Olivia Wolfgang-Smith, "Mutual Interest" (Bloomsbury, 2025)

Summary

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Podcast Summary

Podcast: New Books Network
Episode: Olivia Wolfgang-Smith, "Mutual Interest" (Bloomsbury, 2025)
Date: September 29, 2025
Host: Chris Holmes (Burned by Books)
Guest: Olivia Wolfgang-Smith

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Episode Overview

This episode features an in-depth interview with author Olivia Wolfgang-Smith about her historical novel, Mutual Interest. Set in fin de siècle New York, the novel explores the intersections of queer identity, societal transformation, and the birth of modern capitalism. Smith and Holmes discuss her creative inspirations, narrative style, the historical setting, core characters, and the themes of queer kinship, secrecy, and ambition.

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Key Discussion Points & Insights

1. The Allure of Historical New York

[05:34–08:52]

• Why set the novel in turn-of-the-century New York?

  • Smith was drawn to the period as a moment of rapid societal and technological change, marking the creation of the New York subway and the city’s transformation into its modern self.
  • “If you had to pick one moment, the moment that the New York that we know today kind of became recognizable, it’s just that time period.” — Olivia Wolfgang-Smith [06:24]

• Smith emphasized that character drives her historical fiction. She enjoys reconstructing the material culture and lived texture of the past to immerse her characters in it.

• Dramatic Irony in Historical Fiction:

  • Research allows for playful dramatic irony—writers and readers know more than the characters possibly could, amplifying emotional resonance.

2. Outcasts, Triads & the Appeal of Queer Family

[08:52–11:19, 17:24–20:48, 21:59–26:09]

• Each central character (Vivian, Oscar, Squire) is an outsider, both to family and mainstream society.

• The choice to focus on a “triad of outcasts” rather than a single individual allowed for “infinitely spiraling potential for both positive and negative complications.” [09:20]

• Smith wanted to queer the “love triangle,” centering instead on intentional, chosen family—what she and the hosts refer to as a "polycule" that serves as cover and shelter for queer identity.

  “It felt like a relief to me as a writer to let them find each other... there’s this relief and surprise to find that there’s this other option that they find as they reach community.” — Olivia Wolfgang-Smith [19:21]

• The novel shows how secrecy creates both possibility and limitation for queer community, echoing archival gaps in queer history.

3. Squire, Neurodivergence & the Subway

[11:04–15:57]

• Squire is depicted as neurodivergent—likely on the autism spectrum, if using modern terminology.

• His obsessiveness—especially with the subway’s creation—frustrates family, but proves invaluable as a business trait and a metaphor for “irrational” genius in capitalism.

• Smith’s affection for the New York subway (and its persistent infrastructure from 1904) permeates the novel as both symbol and setting.

  “It is also just miraculous to think about the fact that it was all built starting in 1904. That’s amazing.” — Olivia Wolfgang-Smith [15:47]

• The subway serves as both a plot linchpin (a site for business innovation) and a metaphor for continuous, improvisational adaptation.

4. Kinship, Secrecy, and Queer Survival

[17:24–27:07]

• The partners form a chosen family that both defies and is shaped by societal norms. Their public “marriage” is a ruse for acceptance and professional advancement, yet secrecy is both their shield and their prison.

• The limits of secrecy, passing, and the emotional toll of hidden lives is a persistent theme.

  “To what extent a lot of this arrangement is victorious or sad... really living on their own terms with this huge caveat that it is not... it is a complete secret.” — Olivia Wolfgang-Smith [25:16]

• Smith explicitly draws on queer history (“I always point people toward Hugh Ryan’s great book When Brooklyn Was Queer” — [22:37]) to balance intimacy and the hazards of hiding.

5. The Narrative Voice – Queer Edith Wharton

[27:07–36:40]

• The novel is written with a strong, omniscient, early 20th-century-inflected narrative voice, described by Smith as inspired by Edith Wharton, especially The House of Mirth.
• Smith reads a substantial passage exemplifying this witty, knowing tone ([28:28–33:03]).
• The voice is described as “intrusive,” “affectionately making such fun” of its characters, with the “narrator knowing more than any of the current characters.”
• The narrator’s viewpoint sometimes echoes an alternative Vivian—what she could have become in a different era.

6. Queer Awakening & Capitalism

[36:50–40:33]

• Uniquely, Vivian’s queer awakening coincides with her entry into—and mastery over—industrial capital, a pairing rarely dramatized.

• Vivian serves as a critique of girl-boss/feminist archetypes: she’s fiercely driven, but willing to exploit others for her own advancement.

  “She wants to be in charge of the entire world and... she would gladly and does throughout the book, walk all over many other women with ambitions in order to try to, you know, get what she wants out of life.” — Olivia Wolfgang-Smith [39:32]

• The novel interrogates the compatibility—or lack thereof—between individual self-actualization, queer community, and the structures of capitalism.

7. The Blackmail Party – Comedy, High Stakes, Satire

[40:33–43:03]

• A pivotal late-book scene features a party at which multiple blackmail schemes, plans, and social tensions collide. The result is both comic and suspenseful, likened to physical comedy or farce, yet with real stakes.

  “Even though the stakes are high existentially for these individual characters, there’s a little bit of humor to it. Just in the sense of, like, can you believe this is how life works?” — Olivia Wolfgang-Smith [42:00]

8. History as Web: The Year Without a Summer, Volcanoes & Bicycles

[43:25–47:29]

• The book opens with the aftermath of the 1815 Mount Tambora eruption—“the year without a summer”—which became a running thread in the novel.

• The global climate disaster led to famine and death, but also the invention of the bicycle (due to the death of horses).

• Smith uses this as a metaphor for unpredictable chains of cause and effect and the complications of historical narrative.

  “There’s no way to tell even the smallest, most straightforward story about life without everything spiraling into a crazy thing that is way too complicated to boil down to a positive or a negative or a direct line of cause and effect.” — Olivia Wolfgang-Smith [46:26]

• Listeners learned about curiosities like “bicycle face”—an absurd diagnosis that stigmatized women’s cycling.

9. Current Reading Recommendations

[49:20–53:22]

• Olivia Wolfgang-Smith offers book recommendations:
  • Sick and Dirty by Michael Koreski — Nonfiction on Hollywood’s queer “golden age.”
  • Damon Runyon’s Guys and Dolls and Other Writings — Humorous short fiction about 1930s New York.
  • Anna North’s Bog Queen — Literary murder mystery involving ancient bog bodies (and, delightfully, a moss narrator).

