 Okay, welcome everyone. Happy Thursday. I hope everyone is doing great and staying cool wherever you might be joining us from. My name is Alyssa Stone. I'm the senior director of programs here at Mechanics Institute, and I'm excited that you are joining us for our author talk with Lydia Kiesling, interviewed by Heather Borbo on Lydia's new novel, Mobility, published by Crooked Media Reads. I wanted to welcome all of our guests from wherever you might be joining us from. We are recording this talk and it will go up online shortly as well. If you're new to Mechanics Institute, just want to give you a little bit of information about who we are and what we do. Mechanics Institute was founded in 1854. We are a cultural center, historical landmark, gorgeous library, world renowned chess program and events center. We do many different kinds of events, both in person here in San Francisco at Mechanics Institute and online like we're doing today. Please check out miLibrary.org for more information about all of the fantastic events that we offer throughout the year and weeks. We do programming all day, every day around here. So if you have not come and visited us on site, we have a free weekly tour every Wednesday at noon. And we invite you to come check out the building, learn about our history and see some of our contemporary offerings that we provide to our community. We have a couple events that y'all might be interested in learning about. We've got Cinema Lit starting back up next Friday, September 8th. We have a panel discussion on what the body holds with two authors, Isidra Menkos and Leslie Kirk Cameron, who are joining us on September 13th. And then a collaborative event with AISF on Thursday, September 14th on the future of libraries opening the doors for democracy. So please check out miLibrary.org for more information about our programs that we offer. I'm very pleased to introduce Lydia Kiesling who is our featured author for our talk today. Lydia Kiesling is the author of The Golden State, a 2018 National Book Foundation 5 under 35 honoree and a finalist for the VCU Cable First Novelist Award. Her second novel, Mobility, is published by Crooked Media Reads. Her essays and nonfiction have been published in outlets including The New York Times Magazine, The New Yorker Online, and The Cut. And I will include some information in the chat about Lydia. And Lydia is going to be interviewed by Heather Borbo, whose poetry and fiction have appeared in Alaska Quarterly Review, The Kenyan Review, Meridian, and the Stockholm Review of Literature. A former journalist, she was a contributing writer on Not on Our Watch, the mission to end genocide in Darfur and beyond with Don Cheadle and John Prendergast. She has worked with various UN agencies, including the UN Peacekeeping Mission in Liberia and UNICEF Somalia. Her latest collection, Monarch Explores Overlooked Histories of the US West. I'm very excited to welcome both Lydia Kiesling and Heather Borbo for our author talk today. Thank you so much, Alyssa. Thank you. Thank you for joining everybody. I am really excited to speak with you. Lydia, I found mobility to be deceptively complex. Because it reads, you know, you're just like gobble gobble gobble, you're reading this novel and then all of a sudden you're like, wait a second. She's just doing some stuff here. I also feel like the talking head song once in a lifetime kept sort of repeating in my head of, this is not my beautiful house. I mean, how did I get here? And it sort of answers that question of how did we get here in some ways. But I want to back up before we get into the juice of mobility. And I'm sure you've had to answer this question loads of time already. But how much of this book is autobiographical? I haven't, I haven't had the, I think mostly people try to like arrive at that information in like a more circuitous way. So I actually appreciate the like the forward attack. And I, so I grew up in the Foreign Service. The book follows a woman named Bunny Glenn and starts when she's 15 and she's a teenager living in Baku Azerbaijan and her father's and the Foreign Service with the program with public information. And it sort of follows her into adulthood and that that kind of her teenage years very much like mirror mine, although there are some important differences I was never my family was not posted to Azerbaijan. My dad had a posting in Yerevan Armenia from 1997 to 1999. So I spent two summers there and I guess a winter and a summer and a half. And then I went to a boarding school in the US because the federal government will pay your tuition. If you have a family in the Foreign Service and if there's a, you know, at that time there was not like an established international school, I think in Yerevan. So those are things that bunny and I share which is kind of like moving around, having a very particular type of kind of family culture in service of certain work and then attending elite academic institutions as a consequence of that. And I mean I'm curious, how did you arrive at Azerbaijan of all places. So as I mean when I was thinking about. So when my dad, you know when we lived in Yerevan, some of the work that he was doing was kind of on the negotiation and the conflict between Armenia and Azerbaijan, the sort of first Nagorno-Karabakh war. I had an awareness of kind of the regional situation, although very limited one because I was a teenager and very similarly to bunny was just sort of like, well, I just want to be doing, you know, my teenage things and I'm resentful that I had to move away from my middle and, you know, so I wasn't really paying attention but you know I had sort of a general sense of things that were happening in the region and I knew when I, I knew that I wanted to write a book about