291. Encouraging Readers and Fostering Confidence: An Interview with Margaret H. Willison

[music]

Sarah Wendell: Hello, and happy Friday, and welcome to episode number 291 of Smart Podcast, Trashy Books. I’m Sarah Wendell from Smart Bitches, Trashy Books, and today I am talking to Margaret H. Willison. We are going to talk about librarian-ing – which is totally a word – the internet, and honoring and making public the very hard work that you do. If the name sounds familiar, Margaret H. Willison is, per her bio, one of the Two Bossy Dames newsletter, a podcaster at Appointment Television, and the frequent fourth chair on NPR’s Pop Culture Happy Hour, so you may recognize her name from one of those places.

We talk about a lot of different things, and I want to start with a content or trigger warning that we do have a discussion about workplace sexual harassment, and especially in public-facing jobs such as in the library.

We talk about confidence, intelligence, and choosing the right handle on AOL Instant Messenger and Twitter. We discuss the separation of professional job life and online life and also the overlap of being a librarian in both spaces in somewhat different ways. We also cover the fine line between emotional labor and informational labor, the degree of professional training that librarians receive in both, the process of facing sexual harassment at the service desk as a librarian or in any service industry job, and also the challenge of recognizing your own history with harassment. We also talk about what it’s like to do readers’ advisory and why she thinks that YA isn’t its own genre, a really interesting perspective that I hadn’t heard before, and I’ll be interested in hearing what you think. You also get to hear my theory on parenting and entrepreneurship books and Margaret’s work and advice for crowdfunding and “making public the hard work that you do.” That’s something I still struggle with, and I almost made that the title of this episode, in fact.

I want to send a very special thank-you to Jen, who is a podcast listener who wrote in with some questions about librarianship and the process and training of readers’ advisory. Thank you, Jen, for helping me add to this interview. We had a really good conversation because of Jen’s questions about developing recommendations that not just help people find a book to read, but help people identify themselves as people who enjoy reading, which is a much larger concept that I hadn’t thought of before.

If you have ideas or questions or suggestions or responses to this episode, or you want to argue with me about something, I love this plan; you should totally do that. Or maybe, like Jen, you want to ask me questions to ask other people? Also a good use of your time. You can email me at [email protected], or you can find me on Twitter @SmartBitches. You could also record a voice memo and email it to me, which is really cool, because a couple of you have done that for an upcoming episode, and you’re going to sound great.

Now, this podcast is sponsored by Fearless in Texas by Kari Lynn Dell. RT Book Reviews raves, “There is such a raw vulnerability in these characters that readers will be hard pressed not to scream, cry and cheer right along with them.” They add, “Fearless in Texas will leave you feeling worthy of attaining your own happy ending.” When Melanie Brookman realizes her misogynistic toad of a boss has been deceiving her in the worst possible way, she tosses a bomb into the good old boys’ club on the way out the door, and it’s too bad that her marketing career blew up with it. Rodeo bullfighter Wyatt Darrington’s got it all: perfect car, perfect job, perfect smile, and the perfect lie. He’ll always be an outsider to someone like Melanie, who’s got arena dust sprinkled on her DNA. Unfortunately, he’s also been in love with her for years. But when her life comes crashing down, he can’t resist offering her an escape route: saving the run-down bar he bought in his last fit of gallantry. Something is bound to go up in flames when they’re thrown together; Wyatt is hoping that it’s not his heart. Publisher’s Weekly’s starred review says that Dell’s latest is not to be missed, and New York Times bestselling author B. J. Daniels advises, “Cinch ‘em down; Dell takes you on a wild, fun ride!” Preorder your copy of Fearless in Texas wherever books are sold, or you can find out more at karilynndell – that’s K-A-R-I-L-Y-N-N-D-E-L-L – at dot com [karilyndell.com]. I almost gave an email address, but that’s not what this is. You can also go to smartbitchestrashybooks.com/podcast and check the show notes for all of the options to preorder or to find out more about this book. Thank you to the author, Kari Lynn Dell, for sponsoring this episode!

Every episode also gets a transcript, as you know, and this week’s transcript is sponsored by A Duke in the Night by Kelly Bowen. If you like Sarah MacLean and Tessa Dare, you will love this Regency romance. August Faulkner has returned with his eye on expanding his business empire. He’s a duke, he is a scoundrel, he is a titan of business, and he wears his roguish reputation as a badge of honor. Clara Hayward is the respected headmistress, and she is above reproach. Except that ten years ago, she shared a scandalous waltz with August and, despite herself, has never forgotten the feeling of being in his arms. Can these opposites find a second chance at romance? RT Book Reviews raves, “What a way to start the Devils of Dover series!” A Duke in the Night by Kelly Bowen is on sale now wherever books are sold. You can find out more at kellybowen.net or forever-romance.com.

Now, I have compliments. Yes, this is the best part!

To Holly: You are better than breakfast pastry, perfect buttercream roses, dark chocolate, and watching loops of people decorating cakes online – which is something I love, by the way.

And to Meka: There is a surprisingly difficult victory dance performed among the garden gnome community, and it was choreographed in your honor, because you’re that rad.

Now, if you would like a compliment or you would like to support the show, we have a podcast Patreon, and your support makes an enormous difference to me. Have a look at patreon.com/SmartBitches. When you make a monthly pledge, you are helping me; you are helping me keep the show going, and you’re helping me commission transcripts for older episodes.

I want to thank some of the Patreon folks personally, so to Virginia, Kristen, Michele, Shannon, Alexandra, and Ms. Bev, thank you for being part of the Patreon community and helping the show keep going into the future.

Are there other ways to support the podcast? Absolutely! First of all, if my voice is currently entering your eardrums, you are awesome, thank you! You can leave a review wherever you listen, which helps people find us. You can tell a friend; you can subscribe; whatever works. Thank you for hanging out with me each week.

And if you’re looking for more romance podcasts to listen to, go to RomancePodcasts.com, and you will come up with a list that I created at Smart Bitches of all of the romance podcasts I could find, and then there’s more to be added. So if you are looking for more romance podcasts to put into your eardrums, we can help you with that.

Don’t forget, at the end of the show, I have a terrible joke, I have news about what’s coming up on Smart Bitches, and lots of other stuff!

But now, let’s get started. On with the podcast.

[music]

Margaret H. Willison: Well, hi, listeners. My name is Margaret H. Willison, and let me see, it’s been a while since I’ve had to introduce myself on Pop Culture Happy Hour, but I had a set phrase. I’m a regular fourth chair on NPR’s Pop Culture Happy Hour. I am one third of the Appointment Television podcast. I am one half of the Two Bossy Dames newsletter/miniature media empire –

Sarah: [Laughs]

Margaret: – and for love and money, I’m also a librarian, and for love alone, I host what some – i.e. me – have called the best twenty-four-hour slumber party on Twitter @MrsFridayNext.

Sarah: Friday Next is a, MrsFridayNext, by the way, is an excellent Twitter handle.

Margaret: I really think that an enormous amount of my success can be chalked up to picking that Twitter handle, both ‘cause it’s got the good sound to it, even if you have no idea what I’m making reference to, and then, I think if you know that I’m making reference to Jasper Fforde’s Thursday Next novels about a literary detective who, for example, goes into the text of Jane Eyre to save Jane Eyre, you know, you’re coming correct to my Twitter feed. [Laughs]

Sarah: You already know a lot.

Margaret: Like, you, you know what you’re getting.

[Laughter]

Sarah: Yes, you, you are fully informed of what will be served at this location.

Margaret: Yeah! Jasper Fforde, thank you so much for establishing a cultural reference point that would really give strangers a very good idea of what they were getting themselves into in talking to me.

Sarah: [Laughs] Did you agonize over picking that name? Was that something like, okay, I have to really think about this, or were you like, nope, that’s it?

Margaret: I pretty much knew that was it. I think it was last an Instant Messenger name that I was using regularly –

Sarah: Ohhh.

Margaret: – and it had already been sort of like my go-to name on whatever platform I was using, so as soon as it was available on Twitter I was like, oh yeah, this is perfect! And –

Sarah: Obviously.

Margaret: – I’ve always liked it both for the reference and because it has an implication of procrastination, which is maybe my greatest skill.

[Laughter]

Margaret: Like, I’m going to do that next Friday!

