Angelica Baker, WHEN WE GROW UP: A Novel
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[0:44]Angela Baker is the author of When We Grow Up, A Novel.
[0:48]She is also the author of Our Little Record.
[0:50]Her essays and reviews have appeared in The New York Times, Vogue, Los Angeles Review
[0:55]of Books, and Literary Hub.
[0:56]She lives in Eugene, Oregon, with her husband in two cents.
[0:59]Welcome, and Jelga.
[1:00]Thank you so much for coming on to discuss When We Grow Up, A Novel Congrats.
[1:06]Thank you.
[1:07]Okay, your book opens their bunch of friends sitting in Hawaii who get a notice that an
[1:14]inbound missile is on the way, and they might die.
[1:17]And oh my gosh, what do you even do with that?
[1:21]Tell us in our about the book, where this idea came from, the whole thing.
[1:24]So this people might know if they're listening this happened in January 2018.
[1:29]This is not a made up circumstance, and when it happened, I was on a vacation with
[1:34]people I had known since I was 12 years old.
[1:36]And they are sort of my wider group of friends from high school.
[1:41]Many of them have stayed really, really close, and they travel together every year in
[1:44]January.
[1:45]And I had actually not gone on the January trip at that point in like 10 years.
[1:50]And it was right after I had my first book had come out, and my husband and I were engaged.
[1:55]She was in Japan doing research for the year, so I had been on my own in New York for
[1:58]a couple of months.
[1:59]I was going to Japan, and I was just kind of like, you know what, I'll go on the strip
[2:01]with my high school friends.
[2:02]I hadn't seen some of them in like five years.
[2:05]And that happened the first morning.
[2:07]And so really weird feeling of both that it was your mind kind of like rejected whatever
[2:15]sort of bigger things you think you would do in a near, it was in your death situation,
[2:19]but you weren't reacting that way because it was kind of like, well, what?
[2:22]It was just like, well, we're waiting to see, and you're also your mind wanted to think
[2:25]it wasn't real because as it turned out, it wasn't, so that was the likelyest outcome.
[2:30]But it was just so such a massive thing to try to wrap your mind around.
[2:34]And then I also had this feeling of like, well, I mean, these are the people who have
[2:37]known me longer than almost anyone else in my life, but also like I hadn't seen some of
[2:40]them in five years.
[2:41]I was like, maybe it's far better than we're all getting together, but it also feels
[2:44]really weird.
[2:45]So it only lasted for 45 minutes.
[2:48]And even before the official 45 minute mark when we got the follow-up message that
[2:52]it had been a mistake.
[2:53]We were all on Twitter.
[2:54]There were reporters on Twitter who had called central community lawyers and like, so
[2:58]we had figured out it wasn't real.
[3:00]But it was this kind of thing where we all just kind of sat there frozen.
[3:03]We were like, well, I don't know.
[3:05]What are we going to do with this?
[3:06]And so that was the original kind of spark.
[3:09]Oh my gosh, you wrote in the beginning.
[3:11]But when she looks up at everyone else, they're in motion, flitting back and forth between
[3:14]the house and the deck.
[3:15]No one else is sitting still or even sitting down.
[3:18]She tries to refuse the terror, any space, to rampage, holding herself still the way you might
[3:23]hold a glass of water high in the air during an earthquake's initial lurch.
[3:27]Because all the possibilities are laughable, right?
[3:30]The image of what of dying?
[3:32]The image doesn't exist in her brain.
[3:33]It's an unwelcome specter scorched from the edge of a future photograph.
[3:38]If the missile hits the ocean right now, then what?
[3:41]When will she be dead?
[3:42]How long will she sit here first wondering exactly how much time she has left?
[3:45]Love that.
[3:46]This disaster movie scenario and your brain does not really widen to take into account
[3:52]what if you're in disaster movie, like it just, it feels, so then you're making
[3:55]these jokes and you're kind of underreacting if it's real, you're sort of like both over
[4:00]and underreacting at the same time and it was, you know, it was surreal.
[4:05]And then it was nothing, which was also kind of like the perfect topper at that point
[4:09]in time.
[4:10]It wasn't even real danger.
[4:11]Oh my gosh.
[4:12]And then of course you go into the relationships between the characters and lust and comfort
[4:18]and friendship and loyalty and all of that.
[4:20]So take me through that and what was going on with your friends.
[4:24]Without a worry, yeah, so that was the very initial idea.
[4:28]Just that kind of moment of getting that news and wondering if you're about to die and
[4:31]looking at the people you're with.
[4:33]And then obviously in real life our trip proceeded and was totally fun and pedestrian
[4:37]and, you know, nothing, nothing, nothing bad happened.
