Author Event! Sam Sussman & Chloe Conaway
[0:00]we'll just get right into it. So there are three main narrative threads throughout
[0:06]Boy from the North Country. There's, you know, you growing up in upstate New York,
[0:10]or are you coming home at the end of your mother's life? And there's this third thread about
[0:15]your mom's life as an actress in New York in the 1970s. How did you balance those three threads?
[0:22]Yeah, well, first just thanks to you guys at the views and thanks to Zibi, who's been
[0:29]such a champion of this book. I'll just start by saying something about how it ended up here.
[0:35]So Chloe, who lives around the corner, came into the bookshop, maybe six months before the book
[0:42]came out, and knew Zibi's writing and the books that she cared about, and said, I want to
[0:49]tell you about this book that my friend wrote, and Zibi was really interested in the book,
[0:56]and has since invited us to do this event and also had me on two of her podcasts and
[1:03]made Boy from the North Country her book of the month. And to me, this is just, you know,
[1:10]it's a beautiful story of the ways that books get out in the world. And as a writer, you know,
[1:16]you spend so much time at your desk trying your best to tell a story, but then once you're done,
[1:23]you really rely on friends and people like Zibi to come together and help more people find
[1:31]out about your work. So very grateful to Chloe and to Zibi and to everyone who works here at the
[1:38]shop. We've been so, so supportive of the book. So yeah, and in the different narrative
[1:49]threads, I think in some ways it's a kind of dual coming-of-edge story. It's about my own
[1:59]experience. I call this work of autofiction, the character I call Evan, which is my middle name,
[2:08]my mother's character I called June, her middle name was Juna. And, you know, it's, you know,
[2:16]the heart of the story is really about my experience living home and being in search for my own
[2:23]sense of identity and then coming back at the end of what turned out to be the end of my
[2:30]my mother's life and sort of realizing that so much of who I am or wanted to be came not from
[2:38]that experience of venturing out into the world, but rather from returning and coming into an
[2:45]understanding of what my mother had given me. So in some sense it's that kind of classic
[2:51]oldest story ever told of a person who goes on a long journey and realizes that the thing they were
[2:57]looking for was waiting for them where they began. But the reason I say it's a dual coming-of-edge
[3:05]story is that about a third of this book is told in my mother's voice and it's her character recounting
[3:13]her youth as this actress in sort of mid-70s, Bohemian, New York world and it's so much
[3:25]my understanding of myself through understanding the world that shaped her. And, you know, so much
[3:33]of my love of literature and art came from her and, you know, I encountered that as a child in
[3:43]the forms that she gave it to me, but this is sort of the story of the events and the experiences
[3:49]that shaped who she was and that and it's a sort of tribute to that. Yeah, 1970s, Bohemian, New York
[3:56]Arts World and the events that made her who she is. Thanks. So as I was preparing for today,
[4:06]I was looking back through a decade's worth of correspondence that we've sent to each other.
[4:11]Terrible idea. And I found it was most of not just a very over preparation. But in 2017,
[4:19]you wrote me this email. Don't tell me. Of course, I don't want to be the writer in the woods
[4:25]with his pen and page. And then now, in 2025, you've written this book, Boy from the North Country,
[4:33]about growing up in the woods and you wrote it in the woods. You're pen in your page.
[4:39]No type computer, type phone, the computer. No, no, no page. But could you talk to us a little bit
[4:47]about what it means to you to be from the North Country? Yeah, I mean, let's talk about the
[4:52]title because of course, it's a reference to the Dylan song, growth from the North Country.
[5:00]But it's more than that, you know, a boyfriend in North Country is someone who sort of comes from a far, maybe a slightly more provincial or sheltered background and wants to leave home for a more expressive, creative life.
[5:21]And, you know, when I was a teenager, first encounter in doing, that's of course part of what made me interested in him as an artist. He's sort of the archetypal boy from the North Country.
[5:35]And the book is also interested in a few other artists who sort of follow that last trajectory.
[5:43]And one who meant a lot to me in the writing of this book is plays a role in the background. There's Marc Chagall.
[5:50]The Chagall has such a fascinating life story. His parents were illiterate. He grew up in this small stettle in Ukraine.
[5:58]Or actually what's now Belarus. And, you know, by the time he's in his early 20s, he's living in Paris. He's at the center of Parisian modernism.
