Natasha Solomons, Author of HOUSE OF GOLD
[0:08]Hi, I'm Zibi Owens, and you're listening to Momstone Have Time to Read Books.
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[0:28]I am so excited to be interviewing Natasha Solomon's today.
[0:31]Natasha is a screenwriter and the best-selling author of four novels, including The House
[0:35]at Tinford and The Song of Heart Grove Hall.
[0:38]Her latest book, Her Fifth Novel, House of Gold, is an epic drama about a supremely wealthy
[0:43]Jewish family tested in many ways by World War I.
[0:46]It has already been optioned for TV by Tall Stories, part of the UK team known for
[0:50]Downton Abbey, my favorite show.
[0:52]She currently lives in Dorset England with her husband and two young children.
[0:56]So, welcome Natasha, thanks so much for being on Momstone Have Time to Read Books.
[1:00]Thank you very much for having me.
[1:02]I feel like I'm on the phone with this major celebrity because I've been carrying around
[1:06]House of Gold and telling everybody I know, like, I am reading the best book.
[1:10]And now I get to talk to you, so I'm so excited.
[1:14]Oh, thank you.
[1:15]Oh, you've so made my day.
[1:17]No, it's true.
[1:18]So, can you tell listeners what House of Gold is about and how you came up at the idea
[1:23]for the book?
[1:24]Well, the Gobound family at the Confidence of Governments and Kings, they have banking houses
[1:30]all across Europe.
[1:31]It's 1911.
[1:34]But despite that, nobody quite trusts them because they're Jewish.
[1:39]And for their own part, the Gobounds realize that only family can be trusted.
[1:44]So, Greta Gobound of the Vienna dynasty is being sent to London to marry her cousin Albert,
[1:50]a man who she's never met.
[1:53]And right from the start, it looks like the marriage is going to be a disaster because
[1:56]the couple loaves one another on site.
[2:00]But soon, they have larger problems because the Great War, the World War I is looming.
[2:06]And so really, it's the story of a breakup of Europe that told through the microcosm of
[2:12]the breakup of a single family.
[2:15]So it's a novel of power, a family, of war, of love and loss.
[2:21]Amazing.
[2:22]That's a great description.
[2:25]This is like the Oscar for Best Picture.
[2:27]This is like how I would describe a movie like that.
[2:29]It's amazing.
[2:31]And it came from inspiration from your own family, correct?
[2:35]Well, yeah, a little bit.
[2:36]On the stairs in my parents' house in Dorset, England, there's a portrait of one of my ancestors,
[2:43]a man called Jacob Shvott Sheltzer, a little picture of a man wearing a black yamaki
[2:49]and on his desk, a yellow bird, a golden oriel.
[2:52]And I must have walked past this picture.
[2:54]I don't know.
[2:55]A thousand times, I never really noticed it.
[2:57]And one day, I did see it in the way that you do.
[2:59]And I asked my parents about it and they said that this man, Jacob, he was a tutor and
[3:05]a neighbor in the Frankfurt ghetto to the Rothschild family.
[3:09]And I was intrigued really that my family had sort of brushed so closely to this incredibly
[3:15]famous European family.
[3:18]And my family had left the Frankfurt ghetto at around the same time as the Rothschilds.
[3:24]And the Rothschilds had gone on to have found these banking houses all across Europe and
[3:28]have this sort of meteoric rise and my family had not.
[3:32]And yet somehow, following the journey of both families, ones of incredibly famous and
[3:39]my own moderately and moderately successful, gave me that first kind of writer's tingle.
[3:45]But I think really what drew me to the story and wanting to write about the gold balms
[3:50]was the idea of writing about a family who was both powerful and yet vulnerable, that
[3:56]although they have, they're close to the kind of the wheels of power and they're
[4:00]immeasurably wealthy because they're Jewish, they're other and they're set apart and
[4:04]they're not quite trusted and they always have this sense of unease.
[4:09]And that I think was in fiction, what to me made them so fascinating and maybe want
[4:14]to write about them.
[4:15]It says, I think on the back of the book, somebody had compared this to a Jewish down
[4:18]to Nabi, which is sort of what I was thinking.
[4:20]I was almost disappointed.
[4:21]Someone had said that before me on the back.
[4:24]But it's true.