[4:39]But I started thinking about that moment sort of what it would reveal to a group of people
[4:47]where there were all these other tensions kind of already flying high at that point
[4:52]in time by the very first morning of the trip.
[4:54]Things are already tense.
[4:55]Claire, as it turns out, and this is not really a spoiler because it's revealed on
[4:59]like page five.
[5:00]But she has, for the first time, cheated on her husband on this trip.
[5:05]So that's already happened.
[5:06]And so she has this moment of feeling like if only I could just say that like I did this
[5:10]after this because this would be sort of an excuse for this bad behavior.
[5:15]One of the kind of running things in the book is that they're all kind of always looking
[5:19]for excuses for bad behavior.
[5:20]And so they kind of seize on this first morning where everything feels wrong all of a sudden.
[5:25]And so the vibes are off for the rest of the trip.
[5:28]People are feeling insecure and are embarrassed about the way they react it and she's embarrassed
[5:33]about her behavior, which predates the sort of this horrible thing that happens.
[5:38]So everybody's kind of from that point on just the ground beneath their feet doesn't feel
[5:41]solid anymore.
[5:42]And so I was really, even though that wasn't really what happened in real life, I was really
[5:45]interested.
[5:47]I just had that image of these people sitting in this room, waiting to see if they were
[5:51]going to die and then being like, oh, we have to spend another week here together.
[5:54]Like we kind of all just want to like split up right now and guard separate ways and not
[5:58]talk about the fact that this just happened.
[6:00]But now we're going to spend a week together and there's also 15 years of baggage and
[6:05]tension and history predating this missile text that we got that sort of also coming into
[6:10]play.
[6:12]And why did you decide to put it in third person?
[6:16]Yeah, it was kind of a question when I first started writing this book because my first
[6:20]book is in the third person because it moves between five or six different women.
[6:24]I mean, it's it's very much sort of we talk a little more about your first book and
[6:29]just give us the general focus called our little rocket and it takes place in September
[6:33]2008.
[6:34]It's another kind of very specific moment in a real world timeline.
[6:39]In a similar way, it's not based on anyone real.
[6:42]It's sort of drawing from all these different ideas about real people in the real world
[6:46]that existed, but it is about the CEO of an investment bank who's bank fails in 2008.
[6:52]But it is about the women in the community.
[6:54]So his wife, his daughter, their nanny, his wife's best friend, their daughter's best friend
[6:57]and they all have sort of different.
[6:59]Yeah, what interested me was writing about that time in New York and in Connecticut, which
[7:03]is where the book is sat and writing about that time in the world of sort of the social
[7:07]world of finance from the perspective of the women who have one foot and one foot out.
[7:11]So they can realistically say they didn't know what was going on, but they're also very
[7:14]deeply woven into the fabric of this community and they're also very deliberately kept
[7:18]separate in a way that, you know, the CEO of this investment bank exists in a very male
[7:23]dominated world and his wife is very marginalized from that aspect of his life.
[7:28]So I was very uninterested in writing a financial thriller about the bank and I was very
[7:33]interested in writing about the women that were sort of frustratingly sidelined, but also
[7:38]kind of saved from that, but also kind of cut out from putting together their own taking
[7:44]it in ownership role and what was going to happen to them.
[7:47]So that book very logically to me was in the third person because I felt like I wanted
[7:53]it wasn't, the narrator was an omniscient, I wasn't sort of telling you all these things
[7:58]the women didn't know, but I was sort of darting between different women and looking
[8:02]at the same same three different perspectives.
[8:04]For this book, it was, it was very different.
[8:06]I really wanted to stay.
[8:08]I did not want to give a portrayal of this group of friends that sort of took into account
[8:13]everybody's perspective.
[8:14]I was sort of from the beginning, I knew that I was going to be very, very close to
[8:18]Claire and her thoughts.
[8:20]And when you're letting on Mac or Jesse or someone else's thoughts, whether about
[8:26]Claire or about the situation, you're getting them, however honest, they're willing to
[8:30]be to her face.
[8:31]Not only hearing about them really from her perspective still.
[8:34]So there was this kind of question for a while of whether I wanted to write it in the
[8:37]first person, but I just kept kind of resisting that in the very, very early drafts because
[8:44]she's at such an inflection point in her life where she's so mysterious to herself, almost
[8:49]she's so kind of unhappy and not really clear on why she's unhappy.
[8:54]And I think her husband is not on this trip.
[8:58]Her hearing sort of little tidbits about their marriage from her in flashback and sort
[9:02]of little things she's thinking about throughout the book, but you only really hear from
[9:06]her husband.
