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In my mind, I guess what I was really trying to communicate is that there is no villain and no hero, that they're both just complicated people as we all are.
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That so often in conflicts in life, if the truth is that both people are wrong, and that that's the truth here too, that they're both wrong and they're both right.
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And that in both romantic relationships and in friendship, like long term, there are going to be moments where you have difficulties, where you grow apart, where you grow together, and that the only way to get through them in a healthy way is to be accepting of the fact that those changes happen and to accept the fact that it's okay if you're not in exactly the same place at the same time.
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That you'll come back together, like to trust, to trust that versus to sort of feel guilt and resentment about being different for periods of time.
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So these are like some of the things that I was thinking about when I confused everybody.
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Nora Zelobansky is an author who writes with a kind of emotional clarity that makes you pause, often laugh, and look inward.
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Across genres, her work cracks through the surface of people, characters, and relationships to reveal the messiness, softness, and even the sometimes not so quiet ugliness that makes us human.
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As a journalist, her writing has appeared in the New York Times, The Wall Street Journal, Vanity Fair, and more.
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She is the author of the novels Competitive Grieving, Will You, Won't You Want Me, and Semi-Charmed Life.
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And under the pen name Nora Dahlia, she is the USA Today best-selling author of the contemporary romance pickup.
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In her newest novel, Backslide, written under her pen name Nora Dahlia, Nora explores the pull of unresolved memory, first loves, and the unfinished stories that call us back.
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This is at the podium, and I'm Patrick Huey.
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Today, we're talking about one of the most tender and complicated truths we face.
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That coming home is rarely a matter of geography.
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It is the deeper work of returning to the versions of ourselves we've outgrown, abandoned, or never fully understood.
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Nora, welcome back to At the Podium.
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Thank you, Patrick.
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I'm so happy to be here.
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And that was so beautifully said.
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It was so much more eloquent than any way that I have tried to articulate what this book is about.
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So I appreciate it.
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That makes me happy to hear.
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That makes me happy to hear.
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And then life brings you back.
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There was no tragedy.
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I just wanted to come home.
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But Nora, I'm walking into these old places and I'm seeing old friends, and it's haunting.
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There's a sense of encountering ghosts, I would describe it as.
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And I'm always shocked because my first response to people or places that I'm seeing after 30 plus years, it's always through the lens of who I was at that time and not who I've become.
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So I'm always having to like get myself up to speed really quickly.
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I'm 17 years old again.
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As I was reading the book and what I think the book is really about, it made me think about how memory is really embedded in us and it shapes us.
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And it made me think about how the past lingers with us and it made me think about what it really means to come home, being at the heart of your book.
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Yeah, I I really relate to what you're saying because I think that I am somebody who's really drawn to revisit the past periodically.
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I also moved to my home of New York City back from Los Angeles.
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And now it's been quite a while, but I had been gone for 15 years or so.
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And in that time, the city changed and um the focus of my life, even in this city, changed.
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And I feel this way also when I visit, you know, my college campus or go to a reunion at my high school that I'm really, really drawn to have those experiences and think about those times.
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But when I'm confronted with it, when I'm standing in front of it, I always find myself thinking, why did I do this?
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Not that I shouldn't have done it, but what is the actual purpose of revisiting these moments?
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What is what is the significance and the benefit of remembering what we experienced before and the things that we loved and and maybe lost.
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And I've never really been able to answer that question.
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Maybe you can.
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I think about it all the time, and there is there is no answer.
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I mean, I have suspicions about what I think it is, but it's complicated.
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And I think as we get older, that feeling of being present, and it's almost like you're living in two planes at the same time, all the all the time.
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I think so.
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And I always think about that Joan Diddy and quote, which I'm I'm not gonna directly quote because
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I won't remember, but in slouching towards Bethlehem when she talks about how you have to confront the past versions of yourself where they come knocking on your door at 4 a.m.
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of a b of a bad night and demand to know basically why they've been abandoned and who's gonna make amends.
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I think that's part of it.
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And maybe that's actually part of the answer, right?
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We've got to return to those selves.
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We've got to remember that they exist within us because we carry them with us.
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And there's a lot of unresolved things.
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I always say, maybe a little bit sort of, you know, sardonically, that we're always playing out people's high school pains and our politics and our culture and our adult relationships.
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I'm like, who was mean to you when you were in high school that you can't get over?
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And you're making my life hell today because of that.
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I always found that kind of it's always with us, always with us, you know.
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Yeah, and I think about that too, because also lately, I guess, because I have kids who are now getting a little bit older, been thinking about how fleeting the that period of time is, and yet how seminal it is, how formative, how you have so much life left to live after that period, and yet what you experience in that in that moment impacts everything that happens afterwards.
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I think it happens because in a way, it's almost the purest form of yourself because you're not paying rent, you're not making decisions usually based upon, well, I've got to eat tomorrow, or I have this, you know, the the the decisions we make get very complicated.
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So I think that time in our lives, and it's not, it's not, it's not an ideal time for many people.
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And maybe we're talking through a lens of some some kind of privilege, but you don't just have the worries that you have as an adult day to day.
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Like I'm also like, why is a bill coming to my house every day?
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You know?
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I'm like, why?
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Like it can be that mundane.
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Like I have a bill every day that like, I gotta pay the light bill, the water bill, I've got to pay my like the whole thing.
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It never stops.
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And you don't you don't think about that as a kid.
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Like it's mundane to a certain degree, I think.
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I I think so.
