Hey bessies, Hey fam Today on the bright Side, we're so thrilled to bring you another bonus episode, and this time it's a shelf Life celebration. We're sharing some of our favorite moments from our conversations with Reese's book Club authors.
We love talking to all these authors and hearing them read their own writing. It's always so compelling to hear the personal stories and learn what inspires them. So today we're featuring j Courtney Sullivan, Alexian Ferrell, Falmouth, and Ali Condy.
And if you missed any of these episodes, do not worry. We'll catch you up through this episode. And if you're interested in checking out the full episode, go to our show notes and we'll have more info there.
Okay, let's dive in, y'all. First up, we have a clip from our episode with Jay Courtney Sullivan, the New York Times best selling author of The Cliffs.
The Cliffs was the Reese's book Club pick this past July, and it tells the story of a woman named Jane Flanagan who moves home to the main coast after making a terrible mistake that puts her career and marriage at risk, and the abandoned Victorian house that has captivated her imagination since she was a teenager.
History reverberates through all of Courtney's meticulously researched novels, and The Cliffs is no exception. Courtney joined us to unpack some questions about place and identity and maybe get a little woo woo with us in the best way. You say that your primary obsession with fiction is this idea that quote, the moment a woman is born will determine so much of what she's allowed to become. That is such a powerful thought. Can you share what you mean by that?
Yeah.
I think all of my books, although they're very different in their subject matter, come back around to that central idea, of course, their self determination. But also we always exist within the confines of our cultural moment. So when I'm
writing about generations of women in one family. My book Saints for All Occasions is about an Irish Catholic family very similar to my own in some ways, and I think about the matriarch in that book, who, like my own great grandmother, came over alone from Ireland at the age of sixteen to Boston and is the reason our
family has been American ever since. You know, and I think about what I was able to do when I was sixteen, and the thought of just like crossing an ocean and starting a whole new life is so incredible to me. That was my great grandmother in her particular moment, and because of what she did in her particular moment, each subsequent generation has been able to get as far as we've been able to get.
Do you think about her and like call in her strength?
Ever?
Oh yeah, definitely. I mean this book The Cliffs is you know, very woo woo in a lot of ways, and I'm pretty woo woo in a lot of ways, And so I almost think of my grandmother, my great grandmother, or my mother, myself, you know, my daughter now, like versions of the same person, just with different external possibilities, And of course that shifts and changes who you are
internally as well. And I with every book I write, you know, I wrote this novel, The Engagements, and that's the only book I've written that had a real person at its center. Francis Garrity, who wrote the line A Diamond is Forever in the nineteen forties, and I still think about her all the time. I even this is really Woo Woo had. When I was really in the thick of writing that book, I had a dream where like I was her in the dream from her point
of view, which I've never had that happen before. I don't know if that makes sense now, but I get so close with all the women in my books, she's the only one who was actually a real person.
One of the things that feels really distinctive about you and your writing that I haven't heard a lot of authors say is that you include a piece of of your personal story in your novels. With the Cliffs, your main character, Jane and her family struggle with alcoholism, and you've shared that you are eight years sober, which is just such a huge accomplishment, and so I'm curious as to why you wanted to include that in this story.
Yeah, you know, I think that when I'm writing a novel, it's never because I feel like I have this clear cut thing to tell the world or that I have all the answers. It's more that whatever the burning question in my mind is, I want to explore it and find out how I really feel about it. And the way to do that for me is writing fiction that's sort of how I process everything. And so for me writing this book, you know, I started it four years into being sober, and I've been working on it for
four years. In some ways very helpful because Jane is such a hot mess of a drinker that it didn't make me want to drink, you know, writing what she does all the time is like, oh, thank.
God, I don't drink anymore.
But I think when you are a drinker, when you have made mistakes like Jane does, like I have, the silver lining of that is like you forgive people more easily. You understand that everyone makes crazy mistakes all the time, and people have forgiven you, so you can extend that grace to them. Jane, I wanted her to be in the process of figuring it out, so she isn't, you know, wildly drunken.
In every chapter. She isn't reformed.
