I'm Gilbert Cruz, Editor of The New York Times Book Review, and this is the Book Review podcast. Before we dive into this week's episode, a brief announcement. This year we've started to do some book club episodes every four to six weeks. Maybe you've heard some of them. We have a small group of editors talking in depth about a title that we think people
are reading or will be interested in. We've done James McBride's The Heaven and Earth Grocery Store, Barbara King Solver's Deven Copperhead, Dali Alderton's Good Material, and I think a couple of them. Our next book club discussion is going to be on Perseverance James. This is a book that retails the events of Mark Twain's book, Huckleberry Finn, from the perspective of Jim, the enslaved man that Huck travels down the Mississippi with.
This episode is going to drop at the end of May, so we have a few weeks to get the book, read the book, and then listen to our discussion hopefully. I really enjoyed James, I think it's a great book, and I hope that you enjoyed too. On the podcast this week, Carver, we have a superstar in the world of fantasy fiction. Leigh Bardugo is the author behind the Shadow and Bone trilogy, the novel's ninth house in Hellbent, and her latest, The Familiar.
Leigh, welcome to the Book Review podcast. Thank you. So you've written trilogies, you've written sequels to books. Forgive me if I can't say the word duology, which I feel like I never heard before recently. I honestly feel about the word duology the way I feel about the word webinar. I don't approve of it, but I don't have anything better for you. It's a new word in the past five years. So you've written trilogies, you've written books
they have sequels. They're all part of a shared universe, but tell us how your new book The Familiar is different from all of those. So I made my bones in young adults. I wrote a group of books there that are classified as the Grishaverse, that's the Shadow and Bone trilogy, the Six of Crows duology, the King of Scars duology. Then I branched into novels for adults, and that's where ninth house in Hellbent came in. They're quite different, considerably darker than my other books.
And set at Yale University. And with the Familiar, this is my first historical fiction. It's set during the Spanish Inquisition, and it is very much a standalone. I wanted to build a kind of dark fairy tale, and fairy tales rarely have sequels. I feel like you're giving away the book. So we know one knows who lives or dies. This is true. This is true. Tell us a little bit about the characters in this book, about Lucie the young Scullion. Is that the word also I'd never heard before?
Scullion is a Renaissance word for a kitchen maid. Lucie is very much a Cinderella archetype at the start of the story. She is a woman who literally has to sleep in the dirt, who is worked to the bone every day, who is overlooked by her employer, who really only ever stops to complain or shout at her. But Lucie is hiding a gift for little miracles. These little scraps of magic that she uses to get through the day. And it's small magic. She can unburn
the bread. She can make a grapevine grow. And she longs for a better life and also for a chance to use her very agile mind. But this gift of hers attracts the attention of some very powerful schemers in King Philip II's court who want to use her to fight Queen Elizabeth, the first, the Protestant Queen. And this thrust her into a world of holy men and hucksters and seers and frauds. And also into the path of a man named Guienne Sondan-Hel, who is a very dangerous but very compelling character.
Our shadow and bone series was inspired by Zara's Russia, but the familiar is not inspired by history. It is set within actual history. It's set within an actual historical context, spain during the period of the acquisition, the early acquisition, I think, as it went on for a while. How do you have to think differently about your storytelling, given that you're
actually setting it in history? I wanted to approach this as historical fiction. Yes, there is magic in this book, but the magic is small and the magic is frequently unrecognized or viewed as fraud. I wanted to see it through the lens of the church of the time. And so, when I approached this, my first task was to understand the inquisition, which, as you noted, lasted for over 300 years, where about 100 years in at this point. So practicing Jews and Muslims
have effectively been banished. The Jews were expelled in 1492. The Muslim population was offered the same choice convert or go into exile about a little over 100 years later. And so now you have a population of Converso, San Moriscoz and Lucia is a Converso. She is descended from people who were forcibly converted. And I knew when I was researching, I wanted the threat of the inquisition
to be pitted against this young woman's ambition. But I also found this very real historical scandal that had surrounded King Philip and his secretary Antonio Perez, who was thought to possibly be the inspiration for one of the characters in Shakespeare's Love's Labor's Lost. And this was a murder that Perez orchestrated and that the king was implicated in and that felt like a really great court scandal to them thrust my heroine into the repercussions from.
