578. Harlem After Midnight with Louise Hare

[music]

Sarah Wendell: Hello and welcome to episode number 578 of Smart Podcast, Trashy Books. My name is Sarah Wendell, and my guest today is Louise Hare. Louise is the author of the Canary Club Mysteries series, and book two, Harlem After Midnight, is out this week! Louise and I talk about her main character, Lena Aldridge, and how she uses every asset at her disposal to navigate book one’s transatlantic cruise and book two, which has Harlem in the 1930s. We also talk about writing in dual timelines and the fun of writing messy families and murder and writing a character whose most familiar home is whatever stage she is on at that moment.

Now, it’s a little tricky to do an interview for the second book of a mystery series, so to give you a bit of context, this is the cover copy for Harlem After Midnight:

“Harlem, 1936: Lena Aldridge grew up in a cramped corner of London, hearing stories of the bright lights of Broadway. She always imagined that when she finally went to New York City, she’d be there with her father. But now he’s dead, and she’s newly arrived and alone, chasing a dream that has quickly dried up. When Will Goodman—the handsome musician she met on the crossing from England—offers for her to stay with his friends in Harlem, she agrees. She has nowhere else to go, and this will give her a chance to get to know Will better and see if she can find any trace of the family she might have remaining.

“Will’s friends welcome her with open arms, but just as Lena discovers the stories her father once told her were missing giant pieces of information, she also starts to realize the man she’s falling too fast and too hard for has secrets of his own.”

I also want to say hello and thank you to our Patreon community. Hello, folks! I have a compliment this week to Magdalyn B.:

Scientists who study global weather patterns have named a period of perfect sunny skies with friendly temperatures and the right amount of breeze after you.

If you’ve supported the show with a monthly pledge, thank you. You are making sure that every episode has a transcript – hey, garlicknitter! – [Hey, Sarah and transcript readers! – gk] – you are making sure that I keep going, and I give you access to bonus episodes and a really nifty podcast Discord; there’s a lot to enjoy! So if you’d like to join the community, it would be awesome to have you! Have a look at patreon.com/SmartBitches. Monthly pledges start at one dollar, and a hello to Julia and Daphne, who have just joined us!

Support for this episode comes from Wattpad. You might recognize the name Anna Todd from her number one bestselling After series. It was a massive global hit, it was made into a movie, and her appearances overseas are thronged – actual throngs with people. They have to hire security because people will line up around the block to meet her. And did you know that she has written a new romance trilogy? It’s true! The first two books in the Brightest Stars are out now, and if you are looking for summer reading, well, The Falling and The Burning are just in time for your very warm TBR. Set against the backdrop of a military base, both books feature emotionally powerful stories about slowly falling in love with another person and with yourself. Colleen Hoover is a big fan of Anna Todd’s, and she raved about the first book, The Falling, saying, “Anna Todd…is my go-to for a story I know I’ll love and characters who live in the heart long after the last page is turned.” Look for The Falling and The Burning by Anna Todd and buy your copies wherever books are sold.

Support for this episode comes from Earth Breeze. I have been watching highlight reels of people who go out in kayaks near my hometown of Pittsburgh and clean up the rivers and streams. They pull so much plastic out of the water, and one of the most frequent items? Massive plastic laundry detergent jugs. Why does laundry detergent come in a giant plastic jug that ends up in landfills or in the river? I have no idea. It’s really startling to see how many laundry jugs end up as pollution, so when I was invited to try Earth Breeze I was all in. Earth Breeze looks like a dryer sheet, but it’s not! It is a liquidless laundry detergent sheet that dissolves a hundred percent in any wash cycle, hot or cold. No measuring, no mess, no heavy lifting, and no plastic jug. The packaging is lightweight and biodegradable. When my packet arrived, my husband Adam thought it was a book, and he was rather surprised when I told him it was laundry detergent. It’s available by subscription, and it’s delivered to my door with my mail! I can adjust, pause, or cancel anytime. And does it work? Oh yes, it does. You can use the exact right amount of each sheet depending on how large a load of laundry you’re doing. It is tough on stains, it fights odors, and my clothes come out fresh and clean every time. Trust me, there is no reason not to switch. Right now my listeners can subscribe to Earth Breeze and save forty percent! Go to earthbreeze.com/SARAH to get started. That’s earthbreeze.com/SARAH for forty percent off – earthbreeze.com/SARAH.

