Zibby is joined by Jane Pek to talk about her debut novel, The Verifiers. Jane shares her whirlwind success story, from how she pushed herself to get an MFA to landing an agent, a book deal, and a New York Times book review. Zibby and Jane also discuss how Jane's career as a lawyer and early love for mystery books both found their way into this novel, why she felt the world of online dating was ripe for a murder story, and what other kinds of projects she's looking to try her hand at.
Transcript:
Zibby Owens: Welcome, Jane. Thank you so much for coming on "Moms Don't Have Time to Read Books" to discuss The Verifiers: A Novel.
Jane Pek: Thank you for having me. It's great to be here.
Zibby: Thanks for joining me. As I mentioned, your agent has the best taste in books ever, Julie Barer at The Book Group. How did you connect with her, by the way?
Jane: It's funny because I actually did it the really old-school way, which is that I just submitted through the slush. I had zero connections to Julie. I was like, she's not even going to open my email. Then she did. I sent it in late one night. She wrote back the next morning. She was like, "I really like your pages. Can you send me the whole thing?" Then she read it in two days. Then she was like, "I would love to represent you." My head exploded at that point. That whole four days is just seared in my memory as that first time when someone who you really respect and is really up there in the publishing industry was like, I think this could go somewhere. It was a huge boost and validation. Sometimes the slush pile does work.
Zibby: That is so cool. Wait, so what was your life like before? Set the scene for where you were when you pressed send on the email to her to begin with. How long had you been working on this book, The Verifiers? How long had you been writing? Where were you living at the time? Set the whole scene for me.
Jane: A bit of background is that I'm actually a lawyer. I went to law school. I worked as a mergers and acquisitions lawyer at a big New York law firm for several years. Then I've always wanted to write. I'd always been trying to write on the side, but it was hard because I didn't really have a community. I had no sense of whether or not anything I was writing was good, if it would ever go anywhere. As I'm sure you know, writing is a very solitary process. There's a lot of self-doubt involved. That was totally happening to me. I took a bit of a break from the law. I got an MFA at Brooklyn College. Around that time, I got that first idea for this novel. I started working on it right before I started the MFA, during my time at the MFA while also working on short stories. Then after I graduated from the MFA, I went back to law because I started worrying about the flip side, which is financial security. I just ran right into the arms of the law. I'm now working as an in-house counsel at an investment company.
That was where I was. I had an MFA under my belt. I had a bunch of good writing friends. We did a writing group for a while. I had been working on this novel for, by that point, several years. It actually took quite a few iterations because as a person trying for the first time to write a novel, I had issues with plotting. I had issues with stakes, with pacing, and just figuring things out, like who my protagonist was. That took me a long time. At the time that I sent it off to Julie, it was actually nine months after the first time that I had started querying agents. Then I realized that I just needed to rewrite the whole thing. Then I pulled that process. Then I spent the next nine months rewriting it. Then I went out again. This time, I got really, really lucky because Julie was one of the first few agents I contacted. Then of course, when she said she wanted to represent me, I was like, okay, done.
Zibby: Did you then edit the manuscript again before she sent it out, or did she send it right out to publishers?
Jane: We spent the summer editing it. After that, then we went out. We went out to publishers with it.
Zibby: Then what happened? I'm loving your princess success story here, being plucked from obscurity.
Jane: It was actually quite a few ups and downs. I had probably never seriously imagined that I would end up with Julie Barer as my agent. Then we went out. At the time, the way that the manuscript was, I think a lot of editors actually felt like it needed to be more finished. It kind of ended on too much of a cliffhanger. I'm not sure if you've had the chance to read it. It does still end on a cliffhanger, but it was much more cliffhanger-y originally. Everyone was like, hmm. Then again, I think we really lucked out in that there was an editor at Vintage Knopf, Anna Kaufman, who is now my editor and is absolutely wonderful as well, and she just loved the book. She loved the characters. She loved the story. She loved everything about it. She actually worked with me to edit the manuscript before she officially bought it. That's how I ended up eventually selling the book. It's been great. I think both Julie and Anna were just willing to take that chance on me. I am very grateful.
