Former Actress now Author Deborah Goodrich Royce on That Best Boy

[1:21]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 zibbymedia.com, and follow me on Instagram at Zibby Owens. Deborah Goodrich Royce is back on the podcast to talk about Best Boy. She has been on several times. Her novel Ruby Falls won the Zibby Award for best plot twist when I was doing those. Finding missus Ford was hailed by Forbes and Good Morning America as a top read. And, actually, I just saw that has been optioned and has a big deal star attached, but I'll let her reveal all that when she wants. She also owns the Ocean House in Watch Hill, Rhode Island, where I've done many events and stayed many times. I'm obsessed with it there. She runs her own event series and has some really exciting guests coming up this summer, which we talk about in the episode. She used to be a soap opera star on All My Children. So, well, you can listen to this and then listen to Susan Lucci's episode, which I released. And she also owns the Avon Theatre, Deer Mountain Inn, United Theatre, Martin House Books, and other revitalization projects. She is a class act. Welcome, Deborah. Thanks so much for coming back on Totally Booked to talk about Best Boy, a novel. Congratulations.

[3:10]Deborah Goodrich Royce: Thank you. It is always a pleasure to talk with you.

[3:13]Zibby Owens: It's so funny, Deborah, because I've talked to you about some of the stuff that's happened in the book in person over the years. And then to see it all, like, in final form here and knowing that, like, that's exact that's what happened to your house when that robbery and just all these little its and bits of of your life. Anyway, it was kind of neat to see it all collected

[3:35]Deborah Goodrich Royce: here in the story. Well, it's a funny thing. I think all fiction writers draw from life and how much do we draw. Yep. I don't think it's ever autobiography,

[3:45]Zibby Owens: but we use Yeah. Of course. Well, that's what we have. Yeah. No. But it was great. It was like getting a hug in the middle of the book or something, you know, like being a familiar friend. Okay, let's back up. Tell listeners what Best Boy is about. So

[3:58]Deborah Goodrich Royce: Best Boy is about a woman named Vivica Stevenson, who is exerting kind of a white knuckle grip of control over a life she has created. She lives in a very nice suburb, Greenwich, Connecticut. She has a very nice husband and a very nice son and very nice friends, and she's holding onto it very tightly. And a couple of things happen early on. There's a home invasion and a robbery. And then a letter comes into her mailbox, a letter that's been dropped there from someone who claims to have known her in the past. She's a former actress. The term best boy is a real job on a movie set. He claims to have been the best boy on a film she did. And she can't remember him. She has a flawed memory anyway, for a couple of reasons. She had a big trauma when she was a teenager. And you start to toggle back and forth to see if this man who's writing the letter is telling the truth, and if he's not,

[5:01]Zibby Owens: what it is he wants. So interesting. And I know from our prior conversations as well that that you were an actress also

[5:11]Deborah Goodrich Royce: Yeah. And that you got an email like this, didn't you, from someone who was on a cast or something? Yeah. The guy who said exactly that. I was your best boy on survival game. Survival game is a movie I did, not one of my better films. And I didn't remember the guy, and he had very specific touch points in our life, our life, you know, like there was an hour to it about some Thanksgiving dinner we had together. And then he said, ran into each other at the Cannes Film Festival, where I was holding a baby. And he wondered for a moment if the child was mine, which was kind of, you know, shocking. I had been at the Cannes Film Festival that year. I did have a little baby. I was with my husband at the time. He did go on to say, but I knew that that wasn't possible. So that was, you know, a few big relief. But I got to thinking, how many times does that happen in your life where someone sees you and says, remember in college when you did this? And the most unsettling thing about it is they're remembering your actions or your words that you don't necessarily remember. And it got me thinking about memory and how flawed it is. It got me thinking about this film called Rashomon, which is a Japanese film from 1950. Akira Kurosawa, a rape occurs in a forest, there are three eyewitnesses come to the trial, they've seen three completely different things. So I think that's life. So that's really the underpinning of the book, that examination of memory. But then there's another part that has to do with it. The thing that happened to her in high school, she is a victim of an assault that she doesn't remember. So the memory plays in there, and she carries a tremendous amount of guilt and responsibility over things that happened afterwards. Don't want to say too much about that. And, you know, we are responsible for our actions. We are responsible for our words. And yet, are there are there mitigating circumstances? So a lot of questions around that.