All right, are you ready to do this podcast? On with my conversation with Louise Hare.

[music]

Louise Hare: I’m Louise Hare. I am the author of historical fiction for the most part. At the moment I’m working on a series in particular which is called the Canary Club Mysteries. Harlem After Midnight is the second book in that series!

Sarah: Wonderful! Well, first of all, congratulations on Harlem After Midnight. I try very hard not to spoil books when I do an interview so people who listen to the interview won’t, won’t be spoiled, but I know this is book two of a series, as you said, so can you tell me what readers will find in the series and in the book, trying to avoid spoilers, which is really a challenge?

Louise: Yes. [Laughs] So my protagonist is called Lena Aldridge, and it’s set in, these, both these books are set in 1936. So it begins in the first book, she’s in London, and she sort of gets this opportunity that sounds too good to be true, but she’s offered a, a role on Broadway, so she boards the Queen Mary sailing from England to New York.

Sarah: As you do.

Louise: As you do! And obviously things don’t go as planned; there’s several murders, and she’s trying to figure out what’s going on. So that’s the first book.

At the end of that book she arrives in New York, and so the second book sort of picks up exactly the same day that the first book finishes, and so this is about her time in New York, when she’s sort of there trying to figure out what, what’s just happened to her –

Sarah: Mm-hmm.

Louise: – first up, ‘cause lots of things happened in the first book. But it’s about her sort of learning about herself and about her father, ‘cause her father, she knows her father came from New York to England before she was born. So it’s sort of like an investigation into that, but then, of course, it’s a murder mystery, so there has to be a suspicious event, which is actually what opens the book. So basically a woman falls from a third-floor window, and who is she? And, you know, is she dead or is she alive? We’re not sure, so that’s, that’s solved during the book.

Sarah: It, it is always so annoying when you board a cruise ship and there’s multiple murders? It’s so annoying?

Louise: Very inconvenient.

Sarah: And people just fall out of windows at you – like, it’s very stressful.

Louise: [Laughs]

Sarah: One of the things I love about this series is that Lena is really trying to navigate several in-between spaces all at the same time: she’s a biracial woman who passes as white; she’s a singer on a cruise ship in book one, but she’s dining with a very wealthy family as if she’s one of the wealthy passengers; she’s like an amateur investigator trying to navigate all of this family drama? Birth, both in the first book, there’s a lot of family drama! Outstanding levels of family drama in both books. Her new partner – mild spoiler – and his estranged sister, there’s drama, drama, drama. And that’s a lot! That’s a lot of tension for one character to navigate. What did, how did you approach writing Lena for this series? Like, what traits did she absolutely have to have? ‘Cause that is so much instability in where she is in the world, in just about every scene.

Louise: Yeah! I think when I started out and I was trying to think of this character, I didn’t, once I decided she’s twenty-six in both books, and I, I was just trying to think back to when I was that age and how, how in-, unstable I felt with everything, like trying to, you know, do well at my job and trying to find somewhere to live and, you know, living away from family and things like that, where you feel kind of in this weird space, and so that was the starting point for me to figure out who she was. And then, yeah, once you sort of figure out who is her family and then realize that she doesn’t have very much family, then it seemed like I just wanted to, like, throw all this, put her into, like, all of this chaos and, because she’s always kind of wished that she had this family, and the more it goes on and she encounters these other families and their, you know, increasing levels of crazy –

Sarah: [Snorts]

Louise: – she’s kind of like, you know, Maybe it’s just as well! [Laughs]

Sarah: Yeah! It’s a lot of, a lot of messy people.

Louise: Really messy people, but they’re really fun to write.

Sarah: Oh –

Louise: I love messy people; like, I love dramatic people. [Laughs]

Sarah: Oh yes. And with Lena, because she works and, and lives in this sort of liminal space between several different worlds, she’s very resilient.

Louise: Yeah! I mean, she’s not had an easy life. She’s, you know, she grew up with not very much money right up until the, the book, we encounter her in the book. She’s really got nothing, and part of the reason she leaves London, and she knows that it’s a dubious offer that she’s been made –

Sarah: Yeah.

Louise: – is that she hasn’t much choice. She has been thrown out of her, the place she was renting; she’s just lost her job. Like, she doesn’t have much choice.

Sarah: Yeah.

