Episode 17: Featured Event with Joyce Maynard

In this episode of the Watchung Booksellers Podcast, authors Joyce Maynard and Alice Elliott Dark rejoice in the launch of Maynard's latest novel How the Light Gets In, recorded in-store at Watchung Booksellers.

Joyce Maynard has been publishing bestselling, literary books that shine a light on forbidden subjects for more than fifty years. She is the author of twelve previous novels and five books of nonfiction, as well as the syndicated column Domestic Affairs. Her bestselling memoir, At Home in the World, has been translated into sixteen languages.  Her novels To Die For and Labor Day were both adapted for film. Deemed “a master storyteller at the top of her game” by Wally Lamb, she divides her time between homes in California, New Hampshire, and Guatemala.

Alice Elliott Dark is the author of the novels Fellowship Point and Think of England, as well as two collections of short stories, In the Gloaming and Naked to the Waist. Her work has appeared in The New Yorker, Harper’s, The New York Times, Best American Short Stories, and O. Henry: Prize Stories, among others. Her award-winning story “In the Gloaming” was made into two films and was chosen for inclusion in Best American Stories of the Century. Dark is a past recipient of a National Endowment for the Arts Fellowship. She is a professor at Rutgers-Newark in the English department and the MFA program.

Resources:

New York Times Book Review Podcast

Anthem by Leonard Cohen 

Kintsugi 

John Prine

Sinead O’Connor

Books:
A full list of the books and authors mentioned in this episode is available here.

Register for Upcoming Events.

The Watchung Booksellers Podcast is produced by Kathryn Counsell and Marni Jessup and is recorded at Silver Stream Studio in Montclair, NJ.

The show is edited by Kathryn Counsell and Bree Testa. Special thanks to Timmy Kellenyi and Derek Mattheiss.

Original music is composed and performed by Violet Mujica.

Art & design and social media by Evelyn Moulton. Research and show notes by Caroline Shurtleff.

Thanks to all the staff at Watchung Booksellers and The Kids’ Room!

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Transcript

Marni: Hello everybody, welcome back to the Watchung Bookseller's podcast, I'm Marni and I'm here with Kathryn. Hey Marni! Hey everybody! Kathryn, what are you reading?

Kathryn:  Well, I just picked up Swiped, which is our August book of the month by L. M. Chilton. It is a thriller slash romantic comedy about a woman who has to discover a serial killer that everyone thinks is her before her friend's wedding.

Kathryn: So it seems kind of light and kind of what I need in August. How about you? 

Marni: I just picked up a copy of The Talented Mr. Ripley by the amazing Patricia Highsmith. It's a psychological thriller that came out in 1955 and obviously I knew about the book. I had never read it and then I listened to an episode of the New York Times book review podcast and they do a book club episode where they get a couple of their Uh, Critics to sit around and talk about a particular book, and this, this was this month's pick.

Marni: It's a great episode, but also has spoilers, so maybe read the book and then listen to the episode. 

Kathryn: Yeah. Yeah, cool. Oh, I've always wanted to read that too. Yeah, it's great. I've seen various iterations of it in, you know, film and TV and Yeah. Um, I'll pass it, I'll pass it along when I'm done. Cool. So just to let you know, the next few weeks, various people in our crew are going to be on vacation.

Kathryn: So instead of our usual thematic discussions, we're going to air some of our amazing author events that we've had recently and then maybe even going back a year or two. So if you didn't get a chance to come, you can take a listen here and get a taste of what our in store events are all about. 

Marni: Yeah, so this week we are featuring a conversation we had this summer with Joyce Maynard and Alice Elliot Dar.

Marni: to talk about Joyce's latest novel, How the Light Gets In. It was a packed house full of really diehard fans, and if you haven't had a chance to read her work or learn her story, this is a great introduction. I'm especially excited to launch her book in the store. 

Kathryn: Joyce Maynard has been publishing best selling literary books that shine a light on forbidden subjects for more than 50 years.

Kathryn: She is the author of 12 previous novels and five books of non fiction, as well as the syndicated column Domestic Affairs. Her best selling memoir, At Home in the World, has been translated into 16 languages. Her novels To Die For and Labor Day were both adapted for film and deemed a master storyteller at the top of her game by Wally Lamb.

Kathryn: She divides her time between homes in California, New Hampshire, and Guatemala. 

Marni: Alice Elliott Dark is the author of the novels Fellowship Point and Think of England, as well as two collections of short stories, In the Gloaming and Naked to the Waste. Her work has appeared in The New Yorker, Harper's, The New York Times, Best American Short Stories, and O.

Marni: Henry Price stories, among others. Her winning story in The Gloaming was made into two films and was chosen for inclusion in Best American Stories of the Century. Dark is a past recipient of National Endowment for the Arts Fellowship. She's an associate professor at Rutgers Newark in the MFA program.

Marni: She's a devoted supporter of Watchung booksellers and one of our favorite customers. 

Kathryn: So enjoy the conversation. We'll be back after to fill you in on what's coming up in the story.

Joyce: I just want to say before we dive in, I'm so thrilled to be here. First of all, I had heard about this bookstore and I've always wanted to come and I've never been before and, and then when I came to the Literary Festival last year, I was so thrilled that I got to have a conversation with Alice and I knew I wanted to keep talking, so I, I had to 

publish a book.

So I'm thrilled and most of all I just want to thank you for For having shown up for 51 years now. 

