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- [00:00]
Penn Holderness
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- [00:15]
Kim Holderness
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- [01:31]
Zibby Owens
Hi, this is Zibby Owens and you're listening to Totally Booked with Zibby, formerly Moms don't have Time to Read Books. In my daily show, I interview today's latest best selling buzziest or underrated authors and story creators whose work I think.
- [01:46]
Scott Johnson
Is worth your time.
- [01:48]
Zibby Owens
As a bookstore owner, publisher, author and obviously podcaster, I get a comprehensive look at everything that's coming out and spend my time curating the best books so you don't have to stay in the know, get insider insights and connect with guests like I do every single day. For more information, go to zibbymedia.com and follow me on Instagram ibeowens. Scott Johnson is the author of the Sanderson's Fail Manhattan A novel, author of the bestseller Campusland. Scott Johnson grew up in Manhattan and graduated from Yale with where he later taught as an adjunct. After graduation he worked on Wall street including a stint in Hong Kong and running a quantitative hedge fund. More recently, Johnson shift gears and co founded and subsequently sold two tech startups. He lives in Charlottesville, Virginia. Welcome Scott.
- [02:37]
Scott Johnson
Thank you so much for coming on Totally Booked with Zivi to talk about.
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Zibby Owens
The Sanderson's Fail Manhattan.
- [02:43]
Scott Johnson
Congrats.
- [02:44]
Thank you.
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And I am sitting here in Manhattan as I am. You know this is like a meta moment as I'm in the scene of the crime here on the Upper east side. So yeah, I couldn't wait.
- [02:54]
Are you sit in 740 Park?
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No, no no no. Oh no no no.
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That would Be too funny.
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No, no, no, no. Okay, so tell listeners what your book is about.
- [03:04]
Sure. So the Sandersons are an Upper east side family and they seemingly have it made. The husband, Will, is already very wealthy, but he's on the cusp of entering the professional stratosphere at his powerful investment firm, Bedrock Capital. He's about to go from wealth to mega wealth. And you know, there's always a next level. His wife, Ellie, is an outsider, having grown up in an itinerant, you know, with an itinerant existence as an army brat. And she's really the emotional center of the novel. Her burning desire is to simply feel rooted to a community somewhere, something she never got to feel before, especially growing up. So when the family moves to Manhattan, which is where Will grew up and was very much a center of these part of the establishment, she longs to fit in in the ways one fits in on the Upper east side. The school committees, the dinner parties, the private clubs, et cetera. Not because she's status hungry, but because she desperately wants to plant roots somewhere to belong. Then there are two daughters, both enrolled at one of the top private girls schools, called the Lenox Hill School for Girls. Will is scheming to ensure that Ginny, the older girl, gets into Yale because that's where Sanderson's always go. Ginny is fiercely independent though, and she's driving Will nuts because she seems indifferent to the whole idea. The younger daughter, Zoe, is kind of overlooked most of the time because she's painfully shy until she meets a new student named Clover, who claims, somewhat enigmatically, to be ecosexual, which is someone who has relations with nature. And yes, that is a real thing. So as you can imagine, nothing works out according to anyone's plan. There's this whole new landscape out there of cultural rules and practices that includes DEI struggle sessions and privilege walks and even corporate wokeism for Will at work. And the Sandersons managed to trip on every landmine there is. Things go very south when the girls school gets a much sought after trans student, that is a boy transitioning to be a girl, who then promptly disappears. The whole city gets caught up in finding her, and the Sanderson somehow find themselves in the middle of the story and very publicly in society's crosshairs. And so that's pretty much the setup. Without giving too much away, but that's where we go.
- [05:41]
And what drew you specifically to the story?
