Jane Igharo, TIES THAT TETHER

Zibby Owens: Welcome, Jane. Thanks so much for coming on "Moms Don't Have Time to Read Books" to discuss Ties That Tether, your awesome book that just came out. Congratulations.

Jane Igharo: Thank you. Thanks for having me.

Zibby: It's my pleasure. Would you mind please telling listeners who aren't familiar with your book or who perhaps are not Book of the Month club members and didn't notice that it had been chosen as one of the picks, congratulations for that again, what Ties That Tether is about?

Jane: Ties That Tether is about a Nigerian woman who immigrated to Canada when she was twelve and promised her father back in Nigeria as he passed -- he was ill. While he was sick, she promised him that when she did come to Canada, she would stay true to her culture by marrying someone who was Nigerian, specifically Edo. Years later, she meets someone who is not Edo. He's of Spanish descent. They have a blossoming relationship. She's still caught between her family's expectations and her heart.

Zibby: Excellent. I happen to have read the essay you wrote on Shondaland, so I know where this story came from. Perhaps you could tell us a little more, the inspiration for this novel.

Jane: The inspiration was my experience as a Nigerian woman. I immigrated to Canada when I was eleven. I've had to deal with what my family, specifically my mother, expects from me and who she expects me to date. Just dealing with all of it and dating guys within my culture and secretly dating guys outside my culture, that inspired this book. [laughs]

Zibby: I think what you touch on in the book is something that people in so many cultures that are tight-knit or who feel that any external influence is in some way a threat can relate to. It usually comes from the older generation. I feel like these days, we don't think twice about, really, anything. Our parents, and particularly our grandparents, are like, no, no, no.

Jane: It's definitely the older generation, for sure.

Zibby: Tell me about your secretly dating the first guy who was not Nigerian and how it was not telling your mom about it and worrying the whole time about her finding out and all the rest.

Jane: That was stressful. [laughter] It happened when I was at university and I got a bit more freedom.

Zibby: Was he in your class? How did you meet him?

Jane: I met him on the public transit.

Zibby: No way.

Jane: Yeah. He was really cute. He was from El Salvador. We just clicked. I dated him secretly.

Zibby: Wait, that's not enough detail for me still. You're on the public transport. Then what happens? You start talking to him? He started talking to you?

Jane: He started talking to me. He sat beside me. I can't really remember the conversation. It was a while ago. We exchanged numbers, started dating. I had to hide my phone and lie to my mother about where I was going.

Zibby: Were you living at home?

Jane: Yes. I wasn't living on campus, university, because I didn't live that far from my university. I was living from home. So much harder to hide when you're living from home. That's tough.

Zibby: You managed to keep that a secret. Then you started dating other nationalities, somebody from Jamaica, someone who was white. Still, your poor mother is in the dark here.

Jane: For sure. I recently told her about this two years ago when I was dating someone who was Nigerian. She was very much content, very much happy. I was like, "You know, I used to date a lot of guys who weren’t Nigerian." She didn't believe me. She thought I was joking. I really had to spell it out for her. I'm like, "His name was this. He worked here." Then she was like, "How dare you." [laughs] She was so shocked, but she got over it.

Zibby: Oh, my gosh. This is none of my business at all. Are you dating someone Nigerian now?

Jane: Yes.

Zibby: Okay. So she's very happy.

Jane: You know what's funny? She read my book, and I think she really did change her perspective a lot. A few weeks ago, she was like, "If you bring a guy home, a white guy home, like Rafael," which is the hero in my book, "I will totally be okay with it." [laughs]

Zibby: Really?

Jane: I was like, that's progress. That great. I don't know if he can be like Rafael, but just keep your mind open. That's good.

Zibby: I love how you came to this conclusion that it was really just fear that drove your mom. Tell me a little more about the conversation you had with her because I found that so interesting. We have all these assumptions about our parents and why they make their rules or why they are the way they are. You really uncovered the root of it. Perhaps, that's what enabled her to finally let go of what she had held onto so strongly.

Jane: Sometimes I feel like we don't even care to understand where our parents are coming from. We just get angry. We don't want to figure out their perspective. For me, I gradually realized my mother was coming from a place of fear, like a lot of immigrants when they move to a new country. They're far from home. They're try to preserve what they had back there. It’s so different. It's just preserving it, keeping that culture and tradition so their children can have it and their children can have it and it can still be strong even in the new setting. It's really what motivates them most of the time, a lot of the time, to just say, don't date outside our culture. I just wanted my readers to understand that as fear not prejudice.

