♪ [ Book Lust theme song ] ♪​
-Hello and welcome to Book Lust.
I'm your host, Nancy Pearl.
My guest today is longtime Seattle Times arts reviewer Moira Macdonald.
And we're going to be talking about her new book, her first
novel, “Storybook Ending.”
Moira, thank you so much for coming on the show.
- Thank you so much for having me, Nancy.
I'm thrilled to be here talking to you.
- Tell me, what was the impetus
for this novel?
- Gosh, I have been a writer for a very long time, but I have never written fiction.
I have been at The Seattle Times,
it'll be 24 years this summer, so a very long time.
I have long thought I'd like to write a novel.
And, like all those things that you think about,
—you may know something about this yourself, Nancy—
that, you know, time goes
by and I think I'd like to do this, and I just kind of get around to it.
And the years went by. And then, you know, the pandemic happened.
A few things happened in my life,
and my dad died, and he'd always wanted me to do that.
And I was reaching a milestone birthday.
And I thought, you know, if I don't try this now, I will never try it.
And so I just kind of had an idea, and I took a leave
from my job, an unpaid leave, which was very,
not not very smart of me at the time, but I did it anyway.
- Very brave, very brave.
-I had no idea how things would turn out, but I thought, you know what,
let's just try this and see what happens.
So I just kind of jumped in and this was, spring of ‘22.
So a little over three years ago was when I started.
- Wow. That's fast in the world of writing fiction, I think.
- Well, I'm a journalist, so I write fast. ( laughter )
I pretty much wrote the whole thing in about five months.
The first draft.
And then there were quite a few subsequent drafts
that came along, and then it sold in September of ‘23.
So it sold about a year and a half after I started.
So yeah, I did. It did seem to go quite fast.
- When you said you had an idea for the book, was it the characters
who came to you or was it the setting?
Because I know you based the book, the setting of the book...
on your, on one of your favorite bookstores, Third Place Ravenna,
here in Seattle. So.
Or was it the story?
Do you know what I mean, a plot?
- Yeah.
What it was is that actually,
I've been trying to pinpoint when this happened, so I can't remember.
But years ago, I started saving things I was finding in books.
As you know, if you buy used books, if you use the library, things turn up.
And I just started finding this the oddest things,
you know, like little handwritten bits of poetry and an anniversary card
that had a love note and a hand-painted bookmark and just all these things.
So I started saving them a while ago. I didn't notice that to do with them.
But I saved them.
And, one day I was at Ravenna Third Place, my bookstore down the street,
which I love very much,
and there was a guy behind the desk where they sort these used books,
and I just kind of thought,
“Huh, so if you wanted to leave something for him,
you could leave it in a book and he'd find it.”
You know, like those things that I was finding. And I thought, so what if someone
kind of left him a note because she wanted to get to know him better,
and then the wrong person got the note, because the wrong person picked up
the book.
And I thought, okay,
that's a rom com. And that's a rom com I think I would like to find out
how it ended.
So that's kind of how it began.
Both the bookstore setting and just this whole idea of what books are these things
that we leave our emotions in books, we leave our hearts in books.
We also leave stuff in books.
We can leave a physical object.
And I thought, I like the idea of a book being a conduit for a relationship.
- When you're reading,
do you find that what you're most drawn to
then is, are the characters,
or or the plot of a book?
What what do you look for?
- Oh, gosh, that's such a good question.
I mean, I think I think it depends on the kind of thing I'm reading.
If I'm reading, say, a mystery, I'm probably most intrigued
by the plot and exactly what happens and how it's unfolding.
If I'm reading a piece of literary fiction, I'm probably more interested
in the writing and the style of it
and the language.
I think it's just about all of those things.
- So when you were writing this, it's told really from the perspective
of three different people.
And the bookstore owner
who's very, very interesting.
What I was struck by when I read the book
was how you have included everything
that it, that you love and are knowledgeable about
in the book and
talking about things like there's lots of,
shout outs to different books,
for example, and movies.
And so, you know, if you're someone who has read you in The Seattle Times
for all these years and, and, you know, familiar with the different,
programs that you events that you cover,
you could really find your loves in here.
- And it's a, it's a first book.
And, you know,
you always hear that someone's first novel is just who they are. -Right.
-So much,
you know, a friend of mine read this and just said, where this book is, you.
And so I so I really hope people like it because I guess it's me.
But yes, the things I love are in there because I was kind of looking for a book.
You know, this book was born out of,
you know, about the during the pandemic and so some hard stuff.
