706. The Astral Library with Kate Quinn

[intro]

Sarah Wendell: Hello and welcome to episode number 706 of Smart Podcast, Trashy Books. I’m Sarah Wendell, and my guest this week is Kate Quinn! Kate Quinn’s new book The Astral Library is out this week. I was so excited to not only get an advance copy but the opportunity to interview the author, ‘cause I’ve never spoken to Kate Quinn before, and we had a very good time. We talk about the inspiration for this very magical book and about books that are sanctuaries for readers. We also talk about library advocacy, book banning, and the deadly threat of bureaucracy.

I will have links to all of the books that we talk about and the links to all of the Instagrams that we talk about in the show notes at smartbitchestrashybooks.com/podcast under episode 706.

I have a compliment this week and, as always, it’s my favorite part of the intro! This compliment is for Abbey T.:

Abbey, if a garment were designed based on your personality, sense of humor, and on how you make your loved ones feel, the most common design would be the warmest, softest, fluffiest bathrobe with absolutely zero static fresh out of the dryer.

If you would like a compliment of your very own or you’d like to support this! here! show! I bet you know what I’m about to say: you can have a look at patreon.com/SmartBitches. Our Patreon community is one of the greatest in all of the land. They are the reason why there are no dynamic ads before or after my show. We turned them all off to avoid ads for ICE and other right-wing propaganda with our community support, and I am deeply grateful for that. So instead of Patreon offering ad-free episodes, our Patreon community gave everybody episodes free of dynamic ads for every listener, and I’m so grateful for that.

In addition, Patreon support helps me procure more issues of Romantic Times, it keeps the show going, and it helps ensure an artisan, handcrafted transcript from garlicknitter. Hey, garlicknitter! [Happy to do it! – gk] Your support means a lot. You can have a look at patreon.com/SmartBitches!

So are you ready to talk about books as sanctuaries and magical libraries? I’m totally ready to do this. On with my podcast with Kate Quinn.

[music]

Kate Quinn: Hi, everybody! My name is Kate Quinn. I am the New York Times bestselling author of historical fiction, including Reese’s With-, Reese’s Book Club pick The Alice Network, and most recently author of The Astral Library, which is my first foray into magical realism.

Sarah: I’m so excited to talk to you about The Astral Library. I just finished it recently and have been, like, going over my questions to make sure that I, like, ask the exact right ones, because the hard thing is, if it’s a new book and this is going to come out release week, I don’t want to spoil it for anybody. But I also have, like, a lot of questions that I have to, like, you know, edit.

I do, I do want to ask one thing, though. When you found out your book was a Reese’s Book Club pick, did you have to, like, put your head between your knees? Did you have to, like, lie down on the floor? I would have lost my composure completely.

Kate: Well, I found out in the TSA security line –

Sarah: No!

Kate: – at the airport in Canada when I was flying from Vancouver back to, into the US after an author event. So I can tell you I let out a shriek that nearly got me pulled out of the line for a cavity search.

Sarah: [Laughs] What is her problem? You don’t understand; it’s Reese Witherspoon!

Kate: And then I had exactly twenty minutes of lousy airport Wi-Fi to, before my flight boarded and I lost Wi-Fi altogether to throw posts on all my social media pages, text everyone I ever knew to beg them to vote for my book, because my book was picked in a kind of unusual way? It was a vote-off where –

Sarah: Yes, I remember that.

Kate: – she held up like three books and was like, Which one, whichever one you vote for in the next twenty-four hours will be not only my Fourth of July read, but also our July book club read. So I had to beg everybody I had ever met in my entire life to vote for me. And then be in suspense for twenty-four hours. I later found out, like, she’d read all, all three of the books and already knew they were all good, and I was delighted the next day when I found out that yes, I had won the vote-off.

Sarah: I, I’m, I’m amazed you got no notice for that? I would have had several coronaries in a row.

Kate: Well, actually, it was one of those things where that was very early days in the book club? It was July 2017. I think I’m –

Sarah: Yeah.

Kate: – only like the second or third official book club pick? So it is much, it was much less formalized back then than it is now when you absolutely get several months’ worth of –

Sarah: Yeah.

Kate: – you know, notification for this kind of thing. And then you’re probably going to hear it from your editor and, you know, who will tell you to sit down first and, you know, maybe have an oxygen mask on hand, so you know, you don’t get the news when you’re in a TSA security line. [Laughs]

Sarah: Oh my gosh. And the internet was different then. So, like, if you had to throw things on social media in that time, it was only like three places at most? You know, you didn’t have to film a video and then edit the video and, you know, sitting there on your phone trying to make it work. Like, it was much easier then. I, I kind of miss those times?

So I have a question to start with The Astral Library. Where did you start with this story? But in particular, I have an absurd theory that I would like you to verify for me.

Kate: I can’t wait!

Sarah: So my theory is that you started with the rarely used words list and then built the story around them; i.e., okay, I’ve got this word. In what circumstances would I use this word? Okay, so there is this girl in this magical library, and that’s where I’m going to use this word. Is that what happened?

Kate: I’m afraid not, but…

Sarah: Ah, darn it! I was –

Kate: …great theory.

Sarah: I was not even in the same ballpark. That’s fine! [Laughs]

Kate: Well, I, I, the words came in later: you know, the idea I have a bookworm heroine and, you know, that she’s, she has this, you know, massive vocabulary the way bookworms do. I was absolutely a bookworm kid with a big vocabulary, and you know, when you’re ten and you’re using words like sesquipedalian, you know –

Sarah: Yes!

Kate: – your, your, your colleagues in your classroom think absolutely that you’re showing off, and a lot of adults do too, so it’s one of those things I threw in because it was absolutely my experience as a bookworm kid with way too many words in, in my, in my word bank. [Laughs]

Sarah: Yep!

Kate: But for The Astral Library, I really came to that, it’s one of the few where the title floated into my head almost immediately before there was a story, which doesn’t happen for me. Normally, you know, I’ll, I’ll write an entire book, which is just The Suffragette Book, Draft One. And then I have to come up with a title later, and, and I’m terrible at titles?

Sarah: Oh yeah, me too.

Kate: …it’s like, oh! Astral Library. I wonder what kind of place that would be? And it just floated for a while. And then at some point, it just came into my head, the sentence, Have you ever wanted to live inside a book? And, you know, if you’re a bookworm, the answer, of course, to that is Yes. And –

Sarah: Uh, yeah! Yeahyeahyeahyeahyeah.

Kate: But as soon as I verbalized that, I was like, There’s a place where you can go that’ll give you the opportunity to go live inside your favorite book. And it all came from there.

Sarah: I think that is an excellent origin story, because it’s better than mine. [Laughs]

So what, what is your elevator pitch for this book? ‘Cause the worst thing is, of course, when people come up to you – first, when they ask you for a book rec and you forget what a book is, and then second, they ask you about your book and you forget what your book is. But if you recall –

Kate: Correct.

Sarah: – what is your elevator pitch for The Astral Library?

Kate: The Astral Library is about a liminal place that exists which can be opened up from any library in the world, and that means the grandest of European libraries with stroll-, with, with sliding ladders and painted ceilings, or the most cockroach-infested, underfunded branch in the worst part of the worst city you can imagine, or a Little Free Library even. Any library out there, if – it can open a door. And if you walk through that door, and if you are a bookworm and you are lost and desperate, you will be offered the opportunity to live inside your favorite book.

And this happens for one particularly lost and desperate bookworm in modern day Boston. Her name is Alix, and she finally gets the magic door that opens up that we have all been, all bookworms have been dreaming about ever since we first read The Lion, the Witch, and the Wardrobe. And she gets to walk through that door, and this is the story of what happens to her.

Sarah: This is sort of the ultimate nesting dolls of portal fantasies.

Kate: [Laughs] Can you guess that my, my husband is a gamer who plays Portal?

Sarah: Yeah. Yeah! Yeah, I could tell! I could tell; also, is he the inspiration for one of the characters who I won’t mention ‘cause it’s later in the book and it’s a spoiler?

Kate: Yes.

Sarah: Yay! Oh, that’s so great! I – ah!

Kate: He helped me with some of the, with some of the, the, the stuff in that particular bit that you’re talking about that we won’t spoil. [Laughs] ‘Cause I am not a gamer, and I know nothing about games, but I needed to know a little something for this.

Sarah: Okay, please convey to your husband that the specificity of the references were God tier and so funny. There is one particular joke about a particular game that I had to put the book down and start texting somebody because I’m, that’s like, what, two-thirds in? And I’m just like, Okay, I’m going to explain this book to you, and here’s the deal, but I just need to tell you about this one scene that’s like two-thirds of the way in because I, my brain is exploding. He, he was a marvelous, marvelous advisor, because that part was delightful.

Kate: [Laughs] Well, thank you very much. I had fun with that. My husband helped me with all the gaming stuff, and then the other inspiration for that character, very frankly, I will admit, at least on the outside, was Idris Elba playing Luther, play, as when he’s playing Luther.

Sarah: See, now that’s kind of freaky, because I don’t usually mentally cast real people in the books that I’m reading? My, I, I’m very quietly fascinated by, like, the neurology of reading, like what’s happening in people’s brains when they’re reading, ‘cause I think it’s different for everybody. Like, some people do visual; I do mostly audio, like I hear it? But I absolutely was like, Oh, I bet this is kind of like Idris Elba with a bit of a, you know, bit of a cockney accent. Yeah, I bet – I’m so excited that I was right. Oh my gosh! That never happens.