[Laughter]

Sarah: And it’s, you know, I learned an important thing about procrastination, actually, ‘cause I’m pretty – I never know what day or time it is, and I’m –

Margaret: [Laughs]

Sarah: – very loosely connected to this earthbound concept of, of time and, and, like, what time or day or year it is. Like, I have to remind myself constantly, so whenever I’ve had a due date, I’ve been like, oh, I’m going to forget what day it is, and I’m going to be late, so I might as well just do this now, so I constantly do things early, and someone pointed out, Sarah, if you procrastinate a little bit, like, maybe forty percent of the things that you do, you end up not having to do.

Margaret: [Laughs]

Sarah: And the likelihood of stuff getting canceled the older you get is higher and higher, and I was like, oh, you’re right!

[Laughter]

Sarah: So with Mrs. Friday Next, have you read Friday Next fanfic? Is this, like, a whole area that you’ve explored? Or wait, did you write some? Please tell me you wrote some.

Margaret: No! I think that, this is a thing that I’ve talked about with my best friend, who I’ve been best friends with since our sophomore year of high school, is that our high school was extremely academically rigorous, to such a degree that I really did not know I was smart until I got to college.

Sarah: [Laughs]

Margaret: ‘Cause it’s just, it’s an, it’s a public school, but you had to take a qualifying exam to be admitted, so it’s basically just, like, all the most statistically apt children in the Boston public school system between the ages of twelve and eighteen end up at this one school, and it’s just an incredible mask for natural intelligence, and I have a great deal of natural intelligence, but I have next to no work ethic. So –

[Laughter]

Margaret: – if you put me in that environment, I become convinced – is this a podcast on which I can swear?

Sarah: Oh, very, very much so.

Margaret: Great. I become convinced I’m a complete fuckup.

[Laughter]

Margaret: But we had so many extracurriculars and so much homework that neither of us really got into writing fanfic at, like, peak fanfic time. Like, we were juniors in high school, I think, between, and what everybody calls, like, the long winter or something between books four and five of Harry Potter –

Sarah: [Laughs]

Margaret: – where the fic scene just blew up, I think if we had been at the kind of schools we were supposed to be at, Carrie and I would have both been coasting our way to straight As and staying up until four in the morning to write, like, truly epic fanfics, but because we were at Latin School and we had to scramble to, like, maintain a C average, we –

Sarah: [Laughs] There was no brain power left over.

Margaret: Yeah! So we just never built that muscle, so I’m just one of the great undiscovered fanfic writers of our time. But the name is certainly a suggestion that I personally think that there should be a series of Friday Next books, and that I should be his wife in those books.

Sarah: I think that’s fair.

Margaret: Just ‘cause I think Jasper Fforde would do a good job writing me.

Sarah: Oh, he absolutely would. It’s a very entirely reasonable expectation at this point.

Margaret: Thank you, thank you! I’m so glad to have that wild thought validated.

[Laughter]

Sarah: Well, I am really excited that you agreed to be on the podcast. I have a whole bunch of things I want to ask you about.

Margaret: Awesome.

Sarah: The first, the first being, you are a librarian. Do you talk at all about where you work and what you do as a librarian?

Margaret: I talk very little about it because it has very little to do with what I pursue online.

Sarah: Right.

Margaret: I work in the libraries at MIT, and my primary responsibility is putting together the materials that are going to be needed for professors in their courses each semester, and specifically getting the electronic copies and making sure that all of the things that the library has posted electronically correspond with our current legal understanding of fair use copyright in academic spheres.

Sarah: A piece of cake, basically.

Margaret: Ah, you know, you memorize the, like, four guidelines, and you get really good at explaining to, mm, disgruntled people –

Sarah: [Laughs]

Margaret: – that, like, you don’t actually control these guidelines?

Sarah: Yeah.

Margaret: Currently the US Supreme Court does?

Sarah: Yeah, and it’s not like they’re going to take your call and be like, oh yeah, sure, we’ll change that.

Margaret: Right. And it’s not, it’s not that I don’t understand their exasperation. I don’t know why it’s, the rules are very arbitrary. It’s like ten percent of a book if it has fewer than ten chapters, or one chapter if it has more than ten chapters. We’ve decided that that is enough that we’re not posting the heart of the work, quote-unquote, but, like, that is an astoundingly arbitrary judgment that makes more sense for some types of books than for other types of books, and I can’t argue with professors who point that out. Like, they are right. I just have to say, yes, I know it is arbitrary – [laughs] –

Sarah: Yep.

Margaret: – but we don’t want to get sued, so it’s what we have to do.

Sarah: I mean, there are a lot of things that, that people do or don’t do because “we don’t want to get sued” is a perfectly valid reason.

Margaret: [Laughs] Yeah, it is an unfortunate reality of a lot of jobs, but as you can see, it isn’t necessarily something that lines up that closely with most of my cultural interests in librarianship, although it certainly does share a lot of the same service elements that any library staff person would be engaging with, ‘cause I, you know, sit at a public information desk and answer people’s questions and so and so forth. But I’m lucky that my work is not particularly pertinent to my online brand, because it has saved me from tweeting inappropriate things about my job and getting fired –

Sarah: [Laughs]

Margaret: – which is also a thing, you know, I’ve got to keep my eye on. [Laughs]

Sarah: Right, of course.

Margaret: If something is in bounds, my idea of what aspects of it are appropriate to address are broad?

Sarah: Mm-hmm?

Margaret: So – [laughs] – I feel like it’s sort of for the best that I’ve always considered my nine-to-five job to be mostly not pertinent to the interests of the many strangers who follow me on the internet.

Sarah: Right, obviously. Did you always want to be a librarian? Did you sort of know that was what, the field you wanted to enter?

Margaret: Pretty much, yes. Always is putting it a little bit strongly. I started working as a library page when I was sixteen at my local public library, and I loved it, and honestly, if I could be a librarian at that branch, like, that would be – the children’s librarian at that branch, like, that’s, that’s my dream job. I’m a little bit remote from that job at this point in time for the reasons that everyone gets remote from their dream jobs, but I’d say after college I was eyeing a few fields. I knew I wanted to work with books, and if you want to do that it’s like, well, you could be a teacher, or you could go into publishing, or you could be a librarian, and I looked at those three fields, and I felt like the grunt work in librarianship of just, like, unclogging printers and pointing someone to the bathroom and, you know, having someone be like, my taxes pay your salary, like, all of that was the grunt work that I would have the easiest time doing that I would still be able to get fulfillment from, ‘cause it was all helping people, and I really, I am a pathologically helpful person, like all the best librarians.

[Laughter]

Sarah: That’s actually something I wanted to ask you about, because you mentioned being in a public-facing information desk and that you, you know, you just said you’re pathologically helpful, and I’m thinking a lot lately about the intersection between emotional labor and information labor, where you give someone information?

Margaret: Yeah!

Sarah: Those overlap quite a bit!

Margaret: Hugely. [Laughs] They overlap hugely.

Sarah: And they’re not really, they’re not really given a lot of respect for either one, either.

Margaret: No. Yeah. They’re not really given a lot of respect for either one, and the degree of professional training that librarians get on being good at both is actually quite substantial –

Sarah: Really!

Margaret: – in – yeah, in Masters of Library Science programs, like, trying to figure out a person’s information request and trying to convey open curiosity and helpfulness but never judgment?

Sarah: Mm-hmm.

Margaret: I mean, those are, like, the core things that you learn in a reference class, which would be one of the four required classes for any Masters in Library Science program, where you’re supposed to sit down, and a person should come in and be able to say anything to you, and one, your job is to try and tease out the information that they actually need from the request that they are making of you, and two, you know, if somebody is coming in and they’re asking me to pull statistics that prove, you know, abortion is emotionally damaging to women and, I don’t know, part of a campaign forwarded by Margaret Sanger to increase racial purity in the United States, I would have to help them do that, even though I don’t find those things true.

Sarah: Right.

Margaret: Even though those run contrary to my beliefs.

Sarah: Mm-hmm.

Margaret: Now, obviously, I wouldn’t do that with bad information, and I couldn’t find information that was reputably sourced to back up those claims, you know, that’s, that’s your out, sort of –

Sarah: Right.

Margaret: – in, in a situation where somebody is asking me to prove something that is not true, but I wouldn’t be able to just sort of be like, oh, no, I am pro-choice, and I think abortion is really important, so I’m not going to help you with this, but nor would I be able to sort of like bristle –

Sarah: Right.

