Daisy Alpert Florin, MY LAST INNOCENT YEAR
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[1:03]Daisy Albert Florin is the author of my last innocent year, a novel.
[1:08]Daisy attended Dartmouth College and received graduate degrees from Columbia University
[1:12]and Bank Street Graduate School of Education.
[1:14]She is the recipient of the 2016 Catherine Gour fine writing fellowship at Sarah Lawrence College
[1:19]and was a 2019 to 20 fellow in the bookend novel revision fellowship where she worked
[1:25]with founding director Susan Scarf Merrill, a native New Yorker.
[1:29]Daisy lives in Connecticut with her family.
[1:31]My last innocent year is her debut novel.
[1:34]Welcome Daisy.
[1:35]Thank you so much for coming on Moms.
[1:36]Don't have time to read books to discuss my last innocent year, a novel.
[1:41]Thank you for having me delighted to be here.
[1:43]No, it's it's such a joy to set the stage for this book.
[1:47]I just wanted to read this quick passage so you could tell us where you weigh in on this.
[1:52]So it goes, did you hear about Jason he asked?
[1:54]Yeah, I'd been shocked that Jason Kelsey's boyfriend had been rejected.
[1:59]He was what this is, I should preface this more.
[2:01]There's a seminar.
[2:02]There's an important seminar to which you had to apply to be accepted with this fabulous
[2:07]woman teacherhood.
[2:08]I'm not being the teacher.
[2:09]But anyway, so she's chit chatting with a friend who said, did you hear about Jason?
[2:13]And she said, yeah, I'd been shocked that Jason Kelsey's boyfriend had been rejected
[2:17]from the seminar.
[2:18]He was what I thought of as a real English major.
[2:21]He memorized poetry, annotated short stories in the New Yorker and was writing an incomprehensible
[2:26]thesis on James Joyce.
[2:28]Well, I did was write stories about, quote, girls with feelings, unquote, as Andy put
[2:33]it once in a workshop, according to Kelsey, Jason was devastated.
[2:37]Okay.
[2:38]So is this a book about girls with feelings or is this a real English major book?
[2:42]And how do you feel about folks, genres to get us started?
[2:46]I love that you pulled out that quote actually, yeah, you know, I will just say that
[2:50]I wasn't an English major in college and perhaps because somewhere I had that sense
[2:57]that what I was interested in reading about or writing about wasn't like valuable or
[3:02]wasn't sort of of the canon.
[3:04]Like looking back, I think I was kind of like a lazy reader and never felt like I was reading
[3:09]the right things or like kind of skim reading the things I had to read in high school
[3:14]or doing cliff snotes and all of that.
[3:16]So I don't think I ever really thought of myself as a real, you know, serious writer.
[3:23]So that just kind of came out.
[3:24]So I never was in a seminar like that, but I think I can imagine feeling that way.
[3:29]I mean, I can remember the someone's telling me at one point when I was writing, you
[3:33]know, personal essays, oh, you need to find a big topic.
[3:37]You really need to write about a big topic.
[3:40]I don't know exactly what he meant by that, but yeah, I wanted to, that girls with feelings
[3:46]thing just kind of came to me and then just sort of kind of persists as a motif in the
[3:52]book.
[3:53]I think we, you know, women's fiction is sometimes called exactly that women's fiction
[3:58]or kind of like siloed into this like domestic stories.
[4:02]Those were the stories I wanted to read.
[4:04]So I think it makes sense and it's what I ended up writing.
[4:07]Although I think it is about big topics, you know, not just, you know, squishy girls with
[4:12]feelings.
[4:13]Although what's wrong with that, right?
[4:16]Nothing's wrong with that.
[4:17]I like reading about girl, anybody, I like reading about feelings.
[4:21]I feel like to get into the most difficult topics, you have to go really deep into a single
[4:26]person or single experience and that's how you, it's much easier at least for me to understand
[4:32]big concepts by a story, by someone telling you their experience with it versus just reading
[4:37]about it analytically.
[4:38]But anyway, I just related to that so much because I often feel like a total like sham
[4:46]like, I dropped out after one class in my freshman year, like Chaucer English class and
[4:51]I was like, no thanks, I'm taking like prose writing and I'm going to go back to writing
[4:55]personal essays and I want to read contemporary fiction and everybody would read Chaucer
[4:59]and I would go home and read Richard Jones diary and I'm like, all right, well, this is what
[5:03]I like.