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I think I always think about it in terms of like thinking that paper towels just you know appear magically in your house, you know, or that things like that.
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You take for granted, as assuming, as you said, that you're in a household where things are operating in a functional way.
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Yes, you know, that which is actually sort of a big assumption, I guess.
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Well now, yeah.
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Yeah.
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We know we know more now than we did back then how many people didn't have that, you know.
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Which is also always a fascinating thing to me that I walked around assuming that the my peers, including some of my close friends, were experiencing the same level of stability or like presence as I was, and they most certainly were not.
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That's also really interesting.
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Yeah.
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There are two quotes from Book Club that were really good for backslide among many.
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And I also love that the book was controversial because of how you played with time.
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We'll get to that.
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Um Book Club says, speaking broadly about this idea of memory, time, etc., in relation to your book, it said there exists a particular species of heartbreak that never quite heals, the kind that calcifies into scar tissue that we carry through decades of subsequent relationships, new cities, and reinvent itself.
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And then they say specifically about the story.
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This isn't a story about rekindling what once was, but about determining whether two fundamentally changed people can build something entirely new from the rubble of their past.
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Did Book Club get it right?
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I mean, that's amazing, especially read in your voice.
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I'm available for voiceovers just to reach out.
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I mean, yeah.
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People should definitely take you up on that.
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Do you think you got it right, Nora?
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Yeah, I do.
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I actually I think they they really got it right and touched on something that I'm so glad is actually coming through in the book.
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This idea that as we were sort of saying, that you carry some of these experiences with you and that you can't always just sort of move on with a sense of resolution.
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That sometimes there are things that happen to us, relationships that we have that end in such a way that as they said, it that it they it becomes scar tissue, that that we can't feel perfectly resolved about it, that we have to find a way to be okay, to s to sort of move on with the discomfort of carrying it with us.
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And in the case
of backslide, um, I think they're absolutely right that that this isn't about rekindling what they had before because what they had before was something between two people who had never experienced disappointment or stress or buying paper towels, um, as we were just talking about.
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That when they come back together, they're really two entirely new people, but with the same core, but having experienced entire lives already.
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Right.
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Can you don't give it all away, but can you just set up the basic premise of the book for people who haven't read it yet?
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Yeah.
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Um, so backslide is in in romance trope terms, backslide is an enemies to lovers second chance romance that's told in dual timelines.
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So one timeline is 90s New York, in which the main characters Noah and Nellie are in high school, and we watch them meet and fall in love and then fall apart over the course of the book.
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And we we don't really know what went wrong until later in the book.
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It's a bit of a mystery.
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And then the other timeline is Sonoma, California, a place I also deeply love, when they are forced back together after having avoided each other for two decades for basically a week during the what I call an unwedding, basically a foul renewal of their two best friends.
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And so those are those are the two timelines.
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And they are forced to sort of reckon with their past and also with their lingering feelings now.
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You had told me you were writing a romance book.
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And I was so fascinated by that.
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A, because I was like, Nora has range to go from semi-charm life to roll red roll, roll tide roll.
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Roll red roll.
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Roll red roll.
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I'm getting Alabama roll red.
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I know.
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That's sort of intentional, yeah.
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But you go from semi-charm life to roll red roll to romance novels, and I was like, this is rained.
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Not many writers do that.
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And I'm not at all familiar with the the romance uh genre of books.
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And so my expectation of reading the book was that there was gonna be lots of like, he ripped her shirt off, and they're laying on like a blanket by an ocean.
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I thought it was gonna be that kind of stuff.
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And it does there's there's a bit of that in that, not a ton, but there's a a bit of that in there.
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But I wonder why you thought this particular genre of storytelling was the correct vehicle to tell the story of Noah and Nelly.
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Essentially, what happened was that I had been writing sort of more upmarket commercial fiction and then nonfiction, both as a journalist and then also um as a writer, you know, an author and also ghostwriter, actually.
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And I was working as a ghostwriter.
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And so over the course of the pandemic, I was working, like the sort of height of the pandemic, I was working on two books, one of which was a book about sexual assault, roll red roll.
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And the other was a book that I was ghostwriting, which was a Holocaust memoir.
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Wow.
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Yeah.
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So having come out of those, that sort of long period of COVID and writing, working on those two pretty dark topics, I just really felt like I needed to be in a lighter space.
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Um, and I had started reading a lot of romance during the pandemic because for whatever reason, that seemed to be the only thing I could focus on, specifically these historical novels by um my good friend Sarah McLean, you know, sort of Bridgerchen style romance, but in her case with sort of like a girl power-y feminist vent.
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Anyway, I started doing that and I started going to events with her, and I was like, this in this world of chaos is like this little pocket of joy, you know.
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And I don't know if you've been, you probably why would you have been, but to any of the romance-specific bookstores that have been opening all over the country over the last couple of years, but they are extraordinary places.
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I mean, they are just unabashedly like filled, just like fun and playful and filled with joy, and they are often very pink.
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There's often a lot of Taylor Swift items around.
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And yeah, so I'm that's a very long way of saying that I was really feeling like this is what I want to read, and so this is what I want to write.
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And that started with pickup, which was my book before, and then continued with backslide, which I guess I realized that I could talk about this idea of memory that was sort of percolating in my head through the lens of first love and the question of whether the things we experience when we're that young, since they are so formative, as we were saying, are they real?
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Are we too quick to write them off as, you know, sort of teenage craziness?
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And since they do resonate with us for so long, shouldn't we maybe be paying more attention to them and thinking about them more?
