Carolyn Ferrell, DEAR MISS METROPOLITAN: A Novel
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[0:51]My name is Richie Jackson, and I'm thrilled to have contributed to Moms Don't Have Time to Have Kids.
[0:58]My essay is called Peloton and On and On.
[1:02]And what I really don't have time for is losing weight.
[1:06]Carolyn Farrell is the author of Dear Miss Metropolitan.
[1:09]She's the author of the short story collection, Don't Erase Me, as well,
[1:13]which was awarded the Art Side-A-Bilem Award of the Los Angeles Times Book Prize,
[1:18]the John C. Zacharys Award given by plowshares and the Quality Paperback Book Prize for First Fiction.
[1:25]She's also received grants from the Fulbright Association, German Academic Exchange,
[1:30]DAAD, City University of New York Magnet Program, and National Endowment for the Arts.
[1:35]Farrell's stories have been anthologized in Best American Short Stories and the Best American Short Stories of the Century among other places.
[1:42]She teaches writing at Sarah Lawrence College and lives in New York with her husband and children.
[1:47]Welcome, Carolyn.
[1:48]Thank you so much for coming on Moms Don't Have Time to Read Books to discuss Dear Miss Metropolitan.
[1:53]Thank you very much for having me.
[1:55]My pleasure.
[1:56]Would you mind please telling listeners what your book is about?
[2:00]Well, in a nutshell, I would say my book is the plot is based on three girls who are kidnapped, held hostage,
[2:10]and eventually make their way to freedom.
[2:13]That's the basic plot, but the book is spread out.
[2:16]It's got tentacles everywhere.
[2:18]And it's also about how not only how they deal with this tragedy, but how their community deals with the tragedy.
[2:26]They're various communities.
[2:27]So that I was looking at their own experience, but also the larger experience of the people around them.
[2:34]I thought I was really interesting, by the way, that you started with an intern at a magazine nerd,
[2:38]an intern at the local paper writing the story of what happened because you said, just like you said,
[2:43]like the larger community can't believe that this happened in their backyard and that nobody knew.
[2:49]And what does happen to a community when something so traumatic happens right right there?
[2:54]Right.
[2:55]Well, you know, it's interesting.
[2:56]I think that sadly we're seeing it played out right now with the Gabby Petito case that, you know,
[3:03]all over the country communities are awakened and are, you know, protesting and thinking about how, you know,
[3:11]women's lives, what their worth is, but I would say the other thing that's come out of the Gabby Petito case is that now more people are thinking about brown and black girls who disappear and do not get the national attention, you know.
[3:26]So while it's a tragedy all around, I mean, it's quite horrible what happens and what's probably the outcome of that case.
[3:34]This was an opportunity to kind of look at all of the neglected Native American women who have been disappearing women in Mexico, you know, and just, you know, in our own backyard we're brown and black women who just disappear and upon who no media attention is shown.
[3:52]It's so true.
[3:53]And it's so interesting the way you call the, you call the woman the mother and then how you explain the backstory because I feel like it's so easy to make judgments about why somebody turns out the way they do.
[4:07]And to assume the worst at first, but you have this nice passage.
[4:11]You said, can I just read this one paragraph?
[4:13]You said, you said, to soothe my brother, I started to tell the story about why the mother really acted the way she did.
[4:19]Oh, I hate the story, but said, once upon a time the mother was delivered into the world on wings.
[4:24]She had an okay father.
[4:25]She had, however, a mother who was no more than a fuzzy Polaroid.
[4:28]The world wasn't paying attention, but it doled out these two parents.
[4:32]Well, time went on.
[4:33]I'm going to be different than these two, the mother told herself.
[4:36]And then she turned around again and here was the world once more, giving her two funny looking kids.
[4:41]Come on, world, what games are you playing with me?
[4:44]And then it says you talks about the mother and how I wish it could be another ending, but then it wouldn't be us, but observed.
[4:53]I'm sorry, tell me about that and adding that layer of sort of context.
[4:58]Yeah, I, I felt that it was really important to add context to all of the characters, not just the three girls who are abducted, but everyone in their orbit, you know, even the most minor character I tried to do a little bit of context.
