EVENT TRANSCRIPT
Laurie Frankel/Julie Carrick Dalton
Belmont Books
Wednesday, June 23, 2021
Stacey Liberty: Hi everyone, I'm Stacey, event coordinator for Belmont Books. We have a bedtime story time tomorrow night. If you have questions for the author, please type them into the chat. Laurie Frankel has written 4 novels and has appeared in the New York Times and several other publications. She has received several awards and her works are in 25 languages. She lives with her husband, daughter, and border collie and makes good soup.
I will now turn the event over to Laurie and Julie.
Julie Carrick Dalton: Can you give us an overview of your book?
Laurie Frankel: Yes, and I loved your book too. People write books that they love. The book is called One Two Three and I'm in my third week of book tours. It's hard to talk about because books are so big. It is about a small town with a dark past which isn't really a past. It's about triplets, 3 girls who narrate in turns. They're teenage sisters who live downstream from a chemical plant which is polluting their water. Their mother has a lawsuit against this corporation that has lasted 17 years. The girls take it into their own hands.
Julie Carrick Dalton: When they asked me to do this, my answer was yes. I wrote part of my novel in Belmont Books. I hope everyone buys a book from them. I was grateful that they thought of me; I felt like you wrote it for me. I love books about nature and the environment and climate. I lived in Massachusetts and if you've read Civil Action, it's about a leather company. I saw that waterway every day when I looked out the window.
Let's talk about the sisters, who are very different with different voices. They complement each other. One is in a wheelchair and doesn't have full mobility. One is autistic; their voices and lives are so full. How did you research this and did people read for you?
Laurie Frankel: I'm so glad. I love all 3 of them. They are strong and vulnerable and I feel motherly toward them. I miss them. They are very different; I'm glad you could tell them apart. You can tell which girl you are hearing from. They navigate the world differently from one another. They each have things in common with me but are different from me; I'm not a teenage girl. I used to be.
I did a lot of research and reading and thinking and revising. In early drafts they sounded like me. My vocabulary is better than it was when I was 16; I needed to dial them back a little bit so they sounded believable. Mab is studying for the SATs. It took a lot of revisions so they sounded different from me and from each other. I cut 300,000 words from the book.
Julie Carrick Dalton: That's a lot. Did one sister come to you first or did you have all 3 in mind at first?
Laurie Frankel: They came all together but not in their current form. I looked at varieties of consequences like how the polluted water and catastrophic event impacted people differently. They would be triplets and have different abilities and disabilities and approaches. They came to me together and then took their own paths.
Julie Carrick Dalton: A lot of times when there's books with more than one narrator, I have a favorite but didn't have a favorite with them. You define them as individuals but they come together and work as one person. I saw the love and respect. They have disagreements but come together. I loved that about the book. You defined their sisterhood. I wanted to ask about Bourne. It's fictional and is like a dystopia and utopia at the same time. People have died and are born with deformities. Every place in the town has ramps and is accessible and a third of them have disabilities. It doesn't look like any other town. How beautiful is the town and how well they treat each other. They don't see each other's disability. They don't say "birth defect" or "abnormality" and immigrants also feel welcome.
Laurie Frankel: That's exactly my hope. We tend to think it as one or the other but we should feel both. They have been abused and it wasn't accidental; it was systemic. They will never recover. I wanted to think about what it looks like in 20 years. Newspapers talk about long-term health effects. I was concerned about that; what does it look like? The issues of diagnosis and accessibility and mobility are different if people aren't in the minority. If there are lots of ramps and wheelchairs, it becomes easier to navigate in a wheelchair. It just worked its way in. So many of the ways in which we make things inaccessible are a result of majority versus minority culture and we aren't great at that.
It's a really supportive community and I'm moved by that. It's the way of the future and one thing we've learned this year. Individual people can support each other. It's the notion of listening to one another and trying what's best.
Julie Carrick Dalton: Everyone in the town didn't agree on how to move forward but they're still a community even with their differences. They accept each other's positions. The characters were real and fighting for truth and justice. They are badass women standing up for truth.
Laurie Frankel: I'm so glad. I didn't want it to be cheesy so tried to avoid it. It was important to me that they be angry with what happened to them and with one another and had grudges. That happens in a small town. I didn't want it to be sparkly inspirational.