Margaret: – at the idea that somebody was asking me to do that, and I would have to resist any needling that I got about to what degree these corresponded to my personal beliefs or not. Now, luckily I work in an academic library, and we are open to the public, and we get plenty of people coming in off the street to use our computers and resources, but I don’t have quite the same open reference responsibilities that a public librarian would have, so that hypothetical I haven’t personally had to deal with, but that is the kind of hypothetical that, we are walked through multiple permutations of that. Any librarian who has a Masters in Library Science has been exposed to coursework that’s meant to maximize your ability to deal with the information needs and the emotional requirements of that type of situation.

Sarah: Right. And also to cross reference your own knowledge of sources with what you think they’re asking for, even if they haven’t explicitly asked for it.

Margaret: Right, exactly.

Sarah: So you have to interpret and be open and welcoming, nonjudgmental, and give emotional in-, or give informational assistance and guidance to someone who most of the time, in a lot of situations, could also be doing something out of a place of, of vulnerability.

Margaret: Yeah, exactly. And I would say, like, the biggest example that I have in the academic libraries is you, professor emeriti. They – so I work at MIT.

Sarah: Right.

Margaret: The people who work at this library in their prime were the most brilliant person in basically any room not affiliated with MIT they could walk into, and sometimes in any room at MIT, and in a lot of cases, you know, now they are eighty-seven, ninety-two.

Sarah: Yep.

Margaret: Like, they’re not the titans they once were.

Sarah: Yep.

Margaret: They don’t have – and, and they need to sit there and be helped and have things explained to them by me, you know, a thirty-two-year-old who looks on many days maybe twenty-three.

[Laughter]

Margaret: And they can get, well, you know, you can get, like, a very wounded lion sort of mien –

Sarah: Yeah.

Margaret: – from these dudes, where, like, if you try to take the thorn out of their paw wrong, like, they’re going to take your head off.

Sarah: Yep.

Margaret: And so trying to navigate the situation where the person does not know what they are doing and does need you to explain, but cannot at any cost acknowledge that they don’t know what they’re doing –

Sarah: Right.

Margaret: – or that they need you to explain, you know, it’s, it’s, it, it takes some finesse.

Sarah: I think I’ve read about six or seven romance novels that could be summed down to that plot.

[Laughter]

Margaret: Really?

Sarah: Oh yeah. Alpha or former alpha male –

Margaret: Oh sure. [Laughs]

Sarah: – out of, out of his depth, angry about it, and then, you know, add chemistry, possibly some hijinks or some other situations, but yeah, I’ve, I’ve read a permutation of the Alpha Out of His Depth.

Margaret: Well, hey!

Sarah: But usually they’re not eighty-five.

[Laughter]

Margaret: Yeah. Well, you know what, Sarah, if this ends up being a real May-December romance situation, I’ll let you know.

Sarah: Okay, good.

[Laughter]

Sarah: Which leads me to a question I also mentioned in my email to you: I was reading –

Margaret: Uh-huh?

Sarah: – some of things that you’ve been sharing on Facebook and on Twitter about Kelly – gosh, the name just, is it Kelly Boyce?

Margaret: This is the recent piece that was, I think, in Book Riot about experiencing –

Sarah: Sexual harassment.

Margaret: – harass, sexual harassment at the public desk. Yeah.

Sarah: I hadn’t realized – I mean, I should have realized, because I’ve interacted with enough librarians in my life. I had not realized how unprotected and vulnerable a position that is, where you have to be open and nonjudgmental, and then you can easily be placed in situations that are harassment.

Margaret: Yeah, and honestly, reading that piece was wild for me, because I hadn’t even thought of that aspect of experiencing sexual harassment at my job.

Sarah: Mm-hmm.

Margaret: You know, I, I’ve had this journey with me too, and I feel like a lot of women have, where you read these terrible stories and you think, God, I’ve just been so lucky that I haven’t experienced anything like this in my life –

Sarah: Mm-hmm.

Margaret: – and you live in that space where you’re like, I’m so lucky that I haven’t experienced anything like this in your life, and you’re there for, like, forty-five seconds, and then some niggling little memory at the back of your mind is like, well, except for that one thing – [laughs] –

Sarah: Yep.

Margaret: – and then you’re like, oh, wait, yeah, no, that was sexual harassment, and then you’re like, oh, right, and also that, and –

Sarah: And that too.

Margaret: – that, that situation too, yeah. All of those! All of those were sexual harassment.

Sarah: Mm-hmm, yep.

Margaret: So I’d already gone through this thing of being like, oh, how lucky that I’ve never experienced sexual harassment. What a great benefit of being in a female-dominated field.

Sarah: Mm-hmm.

Margaret: And then been like, oh, no, no, still multiple occasions of severe sexual harassment through my job interacting with colleagues, all that kind of stuff, and then weeks went by, months went by, and I read this piece, and I was like, oh yeah!

Sarah: That.

Margaret: And all of the horrible, creepy stuff you deal with from patrons –

Sarah: Yep.

Margaret: – that I haven’t even considered! ‘Cause it’s just, you know, I, I do always talk about librarianship and public librarianship as a service industry job because a lot of it is just interacting with people screaming at you about policies you didn’t make and can’t change –

Sarah: Yep.

Margaret: – which I think is the true crux of a service industry job?

Sarah: It really is.

Margaret: But I hadn’t thought about the degree to which you are subject to and ripe for harassment in the same way that a waitress is, in the same way that a nurse can be, and reading that piece, which I’ve really got to get to the person’s name –

Sarah: I got it, I got it, I got it; I pulled it up.

Margaret: Oh great, good.

Sarah: It was on Shondaland.

Margaret: Oh great.

Sarah: It was written by Katie MacBride.

Margaret: Thank you!

Sarah: Katie MacBride, and she referenced Kelly Jensen’s piece in her piece, which is why Kelly Jensen was the name that, like, lodged itself in my brain cells, so the original – I’ll link to both of them, but this one is “#TimesUp on Harassing Your Public Librarian” –

Margaret: Yes.

Sarah: – and like, like you, I read it and thought, oh my gosh.

Margaret: Yeah.

Sarah: Yeah!

Margaret: You know, everybody exchanges stories, and I think this is even more true in public libraries, about just, like, patrons who are just, like, persistently inappropriate with you, and it’s not –

Sarah: Mm-hmm.

Margaret: – it’s not necessarily hostile, but it is overfriendly in a particular way that was permissive, thanks largely to a misogynistic understanding about where women fall in the hierarchy of beings, and it’s typically slightly below fully human.

Sarah: Yep. Generally speaking.

Margaret: [Laughs] Yeah. Which is just like, just like, oh, it’s completely appropriate to ask all these invasive personal questions of an adult woman the same way you would of, you know, the child of a close personal friend.

Sarah: Mm-hmm. Yep.

Margaret: Right. [Laughs] ‘Cause they’re just these cute young whippersnappers, and they’re not all the way baked, and, and maybe they need your guidance, you know. And, and they’ll just be glad to know that someone’s interested in what they’re doing with their little lives. And somebody ought to tell them that they should get married sometime soon.

Sarah: Yeah, and then there’s that fine line that I’ve encountered in various public-facing jobs where you know that the person knows that what they’re doing is inappropriate, but they are staying just on this side of flagrant –

Margaret: Yeah.

Sarah: – that there’s plausible deniability if you’re like, okay, that’s not cool. What do you mean, that’s not cool? I’m just asking for information about this, and you’re supposed to provide it for me. I didn’t do anything wrong; why would you take it that way?

Margaret: Yeah. What kind of egotistical bitch are you to think that that’s what I mean?

Sarah: Exactly. I wouldn’t be interested in you, and then, then let the insults begin.

Margaret: Mm-hmm.

Sarah: It, it, it struck me when you shared the, the link that not only is that an obvious place of vulnerability, because as we were, as we were talking about, the, the overlap of informational labor and emotional labor is so intensive, but there’s no protection, that I hadn’t realized the American Library Association doesn’t have guidelines for what to do in that situation, and I’m like, but that situation has to happen, like, all the time!

Margaret: Yeah!

Sarah: I’ve been in my public library and seen people at the reference desk getting questions, and I’m like, oh, this is, this is not a normal situation, and as a patron I don’t know what to do.

Margaret: Right. Yes. That nobody has at any point trained me in what to do if a patron is responding to me in a borderline inappropriate way is –

Sarah: Right?

