♪♪
-Hello and welcome back to “Book Lust.”
I'm Nancy Pearl.
My guest today at Folio in downtown Seattle is author
Julianna Baggott.
Her new book, a collection of short stories,
is called “I'd Really Prefer Not to Be Here with You.”
And I'm smiling
because I loved this collection of stories.
Julianna, thank you so much for being here today.
-Thank you for having me.
-Um, so I first the first book of yours that I read in
I and I, which is which was later in your career,
is “Harriet Wolf's Seventh Book of Wonders.”
And I just I just loved that book.
It was exactly the kind of book
that draws me in very character driven.
The writing was great.
I thought
I thought you did such a good job
making these characters come alive.
And I know when we were
chatting a little bit
before we started, you said that it wasn't
it-say what you what you said about.
Yeah. You know, I don’t always, um you know, write in the genre
that I would most like to read or that I most,
you know, that that I'm drawn to.
It's the story that appears first.
And then I have to kind of
find the best possible genre for that story.
But, you know, I love a lot of like big sweeping historical
novels and I love quirky novels and unusual characters.
And yeah, so it was a joy to write that book.
It took me a long time to write it,
but it was a joy to write.
-But what was that?
Yeah, I see the way you described
the novels that you like that have a little bit of quirk
that have,
you know, this kind of historical periods.
And and that's just that's my what what do we say?
That's my lane or whatever.
And you and you handled the quirk
so beautifully in those the characters are quirky
enough
so that they're recognizable, feasible,
because we're all quirky in our own way.
And and um, and and again, I just loved the writing,
so I do want to recommend
that book to our viewers and listeners as well,
because it was just a joy to read.
Why was it hard to write
or why did it take you so long, do you think?
-It was a it's a big book, like it's a very ambitious novel.
You know, it spans that, you know, 20th century.
It's a lot of research.
I probably wrote into it and then into another novel
and then into another novel, a few times
because if you don't let something go and release it.
So that's the nice thing
about the short stories is that I don't
I can't hold them that long.
You know, there it is.
It either works in its DNA or it doesn't.
I can write the whole thing and then no one sees it
and I can.
Sometimes I rework them, but
I really enjoy at a certain point, I had more ideas
than I had the desire to run marathons.
You know, like here's a concept
and a world and I want to write it.
And then I've got another one coming
and I want to write it.
And so that's why the short story
was always my favorite form.
It's just that novels for a long time
were just selling better for me.
-Right. -And that's what industry wanted.
And then, you know, with short stories
that the film industry
was and television
industries were more interested in them,
and then suddenly there was energy there.
And I thought, Oh my gosh, I got to go
back to what I love, which I am a sprinter.
You know, in my heart. -In your heart.
-I loved to like have the idea run and then be done with it. So,
um yeah, so these
these stories, I mean,
that makes it sound like I didn't edit them.
They're painfully, you know what
What, what is the best possible version of this?
So again, some of these took a long time.
Some of them didn't.
You know, every once in a while,
you have a short story that kind of comes out whole.
And then you think for the rest of your life
that it's always going to come out whole.
But yeah, so I love doing the high concept worlds,
and then I like to tell a really intimate story inside
of a really big concept.
And that's what this collection is.
-Mm hmm.
When you said that the story comes to you first,
and then you have to find the right genre
to make the most of the story.
When did the characters appear?
Because one of the things that that comes through
so beautifully in this collection of stories
are the are the various voices of the narrators.
-Well, you know, with the title story,
“I'd Really Prefer Not to Be Here with You,”
I had a very specific audience. When my kids were little.
They had a babysitter who's very, very, very funny.
And she she went on to write comedy, um, for television.
She now is a writer on he “Family Guy.”
And (laughter) I wanted to write something.
I had
this idea and I wanted to write
something that would make her laugh, you know, really hard.
And I loved “Fleabag.”
I love Phoebe Waller-Bridge.
I feel like her writing allows a lot of space for women
um, to be
messy and emotional and, um you know, uh,
corrupted in their own way, but also seeking redemption.
And so I really
I so, you know, I love “Fleabag,”
so I really what I wanted to do was like “Fleabag” in tone,
but a sci-fi twist, you know
what I mean, like a big high concept world.
So for me, I-with,
I'm always talking about inners and outers.