Joyce: I was 19 when I first published my first book and I turned 70 last November. And I really, I always say, I owe the gift of having been able to be writing all my life to readers, to you. I, I, I see familiar faces and some new faces.

Joyce: Tonight, but anybody who is a reader of mine, I do consider a friend. And 

Alice: um, so thank you. Well, let me just add to that how the level of admiration with which you're thought of in the iterate community. 'cause you've. supported the family with your writing. Very few people are able to do that. I was 

adjourning, I believe, 

Joyce: Member Magazines, that was me.

Joyce: You read me even when you didn't know me. I was the ghostwriter of T. Barry Brazelton. I was writing, uh, critiques of various kinds of sports bras. You name it. I was taking, I, I was doing a comparison between Disney World and Disneyland. And bringing, the fact that I got to take my children free, and instead just bringing the three of them, I thought, Oh, I'll throw in some more children.

Joyce: So I brought six children 

Alice: to Disney World and Disneyland. And I can tell 

Joyce: you they're exactly the same. Well, 

Alice: it is an extremely impressive career. I feel so lucky to be able to talk with you about your work. And I want, I love you to start by describing this book. Sure. How many people have read the book?

Alice: Three. It just came out two days ago, and it's a long story. And I won't give any 

spoilers. 

Joyce: But maybe it will ask, how many people have read Count the Ways? So, I will tell you, Alice, that I did not intend to revisit these characters. And I know that you're in the throes of doing the same too. I thought it was done.

Joyce: I've never written a sequel to a book, to a novel before. And it really was. You, if not literally you, it was readers who told me that I needed to, I couldn't leave you there. If you've read Count the Ways, you may well be among those who were very angry. I got at least a dozen letters from people who said they threw the book down on the floor at some point.

Joyce: They did keep it back up again, but they were very angry, and if you've read the book, you probably know why. They were, they were angry that Eleanor kept on putting herself last, that she was this self sacrificing woman. She, she doesn't tell her children the truth about the divorce, which means that they blame her, and she protects her husband.

Joyce: She gives away the farm that she had bought. I don't ever feel, and I know, that it's our job as writers to portray characters who make wise choices. If we did do that, our books would be very short and rather boring. Um, but I also don't think that that's the truth. That I wanted to portray a real woman who does the kinds of things that women do and, and when, what it is to put themselves last.

Joyce: So, I got all these letters and they basically said, you can't leave Eleanor where she is. She was 55 when the book ends it. The book covers, the first book covers the story of a woman from the 1970s through the year 2009, through before young love, through young love, passion, romance, Children somehow losing sight of each other in the course of it and the downfall of their marriage, precipitated by a tragic accident for which she holds her husband responsible and cannot, cannot forgive him.

Joyce: Forgiveness, I would say, to me. So the new book picks up in 2010 and brings us right to 2024, March of 2024, and it's Eleanor She happens to be exactly the same age as me, and I think you and I are close in age. Yeah, I think we are. Uh, so she was born in 1953, like me, and she goes through all the years and the stages, and when we, to age 70, and she gets to the place that thankfully, you know, if we're wise, we do, of looking out, finally, over the woods, and she, the children are gone, the husband is gone, and she looks at herself and says, Who am I?

Joyce: What do I need? Doesn't mean I don't still give her some trouble, but um, and she still has this little caretaking habit. But it's her time. I wanted to give her a really, a really passionate love affair, but I also didn't want the love affair to be the answer. I didn't want a man to come galloping along and save her.

Joyce: Yes, 

Alice: and that, even as we're going into that, I don't think it's a spoil that there is a love affair. But you can feel that that's not going to be the answer for her. Because she is, her life is so rich and full. And what was it like to be 

back with her? Oh god, I loved it. I, I, I'm very, I just jump out of bed and I can't wait to get going and find out what those people are going to do.

A little like parenthood sometimes, sometimes 

Joyce: too much like parenthood. They do things you didn't want them to do. I'd be interested to know if you were in this camp or the other one, Alice, where I don't plan out my, I don't know what's going to happen in my books. I, I write the book. Usually very fast because I cannot wait to find out what they're going to do.

Joyce: And it sounds kind of oo oo, but it actually, what I do know is who they are. I know who the characters are and they, they lead me. Their nature and their obsessions lead me to what will happen. But I am my own person. First Reader. 

I feel 

Joyce: the same. Yeah. And I, you know, I know the one that's always second is John Irving, who says he writes the last sentence first.

Joyce: And I'm certainly not going to level any criticisms at John Irving, but that would 

take away a lot 

Joyce: of the fun for me. I mean, I want to discover it. I will not tell you what happens at the end of this book, but there is a very dramatic event that happens. I didn't know that was going to be in the book until maybe 25 pages before it.

Joyce: But after it came to me, it was like, of course that was going to happen. That character would do 

Alice: that thing that he does. You may find that. Well, that's exactly it, isn't it? It's like, that character will do that thing. Yes. And that's what you're looking for the whole time. You know, what is this person going to do?

Alice: And the more you write each one thing, then, It's more clear the next day. 

Exactly, 

Joyce: and I mean that's partly what I mean about the comparison to parenthood. That for this very brief time, you control the path of your child's life, but it doesn't last very long. And you, you can dress them as you want and feed them what you want and then They tell you who they are, and sometimes you don't like what they say, or what they choose.

Joyce: And that's part of the deal that Eleanor has to accept also, and I think acceptance is um, a huge part of this story that it, probably a bunch of you recognize where the title comes from. And a couple of people said, I ripped off Louise Penny. I didn't, Louise Penny also has a book called, I didn't rip off Louise Penny, I did rip off Leonard Cohen.

