Laura Dickerman, HOT DESK: A Novel
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[0:44]Laura Dickerman is the author of Hot Desk, a novel.
[0:48]Laura has an MA in fiction from NYU, and an MA in English from Middlebury College's
[0:53]Breadloaf School of English.
[0:55]She has taught high school English at the Hopkins School, the Collegiate School, and
[0:59]Germantown Friends.
[1:01]She was an intern at the Paris Review many, many years ago.
[1:04]At her lowest point, she spent a month temping for her youngest brother, who was critical
[1:08]of her photocopying skills.
[1:10]She has been a book club leader, tutor, and recipient of an NEH grant.
[1:15]She lives in Atlanta with her husband.
[1:16]They have two grown daughters.
[1:18]Hot Desk is her first novel.
[1:19]Welcome, Laura.
[1:20]Thank you so much for coming on Totally Book to talk about Hot Desk, a novel.
[1:25]Congratulations.
[1:26]Thank you so much.
[1:27]Thank you so much for having me.
[1:28]I really appreciate it.
[1:29]It's such an amazing platform that you have.
[1:31]Oh, thank you.
[1:32]Well, if there's anybody who knows about publishing, it is you and your characters and
[1:36]this.
[1:37]But I get everything else.
[1:38]All right.
[1:39]Tell listeners what the book is about.
[1:40]The book is about two young editors.
[1:43]They're ambitious and they are at rival publishing imprints, but they work under the same
[1:48]publishing umbrella.
[1:49]So they're forced to share a hot desk, which if you don't know is when people are
[1:56]use the same desk on a different days.
[1:58]And so they alternate different days of the week at the same desk, neither of them likes
[2:02]it.
[2:04]And so the book alternates chapters between them and they are, they start out sort of,
[2:09]I don't know, in a passive aggressive arguments about different things on the desk.
[2:13]But everything heats up when they become rivals for an unpublished manuscript that a
[2:19]literary lion has left behind in his estate without an agent.
[2:24]So they're, they're in competition to win that estate and then they discover in the
[2:29]unpublished manuscript secrets that surprisingly involve Rebecca, who's one of the main characters,
[2:36]her mother, Jane.
[2:37]And so the book has a dual timeline.
[2:39]It goes back to Manhattan in the early 1980s when Jane Rebecca's mother is an intern at
[2:45]this, at a fabulous literary magazine that I call East River Review.
[2:50]And so the book then picks up Jane's voice as well.
[2:53]Hyjinks and Sue.
[2:55]Well, it's so clever.
[2:58]And even if the book was about sort of just a day in the life of the publishing company,
[3:04]I would have laughed.
[3:05]Like way you, you're such a good observer in this like funny, somewhat snarky, but in
[3:11]a good way way, like you just observe everything.
[3:16]Even just how you pick apart like what people might be doing on a Zoom with their camera
[3:21]off.
[3:23]But it's just, you just say it in a funnier way than anybody else.
[3:25]So I just gotta kick out of the whole thing.
[3:28]Yeah, it's funny because for me, I hadn't worked in an actual real office.
[3:34]It's since like the 90s when I was a, you know, an English teacher at a school that
[3:39]was founded like 1628.
[3:41]So I mean, my office was, you know, you're on the phone and it was a very different world.
[3:46]But luckily my brother works in publishing.
[3:49]And so he was the one that came up with the idea.
[3:52]He called me one day and he's like, listen, you know, your kids have left the house.
[3:56]You need to write a book.
[3:57]This is your assignment.
[3:58]And he gave me this assignment.
[3:59]He's like, we just had a call at work about this hot desk game.
[4:03]And I didn't know what that was.
[4:04]And he explained it.
[4:05]He was, he explained the concept.
[4:06]And he was like, you should write a novel about two young editors who are forced to share
[4:10]a desk and fall in love.
[4:12]And immediately I was like, I, all the characters came to me, Rebecca and Ben came to
[4:18]to me.
[4:19]And I had the whole book right there.
[4:20]And it was really fun.
[4:21]And he was my advisor about about things and I was like, well, what are, you know, I was
[4:26]like, first you get on the phone.
[4:27]He's like, no, nobody gets on the phone.