Are you a reader of historical fiction? Yes. I don't think I would try to tackle something that I hadn't read quite a lot of. All right, let me ask that question again. Are you an enthusiastic reader for historical fiction? Like, I guess, have you always been itching to try your hand at it with your own little spin on it? There's no way I could have written the familiar at the start of my career. The first book I tried to write in a writing class was historical fiction,
said in Los Angeles. And to be completely candid, I just didn't have the chops. I didn't know how to write a book yet. And I certainly didn't know how to research and write something of that of the scope that I had in mind. So I think for me, I love historical fiction. I love being immersed in these worlds. And I particularly love historical fiction where a bit of fantasy or magical realism bleat through. So two two follow up questions here. One, what was the period in LA history
that you briefly thought about long sugar career with? And then second, what are some other great examples of works of historical fiction that have a little magic sprinkled in her fantasy? Early 1900s Los Angeles was where I wanted to set this book. And I may still write it. I actually think now maybe I could take it on. It does not actually have any magic in it. It would be my first book without magic. But I will have a lot of murders in it, which I feel are a good substitute for.
And sometimes easier to come by. And for recommendations, I guess you didn't ask for recommendations. Some of the books I've really loved reading are The Miniatureist, The Gollum in the Genie. I loved. Carter Beats The Devils, one of my all-time favorite books. I think it's a perfectly plotted novel and really walks the line between the idea of the mystical intruding on our lives.
And then there's heavier fantasy, like a discovery of witches. I certainly grew up reading magical realism, Laura Esquivel, Isabell Yende, and Louise Erdrich was probably the author who was most pivotal for me. She was my first exposure to magical realism. We were assigned one of her short stories in a class when I was in junior higher high school. And it shifted the way I thought about fiction and what I wanted to write. What had you thought fiction was before?
I, at that time, was reading really in two separate camps. I was reading the books that I was assigned, which were kind of classics and what was considered literature, serious literature, a lot of things about malaise and torment. And then I was reading a huge amount of fantasy and science fiction. All right, so these lived into very separate worlds and people had very different views on how
legitimate they were. Then I encountered books like Beloved and Love Medicine. And I understood the way that magic and the idea of other worlds and the spiritual could intersect with our world in a completely different way. I, when I was done with the familiar and I got to the knowledgements and the section in the back, it was like I was reading a biography. They were, I don't know, 50 books that you mentioned that you read research wise in order to prepare
this very robust portrait of Inquisition era Spain. When you're writing a piece of fiction like this, how do you know when you're done immersing yourself in the reality of the world through books? And you're like, all right, I get it. I know what people wore. I know what they ate. I understand the social structure. I'm ready to go. Or are you doing that along the way?
You're listeners can't see me, but I'm shaking my head. There's really no being done, especially when it comes to a period like this around which the political and religious upheaval of the time is very heavily documented and debated. So I had no problem finding books about that. And that's really where I began when I was casting that wide net really reading about the roots of the
Inquisition, what preceded the Inquisition and everything that followed. When I zeroed in on this particular moment in history, this kind of moment of crisis for Spain, where the Armada has been defeated, where people in Castilla are really asking themselves, well, if God is on our side, how could we lose this moment of political peril for King Philip? When I zeroed in on that, I had a much better understanding of where I was and I could research more deeply. I also hired
a research assistant who was very helpful for me because I'm not an academic. I am not a historian. And so helped me to find the right source materials and point me in the right direction. And that's why that bibliography is so robust. And then when I was ready to, and understanding the mechanics of power of the time, then came all the work of trying to understand the material culture of the time. And that I found much more challenging as somebody who's not immersed in the academic world.
