296. Acting, Narrating, and Writing: An Interview with Julia Whelan

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Sarah Wendell: Hello, and welcome to episode number 296 of Smart Podcast, Trashy Books. I’m Sarah Wendell from Smart Bitches, Trashy Books. With me today is author, actress, and narrator Julia Whelan. Julia has a new book out this week called My Oxford Year. It came out on Tuesday, April 24th, and she is going to talk about so many things. I really enjoyed this interview, not the least of which because this is a full-score production: not only do we have dogs barking, which is a pretty standard podcast thing, but we have car horns and the street sounds of midtown Manhattan. It’s like a whole audio landscape for you. We cover her start as a child actor, how she moved through acting to audiobook narration to writing screenplays and then writing a novel, and we talk about what makes for good audiobook narration, what the differences are between screenplays and novels, and how being an audiobook narrator and actor influences her writing and vice versa. I also ask some very vague, non-spoiler questions about the characters in My Oxford Year, and we get a teeny sample of her performance of the audiobook and of some of the key characters. We also discuss my very strange idea that Gone Girl and YA have some elements in common. I’m still not entirely sure that this idea is right, but I, I at least make the argument during the episode. And, of course, I always ask what people are reading. I really enjoyed this interview; I almost titled it “English Major Nerds Talking.” I hope you enjoy it as much as I did.

This episode is brought to you by A Devil of a Duke by Madeline Hunter. From New York Times bestselling author Madeline Hunter comes the latest sexy Regency-era tale of glittering balls, aristocratic hubris, false identities, and high-stakes thievery, as one duke follows his lady down a very dangerous rabbit hole into the criminal world hidden beneath London’s fancy veneer. Compulsively readable, inventive, and witty, Madeline Hunter pulls back the curtain of history to explore the light and the dark, the polished and the seedy side of London’s decadence and excess. A Devil of a Duke by Madeline Hunter is on sale now wherever books are sold and at kensingtonbooks.com. And thanks to Kensington for sponsoring this episode!

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[music]

Julia Whelan: I’m Julia Whelan. I am a lifelong actor. I was a child actor, and then most recently I have dedicated my life to audiobooks, and I narrate audiobooks, and my first novel comes out on Tuesday. It’s called My Oxford Year.

Sarah: Congratulations!

Julia: Thank you very much! Thank you!

Sarah: So I have questions about your book, and I have questions about all sorts of other things.

Julia: Okay.

Sarah: But my first question was how did you move through acting to audiobooks, and you also write screenplays, do I have that right?

Julia: I do. Yes, I’m a screenwriter as well. So, sure, I was, I was, as I had said, I’m, I was a child actor and kind of had reached the height of my fame in high school, my high school years. I was on a show called Once and Again, and it was a great show. I would call it probably one of the first examples of prestige television before cable even existed, so –

Sarah: Definitely.

Julia: – I had kind of ridiculously high standards, and I left the business to go to college. I wanted to become my own person and experience life outside of Hollywood, and I still loved acting enough that when I was done with school I returned to it, but there were many other things that I wanted to do, and writing was definitely one of them, and I fell into audiobooks through a friend of mine from college who was not only with me at my, at Middlebury, which is where I got my degree from, but also for my junior year at Oxford, one of my best friends from school. Her mother was an audiobook producer and director, and she came up to me literally at our graduation and was like, you know, with your acting background and this creative writing degree, I feel like you might be suited to audiobooks. And I had never even listened to an audiobook, I didn’t know what she was talking about, and when I came back to LA and I was, you know, doing guest stars and auditioning a lot and writing, I decided, why not, I’d give it a shot, and I sent her a demo and ended up with a couple of books, and then it snowballed, and now it’s, it’s really what I do, so, you know, it’s, it’s the thing that has allowed me to be able to pursue my other interests while still keeping my head above water, and I, I love it. I love it.

Sarah: That’s so interesting! What do you think makes a good narration for an audiobook?

Julia: Oof. Well, I think – [laughs] – the obvious thing is, everyone – ‘cause you get a lot of people who, it’s, it’s a great job, right? So you get a lot of people who come up to you who say, you know, I’ve been told I have a great voice and that I should do audiobooks, and I think that that’s absolutely a part of it: you want to have a voice that people want to listen to. And I think that, obviously, acting chops helps, whether that’s in characterization or accents, but really, what I, as I’ve talked to other narrators and have listened to, obviously, a lot of audiobooks, the thing that I find that really sets great narrators apart is their love of story. They are book nerds. They love the craft of it; they love storytelling. And I think that that can come through in the narration, sometimes even more so than the acting. It’s just the sensitivity to what the writer has done and what’s on the page.

Sarah: The process of – I mean, I’ve spoken to some narrators, not all of them, but audiobooks are a very, very big and growing section of the romance market for certain –

Julia: Oh, certainly romance, yes.

Sarah: – and when I’ve spoken to other inter-, other narrators – I’ve interviewed Renee Raudman, and I’ve spoken to other narrators – one of the things they talk about – she’s so cool!

Julia: Fantastic.

Sarah: One of the things we talked about is how you develop a specific voice for the characters and how much performance can or does not go into that, depending on the material. Do you spend a lot of time before you work on a book developing how different characters will sound?

Julia: I do. I think this also goes back to being a sensitive reader – [laughs] – I think, because I – and I think that that’s kind of what I’m getting at is to, is to be able to understand what the author is going for, first and foremost, and especially when it’s first person, to create a character that can sustain not just the story but also the listener’s interest for six, eight, ten hours, whatever it may be.

Sarah: Mm-hmm.

Julia: And so, yes, a lot of thought does go into that ahead of time, and, and I think that that is, that’s the sensitivity that, I think you just learn that as you get better at the job and as you have more opportunities. You know, you learn what works. It’s different from doing a thirty-second commercial spot, for instance, or even a cartoon.

Sarah: Oh yes.

Julia: You have, someone has to be able to listen to this – [laughs] – to –

Sarah: [Laughs] I could not listen to a commercial narrator for eight hours.

Julia: No, no, exactly.

Sarah: Oh my God!

Julia: It’s a lot, it’s a lot.

[Laughter]

Julia: So yeah.

Sarah: I’m just picturing, like, somebody very fast talking about how excited they are to go to a casino –

Julia: Yeah.

Sarah: – and then listening to that voice for eight hours. No, no!

Julia: Come on down! Friday, Friday!

Sarah: No, no, no, no! [Laughs]

Julia: Or even, or even the In a World voice, you know? I mean, there’s certain things that just –

Sarah: In a world –

Julia: – yeah, didn’t, will not work, that won’t work.

Sarah: So what led you from, from acting to writing? Was that, was that a linear jump, or did you go to narrating audiobooks and then thinking, all right, I want to write one of these? Or have you always been writing?

