B (2:27)

Yeah. When they come along, it's always very nice.

A (2:31)

We don't know who comes along with who, but it doesn't matter.

B (2:33)

That's right. Anyway, Skylark. Paula MacLaine. Here she is. Paula maclean, it is such a pleasure to have you in the bookcase. Skylark, the book just released in better bookstores everywhere. You've written two parallel stories. One in the mid 17th century, one just before World War II. I'm wondering why you chose that form, why you wanted to marry two stories. And what kind of freedom, I guess, or license does that give you as an author?

C (3:10)

Great question. Hello, Charlie. Hello, Kate. Thanks so much for having me. I'm absolutely delighted to be here. So, yeah, the two time periods. So they're both in Paris and in the same neighborhood and in fact, on the same street, three centuries apart. And the idea was, instead of. To have Paris as this sweeping panoramic backdrop, I wanted an intimate, but also like a drilled down view of a single place. And both of these lives are connected spatially. Right. They're connected by place, and they're connected thematically, symbolically. And, you know, it gave me a ton of freedom, as you might imagine. Maybe too much freedom. There was a moment of abject terror when I went to weave the two stories together. Cause I wrote them separately. I wrote them separately knowing I was gonna connect them. And in fact, there was a day I flew to New York and sat in my editor's office and my agent was there, too. And we each had a copy of the book, a physical copy, and we took them section by section with post IT notes and layered the book together. Almost like the way you stack hands in that game, right? Stacking hands. And it was exhilarating. And I'll never forget it. And I think before that moment, all of us were a little nervous. But after that moment, we could have, like, flown out of that room. It was. It was pretty incredible.

A (4:51)

So, first of all, let me start with the process. Which story did you write first?

C (4:56)

I wrote them simultaneously. And again, I know that sounds odd. You know how some writers like. So my agent, Julie Bearer, is married to Colson Whitehead. And he's. Well, number one, he's a stone cold genius. Number two, he's always working on two books at once.

B (5:13)

So.

C (5:13)

And there's always like a lead horse in the race, and it can be different horses on any given day. And he does this. So, like, if he gets stuck on one, he's always working and it's always. The juices are always flowing. The bicycle chain is always oiled. And with these two stories writing them simultaneously, they kind of fed off one another. For instance, there's a part in the novel where each of the characters, Christophe, who is in 1942, and Alouette, who is in 1664, are in the tunnels below the streets of Paris, escaping different sets of terrible circumstances. And those sections of the book weave back and forth, but they're both underground. You know, they're both kind of fleeing for their lives. And writing them like that, it was a way to stay in the pressure cooker myself and to not sort of have that escape hatch. And that was really useful for me as a creative process. I was captivated by the underground. I mean, that was the germ of the book. The germ of the book was there are hundreds of square miles of quarry tunnels running below the streets of Paris. And I had been to the catacombs several times, took my kids there. You know, it's an amazing place, so mysterious and so cool. But I didn't know this. I didn't know that there were these Cory voids, the oldest ones from the 6th century, from Roman times, and that everything that we see above all the marvels of Paris, the monuments that created with this Lutetian limestone, are quarried from below. And this idea that there's this shadowy sister city, right, so that was already sort of captivating my imagination. And once I went down the rabbit hole and started researching the. That that space for its dramatic potential, I. I discovered a book of graffiti markings and. And carvings and stuff. Everything that from below that have been there for hundreds and hundreds of years. The marks that people have made, people carving their names into the walls, drawings. Some from the old couriers, some from prisoners who are being moved from one prison to another, some from thieves, some from people trying to escape their circumstances. And one symbol that I saw over and over again in this book was of. It looks like a peace dove. Sometimes it has an olive branch in its mouth, sometimes it doesn't. And the couriers called this a liberty bird. And apparently it was a directional sign. And the beak pointed the way out of the. Of the tunnels. But I kept seeing it as a sign of. Of hope that here were these people in these dire, dire circumstances, doing just the worst work possible and never seeing the light of day. And wouldn't you want to remind yourself that there was a sky above, even though you couldn't see it? And that's when I decided to name the book Skylark and to have Alouette's name be Symptomatic of that as well. Yeah, I mean, yes, there are all these wheels within wheels and yeah, I'm. I probably am too clever for my own good, but I really.

