433. Life, Death, Memory, and Immortality: A Conversation with VE Schwab

[music]

Sarah Wendell: Hello, and thank you for welcoming me into your eardrums. I’m Sarah Wendell from Smart Podcast, Trashy Books, and this is episode number 433. Today, Amanda and I are talking with author V. E. Schwab, who wrote The Invisible Life of Addie Larue, which both of us enjoyed tremendously. We are going to talk about the ten-year process of writing it and the power of telling an immortality tale about a person who walks through history as a woman.

In talking about immortality, we also talk with some detail about death, loneliness, grief, and death rituals, so if that’s not something that you can engage with right now, that is okay; I just wanted you to know. Very specifically, at minute forty-two to forty-three [42:00-43:00], we talk about very specific details about spreading ashes, so if that is not something you can handle, skip that minute at minute forty-two.

Also, stay tuned at the end for a special surprise when Amanda’s roommate finds out who Amanda is chatting with. It’s super adorable!

I will have links to all of the books and where you can find V. E. or Victoria Schwab on the internet, should you be curious, so do not worry: all of these books will be linked in the episode.

This podcast episode is brought to you in part by a new sponsor: Headspace! 2020 has been a lot, and Headspace could not have come at a better time for me personally. Headspace is your daily dose of mindfulness in the form of guided meditations in an easy-to-use app. Headspace is one of the only meditation apps advancing the field of mindfulness and meditation through clinically validated research. Need some help falling asleep? Headspace has wind-down sessions that their members swear by – Amanda loves those. And for parents, there are morning meditations you can do with your kids! Whatever the situation, Headspace really can help you feel better. Headspace’s approach to mindfulness can reduce stress, improve sleep – yes! – boost focus, and increase your overall sense of wellbeing. I just completed the beginner course today, which I really liked, especially because it gently taught different steps and techniques that made meditation seem much less intimidating and daunting. I also like the live group meditations and the options inside the app to take a break for three to five minutes. It’s easy to fit it into my day, and it definitely makes a cumulative difference in how I feel. Headspace is backed by twenty-five published studies on its benefits, six hundred thousand five-star reviews – whoa – and over sixty million downloads. Headspace makes it easy for you to build a life-changing meditation practice with mindfulness that works for you on your schedule, anytime, anywhere. You deserve to feel happier, and Headspace is meditation made simple! Go to headspace.com/SARAH – that’s headspace.com/SARAH – for a free one-month trial with access to Headspace’s full library of meditations for every situation. This is the best deal offered right now, so head to headspace.com/SARAH – S-A-R-A-H – today!

Thank you, as always, to our Patreon community for keeping the show going and making sure that every episode has a transcript and is accessible to everyone. If you would like to support the show, go to patreon.com/SmartBitches. Monthly pledges start at one dollar, it is a wonderful community, and we deeply appreciate each and every pledge.

Thank you again, Patreon community. You look fabulous today!

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As I mentioned, I will have links to all of the books that we talk about, and I will end the show with two jokes! Two whole jokes just for you, because it’s a holiday week and I couldn’t choose between them, so you win! [Laughs] So please make sure to stay tuned to the end of the episode, but now, let’s get started with this podcast with me and Amanda and V. E. Schwab.

[music]

Sarah: We are both so excited to do this interview. Like, we’ve been so excited to talk to you. Could you please – this is the only awkward part – introduce yourself and tell the people who will be listening who you are and what you do?

Victoria Schwab: Of course, of course! I am Victoria Schwab. I often write as V. E. Schwab. I am the author of twenty novels I guess at this point, across the spectrum of –

Sarah: Whoa!

Victoria: – middle grade, YA, adult, and graphic novels. Usually the one thing my stories have in common is that they’re in some way about the supernatural or about the line between life and death or good and evil, hero and villain, human and monster. Most recently, I am the author of a novel called The Invisible Life of Addie Larue about a young woman who makes a deal with the devil to live forever, and ends up cursed to be forgotten by everyone she meets.

Sarah: When someone asks you about Addie Larue, about the book, and says, well, what is it about? how do you answer that question? Because someone tried to ask me, and I was like, well –

Victoria: [Laughs]

Amanda: It’s like all of the words try to escape your mouth at once –

Sarah: Yes!

Amanda: – when you’re explaining, and then you’re like, oh, and then this! Oh, and then I forgot to mention there’s that?

Victoria: Yeah! It’s difficult, especially because I wrote it over the course of ten years, so I have even more words in my head than I can ever use to explain it, but I think the simplest way to say, besides that, you know, it’s a, it’s a story about a deal with the devil, is it’s a story about immortality and loneliness and the extent to which we will go to leave our mark on the world.

Sarah: Ooh!

Amanda: Oh boy! Also, I want to say that Addie Larue is my Best of 2020 staff pick –

Victoria: Oh my goodness.

Amanda: – at the independent bookstore I work at?

Victoria: Yeah?

Amanda: So –

Victoria: You just made my whole day.

Amanda: [Laughs]

Victoria: Sorry, Sarah.

[Laughter]

Victoria: Amanda’s my favorite now.

Sarah: That’s perfectly fine; she’s my favorite too.

Amanda: I’m feeling it might switch back and forth, though, through the course of this interview. We’ll take a tally at the end.

Victoria: I am a fickle, I am a fickle favoritist, so –

Amanda: [Laughs]

Victoria: Thank you, though. Honestly, like, this is a weird year – I think I, that’s a safe understatement to make –

Amanda: Mm-hmm.

Victoria: – and when you’re working on a novel, you never really know the context into which that novel will be published. I certainly didn’t, and I, this is not the year I would have imagined or had ever chosen for a book that took ten years, but I have to say in retrospect, I’m really intensely grateful this is the year that it came out, because the themes of stubborn hope and defiant joy feel like things we might need a little bit of right now, so thank you.

Amanda: Okay. So what a perfect segue! [Laughs] ‘Cause I was going to ask, considering it took you so long to write it, what, what really led you to Addie and to begin this story?

Victoria: Well – [laughs] –

Sarah: Once upon a time –

Victoria: Once upon a time!

Sarah: – many years ago – [laughs]

Victoria: No, so once upon a time, just about ten years ago, I was living in an ex-prison warden’s garden shed in –

Amanda: Oh! [Laughs]

Victoria: – the Liverpool suburbs.

Sarah: Those are not words I expected to hear in a row.

Victoria: Not only that, but I was grateful to be living in the shed, because the house next to the shed – and when I say garden shed, I hope people can truly picture this: like a Home Depot shed, right? Like a Home Depot garden shed in an ex-prison warden’s backyard, but the house that I was not living in, because I was living in the shed, was very haunted –

Amanda: Whoa.

Victoria: – so I was quite happy to be living in the shed, ‘cause I’m, I, I like to keep my ghosts at a distance. Suffice it to say, I was not terribly happy in that environment, and I had a housemate in this very illegal living situation that would drop me off at random places around the UK as she was traveling for work, and one day she dropped me off in the Lake District in, in a small town called Ambleside, which is just an incredible place: the kind of place where if the electricity wasn’t on, you wouldn’t really know what century it was sometimes. And so I got lost on purpose that day. I had eight hours, and I decided to go hiking, and as I was hiking I, I was thinking about loneliness, ‘cause I was feeling quite lonely there, and I hiked to the top of this very large hill, and I sat down exhausted, physically and emotionally, and the first thought that entered my mind is, I bet this is what immortality feels like. [Laughs]

And it kind of grew from there. I had studied Peter Pan in school and was fascinated by the idea of memory and forgetting. I was in the process of losing my grandmother to dementia, watching my mother be erased from her own mother’s memory. I wanted to tell an immortality deal, a Faustian bargain, but I kind of was fed up with a lot of the, the male Faustian bargain tales, because the, you know, the TL;DR of it is like, they live forever, they eat everything there is to eat, they drink everything there is to drink, they go everywhere there is to go, they screw everyone there is to screw, and then they’re bored! Like, the –

Amanda: It’s like the, the sad little rich boy.