Zibby: Also, you talked about how growing up you were happy to read all the books from school and all the rest, but they typically had white protagonists. They were not stories that reflected your inner experience. You feel very strongly about portraying characters like yourself in fiction. Tell me more about that.

Jane: Growing up, I didn't see people like me, black people or specifically Nigerian characters, in books. The first romance I read was Some Nerve by Jane Heller. I love that book so much. I read it multiple times. I could relate to it on some level, but not completely because the protagonist wasn't like me in any way. She wasn't an immigrant. She wasn't black. She wasn't Nigerian. There was still that disconnect. The first book I ever truly connected with was Americanah, and that was just only a few years ago. I first read that book I think two years ago. It was published before then, but I only got my hands on it two years ago. I really felt seen. I loved the themes within that book of immigration and identity. She talked about hair, which people might not get. For black girls, hair is a big deal. I felt very seen in that book. I'm really excited that throughout my career I plan to write about Nigerian women. A lot of people have been reaching out and saying, this is the first romance that I've seen a Nigerian heroine, and it's amazing. I don't know if it actually is because I haven't read every single book in the world, but it makes me feel really happy to know that another Nigerian girl is seeing herself in the words that I write.

Zibby: It's amazing. What made you write? What made you start doing this? What made you write this book?

Jane: What made me write? Someone asked me this before. The answer is very straight. I couldn't help it. I couldn't not write. The journey to becoming a writer was incredibly hard. It was the hardest thing I've ever had to do. I wrote two books prior to this one in different genres. Trying to get an agent was incredibly hard. It didn't happen until Ties That Tether. Even through that entire process, the idea of giving up never occurred to me. It didn't seem like an option because even through the tears that I cried and the times I wanted to throw my laptop out the window, I knew that I couldn't give up. It just wasn't an option. I write and I will continue to write because I have to, because it's in my blood. I think it's what I'm destined to do.

Zibby: Have you always loved to write?

Jane: I wanted to be a Disney actress when I was younger. [laughter] I really wanted to be that black Hannah Montana. I went on a few auditions, but they didn't work out. It was the summer after I went on an audition and I was really sad because I couldn't progress to the next stage that I wrote a poem called Longing for Spring. It was horrible. I was in elementary school. It was the first thing I wrote, in a purple journal. I kept reading and writing. It just kind of happened. That summer after a huge disappointment -- I found out that I wasn't meant to be an actress because I cannot act. I'm horrible, but I can do something else. I started to explore that.

Zibby: Wow. I know you felt like it wasn't an option, but when you were crying, how did you get back to your laptop? How did you just say to yourself, it doesn't matter, I'm going to do it eventually? Was it just this interior monologue, this faith?

Jane: Yeah, it's faith. I'm a Christian. My faith helped me through this. There's a Bible verse that says a man's gift maketh room for him and bringth him before great men. I wrote that and I framed it. I put it in my room. I would recite it every time because it meant to me that eventually your gift will bring you to a place that you're meant to be if you make room for you in this world where it's crowded and full of so many other talents. Somehow, it will make room for you. Great people will see you. That was in my head. I said it all the time. My family was amazing. My mother, she's an immigrant, but she never pressured me to be a doctor or a lawyer or an engineer, which so many African immigrants or maybe immigrants in general tend to do. I'm so grateful because I can't imagine being a doctor or a lawyer. It's just not for me. I listened to songs that cheered me up. This sounds really ridiculous, but I always listened to that Miley Cyrus song, "The Climb." It's a really good song if you want to be motivated. That helped me a lot.

Zibby: I am going to play that right after this. I'll probably recognize it from my kids. Can you say the verse from the Bible again that you repeated to yourself? Just say it a little slower because you went so fast the first time. I just want to hear it more clearly.

Jane: A man's gift maketh room for him and bringeth him before great men.

Zibby: Cool. I like it. It's great to have a mantra. It's great to have something that you feel like is from, I want to say a higher power but that sounds so hokey, but something that is grounding in that way and that really means a lot to you. It's great. The Bible and Miley Cyrus, who knew? Who knew they would be in the same sentence in this interview?

Jane: [laughs] Who knew?