[6:09]And what does he do at that moment? The work that makes him well known is that he paints his hometown.
[6:17]But he paints this small stettle that he was trying to get away from, right? And he paints the fiddler on the roof.
[6:25]But he can only see that this, his hometown, through the lens of Paris.
[6:31]He can only understand what's interesting about his own life and his own childhood, through the lens of the place that he's gotten away to.
[6:43]And, you know, I think for me, when I was growing up in upstate New York, like every other teenager, I thought was the most boring place in the world.
[6:54]But, to get away, I spent most of my 20s living abroad. And then, you know, I came home when my mom got sick.
[7:03]And suddenly, I was looking at the place that I was from through a different lens.
[7:10]And, you know, what I started feeling at that point in my life was, you know, so much of what felt that it had made me distinct.
[7:21]Or made me the person that I am, was actually not that I had spent my 20s in, you know, Berlin or Oxford.
[7:29]Like a lot of people that I knew at that point, they spent some time abroad in their 20s.
[7:34]That's not interesting. It's cliche, right?
[7:37]What had really made me myself was the experience of growing up in the world.
[7:43]My mother created, but which was, you know, a dozen acres in the woods with chickens and some sheep and dogs and a horse.
[7:55]And we didn't have TV and my mom somehow managed to like keep me off the internet until I was 12.
[8:04]And what was really celebrated and valued in that world was creativity.
[8:10]And, you know, she was from really early age, first memories are for reading to me.
[8:17]And so, boy from the North country is, you know, that title is sort of my tribute to in understanding that, you know, really what has made me who I am.
[8:28]The writer I'm trying to be is, you know, that world that she created.
[8:35]And the book is about coming into that understanding of a sense of self and identity.
[8:43]Could you read to us a little bit about this world that your mother created?
[8:48]So, I think, you know, the challenge I thought about the most in writing this book was how to capture the complexity of who my mother was in a book.
[9:13]And, you know, you can't fit people into books, books are not large enough.
[9:19]So, you make certain choices and I think the pressure that I felt the most was how do I capture the complexity and richness of who my mother was in this character that I'm going to create.
[9:33]So, I'll read a short section that I think captures the sort of the range of who she was.
[9:43]On winter afternoons, we walked into the snow in our warmest coats.
[9:49]My mother carrying her wooden axe, standing over maple trunks that fell in that year's storms.
[9:56]She lifted the axe high overhead.
[10:00]swung it into the fallen trees. The rhythmic thudding echoed through the woods. Sometimes
[10:08]the sound paused and I turned to see my mother struggling with the axe overhead. It's
[10:15]blade stuck in the round cut of wood. A woman in a green winter jacket with Auburn hair
[10:22]about her shoulders and a fierce glare in her eyes. She heaved the axe and cut of wood
[10:30]to the ground, pressed her black boot to the heart of the wood and withdrew the axe with
[10:36]a sharp breath. We carried the wood to the iron grate beside the fireplace. My mother sent
[10:43]our set our burnt offering in the stove. She lit a match and set the flame beneath the
[10:50]kindling and stoked the fire with a steel poker. The flames blazed and warmth spread through
[10:58]the den and my mother said, where shall we go tonight? I walked to the bookshelf and, like
[11:06]an adventurer surveying the globe, grandly pointed to our destination. On the sofa by the fire,
[11:13]we visited Robert Hood in Sherwood Forest and King Arthur in Camelot. My mother's eyes moved across
[11:21]the page for voice-changing tone and temperament as she conjured the Arthurian knights into the room.
[11:30]I have no memory earlier than this. My mother's words, creating the world.
[11:36]Once each year, we ventured to the city. We rose early in the morning, shoveled snow from the
[11:49]driveway and glided in the station wagon down the forest highway. At the bridge with views of
[11:56]the city, we met a stream of cars and I began to worry if we were all going to fit into the
[12:01]theater. Then with relief, I remember there was more than one theater in New York.
[12:09]Curious about the destination of our fellow theater goers, I stared through car windows.
[12:14]Wondering if that mustache man might seek a stern lecture by Arthur Miller or a heart-warming romance
[12:22]such as beauty in the beast. Perhaps he will surprise us all by walking straight into cats.