Victoria: Exactly! And I, I mean, those stories are fun, but I also thought, it would never go that way for a woman! Even if –

Sarah: No!

Victoria: – did give her the curse of being forgotten, she’s still, like, a woman in history! [Laughs] So that kind of all germinated for a few years into this narrative! And then I patently didn’t write it for eight years because I was, not because I wasn’t interested, in fact, but because I was really in love with the idea and became almost protective of it, to the point where I was scared to put it down on paper. I was scared of not being able to do it justice, and about eight years into actively not writing it, I had a realization, much like Henry Strauss, the young human in the book, where I was, oh my God, I’m going to die without writing this book! For the, in a, for the sake of not writing it wrong, when you can’t write a book right! There’s no such thing as a perfect novel! So that’s when I started writing it, about two years ago.

Amanda: In terms of, like, death in books, one of – I feel like death doesn’t scare me, but what gives me the most anxiety is all of the good books I won’t be able to read because they’ve come out after I’ve died.

[Laughter]

Victoria: Oh man. That is an anxiety-provoking thought. Whereas for me it’s, like, all the books I’ll never get to write. So I think there’s a sense of, like, just a keen awareness? Like, growing up I was scared not of death itself as an act, but I was scared of being erased. Like, the, the idea that I could spend all my life, however long that life was, living, learning, growing as a person, accruing memories, and then cease to be. That scared me incredibly, so I wrote a novel called The Archived, which is about a library where the dead are shelved like books, because to me that was a comforting idea! And with Addie, it was kind of, how do I take my worst fears, like, as a creator, a fear of absolute irrelevance and erasure from the narrative, and how do I give it to somebody who’s obviously a much better person than I am, because she finds a way to live through it and have a good life?

Amanda: It’s – so I know earlier I, I’m – we’re going off script – [laughs]

Victoria: I’m sorry. I’m not very good at staying on scripts.

Amanda: That’s fine!

Sarah: Neither are we.

[Laughter]

Amanda: Earlier you had mentioned that, you know, like, once you put a book out in the world, like, that’s it, and it’s hard to get the, the timing right. And now that I’m thinking about it and we’re talking about death and dying and being forgotten, I, I’m wondering if the reason why I really love this book so much is because, so my, I lost my father over the summer, and I’m his –

Victoria: I’m sorry.

Amanda: It’s, it’s okay.

Victoria: No, I mean, there’s nothing, there’s no right answer –

Amanda: Yes.

Victoria: – to that, but I am sorry.

Amanda: I know. And I’m his only child, so –

Victoria: Yeah.

Amanda: – and he never remarried, so I had to take care of everything, and the one thing that really threw me was when I got his ashes in the mail, and I was, like, obsessed with the fact that, of, like, physical space.

Victoria: Yeah.

Amanda: Like, he’s no longer taking up, like, physical space in this world, and a man who is, who was six-four is now in a box that’s, you know –

Victoria: Yeah.

Amanda: – twelve inches tall. And I think, like, that’s what really resonated with me is, you know, like, when you die, or in Addie’s case, like, you know, people forget her, and –

Victoria: Yeah.

Amanda: – it’s like she’s no longer present in these people’s memories and interactions, and how, how lonely and sad that is!

Victoria: Mm-hmm. Yeah, it’s that excision, right? She’s, she’s carved out, and even when she learns to leave marks in more creative ways, it, it’s not attributable to her. But the blessing, I guess, that Addie has in that case is that she has a flawless memory. So, but because, much like you and your father – and, and I have to say, as an only child, it’s my great nightmare as well because there’s no one to help share the burden of memory? There’s nobody else –

Amanda: Yeah.

Victoria: – to look to and say, hey, do you remember when? Because when you don’t have siblings, like, nobody else was there, and, and I think with Addie, the loneliness of that stems from the fact she remembers, but also, at what point do you not trust your memory? When you’re the only keeper of it – she, she describes in the novel that often she feels like a museum that only she can visit. And like –

Sarah: Yeah.

Victoria: – she feels her, she kind of has this neurotic tic of, of circling memories over and over again, because she’s reliving them. It’s her only thing; she doesn’t have an object that she can pick up and think, remember when? She doesn’t have, you know, photographs. She doesn’t have a journal; she doesn’t have – like, it’s all inside her head at all times, and I think that creates an incredible paranoia of the fallibility, even though she knows her memory’s infallible. In the rest of us, I think the fallibility of memory is one of the most – like, I’ll wake up in the middle of the night with a panic attack about my parents dying, and I’ll just think, Go-, I, like, need to capture them on camera more. I need to capture them on –

Sarah: Yeah.

Victoria: – video more. I need to find a way to protect and archive them, because I have a really bad memory. And I think it’s because I’ve been writing novels so long? I’ll, I’ll, like, make a joke of it and say, oh, it’s because I’m always off in a fictional headspace? I’m just not very good at being mentally present in my own reality? For whatever the reason is, I have a terrible memory, and when you’re an only child and have a terrible memory, I just walk around consistently being like, I am in the active process of erasing everything of importance to me.

Sarah: Mm-hmm. One of the things I love about the book and how Addie navigates that loss of permanence and loss of her own archive in the minds of other people is how many subtle ways she’s influenced different people’s art and lives, and I loved that because it really made me think about all of the women through history who have been fundamentally essential to the creation of something and been erased because a dude got the credit for it.

Victoria: [Laughs] Exactly, exactly, and largely inspired early on by research of, like, the Paris salon scene –

Sarah: Yes!

Victoria: – and realizing that the orchestrators, the conductors of so much of the Enlightenment  period, and they would never get credit, but they were hosting because in doing so, in bringing together the influencers of the times, they were helping to shape history. And, like, if, if, if they got put down in the history books for anything, it would never be for any, you know, contribution inside that room; it was simply for articulating the bonds of that room, the boundaries –

Sarah: Mm-hmm.

Victoria: – of that room, but it’s still – yeah, the amount of work done by women so that men can take credit through history is, is an incredible thing.

Sarah: And it’s quite a theme in the book too, especially since the work that, that women did in the salons, in creating a space that was welcoming, that was comfortable, that was –

Victoria: Mm-hmm.

Sarah: – conducive to all of that creativity, that is also work, but it doesn’t have an easy descriptor, and it’s easy to say, oh yeah, that, anyone can do that. Not actually true; not everyone can do that. [Laughs]

Victoria: Yeah, and it’s interesting because the whole reason – and we’ll call him the Devil; not the devil, but it’s the easiest thing for marketing materials – the, the, the dark pagan god of promise that Addie makes her deal with, the reason he erases her from the narrative is because in every interaction that he’s had with humans – most of them men – their deepest concern is with being remembered, with the glory, and so he makes the assumption that Addie will be the exact same way, not anticipating that Addie will find the experience of existing and experiencing things as valuable as taking credit for them. And that’s not to say that Addie at no point in history wishes she could take credit for something, but I think she comes to terms with this excision of her from the narrative and realizes that doesn’t have to mean the excision of her contributions.

Sarah: So you’re saying here that the Devil, for lack of a better term, underestimated a woman.

Victoria: Yeah, shocking, right? Just like –

Sarah: Oops!

Victoria: – a shocking concept. [Laughs]

Sarah: Oh darn. [Laughs]

Victoria: Oh darn. Never saw that coming. But I will say, in the Devil’s defense here, it’s the thing that he becomes infatuated with about her, is that she has upended an expectation that he had really seen reinforced again and again and again through humanity and through the, those that he has done deals with, and, and really, over the course of the narrative, I would personally argue – this is not an argument that readers need to share – but as Addie becomes less human over time, which she does –

Sarah: Hmm!