Louise: So, you know, she has to just get by. I mean, you know, she’s just that character who can sort of, has just learnt to deal with stuff and just move on and, and keep going if you can.

Sarah: Yeah. And she’s also operating, like you said, she’s twenty-six, and she is sort of figuring out who she wants to be as an adult, whereas up to that point she’s sort of been told what it means to be an adult, and she’s like, Well, none of this applies to me? None of this is practical; none of this helps me. I’m going to decide. So why not get on a cruise ship with murders?

Louise: Exactly! Exactly. [Laughs]

Sarah: I mean, listen, if somebody made me a dubious job offer, but it included passage on the transatlantic, I would go! I mean, come on!

Louise: I mean, yeah! Why not? I mean, it’s the only chance she’s ever going to get to travel in first class. Like, you’re not, the one time you’re not paying for it, so –

Sarah: Yeah!

Louise: – she’s just kind of like, What the heck? Like, what’s the worst that can happen? Obviously not envisaging several murders.

Sarah: Yeah. I mean, that really does throw a, a, a bummer –

Louise: [Laughs]

Sarah: – into the whole event.

Now, the first, the title of the first book is Miss Aldridge Regrets, which is a wonderful title, because there’s a lot built into there; there’s a lot of different meanings. What are Lena’s regrets? When you were, did you start with the title? Did you have the title in place when you were writing, or did that come after?

Louise: It came afterwards. And so I think, I mean, she has a lot of regrets. I mean, a lot of them are, are quite spoiler-y, but I think, yeah, she learns things about herself: her father, who was a big person in her life, he, he sort of dies right before –

Sarah: Yeah.

Louise: – the start of the first novel, and so he’s learning stuff along the way, and I think that’s part of one of her regrets is that she never spoke to him about her mother and things like that. Yes! I mean she, by the end of it, she has so many more regrets. [Laughs] I mean, I just really like, was inspired from the song “Miss Otis Regrets” –

Sarah: Yeah.

Louise: – which I love, which is sort of a murder ballad, so I felt like it fit in terms of the theme, ‘cause I think regrets have always like super positive to carry around with you, so how is she going to pick herself back up and, and move on?

Sarah: And she doesn’t really have the opportunity, because her father’s died, to fully appreciate who she is, and part of – mild spoiler – part of what she’s doing in book two is trying to retrace her father’s life. And one thing that happens in, in, in the books is that you jump back and forth in time a little bit. Was that difficult to write? I personally don’t know if I could do that.

Louise: So I learned from past mistakes.

[Laughter]

Sarah: Speaking of regrets.

Louise: Yes, yes; I’ve overcome those regrets and made it work for me. So what I normally try and do is write them separately and then figure out where they fit together.

Sarah: Oh!

Louise: Especially with this book, because the second timeline is sort of thirty years previously, and obviously Lena isn’t in those; it, it’s sort of following what happened to her father.

Sarah: Mm-Hmm.

Louise: And sort of exploring the reasons leading up to him leaving New York to go to London. It was almost like writing two separate books. I mean, they, they fit together –

Sarah: Yeah!

Louise: – and if you’ve read the first book you might pick up on some stuff as you’re reading, but if you haven’t read the first book it doesn’t actually matter, ‘cause it does get sort of revealed at the end of that section anyway. But yeah, it’s kind of fun to sort of explore this completely different character in her father, because I sort of grew attached to him when I was writing the first book, even though he’s not in it –

Sarah: Yeah.

Louise: – technically, but she’s thinking about him a lot. And so, yeah, I just really wanted to explore that. Like when I was sort of doing the whole sort of tour for book one, people always wanted to talk about him, and I –

Sarah: Yeah.

Louise: – and I just was like, Actually, you know, I think I do want to see what he was up to and find out!

Sarah: Yeah!

Louise: He was just such an interesting character…obviously he’s Lena’s father, so she has this, I guess sort of rose-tinted view of, of him as a person, especially because he’s now died, and naturally, you know, exploring him as a person and what he was actually like is, is sort of way more interesting because you start to be able to explore what his flaws were and, and what, what led him to this position where he wouldn’t tell Lena about how they ended up together, how he ended up being a single father –

Sarah: Mm-hmm.

Louise: – in sort of, you know, 1920s England.

Sarah: And a single father to a daughter.

