J. Ryan Stradal, SATURDAY NIGHT AT THE LAKESIDE SUPPER CLUB
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[1:03]J. Ryan Stradel is the author of Saturday Night at the Lakeside Separate Club, a novel.
[1:09]He is the author of The New York Times Bestseller Kitchen of the Great Midwest, winner
[1:14]of the American Booksellers Association Indies Choice Award for adult debut book of the year,
[1:19]the Southern California Independent Booksellers Association Award for Fiction, and the
[1:23]Midwest Booksellers Choice Award for debut fiction.
[1:26]The Lager Queen of Minnesota, his second novel, was an instant national bestseller, one
[1:31]at the 2020 Willa Award for the year's Best Contemporary Fiction, and was a finalist
[1:36]for the 2020 Heartland Booksellers Award, born and raised in Minnesota.
[1:39]He now lives with his family in California.
[1:41]Welcome to J. Ryan.
[1:43]Thank you so much for being here to discuss Saturday Night at the Lakeside Separate Club,
[1:47]your latest novel.
[1:48]Thanks for having me.
[1:49]I really appreciate it.
[1:51]Sure.
[1:52]What do you mind telling listeners what your book is about?
[1:55]Yeah, it's a multi-generational story set in a Northern Midwestern restaurant for generations.
[2:01]Mostly women, telling the story of a restaurant that gets passed from generation to generation
[2:06]through a single family.
[2:07]And where I'm from in Northern Minnesota, it's not unusual.
[2:10]I'm sorry.
[2:11]I'm from Southern Minnesota, but books set in Northern Minnesota.
[2:14]There are restaurants called separate clubs that are quite often up to a hundred years
[2:18]older, older, who have stayed in the same family the entire time, or maintained family
[2:22]ownership.
[2:23]And I always wanted to write about them.
[2:24]I worked in one as a teenager, and I'm down in my veins, and now I've probably got to write
[2:30]about it.
[2:31]Did you cover everything you needed to cover about it?
[2:34]Or are you still, I hope so.
[2:38]Got out of your system.
[2:41]Yeah.
[2:42]Yeah.
[2:43]Yeah, I don't think I'm going to be the Robert Caro of Separate Club, yeah.
[2:47]It's funny, when I was reading the beginning of your book, you wrote in such emotional
[2:53]authenticity about the miscarriage and how it felt in the bathroom, in the bar, like
[3:00]what that whole moment was like that I literally, and I was like, I could have sworn that
[3:05]he was a man, but that I literally like slipped to the back and I was like, no, no, it's
[3:09]the same person I'm thinking of just to make sure because it felt just so like, you know,
[3:14]you were just inside of anyway, not that not that the emotions behind a miscarriage do not
[3:19]also happen to any gender, but it just felt so specific.
[3:23]So anyway, I was hoping you could just talk about that and sort of writing into that
[3:27]and your own experiences, I know you mentioned any acknowledgements of your own, you know,
[3:33]child journey.
[3:34]Absolutely.
[3:35]Yeah.
[3:36]We had an incredible fertility battle in my partner, Brooke and I, and along the way, you
[3:40]know, miscarriages and miscarriages of, you know, IVF and Planet embryos, which is devastating,
[3:47]even though we were told kind of like the first one like, you know, cross your fingers,
[3:51]but don't expect it.
[3:52]It's still, yeah, I mean, it was a immense physical and emotional strain for her that
[3:59]I had a front row seat for and I shared the emotional strain.
[4:03]It felt like, I don't know how to describe it, it's, it was absolutely devastating.
[4:10]I mean, at one point, we actually kind of had a ceremony to let go of the memory and
[4:16]expectations that we had around one of the embryos that had, you know, made it more than
[4:23]a couple weeks and went up to Pizmo Beach, which is at which at the time was a place that
[4:29]was, we went to a lot when we wanted to get out of the city and, and like wrote a letter
[4:34]to the embryo and burned it and scattered the ashes in the ocean.
