John Kenney, I SEE YOU'VE CALLED IN DEAD: A Novel

[1:24]Zibby Owens: Hi. This is Zibby Owens, and you're listening to Totally Booked with Zibby. Formerly, moms don't have time to read books. In my daily show, I interview today's latest, best selling, buzziest, or underrated authors and story creators whose work I think is worth your time. As a bookstore owner, publisher, author, and obviously podcaster, I get a comprehensive look at everything that's coming out and spend my time curating the best books so you don't have to. Stay in the know, get insider insights, and connect with guests like I do every single day. For more information, go to zippymedia.com and follow me on Instagram zippy owens. John Kenny is the author of I See You've Called In Dead, a novel. This is our Zippy publishing title. We are so excited to publish this. It is an indie next pick, which means all the indie bookstores have voted it one of their top picks for the month. It is so amazing, and I am just beyond excited. John Kenny is the author now of three novels and four books of poetry. His first novel, Truth in Advertising, won the Thurber Prize for American Humor. He is also the author of Talk To Me, which received a starred Kirkus Review. And now I see you've called in dead. He is the New York Times bestselling author of love poems for married people, which if you haven't read, you have to. It is hilarious and inspired a whole series of love poems. He is a longtime contributor to the New Yorker. You guys have to listen to this. You have to read this book. It is so good. Welcome, John. Thank you so much for coming back on now called Totally Booked Mississippi to talk about your latest novel. I see you've called it dead. Congratulations. Thank you so much, and thank you for having me. Of course. Of course, I am also publishing this book with our company and could not be more proud of this and excited. And I will never forget reading your very first draft and just sitting there laughing and crying and wow. So to come full circle and have it about to come out and talking to you on the podcast is just amazing. And sitting in the same place and reading and laughing, crying because it was so funny, your collected poems. So what

[3:39]John Kenney: a wonderful journey with you and your writing. Well, it's great to be here, and I'm so happy to be publishing with Zibby Books. And thank you for believing in me and all the wonderful writers who

[3:51]Zibby Owens: you publish. It's not a small thing. Oh my gosh. I have to say we have gotten so many emails from booksellers being and I'm I'm hoping someone on my team has sent them to you, not all copy and paste, and send them after about how obsessed they are with this book. Just to make sense. Sent them, and they I I would love to read them. I love not to afford them reading things about myself. So Okay. Good. I will I'll do that after this.

[4:15]John Kenney: Okay. Tell listeners about what the premise of the book is. Sure. I'm awful at the elevator pitch, but in a sentence, I think the book is about an obituary writer who doesn't know how to live. The slightly longer elevator pitch is Bud Stanley, the hero, is an obituary writer for whom life has taken some tough turns. His wife left him. As we meet him, wife has left him two years earlier for another man, a far more interesting man with an English accent. And one evening, as one does, after a few glasses of scotch, he writes his own obituary as a joke, and then it accidentally publishes it on his company's website. He works for a big news agency like the Associated Press, and it wreaks havoc in his life. The company wants to fire him, but because he's dead to the company's computer system, they can't legally fire a dead person. And so he goes to the wakes and funerals of strangers and with his best friend, a man who is in a wheelchair

[5:17]Zibby Owens: and chaos ensues. Oh my gosh. And where did this whole idea come from? What was the germ?

[5:25]John Kenney: Yeah, so the book came from something that happened to me in 2019. I'm from a big Boston Irish family, five brothers, and my brother Tom, a firefighter, had gotten sick and he had pancreatic cancer. He was at ground 0 as a rescue worker. And we think it came from the days on the pile breathing in as many, many first responders have gotten sick. Anyway, Tom was sick with pancreatic cancer for about five months, I would go back and forth as my other brothers would. And the last time I saw him, a few weeks before he passed, I got to his house first and we were chatting and he's a big handsome guy, strong as a bull, but he had lost a tremendous amount of weight, but he was still himself and sitting in a lounge chair with a blanket on. And I heard a car come into the driveway and I looked out the window and it was my other four brothers that had come down together. I turned to Tom and I said, The others are here. With this sort of Buster Keaton stone face, but with this little smile, sort of dropped his head and he dropped his arm and he said, Tell them they're too late. And I remember at that moment being so stunned that someone could be that funny, but be that sort of brave in the dream of death that I was like, I want that. And the two emotions that fascinate me are laughing and crying. And so I wanted to write a book about that. And so that's what I tried to do. And in fact, the book is, as you know, dedicated to my brother Tom. So I'm very happy about that.

