Loading summary
Transcript117 lines
- [00:00]
Ryan Reynolds
Ryan Reynolds here from Mint Mobile with a message for everyone paying big wireless way too much. Please, for the love of everything good in this world, stop with Mint. You can get premium wireless for just $15 a month. Of course, if you enjoy overpaying. No judgments. But that's weird. Okay, one judgment anyway. Give it a try@mintmobile.com Switch upfront payment.
- [00:22]
Unknown
Of $45 for 3 month plan equivalent to $15 per month required intro rate first 3 months only, then full price plan options available, taxes and fees extra. See full terms at Mintmobile. Do.
- [00:37]
Kate
Welcome bookcasers. It is Thursday. As a matter of fact, if you're listening, on the day of our release, it is Thursday the 13th. We probably caught you Valentine's Day cramming, shoving those big cards into the envelopes, dressing like. I don't think anybody really crams for Valentine's Day.
- [00:52]
Ryan Reynolds
Will you be my valentine, Kate? Will you be my valentine? Well, say yes.
- [00:58]
Kate
Okay. Yes.
- [00:59]
Unknown
Yeah.
- [00:59]
Ryan Reynolds
Good. You've just saved me $5.50 for a card. We bought cards for all the grandchildren the other day and I think I had to take out a second mortgage to make it work. What? This is absurd. Well, we should be in the card business. The profit margin of Valentine's cards, of any greeting cards these days is absurd.
- [01:18]
Kate
Cranky old man alert.
- [01:19]
Ryan Reynolds
Yep. That is. It's a cranky old man alert. That's exactly right. And also, if you have any of those little tiny hearts that are so omnipresent around Valentine's Day, keep them to yourself. Neither Kate nor I want them. What do they taste like? Kate?
- [01:34]
Kate
It's somewhere between tums and chalk, I think. You know, it's just, you know.
- [01:39]
Ryan Reynolds
But each one is covered with a banal message, so it's okay. Anyway, this is the bookcase with Kate and Charlie. And we do welcome you. We wish you have a happy Valentine's Day. And we have a double barreled show for you today. Jeff Hobbs is with us. He's our author of the day. He's written a book called Seeking Shelter, which is about people who are homeless in Los Angeles. And there have been a number of books about homelessness, but they're mostly about people who have drug problems or alcohol problems or PTSD or whatever. He has found a mom, Evelyn. We never know her last name. Six kids, single mom, and absolutely determined that even though they're homeless, she's going to raise those kids and make them upstanding citizens to the extent she can. You know, she's not without character flaws, but it's A really, really interesting story.
- [02:29]
Kate
It really is. It's an incredible story. And one of the things I love about Jeff Hobbs, who I first read with the short and tragic Life of Robert Peace, which was the incredible story of his roommate at Yale who was from the mean streets of Newark. And, you know, in our country, we're a little bit like, you get yourself to college and everything's going for you. But there was Robert Peace. He didn't fit in at Yale. He no longer fit in in Newark. He didn't fit in anywhere, and nobody sort of offered him that support. It's an incredibly. Jeff lends his incredible talents to homelessness in Los Angeles. And this book blew me away because I find the statistics about homelessness are so overwhelming. And so Jeff's finding a family and giving you a humanist story behind some of those statistics I think is really what shines in this book. I fell in love with Evelyn and I fell in love with her kids. And I understood homelessness in new ways that I hadn't before.
- [03:25]
Ryan Reynolds
You can't but come away from her story without tremendous admiration for what she's doing and has done. Jeff calls it reconstructive journalism, which is interesting. He spent hours and hours and hours talking to Evelyn, meeting her kids. He came to the game a little bit late, but when I say reconstruction, through talking to her hour after hour after hour, he got a sense of what she had been through and what she was still going through. And, well, it's just. It's a very, very well done story. She. Every night at 5:00, she had to call to try to get a voucher for a hotel room somewhere in Los Angeles area to put up she and her six kids. And many nights she couldn't get one and stayed the night in the car in her SUV with she and one child in the front seat, kids in the middle seat and kids in the back. But she made it work.
- [04:15]
Kate
She did. But again, the things that were driven home to me in this book that I don't think I understood before is Evelyn's mission seems to be to keep the kids together. And keeping them away from the welfare system becomes very important for that purpose. And so.
