Amy Bloom, I'LL BE RIGHT HERE: A Novel
[0:00]Hi, this is Zibi Owens, and you're listening to Totally Book to Zibi.
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[0:45]Welcome back to Totally Book to Live, I'm here today with Amy Bloom, I'm so excited.
[0:50]Welcome.
[0:51]Yay, claps.
[0:52]Oh, thank you.
[0:55]Amy is, her latest book is all be right here, and I interviewed Amy before for
[1:01]her last book in Love, which is like one of my favorite books.
[1:03]Does anyone read that book?
[1:05]Here in the end.
[1:06]It's so good.
[1:07]Oh my gosh.
[1:08]Okay.
[1:09]I'll read you her bio, and then we'll get into this new book.
[1:10]Amy Bloom is the author of four previous novels, White Houses, Lucky Us, Away, and Love
[1:16]Invents Us, and three collections of short stories, where the God of Love hangs out, come
[1:21]to me, finalist for the National Book Award, and a blind man can see how much I love
[1:25]you, finalist for the National Book Critics Circle Award.
[1:28]Her first book of nonfiction, Normal, transsexual CEOs, cross-dressing cops, and her
[1:33]mafferedites with attitude is a staple of university sociology and biology courses.
[1:39]Her most recent book is The Widely Acclaimed, New York Times Best Selling Memoir in Love.
[1:43]She has written for magazines such as The New Yorker, The New York Times Magazine,
[1:47]Fogue, Elle the Atlantic, Slate, and Salon, and her work has been translated into 17 languages.
[1:52]All true.
[1:53]All true.
[1:54]All true.
[1:55]Feel.
[1:56]They got it right.
[1:57]Here.
[1:58]Can you tell everybody what this book is about?
[2:00]Sure.
[2:01]I'm on.
[2:02]I can.
[2:03]I can.
[2:04]Which you also, please, do that.
[2:06]I was thinking about it on my way over here.
[2:10]My kids say that I only have four topics, and depending on which kid you ask, they would
[2:15]say, family, love, sex, and death.
[2:20]I feel like that's plenty.
[2:22]I feel like I have covered the waterfront.
[2:26]And that's what the book is about.
[2:27]It's about, it begins in occupied Paris.
[2:32]I should say, well, because we're all friends.
[2:35]I should say, I was beginning a historical novel, which was my mandate from my publisher.
[2:41]And so there's a great deal about occupied Paris during the war and our central protagonist,
[2:48]a woman named Gazala, who is French-born, but of Algerian parentage, becomes basically
[2:58]the dog's body and tweeny of Collette, the writer.
[3:03]Collette had always been a favorite writer of mine, and also seemed to be one of those
[3:10]terrible, great monsters that you read about.
[3:14]My favorite story of Collette is she is entertaining a lot of very fancy people at her
[3:19]family's home in Burgundy, and they are late, and she is hungry.
[3:25]So she eats the tops out of the devil's eggs and the custard out of the eclairs and leaves
[3:31]them there for the late arriving guests.
[3:34]I thought, well, how do you not want to get to know this woman better?
[3:39]Also, she was sort of a cheerful bourgeois, polite Parisian anti-Semite for most of her life,
[3:46]and then she fell madly in love with her third husband, who was Jewish.
[3:51]And so the story of her evolution and her struggles with the Germans and hiding Maurice
[3:59]for 18 months really captured me, and so I put Gazala into that world.
[4:06]And when the war is over, Gazala comes to America, and she finds two girls who live across
[4:11]the street over the bakery, which is where she has come to work, and they are Alma and
[4:18]Anne Cone, and the three of them become best friends, and then her brother returns from
[4:25]Algeria, and now they are four best friends, and later on one more friend joins the group.
[4:32]And they are known in their family as the greats, because they are, of course, you know,
[4:37]the grandmother, they are the great aunt, they are the great uncle, and it covers about
[4:42]50 years in a family's life.
[4:46]I think the other thing I tend to write about, because it's interesting to me, are found
[4:52]and made families.