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Notable Quotes & Memorable Moments

• On the power of the narrator:
  “If you’re feeling unconfident while drafting, highly recommend having a very, very confident, intrusive, omniscient narrator.”
  — Olivia Wolfgang-Smith [33:52]

• On chosen family:
  “It felt like a relief to me as a writer to let them find each other... I’m hopeful that that is mirrored in their experience as characters too.”
  — Olivia Wolfgang-Smith [19:21]

• On the subway:
  “A lot of it hasn’t changed that much since then... kind of beautiful and amazing to me.”
  — Olivia Wolfgang-Smith [15:47]

• On historiography:
  “Looking back in archives, it’s very tricky to know what was really happening versus what was written down.”
  — Olivia Wolfgang-Smith [26:09]

• On narratorial style:
  “Usually... I’ll say that it’s a queer Edith Wharton pastiche.”
  — Olivia Wolfgang-Smith [33:51]

• On queer history inspo:
  “I always point people toward Hugh Ryan’s great book When Brooklyn Was Queer if they read Mutual Interest and are interested in actually knowing more about actual queer history in New York City.”
  — Olivia Wolfgang-Smith [22:37]

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Timestamps for Key Segments

| Time | Segment/Topic | |-----------|------------------------------------------------------------| | 05:34 | Why fin de siècle New York? Historical research insights | | 08:52 | Outcasts, queer love triangles, and chosen family | | 11:04 | Squire’s neurodivergence and obsessive personality | | 15:08 | The subway as metaphor and setting | | 17:24 | The trio’s families vs. their created queer family | | 21:59 | Structures that permitted secret queer life | | 25:16 | Secrecy, passing, and their costs | | 27:07 | Narrative voice, read-aloud passage | | 36:50 | Queer awakening vs. capitalist structures | | 40:33 | The comic “blackmail party” scene | | 43:25 | The year without a summer and the history-metaphor | | 49:20 | Book recommendations (Koreski, Runyon, North) | | 53:22 | Plug for Mutual Interest and closing remarks |

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Tone and Language Notes

• The host is warm, enthusiastic, and well-read, frequently expressing admiration for Smith’s characters and style.
• Smith is articulate, self-deprecating, and analytical, often grounding her creative decisions in both literary homage and personal affect.

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Conclusion

Listeners new to Mutual Interest will come away with a sense of the novel’s lush, witty historical world—one that both interrogates and celebrates queer kinship, and the networks of secrecy and invention that make survival and love possible in hostile times. Smith’s narrative style, inspired by Edith Wharton, brings both affectionate satire and emotional depth, and the conversation is rich with literary and historical insight as well as practical glimpses of the writing process.

Recommended for readers interested in: historical fiction, queer history, New York City, found/chosen family, and literary narrative craft.

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Transcript

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[Chris Holmes]

Welcome to the New Books Network. I'm Chris Holmes and this is Burned by Books. Here you'll find interviews with writers you already love, like Jennifer Egan and Rebecca Mackay, mixed in with up and coming voices like Alexandra Kleeman and Roman Alam. You'll find us wherever you listen to podcasts, but check out previous [e-mail] and on Instagram and Twitter BurnedByBooks. Let's start the show. It is the turn of the 20th century and Vivienne Lesperance has seen all that she cares to see of her.

[Interviewer Sam]

Hometown of Utica, New York.

[Chris Holmes]

And she is preparing for liftoff to someplace new, a city big enough in space and wide enough in ideas to contain all that she imagines for herself. So begins Olivia Wolfgang Smith's gorgeous historical novel of fin de siecle New York mutual interest. Full of an industrial tycoon's genius and drive, but shackled to a culture and moment in time that sees her as the weaker sex, Vivian is profoundly limited in her ambitions. And then there is also the problem of her desire for women, who she.

[Interviewer Sam]

Pursues in ways that jeopardize her career.

[Chris Holmes]

And even her safety. When Vivian crosses paths with a young man of middling means working for a soap and beauty company, the two begin a business venture and personal entanglement that will leave both to pursue their unconventional lifestyles while providing each a visibility and respectability as a married couple sanctified by family and society in a ruse of a union, an unlikely third member of this triangle will appear. Squire, the scion of a wealthy family and would be businessman and inventor, finds in Vivian and Oscar not merely a business opportunity, but in fact the potential for something like a queer family. Squire's obsessiveness, the very thing that ostracizes him from much of his family's blue blooded social circle, will become a trait of value and possibility as the trio begin a company that will let loose into the great flood of capital in the early 1900s. Olivia Wolfgang Smith's research into the wonder that is the New York City subway queer lives in an age of secrecy and the rise of corporate culture after the age of the robber barons gives a fine grained texture to the world of mutual interest. We move through the city in a moment of upheaval, an enormous social and cultural change, while hewing tightly to our business partners and queer companions as they try to understand how the commingling of love, desire, family and commerce leaves room.

[Interviewer Sam]

For care and goodness.

[Chris Holmes]

Olivia Wolfgang Smith is the author of the novels Mutual Interest and Glassworks, which was long listed for the center for Fiction First Novel Prize and named a Best Book of the year by NPR, Apple and Good Housekeeping. She is a 2024 NYSE A Artist Fellow in Fiction and lives in Brooklyn with her partner.

[Interviewer Sam]

Welcome to Burned by Books. Olivia Wolfgang Smith thank you so much.

[Olivia Wolfgang Smith]

I'm so happy to be here.

[Interviewer Sam]

This is such a beautiful book and really such a striking narrative form and characters that I'm going have living in my head for a very long time and I wanted to take on straight away its nature as a historical novel. I mean it's queering the traditional historical novel, but in many ways it is a true historical novel in, in the classic sense. And it's dramatization of enormous societal, technological and cultural changes at the turn of the 20th century. Why were you called to set the novel at the femme de sicle and, and what was your research?

[Olivia Wolfgang Smith]

Yeah, that's a great question. I feel like it's kind of inevitable, I guess that for any, any book that's like, that's set in such a different time period of like. Why? Why?

[Interviewer Sam]

Yeah, yeah.