Victoria: – the Devil becomes more human, and she humanizes him, and not in the way of, like, all women want to save broken men? It is not that kind of like archetypal hypothesis? It’s more just that, like, she upends the narration that he has built for humans.

Sarah: Mm-hmm.

Amanda: I will also say that I am, I am an Addie and the Devil shipper? I –

[Laughter]

Victoria: That’s a fine thing to be!

Amanda: So I know, so I’m, I’m sure there will be two camps – [laughs] – upon reading this book, but that is the camp I am firmly in.

Victoria: I mean, I, I wrote them a romance. Like, it’s not a roman- – I mean, it’s a complicated romance, right? It’s a highly abusive relationship, and so –

Amanda: Oh yeah.

Victoria: – I had to work really hard to create a compelling relationship built through antagonism into camaraderie, into the sheer fact of having nobody else, and from there into a toxic romance – [laughs] – but, like, I feel like it was an organic path for them to follow when you’re the only constant in somebody else’s life and they’re the only constant in yours.

Amanda: Well, I’m, I’m a frequent villain shipper, and I’m –

Victoria: Oh.

Amanda: – sure it’s something I should talk to my therapist about eventually.

[Laughter]

Victoria: Well, I mean, I wrote him to be – I wrote him in the hopes that, that some people, not all people, but that some people would, would enjoy their relationship. They are certainly probably meant for each other in a lot of ways.

Amanda: I would agree!

So it’s, it’s taken you quite a long time to finish the book.

Victoria: [Laughs]

Amanda: How do you feel now that it’s, it’s out? Do you miss working on it? Was there a point at, in writing where you’re just like, okay, I just have to stop; I have to stop messing with it and just put it out there?

Victoria: I mean, not to be melodramatic, but this is –

Amanda: [Laughs]

Victoria: – it’s going to sound that way: like, I grieved! I grieved for about six months after it was done, because this thing had taken up such an incredible amount of my heart and headspace for a decade –

Sarah: Mm-hmm.

Victoria: – and realizing the day I was not going to be waking up actively working on Addie’s story anymore with that voice at the front of my head – the voices never go away; they just go to the background with all the other voices you’re not actively writing – but, like, for so many years, like, it’s so hard for people to realize that, like, in the ten years that I’ve been a, a published author, I got the idea for Addie before the first book hit shelves, which means I was actively sitting with her narrative, her voice, her experiences, funneling everything through the filter of, what would Addie think? What would Addie do? How would Addie move through this space? For ten years, along the backdrop of every other book I had come out. So she was a companion, she was a passenger in my life, and I think it’s one of the reasons I didn’t want to write the book is I, I just didn’t want it to end. And knowing it was going to be a standalone novel and knowing that I did want it to have an ending for myself, it was just so hard, and after it was finally done, after the last revisions were done and it went off to print, I just entered this, like, deep – I mean, there was an open grave inside me! Like, I didn’t know what to do; I didn’t know how to fill it. I was per-, petrified by the idea I would never have another book like this? Like, it’s at the far literary end of my creative spectrum, it’s a standalone, it’s a book that took ten years, and I thought, oh my God, I’ve got to find something to fill in the hole!

Sarah: [Laughs]

Victoria: I kept dumping ideas in, in this almost, like, manic terror of having a new Addie. But the problem is, I didn’t realize that Addie was going to take ten years when I first started thinking about it, so maybe I do have an Addie, another one; maybe I don’t; but living in the fear of, what if this never happens again? is something I’m still dealing with.

Sarah: Oof. No pressure or anything.

Victoria: I know, right? That’s exactly what I was about to say.

[Laughter]

Victoria: I’m, like, kind of good at building up pressure on myself in these narrative ways, but at the same time, for like several years, I didn’t want to write Addie because it was so different from my bestselling series at the time, Shades of Magic? And I thought, like, well, God, what are you doing? You’re literally on, like, a road paved with money right now. Like, people are buying these books, and you want to, like, take this really weird, dirt-lined, like, off-ramp into God knows where that you don’t know if anybody wants this from you. Like – [laughs] – so I had to convince myself to go down that road; now I have to convince myself to get back off that road. It’s just, it’s a psychological mess around here.

[Laughter]

Amanda: I feel that’s the current theme of 2020.

Victoria: Oh my God!

Amanda: It’s a psychological mess.

Victoria: This year can just suck it on so many levels. Like, I am so glad for Addie; she has been the one bright spot, but, like, for me, but good Lord! Like, I, I had put my dog down yesterday. Like –

Amanda: Oh my God!

Victoria: – this whole year has been thirty years long. It just won’t end.

Amanda: It, it’s definitely one of those things like, okay, we have a month and a half left, and every month I feel like –

Victoria: It’s so true.

Amanda: – I start anew, and I’m like, maybe this month’ll be different! And – [laughs] –

Victoria: Yeah. I mean, every year, every month is a year, and every year there’s some new terror to have, right? Like, and it’s been such a, such a whiplash to have, like, kind of the current peak of my career, on the one hand, in a year that just cannot seem to get its shit together –

Amanda: Yeah.

Victoria: – on the other hand. Like, I’m, I’m coming to you from France right now, right? A beautiful place to be, but not my home.

Sarah: Mm-hmm.

Victoria: Like, this is my parents’ house. I came down here from Scotland where I live with a carry-on suitcase on March 18th, because that was when the first lockdown started here, and I genuinely thought, I’ll be here for maybe three weeks, four weeks. I just, like, eight and a half months later, like, this year is so full of shit!

Sarah: [Laughs] It really is!

Victoria: You know? That was just a sidebar rant, but I am very grateful that Addie seems to be, like, the one thing doing well this year? And I mean, you know, potentially the barest version of democracy? But on the whole, like, 2020 is going to take up seventy-five pages in a history book.

Amanda: Oh yeah. And I feel like it’s one of those things we’re going to be telling, like, children. It’s like, I lived through 2020, and you’ll never believe what happened! [Laughs]

Victoria: I mean, I was talking about that with my publicist, Kristin. I do feel like we’re all going to have quite a bit of PTSD from this year. Like –

Amanda: Oh, definitely!

Victoria: And I was walking, and, and we are on mask mandate here in France; like, there’s curfews, you can’t go out without a mask on, and, like, I was just walking back to my, to, to do this interview from a walk, and I had my mask on, and I just thought, how weird how quickly something becomes normal.

Sarah: Mmm!

Amanda: Yeah!

Victoria: You know? Like, it’s just a year that I think we’re all going to be changed by –

Sarah: Yes.

Victoria: – and we’re all going to have scars from, whether it’s, like, the COVID of it; the election of it; like, just being gaslit to shit for four years. Like, it’s just a year that I think any one of us who’s lived it, like the poor teenagers who, like, didn’t have high school? Like, who, like, didn’t have any of their experiences they were supposed to have. College kids who, like, got into their dream schools or got into any school, if they wanted to, and suddenly, like, aren’t having any experiences. People who are, like, taken back into, like, bad households that they’d thought they’d escaped. Like, it’s just a shit year! [Laughs] This is a terrible, weird, weird year, and so if I can write a book that makes somebody forget for a few days how terrible it is or provides them with a character who has lived through some real nightmares and has found a way to survive the darkest times because of the, like, stubborn hope that it will get, it will get better, that there will be something beautiful tomorrow, there will be something to sustain you, like, then at least there’s that.

Amanda: So in the course of the book, and we see kind of like Addie’s relationships, so she has other people –

Victoria: Yeah.

Amanda: – and it does span, you know, the spectrum of, like, gender and sexuality, and I know queerness is very important, especially in your books, to you –

Victoria: Yes.

Amanda: – but it doesn’t necessarily become the center of their identity. Have you seen or, like, been getting any responses to the relationships Addie has had? Addie and Henry, Addie and the Devil –

Victoria: Yeah!

