The Chris Voss Show - The Chris Voss Show Podcast – Radiant Heat by Sarah-Jane Collins

Episode Date: January 19, 2024

Radiant Heat by Sarah-Jane Collins https://amzn.to/4b5Em68 When a catastrophic wildfire suddenly rips through a woman’s hometown, she thinks she is lucky to have survived . . . until she finds a dead woman in her driveway, clutching a piece of paper with her name on it. . . . The blaze came out of nowhere one summer afternoon, a wall of fire fed by blustering wind. Yet, somehow, Alison is alive. She rode out the fire on the damp tiles of her bathroom, her entire body swaddled in a wet woolen blanket. As flames crackled around her, the bitter char of eucalyptus settled in the back of her throat, each breath more desperate than the last. The wildfire that devastated the Victoria countryside Alison calls home sets in motion a chain of events that threatens to obliterate the carefully constructed life she is living. When Alison emerges from her sheltering place, she spots a soot-covered cherry red car in her driveway, and in it, a dead woman. Alison has never met Simone Arnold in her life . . . or so she thinks. So what is she doing here? As Alison searches for answers across Australia’s scorched bushlands, she soon learns that the fire isn’t the only threat she’s facing. . . .

You wanted the best. You've got the best podcast. The hottest podcast in the world. The Chris Voss Show. The preeminent podcast with guests so smart you may experience serious brain bleed. The CEOs, authors, thought leaders, visionaries, and motivators. Get ready. Get ready. Strap yourself in. Keep your hands, arms, and legs inside the vehicle at all times. Because you're about to go on a monster education roller coaster with your brain. Now, here's your host, Chris Voss. I'm Oaks Voss here from thechrisvossshow.com, thechrisvossshow.com. Here, let's let the Iron Lady sing it because my voice is so good.

There you go. It's better when she does it. Welcome to let's let the Iron Lady sing it. Because my voice is so good. There you go. It's better when she does it. Welcome to the big show, my family and friends. We certainly appreciate it. As always, you're bringing the most smartest people. The Pulitzer Prize winners, the CEOs, the billionaires, the White House advisors, the government officers. All the cool people who have these really interesting stories that they bring and share.

And these spinsters of tales. Spinsters of tales. I'm trying to sound educated this morning. But they bring us their great novels and all the stuff that can just change your world with the stories they tell and entertain us as well. We have another amazing author on the show. This is her debut novel. It's called Radiant Heat. It comes out January 23, 2024.

Sarah Jane Collins joins us on the show. We're going to be talking to her, and us will be talking about her latest book. She's a writer, editor, and journalist from Brisbane, Australia. She moved to New York by way of Sydney and Melbourne. Her work has appeared in The Age, The Sydney Morning Herald, Overland, and others. She has an MFA in fiction from Columbia University. Her fiction has won the Overland Fair Australia Prize and been shortlisted for other awards. And although New York is her

home now, she misses the beaches of Australia, but not the spiders. I love it. Welcome to the show, Sarah Jane. How are you? I to the show, Sarah. How are you? I'm good. Thank you. How are you? I am excellent. We're just kind of getting rolling here on the Monday morning of the thing over here. So give us the dot coms. Where can people find you on the interwebs? Okay. I'm on Instagram primarily, Sarah Jane Marie, and I'm on X x i guess it's called now not twitter same handle and yeah facebook all those places so that's where i am there you go so it's billed as after the fire the reckoning begins radiant heat give us a 30 000 overview if you would please of the book sure so radiant heat

is the story of a woman who narrowly survives a very severe bushfire, or as you would call them in America, a wildfire. And then she finds a dead woman in a car in her driveway who she's never met before. But the woman has her name and address on a piece of paper, and she doesn't know why she's there. And this kind of leads her down a rabbit hole of chasing her own past, but also the reason for this woman to be at her house at that point in time. And I'd just like to point out right now that it was not me that did that.

I just want to make sure everyone's clear on that. It's a novel. So this is pretty interesting. This is your first debut novel. Congratulations. These are always fun. And what kind of led you to write about this sort of topic? I mean, no bushfires are big in Australia.