Joyce: There's a Leonard Cohen song, the first, it's, the first part of the line is, There is a crack, a crack in everything. That's where the light gets in, how the light gets in. And, um, That, to me, is where Eleanor's at right now. That she, like me, and like a lot of us when we were younger, was always aspiring to this, whether it was making the perfect birthday party, or the perfect dinner, Christmas, or being the perfect mother, the perfect, um, she was trying so hard to, to, to control everything and make it all look the way she had planned, and almost nothing ends up the way we had planned, and we can either grieve it, or say, you know, we're Oh, that was interesting.

Alice: Well, you have a wonderful image in the book of the Japanese pottery artist, Sugi. Does everybody know what that is? Would you want to describe it? Sure. You 

Joyce: know, like so many things. I'll say, um, One of the gifts of my life, you're right that I've mostly just written my whole life, it's not one job, but once a year for over 30 years I've hosted a memoir workshop for women in a very unlikely place, a Mayan indigenous village in Guatemala, and I, I'm a two time college dropout, I'm not conventionally educated, but my education has been women's stories, and women come to that little Mayan indigenous village, and there are some here tonight who There's always a few Guatemalan people who may not look Guatemalan, but they love Guatemala.

Joyce: Um, and my education has been women and women's stories. And there was a woman who came to my workshop years ago. I never rip off anybody's story, those are confidential. But she came to the workshop and she was a Kintsugi ceramicist. What it is, is, It's a very Japanese concept. You take a broken bowl, and in fact, you break the bowl, if you're a true Kintsugi artist.

Joyce: You break the bowl, and you put it back together with gold lacquer in between the cracks, and make a little beautiful thing that it was. 

Alice: Yeah, if you haven't seen pictures of it, look it up, because it's really, it's really striking. And once you brought that into the book, That's how I thought of Eleanor for the whole book.

Alice: I felt that this is exactly what she was doing. She was sort of finding the cracks in her being and repairing them with gold. And it was like, not ever going to be perfect, but it was, it had beauty to it. 

Joyce: I don't want 

Alice: to brag about 

Joyce: being 70, but I will say, because I think we've earned it, that there are a lot of losses along the way.

Joyce: But I don't think I ever knew more, understood more, and was more sort of clear. And I'm sure when I'm 80 I'll say, If I get to be 80, I'll say, wow, when I was only 70, there were all these things I didn't know about. I couldn't have written this book when I was a mere 55, you know, and maybe not even 60. And I don't think there's any way to tell our children or tell younger people.

Joyce: I did, I do have this, This kind of dream that this is, this is the book I wish I could have read when I was 40 and when I was myself very bitter and angry about a divorce in the ways that Eleanor was and trying to be this person making everything okay for everybody, protecting the children from all pain and loss.

Joyce: I actually, one time, I had taken my children, there was this great deal that you could get a ticket, a round trip ticket to London for 100. Including a hotel. It was obviously long ago, but I felt it was my way to get my children to London. And so we went, and I took a, I think it was an 8, a 10, and a 14 year old to London for 3 days.

Joyce: I didn't let them sleep because I wanted to pack in a switch. And they each got to have one special treat in London. And, um, my son Charlie, the older of my two boys, chose this set of very beautiful, um, Very British, leather juggling balls. And we walked into the subway, the tube, and he was, he started to juggle the balls.

Joyce: And, you know, mothers, and some fathers, can sort of see trouble a mile away. And I, I did start to say, No, Charlie, because he wasn't, But it was too late, a juggling ball had fallen into the pit, and I jumped in. Which, if you've read Count the Ways, you know there's a name for that. It's called Crazy Land. And it goes there.

Joyce: I don't go there anymore. But that was me trying to protect my child. God, did he know bigger pain than the last juggling ball. I did retrieve the ball. As I climbed out of the pit, my daughter was there, like, screaming at me. Correctly. 

Alice: I hope he appreciated that. We'll 

get to that 

Joyce: later. 

Oh, the things that our children could appreciate us for.

We just have to 

Joyce: appreciate each other. 

Yeah. 

Alice: Well, one, talking about the kind of wisdom that Eleanor has acquired, And at her age of a young 70. There's still time left, still things gonna happen in the future. But I think we really see that most. When she's on the farm with her son Toby. Yes. And Toby, all of you have read Count the West, you know that he had an accident when he was four that left him with a different kind of brain.

Alice: Yes. Than a typically developing brain. But a lot of his kind of brain is very emotionally astute and very tuned in. And when the two of them are together, I just could have like read that forever. When they're just on the farm, living their life is so beautiful. I 

think of 

Joyce: him as being. It's a kind of angel.

Joyce: He's the heart of the book. He's when we renamed him. He was this brilliant sort of just star of a child and now he's this slow moving goat farmer on the farm and for reasons I won't explain because I don't want to give spoilers, Eleanor is back on the farm and he possesses a kind of center and though his brain is damaged, his heart is alive and well so actually one of the big challenges for me was I knew that he would want to fall in love, and that he would be very good at love, and I gave a lot of, he, when we first meet him, he's sending off, he's obsessed with Scarlett Johansson, and he sends letters addressed to Scarlett Johansson, Hollywood.

Joyce: Um, and I, I gave so much thought to what could, what would be believable that could happen for Toby, and I actually am very proud of what I came up with for Toby, and happy for him. Thank you. I'm sure this happens to you. You come to love your characters. Even the ones who do really bad things. 