But it was also the most exciting to me. I love to read about food. I love to understand text styles and sources for those things. And I tried to tackle as much of that as I could before I began writing, but then as soon as I was in that draft, I started coming up with more and more questions. And that could be frustrating too, because then you're in danger of halting your momentum
through the project. So it was a start and stop process. And then I had a historian who was kind enough to read for me, who specialized in late 16th century Madrid and was able to point out the things that I got wrong. So that was the more humbling part of the process. I've seen or I've read interviews with you in which you talk about the importance of establishing
power dynamics when you're building your worlds. And I'm curious, given that inquisition, era, Spain had very clear and established social dynamics and past dynamics and gender dynamics and religious dynamics, how did you think about all that when creating your characters and figuring out where to place them? I'm thinking particularly in the early part of the book,
there's not a spoiler for anyone who hasn't read it yet. The couple for which Lucia works, they have servants, they have two servants, I believe at the time, but they themselves are not rich, and they themselves are strivers, which they wish they had more money, which they had more access to the court, which they had better clothes. Well, it's interesting that you said that these
lines are so clearly developed in terms of class and religion and power. And I think the places where those lines blur and get more money are the most interesting places to put your characters. So yes, Maudeus and Valentina are impoverished noble people who are living on a Shabby street
in Madrid, not in one of the better areas and who long for more. Valentina, because she's not high enough up in the court, isn't living the life of somebody like the Princess of Ebole who could communicate with scholars and play a part in politics and who was a real mover and shaker. Valentina lives this very cloistered life because she hasn't attained higher class and because she doesn't have the relative freedom of somebody who is a fishwife and has to go to market every day
to hawker wears. So those tensions are exciting places to put your characters and give them stakes that are in keeping with my heroine stakes, the all want a better life even if they have different ideas about what that might look like. Then there's somebody like Walith who is Lucius Ant and who is the mistress of a very powerful man, but who also exists in this strange state where she has some
access to power, but it's keenly aware of how precarious that is. And then there's Victor, her lover who is one of the wealthiest men in Spain and seems to be the most powerful of them all, but he also works in trade. He's made his fortune that way and that has limited how high he can send in Spanish society. So those areas where the lines bend but can't be broken, I think are almost like pressure points that are become exciting for the characters and for the reader.
You have incorporated magic into all of your books, I believe at this point. And I think something that all readers of fantasy are curious about and really obsess over is what they call the magic systems, the rules that establish what can and cannot be done. So I'm curious generally, how you come up with those, like are you sketching these out on pieces of paper? Look, I think people tend to focus a lot on this idea of world building within fantasy or science
fiction and around magical systems as if there's something different from other kinds of power. And they're just not. If you are reading a political thriller said in Washington, DC, somebody is going
to have to make you understand the way that power flows, right? Whether it's on a macro level with the government and the players in the government or if it's on a micro level within an office or like a lobbyist's office or somebody's family, that is a power system that is alien to the reader and that they are looking for signals to understand how it operates so that they can almost forget about it and engage deeply with the characters play. That is the way I approach magic systems to.
Magic is a metaphor, right? It is an open door for a particular kind of possibility in a story. You have to constrain that possibility so that the reader doesn't feel that anything is possible because that eliminates the ability to navigate a world. Once you create those constraints, then it's just operating the same way that economic influence does, that social influence does. If you've ever been around somebody with charisma, that is like being in the presence of magic.
You are enchanted. You don't even know why you're enchanted. They're saying ridiculous things, but you're not only along. That to me is an exciting way of viewing the world. If you think about the way that somebody very wealthy moves through the world, the way that they burn through second chances, that's also a kind of magic. That's the way I think about magic systems and then they're constrained by the needs of the story and the stakes I need to create for the
characters. I feel like maybe I sense and correct me for a slight frustration with my question there because God, I've been asked this question a million times. Let me tell you that I'm just creating. Why are you focusing on the fact that it's magic? No, no, you're good. It's an illustration. I think it's a desire to help educate people who want to embark on this journey as an author. I don't think it's helpful for young authors who are interested in writing speculative