Amanda: – Addie and her –

Victoria: There’s Sam, there’s Remy, there’s –

Amanda: [Laughs] Yep!

Victoria: – you know, there’s Robbie for Henry. Yeah, I mean, here’s the thing, right? And something I really wanted to do with this novel is introduce a, a large amount of casual queerness? Because I think a lot about coming-out narratives. I think they’re hugely important, of course, but I think there’s something weirdly reductive that happens in publishing sometimes, where it feels like the only time –

Sarah: What?!

Victoria: I know, right? It would never! But it feels like the only time that – often – that queer characters are included in a narrative, their queerness is a plot point. Whether that’s the coming-out narrative for the teens, which is, again, so important, but if you’re someone like me who didn’t come out in her teen years, what I, I don’t need a coming-out narrative. I need a queer existence narrative. I need to see characters taking up space and their queerness not being the only reason for their inclusion in the story, because for some people, their, their identity, their sexuality, their gender, these things take up vast amounts of space in their life, but for some people they don’t! For me, I would say my sexuality is like fifteen percent max, and I don’t want to be solely defined by that, and I don’t want every narrative that I am in, in my own life or in fiction, to be simply because of that, and so I think something that I want to do in stories is include casual queerness! Just, like, have characters being queer on the page, in their narratives, and normalize it as much as possible, because it is normal, and it’s always there! And it’s just that so often in fiction we choose to aggrandize it for the sake of narrative, but in doing that, what we’re also saying is that it’s not just there!

Sarah: Yeah. It makes me think of Sue Perkins from The Great British Bake Off talking about how her being a lesbian is like the forty-seventh most interesting –

Victoria: Yes! [Laughs]

Sarah: – thing about her, and I was like, yeah, you’re a conductor; you were on the Bake Off! Like, the whole lesbian thing is, like, way down on the list here! And I realized, you know, that’s so true for so many of the queer people who are in my life. It’s something I’m aware of in terms of respect and safety and care, but it’s not like the only thing I think about all the time!

Victoria: Exactly! And I think it’s, you know – and I really do think some of it depends on when in your life you realized and when in your life you came out, because I think, you know, kids who, who figure things out early and, and make those decisions early are shaped by it in really loud ways often because they’re so much at risk. They don’t have autonomy in their lives, and that can add so much fear and confusion, and that’s why those narratives are also very important. But I came out when I was like twenty-seven. Like, nobody was going to kick me out of the house, right? Like, the –

Sarah: Yeah.

Victoria: – the decisions I was making were for my own life, but I was already myself, and, like, my, it was like a – it was a very slow conversation in my household. When I was like seventeen. I was like, so, parents, like, might bring home a girl. Just going to seed that in there. And then like five years later it was like, so, parents, probably not going to bring home a boy, and then just, like, let that one go for a while. And then like five years later it was like, okay, guys, I guess we should really actually talk.

[Laughter]

Victoria: Like, bless you all.

Amanda: You were just, like, long-conning. That’s –

Victoria: It was! It was a very long con.

Amanda: [Laughs]

Victoria: Yeah, so I just think that diversity of narrative in terms of how much weight we give aspects of identity is also really helpful, because, again, some of us just really want to see ourselves depicted normally!

Amanda: I particularly like to, I, I describe myself as like a chaos bisexual?

[Laughter]

Amanda: I mean –

Victoria: But, like, aren’t, aren’t most bisexuals chaos bisexuals?

[Laughter]

Amanda: Chaotic neutral –

Victoria: Yes.

Amanda: – here. But, like, I, I am with Addie in the sense that, like, if I lived throughout time –

Victoria: Yeah.

Amanda: – come on!

Victoria: Yeah.

Amanda: It’s like a smorgasbord for –

Victoria: Yeah, I mean would she get bored?

Amanda: – to enjoy. [Laughs]

Victoria: Like, Addie definitely starts out, like, seeing herself as largely heterosexual, because that’s, like, the culture and the time period and her initial ideas of what her own attraction is in the purely hypothetical sense, but then, like, you know, a hundred years in, and now she starts to realize – apparently it takes her a hundred years, which, sorry –

Amanda: [Laughs]

Victoria: – the rest of us got there a lot faster – but that, like, you know, it’s about the person, not the gender. It’s, it’s about, like, how she connects to humans. And, I mean, I would certainly argue that none of the three main characters are anywhere near, anywhere near straight. Like, dude, you’re not going to tell me that a pagan god of darkness and promise is, is anything but pansexual.

Amanda: Oh God, no. [Laughs]

So Addie, to, to live the way she does, it’s, it would be easy to kind of sink into a deep puddle of despair and never leave it. And sometimes she does!

Victoria: Yeah.

Amanda: But she still finds, like, that light at the end of the tunnel to keep going, and there’s a tenacity there. And we, we’ve talked about this earlier, about how a lot of immortality stories focus on men, and both Sarah and I agree that it was kind of very scary, but also very exhilarating to read about a woman navigating this immortality on her own –

Sarah: Mm-hmm.

Amanda: – and the strength that it would take for Addie to keep living in a world that, you know, doesn’t value women.

Victoria: Mm-hmm.

Amanda: So what was it like, like –

[Laughter]

Victoria: Yeah! I mean, here’s the thing –

Amanda: – not being bummed out twenty-four/seven?

Victoria: So here’s the really fascinating thing about, about storytelling is that, like, often the longer you sit with an idea, the more it changes, and the first version of Addie that I concocted was all of those things: deeply depressed, deeply weary, and looking for the way out. And then I realized, I needed her to be the exact opposite of that, because Addie has an out button the entire time. Right, all Addie has to do essentially, say is, I surrender. So I had to look at what kind of person wouldn’t. And look, like, spite carries her for about fifty years.

Amanda: [Laughs]

Victoria: Like, being pissed at the Devil gets you a certain amount of distance, but I kind of think it’s the same way as looking at a lot of the hardships from this year: anger will get you a certain amount of the way, but hope will sustain you the rest.

Sarah: Mm-hmm.

Victoria: Like, you can’t have one without the other and have any, any aspirations of longevity. And so basically, that’s the realization that Addie comes – I often joke that her narrative is one about the five stages of grief for her own existence, which is that, like, she is very scared and very angry for a period of time, and then she realizes that spite won’t do it.

Sarah: Mm-hmm.

Victoria: Because if she was somebody who just relied on anger and spite, she would burn out! You know, she would absolutely burn out, and so what I had to give her instead was this relentless optimism. You know, and, and, and I think this is a year in which we talk a lot about small joys versus big joys. Most of us are not getting a lot of big Joy with a capital J this year, but when I’m in, in a depressive episode, when I’m struggling, I don’t go looking for big joys. I look for a reason to get to tomorrow, and that’s essentially what Addie’s life becomes and what Henry’s life was, you know, in his own narrative, which is to say she looks around for a reason to make it one more day. It’s not like she sits down at the beginning and is like, I’m going to make it three hundred years. She sits down and she’s like, I am going to find beauty in this world, beauty in every moment.

That becomes the shorthand for a phrase in the book, I saw an elephant in Paris, which happens, like, a couple of years in, when the Devil shows up and is like, do you give in yet? And she says to him, I saw an elephant in Paris, and what that means is she didn’t even know, like, what that would look like. She was spellbound by something she didn’t even know – and the thing about her world is that it’s constantly getting larger. At the beginning of the narrative, she’s never been more than thirty miles beyond her village. Beyond that, then she goes to Paris for the first time. Then she goes to the sea, and she sees the ocean for the first time! Then she goes to another country! Then she – so she’s, her world is unfolding in a way that always gives her hope that if she can just make it through the darkness of it she will see something wonderful that makes it worth it.

Amanda: So would, would you want immortality, or does it sound like an absolute nightmare to you?