someone who came from a similar sort of upbringing and whose perspective was very much shaped by that time period, and also had a similar kind of like oblivious way of existing in that time period. But I didn't want to write just kind of a straightforward like auto fiction or something that was more kind of in the memoir vein so I wanted to stretch and talk about a place that was less familiar. And at the same time, you know Armenia was very unfamiliar to me, I mean one of the things about that kind of upbringing is often, you know, there's sort of these like platitudes that we talk about like people who have grown up like you know you're you know you used to being a lot of different places you're very familiar traveling like being in foreign countries, but a lot of the times you're really recreating the sort of circumstances of your own like, there's little like American bubbles and little expat bubbles like in every country in the world in my experience and I think from your background, you've probably seen some very similar bubbles. And this is the bubble that I really wanted to talk about, and, and kind of explore. And in that sense like it kind of doesn't matter where you set the book if I mean it does matter but if you're talking about the bubble the bubble is like very kind of portable. I lived in Turkey after college and worked there for a while and studied Turkish and Azerbaijani and Turkish are mutually intelligible. So it actually felt like it would be slightly more culturally legible to me to research what was going on in Azerbaijan at the time in Armenia, even though I had been to Armenia, and I had not at that time been to Azerbaijan and I went later after I had done a draft of the book. So, yeah I mean it was just sort of a series of things that drove my decision making and then when I started reading it turned out that you know Azerbaijan and Armenia had an incredibly different post Soviet experience, primarily because of the existence of vast reserves of the SBNC. So, whereas Yerevan, I remember as being very, very poor, and you know the infrastructure was really struggling. Azerbaijan had some of those elements but then also just had huge amounts of money sort of pouring into it and huge people from all over the world pouring into it, sort of in pursuit of this goal of gaining sort of oil like contracts and then also shaping the pipeline access that would sort of determine what happened in the next decade so it just I became really fascinated with reading about that time period and that's and that's also when the books started to be about oil because initially like I wasn't really thinking about oil and then oil. Yeah I kind of worked itself into my brain and I can't imagine it not being about those extractive industries to me it's it's very part and parcel. And like I said so wonderfully not hitting your head over with the bubble of those industries and those realities. But and it's also crazy to me that Azerbaijan was kind of not the first thing that you thought of because I remember being a reporter working on the foreign desk for someplace and another friend of mine at the same place being told by our editor go to Baku young man like that was and this was, you know, late 90s. Wow, yes. So to me I was like yeah I want to read this book go to Baku let's go to Baku. Yeah, well and that's that was the other thing when I started reading about it I mean the first book that really kind of captured my imagination on this was by a journalist who had been the Wall Street journals. I think like maybe Moscow desk, and in his capacity his name is Steve Levine and in his capacity. In that role, like saw a lot of these things happening and so he wrote a book called the oil and the glory, which is a very like good sort of summation of things that are happening at that time. And I was really struck by, like, in addition to sort of the oil interest that flooded into Baku, there were a ton of journalists, it was like a journalism boom at the same time and there was a Jeffrey Goldberg had like a cover of the New York Times New York Times magazine that was that said getting crude and Baku. There were people going to like make documentaries and, and so that became its own sort of extraction that was happening and which I like really felt myself in, in that lineage because as I was reading I was like oh my God this is so interesting like this look at all these characters and, and so I was kind of like extracting also but like at a remove of you know 15 years trying to figure out or no, no 25 years. Yeah, I was like 15. And yeah it was really and then I've met other people since who have said what I met someone who said oh I used to be a journalist and I my dream was to like get sent to Baku at that time period so clearly it just like did hold this place and sort of the public imagination. I found really fascinating is the layers, you've, you capture very early on and keep it consistent through the book of the layers and people of people involved in these different time periods and different decision making capacities. And bunny as a, you know she may be slightly clueless as we all are when we're 15. She is also privy to some very complicated conversations where people are dancing around topics or attacking topics in a way that I would not even with any precociousness been able to understand and I'm wondering if that reflected your experience with your dad's, you know, diplomatic core or parties that he would go to where people are talking at this level as if you're not a child, you're included in these conversations. Well I definitely I mean, but bunny is in so many ways like a very useful device, because of her sort of people like you know consistently underestimate teenage girls and I kind of play with that and like