Jean Hanff Korelitz, THE PLOT

[0:38]Zibby Owens: Hi. This is Zippy Owens, and you're listening to the award winning podcast, Moms Don't Have Time to Read Books. I'm also the host of Moms Don't Have Time to Lose Weight, and I'm the editor of the anthology, which you should run out and buy, called Moms Don't Have Time to A Quarantine Anthology. All proceeds of that book go to COVID nineteen Vaccine Research. And I'm the editor in chief of Moms Don't Have Time to Write, a new publication on Medium, and we're accepting submissions, so please send your personal essays there. And if all that isn't enough, you can follow me on Instagram at Zibby Owens, and my website is zibbyowens.com. Okay. Now back to this amazing podcast. I could not be more proud to announce today's sponsor and why they're sponsoring the podcast. Citizens of Humanity, which you may know as this amazing denim company, decided to do stay safe t shirts. They're available on Monday, May 3, and you can shop them exclusively on the Citizens of Humanity website, citizensofhumanity.com. A 100% of the retail selling price of every t shirt sold supports the Susan Felice Owens program for COVID-nineteen vaccine research at Mount Sinai Health System, which I founded. I am over the moon grateful and excited that Citizens of Humanity is donating their proceeds of their Get Vaxxed shirts which are long sleeved unisex t shirts available in white or black and the retail price is $34 Go to Citizens of Humanity. Please go get one of these t shirts. And again, every t shirt sold supports vaccine research at Mount Sinai and the program that I founded to honor my late mother-in-law. Thank you Citizens of Humanity for choosing my charity to donate the proceeds to. Thank you, thank you, thank you. And I am just so excited. So go check out Citizens of Humanity, the shirt, buy some jeans, go crazy, and, just thank you. Jean Hamth Corleots

[2:34]Jean Hanff Korelitz: is the author of The Plot.

[2:37]Zibby Owens: She's also the author of the novels You Should Have Known, which was adapted for HBO as The Undoing by David E. Kelly starring Nicole Kidman, Hugh Grant and Donald Sutherland. Admission adapted as the 2013 film starring Tina Fey, The Devil and Webster, The White Rose, The Sabbath Day River, and A Jury of Her Peers. A new novel, The Plot, is just published and her company, Book the Writer, hosts pop up book groups in New York City where small groups of readers can discuss new books with their authors. Welcome, Jean. Thank you so much for coming on Moms Don't Have Time to Read Books to discuss the plot and so much more. And so much more. And, you know, I was remembering that you were actually

[3:16]Jean Hanff Korelitz: one of the last people I saw in person before the pandemic started. We were just meeting that day in not the room you're in right now, but I believe the room next to the room that you're in right now at one of your incredible salons. And I was already terrified by the way. I was pretending I wasn't, but I was completely In retrospect, maybe I should have canceled that one. But I feel like that week, so much happened. The salon was on a Monday, and then by Thursday, like, the world shut down. But on Monday, it was enough that, like, half the people didn't come, but the other half still did, and they were like, is this okay? So I was glad you were there. Well, my friend Janice Kaplan was one of your authors that day. And we went out for lunch afterwards and we were sitting in Orsay over on Lexington Avenue and we were just looking at the people normally having lunch. Janice didn't think it was gonna be a big deal, but I have read too many virus thrillers and too many non fiction books about epidemiology and I was scared out of my way. Well, I didn't. I had no idea. I mean, what was to come at all, obviously. For interest with them, I was very grateful for that day though. Epidemiology aside, I was it was a wonderful thing to be in a room full of people listening to writers talking about books and the kind of thing that made you think, what are we going to do when this is over? We're going to sit in rooms and talk about books. I can't wait for that. Honestly, I can't wait. I cannot wait. I know yesterday it was like such a nice spring day and I feel like I put a skirt on for the first time in months and I was like, gosh, I wish there was, like, something here to see. You know? Like, I wish I could just invite over everybody, but I feel like we're getting closer to that where I can go back to live events again and and all of that. But in the meantime, I get to talk to wonderful authors like you via Zoom still so that's good. Okay, the plot. I loved this book. This was so cool. I love how you basically read two books essentially and like stuffed them both in here and interwove it so beautifully. Would you mind just explaining to everybody what this book is about and what inspired you to write it? Sure. Well, before I do that, I want to say that it was while I was on one of your book groups with Lily King last spring, she she was talking about what it