Loretta Rothschild, FINDING GRACE: A Novel
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[0:44]Loretta Rothschild is the author of Finding Grace, a novel.
[0:48]Loretta is originally from London and currently splits her time between the UK and Italy.
[0:52]She lives with her husband Nat, their young son, and their beloved dogs.
[0:56]Finding Grace is her debut novel, and by the way, I am absolutely obsessed and love this
[1:00]book so much.
[1:01]Welcome Loretta.
[1:02]Thank you so much for coming.
[1:03]On totally booked with zibi, I am so obsessed with your book, as you saw from my Instagram,
[1:08]and now all these people want to read it right now and are so annoyed that I wrote all
[1:11]that before it is available.
[1:13]But Finding Grace, oh my gosh, it's so good, congratulations.
[1:17]Oh, that's so nice, I was very touched by your post, it's all very new, so nice when someone
[1:23]even knows your book exists, but alone likes it, so that was really touching, so thank
[1:28]you.
[1:29]I didn't just like it, it's so good, the writing is so good, the plot is so good, the
[1:35]emotions, like I just, I was so sad, I didn't, as I got towards the end, I just like wanted
[1:42]to slow down, so I didn't lose the characters, and yet then I also had to speed up to
[1:47]see what was going to happen.
[1:48]And now I have so many questions, but maybe I'll have to ask you offline, so I don't
[1:52]give anything away.
[1:53]Yes, thank you, that's a really tough book to talk about, and we've discovered this,
[1:57]because the most exciting thing is knowing nothing about it, yes, and that's been something
[2:02]that isn't my agent and my editor Sarah, and we just sort of sit and go, oh, what can
[2:09]you say?
[2:10]And it's not easy, I have to say, it's not easy, even now we still try and work out
[2:16]how to describe it.
[2:17]Yeah, do you want to give a one-line description or something of what, without giving
[2:23]things away?
[2:24]Anyway, without giving anything away, I think I would say that the core of it, the core
[2:28]of finding grace is a love story between two characters whose lives are appended by unexpected
[2:36]events, and I wrote it wanting to write about these two characters, so it is a love story,
[2:43]but it has maybe the kind of speed of a thriller, that was what I wanted to do, was have
[2:49]it be straight from the beginning for it to just become, I didn't want any, I wanted
[2:55]to do things that were unexpected, but still being very loyal to the structure of a love
[3:02]story.
[3:03]Well, it's built around a secret, and whenever people have secrets, the sort of corrosiveness
[3:12]and the self-destruction that comes from keeping a secret and the after-effects, sort
[3:17]of the ripple effects, rather, of secret keeping and all of that, and how it can kind of
[3:23]drive you mad.
[3:24]I feel like that is part of this as well.
[3:27]It's a full-time job, the honest people, what I discovered with Thomas, I was stressed
[3:33]writing on his behalf, and he's not a liar, he's made a terrible mistake.
[3:42]And he gets very, very far in, and it's very stressful to not be living in the truth,
[3:51]and it's a good lesson, it's a full-time job, it would sometimes wake me up at night because
[3:58]I would be kind of energized from certain things I was writing.
[4:03]It was very real, it was real to me, so I think it was really a lesson,
[4:12]just how unbelievably overwhelming emotions like grief and love can be, and how intoxicating,
[4:22]they are just how dangerous they can be and put you in a place and make you do things you would
[4:27]never do, and no Tom would never have done those things, had he not been in such a deep well of
[4:32]grief, it would never have happened without giving anything away.
[4:36]But oh my gosh, this is killing me.