[4:30]So he was very helpful to me.
[4:33]And he said, I said, so what funny things happen on Zoom calls.
[4:37]And of course during the pandemic, I was on Zoom.
[4:39]I knew all about certain things.
[4:40]But you know, he told me, he was like, oh, people's cats are on Zoom.
[4:45]I was like, people's cats like during work.
[4:47]And I was like, yeah, so that was, we were, we were good collaborators at the beginning
[4:51]there, especially for, for sort of office things.
[4:54]But I do think, you know, I mean, if you know people, you know what happens in offices.
[4:59]I just needed a little bit of update about like phone pods and things like that.
[5:04]I mean, I work in an office.
[5:06]I didn't know about a hot, hot desks and some of the things.
[5:08]So thank you for that.
[5:10]Oh, yeah.
[5:11]Wait, that's, so tell me about you and your brother and your, did you always want
[5:17]to be an author?
[5:18]Like, how did he know it even come with to you with this idea?
[5:21]And why did he not try to do it?
[5:23]And it, it idea.
[5:24]Yeah, yeah.
[5:25]How does your family feel about the whole thing?
[5:27]Well, he, Colin and I have two brothers.
[5:30]They're both great.
[5:31]Colin is in publishing and he's younger than I am.
[5:33]He's not six years younger.
[5:34]And so for a short time, we're kind of on the same trajectory.
[5:37]We both, you know, we're English and English and then move to New York City.
[5:43]We both were interns six years.
[5:45]Yeah, I don't know how many years.
[5:46]Years apart at the Paris Review, very, very early on.
[5:50]And I did a little work in publishing and then I became a high school English teacher.
[5:54]And so then I was one of those things where I was like, I was a writer who then became
[5:58]a teacher and then I was a teacher who wrote, then I was just a teacher.
[6:02]Then I was a mom and then just life happened.
[6:07]And I always, in the back of my mind, I was like, you know, I wrote poems once in a while.
[6:11]Have a couple.
[6:12]I have a YA novel and a drawer.
[6:14]I kind of did a little bit about it.
[6:16]But I sort of let go of it and Colin, my brother, about 20 years ago, he called me up
[6:23]on my, when my children were really little and he said, I have an assignment for you.
[6:26]He said, YA, supernatural books are really big.
[6:29]You should write a novel about a boy who falls in love with the ghost.
[6:33]And I guess like I just really, maybe as an English teacher, whatever, I love an assignment.
[6:37]And like that once and I was like, yes, the whole book came to me, so I wrote this whole
[6:41]book and I got an agent.
[6:42]And I was like, oh, I'm going to be the next Stephanie Meyer and that book didn't
[6:46]sell.
[6:47]So I was like, oh, okay, 20 years later, kids left the house, Colin calls me up, gives
[6:53]me the one sentence assignment.
[6:55]And it just, you know, I think it was, I think I really, again, I love the idea of getting
[7:02]the assignment.
[7:03]And also, I feel as though writing this book and starting out with this idea that it
[7:07]was going to be this really fun and funny and kind of romantic workplace satire.
[7:12]It really freed me up from the kind of, you know, I had been to graduate school in fiction,
[7:18]graduate school in English with the concentration in writing.
[7:21]So I had a very particular kind of writing that I thought that I was supposed to be doing.
[7:25]It was very literary and I think that being a little bit of a perfectionist kind of stopped
[7:31]me from doing as much writing as I, as I think I wanted to.
[7:37]And then, you know, just life, family, all of that.
[7:41]So I, you know, I think this really freed me up.
[7:44]It just, it just came very quickly, very easily.
[7:48]It was so fun to write.
[7:50]And then, of course, being me and having the interest that I had, I started to sort of develop
[7:55]this dual timeline of these older characters and they became more interesting to me,
[7:59]these women.
[8:00]And I was like, well, maybe I don't, maybe I have an experienced publishing workplace
[8:05]now.
[8:06]But I have experienced a little bit of publishing workplace in the early 1980s.
[8:11]So I sort of drew on that and with my memories and then my imagination.
[8:17]And so I sort of, I did those two things together and it just, it was great and I was
[8:22]really lucky and everything happened really quickly and it feels like it happened overnight.