What was it that tripped you on to this plot? So I was a journalist in Melbourne for five years and in Sydney for five years as well. But while I was working in Melbourne, there was a very severe bushfire called the Black Saturday bushfire that killed 173 people in 2009. And that fire was kind of unprecedented. There'd never been a catastrophe like that in Australia before. There's been other fires since that have been very devastating, but not quite as much life has been lost. And so as a journalist, I covered a lot of the recovery after that fire and spoke to a lot of people that had

lived through it and kind of saw the community rebuilding firsthand. And I also covered the courts in Victoria where a lot of the kind of mid-tier offenses get committed, a lot of stuff involving nasty situations domestically and violence against women. And so those two threads were always things that I were interested in exploring, the idea of, you know, how do we rebuild after a big crisis? And also what is the kind of impact on the lives of Australian women from these kind of terrible events that they experienced? So I sat down one day and I just started writing. And I wrote the first chapter actually over a decade ago now.

But then I just put it down and did a lot of other work and came back to it when I moved over to New York to do my MFA at Columbia. There you go. It's billed as a vivid, emotionally intense, and satisfying cerebral psychological thriller in the manner of Tana French I believe that is or yeah or Gillian Flynn I'm reading it by either peeking behind the camera that's on the screen so congratulations it sounds like it's getting a lot of great reviews

and stuff tell us about your so this this book was 10 years in the writing is that correct then yeah I mean on and off so I think I wrote the first chapter and the first chapter is largely the same which is surprising to me because you know you would think you would you would go through a lot of edits and different iterations and I did actually do that but I came back to that first chapter almost exactly as it was um so but then I didn't write anything for a while and then I kind of wrote it in a big chunk for two years between 2016 and 2018. And then edits and revisions for a couple of years after that. The publishing industry is a very slow-moving beast.

It doesn't get things out into the world particularly quickly. I mean, sometimes we get books that are nonfiction, you know, about a story or something. And then it's kind of interesting how even if it's when it's delayed a year, year and a half, sometimes by publishers because, you know, they do their thing. It'll still be relevant when it comes out, like sometimes more relevant. And you're just like, hey, did you plan this this way? Yeah. We had somebody on a politic book recently that we're like, hey, did you plan on knowing what was going on here? Because you sure nailed it on that book. But so give us a little bit more about your background. What, what inspired you to want to be a writer? You've obviously done a lot of writing outside

the book. What, what got you into that field? How did you grow up? You know, what shaped you? Yeah. I mean, I grew up in Brisbane, which is Australia's third largest city, I guess. It's sort of, I, when I'm trying to explain Australia to Americans, I often say that Queensland, which is the state that Brisbane is in, is like the Florida of Australia. So I guess that that would make Brisbane like Miami or something, but I've not been to Miami, so I can't say. Is that kind of a reference of the Florida man, Florida woman

sort of headlines? I mean, there's definitely a little bit of that vibe in Queensland. I'm not going to lie. A little bit of bath salts. Yeah. And you know, there's, there's crocodiles and tropical weather and all of that sort of stuff. So anyway, not to be stereotyping my home state or the state of Florida, but yeah, that's kind of my comparison for Americans. Anyway, so I grew up there and my father is very passionate about theater. And so we saw a lot of theater growing up and he actually directed a lot of amateur theater. And so I guess storytelling and stories were very, very important in my family as a child. My mom is a huge reader. We had like a thousand books in our upstairs living room. My brother just would spend all day, every day reading books. And so that was sort of how I visited the rest of the world from my little bedroom in Brisbane. And I just always

loved to write from as soon as I knew how to do it. I was obsessed with writing things and I would always write letters instead of having conversations. And I was a kid I decided that being a novelist wasn't a very financially like smart uh career path so I thought you know what I'll be a newspaper journalist that's a really guaranteed money kind of job this is like you know the 1980s and and then I went to university and I got a job on a newspaper and three months into working at that newspaper they have their first big round of redundancies because it was 2007 and this is when all the newspapers started you know cutting stuff so I just I started my newspaper career at exactly the wrong time to start a newspaper career and i did that for a

while and and i guess i just always couldn't put down the idea of writing a book so here we are what a great way to grow up stories like we i always say on the show stories are the owner's manual to life and it's how we learn whether it's fiction fiction or nonfiction. We love the labyrinth texture of stories and what they tell us and how we view the world and how we view ourselves and how we view people. Boy, I'm really being pontificating on this riff. But I tell young people, I'm like, be a story collector. Go through life and collect stories. Because that's how we learn, you know, television. It didn't occur to me.