But I was looking for a book that that would make me smile.
I was looking for something that would that would make me happy
during a hard time.
And I kept looking for that kind of book that would not be predictable,
but would but would be just entertaining and funny and leave
me feeling happy and yet satisfied in a way that not politics too.
And I couldn't find that book.
And, so this is the story I'm always telling, but, again,
it always comes back to Ravenna Third Place, but I was there.
This must have been 3 or 4 years ago before all this began,
but they had it,
and I was looking for that book, but they had that sign up on the on the wall.
There's that famous Toni Morrison quote.
“If you cannot find the book you want, then you must write it.”
And I have to say, I read it, that it was like,
“Okay, Toni, okay, I guess I need to do this.”
-Right. -A lot of me is in here because that's
just that's what I know.
- I thought it was wonderful.
I just yeah.
Yeah, I, I think that,
I don't know if you're reading
specifically changed after.
I feel like my reading changed after 2016, a lot.
And what I wanted for all these years in between and still
are, are books that will not make me depressed.
- Yes. Yeah.
That is what I have been looking for as well.
There's so much dystopia out there, and a lot of those books are wonderful,
and I'm in awe of how they're written, but it's not what I want to read.
- Right. Tell me how your your experience as a book reviewer
helped or hindered
when you were working on “Storybook Ending?”
- I don't know.
I think certainly my experience as a journalist helped me enormously
because what my job is, is making sentences.
So I think that's why I was able to write the book pretty quickly,
because just putting words together on deadline is something I know how to do,
and in some ways, it's much easier when you can just make everything up.
When you're a journalist, you really have to check everything
and make sure that what you're saying is it's entirely accurate.
Oh wow, I'm creating worlds here,
I can just do this myself.
So I think that helped me a great deal.
As far as being a book critic,
I don't know.
I just again, a real love for language
and hoping, I don't know, in some ways
I think it made it harder because there was so much to aspire to.
You know, there were many days when I thought were
“Moira, what were you thinking?
You know, you cannot write a book that is anywhere near
as good as the ones that have scribbled you all these years.” -Right.
-But every now and then, you know, as a critic,
I think it's, Ian McEwan.
I read in a profile of him in The New Yorker years ago.
He was talking about writing
and how hard it is,
but he said “that every now and then you get six words that just fall
in the right order and it's all worth it.” And I thought, “every now and then, this book,
there's six words that fall in the right, and that's that felt pretty good.”
But yeah, I, I'm not sure being a book critic was helpful
or just made the whole thing more intimidating.
- One of the things,
one of the ways I found it helpful for me,
and that's why I asked the question, because I wondered
if you felt this way, is that it.
It it made me understand that
some people would like my book and some people wouldn't.
And and it had nothing really to do with the book itself.
- Yes. And I did think about that a lot.
And that is very helpful to know
that there's it is not possible to write a book that everyone will like.
-Right.
-All you can do is write the book that is in you, in the book that you have.
And I hope that some people like it.
-Right. -People are...
Some people are going to hate this book and God bless.
I hope they find something else they like.
- I don't think they'll, I don't think anyone will hate it Moira. (laughter)
Honestly, I can't see that.
On the cover, or I guess it's described
as a comedy of manners in some in something that I read,
rather than a rom com.
Do you see a difference between those two things?
- I took calling it a comedy of manners slash rom com, because it is kind of both.
And I can, and those two, those genres overlap.
But I think you can have a comedy of manners that is not a rom com,
you know, and vice versa.
And my book, I don't want to give anything away
about my book, but it's not really even a rom com.
It doesn't necessarily follow the, the pattern
that you would expect, but I think it does very much have a tone of a rom com.
People keep bringing up a Nora Ephron, the Nora Ephron's movies,
make them think of this book.
And that is definitely a tone that I was going for.
- Were there were those
were those three main characters there from the start?
- No, they were not.
Really the whole thing began with a note in a book and I think
and I think like, okay, who wrote this movie, this note and who found this out.
And so I have these three main characters who came to me
and, April, who is the one who wrote the note...
She might be kind of inspired by some of them,
some of my younger colleagues, because during during the pandemic,
I was thinking a lot about what must it be like if you were a single young person
and you are stuck at home, working from home, working remotely,
you're not getting out. You're not communicating with people.
What must that be like?
And I was kind of worried about them.
I thought, this seems really tough.
And I thought, okay, I can see somebody, a young woman who is of an age, she's 33.
