Lee Kravetz, THE LAST CONFESSIONS OF SYLVIA P.: A Novel
[0:01]Hi, this is Vivi Owens, and you're listening to the award-winning podcast,
[0:05]Momstone Have Time to Read Books.
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[0:38]Enjoy the show!
[0:41]Lee Kravitz is the author of The Last Confessions of Sylvia P.
[0:45]Lee teaches fiction and nonfiction at the San Francisco Writers' Grotto,
[0:49]has lectured at Stanford University's Wallace Stinger Fellowship Program,
[0:53]and Eusti Berkeley's Creative Writing Program, and is co-founder of the Litt Camp Writers'
[0:57]Conference, with collaborators Jonathan Latham, Adam Johnson, Andrew Sean Greer,
[1:03]Paul Harding, and Janice Keknaman, the author of two nonfiction books,
[1:07]Strange Contagion, and Supervisors with David B. Feldman.
[1:11]Lee has also written for print and TV outlets, including The New York Times,
[1:15]New York Magazine, The Atlantic, and Sesame Street.
[1:18]Lee has a master's degree in counseling psychology,
[1:21]has held positions at the VA Palo Alto Healthcare System,
[1:24]the National Center for PTSD, and Stanford University Hospital.
[1:28]He lives in the San Francisco Bay area with his wife and children.
[1:32]Welcome, Lee. Thanks so much for coming on mom's don't have time to read books.
[1:35]We're going to discuss The Last Confessions of Sylvia P., your latest novel.
[1:39]Yeah, thank you. I'm so excited to be here.
[1:41]Uh, we were just chatting before we started filming about my color-coded bookcases,
[1:47]but I wanted to hear more about your experience working at Penguin and what that was
[1:50]like going in the bookroom. That is so...
[1:52]Oh, the mystical, magical bookroom.
[1:55]Yeah. I'm probably talking at a school here, but one of the best parts about me,
[1:58]there's a lot of great things about working and publishing.
[2:01]This is before I got into the writing side I was working on behind the scenes side.
[2:06]And so, you know, you get to work with amazing authors,
[2:09]you get to work with amazing people putting books together.
[2:12]And but it's probably not, I mean, it's probably very well known that you don't get paid a heck
[2:16]of a lot of money when you're in book publishing and certainly not at the beginning.
[2:19]But the best part about it is you would go into the bookroom.
[2:23]And the bookroom had shelves and shelves of books that were about to come out or books that
[2:28]were had just come out. And one of the benefits was you could go through and you could pick
[2:33]out all the books that you wanted. And it was sort of like a kid in the candy store.
[2:37]It was incredible. But every time I move now and it's just been, gosh, 15 years,
[2:42]there's thousands of dollars worth of in book weight. You know, they got to move from
[2:47]from place to place. But it's wonderful. I love those times.
[2:51]So you've actually paid for the books like a hundred times over.
[2:54]Oh, that's exactly right. The joke was on me.
[2:58]Right. It's a collaboration between the moving industry and the publishers.
[3:03]Oh, I think it's a great, I mean, you sell books as much in any way that you can.
[3:08]Exactly. If that's what it takes, that's what it takes.
[3:11]But yeah, it's just common because your your shelves behind you are like the stuff of,
[3:15]I mean, like just fiction. I don't know anybody who has shelves like that real life. They're
[3:19]beautiful. Thank you. Well, I'll have to say, they used to be very disorganized. And by the way,
[3:24]since I started this podcast four years ago, now I have like eight zillion books that I didn't
[3:27]use to have. I used to have a lot of books, but not like this. And this is the only room that has
[3:31]books. But anyway, during COVID, I came in here and I took all of them off. I had to touch every
[3:36]book and I put them down here. And then I spent a day like reorganizing that. And I haven't
[3:40]touched it. That was over a year ago. So I can't believe it was just took you a day. But I mean,
[3:44]one of the benefits of doing what, what, what you do though is that you do get all those books that
[3:49]come your way. It's, it's sort of nothing. It is amazing. I mean, I get to open packages every day,
[3:54]talk about kid in a candy store. I mean, this is like a dream dream gig. I know people are just sending
[3:59]you books and they're like all the time. It's incredible. And then I don't even know what to do with
[4:03]them. I actually outside my office. I have a library cart full of the books that I'm not covering
[4:08]that I don't know it. And like every so often we donate them to housing works downtown. But yeah,
[4:13]there must be a better system. I should just send, I don't know. Anyway, I will talk about your
[4:17]book, but we're already chatting about all this stuff. Where, how did you end up in book publishing
[4:23]as a, as a start anyway? And did you always love books? And like, where did you grow up? And
[4:27]like, where'd you get on that fun stuff? Yeah, just give me a quick sketch.