And the outer is the idea, you know, with that one,
it was, you know,
I thought for a long time there should be a dating app
that you get dinged by your exes if you're trash,
you know, like if you're a bad, bad partner,
you should get dinged.
And, um, I had it in my mind for a very long time
as a very good idea.
But then I thought,
well, what if you were the one who got dinged so hard
that you got banned for life from all dating apps?
And then so I had that and then I knew
I had these characters that I wanted a type of character
I wanted to, so move through it.
So the outer is the idea.
But then I think, okay, how do I what life,
what person should be, you know, moved into this?
What's the inner of this?
And so I was like, you know, it's a needle.
And then how are you going
to thread it with one specific life, one human beings?
And so
you really want those things to kind of exploit each other
so that the idea really
isn't matching with something that's,
you know, a person going through
something that really makes those things collide
and bump up against each other.
And so, um,
I'm always thinking about and I and I'm collecting outers.
I'm always collecting big ideas,
but I'm also constantly collecting little inners.
You know who you know, a person I see on the street.
You know, I imagine their back story
and immediately, like, oh, my gosh,
how did they get there with one shoe,
you know,
or just funny lines that are, you know, said in the house,
somebody goes on a, you know, a big riff.
I was terrified of frogs as a child.
It's in there, you know, that’s how this started.
-Right, right. -So, yeah.
So that's how I kind of conceptualize it.
-And do you keep a notebook?
I mean, do you write those things down?
-Yeah.
And so, um, I have well, I'm looking at a wall
filled with like little tiny pieces of paper
that are mostly, you know, ideas and concepts over there,
there's a wall that's filled with little tiny
memories and details.
And then we have like a big, you know,
I text things to my husband or voice them, send them.
And he puts them in just a really big document.
Every once in a while
he'll go through and say, These are big,
these are the big ideas.
These are little tiny moments, you know?
Yeah. -Uhuh.
-So everything it's not so much like what comes first.
It's like, I have a bunch of this,
a bunch of that, and then it's matching them.
Which ones would make, you know, pairings
that would be too obvious or easy pairings,
but which ones would make pairings that, ooh,
you know, that's unexpected.
But I would love to see this person
in that world trying to figure it out.
-Were,
Did you write as a kid, too?
-Yeah, yeah, yeah. I wrote
my whole life.
My sister was, she's nine years older than I am until
she was living in New York
as an actor when I was still little.
And we went into the city all the time and my parents
go to place tons and tons and tons of plays.
So I saw a lot of really bad theater, (laughter)
occasionally incredible theater, incredible theater.
So so yeah, I really my ear was what was trained early.
I mean, I just,
and so once I have a voice, I really can say, oh,
this person's going to tell me the story.
You know,
I can kind of sit back a little bit and let them go.
-Uh huh.
When you're working on when you get
that sort of combination of inner and outer,
do you always know whether it
should be a short story or a longer piece?
-Yeah.
-It announces itself to you. -It announces itself.
But of course, also it's also about, you know, like
finding pleats.
So if I have something that small,
I can see the pleats and open them up
if I need to get bigger and then I can close them,
you know, cast of characters, how many points of view,
how much time passes.
There's all these different ways
that pleats kind of open up
and a story can get bigger or accordion down.
And that's just experience over time,
you know, kind of figuring those things out.
-Are there short story writers that you really admire
or short stories that you wish you'd written?
-Yeah, there are.
I mean, I really love a lot of writers, um, you specifically,
it's funny
because I as I was
sitting here thinking about point of view
and how one of the stories in
the collection is “Welcome to Oxhead,” which was me doing,
you know, the,
the “we” the collective we of “Virgin Suicides,”
which I could never do
and sustain the way that Eugenides does for a novel.
There's just that's a magic trick.
But I felt like I definitely could use that voice
in a short story.
It's a very short story,
you know, it's a six or seven page short story.
But I really wanted to have that kind of disembodied
but like big voice for a world.
Um, so I am always looking at other writers
and trying to
figure out what they're doing and see if I can use them
that, you know,
their technique, their voice, their their blueprint
of what they've done. Yeah.
-The other big “we” novel that I always think about is Joshua
Ferris's
“Then We Came to the End.”
-Oh, well, he's very funny. -Yeah.
-He's very funny and heartbreaking.
Yeah, I
once, we met each other at a bar once, um
not knowing that we were writers,
I was just very, very hungry,
and the bar had nothing to eat.
So I just asked for,
like, celery and maraschino
cherries. (Laughter) things that you would find.