[9:07]He calls her on the phone at the very, very end of the book.
[9:10]And I just felt like she in the first person, it and again, this is very close.
[9:16]It's a very close third, but she's just kind of not, she's kind of holding her thoughts
[9:22]at a distance because I mean, she's depressed.
[9:24]She's having a really hard time well before she goes on this trip.
[9:27]So that was something that it just felt more natural to me.
[9:30]And so once I kept realizing that in the early drafts, I just kind of went with that.
[9:34]I feel like sometimes people have to use this fear, right?
[9:39]Fear of what if to sort of jolt them back into handling the present a little bit differently
[9:44]and whether that's this novel, which is an eventuality where like this could have happened
[9:49]or this did have into your whatever, or just like those moments where you sit there and
[9:54]you're like, I'm going to die.
[9:55]I'm going to die.
[9:56]Do you know what I mean?
[9:57]Like, what do we do with all of that?
[9:59]Because...
[10:00]Of course, to go on, we have to suspend the, just, we have to like just put that out of
[10:06]our heads, or we'd all just be, I don't know, crying.
[10:08]So what do we do with that and where did you come out after really examining this?
[10:13]I think that another thing that's really going on in the book is both, it's set in January
[10:19]2018 because that is when this happened in the real world, but it's also a very specific
[10:23]moment where these are people who, you know, probably attended a women's march and were
[10:29]feeling sort of politically fired up about a year before this book takes place.
[10:35]And that sort of initial fervor for whatever they're sort of fears or whatever's getting
[10:40]them, making them feel active and engaged politically or, you know, socially or whatever
[10:45]has sort of faded.
[10:47]And so then it's like, okay, well, this is now the next three years, four years,
[10:51]10 years, 20 years.
[10:52]I mean, this is now, what are you going to do about this?
[10:55]And something that really felt evocative to me about the missile alert and that the fake
[11:00]thickness of it is that you're not actually in a media danger, right?
[11:03]You guys are actually leading your life, continuing as you were.
[11:08]The immediate danger is distant from you is not something, even though you briefly felt
[11:12]it is not real.
[11:13]And so what are you going to do with that and how has this been a propel you forward?
[11:18]And then it's kind of one of the animating questions of the book where I don't want to
[11:20]get too much into specifics at the end of the book.
[11:24]There are a lot of things Claire could do when she gets home from this vacation and actually
[11:27]one of her friends says to her at one point, you know, you can like, you can make some
[11:31]changes that aren't blowing up your whole life.
[11:33]You can kind of change a few things and go from there and see how it goes and not just
[11:38]sort of throw yourself from one extreme to the other.
[11:41]And it's not, you know, the book leaves everyone in a very uncertain place.
[11:45]It's very unclear sort of where this group friendship is going from this, you know, where
[11:51]Claire's individual relationships with people in this group, where the group as a whole,
[11:55]where there are sort of individual ways that they're interacting with their lives separate
[11:59]from each other, you know, the roles they're playing in their own relationships, separate
[12:02]from this group.
[12:03]There are a lot of directions that could go and it really is kind of like you may, this
[12:08]may have no effect, right, which is often what happens in real life.
[12:12]And I do think something I'm always kind of pushing against as a writer is there's like
[12:16]a real desire sometimes from people reading stuff to say like, well, you know, this has
[12:22]to people have to make do big things and make big swings and do big actions.
[12:27]And that's actually not how most of us live our lives for most, for the most part.
[12:32]And I'm interested in those kind of interstitial moments where, you know, there could be
[12:36]this big blow out or there could be this big, everything could change, but actually
[12:40]what happens.
[12:41]You actually keep fumbling along, making along the same space.
[12:44]And I think that's dramatically compelling too, but it's more challenging and if you're
[12:48]writing a thriller where like everything that's happening is having huge consequences.
[12:51]And so that's kind of a challenge that I'm interested in with my first book.
[12:55]I was interested in, you know, you're watching this family kind of implode in slow motion
[13:00]over six months.
[13:01]It's not like a huge cataclysmic and even if you look at where the family ends up,
[13:06]it's cataclysmic to the people inside, it doesn't look cataclysmic from the outside
[13:12]things have not changed as, you know, it's not like they're living on the street and
[13:15]he's in jail and, you know, they never speak to each other again.
[13:18]It's just cataclysmic for the children experiencing it.
[13:21]So that's kind of a challenge that I always find myself butting up against.
[13:25]And I really wanted to do that with this too.
[13:27]It's not something where they don't fly home right away.
[13:31]The missile isn't real.
[13:32]They don't talk honestly about almost anything that's going on until the end.