[4:39]Well, in broad strokes, it's also about motherhood, the quest to be a mother, what it means to be a
[4:45]mother, it's part of it is set because one of the characters, grace is training to be a master
[4:52]symbol. Yeah, so you have all this wine stuff thrown in, you have parenting and how to be a good
[5:00]parent and the role of friends, you really have the village really mapped out of how to get through
[5:08]something and who is supporting who and the supporting characters are so vivid and they're not
[5:17]even supported, they're like very central characters and just loyalty and then mother, daughter
[5:23]relationship, I mean, you know, like everything, everything. So I found myself wondering because you
[5:30]wrote so exquisitely about grief and I read a lot of books that talk about grief in many ways
[5:36]and there was a fresh, almost fresh, it sounds, how can you have a fresh perspective on grief,
[5:42]which is of course the oldest emotion in time, but I really feel like you did and the way you
[5:46]wrote about it, especially with some one-liners where you just distill all of it, right? Sometimes
[5:53]it's the most simple explanations that are the most powerful. How have you been affected? Where does
[5:58]your grief story fit into these things? I think, oh, that's very nice and thank you because
[6:04]sometimes you wonder, you know, you're writing in the dark and you hope that what you're saying
[6:10]someone will all understand and get what you mean, but I think coming back to this idea of
[6:17]love and grief as co-pilots, they do drive in life or in fiction, you know, they're real drivers
[6:27]for behavior and unexpected behavior. And I think I read a lot of books, but I really, I really
[6:39]took the grief element of this book incredibly seriously because of the magnitude of certain
[6:45]parts of it. And I think I stopped trying to diagnose grief or explain it. I just kind of
[6:54]wandered alongside of it and I appreciated that the grief has it, everyone reacts in different
[7:01]ways and there is no correct way to deal with grief. And there's no right or wrong. And I think
[7:09]trying to trying to kind of understand it would have put me in a kind of block me a little bit.
[7:16]Instead, I just tried to go on the ride and it was helpful having on her alongside me because she's
[7:23]so fun to write with. She's a great narrator. She's very, very, you know, she's a writer. So she could
[7:31]also inject a fresh take on something also with the context that, you know, it's her husband.
[7:38]So she's talking about someone she knows intimately, which I think added to probably, I think
[7:46]maybe that might be the kind of, when you talk about a fresh look, it might be that little bit of
[7:52]perspective that really made it touch in a different way because I would sometimes get upset or
[7:58]emotional because it sometimes felt cruel to do to do certain things to a character or put them
[8:06]in a sense scenario. But she was very, very, I had rules for her as a narrator because, you know,
[8:12]she is, she would have taken over. If I hadn't have kind of kept us slightly in check because
[8:18]she is a writer, she knows all these characters so well. And she's an unexpected narrator for
[8:23]this story and I obviously won't say why. But she really has everything that you need to kind
[8:30]of inject a story with joy, grief, love. And she just kind of bought it home. Like I couldn't have
[8:38]done it without her and actually wrote it without her. I wrote it in the third person and then I came
[8:44]and I just couldn't do it without her. She had to tell the story. So I think she in a way added that
[8:52]a kind of special, it has something. I can't even sort of put my finger on it. But
[8:59]I think she really took it to a different place emotionally.
[9:04]Wait. So tell me the whole story of writing the book. You first wrote the whole thing in the
[9:09]third person. What did you know? And when did you start writing and what was the process and
[9:15]tell me the whole story? What were you doing before? Maybe I'll back. Go back in your life
[9:20]in the writing life. Where did it go? So I think I've always been a writer. I thought everyone
[9:27]walked around making up stories in their head. I thought that's what everybody did. So I would
[9:32]be having conversations in the car. My sister would be like, what are you doing? And I'd be having
[9:40]an argument to imagine a people thinking something. Because someone had said something, I think
[9:44]well, that's pretty funny. And then I'd start having a conversation. And I just didn't realize
[9:49]everyone didn't do that. So I think you're kind of born a writer in the sense that you do
[9:55]kind of always have the camera's rolling. But, you know, and I think that-
[10:00]there's certain, you know, you wouldn't turn yourself if you weren't. You just, how would you
[10:05]come to it and think, you know, I'm going to put myself in, in this almost kind of
[10:10]insane position of creating an entire world out of nothing. And I think, I think I just
[10:17]realized one day that, you know, oh everyone doesn't think like this. And then I was always
[10:23]writing things, but I was never completing something. I was never, you know, I was just doing it
[10:28]because it was, I had to get it out. But on her was an extremely insistent voice in my head.