She's kind of in the middle, and she's still hoping she doesn't have a problem, even though she knows she does. I also really wanted to write about because I think it's very common of a high functioning woman, a woman who's so good at her job, a woman who people don't think of as an alcoholic until you know she's very good at kind of siloing the different parts of her life until she.
Is You mentioned that every book starts with an open ended question. For you, what was the question that launched the cliffs? That's a great question.
So this time around, I write a book about this woman who reluctantly returns to her hometown and this big Victorian house. And in the process of writing this book, I have left New York after twenty two years there moved home to my hometown, something I truly never in a million years though would happen. And my husband and I and our kids now live in this Victorian house with a plaque on the front door that is exactly
like the house in the book. And so in the book, there's a plaque on the side of the house and it says it's the Samuel Littleton House, right, and it has the date that this house was built. Really, it's the what lives of women that have sort of permeated that house and the land on which it sits, and the idea that if you put your name on something, if you put a plaque on something, that means you
discovered it. I wanted to kind of really explore that and turn it on its head, and this sort of idea of retelling history, looking at it through a different lens and thinking about whose stories do get told and uplifted and preserved.
We have to take a quick break, but we'll be right back with more clips from our favorite shelf life moments. We're back up.
Next, we have a clip from our conversation with the author of Twelfth Night, Alexin Ferrel, Falmouth.
Alexin has published several best selling fantasy novels, including the Atlas series and Masters of Death, all under the pen name Olivi Blake. She only just recently started publishing books using her real name Alexi and far Whah Fall myth when she began writing novels for young adults.
So Twelfth Night was the Reese's book Club summer ya pick, and it's a modern retelling of the Shakespeare play, although in Alexin's version, Twelfth Night is spelled k nig ht I.
See what she did there. Alexin sat down with us to talk about lessons for our younger selves and why we're all cheering for the quote unquote unlikable female character.
Your book dedications are written to versions of your past self, and so what is the mission.
Yeah, definitely. So I was a teenager in the two thousands, and you know, not to say that any times are more or less misogynistic, but it was definitely a different flavor of misogyny at the time. Like the Ya protagonist was the not like other girls girl, and you'd get one quote unquote strong female character and then a full cast of dynamic, diverse men. The goal, I think was to be like the most desirable woman or the most in the guys capable, the guy's girl, right, the cool girl.
Yeah, she looks great in a bikini, but also drank so much beer.
We didn't know how those two things were.
That character was very alive in that era, you know, and we were all trying to be her and it was such a waste of time. And I think, like that's something that I didn't understand as a teenage girl. But of course there are going to be so many
women you don't get along with. And that's actually something I like to write into my books, is like, sometimes it's just like you and this girl are not going to get along, and that's fine because the spectrum of what it is to be a woman and to grow into womanhood is very different for everyone, and it should appear different on the page. But anyway, so just the idea of if I could tell my past self, power is not desirability. Power is not being appealing, especially to men.
Power is not making yourself palatable. Power is you know, what you gain from the collective and the relationships you have with other people, and that you are stronger with these other women. This real fallacy of scarcity that I think as women, we're taught that there are just limited
resources for us. There are only so many women who can succeed, and there's only so many good men in the world, and we're all competing for them, you know, And that was just such a myth, and so I try to like de escalate that myth and fiction just to be like, you know what, you don't have to believe that, you don't have to buy into that myth. There are resources for everyone. You don't have to belong in a certain place or have to be a certain way.
So I think having stories of fiction like that are equally as powerful as nonfictional stories.
Absolutely, I think, and especially at this age, because the teen years are about trying to fit in for safety, like for social safety. You understand how to fit in with other people. And so it's not like the best time to learn about individuality, but I think it is a good time to be exposed to other perspectives and to understand what it feels like to empathize with other people who have different views, and like that's something specifically for the teen years that empathy is so important.
Alexin, you are exposing so many people to your own experience with mental health, and I think a lot of people can feel seen through the way that you've talked about your bipolar disorder diagnosis. You've also mentioned that that actually played a role in your evolution as an author. How did that diagnosis help you discover your best brain?
