Erin O. White, LIKE FAMILY: A Novel

[1:09]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 at Zippy Owens. Erin O. White is the author of Like Family, a Novel. By the way, this has already been picked as the Barnes and Noble book club pick and also Sarah Selects. A 52 year old debut novelist, Erin O. White is also an essayist and the author of the memoir Given Up For You. After growing up in Colorado and living for twenty years in Western Massachusetts, she now lives with her wife and daughters in Minneapolis. By the way, I loved this book. Enjoy. Welcome, Erin. Thank you so much for coming on Totally Booked to talk about your absolutely beautiful novel, Like Family. Congratulations. I loved this book. You are a really gifted writer, and I'm really excited about it. Thank you so much. It's such a pleasure to be here, and I'm so happy that you liked the book. I did. I really, really did. I felt like like each chapter could just be a short story that you read in English class, it's, like, fully contained, and you're, like, you get a sense of the characters so fast and what they're thinking and feeling and all the little details and, you know, even like the the bolognese scene when when when Caroline first meets Mike or something like that. And and you talk about how he was behind the bar and just, like, filling I know you said it better than me now. Can't remember. Like, something like filling the garnish dish, and you just, like, see it. That's all you knew. That was only a couple words. Anyway, I feel like you do that in every scene that, like, immediately we get the picture, and I love that type of thing. You so much. Thank you. Okay. Tell sorry for the rambling intro there. Tell everyone what, like, family is about. It's not rambling at all. I mean, Like Family

[3:25]Erin O. White: okay. So Like Family is about three couples, sort of interconnected families who live in Upstate New York. One of the couples has four kids and are married they're married to have four kids and live on sort of like a gentleman, although it's actually a gentlewoman's farm, a little bit outside of town. The other couple so I should say also that two of the couples are lesbian couples and one of them is straight. The other lesbian couple is kind of like a cool business owning they own a sort of like a viral bespoke pottery company in this town, and they have twins, children. And then the last couple is a straight couple who've moved up from who've moved from Boston, and they have one child whose name is Luca. And the three couples moved to sort of through the book together and apart in their relationships and the way their families are intertwined.

[4:19]Zibby Owens: This is sound crazy, but right before you, I interviewed a psychologist about this book, Love the Teen You Have, and she was talking about, like, identifying different things. And I was like, I need Luca to see Doctor. Lockhart. Like, how can I could she help some fictional characters in my life right now, please? Because I feel like that would be really helpful.

[4:42]Erin O. White: He's a sweet boy.

[4:44]Zibby Owens: Oh, you had a line in there, something like, there's no pain like a child's loneliness or something. Oh my god. That so got me. Oh. Yeah. Oh my gosh. You also had this other line about the role of souls and soulmates. And then you said something that I'd never heard before, something like how the soul is actually the only thing that does not need a mate, that you believe souls are fully formed. And tell me more about that. I I I loved that. You know, it's interesting.

[5:15]Erin O. White: I I think it was so so it's so interesting creating fiction because you can put so much of what you believe about the world, right, and about the cosmos into your characters' lives. And then you can also sort of try on other ideas that maybe don't necessarily belong to you, but you feel like belong to your character. So I feel like and it's Caroline who says that, who doesn't believe that a soul has to be made. And she's a very particular character in that she has so she's extremely beautiful and sort of received by the world as this just like beauty. But she has a lot of sort of, like, suspicions Mhmm. About how people really feel about her. And she is, in some ways, a bit of a fortress, which is why her friendship with the other one of the other main characters, Ruth, is so profoundly important to her. Mhmm. And I think I sort of experienced her as a person who would want to own something essential Mhmm. About herself for herself. Does that make sense? Like, I really believe that she was a person who was like, I even before I was a mother or a wife, I sort of was giving the world my sort of physical ness. Right? My people. And I felt and she probably felt like she belonged to people in various ways. Mhmm. And but she's also quite a private person. So I was like, I bet she actually would think this. Yeah. And it was a way for me to sort of illustrate her. But as also, like also as having and I really like to think about my characters in this way, as having a, you know, having a having a spiritual life Mhmm. That doesn't necessarily appear on the page, but, of course, infuses them, right, as people Yep. And guides their thought processes and their motivations and is sort of their own private thing. Interesting. So I think that's where I sort of got those musings for her. It's so fun to muse inside other people's heads. Right? Nice to get out of our own Nice to get out of my own head.