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I have often. I started blogging about educational issues years ago and blogged a fair amount about Yale in particular, where I gather we both went and sort of watched its long slow descent into what I would call madness. That really dates back to the 80s and 90s, but it has accelerated in recent years. And in the 20002021 time frame, in the wake of George Floyd, the private schools in New York in particular went utterly insane. They retooled their curricula, they, they, they got rid of all the prior principles of pursuit of truth, became all about identity politics. And because I had this blog called the Naked Dollar, which I'm not a terribly active blogger even, but I had this blog and I did write about these things, someone initially reached out to me about one school, which I can name Dalton, and some crazy stuff happening behind the scenes there. In particular a eight page list of demands from the teachers about what the school should do. And they were eight pages of insanity. So I leaked this. I broke the story on my blog. The thing went completely viral. The Wall Street Journal asked me to do an op ed, which I did, and there were several follow up pieces. The headmaster there ended up getting fired in the wake of the whole thing. But then other people started sending me their crazy stor stories from the insides of the other schools. So I had this serial series of blogs about each of the schools. And the Naked Dollar went utterly viral at that time. We got a million hits in a six week period, which for a little blog that I don't even contribute too much was crazy. But clearly I'd hit on something and then something happened. The spark that caused me to think maybe there's a novel here. I was in a meeting. The context of that meeting I'll have to keep to myself. But so in, in the blog I should go back. In the blog, every time I wrote about school, I listed the names of the board members of that school at the bottom of the piece. Like these are the people you can point a finger at if you're upset about this stuff going on. And a woman comes up in this meeting and everyone likes her. And I said, you know, I don't know her, but you know, she's presiding over a school. She happened to be the head of the board of one of these schools that I wrote about that I think has gone nuts and they're doing an utter disservice to their own community. And that gives me a little pause. And almost immediately two or three people said, oh, she's perfectly lovely. And here's the thing, she probably is. I've never met her still, but if she were sitting next to you at a dinner party, you'd probably say, this is a lovely woman, very successful, clearly, probably very educated and engaging. But she and people like her are presiding over a complete overthrow of Western civilization at their own schools and the principles of the Enlightenment, like reason and the pursuit of truth. So I became fixated on this idea of these lovely people, many of whom I know, who indeed are really nice people. But they, they. There's a certain moral cowardice as they sit on these boards and do nothing. They sit on their hands while they watch the insanity and divisiveness of identity politics. So take over. So I became fixated on this idea and the book became known as all the Lovely People, which I thought was a great title, but St. Martin's Press did not like that title. So it's now just a chapter title. But they claimed it wasn't a good hook to get to lure readers in. So hopefully the Sandersons fail Manhattan gets people to say, who are the Sandersons and why are they failing Manhattan?
- [09:34]
It got me to say that, oh, good. I mean, all the Lovely People is much more generic than this. So you know what you're getting. I think with books you have to. You have like two seconds to capture people's attention.
- [09:47]
So they cited Fleischmann's In Trouble, Never read but is another Manhattan based novel. And apparently you want to know why this Fleischmann's in trouble and the book was a dollar, so.
- [09:59]
Well, you know, Taffy Berdeser Aichner is also just amazing. You know, she could write about a tree and I would read it. She's amazing. But, yes, marketing is obviously part of it. Well, I'm sorry, it hurts to lose the title that you're attached to, so I'm sorry for that.
- [10:13]
No, it's okay.
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Zibby Owens
So are you on a school board.
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Scott Johnson
Or have you ever been?
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Not a school board, no. Very close to lots of people who are and have been. And I now live in Charlottesville, Virginia, where there's a lot of craziness going on around the board there at uva. So I just, I get upset that, you know, what happens is people feel compromised. You're on a board and maybe you want to say something, maybe you want to raise your hand and say, you know, wait a minute, is this right? But your kids at that school, and maybe they're a rising senior and Brittany has to get into Harvard and you're afraid you won't get a good recommendation. It's a legitimate fear, actually. The administrations at these schools have become quite vindictive against people who fall out of line. And the parent contracts are written in such a way that if you sort of publicly fall out of line with everything that's going on, you can be asked to leave. You simply are deemed not a good fit anymore.