Zibby: Now not only do you have your book, but you also got reviewed in The New York Times. Oh, my gosh. You have a hard copy, right? Do you need another few or anything?
Jane: I do. I ran out to get it.
Zibby: Oh, good. Wow. What did that feel like after all this time and effort and whatever? Now look at this. This is like hitting the literary jackpot.
Jane: I know. It's pretty amazing. It's also funny because I feel like my friends who do know that I've written a book, then they’ll be like, oh, my gosh, I just saw it in The New York Times. It is pretty incredible. I do have an MFA. At this point, I do know some few people in publishing and everything, but I'm not part of that industry. I'm kind of coming at it from the outside. A lot of it is very new and exciting. Oh, this is how this is done. This is how that happens. Definitely, getting The New York Times review, I was kind of surprised that it happened in the end. I was just super excited when it came out.
Zibby: I feel like everybody is coming in new to the publishing industry because new books are coming out all the time. I feel like it's one of the most fluid places. New books come in. New authors come in. I remember when I was growing up and I was debating where to live after college or something like that. My mother was like, "You know, a good place to live is always Washington, DC, because you know that people are always coming and going. It's not too entrenched. You can always come in and out." I feel like it's almost the same with publishing. Let's talk about your book more because I'm a little nervous about veracity as a concept. Tell listeners what your book is about, how you came up with all of this stuff, and if you yourself have a mystery-writer alter ego, love, passion for reading mysteries yourself, how this whole piece of it came about.
Jane: The Verifiers is, on one level, a modern mystery that takes a twenty-first-century lens in terms of looking at how we use technology today in our personal and social lives and how that affects the choices that we make and how we life our lives. I do this through, specifically, online dating. Our protagonist, Claudia, who is a young, gay, Asian American who isn't out to her mother but otherwise comfortable with her sexuality, lucks into a job as a detective at an online dating detective agency where her job is to figure out if the people who her clients meet online who have all these great photos and these wonderful hobbies and work at some prestigious job, if they are really who they say they are. It's a bit whimsical because it's a bit of a take on the classic detective agency stories. I also wanted to play around with the tropes of the genre. I think this comes out a bit because Claudia herself is a big murder mystery fan. She's always referencing this fictional detective series that she loves in terms of trying to solve her own mysteries. Eventually, we find out that a client ends up dead. Claudia decides to go investigate on her own because she's like, I know how to investigate these things. I read lots of murder mysteries. Then she stumbles into a bigger conspiracy that raises questions around how we as a society use technology and how they might shape our choices. At the same time, there's also an Asian American immigrant family story in there because Claudia's at once close and also conflicted with her family. She has two older siblings and a mother who has certain expectations of all of them. They have a complicated history in terms of how they came to the US and the different dynamics between the four of them. The story is as much an exploration of this one specific family and how they deal with their problems and their choices as much as it is an exploration of how we use technology today and how we meet and relate to people in today's digital world.
Zibby: It's also about how to keep your dry cleaning business [indiscernible/laughter]. One way that she figures out some important clues are just going to all the dry cleaners near where the target lives. I was thinking to myself, oh, my gosh, would my dry cleaner give up all my information just like that, printing out receipts for anybody who asked? Then it's so smart too. I need to put up some guardrails, I think, [indiscernible/laughter]. How did you think about some of the little details you put in? How did you come up with that? Is it from books you've read or shows or just your crazy imagination?
Jane: The dry cleaning thing, it had just been my own imagination. I had probably just gone to a dry cleaner at some point and saw the receipt that they printed out and saw how it had my name on it. I would say it's a mix. A lot of the little things that Claudia does is because at some point I realized that we do actually trust other people a lot, which is a good thing. In today's world, we have gotten very used to putting out large amounts of information about ourselves out there in various forums. I do think it's easy, at the margins, to get information in that way because there's just so much of that out there. On a murder mystery setup and structure level, I did grow up reading a lot of the classic murder mysteries, which I reference shamelessly in the book as well, like Sherlock Holmes and Agatha Christie. Agatha Christie and Poirot was probably my biggest influence. When I got a bit older, I did also read some other series. I always loved genre. Although, to be honest, mystery's actually not my first love. That would be fantasy and science fiction.