[7:10]Zibby Owens: I also love the Jewish characters in the book and how you portrayed that, not as a central driving force of the book, but just like a nice piece in the background with enough enough scattered about that it was meaningful but not overpowering.

[7:24]Erin O. White: Okay. I'm glad. I wanted to Ruth, that character came to me so fully formed, and I just knew that she was a Jewish person in a particular way. And I just wanted some of I just wanted that to come through and the liveliness of her and her marriage and and her and also for Toby and for Evie. Yeah. And I love how you showed different ways that sort of love and lust and passion and

[7:49]Zibby Owens: relationships evolve in different ways. I mean, that sounds like such an oversimplification, but the young, you know, rip our clothes off moments, the older, quieter, she just took off her towel and laid on her husband. Like, that's really it it's such a it was such a nice arc, like a full circle, how how things evolve and you treated it with such care. Oh, thank you.

[8:14]Erin O. White: I sort of think a little bit about the book as like a coming of middle age novel, sort of the idea that, like, these people are just coming into early middle age, so they're in their early forties. Yep. And I think you hold so much of that those I mean, you do your whole life, but you hold so much of those old passions. Right? And you have a memory of them, and you're wondering about sort of, like, how your lives of desire and attraction will sort of follow you through middle age. But then you're also you're also so embodied as a middle aged person, right, in early middle age. You're if you've been married a long time, you still have a super physical intimacy with the person you're married to. But it's so casual and so unspoken in so many ways. So I think that was part of what I was trying to do. Just like in that scene with Carolyn and Mike, just like those are two bodies who have been Mhmm. Together for so long. Right? And there's just that it's just casualness about it, which is so great.

[9:09]Zibby Owens: Yeah. So nice. I guess I could have also given a referral to one of the other characters to the doctor now that I'm thinking about it. But what's her name? Starts with an s. Oh my gosh. I'm blanking on her name. Theta. Theta. Sida. Sida. She's my teenager. That's right. Yes. I mean, my teenager in the book. She's not my real life teenager. Yes. Luca was a little bit younger. But Sida gets some very surprising news early on. She is a typical acting out with teenager. Things evolve. You know, it leads up to this whole thing towards the end. Anyway, tell me a little bit about about her as a character, about how we can better parent our teens. And, like, what do you do when when things in your past suddenly

[9:52]Erin O. White: Yeah. Are things that your your kids need to confront as well? Right. Yeah. It's that's a yeah. Right? That's a huge question. I will actually just sort of share what it is because it's revealed on sort of page two of the book, so I'm not really giving anything away. I'm always trying I'm always very appreciate it. But that's so much I love the discretion. So Sida's a teenage character in the book who finds out very early on in the book that her she was not conceived with an anonymous sperm donor like she thought she was, but that her mother had had an affair when she was very young. Not an affair outside of her marriage, but before she was married. Had conceived Sida at the age of 23 and then had her, and then was estranged from the man she'd had Siddha with. The man dies. That happens in the early part of the book. And then Siddha and her family are left to reckon with this secret that is coming to coming to life. It's a huge secret. Yeah. And, of course, I love the way that it works fictionally in my book, and I and I think that it's interesting how in fiction, you sometimes make things much bigger, right, so that you can sort of make a point about about an idea. And and I think, you know, she's a kid who's just dealing with new information in a way that's just really painful. Mhmm. And it's also really beautiful because it's opening up these other new relationships with other people that she didn't know that she could have. But her parents are left really not knowing what to do because they've made a mistake. And isn't that so much of, like in in a lot of ways, that's a lot of parenting teenagers is you kind of don't always know what to do because oftentimes, you have made a mistake. Yeah. They haven't acted well necessarily, but maybe you have done something you wouldn't do if you had better information. Mhmm. Because teenagehood is I mean, it's the real deal. Yeah. You know, it is just life coming at you fast with a with a person who's trying to figure out the world, and you're just kind of making it up as you go along. And it's and I and it's hard. My teenagers are older now. Okay. So I am through a lot of that. And how old are they? 21 and 18. Okay. So, you know, but it is it is every day is not an easy day. But, god, they're just but also, you know, it's such a it's a beautiful thing too. I mean, I just and that's a lot of what I wanted to capture is, like, you love a teenager in a way that is just really powerful. Yep. And all of it, you know, their feelings are so big, but your feelings for them are really big too. And I think we just don't always talk about that a lot. It's like, you know, you have an enormous amount of tenderness and love for them, especially as you come to that ending time of them living in your house. Yep. And then they're just all over the place figuring out the world, but, god, they're still so beautiful. Right? It's just like I have twin 18 year olds,