Julia: I’ve always been writing. I’ve been writing as long as I’ve been acting. In fact, I was remembering the other day that I, I used to, when I was, when I was younger, before I could even, before I could actually physically write, I would act out stories to babysitters and, like, dictate to them what we were doing –

Sarah: [Laughs]

Julia: – and ask them to write it down, and I, so I’ve always, my brain has always worked that way. I just, I think, I think in story, but more importantly, I think I, that story is always based in character, and so I think it comes from the same place. It’s just, when I was younger, I had the opportunity to focus on acting, and it really is still truly my first love, but I have a lot more control over writing. It’s something I can sit down and, and do. It’s, it’s a practice, it’s a discipline, whereas acting is something that you kind of have to be allowed to do. Someone has to hire you to do it, and so I find that having both works very well for me, that I can feel like I’m constantly creating something when I’m writing. And when I went to school, I didn’t, I didn’t act in school. I chose to focus on writing, so I was an English and Creative Writing major at Middlebury, and then I was reading, obviously voraciously, and I was able to develop some of those writing skills that had always been a desire of mine and latent in me, and when I graduated, the thing that audiobooks gave me was I was actually reading things that were being published. You know, I was an English major; I hadn’t read anything that had been written in the last hundred years, and so –

Sarah: [Laughs]

Julia: – audiobooks provided me with the ability to read popular literature across genre. You know I hadn’t read romance, I hadn’t read YA, and realizing that good writing is good writing, regardless of category, and really opened my – it’s like getting an MFA or something in publishing and in popular literature and getting to know authors and, and contemporary voices. You know, it’s, it’s one thing to, as, as I think you can tell from My Oxford Year, I obviously have a love of the authors who are no longer with us, but it’s, it’s, audiobooks gave me the opportunity to follow authors’ careers as they develop and see what was happening now.

Sarah: So interesting! …started narrating, did you, do you or did you have a favorite genre that you were like, oh yes, I get to do one of these?

Julia: Well, I got into narrating, I think, at the time that I did because of the explosion in YA.

Sarah: Mm-hmm.

Julia: So there have been audiobook narrators for twenty, thirty years who are just respected, and everyone loves their voice, and they’re amazing, but they, they weren’t necessarily well-suited to fifteen-year-old, you know, angsty teenager who turns into a pixie kind of books –

Sarah: [Laughs]

Julia: – and so that was a, there was a vacuum in the industry. They just didn’t really have the voices for it, and that’s how I slipped in right out of college, ‘cause it coincided with the boom in YA. So that was a new genre to me, because, you know, you read, some of my favorite books are those classic writers of the ‘80s and ‘90s that I grew up reading, but I didn’t really know that the category had continued to evolve and that people were continuing to contribute to it somehow. You think of those books just being stuck in time, the same books that the same kids go into the library and they find, and, and the writing was so good. One of the first books I did, I think it was my fourth book, was Jandy Nelson’s The Sky Is Everywhere, and it was her first novel, and it’s, it’s so stunningly good that I just, I realized, this is a new, this is a new world. So I started out the first, I would say, year or so really exclusively doing YA, because that’s what they needed me for.

Sarah: Mm-hmm.

Julia: And then weirdly, I got Gone Girl. Like, I don’t know – [laughs] – how that happened, but I did Gone Girl.

Sarah: Oh, no pressure!

Julia: Yeah, well, and it was, it was, you know, so like YA, and that was, then, then I started diversifying.

Sarah: Interesting that you said Gone Girl is so like YA. I hadn’t thought of it that way –

Julia: Oh, I was completely joking.

Sarah: – but you’re absolutely right.

Julia: I was joking, but how do you think it’s similar?

Sarah: Well, with YA, you have, as – I’m trying to remember who said this to me. I cannot remember my source; I feel like a bad English major. I will remember my source at three in the morning, and I will update this file then, but I did an interview with someone recently – oh, it was Margaret Willison, who’s a librarian in Boston.

Julia: Oh, yes, Margaret! She’s wonderful.

Sarah: YA is very obvious, and everything is on the page in front of you, and it is deliberately engaging on a very direct and immediate level. Like, it’s going to tell you everything that’s happening as it’s happening. Gone Girl is like the opposite of that? It doesn’t tell you everything that’s happening, and it doesn’t reveal everything all at once, but it’s asking you to look at – my brain is coming up with, I’m like, I had that feeling of, oh, that’s true. Wait, why is it true?

Julia: No, no, I think, I think what you’re – yes, I think that, actually one thing that I would say for that book: it’s not like, it’s not like the unreliable narrator had never been done before, but –

Sarah: No.

Julia: – I think that the candor with which that character addresses the audience is similar to YA –

Sarah: Yes.

Julia: – in that sense. That –

Sarah: Yes.

Julia: – there’s really, it’s, it’s unfiltered, after a certain point. As you were saying, obviously, the first half of the book –

Sarah: Is one thing.

Julia: And, like, five years later, do we have to worry about spoilers? Like, everyone knows, everyone knows, right?

Sarah: I don’t think so?

Julia: Okay. I mean –

Sarah: Yeah, it’s been a movie. If somebody watched it on an airplane, I feel like spoiler alerts are no longer valid?

Julia: It’s been a movie. Plus, I’m always, I’m always…that book because I, you know, people like, I saw the movie, so I know the turn, and I’m like, it’s not about the turn. Like, I don’t care if you know what happens in that –

Sarah: No.

Julia: – in that story. If you had, you will have a treat reading that book. But, yeah, I think, well, I think that also that’s part of where the idea of, for audiobooks particularly, a lot of us who kind of came up in that YA boom, we might approach our narration a little bit differently because we’re used to having that very intimate, very direct, unfiltered approach –

Sarah: Yes.

Julia: – to, to our narrative voice.

Sarah: Yes, it’s a very immediate narration.

Julia: Yes, it’s, it’s not a presenting or performative necessarily.

Sarah: There’s no third-person distance –

Julia: Yes.

Sarah: – it’s right up in your feels. Like, hello –

Julia: Absolutely.

Sarah: – I’m going to take residence here. And plus, with Gone Girl, you have the story that you’re being told, and then you have this, the, the suspicion that the story you’re being told is not the actual story, but it’s still the story being told to you in the immediate.

Julia: Yes, and I think, I mean, look…wonder, I sometimes wonder if, you know, if the category had existed, if Catcher in the Rye would be considered YA. I mean, well –

Sarah: Oh, good question.

Julia: – politically, maybe, I don’t know. Written by a man, though, maybe not. But there’s a, there’s that sense, too, where if we’re talking about unreliable narrator of teenagers are at, at both, both sides, right? They can be incredibly honest and also incredibly deceptive, and I think that that, that –

Sarah: Yes. Very true.

Julia: – that’s always been the fun tension in YA narration to me, is the, creating those, those characters that are so sympathetic and so endearing, but also you just want to, you want to just shake them and be like, it’s okay, you’ll, you’ll get over this. Like, everything will be fine.

