The Oprah Podcast - Richard Russo: "Bridge of Sighs" | Oprah's Book Club

Episode Date: August 5, 2025

BUY THE BOOK! "Bridge of Sighs” by Richard Russo, is published by Penguin Random House and available wherever books are sold: https://www.penguinrandomhouse.com/books/159146/bridge-of-sighs-by-richard-russo/ Subscribe: https://www.youtube.com/@Oprah?sub_confirmation=1 Oprah’s Book Club: Presented by Starbucks features coffee and conversation with Pulitzer Prize-winning author Richard Russo in the Emerald City of Seattle, Starbucks’ hometown. His much-heralded classic, Bridge of Sighs, is Oprah’s 117th book club selection. Published in 2007, The New York Times called the novel "richly evocative and beautifully wrought, delivered with deceptive ease." Surrounded by an audience of readers at a cozy Starbucks Café, Oprah talks to Richard about Bridge of Sighs, a story about small-town life, family, secrets and the complexity of marriage. Mostly taking place in the 1950s and 1960s, Richard also explores the contradictions of a time when America was rapidly changing. Oprah and Russo are joined by an audience of readers as they enjoy a Vanilla Sweet Cream Cold Brew and talk through many thought-provoking questions about the book. Follow Oprah Winfrey on Social: Instagram Facebook TikTok Listen to the full podcast: Spotify Apple Podcasts #oprahsbookclub Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices

Hi, everybody! This is Richard Rousseau, everybody. Esteemed Pulitzer Prize, author, Richard. It's great. Once you win that Pulitzer Prize, it follows you everywhere. Isn't it great? First line of the obituary. All right. Are we ready to roll here? Hello, everybody. A warm welcome to you. Thank you for joining me for

book club presented by Starbucks. It is wonderful to be here in stunningly beautiful Seattle. Seattle, we love you. Starbucks hometown. This is where Starbucks was born, where the very first Starbucks opened in 1971. Your cozy neighborhood Starbucks cafe is the perfect place to sit down with a good book, good coffee, and good company. For this month's book club pick Starbucks is pairing it with a vanilla sweet cream cold brew. It's a slow, steeped cold brew coffee accent with vanilla, top with a float of house-made vanilla sweet cream. And my 117th book club selection is Bridge of Size, Bridge of Size,

by Pulitzer Prize-winning author Richard Russo. Let's welcome Richard Russo. This novel is a layered coming-of-age story about the dreams. Oh, the dreams both lost and realized of three friends from small-town America. The story is full of surprises. I'm going to try today not to give away too many here. This audience has read the book, all 642 pages. Thank you, Mr. Rousseau.

Tell us why you loved it. I'm Quentin. Okay, Quentin. I love this book because I love the relationship between Sarah and Kayla. And I particularly love how Sarah introduces Kayla to a whole new world, bringing her out of the projects and introducing her through art. I'm an artist myself. I teach underserved students here in the South King County area of Seattle.

And so I'm able to relate to that story because that's something that I do in my everyday life. Here, here. I'll also just say that today is the anniversary of the death of Maya Angelou. It is. Who I took creative writing with in 2001 at Wake Forest. And so I also see the parallel where Maya Angelou has provided and given a new world to so many different people all around the world. Yeah. Well, thank you for mentioning that.

It is at her anniversary. Marcy, Marcy is a man. Hi, I'm Marcy. Thank you so much for having us here today. One of the things that really resonated with me was a scene with Mr. Berg's honors English class. I just love the way that he was able to get the students to think in a nonconformist way and how he influenced the trajectory of their lives from then until the end of the book. the part that resonated the most for me was when he said

that you'll have the majority of your learning in ages two to three and everything after that it's just looking for confirmation of things you already believe. Very insightful. Very insightful. Well, I've loved your work since Empire Falls. And even though Bridge of Size was published in 2007, I only recently discovered it for the first time.