[12:42]Zibby Owens: so I get it. And younger kids They do. Yeah. But

[12:46]Erin O. White: Yeah. I mean, twin so do you have twin 18 year olds? Mhmm. Yeah. Yeah. Yeah. It's a lot. Yeah. We we need, like, a support group. Anyway. I mean, they're just amazing. And I was trying to imbue Siddha with a lot of what I just believe to be an amazing thing about being a teenage girl. It's just, you know Yeah. They hold a lot of life. Yeah.

[13:08]Zibby Owens: Well, you also I mean, you have so many themes in here, but the female friendship, also the, like, almost like social competitiveness is which you use is, like, this Instagram couple is like a foil. And, of course, early on, you're just like, oh, they're just like normal people. Like, the whole Instagram thing's an act. Everything is an act. Like, not everything is an act. I don't know. But just, like, always wondering about other people, and that that is not something that ends necessarily when you're 18. Right? That is Right. Right. It persists in, like, the whole culture of perfectionism

[13:40]Erin O. White: and, you know, not knowing what is true and what's not. I love how you sort of poke fun at that. It is funny how it keeps going. Right? I mean, it's just like was it Woody Allen, who is the name we don't really say anymore, but Woody Allen said that, like, adulthood is just high school with money or something. Like, I think, you know, it really does and I do and and I do think it also comes to a particular head or in your early thirties, early forties in a lot of ways when you're still kind of really looking around at what other people have. You're sort of striving. You're wondering what you could still make happen. You're thinking about your life choices, all that kind of early middle age stuff. Whereas I feel like now at fifty fifty two, I a lot of that has eased up for me just because of the crucible of the these last ten years where I've seen so many people, everybody experience their own slew of life difficulties. And you look around and you realize, oh my god. Like, all of us are in this together. Yes. But at the beginning of middle age, you're still like, I could maybe move this around. You know, I'm I'm still maybe the captain of my own shit. You know, like and there's a lot of still sort of, like, jealousy. And and that's what I wanted to kinda capture in the book, but from my perspective of being older so that I could give them a lot of my a lot of generosity and a lot of love. But I could also show them kind of in that sort of tortured, like, maybe I can still change this up Mhmm. Way, which is, you know, sometimes a fool's errand. Yeah.

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[18:10]Erin O. White: Okay. I well, it's I mean, to sort of, like, I I've been a voracious reader since I was four four or five years old. Anything I get my hands on. Mhmm. Read and read and read and read. Had a more scientific mind for many years. Worked a bunch in nonprofits in my early twenties. I was living in Philadelphia and took was taking an LSAT class at at like, through community edit Penn, like, and then also signed up on a LARC for a writing class that was sort of meeting next door. I was like, oh, we all wait. Isn't that funny? James Ron of the Rittenhouse Writers was running it. I was like, I think I'll do that too. And the LSAT I took the LSAT, but wow, that was boring. Contrary to what you might think about the LSAT. Yes. You might have I was shocked. Yeah. Guess I had a really bad they stand. Yeah. I would not read through the pamphlets all the way. Yeah. Took the writing class. Got pretty interested in it. Thought I would just just ever shelve that law school thing just for a little while. But then really sort of just got into the writing, got my MFA, and just sort of threw myself into it rather kind of foolishly with how much of a plan. But then I ended up defending my thesis right just a couple months before I had my first kid. And so then I just moved into parenting and doing a lot of nonfiction writing, a lot of ghost writing, a lot of editing, various things like that. I wrote a memoir that was published in 2018, and then I turned back to fiction and just played around with a whole bunch of things and then started this book, I think, in 2021 or something, and then just kind of got to it. And you know how sometimes there is that saying that people say, just, like, write the book that you wanna read. Mhmm. And I think it was I had sort of just even given myself just kind of, like, the permission to just write something super fun. I'm a true lover of domestic novels, domestic fiction. Laurie Colan is my Mhmm. Just my north star. I love Mary Gordon, Sue Miller, all those old books gave me so much comfort. And I love them so much. And I wanted to write I really wanted to write a queer domestic novel. I really wanted to create an American domestic scene that was populated by by lesbians. And I didn't know if it would work, and I didn't know if anyone would want it, but it did. It did work. Yeah. And I had a ball riding it.