[5:04]Exactly.
[5:05]Yes, I completely relate.
[5:07]Someone said to me once, oh, I don't read any contemporary fiction and I thought,
[5:12]god, I only read, I love contemporary fiction and like, oh my gosh, am I okay?
[5:17]I know, it's so funny.
[5:19]Anyway, tell listeners what my lesson is to hear is really about and where, how did you
[5:25]come to write this book?
[5:26]Yeah.
[5:27]So my last innocent year tells the story of Isabel Rosen's final semester at a fictional
[5:33]college in New Hampshire called Wilder College, Isabel is from New York, she's from the
[5:38]Lower East Side, the pre-hipster Lower East Side, her dad owns an appetizing store,
[5:46]which is a kind of Jewish specialty food store where they sell smoked fish and herring
[5:52]and cream cheese.
[5:53]So she's from this kind of, you know, unusual background and she's at this posh college,
[5:59]but it's her final semester, she's kind of made her way.
[6:03]She's made it into this advanced writing seminar that she's really looking forward to
[6:08]and write as the book opens.
[6:09]She has an unpleasant, non-consensual sexual encounter with a peer, which sort of rattles
[6:17]her enough that she eventually comes to have an affair with the professor who is teaching
[6:23]that seminar.
[6:24]So it's set in 1998, the loose backdrop is the Clint Lewinsky scandal and it's just
[6:31]like an exploration of campus culture, the 90s, really I wanted to talk about
[6:38]I mean, I really just wanted to tell a story because I think exactly what you were saying
[6:41]before.
[6:42]If I think if I had gone in wanting to tell a story about what it meant to be a woman
[6:48]on the campus in the 90s and consent and all that, then I think the book might have felt
[6:54]too heavy-handed, but I really just wanted to tell this story about what it felt like
[6:59]to come up as a young woman at that time, the late 90s, and I love campus fiction.
[7:06]I just left the container of the college campus to tell this story.
[7:10]I think it really started for me.
[7:13]I started writing it when I was in my early 40s and I was just like thinking about a
[7:18]lot of stuff that felt like over.
[7:20]Like I had been young for so long and now I wasn't anymore and had that happen.
[7:25]So I think the book really just started about with me interrogating, almost interrogating
[7:30]my younger self, like who was she then, what did she think about her life, what did
[7:35]she think her life was going to be, and then it just kind of grew out of there.
[7:39]Oh my gosh.
[7:40]Well, I have to say, I was a senior in 1998, so I felt like this was so perfect.
[7:47]I'm like, I remember all of these things.
[7:49]I remember Princeton and I remember all the stuff that you referenced on campus.
[7:54]So it was total flashback moments for me.
[7:58]That's great.
[8:00]And also, I do remember because at that time, rape was being talked about in a new way.
[8:08]Like, does it mean, is it rape if you have sex without totally wanting to, how much
[8:16]do you have to tell someone?
[8:17]So I remember having girlfriends who might have, you know, they were like, was it, wasn't
[8:21]it?
[8:22]And like that was very much in the conversation back then.
[8:25]And I don't really know exactly where it all netted out specifically other than that
[8:31]is the beginning of the awareness that led to many more things.
[8:35]Yeah.
[8:36]I don't know where it netted out exactly.
[8:38]I'd build the same way.
[8:39]I mean, I was talking to a friend, you know, I was saying, you know, we didn't really talk
[8:44]about that stuff.
[8:45]I mean, I'm like, you know, I went to, I entered college in 1991.
[8:50]And I don't really remember, I remember when we got to campus, we were talking about
[8:54]all that stuff.
[8:55]Like, no means no.
[8:56]And it take back the night, March and all of that.
[8:59]But I don't really remember talking about it before that.
[9:02]So it's kind of like, it's dropped onto the campus, getting all this information at
[9:08]the same time that you're like sort of let loose, you know, on in this new environment
[9:13]where you're kind of unsupervised for the, you know, really for the first time and they felt
[9:17]really exciting.
[9:18]And so all that was happening at the same time, perhaps if ground, you know, now I know,
[9:22]we lay the groundwork earlier, I have teenagers, you know, who have had many more conversations
[9:28]and I did certainly.
