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[Nancy Pearl] Hello and welcome to Book Lust.
I'm Nancy Pearl.
My guest today is author Maggie Stiefvater, whose new book,
“The Listeners,” is her first book written for adults
after a wonderful career of writing books for young adults.
Fair enough, Maggie?
Thank you for coming to this show.
[Maggie Stiefvater] I am a hugely excited to sit down and talk with you, Nancy.
Thank you for having me. Fair enough.
Fair enough.
- Good, good.
All right.
So “The Listeners,”
I first I just want to say how much I loved this book.
And how much I felt.
I do love.
I do love books that have what I call elastic realism.
You know, when we talk about,
Spanish, American, right, Spanish writers,
you know, Gabriel García Márquez, et al.
Isabel Allende.
We talk about magical realism, but I like to think about it
in a in different terms.
Like that elasticism.
Like, this is this is...”The Listeners”
is a realistic novel with a little bit of stretchy realism in it?
- I think of it as mythic fiction.
Really, I was a history major and specifically medieval history.
And so many of the sources that you were required to use were
deeply magical elements to them that you were asked to believe in.
Not the level of truly believing that there was a giant,
but instead there was a metaphorical giant in the midst.
And I just really fell in love with this way of telling the truth
in a way that makes it truthful, even with so much of the context removed from it,
so I agree. Magical realism. I love it.
It feels like a very different animal then
elastic, I like it, elastic reality;
where you're stretching the truth but it’s still following the rules of reality.
- When you were describing this book to your agent or to your editor,
or to the
public, how how do you describe this book?
- It's interesting because I think there are two different ways
to describe this book.
One is the person that you're standing next to in the grocery store line
who has never heard of you before, and you're just trying to convince them
to pick up the book, and then you just cook with the magnificent reality of it,
this very peculiar moment in American history
when half a dozen or so luxury resorts in the middle of nowhere were tapped
by the State Department axis diplomats until they could be returned.
So it's such an interesting set up to ask these fiercely patriotic
communities to how is the absolute enemy at the beginning of the war?
And it's my corner of the world.
I was born in the Shenandoah Valley, so that's one way to get into it.
But it's not
perhaps the most truthful way to get into it, which is it's a Maggie
Stiefvater book, which means that if I'm pitching it
to a Maggie Stiefvater reader, it's much easier to say
that's what the back of the book is going to say it's about.
But actually it's about a woman
who is trying to find her identity after coming of age.
She thinks that she's done.
She thinks she knows who she is, she thinks she knows what she wants.
And now she's realizing at the start of the war that the whole world
has changed, and maybe she's changed as well.
So I think there's lots of ways into it, but I don't know.
I feel like these are my favorite kinds of novels to read as well.
- Yeah. Yes.
And another thing that we
share is this, great interest in history.
And I too, have a degree in history,
and medieval history was one of my favorite.
In fact, I, I wanted to go on at one time to get a doctorate,
but I couldn't decide between medieval history and Greek and Roman history.
I like both of them.
Yeah, so and so.
I do love what I loved about this book is one of the things I loved
was that it was based on these things that really happened,
as you said, that the axis diplomats were taken to these
very fancy resorts in Virginia and West Virginia.
Right?
And and so, you know, so I thought, “Wow, I didn't know that.
That's that's so interesting.”
But then you have the main character and her growth,
and then you have the elastic realism bit.
And it just all worked. It's.
Yeah. What...
Was it an easy book to write?
- I feel like you ask that question knowing that the answer cannot possibly be.
It just fell out of me, Nancy!
It was just waiting.
But difficult in every single sense of the word.
I think this is my 17th novel or something.
Who knows? I've lost track at this point.
And it was unlike any of my others.
For starters, the research piece was, of course, enormous because not only
is it historical, but it's not really distant historical.
There's still plenty of people who are still alive, which made it
both easier and more difficult to research, in the sense that
the consequences of getting it wrong felt more immediate.
But also, I could pick up a telephone
and I could speak to, for instance, they archivist for the Greenbrier Hotel.