At a certain point, The Verifiers had maybe been a bit more futuristic than it ended up. Then just because of when I was writing the book through the 2010s -- technology was developing so quickly. Now we have all these deep fakes and all the things around how we might have been influenced in terms of elections. I realized that this is actually happening. Also, in my job as a lawyer, I do look at those legal and regulatory implications of data collection and analysis and consumer protection laws and all that. I also put some of that into the novel because on various levels, it is happening. We are relying a lot on the technologies that we use, which is also definitely a good thing. For instance, it allows you and me to talk today pretty seamlessly. Then it's something that we have come to take for granted. I wanted to pull back the curtain a bit and ask, is this something that we're comfortable with? How should we think about this going forward? As these technologies actually get better at predicting our behaviors, is this a good thing? Is it something we need to think about? I don't really want to have any answers and say this is good or this is bad or right or wrong. I just wanted to raise these questions out there because these are things that I've been thinking about for myself as well.
Zibby: Is there anything you would do differently to protect yourself? What should I do that I'm not doing now?
Jane: One thing that I think I try not to do is to link all of my accounts. They always say you can sign in with Google or you can sign in with Facebook. I kind of don't do that. The other thing is I'm actually not terribly on social media. I did basically get on it because of the book promotion. I was like, oh, this is important. Otherwise, it's just thinking about what I would share online and what other forum it could potentially end up in. I will say, on another note, I'm also not saying that online dating is bad or anything. I actually did do online dating several years ago. That was also what was the idea for the original premise of it, which was that I was meeting a lot of people -- I actually had a very positive experience. I met smart, interesting people who I wouldn't have met otherwise being an overworked lawyer with no social life. Instead, I was meeting artists and architects and people in theater and just people who were out there in New York who I might walk by on the street but never otherwise get to know. Even when we didn't have a romantic connection, I always enjoyed the conversations and just finding out more about these people.
Then there's always that background question. How much of this is true? I think that question actually operates on two levels. Are they consciously lying to you? Then the other thing is, in online dating and also in today's world where so much of how we present ourselves is through profiles that we put together, the question becomes, how well do you know yourself? You might say that you're looking for something, but are you really looking for something, or do you just feel like you should look for that thing, and so you say that you do? That was how I came up with that idea. What if there was this online dating detective agency and they were looking into whether people were lying or not? Then that second layer of it is whether these tech companies themselves are able to figure out what we want better than what we think we want. Then what happens?
Zibby: Terrifying.
Jane: Yeah. [laughs] Hopefully, we're not there yet.
Zibby: A friend of mine was just telling me that when she was on the dating apps, she just didn't feel like she did a good enough job, so she hired someone who did it for her. She hired someone to flirt for her, to put the right pictures. She did a photoshoot. It's a business. Did you know that? I did not know that.
Jane: I think I had known that there were people who could coach you to maximize your online dating. I don't know if I knew specifically that you could hire -- but that's a really good idea. If I ever do a sequel, that might make it.
Zibby: There you go. I'll put you in touch with this friend of mine. It turns out she met someone on the one profile that she was doing herself.
Jane: That's so interesting.
Zibby: Which makes me believe in fate, authenticity, all the good things.
Jane: That's a really interesting story.
Zibby: Aside from taking my idea for your second book, what else is coming? What else is in your future? What are you working on? You must be inundated with the book promotion and the job and all the rest. What are you writing?