[8:27]But of course, it was, it's been a long time coming as well.
[8:31]That's how you know you're doing the right project when it's easy.
[8:35]That's exactly what it felt like to me because writing had always been, you know, extremely
[8:40]hard for me in the, in the build up to it, right?
[8:44]Once I was doing it, there was nothing that felt as amazing as that in the process of it
[8:50]afterwards.
[8:51]I felt you know, it's happy.
[8:52]But it was that, I feel like there's just years would be of this kind of torture of
[8:58]you should write, you should write, you should write.
[9:00]And this, you're right, everything felt really fun and easy about this book.
[9:06]So that's amazing.
[9:08]And tell me about how much of your own experience from the Paris Review came into the East
[9:13]End East River.
[9:14]Yeah.
[9:15]East River Review.
[9:16]Yeah.
[9:17]East River Review.
[9:18]It's so funny because I just was pitching an article to Aramail and I'm not sure if they'll
[9:22]end up with it or not, but it was sort of interesting about my experience at the Paris Review
[9:26]again, almost 40 years ago.
[9:28]So it is incredible to me what I remember and what I have no memory of whatsoever and
[9:35]things I would think that I remember like I know George Plimpton took us out to lunch,
[9:40]the interns, you know, I don't have a whole family about that.
[9:46]But I, you know, I remember really clearly sitting on, you know, an armchair and looking
[9:52]out the window at the East River because they, the, the, the Paris Review offices were
[9:57]in the bottom of the townhouse that he had on.
[10:00]east on the east side, and you would go upstairs
[10:03]into his private apartment and read through
[10:05]slash in piles and manuscripts.
[10:08]And he was just a charming presence everywhere.
[10:11]So I just, you know, I started with,
[10:14]it just kind of came to my start writing about that.
[10:16]And again, I used my imagination.
[10:18]And I had an amazing time there.
[10:20]And none of the drama that happened in my book
[10:24]happened, George was a perfect gentleman.
[10:26]And also, you know, I just, I wasn't really thinking
[10:31]of him as the king of the situation,
[10:32]but the character of there's a character in my book
[10:34]called The Lion, who sort of became to me
[10:38]this kind of composite character of all these sort
[10:42]of terrible literary men that were charming and brilliant
[10:46]and problematic as they say.
[10:49]And I was really interested in that, you know,
[10:51]how the kind of power and privilege that those men
[10:54]had, the kind of men that were really revered
[10:57]at the time when it worked at the Paris Review.
[10:59]So I was very interested in that.
[11:00]So I just created this character
[11:02]that really had nothing to do with George Clinton.
[11:05]Let me, let me say that.
[11:06]Yes, I'm like, yeah, but I definitely,
[11:10]that kind of glamorous, you know, everyone's smoking
[11:13]and typewriters and all of that.
[11:16]I think I deliberately set those scenes in the book
[11:21]a little couple years earlier than I was there
[11:23]because I didn't want,
[11:24]and when I was there, we were sort of doing floppy disk work
[11:27]and things like that,
[11:29]but I wanted to make it a little more clear cut.
[11:31]There were no, you know, there were no computers,
[11:34]there were typewriters, that kind of thing.
[11:36]So I wanted to set it a little earlier.
[11:39]So when you were gathering your research from Colin
[11:43]and trying to figure out like how to really sculpt
[11:46]the setting and the narrative and the discourse
[11:49]about publishing, because so much is in here.
[11:52]I mean, like it's so incidery and such a good
[11:56]in all the best ways that I'm like shocked
[11:58]that you yourself were not in publishing house.
[12:00]But when you, what were you most surprised about
[12:03]when he told you or when you were like,
[12:06]oh, I've got to put this in.
[12:07]Like what stood out to you,
[12:10]what changed the most like aside from phones, you know?
[12:15]Yeah, the phone thing.
[12:18]I mean, honestly, I think it's funny
[12:20]because of, because of the pandemic,
[12:24]I think in that, you know,
[12:25]I was on a Zoom call every week with my family,
[12:29]you know, my parents, but the whole, you know,
[12:31]you see up in their chins and all that.
