Sarah Crossan, HERE IS THE BEEHIVE
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[2:11]slash zibi or text zibi to 500-500. Did I say that enough times? Sarah Crossen is the author
[2:17]of Here is the Beehive. She's Irish and graduated with a degree in philosophy and literature
[2:23]before training as an English and drama teacher at Cambridge University, where she worked to promote
[2:28]creative writing in schools before leaving teaching to write full time. She completed her
[2:32]masters in creative writing at the University of Warwick in 2003, and in 2010 received an Edward
[2:38]Albie Fellowship for writing. The weight of water was her first novel in 2012. Welcome, Sarah,
[2:44]thank you so much for coming on mom's time to read books. Thank you, thank you for having me.
[2:48]Here is the Beehive. It's so good. I love how you did it in like a poetic style. It's almost like
[2:55]one big long poem, and I want you to tell listeners what it's about and then tell me about your
[3:01]decision to make it styled in this way. Please. Well, it's about when it opens with Anna Kelly,
[3:08]who's a solicitor getting an estate lawyer, getting a call from a woman to say that her husband
[3:14]has died and that she took care of the last one in testament. Anna realizes very quickly in this
[3:19]conversation that the woman is referring to her lover and a man that she had been having an affair
[3:25]with. This is how the book opens. We learn straight away that her lover is dead, and it's how
[3:31]she deals with this grief. The book takes place in sort of a parallel text, so you have the
[3:37]past where you see how she met Connor and how that relationship blossomed, and then you also have
[3:42]the present tense. So we see how she copes with the loss of this person who she cannot tell anybody
[3:48]about that she has to grieve alone because of the secret nature of that relationship, and she has
[3:53]things about her life that come out through the book. So I think the reader is on occasion
[3:57]surprised by things that we find out about her life. And writing in verse just wasn't a decision
[4:03]at all. It just happened that way. I've written lots of YA novels, children's novels in verse,
[4:09]and I started to do that when I read The Wonderful Out of the Dust by Karen Hess,
[4:13]which won the Newbury Medal in the 80s, and I was teaching that to 6th grade class in New Jersey,
[4:19]and I thought, my goodness, what is this? Way of writing is amazing, and I started to write that way
[4:26]at that time, and I haven't been able to let it go. I have written some prose novels,
[4:31]but this is my first adult novel, and I felt it had to be written in verse really.
[4:35]Well, there you go. I love, actually, in the first few pages, trying to figure out who
[4:42]everybody was, and I kind of read a couple passages again, and I was like, no way is this really
[4:47]what's happening. I couldn't believe it. The way you had it set up, and just sitting there,
[4:52]this lawyer with the run in her stockings, getting this horrific news, and then the devastation
[4:58]that followed. I mean, it's like a combination of horrible secrets with fair and love. I don't know.
[5:06]I get all the ingredients. I was reading it this morning, as my kids were like crazy,
[5:11]and so I grabbed a little scratch paper and wrote this by hand, a quote from your book. You wrote,
[5:17]we plan for death makes sensible decisions while gorging on life, but no one intends to die.
[5:23]So I loved that quote. Tell me about that thought behind that and all of it.
[5:26]I think that we always believe we're promised a tomorrow, and I don't know that we are,
[5:31]and I mean, this book was written for COVID, but I think COVID has made that perfectly clear to all
[5:37]of us, you know, what house have you chosen to live in, nor apartment have you chosen to live in,
[5:41]who have you chosen to live in that space with you, and those things become glaring and have
[5:47]become glaring, I think, in the last six months. But I just wanted to imagine a world where
[5:53]something was taken away suddenly, and then the collapse, the aftermath of that, and for me,
[5:58]it is absolutely a book about grief and who is eligible to grieve. And so I think that a lot of
[6:06]people come to the book really disliking this character because the setup is sort of exposing for
[6:11]them, so a lot of readers have reacted quite violent. And so what she was having in a fair,
[6:16]who cares how she feels, and I think that's a really interesting reaction. I think women particularly
[6:22]have had very, very strong reactions to the book. Young women, perhaps stronger reactions than
[6:27]older women who have scars and know that life is complicated. But that's been really interesting for
[6:32]me, that it has polarized people. I have people saying they love the book and then people
[6:36]absolutely hating the book. So it's been a good one for book groups. I've chest two or
[6:42]a few book groups. And in a nice possible way, people say they don't particularly enjoy the
[6:47]character. But as I say, I think that's because it's kind of exposing for the reader.