[4:39]So it was like a really intense emotional journey for us and I, as a man, I had never
[4:47]read a man writing about infertility or miscarriages in fiction, at least not in a way that
[4:54]I, I don't know, well, actually not at all, but, but certainly not in a way that I identified
[5:01]with emotionally that like this is an, this is an emotional component, not a plot element.
[5:06]And that was very important to me.
[5:08]This is not something that happens to move the story forward.
[5:11]This is something that changes these people and changes their decision making process
[5:16]and their general outlook.
[5:17]And so it, as it did for me and I wanted to see that essentially, I think I wrote the book
[5:23]for the person I was going through this.
[5:25]I wrote the book, I would have liked to have read when I was struggling with fertility
[5:29]and not yet seeing a light at the end of the tunnel.
[5:32]So I worked closely with broke my partner on these scenes and it was very painful for,
[5:38]rehash some of those moments.
[5:40]You know, of course, you know, we have a son now who's three and it's, it's somewhat easier
[5:44]to, I suppose, look back on it having ultimately been successful than if we weren't,
[5:50]but still to like emotionally relive these moments and put them on paper with something
[5:57]that she was totally on board with and in the room for it and she read every draft of the
[6:02]book and, and those scenes were, you know, she's like, this was my experience.
[6:08]You just wrote my experience down and I thought, well, I hope I, I did a justice because
[6:14]I did not bear the physical run of that experience just shared the emotional one with
[6:18]you.
[6:19]And she said, well, I think this should be out there.
[6:21]I think I'd like to see more of this in the world to more representations of, of infertility
[6:27]and fertility struggles.
[6:28]So yeah, and I agreed with her, it was a major component to me of this book, you know,
[6:34]it's not in the cover.
[6:35]I'm sure some readers are awfully disappointed thinking they're picking up a light summary
[6:39]and like wait a second, like I didn't expect a miscarriage to be in the first 10 pages.
[6:43]But in 100 years of the life of a family, there's going to be good and bad and I didn't
[6:46]want to pull back on either.
[6:48]Oh, well, I'm really sorry that you withdrew that.
[6:52]That's a beautiful imagery with the water.
[6:54]Oh my gosh.
[6:55]It breaks my heart.
[6:56]But, you know, so many people have gone through journeys and often we have no idea about
[7:02]each other's, you know, what we go through to get to where we are and sharing those
[7:06]little bits.
[7:07]It's very easy.
[7:08]Yeah, I think it was true.
[7:09]It feels such a nice-flating experience.
[7:11]Yeah.
[7:12]You know, and yeah, we found an online community.
[7:16]It was during COVID too, so, you know, people that are going through it as well, people
[7:22]are age, which meant a lot to us too.
[7:24]But yeah, it was, you know, I forget who originally said it, but most writers put the
[7:30]book they need to have in the world out.
[7:32]And this is the book I needed.
[7:34]My daughter, who's 10, was sitting next to me when I was reading some of this the other
[7:38]day.
[7:39]And she's like, what's it about?
[7:40]And I was like, oh, gosh.
[7:41]Something's having a miscarriage.
[7:42]And I was like, oh gosh.
[7:43]Someone's in a car accident.
[7:45]And she's like, a lot's happening in your book.
[7:48]And I was like, I know.
[7:51]Definitely, it is immersive from right at the beginning and then of course you go back
[7:56]in time and all that.
[7:59]So tell me about writing the structure of this.
[8:01]You had the idea for it and where you want to set it and some of the emotional authenticity
[8:05]behind it.
[8:06]But tell me about the act of writing it and different time periods and the characters
[8:11]and all of that.
[8:12]Right.
[8:13]Yeah.
[8:14]I started with Mario.
[8:15]I wrote each character discreetly.
[8:18]I completed each character story and then moved out to a different character.
[8:22]So I wrote all of the aerial first.
[8:25]And Mario's story has some of the lightest and heaviest elements in it.
[8:30]And so I knew I wanted to balance that out with stories that didn't have, well, that's
[8:36]story actually.
[8:37]It's the heaviest element.
[8:38]But I knew I needed some push pull.