Victoria: No, I’d want it in a heartbeat. I’d want it in a hear- –

Amanda: Oh!

Victoria: Like, so much of my fear is about running out of time. Like, on a daily basis. Like, I know it would be hard; I know that there would be cruxes and curses to it, but, like, I am, I mean, I’m very much Henry in this novel, more than Addie, but, like, in terms of that feeling like you bend down to tie your shoe and you look up and everyone somehow is a mile ahead? I don’t necessarily feel like everyone else is a mile ahead, but I feel like, I feel like every day I bend down to tie my shoe and I lose more than the time it took. Like, I just feel time is continually slipping out of my hands faster than I can get anything done that I want to do. And some of that’s that I have big aspirations, that I love telling stories and I don’t want that to stop, but some of it’s just the sheer terror of – you know, this year took thirty years, but also I’m like, I can’t believe it’s November. You know, I’m always amazed when time slips away without me noticing it. So yeah, I think I would be extremely tempted by the prospect of time. Somebody did that social media thing, mathematically calculated if you read all day every day for the rest of your life –

Amanda: I hate those; I hate those so much.

Victoria: Right?

Amanda: I hate it.

Sarah: [Laughs]

Victoria: Because I’m like, what do you mean, I could only read like four thousand – but, like, like, screw you! Seriously? Like – it was a lot more than four thousand; I, I don’t do math off the top of my head. But –

[Laughter]

Victoria: But I still, those kinds of things, they, they, they terrorize my, my moments when I’m lying down at night. You know, I, I think about, I, I’m just a morbid person; it’s the reason I engage with death and the idea of its porousness in, in all of my works, because I want it to be a porous thing. It’s, you know, it’s my aunt trying to decide if she can adopt a new dog, or if it will outlive her. It’s like starting to measure life in things beyond decades. That stuff scares me!

Amanda: If, if you like morbidity –

Victoria: [Laughs]

Amanda: – I have two recommendations for you, if you don’t already know about them.

Victoria: Yeah.

Amanda: One is Caitlin Doughty.

Victoria: Oh, obviously! Have read everything. I knew you were going to say –

Amanda: Okay.

Victoria: – it’s either Smoke Gets in Your Eyes or From Here to Eternity, which I found –

Amanda: So good.

Victoria: – deeply comforting.

Amanda: I loved her new one, Will My Cat Eat My Eyeballs? –

Victoria: Yes.

Amanda: – and her YouTube channel’s fantastic.

And then, nonfiction, it just came out, it’s called Dark Archives?

Victoria: Oh, I’m reading it right now. About –

Amanda: Oh my gosh!

Victoria: – anthropodermic – let’s see if I can say it – anthropodermic bibliopegy, right? The coating of books –

Amanda: Yes.

Victoria: – in human skin?

Amanda: So I thr-, when I first moved to the Boston area, we did like a ghost Boston on foot –

Victoria: Yeah.

Amanda: – and I became fascinated with the fact that the Boston Athenaeum has a book bound in human skin –

Victoria: Oh!

Amanda: – and it’s just, like, been a weird fascination of mine for like the past seven years? So when –

Victoria: Can I tell you my favorite morbid detail?

Amanda: Yeah! Love it!

Victoria: About graveyards, and I was surprised that I didn’t hear this one in Caitlin’s book, because I was obsessed with her description of, like, the Japanese –

Amanda: Oh my God, I want to see it so much. Like –

Victoria: – sanctuaries, where they, the gra-, like, the little sculptures light up on the death days so that the, the Buddhist monks can, can bless them? But –

Amanda: And of course it would be Japan to combine, like, death and technology.

Victoria: Of course, of course! But my favorite detail is when I was in Oslo, Norway, and a friend was showing me around, and she took me to the Oslo cemetery, and she said that because of the limited number of plots, when you have a plot you’re only allowed to keep it as long as there is someone alive to mourn you.

Amanda: Oh wow!

Victoria: And then when there is nobody left to mourn you, then you’re excavated, and I, I don’t know if you’re cremated or put somewhere else, but, like, I thought that was such a fascinating – ‘cause they say there are two deaths, right? Your death and then the death of your memory.

Amanda: Yeah. Another book is The Museum of Whales You Will Never See?

Victoria: What? I don’t know this one! Oh my goodness!

Amanda: Okay!

Victoria: Okay!

Amanda: So it is –

Victoria: I’m writing this down.

Amanda: – about how Iceland has, I think, like, the most museums per capita?

Victoria: Uh-huh!

Amanda: And so the writer takes a look at these different museums in Iceland, and some are very niche. Like, they have a, a museum for penises.

Victoria: Of course they do!

Amanda: Yeah.

Victoria: I have no, I’m not surprised in the slightest.

Amanda: [Laughs] And so she, like, visits each museum and kind of like looks at Iceland and its culture through, like, one artifact –

Victoria: Ah.

Amanda: – in the museum. It, it’s weird –

Victoria: That sounds amazing!

Amanda: – and bizarre and just, I don’t know, I’ve been –

Victoria: I can’t believe you, you, you found one I had not heard of!

Amanda: Yes! [Laughs]

Victoria: Also, Sarah, I’m sorry; we went off on, like, a very weird, morbid-y tangent there.

Sarah: Oh, I’m, I’m right along with you; I’m writing down all the book, all the book titles.

Victoria: I will say, Smoke Gets in Your Eyes and From Here to Eternity by Caitlin Doughty, like, I love those books, and as somebody who has, like, both a death obsession and an extreme, like, morbidity fear regarding the people in my life, like, I found those books deeply comforting.

Amanda: I, I picked it up after –

Sarah: Oh, me too.

Amanda: – Sarah read it and reviewed it on the site.

Sarah: Mm-hmm.

Victoria: It’s so wonderful.

Amanda: It was, it is great.

Sarah: I also love being the person who is very casually comfortable talking about death and what happens after you die and all of the different death rituals in different cultures? Like, I think it’s fascinating –

Victoria: Yes.

Sarah: – how different cultures examine and deal with and confront death through ritual, but I’m, I’m always like, oh, did you know that so-and-so in this culture, they do this? And people are like, okay, I need to talk to somebody else right now.

Amanda: [Laughs]

Victoria: Okay, we would get along very well, though, at that cocktail party, ‘cause I would also be –

Sarah: Yes.

Victoria: I mean, that’s how, what is it, that’s how the two women who do Stay Sexy and Don’t Get Murdered, what’s it called, My Favorite Murder –

Sarah: Yes.

Victoria: – met, because they were both at a cocktail party, and they were the ones who, like, wanted to discuss serial killers –

Amanda: Yeah.

Victoria: – and nobody else did. I also will say, the detail that I found most soothing – ‘cause I do think about the way in which we engage with death a lot and how, like, puritanical societies have such an, such an unhealthy relationship, but I was thinking about the Japanese cremation rituals and that the family’s job is to pick out the bones –

Amanda: Yes.

Victoria: – that, like, didn’t burn, and I thought, what a soothing, like, what an incredible interaction and, like, grieving process, to have that physical proximity with, with that body.

[42:08, if you want to skip over the part about spreading ashes]

Amanda: I remember when we were spreading my grandmother’s ashes, and something tumbled out, and my brother picked it up –

Victoria: Uh-huh.

Amanda: – and it was, like, this metal piece, and I’m like, what the hell is this? He’s like, I’m going to take a picture and put it on Reddit. Someone will know.

Victoria: Was it like a hip, a hip thing? Like –

Amanda: It was, it was, I forget what they’re called, but it’s, like, something they put under your skin for your chemo. It, a port.

Victoria: Oh, a port!

Amanda: Yes. So, like, her port fell out –

Victoria: Oh my!