Sarah: [Laughs]

Julia: But having that sensitivity to, you know, again, sustain that for eight to ten hours, is –

Sarah: Yes.

Julia: – is sort of the, it’s the job. That’s the job.

Sarah: …that when you’re recording an audiobook, it takes many hours of production in order to arrive at the finished product. Do you work on one book for a very long stretch of time, and then the recording company or the company that’s producing it does all the editing, and then do you ever listen to it when it’s done?

Julia: I’ve listened to some of them. Depending on the, depending – I mean, you have to understand: once I’ve recorded a book, I’ve already read it once, because I’ve prepped it, and sometimes I’ve read it –

Sarah: Right.

Julia: – certain sections of it twice, if I, if there’s something particularly tricky or I’ve had to work it out before I get in the booth, so there are certain books that I, I will return to yet again because I, there’s something that I want to know about, like did the, did the performance come through? It’s kind of a professional curiosity to me.

Sarah: Right.

Julia: And then yeah, some books are just so good that I’ll make people listen to them – [laughs] – on road travels.

Sarah: [Laughs]

Julia: Like, I don’t care; we’re listening to this book. But it’s you! I know, I know, but I don’t care; we’re listening to this book again. It’s so good.

Sarah: …you said a minute ago about YA was the, the feeling of understanding that, to the character, the experiences are very real, and then also wanting to sort of smack them on the side of the head and say, look, you’re making way too big of a deal out of this; could you just calm down? Because there’s no calming down when you’re a YA character! That’s kind of the reason why there’s a YA book. There’s no calming down.

Julia: Right.

Sarah: Now, this brings me to one of my questions about My Oxford Year, and I’m going to ask a couple of questions about it, but the challenge is, I’ve read it, but I don’t want to spoil anything!

Julia: Yeah, I know; this is impossible to do right now.

Sarah: So I have these – right. [Laughs] I have these vague questions that are sort of a little bit on the esoteric side, mostly because I don’t want to spoil it, so –

Julia: That’s all right, we’re – I’m finding this with interviews, that, like, having to, we have to pick our way around the story. I don’t when – like I said with Gone Girl, like, at what point are you able to just say, we’re done with spoilers? Like, but it’s certainly –

Sarah: Yes.

Julia: – it’s certainly not the week before publication, so –

Sarah: No, definitely not. I am well within spoiler territory here. One of the things that I really like about the character of Ella is that she vacillates between, I know everything! Oh my God, I know absolutely nothing. She has these great moments of super confidence! And then these moments of, okay, I’m the worst know-nothing; what am I doing here? And it’s this very familiar cycle of self-doubt and self-confidence and self-doubt and self-confidence, and when you mentioned YA characters, it’s almost as if she’s a couple steps ahead of a YA character, ‘cause obviously it’s not a YA novel, because she’s still feeling this incredible overwhelm of the things that she is doing and the things that she is managing, and she still has these moments of, I am the absolute worst-qualified person; what am I doing here? And then she moves into a situation where she’s like, and I own this moment. That imbalance sort of resolves slowly through the book – again, I’m avoiding spoilers. Do you think that characters and also people reach that balance between confidence and unsureness and self-doubt and self-confidence, or do you think we just grow more comfortable with being imbalanced in and out of situations?

Julia: Wow, that’s a good question. As you were starting the question and starting to explain it, I was beginning to think, does this ever really change? You know, are, we’re here, we’re talking –

Sarah: Yes! [Laughs]

Julia: – we’re talking about this as YA, especially, specifically in that context, but really, does it ever change? If anything, I feel that, as I’ve gotten older – I can only speak personally – I have my areas that I’m very comfortable in, and then I’ve sometimes gotten more uncomfortable when I leave those areas. Like, I was, I, actually, I had just got back from a trip abroad, and because so much of my life now is spent, like, in my little padded booth recording books very quietly into a microphone, the sensation of being, like, for instance, in the Vatican with thousands of people, like, crushed up against you –

Sarah: Yeah.

Julia: – like, as you move slowly down a corridor looking at tapestries was, I was so much more overwhelmed by that than I would have been at twenty-three, so I think maybe we just compartmentalize our, our strengths, and we become experts in things, and that, like any –

Sarah: Literally in a booth –

Julia: Right, right.

Sarah: – you compartmentalize your strength. [Laughs]

Julia: And, like, literally, like any muscle that isn’t being used, it atrophies.

Sarah: Well, let me back up a second, because the problem with, the other problem with avoiding spoilers is that you and I both have a familiarity, you much more than me, with the material, and a fluency in it, and I’m trying to be like, all right, let’s have a 101-level discussion but also entice people to read the book while talking about it without spoiling it. Piece of cake, right? So would you be able to tell me a little bit about the book as you would describe it to someone, which is the worst question to ask an author, so I apologize in advance.

Julia: This is the elevator pitch, right, so let’s start here.

Sarah: Excellent! [Laughs]

Julia: Okay, let’s start there, and then we’ll, we’ll kind of just branch out and, or dig a little deeper, whichever metaphor you want to use, but let’s start with the elevator pitch, which is: a young American girl goes to Oxford on a Rhodes and falls for a young professor who has a secret, and she –

Together: – duh-duh-dun.

Julia: And she has to decide whether her dreams as they were constructed when she was a child are still her dreams at the end of the book. So it’s a story of personal growth and personal development.

Sarah: A fish out of water and being in the place you long to be for so many years.

Julia: Yes.

Sarah: …that I really like about this structure of the novel is that there’s this very long sustained tension between the value of what’s already happened, the value of the past, and the value of the future, and all of the characters are caught in that balance.

Julia: Yes. That’s very well said.

Sarah: Ella is obsessed with, you know, dead people who wrote books, like really, really dead people –

Julia: Mm-hmm.

Sarah: – and Oxford’s library full of really dead people who wrote books.

Julia: Lots of dead – yeah, it’s basically a mausoleum, yeah.

Sarah: Right, a mausoleum of words and dead people who wrote books, and they’re all obsessed with the minutia of the things that have happened in the past and the things that were written in the past, and do the things that were written about the past fully represent the past, and what is it saying? And then she also is – this is an opening scene –

Julia: No, that’s fine.

Sarah: – so I’m not spoiling anything.

Julia: The first chapter’s already been out, it’s fine. Yeah, go ahead.

Sarah: [Laughs] Just want to make it clear! Make it clear for the recording: I’m not spoiling anything here. While she is in line to enter the country, she has a job opportunity that is life-changing, and she decides that she’s going to do both, so not only is she looking at the past in depth, but she’s also looking at the future, working on a political campaign and advising a campaign about educational arts policy and looking at the future of a country she’s not even currently in right now, at the same time.

Julia: She’s fulfilling this childhood dream while being offered her future on a silver platter.