And we started talking and we tried to be normal people.
It was really funny.
We were both trying to be normal, like, um,
there was a Red Sox game on
and we tried to talk about sports
and we tried to talk about like, you know,
chatting to, you know, kill the time.
And then we found out
that we both come from the same publishing
house, like wandered out (unintelligible).
I was there for another meeting with a film person
and we figured out who each other were, you know?
(laughter) Um, but he is very, very funny.
I think Tom Perrotta's, you know, really wonderful.
-Yeah.
-Mary Morrissey is
I don't know if you've ever you would love Mary Morrissey.
She's an Irish writer a “Mother of Pearl”
was really an incredible novel for me to go into.
“Harriet Wolf.” -Mm hmm.
-”Unraveling” by Elizabeth Graver.
Elizabeth Graver has a new ... . -Yes, she does.
-Yeah, I haven't picked it up yet.
Have you?
-No, uh-uh, I have it at home.
-Yeah, I'm excited about her because
she does historical fiction in that way that feels just,
you know,
like you're not caught up in
a disconnect from time, but you're really with
living, breathing people. She's amazing.
Yeah.
So there's a there are a number of people
for short stories. I'm trying to think.
I mean.
Uh, well, you know, Mark has had that,
a short story collection.
You know, Gabriel García márquez,
he's part of the reason why I'm here.
I would say he's part of the problem, yeah. -Really?
-I blame him (unintelligible) old Southern Gothic stories,
short story writers. -Uh huh.
-I love. Yeah.
So there are a lot of great ... .
-Yeah.
One of the with voice
I always think of Lorrie Moore
when she was early in her career
when she was writing short stories.
And I think I think when I was reading the collect ...
your collection and the various voices,
I was thinking of Lorrie Moore in those wonderful quotable ... .
-Every time you see me trying
to describe a character feeling self-conscious.
That's her.
-Mm hmm. -I mean,
she can do a little bit,
like there's that story where she says,
‘I know how I must have looked to the doctor
like a dumpling, like my face,
like a dumpling’ or something like that.
She can just flip it.
And she's so funny and so heartbreaking.
And I love that's my favorite knife edge, you know?
-Mm hmm. -Um, yeah,
so she really taught me craft wise how to be very,
you know, succinctly funny, you know, and
you know, Nabokov, too.
He's always, can be, incredibly succinctly funny.
Um, yeah.
Which is also screenwriting.
You know, a lot of what I've learned from screenwriting
is, you know, you get like this much
to write, a little character description.
It'd be really hilarious, you know?
-Right, right.
So are you doing a lot of screenwriting these days?
I know several of those stories are already.
Are they are. Yeah, yeah, yeah.
-Yeah. A bunch of them are.
In fact that “Welcome to Oxhead”
is with Jessica Biel's company and Paramount
um, and then “Backwards” is the big story in there.
We didn't know it was a big story
when we read the collection, but it turned out to,
you know, um,
there was a bidding war that ended up with Netflix
and Shawn
Levy attached to direct. -And tell us
tell us about, give us the plot of that story.
-Yeah “Backwards,”
So I work with my son
on the film and television side he's
it has an encyclopedic brain for film.
He's Brooklyn-based writer and he,
and he (unintelligible) filmmaker and although he's
very you know, he's still very young.
I mean, I don't know, maybe he's 26, 27.
I don't know. Who cares? You know what I mean?
I think you can keep track of children.
But anyway, so he, um, was in film school
for a masters program
at Brooklyn College, and he just felt like,
‘I'm not learning enough.
It's I'm not learning anything new.’ And so he dropped out.
And then that January, we said,
‘Why don't you be idea
generation for us?
Just come up with ideas because you're
fantastic at that.’
And so he did. He just started generating ideas.
He'd send them to us and whatever.
And then one of them was “Backwards,” which
it had the Benjamin Button
part to it, like it is about de-aging, but
basically when you in, in, in a near future,
when you know that you're going to die,
you have two options.
You know, option A
is kind of to naturally do it and go into hospice
and you know, be surrounded by those you love.
Or option B, you can de-age like go back,
you know, go back through your life
and really in the end die of young age, um,
and you know, like a couple of decades, a
decade a day kind of thing going backwards.
And so this again, it's like, well, how would I, who,
how do I enter that story?
What life goes into that story?
