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- [00:02]
Captain
Race the rudders. Race the sails. Race the sails.
- [00:05]
Jack Edwards
Captain, an unidentified ship is approaching. Over.
- [00:08]
Captain
Roger, wait. Is that an enterprise sales solution?
- [00:13]
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- [00:33]
Jack Edwards
Hi, everyone. As you might be able to tell from the sound of birdsong and the vague hum of a chainsaw in the distance, I'm actually on holidays this week, so please enjoy. Instead of our regular episode, a live episode that I recorded at the Hay Festival last month with Jack Edwards. You've probably heard of Jack Edwards before. He is the Internet's librarian. He is honestly one of the best kind of book influencers out there, and I was so, so delighted to be interviewed by him on stage about the Rachel Incident and Skipshock and just a bunch of other stuff about writing and how I feel about the kind of writing side of my life in general. I love having this conversation. I hope you love listening to it. And we'll be back with our regularly scheduled program programming next week.
- [01:25]
Caroline O'Donoghue
Caroline o' Donoghue is a New York Times bestselling author and podcaster. Her podcast, Sentimental Garbage, has been streamed 12 million times. And I'm seeing some faces in the crowd, too, who are here for our live recording last night. So thank you for coming back. That's always a relief that people want to see us again. The Rachel Incident is her adult novel, which sold 250,000 copies today. We're here to talk about her young adult fiction, specifically this new, wonderful book, which you can see a shiny new copy right in front of me.
- [01:56]
Jack Edwards
So.
- [01:56]
Caroline O'Donoghue
Skipshock. So please welcome to the stage Caroline o' Donoghue.
- [02:04]
Jack Edwards
Hello. Thank you.
- [02:05]
Caroline O'Donoghue
Hey. How is he treating you?
- [02:07]
Jack Edwards
Oh, my God, fabulously. I'm staying in the weirdest house. It's so good. I love about. Hey. They just put you in people's houses because there's no real hotels around here. So I'm staying in the most amazing gaffe, full of, like, Victorian oddities and special fabrics. It's like it's the best fun ever. And I love being here with you as well. It's really fun.
- [02:26]
Caroline O'Donoghue
What a treat.
- [02:26]
Jack Edwards
Yeah.
- [02:27]
Caroline O'Donoghue
Well, since we're now best friends on the hey.
- [02:29]
Jack Edwards
Festival, two events means best friends.
- [02:31]
Caroline O'Donoghue
I mean, it's set in stone. I wanted to talk to you about the Rachel Incident to start with. I saw a lot of people in the room, maybe by kind of A cheer. Who in the room has read the Rachel Incident?
- [02:42]
Jack Edwards
Ok, lovely, thank you.
- [02:44]
Caroline O'Donoghue
Which was my introduction to your work. And I love that we sent her two best friends who are writers. What is it that draws you to storytellers but also to the craft of storytelling?
- [02:55]
Jack Edwards
It's interesting. No one's ever asked me that question before because you're right, they are. So Rachel, who is our protagonist of the story, she is a journalist and an editor of an English newspaper centering on the Irish immigrant experience. And so basically kind of a trade paper or a small community paper. Meanwhile, her best friend James lives in New York and he's a very fancy writer of a. Of a comedy writer, basically, who sometimes writes movies as well. And I always kind of imagined him to have a sort of like Bowen Yang to him or something, like somebody who's like, you know, a writer and a performer and also kind of has the sort of social media credibility. You know, that's always what I sort of imagined in my head. And so it's like a very, you know, a very famous writer and a very work a day writer. And they, you know, they focus on this time in their lives where they were sort of first introduced to that like, artistic way of life. And the two people they met, which is Dr. Byrne and his wife Deanie, and how they got introduced to that sort of like life of the mind that way. And I guess I never really. I think authors are often accused of self involvement when they write about other writers, you know, and it's interesting because writing about writers gives you a lot of narrative freedom because you're naturally centering somebody who's asking a lot of questions and you're. It also gives you the main character who has a lot of free time and a lot of. A lot of excuses to be in random places. So, for example, when we first meet Rachel, she's covering for her newspaper, this kind of Irish expat event called the Late Late Toy Show. Do you have any Irish people in the house that know what the Late Late Toy show is? Yes, we do, but also on a kind of. So on a practical level, doing stories about writers is really fun that way. But on. In terms of the Rachel incident specifically, it's very much a story about how we contextualize our past to ourselves and how we define ourselves by kind of writing our own stories. I mean, I know you're a huge Joan Didion fan.
- [04:59]
Caroline O'Donoghue
I am.
- [04:59]
Jack Edwards
And we all know that quote, and it's always blazed across tote bags. You know, we tell ourselves stories in Order to live. And I think we. Sometimes we who work in the book industry, we take a sentence like that, we tell ourselves stories in order to live, and we think it kind of means, so everyone go buy a book. Do you know what I mean? Books are essential, but really, it's kind of a glib way of saying we are all lying to ourselves all the time in order to compartmentalize the horrors of life, you know, which is the less interpreted, sort of like, meaning of that phrase, I think.
- [05:35]
Caroline O'Donoghue
You know, when you're a writer writing about a writer, do you find that people naturally want to be like, oh, so that character is you, you know, and do you find that biographical kind of observation irritating? Or are there parts of you that are in that character? Is there a perfect balance of how much of yourself to put into any given character?
- [05:53]
Jack Edwards
Do you know what? For this book specifically, I really felt a strong sense of mischief, of like, wanting intentionally to troll the reader. Because we talk all the time about how books are competing with screens all the time now, right? And we can rally against that. There's no use pretending that people aren't picking up their phone every sort of five or six pages, even if it's just to take a picture of the page or take a picture of the closed book in front of their coffee.
- [06:26]
Caroline O'Donoghue
Yeah.
- [06:26]
Jack Edwards
To upload it.
- [06:28]
Audience Member
Right.