fiction or fantasy fiction or science fiction. I don't think that's helpful to them to think in terms of these grand systems that need to be elaborated on and articulated fully. You need to think of story first and story is where all of these things work together, whether that's political power, magical power, economic power, resources, geography, all of those things can be so overwhelming when you're embarking on writing a book. The truth is you need to think smaller in order to be
able to progress through the work of writing novel. I guess I'll also say probably there is some sadness in me because I think there are people who will not approach books that have any kind of fantastical element in them because there's a sense that somehow diminishes or delegitimizes them. As somebody who reads broadly and just about every category, that always seems a little depressing to me. When was the last time you ran into someone like that? What was the
nice way in which you responded to them? I had a very bad date once where this screenwriter took me out and he said, first he started with, so what are you going to write a real book, which was a book? I don't know. We're not doing so hot, but we're only on the appetizer. Then about halfway through, he said, I picture your fans as being middle-aged women with a lot of cats. I said, what are your fans like? That was very short evening. It's very uncomfortable that you're
obviously talking about Tony Gilroy on this podcast. Never met. I have had a lot of people say things to me. When will you write something serious? When will you write something that I can read? That doesn't play around with all this other stuff. There's an idea that it's kids business, but even in the course of this podcast, I've talked about, even in the course of this interview,
I've talked about a lot of books that have tremendous weight and importance and influence. When I think about what can be explored in science fiction and fantasy and the way that can crack our own world open, again, that seems like a very narrow way of looking at fiction. People have limited time. People should read what they like to read, but I like to read outside of my comforts
now whenever possible. The magic in the familiar is grounded in language. Lucia, the main character, is able to perform what those around her regard as small miracles by speaking or eventually by thinking of words in this particular language that you have researched and are now familiar with. How did you decide to make that such a load-bearing piece of this world and this story? I started researching Ladino back when I was working on ninth house. I had given my hero
in Alex Stern, a similar background to mine, and that she is half Sephardic. I had started researching Sephardic poetry and music and some of the, what are the calls, refronis? There are like proverbs that I had grown up hearing but not really understanding. These proverbs were interesting to me because Ladino or Judeo Spanish, there's a lot of different names for it. But Ladino is the language of exile. It's a language of diaspora that has combined
with languages all over the world. These refronis are one of the only ways that the language continues to survive. There are people who are studying it, who are trying to make sure that it doesn't die out. But the refronis are passed down to us from grandmothers and great grandmothers and so on. To me, this was this kind of thread of connection to a culture I didn't know very much about and I wanted that to be Lucy's gift but also the thing she's most terrified of having discovered.
So this thread connects her to her people in exile. This is the power of this language spoken in secret, this language that has left Spain and that can only return to her in letters in a way that the people who are now speaking it and developing it, you never return. So there was tremendous power in that for me and it felt like the right, another one of those pressure points where magic and power could exist. We'll be right back.
Welcome back. This is the Bookerview podcast. I'm Gilbert Cruz and I'm here with bestselling author Lee Bardugo who is talking about her new novel, The Familiar. Now Lee, you talk a little bit about this language, Ladino and House of Language of Exile and part of the inspiration for this book, I believe, rests in your own personal history. When did you realize that this part of your
past was something that could inspire a novel? This is something I've always wanted to connect more deeply to and I think when you're embarking on a novel, you had better pick something that really excites you and that attracts you. I learned very early on that I would never set a book on a boat again because I can't stand nautical research. But what I knew I was interested in rediscovering this part of my family. My ancestors were exiled in 1492 rather than convert they left Spain.
But I know that there were relatives who remained who chose to convert and the thing is during the inquisition, you once you had made that decision, you really had to cut your ties to your original religion. You could not be in touch with rabbis, you could not be in touch with relatives because that was to attract the attention of the inquisition. So that branch of our family tree is effectively gone, it withered away and it's something that I've always wondered about and I
thought, okay, I can use fiction to redraw that. Lee, you outline your books, is this correct? Oh yes. So you're right now, line and then within that outline, where does inspiration or a sense of surprise for you as a storyteller happen within that outline? You know the beginning, the middle and the end, but everything within that is sort of up for grabs? I start with what some people would probably call a beach sheet. So it's an outline, but it's
essentially the 12 major moments of the story. I know some people work with 15, I don't know what the extra three are that I'm missing, but I rate to 12 beats and those are sort of the big momentous turns or important arcs in the story. And I need to have that on a single page in front of me and what I'd like to say is that's a whole book. It's a very short book, it's one page long, but that's a whole book. And then I just start going in and building in individual scenes and
