Bookshelfie: Women’s Prize Podcast - S6 Ep18: Bookshelfie: Naomi Klein

Episode Date: October 18, 2023

Award-winning journalist and New York Times bestselling author Naomi Klein reveals how she had to write herself into her new book to rediscover her voice.  Naomi Klein is a bestselling author, with nine critically acclaimed books which include The Shock Doctrine and This Changes Everything. In 2018 she was named the inaugural Gloria Steinem Endowed Chair at Rutgers University and is now Honorary Professor of Media and Climate at Rutgers. In September 2021 she joined the University of British Columbia as UBC Professor of Climate Justice and co-director of the Centre for Climate. Her newest book, Doppelganger is part memoir teamed with political reportage, and cultural analysis, in which Naomi grapples with her own doppelganger. Naomi’s book choices are: ** The Diary of a Young Girl by Anne Frank **  House of the Spirits by Isabelle Allende ** The Dispossessed by Ursula K Le Guin ** Flight Behaviour by Barbara Kingsolver  ** Her Body and Other Parties by Carmen Maria Machado Vick Hope, multi-award winning TV and BBC Radio 1 presenter, author and journalist, is the host of season six 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 six? Listen and subscribe now! This podcast is sponsored by Baileys and produced by Bird Lime Media.

At Harrison Healthcare, we know that lasting health starts with personalized care. We're not just a clinic. We're your partner in prevention, helping you achieve your health and longevity goals. Our expert team combines evidence-based medicine with the compassionate, unhurried care you and your family deserve today and for many years to come. When it comes to your health, you shouldn't settle for anything less than exceptional. Visit harrisonhealthcare.ca.ca.com.com.com. I could have written a more conventional, authoritative, serious nonfiction book where I wasn't in it. And I just marshaled yet another argument about why we need to really act now in the face of the climate crisis.

I didn't have it in me. I didn't, I'd lost faith in that kind of writing. Maybe I'll return to it one day. But I kind of wrote myself back into speech. I mean, I needed to try something new. With thanks to Bailey's, 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 6 of Bookshelfy, the podcast that asks women with lives as inspiring as any fiction to share the five books by women that have shaped them. Join me and my incredible guests as we've, talk about the books you'll be adding to your 2023 reading list. Naomi Klein is an award-winning journalist and a New York Times best-selling author with nine critically acclaimed books which include the shock doctrine and this changes everything. In 2018 she was named the inaugural Gloria Steinem endowed chair at Ruchess University and is

now honorary professor of media and climate at Ruches. In September 2021, she joined the University of British Columbia as UBCP Professor of Climate Justice and Co-Director of the Centre for Climate. Her newest book, Doppelganger, is part memoir teamed with political reputage and cultural analysis in which Naomi grapples with her own doppelganger. Welcome to the podcast, Naomi. Thank you for having me. I'd love to know how you balance reading for pleasure with the amount of reading.

I'm sure you have to do in support of your work for research. I mean, I know that. I'm relaxing when I'm reading fiction, when I'm reading for pleasure. I read a lot in the summer, but I also teach, I teach university students at University of British Columbia, and I try to assign a little bit of fiction. I teach a course on climate feelings, or we call it ecological affect, but I always say in the first class that that's just a fancy word for climate feelings. And we read fiction in that so so it is a little bit integrated with the research that i do yeah do you assign the fiction so that you get to read a bit of fiction yourself but i think we all need art to balance the

hard facts i think it's medicine yeah so yeah it's for all of us and what sort of fiction what sort of books do you gravitate towards when you want to enjoy huh like i don't have sort of like a trashy fiction habit. But I think maybe I should. I think I would enjoy it. When I want to really turn my brain off, I watch television. I watch a streaming TV. So I like good fiction. I mean, I look to writers who are engaging with some of the themes that I am engaged with, but in a different register, like Richard Powers, Kim Stanley Robinson, Barbara Kingsolver, Tavia Butler, like, you know, I'm interested in sort of clify a little bit, ways in which people are engaging with a sort of complicated utopias and dystopias. I don't love dystopias, but I also don't love like sunny utopias.

I like complicated grapplings with a future in which we don't all incinerate. But mainly I'll just, like if people I trust are passionate about a book, then that's usually what I'll read. review. I mean, I like to trust a good review. I would always go on a recommendation over anything else. But it sort of sounds like when you're reaching for novels that perhaps provide this new perspective on something that might be based in reality, or you were saying, you know, I mean, I read a lot of fiction for my most recent book for Dopplganger. I read a lot of novels and short stories. And I think it nourishes the nonfiction

to be able to draw on a variety of different registers. So it's not just an escape, it's a grounding as well. Like I think really giving yourself to a book that's something I can only really do on holiday. And when a book really has me in its grips, I don't want to do anything else and I'm mad at everybody. Like that's the way I felt when I was reading Demon Copperhead most recently. I'm just like, this is now my job.