- [06:29]
Jack Edwards
And it's like, well, why not work with that? So when I did this book, it was like the. No matter whether or not you've heard of me, whether or not you've listened to the podcast, or whether you've just picked up this book randomly in a bookshop, anywhere in the world, what you're gonna do, because this is what I do when I read fiction, is I read the first few pages. I'm like, this is pretty good. You look at the back page and you go, caroline Donoghue is a writer of six novels from Cork, Ireland, blah, blah, blah. And then you'll go, well, this character is a writer from Cork. And the way this character is physically describing herself looks a bit like this picture on the back. Is this a memo? This play about us? Do you know what I mean? And I really wanted to play with that because you could. If you were reading the first few chapters, you could be like, well, it seems like this could probably be about her. This could probably be about her and her friend. And then once the drama really kicks off, I really wanted people to be like, is this about her? And I love playing with that, because, no, it isn't. It's, you know, it's really what this book is, is kind of a soap opera in many ways. Like, it's. I feel like it's very honestly and truthfully writt, but the events in it are pretty dramatic. And yeah, I just. I'm in love with kind of messing people around that way. It's like, why not, as authors, like, make that work for us, that the fact that people are reading with a phone next to them, you know?
- [07:54]
Caroline O'Donoghue
Yeah. Well, I wanted to ask you about the way that you write love as well, because I think in the Rachel Instant, there's almost three kinds of love with the three different men. There's the relationship with Carrie, there's sort of lust towards Dr. Byrne and the fantasy of that relationship. But then also there's platonic love between her and James. And I loved that you gave their platonic friendship and that relationship as much respect as the romantic relationships in the book as well.
- [08:21]
Jack Edwards
Yeah.
- [08:22]
Caroline O'Donoghue
So I wanted to ask you about that sort of transformative relationship and those years that they have that bubble of two friends who live together. What made you want to write about friendship as well as love?
- [08:31]
Jack Edwards
Do you know what? It wasn't a specific. It wasn't a specific thing of like. I think we've been banging the drum for quite a few years now about like, you know, friendship. You know, friendship mattering as much as or more than romantic relationships. And I think we've. We've all read My Brilliant Friend, you know, we all understand that. But what I really wanted to get into was love of Men. So this book is dedicated. The Rachel Instant was dedicated specifically to the men in my life because I had realized that I was five novels into my career and that I hadn't really written about my relationship with men at all. And I think part of that had to do with the fact that I came of age as a novelist very specifically in a post MeToo era. It's so interesting because we don't think of books as being things that exist within a trend microscope. You know, we think of fashion that way, we think of TV that way, like. But I do think there was a real flurry of books after that time where so many female novelists were so hurt and angry at this. You know, the real. The thing about me too being like this realization that we had all been screwed over in similar ways by similar people. And there was this real anger and this sense of retribution. And I definitely wrote to that anger for my first couple of novels. And then, you know, as all feelings and all, you know, cycles of thought have to do they fade and they churn? And then I sort of got into this feeling of, you know, it became very normal for women my age to be like, oh, you know, kind of like, I'm straight, but I don't want to be or something, or, like, I live with a man in spite of myself. It became, like, very normal.
- [10:14]
Caroline O'Donoghue
This is my burden.
- [10:15]
Jack Edwards
Yeah. This is my burden to bear. And. And it became really important to me to be like, well, who do we mean? Do we mean our dads? Do we mean our gay friends? Do we mean the boys we're besotted with and the boys we marry? Like. And it sort of, like, actually meant a lot to me to really think about the men I love the most in my life and sort of deconstruct the love I have for them and show that on the page, you know?
- [10:38]
Caroline O'Donoghue
Yeah. I wanted to ask you about being an Irish writer. When I was looking at a few reviews, I noticed that a lot of publications kept saying, like, Sally Rooney esque, you know, writers love to do and stick that on the COVID in order to sell some copies. And I was wondering, do you find that as an Irish writer, as an Irish female writer, do you find that reductive, that it draws a false comparison? It's kind of a marketing gimmick that sets you up for something that you're not actually trying to be.
- [11:05]
Jack Edwards
It's so interesting, my journey with that specific question, because I remember when I first started writing, like, my first book came out the same year as Conversations with Friends. And, you know, love the book. Love, love her. Like, she's. I think she is one of the great minds of our generation. And, like, I've received a few DMs back when she used to use social media.
- [11:25]
Caroline O'Donoghue
Oh, wow.
- [11:26]
Jack Edwards
I think she's probably just a lovely gal as well. And it's. I think it's a. It's a real shame that social media has made her have to retreat because people just have become too obsessed with her. But there was this real feeling of, like, it doesn't feel great to be 27 years old with your first book on a panel full of, like, say you're with six other debut writers and everyone gets two questions each. And one of your questions is, why do you think Sally Rooney is so successful? And I bet, like. And I remember sitting there thinking, like, well, I bet she's not in the Waterstones and Leeds asking, Answering questions about me, you know, And I remember feeling like, a real sense of, like, this is tough, you know, and. But, like, then the More. I matured in this profession, and I've been in it a long time now. I've realized that, like. And I've both realized and been on the receiving end of the rising tide lifts all boats. You know, I feel like Sally has created in herself this. This whole kind of industry within an industry. And she, like, so many Irish female novelists have been uplifted by this. And, like, when we. Like, 10 years ago, if someone asked you about an Irish novelist, you know, name one or whatever, they would say James Joyce or something first. Or, you know, maybe Dave Binchey, who's one of my favorite novelists. But now when we think of the phrase Irish novelist, we think of, like, some sassy girl from Dublin with a great outfit. And I kind of love that, you know.
- [12:53]
Caroline O'Donoghue
Yeah.