[4:25]I mean, the book is so the way the vivid imagery is and the descriptions of this castle
[4:32]like living and it's just so clear and amazing.
[4:37]And then you sprinkle that because then I am reading it and I'm imagining that I'm
[4:41]like in down to Nabi as you're writing.
[4:43]And then I actually jumped, I think it was page 34 when Greta is congratulating her
[4:48]brother Otto on some scientific achievement and says, Mazotov and I was like, what?
[4:53]I jumped back.
[4:55]It was like all of a sudden my grandmother from Florida was in your book and I was like,
[4:59]what is going on?
[5:00]And for me, being Jewish, so much of the custom is just a part of me and my family
[5:06]and then to have it shown in this sweeping war story across countries in this beautiful
[5:13]way was something I really hadn't seen before, which I think you did just so so beautifully.
[5:18]You know, they have a broken Mazza in some places and, you know, that the whole thing
[5:22]with Shabbat with Otto and Ari and Claire and Greta, which was amazing and the skull
[5:27]cap under the military helm.
[5:29]I mean, all the little Yiddishisms, I just thought it was amazing to put that element into
[5:34]this context.
[5:36]Anyway, I thought it was awesome.
[5:38]Do you think there are like other modern day sort of gold bums in Europe living like this?
[5:44]Does it exist?
[5:45]I don't think so much now.
[5:47]I think that sort of during the 19th century, nearly 20th century, but I think that the
[5:53]First World War sort of marked the beginning of the incident.
[5:57]I think that really the cost of the First World War, they had to put so much money up
[6:03]really to lend it to the government to finance the First World War.
[6:07]And they made a decision really back in the 1890s, these kind of families because the
[6:12]gold bums are modeled on, the Rothschilds, the sustenance, the Montessoriaries, the goldsmiths,
[6:17]as well as many other of these spanking families.
[6:20]And they're different.
[6:21]The European banking families are different from the American banking families.
[6:26]And they think that they're tremendously important and tremendously powerful until they kind
[6:30]of come into contactfully with the American banking families and discover that really
[6:35]they are small fish compared to the kind of the vast ones of America.
[6:39]They're still hugely wealthy, but compared to those with sort of houses on Wall Street,
[6:43]they are small because they make the decision in the 19th century that they're not going
[6:48]to invest in Wall Street, that America, still Europe is going to be bigger.
[6:53]And that decision really costs them, it keeps them small, small scale.
[6:58]And so when the Wall starts and they're having to really bankroll the European governments
[7:02]and the cost of the war is so enormous, they never quite recover from the cost of that.
[7:08]And so I think that even today, yeah it's just, the families are still rich because when
[7:13]you've been that wealthy, for a fortune to dwindle, takes 100 years, but it's smaller.
[7:19]I don't think there's so that families are quite dislodged now.
[7:22]So did you know all of this?
[7:24]Did you know all this World War I information and the banking and like did you happen
[7:28]to know this for your history major or did you, I know you did a lot of research for this
[7:32]book?
[7:33]Did this all come up in your research?
[7:34]Or?
[7:35]Yeah and it was all research that I had to do, I didn't know, you know I knew tiny bits
[7:40]when I started and it was all, I did loads and loads of research, which was so much fun.
[7:45]I love researching, so no it was great.
[7:49]Usually when I start to search book, I have to save myself, I'm going to be really diligent,
[7:55]I'm going to be really good, I'm not going to start writing until I've done months
[8:00]of research.
[8:01]I get really excited and really carried away and I fall in love with my lead character
[8:05]and then I start writing in this kind of, you know, happy chaos of papers everywhere, books
[8:10]everywhere and I write for a bit and then I have to stop because I have to sort of do
[8:15]a little more research and it sort of all happens in this kind of happy model together.
[8:19]But this time I used the broken finger method because I was reading a email on my phone
[8:26]phone from my US editor and I shut my finger in the car door, on the way back from
[8:32]the school run and yeah I broke my finger in a couple of places and I had to go for surgery
[8:38]and I thought it's fine, I've got 10 fingers, so you know within one out of action I've
[8:45]got 9 more, I can absolutely type and it turned out that I really couldn't, that it
[8:51]was because I touched that pretty fast and I just couldn't do it.
[8:55]Oh my goodness.