Julie Carrick Dalton: I wanted to ask about the research about the chemicals; you seemed very knowledgeable. Were there certain incidences that inspired the book?
Laurie Frankel: In 2016 I read an article by Nathaniel Rich in the New York Times magazine. There was a movie called Dirt Waters about it. Second Nature is also a series of articles about this.
Julie Carrick Dalton: I'll have to get it.
Laurie Frankel: I read it and couldn't stop thinking about it. I thought it was remarkable to be suing for 25 years and the company is so obviously in the wrong. I started paying attention and realized that this example is in newspapers every day. Corporations cause polluted water and soil all over the world, and not accidentally; it's part of the plan. I kept reading about long-term health effects. It's the purview of novelists. I started reading everything I could find about it. I didn't want to pin it on any one company or instance or one town. It happens all over the place. It could be anywhere.
Julie Carrick Dalton: I live on the waterway that dumps into the lake and the elements have dumped into the lake. They have sunk to the bottom but people swim in it. It's beautiful but underneath it, if it's dredged, all of that will come back up.
Laurie Frankel: It's a lot of back yards. The particulars vary but people think it's happening somewhere else. It probably is where you are but in a different way. Runoff from farms pollutes land and firefighting chemicals. We all live downstream. This stuff is in your water; they're forever chemicals. They go into your body and don't come out. This year we learned that it's still your backyard.
Julie Carrick Dalton: I just read How Beautiful We Were about a town in Africa in which an American oil company polluted the water. The two books spoke to each other. These books came out within a couple of months of each other. I also read A Spy and the Struggle. It's about the political movement of young people and environmental and racial justice. There are so many books in this category of fiction.
Laurie Frankel: I'm glad people are talking and writing about it.
Julie Carrick Dalton: What are you reading right now?
Laurie Frankel: Books about climate change are interesting. Ruth's book comes out in October. American War is one I've read. He has a new book coming out in August.
Julie Carrick Dalton: He's one of the first blurbs I got and one of the first who endorsed my book
Laurie Frankel: He is such a good writer.
Julie Carrick Dalton: Do you have another book in the works?
Laurie Frankel: Yes, but don't hold your breath. It's challenging to write when you have a child in remote school. I'm always writing the next novel.
Julie Carrick Dalton: I have one coming out in 2023. It's called The Last Beekeeper. It's about a father and his daughter and has a lot of themes in the background. The story moves me through it, not the themes. The characters pull people through the book and the themes seep through. How do you think about that?
Laurie Frankel: I want to read some thought driven by good characters in good relationships. I don't want to lectured. It's what draws me to novels.
Julie Carrick Dalton: It's a balance.
Laurie Frankel: It's a difficult and interesting balance. I'm interested in how people braid a theme through a plot. It takes someone who doesn't know and they learn something throughout the novel. It's why I write and am almost always reading one.
Julie Carrick Dalton: What are you reading now?
Laurie Frankel: It's a series of essays and they're all different. I just finished a memoir about foster care. (Cannot hear him/her.) is beautiful writer. I just finished this book and was rereading it. It came out at the beginning of the pandemic. It's about teenagers in high school and sort of like mine. Look at that cover; she's such a cool writer. This is her third novel. Also Stranger Care.
Julie Carrick Dalton: You said you cut 300,000 words from your book. Was it character stuff or research? I had to cut a lot of science out of my book. Did it haunt you?
Laurie Frankel: No, it was really bad early drafting. I combine characters. Three or four people boil down to one person. I try lots of character quirks and ways a conversation might go. I write a scene 5 or 6 times so throw out the first ones. I may be wrong about something that I guessed early on. It is interesting because I always think I'll cut less--it's a sentence at a time but adds up.
Julie Carrick Dalton: I'm sure you have those words that haunt you like "just" and I cut those. There's a scene that involves a bear. I love it but had to cut it and was sobbing. In the last draft I found a way to bring back the bear and make it fit into the book; I was very attached to the scene.
Laurie Frankel: The scene is beautiful and haunts me. That's how you know; maybe it didn't call to you anymore.
Julie Carrick Dalton: If you have any questions for Laurie, throw them in there. There's so much to this book. How was this book launching in the pandemic different? Did you learn things to take with you? You've done them in person as well.