Kate: Yes, I normally don’t cast books mentally either –

Sarah: Yeah.

Kate: – because –

Sarah: Yeah.

Kate: – usually whoever it is just looks the way they are, you know, they’re, they exist inside my head. And then only later, you know, people ask me, Well, who would you have for your fantasy cast? And then I have to think about it. But for this one, I did have a couple of actors who did pop into my head a little bit, and that was one. And the other one, I’ll tell you – I know we’re veering off. [Laughs] We’re just having fun at this point, but the other one –

Sarah: Which is, which makes for a good podcast, so please keep going and tell me about hot actors. I’m delighted.

[Laughter]

Kate: The other one was, I was imagining, for the Librarian, very much in her voice, the way she sounds, the fabulous Iranian actress named Shohreh Aghdashloo, who does the most glorious husky, smoky voice? And –

Together: I love her!

Kate: – in The Expanse, and I love her, her voice. She’s the – she’s actually, ironically, after I wrote this book, she voiced a dragon in the Millie Bobby Brown movie called Damsel, and I was just like, this is perfect. So I literally did kind of write her voice into the Librarian’s voice for this book.

Sarah: You make good choices, because that’s a great choice. That is perfection. Oh my goodness.

Now, one aspect of The Astral Library that has stuck with me is that whatever book that people in the book – they’re called patrons – whatever book a patron chooses to enter, there is automatically a welcoming place for them in that book. I love this part. So the other characters will accept them as if they’ve always been there, and they’ll have friends alongside, like, the main characters of the story, but they don’t interfere with the plot. They’re just like side characters of the main action, and it really made me think of the introduction of Dawn in like season whatever-it-was of Buffy, where everyone was like, Oh yeah, she’s always been here! And everyone in the audience was like, Who in the hell is this?

[Laughter]

Sarah: And everyone in the show is like, Oh yeah, it’s Dawn; she’s been here. No, she hasn’t! The idea that these main characters would be interacting with the patrons, but the patrons wouldn’t affect the plot, I think is so interesting. Was that something you decided early in drafting, or was that sort of an organic development as you were writing these people into these books?

Kate: Yeah, that was something I decided early, because I really wanted to explore the world inside a book. Like, the world as created by an author for the story?

Sarah: Yeah.

Kate: And I think I’ve read things before where it’s like, okay, a char-, you know, a, a Jane-Austen-loving reader gets to go in, and suddenly she’s, she gets to be Lizzie Bennet. I mean…

Sarah: Yeah!

Kate: – I’ve read that before; I’ve seen it before. You know, so I wanted to do a different angle, and I just thought, Well, what about if it’s just the world? And I thought, and you know, the, the thing about fantasy which I learned is that you have to come up with, the worldbuilding is really different from historical fiction, which is what I usually do. And there is worldbuilding in historical fiction, but the worldbuilding in fantasy is different, and you have to do a lot of thinking about how does the magic work? What are the rules?

Sarah: Yes.

Kate: And so I, I had to do all of that before I wrote the story, and I had the idea, though, that, you know, if you love a book, for one thing it also loves you, which is why it’s going to welcome you when you come to it. And there’s going to be that place for you, and you’re going to have probably a situation that you enjoy once you, you get there, because it wants you as much as you want it. And we all have this feeling about our favorite books, that they do welcome us. And so I thought, well, you can’t throw the story off. And I thought, it’s cheating if you just get to be the main character or that, if you, like, if you get to, you know, bump the heroine out of the way so you can marry the hero. You don’t get to do that either, but you can exist on the periphery.

You know, like, you can be, you know, one of the little girl, one of the girls that Anne, that is always mentioned as in a gaggle around Anne Shirley in Anne of Green Gables. You can be one of those party guests who’s just, you know, flirting and chatting and drinking champagne in the background as, you know, Elizabeth Bennet and Mr. Darcy are, you know, having their dance on the main floor. Because there’s side characters in everything, and I like the idea that every side character is secretly the star of their own story. So why aren’t –

Sarah: Yes.

Kate: – all these characters living their own lives, and you can be one of them, in this same world?

Sarah: Have there, have there been – I didn’t notice in the book, but in the rules of, for the magic of this world, can there be two different patrons in the same book? Would they find each other? Would they compare small pox scars like in Outlander?

Kate: [Laughs] I think, well, you could have two patrons who go into a book together. Like, I mentioned that there’s, like, a brother and sister –

Sarah: Yes.

Kate: – who both come into the library, so they pick a world together, and they go into it –

Sarah: Yes.

Kate: – together. But one of the rules is, though, that no pat-, each patron’s world is her own. So if you walk into Pride and Prejudice, it’s just your Pride and Prejudice –

Sarah: Right.

Kate: – and you’re going to be the only one from your world who’s there. And so –

Sarah: Yeah.

Kate: – unless maybe somebody comes specifically looking for you after you.

Sarah: That’s very cool.

I think that worldbuilding as a skill set rests in what I said before about the specificity? The finer details of a world help you really envision it and sort of ground it in a reality that makes sense to you? So I, I love your worldbuilding skills in this book. I had the best time in all of the worlds in the book. So honestly –

Kate: I had –

Sarah: – thank you.

Kate: I had a lot of fun with that. I mean, I was literally, like, pulling my copy of Jane Eyre down, and I’m looking at, like, what does it say about this drawing room? What does it say about what this one guest is wearing? You know –

Sarah: Yep.

Kate: – what does it say? Like, what are the names there, that are there so that I can use one of those names for the patron who came in? You know, so, and you know, for some of these books, a lot of them, I read the books that I was, you know, referencing. One or two I had not, so – or that I wasn’t very familiar with, so I had to do a quick reread, or I had to –

Sarah: Right.

Kate: – search for descriptions and try to see, like, okay, I need to build this as concretely as I can.

Sarah: Yes. And, and it shows, because you can see the detail work, especially when Alix goes toe to toe with Blanche. That was very satisfying; thank you very much.

[Laughter]

Kate: I always did think that Blanche Ingram never got a come-uppance the way she deserved, so –

Sarah: Right?

Kate: – yeah.

Sarah: She really did need somebody to be, like, unimpressed with her.

Kate: Yeah.

Sarah: It was, it was needed.

Kate: …good for her. [Laughs]

Sarah: So how hard was it for you to choose which books the characters would enter? I cannot imagine making that short list. Because if, if I were writing this, it would be like four hundred thousand pages, because I would just want to include every possible book that I have felt at home in. How hard was it for you to narrow it down to a short list of books?

Kate: Well, the rule that I, that I decided on, also early on, was that if you’re choosing a book to go live in, and if you’re a patron of the Astral Library, you can only choose books in public domain. And that was chosen for two reasons, one being that I, I, as the author, don’t want to get sued – [laughs] –

Sarah: I mean –

Kate: – for using somebody else’s characters in book without permission. And –

Sarah: Right, fair, yeah.

Kate: – that’s one reason; I will be perfectly blunt. The other reason being is that it gave me the chance to have a very entertaining, you know, discussion about responsible usage and copyediting and all of those things, and, you know, the Librarian makes a point: it’s like, Well, if you can’t reproduce parts of a book that is, they’re not in public domain without violating the rules, why would you be able to go and live in it without also violating, you know, fair usage? And, you know, Alix, of course, is like –

Sarah: Fair assessment.

Kate: – this is not covered by copyright law, but, you know, it is part of the law here in the Library. So that’s the other reason: it gave me a chance for a fun discussion there. But also it’s like, I really, you know, as much of a book nerd as I am, it’s like, I know that not all the books that fascinate me, fascinate everyone?

Sarah: Mm-hmm.

Kate: And I didn’t want to leave the reader adrift if they didn’t know whatever niche title, niche title I was looking at.

Sarah: Yes, of course.

Kate: So it’s like, I wanted to stick with classics that are kind of in the national readers’ database, like in all of our minds – whether we like them or not, or – which meant that, like, classics; it means books that have been endlessly adapted for endless movies. And –

Sarah: Yes.

Kate: – you know, and then it was, so I made a list very early on of like, okay, what does that include, and which are the ones that I like or that have very vivid settings? Like The Great Gatsby is not my favorite book, but as a setting for a scene, one of those West Egg, 1920s, champagne-drenched parties cannot be beat as a setting for a scene, and everybody knows The Great Gatsby because there’s been several movies, and there’s, we were all forced to read it in high school as some part of –

Sarah: Yep!

Kate: – English curriculum. It’s a safe bet.

Likewise, you know, Jane Eyre, Wuthering Heights, The Three Musketeers. Jane Eyre and The Three Musketeers are two books I read to tatters, like, when I was in middle school; I knew I was going to use those. Never read Wuthering Heights. I am not a Heathcliff fan; he is not a book boyfriend; he is a stack of red flags in a, in an overcoat; and – but it is a great setting, again! So I was like, wuthering moors, that’s a great setting; I can use it.

Sarah: Yup.

Kate: And so I made a list of, you know, what are all the different, you know, different books that are in public domain and what kind of settings they have that, so that I’m not jumping from one book to the next that are, are too similar, because I want there to be a lot of visual contrast –

Sarah: Mm-hmm.

Kate: – set into these worlds, especially since much of the rest of the book takes place in the Library itself, which is a little bit of a static environment. So I want the book worlds to be different and to be vivid and to have lots of contrast in them.

