Bookshelfie: Women’s Prize Podcast - S5 Ep15: Bookshelfie: Madeline Miller

Episode Date: October 19, 2022

2012 Women’s Prize winner Madeline Miller joins Vick Hope and explains why as a writer, you have to be your own biggest cheerleader. Madeline is a New York Times bestselling author and Women’s Prize for Fiction winner. Her debut novel The Song of Achilles came out in 2011 after a whopping 10 years of blood, sweat and tears, which all became worth it with its phenomenal success. Her next novel, Circe, came out in 2018 and is currently being adapted for television. Her latest book Galatea is a short story which became an instant Sunday Times bestseller on its publication earlier this year. Madeline’s book choices are:  ** The Joy Luck Club by Amy Tan **  Sense and Sensibility screenplay by Emma Thompson ** Kitchen by Banana Yoshimoto ** Heartburn by Nora Ephron ** The House of the Spirits by Isabel Allende Vick Hope, multi-award winning TV and BBC Radio 1 presenter, author and journalist, is the host of season five of the Women’s Prize for Fiction Podcast. Every week, Vick will be joined by another inspirational woman to discuss the work of incredible female authors. The Women’s Prize is one of the most prestigious literary awards in the world, and they continue to champion the very best books written by women. Don’t want to miss the rest of Season Five? Listen and subscribe now! This podcast is sponsored by Baileys and produced by Bird Lime Media.

Sometimes I feel creatively paused. The writer Anne Patchett had said that sometimes she's writing and sometimes she's living. And sometimes I think I just have to live a little bit more and that my thoughts have to germinate a little bit more. So I never feel like I have writers block. I just feel like that it isn't done yet. That whatever I need to say still is kind of doing something deep in the soil and I'm not quite ready. And so when that happens, you know, I just live. With thanks to Bayleys, this is the Women's Prize for Fiction Podcast,

celebrating women's writing, sharing our creativity, our voices and our perspectives, all while championing the very best fiction written by women around the world. I'm Vic Hope and I'm your host for Season 5 of the Women's Prize for Fiction Podcast. The podcast that asks women with lives as inspiring as any fiction to share the five books by women that have shaped. them. We have a phenomenal lineup of guests for 2022 and I guarantee

you'll be taken away plenty of reading recommendations. My wonderful guest today is New York Times bestselling author and Women's Prize for Fiction winner, Madeline Miller. Her debut novel, The Song of Achilles, came out in 2011

after a whopping 10 years of blood, sweat and tears which all became worth it with its phenomenal success. Her next novel, Circe, came out in 2018 and is currently being adapted into a mini-series. Her latest book, Gallagher, is a short story which became an instant Sunday Times bestseller on its publication earlier this year. It is so great to have you here all the way from Philadelphia in the States. Madeline, welcome.

Thank you. Thank you so much for having me. I'm so glad to be here. Well, I know that writing obviously plays a big part in your life, but do you find time to read as well? Oh, yes. I love to read. I just. You know, a day where I don't read basically does not happen. And reading is always my happy place. And, you know, I read, I reread. I love to reread. So I'm always looking for recommendations. What sort of books do you gravitate towards? Really anything. I go up and down. I now know a lot of people who are writers. So I like to read their books when they come out. I like to read a lot of contemporary stuff. But I also like to read. you know, ancient things and the movie Persuasion just came out. And so I had never read Persuasion. And I thought, well, now it's time to be Persuasion. So I just read that, which I really enjoyed. I can't believe I haven't read it before. So, you know, kind of all over the place. Really, whatever anyone tells me is good, I'm willing to read it.

Well, I tell you what, if you listen to this podcast, there's loads of recommendations in the other episodes. I was listening to some and I was writing it all down. and I'm going to get them. Honestly, it's so great. I feel very, very lucky to be able to host this because I get recommendations every single week for my brilliant guests. So thanks for that.

I appreciate it. And I'm sure our listeners do too. Actually, something that's quite interesting, I know that academically graduated from Brown University, bachelor's, master's and classics, respectively, after that taught Latin, Greek, and Shakespeare to high school students and then studied at University of Chicago's Committee

on Social Thought. So you've got so many academics, accolades which have presumably involved a lot of reading. Did it ever lose its shine for you? The leisurely act of reading, not just the art of it or of the novel. Did you ever fall in and out of love with it? Never. I always have loved reading. And, you know, sometimes I pick up a book and it just doesn't grab me and I put it down again and that's okay. That happens all the time. And sometimes it's just that I am not ready for that book and that later on I'll pick it up and I'll say, what was wrong with me? You know, this book is amazing. So sometimes it's just about timing.

