311. A Nerdy Bookish Deep Dive into My Oxford Year with Julia Whelan

 

[music]

Sarah Wendell: Hello, and welcome to episode number 311 of Smart Podcast, Trashy Books. I’m Sarah Wendell from Smart Bitches, Trashy Books. With me today again is Julia Whelan. After I recorded our interview about My Oxford Year, which we aired a couple months ago, author Julia Whelan asked if I ever did a more spoiler-heavy, analytical, deep-dive conversation about books on the podcast after they’ve been published. Well, we, we do now! In this episode, we are going to take a very bookish, nerdy deep dive into My Oxford Year, the themes and the Easter eggs hidden within it, and the structural and stylistic decisions that went into the creation of the story. So if you haven’t read My Oxford Year and you think you might want to, beware of all the spoilers; we go very spoiler-y in this episode. We talk about poetry and the reasons to tell a story with a big twist. We talk about the ways information is hidden in first person, present tense narratives, and why trust is a big component of making that narrative choice work. We also talk about grief and the challenges of perseverance when facing and departing from loss, and how writers have communicated grief. I also have questions in this episode from folks on Twitter and from the Patreon community as well. There is a lot of nerdy literary talk, so if you are a book nerd and you’ve read this book, welcome. Come on, join us; the water is fine.

I also want to thank the people who supported the podcast Patreon and the folks on Twitter who asked thoughtful questions, including Sarah Rider, Ellen Grafton, Cat McGuire, Hayley Ann – forgive me if I mess up your last name – Gienow-McConnell, and Megan Larsen.

This episode is being brought to you by The Billionaire Bull Rider by Kate Pearce. One by one, the Morgan men find themselves returning to the Northern California ranch where their troubled pasts first began. Together, they have a chance to leave the past behind and forge a new future based on brotherhood, hope, and love. In this fifth installment of bestselling author Kate Pearce’s popular Morgan Ranch series, Rio Martinez’s long and winding road has brought him to the legendary Western ranch, to the brothers he calls friends, and the French baker who could change his roving ways. After her husband abandoned her, Yvonne Payet threw herself into running the café that was her dream. She cherishes her hard-won independence, but Rio isn’t just the sexiest, most arrogant cowboy she’s ever met; he’s also got great ideas for expanding her business. With a reality TV show on the horizon and her ex demanding a second chance, Yvonne has to decide which sunset she wants to ride off into. The Billionaire Bull Rider by New York Times bestselling author Kate Pearce is available now wherever books are sold and at kensingtonbooks.com.

Every episode gets a transcript, and each transcript is compiled by garlicknitter. Thank you, garlicknitter! Today’s podcast transcript is brought to you by Defending Allye by Susan Stoker. Love is a life-and-death risk for the Mountain Mercenaries in New York Times bestselling author Susan Stoker’s explosive new series of alpha heroes, hot action, and hard passion. Ever since his last rescue op off the Pacific Coast, Mountain Mercenary Gray Rogers hasn’t been able to forget his latest “job” – Allye Martin. Any other woman would have panicked during a rescue, but the wily dancer kept her cool, even after being kidnapped by an elusive human trafficker. And Gray couldn’t be happier when a grateful Allye follows him home to Colorado Springs. For Allye, finding sanctuary in the arms – and bed – of the former Navy SEAL is only temporary. People are disappearing off the streets of San Francisco, victims of the same underground trade that targeted her, and Allye could be the key to dismantling the entire operation. She’s willing to do anything to bring them down. Gray isn’t, for good reason. But you don’t say no to a tough girl like Allye who refuses to play it safe. Now Gray is risking more than ever before. The Mountain Mercenaries have his back. But is it enough to keep the woman he loves out of harm’s way? Perfect for readers who love hot Navy SEALs, smart and tough heroines, and action-packed suspense, Defending Allye by Susan Stoker is published by Montlake Romance and is available now wherever books are sold.

I have a compliment in this episode, and it’s my favorite thing!

To Becca: You are the human equivalent of an always-full ice cube tray and the perfect temperature and blanket weight for sleeping.

If you would like a compliment of your very own, have a look at our podcast Patreon at patreon.com/SmartBitches. Every week the podcast and the transcript are supported by lovely folks who support the Patreon, and you can join them if you wish. I have so many interviews scheduled, and I’m constantly asking the Patreon community for question ideas and suggestions, so if you’re interested in that, you can make a pledge starting with one dollar a month and become part of our community!

I also want to thank some of the Patreon folks personally, so to Katherine, Chelsea, Ursula, Liz, and Leslie, thank you very much for being part of the podcast community.

Are there other ways to support a podcast like this one? Yes, there are, and I bet you know what they are, but I’m going to tell you anyway! You can sing along. You can leave a review wherever you listen or however you listen; you can tell a friend; you can subscribe; whatever works for you. Thank you most of all for hanging out with me each week.

The music you’re listening to is provided by Sassy Outwater, and I will have information at the end of the podcast as to who this is. I will also have a truly terrible joke, because, well, they’re fun, and I’ll have a preview of what’s coming up on the website this coming week. There is a website, goes with the podcast; figured you knew that. I will also have links to all of the books that we discuss, including some collections of poetry you might want to get your hands on.

I also want to thank especially Julia Whelan for making time to come back and do another interview where we take a very, very nerdy deep dive. I’m very excited about this episode; I hope you enjoy it!

Let’s do this thing. On with the podcast.

[music]

Julia Whelan: Hi! I am Julia Whelan. I am an actress, audiobook narrator, and writer, and my debut novel, My Oxford Year, came out in April, and Sarah and I were able to talk about it when it first came out, but we couldn’t really talk about it, ‘cause it’s a little bit spoiler-y, and so we decided to go back to the scene of the crime – [laughs] – and start over, now that maybe people had a chance to read it.

Sarah: I have this feeling with movies that, you know, once it’s been on an airplane, it’s sort of safe to assume the majority of people who are interested in preserving the spoiler have already seen it –

Julia: I like that rule.

Sarah: – and I don’t – yeah – and I don’t necessarily know what the rule is for a book, but I figure it came out in April; it’s now the end of July. That’s a pretty good window.

Julia: Well, and also people have to kind of self-select to listen to this podcast, and –

Sarah: Absolutely.

Julia: – we’ve made it very clear there’s going to be a lot of spoilers, so I’m okay with it.

Sarah: Yes.

Julia: I’m okay with it.

Sarah: Okay. So how was book tour? How was book release? This was your first book.

Julia: It was!

Sarah: Was it fun?

Julia: It was. I mean, fun? No, it was actually, it was way more stressful than I thought it was going to be. I, I wasn’t expecting the kind of anxiety that, that comes with it, and a friend of mine who’s an author had told me this, but I just thought I was going to be immune to it because of my acting background, and I’m used to getting up in people and kind of, like, jazz-hands-ing my way through and, you know, it’d be fine. But there was more anxiety than I’d anticipated, and I think it’s because for the first time I didn’t really have a, a place to hide. Like, when you’re a part of a TV show or a film or something, there’re so many other people involved, and this was really just –

Sarah: Yep.

Julia: – me being like, hey, here’s my brain open to you for your –

Sarah: [Laughs]

Julia: – for your opinion and judgment. Please come on in. And so there was a little bit of attendant anxiety, but I ended up getting over that really quickly, and it’s just been, it’s been a joy, so. Yeah, it’s been fine now.

Sarah: You did a lot of events, which I imagine is sort of like, as you say, you know, going from an ensemble to your own solitary stand-up event.