[20:30]Zibby Owens: Oh my gosh. That's amazing. So when you finally finish it I mean, not finally. It's I mean, not to imply it took too long or anything like that. No. No. No. It's just what happens with novels. That's what yeah. How was the publishing acquisition

[20:45]Erin O. White: journey and all that? So that was very I mean, extremely lucky and very straightforward for me. So Claudia Ballard took me on as and was a grand champion of the book and did she's my agent. She did some revision work with me, which was fantastic. And then after a couple of months, she sent it out to some sort of people that she had had in mind for it. And I had a lot of I had a lot of great interest. That's great. Just wonderful.

[21:15]Zibby Owens: And it was but it and my editor was Whitney Frick at Oh, my. Of course. Everything Dialed Press does, like, love. It's, like, getting embarrassing. I, write Whitney thank you ness. I'm, like, I'm serious. I was like anyway.

[21:29]Erin O. White: I and it was funny because I had a bunch of, know, had a bunch of meetings with wonderful editors wonderful people. And Whitney is, you know, she's just she's really one in a million. She's an extraordinary person. And as I said to her, I was like, I will just be happy if I get to write books for you, Whitney, till, you know, the rest of my life. She's a really gifted editor and a really beautiful person. Oh. Yeah. That's so nice. So Will you It's been great. Good. I'm so glad. I have to go back now and read your memoir. Tell me about it. Oh, okay. So my memoir is a real it's a really different story. So it's called given up for you, and it is about how in my early twenties, I was living in Philadelphia and really deep in sort of social justice work in some of the neighborhoods there, I became enthralled with social justice Catholicism. And I converted to Catholicism in my early twenties, sort of in the vein of Dorothy Day and Thomas Merton and those sort of big Catholic thinkers. My parents were raised Catholic. I wasn't but I but they didn't raise us Catholic. But I really became compelled by it. At the same time I became compelled by that, I fell in love with the woman who's now my wife, so twenty seven years later. So the book is about that sort of just, like, real mess of sort of spiritual longing, desire for social action, and then this identity that was forming in me, which was just this massive love affair with this woman that I had just met. And so it's a very just like a a story of my early twenties and sort of just like the soup that I was kind of, like, growing up in Mhmm. And how that kind of played out over the rest of over sort of, like, the first decade of my adulthood. It was a lot to write. I and I'm glad I did, but I'll never write another word about myself.

[23:18]Zibby Owens: No. Really? Why? Not even, like, essays?

[23:22]Erin O. White: Well, I did actually recently write an essay for The New York Times about why I'm no longer cooking family dinner. Oh my god. Read that. I read that.

[23:29]Zibby Owens: Oh oh my gosh. I forgot that was even you. I loved that so much, and I wanted to talk about it, and that is awesome. And,

[23:38]Erin O. White: yes, thank you for saying that. You're just like, I'm not doing this anymore. I'm not doing this anymore. It's great. I've been having long time. Yeah. It sounded like it, and you sound like a great cook. You know? Thank you. I am. Yeah. I you know, it's just as I know you know, writing about yourself, creating art from personal from your personal life is really hard. Right? Because in fiction, you when things aren't working a particular way, you can really move them around. You it's so much more malleable. But when it's your life, you really have to just really dig in and make that meaning and really find the story and find the art. And I found it just really strenuous in a lot of ways. And I found I ended up, to be perfectly frank, revealing more than I would have wanted to. But I was sort of in the process of writing it, and I was compelled by the work so that when I kind of came up for air, I was like, I don't know. Like, love it. Like, I stand by it as but it's also, like, a lot. Do you know what I mean? Yeah. Mhmm. Yeah. Okay.