Alice: Like Coco.

Alice: Don't 

Joyce: you 

Alice: think? 

Joyce: Oh, poor Coco. And Rain is problematic. But there's some new characters who come on the scene in this one. So yeah, Toby, um, Toby has a kind of inner wisdom. 

Alice: And he is, uh, he does raise goats and he makes cheese. I don't think this is a spoiler. No, no. So how did you learn so much about it?

Alice: Because you feel like you're learning how to do it. I don't 

Joyce: do a whole lot of research. And I feel, if there's a subject that I know so well, There's so little about that I'd have to research it, I probably won't write authentically about it if it comes from, you know, Google or whatever, or even if I go deeper.

Joyce: So it, usually there's some kind of human connection. I do not have a child with a brain injury, I do not have a transgender child, one of the children is But I did, one of my daughter's friends raises goats and I went, I spent a long time at the goat farm. And then I watched, I recommend this, I watched a lot of YouTube videos of goats being born, which are really beautiful.

Joyce: I liked kangaroos being born too, but I didn't see it. 

But, so yeah, there's pieces, there's pieces of, I go back to the women I know from Lele 

Joyce: Tidlan in Guatemala, their stories, that I carry with me in a very 

Alice: Big way. So the other two children, let's talk about the other two children. Yes. We have Toby, we have, and so we're seeing, you all know the, you know, all know Al and Ursula 

Joyce: Al.

Joyce: I don't wanna presume everybody's ready count away. So I'll say that Al, the oldest child was born a girl, but recognizes that that wasn't who he was meant to be. And he transitions. And he transitions during a period. And actually one of my children did have a friend who did this in the year 2000, when it was a much.

Joyce: Stranger thing to hear about. And he decides when he's quite young. 

When he's quite young, he does. And it's not what the book is about. Nor is Traumatic Brain Injury. 

Joyce: But it's the stuff of life that happens in families. I didn't, it wasn't sort of the trend of the day to put in a transgender character or, you know, a climate change activist lover.

Joyce: It's the, that stuff is out there. So that's Al. And actually, sometimes the thing you think is going to be the tragedy is not. I remember when my son's friend did announce, and his mother was my good friend, and that announced that they were going to become a man. I thought that was just the saddest, most tragic situation.

Joyce: And, 

and he's great. He's a great 

Joyce: guy. And then, you know, Other things that you don't see coming turn out to be the hardest things, which brings me to the story of Ursula, the middle child. Beloved child, as they all are in Eleanor's life, she's, you know, it's almost redundant to say she's of this deeply loving mother.

Joyce: She's a mother, but Ursula is the little child and the fixer, the one who's always trying to make everything right in the family. When her parents marriage is beginning to fall apart, she, she goes to the library and gets books on how to fix relationships. And she makes a romantic dinner for her father and mother, a grilled cheese sandwiches with a heart cut out in the middle and lights candles.

Joyce: And she tries so hard and she becomes estranged from Eleanor. Which brings me to a thing that I've sort of made a commitment to say every night when I, it's the one thing that I know I will always talk about. I love it that it's always also different. I've spoken about the lessons of my memoir workshop and the lessons that I have learned from women.

Joyce: In the 30 years that I've worked with women, not professional writers, women of all, just women who had a story to tell, which every woman does, I think in the first 15 years I have met four women. who had the story of an adult child who no longer spoke to them and grandchildren they didn't know. Four, maybe five.

Joyce: In the last 10 years, I have come to know over 60. There's at least one in this room and I know there are others that I don't know because it's something we don't talk about and it's something that carries more shame than almost any experience I can imagine. And isolation. And guilt. And it's almost inevitable, and I count myself as one of the people who might once have judged, that people will say about a woman whose child no longer speaks to her, What terrible thing did she really do that we don't know?

Joyce: And sometimes the answer is, no more than all the rest of us. Flawed, imperfect parent, of course. But there is an epidemic. Going on that is not spoken of and it is millennial children Deciding to cut loving parents out of their lives, and I am one And the story with Ursula is not my story, but I wanted to Explore that fictionally partly because it's an interesting story.

Joyce: That's always top of my list I want to give you a good story, but also I feel it's my job to portray what's going on in the world Which actually is going to lead me to a very short, our time together feels so precious that I, I don't, even though I love to read out loud, I used to be able to read out loud to my children.

Joyce: They don't seem too interested in having me read out loud. Um, uh, they're 40, But, uh, I get to read out loud to you. So this is a very short passage that I'm going to read. And this is Ursula, and it's kind of one of the, the period that you were talking about. Uh, Eleanor and Toby. are at the farm, and Toby says, You turned out to be a good mother, Toby says.

Joyce: A good mother, who even knows what that is? For nine months, you carry a child in your body. Then, you give birth to this person, and they depend on you, for a while anyway, for every single thing in their life, including their survival. What they need, is you. Not only food, warmth, safety, diapers, baths, sunshine, fresh air, milk, also comfort, reassurance, protection, encouragement, vigilance, stamina, compassion, money, love.

Joyce: You teach them what bread is, and milk, and a ball, a dog, a helicopter, a tree, a car, a lawnmower, a cell phone, They look to you to tell them about everything, basically. The whole wide world. The meaning of everything. As if you knew. Every year, on their birthday, you bake a cake for this person you gave birth to, and at Christmas, you fill their stocking, after driving around for hours, in terrible traffic, probably, of Lizard, to find the one toy they want more than any other.

