EVENT TRANSCRIPT
Laurie Frankel/Susan Straight
Warwick's Books
Thursday, June 17, 2021
Julie Slavinsky: If you're outside the San Diego, we're in the La Jolla area. We are at the bottom corner of the country. My sign says since 1896. Laurie and Susan might not know this. We're celebrating our 120th anniversary. We're the oldest continuously family owned bookstore. It was started in 1896. I still love doing this even in the virtual world. We'll start live programming in the fall but we will continue to do virtual events.
For today's event, Laurie and Susan will chat and I will monitor Facebook for questions in the chat. I'll put the links to buy Laurie and Susan's books. We can ship them or you can come to Warwick’s and shop. Laurie Frankel is the author of 4 books. She lives in Seattle with her husband, daughter, and border collie and makes good soup. She is here to talk about her latest book One Two Three. Joining her is Susan Straight. She has written 8 novels and 2 children's books. She has been published in several publications and has won several awards. Have a great conversation.
Susan Straight: I am so excited to talk about this book. Laurie, this book made me stay up for three or four nights. That's a great compliment from one writer to another.
Laurie Frankel: Thank you.
Susan Straight: I really loved it and was fascinated. We've talked about geography and family. This is a deep look inside a family. It's intimate; it's about 3 sisters, Mab, Monday, and Mirabelle. It's universal. You can pull back and focus on the community that suffered. How did you decide to have the 3 sisters be the focal point?
Laurie Frankel: That's a great question. With This is How it Always Is, I wanted as many characters as possible to get many points of view. I couldn't sell quintuplets. I wanted all of them to be able to talk. In this case, they would all narrate in turn and needed to sound different from one another. Three was maxed out. I wanted to look at how something impacts 3 people in common who live together. They are very different from one another. You can go in 3 directions and come up with 3 different people.
Susan Straight: Each triplet has a distinct voice. These characters care the most about each other. They're teenagers. Mab has her own distinctive voice and Monday has hers and is very much about books. She's only the color yellow. Mirabelle speaks through mechanical devices. The town of Bourne had a serious disaster and water was poisoned and affected everyone in the town. It has echoes of Flint and other places. The whole community is based on this thing.
I live in Riverside, California. It was citrus groves and other industries. This novel really talks about work and a lot of American novels don't talk about that anymore. How did you get this idea?
Laurie Frankel: I read an article in 2016 in the New York Magazine. I read it and it was about a small town in West Virginia downstream from a chemical plant that polluted their water. They did a class action suit that lasted 20 years and is still going on. It was horrifying and the tenacity was remarkable to wage a lawsuit for 20 years. The magnitude of the wrong would not leave my brain. I thought about it and every day when I read a newspaper and the incident was very common. The towns in the world that are downstream from pollution are many. This place was isolated and had few prospects. These towns are chosen because they are good places to pollute without consequence. That was heartbreaking and important.
Susan Straight: I live in a place with many pollutants in an Amazon Fulfillment Center. My mom was an immigrant and abandoned when I was 3. We lived near acid pits. We played in rainbow-colored acid pits. We were very poor. Now I'm a writer who travels the world. You fictionalized it in a beautiful way. I want to read a passage. The character in this book is the mother of the triplets who have been damaged by this poisoned water. She bakes. (Reading from the book). She bakes because it doesn't involve water.
The serrated edge and softness--you're a stunning water. It is like a master class to get people to feel something. She bakes because it's eggs, butter, sugar, flour, and there's no water. People still have poisoned water. Cows drink poisoned water so people don't want to eat meat. You're a genius.
Can you say something to people -- how do you imagine that kitchen?
Laurie Frankel: You are very kind. One thing you hear when you read the newspapers is that they are still using bottled water. When I stop and think about every time I turn on my tap, it would be an astonishing amount of bottled water. If you believe that your water does you harm, that's a lot of bottled water and people would make compromises. They would cook with it or flush the toilet or bathe. Maybe I would use it for coffee; maybe it's safe. That's how she lands on baking. It feels different as a user than pouring it into soup or tea. It's a compromise.