[12:29]At the theater, my mother gave her name and received two tickets and we sat in a chanted
[12:37]anticipation as the audience took their seats and the actors came on stage. Then the figures
[12:44]began to enact the Ibsen or check-off drama. We had traveled this great distance to enjoy
[12:51]and I was mesmerized to see my mother who the day before had split a falling maple tree in the
[12:57]firewood reciting to herself the actors every line. Beautiful. The passage shows
[13:10]how you grew up between these two spaces, Goshin and New York. Could you talk to us a little bit
[13:17]about those spaces and the physical spaces where you wrote this book?
[13:22]Yeah, part of the book is centered on my mother recounting for me the sort of
[13:37]experiences that sit behind this passage and why does she know these Ibsen and check-off lines?
[13:44]And you know it's about her experience as an actress in her 20s and so by strange coincidence
[13:54]I live in the apartment that she lived in in that period of time which is this old rent stabilized
[14:01]walk up in New Yorkville and the operating side and I wrote the book between there and the house
[14:08]I described. I think places have a sort of magical resonance. You know places are so deeply
[14:17]imbued with meaning and memory and you know so much of what I cared about in writing this
[14:23]book was sort of conjuring those memories or the significance of those places, the memories that
[14:31]are embedded within those places and sort of raising them to the the surface and turning them
[14:37]into a story and it was a magical experience to be writing in those two places. I felt the resonances
[14:45]and her spirit and all of that history in those places. I mean both feel like they're a little bit
[14:51]out of time. Yeah. I've been there I guess you just touched on how your mom knows
[15:00]the check-off line, how your mom knew in the exit lines. Could you talk to us a bit about her time
[15:05]in New York in the 1970s? Yeah well it's a fantastic story. I mean she comes to New York in the
[15:13]early 70s. She dropped out of Bennington College and she wanted to be an actress and the you know
[15:22]the New York that she entered was so rich artistically and she ends up studying you know with
[15:32]these two sort of iconic figures of the post-war New York art world. The first is Norman Reardon
[15:38]who's the youngest child of Shalom Alaykum. And Reardon is this painter and taskmaster. And he
[15:48]has a studio on the 11th floor of Carnegie Hall and the rule is that anyone can walk into this
[15:54]studio. He doesn't care what your credentials are. He doesn't care whether or where you went to
[16:00]college. It's the one credential that matters is will you let him yell at you until he turns you
[16:09]into an artist or you realize that that's not your path. And then Stella Adler is the other
[16:18]figure who was you know the mother of method acting and both Adler and Reardon had come to a point
[16:26]in their own lives where they decided that teaching was more important to them than their own artistic
[16:33]work. And you know they each understood themselves as belonging to you know artistic tradition that
[16:39]they had inherited and it was their role to pass along. And so they were radically democratic. I mean
[16:46]anyone could come into the Adler studio or Reardon's Carnegie Hall studio. And I think that I was
[16:55]interested in when I'm writing this step that's such a different way of transmitting artistic
[17:03]culture or knowledge than we have today. I mean today so much of those worlds are professionalized
[17:08]or you know people care about your degrees or you do an MFA or those sorts of things. And these
[17:14]were two teachers who would not last a week in an MFA because they were they were brutal. There's
[17:20]a story about Reardon that's in the book that you know he so if he didn't like something that a
[17:27]student painted he would just walk over and he'd either knock the canvas off the easel and onto the
[17:34]floor or he would just take his own paintbrush and start painting over it. And one day there's this
[17:43]young man who is you know seemingly not taking in Reardon's lessons. And Reardon dips his paintbrush
[17:52]into this pool of paint and he flicks the paint into this young man's eyes. And he says you like
[17:59]being blind. But you know that was this that was the artistic world I'm not endorsing the more brutal
[18:09]approach is but but they were tough old Eastern European Jews who had suffered a great deal and
[18:19]who thought that art was really serious business. And you know they were there to figure out who
[18:25]they could impart these traditions to and who they they couldn't and it's for me it was great fun
[18:32]sort of being in their studio because they're Adler and Reardon are both such such great characters.
[18:38]And this one day Bob Dylan walked into Norman Raven's class. Can you tell us a little bit about that?
[18:45]Yeah well it's a remarkable story. So this is 1974 Dylan is at an absolute low point in his life.