[7:01]Zibby Owens: And of course, as we're talking, you've just lost another brother of yours, and I am just so sorry. Your family has had so much loss. I've interviewed another brother of yours who also lost his son. I just feel like your family is just it's so sad. We make the Kennedy family look lucky. Yeah. So, my brother Michael what a fun podcast for your listeners. My brother Michael, I just, got back yesterday from his funeral.

[7:26]John Kenney: A remarkable guy. He had glioblastoma. But as you and I were chatting before we hit the record button, he lived for a year. He was in no pain. And before we chatted a bit before you hit record, and one of the things I was saying is that I don't really have a vocabulary for death. I've been to a lot of wakes and funerals, as you have, as your listeners surely have, but I don't know what to do. I say the cliched things, I'm so sorry, and it's that awkward moment, and you wanna hug them. You wanna stand there. It it's maybe it's a Western thing, and maybe other cultures do it differently, but I'm terrified of death. I wanna run from it, but I wanna stay in the moment, and I wanna help. And I I'm egotistical about it, so I put myself in the moment. I think, is that gonna be me one day? And that thought is too big. And so that's a long way of saying, over the past year, I got the great privilege of having many conversations with Mike about death, about what he was feeling. And I think death is a great teacher about how to live. God knows after this call, I'll get in the car and drive to the supermarket and get annoyed at someone cutting me off or someone taking too long because I'm an idiot. But if we can shorten those little windows where we react that way and think, this is it, nine thousand weeks, and try to enjoy it. Yeah, it's been fascinating experience trying to write about it. And as I was saying to you, I don't think I know anymore, but I've certainly thought a lot about it.

[9:01]Zibby Owens: Well, I don't think there are any right answers, and there is no tried and true vocabulary. And in truth, there's really nothing anybody can say to somebody who's in pain that will make it any better. Right? It's it's all it will do is say, okay, this person cares about me, but nothing can take away the pain. No.

[9:20]John Kenney: No. I think that's absolutely right. And I I hope this comes out right. I think the pain that no one can take away stays there always as a reminder, and gift is the wrong word, but informs, I think, how we should live. I don't want to walk around with unbridled joy because I don't think that's I think real joy comes from having that pain there as the counterweight. I don't think I'm being particularly eloquent here, but I think the idea of loss, of the fleeting nature of life,

[10:05]Zibby Owens: can inform the beauty of it. Well, the good news is I don't think that anyone will accuse you of walking around with unbridled joy.

[10:12]John Kenney: I think that's So we're clear. We're good. We're okay. Absolutely.

[10:16]Zibby Owens: Yeah. We're okay. The the dark humor and this sort of way of thinking about death and the the upsides, if you will, and what it can teach you informs the narrative in this book too, where Bud Stanley is a fill in for you or the reader or whoever and is going about it trying to find, honestly, like, the meaning of it all, which is impossible to know. But he has to find a way. And by having Bud go through all these phases and him experiencing the wakes and funerals, blah blah blah, like, all of that, it's you're trying to wake up the reader too. Right? The book is almost like a service call to be like, hey, guys. And it's funny and entertaining and, like, page turning, and there are many characters, and and, you know, the plot is wonderful, and the the dialogue is hilarious and all of it is great. But I feel like the whole thing could be an alarm clock ringing to say, like, don't miss the plot here. Yeah. I hope so. I certainly

[11:15]John Kenney: didn't start out trying to write anything that would, I would never try to teach anyone anything. But I think Bud's little journey mirrors my own. I think I was an incredibly emotionally immature young guy. I think I was pretty clueless. I think I remain fairly clueless, but one of the beauties of age is you get a little just a little wiser, a little bit more life experience, a little bit more pain, a little bit more wonder. Children are the great teacher. And so, yeah, the dark humor, I think I grew up in a family in Boston where that was the currency, sort of the comment that was completely inappropriate and yet perfect for the moment. My mom passed away when I was 12 and she had six sons and she was the sun on the moon and the stars. And I remember we were in the back of the limousine taking us to the cemetery. It was a really cold November day in Boston. And we pull in and we had to wait. There's a long funeral procession because there was a US mail truck, a postal service truck. And my brother Tom, who was lightning quick with humor, said, oh, this must be the dead letter office. And we're all laughing hysterically, but there are people lining the thing. As it starts to move, people are looking in and we're all laughing. So I don't know. I abhor the maudlin and self pity and I like laughing in the face of pain. Today's episode is sponsored by Quince.

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[15:47]John Kenney: There aren't that many choices. We laugh. We cry. Yeah. We don't get out of bed. I mean Yeah. I'll do the crying on my own in my room, but I'd I'd rather make fun of it. Stay tuned for the next podcast. Yeah. John cries on it. Many weeks. Yeah. It's like an Andy Warhol film. He just cries for twenty minutes.