Susan Straight: I love it and the fact that your prose was so lovely. I like to populate my novels with a large cast of characters. It's a community and a family. I love the dialogue and secondary characters. I studied with James Baldwin and he taught me a lot about writing. We as writers are the quiet ones who are listening. This is no ordinary high school; all the kids have been damaged. Half the school is damaged and poisoned. There are 2 kids called the Kyles. Belsam is the chemical company. (Reading from the book).
I think this is a beautiful piece of dialogue. You have a great facility for how teenagers talk. Don't you think listening is our greatest skill as writers?
Laurie Frankel: I do; it's how I know the book is working. The characters start talking and I just listen and transcribe. It's active listening and eavesdropping on conversations when you go out for coffee. You set them off and they go and you just have to listen. I was keen on the community; it's part of what I set out to do. They have been truly wronged. This town would be a wonderful place to live in other ways. They have a sense of community but don't always agree. They support one another. They have done remarkable things in making the town accessible and inclusive for everyone.
Susan Straight: What was so striking is that we love to talk about home. It has turned into a place only for our families. I live in a hard-hit place for Covid. My neighbor was in intensive care for 4 days. My notions of home are what I loved about this. Think about the Yomar girls; everyone is down for Stars Hollow. Everyone worked at Belsam Chemicals. When I wrote my memoir, my mom was 16 and worked in Ontario, Canada at night in a diner. The night shift from the plant came to the diner. I thought of this when I read your novel. It's about the river too. It could be anywhere. It's what Belsam Chemicals needed. Can you talk about the part the river plays in the plot?
Laurie Frankel: The notion of geography was important. I didn't want to make this any particular community or company. This is happening all over the place. The general sense of living downstream from something that is harming your water, soil, and air, is happening everywhere. We don't want to write it off as something happening elsewhere. You can't locate this place. I didn't want you to go "up" to New York. The seasons were general. Many places have rivers and that notion of water being something you can't trust is something we talk about more and more.
Novelists like water; it symbolizes all sorts of things. You need water; it's non-negotiable. When it harms you, you have to work around it and learn to do without. It has been dammed. It's something you can't live without. It's hard to think of current policy initiative that don't get traced back to water. I couldn't put that in the center of the book.
Susan Straight: Today it's 100+ degrees here. I took my dog out at night for her walk. I've been writing about the Santa Ana River. My house is 110 years old. I walked to the deadend and we walk by the river. It's the longest wild river in southern California. I thought when I read your book about geography and water mean. You think about what the river provided. A woman walked by with a little knife looking for a plant that was good for diabetes. She was indigent. I was thinking our river is full of sewerage. I thought about Mab being out in the world. Monday is obsessed with books and here library in her hours. Mirabelle is obsessed with the stories of the world. They all come together around the river and the dam to make your plot work. I loved Nora. Your novel is about home, community, family, and the resilience and strength of women. It's a tender and touching book and a testament to memory.
Laurie Frankel: The issue of memory ran through this as I went along. I didn't go into it with the idea of memory. Such a large portion of the population dies and they take a lot of generational memory with them. The people who could object and warn their children are gone. Their good memories become inaccessible because they have been superseded by the other things that happened. You don't remember the good things because you have fear and anger. All of that seems true to me for these folks that I didn't know until I met them.
Susan Straight: I have 3 daughters and they have a bond. Two of them are married; you can't supersede the bond of sisterhood. I've rarely met someone who can write so well about siblings in both of your last books. Mirabelle has to do something and Monday has to give something up and Mab has to be careful. I loved the unbreakable bond.
Laurie Frankel: Thank you. They are very different and navigate the world differently. Narratively they have to be different. I am interested in how people without things in common can come together to do a thing. It's the beauty of novels.
Susan Straight: I loved it.
Julie Slavinsky: If you have questions, put them in the comments. I have a couple of questions. The names of the characters, how did you decide on those names?
Laurie Frankel: They are triplets and their mother is alone. She wants a device to tell them apart and the reader did too. It's not like the names rhyme. I give you a device on the first page. Mab is one syllable. Monday has 2 syllables and Mirabelle is 3 syllables. That is the only normal name. I spend time at the beginning picking names; they really matter. Mab is from Romeo and Juliet. Monday is because her mom was in labor so long and it's now Monday. It's to help you remember.