And that community was so wonderful.
They were so keen to sit down with me and share everything they had.
All of their first hand documents is just stunning.
But also that made it difficult as well because as someone
who's interested in history, you always have to ask yourself,
is this actually interesting or is this history interesting?
And you would just text it.
You would sit across from your family at the dinner table
or again with that beleaguered person in the grocery store line,
and you'd try out an anecdote that you just read,
and you wait to see if their eyes glaze over.
-Right. -Don't you say... So it is interesting.
Okay. Good. It can go into the book.
So it was difficult in that sense, but it was also difficult because I wanted
not just age up characters and young adult; and I love knowing
that you were a young adult librarian to begin with, because having respect
for that genre really means having respect for the differences
in the structure of those genres, not just thinking that young adult
is a simpler form of fiction that's given to teens, but instead
it has all of these conventions that push it into this category. And,
really came of age
in young adult. And young adult at the time was very low stakes.
You couldn't make any money at it.
You could combine
every single genre into one book, and nobody was going to tell you no,
because we were the goth kids at the party.
So it was a really magnificent place to come of age.
And then I spent a decade there.
Young adult really became a category.
It really started to borrow a lot from the genre as it became
a very immediate storytelling form, and I felt
increasingly unsettled existing in that space
as if it was confining, instead of letting be playful.
So looking into that adult world,
I really had to take a year or two to just read dozens and dozens and dozens
of adult novels across categories and genres and say, how is it different?
How can I move into this world and a place I will be comfortable
exploring for the next decade?
So learning how to just use time on a page and tell non-linear prose,
that was an entirely new learning experience that had to happen.
And, I'm enjoying writing my next adult novel now
because of the work that past Maggie did on this one.
So it is very satisfying.
But yes, it was very difficult.
- What what
sorts of books did you read in that period that that influenced you
or that you felt illuminated
the adult world,
or the adult reader?
For you?
- It was interesting because I, I think that there are some authors
that I very easily sit next to on the shelf already,
reading “Pure Energy,” for instance.
I feel like it's a very natural fit, but that's
even though I love that title, the titles that really stuck with me
were the ones that seemed to have tools that I'd never used before.
And so reading Barbara Kingsolver was so fascinating to watch her
have a very story based novel
and yet use time and theme in a very different way.
Or “White Noise,” which I had never read, was amazing.
Returning to Steinbeck as an adult, now thinking I'm not the goth kid
at the table, but wanting to instead be a mature storyteller.
These are the sorts of things that I return back to, even I have to say,
I reread “Watership Down” and it was very interesting reading it
through the lens of general adult fiction instead of genre adult fiction,
and just looking at what the different cues are, and also realizing
when I ran out of patience for immediate storytelling.
I used to have such a such a capacity for it, and instead now I go,
“No! We slow down, we step out.”
I understand what we're looking at, but why are we looking at it?
And that was a really interesting reading process.
- Mmhmm. That's, that's...
I want to take a course from you. (laughter)
I think
because I think that to, to look at the difference
between young adult fiction and adult fiction is that
is, is, is is so not subject
matter or age of characters,
but instead is really that sense of,
of using the prose in a different way.
I think,
and I and I, I hadn't thought of it in those terms,
before.
So, so the main character, the young woman or not, she's not so young, is she?
She's middle aged and and, you know, you get to a point,
don't you, where you think.
Well this, this is who I am.
And that's not going to change.
And this is my life.
And then something much bigger than you happens and that does that.
That's real life does that.
Whether it's a world war that, you know, that comes in.
- I was fascinated with the idea of,
a successful life, accumulative life
where it's very easy to have these coming of age stories
where it's adult characters who are realizing
they need to change, and it's always after something dreadful happens to them,
and they look around and like Adam Sandler in a film,
they blink about and they realize this has to change.
What have I done with myself? And I, I don't I don't want to tell that story.
The story I want to tell is when you seem to be successful,
changing from a place of contentedness is
it requires so much more bravery, I think, than coming from the at lowest point.