[8:56]When you're researching do you know, it was so exciting to me to be that sort of enforced
[9:02]reading and just writing notes and sort of not doing it in that sort of quite that sort
[9:08]of muddly way so yeah I think it worked quite well but it did feel different.
[9:13]Maybe you have to do this for now on.
[9:14]Oh my goodness no, it was way too sore.
[9:17]Not the finger.
[9:18]Yeah it was, I literally kind of walked into the studio where my husband was working
[9:24]and was kind of holding my finger and the kids were in the car so I was trying really
[9:27]hard not to say bad words and saying in darling, I think you're going to have to take
[9:32]the kids out of the car and it was kind of dripping blood and you're saying I'm busy, can
[9:38]I just finish the sentence because he was working like no, no you know just because I'm
[9:44]not swearing and shouting, you really need to take the kids out.
[9:47]No, I'm not doing that again.
[9:51]When you started researching this book for instance, did you know the plot, did you know
[9:56]how you wanted the whole thing to unfold and then you researched to sort of support that?
[10:00]or did the plot unfold as you research?
[10:02]I think that there was a certain,
[10:05]I had the scaffolding of ideas of where I wanted it to go.
[10:10]And because it is a story that encompasses the Great War,
[10:14]there are six points that one has to go to.
[10:17]So there's a certain sort of their date,
[10:20]like the assassination in Sarajevians.
[10:24]These are six things that cannot change.
[10:27]And there are these dates that you know are immovable.
[10:30]And then within those, there is sort of flexibility
[10:33]and there are other things that you're kind of,
[10:35]you're building and moving around.
[10:38]And I knew that, for instance, I wanted to write a story
[10:42]about war, but without some goodies and baddies.
[10:45]I wanted to write with some of the war
[10:47]from the English point of view
[10:48]and some of it from the Austro-Hungarian point of view.
[10:52]And I wanted to write about a brother and sister
[10:54]who incredibly close
[10:56]and to have some of it from her point of view
[10:58]and some of it from his,
[10:59]and to show the sort of absurdity really
[11:02]of the idea of enemies,
[11:04]how could they be enemies when we've seen them
[11:07]sort of so close that relationship between them?
[11:10]And so having those ideas,
[11:12]then I needed to research what it was like
[11:14]to be a Jewish officer in the Austro-Hungarian army,
[11:18]this very anti-Semitic army on the Eastern Front
[11:22]during the war.
[11:23]And that was really hard to find out
[11:24]because a lot of it was in Russian,
[11:26]a lot of it was in German,
[11:27]and I didn't speak those languages.
[11:30]And so it was just trying to follow really
[11:32]that's just that sugar trail to find out those things.
[11:36]And then it's also that's just having that flexibility
[11:39]that when used to define something wonderful
[11:42]to kind of be able to work that into the story
[11:44]and not be so rigid.
[11:46]And also allow when you're writing
[11:48]of character driven drama
[11:50]to allow the characters to drive the story forward
[11:53]because I think there's always a danger
[11:55]that if it's sort of you're plotting too hard
[11:59]that somehow the plot is driving the characters
[12:02]and they feel rather that they're almost the victims
[12:06]of the plot and world historical events,
[12:08]they're sort of dragging your characters along
[12:10]a little bit by their hair,
[12:12]rather than that your characters are driving the story forward.
[12:15]And I very much want to sort of write stories
[12:18]where it feels that the characters are in charge
[12:20]of their identities,
[12:21]rather than that they're being sort of carried forward
[12:24]in a rather being buoyed along by history
[12:27]and feel a little bit incidental, if that makes sense.
[12:30]Totally makes sense.
[12:31]Your characters, all of them,
[12:33]however, it is that you're doing this so beautifully.
[12:35]They're like real people.
[12:37]Like I'm sad that the book is over that I can't spend
[12:40]my evenings anywhere with Greta and Albert.
[12:42]I mean, this paragraph you wrote about Albert
[12:45]to describe what he's like.
[12:47]In just, I don't know, 10 lines or so,
[12:49]you talk about his regular habits,
[12:51]his aversion to being touched,
[12:53]his need for quiet and being alone,
[12:54]how he washes his loose change every night.