was like to write a book within a book because in her novel writers and lovers, which we were discussing, she was saying that no book could ever be as great as the one that her author was writing, and therefore she did not write a word of it. And I thought, great, I don't have to write mine either. Because if Lily King can get away with that, I can too. Unfortunately, my editor said, you got to write it. So the plot does involve a book within a book, which is a very scary prospect because well, for exactly that reason, you're writing the book that everybody's making a big fuss about. And how good does it really, how good is it really? I mean, you think, you know, what book could really fill a stadium of people? And then you go, Gone Girl. Yeah, everybody would have gone to see Gillian Flynn at the height of that book. And she would have filled very big rooms. Anyway, what the plot is about is about a failed writer and failure for a writer is always extremely close to us. Wherever we are in our careers, are that failure is right behind us, whether in our imagination or in reality. So it's about a failed writer named Jake, who is really watching his career descend and descend and descend. He can't write anymore. His last book tanked. He has nothing in the tank and he is reduced to teaching in a pretty bad MMA program. It's really they just take anybody who signs up. And he has this horrendous student, the kind of student most teachers have had at some point in their career. He's just a real jerk. And he waltzes into class and basically says, well, I don't need you. I don't need to be here because book that I'm writing is foolproof. It has a plot, which is foolproof and shake understandably thinks to himself, what a jerk and also how good can it be? But then he hears the plot and he knows that this asshole is absolutely going to have a massive success with this book. He doesn't deserve it. He's not a terrific writer, but he's right. This blood is full. And that's where we leave them for a couple of years. And when Jake sort of wonders to himself a few years later why this book has never come out, because obviously he would have heard about He discovers that his former student has died and he has died not long after their encounter. And there is no book. So he has a brief wrestle with the angels. Obviously, you do not take somebody's idea. You certainly do not take their written language. There are very good reasons for that. But this is a story and it's a story that was unwritten, obviously not published. And stories cycle through our history and they appear again and again. Can you own a story? Who gets to tell a story? I mean, a lot of questions that we writers obsess about, I'm not sure other people obsess about them as much as we do, but we do obsess about them. But basically he is on a fire, the story. He feels responsibility to the story. And so he writes his own book, not the book his student was writing. And as his former student predicted, he becomes massively successful, but he can't really enjoy it because he's too terrified that somebody is going to come along who knows what he did and then somebody does. And the rest of the book is a kind of puzzle to figure out who this person is, what they know. And Jake also has to ask himself some questions he ought to have asked himself earlier on, like who was his student and where did he get this idea? And did he perhaps take it from somebody he shouldn't have taken it? So it all comes round into this, I hope suspenseful plot. We do get bits of the novel in question because throughout the book, I'm sure everybody who reads it is going to be asking themselves, what is this idea that's so fabulous that it could really guarantee success. And I don't want to give anything away about that, but I think it's surprising the people who have read it. So that's very gratifying. Wow. Well, it was really fantastic. And I hate to use the word propulsive because, like, everyone's using that word these days, but it really did, like, you know, pull you through as if there's, like, some sort of lasso on your waist and you're just, like, holding on. I was, like, water skiing behind the to try to catch up to see what was gonna happen next. And, you know, I had so much compassion, actually. I mean, I felt badly that Jake had taken the story, but the anxiety he lived with and the self almost immolation, it, like, broke my heart too. So I don't know. I couldn't tell if I was rooting for him or not. I kind of want I'd like all along, I won't give anything away. But, like, I just wanted him to, like, decide he was gonna, like, come clean and, you know, shout it from the rooftops or something. You know? I don't know. But anyway, that's what Yeah. Well, he does reach a point where he actually does that. There's a a scene towards the end in which he's suddenly channeling Ozymandias from the Shelley poem, who is this you know, if your listeners remember Ozymandias, it's about this lost tyrant whose ruin ruins the ruins of his city and his statue are are in some desert in the middle of