Miranda Cowley Heller, THE PAPER PALACE: A Novel

[1:18]Zibby Owens: this is Libby 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, 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. Listeners, if you enjoy this podcast, I promise you will love my new audiobook for moms don't have time to a quarantine anthology. It's not about the quarantine, but a lot of the essays were written during that time about other things that moms don't have time to do or other busy people. Things like reading, eating, working out, breathing, having sex, and 60 bestselling and notable authors wrote essays. All those authors have been on this very podcast. So if you like to listen to my conversations, if you want to get to know these authors better, I read the audiobook myself. Check it out on Audible, Moms Don't Have Time A Quarantine Anthology. Again, Audible audiobook. Go listen to it. It's like sixty minutei podcasts. I hope you enjoy. Special announcement. I am teaming up with Katie Couric Media's Wake Up Call and Random House to give away 100 copies of the book Stranger Care by Sarah Santillis. I'm really excited about this. Here's a little about Sarah's book, and we collectively are giving away 100 copies. After their decision not to have a biological child, Sarah Santilles and her husband, Eric, decide to adopt via the foster care system. Despite knowing that the system's goal is the child's reunification with the birth family, Sarah opens their home to a flurry of social workers who question them, evaluate them, and ultimately prepare them to welcome a child into their lives even if it means most likely having to give the child back. Stranger care is an illuminating read and Sarah will be on this podcast soon. So if you would like to enter for a chance to win, please go to the link in the episode description from right where you clicked on it and enter your email address, first and last name. By doing so, you're agreeing to the sweepstakes official rules and agree to receive communications and special offers from Katie Couric's wake up call and moms don't have time to read books. Thank you for doing it and enter to win today. Just go back to the episode description. Thanks again. Miranda Cowley Heller is the author of The Paper Palace. Miranda has worked as senior vice president and head of drama series at HBO, developing and overseeing such shows as The Sopranos, Six Feet Under, The Wire, Deadwood, and Big Love, among others. This is her first novel. She grew up spending summers on Cape Cod and now lives in California. Welcome, Miranda. Thank you so much for coming on Moms Don't Have Time to Read Books to talk about the Paper Palace.

[4:13]Miranda Cowley Heller: Thank you for having me. My pleasure. Thrilled to be here. So yeah.

[4:18]Zibby Owens: I know I was just telling you this, but I am like completely obsessed with your book. It's the best fiction, best novel I've read in a while. It's so good. I could not put it down. I recommended it as soon as I could to like everybody I knew on Instagram and in my personal life and everywhere else. And I'm like, this is the back. This is Anyway, I'm just so excited about it and so thrilled to get to talk to you about it. I am too. And I love that and thank you. And it's, you know, I was

[4:45]Miranda Cowley Heller: just saying a second ago that, you know, you write this thing in a complete bubble, I mean, first novel. So you write in a complete bubble and then suddenly it's out there in the world. And so of course it's incredibly exciting to be, you know, that somebody likes it and loves it or whatever. First, can you start out by telling everybody what the book is about? The book is about a woman named Elle Bishop, who's 50. She has three children. She's very happily married. And at the beginning of the book, Elle wakes up to realize she's done something rather extreme the night before. She has had sex outside a dinner party with her oldest and best friend, Jonas, the man she always thought she was gonna marry. And while her husband and his wife and her mother were all inside at the dinner. And in the next twenty four hours, she's gonna have to decide between the life that she has made with her wonderful husband, Peter, or the life she always dreamed about and probably would have lived if something terrible hadn't happened in her youth. And the story takes place on Cape Cod in the backwoods near Wellfleet. And I think when most people think of The Cape, they sort of imagine almost more like Newport or the Kennedy Compound with these grassy lawns going down to sailboats and calm harbors or whatever. But the Outer Cape, I don't know if you've been there is really wild. The further out you go, the more it's sort of national seashore, it's forests that go straight to the top of cliff dunes and they don't, you can really get lost in the woods. It's that kind of a place and sandy roads and I grew up spending every summer there. And so, in any event, Elle has twenty four hours to make this incredibly impossible decision. But the story is also told in fifty years of her life in glimpses that add up to the moment that take us to the moment that's brought her to this precipice. And to understand why after whatever it is, something like forty years of friendship and never going there, why now? So, there's a sort of emotional mystery that runs through it. It's a sort of a why done it instead of a whodunit. And and I think it's really about, it's not so much about these two men. It's really about this woman and this woman's life and finding herself. Nice job.

