Joanna Hershon, ST. IVO
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[2:16]I'm here today with Joanna Hirschon, who's the author of Five Novels, Swimming, The Outside
[2:21]of August, The German Bride, a dual inheritance, and her most recent book, Saint Evo.
[2:26]Her writing has appeared in Grandtah, The New York Times, one story, Virginia, quarterly
[2:31]review, and two literary anthologies.
[2:33]Brooklyn was mine, and Freud's blind spot.
[2:36]She teaches in the creative writing department at Columbia University, and lives in Brooklyn
[2:41]with her husband, the painter Derek Buckner, and their twin sons and daughter.
[2:44]Welcome Joanna, thanks for coming on mom's time to read books.
[2:47]It is a pleasure to be here and so nice to meet you.
[2:51]We were just talking about how great Joanna's voice is.
[2:55]And we were talking about how great so he's been.
[2:57]So I asked, I just had asked her, and I was like, don't say it until I start the podcast,
[3:01]but so you used to act a while ago.
[3:03]I did.
[3:04]I mean, I always acted, and then, you know, after college I acted for a couple of years
[3:08]or more accurately, you know, auditioned.
[3:11]But I did start writing plays, and a couple of them were produced, you know, on a small
[3:15]scale, and I was in one of those.
[3:17]But yeah, so I used to act, and then I, I think someone said recently, I'm a recovering
[3:22]actress.
[3:23]I'm always be.
[3:24]There's a part of me that has that in me.
[3:27]And it definitely is a huge part of the way that I approach writing, which I think of
[3:31]it like scenes you may not know more like I discovered in graduate school when I got
[3:36]my MFA.
[3:37]I just kind of thought everyone thought relatively similarly about writing fiction.
[3:42]And I realized a lot of the way that I think about it is almost like method acting.
[3:47]Like I'm all the characters, you know, I feel like when I start talking about it it sounds
[3:51]really woo-woo, but I'm very immersed in my characters, and a lot of the same principles
[3:56]of acting training.
[3:58]I feel like that's how I write, and also when I teach writing, I end up teaching about
[4:04]that.
[4:05]Kind of like through the lens of being an actor more than in a way more than being more
[4:11]than you're the, you know, director, it's more like you're in it.
[4:16]Oh, I love that.
[4:17]You know, you should just mark it in your sources to all actors.
[4:20]They should like hand out little pamphlets of everybody online for auditions.
[4:23]Like my class had to become a writer once you as a recovering actor.
[4:28]That's right.
[4:29]Well, anyway, as I've told you, I really loved this book, St. Evo, and from the minute
[4:33]I opened it, I just like clocked myself down and tore through it, and it was really good.
[4:38]Thank you.
[4:39]It was really good.
[4:41]I was really fun to read and awesome and thought-provoking, and the characters were so real
[4:46]so whatever you're doing with the method acting or whatever, they worked.
[4:50]So can you tell listeners what St. Evo is about and how you came up with the idea for this
[4:55]book?
[4:56]It's hard to talk about.
[4:57]Obviously it's hard to talk about any book, you know, sum it up, but it's specifically
[5:02]hard to talk about this book as my publisher and publicist, as we've edited or we've
[5:07]discussed it because it has somewhat of a mystery to it, and it's hard to kind of without
[5:13]giving it away exactly.
[5:14]But it takes place over three days, and it's about a couple that you come to realize
[5:21]met when they were very young and had a daughter when they were very young.
[5:25]You don't know exactly what happened with the daughter.
[5:28]You don't know if she's alive and you don't know what something's off, and you realize
[5:34]slowly there's quite a large story to it, and the structures that this couple are going
[5:42]to visit old friends for the weekend.
[5:44]So it has the country weekend visit structure and reuniting with old friends who haven't
[5:51]seen them very long time.
[5:52]And then you also come to realize there's quite a story as to why they haven't seen each
[5:57]other in so long, and it's an emotional thriller on some or psychological investigation
[6:05]of how we become who we are as adults, and yeah, something like that.
[6:13]I mean, it's also so timely because it's about how people cope with uncertainty.
[6:19]That is right.
[6:20]And what different people do and how they do it together, how you like how you can bond
[6:24]with your partner or how you can go in completely opposite ways and how you deal with
[6:29]that sort of emotional torment.