- [04:30]
Ryan Reynolds
And to keep them in the same school to make sure.
- [04:33]
Kate
Right, Exactly.
- [04:34]
Ryan Reynolds
She had to lie about where they lived because she had them at a good school. And she would drive from wherever, whatever hotel or wherever she spent the night, long ways to get them back to that school. But they were all in the school.
- [04:45]
Kate
Yeah. And all of the kids are dropped off with this message. Please don't talk to the guidance counselors. Please don't talk to the teachers. Please don't let anybody know where we are and what's going on with us. That takes a huge toll on the kids. Obviously, some of these motels that she's lucky enough to be able to land in are in really tough neighborhoods. And so that takes a toll on the kids. So that was another thing that drove. It really drove home to me that even as a parent, if you're doing everything right, you're still gonna end up with different kids coming out of this homelessness. If you're lucky enough to do it, then you go in. Because the trauma and the psychological toll that it takes on both you and your children has to dynamically change those relationships. And so I have huge admiration for Evelyn and her family. And yet they did not escape unscathed. And Jeff Hobbs tells their story beautifully.
- [05:34]
Ryan Reynolds
Yeah, this is a very, very good book. Seeking Shelter. It's also, as I said, a double barreled show. We're gonna revisit our writer in residence, Jay Ryan, straddle. If you have been listening to us through the months. We started with Jay Ryan when he began his fourth novel, a novel in which he is trying to imagine, create a life for his mom, the most important person ever in his life. But she died prematurely at 55, and he's now in his novel, trying to imagine what her life could have been, should have been, had she lived past the age of 55. We'll get to that after our conversation with Jeff Hobbs, which comes up right now. Jeff Hobbs, the book is Seeking Shelter and it's good to have you in the bookcase. I really am curious, as you set about to write this book, what did you want to accomplish with Seeking Shelter?
- [06:26]
Jeff Hobbs
I think where it started with this book, because I had been writing from juvenile halls and schools and I'd gotten to know a lot of kids who had experienced housing instability. And I started to see, in the midst of this generational crisis that is all around us in California, where I live, that I wanted to write about the people, the crisis we didn't see. And namely, I wanted to learn about parents who worked and kids who went to school, but who, for whatever reason, weren't able to afford a home.
- [07:00]
Kate
Did you set out to accomplish that mission and then try to go about meeting the right subjects, namely Evelyn and Wendy, or did you come across Evelyn and Wendy and then decide to write about the important subject of homelessness?
- [07:15]
Jeff Hobbs
Every book is a little bit different in that regard. In this Case, I set about thinking about spaces. And so I started spending a lot of time in schools and talking to high school counselors around Los Angeles. And that led me to spending a lot of time in different transitional housing facilities that were geared toward families. And through spending time in those spaces and with social workers and kind of trying to figure out what this unseen part of the crisis was, that's when I met first Sister Wendy. And Sister Wendy introduced me to Evelyn.
- [07:52]
Kate
Once you've met somebody like Wendy, and she's introduced you to somebody who's experiencing this crisis, like Evelyn, how do you think, okay, I found the right story. I'm ready to begin.
- [08:02]
Jeff Hobbs
It's a really good question. And in this particular case, meeting Sister Wendy, who is very calm and measured, and we could have very rhythmic, kind of wonderful, illuminating, thoughtful conversations. And then once I met Evelyn, Evelyn's reputation preceded her in the sense that she was. We had lived in this transitional housing shelter called Door of Hope. And she was famous because she and her children had truly been through more than anybody, more housing instability, more traumatic situations. And yet, when I first sat down with Evelyn, and she knew who I was and what I was doing there, but all she wanted to talk about was her kids. She wanted to show me pictures of her kids and talk about their dance recitals and their baseball team. And in that sense, this total normalcy of a parent just wanting to talk about her kids really spoke to something much bigger than my goals. And this book I was trying to.
- [09:10]
Ryan Reynolds
Write, as you say, everything revolves around her children. So really, what you found is a sort of different subset, I think, of the homeless.