Louise: Exactly! ‘Cause, I mean, it, you know, it would happen if the mother died, but she never knew who her mother was.

Sarah: Yeah.

Louise: It was like, you know, but he was never willing, willing to talk about it, and she, I guess, never pressed him, because he was all that she had, so –

Sarah: Yeah.

Louise: – Ah! I need to find this out! I need to figure out what happened.

Sarah: It’s like another form of grief for her, I think, to recognize, right? Like, all of the opportunities that she didn’t have, she really doesn’t have them now. They’re, they’re done. Like, she can’t find out from him. She has to extrapolate from little tiny pieces of information.

Louise: Exactly, exactly.

Sarah: One of my favorite scenes in the second book, which is not a spoiler I don’t think, is that she has to go to the library and read old newspaper clippings?

Louise: Yeah. [Laughs]

Sarah: And that’s really all she has to go by! She has to read newspapers for hours to try to find a tiny crumb of information.

Louise: Yeah! And also really not her thing.

Sarah: No.

Louise: Like, she hates it. [Laughs]

Sarah: No. She’s, like, super bored; this is horrible; it’s an, it’s –

Louise: Yeah!

Sarah: – it’s impractical; it’s inefficient; it’s hard; it’s boring.

Louise: Yeah. And, yeah, but, and so then she strikes out; you know, it’s a brilliant idea; I’m sitting around bars and talk to people.

Sarah: Yeah!

Louise: [Laughs] Much more fun!

Sarah: Absolutely, and also is a language that she speaks.

Louise: Exactly, yeah! She lived her all, whole life singing in bars and dodgy clubs and things, so –

Sarah: Yeah.

Louise: – yeah, it’s definitely her environment.

Sarah: So the books are, as you said, set in the late ‘30s, and they, as we said, jump back in time, back and forth, and they’re highlighting a period of time that doesn’t get a lot of attention in mystery and romance, especially from a point of view of a biracial character, especially both on a, on a ship and then in New York. What were some of the things you learned researching this series that you were really excited to include? Was there anything that you learned that surprised you about this time period?

Louise: One thing that surprised me when I was writing the second book, which I hadn’t kind of pieced together was just how much New York changed in those years. So from when I’m writing about Lena’s father, it’s 1908, and then obviously her section is 1936. I had to do two completely separate lots of research.

Sarah: Yeah!

Louise: The areas changed! So Harlem, when Lena’s father was there, was not the Harlem of the ‘30s or the Harlem of now. You know, it’s still very much a sort of Jewish area, and so he was then living in the Tenderloin. I was like, Oh my gosh, I’ve got to get all this; I’m trying to figure out, okay – [laughs]. So it ended up being actually a lot of, of fun. I read lots of fiction from the time, and then I was reading – ‘cause I’m slightly obsessed with the novel Passing by Nella Larsen.

Sarah: Yeah.

Louise: There’s another, obviously the woman falling from the window is a, a small nod to, to that novel. ‘Cause you’re always worried, I think, when you’re writing historical fiction and female characters that you’re not overstepping what would be acceptable for the time in, in terms of how adventurous women could be or, you know, going to places like a bar and doing all those kind of things. But then I read a biography of Nella Larsen, and she was crazy! She was out there traveling across, you know, to Europe on her own and doing all this stuff and having an affair and, you know, and I was like, Actually, yeah. Cool. I’m going to – [laughs] – I’m going to lean into that. So Lena can basically do what she wants, because it seems like a lot of women were not following the norms, necessarily.

Sarah: Yeah! One thing that always strikes me when I’m looking at the history of a place or looking at how people lived in a certain time is that in the present day, we tend to think that we are the ones who are, like, the most wild and the most daring, and it’s like, no, nononono. In, in an era where there was only the oversight of the people around you to keep you in line and to a standard of behavior, if you just up and left, like, you could do whatever you want! You could be very daring, and Lena is very daring.

Louise: She is! And I, I think, I feel like she doesn’t even realize how daring she is. She’s just like –

Sarah: No, she has no idea!

[Laughter]

Louise: She’s just kind of going along and trying stuff, and I think because she is a singer and she’s used to mixing around with men a lot, you know, she’s singing with bands that are mostly male, so what she views as acceptable is kind of colored by the environment she finds herself in most of the time, and so she is doing daring things without realizing that they are daring.

Sarah: Yeah.