[16:05]Zibby Owens: Remind me, what number are you of the six boys? I'm the fifth of six,

[16:09]John Kenney: And there's a big age gap. The two oldest boys are Irish twins, eleven months apart, as you do, big Irish Catholic family. Yeah, so there's a fourteen year age gap between oldest and youngest. So the older boys were like parents. They were godlike figures. My oldest brother, Charlie and Mike, who just passed away, they were godlike figures to me, larger than life, really, really good guys, old school gentlemen who worshiped my mom. They're the kind of guys who can just walk into any room and talk to anyone, and they have a deep, deep empathy and kindness, but they're tough as nails, cops and firefighters. My oldest brother is a writer and a wonderful one. But losing a parent is such a hard thing. The world shifts on its axis a bit when you lose a sibling. It, you know, it it shifts a bit, and it moves you along the escalator a bit, and it's it's sobering.

[17:14]Zibby Owens: I'm so sorry. Well, back back to this book, which, of course, is about all of this stuff. When you were crafting the narrative, you had so many funny scenes in the workplace. Like, I know one thing is like, this is like The Office meets Six Feet Under meets whatever. I can't even remember. The workplace scenes and the workplace camaraderie and all that is such a nice counterweight to the sort of the grief aspect of it. Talk a little bit about how the mundane and the day to day stuff contrasts with sort of it's almost like what we have to do to get through every day. Right? Absolutely.

[17:51]John Kenney: I mean, you know, the wakes and funerals in the book are intense, but I don't know. I mean, we've all worked office jobs. And look, the genius of Ricky Gervais' show was that it took something as mundane as most of us. And I think a lot of us on this listening, the 19 people listening to me are There's

[18:19]Zibby Owens: more than 19 that you're offending me, 100

[18:22]John Kenney: We're the lucky ones because we get to do work we choose. Most of the world doesn't get to do work they choose. It's a job. It's a gig. It's paying the rent. Office jobs are like that a lot of times. No one falls into People fall into these things. And what our coworkers, they're not family, but, man, we see these people every day. And Bud, the main character, has this sort of crazy relationship with his office mate, Thuan, a Vietnamese immigrant, who is I don't know where Thuan came from, but I love him. I hope that doesn't sound strange. He he just sort of wrote himself. He's this very tender, troubled, traumatized gay man who had a brutal upbringing. But I love the connection between him and Bud and some of the other office people because, man, they can make or break a day. Right? We rely on these people in in small and not so small ways. So Very true. And what about Bud's relationship with Tim? Because a lot of the book also is about male friendship, which doesn't often get highlighted enough. Yeah. It's a it's a funny thing. My wife has, I don't know, seven, eight, nine really close women friends. And they talk a lot and they talk intensely. And I don't want to make it too simplistic, but I don't think a lot of men talk that way. In your 20s, have a million acquaintances, right? You're figuring out and go out and there's lots of acquaintances. I think life gets smaller. You have your family and your work and stuff. Life gets smaller, and it also gets larger because of the beauty of family and stuff like that. But I only have a few male friends and I don't see them nearly as much as I would like. And the conversations are sometimes it's like you need subtitles or it would be ideal if you could subtitle it because you're saying one thing but you're meaning another. Whereas my wife's conversations don't need subtitles. The main character Bud moves into an apartment owned by Tim who had been in a very, very bad accident and is now in a wheelchair. But it's not stopped him. He's a Renaissance man. He's fully alive in the world despite his physical challenges. And Bud isn't. Bud is pretty wounded and he's on hold in a way. And I think Tim's ability to be fully male, And I guess by that I mean there's this pull in men to be men. But we also there is a part of us that isn't maybe sometimes sure how to show another side. Tenderness and empathy and care and love, I think each of us have in ourselves both male and female tendencies. And children bring out in men their best selves, I think, often. And I think what Tim is trying to do for Bud is show him that the only fully formed life worth living is when you're willing to be vulnerable and care about someone else and have the courage to show that and put yourself out there. Bud loves Tim in a way that is really completely pure and platonic and needs him in a way that the best friendships are. We need that person, where a conversation or a phone call or a coffee for an hour know when you have those great conversations with a dear friend and you you leave them and you're you're different, you're full, and you're happier, and your whole mood changes because you connected in a way that was really lovely. At least I've heard those things are possible. And I'm like, when was the last time I did that? I know. I know. Well, it's funny. I have a really dear friend. He's a wonderful writer. His name's Bill Landay. He wrote Defending Jacob. And Bill and I met in high school and he and his wife hosted me the other night. I left the wake. I went back. They had a bottle of wine open. They had made dinner. We sat and talked, and it made me whole again. It really made me whole again because he knows me and he knows how to fill in the silences or stay silent. And I love him to death. And I feel so lucky to have him as a friend read Defending Jacob and read it before my book because it's really amazing. But yeah, I mean, I do love their friendship. And it's funny. All I would say about the writing is for anyone out there wanting to write, there's that wonderful quote from Somerset Mom. He said, There are three rules for writing a novel. Unfortunately, no one knows what they are. And I think there's this belief that it's all easily mapped out. Forget who it was who said, Writing is a bit like driving on a country road late at night with only one headlight. I mapped out the book. I mapped out what could happen. But the development of characters, I think, at least for me, is surprising. And I don't know about you, I find they it's going to come out wrong, but I find they can speak for themselves. They speak through you. I really believe that. And when you think about them a lot, you'll write dialogue and think, where did that come from?