Zibby: If you were to have kids who wanted to date outside the Nigerian world, would you have any issue at all, or no?

Jane: No, I wouldn't as long as they take the culture that my mother has given me and I have given them and they hold onto it. My main character eventually learns in the book, you can appreciate many cultures, you can practice many cultures and still stay true to yours. It doesn't take anything away from that. That's basically what I would tell my children, to remember where their mother came from and hold onto that no matter what, no matter who they love.

Zibby: Jane, tell me about your writing process. What was it like? Did you outline this book? Did you consider writing a memoir? Did it all just come pouring out? What was it like?

Jane: This is the first book I've ever outlined. As a new writer, I didn't know what I was doing when I started writing initially, like many writers. I just dove into it, sat in front of my computer. That was a huge mistake. I went to a conference in New York with writers. I learned a lot. I learned how to outline my book and plot points and all that stuff, very technical stuff that readers might not realize writers are trying to do. That really did help me, outlining the entire book from beginning to end even though things changed a lot. It gave me an idea of what to do and relevant points to hit instead of just having chapters that were not pushing the plot forward. My writing process since then has been always outlining my book. Sometimes I write the whole thing. Right now, I'm working on a book. I have a whiteboard, but I'm just outlining things as I go because I don't know what's going to happen in the story. Outlining is wonderful.

Zibby: Excellent. Can you say any more about your next book?

Jane: Book number two does not have a title. I'm really struggling with that right now. It's about a biracial woman who never met her Nigerian father. Then she learns that he's passed away. He's invited her to Nigeria for his funeral because he wants all his children to attend. He's this incredibly wealthy man in Nigeria. She decides to go to Nigeria to learn about her father and his family and the part of herself she never knew. She gets there and she meets this unconventional family of his, a first wife, a second wife, a mistress who never made it down the aisle, and children who are basically Nigerian royalty. She's tossed into this colorful, insane family. Most of the characters are trying to find themselves as she's trying to find themselves. I explore themes of immigration and identity and class in Nigeria, the rich and the poor.

Zibby: Wow, that sounds amazing. Oh, my gosh, that sounds great. That sounds like a movie. I'll be tuning into that when that eventually gets optioned and all the rest. Do you have any advice to aspiring authors?

Jane: It's very cliché, but I stand by it. Never give up. If you feel it in your gut that this is what you're meant to do, just don't stop. Not giving up can mean many things. It can mean shelfing a project and starting a new one, which is very painful. Sometimes it's necessary. It could also mean taking writing classes, going to conferences. Writing is so isolating, but it's so amazing that you can meet people who are like you, who are on the same journey, and learn from them. Not giving up also might mean joining a book club and just talking to people who are reading books, seeing what is marketable, seeing what publishers want. A lot of the times, writers don't know what publishers want. That's very important to know. Not giving up, that's my advice.

Zibby: Love it. I have to ask, did you record the audiobook for this? You have the best voice. I'm serious. This should be your side hustle, is being an audiobook narrator.

Jane: Oh, my god, I would love to. I didn't record the voice. I really would have loved to, but I did not. The person who did record I thought did a wonderful job. I really hope to do an audiobook for another of my books.

Zibby: Put that in your next contract. You got to negotiate that up front. Put that in writing.

Jane: Thank you. I will do that.

Zibby: Awesome. Jane, thank you so much. Thanks for coming on "Moms Don't Have Time to Read Books." Thanks for giving the vantage point of the daughter and the mother in this situation because you can relate to both. As a mom, I can relate to wanting to have my kids keep my culture, but see the point of view of the kid. I can feel myself as the kid too. All to say, thank you for your story.

Jane: Thank you for your time and for speaking with me. This was very fun.

Zibby: Good.

Jane: Thank you. Bye.

Zibby: Thanks. Buh-bye.

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Debra Jo Immergut, YOU AGAIN

Zibby Owens: Welcome to day four of my July Book Blast. Today, I am going to be calling this Thrilling Thursday. There are a bunch of thrillers and suspenseful reads that I thought you'd really enjoy and that would make great summer reads. A lot of these came out during the pandemic. They're really worth your time, so I wanted to get them out. I hope you enjoy them.