The process of dropping out of law school is a really interesting one because it's related to my mental illness, but not in the way that it sounds. It's not
like I was so ill i had to leave. It's more like, once I took steps toward being healthy, I realized that a lot of the coping mechanisms I had for getting myself through a life that I didn't love like, I started to see them as just coping mechanisms, and I think I started to really look at my life and realize that I could be happier, that I almost
had a responsibility to be happier. At that point, I had fallen in love and I was with the man that I was going to marry and realized that, you know, his happiness was also it was important to me, and it was it was built into my happiness, and it was like I could make choices that could lead me down a different path than this, Like suddenly I can see how many paths there are and the path that I'm on is not a good one. Going down this path is going to get uglier for me.
Did you have a diagnosis as a kid?
No, Bipolar starts to show around like eighteen or something, And certainly in my late teens, I knew that something was wrong, and I think I was self medicating in different ways and just in a way that I knew wasn't healthy, but it wasn't important for me to be healthy. I make a lot of jokes about how Vi in Twelfth Night is an unlikable female character because I saw
myself as an unlikable female character. That I had the sense that other people didn't understand me, or that my desire to be authentic, was not coming across in a way that other people understood or sympathized with. And so I totally put on this whole like, fine, make me your villain. You think I'm a bit, I'll be a bit. You took on the persona yeah, and just was quite isolated, I think, And which is not to say that I didn't have relationships. I just didn't take them as seriously
as I could. I never really thought I deserved them.
It's interesting that you brought up this idea that your main character, Viola could be deemed as unlikable because in the acknowledgments, you say, if you're the kind of person who feels angry all the time but doesn't feel like you're allowed to be, I see you. Why was it important for you to write that, to vocalize that.
This book is definitely about anger and about who's allowed to feel it. How many women, how many young girls become aware that their anger is not acceptable, that there is no way to remain dignified in anger, and they're not allowed to be undignified because the moment you do, you lose your credibility. And so to have that for Vie to be a woman who's told to smile, who needs to be tamed, things that I had heard growing up.
And then also to have Jack, who's based on my best friend who I also met in high school, who's he's half black, and so he has the cariacture of the angry black man that he also like, can't become angry, he cannot engage his anger in a safe way, and for that to be so hard because he's seventeen years old and the book is based on it's a fictionalized version of where I grew up, which was a predominantly
white community at the time. It's not really anymore. And that feeling of otherness that these two characters share, and little microaggressions, these little things that like I can't put them into words because they're not big enough on their own, And so this feeling of I'm angry all the time, but not about anything that I can say, because once you start to like pick apart your feelings and rationalize them,
it's easy for people to argue with them. I think this is the problem with a lot of politics and a lot of just the sociopolitical context. It's like, if you really get into the details, someone will find a way to delegitimize what you're saying, and so for them to just be like, well, this is my life and
this is how I've come to deal with it. One is like she makes herself a villain and he is a total people pleaser, and you know, they see each other and almost admire what the other person can do that they feel they can't.
We'll be right back after another quick break.
Our final clip comes from our conversation with Ali Condy, and this one is a real tear jerker.
Yell.
It really is.
Ali's novel, The Unwedding, was the Reese's Book Club pick for June, and the storyline was at least partly inspired by events from Ali's own life.
Just like the main character. At the beginning of The Unwetding, Ali discovered her husband was cheating, and instead of canceling their romantic anniversary trip, she went on the trip all by herself. Luckily for us, Ali wrote this experience into the backdrop of the story for one riveting murder mystery and her first adult novel.
We'll start by hearing Ali read an excerpt from the book, and then we'll end with a true gem of parenting wisdom.
We have selected a passage that we would love for you to read for us. Can you go ahead and set it up?