[4:55]I am deeply attached to the family I was born into, and the family that I gave birth to,
[5:00]that I am also really interested in who comes in from the wings.
[5:06]You know, that cousin to whom everybody is very attached for ten years, who then moves
[5:10]far away, or the person who has been far away, and suddenly makes a connection with your
[5:16]sister, and now this person is at every family holiday, and half the time you're still
[5:20]thinking, where did you come from?
[5:25]So all of those things came together for me, and it is really portraits of everybody
[5:29]in the family, and the weaving in, and the weaving out.
[5:33]I think the other thing is that I did not come from a family.
[5:39]My parents and grandparents were, I think old school would be the polite way to describe
[5:44]it, silent on the subject of their personal histories.
[5:48]And so, you know, I would say at one point to my mother's mother, to my grandmother.
[5:53]You know, grandma, I see, like I know my uncles here in America, but I see in this photograph
[6:00]that when you left Russia, you had eight siblings, and when you came to America, you had
[6:06]four, to which I would get a response that was something like, uh-huh.
[6:12]I found that interesting.
[6:14]I found the closed doors compelling, and so part of this novel is really a way to write
[6:21]about the fact that our parents and our grandparents are so mysterious to us, that we
[6:25]do not know who they were before we came on the stage.
[6:30]And I wanted to write about what people are willing to share, what people keep closed
[6:35]forever, and how that affects the family's life.
[6:39]That's what I think.
[6:40]That was a great cab ride, you know, pitch development.
[6:45]Thank you.
[6:46]Check plus, oh my goodness.
[6:48]What did you end up finding out about your own family?
[6:50]Well, not as much as I would have liked.
[6:55]The other favorite story about my mother's mother, for whom English was, I think, a fourth
[7:01]language and just tired of it by then.
[7:04]You know, she was like, I have learned languages.
[7:07]And so, you know, we, I said to her, so what was it like in the old country?
[7:14]And she goes, ah, not so nice.
[7:17]I said, well, what about here?
[7:19]Nice.
[7:21]So that was, that was my maternal side of the family, that was that.
[7:26]And my grandfather, my father's father, had the distinction of being deported from Russia,
[7:33]not something that happened that often, for being, depending on which relative you asked,
[7:38]a terrific hellraiser and union organizer, which we were all quite pleased with, also
[7:43]it seemed to me a not very talented burglar.
[7:49]So combining his two loves, he came to America and I went to work in a factory.
[7:56]So the stories in the past I liked and I liked, I found a letter from my dad from my
[8:03]21st birthday, which really delighted me.
[8:07]This was not a man who was really put on earth to have children.
[8:10]I mean, he did his best, wasn't a great idea.
[8:14]I'm going to work out, good DNA.
[8:18]As he himself would say, excellent DNA and I would be like, yes, but he was like, no, no.
[8:26]But he was an enormously curious person.
[8:29]I mean, there is nobody he met that he was not interested in.
[8:33]And I feel like that was really part of the DNA.
[8:37]And in his letter to me on his 21st birthday, he said, it's okay to hate things and institutions.
[8:43]He said, especially institutions and especially policies that hurt other people.
[8:48]He said, don't be sorry if you hate them.
[8:50]He said, just don't forget to do something about it.
[8:53]So that is also probably folded in to the novel as well.
[8:58]So interesting.
[9:00]To back up for a minute about in love, your memoir, you wrote so beautifully.
[9:06]And obviously we'll stick mostly on this, but just for context if people haven't read
[9:10]it before so beautifully about your late husbands, all timers and his decision to take
[9:16]his life with dignity and helping with that and writing about that and his telling you
[9:22]you had to write a book about it and how you were not when people would ask you, did
[9:27]you want to?
[9:28]And you were like, no, you didn't ask me to be told me to.
[9:31]And so you did.
[9:32]You shared all of this about your life when really you're mostly writing in fiction.
[9:37]Now, did that experience of writing about it, change things and how did it help you?
[9:42]How did it, if at all, change your approach to writing fiction afterwards?