[4:30]A quick sketch. I've always, I mean, like, it's not a joke. I've always, always loved books. My dad
[4:36]got me into it when I was very, very little. I'd watch him read. We go to the library and he'd
[4:40]pick out these novels. And he'd land his sofa and read. And I just watched him read. And I'd
[4:45]ask him what he was reading. And it was just something I always knew that I wanted to do because I
[4:48]could connect with my dad in that way. My dad's a doctor, not literary. He's very, very well read. But
[4:55]that's just how we really connected. Cut to years later, I'm offered a job, true story. I'm
[5:02]offered a job to be a producer at America's Next Top Model. And then I was like, okay, so I'm in New
[5:10]York. I was offered the job. And at the same day, I'm offered a job to work at Penguin to be,
[5:15]and I think it was in the publicity department, like, bottom run of the publicity department. And I
[5:22]took it and I couldn't wait. It was, it was, it was the job that I wanted to do.
[5:28]You have now adhered yourself to every non-modalish woman, which is 99.9% of us out there. So
[5:34]thank you. It was just, it was just, it made so much sense. I wanted to be a writer my whole
[5:39]life. I wanted to be around writers before that. I worked at PBS. I worked in children's programming
[5:44]and I wrote on TV shows. So my heart was always there. And I was like, well, I could go into, into
[5:49]producing, you know, but gosh, I really want to do book publishing so bad. And I spent the next
[5:56]five years working in different publishing houses and working with some of the most amazing authors.
[6:01]I mean, you can't even imagine the people that would walk through the office. It was incredible.
[6:06]Give me like a couple of sneak peeks like we're in the next page.
[6:10]George Saunders walked into my office one day looking for the men's room. And I was like,
[6:15]he'd walked in and said, hey, I'm looking, well, he's looking for riverhead. And then he was like,
[6:19]is there a men's room around her also? And I was like, yeah, sure. It's over to the left. And he
[6:22]goes, he says, thanks and walks off. And I'm like, that was George Saunders. Oh, my God.
[6:28]But even more than that, I remember taking the, you know, taking the train up town where he
[6:33]he's living up her west side. And, you know, I ran into Philip Roth one night, who was just
[6:39]walking down Broadway. And I sort of secretly trailed him, you know, from 86 to 82nd street.