Julie Slavinsky: Hillary Matel's book with all the Thomases must have driven you insane.
Laurie Frankel: She doubled down on it. It takes you 100 of the 2000 pages to get your head around what she's doing.
Julie Slavinsky: Once you get it, you get it.
Laurie Frankel: I was making people up and she wrote historical fiction.
Julie Slavinsky: I liked that she didn't use their last names. Having triplets is unusual; what sparked that?
Laurie Frankel: There are a lot of things about this town that are unusual. What aspects of their life are the result of this water, good or bad? No one ever gets to know. Was it because of the water that she had triplets? I wanted to look at a wide spectrum of kids and they were all different.
Julie Slavinsky: Did you love the cover? Was that always the title?
Laurie Frankel: My editor picked the title. I didn't title any of my books.
Julie Slavinsky: That's not your strength.
Laurie Frankel: No; she did an amazing job. I didn't come up with it.
Julie Slavinsky: Heather hasn't read it but loved your characters in This is How it Always Is. Was it tough to write?
Laurie Frankel: It was easier than this one which was a pain in the ass. It's about teenagers. The two books go together. They are about the idea of pushing the boundaries of what normal is. The first one was narrated and came out of my brain and was past tense. One Two Three wasn't like that.
Julie Slavinsky: You challenge yourself to keep it interesting to you too.
Laurie Frankel: These girls had to narrate in the first person, present tense because they're teenagers. I had to figure that out.
Julie Slavinsky: Teenagers are all about me anyway.
Laurie Frankel: So they couldn't be talked out of that.
Julie Slavinsky: Karen Fowler is here. I remember you talking about this book many years ago. How did you think about doing that?
Laurie Frankel: Karen was there when I finished the first draft of this book. I got to the end 30 or 40 times because it required so much rewriting. It has been fraught in all sorts of ways that had to be wrestled with. Some happened in editing and negotiating with yourself. What can be comprised on? What can get changed? When am I right about this even if it's upsetting to people? I worry about sending it out into the world. It's in your head and heart and it's as good as you can make it but it leaves your hands and is frightening.
Julie Slavinsky: You know what you wanted it to do but you don't know how people will react.
Laurie Frankel: We get to control it for a long time. It's all me; I control it for years and then control nothing.
Julie Slavinsky: One author we hosted wrote How to Get Rich.... In movies there's a focus puller. In books, readers are the focus pullers and decide what's important. It's so out of your hands.
Laurie Frankel: Definitely. It's an act of courage.
Julie Slavinsky: Susan, do you want to mention your book?
Susan Straight: It comes out in March and is called Mecca. My thinking is that it's all about these ideas of characters. This book is a big California novel. I always wanted to write the great California novel. The main character rides a motorcycle. He's dark skinned and never been to Mexico. Another character lives in San Bernardino. Part of it takes place in a reservation. What does it mean to be from a place that's so big? There are 3 brothers who created a compound in East Hollywood. There's a compound with 10 cottages. How do you create home in a place that's so big?
Julie Slavinsky: Is there a website you can direct people to?
Susan Straight: I published my first book 30 years ago and just turned 60. I've had a website for a long time. One thing I love about Laurie is how much we love to read. I can't wait to go back into a bookstore. It's easy to find me at Susanstraight. What does it mean to be a family and not leave your home during a pandemic versus your home is poisoned? Vaqueros were the first cowboys.
Julie Slavinsky: Are you working on something else?
Laurie Frankel: I'm always writing the next thing. The wrested this out of my hands. I'm way too far into the next novel and it's a big fat mess. I have to cut 50,000 or 75,000 words. Cutting them is easier than writing them.
Julie Slavinsky: The thing about the first draft, 30 years ago I was the audience of an author and she said to envision swimming across the Hudson River and a tree and a rock and ice come at you. You pull yourself out and are gasping. Someone on a bridge tells you that was the first draft; now go back and do it again.
Julie Slavinsky: Do you have a website?
Laurie Frankel: It's lauriefrankel.net.
Julie Slavinsky: This has been so fun and we'll say good night to Facebook and thank you for watching.