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And so that was sort of how backslide became the second romance for me.
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I also, to be honest, like in even the um outmarket commercial fiction I was writing, there was oh there's always a love story in my books.
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I've tried not to, I can't help myself.
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Just give it to it.
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Just give into it.
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There's always like a little mystery and there's always a romance.
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I think it's just what I find propellant in books.
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So one thing that I love about the book, I'm a little bit older than you.
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So when you were having those high school experiences in New York, I was in college.
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But what what when I was reading it, what I thought you captured so beautifully was that time in American childhood when our parents were completely absent.
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Good, bad, or indifferent, you know, and we we joke about it now on social media that we were like basically, you know, you know, flying ships and no one ever knew.
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No one knew how full our lives were at seven.
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But I loved in the book, and it didn't hit me until the end.
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I was like, this story could not happen today because we track where our kids are, your time is completely structured for the most part, and part of what lets the story breathe is that these kids, we had such full, complete lives that were completely unknown to our parents.
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And I was like, that story can't happen today.
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And I thought that was part of the nostalgia and the beauty of the story itself.
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And then that in and of itself is a memory of what life was like when you could be a kid and they said, leave the house for the day, don't come back until dinner.
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And they meant it and you had this full on existence.
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Yeah, I mean, you touched on this idea that when you're in high school, what's unusual about the experience is that you're basically still a child, that you may be operating in certain ways with a kind of independence as if you're an adult, but you're still not buying the paper towels.
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You're still living in your parents' house, you're still having to live by their rules to some extent.
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And so you don't have necessarily full access to what to what you would want things to look like.
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And so I think that that that experience in the 90s specifically is like tripled because or is exponential, I guess, because that's also the last moment in time before Pandora's boxes opened and cell phones become a thing and the internet becomes a thing and social media becomes a thing.
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It's the last moment where kids and
even adults to an extent are roaming kind of free of being tracked, of staring at their phones, of constant onslaughts of information.
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And I had to actually make these characters slightly younger than me, um, even because in order for it to sort of work out time-wise, but I didn't want to take them out of the 90s.
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You know, that was sort of important to me.
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But when I was growing up, or when we were growing up, whether you were in a city like I was, because I was in New York City, or if you were sort of doing the same thing in a car in other places, you're just kind of wandering around trying to find the path of girls or boys or whoever it is who you're hoping to run into, hoping maybe you'll see your crush, hoping that your friend shows up where you were supposedly supposed to meet, changing your outgoing answering machine message to try to coordinate.
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You know, there's a real freedom to that and and a kind of boredom, too, that I think was really valuable.
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The sort of sitting on a stoop with there's no cell phone, you're just sitting together, you're just hanging out and passing time in a really different way.
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Um, I have a lot of nostalgia for that time, I think for that sense of being untethered in a positive way.
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And like you said, we had a generation of parents who were not as sort of helicoptery as parents are now.
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So even my parents who actually were on the more present side, I say that in a way that I want to let you know that I really resented it at the time.
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Um I remember my mother saying to me, because growing up in New York City, you really like there's a different level of releasing the reins at an earlier time.
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Because if there are no cell phones, you let your kids out into the world to walk to and from school to get alone, to go to the orthodontist on the east side, whatever it is, and you don't know what they're doing.
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Yeah, you have no way of tracking them.
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And I just remember my parents talking about how most parents just sort of abdicated control and that they were not willing to do that fully.
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Like, no way.
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That's not surprising knowing your parents.
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Yes, yes.
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But even so, there was just a sense that they couldn't really know it all, and that once I was out of the house, I was free.
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And to this day, for me, like wandering without destination is like my happy place.
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And I think that that's something, like I said, like even if you're doing it sort of in a car, making the same rounds to the same spots to try to find the people or the party or the thing, that's something that doesn't it doesn't exist in the same way anymore.
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One thing in the book that I really liked was Nellie and Noah each see each other at this club.
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And then it's weeks later that they finally meet again.
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And it made me think, it made me remember how in these times, really before cell phones, you could go days and days and days and have no contact with people because that's just the way the world was constructed.
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It made the book ring authentic and true to what it was without sort of commenting on it.
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You know, I love that part of it.
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You're so right, Patrick.
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I can even think about that.
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That like now you probably, I mean, I'm you know I'm sound like such a dinosaur, but now you probably meet somebody, and the first thing you do is you look them up, you know, you find them and then you're debating whether, I guess, to DM them or whatever it is.
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But yeah, in this case, like there's no doing that.
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There's just trying to hoping you see the person again, or I guess trying to investigate via people you have in common, but that's a pretty humiliating thing to do as a teenager.
00:23:00.000 --> 00:23:03.599
And then, you know, asking for their number or hoping they ask for yours.
00:23:03.839 --> 00:23:09.440
Um, and it's the number to your home phone that anybody can pick up.
00:23:10.079 --> 00:23:11.599
That anybody can pick up, yeah.
00:23:11.680 --> 00:23:14.079
So it's exposure on a different level.
00:23:14.319 --> 00:23:16.799
It's it's a it's a really different thing.
00:23:16.880 --> 00:23:26.640
And in the chaos of now, in this, in what I I see as very, very difficult times to be alive, to be honest.
00:23:26.880 --> 00:23:27.200
Yeah.
00:23:27.759 --> 00:23:44.480
It's hard not to think about a time before we were just so inundated and so stressed out, and the pace was so rapid and relentless.
