Jennifer Oko, JUST EMILIA
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[0:45]Jennifer Oko is the author of Just Emilia, Jennifer is a writer, journalist, and filmmaker.
[0:50]She is the author of The Memoir Lying Together, My Russian Affair, which was an editors
[0:54]choice in the New York Times book review, and a novel, Gloss, a satire of Morning Television
[1:00]News, which was optioned by E1 Entertainment to be developed as a television series.
[1:05]She also wrote a novel called Head Case, and now, Just Emilia.
[1:09]Jennifer lives in Washington, D.C., with her husband, two kids, a middle-aged dog, and
[1:13]a young cat.
[1:14]Alongside writing books, she has spent more than two decades producing television
[1:17]news features and documentary films.
[1:19]Welcome, Jennifer.
[1:20]Thanks so much for coming on totally booked, guys.
[1:23]Thank you so much for having me.
[1:25]I really loved your book.
[1:26]I've been talking about the premise of it to so many people.
[1:29]Fill the beans.
[1:30]What is your book about?
[1:32]How did you come up with this idea?
[1:34]I'm so glad you liked it.
[1:37]The truth is, I was actually stuck for a millisecond in the friendship heights Metro
[1:42]elevator in Washington, D.C., and there were a couple of other people in it.
[1:46]They were not me.
[1:47]But by the time I got home, I was thinking this could be a really interesting premise
[1:51]for a novel, stuck in an elevator with people.
[1:54]And then I was like, who would be the hardest person to be stuck with?
[1:59]And I thought, myself?
[2:00]Probably.
[2:01]So that's what it's what I've generated.
[2:04]It's 80.
[2:05]I don't even remember when I actually started.
[2:08]I found a word dog from 2016.
[2:10]So, I mean, this story has been living with me for a really long time.
[2:16]But very early on, it became about the same woman being stuck with herself from teenagers
[2:23]and older years.
[2:24]And it was just so much fun to play with that idea.
[2:26]Wow.
[2:27]So the book is centered around the day that the protagonist's mother passes away.
[2:33]And the three versions of her, who sort of convened the teenage version, as you said,
[2:38]who sort of like a surly teenager with a school sweater and, you know, whatever.
[2:45]And then, you know, an older sort of beautiful lady who is also there.
[2:50]And then this sort of more harried middle of life mom in the midst of everything.
[2:55]How did you go about taking the same character?
[2:59]Because everyone wonders, like, what would it be like to meet myself at another age?
[3:02]So tell me a little bit more about how you went from idea to really forming these three
[3:08]characters, which are really all the same character.
[3:10]Yeah.
[3:11]I mean, so, like full disclosure, the middle character was sort of me, right?
[3:15]Sort of based on my life.
[3:16]I mean, at the time, I was around that age with children around the age that she
[3:20]has.
[3:21]What is it?
[3:22]One daughter in the book?
[3:24]Well, now my daughter is 17, or actually she just turned 18, but so she was younger
[3:28]than, but I have a daughter.
[3:30]And so, and I have a mother and think that she's still here, but she's wonderful.
[3:34]She's been great.
[3:36]And, but I think about that a lot, I mean, mother daughter relationships, I think most
[3:40]women think about that a lot, and especially when you have a daughter and you see your
[3:45]daughter entering, you know, puberty and then adolescence and becoming a woman, it's hard
[3:51]not to think about yourself then and hard not to, you know, to distance yourself from,
[3:57]she's a separate person, but she's me, but she's not.
[4:00]And I just, I think I thought about it a lot and it just came very naturally to write
[4:03]about it.
[4:04]It just, it just made such sense to think about how this woman would be impacted by things
[4:11]throughout her life.
[4:12]Like, actually backing up, I love the idea of one incident having this impact through
[4:21]out stages of her life and how that one incident would impact her at exactly those moments
[4:28]in different ways.
[4:29]Like, when she had big decisions to make and this trauma from the year before the 16 year
[4:35]old, the, you know, when she was 16, how did that impact her at 17 at 47 and 77?
[4:40]You know, what happens with our memories, with our guilt, with our experiences as we go
[4:45]on in life.
[4:46]And it was just really interesting and fun and challenging to think about that.
[4:51]Wow, so fascinating.
[4:53]And you also have a sort of plot line in the present tense, like with the main, you know,
[4:58]the you character, let's just say who's going through quite a bit in her marriage at
[5:05]the moment.