everything that I know when I'm when I'm in that first pass at the story. And I try to keep that momentum and that kind of optimism of knowing where I'm going. The places of discovery happen in research, of course, but I think they particularly happen with characters. So a character like Valentina who starts out as this kind of shrewish employer, as I write her, she evolves out of that archetype into something very different and that changes her relationship to her husband, it changes her
relationship to Lucia and it changes her relationship to the world. And I found myself loving this character who initially begins as this kind of awful antagonist. And I think those are always the most exciting parts of writing. I have to leave places for discovery. I cannot imagine outlining in greater detail. I might move through the story faster, but I think I would miss those moments of discovery and opportunity that those spaces allow for. In 2023. So last year, you did
an interview with the Times Book Review. You participate in our By the Book feature. And I have a couple follow questions because I thought it was, I thought it was a great feature. There's a lot of stuff in there. And I just, I need to ask you some questions. So you said you always read poetry when you're working on something new. I'd love to hear more about that. I had a professor in college who said to me, I don't read poetry so that I can talk about it
at cocktail parties. He was a philosophy professor. He said, I read poetry because it's the last place that heightened language still exists. And that stayed with me because I loved reading poetry and I loved taking poetry classes in college because there was this clarity to the language and a level of engagement it demanded from you in order to understand it and excavate every little bit of emotion and insight from it. And I think that kind of language makes us better at
prose. I don't really write poetry. I certainly did when I was in high school. It wasn't very good, but I like to read it because I think it's, I don't know that it cleanses the palette, but I think it educates the palette. One thing that you said in again, listeners, you should go find this by the book feature. You said in terms of fantasy writing, one thing I'm always very conscious of in the fantasy is what I call, quote, the sure and steady
hand. I had to feel that the author's thoroughly familiar with this world that I'm just getting to know that nothing is being invented for the sake of convenience or expediency. If I feel that confidence in the author, I'll follow a book just about anywhere. That's you reading fantasy. When do you feel a moment when you're writing, when you have the sure and steady hand, when you say, I got it, I actually, I understand exactly what this world is now.
I don't know that I, it's not like Tumblr's locking into place. When I begin a story, I need to understand the world enough and have the voice of the story, not necessarily of the characters, but the voice of the story, the voice of the narrator, deeply entrenched in my head. Otherwise, I can't start. So that requires a level of familiarity
and understanding with all of these things. With a book like this, with the book like the familiar, you're engaging with a time period in a way that for me, as a non-historian, almost felt like a kind of free fall where you could grasp it anything because there's so much to learn about it. So I had to create these boundaries around areas of research that would then allow me to go
back into the book. And so it was this game of moving between surety and confidence and but almost kind of megalomania you need to be able to proceed through a novel and just object humility and doubt and fear, which then gives you the humility to make it as good as you possibly can. What was the thing that you worried about the most with this book or that gave you the most fear? I mean, I was imagining, I would wake up in a cold sweat at 2 a.m.
Imagine a New York Times review where everybody called me a poser. Like, yeah, I mean, if I'm being honest, whenever you're doing something new, it's terrifying. You're going into territory that you wonder if people will say, well, you have no business being here. And again, I'm not a historian. This is not something, and this is not a book that I got to spend 10 years on. This is a book that I spent about two and a half years on. And you worry that
you won't be taken seriously. You worry that you'll make some gap that makes it look like you didn't hear about getting things right. That is the kind of thing that fills me with terror. You also say in this by the book interview, I used to love reading romance, but I can't seem to enjoy it anymore. And that feels like a huge loss to me. And I'm wanted to follow up on this because romance, particularly the points at which romance sort of intersect with the genre that you primarily
write in, is one of the big things in books over the past many years. So I'm curious as to when you read romance, what it was like for you. And then why maybe it's not something that is at the top of your TBR pile anymore. I want to be real clear with this because I think romance really gets a lot of disdain and contempt in the literary world, which I, and that is partially because
all genre does, right? It is the nature of genre. It is generic. So there is a need in me to defend from this as a genre because the truth is most of us spend our lives looking for connection, human connection. And yet we have a kind of contempt, I think, for love stories. And maybe that's because love is mysterious and weird and complicated. And there's a sense that, well, how can you reduce that down to a three-act structure in a rom-com or a few hundred pages in a paperback?