[5:12]And, you know, of course, one of the most difficult people to do that for was boss man, the man who kidnaps and rapes and tortures them.
[5:21]You know, how do you make someone who is completely unsympathetic into a character that people will want to read, will want to invest themselves in and the answer for me was to not make him completely unsympathetic.
[5:35]In other words, to give him dimension, you know, we don't like him.
[5:39]We, you know, he's a loser in every way, but he had this history and perhaps that can explain why he is the way he is.
[5:47]So that was really important to me to give everybody so that it wasn't, I don't know, it's boring if you have characters that are all bad or all good, you know, you have to give them dimensions and texture.
[5:57]Most people are not all good or all bad in reality.
[6:01]We all have everybody has a backstory and their parents have a backstory and, you know, inherited trauma is such a big topic these days and some of this stuff is just seeps in and colors everything you do going forward.
[6:14]Yeah, right. Right. Yeah. Yeah. No, that, to look at trauma, I was also very interested in that to kind of look at the lineage of trauma and how it's passed on and how each generation does something different.
[6:30]And, you know, earn and go any when they are rescued, they don't have any children, but of course there's a child who's born in captivity, Katanya and she is veering down a very different path than her mother and her grandmother.
[6:46]So I just really wanted to capture as best as I could, the different aspects of their experiences and it may not be as easy as saying, well, this is why she turned out this way, but it just gives the reader a picture.
[6:58]And the reader can come to her own conclusions.
[7:02]So what made you write this story? Like, where did this idea come from for you?
[7:06]Well, I had been thinking about writing fairy tales and I, in fact, the original title of the book was the last life of three bears because I was really interested in revising updating fairy tales and I thought about the first fairy tale I that was on my mind was Goldilocks.
[7:26]And I was thinking about, you know, a girl gets lost in the woods and she comes upon this house and I was looking at Goldilocks as both kind of a lack of a better word of colonizer.
[7:38]She just goes in and makes herself, but also someone for whom the consequences were quite surprising and she can even be victimized.
[7:46]So I was thinking about that and then all of these things were happening in the news, you know, the aerial Castro story happens and the story that took place in Vienna where the father locked his daughter in, you know, for 27 years in the basement.
[7:59]And there were just a lot of things happening in the news and it seemed to me that the story of girls held captive was just going on and on and it was, you know, unfortunately now it's sort of like school shootings.
[8:12]When someone says, oh, did you hear about the school, which one, you know, it just happened so frequently now and we just in some ways become desensitized and I really wanted to
[8:23]When I was thinking about these cases, I really wanted to plug the characters that I created because I did not want to write a true crime story that people, for example, in the aerial Castro case, they're still alive and I did not, you know, wasn't my place to tell their story.
[8:39]But I was just when that when that story hit the news, I asked the same question that everyone did how could people not know how could they not know, you know, and
[8:51]I thought about what are the repercussions, you know, for for the society around them, you know, it's not like people just think, oh, okay, they're, they're going to be okay, they'll get some therapy and they'll be okay that, you know, or this idea that they'll get closure.
[9:07]That's, you know, what is closure, what's closure, you know, closure goes on for the rest of your life.
[9:12]I was thinking about those news stories, but there was something else that was on my mind. I mean, there were actually a lot of things that there are a lot of sources of kind of grim, grim inspiration for this book.
[9:23]But I'm not normally a viewer of true crime, but I happen to watch a true crime show one day.
[9:31]And it was about this black woman who's a sex worker who'd been kidnapped by a white man and probably in Ohio, I think it was.
[9:40]And she was telling her story, you know, she obviously had been rescued because she was telling it in retrospect.
[9:47]But there was something about her story that just struck me. She had been imprisoned by this man. She managed along with some other sex workers. They were chained up in the basement.
[9:56]She managed to convince her captor that she was in love with him.
[10:00]And he took her out of the chains and brought her upstairs, and she was fooling him, you know,
[10:06]to try to make it get away.
[10:07]And she asked him one day if he would take her to a gas station so she could just tell
[10:12]her parents, you know, I think her family, I can't remember what was her parents, that
[10:16]she was safe.