I was a real idiot and I still am actually. I think we all know that the audience is like, he's an idiot. But I didn't, it just never struck me until I was 50 that I'd been a story collector. I'd been a griot collecting stories all my life and how important it was all about stories. Never occurred to me that film and books and tv and you know all the stuff we consume are stories it's yeah the fabric of life and it just never really i just really had that epiphany like holy shit it's all stories well you know you got you got there eventually and that's what matters

i finally came around that's usually how it works works. We live with my grandmother as well, and she loved to just tell a story. She would just tell a story about my great-aunts and uncle or my mom growing up or anything like that. And she would just go on and on in a very entertaining way. So I kind of had that oral storytelling happening as well. And my mom is a photographer. So she would, she was very visual storyteller, but she taught us how to tell a visual story as well. So, yeah, I mean, I guess we were a very creative family and I feel very lucky to have had those

experiences as a kid because, you know, other kids maybe were spending a lot more time playing sport and I just got to be in other whole worlds reading books and having fun times watching my dad rehearse plays and in the dark room with my mother so you know yeah it was great they say that maybe the thing that saves us humans from the new species we've created of AI is our ability to create and our ability to tell stories. And maybe that will be our edge that, you know, AI will keep us around for. We'll keep my fingers crossed on that. So a lot of your research for the book came from your newspaper journalism

and stuff then. Yeah, yeah. Actually, like most of it came from experiences that I had as a newspaper journalist. And then I did, you know, some extra reading and talked to some people that I had worked with who had actually, you know, been in bushfire conditions as the Black Saturday fires were receding. And also just reading some of the firsthand accounts

of my colleagues who had, who lived, because the fires were very close to Melbourne. And I actually had a colleague at another newspaper who I was working the courts around with. He, his family home was destroyed and he very narrowly survived. So there was a lot of,

I guess what primary sources that I could draw on to get that texture that you, that I think is really important when you write something like this to kind of make people be able to feel that they're there. Yeah. There you go. Boots on the ground sort of no yeah and you know the first one of the first things i learned when i was a cadet journalist is they got the the country fire association came in to do fire safety training with us and it was designed for because because australia has bushfires pretty regularly and particularly in victoria and so it was designed so that if a bushfire happened we could be sent out to cover it and they would know that we would be we'd behave safely and one of the first things that

the firefighters told us was about the radiant heat and how radiant heat is actually one of the most dangerous things in a bushfire um yeah which i'd never heard of before, but it gets so hot that it doesn't matter how you take shelter or where you take shelter. It'll just kill you. Yeah, which is obviously very bleak, but also very interesting, I think. I think we have that in Las Vegas during the summers. There's three months of the radiant heat. So if you go outside, you turn to ash. I've never been to ash. I've never

been to Vegas. I'll have to go, but I'll avoid those times. Don't go in the summer, yeah. It's a dry heat. That's what they always say. But no, radiant heat. Wow, that's pretty amazing. So note to self, stay out of the radiant heat anytime you're in Australia. Stay away from bushfires, generally.

They're not good. If you're feeling safe, eat Tim Tams. Those are the best things to eat in Australia. At least I think so. There's probably a lot of other things there too. You know, you should ask someone to send you some Caramello Koalas. Camarillo Koalas? Caramello Koalas.

Caramello Koalas? There it is. Australia. Now, these aren't the ones that have chlamydia right no no they're safe they're safe i don't know how you guys got a bunch of koalas that got that i just thought that was the funniest thing i mean it's actually very common in the koala population believe it or not one one direction came to australia like i guess a decade ago now and they were holding koalas at one of the koala parks and a koala peed on harry styles and

everyone was like oh my god did the koala give harry styles chlamydia i'm not even joking that's a real thing that happened that's the excuse he's last time i got it so there you go so i've got this pulled up cat it's cadbury dairy milk yeah yeah i'll order something there's probably somebody who can get this to me locally but yeah i get the tim tams from are the tim tams i think there's places like world market that sell tim tams are they the exact same yeah yeah the ones that you get in america that are called tim tams are the same they're exactly the same all right yeah because i want that i want that rich australian flavor mixed with whatever else you guys put in there that's probably something from the down under so when you did your character research on and you well when you fleshed out your characters for the