And I have to tell you, I was brought in to the story, of course, by Lucy, but also I grew up working in my father's store, which was the ENW Market in Nashville with a barbershop connected to the store. And my father's store reminded me so much of Ikees. And so I'm curious as to how you came to this name. What does the title symbolize in the context of the story, the bridge of size? Well, I think a lot of the characters in this book are Lucy, certainly, but not only Lucy, are at a point in their lives where I wouldn't say they're exactly despairing, but they're stressed, certainly, and they're thinking about where their lives are at the moment. And I think that just how high the stakes are for almost all of the characters in this book

led me in a way to the bridge of size because, as some of you may know, of course, Venice is a city of bridges. Yeah. Pantes, as they call them. Yeah. But the story of the actual bridge of size is one in which the courts

were held on one side of the river and the kind of the dungeons, the prison, was on the other side. Yeah. And it's called the bridge of size because if you were convicted in the court, you would have to cross the bridge of sighs and the legend has it

that of course you would sigh crossing that bridge because once you'd crossed it into into the prison you weren't coming out yeah it's pretty much over you wouldn't necessarily be executed but you would spend the rest of your life there in the dungeon

in the dungeon and that's I think that's and that in the fact that Venice is one of my wife's in my favorite cities and we visited there a lot lot. And so I was probably just looking for an excuse. To call it to use it? But do you think, obviously, you would know, but was it meant to reflect the emotional and, you know, psychological journeys of the characters in any way? Probably. Yes. I said, well, I wouldn't want you to think that that authors know what they're doing when they write these books. Most of my books take me about

anywhere from three to four and a half years to write. This was the four and a half year one. Uh-huh. And during that time, we're basically feeling our way along, trying to figure out what's going on with these characters. Which is always so fascinating to me. Doesn't that fascinate you? Because when I sit down to write something,

I generally know what I'm going to write. Yeah. I know why I'm going to write it, because I write my own speeches. It's never like, I'm just waiting to find. What the speech is going to tell me it wants to do. So what's your writing process? That's the illusion that the writer, if you spend four, four and a half years on a book,

the last final illusion is to convince your readers that you knew what you were doing from the beginning. You can buy that if you want, but I don't recommend it because that's just not. the way it works. So you've been called the patron saint of small town fiction. I would agree with that. Do you think that this small town of Thomaston is a reflection of American life, or is it a reflection of the life that you grew up with? In Glovernessville, yes, yes to both of those. I love small towns, Oprah, because they offer something that I think is so important. If you live in a big city, Chances are that you live in a neighborhood full of people like you. I remember when my daughter, Emily, moved to New York,

and she was working with a literary agency at the time, but she was living in Brooklyn, and she could tell, by looking at the other people on her subway car, she could tell where they were going to get off. Because most of those people looked like her. They were probably the same age. They had the same amount of education. All of those things became identifiable.

as to where they were going to get off in Brooklyn. The thing that's wonderful about small towns, especially if you're interested in class, as I am, the interesting thing about small towns is that the richest and most powerful people in the town have to cross paths with the poorest and the most disenfranchised and the most in danger. They simply cannot escape each other.

And so you have the Mrs. Whiting's of the world from Empire Falls who are breathing the same, air as as um like that poor boy john voss who ends up shooting people yes um and that's why i think cities i mean an awful lot of fiction an awful lot of american fiction not just american fiction gets written about cities because that's where a lot of things happen but my god small towns are just gold mines if you really want to understand america yeah yeah i choose a lot of books that are based in small towns because you really get to understand the essence of who people are yeah yeah yeah and everybody knows everybody's business yeah and everybody's connected yeah well i think one of

the reasons why this story is so relatable is because you write about um that struggle that so many people have in staying in their hometown or leaving their hometown anybody you grew up in a small town yeah okay okay here's a great line from page three about lucy and sarah's choice to stay you say You say, some people upon learning how we've lived our lives are unable to conceal their chagrin on our behalf, that our lives should be so limited as if experience so geographically circumscribed could be neither rich nor satisfying. When I assure them that it's been both, their smiles suggest we've been blessed with self-deception by way of compensation for all we've missed. I think that's so interesting, and it brings us to your question. James?

