Cynthia D'Aprix Sweeney, GOOD COMPANY
[0:01]Hi, this is Zibi Owens, and you're listening to the award-winning podcast, Momstone Have Time to Read Books.
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[0:38]Cynthia DePree Sweeney is the author of Good Company, a novel.
[0:42]Her debut novel, The Nest, spent more than six months on the New York Times bestseller list.
[0:47]The book was a Barnes & Noble, discovered great writers' pick,
[0:49]a Best Fiction Finalist for the Goodreads Choice Award,
[0:52]and was named one of the best books of 2016 by People, The Washington Post,
[0:57]San Francisco Chronicle, NPR, Amazon, Refinery29, and others.
[1:01]The Nest has been translated into more than 27 languages,
[1:04]and optioned for film by Amazon Studios.
[1:07]Cynthia holds an MFA from the Bennington Writing Seminars,
[1:10]and lives in Los Angeles with her husband and sons.
[1:13]Welcome, Cynthia. Thank you so much for coming on Momstone Have Time to Read Bex.
[1:17]Thank you for having me, Zibi. I'm really excited to talk to you.
[1:20]I have to say your book, The Nest, was front and center for a whole year of my life
[1:26]because when my husband and I were dating before he became my husband,
[1:30]he rented this tiny little apartment here, and we called it The Nest.
[1:34]And so your book came out at just the right time, and we always had it.
[1:38]That was the door mat, essentially. That sounds wrong.
[1:42]You know what I mean?
[1:43]I know. I know exactly what you mean, and I love that story.
[1:47]I haven't heard one like that, so that makes me happy that it had that double meaning for you.
[1:52]And so then when I heard you had another book coming out,
[1:55]and then of course the book ended up, of course being great, I was so excited.
[1:58]And it's like full circle, because now of course I live with my husband.
[2:01]And anyway, hopefully you live with your husband.
[2:04]Yes. After this year, I don't know.
[2:07]No, I'm kidding.
[2:08]Yeah.
[2:10]The 24, 7, 365-day year marriage has been interesting, I think.
[2:16]We want conversation a lot. And I feel like I have the easiest, most easy-going
[2:21]husband in the world, but it's like, I'm, you know, I'm, yeah, you're used to people coming and going.
[2:27]Yeah.
[2:28]And like, he used to go on all these trips.
[2:30]How long have you been married?
[2:32]I have been married 29 years.
[2:34]Oh, wow.
[2:34]So we've been married 30 years in September.
[2:38]How did you meet?
[2:39]How did you meet?
[2:40]We met a party in New York, and, you know, I was 27, 26 or 27.
[2:48]And so, and we were together five years before we got married.
[2:51]So as, you know, a lifetime, I've known him longer than I haven't.
[2:55]So, well, and I read your article about sex toys in the New York Times.
[3:01]That's classic.
[3:02]I know this from a while ago, but, you know, just to set the stage here.
[3:07]Like, you didn't even want the book in the house and the peeping tub.
[3:11]And I mean, what a story.
[3:13]A crazy story.
[3:14]That's such a New York story, though.
[3:16]But yeah.
[3:17]That was a huge moment for me.
[3:19]Because I had been working, you know, prior to that, really just as a marketing and branding person and a copywriter.
[3:26]And my kids were getting a little older and I was felt like, oh, I really want to write things that I want to write.
[3:32]And, and I had always wanted to do that.
[3:35]But I think I, for whatever reason, at that point in my life, I decided to take that desire more seriously.
[3:44]And I wrote that piece and I sent it off to John Hodgman, who is the editor of that page, which doesn't exist in the New York Times magazine anymore.
[3:53]But it was a column called True Life Tales and it was a humor column.
[3:56]And when he published it and said such nice things about me and encourage my writing, it really, I mean, that to be melodramatic.
[4:05]But it really kind of changed my life.
[4:08]Having that experience of, you know, the New York Times lands on your stoop on a, as we know Saturday morning.
[4:15]And to open it up and see something I wrote in there was really a major moment in my life.