[12:34]So I think that I sort of had it,
[12:36]whereas I'm not a particularly a person
[12:38]that's very comfortable like tech and computers
[12:41]and things like that.
[12:41]But because of that, I have this,
[12:43]I knew what it was like to be on Zoom, right?
[12:45]And so workplace also really changed because of that.
[12:48]So I think because of the pandemic,
[12:52]the idea of hot desking came around,
[12:54]like how do we, you know, optimize space?
[12:57]How do we, you know, save money?
[12:59]How do we have people at home and this and that?
[13:02]So I already kind of had this idea about
[13:05]what it was like to be on Zoom.
[13:06]And I knew what I was like on Zoom,
[13:08]like, you know, looking at my hair and, you know,
[13:12]that kind of thing.
[13:13]So I used a lot of that.
[13:14]I think that, I mean, honestly, I'll say this again, cats.
[13:17]I was very surprised.
[13:19]But not even, not even the Zoom piece.
[13:21]Like the publishing industry piece
[13:23]and how you talk about submissions
[13:25]and like all the stuff in the meetings themselves
[13:28]and the talk about this memoir and this
[13:31]and this manuscript and just the way that you created
[13:35]the world, like these are all the conversations
[13:37]and like presenting to sales and like,
[13:39]this is all the stuff that actually happens
[13:42]and that it anyone will see themselves in.
[13:44]So I don't know.
[13:45]Again, I was extremely fortunate because Colin
[13:48]was the, he was the publishing advisor
[13:52]to Darren Star's television show Younger.
[13:55]And I don't know if you've watched Younger,
[13:57]but it came out a while ago,
[13:59]but it was just released, I think,
[14:01]or came out on Netflix.
[14:03]So people are watching it and it's about an older woman
[14:05]who pretends to be young.
[14:08]Of course, it's Sutton Foster and she looks like she's 20.
[14:11]But she goes into publishing.
[14:13]And so that was really fun to watch that.
[14:16]I mean, I think they were sort of like,
[14:18]yeah, publishing still glamorous,
[14:19]but I'm not sure how glamorous it really is anymore,
[14:22]but it was that, so he was helpful to me in that.
[14:26]I was like, what happens at a pitch meeting?
[14:28]But then I just, I mean, a lot of it's just people, right?
[14:30]So I feel like I know about people.
[14:33]I had worked in publishing, friends
[14:35]in publishing my brother, all of that.
[14:36]And it just felt kind of organic
[14:39]from who the people were.
[14:40]Yeah, I love that.
[14:42]When you thought about writing it,
[14:44]did you have other books in mind that you were like,
[14:47]oh, this will fit right in with this, this, and this.
[14:49]Like, is there a genre that you're drawn to
[14:51]or authors that you were like,
[14:53]I want my book to be similar to so-and-so's
[14:56]or this is the kind of thing that makes me laugh?
[14:59]You know, it's funny because, again,
[15:00]there was that I think that when I wrote it,
[15:03]particularly when I was first already,
[15:04]I really tried not to think about,
[15:06]because I think that had tripped me up in the past.
[15:08]Oh, okay.
[15:09]When you start to write and you think,
[15:10]oh, someone else did this better.
[15:12]Someone else before me.
[15:13]Someone else did this exact story.
[15:15]And I think that can be very crippling.
[15:16]At least for me, it was difficult for me
[15:20]to get out from under that idea
[15:21]that I had to do it perfectly
[15:23]or I had to do it differently.
[15:24]And so with this idea, I just,
[15:26]I really tried not to think about anything
[15:30]or anyone who could have done it or anything,
[15:32]just write my own version, my own voice,
[15:36]my own feeling about it.
[15:37]And then, as I said, I became very interested in.
[15:40]I read all the time, I read high, I read low,
[15:45]I read everything, you know?
[15:46]So I felt as though later this idea
[15:51]of a mashup of genres was really interesting to me, right?
[15:54]Because at first, I think people were interested
[15:57]in like fitting this into a rom-com genre,
[15:59]but it really isn't a rom-com, right?
[16:01]I don't, the characters, it is what's,
[16:04]it's a very, very slow word as they say, right?
[16:08]So it's an enemies to lovers trope.