Yeah. I grew up in a small town of 3,000 people in Canada. The type of town that assumes your identity, even before you know that, I didn't come out until my 30s, yet I think people knew long before I did. It's the town that raised me. My mother still lives there. It's a part of me, but there's this theme of self-exposure that we have no control over, intentional concealment, this hiding in plain sight,

and also this tension between origin and becoming. And so the question I have for you is, what does it take to leave the town that raised you? And when we come back, do we ever get to be the true version of the person we became? Whoa, James. Good. Well, I would begin by saying that that's what I did.

I mean, I left my small mill town in upstate New York. At my mother's insistence, really, she had a plan for me, and we followed basically the diagram for her plan. And for a while, it kind of worked. We left upstate New York for Tucson, Arizona. and I found a new life there. I think that one of the things that surprised my mother who tried and fought so hard for us to, as she put it, escape this place,

one of the things that surprised her the most was that I would find my way back there. I mean, I've never lived in Gloversville since leaving that place. I go back and I visit. I still have family there. There are still people that I love there. But I've never lived there. But I would also say, if this kind of answers your question, is that if you read my novels,

I think it would be almost as fair to say that I never left. Yeah. So I live my imaginative life among people that I didn't know I loved until I was, I mean, all that time I spent in Arizona, I did, I did a BA in English, an MA in English, a PhD in English, always with the idea that I would become a professor, and had no, no idea at all that I would ever want and need as desperately to live my life imaginatively in various versions of Gloversville, New York, never occurred.

to me. So can you go back? Absolutely. You can go back and what you will probably... And befully yourself. And beefily yourself. And having discovered what you didn't know before, which was who the hell you are, right? It's really this notion of being a traveler like some of the characters, taking a step off the path and making a life elsewhere. But as a traveler, we can always come home. And that's what happens to Noonan in this book. he becomes a traveler he's the one who lives in in venice and thinks until pretty close to the end of the book that he knows who he is um and he he carries his rage his animosity his into his paintings

but it's only when he it's it's only when he changes that he's able to come back home as the person he was destined to be as opposed to the person he was trying to protect who is so full of rage if that makes any sense for me this book raises the question i don't know about you guys you think about this what's more important ambition or contentment and the question is was lucy content being in in in in that community and never leaving i love lucy lynch um and what i love about him Oprah is exactly what you're what you're saying he's um he's he's he's an optimist for one thing and i i try to be an optimist with limited ambition yes and it's true that's absolutely true um and he has found contentment um in um in his life and it's i have to say something

that i that i envy in him yeah um it's it's i mean he's he's married to this wonderful woman, Sarah. He adored his father. It seems to me that he's living the life that he was destined to live. Very different from, very different from Newman. Very, very different from Noon, Bobby McCarney. Is it admirable or naive

or just a coping mechanism, his optimism? Yes. All these. What did you think? What do you think, James? Was it admirable? naive or just a coping mechanism? Well, I know people like Lucy who have not left

and there is an optimism and I don't think it is naive I think it is a choice our world doesn't have to extend beyond the borders of the town this town I grew up with has a start and a finish you know when you're in town

and you know when you're out of town and you know everybody that's from there and so I think for a lot of people it is default, it's maybe naive. But I think for Lucy, it was a choice, and he was happy and satisfied with that choice. Even though the town of Thomaston is small and he has been content there,

he has had a journey, too, because he goes from Berman Court in one section of that town to another section of town that's slightly more affluent, and he ends up in the borough where what limited wealth there is in this town exists. So it's not like he hasn't taken a journey at all.

He hasn't gone to Venice, but he's gone somewhere. And that world isn't as large as Noonan's world, but it's larger than you would think at first glance because it's so centered in Aikilubis. And it speaks to the fact that you can still have meaning, lead a really powerful, meaningful life, powerful for you, meaningful life, living and remaining in a small town. On page 65, Lucy says, in America, my mother claimed that the very luckiest were insulated against failure, just as it was the unavoidable destiny of the luckless to remain thwarted.