[12:57]Like you have all these details
[12:59]and you've painted all so vividly
[13:00]that you figure out right away like,
[13:02]okay, Albert's an introvert and how crazy
[13:06]that now he is forced to be sort of in the center
[13:08]of all this drama and what he probably wants to do
[13:10]is just be hidden all day.
[13:12]And I don't know, I feel like how do you find these,
[13:16]I mean, they're not real people.
[13:17]Like if it was someone real,
[13:18]I would have it, I would think it would be great
[13:21]being able to describe them
[13:22]and distill sort of who they are
[13:24]down to these few little features.
[13:26]But I feel like how do you do that
[13:27]when the person is not even real?
[13:29]I think they feel real to me.
[13:31]And I think also because what I wanted to do
[13:33]is to show that in many ways certainly it's first,
[13:35]it's a very unnatural marriage that Greta,
[13:39]she's doing her duty, but she is an extrovert.
[13:41]She is, she's full of fun and chaos and rebellion
[13:46]and she's being made to marry.
[13:48]This man who is, he is sort of withdrawn
[13:52]in his passion is that he's butterfly in these Beatles
[13:55]and there is a sort of a coolness to him
[13:57]and he's quite controlling.
[13:59]And he has married to this, yeah, this woman
[14:02]who says fidders around the edges
[14:04]and they are so wildly unsuited and unsuitable.
[14:09]And yet somehow they have to find a way of making it work
[14:13]because this marriage isn't just about two individuals,
[14:16]it's about just two dynasties
[14:18]and the stock exchange in Vienna
[14:20]and in London rises onto their engagement announcement.
[14:24]It's beyond just the two of them
[14:26]that it's about a family, it's even about a country
[14:30]and that at various points it's that their marriage
[14:32]has wider implications.
[14:35]And even because Greta's body is in her own
[14:38]that she has that she's told it's at various points
[14:41]that she has to, that they want to get pregnant
[14:44]because it's important for the company
[14:47]and for the family because the investors need to know
[14:51]that there will be at some point an F,
[14:53]their family doesn't have to go on
[14:55]and it's that sense that even her body
[14:58]doesn't really belong to herself,
[15:00]it belongs to sort of something greater than herself.
[15:04]And I think that I hope that makes her also sort of,
[15:07]despite the material riches and the wealth
[15:10]that she's born into, there's something so awful about that
[15:13]and I think it makes her quite relatable
[15:16]and gives her humanity and helps make her feel quite real.
[15:19]Absolutely.
[15:20]I feel like also the way you have her turn to her garden
[15:22]and the way she transforms it and puts her own mark on it
[15:26]really illustrates who she becomes and her sort of role
[15:29]in the context of all these other,
[15:31]how she makes it literally physically look different
[15:34]the way she is now that she's been immersed into this family.
[15:37]Is this also a research thing
[15:39]because I feel like you must be the best gardener
[15:41]in the entire world?
[15:42]No, my mum is a really keen gardener.
[15:44]She's a passionate gardener
[15:46]and some of the research at the book was we went
[15:48]and we visited gardens and my daughter at the time
[15:51]was really, really tiny and we took her with us
[15:54]and we sort of went and did garden research.
[15:57]And I wanted the gardens of the go-bounds
[16:00]to be sort of an expression of character.
[16:02]So initially in the ghetto,
[16:04]this is the Jewish children with bands from the city parks
[16:07]and Jews went aloud to have gardens.
[16:09]The first in the go-bounds do when they have money
[16:11]is they want to create these amazing gardens
[16:14]for their shadows and their castles
[16:16]but the gardens that they create
[16:18]are these incredibly formal part-are gardens
[16:21]and they're an expression both of power
[16:23]because they're so extravagant.
[16:25]There's a series of greenhouses,
[16:27]these amazing glass houses are needed
[16:29]to constantly replace the very delicate bedding plants
[16:33]that are needed all the time.
[16:34]If there's a frost that destroyed the plants are spoiled
[16:37]so that fresh plants are brought out of the glass houses
[16:40]immediately replanted by some of the dozens of gardeners
[16:44]what the family sleeps, they're all fresh in the morning.
[16:47]But it's a very extravagant way of working
[16:50]but then the gravel paths are paths to walk up
[16:53]and do deals as you walk along.