[4:21]Well, as it should be. I mean, that's a big deal. That's like a huge milestone for anybody.
[4:26]Yeah.
[4:27]So when did you, then, did you always love to write? Like, did you ever try writing fiction into like, when did fiction come into the picture, tell me the whole thing.
[4:36]Okay, I'll try and make it short.
[4:39]I always love to write. I always love, you know, like most writers always love to read my entire childhood, read everything I can get my hands on.
[4:48]And when I moved to New York City in my 20s, I had to have a job to pay the bills and I got a job as a writer. I always have worked as a writer, but I worked in sort of the corporate communications, you know, copywriting, marketing.
[5:02]And I thought, oh, well, I'll do that. And then I'll write in my spare time. And I tried fiction writing and it was really hard.
[5:12]And I wasn't good at it right away. And I thought that meant that I would never be good at it. And I think I talked myself out of it. I talked myself out of even trying.
[5:26]Part of it was fear. And then I also felt, and this was, is becoming fortunately less true. But I didn't know how to access that world.
[5:37]Like, I grew up in a very, you know, middle class family. I didn't know people who wrote books or were painters or risk altars.
[5:45]And it felt like there was this universe that you needed to, you know, have grown up in New York or gone to the right schools or the right colleges or have the right contacts to sort of, I didn't have any role models.
[6:00]And I kind of didn't know how to get there.
[6:02]So I didn't do it for a really long time and did a good job of telling myself that I didn't want to do it. And, you know, and then, and then I got older and, and I, my husband and I made a life in New York.
[6:15]And, and I didn't know those kind of people all of a sudden, the people who were authors worked for the New York Times and worked for the New Yorker and worked for National Public Radio.
[6:24]And that world demystified for me a lot. And, and my kids got older and I wanted to think, I started thinking about what I wanted to do with the rest of my life.
[6:38]And, and so I sort of like tiptoed into fiction. And in the middle of all this, we moved to Los Angeles, which I think ended up being a real blessing because living in Park slope, it was very intimidating to say, I want to be a writer, you know, I'm, I'm 47 years old and I think I want to write a novel.
[6:58]Like that club house was not accessible to me. And I also just knew people who had been doing it since they were in their 20s, you know, who had figured it out in a way that I really hadn't.
[7:11]And I moved out here and kind of nobody was looking. Oh, I thought, okay, I'm just going to, I'm going to give myself a year to figure out if this is really what I want to do.
[7:20]And I took some classes at the UCLA Writers extension, which is a wonderful program. And my teachers there were very encouraging and said, you know, you should be doing this.
[7:33]And so I decided to go to a lowency MFA program in 2011, which was great because that really pushed me to write a lot. I felt like I had a, I felt like I had a lot of catching up to do and that pushed me to really produce a lot of work.
[7:49]And that's where I started the nest. So wow. Yeah. And then it sold.
[7:55]But that, no, I love it. I'm like so interested. This is a great story. It's also so inspiring. I mean, I'm in my 40s too. It's like your life is never over like that's such a misconception.
[8:05]I feel like the people I know who are my age are actually like all doing really cool things. Like there's some sort of renewal of energy that comes around now.
[8:13]Like this is hardly the end. This is like the new beginning, especially for moms who have kids growing up, like you said.
[8:19]I think the other thing that you really discount when you're feeling intimidated by something is how much you've learned from running a family, being a mother, having whatever your first career was.
[8:32]You know, the difference when I sat down at 48 and wrote the first piece of fiction that I'd written for a long time. I showed my friend a personal essay.
[8:42]And she was like, I think you should write this as a short story. I was like, I can't write stories. And she was like, what do you mean?
[8:48]Like you just wrote, you just take this and you make things up.
[8:54]Well, you looked at me like I was insane. And so I wrote it as a short story and I read it and I instead of thinking, oh, this is terrible. I can't do this. I thought, oh, that one paragraph.
[9:10]I think is really good. So I'll just throw out the other paragraphs and write more like that.
[9:16]So that's the difference between being 28 and 48. It's like I understood process and creativity and gave more credence to effort.
