Friends & Fiction Episode 62: 1 Year Anniversary with Jodi Picoult!

[Music] welcome to friends and fiction five best-selling authors and the stories novelists mary kay andrews kristen harmel christy woodson harvey patty callahan henry and mary alice monroe are five longtime friends with more than 80 published books to their credit in 2020 they created friends in fiction to provide author interviews and fascinating insider talk about publishing and writing and to highlight independent bookstores these friends discuss the books they've written the books they're reading now and the art of storytelling if you love books and you're curious about the writing world you're in the right place hi everyone oh this is my favorite screenshot ever okay someone takes a picture of this oh okay it is wednesday night and it is not just any wednesday night it is friends and fiction night and it is not just friends and fiction night it is our one year birthday party welcome i am patti callahan henry and i'm mary alice monroe and i'm mary kay andrew she doesn't know who she is i can't recognize myself with the glasses i'm kristen harmell and i'm christy woodson harvey and this is friends and fiction five best-selling authors endless stories to support indie bookstores tonight we are thrilled to welcome the indomitable and number one new york times best-selling author jody pico tonight we'll be hearing about the deep research jody does for her best sellers including her latest book the book of two ways we'll visit egypt and talk about her inspirations for her work we'll talk about what women's fiction really might mean and of course we won't let her get away without a writing tip oh does that mean it's our birthday month and even though it's our birthday we are giving you the presents every week susie mcmahon is the lucky winner in last week's barn light electric reading lamp giveaway and this week our gift to one lucky winner is a cake from my favorite cake company caroline's cakes the winner q the winner gets to choose any of the delicious signature caroline cakes shipping included my favorite right here is the coconut lemon though they're famous for the seven layer caramel cake i think that's mary kay's favorite plus some lucky winner will get a gift set from charleston coffee roasters including a mug and a bag of the beach house blend coffee which was inspired by my beach house series and there's more to go with your delicious cake and coffee you can pick any fab five book who will be the winner of this sweet cake and coffee giveaway find the entry form link on our facebook and instagram and in our newsletter and enter before sunday and eat cake be happy oh so tonight after the after show will be more than our usual after show it will be a birthday party so we have a video to show and make sure you stick around because it'll be at the after show and who wants to miss a party no one not me no one but now before we dive into the rest of this stuff let's take a minute to thank our sponsors our partners mama geraldine's and page one book subscriptions we adore them both and the code fab five named after the five of us will get you a discount on both websites we'll be telling you more about them later on in the show we will also be telling you about our featured independent bookseller of the week still north brooks and bar in downtown hanover new hampshire the link is above the video and it is also posted under announcements on our facebook page but before we welcome jody and really get started we have something really again really special for you tonight our very own mary kay andrews it's me look that seems is here with her trailer for the newcomer which comes out may 4th which is appropriate because when we first started friends in fiction a year ago tonight it was mary kay who said let's get together on a zoom and well you know what happened after that because you're here so sean roll the trailer [Music] um the newcomer will be out may 4th it's a mystery it's some romance it's set on the florida gulf coast which happens to be my hometown and so what i want to tell you all is that if you pre-order uh the newcomer which comes out may 4th and i already say that um from our bookstore of the week um the bookstore of the week is still normal still north brooks and bar thank you um i am going to send you one of these cool motel old school motel key fobs it says newcomer on this side and then friends and fiction on the other side so uh pre-order your book from um still north books and i'll send you the key fob and an autographed book plate stay tuned for lots more details about my upcoming tour oh i'm so excited all right so usually this is where we talk about our parade essay but tonight we'll be chatting about that in our big after party show because it connects directly to our mission here at friends and fiction so you won't want to miss any of the fun we have in store for you tonight so make sure you stick around and now let's talk about our incredible guest jody pico and remember if you have questions for her please just put them in the comments we'll be pulling a few during the show jody is the number one new york times best-selling author of 25 internationally best-selling novels her most recent novel the book of two ways published on september 22nd 2018. it was her 11th consecutive number one new york times bestseller wow i know wow it is about the choices that alter the course of our lives in an instant and pico's books have been translated into 34 languages in 35 countries small great things has been optioned for motion picture adaptation by amblin entertainment and is set to star viola davis and julia roberts now that's who's never heard of them yeah yeah exactly roberts i don't know yeah my family oh that's amazing yeah it is i think yeah yeah so jody's written two young adult novels between the lines and off the page with her daughter samantha van leer she's also the recipient of many awards and holds an honorary doctor of letters degree from dartmouth college oh degrees from the dartmouth college dartmouth college and the university of new haven wow he lives in new hampshire her husband and they have three children so let's bring jody on and welcome her welcome jody [Applause] hi guys happy birthday it's so nice to be here thank you i also i can tell all of you guys are southern because you have three names most of you yeah i'm the only non-southerner and there we go who lives in orlando which is scary not really the south well we're thrilled you're here for our one year anniversary because the one year anniversary is paper so oh cool that's really good yeah that's great that's awesome well it's a lovely lovely day to be here i want to thank you because i got a ton of swag and i never get good swag but i mean i am i'm decked out i've got my cake what flavor did you get champagne in my friends in fiction class so i'm i'm very delighted to be here thank you for having me well jody we're so happy you're here and we are dying to hear about the book of two ways so can you tell us about it sort of the elevator pitch because we are gonna deep dive into it in just a minute sure i'm gonna try because i think i've forgotten it all um no way yeah it's the story of a woman named dawn and when you meet her um she is on a plane and it's going down and instead of thinking about her husband and her daughter um who is a teenager she brings to mind this memory of a life that she gave up when she was an egyptology grad student and she was working on a dig with a guy that she wound up falling in love with and she hasn't thought of this person in 15 years and when she actually survives this crash she is given a ticket anywhere she wants to go because that's the way it works when you survive a crash and right and um and at that point the book splits into two different um two different uh alternating chapters one that shows you her life in boston with her husband and her daughter and one that shows you her life in egypt if she continues to go there and to um to speak to this guy wyatt who meant so much to her and to finish a life that she didn't get to finish because of life circumstances that changed that so it's really a book about um you know who would you be if you weren't who you are right now which is i think a question ironically that we've all been asking ourselves we've all kind of wondered this past year what if this year hadn't happened what would i be doing where would i be i mean i never planned to publish a book during the pandemic none of us did but um you know in thinking about it this felt like a very resonant book because i think a lot of us have had those questions i agree so true i love that idea who would you be if you weren't if you weren't right now like just take a hook pull me in done nearly every single person here or listening has thought about that why in the road about an alternative about life not chosen one of my favorite quotes about that is by cheryl strait you know who wrote wild she has that great book about dear sugar and somebody wrote a letter and her advice was i'm gonna read it i'll never know and neither will you of the life you don't choose will only know that whatever that sister life was it was important and beautiful and not ours it was the ghost ship that didn't carry us oh i love that i know i love that that's right yeah i kept thinking about that when i was i listened to it and i kept thinking what was the spark for the book of two ways was it this idea of a wine life i'm dying to hear about the sparks that set the origin story of this book well the origin story of this book is a weird one um the weirder the better so that's what we're all about so i have i have three kids and my oldest is 29 and when he was at yale he was his major was egyptology he's one of the you know 10 people in the world who can read middle egyptian and so he um very cool right so he came home one day and he was translating a book you know during a vacation it was an assignment and it was called the book of two ways and i said well what's that and he said it's an ancient egyptian funerary text and many of us have heard about the uh the book of the dead um which is actually called in egyptian the book of going forth by day well this is kind of a precursor to that it's from a little bit older in the middle kingdom of uh egypt and um it was basically found in a certain place in egypt the middle egypt in the bottoms of cedar coffins of nobles and uh and their wives and their families and it was basically um a how-to guide of how to get once your dad to the afterlife how do you get to you know the next world and in the book of two ways what they posed is that you could go on a land route or you could take a water route and there were all kinds of obstacles that you would face but no matter which one you took you would wind up at the same place and it's called the field of offerings it's the ancient egyptian version of heaven and so um i love that concept i was like wow the book of two ways is a great title for a novel that was literally as far as i got at that moment and i always thought i wanted to write a book like that i wanted to write a story where i could mirror the book of the actual literal book of two ways in the text and i wanted to go to egypt and i wanted to do research and i booked a trip for my family and that was the summer of arab spring