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- [00:08]
A
This is all of it on wnyc. I'm Alan Al. I'm on Alison Stewart. No, I am Alison Stewart. Coming up on the show tomorrow, chef Dorie Greenspan will be here to talk about her latest cookbook Anytime Cake. Actor Jeremy Piven joins us to talk about his shift into stand up comedy. And Martha Plimpton will be here to talk about her role in the new HBO series Task. And reminder to you, you can still get tickets to our Get Lit with all of it event with SA Cosby on October 28th. Go to wnyc.org getlit or you can buy tickets to our October 30th event with the cast of Hadestown at wnyc.org hadestown. That is all in the future. Let's get this hour started with author Lily King. Author Lilly King is the master of the literary love triangle. She won the Kirkus Prize for her novel Euphoria, which told the story of an anthropologist caught between two men. Her last novel, writers and Lovers, focused on an aspiring novelist choosing between two very different love interests. And in her latest book, heart the Lover, a college student finds herself stuck between two best friends. Our protagonist is a woman named Jordan who catches the attention of the two smartest boys in her English class when the professor reads one of her essays aloud. Yash and Sam are honored students and roommates. Sam asked Jordan out. They start dating. Jordan soon finds herself drawn into the orbit of Yash and Sam. They are smart and funny and have created their own little world on campus. Jordan and Sam are incredibly attracted to each other, but Jordan can't help but notice how much fun she has when she's with his best friend. The novel then jumps forward decades into the future. We learn what has become of Jordan's relationships with Sam and Yash and how one massive secret might threaten to destabilize and everything. The New York Times says heart the Lover is a literary love triangle like no other. It's out now. And Lilly King joins me. Hi, Lily.
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B
Hi, Alison. Thank you so much for having me on.
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A
We're happy to have you. You were recently interviewed by friend of the show Emma Straub, and you told her that before you started this novel, you were working on a murder mystery set on an island in Maine. What happened to that project?
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B
It just kind of died at about page 90. I had a dead senator on the first page and I had all of these ideas and this whole situation. And then I just found myself after about 90 pages, just not caring who did it, not really wanting to explain why and just everything. All my interest in it dried up. And right at that moment, my friend Ann Patchett sent me the manuscript of Tom Lake. And I started reading that, and I just got, like, six pages in, and I thought to myself, she is having so much fun, and I want to have fun, too. And so that's. I just flipped to the back of my book and I just started writing this book.
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A
That's a good book, too. Patchett's book.
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B
Great book.
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A
I also read that originally you thought you were going to spend more time with the characters that you decided on for this novel into the future than you'd plan to spend with them in their college years.
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C
How did that change?
- [03:28]
B
I really thought that I was just writing the backstory for 20 or 30 pages, and the whole meat of the novel would be what is now the third part? And I don't know, something kind of took over, I think, because the third part is hard, and it's an emotionally hard thing to write about. I think maybe there's part of me that was just sort of lingering in college, because that was the fun part. And then it just sort of. It just went on, and they took on a life of their own, and they started talking, and they wouldn't stop talking. I think that also happened.
- [04:07]
C
Oh, that's interesting. Your characters wouldn't start talking to you.
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B
Mm.
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A
Do they.
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C
Do they come to you as fully formed characters or voices, or how do they come to you?
- [04:17]
B
They're sort of disembodied for a little bit. I hear them more than I see them. I have to make an effort to describe my characters, and I don't spend very much time with that because I don't. I don't see them as much as sort of know them and understand their minds and then. And hear their voices, particularly when they start talking to each other. I really love writing dialogue because it doesn't. It doesn't take very much thinking. I just. I really am sort of listening, you know, it's kind of more of an intuitive gut thing than a cerebral thing. And it's very fun to just sort of write that all down. And I rarely change very much of my dialogue, but I have to make everything work around it.
- [05:01]
C
My guest is author Lily King. Her new novel, the Lover, follows one college student as she navigates her romantic interests with two best friends. It's out now. Let's talk about writing a love triangle. First of all, when did you get interested in writing these stories about three people?