[7:15]Zibby Owens: I hate that I put everybody on the spot, but I do think it's important for people to know, you know, what the general gist is. But there's like so much more. It's like divorce and marriage in New York City and Cape Cod and family and parents and step parents and, like, family and trauma. And there's so much. You you have, like, everything you could hit. Mother like, being a mother, dealing with your mother, like, mother in Like, there's, like, nothing you didn't hit in this book that, a woman could not relate to essentially, not just women, but you know what I mean? Yeah, I mean, I think that there's,

[7:54]Miranda Cowley Heller: you you don't write a book hopefully with a theme in mind, you know, you have an interest and then it sort of emerges. But if there is something in there, a sort of continuum, Elle comes from a family of divorce, her mother comes from a family of divorce. There's a line in the book that says, In my family, divorce is just a seven letter word that could easily be exchanged with too bad or I'm bored. And her mother, who's called Wallace, was a formidable figure. At one point, she just sort of says, divorce is good for children. But in fact, you know, there's a little bit of a Grimm's fairytale aspect to this life. And as you say, her mother is, her relationship with her mother, her mother's relationship to her mother before, Elle's relation to her daughter and to her sister, all of these things are affected in kind of a domino effect by the past generations, but also by divorce and by what happens when your family splits up, you know? And in a way, that's why I think I said it on the cake because that place is so important to me. That's where I find myself at home in my, you know, as a child of divorce. And so the place that grounds her and shapes her life is this, you know, summer place. Because it's the one constant

[9:24]Zibby Owens: know, every year for life. I feel like I have the same attachment, and I am a child of divorce, and my grandparents were divorced, and I got divorced. And now I feel really bad for whichever kids of mine end up getting divorced. You know? That said, the second husbands of all three are really awesome guys. So, you know, there's a perk. But I do feel like when things shift, you rely more on physical place so much so that, like, you know, I've been coming to the same place, you know, out here on Long Island. And, like, when, like, one store closes, it's been there forever. I'm, like, deeply wounded by it. You know? Like, how can this change? I rely on this. You know? Where's the newspaper shop? Where's the Exactly. Yeah. The Penny Candy store. Exactly. Now it's all, like, you know, decrepit and, like you know, I'm like, this is so sad. You know? But anyway, so how did you tell me about this whole thing. I know so you used to work as head of drama at HBO or something like I did for a while. Mean, that's sort of an ancient not an ancient history chapter, but that was a while ago. Tell me, like, where I only read from your bio, like, trying to figure out Right. How we got here to you writing this amazing I miss book. So take me back. When did this whole writing thing start, and how did we get here, and why this plot?

[10:35]Miranda Cowley Heller: Right. So I was always a novelist in my mind, starting at the age of whatever, seven or 10. I wrote poetry when I was, that was my path. I come from a family of writers and book editors and grew up in that soup. And, was a lot of pressure. You have to get your name in print, you have to do this, you have to do that. Coming from my grandfather mostly. And that was my major in college. That was when I came out and my first proper job after being an assistant, was the fiction books, well, the associate fiction and books editor at Cosmopolitan magazine. Then I left that job because I fell in love and moved to Italy, but there I was writing articles and travel pieces and this was what I thought was my path. And I did some ghostwriting and I was a book doctor for various New York agents. But when I tried to write something, it was just frankly bad. Mean, couldn't access. I was so in my own way. Let's put it that way. Because of the family, because of, you know, my husband's sister is a successful novelist as well. Like there's just all this stuff. And I wouldn't say I'm a perfectionist at all. I'm a very imperfectionist. However, I just was like frozen because I thought I can never write something unless it's really good. I refuse to be humiliated in public. So all that pressure finally led me to just say, just sort of put it aside, I guess, for a very long time. Who is your husband's sister, by the way? Zoe Heller, British novelist. And my cousin's father divorced from my aunt, but is Martin Amis. So there's this pressure. Got it.

[12:28]Zibby Owens: And pride. Good. Yeah.