Julia: Well, it was interesting. I didn’t have, we didn’t really have a formal book tour per se, but I, I did the launch event in LA that was kind of more private with people that I, I knew, so that was, like, a party of just friends, sort of, and then we had a more public-facing launch a few days later at the amazing Ripped Bodice, and that was a couple of author friends of mine who were lovely to come by and support, so I felt like I had a, I had a support system and a team behind me with that, and then what was really interesting is I took about three weeks off, maybe even more than that, and then was in New York with the author Catherine McKenzie, and we did an event in Manhattan and then one in Jersey, and at that point the audience had shifted from, like, just people I know or Catherine knew to people who’d actually read the book, and –

Sarah: Oh, that’s an interesting shift!

Julia: Yeah, and that was really, that was really interesting, ‘cause people had very targeted questions, they were very engaged, and I got to kind of glimpse the, the fandom a little bit, if, if that’s even a word that can be applied to this.

Sarah: Absolutely, yeah.

Julia: But it was, that was really rewarding, and I realized that I, I enjoyed that. I enjoyed that interaction with people.

Sarah: So my first question then is to ask, what were some of the reactions? What were some of those very specific questions that you got once you started encountering readers who’d already experienced the story?

Julia: I think generally – I mean, look, I, I don’t, I hope there aren’t people in the world that would show up at a book reading just to kind of hate-watch it – [laughs] – so everyone was very positive, but I think that, I, I got the sense that – which is really gratifying – is that what ended up resonating with people to a, to the extent that they would actually show up for something like this and take time out of their day to come by and have me sign their book is they really liked the philosophy of the book. They, it, it moved them in some way. It was catalyzing in certain ways; there’ve been a number of people who have come up to me saying, you know, I just needed this at this particular moment in my life to, like, get me off my ass and help me make a decision and realize that there’s a bigger picture out there than what I am obsessing about on kind of a small detail level in my life, and –

Sarah: That’s lovely.

Julia: – or, or it’s helped me get through grief; it was the grief book I needed at this moment, and that’s a very – look, I can’t really take credit for that, ‘cause that’s something that I feel, that just some books happen at the right time for you, and that is something I obviously can’t control. I mean, I don’t think anyone who’s, you know, two weeks into their grieving process should read this book; I think it would be overwhelming – [laughs] – but –

Sarah: [Laughs] Yeah.

Julia: So that’s, that’s a luck of the draw situation. But that’s been very, very validating.

Sarah: But to know that your book was the emotional experience that someone really needed? That has to be a really incredible experience.

Julia: It is, and you know, even people who haven’t been through that, who just were like, I loved the romance; he’s so hot – [laughs] – even that’s gratifying, ‘cause that’s like, you know what? You got what you wanted out of it. I’m so happy about that. I’m glad it was a, a fun read for you, and you know, for people who just couldn’t, like, I’ve gotten some notes from people being like, I loved the first half, and then I just realized what the book was doing, and I just, it’s not you; I just don’t read books that like that. You know, I read to escape, and I just don’t want to go there, and I also feel like, you know what? Fine; you, I’m glad you took care of yourself there. I have no problem with that.

Sarah: Yep.

Julia: So.

Sarah: So you did mention to me that a lot of the readers that you’ve encountered responded specifically to the poetry and that even if they read it in an e-book, they wanted it in print so they could have print copies of the poems that start each chapter. Do you know which poems elicited the most response? Did that surprise you at all?

Julia: That’s a – no – that’s a good question. No one really was – I, I haven’t heard that there was specific poe- – a lot of people have said that it just made them want to go back and read some of this poetry, which was also a beautiful kind of –

Sarah: All good.

Julia: – ancillary benefit to this. But for instance, I, I know a friend of mine, friends of mine are getting married this year, and they asked me to stand up and read a poem at their, during their ceremony, and one of the poems that they, they want me to read was the Rossetti poem at the beginning of chapter fifteen, which I actually pulled the book out, ‘cause I was like, I’m trying to remember the poetry. And it’s, the snippet that I use is about the relationship, but the entire poem is really that general feeling of déjà vu and we’ve been here, and it says:

“You have been mine before,—

How long ago I may not know:

But just when at that swallow’s soar

Your neck turn’d so,

Some veil did fall,—I knew it all of yore.”

And that –

Sarah: That’ll work.

Julia: Yeah – [laughs] – that’ll work, but that, that feeling –

Sarah: [Laughs] Nice job, by the way!

Julia: Oh, thank you. But that, that feeling, the, the, that sense of we’ve been here before was also kind of the entire point of using the poetry in the book for me. It was kind of signaling to the reader that these themes of love and loss, people have been writing about them, reading them since before Ella and Jamie, through the entire history of this city that they’re in. These are not singular experiences to these characters, and so that was the –

Sarah: Yeah.

Julia: – and I’m glad that people are responding to that, going, you know, let’s, let’s, I would like to go back into this, this stuff that used to torture me when I was a sophomore in high school, that I hated doing – [laughs] – you know?

Sarah: Now it resonates –

Julia: Yeah!

Sarah: – and I, and I get it! And that’s a very sort of, this liberating feeling.

Julia: Well, it is, and I think it also, ‘cause I, I never wanted, I don’t want the book, I didn’t want the book to feel in any way snobby or inaccessible, that, you know, these are very clever people, these are Oxonians talking about very clever things, and I never wanted it to feel you know, exclusionary in any way, and so the fact that people were able to follow the conversations and kind of be a fly on the wall, I, I’m, I’m happy that no one, that people seem engaged with it.

Sarah: Yes, and that, in some of the reviews that I’ve seen, one of the things that is mentioned frequently is that the emotion of the chapter and the emotional feeling of the chapter often matched the emotional sort of capsule of the piece of poetry at the start, so they were picked well.

Julia: Thank you!

Sarah: Nice job, by the way.

Julia: Thank you! Thank you. Yeah, they –

Sarah: [Laughs]

Julia: – they, they moved, they moved around; I moved ‘em around at the end there a little bit, but I, I, thank you, that was very deliberate, so it’s nice when people recognize that.

[Laughter]

Sarah: Now, you said to me that you included references to Middlemarch and Brides-, Brideshead –

Julia: Yes.

Sarah: – and that people didn’t all entirely catch those Easter eggs. Do you want to spoil those parts?

Julia: Sure, let’s do it. So first of all, well, Middlemarch, I think, is, is obvi-; I pretty much explain why Middlemarch is relevant to, to the story and to the character, but generally speaking, I think Middlemarch is probably – I mean, in my opinion – the, not just the best novel ever written, but – [laughs] – but the, the best description of a, of a young woman coming to terms with, that maybe her life is not going to match up to what she thought she was going to do, and what she’s going to do with the circumstances that she’s given, and so in that respect, this is very much a, an ode to that journey, and, and I, I love that. With Brideshead, it, it’s hard not to write about Oxford and to not have the spirit of Evelyn Waugh just present, because that is so much how people think of Oxford, and that’s kind of what the Charlie character is in a certain way, is, I feel like Charlie could have been there in the early 1920s with that crew. And the, the thing that I, that I did, that I, so far no one has seems, has seemed to pull out, is that at the very beginning when Ella first gets off the coach and she’s on the High, and there’s a family looking at a map trying to figure out which way to go, and this, this bike swarm of rugby players comes by, and one of them clutches the mi-, the map out of the family’s hand and raises it in the air and says, “Et in Arcadia Ego,” and –

Sarah: Right.

Julia: – keeps going. That is the, book one of Brideshead Revisited, that is the title of, of the first book –

Sarah: Oh my good gracious!

Julia: – but more than that, and it’s, it’s the, it’s a motif that Waugh used in that book; it’s actually in the, in, in Brideshead it’s a skull that Charles has on his, on his desk, and on the forehead of the skull it says “Et in Arcadia Ego,” but what it means is even in paradise, here I am; I am here, and the speaker is Death.

Sarah: Right!

Julia: And it was –

Sarah: And that’s, that’s a small – spoiler alert! –

Julia: Yes!

Sarah: – small bit of –

Julia: It’s a little bit of –

Sarah: – bit of foreshadowing.

