Rachel Beanland, THE HALF LIFE
[0:00]Welcome to Totally Booked.
[0:02]I'm Zibi Owens.
[0:03]I've interviewed more than 2,000 authors on this show and learned endless amounts about
[0:09]storytelling, reinvention and life itself because when you talk about books, you're really
[0:13]talking about life.
[0:15]So get ready to hear from today's best authors, the best-selling and the not yet discovered.
[0:20]Come find your next great read and the story behind it.
[0:24]Enjoy!
[0:26]Today's episode is with Rachel Beanland, who's the author of The Half-Life.
[0:31]Rachel is the author, also, of the house's on fire, and Florence Adler swims forever,
[0:37]which she was on this podcast discussing so you can go back and listen to those.
[0:41]Florence Adler swims forever won the National Jewish Book Award for debut fiction.
[0:46]She is a graduate of the University of South Carolina and earned her MFA in creative writing
[0:51]from Virginia Commonwealth University.
[0:53]She lives with her family in Richmond, Virginia.
[0:56]Welcome, Rachel.
[0:57]Thanks for coming back on Totally Booked to talk about The Half-Life Your latest novel
[1:02]Congratulations.
[1:03]No, thank you so much for having me.
[1:05]So this novel comes after two phenomenal hits.
[1:09]You had Florence Adler swims forever, which won the National Jewish Book Award for debut
[1:15]fiction.
[1:16]You had this house's on fire, right?
[1:18]Yeah, yeah.
[1:19]The house's on fire, both of which we talked about.
[1:24]I loved and I was so excited to see you had a new book out.
[1:28]Take us into The Half-Life.
[1:30]Why this story, what is this story, and how did we arrive here on this beautiful coast?
[1:36]Well, I think readers who have been following me from the beginning will realize that I
[1:40]never take you to the same place twice.
[1:42]So, you know, I had 1934 Atlantic City with Florence Adler swims forever.
[1:47]We were in 1811 Richmond, dealing with the Richmond Theatre Fire in the house's on fire.
[1:52]And then with The Half-Life, we're going to La Modelina Italy, which is a tiny island
[1:56]off the northern coast of Sardinia, where I lived when I was a little girl.
[2:02]My father was an officer in the US Navy.
[2:05]And there was, for a time, about 35 years, there was a US Navy presence on the island.
[2:13]Really when we're talking about a Navy presence, we're talking about nuclear submarines.
[2:16]There was a submarine tender and nuclear submarines coming and going.
[2:20]I lived on the island between 86 and 88, but I did not return to the island until 2019.
[2:28]And when I returned with my family, just kind of on a vacation wanting to see where I
[2:32]had lived as a little girl, suddenly I realized like this wasn't just this idyllic island
[2:37]that I was living on for two years, but also there was all this geopolitics.
[2:41]There was so much going on between the Italians and the Americans.
[2:45]And I knew that I wanted to set a novel there.
[2:49]And so it took me a couple of years reading and researching, and I was writing the houses
[2:54]on fire at the time.
[2:56]And ultimately I decided in the story of Eileen Archer, who is this young 23-year-old woman
[3:02]who has grown up in Charleston, South Carolina.
[3:05]She meets a guy in the Navy.
[3:06]She marries him very quickly, which is a common story in the military, because you want
[3:10]to follow the person you're dating to wherever they're off to next.
[3:15]And so she ends up on this Italian island with really no idea who she is, let alone
[3:20]what she's meant to be doing there.
[3:22]Wow.
[3:23]And then as a fish out of water, so to speak, she lands there, learned how to speak,
[3:28]Italian, learned how to navigate everything from, you know, buying the things that she needs
[3:33]and using the little hot plate and their tiny little apartment to making friends and infiltrating
[3:38]the group of women that's already on the island and trying to find herself.
[3:42]I mean, it's hard enough coming of age, but doing so in a foreign country, in a group
[3:47]of new people.
[3:48]I mean, it's crazy.
[3:49]Yeah.
[3:50]I always had the experience as a Navy kid of kind of showing up somewhere new and having
[3:54]to figure out, you know, the culture and what I was doing there and how to fit in.
[4:00]And, you know, so it wasn't a leap for me to figure, you know, okay, here's this young
[4:04]woman who's never traveled anywhere and she's in Italy and she's trying to figure
[4:09]all of that out.
[4:10]I also wanted to write the story of a woman who was trying to figure out marriage.
[4:14]You know, I got married young.
[4:16]I think I was also influenced by my father.