Laurie Frankel/Susan Straight
Warwick's Books
Thursday, June 17, 2021
Julie Slavinsky: If you're outside the San Diego, we're in the La Jolla area. We are at the bottom corner of the country. My sign says since 1896. Laurie and Susan might not know this. We're celebrating our 120th anniversary. We're the oldest continuously family owned bookstore. It was started in 1896. I still love doing this even in the virtual world. We'll start live programming in the fall but we will continue to do virtual events.
For today's event, Laurie and Susan will chat and I will monitor Facebook for questions in the chat. I'll put the links to buy Laurie and Susan's books. We can ship them or you can come to Warwick’s and shop. Laurie Frankel is the author of 4 books. She lives in Seattle with her husband, daughter, and border collie and makes good soup. She is here to talk about her latest book One Two Three. Joining her is Susan Straight. She has written 8 novels and 2 children's books. She has been published in several publications and has won several awards. Have a great conversation.
Susan Straight: I am so excited to talk about this book. Laurie, this book made me stay up for three or four nights. That's a great compliment from one writer to another.
Laurie Frankel: Thank you.
Susan Straight: I really loved it and was fascinated. We've talked about geography and family. This is a deep look inside a family. It's intimate; it's about 3 sisters, Mab, Monday, and Mirabelle. It's universal. You can pull back and focus on the community that suffered. How did you decide to have the 3 sisters be the focal point?
Laurie Frankel: That's a great question. With This is How it Always Is, I wanted as many characters as possible to get many points of view. I couldn't sell quintuplets. I wanted all of them to be able to talk. In this case, they would all narrate in turn and needed to sound different from one another. Three was maxed out. I wanted to look at how something impacts 3 people in common who live together. They are very different from one another. You can go in 3 directions and come up with 3 different people.
Susan Straight: Each triplet has a distinct voice. These characters care the most about each other. They're teenagers. Mab has her own distinctive voice and Monday has hers and is very much about books. She's only the color yellow. Mirabelle speaks through mechanical devices. The town of Bourne had a serious disaster and water was poisoned and affected everyone in the town. It has echoes of Flint and other places. The whole community is based on this thing.
I live in Riverside, California. It was citrus groves and other industries. This novel really talks about work and a lot of American novels don't talk about that anymore. How did you get this idea?
Laurie Frankel: I read an article in 2016 in the New York Magazine. I read it and it was about a small town in West Virginia downstream from a chemical plant that polluted their water. They did a class action suit that lasted 20 years and is still going on. It was horrifying and the tenacity was remarkable to wage a lawsuit for 20 years. The magnitude of the wrong would not leave my brain. I thought about it and every day when I read a newspaper and the incident was very common. The towns in the world that are downstream from pollution are many. This place was isolated and had few prospects. These towns are chosen because they are good places to pollute without consequence. That was heartbreaking and important.
Susan Straight: I live in a place with many pollutants in an Amazon Fulfillment Center. My mom was an immigrant and abandoned when I was 3. We lived near acid pits. We played in rainbow-colored acid pits. We were very poor. Now I'm a writer who travels the world. You fictionalized it in a beautiful way. I want to read a passage. The character in this book is the mother of the triplets who have been damaged by this poisoned water. She bakes. (Reading from the book). She bakes because it doesn't involve water.
The serrated edge and softness--you're a stunning water. It is like a master class to get people to feel something. She bakes because it's eggs, butter, sugar, flour, and there's no water. People still have poisoned water. Cows drink poisoned water so people don't want to eat meat. You're a genius.
Can you say something to people -- how do you imagine that kitchen?
Laurie Frankel: You are very kind. One thing you hear when you read the newspapers is that they are still using bottled water. When I stop and think about every time I turn on my tap, it would be an astonishing amount of bottled water. If you believe that your water does you harm, that's a lot of bottled water and people would make compromises. They would cook with it or flush the toilet or bathe. Maybe I would use it for coffee; maybe it's safe. That's how she lands on baking. It feels different as a user than pouring it into soup or tea. It's a compromise.