[6:51]It's not really about the character. I think it's about the reader and what the reader is
[6:55]bringing to that story. And your book already came out in the UK, is that where you have the book
[6:59]groups? Yeah, yeah. So the UK and Ireland have had some book groups, so it came out in on August
[7:05]20th and over here. It's like ESP, you get to look glimpse forward of what's going to happen over
[7:10]here. A little test marketing run with not really test markets in enormous market, but where
[7:17]did writing from grief come from? Have you gone through something yourself? Is this something that
[7:22]you just wanted to tackle? Tell me where the feelings this came from? Yeah, I've experienced grief,
[7:29]not in the same way that the character Anna has experienced grief, but I wanted to also write
[7:36]about secrecy in grief. And I think there are a lot of things that for a lot of people, they
[7:42]grieve silently. You know, whether that's that they have, you know, doing the research and speaking
[7:48]to lots and lots of women. And I didn't just speak to women who had affairs. I spoke to women
[7:53]who were going through grief. And then I just tried to talk to women generally about what is
[7:56]a secret that you keep. And there were such, in terms of the relationships that women have had in
[8:01]their lives, the secrets the women have kept, having an affair with a co-worker, a relationship
[8:07]with someone of the same sex, someone of a different religion, a family member, a teacher, or a
[8:13]professor. So a huge number of women that I spoke to were were in secret relationships, but then
[8:20]also just other types of secret grief. So speaking to a woman who had a child who was not neurotypical
[8:27]and how that felt for her on a day-to-day basis, but she couldn't really, she didn't really want
[8:31]to talk about it because it was, she felt so bad about that. She felt so bad that she was even upset
[8:37]in the first place that she had a child who was challenged to her. So that's kind of what I meant
[8:43]at the beginning is legitimacy of grief. Like who is entitled to grieve and for what are we entitled
[8:48]to grieve? And I was listening to Brene Brown speak on her podcast recently about COVID and how we
[8:55]say to ourselves on a daily basis. Well, I shouldn't, I shouldn't get too upset because, you know,
[9:00]I have a house and I have food on the table and my home is warm. And she said, but there's no
[9:04]hierarchy here. You know, we're all allowed to have our feelings and just because a person might
[9:10]be going, you know, externally, it appears to be something that's much more difficult. Doesn't
[9:14]mean you don't have your cross, you know, that we're all bearing something and that when we have
[9:19]empathy for ourselves, we're much better at having empathy with other people. And so when people
[9:24]do say they don't like the character of Anna, I think, I wonder how hard you are in yourself,
[9:29]you know, the fact that you can't empathize with this character who is grieving in this book
[9:33]are you particularly hard on yourself? And I think from the friends, I know who read the book,
[9:38]it does seem that those who dislike the characters have things about themselves as well at their,
[9:43]they're not coping with too well. And that was a challenge for me to like this character.
[9:47]You know, as a writer, it was a real stretch. Can I give her enough thing that that makes her
[9:52]sympathetic? And yet can I as a writer by the end be devastated for her and feel for her and cry
[9:59]for her?