You know, you never know what kind of mood you're in. But I think that for me, reading is just so therapeutic. And there's always something out there that I want to read. And I actually love reading academic stuff. I mean, this makes me sound super nerdy. But I really enjoy listening to academics argue with each other. about this, so I enjoy reading that. It's so interesting what you say about timing as well. So many experiences in our lives can be so perfectly articulated in the pages of a novel. And yet we might not know that the first time we read it because it just hasn't happened yet.

It just doesn't resonate yet. I was just rereading actually a book. It was like a, you know, Y-A fantasy novel that I loved when I was 12. And that's, you know, comfort reading for me. or I reread Watership Down. Like I love to read, but also new books can be an escape. I mean, I'm absolutely adoring the secret lives of church ladies, which I am just in love with. So, you know, there's so many, there's so much noise.

And I feel like that, you know, the phone and the internet and there's all this noise. But reading is just such a pure, a pure thing for me. And I'm always happy to do it and to dig in. It is a little challenging. Now I have two kids. And that feeling of being, you know, really like deep in a paragraph that you're loving and being ripped out. And then, you know, that's hard. So I've had to work out.

I've had to change a little bit my reading style because I used to literally just walk around the house, holding up a book and like doing chores and reading with one hand in front of my thing. You know, I would read when I walked. I hit a lot of poles. Like I would, you know, I was constantly reading. So I've had to cut down a little bit because I also want to spend time with my children. And, you know, I don't really like kind of the getting yanked in and out of the book. But one of the big, like, pleasures is every now and then I'll let myself, just like I used to in the old days before I had kids,

I'll let myself read until like 3 a.m. And I'm exhausted the next day, but there's something so good about like it's midnight and I really want to know what happens. I'm just going to keep reading. What a feeling, honestly, one of the best feelings. in the world. Well, let's dig into the books that you love right now. Your first bookshelfy book is The Joy Luck Club by Amy Tan. First published in 1989, the novel follows the stories of eight women and is rich with both Chinese and American history, life and traditions. It's centered around Jing Mei, American-born daughter to Suyan, the founding member of the Joy Luck Club.

Upon her mother's death, Jing May is asked to replace her at the club's meetings, and he, Here she is tasked with fulfilling Cyan's greatest wish to reunite with her twin daughters. But there's one problem. Jingmei doesn't feel she knows her mother well enough to tell her sisters about the mother they never knew. What did you love about this book, Madeline? Oh, I loved the psychological realism of it. The relationships between mothers and daughters, because they're four mothers and four daughters, were so beautifully drawn, so just absolutely razor sharp, so, you know, filled with sympathy.

You would read the mother's story and you'd read the daughter's story. And, you know, it made total sense how these people could end up in, you know, the relationship they ended up in and seeing the impacts. I mean, there's so much intergenerational trauma in the book, things that, you know, the mother's experience and then you see how the daughters are now kind of continuing to deal with that and how that's kind of reverberating through the generation. But just the warmth that she writes with, the love for the mothers, for the daughters, some of them are quite difficult people. You know, she's not afraid to show us the complexity of their difficulty, their trauma, but also, you know,

this warmth and this real understanding and empathy for their life. And it was something I had really never seen so masterfully done before when I first read it. And I just thought, this is the best. And then whenever that happened to me, I would immediately read everything the author had ever written. But it was really, it was the mothers and daughters and the psychology of it. It was just so exciting as a reader. Like it's just thrilling to read something that rings so true and is written. so beautifully. You said that you loved the psychological realism, but you also said that the

psychological realism set the bar for you when we spoke to you about this. But what do you mean by it set the bar? Well, I think what I mean is that, you know, reading it as a teenager, I thought, you know, this is writing. And, you know, whenever I write, I want to write with this level of psychological realism. I want my characters to feel like they are living, breathing, people. I want to be able to imagine them. I want to be able to see them, you know, walking through the grocery store. And I want to be able to understand exactly how their relationship with their, with their daughters works. And just it was all so, I felt like it was almost like reading like therapist case notes. I knew it. So, you know, you understand the characters so deeply. And I love that