[8:41]So I also realized that in writing Florence through Mario's size that I was really short
[8:46]changing Florence that to see Florence just purely through her daughter's eyes would
[8:52]potentially make Florence a would risk her being a stock comic character.
[8:57]And I I know and love too many women of a certain age from the Midwest to make any one
[9:02]of them a stock comic character and it's also been done.
[9:06]You know, I I don't want to add that to the world and in a, in a literary universe
[9:11]where there's still to my perception of posity of Midwestern voices and representations.
[9:17]I think if I'm going to write up like a working class Midwestern woman of a certain
[9:21]age, I'm going to do it as well as possible.
[9:24]And that meant that I had right from her point of view.
[9:27]The funny thing is I intentionally, I originally intended to have this book take place over
[9:31]a summer.
[9:33]I don't like Mario's story takes place over a summer and I thought everyone is.
[9:38]I'm just going to want to go to Florence.
[9:39]So it'll be Florence point of view of her sitting in that church and reminiscing about the
[9:43]decisions she made in life that made it there.
[9:45]And I went, what a second, Francis chapters are just these huge flashbacks.
[9:48]She sees terrible.
[9:50]Why don't I just make them active?
[9:52]I mean, oh, I mean, it's a gotta start in the 1930s.
[9:55]You know, and also in this book that was supposed to take place over one summer in 1896,
[9:59]takes place over.
[10:00]for a hundred years.
[10:01]So yeah, yeah, there you go.
[10:04]I mean, best laid plans of any author,
[10:06]but up and up through this book,
[10:08]I've been a pantser more than a platter.
[10:10]And so I'm surprised when these things
[10:14]as a writer sit down,
[10:15]I don't know what I'm going to do that day.
[10:17]I think I'm going to change that actually.
[10:18]It's really hard.
[10:20]Like I don't advise it.
[10:21]Like if you sit down to write a novel,
[10:23]don't just sit down every day
[10:24]without a thought in your head
[10:25]and just see what happens.
[10:26]It's a really long time
[10:29]to write it halfway deep and poke that way in.
[10:31]And whether or not this book is even halfway deep,
[10:33]deep, deep, deep, I'm for grabs.
[10:35]Like you'd be the judge.
[10:37]Yeah.
[10:39]I mean, at least halfway, yeah, thank you.
[10:43]Thanks to me.
[10:45]Wait, go back and tell me about how
[10:47]you got into writing to begin with.
[10:49]Right, right.
[10:50]I'm sorry, I got terribly aggressive.
[10:52]I get it from my dad.
[10:53]I got it right in the beginning
[10:54]because my mom, my mom was an aspiring writer
[10:57]and I published poet.
[10:58]I always wanted to write a novel.
[11:00]She had gone back to college
[11:02]to complete her bachelor's in English when I was a kid.
[11:05]And that was around the time
[11:06]that I realized how much writing reading was important.
[11:09]I mean, it was academically important
[11:11]at the time she had assignments and two dates and so on.
[11:14]But it was also clear that she really loved it.
[11:16]That she was going back and doing this
[11:18]as an adult in her 30s
[11:19]because this was important to her.
[11:22]And it was something she really loved.
[11:24]Up until then, she'd been a waitress at Perkins,
[11:26]which is a Midwest chain restaurant
[11:28]that Jorby's in my book is loosely based on.
[11:31]And I don't recall her coming home from that job
[11:38]with a sort of happiness or a general attitude
[11:42]that she displayed when she came home from her
[11:45]undergraduate classes.
[11:47]And I just thought, well, my mom's happy.
[11:48]My mom's loving what she's doing.
[11:50]She's reading and writing.
[11:51]And she already was a big reader and writer.
[11:53]Like their books everywhere around the house.
[11:55]And I just thought early on,
[11:58]I thought, if I really want to make my mom happy,
[11:59]I should write something.
[12:01]That would really impress her.
[12:02]She was the biggest influence in my life.
[12:04]And unfortunately, she passed away, I think, about a year or so
[12:09]before I even published my first short story.
[12:12]But 10 years before I published my first novel.
[12:14]And so she didn't love to see any of it.