I have to read this book. and I'm not a fast reader I really envy people who are speed readers but it takes time and I didn't want to do anything else I get cranky with people who try to take me away from it So you need to put that time aside

we were just saying before we start recording how jealous we both are of anyone who hasn't read Barbara Kingselver's demon called ahead and I become an evangelist for books like that I was like that with overstory as well but that feeling

of just being so engrossed and sort of wanting to carry on, wanting to turn the page, wanting to get to the end, but also being kind of annoyed when the end comes because it's over and I still want to be inside it. It's actually one of the best feelings in the world. Yeah, yeah. We're going to talk about some of it's like travel. Yeah. What would you say the comparisons between that and travel are that?

How does it sort of rouse you in that way? I mean, I think that really gifted fiction writers make you feel like you've been to a place. You know, I think about Arndati Roy's Carola and God of Small Things. Like, I've never been to Carola, but there's a part of me that feels like I went there. And I've spent a little time in Appalachia, but not King's Alistachia. And I think it's just, she's so fully inhabits other people's consciousness. And there's a transference that occurs, I think. Yeah.

We're going to talk about the books that have taken. you on those journeys to those places. Now, in your first book, Shelby book, is The Diary of a Young Girl by Anne Frank. One of the most famous accounts of living under the Nazi regime of World War II comes from the diary of a 13-year-old Jewish girl, Anne Frank. It describes both the joys and the torments of daily life, as well as the typical adolescent thoughts throughout two years spent in hiding with her family during the Nazi occupation of Holland.

Can you remember when you read this? I read it when I was in the fourth grade. So I was either eight or nine. Okay. It's a little younger than I'm frankly. Yeah, yeah. And it was part of, I went through a phase when I started reading longer chapter books where I was, I maybe had an unhealthy obsession with a Holocaust stories. And I remember just looking for stories about children who had.

hidden in the woods and like these stories of children hiding like really really really captured my imagination in a way that may not I mean I was terrorizing myself a little bit and I don't remember that many of the books by name but I know I read a few of them I kind of binged it and I remember going through my parents bookshelf in the basement of our house in Montreal and looking for more of these books. But Anne Frank, that book was different. I think, I mean, I was younger than her, but I definitely identified with her, probably because Montreal girls were precocious. So, I mean, and the, but that feeling of, it's interesting because I didn't realize at the time that she seems to have known that she was not just writing for herself, that she was writing

something that might be read by others, that it would be a testament. But, but, But the ability to capture that feeling of claustrophobia was so extraordinary. I mean, what a gifted writer. And also, I really remember the crush that she had a crush on. Same. But I just remember thinking, ooh, I felt these things. Someone else has. And it must have been one of the first times I'd read a book where that resonated with me.

Yeah. Do you know how old you were when you read it? Probably younger than 13, probably like you, around eight or nine as well. But I know that I was in fourth grade because in fifth grade, I started to keep a diary. And I kept it because my family moved from Canada to Oxford. And I was very upset about it because I had a strong group of friends when I was, fourth grade was like peak childhood for me. Everything was going right.

Pre-puberty, things are awesome. And then things started really going downhill after that. But I really felt like wrenched from my friend group and my dog. They wouldn't let me bring my dog. There was a rule at the time that if you brought a dog to the UK, you had to quarantine it for six months. And we were only going to be here for a year because it was my father's sabbatical year. He was doing research. And so we couldn't put Buffy.

The Golden Ridge. But were you reunited with Buffy? When I got back, yes. But it was still, like, you know, when you're, when you're, when you're, Nine, the idea of not seeing your dog for a year was very upsetting. So I still have this diary from beginning school in fifth grade. Do you call it fifth grade, fifth year? So if it was age 10ish, I guess that would be year six, year five or six probably.

It was five, yeah, yeah, year five. So I had a diary that was like a squishy cover and it had an ice cream picture of an ice cream and a little lock. That sort of, I feel like I know it. Was it that sort of almost like jelly? Feeling, yeah. Yeah, yeah, like squishy vinyl and like a little cheap broken gold lock and addressed her diary to Kitty. And the first page of the diary says, this is where I'm going to keep my secrets and I'm going to call it you Kit after Anne Frank's diary Kitty. So I read it before that.