[10:35]She wasn't going anywhere. So I didn't, she was going to get rid of no matter what. So I think
[10:42]that's why this was the first thing I kind of went out into the world with because she was so,
[10:47]you know, she was, she was coming in hot. She was like, okay, this is what I want to do. And
[10:54]even now, sometimes I walk around and she'll make a comment about someone in my, in my, in my
[11:00]eye line. She'll, you know, make some passing comments. And I, it's actually a slightly,
[11:05]it's better now because I'm writing my next book. And at times she just pops in with a huge
[11:11]opinion about something that I have to kind of take a walk or read something because she just comes
[11:17]in. And so it's, it's a, it's a, I don't, I don't know anything else in a sense of a way to be.
[11:25]And there's a great line in the, in a movie called The Beetha Contessa where Humphy Bogart says to
[11:33]Ava Gardner. Oh, she says to him, can you teach me to act? Can you teach me how to act? And he
[11:39]says, if you can act, I can teach you. And I think it's the same as writing, you know, if you
[11:44]you can write, you can really learn how to write in terms of how do you make your idea digestible
[11:51]to more than just yourself. And that part is a different part. I think you can't sort of the
[11:59]sort of ideas and the wanting to create something has always been there. And then it was like,
[12:03]right, how am I going to execute this and, and, and make it what I see it as an, and, and digestible
[12:11]for people that don't know me who I'm not sitting in front of and, and it turns out that was
[12:17]a book. Yeah. It's amazing. So what were you doing in your regular life while this came to be
[12:27]like, paint me a picture of, of life for you and then the book finding its way in?
[12:34]So I was, I was living in, this, I was living in LA. My husband was doing it. He was at
[12:42]USC doing a, he was meant to be doing his PhD. And I always had my laptop with me. I was always
[12:50]writing things down. And I'd be modelled before. So I was always kind of moving around and I was very
[12:56]used to kind of having all my books with me and like, you know, I carried everything with me. So I was
[13:01]always able to write. And I just kept writing every day. I would, wherever I was, I kind of got
[13:08]over the idea that I needed to sit at a certain desk and do it a certain way. And I just got on
[13:13]with it. And LA was a place that, you know, with everyone's talking about creating things,
[13:19]talking about things, incredible workshops. So it was sort of fertile ground to, to get on with
[13:25]something. But I did get on with it quite quietly. I didn't want to talk about it until it
[13:30]existed. That didn't, didn't come naturally to me. But yeah, I think that was, that was about
[13:37]nine, eight years ago. And then how long, what happened from nine, eight years ago till now?
[13:43]So I started writing this book properly in lockdown. So I had a kind of maybe three or four chapters
[13:50]and then with all that time. And it was so sort of not being, there was no more excuses.
[13:56]I couldn't, there was no reason I couldn't do it anymore. You know? And I loved that sort of,
[14:03]there was no obstacle. So I had to, I had to get on with it. And I did. And that was maybe
[14:08]just before. So maybe four years ago, something like that, four years ago. And that's, that's now.
[14:15]And then you just took it out as a, you got an agent right away. Was it just an easy process?
[14:22]I got an English agent first and I got my agent, Jonathan Lloyd Curtis Brown. He read the first
[14:29]three chapters and, you know, rang me up. So it was such a wonderful moment because you just
[14:35]think, oh, maybe I'm mad. Maybe this is just like, no one's going to understand what I,
[14:40]but I've done. And he rang me up and just said, this is, I can remember so well, what he said,
[14:46]I was like, hello, he said, better. I mean, I can't believe what you've done. I mean,
[14:52]this never happens. This is so dangerously brilliant. I don't know what to,
[14:58]and you just sort of, and I just thought, oh my gosh, thank goodness. And he said, okay,
[15:01]right, let's get on with this. Let's get on with this. And so I just kept writing and kept writing.