I'm pretty cruel to bunny as a teenager also, but in ways that are, I think are mostly loving because I am taking so much of what I remember myself from that time period. I'd say I. So I'm an only child bunny has siblings in the book I'm an only child and my parents before my dad joined the foreign service. Both my parents worked as archaeologists and that's how they met. So they were in kind of to like expat type of bubbles and we had to post things in Greece. And they were you know as a foreign service officer but that was also where they had spent this other kind of professional life and knew a lot of people and that's like a very serious and substantial bubble in in Greece and. And I remember, yeah vividly being younger than bunny and and just hearing all these things and and I don't, and unlike bunny, you know so in the novel it's, it's convenient to sort of have bunny listening to these things. I don't really know that she would have like remembered or understood them to that level I certainly don't remember like the substance of a lot of conversations but I do think what that experience with my own experience sort of gave me and which bunny shares is just a noticing you know you are even if everything's washing over you, you really can. What stays with me at least is sort of like what those rooms feel like what are the, what is the type of kind of like joviality like what are people drinking, what are people eating like how you know who who's in charge of who's hosting and what. So it did really attune me to. Yeah what it feels like to be in a room in a way that has served me as a fiction writer, and it's something that you know journalists, journalists who are like at the top of their game and who also have a lot of freedom and what they're what they're covering, they're able to bring in those details and not as often as as it would be nice for them to be able to. And, and in the nonfiction writing I was doing before I started trying to write fiction. I just wasn't able to bring in that type of noticing in the same way and so fiction kind of gave me that opportunity to be like no I get to describe the room like in detail and that's what that you know that's how I can like paint a picture. I just, and then I was like well then I can also like the book doesn't make sense if you don't have the same information as the people in the book but the only way to give that information is through what I use dialogue more than anything else, because it felt sort of more natural to me. There's also, or what, what for me was interesting is it, it felt like bunny had a touch of imposter syndrome. Partly because she had been placed in a point of privilege and had these conversations and so people on one hand assumed certain knowledge of her, but she was also an English major in college, you know so she didn't have the, she didn't have the actual chops in some ways, and that's true, but she was also incredibly competent in, in other ways, but did not have the confidence to, to move around, we'll just say in her, in her work. I'm wondering if there's something about that, that having been privy at a young age, again, to those things that you know, you know you're not qualified to be in that room, and yet you're in that room if that's something that, if you see that connection to bunny as well. I mean, I think so my imposter syndrome is a huge kind of part of the book or yeah feeling of like what how everyone else seems like they're doing something like what is the thing that I'm going to do like how do you become something. That I felt really so we're bunny and I sort of part ways is after you know you see her. She's in her mid 20s and it's the recession. And she's gotten broken up with by her boyfriend, where she was in a little bit of a holding pattern with doing like jobs that weren't that interesting but just sort of sustained them while he was in law school. Then you see her kind of a drift now she like has to get a, you know, job that is sustaining her, but she's an English major. She's in her mid 20s is already kind of feeling like she blew it because she sees peers from her, you know, elite academic institutions, really underway on some journey of like, you know they're going to med school or law school or, you know, some sort of program. And, and that's when she becomes a temp at an engineering company and so that is like an experience I had. And I remember so strongly just wondering, like how are people. How did people get these jobs that they have or you know you would see people sort of start to establish themselves in certain realms and you're like, but I went to school with that person we were in the same classes together. We were going to the same parties you know acting like idiots, you know, at night. What, how did they, what was the class they took where they learned, you know what qualifies you to get a job and that was also a time period where many people I knew in sort of in real life were, were suddenly like thinking oh I need to apply to grad school because every job is now asking for a master's degree, you know, even if it's like in something unrelated so I that that's kind of where that like, I really felt that at that time period like what am I supposed to do you know what is my what is my education actually qualify me for in this modern like marketplace. And then I think once you, once you are in more professional environments you see that, you know how irrelevant some of those qualifications are and that it really is about making yourself like competent and indispensable in any given work environment. And most jobs are things you have to learn on the job. You're, there isn't like some class that you take in school that's actually training you for them unless it is literally like to perform surgery on