when I read a novel and I really, you know, you just see how people have been formed by their background and how they've passed that on. And so I always wanted that level, that depth in all my characters. Even if you don't sort of get it on the page, I wanted to know that level of depth. And I wanted to make sure that I was writing with that level of psychological acuity, of observation, where people felt like hopefully they really knew the characters. You know, they were so rich and complex and messy, just as we all are. There's great psychological takeaway from Greek mythology. Like I know it's mythology, and that might sound like a completely different genre

from psychological realism. And yet, I think I've heard you say that one of the things about Greek mythology that's so interesting is just how horrible the gods are. It's an exploration, a comment on power. and privilege. Do you find your interest in mythologies in any way connected to this love of psychological realism? Do they kind of go hand in hand? Oh, absolutely. Absolutely. And I always, you know, even when I'm writing about gods, I want to make sure that that there is psychology to them. It's just the gods are a little bit twisted. I mean, they're basically sociopathic narcissists.

Yes, it's that, is that. You know, I want to, you know, represent that in the, the way I create them. And some of them are slightly better than others. And some of them, you know, there are a few exceptions. It's, I mean, I just love psychology in general. And I, I feel like that this book was, you know, the Joy La Club was the first time that I really found that in a book. It was the first book I read where, you know, I was really like, wow, these characters are here. I feel like I know them. And so, yeah, and it's, it's really fun to work with mythology that way, because oftentimes, you know, psychology is implied in mythology. I mean, we can sort of guess at people's motives, but really what you get in mythology is you get actions. And so it's really enjoyable

for me as a writer to try to imagine, okay, here are the things that the person does. Who is the type of person that would do that? How can we connect these disparate stories to make a psychological arc that, you know, really makes sense? How do we bring in the sociopathic narcissist to, you know, do their damage as they come in, you know, the ultimate privileged. And how do we see humans reacting to that? So all of that sort of psychology, absolutely. I mean, that's what I love about writing about mythology is to sort of bring in that psychological element. The two things I love, psychology and mythology. I mean, two of my favorite ologies. It's just so interesting that these gods are really not exemplars, you know? Like, this isn't what I think when I initially

think of the word God, but it's such a vast concept and so fascinating. Yes, yes. I mean, that's one of the really interesting things is that, you know, when you're looking for morality in ancient Greece, you're not really looking to the gods. I mean, you know, you're looking more to philosophy. And it was interesting to see the way sort of, certain philosophical schools interacted with the idea of the gods because they didn't really believe in the gods, you know, as from the mythology perspective. You know, they were already like, yeah, we can't follow them. You know, we're not doing it that way. So it's interesting that in a sense, gods are, you know, morally, humans are usually much better than gods in the myths. And that's

very interesting to me that, you know, these beings that have all the power are actually incredibly inhumane. And oftentimes when characters in mythology are said to be acting, you know, they're worse. They're acting like a god. And so that definitely resonates, I think, with some of where we are right now, you know, with people who have so much enormous power and privilege. And there have actually been, back to psychology, psychological studies that have said that one thing that naturally happens when you have a ton of power and no consequences, and no rules, is that your empathy starts dropping. It's just like a natural human phenomenon. And the good news is that you can fight that. You can fight it by remembering times when you were

powerless and that that will sort of bring you back in line with remembering that you also belong to the rest of humanity. Because I think what happens is that people start to think, well, I'm up here because I deserve it. And if those people aren't, it's because they don't deserve it. And therefore it's fine if I step on them. I feel like that that's sort of like the psychological thing that happens. And so I just find that very interesting to explore. And so that's something that I really like to kind of dig into is how people react to power. Who is able to hold on to their humanity with power and who isn't and why. I think there are a lot of people with a lot of power who could do with reading Sursa and remembering that's remembering a little bit of empathy.

Let's move on to your second book, Shelfy book, which is actually a screenplay rather than a book this time. Sense and Sensibility, the screenplay, by Emma Thompson. We've not had one. We've actually not had a screenplay yet, so thank you for being the first. Emma Thompson's adaptation of Jane Austen's beloved novel, winner and Oscar for Best Screenplay in 1995. Emma also starred in the film as Eleanor Dashwood, while Kate Winslet played Eleanor's younger sister, Marianne. The story follows the two sisters, members of a wealthy English family, which is suddenly made destitute. They're forced to seek financial security through marriage with Hugh Grant and Alan Rickman playing their respective suitors. As I said, first time we've had a screenplay on the podcast.

