The Chris Voss Show - The Chris Voss Show Podcast – Yes, Daddy by Jonathan Parks-Ramage

Episode Date: June 5, 2021

Yes, Daddy by Jonathan Parks-Ramage "A gut-churning, heart-wrenching, blockbuster of a first novel . . . Parks-Ramage is an extraordinary new talent and Yes, Daddy is truly something special." —Kristen Arnett, author of Mostly Dead Things A propulsive, scorching modern gothic, Yes, Daddy follows an ambitious young man who is lured by an older, successful playwright into a dizzying world of wealth and an idyllic Hamptons home where things take a nightmarish turn. Jonah Keller moved to New York City with dreams of becoming a successful playwright, but, for the time being, lives in a rundown sublet in Bushwick, working extra hours at a restaurant only to barely make rent. When he stumbles upon a photo of Richard Shriver—the glamorous Pulitzer Prize–winning playwright and quite possibly the stepping stone to the fame he craves—Jonah orchestrates their meeting. The two begin a hungry, passionate affair. When summer arrives, Richard invites his young lover for a spell at his sprawling estate in the Hamptons. A tall iron fence surrounds the idyllic compound where Richard and a few of his close artist friends entertain, have lavish dinners, and—Jonah can’t help but notice—employ a waitstaff of young, attractive gay men, many of whom sport ugly bruises. Soon, Jonah is cast out of Richard’s good graces and a sinister underlay begins to emerge. As a series of transgressions lead inexorably to a violent climax, Jonah hurtles toward a decisive revenge that will shape the rest of his life. Riveting, unpredictable, and compulsively readable, Yes, Daddy is an exploration of class, power dynamics, and the nuances of victimhood and complicity. It burns with weight and clarity—and offers hope that stories may hold the key to our healing.

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. 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. All right, let's do this. Hey, folks. This is Voss here from thechrisvossshow.com.

The Chris Voss Show.com. Hey, we're coming to you with another great podcast. We certainly appreciate you guys tuning in. Thanks for being here. Be sure to go subscribe to the podcast. Refer to your friends, neighbors, relatives. Get everyone in your little book club to sign up for the Chris Voss Show so they can see all the wonderful, beautiful, intelligent authors that we have on the show.

Also go to youtube.com, 4chesschrisvoss, hit the bell notification button. Go to goodreads.com, 4chesschris voss and to see everything we're doing over there all the groups that we have on facebook linkedin and this they're everywhere just search for the chris voss show and you can find out more about them today we have another uh debut author on the show this is his uh first book that he's just come out with it's called yes daddy and novel just came out this month and you can pick this baby up at local fine bookstores his name is jonathan parks ramage and this episode is brought to you by a sponsor ifi-audio.com and their micro idst signature it's a top of the range

desktop transportable DAC and headphone app that will supercharge your headphones. It has two brown burr DAC chips in it and will decode high-res audio and MQA files. We're using it in the studio right now. I've loved my experience with it so far. It just makes everything sound so much more richer and better and takes things to the next level. IFI Audio is an award-winning audio tech company with one aim in mind, to improve your music enjoyment of quality sound, eradicate noise, distortion, and hiss from your listening experience. Check out their new incredible lineup of DACs and audio enhancement devices at ifi-audio.com. He has been widely published in such outlets as vice slate out w atlas obscura broadly

and l he is an alumni of the bread loaf writers conference he lives in los angeles with his partner ryan o'connell and this is his debut novel as we mentioned before welcome to the show jonathan how are you? I am fantastic. It is a sunny, vaccinated day in Los Angeles. So there you go. Things are good. Are things getting better down there with the whole lockdown? I feel very fortunate.

After going through a very hellish December where things were very dark, it seems like we're starting to emerge. There are people out, people eating in restaurants again, celebrating various things with their loved ones. So I feel very fortunate to be vaccinated and getting back to some initial semblance of normalcy. No kidding. It's so nice to eat out in restaurants.

Oh my God. Give us your plugs so people can see you on the interwebs and find out more about you. Yes, you can find me on Instagram. That is my sole social media outlet. I am at JP Rampage and just say hello to me there. There you go. There you go. So what motivated you to write this, your debut novel? Yes. So the book is about a young aspiring writer who is broke. He's in New York City. He gets into a relationship with a much older, wealthy, famous writer. And he thinks that this older writer is going to be the answer to all of his prayers, whether they're professional or romantic. And he winds up going out for the summer to the wealthy writer's Hamptons compound, where things take a very dark turn. And he's drawn into this kind of web of sexual abuse and assault.