[10:18]And he said, okay, you know, we believe that she loved her.
[10:21]So they went to a gas station.
[10:23]She went to, this was in the day of the days of payphones as she went to a payphone, and
[10:28]there happened to be two cops there.
[10:30]And she went up to them and said, I have been kidnapped, I need to be saved.
[10:35]And they were just laughing.
[10:36]They looked at her and saw a strong out prostitute.
[10:39]And they didn't take her seriously, and she had to bake her like 10 minutes.
[10:43]I have been kidnapped, and they were laughing at her.
[10:47]So eventually, I think they followed her, you know, they said, okay, okay, do you want
[10:51]to humor her?
[10:52]They followed her to the house.
[10:53]They discover all of these women chained up.
[10:55]The man is arrested.
[10:56]In fact, one of the women in the basement had actually died.
[11:00]So that also just stung me.
[11:04]And what was interesting was that the very end of the show, you know, was a really difficult
[11:09]story you could tell for this woman to tell and for us to hear.
[11:13]It was so much to process.
[11:15]But in the end, they kind of tack on this happy ending.
[11:18]So, you know, they wrote in text on the screen.
[11:21]She got married.
[11:22]She's happily married and living.
[11:24]And I just thought, again, it's this idea of, okay, let's not even deal with the complexities
[11:30]of, you know, what it's saying about race and gender or sexuality, what we're talking
[11:35]to you to think about that.
[11:36]We're just going to give it a happy ending and be on our way.
[11:40]And that really inspired me to take on the other side of these three girls.
[11:45]Wow.
[11:46]So how do you like do research into this and write about it without feel, I mean, this
[11:53]is dark stuff.
[11:55]This is upsetting and, I mean, even like references to what happens with even something
[12:00]is benign as a paper clip.
[12:02]I mean, the view of the world becomes so, so dark, it really, how did you like preserve
[12:08]your mental health while writing this book?
[12:11]It was really hard to say it was really, or maybe I should say, did you, did you preserve
[12:16]your mental health?
[12:17]I don't know if I preserve my mental health.
[12:20]I will say that I did relatively little research, in fact, I did almost no research.
[12:27]I, for me, the research that was important was just figuring out how to inhabit these
[12:32]characters, you know, that it wasn't just for me writing them, it was really seeing the
[12:37]world through their eyes.
[12:39]And it was, it was hard and there were times that were really hard and for me, the most
[12:45]difficult character to do that or was just any, because she has this, you know, whatever
[12:50]Stockholm syndrome or, you know, she identifies with her captor and she wants to have a
[12:55]future with him and she, you know, they're going to have a baby together and she's so,
[12:59]you know, she's really looking forward to it and everyone around her knows that that's
[13:04]not going to happen and that that shouldn't happen.
[13:07]But her denial was, I would say for me, fictionally it was such a, I love the challenge
[13:14]of doing it, of writing a character who really could not see what the reader wanted her
[13:20]to see and had built this fantasy, but it was really tough writing it also because of the
[13:26]abuse she endures and her, you know, unwillingness to kind of connect with reality.
[13:32]So that was really hard to write.
[13:35]I would say with the other characters and also with Decenia, one thing that saved me from
[13:40]completely losing myself in the grimness was humor, you know, and one of my colleagues
[13:47]with my novel and he said, I can't believe how many times you mentioned Judge June, you
[13:53]know, for me humor is so important to preserve their humanity.
[13:58]It's just really, it's a really important tool, you know, everything can't be serious
[14:03]all the time, even though it is a serious and tragic situation, they have to have some coping
[14:08]mechanisms and for me, it was really humor, it was kind of building this world that they
[14:14]actually cherished, you know, and also building a friendship.
[14:18]That was also a really big part of it for me.
[14:20]So it wasn't, you know, that much about doing research and I'm often asked, you know,
[14:27]did you do a lot of crime research?
[14:28]I didn't do any.
[14:29]I just imagined what it would be like when you have to really build a new world where
[14:35]your food is not actually food, where you're chained up, where you have to, you know,
[14:40]we're always talking about world building, but in, you know, relation to the science fiction
[14:44]or fantasy, but what about people who have to do it all the time?