That's all I know. I don't know exactly when, but it was before it was before we moved to Oxford. And does it sort of depict the turmoil of being like you said wrenched from. your friendship group from your life? It captured that loneliness and it turned me into a mad diarist. You know, after that, it was off to the races. Definitely turn me into a writer

and I filled many, many a journal. Although I didn't fill that one. I didn't keep it as religiously as I had pledged to on the first page. You said you were fascinated at quite a young age by these stories of the Second World War, children, particularly children who were hiding. Do you know why?

Why that might have been? I went to a Jewish day school in Montreal, and there was a lot of Holocaust education in my grade school education. And I think I was just trying to make sense of it. You know, we would visit museums, and there were teachers at our school who had numbers on their wrists, on their forearms who had been in the camps, older teachers. We had a substitute Yiddish teacher because in my school we learned the Yiddish

and Hebrew, French, and English. We didn't learn much else besides the languages because it was a lot. I mean, when I think of it now as a mother of an 11-year-old, I think it was quite a lot to learn at a very young age. I remember going to, we went to a museum exhibition where there was like a pile of shoes, you know, and it was very graphic. And in my new book, Dopplaganger, I quote, somebody saying that some of this education was a kind of retramatization, that it wasn't, like, there wasn't, the idea was that we should be very afraid because people might come for us again. So I think that that's why I was reading these books, because I was just trying to make sense of it. I mean, I think we should teach children history. Don't get me wrong. But I think that this,

there was something about the way it entered my brain that was, I didn't know what to do with it. And now when I think about my own son, I'm a little bit more careful with, when I introduce some really, really difficult ideas, because kids are so sensitive. At the time of reading, Anne Frank, did you feel something in you spark? I don't know whether it's a triggering. I remember for me it was reading To Kill a Mockingbird by Harper Lee,

and I was quite young, and I remember all of a sudden, like an activism was sparked. Do you remember being politicized? I was so shattered by it, but it was such a story of the worst and the best that humans are capable of, right? which is something that I think has stayed with me in all of my work where, you know, you see this, whenever there are disasters, large-scale crises, you see kind of the worst predation,

and you also see people taking incredible risks for one another, right? And that's the story of that family is that they were hunted, as all Jews were under, you know, in Nazi-occupied territory, but they were also hidden by people who took risks to keep them alive, and in the end weren't successful. And I think that was, you know, that's the other thing about that story is that we're so hardwired to expect happy endings. And that, you know, the end of Anne Frank is not in the diary, but we know the ending, which is that she died in Bergen-Belsen. And, you know, I think that was another reason why I just couldn't sort of stop looking was like, but aren't, isn't there supposed to be a happy ending? And there wasn't one.

But yeah, I was very interested in the people that hid them and why they took those. risks. Yeah. It's time now to talk about your second book, Shelfy book, which is a firm favourite of mine as well. Oh really? House of the Spirits by Isabella Gindi. This mesmeric debut paints this incredibly rich portrait of the social and political upheavals of post-colonial Chile, blending magic realism and history. Set in an unnamed Latin American country over three generations, the House of the Spirits is a magnificent epic of a proud and passionate family, secret loves and violent revolution. Why was this book so influential to you? Well, I read it a few years after, I'm prank when I was in high school. So I read it in 85 or 86. I was 15 or 16. And it just

blew my mind because I'd never read any magical realism before. Yeah. And yeah, talk about travel. I felt like I was there. I loved the idea of the dead being so present, being characters in the book, right? And it sent me down a whole rabbit hole, like Marquez, and I wanted more, more, more. I didn't want to read straight fiction after that. I wanted magic.

And it could have coincided with a Ouija phase. It'll be, man. Now that I think about it, But yeah, I had a little witchy thing going on as a teen. But also, I had written a paper at around the same time. I had a wonderful English teacher at my high school. I was one of those sort of erratic students where I did very well in the courses that I cared about and just sort of ghosted the subjects that I didn't love, that I loved Mrs. Young,

who gave us this interesting, one of the options, we had three options to choose from for an essay. It was actually a history class, not an English class. One of the subjects was America, policemen to the world, question mark. And I went home and asked my older brother, who was very political, what does this mean? Like, will this be the easiest topic, you know, for me to do? And he said, go to the library and look up Chile and Pinochet and write about that. And so, you know, this is, Back in the olden days of, you know, library, like catalogs, like the card. And I remember, like, going to the librarian who, with a few of the cards that told me, like,

1973, Time Magazine, you know, it would have been September, October, 1973. And they would go down to the basement and bring me the Time magazines. And, you know, no Internet, obviously. And it was quite shocking to me that there had been this coup. And I read about the CIA involvement and all of that. And I wrote this essay, No, America should not be policemen to the world. And they should not have been complicit in destabilizing the government of Salvadoriende

and installing this brutal military dictatorship. So I was doing that paper, that nonfiction paper, which stuck with me and reading a whole lot of Latin American magical realism. And then, of course, in House of the Spirits, Iy is sort of one of the characters, and I sort of got that, that he was the candidate. And I think it ignited a lifelong interest in that part of the world for me.