And as somebody
who's a sandwich generation, you know, with older parents
in their late eighties who I'm the primary point
person, I live very close to them.
And with kids, you know, I was very interested in
in the person who would be the daughter
who's estranged from her father
and who gets called in to kind of be the person,
the point person for him to de-age
and how they would so quickly
have to come to terms with their relationship.
And also how much when someone is older
and, you know, the parent
becomes the child and you know, that that
that reversal that happens it's so beautiful.
-It is. -And I wanted to do that, um,
you know with someone who had a long way to go and had an
and couldn't really actually maybe get to the forgiveness
as cleanly
as they could have,
because I think that a lot of people don't get
clean forgiveness, you know, at the end sometimes.
But it doesn't matter
when somebody is actually, when you're losing someone,
it doesn't matter becomes more primal than that.
-Right.
I, I think that one of the things
about the collection that I found so interesting
is, I mean, they're all clearly
your ideas is your inners and your outers.
But each of the stories has its own strength and its own, um,
its own appeal.
And they're going to, in many ways, appeal
for different reasons to different people.
Because I found that
that de-aging one, um,
just, it was very moving.
It was in a way humorous.
I mean, it had the same
I mean, it's hard for me to see that
you could write a short story,
that you
could write a short story
that doesn't have some humor because that's you.
Right?
But but it was a story that was that
that was so moving and and flipped,
flipped everything that you think,
you know, I really thought about, oh,
if that had been possible,
you know, for me and my father,
you know, what would that have been like?
That would have answered a lot of questions for me.
So, you know, I don't want people to
to think, oh, you know, this is a book,
these are humorous,
you know, very clever, lovely short stories.
But there's a bedrock underneath them
that's really a commentary on the way we live our lives.
I thought.
-Yeah, I think that, well,
and there's also some horror in there too. -Yeah.
-You know what I mean, really, which comes from my own, you know,
some very personal parts of my life that I had to
figure out (laughter) and process.
You know, there is
the horror is definitely me
processing actual things that happened. But um,
yeah, so also I really like to make people laugh,
especially in certain ones because they, they
they open their arms, you,
you laugh
you you throw yourself back, you open up your chest,
you know the things that you do.
And it's so much easier to punch somebody when they're
laughing. (laughter)
So the emotional punch,
I always that's one of my favorite things
to be able to do to disarm people and then punch them.
-Yeah.
The title story about the young woman,
about the group therapy for people
who have been banned for life from dating apps.
I just I have to say that was the first one I read.
I usually start
with the title story when I'm reading a collection,
and I just I just wanted to read the whole thing out loud.
I mean, I kept like,
you know, calling my husband and saying,
Oh my God, this is so clever.
And you always want to just say,
‘How did you get the idea for that?’
But you know. -Yeah. I know, I know this.
And especially with Ubers,
once I found out that Uber is not only you could
ding the driver, but the driver could ding you,
I thought, ‘Oh, well, friends, here we are.
We've done it.’
To be honest, I was a little bit afraid.
I was like, ‘I've got to go around being nicer.’
I mean, I have, I have just in French, but
like cursed out, a French cab driver so viciously,
you know,
because he was pulling into oncoming traffic and whatnot
and change lanes in Paris.
I was with my mother and holding a baby
and I just went off
and my mom was just
she had no idea what I was saying,
that she was like, oh, my God. Yeah.
And so I was like, yeah, I have I,
you know, I'm not always my best self. I'm not.
Although in that situation,
I still feel like we needed to get out of that car.
But yeah, so the idea that, you know, yeah,
I was something that I just held on to
and then, you know,
the details on every page people say, like,
where did you get the idea for that?
And I'm like, every story is like 17 million
little ideas, you know, that you're like,
is this the story belongs or is this then you know,
and you're constantly, yeah.
So there's
this guy named Melnick who in I think the late 60s
define creativity as associative memory.
That works exceptionally well.
And I don't think that's everybody's description
that works for everyone
because I
think a lot of people are generative
from a really deeply imaginative base, you know,
I mean,
or they're blocked from the subconscious aspect of that.
They're really just pops for them.
And it's a world that they are unfamiliar with.
But for me, it's all about associative memory,
you know what I mean?
I constantly like
I have a Rolodex of my life, you know, and every story
I've ever heard and every detail it, you know,
and I'm moving through them and so everything's like,
you know, um,
I don't know, glittered,
you know, with all of that.