[14:48]And that actually includes all of us, we're always, we're all world building, right?
[14:53]But they're a pretty extreme case.
[14:55]Wow.
[14:56]Well, it's definitely, I mean, you did obviously a very successful job and it's emotional.
[15:01]I mean, you know, you feel it when reading it that emotion and, you know, it's, that's
[15:07]the kind of really good fiction, right?
[15:09]When you are inside the characters, interior lives and you feel, even when it's really
[15:13]horrifying stuff.
[15:14]So how did you end up becoming a writer?
[15:18]Well, the original myth behind this is that when I was, and it's actually not a myth,
[15:23]it actually happened when I was six and my sister was five.
[15:26]We had a big argument, who was going to be the artist in the family?
[15:30]Of course, you know, I wanted to draw horses and she wanted to draw them and we both
[15:34]could not deal it.
[15:35]And so we argued and argued and my mom came up to both of us and said, okay, stop.
[15:40]Marlene, my sister, you're going to be the artist and Carolyn's going to be the writer.
[15:44]And that really set the past and my student artist and I'm a writer.
[15:48]And my mom gave me a notebook and I wrote a collection of poems immediately and I mean, I've
[15:53]always wanted to learn how to draw, but writing is my, as my lot in life.
[15:59]And I always wanted to do it in school, but the public school I went to had no, you know,
[16:05]there was no creative writing.
[16:06]I had to wait, unfortunately, to like, got to college.
[16:09]And then I had just amazing writing teachers and I, you know, I never looked back.
[16:15]Wow.
[16:16]How is the process, what was the process like in terms of timing and like actually sitting
[16:21]down like, where did you write this bag?
[16:23]Well, I need to be in your anthology because, you know, where do mothers get time to write?
[16:30]And it's interesting there was a review of my book in the times in which Dwight Garner
[16:34]talked about the 25 years that had passed between my first and second books.
[16:40]And you know, he described it as a time of silence.
[16:42]And when I look back on it, it's like I, it's a time of kids.
[16:46]I had two kids and noise and birthday parties and, you know, trying to get little bits
[16:53]of time to write here and there.
[16:55]And when they were very young, I had a short story collection that came out, actually,
[17:00]I was pregnant with my son when it came out.
[17:03]And when they were very young, I writing was just almost impossible.
[17:08]So I actually have been publishing in these 25 years, but short stories.
[17:12]That's what I really turned to short stories.
[17:14]And I wrote a few essays, but short stories have always been my thing.
[17:19]I can't believe I actually wrote a novel.
[17:22]I have been, you know, I admire Alice Monroe, Grace Paley, people who just were like,
[17:28]I'm writing short stories and that's it.
[17:30]And then suddenly this weird novel comes out of me, which I really see as a collection
[17:35]of short stories in some way.
[17:37]You know, everybody has a, it's so fragmented, you know, and it's fragmented for a reason.
[17:43]You know, not just my love of stories, but I really wanted the fragmentation of the girls
[17:49]were experiencing that their lives were, you know, upside down that everything had been
[17:53]fragmented.
[17:54]I wanted to kind of use that as a narrative strategy for the book that, you know, just
[17:59]kind of break things apart in this way to mirror what they're experiencing not to completely
[18:04]confuse the readers, but just to kind of get a sense of, you know, how they're experiencing
[18:08]the world.
[18:09]So, yeah.
[18:10]What was it like to sell the book?
[18:12]What was that publishing journey like?
[18:14]That was, I've had, I've sold two books and each one was a Cinderella story.
[18:19]So my Cinderella story with this book was right before the pandemic.
[18:24]My last outing, before we knew that we would be locked up, I was invited to give a reading
[18:29]in Harlem in this restaurant in the basement of a restaurant.
[18:34]And it was like Sunday night.
[18:35]I didn't invite anyone I just thought, you know, who's going to want to come out of this
[18:39]school night, you know?
[18:40]What is the hour long to the morning?
[18:41]So my husband came with me.
[18:43]I gave, I was reading with actually a former student, former MFA student at Sara Lawrence.
[18:49]And so the person who came before me was reading poetry and playing the didgeridoo.