[16:10]It's a slow word, but they don't even lay eyes on each other
[16:12]until two thirds of the way through the book.
[16:14]And I'm sure that will make some people annoyed.
[16:17]But to me, it was really important
[16:18]that they had very fully formed lives,
[16:22]work lives, friends, family, and before they fell
[16:26]for each other, that felt important to me.
[16:29]And then I had all these other things kind of happening
[16:31]and that were important to me in the book as well.
[16:35]So it wasn't that genre.
[16:38]And so I'm interested in that.
[16:40]And in terms of books that are funny,
[16:42]I think the book is funny.
[16:44]I am just so funny.
[16:48]It made me laugh.
[16:49]So I mean, I guess, I don't know.
[16:50]I think that the gold standard of funny books,
[16:54]I would say probably where'd you go, Bernadette,
[16:57]by Maria Semple, is hilarious.
[16:59]Just recently, I think the wedding people,
[17:02]Alison S. that's very, so good, just like so funny.
[17:06]And all the little literary touches in that as well.
[17:09]I think the plot and the sequel
[17:12]are both really, really funny,
[17:14]Jean-Hamp Corlettes.
[17:16]So I mean, if I might be so bold,
[17:21]I would hope that my book was funny in that way.
[17:25]That's what I was thinking about,
[17:26]or hoping, hoping for the book.
[17:28]So armed with all that you know
[17:30]and have learned about publishing
[17:31]and from the characters in your book,
[17:33]now that you're taking a book out yourself
[17:35]as a debut, what insider knowledge do you have?
[17:39]How do you feel about the whole machinery behind publishing?
[17:43]Well, I mean, I thought I knew a decent amount
[17:47]about publishing, because again, I've been,
[17:49]you know, in writing and books and English teacher
[17:53]and family friends, like in the industry,
[17:56]I really am surprised and by the just how many people
[18:02]are involved in getting a book out there, right?
[18:06]So I think the way I leaned on, you know,
[18:10]the assistance and the copy editors
[18:13]and the marketing and the publicity
[18:16]and you know, they're just so many moving parts
[18:19]to get a book out there.
[18:20]And I feel like I've been really fortunate.
[18:22]Gallery has been very, very supportive.
[18:25]They're excited about it.
[18:26]I think, you know, they're really,
[18:29]they've put a lot behind the book,
[18:30]which makes me feel extremely fortunate,
[18:33]but it's, it is a whole world out there.
[18:36]And of course, I'm a person that, you know,
[18:39]lives in indie bookstores and loves bookstores
[18:42]and, but to realize sort of the,
[18:45]just these people out there, I mean,
[18:47]you know, you know better than I do,
[18:48]but people who own bookstores, who buy books,
[18:51]who sell books, who hand sell books,
[18:53]who are just really committed to this world.
[18:58]I mean, it's very beautiful to see,
[19:00]especially now I feel as though,
[19:03]I guess that's so important to me
[19:05]in terms of people's humanity.
[19:07]Like, I, again, this is an English teacher
[19:09]and a writer's speaking, but I really do think
[19:12]that we are better people for reading
[19:15]particularly fiction, I'm gonna say it.
[19:17]And I just to be reacquainted with
[19:21]or to sort of be on this side of that world
[19:24]and those people has been really beautiful
[19:28]and exciting.
[19:29]And I'm also, I mean, look, Zippy,
[19:31]I'm like 62 years old.
[19:32]This is the most exciting thing that's happened.
[19:34]I'm like, just, you know, I'm like, hey, all right.
[19:38]I'm just enjoying so much everything
[19:41]and really trying to, really just trying to
[19:45]enjoy every moment of it and to,
[19:47]and every first is exciting to me
[19:49]and I'm just trying to live in it.
[19:53]Okay, you don't look 62, FYI.
[19:56]No, really, that's a shock.
[19:57]I thought you were just like, we're choosing.
[20:00]The premature gray thing.
[20:02]Oh, my gosh, my hair's been gray.
[20:03]It's been a little bit gray since college.
[20:06]And the scene I told you,
[20:07]premature gray, I'm right, exactly.
[20:09]In my mind, I still have black hair
[20:12]with a couple of streaks of gray.