[12:30]Miranda Cowley Heller: So, okay. So, eventually, my husband's British, we moved to I get a job in LA by some miracle working at the new drama department at HBO with absolutely no experience, but a long series of miracles basically. And I worked there for ten years. We built a drama series department. My boss, Carolyn Strauss, who's amazing. She was already running comedy that had been established and you know, all these specials and all that stuff. So this was somebody else ran miniseries, but so this was this new thing. And the first show we did was The Sopranos. So that was like, you know, and so I did that, Six Feet Under the Wire, you know, Deadwood, etcetera, etcetera, which was amazing. And it's funny because people always say, Oh, you know, did you bring your experience as a TV person to writing a book? And it's the, I would say like it was the exact opposite. I brought my experience as a literature or writing person or reading of literature person to HBO, to my job at HBO. And I think that was part of the fun was just like creating, finding voices that felt and creating sort of writers who could create big stories. Right. And then I quit after that period of time and sort of bumped around and I started this book and I started about two or three other books and then put them away. Again, I just was sort of, I couldn't find it. Very briefly, then I went back to UCLA to get a art history degree. But in any event, very briefly, this was the one thing I just couldn't accomplish. And I was gonna go to grad school and then my husband's show was gonna be set in New York. So therefore I had to say no to LA and then I applied to New York and then they changed the show back to LA. Oh gosh. Year where I was going, what am I gonna do with this one year? And one of my best friends, Libby said, we were on a hike and she just said, Well, why don't you just take this as the one year to commit to writing? If don't do it, never talk about it again. And I was like, Okay. And I pulled this project out of the drawer. At the same time, I took this class, this amazing class with this guy called Jack Grapes. He's sort of a writing teacher genius, not fiction or anything like that, but it's called method writing, sort of like method acting. And what he teaches, he undoes everything you've ever learned about anything, structure anything. And he makes you write very badly for a long time, and then apply different voices to sort of boring writing, to journaling or whatever. And so, I got pulled apart and that was great for me as a writer. Then I started writing in his class, it progresses and progresses, and I started writing a lot of poetry and I got some poetry published. That is when something about that, the poetry is what broke me open finally, to be able to write this book. So, I went back and I found it. I did a class, some novel five class at UCLA with this amazing guy, Mark Sarvis, who's a novelist. I don't know if you know his work, but he was my mentor, I would say. And I just wrote this book slowly but surely. So, there were huge gaps in time. I started it and then there were years in between. But somehow writing poetry, think, got me out of this, like, frontal lobe space, you know, and allowed me to just like and also, I just decided when I started writing it, no one will ever read this. I'm not gonna tell anybody I'm doing it. I can say anything because no one's ever going to read it. So that made me that gave me this sort of freedom of like, I'm just doing this. Today's episode is sponsored by Quince.

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[18:50]Zibby Owens: Yeah. I tried to start writing this memoir I'm working on, and I was so, like, just, like, frozen that finally in all caps, I was like, no one will see this. Like, not the real draft. Like, only for you. You know what mean?

[19:06]Miranda Cowley Heller: I mean, that's exactly what I had to do too, because I think those of us who really can get caught up in that, you know, I mean, it just took me so many years to get out of my own way. And I knew it was in there for this very strange reason, like, because of the way I always had these huge, massive dreams of where I would dream paintings and dream, you know, entire architectural cities and sort of, you know, Game of Thrones esque things and statues and art and blah. And so, I knew it was in there. I just couldn't get to it somehow. And in my mind, I always had this vision of like, that my brain my head was divided by this like plate, you know, and I had to like somehow scale it and like, leap over to the back and finally manage to and like, go down and, you know, get that writing stuff back, you know, that I knew was there. Oh my gosh. So what when you were thinking about this project,

[20:05]Zibby Owens: which part of the plot did you know all along or maybe none of it? None. None.

[20:12]Miranda Cowley Heller: All I knew was that I was, you know, that I wanted to write. I mean, I knew none. Wrote, as they say, I wrote the whole thing into the dark. I didn't know anything that was going to happen from one day to the next. That's what poetry taught me by the way, to love the blank page. Whenever I have now a task for writing, it's the blank. I'll go away from the book. If you know, when my editor said, well, I want more of this. I have to open a blank page and not know what it's gonna say. That's it. I have to take it completely away. And I do think that sort of you find lyricism in some strange way. And I know a lot of people, I used to be terrified of the blank page. And now it's like my most comforting thing, you know. Wow.

[20:55]Zibby Owens: And so all of it just unfolded as you went?