00:23:44.720 --> 00:23:51.680
It's hard not to think back to that time and kind of want to like, you know, put yourself in it for a little bit of time.
00:23:52.240 --> 00:23:56.400
You can't put the toothpaste back in the tube, so you know, it's it's gone.
00:23:56.559 --> 00:24:06.240
It's, you know, you bring up what I thought was really interesting in the book is this whole architecture of what memory works like and looks like it is.
00:24:06.400 --> 00:24:15.279
And I love the dual timelines and the the structure of the book is past, present, and then the perspective of the two protagonists or antagonists, depending on what side you're on.
00:24:15.599 --> 00:24:24.079
But it constantly had me questioning where are we and the reliability of the memory.
00:24:24.400 -->
00:24:27.359
Wonder if that was intentional when you wrote it.
00:24:27.920 --> 00:24:33.279
Well, I guess what happened was I spent a lot of time thinking about, and I do this before I write every book.
00:24:33.359 --> 00:24:43.119
I always go back and forth about like third person versus first person versus having one perspective or two perspectives, or is it an omniscient narrator?
00:24:43.359 --> 00:24:47.359
You know, these are the things that I procrastinate with before I start.
00:24:47.519 --> 00:25:03.839
Um and in this case, I ultimately made this decision to write the past, the chapters about the past in third person, even though the other chapters that are in present day in the perspective of both main characters are in first person.
00:25:04.400 --> 00:25:11.680
The reason why I did that with regard to the third person is that I wanted the reader to be able to trust it.
00:25:12.160 --> 00:25:20.720
What the main characters are talking about or thinking about or experiencing now comes from their particular point of view.
00:25:20.880 --> 00:25:21.039
Yeah.
00:25:21.279 --> 00:25:23.920
But that in the past, it's third person.
00:25:24.000 --> 00:25:31.279
And so it's it's the and I say this, I understand this as an a heavy word, but it's the truth.
00:25:31.599 --> 00:25:36.160
It's what actually happened, I guess, from the most objective point of view.
00:25:36.720 --> 00:25:47.599
I was reading this reviews on the book, and the reviews are overwhelmingly positive on this book, but people really had feelings about this playing with time, which I thought was really interesting.
00:25:48.000 --> 00:25:58.640
Well, okay, so I in the beginning, uh like right after the book came out, I read a few of the reviews, but I actually didn't see a lot of the stuff about um the time.
00:25:58.720 --> 00:26:01.119
So I'm curious, what were people glitching on?
00:26:01.279 --> 00:26:11.200
I mean, I think one of the really difficult things in dual timeline books, when I, as a reader for me, is that often you really favor one timeline or the other.
00:26:11.279 --> 00:26:11.440
Yeah.
00:26:11.680 --> 00:26:19.279
And you kind of like slog through the ones you you're the one you're less interested in to get to the one you want.
00:26:19.599 --> 00:26:26.240
And then you had this, you had this sort of dueling narrative between Noah and Nelly.
00:26:26.319 --> 00:26:29.279
And it's like, I I think I text you like I was like, I'm on his side.
00:26:29.519 --> 00:26:35.200
You know, I think it doesn't make you like it didn't tell you who the who the villain was.
00:26:35.519 --> 00:26:37.680
Well, maybe in one case it tells us who the villain is.
00:26:37.920 --> 00:26:41.759
But it it's the complexity of that relationship.
00:26:41.920 --> 00:26:48.160
And you have to like on your own figure out who you like, who you don't like, who's telling the truth.
00:26:48.720 --> 00:26:48.960
Right.
00:26:49.119 --> 00:27:05.279
It it forced you into like rigor, basically, versus it's so funny because I didn't think that much about the structure being complex until I started doing book events over the coming the last like, you know, whatever, the month or two after the book came out.
00:27:05.920 --> 00:27:24.319
And the writers who I did the events with, so not not the readers, but the writers who I did the events with who read the book to like pre-event so that we could talk about it, were like, why are you trying to make us look bad by making using these super complex like structure?
00:27:24.480 --> 00:27:25.599
Like, why did you do that?
00:27:25.759 --> 00:27:26.880
And I was like, I don't know.
00:27:27.039 --> 00:27:30.319
I just, this is just how I felt like the story had to be told.
00:27:30.559 --> 00:27:49.680
In my mind, I guess what I was really trying to communicate is that there is no villain and no hero, that they're both just complicated people as we all are, that so often in conflicts in life, if the truth is that both people are wrong.
00:27:50.000 --> 00:27:50.160
Yeah.
00:27:50.480 --> 00:27:54.960
And that that's the truth here, too, that they're both wrong and they're both right.
00:27:55.119 --> 00:28:06.640
And that in both romantic relationships and in friendship, like long term, there are going to be moments where you have difficulties, where you grow apart, where you grow together.
00:28:06.960 --> 00:28:14.319
And that the only way to get through them in a healthy way is to be accepting of the fact that those changes happen.
00:28:15.039 --> 00:28:24.720
And and to and to accept the fact that it's okay if you're not in exactly the same place at the same time.
00:28:25.680 --> 00:28:38.000
That you'll come back together, like to trust, to trust that versus to sort of feel guilt and resentment about being different for periods of time.
00:28:38.240 --> 00:28:43.759
So these are like some of the things that I was thinking about when I confused everybody.
00:28:45.440 --> 00:28:56.960
I also think because I, you know, and again, I and this is my my wrong assumption, but I don't know if romance stories, novels, come with that level of complexity in terms of structure.