[13:36]They have this huge blow out fight and then they kind of just wake up the next morning
[13:39]and kind of agree to not talk about it, which also to me feels very accurate to kind
[13:44]of group friend dynamics.
[13:46]So that's kind of something I wanted to explore.
[13:48]Do you feel like riding the book has helped you grow up a little bit?
[13:52]It's so strange because I don't really identify with most things.
[13:57]We're always joking about that.
[13:58]I have to say this because I'm married and it was not, you know, my husband's always
[14:02]like, I'm sure you don't people, but I don't really identify with, there are a lot of
[14:06]of things about Claire that I don't identify with.
[14:08]I don't feel like I wrote someone who is myself.
[14:12]But there is a sense of sort of rootlessness and she's turning 30.
[14:17]I was turning 30, you know, the year that I went on this trip.
[14:20]And I did kind of have this sensation of I just published my first book.
[14:25]That was over.
[14:26]Like it had been this huge thing that I've been working toward, you know, up until that
[14:30]year and then it happened.
[14:31]And I had this feeling of like from now on all the choices I make are going to be like
[14:36]limiting kind of narrowing my options going forward instead of when I was 22, it just kind
[14:42]of felt like, who knows, like, I do this and then I do this and I was totally rootless
[14:45]in a way that was very scary a lot of the time.
[14:48]I mean, when I was living in New York and trying to finish my book and extremely, extremely
[14:52]broke and, you know, just very precarious in a lot of ways.
[14:57]That was rootless in a different way.
[14:58]But I just felt like I was turning 30 and it was like, okay, if I make this decision
[15:01]and I like have concluded six other ones, which is always true, but did not feel true to
[15:07]me when I was 22 in the same way.
[15:08]And obviously now I look at turning 30 and I laugh because since I turned 30, I've had two
[15:13]small children and so I'm like, well, yeah, things are things are really on a narrow track
[15:16]right now.
[15:17]I have two children under the age of three.
[15:18]But I don't think that's necessarily true.
[15:21]And even if it were true, I don't think it's necessarily a bad thing.
[15:23]I think it's just an absolute truth about growing up, but also just being in relationship
[15:29]with other human beings in the world, like you, you can't just do anything at any given
[15:33]time for your entire life.
[15:35]So it's not upsetting in the same way that it was, but it did, there was a moment and
[15:41]I don't know how much of it was just purely about aging and being, you know, a woman and
[15:45]turning 30.
[15:46]I mean, who knows?
[15:47]But it did feel very much when I was turning 30, like, okay, like I've made these decisions
[15:51]that I didn't know were decisions at the time and now it's kind of like, now I can't
[15:54]go back and make any other decisions, which is again, like the most obvious thing in the
[15:58]world.
[15:59]But I do think writing about this moment and this feeling, I think a lot of times I write
[16:03]about stuff that's that's important to me, but I can't really write about it until a few
[16:08]years later.
[16:09]I can't really think through like, it's kind of interesting to look at now where I'm like,
[16:12]I can't really remember this feeling of like feeling this kind of panic, but very much
[16:17]what the book is about.
[16:18]So I do think sometimes it's like it just lags a couple years behind where I'm also
[16:22]writing a publishing book takes a while.
[16:23]So it makes sense.
[16:24]True.
[16:25]Have you been working on a new project since this or fall in on this?
[16:30]So I always kind of blame my children for how long it took me to write this book and it's
[16:34]not really fair because I had time before I had children.
[16:36]But my first son was born in 2021 and my second son was born last year, 2024.
[16:43]And so I was, I think I was like just racing to get a draft of this finished before I
[16:47]had my first child.
[16:48]And then I sold this book in between kind of right around the time I got pregnant with
[16:53]my second child, I think.
[16:54]So then I was trying to finish a draft.
[16:57]My husband and I moved cross country.
[16:58]I was pregnant.
[17:00]We got here.
[17:01]I was working remotely.
[17:02]We had no child care yet.
[17:03]And I was trying to finish this draft for my, I'd already sold it, but I was trying to finish
[17:06]the final draft for my editor.
[17:08]And then my copy edits were due.
[17:09]I have pictures with my second son where he's like asleep on my chest and I'm like on
[17:14]my computer.
[17:15]So it was so crazy.
[17:17]But I also think I had this false confidence where I was like, oh, I like got this book
[17:20]finished during the period of time when I had two children.
[17:22]But I already had a complete draft for my first child.
[17:26]And so now I'm trying to work on something new.
[17:29]And I feel like it's, I just, it's completely from scratch and it's such a different thing.
[17:35]And it's such a different part of the process.
[17:36]And I'm just like, oh my God, how am I ever going to do this?