[20:58]Miranda Cowley Heller: Because it Yeah. Then you did you have to mean, you must've had then gone back because it, you know, there's all this. Yeah. I mean, I went back, but I knew what it was about. Okay. So, right? I mean, in my mind, what interests me? So when I was very young and naive, but maybe not, I became mildly obsessed with this John Lennon quote, Life is what happens when you're making other plans. Think it was, and I cut it out and I put it on the wall of my bed, it in my tape it like you do with those in my journals. And there was just this one point in my life when I went back and looked at all these journals and I realized like as an adult, I was still doing the exact same thing. I was like living this life in my head that I was imagining, but kind of ignoring my entire life that I was living or just sort of letting it all pass by. And so I was very interested in like creating a character, a structure around a character that mirrored that and sort of investigated that where, you know, so the fifty years is the life, you know, represents in that sense, the life that Elle has actually led. And then the twenty four hours is the chance to live the life that's been in her head, the fantasy that she's held. And so that was all I knew, just those two pieces to create, to show a life in twenty four hours and a life in fifty years. It's not flashbacks. They're not flashbacks. It's two separate stories of the same woman. And they meet time wise just before sort of at the precipice, the night before she does the thing she does. Let's put that way, you know? And so you understand, I hope, you learn who she is and why she's here. And then also, you know, I'm also very interested you know, it's sort of an obvious word, but choices, right? How the smallest thing, you know, can it completely derail you or make your life and it's just the tiny randomness of that, the choices that we inherit as well, from our parents or grandparents, love lives, how their love lives, up shaping who we are too. And so with Elle, I just love the idea of a character, a woman who has to make a choice between one incredible love and another equally incredible love. Both men are amazing. There's no way to choose, but what do you do if you have to make a choice? Your life depends on it, but there's no good answer you can find. So she's sort of on this emotional tight rope between two skyscrapers that say she's gonna fall if she doesn't go one way or the other, but how do you make that choice? So it just raised questions and I think that's more how I followed the story, if that makes sense. It raised the question for me of, can you actually live a life filled with regrets? Who do I wanna be true to in the end? This is a woman in her fifties. So, she's at a very different stage of life. I thought that was also interesting. Don't think there are a lot of novels where there's a sort of sexy woman in her fifties.

[24:21]Zibby Owens: Seriously. Sexy woman is like, I mean, she's like so getting busy with all I mean, she's like, it's amazing. The scene with the tent in the sand, I was like, oh, like, that was that was like I mean, there was Put me down. Heavy stuff going on. And by the way, not just with her, but even, like like, I was really struck by how great a need for, like, sex, honestly, the women, all the women in the book really have and explain and enjoy it. Right? I mean, there's nothing shameful in this book. This is like, you know, I think about and I'm forgetting their Dixon. Dixon and his girlfriend just sort of, like, parading around naked around them and, like, you know, the mother Right. Grandmother, like, begging her husband for sex and, like, always going on around them. Like, in, you know, obviously, in in all different shapes and forms, some healthy, some blatantly horrific. But like at the core, I feel like is this like embracing of women's sexuality forever. And it's pretty awesome.

[25:26]Miranda Cowley Heller: Yeah. I mean, and I think these are powerhouses of women. Even the women who are weak or who do terrible things are really strong women. Women who have all gone through some sort of trauma, which I think, you know, almost everybody unfortunately goes through some form of trauma in their life. And they've sort of had to put away childish things as it were, you know, and in the case of Wallace, what her mother did. Well, I mean, even going back to, the grandmother, Nanette, she was this wealthy woman whose family lost everything in the crash. Suddenly she's sort of their currency, they want to sort of sell her. And at the same time, she's completely beholden to the man, which in that way, the husband, because she can't survive on her own. And that's a whole generation of the past that sort of weirdly reminded me of Jane Austen novels, which I love. You know, that thing of the women who can't, it's hard for us to imagine entirely that, but it's a truth. And what I wanted was then to see, if the net net hadn't been that person and Wallace hadn't had the life she had, would she have been a different person and would Elle have, you know, gone to her mother more with her, you know, would they have been closer? All of these, what I wanted was, I think to see how you can survive flaws and you can be still be strong and you can make mistakes. And I didn't wanna judge anybody. I just wanted to, yeah, to make them, the women real. That's it, you know? Wow.

[27:04]Zibby Owens: Well, I mean, there were so many different people who like came and went in the book, and everybody who sort of entered stage left was like, you know, you could see them, you could smell and feel and, like, all those things they tell you to do to, like, create a scene and, like, get people in the like, you did all those things. You know what mean? Like, every like, it all made it just even and I noticed, like, you didn't even say that much sometimes. Like, even where you ended your chapters and where you stopped describing things. You know, I've heard somebody on the podcast was talking about, like, like, don't underestimate the reader. Like, the reader can figure it out. Like, you don't need to give four extra sentences when they walk out of the room. You don't have to then see them close the door. You get it. Or you know what I mean? And I feel like you are like Yeah. That's that's exactly what you're doing, like, so often. It's just a line or two, but it conjures up entire experiences.