Yeah, I'd love to do that. And I love this passage that you suggested that I read. It's not when I've been able to read a lot because I can't get through it without crying. So I'll see how this goes. But it is one of the few passages in the book that is taken directly from real life. So Ethan is the child and the main character is the mom. After they'd returned from the trip, Ethan asked her repeatedly to take him to a lake up in the mountains
that they sometimes visited. It was a beautiful spot, blue water, perfect green pines, a sandier beach than you usually found in Colorado, a long wooden dock stretching out into the water from which you could launch kayaks or paddle boards. The days she'd finally gotten around to taking Ethan had been months after their trip to California later in the year, when the air and water were cool bordering on cold. There hadn't been many people at the lake. Had climbed
out of the car with a sense of purpose. Wait for me, buddy, She said, trying to make sure she had her keys and phone, but he was off, stalking intently out onto the dock, since he had a pensiont for jumping into bodies of water. Fully clothed, she hurried after him, worried he'd gotten it into his mind to go for a swim, But Than stopped at the end of the dock and turned to look at her. It was then that she saw he was holding his wand she hadn't noticed that he'd brought it in the car.
His blue eyes and the blue T shirt he was wearing in the blue water behind him all brightened and deepened one another, and she thought, this is impossibly beautiful. He is impossibly beautiful, mom Ethan said urgency in his tone. Mom. To her surprise, he handed her the precious wand mom.
Turn me into a fish.
Oh Ethan, she said, her heart breaking, I can't. I'm so sorry. No, Mom, he said, you can. It built and built, the urgency in his voice, then the distress, the break in her heart, until she they would both shatter in order outwards. She didn't know, but neither of them could bear this much pain, this much want, this much failure. Mom eth had kept saying tears in his eyes, Mom, please please turn me into a fish. When he finally
realized that she couldn't. Oh, how she hoped. He didn't think it was that she wouldn't, they got back into the car and drove home. They wound down the forest roads in silence, both of their faces tear stained. She hadn't seen the wand since he had never asked to go to the lake again, she had thought that day that it was the worst she could possibly fail someone. She'd been so absolutely wrong.
Thank you for that.
Ali. Before you read, you said that you usually cry when you read that passage. What special meaning does it hold for you? Well?
I tried not to read it too much because it was a real experience that happened, and I'm not it's hard to revisit. Frankly, my son has is neuro divergent and we had that experience post divorce, and like I mentioned earlier, it's one of the few real experiences I put in the book, and that was just such a feeling that day of He desperately wanted this thing, and
he truly thought I could grant it to him. He thought he had all the elements there, he'd brought the wand we'd gotten too the place, and then he was asking me to transform him into something else, take him away from this, and there was I could not do it, you know, there was no way for me to do that.
And as a parent, I mean, that's one of the hardest things is when you disappoint your child or when they desperately deeply want something and you cannot give it to them, even though you would love to be able
to do that. And so that's tricky for me to revisit because that was a hard day and that he really wanted that for me and I didn't give it to him, and it became a little bit of a you know, a stand in for all of the things he wanted, like tact family and different things that I also really wanted that I also was unable to give him. And so that that feeling is still kind of with me. Frankly, there's still some things that I wish I could provide that I can and as a parent, that's really tough.
It's so hard what do you say to your kids in those moments. I'm asking for a friend, because it is really hard whenever your kids want something that you can't deliver.
Yeah, I kind of have to. I have to acknowledge that it's a valid want. You're not wrong to want this. This makes sense that you want this to kind of teach them to be able to do that for themselves. Like it's okay to want things. And often the things that you want are really good, and you still can't have them because someone else is making a different choice or the circumstances don't allow it. And then sometimes you can acknowledge, I want that too, but you don't want
to put yourself in there too much. You know it's about their want, not about yours. And then I say I can't fix it, but I can sit here with you in the wanting. We can be here together, and then what's something else that we can control that we can maybe do. Sometimes that's the next step, and sometimes the next step is not that. Sometimes the next step
is just Okay, we're still sad. Nothing's going to fix this, and we'll just be here in the sadness for a few minutes and not try to move past it until we're ready.
Ali, have you ever thought about being a parenting coach?
No?
That was amazing. I learned so much just in that fifteen second SoundBite.
Oh gosh, that's so kind of you, Simone. I'm muddling my way through like everyone else, but I do really care about.
It, so I hope that counts for something. Yeah, totally. I think the sitting with is the hardest thing for adults and children to do, but it's the best thing that you can do oftentimes.
The Cliffs, Twelfth Night, and The Unwdding are all available now. We'll link to the electronic versions in our show notes.
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We'll see you Monday, y'all. Keep looking on the bright side.