So yeah, I had a list and I, you know, checked off which ones I wanted, and I tried to shoehorn in the ones that I really, really wanted so that I did have a chance to, you know, make sure that I gave them the tip of the hat that I, I think they deserve.

Sarah: Oh, for sure! And it also seems to make sense, now that you’ve said it, for people to at least perhaps have encountered this story, maybe on the screen of somebody else’s airplane seat. Right, like I’ve watched a lot of, like, segments of movies in GIF sets online, and then I think I watched a lot of Master and Commander because four people around me on a flight were once watching it all at the same time –

Kate: [Laughs]

Sarah: – and I was like, Ooh! It’s a lot of ocean right here. Okay! Like, I have a passing familiarity with this movie that I’ve never seen simply by seeing it out of my peripheral vision. It makes sense to frame the books that are on the short list of in-, of interaction with widest possible knowledge of that book.

Kate: That’s what I was thinking, because I thought if I take the reader jumping into a world that they have no familiarity with –

Sarah: Mm-hmm.

Kate: – you know, the, the in-jokes aren’t going to land. The –

Sarah: No.

Kate: – the, the vision of the world is not going to have its own pop-up right into your head right away because you’ve read it or you, you saw the movie adaptation.

Sarah: Right.

Kate: So I wanted to make sure that the books that I chose were books that the widest possible number of readers would have at least a passing familiarity with how they sound and how they look.

Sarah: Yes.

One of the other aspects of The Astral Library that I really enjoy – again, no spoilers – is that it’s not just literary art that you’re talking about. You also go into visual art and digital art and also fashion as an art and as a marker of its time. The fashion elements were some of my absolute favorite parts. I think Beau is my favorite character in this story. How much fun was it, you know, researching hairstyles and fashion? Because the characters who are going in and out of these books, they have to change from period to period, and so all of a sudden they’ll go from one hairstyle to another. I did Google the hairstyle from, I think it was Jane Eyre. It was a particular kind of knot that I’d never known the name of.

Kate: …Apollo knot, which is…

Sarah: Apollo knot! Thank you. And that’s like –

Kate: It’s one of the most god-awful hairstyles of the 19th century, but it was accurate for the time, and if you’re getting a wardrobe change, it’s probably for a party that, your hair’s probably going into an Apollo knot.

Sarah: You, people look like Malteses.

Kate: [Laughs]

Sarah: They look like Maltese dogs with a top knot. Like, I looked at these pictures, I’m like, Oh, the Maltese hairstyle. Okay, sure. Which is not what you would call it; it’s what I would call it. But I imagine you had a really good time researching all of these hairstyles and fabrics and clothing styles. What was your research like?

Kate: Well, I am a – the reason this came into this book at all, you know, considering that, you know, fashion is not necessarily – it’s a little bit of a sidestep from, you know, the world of the books and so forth. But one of the things that I love about historical fiction, and writing it as well as reading it, is that I love the chance to at least imagine myself able to dress in the clothing of eras past, which is long gone, but which I love. Which is why I will never write a book later than the 19-, the 1960s, ‘cause I really think fashion went downhill once you got past little Jackie Kennedy suits –

Sarah: [Laughs]

Kate: – and I don’t want to write about anybody in bell bottoms. I’m never writing about the ‘70s. But –

Sarah: Oh, flares, flares are not in your future, huh?

Kate: No, no, not at all.

Sarah: [Laughs]

Kate: So I ended up – but I love historical fashion. I love that part of research, you know, in helping, in that clothes, the clothes people wear helps create a historical world. I am a big fan – if you have never read it, please start following immediately – of the blog called Frock Flicks, which –

Sarah: Yes! Oh my gosh!

Kate: And that is this fabulous cadre of historical fashion experts who watch historical movies and have fun tearing the costumes to pieces. And they are so nerdy about it! I just love it because I am surrounded by nerds myself, history nerds, and I absolutely understand, therefore, the frothing that happens when you catch a historical error. And so therefore I get it when these ladies are like, There should not be back lacing on an 18th-century gown! That is Watteau pleats all the way! Front lacing –

Sarah: [Laughs]

Kate: – front fastenings, people! Front fastenings! And you know, I get why they’re frothing; this is the kind of thing I do. And I, and, so it’s clothes plus history, which I love.

And then, plus too, from there, I really got into, like, following all these historical costume makers who, like, post the most beautiful pictures on Instagram of, like, I’m doing my fantasy-inspired Versailles ball gown, which I’m actually going to wear in Versailles and take pictures of myself in, in the Hall of Mirrors, inspired by a honeycomb pattern. And I’m just like, Oh, this is the best timeline cleanse of all time. And –

Sarah: Oh yes. That’s me too.

Kate: So I follow a lot of these. And plus a lot of them, they not only will post pictures of the beautiful gowns, they will post videos of, like, this is what it takes to, know, sew a channel for the boning for a period corset.

And there’s all kinds of good technical stuff, and so I decided for this book, you know, when Alix, who is the heroine, goes into this world, you know, she’s, you know, looking forward to the makeover, because we all –

Sarah: Yes!

Kate: – look forward to the makeover scene. You know, I love a good makeover scene. It’s like, if you get to go into a new world, you get a top to bottom makeover. And she’s looking forward to that, and I decided, well, as a little bit of her fairy godmother/fairy godfather, I’m going to give her a friend. And Beau is therefore the hero in this book, and he ends up in charge of a lot of the costume changes for the, for the Astral Library, supplying period costumes that look right if you are walking into Jane Austen’s Meryton or Jane Eyre’s drawing room, the clothes and hair that look right. And he is an absolute fashion nerd and a fantastic dress designer and dress and seams-, and, you know, dress sewer, and he has a costume shop in Boston on Newbury Street. And I decided he’s very much based on all of these, you know, wonderful, you know, fantastically gifted seamstresses and fashion Instagrammers who love historical clothes and make them and photograph them and geek out about them, and he was inspired by them. So I decided I would put all, all of this together – and this is a very long answer; I’m sorry – and –

Sarah: No, I’m enjoying it! Keep going!

Kate: – put it…

[Laughter]

Kate: So that’s the inspiration for Beau, who is the hero. And you know, I like to flip a, flip a trope on its head. I like to have a hero who does not necessarily have, like, you know, the most manly-man, masculine, must be very hard-edged, you know, job. This is a guy who geeks out over clo-, over clothes and historical accuracy of clothes. And he loves making someone look great in something he made.

Sarah: Mm-hmm.

Kate: And he makes no bones about it! And he loves clothes for himself, and he loves fashion, and he is a great guy, and he also knows his way around a fist fight or a sword fight, too. So I like, you know, turning some of those tropes on their end and, you know, having,
you know, a guy who is a clothes horse.

Sarah: Of the outfits that you wrote about, do you have favorites? Were there ones where you were like, This is the one, this is it; I love this one?

Kate: Yes, and that was another piece of inspiration behind a scene and a dress in this book, which is called the Book Dress. And the Book Dress –

Sarah: Yes!

Kate: – is absolutely taken from a, another Instagram account I follow of a French designer who literally made a book dress, a series of them. And she took a trunk-ful of disintegrating 19th-century novels that were, you know, just bound for a landfill somewhere, and she unpicked the stitching of these leather, beautiful leather bindings with the guilt lettering, and she made a dress out of the spines of books that flower into pages, a skirt that looks like pages, and it is so incredible to look at! I mean, just literally google book dress and her, her stuff will pop up, and I give her credit for absolutely inspiring this in my Author Note.

But that idea was so beautiful ‘cause that’s where, that’s a scene where it’s not a historically accurate dress? It is pure fantasy. It is –

Sarah: Yes.

Kate: – when a book becomes a gown, or a whole set of books becomes a gown. And I thought, well, if you’re going to have a magic fantasy library, I want a magic fantasy library book dress as well. So that’s my favorite piece out of the whole, favorite costume change out of the whole book. And I had such fun, you know, you know, absolutely, like, going through her whole Instagram page and looking at every single picture and, you know, just thinking of, like, how it could look, and that was absolutely necessary research for this novel.

Sarah: Oh, absolutely! I think Instagram should be paying you!

Kate: [Laughs] I got a lot of Instagram inspiration about, from this. You know, it’s like, I kind of feel like this book came from the fact that I have so much in my Instagram feed and on my Facebook feed of readers who are like, they’re into the book vibes. This is a vibe book. It is about the readers who geek out over cozy candles and, you know, book snacks and, you know, perfumes that are inspired by literary heroines and, you know, the fact that we all – and way too many GIFs of, you, we’re all posting way too many GIFs of Belle on the sliding ladder going down the bookstore –

Sarah: Yep.

Kate: – and Belle’s library. And all of these things, like, those are the readers that I, are in my feed a lot, and I follow them, they follow me, and these are the readers I was writing for. It’s like the readers where books and book visuals are such a vibe. It’s…

Sarah: Yes.

Kate: – the whole Bookstagram vibe, and I was like, Maybe that’s the, maybe that’s the, the, another inspiration for this book is like if Bookstagram was an actual novel. [Laughs]

Sarah: Yep, pretty much! Which, I mean, honestly, if Bookstagram was an actual novel I would follow that account immediately. No, obviously.

I also think it’s very interesting that with fashion, you are taking something that is in your imagination and you are making it visible for everyone. It’s like art: you are visibly creating something with color and depth; like, it has mass; it has matter. Writing a book is slightly different because it has mass and it has matter, but all of the visual is up to the reader. Like, you have your visual that you have put into the book, but when I read it, I might see something completely different, so it’s my visual as well, which is a fitting way of tying these characters to the Astral Library, because each of these patrons is going to enter a book, and their, their perspective of that book is going to influence how they experience it, right?