[18:57]He's going through personal and artistic crisis. It feels that he hasn't written anything worth
[19:02]while since blonde on blonde which is now eight years before. His 33 it feels that his best work
[19:10]has been done in the first half of his 20s. And you know he basically feels he's at risk of
[19:16]becoming a has been. And Reardon had a reputation for working with artists who were not painters
[19:24]and using painting to draw out in them what they needed to find for their own form.
[19:31]And Dylan has heard about this. So he comes to Reardon's class. And later Dylan will say that
[19:42]Reardon is the person who turned him out of artistic crisis and into the album that became
[19:48]blood on the tracks. So I'll tell this story in the book but I'll I'll share it here. So
[19:54]Reardon had a practice where students would go around and critique each other as
[20:00]canvases. And early on when Dylan is there, it's his turn for the first time. And people are just
[20:09]saying to him, you know, your canvas looks like your lyrics sound. I mean, just kind of
[20:15]observed flattery. And it comes to my mother and she says, you know, your composition is off,
[20:24]you chose the wrong colors. The painting is really harsh and uninviting. Like, you have a lot
[20:32]to learn. And he loves this. But because he hasn't come to be told he's a great artist,
[20:39]he knows he's not a great painter. He's come because he's the moment of crisis. And he's trying to
[20:46]understand how to write more meaningful music. And for him that that comes through the painting.
[20:53]So he's immediately taken by her. And one day after class, he says that her, you know,
[21:01]why don't you host the party at your place? And that's the first time they spent time outside the
[21:09]class. Could you read to us a little bit about that party? I could.
[21:13]There are already 2,000 people in the apartment by the time Dylan arrived.
[21:40]They were stand flannel shirt, blue jeans and red cowboy boots. He stood in the center of my tiny
[21:47]walk up as people tried and failed to make conversation with him. He nodded, murmured, looked straight
[21:54]at one person while he spoke a fragment of a sentence, then turned to someone else and said nothing
[21:59]in particular. He didn't seem to know what he wanted. He'd spent half as adult life accumulating
[22:05]and half running away from it. And all the contradiction was right there in his face. After 40
[22:11]minutes, he still hadn't said hello to me. Every time I looked at him, his eyes were wandering
[22:17]over the aged wooden floorboards. The poetry and play is on the shelves. The cracked
[22:23]paint across the ceiling. The records stacked against the wall. The gaping hole where the heat
[22:28]pipes ran into the floor. As if the most banal detail of the dilapidated apartment, it was more
[22:34]intriguing than the people trying to speak with him. But maybe nobody was speaking to him.
[22:40]They were speaking to his songs, speaking to the memory of how his songs made them feel,
[22:45]some night they kissed their high school love. Of course, he didn't want any of them wanting him.
[22:51]How could he talk back to any of that? People began to leave around 2 in the morning.
[22:58]He closed the door behind the last guest with a sweep of his red cowboy boot.
[23:04]Then he turned to me, a hand that is massive brown hair, and that mischievous smile in his eyes.
[23:10]As he said, well, that was boring.
[23:18]It's a great pick-up move. You suggest someone hosts a party, and then you make sure you're the
[23:25]last person to live. There's a lot more in the book, but you should all buy.
[23:33]So, all three of the main characters, in Boyves, Evan, based on Eastern New June,
[23:38]based on your mother, and Dylan, are all trying to create a work of art out of their life.
[23:44]Can you tell us about how each character approaches that differently?
[23:49]Yeah. Right. So, you know, Dylan is going through the pan of his divorce.
[24:01]As I said, he's in this moment of personal art as the crisis.
[24:06]What Raybin is teaching him is that a rather than turn away from what's difficult in his life
[24:12]and look back to the music of the 60s, what he has to do is ride from the pain of the present.
[24:19]He starts riding the songs that become a lot of the tracks.
[24:23]And so, that section set in the 70s, this is the most intimate portrait.
[24:30]It's been published of Dylan riding those songs.
[24:34]But what becomes complicated with Dylan is that once he does that, he can't do anything else,
[24:40]but write more songs. But that life is always, this is something my mother comes to feel about
[24:45]him, that life is always going to be something that he's taking into his art.
[24:50]It's almost a one-way relationship.
[24:55]Whereas, June, my mother's character, who has gone to a very pain-
[25:00]and for things up until this point in her life,
[25:04]and she's trying to understand those experiences
[25:07]through playing Hedda Gobler,
[25:09]but the Ebson title character.