[24:02]Zibby Owens: The friendship between Tim and Bud sort of wrote itself, and perhaps it's it's a latent thing that I desperately want. But yeah. When you are writing the book and you've mapped it all out, what does it look like when you're writing? Like, is this like an all day you go somewhere, you work from nine to five, and you're like, this is a writing day? I mean, I know you also contribute for the to The New Yorker, and you're doing, like, short things and long things and this and that. Like, how do you organize your time? Yeah. If you saw me during the day, you'd be like,

[24:32]John Kenney: does that guy do anything? Aaron Sorkin talked about how 90% of his day looks like he's a guy just watching ESPN. I don't have a writing schedule. I write all the time. I get up and we get the kids out and I waste some time on emails and I clean the kitchen and I listen to NPR and quickly turn that off because it's depressing. And I read an old New Yorker piece and it's like you're on a diving board about cold water and I'm psyching myself up to have the courage to jump in because I don't want to because it's terrifying. But I'm thinking about it all the time. And then I jump in and I might work for ninety minutes, I might work for two hours, and then I'll come back to it later in the day. But I'm old. I go for a walk later in the day and I'm thinking of things and I write stuff down and I'm always trying to do it. I can't just sit from nine to five and do something. I often write standing like I am now because of my terrible hips. But I think I tend to write very fast in bursts. I worked in advertising a while back and it was a great gift in a way because you have deadlines. So I try to make unreasonable deadlines for myself, a certain number of pages a week or a month, and that's so helpful. You have to want to do it because it's hard. There are days where you're like, I wish I was a carpenter. John Kfee talks about the great New Yorker writer and teacher at Princeton talks about when he was writing, he took the terry cloth belt from his bathrobe and tied it through a loop in his pants around the chair so every time he got up from the chair, he couldn't. It's not pleasurable sometimes, but you have to sit there and do the work. And then there are those days that make it all worthwhile where the book speaks to you and you get a scene and you think, oh, why are there tears running down my face? Or, oh, why am I laughing at that? Why does that little tingle in your palms happen where you think, oh, think that kind of works. That doesn't suck completely. And so that's a kind of fun thing to chase too. So I don't know. I guess being a writer is like being a golfer or being a runner. It's the thing you do when you have the time. That's how I spend my days. Like you, the way I sort of think about the world is through words, how I experience the world. Some people, it's like this is the deal I just did. I did this deal. It's an amazing deal. I built this building. I fixed this car. I'm a firefighter. I did this shift. I'm not very good at anything. And so what I try to do is put the words down and that's how I experience the world. And you know, I hope this doesn't sound ridiculous, but I've been very fortunate and written a few books and stuff, but I've never worked harder on anything in my life than this book. With your good help and Kathleen Harris, my editor and our dear friend, it was a joy and

[28:08]Zibby Owens: yeah. So we'll see. Well, it is so good. Is so so good. Very And you should be just enormously proud of it. So congratulations.

[28:17]John Kenney: And I feel very lucky that, you know, have said it, but Zibby, you're what you're doing is amazing, and I feel very lucky that you're you're

[28:25]Zibby Owens: you took this book on. So thank you. Well, it's quite a vote of confidence that you came to us, so it's amazing. I'm sorry again for all of the stuff, but I am also very grateful because the way you take your loss ends up helping everybody else in a way that people can consume and metabolize and have it change their lives just a little bit. So thank you so much. Thank you. I appreciate it. Okay. Thank you for listening to Totally Booked with Zibby, formerly moms don't have time to read books. If you loved the show, tell a friend, leave a review, follow me on Instagram at Zibby Owens, and spread the word. Thanks so much. Oh, and buy the books.