- [11:14]
Wow. So, I mean, you write so searingly about the politics of society and like stations in life and all of that and sort of the awareness of who you are and what it means. And like optics, I guess optics play a big role. Talk a little bit about that.
- [11:33]
Well, most people are concerned with status and how they're perceived by others. And I guess I was very inspired and sometimes get compared to, which is flattering to Tom Wolf, who, you know, famously looked at everyone's vanities and, you know, funny side story, when I was a young pup right out of college in my first job on Wall street, he spent two days on my trading desk at Salomon Brothers researching Bonfire, which was a real kick for me. And, you know, it was interesting. It was clear from the questions he was asking he didn't know anything about what was going on. But then the book came out and he clearly listened very well. So anyway, it's always great to analyze people's motives and vanities, if you will.
- [12:22]
And what do you think? It sounds like you have a very strong point of view on what schools and education boards and all that should be doing in the face of identity.
- [12:33]
Zibby Owens
Politics and all the rest.
- [12:34]
Scott Johnson
What do you think schools should be doing in this time?
- [12:38]
Zibby Owens
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- [14:07]
Penn Holderness
Hi, this is Penn and Kim Holderness from the Laughlines podcast.
- [14:10]
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- [14:27]
Penn Holderness
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- [14:40]
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- [14:51]
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- [15:22]
Scott Johnson
Well, the boards need to stand up, and Barry Weiss too, has been very vocal about this. She's great. The boards need to stand up and take control because mostly they've been vanity boards. You go on a school board and you're, you're thrilled with yourself for the status that that conveys and people approach you about getting their kid into that school and it feels good. But mostly these boards, and this is the college level too, in fact, maybe more so on the college level, don't really do anything. They're vanity boards. They sit there and receive information from the administration, but their strings are completely pulled by the school presidents and other administrators and some really awful stuff is happening. I mean, critical race theory, if you spend five minutes trying to understand what it really is, is a horrible ideology. And it's being taught as, as dogma at some of the best schools, elementary schools in the country. They're also being taught to to hate our own country, which I think is important, abhorrent. And the boards are doing essentially zero about this because again, you know, maybe Brittany, maybe the adjective used in a recommendation for Harvard from outstanding to above average. And that kills you right there. So there are legitimate concerns that people could pay a price for standing up. But that price compared to some of the other periods in world history, the cost for standing up to the Nazis in the 30s, for instance, or the ayatollahs in Iran in the 80s and 90s, are vanishingly small. So I do get upset that people seem to lack any moral courage about these things.
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Tell me about a time you've stood up for something you believed in.
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Well, I really got into it over the school my oldest kid was going to up in Westchester county, and we went toe to toe with them. And for a time it was an extremely uncomfortable situation because all the other parents were who, by the way, who didn't necessarily disagree with me and my wife, but they were upset we were rocking the boat was really what it came down to. No one wants to rock the boat. But I really looked into the situation of what was going on at that school and this is way back in the aughts and it was horrible what was being taught and what was not being taught. So that was a very, very uncomfortable situation for us for a year or two. And we finally left that school and found one we liked, which is hard to do from where I sit these days.
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Wow. So taking all of that, how did you come at the Sanderson's Fail Manhattan? What do you want people to think and feel when they finish reading the book?
- [18:24]
I want them to have fun. Same with my first novel, Campus Land, which was a thinly veiled send up of Yale. I want them to laugh, hopefully out loud a few times, and I want it to be a fun ride. But I also want them to learn a couple things along the way. And you have to be careful about that as an author because if you're really trying to spoon feed people a point of view, they generally don't take it very well. So you have to do that with a little subtlety and maybe wrap it in a whole lot of fun. But I'd like people, I mean, my first novel, I wanted people to understand what was going on with the abuse of Title IX on campuses and some other issues. And here I'd like people to understand about these completely lame boards and the insanity of what's happening in private schools, which by the way, has been dialed back a tiny bit. But the pendulum has maybe swung back, but only just a little.