[16:55]They're not places to relax
[16:57]or to find a hidden corner and read book
[17:00]and Grether is given a garden
[17:02]or land for a garden by her mother-in-law.
[17:04]It's a wedding present
[17:06]but she's rather worried that really it's a ruse
[17:09]of clip and turn her into the perfect gold-bound wife
[17:14]and if not what she wants to be,
[17:16]she doesn't want to be sub clipped by
[17:17]some of their gold-bound topiary.
[17:19]She wants to create a much more kind of laid-back,
[17:22]relaxed place she wants, a garden of defiance
[17:24]with women gardeners, women wear trousers
[17:28]because you can't dig in a corset.
[17:31]It's physically impossible
[17:33]and she wants something with kind of wavering grasses
[17:36]and hiddens of bases.
[17:39]But I'm not a great gardener.
[17:41]I have a lovely garden but it's weed filled.
[17:43]I think at this point in my life
[17:45]I could either weed or I could edit.
[17:48]And at the moment I need to edit rather than to weed.
[17:51]I've got these pictures of my garden on Instagram
[17:53]but you can't look too closely
[17:55]because there's a lot of weeds at the edges.
[17:59]Have you ever been interviewed by
[18:00]or spoken to an author named Dominique Browning?
[18:03]She writes all these gardening books.
[18:05]This is my dream now is to have a panel
[18:07]with you and her talking about gardening
[18:09]because she often reviews books about gardening.
[18:12]She has a book, I think it was called Slough Love.
[18:14]Anyway, it's really good.
[18:15]But I don't know, actually.
[18:17]Maybe she might be ashamed of all my weeds.
[18:20]No.
[18:21]So in the book you have Greta Meet Claire,
[18:25]Henri's mistress basically.
[18:28]And she designs a dress at the beginning of the book
[18:30]for Greta that I feel like really sets the stage
[18:32]of her character and who she becomes
[18:35]of the boldness of deviating from what the Baroness
[18:38]once or to wear by wearing this
[18:40]or climped, inspired gown.
[18:43]So I think you should start a clothing line.
[18:46]This is my new thing.
[18:47]Like you need to start selling these dresses
[18:50]or at least have one or a few of them made
[18:53]so that people can actually see
[18:54]because it sounds pretty gorgeous the way
[18:56]you just started.
[18:57]But Greta is a real, because the glimpse girlfriend
[18:59]is this woman Emily floujé
[19:01]and the dresses that he paints
[19:03]were real dresses designed by Léjé
[19:06]and she was this dress designer in Vienna.
[19:09]And so you can see the dresses.
[19:11]If you look at a climped painting,
[19:12]the women that are wearing the dresses
[19:15]are dressed in the flowjé dresses.
[19:18]If you look at a climped painting,
[19:20]those are what they're like.
[19:21]So the dresses that I describe
[19:23]if you look at various of their climped paintings,
[19:26]you'll be able to see the dresses.
[19:28]There you go.
[19:29]I thought you had made a dollop.
[19:30]No, I haven't.
[19:31]They're taken from climped,
[19:33]but basically he paints his girlfriend dresses.
[19:35]That's what he does.
[19:36]So yeah, they are amazing.
[19:39]These are very, yeah, no, they are quite something.
[19:43]Amazing.
[19:44]I don't know if any of the dresses has survived.
[19:46]Or whether they've just survived through the paintings,
[19:49]but they are remarkable modern pieces of art.
[19:53]I'm definitely gonna go online now and check those out.
[19:57]So I thought it was the sweetest thing
[19:58]in your acknowledgement section.
[20:00]And when you wrote, and lastly, thanks to my children,
[20:02]as far as they're concerned, I've been writing this book
[20:04]their whole lives.
[20:05]The tiny baby who was asleep in a Moses basket at my feet
[20:08]when I began is now running around with the dinosaur
[20:10]in each hand shouting, have you finished yet?
[20:12]And yes, darling, now I have.
[20:14]It was so great.
[20:16]Yeah, I just get quite hairy when I finished
[20:19]writing that bit.
[20:20]Yeah, you could tell there's so much emotion.
[20:23]How, first of all, how long did it take you to write this book?
[20:26]And how did you balance sort of managing to write and research
[20:31]and produce this masterpiece with two small kids underfoot?
[20:34]Oh, this book definitely has taken me the longest
[20:37]out of anything I've ever written.