and no one in america was going to egypt so we canceled the trip and years later my son got married and his former thesis advisor came to the wedding and i said to her you know i really still want to write this book and she said well i'll take you and so a few months later i got a very private very academic tour with one of the foremost egyptologists in this country dr are now wait and the really cool thing was that you know if you go to egypt now as an american they're going to take you to certain places you're going to go to cairo you're going to go to luxor you're you know you're going to see the sights but you're gonna skip entirely over middle egypt because there have been a lot of terrorist things that have happened there and so americans don't usually go there and we had to get permission we had to go with an armed guard we had people with really old machine guns driving us in a jeep we had to have um you know security with us at all times the government had to give us permission and i got to see these rock cut tombs which are exactly what my character don and her former love interest wyatt would have been studying back when she was an egyptology student and in the book wyatt has gone on to have the career she didn't and is now the head of uh this this um uh university um egyptology program and he basically took a discovery that they uncovered together 15 years earlier and has now brought it to its its final point and so it was really fun to see it firsthand and the things that that surprised me the most about being in egypt were that i i always think about egypt as dusty and old and when you go into these tombs the paint is vibrant and like it's like yesterday it's like the bottom of my hair it's so bright you know and you just aren't expecting that um i just i i thought it was so beautiful and uh and it was really fun to be able to to see it from an academics point of view and also to learn how a dig has changed in 15 years because technology has completely revised the way egyptologists do their work now so i got to write about both of those in the book which was super fun it's kind of like indiana jones you know with a modern day indiana jones but i feel like when you said that's a great book title vivian universe said i'm not giving up on you i'm going to send this thesis advisor to the wedding because you said it and now you're doing it yeah and your patience paid off what it took yeah i mean i'm sure you guys have had that too don't you have books that just ideas that just stick in your head like you know like a fish bone in your throat it's not a good feeling you've gotta somehow get it out of you and then yeah [Laughter] and i think that's probably an understatement of having your books categorized as women's fiction and i'm in that same category you've said i think this is in part due to this very arbitrary distinction between women about what women's fiction is a book that examines the relationships between people or families it's called women's fiction if it's written by a woman author and if it's written by a man it's called groundbreaking thought-provoking yeah we don't have enough time in this little podcast and i don't have enough champagne we can send you more yes darling you know i i've been very vocal about this for a really really long time and um when people look first let me say women's fiction is awesome right i mean it's great all fiction women read and romance is fantastic and mystery is fantastic and every genre is great but when people call the book women's fiction what they're really saying is a woman wrote that book not who's reading it but a woman wrote that book there is no way on earth that nicholas sparks doesn't write women's fiction yeah but even he will describe it as love tragedy i don't know what that is but you know that's his thing and not tragedy i i'm not making this up and honestly that that really upsets me that women tend to get pigeonholed because of the things they write as if it is you know incredibly ground no like i don't know why it's a major miracle for a male writer to have both male genitalia and a heart but apparently it is and i don't think that women are the only ones who read my books and in fact i was so tired of being called a women's fiction author because i knew it wasn't true i tracked my fan mail for three months and 51 of my fan mail comes from men and they all start they write and they're like i'm sure i'm the only man reading your books and i'm like it's okay honey you're not you know but it's kind of sensitive it's not even that i mean there's something that isn't visit yeah i mean there are some books i write where i'm i wonder why how on earth you could consider my book chiclet or you know a beach read because like small great things is a great example of that when they called that a beach read i was like wow worst vacation ever you know because if you're picking up a book that's about racism in america you know it's not a walk in the park and there's nothing there's not even a kiss in that book and i you know i i'm amazed at how um how easily pigeonholed women are and i don't think that's right i don't know why we assume that women should read both men and women but we allow men to say well i only read male authors that's ridiculous i look at my husband's library on his reading device and it's 99.5 percent uh male unless he accidentally reads um an author with initial yeah you know yeah recognition right yeah yeah right yeah that one [Laughter] we support an indie bookstore and this week you've chosen still north brooks and hannover yeah tell us about that store and why it's special to you so it's in my hometown but what's really special to me is because it's brand new they opened months before the pandemic oh no yes and amazingly um alec levy who is the one who who opened it has managed to keep it going to have you know books that people order and they they uh put them in little bags and they're waiting for you and i i just really i hope she sticks around for a while so i wanted to do the absolute best that i could to support her we hope she knows too yeah that's great so the link for still north books is above and remember you get 10 off with the code ff0421 it is so important to keep supporting these locally owned stores we talk about this every week you guys so now jody i know you are a meticulous researcher you talked a little bit about that uh earlier in the show um so i have read that you have met with everyone from nasa experts to a man who spent a year alone in the woods with wolves you've gone ghost hunting you've spent time in an arizona jail you've even been to death row this is amazing so i am trying to know a little bit more about the research that you did for the book of lost lost ways kind of some of the things you experienced when you were walking through those areas you talked about sure and i would also love to know do you research and write at the same time or are they separate for you yeah so um i try to do i front load my research okay and i you know i think the reason for that is because while i'm doing the research i can filter through my head i'm going to use this i'm not going to use this or this is going to change the direction of the book you know in a way i'm i'm writing i'm pre-writing in my head while i'm doing the research so um you know i told you a little bit about what i saw when i was um in middle egypt and it was it was fascinating and it was like the thing about the thing about uh about doing the research is that it put together for me a lot of ancient egyptian lore that i kind of knew about but didn't really understand so for example you all know that the egyptians had mummies right you probably do not know why so the whole point of getting to the afterlife if you were an ancient egyptian is that your ba soul would be able to leave your body and go hang out with rey the sun god and party all day long and help pull the sun across the sky and then at the end of the day when the sun set ray reunites with his corpse the corpse is another egyptian god called osiris he is the lord of the netherworld he's the the guy who you know kind of like hades but egyptian and um the reason that's important is because the whole tomb and the body act like a battery ray cannot power himself up for another day across of pulling the sun if he doesn't charge up at night with his physical body okay so they have to unite and rey and osiris are like flip sides of the same coin it's very much like father-son holy ghost it's like one big package so the whole point of a human death is that you wanted your soul to hang out with the gods and that meant that your soul every night had to power up with your body how do you make sure your body survives eternity you mummify it that's fascinating right wow i didn't so and i feel like i know a lot about egypt and i did not so i mean like that stuff was super super cool but that was only half the research and actually more like a third of the research um okay i also wound up doing research about uh quantum physics because my life wasn't hard enough and i yeah that was really really hard for me because i you know i'm like i'm not a math person and so to be able to explain quantum physics and schrodinger's cat to people who might not know anything about physics required me to understand it and since uh dawn my main character is married to a quantum physicist and he studies uh parallel universes and the idea of multiple lives which of course weaves very beautifully in with the idea of the way i structured you know this book is two lives um and then the last bit of research i had to do was really fascinating and it involved dawn's work uh when she is when she leaves egypt she winds up coming home to boston and she becomes a death doula and a lot of people know what a birth doula is you know it's somebody who kind of helps you deliver baby um and takes care of the mom is that transition's happening a death doula is the opposite they help people leave this world they do exist it's a real thing and i met people who were death doulas and i spent a week shadowing hospice a hospice chaplain and it was amazing it was such a privilege to be at the end of somebody's life when they don't have a lot of time to realize that they're sharing it with you and what i realized was that a couple of things nobody wants to be remembered for the way they are at the end when they're sick or frail or old they want to be remembered for who they used to be and what they really want is to give you a story you know so that you keep it in your hands and your heart and as long as your story is kept alive of course you know you're still here um they also are just literally the same things the egyptians worried about that you see all over their tombs and in the hieroglyphs and in the book of two ways is how do you have a good death that's a question that we're still asking today and remarkably four thousand years later the answer is still the same and it's have a good life figure out for yourself what is a good life and again you know i don't want to drag us back to the year 2020 but i think we've all learned a little bit about what matters yeah that's so true and i you know i love that idea that you put so much into the research into the facts of it but it leads you to these core observations sure to get the heart of who we all are and i