I still remember how much this upset me. There wasn't supposed to be any limit to the benefits of hard work and honesty. And her saying that there were limits imply that she didn't believe in America or worse in us. I know your time is so valuable to you, dear listeners, so I thank you. you for joining my conversation with the much-beloved and celebrated Pulitzer Prize-winning author, Richard Russo. His sixth novel, Bridge of Size, is my 117th Oprah's Book Club selection. Coming up, our audience has questions that explore small-town life, self-exploration, and finding meaning, themes which run deep throughout this compelling story. Maybe you left your hometown, or maybe you chose to stay.

Do you ever think about your life if you had made a different choice? We're going to answer that question. Stay with you. This summer, try the new Strato Frappuccino blended beverage at Starbucks. It's the classic blended iced coffee you know and love now topped with a creamy layer of handcrafted brown sugar cold foam. Available for a limited time. Your strato Frappuccino is ready at Starbucks.

I welcome you back to Oprah's Book Club. We're in Seattle, the home of Starbucks. And I'm talking with legendary author Richard Russo about his sixth novel, Bridge of Size. It's a layered coming-of-age story about the dreams, both lost and realized, of three friends from small-town America. Let's get back to our conversation. Kiera and our audience has a question about what are the recurring metaphors in the novel, Kira? Bridges are featured prominently throughout the story, first with the narrow bridge that Lucy is afraid to cross. and then again with the famous bridge of size.

And they come up throughout the novel many times. I'm curious, what do they represent in the novel? I guess most people find themselves crossing bridges. I think it's more a metaphor than anything else to get from one place to another. It may not be a physical bridge, but we pass we pass through some kind of bridge.

I think the most important bridge in some ways in this novel is the smallest of the bridges not the bridge of size but that first bridge that Lucy Lynch has to cross over and he's afraid to do

unless he's held in the trunk Yeah, yeah And that is traumatic Yeah, yeah, yeah That impacted him in ways that he didn't even realize and is still impacting him at the end of the book. At the end of the book.

Because as a result of that, I mean, the trunk that he is locked in, and you learn towards the end that Bobby Marconi himself is not free of blame in terms of what happened. And he was there. And he was there. And as a result of that, Lucy has lived with these spells his entire life. And he's also learned a piece of wisdom that he wishes in some ways that he hadn't learned. his belief is that some people have to pay to cross the bridge and other people don't.

I'm not sure that the novel bears that out, Oprah, because I think the actual ending of the novel suggests, and certainly Robert Noonan seems to believe, then in the end we all pay to cross that bridge. But from Lucy's point of view, it sure doesn't seem fair that some people have to pay and other people don't have to pay. So who is Lucy?

He is a composite of other people you knew, or is he completely made up? Lucy is certainly more made up than Noonan. Okay. Yes. Lucy and his father are based on people from my own childhood. I had a much-beloved, adored uncle who had a milk truck. He delivered milk throughout Gloversville.

New York. And he would let... When milk was in bottles. Yeah, when milk was in bottles, right, right. Did you all realize milk used to be in bottles? You see people in the audience going, what? What? He used to deliver milk and bottles to your door, yes.

And he would let me... Not in my neighborhood. We had our own cow. It was my job to take the cow out to the pasture every day. But anyway, go ahead. But he... He would allow my cousin and me to surf the truck. Wow.

So that's a detail that did come from my own life. But there were on one side of the family, it did seem to me that there were these wonderful, generous, optimistic, and yes, naive human beings, where on the other side of my family, there was a there was a kind of ingrained cynicism uh-huh um that uh was more likely to put people in motion i think one of the things about bobby marconi becoming robert noonan is that that begins with motion he has to go um he has to he has to leave this place leave the town yes um in

order to discover uh in order to discover who he is he's not going to discover it there uh and as is the case for a lot of people having to leave small towns yeah i mean which made me think about You know, I was born and raised for the earliest years of my life, a small town in Cazesco, Mississippi. Who would I have been? Do you all ever think about this? Who would you have been if you had stayed? Do you think about this, James?