Julia: It’s a little bit of foreshadowing, and it’s also –

Sarah: A long foreshadowing.

Julia: Yeah, yes, and it’s kind of this just feeling of, you know, I mean, the rugby player’s just being obnoxious. He’s – [laughs] – stealing the map and –

Sarah: That, like Charlie is –

Julia: Right, I mean, of course.

Sarah: – perennial. [Laughs]

Julia: But it’s a, but it’s a, just a little clue that Ellen misses, which is to remind you that even in this, even in this world, this paradise that you’ve wanted to get to for so long, this Edenic state, it will fall, and that’s, and that is also, I think, just, for a city with that kind of history, too – I mean, you are living among the spirits of the people that were there before you.

Sarah: Yep.

Julia: So anyway –

Sarah: And you have a sort of perennial character like Charlie too, who –

Julia: Yeah, who represents that.

Sarah: – is so present.

Julia: Absolutely; he –

Sarah: Yes.

Julia: – he could be Oscar Wilde, you know; I mean, he’s, he’s just been there forever. But yeah, so that was – and, and then the book closes with the, the quote from Brideshead.

Sarah: Correct.

Julia: But, ‘cause I just, like I said, I think that it’s impossible to write a novel about Oxford and not talk about Evelyn Waugh, so there we are.

[Laughter]

Sarah: Yeah. I can see why that is, and it’s, and it’s hard to capture a place that is so unique and so resonant without talking about one of the reasons being that you, you have so many people that have walked on those exact same steps as you are.

Julia: Yeah, that’s part of the thrill of it!

Sarah: Yeah. I studied abroad when I was fifteen and then when I was twenty, and I went to the University of Salamanca.

Julia: Oh, I’ve been to Salamanca!

Sarah: Salamanca is the shit! [Laughs]

Julia: It’s the shit, and it’s also very Ox-, it’s very much like Oxford in a lot of ways!

Sarah: Yes! It’s like a very sun-bathed, drier –

Julia: Yes!

Sarah: – hotter Oxford.

Julia: It’s beautiful.

Sarah: But I had all of my courses in this plaza right by the big, bit façade where you’re supposed to find the frog. There’s a very tiny –

Julia: [Laughs] Oh yeah!

Sarah: Did you find the frog?

Julia: No. [Laughs]

Sarah: Find the tiny frog, and you ace all your classes. Totes found the frog –

Julia: Oh good.

Sarah: – it was pretty cool. But I was there for, like, you know, three and a half months; I had a lot of time to stare at this giant wall. But all of my classes were in these very, very modern classrooms that had been retrofitted into an incredibly old building, and I remember very clearly thinking as I walked around Salamanca touching the wall, you know, this, this all existed before anyone had shown up in the US to be like, oh yeah, this is totally ours now! Like –

Julia: Right.

Sarah: – this, this is from the 1400s and the 1300s and older and older and older, and am I touching a spot on the wall that had been touched by a person my age a hundred years ago? Probably! And it’s really hard to encapsulate that and explain it as part of the experience of being –

Julia: It is! There’s that –

Sarah: – present.

Julia: – there’s that beautiful moment. Weirdly, I was just watching –

Sarah: Yes!

Julia: – I was just watching a, the, the HBO documentary on Robin Williams, and one of the clips that they showed was that – which I had forgotten – it was that amazing scene in Dead Poets where he’s got – I mean, what scene isn’t amazing in Dead Poets Society? – but he’s got –

Sarah: True.

Julia: – all of the boys, like, gathered in front of the glass cases where the trophies and the pictures of previous classes are, and he says, you know, lean in, lean in, boys. Look at them, look at them. They look just like you. You see the hope in their eyes, you know, and, and he said, and there’s this moment where he’s like, lean in and hear what they’re whispering, and they say, “Carpe diem,” and then he says, and all of these boys are now fertilizing daisies, sons. Like, go out and do something –

Sarah: Yep.

Julia: – and it’s just that, it is that beautiful, these things that we walk by all the time, and if you just take a second to be like, I’m not the first one here.

Sarah: Nope. It’s, it’s a much larger experience than yourself, and yet your own life is so immediate and so painful, it does kind of take up your entire field of vision sometimes.

Julia: It does, it does.

Sarah: Yep. So speaking of field of vision, I want to ask you about the choices that you made to make the story first person present. Now, I originally had two questions, and you told me that, this folded those questions into, into, into one, that your reason for that choice had a lot to do with the story you were telling.

Julia: Yes. Okay, so, and we, to be fair, we prepared y’all that this was going to be, like, a deep dive into craft talk, lit nerd stuff, so, like, just –

Sarah: Oh yeah. This is no boundaries.

Julia: – skip ahead if you’re bored. Okay, but this is, this –

[Laughter]

Julia: But we’re not, so we’re going to keep going. So –

Sarah: Let, let the nerding-out begin.

Julia: Right. So in the last interview that we did, and in every interview since then, I’ve been very clear about telling people, which is a, an essay at the back of the book, that this began life as a screenplay, and it was always a, even working on the screenplay, what became the challenge of the story is this issue that you have that it’s kind of broken in half and that it’s two tones, and the first har-, the first part is romantic comedy, and then the second part is a, is a romantic drama, and how do you bridge those two parts of the story? And –

Sarah: Yeah!

Julia: – it’s, it’s comp-, I mean, every story has its complications, but this is, this is challenging in that the one thing I didn’t want to do – I was very adamant – was that I didn’t want to set up a situation where the reader felt that the rug had been pulled out from under them.

Sarah: Right.

Julia: And to feel that I had been lying to them in any way. And to me, the simple explanation, the simple solution to that, which you don’t have at a, in a screenplay but you have in a book, was to make it first person so that there wasn’t a, a narrator, a third-person narrator voice who had been withholding information. There was a first-person narrator who just didn’t know the information.

Sarah: Right. And that –

Julia: And then I, and then I thought –

Sarah: – that makes a lot of sense!

Julia: Yeah! At least, that was the intention, and then I thought, well, even more to the point, I, first person present is extremely difficult. It’s hard to write, it is hard to read, but I felt that I really wanted the reader to be on this journey with Ella and to go through what she went through, and if in any way possible to have this thing that happens to her feel very real, the way that things just happen to you in life and you have to deal with them. And so –

Sarah: Right.

Julia: – the immediacy of first person present made the most sense to me, again, because I didn’t want a, anyone to feel like something had been withheld from them, and to be able to go on that journey with her. And it was, it was challenging, but that was the, that was the best way I could, I could find to create that.

Sarah: That makes a lot of sense, because that way the immediacy of what’s happening is located in the text as well as in the narrative that it’s telling.

Julia: Yes. Right, and you’re giving people – I mean, I, I think for anyone who’s had, you know, grief, or you’ve gotten that phone call – I mean, for me it’s like, I think part of what went into this book is that I was, while I was in the writing process of this, of the screenplay and the novel, both of them, I was dealing with grief, and I was, my father died very suddenly. I was working on a film, we were five days into shooting, I was in North Carolina, and I got that call. I got that call –

Sarah: Oh, no.

Julia: – completely out of the blue, but that’s, that’s a marker in my life now. That is a before –

Sarah: That’s a time stamp –

Julia: Right.

Sarah: – that you don’t particularly want.

Julia: Before March 9th. After March 9th. And –

Sarah: Yep.

Julia: – that is a, that, that is often how it happens, and you don’t, if you, God, if we saw that coming, we wouldn’t be able to get out of bed, so, like, that idea of you’re just moving through your life, and you’re dealing with everything that’s coming at you until you hit a wall, until a wall just drops in front of you, and then how do you deal with it? So that was the idea. In terms of the, in terms of then balancing the tone, I mean, I, the, again, I think the task for me just became if you can create an engaging enough voice, if Ella is engaging enough and trustworthy enough that people will follow her through it, then maybe they’ll be able to roll with the way the story changes. But it was, it was always, yeah, it was, I knew, I knew what that task was going to be, because I was, I had so intimately dealt with it in the screenplay.