think that's what i don't know that's really what makes your book stand out it's very just interesting to hear your process yeah it's really fun it's fun to do it and i i always learn a ton when i'm you know researching and it's funny because um when i was writing during this past year i was doing as much research as i could on zoom like everybody else right you know because that's what we were doing and the one thing i had to do live was learn how to be a beekeeper and i was like all right how am i going to pull this off in the middle of a pandemic and i found this guy who you know is a beekeeper was willing to teach me from six feet away i had a mask on under my veil you know and that was how i spent a season with him learning about bees wow that is so cool wow yeah you know it for me it's it's really i love being able to do it it's the most fun part i think of writing agree well judy i've read that you say it takes you nine months to write a book almost exactly the same every time so was it the same for this book and also do you have a routine that keeps you to that time or does it just work out that way so it's um when i say nine months that's to the end of a first draft right and you know even when i add it up it usually still winds up being about nine months there are times that it's different this book um this book was i don't know if it took exactly nine months because i had to i had to go to egypt at a time when this academic could go to egypt so i had to like pause everything and do this chunk of research for three weeks and then i went to texas actually and i was doing research with hospice people and so i had like my research was in clots you know and i was forming everything else around it um but uh there are some books just don't take very long and some books feel like they take forever and when i add it up it still seems to be nine months i don't think it's it's driven by anything except you know kind of my writing schedule my touring schedule and my production schedule yeah okay yeah but there is something very gestational about it is there a certain place that you have that you like to write the most you're awesome that's it you're in my office this is it oh yeah nice yeah i've spent a lot of time here in the past year so yeah love our offices yeah okay i'm going to move over to another one of your accomplishments and that's all right we'll just take them off as we go through the night but this one really blew me away and that's that you've written not one but two musicals and the new musical breathe everybody breathe is going to have its virtual world premiere on may 14th so y'all you can order your tickets on dodie's website right now yeah it's very exciting and you wrote the other one with samantha's your daughter between the lines right so tell us about the musicals first of all and what it was like a to write a musical but also to write with your daughter yeah well so those are two different questions writing with my daughter to create that y a series was really interesting um it it started when sammy was 13 years old she is 25 now so it started when she was 13 and i was on a book tour and i remember exactly where i was i was in traffic in la and she called me up and she said i think i have a really good idea for a book and i was like okay hit me up and she said well what if every time you closed a book the characters inside it had lives of personalities different from who they were in the book and what if there was a teenage girl who was like really kind of like quiet and had a really crappy home life and she was obsessed with the kids fairy tale because the prince who was illustrated and it was really attractive and she felt like his circumstances really spoke to her and then one day so did he and he wanted out of his story as much as she wanted out of hers and i was like wow i have a genius child because you know like how many of us are still waiting for mr darcy we're all in love with oh yes right and so i said you know we're going to work on this together and she was a kid she had a day job which was school so we wrote it on the summers when she was at home we wrote right here she had a chair like mine and we would take turns typing and we spoke every word out loud we wrote the entire first book uh we toured three continents when she was 16. she's the only person in my family who knows what a book tour is like and um and she was like i'm done i'm done i was like no you're not we wrote a cliffhanger she's like no i'm really done and went up to college and she calls me up that september and she's like so i've been thinking about the sequel and i'm like yeah yeah right and so she uh she and i actually wrote the sequel from 10 am to midnight because that was the only time she had free via speaker phone and um yeah and so we toured you know again we went on tour for that and i will say that she is a teacher now she's a fourth grade teacher but she um she went to vassar she wrote a creative thesis and she's actually taking a year off to write and so i have every expectation that you can have her on your show next year but um after when we finished between the lines i really felt like it's sang it felt like a story that sang and i started to look to figure out how do you turn that into a broadway-bound musical and i was fortunate enough to connect with a woman named daryl roth who is a very famous broadway producer uh she did kinky boots she's won over a dozen tonys and she loved the book and she wanted to pull together a team to do this and she wanted to teach me how to write a musical and um i found the songwriters who uh were brand new just out of something called bmi which is um kind of like a uh crucible for musical theater songwriters and on the strength of the music they wrote for between the lines they were actually hired by disney so i was like okay i pick good people and um really and then she brought in a book writer the book writer is the one who writes the libretto the script and this is a guy named tim mcdonald and um tim was great because tim was like i would love for you to help me and he didn't have to do that he literally could have said bye it's mine now and because of that working with him i learned how to write a musical and not only that but i also learned that he's kind of the brother i never had and that we just fit like that and so um we loved working together so much that we actually said what else are we going to do next and so not to correct you mary alice but um we have free musicals so we then wrote um i wanted to i wanted to write something to adapt something that i hadn't written the source material for so we got the rights to the book thief by marcus zusak oh no oh you did not uh and that is um that was supposed to debut this year in the uk but we pushed it a year because of covid so you'll see that next year in the uk and then during this entire pandemic right away tim and i start we tim and i talk all the time so i said you know someone's got to tell this story someone has to make sense of this pandemic and it felt right to start with theater because what is theater other than being in an individual seat and having the same emotion as the person next to you because of what you're seeing that's how we all felt in lockdown we were all feeling the same thing but we were all very isolated and we decided to come up with with five different vignettes that were um that looked at different couples and how they the effects the impact of the virus on their lives their families their health um on the nation uh you know and they range from a rom-com and from things that are funny to things that are devastatingly heartbreaking to um to the story of uh the racial unrest in this country um they come what it's like to have to homeschool your kids i mean they range all over the place and what we wanted to do was to involve as many musical theater writers as humanly pers possible because nobody was working so we collaborated with five different songwriting teams each of them worked on a different vignette and they're all interconnected and then we hired five different directors and a supervising director and we knew that we couldn't perform this live because we're not allowed to do that yet so what we chose to do was to film it quite beautifully in a theater an empty theater with the empty audience lit like it's basically you know a character and we're showing you the last reading basically for the authors and because of covid this is a beautiful thing our cast is insane we have kelly o'hara and brian stokes mitchell and denise penton and matt doyle and max clayton and daniel yearwood from hamilton and t oliver reed and it's like it's an list of amazing people and the music is phenomenal and i promise that when you when you finish watching it what you're going to feel is hope which is what we all need right now so i do hope that people will know tickets are available go to tickets available now may 14th that is super yeah and i ask one question and you don't have to watch it on the 14th you can you buy a ticket and you stream it anytime in the next two months but i have one quick question we know not writing a novel and we always talk about how writing a script is so different yes yeah is writing a musical that kind of different yeah so the difference between writing as you probably would say writing a book and writing a script or writing a screenplay is the difference between taxidermy and um paleontology right because a screenplay is creating a skeleton that everyone's gonna layer over and your layers of the director and the set designer and the actors when you write a book you have to create everything in 3d so i always i approach any kind of libretto like that the other difference though is that music takes the place of words often um music is not very good for getting information across but it's really good for getting feeling across and so it's a very collaborative effort very often we'll write a scene and then the songwriters will go oh that's excellent we're going to steal all those and we're going to put them in the lyrics thanks so much you know and they do that all the time or vice versa um so it's really fun because it's a give and take and it feels like you have five brands working instead of one which i really love because as you know we have very solitary lives as novelists so the collaborative element is what i really love about making theater and um and it does require you to think in a different way and for me you know when you're a novelist you kind of want to show off you want to use a phrase that makes someone go wow that's beautiful when you are a librettist you want to go away if you do your work well the songs are seamless and nobody even notices that you're the one who organized them or who created the structure so it's a very different kind of writing but kind of fun that's it's enlightening thank you yeah okay jody we have this amazing community who are pouring in their questions right now yay so marielle can you ask one of the ones that um came in already i will and i'm sorry my sister-in-law who wants to so badly ask you a question but i can't find it this one is from lynn prosserkumer who says what book or author has had the most impact on your life and how has that influenced your writing that's a great question and the answer is alice hoffman alice um was the first