Who would you have been if you had stayed? I would be in Mississippi with a grocery store that everybody came by the grocery store. I would be the town place where everybody gathered and we wouldn't just sell vegetables and food and stuff, but it would be the gathering place. And I would be doing exactly what I'm doing now. I would be, honey, say, honey, come on over here and let me talk to you.

Yes, it's time for you to leave that man, I've got to say. You know, it would be, it would be the gathering place for people. That's what I think. Can I ask you a question? Sure, ask me. Would that, would that have been a tragic thing? No, it wouldn't have been a tragic thing because I wouldn't have known that there was a whole other way of being. Yeah.

I would have found a way to manifest my personality and be who I am in an environment that would be conducive to that. But I would have risen in that environment. I do believe that. Yeah. That's a great answer because I don't think it would have been either. I mean, you are who you are, Oprah, and you have, my God, what you have done is just breathtaking and astonishing. But the other version of you, I suspect, would have been just as astonishing. I would have been the deaconess in the church.

I would have had the whole thing, you know, all of that thing. Krista's here and she said that she could relate to Bobby's complicated feelings about his father. Krista? Hi. There was a passage that spoke to me and it was when Bobby was reflecting on the different version of his father that he observed with Maxine as compared to at home with his mom. I'd like to read it. Was there one thing he wanted an explanation for? or everything. Without warning, his father had stopped being a simple man. Did Noonan want an explanation

for the kindness he'd shown this Maxine and her idiot kid, or for the mean-spirited bullying he'd offered his mother and his brothers and himself? The best guy, Willie had called him. In what reality was his father even a decent guy? It was as if the first 17 years of Noonan's life had taken place under a full moon that suddenly had waned, allowing his wolf of a father to take on the shape of an ordinary man. How had he managed to miss that transformation? So this made me think of my dad. So my dad left my mom for another woman after 25 years of marriage. And the person he is today is very different from the person I grew up with.

And so I wonder, you know, if the real crime was the environment he created in my home, his, you know, short temper or lack of affection. Or was it that he married the wrong person? and I think that the book asked the question can you change or are you always the same person at your core but when you do change

which version of you is your true self and how much of who we are is determined by the people in our lives thank you thank you yo I'm going to deeply sigh over the bridge for all of you all

wow deep questions here bridge of sighs um And I think in order, I don't know if that was exactly a question, but to comment on it, I would go to Noonan. Because I think that Noonan, when he becomes a painter, that's the first stage of something new for him. He becomes, by going to Venice and learning to paint, he's made an enormous change in his life. it's probably not as enormous however

is the last change in his life which takes place just before he comes back to America for his last as it turns out final show and something very surprising happens to him there because he's painting that what people think of as a self-portrait he's painting his father his rage against his father that he is protected as if he might run out of it at some point

he's protected that that rage and throughout his paintings not only that painting of his father but other paintings Hugh his agent refers to those paintings as being all worm because

Noonan thinks of himself as somebody who's if there's an apple there and there's a worm at the center of the apple he's always after the worm and as his paintings have gotten darker and darker Hugh says that they're all worm There's nothing else.

But at the end, the astonishing thing happens that he decides to paint Sarah, this woman that he was in love with all those years ago. And he sets up the easel, right next to the easel, the all-worm version of his father. And when he begins to paint Sarah, it's as if the light from that, painting of Sarah is now shedding on his father and it changes his father's portrait. It's not all

worm anymore. I think that's the big change in Noonan is that his love for Sarah, even remembered all those years ago proves stronger than his hatred of his father. So when you say which is the real person, I'll just throw the question back at you, but I think

the real Robert Noonan is the one we see just before he dies. And to add to that, because we all went, ooh, when you said, like, did your father marry the wrong person? You marry the person that is going to most help you evolve into the person that you need to be.