[7:28]Zibby Owens: Interesting. Well, I like how how you structured it so we don't find out sort of till later everything exactly that had happened in the beginning. And really, all you know is she's she's essentially running from her past. Right? Because she starts with a new name and identity and

[7:45]Deborah Goodrich Royce: some plastic surgery. I don't think I'm giving too much away. It was pretty early. No. No. That's known early on. Her face is damaged in this this thing that happens to her, and her vocal cords are damaged. And that's one of the ways she is able to reinvent herself as an actress. I think I often still get recognized for my voice. The voice is an interesting thing, whether it's cadence, whether cadence or tone. But if your voice changes, what about you is the same or different? Wow. So interesting.

[8:19]Zibby Owens: When someone goes through something this terrible, you have to wonder how do they make sense of that? And in the book, have the migraines, the ocular migraines that she has start even before and perhaps during what ends up happening. Perhaps alcohol is an exacerbating factor. But when she goes into one of these migraine moments, she doesn't remember anything. Does this actually happen? Has this Do you know? Tell

[8:45]Deborah Goodrich Royce: me about that. Yeah, it's very brief. Those like mental fogs are not long. Do suffer, well, in my youth, one of the benefits of aging, I can give a post menopause testimonial. I do not have migraines like I did for all those decades between being a teenager and being in my mid fifties. The ocular migraine is the weirdest thing because I would be looking at you and suddenly it's like a scrim appears in the middle of what I'm seeing this weird hazed out scrim. And then the lights, it would be interesting to hear when other people read it if their experience is the same. I have not had those momentary blackouts, but people do sometimes from just the severity of the pain and whatever else is going on. I've had one ocular migraine, and it is bizarre. It is totally bizarre. Well, you think you have a brain tumor the first time it happens. It's so weird. Yeah. I didn't know. I was like, how do you escape what you see? Right? Because I was like, how do you get out of it? But it's like, you can't get out of it because And it lasts for me, it always lasted about fifteen minutes like clockwork. And once I relaxed with that, that was very helpful.

[10:03]Zibby Owens: Yeah. Once I knew what it was, I went to the urgent care and I was like, oh, it's a migraine. Okay. I can handle that. I think once you know what anything is, you can relax a little bit. Right. Yeah. I think so. Well, let's talk about her current life. Vivica, whose real name is not Vivica. In her current life, she is a mom. She's totally put together. She's dealing with the other moms about the volunteer work, and she's you know, just doing all the right things and yet carrying around the secret. And also having her marriage seem to be totally great, and who knows what is really going on beneath the surface, which I feel like is another throughline of the story. Talk a little bit about how appearances essentially can be deceiving because I feel like that's one of the things that she has masked the pain and puts forward this very together picture,

[10:57]Deborah Goodrich Royce: and yet you don't really ever know what's going on with people. Right. You don't. I mean, it starts with her as a girl. She has a somewhat unhappy family life. She goes to this museum in Detroit, the Detroit Historical Museum, that has this cool exhibit that still exists down in the basement. It's called the streets Of Old Detroit. And it's really amazing because it's very dark and there are yellow lamplights and little storefronts and cobblestone streets. And for her as a girl, there's something about it where she feels kind of safe and removed from her own life. When I first moved to New York, I was so alone, so lonely. I was a young aspiring actress before I'd booked all my children, and I would go, true confession, to Macy's department store on 34th Street, And I would walk the floors, just walk the floors. I wasn't buying anything. But there's something about being in certain spaces. It's different now with cell phones and everything. But back in the day, prior to all that, there was a sensation that you could for a time just leave the real world. So that is what she seeks. She creates shadow boxes, that's another way of her kind of controlling an image of reality. She has this dollhouse when she's an adult, which is a continuation of the shadow boxes and these worlds that she's trying to create. So like I said, she's a little bit white knuckling her sense of well-being.

[12:43]Zibby Owens: I know you host such an amazing book series at the Ocean House every summer, but I think you should maybe consider having Marie Benedict because she just wrote a book called Daughters of Egypt, and you have a whole piece about Egypt and Tutankhamen and all of that in here, which I think

[12:59]Deborah Goodrich Royce: dovetails with her historical novel about it. Just saying. I I'm interviewing her March 31 in you go. Okay. Not at the Ocean House because the Ocean House is having a complete room renovation, which is very exciting, which is a periodic thing in five star hotels. But at the United Theater in conjunction with the same bookstore, Martin House Books. So I'm reading it now. I'm really psyched to interview her. Doctor. Oh, excellent.