A (8:45)

The seed for this whole novel was the underground of Paris. But now I'm interested as to how you start the seed of the story in the 1600s and the seed of the story in World War II. Was it that?

C (8:56)

Great question, Kate. I like this game. I like this game. Where did it really start? Yes, it is. You know, I learned about the tunnel on, you know, listening to a podcast while walking my dog one day. And I went home and I just started researching and all of these different stories came up. And the first thing that blew my mind, literally blew my mind, was these two young doctors who were psychiatric residents at the oldest psychiatric hospital in Paris, which is called St. Anne, who were. This was before the occupation. They were exploring the basement of their very, very old hospital and they found accidentally an entrance to the tunnels to the catacombs. And they were exploring, just like in their off hours. It was very near the on call room, believe it or not. They were exploring in their off hours and. And they decided to map the tunnels for themselves. And then one day they came upon a German bunker. They really did. This was years in the making of these maps. And that's when everything changed for them. And they decided that they were worried, in fact, that the Germans could use the tunnels in horrible ways for their own ends. And so they decided to speed up their mapping of the tunnels and find a way to turn them out over to the French Resistance, which they did. And in fact, the liberation of Paris was plotted by the Resistance from underground.

A (10:32)

I was fascinated by the idea too, that there is an entire river running under this city. Is there an entire. Is the Bievre? Have you seen it? Have you seen the red, dark river under the city?

C (10:43)

I have seen the Bievre under the city. And so, yes, another sort of fascination of mine as I started to research the book was this buried river. And Alouette's story is set in a neighborhood called St. Marcel, which is now the 13th arrondissement. Back then it was outside of the walls of Paris, and it was the most squalid possible suburb of Paris. This is where sort of the lowest of the lowest classes worked as tanners, starch makers and butchers and dye makers. And the river that ran then perpendicular to the Seine and emptied into the Seine, this river that Biev became so squalid with poison and dye runoff and putrefaction that it was culverted and buried in the early 1900s. But the idea that there's this buried river, that it's invisible, but it's still there, just like the quarry tunnels are invisible, but still there was meaningful to me. And I wanted Alouette to be plagued by the river. She hates it.

B (11:54)

I was fascinated by the fact that the Bievre became so. So toxic with the dyes, which are such a big part of the 17th century Parts of the book, that it became so toxic that it had to be covered over.

C (12:08)

The river is so squalid that they have to bury it and hide it out of sight. I mean, that's what they did with that whole neighborhood by keeping it out of sight. And that's what King Louis did in his edict in the late 1600s, mid to late 1600s, by. He wanted Paris to be Rome. He wanted it to be a shining city on a hill. And the way he was going to do that was by sweeping the streets clean of beggars and vagrants and the lame and the halt and the mad and the prostitutes and rebellious women and anyone who didn't fit, who was deemed unacceptable by society's standards. And he made the Hospital General. And one of the arms of the Hospital General was Salpetriere Asylum. And that's where Alouette, my character, is sent at one point, because what we don't want to see, we try to hide.

A (13:07)

Did you research one and then the other? Or were you doing research on the 17th century and World War II Paris at the same time?

C (13:17)

I was doing it at the same time. And, you know, I'm always. You know, different writers work different ways. For instance, I know that Anthony Doerr or Amortols, they research for years before they sit down to write a single word. But I'm always writing from the minute I have the idea, because that's the juice. Like, that's the electricity. That's the thing that sends me to the page. And research is my Gatorade. Like, I get so inspired by what I'm reading. It really is. And. And I was inspired in this book, even though I had never done this particular thing before, which was the two disparate timelines. I was energized by what I was learning and energized by the way that these two time periods were sparking against each other.