What was it about Emma Thompson's adaptation that elevated this classic story for you? Oh, so I had gone on a big Jane Austen kick and I had read Emma and I'd read Pride and Prejudice and Sense and Sensibility, although I didn't make it to persuasion. And then the movie came out, and I hadn't really, I hadn't, you know, sense and sensibility was fine. I enjoyed it. It hadn't grabbed me the way Pride and Prejudice and Emma had. But then the movie came out and I saw it and I was completely blown away. I thought that the adaptation that she did, and also Angley, the director, I mean, I just, I feel like, you know, he is so brilliant. And what he did with it was so brilliant also.

but the way she wrote the scenes, the humor she brought in, again, the psychology, the acuity, these like incredibly wonderful, you know, encapsulating of whole long scenes in just a few lines back and forth was so exciting to me and so impressive. And I'd always loved sort of theater. And I think for me, it was really formative to see like a brilliant adaptation. and to see, you know, how you could take source material and, you know, work with the scenes and and really boil them down and sort of gesture at characters and translate characters from one medium to another. I mean, it's just, I felt like it was a masterclass in adaptation.

And I've watched that movie many, many times. In fact, I just showed it to my daughter, which was really fun because she loved it. It's just filled with so much nuance. it's so incredibly smart the way she translated it. And of course, Angley's work as well as the director. And all the, I mean, the acting is brilliant. I mean, the whole thing is amazing. But I was really impressed with the script, with the way she was able to take this large source text

and move it over in such a way that, like, captured the essence of all these characters, but in such a streamlined way. Well, of course, your own novels, as I, is being adapted into a mini-sense, series. How did it feel when you heard that and what is the process of adapting it for the small screen? I mean, I was thrilled. I am not involved in the writing part, but it's been really exciting to get to see, you know, it go through that. I mean, I was starting with

mythology. I was starting with an epic poem as my source material and then I made it a novel and now here we are going to the next step, a miniseries. And so it's just really interesting to watch, you know, the writer's minds at work as they sort of take the book and, you know, move it into this new medium. So I just, I loved studying as an academic adaptation. I was very interested in the way, you know, myths take different forms. Like one of my favorite adaptations is Shakespeare's Troilus and Cressida. I think it's wonderful how that play is so angry and bitter and nasty and funny and, you know, all of that. And so, I, I just love watching that process.

And a good adaptation is so satisfying because it gestures, I mean, it gives you the original material, but it also surprises you. You know, it's the satisfaction of the material you already know and love, but in this surprising, new, thrilling way. And so I just love a great adaptation. For me, that's one of my great pleasures. So I'm just excited to get to get to watch the process. Are there, I mean, you can say this is a space. Are there any fears about them taking your work, your baby, and taking it in a new direction, and it's out of your control?

Absolutely. I mean, I think all writers fear that. And ultimately, I'm not sure, particularly when you're dealing with movies or miniseries, I think that the writer ultimately doesn't have that much power. So I'm going to watch and I'm, you know, part of it. But absolutely, you know, I think I do have have some fears, you know, just kind of generally about that. And, you know, I try to remind myself that that's just what adaptation is. That sometimes it looks quite different from the original.

And I know that better than anyone. But I think there's always that, you know, this is, yeah, exactly as you say, you know, this is my baby. what's going to happen to it. And there were definitely some hard, when people were talking to me about wanting to adapt it, I was listening very carefully to the way they talked about the work and sort of their ideas about the work and how they interpreted it because I wanted to make sure that they were interpreting it in line with sort of what I felt was the heart and the heart of the story. And so I think for me, what I want is I want the heart of the story to be intact. And as long as it is, I'm okay with other changes.

But I feel like the heart should be there. I get that. And I'm sure although she probably wasn't, well, she definitely wasn't consulted. I'm sure Jane Austen would be very happy with the way Emma Thompson retained the heart of sense and sensibility in her adaptation. Bailey's is proudly supporting the Women's Prize for Fiction by helping showcase incredible writing by remarkable women, celebrating their accomplishments and getting more of their books into the hands of more people. Looking for a treat to pair with your favourite book, Bailey's, is the perfect accompaniment to enjoy either over ice or over coffee. There are no better friendships than those formed around brilliant books.

And since you're listening, we're guessing you love books as much as we do. The Women's Prize has created an exclusive community that gives you a bookish backstage pass, offering surprises and freebies plus unmissive. reading recommendations and book chat from my founder friends, including me, Vic Hope. Search for Women's Prize friend to become a friend today. We cannot wait to meet you. Let's move on to your third book, now, Madeline, which is Kitchen by Banana Yoshimoto. Banana Yoshimoto's novels have made her a sensation in Japan and all over the world, in fact, and Kitchen is a book about mothers, love, tragedy, and the power of the kitchen and home in the lives of a pair of free-spirited young women in contemporary Japan.