Debra Jo Immergut is the author of You Again. She's also the author of The Captives, a 2019 Edgar Award finalist for Best Debut Novel by an American Author, which was published in the US and in over a dozen other countries. She has also published a collection of short stories called Private Property. Her essays and stories have appeared in American Short Fiction, Narrative, and The New York Times, among others. A recipient of Michener and MacDowell fellowships, she has an MFA from the Iowa Writers’ Workshop and lives in Western Massachusetts.

Zibby: Debra, You Again, first of all, tell listeners, please, what You Again is about. Then I want to hear about the impetus for writing this book and everything else.

Debra Jo Immergut: You Again is about a fortysomething-year-old working mom in New York City who is coming home late from work one night and looks out her taxi window and sees her younger self coming out of a nightclub that closed years ago. It is really about this woman who is literally haunted by this younger self and what these encounters mean, how they change her, how they throw her life into complete upheaval, and how she comes out the other end of it.

Zibby: I know this is not your first book, but tell me how this particular book came into your head. Were you in a cab by the Hudson tunnel? Is it not called the Hudson Tunnel? I'm losing my mind. Hudson Tunnel, right?

Debra: Holland Tunnel. [laughs]

Zibby: Holland Tunnel, oh, my gosh. I've been out of the city too long. Did you ever see yourself while you were in a cab or somebody who looked like you and then that sparked the novel? That's my theory, but probably is not true. Tell me.

Debra: Not exactly, but not far off. What happened was I was walking through my old neighborhood in Greenwich Village with a stroller holding my one-year-old son at that time. I just happened to be in this area where I had lived when I was in my twenties. By this time, I was in my late thirties or mid-thirties, about thirty-five. I walked by my old building. I just happened onto this block, hadn’t been there in a long time. I just had the strangest sensation that I was going to see my younger self coming out of the door. The block is one of those landmark blocks, so nothing had changed. The old tenement building was still there. I just felt like I could see her coming out. Then I thought, what would she say to me? Here I am pushing a stroller. She wanted to be a novelist. I have not yet managed to get that novel out there. What would our conversation be like? What would I tell her? What would she say to me? That moment stuck with me for a long time. At that period, I really wasn't writing. I think that was part of the reason that I felt this encounter might be somewhat difficult. As soon as I did get back to writing a few years later, that story, I thought, I need to just start writing it and see what the girl says.

Zibby: That's so cool. Now I'm thinking in my head, wow, at what times could I really have used the me now to go back and say something encouraging to the me then? That would be so nice if you had those kind of touchstones throughout life to get you through the harder times. Wait, but tell me -- so you started writing and then you took a break for like twenty years, essentially. Then you came back. Tell me what that journey was like.

Debra: I went to the Iowa Writers’ Workshop and got off to a pretty nice start, sold a story collection half-finished. It was really the first handful of stories I'd written in my life. That was probably not great. I was so green. I really did not have a clue about what I was doing as a writer, as a published author. I was unprepared. I was young. It kind of threw me for a loop. I thought, wow, this was a rocky journey and not what I expected. It was kind of a difficult publishing experience. As I know now, and since I know so many authors and friends who are writers, pretty much every publishing journey has a lot of bumps in the road. That's how green I was. I didn't know that. I needed to retreat from it a little bit. I did write a novel that got rejected. That even more sent me a signal, I need to step back from this. At the same time, I became a mom. I needed money. I got a job in the magazine business. I just thought, let me set it aside for a while. Then in those twenty years, it was not that I wasn't writing. I did go back to writing. Among other things, I was working on this concept of the older self/younger self novel. I was doing it slowly as a full-time working mom and kind of feeling like I love writing, but maybe I'm just not thinking about publishing at this point. That's where I was for a long time. Then I slowly made my way back to publishing when I knew I was ready. This time out has been really different.

Zibby: I bet. It seems like things are going well.

Debra: Things are going well. That novel that I was rejected all those years ago, I took out of the drawer. I put a lot more work into it and sent it out and got an agent. Then it was sold within two days of going out on the market. That was just so far beyond my expectations. That became my first novel, The Captives. Then the second one, I brought this other novel, what has become You Again.

Zibby: For The Captives, you taught writing to prisoners, men's prisons, and got to know them and channeled that into your first book, and then now switching gears to a New York-based harried mother for the characters here. [laughs]

Debra: Exactly. One of the things I was doing in all those years was teaching writing in incarceration settings of various kinds to both women and men and became very interested in those lives. The Captives is about a prison psychologist. He's about in his thirties. One day a new client comes in, and it's the girl he went to high school with who he had a huge crush on from afar the whole time. She's incarcerated. It's about what happened between the two of them. It's funny, both of these books have these intense duos who go back in time and who are now coming back into each other's lives. I seem to be really drawn to that dynamic.