- [12:53]
Jack Edwards
But it's really interesting to be on the receiving end of a trend, because I think there's. The only thing that ever really annoys me is that when people. People pretend as if like, okay, so one author broke through, and then we just scooped up all the scraps, and then we just blasted them out of a cannon kind of thing. But when in reality, there is a reason that there are so many Irish novelists, there's a reason so many Irish playwrights and artists. We're a tiny, tiny country. We've created an enormous amount of, like, great artists and thinkers. And that is because we are a country that invests very heavily in the arts. Like, in the last couple of years, we've also started a universal basic income for artists, which is still based on a lottery system. But I think out of the people who applied something, like, half of them were awarded it. We have a grant system, and that has completely changed people's attitude to art and Ireland. And it's actually magnificent to be around because I'm born in Ireland, but I moved to London when I was 21. And because of that, I see myself as almost a London writer. And I always think that the kind of writer that you are is very much shaped by the sort of people that you have to impress in order to get published. Right. And so if you're a London writer, you know, you might be at a cocktail party and see David Nichols there or indeed Dolly Alderton or like, whatever. And you see that, like, oh, wow, people making a serious living off these books. And you think, well, God, you know, he. You go into publisher, you're like, david Nichols wrote, one day, I'll give you two days. I'll give you three days. I'll give you a set of days. I'll give you a week. And it makes you kind of a shark. It makes you a commercially minded author. Whereas I speak to my friends in Ireland who are working off a grant system many of the times, and they are thinking about the art, but they're also thinking about how they can present the art that will get it funding, which means they have to think of it in a term, they have to back themselves, and they have to feel like their work is important. And so there's this artistic confidence behind it that makes me really envious sometimes, you know, I almost feel like I have to have a gimmick and a joke. But I really envy some of my sort of Irish counterparts who will just sit there and be like, my book is about a difficult subject, and if you don't want to buy it, I don't fucking care. Do you know what I mean? So, yeah, it's a fascinating subject.
- [15:16]
Caroline O'Donoghue
Yeah. A lot of your characters do come from Cork in Ireland, and I wondered if there's kind of like a codcu. Like the Carolina o' Donoghue cinematic universe, in which, like, a lot of the characters are from Cork. I'm like, I wonder if they have met.
- [15:32]
Jack Edwards
Oh, I love that.
- [15:33]
Caroline O'Donoghue
I find it easier to write about Ireland now that you are no longer there. I sometimes wonder if it's easier to write about a place and you can kind of calcify it into something easier to put on the page once you are no longer there, seeing it, the way it moves day by day.
- [15:47]
Jack Edwards
It's so interesting that you say that, because I don't. I sort of almost see Cork as a vector for youth, because all of my youth lives there. Like, as I said, I moved to this country when I was 21, and therefore, everything in Cork has a sort of an amber glow around it and the shades around that. I can adjust the dimmer on that all the time. And sometimes, depending on the day or the year I'm having, I feel like Cork was this idealistic place to grow up. And sometimes I feel like it's this kind of dark net of secrets and. And of course, like all, you know, small Irish places, it's both, you know, but, yeah, I. I wonder to myself a lot whether I'll be able to write a book about Irish people in Ireland who are older than the age of 21, because that's where all the Irish books stop for me, where it cuts off. Yeah. Yeah. If anyone's over 21 in one of my books, they're living in England.
- [16:42]
Caroline O'Donoghue
Yeah. Okay. I have One final question for you about the Rachel incident specifically, and I think a lot of people in the room will be thinking this too, but we're all desperate to have an update on the screen adaptation of the Rachel incident. Can you give us any updates? Well, is there a gun to your head that you can't say anything?
- [16:57]
Jack Edwards
I don't know. Yeah. Because the thing is you think they make you sign an NDA, but they haven't.
- [17:02]
Caroline O'Donoghue
And that is very much their mistake.
- [17:05]
Jack Edwards
And you know what? That's on them. No, but. So, yeah, no one's like sat me down and said, here's what you can say, here's what you can say. So I'll just have to use my own discretion.
- [17:15]
Caroline O'Donoghue
So let's just go crazy.
- [17:16]
Jack Edwards
Let's just go mental. Here's who we're not casting, but the. So I'm writing the bulk of it. It's going to be an eight episode show and I'm writing six. It's for Channel 4 and I think all going well, it will be on TV by Christmas 26th. So it seems like a long way away. But actually in sort of filmic terms it's tomorrow because it means we need to start shooting in Ireland in January of 20 of 26 and which is that will be the first time I will be living in Ireland again since I was 21. So maybe I'll finally be able to write a novel about Irish adults after that.
- [17:55]
Caroline O'Donoghue
Okay, so it's an investment into that as well.
- [17:56]
Jack Edwards
It is, yeah, exactly.
- [17:57]
Caroline O'Donoghue
Two birds, one star.
- [17:58]
Jack Edwards
I'm very much a use every part of the Buffalo sort of author.
- [18:02]
Caroline O'Donoghue
Well, I wanted to talk to you about your young adult endeavors.
- [18:05]
Jack Edwards
Yes.
- [18:07]
Caroline O'Donoghue
How do you feel about the term young adult in general? Because I was reading Skipshock and it didn't feel to me like something that adults wouldn't enjoy as well. I thoroughly enjoyed this book and it felt so exciting to go on this adventure with the characters. So I wanted to ask you about the. That framing of this book as a young adult book. And do you think there is an age limit to books or can anyone enjoy it?
- [18:30]
Jack Edwards
It's a really curious thing, isn't it? Because I kind of go back and forth. I fully think if you enjoy like 4th Wing or Sarah J. Maas or any of the kind of adult commercial fantasy that you see that this is absolutely a book for you. I think this is, you know. Yeah, I don't think. And there's, you know, there's some heavy stuff in this. Like there's, you know, there's sex work. There's murder, there's death. You know, there's stuff.
- [18:49]
Caroline O'Donoghue
They're going through it, they're going through it.
- [18:52]
Jack Edwards
But the older I get, actually, I've been working in this genre kind of simultaneously for my whole career. You know, half of my books are Y and half of of them are adults. And the older I get, the more I think that young adult is actually not a descriptor of the audience. It is more a descriptor of the genre. So I think when you get older, fantasy, like, for example, like someone who I would think would be firmly fantasy would be like someone like Samantha Shannon, right? Who. It's like deeply complex lore and, you know, incredibly complicated political systems and all that kind of stuff. And. And I think there. Those books are, you know, they're huge, and they're like a huge investment of your time as well. And the investment is so worth it. She's so gifted. But I think of YA fantasy as being a little bit lighter on its feet kind of thing. I think that there's like, you know, the. The young adult of young adults describes the characters far more than it describes the tone of the book. You're sort of seeing something with kind seeing the book through the lens of almost the innocence of a young person. But because you're. This book is set in a completely different world. You are that naive person as well. So there's a slight sense of naivety to it where these characters are discovering themes of like, segregation or racism or whatever for the first time. And I hope that it. You know that when you first see something really unfair when you're young and it cuts you like, you see somebody who's homeless or something, and you just can't believe why. Why that would happen. And then as you get older, you mature and become calloused, that kind of thing. I think when you read young adult, which is so often about political terms, it sort of reopens your heart and your mind to how unfair things can be and how scary the world can.