Tell us a bit about this book. Why do you love it? I mean, so I remember picking it up. I was in a Barnes & Noble here. I mean, I spent tons of time in bookstores. Mostly I was in independent bookstores, but also Barnes & Noble. And it was on a display, and I picked it up, and it had such an appealing cover. And I'd never heard of the writer at the time. This was again when I was a teenager. When I started reading it, I just, it was like that wonderful feeling when you think, oh my gosh, I'm going to love this book. And the descriptions of this sort of free spirit, as you say, but also kind of a lost soul, this person searching for family, searching for connection, and finding it partially through cooking. And the descriptions of food in it are amazing.

With a book named kitchen, you would expect there to be some good foods. You want to be salivating. Oh, and you will be if you read it. It's so, it just made me so hungry reading it. I was like, it sounds so good. But the way she's able to really infuse the food, not only make it sound delicious, but really describe the love with which it's made and how important that love is to just how delicious it is. And ultimately, it's really a story about sort of found family that, you know, she finds her way into this other family. and the mother figure in the story is actually trans. And that was, you know, when I was reading this in 1994,

there weren't a lot of books that were telling the stories of trans people. And I loved that. I loved that too. I was very engaged in that part of the story. And what a wonderful and complicated character that the mother is. And, you know, most of all, this idea of, found family of how, you know, even if we don't have family, that there are families out there in the world where we can really be ourselves. And I think that part of the story really spoke to me.

And some of my novels, I feel like have sort of found families in them. I'm very drawn to that story about people who sort of move away from their families of origin, but find families out in the world. And so I loved that part of the story, too. It's very poignant. Do you read to your kids to your family? Is that love of this theme of found family? Is that something that might pass on to your family? I hope so. I love to read to my kids and I hope that they will, you know, I hope that they do love their family of origin. But I also hope that they go out and find families out in the world, that they find people who feel like family. I would absolutely want that for them because there can never be too many people who love you and who cherish you and who let you be who you are.

So I definitely hope they get that. And I love to read them. I mean, I just love to read them. I read it them all the time every night, of course, but also during the day. And when they were babies, I was just constantly, constantly reading. So the love of books, I wish I were as good to cook as the people in kitchen. I feel like I need to work on my food side. I need to work on my, you know, filling food with love, but I definitely fill reading with love. And I would certainly hope that they, that everyone can have some people that they say, well, this is my family of origin, but these are my family out in the world. Yeah. And what better way to show love than pressing books into the hands of those that you do love? I think it's one of those special things that we can do.

And, you know, as a teacher as well, you've done that. You've pressed works of fiction, of literature of mythology into the hands of so many young people. Is there any particularly good writing advice that you would like to pass on to younger writers? Sure. I mean, I think the main thing is to just keep writing and keep reading and to be patient with yourself. You know, one of the hardest things I think about writing, particularly when you're

starting out, is that it takes a lot of draft. for something to be good. And you have to simultaneously believe 100% in what you're working on and think it's great. And also at the same time, know that you are about 100 drafts from it actually being great, or maybe 200. And holding those two ideas in your mind at the same time, at least for me, when I was an early writer, when I was a young writer, that was really hard for me. I would sort of think it was great. And then I would have this crash of despair. And I'd be like, no, it's not. It's terrible. And then I would work, you know, and I feel like after you've gone through that process a bunch of times, you understand that like, hey, this needs work, but it'll get there.

And I know how to get it there. And, you know, it can both be true. Something can be very promising and be totally not done yet. And so trying to hold those two opposing ideas and not have these crashes of despair that I used to have and just, you know, have faith and keep sitting down with it, keep working to improve it, keep reading great writers, and you know, you'll get there. Well, talking of these crashes of despair, you know, your debut novel, The Song of Achilles, it took you 10 years to write. It's magnificent. It's a work of art. But 10 years is a long time. It's a huge part of your life with a crash of despair during that process. How did you get through them? Constantly, constantly. You know, it was like this roller coaster of I'd be really happy,

and then I'd put the book away and come back and read it. I think, oh, no, terrible. You know, delete, delete. So I think for me, it was during that time, I mean, the reason it took 10 years is that I was learning how to write a novel and I was learning how to adapt. And I was learning what I wanted to say and how I wanted to say it. And I was learning how to write dialogue. I mean, I really, you know, I didn't go through any writing programs at all.