[6:31]It is very relevant.
[6:33]Really is a book about emotional uncertainty and how to live, like how not only to survive
[6:40]and but how to live.
[6:43]And I think I'm always really fascinated with this narrative that I think we have about moving
[6:49]through trauma, like moving through loss.
[6:52]Like there's this kind of linear image, like you go through something and you come out
[6:56]the other side.
[6:57]And I always think of it more of like a parallel life, like if you can live alongside
[7:03]your trauma or your sadness, where it almost seems like, you know, I always hear people
[7:09]talk about how when they experience, you know, a death of a loved one, it seems quite
[7:14]like how can the world be going on, you know, how can everyone just be, you know, living
[7:20]and going to restaurants and, you know, and then, and also just things like when someone
[7:25]is in crisis, it's also possible to enjoy like the taste of something or laugh or, you
[7:33]know, we are not just suffering even when it feels like that.
[7:37]So I'm really interested in like how we can live alongside sadness and we still are humans,
[7:44]right?
[7:45]Yeah.
[7:46]You also have this whole idea of parallel lives with, oh yes, if, like, if certain things
[7:51]so you have your main character Sarah spend some imagining like, what if I had had a child
[7:57]who was a son and what if his name was Alex and what would that look like?
[8:01]And she goes into this entire narrative in her head about Alex and you write, she suppose
[8:06]she wasn't the only person who daydreamed these glimpses other children, other husbands,
[8:11]other lives.
[8:12]She dreamed of the children, she might have had if this or that pregnancy had taken,
[8:15]if this or that man had been hers, I do all the time, it's like, well, what if I had
[8:20]seen the second, what would our kids look, you know, what if it's like the so sliding
[8:24]doors thing?
[8:26]What do you make of that?
[8:28]I mean, in some ways I feel like it's just a by-product of being human and living in an
[8:32]era maybe of more choice than ever and more freedom as a woman and that's, you know, but
[8:38]I also think it's just the storytelling impulse, you know, I'm absolutely a curious person.
[8:43]So I'm curious about everyone else's lives.
[8:45]I love knowing people eat for breakfast, like I love, you know, what if I had stayed
[8:49]home?
[8:50]You know, the storytelling impulse to imagine, you know, when I was in kindergarten, my
[8:55]mother told me, I pulled out the class list and I called everybody in my class and asked
[9:00]them what they had for dinner that night.
[9:02]Oh my gosh, for a kindred spirit.
[9:04]Yeah.
[9:05]I just, like, want to know.
[9:06]What do you want to know?
[9:07]I just wanted to know.
[9:08]Yes.
[9:09]And I think that wanting to know is, you know, leads to it's an act of imagination and, yeah,
[9:17]so your character, Sarah, I found her interesting on so many levels.
[9:21]But one thing that she talked about was how she likes, how she needs to be alone and
[9:26]how this is such a hard thing to do when you're with a spouse and something that sometimes
[9:30]I think about because as much as I adore my husband, you know, sometimes you just need
[9:34]that time to yourself.
[9:36]Anyways, Sarah, you write in the book, she loosely calculated that she needed at least four
[9:40]hours of being completely by herself every day to feel vaguely okay and she wondered as she
[9:44]often did.
[9:45]Why is she so bad?
[9:46]She wanted so badly to stay married.
[9:50]So what happens to, like, introverts who have to be around people all the time?
[9:53]Like, do you feel like you're an introvert?
[9:55]You know?
[9:56]No.
[9:57]I would say that I'm definitely an extrovert and I get.
[10:00]so much joy from other people.
[10:02]And I'm collaborative by nature, super social,
[10:06]but I have chosen this life of, and I was acting.
[10:10]And I always wrote my whole life.
[10:13]I've always written stories.
[10:15]And I have chosen this life in which I'm alone a lot.
[10:18]It's very isolating work.
[10:21]And I'm fascinated by my own choices,
[10:24]because I do feel like I'm an extrovert,
[10:26]and I do feel like I need that time totally alone
[10:29]with my own thoughts.
[10:30]So I don't know.
[10:31]I think my guess is that a lot of writers are like that.
[10:34]There's this image of the writer as an introvert
[10:37]and kind of like socially awkward
[10:38]and not able to socialize.