- [09:19]
Jeff Hobbs
I think so. And it's a subset that is not seen very much. And the reason they're not seen is because Evelyn in particular, and a lot of those who share that plight, working parents, single parents, in these markets of immense housing disparity, they don't want to be seen. You know, Los Angeles does this big homeless count every year. I've participated in it. It's where they get their data and how they plan services and budget for services. Someone like Evelyn wants no part in that counts. Because once she gets drawn into the system and the children's welfare system, then, you know, maybe her kids get taken out of school, maybe her kids get bullied at school, and all sorts of social consequences.
- [10:05]
Kate
This book, in some ways, was a different procedure for you, because I think of you as an embedded journalist. But you got to know her and her kids and reflected back on her story. How was that?
- [10:15]
Ryan Reynolds
Yeah, you call it reconstructive journalism. Reconstructive journal's an interesting phrase. Yeah.
- [10:20]
Kate
Yeah. How did that change your research process and how did that change your day to day writing process?
- [10:25]
Jeff Hobbs
Yeah, you're right. There's a version of telling stories like this that has been done very, very well by many journalists where you're the fly on the wall and you're on the journey with them and observing and recording. And I've done that kind of work in this particular world with these people who I care about a lot. Something just didn't feel quite right about being on the street with Evelyn with her kids, seeing them, you know, struggle through each day, each day being this ticking clock toward sunset and the dangers of night where she just needed to secure a motel room or a shelter space or a, you know, a friend's couch to sleep on. Something. Didn't feel ethical about leaving them at that point in the day to go back to my own home with my, my notes. And so in the case of this particular story, I thought it would give Evelyn a little more onus, a little more power over her own story to be able to reflect on it and tell it after the fact and after she and her family had established a home.
- [11:36]
Kate
Sometimes we get worried on this podcast about doing nonfiction because so much of nonfiction is the left pointing at the right or the right pointing at the left and saying, our systemic societal problems come from that person from that party. So I thought, oh, I wonder if there's going to be some finger pointing in this book. But you don't. And you talk specifically about something that I had thought about but had never heard articulated quite in this way, which is the entrenchment of the asset versus the service economy in the U.S. i wonder if you wouldn't mind talking a little bit about the asset versus service economy in the US and after having written this book, do you have any hope that we might be able to move past that entrenchment as a country? Or are we stuck with this problem as it is and we need to triage it moving forward and just consider permanent triage solutions.
- [12:25]
Jeff Hobbs
To the first part of your question, as far as depicting systems and the people in those systems, I really do believe that even flawed systems have a lot of good people working within them. And it is easy to point fingers when you're writing this kind of book. And it would be easy to blame the welfare system or blame sort of the lack of certain kinds of services. But I've met so many just decent people trying to do decent work within a massive crisis and a system that is overrun. And then as far as the second part of your question, in the asset economy and the service economy, it all adds up to a transactional economy. And, you know, when you have people who don't have assets and can't pay for school, don't have much to contribute in terms of big things, taxes, and the work they do, then you're in a situation where people need a lot and they can give very little. And in this asset economy that we all live in, people are very uncomfortable with that. Just the mathematics of that. How do you give a kid a place in school? How do you give a family shelter when they don't have anything to give back at the moment? And I think that's a big unspoken part of the ethos we all have that that makes it really hard to fix, you know, the lack of shelter in our cities and the sort of invisible destitution that's easy to walk past a lot of days.
- [13:58]
Ryan Reynolds
As we follow Evelyn's story over 300 plus pages, you have tremendous sympathy for her as she tries to fight to make sure that her kids are okay. But at the same time, when you come from a life of privilege, as I, as I do, and Kate does, you get frustrated with her because she does things that in the long run are not helping. She can't accept help because she has this sense of, as you say, it's us against the world. And then also you point out at the end, you say, for parents living with children without shelter, there is no long term. There is only today and tonight and tomorrow. And within that compact experiential framework, a stranger's empathy matters not at all. Tell me a little bit about that.