[9:29]But I wanted to sort of represent this kind of experience that I think a lot of women have.
[9:36]And the labels, you know, I'm not really interested, I guess, in like, was it rape?
[9:41]Was it not rape?
[9:42]You know, it's like a harm had been done to her and I just wanted to explore that.
[9:47]And sometimes like the lack being unable to label something leads to a lot of extra shame
[9:54]because you can't sort of identify as a victim or whatever and like you feel you just
[10:00]a lot of the blame on to yourself.
[10:01]So I wanted to explore those kind of gray,
[10:04]like icky areas, icky feelings.
[10:07]I don't know why I wanted to do that.
[10:08]It's kind of fun, but yeah, I think that a lot of people
[10:11]have sort of responded to that.
[10:14]And with that same, you know,
[10:15]like I know women who have had that
[10:17]or that's happened to me or, you know,
[10:19]and so I think that's important to put on the page.
[10:22]Yeah, for sure.
[10:23]I was also interested in how you brought in
[10:27]like the sort of benign, if you will,
[10:30]stealing that went on and how that became
[10:33]one of her coping mechanisms to, you know,
[10:36]get through all, like the loss of her mom
[10:40]and the upheaval in her life.
[10:42]And, you know, that is something that so many,
[10:44]that so many, but it is a thing among teenagers,
[10:47]especially in college and all that.
[10:49]And yet doesn't get talked about so much.
[10:52]And also, and I like, anyway,
[10:54]how did you decide to make that sort of one of the ways
[10:56]that she coped?
[10:59]Yeah, thank you for bringing that up.
[11:01]It's something that was important to me
[11:03]and not that many people have even like really picked up
[11:06]on that that she is a thief.
[11:08]And I don't, you know, she is someone who comes
[11:12]from a background where she just feels lack generally,
[11:16]you know, materially, she's not from, you know,
[11:19]an affluent family at all.
[11:21]And she's lost her mother.
[11:23]So I just thought it would be interesting
[11:25]to have her just take things, you know,
[11:28]she's really taking things more in high school.
[11:30]And she kind of has stopped by the time she gets to college
[11:35]where she says, you know, she would have had ample opportunity
[11:38]because everyone just like leaves all their things around.
[11:42]And, you know, it's just the carelessness
[11:44]of her more affluent friends.
[11:46]But it kind of creeps in a little bit that temptation
[11:49]creeps in as the novel progresses.
[11:52]Yeah, I think it is something that I know people did,
[11:57]you know, growing up adolescent like taking something
[11:59]from, you know, the convenience store or whatever
[12:02]and what you could get away with.
[12:04]I don't know, it's just something, you know,
[12:06]you don't see it represented that much in literature.
[12:09]And it's not something she really even has caught,
[12:12]there aren't really consequences for it in the novel.
[12:15]So it just kind of runs through as a, as a motif,
[12:19]you know, and then of course she's having this love affair
[12:22]with her married professors.
[12:24]So it's still a little bit of that,
[12:26]what can I take that isn't mine?
[12:29]Totally.
[12:30]Yeah, and actually the whole love affair and everything,
[12:33]not to give things away.
[12:34]But it almost becomes not a thriller,
[12:37]but there's a, you know, there's like a mystery
[12:41]to be solved towards the end.
[12:43]And she's a very much essential piece of the puzzle.
[12:47]It's almost as if, you know, she's writing herself
[12:50]into the narrative of the school
[12:53]while she's being taught, right?
[12:55]And yet she's inserting herself
[12:56]into this sort of dramatic plot as it unfolds.
[13:00]Okay, I'm glad you think that.
[13:02]Yeah, it was one of those things that I,
[13:04]as I wrote into the book, you know,
[13:05]plot these plot points kind of came later for me.
[13:09]I was really trying to capture like feelings and vibe
[13:11]and emotions and sort of like,
[13:13]oh, I'm writing an novel so I have to have like all this happen.
[13:16]So that kind of got layered in a little bit later.
[13:20]But yeah, I mean, it is essentially a book
[13:22]about a woman, young woman, trying to find her voice
[13:25]and trying to learn how to tell the truth.
[13:27]And so I felt like that was an important part
[13:30]of that journey was for her to do something
[13:34]that had a consequence for her.