[6:45]And I was like, he had a new book coming out. And I was like, I wonder if he's going to do a
[6:49]reading at the Barnes Noble. That's right over there. Yeah. So I sort of secretly trailed him
[6:53]down to the street as one does, you know, and of course he's just wandering around the upper
[6:58]west side. That's what he's doing. So you're like, you know, and he wound up stopping in a new
[7:03]stand and pulled up a news week that had covered his new book. And he was reading the review. And I
[7:07]was like, that is such a Philip Roth moment. Right? Oh, my gosh. It was great that I walked off. And
[7:12]but you know, if you're looking for it, you know, you'll find literary greatness. Well,
[7:16]everywhere, but in New York, especially. And that's the thing though about authors that I've been
[7:20]trying to like figure out if this is a problem authors want solved or not. But I just want solved
[7:26]myself because you can be in a room. Like I've gone to these New York Public Library amazing
[7:32]colors and all this stuff. And I'm like, I know that there are people next to me. And I've
[7:36]probably spent hours inside their heads reading their books. But I don't recognize them right now
[7:40]because I just don't. I don't know what they all look like. I could tell you there's the spine of
[7:44]their books. But who they are, you know, it's crazy. I have to say there's something really cool
[7:49]about that. I mean, you know, I've worked in an entertainment before I started doing this or worked
[7:53]in the writing set of entertainment for a Caribbean film. And, you know, if you're somebody who
[7:58]really appreciates that sort of world, you know, getting close to anybody who's doing that is very
[8:04]tough. But one of the most wonderful things about authors, and this has been, I've known this since,
[8:09]you know, from the beginning is that you can reach out to them and talk to them and still connect
[8:14]with them on a human level in a way that, you know, there are celebrity authors, but you can still
[8:20]reach out to them. I have this little thing that I've always done. I reach out. Every time I read
[8:26]a book that I really love, reach out. And there's an author that I just fall in love with, like
[8:30]Jonathan Latham or Michael Shabin or, you know, any of these sort of guys, 20 years ago, I started
[8:36]doing this. They used to have their emails on their on their websites. And a lot of them don't
[8:40]anymore. But at the time they did, and you can reach out to them, and you could say, oh, I love
[8:45]your work. I love your novel. I really, you know, I just fall in love with everything that you said.
[8:50]I love these characters. And they would write you back. And to this day, I still get those sort
[8:55]of emails back and forth. I have that little thrill that comes my way. Like, you know, you know,
[9:00]you just reach out to people and they write you back. And that's one of the great things about
[9:02]authors and generals that they still really want to connect with their readers. And it's such a
[9:07]loving relationship between author and reader. It's true. We're like cut from the same cloth. I started
[9:13]doing that when I was like 10 years old, I would write like my mom helps me call a publishing house
[9:19]in Michigan to like look up someone's address. And I would hand write the letters. I ended up in
[9:22]this 10-pound relationship with an author whose name is Zivio Niel. She was a middle-grade author. And I
[9:26]was like, oh my god, the only other Zivi in the world is an author. This is amazing. And we would
[9:31]like write back and forth. And after a couple of years, she was coming to New York. And she came
[9:35]to my apartment and picked me up and took me for tea at the plaza. And I wore my fanciest outfit
[9:39]with like shoulder pads because it was the 80s. Like I just got chills. That's awesome. What is
[9:43]the big story? Yeah, it was really amazing. And yeah, we kept in touch for a long time. And
[9:48]it made it all the difference. Right. It's just so great. And even now, I mean, this is like what I
[9:53]do. It's like the coolest thing ever. It's and I'm sure with you in Ed Penguin. I remember reading
[9:58]Jill Santa Pulla's novel.
[10:00]a couple of years ago, the light we lost.
[10:01]And I was literally in bed sobbing.
[10:03]Like, and I don't cry that often, but I remember just sobbing.
[10:06]And I was like, I don't know her.
[10:07]I know I'm interviewing her to come, but like,
[10:09]I'm sobbing.
[10:10]I have to tell her.
[10:11]And I like, DM'd her and she wrote me back.
[10:14]And I was like, sitting there in my bed with the tears still
[10:16]on my face being like, this is amazing.
[10:19]It's wonderful.
[10:20]I did that with a joy and a rag cough.
[10:22]Who were actually, I was just on a scene with her right before you were.
[10:25]We were.
[10:26]Yeah, she's done.
[10:27]She's on my advisory board for Zibi books.
[10:29]So I have a publishing company now.
[10:30]So I know I heard you're doing amazing stuff.
[10:34]And no, no, no, no.
[10:35]She was just on the Zoom, which is why I brought it up.
[10:37]It's really funny because I reached the same sort of thing.
[10:40]I read my, my salary year, I heard about in galley form.
[10:44]And so it's like having galley form.
[10:45]And I wrote her.
[10:46]I just actually, I DM'd her also.
[10:48]And she wrote me back.
[10:50]And now we are like, not only we're doing events together,
[10:52]but we're like, actually, we're hanging out in Boston and stuff like that.
[10:57]It's that sort of relationship you have with people who are just,
[11:00]it's something you can't really even describe.
[11:02]You know, it's such a wonderful thing.