[27:55]Miranda Cowley Heller: Well, I think, I mean, there's, you know, in life, interests me are sort of the silences in between. The unsaid is just as resonant, right, as said. And and I think also my father, you know, when I was very small, you know, I brought him my first essay or whatever about the osprey or something, you know, and I was so excited. I was at Nightingale at the time, I think. And anyway, I was probably 10 and my parents were already divorced. And he read the first paragraph or whatever of this thing and he went He starts literally scratching stuff out. And he goes, You just need to know that the way to write, it's always the shortest distance between two points, Miranda. So of course, I'm traumatized, but ultimately, best lesson ever. You know what I mean? Wow. I think that that's And it's the same thing with sort of high low of, you know, sort of bumping up, you know, something funny with something horrible or, you know, that like a dirty sock can have as much meaning in a weird way as, you know, a wedding. It depends what it represents to the character. It's not, you know, everybody's triggered by different things and,

[29:15]Zibby Owens: you know, writers I just love a lot of the writers who leave those spaces for us. Amazing. Okay. Well, I know we're, like, almost out of time, and I can talk to you forever. I feel like I have a thousand other questions because I feel like these characters are actually real. And I already started, like I was like, oh, the character in in my book I'm reading blah blah blah blah blah. I'm like, oh my gosh. These are not real people. Like, you have to stop. Like, you can't share anecdotes. Anyway, okay. Is this gonna be a movie? Has it already been optioned? A. B, what advice would you have for aspiring authors, although you've given a lot already? And then what are you gonna do next? Those are my questions.

[29:48]Miranda Cowley Heller: Well, it was bought by HBO actually as as a miniseries. Although just in my own defense, there was an option for it. It wasn't a gimme. And I'm writing I just turned in a new draft of the pilot, you know, executive producer write it with my partner Lynette Howell Taylor, hopefully, if, you know, they like it. And so that's what I'm working but that's so that's A and C. That's what I'm doing right now, but I'm very anxious then to get back to writing another novel. That's where my heart is, but at the same time, dialogue is so much fun and so much fun to write. I guess in terms of writers writers who are having difficulty or aspiring or starting, don't do what I did for one. I would say what I learned is that there's no such thing as a real writer. In my mind, I get thinking like so and so is a real writer. No, I'm not a real writer. So, you know, because I don't know what I'm gonna write tomorrow. I haven't made an outline. I haven't, you know, I've never studied form or structure, you know, I was like, and it doesn't matter, you know, whether you have your ass in chair or whether you go from like 6AM to twelve every day or what you can, I mean, I wrote this when I had time sort of, you know, between doing or, and then suddenly it was something? And so then it's, you know, gathers momentum. But, you know, the other tiny piece of advice or huge is that a friend of mine who's a novelist said when I was going, Oh God, it's so awful. It's taken so many years. And she said, When I was writing my first book, you know, everybody kept saying, Oh yeah, your novel, you know, I had that feeling too, Oh yeah, you're writing a novel, people do it, is it gonna be finished? And she said the pressure was on her so much because she'd taken so long and she wanted to prove something that when she went and got her first copy of the book basically, whatever, she realized it was completely not cooked. And she said to me, do not rush because guess what? No one is waiting for this. Nobody cares, just make it yours. And so I think that's really important too. There are no rules, I mean, you can, like I write in an ill doctoral quote, I'm sure you know, but what does he say? He says writing for him was like driving in the fog at night, you can only see as far as your headlights can show, but you still can make the entire journey. And that's how I made the journey. And somebody else might have a completely other way, you know, just get out of your way and get out of your head, you know.

[32:34]Zibby Owens: I should just post that somewhere. That applies to everything. I mean, I'm writing.

[32:40]Miranda Cowley Heller: And PS, if I could do it, I know I shouldn't eat that brownie. Exactly. And then I Oh, yeah. Now

[32:49]Zibby Owens: you can come up, mom's don't have time to lose weight. We can start talking about that.

[32:55]Miranda Cowley Heller: Moms don't have time to, you know, exactly.

[32:58]Zibby Owens: Moms don't have time to write papers for their kids. Why are you asking me to do this again? I know. I just relearned all of American history this year. Was like, thank you very much. Thank you. Thank you. Oh my god. Awesome. Well, Miranda, thank you. I'm so excited about your book. I'm so excited to see, like, what happens with it as it's launched into the world. I can't wait for other people to read it and just, like, get as excited as I did. Anyway, just really awesome. So congratulations.

[33:22]Miranda Cowley Heller: Well, thank you so much. It actually does mean the world. It really does. Fingers crossed. I mean, it comes out on Tuesday. So here on Thursday in England.

[33:33]Zibby Owens: You know, so Hold on, hold on. Buckle your seatbelt. And

[33:38]Miranda Cowley Heller: cross all your fingers. All right. Thank you so much. It's really, really nice to meet you. You too. All right.

[33:46]Zibby Owens: Bye bye. Thanks for listening to this episode of Moms Don't Have Time to Read Books. Don't forget to follow me on Instagram Zibby Owens and momsdonthavetimetoreadbooks. 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.