Laurie Frankel: Book launches are different from one another. Some people write books faster than others. Four years passed since my most recent one before this. I'm not wild about talking in front of people; it's terrifying. I miss seeing everyone but like doing it virtually. I didn't have to find shoes and wear a nice outfit. You have to travel light because you get on a plane every day. We have been able to have CART transcription and ASL interpretation. It makes it more accessible to people. I think it will become more and more the norm going forward.
Julie Carrick Dalton: My book came out in January and so many other authors learned how to launch on Zoom before me. You're staring at yourself. It's a different experience from a live crowd.
Laurie Frankel: I hope we will be able to meet in person. It's nice to connect this way and see into people's home and have intimate conversations. I don't look at myself; I look at you.
Julie Carrick Dalton: In CrowdCast it's just you on the screen. It's a learning curve technology wise. Some events will be live and some will be streamed. The librarians and booksellers have done a lot of work coordinating these events. When this is all over, I want to go on a tour and hug the booksellers who supported my book.
Laurie Frankel: It has been heroic work. It's supporting your community and is irreplaceable.
Julie Carrick Dalton: We haven't talked about your writing process. I'm very curious. Has it changed from book to book?
Laurie Frankel: Yes, but it's more as my kid grows up. There were years when I couldn't take my eyes off her. Paying for babysitting is very motivating. School isn't like 40 hours a week for child-care. I was good about sitting down and writing when she was out of the house. There's a tiny bit of magic in it. It's hours and hours at a time. I don't outline; I just write bad drafts and revise and revise. It's not an efficient process but is increasingly gratifying. Some people like to do the draft but don't like to revise or overhaul it. Those are different jobs. The process of drafting is different from late-stage revision. I have challenges but they are not forcing me to sit down and do it. I feel lucky about that. Sitting down and writing isn't something I have to make myself do.
Julie Carrick Dalton: I have 4 kids and it took 13 years of stolen moments to write my book. I was under contract for the second book and didn't have 13 years. The kids are older now so I have to rediscover how to write. I'm still discovering myself as a writer.
Laurie Frankel: That's perfect. I tell people to use those stolen moments. Those 20 minutes are huge. You're not on the phone or talking so you can think about what happens next and then write it down when you get home. I want to write as fast as I can type so I have to think it through. I think of things in the shower or walking the dog. Now I don't even start if I don't have 4 hours and my desk and chair.
Julie Carrick Dalton: No one can get to me in the car-pool line. I talk to myself and play with dialogue and pretend like I'm talking on the phone. I recorded myself sometimes to see what it sounded like. I still do that.
Laurie Frankel: I'm going to steal that; it's a good idea.
Julie Carrick Dalton: I need to hear things out loud. When is your new book coming out?
Laurie Frankel: I don't have a date; we'll see how it goes.
Julie Carrick Dalton: I want to read it.
Laurie Frankel: I appreciate that. It's not quite coming together yet and it's overly long; I need to cut it but have to figure out what to cut.
Julie Carrick Dalton: I'm wrestling with a messy draft now too. It's like putting a puzzle together. It's a good feeling when you find out what isn't working. What are your best writer tips?
Laurie Frankel: I tell students to write about what they read; that's good advice for writers. People ask me about books about writing. I don't recommend them but they often give advice that doesn't apply to you and it makes people feel bad. Everyone's process is personal and you have to figure out what works for you. Read a lot while you're writing. I write with a book in my lap which isn't for everyone. It presents posture challenges. It's how you learn to write. I have students write about it when they finish a book. Here's what worked and what didn't and how does it apply to me? I make a list.
Julie Carrick Dalton: That's a good idea and you can go back and look at books you've read and what worked for you.
Laurie Frankel: It's an exchange of ideas; it's not stealing. I always have students do this without fail. It's really clarifying about concrete things. I need to plant the seed for what will be revealed at the end.
Julie Carrick Dalton: I want to remind people that you can get the book at Belmont Books. It's a beautiful read if you like books about small towns and sisters and environmental issues. The mom is a fighter and fierce. It's not about just one thing. I'm grateful Stacey for reaching out to me.
Stacey Liberty: I saw Laurie with Charlotte McConaghy when they did an event together. I read both books and they're both really good. Susan, thank you for doing the closed captioning. Thank you everyone for giving us your time and have a great time. Good night.