Margaret: – really surprising. Was, was just flabbergasting to me, but I mean, it can only be so surprising because, until reading that piece, I really had not thought of it in that light. [Laughs] I just sort of thought of it as a, like, well, this is, this is just part of the job!

Sarah: Part of my job. And when you are, I think that when you are connecting people with information that they are looking for and you are helping them – another thing I want to ask you about also is readers’ advisory. I do the sort of amateur version of that. I’m not a trained librarian, but I want you to find the romance novel that you want to read. Like if –

Margaret: I think –

Sarah: – whatever it is your catnip, if I can identify it, I want you to have lots of it.

Margaret: I, I think at this point you have training commensurate with a degree. I, I’d call you a professional.

Sarah: [Laughs] I’m a, a semi-amateur librarian-ish type of recommending person.

Margaret: I think you could deem yourself a professional readers’ advisor-ist.

Sarah: Ooh, that’s a good one! It’s much better than a very expensive person to know who enables your poor impulse control.

Margaret: [Laughs]

Sarah: That’s a much better title. I like yours better.

Margaret: I do online chat reference for part of my work at MIT, and it’s supposed to be for the MIT community only –

Sarah: Mm-hmm.

Margaret: – but there’s a way people from outside the MIT community can get in, and it’s like, one of the situations, I had somebody who definitely was having a kind of paranoid schizophrenic episode, with them coming to –

Sarah: Oh no!

Margaret: They’d come to MIT’s reference because they were convinced that, like, aliens had broken into their home and that the CIA –

Sarah: Oh no!

Margaret: – had implanted all kinds of devices, and it’s just like, in that circumstance, my first and last name are visible to the person chatting in, because that’s the default setting.

Sarah: Right.

Margaret: I don’t know anything about them, and I have to sort of convey that, like, no, MIT is not going to come to Philadelphia to pick up this material, because that’s not what this service is here designed to do, and that’s not what we’re here to facilitate. But also, you know, not attract the ire of a person who’s not in a good place.

Sarah: No. And is asking you to help them with something that they are very sure is very real, and you are the person who either can or can’t do that.

Margaret: Yes.

Sarah: Oy!

Margaret: Yeah.

Sarah: That’s a lot!

Margaret: Yeah! It can be tricky. I mean, it happens to be work I, I like doing and skills –

Sarah: Mm-hmm.

Margaret: – I’m proud to have, but it, it is the kind of thing where I’d never examined how much is asked of me, and I’d never really thought through whether all of it was fair or necessary until I read that terrific piece by Katie MacBride.

Sarah: Yeah, yeah. Me, me either. Are there now steps being taken to provide better ways of addressing and preventing that kind of situation professionally, like, locally or on the, on the library organizational level?

Margaret: I would hope so? I mean, right now, as we’re on the phone, the midwinter meeting for the American Library Association –

Sarah: Yeah!

Margaret: – is taking place in Denver. My writing partner Sophie is out there, so Katie MacBride’s piece was really well timed, and I would be flabbergasted if it’s not being discussed in depth with a lot of the important committees that are meeting right now. On a local level, I think I happen to be very lucky that, because I work for an institution where, like, we have our own police force.

Sarah: Mm-hmm.

Margaret: There is an understanding that, like, we have external support we can turn to at the second we feel uncomfortable. We’ve been doing a lot of navigating of how non-MIT users are in our spaces, so –

Sarah: Mm-hmm.

Margaret: – I think in the years that I’ve been at MIT, we’ve transitioned from a, that’s a thing you do at the last possible moment, to a, that’s an option that’s on the table if you need it and you feel uncomfortable, to an understanding that we didn’t have to feel uncomfortable in our jobs, that that’s, that that’s not the brief. And I think it would be worthwhile to examine it more closely and examine how we should be, you know, what we should be expected to put up with from the MIT community as well, but those conversations haven’t started happening yet.

Sarah: I hope that they do. I would, I would like to ask you, I had an email, after I had contacted you about being on the podcast, I had an email from a reader or a listener named Jen, who wanted me to ask a librarian about readers’ advisory, that this is a field with study; that there’s a, there’s a course that, that is involved in creating readers’ advisory specialists; and how you are taught to zero in on what a person likes about a book or wants to know about and identified the appeal characteristics to find matches. A lot of the things that you do online do seem to involve –

Margaret: Yes.

Sarah: – recommending and encouraging, and, like, I have two keywords that I was, when I was doing my research here: recommendation, encouragement, and confidence.

Margaret: Yeah. So I would definitely say that I, I’m a professional readers’ advisory specialist. Even if that is not what I do in my work at MIT, that’s something that I’ve spoken on at library conferences and things like that, so that’s, that’s my special skill set, and I would say, larger than just readers’ advisory, that it’s cultural advisory. Sophie and I don’t call ourselves Bossy Dames for no reason? If somebody wants to ask us what they should do with their lives, well, we will be happy to weigh in. [Laughs]

Sarah: Yeah, no kidding! [Laughs] Please, please go on.

Margaret: But I think that, particularly when it comes to culture, I have a really good job at identifying common using appeal factors, appeal factors across genres, and figuring out sort of like how someone – I think where my specialty lies is helping people who’ve never really read genre fiction find types of genre fiction or individual things in genre fiction that are really going to work for them, and I would put into that category also YA, even though YA is not a genre. [Laughs] But I think that I serve to the world as sort of like a, a great adult ambassador for adults interested in reading YA novels and unsure of where to start or unsure of what that category has to offer, which is basically everything adult novels have to offer, but backwards and in heels.

[Laughter]

Sarah: What do you see as the backwards and in heels part of YA?

Margaret: I’d say with less bloat, just much more streamlined books, I think if an adult book isn’t three hundred pages, it sort of has to justify being so short, and I think if a YA book is more than 350 pages, it’s got to be doing some very special work to be that long. And neither of those things is necessarily better or worse, but they are different, and I feel like for adults who do not necessarily have huge portions of their lives to dedicate to pleasure reading –

Sarah: Mm-hmm.

Margaret: – the joy of having something that’s going to get to the fireworks factory in a reasonable amount of time –

Sarah: [Laughs]

Margaret: – is enormous and can actually be a thing that leads people to remember, like, oh yeah, this is why I loved reading when I had worlds of free time to dedicate to it.

Sarah: Right.

Margaret: If you want to read The Goldfinch, like, God bless you, read The Goldfinch. It’s a wonderful book, and you’ll love it. But if you, like me, have fifteen minutes of commute in the morning on the T and fifteen minutes of commute back, it can be really, really hard to get into the narrative flow of The Goldfinch –

Sarah: Mm-hmm.

Margaret: – and it’s not going to be equivalently hard to get into the narrative flow of something on a YA level that is doing stuff that’s just as remarkable, like – I, I’m touted a lot about my appeal factors, and I’m having a very hard time finding a good YA equivalent for The Goldfinch, but I’m going to go for someone I think is incredible and under-read: Margo Lanagan, who does these really, really dense and literary and weird books that are also, you know, reasonably short –

Sarah: Mm-hmm.

Margaret: – and you get the thread right away, and I do think that, like, if you’re an adult who would like to be reading Donna Tartt but has been carrying around The Goldfinch for nine months and making no progress, maybe give yourself permission to put The Goldfinch down, save it for the next time you’re on a week-long vacation in a nice cabin with limited internet access, and pick up some Margo Lanagan – [laughs] – and you might find that you make your way through it in three weeks and remember what it is like to be an avid reader.

Sarah: Which Margo Lanagan titles do you recommend most often?

Margaret: So I think the one that I would recommend the quickest is The Brides of Rollrock Island, which is working with the Irish myth of selkies, which are humans that transform back and forth between seals and people, and it is sort of looking at that over three generations and in this tiny Irish village, and in the first generation a sort of social outcast discovers how you can bring the humans out of the seals that live on the island. Then in the next generation, all of the men are married to these sea-wives, and what does that do to the human women who were in the village? And then in the third generation, it is the children of the men and these sea-wives, and how do they navigate this sort of murky relationship? And it’s so weird, and it’s so beautiful, and it’s extremely satisfying and great, and I think everyone should read it.

Sarah: So readers’ advisory isn’t just about identifying the appeal characteristics, but it’s also identifying the time and situation someone has to, to engage in reading.