- [05:20]
B
I don't mean to. It's not it's not the first thing that comes to mind. It just sort of happens. And I think for me that the dynamic of three is just, it's just, it's more tension, there's more, there's more, I don't know, left unsolved. I mean, you know, when you have a meet cute and one person meets another and they like each other, it's, you know, you can't make a novel out of it. And, and there is something about the choice and it involves, I feel like it involves the reader more as well because the reader starts having a preference and starts having opinions and starts getting invested in it. Um, and I, I also find that, that, that does often happen in life. You know, that for whatever reason you meet one person, then you meet another one. And whether it's. You're giving off a different vibe or, or something that, that it's never, it's never as neat and tidy as you think.
- [06:37]
C
When you're writing a love triangle, how.
- [06:41]
A
Important is it that the interest, the people involved are likable or at least desirable?
- [06:49]
B
I think, again, I'm not sure I think about it ahead of time, but for there to be interest, I have to make them desirable to the character whether they're desirable to me or not.
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C
Right.
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B
It's not. But, but there does have to be that, that connection that, that you have to create and feel in terms of likability. I don't really care. I'm more interested in them being interesting and somewhat compelling in, in their situation and their personality.
- [07:34]
A
Does the connection come first before the characters?
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B
No, I think the characters come first. Okay, they're there and then, and then they get into scrapes that you don't often anticipate.
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A
This is a love story that begins for Jordan, as we mentioned, when she's in college. What is powerful about a person at that time in their life?
- [08:04]
B
I think for her in this situation, everything is so new. You know, it's so many, many firsts all at once. And these are her first intellectual friends. These are the first people that she's met who are truly intellectually ambitious in a different way than she's ever known before. And that is really compelling to her. I mean, she's been a good student, she's well read, she's a well read English major, but she is meeting people who are just, who just have read so much more outside of class and have really, are really thinking about the big picture of literature and, and, and, and are. They're all writing honors thesis theses, they're all in seminars. And all of this is new to her as well as sex and sexual feeling. I mean, she's only had one relationship before, and so everything is new and. And they live off campus. She lives. She lives off campus too, but in a house with like 11 people. And she pays, you know, she shares a room and she pays $44 a month, I think. And they're living in this professor's house who's gone to Oxford for the semester or for the year. And so it's all. It's just. She just walks through that house on the end of the first date, and it's just this whole new world that she's entering.
- [09:39]
C
Jordan first notices Yash and Sam because they're the smartest students in the class, and they notice her because of an essay she wrote.
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A
Why did you want to begin with.
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C
These romances based around intellect?
- [09:56]
B
Yeah, for me, romance and intellect are very, very intertwined. There's something both in life and in literature about characters connecting through sort of banter and wit and intelligence. And, you know, they're kind of. It's like their form of play. And I just. I don't know. I. That's how I. That's how I like a relationship to begin. And so, you know, it kind of begins for her with both of them having this. And. And they do first notice her because oddly, the professor has read her paper out loud, so they're kind of like, huh, what's that? And she's surprised because she didn't. The professor gives it sort of a performance and brings out all the humor in it, and she hadn't really realized how much there was in it to begin with. And so she's. She's just very unrealized potential in. In many, many ways. And it starts right from page one.
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C
Yeah, it was kind of interesting because Yash and Sam give her a nickname of Jordan after Jordan Baker in the Great Gatsby. But I. They call her Daisy first, right?
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B
Mm. I think that they. That's how they sort of perceived her. And that was their little nickname for her until they met her.
- [11:35]
C
Why did that feel like the right name for her character? Because we don't find out her. Her real name for a long time.
- [11:43]
B
She first. They give her Daisy because I think she's from the northeast and she. She sort of seems to them just a little Daisy esque, and she's horrified. But once they. They sort of figure out things about her past, I don't want to give too much away. They. They rename her, you know, Daisy's friend Jordan. And I didn't mean to do that. I didn't. When I started out, I wasn't thinking of the character's name. And then they nicknamed her Jordan. And it was only sort of slowly, in writing those first 20 or 30 pages as pages, when I realized, oh, I took a note in the back of my book and for the future, and I wrote down her husband's name. I was like, oh, I. She's married to him. And so it brought it back. A character, a few characters from a previous novel, and I did not see that coming.