[9:29]And instead of thinking that like writing fiction was a magical thing. I think I thought that, you know, people who wrote fiction just sat down and it kind of flowed out of them.
[9:39]And I think that is true for some people but not for the vast majority. So I so the exciting thing about deciding to do something later in your life is that you have all these skills.
[9:50]that you just didn't have in your 20s. You have experience. So it's really satisfying.
[9:57]And not just the skills, but the.
[10:00]perspective that you gain from what you've lived through.
[10:03]I mean, I think about what I tried to write
[10:04]when I was, you know, same thing,
[10:06]like right after business school.
[10:07]And I'm like, oh my gosh.
[10:09]Like, I mean, that was, it was right for then.
[10:11]But like, if you took two books side by side,
[10:14]like the life I live now is like 57 lives,
[10:16]you know, like compared to then.
[10:18]I don't want to see Cynthia's 28 year old Mahal.
[10:21]Like I have a pretty good idea of what it would have been.
[10:24]Yeah.
[10:25]And yeah, you're right.
[10:26]It's just, it is, you know,
[10:27]it's the benefit of getting older.
[10:29]So let's talk about a good company
[10:31]that we've like, I'm sorry to like,
[10:33]usually I do that first,
[10:34]but whatever.
[10:34]I was like, so interested.
[10:36]Good company.
[10:36]So tell listeners a little more about what it's about
[10:39]and how you decided on this particular story
[10:41]to tell next after the nest.
[10:43]Okay.
[10:44]So good company is about two married couples
[10:47]who've been friends for a very long time
[10:49]and three of the people in this little configuration
[10:53]that when they were very young in New York
[10:54]as theater actors.
[10:56]And now they're, you know, they're in their late 40s
[10:59]in the present time of the book.
[11:00]They live in Los Angeles.
[11:02]And one of the characters finds a wedding ring
[11:06]that belonged to her husband
[11:08]that he told her many years prior.
[11:10]He had lost while swimming in a pond.
[11:13]And so the plot is sort of the unraveling of that story
[11:18]and how it impacts the four couples and their marriages
[11:22]and their friendship.
[11:23]But I mean, to bring it full circle.
[11:25]I actually think what it's about is hitting that point
[11:29]in your life where you are realizing
[11:34]that not everything ahead of you is opportunity,
[11:37]not everything's possible,
[11:39]and sort of taking stock about where you are
[11:43]in whether it's in your marriage or your career.
[11:46]And, you know, we all hit those moments
[11:49]and it can be triggered by a lot of different things.
[11:53]And so I think that that's a great path to divorce,
[11:56]job loss, you know, finding out that your husband lied to
[12:00]about where he lost his wedding ring.
[12:02]So I think it is very much a book about middle age.
[12:07]And I think it, I guess it's not really a coincidence
[12:10]that after I completely changed my life in middle age,
[12:14]I wrote a book about people facing that moment
[12:17]in their lives and sort of having to decide how to move forward.
[12:21]And I think it's really important to me now actually
[12:24]to remember what I was thinking because I had the idea before
[12:28]I even finished the mask.
[12:29]I love William Stegner's Crossing to Safety.
[12:31]And I remember wondering why there weren't more books
[12:34]about marriage and friendship and thinking,
[12:37]oh, you know, maybe that's where I should go next.
[12:40]So that's great.
[12:42]I was literally just telling someone yesterday.
[12:44]I was like, they were asking, what kind of books do you like?
[12:46]And I was like, right now I'm really liking books
[12:48]about middle age because I seem to have
[12:51]like there was no celebration that there was no nothing
[12:56]told me I had entered it except for I clearly am in it now.
[13:00]I mean, like no one says like, OK, it's your 43rd birthday.
[13:03]And now you're going to be in middle age.
[13:05]Like it's just like all of a sudden every so often people
[13:08]would say, well, in middle age, like us or something,
[13:09]like what?
[13:11]Anyway, I feel like books like yours and books
[13:14]like memoirs about people in middle age.
[13:15]And you know, I'm always looking to the stage I'm in
[13:19]and the stage slightly ahead of me.