00:28:57.200 --> 00:28:57.759
Maybe they do.
00:28:57.839 --> 00:28:58.160
I don't know.
00:28:58.240 --> 00:29:05.519
I haven't I haven't read a romance book, but it was much more layered, Rich, and and maybe it's just my own implicit bias coming up.
00:29:05.920 --> 00:29:24.880
No, I I think that I mean, maybe, maybe not in a bad way, but romance has it gets a bad rap and it's um it has changed a lot over the last decade, I think, in that there's been more emphasis on like language and form and and all these things, maybe than perhaps before.
00:29:25.119 --> 00:29:30.480
But it does have this very particular structure that you do have to at least to some extent follow.
00:29:30.559 --> 00:29:32.400
Otherwise, it's not considered a romance.
00:29:32.559 --> 00:29:35.680
For example, you have to have a
happy ending.
00:29:35.759 --> 00:29:39.920
If there's no happy ending, the romance community does not consider a romance novel a romance.
00:29:40.240 --> 00:29:41.279
I was curious about that.
00:29:41.440 --> 00:29:43.359
I was like, why are we having a happy ending?
00:29:43.519 --> 00:29:45.519
And so it's structurally required.
00:29:45.920 --> 00:29:47.359
It's structurally required.
00:29:47.519 --> 00:29:51.200
It is literally not a romance if the ending is not happy.
00:29:51.440 --> 00:29:56.559
It can be a romantic book, a romantic kind of drama, but it's not a romance.
00:29:56.799 --> 00:30:04.400
A romance is, you know, it generally something that implodes, you know, at the end of the second act.
00:30:04.559 --> 00:30:11.680
There's there's the third act breakup, usually, and then the come back together for the happy ending.
00:30:12.000 --> 00:30:12.880
It's Shakespeare.
00:30:13.039 --> 00:30:13.839
Essentially it's following.
00:30:14.960 --> 00:30:16.079
Oh, interesting.
00:30:16.400 --> 00:30:21.359
There's something grounding about that structure, both for a reader and a writer.
00:30:21.519 --> 00:30:24.799
And perhaps that's also why I was drawn to it at the time.
00:30:25.359 --> 00:30:30.720
For the reader, you're coming to a story that you know you're safe in.
00:30:31.359 --> 00:30:40.079
You know that yes, you know that no matter what gets pulled apart during the course of the story, in the end, everything will be okay.
00:30:40.319 --> 00:30:47.839
I think some people who are voices in the romance community would say that that's is the power that lies within them.
00:30:48.240 --> 00:30:50.319
I'm getting a whole education on romance.
00:30:50.480 --> 00:30:52.559
This is You are, I'm sorry.
00:30:53.039 --> 00:30:53.519
Thank you.
00:30:53.680 --> 00:30:54.160
Thank you.
00:30:54.400 --> 00:31:02.640
Um, there's a great quote in the book that when when I read it, I was like, I took my breath away a little bit.
00:31:02.960 --> 00:31:18.720
And you wrote, you said, It's hard to age gracefully, hard to accept new versions of yourself, when that also means saying goodbye to the old versions, the formative ones, the ones that made you you.
00:31:19.599 --> 00:31:23.759
When you feel like you've lost your identity, where do you look?
00:31:24.400 --> 00:31:25.680
Where do you go?
00:31:26.240 --> 00:31:31.440
And it made me question this idea of how we as people are wired.
00:31:31.759 --> 00:31:35.440
Are we wired to always be looking back?
00:31:35.599 --> 00:31:39.920
And do we really only understand our lives in the rearview mirror?
00:31:40.319 --> 00:31:40.880
Yeah.
00:31:41.599 --> 00:31:46.880
I have this one friend from college who always looks forward.
00:31:47.200 --> 00:32:00.880
Like she she leaves the past in the past, and she is not sentimental, and she is always focused on whatever is in front of her and whatever is next.
00:32:00.960 --> 00:32:14.480
And in some sometimes I think that it's a level of like incredible enlightenment that most of us don't possess that I certainly don't, because I am, I think by nature like a very nostalgic person.
00:32:14.960 --> 00:32:19.680
But she also had a very, very difficult upbringing.
00:32:20.640 --> 00:32:28.160
And I sometimes wonder if that's something that she learned to do in order to keep moving.
00:32:28.400 --> 00:32:45.920
So that maybe our default state is to continue to look back, to think about who we were and who we are now in contrast to who we were, but that we are capable of shifting out of that if we need to.
00:32:46.720 --> 00:32:54.559
I mean, I am so bad about it that every time I look at a picture of myself from even like three weeks ago, I'm like, my hair looks so much better then.
00:32:54.880 --> 00:33:05.759
You know, throughout the entire 20s, I think I kept cutting my hair into a bomb because every time I saw a photograph of myself with one, I was like, yeah, that's way better.
00:33:05.839 --> 00:33:08.319
And then I'd cut it and be like, no, no.
00:33:08.640 --> 00:33:09.440
It's not.
00:33:10.079 --> 00:33:11.680
It grows out really bad.
00:33:12.000 --> 00:33:26.480
Yeah, because I do think that we are very guilty often of either romanticizing the past or thinking of the ways in which we were victimized or we were celebrated, and how now we're not.
00:33:27.200 --> 00:33:33.440
There are two scenes in the book that structurally I was like, oh, these are mirrored images of each other.
00:33:33.599 --> 00:33:36.000
And they were two of my favorite scenes in the book.