- [20:39]
Caroline O'Donoghue
Be, you know, and your trilogy, All Our Hidden Gifts was. Am I right in saying it was inspired by tarot cards?
- [20:46]
Jack Edwards
Yes, it was. I. Yeah, I was a big tarot card gal. I collected them for a long time. And then I remember I had this moment short, weirdly, shortly after, like, the first Trump presidency. And I remember having this moment of being like, I can't do this anymore. I can't, like, tell. Collect tarot and tell tarot to myself because, like, this great force for evil has won and they're laughing at us kind of thing. I thought of all the kind of right wings men who would be laughing at me like this kind of crying liberal with my tarot cards. And I became like, briefly disgusted by myself. And I was like, no, no more. And then I remember, do you know that, yeah, free cycle. I put all the tarot. It was like 40 tarot decks into a box and I put on free cycle, free tarot cards, free box of tarot cards. And then I looked at the bot. The photo I had attached and it looked so weird. And I just added brackets. Not haunted. But then weirdly, I've, like, come back. But like, you know, I was such a huge, huge tarot fan. I loved, you know, I'm a huge fan of like Philip Pullman as well. And like, I think so much of the alethiometer that Lyra Balacqua has is about sort of reading into the timelessness of symbols and archetypes. And like, for example, you know, of a symbol for hope in your tarot deck is represented by the star, but you might get a Chinese tarot deck and it's represented by a certain flower or a Mexican deck represented by a certain other kind of, you know, bird or something. And then you. You develop a kind of international inner dictionary of what different symbols mean. And I loved that. And yeah, I loved playing that with that for all our hidden gifts. Weirdly now, over the last sort of like five or six weeks, I've come back around to Tarotkin again.
- [22:32]
Caroline O'Donoghue
Oh, really?
- [22:32]
Jack Edwards
And I've started buying it again. I'm like, oh, no, friends fear she's reading tarot again.
- [22:38]
Caroline O'Donoghue
So when it comes to planning out a trilogy. Because Skipshock is going to be a duology, right?
- [22:44]
Jack Edwards
Yes. Yeah.
- [22:45]
Caroline O'Donoghue
So how do you decide how many books an idea should have? You know, like, how do you decide, oh, this is. This series is going to be a trilogy. This one's a duology, this is a standalone, you know. Or does it kind of develop as you write, you think? I've got more to say on this topic.
- [23:00]
Jack Edwards
Yeah. No, do you know what? This was supposed to be a standalone.
- [23:03]
Caroline O'Donoghue
Okay.
- [23:04]
Jack Edwards
And then it just kept getting longer and longer and longer. There was just more in it for me, I suppose. And then I said to my publishers, listen, this will eat. This can either be a kind of 400 page or 600 page kind of big tomb and it will take me another year, or we can cut it in half.
- [23:21]
Caroline O'Donoghue
Okay?
- [23:22]
Jack Edwards
And they went with the cutting in half. So this is, this is. Yeah, it's very Much A Part one and part two.
- [23:27]
Caroline O'Donoghue
Yeah. Okay. And is there a chance that. That there could end up being three and four? Are you like. No, I think I'm finishing the story at 2. It's going to be neat as an ending.
- [23:35]
Jack Edwards
I don't know. The thing is, is that I always think to myself, because, you know what, Being a YA author is not easy.
- [23:41]
Caroline O'Donoghue
Yeah.
- [23:42]
Jack Edwards
Everyone wants to give all the kind of the claps and the medals for the contemporary literary fiction. Everyone's ready to respect that. But you're at a dinner party and you tell people you write YA and they act like, you know, you just said, you know, I make small mice from soap and it can get a bit knackering, you know, and every so often I think, oh, God, maybe I'll just wind it up. But I love writing it so much, it gives me again the phrase I keep coming back to. I feel light on my feet when I write it. And then I did a YA event yesterday morning with 800 kids and I felt like I was Taylor Swift of the eras tour. It was so good. And we all, we did this kind of world building class together where they were all kind of like screaming out their different suggestions for what this world we were making together should be. And I was, I could never give this up. It's better than crack, man. It's so good. I love teenagers. I love. I just think they're the most. And you know what? I have to say Welsh teenagers are my favorite sliver of the teenage. Because there's something about Welsh teenagers I find so endearing because they're, they're kind of. They're not precocious, but they are kind of old before their time, like, hello, how are you? Kind of thing. And they're, they kind of shake your hand very strongly and then they're like, I've brought you my book I've been working on. Yeah, I got a few sort of work in progresses yesterday. There's a kind of an old world seafaring confidence to Welsh teenagers that I am obsessed with. With. That's why I love coming to. Hey.
- [25:16]
Caroline O'Donoghue
Yeah. I wanted to ask you about the difference between writing YA and writing contemporary fiction.
- [25:21]
Jack Edwards
Yeah.
- [25:22]
Caroline O'Donoghue
You know, do you have two things on the go at the same time and then you dip in and out? Or are you like. No, I'm focusing on one project. And which do you find more relaxing to do? You said you feel more light on your feet with.
- [25:32]
Jack Edwards
Yeah, well, the thing is, with this book specifically, I mean, I don't know if any of you have tried world building before, but it is extremely difficult because, you know, you might have some fun being like, oh, I'm gonna think about their feasting traditions and in what way they eat and whatever. But you can't just come up with the bits that you like. You have to like come up with currency, religion, burial practices, superstitions, kind of that kind every. You have to come up with everything. And it's so easy as well to slip back into boring cliches that we've picked up from world building. Like for example, I remember I was writing a sentence and I was like, oh. And then everyone went to the tavern for. For some mead and I was like, why am I saying tavern? Why am I saying mead? Is it because I've just inherited this kind of fantasy lingo way of speaking that I haven't really earned, you know, or that doesn't really make sense here. And so you have to kind of police yourself all the time. So it's not relaxing, but feels like a greater accomplishment in some ways. This book anyway. Yeah, For All Our Hidden Gifts, that was a real laugh because it was. So much of that book is just kids hanging out, being really silly. And I love writing teen dialogue. I just think, yeah, they're endlessly fun to write.