And for me, the book came out of, I like to say that it's personal, but not autobiographical. I think it came out of a period of my life when I was in my early 20s and I was living in New York and I felt very lost. And I dated a lot of older, wealthy, famous men because I thought that would give me some sort of direction or some sort of stability, when in fact, it gave me the opposite. And it took me a very long time to learn that I basically needed to stand on my own in order to be independent and live a fulfilled life. So I'm now thankfully far, those dark days are far behind. And now I'm in my late 30s, and this book was a way to metabolize my personal experience, but then filter it through the lens of fiction. And I think that it was that initial kernel of personal resonance that, for me, started

the book. But then I also wanted to create more space in our national dialogue around sexual abuse and assault for queer people, because oftentimes queer people, as in so many areas of life, fall to the margins of our societal. And I felt like that was the case with the Me Too movements. So I hope that this book can be a part of a larger push to move LGBTQ voices out of the margins in terms of the Me Too dialogue and into the center of the narrative. Cool.

So it's a great book and hopefully has a good message. We'll get into some more of the depth of this. Remind me a little bit of some lyrics from the Elton John song, Goodbye Yellow Big Road. Oh my God. Yes. Very true. Very true. Give us an arching overview of the book and kind of the

plot line details and stuff a little bit and then we'll get into some more yeah for sure like i said it starts out with this younger writer who's pulled into this world whirlwind romance with this older wealthy daddy and he goes out to the hamptons compound for the summer where he's pulled into this web of sexual abuse and assault. And it basically modeled the book after a little bit after Bryan Singer, who was in the news. He was the director of X-Men. And he also had this ring of sexual abuse and assault in Hollywood with a bunch of his friends. And so I modeled the structure of the book after that kind of ring.

And there are two sections of the book. The first section happens in 2009, where we see our protagonist go through this trauma and enter this relationship. And then the second half of the book happens in 2017, when he's reflecting back in a post-Me Too world, reflecting back on that era of his life and re-examining his relationship with his older writer, but also his relationship to the other victims that he met of this older writer. So there's, yeah, two time periods that allow for that kind of reflection that I feel like so many people had after in the wake of the Me Too movement. Yeah, the basis of the book draws from several literary traditions. So to give description to the audience, would it be suspense, literary fiction, and thrillers, to name a few? What were you thinking about for genres when you wrote the book?

Yeah, totally. I think that for me, genre is something that I like to utilize in order to subvert it. On the surface, the book definitely at the beginning feels like kind of this gothic romance slash thriller. You're drawn into this very kind of glitzy world of wealth and glamour and fame, just like our protagonist. You're drawn in with him to this very attractive world, but you get the sense there are these dark underpinnings. I think that it really starts out as a thriller. And I use genre as like a bait and switch, essentially, for the audience. So to hook them with kind of recognizable genre elements,

but then pulling them into a much deeper narrative and much more kind of urgent subject matter than your typical genre affair, namely sexual abuse and assault within the LGBTQ community. But also the book gets into our narrator's backstory, which he comes from the evangelical church and undergoes conversion therapy. So there's a lot there as well. Yeah. You mentioned Brian Singer earlier and you were talking about him. I'm actually friends, not just not close friends, but we've been friends for a few years with, with a guy who was, I don't know how involved he was with that, but a whole thing, but Brock Pierce.

And I think he was one of the accusers of him. I don't remember the whole story, but there was like a ring or something. But yeah, you wanted to shine a light onto rape and different things with the LGBTQ community. And what are you really hoping to be accomplished by this, by putting your book out and talking about some of these different aspects? Yeah, I think that what we saw with Bryan Singer really frustrated and angered me because the stories about Brian Singer were there, were there, were part of the Hollywood kind of milieu for so long. And people whispered about them. And this was like an open secret, much in the way that Harvey Weinstein was like an open secret. And yet even in 2017, after the Me Too movement really gained

its breakthrough in terms of popular culture and after Harvey Weinstein, still he was not being brought down. He wasn't really officially brought down until 2019, where there was finally an article that was in The Atlantic that kind of aggregated all of the accusations and everything that happened over the years. And I think the reason it took so long is because gay men and queer people often push to the edges and the margins of society. And so therefore, when these big stories hit, their queer stories aren't centered. And I also think that a lot of the people that Bryan Singer and his kind of cohort victimized were poor, were sex workers, were addicts, were people who were already vulnerable and less likely to be believed because of their very vulnerabilities. of uphill battle to really take him down in Hollywood. And there was so much wealth and he was the driving engine behind a huge Hollywood franchise. And he had so much power that people

were reluctant to question that, even opposed me to, again, and I think partially because of the factor of the fact that he was gay and his victims were gay. So I really think that it's important to center these conversations so we can start thinking of queer people as victims, start thinking of trans people as victims, that we can really center these stories so that that representation soaks into the culture and that we can start to shift that conversation. There you go. And I forgot to mention, Yes Study is in development at Amazon Studios.