And eventually I did, I lived in Argentina for a while and did a lot of research about the military dictatorship. And that ended up informing the work that I did for the shock doctrine. So, yeah, I really credit Isabella Aende for, leading me down this whole road. Yeah, I just, you know, it's so funny. When I think about that book, I just see color, color, color. It was so rich.

She's so sumptuous. And yet the sociopolitical climate against which she's writing these stories is often so I'm harsh and stark. But it's absolutely fascinating. Completely relate. I remember reading, I think it was Marcus first and just igniting this obsession with South of America and I too also went to Argentina to live and work for a year because I was so fascinated me too this is getting weird and came I get it I mean how do you think the

books that you read change you as a writer write back from reading and Frank and then thinking okay I'm going to write a diary like the impact seems to be quite yeah yeah yeah it's so extraordinary there are times when recently when I have just felt like do words even matter anymore they're being so distorted and twisted and nothing seems to change no matter how many books are written but then you remember like there is this alchemy that we don't understand so we can't give up on them when you put yourself into sort of the center of the book like in your latest book doppelganger which is out now does that change how you approach writing it the research and and the sort of sitting down putting pen to paper

Well, this latest book came out of this feeling of speechless during the pandemic, but also like a kind of a, I think I was despairing about the point of writing is the only way I can describe it is that, you know, writing and research is it's an act of faith. Like you are, you are believing that by marshalling facts and making an argument and trying to be persuasive that that is going to have some. effect on the world. And I don't believe that books change the world. I believe that social movements change the world and people do that. But I do believe that they can play a little role that they can change minds and that there's a kind of partnership that takes place between the written word, between ideas, different forms of art as well. And because we don't really understand what causes people to suddenly be in the streets demanding justice one, one month and not the next. It's very, very mysterious, even for the people involved. And, because we don't really

And so I think there was something about the isolation of the pandemic, not having the usual ways that I know who I am, my friendships, my community. But it was also that in the early months of the pandemic, I had some hopes that this was going to be a kind of a real shift, that there was going to be a wake up. And that was that had to do with the way the virus lit up our interconnection. like you couldn't ignore the fact that we breathe the same air as each other, we touch the same surfaces as each other. And so, you know, we live in a culture that studiously unsees so many of the people who hold our world up. And COVID was like a searchlight going, you can't unsee. You have to think about who is delivering your food, who is making your food, who's picking your food, who's caring for your parents, who is, and can they call in sick? Like, are they, they exist? And,

And, you know, there was that sort of moment of like clapping for essential workers. And then there was the Black Lives Matter uprising in May and through the summer. And then there was all this organizing that I was a part of and that so many of us were a part of where we were thinking, okay, well, if we get rid of Trump, like, how do we learn these lessons that we actually, we want to live in a world that doesn't treat people as sacrificial? And we actually want time in nature. and maybe we don't want to work quite so hard as we were before. And there were all these projects of kind of reimagining how we could live. And it was when things, just the grind of normal returned. I don't know if you remember this, that essay by Arundtie Roy early in the pandemic

where she said the pandemic is a portal. Basically, she was saying, this is too big to not change us. We're going somewhere else. And we have a choices to make about what we bring with us through the portal. She said, are we going to bring our hatreds? Are we going to bring our smoggy skies? Or are we going to travel more lightly, you know, and make some choices about what we're going to bring with us?

And I think it was realizing like, oh, we're bringing all of it with us, you know, that made me feel just really unsure about the kind of writing that I've done. So the book is more personal, but it's also more experimental. It's much more in the tone that I speak with my friends. It's more honest. It's more self-critical. It's a doppelganger book.

so in the end it's always about looking in the mirror, as we know from doppelganger literature. But for me, like, I didn't have a choice but to write this way. Like, it was either that or not right. Like, it wasn't like I could have written a more conventional, authoritative, serious nonfiction book where I wasn't in it. And I just marshalled yet another argument about why we need to really act now on the face of the climate crisis. I didn't have it in me. I didn't, I'd lost faith in that kind of. writing. Maybe I'll return to it one day, but I kind of wrote myself back into speech. I mean,

I needed to try something new. I started working with a writing teacher. I almost signed up for an online writing course, but somebody convinced me that I should get a private teacher. So I was just, I really went back to school, like to try to remember what I loved about writing to begin with. And it was amazing to just write for one person instead of lots of people. We did all kinds of reading and exercises and out of that process came this idea of using my own doppelganger as a literary tool to look at all the ways that we are doubling and doppelganging and mirroring. So yeah, it's not like anything I've done before, so I can't compare it to, yeah, it's an experiment. And you did remember why you loved writing?