Kate: Of course it will! Because every, all of us, when we read a book, we’re all reading a slightly different version –

Sarah: Yes!

Kate: …the book itself, but it’s also how that book interacts with us individually –

Sarah: Yes!

Kate: – as a reader, what we bring to it. And –

Sarah: Yes.

Kate: – you know, it’s, it’s like the same thing as a song, you know, where for some people when they hear a song they’re like, That’s absolutely about this.

Sarah: Mm-hmm.

Kate: And for another reader it’s like, It’s not about that! It’s about this! But that’s the fact we’re bringing our own experiences to listening it, to it. And we do the same thing with books. Like, when we come to a book, it is, we’re bringing our own baggage with us –

Sarah: Mm-hmm.

Kate: – and the way that we see the world. And so every reader’s experience of a book is different. And so that’s why I think that not all the patrons can go to the same version of the sa-, of the book and the same world when they walk into that world –

Sarah: Yeah.

Kate: – because they’re walking into their version. They’re walking into the version of Pride and Prejudice or Wuthering Heights or The Great Gatsby –

Sarah: Yes.

Kate: – that lives in their head. So that, that is going to be different for everyone.

Sarah: This is also the foundation of a workshop I used to give about how authors should interact with online reviews? Back when – so my site is twenty years old, and back when we started reviewing romances critically, this was, like, outrageous behavior in, in a lot of people’s opinions, and I got a lot of “You bitches have gone too far!” email back then. And so I developed a workshop for authors about how do you deal with online reviews of your work? Because if you are searching your name, these are going to pop up. Sometimes people might send them to you. You should ask them not to do that. And I had to explain that the review is an account of that reader’s experience with the book, and it’s absolutely nothing you have control over. There is absolutely nothing you can do. It’s, it’s literally not your problem. I mean, yes, you wrote the book, but your ability to affect what happens when a reader starts reading it is like none, zero, nil. Like, you can’t –

Kate: Yeah.

Sarah: – do anything about that! Which, as a controlling person who has written books, is not easy to deal with. I will acknowledge it’s very hard. [Laughs]

Kate: …difficult, but it’s one of those things, and my friends and I – you know, I’m friends with so many authors – we all have the, it’s, we, it’s the very firm agreement that when you, that one-star review crosses your feed and you have not been able to stop yourself from reading it, although you shouldn’t read it –

Sarah: No, don’t read it. It’s fine.

Kate: Don’t read it – but if you do, and if it sticks in your head, this is not an occasion for social media.

Sarah: No!

Kate: This is an occasion for that four-way text thread with your closest friends where you are going to bitch about this review and you are going to call the reader a troglodyte.

Sarah: [Snorts]

Kate: Privately!

Sarah: Privately! [Sings] Put it in the group chat! Because, you know what? You can call a reader who gave your book a one-star ‘cause it had too much sex in it and you don’t like gay people, you can call them a troglodyte! (I mean, I might even do it publicly, but I’m in a different position.) [Sings] Save it for the group chat, save it for the group chat!

Kate: Oh yes.

Sarah: Like, seriously, you can’t do anything about this book. The best solution is just write another book, you know?

Kate: Oh yeah. Yeah, I absolutely agree.

[Laughter]

Sarah: Every reader’s experience with the book is their own, which I think is one of the best parts of reading?

The other thing I find so interesting about the melding of art forms in your book is that some of these are what I think of as temporal art forms? Maybe that’s a formal name, or maybe I just made it up. But some forms of art only exist when they’re happening, and they don’t exist unless they’re happening. Dance is like that. Music happens when it’s being played. You can listen to a recording, but you’re still listening to a very finite piece of time. And books exist as objects, but the reading of the story only exists when it’s being read. It, it only happens while it’s happening, which makes it, I think, very, very precious. And so what’s so interesting about your, your take on this, both, you know, more, you know, enduring pieces of art and then very temporary pieces of art, is that for each person who enters them, they are so deeply personal and important and exist permanently in that person’s memory. I find that so comforting. Do you know what I mean?

Kate: Yes! And, because we can all think, if you’re asked, like, Is there a book that has changed you?

Sarah: [Laughs] Oh yeah!

Kate: If you’re a reader, then yes, you will probably have a list of those. And that’s when, like, the right book found you at the right time and changed something in you, and, like, you can literally be a different person because of a story you heard or, or a story that you read, and –

Sarah: Yes!

Kate: – I love that! And, you know, sometimes the reason is completely nonsensical or, you know, does not make sense to anyone but you, or the reason is completely arbitrary. It’s just books have a way of finding you at the right time for you. I do think that, and –

Sarah: Absolutely.

Kate: Which is sometimes why I, I sometimes get the sense of, like, rather than not finishing a book, I sometimes put it aside for later because sometimes there’s the idea of, like, I just don’t think this is the right book for me for now.

Sarah: Yep!

Kate: I think it might be the right book for me later.

Sarah: Yep.

Kate: And sometimes I’m right about that, and sometimes it’s just, I don’t, maybe this isn’t the right book for me. But I have had that experience where it’s like, I tried reading something, it wasn’t grabbing me, but then later, like, the mood shifted, something shifted, and it opened up, and it opened up something in me. And I love that, that, you know, it’s, I think mood has a, mood and age and experience: all of these things affect your reading, which is one reason I’m a big fan of rereading? I mean, I know –

Sarah: Oh, me too.

Kate: – some people say Oh, they never reread anything, ‘cause there’s too much out there to read, and that’s true! There’s more books out there than we’ll ever have time to read. But I love rereading things because you’re not the same person as you were the first time.

Sarah: Never.

Kate: I have a wonderful friend who said that, like, the first time she read, you know, Anna Karenina, she was a teenager, and she was so in love with the poetic hero named Levin, and she’s like, Oh, he’s my ideal man. And she just said, like, I read that in my thirties and I wanted to clock him upside the head with a frying pan and just say, Get a practical outlook on life! And it’s like, but both views are valid! Both views are valid!

Sarah: Absolutely.

Kate: It’s like the way when you’re a teenager, you read Romeo and Juliet and you think it’s just the most romantic thing in the world, and then when you’re, you know, again, in your thirties or something, you’re like, Kids, can you just slow the brakes a little bit before anybody – and everyone’s dead.

Sarah: Yep, yep, yep! Totally. Absolutely true. And there are books where I have read them, there are – especially, especially romances – there are romances that I’ve read fifteen, twenty, twenty-five years ago (I’ve been reading romance for a long time), and I look at them now and I’m like, I understand why I liked this, but I also see so many more things that are not great about this whole character arc! [Laughs] Especially because I started reading romance in like the ‘90s?

Kate: Oh yeah.

Sarah: There’s some interesting – yeah, it was a different time in romance!

Kate: So…I read, I read some romances in the ‘90s, and it’s just like, Mm! It’s…

Sarah: Yeah!

Kate: You know, it’s, there’s also things – and you talk about this extensively, so I won’t bother to recap for people who have, are used to hearing that, especially from you, but this whole thing of like, there’s a, they were not having the conversations nationally about consent that we are having now. So I’m not going to blame the writers for maybe not including that back then?

Sarah: Mm-hmm. Yeah.

Kate: Because that conversation happened on such a huge stage?

Sarah: Right.

Kate: And, but it’s like, you read some stuff back then and it’s like, okay, that’s both cultural appropriation and rape-y. And, uh –

Sarah: Ugh!

Kate: – I’m not comfortable with that anymore, even though I probably blew right by it when I was fourteen.

Sarah: Oh! Flew over my head at thirty-four thousand feet. I was not even aware of it happening at the time, and now I look at it and I’m like, Whoa, yikies!

And also I have to remind people, like, if you’re going to go back and read older romances, you have to be prepared for almost an anthropological experience, because this is going to be truly different than what is being published right now. But also, I also remind people that the context of the time that those were being published in, the ‘70s and the ‘80s and the early ‘90s, those are very different time for women, for feminism, for what feminism, what, what the word feminism meant at the time is even different. And how women interacted with arousal is different. Like, right now in 2026, we have such a wider opening – heh-heh – to being, to exploring sexuality and having words for sexuality. And if you want a sex toy, I can, like, think of seven different places for you to get one. When I started reading romance, I didn’t even know that existed! I had no idea, and certainly no one talked about it. It’s a completely –

Kate: Or –

Sarah: – different narrative.

Kate: Or, like, like a line literally from your book was that you never have, in older, Old Skool romances, a hero who might be bisexual. Like –

Sarah: No! God.

Kate: – even if you’re going to end up – I mean, for one thing, your…

Sarah: Unless he’s the villain. The, the villain can be bisexual. The villain was often gay back then. [Laughs]

Kate: Yeah. But not only are you never going to have a romance where – or you’re, or very, very rarely, and that’s very niche and very different; it’s not mainstream romance – you’re not going to have a male/male or female/female romance. The hero does not end up with another hero in a mainstream romance; it just didn’t happen. And certainly the hero, even if he’s going to ultimately end up with a woman, there’s not going to be just parts of his backstory that, oh, he might be bi and maybe he’s had boyfriends. And I was thinking of that when I wrote – and it’s a little spoiler, but it’s not a big one; it’s just a little bit of character development – Beau, in my, in The Astral Library, I wrote him as bi! And –

Sarah: Yes, he is! And boy, did I love it!