[25:13]And...
[25:15]Give us a little more about Hedda.
[25:16]Yeah, well, if the Hedda Gobler is the story of this young woman
[25:23]who is in an unhappy marriage,
[25:26]and this old lover from earlier in her life reappears,
[25:30]and she tries to decide which of these relationships
[25:34]is right for her,
[25:35]and then sorry for the spoil of the plot,
[25:40]but by the end kills herself.
[25:43]And she feels that she can't live an authentic life,
[25:46]and this is considered one of the great feminist works
[25:49]of 19th century European drama
[25:51]because it's a portrait of how she is trapped
[25:55]by the norms of her time,
[25:57]and there's no way out for her.
[25:59]And it's, although it's written by men,
[26:01]it's an extraordinarily rich portrait of the misogyny
[26:06]that she encounters,
[26:07]and the ways in which being a woman
[26:10]for closes having an authentic and full life.
[26:14]And my mother is playing this role
[26:16]and trying to understand the experiences
[26:18]that she has had with misogyny and sexism.
[26:22]And she comes to a point where she understands something
[26:26]more deeply about her life by playing this role,
[26:29]and then she realizes she has to leave the role behind,
[26:33]because Hedda doesn't know how to heal.
[26:36]And the realization that my mother comes to
[26:38]by the end of that section set in the 1970s
[26:41]is that she's not going to find the love
[26:43]that's missing from her life on stage.
[26:46]She has to create that love in her life,
[26:50]not as an actress, art isn't going to give it to her,
[26:53]and Dylan's certainly not going to give it to her,
[26:55]because for him, it's all about the next song.
[27:00]And there's, throughout 1974,
[27:04]she's trying to play this role.
[27:06]Dylan is writing these songs that become blood.
[27:10]And she realizes she kind of has this hope
[27:13]that when they've both gone through these artistic journeys,
[27:16]they're just going to have quiet time with one another.
[27:20]And then by early 75, she realizes no,
[27:22]he's just writing the next album.
[27:24]This is not how he works, right?
[27:27]So they have very different relationships to life and art.
[27:31]Rayb in there, the painting instructor has a line
[27:34]that he says, art as a way of life.
[27:37]And Dylan would always repeat this, art as a way of life.
[27:41]And after his written blood,
[27:44]and she's finished with Hedda Gobler,
[27:46]she has a moment where she realizes it's not a slogan.
[27:49]Dylan really means this.
[27:51]This is his life.
[27:52]There's nothing larger than the next song.
[27:58]And then Evan, my character is going through something different.
[28:04]He's left home, he's wanted to become a writer.
[28:08]He's had a sort of remarkable intellectual experience.
[28:13]And he's got a great education.
[28:16]He's been thrilled to encounter the world of ideas,
[28:19]but he still can't write a worthwhile novel.
[28:22]And he feels that the novels that he's writing,
[28:25]they're insufficient in some way.
[28:28]And then when he comes home and he's spending time
[28:32]with his mother, and this is the most time
[28:35]they've spent together since he left home at 18,
[28:38]he's slowly coming into the realization
[28:40]that his writing is missing the spiritual and moral wisdom
[28:46]by which she has lived.
[28:48]And what he has to do is synthesize the intellect
[28:52]that he's developed by leaving home
[28:56]with the moral wisdom with which she raised him,
[28:59]and that bringing those two things together,
[29:03]that will give him a chance of writing a worthwhile novel.
[29:09]And so I think that's a sort of third way
[29:12]of thinking about life and art,
[29:15]that they're cyclical, that being attuned to life
[29:19]to the people around us can help us ride
[29:24]or create a worthy work of art,
[29:26]but also that art has to have a spiritual or moral dimension
[29:29]that it has to teach us something about how we should live.
[29:35]Which approach is your favorite?
[29:39]Turn on to that question.
[29:40]Next question.
[29:41]I know you wouldn't.
[29:43]Right, so boys in conversation with so many artists,
[29:48]if you've talked about a few,
[29:49]talked about Shagal, you talked about Raven,
[29:52]but could you talk to us about some of the others?
[29:55]Well, one thing that I really wanted to do with the book.
[30:00]is sort of synthesize all these different forms,
[30:04]all these different art forms.
[30:05]So there's a lot of theater in the book.