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[15:29]Deborah Goodrich Royce: I've I've done a little pivot more to a different thing going on with a couple of things I'm working on, but that's not what we're talking about now. So how do we cope with trauma? What do we carry forward? There's generational trauma for sure, in large populations, in small family groups, but there's also conferred trauma, you know, things that happen to us, things that happen to our loved ones, all those levels of trauma. What do we do with it? Because I think in life, it's probably unavoidable. I mean, obviously, there's a different degree of what people go through. But how do we cope? How do we go on? How do we make sense of it? Particularly if we feel that we played a part in in an unraveling.

[16:18]Zibby Owens: Mhmm. Yeah. This notion of regret, friendship, loyalties, memory. There are a lot of lot of big topics here. Wait. So you teased what you're working on now. What are you working on now? Yeah. So

[16:33]Deborah Goodrich Royce: I'm writing a ghost story. I my mom died two years ago, and my mom was a real spark of life. As I sense your mother is Zibby, I'm loving these over the years. You're posting with your mom, it really touches me because your mom seems like she's got that spark and my mother had it and I miss that. And after she died, I got this idea of kind of this mother daughter ghost story. I don't want to say too much about it, but it's funny. And it's really more of a cozy. I mean, there's tension and there's a mystery and there's danger, but the relationship I want between the mother and the daughter is more like terms of endearment with Shirley McLaughlin. And Deborah Winger. So that's the mother daughter relationship. The daughter is 55 years old. She's a writer. She's had writer's block. Turns out her mom used to hash out ideas with her. The mom dies. She's there to clean up her house. And the mother comes through to her, and, of course, she doesn't believe it. So it's a little bit like terms of endearment meets the ghost and missus Muir.

[17:45]Zibby Owens: Interesting. Well Love that. Love that pitch. And how what would you say what meets what for best boy? Oh,

[17:51]Deborah Goodrich Royce: Best Boy is I would put it more in thinking about like Hitchcock's Vertigo. If you've seen Vertigo lately, Jimmy Stewart, Kim Novak, but also notorious because the woman's more questionable and notorious. Maybe more notorious. Interesting.

[18:16]Zibby Owens: Love it. Do you ever miss acting these days? Do you ever miss it?

[18:21]Deborah Goodrich Royce: I do not. I feel like I can say more what I want to say and what I need to say through writing. And I feel like I'm at an age and stage where it's really all about doing what I'm called to do. I mean, that's a luxury. We don't all have that luxury, but for me, it's very meaningful too. Even like that little, how I get ideas for books and what I start writing, that's a huge part of the joy in it.

[18:54]Zibby Owens: And you support other authors so much with your series and on I mean, you're just like such an advocate and a fabulous interviewer, by the way, as well. Tell me about the joy that that brings.

[19:07]Deborah Goodrich Royce: It's it was such you know, there's always kind of an unintended to say unintended consequence sounds like something bad. This is an unintended happy consequence of being a writer. So being an actress when I was young, and I was only an actress when I was young, really in my early twenties to early thirties, it felt more like a zero sum game. There's a part I'm going to get it or you're going to get it. We're not both going to get it. And I certainly made and retained actress friends, but it was a very different feeling and also an utter lack of control. I'm not saying we have total control as writers. I'm not implying that. However, being able to start the Ocean House author series and continue it, and it just keeps growing, has enabled me to build this relationship with other writers as I see that you started doing before I did, and you've done it in a much larger scale. It's very fulfilling. And then a couple of years ago, I was talking with a couple of other writers and we were longing for a retreat, not a retreat where you have to workshop or teach or speak or do anything, just writing. But we didn't want to do it like, you know, McDowell or Yaddo where people apply. We didn't want to have to judge other people's work. So we started the Deer Mountain Writers Retreat, and we're about to do our fifth cohort. And it's a solid week of writing and then lovely dinners and wine. And it's up in the mountains in the Catskills. And everybody comes out a little different from when they entered, they've accomplished something, whatever it is. And everybody shared their frustrations in the evening, because everybody has frustrations in this business. And it's a very out of the limelight, off the grid, meaningful

[21:10]Zibby Owens: week. I love that. So creative. Really fun. And I think the community that authors bring each other is one of the saving graces of sort of a lonely pursuit. Right? You have to just be with your brain and your keyboard. And writers, of course, are, for the most part, so supportive of each other, like you said. So it's it's it's nice to have that touch base. They are. They are. And you're you're at the pinnacle there, miss Zibby. You are. Stop. A writer supporter. With all of the trauma that you write about, where does it come from? Do you have a a traumatic memory or series of things? Did anything like this happen to you? Is that your real nose?