[4:19]He had had an early marriage that didn't work out.
[4:22]I'm still married.
[4:24]And I was very interested in that too.
[4:28]What do you do when you get married so young that you don't really know who you are, let
[4:33]alone what you're meant to be to this other person?
[4:36]Interesting.
[4:38]Well, I love how you explore their early marriage, especially because he is working so
[4:42]hard, which is also common in many relationships in the beginning.
[4:46]And especially when you move for work, right, I remember moving for work for around the
[4:51]same age for the person I was dating, which ended up ending perhaps as a result.
[4:56]Right.
[4:57]Right.
[4:58]Just like popping down in a new place and it's centered around the other person's career
[5:02]and how do you how do you navigate that?
[5:05]Well, and I think military careers in particular are tricky because there's so much that
[5:10]these guys, I mean, in the 1970s, we're mainly talking about guys couldn't talk about,
[5:15]right, particularly when you start talking about the Navy's nuclear propulsion program.
[5:20]There's so much stuff that's top secret.
[5:21]And so, you know, these women like Eileen were kind of forced to just kind of accept the
[5:28]bits of information they were given and then kind of create a story around around that.
[5:33]And we made Teo, she'd be friends, a local journalist of sorts, and that's some other
[5:40]narratives.
[5:41]Yes.
[5:42]Yeah, without giving too much away, I mean, you know, she doesn't know who she is.
[5:46]And you know, I didn't want to write a perfect character.
[5:49]You know, I wanted to write someone who was real and who was struggling.
[5:53]And you know, and Eileen's case, she's lost her brother several years before she
[5:57]marries Paul, and she's still very much grieving and trying to kind of, I think maybe
[6:05]she's guilty of compartmentalizing some of that, but it's, of course, all right below
[6:09]the surface.
[6:11]So here she is away from her parents for the first time, finally maybe figuring out what
[6:15]it means to have lost her brother, and then also dealing with this marriage.
[6:20]And of course, Teo is able to not just kind of help her see, you know, what Italy really
[6:26]is like or what Sardinia in particular is really like, but he's also the journalist
[6:31]who's doing a lot of research on what these nuclear submarines are doing, you know, to the
[6:36]environment and to the people around them.
[6:38]The loss of Eileen's brother that narrative was so powerful and the way that you portrayed
[6:44]that both her and the impact of the family and her guilt at leaving and how they pushed
[6:51]sure to go and then how years later it was only her mom who was who Paul invites to come
[6:57]and she's like, what about, what about my dad and he's all alone and just said that emptiness
[7:02]and the reverberations of that loss are so widespread throughout the book.
[7:08]And I don't know, it's kind of the heartbeat of the story.
[7:12]I think, you know, I lost my father young and I think that to some extent I will always
[7:19]be writing about it.
[7:20]I think grief is a territory that I'm sadly very comfortable in and, you know, I think
[7:29]if you look at my books, you know, Florence Adler, The House of the Fire and then now
[7:34]this one, that is a through line, you know, I'm always interested in not just how people
[7:41]deal with loss in the kind of immediate, you know, events, you know, after someone's death,
[7:47]but also just how they deal with it long term because I think that's the thing that we all
[7:53]realize, right, when we lose someone we love is that it keeps going, right, that's not grief
[7:59]isn't just something you kind of get to get to the other side of.
[8:02]Can you talk about losing your dad?
[8:04]How old were you at the time and what happened?
[8:08]I was 29 when he died, he was 58, he died a pancreatic cancer, he had had prostate cancer
[8:15]first in his early 50s and then pancreatic was his second cancer diagnosis and so I think
[8:22]one of the things that I was very interested in with this novel and I think that this story
[8:27]in particular is kind of the closest that I've come to exploring some of the stuff with
[8:31]my dad is I was just interested in like, we can never figure out, right, when someone
[8:37]we love dies of cancer, like what caused it, what's the reason, right?
[8:43]And it's also, there are million ways we have introduced risk into our lives, what we eat,
[8:48]what we drink, you know, the air we breathe, right, like the pollution all around us,
[8:54]there's so many different kind of factors that can be influencing why we're getting
[8:59]cancer, why we're dying of it and I was interested in how people deal with that risk and
[9:06]make sense of that risk and, you know, in cases like my dad's who, you know, he did work
[9:13]on nuclear submarines for many years, did the nuclear submarines have anything to do with his death?
[9:19]I don't know, I'll never know, right? And I think that's one of the things that's so hard.