- [19:22]
So yeah, what are you focused on next? Do you have a new book that you're writing, a new thing that you're thinking about a lot?
- [19:29]
I have two half written books. One is the send up of the Art world, which is A little different. Sometimes it's difficult to satirize something that's already self satirical, which the art world very much is. And the other is a road novel called the Ashes, which is about two brothers forced to set out on the American road to find the right place to spread their father's ashes. And they were only given 30 days by their father to do it, who they were estranged from him as well, and otherwise they don't inherit. So they're forced to spend time with each other and the father speaks to them through a GPS enabled speaker that sits in their car as they travel the American roads and are forced to go to the world's largest bowl of twine and other things. So I'm having some fun with that.
- [20:15]
Have you seen the play the Lucky Stiff or Lucky Stiff?
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No, it's.
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I mean, my daughter's school just put it on, so I have just seen it. But it's sort of similar that the, the voice from the past, literally through a tape recorder is telling the people what to do and all the experiences they have to have.
- [20:33]
Oh, interesting. Well, you know, I hit on the idea of a tape of a, you know, Bluetooth speaker being GPS enabled and that that technology does exist.
- [20:41]
Yeah, no, it's, it's like a modernized version. I'm sure it's completely different, but just, you know, it's this funny from the grave sort of direction because don't we all kind of want to be able to dictate things forever?
- [20:55]
Zibby Owens
Okay, well, what advice do you have for aspiring authors?
- [20:59]
Scott Johnson
Well, I don't know. I'm probably. I don't know if I'm a good person ask or not. I didn't. I never thought about being a novelist, honestly, until some crazy stuff happened at Yale that I thought, oh, this, there's someone's got to write a novel about this. So I did. Campus land. I would say you need to hook readers early. You need to. And it's amazing how many books fail to do this. You need to give them within a chapter, two at most. The reason they're reading that book and want to keep reading. I would always end chapters with a little bit of a tease or a hang again, keep reading. Keep readers moving forward. I would do what I do, which is a. You know, anytime you hear someone say funny or have a great turn of a phrase, write it down in your notes app and your on your phone because you'll never know how, how you might be able to use that someday. In fact, sometimes a funny turn of a phrase can turn into a whole chapter of a book and the last thing. And this is literally when I set out to write my first novel. Like, you know, googling, like how do you write a novel? Kind of a mystery to me. It seemed like this incredibly complex endeavor and one bit of advice I stumbled on and I don't remember who said this, but I thought it was great. Of all the endings you can imagine, choose the one that is the most outrageous and yet still plausible. I definitely took that to heart.
- [22:21]
Love it. Okay, well Scott, thank you so much.
- [22:24]
Zibby Owens
The Sanderson Fail Manhattan.
- [22:25]
Scott Johnson
Thank you for shining a light on this part of the world, so to speak. And congrats.
- [22:32]
Thank you so much. Thanks for having me.
- [22:33]
Okay, thanks.
- [22:34]
Zibby Owens
Thank you for listening to Totally Booked with Zibby, formerly Moms don't have Time to Read Books. If you loved the show, tell a friend, leave a review, follow me on Instagram ibbeowens and spread the Word. Thanks so much. Oh and buy the books.
- [22:56]
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- [23:34]
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- [24:04]
Scott Johnson
Acast Powers the world's best podcasts. Here's a show that we recommend.
- [24:12]
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So what does it mean to live a good life?
- [24:14]
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Really accepting the fact that happiness requires.
- [24:17]
Scott Johnson
A little bit of training?
- [24:18]
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- [24:26]
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- [24:28]
Scott Johnson
That actually matter to you. Remember what's already good and stay curious about what could be good.
- [24:35]
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- [24:42]
Scott Johnson
Well, I'll just say what just came to mind, which is to be careful with yourself. Be yourself. It's. You know what?
- [24:49]
It's not easy always, but it's simple.
- [24:52]
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- [24:58]
Scott Johnson
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