Margaret: Yeah! Yes, absolutely, and that can be with adults, what I described, and then I think the other category that, where readers’ advisory is especially important is when kids are transitioning out of easy readers and into chapter books –

Sarah: Mm-hmm.

Margaret: – and you’re trying to build confidence in them as readers and build an understanding into them of themselves as readers, and you get some kids who at age eight are perfectly competent to pick up a Harry Potter book and drive straight in –

Sarah: Mm-hmm.

Margaret: – and when kids feel like that’s the only model forward and they don’t have that same facility right away, they can get this understanding of themselves as, like, oh, I’m not a reader.

Sarah: Mm-hmm.

Margaret: And so what you need at that age is you need high-appeal, low-skill books, where it’s just, like – and this is why the Diary of a Wimpy Kid books are partly so popular, right, because an eight-year-old really can read Diary of a Wimpy Kid and can read it quickly and can read it confidently and can enjoy all of the aspects that it’s putting forward –

Sarah: Mm-hmm.

Margaret: – but you look at that, and it looks like a real book.

Sarah: Mm-hmm.

Margaret: You know, it’s like a little hardcover book, and they don’t feel like they’re reading something for kids.

Sarah: Yes.

Margaret: They don’t feel like they’re reading something for someone who can’t really read. They feel like they’re reading a book just like anybody else. They’re reading books that all of their peers are reading, and it, again, it just gives them a way to understand themselves as a reader.

Sarah: Yes, and the, and they, they get engaged with a series of characters that they can revisit, too.

Margaret: Exactly, exactly, and honestly, it’s that understanding of yourself and just wanting to go and pick up a book. You know, that’s the most important thing that we can maintain in people, and because, unlike most forms of entertainment and culture –

Sarah: Mm-hmm.

Margaret: – there is just such a veil of pretention attached to reading, and –

Sarah: It’s so true!

[Laughter]

Margaret: It can be hard to guide people back to the idea that, like, no, this is supposed to be something that’s fun for you.

Sarah: Yep!

Margaret: It can be hard to guide them to that idea when they’re eight –

Sarah: Yep.

Margaret: – and it can be hard to guide them to that idea when they’re thirty-eight!

Sarah: Very true, and then there’s the idea of, that you have to be reading the right things in order to be considered a reader.

Margaret: Right, exactly.

Sarah: And you have to –

Margaret: Like, that if you’re devouring nine romance novels a month, you’re not a real reader, because you’re not reading The Goldfinch.

Sarah: Right! Like, what?! No, come on. [Laughs]

Margaret: No, you’re a real reader.

Sarah: Yes. And if you’re reading digital books, you’re not reading real books.

Margaret: Yep.

Sarah: And if –

Margaret: If you’re listening to audiobooks, you’re not a real reader. No –

Sarah: And if you’re reading –

Margaret: – you’re reading! [Laughs]

Sarah: If you’re reading, like, a 225,000-word fanfic, you’re not reading something real. Like, whoa, it’s literally –

Margaret: Right.

Sarah: – reading. The words are all using the same letters of the alphabet, swear to God.

Margaret: Yep.

Sarah: [Laughs]

Margaret: This is another thing that I’ve presented on at library conferences is, I want to try and move our understanding culturally away from the idea that value in culture comes from what you consume. Right, like, oh, if you’re only consuming fanfiction, there’s no value in your cultural consumption, but if you’re consuming, you know, these eight books, mostly by white men, almost exclusively by white people that we as a culture have deemed important this year, then regardless of how you’re engaging with them and how you’re thinking about them –

Sarah: Mm-hmm.

Margaret: – you know, that’s a culturally important – like, your, your consumption has value. I want to move away from that model and move into an idea of how do you engage with the things you consume? How do you think about it? What role does it play in your life? How do you play with it? How are you in conversation with it? Because I think that’s where the skills that we value in terms of critical thinking and imaginative play actually develop.

Sarah: Yeah.

Margaret: And I’d say that anyone who’s had the misfortune to sit next to a Jonathan Franzen reader – [laughs]

Sarah: Oh God.

Margaret: – at a dinner party –

Sarah: Oh God.

Margaret: – can probably speak to this, and that’s not to say that no one reads Jonathan Franzen in a sincere and engaged way and that no one has interesting opinions about him. It is to say that there are a lot of people who think they have done the work just by reading the thing and want to talk about how they’ve done this impressive work of reading the thing, and, like, that’s it, they’re done. Their, their intellectual credentials have been established, and I would like to push those people off a cliff.

Sarah: [Laughs] Yes, when the point is to have read a thing and not to actually have something to say or engage with the thing itself, the whole point is to have read, or say you have read.

Margaret: Yes.

Sarah: And there’s a whole industry around business books where there’s a business book; and then there’s a, a, a smaller version of that; and then there’s, like, a five-page summary of that; and then there’s, like, an outline of that.

Margaret: [Laughs] Yep!

Sarah: Like, that’s a whole industry! And it’s fascinating, because there are a number of nonfiction books that I like to read that I don’t have time to go through all of the sing-, all of the examples, because there’s, there’s a, a group of people, especially inside nonfiction, that I call entrepre-dude-bros?

Margaret: Ha! Ha!

Sarah: And you know who I’m, you know what I’m talking about, right? Like, they’re the guys –

Margaret: I call them Silicon Valley Snake Oil Salesmen, but you know, same difference.

Sarah: Same dudes.

Margaret: Tim Ferriss and his adherents –

Sarah: Yes, and his coterie of entrepre-dude-bros.

Margaret: [Laughs]

Sarah: Like, and there are only so many examples of one person’s awesomeness that I can get through to get to the nugget. There’s also, by the way, an astonishing amount of similarity between entrepre-dude-bro books and parenting books?

Margaret: Ha!

Sarah: Like, ninety-nine percent of a parenting book is completely not applicable to your life, but there’s going to be one piece of information that you’re going to be like, oh, okay, that is useful. I am so doing that. Thank you, book. That was a lot of hours for one piece – same thing in a business book by an entrepre-dude-bro. There’s a whole lot of fluff and one nugget, and you’ve got to dig out that nugget.

Margaret: That said, I feel like all books of advice directed at women are inherently shame-based.

Sarah: Yes! Absolutely.

Margaret: Right, and all books of advice directed at men are inherently ego-boosting.

Sarah: Yes, it is an actually inverse chemical reaction that’s going on there. Like, if there’s a –

Margaret: Great, I just wanted to make sure that that was still true.

Sarah: Oh yes. You’re not doing it right, you’re not doing it like me, but you can be like me if you have read my book. Like, oh for –

Margaret: Mm-hmm, right.

Sarah: – for God’s sake. [Laughs] This actually leads me to my, the other thing I wanted to ask you about, which is how much of your online work – and offline work – is based in encouragement and confidence, in, in offering encouragement and offering confidence?

Margaret: I mean, in an ideal world, a hundred percent. [Laughs]

Sarah: Right, of course.

Margaret: I mean, that’s obviously not true. I do a certain amount of, like, criticizing. [Laughs] But even if I’m doing critical talking, I, I try to push to a place where it’s like, this person did things wrong. In light of how they did things wrong, here’s something I want to do to make that problem better. Here’s a way that I’m trying to approach things that will improve outcomes, because I find that, that it is a real crutch for intelligent people that you think if you can point out the hypocrisy in somebody else, then you’ve done the hard work, then you’ve demonstrated again your intellectual credentials, but I think the harder part is figuring out what does the good thing look like? And that there isn’t as much energy in that field, and, like, that’s where I really want to push.

Sarah: Yes.

Margaret: I happen to be somebody who’s been given an enormous amount by the world. You know, I was born into, like, a, a lovely middle-class family with parents who loved and liked me and did not think I was a lesser human simply because I was female, and in, in, in, like, a major urban center where I look Irish Catholic and every cop was inclined to give me a lollipop.

[Laughter]

Margaret: You know, like, the world treated me okay. I’m, I’m one click away from being the most privileged kind of person in the world, so –

Sarah: [Laughs]

Margaret: – I feel like –

Sarah: Oy.

[Laughter]

Sarah: One click away. That’s a very good way of putting that. [Laughs]

Margaret: I feel like I have more of a burden to figure out what comes next than people who are iced out of many more of these systems of privilege.

Sarah: Mm-hmm.

Margaret: That if all I can do is point out what’s going wrong in everybody else’s actions, and if what I’m neglecting is focusing on what are the meaningful things that I can do with the incredible amount of power and privilege I’ve been given, then, like, I’m not doing my job.