Joyce: You teach them letters, numbers, colors, the names of vegetables, how to ride a bicycle, how to swim, how to make friends, what sex is, and You teach them that someday everybody dies, but in their case, you pray, not for a very long time. You teach them what's the right thing to do, how to treat people. When they get this wrong, you give them another chance.

Joyce: You take them places, you make sure they get home, you tuck them into bed every night, and maybe sometimes they wake up with a bad dream, which means you need to be there once again to tell them it's alright. Even if it isn't always going to be, you need to say it. Here is this thing called life, you say.

Joyce: Now, go out into the world and live yours. I'll be here looking out for you, no matter what. I'll be here. It's an impossible job. How is anybody going to get it right? You won't, of course. You will definitely screw up and possibly fail miserably. Your child will suffer disappointment. Some caused by you. You promised to stay married to her father, but you don't.

Joyce: You told her life was fair, but it isn't. You wanted her to believe people were mostly good. Then someone really bad came along, or just someone who hurts them badly. Your child will be angry at you sometimes. You may be angry at her, too, but because you're the parent, you're not supposed to be. One day, you may pour a glass of wine over your head, or stuff a fancy cake you just finished making into the garbage.

Joyce: You may go crazy now and then. You may get angry at your child's father. You may say things you wish you hadn't. This child you've raised may forgive you, or she may not. On Mother's Day, she may send you a card telling you what a great mother you are, the best ever. She may send you a text message informing you that as a victim of toxic parenting, she has recognized her profound need for boundaries.

Joyce: She may inform you in this text message that this will be her final communication with you. She's severing your relationship. Don't call, don't write. No, she does not want to go into therapy with you. She may break your heart. You're a bad mother. You're a good mother. You used to be a good mother, but now you aren't anymore.

Joyce: You were a bad mother, but maybe you can make it up to this child whose life you ruined. You didn't get to be a mother. You did, but you wished you didn't. You wish you could do it over, but you can't. You were given this person to take care of. Egg, sperm, nine months, gestation, labor. The easy part. It's all the rest that got you in trouble.

Joyce: As hard as you tried, your efforts were never enough. None ever can be. You turned out to be a good mother, Toby tells Eleanor now. Well, she's a mother, that's all. That's as much as Eleanor is prepared to say about herself on the subject at this point. About her performance on the job. I did the best I could, she thinks.

Joyce: But, not even that. She could have tried harder. Could have done better. Could have given more. When, in the life of a mother, or a father, is that not true? And I 

want to say, because I know I'm 

Joyce: not alone. 

I know that's kind of a tough 

Joyce: passage to read, and I actually think that this is the most optimistic book that I've written.

Joyce: So, 

if I say something about the others, just refer to me. But, what's optimistic is not that bad things don't happen, 

Joyce: but that she survives. That she's resilient. That's what I believe in at the age of 70, not escaping trouble, 

Alice: but surviving. She is really resilient, and the way she approaches this issue of estrangement from her daughter Ursula, and absolutely open door, you know, and if there's a chance to do her a favor, or watch her children, or anything, you know, there's never any hesitation on her part, which I thought was really important.

Alice: It's never a clear two way street. You give. You keep giving. And you give because you want to give, presumably. It was a painful part of the book, um, to read that story. I mean, there's so many different incidents and stuff. But you'll tell them they're 

Joyce: good things, too. I'm just saying. 

Alice: There's, I mean, there's so many things.

Alice: You know, it's very rich. And can I just say what that passage you read, Just read where, where it came off of, the scene right before. Sure, I don't even remember where it came off of Eleanor's watching the Brett Kavanaugh hearings and being very engaged by Christine Blasey Ford's testimony. And just after she watches it, she goes into Toby.

Alice: And she thinks he's such a good man. He's a good man. Yes. And then he says to her, well, you're a good mother. 

Joyce: And I believe in good men. Yeah. I believe in the goodness of men and the goodness of women and I've just about never read a character who's a real, really bad person. They do bad things. But I, I try to find, there's a character in the book This was a stretch.

Joyce: Actually, I want to say a couple of things about being political. Well, that's 

Alice: what I 

Joyce: was, 

Alice: that's what I wanted to say. And I 

Joyce: probably won't have as much pushback in Montclair as I would in San Francisco. But, I'm just guessing. But, um, and it's an interesting time. We know, we all know what's going on at this very moment.

Joyce: Um, there was a woman who posted something on Amazon, and it brought my Amazon rating way down. She said she would have given me a negative if she could. But she said I've always really liked Joyce Maynard's books, and then she had to get political, and it spoiled everything. I actually do have very strong political views, and I'm sure most of us do.

Joyce: I don't think you want to spend 25 to hear my political views, so that's not what I do in my books. But my characters. have views and opinions about food and music and what they like to watch on TV or who they fall in love with. And they have very strong views, how could we not, especially during the years that I covered in this book, 2010 to 2024, about what's going on.

Joyce: So, um, That's all in the mix. I've always, it's a thing that I really love to do in my books. I feel my books are very American. And I've always been aware of what's going on in the kitchens and living rooms and bedrooms, but also the stories that are coming in on the television and the radio and our social media.

Joyce: And when a friend calls up and says, can you believe, so there's, there's a scene. Well, it was seen in Count the Ways where Ursula goes off to school on January 26, 1986, wearing a little Krista McAuliffe suit that her mother sewed for her and to count down the challenger with every child in America as my daughter did when she was seven.