Kate: He’s bi, and he, he has no problem with this. And it hurts him that his parents have a problem with it; they’re much more comfortable if he brings a girlfriend home and not a boyfriend.

Sarah: Yeah, mm-hmm.

Kate: You know, that’s hurtful. And, but it’s not something that the heroine even bats an eyelash at…

Sarah: Not a, not a one.

Kate: And they –

Sarah: Not a one.

Kate: – you know, when they start to flirt, and he definitely does, and she’s definitely interested in him, she never has any problem with the fact that, oh yeah, I know he’s dated guys in his past. She’s a modern woman, though.

Sarah: Uh-huh.

Kate: She’s a woman of, in her twenties in 2026, and she does not have a problem with this. Whereas back when we were, you know, fourteen and reading these Old Skool (with a K) romances – [laughs] – you know, it’s like, there is no such thing as, like, a, the hero who ends up with a heroine who maybe dated guys in the past –

Sarah: Oh, not ever.

Kate: – or vice versa.

Sarah: And if there was one, it ended terribly for them, or they were the villain, or they aren’t even part of the –

Kate: Or it was traumatic.

Sarah: – ro- – yeah, or, or it was traumatic, or they weren’t really even part of the romance genre. There’s a lot of books –

Kate: Yes.

Sarah; – that you can sort of retrofit in, but the, at the time, if you said, Is this a romance? readers would have been like, No! It’s got gay people in it! Nuh-uh! No, no, no! Nononono.  Not at all.

Kate: Oh yeah.

Sarah: But, I mean, we also went through a whole period of time where, in the romance genre, we were rewriting the Civil War over and over again. Over and over, so many of these books! I went to a used bookstore in Texas that was like a museum. Oh my gosh, it was like fifteen shelves, every possible author you could think of, whole shelves of every line of Harlequin, Silhouette, Candlelight; like, all of them. I kind of went in and was like, I’m allowed to touch all of this and just pick it up and, like, buy it? Oh my gosh! The amount of Civil War romance that we produced at – oh my goodness me! So much, so much antebellum romance. And I’m like, yeah, that’s not a thing now. [Laughs]

Kate: Yeah. Oh boy.

Together: Yes.

Kate: No.

Sarah: Yikes! Oh, and we won’t even get into Native American romance. We’ll just, we’ll just leave that, we’ll just leave that in the past.

Kate: …one or two of those from, like, my middle school reading, and…

Sarah: Oh yeah!

Kate: – and I’m like, Oh boy!

Sarah: Oh God! And the thing I, I don’t think readers now understand, like, for example, speaking specifically of Cassie Edwards – who has since passed, so I, I feel comfortable speaking about her now that she has moved on. May she rest – I don’t think I can possibly explain to people the ubiquity of Cassie Edwards’ romances. They were everywhere. They were in the library; they were in the drugstore; they were in the truck stop; they were in gas stations. Like, they were just ubiquitous. The level of coverage that you would see for Fourth Wing, that’s the kind of retail exposure Cassie Edwards and Native American romances had at that time. They were just omnipresent, and it was –

Kate: Mm-hmm.

Sarah: – really hard to avoid them.

And as many of my listeners has, have pointed out, one of the things they’re glad about the romance genre having changed is the idea that, you know, back then we had, what – I don’t remember how many publishers we had, like six or seven? – what they produced was it. That was it; that was the romance you got. It was one book a month from each of them, maybe two, but that was it. That was the romance. And now we have so much romance! It’s awesome! But also for a time we had very little choice, and what choice there was we look back on, and it’s just like, I have a nine pack of abdominals from the cringe of looking back on those books, right? [Laughs]

Kate: Oh God, yeah. That was – the whole, I mean, conversation about cultural appropriation alone and all of that, it was just – like, I was thinking of that too, ‘cause that’s a big part of the conversation now, and I, I have, I tried to put in little bits of that for the book discussions that happened. It’s like –

Sarah: Mm-hmm!

Kate: – can we, if we’re going to go into this book, is this, am I, am I going to get sent, like, if I go to A Thousand and One Arabian Nights, the tales, like, am I going to get some sort of, like, outfit that is, I’m a white girl, am I going to get some kind of like harem outfit? Is that…

Sarah: Yes?

Kate: – that that feels very cringey? [Laughs] I mean –

Sarah: Yeah!

Kate: – like, they’re having these, some of these discussions, and, like, Beau, who is also biracial, is like, Yeah, yeah, I’m not going to Gone with the Wind. I am not blending in at –

Sarah: Nope!

Kate: – a barbecue with Twelve Oaks; it is just not happening. And it’s like –

Sarah: Nope!

Kate: – yeah, that’s totally fair. And –

Sarah: [Laughs]

Kate: – these things are – I was thinking about some of this stuff, too, because, you know, book conversations are a huge part of the world that I live in –

Sarah: Yes.

Kate: – so it’s like next, every time something blows up, you know, or, like, somebody decides to try to school Nora Roberts, you know, and the whole internet, you know, gets popcorn and just is like, Oh, this is going to be good, you know, it’s, every time something new blows up, it’s just, we learn something more about where readerships are. And –

Sarah: Yes.

Kate: …these things keep changing, you know, so it’s, you know, I, I hope, I’m hoping very much that whatever is, this part of The Astral Library won’t suffer too much in another thirty years the way that, for example, a lot of Cassie Edwards has not aged well – [laughs] – because this is –

Sarah: Oh!

Kate: – an ever-moving conversation, and so are the ways –

Sarah: Yeah!

Kate: – that we interact with story.

Sarah: Yeah! And we don’t have a monoculture anymore. Romance in the ‘90s was part of a monoculture. We didn’t have all that much! We had like four channels and, you know, these were the romances, and that’s what you got!

Kate: Yep.

Sarah: Unless you were reading Sweet Valley High, in which case you got one every month as a literary soap opera.

Kate: [Laughs]

Sarah: So I have a question about your writing. Actually, I two questions about your writing. One is from a, a Patreon listener named Julia. She asked – this is a bit of a, a craft question.

>> You often feature books with multiple timelines and points of view. How do you keep those straight? And are you ever worried that one might bleed over into another? I realize that’s much more common with your historical fiction and isn’t so much the case here, but I think it’s so interesting to, to, to read a contemporary fantasy from you when your, when your previous books have all been very emotional historical fiction.

Kate: Well, it is one of those things where, generally speaking, I do like to write, cut back and forth between timelines when I write, and I like doing two different timelines because it is, sometimes accomplishes a number of things. It can be –

Sarah: Yeah.

Kate: – a way to create, like, to show the reader how there are echoes that go through history and how an issue that has cropped up in one timeline is still very much not solved in the next –

Sarah: No.

Kate: – because things linger through generations and even through centuries. And that’s a –

Sarah: [Laughs]

Kate: – that is a cool way to look at history, to be able to draw those parallels.

Sarah: Yes.

Kate: And the other thing, too, is it can be a, a useful contrast because, you know, like, if you have a, you know, a, a grim wartime setting, if you can then throw another timeline that’s not in the war, you’re giving the reader a little bit of a respite from, you know, the unrelenting grimness and all those little rayon wartime-rationing frocks, you know. And, you know, all those things, you’re throwing in some sunlight, some beauty, something different, a palette cleanser.

Sarah: Yes.

Kate: And then also, too, it’s that a lot of readers can be a little cautious about diving into a historical era that they’re not familiar with, which is often stuff –

Sarah: Mm-hmm!

Kate: – that’s further back in the past? And if I can give them an era that they’re more comfortable with – either it’s a modern-day era or it is an era that at least feels less unfamiliar, like, you know, a World War II era, 1950s – and then I give you something less familiar as the other one, then it’s an introduction. It’s a way I can lure you in and say, Come learn about this other period. I know you’re going to like the wartime stuff; I think you’ll really like this too.

Sarah: Yeah.

Kate: And it’s a way to try to pull people in. They might not pick up a book that’s all about, you know, say, the 1500s, but if you have a story that’s the 1500s plus a 1940s thread, and I wrapped the one in the other, the reader might pick it up for the 1940s thread and then stay for the Renaissance. You know, so –

Sarah: Yeah.

Kate: – it’s a nice way of, you know, pulling readerships together, you know, and, you know, hopefully making people enthusiastic about different historical eras, which is why I like doing it.

As far as how I normally work, I tend to like to cut back and forth between them as I go, because that means it is easier for me to tease out these parallels of what is happening between two different, entirely different times?

Sarah: Yes.

Kate: It does mean there’s a certain amount of care has to be taken that, for example, my, you know, 19-, my 19-, 1915 heroine is not suddenly using the ‘40s slang of the heroine in World War, in the World War II timeline? It means that etymonline.com is permanently open as a tab on my browser because I’m constantly looking up the etymology of things at work, can I use it in this time-, timeline but not in this one? It is a permanent tab, it is always open, and I, I live there.

So there is some, there is some danger of that, but it’s just something you have to keep, kind of just keep aware of.

Sarah: Yeah!

Kate: And, you know, sometimes I, I don’t always work that way. I’ve had, in the latest book, I have two – which I’m drafting right now – I have two timelines, one in 1922 and one in 1912. And I have absolutely –

Sarah: Ooh!

Kate: – no idea what is happening in the 1922 timeline. So I have abandoned that one for now. I am just writing the 1912 timeline, and I hope that when I get to the end of that, of that, that the muse will send me something about the 1922 timeline, because the deadline approaches. And I really do…

Sarah: Uh, yes.