So I had, you know, all the books I had read, which was quite a lot of books. But could I do that? I didn't know. So it was just me practicing and writing and writing and writing and draft after draft after draft. And, you know, one of my biggest crashes of despair was about halfway through five years in. I had a completed draft. And I thought, you know, okay, I'm going to get an agent. I did.

And I'm going to start thinking about moving to publication, you know, to trying to find a publisher. I read it one more time. And I thought, oh, no. this is terrible and I don't know how to fix it but it's not right. The voice that I have for Patroclus is not right. And sitting with that of, you know, that feeling of this is not right, but I don't know how to fix it was really hard. And for a while I just gave up on it and I thought, well, maybe I'll write some personal essays. I'll write some memoir. I couldn't even write fiction anymore because I was so, but I actually went to a summer writing program, which I would

highly recommend also for young writers that, you know, going and being around other writers, other people who are struggling with the same things you're struggling with. And also writers who have come through it, there would be lectures every night from published authors that I really respected. And that was helpful. Just being around all this talk about the craft of writing was really helpful. And I was able to sort of go back to the novel and suddenly, like the first line of the novel as it now stands, came to me in a bolt of lightning as I was walking across the campus. And I ran back and typed up the first chapter pretty much as it stands now.

And then it still took me five years to write the rest of it. But I had the, you know, I had the voice. I had. So you never know when those breakthroughs are going to come and just trying to be patient with yourself and not give up on it. And, you know, it's hard. It's a hard thing to do. do to create a story that is so, you know, that you hope will be able to capture a world

and capture characters. And it should be hard work. It should be. Well, those breakthrough moments of inspiration, that are stuff of dreams, but it's very heartening to hear that even within a 10-year period, you know, that they'll happen and then you'll work hard again and then it'll happen. Let's move on to your fourth book now, which is Harpburn by Nora Ephron. The late Ephron writes semi-autobiographically about her own divorce in her first and only novel, packed with snappy, hilarious, endlessly quotable one-liners. Hartburn is a roller coaster of love, betrayal, loss, and most satisfyingly, revenge. What is it? What is it about Nora Ephron's writing that speaks to you, Madeline?

I mean, everything you just said. First of all, I love the fact that there is revenge in it. Yes. Because the revenge is so deserved. And it's not like, you know, I was really blown away by how incredibly sad the book is and how much it's about pain and bitterness and betrayal and how funny. And seeing, I mean, she just is able. to perfectly like the zingers and like the knife to the heart.

Sometimes it's the same sentence that has both in there, like that, oh, this is so painful for the character and you're with the character, but also she's making you laugh and then you're crying and then you're laughing. And it's just the poignancy and the sharpness and the intelligence and the voice. It was just seeing how funny, a really sad, painful story. could be was I was amazed. I was blown away and I thought there's I haven't read anything like this before. This is just so exciting to see this and I've reread it many times since then and it's always it always makes me laugh and it also makes me cry and I feel like she really brings out

that pain of feeling completely betrayed and you know lost in that betrayal. Her fiction and nonfiction actually always hits this balance of soft and hard of realism and wit. Is this something that you ever tried to do in your writing, is something you strive towards? Yes. I mean, I am not a funny writer. I don't have one one hundredth of Nora Ephraon's ability to be funny in writing. And I think it depends on the narrators,

but I really enjoy bringing in moments of humor, because I love reading funny books and watching funny plays. But I always like it to be character-based. I feel like I always want the humor to be sort of based in character. So I'm not a zinger. I don't have the Nora Ephron Zinger thing, although I love to read her work. But it reminds me of how important it is to have all these different notes

that you want there to be humor. and you want the pain. You can't just have unrelenting misery. You know, no one wants to read that. And that doesn't really reflect even the human experience that even in incredibly hard times, there's always sort of the rhineness, the absurdity, the fun. So I love that richness of the tapestry that she leaves.

And I try to bring that into my own work, even though I am not a Zinger. I'm not the queen of Zingers like Nona Ephron. We said just before, this is Semmel. me autobiographical. This book is loosely based on Nora's own life. Do you ever find that autobiographical elements slip into your fiction at all? I mean, it's experience, isn't it? We write about things that we hopefully understand. Absolutely. And in some ways, it's always really interesting when a close friend reads my book and they'll say, hmm, that thing. And I'm like, oh, I actually didn't even realize that.