Zibby: Is there a point in your life that you wish you could go back to and change? Aside from the being green and the publishing journey, is there more of a personal moment or something that you wish had gone differently or that you would love to go back and redo?

Debra: I would say about my publishing journey, now I feel like it could've have gone better than it has gone. We come to things, ideally, when we're ready. I was not ready that time. This time, I am. I'll also say as a writer at this point in my life, I have so much material to work with. When I was in my twenties, you're sort of scraping the barrel a little bit. I feel like I have this deep well. I really wouldn't change that piece of it. What I would do is go back to that ambitious young writer and really tell her, you know what, it's going to be okay. The disappointments that feel hard right now, it all smooths out with time. I always used to be skeptical about how you get better with age, but I really do feel like life does get better when you have a little bit more perspective for the ups and downs. I think I had very, very little perspective then. I would love to be able to share that with my younger self just to say, take a deep breath. You can't believe it now, but this is not that big a deal.

Zibby: That is good advice in general. The one scene in your book that I felt like I related to the most is when the main character is going to Dr. Singh with all these complainants like fainting, headaches, vomiting, dizziness, aching. He kind of dismisses her and says, "Are you under stress?" Then he says, "All the mommies are under lots of stress," and is like, "Go about your business." I feel like you hear things like this often. You present with some complainants, and everyone's like, no, it's stress, it's this. Then you find out that it ends up being all these other things. In your book, it was a very complicated unraveling of a lot of different factors that I won't go into so as not to reveal anything. I felt like that was such a classic moment that I'm sure other people have experienced as well.

Debra: He says to her, "All the mommies have so much stress." Then he tells her to go get a massage at the shiatsu place down the block. He thinks that might do the trick. Of course, it doesn't. She goes down the block, though. She takes his advice. Of course, what stressed-out working mom doesn't like the idea of having an excuse to treat yourself to a massage? She does go there. While she's in the waiting room waiting to go in, she sees her son outside -- she has a sixteen-year-old -- in a street protest. She never ends up getting that massage. She has to go out there and mix in a little bit. I won't say more than that. In some ways, that might alleviate her stress a little bit more, getting out into the street with the angry protestors for a moment there.

Zibby: By the way, I was reading it and I was like, wow, this is so timely. The antifa movement and everything that's going on in Seattle right now, I'm sure I'm just totally naïve and in my own little bubble, but I had not even heard of that particular movement before it's been plastered all over the news. Then it's all over your book. This is so of the moment, the protesting, all of it. It was like you had a little bit of ESP or something of what was to come.

Debra: I'm quite amazed by that too. I was aware of them, mostly because when I was in my twenties to early thirties -- my husband is a journalist. We lived in Berlin for a few years. The antifa had been there in Europe really since the 1920s in various forms. There have been lots of these, what we now see as antifa, these black-clad young people, very far left. That's been all over Berlin for many, many years. They always grabbed my attention and fascinated me. They were so wild and kind of intimidating looking. Also, often you'd see them, it looked like they were having fun. As a twentysomething of a very different variety, I was just like, well, look at those people. I just always noticed them and remembered them. Then around Trump's inauguration, that was really where I saw them here for the first time. I don't know if you remember. They turned up on inauguration day in Washington in a small way. I thought, oh, look, it's the American antifa. I always wondered if that would ever take hold there. As I was starting to work on You Again, I knew that my sixteen-year-old character was going to get into trouble of some kind of and pushing the boundaries and pushing the envelope. I thought, given everything that's going on in the country and the crazy atmosphere of the last few years, I just had a sense that that might be a coming thing and a bigger factor as time goes on. We are really polarized. The extremes are very activated at the moment. That's where my sixteen-year-old ends up. Actually, my fortysomething ends up delving into it, I'll say, really brought in by her son and trying to figure out what it is and what it means and how it even reflects on her own life, but without endorsing it in any way. I would say personally I'm fascinated by them, but in a neutral way. [laughs]

Zibby: Got it. You just mentioned your husband a little bit. I wanted to bring up your Modern Love piece from early May this year, which was fantastic, about needing the space to breathe in your marriage and how Burning Man became a piece of that. The last line of that, "It takes fresh air to feed a fire," just gave me goosebumps. It was so good. Tell me about selling that to Modern Love and also what it felt like to be needing that kind of recharging and how Burning Man fit into everything.