book that i remember reading outside of college that i wasn't assigned you know when i got to be a reader again instead of a student and i loved her writing because she makes writing looks so effortless and so easy and dreamy and um and all the magical realism it's just so beautiful her writing is so beautiful and for years i was like her number one you know stalker fan and then i got asked to do an event on cape cod and she was going to be at the event i was like yes yes you know and um and i went and you know i met her i tried to play it really cool and she could not have been lovelier and you know do you know when you meet like an author and you're like oh my god they're just as nice as i wanted them to be i know right and and you know i have to say that my one of the high points in my career is that alice and i are we're friends now and like whatever i want and i love that that's how i look at all about being on friends and faces the friendships that we make with certain writers because we we have experience that other people don't have i think they're really really important and i i love alice she's just a wonderful human being and an incredible writer obviously so she's the one for me so christina palmer says jody i love your twitter account and i do i follow you on twitter you kept me sane during the last four years um did twitter keep you saying too i don't think twitter keeps anybody saying oh my god twitter is like the cesspool of social media but i i don't know about you guys i find that i use my social media in very different ways you know so my my instagram um i don't even know usually it's my dogs or something on my instagram uh my facebook page is mostly run by the publisher and is really about book stuff and twitter is where i i maintain my twitter and i'm very political and i'm very outspoken and in fact very oddly i spent the entire day trying to explain to the state of new hampshire that i don't want to run for governor because i'm being recruited i am not kidding you if you go to my twitter journey run run we want your vote no i won't be able to write if i'm a governor um you know it it has been a very strange day that's all i'm gonna say so i shouldn't have to say that but apparently i do i will not be running for governor of new hampshire i love it well um diana mcgoldrick wants to know if your son has read i'm sorry i'm doing this it's because yeah um your son has read your book and if so what did he think yes um so you're talking about my son the egyptologist i'm sure and uh and yeah not a future governor get that screenshot up on twitter so yeah kyle has read the book in fact to kyle's great chagrin kyle had to read the book before it was published to make sure i wasn't messing up on any of the spellings and translations of the hieroglyphs so um i think he he was not thrilled that he was roped into that but uh you know it's what can i say it's i guess the caveat to be here yeah exactly yeah what a great built-in fact checker that's wonderful rhonda parrot would like to know she says you attack some pretty heavy life events in your books are you ever nervous how they will be received um so i i just don't have a lot of f's left to give that's not really okay we have to remember that one say that again i don't i've gotten to an age where i'm like you know take it or leave it and i honestly i do write about really challenging things and i what i hope i do in my books and what i strive to do in my books is to make sure that if i'm writing about a particularly contentious situation i will always give you both sides of the story i'm not going to tell you what to think i'm going to let you examine your own uh beliefs and decide why your beliefs are what they are you know um but i'm very i'm i think i'm very equal handed in that and to the point where for example um when i when i did spark of light which was about abortion rights in this country uh i have been asked multiple times are you pro-life or are you pro-choice i can't tell and i am 100 happy to tell you you know what i am and i happen to be pro-choice but i also recognize this is a really fraught issue and nothing is black and white women's lives are thousands of shades of gray and that was the point of the book and you know that's why i don't believe that we should be legislating those rights so i i made sure to include all sides of that in the book and um to that end i will always tell you my point of view but i promise you that in my books i will always let you have both sides of the story that said there are some people who just are not happy and um a really good example of that is i know someone had mentioned earlier before we got on that i recently did a chat with nancy johnson amazing author first time author her book is called the kindness lie love her we haven't yeah we have a amazing guy isn't she great right so i um one of the things that i i take very seriously is trying to do what i can to dismantle racism as a white woman and part of having a platform means being able to use that so i try to do talks about race with people like nancy johnson or nick stone or really anyone who will talk to me about it and um i went i had posted on facebook that cuyahoga library was basically doing this talk and i said it's free you know oh my god oh my god i could just give you the stuff right but right you saw that and so i was like all i said was free event america we need to talk about race and literally i had a thousand comments how dare you call me a racist and i was like i'm sorry did i call you a racist you know it was uh me thinks the lady death protests too much moment and it got into a lot of white guilt and um you know all this stuff that is is very hard to unpack and unfortunately i i mean i have very strong feelings about racism and about the work that white people have to do to dismantle it i'm not going to shut up about that because i really think it's important that we talk about it and i'm not going to tell you you're a racist and i'm not going to say feel guilty for being white no i didn't ask to be born this color but if i am this color what am i going to do with that privilege that's the real question so i engaged with a lot of those haters that weekend and you know the truth is oh yeah i mean i always will but i i just some people aren't ready to hear it and some people don't want to hear it and i hear on a daily basis i am never reading your books again i'm burning your books i'm throwing them in the trash and you know i say i always say well i hope you'll give them to a library instead but sometimes they don't that's a great answer yeah okay jody every week on a totally different subject one of our favorite parts of the show is receiving a writing tip so we're going to pretend this is for our viewers but okay we want to know so one of the things that i've talked a lot about is i don't believe in writer's block i don't believe in it because when i started writing i had three children under the age of four and i did not have i didn't have time for writer's block yeah so probably like you i would write anytime they were napping um i would take my laptop to swim practice i would have it on my car dashboard when i was picking up at nursery school um if they weren't hitting each other over the head with sippy cups i was trying to get into paragraph any spare moment i could i i was writing and then of course a miracle happened public school and i had eight hours a day to write and that was great but i still behaved the way i did when i had no time and for people who think about writer's block i want you to imagine being in college how you couldn't write that paper and then miraculously the night before it was due you were able to write that paper so you know writer's block is really for people who have too much time on their hands and what what i've become known for saying is that you can't edit a blank page but you can edit a bad page and so it's really important that what you do is put down on paper anything anything at all knowing that you can revise it because if you put nothing down you have nothing to work on and so just sit yourself down in that chair and make yourself start writing and then go back to it um but that's that's basically the way you work through writer's block that's awesome what a great tip you can't edit an empty page yeah yeah and i i love that idea that the challenges that we face at the beginning of our writing careers kind of make us into the writers we are now i mean that that was a challenge to have to find that we literally just had this talk like yeah yeah yeah yeah well i i really think so because um i was i was writing on a very tight schedule a book a year i had three kids i was the primary caretaker you know i mean i was i was doing everything that i could to just meet my deadlines and i think that gave me a rigor now that i i keep even though and i don't need it that's amazing do you have a book you could recommend tonight yeah i'm kind of excited about this it's coming out next week so all of you can go and order it right now and it is by christopher jalien who is a lovely guy yeah do you know it yeah he's coming about it yeah he's good good good um we know what it is the hour of the which yes and um here's why i love it i mean he's kind of like he's the reverse of the question that um that mary kate was talking about when it was about women's fiction he's a man who writes women really really well really well and really well and i don't think he is as well known as he should be and i i've always maintained that he's also a lovely human being i have to say he's just the nicest man but um but so the hour of the which is actually set in puritan new england right in boston and is full of like it's a total look at um you know at what life was like for women back then and particularly what an abusive relationship looked like and i was reading this and i was like oh my god i cannot believe this first i couldn't believe how much research she did i was blown away by that but also that so little has changed that an intelligent woman is a scary woman and that still has not changed yeah you still get to know her names yeah call her names um comment on her on her brain comment they call what does he say um her husband says you have white meat white meat grape cheese or something yeah no it's not white meat it's like bread you're very like cheese now yeah and you know and that is so threatening to men women who can think and um i love time a lot of women and we think and we see you i like the way you ended that we see you thank you for recommending that because he's going to be our guest on the 28th so i'm so glad you'll love him come for them get the book now i have a book to recommend and it's an audiobook everyone knows i love audiobooks and this week i have a faye faraway by helen fisher and it's a really cool belt book it's if you love the time traveler's life of white you're going to love faye faraway it's about a a woman who travels back in time and she's reunited with the mother she lost as a child she has decisions to make talk about two ways what i really love too is you have to have a good narrator and sophie roberts is a beautiful narrator and her voice takes you far away that's awesome it sounds great i would like to recommend tonight little pieces of me which just came out yesterday by allison hammer um