[12:16]But I had a writing instructor in the early 2000s
[12:20]who was reading the short stories and was publishing.
[12:22]And said, you know, once you start writing about things
[12:24]you care about, your work's going to get a lot better.
[12:27]And I thought, well, it's, all right,
[12:29]that hit me right here, but you're not wrong.
[12:32]And I started thinking about what I was ignoring
[12:36]and addressing it through fiction as opposed to writing
[12:39]around it and writing to modify myself.
[12:43]You know, I was writing to resolve not to ignore.
[12:47]And that was a pretty big sea change.
[12:50]And that's when I started thinking like,
[12:52]I want my mom to be alive.
[12:54]I can't make that happen, but I can put her in my books.
[12:57]And I can communicate with her through my books
[12:59]and put her in my characters.
[13:01]And I've done that ever since.
[13:04]It's like the third time I've almost cried.
[13:05]Listen, how did you, can I ask how your mom passed away?
[13:11]I was cancer.
[13:11]It was a mental cancer.
[13:13]Yeah, it's not an organ.
[13:14]I'd heard it before.
[13:15]Oh, the momentum is like a momentum.
[13:18]I think it's like a intestinal lining, some kind.
[13:21]Yeah, it's not a vital organ.
[13:22]But it was a large one.
[13:23]And metastasized from our ovaries.
[13:25]But the proximate cause of death was
[13:27]lamental.
[13:28]And I remember talking to them, whoever
[13:30]writes the death certificate.
[13:31]What do I quote on his cause of death?
[13:33]And I said, oh, mental, please, that needs more research.
[13:36]I mean, I mean, not to deny whatever
[13:40]fraction of attention that my mom's ovarian cancer
[13:43]just might have supplied.
[13:45]But I just thought, well, this is something
[13:47]I never heard of, so let's do that.
[13:49]And it was in part a result, I think, of her work
[13:52]environment in the 70s and 80s, being a waitress
[13:55]in a smoky building.
[13:57]And so I wrote about that in the new book, too,
[13:59]like the environmental hazards that a lot of women
[14:03]working class women faced and how those jobs killed them.
[14:06]Yeah, so I'm making this book sound really heavy.
[14:13]Yeah, as you know, it's not just.
[14:15]Yeah, there actually is a fair amount of that kind
[14:18]of like summer getaway vibe to it.
[14:19]But it's the whole, I tried to make it the whole package.
[14:23]But yeah, long story short, my mom's influence
[14:26]both in terms of her desire to be a writer, her writing,
[14:30]and her life are in this book.
[14:32]You know, it's funny you say how powerful it is
[14:35]to how your mom was happy, because I
[14:38]feel like so many parents, a lot of women, a lot of moms,
[14:42]but a lot of parents are afraid to pursue what they really
[14:45]love if it takes time away from their kids,
[14:48]that time is the greatest currency.
[14:51]And then you forget that the modeling of pursuing something
[14:56]amazing can have far-lasting effects and just being around.
[15:00]You're absolutely right, Sivi.
[15:01]Unfortunately, I had the experience of seeing
[15:03]both my parents do that.
[15:04]My dad returned to college and got his degree in his late 40s.
[15:09]And I thought that was just as cool.
[15:10]Like never there's never, it's never too late to a U-turn,
[15:14]you know, take a 90 degree turn, whatever analogy.
[15:18]And yeah, and he was a great deal happy.
[15:20]I'd never seen him happier in my life
[15:22]than when he quit his job and told us he was going back
[15:25]to college.
[15:26]I'd never seen that man smile bigger.
[15:28]And that's what makes him impression on me.
[15:30]I wasn't thinking at the time, like, oh, you just quit
[15:32]your job, what are we going to do?
[15:34]You know, like, how are we going to like
[15:35]go on our summer vacations every year,
[15:38]am I going to get that brand of jeans I want,
[15:39]or whatever, you know, material, things
[15:42]that a lot of teenagers can be preoccupied with
[15:45]in terms of just day to day life.
[15:46]And that just went out the window when I saw his face.
[15:48]I just thought, well, good, this is an overall
[15:51]net and gross positive for our family.