Sarah: Now, a lot of the, the roles that you inhabit in Bossy Dames and Appointment Television and even on Pop Culture Happy Hour and in different places on the internet, your, your online – I don’t like to say persona because it sounds as if it’s an act, and it’s not. It’s just a, a, a –

Margaret: Presence; we can say presence.

Sarah: Presence; it’s a portion of your personality.

Margaret: It is edited, you know, like, it’s not my whole self.

Sarah: Oh, absolutely. It’s a portion of accurate personality. Same thing with me. Like, Sarah Wendell is my real name, but there are a number of things that are part of my life that I don’t ever share. Like, there’s no pictures of my children except when they were born, and they’re ten and twelve now.

Margaret: Right.

Sarah: Mostly because I wanted them to roll onto the internet the way I did, with an absolute blank slate to create the persona that they want to create, to create the presence and personality online that they have without me having left things for them from when they were kids? Like, I don’t –

Margaret: Right.

Sarah: I want them to have the, the blank slate of creating their online world the way I did, so I try very hard to keep that space clean for them. So I don’t talk a lot about it, but I do talk about parenting. I just talk about them –

Margaret: Right.

Sarah: – name. A lot of the ways in which you are online combine this, this sort of confident, encouraging, recommendation, but also reflecting, as you said, what is happening, what is wrong, and what can we do. Has that always been a role that you’ve, you’ve had in your life? Or is that something that you found online?

Margaret: I would say aspects of that have been pretty consistent in my identity my whole life.

Sarah: Mm-hmm.

Margaret: Like in eighth grade, I ended up convincing our art teacher to show five sections of our art class Vertigo by Alfred Hitchcock and, like, analyze its cinematic content. [Laughs]

Sarah: Nice going!

Margaret: I mean, Mr. Labasco was very suggestible, but also –

[Laughter]

Margaret: – I took advantage of it and other people didn’t. [Laughs]

Sarah: Yeah.

Margaret: So, and, like, at the children’s book shop where I went as a child, by the time I was fifteen, if Terry, the owner, was, like, with somebody who was being tiresome about the handselling process, she would just be like, maybe Margaret can help you.

[Laughter]

Margaret: And I would happily handsell for free –

[Laughter]

Margaret: – for a good twenty-five minutes. So parts of this are certainly endemic to how I’ve always been. Consciousness of how much power I have in the world and how much work I should be doing in light of that, how much I’m willing to process publically, and how much I put on myself to process publically –

Sarah: Mm-hmm.

Margaret: – that is something that I’ve grown into much, much more in my adult years and something that Sophie has been just a huge, huge, huge help in refining, because my instinct is to steer away from messy things, right –

Sarah: Mm-hmm.

Margaret: – because it’s so easy to make errors, and the cost of making an error can be, can feel in the moment very severe and scary.

Sarah: Yes. I have said many times, no one trips gracefully over their own privilege. You will always –

Margaret: [Laughs]

Sarah: – they, in, like, in, in snowboarding and in skateboarding, there’s a, a concept called face-plant to scorpion, which is when you face-plant, and then your board or your, or your skateboard comes around the back and pops you on the back of the head?

Margaret: [Laughs] Yeah.

Sarah: So if you ever trip gracefully and you’re like, oh darn, I just, oh, I just made a misstep. Oh no, if you’re going to trip over your privilege, you are going to face-plant, and then you’re going to get a scorpion, and you’re just going to be down and out. Like –

Margaret: Yep.

Sarah: – you never trip gracefully over your own privilege. That’s part of why it’s privilege, ‘cause you don’t see it.

Margaret: Yes.

Sarah: You’re going to trip hard.

Margaret: Yes.

Sarah: You’re going to trip way hard over it, and making mistakes in public is very painful. I, I completely agree.

Margaret: But I’ve been really lucky in that, like, typically, the people I’ve hurt when I’ve made mistakes in public have been just sincerely invested in someone who’s going to acknowledge the mistake that they’ve made –

Sarah: Yes.

Margaret: – and apologize sincerely and not make excuses for themselves.

Sarah: I can remember many social media workshops for authors where I talk about the difference of apology, where there’s, I fucked up; boy, did I fuck up; I am really sorry; and I, I completely own my fuckup; the fuckup is all mine, and I feel terrible; I am sorry; and oh, I didn’t mean it or I’m sorry if you were offended or –

Margaret: Yes.

Sarah: Those are not apologies. I think Linda calls them onomatopology?

Margaret: [Laughs] I know.

Sarah: They make all the noises of an apology, but they’re not a real apology. A genuine, honest apology on the internet is a rare and powerful thing.

Margaret: Yeah. And I always say that, like, my, that I could probably have a social media consulting firm, and my entire social media consulting philosophy would be, don’t tweet that; text me. Because, like –

Sarah: [Laughs] Yes!

Margaret: You’re allowed to have a journey of acceptance, to getting to a place where someone has, in your mind, misunderstood the intent of what you did and been hurt by it, right, and is demanding an apology. You’re allowed to have a journey where you’re like, well, why couldn’t they just see what I was trying to say, and, like, what’s in it for them to make me apologize? You’re allowed to have all of that journey. Just, like, have that journey by text message with your best friend, right, and what you put out into the world publically should just be acknowledging the pain that you’ve caused, apologizing for it, and saying, I’m not going to make this mistake again, and thank you for trusting me enough to tell me how my actions affected you.

Sarah: Yes.

Margaret: [Laughs] And it seems like celebrity after celebrity, you see them, like, screencapping their Notes app, and you look at that text, and you’re like, this is a thing that you send to your best friend when you’re complaining about the fact that you had to apologize for something you don’t think you should have had to apologize for.

Sarah: Right.

Margaret: This is not the thing that you send to the person you’re notionally apologizing for, ‘cause they don’t care. You hurt them; they need you to acknowledge that, and that is all they need or want from you.

Sarah: Mm-hmm, and that’s all you have to do, which is uncomfortable, but, you know, so is, so is adulthood.

Margaret: Yes!

Sarah: One of the things that I learned from you when I asked you for advice about setting up the podcast Patreon, which thank you, by the way for that advice.

Margaret: My pleasure!

Sarah: One of the things you said was that it is, it is hard but necessary to make visible the work that you do.

Margaret: Yeah. It’s really scary, but it is.

Sarah: It is! Why is it so scary, and why is it so difficult, do you think?

Margaret: Because, well, women are never encouraged to show their work ever. Effortless perfection is the goal for women at all times. You’re just supposed to be –

Sarah: Right.

Margaret: – perfect from inception, and it’s never supposed to take any conscious thought to achieve that, and if you admit that you’ve consciously thought about anything, you know, you’re, you’re a fake, manipulative shill, but I think particularly in a situation where you started doing something for free, you didn’t ever go into it necessarily knowing that it would be as much work as it is –

Sarah: Yes.

Margaret: – and it can be hard to admit to yourself that it has become work, and you feel like people are going to feel betrayed by this being re-categorized. Right, you feel like you’ve been doing something generous and friendly, but it’s also hard, and I feel like there’s almost no other part in your life where you can be doing something for free in a spirit of generosity and friendliness and community-making and then turn around to the person and say, actually, this is extremely hard work, and I need you to see and acknowledge that. Typically, when that happens, the other person who’s been, made this bargain with you can feel kind of betrayed. You’re like, oh, I thought we were friends, and now you’re telling me this is work. And you have to trust that people are going to understand this kind of online friendship differently. And –

Sarah: Yes.

Margaret: – and you don’t have a guarantee that they will, and it’s very frightening, and, luckily for Sophie and I and now for Andrew and Kathryn and I, it, it – weirdly, it doesn’t get easier, like when I had to start a second Patreon for Appointment Television, Andrew had already been running one for his books podcast Overdue for quite some time. I’d been running one for Two Bossy Dames for quite some time, and we were still sort of convinced that, like, we were going to launch this one, and, like, this was going to be the one where, like, the mob spat in our faces and, like, no one listened to our podcast again.

Sarah: [Laughs] I know.

Margaret: [Laughs] And no!

Sarah: I struggle every time when I’m doing the intro and outro, hey, we have a podcast Patreon, and it is, and it is incredibly meaningful if you support it, and if you leave a review or you tell a friend, that is also very meaningful support, but acknowledging the work that goes into this thing that I produce for free is very challenging!