somebody. I wanted to kind of instill that like, that sort of white cut that white collar, like, aimlessness that I think many people who who didn't have some very clear idea from early on, you know, that they were training for a specific thing. And it is yeah trying to like align that with the workplace but I hadn't thought about it in terms of like, she that bunny grew up in this very. The childhood was shaped by someone else's professional life, and that is really interesting. And I think, yeah, like that's a, that's a neat way of thinking about it, because it is. Yeah, anything like I think Foreign Service or like military or anything where you're that has such a totalizing effect on on a household, sort of dictating where you move in like where you know where you're living. It does. Yeah, you're you're introduced at an early age to a kind of professionalism that then if you don't, if you don't follow in those footsteps. Yeah, you can feel kind of like a drift I guess. Well in her older brother seemingly has such clear direction. Yes. There's nothing way about the younger brother because I find him fascinating as well but you know it's I, yeah, it just was she was a really wonderful contrast to, to many of the other characters. I want to talk now about a character in particular that I couldn't quite put a finger on and yet felt very familiar in the way that I think many women reading this book will be like, I know a Charlie. There's, there's this tension between right and wrong that many of the characters seem to tightrope and I will let readers decide if they fall off on one side or the other. But, but nobody seems to be, you know, Kirk, like caricature that you can just write off is like purely good or purely evil. And to me it's a very, very difficult and well done feet to pull off having people do that tension. But was that tension purposeful when you started out or did that emerge as you started getting used to these characters and let me just say the character Charlie is a journalist who appears to be on the left side of journalism and sort of Gonzo journalism in the beginning and like we're going to do this zine in their face against the extractive industries, but he's also a 30 something hanging out with a 15 year old. And I'll just leave it at that and I'll let you know. So, yeah, I wanted that. One thing that I was thinking about as thinking about the characters and thinking about bunny and just kind of thinking about the trajectory of the book is a phenomenon I sort of the idea like the political journey and sort of like how people's individual politics are shaped, how your politics are shaped by your parents, or either sort of literally shaped by your parents or in reaction to your parents politics or like your family politics or. And how often who you are around is will be incredibly influential and bunny is very much like a chameleon character and I think that like many people who have sort of moved around a lot in childhood. It's very sort of important to bunny to kind of fit in with whatever group she happens to be closest to for better or worse. And when she's in Azerbaijan she is surrounded by these kind of young adventurer types there's there's sort of like the older cohort of like people she thinks of as boring sort of like the oil guys like her father's peers and counterparts at various levels. But then there's like the young more adventurer guys who are kind of the journalists parachuting in. And Charlie is one of these like Gonzo journalists and I don't think I mean I like put them in the acknowledgments but there was a magazine called The Nile that two American journalists had in Moscow in the 90s. That was very notorious for, you know, actually doing like good reporting and sort of uncovering these scandals from the like, you know neoliberal scramble like end of the Union things that were happening in Russia but at the same time was famous for being like, incredible like so sexist. Like, really, there's a lot of things that were called like satire in the magazine that it's really that's like takes a very broad definition of what satire is and so I was just thinking about that because you know I, there's so many people you meet in life who sort of have like exemplary politics in the broad sense but then you, you know, know that they're, for example, like their personal life might be a mess or that they, you know, have in the case of Charlie as I wrote him, you wrote his like magazine and it's employing like incredibly like sexist and racist tropes to make his point so, and then he also is interacting with a teenage girl in a way that just is not quite right. It is unfortunately like very familiar to many people who have been teenage girls just the way that the world interacts with you in the way there's just always like an L there's just an undercurrent of violence in it and, and sometimes it's, it's compelling to think teenage girls I think often are like attracted to that or, or maybe flattered by it. And of course I'm generalizing hugely about teenage girls and there are many different kinds of teenage girls but I do, in my case, you know, was was interested in a cohort of like young men who were still not my peers and they could never be your peers because they're adults and, and if they began to see themselves as your peer then there would be a big problem with that and. So as my husband was when he read the book for the first time he was like I feel like I'm, I'm like watching a horror movie like I'm. It's like I just, I'm so worried that like something is going to happen that I really don't want to happen and, and I was, I was very kind of intentional about that like I wanted it to be a thing that you sort of worried people worry about what happened with teenage girls and how they