[15:53]Like to have a happy father is much better
[15:55]than anything that material offering
[15:57]that his former job could have provided.
[15:59]You feel like you are a happy father?
[16:01]Yeah, yeah, I feel fortunately so.
[16:04]I mean, it's been a stressful year that's had nothing
[16:08]to do with parenting, you know,
[16:10]just the circumstances around like, you know,
[16:11]a treat on our house and, you know,
[16:13]we're in a rental house up at the insurance companies
[16:16]paying for that has its own issues.
[16:18]And I think it's been hard on my son to be displaced.
[16:21]Like he asks, like, when can I see my toys again?
[16:23]And, you know, and stuff like that.
[16:25]It's, but he's a versatile, hardy kid.
[16:28]You know, and we sometimes forget that.
[16:30]The kids are pretty adaptable.
[16:32]Like I think we take it harder than he does.
[16:33]And he's showing us how to have a good time every day.
[16:37]And, you know, and taking them out in the world
[16:40]and just exploring the world and the neighborhood
[16:42]we're in now is, it's fun.
[16:44]But yeah, I think he got me to good time.
[16:46]I'm a far better father, present, you know,
[16:49]domestic circumstances aside vis-a-vis living situation.
[16:53]I'm a far better place now to be a dad
[16:55]and I would have been 10 years ago,
[16:57]so certainly 20 years ago.
[16:59]And, you know, much more wiser, more patient,
[17:03]color and much more secure in my career.
[17:05]I feel like I'm really blessed
[17:07]that timing ultimately worked out when it did.
[17:10]I mean, I guess in a sense,
[17:12]we had the, had a child the last possible viable
[17:15]biological time we could have in that
[17:17]without great assistance.
[17:19]Yeah, but, oh, a damn it, what a blessing that kid is.
[17:23]You know, it just puts a smile on my face every time
[17:25]I think of him.
[17:26]Oh, my gosh.
[17:27]And so when do you get all your stuff done?
[17:30]When do you do your best?
[17:31]Oh, yeah, when he's sleeping.
[17:36]Yeah, it was so far happening.
[17:38]Yeah, pretty much the stay at home dead.
[17:40]My partner's a nurse, you know, it's a demanding job
[17:43]and she comes home and she doesn't want, you know,
[17:45]the idea of like being a 100% parent
[17:47]when you come home, it's like, hey, I've been
[17:49]pairing all day and she's like,
[17:50]good for you, I'm exhausted.
[17:51]Yeah, you know, it's like, all right, well, you know,
[17:55]so we have nights on and nights off.
[17:58]Yeah, you know, we alternate.
[17:59]We have what we call like divorce a nights, you know,
[18:01]where a calendar, it's like, hey, like just pretend
[18:04]I'm not here, you know, and that's the night
[18:07]that the other one can like go up for friends or do nothing
[18:10]to sit on the couch and scroll or read a book
[18:13]or watch Happy Valley or, you know, just, yeah.
[18:17]And so it helps that it's codified that
[18:21]on any given day someone is not doing all the work.
[18:24]Yeah, because it is, it is a lot of work,
[18:26]especially when they're young and, you know,
[18:28]they can always communicate what they need or want
[18:30]effectively.
[18:31]So yeah, full-time stay home writer.
[18:33]So enough a lot can fall on me.
[18:36]And I therefore have to set up boundaries in certain days
[18:38]where I'm like, oh man, I'm on a roll.
[18:40]I know he's up from his nap, but can I keep writing
[18:43]for another hour, you know, we worked that out.
[18:46]Yeah.
[18:47]What do you just lock the door?
[18:49]Well, I'll go down and say, I'll just say like, yeah,
[18:54]he can climb stairs now.
[18:55]So it's an open door.
[18:58]So yeah, what are you doing, Daddy?
[19:03]Yeah, yeah, no, he's interested in it.
[19:05]Like, but he's his relationship with my writing,
[19:08]I think is really funny.
[19:09]I mean, it'll evolve, obviously,
[19:11]but it kind of like the face that it's in where
[19:13]he sees a copy of my new book around the house.