[15:05]And he sent it to Christie Fletcher at UTA. And she sent me a wonderful email as well saying,
[15:12]you know, this is extraordinary. And let's do it. And then about a year later,
[15:20]I finally finished it and we went out with it. And that was when I was lucky enough to have
[15:27]St. Martin's press by it. And also my next book. So I get to do my next book with that Sarah too,
[15:34]which is amazing for me. Can you share anything about your next book? It's too early,
[15:40]too early, but it's going very well. But it's, it's, you know, it's, it's the gestation period.
[15:45]It's very, very, I'm very nervous all the time. But it's going to go. It's, it's that moment where
[15:52]you, it's, it's very new. It's very new. Okay, I won't dig too deep. It's okay. But just what
[16:00]are the things? Can you share anything about your own life or an experience? Because
[16:06]at least for grief, and I was, I was touching on this before, I mean, you can't,
[16:10]you can't have written this beautifully about grief without having felt it. Can you,
[16:14]I mean, is that even possible? Did you? I, I mean, I've definitely had grief in my life. I,
[16:21]I've not had a traumatic event in the same sense as, as honor and, and grace and time. But I do
[16:30]think that grief is such a pungent emotion. And I think depending on what kind of age it hits you,
[16:40]it can really stick with you. And I don't know if I kind of have an experience that would,
[16:50]would kind of have led me to writing this book and, and led me to writing it about grief in the way
[16:57]I have. I think I, I think I'm always listening. And I'm always wondering, you know, I became
[17:04]very interested in, in, in fatherhood because of this book. And I had a conversation with someone
[17:11]it completely off of nothing that we weren't talking for the book or anything. We just met and he
[17:16]had a daughter and him and his wife were divorced and he was the sole, he looked after her most of
[17:24]the time. And I can't remember how we got onto it, but he's, you know, Loretta, I very rarely
[17:31]go into a restaurant where someone says, I'll get you a seat without saying, is it just the two of
[17:37]you? And it was moments like that. I didn't look for things that were bigger than, than the day
[17:46]today. I think that maybe the reason it feels so kind of universal and, and real is because I,
[17:52]I didn't, I didn't go in a deep dive for anything, anything. I sounds silly, but like bigger than
[17:58]the day. And I think that in the day, things can happen that feel in when you're in a certain,
[18:05]you know, when you're in a certain environment, you know, that was obviously for that person,
[18:10]you know, they were with that child. And is it just the two of us? If you hear that three or four
[18:15]times as a week, I mean, that would be, you know, it had a really kind of, it really touched me.
[18:22]I remember sitting there thinking, I mean, wow, I mean, he goes through that three or four times a
[18:27]week. And it was something I never thought about. I'd never thought about what that might feel like.
[18:34]And so that was very, there were moments like that that I really took seriously. And I wonder if
[18:42]maybe it's the day to day that where, you know, but I don't know. I just, I really didn't take
[18:52]anything for granted. And I felt very, what's the word? I felt very responsible to make sure
[18:59]that I told that story between for both the characters in the book. I wanted to make sure I did
[19:06]it justice because obviously without giving too much away. And it is a, you know, there is,
[19:13]you know, a lot of joy that comes out of something in the book. But it definitely, yeah, I didn't,
[19:20]I took it very seriously. And I didn't want to, I wanted to make sure I did that particular
[19:26]loss justice. Do you believe that there are doppelgangers, if you will, of all of us in the world,
[19:34]that there are people who are similar or that we each have a person out there who could be
[19:42]a proxy for us in some way? That's a great question. I wonder, I wonder, I think, I know, I don't
[19:51]know. I mean, I think we see what we want to see. And I think I want to talk about this in the book,
[19:57]you know, if I introduce you to someone in the context of being
[20:00]connected to me, you see them, you know, if they were walking down the street,
[20:03]would you think, oh, that person looks exactly like,
[20:05]Loretta, I wonder if they're, you know,
[20:08]long-lost sisters or whatever. I think that I think that context is a real
[20:15]context really does a lot of the work for us. But I'd like to think so.