And perhaps being with your mother, even if it was, you know, they were not compatible or he was not happy there, it helped him move on to a better version of himself, just like many times you're in a relationship with somebody who makes you better because their behavior is so the antithesis of what you really want. And so you recognize this is not what I want. And so he moved out of that relationship and evolved into somebody that you don't recognize

because he was a different person with her. And also people can get really sick of themselves. You know, you can, if you live the kind of life your father had lived with your mother and was unhappy about that, that's another way of saying that he was really sick of the person that he was. And when he had a chance to do something different, he did. And I would only say to add on to that, one of the things that to my mind has always been the thing that I love most about fiction writing

is that it has saved me from, I mean, I still get sick of myself, believe me. But fiction writing, losing yourself in stories of people, like Lucy Lynch and Bobby Marconi and Sarah, the four and a half years that it took to write that book, losing myself in their lives, was wonderful because it was a way to keep myself from being sick of myself, you know? That's the beauty of art. It allows you to not fall into that place of being trapped in yourself all the time. Just a quick moment to say, I'm so grateful you've joined us for this episode of Oprah's Book Club. When we come back, more of my conversation with Bridge of Size, author Richard Russo,

my 117th Oprah's Book Club selection. Next, we're going to explore the complex relationships between mothers and sons. And I asked something I've wondered while reading Bridge of Size, how did Richard learn to write so profoundly from a woman's perspective? We've got more thought-provoking questions

from the audience after the break, so stay with us, book lovers. Listen in. Starbucks. It's a great day for coffee. Welcome back, listeners. I am in the beautiful Emerald City of Seattle for this episode of Oper's Book Club, presented by Starbucks. In case you didn't already know, Seattle is the hometown of Starbucks. And I'm with an audience of readers. We're talking to best-selling author Richard Rousseau about his book, Bridge of Size, my latest book club selection. It's a sweeping saga

that invites readers to contemplate life's biggest questions. Let's get back to more of those questions from the audience. Carrey in our audience has a question about the relationships between mothers and her children. Caring? One of the themes of the book that really resonated for me personally was a complicated relationships between mothers and sons. So my question is, how did your relationship with your own mother influenced these characters? And did you find that the mothers took the brunt of the blame for the shortcomings of the fathers?

And did you consider that with creating Lucy? I don't want to overgeneralize here, but I loved my mother deeply. I owe her more than I could ever express here or anywhere. But growing up, I could be a little prick sometimes. And I think that boys, especially my parents separated, so there was only my mother.

And whenever anything went wrong, there was nobody to blame but her. And I think that there were times, especially when I was younger. And like most boys, if there was only one, whoever's handy, you know, and my mother, and my mother was handy. But I would also say that her dream for me, more than anything else, was responsible. for the person who's sitting here in front of you today. She was absolutely determined. And some of her gifts to me were like that. Here's what we're going to do.

She laid out the blueprint. And by God, we followed that blueprint, you know, step by step by step, always. But some of the greatest influences that she, the influence that she had on me was lessons she was teaching me that she didn't even know she was teaching. For one thing, she had a very hard life. she worked in Schenectady an hour away from where we lived in Gloversville she worked at General Electric when she came home after a hard day she still had me to deal with all the things that I would need in school the next day a laundry that had to be done her own dinner that had to be cooked and at the end of that long day and it's now coming towards like nine o'clock before her day is done and it started at six

and at the end of that long day what she did instead of turning on the TV was she sat down and read she never told me to read she never thought she never suggested to me that it would be a good idea she simply showed by example this is what you do to reward yourself

at the end of a long day and made me without ever even suggesting it to me made me into a voracious reader and I can tell you I think it's, I'm not sure if it's true for every writer, but I don't think you can be a writer without being a reader. And that's, I mean, that was her first gift to me, the first of many, many, many gifts.

And both her example and her faith in our ability to change our lives was pivotal at every stage of my childhood, adolescence and went well into my adulthood. Thanks, Karen. There was a famous model who was on the Oprah show many years ago. I'll never get that she told me that she noticed the moment that she walked into a room and heads no longer turned when she came into the room. And you write this about aging.