[9:47]If I'm lucky, I'll never write a memoir again.
[9:50]It was not my goal.
[9:52]And it really was true.
[9:53]People would say in interviews in a very lovely manner, oh, did your husband ask you
[9:59]to write about it?
[10:00]This, and I would be like, no, no, he didn't ask me.
[10:03]He said, you're a writer.
[10:05]You got a write about this.
[10:06]He said, if we had a leaky faucet
[10:08]and you were a plumber, I'd ask you to fix it.
[10:10]You have to write about this, and so I did.
[10:13]And I certainly shared more of myself
[10:15]than I am inclined to in fiction.
[10:18]And when I first started writing fiction,
[10:22]I thought that I could hide.
[10:24]I thought that I could create these interesting characters
[10:27]who were not me, as it turns out, not me.
[10:32]And that I could keep myself to myself,
[10:34]which is my preference.
[10:37]This public speaking is all fairly hard one.
[10:40]It is not actually my nature.
[10:41]And I think returning to fiction
[10:45]was, first of all, a certain kind of relief.
[10:47]It's like, oh, good.
[10:48]I don't have to make any embarrassing announcements
[10:50]about my own personality.
[10:52]But it's also coming to terms at this point
[10:54]by writing with the fact that whoever you are,
[10:58]whatever you are writing, yourself will leak out.
[11:01]It will come out in the little round spaces of the A's
[11:05]and the E's.
[11:06]It will just, you cannot hide who you are.
[11:10]I remember, you know, when I remember when Philip Roth
[11:16]died, I was on a couple of panels,
[11:17]because I was a great admirer of many aspects of his work.
[11:21]And you know, somebody said to me,
[11:24]what do you really think that people's personalities
[11:26]come out?
[11:27]And I said, yes, nobody ever read Philip Roth
[11:29]and said to themselves, boy, if I were down with the flu,
[11:32]this is the guy I'd really want bringing me a bowl of soup.
[11:36]No, I said, no one ever.
[11:38]You know?
[11:39]I don't think it's a bad thing.
[11:41]And it doesn't even speak to whether or not the man
[11:43]might have been completely great as a caregiver.
[11:46]But you cannot keep who you are from the reader.
[11:50]And I think I don't try as hard now.
[11:53]And it's like, you know, when you have a novelist who says
[11:57]to you, oh, it's all made up, they are lying.
[12:01]When you have a memoirist who said,
[12:03]this is exactly what happens, they are also lying.
[12:06]You know, because we're writers, so we drag ourselves with us.
[12:11]You know, just like everybody else does.
[12:13]You know, in every conversation, you know, you are you.
[12:16]I mean, one makes an effort, as my mother would have said.
[12:21]In the green room, I was brushing back my hair.
[12:23]And I could hear my, I could feel my mother's hand, right?
[12:26]Just all of your face darling, all of your face.
[12:30]And I feel like, you know, they come with us.
[12:33]We come with us, they come with us in whatever form the writing is.
[12:38]I can't believe you said this doesn't come naturally to you.
[12:40]I feel like I'm just sitting here watching like a stand-up show.
[12:42]And I could just watch you all day.
[12:45]Happy to hear it.
[12:46]OK, well on a more serious note, in the book, there is so much about obviously anti-Semitism
[12:56]about the Holocaust more than just anti-Semitism, but the extinction of Jewish people
[13:02]and how one girl tried to take some matters into her own hands.
[13:07]I, you know, one by one sort of stuffly, sing about as some German men, which we could talk
[13:12]about.
[13:13]I'd be happy to, because those are based on real people.
[13:17]Really?
[13:18]Yeah.
[13:19]So in the novel, you know, Gazala is trying to find her way as a human being.
[13:24]And part of what I wanted to write about, you know, is that I grew up with a, part of
[13:28]my family is French and I grew up with a lot of stories about the French resistance.
[13:33]You know, which if you read the first person accounts from the early 1950s, it sounds
[13:37]like 97% of the country was engaged in resistance.
[13:42]More like two, so, but there were these two girls who were tremendous heroes in World
[13:49]War II.