Louise: And for most of the ‘30s, people were, were quite wild. Like, in her, like, the clubs and people mixing and all that kind of thing going on, that I think we, we forget that that, that did happen. Like, it was sort of underground, but it did happen.

Sarah: And it was during Prohibition, which, for one thing, I love sort of Lena’s attitude as a person who grew up in England at, looking at Prohibition like, ‘Kay? This is weird.

Louise: [Laughs]

Sarah: But if you’re going to go in a club during Prohibition, you are already complicit in keeping the secret of the fact that you’re in a club that serves alcohol at a time when you’re not supposed to. So she’s already connected to these people and doing something that’s not allowed, so she’s already being daring, but she sort of thinks that she’s just like everyone else, and I think that what she comes to realize, especially in the second book, is Wait a minute, I’m a little bit different than a lot of the people I’m around right now. And how do I reconcile that?

Louise: Yeah! Because I, I mean, I guess I was interested in, I was looking, you know, because she’s grown up in England, and she pa-, can pass as white, so she has essentially been able to choose, you know, when she works in clubs with Black musicians she also presents herself as Black, and then when she’s out in the wider world she, she knows it’s easier; she just doesn’t say anything and people think that she’s white. Whereas when she gets to Harlem it’s like suddenly she’s in this Black community, and it’s like the first time she’s been in a community like this –

Sarah: Mm-hmm.

Louise: – and so it’s like, it’s about her I guess trying to figure out where she fits in, or, or maybe she doesn’t! I feel like, even by the end of the second book, she’s still at I don’t still fit; like, where do I fit? I don’t know.

Sarah: Part of what keeps her from fitting in is that her moral code is so different from other people’s? And in some ways –

Louise: Yeah.

Sarah: – it’s very similar to other people’s. She’s been on a ship, right? With, with this guy that she likes, so to be blunt, they can go to Bone Town whenever they want, no one’s going to stop them, but when she’s in Harlem she’s staying with his friends, and then they’re very proper, and she has to be aware of, you know, how much time she’s alone with him and are, what do they think, and what – there’s a, there’s a sort of expectation of behavior that sudden she, suddenly she’s like, Oh, okay, I will, I’m, I’m staying in their house. I will be a proper guest, and I will be respectful of their, of their expectations, but at the same time she’s like, This kind of chafes! This is not pleasant! Kind of want to do my own thing, ‘cause in London she was, she was in a terrible little apartment, a place to live, and no one was really, like, overseeing her behavior in such a way, and she has to reconcile, Do I want to belong in a group that is going to restrict me from doing things that I like?

Louise: Because, yeah, she, I mean, she hasn’t had this before; she’s always had this total independence, but, like, what she had, she had and she could do what she wanted. And so, yeah, I mean, she loves the people that she’s staying with, she really gets on with them, but then at the same time, because she is sort of working class, and essentially they’re middle class –

Sarah: Yeah.

Louise: – and they’re a different, you know, she’s not as educated as they are, and, and there are various, I think, things that she sort of is very aware of.

Sarah: Even in different classes, whether it’s very, very wealthy or middle class or at, at, at the level that she was living in at the start of book one, there are people who will do things that she finds truly shocking and will cover up and take on responsibility for things they didn’t do to preserve what they have. And I think one of the things she reconciles, or she’s trying to reconcile, is that she doesn’t have much, but what is she willing to do to protect what she has?

Louise: American moral cred is strong in the way that she, she does think about others –

Sarah: Yes.

Louise: – in…is it going to harm? You know, if I do something which I’m not supposed to do but it’s not harming anyone –

Sarah: Who cares?

Louise: – then yeah! Actually, that’s okay. Whereas, I think what she does start to feel more strongly is when you do something and it’s going to affect the life of someone else, that’s like a step too far.

Sarah: Yeah. That’s a problem.

Louise: Well, that…that’s like real life, you know –

Sarah: Oh –

Louise: – and it’s, I mean, it’s messy. You know, you read crazier stuff in the newspapers every day.

Sarah: Oh yes! I’ve seen, I’ve, I’ve, I’ve seen it, yes.

[Laughter]

Louise: I feel like, you know, I just wanted to sort of explore those gray areas; like, what are people willing to do? And what are people willing to live with?

Sarah: Yeah.