Debra: There's some common themes there in You Again and my Modern Love piece, which shows you how personal this book really is. It is kind of my statement of being a woman in a very long marriage and having really worked hard raising a kid, paying the bills, all of those things that we have to do. Yet somewhere in there is still that teenage girl yearning to break free. I think that's what Abigail goes through. That's because that's what I have experienced in the last few years too. Yet I am crazy about my husband. He is wonderful in every way. We have such a deep, long connection at this point that I knew that I didn't want to walk away from it if I could in any way help it. The Burning Man piece is really like, what can we do to get some of that freedom into our tight bond without breaking that bond? The Burning Man adventure was one way that we decided to try to do that, something that I was really reluctant to do. He was curious about it for years. When I came into this point of my life of feeling like I needed freedom, I thought, this is something I can do for him and it might help us. It did. It was amazing. I wouldn't say it was like, and then everything was completely different. As you well know, marriage and having a family is an ongoing project. It's always changing and moving and evolving. That was kind of a crisis moment that I wrote about that we got through by just having a great adventure together and something really out of our comfort zone. It was fun. It was really fun, I have to say. I don't know if we'll go back. We might. We're not hardcore Burning Man people. What we found out is doing something really out there is good for us.

Zibby: It's probably good for everyone. Now doing something out there would just mean leaving my house. [laughs] Burning Man could probably really shake things up.

Debra: That is true. Going to the grocery story these days feels like pushing the envelope. It's amazing how two years feels like an eon ago.

Zibby: I got my hair done for the first time in four months.

Debra: You got your hair cut?

Zibby: Yes. Going into a salon felt like, oh, my gosh, this is a whole new world, all these people and smells and sounds. [laughs]

Debra: You're making me a little jealous, I have to say.

Zibby: It was pretty awesome. It was pretty much the most awesome three hours I've spent for not too much of a change, but it's okay. It was just nice to get a little trim and all the rest. All to say that our standards and what constitutes really exciting things, out of the ordinary, can shift very quickly.

Debra: Absolutely. I would just add for all you long-married folk out there, Burning Man is not necessary, but maybe thinking about how to add fresh air, I think it's a really good question to address together. I guess maybe what really came out of that whole experience was the honesty of our conversations. I think that's really what changed. It was even just hard to address that this was an issue, that we had to really look and work at our relationship which really had been very easy for many years. Even that is a great step to take every so often.

Zibby: It's really great you shared it because I feel like marriage is one of those things that people only discuss on the surface sometimes. When you actually open up and talk about the real stuff, all it does is help other people through whatever they're going through. Thanks for doing that. Tell me a little more about your writing process. When you were writing You Again, how long did it take to write? Where do you like to write? Do you sit right where you are now? We're on Skype. I'm looking at you on this cozy little couch and beautiful light streaming in.

Debra: I actually sit on the other side of the room here right in the center of my house. One thing I've discovered about myself over the years is putting my writing space really sequestered somewhere in a corner of the house makes me not go there. I finally set up my office and my desk right in the center of the house. I have one child. He's been in college. Of course, now he's home. That's a fantastic bonus of what's been a really hard and awful time. I never thought we'd have him home for, I think it's been going on four months now. He's around. That's fantastic. I really do write in the midst of my family. I try to at least touch my work every day. I will say, I do believe in intermittent persistence, and especially for women who are trying to write and juggle many other things. I would say I've gotten two novels out there and a collection of short stories and a bunch of other essays and things writing persistently but with breaks. It's okay. I think sometimes there's a machismo in the writing world about, you must write every day. You must do so many words every day. When I'm able to do that and my life allows, I do that. There are other times when I have walked away when I need to. I go back, and it's still there. I just like to put that message out for women who are trying to write. I think intermittent persistence is a good strategy if you can't make it every day.

Zibby: I like that. It takes a little of the pressure off. Do you have other advice to aspiring authors?