Kate: – to figure that out. [Laughs]

Sarah: I –

Kate: But, and this is the inside joke just for you, I beat my, I treat my muse very badly, so maybe she’s…

Sarah: I –

Kate: – right now.

Sarah: I, I am aware! I am, I have, I, I, I saw! I saw! I noticed. Yep, yep.

Kate: [Laughs] And that’s an inside joke for your, for you if you’re listening, and you’ll know it when you see it.

Sarah: Yes, very true. I will not spoil.

So what was fun about moving from historical fiction to contemporary fantasy? The feel is different; the energy is different; the time period is very different. What was fun for you about making that switch?

Kate: It was just a chance to play. And –

Sarah: Yeah.

Kate: – this was the book I came up with after the pandemic. I think it was a little bit my own yearning for escapism?

Sarah: Yeah.

Kate: And it’s, I don’t think I’m ever abandoning historical fiction. I mean, I went right from The Astral Library to my next book, which is straight hist-fic, and that’s the, that’s the sandbox I, I love the best, I think. But I love fantasy as a reader, and –

Sarah: Yeah.

Kate: – I love magic realism as a reader, and – so it was really fun getting a chance to play in a different world. It was challenging; like, suddenly I’m like, I have to come up with the rules of magic, and I don’t know how to do that. You know, Patricia Wrede helped me there; she has a whole checklist you can go down. But it also was just like, I don’t have to stop and look things up every other moment, you know, to see like, am I according to the historical timeline correctly here or not? It’s like, it was fun to be able to have modern-day references to things.

And it was fun to be able to write as a book geek, rather than as, you know, amateur historian, you know, because I, as a reader, you know, I cut my teeth on fantasy with, you know, the O-, the, like all the Oz books from, you know, from the Wizard of Oz on, and then, you know, all the Narnia books.

Sarah: Yep.

Kate: But I had – my dad read those to me; he read to me before I could read myself, and we had read all of those by the time I entered first grade. And, like, I spent so much of my childhood, you know, like, poking around in closets trying to find that door to Narnia where I would get to be a queen. It is a really good thing I did not grow up in tornado country, ‘cause I think if I’d seen a twister, I would have been like, Yes! Take me to Oz! And you know, there I am, I’m, I’m dead at nine.

Sarah: I’M OVER HERE! COME THIS WAY! Yeah. Mm-hmm! Totally.

Kate: So that was sort of my gateway drug, and then I went on to read more fantasy, you know, with, like, you know, the classics like Tolkien, and then went on to, you know, of course, George R. R. Martin, and then, you know, getting on – again, talking about, there’s some fantasy that has not aged very well when you look back –

Sarah: [Laughs]

Kate: – how white it is and how Eurocentric it is and how not very feminist it is, all kinds of things, which then got me into more modern fantasy where I’m reading, you know, I love N. K. Jemisin, and I love G. R. Macallister. These are, you know, really richly detailed worlds that are much more inclusive – [laughs] and alive –

Sarah: Yes.

Kate: – which I love to see this genre moving toward? I love the way it’s been moving.

And so I got to play with all of that, and I got to be a fantasy reader, and the thing I really loved about this was that the thing that always a little bit bothered me in books was that, like, anybody who ever gets magic in a book, they, they, they read like they’re someone who has never read a book about a magic adventure before. Like, it’s like, oh, I’m in a new world! And then they go do all the wrong things. And I’m just like –

Sarah: Yeah.

Kate: – I want to have the idea of a reader who is absolutely up. She, she knows her tropes; she knows the hero’s adventure.

Sarah: Yes.

Kate: She is absolutely familiar with, you know, like, what are the tropes of modern fantasy? You know, is the mentor going to show up and give me a quest now? You know –

Sarah: Yes.

Kate: – it’s like, do I get to be queen in this world? You know, it’s, it’s like all the, she knows the rules! She is like, she is one of these Bookstagram girlies who absolutely knows her tropes and her, you know, the rules of book worlds, so that when she drops into a magic world in a magic library, there is no, like, Heavens me! I have no idea what to do here! She is like, No, I am locked, cocked –

Sarah: Yep.

Kate: – and ready to rock. Like, let’s do this. And I always thought, like –

Sarah: [Laughs]

Kate: – that would be what I would do if I dropped into a magic world, because it’s like, I, first thing I would think would be like, Okay, I’ve read this book before; which book experience am I going to have? I’m like, I’d be on the hunt for the story conventions.

Sarah: Yep.

Kate: And I liked the idea of having a heroine who could do that and –

Sarah: Yep.

Kate: – would do that. And I thought there’d be a lot of opportunity for comedy in that – [laughs] –

Sarah: Oh yes.

Kate: – which is good, because there is some, you know, darker stuff in this book too.

Sarah: Mm-hmm! Just a little.

Kate: [Laughs]

Sarah: I, I won’t go too deeply into this because I think discovering the nature of the villainy in this story is part of the plot, and it fully sort of coalesces so late in the book, I don’t want to spoil that for anyone. But I really admire how the villainy of this book is hiding in plain sight through politeness. You know, it’s not a visible villain. They’re not, like, chewing on the scenery or, you know, they’re not just, you know, waving a big black staff and there’s a thunderstorm and things are bad and things are – no. These are the people you do not expect to be the villain. And I find that extremely timely, and also very reassuring because, you know, much like Blanche, somebody needs to tell these people to fuck off, please.

[Laughter]

Kate: Or, you know, maybe eat them if they need to be eaten.

Sarah: Or eat, I mean eating them is fine too. I am not picky. (I’m totally picky.)

Now you’ve sort of already mentioned this, sort of already answered this question and I know it’s definitely part of the Author’s Note, but I did want to ask: books – and all of the other things I won’t mention because spoilers – are sanctuaries for so many people. Are you familiar with the world of Murderbot?

Kate: Yes. I haven’t read those books; they’re on my TBR, which is going to dwarf my house at this point.

Sarah: It’s going to eat you is what it’s going to do. It’s going to grow into a sentient being.

Kate: Yeah. But I, yes, I am familiar with, I know the world a little bit and I –

Sarah: Yeah.

Kate: – I know many people who have raved about them.

Sarah: So one aspect – this is not a spoiler – is that Murderbot likes to watch a lot of TV. Like, it, it, it’s not killing people ‘cause it’s watching all of the combined media streams and, and like a whole bunch of different galaxies; it’s got lots of TV. And –

Kate: [Laughs]

Sarah: – its favorite show is a show called The Rise and Fall of Sanctuary Moon, and so many times during the story when stuff is tense, it’ll just start playing an episode in the background, or it’ll play the soundtrack. Like it is a soothing mechanism for this, this construct to be reminded of Sanctuary Moon. And there’s a common phrase that I’ve seen – I’ve seen it on merch or on, you know, fan art; I’ve seen it in the subreddit – that Murderbot, the books of Murderbot are my Sanctuary Moon. What Sanctuary Moon is for Murderbot is what the Murderbot books are for me. And I have, I, like, when you were talking of reread, rereading, I think I’ve reread them like fifty, sixty times? Like, when I have insomnia, that’s where I’m going. It’s so comforting.

What books are sanctuaries for you? And if there’s more than books, please add those too!

Kate: I think of them as like comfort reads –

Sarah: Mm-hmm!

Kate: – the things I can go back to, which, you know, just put a big smile on my face.

For romances, the late, great Eva Ibbotson is as, as good as it gets. Like, her romances, which are so funny, and the, the, the language that she uses is so inventive and beautiful that I can always dive back into a book of hers like The Morning Gift or A Company of Swans. You know, they’re wonderful. I love those.

I, there’s some childhood favorites I love. I, I love L. M. Montgomery, and specifically my favorite of hers isn’t one, isn’t an Anne book, but it is one, a standalone book she wrote called The Blue Castle –

Sarah: Oh yes!

Kate: … such a great hero and a fully realized romance, but it’s about a woman reclaiming her life when she has lived her whole life as the most, most repressed and depressed and oppressed wallflower.

Sarah: Yes.

Kate: Really coming from, like, an abusive family, and she throws it all off, and, like, this arc she has of, like, flowering into who she is and a happy life is so wonderful?

Sarah: Yep.

Kate: And so that’s another one I like to return to. And I can always read, like, the James Herriot All Creatures Great and Small books.

And I can also say, too, that Auntie Mame is a favorite because, for the humor of it? That is an old book that has actually aged well. Like, talk about, like, she goes to the Antebellum South and skewers it!

Sarah: Yes! Yes, she does!

Kate: …goes to the Old South and, like, wrecks it. And, you know, she’s like, there is no, like, Lost Cause, you know, romanticism in that chapter, and I’m just like, Wow, this is, this has really aged well, considering this is an old book. And, or like the scene that, you know, Auntie Mame has where she’s having dinner with per-, some perspective in-laws of, you know, her son’s fiancée’s parents, and this is, you know, just pre-World War II, and the father just goes in the most horrible antisemitic rank, rant, and Auntie Mame, who has been trying to play nice, just decides she’s had it.

Sarah: We’re, we’re done now.

Kate: And she, like throws, down the dinner napkin, and she schools him –

Sarah: Mm-hmm.

Kate: – like Nora Roberts schooling an internet troll. I mean, it is, the carnage is glorious.