Sarah: Yeah, piece of cake.

Julia: Yeah, no problem.

Sarah: No wonder she cycles between, I’m the greatest!/I know nothing. [Laughs]

Julia: This is like, that’ll make anybody a little nuts, yeah.

Sarah: And the other characters, as well, are trying to decide if what they’re doing right now is what they want to do forever? Or –

Julia: Mm-hmm.

Sarah: And I, I particularly love the character who is just, has taken up residence in college?

Julia: [Laughs] Yeah.

Sarah: He just starts over and starts over and starts over, and maybe every college has a character like that? Yes, I really think so. [Laughs]

Julia: I think so too. I mean, that’s not a, you know, that person is not based on anyone specific, but he’s kind of based on the, that classic stereotype of that person, who just seems to never leave?

Sarah: Yep. And that college is, is, college and university education is usually, for the people who enter it, a transition place. It’s like a, a, a resting place between childhood and more formal adulthood, and it’s very tempting to want to stay there and not have to make, make more decisions about your future that you’re entirely responsible for, where you set your own schedule; your schedule isn’t handed to you.

Julia: Abs-, yes. I think that that’s – the first kind of rush of strong feedback that I got from this book were from women who were just post college who –

Sarah: Yeah.

Julia: – were reading it, and it surpri-, it, I wasn’t expecting it to resonate with them so much, but I think it’s because when you take that struct-, you take that person out of a structure, this is the thing you have to do in order to accomplish this thing, and then we give you a thing that acknowledges you’ve accomplished this thing, all of those –

Sarah: Yeah.

Julia: – parameters are suddenly evaporated, and I, I think that that is the first time that you have to be able to know yourself well enough to say, okay, this is what I actually want to do, this is who I want to be, and nothing leading up to that has prepared you for that. Because that’s not what we’re measuring; that’s not what we’re, that’s not the sort of person we’re trying to create in the system.

Sarah: No. And I’m, I’m in my forties; I still don’t necessarily know what I want to be when I grow up.

Julia: Fair!

Sarah: Like, I am a freq-, I am a frequent flyer on Fly by the Seat of Your Pants Airline; I have a lot of miles there.

Julia: [Laughs] That’s good.

Sarah: And, and I was an English and Spanish major in college, so I’m really well qualified to talk a lot, which is kind of what I ended up doing, but it is very alarming to me to look at – I don’t want to say alarming; it makes it sound like I’m concern trolling and I’m walking around crushing, clutching my metaphoric pearls, but I look, you know, seventeen-year-olds: I didn’t know what I wanted to do at seventeen or eighteen. I still don’t even necessarily know, and I’m forty-two, so I look at the system of, okay, when you get to college you’ve got to pick a major, and you’re going to decide right now what you’re going to do for the rest of your life! Actually, really, no. [Laughs] It’s okay to have other choices. But it’s more, even harder for a character, I think, like Ella, who’s pretty sure she knows what she wants and then realizes maybe that isn’t what she wants.

Julia: Yes, and I think that that can be a very scary moment, because you’ve, at that point, you’ve sort of learned not to trust yourself, because you are, you’ve learned to trust what people, what other people think of you. So the fact that –

Sarah: Yeah.

Julia: – she’s so capable, and she’s good at what she does, and she’s been rewarded for that her whole life does not help if it’s not what she wants to actually be doing, and I think it was resonating with people of that age who read the book, is that sense of just because somebody else validates you in a certain area, is that really your destiny? Is that what you want to be doing?

Sarah: …‘cause you are skilled at something doesn’t mean you have to do that all the time if you don’t want to.

Julia: Right, because really, at the end of the day, all that, all that is saying is that you are making their life easier. Because you are competent. [Laughs]

Sarah: Exactly.

Julia: And that’s something that I think, you know, there’s, I, I had said recently that I think, you know, there are lots of books about finding yourself and figuring out your, your purpose –

Sarah: Yes.

Julia: – but I think this is, this is that, but the, the additional part of that is not that you’re lost and flailing around, trying to figure out what you want to do, but that there is a very viable path for you that you do kind of like. You know, this isn’t, this isn’t a, an evil choice. This is just this, there is a, there are many things this very smart, capable woman could be doing, but is any of it –

Sarah: Mm-hmm.

Julia: – what she actually wants?

Sarah: …unsureness, the insecurity of not knowing exactly what you want when you thought you did is terrifying to experience, even vicariously for a character.

Julia: I, I think so! [Laughs] Yeah.

Sarah: [Laughs] So what was your entry point into this story? What brought you into writing My Oxford Year?

Julia: Well, the, so the origin story of the book is, is a little different. It began life as a screenplay, and, written by a man named Allison Burnett, and it was in development at a studio, and a friend and I were brought in to work on it, which is a very common process of, of script development. Screenplays are often this kind of collaborative soup, and –

Sarah: Right.

Julia: – I, having been to Oxford and having been specifically a young American woman in Oxford, I have very strong opinions about what I thought the story could be, and then also, again, without giving too much away, where the story goes and what the characters are eventually dealing with was something that had personal resonance to me, especially at that time. I was kind of in the midst of dealing with, with grief, and so I had, I had a lot to say, and the fact that it was also set in my favorite city and probably the place where I’ve ever felt the most at home really tied me personally to this story, and when the possibility of turning it into a novel came up, I, I, it so excited me, because the process of screenplay, obviously, is you have to, there’s a lot that gets sacrificed to keep the story clipping. A lot of interiority gets lost, and this is, it’s such a, for a number of reasons, for not just the interiority of the character of Ella and the journey she’s on, but also the fact that it’s, like, this, this book nerd, very literary, very bookish subject matter and I could have more room to explore that in an actual novel was very exciting to me.

Sarah: Right!

Julia: So it, it was a, an opportunity that I felt I couldn’t, I couldn’t turn down. It just seemed like everything I was really wanting to focus on at that time and to create my own version of this story.

Sarah: That’s very cool. What you said gave me, like, five questions –

Julia: Sure, sure.

Sarah: – so my brain looks like Jiffy Pop right now. Like [small explosive noises]…me a little bit more about being in a place that resonated with you…though it isn’t where, necessarily where you’re from.

Julia: Yes. Oxford was a weird experience. I got on the plane at LAX, flew to Heathrow, and I had never been – well, I was going to say I’d never been out of the country; I guess that wasn’t true ‘cause I’d been to Canada and Mexico – I had never been to Europe. I had never been across the Atlantic, and I landed with my bags, and, like Ella, really no plan to come back until June, and I just remember those first few moments so vividly, which is why the first chapter, I mean, you know, everything from Customs to getting the ticket for the bus to getting on the bus to the, choosing the seat on the bus, all of those things that, you know, in, in the screenplay, for instance, it’d be like, we’ve got to cut this, we’ve got to cut this, we’ve got to cut this; like, let’s keep it moving. It was like, no, this is important –

Sarah: Right.