book how did you approach your character development what were some of the things that went into it did you did you bring from people you know sounds like you have a pretty rich story base to pull from for all the reading you did did you pull anyone from your personal life or yeah i mean i think we all borrow from our lives when we write i you know and what's what's that thing that nora effron said that you know anything everything is copy right so um yes is the short answer there's definitely characters in there that remind me of people i know you know for diplomatic reasons I probably shouldn't be too specific about which ones are which I think um I think that there's a lot of my more cynical side in the in the

protagonist Alison and there's also a really a lot of my grandmother and my grandmother's best friend in her friend Sal who is an older woman. That one, I think, is an obvious one, and I don't think anyone would be surprised by that. Are any of the characters based on me? No, I'm just kidding. Oh, like the villain, obviously. Oh, the villain. All right.

The judge would probably agree with you on that. So there you go. What was your writing routine? I mean, obviously, it took 10 years to do this. Did you, somewhere you had to start ramping this and start getting really serious? Yeah, I mean, when I was at Columbia doing my MFA, that's a really rigorous program, and you have to turn in a lot of work. And so I was turning in short stories, but I was trying to turn in a chunk of this every

semester as well. And then in my final semester, I only turned in the book, the workshops. But I guess my routine when I really got into writing it was there was a little bar around the corner from the place I used to live in Greenpoint that I used to go to three times a week with my laptop and just sit there and type for four hours until I'd written as many words as I thought I needed to write that day. And then I would put the laptop away and play some pool. Yeah. Cool. Cool.

I love billiards. Yeah. Yeah. I mean, just, just, you know, bar pool. Oh, there you go. House bar rules. I used to be, I used to be a good pool player shark back in the day. I was one of my eyes still worked.

So there you go. So let's see. What advice do you give to aspiring authors who wish to write novels? I mean, it's the most obvious advice, and it's not really that helpful. But really, my advice is just write it. I have so many friends who are wonderful writers and who have great ideas, who talk a lot about their ideas, but then they don't have time or they're doing their full-time job or life gets in the way and they don't actually sit down and write.

And it seems like the most obvious thing to say, but truly that's going to get you so much further than any other piece of esoteric advice I could give you about post-it notes or character studies or where you get your inspiration from. It's just sit down, wrestle with that blank page, and just write until you've got enough words that you can form it into something that you can show someone else. And then you can start the process of revision, you know? Just write it you know i i i started when i wrote my first book i started an accountability group and it was just like everyone just trying to write a day and you know i remember at first it was like really like a whole hour that's eternity you're trying to write stuff and then eventually it just starts the roll and you know speed and you get going and you're eventually you're cooking and and all that good stuff i'm trying to get back

on that track now but yeah just just write like i would have and what's funny was a lot of people my accountability group they were trying to edit as they would write you know they like sure make sure all the spelling and the periods are in the right place and stuff and i was like dude you guys you guys are you guys are just really slowing yourself. Just write the damn thing because that thing is going to go through 50 edits by the time you're done. Don't worry about where the commas are. Just get it done.

And so I was the only one who survived the book accountability group. So I think that was one of the things that I did what you said. Just write. I called it puking on the page, which is a scientific term. But I would just write. And, you know, sometimes it was really awful. Well, most times it was. That's what the editor said when he threw out half the book.

But, you know, we got there. So there you go. Now, one of the mean things that they do to you as a new a new author is as soon as the day comes where in the book drops they have one question for you uh what do you got next uh and you're just like i just poured my soul on this damn thing what do you want from me people uh any future new projects you're working on yeah i i have started working on the next thing which well what i hope will be the next thing which i'm excited about it's uh it be the next thing, which I'm excited about. It's, uh, it's going to be set in New York, which is obviously different for me because this one

is set in Australia, but you know, I live here now and I think the, the way that I write, I'm very interested in detail, like visceral detail. And, and I, I i i think that i'm better at observing a place where i am than imagining a place where i'm not if that makes sense well new york is a fabric that uh there's a lot to take from man yeah yeah so it's kind of like this project is sort of in part inspired by everyone's journey through hell that was COVID lockdown and sort of how that made everyone a little bit crazy and in New York and yeah yeah well not just in New York I think that happened everywhere didn't it you crazy in New York no way people's crazy in New York yeah and I know this is very shocking groundbreaking groundbreaking. I've been on this subway.