[5:06]Can you, can you talk a little bit about that?
[5:07]And to be clear, it only based on me loosely in that I was around that same age, my, my
[5:12]marriage is strong.
[5:13]My husband is wonderful.
[5:14]When he read the book, he was a little like, it's totally not him, but you know, again, sort
[5:25]of right what you know.
[5:26]I think at the same time that I was working on this book, I was writing and trying to write
[5:30]a different book that was just completely elsewhere.
[5:33]And then the pandemic hit and I had actually three partially written manuscripts in my,
[5:39]you know, proverbial chopped drawer.
[5:41]They were each around, you know, 40, 50,000 words at that time.
[5:46]And I was like, okay, you just pick one, pick one, force it through, see what happens.
[5:52]And, and that's what I did.
[5:53]And this one just, it just, it just came naturally, I mean, you're a writer, you know,
[5:58]sometimes you get the flow and sometimes you don't, I mean, it came naturally to get rolling
[6:02]with it.
[6:03]And then obviously there are lots of hiccups as you go.
[6:07]And I'm very much the kind of writer who writes herself into a corner and then tries to figure
[6:11]out how to write herself out of it.
[6:13]And when you're in an elevator, obviously, the corner becomes a big deal, fairly early on
[6:18]in the writing process, a friend of mine read it, it's like, I'm feeling claustrophobic.
[6:23]You need to get out of the elevator and that opened up this whole world.
[6:28]And so, and that was super fun to think about because a lot of it had to do with what Washington
[6:35]DC, what this neighborhood in Washington DC would be like in the future.
[6:40]Also, what it was like in the past, and I didn't live here that I'm from New York City
[6:44]originally.
[6:45]And so it was really fun to do that research to figure out, oh, what was here?
[6:50]What wasn't here?
[6:51]What did it look like?
[6:52]Just a very happy to find that like, Rodman's is one of my favorite stores and it was here
[6:56]then.
[6:57]So that was fun.
[6:58]It's totally where you would have gone to buy 10x.
[7:00]I don't know.
[7:01]You're a little bit younger than me, but you must remember 10x, right, it's like this
[7:05]gel that I used to wear in my school and it would just mold your hair into some position.
[7:11]It was just, it was amazing.
[7:13]I don't, I don't think it's the age I just didn't use gel in my hair.
[7:16]I had like this big, but I didn't even know it was crazy.
[7:22]And then thinking about the future in DC, it's actually been giving me a lot of chills
[7:27]right now.
[7:28]I mean, DC is not an easy place to be right now.
[7:31]And while I wasn't thinking about the politics of it, just what the city might look
[7:37]like being that it's often of some of the cities in a flood zone, what would it look
[7:41]like?
[7:42]What would it feel like to be here?
[7:44]It's just, it's an interesting exercise and it's, it, I don't, it just felt very sort
[7:50]of fulfilling, not fulfilling because it was sort of disturbing, but interesting intellectually
[7:54]to think about what the physical nature of my environment would actually look like at
[7:59]that time.
[8:00]It's actually a great writing prompt for those who are stuck on, not finding the flow
[8:06]that you mentioned to think about their environment 30 years before and after and today.
[8:11]And just, just to do that is really interesting.
[8:15]Yeah.
[8:16]Maybe I should challenge myself next and be like, oh, he's 60 years, 70 years.
[8:19]Just keep going.
[8:20]It's going on.
[8:21]A thousand years, you know.
[8:22]A thousand, yeah.
[8:23]I don't know if I want to think that far.
[8:24]You're becoming a sci-fi writer accidentally.
[8:26]You just never know what's going to happen.
[8:29]So then when did you first start writing and like what else did you do with your life
[8:36]along the way?
[8:37]Oh, what did I first start writing like creative writing?
[8:40]So I started out actually as a journalist and I at the time of starting to write my first
[8:47]book, I was at ABC News and this is like in the mid to late 90s.
[8:53]And as much as I love my job, I wanted some creative outlet.
[8:57]And so I, who's standing on my bed, my best friend was over and I was like, oh, why
[9:03]don't they start backwards and I stood on my bed and I was like, I want to thank the
[9:07]Academy.
[9:08]It was like, because this is clearly where it's going, right?
[9:11]What's funny is that book that I started with in fact then is still one of the books
[9:16]that's in my top drawer.
[9:18]And it's yeah, it's how I clearly I need to go back to this.
[9:22]This is a big drawer.