Julia: – because this is, this is the, this is the entrance into this new, into this new world, and it’s worldbuilding, and it’s seeing it through her eyes. And I stepped foot in Oxford, I got off the bus – the whole time it was crazy too; it was like the worst possible situation. The, the stop I was supposed to get off at was closed, it was absolutely pissing rain, they took me to another stop – this is pre-, you know, I did not have a smart phone over there; I don’t even know if smart phones existed yet – so I’m, like, looking at my map, trying to figure out where I am, and I ended up on a completely different side of town and somehow had to, like, get back to college, to the right college, and I’m jetlagged, and I’ve got way more stuff than a human being needs, because I’m American and I don’t know how to pack yet, and so I’ve got all of my stuff –

Sarah: [Laughs]

Julia: – and yet, with all of that, I had never felt more instantly at home anywhere. It was like this, this –

Sarah: Wow.

Julia: – it, it felt like a return, as opposed to a new experience, and that continued that whole year I was there and, you know, making friends and going to classes and tutorials, and I just have never felt more present or embodied anywhere.

Sarah: …feeling?

Julia: …feeling, and I don’t think I’m alone? I mean, I think that that –

Sarah: No, you’re definitely not.

Julia: Even specifically to Oxford, I don’t think that, I think people have experienced there frequently. I mean, I know that the, the setting alone is enough to draw a lot of people for some reason. There’s something mystical and romantic about it. But, yeah, for me it was really, it was like coming home. And it still is every time I’m there.

Sarah: …-zing feeling?

Julia: It is! And I can’t, I can’t really explain it. I don’t, I mean, I can tell it. I can tell the story, but I can’t explain it or extrapolate.

Sarah: And it, it, and because Ella experiences something very similar, it adds another contrast to the idea of her certainty and her uncertainty that she’s, she’s sort of navigating between certainty about her future and certainty about herself into areas where she’s learning things and isn’t sure, and she hasn’t been to this place, and yet she’s certain that it is like home.

Julia: Yes.

Sarah: Which is very strange, but very cool. You mentioned starting as a screenplay and then becoming a novel, and when I was, when I was doing research and, and drafting questions, I, I wrote down, well, I know screenplay and novel are different, but I can’t articulate that difference. Can you help my, help me articulate the difference between writing a screenplay and writing a novel? Like, I know they’re different, but I’m like, aside from a screenplay is very minimal and has dialogue, what are some of the key differences in each format?

Julia: You would think I could articulate that, wouldn’t you? I –

Sarah: [Laughs] So glad I’m not alone!

Julia: No, you’re not, you’re not alone. I think, yes, everything that you’re talking about, so just technically speaking, right, you, dialogue is the drive behind a screenplay, but like any good contrast or paradox, it’s also the silent moments, and the, I think that the challenge for me was in taking this story, which has a kind of classic rom-com structure and those moments that – for instance, when you go back, if you, if you’re doing it the other way, if you start with a novel, the way most of these things are done, you start with a  novel and then you turn it into a screenplay. Certain things get sacrificed, and the –

Sarah: Yep.

Julia: – exercise, for me, besides my secret list of, like, everything I wanted to do with the story and everything that meant something personally to me and, like, what it was that I wanted this novel to be, besides that, I also was kind of doing a thought exercise of, okay, let’s say that this is a screenplay, this version of this screenplay, that came out of a pre-existing novel: what was taken out? And that became – which is, which is an inter-, I, I mean, for people who are really into this, like for, if anyone is listening to this going, this is, this is so interesting, I, I recommend you do this: don’t just watch the finished film of, of novels; read the screenplay as well. Usually, these things are online. Go find the screenplay of the novel that was adapted, because it, it’s fascinating to see what ends up getting taken out. And part of it was, like, for instance, this is not about My Oxford Year, but in the adaptation of Me Before You, which Jojo Moyes did, so she has – [laughs] – to me, like, that, you know, when the author does it, there’s, there’s some credibility there – she chose to take out Louisa’s backstory.

Sarah: Mm-hmm.

Julia: Again, I don’t know if this is spoiler-y, but this kind of darker part of Louisa’s past that actually makes that character make a lot more sense, but for the purposes of the screenplay needed to be excised. Part of Louisa’s backstory in the book…important, but it’s unbelievable that if you take it out, the story still plays in the screenplay.

Sarah: Mm-hmm.

Julia: So to me, a novel is a, is a deepening. It is like, if you think about an old Hollywood set, right, you have the façade, an old Western town where you really just have the fronts and then, like, some four by fours holding it up. That’s a screenplay. But…you had to take that and actually make it inhabitable, and you’ve got to pour the foundation, and you’ve got to make it, you also have to put up the walls in places where there may be, there didn’t have to be before, but now there has to be actual rooms? You have to make it pretty as well and make it inhabitable, and it’s all of that, it’s that refining while deepening that I think is, is the challenge, and in some respects, it’s even harder than building a book from the ground up, because there’s certain things that already exist. There’s an existing structure of some kind, and you, sometimes I would find myself being like, what, did, did this, why does this exist? And then working backwards from that –

Sarah: [Laughs]

Julia: – kind of answering that question for myself and finding ways to justify the certain things that already existed and going, actually this is really interesting; it just needs to be explained; it needs to be explored.

Sarah: …-ing from a novel to a screenplay, and you’re removing things like, for example, the backstory, does the responsibility of grounding that character and giving them backstory and motivation then translate to the actor, that becomes the actor’s job?

Julia: Yes. But it’s so much more than just the actor, and that, in that situation, you would also have the director. You would also have the editor, who’s eventually –

Sarah: Mm-hmm.

Julia: – kind of forming the performances the way that we end up seeing them and, and how that is chosen to be presented.

Sarah: Right.

Julia: And to be fair, I think the way that it is an actor’s job is that there are certain things that can be summed in a, in a look that might be a five-page description in a book. So a perfect example is, there’s a scene in My Oxford Year which is kind of the, let’s say the first real breakup that they have, and it’s after she finds out what he’s been hiding, and she has a, she panics. [Laughs] She has a, she has a freak-out because she can’t, at that moment, kind of square the information that she has received with how she actually feels, ‘cause she has been lying to herself about how she feels.

Sarah: Mm-hmm.

Julia: Do you want to pause for the siren?

[siren]

Sarah: Nah, it’s cool!

Julia: [Laughs] Okay.

Sarah: And like I said, in a minute I’ll have a Foley artist –

Julia: This is the audio narrator in me, though. I’m like, I can’t possibly keep talking, because there’s something else going on!

Sarah: [Laughs] No, it’s, it adds to the scene.

Julia: It adds to the scene; it’s an emergency!

Sarah: There’s an emergency!

Julia: Right.

Sarah: There is an emergency happening!