[24:40]Zibby Owens: Well, now I even wanna read it more, but that's good. Okay. Are you sad to leave these characters? Are you ready to write about new characters? Are these gonna New person. Characters continue,

[24:50]Erin O. White: or what are we thinking here? I'm super sad. I I can't return to them just because I feel like I put got them to a great place, and I just feel like they should just do what they want on their own. And so I'm in with another group of people now. Nice. And I don't know them all that well, but I'm having some fun. And they're sis it's all sisters. That's so good. I love a sister story. So as as all sisters and a mother, and one errant brother over here on this side. So that's what I'm in now.

[25:23]Zibby Owens: Well, just from, like, a literary device standpoint in this book, I love how you start us out sort of in the freezing cold water, and then in a way we end up in freezing cold water in another way sort of later on, and that we are somehow contained in this, you know, space that is at once therapeutic and calming and also terrifying, which is sort of emblematic of life itself, would say. Was that a device intentionally? Or tell me a little bit about sort of using how you use setting and ways and devices to make meaning or reflect something, or maybe I'm just reading into it. I love that you noticed that. So for me, it's about that there's

[26:04]Erin O. White: the there's this pond in the book. For me, it's really about that. I the book takes place in a fictional town in Upstate New York, but in so many ways, the setting belongs to the place where I raised my kids mostly with my wife, which is Western Massachusetts, outside of Northampton. And we lived in a really rural area with a bunch of families, and we all really raised our kids together. And our lives really revolved around a particular body of water where we spend a lot of time. And I do feel like because I spent so much time thinking about how that water changed through the seasons, how I would be in it with my kids in the summertime, and then we'd be on it in the winter, and it was the same water, and we kept returning to it. I did think about how you can use those elements of the natural world in fiction to really bring your characters kind of back to the same places in different ways with different perspectives. And it's a really fun part of writing is to find those settings that you can really see so clearly in your head and then put and then sort of get them onto the page in different ways. So for me, it was yeah. It really was the water. I mean, it's a couple things. It's the water. It's the pond. And then it's one particular house Mhmm. That one of the couples lives in, which is modeled on a house of one of my dearest friends where my kids really grew up. And it was great to sort of just, like, be back inside. You know how that is? You're just, like, back inside a space that meant so much to you. So that was a lot of fun too. So for me, it's like, yeah, it's houses, I think. And then it's like a few those sort of a couple of touchstone natural places. I feel like in our lives, we just sort of do return to.

[27:39]Zibby Owens: Yeah. Makes me wanna, like, write a novel just to go back to some places that I miss. Yeah. Like, as a therapeutic exercise or something. Yeah. I mean, yeah.

[27:49]Erin O. White: And I do think that is I so I was working on this in the pandemic when traveling wasn't super possible or, like, the tail end. Mhmm. My family had moved to Minneapolis from Massachusetts a few years before, and it really was heal beautiful and healing for me to go back all the time and just be in these places and to visit with my young children Uh-uh. You know, which is always a joy. Do you do any teaching? I feel like you're a really good writing teacher. Oh, that's sweet. I don't do any teaching. I have in my past, but since we moved to Minneapolis, I don't. I do a lot of one on one editing and coaching.

[28:26]Zibby Owens: I have two newish friends who I've met through just like Instagram and retreats and all that who live in Minneapolis who are so amazing. So Oh, is such a great city for writing. Yeah. They're so nice. Everyone there is so nice. I did. I came last year, two years ago, but I'll come back. Yeah. Yeah. Come back. Yeah. They were so nice. They, like, knitted or the They were so nice. Yeah. So nice. So nice. Yeah. It's a great place to live. It's cold.

[28:52]Erin O. White: Yeah. Okay. Yeah. But it's a great city full of beautiful wonderful people. Yeah. Amazing.

[28:58]Zibby Owens: Well, Erin, you have a new huge fan in me. Really Oh, so love thank I mean it. You I love how you write. I loved this book and your story, and I'm just gonna be cheering you on as the book comes out and and all the rest. So congratulations. Thank you. It was such a pleasure to talk with you. You too. You too. Alright. Good luck with everything. Okay. Thank you so much. Take care, Zibby. Alright. Take care. Bye bye. Bye bye. 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.

[30:12]Zibby Owens: At Edward Jones, we believe rich means opening yourself to new possibilities. That's why your dedicated financial adviser meets you where you are, helping you move forward with confidence. Let's find your rich, Edward Jones, member SIPC.