But I think the people who wrestle with that and who do so successfully just have a tremendous gift for making us root for people and for things that we might not necessarily have in our lives or that we might not want to see idealized in our lives. So I read a ton of romance in my teens and twenties and then I got back and treating it in my probably in my thirties and it was always a treat for me. It was a way to re-engage with a kind of heightened emotionality. And I think romance
is a tremendous engine for a story as well. And I love experiencing romance and stories particularly when I don't see it coming. I will say this, please don't put the name of the book. But I will say I recently read a wildly popular romance novel. And I didn't engage particularly with the romance. I wasn't that invested in it, but every other part of the book delighted me. I thought the banter was hilarious. I laughed out loud multiple times. I thought the family dynamics were tremendous.
So again, much like fantasy and science fiction, I think would be a shame to write off the genre just because you don't connect to a particular part of it. I think there's a lot of different ways to read books or consume books. And for me, I just feel sad because that was always my when I would finish a novel. I would read a few romance novels. And it was just a wonderful way to get back into the pleasure of reading and to set down my editorial brain and be swept along by
this beautiful story. And again, people will sneer at the idea of a happy ending, but there's something very beautiful about reading a book like a cozy where you know the murderer will be found out and also like a romance where you know that these people will go through their trials and tribulations, but we'll end up together. I love to ask authors about the book that they've read the most in their life because I think it allows them to talk about the book, but it also allows
them to reflect on their life in some ways. So I'm wondering if there's a book that pops to mine when I give you this prompt. There are two books that come to mind for me. The book I read again and again when I was in junior high school college was Rita Hayworth in the Shawshank Redemption because Stephen King, that was my comfort read. Love a story about a prison break.
And I think the book I've returned to again and again in my life is Howls Moving Castle by Diana Win Jones, which again operates as a kind of fairy tale, although it does have sequels, plays with a lot of the tropes of fairy tale, but also has many other things to say about the world. And I call it the shapeshifter book because it is a different book to me now than it was when I read it in my teens. And I think it will be a different book when I read it in old age.
I've seen the Miyazaki film. I've not read the book. I think there's some differences. There are some big differences. Tell me and our listeners a little bit about the book and then how it has changed over your life. The book centers around a young girl named Sophie who is cursed. She appears as an old woman. And it is also about her relationship with this sorcerer wizard,
mischief maker, pain in the butt named Howl. And I think that the differences in the novel, there are some story differences, some plot differences, but I think the mood of the novel is quite different. And there is a melancholy and an understanding of the way that Sophie has perceived that don't think I picked up on when I initially read it as a kind of whimsical fairy tale, but that I certainly do pick up on now reading it as a woman who is soon to be 50.
Now I know that you, as you alluded to, as many of us did, we had to read all the classics or the Tim tree, the classics one, we were young. But I also know that fantasy, science fiction, speculative fiction, these were big influences in your life, particularly when you were a teenager. And other than Howl's moving castle, what are the ones that sort of do you think have stood the test of time that you discovered back then and still return to? I still love Stephen King
and read him regularly. I think it was the book that taught me about character and what I meant to love characters and fear for them. And I recently started rereading that. It is a brick of a book. And also I love a bad town. Like I just love a book about a bad town. Dune by Frank Herbert was really pivotal for me. And I think you can see the echoes of that in my first trilogy
in terms of this kind of teenage Messiah and the import of that. Dune was also the first book I read that I remember closing it and just starting all over again going back to the beginning. Have you been delighted or frustrated by the sort of the bloom and Dune fan them again all of a
sudden with these movies that have come out? First of all, I've talked extensively about the movies with my friends and my attitude whether I like in particular detail or particular form of execution or not is I'm so glad this exists because to walk into a movie that is that transformative and that seamless is I think a wild experience for anyone. For me, it's exciting to see people engage with genre in any kind of serious way. So whether they like it or they hate it.
So I am all for it in the same way that I was all for the adaptation of Game of Thrones as a huge game of growth fan did I have problems with? Absolutely did. And I've had a lot of arguments about it and I've shot it about it a lot. But it also meant that people were engaging with genre in a way that wasn't dismissive. And again, that is always exciting to me. I mentioned Louise Erdrich before but I think it's important to say she's somebody whose career I followed my whole
life who I fell in love with at an early age. I have never felt let down by her work and I have always found something new to love in it. You mentioned the fandoms behind Game of Thrones and Dune and some other stuff. You have your own fandom and I'm wondering how your relationship to that fandom has changed as you have expanded your Grishaverse as that stuff has hit Netflix as you've written these adult books and now you're writing these books. How do you interact with them, engage
with them, communicate with them? What have you learned? When I started out, I sort of a small fandom and I would hesitate to even call them a fandom. I had readers and I was lucky early on to have some people who created beautiful art. There was a woman named Irene Co who I think did the first Grishaverse fan art and I think is a big reason that people came to the novels.