[11:05]It's true.
[11:05]The books I read where I'm like, oh my gosh,
[11:07]I would totally be friends with her and back in the before podcast days.
[11:10]I would just keep that and like close the book
[11:12]and maybe write a note or a letter saying, and that would be the end.
[11:15]And now these have become some of my best friends.
[11:17]I mean, it's crazy.
[11:19]Now you're writing, you've got, you have two books now.
[11:22]Ryan, my wrong.
[11:22]Look at you doing your research.
[11:23]That's very nice of you.
[11:25]You're doing some really amazing stuff.
[11:27]And it's a small literary community that goes deep.
[11:32]So the person who what you do.
[11:34]Thank you.
[11:35]OK, well, should we like mention your book here?
[11:37]I mean, so I can talk about it.
[11:39]I mean, OK, tell first of all, how did you come up with this idea?
[11:44]For tell listeners about now I'm going to remember
[11:47]that we have people listening to our conversation.
[11:49]Oh, right, right.
[11:50]The basic premise of the book and how you decided to come at it
[11:53]from all these different angles.
[11:55]Yeah, so the last confessions of Sylvia P
[11:58]is the story of how Sylvia Plath came to write
[12:00]her famous novel, The Bell Jar, and the way
[12:03]that several people influenced her and the way
[12:06]that she and her novel influenced them as well.
[12:09]And so the story sort of cascades throughout history,
[12:13]because it's about 35 years that sort of encapsulates.
[12:17]But I knew that Sylvia, when I wrote the book,
[12:20]I knew that Sylvia was going to be sort of the center
[12:22]of the novel, but it wasn't going to be specifically
[12:26]about Sylvia.
[12:27]It was really going to be about the people who influenced her.
[12:30]But more importantly, the people that she influenced as well.
[12:33]And how it just sort of all the different ways
[12:37]that she influenced them.
[12:39]I mean, the way that art and literature is supposed to, right?
[12:43]So that was really the impetus behind it.
[12:47]And I came to this story originally.
[12:49]So here I am.
[12:51]But I'm going to start talking about penguin,
[12:52]because I'm working at penguin, and about to turn 30.
[12:56]And I'm getting basically a crash course
[12:59]and how to write, because I'm surrounded by these amazing authors.
[13:03]And of course, I'm not publishing anything at this point.
[13:06]And I'm trying.
[13:07]And so I had a heart to heart with my dad.
[13:09]And he's like, Lee, I know you really want this,
[13:11]but it's just not panning out as time to grow up.
[13:14]And I was like, Dad, you're right.
[13:15]So I decided to go to grad school.
[13:17]And I go to get a Master's in Counseling Psychology.
[13:21]I'm going to be a psychologist.
[13:23]So there I am.
[13:24]I'm doing my thing.
[13:25]And during one of my rotations in my postgraduate work,
[13:28]I'm actually working on a mental asylum, a mental hospital.
[13:31]And it happens to be just coincidentally
[13:33]the same mental hospital that Ken Keezy worked out
[13:36]when he was writing one flu over the Kuckus nest.
[13:39]So there's something in the air.
[13:40]There's something going on.
[13:41]I'm walking in one day.
[13:43]And there's a kiosk with a bunch of books,
[13:45]like paperback books for all the patients
[13:47]who are there to read,
[13:48]because it's kind of a boring place to be
[13:50]when you're hospitalized, you know?
[13:53]And there's the Belger.
[13:54]It's just there in the Keezy.
[13:56]And I had read it before when I was really much younger.
[13:58]And you know, I loved it.
[14:00]But when I was rereading it this time, something clicked.
[14:05]There was something about it.
[14:06]As I was rereading it and I realized it's not just the story.
[14:09]I mean, the Belger is sort of a thinly veiled memoir
[14:14]even though it's a novel about Sylvia Platt's time
[14:17]in clean hospital.
[14:18]And as I'm reading it, I'm realizing
[14:20]it's also there's a parallel story underneath it.
[14:23]And it's really also the story of the birth
[14:25]of confessional poetry.
[14:28]And that just clicked.