So yeah, it kind of takes that sort of that hothouse, feverish kind of feeling and then adds in some murders and yeah, but it's going to be fun. It's going to be a bit more fun than this book, I think, but it's still going to be messy

and dark and all of those kind of things that I think are good. There you go. Well, people love that suspense, right? Yeah. Yeah. So when I was 10, my dad gave me a copy of Patricia Cornwall's first book. I think it's called Postmortem.

And he said, I think you'd really like this. And I took it to school. And my teacher said, do your parents know that you're reading this book? And I said, oh, my dad gave it to me. He said I'd really like it. Now we know who hurt you. There you go. So, yes, I mean, I've loved the thrillers and the crime reads my whole life.

And so, yeah, I'll probably still stick a little bit in that lane but slightly different to this one yeah now in your bio you mentioned you do not like the australian spiders have you thought about writing a thriller based on those no because then i would have to think too much about spiders that's true they are truly horrendous you have dreams probably or nightmares of the spiders yeah because you're focusing on them too much yeah that's i see to this day i still close my eyes whenever that horrible giant spider and lord of the rings comes out of its cave i've never i've never actually seen it i'm like i don't i can't no thank you i've seen pictures of the real australian spiders and yeah i just burn everything down if it came in my house.

I just let me light on fire and move. There are ones called huntsman spiders. They're not poisonous. And so everyone always is. You should be nice to them. But they are huge. And they do live in your house. They live inside.

They do? Yeah, I had one once. I was like, I came home from work late and no one yeah I had one once I was like I came home from work late and no one else was home and I was really tired so I just crashed in into my bed without turning the light on or anything in my room and I had a cat at the time and he jumped up on the bed and then he just froze and was staring at the wall behind me and I went what what are you looking at what what are you please be looking at a moth like please be looking at something very innocuous and so like I turn around I turn

the light on and there is a huntsman spider the size of my hand on the wall directly behind the bed I was like okay I'm sleeping on the couch tonight and then we're burning the house down yeah yeah because so they're not venomous but you can get a nausea and headache sometimes i guess yeah i mean i i don't think anyone i've never known anyone to be sick from a huntsman and i i also know people that like encourage them into their homes because they don't have a phobia of spiders and they like that they eat mosquitoes and other things but i know no thank you yeah that's that's i agree with you i'm on the same page you know hey i got an idea for you for a book in new york i for some reason in tiktok i picked these up i think there's a channel that's doing it and it's like the rats

of new york and they have these videos of like rats fighting over food and pizza remember the pizza rat yeah so it's kind of based on that and so they just videos of all these rats in the in the like the subway and and and stuff running around and they're fighting over food and it's just kind of like and like how oblivious people are to it they're just like yeah it's a bunch of rats fighting over pizza whatever it's true there are so many rats in the subway that you just kind of you're like oh there oh, there's one of my friends. Just hanging out. Yeah, they have names. Anything more you want to tease out or pitch on the book as we go out?

I would just say that if you're a person that's interested in Australian culture or if you're interested in exploring ideas around grief and post-traumatic stress, but also solving an interesting mystery, then it's a great, I think it's a great read. And I had a lot of fun writing it. And I really am very excited to share it with the world now. It feels like it's been gestating. I feel like I'm an elephant parent or something. It's just been gestating for so long. But yeah, I really hope that people read it and that they enjoy it and they take something meaningful from it. Because that's the whole point of this kind of exchange really, isn't it? There you go. Well, very exciting.

Congratulations on getting your first. There you go. I'm sure you're going to have a lot of fun with it. And give us a dot coms where we want people to get to know you on the interwebs. Yeah. So just Sarah Jane Marie, which is spelled M-A-R-E-E. And that's my Instagram.

That's my X handle. And that's my Facebook as well. So there you go. Order it up, folks. Wherever fine books are sold. Radiant Heat. January 23rd, 2024. Sarah Jane Collins.

And watch for her future stuff that she works on. Thanks, guys, for tuning in. Go to Goodreads.com, Fortress Chris Voss, LinkedIn.com, Fortress Chris Voss, Chris Voss 1 on the tickety-tockety, and Chris Voss Facebook.com. Thanks for tuning in. Go to Goodreads.com, Fortress, Chris Foss, LinkedIn.com, Fortress, Chris Foss, Chris Foss 1 on the tickety-tockety, and Chris Foss Facebook.com. Thanks for tuning in. Be good to each other. Stay safe, and we'll see you guys next time.