[20:20]I mean, it would be quite cool to have, you know, like another version of you.
[20:24]But yeah, I mean, I can't imagine if that would be, I mean,
[20:28]it would be quite cool. Are you prepared for the level of success?
[20:32]This book is going to blow up. It's, I just know it. It's amazing.
[20:37]It's going to blow up. Are you ready for that? Are you excited for all that comes
[20:41]with it? You know, someone asked me the other day what I wanted for this book.
[20:46]And I sort of thought, I wanted this book to exist in the world.
[20:51]And maybe for a few people to read it. So everything after that is a bonus.
[20:56]You know, I'm so lucky to have St. Martin's press Sarah Benton and I,
[21:02]my editor, I just completely in sync.
[21:05]And I've just met most incredible people and the fun of it is that they totally
[21:12]got it. I mean, when Sarah and I met for the first time,
[21:16]she got it. She got the whole thing. She didn't want anything other than what I,
[21:22]I'd done. And working with her was just, it was just so easy and fun and so bright
[21:29]and so smart and so clever. And I mean, what a, what a privilege to get to work
[21:34]with people like that. And everything is just everything is a bonus.
[21:39]And I hope people like it. I hope they find a character in there that they may be
[21:43]identified with or find funny or a moment that, and I think I think there will be
[21:50]a hope so, but it's just been really incredible. And I feel incredibly lucky that
[21:56]it's a real object in the world now.
[21:59]Do you have a book or two that you loved, that you were like, if only it could be like
[22:03]this, like a book that I, you know, that's, that's a great question.
[22:07]Because I think when I looked back at what I was reading and what really
[22:11]stuck with me, it was a lot of, there's a great book called Grievous
[22:17]A Thing With Feathers, which is narrated by as three narrators, but one is a pro.
[22:24]And I found that so it really changed things for me. It kind of gave me permission
[22:29]to allow honor to take the lead. That book was hugely influential, looking back.
[22:34]And, and also just, you know, traditional, you know, love stories like
[22:39]Jane Eyre, I mean, these books are perfect books. So you can have, you know, you
[22:46]can have an original story, which is really what I wanted to do.
[22:49]I wanted to write a traditional story, a traditional love story, but with a kind
[22:55]of modern twisty bringing it to today, kind of what could happen.
[23:01]And lead questions like does love one, does one love take from another, you know,
[23:08]are we truly ever alone? Is that really, you know, fresh start that these things
[23:12]I was so interested by? I wanted to kind of write a book that would lead people
[23:19]to question things that maybe in the book. I didn't want to answer things.
[23:25]I thought it was so fun to kind of go along with these characters and, and even
[23:30]ask myself these questions like, does one love take from another? Does, is that
[23:36]I think, you know, so I'm, I'm a big, I mean, I'm a big, I love poetry and, and actually
[23:43]when I looked back at some of my notes before we did this from things I was writing because
[23:47]I'm very analog. So everything is, everything is in, everything is physical. So I have
[23:55]my notes and I was looking through and it was quite clear that I was, I was writing and
[24:01]and I was asking these questions to myself all the time. And a lot of them I can hear
[24:07]almost voice kind of answering, but I, I still post myself the questions, which is really
[24:12]fun. Well, Loretta, congratulations. So amazing. I'm so excited for you. Thank you for
[24:19]coming on. Thank you so much, Debbie. Thank you for listening to totally booked with Zibi.
[24:24]Formerly, moms don't have time to read books. If you loved the show, tell a friend,
[24:29]leave a review, follow me on Instagram at Zibi Owens and spread the word. Thanks so much.
[24:35]Oh, and bye the books.