[10:41]I don't know.
[10:41]And surely there are many introverted writers,
[10:45]but I also feel like it's that contradiction
[10:48]that I certainly see it in other writers.
[10:52]But I don't know.
[10:53]I need both.
[10:54]I, at least from my anecdotal evidence,
[10:57]having interviewed a lot of authors,
[10:58]I do not feel that authors are in general
[11:01]an introverted bunch who just like to toy away
[11:03]and obscurity.
[11:03]And I also feel like today's world's set up
[11:06]so that you have to be a little more outward facing
[11:08]as an author.
[11:09]That's true.
[11:09]Anyway, even to get something published,
[11:11]you might have to prove that you're still out there.
[11:15]But yeah, but yeah, I do,
[11:16]and I actually enjoy people, but that line I relate to.
[11:22]I love, I do love being alone.
[11:24]I also feel like, I don't know, I like to write too.
[11:27]And sometimes I don't even, the sounds ridiculous.
[11:29]I don't even realize I'm really alone.
[11:31]Because I'm so engaged with all these other people
[11:34]in what I'm writing, that I,
[11:36]sometimes I don't even notice.
[11:38]It's like if you're dreaming.
[11:39]It's not a lonely feeling.
[11:40]It's like, it's like,
[11:42]a dependable feeling.
[11:43]A dependable with yourself, right?
[11:45]Yeah.
[11:46]I mean, really, because writing is about,
[11:48]you have to understand and be interested in other people
[11:50]to write about them all day long.
[11:51]Right.
[11:52]So.
[11:53]We'll also Joan Diddy and famously said,
[11:54]I'm sorry if I'm gonna botch it,
[11:56]but I write to find out what I think,
[11:59]something like that.
[12:00]And that I remember reading that line
[12:02]when I was probably 17 or 18.
[12:05]And it was just this profound recognition.
[12:08]Totally.
[12:09]I need to write in order to find out what I think.
[12:11]I don't know what I think until I write.
[12:13]And I definitely don't, I don't work.
[12:15]Like I don't have one big idea.
[12:17]And then I write it.
[12:18]That's not how it ever works for me.
[12:20]So I need to kind of engage with myself through writing
[12:23]in order to have a clue as to what I'm thinking
[12:25]or feeling.
[12:26]It helps.
[12:28]I know.
[12:28]I'm like, what would I do if I didn't have that?
[12:30]I know.
[12:31]It's a good.
[12:32]It's really a gift to oneself.
[12:34]I guess that's true.
[12:36]How did you pick the title for this book?
[12:37]Well, in the book there is an encounter in the beginning
[12:41]that really sets the whole plot in motion.
[12:43]And the title is something has something to do
[12:48]with the encounter.
[12:50]And the encounter is mysterious.
[12:52]And the mood is mysterious.
[12:54]And the place, it's a bar.
[12:57]Or it's a place.
[12:58]Yeah, Saint Ivo, our Evo, depending on how you say it.
[13:01]But I'm going with Ivo.
[13:03]And it became this kind of almost talismanic thought
[13:07]for the character as she moves through a couple of days.
[13:11]Did you always know that would be the title?
[13:13]I think so.
[13:14]Yeah.
[13:15]Because she is curious about Saint Ivo
[13:19]and curious about which Saint he was and looks it up.
[13:22]And also some of what she learns is relevant.
[13:27]So it's great.
[13:28]It's great.
[13:28]I was just, it could have easily been like, you know,
[13:31]so we can do it.
[13:32]Right.
[13:33]Who's already booked all the weekend?
[13:34]OK.
[13:35]All right, fine.
[13:36]I'm sure.
[13:37]That's too generic.
[13:38]I just meant that you could have been.
[13:39]It's very good.
[13:41]Well, the book starts off with this encounter
[13:43]on a subway between Sarah and a man she meets.
[13:47]And I was wondering if a similar subway situation had
[13:50]happened to you and that it's
[13:52]he thought, oh, this could be cool.
[13:53]So I will say that unlike almost anything I've ever written,
[13:58]this actually started, this whole book
[14:01]started from a very similar encounter I have on the subway.
[14:04]And I had, but I am not the character Sarah.