[30:07]There's also a lot of poetry that's read aloud,
[30:10]both between me and my mother.
[30:11]My favorite scene in the whole book is,
[30:15]this is just based on something that happened in life,
[30:17]is one night my mom and I smoked her medical marijuana
[30:22]and just got really high and read poetry to each other.
[30:26]And so this, this poetry, this theater,
[30:30]of course there's a lot of music, there's painting.
[30:33]And, you know, I was interested in the ways
[30:37]in which these different forms accumulate
[30:39]a layer upon each other and give a deeper sense of meaning
[30:44]to one another.
[30:46]And that's, you know, that's been important for me
[30:49]as a writer to draw not just from other writers,
[30:51]but from other art forms as well.
[30:54]And so, you know, there's quite a bit about
[30:56]Shagal and here, of course,
[30:58]the book is in conversation with Dylan's music,
[31:01]it's in conversation with Len Cohen's music,
[31:03]Cohen appears at a few different times.
[31:06]And I know with Ibsen's drama
[31:12]and it was important to me to bring that all together.
[31:18]Yes, last question for me
[31:20]and then we'll open it up to the crowd.
[31:22]I want to talk to you about the experience of writing
[31:27]about death and grief and what kind of,
[31:31]that emotional landscape does to your storytelling
[31:34]what the experience was of writing those questions of the book.
[31:40]Well, I mean, the book I read very directly
[31:43]about the experience of being with someone
[31:45]you love at the end of their life.
[31:49]That was the most raw emotional experience I've ever had.
[31:55]And I wanted to speak and write truthfully
[32:00]about what that was like.
[32:02]And I, you know, I think our culture often struggles
[32:07]to have meaningful and open conversations
[32:09]about grief and death.
[32:11]And, you know, after my mother's death,
[32:15]I wasn't always sure where to put that grief
[32:17]or, you know, where to talk about that experience.
[32:21]And reading the books, those were important places
[32:26]for me, reading about other people's experience
[32:29]of something similar.
[32:32]So I wanted to write directly about that experience,
[32:34]but I also wanted to write a book
[32:36]in which the love would be larger than the loss.
[32:40]And what would make it bearable to be with these two people
[32:45]as one is dying?
[32:48]Is the sense that, you know,
[32:51]the, that her love would live on
[32:53]and that it will find other forms.
[32:59]And that's the thing that carries you through grief
[33:01]and is larger than grief.
[33:03]And I was really important to me
[33:06]in how I told that story.
[33:08]Could you read us one last passage about,
[33:11]because how you told that story?
[33:15]So this is drawn from the, the very end of the book.
[33:32]And my character is in the hospital,
[33:36]sort of calming the terms with the realisation
[33:39]that he's going to live and she's not.
[33:42]And what, how to confront that.
[33:50]The only way to live would be to tell.
[33:54]There was no alternative to memory and to story.
[33:59]It was only through recollection
[34:01]that I would be able to recreate the intimacy I felt now
[34:05]in these fleeting hours
[34:07]when I could still press my hand to my mother's gaunt cheek
[34:12]or place my fingers in hers
[34:14]and feel myself involuntarily absorbed
[34:19]by the rush of memory
[34:21]conjured by the primordial touch of my skin against hers.
[34:27]For no matter how long I lived
[34:29]or the distance I roamed for my origins
[34:33]or the person I became,
[34:35]what could ever compare to the touch of my mother's skin?
[34:40]My first and most enduring impression of this world,
[34:45]the body from which I was born and like a memory,
[34:49]like a story, passed on in perfectly into the world.
[34:53]Thank you.
[35:00]That's with that. We'll open it up to any questions that you all might have.
[35:10]Where? Let's move down.
[35:13]In Goshan.
[35:14]Which is near.
[35:16]Goshan Monroe Chester of Warwick.
[35:20]Some of those towns. Yeah.
[35:24]Yeah.
[35:27]You talked about a third of the book being from the perspective of your mother's character.
[35:33]Did you try to capture your actual mother's voice in that character?
[35:36]You tried the French shape and how did you get into that?
[35:39]Since it was a younger version of your mother,
[35:41]you could probably have a net effort.
[35:43]Yeah. It's sort of thanks.
[35:45]That's a wonderful question.
[35:46]Well, it's written as sort of told to.
[35:49]So the way those sections begin is it will be
[35:53]my mother said, and then we go and hear it in her voice.