- [26:43]
Caroline O'Donoghue
Well, we will have time at the end for some questions, by the way. So this is just your heads up to get thinking of what you would like to ask Caroline at the end. But I do have some questions for you specifically about Skipshark. Obviously. The book I think is available in the bookstore. So I will be really impressed if someone has managed to read it already. I assume that most people in the room are excited about it, but have not yet.
- [27:04]
Jack Edwards
Yes, it's out on June 5th by the way, but we have some special kind of advance copies in the. In the books tent. So you're the only people in the country who have access to the special edition book.
- [27:14]
Caroline O'Donoghue
So I wondered if you could give everyone a bit of an insight into what the book is about.
- [27:19]
Jack Edwards
Sure. How long do you have? So, okay, so. So Skip Shock is a time travel novel. And it's not time travel in the sense that you're going backwards and forwards in time. It's the time travel in the sense that it's time distortion. So it's a. It's sort of a string of related parallel worlds that are connected by a train line. And in those worlds they all the time kind of moves differently. So if you think of like a normal train map that goes north, south, east, west, the Further north you go, the faster time gets. So you might have, you know, 12 hours in a day, 10 hours in a day, six hours a day, eight, two, you know, and then the further south you go, the, you know, the more hours in a day. So we could have days that go on for 40 hours, 60 hours, 80 hours. And you know, you can sort of, you know, tell from yourself where's all the power and money and influence and stuff going to be. Obviously in the south, because people are living longer, they're holding onto wealth for longer, as opposed to the north where things are far harder, people are living and dying far quicker. And I was really obsessed with this because I'm sure you guys have all had this conversation before. But like post Covid, we were all saying the exact same thing, right? Which is that our relationship to time had completely changed. We're still talking about it, we're still talking about the years of 2020-23 as they just sort of went by like that. And we joke about it in conversation all the time. But I think it has a real existential, sort of real fear for. I don't think we all sort of talk about how we don't like seeing Covid in art and there's no Covid in this, don't worry. But I think because we don't like being confronted with lost time, I think it's the existential panic of lost time is very confronting for us. And one of the characters, Margo, she's from our world, she's from a 24 hour world and she kind of slips into this system, you know, and she ends up in a six hour world first. And she has this kind of sensation that comes over her where she kind of panics and vomits and blacks out. And it's kind of like, like an advanced form of jet lag, which is what skip shock actually is. It's like this kind of really. It kind of kind of kills you or whatever. So we've got this character, Margot, who's kind of slipped from Ireland on a train from Cork to Dublin into these worlds. And on that train she meets this traveling salesman. Because the only way you're allowed to travel around these worlds is if you have business, which some of you might remember from COVID as well, where. Remember when there was that weird thing where all these random rules, like you had to, if you wanted to go to the pub, you had to have a significant meal.
- [29:52]
Caroline O'Donoghue
Yeah, yeah.
- [29:53]
Jack Edwards
And if you wanted to travel, it had to be for business that you could prove. And so he's he's someone who's traveling around and you know, he's inflicted with this disease, Skip shark. He meets Margot. He's never met anybody from a 24 hour world before. And then adventures ensue. There's a lot to this book and that's just the tiniest iceberg of it. But yeah, a lot of it is about our relationship to time and how also we'll never. It's the most subjective thing in the world. I will never know how quickly this event has gone for you, but according to the thing, it has 20 minutes left. So for me it's gone very quickly indeed. You know, it's like, so it's so subjective. I find find that fascinating.
- [30:31]
Caroline O'Donoghue
Yeah. We were even saying on stage, they were like, okay, this video is two minutes long. We were like, this is the longest two minutes.
- [30:36]
Jack Edwards
I know, I know.
- [30:37]
Caroline O'Donoghue
Yeah. It is weird how time sort of shifts like that.
- [30:40]
Jack Edwards
Yeah.
- [30:40]
Caroline O'Donoghue
Am I right in saying that some of the discussion around travel and borders and areas that different people are allowed into and others aren't and visas was partly inspired by Brexit?
- [30:50]
Jack Edwards
Yeah, it really was like, you know, some books that kind of come upon you suddenly, like the Rachel Institute I wrote, you know, in a couple of months and it was just sort of. It kind of came out whole. I didn't really have to think about it. Sometimes you get really lucky that way. And this book is kind of the equivalent of like a piece of chewing gum underneath a Cinema seat for 30 years, you know, which is like rolling around in popcorn and hair and use condoms and just, you know, and I. The first kind of germ of the idea came to me when you. Just after Brexit was announced. I had, you know, it's so strange now because obviously Brexit. I'm assuming we all rather. It didn't happen in this room, but it was the. After kind of the Obama years and after the kind of time I was living in London, which was such a hopeful time, it felt like the first really bad thing to happen to my generation. Like obviously we had lived through the recession. We'd all started our careers in the recession. But then when that happened, it was like, oh, what? Like we didn't. We'd been on the winning end of things, it felt like for a long time because I had, you know, taken part in kind of the abortion referendum in Ireland and, you know, marriage equality in Ireland. I had been used to easy wins for left wing policies and to have this sudden thing where suddenly all of my friends were saying to me all my sort of British friends were saying, well, you've got the good passport. You know, I've got the Irish passport. Nothing for me changes. And I found that fascinating, that kind of thing. My. My husband, who was my boyfriend at the time, everyone was saying, like, well, hurry up and get married. You want to get that passport kind of thing. I was like. I was like, we've been together for eight years. Stop, like, treating me like a GI bride. This is so strange. And I was so fascinated by how, like. And, you know, we were kind of a fairly, you know, media. London media crowd. Most of us, you know, white, most of us born, you know, in England or whatever are. Most of them were. And it was the first time anyone of that cohort was faced with this idea that people all around the world face all the time, which is, I don't have the right piece of paper to be where I want to be. And the randomness of that really struck me, and I really felt like. I really feel like the best fantasy, whether it's like the Handmaid's Tale or the Hunger Games or. Or whatever it is, is based on something that an author has noticed about the real world that feels perverse to them, and they just have to blow it up. Like Suzanne Collins, famously, for the Hunger Games, she was watching Survivor and flicking between channels, and she saw the Iraq war also. And the collision of those two images inspired those books. And famously, in the Handmaid's Tale, all of those injustices that happened to women happens to somewhere in the world. And I think what happens is, as a fantasy writer, you take something that you think is perverse and you put it under the microscope, and then you sort of project it on the ceiling of your own brain, and you make it big so you can see all the details. And that's kind of what I hope this book does, is kind of how perplexing it is that we do that at all.