- [14:43]
Jeff Hobbs
I think what you just described is very central to this story. And I'm thinking specifically about school. This is very much a story about school. And Evelyn's desire to have her kids go to a nurturing school really is what drove a lot of these decisions, including some of the. The not great decisions you mentioned. And at schools, there are support resources. There were counselors and teachers who cared a lot. And Evelyn actually almost daily instilled in her children the directive to not tell anybody about their situation. Not the most nurturing teacher, not the most equipped school counselor, because she was afraid that if the kids were honest, they might get taken out of school, they might get separated. The older kids could get separated from the younger kids. All these consequences that, you know, kids who grow up in a world where adults really do exist to help them don't really Understand the danger of asking for help for some people, I believe as a parent and as a journalist. Well, I mean, as parents we're always just every day making the. Just the best educated guess we can make situationally. Right. Typically, the stakes are not in the life and death realm that Evelyn and her kids lived in every day. And again, most of the decisions she made had to do one way or another with keeping her kids in school. So the end result of that is that her oldest son now is a freshman in college in Arizona. So that in a certain way is a happy ending. But you allude to a lot of consequences that again are not necessarily Evelyn's direct fault. That she was in a lot of it was just the messiness of life and a lot of it had to do with her own misunderstandings of the system and housing and support services available.
- [16:43]
Ryan Reynolds
We think in the cases of homeless, we think about shelters and all of that. I learned something new that there's a 211 general line in Los Angeles that was fascinating to me. Every single day she had to call 2:11 at around what, 5:00 in the afternoon and see if she could get.
- [17:02]
Jeff Hobbs
So that she could get the emergency line and not the day line and.
- [17:07]
Ryan Reynolds
Get a place in a motel somewhere in the Los Angeles area in order to put her kids up for the night. And she did that day after day after day after day, waiting on the phone for somebody to come on and say, yes, we can give you a voucher for a room somewhere in the farthest reaches of Los Angeles.
- [17:24]
Jeff Hobbs
Tell me about that system at 5:01pm every evening. And it had to be 5:01 because at 5:00pm you get kicked to the day system, which works a little differently. But at 5:01, whether it was outside her kids school talent show or at a little league baseball game or just at dusk while the kids played in the park, she called this number and would learn after waiting on hold for however long whether they would be provided a room for that night or if they. I had to maybe sleep in her car.
- [17:58]
Kate
We talked about the service asset economy, the pandemic, the riots, about social justice after the George Floyd murder. I would imagine exacerbated everything and made it exponentially worse. I'm going to ask you a completely unfair question of a journalist which I'm sure my father's going to smack me for when we hang up. Do you have any hope?
- [18:17]
Jeff Hobbs
I ended this work actually with immense hope, mainly having to do with the, the spirit of this family and those at the, you know, they ended up at this faith based, nonprofit organization that gave them shelter and some job training and just some rudimentary stability by which Evelyn could sort of form plans that went beyond just the present tense daily grind of finding a roof and just seeing, on the scale of eight families in a house, working towards stability, seeing what could come of just that. For Evelyn and for many others, it gave me immense hope regarding the human spirit and the capacity to help one another and seeing what kids are capable of when they have a little bit of predictability in their days. And I believe that we made a little more room for just these small family shelters in residential areas, not. Not shunted into the far flung borders of cities where most homeless services tend to be clustered. But if we made a little bit of space for just these small homes with six or eight families in residential neighborhoods, I think that this version of homelessness, the single parent families, the working parents, could really be fixed.
- [19:37]
Ryan Reynolds
Well, and Evelyn gets into one of those, as you write about the City of Hope, she gets into a situation where she is housed with some other families and there's perhaps at least a prospect of some stability in her life. But the problem is so immense. I mean, you write about the fact that there are 75,000 people who are housing challenged every night in the city of Los Angeles alone. That's, as you point out, that's everybody in Scranton, Pennsylvania, or everybody in Evanston, Illinois, or everybody in Wilmington, Delaware.
- [20:11]
Jeff Hobbs
Yeah, the system is overrun. I think that's what I found, is that when homeowners, people like me, really start to care about homelessness and start to label it a crisis. That doesn't happen until it becomes a part of our daily lives. And homelessness only becomes a part of our daily lives. You know, grocery shopping and using local transit. That only happens when the existing services have been overrun. It only happens when it's too late.
- [20:39]
Ryan Reynolds
I came away just overwhelmed with the immensity. I found her family fascinating, but I felt overwhelmed by the end of the book. And that you can come away hopeful, I find hopeful.