Oh, yeah, I mean, I had so much fun. And yeah, I rediscovered a sort of sense of play. And it stayed that way, even through editing. It was not a chore. It was like my secret. I didn't tell. The other thing about this book is that I didn't tell anybody about it. All my other books, I made a proposal and outline.

I had an agent. I had a publisher before I really started writing. So then I was writing the book because I had a deadline and I'd get in a lot of trouble if I didn't. But with Doppelganger, I was basically. eight months pregnant before I told anyone that I had written a book. I mean, by which I mean, I had written 10 chapters. And I think it's because I wanted to have an out in case it was too personal in case I didn't pull off or feel that I had pulled off this sort of experimental form. So I only wrote because I wanted to. Nobody was asking. Nobody was asking me to do it.

And as I say in the first sentence, several people strongly cautioned against it. 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. Bayleys is the perfect adult treat whether shaken in a cocktail, over ice cream or paired with your favorite book.

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and visualize your family story in more detail than ever before. Start your free trial with Find My Past today at findmypass.com. UK and see what stories you can uncover. Naomi, your third book, shelfy book, is The Dispossessed by O'Sloquet-Leguin. This is a 1974 anarchist utopian science fiction novel. It tells the story of Shevac, a brilliant scientist who is attempting to find a new theory of time. But there are those who are jealous of his work and will do anything to block him. So he leaves his homeland, hoping to find a place of more liberty and tolerance.

Shevac soon finds himself being used as a woman. a pawn in a deadly political game. Tell us about this book. Why did you choose it? So I was trying to think of books that were important to me in different chapters of my life. And this book I read in 2001, I think near the end of 2001. And my first book came out just at the cusp of the new millennium, like between 1999 and 2000, no logo. And then it was swept up in the social movement. in these mass movements because the book sort of was about these pockets of emerging anti-corporate and anti-capitalist resistance, but it was not understood to be a movement yet. It was just like the pockets, like reclaim the streets here in the UK or anti-swet shop activism, things like that. And so the book

had different chapters or people organizing their McDonald's and trying to bring in a union, things like that. But then when the book was at the printer, there were these huge protests against the world trade organization in Seattle. And then suddenly the movement that I said was going to happen was happening, not because I said it was happening. The book hadn't even come out yet, but because I had been reporting on it. And it turns out, yeah, there was a real growing youth-led resistance to the way corporations were sort of taking over all aspects of life and offering more precarious jobs and more environmental despoilations. So my life just went kind of like upside down. And I went from being an unknown Canadian writer to being translated in all these countries, but really being swept up in the wave

in the movement momentum, which is sort of unlike, you know, it's hard to compare it to just like a book success because you couldn't separate the book from this broader movement and the way it got picked up. And so that was a movement very much of no. In Italy, they called it the no global movement. And it was really like, it was a rejection of a certain kind of corporate globalization and a desire to protect the local and the particular and the non-corporate, the public, the commons. But whenever I would do interviews, I would always get this question, well, we know what you're against, but what are you for? Like, what is your vision of the economy that is not like this? And I think it's hard to imagine, like, from this vantage point of 2023, what it was like.

in 2000, 2001 to critique corporate globalization. Like, people thought it was really great. Now everyone's just like done with capitalism, although not really doing all that much about being done with it, but there's sort of broad consensus that this system is really not serving the vast majority of people. But then it was sort of heretical.

And so that was the attack on the movement, was you only have a no, but you don't have a yes. You don't have a vision of the world that you want. So that's where my head was at. That's also why I moved to Argentina for a year because we ended up making a documentary film about different kinds of utopian experiments in Argentina after their economy crashed right in this period. So there were factories that were taken over by their workers and turned into like anarcho-sindicalist cooperatives. And so my husband and I have made a documentary about that called The Take about workers taking over their factories and turning them into co-ops.

But there were all kinds of other experiments going on, sort of post-money trading networks and things like that. And around this time, I started reading The Dispossessed by Ursula Le Guin, which is this amazing utopian science fiction, troubled utopia, not rosy utopia, a complicated utopia. And it was interesting because Le Guin, who I love, said that she wrote it in the early 70s, and she had been part of the anti-Bietnam War movement. And it had also been in this space of no, you know, no war, we don't want that. and wanting to, as she said, she wanted to study peace because she didn't just want to stay in the rejection of war. Like, what does it mean to create a peaceful society, a society that doesn't need to go to war all the time? And I had also heard from a lot of people in the movement that this was kind of their Bible, that this book laid out the world that they actually wanted. And, yeah, it had a big effect on me.