[19:15]And like, this is Daddy's book.
[19:18]And he's conflated the notions of creation and ownership.
[19:23]So he's, this is Daddy's book.
[19:25]He's Daddy wrote it, but it also belongs to Daddy.
[19:27]And I must return it to him.
[19:29]Oh, yeah, I have more, more than a few copies of the book
[19:32]started around for various reasons.
[19:34]And when he sees when he has to bring it to me,
[19:37]like this is Daddy's book.
[19:38]Here you go, Daddy, you know, it's really cute.
[19:40]It's really cute, yeah.
[19:42]So are you working on anything else now?
[19:45]Oh, God, no, not yet.
[19:46]I mean, I started writing a new book in January,
[19:50]but then when the tree fell on our house,
[19:52]like I've kind of had to become a project manager
[19:55]when my son's in preschool, and that's
[19:57]what I'm going to be doing after this call.
[19:58]I'm going to drive up to that.
[20:00]I was in the supervisor, the demolition replacement
[20:03]of the irrigation system.
[20:04]Oh my gosh.
[20:05]I'm gonna go all week.
[20:06]Yeah, that was crushed by a different tree.
[20:08]What?
[20:09]Yeah, isn't that funny?
[20:11]Yeah, it broke one sprinkler head.
[20:13]So therefore the entire irrigation system
[20:15]is being replaced by insurance, which is a good thing.
[20:17]But it's still, I'm not writing, you know.
[20:21]It's like, well, I gotta be there and make sure
[20:22]I know what's happening.
[20:24]I don't need to get two in the weeds with all that.
[20:26]But yeah, I was speaking to a fellow writer
[20:29]named Sherman, Sherman Craig, who's
[20:31]house kind of fire a couple years ago.
[20:33]And she said, it wasn't until that whole process
[20:36]was remediated and the house was fixed
[20:39]that she started writing again.
[20:40]She said, don't put pressure on yourself
[20:41]to write when you're displaced from your home
[20:43]and every day is provisional and there's projects happening
[20:46]at your house and, you know, like she said,
[20:49]take the pressure off yourself.
[20:50]And I've been trying to do that.
[20:51]But that said, when things are moving along, you know,
[20:55]the dry walls up right now, the roof's back on the house,
[20:58]and I think I can do it.
[21:00]You know, and he's in preschool and I'm at home
[21:02]and you're like, all right, so I can just kind of ease back
[21:07]and maybe start going on it again.
[21:09]Maybe next year, we'll be in one tractor.
[21:12]Oh, God, yeah, I don't know.
[21:14]Yeah, yeah, yeah, I know.
[21:16]All this stuff, it just like goes into the thing
[21:18]and then it mixes up and then who knows where it'll come out.
[21:21]All right, have you ever had an unexpected experience
[21:24]that ended up in your writing?
[21:26]Have you ever, you know?
[21:28]There's some more experience where like,
[21:30]I didn't think I'd be writing about this topic
[21:32]or this kind of character, but this thing just happened to me
[21:34]and now I gotta resolve it.
[21:35]I've had stuff that I have long not thought about.
[21:38]Yeah, that comes bubbling up and I'm like,
[21:40]oh my gosh, I guess that was bothering me.
[21:43]Oh, yeah, right, right, right, right, right.
[21:46]But maybe not, not, I don't know.
[21:48]No, I'll be on really hard part.
[21:49]All right, yeah.
[21:51]You too.
[21:51]Yeah, so it's possible, I can't rule it out.
[21:54]Yeah, I'll never know.
[21:56]Maybe in 20 years,
[21:57]probably not.
[21:58]You know what?
[21:59]And that's who we are.
[22:00]Yeah.
[22:01]And I know you're dead,
[22:02]but this jail resident's are whatever.
[22:04]Right, right, right.
[22:05]That's true.
[22:06]Yeah, a little close to the blast radius now
[22:09]to find it interesting to write about.
[22:10]Yeah.
[22:11]Yeah.
[22:12]That's true.
[22:13]Yeah.
[22:14]Exactly.