[14:30]That just was like there's something there.
[14:32]And this idea of confessional poetry starting
[14:35]not in a university town, not during a time
[14:38]of upheaval or political upheaval.
[14:41]But it's literally, it was a poetry movement born
[14:45]in a mental hospital.
[14:47]I mean, you got Robert Lowell and Sexton, Sylvia Platt,
[14:51]all of them were diagnosed with bipolar
[14:54]or manic depression back then.
[14:55]They were all hospitalized.
[14:57]And they all during this very brief period of time
[15:00]in the mid fifties and late fifties,
[15:03]all congregated in Boston, Massachusetts.
[15:05]And we're writing confessional poetry.
[15:08]I was like, that is incredible.
[15:10]So that was the story I wanted to tell her.
[15:12]who you even wanted to get into
[15:13]how this movement started in a hospital.
[15:17]It's crazy.
[15:18]Yeah.
[15:18]Especially when you tell it from the point of view
[15:20]in the hospital and even some of the treatments
[15:23]that were done at the time,
[15:24]which we wouldn't really think about now
[15:26]and the analysis of the patient.
[15:27]And you have this one seen with the shock treatments.
[15:31]So they're describing the treatment.
[15:33]I'll just start here.
[15:34]Behind the bed is a number dial with a voltage symbol
[15:36]that lights.
[15:37]It is at this moment each session that Ms. Platt
[15:39]appears most tormented, not with terror,
[15:41]but with shame.
[15:42]Her eyes closed and at the press of a red button,
[15:44]her back arches and her shoulder strain.
[15:46]The violence rages through her
[15:47]and qualifies into small melodic spasms.
[15:50]Though she is out, her body continues to fight to kick
[15:53]to drum against the mattress
[15:54]when the internal wave crests, her muscles ease.
[15:57]She remains still like this for another 30 minutes.
[15:59]As promised, I sit by her side and wait for her to wake
[16:02]the clicking of the clock.
[16:02]Second hand mirrors her delicate pulse.
[16:05]Do I believe the treatment is effective
[16:06]and affords Ms. Platt's assemblance of inner stillness?
[16:09]I do.
[16:10]And yet it remains a shallow inner piece,
[16:12]despite fleeting flashes of euphoria that follow each session,
[16:16]her depression deepens.
[16:17]She remains contemptuous, self critical, and withdrawn.
[16:21]Like what it's seen, you know, you can just see it.
[16:23]Like, oh my gosh.
[16:25]Yeah, you know, it's, you know, she talks about,
[16:28]if you read the Bellagire, she talks a lot
[16:30]about the, the horror of getting
[16:32]electro convulsive to track therapy.
[16:35]And the thing about, you know, you see T is that it works.
[16:38]It does work.
[16:39]It does work, but it's awful.
[16:41]It's awful.
[16:42]So there's a character named Dr. Barnhouse,
[16:45]who is actually a real person.
[16:46]And Dr. Ruth Barnhouse is Sylvia's psychiatrist or doctor.
[16:51]And she realizes both in real life, but also in the novel,
[16:55]that these things aren't working.
[16:57]Like they offer a very short window of peace, of inner peace.
[17:02]And so she sort of takes it upon herself to find new methods.
[17:07]And a lot of them are unconventional,
[17:10]but these methods are actually the very thing,
[17:12]that sort of draw Sylvia back into herself
[17:15]and teacher how to read and to write.
[17:17]And actually to actually become the poet
[17:20]that we all know and love today.
[17:22]It's amazing.
[17:23]Well, thank goodness for people who care
[17:26]about patient care in a real way.
[17:27]I actually also worked in a mental hospital.
[17:30]I went into be a psychologist.
[17:31]So I worked in adolescent and patient unit.
[17:33]And yeah, which was not, that was tough.
[17:37]And I was only like 20.
[17:38]So they didn't care what I had to say.
[17:39]But no, but the hospital landscape,
[17:42]I mean, it's all tough.
[17:43]And it's like your people are there
[17:44]because they're on their last,
[17:47]like this is their last hope.
[17:48]And yet I'd want to like fall into a bit of M&M's or something.