[9:24]This drawer is like.
[9:26]But then actually what really happened was that I wound up in Russia working as a journalist
[9:30]and I had a, at the time I was also went there engaged to be married, the relationship
[9:36]fell apart, the country at the time fell apart.
[9:40]And I wrote a memoir about it and it actually started as diary entries.
[9:43]I was just writing my diary and it came back to New York and I was just looking, I was
[9:48]like, there might be a book here.
[9:51]And I took a class with the Gotham Raiders workshop and put it together and like lo and behold
[9:56]there was a book and it was, it was an incredible.
[10:00]Civil experience, publishing writing and publishing that book and putting it out into the world, but it was also it made me very vulnerable at like a memoir is it's a lot right and so after it came out, it came out just a few weeks when trying to remind the
[10:19]Yeah, after right after my wedding, but so like during my honeymoon, I'd taken a leave of absence from work and my husband had an internship at UNICEF at Hanoi and we went off and it's really hot there.
[10:31]And so I just sat in the air condition kitchen and I wrote this kind of swan song to my television career at the time.
[10:39]And that actually that novel became gloss, which was my second book.
[10:45]So it's sort of they also they sort of overlapped each other although lying together came out and it did really it did really when they got great reviews it was a New York Times editor choice which is beyond amazing.
[10:56]And I guess that my bug like I got the bug and I couldn't stop writing and it's sort of the rest is history once I got when I got the contract for gloss I wound up going part time.
[11:07]I was at CBS at the time, and it just kind of rolled a little like that.
[11:13]And I've been incredibly fortunate in that I have now a production company we do documentary films met my partner Miriam wide tribe at I but we both so we have our sort of day job, which is also really creative and interesting and still tapping into that journalist in us, but we both also have our creative outlets.
[11:33]So I write and she makes jewelry and oh I'm not wearing any first stuff I should have worn stuff but beautiful stuff.
[11:40]And so it's it's been lovely like for the past we both neither of us remember exactly how long we've been together now it's probably about 12 years.
[11:48]And so it allows us both time to have some creative outlet that isn't our professional creative outlet and still pursue the stuff that we sort of started our career as.
[12:00]It's amazing and so what documentaries are you deep into right now.
[12:04]Well, I'm sure how much I'm allowed to say we we had a story that has something to do with corruption and family court that we were working on for like four years just labor of love and ultimately partnered with another production company and so we're in the final froze of that.
[12:20]probably like it's like 90% done and so that's sort of the biggest thing we've ever done and so it's super exciting but we're also starting up another project right now about undocumented.
[12:33]and migrant laborers who repair and rebuild after hurricanes so we're sitting here waiting for the hurricanes to have been seriously.
[12:42]Jump in our cars when it happens that's the plan.
[12:45]Oh my gosh and where are you based now.
[12:47]I'm in DC.
[12:48]Oh you said that.
[12:49]I'm sorry.
[12:50]I'm DC.
[12:51]I just met.
[12:52]Yeah.
[12:53]It doesn't.
[12:54]It doesn't look like you see right.
[12:55]It doesn't look like DC so I was waiting for you to say you know the middle of North Carolina or.
[13:00]just like an on vacation in our backyard it's really it's really we actually just we were waiting for a team on some and we just came back and we're like what happened to that tree.
[13:08]It's just what crazy this year.
[13:10]Well trees also play a role in this book and the build out tree and all that do you have those at your house and the friend is that.
[13:17]That is very much in right what you know we have one of those can go trees that drops the fruit that has been the vein of my existence since we moved into the house.
[13:26]And the big joke is that if we ever were to sell we can't sell in the fall because that's when the very start to drop and it's just horrible.
[13:34]And we've tried to petition our neighbors just like happens in the book and nobody wants to do that because everybody loves trees and the canopy is beautiful.
[13:42]But this tree also this tree is just ugly like like they have to keep cutting down branches because it you know tangles in the wire so it's dropping fruit it's ugly it's terrible it's like the stuff of nightmares.
[13:54]It's literally the stuff of nightmares in the book right wow so what do you want readers to take away from the book.
[14:02]What's been totally amazing is when I've done some events I've had people write on index cards just say something what would you want to say to yourself younger or older if you had that opportunity.
[14:17]And it's amazing to read those cards because I think giving people that moment to really reflect on that can be very profound now I will say there are often the cards it's like I would have bought stock an apple or whatever.