Sarah: And you were able to locate the emotions of the characters exactly as they were happening in a way that would be hopefully more visceral for the reader, too, because when, my struggle with first person, especially first person present, is that there comes a point where I have to sort of give up my own ego, and for some, sometimes it’s really easy for me to do and sometimes not so much, but I have to be like, okay, I’m not in charge here. I have to locate my point of view inside this person’s point of view, first person very immediate. For example, there is a book coming out the first week of August that I’m talking a lot about called Jane Doe by Victoria Helen Stone?

Julia: Hmm.

Sarah: It is a first person narrator who is a female sociopath, and she owns it, and she’s very aware of why she’s different, and she is getting revenge on a man who hurt someone she, that she cared about, and it was both terrifying and really liberating to spend that many pages in the head of somebody who has no shame, no guilt, no fear, and no remorse, which are things that are, you know, inculcated into women at a very young age.

Julia: Yes.

Sarah: So I was very willing to surrender my ego in that point, because wow, the catharsis was great! But when you’re experiencing, for example, in, in this book, the immediacy and of potentially imminent grief, it can be very, very painful, and it’s –

Julia: Yeah, and our reflex is I don’t want to do this.

Sarah: Ah, oh, unpleasant feelings –

Julia: Yeah.

Sarah: – I’m here for the good feels! Ugh. Was it hard for you to write up to the sort of point where the story takes a turn?

Julia: Yeah, I think in a weird way, that was the harder part for me. I think the first half of the book was probably the more challenging part for me, and it’s probably just because – [laughs] – unlike Ella, I knew what, where it was going. So I felt a little bit –

Sarah: [Laughs]

Julia: – like I was leading her to slaughter, and –

Sarah: Yep.

Julia: – and I, and I think the other, you know, the other part of this, too, is when you’re trying to create a char-, I find characters much easier to write in third person, because you can be honest about them in a way characters are never really honest about themselves. So, like –

Sarah: Yes.

Julia: – a sociopath works really well for first person. This goes back to our original Gone Girl conversation. That works really well because she doesn’t care if you think she’s horrible. So there’s, there’s something that we always, first person present can often feel really disingenuous to me, because it, it never, it, it’s very hard for me to find that a character would be self reflective enough or honest enough to be able to place themselves in their context, and so there’s a lot, I mean, I think some of the early feedback I got was like, I wasn’t even sure I really liked Ella! And I was like, that’s actually fine. I’m, I’m fine with that, because I don’t think, I don’t know if she knows she really likes herself. And, like, there’s a, you know, there’s definitely a version of this where it could have been almost dual perspectives?

Sarah: Yeah!

Julia: But again, I didn’t want to set up this thing where Jamie was lying to the reader. He lies to Ella –

Sarah: Yeah.

Julia: – but he doesn’t lie to the reader. And, you know, it, but it was, it was a, it was a choice, and there were a lot of times where I was like, why did I do this? Because especially, I think, also coming from the screenwriter side, I like to be able to cut away. Cut, cutting away is like how you, it’s such a, it’s a cheat, but it’s a good one, where, like, how do you build tension? How do you withhold information? How do you – you, you can use that so effectively in storytelling, but when it is first person present, there’s just no cutting away. And –

Sarah: No, there is really not.

Julia: There’s really not, and one of the – this kind of came to a, to a head for me, and now it’s probably one of my favorite things in the book, but this came to a head for me in, in chapter twelve, which is when the book suddenly goes into the second person, and it’s, it was because this is after Ella and Jamie have slept together, and they, they’ve decided that they’re going to try this friends with benefits, no strings thing.

Sarah: Mm-hmm.

Julia: And, like, I just was resisting writing that relationship, ‘cause it was like, first of all, we all know, we all know what this is. Every, you know, the, I don’t need to explain the particulars of, like, how they made it work, and also I don’t want to take the pages, and also it’s not really relevant to the story, so how do I get, how do I, like, jump forward in first person present without bringing the audience along with me? And so it just, I, it was like I worked on it for a couple of days and kept writing these encounters between them, and then it was starting to feel very romance-novel-y to me in a way that I didn’t feel was appropriate for this book, and so I just thought, I’m not liking this, and I did one of those, I got in the car, and I went to the Huntington Museum in, in, well, house and gardens in Pasadena, which is kind of the most, like, British sort of thing we have in LA, and I just, like, went and spent the day there and –

Sarah: [Laughs]

Julia: – walked around, and realized that I, this was a way around it, that I could have Ella – because she’s lying to herself at this point, and so having the distance of the second person then became really valuable, because it’s like she’s couching her entire experience that she’s telling you about as if it’s hypothetical. Like, let’s say –

Sarah: Right.

Julia: – this. Maybe. And it was, it accomplished everything I needed in that, in that moment. And then –

Sarah: That must have been really hard.

Julia: Well, the, yeah, but the best part of that though is then like a month or so later, I’m recording Taylor Jenkins Reid’s One True Loves, a fantastic book, and there’s a section where she’s got to cover, she covers, like, four years, and I’m reading it, I’m recording it, and I’m like, son of a bitch!

Sarah: [Laughs]

Julia: She did the, she did the same thing! There’s a, there’s a chapter in second person, and I was like, okay, well, if it’s good enough for Taylor, it’s, it’s good enough for me, and I texted her, and I was like, thank you. I’ll explain why later. But, like –

Sarah: [Laughs]

Julia: – thank you for, like, validating and verifying this choice I just made. So yeah.

Sarah: Oh, that’s, that’s always the best. Like, oh, oh-kay. Whew!

Julia: Yeah.

Sarah: I’m all right here.

Julia: Yeah. So.

Sarah: I, yes. I understand that very well. So what’s up with Tennyson?

Julia: [Laughs] Why, why Tennyson?

Sarah: Yeah!

Julia: Ugh. Why any man? No –

Sarah: [Laughs]

Julia: – I –

Sarah: Better than Byron.

Julia: Yeah, oh God yes.

Sarah: [Laughs]

Julia: Oh God, anything’s better than Byron, although – Tennyson is, Tennyson is a tricky figure, and I, so I came to know Tennyson – [laughs] – came to know Tennyson when I was at Oxford, ‘cause what I was working on was the, his specifically, but also generally the Victorian appropriation of the Middle English Arthurian legends. So how under, and why, under Victoria, there was this boom and resurgence of King Arthur and Camelot that hadn’t really been dealt with in, I don’t know, four hundred years, so why?

Sarah: Mm-hmm.

Julia: And Tennyson was really at the, at the beginning of that, and he became the, the torchbearer for the legends, and so I got to know him through his Arthurian work and then got into all the other stuff, and before I was, started this book, I was working on historical fiction that actually, where Tennyson was actually the main character, so it just became, for me, a kind of – [laughs] – lazy writer decision of like, you know what? Jamie’s going to be a Tennyson scholar, ‘cause –

Sarah: ‘Cause you’ve already done the work!

Julia: – ‘cause I already know it, and –

Sarah: [Laughs]

Julia:  And he, and he is known. I mean, I, I don’t even think he’s as well known for the Arthurian stuff; I think he’s more well known for the grief poems, and for Jamie that made sense, that, you know, Tennyson spent seventeen years writing grief poetry about having lost his best friend in his early twenties, and so there’s, he, that’s really his legacy, so it, it made sense.

Sarah: That does make sense. He’s one of those sort of perennial element, or, yeah, perennial elements who’s always there in some form.

Julia: Well, he lived long. He was –

Sarah: Yep.