[13:21]Like what's coming next?
[13:22]Like what's the next?
[13:23]What are my next five years?
[13:24]10 years, 15 years is going to look like.
[13:26]And I feel like I used books so much as a guide for that.
[13:28]So I think it's great to have fiction address these questions
[13:33]that we're all thinking of, especially now.
[13:36]Yeah.
[13:37]I mean, I think a lot of letters and I think this is true for me
[13:40]when I'm starting to think about what kind of book I want to write,
[13:42]I'm really thinking about what kind of book I want to read.
[13:45]And it does kind of start with the question for me.
[13:47]Like, well, how come nobody writes within that?
[13:50]So I was like, people are writing about family and money.
[13:52]Like everyone I know is dealing with that.
[13:55]And especially as you reach middle age
[13:58]and your parents get older in completely different ways,
[14:03]all super dramatic.
[14:05]So why aren't there more books about that?
[14:07]And so did you write the nest?
[14:09]So tell me about the difference between the process
[14:11]of writing the nest and writing good company.
[14:13]They were really different.
[14:14]I started the nest at the very end of my MFA program,
[14:18]which was a real stroke of luck because my thesis
[14:22]mentor was someone I, he's a writer.
[14:24]I admire tremendously.
[14:26]He had just finished a novel.
[14:27]And so I was just working as quickly as I could
[14:32]to send him pages every month for as long as I had him
[14:35]to get all of his, you know, like real advice and input.
[14:39]And when I, so we worked on it, you know, together
[14:41]for about five months and when I graduated,
[14:43]I had probably half of it written.
[14:46]And I, and I had this real sense of urgency,
[14:50]not just because I'm old, you're not old.
[14:54]Not just because I'm in the middle of my life,
[14:57]but because, you know, I had done this thing
[14:59]that had taken time away from my family
[15:01]and they were super supportive
[15:03]and I wanted to prove to everyone that I was serious.
[15:07]And so I wrote that book relatively quickly.
[15:11]And then when it came out in this way
[15:14]and it was completely surprising to me,
[15:17]it really ate up a good year and a half of my life,
[15:21]which was an incredibly lucky thing to happen to me.
[15:25]But it took a while to kind of settle my brain back down
[15:29]and be ready to start something new.
[15:33]And this book just took me longer.
[15:35]And I think that part of it was that I very intentionally
[15:39]wanted to not write something that was like the nest.
[15:42]I wanted to focus on smaller number of characters
[15:47]and go deeper with them.
[15:49]And so it just took me longer.
[15:51]I didn't write quite as quickly
[15:53]and I didn't wrote as much every day as I did with a nest.
[15:56]And at first that was frustrating,
[15:58]but then my, you know, I was complaining
[16:00]to my husband one night.
[16:01]I was like, I just, I don't feel like I'm in a groove
[16:03]and he said, well, you're just in a different groove.
[16:06]Like the nest was one groove
[16:08]and this is a different groove
[16:09]and the next book will probably be its own things.
[16:12]So once I kind of calmed down and accepted,
[16:15]like, oh yeah, this is just how this,
[16:17]this is what this book requires.
[16:19]It requires me to go a little more slowly.
[16:21]I was able to enjoy it a little more.
[16:23]But yeah, so I think it was harder.
[16:26]And are you working on another novel already?
[16:28]No, I'm trying to start.
[16:30]I find it hard, you know, right now
[16:33]I'm just doing all the promotion for good company.
[16:35]It's not gonna take up sadly as much of my time
[16:38]because there's no book tour
[16:39]and there's no traveling.
[16:41]And so I do wanna get into something quickly
[16:44]and I've had an, I've also had that idea for a while.
[16:47]So probably soon.
[16:49]And do your kids read your books?
[16:51]Oh yeah, yeah.
[16:53]Yeah, yeah, they love them.
[16:54]That's like a real joy.
[16:56]Like they're in my kids around their 20s.
[16:58]And so, you know, they are excited to get it
[17:01]and they're just cheerleaders.