Laurie Frankel/Julie Carrick Dalton
Belmont Books
Wednesday, June 23, 2021
Stacey Liberty: Hi everyone, I'm Stacey, event coordinator for Belmont Books. We have a bedtime story time tomorrow night. If you have questions for the author, please type them into the chat. Laurie Frankel has written 4 novels and has appeared in the New York Times and several other publications. She has received several awards and her works are in 25 languages. She lives with her husband, daughter, and border collie and makes good soup.
I will now turn the event over to Laurie and Julie.
Julie Carrick Dalton: Can you give us an overview of your book?
Laurie Frankel: Yes, and I loved your book too. People write books that they love. The book is called One Two Three and I'm in my third week of book tours. It's hard to talk about because books are so big. It is about a small town with a dark past which isn't really a past. It's about triplets, 3 girls who narrate in turns. They're teenage sisters who live downstream from a chemical plant which is polluting their water. Their mother has a lawsuit against this corporation that has lasted 17 years. The girls take it into their own hands.
Julie Carrick Dalton: When they asked me to do this, my answer was yes. I wrote part of my novel in Belmont Books. I hope everyone buys a book from them. I was grateful that they thought of me; I felt like you wrote it for me. I love books about nature and the environment and climate. I lived in Massachusetts and if you've read Civil Action, it's about a leather company. I saw that waterway every day when I looked out the window.
Let's talk about the sisters, who are very different with different voices. They complement each other. One is in a wheelchair and doesn't have full mobility. One is autistic; their voices and lives are so full. How did you research this and did people read for you?
Laurie Frankel: I'm so glad. I love all 3 of them. They are strong and vulnerable and I feel motherly toward them. I miss them. They are very different; I'm glad you could tell them apart. You can tell which girl you are hearing from. They navigate the world differently from one another. They each have things in common with me but are different from me; I'm not a teenage girl. I used to be.
I did a lot of research and reading and thinking and revising. In early drafts they sounded like me. My vocabulary is better than it was when I was 16; I needed to dial them back a little bit so they sounded believable. Mab is studying for the SATs. It took a lot of revisions so they sounded different from me and from each other. I cut 300,000 words from the book.
Julie Carrick Dalton: That's a lot. Did one sister come to you first or did you have all 3 in mind at first?
Laurie Frankel: They came all together but not in their current form. I looked at varieties of consequences like how the polluted water and catastrophic event impacted people differently. They would be triplets and have different abilities and disabilities and approaches. They came to me together and then took their own paths.
Julie Carrick Dalton: A lot of times when there's books with more than one narrator, I have a favorite but didn't have a favorite with them. You define them as individuals but they come together and work as one person. I saw the love and respect. They have disagreements but come together. I loved that about the book. You defined their sisterhood. I wanted to ask about Bourne. It's fictional and is like a dystopia and utopia at the same time. People have died and are born with deformities. Every place in the town has ramps and is accessible and a third of them have disabilities. It doesn't look like any other town. How beautiful is the town and how well they treat each other. They don't see each other's disability. They don't say "birth defect" or "abnormality" and immigrants also feel welcome.
Laurie Frankel: That's exactly my hope. We tend to think it as one or the other but we should feel both. They have been abused and it wasn't accidental; it was systemic. They will never recover. I wanted to think about what it looks like in 20 years. Newspapers talk about long-term health effects. I was concerned about that; what does it look like? The issues of diagnosis and accessibility and mobility are different if people aren't in the minority. If there are lots of ramps and wheelchairs, it becomes easier to navigate in a wheelchair. It just worked its way in. So many of the ways in which we make things inaccessible are a result of majority versus minority culture and we aren't great at that.
It's a really supportive community and I'm moved by that. It's the way of the future and one thing we've learned this year. Individual people can support each other. It's the notion of listening to one another and trying what's best.
Julie Carrick Dalton: Everyone in the town didn't agree on how to move forward but they're still a community even with their differences. They accept each other's positions. The characters were real and fighting for truth and justice. They are badass women standing up for truth.
Laurie Frankel: I'm so glad. I didn't want it to be cheesy so tried to avoid it. It was important to me that they be angry with what happened to them and with one another and had grudges. That happens in a small town. I didn't want it to be sparkly inspirational.