[10:00]and want her to be okay. And so that was work, like that was me having to do a lot of emotional
[10:05]work myself to get there to feel for this person who, if you told me her story, I wouldn't like her
[10:09]either. Well, but there is that universal human compassion whenever anybody has someone ripped away
[10:17]from them, you also immediately kind of put yourself in their shoes and think about the things that
[10:23]have been ripped from you and then have that compassion. I think it's hard to limit it based on
[10:29]circumstance. Well, I think that says a lot about you actually. Oh, I don't think that's a
[10:33]general feeling. I don't think that, I mean, that hasn't been the general reaction. I think that
[10:37]says a lot about the person who is listening, not necessarily about the story that's been told or
[10:42]kind of a general compassion that we have. Yeah. All right. Well, I think it says something quite
[10:47]nice about you. Thank you. I don't know. It's just in the same way that no matter how terrible a person
[10:54]is, I don't wish ill on. I don't want anything bad to him into them. I mean,
[10:58]something new is now. I don't know. Everybody is hoping for a terrible thing to happen to people
[11:04]who can be terrible. I don't know. I don't think anything justifies. No, I know. I think it's
[11:09]Scott Turro, the writer who said, you judge a society not on the way that we treat people who are
[11:15]loved, but on the way we treat people who are hated. So how do we treat the people who are most
[11:19]hated? And that shows a lot about who we are. So I think you're right. And there's a lot of
[11:24]ill, you know, there's a sort of sending ill wishes towards particular people at the moment,
[11:29]hoping that, you know, hoping for their downfall. I think you also near but captured some of the
[11:34]immediate aftermath that like shock value of grief and how Anna stops eating and like everything
[11:42]in her, in her, lets her hair go and, you know, everybody notices, but no one can pinpoint it and the
[11:48]fact that she can't reveal it, it just makes it all the worse. But it's like those first weeks or
[11:54]days or weeks or when you're integrating that information with everyday life again are so
[11:59]challenging. And I feel like you, you like got to the heart of that particular time.
[12:04]Thank you. I mean, I think, I think, I think it was, it was watching, observing, having gone
[12:09]through things myself. But also, I think, I mean, spoiler is, it's a spoiler. I don't know what
[12:14]page it comes out on, but she's a mother as well. And she finds that difficult. And that's
[12:21]something that readers have judged her for as well. So she's just this terrible mother thing. Well,
[12:26]have we all not had moments where we have not been our best selves? I can think many or I do
[12:32]a little bit of pages and pages where I know I could have done better. And so I think that's the
[12:38]one thing that's leveled at Anna, which bothers me that I don't think, I think if the protagonists
[12:43]have been a male, that wouldn't be leveled at him, that he's a terrible father. He's disconnected
[12:48]from his children. Of course, she's disconnected from her children. She's disconnected from
[12:52]herself. She's disconnected from her whole life. Yeah, having kids makes everything more complicated.
[12:58]I was on Instagram like debating if I should admit how like, not proud of my mom behavior I was
[13:04]the other day. And I was like, no, I think I'm going to delete this. Nobody needs to know
[13:09]taking a imagine like everyone's been there, but still I don't necessarily need to put it on display.
[13:14]Everybody slips. I mean, not in like a, you know, lifelong damaging way, but it's a lot having kids.
[13:20]And when you throw on extra emotion over it, it's a lot. It's, you know, and then they take on
[13:25]your emotion too. I mean, kids are like sponges. So, you know, you can't hide it necessarily.
[13:31]How old is your daughter? Do you have other kids? It's just your daughter.
[13:33]I just have one. Yeah, she's eight. Yeah, she's back at school now after I think six months.
[13:40]So she's, she's not happy. I thought she would be delighted to go back, but she's not,
[13:45]she's not enjoying it massively. So I, I don't know, I think she feeds off my anxiety. I feed off
[13:50]hers. And yeah, I need to kind of be better at hiding. I don't know. I don't know. I don't know.