Julia: It’s getting real. It’s getting real!

Sarah: [Laughs]

Julia: We’re driving towards a climax! Okay, so –

Sarah: Yes.

Julia: So that piece and what she specifically says to, what Ella specifically says to Jamie before she walks away is quite cutting, and I, this had to go through a number of drafts, because the actor in me and the screenwriter in me were seeing exactly how that moment would be performed, and when it was read by some early readers, to them it was just coming off as cruel. And, and I, and it was a very interesting –

Sarah: Ah!

Julia: – that was, that was a perfect example to me of, like, a moment where, if I were acting it, I know exactly how I would do it? If I were directing it, I know exactly what I would want to see. But as a, as a writer of fiction, as prose, to be able to walk the reader through that character’s experience so that they become the actor in that situation is, that’s, that’s –

Sarah: Yes.

Julia: – okay, that’s the best example I can think of –

Sarah: That makes sense.

Julia: – for this whole process. [Laughs]

Sarah: …really interesting example to bridge, as the screenwriter, the gap between the novel and the actor and the performance and the reader, because you can’t, you have to do as much as you can to influence the performance that going, that is going on in the reader’s mind, but not do so much that it’s boring.

Julia: Like, that’s always the battle, right? I mean, oh my God, go back to any, like, undergraduate creative writing workshop saying is, like, show don’t tell, right? And you, you have –

Sarah: Yep.

Julia: – that’s the, the job of any writer is to give people just enough of that structure, like we’re saying. Like, build the house; like, maybe put up the walls; but, like, don’t paint. And –

Sarah: Right, you don’t need to describe, the, the wallpaper in intimate detail.

Julia: Exactly! And, and that’s always, that’s a very – look, that’s the work. That’s the tricky bal-, that’s what everyone is trying to achieve. That’s the goal is that –

Sarah: Right.

Julia: – perfect balance.

Sarah: Unless you’re getting paid by the word; then go ahead!

Julia: Right.

[Laughter]

Julia: Please! But then, but screenwriting is, you know, first and foremost a blueprint. Screenwriting is, you know, screenplays, there are very few people that write screenplays that should actually be read. I mean, I always make this argument about Shakespeare is that we forget that Shakespeare was never meant to be read. He was meant to be seen! And to be performed.

Sarah: Mm-hmm.

Julia: And so sometimes I think the, the idea of a screenplay is just a blueprint so everyone’s on the same page, right?…actors all have a similar sense of what needs to happen in the scene, but everything else is up to interpretation in that moment.

Sarah: Mm-hmm.

Julia: And a novel is a, is, is not. It’s a, it’s more, it’s, there’s more hand-holding.

Sarah: Where does the audiobook narrator fall into that performance?

Julia: …narrated this book – [laughs] – I just had that experience.

Sarah: Was that weird?

Julia: Yes!

Sarah: [Laughs] ‘Cause I have, for my summer, when my children go to camp, I have it on my agenda to try to record my own novella, ‘cause I self-published a Hanukkah novella –

Julia: Oh great!

Sarah: – and I have it into my head –

Julia: Nice!

Sarah: – that I want to try to perform it, and I’ve been thinking about it, how am I going to do this? And I’m like, wow, reading my own writing is going to be weird!

Julia: Yeah, it was, it was weird, and this is not to say, it’s not like I hadn’t read the book out loud multiple times before –

Sarah: No.

Julia: – it was finished. I mean, this is, that’s part of my editing process; that’s part of –

Sarah: Mine too! How, how cool! I do the same thing.

Julia: Well, I think, I really think – I mean, look, I, you know, even on, like, every level, I think people need to be doing that. I, I tutored high school kids for years, and I would just make them read essays out loud because –

Sarah: Yep.

Julia: – you know, I don’t think you learn – that’s how you learn your own voice.

Sarah: So true!

Julia: And, so anyway, I’m, I’m pretty crazy about that to begin with. So it’s not like this book had not been read out loud before, but there was something about being in the booth and performing it that, look, it’s, first of all, just on its face value, it’s a challenging book to perform, because there are so many different accents, and it’s first-person present. Like, all of the stuff that is usually, makes for a challenging audiobook performance is, is here in this book, but then also just, yes, the personal connection made a difference, and I got back, so in a normal book, the normal recording process is you record a book, the files get sent off to a proofer who listens and reads along and then sends back a list of corrections when, you know, you make a mistake or you switched words or whatever, and then you go back and you record those sentences, and then they get dropped into the finished files.

Sarah: Right.

Julia: For, like, a book that’s about this length, I think it ended up being nine and a half hours or something. I’ll usually have maybe twenty-five corrections to do? I got this, I got the corrections back for My Oxford Year: there were forty-five.

Sarah: [Laughs] Oh, that must have been –

Julia: And I told the –

Sarah: – that must have been a hit. [Laughs]

Julia: It was mortifying, and I emailed the producer, who I’ve known for years, and I was like, I am so – like, what happened? I’m so sorry; did I not write this book? And he said, he said, you would not believe that every author I ever record has said that exact same thing. And I think it’s because we, we know the story so well, we’re so into it in the recording that we’re not necessarily looking at the actual order of the words on the page. ‘Cause for me it wasn’t mispronunciations; it was switching words in sentences or using different words, entirely different words that maybe the editorial part of my brain just thought, this will, this is better! I’m going to say it this way! So, yeah, that was, it was a very, it was a very, very rewarding experience, and also unlike anything I’d ever done.

Sarah: [Laughs] I’m imagining, like, the pain of getting this editorial. Oh my God, so many corrections!

Julia: Oh my God, I think it was so embarrassing somehow. So that was, that was more embarrassing than anything else. I don’t, I don’t know. Yeah.

Sarah: [Laughs] I’m so sorry.

Julia: Mm-hmm.

Sarah: So I know there are a lot of authors who want to record their own books. Do you have any advice for them?

Julia: Don’t? No, I’m kidding. I –

[Laughter]

Julia: Here’s the thing: like, there’s always this kind of rule that maybe with memoir or nonfiction an author should record it. With fiction, it very, it very much depends – I, I’m not, I don’t have a hard and fast rule about it. I think, I think it very much depends on the book, and I think it depends on the voice of the book.

Sarah: Of course.

Julia: So, I mean, no one’s going to argue that Neil Gaiman shouldn’t record his own books.

Sarah: No, and I don’t think anyone’s standing in his way.

Julia: No, no.

Sarah: [Laughs]

Julia: But I think that, I think you, well, as I just learned, like, I think you have to be prepared for the fact that it’s going to be harder than you think it’s going to be.

Sarah: Yes.

Julia: If you’re not comfortable to…of your own voice, like, if – [laughs] – if you’re calling your voicemail and you skip right past your own, like, your outgoing message, you just can’t handle it, this is probably not the right thing for you to do. It’s –

Sarah: Yes.