Her friends are kind of starting to get married, have kids and get together
and do all that.
And she's still kind of on her own and kind of lonely.
And she decides to make a bold gesture because she's feeling so stuck.
And I thought, okay, I can see that.
And I thought, okay, who is she going to make this gesture toward?
And I thought, okay, there's a man at the bookstore.
And I was thinking, okay, what would it be like to be of a very,
very good looking person who has no confidence?
But we're so used to romcoms in which there's this handsome devil
at the at the middle of it, who just knows exactly who he is and what he's doing.
And I thought, okay, what if this is a man in his mid 30s
who's kind of been floating a little bit in his life.
He's very good looking.
He's kind of been able to skate through a lot of things in life because
he's good looking, he's very sweet, but he's he's not at all sure of himself,
and he doesn't know what to say all the time,
and he doesn't know kind of where he fits in the world.
And he's just kind of struggling and so he's sort of sitting at the desk
at this bookstore having a little existential crisis,
and he has no idea this woman's left him an absolute never noticed her.
And then I thought, okay, so who does get the note?
And the woman who gets the note is a she is a young widow.
She her husband died about five years ago.
So she is someone who has known a terrible tragedy.
And that's something that I've thought about in life as well.
And I thought not.
I thought it's an interesting place to be, not at the moment of the tragedy,
which is just awful.
But five years later, when she still isn't quite able to move on.
But she's really close.
She is right there on the edge of
maybe this is the moment, maybe I'm feeling strong enough.
Maybe I can try again.
I knew love before. Maybe I can find it again.
But she's got a little girl. She's got a busy life.
And one day she finds this note.
And this completely throws her life into a bit of turmoil.
But oh my gosh, someone's noticing me.
What do I do?
And so that so the three of them
just kind of came out of different things that I've been thinking about.
And I wanted them to be three quite different people,
but people who you could kind of be getting along and people who intersect
at this bookstore because to me, all of life intersects at bookstores.
- Or a library.
Right.
What was the hardest part for you about writing this?
- Oh, gosh. Everything.
No, no, I,
I recently learned some really great terminology
that there are two kinds of fiction writers,
that there are plotters and there are pantsers.
And pantsers are the ones who do it by the seat of the pants.
And I am definitely a pantser.
I have never outlined anything in my life, and I didn't outline this book,
and I just started writing it to see what would happen.
And the hardest part, I think I got about maybe
halfway to two thirds of the way through, and I got stuck.
I just got completely stuck.
Oh no, I don't know what.
Should I start over?
What is going on?
And I found a bit of advice, somewhat, that I picked up a book
at the library about, you know, how to write a novel
and one bit of advice it had, but if you're stuck, jump ahead.
And so I jumped ahead and I wrote the last chapter.
So even though I didn't outline it, I thought, okay, where do I want
these people to end up?
And so that was that kind of saved me.
I think I wrote the final chapters, okay.
This is where they need to get
I don't know how to get there, but now I have an endpoint.
Now I will figure out
how to get these three people intersected and get them to that place.
So that that was probably the hardest.
And gosh, a lot of it was hard.
It's just as hard, you know, it is, right?
- Yeah, yeah.
It's hard to force yourself to.
- Yeah. Reading is joyful and easy and wonderful.
Writing is hard.
-Yeah. Right. Yeah.
So when you were writing the book,
were you reading as widely
and as,
I know you weren't reading for work because you were on a leave,
so you were doing pleasure reading or
whatever you what you want to call it, but did it change?
I mean, I know there are writers who, if they're working on a novel, don't
read fiction because they're afraid the voice.
Would...
The voice of the novel
they're reading, the fiction they're reading, will seep into theirs.
Did you have that worry?
- Not so much, but I did mostly focus on.
I remember at the time I was mostly reading mysteries.
I thought, I think I'm going to read books
that are a completely different genre than what I'm doing.
And that ended up making its way into the book,
because April reads a lot of mysteries.
And so that kind of got in there a little bit.
But I thought, this is I think I'll feel more comfortable reading books
that are nothing like what I'm trying to do here.
And every now and then I would reread a favorite.
And I love to reread,
and I've talked about that, but, but yes, every now
and then I would reread something that many times and I will
I did, I think I did read Nora Ephron's “Heartburn” during this year.
Okay.
Yeah.
This is this is kind of some kind of ending for her, but with its own twist.
- I sort of imagined that you read,
the ultimate
comedy of manners, I think, “Pride and Prejudice.”
- You know, I have not read that in many years.
I have read it. That's been a very long time.