- [33:55]
Caroline O'Donoghue
You know, and another facet of that kind of divide is also that moon, who is our male main character, is part of the lunati, which is basically kind of like a religious group. They sort of worship the moon in a way. And he has a very visible sign because he has a moon tattooed on his face.
- [34:13]
Jack Edwards
Yeah.
- [34:14]
Caroline O'Donoghue
And I think that that symbol of his religion made me at least think of other very obvious visual signs of someone's religion, like a turban or a burk or something. Was that kind of, in your mind, that idea of visible religion being. Being seen in society as well?
- [34:30]
Jack Edwards
That's so interesting. I actually hadn't even made that connection. But you're so right because like, yeah, people wear visible signs of their religion all the time. And even though it opens them up and it makes them vulnerable to anybody who wants to say something hateful or indeed do something hateful. But like, I think what really inspired me about, about all that was, was like the how we feel about kind of nomadic religions in general or nomadic people in general. So it's something, what I really enjoyed about creating that religion that this character is a part of, which is called the Lomati. They, you know, if they follow the full moon. So therefore travel is intrinsic to what they do. And so, and what they kind of, what they get from this nomadic religion is that they sort of have a kind of a monthly ceremony where they are given sort of flecks of silver, silver seeds, it's called. And that is their payment from their religion for following their religion. Because you can't really have a job if you follow this religion. And what this translates into for the people around them is they get money for free. Like, and I think it's fascinating how we talk about people who get money for free, even if it's part of a tax paying system that they've been paying into their whole lives, even if they're, you know, for any kind of reason, you know, an asylum seeker, refugee or whatever. I find it fascinating how quickly empathy sours when someone thinks somebody else is getting something for free, even if it's like the tiniest amount of money that is really hard to live on. And I also was really inspired with that. I mean, Irish travelers was like a touch point for me as well, because, you know, as I've just been talking about being from Ireland and what a wonderful liberal society we are in many ways. But you'll still get in Ireland this enormous gulf of empathy about Irish travelers. And I'm not here to, you know, sort of weigh that up or anything, but I just think it's really interesting when you get a population of people like the Irish who are, are so careful to not overly categorize and not overly judge or, and to remain liberal. And then you will hear very liberal Irish people just being like, oh, well, the travelers all got plasma screen TVs in their caravans, you know, that, you know, that kind of like really like generalized broad stuff and like that. That to me was a fascinating sort of thing to explore in fiction.
- [36:58]
Caroline O'Donoghue
Yeah, I wanted to ask you about, and a lot of people will notice this as soon as they start reading that we have two different perspectives. But Margot's perspective is told in the third person, whereas Moon's perspective is told in the first person. I wondered why you chose to share their perspectives in a different stylistic way.
- [37:17]
Jack Edwards
Yeah, it was like cracking a safe, you know what I mean? It was like, the longer I get into this profession, the more I realize that like so much of the stuff we learn in school is just bollocks. It's so I just don't think about a grammar construction or whatever, or ending a sentence on a preposition or all these rules that we learn, I think are basically kind of useless really. But then the one writing thing that does vividly change how a novel is perceived, how a character is perceived, is perspective and tense. So because we have Margot. So Margot, as I said earlier, is this 16 year old girl who has very much in the grand tradition of fantasy, like Alice in Wonderland or Dorothy in Wizard of Oz or sort of Chihiro in Spirited Away, is a girl from our world who has fallen into another world. And that is actually, even though it's such a common trope, it's a really hard narrative to write because you're just writing this character who's amazed by everything all the time. And like that really slows up the action to be like. And wow. And they're eating a different way and oh my God, this is God. And they've got all these pictures and they're all backwards kind of, you know, it's really boring to write about a character who's constantly amazed by things. The best writing advice I ever got in my entire life was from my secondary school English teacher who I'm sure secondary school English teachers have their own place in heaven because they're the one everyone comes out to and they're the one everyone quotes in books, events. But I remember we had this kind of essay, creative writing task to take home for the weekend. And you know, I think where they give you four or five options to choose from of what prompt you want to go with. And one of the prompts was the time machine.
- [38:59]
Caroline O'Donoghue
Okay.
- [39:00]
Jack Edwards
And she said to us, and by the way, if any of you choose this time machine, I don't want half a page on how amazed you are to find a time machine. I want you to just go back in time. And I think about that every single time I write. It's like it's. Yeah, amazement is the most boring emotion. It's the least contagious emotion. And so then with Moon, I wanted him to be in first person because he's a character who's been living in these connected worlds for a long time, and it's very boring to him. He's very cynical. And so I wanted the kind of the reader to exist in the gulf between his cynicism and her complete naivety.
- [39:36]
Caroline O'Donoghue
Well, given that my mic has literally stopped working, it's like, shut up, Jack. It's time for other people to ask some questions. So I'm going to ask one more of mine while you guys formulate your question. Then I'll come to the audience for questions. My last nerdy question about the craft of writing this for you was, I noticed that names were such an integral part of this book. Obviously, Moon and Margot are such distinctive names, but throughout the whole book, you can sort of start to see patterns in different communities based on how you named the characters. I wonder if you could give us an insight into how you came up with that naming process, process and system.