[20:39]Because I was supposed to be on maternity leave
[20:41]when I started, because I think my daughter was six weeks old
[20:44]when I started this book.
[20:46]And so I was researching it and looking
[20:49]after her all-in-ness kind of slight kind of hormonal blur
[20:54]really since the beginning.
[20:56]And then I started, I guess, writing it kind of more intensely
[21:01]as she got bigger.
[21:03]So I think probably I was writing it over the course
[21:07]as a couple of years.
[21:09]But I probably, I can't remember exactly,
[21:14]but I wasn't writing it sort of intensely all the time,
[21:19]because I was supposedly on maternity leave for some of it.
[21:23]But yeah, it was a model because sometimes
[21:25]when she was smaller, I would write what she was sleeping.
[21:29]And she was literally kind of, yeah,
[21:31]asleep in the Moses basket on her cut upstairs.
[21:34]And I would write in those stolen moments
[21:37]when she was asleep with a baby monitor on
[21:41]and just kind of listen for that kind of cry.
[21:43]And then literally kind of, yeah,
[21:45]abandoned the book and run back to her.
[21:48]And now it's a bit different when I write
[21:50]because she goes to preschool and my son's at school.
[21:54]But I have this sort of, once they're out of the house,
[21:57]they kind of internal clock starts.
[21:59]And I know exactly how many kind of hours and minutes
[22:02]they've got, and I have to go and pick them up
[22:04]or they get delivered back to me.
[22:06]And I'm just kind of super focused
[22:08]and get quite anxious about how much time I have
[22:11]to write what's there out of the house.
[22:13]And then they come back and yeah.
[22:16]And I start writing, often mid-sentence.
[22:19]But sometimes it's a good thing
[22:21]because then it's easier to pick up the next day
[22:24]because you should have, yeah.
[22:25]But it is, it's some week she should have felt like,
[22:30]yeah, this is fine.
[22:31]I'm managing to balance the kind of the work mothering.
[22:36]And then other times it just feels awful.
[22:39]And it's a complete mess.
[22:41]And total chaos, there was time.
[22:44]I have few weeks ago heard that I didn't have a handler.
[22:48]I went up to London to meet my editor.
[22:50]And it turned out that I was four days early for meeting.
[22:55]And there was this kind of, yeah, I've just not,
[22:57]I'm just not managing this at all.
[23:00]And yeah.
[23:03]And it just gets all a bit chaotic.
[23:06]That makes me feel better as a mom,
[23:08]all the times I show up for birthday parties
[23:10]on the wrong day and forget different activities
[23:13]and like the chest teacher is at the front door.
[23:15]And I'm like, oh, the kids aren't even here.
[23:18]So I feel like the managing of the logistics of motherhood
[23:21]is quite daunting.
[23:22]It's like hard to keep it up straight.
[23:24]Yeah, and there's some pictures on my Instagram feed
[23:26]that I set my husband to drop my daughter preschool.
[23:30]And it turned out the preschool was shut that day.
[23:32]And I had no childcare organized.
[23:34]And I absolutely had to write, I had a deadline.
[23:36]So she just came and sat in my office
[23:39]and there's like terrible pictures
[23:40]that she's just sitting on the walking chair, my room.
[23:44]And I'd like to say that she was drawing
[23:47]and painting and doing creative stuff.
[23:49]She wasn't, she was watching Paw Patrol.
[23:51]She said, you've been there.
[23:53]It was probably the best day of her life.
[23:54]Yeah.
[23:55]But you know, some days you just do what you have to do.
[23:58]It was fine after a while my mom came and got her
[24:01]and they went to a cafe and she had a great time.
[24:04]But some days you just kind of muddled through
[24:07]and it just, yeah, it is.
[24:10]Is this a balancing act?
[24:11]But balancing suggests that you have some measure
[24:14]of control and that there is a balance.
[24:16]And I don't think it is.
[24:17]You just, you flop.
[24:18]I flop from one side to the other.
[24:21]Yeah.
[24:21]Yeah. Probably not the best.
[24:24]Miss, a bit of a misleading word.
[24:26]Yeah, there is no balance.
[24:29]So household is going to be a TV series.
[24:32]Why not a movie?
[24:33]And how involved are you in this project?