[Olivia Wolfgang Smith]

And I think that part of it is that from the very beginning I was thinking about New York, which is the city I live in as a transplant, and that's just like a really fascinating time period for this particular city at the turn of the 20th century got the. This is. That's when the subway system started, which is kind of a big part of the book and is a huge. It's kind of the. It's the moment that New York. There is no one moment, you know, that I guess is kind of part of what the book is about, that the things are always changing all the time. But if you had to pin it down, it's just that time period was sort of. If you had to pick one moment, the moment that the New York that we know today kind of became recognizable. So I was sort of interested in.

It for that reason.

And it's just. It was just a time of enormous like societal and technological change in a way that it sort of feels like we're also have been living through at the beginning of this particular century. So I found it interesting in that way. And then just the more thinking about it. For me, everything I write sort of begins with character. So with historical fiction in particular, researching and thinking about time period and like material culture of a given world goes along so much with like trying to picture just the world that characters move through and what life is like even before there's like a plot to a novel. Like if you've dreamed up this person in this time period, what is their life like? Though I find the research for. For a novel like this is very like exploratory and generative in that way.

[Interviewer Sam]

I feel like that's a. I. I mean, it's such a great reminder. I find that students now who are very interested in creative writing don't really want to have to think about the historical context for their character. And they. That they are so often presentist in how they imagine everything and. And think that, you know, one's. One's context historically doesn't affect who one is and who. What that person can become. And so it's a good reminder of how much that shapes character.

[Olivia Wolfgang Smith]

Yeah, sure. And I understand the resistance to it. I understand the philosophy of the idea that it makes it harder because there is up front front loaded a lot more work to do of learning. I think it's part of it is like a trick of, I don't know, this is just sort of a disease I have that I find that fun. Like, I find the look that like reading into that like to be enjoyable. But I do think that it does kind of make it easier in other ways because you as the writer and.

To what extent you want your narrator.

To have, you know, foreknowledge and omniscience, but you have more context to see that, because it's exactly like what you're describing, that like, we obviously are all creatures. There's no magical historical present where people are unaffected by their political and geographical context. So you have more. The benefit of hindsight, I think, is huge in getting to kind of decide how much self knowledge you want characters to have. There's a lot more. I love dramatic irony as a reader. I love it everywhere that I encounter it. And you have a lot more room to play with it when you're writing historical fiction.

[Interviewer Sam]

Mm, that's so true. I love a novel that centers the lives and experiences of decentered people. Vivian, Lachense, Oscar and Squire are each a certain kind of outcast trying to exist in a society that would prefer not to see them or hear from them. What was the appeal of the outcast and how did you decide that a triad of outcasts would have a different impact on society than a single driven individual?

[Olivia Wolfgang Smith]

Oh, that's a really good question.

I'm not sure I've ever heard it asked that particular way. I really love thinking about that. I think that there. There's an interesting. Something that was interesting to me. I'm thinking at first about the second part of your question, I guess about the idea of having this like, trio, this, this triad of people. I know I knew that I wanted there to be kind of a complex love story, but I didn't want it to be a love triangle as we like traditionally stereotypically think about it. So I think that part of what I was thinking about in terms of that outcast factor is that these are all three characters who, with varying degrees of like, positivity versus self loathing, think of themselves as very singular from a very early age, think of themselves like the only person like them. And I wanted that to be complicated by them finding themselves in community with like this kind of group, this, this group of the three of them. And I just thought that it was a, an opportunity for a really complex set of like, collaborations and conflicts. And I think that it's a matter of just how much more, infinitely spiralingly, like how much more potential there is for both positive and negative complications when you've got three people instead of one or two.

[Interviewer Sam]

Oh, for sure. With such like competing, overlapping, and then sometimes really kind of distorting interests and motivations. Yeah, we'll get into. I want to start by talking about Squire's, you know, singular singularity. And without being too anachronistic, I think it's fair to say that you depict Squire as, as being neurodivergent. Is it, Is that true?

[Olivia Wolfgang Smith]

Yeah, yeah. I think that there's an. It's just like there are many ways in this book in which kind of identities and labels have shifted so much over time that it's hard. But yes, I think that he probably would if you were alive today, diagnosed as somewhere on the autism spectrum.

[Interviewer Sam]

And. And he evinces this in. In brilliance and obsession. Obsession over details of things that interest him. This is a great irritation to his wealthy bespoke family who see him as irregular in his behaviors. But it is a rather beautiful quality in an entrepreneur. I adore Squire's obsession with the creation of the subway, which you referenced as like, so crucial to this turn of the century. And at one period of time, he attempts to just ride it through all of its existing stops all day, all day long, or not all day long, but once a day anyway. And I. I wonder what about Squire's obsessiveness, if we even just want to call it that makes him exciting to you as a kind of turn of the century businessman or entrepreneur?

[Olivia Wolfgang Smith]

That's a great question. I think that I have a. There are. I have a lot of affections for all of the characters in this book. I guess I think that that's maybe part of how I write, which maybe is dismaying for some people who have read it and find them very unlikable.

[Interviewer Sam]

Oh my gosh, no, they're so awesome. I don't. I don't find them even a little bit unlikable.

[Chris Holmes]

They're.

[Interviewer Sam]

They're extraordinary.

[Olivia Wolfgang Smith]

Well, I'm glad to hear it. But yeah, I think that part of it, Squire's sort of like obsessions and hyper fixations are, I think in some ways, like, that's just part of how I move through the world, having these very sort of sometimes lifelong, sometimes fleeting, like, moments of like, I need to just like deep dive and only think about this particular thing for the next while time to be determined. And it's a great, I mean, honestly, type of character to have in a book where I have the opportunity to, when I become obsessed with the early days of the New York subway, you know, give Squire all of those feelings and facts and things to talk about and explore. But yeah, I think that part of what's interesting to me is that part books set around this time period, they tend to really, especially when they're about sort of like wealthy entrepreneurial business people, tend to be a little bit hand wavy about what those people actually do all day and what they're thinking about, it's kind of tends to be like.

The source of money.

And for the most part, a lot of these books are about people who just have a lot of money, and therefore you don't hear anything about what they think or do all day unless it's like leisure time. So I like the idea of Squire as someone who comes from a lot of money to be someone who. Be who. Because of those resources, we're going to hear a lot about what he cares about and thinks about and the different ideas that he's like blue skying in terms of work, although his work gets to be very irrational because he is very wealthy.