Julie Carrick Dalton: I wanted to ask about the research about the chemicals; you seemed very knowledgeable. Were there certain incidences that inspired the book?
Laurie Frankel: In 2016 I read an article by Nathaniel Rich in the New York Times magazine. There was a movie called Dirt Waters about it. Second Nature is also a series of articles about this.
Julie Carrick Dalton: I'll have to get it.
Laurie Frankel: I read it and couldn't stop thinking about it. I thought it was remarkable to be suing for 25 years and the company is so obviously in the wrong. I started paying attention and realized that this example is in newspapers every day. Corporations cause polluted water and soil all over the world, and not accidentally; it's part of the plan. I kept reading about long-term health effects. It's the purview of novelists. I started reading everything I could find about it. I didn't want to pin it on any one company or instance or one town. It happens all over the place. It could be anywhere.
Julie Carrick Dalton: I live on the waterway that dumps into the lake and the elements have dumped into the lake. They have sunk to the bottom but people swim in it. It's beautiful but underneath it, if it's dredged, all of that will come back up.
Laurie Frankel: It's a lot of back yards. The particulars vary but people think it's happening somewhere else. It probably is where you are but in a different way. Runoff from farms pollutes land and firefighting chemicals. We all live downstream. This stuff is in your water; they're forever chemicals. They go into your body and don't come out. This year we learned that it's still your backyard.
Julie Carrick Dalton: I just read How Beautiful We Were about a town in Africa in which an American oil company polluted the water. The two books spoke to each other. These books came out within a couple of months of each other. I also read A Spy and the Struggle. It's about the political movement of young people and environmental and racial justice. There are so many books in this category of fiction.
Laurie Frankel: I'm glad people are talking and writing about it.
Julie Carrick Dalton: What are you reading right now?
Laurie Frankel: Books about climate change are interesting. Ruth's book comes out in October. American War is one I've read. He has a new book coming out in August.
Julie Carrick Dalton: He's one of the first blurbs I got and one of the first who endorsed my book
Laurie Frankel: He is such a good writer.
Julie Carrick Dalton: Do you have another book in the works?
Laurie Frankel: Yes, but don't hold your breath. It's challenging to write when you have a child in remote school. I'm always writing the next novel.
Julie Carrick Dalton: I have one coming out in 2023. It's called The Last Beekeeper. It's about a father and his daughter and has a lot of themes in the background. The story moves me through it, not the themes. The characters pull people through the book and the themes seep through. How do you think about that?
Laurie Frankel: I want to read some thought driven by good characters in good relationships. I don't want to lectured. It's what draws me to novels.
Julie Carrick Dalton: It's a balance.
Laurie Frankel: It's a difficult and interesting balance. I'm interested in how people braid a theme through a plot. It takes someone who doesn't know and they learn something throughout the novel. It's why I write and am almost always reading one.
Julie Carrick Dalton: What are you reading now?
Laurie Frankel: It's a series of essays and they're all different. I just finished a memoir about foster care. (Cannot hear him/her.) is beautiful writer. I just finished this book and was rereading it. It came out at the beginning of the pandemic. It's about teenagers in high school and sort of like mine. Look at that cover; she's such a cool writer. This is her third novel. Also Stranger Care.
Julie Carrick Dalton: You said you cut 300,000 words from your book. Was it character stuff or research? I had to cut a lot of science out of my book. Did it haunt you?
Laurie Frankel: No, it was really bad early drafting. I combine characters. Three or four people boil down to one person. I try lots of character quirks and ways a conversation might go. I write a scene 5 or 6 times so throw out the first ones. I may be wrong about something that I guessed early on. It is interesting because I always think I'll cut less--it's a sentence at a time but adds up.
Julie Carrick Dalton: I'm sure you have those words that haunt you like "just" and I cut those. There's a scene that involves a bear. I love it but had to cut it and was sobbing. In the last draft I found a way to bring back the bear and make it fit into the book; I was very attached to the scene.
Laurie Frankel: The scene is beautiful and haunts me. That's how you know; maybe it didn't call to you anymore.
Julie Carrick Dalton: If you have any questions for Laurie, throw them in there. There's so much to this book. How was this book launching in the pandemic different? Did you learn things to take with you? You've done them in person as well.