Jane: The book promotion has been -- the last couple of months have been pretty busy, but I think it's starting to die down a bit now, which is also nice. In terms of things that I'm working on, I do have ideas for more Verifiers books. There are directions in which I would like the stories to go. For instance, if there were to be a second book -- I feel like the first book played on tropes of the murder mystery. It would be fun if the second book played on the tropes of the spy thriller, so more like John le Carré and making a bit of fun at James Bond, which I feel like is also easy to make fun of. Then otherwise, I had been working on -- it takes a long time for a book to come out. While this book was in the process of coming out, I had started working on a book that's more science fiction-y but that also looks into these questions of how technology figures into our lives and what it means to be human in an age of virtual reality and AI and everything. Then otherwise, I always have a short story going somewhere. I probably write one short story a year. I go back to that every now and then.
Zibby: Then in your spare time, you bike. I see all your biking equipment behind you.
Jane: Yeah. My protagonist is a serious biker around the city. One of the things I actually love most about New York is being able to cycle everywhere when the weather is cooperative, which is not super often. I feel like it's a great way to see the city. I always feel like I never feel so alive as when I'm cycling in New York traffic because anything can happen.
Zibby: Meanwhile, I'm in the car being like, what are these bikers doing? They have to be so careful. [laughs]
Jane: I know.
Zibby: You have to be so careful, oh, my gosh. I actually just read this other book this morning called Delphine Jones Takes a Chance. The mother was killed early on while riding a bike. Now I'm so worried for you by this fictious death. I have to get out of my novel world. Ridiculous. What advice would you have for aspiring authors?
Jane: A few things that have been really helpful for me, I think one is that you do have to put in the time at the end of the day. It's easy to think that, oh, I'm writing every day, but if you actually look at how much you're writing -- especially with a novel, it's such a big project. It can feel really daunting. If you do put in the time, you will eventually get to the end. It's another question of how much work you need to do to revise it, but you need that initial step. You just need to put in the time and accept that it's a marathon, not a sprint. It takes a long time. For some people, I think it takes less time. For me personally, it takes a lot of time. Something else is, and this is what I have also come to learn along the way, is to write something that you feel like only you could write. It doesn't mean that it has to be autobiographical or anything. It's just something, whether it's a perspective or an experience or a take, like the way that you view the world, that you feel like it's kind of unique to you. I feel like people will also respond to that. They will feel like, this is something special. This is something that I want to read. The third thing is, it's also helpful to have perspective. I think it's very easy to get sucked into just that literary world. Like you say, it's so fluid. There's always new people coming in and going out. Things are always happening. It can feel like all these things are happening, except happening for you. It's actually been helpful for me to have a job outside of writing because I can never freak out that much about my novel when I'm like, oh, my god, I have a meeting in two hours. I have to write this email. While I might sometimes feel like, I wish I had more time to write, I am also grateful for the fact that it does anchor you. You have your writing, but the world goes on outside of it. You do your best. At the end of the day, the world will still go on.
Zibby: True. Good point. I always have these ideas. I'm like, I should do this, but what I really want to do is this, but... I'm like, you know what? Just do the thing you really want to do, right?
Jane: Yes.
Zibby: It always turns out better than the thing you're doing for some other reason. Even if it's not the end result you want, it'll get you there in some other way. That's my incoherent piece of advice for the day myself.
Jane: I agree. Also, if you're doing what you really want, that's your motivation. It takes so long. You have to really want to do this or at some point, you'll kind of fall off.
Zibby: Amazing. Jane, it's so nice chatting with you. Thank you for coming on "Moms Don't Have Time to Read Books." Congratulations. I'm excited for more Verifiers or whatever you have up your sleeve, poking fun at every genre there is. I'll tune in for the romance fantasy.
Jane: That's a good one. Thank you so much for chatting with me this morning. I really appreciate you taking the time as well on your end.
Zibby: Maybe we'll meet while you're biking and I'm not. I'll pass you on the street. I'll be like, careful!
Jane: You'll be like, oh, my god, that crazy cyclist. [laughter]
Zibby: Take care, Jane.
Jane: I'll see you. Have a good morning.
Zibby: Best of luck. Buh-bye.
Jane: Bye.