[13:50]They were Dutch girls, they were teenagers, and they were in the resistance, and their
[13:55]form of resistance was, this is a little dark, I should warn, this is not cheerful.
[14:00]And so they walked past the German soldiers and they're like, hi, and this German
[14:06]soldiers, naturally, you know, foreign guys in another country go, hi, they go,
[14:10]I want to take a stroll, and they go, sure, let's take a stroll, and they walk through
[14:14]a sort of, I guess, the Dutch equivalent, the Baud de Bologna, and into the groves of trees
[14:19]and then they slit the Germans' throats and roll up their skirts and off they go.
[14:25]And they were tremendous heroes, and they did this more than once.
[14:28]And I really wanted to write about that.
[14:31]I thought, what is it to be a 16-year-old girl in an occupied country and decide that this
[14:39]is the thing you can do, not delivering maps on your bicycle, people did that, not handing
[14:45]over a code, not just trying to protect your parents, but that you could actually be
[14:51]a fighter.
[14:53]And I was very taken with that.
[14:54]So I used that story, but I always tried to make it really clear, this is not a story
[14:58]I made up.
[14:59]This is based on history of World War II.
[15:02]It was not your own experience, no, it was not my own experience.
[15:06]So we have to ask after your last.
[15:09]There is just have to ask.
[15:10]Yeah, okay.
[15:11]I don't think there's a lot in there that's my own experience.
[15:16]Although there is, I think, a very entertaining section of a early, like 1970s feminist
[15:25]consciousness-raising group that is based on my own experience, and it's, from my point
[15:31]of view, hilarious.
[15:35]How do you feel in this climate of antisemitism here in the US and everywhere with this
[15:41]book coming out, are you, how do you feel about it?
[15:46]I would say about myself as a writer, I don't write to recommend, and I say that partially
[15:51]because I have often gotten letters from people saying, how could you let this happen, or
[15:56]why did you choose to describe this, or you know, the wicked are not punished and the
[16:02]good are not rewarded, and I'm like entirely correct.
[16:05]That would be consistent with my life experience, right?
[16:08]The bad are not necessarily punished, the good are not necessarily rewarded.
[16:12]For me, I don't think of myself as a political writer at all, but I think there is enough
[16:18]of a shift in the world that now I feel to write about women as people, to write about
[16:27]Jews as people, to write about people of color as actual human beings, turns out to be,
[16:35]for me, unexpectedly, a political stance.
[16:38]It had not occurred to me that the world would be shifting in such a way that any of those
[16:44]viewpoints would have more impact than just being the basis of how, you know, how I tend
[16:51]to operate and see the world, and I feel more than I have, I think in the past, that
[17:00]it is important.
[17:01]It's important to tell the truth, which one wants to do in writing, which is not necessarily
[17:06]about the facts, but about things that are true.
[17:09]And also my view of the world is that this is a big, extraordinary bouquet that we are
[17:16]handed in this lifetime, and I do not see it as my job to pluck out some of the flowers
[17:23]and trample them underneath.
[17:25]Okay, beautiful.
[17:27]When you are writing about the close relationships, especially the brother and sister
[17:33]relationship, talk to me a little bit about that and how you structured that the varying
[17:40]layers of their relationship of it.
[17:43]So Gazzala has a brother, Samir, who is her big brother, and he is, in fact, not her
[17:48]biological brother.
[17:50]He is brought into the family as a baby when his mother dies in childbirth, and there
[17:55]Gazzala's mother is his mother's best friend, and so they grow up together.
[18:01]And I think, especially for people who have had what we would now call deeply traumatic
[18:07]childhoods, like a war and an invasion and the death of your parents, there is a very
[18:14]particular bomb that can be formed, certainly between parents and children, and also between
[18:18]siblings.
[18:19]And they are just, there is a Greek myth, gosh, Bousus and Philamine, whose greatest wish,
[18:28]right, when the fish jumps out of the ocean and grants them their magic wish, is that
[18:32]they would be together forever, and so they become bushes.