nowhere. And he says, look upon my works, ye mighty and despair. And Jake does have a moment of that arrogance where he's like, screw it. I did nothing wrong. I'm going to tell everybody. But does that come to happen? I do not say. Like a lot of the protagonists I've written over the years, Jake is not a particularly likable guy. I'm not a big fan of the likable, of the automatically likable protagonists. Look for likable people in fiction. Look for them in- I was going to ask if you did or not. I don't need everybody in a book to be my best friend. And Jake is complicated. I mean, he has been so twisted by his perceived failure and the loss of what he thinks he deserved to have and what he worked very hard to have. Writers' minds, as I'm sure you know, very complicated places. We're courageous people. We do this insane thing where we write a story nobody's asking us to write, which is an act of great arrogance, but also incredible humility because when it fails, as it often does, we have to acknowledge that it's failed and we have to put it away and we have to start over. And these are not easy things to do. But I feel like you've had so many successes yourself. Have you had failures that maybe I don't know about? Oh my Even like all these like bestselling, I mean, movies and books and I mean, your resume is like, even just like looking at your I mean, look at this. You would just think, you know, you should have known which was on HBO as The Undoing and Admission which was a film with Tina Fey and The Devil and Webster and The White Rose and The Sabbath Day River and A Journey of Her Peers and Interference Powder and more and more and more. I mean, you don't seem like someone who we should be like, oh, well, Jean must have had lots of failures. Well, this is probably not the moment in my career to rehearse all, you know, to regurgitate all of my failures. There have been many. You have to understand that, you know, the plot is my seventh novel. And until maybe six months ago, it was absolutely ordinary to walk into a bookstore and find none of my books there. I was a completely unknown entity, except perhaps among some writers, my name would have drawn absolutely no recognition among most readers. And, you know, I'm not going to say that was no problem. No worries, no big deal. It, it hurt a lot, but, you know, my job was always to write the best book that I could. And I was very fortunate in that I had one editor in particular who really believed in me, even though I continued to not put the money on the plate as far as book sales. So I'm grateful to my agent. I'm grateful to my editor and I'm grateful to the writer friends who stood by me, but no, I was not a successful writer at all. I mean, depending on how you're measuring success. Exactly, exactly. In terms of you walk into Barnes and Noble and they have your books, I was not successful. In terms of, you you meet somebody at a party where there are lots of writers whose work you've read and loved and you introduce yourself and they just have no idea who you are. You know, but these, again, these are the things that you have to remember. They're out of your control. What's in your control is how good the book is. And also, starting over and doing it again. That's enough. That's hard enough without taking on the New York Times bestseller list or whatever other measures out there. You just have to keep going. And you mentioned until six months ago. So what's happened since The Undoing came out? How has your life changed at all? I sense a disturbance in the force. I feel, I know, obviously I'm in a rural place in Upstate New York. I've been here for most of the last year. I'm not going to conferences or frequenting bookstores any more than anybody else's. But I sense that my work is being recognized or anticipated or people are engaging with it. I'm seeing a lot of things like, well, I read You Should Have Known, Which Became The Undoing. And I see she has six other books, so I'm going to read them now. This is a wonderful thing to me. It's a great thing about books in general that they don't go anywhere. I mean, they may not be on the shelf in Barnes and Noble, but this is one thing we can thank the internet for. I'm constantly writing down the names of books that I'm hearing about for the first time, even though they came out decades ago or sometimes centuries ago. And I can get them and I read them. I do it all the time. In fact, I have an extra special little Instagram account called Books of Yesteryear, which are just old books that I'm reading. I mean, I buy them in flea markets. I get them on the internet. This is in addition to all the contemporary stuff that I'm constantly reading. Today's episode is sponsored by Quince. Summer always makes me rethink what I'm reaching for every day. Lighter fabrics, better materials, pieces that just feel good the moment you put them on and look effortless. That's why I keep coming back to Quince. They focus on high quality essentials. 