[21:53]Deborah Goodrich Royce: That is my real nose. That is. I mean, who knows what else is real, but the nose is. So childhood is psychedelic. And I am quoting my friend Iliana when I say that. Don't you find childhood is totally psychedelic? The adult world is so weird. Things come out of nowhere. I think about, I had a much older father, much younger mother. My mother was my dad's third wife. I don't know why this never occurred to me. When I was about 12, I'm starting to scratch. My cousin Vincent, we were playing in the backyard. He said, Yeah, well, you have a brother you don't know about. I said, I do not. He said, Yes, you do. Guess what? This brother was older than my mother, a child from my dad's first marriage. He and his wife were kind of scandalized by my parents. So in the grand old tradition, my parents thought, we just won't mention it. So that was crazy. Yeah, my mother's best friend was murdered when my mother was a child. That's where I talk about generational trauma and conferred trauma. I think when something like that happens, you are changed in what you consider as being possible. A normal 12 year old child has a range of possibilities. And suddenly your best friend is so violently murdered at home, you don't think the same way. You don't expect the same things to come in life. So I mean, I could name some things like that. I would say probably my mother's friend's murder was one of, because I had this awareness of it. And when people would say, Oh, the world is so much more dangerous than it ever was. And I think about World War II, or or on a personal level, my mother's friend. I mean, there were terrible things going on. Yeah.

[23:47]Zibby Owens: I think maybe just the fact that every time you open your phone now, you have to watch another one makes it feel like there are more. Well, we that is exactly right. We are inundated

[23:58]Deborah Goodrich Royce: with these news slash non news chatter cycles about everything. And some of it can be entertaining, whether you're Googling what happened at the wedding dance at the Beckham wedding, which the internet memes were rather hilarious about that. Not for them, I'm sure, but for outsiders. Or Bad Bunny and who liked and who didn't, or the Epstein quagmire. There's what you read in traditional news sources. And then there's the internet. And I feel very sorry for people much younger because I don't know how they make sense of it. I agree. I feel sorry for us.

[24:48]Zibby Owens: I'm like, how do I even often I'll, like, ask Kyle. I'm like, my husband I'm like, I don't understand. Like, what news did you get today? Because, like, I got different news. So we have to trade. Yeah. It's it's, like, hard to parse. It is very hard to parse. Yeah. But luckily, we have books like yours to escape into, and then it doesn't even matter.

[25:09]Deborah Goodrich Royce: Well, there's always truth in fiction. I think there's great human truth in fiction, but it's not really giving you the factual details of what's going on in the world around you. That's true. That's true. Yeah. But an escape, a much needed escape.

[25:23]Zibby Owens: Much. Thank you. Anything this summer people should know about for your amazing series? We have just arranged

[25:33]Deborah Goodrich Royce: for Jenna Bush Hager to come personally with two of her authors. So she'll be there July 16, which should be a lot of fun. She reminds me of you in that, you know, she has a hand in many pies, and she's got now an imprint. So yeah, I'm very excited about that. We've got Chris Bajallion, we've got Annabelle Monaghan and Beatrice Williams and Lou Anne Rice and, oh my gosh, Don Winslow. So it's all coming together. Maybe Mary Kay Andrews. I probably shouldn't say that, but because that's not finalized. But it's a really, really robust schedule.

[26:14]Zibby Owens: Amazing. Well, for anyone out there listening who has not been to the Ocean House, it's one of my favorite places. The author series is so amazing. It's beautiful. I just adore it, and as you know. So everybody must make it We have new rooms now, so that'll be really snazzy. I loved how you posted, like, which of the which, you know, motif for the decorating. And I I found myself sitting there for way too long debating, and I was like, oh my god. Stop. Go do something else. Oh, you actually picked three.

[26:45]Deborah Goodrich Royce: All three palettes. There's kind of an aubergine palette. There's a kinda blue leading with blue palette and a leading with blue and pink and blue and green palette. They're all, they're very compatible. So, I mean, that's the way you do it. You have these three schemes and you alternate them. And I mean, it's a long, long process to redo

[27:07]Zibby Owens: hotel rooms. I bet. I can't wait to Happening right now. Can't wait to see the final product. Congrats. I really, really enjoyed this book. Great. Well done. Really enjoyed it. Thank you so much for coming back. Thank you, my friend. Always a pleasure. See you soon. Okay. 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 Zippy Owens, and spread the word. Thanks so much. Oh, and buy the books.