Julia: – he was poet laureate. He was poet laureate under a very, very stable and, you know, booming monarch, and so he had kind of, he was able to do what he wanted to do, in a sense. There wasn’t a lot of political upheaval or turmoil, although he did find himself on the wrong side of things a couple of times. But you, I think that for that reason he’s just, his stuff has been documented since he was, you know, twenty, and so there’s just a lot. There’s a lot, which is the other thing, because that’s one of those things where, like, no one, there doesn’t need to be another Tennyson scholar? So for me, I had to, like, work out, even for myself – I don’t think anyone else cared – but I had to be like, this is what Jamie is studying in particular. Like – [laughs] – this is the, like, the stupid level of what he is working on, because there really, like, who, we don’t need more work on Tennyson; we just don’t.

[Laughter]

Sarah: Yeah. I think we, we’ve covered him pretty well.

Julia: Mm-hmm, mm-hmm.

Sarah: But he can inform characters the way he did Jamie in a way that is still very relevant.

Julia: Yeah, I think so. Yeah, I mean, I, but I think that about poetry in general, I mean, and writers in general. I think that there’s just this kind of disappointing proclivity that we, we seem to have where if someone’s not writing in our day and age, it’s just, it’s, then it’s old, it’s antique, it’s dusty, it’s not valuable, and it’s like, I think it’s essential, ‘cause I think it’s about perspective; that you’re not alone in this; that someone else has been through this; that, you know, they turned their trauma into art; and I, yeah, I agree. And I think he’s, he’s just so, just, like, also on a craft level, it’s so beautiful! It’s just so pretty!

Sarah: Yeah.

Julia: So.

Sarah: And especially with, with, with some poetry, once you sort of – can’t think of a better way to say this – once you crack the code and you get what the emo-, what, what emotion is trying to be conveyed, I mean, it’ll knock you flat on the floor.

Julia: Yeah. Yeah.

Sarah: Boom! Right in the face!

Julia: No, I mean, I, I have a, because I’m not a – we talked about this, I think, a little bit last time, but I’m, I’m not poetry inclined? I kind of avoided it during my education; it just wasn’t something I really enjoyed, but to this day, like, I have some go-to poets that I, I don’t, I mean, I’ll just get lost in them!

Sarah: Yep.

Julia: Seamus Heaney just, I, I sit down to read him, and I just become one big goosebump.

[Laughter]

Sarah: I have that experience with some poets too.

Julia: Ah!

Sarah: Pablo Neruda, as much as I –

Julia: Ah, Neruda.

Sarah: Geeze Louise, I mean, that’s one of the cases where I need to separate the art from the creator very, very much.

Julia: Oh yeah, well, yeah.

Sarah: So what else is new? But there are, there are, there are poems where I read them, and not only am I sort of eviscerated emotionally by, by having had this feeling that I know communicated in such a way, but I’m, like, deeply grateful to the person who gave me the book again?

Julia: Yeah.

Sarah: I would not have had this experience if this person hadn’t given me this book. Whoa! Because even though I really like words and I really like reading, every now and again I am surprised that words can do that thing.

Julia: Yeah. And I think, but that is, and that is truly what poetry is amazing at, because you –

Sarah: Yes!

Julia: – that, it’s so few words! Like –

Sarah: How’d you do that with, like, five words? Really, that’s –

Julia: It took me, it took me an entire book to say what I wanted to say, and, like, you just did it in, in a stanza. It’s unbelievable! So –

Sarah: Yep.

Julia: – a, a teacher of mine, actually, my, my old studio teacher had given me a, I think it was the hundred love poems of Neruda [One Hundred Love Sonnets] and, ‘cause she’s always been like, you’ve got to, I don’t understand why you don’t like poetry, and I was always like, I just don’t have the patience! I don’t like it; I don’t get it, and so she gave it to me, and I remember about ten years ago now, I was sitting at – I don’t even remember what it was for, but I was sitting in an audition in LA, and I had this book of poetry, and I’m trying to just keep it together in the waiting room, looking at my watch, being like, I need to go plug the meter if they don’t hurry up. Like, ah –

Sarah: [Laughs]

Julia: And I was reading this book, and – an actual, physical book; that’s how long ago this was – and this guy came up to me in the waiting room. Like, in retrospect, gorgeous, like, kind of like motorcycle jacket sort of –

Sarah: Yep.

Julia: – Gael Garcia Bernal sort of look to him, and he goes, do you like Neruda? And I said, uh, no.

Sarah: [Laughs]

Julia: Like, I was just taken out of the book for a second, and I was like –

Sarah: Damn it!

Julia: – I was like, what are we talking about? Like, I wasn’t even paying attention, and he, he said, oh, are you reading it in, in English or in the Spanish? And I said –

Sarah: Oh, come on!

Julia: Yeah! I was like, I was like, English, it’s English; it’s a translation. And he’s like, okay, and there’s this pause, and I just don’t know why I was so slow on the uptake. I don’t know why, but I was just, like, sitting here going, I’m not getting this, I’m not getting this, and he goes, he’s like, well, if you ever need someone to say it to you in Spanish, you, you let me know. And I, I was like, I was like, yeah, okay, I’ll do that, thanks. Like, just –

Sarah: [Laughs]

Julia: – dumb, and it was only ‘cause I was like, I was in the audition, I wasn’t, I was, the poetry, I was, like, just too distracted, and it was only as I was driving home, I was like, you idiot!

Sarah: [Laughs more]

Julia: Like, a rare, a unicorn just, like, came up to you, and you just shat upon it. It was amazing. Anyway. Yeah.

Sarah: Well, there’s your next book.

Julia: Yeah, right, but then I, I really, but then I did get into Neruda, after I – [laughs] – maybe he sparked something in me, and now I always think of him when I read Neruda, but – I, well, so gorgeous.

Sarah: [Laughs]

Julia: The poetry, the poetry, the poetry.

Sarah: Yeah, of course.

Julia: Yeah.

Sarah: [Laughs]

Julia: Yeah, amazing. So.

Sarah: So we have some questions from people on Twitter and people on my Patreon who are super excited –

Julia: Oh!

Sarah: – that we are recording this episode.

Julia: Okay!

Sarah: The first question is from Sarah Rider. She says, I really enjoyed this book. I’d love to know if you – try to change the tense here – if you have or will narrate any romance novels in the future, because you’re the best narrator she’d ever listened to.

Julia: Aw!

Sarah: Also, was it hard or easy to narrate your own book? Thank you!

Julia: Wow, okay. So we talked about the audiobooks, the audiobook experience of narrating this a little bit in the last episode, but it was actually hard. I’ll just cut right to that. It was, it was difficult but immensely rewarding, as you can probably imagine. Yes, I do, I mean, the line between romance and women’s fiction for me, I, I really record mostly women’s fiction. In the romance category, I recorded a lot of Nora Roberts. My suggest –

Sarah: You won an Audie for that, right?

Julia: I did, I did, I did.

Sarah: Congratulations!

Julia: Thank you. I think if you, if you go to Audible and search my name and then filter for romance, you’ll see what pops up and maybe that’ll, that’ll be enough, ‘cause I honestly, I’m drawing a blank right now.

[Laughter]

Julia: I mean, Taylor’s books are, Taylor’s, Taylor Jenkins Reid’s books are very, are, like, complicated love story, really satisfying, good books, but yeah, I would, I would do that.

Sarah: One question I have – I actually have a, a very long email message from a podcast listener who is super curious about many, many things in audiobooks, and one of the things she wanted to know was the reading aloud of sex scenes.

Julia: Mm.

Sarah: Is that sometimes difficult? Like, are there moments where you’re just like, wh-, what? No, I can’t do this right now. [Laughs]

Julia: Yep!

Sarah: Or is sort of like text like any other sometimes?