Susan Straight: I love it and the fact that your prose was so lovely. I like to populate my novels with a large cast of characters. It's a community and a family. I love the dialogue and secondary characters. I studied with James Baldwin and he taught me a lot about writing. We as writers are the quiet ones who are listening. This is no ordinary high school; all the kids have been damaged. Half the school is damaged and poisoned. There are 2 kids called the Kyles. Belsam is the chemical company. (Reading from the book).
I think this is a beautiful piece of dialogue. You have a great facility for how teenagers talk. Don't you think listening is our greatest skill as writers?
Laurie Frankel: I do; it's how I know the book is working. The characters start talking and I just listen and transcribe. It's active listening and eavesdropping on conversations when you go out for coffee. You set them off and they go and you just have to listen. I was keen on the community; it's part of what I set out to do. They have been truly wronged. This town would be a wonderful place to live in other ways. They have a sense of community but don't always agree. They support one another. They have done remarkable things in making the town accessible and inclusive for everyone.
Susan Straight: What was so striking is that we love to talk about home. It has turned into a place only for our families. I live in a hard-hit place for Covid. My neighbor was in intensive care for 4 days. My notions of home are what I loved about this. Think about the Yomar girls; everyone is down for Stars Hollow. Everyone worked at Belsam Chemicals. When I wrote my memoir, my mom was 16 and worked in Ontario, Canada at night in a diner. The night shift from the plant came to the diner. I thought of this when I read your novel. It's about the river too. It could be anywhere. It's what Belsam Chemicals needed. Can you talk about the part the river plays in the plot?
Laurie Frankel: The notion of geography was important. I didn't want to make this any particular community or company. This is happening all over the place. The general sense of living downstream from something that is harming your water, soil, and air, is happening everywhere. We don't want to write it off as something happening elsewhere. You can't locate this place. I didn't want you to go "up" to New York. The seasons were general. Many places have rivers and that notion of water being something you can't trust is something we talk about more and more.
Novelists like water; it symbolizes all sorts of things. You need water; it's non-negotiable. When it harms you, you have to work around it and learn to do without. It has been dammed. It's something you can't live without. It's hard to think of current policy initiative that don't get traced back to water. I couldn't put that in the center of the book.
Susan Straight: Today it's 100+ degrees here. I took my dog out at night for her walk. I've been writing about the Santa Ana River. My house is 110 years old. I walked to the deadend and we walk by the river. It's the longest wild river in southern California. I thought when I read your book about geography and water mean. You think about what the river provided. A woman walked by with a little knife looking for a plant that was good for diabetes. She was indigent. I was thinking our river is full of sewerage. I thought about Mab being out in the world. Monday is obsessed with books and here library in her hours. Mirabelle is obsessed with the stories of the world. They all come together around the river and the dam to make your plot work. I loved Nora. Your novel is about home, community, family, and the resilience and strength of women. It's a tender and touching book and a testament to memory.
Laurie Frankel: The issue of memory ran through this as I went along. I didn't go into it with the idea of memory. Such a large portion of the population dies and they take a lot of generational memory with them. The people who could object and warn their children are gone. Their good memories become inaccessible because they have been superseded by the other things that happened. You don't remember the good things because you have fear and anger. All of that seems true to me for these folks that I didn't know until I met them.
Susan Straight: I have 3 daughters and they have a bond. Two of them are married; you can't supersede the bond of sisterhood. I've rarely met someone who can write so well about siblings in both of your last books. Mirabelle has to do something and Monday has to give something up and Mab has to be careful. I loved the unbreakable bond.
Laurie Frankel: Thank you. They are very different and navigate the world differently. Narratively they have to be different. I am interested in how people without things in common can come together to do a thing. It's the beauty of novels.
Susan Straight: I loved it.
Julie Slavinsky: If you have questions, put them in the comments. I have a couple of questions. The names of the characters, how did you decide on those names?
Laurie Frankel: They are triplets and their mother is alone. She wants a device to tell them apart and the reader did too. It's not like the names rhyme. I give you a device on the first page. Mab is one syllable. Monday has 2 syllables and Mirabelle is 3 syllables. That is the only normal name. I spend time at the beginning picking names; they really matter. Mab is from Romeo and Juliet. Monday is because her mom was in labor so long and it's now Monday. It's to help you remember.