[Interviewer Sam]

That's right. And it's. And the subway will end up becoming a linchpin. And in the business that they're starting, it's. It's a way to offer a new space in which to advertise the. The kinds of hygiene products and beauty products that their company works on. But I'm interested as a. As a New Yorker. You know, the subway gets a lot of hate these days, and you give it an extraordinary amount of love. And I wonder if you talk about how you bring your own experience of the subway, which I never find anything, but, like, fine. I don't like. It's not dangerous. Sometimes people do clip their toenails on it, which is like, an issue. But other than that, like. And then we have this, like, the sense of it is like a glorious invention, and Squires just wonder at it. And I wonder if you could bring both your own experience and Squires together in that moment.

[Olivia Wolfgang Smith]

Yeah, absolutely. I think that it's true that I think that part of the experience of writing this book was definitely a way for me to, like, enchant myself with or re. Enchant myself with things about the city that maybe I either take for granted or don't see. And, you know, some of that is rightful. Like, there's plenty I would change about the mta. Like, it has a lot of problems, but. Yeah, I think that it is also just miraculous to think about the fact that it had. It was. This was all, you know, built starting in 1904. That's amazing. And like, I mean, some of this is kind of. You could say it in a negative tone of voice as well, but it really. A lot of it hasn't changed that much since then. Like, we're.

We're all.

We're all really still using a lot of the infrastructure that is like over a hundred years old at this point in a way that is like Kind of like beautiful and amazing to me. And.

[Interviewer Sam]

Yeah, and in part it, it. Because it never stops. It like, can't be properly fixed or cleaned or. I mean, unless you take it offline, it's not like the tube where it like comes to an end every, every night and then you can, you know, clean it and fix it and it just, it just goes.

[Olivia Wolfgang Smith]

Yeah. You know, I had that exact experience. I visited London for the first time earlier this year and my spouse and.

I were at first so amazed because.

The tube was so like, clean and, and we, we were sort of like ragging on New York. I'm being like, why can't you be like this? And then realized it was because it closes every night. And it made me weirdly have like this sort of like New York pride where I was like, yeah, like, well, that's what you. If you like, I don't know, I was reverse engineering the tagline of the city that never sleeps and getting very like, proud of myself about it.

[Interviewer Sam]

I mean, if you have a, if you have a job that has a late shift and, and, and the subway is no longer operable. Yeah, you're, you're kind of out of luck.

[Olivia Wolfgang Smith]

Yeah. I think the idea of like, it just the idea of how much sort of effort and ingenuity it took to and continually takes to, to run something that for the rest of us is, you know, like you said, at best, fine. It's, it's, it's literally like what we do to get to what, what we're, what we consider ourselves actually doing for the day. Yeah.

[Interviewer Sam]

Would I prefer. Didn't smell that way? Yes, I would. But you know, it get. It gets you to a place hopefully eventually. So each of our trio draws a particularly bad straw when it comes to family, with Vivian's, I think being the shortest straw. Her family would just as well presume her gone from the world as have to think about her existence in connection to them and even fears her as a kind of like would be informant on their immorality. And, and Squire's parents find him such an oddity that even though his mother quite loves him, he's mostly an embarrassment. But those families are contrasted by the queer family that Vivian, Oscar and Squire forge around their. Their shared business. It is sort of a polycule in that it involves a aspect of desire, intimate desire between the men and in Vivian's case, a desire to be visible in society. And which really only comes at that point through being a married hetero woman. You, you aren't blind to the complications of this arrangement. But the novel admires and loves this crafted family. Can you talk to us a little bit about queer family and kinship as a means of creating a life in an inhospitable world?

[Olivia Wolfgang Smith]

Yeah, sure.

I think that, that there's something that was important to me as I was like drafting and starting to kind of get to know the, these, these characters and their relationship. The idea that they kind of find each other accidentally that I sort of. The first three chapters of the book are kind of introducing. I would say. I don't think I really know enough about Dickens to say this, but I think of it in my head as Dickensian, that we have this sort of like, from very early childhood, like for each of the three of them, like, introduction to Anywhere.

And then the fourth doctor is they.

All kind of like converge and meet each other. And I sort of wrote it that way. I wrote those three chapters introducing them to myself and then kind of from then on, just kind of like let them tumble together and saw what would happen. And having introduced them with these three sort of like very like, you know, difficult, as you say, like, origins, it felt like a relief to me as a writer to like, let them find each other. So I'm hopeful that that is mirrored in their experience as characters too. And I think that because of the fact that there's all this early disappointment, it's this kind of like, relief and surprise to kind of find that there's this other option that they, that they find as they reach community for, for.

For Vivian and for Oscar, who are transplants.

It's kind of about coming to New York and finding like, what's possible in the city that wasn't possible outside it. And Squire has a little bit of a different situation because he's like this lifelong and very like, blue blooded New Yorker, but he's had this very like quite quarantined, controlled childhood. So he also is kind of like getting to know the city for the.

First time as well.

So that's kind of part of it. I wasn't, I was very inspired by like the kind of like learning and about like broad strokes about like queer community in New York throughout its history. But it is like so far beyond my talent as a historian or like the scope of this, you know, kind of like a small, kind of intimate.

Love story novel to try to talk.

About, like, you know, what everyone is up to all over New York. So I've tried to kind of dramatize that as the story of just these.

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[Interviewer Sam]

Although you do a very nice job giving us the, the structures that exist in a, in an underground way to offer queer people chances for loving and intimacy. You talk about like the ways in which Vivian and Oscar in particular are able to pursue that prior to this kind of coming together as a tri part family and, and it's clear that you investigated the ways in which, you know, someone with attraction, same sex attraction to women could find intimacy.

[Olivia Wolfgang Smith]

Yeah, absolutely. There's, I think has always been many, even more or certain, I should say opportunities for that in the sense that I think at this time in history lesbian desire is very like poorly understood even by the organizations that would wish to police it. So there was sort of a lot of opportunities to get away with a lot in fairly, fairly plain sight. But yeah, it's an interesting. There's all of this really great. I always point people toward Hugh Ryan's great book When Brooklyn Was Queer if they read Mutual Interest and are interested in actually knowing more about actual queer history in New York City. But it's interesting writing a literary novel where you know, you want characters to be like, you know, frustrated and make bad decisions and be dealing with like, you know, not always acting in their best interests. It's like there, there are a lot of characters in this book book who are having a very great self actualized time for a much larger percentage of it than the protagonist.

[Interviewer Sam]

Yeah, yeah, that's, that's very true. I will make sure that we have a link to When Brooklyn Was Queer.