You know you have to change.
Instead, making the choice to change is a very different thing.
And it is.
You talked about teaching, and I did leap into a teaching experience
just after Covid, and it's impossible to not be informed.
This novel was definitely informed by that process.
After Covid, as soon as it opened up a little bit, I locked hundreds of writers
into a Scottish castle one summer, and we just spent days and days and days.
It's of course always sunny there, so it's daytime all the time.
It's perfect for a horror movie or for a novelist who was telling you,
I know you really love this novel you've been working on for ten years.
But I would throw it away or I'm not letting you leave this castle.
And so we just really took apart all of their bad creative habits
and dismantled their personalities and let them build personalities again.
It sounds like a cult.
I swear it wasn't a cult, but just giving them this liminal space
where they were allowed to say, “It's not that I'm in a trouble,
but I want to be something different and I want to come to a place, choose
to change, be surrounded by other people who are choosing to change.”
So every single year I worked with these students until I had a 200 or so of them.
And then this last year, I finished it off with a boot camp where for six months
solid, had 900 some one-on-one 30 minute zoom calls with them.
And I'm very proud of them.
Many of them have book deals.
All of them have reinvented themselves as humans.
It was just incredible to watch.
But it informed this project so much because here's June Hudson,
who is managing a hotel in the middle of nowhere.
And why do people come, especially in 1940,
to a hotel in the middle of nowhere if they have everything at home?
And it's because in the real world, they were coming
to these places for that liminal space where they could be someone else.
So who is June Hudson and what is she doing with her, with her people there?
And what can she do at scale that one woman can't do on her own?
What does she need 300 staff members for?
So it's absolutely impossible to not read this book myself later
and look at it and think,
“Oh, I can see you working through all of these different thoughts as well.”
And having seen all of these people who were middle aged
and some of them were far beyond middle age, coming to a place and choosing
to reinvent themselves and doing it successfully, not on a surface level, wasn't
about the book, it was about the person who could write a book.
So just knowing that that was possible and what it took was,
I mean, that's the heartbeat of this novel. Really.
- The other
thing that I, that I loved about the book was that the hotel,
I kept wanting to like make a reservation and go there, you know,
I just love, love, love, love those descriptions of it.
Well,
do you think you would ever write a book,
a work of fiction that didn't have that
elastic realism aspect to it?
-Gosh, I seriously considered it
with this novel, asking myself, do I think that it needs to be heightened?
Because really, that's what myth does, is it takes a moment and makes it bigger.
It makes it more obvious what the emotional anchor points are.
And I thought, we're here looking at war and everything is changing.
And then I thought, “No, but the thing that we're blowing up larger
by having this mystical thread of water that listens so carefully,
I'm not amplifying the war.
I'm amplifying June to be on the same level as the war.”
So I'm not sure that I will always have magic in a book,
but I think I'll probably still need to play in that level of metaphor.
I think that's important to me.
- Do you think that
writing and writing a novel
changes you as a human being?
I mean, all those students that you had that were coming out of themselves
to produce something, does
that does that change you as a human being?
- Teaching certainly changes you as a human being.
And I would say that before this novel,
I would say that writing was the thing that came after change.
I'd gone through a moment, especially the novel that I think I wrote,
that has the most in common with this one. “All the Crooked Saints”;
it would be informed by a process that I lived through.
In that case, it was very much, what do you do
when people keep on coming to ask you for advice
and then they don't take the advice?
That's it might be magic in “All the Crooked Saints”,
but that's really the crux of it.
But I already decided how I felt about that, and then I wrote about it.
But when I was writing “The Listeners,” I did not realize
that a novel could change you in the process of it.
But there was something about looking straight on
at the character of June Hudson and asking myself how does she get here?
How did she get this way?
And why do I think she behaves this way?
Because she is very similar to a character
Hannelore at the girl, the daughter of the diplomats
and quite neuro atypical
and asking myself to draw a study of that and say,
how much of this is like you, and why do you think you were this way?