[14:08]So it was different because she's carrying around a lot
[14:11]of just carrying around a lot that I was not
[14:14]carrying around when I had this encounter.
[14:16]But I did have this encounter.
[14:18]Interesting encounter on the subway.
[14:20]And after it happened, I immediately thought,
[14:24]and this is completely out of character for me.
[14:26]I don't usually take notes or think about,
[14:31]I don't really usually think like, oh, that would be
[14:33]a great story.
[14:34]That's not really the way I work.
[14:35]So this encounter happened.
[14:38]And I immediately thought, this is the opening of something.
[14:41]This is something I don't know what it is,
[14:43]but I wrote it down.
[14:45]Just wrote it down when it happened.
[14:46]And it really set me off on this whole research journey.
[14:50]I thought I was going to write about something
[14:52]very, very different than ended up doing research for years
[14:56]about really.
[14:57]Yeah.
[14:58]And then I thought it was going to be more of an actual
[15:01]thriller.
[15:03]But then it didn't happen.
[15:05]No.
[15:06]And I had to kind of listen to what was going on underneath
[15:10]my intent.
[15:11]I had the best of intentions to do one thing.
[15:13]And then something else was emerging.
[15:15]And so I had to listen to that.
[15:17]But it was a really, really interesting encounter
[15:19]and not terribly dramatic.
[15:21]Just it was more of how the encounter made me feel.
[15:25]And all the things I started thinking because of it.
[15:28]So yeah.
[15:29]So what did you spend on the encounter?
[15:31]What about the weekend away with friends?
[15:34]Did that come from a place?
[15:35]Like, did you go away with friends?
[15:37]Do we have a see in a while?
[15:38]Or have you had like an awkward weekend away?
[15:40]No, I'm not.
[15:41]I'm not.
[15:41]I'm not.
[15:42]I'm not something like it.
[15:43]No, I'm always really, really interested in weekends
[15:47]with friends and how there's just very, very quickly,
[15:52]people end up forming like this ecosystem.
[15:57]I remember the writer, wonderful writer, Jennifer Egan.
[16:00]I remember saying at a reading probably 25 years ago
[16:05]or something.
[16:06]I remember her saying that she loved writing about traveling
[16:09]because every time you travel, you kind of reinvent yourself
[16:12]or you reinvent your family in some way.
[16:13]If you're traveling with your family,
[16:15]or there's this opportunity to kind of,
[16:17]even in the smallest ways, like you discover new routines
[16:21]and you, I don't know, there's just something about it.
[16:23]And I feel that way about weekends with friends
[16:26]or friends and make friends kids.
[16:28]And there's this interesting way that we fall into roles
[16:33]and just, I don't know.
[16:35]You definitely learned a lot about your friends.
[16:36]You learned a lot about your friends.
[16:37]You said that we go through traveling.
[16:38]And then as a parent, too.
[16:39]Yes, and like, you know, how people relate to their kids
[16:42]and how you realize people do things really differently
[16:47]or very similarly.
[16:48]And that's, you know, maybe you didn't think you had
[16:50]that much in common with someone.
[16:51]And then you realize, oh, we operate on the same frequency.
[16:55]Yes, that's always nice.
[16:57]But I was very inspired by a house that my family
[17:00]and I rented about 13, 12 years ago,
[17:05]just rented for a couple of weeks.
[17:06]And it's saved with me, like just the geography
[17:09]and the feeling of what was going on
[17:11]around the house.
[17:12]And I always thought maybe I'd write about that place.
[17:16]So it's not totally, it's not very literal.
[17:18]It's not like that's exactly the house
[17:20]or that's exactly the town.
[17:22]But yeah, certain area of upstate New York.
[17:25]I feel like a lot of your books.
[17:28]And I've only read this book.
[17:29]But now I want to go back and read all your other books.
[17:31]Because this book was really good.
[17:32]I feel like they all sort of touch on these seams
[17:34]of disappearance or searching for someone
[17:37]or loss or something.
[17:40]Do you know where that comes from?
[17:42]It's a really good question.
[17:43]So I'm just going to tell the story.
[17:45]Tell the story.
[17:45]I've never told the story.
[17:46]I don't know if I've told anyone.
[17:48]But basically, so my first novel, I wrote,
[17:51]I started it when I was 24, 23, 24.