- [20:54]
Kate
We find optimism in your hope.
- [20:56]
Jeff Hobbs
Yeah, I'm glad. And I mean, maybe it's not entirely reasonable, but I've definitely finished books where I was left without that feeling. That can be a hard experience doing what I do. And so in this case, just to see what one mother's love can accomplish, for in this case, six children who are all on different paths leading toward, if not college, at least leading toward something better than they knew when they were little kids.
- [21:25]
Ryan Reynolds
The nights that she spent in that Toyota Highlander when she couldn't get a voucher to stay in a hotel that night, the night she spent. The driver's seat, the master bedroom, the front seat, the living room. The middle row was the dining room and the way back was the kids room.
- [21:40]
Kate
One of the things that gets to me most about Jeff's book is that despite the fact that she's sitting up in that seat worrying all night, if one of her kids wakes up in the middle of the night and wants to talk about X or wants to talk about Y or wants to joke around about this, she will set her worries aside at any given moment just to have those fun late night talks just to convince her kids it's a campout. If that doesn't speak to the resilience of mothers, I don't know what does.
- [22:06]
Jeff Hobbs
Yeah, really sweet of you to notice that. And you know, the psychology of childhood really is entwined with the psychology of belonging. And there were a lot of reasons her kids were made to feel like they didn't belong because they didn't have money and they didn't have time to do what other kids were doing. But even when they were sleeping in the confines of a 2009 SUV, I think she created, just like you described, that little sense of belonging. And it turned out to be enough.
- [22:35]
Ryan Reynolds
Jeff Hobbs. It's an interesting book. Seeking Shelter. Really appreciate it.
- [22:39]
Kate
Yeah, it's a wonderful book, Jeff. Thank you so much.
- [22:41]
Jeff Hobbs
Thank you.
- [22:47]
Kate
The brilliant Jeff Hobbs. You know, another thing this book really drove home to me is dealing with the government for anything, taxes, your driver's license, what have you. Dealing with the government, they do not make it easy. There is a ton of bureaucracy, complex language, legalese. And one of the things that this book drove home to me is how complicated it is to seek that extra help from the government for housing and how difficult it would be without a really strong education in government affairs. I am a very well educated person and the DMV confuses the heck out of me. And so the idea of approaching the housing system and knowing too that I go in there with that panic about saving my kids and I have to deal with the complexities of bureaucracy is just. I don't know, Evelyn, you're sort of my hero. But that also came through vividly in this book for me.
- [23:39]
Ryan Reynolds
One other thing that I thought was interesting in talking to him about how he carried out this practice of reconstructive journalism, I kept thinking at some point, you know, he had to intercede, which might have changed the course of the story. He might have offered money to Evelyn or he might have offered whatever. You know, he, he has that to offer, but he didn't. And he told us in the part that we didn't put in the interview here, she never asked him for it. She understood what he was doing. She understood that if they had a relationship where he was helping out in any way financially, it would alter the story. And so she didn't ask. Commendable on both their parts, I think, and makes for a very good book. Jeff Hobbs, the book is Seeking Shelter. We're going to take a break. When we come back, Jay Ryan Straddle, who we have had the pleasure of talking to as he works on his fourth novel. The first three very successful. I think this one will be too. But it's not an easy process, as any novelist will tell you. We'll be back with that after this. My dad works in B2B marketing.
- [24:41]
Kate
He came by my school for Career.
- [24:43]
Ryan Reynolds
Day and said he was a big roas man. Then he told everyone how much he.
- [24:47]
Kate
Loved calculating his return on ad spend.
- [24:50]
Ryan Reynolds
My friends still laugh at me to this day. Not everyone gets B2B, but with LinkedIn you'll be able to reach people who do. Get $100 credit on your next ad campaign.
- [25:00]
Kate
Go to LinkedIn.com results to claim your credit.
- [25:03]
Ryan Reynolds
That's LinkedIn.com results. Terms and conditions apply. LinkedIn the place to be to Be.
- [25:10]
Unknown
This episode is brought to you by Lifelock. During tax season, your personal info travels to a lot of places between payroll, your tax consultant and the IRS. If your W2 gets exposed, that's just the ticket for identity thieves. That's why Lifelock monitors millions of data points every second. If your identity is stolen, they'll fix it, guaranteed or your money back. Don't let identity thieves take you for a ride.