[9:24]So interesting. Well, how you explored that here and the way pervaded the community and some of
[9:31]of the side effects perhaps, who knows and how that happened throughout the book that was also
[9:36]sort of like an underlying medical mystery going on and it really explores responsibility and
[9:43]what are the costs to serve? It's great. Yeah. And there are costs with everything, right?
[9:50]Like, I mean, there are all kinds of advancements that we get, you know, nuclear submarines is one
[9:56]example. We can point to so many others in our world.
[10:00]and but with so many advancements there are costs and and sometimes when we're just kind of the
[10:04]civilians sitting around we don't understand the costs. Mm-hmm. It's so interesting. Well, I'm so sorry,
[10:10]you know, I'm at your father and I'm sure. Oh, thank you. Yeah. Yeah. I mean, I, I'd like to think
[10:16]he would really enjoy this book. He, you know, he certainly would have been the number one person
[10:22]I would have called because of course it was very difficult to write a book, you know, kind of set the
[10:26]the midst of the this naval, you know, environment, right? The US Navy plopped down on the
[10:32]Sardinian island and of course I was a little girl when I lived there. So, you know, I would call my
[10:38]mom. I would call other guys who had been in the Navy. I had a whole kind of network of of naval,
[10:44]you know, folks that I would call, but of course my dad would have been the big, the big guy I would
[10:49]have loved to have talked to. Well, the research you did clearly shows. I feel like you included
[10:56]eight million details about this time and this work and the place and it definitely was like
[11:04]a flight for me to another time and place that was completely immersive. So thank you for that.
[11:11]Thank you. Thank you. I try. I mean, you know, I don't know how to do it any other way. I mean,
[11:16]it's like the details I think make the story. And so I always want to get all of the details right.
[11:23]So interesting. You said you have a writing group and you kept coming back to whether you
[11:27]should write the Italy novel or not. Tell me more about your writing group, which I know includes
[11:31]Claire Gibson, right? Yes. Yes. I mean, it's we're such a funny group because we very rarely
[11:37]exchange pages like we don't actually read each other's work until the very end when it's like,
[11:42]hey, I have a whole book. Do you want to read it? You know, but we are in a we're in a WhatsApp group
[11:48]because one of us is in Canada. And so we, you know, have international texting going on. And
[11:53]it's like the only reason I ever check what's up is like for this one group. And, but we are just like
[11:59]kind of great sounding boards. And we're all in approximately the same place in our careers like
[12:05]second, third books, all fiction writers, you know, all kind of just like bumping along with
[12:10]the ups and downs of, you know, of this crazy career that we have decided is worth pursuing. So
[12:19]it's Lauren Francis Sharma, Blair Hurley, and Claire Gibson. And they were right. They said, go
[12:24]write the Italy book. And so I did awesome. So what did you get at writing this book? I mean,
[12:30]I got to spend two years in the model Lena in my head. Right. Um, I did a research trip to
[12:38]two years ago, as well as, you know, of course the family vacation I had done in 2019. And, you know,
[12:44]any opportunity I get to go back to the model Lena. I mean, the model Lena is a tiny island
[12:49]a couple of miles across with like dozens of beaches. And it's just, I mean, it's paradise, like
[12:55]crystal clear water. They did not get it wrong on the cover. You know, this is
[13:00]the model Lena. It's just really a paradise. So I loved spending time there. And I also loved
[13:08]because I grew up in the Navy. And then, you know, of course, married a guy who was not in the Navy.
[13:13]And I never joined the Navy. And, you know, it was like when you, when you've been a military
[13:17]dependent your whole life, and you get to be an adult and like suddenly you're not even allowed
[13:22]on the bases anymore, or you like can't shop at the commissary or do all of the things that you
[13:26]used to do your whole childhood. It's like a shock. You know, so I did enjoy just spending
[13:33]a couple of years back on kind of like my home turf where I know what many of the acronyms mean.
[13:40]And I, you know, I kind of speak the lingo to an extent. And so that that was also fun.
[13:46]Yeah, it was, I mean, to the extent that writing a novel is ever a good time, right?