Joyce: And we all know what happened. That's not political. That's the world coming into our lives in a very personal way, the intersection of the big world and our little piece of it. And in this book, Eleanor Decides to throw a party for what she anticipates to be the election of the first woman president.

Joyce: And she bakes a really great chocolate cake that nobody ends up eating. And so I guess that's what offended this reader. But, yeah, the book is also There's a character, Ursula's husband, 

Who deeply loves his wife, 

Joyce: deeply loves his children, loses his job, starts drinking way too much, becomes very sort of alienated and angry, and attaches himself to all kinds of conspiracy theories.

Joyce: And he ends up driving to our nation's capital on January 26th. 2021. And I didn't make him a villain. That was actually a really important thing for me to get into Jake's head and imagine 

Alice: what could have brought him there. Yeah, I really like the way you handle having those events. They're not changing the lives of the characters, but they're so relevant to the lives of the characters.

Joyce: It's it's I could no more imagine Setting a book in these years and not talking about the Trump years, and many other things. Um, then, you know, setting a novel in Europe in the late 30s, 40s, and not mentioning World War II. You know, these things are going on, and they are part of the fabric of 

our days.

Alice: Yeah. And when you have a family with a trans child and a child who needs, you know, perhaps, medical care, you know, these things are so relevant. And whose president is really relevant to how that family is going to be cared for. So, you know, I thought you worked it in really well because it was just passage of time.

Joyce: And some of it's little stuff. There's a lot of music in this book. And 

Alice: partly that's just because I love music. Let me say next 

Joyce: question. Okay! 

Alice: You have your afterword, you say how important, she says how important music is to her. You figure out each character's favorite and make them a playlist. Yeah, which is so wonderful.

Alice: So can you talk about that? And it's not always the 

Joyce: music I listen to. You know, because I go to the Capitol listening to Kim Brock, which is not on my, it's not on mine. But I think music speaks to where our passions lie. I mean, for me it does. And the things that make us cry, the things that move us. So I think very closely about what everybody listens to.

Joyce: And in this book, so there's a pretty wide range of, you know, some songs we all know, but there's a lot of very obscure music. I keep on saying I'm going to be posting on my website a Spotify playlist of this book, and I just have been running around so much I haven't done it yet, but I will. At the center of the music, there's a lot of, Music that I just, speaks to me, or speaks to one of my characters.

Joyce: But at the center is John Prine, actually. And I was John Prine. And John Prine was a singer, songwriter, Americana artist, who I saw many times in concert. And, you know, I love Bob Dylan too, but I don't want to have dinner with Bob Dylan. John Prine was somebody that you felt you could just, He'd be your friend.

Joyce: And John Prine was one of the very first high profile deaths during COVID. So Eleanor, who has been all her life, you know, singing John Prime songs to her children when she's taking them out of the bathtub or wherever, you know, she's as I did, she experiences John Prime's death, as the loss of a friend.

Joyce: And, and, and he, he's almost a character in the book, but. Many others, too. Sinead O'Connor's death happened just as I was doing the final revisions of this book, and I thought, Oh, I just, I spent an afternoon just listening to Sinead O'Connor, and I thought, Oh, Sinead O'Connor needs to be in Eleanor's world, because she would have been.

Joyce: I, I 

Alice: must ask you one more thing, and then I think it's time for Bonnie's question, so get ready. 

Joyce: And I'm so torn, because I love talking with you, Alice, 

Alice: but I also 

Joyce: do love, it is always my favorite thing to hear from you, so I know you appreciate it. 

Alice: So Eleanor has a writing career. Yes. She writes children's books.

Alice: She writes She does a comic strip. She does a comic strip. She invents these different characters. She's involved in a film being made of her. You know, that goes sideways for various reasons. And when I was reading about that, I really thought about you. And I was wondering how much you were giving her your writing life.

Joyce: Sort of I was, although I, I mean I did, I never made a comic strip. I do draw in everybody's book. It's my little thing. I always thought I'd be a drawer, not a writer. But the part that is me, is that Eleanor always puts her work after everything else. And she does it, it's sort of, it's actually pretty important it supports the family, because if it doesn't, but it's not where, it's not the thing that she assigns the greatest value to.

Joyce: And it creeps up on her. As it has me, I will say. This is one of the great, Discoveries and gifts of my later years that how much work means to me and how I honor the space in my life now for work and don't put it last and don't do it when everything else. I used, I wrote the first five books I wrote I think were written at the kitchen table.

Joyce: I didn't have a desk and I sort of did it, you know, in and around other people's needs. I have a desk now. I don't have a room, like 

Alice: you do, but I think a lot of work has been done. That's their experience, and it can take a while to start to put it higher up on the priority list. But, you know, I found that really interesting, the book, because she has gotten so much done, but really she talks about it in one page.

Alice: Well 

Joyce: at one point, a young feminist journalist comes and interviews her for her graduate work at Harvard. And she's kind of incensed that Eleanor is so domestic and that Eleanor bakes pies as I am. And that's sort of a lesser thing. And you and I are both of the generation. That kind of did diminish the domestic.

Joyce: It was almost a betrayal of our women. I had children very young, I think partly because it was the thing that I didn't feel confident I'd have. I was writing from when I was very young. I sort of, I didn't take it for granted, but I always knew that that would happen. But the idea of getting to be part of a family was the big dream.