Louise: And the actions or, or just ignoring things, ignoring something that you’ve seen. My life is easier if I just pretend that never happened…no more mention it again. Yeah! [Laughs]

Sarah: So what, what are the things you enjoy most about writing this series?

Louise: I think I just love writing Lena as a character. She’s very fun.

Sarah: I can get, I could tell.

Louise: ‘Cause it’s first person, you can, like, properly get into her head and, and sort of mess around with things. And that the environments, like, I love it, like, I loved in the first book writing about the ship and, and researching the ship, and then for book two, being able to create this whole community around her, that she’s now, you know, she’s sort of deciding a lot of the time in book two, does she want to try and stay in New York where there’s, you know, she’s bought a ticket to go back to England, but, like, what if she stayed? That’s sort of one of the questions that runs through the book. I wanted to give her an environment where she would think, Maybe I can live here.

Sarah: Mm-hmm.

Louise: So it’s actually fun sort of building that, that up for her.

Sarah: She is constantly trying to figure out where she fits and figure out with, with the people who she belongs with, while also carrying around a sizable amount of baggage that makes it hard for her to trust people?

Louise: Yeah.

Sarah: And that’s a, that’s a big tension, where you desperately want to connect with people, but you’re also going to hold part of yourself back because you don’t know what these people are up to, and they’re very messy. [Laughs]

Louise: Very messy, and you don’t know what they’re up to, until the end. [Laughs] Basically, I mean, my thing is always, yeah, don’t trust anyone. Everyone has a reason why they might be up to no good –

Sarah: Yeah.

Louise: – and…figure it out as it, as it goes along. Yeah, it’s just so, it’s just so much fun.

Sarah: It’s very fun! What, I’ve just realized, part of what she’s trying to reconcile is the concept of respectability.

Louise: Yeah! Because a lot of people, especially at the start of book one, look down on her.

Sarah: Yeah!

Louise: Yeah! Okay, she sings in a very dodgy nightclub. You know, she has one dress – [laughs] –

Sarah: Yeah.

Louise: – that she can wear, and it’s falling apart. But then, you know, she, you know, she’s a person that has ambition. Like, she wants to do better, she’s trying. You know, I mean, she’s someone who literally gave everything, gave her entire salary to try and pay for medical care for her father. Like, she’s a good person, like, at, at the root of it. She makes dubious choices, but, so yeah! So I feel like – [laughs] – like the whole thing is her trying to show people that she’s worth something.

Sarah: Yeah. And that she is worthy of their respect, even though she doesn’t live a life that they may approve of or understand or even be aware of her circumstances.

Louise: They, and, you know, you look at the people that look down on her, and they’re not good people. [Laughs]

Sarah: Nooo, they’re very messy!

Louise: So – but they’re very messy!

Sarah: Yeah. Did you listen to get mu-, to, to music? Did you listen to music to get into her head? There’s a lot of music in, in these books, which I love.

Louise: There is, yeah. So I listened to a lot of jazz, a lot of Ella Fitzgerald, Billie Holiday, to give me the soundtrack, because it’s all this, it’s all that area, era, it’s like the mid to late ‘30s –

Sarah: Yeah.

Louise: – and, and yeah! It was just really cool to sort of listen to that, imagine her singing those songs on stage and yeah…’cause there’s so many, like, club scenes and theatre scenes and –

Sarah: Yeah.

Louise. So yeah, I felt like I needed to listen to it and sort of be, be able to imagine, be able to hear Lena.

Sarah: Yeah. And also the, the people with whom she connects the most easily are the other musicians. And they’re connecting over just the song, they’re connecting because they know the song, they’re going to get through the performance, but they don’t have any connection beyond that.

Louise: Yeah! I think I just feel like, I guess, creative people tend to be less judgmental? That was my, that was my idea, I, I felt like, Okay, this is, like, her people –

Sarah: Mm-hmm.

Louise: – and she’s got…people as the musicians; that’s, like, where she feels comfortable. That was, like, this safe – I mean, for me, like, when I’ve felt like the tension was getting too much for her, I just, like, put her on stage or put her in a situation where she could be surrounded by music, because I felt like she just needed to get into that, chill out, take a step back from what was going on. And I think that, like, writing it as well, like, you just wanted sort of some breathing space! [Laughs]

Sarah: Yeah.

Louise: Amongst all the crazy.