[17:51]Do you know what I mean?
[17:52]This is like not the warm and fuzzy place
[17:55]you need when you're feeling your most vulnerable
[17:58]and weak emotionally, I think, but whatever.
[18:00]No, I think you're absolutely right.
[18:02]And that was one of the things that sort of intrigued me.
[18:03]I mean, there's this whole thing about psychology
[18:06]when you think about psychology,
[18:07]it's, you think about the negative side of psychology.
[18:10]But there's actually a lot of positives too.
[18:13]There's Freud talks about sublimation, right?
[18:16]It's a defense mechanism.
[18:17]The high-duty behind sublimation is
[18:20]you actually take all of the pain and angst
[18:22]and depression that you have instead of denying it
[18:26]or burying it, you pour it into something wonderful.
[18:30]You pour it into art, specifically what he talks about.
[18:34]And that's one of the things that I think really sort of
[18:37]intrigued me about the idea of Dr. Barnhouse teaching Sylvia
[18:42]to pour her all of her pain and anguish into her writing.
[18:46]And she literally grabs a pencil and shows her how to write
[18:50]because when Sylvia shows up or in real life
[18:52]shows up at McLean Hospital, she can't read or write anymore.
[18:55]She's in that sort of state.
[18:59]And I think through art, I think through writing,
[19:02]through literature, we can actually sort of grow and thrive
[19:06]and become our better selves.
[19:08]Sometimes even by showing the worst version of ourselves,
[19:10]which is what confessional poetry was all about, right?
[19:13]It was this idea that you talk about the grief
[19:17]and the ugly thoughts and the pain and anguish
[19:20]and you pour it into the page.
[19:22]And then all of a sudden you have a poem like Lady Lazarus
[19:25]or which is it talks about her suicide attempts,
[19:30]but it changes the way that we view the world.
[19:32]as well.
[19:33]And we also find it our own innocence of empathy.
[19:36]It's incredible.
[19:38]No, and I love your classroom scene
[19:40]where the poems are first coming up and getting met with all
[19:43]of this, like, oh, what is that?
[19:44]Like there's amazing and the work shopping.
[19:47]I mean, we think when you think about it now,
[19:49]I mean, that is what songwriting essentially is
[19:52]is confessional poetry, like put to music.
[19:54]I mean, that's really what a lot of the people today
[19:56]who are super famous.
[19:57]It's what everyone's doing.
[19:58]We're all just trying to find our way into it.
[20:00]I think that's, you know, you bring up a really great point. Think about the music in the 1950s.
[20:05]It's got, you know, the sort of the buddy Holly's first stuff and you got some of the blues stuff.
[20:11]But then compare that to some of the confessional sort of lyrics that we're getting today,
[20:15]you know, my young daughter. She's almost 10 and she's listening to music that is all about
[20:20]heartache and grief and, you know, the reason that that happened is because Sylvia Plath
[20:28]and her co-heart started writing like this. And it was so different than everything else I was
[20:33]coming out at that time that there was a huge amount of rejection from the general public. And
[20:38]even within the poetry world, like in the literature world, you can't write like this, you can't talk
[20:43]about this sort of stuff. And yet they did and I really did change everything. And even how
[20:50]Prozac Nation and Girl Interrupted, those were some of the leaders of even the confessional memoir,
[20:54]like even that wasn't done that much before. That's exactly right. We're talking like, I mean,
[20:59]yeah, I mean, those came out I think in the late 90s. And those changed everything too. I mean,
[21:04]Prozac Nation is incredible. Girl Interrupted. I mean, I think about that opening scene all the time,
[21:12]you know, and it's just it's a beautiful, beautiful memoir. Yeah. Well, thanks to Sylvia Plath.
[21:18]Oh, Sylvia. Did you read three martini afternoons at the ritz?
[21:23]I did. It's in my, it's in my collection. I'm blank gale crouler. Maybe I had her on my podcast.
[21:29]Does it sound wrong? But she's it sounds right. You know what? Here's the thing.
[21:33]When I go to the ritz, I'm definitely having the martinis. That's that's what I'm doing.