[18:54]So it was one of those kinds of, no, and I was like, okay, this is kind of funky.
[18:59]So I read my stuff and in the audience was an old friend of mine.
[19:05]We used to be in a book group together and she had been an editor years and years ago.
[19:11]And then changed, took a different career path, led the publishing program at City College
[19:16]and did a lot of other things that also had two kids.
[19:20]So she was in the audience because she happened to live around the corner from this venue.
[19:24]And she knows that I am a story writer and she said, well, you have a collection of short
[19:28]stories.
[19:29]I'm going to begin work at Holt.
[19:30]I've taken a job as editor at large.
[19:34]And I said, well, I'm almost finished with my story collection, but I do happen to have
[19:37]this novel.
[19:38]And I had just gotten an agent a couple of months before and I showed her that went through
[19:45]the proper channels.
[19:46]My agent sent her the book and I mean really in a matter of like two weeks, I had a contract.
[19:51]And it was really wonderful because Rita, my editor, she wasn't even working for Holt yet.
[19:57]And this was her first acquisition for the company.
[20:00]And it just, you know, then we were suddenly locked down,
[20:03]and my task was to revise, you know, to make edits.
[20:07]And, you know, I went through, I guess,
[20:09]what everybody goes through, okay,
[20:11]there are a few things I have to change.
[20:13]And months later, a lot of things that I, you know,
[20:16]had to tighten up and with a book like this,
[20:19]getting the dates right and making sure that the hard
[20:23]didn't overwhelm the reader.
[20:24]And so that was my pandemic project, you know,
[20:27]I worked on it through the pandemic.
[20:29]Wow, that is impressive.
[20:32]I mean, that was a dark time.
[20:33]So there you go.
[20:34]This A, it was really this silver lining,
[20:38]this, you know, really like Cinderella story,
[20:40]because I didn't think, you know,
[20:42]I was like, this is a really weird book.
[20:44]Who would be interested in reading this?
[20:46]Totally chopped up book, you know,
[20:49]I think that, and this is based on just what I read,
[20:52]I think that women ask that question,
[20:55]they don't really ask it, you know,
[20:56]because they'll write something weird
[20:58]and it'll be published and people will, you know,
[21:00]praise it.
[21:00]But I think it's for women sometimes, it's hard, you know,
[21:03]to write something that's so out of the box
[21:05]and just, you know, will people be interested in reading it,
[21:08]you know, it was meant to be, right?
[21:10]That's like a meant to be story.
[21:11]This book was coming out and it just had to find its way.
[21:14]Oh, right.
[21:15]I feel about my daughter half the time.
[21:16]Yes.
[21:17]She was gonna get out into the world one way or another.
[21:21]Right.
[21:21]Out on me.
[21:22]So it's like the same thing.
[21:24]Yes, exactly.
[21:26]So are you working on anything else now,
[21:28]as if this isn't enough to, you know?
[21:30]I am trying to finish the story collection
[21:34]and I am, believe it or not,
[21:36]I'm working on another novel and I sat down
[21:38]and I said, okay, this book is not going to be
[21:41]as fragmented and all over the place.
[21:44]And so far, I've about 100 pages in
[21:47]and it's just as fragmented in my face,
[21:50]but I'm kind of looking at slavery and the Holocaust
[21:54]and trying, you know, and kind of making connections there.
[21:57]So, so another light read.
[22:02]Yes, exactly.
[22:03]I'm just gonna have a therapist show up at your doorstep.
[22:06]You're gonna be like, who's this?
[22:07]And you're like, oh, right.
[22:08]That talk was gonna be a while ago.
[22:13]No, kidding aside, is there something that appeals
[22:16]to you about writing through like the worst case scenario
[22:19]of stuff?
[22:20]Like do you know where that comes from in yourself?
[22:23]Oh, that's a really good question.
[22:24]I guess where it comes from the sort of thread
[22:28]that I think has been through all of my work is
[22:31]I don't like when people are not heard or seen
[22:34]and that's like a thing with me, you know?