she was actually on our show i think back in uh january when we were talking about debuts this is her second novel um it is i think even better than her first which i would not have thought possible because i loved her first um it's beautiful she's a gorgeous writer it explores some fascinating issues um and i just so highly recommend it she's just such a good human being and that just it just comes through on every page in this book little pieces of me allison hammer i can't wait to read that and jody i loved the hour of the witch so much the minute i finished it was like you were like on the plane texting me i was texting all of that yeah yeah because he speaks from her point of view the whole book and it that's awesome it's astounding um i would love to suggest to everyone i know we've talked about it but my dear friend paula mclean's book came out yesterday when the stars go dark and paula as you know is the author of the paris wife but this is a genre switch for her it's a thriller it's astounding okay all right jody please stick around don't go anywhere for the birthday party because we have one more question for you and it's one of our favorite questions but first we have to tick through a couple things we want to remind all of you out there to check out our podcasts we have a couple new ones that have just popped up so go check those out and don't forget to join the friends and fiction book club it's the official book club hosted by our friends lisa harrison and brenda gardner and patty will be visiting on monday to talk about her book surviving savannah yay and go grab her book club kit off her website and she'll see you there on monday and next week they're going to be reading my new book under the southern sky which comes out next tuesday so it's free that would be it days from now that'd be six days from now you're so good i don't even have one with me yeah we don't even have one we just did the first event it was so fun it was so exciting um from your favorite independent bookstore preferably or wherever books are sold and we also want to give a big thank you to our amazing partner mama geraldine's whose cheese drawers are out of this world and who my personal favorite cinnamonies are um my favorite road trip snack so i have a ton of them packed i actually have the little mini bags for pretty much all of my tour events so if you come see me on tour you're probably going to walk away with some mama cheese they are amazing you can get 20 off of your orders on their website mamajayldeans.com with the code fab five and don't forget um to you know as long as we're talking about pre-ordering you know i gotta keep my own horn i hope you will remember to pre-order the real thing that's the newcomer and i hope you'll do that tonight because we now know um what jody told us that you we've got a new a new bookstore tonight and the new bookstores it's so hard from up and running and to um you know to to find their place in a community um and so i you know of course i want you to pre-order my book but i want you to pre-order everybody's book and you know the great thing the the great the only good thing about the pandemic just about is it it's made us all aware that we can order books from anywhere we want yeah um and and that's just an amazing thing and um okay next week 7 p.m eastern time we're gonna have the big we're just partying this home i know this is a party mine celebration launch of under the southern sky she's got big surprises in store for all of us and then the next week guess what christmas aliens okay as we talk to him about his stunning the hour of the witch and uh oh i can't forget to thank our partner page one books where you can also use that same code fab five to get 10 off your first subscription and that's what they do they book subscriptions awesome hand-picked personalized book subscriptions from an independent bookstore right to you if you like to read you need this think about if wrapped books mailed to your door each month it's almost as good as chocolate arriving [Laughter] and sean is showing you the graphic for that you can find more about page one books right there at pageonebooks.com and i think they'll send you mama geez with your books too i think they might have heard my rumor about it i love it it's not so good we snatched books oh you're eating our cake all right so jody it is so interesting not only to hear about your books but also about you so one of the things we love to know about the authors who visit with us is a little bit about what shaped them into the writers they are today so here's the question that we try to ask every week what were the values around reading and writing in your childhood um huge so my mother well actually i come from a long line of teachers and i've produced a bunch of teachers as well and um and i was a teacher before i was a writer i was an eighth grade english teacher and so um yeah and when i was really little i started to read really young i was reading when i was about three and a half four years old and my mom told me that i could get a library card when i could sign my name that was a really big deal to me and so as soon as i could sign my name she took me with her to get a library card and twice a week we would go to the library and she would bring home a stack of books and i would bring home a stack of books and then i would go and you know i loved the library i thought it was fascinating and um and that was it like we always read before bed and my mom 100 modeled reading for me um then i i grew up and my first real job was as a page at a library which is a total self-fulfilling prophecy right it's so cool yeah so i was there shelving all the books and doing like big displays in the children's section i loved it and um and i really i love librarians you know i think a lot of times people think books but the writers don't love libraries because they don't buy books but we love them we love them because they make reading accessible and you know and it they're just such an important institution in america so we all love our libraries very very much and we love librarians for many years before there was an internet because i'm that old i use librarians to do research with me right and um you know so that that sense that reading was not just um it wasn't just a pastime it was really part of our lives i think that's that's what really made me a reader when i was growing up and i i just i can't even imagine i can't even imagine a world without reading okay yeah absolutely well thank you so much jody for being here with us and to all of you all thank you we would ask you to keep hanging out with us because we have our birthday party after show coming up and we strongly encourage you to grab this new book two ways preferably from our book seller of the week which is still north books and bars books and bar in downtown hanover new hampshire and jody thank you so much for jody thank you thank you for the afterparty thank you congratulations it's right now yes okay folks we'll see you in a minute at the after party come back next week same time same place as we celebrate our christy woodson harvey oh and go i'm gonna post it tomorrow the witch under the southern sky character for the party for the party before the party because we're gonna find out and if you're just dying and you can't wait to take the quiz you can go to christywoodsonharvey.com and it's up right now and don't forget that you get a key fob if you order her book today pre-order from still north books and we'll see you after party in about 30 seconds 45 seconds less than a minute thank you for tuning in join us every week on facebook or youtube where our live show airs every wednesday night at 7 pm eastern time and please subscribe to our podcast and follow us on instagram we're so glad you're here good night [Music] hi everyone we're getting ready for the birthday party we're going to go get the cake so we're going to get the cake and we are so lucky tonight because first of all was jody um yes oh my gosh amazing great job patty that was excellent hosting oh that was so much fun carried it so oh oh yeah sure and then the top right is a match yeah a lighter um we are so lucky that tonight meg walker our managing director who we could not do this without is going to join us for the birthday party come on baby join us [Music] hello hello oh too much champagne where'd she go oh oh my goodness i wonder if she thought it was a different link maybe she'll be right back on okay so all right kathy wanting to work without the great giveaway okay the grace of the way last week we had a great giveaway with our friends at barn white electric if you follow me on instagram you might have seen that we've got a bunch of their lighting at our tybee island beach house um and so we gave away last night she looks surprised i thought oh are we oh i thought it was a different no talk about the giveaway and then you get to talk right so our friends at barn line electric gave away a custom retro desk lamp and signature friends and fiction colors teal and white those are our team colors team colors plus any of the of our first year fan fiction guest books of the winner's choice and the winner was drum roll mcmahon congrats susie okay meg take it away okay you've been seeing me eat this all day look at this guys you're partnering with caroline's cakes i want you to see my decorations can y'all see the guys oh my gosh i have those guys they hang on your wine glass glasses i think they're gonna hang on the that's my favorite caroline's cake and the winner will get a caroline's cake of their choosing and the beach house blend coffee named after my beach house series with this really cute mug you know that's a turtle do you see all y'all see that that's a turtle and plus any fab five book of the winners choice so if you've never had a caroline's cake i don't know how because it's the best in the world you really have to try one as i said my favorites coconut lemon but they're famous for their seven layer caramel cake and it goes perfectly that's what you're having uh it's so good seven layers and it goes with uh the sweet cake and coffee giveaway goes with the book and the entry form link is on our facebook and instagram and in our one news now well done there they are one year what flavor is that meg mine is a rainbow cake i can't wait to cut it open oh how pretty yeah so good luck everybody and enter before sunday we are so happy you are here meg we are so happy i'm happy to be here too i bet my original first line was it doesn't matter what i had to say anymore because y'all already we moved on so no no want to hear you i'm just oh that it's so nice to be with you and i'm so grateful to be here to all of our followers and i was then going to queue mary kay to talk about our giveaway but we've already done that the stage and not the backstage you all have to know we could not do this without meg oh thank you and we got my friends and fiction champagne food and my food i'm so excited okay can we blow our candles out guys okay ready we have to make a wish okay okay here we go we have the coconut happy birthday to us happy birthday oh thank you for the happy birthday okay so the week of april 19th we have a giveaway coming your way from our sponsor mama geraldine's who you hear us talk about all the time one lucky winner that week