[14:31]There's been some really beautiful things about relationships with parents about a lot about not being so hard on ourselves especially from women you know that's a big through line.
[14:43]And it's actually I feel like writing the book has actually made me more compassionate for myself and when I'm finding myself looking in the mirror and going oh my god.
[14:52]I stopped and I'm like you you look beautiful now and when you're 10 years from now you're going to really be missing this face so appreciate it and it's a hard thing to do I mean.
[15:05]Aging is hard but I think having sort of marinated in that for so many years in writing the book it has made it a little bit easier.
[15:14]I like that coming from a place of acceptance instead of always fighting the changes which is which is great.
[15:21]And do you have any more fiction coming do you have any other ideas are you going to pull anything else from the door.
[15:27]Writing the way this grew up.
[15:29]Yes, I do and actually the next one it's another the one I've been working on for a long time.
[15:36]This one has a lot more to do with being Jewish and Jewish history and I'm excited and scared of it.
[15:42]But premise is that this young woman discovers it sort of takes place in the 90s and this woman discovers because of her grandmother who has Alzheimer's saying things that she might not have otherwise said she discovers that her grandfather may or may not have been involved with my or Lansky in the Jewish mafia and then there's this whole bush belt thing.
[16:03]So I had spent I've done a lot of research into that like I've read all these crazy books about the Jewish mafia but also the Borsch Belt and all of that.
[16:12]And so I'm hoping it's hard when you've got a book launching and other stuff to find the space to get back into that but that is my plan is to get back into that book.
[16:22]Probably also that it's fun it's like a funny fun topic I mean obviously yes mafia bad but still exciting and yeah so I'm hoping right now it's called the true life of CB Weiss but I don't know what it will be called when it's done.
[16:40]We'll see like that.
[16:41]We have a book coming out from our publishing house called the Phoebe Variations this fall.
[16:45]Oh really?
[16:46]Yeah.
[16:47]That's funny.
[16:48]Yeah.
[16:49]Good name.
[16:50]Yeah.
[16:51]Okay.
[16:52]Any advice for aspiring authors.
[16:53]Yeah.
[16:54]The most amazing thing happened at my launch which was that politics and prose here in DC which is the phenomenal bookstore right and it was it was great packed to the girls with lots of friends and it was wonderful.
[17:07]And then this young man came up afterwards asking the question you know for the Q&A part.
[17:12]And nobody I knew didn't recognize him and I said that he had grown up in a refugee camp.
[17:18]I believe it was in Sierra Leone and he was talking about how he he said I'm not a right I'm not an author I'm not a novelist but I write games and I'm really struggling sometimes with how do you keep going.
[17:30]How do you how do you how do you tell these stories and I was just like you just there is no other choice.
[17:37]If we stop telling stories.
[17:40]If we stop engaging in narratives I think life gets pretty dull and I think a lot of things go unanswered.
[17:47]I think we explore so many questions in fiction that we can't really as easily head on in life maybe answer or you answer it through another angle in fiction and I just don't think there's another way.
[18:01]you we all tell stories and whether you are writing the stories or whether you're just telling your friends what happened to you it's really everybody tell stories and so for me and for a lot of writers.
[18:12]That comes more easily perhaps when you're writing and I don't know we all get we all get in the way of ourselves right writing and it's it's so hard.
[18:21]to write and not think about what people are going to think of it and so that I guess just know you're putting your story out there and it's a beautiful thing and whether people like it or not is sort of out of your control.
[18:35]And as much as you can just kind of the Mel Robbins thing let them when she went she came out when that came out was the last year I was like yeah that's kind of that's a good message let them.
[18:46]that they hear your message and enjoy it and and honestly the response is incredible it's been really lovely and so and so grateful for that that's wonderful well thank you so much thank you for coming on I loved it I have my mother reading it next and.
[19:05]You have to like have you tell me if you if you want what your mother thinks and that the multi generational.
[19:11]I have one of my daughter's read at the same time anyway whatever we could.
[19:16]I see some mother daughter book clubs in your future for this for this.
[19:22]I will tell you that was the scariest thing and she loved it so and she laughed a lot and so this is really funny because some of this seems a little bit familiar but.
[19:34]Anyway, thank you so much it's great to meet you and look with her okay.
[19:41]Thank you for listening to totally booked with Zibi formerly momstone have time to read books if you loved the show tell a friend.
[19:51]For review follow me on instagram at Zibi Owens and spread the word thanks so much oh and bye the books.