Sarah: [Laughs]

Kate: And the way that, you know, the, you know, the, Auntie Mame and through her the author skewers things like antisemitism or, like, you know, Lost Cause, Antebellum romanticism, and all kinds of things, it’s like, it’s just delicious. And it is never not delicious every time I read it. So these are –

Sarah: Yep.

Kate: – a few of my sanctuary novels.

Sarah: And it’s also a situation similar to in The Astral Library where the person who stands up to the terrible behavior is often the one labeled as the problem, because everyone else was going to give this person a pass, but you had to make it awkward. You had to say what it was that we weren’t saying out loud. You had to say, No, actually, that’s, that’s terrible, and you should feel bad for what you just said. The person who says that –

Kate: Well, a lot of –

Sarah: – is the one who gets blamed –

Kate: Yeah.

Sarah: – for being the problem.

Kate: Yeah, it’s a lot of gaslighting that happens, you know, when – it’s like, you’re the one who spoke up, and then it’s like, everybody else is looking at you like, why did you say the quiet part out loud? We were all happy not saying the quiet part out loud and –

Sarah: Yep!

Kate: – we’re –

Sarah: ‘Cause they don’t –

Kate: Why did you have to –

Sarah: – they don’t want to –

Kate: – say that?

Sarah: Yeah, they don’t want to take responsibility for the thing that you have just taken responsibility for, which is correcting this, you know, buffoon.

Kate: Yeah.

Sarah: Yeah, they don’t –

Kate: Well…I had, my mother was a librarian. She’s retired now, and she’s helped me a lot with the worldbuilding of this? Kind of like, we were thinking of. like, she’d be like the things, the props in a library that –

Sarah: Yeah.

Kate: – you know, that become, what, what can they become if I throw magic with them? Like, a stamp: what does a library stamp become when it’s magic?

Sarah: The paper cutter! The big guillotine paper cutter! Oh!

Kate: …I was, like, terrified of with the big arm that comes down, and you’re convinced you’re going to lose a hand?

Sarah: They’re so scary!

Kate: Yeah! What happens when one of those is, like, chopping up and down all by itself? You know, it’s like, what about an old-fashioned library card or a card catalog? You know –

Sarah: Mm-hmm!

Kate: – these are all things that, yes, they’re kind of moving away because libraries are becoming more digital, but still, it’s like they’re still parts of a library; how can we use those as parts of the worldbuilding when you throw magic into them? But also, what went into this book was that there’s a lot of humor that I, I was able to get into this, and more than humor toward the end, of the bureaucracy of library speak.

Sarah: Yes!

Kate: And –

Sarah: Ho –

Kate: – my mom always said like, Oh my God, you’ve never heard anybody who can go into bureaucrat speak like library management.

Sarah: Oh my gosh, yes!

Kate: And there’s certain kinds of library management who doesn’t actually –

Sarah: Mm-hmm.

Kate: – they want the library, but they really kind of just want it all to themselves. They don’t want it, patrons in it mucking up their library. And there’s a certain kind of library management – not all of them! There’s a of wonderful library management. Not saying the managers are bad, but there is a certain kind that will go into these bureaucratic drones, and they don’t actually, they’re often not actually readers, and –

Sarah: No.

Kate: – they can propose the most jaw-dropping things. And you’re just like, Why did you get into this line of work? And I know my mom used to go into these meetings and just come out of it, just, you know, breathing smoke.

[Laughter]

Sarah: I, I know so many librarians, and if I played them that clip all I would hear would be Girl. Girl, you do not understand. Oh my gosh. Yes. Do you want their names in alphabetical order or in order of, like, annoyingness? Like, every librarian I know has dealt with that particular flavor of library bureaucrat.

Kate: Oh yeah. Those are the bane of the great librarians, you know, the book dragons, the ones that we adore.

Sarah: Yep!

Kate: So – I remember, my mom was reading it. She’s like, You can make this worse. I mean –

Sarah: [Laughs]

Kate: – you can, you can crank up, you can crank up the, like, the acronyms and the bureaucratic speak. Yeah, crank it up; keep it coming. And I’m just like, Okay, I’ll crank it up! [Laughs] But, like, she sat through a lot of meetings in her day before finally retiring. She’s like, Oh no –

Sarah: Yep.

Kate: – it can be more boring. It can be more bureaucratic. It can be more tedious and fiddly and –

Sarah: Soulless.

Kate: …and soulless. You can –

Sarah: Mm-hmm.

Kate: – you can go further. And I’m just like, All right! I will!

Sarah: Be-, because there comes a point where you can tell that if there was a tipping point between this individual choosing between control and people who need help, they’re picking control every time.

Kate: Oh yeah!

Sarah: People are, people are, are irrelevant to everything that they’re doing.

Kate: Yeah, and it is, yeah, it’s very true. And that’s the reason why I think we’re having troubles with, you know, the fact that libraries are continually underfunded, and –

Sarah: Always.

Kate: – book banning and book – you know, hopefully not leading to book burning, but you know, I know, I, I know some folks who probably will read this book and be like, You are not very subtle about the fact that, you know, the book banning themes. I’m like, No, I know I’m not, but on the other hand, I don’t think what is happening to libraries and to reading lists is, right now is very subtle either.

Sarah: No, book banners are not subtle. Like, they think they’re clever. They are not subtle, and they’re often just stuck on one track, and they cannot divert from it, and they will not learn. You can only just shut them down and shut them out. Like, they won’t change. It’s so frustrating.

Kate: I feel like, you know, when it say – I saw a great quote from someone or other; I wish I could remember who, who said, Rather than being concerned that there’s a book on a, a shelf that might potentially upset some child somewhere, why not be more, concern yourself with being the kind of person that a child could come to if they read something that upsets them?

Sarah: Uhhh –

Kate: And I think that that was rather –

Sarah: Yeah!

Kate: – prescient. And I liked that.

Sarah: Yeah!

Kate: And, and also I speak too as someone, I’m in that sort of Xennial generation, you know, and, and I don’t know about you, but I feel like it was a formative part of that generation that all of us got some piece of massively inappropriate literature at some point.

Sarah: Oh!

Kate: My whole class had read Flowers in the Attic before we were –

Sarah: I was just thinking, oh, Flowers in the Attic, hundred percent. Twincest, poisoning doughnuts, all of it, absolutely.

Kate: …everybody, like, everybody read Flowers in the Attic; everybody was reading Stephen King way too soon. And then we turned around, and then we went back to like Encyclopedia Brown and all the wholesome stuff, but you can – it was this wild swing of dichotomies between something that is probably massively age-inappropriate and then something that is perfectly wholesome and fun, and I honestly do think I did not come to any harm of it. I, it, it was, I kind of consider it’s a formal part of becoming a reader is that you’re going to find something that is probably too much for you or too old for you.
And obviously if it’s truly disturbing, I am sorry for that, and I really hope that you do not get traumatized by this, but –

Sarah: Mm-hmm.

Kate: – it is also part of, like, you, you’re going to come across something at some point that is too much for you, and it’s going to teach you how to handle that.

Sarah: Yep.

Kate: And I think that is also part of growing up. And –

Sarah: It’s also part of the value of fiction!

Kate: Yeah.

Sarah: I mean, romances especially.

Kate: I don’t know how much of this is going to make it into the finals. I’m sorry if I get a little, I, I can get a little controversial on some of this stuff. I know these opinions are not all popular, but! [Laughs]

Sarah: You – I don’t care, ‘cause I agree, and it’s my show. So, ha. [Laughs] Nice thing about being an independent media person is if I want to say it, then I can just say it, ‘cause that’s how it works. It’s, it can be scary, but it’s good!

There, there, there’s also the idea that if a child is reading something that is beyond them,  and they, they just won’t understand it. Like, it’ll just blank right past them! Many kids read or experience or encounter – I mean, have you seen the internet? Right? Like, we don’t need to worry about books. Like, we got –

Kate: Yeah.

Sarah: – much more pressing problems in terms of exposing kids to things that are harmful.

Kate: Yeah.

Sarah: The idea that kids are going to read something and it’s going to, like, suddenly educate them into, like, you know, the world of kink, for example. No! No, because there’s so many steps missing between them and that. They’re just going to be like, Oh, whatever.

Kate: Well, it goes right back to, it goes right back to what we were discussing earlier about how when you’re reading a book, it is what you are bringing to it. So if you –

Sarah: Yep!

Kate: – can’t visualize something –

Sarah: Nope.

Kate: – there might be something on a page, but you’re not going to be able to visualize it if you have no context or experience or understanding of what it is.

Sarah: Totally.

Kate: So there is just going to be a blank spot as you go past it.

Sarah: Mm-hmm.

Kate: And, you know, it’s like, it’s not like finding, I don’t know, if you’re, like, a kink, X-rated something on the internet, which is extremely explicitly showing you –

Sarah: Yeah, yeah.

Kate: – you were, like, that is doubt, that is inputting straight into your eyes and into your brain; it is not about what you were bringing to that. That is going to be –

Sarah: It’s a visual. It’s not interpretation. Yeah.

Kate: Yeah, it’s not interpretation, and it’s not requiring experience and input from you –

Sarah: Mm-hmm.

Kate: – which is the difference between, I think, harmful media and harmful books, which is –

Sarah: Agree.

Kate: Yeah.

Sarah: I agree.

Speaking of, what books are you reading right now that you would like to tell people about?

Kate: Oh, I’m glad you asked that, and I’m glad I thought about it in advance so that I would not do my usual complete vapor lock.