[22:15]Why did you move to California?
[22:17]Oh, for work.
[22:17]I came out here to work in the entertainment industry.
[22:19]I had an instructor in college who said he was going
[22:22]to interview me to be a assistant at CBS.
[22:25]I went to college at Northwestern
[22:26]in Evanston.
[22:28]And so I moved out here and I didn't get the job.
[22:30]But that's fine.
[22:31]I would have been a lousy executive assistant
[22:33]at a TV network.
[22:34]And as it turns out, my first job in the entertainment industry
[22:39]was an executive assistant at a TV network guy
[22:42]and V1 for Jane Lipzitz who figured out in three months,
[22:45]what David Sucker knew instantly that I'm not a good assistant.
[22:48]But she had the wisdom and kindness to not fire me,
[22:52]but divert me into a production.
[22:54]And at the time, each one was still a music channel.
[22:57]And I was excited about working in music programming.
[23:00]But while I was there, it evolved into what it is now,
[23:02]just a reality channel.
[23:04]And I ended up by a dent of that.
[23:05]And you end up usually in the entertainment industry, usually
[23:08]the latter you start out as the one you're stuck on.
[23:11]And so yeah, I ended up working in reality television
[23:13]for 14 years.
[23:14]Thankfully, I got to work on some interesting shows.
[23:17]Deadly as catch, and iceberg truckers, and deadly as roads,
[23:20]and storage wars, probably being my favorite of that,
[23:23]that grew, yeah.
[23:24]And I was working on a spin-off called Storage Wars
[23:27]Texas at the time I wrote my first book.
[23:29]Oh, wow.
[23:30]Yeah.
[23:31]I lived in LA in the late 90s.
[23:33]And I would wake up early before my job in studio city
[23:37]and work out to the VH1.
[23:40]They called it like the early morning, whatever it was,
[23:43]do you know what I mean?
[23:44]Yeah.
[23:45]Yeah.
[23:46]That was always on in the gym in my building.
[23:48]And so I was, that was what got me through like every morning
[23:52]when I used to actually make time to work out.
[23:54]And all that kind of VH1.
[23:56]It was like the morning something, and I'll come down.
[23:58]You know, hold it.
[23:59]Yeah, it'll come to me too.
[24:01]But yeah, back in the day.
[24:02]Yeah.
[24:03]Do you have a favorite book that you're reading now?
[24:05]Oh, wow.
[24:06]You know what, I really am into the overstory
[24:11]of our Richard Powers.
[24:12]I read it earlier this year, and I'm going to read it again.
[24:15]At least the first half.
[24:16]I really love what he does in the first half
[24:17]with diversity of voices and their distinctiveness.
[24:21]That's his level of craft that that is what I aspire to.
[24:25]I think Jennifer Egan does extremely well as well.
[24:28]You know, I want to read her latest book.
[24:30]I loved visit from the Goon Squad.
[24:32]That was one of the books that influenced me to write kitchens.
[24:35]Yeah, both in kind of style and format.
[24:39]But yeah, probably the book I'm thinking and talking
[24:41]about the most right now is the overstory, you know,
[24:42]which is not even powers as new as book.
[24:45]Yeah.
[24:46]I've six years ago, but yeah, I'm always looking
[24:49]for books that have different point of view characters
[24:53]and take liberties with narrative structure.
[24:56]Because I find that's kind of my default.
[24:59]Or that's, I don't know.
[25:00]I feel like I have such an inclusive sense of the community
[25:03]and my imagination that I just want to hear
[25:07]from a lot of different people.
[25:09]I want everyone's voice to be heard, right?
[25:12]Very like lowercase D democratic ideals when it comes to narrative.
[25:16]But I also love the unreliability and insularity
[25:20]of the close third voice.
[25:22]And so whenever anyone does a close third alternating
[25:25]POV characters, I'm like, let me at it, you know, what about
[25:29]you?
[25:30]What about yourself?
[25:31]What are you reading?
[25:32]Oh, I read this book called Saturday Night at the Lakeside.
[25:35]Oh, yeah.