A (14:15)

I really loved this book. And that's a bit of an achievement for me because I have very mixed feelings about historical fiction. Look, there's great historical fiction out there. I'm not gonna Say there isn't. There's some terrific writing out there, but there's also a lot of bad historical fiction. Sort of melodramatic, you know, oh, I've got a case of the vapors. So I always think of it when I go into the bookstore. I'm like, oh, yeah, there's all the shelves where all the women are walking away from you. You know, some are walking away from you with suitcases. Some of them are walking away from you, and the background's different, but this woman is always walking away from you. So when do you mean?

B (14:47)

You mean the customer of the store? No, no.

A (14:49)

The COVID of the book is always a woman who always has her back to you, who's in some period piece, and she's often carrying a suitcase and she's. I don't know.

B (14:58)

Next time I go into a bookstore, I'm gonna look at all these books.

A (15:00)

I worked at a bookstore, and we as booksellers used to joke about it.

C (15:03)

I think you made that whole point.

A (15:05)

No, I'm not. We as booksellers used to joke about it. We were like, oh, so you want the woman walking away from you section? That is where we kept history. The covers have similarities that way. Anyway, I digress. I loved this book. I sure do. It is beautifully written. It is fantastic historical fiction. And I can't wait. Beryl Markham fascinates me. And Paula MacLean wrote a book, a novelization of Beryl Markham. I can't wait to read that. I can't wait to read the Paris Wife. She's made me a fan.

B (15:33)

Yeah, the Paris Wife was her first big book. And I think this will be quite popular simply because the bookcase profiled it.

A (15:39)

Oh, yeah, yeah. It's like what we did for Oprah we just sent her. Sorry.

B (15:42)

That's right. Anyway, we're going to take a break. When we come back, we're going to talk some more to Paula MacLean because her background is really interesting. And you'll hear that after the break.

C (15:59)

Here's to quitting. Quitting the couch for a quick run.

A (16:03)

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B (16:31)

Same extra value meals at McDonald's. So now get two snack wraps plus fries and a medium soft drink for just $8 for a limited time only. Price is. Participation may vary. Prices may be higher in Hawaii, Alaska and California. And for delivery. I want to talk about you for a minute because I'm fascinated a by your background and how you've come to this. You're a published poet. You have a degree in poetry. I'm really fascinated how poets turn from what is a. Such a. A confined space of words to being able to turn to a novel and how that background in poetry influences the way you write.

A (17:17)

Yeah, we talked to Kaveh Akbar, who talked about the fact that he wrote Martyr last year, and he talked about the fact that, like, as a poet, he forgot about connective tissue. Like, how did the person walk into the room? How did the person pay the bill for the dinner? Like that. All of that connective tissue ended up having to be a muscle. He had to sort of wake up and learn.

C (17:37)

Yeah. That's a wonderful book, by the way. Martyr and Cava's poetry is also phenomenally beautiful. So, yes, I got my start as a poet, and I've always been in love with words. The power of words, the musicality of language, but also the image, symbols, metaphor, and what a superpower they are to make something something else. Right? How. How long have we been looking at the moon? Since the beginning of human time. And how long we've been trying to describe it to ourselves and to one another. And if you read poetry, you'll read a million descriptions about the moon, and none of them are exactly the same. How do we do that? Like, how do we do that as. As writers, but how do we do that as people? That fascinates me. And I think sometimes when I'm doing events, I get asked the question, do you still write poetry? And my answer is, yes, I do still write poetry. I just do it in long form in my novels. You know, it is a very different muscle. When I wrote poetry, there were these lyrical little boxes. I always thought of them as boxes that by the end of the poem, the idea is that it clicks closed in a way that's satisfying to us as readers. And a novel is the opposite. Right. It just sprawls and goes on and on and on, and it's too big to hold. You can't look at the whole thing at the same time. And there is a satisfaction to that, a difficulty to that. Like, the book is too big. It's bigger than me. It's like juggling an elephant denna teacup and a chainsaw and a. You know, and a ball of string, all. All at the same time. I. I like doing things that are a little too hard for me. I like doing things that challenge me to be a better writer than I might be otherwise. So that I can't fall back on my old bag of tricks. I want to do something. I want to always be doing something new. I don't know if you guys know this about me. I grew up in foster care from the time I was 4 until I was 18 and aged out of the system. You know, I had a really, really difficult childhood, and. And reading kind of saved me. Like, having a world to escape to and finding beauty saved me. And it's not a mistake that I have created a character. In Alouette particularly, but Also in the 1942 storyline, there's this young girl who Christophe befriends named Sasha in his apartment building. They become very close. She, too, is. Uses beauty as a survival skill. She's obsessed with the Greek myths and with memory palaces. And Alouette has her color that does help her hold on to her sense of self, her dignity, and give sorrow when things seem quite hopeless.