Julia: – it will be unnecessarily brutal. But, you know, it’s the same way that you edit a book. I think you have to have as much distance from it as you can possibly get; that has to be the goal. And you have to get out of your own way, and you have to just trust that the story, you constructed a story that can be told without you necessarily in the room, and then just pretend that it’s a book that someone else wrote.

Sarah: Yeah.

Julia: Now, that’s, because that’s my day job, so I know how to do that, I, I don’t, I don’t know how –

Sarah: To instruct someone else to do that.

Julia: Yeah, it’s tough, it’s tough.

Sarah: Is it uncool of me to ask for a sample of Ella’s voice and Jamie’s voice, or is that, like, super uncool?

Julia: No, well, I think with Ella’s voice, I don’t know that I changed it that much from my own voice –

Sarah: Mm-hmm.

Julia: – and with Jamie, you know, I just gave him a very kind of, that low sort of sexy Brit thing, you know? I didn’t want to go too much. Everything’s just sort of a suggestion, but that’s, that’s, I’d say, the extent of Jamie. The other characters had sort of different regional accents, but –

Sarah: Right.

Julia: – you know, Jamie, I just wanted to go rather standard.

Sarah: Isn’t it funny when you do different accents how your, different parts of your mouth and your face start to hurt?

Julia: Yeah, the very first book I did  –

Sarah: [Laughs]

Julia: No, this is very true. The very first book I ever did was, the main character, and it was first person, it was YA, was from North Carolina. She moves to Maine –

Sarah: Oh, piece of cake! [Laughs]

Julia: – and the hero, the sexy hero was Irish, so –

Sarah: As you do.

Julia: – so I was, it was one of those things, it was weird, ‘cause it was, like I said, the first book I’d ever done, and I, after, I thought I was coming down with something. Like, I thought I was getting a cold at the end of the day, because my throat hurt –

Sarah: [Laughs]

Julia: The musculature of my throat and, and palate, like, hurt…’cause different muscles were being used, so. Now, though, you know, now –

Sarah: You’re used to it.

Julia: Yeah.

Sarah: Those muscles are strong.

Julia: Yeah, they’re strong.

Sarah: Two last questions: one, you’ve a lot of poetry in My Oxford Year, which is very cool. Do you have a favorite in that book?

Julia: Well, I, so, when I was, when I was at Oxford, I was focusing mostly on, Victorian novelists are my thing, so the George Eliot stuff in there is, that, that was really, that was my jam. Poetry, I kind of had to be, I had to be dragged to.

Sarah: [Laughs]

Julia: And it was really through the process of writing this book that I was rediscovering just how beautiful so much Victorian poetry is, and obviously the center of that is, is Tennyson. And so going back and looking at, again, I think it’s the age, I think it’s where, you know, looking at things with a fresh eye, like going back and looking at “In Memoriam” and the grief poems for Tennyson, having just been through more of life and having –

Sarah: Uh-huh?

Julia: – lived through loss, suddenly these things resonated so much more with me. So the, some of the Tennyson poetry affects me. The Matthew Arnold stuff is obviously beautiful. That, you know, all of the chap-, all of the poetry at the chapter headings was chosen for very specific reasons that have, that make sense in context of the chapter that they introduce, and I just was picking those out of my old Victorian poetry anthologies that I carried back with me from Oxford, and it was almost weird; it was like little messages to myself. Like, I had, there were torn pieces of Post-Its in that, in those anthologies, and I was here picking them up ten years later, going back through them, and, like, stopping at, you know, where I’d put a Post-It. Why I’d put a Post-It there ten years ago? I don’t know, but it happened to be “When You Are Old” by Yeats, you know? And I was like, this is perfect. This is perfect for this particular chapter; this is what I want to use. And then I somehow got it into my head, I don’t know why I did this, but I got into my head that Jamie should attempt poetry at some point –

[Laughter]

Julia: – and so I, I, you know, just took a stab at writing my own poetry and hadn’t really done that before, so that was fun.

Sarah: I imagine it’s a little bit different to write a, write a poem as a character.

Julia: Yes.

Sarah: It adds a little bit of distance, and so it’s less, maybe a little bit less self-conscious in the process?

Julia: It is, it is, because I, I also think, like, having the, again, the structure of being able to use everything I already knew about this book and the story and the themes and the characters and having that to anchor it –

Sarah: Yeah.

Julia: – was, was very helpful, and –

Sarah: You have all the backstage knowledge!

Julia: Yes, exactly. I think when you’re trying to write a poem as yourself it’s harder.

Sarah: Yeah.

Julia: It’s very opaque –

Sarah: Oh, that’s –

Julia: – it’s very opaque.

Sarah: And it’s such a squidgy, embarrassing feeling.

Julia: Oh, it really is. That’s why I have so much admiration for poets, especially, especially good poets, but even bad poets! Because, you know what –

Sarah: Yeah.

Julia: – you, like, you tried. That is, it’s, it’s hard, and it is, that’s a process I, I don’t particularly enjoy, so I’m always amazed at people who do it and do it so well.

Sarah: [Laughs] Yeah, me too.

…last question I always ask guests is whether or not you have any books that you’ve been reading that you would like to recommend to other people.

Julia: Oh, whoo, yes, okay, sure…read Robinne Lee’s The Idea of You?

Sarah: …ohhh. No, I haven’t.

Julia: You need to read this book.

Sarah: Ohhh?

Julia: I have been, I feel like I’ve been…book so much that people are probably like, we get it, The Idea of You, but I –

Sarah: [Laughs]

Julia: – I love this book so much. She is also an actress who decided to write a novel, and it’s, it’s beautiful. The, the, the tag line on the book is, what if your daughter’s fantasy became your reality? And it’s about a forty-year-old woman who falls for a boy band member?

Sarah: Hello.

Julia: Yeah, and as someone who, I, I, personally? [Laughs] Personally, not my thing; I don’t, I don’t, I don’t get the appeal there, but I also don’t have a thing for rock stars, so I’m, I’m probably not, I’m not the market for this book, and I still loved this book, because Robinne spends this, it’s a very sexy, very beautiful, headlong tumble into this romance, but it is also about aging and feminism and sexism and the way that we perceive fame in this country that I think, you know, again, as a, as an actress, Robinne is qualified to write about. This is really kind of the, the underside of the underbelly of fame, and it’s just, it’s so, it’s so well done, especially, I think, from the perspective of a forty-year-old woman who has a life and has made choices and has fought so hard to have autonomy and to be her own person and to just kind of get wrapped up in this twenty-year-old is, is fascinating, so it’s a wonderful book.

And I also, I had a, I had the pleasure of narrating The Great Alone by Kristin Hannah and Educated, which is a memoir by Tara Westover, and both are absolutely fantastic.

Sarah: Very cool. Is it, is it part of the, the danger of being an audiobook narrator that, like, you, you have extra more books to recommend?