[25:37]I heard that as close third alternating point of view.
[25:39]I don't know.
[25:40]I mean, this is my nightstand.
[25:43]So, you know, anyway, do you have any last question?
[25:47]Do you have any advice for aspiring authors?
[25:50]Oh, wow.
[25:51]I wouldn't say don't think about the marketplace.
[25:54]Yeah.
[25:55]I didn't, you know, for kitchens.
[25:57]I thought, well, you know, I only thought about it in this
[25:59]since I thought a book that kitchens with a great Midwest
[26:01]doesn't exist yet, so I've had to write it.
[26:03]And then a part of me thought, you know, wait a second.
[26:06]There's never been a novel set within the world
[26:09]of Midwestern food before.
[26:10]Oh, man, I better be the first one.
[26:12]I bet everyone's going to try to write that and fill that
[26:14]hole, you know.
[26:15]And then I thought, wait a second.
[26:17]There's never been a novel set within the world of Midwestern
[26:20]food.
[26:22]But here, pushers run screaming from that.
[26:24]You know, it's like, probably a very good reason for that.
[26:27]Like, who cares about a lot of this, you know?
[26:30]And on the coast, you know, but luckily, Pam Dorman did.
[26:34]And, you know, that book set the tone for the rest of my
[26:36]career.
[26:36]And I remember just sitting and thinking, like, you know what?
[26:39]Four people are going to read this book, you know?
[26:42]And like it.
[26:43]And I was, I thought, like my dad, my grandma, my girlfriend,
[26:46]you know, my brother.
[26:47]And I was wrong.
[26:48]My grandma hated it over friends.
[26:52]I will never recommend this book to anybody.
[26:54]Yeah.
[26:54]It said that to me, you know, she's 98.
[26:58]She can say whatever she wants.
[26:59]So yeah.
[27:00]And she was, you know, only only like, she was only 90 then.
[27:05]But yeah, no, it's still a big breeder.
[27:08]And I felt like, you know what?
[27:11]Yeah, most importantly, and it's real quick for context.
[27:14]I had written a book that I'll never see the live
[27:16]day before then.
[27:17]And so any, any idea of like making a big splash with my
[27:20]debut novel was firmly disabused by them.
[27:23]I thought, oh, man, kitchens is a great Midwest and
[27:26]you know, me met with the same cars, the crickets that my
[27:28]earlier manuscript did.
[27:29]So going into a new expectations that anyone's going to
[27:32]care and just liberated me to write the book that I wanted.
[27:36]And it turns out that other people happen to agree with me
[27:40]that they wanted really to.
[27:42]And I felt very, very fortunate that that happened.
[27:45]Yeah, it's incredibly lucky turn of events.
[27:50]Well, I hope that your house construction goes OK.
[27:54]And I do have a really good contractor in LA if you ever get
[27:57]stranded, just let me know.
[27:59]Oh, wow, wow.
[28:00]And oh, wow, that's so nice to hear.
[28:02]So far is this great.
[28:03]But we'll let you know.
[28:04]OK, you know, it's hard to get hard to find.
[28:07]You're right, you're right.
[28:09]It's like the fourth one we interviewed.
[28:10]Yeah.
[28:11]Well, well, I hope to meet you out there at some point.
[28:13]And good luck.
[28:15]And take care and thanks for being someone.
[28:16]Oh, thanks so much to be.
[28:18]OK, all right.
[28:19]Have a great day.
[28:20]You too.
[28:20]Bye bye.
[28:22]Thanks for listening to this episode of Moms Don't Have Time
[28:25]to Read Books.
[28:26]Don't forget to follow me on Instagram, at Zibi Owens,
[28:29]and at Moms Don't Have Time to Read Books.
[28:31]Also sign up for my newsletter at Zibi Owens.com and sign up for
[28:34]my virtual book club and meet lots of authors on Zoom every
[28:37]other week.
[28:38]Thanks so much to Steve and Ryan Fett,
[28:40]Texture Sound for the Sound Editing.
[28:42]And thank you to Morning Moon Productions for providing
[28:44]this fantastic intro and out trim music.