[22:37]Even though I'm very introverted,
[22:39]I'm not extroverted by any means,
[22:41]but I'm really talking about people who are silenced
[22:45]and you know, there can be silence
[22:47]and of course, as you know, many ways,
[22:49]not just through overt violence,
[22:51]but I've just, even as a child,
[22:54]I've always thought about stories
[22:56]that we don't hear about, you know?
[22:58]I thought about in fairy tales, you know?
[23:00]What about, you know, what actually happened with that princess?
[23:03]You know, I'll give you a good example.
[23:05]When I was, I think I was five years old,
[23:08]I was watching, no, I was about six or seven.
[23:11]I was watching West Side Story, it was on TV.
[23:13]And one of my sisters friends who was a year younger,
[23:17]who were watching it, and she said at the end,
[23:20]you know, we were all crying at the end
[23:22]and she said, oh, well, you know,
[23:24]nobody dies actually.
[23:25]Tony didn't die, Maria doesn't die.
[23:28]You know, they, in the other, she said in the other end,
[23:31]they all actually just lived happily ever after.
[23:33]And I thought, well, the whole point,
[23:37]there's a murder, you know?
[23:39]I didn't know it was around me on Juliet,
[23:40]but that was, you know, it was about how fighting was bad,
[23:45]but that this friend just made up this whole other story
[23:48]about Tony, and then even thought about dragging Maria
[23:52]into it, that just intrigued me.
[23:54]I never stopped thinking about that.
[23:55]How could she say, well, nothing actually happened to them?
[23:58]You know, she probably couldn't deal with that.
[24:01]But I was just so intrigued.
[24:04]So I, you know, I'm always interested in that other side
[24:07]of the story, but particularly with people
[24:09]who are just not heard or taken seriously
[24:12]or seen or who are invisible, you know.
[24:15]Wow, well, good for you for sort of excavating.
[24:18]So that's awesome.
[24:19]Thank you.
[24:20]You're welcome.
[24:21]Last question, any advice for aspiring authors?
[24:24]Oh, my gosh.
[24:25]I just came out of my graduate class,
[24:26]and I had a long lecture, and so I can just,
[24:30]okay, just to watch as one thing.
[24:32]I don't know, it will be a long lecture.
[24:34]One thing that I would advise people to do
[24:37]is when they're writing something,
[24:39]to try to write it to its end,
[24:41]as opposed to writing a little bit,
[24:42]and then going back and revising,
[24:44]and writing a little bit on go back and revising,
[24:46]but to write something to its end,
[24:48]of course that's difficult with novels.
[24:50]But I think there is something about getting a finished draft
[24:53]down and then, you know, using the powers of revision
[24:57]to really figure out what you want to do
[24:59]as opposed to constantly editing yourself,
[25:02]that sort of leads to a kind of perfectionism
[25:05]that stymies everybody, myself included.
[25:08]So I mean, I always practice what I preach,
[25:10]but I think that that's the best advice I could give us
[25:13]to try to write a full draft before revising it.
[25:18]Okay, well, we won't hold you to it yourself,
[25:20]but thank you for the advice.
[25:21]Well, Carolyn, thank you so much.
[25:24]Thank you for your time and this beautiful bug
[25:26]dear Miss Metropolitan, and you know what?
[25:28]If choppy is your thing, just own it.
[25:31]That's to your style, it's amazing.
[25:33]Why not?
[25:33]You have to do something different, right?
[25:35]Everybody has their thing, so.
[25:36]Great, right.
[25:37]Thank you so much, Sivi.
[25:39]All right, let's take care.
[25:40]It's been a little bit.
[25:42]Okay, bye bye.
[25:43]Bye bye.
[25:45]Thanks for listening to this episode
[25:46]of Moms Don't Have Time to Read Books.
[25:48]Don't forget to follow me on Instagram,
[25:51]at Zibi Owens, and at Moms Don't Have Time to Read Books.
[25:54]Also sign up for my newsletter at Zibi Owens.com
[25:56]and sign up for my virtual book club
[25:58]and meet lots of authors on Zoom every other week.
[26:00]Thanks so much to Steve and Ryan,
[26:02]in fact, Texture Sound for the Sound Editing.
[26:04]And thank you to Morning Moon Productions
[26:06]for providing this fantastic intro and out trim music.