I’ve got three on the go right now. One is the art –

Sarah: What is a, what is a book?

Kate: My historical fiction read is The Artist by Lucy Steeds and I’m loving it. It’s about art and a, you know, a terrible, enfant terrible artist in 1920s France, and it’s getting in so much that I’m loving about how women and their work underpin the art of these enfant terrible male artists who need somebody to manage their whole lives so they can be geniuses. It’s getting in so much, it’s scratching all my itches; I’m loving it.

And I’m reading two fantasy novels because, you know, I’m kind of in that fantasy mode what with The Astral Library hitting shelves. And one is a reread because it was that good the first time around and it’s called The Everlasting by Alix E. Harrow. I love it so much, and there was so much in it the first time I knew I would get a lot out of it the second time, so I’m reading that and enjoying it.

And I’m reading Queen of Camelot by Nancy McKenzie, and that’s new to me, but it is a King Arthur retelling, and I, I’m a sucker for a good King Arthur retelling.

Sarah: Oh, always. There are some stories I can just revisit multiple times from multiple perspectives. King Arthur is one of them. It –

Kate: Oh yeah.

Sarah: – I totally understand.

Kate: One of the fun ones I read this year, or last year, was the Lev Grossman book on King Arthur, which I swear takes every King Arthur trope and myth and piece of media, like everything from, from, like, you know, the original Le Morte d’Arthur to Monty Python’s Holy Grail –

Sarah: Yep!

Kate: – and throws it all together, and somehow it works! It is genius.

Sarah: Just put it all in together; it’s fine. Just do it.

Where can people find you if you wish to be found? It’s okay if you don’t wish to be found.

Kate: Ah! Well, you can always find me procrastinating from my word count, scrolling through all those lovely fashion feeds and Bookstagram feeds on Instagram, where you can find me at @katequinn5975. And I know it’s weird to have a number at the end, I should have gone with katequinnauthor, but the reason I got on Instagram was at that Vancouver airport where I learned I was a Reese Witherspoon Book Club pick, potentially, and I wasn’t on Instagram, and my agent said, Get on Instagram, like, now!

Sarah: [Laughs]

Kate: And I took the first suggestion Instagram threw at me because I had that terrible airport Wi-Fi and fifteen minutes to set an account up so that I could post something about being a Reese Witherspoon Instagram pick. So that’s the reason why my handle has numbers in it, like a complete dork.

Sarah: I’m literally crying. Oh my God, that’s so funny! [Sniffs, laughs]

Kate: And my other one is katequinnauthor – much more considered and easier to remember. @katequinnauthor on Facebook, and I am there too. So you can find me in either place.

Sarah: And your, your website is Kate Quinn dot com, right?

Kate: Yes, it’s just katequinnauthor.com.

Sarah: Kate – oh, Kate Quinn is a fashion label! How dare they steal your name?

Kate: Yeah, sometimes I do get some-, somebody confused who tries to order a, order a, a six-month-old onesie in baby blue…

Sarah: Yep, little smocking. Yeah.

Kate: …you know, for smocking. And I cannot help you. If, if you’re looking for couture baby clothes, go to –

Sarah: No.

Kate: – katequinn.com for that. Katequinnauthor –

Sarah: Yeah.

Kate: – is where you can buy a book. [Laughs]

Sarah: Have you thought about a crossover, though? Have you thought about a Kate Quinn/Kate Quinn crossover?

Kate: [Laughs] That might be something. God, who knows?

Sarah: Kates Quinn. Like, it’ll be amazing. Actually, you know what? Have them do – like, I’m just going to make up work for people, ‘cause I’m horrible. If you – they should do a line of book-themed baby clothes, and it can be the Kates Quinn Astral Library collection?

Kate: [Laughs] That is hilarious. I love that.

Sarah: I’m really good at, like, ideas that are expensive and time consuming for other people. I’m, I’m also very good at expensive and time-consuming ideas for myself too; that’s also as well.

Kate: [Laughs]

Sarah: Thank you so much for doing this interview. I’ve had the best time, and I really appreciate your time.

Kate: …was super fun. [Laughs]

Sarah: Yay! I’m so glad! Thank you!

Kate: This was so fun. Thank you so much for having me. As I, as I said earlier, I am a huge fan, and I have your book, and, you know, I, a lot of the thinking I’ve done about, you know, romances has been so much of this thoughtful work that you’ve done about the tropes and, you know, how fiction ages and how so much, you know, what, the passage of time can affect books and affect how we read them and what we bring to them. So thank you for doing that work, which is so important and has been, frankly, seminal.

Sarah: Thank you! I appreciate that very, very much. One thing I say all the time is that romance traffics directly in empathy: it wants you to feel things. It asks you to feel things. It is kind of demanding it, in fact. And that range of feelings is very overwhelming and can be very vulnerable. And one of the more pivotal scenes that I won’t spoil in The Astral Library is also trying to invoke empathy, is trying to invoke empathy as a reason for making a different choice. And the way in which romance and its ability to create empathy, I think, has had a lot of ripple effects in the way people see and understand each other. And I am so grateful that I get to sort of look at that and think about it and talk about it, and that there are people interested in reading my weird thoughts about it, so thank you! I appreciate that very much.

Kate: And I would say too that, you know, since the, the, the core question of The Astral Library is, you know, what book would you choose…

Sarah: Oh yeah!

Kate: – into it?

Sarah: Mm-hmm.

Kate: I honestly was thinking, you know, I think romances would be great books for people to go live in, for readers to choose to go live in?

Sarah: Heck yeah!

Kate: A lot of historical fiction or fantasy, it is violent!

Sarah: Yeah.

Kate: It is terrible! There are terrible things happening. And something Alix thinks about when she’s thinking about, Do I want to go live in my favorite fantasy novels? ‘Cause my favorite fantasy novels can be pretty violent places.

Sarah: I’d be exhausted –

Kate: Yeah!

Sarah: – all the time.

Kate: All that traveling? Yeah, no.

Sarah: And I know what’s going to happen? I would be exhausted.

Kate: But one thing I did think when I was writing this is, I bet a lot of readers would have great fun going into their favorite romances, because –

Sarah: Oh hell yeah.

Kate: – you would go into this world where, which is governed by the rules of empathy, and which is guaranteeing you, you know, things might get dark, but you’re, they’re going to get better. You are going to get a happy ending. It’s literally part of the world –

Sarah: Yep.

Kate: – that you’re entering, and that people, if it’s a historical romance, it’s like you, you get to live in a historical setting, but everybody’s still going to have good teeth, and there will be more six-pack abs than there really were in any of those Regency ballrooms. And –

Sarah: So much bathing. So much bathing.

Kate: Yes, everybody will, will, will be, will smell good. And, like –

Sarah: [Laughs]

Kate: – this is not a guarantee for when you’re walking into, you know, maybe the real Jane Austen, you know, Regency ballroom. But it’s like, I think, I think, I think romance novels would be wonderful places to go decide to make a new life for yourself. ‘Cause they are kind worlds, and they are worlds where people’s happiness is absolutely important.

Sarah: Yeah.

Kate: And there’s a reason why, I mean, like, everybody, myself included, was reading romance during the pandemic. We wanted that guarantee of the happy ending. We had guarantee of nothing else at that…

Sarah: Absolutely. Very true. That is so true. And the reward of empathy is only good things.

Thank you so much for doing this. I really, really appreciate it. I am going to –

Kate: No, I appreciate you for having me. This was a total delight.

Sarah: Yay!

[music]

Sarah: And that brings us to the end of this week’s episode. Thank you immensely to Kate Quinn for talking to me at such a busy time, ‘cause book launch is exhausting. I hope you enjoyed this conversation as much as I did, and I will have links to the book dresses, fantasy worldbuilding questions, and other places where you can find Kate and all of her work!

I end with a terrible joke. Before I have a terrible joke I have a wonderful Tumblr post, and then I have a bad joke. You get extra stuff in the outro today. I will put a link to this in the show notes, but a person in another Discord shared a Tumblr post with me that was basically people talking about hope. And then people in the comments on Tumblr made those ideas even bigger and bigger. And then finally, someone took all of the comments from the posts and in the hashtags and made a poem out of it, and I love it, and I’m going to share it with you. The Tumblr user who posted this was tenaciouswritingdragon – hi – but I don’t know who wrote this in the notes. If I can figure it out, I will update.

#hope is a weapon  #hope is a skill

#hope is a plant you can care for or kill

#hope is a discipline  #something you choose

#hard to stop looking for  #easy to lose

#hope isn’t something to have or to take

#if you can’t find it it’s something you make

#make it from willpower make it from spite

#learn how to weaponize love in a fight

#hope is a shield and a thing to defend

#end in itself and a means to an end

I love this so much, and I will share the post in the show notes, because yes, somebody did turn it into a Dr. Seuss illustration. Tumblr is the greatest place on the internet, right after, you know, where I hang out on the internet.

And this week’s bad joke is bad. As good as that poem was good, this joke is bad, and that’s how we like it here.

Did you hear about the guy who had to stop giving ducks belly rubs?

Yeah, it’s true. He really had to stop giving ducks belly rubs, because it just made him feel down.

[Laughs] I love the part where I can so clearly hear in my imagination that you are groaning.

On behalf of everyone here, we wish you the very best of reading. Have a wonderful weekend; we will see you back here next week. And in the words of my favorite retired podcast Friendshipping, thank you for listening; you’re welcome for talking!

[end of music]