[13:58]I don't know that a psychologist would say that was a good thing, but I suppose because she's
[14:02]'s been at home so much. I ended up revealing things to her. You know, she ends up overhearing
[14:07]conversations that I'm having. You know, there's an illness in my family and I was trying to deal
[14:11]with that. And there was no, for me to go, you know, I'm on the phone. I have to take the phone
[14:15]calls. So yeah, I think I'm like, you're talking about the pandemic, but during the pandemic, I think
[14:19]parents would just be particularly difficult because we spend so much time protecting our children
[14:23]from things. And then they're face to face. But there's, there's nowhere to hide.
[14:28]I lost my, I went through my mother-in-law and grandmother-in-law both had COVID and both passed away
[14:34]during the summer within six weeks. And my husband, Kyle, we were like in charge of her care,
[14:39]you know, it has to be remote because she was in Charlotte, North Carolina. Anyway,
[14:43]I have four kids myself as all the calls were coming in and the nurses and I tried to be like,
[14:47]everything's good. Let's go on the trampoline. It's like it seeps in and then it comes out of them
[14:52]and other places too. You know, then like all of a sudden they're having separation anxiety,
[14:57]which they haven't had in years. And you know, like you can't, even if you put on a happy face
[15:01]and don't talk about it, like they feel it. It's like one of these things that nobody really
[15:06]warns you about, like you can't actually hide your feelings. You have to change your feelings
[15:10]if you don't want your kids to feel them. Yeah, no, yeah, no, I completely agree. Yeah. And I was
[15:18]speaking to a psychiatrist not that long ago who was saying, you know, one of the worst things
[15:22]for children is a house where there's silence because they know there's some kind of danger
[15:27]they know there's silence in terms of tension or silence in terms of a house where people are
[15:32]not getting on very well, but they're not shouting at each other because a child senses it,
[15:37]they know, they feel their energy and they attach that danger elsewhere. They're like, I know
[15:42]something's not quite right, but everything looks right. So, you know what, I'm just going to suddenly
[15:45]be scared of buttons, you know, right? I'm going to suddenly be scared of, you know, ice cream or
[15:50]whatever, not likely, but, you know, I'm going to, I'm going to attach my fear so true. Just like
[15:54]sort of like a dog approaches the situation, right? Like how you don't hear anything
[15:58]necessarily and they pick up everything and they just like freeze and they're like,
[16:03]look it around. With my dog, it's like howling in the middle of the night.
[16:07]Oh, be quiet. So tell me more about the process of writing. What's your writing process? Do you
[16:15]work there at like a shared space or how long does each of your books take? What made you switch to
[16:20]adult fiction versus younger children's fiction? I used to work in a in a co-writing
[16:26]space in the writers room in New York City actually where I lived when I lived in Joseph City.
[16:32]I used to go in every day but then my daughter was born and I stopped doing that and then
[16:36]eventually relocated to the UK and then I had a writing space built at the end of my garden.
[16:42]But actually that stopped working. That kind of isolation in my own studio didn't really
[16:48]benefit me creatively. I don't think I was a school teacher for 10 years and I need people and I
[16:53]need relationships and I need noise. So I half the time ended up going out to a library or to a
[16:59]coffee shop anyway and I'm now relocated again. I'm still in the UK but I've moved with two hours
[17:04]away from where I previously lived. So I found this amazing co-working space where I'm allowed to
[17:10]bring my dog and they have like little rooms for zooms and they have desks that you can book out
[17:17]and tea and coffee and dance lovely. So I'm trying to not come as much because I'm trying to
[17:24]sort of stay as distant from people as possible but it's great. I mean those hands on a tada
[17:29]everybody have to spray all your desk down. People stay away from one another so they're just
[17:33]the noise that kind of it's quite nice to have that noise in the background of other people living
[17:38]and working and there's all different types of people working here which is quite nice as well.
[17:42]So you check my chat to an architect one day and a web designer another day. So that's
[17:47]that's quite interesting because writers tend to talk to writers and that's it and we forget
[17:53]that all these other amazing jobs exist. So yeah that's how I'm working at the moment and in terms
[17:58]of writing for adults I just didn't see the, I mean it wasn't not a conscious decision at all.