Joyce: And I knew the only way I could be part of a happy family was to have children. And that's Eleanor. She's, her dream, I always ask what's my character's obsession, and her obsession is family. And what she comes to realize is that it takes, and I have come to realize, that it takes many forms. And it doesn't necessarily look like those families we grew up watching on television.

Joyce: And we won't be failures if we don't have a family like that. 

Alice: All right. Okay, we didn't get to talk about The boyfriend, but maybe someone will ask about that. But let's open it up. Great, and say your name 

if you would, 

Alice: just your 

Joyce: first 

name is fine. Ken, when you decided you were going to write a sequel, how much obligation did you feel to fill in people who hadn't read the first book?

Such a good question. Or did you ever consider just like, hey, you want to know what happened? Read the first book. I, it's a 

Joyce: combination. I wouldn't do that because there's things you have to know to understand. But I was keenly aware, and it's a balancing act, you're probably going through this now, I didn't want to, you know, Be repetitive or insulting to people who had read the first book.

Joyce: But I had to, I had to, you had to know like what happened to Toby and some things. So I gave you, I gave you some flashbacks, but they're not things that were in the first book. It's things that happened during that period that I hadn't put there. And, but it was, it was a challenge. Yeah, I'll say it was a challenge.

Joyce: And, and I was very glad once I got about, 60 pages in. I didn't have to do that anymore because you already knew them. But if you've read Count the Ways, you'll see some things that you know, but 

they'll be told in a new way. I hope. My name is Linda. I've been reading you for decades, and I hope you don't mind if I digress for a moment.

But the good daughters It's one of my all time favorites. No, that's not it. I'd love to hear that. So I would like to know, what gave you the idea for that book? Because it's underrated. People don't talk about it. People haven't read it. And I've adored it for decades. So what gave you the 

Joyce: idea? 

You 

Joyce: know, it's always different, but I'll tell you what.

Joyce: So, I've written for my living. And I got a magazine assignment that two women had just learned that they were sisters. You know, it's one of those stories. They were given to them. Oh, they were given to them by their parents. And I was given an assignment by one of the many magazines that no longer exists to write about them.

Joyce: And it was going to, you know, it was going to pay quite a few bills. That article would be, you know, a couple mortgage payments, whatever. And I was all set to write it, and I thought, why do I always do this? I always write the magazine article. And I didn't. I went off to a cabin in Wyoming, and I imagined the sisters.

Joyce: I didn't write the magazine article that would be, you know, long gone. So that happened to be that one. And then I placed it, I didn't research it in any way, any more than I researched the Pamela Smart case for, to die for, which is not about the Pamela Smart case. I wanted to then, to take the little pieces of something that happened and then imagine what didn't happen that could have happened.

Joyce: And that's what I came up with. I had a friend in New Hampshire who grew up on a farm where they grew strawberries and she was. That is an example of not exactly research, like Googling, but I spent hours hearing everything about the family farm and strawberries, and in fact, I always record my books now, and I really love to record, and when I did that book, there are two voices, the voices of the two sisters, and my friend, Becky, who came from the oldest family farm in America where the strawberries were grown, did the voice of one of the sisters, because she had a really good New Hampshire accent.

There. What's your name? 

Joyce: Marnus. 

Hi, Marnus. 

Joyce: My question, you hinted that you have a possible sequel to The Bird Hotel. We did that for a book group. Everybody loved it. So I will really quickly tell you about The Bird Hotel, if you don't know about The Bird Hotel. Because it's, it's unlike any other book I wrote.

Joyce: And so I mentioned I do this workshop. And I, it used to be one writing workshop one week every year in Guatemala. And about 12 women would come down and I'd put them up in this funky little hotel in the village. It's a Mayan indigenous village, nothing fancy. And they'd come over to my house every day, and we would work all day long on their stories.

Joyce: And I loved it. It was great. And the women loved it. And it was an unlikely place to go. Definitely wasn't Tuscany or Provence, but it was pretty special. And we had great food. A chef would come down and cook for us. And then March of 2020, you all know what was going on then. I didn't know if anybody would show up, but I felt I had to be there in case they did.

Joyce: And lo and behold, we were there. Fifteen women came that year, and then they closed the airport, the chef couldn't make it down. They closed the airport, we kind of hunkered down at my house, and the workshop went on longer than usual because there was no plane. I knew that the U. S. State Department was going to send a plane, and they did.

Joyce: And so the women went home, all except for two, who I invited to stay with me. The two youngest, who were about 32, I called them the girls. So the girls and I were there at the house. I'm almost embarrassed to say what a great pandemic we had. It was the best time in my life. The girls would say that too.

Joyce: Men were not involved, but we would, we got very busy with our projects. Yes, mine was writing, rewriting Count the Ways completely. Jenny was an activist, political activist, and she started a podcast. She ran as a composer, she had no piano, I thought it was more rimba, that really wasn't good enough. And she started recording bird songs, which are on the audio book of the Bird Hotel.

Joyce: Um, and every night we would gather. on my patio in front of the house. There are a couple of women here who know this scene. And we would cook a fabulous meal. We had a garden. There was a fisherman who would bring fish right from the lake. Well, there was this other thing that is kind of weird, but stores like Neiman Marcus that have very, very expensive fish.

Joyce: But if they don't sell them, they can't donate them to Goodwill because then the people who spend all their money would be kind of mad. So they send them to Guatemala, and I buy them. So I had a closet full of sequined gowns, designer gowns. And every night we'd put on our designer gowns, and we'd cook this fabulous meal, and we sat out under the stars with candlelight, and I would read a chapter of Count the Ways to them.