Julia: Well, it, it is, but it isn’t. You, so it become – and that’s, I’m not, I’m trying to, I’m not trying to avoid the, the answer here. [Laughs] I just –

Sarah: Of course!

Julia: – I’m trying to explain. It is very much just part of the text, but in the way that you still have to be cognizant of what it means to the story. So, like, without being too euphemistic, but, like, the rising action –

Sarah: Mm-hmm?

Julia: – of the story, it’s often a climactic point in the book, and it needs to be treated as such, so in the same way that, like, an epic battle or fight scene three-quarters of the way through needs to be treated as such. So it can be awkward. I don’t like to vocalize sometimes what is suggested I vocalize? So the, you know –

Sarah: Yeah.

Julia: – heavy breathing or moaning or stuff like that gets weird?

Sarah: [Laughs]

Julia: The guy voices can get weird. You know, but, I, I don’t know. I think the fir-, it’s like anything. It’s just, you just become inured to it. I, it, it’s, it’s, it’s easy at this point.

Sarah: Yep. You’ve figured out how this works.

Julia: Yes, literally how the mechanics work. Like –

[Laughter]

Julia: – there’s a, there’s definitely a first-time jitters sort of thing, and then it, it becomes, it becomes, you’re easy. You become easy.

[Laughter]

Sarah: Okay!

Julia: Yep. Yeah.

Sarah: Ellen Grafton – to change tracks a little bit –

Julia: Mm-hmm.

Sarah: – said, to what degree do you think Tennyson’s reimagining of Arthurian legends influenced Tolkien’s portrayal of Galadriel?

Julia: Okay, so – [laughs] I saw –

Sarah: And also the sex scenes; also that was interesting? [Laughs]

Julia: Yeah, right, exactly. So I’m, I saw this one, and I’m laughing only because Ellen is actually a friend of mine, and so she’s, she’s, she’s baiting me, because she knows that I haven’t read The Lord of the Rings. So –

Sarah: [Laughs] Watch, now you’ll be asked to record it.

Julia: Right, so thanks, Ellen. But no –

Sarah: [Laughs]

Julia: – I – or, yeah. But so, I will have this, I will have this discussion with her.

Sarah: [Laughs] You’ll take this up with her at a later date?

Julia: But, but my understanding is, so that’s the Cate Blanchett character, right?

Sarah: Right.

Julia: So I think she’s probably talking about Tennyson’s treatment of the Lady of the Lake, and that is, that is a whole other, that is a whole other discussion.

Sarah: That is a bit of a discussion.

Julia: Yeah, yeah. M’kay, so, Ellen, thanks.

Sarah: [Laughs] Cat McGuire says – now, this is an interesting question – she says she hasn’t been able to read My Oxford Year because the blurb on the back suggests that it’s a romantic relationship between a professor and a student. Is this so, and if yes, how did you deal with the inherent power imbalance? And we had a little bit of discussion on this, about this on Twitter, because she was asking specifically from her own experience of serial, ongoing sexual harassment on the part of professors –

Julia: Ugh.

Sarah: – of several writing programs in Canada – bleah.

Julia: Ugh.

Sarah: But I also wondered, maybe there were other readers who saw this and thought, oh, that’s, that’s not for me, whereas in the book, the power differential is very, very different. Do you want to talk about that a little bit?

Julia: Sure. So first of all, this goes to the problem also of, like, blurbs. Like, condensing into a blurb that he is a postdoc, doing his postdoc fellowship with certain teaching responsibilities and is given a section of a lecture class to Ella, and he is no way responsible for her grading, and he is no way responsible for the outcome of her life in this department, and it’s only for the first term, and it’s only one class doesn’t really fit well into a blurb, but I do understand why that’s potentially triggering for people. And I think that for me, it was always, always important to clarify that he in no way had any power over her.

Sarah: No.

Julia: And part of that comes through being able to explain the Oxford tutorial system, where even, even when you are an, even when you’re an undergraduate or a graduate student but you have tutors that are kind of in charge of your education, they’re tutors, meaning they teach you what you need to know to do the test that will determine whether you stay on or whether you graduate. So they’re not in, ever responsible for anything other than making sure you do the best you’re, that you are the best prepared you can be to take the test. So I, I think that, I mean, generally, I mean, what she’s talking about is so horrific and such an abuse of power, and especially – I mean, you see this sometimes in creative writing programs where they bring in a writer as a, as a guest artist or something, and they’re just not cognizant, or if they are, they don’t care, of the rules of a university, and –

Sarah: Right.

Julia: – it’s, it’s just, it’s just icky to me. It’s icky, and I, I think if you’re going to write that story, then that’s what the story needs to be about. Then it’s a, then it’s a story about power, and that is, that is not, not the story –

Sarah: Not the story that you are telling.

Julia: No. No. But I, yeah, I think that, I think that she’s right. There’s just certain tropes that I think at this point we either need to retire completely, or we need to do the work on them.

Sarah: Yeah. Yeah.

Julia: Yeah.

Sarah: And power differentials are almost always fodder for different tropes. I mean, that’s –

Julia: Mm-hmm.

Sarah: – sort of the foundation layer of romance, but the ways in which the power imbalance cannot be corrected does not a good romance make.

Julia: No, exactly!

Sarah: So –

Julia: I mean, I, I was thinking that, and I think that, I think that we all accept that there are certain things in our fantasies, you know, that fuel us in that way –

Sarah: Mm-hmm.

Julia: – that we would never stand for in real life, so that is just a split, and also the human condition that we kind of need to understand better as well. Like, the idea of your literature professor is one thing; the actuality of it is like, this would be terrible. This is terrible; this is life-ruining for both people; this is –

Sarah: Yep.

Julia: – this is not a good idea. But I think that there’s – like, I was just thinking, I, I read, early, early on in my career I was given a backlist title of a romance novelist, and it was written literally the year I was born, and it was so, ugh. It was just really, really –

Sarah: [Laughs]

Julia: – revolting because of the power differential, what we’re talking about. It was just like someone who, she was so, she didn’t have any mobility, she had no currency, she had no agency, and the, the guy was exploiting all of those things to be with her.

Sarah: I’ve read that book!

Julia: I think –

Sarah: Yep.

Julia: I mean, I don’t think it’s, I don’t think there’s one. And it was interesting to me to see how maybe that’s changed?

Sarah: Mm-hmm.

Julia: That maybe that’s, I don’t, I don’t know, I’m not in touch enough with what’s happening in romance generally, but I certainly, it doesn’t come to me a lot, those stories, anymore? So, yeah, I, I hope that we’ve evolved a little bit, but it’s just, it’s not in any way appealing or attractive to me.

Sarah: No.

Julia: So.

Sarah: Now, I hope I’m not going to completely kill this name. So Hayley Ann, I apologize in advance, but Hayley Ann Gienow-McConnell – or Gienow-McConnell – said, knowing that the novel is inspired by a pre-existing treatment for a screenplay, how would your novel have been different if you’d had no preconceived notions of the story? Had this opportunity not come along, was there another novel that was taking shape in your mind?

Julia: Yeah, so good question. First of all, to answer the second part of the question first: yes, there were. Like I said, I was working on historical fiction before this, but I was also working on a YA novel, and I kind of had a couple of things going. The interesting thing about this, it’s hard for me to distance myself enough from the screenplay, because I had worked on the screenplay and had already put a lot of my own energy into it, to kind of completely dissociate it from, from me, but I will say that I think if someone had come to me, even as a screenwriter, and said, we would like a love story set in Oxford, I don’t think it would have been this love story, because I just, that’s not where my mind immediately goes. And I, so, for that reason, this is not the, you know, this would not have been if, if I were like, I’m going to write my Oxford novel.

Sarah: Mm-hmm.

Julia: I don’t know that this is what I would have set out to do originally, but by the time I sat down to write the book, the story had become so important to me, and it was touching on so many personal parts of myself and my own, the things that I was dealing with, that it, it became my story, for sure.