exist in the world and people interact with them. But then Charlie is someone who comes back, you know toward the end of the book and, and inhabits a different role I mean ultimately I think I, there's sort of a meta quality in to the book in which I think I am a little bit like kinder to Charlie and like I started out writing from a place of kind of sort of resentment and anger at like the, you know mobility. So to speak that often like, for example like male journalists have enjoyed in that way, which is just not it's it's not accessible to women in the same way or, or, or to get it, like, they had to fight for it and they had to deal with exactly those type of personalities who were excluding them at every step so. And in the end, you know, Charlie sort of like gets to keep his like he still has his like good politics he is right about a lot of things he does see things very clearly about world systems that are wrong like by any by any standard they're wrong. And so I, I'm sort of like mad at myself I'm like I had it so annoying like, you know people will leave the book being like well bunny, you know bunny is this like great sort of moral, like, more ass of, you know, making all these. I guess I was sort of interested also in thinking about how we scrutinize. It's easy to kind of scrutinize figures who like stand out more even if ultimately they are like lower in the power hierarchy hierarchy than like examine the overall sort of hierarchy, because you know the book is full of a world that like men and, but you know bunnies who you end up being like is bunny bad, but he's bad and, and I did you know when a sort of subcurrent of the book is the war on terror because bunny and anybody who you know was born I was born in 1984 and what my generation saw as the pivot from the cold war to the war on terror. And I think that's really characterized sort of like American public life and politics and ways that we still don't, we still won't see clearly, you know, for a long time but women it turns out we're actually instrumental to some of the kind of worst things that happened in the war on terror and so that I would and I sort of like name them and I'm interested in them, but they are still out there still, ultimately like they are, they stand out because they are unusual, I think. Yeah, there's like many those structures were kind of in place, and that's not to excuse them of like culpability but it is just something I notice it's like it's sort of easy to be like to like find someone who, you know when people make the joke about like, oh, there's like a sort of sarcastic thing that people will say about like women, women's equality where it's like oh great like yeah like more women prison guards or something you know obviously it is, it's ludicrous to imagine that having when more women and exactly the same hierarchy will lead to a different result and I, I think that's what I'm talking about a lot in the book. But I do think there's a way that that sort of genre of like very of humor, sort of lets up the hook like the people who were like inventing and building those structures to begin with. Well, and also so many times the women who do enter into those fields have had to, they've learned to mimic or do and say things that are rewarded in that system. Exactly. You know it's not, it is the rare woman at those high levels who is able to reframe things. Yeah. I mean even I, the same year by the same editor, who told my male colleague go to Baku young man me, he wouldn't send me overseas. He was already an overseas reporter for this person FII, he would not send me overseas because he, I reminded him of my editor who was female, and I might want to have children someday. Yeah. I'm so sorry. That's just really, and that was commonplace and I think probably is still commonplace just probably not stated as it's couched in different language probably. But just to show that what you're capturing, I lived in that time period, it's very poignant what you capture and the dynamics are resonated unfortunately for me. But a lot of the book also seems to be dealing with complacency and complicity and where those two meet. And, you know, I, I feel like bunny is making decisions earnestly for herself without seeing the big picture and I think that's true of a lot of people. And I'm wondering if you think that there's something in that complacency that is specific to extractive industries, or is it overall a problem. That is such a good question. I do. I guess I'd say it's overall a problem in the sense that I, we see it in so many elements of kind of our social dynamics. And, but I, but I do think that extractive industries have such. They have such power in, in every sense but one of the things they have is a kind of narrative power, because of their sort of ubiquity. And, you know, it's the easiest thing in the world for there are many like activists and journalists like pushing back on this but it is such an easy thing for people to say to you know climate activists it's like a trope at this point like oh well I think that you like drove here in your car or you like flew here. So, you know that's common to the point of like, it's a, it's a cliche, but, but I think it sort of echoes this thing and actually when I went to Texas to do some research and I, and Texas isn't the only place in America where there's a lot of oil infrastructure but it is very, very present there. And so not only in the sense of like what you're looking at when you go into different places in Texas where you know their oil refineries where there's just a huge amount of like visible infrastructure but then also like the social networks if you talk to people in a certain like kind of class level in a place like Houston, everybody, or not everybody but like so