[Chris Holmes]

So that people can explore it because.

[Interviewer Sam]

It sounds like a great, a great compendium to mutual interest. If we think about this group of three characters in terms of, you know, almost like superheroes with Special talents and also key weaknesses. We can understand that each has a kind of kryptonite in the form of an identity that is in some way has the. Has the capability of not only humiliating them, but really, really kind of ending their social existence and business existence as well. And you shape the novel so that, you know, Vivian can hide Oscar's queerness while sort of, you know, providing a veil for her own. And the organization of the company can keep Squire's obsessive tendencies from being a public relations issue, while also giving him reason to want to spend time or seen it seem to be spending time with Oscar, who is his focus of his desire. But there's a lot of obscuring happening, happening here. And that's sort of the limit factor to this, where the superpower gives out and that there's a lot of incredible downsides to that that we see in the novel. So could you talk to both the sort of miraculousness that they come up with this plan sort of organically, weirdly, and then the. It's.

[Chris Holmes]

It's kind of fundamental flaw?

[Olivia Wolfgang Smith]

Yeah, I think it's. It's sort of up for interpretation to anybody, whether that's the reader or the characters themselves. To what extent a lot of this arrangement is victorious or sad, I guess that they're. They're really living on their own terms with this huge caveat that it is not. That it is a complete secret. And I think. I don't know, I think that that is like a. That's something that. That kind of poignancy is, I think, interesting anytime I'm thinking about queer history, because a lot of it has to do. I don't know. There's a couple of different things going on. One is that it's sort of always very poignant. As someone who's interested in that history from my own modern perspective, is that, like, looking back in archives, it's very tricky to know what was really happening.

Versus what was written down.

And so there's like, this sense of. I think part of what I was doing with this book was imagining this fictional world of like, what. Like, what would these people have looked like on paper? What would they have left behind versus, like, the vibrancy of their actual lives, that they were living together in this. In this home. But, yeah, I think that that's something that I wanted. Like, this is a. You know, this is a love story about, like, people who are. Who are finding. Finding their line of best fit, finding their. In this very, or sort of sometimes in some way borderline fantastical. Way, like finding, finding, making a life.

A life, a shared life for themselves.

And then at the same time, yeah, there's a, there's a tug to it of like, you know, what, what more we would wish for them maybe, you know, in a perfect. That resonates with me now when I think about the modern day. And I think that that's just a kind of a fundamental, a fundamental element.

When you think about these stories.

[Interviewer Sam]

Yeah, that, that, that complicated, you know, without, you know, we don't want to be ahistorical and imagine that there could just be a revelation that would all be happy and to, to think about, you know, in your words, the vibrancy and joy in, in living, even if that living can't be its fullest expressed self. I think it's impossible to talk about this book without talking about the like, incredible and unique narrative voice that you give to your omniscient third person narrative. So this disembodied voice has an enormous amount of personality and opinion on, on things. And you've, you've inflected that voice with something like a kind of early 20th century brio and its delight in critiquing its characters and its historical moment. And it's such a fun and knowing voice. I'd love to hear you read a little bit. This is early in Vivienne Lachance's youth and time in Utica, another city that you, that you delve into and its historical moment. But she's about to rocket out of Utica and achieve what the narrative voice calls the escape velocity. So would you read that little section for us?

[Olivia Wolfgang Smith]

Yeah, sure.

All right, so this is from the.

First, the first chapter, first few pages of the book. Our subject is change. Some change is so gradual it cannot be tracked with the human eye. Some is cataclysmic.

The development of the bicycle was the first.

Sort of like the spread of ash in the atmosphere, the build of pressure beneath Mount Tambora. Vivian's first ride was the second. An eruption. The two types of change are always entangled this way, like lovers slumbering in a train compartment, unconscious and always moving forward. The quick and the slow are mutually interested. Vivian taught herself to ride Patience's bicycle over the course of a dozen scrapes and one sprained wrist. Even after she saved the pocket money, money that in another life would have drained to whiskey to buy her own, the women sometimes still rode doubled for the thrill of it. The exponential miracle of two bodies balanced on one unlikely contraption, pressed flush, sternum to scopula using one another to steer.

Vivian saw Rufe less somehow, though he.

Was still around as much as ever. Even the least athletic of us will vault on, thinking over furniture. If sufficiently excited, we may even fail to notice when we bark our shins crossing the room, absorbed in something more interesting. Alas for Ruth Thomas, but glory and trumpets to the invention of the bicycle. Is there a more beautiful sight than a woman going fast enough under her own power to escape her demons? And how do you weigh the sight of it? The rushing, whooping, gorgeous cold wind in her hair against the thousands dead in pyroclastic blast and subsequent famine? Any attempt to keep a ledger is hopeless, yet to abandon the task is to abandon each other. But quick, catch a glimpse of her as she passes. Vivienne les France is riding out of Utica. Patience once again was the bridge out. When Both girls were 18, Patience was sent to spend a season with her aunt in New York for cultural development and for Cotillon. The tacit expectation was that she would find a husband by the end of the year, a prospect she looked forward to with the same benign interest as she did the museums and theatrical reviews. As the only sister marooned among five brothers, Patience lobbied successfully for the right to invite Vivian along to the city as her companion. Vivian's parents were only too willing to send her, seeing the venture as another kind of opportunity to consolidate their antagonist. And whether pawning their daughter in matrimony to Ruth Thomas or sending her to Manhattan to live off the stones for a while, one method of escape was as good as another to the Les Bronces, however differently the options might strike Vivian herself.

But if Vivian was careless enough to.

Develop champagne tastes, they told her, that would be her affair and her disappointment upon her return. Privately, though still unclear on logistics, Vivienne had already decided there would be no return. A few hundred miles by train to reach a city like nothing Vivian had ever seen, Patience was much preoccupied with the interminable preparations for her debut, having her wingspan measured in satin, learning to fold herself in thirds from the waist. And so Vivian had ample time to herself. She spent it observing tourists and locals with an equal, almost extraterrestrial interest. She learned fast, keeping quiet in tea rooms and theater lobbies until she'd mapped the faux pas that would mark her as a bumpkin aping society mannerisms. By the end of her first week, after a look at her wardrobe, Patience's aunt Daphne had some of her niece's old clothes altered to fit Vivian. The silhouettes were outdated, but Vivian wore them with a kind of ethereal confidence born of ignorance that disarmed any notice of their flaws. In fact, Aunt Daphne's set was rather taken with her, proudly surprising, as she was reflecting back to the women their most flattering portraits, focusing all her considerable survivors faculties on courting an invitation to remain in New York beyond the summer. Aunt Daphne nearly broached the subject during an afternoon card game. You're a dear, she said dreamily as Vivian refilled her bridge party's glasses of lemon squash. How lovely it would be if you could come out this season with the other girls. Vivian moved, carefully, topping off a glass. She smiled at the women waiting for the implied offer to bubble to the surface. Perhaps we can forgive Aunt Daphne for letting the invitation lie unexpressed. It would have been an astronomical act of generosity to sponsor an unconnected provincial girl through the enormous expense of a debut and to chaperone her through a social season.