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[18:40]Jean Hanff Korelitz: So, I mean, it's a great thing about about books. They're mostly forever. I didn't even realize, and I've been a lifelong, like, huge reader, like, recreationally. Right? Just love to read. I didn't realize how much focus inside the literary industry was on new releases. Like, because that's never how I used to shop. I mean, I would go to that table or look at that wall, but I would look at so much more than that was just like one stop. That's one wall in the whole bookstore. So when I started even like pitching people to come on the show, I remember asking like Michael Lewis or somebody like I was like, oh, I'll just start with like, you know, Michael Lewis who of course, said no. But anyway, and his agent said something like, you know, Andy doesn't have a book coming out. And I was like, okay. Like, why is that even a thing? You know? And then I realized like, it's all the industry is makes it feel like it's so much about new releases, but literature is literature and, you know? Oh, like backlist phenomenon. I'm like, what's a backlist? It's like, oh, the other books people have written is that backlist sounds so derogatory. Like it should be like they're, I don't know, magnum opus or I don't know, something with a better name. Well, the book that I always wanna hear about is the book that you read, you know, twenty years ago that you have one old torn up copy that is out of print that nobody's ever heard of. I wanna know what that book is and I wanna order it immediately from Thriftbooks or Better World Books. And I wanna read it. I mean, these are the books that get me going in addition to all the new stuff as well. It's impossible. The list of great books that I have not read is so embarrassing. And I read constantly. I read at least three books a week, usually more. So it's we all have our list of shame of the books that but I did finally get through Ulysses. So at least that's off my list of shame. I'm not even trying to go back to classics that I've missed. So, you know, you're a thousand steps ahead of me. I'm like, I missed those ones. They weren't assigned in school. Can't can't worry about it now. They're still there when you're ready. Yeah. If I wanna go back, which eventually. So when you're reading all these books, three books a week, is it mostly fiction, poetry, memoir? Like what type of genre? I read a lot of memoirs and I read a lot of fiction and I read a lot of old fiction. I do like the biography, the odder the better and non fiction too, if it's something that I'm interested in. So I have about, I don't know, 80 books stacked up upstairs that I've, I mean, it's impossible, but it's wonderful too. And I think because I was always a reader, I think the fact that I never suffered from severe depression or anything like that can be directly traced to the fact that I was a reader. There was always a book that I was looking forward to reading. And I mean, there's nothing that I can imagine that I can pinpoint in my history or chemistry or whatever that would have spared me that. It's only the fact that I always had something to read. So get your kids reading because I think it's a great stay against some of the vicissitudes. I totally. I totally agree. This whole bibliotherapy thing is like long overdue. Right? It's something people have known for a long time without perhaps a name. But yes. Plus the fact that you're just not ever alone. Right? You're always in someone else's mind and always thinking and learning and accompanied no matter what. Absolutely. You're you're not alone. You're transported. And you know what? If it's not working for you, there's an infinity of other worlds and other minds you can be entering. So yeah, have ordered my life and enriched my life. And to me, like the highest thing that I could ever aim to do was write a novel. And I remember when I was a kid, my father asking me if I thought I had a novel in me and I lied. I lied to him. I said, yes, but I didn't think I could do it. Maybe it was just an early example of fake it till you make it, but I wanted it so desperately. And when I started to do it and I, you know, I failed quite decisively, you know, picking yourself up and saying, now I'm going to do it again and try harder and do better. That's really something I'm proud of. So when you started writing your own fiction, did you just sit down and try it? Or did you like try to learn the craft or like, how did you approach it? No, I was a poet at the beginning. I started writing poetry in high school and all through college. And I went to Cambridge for two years after college and I was only writing poetry, but I was only reading fiction because I mean, my natural inclination really went towards the novel. And one of the things I realized at one point was that I was that the dream was fiction. And I had to stop futzing around with poetry. But I think writing poetry was a fantastic way to begin because poetry teaches you respect for language and in a way that maybe even fiction doesn't. And every word in every book that I write is weighed and compared to 