Joyce: And every morning they'd shoo me up the hill to, you know Go write another chapter because I couldn't wait to find out what would happen and neither could I. I didn't know. And then a terrible thing happened, which was I finished the book. And the girl said, okay, what now? And that's why I started The Bird Hotel.

Joyce: Which at the time, it's a story of a woman who's experienced a terrible tragedy. She's still alive. She doesn't really care if she lives or dies, but she gets on a bus, ends up, she doesn't care where she goes, she ends up in this little Mayan indigenous village that I never named the country of, but there are volcanoes and a lake.

And 

Joyce: she, for reasons I won't go into, she, she takes over running this completely broken down hotel and rebuilds not only the hotel, but her life. At the time that I wrote The Bird Hotel, which has a hundred chapters, because that was how many nights I kept on, it was like, early in the night, um, I would be reading to the girls.

Joyce: It was purely an act of fantasy. We were living in my house, my sort of normal house. It was a very beautiful garden and birds, but it was just a house. And COVID never came, never came to that village. We were all very careful. COVID didn't come, but something else just as devastating did. And so I decided to do something that I could not have afforded to do in the United States of America.

Joyce: I hired 20 men, a crew of 20 men, to come and just do building projects. And at first I had them fix my roof and a couple other things. And I just drew a little drawing of a little casita, a little house. And I said, no building permits, no, you know. And I said, would you build that? The men were so happy to be working and feeding their families again, and if you're paying 20 men, 120 people, 150 people are eating.

Joyce: So, Casita was finished and there was still COVID. So I said, well, I drew another picture of another Casita. So we built seven. They built seven little houses. I don't know what I was thinking of, but it wasn't until it was all over I said, Oh, I only have a workshop a couple times a year. What am I going to do?

Joyce: So I do now run a hotel in Guatemala. It was not my intention. I do sometimes in the middle of the night have to like, Tell somebody, explain somebody where to get the boat, or when the massage is going to be, or I, and I kind of write books in my spare time, but there is now a Byrd Hotel. You can actually, if you, if you love the book and you want to see what it looks like, you go to CasaPalomaRetreat.

Joyce: com. It's, my name is not mentioned, but the casitas all are named after books of mine. And on my, on my website as well, yeah. Do we, do we have time for another question? Yeah. 

Hi Joyce, my name is Cindy. Hi Cindy. I love the way you handled in this book Toby's, um, predicament and when Guy said something to the effect that, you know, he's doing really well for a brain injured person and, and Eleanor Martin.

And I just love the way that was handled because forget the labels. The labels have done well. We've all 

Joyce: got some kind of disability, don't we? Yes, we do. Yeah, some of them are just not as clearly labeled. 

So I really just wanted to say thank you. Um, 

Joyce: I, I'd love to end with a very, very short reading. It's just a couple of paragraphs.

Joyce: Yep. And this This is pretty much where I'm at right now. I'm not Eleanor, but I, I will cop to the fact that I agree with her on just about everything she's about to say. The thought comes to Eleanor. All this time she had it wrong. All those years she spent grieving the loss of her son's brain cells. All those years when it seemed something inside him had been broken and that nothing could ever be all right again.

Joyce: What she sees now is the beautiful part. There is a reason some people are broken. If nobody ever broke, if everything always turned out the way you wanted, if the sun always shone and the rain never fell, if there was only spring and no winter, only music and no silence, only love without loneliness.

Joyce: Where would beauty come from, or amazement? If nobody ever died, how could they know the preciousness? of every day they got to be alive in the world.

Kathryn: Thank you Joyce and Alice for this in store event. Listeners, you can find their books and all the books they mentioned in our show notes and at watchungbooksellers. com. We're 

Marni: quiet in August, but building a busy fall season of events. Join us on Thursday, September 5th for Jenny Rosenstrack, author of The Weekday Vegetarians, who's releasing her follow up cookbook, The Weekday Vegetarians Get Simple.

Marni: And on Tuesday, September 10th, we welcome back Ian Frazier for the launch of his newest book of essays, Paradise Bronx. He'll be in conversation with his New Yorker colleague, DT 

Kathryn: Maxx. And on Saturday, September 14th, we're excited to welcome best selling novelist Laura Dabe for the release of her brand new novel, The Weekday Vegetarians.

Kathryn: Laura is the author of the New York Times number one bestselling, The Last Thing He Told Me. And as a bonus, this book will be available to ticket holders before the release date. So get your tickets and don't miss out. We're scheduling more events by the day, so you can find out about all of them in our newsletter, show notes, and blog.

Kathryn: The Watchung 

Marni: Booksellers podcast is produced by Kathryn Council and Marni Jessup and is recorded at Silver Stream Studio in Montclair, New Jersey. The show is edited by Kathryn Council and Bri Testa. Special thanks to Timmy Kaleni and Derek Mathias. Original music is composed and performed by Violet Mohica.

Marni: Art and design and social media by Evelyn Moulton. Research and show notes by Caroline Schuertleth. Thank you to the staff at Watchung Booksellers and The Kids Room for all their hard work and love of books. 

Kathryn: And thank you for listening. If you enjoy the show, please like, follow, and share it. You can follow us on social media at Watchung Booksellers, and if you have any questions or ideas, you can reach us at wbpodcast at watchungbooksellers.

Kathryn: com. We'll see you next 

Marni: time. Until then, for the love of books, keep reading.