many people work for oil and gas, it's just, it, and it really struck me kind of like, Oh, what I, what I think is irrelevant like, and instead of the, the overwhelming miss I guess of how big some of these industries are and how connected they are and even things that seem like they're outside of the scope of oil and gas are not because companies like Amazon or like Microsoft are also very tied with the energy industry. And, and I think that really works to oil and gas companies advantage because it makes it so easy for them to say like, well like you need us like we have to be part of the and then you know you need us but then also in thinking about how to change and like sort of decarbonization, they have made themselves central to that process as well. And to the point where they, there's language that oil and gas companies will use it's basically sort of asking us to like thank them for being so like pivotal in the energy transition. So I think complacency is, is so easy, and really encouraged by that, that kind of the bigness and the interconnectedness and, and the fact that few of us can say, especially, you know, who live in America like, I live lightly on the land, like, I certainly can't say it, you know I can do my best and I can close line for my clothes but and, and when we, and oil and gas companies have also really exploited that feeling of like guilt to serve you like well if I can't say that I'm living like correctly, you know I can't like push back against that and so I'm grateful to all the journalists who are like no, that's not that's not how it works but yeah I would say they have courted complacency through those types of rhetorical measures. So, thank you, I could talk to you all day but I know we probably have questions from the audience so Alyssa do we have any questions from people who are tuning in. We don't have any questions yet from our attendees. So I'd love to invite folks to add any questions they might have in the Q&A. Lydia, I have a question because I found your book to hit me very hard in the heart. We're about the same age and let me try to get my video back on here as well, if I can. And, you know, we're about the same age and so all of the things that you were talking about the kind of feelings that you were having and the things that that you were alluding to from product side to current events. Oh my god I'm moving whiplashed back to, you know, childhood, adolescence, young adulthood, adulthood and I wonder what that process was like for you. Did it hit you in a way where you had to sort of go back to that time of discomfort or sometimes elation as a, you know, kind of a middle school, early high schooler into your young adulthood like what was that process like. I think what sort of, I mean I guess this is why I like felt compelled to write the book the way that I did but what is sort of alarming to me is how easily accessible some of those things are, especially from the kind of like consumer side. When I just think about myself and what I was moved by as a as a teenager, like how much of it was sort of like things that I wanted to buy or like, I have such strong like smell memories of like perfume that was, you know popular at the time or that I like really wanted. And so I'm just struck by how how those stay with me, and I have two daughters who, you know are very young, but even sort of watching them kind of like develop like a sense of personal style and and be sort of attracted to certain things that they want it's unnerving to see that and so some of those things just like, I feel like live with me, and it was very easy to bring them back, but I did, I mean I do I think there was a sort of like I had to put myself back in that time period of like high school in a way that was kind of uncomfortable but I think was generally was part of like a more general, like my, you know, entering my 30s like having kids and seeing things happen in the world around me and then placing yourself in systems in a way that you didn't necessarily do before. I think, you know when I was in high school I was thinking like, Oh, you know history is a thing that happened. It was like sorted and it's sorted by people who aren't me, and I just live here and have to just do things. And I don't have sort of ethical obligations beyond sort of like a vague like do one to others. And then, you know, and obviously there's a lot of privilege in that level of like naivete and obliviousness but but that's how it was and then, you know you get older and you say, Oh no these systems are very dominant they're ever present they're being built a new every day. There's ways that, you know, young people also like participate them are like young adults, you know who didn't make them are still perpetuating them and and that that comes with like a lot of looking in the book or two to say, Oh, this is like, this is how I was situated this is what I was a part of in a way that's like very painful often, but but then also, you know so there's like sort of the broad view that painful but then there's also those just small things like where you can be like kind of loving to your teen self because you like, we're really worried about like your bikini line. And it's not, there's no shame in that that scene early in the book with the shaving in the near I was like, I am living that memory. And it was not pretty someone on Goodreads was like, Why would you have that and I'm like well why wouldn't you have that I'm sorry that's what I feel like if my editor had been like you can't have that I would have been like this is a deal breaker I would have had hair removal methods because people spend a lot of time worrying about this stuff. Yeah, yeah, especially as a young woman. Yes. I also like that you name checked a lot of