[21:38]Yes, I had invited her. I said in my podcast is like, whenever that came out, I was like,
[21:41]can I please come to the ritz and have martini? So now we have to open up the, if I ever get back to
[21:45]Boston, please, we'll have like a ritz, but you're not in Boston. Where are you? You're on the
[21:50]San Francisco. Okay. Well, next time we're all in Boston, okay, we should just meet up in Boston
[21:55]and do this. You know, what should you like the, the roundtable thing all over again? Like the
[21:59]Algon? What should go to New York? We'll just do the Algonquin. Great. Yes. Perfect. Are you an
[22:04]LA or you in New York? Where are you? I'm in New York, but I go to LA a lot. Okay. My husband
[22:08]basically works out there. So we go, I go back and forth a lot. You're by coastal and by coastal.
[22:13]I'm divorced and remarried. So I have these weekends without the kids. Oh, my God. It's
[22:18]I don't say something in coupe, but it sounds like you're doing really well. It sounds like
[22:21]like what a, what a life. Books around you live in by coastal. I have weekends off. I mean,
[22:29]I promise I work really hard. I know you do. I know you are. It's incredible stuff. But yeah,
[22:36]it's good. And I like, by the way, in your book that you have the whole thing with a little mystery
[22:40]to it because that always like really propels a plot when you're trying to figure something out of
[22:44]how did these papers get into this house that where they were discovered? And how does the reader
[22:49]go along with it and figure it out? And I don't know. I found that also very captivating as I
[22:55]I saw the wrong word as I went. No, plot. I think the long plot. No, it's so this is the funny thing.
[23:03]Someone asked me one time, like how, you know, why are you writing from the perspective of three
[23:07]women? And you know, sort of, which is a very, it's a little bit of a touchy subject. I thought
[23:14]about this a lot. And so part of it came down to, how are these people affected by,
[23:19]by Sylvia and who were they? And so, you know, I had Dr. Barnhouse, which made a lot of sense to me
[23:24]because she's a therapist and a psychiatrist who really, truly did help Sylvia in her early days.
[23:29]And then you have this rival, right, who many years later and her literary rival who had to be
[23:35]so similar to Sylvia that with just a little bit of a difference that the rival
[23:40]would be real. So those two were going to be women. But the third, which takes place in modern
[23:45]times, which is the mystery you were talking about. I couldn't crack that one. I couldn't crack
[23:50]who that character was. And went through iteration after iteration. And it was at one point, it was
[23:56]these a literate, you know, is that one of the a literate brothers who discovers the manuscript
[24:01]in an attic. And, and then it was somebody who was going to steal the manuscript. And then it was
[24:06]and it just changed. It kept on changing, it kept on changing. And at some point, I realized that
[24:10]the whoever this character was had to be sort of me in the novel because I was coming into this
[24:16]as almost as a novice to Sylvia. These guys were not like you. No, you guys, those guys were sort
[24:22]of like, you know, very, very different. But you do have this sort of curator who knows enough
[24:29]and starts digging deeper and deeper. And the more she starts digging into the history of these,
[24:35]this manuscript that shows up in front of her, which may or may not be the real deal,
[24:39]all of a sudden a mystery sort of opened up in front of me. And I was like, that has to be
[24:44]the narrative drive throughout the entire book. Are these real? And if so, how do they wind up where
[24:49]they wound up? And what does it have to do with, you know, the curator, the modern decorator?
[24:56]And also this mystery has to lock in all three storylines. And so I just set myself up
[25:04]amount of work and trouble to figure out. And then all of a sudden, it clicked. And I was like,
[25:07]yeah, this mystery, the mystery has to drive the whole thing. Yeah. Well, it's very cool.