In raising the subject at all, Daphne.

Had simply yielded to a moment's impractical daydreaming. Her cheeks were flushed with sugared lemon and heat and good conversation. She was partnered in the card game with Emily Drexel, who was wearing a bracelet that Daphne had given her 20 years before, and together they had taken the last three tricks running. The window was open, letting in fresh air and the familiar sounds of the neighborhood. Her rheumatism wasn't bothering her. The glass at her elbow was full again. Patience's little friend Vivian was here, and she was responsible for some portion of this happiness. For a moment, Aunt Daphne gave her credit for all of it.

[Interviewer Sam]

I'll stop there. Thank you so much. That was lovely. And as you were reading, I realized that I had mistakenly called Vivian Vivian Lachance instead of Les Barrance, which is weirdly Freudian in that I took away her hope and made it chance. But. But. Yeah, but it was great to hear that and especially to hear what I love about your. The narrative viewpoint here, which is. It's. It's constant, amazing critique and vision. So our. Our subject is change, and then perhaps we can forgive on Daphne. And I wondered what. Where that voice came from? Is it something you just heard in your head? Were there sort of examples from literature.

[Chris Holmes]

That you were drawing upon?

[Interviewer Sam]

Because I really love it.

[Olivia Wolfgang Smith]

Yeah.

Oh, thank you. I mean, this definitely. This book was like a voice first book for sure. I think that I definitely. There was no point where I was telling the story, not in that. In that voice, which kind of helps helped with drafting a lot because it's a very, very Confident voice. So if you're feeling unconfident while drafting, highly recommend having a very, very confident, intrusive, omniscient narrator. But, yeah, I mean, usually when I talk about this book and try to describe it very quickly, I'll say that it's a queer Edith Wharton pastiche. So the Edith didn't always write like that, but that sort of like, very intrusive, very highly omniscient narrator. I think of it as. It's kind of her voice or one of her narrative voices.

[Interviewer Sam]

I mean, House of mirth for 100%.

[Olivia Wolfgang Smith]

Yes. Yeah, yeah, yeah. In some ways, I do think Vivian is kind of like a less tragic Lily a little bit. In some ways. There is a little bit of a shared DNA there for sure. But yeah. And the narrative Wharton's confidence and the joy she takes in sort of affectionately making such fun of her characters was something that I was definitely trying to steal throughout this entire thing that you. You end up with in a lot of her. Her novels. It seems like she's invented these, like, beautiful, complex, very lovable people, like, in order to make fun of them and actually even more in her short fiction than. Than in her novels. So. So that was something I was certainly. Certainly going for. And it sort of spiraled from there. Cause I was realizing, like, once I have this narrator who is. Has this confident voice and will interrupt the story to make fun of what's happening or contradict something that a character has just said or, you know, that once. Once you have established that kind of rule, I discovered, like, the challenge and the joy of, like, what else does this character know? What else is this. What else is this narrator, like, allowed to say? Like, what else are they allowed to. So that's when you get. It sort of happens a little bit in that passage I just read with Aunt Daphne, where you sort of, like, get distracted. You sort of spend some time with a character who, in a different voice in a different version of this novel, we might not even notice. And you kind of like, we'll dive a little deeper in.

[Chris Holmes]

And it felt like the.

[Interviewer Sam]

At times that the narration was a kind of a version of Vivian, what Vivian could be in different historical circumstances, like. Like a badly behaved woman kind of thing.

[Olivia Wolfgang Smith]

In.

[Interviewer Sam]

In the way in which that narrative voice, even though it's not a gendered one, critiques and. And can see so much. And. And I. And I liked that parallelism.

[Olivia Wolfgang Smith]

Yeah. Certainly there's a. The narrator definitely has more perspective than. Than any of the. The current characters, for sure.

[Interviewer Sam]

So one of the things that, you know, greatly interested me about this is that I think it's. It's kind of an outlier as a novel in its. In having a. A kind of a queer awakening for Vivian. And that awakening ends up going hand in hand with like joining industrial capital at a certain transition moment. And I don't think I've ever read a book that sort of joins those two things quite so, so dramatically.

[Olivia Wolfgang Smith]

And we see not often associated.

[Interviewer Sam]

Well, yeah, no, or at least not dramatized. I mean it's. It's certainly like, you know, something that we imagine was, you know, if not common, then certainly available as a story, but you've chosen to dramatize it. And as Vivian comes to see her life in. In ways in which sometimes she's feeling like she has to abandon intimacy kind of all together in. In order to pay. Pay the dues for this business that really she's running. It's sort of the men are this cover for a business where she is the boss and. But the structures of capital are in a way antithetical to some of the things she's discovering about herself, about queer community.

[Chris Holmes]

And I wondered how you wanted to.

[Interviewer Sam]

Bring together that kind of all dominating structure with a kind of individual coming of age in Vivian.

[Olivia Wolfgang Smith]

Yeah, I think that that's really well put as a question because the idea of like large structures versus individual coming of age, that is something that for a very like. It's really Vivian's journey in this book of realizing the difference between those things. She is so confident and so driven and so individual and so like determined to, to get what she wants out of life. And, and she so often is successful especially early on that I think that she has a really hard time realizing that she's not, you know, independent of like. Like she's not actually in charge of all of American capitalism. She's not actually like outside of these systems. And I think that it's really her journey over the book of like realizing that she hasn't like run around the. The concept of having to have self knowledge by being so good at manipulating like her. Her business relationship, you know, which I think that she's kind of lying to herself about. For. For big. For big chunks of the book. So that's a little bit of a. I think she's kind of having. Having an 1890s version of like trying to have it all right at the. Kind of. At the beginning there.