- [25:33]
Ryan Reynolds
Save up to 40% your first year.
- [25:35]
Unknown
Visit lifelock.com podcast terms apply. Build a routine with Ollie that supports your wellness needs, like getting your daily vitamins and minerals with Ollie's multigummies or keeping your mood upbeat with all the vitamin D and hello Happy. Give your gut health some support with probiotics and wake up feeling refreshed after taking Ollie sleep. Do wellness on your terms. Find Ollie at a Walmart or Target near you or@ollie.com these statements have not been evaluated by the Food and Drug Administration. This product is not intended to diagnose, treat, cure or prevent any disease.
- [26:15]
Ryan Reynolds
Jay Ryan Straddle Good to have you back when we left 20 some thousand words in and you Were beginning to think, this is going to be okay. This is going to settle into the novel. So where are you now?
- [26:26]
Unknown
I'm on Microsoft Word page 105, and we're at 28,266. So only slightly farther. But since we last spoke, I went back to the beginning and revised and took a lot of stuff out. I need to just keep moving forward. That's my problem. I keep going back and reading what I've written already and taking stuff out, which is good, but I need to write that crappy first draft where I'm at right now. I need to finish this and then revise the whole thing as opposed to, like, I feel like I'm building a car from a kit. And I. Oh, man, I've got the hood, and I just keep shining, waxing the hood again and again and again.
- [27:05]
Kate
You know, the last time we talked, you talked about the fact that you wanted this so much tighter. I wonder why editing this first draft has become somewhat obsessional for you and why you think such a tight first draft is so important for this particular novel.
- [27:23]
Unknown
I think because my last two books, I wrote giant, unwieldy first drafts that were a lot of work picking apart. It was like having that block of granite and just imagining the statue inside of it. And I wanted a more precise shape to this draft than in my last two novels. So I think that's part of the problem, is just trying to get a more ready first draft or a more progressed first draft relative to my last two, because my last two are so much work to cut down. And I thought maybe if I cut down as I write, that'll help. But the trade off there is I haven't made the kind of progress I would have liked by this point. I've been writing for about a year at this point.
- [28:02]
Ryan Reynolds
So what's hanging you up about these first 20,000 words?
- [28:05]
Unknown
Well, the part I'm writing right now, my character's in California. It's the first chapter I've ever written in my life where a character is in California. It's the kind of stuff I want to read right now. I mean, I wanted to read. I want to read something a little more upbeat, a little more hopeful. A book where the good guys win, you know, and that kind of starts to happen for her in California. Before then, there was a lot of establishment of the world she's in and the people she's around. And it pays off, or it will when I write it. But, yeah, no, I keep going back and thinking, oh, I don't do I really need that? Like I'm standing in the shower every morning thinking, not about what's to come, but thinking about, oh man, that one scene. I don't need that scene in the coffee shop. I can take that out. Yeah, that doesn't lead anywhere.
- [28:54]
Kate
But you say you're really enthusiastic to get to California, both as a writer and as a reader. So how do you know? When you say to yourself, I need to get to California that much faster, how do you know? Are you honoring the self indulgent writer who can't write to write it, or are you honoring the reader because that's what you want to read right now? And how do you know?
- [29:15]
Unknown
Right. Wow. That's the million dollar question, isn't it? Also, I generally felt, I've felt in the past, and I think this has been true, that the parts of the book I've really, the parts of previous books I've really enjoyed writing, people tend to enjoy reading. I think they can get a sense of my joy and energy from these parts. I mean, ideally I'd like to say that about every chapter of the book. Like, no, this is my favorite. No, this is my favorite. I feel like every chapter deserves that. But for the most part, I generally feel that when I'm excited to write something that is, that comes through to the reader.
- [29:59]
Ryan Reynolds
I may be under a misimpression, but when you say I have 20,000 words plus and I keep revising them, I'm thinking, well, of course those are the first 20,000 words of the book. But obviously from what you're saying, they're not going to be that. You've got a middle chunk here.