And I think utopian science fiction often has a big political, more of a political impact for better and worse than maybe people realize. Think about Ayn Rand's books and their impact on Silicon Valley. You talked about the release of no logo around the time. I mean, things had started changing even when it was just gone to press. It was just being printed and being thrust into this. world. You just come from interviews today, a day full of interviews for doppelganger,

which you were saying to me before, is a little different. It's a little less combative, because I know what it can be like sometimes in the media. It's a lot. How do you avoid becoming overwhelmed or cynical about the world, given your line of work? And also, how do you protect your energy on a daily basis? You know, I think there's an energy exchange when you're out in the world. And I haven't been on book tour since before the pandemic. So the last book tour I went on was 2019. And I love my life. I live in British Columbia and in a very beautiful, wild part of the province.

You have to take a ferry boat and then it's an hour from the ferry boat. And I see seals and orcas occasionally. Occasionally I'll see an orca. We feel very blessed when they visit. But regularly I live amidst the bald eagles and the, the seals and the sea lions and we have to be very careful with our trash or the or the bears will get it. They know how to open car doors also. They've gotten into the car. So I'm not, I don't feel in any way deprived, but there is something about people. Yeah. And so it's been actually just

amazing to be on this tour because it is, yes, the press can be amazing. And, you know, I try to not to see it as press. You know, when you're doing a quick little TV hit, okay, yeah, it's just sort of a performance. But the nice thing, I mean, podcasts are really nice because I've had a lot of, like, long conversations with really smart people where we're thinking together. And that's the thing about writing is, yes, you have to be alone to do it, but you have this cacophony of voices with you who are all the writers who have made you, who you're in conversation with. They're helping to shape the text, and then you bring the text into the world. And then, you know, the most fun part about doppelganger is that it has inspired, I think because it is not one of those books that is

claiming to have figured everything out, that it's, you know, it's not a thesis that is saying, you know, here is the thing and here is what we must do. It's, it's my personal advantage point through a very vertiginous period. It's a first draft of a bit of a map of the way the world has been upended. So I've got the mirror world and I've got the shadow lands and trying to understand the relationship between what we don't want to look at and all the ways in which we distract ourselves with looking at mirrors of ourselves on our phones and creating fantastical stories in conspiracy land and then feeling superior because we don't believe those conspiracy theories because we're the people who are focused on reality except are we really focused on reality

because there's a lot that is really hard for everybody to look at because we're all enmeshed in these systems. So I think because it's so, it is subjective, it's more personal, it's more eccentric to use one's doppelganger as a sort of a lens to look at all of this. It's inspired all of this amazing writing. Like it's not just reviews, like people have written more examples, like somebody who interviewed me for Conspiruality, which is a podcast that really helped me while I was writing this. It looks at the intersection of the worlds of wellness and yoga and conspiracy and how a lot of people are tipping over. Matthew Remski is somebody who I know from the yoga world. I met him on a yoga retreat a long time ago.

He's a yoga teacher, former yoga teacher. But he interviewed me for spirituality, and he was like, I've made 50 pages of notes. And it's like, that is so cool that writing does that. Like, that you writing makes somebody else just makes all their synapsies fire and write all kinds of cool things. So it is magic. The way we all help each other make sense of this, of this wild world. Yeah.

More thinking, more listening. I think I was just saying before I logged into Twitter now called X and what I noticed is everyone's sort of just shouting at each other and not listening whereas if we can encourage one another to to just

stop for a second okay now let's go it's a different way to think no no no you're not supposed to think on Twitter no no it's a state of pure reactivity you're in fight or flight when you're on when you're on that platform and all you're thinking is like not what did you say

but what should I say about what you said? You know, it's the meme, everything is refracted through you. It's not a good thing that they have created for us and that we have helped them create. We touched earlier on a writer who is just exquisite in every way and whose work has made us think, has, I feel like, incited change.

And she's the author of your fourth book today, which is Flight Behavior. And it is, of course, Barbara Kingselver. A Women's Prize for Fiction winner, flight behavior takes on one of the most contentious subjects of our time. Of course, climate change with a deft and versatile empathy. Kingsolver dissects the motives that drive denial and belief in a precarious world. Talk to me about why you picked this book in particular,

but I know you're a fan of Barbara Kingsolver in general. Yeah, I really am. And I could have easily picked even Copperhead, but I thought probably your listeners had, because she won the prize this year would probably have been having all kinds of demon copperhead book clubs and so on. But flight behavior, that's an example of, I guess, how sometimes I use fiction as a companion to my nonfiction. So when I was writing my first book about climate change, this changes everything. I read flight behavior and I really do believe it is one of the best books about climate change, period, not just fiction, just nonfiction as well, because that's one of the things.

things that Barbara does so well is she doesn't hide the fact that she has something of an agenda with these books, and it doesn't come at the expense of story and these incredible characters. But she puts her ideas in their mouths. You know, there's an incredible scientist in flight behavior who is just could be speaking on behalf of every pissed off scientist everywhere where he just goes on this incredible rant with a sort of, let's just say, like a little bit of a ditsy local news reporter who is feeding some climate change denial his way and he's having none of it. But the other thing that made me want to choose flight behavior is that, you know, Devin Copperhead is, King Solver has described it as wanting to write the great Appalachian novel.