We would do things we on Twitter back in the old days. We would camp out before a cover reveal, meaning we would all get online and wait for whatever outlet it was to release the new cover and I would answer questions and it felt very convivial. We would talk about things that had nothing to do with my books. We would talk about other people's books and movies and what we were watching, what we were doing, which is always more comfortable than having to just engage with your own work.
As the fandom grew, that became more and more complicated and it is now a situation where because of the show, I think that fandom grew to a size where that kind of human interaction got harder and harder. I will candidly say that social media has changed so much in the last few years that I think it makes real interaction or real connection tougher and tougher. I am going to be taking a huge social media break in the next few months. I don't know if I'll come back. It's a very
powerful tool for me. I have enough followers that it actually can move the needle on sales when I post about a new book or I post about a cover. But I also recognize the way it's changing my taste, recognizing the way it's changing the way I think about my own work and the fact that I never feel better. And I think from most people, this is true. I never feel better when I've spent five minutes, ten minutes, a half hour scrolling on social. I never do.
I'm very familiar as I think many people are with the experience of feeling like crap after you get off Twitter or Instagram, whether it's why did I see this or look at this person that is living a nicer life than I am. But when you say it's possibly changing some of your taste, what do you mean by that? I had a friend who said to me, you need to understand that you have a behavior modification device in your pocket. And when she put it in those terms, I jumped back.
But when you think about it, it is a system of reward and punishment. Post the right thing, you get a reward. You post the wrong thing, you get punished. Or you see other people getting punished. So that's changes what you would post. When you think about how trainable we are, how malleable we are, that is a disturbing thing to think about. So of course, it's altering the things that I would write, the things that I would think, the way that I approach fiction, the things
that I consume. I made this really pretty real. Let's like TikTok for Instagram. I made this really pretty real for the holidays where I showed off at the beautiful table I was setting. And oh, I mean, take you on a little tour through my house. And what I realized after the fact was I'm selling people something. I am in the act of creating this quote unquote aesthetic.
I am selling to people something I don't even mean to be selling. And what I always say to my audiences is if you want to be on there, be on there, but just remember, you are working for free. So when I think about it that way, I'm like, no, I'm going to keep my creativity. I'm going to keep my attention. I'm going to let my taste be shaped by something other than what the algorithm wants to feed me. Your for you page is not for you. Your for you page is for whoever is selling
you something. So I don't want to engage with that anymore. I love this philosophy. I wish I was strong enough to assume it myself. But that's one of the things that's hard when you are like, I am, we're not celebrities for semi public figures. There's a sense that you have to remain engaged in some way. But I want to see who I will be and what I might write if I'm not receiving this kind
of input and feedback regularly. And I feel genuine worry for the young people I encounter through so much through my work for our constantly being judged, being found to be great or being found to be wanting when I think about how vulnerable they are. That is I think a very hard way to live and a very hard way to discover yourself. Since you're going to be taking a very healthy and well-deserved social media break, possibly permanently, it's going to hopefully allow you to work on
your next work. What is that if you can say? Right now I'm working on a horror novella. So we'll see how that goes. That's a little bit of an an experiment. I keep writing different things which you know, people who love ninth house don't love the familiar and the people who love the familiar don't love the crucianverse. So it's not always the best road to take. But again, you have to love you have to love the story. And so you have to follow it where it wants to go. The next book I'm
going to be writing is the third in the Alex Stern series. That's ninth house. I'm in Hellbent and this will be the concluding book in that trilogy. And then hopefully maybe I'll be working on that historical novel set in Los Angeles. I'm glad you're working on a trilogy not a duology, which is not a real word reminder for everyone. Lee, thank you so much for appearing on the Book Review podcast. Thank you. That was my conversation with Lee Bardugo about her latest
novel The Familiar. I'm Gilbert Cruz, editor of the New York Times Book Review. Thanks for listening.