00:33:36.319 --> 00:33:37.119
Okay, yeah.
00:33:37.359 --> 00:33:38.640
And they're present and past.
00:33:38.720 --> 00:33:49.359
So the scene that was past was when when when Nellie and Noah first go around New York together.
00:33:49.680 --> 00:33:56.480
And they're they're on this like you have the this is a this is a strain in your writing that I love, this idea of magical adventure.
00:33:57.279 --> 00:33:59.759
That's that's in a lot of the the other three books.
00:34:00.079 --> 00:34:08.639
But there was a moment in in that whole narrative there where time seemed to stop and be suspended.
00:34:08.719 --> 00:34:10.719
And I felt the book breathe.
00:34:11.280 --> 00:34:13.199
It was rhythmically very different.
00:34:13.440 --> 00:34:20.800
And then when Nellie's trying to get dressed and her shoulder's not working, and Noah comes in the room to help her get dressed.
00:34:21.039 --> 00:34:26.239
Yeah, I felt the book paused in a really beautiful way.
00:34:26.400 --> 00:34:31.920
And that I was like, it was like a suspension where time stood still and it was just those two.
00:34:32.159 --> 00:34:35.440
And I I got it, and it was really satisfying.
00:34:35.599 --> 00:34:37.199
I get who they are together.
00:34:37.519 --> 00:34:38.639
Yeah, that's interesting.
00:34:38.800 --> 00:34:39.039
Yeah.
00:34:39.119 --> 00:34:59.920
I mean, I think that those are some of the first moments in the book where
we really see them alone together, and there's a moment of like quiet that's about energetic sort of tension between them being like in one case very positive, and in one case cut more complicated.
00:35:00.079 --> 00:35:12.960
It everything slows down, and there's just a moment of what it feels like to be sort of in their bodies for a minute, um, just sort of near each other.
00:35:13.440 --> 00:35:27.039
And yeah, I think it's it's funny, like that chapter of them wandering around New York, it's ultimately not that much happens, but I think that it's really important because we have to understand why they like each other.
00:35:27.280 --> 00:35:27.920
Yeah.
00:35:28.559 --> 00:35:32.639
Otherwise, you as the reader are just taking my word for it.
00:35:32.960 --> 00:35:57.360
I'm hoping also that their experience is like resonant in that we can kind of remember what it felt like to be a teenager or a 20-something or whatever it is from our past, and don't have the baggage of like a lifetime of dating and whatever it is, and are just kind of like, I like you and you like me.
00:35:57.599 --> 00:36:01.440
This is amazing that this is happening, you know.
00:36:02.000 --> 00:36:13.280
Um I I thought a lot about that because I think it's it's sometimes when I'm writing, I try, I want to try to like return for myself to what that feeling might feel like.
00:36:13.360 --> 00:36:19.280
It's been a really long time since I had the I liked a new person.
00:36:19.440 --> 00:36:22.000
I've been married for a hundred years.
00:36:22.239 --> 00:36:34.079
So I had to really like think about what that feels like, um, and try to try to put myself in that mindset in order to in order to write the book.
00:36:34.559 --> 00:36:38.880
There's a great line in the book that you write.
00:36:39.119 --> 00:36:42.480
There's a whole strain in the book, and I'll come back to that line in just a moment.
00:36:42.639 --> 00:36:47.119
But there's a whole strain in the book about friendship, truth, and betrayal.
00:36:47.360 --> 00:37:00.480
You have the moment when she realizes that Rita and Sabrina are friends with Noah and the level of their friendship and the sort of like weird dance that that was to sort of not have her be in on that.
00:37:00.639 --> 00:37:16.159
But it made me think that that betrayal, if we want to call it that, made me think about how often we avoid telling the truth to people because it's inconvenient or because we love like and and in Rita and Sabrina's case, they love her, they don't want to hurt her.
00:37:16.320 --> 00:37:20.719
It wasn't like they were, you know, trying to put the knife into her in any kind of way.
00:37:20.880 --> 00:37:43.039
And what you call them in the book, you call them lies, at least of omission, the many unspoken truths and a lifelong friendship, which is very powerful because I think anytime you have a long-term friendship with someone, there are things that you don't say because it's just better if you don't.
00:37:46.800 --> 00:37:50.880
I love that that is present because it made the friendships real.
00:37:51.039 --> 00:37:53.679
And this happens throughout all their relationships.
00:37:53.840 --> 00:37:58.719
There are these moments where you know they're not telling the first time the truth they're talking to you.
00:37:59.119 --> 00:38:13.599
I was thinking a lot about friendship because I go on an annual trip with my two best friends from college, and we often go to Northern California to wine country, often specifically Sonoma.
00:38:13.920 --> 00:38:29.440
And so it partially was just that I love it, but also when I think about female friendship, I think about those trips sometimes because these are people I've been friends with now for 30 years, and with whom thus far we've managed to maintain.
00:38:31.199 --> 00:38:50.320
Despite periods of time where we're in really different places, I wanted to make sure that there was a character with kids and a character who's married but not with kids, and the main character who is not married and and doesn't have kids and feels kind of behind, so that they were in very different places than each other.
00:38:50.639 --> 00:38:56.159
I think a lot lately I've been thinking a lot about the idea of a fatal flaw, which is I think something I learned about in high school.
00:38:56.400 --> 00:39:03.280
But this idea that we have these traits that are our strengths and our weaknesses at the same time.
00:39:03.599 --> 00:39:04.239
Yeah.