[13:36]Yeah.
[13:37]And the way you wrote about loss was so beautiful too.
[13:40]Like, where did, have you gone through loss yourself?
[13:43]Or like, what did you tap into to write those sections?
[13:46]Yeah.
[13:46]My mother did die.
[13:48]Not at that exact time is about loses her mother earlier
[13:52]than I lost my mother.
[13:53]It wasn't even like a conscious decision on my part.
[13:56]It was just like, oh, she's going to have lost her mother.
[13:59]It just sort of creeps into the narrative
[14:02]without me really intending to.
[14:04]And then I feel like the mother's voice kind of comes
[14:07]through at these moments.
[14:08]She imagines things her mother might have said
[14:11]or my mother, you know, what she would have thought about
[14:14]something.
[14:15]And that is how I feel sometimes, you know, when I see things,
[14:18]like, oh, my mother would have loved that
[14:20]or she would have thought she was really annoying
[14:22]or, you know, she would have had a blast doing that.
[14:24]So I think that, you know, one of the other things
[14:27]I wanted to give Isabel when she came to this college
[14:30]was not just feeling out of place, you know, maybe culturally
[14:35]and in terms of her socioeconomic background,
[14:37]but also she has experienced a loss that most people,
[14:42]young people when they go to college
[14:44]have not.
[14:45]So it's something else that isolates her
[14:48]and, you know, I think, I think I did feel that way.
[14:53]You know, I lost my mom in my late 20s.
[14:54]She wasn't at my wedding, you know.
[14:56]And I think I felt like some, like almost a little bit
[15:00]of shame around that, like I had suffered this thing
[15:02]that other people hadn't suffered.
[15:04]And it's like, it makes you feel on the outside
[15:07]of, you know, of experiences.
[15:09]I've come to feel differently about that now.
[15:13]But I think it's, I also do remember,
[15:16]I remember a friend in college who lost her father
[15:19]while we were in college.
[15:20]And I just remember, like, I don't think I ever said
[15:24]the right thing to her.
[15:25]Like, I didn't really know how to talk to her or help her.
[15:29]And when I think back to that, I'm like, oh my God,
[15:32]I feel like I was just a terrible friend or whatever.
[15:35]But it was like too much for my brain to process
[15:39]at that time.
[15:40]So, you know, again, it just sort of,
[15:43]I didn't intend to have that.
[15:44]It just sort of was there naturally.
[15:46]But I think as the book progressed,
[15:48]I felt like it was a really important part.
[15:50]I'm really sorry about your mom.
[15:52]Thank you, thank you.
[15:54]Can you say, how does she pose an illness or?
[15:57]Yes, my mom was awesome.
[15:59]My mom, she was 56, which at the time,
[16:04]everyone's like, oh, your mom was so young.
[16:06]And I didn't really, I was like, well, 56, not like,
[16:08]so young, but now a person, I'm almost 50, it's terribly young.
[16:12]So she got cancer and died very quickly.
[16:15]It was like of, you know, like she was like not sick
[16:18]for nine weeks and died.
[16:20]And it was very shocking and very sudden.
[16:22]And she was really just like in the middle of her,
[16:25]you know, second act in life.
[16:26]And we lost her quickly and too soon.
[16:31]And it was a very, there's just a shock to me in my late 20s.
[16:35]I'm so sorry.
[16:36]But so tell me about, I know you grew up in New York City.
[16:41]And then you went to Dartmouth, right?
[16:42]Where perhaps Wilder is based loosely.
[16:45]I'll just throw that out there.
[16:47]And then what happened after that and like, what
[16:49]stage of life are you in in your late 20s?
[16:51]And then how did you come to be writing now at this stage?
[16:54]Well, you know, I left college and I worked, you know,
[17:00]briefly as a newspaper reporter.
[17:02]But then I realized I didn't really like talking to people
[17:05]or talking to strangers and stuff like that
[17:07]at that, which makes you not very effective newspaper reporter.
[17:10]And then I worked in book publishing in New York.
[17:13]And then I ended up going and working.
[17:15]I taught elementary school and I taught preschool.
[17:18]And I went and got a couple of master's degrees,
[17:21]not in creative writing.
[17:22]And then I just, you know, I had my son when I turned 30.
[17:28]And I just stayed home with him.
[17:30]And I eventually had two more children.