products. You know, which really helped situate it in the specific time period talking about that have you heard from any of those brands. Oh no, I'd be amazed that would be really funny I'd be like please buy 2,500 copies of the book for your employees all the OP nail fans. Yeah, I that one I was like they should they should be glad that I have that memory and then yeah I'm like why do I even know that but I just I'm like I know that look, I don't know, like I couldn't name like every, every state capital, but but I know like op nail polish names. That's what was important. We've got a couple questions and folks I encourage anyone to pop questions into the Q&A if you've got anything. What was your process of researching and writing for the book. So, it was very haphazard I mean I think at first. What I wanted to do was to write about the Foreign Service so I was reading some, and I, and I wanted it to be. I think I specifically didn't want to like involve my dad I didn't want to have. I didn't want it to be about him or anything that he like actually did so I wanted it to be a different type of. So he was not in public information or which is sort of the like propaganda, like wing. So I was reading about, there's a lot of like oral histories of diplomats that are available online and then you know people have like memoirs and so I was reading things like that. But then I, it was also just kind of like reading about like the region and that's when I read that book the oil and the glory by Steve Levine and that just like, then I went off on this like oil, like binge and so then I was just reading like every time I could get my hands on that was about oil but specifically what was so interesting and useful were memoirs of oil men like geologists engineers. There's also like a more official often these are like self published or like independently published. They're not super edited which is actually which is great because then it's like has so much detail that you can take from them. I got a lot out of there's maybe two or three books like that that were so useful. And then they're more sort of like corporate style memoirs like. What's his name, John Brown from BP like there, there's people I read like Condoleezza rice is one of her memoirs. So things like that and then, and then just like so much you tubing of street scenes of Baku in the 90s which YouTube is really amazing for just visiting places, people put a lot of footage that is literally just like from a tram window or a train window and you can Google like a town and a decade anywhere in the world and you will probably find someone's like kind of early like video footage of it. So that's kind of where I got started and it was very just like, I would read a lot and then I would like write five pages and then there was just trying to figure out how to like thread them all together that. I mean it was like a five year process of just like inching forward and doubling back. Can I ask a question. Is the brother in the book named for your father. No, but and I actually thought I like, because my dad doesn't go by john he goes by his middle name Brady. So I forget that his name is actually john and then I, by the time I realized I was like, Oh God like I it's like my dad's name. I had already I was so like attached to this character being named john. I was like, well, and then I just decided to keep it. So are you specifically in you were you imprinting any things from your father on to this brother character. That is interesting. I mean I do think the brother is sort of the more in their family he's like the stand up like, you know, easy. It's easy for him to do things he like went to the right schools like he's got a path that he then then then his path ends up being kind of like less straightforward than he imagined so you know there's there's probably some like some resonance there but yeah that's not initially what I was thinking about. We have one more question in the chat. What elements of the political atmosphere from the book remain relevant today. The book like extends into the present and and into the future a little bit. And actually the present part was the hardest to write because I kept trying to pile up more and more from the present day. Partly is I partly is I think, like a defensive measure to sort of be like, I know what's going on like I'm, you know you really want to create like the, the authorial distance between yourself and your characters and sort of want to make sure like the reader knows that you aren't your character and, and also just things kept happening so there was a lot more like Trump stuff for a while in the kind of late teens like in early 20s. Of this millennium, and then my editor was kind of like you have to take, you have to take these out. She, especially my second revision I had stuffed a lot of stuff in. And she said, you know this is just feeling ponderous, because you're clearly like Barry caught up in your own sort of political moment and so and it's like coming through too much and it interferes with the like balance that you strike and the rest of the book of being a little bit detached. I would say. Yeah, I don't know I mean the the things that were. It just seems like a straight line between the things that were happening after the collapse of the Soviet Union and the things that are happening now just in terms of like what is seen as pragmatism but is actually like, basically like genocidal willingness to keep moving forward with oil and gas projects, and it's in the name of this kind of like real politic, like idea that that still a lot of politicians feel very attached to but like, but then, you know, there's whole states that like aren't going to be able to have homeowners insurance. So in another sense it's actually