Sarah: Yeah. And it also, it seems to have been sort of infused with so much of your own affection and experience for Oxford, with Oxford as well.

Julia: Yes. Yes. I mean, I think I probably would have done, because it’s just a write-what-you-know sort of thing, I think I definitely would have had an American woman there. You know, I, I, I feel pretty confident about that, but knowing me, I probably, I probably would have set it back like a hundred years before and had it have been the first woman at Oxford.

Sarah: [Laughs] That would have – you know, no pressure.

Julia: No presh, but that probably would have been if it had been a, if I’d just been set, set loose on it, that’s probably what I would’ve come up with and then hated myself.

Sarah: [Laughs more]

Julia: So, yeah.

Sarah: So one question that I received from my Patreon community is from Megan Larsen, and she says she read your book and she loved it.

Julia: Mm-hmm?

Sarah: And she says, I know it was billed as more women’s fiction than romance, but will there be a sequel, and what is your next – please, please, please – novel about?

Julia: Aw. So I don’t, I, I left it on the page. I don’t –

Sarah: Yep.

Julia: – I didn’t feel that there needed to be a sequel. I think I get that feedback a lot from the romance community – [laughs] – which I totally understand, but, look, just be happy I didn’t kill him, okay?

Sarah: [Laughs] So in the postscript that you didn’t write –

Julia: Yeah.

Sarah: – he, he dies pretty soon?

Julia: Yeah, yeah. So I, so I don’t – I mean, look, I’ve thought about what I would do, ‘cause I think it’s impossible to, like, just walk away from a story and be like, well, that’s done. So I’ve definitely thought about what I would do, but it’s not in the works at all, so just, just get very comfortable with the way – [laughs] – the way the book ends.

Sarah: They’re spending eternity in a waterfall –

Julia: Yeah.

Sarah: – and it’s great!

Julia: That was part of, that was actually part of the best part of the Jersey event was a couple women came up to me in, like, a very Jersey sort of way, which I say with the most love. I, I love it there, and I love them, and they, they came up, and they were like, here’s what I think happens. And I was like, okay? And they’re like, he lives –

Sarah: Yep.

Julia: – and they live happily ever after.

Sarah: Yep.

Julia: And I said, okay, great! I’m on board. And they’re like, yeah? And I was like, yeah, I’m totally on board, and they’re like, okay, that’s what we thought.

Sarah: [Laughs] We need you to confirm this, please.

Julia: Yeah. It was kind of like a threatening, like, you want to contradict us? I was like, nonononono!

Sarah: You don’t want to argue with us, do you?

Julia: It’s fine. No, yeah, no, we’re good. [Laughs] Okay, the, yeah, and so I am, I just cracked foundation on a new book.

Sarah: Yay!

Julia: Yeah, and I don’t want to talk too much about it, but I will say that it shares, it will definitely share some of the same bookish DNA as My Oxford Year. It’s, and it’s going to be in the women’s fiction realm again.

Sarah: Fabulous!

Julia: Yes.

Sarah: So if you had to coin a term for your specific genre, would it be some, some combination of literary, nerdy, women’s fiction?

Julia: I guess. I mean, I’ve been using book club fiction to describe the book, but then someone pointed out that that doesn’t mean anything? [Laughs]

Sarah: Well no, it’s a, it’s a, it’s a valid term, I think. It, it explains what the, what the purpose and what the potential use of the book is, and –

Julia: It is, yeah, that there’s something that, there’s something to be discussed; you can read it with other people; there’s something to chew on. And I mean, for me, I just, I think because my, my world, like my, my day job, my history, everything is book-based, that –

Sarah: Mm-hmm.

Julia: – I don’t, I’ll, I could set something really anywhere, but I, what I really want to talk about is how we tell ourselves stories?

Sarah: Mm-hmm!

Julia: Like, I think that that’s just fascinating to me. So I think the kind of meta book-within-a-book, books about poetry, books about other books, I, I really like that. I don’t know how many other people do, but I, I really like that.

Sarah: Oh, I, I, I like those very much –

Julia: Good.

Sarah: – myself. [Laughs] I am –

Julia: I, I go back to Possession, like, I think is one of my, one of my all-time favorite novels, and I, I think that, I mean, talk about, oh my God, like, my kink is probably undersexed Victorian academics, and, like –

Sarah: [Laughs]

Julia: – that book, that book is just, it does it so well, and she’s, you know, I mean, A. S. Byatt is incredible, and I think that those books would be firmly called literary, but I think that when you write a novel that’s, like, predominantly a love story about a twenty-four-year-old girl, just that’s not the way it’s going to get slotted, so.

Sarah: And it also depends so much on, on packaging and the cover and the marketing and the genre and the way that the book itself is slotted into a schedule. I mean, there are many books now that are pretty much, one of the top three storylines that’s happening is a romance, but they are not marketed as romance fiction, and romance fiction itself is sort of changing a little bit in how it’s presented.

Julia: Yes, very true, very true.

Sarah: So you can – I am always happy when I get the – [laughs] – I call it the all-clear? Like, okay, it’s marketed as women’s fiction, and it’s in trade, and this is what the cover looks like, but I promise there’s a happy ending. Okay, thank you!

Julia: Yeah.

Sarah: It’s important.

Julia: Yeah.

Sarah: If I get the all-clear, it’s all good. [Laughs]

Julia: Right, right, and I, you know, I mean, I think the, the kind of, the thing that I’m not sure how to balance quite yet is that what I particularly like to read, like, I was realizing recently that the love stories that I love, that I return to again and again and again, are actually – [laughs] – the love stories where they don’t end up together at the end. Like, I like putting myself through the wringer. I like having a bittersweet, like – that maybe the relationship itself was more important than how it ended?

Sarah: Mm-hmm.

Julia: And that’s a, that’s a thing that I know, I know a lot of people don’t love that – [laughs] – so that’s kind of something that I’m, I’m dealing with right now even is I, I could definitely, like, I liked not fin-, I, I’m glad that I’m – seriously, all jokes aside – I never had the intention of, I, I really didn’t want to kill Jamie, because in a way I felt like that was actually too much of an ending. I wanted people to –

Sarah: Yeah.

Julia: – live with the uncertainty of it, the way they had to.

Sarah: Right, because that’s kind of the, the, yeah, it’s kind of the whole point, that in some degree we’re all living with uncertainty.

Julia: Exactly. But, you know, that’s so, that’s just, that’s just me. I like the, the really complicated, bittersweet, gut-you-and-leave-you-on-the-floor-to-die ending. That’s –

Sarah: [Laughs]

Julia: – that’s me.

Sarah: All right, well, the next time I find one, I’ll know exactly who to send it to.

Julia: Yes, please do. Please do!

Sarah: I always ask, what are you reading that you want to recommend?

Julia: Whoo –

Sarah: Like, what book is on the iPad in the booth with you?

Julia: I know, right? I’m looking at, I’m actually recording The Moon Sisters by Therese Walsh, which came out a couple of years ago and was, like, a library pick, and they just never put it on audio, so I’m doing that, which is, which is pretty great. I have, in a couple of weeks Vox is coming out, and I just narrated Vox, which is kind of a Handmaids-y tale about, in the not-so-distant future women are given electric shock, like, word counters on their wrist, and they’re only allowed to say a hundred words a day.

Sarah: I heard about this book.

Julia: Yeah.

Sarah: That must have been a rather intense reading experience.

Julia: Oof, yeah, very intense.

Sarah: [Laughs]

Julia: And, let me see, I’m trying to think of – I have been so, just, I’ve just been reading for work right now, and I’m trying to think if I read anything for pleasure recently. Hmm. Hmmm.