- [40:10]
Jack Edwards
I love that because. I love that question because it was one of the hardest things to come up with this book. So another thing that's really difficult about world building, like. Like, is. Is character name is because if you're going to build a world, there's gonna be a lot of people. And you might come up with a few sort of, like, interesting, sexy names for the main characters. But then after that, you're kind of mashing the keyboard. You're like Caroline with the y and a h at the end, you know? And that, to me, feels, like, just very unoriginal. And so I really racked my brain of, like, I need an easy system with which I can name people. And I eventually landed on. I'm going to name every character in this book based on a unit, a way that people measure time all over the world. So I created this enormous table, right? And across this side, it was just languages of the world. I think I had about 20 languages. And down here, I had ways in which we measure time. And I said, you know, hours, minutes, seconds, days, months, days of the year, days of the week, even, like, words like, for example, one of the characters is called Taiyo, and Taiyo is Japanese for shadow. And a shadow is a way in which we measure time. The moon is way in which we measure time. There's a character called Annie, but, like, it's. It's spelled like the French for ane, like the French for year. And there's a character called, like, Sam Donnerstag. It's, like, literally German for Thursday, you know, and there's a character called Domingo, which is obviously Sunday. And, like, once I kind of hacked that little thing. I was like, oh, this is good fun. This is a bit of good fun stuff.
- [41:47]
Caroline O'Donoghue
Okay, so there's a little Easter egg to look out for while you're reading as well.
- [41:52]
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- [42:35]
Captain
Race the rudders. Raise the sails. Race the sails.
- [42:39]
Jack Edwards
Captain, an unidentified ship is approaching. Over.
- [42:42]
Captain
Roger. Wait, is that an enterprise sales solution?
- [42:46]
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- [43:08]
Caroline O'Donoghue
Okay, I would love to come to some audience questions. I see one right at the back.
- [43:12]
Audience Member
Hi.
- [43:13]
Jack Edwards
Hi, friend.
- [43:14]
Audience Member
Such a marvelous, nourishing conversation. I love this idea of, like, time being a privilege. Right? Like privilege being the idea that in a social sense that there are certain obstacles other people face that you don't, you might not, and that offers you extra access and power. Right? Yeah, Opportunity. And this is a topic that comes up time and time again in discourse. I remember, like Molly Mae saying that you have 24 hours in a day and everyone's like, no, Boo.
- [43:44]
Jack Edwards
No, we don't shut up.
- [43:45]
Audience Member
Exactly. Right. And even during COVID you mentioned that being a time where time was relative. And yeah, I'm a content creator and loads of my friends who also want to create a started in lockdown. Right?
- [43:57]
Jack Edwards
Yeah.
- [43:58]
Audience Member
And they talk about how it was so great for so much time and I'm like, but that in itself is a privilege. Other people were struggling to make ends meet and that sort of thing. Right. So my question really is that I think this is a great opportunity for a younger audience maybe to get encountered this idea that time is a privilege. And maybe think about, okay, I actually maybe have more time than other people in the world. Right. In my society. And what would you want them to do with that time ideally?
- [44:26]
Jack Edwards
Oh, God. Oh, God. The thing is, as you were talking, I was formulating my answer and then you throwed me a curveball. I think I know the question is, no, I don't. But like, I thank you so much for the time and privilege question because that was actually a Huge part of what motivated this book. Because I feel like questions around privilege, they almost fall down before they get anywhere interesting. Because, like, someone will talk. You know, someone. The phrase that I now think has sort of fallen out of common use, that, you know, check your privilege or whatever. God, when's the last time you heard someone say that? Check your privilege. And those conversations, I think, ended up alienating more people than they embraced because it always, like, got into the splinter cell of kind of, well, yes, I know I'm white, but my parents were working class. Or, yes, I know I'm rich, but, you know, one of my parents is an immigrant or whatever. And it would just kind of really dismantle into, like, people arguing they didn't have privilege or the ways in which the privilege that you're observing didn't really exist or was negated by something else. And, of course, obviously, everyone's working with a different batch of sort of problems. But it really meant that I always thought we never got anywhere constructive because everyone was just showing their own sticker book of, like, why? Very specific case. It's like, that wasn't helpful. And so the thing. What I loved about writing this book was that every single person who reads this book, to quote Molly mae, does have 24 hours in the day. And they have to think about, like, how would my life be different if, like, I was aging at the same rate? Like a day? That's. I think it's like every. The average human life is 20,000 days or something. And, like, if every day was passing the same, but they were two hours long, how would that change your attitude to food and relationships and love and sex and religion and. And all. How would it change your attitude to absolutely everything? Would it make you kinder or would it make you sort of like. You know, how some people are kind of. What's that phrase that they use for. For people from Boston? What is it? They're kind, but they're not nice kind of thing. Or, like, you get that from a lot of cold countries because people kind of. They can't slow down for small talk because it's cold. And so they're just like, okay, here's what you gotta do. I'll help you change your tire, but I'm not gonna talk to you, you know? And so in terms of, like, how people should be spending their time better, I would never. I would never hope to say by reading this book. By reading this book and going to.
- [46:53]
Caroline O'Donoghue
The bookshop afterwards to get it started. Sign.
- [46:56]
Jack Edwards
Excellent.
- [46:57]
Caroline O'Donoghue
Do we have any other audience Questions? Yeah. Number two. Oh, yeah.
- [47:00]
Jack Edwards
Hi. Hi.
- [47:02]
Audience Member
So I was just in the talk from Tim Berners.
- [47:04]
Lee.
- [47:04]
Basically quite sobering, you know, the world is in crisis, blah, blah, blah.
- [47:08]
Jack Edwards
Yeah.
- [47:09]
Audience Member
And I'm wondering how. And exactly that, like, how do you talk about writing fiction and encouraging people to read it and encouraging them to take space, to sort of dream at the same time as going, the world is in crisis and we need to do something meaningful, like, how do you, how do you match that?
- [47:26]
Jack Edwards
Oh my God. Yeah, the real tough questions here, like, how do I, how do I fix the world? I don't know. How do we just, how do we. Well, you know what, A lot of fiction like this can sometimes have kind of like a grim view of humanity because there's a lot of people terrorizing other people kind of thing and everything. And there's a conversation that happens when this book that I was, I took a lot of time over because every time you write for teenagers, you, even if you're not, even if you're mostly thinking of the story, even if you're mostly thinking about your themes, you want them to be able to take something away from it that they can use. And there were a couple of things in this book I really wanted to get across to the average 16 year old, one of which is that you will be asked to hate people who have less than you. And here's a toolkit for not doing that. And also is that things change, but they change again. And you know, this character, the main character in this book, Moon, he's 19 and he's incredibly cynical because he's seen a lot of the world and he's been treated very badly within it. And he doesn't want to join any kind of revolution or any kind of political action because things have always been this way. And then he speaks to another older character and like, they're not, they had to change to get this bad, which means they'll have to change again. And like, you know, we're, we're constantly living within cycles and trends and yeah, we, we, we owe it to ourselves to believe that it can change again because it had to change to get this bad. And I'm afraid, like, that's the, that's the biggest solution I have. I'm just an author, you know, I just write fiction.