[Interviewer Sam]

Is she leaning in?

[Olivia Wolfgang Smith]

Yeah, she's leaning in. I actually have. Yeah. During early kind of like marketing meetings for this book had people being like, should we describe her as a girl boss? And like, it's like an interesting. Like, I think anytime I understand why some people kind of see her as a. As a proto feminist figure. Like, I get that, but she's that I think I see Vivian as, you know, she's not feminist. She's not. She. She believes in Vivian's rights like she wants herself to. She wants to be in charge of the entire world. And like, she happens to be a woman, so she believes in like, you know, but she would gladly and does throughout the book, walk all over many other women with ambitions in order to try to, you know, get what she wants out of life. So I think that that's a. That's a project for her throughout the book to detangle sort of what her goals are personally and where they come from and like what she kind of. She has a hard time seeing opportunities to manipulate things as anything but positive and kind of maybe reaches the end of that road at a certain point.

[Interviewer Sam]

Yeah. And there's a moment where she might have changed that vision where she's like being blackmailed. It's a really great scene where she's being blackmailed and. And the blackmailer is revealed at this party. And then it turns out the blackmail is like the stupidest blackmail ever and like a self own. And it could have been a moment in which she would have more like, clarity about her. Herself and her choices. But instead it's like everyone else is to going kind of an idiot. And so I might as well girl boss it to use your language and it. And run over like, you know, whoever's in my way. And. And I guess I also want to hear about like, crafting that scene because that's a really fun, like, party blackmail scene.

[Olivia Wolfgang Smith]

Oh, for sure. Yeah. This was a lot of fun having this kind of. This is like this big party that comes like, very late in the book where this like, kind of. I tried to have the party as like a kind of ellipse used throughout the book that we kind of know from very early on that this big party that this family throws happens every year. And it's like, you know, the event of the year and then just fun to kind of have once you've established all of these characters to end this narrator that like, can be in everyone's head at once and kind of tell you everything that's going on to end up at this huge party with everyone just like getting drunk and going crazy was.

[Interviewer Sam]

And so many competing plans.

[Olivia Wolfgang Smith]

Yes. Yeah, yeah. Yeah. A lot of fun to kind of like imagine. Imagine the blocking of, like, where everyone is and like, what kind of is going on. And everyone. Everyone has kind of shown up to this party with a different. Yeah, as you say, different competing plan. All the. All of the different main characters have a different main thing that they're hoping to accomplish or. Or elude at this party that are very at odds. So it's a little bit. I mean, it's a very serious scene, I guess, but it is a little slapstick. I think maybe in execution. I think that's something that I've got. I'm trying to have going on at all times in this book is that, like, the scope is so large and that even though the stakes are high existentially for these individual characters, there's a little bit of humor to it. Just in the sense of, like, can you believe this is like, how life works? That this is how things are happening and that. Yeah, the ups and downs. That Vivian definitely gets jerked around and kind of jerked herself around with the. With the drama of that. That blackmail plot as well. Yeah. And there's going to be very scary and very ridiculous at the same time.

[Interviewer Sam]

Oh, absolutely. I think that's well said. And there's a lot of it. It's. It takes on the. The kind of physical. The physical comedy of. Of a play. It's like, you know, you can't be in this room, but you're in this room and you can't be with that person. And for God's sake, don't run into, like, your mom or Rebecca Van Beek, because everything's going to go south.

[Olivia Wolfgang Smith]

Yeah.

[Interviewer Sam]

And. Yeah, no, it's a nice combination of high stakes, like serious stakes, but also, as you say, like, quite a lot of fun. I want to ask you, because you. You begin with a. A historical refrain to the year without a summer 1816, which I did not know existed until I read the book. When an Indonesian volcano causes a dramatic shift in global climate, I had no idea it affected Mary Shelley and the writing of Frankenstein. So talk about this. This event and how it becomes an interesting analogy and microcosm for things going on in the novel.

[Olivia Wolfgang Smith]

Yeah, sure, it's. Yeah, it's a very strange kind of running thread that I learned about very, very randomly. But, like, just as I was beginning to have the ideas for this, for this novel and for these characters, I learned about this. Yeah, this was 1815 was the eruption. 1816 was the year that it affected that Mount Tambora. This volcano erupted, had the Huge effect on, you know, global climate. It had all of these spiraling. This is like how the book opens is the frame that sort of explains this that there was a lot of like crop failure that led to a lot of livestock deaths, that led to a lot of famine and there were disease and like very. And this is all over the world because of the way it affected the entire atmosphere. And for. For us in North America, it was called the Year without a summer because there was.

It.

It truly was like snowing in July all throughout the Northeast because of this like crazy like tephra in the atmosphere. And it caused all of these like, horrible things both locally where the. The eruption was and all over the world cascading for.

For a year and beyond.

You mentioned Mary Shelley. That's the. The reason why they were all holed up on vacation in Switzerland to. And. And she ended up writing Frankenstein. There was that they had terrible weather because this was happening when they were supposed to be on vacation. But there were all of these depending on again especially as. As you. You spool time out farther. Also positive, ultimately positive effects from it. And the one that I kind of focus on the most is that it led to the invention of the bicycle because so many horses died that they need. There was a transportation gap for everyone who would have been using horses to get around. They invented the ancestor of what quickly became the bicycle. And I, I was so taken with that at the moment. It's part of. It is just like. This is just. What's interesting about writing is that when you're in the early stages of drafting a novel, you're so obsessed with it that you see things that are relevant to it everywhere and you like, see everything in the world through the. Through this lens. But I knew already that I was trying to write a book about webs of cause and effect and, you know, webs of influence and the idea that even in little lives, like, like, like this is kind of a. In some. One way you could describe this book is that it's like the story of how Oscar and Squire, you know, these.

Two lovers met each other.

And the story is that like Vivian pushed one of them into a walrus tank at an aquarium. Like, you know, like, that's like, like, like. Which is not like the way that these. That things become the way that every. Like there's no way to. There's no way to tell even the smallest, most straightforward story about life without everything spiraling into a crazy thing that is like way too complicated to boil down to a positive or A negative or a direct line of cause and effect. And so I liked the element of like, kind of like chaos theory. I liked the element of like this very, very elaborate spiraling, like, huge scope and scale, but also like a very compelling story that you can kind of shift the story anywhere depending on where you started or where you look at it. And it was a good opportunity to have the narrator demonstrate immediately. Like, they're kind of like all knowing, like, like geological perspective in that way. And then. Yeah, the volcano just comes back to us a lot throughout. But it's kind of like paired with Vivian.