Julia: The problem is, they’re always the same books, because – [laughs] – I have no time for elective reading.

Sarah: [Laughs]

Julia: I’ll still talk about Gone Girl. I think everyone should read Gone Girl, because, you know, I record about seventy books a year, and so, you know, my, my allotted time for pleasure reading is, is very short. But there’s, so yes, but when I love something, oh, I love it fiercely.

[music]

Sarah: And that brings us to the end of our interview. I hope you enjoyed that conversation as much as I did. I want to thank Julia Whelan. If you would like to find her on the internet, she is at the same place at Twitter and at Instagram, justjuliawhelan, W-H-E-L-A-N, so @justjuliawhelan on Twitter and Instagram.

This podcast was brought to you by A Devil of a Duke by Madeline Hunter. From New York Times bestselling author Madeline Hunter comes the latest sexy Regency-era tale of glittering balls, aristocratic hubris, false identities, and high-stakes thievery, as one duke follows his lady down a very dangerous rabbit hole into the criminal world hidden beneath London’s fancy veneer. Compulsively readable, inventive, and witty, Madeline Hunter pulls back the curtain of history to explore the light and the dark, the polished and the seedy side of London’s decadence and excess. A Devil of a Duke by Madeline Hunter is on sale now wherever books are sold and at kensingtonbooks.com. And thank you to Kensington Books for sponsoring this episode.

Every episode gets a transcript, and every transcript is hand crafted by garlicknitter. Thank you, garlicknitter! [You’re welcome! – gk] This week’s transcript is brought to you by Whiskey Sharp: Jagged by Lauren Dane. Vicktor Orlov took one look at the wary gaze and slow-to-trust personality of the deliciously sexy and fascinating Rachel Dolan and knew he wanted more than just a casual friendship. But as a natural protector, he also knew bossiness and overprotective maneuvering would push her away rather than draw her close. He will use every tool in his easygoing, laid-back arsenal to convince her to take a chance on them. Rachel’s flourishing new career as a tattoo artist has brought color back into a life previously damaged by a series of bad choices and violence. She knows she can trust Vic; it’s herself she’s not sure of. She doesn’t want to be caged or controlled, doesn’t want to be protected so much that she has no ability to make her own choices, and he knows that, so when Vic finally drops all pretenses of “just friends” and focuses his careful affection and irresistible seduction on her, Rachel knows that she is falling hard for the laid-back man she has discovered has a relentlessly steel spine when it comes to her, and she can’t resist. You can find Whiskey Sharp: Jagged on sale now wherever books are sold. Thank you to Lauren Dane for sponsoring the transcript this month.

As we make our way to the terrible joke at the end of this podcast – it’s kind of like the monster at the end of the book, only it’s a terrible joke and not a monster; it could be a monstrous joke, but it’s really just kind of terrible – I want to tell you about the podcast Patreon. If you go to patreon.com/SmartBitches, you have the ability to make a monthly pledge, beginning with one entire dollar each month, and your pledges help me continue the show, they help me transcribe older episodes that don’t have a transcript yet, and you help me keep going into the future with new episodes. Plus, the Patreon community gets to find out about some of the guests that I’m booking early, and they help me craft really cool questions.

I also want to thank some of the Patreon folks personally, so to M, Katie, Carla, Marta, and Stacy, thank you so much for being part of the Patreon for Smart Podcast, Trashy Books.

Are there other ways to support the podcast? Yes! Sing along with me: you can leave a review wherever you listen, you can tell a friend, you can subscribe, whatever works! But either way, thank you so much for hanging out with me each week.

And if you are looking for more podcasts to listen to, check out RomancePodcasts.com, which is a list of podcasts focused on romance fiction that I’ve put together and I’m continually updating.

And speaking of podcasts, I have news! I probably should have put this in the intro, but I’ll put it in the intro next week! But if you’re listening, you get special news. On Thursday, May 17, 2018, at the Romantic Times Booklovers Convention in Reno, we will be hosting another live taping of the podcast, yay! Now, you must have a badge to enter. We will be in Naples 4 at 5:30 p.m. Pacific time. You have to be a conference attendee with a badge to enter the conference area, and I am sorry that it is not open to the public, but it is available to every conference attendee at Romantic Times Booklovers Convention. Again, that’s Naples 4, 5:30 p.m. You can join me, Elyse, Amanda, Robin Bradford, and more guests to be announced. We’re going to be creating mayhem, having extremely inappropriate conversations, and we may even have a team-trivia-style challenge that I am currently putting together; heh-heh-heh. But if you are going to RT in Reno in May, Thursday, May 17, 5:30 p.m. Pacific time, live taping of the podcast. I hope you’ll join us!

Now, coming up on the site this week we have our mammoth, expensive thread where we talk about what you’re reading. What’s it called? Whatcha Reading? It’s going to be Saturday. Please come, tell us what you’re reading. It’s a really expensive thread, though, because you’re going to find out what other people are reading, and then you’re going to go buy those books. At least that’s what happens to me. We also have reviews of a Sleeping Beauty retelling, we have Cover Snark, Help a Bitch Out, and it’ll be the first of the month next week, so we have a Hide Your Wallet as well, talking about all of the books that are coming out in May that we want to buy – hence Hide Your Wallet. It’s a really expensive couple of days. Plus we’re going to have a recommendation thread about plus-size heroines and a post about cool library features that you may not know about. I hope you will come hang out with us at smartbitchestrashybooks.com.

And now it is time for our terrible joke. Okay, so I accidentally ended up subscribed to a church newsletter for a very small church in a very small community, and I have never unsubscribed because I find this newsletter to be incredibly charming. Every Friday I get an update as to what the vestry’s doing and who’s in charge of the coffee hour and, you know, sometimes there’s talking about hiring a new person and what the board is going to do. It’s not necessarily privileged communication, ‘cause the list is quite long, but I’m on it, and I really enjoy this newsletter that I probably should unsubscribe to, but I keep getting it! So the church newsletter this week had jokes in it! It’s like they knew me. It’s like they know I’m, I’m on this list, even though I’m not supposed to be. So to the anonymous church newsletter that mistakenly added me to their loop that I really enjoy, here is your joke. Are you ready? Okay.

Can February March?

Can February March? No, but April May.

[Laughs] I read that and was like – [gasps] – this is great! I have another one from the newsletter, too. There’s two of them! But I will save that one for another time. [Laughs] April May! Okay, I will bring myself under control.

So on behalf of Julia Whelan and myself and everyone here, including Orville, who is trying to bang his tail on the sound box, and I’m not letting him, we wish you the very best of reading. Have a wonderful weekend, and I will see you back here next week.

[charming music]

Sarah: This prodcast – prodcast; prod – this prodcast, prodding prodcast. It’s prodding all of – nah, I don’t want it to prod me; that would be gross.