Sarah: And regardless of where she is, whether she’s in London, if she’s on the boat, or if she’s in New York, being on stage, whatever stage it is, is going to be a piece of her home, so it makes sense that she’s going to come back to that as her sort of foundation.

Louise: Exactly, exactly, and obviously ties into her father, who was also a musician, so –

Sarah: Yeah.

Louise: – it was like all those sort of stage spaces were, were connected –

Sarah: Yeah.

Louise: – through their music.

Sarah: So what are you working on right now?

Louise: Well, I’ve currently just finished a first draft of something completely different.

Sarah: Ooh!

Louise: So not Lena this time. So this one is set in the 1760s, and it’s set in London, and it’s sort of a story of a young girl; basically, she’s sort of running away from home, and she, and she meets this sort of young man on the street, and he’s been really badly beaten, and she takes him to a doctor, and it turns out he’s sort of an escaped slave, and he’s been left for dead in the street. So it’s sort of about how that situation develops. It’s sort of based on, on a true story, as well. Yeah, so I just wanted to write about what it was like to be Black in London in the 1700s, because I feel especially British people kind of feel like there were no Black people – [laughs] – in this country in the 1700s, and there was actually quite a big community, especially in London. So that’s my focus, is to remind people of history. I mean, in Britain, a lot of people don’t believe there were Black people here till 1948, so –

Sarah: [Laughs]

Louise: – it’s kind of, kind of…[Laughs]

Sarah: Was that when Black people in England were invented? That’s the date? Wow, that’s amazing!

Louise: [Laughs] Yeah. So yeah, interesting. But yeah, so my mission, my next mission is to correct that.

Sarah: That’s very cool, and also very necessary. [Laughs]

So I always ask this question: what books are you reading that you wish to tell people about?

Louise: So I have just finished Yellowface. Yeah! I mean, it was one of those books where I read it like super fast, like in the same day?

Sarah: Mm-hmm?

Louise: I don’t know how to describe it! It’s like sort of watching a car crash, and you can’t take your eyes off it, but you wouldn’t want to do it again. [Laughs] A book, everyone should read it because, I guess, I think, maybe just ‘cause as another writer you’re so placed in it, the subject matter, because obviously it’s about a woman who steals a manuscript and passes it off as her own. Basically just keeps doing dumb stuff –

Sarah: [Snorts]

Louise: – to, that lead to her getting caught, and you’re like – [laughs] – Oh my gosh! Yeah, because of that it was a bit like reading with my hands over my eyes kind of like, Oh my gosh, what’s going to happen next? So very exciting.

I actually can’t think of anything else that I’ve read, although I do just have the new Colson Whitehead –

Sarah: Oooh!

Louise: – which is set in Harlem. So I’m looking forward to, at the end of this week, when I’ve got some time, sitting down with that.

Sarah: Well, where can people find you if you wish to be found?

Louise: Ooh, everywhere! So my website is louisehare.com, and then I am on Twitter and Instagram and also Threads. Well, I’m still getting the hang of thing with that. So my handle is @lourhare.

[music]

Sarah: And that brings us to the end of this week’s episode. I will have links to all of the books that she mentioned, as well as where to find her books, in the show notes! And I know you know where that is, but I’m going to tell you anyway. It’s at smartbitchestrashybooks.com/podcast, episode number 578.

Now, I do have a humble favor to ask you: if you have a moment and your thumbs are not busy, would you be so kind as to leave a review for this here show? I used to have some on Apple Podcasts, which remains the place where people review podcasts most often, and I have none now? It’s very strange. And it makes me a little bummed out, so hey, if you have a moment, would you please review the show and let other people know how much you like it? It would mean the world to me. I very humbly, humbly thank you for your effort. I realize that going to review a podcast is a big ask, so thank you for your consideration.

I end every week with a terrible joke, and I would never ever forget the joke. I mean, actually sometimes I start recording and then realize I forgot to pick a joke, and then I stop and go find one ‘cause it’s really important! This week’s joke comes from Lisa B.

What is great on toast but horrible on the road?

What is great on toast but horrible on the road?

Jam.

[Laughs] As I live very close to the DC beltway, yes, that is entirely true. There are some points where I just don’t want to leave the house ‘cause I’m not going to get wherever I’m trying to go. Thank you for the joke, Lisa!

On behalf of everyone here, we wish you the very best of reading. Have a wonderful weekend, and we will see you back here next week!

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

[end of cool music]