[Interviewer Sam]

Yeah, yeah. And I. Well, one, thank you for introducing me to this. But two, I love just the sort of play of cause and effect that happens with it throughout the novel. Speaking of, like, the invention of the bicycle, you probably already know this because I feel like it would have fascinated you, but have you heard of the affliction bicycle face?

[Olivia Wolfgang Smith]

No.

[Interviewer Sam]

So early, early bicycle riding was seen as very deleterious to a woman's constitution. And, and there was indeed a diagnosable ailment known as bicycle face that only, only women had. And it is, it is diagnosable as having a red face and, and being sweaty. And you know what we think of as like, exercise.

[Olivia Wolfgang Smith]

Yeah, but.

[Interviewer Sam]

But it was seen as like, you know, terribly deleterious to a woman in every way. Like her, her femininity, her like, reproductive health. And. And really what it boils down to is like women could all of a sudden like, get the hell out of Dodge and that like, society wasn't so psyched about that. But I, I just love that it was called Bicycle Face.

[Olivia Wolfgang Smith]

Yeah. That's incredible. And that, That's a great. I had never heard of that. That is amazing. And yeah, truly like a fascinating. It's. It's just funny to. At all to think whether in a positive or in that like a, like a negative kind of way, it's so funny to think of a time when like, the bicycle would have been like a mind, like, like a scare, like an earth shaking concept. That was like. Right.

Frightening to behold.

Yeah. So that is part of what's interesting.

[Interviewer Sam]

But yeah, and that exercise and, and clearly like happy exercise by women could be seen as. As really the end of a culture as we know it. So.

[Olivia Wolfgang Smith]

Yeah.

[Interviewer Sam]

Olivia, before I let you go, I would love to hear a little bit about some things that you've been reading and loving recently.

[Olivia Wolfgang Smith]

Yeah, absolutely. I can tell you what's. What's been on my most immediately recently reading pile here. One thing is, I this is, I've. I've been reading a little bit of nonfiction which is, I say as though it's crazy, which is just a little.

Unusual for me this time of year.

But I just finished this great book.

Sick and Dirty by Michael Koreski.

Hollywood's Gay Golden Age and the Making of Modern Queerness is its subtitle. So it's just about like kind of code era, like queer representation during like the Hays Code era. And it's like a very fascinating like look at like these films that obviously were very, very heavily censored and like had to be very, very careful and sneaky. And it's actually almost in some ways a fascinating craft book because you learn a lot about the many, many, many different rewrites these movies had to go through in order to try to remain true to their original source material. A lot of them were adapted from very kind of like risque Broadway plays. And so like trying to take something that had been originally on stage where the entire point was like the, the. The drama of the material that then has to get like sanitized and made into a squeaky clean mid century like MGM movie. So that for any like it actually is sort of mutual interest resonant as well. The sort of like queer subtext in a, in a very closeted age was really fascinating.

I learned a lot not knowing much.

About it coming in. Yeah. And then this is so strange, but I've been reading a, an omnibus of Damon Runyon stories. The like the, the title of this one is Guys and Dolls and Other Writings. So this is all the sort of like 1930s short stories that did eventually become like Guys and Dolls. The musical and the movie of this. Damon Runyon was a newspaper reporter in like Times Square in the 30s and like wrote all of these humorist like 11 page stories about these crazy like made up characters, like gangster characters and really paints a picture of a very fantastic New York. I don't think it's at all realistic, but they're like really amazing. And they're all written in like this historical present voice like as the like it's hard to even. It's like he does none of his characters use contractions and they all say, they all say everything as though it's happening right now. So it'll be like I am sitting at the counter in Mindy's. Like it's just an incredible. And like there are so many of them. So if you live in that world for like 600 pages at a time, really like come out of it blinking.

Like, where am I?

Incredible. It's great.

[Interviewer Sam]

That sounds so.

[Olivia Wolfgang Smith]

Yeah. And then I'm also. Because we're getting ready to do an event together next month. I'm reading Anna North's new novel, Bog Queen, which is like really incredible. I'm losing my mind. It's like a literary murder mystery about a bog body.

[Interviewer Sam]

Oh, I love bog bodies. The really, really old ones. Right. The like 5th century or something.

[Olivia Wolfgang Smith]

Bananas. So this is. It's like braided timeline. So you've got like sort of ancient druid stuff and you've got forensic anthropologists in modern times investigating the body that has been found in the bog. And it includes a moss narrator, like next one.

[Interviewer Sam]

Really.

[Olivia Wolfgang Smith]

And like the. The actual moss in the bog has a point of view as moss does. I mean, as it does. Yeah, yeah. So, yeah, really incredible. I'm really excited about that. It comes out in about a month, so I'm.

[Interviewer Sam]

Oh, wow. I'll have to get in contact with her because I loved her first novel and it would be fun to. I mean, that's such a great wreck for. For bog. Bog Queen. Is that what it is?

[Olivia Wolfgang Smith]

Yeah. Bog Queen, yeah. You gotta. Everyone gotta get on board with Bog Queen.

[Interviewer Sam]

Okay. Clearly. But the book that I really want to flag for everyone is Mutual Interest by Olivia Wolfgang Smith, which is an extraordinary historical novel that's also very closely focused on an extraordinary coming together of queer kinship and intimacy around a structure of an up and coming New York City and the beginnings of a certain kind of mid to late capital. And all told with such an unforgettable and hilarious and knowing narrative voice that knows everything about volcanoes to the workings of the subway. So please go to your indie bookstore and get Mutual Interest. And Olivia, it was so fantastic to get to talk to you and such a pleasure to hear more about your work.

[Olivia Wolfgang Smith]

This was so great. Thank you so much for having me.

[Interviewer Sam]

Thank you.

[Chris Holmes]

Well, that's all from me for now. My thanks to Olivia Wolfgang Smith for coming on to talk about her latest novel, Mutual Interest. You can find links to purchase Mutual Interest and all of Olivia's recommended books at the website burned by books dot com. There you'll find all of our previous episodes, links to buy a podcast T shirt, and ways to get in contact. As you listen, take a moment to rate the show on itunes, Spotify or wherever you find your podcasts. Until next time, this has been burned by books.

[Interviewer Sam]

Sam.