Amanda: – of her ashes – [laughs] – but it was just interesting. It’s like, this was in my grandmother’s body, and my brother’s like, I’m going to put a photo on Reddit –

Victoria: [Laughs]

Amanda: – and someone’s going to tell us what it is. And within like –

Victoria: Oh dear.

Amanda: – twenty minutes, someone’s like, oh yeah, that’s a port. [Laughs]

Victoria: I mean, what would we do without, without the search engines of the internet to tell us anything? Goodness.

[43:00, so if you were skipping the part about ashes, come back now]

Amanda: So we’re switching to, like, craft portions. Like –

Victoria: Yes, yes!

Amanda: – away from death.

Victoria: Get away from death. We have people a little, if you were really skeeved out, come back here.

Amanda: Sarah will put timestamps.

Sarah: Yep!

Amanda: So you’ve, you’ve written many books –

Victoria: Too many.

Amanda: – [laughs] – and while they, they do have, like, a fantastical element, they’re all different in terms of genre. Do you approach them all the same when you’re planning and writing?

Victoria: I mean, that’s a great question, ‘cause I think there’s this weird immediate assumption that, like, well, the, the children’s books are easier, and then, like, that, that them trying to get some-, like, oh, my five-hundred-page fantasy novel must be easier than my, you know, two-hundred-page middle grade, but the middle-grade novels I write – [laughs] – shockingly, about death – they’re called the City of Ghosts books, and they’re really, they take a huge amount of historical research, because in the books the main girl almost died and was saved by a ghost, and now they’re best friends and they are able to, like, cross the veil, but her parents host a television show where they travel to the world’s most haunted cities? And so the first book’s called City of Ghosts, and then Tunnel of Bones and Bridge of Souls – Edinburgh, Paris, and New Orleans, respectively – but the ghost stories in those books and the places they go, all real. So, like, that took a huge amount more research than something that I was able to, you know, create wholesale.

As far as what changes: very little. The, the way that I think about it is, when I write a novel I, I’m writing to a specific age of myself, because I don’t know what life was like for, like, all eleven-year-olds. I only know what my eleven-year-old life was like, and it was weird as shit and again, shockingly –

Sarah: [Laughs]

Victoria: – pretty morbid. [Laughs] And so, and so when I am writing my City of Ghosts books, like, I’m thinking about eleven-year-old me and, like, what I needed, what I wanted to read. That’s really the only thing that changes. When I’m writing my YA novels, I’m writing for seventeen-year-old me, who was angry and felt lost in her own world and in her body and just shut-down and at odds and anxious, and so, you know, when I’m writing, like, the Monsters of Verity books, which is this really dark YA series I have about the idea that violence begins to breed actual monsters, the, like, those books are written to seventeen-year-old me, just who I was, ‘cause again, I had a really unconventional upbringing: only child who moved around a lot and then was dumped in an all-girls Southern preparatory school like a week before it started and hated every minute.

And so, like, I’m looking for exactly what I needed, and then what’s fun is, if you look at my adult novels, they’re all written to the age I was when I was writing them! So, like, Vicious was written for twenty-five-year-old me, A Darker Shade of Magic was twenty-seven, and Addie Larue is basically thirty to thirty-three. And the, the themes that I’m exploring in Addie Larue are so crucial! I don’t think they’re only applicable to somebody who’s really kind of at that threshold, but they really start to pinpoint a lot of the fear that comes with being a full-fledged “adult” and suddenly everybody assuming that you know what you’re doing and feeling like, you still feel like a child in so many ways, and your life still feels so uncertain, and there’s this weird sudden assumption that you have found yourself when you haven’t.

Amanda: And I will say, as my other role as a bookseller, kids are very opinionated about what they read.

Victoria: Oh yeah.

Sarah: Oh yes.

Amanda: [Laughs]

Victoria: Oh yeah.

Amanda: And, like, they will tell you, like, I don’t like this very small detail in books. Please don’t –

Victoria: Mm-hmm.

Amanda: – recommend me anything – [laughs] –

Victoria: Yeah!

Amanda: – that’s this very small detail. It’s like, okay!

Victoria: But, you know, they’re also, like, so capable of self-censoring. Like you say –

Amanda: Yes.

Victoria: – they, they will do that. And also, my favorite thing is like last year – it was either last year or the year before; time is, time is a flat circle; it means nothing now –

Amanda: [Laughs]

Victoria: – but I had a, like a ten-year-old boy come up to me at the Texas Book Fair, and I, I held out my hand, expecting him to hand me one of the City of Ghosts books, and he handed me Vicious, which is an adult novel that I wrote about supervillains. It is very dark and very, very violent, and he handed it to me with the biggest smile. He’s like, dude, this is my favorite book. He, like, wanted a high five, and his dad was with him, and it was like, hey, look, it made him happy. That’s really all that matters is that he enjoys reading. And, like, the fact is, like, I have kids who will start one of my books and say, no, I wasn’t ready for it, so I stopped.

Sarah: Mm-hmm.

Victoria: Or I wasn’t in the mood for it, so I stopped. Like, I trust children and adults and everyone in between to be able to self-censor, because that’s part of learning what you like as a reader, and, like, the more somebody says, like, oh no, you can’t read that – like, I don’t ever want anyone to say you can’t read something. Like, the best thing you can do is say, like, read it, and if it starts to make you uncomfortable or you don’t like it, then we can have a conversation about why. But, like, I trust, like, my readers are so whip-smart, and I have readers that range from, you know, a girl who started my City of Ghosts books when she was seven, with her mom reading it to her before bed, and now she’s nine and she reads them herself, to, like, eighty-five-year-olds who send me long emails about my books.

Amanda: [Laughs] That’s so sweet, though!

Victoria: Just across the gam- – my goal is, this is my little train, right? And I’m just trying to capture everyone along the train.

Amanda: [Laughs]

Victoria: Right? I just want to groom them young. I need to write a picture book, but it would probably be about death.

Amanda: I mean, there are some about death!

Victoria: There are. They’re amazing.

Amanda: So you have many characters in your arsenal. Do you have a particular attachment to any, any of them? Do you feel you’re more like one or you wish you were more like one, kind of like who I am versus who I want to be?

Victoria: Huh! I think that’s a really good way to phrase it, ‘cause there are definitely characters that I put a lot of myself into, like Henry Strauss. I wrote him, he’s who I would have been – in Addie Larue – he’s who I would have been if I hadn’t found writing. That kind of lost. And then there are characters like Lila Bard in the Shades of Magic books that I am not like at all, but I wish I could be like. You know, fearless, a little bit more reckless, a little more able to stand up for herself? And I think I do a pretty good job of it, but this is someone who just truly gives no fucks about, like, what other people are going to tell her she can and can’t do. And I think in a lot of ways Addie Larue was an aspirational character for me, in terms of the way that she can find that silver lining?

And, yeah, I think, I feel really, I feel a strong attachment to almost all of my characters, because I wouldn’t write them if I didn’t. Like, they have to captivate me; I don’t do placeholders. I don’t do – especially, like, secondary characters and tertiary characters? My rule is, regardless of how much space the character takes up in the novel, they should be able to be the main character of their own story.

Sarah: That’s a good rule.

Victoria: Yeah, ‘cause you might meet them for like a page, but I guarantee you those are the ones that become a fan favorite because, like, they give you just enough, and you can tell that there’s more.

Amanda: Oh yeah. That’s usually how a lot of romance readers are. It’s like –

Victoria: Yes.

Amanda: – yeah, I know this person has seven million brothers –

Victoria: [Laughs]

Amanda: – and they’re going to get their own book, but I want to know about this really shy shopkeeper that was on page for like three seconds.

Victoria: Exact-, I did that with a character in my, in A Darker Shade of Magic. He was supposed to be on page – his name is Ned Tuttle, Ned Tuttle the third, and he has no magic, and he really wants to be a magician, and you meet him for like a paragraph in chapter one, and I thought, well, that’s enough with him! And dude comes back through that entire series. Like –

Amanda: [Laughs]

Victoria: – he just would not get off the page.