[20:13]And sometimes I walk past like a shop window
[20:15]and I'm like, what is that, you know?
[20:17]I've got to embrace it.
[20:19]I mean, I, when I was first thinking about,
[20:24]you know, writing things on a website
[20:26]and kind of this idea of putting myself out there,
[20:30]all of that.
[20:31]I was like, well, I was googling, you know,
[20:33]late bloomers, people who like late, you know?
[20:36]At the age of 37, so-and-so published her first.
[20:41]I was like, you know, later, later, but I did discover
[20:46]that Laura Ingalls wilder published the house
[20:49]on the prairie when she was 65.
[20:52]So, yep, got in right under there.
[20:54]So, well, you and Laura Ingalls wilder, see?
[20:57]You'll just think, and both have the Laura
[20:59]and your name's, it was meant to be.
[21:01]It was, so now that you've done this one,
[21:04]what are you gonna do next?
[21:05]Did Colin give you any more ideas?
[21:07]Or did you have some of your-
[21:08]No, I feel like I, but she would love.
[21:10]I feel as though I'm, you know, this unlocks something,
[21:15]I think for me, in terms of a voice that I feel
[21:18]really good about, and not say it's gonna be exactly
[21:21]the same voice, it won't.
[21:23]But I just feel like this idea of writing the kind of book
[21:26]I love to read, that's fun to read, it's fun to write.
[21:29]I feel like it did unlock a little bit,
[21:31]and I have a couple ideas in my head.
[21:34]One of them right now is taking some precedence over the others,
[21:37]and it's also kind of a mashup of a genre.
[21:41]I literally have two chapters,
[21:42]so I'm not getting too excited about it,
[21:44]but a lot of it's already in my head.
[21:46]I've taken a lot of notes, I have all the characters,
[21:49]and this is a different idea, and it starts with it,
[21:51]it starts with the dead bodies,
[21:53]it's a little mistrigy, and then it's also got,
[21:56]because I love a romance, it's also got
[21:58]the sort of romantic trope of, I think they call it,
[22:01]second chance, love when someone comes back
[22:03]to their sort of hometown, and you know,
[22:06]the high school boyfriend, they left behind,
[22:08]so I've got a couple of ideas about that,
[22:11]and so I, but right now I know Collins,
[22:14]like you should be writing my agents,
[22:16]like you should be writing, but like I said,
[22:18]I'm just really enjoying all of the things
[22:20]that are going into the pre-publication
[22:23]of the debut novel, too, so I wanna make sure
[22:26]that I have that.
[22:29]Oh, it sounds like you have all the wisdom you need
[22:32]to get through this experience.
[22:34]That is one thing about being a crone,
[22:37]but you're doing it.
[22:38]No, you are not a crone.
[22:39]I'm claiming crone, a crone is good, I love a crone.
[22:43]I think crone is a good thing, I'm excited to be a crone,
[22:48]I'm excited to, you know, I have no, this is,
[22:53]like I said, I mean, this is just like a bonus dream
[22:55]come true for me, so, but yeah, no,
[22:57]I think we're gonna reclaim crone.
[22:59]I like it, let's rebrand.
[23:01]Exactly, you can't, you've got a couple decades to go,
[23:05]but I think you'll be happy today.
[23:06]I don't have that much time to go.
[23:08]Not, I'm like a decade, but thank you a little more.
[23:11]Yeah, oh my gosh, well, thank you so much.
[23:15]I really was so entertained.
[23:18]I laughed so many times, and you know,
[23:21]you just never know, like what you're gonna get,
[23:24]and I got just hours of entertainment.
[23:26]So thank you.
[23:27]Oh, much, I really appreciate it.
[23:30]All right, well, congratulations.
[23:31]I will be rooting for you, and thank you.
[23:34]Thank you.
[23:35]Thank you.
[23:36]Okay, thanks, bye bye.
[23:39]Thank you for listening to Totally Booked with Zibi,
[23:42]formerly mom's don't have time to read books.
[23:44]If you loved the show, tell a friend, leave a review,
[23:48]follow me on Instagram at Zibi Owens,
[23:50]and spread the word.
[23:52]Thanks so much.
[23:53]Oh, and bye the books.