the opposite of pragmatic it makes no sense it's crazy. But yeah I mean there does, I think the sort of political, there's certain, there obviously been a lot of wild things that have happened but there's also been the sort of constant of like capitalism and our political system like working very closely together in ways that just become increasingly like untenable, I think. I'm very curious because you're the first novelist to be published through crooked media books, which is an offshoot of the same guys who did pod save America which seems to where it's politics on its sleeves so it's very fascinating to me that, you know, you had to pull back on some some of the more modern political parts what's it been like to to work with them as the, the guinea pig sort of the debut author. Well, I mean, so the reason that happened is my editor for the Golden State Emily Bell left her in the period between when I wrote the Golden State and then when I wrote this book and sort of before this book was out on submission. Emily left where she had been for our Strauss who published the first book and she went to Zando projects which is like a new kind of publishing enterprise that paired pairs partner partners that partners with them. I think what they they they're the phrase they use is influential people and institutions so they have all these little imprints underneath the Zando umbrella with people and institutions and so when my when mobility was finished and my agent was going to kind of take it out. Emily my previous editor had always said like I really want to see your new book like please send it my way and I had a wonderful experience with her publishing the Golden State I really trusted her a lot. And so you know my agent sent it to her but it was weird because she was at this new thing you know and you're like no writer I think ever wants to be like the first to go to a new place and then when she read it she said, you know I love this and I want to publish it but also like, I would not really ask that you consider one of our new partners is going to be crooked media. And I think this actually would be a really good fit for them because they're willing to publish a broad range. And I was really I to be honest I was apprehensive because I don't. You know I think of this book more than anything is like a work of literary fiction and that's how I was writing it and I wasn't writing it to be like, I want this to fit in somebody's like politics imprint. And it's like the book I think is a critique of some of the, you know, there's like Obama is also in there. That's like. So I, you know it's just I was I was interested but sort of like curious and wondering and, but I saw that crooked media had had a lot of other kind of podcasts under their wing from journalists I really admired and, and I do, you know think that they are doing like amazing and trying to mobilize people into political action. And I was so I was kind of like well if if the relationship is with my editor who somebody I trust and know and is thinking about this is literary fiction, like, and they are not going to have sort of like an editorial imprint on this but they are going to do the work of marketing and getting it out to their networks like that felt like a good. I was kind of like, why not. Basically, and they have been really wonderful to work with they have. There were people who came to my event, especially in Houston it was really interesting people were like oh I heard about this on one of their podcasts and it wasn't even pod save America was one of their legal podcasts and like four people came, which in like book event terms is a lot because they had heard about it so and I've been yeah they've been super supportive and. Yeah, I was I was nervous because it's what you don't want to. First of all, I'm like I'm not a podcast I'm a book, you know, but I think knowing that I had that core editorial relationship sort of pre existing was very important. Yeah. And then the question that all writers hate what's your next project. I want to write something that is not doesn't have research, I mean I say that I'll probably like end up going on some weird poll and then but I would like to write something that sort of feels more like local that is like. I think I always am going to want to write about women's lives that's just very fundamental whenever I like leave that that's when I start feeling like I don't know what I'm like I don't. I don't know what I'm doing but so I want to, I know it'll be about like women I kind of think of it as like, I'm trying to think of as like a neighborhood story but I don't really know beyond that. Awesome. Well, I want to thank everybody and I'm not sure Alyssa do you want to do the closing. I'm so grateful. Thank you Lydia for. Your conversation and for writing a book that leads to a lot of conversations as well so thank you so much other I'm so grateful for your for your generous and like very astute reading thank you. I'm so glad to have welcomed Lydia key sling for our online author talk about her new book mobility. I'm going to add the link to purchase the book back into the chat so people can grab it it's so good. I just absolutely was so tickled reading it I was laughing horrified defying all the emotions, and a big thank you to Heather borbeau for being our wonderful interviewer for today. We're so grateful for such interesting conversation, and folks I definitely encourage you to please check out Lydia's new book mobility. It's a really fun read a really interesting read. So check out Heather borbeau's work as well monarch heathers newest book out now. And please visit my library.org to see other events that you might be interested in joining. Thank you so much and have a great rest of your day all. Thank you.