A (20:46)

It's one of the things I thought you did brilliantly in the World War II story. I've never gotten a sense of the separation of families as vividly as I did at Skylark. You know, of course, you hear about the horrors of World War II backwards and forwards, but the idea of just a momentary, you, you're coming with me, and that's the last time you. You see them. You do that brilliantly in this book.

B (21:09)

But reading this book through that prism of your having grown up in foster care, it gave it a whole new dimension to me. As we were talking, I went back. One of my favorite quotes in the book, in the deepest dark, you lose yourself entirely, or you find a new way forward, not only who you are, but who you can still become. And that, it seems to me, has to be a foundational thought in the mind of a foster child if he or she is gonna survive.

C (21:40)

Amen. No, that. That's beautifully said. Thank you for drawing that out. Yeah. You know, back to Sasha, just for one moment, she was a late character for me. I wasn't sure that I was going to. You know, there was Kristoff's story and Alouette's story, and then I was researching the way I do, crazily, obsessively. And I found these firsthand accounts from teenagers who had survived the Holocaust, but survived, in particular these roundups in Paris in 1942. And I did not know the story. You know, you think there's so much written about World War II. Haven't we learned everything? But in fact, no, I had never known that, at least on one given day during those roundups, that anyone over 14, between the ages of 14 and 18, in fact, were released from the holding areas before they were sent off by train to the death camps. And that these teenagers were sent away from their families. And where did they have to go to? Right? They had no home anymore. Their apartments were already absconded, the keys turned over to the concierge. They had no family, they had no home. They had nowhere to go to. And I knew immediately that I needed to tell that story. It was an imperative. And that I needed a character to tell that story from a closer, Closer to the skin. Then Kristoff could tell that story. And that's when we started working on Sasha's voice. And she breaks my heart. I mean, and puts it back together again. She's literally. I just, you know, our characters, they're imaginary. And yet you can't talk.

A (23:27)

No, it does. She broke my heart as well. Every time we would start a chapter with the word Sasha or Sasha, I'd be like, no, I don't want to go back to Sasha. Because again, you did such a beautiful job of not just that momentary separation from the rest of her family and her father, but also that struggle of, like, am I one of the lucky ones? I got away and am I lucky? I don't know. Like, that's. Let's deal with the layers of the trauma that are built into my so called luck. I just thought you did a big, beautiful.

C (23:57)

I mean, that is so articulate. Yes, it is like that, right? Maybe yes, maybe no. I mean, we get the. We're dealt the cards we're dealt. It's what we do with that hand that defines us as humans.

B (24:11)

So you made a reference to something a moment ago. You said, that's what saved me as a foster child. How many different homes did you go to?

C (24:19)

Well, four and four years. Between four and eight. And then various placements with family as they were trying to figure out what to do with us. So I don't know, six or seven homes then, really, in four years. And then when I was eight, we went to one home and stayed there until I aged out of the system. We were never adopted, and it wasn't a good home. I actually didn't have any positive experiences in Foster care. I think that, you know, we. Alouette's story, for instance, with her mother grew out of my own story. Right. We're finding ways to work through our circumstances. And one of the ways that I do it, because I'm a writer, is through other people's stories and giving my character similar circumstances and then seeing how they deal with those situations. Alouette actually has a much more hopeful and resolved relationship with her returned mother than I do with my returned mother. My mother was away for 16 years. We didn't know where she was or if she was alive, in fact, and she returned when I was 20. And we have a relationship. It's a fraught one, as you might imagine.