[17:04]They're, you know, they're just my older son, Reddit,
[17:07]read good company when he was home for Thanksgiving
[17:10]and he told me his real friend was also here
[17:12]and he said he finished the last page of the book
[17:14]and closed the book and said,
[17:15]oh, thank God my mother doesn't write shitty books.
[17:18]That's a high appraise as you could ever hope to get
[17:27]from, that's great, I love it.
[17:29]Do you have any advice for aspiring authors?
[17:31]Yeah, I mean, the advice I always have
[17:34]is first of all just read voraciously
[17:37]but also read aspirationally.
[17:39]So, you know, think about the readers you,
[17:43]the writers you admire and read their work
[17:46]and you absorb a lot.
[17:48]And then I think it's really important to understand
[17:52]that you have to write to get to the stuff you love,
[17:56]you have to write the stuff you hate.
[17:58]Like every first draft is just lacking.
[18:02]And to sort of remind yourself a good friend of mine
[18:06]always says to me when I'm frustrated
[18:08]in the middle of the first draft,
[18:10]just remember you're telling yourself the story now
[18:13]and then you're gonna get to the end
[18:14]and you're gonna go back and figure out
[18:16]how to make it a good story for the reader
[18:19]and I try and remind myself of that.
[18:21]And then I think just a really practical piece of advice
[18:24]is I'm a firm believer in reading your workout loud.
[18:28]It's incredibly helpful to me.
[18:30]It's, you know, tedious, but your ear hears things
[18:36]that your eye just glances over
[18:39]and it makes everything better.
[18:42]I read everything I write to my husband.
[18:45]Every's really, really helpful.
[18:47]It's really, really helpful.
[18:48]And especially with the novel, there's always a point
[18:52]when I get, usually when I get the second pass pages,
[18:56]I read the book out loud.
[18:57]And, you know, there is inevitably a point
[19:01]where I'm getting bored in the scene.
[19:04]I wanna skip ahead and I'm like, no, that's,
[19:07]if that's happening to me,
[19:09]this isn't just because I know the book.
[19:11]You know, this needs to be shorter,
[19:13]it needs to be tighter, there's something missing.
[19:15]So it just helps you in all kinds of ways.
[19:18]And you can't believe how often you use the same words.
[19:22]I mean, you know, I've been writing all my life.
[19:24]I'm used to varying my terms and keeping an eye out for that.
[19:29]But you just, you know, you don't agonize over every word
[19:33]while you're writing a book because you can't take that time.
[19:36]You've got to get the story down.
[19:37]The last thing I read, I had forgotten to read it to my husband.
[19:40]I had like sent it to some people
[19:42]and then I was like, wait a minute,
[19:43]I forgot to read it to him.
[19:44]Like, this is my, this is like the baseline thing that I do.
[19:47]I don't even like put something on my website
[19:49]without reading a tip.
[19:50]So I like read it to him in bed.
[19:52]And I looked over and he was sound asleep.
[19:54]And I was like, oh my God, it's terrible.
[19:57]It's terrible.
[19:58]It was the worst thing ever.
[20:00]And he feels, he was like, no, I didn't mean that.
[20:02]I was just tired.
[20:03]I was like, you're an insomniac.
[20:04]What do you mean?
[20:05]Anyway, so yeah, it's a good trick.
[20:07]And also the writing classes, I took a class
[20:10]at UCLA Extension School 100 years ago, yeah.
[20:13]And my husband always jokes
[20:14]because we go to LA all the time
[20:15]and we'll drive by and he'll be like,
[20:16]oh, you're on the water.
[20:17]I'm like, it's not on the water.
[20:19]Anyway, yeah, I mean, that's anything you can do
[20:22]to create accountability for yourself is really important.
[20:25]I think protecting your writing time is really important.
[20:28]I try and look at each week.
[20:29]I mean, I really treat writing a novel as my job
[20:33]because it is.
[20:34]And I treat every day as a work day.
[20:37]It's a much more relaxed work day
[20:40]than if you were going to an office.
[20:42]But I make my cup of coffee,
[20:44]I answer a few emails
[20:46]and then that's like my block of writing time.
[20:48]And a lot of writers say this.