I should have read it. Yeah.
- Well, yeah, I mean, yeah.
So what
what do you read?
What are you reading?
I know you're not reviewing books anymore.
Which is.
Which is sad.
I think for the book readings.
- It is I was like, sorry to hear that decision, but I understand it.
-Yeah, yeah.
- So what would talk about what you're reading, what?
You know, what are you reading? What?
You're away from Seattle when we're taping this show.
What did you bring with you to read?
- Okay, what I did bring I am a
despite my best efforts, I'm still getting sent galleys of things.
And I worked so hard to get to cancel everybody.
But every now and then, one of them slips through.
But one came the other day that I really wanted to read.
And it's Janice Hallet's latest.
Have you read her books at all?
Hers. So interesting.
They're made up of emails and texts and and just little bits of
ephemera like that, and they're just fascinating. And she's
got a new one out about something terrible that happens at a pub quiz.
So it's, it's it's very, very enjoyable.
I read most of that on the plane just the other day.
What else?
I picked up two other books and I'm sitting right here.
It's my book, but.
- And I have it too, right here.
- You've got the nice hardcover.
So. Yeah, it's so pretty.
I love this. -I love the cover.
I'm actually reading
quite an awful book right now, so I'm not going to name the author
because I don't want to do that to somebody.
But it was a book that I picked up in a bookstore
the other day,
because it's an international bestseller, and it looked like it would be.
It's a thriller. It looks like to be a lot of fun.
And yeah, not so much.
Yeah. Yes.
- So writing negative reviews must be must have been
well of any, you know, theater or music whatever.
Because when I was reviewing books
I never, I never wanted to give a book
a negative review because
there are so many books that you could recommend.
You know why? Yeah.
- I never did give a negative book review
because there were so many books out there.
And yeah, so, so long as if I got a third of the way into something, I thought,
oh dear, I don't like this stuff.
I'll just go read something else and review something else.
I don't think I wrote a single negative book review.
I generally don't think so.
I do write negative movie reviews because those come along fairly often,
and when you go to a screening, you're obligated to write a review.
What do you like. Right. So and those are those are difficult.
So you just have to I so I try to really focus on just being as fair as I can
and remembering that when you're when you're a critic,
you're primarily writing not to help out the filmmakers,
but to help your readers figure out what to go see
and something that I didn't like might be something they would like very much.
So I need to really give a full picture of what it might be.
And not just that. Oh, I think this is bad. More.
Yeah, give it much more of a sense of what the journey of it is.
- Yeah.
And there's a sense
with book reviews that you want the book that's written to be reviewed
and not the book that the reviewer hoped that
the book would be, which is sometimes
a distinction that a lot of many reviewers
don't seem to make these days. So,
do you think that, you know, one of the things that you still have
in The Seattle Times is your your interest in fashion?
And, how did that fit in to storybook ending?
- Oh, well, I, I gave Laura, who was, the,
the third character, the widow of the young mother,
the job I've always wanted to have, which is that
she works at a department store, and she is the one who, if you come in,
you don't know what you want, and you need an outfit for an event,
and she will help you put that together. And that's something.
I also have done that for my friends quite often, and I love doing that.
And I've never done it professionally, but I have that.
I've thought a lot about that.
That would be a career I would really love.
So I'm going to give this to one of my characters.
- Yes. See that?
Yes, yes.
When I read what Laura did and then, you know, her job is like a personal shopper,
I thought, I said, oh God, that's so wonderful.
Moira managed to put everything
I know, everything that she does at The Seattle Times in this one.
Lovely, you know, lovely novel.
When you were, were you a
I'm assuming you were a big reader when you were a kid.
Are there still books that you remember from those days?
- Oh, gosh. Yes.
There are books from my childhood that I still reread all the time,
you know, like “Anne of Green Gables” and all of those books
which made such an impression on me. “Little Women”
I probably reread it every year or so, and every year I find something new in it.
And I think I was I was very young when I first read it.
I remember skipping a lot of books.
I didn't understand it.
That's how young I was. -Yeah.
-Gosh, those those are probably the it's not popping in my head.
And of course I'm losing them.
But yeah, those two that...
I read obsessively when I was a kid, I read the same stuff over and over.
It kind of seemed like some of the time.
- Do you think now that
you want to do another novel?
- I do, and I'm well into it, actually.
- Wow. Okay.
Can you talk about it or would you rather not?