Debra: I would just say you need to find your core stories. You Again, coming out of this moment in my life, it just felt like a very urgent question to answer, how to make it in a long marriage, how to grapple with unfulfilled ambitions or sidelined ambitions. I think you can't shy away from going there, to those hard, core, deep issues. That's the well. It doesn't mean you have to write openly and blatantly about them. I sometimes think of it as method acting, like when the director needs a child actor to cry and he goes up and whispers in his ear, remember when your dog died? That's what you want to be thinking about. The scene may concern something completely differently. I think you need to tap into those emotions. Then write a spy thriller if that's what you want to write, but try to locate it in your core. That works very well for me.

Zibby: That's so great. Just going back to structure for two seconds because so much in this book -- I loved, at one point, there was somebody who was like, let's go over all the facts right now. You outlined them all step by step. Here's what we know. There were so many different pieces. It was a kaleidoscope of what's true and what's not true and who believes what and which transcript and whatever. How did you assemble that? How did you do it? Tell me how you made that work. I'm very impressed.

Debra: When I began the book, I really just had that vision that I talked about before with me and the stroller and the girl coming out of my old apartment building. I had no idea what the explanation for this could be, how this woman could be seeing herself. I just wrote with a fair amount of fear and trepidation. How am I going to explain this? One thing I knew for sure was I didn't want it to be like, she woke up and it was all a dream. I really said to myself, if you're going to tackle a woman haunted by her younger self, you must have some plausible explanations for why it happens. Yet you must maintain mystery and depth, not overexplaining. That was scary as I got further and further in and was really committing to the story not knowing exactly how to do it. What I've found is -- I'm sure you've heard authors say this before. Your subconscious is smarter than you are.

Slowly, explanations started to emerge as I brought in other characters, as I brought in Abigail's history and the whole backstory and what's happening with her younger self. The explanations were sort of embedded in the facts of her life. We discover that the things that happen to the twentysomething lay the groundwork for this haunting. That's about as much as I can say without really giving too much away. It was embedded in there for me, but I had to get about two-thirds into the first draft before that started to take shape. Then all those other pieces that you're talking about, the mosaic of explanations and facts and twists, that comes in revision when you really see, okay, I need to account for that plot strand. Again, I would look at the groundwork I'd set with Abigail's story. There were things that I could draw out, possible explanations, possible factors, and weave them in. It's a mysterious process. You really do need to trust yourself when you're writing a novel. If you do that enough, I don't know, there's some magic to it. It comes together.

Zibby: That's really exciting.

Debra: I take a lot of notes too. I ask myself questions. I have a notebook for each novel, and ask myself questions, sleep on it. Again, I think it kind of comes out of the subconscious if you allow it.

Zibby: I can't wait to hear what comes out of your subconscious next. Are you working on another book? What are your plans after you celebrate the book review?

Debra: I am hard at work on novel three. One of the lessons I learned from my earlier publishing rough seas was that, just be working on new things and really going to that beautiful, magical, imaginary place. That's why we do it, to be able to spend time creating and living in our imagination and trying to make dreamworlds that will please our readers. That's the fun part. I really learned, publishing, the best antidote or counterbalance is writing. I've been writing a lot the last few months as I get ready for You Again to come out. It is set partly in Berlin drawing from those years in the nineties when I lived there, which was a really exciting time, and partly in this small college town, which is where I live now in Massachusetts. There's a mother and a daughter in it. It is sort of an older and a younger again, and a past story and a present story. I'm really starting to see my patterns. That's okay. William Faulkner wrote variations on very similar stories. He won the Noble Prize, so I guess that's okay.

Zibby: What's that expression? If it's not broken, don't fix it. Just keep at it. It seems to be working.

Debra: The subconscious, that must be what its shape is for me. Go with it.

Zibby: Go with it. Love it. Thank you so much. Thanks for coming on "Moms Don't Have Time to Read Books." Thanks for your Modern Love inspirational piece and this beautiful dreamlike state of novel. Thank you.

Debra: Thank you, Zibby. I just want to say, huge thank you to you for all you're doing for writers and readers during this time, and before that also, but especially now. It's just fantastic. Thank you. I can say on behalf of everyone who's trying to write, we thank you.

Zibby: Aw, that's so nice of you. It's my pleasure. I love it. Thanks. Have a great day. Thanks. Bye, Debra.

Thanks for listening to this episode from Thriller Thursday, part of my July Book Blast to get great authors into your hands while the summer is still going on. I hope you enjoyed this episode.