You know, that, you know, we write from, I write from all the things that have ever happened to me and that I've ever seen and that they're always, you know, that's who I am. And so all those things are there. And I think as writers, it's really important to be really curious about the world, be, you know, observing the world and wanting to learn about new things, but also, you know, your own experiences and the things that happen to you were there. So, you know, I don't. None of my characters are based on anyone I know. I know a lot of writers do that and that's great. And I often love to read those books. But I don't know why. That's just not how I conceive of my characters. But I know that there are things in there that, you know, resonate with that. For example, I mean, just in Cursi, thankfully, neither of my children are demigods.

So they are not quite as challenging as Cersi's child. But that experience of, you know, walking with an infant who is screaming their head off and won't go to sleep at 3 a.m. You know, when I was writing those scenes, I was like, I had viscerally experienced that pretty recently. And, you know, Circe is not me at all, but these experiences work their way in. And I think it's important to do that. For another example, Circe's magic, I was, you know, I wrote this whole section about how she discovers her magic and then I was reading back over it and I was like, wow, this sounds a lot like my writing process. You know, the like trial and error and throwing step out. It's funny that, isn't it?

So, you know, sometimes it kind of, I don't realize it until later that it's in there. And I'm like, oh. You're not, Susie or Patroclus, but they are both written in the first person, their first person narrators. How do you get inside their heads? How do you, convey how they'd speak, how they'd see the world. How do you write from their perspective? So this is something I'm really grateful for my background in theatre. So I was a theatre director for many years and working with actors on how to get into character and working with plays and sort of how you evoke characters through language,

through tone, through all of that was really helpful. in terms of how I think of my characters. And in a way, I sort of conceive of both my novels as monologues in a way, that the character is telling their life story. And, you know, sometimes I even imagine them up there on a stage, narrating it. And my friends joke that I'm a method writer because I sort of put on the character, and I really try to see through their eyes and feel what they're feeling.

And, you know, oftentimes I write in, like a darkened room with a hood pulled over to kind of block out stimuli because I'm trying to be in it. You know, I want to be in the scene. Yeah, so I can't write in cafes at all because I have to like go into the scene. You're a method writer. I love that. Love that. Well, Madeline, it's time to talk about your fifth and final book this week, which is The House of the Spirits by Isabel Agende. Spanning four generations, this family saga is populated by memorable, often eccentric cast of characters together.

Men and women, spirits, the forces of nature and of history converge in an unforgettable, wholly absorbing and brilliantly realized novel that is as richly entertaining as it is a masterpiece of modern literature. Why did you pick this book? So this book was also just an absolute revelation to me when I was in high school. And there was so much about it that just blew me away. I mean, the first thing was the scope of it, the generations and the sort of like family drama, family relationships, the love, the sort of epic nature of people's experiences was really gripping. I felt immersed in these families and in these people's lives.

But on top of it, it's really so much a story about injustice and political injustice and cruelty and how we respond in the face of cruelty. And it was really amazing to see just to think about that and to think about how powerfully she shows scenes of resistance to that kind of cruelty and to political. and to political oppression. And that was really something that I hadn't encountered the way she creates. It's so, so gripping. And, you know, it's a very political novel in a way. I mean, it's about families, but it's a very political novel. And I was really amazed at how she brought that in seamlessly.

Like the whole thing just works as a whole. how explicit she is in addressing that political oppression. And then I think the third thing that just grabbed me about it was, of course, the aspects of magical realism, how seamlessly the spirits and the fantastical elements were part of the story. And yet, this was utterly, you know, realistic, gripping, completely rooted in these people's daily lives. It was the first time, you know, I had read fantasy and I had read things that were very realistic, but this was the first thing I read where it was really exciting to read. And one of the things that, you know, when it came time for my novels, I'm always thinking about how do you

have a realistic world and also these fantastical elements. And I feel like House of the Spirits is just such a masterclass in basically everything. I mean, but that in particular. magical realism and I guess your work is mythological realism there there is that cross of it and there's so much that became this masterclass for you in magical realism how do you find inspiration do you look around you do you look to what you've read in the past do you ever feel creatively blocked sometimes they feel creatively paused the writer anne patchett has said that sometimes she's writing and sometimes she's living and sometimes I think I just have to live a little bit more and that my thoughts have to germinate a little bit more. So I never feel like I have writers block. I just feel like that it

isn't done yet, that whatever I need to say still is kind of doing something deep in the soil and I'm not, I'm not quite ready. And so when that happens, you know, I just live. I still try to write. But if I, If I can't, I can't. And instead, I, you know, try to read wonderful books and be with friends and family and broaden my world and learn about new things. And then, you know, come back. Keep checking on those seeds that are germinating and see how they're doing. And for me, the impulse, usually what I want to write about is something that I'm mad about, to be honest. It's something that starts to obsess me and I'm really frustrated about.