- [30:15]
Unknown
Oh, it's possible. I am trying to write this book in order this time, which also stinks. I mean, I've never done that before. And now I know why. Because I started the book initially with a chapter of my character as a fourth grader. And you see all these people that end up becoming factors later in her life as kids around her or as younger adults in her life. And I thought it was great. It was one of my favorite things I've written in a long time. And I cut it. And I think I talked about that the last show. Yes. And I don't miss it because now. Okay, we're starting later. Like it's, it feels. What's the word? Less procedural and more active. Yeah. Like I'm not explaining, I'm telling a story now. Yeah.
- [31:04]
Ryan Reynolds
Well, as we've, as we've said a number of times, the critical Thesis to this novel is that you're starting the life that your mother could have led had she not, in real life, died so early.
- [31:17]
Unknown
That's right.
- [31:18]
Ryan Reynolds
So why would you start in the fourth grade when you really basically want to start with her at the age of 55?
- [31:25]
Unknown
Right. Yeah, you are correct, sir.
- [31:30]
Kate
You're like. And where were you when I was writing that chapter? You could have saved me some time.
- [31:34]
Unknown
I felt like I wanted to get to know the character better so it wasn't a useless exercise in writing that chapter. I understood her emotional foundation, her underpinnings behind her values and her value system that she puts out into the world as a. As a grownup.
- [31:52]
Kate
So what percentage of your day would you say you spend polishing that hood versus creating the new material you will polish tomorrow?
- [32:01]
Unknown
Okay. Luckily, none at this point. As of this month, I'm writing forward. I'm writing stuff that does. Yeah. Yeah. Just starting this week, starting this last weekend on Saturday. And I got all day to write, and I just took off. It was my best day of writing in months.
- [32:18]
Kate
Excellent.
- [32:19]
Unknown
And I've been moving forward from there every day. I even wrote on Sunday, which I almost never do. So, yeah, I've been chiseling time out every day, regardless of what's going on.
- [32:28]
Ryan Reynolds
Do you have a sense of how this is going to resolve itself?
- [32:33]
Unknown
Yeah, I do.
- [32:33]
Ryan Reynolds
You now have a sense of what that life that you want to project for your mom, had she lived past 55, is going to be?
- [32:42]
Unknown
Mm, yeah. Yeah.
- [32:44]
Kate
You know how it's gonna end? You know how it's gonna end?
- [32:47]
Unknown
Yeah, I do.
- [32:47]
Jeff Hobbs
Yeah.
- [32:48]
Kate
Have you written the last chapter?
- [32:49]
Unknown
No, not yet.
- [32:50]
Kate
Okay. But it's in your head.
- [32:52]
Unknown
Yeah. Yeah. It shifts a lot. It shifts a little bit. Like, the details around it change sometimes, but I have a sense of. I have a sense of the ending. Yes.
- [33:01]
Ryan Reynolds
Seems to me that's a huge part of the process.
- [33:04]
Unknown
Absolutely. In the past, I generally haven't started writing a book unless I knew the ending first. I sometimes tell people who ask me, how do you write a novel? I'd answer with, think of an ending and start really far away from that ending. Start with a situation that makes that ending seem almost impossible.
- [33:23]
Ryan Reynolds
It strikes me that unlike a more traditional novel that a writer would write that you really have to come to an ending or a conclusion that satisfies three different parties. Yourself, the reader, and your mom.
- [33:39]
Unknown
Yeah. Yeah, that's absolutely true. That's very insightful. And in doing that, I feel like when I'm writing, especially when I'm writing well. I feel I have my mom's voice in my head anyway. I have throughout all my books. And I can feel her editorial voice already correcting me or pushing me in certain directions or keeping me from being too indulgent.
- [34:04]
Ryan Reynolds
Even more than that, I would think you'd want to have her in your head saying, yeah, Jay, I would have liked to have lived that life had I gone past 50.
- [34:13]
Unknown
Yeah, absolutely. Absolutely.
- [34:15]
Kate
Yeah. Well, we look forward to you. Thank you for continuing to talk to us. We're loving this.
- [34:19]
Ryan Reynolds
Yeah, Yeah, I love it. I love it.
- [34:22]
Unknown
Well, you're welcome. Thank you for having me. Part of it. It's a joy to talk to you as well.