- [12:54]
C
My guest is author Lily King. Her new novel, Heart the Lover, follows one college student as she navigates her romantic interests with two best friends. You mentioned the novel before. Do you have to read the novel before to understand this one?
- [13:08]
B
Definitely not. Okay. Just wanted to be clear about that. Novels. Yeah. Yeah. Thank you.
- [13:12]
C
I also wanted to get in the head of Jordan. You know, Sam's her boyfriend, but she clearly shows interest in Yash. Why does it take her so long to admit this to herself?
- [13:30]
B
I think it's a tricky situation because she really likes it, the three of them, and she knows that whatever she does to disrupt it would mean losing that. And she feels that she would lose Yash if she told him, because she knows they're really good friends, really the best of friends, and they have a kind of an ethical sense about them where they would never betray each other. And so she knows that she would never see either of them again if she were to confess her real feelings. And so she just kind of prolongs it for a little while longer.
- [14:19]
A
One of the tensions in the relationship between Sam and Jordan is that because of religious beliefs, Sam isn't really sure that sex is right. It's a sin before marriage. How does this complicate the sexual tension and the frustrations in the story? And as you're building it?
- [14:39]
B
Well, again, you know, you love tension in a. In a novel. And so when I stumbled on that, it's. It's very helpful because they are attracted to each other. And yet she is made to feel very ashamed of this desire that she has. And it. You know, it creates a power dynamic when there's already a power dynamic. It's the. It's the late 80s. There is some underlying misogyny in this world, for sure. And then. And then there's this, you know, sort of God overlying everything and this concept of sin. And then Sam has the double bed in the big front room, and Yash has the twin little bed in the back room. And of course, she's in the front room feeling guilty about her desire, when really she starts to think that maybe she would like to be in the back room with somebody who would just want to have sex with her.
- [15:49]
A
It's interesting you mentioned the first half of the book is set in the 80s. Tell us a little bit about why you set the book that way and how it led to various forms of romance. 80s style.
- [16:08]
B
Well, I just felt like I had to set it at roughly a time when I went to college. I just didn't feel like I knew enough about any other time period to. To really get there. So it was just easier to do it that way. And I. I didn't. I think it was really important, especially when they get out of college and she moves to Paris. It was all very important that it was landlines only, like wildly expensive phone calls. I think things would have gone very differently had there been cell phones and texting is my kind of my guess. So I needed those sort of obstacles as well to, you know, to create more tension. So I think that those two reasons are the big ones.
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C
And there's a big time jump in the middle of the novel. We move from college to decades in the future.
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A
What are some of the challenges of.
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C
Navigating a time jump that large but keeping the same characters?
- [17:16]
B
I really love a time jump, but the first time I tried this, I went from the first section to the third section, and there wasn't a second section. My editor really felt like there needs to be just a little something in the middle. And what I had had. I had a little prologue of. Of the beginning of the second. What that is when the second section, it was in the. It was at the beginning going to a park when her kids are very little. And. And then when I realized that I did need something in the middle, and I also. I came to the secret that she has that you mentioned. I came to that very late in the process. And once I had that, then. Then I had to continue out the second section and make it a bigger. A bigger scene. And I. I love just plopping in and kind of going and trying to catch the reader up slowly and hopefully not to not spoon feeding them too much, but just letting them come catch up naturally. I like. I like it when I read novels like that, so I wanted to try that. And. And there is. I love compression of time. And I do think that those scenes sort of compress time. You know, we didn't have to read all the. What's in the middle. We just kind of get it. And it's very, it's very distilled what we get. And it's very deliberate. You know, the second and third sections.
- [19:06]
C
To find out what the secret is, you'll have to read Heart the Lover by Lilly King. Lilly, thank you for your time today.
- [19:16]
B
Oh, thank you so much.
- [19:17]
C
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