstone have time to read books.
[27:30]If you loved the show, tell a friend, leave a review, follow me on Instagram at Zibi Owens,
[27:36]and spread the word. Thanks so much. Oh, and bye the books.