will get a 12 pack variety case of mama geraldine's cheese straws and cookies plus a friends and fiction wine tumbler just like the one jody was drinking out of tonight so stay tuned for that that is going to be our giveaway next week which coincidentally happens to be the launch week for our very own christy woodson who knew i had noticed and last but certainly not least the week of april 26 we'll be giving away a three-month page one book subscription care of our sponsor page one books plus a friends and fiction jew toot they are very oh we have them we have one they have one we can't get up i can yeah i've got it right here no i brought one now kathy's gonna get that fab your hair here we go okay i couldn't even tell because i can't oh there we go mary alice is very i threw a few extras in my car and i was like um gonna take i'm gonna pack with them so maybe you can get one from her on book tour and in case you haven't met him we want to introduce you to our tech genius our guru the wizard behind the curtain the man that makes all of this work [Laughter] that's my friends in fiction glasses by the way oh yes before sean worked with us he was a lot of things and still is but he was a viral sensation shawn will you show us a sample of your viral sleep please [Music] [Laughter] oh wait for your children to watch it's so good oh my gosh and shawn was just nominated for two huge awards for his music best pop songs memory and the el pedito go go get it girl that's our boy so the gang is all here you get the presents and we tell the stories tonight all of us have our cakes and we're going to blow out the candles which we already did and we are going to do a complete fun round-robin of questions we have had the most extraordinary year thanks to y'all i know i am grateful beyond measure i want to know everyone including you sean don't you leave everyone's favorite memory mine i'm gonna have so many but i have to say that because it's so recent mine was the surviving savannah launch when our beloved kristen harmel put on a beard yes she did that was memorable and the accent let's be honest the accent was the best i'm going to joke to death at my caroline's case oh my god sean wedding i know john don't tell anybody about it what was your favorite memory oh okay well i'm behind the scenes so all of my like great memories are just the nightmares that um putting out these cars but there was one show i was thinking about i don't even want to like out the person uh it was a guest who was outside on their phone and we're just slowly watching the light thing please let's just wrap this up before it's all the way pitch black no no no it did not wrap up in time it was pitch black remember you put up with so much okay okay again there's so many memories and um it's hard but i first of all everyone gave us a memory when you go back and think of all the different authors they all said something that made us go even jody when she talked about that you know you can't edit a good page it's just that moment of oh yeah that's great but i'll never forget for me and it was kind of it's good and bad but i was i was hosting and it was karen slaughter and it happened to be a pop-up surprise for me wedding for my daughter that night so i i think a couple of us were gone but i was cutting out and then christy and kristen hung in there for they were like oh i went there oh patty the blondes and karen slaughter was karen slaughter with the pirate hat the r and the f-bombs i think the funniest part was just watching all your faces it was so good i loved every minute of it watching it over afterwards i i would like to just note so far that two-thirds of the answers have involved weird things about my face i'm just saying that he wants my favorite was the summit our first summit this past november at uh our house at tybee island where we drank a lot of excellent wine thanks to christine kristen they they have they bring brought so much wine we had to have two cars to carry it all in and yeah it was all gone i don't know what happened to it yeah weird i think it's somebody stole someone broke someone broke it yeah total global domination and where coincidentally i finally met kristen in person even though we lived in the same town wasn't that crazy when we were young well she was young and i was old but i'm a bulldog and she's a she's a gator so that's my that doesn't work my my condolences sorry so yeah yeah you know what uh kathy finally meeting you patti and meg was probably my favorite memory too um though by the time we all met in person i felt like i had known you forever i mean it was bizarre to be like hey nice to meet you like and we were just so far past that point and i think that's what's so amazing is that we not all of us knew each other as well yeah we're on the zoom and then it was at the summit that we lost you guys none of us have met sean in person that's crazy not yet john so in addition to that tybee summit though i would love to say that having my favorite band sister hazel on the show last summer oh yeah uh especially when they sang to us was a really cool highlight that was and i it was so fun and i got such a kick out of andy mcdowell when she was here especially her crazy gerard de pardue story as she was telling that i was like is she saying this is she really saying i know that's why it's pretty amazing that was x thanks for saying that that was great she was great i liked her how about you meg well i'll say you guys really covered a lot of my favorite memories and um as the marketing nerd of the show um and and the only one here besides sean who collects a paycheck because that my most professionally gratifying thing has been uh welcoming our sponsors i think yeah it's just so rewarding to know that there's companies out there who find our little passion project worth investing in so um cheers to mom and jesus and page one and to all of our future partners out there yeah thank you thank you so much cheers um i have to say i mean one is definitely like kristin hannah talking on paddy's phone like having no say i'm like our first test we finally have like hired sean so that we don't look like complete idiots and then like the only the single thing that sean cannot control is brisbane sounds and kristin hannah's sound our first guest it was i just will never forget that it was so funny and then when you watch the episode back you like really can't even tell that it was happening but that was um but we were all time nightmares we were dying inside we just sat there calmly is and then also i am like a little bit competitive and so when what's going on but i'm like a little so when we decided to do the ugly christmas sweater party i was like wow yeah i'm gonna i'm gonna win this and and you did i was extremely convinced that i had to have christmas niggles yeah you had jesus well well here's the thing though they would not come off horrible christmas nails for like three weeks so you still have them you still have the christmas milk well i have my christmas sweater i'm gonna keep that and take it out every year right now in fact yeah she does we do yeah um okay so my question for everybody is what would you say to our community if you could sit down with them and um i guess i'll answer it first and i i like don't even know what to say except that you guys have taken a year that could have been really hard and could have been really impossible and you kind of not only like supported our careers but you allowed us to find the joy in them again because for us the joy of sitting by ourselves for a year and writing a book is to be able to come out and see you guys and we couldn't do that and so to be able to see you here and to get your letters and your emails and your comments i mean it kept us going and there's there's no way to thank you for what you've given us ever yeah i think i just would say thank you and then start crying which i think you're crying i know i'm such a baby i cried a couple times on the show that's true um you have befriended us and you've befriended each other which is astounding to watch that you you know did the friends and fiction book club and you you grew and you you got to know each other we just ran into somebody today who said hey patty weren't you just in hawaii and kathy i love your new coquina they knew us and we'd never met her but we knew her so you we have built this community and we cannot say thank you enough wait before we jump to you ma'am i want to hear sean i want to hear what you would say to everyone i know you're not supposed to but i just want to mike check that's what he did yeah yeah yeah without all these great comments to pull into the feed and you know i'm pouring over every single comment in real time and i it's it's really amazing to see it but i'm also like such a now a huge fan of it like this is the thing i look forward to every week this is my favorite thing and so thank you for letting me be a part of it also don't know and now really from the heart i hope nobody cries i just have to say that was very good i love that okay marielle all right well again like everyone else thank you i'm always amazed that everyone's so busy and they take an hour out of their time and a lot of people don't miss it we see your names out there i mean you know we all and you talk about it we do it we really really love when i look and i see and i always like it because i see hello from and they give the name of the um stone am i echoing here i think i am and hello from hello from and so it means a lot and when you all say you know you made the pandemic bearable you you got us through the pandemic those comments mean a lot to all of us that's really great yeah we feel the same way yeah i think i think i would say stick around we have so much more fun ahead we have so many more great guests so many incredible books to talk about we've got three more lunches right oh what we got nothing more well i would say um since there's so much strife out there on the internet so many places so many corners to find arguments and fights and to disagree with one another thank you for making friends in fiction a soft place to fall and we're a place where we check our differences at the door and we just talk about our common love of books and leave it at that i love that i love that you know and i would say thank you from the bottom of all of our hearts for being our rock through a difficult year so many of you have posted or emailed sweet things saying how you how we've helped you through the pandemic but the truth is you've been a lifeline for all of us so thank you for putting the friends in friends and fiction and thanks for being with us and as you all know um switching tracks a little uh we have started a partnership with parade magazine to write a weekly friends and fiction column and this week it was my honor to write about one of our reasons for creating friends in fiction our love of indie bookstores so i got to interview two independent bookstore owners including one who worked two extra jobs last year to be able to pay her bills during the pandemic she worked a job doing payroll for the government and she worked at a gas station at a walmart gas station just to keep her bookstore doors open which is incredible so it's so important to keep supporting local booksellers like her like like the other woman i wrote about in