00:39:04.719 --> 00:39:14.800
So there are going to be periods of time in which our friends and we make decisions or do things that don't make sense or sound unhinged to other people.
00:39:14.960 --> 00:39:18.800
And as a friend, like you want to be able to be somewhat honest.
00:39:18.880 --> 00:39:28.400
But as you said, you can't always call it out, especially if somebody is in kind of a vulnerable place and they're just they need to work through it in the way that they work through it.
00:39:28.639 --> 00:39:35.920
And that is part of real friendship to me, these untruths or these things that we don't share.
00:39:36.079 --> 00:39:54.880
And I also wanted to stress, I guess, the importance of sharing our vulnerabilities, even if it's uncomfortable, so that people do understand where we're coming from when we behave the way we do, sometimes badly, because let's be honest, we don't all behave well all the time.
00:39:55.199 --> 00:40:03.039
Real friendship, true friendship is friendship in which you don't censor yourself all the time.
00:40:03.280 --> 00:40:18.480
That sometimes you find a patient way to say something or you hold back until you think it's a better time, but there's a line, I guess, between full like lies and, as I said, like an omission.
00:40:18.719 --> 00:40:19.199
Yeah.
00:40:19.519 --> 00:40:47.599
Have you ever had a friend who you're really fond of, but that as time progresses, you just feel like when you speak to them, you can never say what you
really think because what the decisions they've started making or the things they've started believing or telling themselves about their lives or whatever it is, have become so far removed from what you think is true that there's no authenticity to the friendship anymore.
00:40:47.920 --> 00:40:48.400
Yeah.
00:40:48.719 --> 00:40:51.840
I'm kind of in a situation similar to that right now.
00:40:52.079 --> 00:41:02.400
So I that's why I think that line stuck out to me because I think there are things that we just don't it's not because you don't care about the person, but it's because it's better just not to say it.
00:41:03.360 --> 00:41:05.920
There are some things that are too big to say.
00:41:06.239 --> 00:41:06.719
Too big.
00:41:06.880 --> 00:41:07.440
Too big.
00:41:07.679 --> 00:41:09.920
And they're not asking you.
00:41:10.320 --> 00:41:11.760
Yeah, that too.
00:41:12.159 --> 00:41:12.960
That too.
00:41:13.280 --> 00:41:15.760
But then it's also like you do have to ask for help.
00:41:15.920 --> 00:41:17.360
These are the people who love you.
00:41:17.519 --> 00:41:33.280
So with Nelly, like she avoids telling them what's going on with her because she's afraid of being judged, or she's or or if she says it, then maybe it's like makes it real in a way she doesn't want it to be.
00:41:34.079 --> 00:41:54.000
And so there is sort of a a fine line there between like writing out the the periods of time in which you're in a different place from someone, but still being committed to the friendship, and then the things you actually like should be sharing in order to have long-lasting real connections with people.
00:41:54.400 --> 00:42:03.280
In your books, across all of your books, there is this theme of the very complex dance that happens between men and women.
00:42:03.599 --> 00:42:06.320
And you have a daughter and you have a son.
00:42:06.639 --> 00:42:13.679
I wonder what you hope they understand about this very sort of ancient dance that happens between men and women.
00:42:13.840 --> 00:42:17.360
That's been complex since Adam and Eve.
00:42:17.840 --> 00:42:28.960
I think in this case, that well, I want to preface this by saying that my mom broke me when I was 10 and she read me Pride and Prejudice for the first time.
00:42:29.199 --> 00:42:30.559
We read it together.
00:42:30.960 --> 00:42:31.599
There you go.
00:42:32.239 --> 00:42:33.119
And there we go.
00:42:33.280 --> 00:42:50.320
And then it was just solidified by like, you know, the Remington Steel and the moonlightings of it all, and the the Bridget Joe, you know, whatever it is, especially that like enemies to lovers story where people meet and they hate each other and then they fall in love.
00:42:50.559 --> 00:42:57.920
I think I'm very seduced by like the sort of fun of sexual tension.
00:42:58.159 --> 00:43:02.159
And that actually is an experience that you experience much more when you're younger.
00:43:02.320 --> 00:43:09.119
When you're in high school or middle school or college, like there's this constant sense that that's a priority.
00:43:09.360 --> 00:43:22.480
There's all these rotations of romantic relationships and the shuffling of partners and all of this stuff, and how that makes everything more interesting and more technicolor and more exciting.
00:43:22.719 --> 00:43:26.960
I think that that's actually a lot of what drives me to write these stories.
00:43:27.119 --> 00:43:29.599
I think it's like the fun of life.
00:43:29.760 --> 00:43:30.079
Yeah.
00:43:30.239 --> 00:43:31.760
Um, that's part of it.
00:43:32.000 --> 00:43:35.119
The gender role stuff, it's just embedded in it.
00:43:35.280 --> 00:43:40.079
And this is probably even more true in pickup because it's about a divorced mom with kids.
00:43:40.320 --> 00:43:51.920
I think when I wrote that book, I was really thinking about gender roles, like in a household, the double standards, the ways in which we think that we've found equivalency, but we haven't.
00:43:52.159 --> 00:43:59.599
Those issues are always rotating through romantic relationships, heterosexual romantic relationships.
00:44:00.159 --> 00:44:02.079
And also just my brain.
00:44:02.480 --> 00:44:02.800
Yeah.
00:44:03.119 --> 00:44:10.719
So much of the book is about this idea of what does it mean to come home to yourself, to your memories?