Laurie Frankel: Book launches are different from one another. Some people write books faster than others. Four years passed since my most recent one before this. I'm not wild about talking in front of people; it's terrifying. I miss seeing everyone but like doing it virtually. I didn't have to find shoes and wear a nice outfit. You have to travel light because you get on a plane every day. We have been able to have CART transcription and ASL interpretation. It makes it more accessible to people. I think it will become more and more the norm going forward.
Julie Carrick Dalton: My book came out in January and so many other authors learned how to launch on Zoom before me. You're staring at yourself. It's a different experience from a live crowd.
Laurie Frankel: I hope we will be able to meet in person. It's nice to connect this way and see into people's home and have intimate conversations. I don't look at myself; I look at you.
Julie Carrick Dalton: In CrowdCast it's just you on the screen. It's a learning curve technology wise. Some events will be live and some will be streamed. The librarians and booksellers have done a lot of work coordinating these events. When this is all over, I want to go on a tour and hug the booksellers who supported my book.
Laurie Frankel: It has been heroic work. It's supporting your community and is irreplaceable.
Julie Carrick Dalton: We haven't talked about your writing process. I'm very curious. Has it changed from book to book?
Laurie Frankel: Yes, but it's more as my kid grows up. There were years when I couldn't take my eyes off her. Paying for babysitting is very motivating. School isn't like 40 hours a week for child-care. I was good about sitting down and writing when she was out of the house. There's a tiny bit of magic in it. It's hours and hours at a time. I don't outline; I just write bad drafts and revise and revise. It's not an efficient process but is increasingly gratifying. Some people like to do the draft but don't like to revise or overhaul it. Those are different jobs. The process of drafting is different from late-stage revision. I have challenges but they are not forcing me to sit down and do it. I feel lucky about that. Sitting down and writing isn't something I have to make myself do.
Julie Carrick Dalton: I have 4 kids and it took 13 years of stolen moments to write my book. I was under contract for the second book and didn't have 13 years. The kids are older now so I have to rediscover how to write. I'm still discovering myself as a writer.
Laurie Frankel: That's perfect. I tell people to use those stolen moments. Those 20 minutes are huge. You're not on the phone or talking so you can think about what happens next and then write it down when you get home. I want to write as fast as I can type so I have to think it through. I think of things in the shower or walking the dog. Now I don't even start if I don't have 4 hours and my desk and chair.
Julie Carrick Dalton: No one can get to me in the car-pool line. I talk to myself and play with dialogue and pretend like I'm talking on the phone. I recorded myself sometimes to see what it sounded like. I still do that.
Laurie Frankel: I'm going to steal that; it's a good idea.
Julie Carrick Dalton: I need to hear things out loud. When is your new book coming out?
Laurie Frankel: I don't have a date; we'll see how it goes.
Julie Carrick Dalton: I want to read it.
Laurie Frankel: I appreciate that. It's not quite coming together yet and it's overly long; I need to cut it but have to figure out what to cut.
Julie Carrick Dalton: I'm wrestling with a messy draft now too. It's like putting a puzzle together. It's a good feeling when you find out what isn't working. What are your best writer tips?
Laurie Frankel: I tell students to write about what they read; that's good advice for writers. People ask me about books about writing. I don't recommend them but they often give advice that doesn't apply to you and it makes people feel bad. Everyone's process is personal and you have to figure out what works for you. Read a lot while you're writing. I write with a book in my lap which isn't for everyone. It presents posture challenges. It's how you learn to write. I have students write about it when they finish a book. Here's what worked and what didn't and how does it apply to me? I make a list.
Julie Carrick Dalton: That's a good idea and you can go back and look at books you've read and what worked for you.
Laurie Frankel: It's an exchange of ideas; it's not stealing. I always have students do this without fail. It's really clarifying about concrete things. I need to plant the seed for what will be revealed at the end.
Julie Carrick Dalton: I want to remind people that you can get the book at Belmont Books. It's a beautiful read if you like books about small towns and sisters and environmental issues. The mom is a fighter and fierce. It's not about just one thing. I'm grateful Stacey for reaching out to me.
Stacey Liberty: I saw Laurie with Charlotte McConaghy when they did an event together. I read both books and they're both really good. Susan, thank you for doing the closed captioning. Thank you everyone for giving us your time and have a great time. Good night.