[17:55]And it's definitely not an autobiographical first novel.
[18:00]But it's about in the novel, though.
[18:03]There's, it's a girl and she's two brothers
[18:06]and one of the brothers who's a two teenage brothers
[18:09]and are young adults.
[18:11]And one of them dies and tragically.
[18:16]And it sets emotion this whole year, many years
[18:20]of other brothers disappears.
[18:22]There's a lot that happens to their family.
[18:25]And this does not happen to me at all, thankfully.
[18:28]But I had a woman contact me.
[18:31]And this was, I'm trying to remember if she wrote me a letter.
[18:33]I mean, it was definitely the book came out in 2001.
[18:36]It was probably an email.
[18:37]But she contacted me and she said, she wanted to meet me
[18:42]because she said that she had never read a book
[18:45]that so described to her, like she felt this loss
[18:49]because her son was autistic.
[18:51]And she felt like this book, which was done about that at all,
[18:56]spoke to her in some way about her own feelings,
[18:59]about her inability to communicate with her son.
[19:03]And I did, I went and met her.
[19:05]And I was really moved because my brother has a syndrome
[19:09]and he's not autistic.
[19:10]But I have one sibling and that, and he's wonderful and lovely
[19:15]and I love him very much.
[19:17]But we don't have, I can't communicate with him
[19:19]the way that most siblings communicate.
[19:23]So I think I have, so I thought it was really
[19:25]striking that she felt that in my book.
[19:29]So I don't know.
[19:31]I do think I have something about feeling like searching
[19:35]for like an intimacy and closeness with family number.
[19:41]That makes sense.
[19:41]Yeah.
[19:43]So it's not literal.
[19:44]I've never written about that.
[19:45]But I think it informs a lot of my writing.
[19:49]I was just talking to another author who said, sometimes you
[19:51]don't know your themes and what you're working through
[19:53]until you see it all.
[19:55]But totally.
[19:56]It's very, it's really, it can be a real thing.
[20:00]really fascinating.
[20:01]There's another, I wish I knew who saw this,
[20:03]but someone said that writing a novel
[20:06]is about following your unconscious anxieties.
[20:10]And I remember hearing that and I thought about
[20:12]at the time I thought about the,
[20:14]maybe four books I'd written or three books.
[20:16]And I thought, oh, yeah, that's probably true.
[20:19]But I've never thought about it that way.
[20:22]I mean, I think it's also about following your interests,
[20:25]just following what compels you,
[20:26]but usually what compels us can be tied to.
[20:30]Did your parents read your books?
[20:33]Like have they have your parents read their books?
[20:35]Do they see that connection between you
[20:38]and your brother playing out in the books?
[20:40]Or you think that's a match?
[20:42]I don't know, I don't think so.
[20:45]I don't know.
[20:46]And you have to reread them in that lens.
[20:48]I mean, it's strange for me to even think about that,
[20:51]but I had, because I mean, it really,
[20:53]I don't know.
[20:54]But I think that there's truth to it for sure.
[20:56]It is interesting to examine that sort of way after the fact,
[21:01]because I certainly wasn't conscious of it
[21:03]when I was writing, you know?
[21:05]I mean, if books are really, are unconscious anxieties played out,
[21:08]then like, I could write a thousand books.
[21:11]I mean, do you know what I mean?
[21:12]Like, I think basically we all have like a trillion things
[21:15]we're worried about all the time that,
[21:17]like, I mean, like, then everybody has like a trillion books
[21:20]in them, right?
[21:21]Yeah, I mean, I definitely think this moment
[21:23]we're in at this moment, but what's the date?
[21:27]Things are changing for days,
[21:29]but I do think that this uncertainty in the air is rich.
[21:35]I wonder what's going to get written out of this moment.
[21:37]It's a good way to look at it.
[21:39]Maybe really great stuff.
[21:40]Maybe.
[21:40]Maybe not.
[21:42]Are you working on another book yet?
[21:44]I haven't started another book.
[21:45]It's OK.
[21:46]I'm definitely in a percolating moment,
[21:49]which is usual for me.
[21:51]It's always, it's always hard for me to,
[21:53]this is my best novel in every time.
[21:55]I, well, I had a second novel idea,
[21:58]but after my first one, but usually takes me a while.