[35:58]So it's first person in her voice.
[36:02]And that was a wonderful exercise for me because I had spent years and years talking to her.
[36:09]I mean hundreds of hours of my life.
[36:12]And now in 90 pages,
[36:16]I had to distill the essence of this part of her life.
[36:20]And I really cared about trying to convey her voice.
[36:23]What it sounded like to listen to her.
[36:27]And I would read that section out loud to myself.
[36:31]And I would remember how she talked.
[36:33]And I would also read,
[36:35]she was a writer for the original newspaper.
[36:37]And I would read pieces that she wrote.
[36:40]And when I could, I would slip an anecdote right from her writing into mine.
[36:47]And that in a way was the most difficult part was trying to feel that I was capturing what felt like to listen to her.
[36:57]And what it felt like to talk to her.
[37:01]Yeah.
[37:06]Since this is a novel and not a biography or a biography,
[37:12]how was there anything that you made up of scenarios that you created to move the narratives that didn't really happen?
[37:21]People always think fiction is what is invented.
[37:25]But fiction is just what's left out.
[37:28]And that was the hardest thing to learn in the book.
[37:32]But this novel is 90,000 words.
[37:35]But the first draft was 160,000.
[37:38]And the fiction of this work was learning what do I cut away.
[37:45]And sometimes I would ask myself, why am I writing this?
[37:48]Just because it happened to me?
[37:50]That's not a good enough reason.
[37:52]It has to sit within a narrative coherence.
[37:55]Right?
[37:56]That is justified by the story.
[37:59]And that was the most difficult thing to learn.
[38:04]So, in other words, my understanding of what you're saying is you didn't write anything false.
[38:12]But you didn't write everything.
[38:14]You just, you took the pieces that you put one of the most important and woe them together to make this novel,
[38:22]which had you made the movie might be eight hours or nine hours long.
[38:28]Well, false.
[38:31]That's an interesting thing.
[38:32]There's composition.
[38:33]There's certainly composition.
[38:35]And we've false like that thing, just something that just happened.
[38:38]Yeah.
[38:39]Well, there's certainly composition to move the story along.
[38:46]And there are also leaps where, you know, you recreate, especially the parts where I'm recreating aspects of my mother's life.
[38:56]If the details didn't feel the narrative details needed a little push to get from one day to the next or the morning to the afternoon, I wasn't precious about that.
[39:08]But they had what they had to serve was the larger narrative.
[39:12]If that makes sense.
[39:15]I mean, I'll give you a really silly example if you want one.
[39:19]Like I went to, I went to three different universities.
[39:24]And when I first wrote it, I wrote about my experience at all three of those places.
[39:29]Right.
[39:30]But then as the editing went on and as those 160,000 words turned into 90, I realized one of those experiences, it was important in my life.
[39:40]It wasn't important in the book.
[39:42]I folded those two experiences into one.
[39:45]And there are all sorts of things like that.
[39:52]And remember, because of your mother's experience, the influence of her, we understand it.
[40:00]amazing that you ever thought about instead not being a right to a home being an actor
[40:09]Thank you
[40:11]He met the audio book
[40:14]I did do the audio book
[40:16]Because of the audience that we spoke about, but it's lower extent than being a stage
[40:21]But she did so many hours this week, so I wonder if I just wanted to...
[40:26]Yeah, I wrote a short film seven or eight years ago
[40:33]and made the great mistake of asking the friend who directed it if I could play the lead role
[40:40]And I think that will happily be the last time that I asked
[40:47]But no, I think
[40:52]But I think part of what I try to write about was the way in which
[40:58]a sort of artistic spirit moves between forms
[41:02]And so I have no gift for acting particularly
[41:09]But I think something Norman read and taught and was trying to get at was the idea that
[41:16]Whatever your form is, there is a certain
[41:20]artistic truth that if you're a musician or an actress, you can learn about through painting
[41:28]Oh, and so I'd like to think that whatever that artistic truth is, it's fluid between these
[41:34]These forms, but my form is definitely writing
[41:45]The minute time for one more question anyone has one
[41:52]Um, yeah, I'm writing another novel
[41:55]Which has been wonderful and I won't say too much about it because it's very it's very very early
[42:07]But it's um
[42:10]Yeah, that's it's coming
[42:25]Thank you