[24:35]Well, I think because the book is sort of,
[24:37]has this epic fleet, I think to try and squeeze it
[24:41]into sort of two hours would be,
[24:45]I think would be quite a mission.
[24:47]It feels like it will take longer than that to tell.
[24:50]So I think that a TV series would really give us
[24:53]a bit more time to tell the story.
[24:54]I think it will need that kind of six to eight hours
[24:57]to really tell it properly.
[24:59]So TV and that kind of lush sort of TV
[25:03]that we haven't at the moment with those budgets,
[25:04]it felt like a much more natural home
[25:07]than trying to kind of push this into sort of a period movie
[25:11]that just, I think it would be hard.
[25:13]Are you writing the scripts of the screenplay?
[25:15]Like how involved are you in that project?
[25:18]Well, my husband, I'm married to a screenwriter as well.
[25:20]So we've co-written the pilot together.
[25:23]And if the show gets made, we'll exact produce it as well.
[25:27]So I think we'll be, we'll be really involved
[25:28]at every step of the way, which will be really nice.
[25:31]Yeah, that's it.
[25:32]Do you have any stars on your wish list?
[25:34]I do.
[25:35]I think it's because to me, the characters are so real,
[25:38]like imagining kind of, I don't imagine Greta as somebody,
[25:41]like Greta's Greta.
[25:43]So yeah, like on, you know, if it gets to that stage,
[25:47]it'd be very exciting.
[25:48]But for the moment, sort of brushing my head is she's herself.
[25:51]So I just don't picture her as a different person
[25:55]if that makes sense.
[25:56]Yeah.
[25:57]So do you have any advice to aspiring authors out there?
[26:00]I think anything else can make you happy do that
[26:05]because this is a crazy job.
[26:07]So there's anything else you should, you can possibly do
[26:12]that you think make you happy do that.
[26:14]But if you're listening to this and thinking,
[26:15]nope, there's nothing else.
[26:17]Then you have no choice, you're a writer anyway.
[26:20]So you're kind of stuck with it.
[26:22]And yeah, and you just kind of have to battle on
[26:26]through the lows and the odd high.
[26:29]And it's one of those things.
[26:30]And I think the other thing to bear in mind is that, yes,
[26:34]we're all sort of hoping to get published
[26:36]and the dream is to make a career of it.
[26:39]But I think even if it's not your career,
[26:41]writing can still give you great pleasure.
[26:44]And for every kid who pays the guitar,
[26:48]you don't say to them, right, well,
[26:49]if you can't make it as a rock star,
[26:52]that's it, put your guitar down and burn it.
[26:54]You say, well, you know, play with your friends,
[26:56]join a band, you can still enjoy it.
[26:59]And I think that even if the dream of publication
[27:03]doesn't happen, still right.
[27:05]It doesn't mean you don't have to do it.
[27:06]Still take great joy in it.
[27:08]And writing can still be part of your life
[27:11]and something that can give you and your friends,
[27:14]great pleasure.
[27:15]And, you know, I don't know if that's useful advice,
[27:18]but I think that's totally useful advice.
[27:20]That's fantastic.
[27:21]Will I start a writing band?
[27:23]Yeah, a writing band, there you go.
[27:24]LAUGHTER
[27:26]Actionable advice.
[27:27]You heard it here first.
[27:29]LAUGHTER
[27:30]Well, thank you so much for taking the time
[27:32]to talk to me and moms don't have time to read books
[27:34]and all the listeners.
[27:35]And I really, truly, truly enjoyed your book.
[27:38]Oh, thank you.
[27:39]And I'm just so really wish you all the best success
[27:42]and just know that, at least for me,
[27:44]you've entertained me for, like, solid,
[27:46]I don't know, 14 hours of reading.
[27:48]LAUGHTER
[27:49]Thank you for that.
[27:50]Thank you for having me on the show.
[27:52]Of course.
[27:53]All right, take care.
[27:54]Thanks so much.
[27:54]Thanks. Bye-bye.
[27:55]Bye-bye.
[27:56]This episode has been sponsored by Bookhampton.
[27:59]Bookhampton.com.
[28:00]Thanks to Ryan and Steve at Texture Sound
[28:02]for the audio editing and mixing.
[28:04]Thanks for listening to moms that have time to read books.