Julie Slavinsky: Hillary Matel's book with all the Thomases must have driven you insane.
Laurie Frankel: She doubled down on it. It takes you 100 of the 2000 pages to get your head around what she's doing.
Julie Slavinsky: Once you get it, you get it.
Laurie Frankel: I was making people up and she wrote historical fiction.
Julie Slavinsky: I liked that she didn't use their last names. Having triplets is unusual; what sparked that?
Laurie Frankel: There are a lot of things about this town that are unusual. What aspects of their life are the result of this water, good or bad? No one ever gets to know. Was it because of the water that she had triplets? I wanted to look at a wide spectrum of kids and they were all different.
Julie Slavinsky: Did you love the cover? Was that always the title?
Laurie Frankel: My editor picked the title. I didn't title any of my books.
Julie Slavinsky: That's not your strength.
Laurie Frankel: No; she did an amazing job. I didn't come up with it.
Julie Slavinsky: Heather hasn't read it but loved your characters in This is How it Always Is. Was it tough to write?
Laurie Frankel: It was easier than this one which was a pain in the ass. It's about teenagers. The two books go together. They are about the idea of pushing the boundaries of what normal is. The first one was narrated and came out of my brain and was past tense. One Two Three wasn't like that.
Julie Slavinsky: You challenge yourself to keep it interesting to you too.
Laurie Frankel: These girls had to narrate in the first person, present tense because they're teenagers. I had to figure that out.
Julie Slavinsky: Teenagers are all about me anyway.
Laurie Frankel: So they couldn't be talked out of that.
Julie Slavinsky: Karen Fowler is here. I remember you talking about this book many years ago. How did you think about doing that?
Laurie Frankel: Karen was there when I finished the first draft of this book. I got to the end 30 or 40 times because it required so much rewriting. It has been fraught in all sorts of ways that had to be wrestled with. Some happened in editing and negotiating with yourself. What can be comprised on? What can get changed? When am I right about this even if it's upsetting to people? I worry about sending it out into the world. It's in your head and heart and it's as good as you can make it but it leaves your hands and is frightening.
Julie Slavinsky: You know what you wanted it to do but you don't know how people will react.
Laurie Frankel: We get to control it for a long time. It's all me; I control it for years and then control nothing.
Julie Slavinsky: One author we hosted wrote How to Get Rich.... In movies there's a focus puller. In books, readers are the focus pullers and decide what's important. It's so out of your hands.
Laurie Frankel: Definitely. It's an act of courage.
Julie Slavinsky: Susan, do you want to mention your book?
Susan Straight: It comes out in March and is called Mecca. My thinking is that it's all about these ideas of characters. This book is a big California novel. I always wanted to write the great California novel. The main character rides a motorcycle. He's dark skinned and never been to Mexico. Another character lives in San Bernardino. Part of it takes place in a reservation. What does it mean to be from a place that's so big? There are 3 brothers who created a compound in East Hollywood. There's a compound with 10 cottages. How do you create home in a place that's so big?
Julie Slavinsky: Is there a website you can direct people to?
Susan Straight: I published my first book 30 years ago and just turned 60. I've had a website for a long time. One thing I love about Laurie is how much we love to read. I can't wait to go back into a bookstore. It's easy to find me at Susanstraight. What does it mean to be a family and not leave your home during a pandemic versus your home is poisoned? Vaqueros were the first cowboys.
Julie Slavinsky: Are you working on something else?
Laurie Frankel: I'm always writing the next thing. The wrested this out of my hands. I'm way too far into the next novel and it's a big fat mess. I have to cut 50,000 or 75,000 words. Cutting them is easier than writing them.
Julie Slavinsky: The thing about the first draft, 30 years ago I was the audience of an author and she said to envision swimming across the Hudson River and a tree and a rock and ice come at you. You pull yourself out and are gasping. Someone on a bridge tells you that was the first draft; now go back and do it again.
Julie Slavinsky: Do you have a website?
Laurie Frankel: It's lauriefrankel.net.
Julie Slavinsky: This has been so fun and we'll say good night to Facebook and thank you for watching.