[22:02]How long does each book take to write?
[22:03]I would say my average is about three years,
[22:06]but my, the German bride, which is a historical novel.
[22:11]I think I researched for about three years
[22:13]before I found my way into the story
[22:15]and then to check about two years to write.
[22:17]And then my last book, a dual inheritance,
[22:20]also I had a tremendous amount of research.
[22:22]And I definitely feel like having,
[22:23]since having children, the books have taken longer to write.
[22:27]But no, not this one.
[22:29]This book took about two years.
[22:31]And what about the fact, like in this book,
[22:34]two of the characters are married to more artistic types?
[22:37]What about that?
[22:38]And you're like, you're married to an artist.
[22:39]That's true.
[22:40]The book is so great.
[22:41]I went and looked at his website
[22:43]and I was like, oh, these pictures are three ways.
[22:44]But paintings of freeways are so cool.
[22:46]Oh, thank you.
[22:47]Anyway, that's wonderful.
[22:48]But being married to someone creative,
[22:50]I mean, you even wrote in this book about how,
[22:52]I think he said something like,
[22:53]to use one's imagination for art or even for leisure
[22:56]seemed like the world's greatest luxury.
[22:59]Is that how you feel?
[23:00]Like how does that play out in your own home?
[23:03]Well, I do think that's true in the sense of,
[23:06]I've met a couple of people who've suffered terrible,
[23:09]a lot who are fiction writers and suffered terrible losses.
[23:12]I guess two people.
[23:14]And it's just made a really big impact on me
[23:16]because they said they stopped.
[23:17]In one case, it was someone who stopped reading fiction
[23:20]and in another case, it was someone who stopped writing fiction.
[23:23]And it was just like two, they just lost their taste for it.
[23:26]Like the imagination was just like two sort of,
[23:30]I don't know the words they used to describe why,
[23:33]but it made a kind of sense to me.
[23:35]Like the brutal reality, like they couldn't escape anymore.
[23:39]And I've never experienced that, but it made sense to me.
[23:43]And I feel like there is something,
[23:45]it's just the greatest gift to me is to be able to imagine
[23:48]and to pursue your imagination.
[23:51]And I do think of it as a gift.
[23:53]So I feel like, I don't know,
[23:55]it's true that books characters are artists or have artists
[24:01]today of creative pursuits, right?
[24:04]I think that's, I guess it is relevant to,
[24:07]it's relevant to who the characters are, for sure.
[24:09]Do you have any advice to aspiring authors,
[24:12]especially since you teach writing?
[24:13]Read and pay attention to your anxieties,
[24:17]pay attention to your, not just to story,
[24:21]but to the daily feeling of mystery.
[24:26]Like there's mystery out there.
[24:28]And sometimes we'll have moments where we can kind of tap
[24:31]into that.
[24:32]And that's what happened to me in a subway that day.
[24:35]It's not like something happened.
[24:36]And if I told you the story of what happened,
[24:37]you wouldn't say, that's a great story, you know?
[24:41]It was more like something was in the air.
[24:44]And I felt it.
[24:45]And so I feel like just paying attention
[24:47]to the parts of life that we don't understand
[24:51]or know about can lead to some really interesting stories.
[24:55]I love that.
[24:56]Well, thank you so much for coming up today.
[24:57]Thank you so much for having me.
[24:59]It's such a pleasure.
[25:00]You've been listening to Moms on how time to read books
[25:03]with Zibi Owens.
[25:04]Please make sure to sign up for my newsletter
[25:06]at zibiowans.com to get more updates about episodes like these
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[25:12]Again, today's episode has been sponsored
[25:14]by my collaboration with Page One Books
[25:17]and Hampton's hand poured.
[25:19]Please check out the book box bundle
[25:21]retailing on page one books.com.
[25:23]Also available on my website zibiowans.com.
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[25:27]wefoundtime.com for this week's five new essays.
[25:31]You can follow me on Instagram at Moms.
[25:34]Don't have time to read books.
[25:35]Thanks so much to Steve and Ryan at Texture Sound
[25:38]for the sound editing.
[25:39]And thank you to Morning Moon Productions
[25:41]for providing this fantastic intro and now trim music.
[25:44]Thanks for listening.
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[25:47]Have a great week, everyone.