[18:03]It was just that I had this idea this hook that I imagined what would it be like if a woman
[18:10]was to lose somebody that and she couldn't tell the world about it and then I had a conversation
[18:15]with some friends when we were out of the pub one night and asked have you ever been in a
[18:18]relationship with a secret and slowly but surely every single person around the table revealed a
[18:24]secret. I thought gosh this is a really universal experience and I wanted to write about it and
[18:30]I couldn't write about it within the content. It was within children's fiction. I couldn't find
[18:35]a way in. That's probably better. Yeah so I mean I gave it a go. Could I write about a parent
[18:45]having a relationship and it being secret and what that does to family that I decided to write
[18:49]an adult model instead and a lot of people. I mean there's this I was interviewed by someone who
[18:54]said oh you're a apprenticeship in children's fiction and I was I was horrified because I never
[19:01]I mean I absolutely don't see writing for adults as step up in any way. In fact to some extent
[19:08]writing for adults has been a little easier because I don't have to watch every single word. I mean
[19:14]I do in terms of making the language as good as it can be but you know like the swearing and
[19:19]being careful not to say something that may be interpreted by a child in a particular way that
[19:24]is damaging or just not of my politics you know so but with an adult reader you can say what you
[19:32]want and let them let them do the hard work of dismantling it and I need to make my children's
[19:37]but palatable to teenagers and I don't have to do that for adults. I don't care about it being
[19:41]palatable. I just wanted to be as real as possible so in a way it was kind of freeing and
[19:46]easier is not the right word but definitely freeing and a painstaking I guess in some ways especially
[19:51]when I came to the edit. The edit was so joyous. I did sing it at children's book. How long did
[20:00]a tick to rate. The first draft, not three, about three years, probably three years in total,
[20:06]and then it was quite, I think it was kind of clean when it got to the to the publisher,
[20:10]which is always quite nice to not have a huge edit to do with your publisher. I will
[20:14]probably for the next book, but for this one it was, it was kind of cleanse that was nice.
[20:18]And tell me about your next book. I haven't started writing it yet. I'm actually
[20:23]meeting my editor in a couple of weeks so we can talk through some ideas. I had, I had written
[20:28]some stuff and sent it to her and she said, did I do really want to write this? It doesn't
[20:36]you're still, it doesn't seem to have the energy of Emma, but no, not really, but I'm on deadlines.
[20:42]That's what you're getting. And she said, hey, why don't we just wait and see what comes to
[20:46]your other than forcing you to write something that you don't want to write. So in the meantime,
[20:50]I've written a YA, a young adult novel in verse again, and that's going to come out in August,
[20:57]but I haven't edited that yet. So I'm doing that in a moment.