10 other, alternatives, even in a so called thriller. Can't leave a sentence if I don't think it's beautiful, maybe too big a word, but if I don't think it's as fine as it can be, I just can't leave it there. It bothers me. So I'm glad that I started with poetry and I stopped completely after my only book of poems was published. So that was another indication that I was really not going to be a poet. Although some of my best friends are poets and I'm married to a poet. So I'm still in the poetry world. But yeah, I took the road equally traveled. Wow. And so if you have that approach to writing where every sentence bothers you, which by the way, I love just hearing that because I'm sure so many people can relate to that sort of perfectionism and something that can't be perfected. Right? It's a sentence. Like, you have to at some point let it go. How long does something like this like, how how long did this book take and how long some of your other books taken to write? This novel was a once in a lifetime experience fueled by, I think you will agree, some rather unusual circumstances. The story is that around the time that you and I met a little over a year ago, I had had this extraordinary meeting with my editor in her office. And the purpose of this meeting was for her to explain to me why she was not buying the book that I've been working on yet. It was a big novel. It was quite a different book than this. It was about a New York family with triplets and big family saga. And it just wasn't working. And she called me into her office. This was the second in a series of meetings, telling me the exact same thing, which was that she was not going to buy it yet. But I was so upset because I had been working on it for so long. By the way, that's my dog barking. I figured. And in the middle of this meeting, which was not a great meeting, I heard myself say to her, well, I have this other idea. And then I just upchucked this idea that had really just come to me. And that I this idea was good. I mean, good. The last time I'd had an experience like this, it was you should have known and that became the undoing. It just came to me. And you know, I've had books that I thought about for literally twenty years before I wrote the first sentence, but this was just there. And I started to tell my editor the story, the plot of the plot, which was already called the plot, even though it was just being born on the spot. And I could see her get more and more excited, which was very gratifying. And the next day she bought both books. I mean, was an amazing experience professionally, but it also meant that I had a new project just as everything was shutting down. And I, as I think I've mentioned before, I was very, very upset and very scared and very angry about what was happening. And suddenly I was up in this very snowbound house in Upstate New York and I had this book to write. So it was a kind of perfect storm of propulsion to use your word. And I wrote this novel in three and a half months, which is insane. And I hope never to have experience like that again, because it took a lot out of me, but it was three and a half months of writing every day, all day. And at the end of it, I had this novel that I was very, very happy with and am very happy with. There were not many changes that were made. I mean, there was a lot of revising of sentences, but basically the story, the characters, it was all there. And so, I mean, usually a novel takes two, two and a half years for me to write this took three and a half months, but I hope people will not hear that and think, oh, it was just dashed off. It was a very intense writing experience. That's still close to like a hundred days of just sitting there writing all day. I mean, a hundred days in a row of doing anything. Else did I have to do? I understand. But not everybody wrote a Yeah. I mean, you could have done a million things. You could have baked banana bread like everybody else. You know? So I did not bake any banana bread. Figured. You couldn't. How could you? Did not bake any banana road. No. What advice would you have to aspiring authors other than perhaps not stealing somebody else's story? Well, I mean, the best advice to anybody who wants to write is to read. I mean, I know this is where people insert, right? You must write. Yeah, of course you must write. You must. If you don't write, can't be a writer. But people seem not to recognize the crucial element of reading. It helps if you're an obsessive reader from a young age. Thankfully, most of us who want to write are, but there are a lot of people out there who don't feel it's necessary to read other people's books. They have some idea that their voice is just waiting to say wonderful things and in a scintillating way, and everybody will stop what they're doing and want to read their book. I'm not saying that never happens, but for most of us, you must read, you must want to read, you should want to read. Never fear that it's dangerous to read because you'll incorporate other people's voices. This happens. It happens to