Amanda: The joke’s on you!

Victoria: Yeah! He just kept resurrecting, and he’s in the next series too, and I’m just like, dude, I can’t, like, I like you now! Like, congratulations! You, you sunk your teeth in, and I was, I, I admire that!

Amanda: Can you share what you’re working on presently?

Victoria: Oh my goodness. A, a little bit, but the good news is I’m working on so many things that a little bit is still probably too much.

Amanda: [Laughs]

Victoria: So what I’ll say is, I’m currently working on Threads of Power, which is the next arc of the Shades of Magic series? So three more books. And I’m also working on a comic book called Extraordinary that’s set in the world of Vicious and Vengeful, my supervillain books?

Sarah: Ooh!

Victoria: I have the third book in my City of Ghosts trilogy, the New Orleans book, Bridge of Souls, coming out in March, and I am currently in the writer’s room for my TV show! Which is, makes me so happy because it’s basically like Buffy meets Killing Eve?

Amanda: Ooh!

Sarah: Oooh?

Victoria: About a teenage girl named Juliette who happens to be a vampire, who has a crush on a new girl at her school named Calliope, and she decides that Calliope’s going to be her first kill, but when she goes to bite Calliope, Calliope goes to stake her through the heart, and it turns out that the new girl is a vampire hunter, and so it’s just like a really fun, genre, super gay – like, the, the show I wish I’d had as a teenager that probably would have taken me, like, a lot less time to come out if I had –

[Laughter]

Victoria: So that’s at Netflix, and we’re about halfway through the season in terms of writing it right now.

Sarah: [Gasps]

Amanda: That’s exciting!

Victoria: Yeah, I’m really excited. It’s based on a short story I wrote in an anthology called Vampires Never Get Old that came out –

Sarah: I was –

Victoria: – couple months ago.

Sarah: – just going to say. I’m like, I’m pretty sure I read this story –

Victoria: Yeah!

Sarah: – in Vampires Never Get Old!

Victoria: Exactly! So “First Kill,” which was my short story in there, is the thing that’s becoming a Netflix show.

Sarah: [Gasps] That’s amazing!

Victoria: Yeah, I’m really, really excited. [Laughs] Especially ‘cause so many of the characters, like, it’s the kind of characters that get tokenized and get put on the fringes of a narrative, and this is like, there’s the central players!

Amanda: Are there any books that you’re reading right now and loving that you want more people to, to know about?

Victoria: Oh yeah, okay, I’m, like – so I’ve read ninety-nine books so far this year.

Amanda: Oh my God!

Sarah: Nice!

Victoria: I’m a monster. I’m a monster. But what I will say is, like – [sighs] – I’m now going – so one of the best books I read this year, The House in the Cerulean Sea by T. J. Klune, because I feel like it was the book we all needed this year, and that it’s like a big, gay sweater. Like, it just –

Amanda: Yes.

Victoria: – wraps you up. It’s just warm, comforting read. Everyone in my family loved it.

I am currently going on, like, a backlist hunt for Diana Wynne Jones?

Amanda and Sarah: Oooh!

Victoria: I’m currently reading Fire and Hemlock –

Amanda: So good.

Victoria: – with Dogsbody up next, because I realized I’d only read like three of her books. So I’m doing like a deep dive.

I also just finished a book called We Ride Upon Sticks?

Amanda: Yes!

Victoria: Which I loved!

Amanda: It was a delight. I always describe it as, think of, like, an ‘80s teen movie –

Victoria: Yes.

Amanda: – meets, like, a sports underdog story, but add in witchcraft.

Victoria: Exactly! Like, accidental coven in 1989 field hockey team. Like, it was just, and I just, I don’t know! I went in knowing I would like it, but by the end I just really, really loved it!

Amanda: It was a quirky little book; I enjoyed it.

Victoria: Yeah, highly, highly recommend.

Amanda: But I think that’s, that’s all the questions we had!

Victoria: Oh man!

Amanda: I know!

Victoria: This was such a delight! I’m so sorry that we went off onto death for so long. I just –

Sarah: No, don’t worry! It – I was actually thinking while you were talking, looking at the, the news every morning and how high the death toll is in the United States –

Victoria: Yeah.

Sarah: – and how many more people are dying every damn day –

Victoria: Yeah.

Sarah: – yet because of the conditions of the pandemic, and because of the contagion, and because American culture does not deal with death as intimately –

Victoria: Mm-hmm.

Sarah: – it’s very sanitized and bound-, and, and has a boundary –

Victoria: Yeah.

Sarah: – a lot of boundaries, grieving is not something that Americans collectively do.

Victoria: No.

Sarah: It’s not a cultural element that Americans share, and it, the inability and the lack of access to understand grief and loss, because we’re all separated from each other, makes it even harder to understand the full devastation of, of coronavirus, and I think that’s one of the reasons why I find different cultural death rituals so interesting, because the ones in the culture into which I was born are so unsatisfying for me.

Victoria: Yeah, they’re unsatisfying even in ideal times, and right now I just think we’re creating an entire generation full of deeply scarred –

Sarah: Oh yeah.

Victoria: – individuals, because not only do they not even have the bare minimum, highly sanitized grieving practices, but there’s truly no –

Sarah: None.

Victoria: – grieving opportunity right now, no community, and we’re all so in, you know, we’re deeply lonely as a society right now. We’re all so deeply separated, and to not have that processing, to not have that opportunity, I don’t know. It’s a time when I think, like, you’re going to go two ways as a reader: like, you’re either going to seek for something that is just completely fluffy, forgetting, but if anyone, you know, is, is listening to this that wants to just find maybe, like, kind of like a quieter kind of comfort? I think Caitlin Doughty’s books, as somebody who has a fear of death and is death-obsessed at the same time, I just found the comfort in thinking about communal grief and the, the, the generations through which it has existed to be, to be deeply helpful.

Sarah: Absolutely, and, and ritual has purpose.

Victoria: Exactly. Exactly.

Amanda: I have one tiny request.

Victoria: Of course!

Amanda: My roommate is a huge fan.

Victoria: [Laughs]

Amanda: She has a bookshelf dedicated to your books –

Victoria: Oh man, an altar –

Sarah: Ohhh!

Victoria: – I love it.

Amanda: – and various ephemera.

Victoria: I love an altar.

Sarah: Nice!

Amanda: She’s been having a rough year.

Victoria: Yeah!

Amanda: Could you say hi to her?

Victoria: What’s her name?

Amanda: Come in, Stephanie! It’s V. E. Schwab!

Victoria: Come in, Stephanie!

Stephanie: Oh my God!

[Laughter]

Amanda: Put the headphones in!

Stephanie: Oh my God!

Victoria: How are you doing?

Stephanie: I, I’m okay! How are you? [Laughs]

Victoria: Oh, I’m okay, I’m okay. It’s kind of a shitty year. So we were just talking about that and everything that goes with it, but I, it’s just like, we’re all kind of talking about loneliness and what a weird year it is in that way, and I heard that you have a few of my books. And I just wanted to say –

Stephanie: Yeah, I definitely do!

Victoria: [Laughs]

Stephanie: A, a few, just a couple, just a whole shelf full of them; it’s totally fine. [Laughs]

Victoria: Yeah. I mean, I do love it. I always call those altars, and they make me feel, as a pagan, they make me feel very powerful. [Laughs]

Stephanie: I mean, there are candles on it too that are, like –

Victoria: Oh, wow.

Stephanie: – related, so it feels very –

Victoria: I love it.

Stephanie: – altar-ish. [Laughs]

Victoria: I absolutely love it! Have you read anything lately that you’ve really liked?