[21:01]Excellent. Do you have any advice to aspiring authors? Yeah, I guess if you wanted to be a connoisseur
[21:08]of wine, you drink clothes and wine, that's what I would do. Or if you wanted to play tennis,
[21:14]you'd just sort of pick up a tennis racket and you'd start banging a ball about. And I think a
[21:19]lot of people have an idea of what it is to be a writer, which is a fantasy and a romantic
[21:24]idea of being a writer is a lot of drudgery involved in it. And so to write, you just got to
[21:29]sit down and get writing rather than kind of have a fantasy about it. And also to make, you know,
[21:35]it's so easy to think of publication as the Holy Grail, but with publication come other problems,
[21:40]you know, where are my on the bestseller lists, you know, have I won a prize in what are my reviews
[21:45]like? So that idea that you will suddenly feel like a real writer once you get published,
[21:50]that's not true, because there are always new mounds to climb and hurdles every day. And
[21:55]I always, another thing I tell you, I'm giving a lot of advice now, but another thing I tell people
[22:00]is, it's not going to make you happy. I think a lot of people think that once they get an age,
[22:04]you know, once they get a publisher, it's going to make them happy. But your other life goes on,
[22:08]all the other stuff continues. And I won a big prize in the UK, a children's prize,
[22:14]called the Carnegie Medal. And I got a call for my publicist to say, are you sitting down? And I
[22:19]thought someone had died? She was like, oh, you won the Carnegie Medal. So they're like,
[22:24]goodness, I'm screaming. And I go, I'm so happy. And then I put the phone down, and my daughter
[22:30]was basically saying I needed to wipe her bottom. She's like, I need you to wipe mine. I was like,
[22:35]okay, there we go, back into reality, back into life. I was given sort of four seconds to enjoy this
[22:40]moment. And then like, write your mom and back to your real life. So it's not going to make you
[22:46]happy. It might add to it, right? Take away from it. But it's certainly not going to give you
[22:51]everything that you think you want in life. It's, I don't know, for me, it took, I guess, winning
[22:56]the Carnegie to realize that my relationships had to, had to be the thing that fed me and nourish
[23:01]me, which they do. Yeah. Although I would say that phase of parenting is not always the most nourishing
[23:07]when you're in it. So I wouldn't be enough of that too much. But sometimes you just have to get
[23:15]through certain things. Well, that's great perspective to have. Well, thank you. Thank you for
[23:21]coming on mom's time to read books. I'd really love for you to, I have a virtual book club called
[23:25]Zippy's virtual book club. And we have authors come on. We all read the book. And then there's Q&A
[23:30]with the author. And if you have any interest, I think it would be a great book for my club. So if you
[23:34]want to do it, I could work with your publicist and try to find a time. Yeah. Yeah, I would love to.
[23:39]I think one thing if the readers were reading it is my mom suggested that readers were one of
[23:44]three people that she suggested that the reader was either a person who had had an affair,
[23:50]a person who had had an affair done to them, you know, they were the victim of it,
[23:54]or they were a person who was terrified and was going to happen to them.
[23:59]So when I was spoken to book groups before, like, which in those people are you before you go
[24:04]know who you are when you're going in. And I think that it will tell you a lot about what you
[24:09]feel when you come out of it. I think it's interesting. But yeah, I would love to. I would be
[24:12]neat up to your book is like a roar shark test. Right. I also found I am divorced and remarried
[24:19]when I started telling people, this is years ago, but when I was tell friends and sit down with
[24:23]them, you know, I'm getting, you know, getting a divorce or whatever, their reaction had nothing
[24:28]to do with me. And it just that everything about their own marriage, it was basically like,
[24:33]if you want to find out about your friend's marriages, tell them you're getting divorced.
[24:36]See, yeah, they react and then be like, I'm kidding. That's the way to get it the heart of like,
[24:43]I mean, I don't actually recommend that I'm disjoking, but like, you know, once sometimes when you
[24:47]put up a sort of mirror is when everything else comes pouring out. So in the same way as your book does.
[24:55]I had a friend who when she told another friend that she was getting divorced, her friend said,
[24:59]but who's going to do things like change the light bulbs in your house? And she thought,
[25:03]that is the literally, the only use you can see for your husband. It changes light bulbs.
[25:09]That is it. That's the extent what he adds to the marriage has been handed to you, man. I don't know.
[25:14]I mean, yeah. Oh my god. It was so nice to speak to you.
[25:20]Nice to see you. Really, really fun. Yes, you too. All right. We'll have a great day and thanks so much.
[25:24]Yeah. You took it in five. Thanks for audible sponsoring this episode. Get your amazing deal
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[25:39]Go to audible.com slash zibi or text zibi to 500-500. Thanks, Audible. Thanks for listening
[25:45]to this episode of mom's don't have time to read books. Don't forget to follow me on Instagram
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[26:00]other week. Thanks so much to Steve and Ryan at the Texture Sound for the Sound Editing.
[26:04]And thank you to Morning Moon Productions for providing this fantastic intro and now trim music.