[25:12]I liked exactly how it works. And it's very cool. And I learned a lot. And yeah, just the echo effects
[25:20]of that whole time period are so alive and well. And basically, thank you to Encanto, the movie,
[25:26]so that my almost nine year old daughter has stopped singing things like this, like Taylor Swift and
[25:31]all the TikTok songs and whatever that's derived directly from Sylvia Black and this book. And
[25:37]it's finally back to like, kid. It's very, you know, it's very funny. My kid's, my daughter was almost
[25:44]too much. She was like, Encanto, everyone's watching it. I'm not into it. Yep. Now she's watching
[25:50]15 times. She was like, I'm still learning it too. But I still got to watch it again. So she's loving
[25:54]this too. It's a thing. She's learning Spanish. This is great. Anyway, okay, advice. What
[26:01]are you working on next? And what advice do you have for aspiring authors? Oh, boy. That's
[26:05]a, that's a mouthful. I am working on a new novel. And I'm not going to go too much into
[26:10]because I keep these things pretty close to the, the, the chest or the vest or whatever the phrase
[26:14]is, these things. But, but you know, that's exactly what, that's exactly it. Keeping it close to the
[26:19]handling. We should, that's, that's, that's we should. That's a good title. Yeah. That's a great
[26:23]keeping it close to the handling. Yeah. You can write that one. You can, I'll give it to you.
[26:27]Are you sure? Okay, but I'm giving you credits. You definitely can. I'll just take, I'll take a line
[26:31]like not even a line. Just in the acknowledgement somewhere. It's fine. I think that's fair enough.
[26:34]That works. I think that's a good compromise. So it's, it's in the vein of sort of historical
[26:38]fiction, but it's, and it takes place in New York. And it's, it's something that is,
[26:42]if you could see my desk right now, it's just an explosion of maps, a narrative maps and
[26:48]the things like that. And as far as, as far as advice for up and coming writers,
[26:53]you know what I would actually say? I would say treated like a business, treated like a business,
[26:58]treated like work because it is. There's the passion. There's the art. But every day,
[27:02]I wake up every day. And I, I take my kids to school, I come back home, I put my shoes on,
[27:08]when I sit down and I work every day and I work from a 30 until six at night.
[27:13]You go barefoot to drop off. I go barefoot to drop off, but it work. You're always wearing shoes.
[27:18]Okay. So that's really it. So if you, you work until you write from 836, right?
[27:24]Oh, my gosh. Every day. I thought everybody did it that way, but apparently they don't because
[27:30]I get that sort of response from my friends to like, I'm nuts. But it's, you know,
[27:35]nuts to work that long at your desk. It's just like being in a manuscript and tapping into
[27:40]that creativity for that long is a little, it's, it's a lot. It's a lot. And I'm sure I've
[27:47]missed out on some majors. I'd like apparently there's been a pandemic that I just raised lifted
[27:51]my head up. I was like, where is everybody? But that's really it. I would give that advice,
[27:55]which is, is to treat it like work and learn the craft because I think that was the difference.
[28:01]You know, my dad, you know, was right. He was like, ladies, you know, you got to sort of, you know,
[28:06]growing up and, and, and being serious about something and it, and at that point I sort of
[28:10]realizing like, you know what, it's not just that you, you can love what you do, which is super,
[28:15]super important. But if you sort of really think of it like, you know, learning the craft and sitting
[28:21]down and doing it every single day, you're, you're going to get somewhere, you're going to
[28:23]start moving forward. So that's, that's pretty much how I, I'd probably say that by seven year old self
[28:29]anyway. Okay. All right. We'll be this was so much fun. And thank you for joining me today. And
[28:37]I hope that we can meet up with Gail and have our Martinez at the in Boston sometime.
[28:42]That sounds amazing. Thanks for having me on. This has been super fun.
[28:46]Okay. Have a great day.
[28:48]Good to see you. Thanks. Bye bye.
[28:51]Thanks for listening to this episode of Moms Don't Have Time to Read Books.
[28:54]Don't forget to follow me on Instagram at zebi Owens and at Moms Don't Have Time to Read Books.
[28:59]Also sign up for my newsletter at zebiowens.com and sign up for my virtual book club and
[29:04]meet lots of authors on Zoom every other week. Thanks so much to Steve and Ryan at Textures
[29:08]Sound for the Sound Editing. And thank you to Morning Moon Productions for providing this
[29:13]fantastic intro and outro music.