You say, then the change, as if one morning she looked at herself in the mirror and saw, saw into the future that before long even the most desperate and befuddled of the sundry arms divorcees would stop coming to her for solace. Probably she saw too where all the martinis had settled in the dark bags under her eyes. Her sunken cheeks had breasts. Possibly it wasn't even the bathroom mirror so much as the one on men's faces where she did not register anymore. Or worse, she registered briefly, but then didn't pass the test. Sex had been the currency of her life, and soon she'd be broke. If her husband had talked a good game, well, at least he was still in business.

That was something you could still do. Whereas for all Sarah knew, her father may have even warned her about the day when she'd flirt and no one would flirt back, when men no longer would gather around her at parties for the privilege of looking down her blouse when she'd have to face what little remained and face it alone. I want to know how you knew how to write this from a woman's perspective. If you'd read only my first two novels, I don't think you probably would have come to that conclusion because those first two books were about male misbehavior. I was a much younger writer then, and I didn't have a lot of major female characters in those books, but

I don't think any male writer wants to publish a book with a lot of female characters and have a reviewer say, God, he doesn't know a damn thing about women, does he? And so I think my first couple of books, I didn't allow as many female characters to come in as my later ones. But there was a point in my life where I looked around, Oprah, and so, Suddenly, all the important people in my life were women. It was my wife. By then, I had two daughters. My mother was still alive.

So how do you write from a woman's point of view? One pretty good tactic, although it wasn't a tactic on my part, it just happened. Be surrounded by women and keep your eyes open. For God's sake, observe. You're never going to be a woman. you're going to have to indulge in your imagination. But that's really like almost anything else that writers write about. We write about people whose lives, whose lived experiences are much different from our own.

I mean, one of my favorite characters is my sister Ursula from the Horace Child, who is an octogenarian Belgian nun. What business did I have at age 40 writing about an octogenarian, Belgian nun. I was never going to be a woman, never going to be a nun. I'd never set foot in Belgium and never been sold by my father to a convent. What possible business did I have writing about this woman? But that's the task, is to imagine lives different from your own. and the only way to do that is use the tools at hand

and in my case being surrounded by women at that stage in my life along the time of nobody's fool suddenly there were women everywhere and I wasn't so terrified anymore of being a writer who would be panned in reviews

for not knowing anything about women Well, you got it. Thank you. I think you have such a beautiful way of phrasing the big questions we all have about life. One of my favorite passages from page 620 is about the road not taken. You say don't even the best and most fortunate of lives hint at other possibilities at a different kind of sweetness and yes, bitterness too. Isn't this why we can't help feeling cheated even when we know we haven't been?

do you think most people feel cheated? Sure. You do? But not in their best moments. You guys think most people feel cheated? Hmm. Hmm. Yeah.

You don't wish you had two go-rounds? Another chance to try something different? No? Okay. Yeah? Okay, okay. Do most people feel cheated? Raise your hands.

Okay. I think women do. You think women do? Oh, that's interesting. Okay, that's interesting. Why? Why do women feel cheated? Yeah. I think because we are cheated from the time...

From the time we're born, we have all of these societal expectations to squelch who we are and what we can do. and I think now that I'm in my 50s that rooster has come home to roost in a sense and I think I realize it now more than I ever have and I also don't care anymore so I talk about it a lot

so anyway that's I think we feel cheated because women are cheated yeah this reminds me of the passage of the book just on page 583 in your hymnals you write that the men never felt trapped. They never wondered about the mountain road not taken, never felt as though some important part of them

was withering as another flourished, never were greedy for what they didn't have and would never experience. But many of the women in the book did, of course, admit feeling trapped in their marriages, you know. But the men never felt trapped because they weren't, because they weren't. So does that represent contentment,

or is that the essence of settling? What do you think? well i think sarah is is the is the character there through whom a lot of that um gets investigated towards the end of the book um she leaves lucy um and is not sure she's coming back um and it's because she's trying to locate her mother who she knows has died but she's trying to locate her mother i think uh for her mother if her mother were alive she might be able to explain some things about Sarah's own life that she has never been able to understand and is trying to understand now.