the parade essay and like all of these booksellers we talk about every week um you know even as the world goes back to normal so i am wondering ladies what have independent bookstores meant to you this last year for me i mean since my first book indies have been supported my work and supported me and i'm not sure that my books would have ever blown in to the world in any way without their support and there's no way we i would ever not turn that around and support them right back you know it's so interesting that you say that because i remember when my first book was about to come out dear carolina and i wanted to go to siba and i did and my publisher was like why are you going to go to seabed like we can't send you a c but you don't even have a book and i was like well i'm going to find a way you know and i think there was just that instinct from the very beginning that like independent bookstores were gonna be the people that were gonna get behind me and that we're gonna try to sell my books and that we're gonna say you should read this this is a new author and that is so 1 000 true um and i think that's able just to think to be able to do anything to help them during this really difficult time and to think you know maybe we could replace the book sales of a signing for them one night when they can't have signings or just anything like just a way to say thank you is it means a lot because they've done so much for us and you know hand selling books is kind of the classic old school way i mean that's what we count on and that's what these are great for but for me i just want to say thank you because they've had to be very creative this last year and for me the most innovative were the virtual book events you know usually we go out and we go have a luncheon or we see you in person but this i mean this last year when we started out i didn't know what a zoo was when kathy's you know mary kay said hey we're gonna meet on zoom i'm like okay i got first i gotta figure out what that is much less hook up so i want to say that it's been really great for me because and the bookstores we've been able to go to communities that we haven't been able to go to on tours and that's been really wonderful so it's just one more way they've been really creative to get books out there to get authors to you and that's why we want to support them yeah i'll echo all that and just say i'm really inspired by indie's creativity and the way that they have so many of them have just risen to the occasion in a really hard time and found ways to not just survive but actually thrive and really add different um aspects to their whole business model i mean just look at what what what oxford exchange did for example with the friends of the first box i mean and and selling other things besides books and delivering books to people's houses and my local indie here shout out to river road books in fairhaven rummage drove to my house and dropped the book off at my door they're driving around ferry even on in bicycles and baskets hand delivering books i mean to just be able to literally think so far outside the box and do whatever it took to not just stay afloat but more than that yeah they've been indie book sellers have been so inspiring to me i've been inspired by their scrappiness yeah and their refusal to say i'm done they don't they you know they could have folded up they could have said i can't do it i can't pay my rent but they just kept going on they kept finding ways to get books into customers hands even when their doors were closed i mean i um there's a bookstore in st pete florida my hometown tombolo the owner is a bicyclist she put a basket on her bike and delivered books on her bike all over the downtown saint pete area little shop of stories in downtown decatur on the square they they came up with an idea of bagging books and putting them outside the door so people could could pick them up and doing after school pickups there's they've just been so creative and they and it's inspiring to us to say you know what if they can keep going you know and we we should add that um that i think it's about a week and a half away independent bookstore day april 24th saturday april 24th it's a day when the whole country celebrates independent booksellers um you know so if you thought about making an independent bookstore purchase before and you haven't or if you haven't in a while this is a great time to do it to celebrate these people you know who have really kind of kept our literary community alive and thriving yeah now my question of course you know i go for the for the silly stuff what is your most embarrassing moment from this last year so many of course have to do with technology well mine of course was watching my daughter at the very beginning we did not know what the hell we were doing with trying to go live to facebook i understand man and so my daughter katie was our was our tech crew and uh on one of those early shows uh you could see her crawling across the floor like a ninja she was under the she was literally under my desk trying to help with the check and that was me thank you so much by the way i don't think i ever formally thanked katie for that yeah this was before we hired sean of course and let me tell you nobody was more grateful for sean and the ought to be a crew and he was like peace out that is um you know there was a show a few months ago um where i had to our power went out and i had to ask a neighbor on the other side of the neighborhood if i could come over and do it from his dining room i remember that yeah and it was so awkward he was so nice i see him every morning when i walk but we're not like you know super close friends it was like kind of a weird ask but i was like i can't let it was when we had lisa see i'm like i can't let you guys down i was the one hosting so he was like yeah sure um so i went over and at the end he told me that his wife's sister was dying and he was he apologized for if they were a little unwelcoming but they were dealing with that that was like oh my god i'm like the worst person in the world so that was an embarrassing memory as well as what mary alice mentioned before about our faces when karen slaughter came on because if you watch that episode back you can see it registering every time like an f-bomb drops from her mouth and it wasn't so much horror it was like are we allowed to do that on facebook like what's happening are we gonna get in trouble here i don't understand what am i supposed to do it's like escalating fantastic it's priceless are we gonna be cut off like yeah it's surprising okay just to just to piggyback on that okay so we've had all these shows where like we all like have our hair done and our makeup and we look really good and we're all here and presentable and ready well that night like for most of the show it was just kristen patty and me it was the one time in the entire time that i was like and not wash my hair i was like at home with my parents i had my hair up in like a bun i looked absolutely horrible i don't know how to look for the washington post took a screenshot that night we all looked bad i think one person i am like kind of mouth open like my eyes are closed it was like kathy we're missing mary kay and mary alice that's the women's show that jody was talking about it was bad it was it was um it was perfect also also so us i mean right the reality is that i like want to be embarrassed but also it just encapsulates who we are it was just everything that was an embarrassing moment that was a good one so one of my most was that embarrassing my most embarrassing was we had one bookseller who everyone seemed very hard time pronouncing and i butchered it yes you mercilessly butchered it so then i tried to mumble my way through it i don't think any of us pronounced it the same way twice but never once pronounced it correctly and for speaking marissa dela santos hates me so con can you show us how great you were at that bookstore who won't say their name you know part of the reason we started this show was to support independent bookstores and you chose one this week and i am going to butcher the name of it so i'm actually not even well i will hocusian hoe kesem okessen books in delaware and i need to remind you that this week's bookstore is hawkeisen book in delaware as our featured independent bookseller of the week who are going to run out or stay put and click on hackassian books okay patty what is the correct pronunciation do we even know it now okay okay everybody go to hope kessin books i know how to say that yeah that was hysterical that was right the worst part is if you look at maurice's face she's like she looks like i was supremely confident that i knew how you went with this authority [Laughter] steam stay easy for us to laugh exactly all right all right all right to be horrified and there yeah how dare you all right well for me i think you know i'm not normally on screen and there's good reason for that i'm always backstage and at the beginning of the show there's this this split second where the cr the music plays and you can sometimes see everybody for half a second and then one show susan yes and by mistake when when we were brought into facebook i was still there and i did not know that i was and i was not just biting my nose i was literally like modeling on them and i thought it looked oh that's amazing what's worse is that it's it's actual moving footage so you can see it every time i'm like oh my my grandmother was rolling i don't know what to say i don't think anything beats that oh my god well anything i say now is sort of like wow that wins but i mean just over and over again it's just happened so many times when i have especially when i'm in north carolina and i freeze and you're always in that awkward moment and i i remember a couple one night i don't even remember who the guest was i must have frozen ten times and i kept coming back in then finally you get in with the phone and and everyone's trying to be gracious and i think we all decided if that ever happens again mary alice just stay away just stay out it's easy i kept popping in like this face from nowhere okay here's my question um there's some we have some classic really great segments that we have week after week after week and i'm curious now that it's been a year um which segment is your favorite segment of the show and i'm gonna say and i know y'all are gonna be mad because you love this too it's the writing tips and i think you know even tonight while we were oohing and eyeing over what jody said yeah they always have authors have such a unique way of looking at their work and there's always one thing and it always seems to be i needed to hear that tip that night well i have to say i love the after show yeah oh yeah which is where we are where we get to let down our hair and that was kind of an accident at the very beginning i don't i think we didn't realize that we were still on camera yeah and we just were like saying oh that was fun or oh my god my you know my bra needs to be on snapchat we're like y'all are still alive [Music] and we always know yeah well it's time it's almost time to go no no it is not you're not going anywhere i know i was just gonna say gotta hurry this up you guys you know i uh i love it when the authors first come on before the show so the part that all of you out there