And flight behavior, I think, gets short shrift as a great Appalachian novel. And this has been a real passion of hers is to insist on the humanity of people who live in this part of the world who are really kind of, you know, one of the last acceptable groups to just openly mock and, you know, are they just the butt of endless jokes and just the, you know, just the figure of the kind of the redneck, the hillbilly. And she's their avenging angel, you know. I mean, this is the thing. It's flight behavior when I finished it. I'm like, this is a book about climate change, but it's also about red states and blue states and the way kind of coastal elites, for lack of a better phrase, like really just.

do not understand these places that they are so prone to dismiss as the deplorables. And so the main character in flight behavior is Delrobia Turnbow. She's in an unhappy marriage, is not appreciated, is quite brilliant, and is off to have an illicit rendezvous. And on her way to meet her, would-be lover, comes across this incredible sight of just a hilltop covered in orange monarch butterflies. And that scene is like one of the great scenes. And it's also about uncanniness because it's both exquisitely beautiful and wrong.

Right. It's the uncanniness of our world, right? Where, you know, Freud called the uncanny, the species of frightening in which the familiar becomes strange, right? Monarch butterflies don't belong. That's not their migration route. But anyway, I love the novel. I love King Solver.

unsheltered, which she wrote between demon copperhead and flight behavior is also an incredible novel about the climate crisis and really the dissolution of our shared home told through an actual building that is falling apart, a home. You said earlier that although a book can't insight change, it's everything that goes around it. It was Barbara Kingselver driving force in sort of changing your view on how authors can use their voices to drive change. I just love how unabashed she is about the fact that she, there's such a condescension towards, like, political art where this idea that you can't be a great artist if you actually care passionately about the world. And I love that King Solver just has no time for that whatsoever. It doesn't hide the fact that she cares passionately about the climate crisis.

You know, and the acknowledgments for flight behavior, she thanks 350.org. And, you know, of course she cares. Of course we should all care. and I'm very inspired by the way she just has charted her own path. She's a great companion. Is there anything a key thing, let's say, that we could be doing each of us that collectively, when it comes to us coming together,

our voices working together, that we could be doing collectively, to be better to advance humanity? That's the big question. After this very long and winding journey of trying to sort out, like how much I should. care about the fact that my identity is really out of control in the sense that like if you have a doppelganger, it means that you could try to perfect yourself as much as you want. You can perfect

your brand. You can do the perfect filter on your photographs. You can optimize. You can, you know, you can get the tone just right. But if there's somebody out there who like a big part of the world thinks is you and they're doing things you never would do, then like I took that as a message to just take yourself less seriously. And I think in general, I don't think we will come together as individuals or as groups of individuals, you know, reaching across often difficult divides unless we really believe that it is worth it, you know? And I think that that means that there has to be a clear horizon that we're working towards. I think there's been a lot of excavation. There's been a lot of difficult looking back. And we have to do that. Like we need truer narratives of where we live and how we came to be, especially colonial nations and settler colonial nations. But I increasingly feel, and this is why I included a little utopian fiction, is that if we don't have a horizon that we're moving towards, and if everybody can't see themselves in that horizon that we're moving towards, then I don't think we will do that hard work of coming together because people are hard, right? And there's a lot of difficult, there's so many reasons to fracture. There's so many reasons to just be done with it, to just be frustrated with each other. but I think if there is, if we understand what we're moving towards, we might, we might do that hard work and get over ourselves a tiny bit.