[17:39]Honestly, I don't even know how you were doing it to begin with.
[17:41]I mean, I could not do anything.
[17:43]I was, it was like hard to do my emails back then.
[17:45]It was like, so the fact that you're putting out works of creative.
[17:49]It was.
[17:50]So we'll see.
[17:52]But it is right now it does feel like this thing where the kind of like, my husband and
[17:58]I think both my husband's also a writer, but very different.
[18:01]He's a history professor.
[18:02]So he's also working on a book right now.
[18:03]And I think we both, the thing that the kind of push poll that we both really struggled
[18:07]with in parenthood is that we both kind of require so much like quiet times and like, that's
[18:13]kind of something you just never get again for a while.
[18:16]I don't know.
[18:17]I don't know if your children are older and maybe that comes back.
[18:18]But like, even, and we're so fortunate.
[18:21]I mean, we pay for childcare and have our children in daycare.
[18:24]And so technically do have time every day when they're not physically in the house.
[18:29]But it's just the amount of quiet time I feel like I need inside my head to start a brand
[18:34]new book as opposed to like, dive back and then keep editing something that already exists.
[18:39]Just feels so insurmountable right now.
[18:41]And so.
[18:42]So now it's okay.
[18:43]It's not always the time to produce.
[18:45]Sometimes you need inputs.
[18:46]Right.
[18:47]You're getting all the inputs right now and then you can do something with it later.
[18:51]But if you don't get out there and do the living, right?
[18:54]Yeah.
[18:55]Any advice to aspiring authors?
[18:56]Well, following on what we were just talking about, I do think that just do it if not
[19:01]every day and there are going to be plenty of times in your life when you can't do it
[19:04]every day.
[19:05]But I heard, I wish I could credit who said this because someone said this a long time ago
[19:08]that like you just need to open the word document on the top.
[19:11]Yeah.
[19:12]It's okay.
[19:13]If you're not getting meaningful work done every day for months or years of your life.
[19:18]But like, try to keep it at the forefront of your mind.
[19:21]Try to keep the notebook that you have in your in your bag that's only for this book.
[19:25]Like try to just keep it close to the top of your brain even if you're not getting
[19:30]good work done on it and trust that that's going to pay off in the future when you have
[19:35]time, whatever that looks like, whatever that means, when you can work on it.
[19:39]I think that's one thing I think that's really important and helps you to take it seriously
[19:42]during, you know, when I was like 24 and out of grad school and trying to finish my first
[19:48]book, there wasn't especially, I mean so many of the people around me were people I
[19:52]found a college with who would concentrate into finance or who were sort of like, I remember
[19:55]when I went back to school and was getting an MFA.
[20:00]The guys in finance were just like, I don't understand.
[20:02]Like, how does this work?
[20:04]Like, how is this going to pay off for you?
[20:07]Like, what?
[20:08]Well, I don't know.
[20:09]It might not, but it helps you take it seriously in your head,
[20:12]which is especially if you're not living around other people
[20:15]doing it, or if you don't have other writers
[20:17]that you can kind of, the amazing thing in New York
[20:19]is you could just go see a writer talk about it every single night
[20:22]if you wanted to, or just people at every stage
[20:24]of the career trajectory of the process.
[20:28]And I think that really did feed me and was really important.
[20:31]It can also make you feel, you know,
[20:33]when you're having a bad writing month, it can go well.
[20:35]But I think it helps you take it seriously
[20:37]to just be thinking about it all the time,
[20:39]even if you can't really be working on it all the time.
[20:42]And then the other thing is just to be reading all the time.
[20:44]Like, there's never, I keep a log of what I'm reading.
[20:47]And the times when I can look at, you know,
[20:48]I didn't read anything that month or something
[20:50]or these like dark, I know, I can remember that it was like,
[20:53]oh, that was, I mean, it was the first month postpartum
[20:55]or like, you know, a really bad time previously
[20:57]and I'm almost always reading all the time.
[21:00]Oh, I love that.
[21:01]I love the log.
[21:01]I meant to, I always meant to do that, but I don't.
[21:03]But anyway, well, Angelica, congratulations.
[21:07]When we grow up, totally thought for voting
[21:09]and beautifully written, so congrats.
[21:12]Okay, take care.
[21:13]Thank you.
[21:14]Bye.
[21:15]Thank you for listening to totally booked with Zibi.
[21:18]Formerly, momstone have time to read books.
[21:20]If you loved the show, tell a friend, leave a review,
[21:24]follow me on Instagram at Zibi Owens
[21:26]and spread the word.
[21:28]Thanks so much.
[21:29]Oh, and bye the books.