[18:36]And their roots are entwined and their branches are entwined, and that's how I think
[18:40]of this brother and sister, that they are the center of each other's lives, and it allows
[18:46]them to be a very strong base for others, but they are always at the center for each other.
[18:52]I love that.
[18:53]And I love the co-insisters and the whole family of the co-insisters, and I mean, they're
[18:58]like a comedy act in the middle of the, in the middle of the novel.
[19:02]How did that come about?
[19:04]Well, again, you'd have to speak to a lot of my dead relatives, but there is a moment.
[19:10]I actually, I have a big, I have a big sister.
[19:14]This is a woman who only stopped introducing me to people as baby Amy in the last 10 years.
[19:20]And I said to her, you have to stop.
[19:22]I said, you make us sound like Betty Davis and Joan Crawford, it's like it's upsetting
[19:27]to people.
[19:28]She says, well, that's how I see you.
[19:30]So in the whole section in the early 1950s, I really wanted to write about New York post
[19:38]World War II, because it was a period of such, you know, on one hand, such constriction
[19:43]socially, but also people who had been released and were actually going to be able to
[19:50]move forward.
[19:51]And there is a moment where I stole a line from my sister's mother-in-law.
[19:58]I don't know what that would mean she is to.
[20:00]I'm sure there's a word in Yiddish, but I don't know what it is.
[20:03]And so she would say very sternly during a conversation.
[20:10]If you said something that she thought was untoward,
[20:12]I mean, it could have been anything.
[20:14]It could have been, you know, and so-and-so's new hairdo
[20:17]or, you know, dada, dada, whatever it is that, you know,
[20:20]Uncle Archie was doing, and she would say very repressively,
[20:24]I could make a remark.
[20:27]And I just-that just stayed with me.
[20:29]And so I had to build an entire scene
[20:32]in the Khan Family apartment, you know,
[20:35]where they moved down from the Bronx
[20:37]around, I could make a remark.
[20:39]LAUGHTER
[20:41]And I felt like it was sort of like a combination
[20:44]of like the worst of the KGB
[20:47]and sort of borched-belt comedy, you know.
[20:51]Are you working on another project now?
[20:53]My publisher must have sent you.
[20:55]LAUGHTER
[20:58]I have two things that I am working on.
[21:03]And one of them that will happen more immediately
[21:06]is actually next year I have my first mystery coming out.
[21:10]I love mysteries, I always used to read them
[21:12]for like just kind of mind candy.
[21:14]And the mysterious press was nice enough to buy it.
[21:20]And they said, oh, we like this character very much.
[21:22]How about two more?
[21:23]And I said, sure, I think what they liked
[21:26]is when I was an undergraduate,
[21:30]one of my gigs, this is back in the day
[21:31]you didn't have to be 21, I was a bartender
[21:33]for like the alumni events.
[21:35]And because I was the most junior member of the staff,
[21:38]my job was to, they would say,
[21:41]wake up the alumni who are still here.
[21:44]I don't think that's what they meant.
[21:45]I think what they meant is make sure nobody is dead.
[21:48]And so, you know, and I'd wake up the gentleman,
[21:51]and I'd say, oh, Mr. So and so, time to go home.
[21:54]And neither he would get up or he wouldn't.
[21:55]And I thought, what a great setting for a murder.
[22:00]So, in the murder, in the murder mystery,
[22:05]I have a disgraced English professor
[22:08]who takes up being a private eye
[22:11]and is called into her alma mater
[22:14]for the death by bludgeoning
[22:17]with a bronze bust of Nathaniel Hawthorne.
[22:20]So, that's the next one.
[22:22]Amazing.
[22:24]Amy, thank you so much.
[22:25]Congratulations.
[22:27]Thank you for listening to totally booked with Zibi,
[22:30]formerly mom's don't have time to read books.
[22:32]If you loved the show, tell a friend,
[22:35]leave a review, follow me on Instagram at Zibi Owens
[22:38]and spread the word.
[22:40]Thanks so much.
[22:41]Oh, and buy the books.