So that should be interesting. Are they going to give you a shot at helping choose who are the roles, lead roles in it? Yes, we're not quite there in the development process yet. I'm super excited. I'm working with Patrick Moran, who's an incredible producer. He used to be the head of ABC Studios. Now he has an overall deal at Amazon. He's been behind so many incredible TV shows. And he's also gay and also really, I think, understands this material and has a respect for the material and the subject matter. So I feel like I'm in very good hands with him. And then the adaptation is being written by Stephen Dunn, who's a filmmaker and creator. He did a movie called Closet Monster. He's show running the upcoming Queer as Folk

reboot that's going to be on Peacock. And he's absolutely incredible, also queer, and also feel like I'm very good hands with him. So right now, it's still in the kind of the script phase, working with a pilot with the network. But yeah, eventually, when the casting conversations happen, it'll be exciting to see how those go. I'm really excited to translate the work to screen with collaborators who really understand what I'm going for and really respect it. That sounds awesome, man. That sounds awesome. Now you come from a religious family and religion pays a part in, or Jonah comes from, how did that inform you on how you wrote about in this book?

Yeah, I wanted to, Jonah, the, the protagonist comes from an evangelical background and he he that's a huge part of his identity growing up he has a father who's a preacher and he goes through a very traumatic conversion therapy during very formative you know years of his life and i wanted to depict the ways in which trauma can manifest over a lifetime. And Jonah's fractured relationship with his family makes him, leaves him without a source of support. And the trauma that he experienced in his teenage years also leaves him uniquely vulnerable as he moves through life searching for direction. And so I wanted to illustrate the damage that the evangelical church can have when it inflicts trauma on LGBTQ people through conversion therapy and through other oppressive church

policies that evangelical churches have. So that was a hugely important thing for me to explore in this. There you go. Anything you want to tease out? It's hard to talk about novels too much because you can't give away the ending and kind of the middle, but anything you want to tease out to readers? Oh, no, I think that the book also, without giving away the ending no i don't um but i think that what i would want to tease out also is that though the story goes through so much dark material and though we're we see so much trauma from both the evangelical church and then again through the sexual assault that he experiences at the hands of his older partner. I wanted, it was important for me to end the narrative in

a place of hope. I wanted us to move towards a place, even if it was just a kernel of hope it was important for me to end this story with someone at least taking the first step on a path towards healing and and health so it was because i think as queer people we so often know the tragic ending to the story and we've seen the tragedy that can happen from queer oppression represented in media a lot. And we know the dark endings. We know the tragic endings. And oftentimes we live tragic endings or experience people or know people who have. And so for me, it was important to present a different ending, an ending that is equally as possible as tragedy, which is hope. And I wanted to give people that kernel of hope at the end. There you go. Do you see using the characters in any future books or continuing books from

and making a series or? I don't think so. I think what will be interesting with the adaptation, not for a novel, but with the adaptation, the series is but with the adaptation this series is being at least the way it's being talked about now in development is having it be an open-ended series and so i'm curious to see how that conversation evolves i think that with this series they're thinking about potentially teasing out storylines of other victims of this man, of following the larger ensemble after this initial narrative. So I do think that there's a lot that can be done. And I think that the space to explore that,

the space I would be interested in exploring that would be in television. And I think that there's a lot of richness that could be drawn from the characters that I've created. In terms of another novel, I've spent so long on this novel. I've spent so long with these characters, and I love them, but I'm also ready for a break. You know what I mean? It's exciting to translate them to a new medium, but as a novelist, I definitely feel ready to move for sure. There you go. There you go. It's been wonderful to move for sure. There you go. There you go.

It's been wonderful to have you on. Give us your plugs one more time, Jonathan, so people can find you on the interwebs. Sure. Again, just at JPRampage on Instagram. You can find me there. There you go, guys. And thank you very much, Jonathan, for being on the show and sharing with us about your great new debut novel, Continued Success.

Thank you so much. Thank you. on the show and sharing with us about your great new debut novel continued success thank you so much thank you and guys go check it out it's yes daddy available may 18 2021 so it's just hot off the shelves you can take and pick that baby up but wherever uh fine books are sold thanks to my honest for coming on the show you see the video version this at youtube.com for says ch Voss. Hit the bell notification button. Go to goodreads.com. Forrest says Chris Voss. Tell everyone you know to subscribe to the show. Got all the groups we have on Facebook, LinkedIn, all the different places. Thanks to everyone for tuning in. Be good to each other and we'll see you guys

next time.