So that's why I think the specificity
and specificity is funny.
You know, specificity is heartbreaking.
That's the way you get there.
-Right?
What advice would you give to somebody
who's just starting out as a writer,
wanting to be a writer, wanting to write?
I think there's a difference between saying,
I want to be a writer and I want to write.
Yeah, it's just it's hours.
It's drilling the hours.
Um, you know, obviously, like figuring out who you love
and reading them viciously, you know,
really hating certain writers.
I have readers who, I mean writers who come in who
who just love everything that they read.
And I think, ‘Oh,
you're impossible for me to teach how to write,’
you know, because you love everything,
go out and hate something or, you know, pick somebody
(unintelligible) you know.
So I love, um,
writers who are, you know,
who love obsessively and read something.
And again, like don't read it as entertainment.
Take it apart,
you know, be a young engineer given a clock like
take off the back, figure out how all the gears work.
So don't be a fan.
Stop being a fan.
And that goes for screenwriters, too,
you know, stop loving the show.
Go back and watch it and figure out how they made
you feel that, you know? -Right.
-Yeah.
And then I do think
that novelists in particular about short story writers too.
I think it's really great to learn to learn screenwriting.
It is a way to figure out if something is to scale.
So if you're looking at a big, huge canvas of a novel,
so many novelists,
especially young novels, don't
who haven't done it before,
they don't know what to scale is.
And so they start oil
painting paragraph to paragraph in one corner,
and they don't even realize like, it's going to be
a scale, you know,
whereas screenwriting
really helps you move quickly and get,
you know, a real sketch that covers the whole canvas.
And at least you get to
more quickly understand how story works, you know,
and how it can be changed and be more flexible with it.
So yeah,
I think architecturally it's really important
to try to figure out screenplays, whether you read,
you write one or not, but at least
try to figure out how, how story works in that way.
And then read poets,
because poets
are going to teach you
epiphany, poets are going to teach you image.
You know, they're really, really great at those things.
And then, you know, whatever genre you're in.
So in my thing is like don't ever,
you know,
pigeonhole yourself, you know, you might get called
later, but
you might find what you love later.
But every genre has things to teach you.
And so really try to figure out
all the different genres to feed your central genre.
-Well, I know that I get this feeling that everybody
who's going to watch
or listen to
this podcast is going to want to take a class from you.
I think you just that it's very, very inspiring.
I want to recommend since you recommended
Mary Morrissey to me, I want to recommend a book to
you called “The Diamond Lane” by Karen Karbo.
Um, so it's funny
and it's moving and I think it's the kind
and it's, it's about filmmaking as well.
And the mother and daughters and sisters,
I think it's an older title and I always like to recommend
older titles, so I think you would really love it.
-I know Karen Carbo, but I don't know that. Yeah, yeah,
-Yeah.
-And I love writing women, you know, I mean, the book is
I think 1% women in my I think it is pretty sure.
Yeah.
Well I do teach at Florida State University.
I teach film, I teach screenwriters there.
I mentor about, you know, eight students,
you know, a year.
And so I love that.
But I do have some things.
I do have a jumpstart writer to
writer like thing that you can go,
-Oh yeah. -Yeah efficient creativity
if you look up Julianna Baggott efficient creativity.
-Okay. -Things, there's one like a
an audio series where I talk about
process, really, really talk about process.
-Okay.
-And then the other one is, you know,
you know, just like, you know, a six week thing
where you get prompts and things like that.
-Oh yeah. -Yeah.
But I think honestly, the best thing,
I mean, especially on the short
story, is to read short stories.
And, you know, I mean, what I always say to
students is like
the book You Love is and and then to a certain extent,
the book you hate but every short story
you read is a masterclass with that teacher,
you know, with that writer.
And so really, I mean,
you know, if you want to learn how to write like me,
I think buying the book, you know,
you know, “I'd Really Prefer Not to Be Here with You.”
And then you're getting all of my past
education.
-Right.
Of all the hours I've done
and all the different genres you get,
you're the beneficiary.
You know,
if you're reading it, not as a fan,
but you're reading it as a writer.
-Right. Wow. Julianne,
I feel like we could go on and and talk some more,
but our time is up and gosh, thank you so much.
Thank you for being the writer that you are.
And thank you for coming on the show.
-Yeah. Thank you so much.
I appreciate it.
-Bye bye. -Bye bye.
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