[17:32]And I was just like home with my kids for 10 years.
[17:37]And I really enjoyed those years.
[17:40]I taught a little bit at that time also.
[17:41]I was teaching preschool.
[17:43]And then in my late 30s, I just started writing.
[17:48]I had a blog because it was like 2010.
[17:51]And I was writing about my kids.
[17:53]And I started writing personal essays.
[17:55]And I was taking some workshops locally.
[17:57]And I just like over time got like more, you know,
[18:01]took my writing more seriously.
[18:03]And then in 2015, I started to write scenes
[18:08]that would become this novel.
[18:09]And I just wanted a, looking back,
[18:13]it was like always there, this interest,
[18:16]everything was sort of circling around words.
[18:18]I come from a family that my brother's newspaper journalist,
[18:22]his wife's a journalist, my father was in PR in the theater.
[18:27]So all around like storytelling, my aunt was an English teacher.
[18:30]Like we're all, that's kind of our family business.
[18:33]Now that I can see that more clearly,
[18:35]but at the time I didn't see that,
[18:37]that was where I was heading.
[18:39]And I don't think I would have, you know,
[18:43]ever thought to be a writer when I was younger.
[18:46]I don't think I had anything that I really wanted to say.
[18:49]So yeah.
[18:50]And then the book really, I wrote mostly through my 40s,
[18:53]which just felt like the absolute right time for me.
[18:56]And now I turn 50 in May.
[18:58]And it's gonna be, it's out now.
[19:00]So I feel really delighted to have like finally figured out
[19:04]what I wanna do with the rest of my life, you know,
[19:07]I feel really lucky that I had a chance to do this.
[19:11]That's amazing.
[19:12]That's so great.
[19:13]I think the 40s are the best time to write.
[19:15]I feel like most, and maybe it's cause I'm in my 40s.
[19:19]And so I'm drawn to the topics,
[19:21]perhaps of a lot of people writing about this time,
[19:23]but I don't think that's it.
[19:24]I think this is just the most of what's coming out
[19:27]is written by people in their 40s, 50s, and up.
[19:31]It's rarer younger.
[19:33]But anyway, I think you have enough life experience
[19:37]and enough wisdom and enough energy to do it all.
[19:41]And also, you know, just more confidence,
[19:44]I think like, you know, the way that I, you know,
[19:47]when I was growing up, I felt very like motivated
[19:49]by external validation and that I had to sort of do things
[19:53]that fit like other people's perceptions
[19:56]of what made sense for a life.
[19:59]And
[20:00]Now I can see that, you know, you just have to like step boldly into your own life and do the thing that you want to do, even if it doesn't really make sense to people on the outside, which, you know, when you decide in your 40s when you're like the state home parent of three kids, like I'm writing a novel.
[20:15]You know, he were like, okay, that sounds good.
[20:19]And I think when I was younger that would have probably derailed me, you know, if someone had asked me like, oh, did you go to school for that or is that something you've always wanted to do?
[20:29]And the answer to both of those questions would have been no. And I think when I was younger, I would have taken that as a sign that I should just stop like a lot of no business doing this.
[20:37]But now I know the other thing I learned later in life was that I used to think that if something was hard, that meant you weren't good at it.
[20:46]And now, of course, I know that everything is hard, you know, like, you know, basically every single thing is hard and that has no bearing on, you know, whether you're good at it or not, you just it's just whether you're with it.
[21:00]Well, everything is hard until you learn it. Like you can't just know. Yeah. Yeah.
[21:05]Like everything seems, if you let that be the gating item, then you wouldn't try anything.
[21:10]For sure. So I don't know. I feel like this is what I tell my kids.
[21:14]I know. And you try to tell your kids and it's like, they just have to watch them go through it all them. So I know.
[21:20]I mean, look at us. We're just learning this now. Like in our late 40s, our little late 40s.
[21:25]I'm telling my kids like, oh, if you, if you just did what I told you to, you'd be a lot better off, you know, but they can't, they cannot do that.
[21:34]No, it doesn't work. But we can, we can't stop trying though, you know, I can't stop trying. I was like you, by the way, I stayed home for 11 years, basically had four kids and, and I always loved to write and I would say I was working on something, but then I would feel like such an imposter.