[13:51]It was a good time. I go back and forth on that because I love editing, drafting, you know,
[13:58]I mean, there are days where it's going smoothly. And then there are days where I just want to
[14:03]like fall on the laptop keyboard. Did you make any huge changes, like cut entire characters or
[14:11]have things go in a different direction than you set out? I probably wrote 200,000 words that
[14:17]did not end up in the book. Oh my gosh. I know. Yeah. That's crazy. That's like another couple
[14:22]books. Unfortunately, I just like don't know another way to do it. I like I write with my document
[14:27]that I have another document called Stuff I Chopped. And I just like throw everything in stuff I
[14:31]chopped as I so 200,000 is like sometimes I take the same paragraph and it ends up there four times
[14:35]or something. But it was a lot of words that got chopped. I was very much kind of feeling my way
[14:41]with this story. You know, the house is on fire and Florence Adler swims forever or both after
[14:47]math stories. And so something bad happens in the beginning and then everyone is kind of left to
[14:53]pick up the pieces and figure out what it all means. And so I feel like I kind of had that structure
[14:57]down. But with this one, I was building towards something. And I knew roughly what I was building
[15:05]but it was a very different book to write because of that. And it was also my first time writing
[15:12]a book and first person, which I know some people find first person to be the easiest. But like
[15:19]I find it to be very difficult. So that took me a while. And what about your next book? What are you
[15:26]thinking? I mean, I'm hard at work, but I am way too nervous to say anything aloud. I think it
[15:33]will be contemporary. That is what I will tell you. I think I am coming a hundred percent into
[15:38]the present, which is nutty because I've never had to write anything where a character has a cell
[15:44]phone. You know, like I never had to deal with texting. I've never had to deal with email
[15:53]but so that will, I guess, factor in. So after winning the Jewish book award for debut fiction,
[16:00]how do you think about including Jewish themes in your work?
[16:04]You know, I think about it every time, but it doesn't mean that they actually work their way in.
[16:10]Like it really depends on the story. And I think because I was raised in such, I was raised in an
[16:18]interfaith household, like my dad was, you know, Methodist and my mom was Jewish and they raised us
[16:24]to be Jewish. And I'm raising my kids to be Jewish, but I married to a Catholic guy. And so
[16:30]I always when I'm writing and thinking about what the story demands. And so like for this,
[16:38]for this novel, I knew I needed to be, it needed to have been raised Catholic because I wanted her
[16:44]to be kind of in conversation with the Catholicism that was going to be around her when she got to Italy.
[16:51]And that felt kind of important to the story. With the houses on fire, I kind of referenced,
[16:59]there was a thriving Jewish community in Richmond in 1811. And there was a family that, in fact,
[17:06]was Jewish and had had a lot of loss in the fire, but it was actually just such a tragic story. Like
[17:14]they lost almost everyone that I found I couldn't write about it. It was like, it was too much.
[17:19]But I think my Jewish values end up in every story. There are certain things that I do or think
[17:25]that I don't even realize are Jewish thing. And they always work their way in. And in fact,
[17:31]in the final couple of weeks, going through edits for this book, my mom and my sisters and other
[17:38]people were reading. And they're like, Rachel, you can't, you know, you can't call that guy a
[17:43]pups. Like, you know, nobody would use that if they weren't Jewish or, you know, like certain
[17:49]words that I was like, and I was like, oh yeah, you're right. Sometimes it's a question of editing
[17:55]it out. It just depends. Have you felt any impact from being a Jewish author writing in the current
[18:01]environment? Gosh, I probably have, but I am not sure I always know when I have with that.
[18:09]Makes sense. Yeah. All right. Well, any advice to aspiring authors?
[18:14]Advice. Keep going. It's a long road. Yeah. I mean, I don't know. My advice is always kind of like
[18:22]the straightforward stuff. Like, I'm still a person who tries to write every day. I try to get
[18:28]something on the page. Even if it's like crap or, you know, it's me writing capital letters come
[18:33]back here, write more on this. And then I'm always just reading. I mean, you know, it's been
[18:40]really fun for me because I was judging a couple of things this last year. And so I was reading
[18:44]a lot that was like required. You know, and then in the last couple of months, I have just been able
[18:52]like whatever my little heart desires. And I do find that that just gets my juices, you know, flowing.
[19:01]So yeah, I just try to read widely and write every day, ish, even when it's crap.
[19:09]How eloquent. Thank you so much for that.
[19:14]Anyway, well, Rachel, thank you. I really lost myself in this story. It was so immersive.
[19:19]And I loved the time I spent. I mean, it's a thick book full of so much. And I read every word
[19:27]and really loved it and got so much out of it. So congratulations.
[19:31]Oh, thank you so much. I really appreciate it.
[19:34]Thank you for listening to totally booked with Zibi, formerly momstone after time to read books.
[19:39]If you loved the show, tell a friend, leave a review, follow me on Instagram at Zibi Owens,
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