Margaret: Yeah.

Sarah: It doesn’t get easier! And I’m like, why is this the case? And one of the books that I read, I think it was last year, I didn’t enjoy the book very much; it was, I think it was The Art of Doing Nothing, which was very frustrating because the book wasn’t actually about doing nothing.

Margaret: [Laughs]

Sarah: It was, it was about doing things and saying that that was doing nothing, but I’m like, no, you’re still doing something. That is a thing that you’re doing. It’s a something that is not a nothing, and doing nothing – ascribing different things as, that I find restorative as nothing was not actually helpful.

Margaret: [Laughs]

Sarah: So I was very frustrated with this book. It was called, excuse me, it was called The Joy of Doing Nothing –

Margaret: Mm-mm.

Sarah: – but one of the things that – like I said earlier, there’s always that one nugget? No one pays as much attention to what you do as you do.

Margaret: Right.

Sarah: No one’s actually sitting there going, oh, well, how much is it? How much have you earned? What’s going on? How much is this, and what are you doing, and what do you do with your money? Like, no one pays as much attention to you as you do?

Margaret: Yes.

Sarah: I have to remind myself of that constantly when it comes to making public the work that I do.

Margaret: Yeah, I think that that’s one of my, like, big axioms is, is no one but you looks at you with hate in their heart? [Laughs]

Sarah: Yes! Thank you, that is very true.

Margaret: And that’s not, that’s not true for everyone. There are people who are in less privileged classes where people do just look at you with hate in their heart, but it’s true in more circumstances than you think when you’re like, should I wear this patterned dress, or is everyone going to think I look like a sofa?

[Laughter]

Margaret: It’s like, no one but you cares enough about you to be that –

Sarah: Yep.

Margaret: – mean to you. [Laughs]

Sarah: So the degree to which you are so confident and fully inhabiting of your, of your, of yourself, do you still battle that, that inner critic of, dude, no, no, don’t do that, don’t do that, everyone’s going to look! Well, you know. Or do you get to a point where you’re like, nope! Don’t give a fuck who looks; going to have a good time?

Margaret: [Laughs] So I have a very easy time. My, my anxiety about meeting new people is very low.

Sarah: Right.

Margaret: My anxiety about sustaining the affection of people is very high. [Laughs]

Sarah: Yes, I have this exact same problem. I can talk to any stranger, but if it’s, like, the fifth time I’ve met you, I’m like, ohhh, crap.

Margaret: I’m like, this is going to be the time you realize I’m trash, and you never want to speak to me again.

[Laughter]

Sarah: Yes!

Margaret: I’ve snookered you for this long, but it’s all going to come falling down.

Sarah: Yes, now, you’re onto me. Oh crap.

Margaret: But my philosophy has always just been to be myself as loudly as possible, and the people who like it will walk closer, and the people who don’t like it will walk away.

Sarah: Yes. Because you lose nothing by being yourself –

Margaret: No.

Sarah: – but you lose a lot by, by occluding and hiding and, and sup-, and suppressing yourself.

Margaret: And I happen to be very lucky that myself is highly socially acceptable.

[Laughter]

Margaret: It’s like, oh, no, I want to be like a nice, feminine white lady – [laughs] – who wears lipstick. Heaven for-fucking-fend!

Sarah: Yeah. [Laughs]

Margaret: I’m not going to say I don’t do anything to complicate that. I’m just going to say that I, I happen to be lucky in that most of the top notes of how I would choose to express myself are top notes that are very palatable to a wide array of people who are not inclined to be nearly as nice to many others. I’m not taking nearly the risk to be myself loudly that many, many people are.

Sarah: Right. This is very true.

Margaret: I’m not like, I’m going to be myself loudly, and maybe that means I’ll be risking violence every single time I step onto the streets! No. [Laughs] I mean, I’m a woman in the world; I risk violence every single time I walk into the street regardless –

Sarah: Right.

Margaret: – but I risk arguably the least amount of violence of most women in the world.

Sarah: Right. The intersections at which you encounter violence are fewer than, than many other women in this world.

Margaret: Exactly.

Sarah: So my, my last question that I always ask is, are there any books that you are reading that you would like to recommend to people? I imagine that you have none whatsoever.

Margaret: [Laughs] Yeah, just a complete dearth of books to recommend. I mean, I’d say revelatory books that I think you, in fact, first put me onto, I fell in love with the Sherry Thomas Lady Sherlock books? This –

Sarah: Oh, I love them! Love them!

Margaret: I’ve been a Sherlock Holmes nerd since I was very small, and my brother and I used to listen to the 1940s radio serial starring Basil Rathbone and Nigel Bruce on long car trips, so we had those on, they released them on, like, a cassette tape when I was about eight, and so I’ve been, like, gung ho about Sherlock Holmes for quite some time, and they’re the kind of books where I was going to like them, probably, no matter what, ‘cause they’re like a retelling of a Sherlock Holmes book, but I did not expect to be so completely bowled over by them as I was, because I’m kind of picky about what makes a good mystery novel, and I’m kind of picky about what makes a good interpretation of Sherlock Holmes, and to go from the idea of, like, what if Sherlock Holmes was a woman is going to be an idea that’s fun for me, but with a lot of historical books, you find that it’s people who are really interested in sort of the trappings of that historical time, but they’re not interested in engaging with the historical realities of oppression –

Sarah: Right.

Margaret: – that people would have actually been navigating, and they just kind of want to use the superficial trappings but then write basically modern characters, and look, I’m here for that. I love a corset as much as the next girl, aesthetically.

Sarah: [Laughs]

Margaret: But what I found with these books is that, although she’s obviously writing an exceptional female character who breaks all kinds of rules and leads a completely atypical life, she’s writing that with a real understanding of what the social costs and risks would have been and what systems of oppression she would have been subject to and what she would need to do to get around them, and it’s just, like, so much more satisfying! I mean, just because it gives much deeper stakes to everything that’s going on, so I love those. The two books that have been published in that series are phenomenal, and I’m recommending them to everyone lately.

Sarah: Oh, they’re so –

Margaret: And I love Sherry Thomas’s romance novels as well, so I shouldn’t have been so surprised.

Sarah: [Laughs]

Margaret: But –

Sarah: I love those books because not only is she placing Charlotte in a, in a place of incredible social precariousness, but she herself is, Sherry is so good with language, she is constantly introducing me to things that I didn’t know about English, which is amazing, ‘cause it’s her second language. I could just listen to her talking for hours and hours and hours.

Margaret: I’ve not had the privilege to do that, and I will clearly have to avail myself of the, avail myself of the opportunity sooner rather than later.

Sarah: [Laughs] All right, do you have any others, ma’am? I’m sure that you only have just one.

Margaret: [Laughs] I also just want everyone to read all of Rose Lerner’s books. I was coming up with Penny something? She’s not the person I was talking about, but Rose Lerner’s books are my favorite historical romance novels.

Sarah: Do you mean Lively St. Lemeston?

Margaret: The Lively St. Lemeston books and also the two that she wrote prior to that, which have just come back into availability electronically, so that’s A Lily among Thorns, which –

Sarah: Yes.

Margaret: – has Napoleon War espionage and a former courtesan who’s become an inn owner and an incredible hero who’s a chemist who specializes in fabric, coming up with dyes to produce color in fabrics, and is, like, an expert tailor, which is, I love a man who knows his muslins, so it’s, like, a real potent one for me?

Sarah: [Laughs]

Margaret: And then there’s also In for a Penny, which is sort of written as a response to Jane Austen’s Sense and Sensibility and functions ridiculously well as that, where it’s about a marriage of convenience between a very proper merchant’s daughter and a very improper, impoverished nobleman, and how they navigate all of the things contingent upon that is so interesting and great. And then there’s the Lively St. Lemeston books, which are all set in a particular political borough in rural England and deal with romances –

Sarah: Yes.

Margaret: – around 19th-century political machinations in this tiny borough in a way that is engaging with history –

Sarah: Yes.

Margaret: – directly to my taste, and also just incredibly compelling and distinct romantic storytelling with really well-defined characters who have a fascinating journey towards being together and, you know, not really falling back on any kind of lazy impediments to why characters might be together. So those are my favorite historicals –

Sarah: Yes.

Margaret: – and then my favorite contemporaries are the London Celebrities books, Pretty Face and, oh, Act Like It by Lucy Parker.