00:44:11.039 --> 00:44:14.719
There's a reflecting quality of that process.
00:44:14.960 --> 00:44:26.960
And I wonder for you as a mother, sister, wife, writer, journalist, all of it, when you think about that this idea of coming home, what does that mean for you?
00:44:28.000 --> 00:44:34.400
Yeah, I mean, I think I'm somebody who thinks a lot about the fact that you can't go back.
00:44:34.639 --> 00:44:42.000
I was thinking just the other day, this is kind of a funny example, but my daughter is now in middle school.
00:44:42.239 --> 00:44:47.280
And so she had to leave the little sweet elementary school in our neighborhood.
00:44:47.599 --> 00:44:54.079
And I have a lot of really close friends who are parents of her friends.
00:44:54.400 --> 00:44:58.320
Um, and a lot of those families are are only child families.
00:44:58.400 --> 00:45:05.840
And so when her class graduated, almost all of my friends left.
00:45:06.079 --> 00:45:13.199
And the school, even though I still have a kid in a younger grade, the school feels like a totally different place for me.
00:45:13.840 --> 00:45:19.280
And when I walk past it, I literally feel like I'm in mourning.
00:45:19.440 --> 00:45:30.480
Like I feel like I'm grieving a period of my life in which I experience so much joy that I would just go.
00:45:30.639 --> 00:45:32.559
I'm an extremely social person.
00:45:32.719 --> 00:45:47.760
And so having people around me who I can talk to and who are smart and funny and you know, who I can vent to and whatever it is, is was so nourishing for me.
00:45:48.000 --> 00:45:55.920
And so when that ended, I really felt like I lost something.
00:45:56.400
--> 00:46:02.639
And I was just thinking the other day about how I'm never gonna get it back.
00:46:03.039 --> 00:46:09.440
And I know that that sounds like because now I go to school every day and I drop my kid off, my other kid, and I leave.
00:46:10.480 --> 00:46:22.960
And I don't have that anchor of like these people I want to talk to, I start my who I can start my day with, who literally I can count on, because they also happen to all be very, very funny, which is something I value a lot.
00:46:23.280 --> 00:46:29.760
Um that I can count on like a laugh in the morning and and all of those things.
00:46:30.000 --> 00:46:33.119
It's really sad to me that you can't go back.
00:46:33.280 --> 00:46:46.079
That I think it would be so wonderful if we could even just have these moments where we got like just one day in which we just got to experience what it felt like to be in the body of a version of our past selves.
00:46:46.480 --> 00:46:53.119
I just feel like that would be such an incredible, incredible thing.
00:46:53.519 --> 00:47:00.559
And I want to say on the flip side, I'm not one of those people like who keeps all the photos and remembers all the people and all that.
00:47:00.719 --> 00:47:14.559
It's more of a nostalgia about a feeling, about an experience, like about as we talked about, like moments of joy and freedom, you know, about remembering who you were.
00:47:15.119 --> 00:47:22.480
And so I think that memory is this really beautiful thing, but it's also this really painful thing.
00:47:22.960 --> 00:47:29.679
And it's sad and it's happy and it's funny and it's painful.
00:47:30.000 --> 00:47:34.000
And I guess that's what I always want my books to be.
00:47:34.239 --> 00:47:36.400
I want them to be all of those things.
00:47:36.559 --> 00:47:53.360
I want people to read and I want them to see themselves in the book, and I want them to feel the relief of a laugh, but I also want them to, you know, feel sort of the melancholy of the passage of time.
00:47:54.239 --> 00:47:54.880
Yeah.
00:47:55.679 --> 00:47:57.119
Nora, thank you so much.
00:47:57.360 --> 00:48:00.480
I have literally probably 30 other questions I did not ask you.
00:48:00.559 --> 00:48:02.719
So I'm sorry, I went off.
00:48:03.039 --> 00:48:04.000
No, we both did.
00:48:04.079 --> 00:48:18.719
I I mean, I want to talk about Damien, I want to talk about dynamic between these two male friends who literally one destroys the other or tries to, and a very but he's also a truth teller, very complicated character.
00:48:18.960 --> 00:48:20.639
But thank you for the day.
00:48:20.719 --> 00:48:21.599
I I appreciate it.
00:48:21.679 --> 00:48:22.960
I always love talking to you.
00:48:23.280 --> 00:48:24.559
I love talking to you too.
00:48:24.639 --> 00:48:25.760
And I'm I'm sad too.
00:48:25.840 --> 00:48:27.440
We we do need to talk about Damien.
00:48:27.519 --> 00:48:29.119
We I haven't talked about Damien enough.
00:48:29.360 --> 00:48:32.639
I think Damien's such an important role, and yeah.
00:48:32.880 --> 00:48:34.559
But people should read the book.
00:48:34.800 --> 00:48:36.159
I will link to how they can buy it.
00:48:36.239 --> 00:48:38.880
I'll link to how they can buy it in the show notes and all of that.
00:48:39.039 --> 00:48:40.320
But yes, but thank you, Nora.
00:48:40.400 --> 00:48:41.199
I appreciate you.
00:48:41.440 --> 00:48:48.079
And to all of you who are watching or listening, remember we all have a voice, we all will leave a legacy.
00:48:48.320 --> 00:48:52.320
And the journey home is how we embody them both.
00:48:52.559 --> 00:48:53.440
Thank you, everyone.
00:48:53.679 --> 00:48:54.639
Bye, Nora.