[21:49]And then I was at some point, I was like, can I just call myself like a non practicing writer because all my non practicing lawyer friends would say that and that at least gave them legitimacy, you know, that's right.
[22:00]So, but no. Anyway, well, so now that you've gotten like sort of the writing, not bugs and you know, but the confidence and the book out and all of that, are you, is are you like gearing up to do another novel?
[22:13]You know, my husband always said, I guess it was some singer and I'm going to misquote it. He was like, you have your whole life to produce your first album and then like six months to produce your second.
[22:23]And so he always reminds me of that, but I feel like it's the same thing with so many authors. It's like, okay, I've been kind of working on this for 10 years and now like my next books too.
[22:33]Yeah, exactly. I've had a friend who said the same thing. It's like your first novel is like the things you've been thinking about for your whole life and now they're like, do it again in two years.
[22:41]I do have enough. I would like to write another novel. I do have something I've been working on. Not I haven't really touched it in like a couple of months because I've been so, you know, like hyped up and excited about promoting this book and have been able to talk about it with people.
[22:57]But I would like to write another one and I have to just I have to think it'll be, I don't know that it will be easier at all. I don't think it will.
[23:05]I think it will be equally difficult. But I do hope I've learned something in the process of writing this one. So I maybe start out on steady your ground or just maybe don't make exactly the same mistakes that I made early on, maybe not as many dead ends.
[23:21]And I think the one thing that I think you learned by writing a book is that like the process is the process and the process is messy.
[23:31]And I think I read once like frustration is not an interruption of the process. Frustration is the process. So I'm just knowing that it's for a long time. You just feel like you're not accomplishing anything.
[23:44]You know, you're writing pages that you don't end up using, but that you need to do all of that to get to the finished product. So hopefully I can hold on to that and do it again. I would like to very much.
[23:55]Amazing. Do you have any books you've read lately that you love or something that's stuck with you for less couple years or anything?
[24:02]Well, I loved Catherine Newman's book. We all want impossible things that I know listeners love to. I've been reading her stuff online for years, like her kids are kind of the same age as mine and she would always write.
[24:15]She really was like writing about her kids in a way that made me want to write about my kids in kind of the same way. So she was really an inspiration.
[24:22]And then actually after that I went I went back and reread all my puny sorrows by Miriam toes, which I had read when it came out. But now I read it again and I loved it all over again and I can see those two books kind of in in conversation with each other. So those are two books I've read recently.
[24:43]Looking forward to Rebecca Mackay's book that just arrived on my. I read that. Of course, if yesterday. Yeah, I hear it's I really loved that book. Yeah, that was really great.
[24:55]Different though.
[24:56]It's very different from yours. But yes, definitely on a campus but I loved her for the great believers. I love that one very much.
[25:05]to do an event or something. Yeah.
[25:08]I know I think you're looking new Hampshire too. New Hampshire is I think set in New Hampshire. Yeah, yeah, but hers is a boarding. Here's was a boarding school.
[25:16]Yeah, you'll find out.
[25:18]I haven't seen my brain can't like focus on anything right now, but like an Instagram post, but I totally get it. I totally get it.
[25:27]Well, Daisy, I'm so excited for you. I'm, you know, so great. I love hearing these stories of persistence and books that are about the feelings like the just girls girls feelings, but with deeper stuff behind it and you know, this is how we connect. So I think it's great. We connect over shared experiences.
[25:46]Yeah, well, thanks for having me was pleasure talking to you too. Are you based in New York, by the way, or where are you in Connecticut? I love it in Greenwich. Yeah, okay. So perhaps our puzzle cross you.
[25:59]I've come to New York a lot. I'm actually today. So yeah, amazing. Come on over. You can have done it here.
[26:06]I'll have a not ring your doorbell. Okay. All right. I'll talk to you later. Bye.
[26:14]Thanks for listening to this episode of Moms Don't Have Time to Read Books.
[26:17]Don't forget to follow me on Instagram at zebi Owens and at Moms Don't Have Time to Read Books.
[26:22]Also sign up for my newsletter at zebiowens.com and sign up for my virtual book club and meet lots of authors on Zoom every other week.
[26:29]Thanks so much to Steve and Ryan in fact, texture sound for the sound editing.
[26:33]And thank you to Morning Moon Productions for providing this fantastic intro and outro music.