And so she goes on this, she goes on this seemingly bizarre quest for an answer to a question that she thinks when she first arrives on Long Island. She thinks she's, she may be on a quest that's simply impossible to succeed in, only to discover that, no, there was a reason. that she was there, a very important reason that she was there, and her sense that something was missing, when she first starts out on that journey, you think, oh, God, this is a lunatic quest, no good could possibly come of this,

and yet the longer she's away, the longer she's away from the life that she wouldn't trade, she wouldn't trade her husband in, she wouldn't, she knows that in many respects that she's been lucky lived a fortunate life. But that unanswered question, I think she does feel a little cheated. And I think that she doesn't know what it is, but there's something missing. What on earth is it that is missing? If you don't at least suspect that there's something missing, you're not going to find out

what it might be. And this line I love, too, this is on page 563. The line of gray along the horizon is brighter now. And with the coming light, I feel a certainty. There is, despite our wild imaginings, only one life. The ghostly others, no matter how real they seem, no matter how badly we need them, are phantoms. The one life we're left with is sufficient to fill and refill our imperfect hearts with joy,

and then to shatter them, and it never, ever lets up. Blame love. Blame love. Thank you, Richard Rousseau. Thank you so much. Thank you. Thank you. And this fantastic Seattle audience, thank you so much for being here. Thank you for your questions. Thank you so much. This is my favorite thing to do, talk about books. Bridge of Size is available wherever books are sold.

And did you have to go back and read it yourself to remind yourself of what you'd written after I called? I absolutely did. You did? And what I would like to tell you now, Oprah, is that as honored as I am and believe I am so honored. that you have chosen this book for your book club. You also gave me a wonderful, great gift because after Bridge of Size, this book was a struggle. It's my longest, my most complex book.

It has the widest angle lens. It has the most characters in it. And the most time elapses. That's what makes a book big. And I had not thought about this book since it was public. because I had other books. Once a book is published, you can't help these people in this book anymore.

They're on their own. And so I wrote other books. And this was never a book that Hollywood was interested in. And so I had no particular reason to revisit it. And Oprah, I read this book as if someone else had written it. I had forgotten almost the whole thing. Wow. And I was, and I was, it was just such a,

gift to fall in love with these characters again, as if someone else had written the book, I can't thank you enough, I don't think. But for this, I would have ever given another moment's thought to this novel. The Bridge of Size! You fell in love again with Lucy. You fell in love again. I did. That is so great. I didn't know I did that, but I'm happy. I'm happy to be able to do that for you, okay? Before we go, I want to share that I recently published something tailor made for you avid readers so delighted to tell you about it it's my book lovers journal and here's what's great has over a hundred prompts like the first book that made you feel seen and the book that reminded you of what matters most all designed to enhance your reading experience it's a great gift for book lovers and i hear book clubs are using it when they meet which makes me so happy i write about some of my favorite books and first sentences don't you love a good first sentence do you struggle with that first sentence Well, usually what happens is that the first sentence of the book appears in the first draft on page 375. And you go, and you think, oh, God, that's it.

That's it. That's the sentence. I don't, it's, it's not the first sentence that I write. It's somewhere in the, it's, it's years later. I say that, oh, my God, that's the first sentence of the book. Yeah. There's a whole book about first sentences, actually. Yeah.

I love it. So thank you so much for being here. Thank you all. Oprah's Booklover's Journal available anywhere you buy your books, audience. You're all going to get a copy. There you go. Thanks again to our fantastic partner, Starbucks, for supporting Oprah's Book Club. Next time you head to your neighborhood Starbucks.

Bring a friend and your copy of Bridge of Size. And try this month's pairing, the Manila Sweet Cream Coal Brew. Go well, everybody. Thanks so much. Thank you. Thank you. Thank you. Thank you.