or I feel like I have something that I really, really must say about it. And, you know, something I want to push back on, a story I want to see in the world that isn't in the world. So with Song of Achilles, I was really angry at the way that I felt, you know, that the relationship between Achilles and Petroclos, which in the ancient world was interpreted both as, you know, a romantic relationship or as companionship, both of those were totally accepted in the ancient world. In all the stuff I was reading and in what I was being taught, the whole romantic possibility was completely off the table. I mean, it was definitely, you know, this homophobic reaction where that was being sort of erased from the story. And I was really

angry about that because I felt like reading the Iliad that a romantic relationship makes total sense for them. You know, you don't have to go that way. But for me, that was how the story resonated. And so, you know, putting that out in the world, pushing back against what I felt was this, you know, forcible closeting of their relationship. And with Circe, it was the fact that, you know, I felt that I was really frustrated by the way Odysseus talks about her in The Odyssey. And I wanted to push back against that. And I wanted to make a woman's story, you know, an epic and set that at the center of the story. A woman's life gets to be just as epic as a man's life. So it often comes from this frustration or this anger or this feeling that, you know, there's there's an injustice that I'm that I want to address. And that's really where it comes from. So it's very internal,

but it's related to sort of a conversation that I'm seeing in the world. Finding inspiration from frustration is a brilliant way to live as is whenever you're feeling creatively blocked or creatively paused. Just live. Just live. We can do that. Do you have a preference, actually, between teaching, reading, writing and learning? Or do you feel like they all go hand in hand? Yeah, I think it all goes hand in hand. And I would add theater to that because I, theater is one of the most engaging things. And it's all similar. You know, in some ways, it's hard to teach when I'm writing and parenting at the same time because I think they all

call for being very emotionally present for other people, being emotionally present for your children, being emotionally present for your characters, being emotionally present for students. And so it's very similar in some ways. And of course, you know, teaching, there's so much storytelling in teaching, attending to, you know, what's going on to in your students' lives. So it's all, it's all related. I love it all. I can't do it all at the same time. But I love it all. And I do really miss teaching. I haven't been, I haven't been, I haven't been teaching recently. But I do hope I go back to it. And I hope I go back to directing. But right now, writing is what's calling me.

So that's where I am. Well, that's good for us. Then we get books. We get books to read from you. So thank you. My final question, do Madeline, is if you had to choose one book as a favorite, which one would it be? And why?

Oh, my gosh. This is so brutal. Every time I ask it. And you know what? I ask it every single podcast. And every time my lovely guest is always like, Oh, my God, you knew this was coming. Oh, because it so depends on my mood.

You know, sometimes I really need kitchen and sometimes I really need House of the Spirits and sometimes I need to watch Sense and Sensibility. And it's all, but if I have to just pick one, oh my gosh, I think it would have to be probably the dry look. I truly, I truly love that book. It's such a comfort read for me because it brings back my teenage years really strongly. And it's so beautiful and it's so satisfying.

And oh, but I also feel like I should have said heartburn. Like, I can't help. You're going to talk yourself around in circles. It's so odd. I know it's so hard. And I'm sorry because I'm the one you made you do that. But I tell you what, the way you speak about all of those works is so evocative. and it makes me want to read them right now.

And I know that so many people listening will feel the same. You've just described these places that we can all escape to, these places that we can all go. Oh, thank you. Thank you so much. It's been an absolute joy to chat to you, Madeline, and to hear about your processes. I feel like anyone who's a budding writer as well, listening has got some really good advice.

So thank you so much for joining me on the Women's Rights of Fiction Podcast. I'm Vic Kauv and thank you for listening. Please rate and review this podcast. It is the easiest way to help spread the word about the female talent you've heard about today. The Women's Prize for Fiction Podcast is brought to you by Bayleys

and produced by Bird Lime Media. Thank you so much for listening. Thank you so much, Madeline. I'll see you next time.