all of us. And it's an important phase that we all go through. And my husband went through a TS Eliot phase where he was writing like TS Eliot. He was very young. But it's something that is an important part of finding our own way of speaking. But if you don't love language, you shouldn't be a writer. I mean, just do something else. Be a ballroom dancer. I'd love to be a ballroom dancer. I can't do that. Literature should be left to those of us who love literature. It just seems like an awful thing to say, but it's also like a no brainer, I think. That's a good point. I mean, have to love what you do. Right. Mean, otherwise, I don't know. Do I it? Why do I? Do something else. Yeah. Like you said, nobody's assigning you these stories necessarily. Nobody was saying, Jean, where? Actually, mom and dad, 94 88, were waiting for every chapter as I was writing that. And I was very happy to be sending them along because it was distracting all of us last winter. So what happened with the other book? Is that going to come out next? Yeah, I have a deadline of July and I think I know what I need to do to make it work. It is a very different book than the plot. I mean, in my career, I've always kind of ricocheted back and forth across this genre line. I don't have control over the books that I am given to write. It has been, I think it's been part of the reason why I have not been better known that every time I get traction with one book, the next book will disappoint people because it's so different, but I can't help it. I mean, you could hold up, you know, you should have known next next to the book that was written before it, Admission, which is a literary novel, but sort of became a comedy movie with Tina Fey. Adorable movie. Was really sweet movie. And then the book before that, was called The White Rose, and it's about New York in the 1990s. It's the plot of Strauss's Der Rosenkavalier among wealthy Jewish New Yorkers and think these can't be by the same person. And that's a flaw in the publishing world. Bookstores and readers really want a kind of branding and I've just not been able to do that. But I hope that people will enjoy the plot and the next novel, which is called The Latecomer in different ways. And I hope they'll give the latecomer a chance if they Well, I feel like Jake might weigh in on this and say, you're only as good as your last book, right? Everybody keeps saying that. And that's his like mantra, I feel like. So I don't think readers care as long as they like the books. Yeah. I hope so. I mean, I really think I mean, I don't know. It'll be a great book and people will read it. And just go from there. Just go from it's marketing of marketing is a separate animal, you know? It is. I was just having a phone call this morning with the head of digital marketing from Sell It On this morning. And I mean, this is another first in my career that I just feel so supported by my publisher and they've been really, really fantastic. So your readers, your followers may or may not be aware that in every, for every publisher in every season, there are two or three books that they're going to hear about. And then there's another fifty, sixty, 70 books out there. To get that magic fairy dust from your publisher is just a it's a wonderful thing. But there are a lot of books right behind them that are also terrific and want us to read them. Very true. Well, Jean, thank you. Thank you for the plot. Thank you for writing the book by the way that became The Undoing which I inhaled in a single day with my husband once. And you know, you give off a very self I think you should feel really awesome about your career more so than you do. I actually do. Maybe I'm proud of myself for keeping going. Yes. And I'm proud of myself for writing books that pleased me. So there's a lot to be proud of. But it's been a long time since that first book was written and I'm here, you know, just like at the end of The Color Purple, I'm here and I'm fine. So it's all good. It's all good. All right. Well, thank you. That's actually super inspiring. So thank you. Thanks for sharing everything. And I hope to see you back at an event once they start in person again. IRL. Yeah.

[34:02]Zibby Owens: Thank you again to citizens of humanity for sponsoring this episode and for donating all the proceeds of your long sleeve unisex t shirts that are available for getting vaxxed. The retail price is $34 to the Susan Felice Owens program for COVID-nineteen vaccine research at Mount Sinai Health System. Go to citizensofhumanity.com,

[34:24]Jean Hanff Korelitz: Chad, and check them out. Thanks for listening to this episode of Moms Don't Have Time to Read Books. Don't forget to follow me on Instagram at zibby owens and at moms don't have time to read books. Also, sign up for my newsletter at zibbyowens.com and sign up for my virtual book club and meet lots of authors on Zoom every other week. Thanks so much to Steve and Ryan at Texture Sound for the sound editing, and thank you to Morning Moon Productions for providing this fantastic intro and outro music.