Stephanie: Oh my gosh. No! Actually, it’s really sad because this year has been so crazy, my reading is totally in a slump, and it’s awful!

Victoria: I understand.

Stephanie: I’ve tried so hard to, like, get out of it, but I’m just trying to do, like, maybe graphic novels has been kind of like really easy, and, like, something sweet and soft? So –

Victoria: Oh yeah, I got like three, all three issues of Heartstopper, which is this really sweet –

Stephanie: Oh, it’s so good!

Victoria: – graphic novel that I –

Stephanie: It’s so good!

Victoria: – like a lot? Yeah. And now I’m reading a lot of Lore Olympus, which is a web comic?

Stephanie: Ooh!

Victoria: So, like, it’s on WEBTOON?

Sarah: Oh, it’s so good!

Victoria: And I’m only like seventy-nine issues in, of course, but, like, you can download WEBTOON to your phone and then just read it on there, and it’s called Lore Olympus, and it’s absolute delightful candy.

Stephanie: Oh my gosh, I’m going to have to do it, because I love, I love all that stuff. Like –

Victoria: Yeah, it’s very –

Stephanie: – mythology.

Victoria: – Hades/Persephone –

Stephanie: Awesome.

Victoria: – and it’s just kind of like visually delightful, I think?

Stephanie: Yeah!

Victoria: That’s my current graphic obsession. ‘Cause I understand: it’s, like, so hard, and I’m going through a lot of audiobooks because I can work out or go for walks or do something to listen to them at the same time without feeling like I’m going stir-crazy in my bones.

Stephanie: Right. Oh my gosh. Yeah, I’m going to have to now, because that sounds awesome and right up my alley. [Laughs]

Victoria: Awesome! Well, it’s so nice to meet you, Stephanie!

Stephanie: It was nice to meet you too! Oh my gosh! Yay! You just, like, totally made my entire week, so – [laughs]

Victoria: Oh, well, hang in there!

Stephanie: Yeah, you too.

Victoria: Thank you.

Amanda: She’s freaking out; thank you so much.

[Laughter]

Victoria: Oh man, it’s a weird year.

Amanda: [Laughs] I know. She’s been working, she works in publishing; she works at Candlewick –

Victoria: Oh yeah?

Amanda: – and has just been working from home for, like, almost the entire year.

Victoria: It’s crazy. And as somebody who, like, normally works from home, the truth is I don’t actually know how to write from home? I write at coffee shops, or I have, for, like, my entire career, and learning how to actually write at a desk at home has been one of the weirdest – I, I hate it. I hate it; I want to go back to the way things were with my corner of a coffee shop.

When I first got here – I have to tell you guys ‘cause you’ll think it’s very funny – when I first got here to my parents’ house, because I’m an only child and they’re very indulgent, I, like, had a really sad day a couple months in, and I was like, I just want a coffee shop! I convinced them to make a little fake coffee shop –

Amanda: [Laughs]

Sarah: Aw!

Victoria: – and then they gave me so much shit for it. They were so sarcastic the entire time, and then my mother, at the end of it, had the nerve to give me a bill.

Sarah: [Gasps]

Victoria: And I was like, fuck all of you. All I wanted to do was write and, like, have a coffee shop moment, and you guys couldn’t help yourselves, so.

Amanda: [Laughs]

Victoria: Now I put on, like, ambient coffee shop noise in my ears, which feels deeply pathetic, but it works.

Sarah: Oh no, I use those!

Victoria: Yeah, the, like, rainy mood filters that have coffee shop and sea sound and stuff?

Sarah: Oh yeah.

Victoria: They’re good.

Sarah: I have a lot of ambient noises that I use, because I have teenagers. They are in middle school and in high school, and they are –

Victoria: Yeah.

Sarah: – virtual schooling, and, you know, it’s, it’s loud when there’s four humans all working and talking, so I have a lot of ambient noise in my arsenal. Coffee is, coffee shops and Brain.fm are my two big ones.

Victoria: Yeah. It’s, it really, what’s so weird is how much it helps.

Sarah: Yeah!

Victoria: Because when I first started doing it, I thought, this isn’t going to work. Like, this isn’t real, and, like, it became so Pavlovian so quickly, where I was like –

Sarah: Oh yeah.

Victoria: – my brain just clicked into, like, oh, I know what to do! I will, I do that, I’ve trained my brain to do that with, with, like, rain sounds? So just, like –

Sarah: Yeah.

Victoria: – pure white noise rain, and now, as soon as I click that on my brain goes like, oh, well, we don’t need to check any in-, like, any websites.

Sarah: Yep. We’re good.

Victoria: We’re just good.

[music]

Sarah: And that brings us to the end of this week’s episode. Thank you again to V. E. Schwab for hanging out with us, and thank you to Victoria’s publicist, Kristin Dwyer, who is fabulous, who set this all up and did so across many time zones.

I hope you enjoyed this conversation. If you are curious about these books, have a look at the show notes at smartbitchestrashybooks.com/podcast. I will link to all the books and where you can find V. E. Schwab’s work!

This episode is also brought to you by Ritual! Ritual is a daily multivitamin, now available in Essential for Kids! Ritual knows how difficult it can be to get your kids the nutrients they need. That’s why they made Essential for Kids to help fill gaps in the diets of ages four through twelve without making a single compromise to quality or taste! Not only do they have a natural citrus berry flavor, but they’re also convenient by design: each gummy features a three-in-one design that combines a daily multi, vegan omega-3 DHA, and a good source of fiber per serving. I like Ritual because it is so convenient. The delivery schedule means that as soon as I run out I get more! And the literal transparency is pretty neat, as in the capsules are see-through and I know exactly what is inside each one because the information is provided in the packaging. When it comes to what goes into our kids’ bodies, they’ve got being picky down to a science – at least mine do. That’s why Ritual is offering my listeners ten percent off your first three months. Visit ritual.com/SARAH to start your Ritual or add Essential for Kids today! That’s ritual.com/SARAH! And if by the end of this episode you don’t know how to spell my first name, I am very sorry, but it’s S-A-R-A-H. I mean, there’s multiple ways to spell Sarah, but that’s the way I was given.

Now, I will have links to everything we talked about, and I will have links to all of the books, but really what you’re here for is the joke, so bad joke? Here we go. I have two. First, spanning many holidays!

What do Thanksgiving and Halloween have in common?

Give up? Other than very limited social engagement and being mostly canceled for most people this year, I hope? What do Halloween and Thanksgiving have in common?

Gobblin’s.

[Laughs] That was so silly and charming, I loved it very much. But I have a bonus joke ‘cause I couldn’t choose!

And you get to tell me which one you think is better, ‘cause I would love to hear from you. You can email me at Sarah, S-A-R-A-H, at Smart Bitches, Trashy Books dot com [Sarah@smartbitchestrashybooks.com]. I would love to know which one you like better.

‘Cause here’s the second joke! ‘Cause I’m very generous! Also a little silly. It’s a little punchy today.

What role do green beans play in Thanksgiving dinner?

What role do green beans play in Thanksgiving dinner?

The casse-role!

[Snorts] Which I hear in the Midwest is a very important role!

How do you cook your green beans for Thanksgiving? Do you put, like, marshmallows on top, or is that just sweet potatoes? We are not having green beans, because there are only four of us, and only two of us eat green beans, so we’re doing roasted mushrooms and stuffing and turkey and homemade cranberry sauce with ginger and, and also wine. Did I mention there would be wine? There will definitely be wine for me and the husband. Yay!

I hope you and yours, if you are celebrating, have had a very safe and delicious holiday. We will be back next week, but until then, please! we wish you the very best of reading! Please stay safe and wear your mask.

Smart Podcast, Trashy Books is part of the Frolic Podcast Network. You can find more outstanding podcasts to subscribe to at frolic.media/podcasts.

Gobble-goblins! [Laughs]

[very cool music]