- [49:05]
Caroline O'Donoghue
We have time for maybe a couple more questions. There's a hand just here. There's one in the front row and then there's one at the back.
- [49:11]
Jack Edwards
Gentleman back here has been. Yeah, thank you. Hi.
- [49:13]
Audience Member
If you could play the role of my English teacher for, like, a hot minute.
- [49:16]
Jack Edwards
Are you gonna come out?
- [49:20]
Audience Member
If you like, your biggest advice for going on the theme of time? How would you balance the time, especially when you were starting out, between when, like, what you were doing in your normal life and when you kind of started writing? How would you balance. Like, when would you decide to write? Would you write when you, like, had ideas come to you? Like, you'd be in the middle of the night, like, oh, I've got to write this down.
- [49:39]
Jack Edwards
Yeah.
- [49:40]
Audience Member
Or would you write when you kind of sat down, you were like, I want to write this. I want to get a chapter. I want to get a short story out. How did you manage your time like that?
- [49:49]
Jack Edwards
That's what. Yeah. What an interesting and relevant question. Yeah. You know what? I've always written. I've always done it. But, yeah, when I was, like, a teenager, always, I get asked a lot by very young people about advice to be a writer, and I always feel really bad for them because it's like, I barely wrote when I was a teenager. I wrote for creative writing, and I would try and start journals, and then I would abandon them, or my brother would read them and broadcast them to the family. And that's my trauma. That's my sticker book. And I'm always kind of saying to very young people who are still in school because they're. They have all these social activities, they have homework, they have all that kind of thing. Like, don't. Don't pressure yourself too much to get words on the page. Right now, to me, the most important thing before, when you're still in your living, your very young life, is to find friends who nurture creativity. Because, like, you see people kind of lose that knack for making stuff up or just having a bit of fun. Like, it's always like, I'm always like, please join a band. Like, even if you can't, you can't play an instrument. Like, to me, just like having a friend I met up with every week to write songs with is so integral to my creative practice. Because the people who will get published. I'm sure there's many wannabe novelists in this room. The people who will get published are the people who are sharing many drafts along the way. And in order to do that, you have to have friends who you trust with your creative process and friends who. It doesn't feel silly to be like, I wrote a few thousand words. Will you please read it? But in terms of carving out time to physically write, I was sort of Like, I moved to London. I desperately wanted to be employed at a magazine. Nobody was hiring, so I just started blogging, which is now more or less a dead art form, but Substack is bringing it back. And that was always just like, whenever I came up with a funny idea or whenever I read someone else's funny thing that sparked an idea, and it was just sort of like, crowded around. But I wanted to be noticed, you know, So I was trying to build regularity. And then eventually I got some journalism work. Things built from there, but then it was really. It was my agent coming to me, my agent, Briany woods, saying, I think you could write fiction. From that point on, I gave up drinking for six months. I used to get up at 6am before work and write for an hour. And I just did that every day for six months. And then I had a first draft and it was bad. And then I spent another year editing it. And, you know, it got to a publishable state. But to me, it really, like, took somebody believing in me that I could write a whole novel that made me be very disciplined about it. So I do think, yes, be disciplined, but have a playfulness and be open. I think much more than discipline. Sort of like it's such a long and lonely road to being published. You need to have a creative community who are excited to read your drafts, and you're excited to read theirs as well.
- [52:43]
Audience Member
Thank you so much.
- [52:44]
Jack Edwards
Thank you.
- [52:44]
Caroline O'Donoghue
And we'll be coming to your talk at. Hey. In like a couple years time.
- [52:48]
Jack Edwards
We're out of time, but we did promise this young man.
- [52:50]
Caroline O'Donoghue
Yeah, we have one. One last question. If you can make it as speedy as possible.
- [52:53]
Jack Edwards
Yeah, because it's doing the red thing now.
- [52:55]
Caroline O'Donoghue
So you spoke earlier about the north south divide in your book.
- [52:58]
Jack Edwards
Yeah.
- [52:59]
Caroline O'Donoghue
South being more wealthy and the north being more impoverished. Is that like a deliberate parallel between the UK and the way things are now? Was there another reason behind that? That's a corker of a question.
- [53:11]
Jack Edwards
That's a really good question. Do you know what it was, actually? It was a flip of London is what I really wanted to do. Because I live in London. I live in southeast London. I've always lived in southeast London. When I first moved. I don't know how many of you guys know London that well. I moved to Elephant and Castle and I was sort of like living on a mattress next to my friend's dryer for six months. And, you know, I'd never I from Cork. I never lived in Elphinston. Castle is a bit more gentrified now but you know, it was like a pretty rough and ready neighborhood back in 2010. And I would, you know, get on the Bakerloo line or get on the Northern line and I would go all the way up and then see just how people stays were just different. Like you know, you go to Evan and Castle and like people are managing their, their childcare and their jobs and they're getting on the bus and they have like two full shopping bags and they're getting off, you know, a bus down to oval so they can like unload it and whatever. And it's like it's a pace of life is different, right. And they're eating on the go because they don't have time. And then you go up to Highgate on the northern line, 45 minutes later people are just like let go freelance. You know. And I was really amazed by how much like a 45 minutes on one train could do that. And because I'm. Because I sort of identify as a southeast londoner now after 12 years I wanted to flip it and just make the south rich.
- [54:31]
Caroline O'Donoghue
That's so interesting. And now you're equipped to go into reading this book with all of these little Easter eggs and nuggets of wisdom. So enjoy the book.
- [54:38]
Jack Edwards
Thank you, John.
- [54:39]
Caroline O'Donoghue
A round of applause for Caroline o' Donoghue. Thank.
- [54:49]
Jack Edwards
You.
- [55:02]
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