Sarah: I have this problem too; I will pick a book and be like, okay, this is going to be the book you listen to while you’re cross stitching, you’re going to turn off the reading brain, and then I’m listening to it and I’m like, but I want to talk about this ‘cause it’s amazing!

Julia: Well, as soon as we hang up, you know I’m going to think of five, so I will –

Sarah: Oh!

Julia: – I’ll email them.

Sarah: Totally fine!

Julia: Because, yeah, I –

Sarah: The show notes can always be added to.

Julia: [Laughs] Please! Footnotes, footnotes, footnotes. Yeah, I think –

Sarah: You know what would be brilliant for you to do, because I’m just terrible? Is for you to write a book that has literary, you know, a literary inclusion, but also there’s a second story being told in the footnotes?

Julia: Oh, so the thing that immediately comes to my head when I’m, when you said that was, there was a James Franco – that James Franco – had a short story collection a few years ago, his second one, not Palo Alto, the other one, which I can’t remember the name of right now –

Sarah: Right.

Julia: – and I directed him in the audiobook for it, and there was a, there was a story that was I think about forty pages long, and it was footnotes on footnotes on footnotes that would then –

Sarah: [Laughs]

Julia: – that would then jump you back to where you were, and it was, to, reading it was difficult enough, but recording it –

Sarah: Oh my gosh.

Julia: – and listening to it was impossible, and I remember in preparation for directing it, I printed the story out, and I just got down on my living room floor and was, like, kind of flow-charting, okay, if this is the footnote here, then I’m going to, we’re going to add in, like, he’s going to say footnote, and then we’re going to say back to, and we’ve got to, like, come back to this. This is too long, ‘cause the, the footnotes would go on for, like, six pages –

Sarah: Yep.

Julia: – and then jump back, and I went into the studio trying to explain to him what we were doing. He was like, I don’t get it, and I was like, we’ll just, we’ll take it one sentence at a time when we get –

Sarah: Oh my God!

Julia: When we get there, I’ll tell you exactly what to say; that’s how we’ll do this. It was –

Sarah: That’s hard.

Julia: Yeah, but I think, look, there’s a lot of fun to be had with that. I love experimental stuff. I just recorded, it, it came out a while ago, it’s a Polish novel called Flights, but the translation is just being published here in a couple of weeks, and it won the Man Booker International Prize this year for translation, and it is, ugh, in terms of literary, like, there’s, you can’t even say what happens in the book. The only thing that unifies all of its disparate parts are the themes, and so taking that journey through five days of recording of tracking this story and these – it was, it was, it’s amazing, and it is so beautiful, and the translation is just stunning. You feel like you’re reading it in the original; I don’t know how she did it. Incredible.

[music]

Sarah: And that brings us to the end of this interview. Thank you again to Julia Whelan for coming to hang out with me and talk in great detail about My Oxford Year. I hope you enjoyed our conversation. If you want to get in touch with me, ask questions, or make suggestions, you can always email me at [email protected], and I will have links to Julia’s projects and to My Oxford Year and all of the other books that we discussed in this episode as well.

This episode is being brought to you by The Billionaire Bull Rider by Kate Pearce. One by one, the Morgan men find themselves returning to the Northern California ranch where their troubled pasts first began. Together, they have a chance to leave the past behind and forge a new future based on brotherhood, hope, and love. In this fifth installment of bestselling author Kate Pearce’s popular Morgan Ranch series, Rio Martinez’s long and winding road has brought him to the legendary Western ranch, to the brothers he calls friends, and the French baker who could change his roving ways. After her husband abandoned her, Yvonne Payet threw herself into running the café that was her dream. She cherishes her hard-won independence, but Rio isn’t just the sexiest, most arrogant cowboy she’s ever met; he’s got great ideas for expanding her business. With a reality TV show on the horizon and her ex demanding a second chance, Yvonne has to decide which sunset she wants to ride off into. The Billionaire Bull Rider by New York Times bestselling author Kate Pearce is now available wherever books are sold and at kensingtonbooks.com.

Each episode receives a transcript – thank you, garlicknitter [You’re welcome! – gk] – and today’s podcast transcript is brought to you by Defending Allye by Susan Stoker. Love is a life-and-death risk for the Mountain Mercenaries in New York Times bestselling author Susan Stoker’s explosive new series of alpha heroes, hot action, and hard passion. Ever since his last rescue op off the Pacific Coast, Mountain Mercenary Gray Rogers hasn’t been able to forget his latest “job” – Allye Martin. Any other woman would have panicked during a rescue, but the wily dancer kept her cool, even after being kidnapped by an elusive human trafficker. And Gray could not be happier when a grateful Allye follows him home to Colorado Springs. For Allye, finding sanctuary in the arms – and bed – of the former Navy SEAL is only temporary. People are disappearing off the streets of San Francisco, victims of the same underground trade that targeted her, and Allye could be the key to dismantling the entire operation. She’s willing to do anything to bring them down. Gray isn’t, for good reason. But you don’t say no to a tough girl like Allye who refuses to play it safe. Now Gray is risking more than ever before. The Mountain Mercenaries have his back, but is it enough to keep the woman he loves out of harm’s way? Perfect for readers who love hot Navy SEALs, smart and tough heroines, and action-packed suspense, Defending Allye by Susan Stoker is published by Montlake Romance and is available now wherever books are sold.

We have a podcast Patreon, and if you would like to have a look at it, it is patreon.com/SmartBitches. For monthly pledges beginning with one dollar, you can be part of our Patreon community, and the Patreon community helps me draft questions for upcoming interviews, and they have really great ideas for guest suggestions too, so if you’d like to join the community, I hope you will come and make a pledge and join us!

Are there other ways to support the show? Of course! Leave a review; that is massively helpful, and if you have, thank you. You can also tell a friend, you can subscribe, but if you are hanging out with me in your eardrums every week as you dye wool or walk the dog or clean the house, or walk the wool and clean the dog, or garden or whatever you, it is you’re doing right now, thank you for bringing me along with you. And if you’re on the treadmill or the elliptical or any of those exercise machines, keep going; you’ve totally got this. You’re almost done.

The music you’re listening to is from Caravan Palace. Each week, Sassy Outwater provides our music. You can find her on Twitter @SassyOutwater. This track is called “La Caravane.” You can find this on their two-album set, Caravan Palace and Panic. I like this music a lot. You can find them on iTunes and Amazon and at caravanpalace.com.

Coming up on the website – there’s a website; it goes with the podcast. I’m sure you knew that, but we have reviews, including reviews of nonfiction titles, a movie, and a brand-new book that I really, really liked so much that this book made me laugh aloud enough times that my husband came to ask me what I was reading. I also have Help a Bitch Out, Books on Sale, and a new mini-course from Organization Academy, which is my other project.

This course is called “Send Your Friendship,” and it is all about using Google Calendar to help you remember to send birthday cards and presents, anniversary cards, and notes to acknowledge other occasions in the lives of people who are important to you. If you would like to be the kind of friend who remembers to send cards and notes, or just sends cards and notes ‘cause you’re thinking of someone, this course can help you out. I hope you’ll have a look. You can find out more information at smartbitchestrashybooks.com.

I will have links to all of the books and collections of poetry that we discussed, and as always, I end the podcast with a terrible, terrible, terrible joke. This is really bad; I hope you love it as much as I do. [Clears throat]

Why is it hard to explain puns to people with kleptomania?

Why is it hard to explain puns to people with kleptomania?

Well, they always take things, literally.

[Laughs] I love it! Not only is it a stupid joke, but it uses literally. Really, it does not take a lot to amuse me. Thank you to Troy G. for that joke; that really made my day.

On behalf of Julia Whelan and everyone here, including Orville, who is really happy that I plugged the heating pad on my desk back in for him, we wish you the very best of reading. Have a wonderful weekend, and we will see you here next week.

[that rhythm music]