- I will give only that this is my very, very vague elevator pitch that I'm giving,
which is that my second book is also a comedy of manners
slash rom com, inspired by a conversation that I overheard in Tuscany.
- I guess the message of that is that we should all pay
more attention to what people are saying all around us.
- I'm telling you this conversation,
I will say I overheard it 15 years ago
and it's been on my mind that long because it was that interesting.
And I thought a lot about the people having that conversation.
I don't know who they were.
I don't know their names, I don't think about them.
But I thought a lot about them.
And I have now kind of recreated them in the second book
because I wanted to understand why they were having that conversation.
- Cool.
Oh very cool. I know we're all looking well.
We're all looking forward to, to that one.
Do you write and do you write?
Did you write “Storybook Ending” on the computer or in longhand?
- Oh my God, I have the worst handwriting in the world
because I spend my days taking notes in the dark at movies,
and I just scribble.
My handwriting is awful.
I couldn't get to. I wrote it on a laptop.
I can't even read my own writing.
I certainly couldn't expect anybody else to.
So. Yeah.
No, it's thank thank goodness for computers.
-Did when you did your when you were working on “Storybook Ending,”
did you write that first draft straight through or did you stop it,
correct, as you were going along?
You know the big...
- I pretty much wrote it straight through as as I mentioned,
I did have that pause in the middle where I jumped to.
-Yes, right.
-But I pretty much then went back and because I was so
is such a temptation that you want to go back and fix things,
but you could you could tinker with it forever.
And I got this better to get one
complete awful first draft done, and then I'll go back and start again.
And the the other, the other bit of good advice that I read
that first finish, the first draft, which was a real mess.
And it I mean it's basically what you what you read there,
but there was a whole subplot
I had to clean up because it didn't work at all,
and there were just a lot of things that it it got quite, quite cleaned up.
What I read was a smart thing to do is when you begin
draft two is retype the whole thing,
as opposed to going into your file that's already there and revising in the file.
If you retype the whole thing, you are less likely to just keep things
that don't work because they're all in there.
So I retyped the whole thing a second time,
and I found that really sort of helpful and freeing.
And there were huge sections, okay, this
this is going this doesn't work and I'm just going to get rid of it.
So that's that was a good that's advice I would give anybody.
- And did you have somebody that you were
that you really wanted to read the book immediately?
I mean did you not not don't write it for somebody.
But, you know, we talk about like first readers or, you know, who, who,
who did the first pass on your book
in your life, not an agent or something like that?
- Oh, I was terrified to show it to anybody.
And so nobody saw it for a long time.
And then I showed it to my husband and I thought, “Okay, he's a really smart reader.”
And but I thought, “Will he be able to tell me if it's awful?”
Because at that point I thought it might be awful, but
I emailed him the file. I said,
“Read this when you have time and just tell me what ya think.”
And he was downstairs. He has a studio downstairs.
He's a musician and he had disappeared for a while.
And then he came back upstairs, and he sort of nodded.
He said, “I think you got something.
I think you've got something.” ( gasps )
-Yeah.
-So he was the first reader.
A few of my friends also read fairly early drafts.
Not that many people read. A few,
a few friends did.
Really, what...
Yeah,
a few friends read it and give me a few bits of advice.
Not a whole lot.
And I did a second draft,
I think I did the third draft, and then I was really ready to give up.
And then I found out about, the writer... the writer
to agent program at AWP,
which AWP was in Seattle in the spring of ‘23.
And through that program, you can submit five pages, just your first five pages,
and one paragraph describing who you are and one paragraph describing your book.
And representatives from five literary agencies will take a look.
And somebody told me about this.
I thought, oh my gosh, that sounds crazy.
And I almost didn't do it because in order to do it,
you have to register for the conference.
And the conference was $300.
And I said to my husband, I can't pay $300; he said “do it!”
So this is why the book is dedicated to him. And so
and I did.
And two out of the five literary agencies wanted to meet with me,
and the person I signed with told me that there were over 1000 submissions
and she picked eight, and mine was number one of the eight. -Wow.
Oh that's great.
That's better. That's how I found my agent.
And that's how all this happened.
Just from five pages.
- Well Moira our time is up.
But I did want to thank you again for being on the show.
And, good luck with “Storybook Ending.”
And good luck with the next book, which, you know, I can't wait to read.
- Thank you so much, Nancy. I'm just.
You can't imagine what an honor this is to be here.
I have read, enjoyed your work for so long and I'm just delighted to talk to you.
- Ditto.
Bye bye.
- Thank you so much. Bye Bye.
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