- [34:30]
Kate
J. Ryan Straddle, author of Queens of Minnesota and Saturday Night at the Lakeside Supper Club and Kitchens of the Great Midwest. I'm really looking forward to this. And I wonder, you know, I've been. The conversation that we just had with him that you guys just listened to stays with me because I wonder sometimes, like, yes, I know he wants to have a tighter first draft because he thinks this is his fourth novel and he wants it to be tighter. But I also wonder if there isn't just a touch of that perfectionist in him because this is the story of his mom and those pressures that you talked about of having to answer to his mom in his head. I wonder if that's causing him to create a tighter first draft.
- [35:05]
Ryan Reynolds
A touch of perfectionism, I would think it would be. It would pervade his entire attitude of approaching it. She, as he has said a number of times, the most important person in his life, the person who got him living in rural northern Minnesota, who got him believing that he could be a writer. And then he's become a very successful novelist. And this one, it seems to me, has come through in all of our conversations, especially important to him because it is the fictionalized story or the made up story of what her life would have been like in his mind if she had lived past the age of 55, she raised her kids, she was ready for the next stage of her life, next chapter, to put it in novel form. And she never got to realize it. So he's now creating it. I think it's a labor of love, but whenever you write, it's a labor. So anyway, we appreciate it and we will be talking to Jay Ryan Straddle again over the weeks.
- [36:00]
Kate
We should talk a little bit, by the way, before we go. First of all, I want to push who we've got next week because I love doing this I love it when I can get two. And I don't think Jeffrey's as old as you are, but I love it when I can get two old war horses from the journalistic world to sit down and talk about history.
- [36:17]
Ryan Reynolds
That old war horse, you're referring to.
- [36:20]
Kate
Your father, and I'm sticking by it.
- [36:23]
Ryan Reynolds
I'll take old. It's the war horse part that I'm.
- [36:26]
Kate
I'm sticking by it. I'm sticking by it because you went over to Saudi Arabia for the Gulf War. I mean, you've seen some things, you've done some stuff, you have some game, you've covered some things. And Jeffrey Toobin has written a new book all about the history of the presidential pardon and how in some ways the history of the presidential pardon has shaped where we are today. And so I'm really looking forward to that conversation because all I have to do really, is like, sit back with a little virgin daiquiri and just watch you guys talk and tell old stories.
- [36:54]
Ryan Reynolds
Well, so I hope you'll participate in the conversation. But maybe. But he's done some original reporting on what happened that led up to the Nixon pardon, when Gerald Ford pardoned Richard Nixon. And then obviously the pardon power of the President is very, very much in the news now. So I think it'll be an interesting conversation. And I always love talking to Jeffrey, particularly when he works for Good Morning America and we had a chance to interview him on legal issues. Anyway, that's it. We'll remind you of the people who make this podcast possible. And then we'll have a coda from Jeff Hobbs.
- [37:27]
Kate
The Bookcase with Kate and Charlie Gibson is a production of ABC Audio and Good Morning America. It is edited by Tom Butler of TKO Productions. Our executive producers are Laura Mayer and Simone Swink. We want to make mention of Taylor Rhodes, Amanda McMaster and Sarah Russell at Good Morning America and Josh Cohen, Asal Asanapour, Meg Fiero and Amira Williams at ABC Audio.
- [37:48]
Jeff Hobbs
I would say that I love what I do because I'm almost always the dumbest person in the room. Person who knows the least. I wish everybody could experience that. A lot of the time.
- [38:01]
Ryan Reynolds
T Mobile's network is more expansive than your favorite fictional universe because T Mobile helps keep you connected from the heart.
- [38:07]
Kate
Of Portland to right where you are.
- [38:08]
Ryan Reynolds
On America's largest 5G network. Switch now. Keep your phone and T Mobile will pay it off up to $800 per line via prepaid cart.
- [38:15]
Kate
Visit your local T Mobile location or.
- [38:17]
Ryan Reynolds
Learn more@t mobile.com keepandswitch up to 4 lines of your virtual prepaid card. Allow 15 days qualifying unlock device, credit service port in 90 plus days device ineligible carrier and timely redemption required. Card is no cash access and expires in six months.