[20:51]I go, well, in the past year, I haven't seen anyone.
[20:53]But in the days where you can see people,
[20:56]you know what, I'm really in it.
[20:57]I don't make any appointments before 3 p.m.
[21:00]That's sort of like a protect that space
[21:04]just to keep myself accountable.
[21:06]And if I, you know, something happens
[21:09]that I have to not work one day between the hours
[21:12]of nine or 10 to three, I will work on a weekend.
[21:15]I will make it up.
[21:16]I don't write seven days a week,
[21:17]but I do really try and write five days a week.
[21:21]And even on the weekends,
[21:22]I try and even just look at the document,
[21:25]look what I've worked on during the week
[21:28]just to keep my head in the book all the time.
[21:30]It helps you.
[21:32]Another author, I wish I could remember who this was,
[21:34]I should go back in search,
[21:35]but they said that what helped it was a woman, I know.
[21:37]She said what helped her the most
[21:38]is just opening the document every day.
[21:40]Just open the document.
[21:42]I thought that was such good advice
[21:43]because it's like once you see it,
[21:45]then you want to start doing something.
[21:47]And the other thing I tell people is,
[21:49]especially beginning writers is,
[21:51]King is where, when you're a writer,
[21:53]it's very easy to get wedded to word count,
[21:55]like how many words did I write today?
[21:57]And I do set a goal for myself,
[21:59]but especially early on or at transition points
[22:02]or when you reach a place in the novel where you,
[22:04]you're not sure where you're going next.
[22:06]A lot of it is just having that open document
[22:09]in front of you and thinking about it.
[22:11]I'm a pacer, so sometimes it's like walking around my house,
[22:16]like trying to talk out what might happen
[22:18]or think about what might happen.
[22:20]And sometimes at the end of those days,
[22:22]you have no real words to show for yourself,
[22:25]but you have worked, you know, you have worked.
[22:28]So as long as you're putting yourself
[22:31]into the world of the book
[22:33]or some amount of time you're working,
[22:35]it's a lot more satisfying when you can say,
[22:37]I don't know, it's 1,500 words today,
[22:38]but it's all work, all count, it all counts.
[22:42]That's like a play on word count.
[22:44]You know what I mean?
[22:45]Like the expression?
[22:46]Yes.
[22:47]How to make words count.
[22:47]I don't know.
[22:48]I don't know, something clever that I can't think of.
[22:51]Anyway, well, thank you.
[22:53]I'm sorry we didn't really go into the nuts
[22:54]and bolts of the book, but I've so enjoyed
[22:57]like getting to know you.
[22:57]So sorry for that, but you indulged me.
[23:00]So great, it's been, I love talking to you
[23:04]and I'm really thrilled to be invited.
[23:07]So that's for including me.
[23:10]No, I've had your book for months.
[23:11]I'm like, you know, it was one of the first,
[23:13]I feel like I got it at first.
[23:14]It was like bound with black, you know,
[23:16]they were like, here, take it.
[23:17]That's like, of course, don't worry, I got it.
[23:21]Anyway, well, I hope to meet you in person someday.
[23:24]I'm gonna be in LA last the summer.
[23:25]So I don't know who knows who's starting the books.
[23:27]And yeah, maybe I'm in normal time.
[23:30]So hopefully in the vaccinated time.
[23:32]Yes, exactly.
[23:35]All right, well, it was great to talk to you.
[23:37]Thanks so much.
[23:38]Okay, bye bye.
[23:41]Thanks for listening to this episode of Moms.
[23:43]Don't have time to read books.
[23:44]Don't forget to follow me on Instagram
[23:46]at ZB Owens and at Moms.
[23:48]Don't have time to read books.
[23:49]Also sign up for my newsletter at ZB Owens.com
[23:52]and sign up for my virtual book club
[23:54]and meet lots of authors on Zoom every other week.
[23:56]Thanks so much to Steve and Ryan at Texturesound
[23:59]for the Sound Editing.
[24:00]And thank you to Morning Moon Productions
[24:02]for providing this fantastic intro and outro music.