B (25:37)

Oh, there's a fascinating scene in the book when Henriette comes back to Alouette, and I think I'm quoting correctly, Alouette says, you've been living half a mile from me and you never wanted to find me. And Henriette tries to make some amends, and Alouette says, I'm sorry, it's just too late. You've waited too long. And, boy, do I get that. If you read the book through the prism of what you went through as a kid, I think it will make the book more meaningful. What saved you?

C (26:07)

Yeah, well, my sisters. Over and over again, on and on, every day, and they still do. You know, we were in every home together. That's a very unusual set of circumstances. And even though we never talked about our experiences and never openly, not until we were adults, told the stories of our own stories to one another, because, as you know, even though you might be right next to each other and having two different experiences. Right. As kids, I'm sure you each have siblings that would describe your childhood very differently than you would. But it's as if we were in. We really were in a foxhole together. Right. Like, we survived a war. And we did it physically, just physically, knowing that my sisters were with me in all of those places, they were my home. They still are that. And honestly, the library, you know, when I was a kid, we moved so often, I was terrified to make friends. And so I made friends with librarians, and I ate my lunch in the library and read my way through the stacks and fell into the world of story as a way to give myself hope. And honestly, that's what escape can do for us sometimes. Right. I wanted to imagine any other life except the one that I was living. And believe it or not, I was also becoming a writer. Yeah, that, honestly, is how I make my money. Strangely, Enough. But it's my vocation. It's my. It's my religion. It's my favorite thing besides the people I love.

A (27:53)

What an amazing thing to turn the trauma into the gifts that you. That you. Thank you so much for sharing your gift with us.

B (28:02)

Yeah, I have tremendous admiration for her. The number of foster homes that she went through and then the last one for considerable period of time. But as she said, not a happy experience. And both, as I think, as she said, both of her sisters and she have really made something of themselves. And that's not easy when you come out of foster homes.

A (28:27)

No, I think it's actually one of the things you learn as an adult is a lot of trauma is caused when you're a child and you are not wanted or you are ignored. And so the idea that she managed to survive, not just survive, but thrive, as did her other two sisters and lives to share these amazing gifts with us, her readers. Every time I hear about a background like that, I always think to myself, would I have survived?

B (28:50)

Well, if you read it through the prism of the fact that she was abandoned by her mother and father when I think she was four when she went through all those foster homes with her sisters, which, as she says, she was very fortunate that her sisters were with her in all those homes. But it's still. It is still tough. And as she said, we don't talk about it, which is really interesting to me. But anyway, if you read it through the prism of the fact that she did this, you'll see a lot of what must be references to the background.

A (29:21)

That she has and the ultimate hopefulness of the future. I think that's one of the things this book does really beautifully, is even in the darkest moments, you can find things for which you hope. And Paula MacLean obviously did that in her own life and learned to adapt it into this tremendous gift that she shares with her readers. I mean, again, would I have survived?

B (29:39)

Don't think so.

A (29:40)

Don't know. But what an incredible woman and what an amazing thing to do with her life and her gift.

B (29:44)

Yep. Yep. We'll remind you of who makes this podcast possible as we do every week. And then we have a coda from Paula MacLean.

A (29:52)

The book case with Pete and Charlie Gibson is a production of ABC Audio and Good Morning America. It is edited by Tom Butler of TKO Productions. Our executive producer is Simone Swink. We want to make mention of Amanda McMasters, Sabrina Kohlberg, Arielle Chester at Good Morning America, and Josh Cohan from ABC Audio. Follow the bookcase wherever you get your podcasts and be sure to listen, rate and review. If you'd like to find any of the books mentioned in this episode, we have them linked in the episode Description.

C (30:21)

I don't do resolutions, but I can't help from, you know, being a little hopeful on New Year's Eve. Like here we are tilting toward a new year, toward a fresh page, if you will. Right. A fresh patch of snow to write whatever we want. And I love that, the way that every year brings and every day, obviously, but particularly at the turning of the year, an opportunity to do something braver or bolder or louder or more colorful or more resilient or transformative or what have you. So let's all move in that direction.

B (31:07)

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A (31:17)

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C (31:22)

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