Sarah: Did you see this morning she was tweeting about a Valentine’s Day conversation between the characters of Act Like It from last year’s Valentine’s Day and that she had done a new text conversation that’s going to be released this week?

Margaret: No, I hadn’t, and that is incredibly valuable news, and thank you so much for sharing it with me.

Sarah: Okay, I am going to find the link for you, because I read it this morning before I had had coffee, and I was just standing there with, like, happy charming tears on my face, like, this is just the greatest thing! I’m going to send you this link right now so that you can have it, because it will make your day better.

Margaret: Thank you so much!

Sarah: So the minute I get the new one, I will send it to you. But, yes, I love those books so much. You know, the third one is on NetGalley.

Margaret: I did not! I’m going to request it as soon as we get off the phone.

[Laughter]

Sarah: I do have a book to recommend to you, if you would like.

Margaret: Oh, I would love that!

Sarah: Okay, along the lines of Rose Lerner, there is a book called Untamed by Anna Cowan, C-O-W-A-N –

Margaret: Mm-hmm?

Sarah: – and I don’t want to give away a lot. It is a very lyrically written book, and it is very absorbing. The heroine is – so, basically, the, the, the three-word hook is that the, the duke in the story, the hero, is cross-dressing –

Margaret: Ohhh!

Sarah: – and disguised as a woman, and there’s a lot of reasons why, but he’s en-, engaged in a massive deception, and he is dressed as a woman for a lot of the book, and it is really an interesting story. The heroine is from a small town and is of the, of a, of a class of, of women so that she would have social interactions in Regency London that she can’t stand and does not like to deal with, because she’s more accustomed to talking to farmers –

Margaret: Mm-hmm.

Sarah: – and people who own land, a completely different form of communication. She doesn’t speak in code, and this guy is all code.

Margaret: This is fascinating! I’m adding it to my Goodreads right now.

Sarah: I think you might like it.

[music]

Sarah: And that brings us to the end of this episode. I know this was a bit of a long one. I hope you enjoyed this interview as much as I did. We talked about a whole lot of things.

I will have links in the show notes at smartbitchestrashybooks.com/podcast where you can find Margaret H. Willison, and that is a lot of places, like, so many places. You can find her on the Twitters, on Two Bossy Dames, on Appointment Television, plus I’ll have links to the articles that we talked about regarding harassment in public libraries. And of course I will have links to all of the books that we talked about, and there were quite a few!

I have a bad joke at the end of this episode that I’m so excited about, I can’t wait to get to that part, but first I have things to tell you! Are you ready? Here we go. Okay!

This episode was brought to you by Fearless in Texas by Kari Lynn Dell. RT Book Reviews raves, “There is such a raw vulnerability in these characters that readers will be hard pressed not to scream, cry and cheer right along with them.” They add, “Fearless in Texas will leave you feeling worthy of attaining your own happy ending.” When Melanie Brookman realizes that her misogynistic toad of a boss has been deceiving her in the worst possible way, she tosses a bomb into the good old boys’ club on the way out the door and unfortunately takes her own marketing career down with it. Oops! Rodeo bullfighter Wyatt Darrington’s got it all: perfect car, perfect job, perfect smile, and the perfect lie. He’ll always been an outsider to someone like Melanie, who’s got arena dust sprinkled into her DNA. Unfortunately, he’s also been in love with her for years, and when her life comes crashing down, he can’t resist offering her an escape route, helping him save the run-down bar that he bought in his last fit of gallantry. Something is bound to go up in flames when they’re thrown together. Wyatt is hoping that it is not his heart. Publisher Weekly’s starred review says, “Dell’s latest is not to be missed,” and New York Times bestselling author B. J. Daniels advises, “Cinch ‘em down; Dell takes you on a fun, wild ride!” You can preorder your copy of Fearless in Texas wherever books are sold, and you can find out more at the author’s website, karilynndell, that’s K-A-R-I-L-Y-N-N-D-E-L-L dot com [karilynndell.com].

Each episode gets a transcript for many reasons, not the least of which is accessibility for people who can or do not, cannot or do not wish to listen. Each transcript is hand compiled by garlicknitter – thank you, garlicknitter! [You’re welcome! – gk] – and this week’s transcript is sponsored by A Duke in the Night by Kelly Bowen. If you like historical romance, if you like Sarah MacLean, if you like Tessa Dare, you will love this historical Regency romance. August Faulkner has returned with his eye on expanding his business empire. He’s a duke, he’s a scoundrel, he’s a titan of business, and he wears his roguish reputation as a badge of honor. Clara Hayward is the respected headmistress and is above reproach, but ten years ago she shared a scandalous waltz with August and, despite herself, has never forgotten the feeling of being in his arms. Can these opposites find a second chance at romance? RT Book Reviews raves, “What a way to start the Devils of Dover series!” A Duke in the Night by Kelly Bowen is on sale now wherever books are sold. You can find out more at kellybowen.net or forever-romance.com.

And of course at the website smartbitchestrashybooks.com/podcast, you will find the show notes, and I will have links to both of these books and options to buy or preorder them.

[Thunk] Oy. Now it is time for me to tell you about the podcast Patreon and – [thunk] – for Orville to flop over on the desk and thunk his tail onto the sound box. So Orville and I are now here to tell you about the podcast Patreon. Your support is deeply, deeply appreciated, especially if you are not a cat who wants to bang the sound box while I’m recording, without fail, every time. The podcast Patreon is at patreon.com/SmartBitches. When you make a monthly pledge, you are helping me continue the show, you are helping me commission transcripts for older episodes, and you are helping me continue to make sure the podcast quality improves with constant assistance from Orville, my feline audio engineer.

I also want to thank some of the Patreon folks personally, so to Abbey, Natasha, Maia, Amanda, and Regina, thank you very, very much for being part of the Patreon community. I deeply appreciate your help.

Other ways you can support the podcast? Yes! You can be a cat, and you can flop over on my desk and bang your tail on the sound box when I’m working. If that’s not possible, ‘cause you’re not a cat, you can leave a review wherever you listen or however you listen. You can tell a friend, you can subscribe, but the fact that you hang out with me each week, given how many podcasts there are, I am very grateful for that; thank you.

And if you are looking for more podcasts, RomancePodcasts.com will lead you to a list that I am continually updating of podcasts that are focused on the romance genre, which I assume is a thing that you dig.

The music you’re listening to is provided by Sassy Outwater. This is the Peatbog Faeries! This is Live @ 25, and this track is called “Tom in the Front.” You can find the album at Amazon or iTunes, and you can find the Peatbog Faeries on their website at peatbogfaeries.com.

Coming up on Smart Bitches this week – you know there’s a website that goes with the podcast, right? I’m assuming you knew that. I mean, it’s not like it’s a surprise – tomorrow, Saturday, the 24th, it’s Whatcha Reading? It’s one of the most popular posts every month where you tell us what you’re reading! So come and tell us, what books are you really liking right now? Sunday the 25th at 8:00 p.m. Eastern time, we are going to have a discussion of A Wrinkle in Time, both the book and the film, and I am so excited about it; I hope you will join us. The discussion is a text chat, so it’s not video or audio, it’s just typing text in a window at smartbitchestrashybooks.com. You’ll see it at the top on Sundays – Sunday: just Sunday the 25th, not all of them, just the one. And next week we have Cover Snark and Help a Bitch Out, a guest review that I’m tremendously excited about, and a review of a historical mystery audiobook that I’ve enjoyed. I hope you come out with us, come hang out with us, or come out with us if we go out. You could totally come along, but this is mostly, like, you virtually come hang out with us. Speaking of audiobooks, by the way, next week’s podcast is me and Amanda talking all about the audiobooks we’ve been enjoying. I hope you’ll tune in!

Now, as always, I end with a joke. I sent this joke to Meka, and she said I had to use it, so if you hate it a lot you can blame her. This was inspired by Eyetalianman on Reddit. You ready? It’s so bad. [Laughs] All right.

Why should everyone read horror novels in Braille?

Give up? Why should everyone read horror novels in Braille?

Because then you can feel when something is about to happen.

[Laughs] So bad! I think Orville just rolled his eyes at me! Or, you know, he just did that ‘cause that’s what cats do. Oh goodness, I like that joke!

So on behalf of everyone here, we wish you the very best of reading. Have a great weekend. We’ll see you back here next week.

[music, applause]