Yeah, not a true word spoken. Well, we're moving towards your fifth and final book that you've brought to the podcast today, Naomi, which is her body and other parties by Carmen Maria Machado. This collection of short stories from 2017 blur the boundaries between magical realism, science fiction and horror in this electric and provocative. debut, Machado bends genre to shape startling narratives that map the realities of women's lives and the violence visited upon their bodies. Is there one story in particular in here that really caught you? Yeah, yeah. I mean, the whole collection is incredible. I wanted to talk about eight bites because for doppelganger, I did a deep dive into the history of the figure of the doppelganger, which is so persistent in

literature, back to mythology, the figure of the twin, you know, the shadow self. And, you know, I watched a lot of doppelganger films, everything from the great dictator to Denisov's enemy. You know, even parent traps starring a young Lindsay Loe. Like, I'll do, if I can call it research, I'll just watch

absolutely anything. But I was frustrated in my deep dive into doppelganger literature that there are some women who have written doppelganger novels, but it is a very male genre. And I think in part because the doppelganger is the threat to the ego, right? So there's Dostoevsky, there's Edgar Allan Poe, there's a lot of Philip Roth, but I wanted to find more women's voices thinking about doubling. And, you know, Liguin does have a really interesting doppelganger and Wizard of Earthsea, GED, but, but I found Machado's story eight bites to be so useful. It's a very strange story. It's a doppelganger story,

but it also gets to something really, really key that I was trying to understand about the weirdness of now, the wildness of now, which is like how a sector of the wellness world, the sort of new age yoga world that I've had big yoga phases. I know a lot of folks who kind of crossed over and are suddenly spouting QAnon and talking about their bodily autonomy not to get vaccinated. And if people have compromised immune system, that's their problem. And, you know, maybe this is sort of a Darwinism at work. And this is a culling that needs to happen. I mean, I've heard people say this, glowing Instagram influencers who, you know, you would be surprised to hear it from. So I was trying to make sense of this. And somebody referred me to this story, Eight Bites, as a way to sort of understand a kind of a

body fascism that can set in. And so the premise of eight bites is the main character is very unhappy with her body and she feels that it's too heavy. She's angry at it. It's not fitting into conventional norms around thinness. And so she has bariatric surgery. She's very happy because her appetite is suppressed and she loses a lot of the weight. But then she becomes haunted by a figure a shadow figure, a kind of a doppelganger, that she first thinks is a ghost, and then it turns out to be the hundred pounds of fat that she shed that has become a fat golem

that will not leave her. And the story ends with her beating this doppelganger with terrifying violence. And it gets at this, and there's also a character in the story who was her daughter, who also has a similar body type, and she's very angry that her mother has changed in this way.

And she says, well, do you hate my body? Because my body's the same as your body was and you wanted to, you know, cut that body in half. So what do you hate mine? And it's getting at this kind of exercise is great. I'm not saying that all of wellness engages in this kind of hatred. But there is a way in which this obsession with the idealized form can, it creates a double where you're reaching for this idealized version of you. And if there's enough reps, if there's enough discipline, you'll reach that double, that idealized double. But then what

happens to the you that was? And it seems like Machado is saying, like, you can't reach for that idealized form without in some ways hating the other one. And that hatred isn't just of the other you or the you that you lost. It can also bleed into other people who are not seen as perfect. And in that way. And honestly, I think it goes a long way towards explaining some of the strange happenings that we've seen in the COVID years in the wellness world. Why do you think we still need to protect and champion women's voices and women's representations and women's rights? You said before, you know, a lot of those doppelganger pieces of literature that you've read have been from that male perspective. Why was seeing a female perspective

important. There's this history around doppelgangers where it's the must kill, must stab, must be the last me standing in literature. And you think about Oscar Wilde's, a portrait of Dorian Gray, right? And you stab the portrait and then they both die or like Edgall and Pose, William Wilson, it's the same thing. You confront your double who's threatening your identity and then you both die. And when women write about doubles, it is, does seem to be different. There does, you know, often seem to be much more of a grappling with that underlying impulse of like why why are we trying why are we putting so much on the self so you know i don't think we can generalize that all women are you know challenging the ego and certainly some women including women writers are probably pretty ego driven but i do think

we need that that different perspective and looking forwards what can readers expect from you next um i want to try some other forms that was the big lesson for me and and go on back to school during COVID and trying some other writing styles is that actually it's never too late to try a new form and if you're bored by your old form try a new one do that online course exactly if you had to choose one book from your list that you brought today as a favorite which would it be in one oh boy i think i'd have to bring king solver but if i bring demon I'm in copper. I'm cheating.

You know what? It's not cheating because the reason you gave it made sense. But we're also, we're not sick of talking about demon copy art so you can bring it. Okay, thank you. I'll change the rules. It's fine. I want to read it three more times.

Well, if we keep feeling jealous of anyone we see reading, I think it's a sign. Yeah, yeah. No, I mean, it's been such an absolute pleasure to talk to you today. I know you've had a really long day full of interviews. I hope this was a nice tonic at the end. It was amazing. Thank you, Vic. This was such a pleasure. I'm Vic Hope and you've been listening to the Women's Prize for Fiction podcast. This podcast is brought to you by Bayleys and produced by Birdline Media.

Thank you so much for listening and I'll see you next time.