It asked me to examine myself in a way that I don't think I had
since I was a teenager.
So this is not exactly a coming of age novel in that way,
but it was still a moment of self-reflection.
I think that,
I don't think I've
experienced with any of the other novels.
- Yeah.
It's hard not to identify with June,
but one of the
wonderful successes of your writing in this book
is that the ending is entirely satisfactory.
And I wonder whether
you had thought about different endings and how you,
without giving anything away, I guess so that might make it harder to answer.
But I did want to talk about the ending, because a lot of times
in adult fiction, there isn't this satisfactory ending.
I mean, there's an ending, and in the book
ends, you turn the page for this one.
Golly.
It just it just felt so right.
- That means a lot to me, Nancy, because for all I learned
and loved of my reading of adult literary fiction, you can pry four act structure
from my cold dead claws. I do love an ending.
I do love it.
To me, that's the point of a book is where you arrive at.
I know when you begin writing, a lot of times the point is the beginning.
As a reader, the point is the ending.
How do we feel after we closed that book?
So many novels are ruined by you
just get there and then it's over.
And no, I want to feel that that sense of intention, of purpose moving through.
That said, there were a few other options
that were, can I say this without spoiling it,
that were less bittersweet, perhaps that, envisioned a different role
for Hannelore, and it was really interesting because the biggest thing that changed
during the course of this book for me was my impression of luxury.
I was quite certain as a extremely middle
class, redneck Virginian, that I would be debunking luxury.
That was my task as I was writing this novel, and it was so fascinating
to sit down with the hoteliers that were so kind to give me their time.
I was lucky enough to sit down with some modern day luxury hoteliers,
and one fellow in particular,
I remember,
he managed a property in Switzerland that went for $54,000 a night,
and he was explaining to me how you pampered the rich;
that you couldn't buy them anything because they could buy it for themselves.
And he told me, this is what everyone wants to be known:
they truly just want to be known, to be known and wanted,
but not needed to be known on not a surface level,
but so you can predict them, what they might possibly desire.
Anticipation is the heart of luxury, and you can do that for free.
And it was revolutionary for me to think, “Of course.
I mean, of course, who wouldn't want that?”
And so to separate
that sense of luxury from wealth was it was just enormous for me.
- How did you find out about the diplomats
being moved to the Greenbrier and whatever?
I mean, what were you doing research
deliberately trying to find, you know,
looking for a topic that would in turn into a novel?
-I would love to say that I found it in a very cunning way, but instead
I just ran across it because in the back of my head,
I had thought for years that my next novel would be a hotel novel.
I had stayed at the Gore, which is a very singular hotel in London,
and every single room is different.
And the time that I was staying there, that my publishers had put me there,
all the guests seemed to be extremely interesting guests who all had
capital letter professions.
I was the designated capital-A author, but there was also a capital-P physician,
capital-A attorney, and to my delight, a capital-E explorer,
which felt like a very indulgent kind of profession to have.
And I remember thinking at the time, what a nice little locked box,
a little distillation of society.
And so I was really just looking for hotels in history.
I talked to my agent and I said, “What do you think of Maggie Stiefvater
novel is?”
And he says, “I think at its heart, you go to a location
in the pages that you really wish you could go to, but it doesn't exist.”
So I was looking in history for a hotel, because history is a great place
to find things that no longer exist.
And it was a single line and I was astonished,
I have, I said I was born in the Shenandoah Valley.
I could throw a rock at these mountains, and for this bit of history
to have escaped me, just felt like I was astonished.
I was just absolutely amazed and to imagine the kind of people
that I had grown up with being the sort of people
who were asked to do this, or they are not people who suffer fools.
And so it was a quite a thing to imagine.
- Yeah. Wow. All right. Maggie, I'm.
I just can't now wait for your next book, and I hope
I hope our paths will cross again. But,
I just
want to thank you again for writing “The Listeners.”
It meant a lot to me.
And I think you're just great.
- Thank you so much. This is a delight.
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