don't see because you can see that second when they realize what they're walking into so this isn't your typical interview show it's not your typical book event it's five friends and we embrace every author guest as a friend and comrade i mean because they are we already have so much in common right out of the gate and you know we're all having a hard time this year and almost everyone we bring on has a book to talk about and it's just you know we're all kind of in this together so it's really amazing each and every time to see that moment that that dawns on the guest and to kind of watch them slip into that rhythm of our friendship here on the show i i love it when they just you can see sometimes they're a little nervous just like you said and all of a sudden like you said they start to laugh and i think it's the camaraderie that we have that warms them up and knows this isn't going to be just question and answer yeah it's going to be a little more yeah exactly yeah um i love hearing the authors talk about their favorite independent bookstore yes there's always a story and it always kind of makes me feel a little nostalgic and like why i love the bookstores i do and i think we all have those moments especially um not only as children but it's becoming beginning authors and how we remember so well those bookstores that we're like willing to take a chance on us on those very first books and that's true um i mean i hope that you know someday we're like me personally you guys definitely are but that i'm able to kind of pay them back for that kindness because i will never forget it i will never forget the ones that were like yeah we've never heard of you in your debut but we would love to have an event for you and you also kind of don't forget the ones that were like no yeah me too they put your book out front right now nobody they put your book out front that was yeah but exactly and i just i love hearing that everyone has those memories it's like a universal experience very true i love when they talk about the values of reading and writing in their childhood it's my favorite question and i love it one more question yes i love hearing about who they were before they were writers and i love hearing i'm telling y'all we need to take a poll i bet it's eighty-five percent of the higher libraries library and jody did it tonight it's um it's a common running theme and then then there's those actually who have the opposite story like itafram who wasn't even really supposed to be reading some of the books that changed her life and how books that they read in their childhood and the values around reading and writing actually make them go the other way so i love that part um i got to do something real with her i'm sorry this is so off topic a couple weeks ago nothing's off topic on the other side of things on the planet and like we're going to be best friends shortly don't tell her i think she knows that's going to happen i think she knows okay i think she knows yeah i mean i think it's it's gonna happen i mean i'm i'm gonna i'm gonna pursue i'm gonna make it happen she's amazing well i love when an author catches us off guard that by sharing something so deeply personal and it's happened a bunch of times where i'm backstage and i'm brought to tears um by an author's openness and honesty and it just strikes me as generous because they don't have to tell some of the stories they tell and um it's just really rewarding and i think the highlight clip reel that we released last week highlighted a bunch of those moments and i hope you guys got a chance to see that um speaking of highlights we don't fish for compliments around here but again back to the marketing nerd in me i really love when our authors our author guests um speak highly of friends and fiction and that's happened a few times as well and sean i we've pulled a little bit of a clip reel of the praise for fnf can you show it beautiful thing here and i am so so grateful to be a part of it you guys are amazing thank you so much first i do also want to thank you for having us i just think this show is spectacular and fun you're all so adorable i can't seem i'm so happy to be here hello thank you for having me my gosh the fab five i mean it's pretty great before i start i am honored to be with these beautiful talented women my gosh what a group thanks for coming i am you know so admiring of what you guys have done and how you pitched in in the in the pandemic to help other writers and to support independent bookstores and you know i think a lot of people sat around and said boy i sure would like to do that and i sure would like to help people but you guys actually did and um so kudos to you if i wasn't out of champagne i would cheers all right so now i have a question for all of you so what is the one thing you've learned about yourself this past year either from being a part of friends and fiction or just from life in general during this difficult time that we're all living through um i'll answer first i i'm i'm so glad to learn that the old adage that you can't teach an old dog new tricks is a dirty dirty lie look at all the new tricks we've learned you guys oh gosh wait who are you calling old dogs is the dog in this scenario in this scenario yeah seriously we have we've all learned so much together and it's just been super inspiring and um here's to new tricks here's some new tricks and tricks yeah all over whatever it might be i'm out i'm out bag where's sean when we need him to gosh i think for me it's just been like the power of the pivot i mean oh wow love that it's a really big true thing um and we've all done it and we've all helped each other do it and we've all been in that moment especially during covert of like oh my god like no stores have my books now oh my god none of us can go on tour now what oh my god i mean it was just like one thing after another after another after another and this community has just continued to be here for us and i just want to say this is not something that i learned about myself this is something that i have learned through friends and fiction and our group um people who say that reading is over and reading is dead do not know what they are talking about because community is absolutely unbelievable and reading is here to stay my friends yeah i'm saying it's actually growing yeah for me one of the things i kind of knew but learned even more so is it's the collaboration and what happened in the collaboration not only among the six of us and seven including sean is the collaboration of y'all out there you collaborated with us it ended up being this because we couldn't have done it without you you couldn't have done it without us and we all came together with a common purpose that can be done even when we're kept apart so for me i've learned that you can build community and you can collaborate even when you're isolated yeah um boy these are hard ones because i mean we learned so much and i actually that's what actually my whole book was about but i think that the conclusion i came to is to actually do what i've heard all my life that we should do and that is to live in the present yeah you know so often especially with booktubers we're always planning ahead and we're living in the future but to just enjoy today as the gift that it is and enjoy the people in the right here and right now and right now we're all together and i have to say to all of you people out there too thank you you're the gift you're here with us too yeah and we're enjoying this moment one year kids one year one year are we dogs or kids yes my wife you never know what you're going to be called next i've got garden gnomes i don't know well i learned that if i just put my head down and power through that i can do just about anything and there were some big challenges this past year and there are challenges in the coming year because the public landscape has changed dramatically yeah so you can do anything like even write an anthology with us one day we're gonna meet her say yes right here right now exactly i i've learned that this show's not worth doing if mary kay andrews won't write an anthology with us how's that i'm just kidding writing a personal essay that's what i've learned no you are not right you're all better than you think but it's a new way of communicating it is it is and it's it's good because i think we've all learned to be a little bit more open and more personal and dig a little bit deeper which i think is good for us so it's certainly it's been good for me so i've learned that that you know kind of like meg said we're all resilient we're all capable of adapting and sacrificing and as i've said before it's sometimes in the darkness that we find that bright light within us right i mean i feel like not just through friends and fiction but just through this whole last kind of difficult year so in this case though we found the bright light all around us yeah which is all of you out there all of you who have shown up week after week to hang out with us all of you who have read our books and taken a moment to tell us or to tell each other about those books and in the midst of a dark year you have given us so much light there's been light around us indeed so speaking of light patty you did such a beautiful job running things tonight and meg sean what would we do without you i know we talk a lot about the fab five but i wish people knew the two of you better too because you're both extraordinary and you were working every bit as hard as we are to deliver a great show every week so thank you so much oh sean we love you so thank you sean thank you meg for doing all you do it's a it's just an honor to work with both of you to my friends and fiction sisters i never could have imagined that something so beautiful this true and deep and lasting friendship would have come out of such a difficult time but it did and i hope that reminds us for the rest of the for the rest of our lives that there is always light to be found in the darkness and speaking of light all of you out there are it those of you who show up most weeks we notice we see you see you we appreciate it more than we can ever say and you have illuminated our worlds you have supported us and you have sustained us and it has been a great great honor to spend the last year with you and i want to thank sean especially for those funny comments you slide by on the banners each week they always catch us all by surprise and to meg for working so hard behind the scenes to make it look seamless and to all of you for showing up week after week and spreading the love and as we move into the future the world will open up but we'll still be here and we hope you will too we have amazing future guests giveaways and some special surprises in store in the coming months starting next week but most of all we have each other and we have you okay and you have us the friendship goes both ways thank you from the bottom of our hearts for being here we'll see you next week clara berry special launch for christy's new book featuring two special guests three special guests and one cutter happy one year birthday to all of you too cheers good night y'all

Channel: Friends & Fiction

Views: 896

Rating: 4.8857141 out of 5

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Id: N8nN4raDeEo

Length: 105min 16sec (6316 seconds)

Published: Thu Apr 15 2021